● 11.07.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 07/11/2022: Mastodon Growing Very Fast

Posted in News Roundup at 8:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• **kompare** , **konqueror** , **konquest** , **konsole** from the KDE software series of Slackware

Instructionals/Technical

• NLnet Labs make DNS software (and more), and amongst their best-known utilities are probably the recursive Unbound server and the authoritative NSD server, one which was originally written to drive a root DNS server.

• I’m occasionally asked whether NSD can be used to serve a DNSSEC-signed zone (the answer is ‘yes’), but NSD isn’t a signer: it requires other utilities to actually sign zones which it can then serve. I’ve occasionally mentioned ldns, specifically when I wrote about using a SmartCard-HSM for DNSSEC and again when I wrote about DNSSEC signing with an offline KSK.

• But let’s look at the task of signing one or more zones and serving them with NLnet Labs programs.

• I am noticing that nearly all of mail I get physically delivered I did not request, want or need. I want to collect all my mail for a month, classify it and organize it in order to figure out just how much junk I get. As part of that I want to identify all the types of mail and figure out if I was somehow responsible indirectly for obtaining it.

• Now while collecting evidence for this future blog – I realized that mail this close to voting day will probably skew my stats. So I’ll collect mail for the entire month of October, November and December and use that for a post.

• Just like for margin or padding, there are also logical property variations for border properties.

• Originally there were 4 shorthand properties we could use for defining borders.

• The good news is that Exim actually already logs the Message-ID value for every message in the ‘id=’ field logged as part of message reception logging. It was still more convenient to add my own logging that called out some specific aspects, but Exim’s normal logging meant that I could already do some useful things with our historical data.

• The bad news is that it turns out that the Message-ID header isn’t a strong signal about whether or not the email was spam, and as part of that GMail is not being entirely honest in their SMTP time rejection messages. In the time when we were doing detailed logging, I saw a reasonable amount of real, desirable email without a Message-ID header at all (including a message to me), and some amount of it with what looked like ‘invalid’ Message-ID values. There’s clearly some real mail sending systems that just don’t put in a Message-ID.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Back in the early middle of 2021, I worried about our future upgrade wave of Ubuntu 18.04 machines because these weren’t ordinary times and we weren’t upgrading machines to Ubuntu 20.04. Ubuntu 22.04 came out as expected this April and started the countdown for Ubuntu 18.04′s official support (which runs out next April), which also started our countdown to do something with all of our 18.04 machines. The good news (for us) is that upgrading our 18.04 machines is now mostly done and it wasn’t particularly a problem. Looking back, I think this was due to a number of factors.

Devices/Embedded

• This article will explore the hardware design of Starfish, a control board for a pick and place machine built around the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller and Trinamic TMC2209 motor drivers.

Open Hardware/Modding

• At the budget end of the oscilloscope range lie the so-called pocket ‘scopes. About the size of a deck of cards, they combine a microcontroller and an LCD screen to make an instrument with a bandwidth in the tens of kilohertz and a not-too-sparkling performance. They’re something of a toy, but then again, if all that’s needed is a simple ‘scope for audio frequencies, they make a passable choice in a small package. Now [jgpeiro] has made one which is light years ahead of the toy kits, using a Raspberry Pi Pico, a 100 MHz ADC, and an effort to design a better input circuit.

• The T8 Pro is a MiniPC featuring a 15W Celeron N5095 processor along with Intel UHD Graphics. This device provides support for up to three 4K displays, dual GbE ports, Wi-Fi 5 and a couple of USB 3.1 ports.

• Last week T-Head semiconductors announced their XuanTie C908 which implements a 9-stage pipeline along with an AI acceleration engine for AR/VR apps. Similarly, SiFive also shared details about their new P670/P470 RISC-V processors for wearables and smart consumer devices.

• The past few weeks, I talked somewhat in depth about kerosene lanterns and why you should buy one. This week, I’m covering a related technology – kerosene heaters. They’re a very useful thing to have around for when the power grid goes down in the winter, and you’d like to avoid freezing. I’m also going to do a teardown of a reasonably modern one, just so you can see what makes them tick inside. They’re quite simple!

• I may not be handy, but my programmer’s brain has made me particularly adept at designing workarounds, so through some minor trial and error I was able to keep the water contained in the laundry room and funneled into the drain while we assessed our options. After some inspection, I felt confident that the issue was caused by a big chunk of rubber that seemed to have been torn out of the gasket that kept all the water in the big spinny thing (that’s the technical term, I looked it up) when the door was shut.

• Winterbloom is a boutique, open-source synthesizer company and it has exactly one engineer – me. I am responsible for everything – from the hardware design, to the firmware, to the documentation, and everything else! Because this is a ton of work I’ve had to be very deliberate with the tools and tech that I use.

• This article is a look into our current tech stack one year in and some ideas I have for the future. I’ll go from the microcontrollers, the firmware, and all the way up to user guide. I hope this is helpful, but if you want more details about something or if something doesn’t make sense, feel free to reach out.

