● 11.15.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 15/11/2022: Release of Fedora 37 and Amazon Layoffs

Posted in News Roundup at 1:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Higole has brought another unusual mini-PC to market. This time, the company has introduced the Gole1 R, a Rockchip RK3588-based device that has a 5.5-inch built-in display for running Android 12, Linux or Ubuntu.

• With an HPL score of 0.442 EFlop/s, the Fugaku system installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan still holds the #2 spot.

• Protect your browser privacy! Using Firefox, a bevvy of clever plugins and discovering the tricks and techniques used to track you we beat the trackers, stop the snoopers and stay safe online! We fire up the latest Tor 12 for complete online safety and explore Google Manifest v3.

• PLUS: Explore Ubuntu 22.10, terminal screencasting, advanced desktop search, automate installs with Ansible, safely delete and recover files, vector drawing packages, the future of 3D printing and loads more!

Applications

• Mastodon is a free and open source microblogging platform similar to Twitter, but with user privacy and decentralization in mind. It’s one of many protocols that interacts with the Fediverse of protocols like Pleroma, GNU Social, and others. Unlike Twitter, Mastodon is not one social network.

• Getting started with Mastodon can be confusing for newcomers. Mastodon is a federated service. This means its similar to email. You can create an email account with many different providers. And that’s the same with Mastodon. The service lets you sign up to one of many sites that run Mastodon software, called instances. A user can communicate with other Mastodon users on different instances. The instances are themed – many by country, city, or interest.

• Signup to Mastodon is simple. Just supply a username, email address and password and you’re set.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this video, we cover how to manage date and time on your Linux Server using timedatectl command. The timedatectl utility is used to display server time details, view, list, and change the timezone. Please enjoy the video and if you have any questions, leave a comment below. My goal is to expand the Linux community.

• ClickHouse can easily be installed on Ubuntu 22.04 Linux for getting column-oriented DBMS (columnar database management system). It is developed by Yandex, a popular technology company for online analytical processing (OLAP).

• This DBMS is used to generate analytic reports in real-time for non-aggregated data and has the capability to generate reports from petabytes of raw data without any significant latency. It uses SQL queries.

• In this guide, you will learn how to easily configure NTP Server on Rocky/Oracle Linux.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ruby on Rails on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Ruby on Rails is a web-app framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. With the complexity of modern web applications, Rails makes web development easier with the pre-built structure for development, providing all the required tools to build an app.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Ruby on Rails on Rocky Linux. 9.

• Linux is a great platform for gaming, but it can sometimes be challenging to get the best performance out of your games. This is where GameMode, a tool that allows you to optimize your system for gaming, comes in. Here we show you how to install and use GameMode to improve gaming performance in Linux.

• Ubuntu finally added support for disabling automatic updates for snap applications, though it’s currently considered experimental at the moment of writing.

• As you may know, Snap is an universal package format runs in sandbox. It’s developed by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, as a competitor to Flatpak.

• The pre-installed Firefox in Ubuntu 22.04+, and Ubuntu Software in Ubuntu 20.04+ are Snap applications. And there are lots of apps in Ubuntu Software available as Snap, including Chromium browser, Skype, and more.

• By default, Snap apps automatically update to the newest version. Though, user can delay or specify when to perform updates. It was impossible to completely disable automatic updates due to security issue.

• According to the spec, that’s because Pseudo-elements are generally excluded from :has() because many of them exist conditionally, based on the styling of their ancestors, so allowing these to be queried by :has() would introduce cycles..

• For the sake of completeness, of course :has() works with pseudo-classes.

• Unbound 1.16.0 adds support for Extended DNS Errors (EDEs) as codified in RFC 8914. While EDE was already supported in NLnet Labs’ Name Server Daemon (NSD) since version 4.3.6 was released in April of 2021, as with most things in a resolver, EDE support took more time to implement.

• EDEs are EDNS options that enrich a DNS response with an error code that tells you what the error was, and can even include human-readable text specifying what went wrong exactly.

• By building on top of common development interfaces and infrastructure tools such as Terraform, Coder aims to make the process of provisioning and accessing remote workspaces approachable for organizations. Coder workspaces are represented with Terraform.

• how to install NVIDIA proprietary drivers on Fedora 37 with Hybrid Switchable Graphics [Intel + Nvidia GeForce]

• One of my little maker projects has a need for a battery powered micro controller, some DIY to clean up some old equipment and some basic HW design. Ultimately I’d like to be able to integrate it as a fun thing into home automation possibly even using Matter. More on the project for another post.

• To move things forward and actually be able to play with LEDs and buttons rather than doing a board port I decided to use the standard firmware. I looked through my collection of micro controllers and found a FeatherS2, it’s based on the ESP-32-S2 MCU with WiFi in a Adafruit Feather form factor with builtin LiPo charger circuit, a USB-C interface, an onboard RGB LED and runs CircuitPython.

