● 11.06.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 06/11/2022: Twitter Continues to Shrink (Exodus)

Posted in News Roundup at 4:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• We present the weekly roundup #22.12 featuring FOSS and tech updates across the web.

• Welcome to the DebugPoint Weekly roundup #22.12, where you can find all the happenings from this week, mainly from the Linux and open-source space.

• This week, we saw several critical security updates from major packages, distro updates and new features on some major app releases.

• Here’s what happened this week.

• We cover events and user groups that are running in Cyprus. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.

• While there are interesting — and valid — points made by Poettering (creator of systemd), the idea of making the mere act of “booting Linux” reliant on a locked down Microsoft specification… well… no sir, I don’t like it.

Audiocasts/Shows

• There are many small timer or stopwatch programs available in Linux, but…why not make our own? I will show you many different ways to create your own custom timers using the standard Linux command line utilities. I’ll use ‘for’ loops, ‘while’ loops, cat, read, time, timeout, and several other standard utilities.

Applications

• The goal of the previous iteration was:

• Lately I haven’t written much here, so I thought it’d be nice to change this with a short update on my recent OSS activity.

• We are very happy to release dnsdist 1.7.3 today, a maintenance release with no functional changes.

• This release strictly serves to bring dnsdist packages to our EL9 and Ubuntu Jammy repositories, and upgrades the dnsdist Docker image from Debian buster to Debian bullseye, as buster is officially EOL.

• This is the release of version 4.7.1 of the Authoritative Server.

• After 4.7.0 (quite recently) was released, we realised the SQL schema update files were missing. 4.7.1 corrects this. It also contains a few small fixes in the catalog zones implementation.

• Just one day after releasing version 4.7.1, we realised an important fix was missing from it. Specifically, AXFR clients (secondaries) can get very busy checking for updates on primaries, or could miss updates entirely. 4.7.2 fixes this.

• I have now named the project “oe-qky-dunfell” and uploaded it to github.com

• This project will cross-compile hundreds of packages (currently 956 packages), on a x86_64 host system, for x86_64 (nocona), i686, or aarch64 target.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GlassFish on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, GlassFish is a free, open-source server for deploying JAVA based applications. It also provides both web and CLI-based administration consoles for easier configuration and management of your Java applications and their respective components.

• 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 GlassFish on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

• Prefer macOS spotlight or Alfred style search system? You can now get similar feature in Ubuntu via an extension.

• It’s ‘Search Light‘, an extension so far supports for Gnome 42 & 43, meaning for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 22.10, Fedora 36/37, Arch and Manjaro Linux.

• With it, you may press a custom shortcut key on keyboard to open the search box. Then, type to search and launch applications, settings, and/or app content.

• Docker and systemd, getting rid of dreaded ‘Failed to connect to bus’ error

• Besides several bugfixes, the latest version now supports using higher compression levels and logging to syslog facility. I also finished packaging and official packages are now available,

• In Linux, every directory has its own purpose for its existence. The same is true for the sysfs directory. The sysfs entries are used by the kernel to export the information to processes in the user domain and to get input from the user. These entries travel through the file system to find the show and store functions registered for it.

• Entries in sysfs can be sorted based on the bus type, object type, device type, parent/child relationships, etc. Symlinks aid in reducing redundancies.

• Like the lab() color function, hwb() is one of the more recent methods for defining colors in CSS. Just like rgb() and hsl() it uses colors from the sRGB color space. HWB, which stands for hue-whiteness-blackness, describes colors with a starting hue, then a degree of whiteness and blackness to mix into that base hue.

• The function takes 3 space-separated values.

• 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.

• There are four places prose text font-size can be set: [...]

• Once up on a time there were good reasons to use a separate /boot filesystem, but they’ve gone away these days in basic configurations. No x86 system’s firmware has problems reading all of your disks, and if you’re sticking to non-exotic storage devices, the firmware can boot from anything you want to use. There remain reasons like having your root filesystem encrypted or using btrfs for it (the current Fedora default), but if your Linux distribution does this, the installer should get it right if you need a separate /boot (and also if you don’t).

• We have been working lately with Enric Balletbo and Dorinda Bassey to improve the support for the HP X2 Chromebook in Fedora. This post explains how to install Fedora on that Chromebook.

• By default, SSH utilizes port number 22 and many sysadmins change it to avoid the influx of bot attacks trying to brute-force their way in.

• The tar command is used for creating archive files from various files and folders.

• It’s quite simple when you have all the required files in one place. But what if you want to put some files or folders in the tar file and exclude some?

• One way would be to copy those required files into a new directory and then proceed with the standard procedure, but it is not an efficient way.

• Lutris is the most popular Linux game manager on Linux that allows you to install games from different platforms like Steam, Battle.net, and others. In this tutorial, we will learn how to install Lutris on Manjaro Linux, and also how to add games from the application and from the official Lutris website.

• In this tutorial you will learn how to install the Plex Media Player to your Ubuntu device. This Plex client is the best way to stream media from a Plex server thanks to its advanced media playback engine.

• The groupdel command enables you to remove specific groups from a Linux operating system. After invoking the command, it will attempt to remove all entries that refer to the specified group from all the system account files. If you maintain a system with many users and groups, this command will eventually come in handy.

• The date() function in PHP allows you to print the date and time using the specified format.

• You can get the date and time from any point by specifying a Unix timestamp. However, if you don’t specify a timestamp, then the date() function will use the current date and time as retrieved from the “time()” function.

• While this function may initially seem confusing, it is relatively simple once you know what characters are replaced within the string.

• Over the following sections, you will learn all there is to know about using this function within your scripts.

• The gpasswd command allows you to edit a group’s password, members, and administrators. It is used to edit both the /etc/group and /etc/gshadow files. If you use the command without any options, it will prompt for a new password for the group.

• Since a group password is often shared amongst multiple people, they are not considered very secure. However, they are a useful tool if elevated security is required.

• Postgresql is an open source object-relational database system with over 30 years of active development that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, feature robustness, and performance. Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance.

Games

• Ready for some more quality games? There’s an 11 Bit developer / publisher bundle on Humble and it seems like a pretty good deal overall. Here’s what to expect from it on Linux desktop and Steam Deck, along with ProtonDB rating if needed.

