● 11.13.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 12/11/2022: Nat Friedman-Linked FTX Collapses

Posted in News Roundup at 12:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• When the head of the family tells you to install Arch Linux, you install Arch Linux by the way. Unless you want to sleep with the fishes.

• I’ve been putting off a really serious data issue for quite a while and it’s finally come back to bite me, I lost a lot of video and it’s been a nightmare trying to rebuild them once again

• In this video I discuss how FTX collapsed due to having no liquidity, the activity involving FTX and Sam Bankman-Frieds (SBF) other company Alameda Research and how the FTT tokens value plummeted after CEO of Binance CZ announced they would be selling all their FTT tokens.

Applications

• Kodi is a powerful open-source, cross-platform application that can turn any computer into an amazing home theater system. It offers a variety of options to make it work perfectly with your big-screen TV and hi-fi audio system.

• Kodi transforms your entertainment experience by organizing and playing streaming media – like videos, podcasts, and music – from the web and local/network storage.

• This software provides a fluid user interface that can be extended with a wide range of add-ons to increase functionality and capability. Kodi can play all types of music files, including MP3, FLAC, WAV, WMA, and OGG. It is also able to play all video collections in various formats such as AVI, MP4, DivX, XviD DVD-Video, and MKV.

Instructionals/Technical

• Linux Mint offers three different editions of the operating system, namely Cinnamon, XFCE, and MATE. A quick glance at the Linux Mint website shows that there’s no official KDE Plasma-based flavor available for you to download.

• KDE Plasma offers endless customization options, and the best part about using Linux is that you can mix and match desktops and distributions to build an operating system you can proudly call yours. Here’s how to replace the default desktop and install KDE Plasma on Linux Mint.

• Discord is a free voice, video, and text chat app used by millions of people ages 13+ to talk and hang out with their communities and friends. Users communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media, and files in private chats or as part of communities called “servers.” Discord is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux Distros. Fedora is one of the many Linux Distros that Discord is compatible with; the only downside is that a natural RPM download is unavailable, leaving most to install the client using third-party repositories.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Discord on Fedora 37/36/35 desktop using two different methods with RPM Fusion or the natively installed flatpak manager and using the Flathub repo, which, given Discord’s popularity, will always have the most up-to-date binary.

• In this tutorial, we learn the simple commands to install Nginx on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JelyFish LTS Linux using the command terminal.

• Apart from using as a Web server, it is also used as a proxy, cache, and load-balancing server. To install it, you just need a Linux server such as Ubuntu 22.04 and sudo user rights along with the Internet connection.

• Here are the complete steps and precautions you need to take before upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish releases on April 21, 2022. I recommend you wait for a month or two after April 21st to upgrade. Ideally, it would be best if you plan to Upgrade to any major release after the first point release.

• But if you are in a hurry or want to experience the stunning changes and features that Ubuntu 22.04 brings to the table, then read below the steps required for a flawless upgrade process.

Games

• Valve has just released an all-new beta build of software for the Steam Deck as part of the SteamOS 3.4 preview suite. Deck users who are subscribed to the beta update track have been able to enjoy a wide variety of crucial improvements and feature additions ahead of those sticking with stable SteamOS versions, and the latest new update may be one of the most important ones yet.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I’m happy to announce that the support for WebVTT format and all the nice features that it brings is finished.

• Along with reading and writing of WebVTT subtitles, Subtitle Composer can now fully understand CSS – Cascading Style Sheets, subtitle positions and alignment.

• A new panel has been added that allows syntax-higlighted CSS editing and subtitle position/alignment adjustment. Of course all edits are visible everywhere in app in realtime.

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• One of the aspects that first attracted me to Linux was the choice in desktop environments. What I specifically thought was great when I made the switch to Linux from Windows was the KDE option at the time. I could shape and mold it to what I wanted my desktop to be, something I had never experienced quite like that before.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.7 is here six months after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 and introduces new capabilities like the ability to view and manage system-wide crypto policies for consistency and reduction of risk, support for editing custom firewall services, as well as to label and encrypt data in sosreports.

