● 11.05.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 05/11/2022: FreeBSD 12.4 RC, LXQt 1.2, and GNU Taler 0.9.0

Posted in News Roundup at 12:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• A VotingWorks machine. The paper ballot, previously marked by pencil, is placed on the tray, drawn into the machine and read. The screen tells voters whether any errors were found.

• Voters in three small New Hampshire towns will be putting their ballots into a new type of counting machine Tuesday – one that runs on open-source software rather than company-controlled software – in a pilot project to see whether digital transparency can increase confidence in the reliability of elections.

• “In 2018, 2019, this was not a very important topic. Nobody talked about voting machine source code. Then 2020 happened and suddenly many people were talking about voting machine source code,” said Ben Adida, a co-founder of VotingWorks.

Kernel Space

• Intel told Ars Technica that it is possible for both Intel and AMD-based platforms to update Arc GPU firmware, and that Intel’s Management Engine wasn’t actually required for firmware updates.

• “Intel Arc products do not require the host CSME to update Arc firmware,” an Intel spokesperson told Ars. “Firmware updates will work on both AMD and Intel platforms. Arc products have their own Graphics Security Control for firmware updates and leverage existing Intel technology like the HECI interface protocol to implement the firmware update flow.”

• An update from Richard Hughes, the developer who originally discovered the limitation, noted that an “HECI-using GSC device shows up in Windows” when an Arc GPU is installed, which ought to allow updates on x86 devices. We double checked on a Windows PC with an Arc GPU installed and did indeed see Intel’s GSC firmware interface listed in the device manager, which ought to work the same way on both Intel and AMD platforms since it’s a part of the GPU itself.

Applications

• Over 120 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear.

• EagleEye is a free open-source script that allows anyone to scrap, find, monitor, track, and stalk social media accounts just by entering the name.

• [...]

• The project is released as an open-source under the WTFPL (Do What The F*ck You Want To Public License), version 2.0.

• “Enhancements to this release include: kernel runtime improvements on multi-CPU systems, python3 tapset support through python3.11, tapset and template script for cve livepatching, bpf backend embedded-code assembler improvements”.

• Zim is an open source free lightweight note-taking application in a form of desktop wiki. It allows you to organize your notes, articles, resources, and ideas all in one place, connect them together using page links, attach media and documents and more.

• By default, Zim supports wiki syntax and a long set of shortcuts keybindings that makes writing a pleasing experience.

• MoinMoin is a free open-source wiki engine, that comes with a large set of features, themes, and extensions.

• MoinMoin was the choice of many Linux distros and community to host their documentation, manuals, and guides. It is used for Ubuntu documentation, Python community groups, and several development groups.

• MoinMoin is written in the Python language and can run on SQLite or other similar database.

• At Purism, we’re especially happy about this milestone, because we recognize how important libcamera is for the future of the Librem 5 phone.

• That doesn’t mean that we sit back and wait for libcamera to gain support for our cameras. Quite the opposite! We already added one of the sensors in 2021. This year, we’ve been pushing forward to execute the plan from our previous blog post.

Instructionals/Technical

• We rely on CSS Media Queries for selecting and styling elements based on a targeted condition. That condition can be all kinds of things but typically fall into two camps: (1) the type of media that’s being used, and (2) a specific feature of the browser, device, or even the user’s environment.

• Years ago while rummaging through the contents of a shelf in a used bookstore, I happened upon a booklet titled “UNIX System Command Summary for Berkeley 4.2 & 4.3 BSD,” published by Specialized Systems Consultants. I bought it as a curiosity item because it was nearly 20 years old yet still largely applicable to modern Linux and BSD.

• That amused me then and now. A booklet written in 1986 was still largely relevant in 2016, while books on the same shelf about a proprietary OS weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. (Think about it: What technology do you think is going to survive a zombie apocalypse?) I’ve had the booklet on my own bookshelf for several years now, but it occurred to me that it’s probably worth doing a little digital preservation of this artifact, so I decided to scan the booklet to create a CBZ ebook.

• Scanning was easy, albeit time-consuming, with Skanlite. After I was finished, however, I discovered that some pages weren’t quite level.

• In printing, this is called a registration problem, meaning that the position of what’s being printed isn’t correctly orientated on the page.

• When you first install a Linux virtual machine using VirtualBox, you might find the experience sub-par. VirtualBox Guest Additions upgrade your VM experience by bringing additional features to the table, including a shared clipboard, drag-and-drop file sharing, and adaptive display scaling support.

• Performance monitoring is crucial to get a view of how the various tasks perform on your system. There are plenty of performance monitoring tools, but OProfile stands out. It is a system-wide performance monitoring tool that comes with the oprofile package. Besides, it has low overhead, making it perfect for retrieving information about executables and other tasks on your system, such as determining the total hardware interrupts received on your kernel.

• Ideally, OProfile utilizes its system daemon and loadable kernel modules to collect the data for various running tasks to monitor their performance. If you haven’t used OProfile before, this guide covers everything you should know. Take a look!

• Teleport is an open-source tool for providing zero trust access to servers and cloud applications using SSH, Kubernetes and HTTPS. It can eliminate the need for VPNs by providing a single gateway to access computing infrastructure via SSH, Kubernetes clusters, and cloud applications via a built-in proxy.

• Today we are looking at how to install Unity 2022.1.21 on a Chromebook.

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

• In this video, we are looking at how to install the Brave Beta Browser on Linux Mint 21.

• Transfer or exchange files between two client or server computers via SSH connection by installing WinSCP on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish Linux.

• Based on the open-source Chromium project, Otter Browser strives to recreate the best aspects of Opera 12, focusing on providing powerful features for power users while remaining fast and lightweight, making it a good choice for those looking for an alternative to mainstream browsers. The following short tutorial will show you how to install the browser from Fedora’s default repository, which, given Fedora focuses on upstream releases, is normally up-to-date with the latest release.

• PostgreSQL 15 is out and delivers many performance improvements. The new release improves PostgreSQL’s capabilities in several key areas, notably performance, data compression, and security. In terms of performance, PostgreSQL 15 includes several enhancements that should help to improve the database’s overall speed and responsiveness. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install the software on Ubuntu Jammy and Focal LTS using the command line terminal.

• The Firefox Nightly browser is contributed code by Mozilla developers, which is added to a central repository daily, then compiled nightly for developers or enthusiasts to grab the latest edge changes. As the code matures, it then merges into the beta repository. It then reaches a level of quality that allows for a new final version of Firefox to be shipped to hundreds of millions of people. Nightly builds are an essential part of the Firefox development process, as they allow us to test new code and ensure that it meets our high standards before it is released to the public. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install the nightly browser on your desktop using the command line terminal and well know third-party COPR repository.

• Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. It uses a static type system, manual memory management, and minimal runtime. It is well suited to writing operating systems, system tools, compilers, networking software, and other low-level, high-performance tasks. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install Hare using the command line terminal and COPR repository on your Fedora server or desktop.

• As anyone who has used CentOS Stream for any time knows, one of its primary focuses is stability. This can often mean that the distribution is relatively stable but usually has very outdated packages in terms of new features. For example, at the time of this writing, CentOS Stream features kernel 5.14, but some users may require a more recent kernel for better hardware compatibility, among many other things. While this focus on stability is admirable, it can be frustrating for users who need the latest and most significant features that newer kernels often provide. Fortunately, there are a few ways to work around this issue. One option is to use the ELRepo repository, which has an excellent reputation amongst EL9, EL8 distributions such as CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, etc.

• Additionally, ELRepo offers many updated packages across various categories, including everything from kernels and drivers to multimedia codecs and desktop applications. As a result, ELRepo is an excellent option for users who need access to the latest and greatest software while still using a stable distribution like CentOS Stream.

• Mirage is a fast and simple GTK+ image viewer because it depends only on PyGTK. If you want a decent image viewer and the ability to access it via the command line, a fullscreen mode, slideshow mode, essential editing tools to resize/crop/rotate/flip, and a configurable interface, Mirage would be the most straightforward option. The following tutorial will teach you how to install it on your Fedora Desktop.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Hadoop on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Hadoop is an open-source, Java-based software platform that can be used to manage and process large datasets for applications that require fast and scalable data processing. It is based on Java and uses HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) to store its data. Hadoop is designed to be deployed across a network of hundreds or more than 1000 dedicated servers. They all together to deal with and process the large quantity and variety of datasets.

• 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 Apache Hadoop on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Newsboat on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Newsboat is a CLI feed reader application. The web feeds a website provides can be used to get the latest updates from the website. And, this is where Newsboat comes into play. If we have a web feed then, we can use it with Newsboat to have all the updates.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Newsboat RSS feed reader on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Samba on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Samba runs on a Unix system, it allows Windows to share files and printers on the Unix host, and it also allows Unix users to access resources shared by Windows systems. The software can be used as a controller for the domain or as a normal member.

• 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 Samba on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

Games

• Valve has put out an update for Dota 2 and there’s some major changes coming, along with another new hero set to enter the fold.

• We released Godot 4.0 beta 1 in September, and that was a big milestone on our journey to finalize our next major release – be sure to check out that blog post if you haven’t yet, for an overview of some of the main highlight of Godot 4.0.

• But the “1″ in beta 1 means that it’s only the first step of the journey, and like for the alpha phase, we’re going to release new beta snapshots roughly every other week.

• We’re now at beta 4, slightly delayed as I was on holiday, but all the more interesting to try out. It adds less new features than previous beta snapshots did, but instead has more focus on bugfixing and stabilization, which should make it a much nicer experience than previous betas.

• Honey, I joined a cult, developed by Sole Survivor Games and published by Team17, is a funny Cult theme park building that goes stale fast. It runs on Linux with Proton and the flag PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1, but not without issues.

• In this game, you develop your cult compound. Gather followers and find ways to extract more money from them with the most varied hoaxes, while joking about real life cults and pop culture.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• LXQt 1.2 is here about seven months after LXQt 1.1 and it’s a major update to the lightweight desktop environment that introduces initial support for the Wayland display server in an attempt to keep up with the times and the new technologies most GNU/Linux distributions are adopting these days.

• Still based on the long-term supported Qt 5.15 LTS open-source application framework, LXQt 1.2 also improves its file manager component with a new search history feature that offers separate lists for name and content searches. Users can search the maximum number of history items in Preferences > Advanced > Search.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This week KRunner got a lot smarter about its search results. For years people have complained about various things not being the top item when they expect it, so Natalie Clarius and Alexander Lohnau decided to make some major improvements…

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 28 to November 04.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• In this tutorial, we will learn how to control startup programs in Ubuntu, either by adding or removing them to start up automatically upon boot.

• To configure your startup applications, follow the steps below.

• Automatic updates grant snap users an ability to receive timely patches to their software, both in aspects of security and functionality. This can be rather useful and convenient, especially for applications that have online access. On the other hand, automatic updates can potentially disrupt users’ workflows if they happen to coincide.

• By default, snap refreshes are triggered four times a day. Users have the option to fine-tune the exact schedule, which can help minimize any conflict with actual work, but even so, there might be an update to a running application while it’s in use. In this case, a notification is shown to the user asking them to close the application, in order to allow it to be refreshed in the next slot (about six hours later), or to allow them to manually run the snap refresh command. Of course, this behavior is confusing and inconvenient, and that’s why the snapd team is working on a number of methods designed to minimize impact in these scenarios. These include snap refresh awareness and deferral for when the application is closed.

Devices/Embedded

• e-con Systems e-CAM20_CURB is a 2.3 MP fixed focus global shutter color camera designed for the Raspberry Pi 4, and the company has sent us a sample for evaluation and review. We’ll start by providing specifications, before checking out the package content, connecting the camera to the Raspberry Pi 4 with a DIY LEGO mount, showing how to access the resources for the camera, and trying tools provided in the Raspberry Pi OS or Yocto Linux image.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Its proper name is the Panzer 68 driving simulator (FASIP). There are tonnes of brilliant photos, plus details about all the other upgrades made during the restoration process on the museum’s website. Shout out to museum staff Gerold Handschin, Michael Salathé, and René Demarmels, who did most of this work.

• It took them several days to translate the original paper-based computer program into a modern language for the Raspberry Pi. The simulator’s camera, screen and some site lighting also needed replacing.

• The parts list is very short, but unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to get them now (October 2022): [...]

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Around one year ago, Sipeed announced initial support for Android on their RISC-V development boards, hinting that a first functional prototype of RISC-V phone could be coming within one or two years. Although Android is now supported by several development kits based on this architecture, as can be seen in the relatively new RISC-V Android Source repositories, we have yet to see a major mobile device implementing this architecture. Although still in the depths of the Linux kernel’s architectural porting, things are moving fast.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• This year we will be doing things a bit differently than we have in the past. Instead of having all the presentations happening on the same day, we are organizing two streams on two different days, one for Tor Project’s teams and another for our community. So please make sure to save the date for both events!

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has announced the successor to the Mozilla Builders incubator: Mozilla Ventures.

• Mozilla defined the project in a post as an investment fund for early-stage internet startups that Mozilla feels align with the Mozilla Manifesto. The fund will officially open next year, but has already made some preliminary investments.

• The news came from Mozilla executive director Mark Surman, and the new fund will be run by Mohamed Nanabhay, previously senior advisor at the Media Development Investment Fund. The new fund succeeds 2020′s Mozilla Builders program, which apparently “invested in 80+ people, projects, and technologies reshaping the internet.”