• The Commodore SFD-1001 is an oddball and a rarity even among Commodore IEEE-488 5.25″ floppy drives, which nowadays aren’t particularly common either (though my preferred IEEE-488 device is the MSD Super Disk Drive SD-2, which also conveniently has IEC serial). The SFD “Single Floppy Drive”-1001 is a low-profile single drive version of the CBM 8250 dual drive and stores a whopping 1MB per disk, which in 1980 was really quite something. Unfortunately it requires 96tpi double density “quad density” floppies to do it — not the 48tpi double density disks you’d feed a more typical 1541 or 1571, nor the 96tpi high density PC floppy drives use — so there wasn’t a whole lot of megabytes to store into even when these drives were newer. I also have a CBM 8050 which is the single-sided (but still dual drive) version of the 8250; it can store roughly a cool meg too but you have to flip it over for the second half.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• So you want (or need) to figure out what “open source” really means. I’ll cover the basics of open source, whether you’re interested in contributing to a project or want to be in the loop at a new job where the term keeps getting thrown around.

• Full disclosure: I am a person with little technical experience, working in the content-design fringes of a very technical open source environment. Given my background in marketing and communication, I felt like a fish out of water when I made this career switch. Git, data science, the ins and outs of software… It was, and still is a year later, a lot to comprehend.

• But that’s why I’m writing this piece. I want to help make open source a little less intimidating. After all, at the center of open source is a supportive learning community—built for everyone, technically experienced or not.

• I’ll start with the absolute basics.

• As many of you have observed, the activity of Osimis around the Orthanc ecosystem has reduced in Q3 and Q4 2021. I would like to inform you about the current project situation and tell you about my plans for the future of Orthanc.

• Vely combines high performance and the low footprint of C with the ease of use and improved safety of languages like PHP. It’s free and open source software, licensed under GPLv3 and LGPL 3 for libraries, so you can even build commercial software with it.

Licensing / Legal

• Well, that was then, and this is now. With software now pervasively embedded in all manner of devices—cars, tractors, toasters, and smartphones, just to name a few—it has become difficult, and sometimes impossible, for owners of devices to repair them when they break down or have them fixed by independent repair shops. Often this is because parts, tools, and schematics are unavailable. But because embedded software is copyright-protected and often subject to license and technical restrictions on reverse engineering, repair, and maintenance, repairing your own devices or hiring others to repair them may also be legally risky.2

• As somebody said, the best code is written when you are supposed to do something else [1]. Like a writer will do her best when writing that novel that, maybe, nobody will pay a single cent for, and not when doing copywriting work for a well known company, programmers are likely to spend more energies in their open source side projects than during office hours, while writing another piece of a project they feel stupid, boring, pointless. And, if the company is big enough, chances are it will be cancelled in six months anyway or retired one year after the big launch.

• We’ve filed a law­suit challeng­ing GitHub Copi­lot, an AI product that relies on unprecedented opensource software piracy. Because AI needs to be fair & ethical for every­one.

Programming/Development

• No, I’m talking about major attacks on knowledge work within 5 years, with something like 50% to 80% of knowledge work is doable by AI within 8-15 years. Whether it will be done by AI that’s another story, but the capabilities will be there.

• Now the age of tinyML has come — we can already run meaningful ML inference on Cortex-M equivalent hardware. Rapid improvements in modern 32-bit MCU compute power efficiency and math capabilities (FPU, vector extensions), together with advancements in neural operators, architecture and quantization along with better open source tooling like TensorFlow Lite Micro are making this possible. For example, we recently built a complete DSP, Anomaly Detection and NN classifier for complex events on real-time 3-axis accelerometer data in software on a standard Cortex-M4 in just 6.6 kB of RAM and 20 kB of Flash. We are experiencing the start of what I call the “3rd wave of embedded compute.”

• So, get ready to read a sentimental post about a data structure, and don’t tell I didn’t warn you.

• Linked lists are educational. When your teacher, or the page of a book, or anything that exposes you for the first time to linked lists shows you this little circle with an arrow pointing to another circle, something immense happens in your mind. Similar to what happens when you understand recursion for the first time. You get what data structures made of links truly are: the triviality of a single node that becomes a lot more powerful and complex once it references another one. Linked lists show the new programmer fundamental things about space and time in computation: how it is possible to add elements in a constant time, and how order is fundamentally costly, because if you want to insert an element “in place” you have to go from one node to the other. You immediately start thinking of ways to speed up the process (preparing you for the next things), and at the same time you understand, deeply, what O(1) and O(N) really mean.

• Have a seat and make yourself comfortable, we’re gonna talk about GitHub. Yes, GitHub. And I’m not referring to the ICE Contract, the performative activism, the fleeing of their women senior engineers, or the other litany of accusations against the company. I want to talk about the idea of GitHub.

• And for that matter – I want to talk about the idea of SourceForge, Google Code, BitBucket, GitLab, etc. The entire concept of a single, centralized project & repository hosting service is fundamentally at odds with the health and longevity of the open source community.

• Reed-Solmon coding gives us much more flexibility, allowing us to store our data over n = k + t drives, so that any t drives can fail while still not losing data.2

• Dr Luis Falcon is a medical doctor and computer scientist. He combines these skills to work on GNU Health to bring free software / open source to the healthcare sector. He spoke with us about progress, ongoing problems and an upcoming event.

• Ciarán O’Riordan: You’re working on free software / open source for the health sector. Is the health sector lagging behind?

Python

• In this article, I want to talk about just one approach for converting artwork for PCBs- Image tracing, sometimes called raster-to-vector conversion. This process takes a raster image (such a png) and converts it into a list of polygons. This article will show how I used Python to glue together a few clever libraries to build gingerbread.trace, a tool for converting images into KiCAD footprints.