• I’ve finished my NewGRF that adds tea to OpenTTD. It’s not publicly available yet, because I want to test it more and see if there’s anything that should be tweaked.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora and Red Hat

• Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 07 November at 1300 UTC. The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend. You can join us over:

• So far in this series I have established that the following are all necessary components of the modernization project planning process:

• Vulnerabilities in software are a global concern, and open source software is no different from proprietary software in this regard. Any software vulnerability has the potential to be exploited by miscreants to harm its user. Whether this is on-premises, in the cloud, or on your mobile device, vulnerabilities in software make headlines (for good reason).

• There is tension, however, between software producers and software users. On the surface, any vulnerability is scary due to the potential for harm. Yet, the reality is that most vulnerabilities have minimal opportunity to cause harm, whether due to the type of vulnerability itself, the type of authorization required to execute it, the vulnerability’s level of exposure in typical use of the software, and many other factors. This variability means a vulnerability in a particular component used in different products could result in different severities in those products. All software vulnerabilities are not created equal, and there is a substantial body of work to support this assertion.

• Red Hat is a bright spot for the company, which is starting its third transformation in history

Devuan Family

• Probably the biggest news in this new PeppermintOS update are the redesigned Welcome screen and Peppermint Hub in-house-built apps. There’s no word from the devs about what exactly was changed, but I took this release for a spin to check out the changes and report them back to you.

• The Welcome screen, which is the first thing you see when running the distribution, now features two sections. On the left side, you get the same items that have already been present in the previous design, while on the right side you have access to the various social media accounts of the distribution.

Devices/Embedded

• Synology launched this week a Wi-Fi 6 router with transmission rates up to 600Mbps (2.4 GHz) and up to 2400Mbps (5 GHz). The WRX560 router features one 2.5GbE WAN/LAN port, one Gigabit WAN and up to three Gigabit LAN ports.

Open Hardware/Modding

• One of my favorite SparkFun products is the Binary Blaster. It’s a lovely little soldering kit, which, when completed, is a fun game to help the user practice converting from decimal and hex to binary! I picked one up and had fun putting it together and playing it, but found that rather quickly I mastered both game modes and wanted more of a challenge!

• You might remember Rob’s candy throwing robot from last year, when he used the ESP-32 and some other materials to change the social-distancing trick-or-treating game!

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• New York City has an agreement with CityBridge, the team behind LinkNYC, that involves installing 2,000 5G towers over the next several years, an effort to help eliminate the city’s “internet deserts.” Ninety percent will be in underserved areas of the city — neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and above 96th Street in Manhattan.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• Spatial data is always tougher to visualize than it seems at first. Well, not anymore. R ggmap is an amazing package you can start using almost instantly, after some light configuration. It won’t take you more than a couple of minutes to configure everything and have your first map ready.

• Today you’ll learn how to use the ggmap package to do almost everything geodata-related. We’ll kick things off by plotting basic maps, markers, and paths, and then dive into changing map themes. Once that’s under our belt, we’ll focus on advanced topics, including geocoding, reverse geocoding, drawing routes, and calculating distance between locations.

• Though Decision Trees look simple and intuitive, there is nothing very simple about how the algorithm goes about the process deciding on splits and how tree pruning occurs. In this post I take you through a simple example to understand the inner workings of Decision Trees.

• Producing a journal-quality table requires fine-grained and reproducible control over presentation. Surgical targeting of footnotes, capable of adapting to changes in the underlying data, is one example.

• This post briefly explores the shifts in the nature of employment whilst at the same time visiting the grammar of tables gt: The natural companion to the grammar of graphics ggplot2.

• Hello! A while back I wrote a post about how to write a toy DNS resolver in Go.

• In that post I left out “how to generate and parse DNS queries” because I thought it was boring, but a few people pointed out that they did not know how to parse and generate DNS queries and they were interested in how to do it.

• This made me curious – how much work is it do the DNS parsing? It turns out we can do it in a pretty nice 120-line Ruby program, which is not that bad.

• So here’s a quick post on how to generate DNS queries and parse DNS responses! We’re going to do it in Ruby because I’m giving a talk at a Ruby conference soon, and this blog post is partly prep for that talk :). I’ve tried to keep it readable for folks who don’t know Ruby though, I’ve only used pretty basic Ruby code.

• I work on Cinder, a just-in-time (JIT) compiler built on top of CPython. If you aren’t familiar with Cinder and want to learn more, a previous post about the inliner gives a decent overview of the JIT. This post will talk about how we use binary search to isolate miscompiled functions, a technique that is applicable to any compiler if you have the right infrastructure.

• The concept of time-sharing has been around since the early days of UNIX. However, it wasn’t until the advent of virtual machines that the security boundary between two different workloads was hardened enough to support two different customers on the same hardware. True cloud multi-tenancy changed the way we write programs. And it’s still improving – lightweight isolation like containers and WebAssembly are becoming more secure.

• I keep getting lost in the maze of Haskell’s numeric types. Here’s the map I drew to help myself out. I think there might have been something like this in the original Haskell 1998 report but I like this one better.

• In the world of BSD and Linux, a software developer is someone who develops software, it’s someone who knows how to program in a programming language like C (or something else). A ports or package maintainer on the other hand, is not someone who develops software, it is someone who typically maintains a port or a package (I am going to use the term “package” henceforth in this article for both ports and packages).

• For the last few weeks, some of us have been working through learning about interactive theorem proving together at Recurse Center. I’ve been curious about proof assistants since undergrad, and finally have the time, space, and peers to dive into it with. It’s been an interesting experience getting started. Since we’re just getting started, I can’t tell you much about the long-term experience, but I can give some basic guidance on what it’s like to get started on each and who I imagine the audience for each is.

• First off, what’s a proof assistant? Simply, it’s a piece of software that helps develop formal proofs via human-machine collaboration. You want formal proofs in a lot of cases; they’re used in math, but it would also be great to know that an algorithm you want to implement does what you say it does, or that a bigger piece of software is proven correct. Proving software correct does, of course, lead to the question of how you check that the spec is correct, and that you’re specifying the properties you care about. That’s a whole other conversation.

• I’m halfway done with my RC batch now. Time feels like it has sped up. The feeling that my time at RC is infinite is gone. This was compounded by seeing folks from the Fall 1 batch conclude their batches yesterday. We’ll get a new boost from the Winter 1 batch joining on Monday, which I’m really pumped for! New people, new excitement, new energy!

• I’m happy with how things have gone so far in the batch. I don’t think I want to do anything dramatically different in the second half of the batch, except be a little bit more focused on one project instead of splitting between two.

• I did have a less social week this week than most weeks, because I have some personal life stress right now (should wrap up next week) and it made it hard to focus, and I withdrew a little bit. Despite that, I still had a pretty social week! Something for me to take away here is that RC has shifted my understanding of where I get energy from and how much I do benefit from social things.