• The initial pot of $35 million will go towards “seed to series A startups… whose products or technologies advance… values… like privacy, inclusion, transparency, and human dignity.”

• Some backing has already been given to three new companies: Block Party, heylogin, and Secure AI Labs.

GNU Projects

• We are happy to announce the release of GNU Taler v0.9.0.

• We have addressed over 200 individual issues, our bug tracker has the full list.

Programming/Development

• If you have been writing C++ classes for mocking out your C or C++ dependencies, you know how tedious it is. I generally write small classes with just a handful of methods, so it’s generally bearable, but when using third-party code I’m usually not that lucky. If the dependency is a C library this becomes especially tricky, both because they might be larger than what you can handle, and both because the lack of an object-oriented design might not offer you an easy solution to store the mock object data.

• But fear no more, Deride is here!

• I won’t spend too many words describing it, since you can read its description from the link above, where you will also find some example code. More examples, by the way, can be found in the example/ folder in the code repository, where you can see how it can be used to mock both pure C++ and QObject-based classes, and C libraries.

• What is most important for me to say now, is that the project is in alpha state, meaning that I’ve tried it on a handful of header files only; it’s highly likely that it will not work on many real-life scenarios, and if that happens I warmly invite you to inform me by filing a bug report providing the include file that was not properly processed.

• I leave you with a short example of a unit test, written using Deride. The class under test is called Stable, and internally it uses objects of type Horse, that we decided to mock. We used Deride to generate the mocked implementation and a MockHorse class which can be used to control the mocked objects. When building the test, we won’t link against the original horse.cpp, but we’ll only use the original horse.h; the implementation will be found in mock_horse.cpp, generated by Deride. And in the corresponding mock_horse.h file we’ll find the MockHorse class with all the on<method>Called() hooks which we can use to install our callbacks (either to reimplement the object behaviour, or to just be notified on when its methods are called).

• React-Static is a fast, lightweight, and powerful progressive static site generator based on React and its ecosystem. It resembles the simplicity and developer experience you’re used to in tools like Create React App and has been carefully designed for performance, flexibility, and user/developer experience.

• A brand-new version 0.0.9 of RcppSpdlog got onto CRAN overnight. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich.

• This release contains two changes. First, we extend usability by offering both a set of simple R functions for logging from R, and a matching set of functions at the C++ level that are directly callable (and exported) from this package (so that client packages do not need to compile). Both these changes are described (as sections seven and eight) in the vignette. Second, while we were working on this Gabi released version 1.11.0 upstream so we included this as well.

• Version 0.78 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated): [...]

• This is the second part of the series to create a map of any region of the world with R.

• Seven weeks down, five weeks to go! It’s flying by quickly. On the one hand, I want it to last forever. On the other hand, I know it can’t, and I’m looking forward to talking to coworkers again at my day job when I go back. RC has given me a renewed appreciation for what I get at my job. More on that in December, though.

• For now: RC, and the goals I have while I’m here. Instead of focusing on what I did this week, I’m going to use this post to talk about how I want to improve as a programmer.

• CrowdSupply recently launched the Pocket Integrator, which is an add-on board for the compact programmable synthesizer/sequencer Pocket Operator released some years ago. This add-on board allows the user to control the time, tempo and also send MIDI & sync to the PO in real time.

Standards/Consortia

• The thing that we often say about our modern social media ecosystem is that we’re often playing within the walled gardens of others. This is largely by design—Facebook, or Twitter, or Snapchat, or TikTok have more control over the final result if they’re the ones hitting the switches back at HQ. But there was once a time that all that chatter, albeit at a smaller scale, was happening on disparate platforms that nobody owned. There was no walled garden—only a whole lot of weeds, growing freely around the internet. Someone had to make sense of it, and that led to the rise of the blog search engine—a concept popularized by Technorati. (Remember that?) Today’s Tedium considers the forgotten period when blog search engines were a big deal.

• Today, WebKit in Linux operating systems is much more secure than it used to be. The problems that I previously discussed in this old, formerly-popular blog post are nowadays a thing of the past. Most major Linux operating systems now update WebKitGTK and WPE WebKit on a regular basis to ensure known vulnerabilities are fixed. (Not all Linux operating systems include WPE WebKit. It’s basically WebKitGTK without the dependency on GTK, and is the best choice if you want to use WebKit on embedded devices.) All major operating systems have removed older, insecure versions of WebKitGTK (“WebKit 1”) that were previously a major security problem for Linux users. And today WebKitGTK and WPE WebKit both provide a webkit_web_context_set_sandbox_enabled() API which, if enabled, employs Linux namespaces to prevent a compromised web content process from accessing your personal data, similar to Flatpak’s sandbox. (If you are a developer and your application does not already enable the sandbox, you should fix that!)

Leftovers

• The players from Mexico explained the origins of the game, showed the two types of balls used (one of them soaked in fuel and ignited), and covered the rules and the meaning of the game. They also played some exhibitions, a few of them in a 15,000-capacity stadium used for the opening ceremonies. Fans and others were invited to give the sport a try if they wanted to.

• Welcome to America! Fuck everything! And not in the sexual sense, as any person would immediately understand unless, of course, they just want to hit people with criminal charges for maximizing the use of limited space to criticize the government.

• Still, the scenery from the decks is spectacular. On a clear day Mount Rainier towers and spreads to the south. A hundred miles to the north along the peaks of the Cascade Range can be seen the white pyramid of another of the state’s great volcanoes, Mt. Baker. Like Puget Sound, this mountain was named after one of the officers on the HMS Discovery commanded by the Royal Navy’s George Vancouver, who sailed through this inland sea in the spring of 1792, christening the country as he went.

• In october, I went on 2 trips and after that several things became very clear: First, covid is still out there and you can still get it (as I did) and that my current trusty phone that I had been using for the last 7 years finally needed to be replaced.

• The old phone is a one plus 3t and it’s been a great phone. I currently have been running /e/ on it (with no google) and it’s been fine. Unfortunately, the years have now taken their toll on the battery. When traveling I had to put it on super battery save just to have any battery left after a day away from a charger. On super battery save it’s slow slow slow, bordering on unusable. The sad thing is, if I could replace the battery I could probibly be fine with this phone for more years. It’s true it doesn’t take super great pictures, only has 64GB space, and has a bunch of scratches now. But alas, the battery is non replaceable, so I decided I needed to do something.

• Of course the first thing I looked at was just using one of the 2 pinephones or 1 pinephone pro I already have. Sadly, they just aren’t good enough for a daily driver for me. They are slow, the battery life is also bad (on the pro at least), and… the biggest problem: The camera is just not good at all. I end up taking a lot of pictures and I really need them to be viewable. Finally, despite lots of work, there’s still a bunch of things non upstreamed, so I would have to run a custom kernel and a bunch of other non upstreamed parts.