Leftovers

• The gold aside, what a horror to read that the thorny symbol of a God’s defilement had almost been lost in a fire caused by a carelessly flicked Gauloise. I had to hold my heart to think. Here, in the form and function of Our Lady, was an example of the true Gothic, now in flames, her Towers almost falling, but miraculously stayed and steadied and fortified.  O all the sighs, farts, benedictions, liturgies, vows and eulogies — all the suspirations gathered in its chambers of awe-inspiring horror married to beauty, released to the outer, unshriven atmosphere of Nature, lost forever.

• John Ruskin, with eye of a god and the expression of an archangel, captured the essence of its aesthetic in The Nature of Gothic from The Stones of Venice, when he wrote:

• For those that haven’t heard, ultrasonic levitation is a process by which two or more ultrasonic transducers are set opposite to each other and excited in such a way as to create a standing wave between them. The sound is, as the name implies, ultrasonic — so outside the range of human hearing — but strong enough so that the small, light objects can be positioned and held fixed in mid-air where there’s a pressure minimum in the standing wave. [Olimex] has created a small ultrasonic levitation kit that exemplifies this phenomena.

• Veteran foreign correspondent Patrick Lawrence takes issue with this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

• One of our favorite musical hackers, [Look Mum No Computer] is getting dangerously close to building a computer. His quest was to create a unique drum machine, inspired by a Soviet auto-dialer that used rope core memory for number storage. Rope memory is the read-only sibling to magnetic core memory, the memory technology used to build some beloved computers back in the 60s and early 70s. Rope core isn’t programmed by magnetizing the ceramic donuts, but by weaving a wire through them. And when [Look Mum] saw the auto-dialer using the technology for a user-programmable interface, naturally, he just had to build a synth sequencer.

Science

• The equipment will be used to record and analyze seismic events in Estonia and surrounding regions.

• In addition to the Särghaua Earth Science Center in the village of Kurgja, Pärnu County, three more stations will be set up across Estonia.

Hardware

• I used a power meter to measure the electric energy consumption, and a multimeter with a thermocouple (type K) to measure the water temperature. The thermocouple was at the bottom of the water, not touching the bottom of the can.

• The USB fridge consumed 60.717 Wh over that period, and the water temperature (at the bottom) was around 14.7 °C when I stopped the test. After the test, I moved the thermocouple to the top of the water, and there the temperature was 16.9 °C.

• CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions) is a joint research project of SRI International and the University of Cambridge to revisit fundamental design choices in hardware and software to dramatically improve system security. CHERI has been supported by the DARPA CRASH, MRC, and SSITH programs since 2010, as well as other DARPA research and transition funding. Since 2019, development of Arm’s experimental CHERI-enabled Morello processor, SoC, and board has been supported by UKRI. We gratefully acknowledge DARPA, UKRI, and our other supporters including EPSRC, ERC, Google, and Arm.

• Public transit seats have a rough life. Enduring a number of wear cycles that would make your sofa weep, they take a beating and have to keep looking presentable. When trains and buses are retired, where do the old seats go? A team from the MIT Hobby Shop investigated what was happening to the seats from retiring MBTA Red Line cars and recycled them into stylish chairs.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• In accordance with facilitating Chinese e-government construction, many laws made for the purpose of state security, public security, censorship, and taxation have granted the Chinese government extensive power of access to private-sector data generated in such businesses as information, finance, trade, travel, entertainment, and so on, operated in China. There are no laws or practices related to governmental systematic access currently found in China. However, this kind of systematic data access will certainly find itself any time in the future enforcement and ensuing legislation once the Chinese government realizes it is necessary with the evolution of e-government strategy.

• That’s why I’m a huge fan of encrypted email but a lot more indifferent on or even reluctant towards encrypted anonymous publishing. People were able to speak freely and try out ideas fearlessly when talking to their own friends, but you didn’t have to fear a dog-pile of two hundred anonymous sealions everytime you left your house.

• The other big venture Ellison is pushing for is connected clouds. Microsoft’s Azure and Oracle clouds are already connected. Ellison believes that customers will increasingly opt for multi-cloud platforms, forcing AWS and Google to also link up their clouds with Oracle and Azure.

• The primary reason is moral: People have the fundamental, God-given rights of freedom of travel, freedom of movement, freedom of association, liberty of contract, and economic liberty. No government, including the U.S. government, wields the legitimate authority to infringe rights that preexist government, as the U.S. Declaration of Independence points out.

• The secondary reason is utilitarian: America’s system of immigration controls is a socialist institution, one that is based on the core socialist principle of central planning, and has come with death, suffering, violence, and the adoption of an immigration police state in the American Southwest.

Defence/Aggression

• In addition to excessive spending on defense, there has been an increased operational tempo that takes advantage of 700 military bases and facilities the world over.  The United States, moreover, has consistently underestimated its power and influence, and consistently overestimated the power and influence of its adversaries.  The current policy of dual containment of China and Russia as a major mission of the national security state is being used to justify more military spending and influence.

• Last month’s release of the National Security Strategy (NSS) was the latest step in the process to convince the American people that we are devoting insufficient resources to our defense.  There is nothing in the report that points to new diplomatic initiatives by the Biden administration; instead, it highlights the need for increased military power to advance our international interests.  The NSS presents no alternatives for curbing our military deployments in more than 100 countries or for returning arms control and disarmament to the national security dialogue.  Clearly, the Biden national security team has forgotten that the disarmament dialogue with the Soviet Union was central to improving bilateral relations with Moscow and ending the Cold War.

• Voters in a number of states this midterm cycle are being presented with a stark choice: Do they want someone who denies the legitimacy of the 2020 election to oversee voting in their state?