• The piece You might as well timestamp it argues that instead of storing booleans in databases, you store the timestamp of when it became true. A missing timestamp means that value is false. This is generally more useful than a boolean, because in addition to boolean behavior you also get auditing information.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• Bash scripts are best when it comes to simplifying the daily tasks. These scripts contain commands and tricks that you can use as a sysadmin. The backtick (`) operator is one of those features of Bash script that can ease up your work.

• However, many beginners misunderstand the backticks as quotation mark characters used in the strings. That’s why learning about back quote characters or backticks is essential. In this guide, we will list down the approach on how to master the backticks in Linux Bash scripts.

• Exit codes are integer numbers that indicate that a script has been successfully executed. These codes are also known as return codes or exit statuses. Exit codes usually return zero upon successful execution and non-zero upon unsuccessful execution.

• However, many Bash script users want to return with different return codes on exit, but they get errors. In this tutorial, we will explain the different approaches to make a Bash script return with different return codes on exit.

• The command line might seem daunting for new (and old) developers, but another unlock for developer productivity — if you can master it. A crash course syllabus that will get you 80% there (Pareto principle).

• The caveat is that “the command line” means a lot of things. To be more specific, these are UNIX-y, bash, and popular terminal emulator tricks. This is not a list of complex one-liners that you can alias and never remember what they do. It’s a hopefully practical list of things you can learn and remember.

Java

• When we do the program, we tend to work with many user-defined and built-in methods. Java programming is also diverse when it comes to the use of functions. The special class methods known as getters and setters are employed in Java programming to read from and apply to an entity’s attributes. In Java, the setter function serves to set up or populate corresponding class fields while the getter function serves to read the value stored in the variable or retrieve the content. This procedure can be performed with inheritance as well. Most classes come with getter and setter methods by convention. Nevertheless, by specifically declaring the getter and setter functions, we may override the standards. In this regard, we are going to explain the usage of getter and setter functions in Java programming.

• Arrays and lists are the two most basic data structures in Java. The array provides the common names of the collection which has the same data type. It includes both primitive data types and objects of a class that is based on the array’s definition. On the other hand, the Java lists are the collection frameworks that organize the elements and store them in an object in a manner that maintains the insertion order. There come various scenarios where the Java arrays are required to be converted into Java lists. We can accomplish the conversion of the arrays to lists by using the methods provided by Java.

• The logical operator in java is utilized to integrate two or more conditions as well as to enhance the examination of the initial condition. There are various logical operators in Java and one of them is the logical OR operator. The logical OR operator used the two vertical bar symbols “||” in the program. It is utilized between the operand which is to be evaluated. The result of the logical OR operator is true when the two or more specified operands have true values on the evaluation of the condition. It is frequently applied to Boolean (logical) values.

Standards/Consortia

• No more JavaScript (except for Commento and GoatCounter, neither of which impacts any important functionality)

• One of the big things I’ve done is add support for embedding mastodon posts in a more native way. Mastodon normally has an “embed this post” link, which makes things look like this:

• I just did again the usual web search, and I have verified that Mastodon still does not support managing multiple domains on the same instance, and that there is still no way to migrate an account to a different instance without basically starting from scratch.

• [...]

• I have managed my own email server since the ’90s, but I do not feel that the system administration effort required to maintain a private Mastodon instance would be justified at this point: there is not even a Debian package!

• If you need a lightweight Mastodon instance, I have a tip for you: GoToSocial is an ActivityPub backend written in Go, no dependencies needed, lightweight (well, 50MB binary) and can store data in either SQLite3 or Postgres.

• The setup is well documented, you can download pre-built binary, create an empty directory, configure database connection and just run it. It has a built-in support for Let’s Encrypt, however, if you already have a domain with existing web server and Let’s Encrypt certificate, you can turn this feature off.

• Twitter is rapidly declining, and users are going elsewhere; my updates have been infrequent, and you thought I was gone. Take this chance to review your options and continue getting the latest Xubuntu and Xfce news however you’d like.

Leftovers

• However, what I have experienced more than once is that some people tend to simply skim an article, misunderstand or simply read things completely out of context, then make a whole LOT of assumptions (without bothering to email me and try to get clarification about the issue), and then comment emotionally about it on Hacker News, Lobsters, Reddit or somewhere else.

• [...]

• Now, I don’t mind this guy hating me, but why would someone “hate” another person whom they have never met, don’t know anything about, just because they express their opinion about what they consider or analyze to be, the true motivations behind a piece of software?

• On Tuesday, 8 November 2022, 7PM Detroit time, I’ll be giving a talk for mug.org about Rat Operated Vehicles. If the guys are cooperative, there might be a demo.

• In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the Sorbonne in France – after a yearlong traveling after leaving office. He gave a speech titled Citizenship in a Republic, in which he reflected on the qualities that a successful democracy required of its citizens.

• Water is sometimes known as the universal solvent. But researchers at Harvard want to use water to put things together instead of taking them apart. Really small things. In the video below, you can see a simple 3D-printed machine that braids microscopic fibers.

• Almost every type of retro indicator technology from a Nixie tube to a flipdot with everything else in between has found itself on these pages in some form of artwork or decoration. It’s pleasing then to see one that hasn’t appeared so much over the years, and particularly at the hands of our colleague [Voja Antonic]. He’s taken a large array of moving-coil panel meters and hooked them up to a microcontroller board that’s triggered by a PIR sensor. Normally the readings are random, but get too close to it and all those needles start moving, making for a very different take on an electronic wall display.

• Instead, ads from other companies are being sent out as push notifications, much to the chagrin of some Uber users. Over the weekend, people turned to Twitter to complain about the notifications, sharing screenshots of ads, including one particularly popular one from Peloton that Uber had sent out. One of the primary complaints: notifications are being sent out when users aren’t engaging with the app.

• What happens when everyone can become a video star just by having a script?

• few days ago, my home network got a refresh that resulted in the enablement of some next-generation technologies for me and my family. Well, next-generation or current-generation, depending on your point of view. Per the ISP standards in Spain (my country), what I’ll describe next is literally the most and latest you can get.

• The post title spoiled it already. I have now 10G internet uplink and native IPv6 since I changed my ISP to https://digimobil.es.

• My story began a few months ago when a series of fiber deployments started in my neighborhood by a back-then mostly unknown ISP (digimobil). The workers were deploying the fiber inside the street sewers, and I noticed that they were surrounded by advertisements promoting the fastest FTTH deployment in Spain. Indeed, their website was promoting 1G and 10G fiber, so a few days later I asked the workers when would that be available for subscription. The told me to wait just a couple of months, and the wait ended this week.