• Next up I needed to get a development environment up and running on Fedora, batteries and other HW bits can come later. First step was to work out how to getting it running the latest CircuitPython. On the CircuitPython page for the FeatherS2 there’s two firmware, one for boot and USB and then CircuitPython itself.

• Fedora 37 release is finally out after a series of delays. This iconic release brings stunning GNOME 43, the latest Kernel 6.0, KDE Plasma 5.26, Wayland updates and more. You can read my guide on Fedora 37 features on this page.

• If you’re trying to upgrade to Fedora 37 from Fedora 36, here are the recommended steps you should follow.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nessus Security Scanner on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Nessus is an open-source network vulnerability scanner for vulnerability assessments and penetration testing. It gives you malware detection, scanning of embedded devices, configurations auditing, control systems auditing, and compliance checks among other features. Also, Nessus is available in multiple types of versions, including the Nessus Essentials the free vulnerability scanner, and Nessus professional for professional pentester.

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

• This quick beginner’s guide will help you to install Notepad++ in Ubuntu and Fedora.

• Notepad++ is a very popular free developer-friendly text editor and is primarily popular in Windows systems. However, you can easily install this in Linux systems thanks to snap.

• pgAdmin is an open-source feature-rich, frontend management tool that allows you to easily administer and manage your PostgreSQL relational database from a web browser.

• It provides an easy-to-use user interface that simplifies the creation and monitoring of databases and database objects. PgAdmin 4 is an improvement of the earlier pgAdmin tool and is available for Linux, Windows, macOS systems, and even a Docker container.

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to install PostgreSQL with pgAdmin4 on Linux Mint 21 and Linux Mint 20.

• One of the advantages of working in a terminal is that it’s faster than most other interfaces. Thanks to the GNU Readline library and the built-in syntax of shells like Bash and Zsh, there are several ways to make your interactions with the command line even faster. Here are five ways to make the most of your time in the terminal.

• [...]

• It’s not uncommon to misspell commands. You might be used to using the Backspace key on the keyboard to delete characters in the backward direction and the Delete button to delete them in the forward direction. You can also do this task more efficiently and easily with some helpful keyboard shortcuts.

• Instead of deleting commands character by character, you can delete everything from the current cursor position to the beginning of the line or the end.

WINE or Emulation

• Another fresh development release of Wine, the Windows compatibility layer has been released. Version 7.21 is out now. This is part of Steam Play Proton, which allows you to play tons of Windows games on Steam Deck and Linux desktops. Once a year they make a big new stable release, and eventually Proton updates to it too.

Games

• GOG are back again with some more big themed deals, this time around they’re doing a Cozy Autumn Sale along with a Czech and Slovak Games Week.

• Briefly, for the uninitiated: In D&D a group of players collaboratively play out a story in a world created by a Dungeon Master or pre-written source material, rolling dice to simulate chance as their characters travel through the game and encounter various challenges—like the aforementioned wyverns. Characters are assigned specific abilities, and a complex set of rules, arbitrated and enforced by the Dungeon Master, standardize the game. Typically the DM spot would be determined by seniority of experience with D&D or other role-playing games—the person who’d played the longest would run the game. Alternately, it would be the person in the friend group who is the best with logistics and plan-wrangling. Back in the day, game shops would have physical bulletin boards featuring players or DMs looking to pair up.

• A little late on this but Humble Choice has a fresh set of games to pick for November 2022, so here’s what to expect from them on Linux desktop and Steam Deck. I’ll list their Steam Deck rating, note any Native Linux builds and use the ProtonDB rating.

• Salt and Sanctuary has seen an update recently which brings with it Cloud Saves, along with better Steam Deck support. The update initially landed for the Windows version, but it has now been put into the Linux and macOS versions too.

• After originally improving Rhythm Doctor for the Steam Deck earlier this year, they’ve now decided to do Native Linux support with it available now.

• For fans of games like Factorio, the original shapez was a pretty fun take on the automation and factory-building genre and it’s getting a bigger follow-up with shapez 2. It will include Native Linux support once again too.

• APICO is a wonderful little gem about keeping the bees safe, and they just launched a massive 2.0 update with more planned to come. In their announcement, they said that while the 1.0 release was a “finished game” there’s still plenty they want to add. This 2.0 update is part of a series of updates planned, as they want to go Terraria and Minecraft style with content upgrades.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Our first post ever on this website was about the GNOME Project “getting ready” to adapt their environment to the growing demand of responsive, mobile-friendly Linux devices. That was back in 2019, before libhandy (Gtk mobile library) was considered stable, and when Librem 5s and PinePhones were less than a clear mockup on their engineers’ desk. One year later, the first concepts of a tablet-friendly GNOME Shell were released, which would then see its first realization in the major GNOME 40 update from 2021.