• In a different political universe, that might seem outlandish, considering hand-count audits of paper ballots and court challenges found the 2020 election to have been one of the most accurate and accessible in American history.

• Like in the town of Stains, just north of Paris, where the mayor, Azzédine Taïba, and alderman, Maïmouna Haïdara, back the initiative of community activist Houria Seddiki to name a street after the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad. There was no opposition to speak of, at least in local politics, as all 12 members of the left-wing city council are of Arabic and African origin — not a single one carries a traditional French name.

• Rachman’s use of the phrases “might kill hundreds” and “just a few square miles” is outrageous in its callous trivialization of what would occur in the kill zone.

• The crude, “small” atomic bomb the United States used to smash and burn Hiroshima was a 15-kiloton device. This “small” atom bomb incinerated five square miles and “…turned into powder and ash the flesh and bones of 140,000 men, women and children,” as historian Howard Zinn noted in his essay The Bomb. Likewise, in Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, Robert Lifton and Greg Mitchell reported that the bomb’s detonation resulted in “killing 100,000 people immediately, and fatally injuring at least 50,000 others.”

• The fourth century BCE was a time of trouble and Enlightenment. The Peloponnesian War in the last quarter of the fifth century BCE wrecked Greece, blotting the golden age of Athens. The Parthenon remained as a permanent symbol of genius and greatness – if only the Greeks worked together.

• Plato, 427 – 347 BCE, grew up during the dark days of the Peloponnesian War. His teacher, the stone mason Socrates, fought during the Peloponnesian War. Alcibiades, student of Socrates, undermined Athenian democracy. He joined Athens’ enemy, Sparta. Then he conspired with the Persian enemies of Greece to fund Greeks killing Greeks.

• In New York in my twenties, I needed extra money and served free drinks at a pop-up art exhibition hosted by Russians on Avenue C. (I am not sure they called them pop-ups back then.) The previous Sunday I had dined with a Ukrainian-American family on 6th or 7th Street in Little Ukraine, where I was shocked to discover — over a plate of holubtsi cooked from boiled cabbage — that the host felt real violence at times towards Russians. Back at the Russian pop-up art exhibition, meanwhile, one of the guests had been a soldier in Afghanistan, and I only determined this as he was walking out the door. I chased after him, down East 10th Street, careful not to slip on the ice, because I wanted to hear his stories, especially as I had been there on the other side, filming with the mujahideen. When the Russian saw me running, however, he began running too. It was one of those truly comic Manhattan moments. A yellow cab at one point may even have screeched to a halt. Anyway, still panting, I returned, empty-handed, so to say, to serve more drinks to thirsty Russians, and to chat with sculptor Leonid Sokov who got me the job in the first place. Leonid was a Russian non-conformist who made large Russian dolls based on what he saw as contentious characters from Soviet history, including Stalin. One of his fellow exiles kept interrupting. My response was just to pour him more vodka. He had a serious bee in his ushanka about the murder of Pushkin, the ‘Russian Shakespeare’, and shouted in English across the bar that he hoped the man who killed him was boiling in hell. ‘No,’ he corrected himself, trying his hardest to stand up straight. ‘I hope the man is BROILING in hell!’ Important distinction, I was thinking.

• I see that the US and UK — in the face of continued Russian assaults, withdrawals, assaults again — are the two largest western contributors towards the defence of Ukraine. Only those fighting on the ground will know what it is really like but here in London people are increasingly worried. Forget the socks, forget the succinct and important dark-blue public UK defence intelligence reporting, there was a fresh admission from the UK last week that British spies were giving Ukraine serious cyber support. They said they were revealing this on the basis that Moscow already knew about it. Slowly, the iron bars inside the boxing gloves are being revealed. I would have thought going public only obliges a public response. Is this what Russian accusations that the UK carried out the recent Nord Stream gas pipe attacks are about? I know of one diligent Brit who doesn’t enjoy business trips to London anymore on the grounds he believes we are now making ourselves a legitimate target. I myself wouldn’t want to rely solely on soldiers and spooks to choose what to do. That’s what politicians are supposed to be for, though ours are presently good only at chaos and occasional appearances on ‘I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here’, as in former health minister Matt Hancock, the man who once criticised people for saying politics was about individualism and egos. I also note that far across the vexed English Channel is growing dissent in cities like Prague about the war in Ukraine. Again, is anyone thinking outside the box here? The establishment seems set on one course of action only.

• Service members from the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade of the Pacific Fleet sent a letter to Oleg Kozhemyako, governor of the Primorye region, complaining that their commanders’ actions had allowed for heavy losses.

• Ukrainian Telegram channels report that the power was out in Russian-controlled Kherson on November 6.

• New research shows that the share of Germans who believe Russia “had to” invade Ukraine in response to “NATO provocation” has risen by 20 percent in the past six months. German media picked up the story, reporting that anti-government, pro-Russian propaganda is spreading quickly in German society. However, some analysts believe that the change in opinion has more to do with German domestic politics than with Russian influence.

• Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said that Iranian authorities “lied” in a report, which says they supplied Russia with only a small number of drones, and only before the start of the war.

• Businessman Evgeny Prigozhin says he will finance the creation of “militia training centers” in the Kursk and Belogorod regions, both of which lie on Russia’s border with Ukraine, according to a post by the press of his for his company, Concord.

• The proxy war between the U.S. and Russia is devastating Ukraine, ironically in the name of saving Ukraine.