• I called the ISP and a marketing person told me a lot of unnecessary information about how good service I was purchasing. I asked about IPv6 availability, but that person had no idea. They called me the next day to confirm that the home router they were installing would support both IPv6 and Wi-Fi 6. I was suspicious about nobody in the marketing department knowing anything about any of the two technologies, but I decided to proceed anyway. Just 24 hours after calling them, a technician came to my house and 45 minutes later the setup was ready.

• I’m getting tired of working alone and I’ve had no success finding collaborators. All of the people I’d like to work with are either already busy working full-time or are totally burnt out.

• I was never a Boy Scout.

• My career has largely involved an abundance of isolation, my hobbies are enjoyed in solitude, even the sports I played growing up involved individual events without any real “team effort.” Call it social anxiety, or introversion, or something else; I was just never much of a joiner.

• But one thing I’ve always envied the scouts for (both the Girl and Boy varieties) was merit badges. There’s something deeply satisfying about the clearly defined path these organizations have laid towards earning each badge, and once a candidate demonstrates their understanding and application of the underlying skills, they earn a physical token of their accomplishment.

• It’s like video game achievements, but in real life. What’s not to like?

• I’ve always been a bit of a collector of hobbies. I like to learn new things, and enjoy the satisfaction that comes from exercising a newly acquired skill. Granted, it makes for a pretty clear jack-of-all-trades mentality (master of none), but understanding and applying the basics of painting, or lock picking, or genealogy isn’t about mastery, but exploration.

Science

• A tale of woe: Our institution, like many others, has a high attrition rate in introductory computer science (CS1), our first programming class for majors. We often use the term “DWF rate,” as those students who earn Ds or Fs, or who withdraw from the course are ineligible to continue further in taking other CS classes as part of the major. Beyond the DWF rate, students who earn Cs in their CS1 course, while technically allowed to continue taking CS classes, tend to struggle in those later classes. We do offer a pre-CS1 programming class to help students who are not ready to jump directly into CS1. Many researchers have shown students with prior programming experience tend to do better in the initial CS1 course. We have published research on this,3 as have many others.

• Chess players and programmers now have access to tools that can improve skills and unleash creativity

• Advancing the spontaneous bottom-up construction of artificial cells with high organizational complexity and diverse functionality remains an unresolved issue at the interface between living and non-living matter.

• Explainable AI (XAI) is the idea that an AI should always provide reasoning for its decisions in a way that makes it easy for humans to comprehend. XAI helps to build trust and ensures that issues can be more quickly identified before they cause wider damage.

• A quantum stopwatch made of lasers and helium atoms can measure the time that has passed with complete accuracy, without counting seconds like other clocks

Hardware

• With surface-mount components quickly becoming the norm, even for homebrew hardware, the resistor color-code can sometimes feel a bit old-hat. However, anybody who has ever tried to identify a random through-hole resistor from a pile of assorted values will know that it’s still a handy skill to have up your sleeve. With this in mind, [j] decided to super-size the color-code with “The Great Resistor”.

• As through-hole components are supplanted by their surface-mount equivalents, we’re beginning to see the departure of once-common component form factors. Many such as the metal can transistors became rare years ago, while others still hang on albeit in fewer and fewer places. One of these is the once-ubiquitous TO92 moulded plastic transistor, which we don’t see very much of at all in 2022. [Sam Ettinger] is a fan of the D-shaped plastic blobs, and has gone as far as to recreate them for a new generation to enjoy.

• We suspect that most of us who use an alarm clock have our particular sound memorized. Common choices are annoying beeping, energetic marimbas, or what used to be your favorite song (which you have now come to despise). [Adam Kumpf] wanted a more pleasant alarm clock and came up with WakeSlow, an alarm clock audio stream, which is a spiritual successor to an earlier project he did called Warmly.

• China ordered an industrial park that houses an iPhone factory belonging to Foxconn (2317.TW) to enter a seven-day lockdown on Wednesday, in a move set to intensify pressure on the Apple supplier as it scrambles to quell worker discontent at the base.

• The Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone in central China said it would impose “silent management” measures with immediate effect, including barring all residents from going out and only allowing approved vehicles on roads within that area.

• China cripples production at world’s largest iPhone factory under zero-COVID policy

• Hands, man, they’re a tough gig to beat. Four fingers? An opposable thumb? A design classic. But that’s never stopped scientists from trying to surpass what nature perfected. And their latest attempt to out-fing humanity’s fingers is pleasingly terrifying.

• Arm today announced the appointment of Tony Fadell, Build Collective Principal, to its Board. Mr. Fadell brings decades of experience with the Arm architecture and ecosystem to his role as the company prepares for a potential public listing.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The reluctance was simply because the way the debate is framed — it’s ‘Whose side are you on?’

• But of course, most people in the world are perfectly capable of worrying about two things at once.

• The danger with even raising the specific challenges of boys and men is that it will be seen as a distraction from ongoing efforts to help women and girls. I think that’s a false choice. Partly as a result of the changes of recent decades, we both can and should now pay attention to both sides of gender inequality.

• But the likelihood of lawmakers pushing the bill over the finish line in the final stretch is dimming.

• In case you are unaware, the US is currently experience a critical shortage of blood.

• A new X-ray technique that combines conventional equipment with a deep-learning algorithm might find its way into both security settings and the healthcare industry.

• Researchers from the United Kingdom’s University College London (UCL) recognized that X-ray security systems, though good at detecting shapes, weren’t so great at recognizing textures. Identifying textural abnormalities could be the key to locating explosives and other harmful items—especially those hidden away within larger objects. So they set about devising a system that could be paired with existing equipment to detect concerning textures.

Security

• Data exfiltrated from independent co-educational Baptist institution Kilvington Grammar School by the LockBit ransomware gang has been posted on the dark web on 14 October. LockBit only attacks Windows systems.

• iTWire asked the school, which is based on Ormond, on 15 October whether it had anything to say about the breach, but there has been a studious silence from the institution.

• However, on Sunday, The Age reported that the school had notified the families of children who attend the school that it had suffered a data breach.

• In a statement to The Age, the school said: “Kilvington Grammar confirms it has experienced a data incident involving unauthorised access to some of its online systems.

• Thousands of Victorian students and their families may have had personal data including medical information [compromised] after a technology company that has contracts with the Victorian government was [breached].