Hardware

• We had many attendees fly in from across the country this week (and even a few international ones!) to hear us talk about ROS and its importance to the robotic community around the world. Beginning with the basics of how to set up a ROS workspace, we led the students through various exercises designed to guide them through the process of how to set up a ROS environment and incorporate it into their various projects. Other content included using MoveIt! for motion planning and how to create a URDF. Our recently updated advance topic, Building a Perception Pipeline, taught the students how to use several tools within the Point Cloud Library (PCL) to filter and segment camera data to be used with their robots.

• The more people we have on this planet, the more food we need. Naturally, this extends to water, another precious resource that generally plays a part in farming and food production. And honestly, we’d probably all eat a little better if it were really easy to grow healthy things like spinach. Well, that excuse doesn’t work anymore, thanks to [J Gleyzes]’ Ultratower. It’s a simple-to-use hydroponic tower that uses recycled mist to water plants, ultimately saving water in the process.

• Many of us will have the problem of several computers on the same desk, and to avoid clutter we’ll use a KVM switch to share the peripherals. [The Turbanned Engineer] has an interesting solution to this problem in the form of a USB triplexer. It’s a device that routes USB data lines depending upon which of its connections is powered up.

• There are all kinds of avenues into the mechanical keyboarding hobby, and one of the more well-traveled ones runs between coworkers. [crsayen] aka [DrJamesOIncandenza] has one such relationship, and was turned on to the CRKBD a while back by an office mate. For the uninitiated, that’s short for Corne keyboard, which is a column-staggered 3×6 split keyboard with three thumb keys per hand.

• Bike frames are simple on the surface, but can quickly become complicated if you want to fabricate one yourself. Brazing and welding tend to be less common skills than knowing how to bolt things together, so [Arquimaña] has brought us the OpenBike to make the process accessible to more people.

• [MirageC] is a bit of a contrarian. Instead of taking pictures of 3D printed objects that show them in their best light, he takes pictures that show them at their worst. The reason? He wanted to figure out why he was seeing a strange artifact in his printer when using a direct extruder. Just at a quick glance, you might think the problem was Z wobble, but, in this case, it was something else. You can see the fine detective work in the video below.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The MRI machine is one of the greatest achievements of modern medical imaging. Short for magnetic resonance imaging machine, MRIs are essentially magnets that look like giant tubes and use radio waves to take extremely detailed images of your inner organs. MRIs are so common that today they are used to diagnose everything from cancers and organ injuries to concussions (which, some argue, they should not be used for). They are valued both because of the accuracy of their images and because, unlike computerized tomography (CT) scans, MRIs do not expose patients to radiation. In other words, they have revealed and saved thousands and likely millions of lives by peering into the body in ways that only a surgeon could do before.

• Way back in 2020, we heard about a small company on a mission to remove pollution and minimise human labour in land care. Raspberry Pi 4 is at the heart of Directed Machines‘ solar-powered, autonomous, electric tractors called Land Care Robots.

• “When a middleman makes profits from ‘managing’ your healthcare, they inevitably do so by limiting the care you get.”

Proprietary

• The report, which is divided into three sections, recommends that the federal government improve the country’s cybersecurity risk posture in the health care sector, help the private sector mitigate cyber threats and assist health care providers in responding and recovering from cyberattacks.

• “Unfortunately, the health care sector is uniquely vulnerable to cyberattacks and the transition to better cybersecurity has been painfully slow and inadequate,” Warner said in the report.

• The health care sector is vulnerable to cyberattacks for a number of reasons, including its reliance on legacy technology, a wide and highly varied attack surface (that only grows more complex from the ever-increasing number of connected devices), a high-pressure environment where even the slightest delay can have life-or-death consequences, funding constraints, and an outdated mode of thinking that views cybersecurity as a secondary or tertiary concern.

• While VMware’s VMinclusion Taara aims to upskill women by providing free technical education and certification courses in Cloud Management & Automation, Data Centre Virtualization, Networking and Digital Workplaces, SLD will help more women become data-literate through their signature programmes on technology, mentorship, essential skills development, and offer networking opportunities, as per the statement.

• Europol has added Aleksanteri Kivimäki, suspected of hacking patient data at the psychotherapy centre Vastaamo, to its “most wanted list,” Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) announced on Thursday.

• The sensitive, confidential information of about 30,000 patients was stolen and used in an attempt to extort money from the company and its clients.

• Ransomware attacks are more or less exclusively limited to systems running versions of Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

• This was one of the trends that the ACSC mentioned, but most of the others — cyber space has become a battleground, Australia’s prosperity is attractive to cyber criminals, Worldwide, critical infrastructure networks are increasingly targeted and the rapid exploitation of critical public vulnerabilities became the norm — are hardly new.

• In the middle is Amazon, which has over-invested in e-commerce and expanded too far, crushing its cashflow and returns. Mr Bezos, who remains executive chairman, owns less than 15% of the firm’s voting rights, so he has to be at least somewhat responsive to investors. Apple and Microsoft are at the benign end of the spectrum. Both firms are older, no longer have founders with controlling stakes and operate on the principle of one share, one vote. Both listen to outsiders. In 2013 Tim Cook, Apple’s boss, sat down for dinner with Carl Icahn, a fiery investor, and took on board his request to return money to shareholders through buybacks. In 2014 Microsoft invited an activist investor, Mason Morfit, onto its board. The two firms have performed the best of the big five this year.

• You can also download all of your Gmail data at once, including unread, read, sent, draft, and archived messages. If your e-mail is part of a school or organization, you may not be able to download certain things, if anything at all. If you have Super Administrator privileges of your own domain, you can download anything.

Security

• In this Help Net Security video, Christopher Maddalena, Director of Internal and Community Product at SpecterOps, showcases Ghostwriter, which helps you manage clients, projects, reports, and infrastructure in one application.

• The tool does not replace some of the more common or traditional project management tools, such as CRMs. Still, it does consolidate all relevant project information in a way for users to easily curate every aspect of their projects.

• Responding to a recent surge in AI-generated bot accounts, LinkedIn is rolling out new features that it hopes will help users make more informed decisions about with whom they choose to connect. Many LinkedIn profiles now display a creation date, and the company is expanding its domain validation offering, which allows users to publicly confirm that they can reply to emails at the domain of their stated current employer.

• The security world held our collective breaths early this week for the big OpenSSL vulnerability announcement. Turns out it’s two separate issues, both related to punycode handling, and they’ve been downgraded to high severity instead of critical. Punycode, by the way, is the system for using non-ASCII Unicode characters in domain names. The first vulnerability, CVE-2022-3602, is a buffer overflow that writes four arbitrary bytes to the stack. Notably, the vulnerable code is only run after a certificate’s chain is verified. A malicious certificate would need to be either properly signed by a Certificate Authority, or manually trusted without a valid signature.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Account deletions happen in two stages: First the account is deactivated, which pulls it immediately from the site. If you don’t touch it again, 30 days later the account gets an actual wipe. This gives people who accidentally deactivate (or have second thoughts) an out, as during that grace period, they can revive an account with all data intact.