Environment

• The healthcare industry is the fifth largest contributor to planetary pollution, and adapting digital health technologies like telehealth, electronic health records, usage of artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things would help to reduce carbon emissions in the sector., according to a new research report.

• Green campaigners expressed cautious optimism Sunday after it was announced the key issue of “loss and damage” financing was officially added to the agenda for the U.N.-backed COP27 climate summit taking place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

• “For 27 years, these fundamental issues have been on the negotiating table: halt the development of fossil fuels, invest heavily in renewable energy solutions, and commit funds to helping vulnerable nations deal with the impacts of the climate crisis.”

• A new report by the World Meteorological Organization released Sunday shows that the last eight years are on track to be the hottest on record and warns still soaring emissions means humanity’s hopes to hit global temperature targets in the coming decades may not be achievable.

• “It’s already too late for many glaciers and the melting will continue for hundreds if not thousands of years, with major implications for water security.”

• Voters this Tuesday will pass judgment on an existential emergency facing the nation. Despite the efforts of some Democrats to normalize the historic trend favoring the minority party in midterms, the code blue alarm bells this year have a chillingly different resonance.

• The University of Chicago has announced they have created a material that behaves like plastic but conducts like metal. They also say they don’t fully understand why it works yet. Usually, good conductors like metals have very orderly atomic structures, something that plastics tend not to have.

Energy

• SourceHut is planning to roll out updates to our terms of service, effective in 2023. The changes most likely to impact users is the prohibition of cryptocurrency- or blockchain-related projects on SourceHut.

• These domains are strongly associated with fraudulent activities and high-risk investments which take advantage of people who are suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality. Few to no legitimate use-cases for this technology have been found; instead it is mostly used for fraudulent “get rich quick” schemes and to facilitate criminal activity, such as ransomware, illicit trade, and sanctions evasion. These projects often encourage large-scale energy waste and electronics waste, which contributes to the declining health of Earth’s environment. The presence of these projects on SourceHut exposes new victims to these scams and is harmful to the reputation of SourceHut and its community.

• We recognize that the basic idea of a blockchain, as it were, may be generally useful. However, most projects which market themselves with blockchain technology are subject to the same social ills as cryptocurrency. Consequently, we have chosen to include “blockchain” related projects in this ban for the time being.

• We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support.

• Projects which seek out cryptocurrency donations are strongly discouraged from doing so, but will not be affected by this change.

• As digital currencies gained widespread popularity last year, [crypto] advertisements became ubiquitous in the world of sports. A Coinbase commercial aired during the Super Bowl. The [crypto] exchange FTX, run by the billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, bought the naming rights to the Miami Heat’s arena. In Europe, a company called Socios markets soccer-centric “fan tokens,” special digital currencies associated with teams like Barcelona and Manchester City. To critics, the [crypto] industry’s flood of sports marketing looked like an opportunistic strategy to lure young men into speculative investments; when the [crypto] market cratered this spring, wiping away $2 trillion in value, many of those amateur traders lost everything.

• Mr. Johnson insists that his soccer project is different. Rather than selling [crypto] to Crawley fans, he said, the ownership group is trying to sell Crawley to [crypto] fans and thus create new sources of revenue for the club. With skepticism about the industry spiking in the wake of the crash, the project is a quixotic effort to prove that [crypto] technology has real-world utility, as a vehicle for raising money and engaging fans in a communal project.

• Saudi Arabia and OPEC have decided to cut oil production by two million barrels a day. The President is miffed, and has signaled that he’s fed up with the Saudis who, according to a New York Times report, “duped” the administration into believing OPEC would not be cutting oil production—and in fact would significantly increase it.

• If the episode amounts to Saudi duplicity and Russian influence, as opposed to an honest Saudi cost-benefit calculation on oil pricing, the question is: What will Biden do about relations with Saudi Arabia?

Wildlife/Nature

• The first butterflies have been seen exploring the mountaintop reserves in th states of Mexico and Michoacan, apparently trying to decide where to settle this year.

• The monarchs have shown up a few days late this year. Normally they arrive for the Day of the Dead observances on Nov. 1 and Nov. 2. Mountainside communities long associated the orange-and-black butterflies with the returning souls of the dead.

• After years of concerns about its viability, this past July, the migratory monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) was officially declared endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The organization blames habitat loss and climate change for reducing numbers so much that there may not be enough of a population to reproduce.

• Those that winter in California are nearly extinct now, but there are serious concerns about those who fly up to 4,500 km from Canada and the United States to wintering grounds located in the high pine forests at the México state–Michoacán border.

Finance

• As the world is processing the Twitter deal the open source project Mastodon is gaining a lot of traction. The instance that I am on, fosstodon, is run by a small team and is fully funded by donations.

• Now this may sound somewhat strange; as the twitterverse is blowing up about $8/month for a blue checkmark I would argue that the $8 is better spent supporting open source projects. As developers, security people, and users we rely on a lot of free time and effort from open source contributors.

• Well, that’s exactly what many Republican gubernatorial candidates are suggesting. Most egregiously, the idea is being floated in Wisconsin by GOP gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels who proposes resuscitating the idea of a “Flat Tax” for Wisconsin. Much US government policy since Ronald Reagan has waterboarded the rich with money in hopes of it leading to their investing it, thus creating more growth for all. At least, that has been the supply-side argument in its favor. A flat income tax is one more failed policy step in that direction. A flat income tax is used in neighboring Illinois, which is perpetually in fiscal trouble and has a higher sales tax (inherently regressive) than Wisconsin. Yet, Wisconsin’s wealthy want another pass at the all you can buffet that comes at the expense of the state’s working people.