• “Over the past decade, the American public has witnessed increasingly brazen and disruptive attacks on its health care sector that jeopardize sensitive personal information, delay treatment, and ultimately lead to increased suffering and death,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, noted in a report published this week, before outlining recommendations on ways the federal government can improve security standards in the sector to combat those attacks.

• 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 to and recovering from cyberattacks.

• Searching for ‘GIMP’ in Google until last week would yield a Google ad leading to the phishing site, which facilitates the delivery of a malicious executable ‘Setup.exe’. Binary padding has been leveraged by attackers to make the malware file, which is under 5 MB in size, seem like a 700 MB file.

• Some room-temperature takes on yesterday’s not-quite-RCE vulnerabilities in OpenSSL 3.0, and on what there is to learn about safe cryptography engineering.

Privacy/Surveillance

• It seems Meta is having problems persuading even its own employees to don one of its virtual reality headsets and use its primary metaverse app, Horizon Worlds. So much so that an internal memo says the company would “hold managers accountable” for their teams using it.

• It’s one of a set of leaked memos that suggest Apple may not have too much to fear from Meta’s competition to its own upcoming VR/AR headsets …

• As of today, a data-sharing pact between the US and the UK is in effect, five years after it was first floated. The two sides claim that the Data Access Agreement, which was authorized by the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act in the US, will help law enforcement to combat serious crimes in both countries. The Department of Justice called the initiative the first of its kind, adding that it would enable investigators “to gain better access to vital data” to fight serious crimes in a manner that’s “consistent with privacy and civil liberties standards.”

• Under the agreement, authorities in one country can request data from ISPs in the other country, as long as it’s related to preventing, detecting, investigating and prosecuting serious crimes including terrorism, transnational organized crime and child exploitation. US officials can’t submit data requests targeting people in the UK and vice-versa — presumably the requests can either be used to assist domestic investigations or investigations into foreign nationals. Authorities also need to adhere to certain requirements, limitations and conditions when they access and use data.

• Shwetak Patel loves to combine academic research with being an entrepreneur, all in the field of sensing technology and ubiquitous computing. At a press conference during the 9th Heidelberg Laureate Forum this September, he put it this way: “Being an academic is my intellectual playground. Entrepreneurship is a way to show impact. When I was a young researcher, one of my goals was to build something that could impact the lives of a million people. I hit that goal, so now I’m going to go for a billion people.”

• Patel is the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professor in Computer Science & Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the University of Washington. In 2018, he was awarded the ACM Prize in Computing for his contributions to creative and practical sensing systems for sustainability and health. As a result, he was invited to the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF), an annual conference where 200 young researchers spend a week interacting with laureates of the most important prizes in computer science and mathematics.

• Among many other applications, Patel and his research group have developed a new way of screening for tuberculosis using low-cost microphones to monitor coughing, and a way of using a smart watch to predict whether somebody is infected with the COVID-19 virus days before symptoms appear (based on a combined measurement of heart rate, heart rate variability, and respiratory rate). Says Patel, “With more intelligent sensors integrated into the Internet of Things, we can better understand the world, better intervene, and better take action. Sensors make the unknown known, and when we combine sensing with AI (artificial intelligence), as is happening now, you get so many new possibilities.”

• One of the most recognizable police forces is joining Ring’s Neighbors app. The New York Police Department has announced that it will participate in Ring’s neighborhood watch tool. Officers won’t look for posts “around the clock,” but they will respond to users’ crime and safety concerns, post notices and ask for help with “active police matters.”

• The move potentially gives the NYPD another way to interact with the community. It may also obtain footage of criminal activity that it wouldn’t otherwise have, with maps and timelines that could help pinpoint crime sprees and trends.

• Smartphones could be used to monitor the safety of bridges much more quickly and cheaply than currently possible, providing engineers with data they can use to fix the structures before they become dangerously unstable.

Defence/Aggression

• In Kostroma, a fire occurred in the Polygon nightclub in the early morning hours of November 5. The conflagration was reported to emergency services at 2:37am. There were hundreds of people in the club at the time. 250 people were evacuated from the nightclub building, as well as 15 residents of a neighboring home, due to heavy smoke. It took five hours, 50 emergency responders, and 20 pieces of equipment to extinguish the fire, which consumed a 3,500-square meter (over 37,000 square feet) area. The nightclub’s roof collapsed over the entire affected area.

• In the city of Vuhlehirsk, in the Russian-annexed “DNR,” an attempt was made on the life of Alexander Nikulin, judge on the region’s Supreme Court, reports the regional Ministry of Internal Affairs.

• Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research On 17 October, the head of US Africa Command (AFRICOM), US Marine Corps General Michael Langley visited Morocco. Langley met with senior Moroccan military leaders, including Inspector General of the Moroccan Armed Forces Belkhir El Farouk. Since 2004, AFRICOM has held its ‘largest and premier annual exercise’, African Lion, […]

• Russia’s back and forth with Ukraine wheat exports—first accepting a deal to allow their shipment, then threatening to block them, and apparently agreeing to allow them to be released again – is yet one more illustration of the use of food as a weapon.

Environment

• “This action today is about Schiphol airport needing to cut its emissions which means we need to fly less,” Greenpeace spokeswoman Faiza Oulahsen said.

• “We are starting with those flights we absolutely don’t need like private jets and short flights,” she told AFP.

• Many island states had the same red line. Their reasoning was simple. For a country like the Maldives, with more than 80% of its land rising less than one metre above sea level, more than 1.5°C (2.7°F) of global warming would see most of its sovereign territory disappear. Some continental countries which felt themselves at particular risk, or felt a particularly strong sense of solidarity, embraced the cause too. Third-strike make-or-break Paris was the perfect place to take a stand.

• If the world really does face a climate emergency, what ought you, personally, be doing about it? Should you, as increasing numbers of young people are doing, roam the streets at night letting down the tyres of SUVs?

• The fast-growing movement that calls itself the ‘Tyre Extinguishers’ thinks this is an effective approach, and has targeted thousands of SUVs in cities around the world. My home town of Bristol – always quick to espouse a green cause – has seen at least 200 SUVs ‘extinguished’ in recent weeks.

• The protester, who is a writer and film editor, says she is willing to spend time in jail over her cause and will only stop if the government takes action against SUVs, including banning adverts for the vehicles.

• The Bristol Tyre Extinguishers (BTX) took to the streets in the early hours of Wednesday morning for their eighth major extinguishing action.

• Targeting the affluent areas of Clifton, the group deflated the tyres of 55 SUVs.