• Israeli authorities are to be allowed to process and interlink personal information from the EU using „automated procedures“. According to a draft, this would even be possible in the territories occupied after 1967, although the so-called territorial clause excludes this.

• “The department has voluntarily taken on this role, and in doing so, prioritized the interests of other agencies over those of law-abiding Americans.”

Confidentiality

Defence/Aggression

• While the DOJ did not take a formal stance on how the court should decide the case, the department’s filing was closely aligned with arguments made by the nonpartisan League of Women Voters, which filed the suit. “Much like a citizen’s refusal to pay taxes does not become protected speech because she is attempting to express disapproval of the IRS, photographing a voter’s license plate does not become protected speech whenever the photographer seeks to express disapproval of drop-box voting,” the DOJ wrote.

• The League of Women Voters has asked for a court order banning armed vigilantes from patrolling ballot boxes and has accused several right-wing groups of deliberately dispatching individuals to coerce residents out of casting a ballot. A similar suit filed by the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans stalled last week, with US district judge Michael Liburdi, who is also overseeing the League of Women Voters case, refusing to bar groups from monitoring outdoor ballot boxes on First Amendment grounds.

• U.S. District Court Judge Michael Liburdi, in an unexpected reversal of an earlier ruling in a related case, granted a motion Tuesday for a restraining order in a case consolidating a lawsuit brought by the nonprofit advocacy groups Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans and Voto Latino with a similar suit brought by the League of Women Voters of Arizona.

• Party officials also called for supporters to stage rallies and marches across the country after Friday afternoon prayers, the most important of the week.

• He adds that he was angry with the procession for making a racket during the call to prayer that summons Muslims to the mosque five times a day.

• The war games provoked a massive show of force by North Korea, and Pyongyang is warning of more consequences due to the extension.

• For the 30th year in a row, almost every country on Earth voted at the United Nations General Assembly to oppose the illegal six-decade US blockade of Cuba. 185 nations voted against just two: the United States and Israel.

• Vladimir Putin signed multiple new bills into law on Friday, including one concerning volunteer formations in the military and one concerning the conscription of people convicted of grave crimes.

• The war in Ukraine has moved into a new phase. While both armies are struggling in the autumn mud, each side is covertly preparing for serious action in the winter. These preparations are not limited to mobilization, training new conscripts, and creating new military units. Without an air advantage on either side, the war threatens to devolve into a stalemate. In pursuit of that kind of advantage, both sides — and Russia particularly — are trying to overwhelm the enemy air defense systems, forcing them to waste ammunition, and trying to destroy as many aircraft and air-defense units as possible. This is probably why Moscow is bombing Ukrainian critical infrastructure, including power plants and substations, which the AFU simply cannot fail to protect with all available means. The West has responded to the change in Russian tactics by stepping up supplies of air defense equipment. The outcomes of the coming winter and spring campaigns will largely depend on which of the sides will ultimately gain that coveted aerial advantage.

• The Russian army has increased combat intensity on segments of the Ukrainian front, said the Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, when speaking on the phone with Christopher Cavoli, commander of NATO Allied Command Operations.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• A new FOIA lawsuit revealed a highly censored report from six years ago detailing more deep state malfeasance.

• Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the Department of Homeland Security is working with private tech companies to fight online speech that undermines support for the U.S. government. We speak to one of the co-authors of The Intercept’s report, investigative journalist Lee Fang, who says the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act signed into law in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump expanded the government’s power to reshape online discourse. “These documents raise clear civil liberty concerns, concerns around the First Amendment and if the government is trying to shape the kind of news we see,” says Fang.

• The Freedom of Information Act was enacted 55 years ago. To its credit, it has resulted in an unprecedented amount of access to documents and communications created by federal agencies.

• When hundreds of literary figures and employees of Penguin Random House took issue with the publisher’s $2 million book deal with right-wing Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett (Guardian, 10/27/22), they provoked a backlash that underscores the degree to which the right seeks to control speech and dissent.

Environment

• The area above the Arctic circle heats up four times faster than the rest of the planet and “it is this climate amplification which causes abnormal fire activity,” David Gaveau, one of the authors of this study, told AFP.

• Researchers concentrated on an area five and a half times the size of France and with satellite pictures observed the surface area burned each year from 1982 to 2020.

• Tim Radford reports on a new study that shows the real devastating cost of heat waves and climate change overall.

EnergyEesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Estonia gives up stake in Finnish LNG terminal“In the supplemental budget, we decided to allocate €30 million for the security of gas supply to the Estonian Stockpiling Agency (AS Eesti Varude Keskus or ESPA) to serve the same goal in a different way. Therefore, if it cannot be achieved through the purchase of a stake, as it would be not practical at this time, it can be achieved through the purchase of additional gas. This option is available,” Minister of Economic Affairs and Infrastructure Riina Sikkut said at the same press conference.RTL ☛ Two welds on Reactor 1 of nuclear power plant must be repairedThe French energy supplier EDF conducted inspections, which revealed cracks with maximum depths of 4.7 and 6.1 mm. The ASN reviewed the results of the check to determine if the reactor could be reactivated for an eight-month period.Cointelegraph ☛ UK lawmakers open inquiry into NFT regulation — ‘there are fears that the bubble may burst’In a Nov. 4 announcement, the DCMS committee said its inquiry was related to the sudden growth of the NFT market, responding to fears the assets may be overvalued and at risk of the bubble bursting. According to the committee, NFT regulation in the U.K. is “largely non-existent,” with the DCMS planning to assess the assets ahead of a review by the treasury department.Rolling Stone ☛ Biden Didn’t Fight Big Oil. Democrats Are About to Pay for ItOn Monday, President Biden all but accused Big Oil of profiting off the blood and suffering of the Ukraine people. “Oil companies’ record profits today are not because of doing something new or innovative,” Biden said. “Their profits are a windfall of war, a windfall for the brutal conflict that’s ravaging Ukraine and hurting tens of millions of people around the globe.”The president called on Big Oil CEOs to ramp up production and lower prices. “If they don’t, they’re going to pay a higher tax on their excess profits and face other restrictions,” Biden warned.It was a nice bit of old-time economic populism, something the Democrats desperately need in the closing days of the mid-term election. But it also was a perfectly illustrated the election oil trap that has long crippled American politics.Common Dreams ☛ 400+ Scientists Tell COP27 PR Firm to Drop Exxon and Other Fossil Fuel Clients“Letting Hill+Knowlton run communications for the climate talks is like putting the fox’s PR hack in charge of branding the chicken coop.”Wildlife/NatureAtlas Obscura ☛ The Giant Squid of Thimble TickleThis giant squid sculpture sits near the spot where a real-life specimen was captured in the late 19th-century.