• This release also improves the kernel live patching workflow by allowing you to install only kpatch updates in the web console, and makes it possible to download the Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation media when you try to create a new virtual machine in the web console.

Debian Family

• There has been a flurry of activity on the Debian mailing lists ever since Steve McIntyre raised the issue of including non-free firmware as part of official Debian installation images.

• Firstly I should point out that I am in complete agreement with Steve’s proposal to include non-free firmware as part of an installation image. Likewise I think that we should have a separate archive section for firmware. Because without doing so it will soon become almost impossible to install onto any new hardware. However, as always the issue is more nuanced than a first glance would suggest.

• Lets start by defining what is firmware?

• From November 2nd to 4th, 2022, the 19th edition of Latinoware – Latin American Congress of Free Software and Open Technologies took place in Foz do Iguaçu. After 2 years happening online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event was back in person and we felt Debian Brasil community should be there. Out last time at Latinoware was in 2016

• The Latinoware organization provided the Debian Brazil community with a booth so that we could have contact with people visiting the open exhibition area and thus publicize the Debian project. During the 3 days of the event, the booth was organized by me (Paulo Henrique Santana) as Debian Developer, and by Leonardo Rodrigues as Debian contributor. Unfortunately Daniel Lenharo had an issue and could not travel to Foz do Iguaçu (we miss you there!).

• From 01/11 until 05/11, I went from São Paulo to Foz do Iguaçu in Paraná to tend to the KDE booth at the biggest free software event of Latin America, Latinoware 2022, together with two great people who have been attending Latinoware for years, Pedro and Barbara, and who have been contributing to KDE longer than I am.

• Immediately after arriving at the hotel close to the midnight of 01/11, I got a heartwarming greeting from other event participants who would present talks over the next few days. I did my check-in afterwards and went to my bedroom, where I just dozed off.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Partaker J6412 is a Mini PC based on the 2.6 GHz Celeron processor along with Intel UHD graphics. This product offers triple 2.5GbE ports, triple display interfaces, an M.2 2280 socket, etc. Moreover, the device is offered as barebones or it can be configured with up to 16GB DDR4 and 512GB SSD.

• We’re always under pressure from the atmosphere around us, even if we forget! Using the Qwiic MicroPressureSensor as the cornerstone of her project, Mariah built a tool that can measure height using atmospheric pressure readings. You’ll even get a look at the software she used as well! Check it out below, and think about what projects you might want to do with measuring pressure.

• Hello and welcome back to another Friday Product Post here at SparkFun Electronics! This week, we have a handful of new products to show off and it all starts with the new ENS160 Indoor Air Quality Sensor! This Qwiic-enabled breakout consists of four independent heaters and gas sensor elements based on metal oxide (MOX) technology and a controller. Following that, we have two new products from SparkX, a GNSS Antenna Splitter and a Qwiic Micro Dynamic NFC/RFID Tag. Let’s jump in and take a closer look at this week’s new products!

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Events

• Though I’ve been involved with SRECon EMEA many times before, this time was unique for two reasons: firstly and most importantly, we hadn’t been physically together since late 2019, and secondly, I was program co-chair (alongside Daria Barteneva) – a new experience for me. With the freshness of the experience still in mind, I thought it was the perfect moment to write up my reflections.

Programming/Development

• Today no cartography in R but in QGIS. However the satellite image processing has been made with the {sen2R} package.

• We emulate infrared photography with a combination of the 8, 4 and 3 bands from the Sentinel-2 satellites, aimed at Termignon in the Vanoise National Park.

• It has been a wild view days on Twitter after Elon Musk took over. The future of the platform is unclear and many users are looking for alternatives, a popular one being mastodon. I also decided to give it a try and signed up. I quite quickly became interested in its API and realized that there is only a seemingly unmaintained R package on github. So I decided to write a new one. Fast forward a week(!!!!) and the package rtoot was accepted by CRAN.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• I’m serious about shell startup speed. I use tmux to open and close tmux splits all day every day, so I need zsh to start quickly. I used to use frameworks like oh-my-zsh or prezto and while I was happy with the functionality they provided I wasn’t happy with their impact on my shell’s startup speed. So, what do we do about it? The first step when something feels slow is to validate that it is slow; we need to profile!