• The flat income tax in fact is a “Republican In Name Only” (RINO) plan. The Republican Party’s first President, Abraham Lincoln, certainly knew this. In 1862, Lincoln needed revenue to develop the nation’s infrastructure and pay for the Civil War against the Confederacy. So, he and Congress jettisoned the US flat tax, which he considered an unfair burden on the nation’s workers and insufficient for raising needed revenue, passed the Revenue Act of 1862.

• Job Growth Led by Health Care and Manufacturing

• Job growth was strong across sectors, but it was especially strong in health care and manufacturing. Health care added 52,600 workers in October, and it has added 298,800 workers since May. This is largely catch-up since the sector’s employment had lagged earlier in the recovery. It is now 0.5 percent above the pre-pandemic level.

• This essay is dedicated to the memory of Herman Daly, the father of ecological economics, who began writing about the absurdity of perpetual economic growth in the 1970s; Herman died on October 28 at age 84.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• As for my take on things, I will just say that Elon miscalculated a number of things in his handling of the transition. I think he thought his actions would be better received. But he fired a lot of people, all at once, so he should have anticipated the blowback.

• The once-free blue check mark given to verified accounts on Twitter will soon available to any Twitter Blue user who pays $7.99 per month. Since 2009, blue-checked accounts had been distributed to users through a verification process as a way to separate authentic accounts from impersonators.

• The campaign — using accounts that pose as enraged Americans like Nora Berka — have added fuel to the most divisive political and cultural issues in the country today.

• It has specifically targeted Democratic candidates in the most contested races, including the Senate seats up for grabs in Ohio, Arizona and Pennsylvania, calculating that a Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives could help the Russian war effort.

• The campaigns show not only how vulnerable the American political system remains to foreign manipulation but also how purveyors of disinformation have evolved and adapted to efforts by the major social media platforms to remove or play down false or deceptive content.

• CNN failed to mention that while Twitter has more “users”, many millions of them are just spammers, bots, advertising accounts, and dormant accounts, some of which haven’t been logged into in years.

• Decentralised, free-to-all microblogging sites are not new. Mastodon was created in 2016 by Eugen Rochko after he shared a gripe similar to that made by Mr Musk: corporations that own a social media platform take independent business-driven decisions that have an effect on users, who have no say in the matter most of the time.

• The welcome note on the desktop version of the site says: “Your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see. Radically different social media, back in the hands of the people.”

• Mastodon is an open-source microblogging alternative to Twitter. Rather than a centralised platform, Mastodon consists of independent, user-managed servers. Users are based on one server but can interact freely with others.

• Decentralised in nature, Mastodon was launched by Eugen Rochko, a once-avid and later disillusioned user of Twitter. Rochko was supported by Patreon in the launch of Mastodon in 2016.

• The platform’s new owner issued the warning after some celebrities changed their Twitter display names — not their account names — and tweeted as ‘Elon Musk’ in reaction to the billionaire’s decision to offer verified accounts to all comers for $8 month as he simultaneously laid off a big chunk of the workforce.

• It’s a version of Twitter. Instead of joining a platform, you join a server run by an organisation, individual, or group of individuals. The “decentralised social network” consists of different “communities” and is “built with a focus on privacy and safety”, allowing users to decide who they want to share their posts with and offer content warnings. There is a chronological timeline, custom emojis and a 500-character limit.

• “I have no idea what will replace Twitter if and when that happens. But I’m doing what I can to retain an alternative social media foothold,” Krugman added.

• Perhaps this shouldn’t have been surprising, but Musk has absolutely no idea what he’s doing, having screwed up the most basic element of the business: he doesn’t even know who the customer is! (It’s, um, the ad buyer, stupid.) Instead of doing what any sane new CEO of a troubled entity would do (namely, determining what changes need to be made by spending a bunch of time listening to customers, users, and employees — and then carefully plotting and executing those changes) he seems to be just… making it up as he’s going along. (Who knew that Stephen King is such an effective price negotiator?!) Maybe this would work where customers don’t have a choice or are locked into long contracts, but that isn’t the case here: customers can walk immediately. And advertisers themselves don’t want to be anywhere near controversy, which is why — as Josh Marshall points out — the Drudge Report never had mainstream advertisers, despite having plenty of eyeballs on it. Add to this that Twitter isn’t essential for advertisers and that the macroeconomic environment sucks, and it’s very easy to see how ad buyers would take a wait-and-see approach — reticence which, in the instant world of ad buys, means an immediate decline in revenue.

• Twitter is delaying the rollout of verification check marks to subscribers of its new $7.99 a month subscription service until after Tuesday’s midterm elections, according to an internal post viewed by The New York Times and two people with knowledge of the decision.

• The company made the call a day after announcing that it was rolling out the program for people to receive a verification check mark on their profile for the monthly fee. On Saturday, the company had said in notes accompanying a new update to the Twitter app that the paid verification system was now a feature of the website’s subscription service, Twitter Blue.

• It was unclear how many people would be cut and in which departments, said the people, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The layoffs were expected by the end of the week. Meta had 87,314 employees at the end of September, up 28 percent from a year ago.

• Meta has been struggling financially for months and has been increasingly clamping down on costs. The Silicon Valley company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, has spent billions of dollars on the emerging technology of the metaverse, an immersive online world, just as the global economy has slowed and inflation has soared.