• This brings the total number of SUVs ‘disarmed’ across Bristol to just over 500 since they first became active in March 2022.

• The activists say they are ‘disabling’ 4×4 and SUV vehicles in cities as they are the most polluting and dangerous, and they say no one needs to own one in a city. The group has also targeted electric 4×4 vehicles, much to the fury of one 4×4 EV owner, with the Tyre Extinguishers stating that even electric vehicles are statistically more dangerous to other road users, particularly cyclists and pedestrians.

• More than 500 environmental and social justice campaigners on Saturday occupied the runway and blocked private jets from taking off from a major airport in the Netherlands to call attention to the highly-polluting travel practices of the uber-rich in the face of runaway climate catastrophe.

• The organizers of the protest said participants—many of whom were arrested by police for their actions—said the plan was “to keep air traffic from the private jet terminal grounded for as long as possible.”

• Back on October 13th, I wrote an article here titled When Will the Victims of Oil Companies’ Lies Get Their Day In Court? detailing how Big Oil has been deceiving Americans—and, thus, killing Americans and our climate—for more than a half-century.  Their model, “Doubt is our product,” was borrowed from the tobacco industry and weaponized against us.

Energy

• The amount of electricity generated from renewable sources increased by six per cent from the previous year to 69.3 terawatt hours, largely as a result of the growing use of food fuels in electricity production. Renewable electricity accounted for 53 per cent and nuclear energy 33 per cent of total electricity production in the country.

• The nuclear reactor at the Olkiluoto power plant, the third reactor at the site, has been under construction since 2005, and its original scheduled on-line start date of 2009 has been continually pushed back, due to various technical issues. It is now due to start work in December, as things stand.

Wildlife/Nature

• The finding suggests that like humans, insects also interact with inanimate objects as a form of play. Also similar to people, younger bees seemed to be more playful than adult bees.

• Airplanes and birds have been sharing the skies since the first ever flight back in 1903. However, to say this has led to some issues, particularly over the last few decades, is something of an understatement. Collisions between birds and aircraft are the cause of thousands of bird deaths every year. Such incidents, known as bird strikes, can also result in aircraft damage, as well as delays and cancellation of flights, costing the International Civil Aviation Organization a reported $1.4 billion each year.

Overpopulation

• The purchase was done through its fully-owned subsidiary Fondomonte, Arizona LLC, composed of 3,604 acres of freehold land, 3080 acres of agriculture lease hold land and 3,150 acres of grazing lease hold land.

• We are using up the renewable resources of 1.7 Earths. If things don’t change, we’ll need three by 2050. As more of us demand more from nature, we worsen already catastrophic biodiversity loss, accelerating water scarcity, pollution and deforestation.

• At current rates, our planet doesn’t have enough to support our burgeoning numbers – let alone sustaining all other species. In less than a month, humanity will hit 8 billion people on our planet. Governments, international bodies and societies can no longer ignore our population’s role in adding to the climate, wildlife and ecosystem collapses confronting us.

• However, the population may not level off as soon as the UN projects. If climate change continues unchecked, developed countries with low birthrates could be driven into poverty, pushing their birthrates back up.

• Even if the population levels off, the world will still have to support 10.4 billion people for several decades. Regardless of whether the population declines in the future, the repercussions will still be felt during and after the population is at its peak. Resources will be scarce, climate change will worsen and rates of sickness and conflict will increase.

Finance

• Progressive leaders and Democratic Party supporters are raising last-minute alarms over the unparalleled catastrophe that would result if the Republican Party—an organization many see as a creeping fascist force in the United States and on the world stage—manages to win control of one or both chambers of Congress in Tuesday’s midterm election.

• “We owe it to generations before us who fought and died for democracy and the rule of law, and to generations after us who will live with the legacy we leave them—to get out the vote next Tuesday.”

• President Biden has the opportunity to show the public he stands with them instead of Big Oil. He’s set up a clear choice for the fossil fuel executives gouging American families at the pump: lower prices or face the consequences.

• To help address the nation’s housing crisis while at the same time confronting Wall Street greed, three California members of Congress on Saturday touted new legislation to target rent-gouging in the U.S. by private equity firms and investment giants who have gobbled up huge numbers of single-family home and residential units in the years since the 2008 financial crash.

• “Wall Street should not be any family’s landlord.”

• Our wellbeing is on the ballot this November. Amid a pandemic, rising inflation, and deepening financial instability, we need a strong commitment from all candidates to our children, families, and planet.

• Most of us believe that we do stuff because we want to be good people, and that other people act the same. But the dominant political philosophy for the last half-century, “economism,” views us as slaves to “incentives” and nothing more.

• Economism is the philosophy of the neoclassical economists, whose ideology has consumed both the Democrats and Republicans. They dismiss all “non-market” solutions (that is, projects of democratically accountable governments) as failed before they’re begun, due to the “incentives” of the individuals in the government.

• Economism’s major project has been to dismantle the achievements of the New Deal (Social Security, unions, public housing, limits on corporate power) and to discredit the very idea that we can or should attempt those sorts of bold initiatives.

• Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. is turning to robots to ease workloads at drugstores as it grapples with a nationwide shortage of pharmacists and pharmacist technicians.

• So in these wild times, the “ten year interest rate” is suddenly in the news again. But what does this mean? There is no committee that sets these rates, but it is also not something you can just measure. While you’ll find various other explanations of how to calculate the 10 year interest rate online, this may be the geekiest one, and definitely is the only one with a built-in calculator.

• As of today, I am no longer employed by fly.io.

• We’re both very sad, and we’ve promised to stay friends and send postcards to each other over winter break.

• [...]

• For now, I’m aggressively embracing my new reality: funemployment.

• I’m not going to seek employment in the near future — I will rely on donations to pay the rent, utilities, various server costs, software subscriptions, etc.

• If Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget survives the storm it triggered, a banker on a million-pound annual salary stands to receive £50,000 of income tax relief – on top of the extra bonuses the bank can throw in, now that the Liz Truss government has removed the cap on them. Meanwhile, a Deliveroo rider gets a pep talk on the emancipatory value of aspiring to be wealthy, presumably as an incentive to pedal harder. This is the gist of the government’s growth strategy or, according to former Brexit minister David Frost, its antidote to stagnation and defeatism.