Java

• In the Java programming language, a hashmap is a list of associated values. Java uses hashmaps to store data. If you keep a lot of structured data, it’s useful to know the various retrieval methods available.

Leftovers

• In May, the composer Carter Burwell flew to London to record his score for Martin McDonagh’s new movie, “The Banshees of Inisherin.” The sessions took place in Studio Two at Abbey Road—the Beatles’ old studio. The ensemble consisted of six violins, four violas, three cellos, two double-basses, a flute, a clarinet, and a harp. Burwell, who is sixty-seven, stood on a low platform and opened an annotated copy of the music on a large stand in front of him. He has wavy gray hair and a soul patch the size of a blob of shaving cream, and he was wearing jeans and an untucked collared shirt with a flower print. “For some reason, there’s a magnet and a nail on my music stand,” he told the group. “I hope I don’t have to use them.”

• “Banshees” is set on a small island off the Irish mainland in 1923. Early in the film, Colm Doherty, a fiddler, played by Brendan Gleeson, tells his longtime best friend, Pádraic Súilleabháin, played by Colin Farrell, that he no longer wants anything to do with him, because he’s so boring.

Education

• “We should be able to educate enough university teachers and professors, who in turn can teach in Estonian, at least [in] these curricula that are needed to effectively run the country,” said Professor Soomere, citing cybersecurity as an example. “This ability is already questionable in several IT fields, where up to 90 per cent of teachers and students are international.”

• At the same time, low funding means that the best young Estonian speakers are lured abroad for undergraduate study and might not return, which in the long run could contribute to security risks, Professor Asser said. “There are so many fields we have to cover.”

Hardware

• The last two Novembers, Hackaday’s annual gathering was held in remote mode: Remoticon instead of Supercon. While still recovering from jetlag, I’m reflecting on the pros and cons of live versus virtual events. And wondering how we can combine the virtues of both for next year. Come brainstorm with me!

• [Donald Bell] wanted to recreate the magic of seeing Kermit on a tricycle from a 2018 NY Maker Faire he attended, so he created his own take of a Muppet on a Radio Flyer kids tricycle bike.

• If you’re a cyclist that lives in an area with poorly-maintained infrastructure, you’ll likely have plenty of punctured inner tubes begging for reuse. Consider crafting them into a rugged, hard-wearing pencil case with this design from [Yorkshire Lass].

• If you were around for the early days of the personal computer revolution, you’ll no doubt recall the excitement every time IBM announced a new version of its beige boxes. For a lot of us, the excitement was purely vicarious, for despite the “personal” moniker, mere mortals could rarely afford a branded IBM machine. But it was still cool to keep track of the latest releases, and dream of the days when cheap clones would make it possible to play.

• Let’s face it: if you can’t trust a fire-breathing billionaire industrialist to protect your stuff, who can you trust? (Video, embedded below.)

• The one thing that separates the pros on Twitch from the dilettantes is the production values. It’s all about the smooth transitions, and you’ll never catch the big names fiddling with dodgy software mid-stream. The key to achieving this is by having a streamdeck to help control your setup, like this straightforward design from [Electronoobs]. (Video, embedded below.)

• [Stefan Schüller] was a fan of the LED signs that display arrival information for the trams and buses in their city of Zürich. [Stefan] was having trouble finding a source to purchase the signs so, instead, decided to build one himself.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

Proprietary

• The buzz around digital transformation strengthened after the pandemic, and companies rushed to change the way they did business. From customer service to supply chains, every aspect of business felt the need to be digitally sound. But what constitutes digital transformation, what impact can it have on supply chains, and how does one implement it? In a conversation with ET Digital, Rakesh Prasad, Senior Vice-President – Digital Services, Innover, talks about the need for clarity, what digital transformation can achieve and the trends to watch out for. Edited excerpts: [...]

• This may be a seminal moment for the country as social, economic and security concerns are being examined under new lenses.