Finance

• “Americans understand this is happening, and they want it to stop.”

• “During this campaign, my Republican colleagues talk a lot about inflation, and they are right to do so,” Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote. “Over the last year, Americans have become sick and tired of paying outrageously high prices for food, gas, healthcare, prescription drugs, housing, and other necessities.”

• “A ‘Yes’ on Question D would raise the minimum wage for all workers to a living wage of $18 an hour—including tipped workers, workers with disabilities, youth, gig workers, and incarcerated workers,” Sanders wrote. “As you might expect, opposition from the billionaire class and the ultra-wealthy to Question D has been fierce.”

• “Today’s jobs report—adding 261,000 jobs with the unemployment rate still at a historically low 3.7%—shows that our jobs recovery remains strong,” Biden said in a statement.

• But once in power, much like under Barack Obama (or Bill Clinton before him), they unsurprisingly failed to deliver on the pro-working class platform they ran on. And thus the massive wealth inequality suffered under Trump, remains unchanged under Biden. Only now, while the billionaires and corporations are making record profit, workers are struggling with record inflation. And the Democrats, as the national party in power, has done nothing of meaning to mitigate this or address the real economic concerns of the working class; instead they have offered little more than virtue signaling around identity politics and demonstrated a prioritization of sending billions of dollars in weapons to the Ukraine (even at the risk of a nuclear conflict with Russia).  This is not progress.  This is not change.

• The ultra-wealthy entrepreneur and investor Ruben Vardanyan has been appointed the new head of government in the breakaway republic of Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• On Thursday, the agency approved the mechanism for which to test a slice of the 6 GHz band for unlicensed devices, including approving 13 proposed automated frequency coordination database systems from companies Broadcom, Google, Comsearch, Sony Group, Kyrio, Key Bridge Wireless, Nokia Innovations, Federated Wireless, Wireless Broadband Alliance, Wi-Fi Alliance, Qualcomm, Plume Design, and RED Technologies.

• During this public trial phase, each company is required to make its system available for a specific period of time to provide an opportunity for the public to test their system’s functionality, the FCC said in a press release.

• The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has conditionally approved 13 proposed automated frequency coordination (AFC) systems to manage spectrum access for unlicensed devices in the 6GHz band.

• The aim is to prevent new Wi-Fi kit from interfering with existing users in the stated space.

• Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, said on Tuesday that many of the hundreds of staff members who previously had access to content moderation tools have now lost that capability, dwindling the moderation team down to 15 people.

• Musk’s plan to charge blue-marked Twitter a monthly fee is inane and will have minimal impact on the platform’s revenue. The purported benefits to being “blue-marked” aren’t strong enough to get most people to pay.

• The legal action comes as Twitter notified employees on Thursday (Nov. 3) that they would find out via email on Friday whether or not they still had a job. Musk is targeting a headcount reduction of 50%, or about 3,700 of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, according to a previous Bloomberg report.

• The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, alleges that Twitter failed to provide advance notice of mass layoffs, as required under federal and state law. The U.S. Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act requires employers to provide advance notice — typically 60 days — of mass layoffs or plant closings. California’s WARN Act has the same requirements.

• Musk’s plan, as it appears from his tweets, seems to be expanding it to charge more money for more features – including the verification badge – and spread it to more users.

• Employees at the platform were told in an email Thursday evening that the company will see mass layoffs Friday as the billionaire looks to cut down on costs and try to recoup on his $44 billion investment.

• In the unsigned email, viewed by The Hollywood Reporter, the company wrote that “in an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” adding that “we recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”

• The layoffs were spread across content, partnerships, content curation, sales, and social marketing teams, they said.

• A company-wide email seen by AFP says Twitter employees will receive word via email at the start of business Friday, California time, as to what their fate is. It does not give a number but the Washington Post and New York Times reported that about half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees will be let go.

• The firm added that its offices would be temporarily closed, with staff unable to enter the building until they know if they have lost their jobs.

• The company’s 7,500 employees were reportedly told to go home and not come in to Twitter’s offices on Friday amid the cuts, The New York Times reported. Employees will instead receive an email by 9 a.m. Pacific time on Friday that will notify them of the status of their job.

• Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk has defended sacking about half the company’s workforce, saying he had “no choice” as Twitter was losing more than $4m (£3.5m) a day.

• On Wednesday, Joe Biden delivered his second major speech in two months warning of the dangers right-wing extremism poses to American democracy. As in his earlier speech, Biden effectively cited actual examples of such extremism—in this speech ranging from the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol to the break-in at Nancy Pelosi’s residence that ended with the brutal assault on her husband. Democracy, Biden claimed, is on the ballot in the midterms. Laying down the stakes of the issue, he said, “What we’re doing now is going to determine whether democracy will long endure and, in my view, is the biggest of questions: whether the American system that prizes the individual bends toward justice and depends on the rule of law, whether that system will prevail.”

• “With today’s ruling, we will uplift our voices loud and strong to protect the right to vote heading into next week’s critical elections.”

• Chinese and international media report Xi said during an official state visit by Scholz to Beijing that both leaders “jointly oppose the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons.”

• Voters can check the status of their ballot by calling their county supervisor of elections office or using the online trackers available in most counties. They have until 5:00 pm ET on Thursday, November 10 to resolve any outstanding issues.

• Next Tuesday, voters will vote on the Funding for Early Childhood Programs Amendment, which would enable the state to withdraw funds annually from New Mexico’s Land Grant Permanent Fund.

• “We need our voices to be heard and for the government to realize this is not acceptable.”

• The threat is real and extremely dangerous.

• Now that far, far right Israeli politician Binyamin Netanyahu has been elected, what are the major negative consequences Israel and the world might see, according to the Israeli press and other sources? I’m drawing in part on a round-up by BBC Monitoring. 1. Netanyahu’s more […]

• Benjamin Netanyahu is set to return as Israel’s prime minister, with Tuesday’s election results showing his Likud Party and far-right allies winning enough seats to form a parliamentary majority. This includes far-right lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir, who openly supports the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, vows to crack down on the LGBTQ community and was once convicted of racist incitement against Arabs. “This is going to be a whole new level of power for the extreme right in the government,” says Natasha Roth-Rowland, editor and writer at +972 Magazine, who studies right-wing Jewish extremism.

• As Axios reported Friday, Trump’s aides are “discussing announcing the launch of a 2024 presidential campaign on November 14.”

• Pennsylvania congressional candidate Summer Lee, a rising star on the left, won a May primary despite a withering assault from a super PAC set up by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to defeat progressives in Democratic races. It was an important victory for grassroots activists in Pennsylvania’s historically Democratic 12th Congressional District, and for progressives nationally who have been looking forward to Lee’s joining the “Squad” of advocates for economic, social, and racial justice in the House.