• While it’s tempting to draw the obvious analogy between zombie ideas such as the trickle-down growth effect, and the classic Hollywood horror film Night of the Living Dead, a more appropriate response to the seriousness of the situation is to follow the banker’s extra cash. The government claims the banker will invest it, thus promoting growth. If it were not a blatant lie, it might have passed as a touching example of unfounded faith. But unlike Adam Smith’s bakers, butchers and brewers, who would invest any spare cash into better and more bread, ale and meat, the banker will buy into some fund that will, in turn, purchase shares, derivatives and bonds.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• During more than five hours of oral arguments in two cases that will probably spell the death of affirmative action in colleges and universities, the racism of the six right-wingers on the Supreme Court was on full display.

• With the elections in Victoria due in about three weeks and the incumbent government looking very much like it will romp home, media in the state are resorting to every tactic in the book to push their barrows.

• It is probably this kind of approach that led to Paul Sakkal, a political reporter for The Age, accusing the Victorian premier Daniel Andrews of making a “extraordinary and deceitful statement” when the latter issued a release about a story on the state’s Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission.

• Sakkal, apparently, had second thoughts about his comments, as he deleted the tweet in question. But then deleting such things from Twitter does not always ensure that they disappear, as one can see from the image below.

• Musk, whose deal to acquire Twitter for $44 billion was finalized late last month, has defended his decision to lay off up to half of all Twitter staff, equal to about 3,700 employees. He tweeted on Friday, the day that the layoffs began, that he has no choice when Twitter is losing $4 million per day.

• “Your account will get a blue checkmark, just like the celebrities, companies, and politicians you already follow,” the company wrote.

• It also listed several features that are “coming soon” to the subscription service.

• One Twitter user, however, pointed out a tweet Dorsey wrote in April in which the former CEO praised Musk as the “singular solution I trust” to take over the company.

• So we haven’t gained anything for the community. In fact I’d argue we’ve lost a lot. One of the biggest features of the blue check—not just on Twitter but on any social media platform—is disambiguation from copycats. If the analysis above is true and correct, we lose that. Now it’s just blue checks everywhere.

• Which would be fine if that was the case for validated non-public people—the more the better. But they’re not validated. In sum, this is less validation, and more blue checks. Seemingly all in the name of revenue.

• The idea that advertisers alone will save us from hate speech and the further degradation of digital social media is wishful thinking. A primarily advertiser-financed site is neither free nor healthy. The reliance on advertising by so much of our digital public sphere — Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter — has perniciously fueled tribalization, hate speech and surveillance.

• With advertiser-financed digital media, advertisers are the true customers, and what they are paying for is our attention, as much of it as they can get for as long as possible, and our data, so that they can target ads with more precision.

• Hungarian pro-government outlets are demanding the resignation of two judges because they met with US Ambassador David Pressman. The government-friendly media outlets argued that Csaba Vasvari and Tamas Matusik must resign because the meeting interferes with the “judicial independence”.

• The meeting with the two judges was public, Pressman tweeted about the event on his official account, saying it was an “informative discussion about the [ National Judicial] Council’s critical role in Hungary’s judicial system”.

• Thank you to members of the National Judicial Council, Judges Csaba Vasvári & @TamasMatusik , for the informative discussion about the Council’s critical role in Hungary’s judicial system. pic.twitter.com/2FmWcdT0fh

• Correction: the number has increased since I last checked about a week ago. Currently, there are -57 🇷🇺 diplomats in Budapest-3 in Debrecen-2 “bank executives” with diplomatic immunity at the @IIB_Press in BudapestThis is likely the largest 🇷🇺 diplo presence since the 90s. https://t.co/8rEYTkDLln

• From July to September of this year, Russians made 9.7 million trips outside the country, nearly twice as many as they made during the previous three month period, says Russian state broadcasting company RBC.

• Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, does not believe that Russia will use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, he said during an interview with Turkish television channel NTV.

• The Democrats are burning it all down.

• They are going to lose the midterms because of the Ukraine War.

• Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who is seeking reelection, have been crisscrossing the state in the lead-up to Tuesday’s election, visiting megachurches and smaller houses of worship packed tight with parishioners.

• The stops are part of a longstanding tradition for political candidates that often accelerates as Election Day nears.

• The world’s billionaires—only 3,311 individuals—represent almost $11.8 trillion in wealth.

• [...]

• We’ll begin by zooming out to look at how various continents and world regions rank in terms of their billionaire population.

• North America is home to most billionaires, worth $4.6 trillion. The U.S., unsurprisingly, accounts for the majority of this wealth, with 975 billionaires and a collective net worth of $4.45 trillion.

• The “Potpourri Budget” has something in it for everyone, including the fossil fuel lobby which has attracted another $3 billion in spending commitments. Callum Foote reports.

• This was the potpourri budget. Lacking in adventure, low on risk, higher on fiscal rectitude; Labor’s first Budget in nine years is designed to leave a pleasant scent in the air.

• I guess the common name “Hooker” is occupational, perhaps originally referring to a fisherman.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• But facts are often not the point of these games. Instead, they are part of a broader trend of “participatory misinformation,” in which people become more actively involved in sharing falsehoods and conspiracy theories. That leads to people integrating with a wider community and earning kudos, which makes them more likely to believe and invest in the misinformation, researchers said.

• “There’s a feeling that you can participate in the construction of a narrative and have impact,” said Kate Starbird, a professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Washington who studies misinformation. “It’s very empowering.”

• Defenders positioned across a wide range of roles and industries are engaged in identifying and exposing different types of malicious online influence activity.

• Mandiant has recently observed DRAGONBRIDGE, an influence campaign we assess with high confidence to be operating in support of the political interests of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), aggressively targeting the United States by seeking to sow division both between the U.S. and its allies and within the U.S. political system itself.

Censorship/Free Speech

• In November 2012, Russia’s federal censor, Roskomnadzor, published a “blacklist” of banned websites. In the decade since, Roskomnadzor and other Russian authorities have gained increasing control over the Russian Internet, limiting foreign companies’ operations in Russia as well as Russia publications’ reach and content. The war in Ukraine has only accelerated these processes. Here are the major moments in the Russian state’s ongoing takeover of the Internet within the country.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Afghan journalists who fled across the border to Pakistan to escape Taliban rule say they still face an uncertain future.

• Living in Pakistan often on temporary or family visas, many are unable to find work and are concerned about their legal status when their permits expire.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Instead of taking the opportunity to buy as much as possible on Black Friday, you could do the opposite and buy absolutely nothing. Since 1997, Buy Nothing Day has been held on the same day as Black Friday. The rules are simple. Just don’t buy anything at all for 24 hours. Many people are surprised how difficult this actually is. The aim is to make people think more about their spending and to make better decisions about what they buy and where they buy it from.