• Policymakers can be deliberate rather than diffident when addressing the full range of tech policy issues. Their erstwhile deference to industry dictates can now be reviewed and reversed.

• Taken together, these developments are all good, not only for Americans but also for the world. They allow the industry to retool for today’s economic realities — and to recalibrate their C-suite leadership for tomorrow’s workforce.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• Those shuttles will leverage the existing OpenMPW shuttle infrastructure based on the OpenLane automated design flow with the same Caravel harness and the Efabless platform for project submissions.

• We are thrilled to announce the 2023 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program and share the timeline with you to get involved! 2023 will be our 19th consecutive year of hosting GSoC and we could not be more excited to welcome more organizations, mentors, and new contributors into the program.

• With just three weeks left in the 2022 program, we had an exciting year with 958 GSoC contributors completing their projects with 198 open source organizations.

Security

• A 100-person strong task force, formed jointly by the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Signals Directorate, will be given the job of hunting down those who commit crimes online.

• Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil and Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus made the announcement jointly on Saturday, a day after the AFP commissioner Reece Kershaw claimed that those behind the ransomware attack on medical insurance provider Medibank Group were based in Russia. Ransomware generally attacks only systems running Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

• O’Neil, who is also responsible for online security, said: “This is the formalisation of a partnership, a standing body in the Australian Government, which will day in, day out, hunt down the scumbags who are responsible for these malicious crimes against innocent people.

• “Around 100 officers across these two organisations will be a part of this permanent Joint Standing Operation. They will show up to work every day with the goal of bringing down these gangs and thugs.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Yesterday, several EU parliament negotiators on the AI Act from Socialists and Democrats, Greens/EFA, Renew and The Left groups gathered in the European Parliament to discuss how far the AI Act should go in banning Biometric Mass Surveillance in Europa. They were joined by 20 NGOs coming from all over the EU, representing a “Reclaim Your Face” coalition of 76 NGOs in favour of a strong ban.

• The event, co-hosted by a cross-group coalition of 10 Members of the European Parliament, including co-Rapporteur Brando Benifei, ended with several commitments not to agree to an AI Act trilogue agreement which doesn’t include a ban on BMS. The speakers covered different areas which they argued ought to be in the scope of the ban: remote biometric recognition – whether for law enforcement or border control purposes – but also emotion and gender categorisation, polygraphs, behavioural analysis and crowd control. The impact of biometric mass surveillance on democracy, on fundamental rights such as the freedom of expression, and specific communities such as people on the move was highlighted. All speakers concurred about the need to ban the practise, and that this ban should take a strict and ambitious form.

• Brace yourselves, Alexa owners. Amazon is looking at cost-cutting, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, and Alexa looks like a target. The WSJ reports that the business unit has a reported loss of $5 billion a year.

• By David Rosen / CounterPunch On October 14th, AT&T’s Illinois subsidiary agreed to pay a $23 million fine to resolve a federal criminal investigation into alleged misconduct involving the company’s efforts to unlawfully influence former Illinois Speaker of the House Michael J. Madigan. Madigan was a very influential political player.  The Justice Department notes that, in addition […]

Defence/Aggression

• The UK began using GPS-enabled ankle tags to track adult foreign-national offenders who are subject to deportation orders in August 2021. People in this position, also known as immigration bail, aren’t UK citizens and have committed a crime that resulted in a custodial sentence of more than 12 months or are considered to be “persistent offenders”. According to the most recent data, as of 30 September, 2146 people were being monitored in this way.

• The new devices, which resemble a large key fob and are produced by Buddi, will be given to people on immigration bail soon, the Home Office has confirmed. They will track an individual’s location 24 hours a day. Lucie Audibert at Privacy International says the charity understands that the devices will be rolled out this autumn.

• This story is based on a year’s worth of election board meetings, conversations with citizens of Spalding County on all sides of the political spectrum, and more than 3,500 of pages of mostly duplicative internal emails obtained by Rolling Stone under public records laws. The Republican officials taking over administration of Spalding’s election board largely declined to speak with Rolling Stone. In internal communications, they’ve argued their ultimate goal is to reform a faulty election system to prevent future mishaps. To their critics, it’s something far more sinister.