• Six months ago, I was at the Linux App Summit (LAS) 2022 when I had the opportunity to see one of the very first experiments of a responsive, mobile-friendly GNOME Shell experience, from its developer Jonas “verdre” Dreßler.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• One of my business mantras is “control your platform.” If you build your business around a site like Facebook, they can de-prioritize you and disappear you. Twitter’s implosion served as a fierce reminder of that, so I’m blogging more here.

Arch Family

• Unity Desktop is a classic desktop environment built by Canonical and was a part of Ubuntu from 2010 to 2017 but dropped in favor of GNOME.

• And, we thought it was killed forever. But it made a comeback.

• Earlier this year, a revamped version of Unity was released after a long 6-year period since its last update in May 2016.

• The development was spearheaded by a young developer Rudra Saraswat, who is also the creator of Ubuntu Unity, an official flavor of Ubuntu now.

Red Hat ‘Community’ and Corporate Puff Pieces

• Today I’m excited to share the results of the hard work of thousands of Fedora Project contributors: the Fedora Linux 37 release is here! Let’s see what the latest release brings you. As always, you should make sure your system is fully up-to-date before upgrading from a previous release. Can’t wait to get started? Download while you read!

• New editions

• Fedora Editions are flagship offerings targeted at a particular “market”. With Fedora Linux 37, we’re adding two new Editions. Fedora CoreOS is the successor to what you may remember as Atomic Host. Drawing from Project Atomic and the original CoreOS work, it provides an automatic update mechanism geared toward hosting container-based workloads. With atomic updates and easy rollback, it adds peace of mind to your infrastructure.

• Fedora Cloud is also back as an Edition. The Cloud Working Group has seen a resurgence in activity. Cloud provides a great Fedora base to run in your favorite public or private cloud. AMIs will be available in the AWS Marketplace later this week and community channels are available now. Check the website for images in other cloud providers or for your own cloud!

• Version 37 of the Fedora family of distributions has been released, a few weeks later than originally intended.

• Fedora Workstation 37 is the latest version of the Fedora Project’s desktop operating system, made by a worldwide community dedicated to pushing forward innovation in open source. This article describes some of the new user-facing features in Fedora Workstation 37. Upgrade today from GNOME Software, or by using dnf system-upgrade in your favourite terminal emulator!

• We’re so glad you’ve decided to give Fedora Workstation a try. We know you’ll love it.

• En ce mardi 15 novembre, les utilisateurs du Projet Fedora seront ravis d’apprendre la disponibilité de la version Fedora Linux 37.

• We are presenting our traditional Fedora release article – “10 Things to Do After Installing Fedora 37”, with post-install tweaks.

• This post-install guide is primarily for Fedora 37 workstation edition. These tips are not ideal. But it should be a good starting for all types of Fedora user base. Here are the ten things you can do after installing Fedora 37 Workstation Edition (GNOME).

• The long-awaited release of Fedora 37 is here.

• If you’re new to the Linux world, Fedora is the upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. While Fedora aims to be as stable as possible, it’s more about adding bleeding-edge features and technologies.

• Fedora 37 release may not be the most impressive, but it has a few interesting things to offer.

• [...]

• The new Mesa graphics drivers and the Linux kernel bring the much-needed features to support the Raspberry Pi 4 including accelerated graphics.

• Improved support for the Raspberry Pi 3 series and the Zero 2 W is also confirmed.

• Even though Linux Kernel 6.0 is out now, the release includes Linux Kernel 5.19 by default. You can expect to get Linux Kernel 6.0 soon enough.

• Powered by Linux kernel 6.0, the just-released Fedora 37 gives its users the latest GNOME 43 and Raspberry Pi 4 support.

• Red Hat’s community Linux distro Fedora version 37 rolled out in beta on September 13, 2022, and today, two months later, it is officially released and available for download.

• However, this only went with what has now become the norm for Fedora releases, postponing the initially announced date. So, after two delays caused by a discovered OpenSSL vulnerability, Fedora 37 is finally here .

• While the emphasis remains on a desktop PC with cutting-edge everything, this release focuses on an updated desktop experience and improving support. Let’s have a look at what’s new.

• After a series of delays, Fedora 37 is finally here. It has been an eventful few days since its beta release because several items blocked its release. A few bugs and the critical OpenSSL bug eventually postponed its release for 15 days.

• But it’s finally here; you can download it from the official website (links at the end of this page).

• Before that, here is a quick recap of the new features.

• Fedora Linux 37 is one of the most anticipated GNU/Linux distro releases of the year and it doesn’t disappoint fans. It’s powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.0 kernel and uses the latest GNOME 43 desktop environment by default for its Fedora Workstation flagship edition.