• Amid uncertainty and criticism following Elon Musk’s takeover of social media giant Twitter, nearly half a million users have flocked to Mastodon, a decentralized alternative.

• Mastodon, created by the German-based non-profit Mastodon gGmbH in 2016, is an open-source network of thousands of servers that act as individual social media platforms.

• The social network says it now has over 655,000 users – with over 230,000 having joined in the last week.

• These servers are themed according to location, city or interest – like UK, social, technology etc – according to the BBC. However, users can interact with freely with others.

• It works similar to Twitter, which means that users can tag other users, share media and even follow other accounts. Independent servers is the only distinguishing feature between the two microblogging platforms.

• Comedian Kathy Griffin had her account suspended Sunday after she switched her screen name to Musk. She told a Bloomberg reporter that she had also used his profile photo.

• “I guess not ALL the content moderators were let go? Lol,” Griffin joked afterward on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.

• Actor Valerie Bertinelli had similarly appropriated Musk’s screen name — posting a series of tweets in support of Democratic candidates on Saturday before switching back to her true name. “Okey-dokey. I’ve had fun and I think I made my point,” she tweeted afterwards.

• Before the stunt, Bertinelli noted the original purpose of the blue verification checkmark. It was granted free of charge to people whose identity Twitter employees had confirmed; with journalists accounting for a big portion of recipients. “It simply meant your identity was verified. Scammers would have a harder time impersonating you,” Bertinelli noted.

• Political violence is on a bloody and disturbing rise in the United States. Early Friday morning, an intruder broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home, attacking her 82-year-old husband Paul with a hammer, fracturing his skull. The intruder, David DePape, 42, was arrested. DePape’s online presence is a horrifying mix of conspiracy theories, racism, election denial and antisemitism. “Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?” DePape screamed at Paul Pelosi, using a phrase chanted in the U.S. Capitol during the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Pelosi managed to call 911, leaving the call connected so the dispatcher could hear as he tried to negotiate with the intruder. The dispatcher called on the San Francisco Police to conduct a wellness check. DePape attacked Pelosi as the police arrived, and was quickly arrested. Pelosi was rushed to the hospital. DePape has been jailed, charged with multiple state and federal crimes.

• However, in the last ten years, RCV has emerged again as an alternative to voting candidates into office. For example, in June of 2021, New York City used RCV for the largest election in RCV’s history. This year, 32 cities in seven states used the voting procedure to determine winners.

• Nationwide, 50 jurisdictions employ some form of ranked choice voting. The number of states using RCV could go from two to three if Nevada voters approve it on November 8. At the same time, Seattle voters could add their city to the list of bigger cities, New York, San Francisco, and Austin, using RCV.

• Voter grumbling, rage and cynicism is rampant heading into the mid-term elections on November 8th. Add the flattering, flummoxing and fooling of voters by many corporatist politicians to the mix and we have the makings of an election-day disaster.

• For whatever faith we can put in national polling data, Republicans are favored to gain the majority in both the House and the Senate. Given the Republican efforts to suppress voter turnout across the country, engage in voter intimidation and knowing that there are voters who see little point in voting, it does appear that those polls may be accurate.

• Without a strong turnout of those discouraged voters and young voters, we should expect Republican victories and another two years of deadlock and inter-party hostility. Of course, with the near total lack of respect and cooperation amongst politicians of both parties, regardless of who wins we can still expect more of the same, little progress, more hostility and continuing disregard for physical violence in the name of MAGA.

• It is not controversial to say that the UK’s immigration system is utterly broken. The reason is very plain but seldom noted – decades of cuts in which the cheapness of the system is crazily prioritised over the system working.

• Steve Ellner says opposition to NATO’s stance on Ukraine has created fertile ground for the expansion of a bloc of non-aligned nations, now with a progressive possibly at the helm.

• We should have walked out on the Democratic Party and mounted a serious opposition movement while we still had a chance.

• Freedom requires that people are able to influence decisions about policies that affect their lives. In many states, ballot initiatives offer a way for residents to make certain policy choices directly, from the voting booth. In one of those states, Arizona, voters this November will consider a constitutional amendment that joins a growing, worrisome trend of state efforts to simultaneously erode state tax systems and weaken democratic norms. If approved, the measure would both hamstring the state’s ability to raise adequate revenues for vital services and empower a minority to thwart policies that a majority of Arizonans support.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• A new study reveals that TikTok diet gurus almost always give scientifically inaccurate advice

• It is not clear whether the elected officials and media personalities who have trafficked in falsehoods believe the conspiracy theories they are elevating, or simply want to be rewarded by their right-wing base. According to public polling, as many as 70 percent of Republicans still believe that Mr. Trump was the true winner of the 2020 election.

• Ahead of the midterm elections, disinformation watchdogs say they are concerned that what has been described as an aggressive effort by YouTube to confront misinformation on the Google-owned platform has developed blind spots. In particular, they are worried about YouTube’s TikTok-like service that offers very short videos, and about the platform’s Spanish-language videos.

• But the situation is difficult to understand clearly, more than a dozen researchers said in interviews with The New York Times, because they have limited access to data and because examining videos is time-intensive work.

Civil Rights/Policing

• An October 31 demonstration in the drying out river bed  by migrants seeking entrance into the U.S. turned sour when, according to accounts published in the Ciudad Juárez and El Paso press, a Central American migrant allegedly tossed a rock at deploying U.S. Border Patrol agents who responded by attempting to arrest some protesters and firing pepper spray projectiles. At least two migrants were reportedly injured in the altercation before matters deescalated.