• In a long and detailed Twitter thread, Alec Karakatsanis dives into a controversial academic article from two Harvard professors calling for the expansion of police.

• The Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs decision ending nearly 50 years of established abortion rights, ignited a burst of anger and widespread support for Democratic candidates who made abortion a centerpiece of their mid-term campaigns.  But recently, as alarm about inflation and the economy has escalated, abortion rights have become a less pressing concern to voters, as if access to abortion and the economy were not intimately connected. In fact, access to abortion is as much of a “kitchen-table” issue as the price of groceries or gasoline. And denying women this access has profound immediate and long-term economic consequences.

• After he said what he had to say, that’s when “it got wild.”

• Author and political commentator Anand Giridharadas was about to deliver a speech touching on the ideas of democracy, freedom, and fascism at a gala event during the Texas Book Festival on Friday night when he learned that Cecilia Abbott, wife of the state’s Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, was in the audience.

• You would have to agree with me that all people should obey just laws but I would also say that unjust law is no law at all. And when we find an unjust law, I think we have a moral obligation to take a stand against it.

• I do feel there are two types of laws: one is a just law and one is an unjust law. We all have moral obligations to disobey unjust laws because noncooperation with evil is as much as moral obligation as is cooperation with good.

• Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail in order to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is in that moment expressing the very highest respect for law.

• Laws have been made for us to have a better life, and to provide a good condition for living in communities. At least it is the purpose that we have been told the laws have. However, laws were supposed to trigger the moral obligation of humans toward each other in societies to do good and avoid evil.

• Since we made laws zero and one, it is doing more damage than good to the soul and spirit of the original purpose and idea of having laws. Since the creation of classes and since one class made to rule and control other classes, laws have changed to protect the benefits of the master class against other people.

• [...]

• My brothers and sisters, we are living in a new slavery and we are bound by unjust laws to obey these lords and masters, but we are morally obligated to disobey the unjust laws forced on us and we are morally and humanly obligated to fight against these masters for the sake of ourselves and the good of people and for a better future.

• Some 49.6 million people are trapped in modern slavery on any given day. They are either forced to work against their will or are in a marriage that they have been forced into, according to the 2021 Global Estimates of Modern Slavery released September 12, 2022.

• Forced labour accounted for 27.6 million of those in modern slavery and forced marriage for 22 million. The new estimates showed that forced labour and forced marriage had increased significantly in the last five years.

• Among men of all religions, Hindus rank at the top when it comes to having multiple sexual partners in India. They are followed by Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims and Jains, in descending order.

• The Wire‘s analysis of National Family Health Survey-5 (NFHS-5) data reveals that Hindu men, who chose to have partners outside of marriage or were in live-in relationships, had 2.2 ‘mean number of sexual partners in their lifetime’.

• Sikhs and Christians had 1.9, while Buddhists and Muslims had 1.7, on an average. Jains had the lowest mean number of 1.1.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• Russia’s premium broadcasters use conditional access systems to restrict viewing to paying customers and prevent piracy. These systems are reportedly very good but that’s making Russia nervous. Western anti-piracy companies dominate the market and at least in theory, could black out TV sets all over the country. A second scenario has Russia equally worried – free premium TV for all.

• Shutterstock is expanding its partnership with OpenAI to advance how AI image generators are trained and how contributors are rewarded.

• The stock image service will offer “direct access” to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 image generator through its website.

• “The mediums to express creativity are constantly evolving and expanding. We recognize that it is our great responsibility to embrace this evolution and to ensure that the generative technology that drives innovation is grounded in ethical practices,” said Paul Hennessy, CEO at Shutterstock.

• The study into the Online News Act continues this week as the government and Bill C-18 supporters continue to insist that the bill does not involve payment for links. These claims are deceptive and plainly wrong from even a cursory reading of the bill. Simply put, there is no bigger concern with this bill. This post explains why link payments are in, why the government knows they are in, and why the approach creates serious risks to the free flow of information online and freedom of expression in Canada.

• Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez’s credibility took another hit yesterday with an exceptionally misleading tweet on Bill C-11. The tweet featured a video of artists encouraging Canadians to seek out Canadian content, which Rodriguez used to tweet “I’m hearing so many stories from artists about how Bill #C11 will make a real difference for artists. This is what it’s all about: supporting diverse Canadian culture, artists, and stories.” Leaving aside the fact that thousands of digital creators have vocally opposed the bill with warnings that it will result in serious harm to their careers and livelihood, the artists in the video were not speaking about Bill C-11. We know that because the video was launched in April 2021, pre-dating Bill C-11 by nearly a year and created before the government started the ruckus by removing Section 4.1 protections for user content from Bill C-10, the predecessor to Bill C-11.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• As is the trend these days, nobody was wearing face masks save for one woman. I overheard someone mocking her for this. Everyone is acting like the pandemic is over.

• I tested positive for COVID as soon as I got home. The first day (Friday) it felt like a bad head cold, but by Saturday I was running a fever, had chills, and muscle-aches all over. It feels like a combination of strep throat and the flu. Not a fan.

• My doc offered to prescribe me something called Paxlovid. I hope that that helps, because this is miserable.

• I’m worried about transmitting the virus to my partner, who has a weakened immune system. They’ve been kind enough to deliver tea and snacks while I’ve been sequestered in this room all day. I make sure they know they’re appreciated (from a distance and behind a mask).

Technical

Internet/Gemini

• There has been a lot of talk on the Gemini mailing list lately about applications, and dealing with the ugly realities of things like spam and CSRF vulnerabilities

• To some extent, all this app stuff has taken me kind of by surprise. Not the fact that they’re possible or that people want them, I expected that, and the client certificate stuff in Gemini was partially motivated by wanting a better way to do server-side applications. But I guess I was not prepared for how badly people would want apps, how many of them, how quickly, and what kind they would be – that serving static content out of the filesystem would be seen as an unfortunate limitation. I guess years of living in Gopherspace have narrowed my vision a bit.

• Adding support for PCRE2 in the_Foundation (and thus Lagrange as well) has got me thinking about APIs.

• Generally speaking, the challenge in API design is to fit together internal and external views of a system. There’s a tension between how the internal implementation wants things to be — for maximum efficiency — and the user wanting a friendly easy-to-understand black box. Choosing the right level of abstraction is crucial. However, the time dimension is critical as well: APIs should be resilient to allow unforeseen improvements and new features while not breaking user code. Changes may occur both internally and externally. A dead end is eventually reached when enough time has passed. The API has to be changed to accommodate the new situation.

• 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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