• The story of Spalding County isn’t just the story of Spalding County. It’s the story of the takeover of America’s election system and, by extension, its democracy. All over the country, a Republican party obsessed with phantom election fraud is taking control of local election administration, putting people in charge of elections who are — at a minimum — skeptical that an election can be free or fair if their side didn’t win. The scariest chapters of this story are ahead: In 2020, Trump’s push to overturn the election was stalled by a handful of brave people at all levels of American government. But 2024 is upon us, and if Trump tries again, it’s unclear how many of those people will be left.

• In Spalding, what began in a dumpster continued with pro-Trump zealots and conspiracy theorists overseeing elections in Spalding County. Now, they have been subpoenaed for their involvement in trying to commit a possible election crime.

• At least eight councils have taken or are considering legal action to block the use of hotels, of which there are now thought to be about 200 funded by the Home Office, to house as many as 37,000 migrants.

• The most opaque war in my lifetime and probably yours, the war we can hardly see because the reporting is so bad, just took an unexpected turn. There must be someone somewhere who anticipated the retreat of Russian forces from Kherson, the key Ukrainian city along the southern […]

• Declassified sits down with Stella Assange, the wife of the WikiLeaks founder, to talk about how he’s holding up in his fourth year inside Belmarsh prison—and how his case threatens the very core of freedom itself.

• Head of the regional military administration, Yaroslav Yanushevych, arrived for the liberation of Kherson, reports Kyrylo Tymoshenko, adviser to the President of Ukraine.

• Henichesk will be the temporary administrative capital of the occupied part of the Kherson region, following the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kherson.

• Members of the Russian-appointed administration in the annexed Kakhovka area of the Kherson region are leaving a 15-kilometer (around 9-mile) zone on the left bank of the Dnipro River.

• Ukraine does not intend to freeze hostilities at the front following the liberation of Kherson, said Oleksiy Danilov, Secretary of the Ukrainian National Defense and Security Council, live on air during a national television marathon.

• The following is the text of the keynote address delivered to the conference on Anti-Fascism in the 21st Century, held at Hofstra University on November 2 and 3.

• Less than a month after he expressed eagerness to provide testimony on live television, former President Donald Trump sued the House January 6 panel to block a subpoena ordering him to testify.

• In a lawsuit filed Friday night in the Southern District of Florida, Trump’s legal team argues that while ex-presidents have voluntarily agreed to cooperate with congressional subpoenas in the past, “no president or former president has ever been compelled to do so.”

Environment

• Hundreds of people rallied Saturday at the United Nations COP27 summit in Egypt to demand the fundamental political-economic transformations required to achieve climate justice.

• “There can be no climate justice without human rights,” declared the COP27 Coalition, an alliance of progressive advocacy groups that planned the protest as part of its push for “an urgent response from governments to the multiple, systemic crises” facing people around the world. “We are not yet defeated!”

• Russia has sent dozens of executives from the country’s vast fossil fuel industry to COP27, including two sanctioned oligarchs with significant interests in coal.

• Oleg Deripaska, who has large stakes in multiple coal companies, and Andrey Melnichenko, who transferred ownership of Russia’s largest coal producer to his wife in March as sanctions were brought in, are both set to attend.

• Today, high school students are showing that we have way more power in taking climate action than might have been imagined a mere decade ago. We’re taking to the streets in global climate strikes on the scale of millions, but outside of the strikes, we need to keep up the pressure for sustainable change from all of our institutions. For my peers and me, that can and must include institutions of higher education. Right now, universities, both public and private, are complicit in the progression of the climate crisis due to their acceptance of research funding from fossil fuel companies, a clear conflict of interest that jeopardizes climate research. Any sort of allyship between a university and the fossil fuel industry is a blow to its students, for it shows that the university takes no regard for their futures when choosing its partners.