• The ISOs come with Linux kernel 6.0.7 by default, but the latest Linux 6.0.8 kernel is already available as an update. Also included are the most recent Mesa 22.2 graphics stack and PipeWire 0.3.60 multimedia backend.

• The point of this is that especially in larger communities, it is worth noting negative and harmful responses and not totally ignoring them. Communities that organize in more decentralized ways will always have supporters, users, and contributors from both the core and the periphery. The core project membership may not interact or engage often with the periphery often, so there can be a blind spot to parts of the project that identify with the community but are a few degrees removed from the inner ring of the project community.

• Noting whether something is indicative of a larger pattern is important. If your community has a ton of jerks, you need to know that your community is full of jerks so that you don’t waste time persuading people otherwise, when the lived experience is very different.

• In the original conversation with the CHAOSS Project team, this data scrubbing question emerged in the process of running the survey instead of after the data collection concluded. The survey later closed and our data manager confirmed that the flagged response from earlier was the only one of its kind. As a group, we then felt more confident in discarding that one outlier as an anomaly since the survey was open to the general public.

• In my previous article, I provided an overview of possible community health metrics. I look at what you can do with those metrics in this article. You’ll see several examples from different communities, some of which you may be familiar with.

• [...]

• I’ll start with the “new contributors and contributions” metric, which measures developers joining and leaving a community. I can measure this by seeing which developers made a commit during a specific period. Someone who shows up for the first time joined. Someone who hasn’t contributed for a while has probably left.

• It is natural for developers to leave a project. Maybe they change jobs, have a change in priorities, or have personal reasons for reducing their open source engagement. It is important for the health of an open source project to attract new developers to continue the work.

• In the first quarter of 2022, global funding to artificial intelligence (AI) startups reached $15.1 billion, according to CB Insights’ State of AI report. However, machine learning (ML) algorithms can lead to counterproductive results when deployed without reason.

• Here are four common challenges that companies implementing ML-based systems may encounter, along with some expert tips to maximize the impact of algorithms while avoiding missteps.

• There’s a big difference between taking on a digital transformation initiative and making it succeed. Unfortunately, many companies don’t see the fruits of their labor. According to a Boston Consulting Group study, 70 percent of digital transformations fall short of their objectives.

• When that happens, there are grave consequences related to time, money, and organizational effort. That’s in addition to falling behind competitors in innovation, customer engagement, and technology, among other areas.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Canonical announced today the availability of new enterprise-grade Ubuntu images designed for next-gen Intel IoT platforms. Purpose-built for industrial environments and use cases, the latest Ubuntu images on Intel hardware deliver the performance, safety, and end-to-end security enterprises expect from the most widely used Operating System (OS) among professional developers with latest Intel technologies pre-enabled and available .

• The industrial-grade images are available for both Desktop and Server Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and 22.04 LTS. New images will be announced soon for Ubuntu Core 20 and 22. Intel and Canonical will jointly provide enterprise-class hardware and software support, ensuring product longevity. Long-term maintenance for 10 years, from security updates to the base OS and critical software packages to its infrastructure components, will enable device manufacturers to concentrate their efforts and redirect resources towards value-add activities. Industrial innovators shipping embedded Linux in production can develop and debug their software quickly and easily with their preferred tools on Ubuntu workstations before building and seamlessly deploying to the target Intel hardware running Ubuntu.

• One of the core aspects of the snap ecosystem is the built-in, robust auto-update mechanism. Whenever there is a snap update available in the Snap Store, the snapd service will apply it, keeping your software patched and up to date. Most of the time, this works great. In some scenarios, though, this may not be what the user wants or expects.

• For instance, you may not want an application to update while you’re running it and using it. We’ve all witnessed the arguably funny situations where someone’s laptop performs a system update just as they’re about to present to a large audience at a conference. You could be on a metered connection, or your organization has a strict test-before-update policy. While there are workarounds for how to effectively manage snap refreshes, they don’t fully provide the required level of control. A new refresh hold feature, available in the snapd edge channel, now resolves this long-outstanding conundrum.

Open Hardware/Modding

• It keeps track of when the blackouts start by logging an entry on an e-paper display which ensures data can be seen whether or not the power is currently on. It also logs when the blackout has ended so you can see the duration of the power outage. You can see the last few blackouts on the log, not just the most recent entry to get an idea of what the schedule has been like.

• The beret has two modes. When ‘idle’, the beret’s LEDs light up around it with ever cycling animations at random intervals. With a phone connected to the wireless LAN on Pico W, Sean was able to control the lights from the web browser.