• Do New York Democrats really have to worry about Governor Kathy Hochul losing to Donald Trump-hugging, election-denying sad-eyed Long Island GOP Representative Lee Zeldin? I really can’t believe that. But I couldn’t believe Trump would beat one of the stars of Hochul’s Thursday rally at Barnard College, our first female senator and first female presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, back in 2016.

• The municipal district of Moreland in the north of Melbourne has recently renamed itself to Merri-bek. The old name was associated with slavery, the new name recognizes original inhabitants. In this case, the association with slavery was far stronger than in the campaigns to abolish the word master.

• One of the most notable cities in the former Moreland is Coburg.

• The city of Coburg was originally named after an English village called Pentridge. A prison was built in the district and as the name Pentridge became synonymous with the prison, inhabitants wanted a new name for the district.

• In 1867, Prince Alfred became the first member of the British royal family to visit Australia. Prince Alfred, like Prince Andrew today, was the younger brother of an heir to the throne.

• The British royal dynasty today uses the name House of Windsor. Their origins are in the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a predominantly German dynasty from Coburg, Germany. In 1915, at the height of the Great War, the British royalty wanted to distance themselves from Germany so they adopted the new name House of Windsor. It is a lot like the recent decision of Facebook to rebrand as Meta after the scandals revealed by Frances Haugen. It is the same people with a new name.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• YouTube is facing renewed pressure to crack down on Spanish-language disinformation in a letter sent to the tech giant Friday by Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif.), Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.).

• The Democrats told YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki they have “serious concern with the continued lack of action and transparency” from the company in regard to the spread of false narratives, especially in Spanish, as it related to the upcoming midterm election, according to a copy of the letter exclusively shared with The Hill.

• As the Listenbourg post gains traction on social media, the lore around the fictional country grows. Some are even “trying to claim it’s real,” according to Know Your Meme.

• Those who work in health care, however, are deeply dismissive of the idea. Dr. Ryan Marino, a medical toxicologist, emergency room physician and addiction medicine specialist at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center told Salon that this idea doesn’t pass “the sniff test” and would only complicate things for medical providers.

• “Fentanyl is not a weapon,” Marino said. “Fentanyl is already a restricted drug, and in medicine we deal with shortages on necessary and invaluable medicines like fentanyl frequently just because the DEA can arbitrarily restrict production and supply of any controlled substance if they want.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Let’s take a look at several of the biggest databases out there, as well as who they are affiliated with. This is by no means comprehensive, but instead, a way to make sense of where these challenges are coming from and a way to see where book challengers are getting their copy-paste arguments.

• Irish media and sources close to Web Summit’s CEO confirm The Grayzone was banned from the gathering as the result of a personal campaign waged by Olena Zelenska, the wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Although China has not officially expelled CBC’s journalists, Fenlon wrote that “the effect was the same.” Given the fact that CBC cannot obtain work visas for its reporters, he wrote that “there is no point in keeping an empty bureau,” when another could be established in “a different country that welcomes journalists and respects journalistic scrutiny.”

• The Forum featured blockchain industry leaders along with influential experts in global financial markets and the Bitcoin ecosystem at the Palazzo dei Congressi in Lugano on October 28th and 29th 2022

Civil Rights/Policing

• The tribe has argued the U.S. is failing to fulfill its obligations regarding the river under the terms of an 1849 treaty.

• In a filing, lawyers for the tribe wrote that “[w]hen the government creates an Indian reservation, it reserves then-unappropriated water sufficient to fulfill the reservation’s purposes.” The Navajo Nation, which first sued over access to the river in 2003, has asked for access to the main branch of the river, rather than to the San Juan River, the tributary where it gets most of its water.

• “It defies logic that these people didn’t know the truth as to what Amy Marin did or didn’t do,” Gutierrez said. “When they accused Amy Marin, they knew that she absolutely did the right thing and yet they let her feel the pain of that accusation for five days, and she will never be the same.”

• Marin told ABC News that an FBI agent and a Texas Ranger interviewed her before McCraw went on television with his inaccurate statements about her actions. She told the officers at that time what happened on the day of the shooting, including her shutting the door behind her.

• “They had the video and the FBI and Rangers had already interviewed her and confirmed with her that she kicked the rock out,” said Flanary. “It doesn’t make sense.”

• An inquest in the death of Lee Brown, 39, heard that not enough was done to prevent his death as his fellow in-mates called the Brits’ family to tell them of his suffering

• The next morning, his family were told he was shackled, hadn’t eaten or drank in days and was drifting in and out of consciousness on the floor of a cell.

• The inquest was told a British official was turned away from the prison when guards said Mr Brown was asleep.

• But fellow inmates had called the family, at great personal risk to themselves, to tell them that he was being beaten and starved by the police and needed help or he would die. Mr Brown had flown to the Gulf state on 6 April 2011 and planned to stop off for a few days on his way to visit his girlfriend in Indonesia.

• Returning a narrative conclusion of neglect, the jury forewoman said: “The factors that probably contributed to his death are as follows. Bruises from other detainees, guards and police officers, a lack of adequate food or water, a lack of habitable living conditions and a lack of access to necessary medical care while at the police station.

• As thousands of asylum seekers continue to arrive on buses in New York, we speak with a man from Venezuela about his journey, and two New Yorkers who have been helping since August to welcome them with dignity and ensure they get the housing, food and other assistance they need. “The system here in New York City is not created for this type of community, which is the migrants that are arriving,” says former asylum seeker, Adama Bah. “It is our job as New Yorkers to be able to welcome them in this city that is a so-called sanctuary city,” adds Power Malu, with the group Artists, Athletes and Activists. Bah and Malu also discuss how their work is being repeated nationwide.

• Thoreau’s civil disobedience was based on his perception that the government was pro-slavery and that because the war with Mexico would increase the number of slaves states, he could not in good conscience pay his taxes to support the government. His argument was anti-government. “I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually,” he wrote.

• The representatives of the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas and the Nahua nation in Mexico met with executives from HSBC, Barclays, and Credit Suisse in London this week to urge them to stop backing oil and gas pipelines and fracked gas export terminals.

• In Makhachkala, Dagestan police detained and questioned a group of 15 young people singled out for their “countercultural” interests, looking for information about the four sisters who recently fled Dagestan, escaping years of abuse and domestic violence.

• On Unity Day — a state holiday celebrated on November 4 in Russia — President Vladimir Putin explained, once again, why Russia invaded Ukraine. Before an audience of historians gathered at the Moscow Manezh exhibition hall, Putin spoke about why the war had been inevitable. Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev, too, had some holiday thoughts — about the various kinds of people who apparently oppose Russian unity. Meduza has compiled — and translated — the slurs, fallacies, and clichés that might help you get into a festive mood for this holiday.