Energy

• Crisis-struck cryptocurrency platform FTX has gone bankrupt in the United States and its chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried has resigned, it said Friday, the latest blow in a saga that has reverberated across the digital currency landscape.

• The filing comes after the world’s biggest cryptocurrency platform Binance agreed to buy its rival earlier this week but backed out, leading market players to consider possible regulator responses.

• Now, his Bahamas-based empire is scorched, investors are shellshocked and the entire [cryptocurrency] ecosystem is on edge. FTX and an array of related entities filed for bankruptcy protection on Friday morning, Bankman-Fried resigned and a new CEO has been installed to oversee a process to “maximize recoveries for stakeholders.”

• The meltdown began last weekend and accelerated Tuesday when FTX International halted customers’ redemptions. A major investor threatened to sell because the company’s financial soundness had come under scrutiny and the ensuing market mayhem took the price of bitcoin to a fresh low this week.

• FTX was engulfed in more chaos on Saturday when the [cryptocurrency] exchange said it had detected unauthorized access and analysts said hundreds of millions of dollars of assets had been moved from the platform in “suspicious circumstances.”

• FTX filed for bankruptcy on Friday, one of the highest profile [cryptocurrency] blowups, after traders rushed to withdraw $6 billion from the platform in just 72 hours and rival exchange Binance abandoned a proposed rescue deal.

• Now that ftx’s demise is total, what remains are big and difficult questions about how this could have happened, what can be salvaged and the size of the reverberations. Some are already being felt in [cryptocurrencyland]. The prices of digital assets are sliding as investors panic about who is exposed to the blow-up. BlockFi, a business Mr Bankman-Fried swooped in to save when prices crashed in the summer, has halted customer withdrawals.

• As world leaders meet for another climate summit in Egypt, the U.S. is pushing to mine more lithium for electric vehicle batteries at home. EVs will help cut pollution from transportation, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. But there’s a tradeoff, as residents have learned near Charlotte, where a big open-pit mine is proposed.

• A company called Piedmont Lithium wants to build a mine and processing operation on 1,500 acres in northern Gaston County, about 30 miles west of Charlotte.

• From the world’s biggest soccer championship to soccer training for kids, from major universities to music festivals and art galleries to — if you can name it, fossil fuel companies have probably sponsored it.

• TotalEnergies will sponsor the 2023 Rugby World Cup in France. Aramco has partnered with Spain’s Laguna de El Hito Nature Reserve to conserve bird species. Chevron partnered with a “Community Inclusion” social project in Brazil. BP has donated to the British Museum in London since 1996.

Overpopulation

• Running out of time and options to save water along the drying Colorado River, federal officials said they’re considering whether to release less water from the country’s two largest reservoirs downstream to Arizona, California and Nevada.

• Without enough snow this winter, the water level at Lake Powell — the country’s second-largest reservoir — will drop below a critical level by next November, according to a new report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Below that point, the Glen Canyon Dam will no longer be able to generate electricity and experts worry whether conditions will worsen to the point that the structure will no longer be able to send water downstream at all.

Finance

• Why to Be Wary of Another Volcker-Type Monetary Tightening.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• His Republican colleagues on the Senate side also warned against the TSA requirements on the pipeline sector, calling them “unnecessarily burdensome” and saying they “shift resources away from responding to cyberattacks to regulatory compliance,” The Washington Post reported.

• Cyber industry leaders have expressed the same concerns to lawmakers.

• The Transportation Security Administration already imposed new cyber regulations on pipeline operators in the wake of the Colonial Pipeline hack, which briefly disrupted gas supplies. New requirements are in the works for the rail and air sectors as the Biden administration pushes to raise the nation’s cyber posture amid a wave of ransomware attacks.

• Twitter’s chief information security officer Lea Kissner and its chief privacy officer Damien Kieran announced their resignations, and they were joined out the door by others who worked on cybersecurity and related teams. Musk a week ago laid off about half of Twitter’s workforce, citing financial constraints.

• I’ve researched leaving Twitter several times. The biggest alternative is Mastodon. However, Mastodon isn’t Twitter. It is different. It has a different intent. It functions differently.