• It is an annoyance for some members of our community, that it has become almost impossible to buy a TV that’s not a so-called “smart” TV. These units contain a computer as well as the display, and it boots into a locked-down OS with a user interface and a load of streaming apps. Can anything be done with them other than what their manufacturers intended? [Nina Kalinina] has managed it, taking the mainboard from a discarded LCD TV and liberating the ARM Linux board within.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• As always, thanks go out to all contributors for their work. We are nearing 4,000 commits since v19 “Matrix” was first released on February 19th 2021. For everyone that has contributed, both those in Team Kodi, and all other developers that choose to roll up their sleeves and fix an issue – thank you. Everyone appreciates you for making Kodi better.

• We also want to thank all those users who provide endless support on the forums, we appreciate you, and all the support anyone provides to our users.

• From now on, as I want to reach as many as possible, you can also read sudo and syslog-ng news from me on Mastodon. You can find my account at:

• https://fosstodon.org/@PCzanik

• Mastodon is a decentralized network of servers. I chose a server called “Fosstodon” as it is focused on open source software. Some of the projects I participate in are already there: BastilleBSD and openSUSE. As usual, next to my usual syslog-ng and sudo posts, you will also sometimes hear from me about OpenPOWER and ARM with some occasional photos from my hiking trips

• Note: I plan to keep using Twitter as my main communications platform for sudo & syslog-ng. However, some of my most active followers, who liked, commented and retweeted my tweets regularly, left Twitter for Mastodon. I want to make sure that I can keep them updated about syslog-ng and sudo, and reach readers who are not available on Twitter.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• The biggest change in Firefox 107 appears to be support for power profiling on Linux and Mac systems with Intel CPUs. This feature was already supported on Windows 11 and Apple M1 Macs since Firefox 104, but now it’s also available for Intel processors used in Linux/Mac desktop and laptop machines.

• The Firefox power profiler lets you visualize performance data recorded from web browsers, which may come in handy if you’re using a laptop and you are concerned about battery life and want to extend it by avoiding websites that consume lots of CPU usage.

• Firefox 107 carries a relatively small change-set but there are a few interesting things in the mix.

• On the Linux side, Firefox 107 adds power profiling support for Linux systems using Intel CPUs. Firefox already supported this feature on Windows 11 and Apple Silicon. While I am able to run power profiling using the browser in Firefox 106, CPU usage is not detailed in the report — presumably seeing the graphs is what’s new.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• FOSDEM PGDay 2023 is a one day conference that will be held ahead of the main FOSDEM event in Brussels, Belgium, on February 3rd, 2023. This will be a one-day PostgreSQL focused event with a single track of talks. This conference day will be for-charge with a registration of 50€, and will be held at the Renaissance Brussels Hotel. Registration is required to attend and since we have a limited number of seats available for this event, we urge everybody to register as soon as possible once open.

• PostgreSQL Europe will also have our regular devroom at the main FOSDEM event during the weekend on Sunday 5th February. This day will, of course, continue to be free of charge and open to all FOSDEM attendees. No registration is required to attend this day.

• Pgpool Global Development Group is pleased to announce the availability of Pgpool-II 4.4 beta1. This is not intended to be used in production but is close to the release version. So users are encouraged to test it out.

FSFE

• After a year of coding and evaluation, the Youth Hacking 4 Freedom competition came to an end, giving us amazing projects. Over a hundred people coming from 25 countries registered for the competition, making it a truly pan-European event. The six winning programs offer sign language transcription, a smart table robot, a personal assistant, a music tutorial, file sharing, and a homework manager. All Free Software.

Programming/Development

• Still, one has to wonder. There must be a reason these zealots are so excited. In my personal experience, it’s wasn’t the lazy, incompetent programmers who developed an interest functional programming.1 Instead, the most intelligent coders I knew tended to take it up; the people most passionate about writing good code. (Though, they did tend towards the boffin end of the spectrum.) And this raises the question: What are they so excited about?

• TL;DR: Codeberg might suffer from decreased performance, and smaller downtimes from Monday (Nov 14) to Wednesday (Nov 16). Final migration will require a short period of planned downtime on Wednesday.

• Last Friday we’ve shipped wlroots 0.16! This long-overdue release is the fruit of 10 months worth of work from 46 contributors. It includes many improvements, especially around new protocol support, the scene-graph API and the Vulkan renderer. See the release notes for more details!

• With the new release freshly delivered, we’re already working on the next one. I’ve been continuing my work on the Vulkan renderer: the patch to stop blocking while the GPU is rendering is almost ready to be merged. I’ve even fixed a Vulkan-ValidationLayers bug along the way. I’ve also investigated color management and ICC profiles a bit more, and have a better idea of what we need to lay down the first pieces of the puzzle.

• I’ve reached a new milestone for wlroots-rs: the example can now display a red screen! I’ve cleaned up my work and properly exposed the API in a package. I’m still not super happy about the way the compositor state is handled, if you have suggestions please let me know!