• A visit to the encampment by this reporter about a week earlier found a tens and exhausted mood among hundreds of migrants and refugees, who include numerous children.  “People are getting desperate,” summed up Venezuelan asylum seeker Albert Silva.

• Abd el-Fattah’s book “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated,” brings forth personal essays, theories on technology, notes, poems and deeply heartfelt reflections on prison life, all combined to give an essence of urgency, defiance and an air of resistance that refuses to budge in-spite of all the incredible injustices. His ideas and his utter veracity make him a symbol of hope in an Egypt that has suffered incredible misery and political shenanigans after a disheartening militaristic takeover following the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and his 30 years dictatorship. Alaa is the not only a symbol of hope but also the symbol of change for Egypt itself and the evolution of civil society in the larger Arab world.

• Since most of his texts were smuggled out during his numerous detentions in Egyptian prisons, the collection gives us a sense of an awakening to the militarism, torturous barbarity of a post-Arab Spring Egypt. They are no delusions of grandeur. The work brings together the fraught conditions he and many are dealing with. The sequence of events and experiences are dizzying to say the least. Abd El-Fattah supported initiatives that advanced citizen’s awareness, citizen’s participation, real investigative journalism on social media against the political apathy that was and is so dire across Egypt.

• Climate campaigners and digital privacy advocates expressed alarm Sunday over revelations that the official app being used at the COP27 could be exploited by the Egyptian government hosting the global climate summit to spy on those using it, including domestic dissidents and outside critics of the regime’s brutal human rights record.

• As the Guardian reports:

• They went on to find two sheathed blades, each about 30cm long.

• The Homerton Policing Team issued a photograph of the curved machetes to explain why they considered their actions necessary.

• Officers wrote on Twitter: “To the two members of the public who tried to obstruct us whilst we were dealing with a group of youths in Retreat Place E9 tonight, shouting at us & accusing us of harassing the youths, if you tried to listen to us we may have been able to show you what we found.”

• Earlier in the night, the team had also used the social media site to highlight that they were conducting high visibility reassurance patrols, intelligence-led weapon sweeps, and block sweeps.

• Members of the Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes traveled from South Dakota to take custody of the weapons, pipes, moccasins and clothing, including several items thought to have a direct link to the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota.

• A decision by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to block Poland from extraditing a Taiwanese online fraud suspect to China could set a precedent, human rights organization Safeguard Defenders said Thursday (Nov. 3).

• The Polish court system, including its Supreme Court, had ruled in favor of extradition, but the Oct. 6 ruling by the ECtHR said Liu Hongtao would be “placed at significant risk of ill-treatment and torture” in China.

• “If Gianni Infantino wants the world to ‘focus on the football’ there is a simple solution: FIFA could finally start tackling the serious human rights issues rather than brushing them under the carpet,” Steve Cockburn, Amnesty International’s Head of Economic and Social Justice, said in a statement.

• While the government of newly elected prime minister Ulf Kristersson might no longer carry the feminist torch, it still needs to live up to its obligations on gender equality and the rights of women and girls everywhere.

• Sweden’s landmark feminist foreign policy set a precedent for the entire international community. Its abandonment is a step in the wrong direction.

• Less hiring and lower wages are top ways the majority of companies say they plan to recoup the lost business margin.

• “How is it that today in the world we cannot stop the tragedy of infibulation of young girls?” he asked, referring to the ritual cutting of a girls’ external genitalia. “This is terrible that today there is a practice that humanity isn’t able to stop. It’s a crime. It’s a criminal act!”

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• I’m making a point of saying I own these and showing you I do, because none of the Pro Pinball titles will play without the CD mounted. For The Web, which I have here as part of the 10 Tons Of Fun compilation pack released by StarPlay, and Timeshock this makes sense because the music tracks are regular redbook audio and play directly from the CD. But this was not the case for Big Race USA nor my personal favourite Fantastic Journey: near as I could determine, the CD requirement was only to make sure you owned the disc. I could certainly dupe it and play from a burned copy, and that’s what I did, but I ought to be able to install the game and not need the disc at all. As always copy protection only inconveniences legal owners and never deters the pirates.

• In the course of the fantasy series’ entire six-week run, Amazon released just one figure quantifying its performance, claiming the first two episodes were streamed by 25 million global viewers in their first 24 hours of availability.

• And in the three weeks since the first-season finale, the company has been just as quiet, with only a line in its Q3 earnings report noting “The Rings of Power” is “closing in on 100 million viewers to date” — a vague figure previously revealed by Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke in an interview with Variety.

Monopolies

• Citing sources close to the matter, The Hindu Business Line has reported that CCI Apple is likely to face antitrust heat for its Google-like payment processing policies on the App Store. The report says that “the investigation report in the App Store matter is likely to be submitted soon whereupon the same would be forwarded to the complainant and Apple for their response.”

Copyrights

• A man from Denmark has been convicted for playing a key role at Asgaard, a private torrent site that shut down in 2020 following intense legal pressure. In addition to co-founding Asgaard, the 47-year-old was associated with NordicBits, DanishBits and ShareUniversity. His criminal conviction marks the fifth in this investigation, with the fate of two other men yet to be decided.

• Despite its world-famous ability to tell fantastic stories, Hollywood hasn’t always been able to polish the media’s presentation of piracy news in ways that really benefit Hollywood. Through a new program targeting journalists, influencers, and other media figures, the MPA hopes to transform the negativities of piracy into beneficial, reputation-building opportunities.

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