• Online giants Amazon, Dailymotion, Google, Instagram, Meta, Microsoft, Snapchat, Twitter, Qwant and TikTok are all to be involved in the lab’s work, joining the UN, UNICEF and the civil society organizations Save the Children, WeProtect, E-enfance, RespectZone and Point de Contact

• The roundtable led by President Emmanuel Macron was held in the Élysée Palace Friday, presenting the laboratory as a joint French, Estonian, Argentinian and New Zealand initiative whose work would involve the input of representatives of a wide range of countries, NGOs, research institutes and Internet giants.

• On Friday night, two additional Democratic candidates for secretary of state defeated Republicans who endorsed former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential contest was stolen, delivering another blow to far-right conspiracy theorists running for top elections posts.

• In Arizona, Democrat Adrian Fontes beat his Republican opponent Mark Finchem, a state lawmaker with ties to the Oath Keepers who was at the U.S. Capitol during the deadly January 6 insurrection and who said he would not have certified Biden’s victory in the state.

• In a matter of days Americans will vote on a new cohort of U.S. Senators in a midterm election cycle with significant bearing on the nation’s future. Among those vying for what is actually a tedious, bureaucratic “sausage-making” job, is a crop of celebrity-politicians whose electoral success, along with that of Donald Trump’s, is signaling what could be a fundamental change in the way political power works in America.

• The mid-term congressional elections are over, but the counting in some very close races continues, which extends the time for determining the margins of control over the Senate and the House.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Twitter moved on Friday to curb fake accounts that have proliferated since Elon Musk’s takeover. Figures from US presidents to mega corporations were lampooned by users impersonating them before Twitter took action to combat the trend.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Though debates on the nature of free speech have been ongoing throughout American history, the tension surrounding them has dramatically escalated over the past two years. In the aftermath of the pandemic, the Jan. 6 [insurrection] and Twitter’s decision to “deplatform” some politicians, pundits and other right-wing figures, Facebook and other social media have become far more censorious. While private companies maintain a right to moderate discourse on their platforms, the inconsistent manner in which they’ve done so has profound implications.

• Such colorful posts are remarkable not only because they represent growing public frustration at China’s unrelenting zero-Covid policy — which uses snap lockdowns, mass testing, extensive contact-tracing and quarantines to stamp out infections as soon as they emerge — but because they remain visible at all.

• Normally such harsh criticisms of government policies would be swiftly removed by the government’s army of censors, yet these posts have remained untouched for days. And that is, most likely, because they are written in language few censors will fully understand.

• These posts are in Cantonese, which originated in Guangzhou’s surrounding province of Guangdong and is spoken by tens of millions of people across Southern China. It can be difficult to decipher by speakers of Mandarin — China’s official language and the one favored by the government — especially in its written and often complex slang forms.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• In October, a study published in PLOS One provided some fresh insight into how and why American media has become so dysfunctional. Over the past 20 years, the study reported, headlines that convey anger, fear, sadness, and disgust have been increasing, while headlines conveying neutrality or joy have been in decline. These trends have coincided with a massive drop in trust in news journalism, particularly in the US.

• An important question raised by this work is whether the sentiment and emotionality embedded in news media headlines reflect a wider societal mood or if instead they just reflect the sentiment and emotionality prevalent or pushed by those creating news content. Financial incentives to maximize click-through ratios could be at play in increasing the sentiment polarity and emotional charge of headlines over time. Conceivably, the temptation of shaping the sentiment and emotional undertones of news headlines to advance political agendas could also be playing a role. Deciphering these unknowns is beyond the scope of this article and could be a worthy goal for future research.

• To conclude, we hope this work paves the way for further exploration about the potential impact on public consciousness of growing emotionality and sentiment negativity of news media content and whether such trends are conductive to sustain public well-being. Thus, we hope that future research throws light on the potential psychological and social impact of public consumption of news media diets with increasingly negative sentiment and anger/fear/sadness undertones embedded within them.