• I’ve released libdrm 2.4.114 with new helpers to allocate DRM dumb buffers. Up until now this is something developers had to hand-roll themselves with raw IOCTLs, hopefully this addition can help newcomers and improve type safety. I’ve also released Pixman 0.42.0 with a constified API for regions and work by Manuel Stoeckl to fix bugs discovered via the wlroots Pixman renderer and port demos to GTK3.

• Late last year, StarFive Technology released “StarFive Dubhe Linux Software Development Kit (SDK)”, which is based on the Yocto Project. It provides a flexible toolset and development environment that supports global collaborations among embedded device developers, allowing them to share technologies, software stacks, configurations, and best practices used to create tailored Linux images. To ensure the best out-of-box customer experience, a Yocto-extensible SDK (eSDK) is also included. The eSDK eliminates the need to download large packages of Yocto. As such, customers will be able to recompile the entire system in a much shorter timeframe with just a few simple steps.

• Helix Editor using the Bash Language Server to show the symbols in the script included in this post.

• Many times when someone tells you that language X is “better” at something they really mean that it has better built-in libraries for that task. Java is a great example. The language isn’t all that different from C++ outside of garbage collection and multiple inheritance, but the standard libraries are super powerful, especially for networking.  Even C relies on a library to provide a lot of functions people think of as part of the language — printf, for example. That’s not really part of the C language, but just part of the standard library. When you are writing for a tiny processor, the choice of library is critical and [Keith Packard] offers you one choice: picolibc.

• I am proud to announce that we have released Qt 6.4.1 today.

Python

• Several top universities around the globe use Python to introduce students to programming. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Texas at Arlington, and Stanford are only a few examples of institutions that use this language extensively.

Standards/Consortia

• It was launched on the occasion of Kannada Rajyotsava, in the backdrop of controversy regarding Uber, Ola and Rapido overcharging customers. Uber India had also stated that it is mulling limiting the auto services in some parts of Bengaluru due to the Karnataka high court’s decision to cap commissions at 10%. The Namma Yatri app aims to fill the gap in the market now.

• “We don’t want any middlemen. We want to provide a good service to the customers. We want them to avail our services with trust and this is how we can also benefit from the initiative,” ARDU general secretary TM Rudramurthy was quoted as saying.

• Two autorickshaw unions will roll out their own apps in the days to come. Peace Auto Union’s app Rook will be launched on November 9 while Autorickshaw Drivers Union rolled out the beta version of its Android app Namma Yatri on October 15.

• Unhappy with the functioning of app-based aggregators, two autorickshaw unions in the city are tapping technology to take on the firms and compete with one another. The unions will roll out their own apps in the days to come.

• Peace Auto Union’s app Rook will be launched on November 9, which is observed as autorickshaw day by state drivers on the occasion of Kannada actor Shankar Nag’s birthday. Autorickshaw Drivers Union (ARDU) rolled out the beta version of its Android app Namma Yatri on October 15. It will be formally operationalised in a couple of weeks.

• Autorickshaw Drivers’ Union (ARDU), which is behind Namma Yatri, hopes the app will beat mobility behemoths Uber and Ola at their own game.

• However, he pointed out that the true potential of the ecosystem goes far beyond mobility. The open-source Beckn protocol, for example, allows the creation of decentralised networks that can cover more than taxi services.

• While the global movement is led by Open Mobility Foundation, the Foundation for Interoperability in Digital Economy (earlier known as Beckn Foundation) is pushing for a seamless digital commerce era in India to remove the intermediaries manipulating prices and services. Mobility is one among sectors like retail, agri commerce, logistics, supply chain and skills.

Leftovers

• But this raises the question: Is this nothing more than a utopian vision? Can we pinpoint a time in our evolutionary trajectory when we wandered from the path of empathy, of compassion and respect for one another and for all forms of life? Or are we nihilistically the victims of our own natural tendencies, and must we continue to live reckless lifestyles, no matter the outcome?

• Studying human prehistory enables people to see the world through a long-term lens—across which we can discern tendencies and patterns that can only be identified over time. By adopting an evolutionary outlook, it becomes possible to explain when, how, and why specific human traits and behaviors emerged.

• Father Michael Doyle, who died on November 8 at his parish house in Camden, New Jersey, infused his Christianity with his goodness. That goodness showed us what it means to live a life of faith.

• No surprise, then, that the occasion of commemorations are now filled with the anticipation for another war waged by the enfeebled of thought.  There is the horrendous bloody unfolding of the Ukraine conflict, but other powers would also like to engage in a vicious confrontation in other theatres, from Taiwan to the Antarctic.