• Two weeks ago, I had the chance to go see Cory Doctorow at my local independent bookstore, in Montréal. He was there to present his latest essay, co-written with Rebecca Giblin1. Titled Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, it focuses on the impact of monopolies and monopsonies (more on this later) on creative workers.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The latest proposal, which hasn’t been reported, is being discussed within the telecoms lobby group GSMA, an association that represents more than 750 mobile operators.

• “GSMA is coordinating a proposal that speaks to Big Tech contribution to European infrastructure investment,” said John Giusti, GSMA’s chief regulatory officer, without elaborating on the content of the proposal.

• A letter will be sent to EU industry chief Thierry Breton in the next five to six weeks, Giusti said.

• Cable giants like Comcast and Charter continue to struggle to retain traditional TV subscribers, so they’re extracting their pound of flesh from their captive cable broadband customers that have no alternative ISPs to flee to thanks to a continued lack of competition in the United States.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Microsoft has always sold Xbox consoles at a loss, an executive confirmed during the Epic Games v. Apple trial on Wednesday, as previously reported by Business Insider. An Epic lawyer asked Microsoft’s vice president of Xbox business development, Lori Wright, about what profit margins the company has on its sales of console units.

• “We don’t — we sell the consoles at a loss,” she replied, before confirming that Microsoft has never earned a profit on console sales.

Monopolies

• Look closer, though, and similarities abound. Huge profits from tech firms’ core businesses have funded a giant land-grab. Amazon’s dominant position in cloud computing, initially intended to support its e-commerce marketplace, now contributes the lion’s share of profits and bankrolls big bets in entertainment (like the $8.5bn acquisition of MGM, owner of the James Bond franchise), health (a $3.9bn deal to buy One Medical, a provider of primary care) and space (Amazon plans to invest more than $10bn in its Kuiper satellites). Alphabet’s lucrative search-ad and YouTube businesses subsidise a loss-making cloud operation and a moonshot unit, which together lost more than $2bn in the most recent quarter. The result is that big tech firms now compete across multiple industries, largely with each other.

Trademarks

• It just occurred to me as I was preparing to start writing this post that the volume of trademark conflicts I’ve seen in the craft beer industry seems to have finally calmed the hell down. There are still disputes, obviously, but it used to be that I could count on writing several posts a month on the topic. That’s a good thing and I almost certainly will go hunting around for information on why this is.

Copyrights

• Many of you are inquiring about a lawsuit filed yesterday afternoon by two “J Doe” Plaintiffs regarding the serious and ongoing GitHub Copilot problem which we have been working on for the last 18 months. This issue is dire and important, but includes many complex issues that intersect FOSS license compliance with moral questions of software freedom and the future of machine learning in human endeavor. Complex issues need careful, diligent, and community-oriented consideration and response.

• The attorneys in this newly filed case — Matthew Butterick and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm — did reach out to us, and we’ve been in discussions with them as to the key issues of copyleft policy and concerns about problematic interpretations of copyleft that are inherent in this type of novel litigation. These attorneys expressed to us that they had Plaintiffs who wanted to move very quickly, and we certainly understand their frustration.

• We pointed these attorneys to our Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement, which we co-drafted with the Free Software Foundation and has been endorsed by the Linux Netfilter Team, and many others. One of those principles is particularly relevant in this situation: Community-oriented enforcement must never prioritize financial gain.

• The lawsuit has been initiated by Matthew Butterick, who is a programmer, author, and lawyer. He is being represented by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm from California. Together, they are claiming that Microsoft is engaging in open-source software piracy by using billions of lines of code written by millions of programmers under various licenses including MIT, GPL, and Apache. The defendants named in the lawsuit are GitHub, Microsoft, and its technology partner OpenAI.

• GitHub and OpenAI launched Copilot in June 2021, an AI-based product that aims to help software coders by providing or filling in blocks of code using smart suggestions. It charges users $10 per month or $100 a year for its service.

• “By train­ing their AI sys­tems on pub­lic GitHub repos­i­to­ries (though based on their pub­lic state­ments, pos­si­bly much more), we con­tend that the defen­dants have vio­lated the legal rights of a vast num­ber of cre­ators who posted code or other work under cer­tain open-source licences on GitHub,” said Butterick.

• These licences include a set of 11 popular open source licences that all require attribution of the author’s name and copyright. This includes the MIT licence, the GNU General Public Licence, and the Apache licence.

• This is all kinds of hilarious if you’re aware of the history of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), formerly the MPAA. Basically, the group’s entire existence has been built around lobbying government for ever more ridiculous laws that protect the bottom line of the movie studios. In the late aughts, the studios decided they needed to fight for special “release windows” to make it harder for people to rent movies (this was the pre-streaming, DVD era).

• One of the striking features of the copyright industry is the fact that enough is never enough. Give companies stronger enforcement of copyright, and they will still start pushing for more. An example is the EU’s Copyright Directive. Even when upload filters were approved against all expert advice, on the grounds that sufficient safeguards were built in, French politicians were persuaded by copyright companies to jettison even those weak user rights.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• There are many reasons that I’m seen as an anti social kind of person, and if I have to pick one reason that stands out the most, it would be people who guilt trips me. Guilt tripping is basically an act, whether geniune or not, an attempt to make a situation, whether it be if person A is a good politician, or if we are going to have rice or noodles tonight, beautifly crafted so that you, as a person, would sound guilty, if you don’t follow their underlying desires.

Politics

Technical

• “Humans are inherently technological beings or tool users. We are deficient beings who use technology to complement, enhance, or disburden ourselves” (Human-Technology-Relations)

Science

• Have you ever considered building your own telescope? Such a project can be daunting, especially if you grind your own mirrors. But with a 3D printer, hardware store bits and bobs, and some inexpensive pre-made mirrors, you too can be the proud owner of your very own own Hadley — a 900mm Newtonian Telescope that can cost less than $150 USD to build! Check out the video below the break to get a good scope on the project.

Internet/Gemini

• A big welcome to folks that are just joining Mastodon.

• I have been on Mastodon about 2 years I think and I really love it. Although I have a twitter account I may have only logged in 5 times in the past year or so, and that’s just to check my messages, which I could have set to automatically send to my email.

• I’m announcing the release of my new service for Gemini, Lasso! It’s a bookmarking service oriented akin to Wallabag or Pocket; that’s oriented towards bookmarking articles, gemlog posts, and other primarily written material (perfect for Gemini!). It also archives bookmarked articles to help mitigate link rot—I know for me personally, there’s many a time I’m trying to re-read some interesting gemlog post from a few months back and I find that it was deleted forever.

• People wanna completely erode the entire meaning of setting a font-size in the browser by moving into some wack-ass race-to-the-bottom of shifting the “de facto” default up by 25%. What’s the, uh, what’s the long-term consequence of that, you think? It’s gonna be a slippery slope, a tug of war of increase/decrease/increase/decrease—your CSS is just the wrong place to set this.

• 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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