Civil Rights/Policing

Monopolies

• A bipartisan antitrust bill that aims to keep dominant tech firms from preferencing their own products has been stalled in the Senate as vulnerable Democrats fought off tough challenges this year, but proponents remained steadfast that they would get a vote before year’s end. Now, if Democrats’ Senate power hinges on a tough battle in Georgia, the bill may fall to the wayside yet again.

• Even if Democrats secure Senate control, their chances of passing the bill, or other antitrust legislation targeting tech giants, in the next Congress are slim with Republicans poised to win control of the House — making the lame-duck session the best shot for the bill’s supporters.

Copyrights

• When a domain appears on the ‘Infringing Website List’, it means that UK police have concluded its activities are most likely criminal. Advertisers and other intermediaries are advised that knowingly supporting crime, is a crime in itself. The IWL is not open to scrutiny but TorrentFreak has learned that for the last four months, a GitHub subdomain has been labeled “massively infringing.”

Gemini* and Gopher

Politics

• I started exploring something new — growing crystals. Household salt was handy, so I gave that a try for starters. The basic idea is you heat up some water, put in enough salt to saturate the water, pour out some of that water into a jar, and have something like a piece of rope sticking into the water, so crystals can grow on it. As the water cools and evaporates, crystals build up — hopefully interesting ones — because the water is already saturated and so the minerals are forced to precipitate.

• My first attempt went fairly well — there were some interesting cube-shaped crystals at the end of the rope, and some spikey ones along the middle of the rope.

• Tonight I saw a deaf man. He was a veteran who had lost his hearing at war.

• He was also ill from being exposed to chemical bombs.

• He said that the regime did not grant him medical care or life support. He was on the street trying to make a living. He fought for a regime that abandoned him and gave his rights to their cousins.

• Tonight I cried. Yes even men cry sometimes. Everywhere I look I see death, I see anguish and torture and worst and I don’t know what to do with myself, with these emotions, I guess something reckless and aggressive.

Technical

• Things start slow and hard amd expensive, and get easier, cheaper and faster. That is how it is. Was it always like this, or are we on a runaway train?

• With tech the curve is clear. Think back to 1953, when IBM was surprised to get more than 5 orders for a new computer. Coincidentally, John McCarthy put together the first Lisp a few years after – the language which pioneered garbage collection, bytecode interpretation, first class functions and lambdas, to name a few concepts – the language which I use daily… Weird, huh.

• Back when Lisp was invented, running a Marathon was a feat for professional athletes. Today, if you go to a Marathon in your city (!) you will likely find older folks, people with arms and legs missing, and likely people who’ve had heart attacks. It’s just a race. There are people who fly around the world and run Marathons a few times a week. It’s not just tech, it’s the whole society.

Internet/Gemini

• For the last month or so, I have done all of my cooking on a small wood stove. I didn’t have to do this, but I wanted to do it as an experiment to challenge my concepts of what I need to live. At some point in the experiment, I experienced a sort of matrix style download, and could suddenly understand a great deal about different food preservation methods, why certain common dishes became popular historically, and how I might go about storing and grinding various grains. The reason I mention this, is because it is not the first time I have had this kind of experience. But what i realized this time, was that the experience is always preceded by challenging a perceived need, or a norm of convenience.

Programming

• Pushing pieces around a game board can be done in a number of different ways. The first attempt was recursive, though I did have vague notions of how to do a better job of it. Up to N moves are made, swapping the piece being moved with an empty cell, or recursing if there is something in the way, in which case there’s a conga line of swaps. With a callback or by building a list this could in theory give an animation routine something to do, but I have no idea how to implement animations, so that might all be wrong.

• If you read the literature for long enough, you see the same ideas come around again and again, be they good or bad. A good idea is imposing a structure of larger units, components, composed of many indiviual modules. Components are also often used as a unit of deployment, rather than one of work assignment like modules.

• [...]

• First, Taligent. I’ve heard it referred to as a noble failure, like the Charge of the Light Brigade. Clean C++ interfaces for all OS features, but it was built as a library for AIX, OS/2, etc. I never saw it running, apparently very few did since it didn’t sell well at all, but did I leaf through the documentation.

• 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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