• The authorities will wheel out (sometimes literally), past warriors who refer, somewhat obliquely, to lessons they have not quite learned themselves.  Australian soldier Daniel Keighran, who made a number of tours to the Middle East including Afghanistan and Iraq, is something of a poster boy of flashy ignorance, with all the necessary capital to exploit on such networks as Sky.  “I should be dead for my actions, I know that but today, Remembrance Day here I am in Brisbane at the Shrine of Remembrance I encourage everyone to pause and reflect and remember.”

• Early in Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons, an 11-year-old Roland Baines witnesses a terrible traffic accident as he and his father stroll through the streets of mid-20th-century London. Seeing the alacrity with which the onlookers—men who “had been in the war and knew what to do”—come to the victims’ aid, he is overwhelmed by a sudden wave of gratitude. As an ambulance carries away a man who might be fatally injured, young Roland is moved to tears by the idea that he lives in a society supported by “an entire system, just below the surface of everyday life, watchfully waiting, ready with all its knowledge and skill to come and help, embedded within a greater network of kindness…. It would embrace and contain him kindly, justly, and nothing bad, really bad, could happen to him or to anyone, or not for long.”

• Hey, slowly but surely I’m continuing my experimentations. I filled many pages on my brainstorming (a libreoffice draw multipage ODG file) and I’m starting to get a better picture of where I’m going. I still need a little bit of time to train certain missing skills, or skills I’m unsure I can get.

• In fact, it’s easy to write something like “leave more brush stroke at a early step” in a brainstorming, but harder to have a workflow that leave interesting looking early brush stroke. It’s all about that type of exploration.

• I’m very near the completion of my research. I even already have a new full storyboard for Pepper&Carrot episode 38 that includes all the changes I want to perform. So, on this last set of test, I try to enjoy the trip, and I used my favorite test temporary metaphor characters to storytell that.

Science

• The circle of fifths is a beautiful thing, fundamental to music theory.

• Sound is vibrations in air. Start with some note on the piano. Then play another note that vibrates 3/2 times as fast. Do this 12 times. Since (3/2)¹² ≈ 128 = 2⁷

• when you’re done your note vibrates about 2⁷ times as fast as when you started!

• Earlier this year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology revealed four finalists in its search for a post-quantum cryptography standard. Three of them use “lattice cryptography” — a scheme inspired by lattices, regular arrangements of dots in space.

• Lattice cryptography and other post-quantum possibilities differ from current standards in crucial ways. But they all rely on mathematical asymmetry. The security of many current cryptography systems is based on multiplication and factoring: Any computer can quickly multiply two numbers, but it could take centuries to factor a cryptographically large number into its prime constituents. That asymmetry makes secrets easy to encode but hard to decode.

Education

• Around 48,000 unionized academic workers at every University of California campus on Monday began what’s being called “the largest higher education strike in U.S. history” as they demand a living wage and better benefits and working conditions.

• “We are overworked and underpaid, and we are fed up.”

Hardware

• The government of Japan has announced that it will invest ¥70 billion ($500 million) in a new venture to produce advanced microchips. This latest effort by the government is part of an attempt to reassert Japan as a leading maker of bleeding-edge semiconductor products. However, the announcement, first reported by Reuters, describes this as an ‘initial’ investment, suggesting that the Japanese government could put more money on the table in the coming years.

• We’ve all played some variant of that simple old racing video game. It’s the one that involves swerving around cars in front without crashing, as the pace steadily increases further. [Dr. Engine] has recreated that very game in the physical world, with the help of LEGO Technic.

• Shooting space launches often requires the use of remote cameras for safety reasons. However, that means there’s no photographer on hand to wipe lenses down if they happen to get condensation from the prevailing weather conditions. [Michael Baylor] was having issues with atmospheric moisture interfering with his launch shots, so built a custom automatic lens cap to help solve the issue.

• Few things are more satisfying than finding an old, forgotten piece of technology somewhere and bringing it back to life. And while it’s great to see a rare sports car or an Apollo Flight Computer being restored, even not-very-successful game consoles from the 1980s can make for some great repair stories. Just look at how [Discreet Mayor] describes his restoration and modification efforts on a ColecoVision that he literally found in a barn.

• We wrote about the low-cost T8-Pro Celeron N5095 mini PC with three HDMI outputs and two Gigabit Ethernet ports last week, but if you’d prefer a model with 2.5GbE networking instead, the Partaker J6412 might be a better, albeit costlier option, with still three displays support (2xDP, 1xHDMI), and three 2.5GbE ports.

• Aaeon released today a 1U rackmount network appliance based on the ICE-Lake-D LCC processors from Intel. The FWS-7541 features dual DDR4 SO-DIMM slots, 12x GbE LAN ports, 1x M.2 3052 slot, 1x M.2 2230 slot and other optional peripherals.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Colorado has become the second state to decriminalize and legalize recreational psychedelics.

• Voters passed a ballot initiative during last week’s election that will make it legal for adults to purchase and use dimethyltryptamine (DMT), ibogaine, mescaline (excluding peyote), and psilocybin. Nearly 1.2 million voters, roughly 53% of the total vote, approved Prop 122, according to state election results.

• From a health perspective, if he had to rank permanent daylight saving time, permanent standard time or our current practice of biannual clock changing, Wright says, “I think the answer is incredibly clear.” Permanent standard time is healthiest for humans, he says. In his view, permanent daylight saving time ranks last.

• A new paper shows how the lifespan of the adult honeybee appears to have shrunk by nearly 50% in the past 50 years. The European Red List for Bees suggests nearly one in ten species of wild bees are facing extinction. Imagine how we would react if human lifespans halved. The equivalent would be if the average woman in the UK was living to 41 instead of 82 years old.

• AB 2098—the California law signed on September 30 that takes a first stab at curtailing doctors who spread Covid misinformation––went to the courts this week after a Koch-funded right-wing litigation group, the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), filed a complaint and motion to stop the law from going into effect. The NCLA is representing five California-board certified doctors in Høeg, et al. v. Newsom, et al. who are suing the state’s medical board members as well as Governor Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta. In an NCLA press release, one of the plaintiffs writes that AB 2098 is “unconstitutional,” amounting to a “gag order” on physicians.

• In California, recent efforts to legislate scientific truth have proven complicated. This new lawsuit is the anti-vaccine movement’s latest effort to protect doctors who disseminate false information about Covid. Just this week, the Center for Media and Democracy reported that the NCLA also recently become involved in another lawsuit, in which signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration––an influential letter released in October 2020 that argued governments should forgo large-scale public health precautions––are suing members of the Biden administration over their efforts to combat online misinformation.

• Funded by a grant from the U.S. National Institute on Aging and prepared by a group of U.S. and Canadian researchers, the study found a close relationship, in the period from 1999 to 2019, between the mortality rates of Americans between 20 and 64 years of age and the conservative or liberal control of their state governments.

• Specifically, the study concluded that a state’s liberal policies promoting gun safety, environmental protections, labor rights (e.g., minimum wage and paid leave), progressive taxation, and tobacco control lowered mortality rates. By contrast, a state’s conservative policies in these areas increased a state’s death rate. Thus, in 2019, life expectancy in conservative Mississippi stood at 74.4 years; in liberal Hawaii, at 80.9 years.

• Recently, I was taking my turn supervising the surgical skills lab for the interns in the residency program in which I’m faculty. It was a practice session for knot tying, suturing, and using the simulators to practice basic laparoscopic skills, as the course was nearing its end and the final examinations are coming up. I happened to be talking with some of the interns as they practiced or took breaks, and somehow the topic of medical misinformation and antivaccine physicians came up. As I’ve noted a number of times among my colleagues and trainees, one intern was surprised at how many physicians have been promoting antivax disinformation and COVID-19 quackery since the pandemic hit. As I am wont to do, I pointed out that we’ve always had these “contrarian” doctors in our profession’s midst who view themselves as apostates; it’s just that most of our colleagues didn’t notice or pay attention to them. Many didn’t believe they existed—or thought our complaints about them were exaggerated—and as a result there has been little impetus in our profession to do anything about them, a task that specialty boards and state medical boards have historically been depressingly lax about. Indeed, it’s a topic that I’ve written about almost as long as I’ve been blogging, and way back in 2008 a friend and fellow blogger, Dr. Val Jones, even coined a term for doctors who didn’t pay much attention to medical pseudoscience, the “shruggie“. I noted that no one who paid attention to these issues before the pandemic has been particularly surprised to see how many quacks and antivaxxers are in our midst. Indeed, some of these interactions are why of late I’ve been stepping back a bit and writing more and more about my views regarding why and how physicians ostensibly trained in science-based medicine break bad and use their credentials to attack the science-based regulation of medicine, viewing it as “thoughtcrime” and “censorship.”

Proprietary

• A Texas-based real estate tech company is facing a new barrage of questions about whether its software is helping landlords coordinate rental pricing in violation of antitrust laws.

• Seventeen Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter Monday to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission asking the agencies to investigate RealPage’s rent-setting software. In an Oct. 15 story, ProPublica detailed how RealPage’s pricing algorithm uses competitor data to suggest new prices daily for available apartments.

• In the email, Amazon informs Drive customers that support for uploading new files will be disabled on January 31, 2023. Customers who use Amazon Drive may continue to access files uploaded prior to that date, but the option to add new files or change existing ones is no longer available after January 31, 2023.

• Amazon Drive customers have until December 31, 2023 to access their files and download them to their devices. After December 31, 2023, access to Amazon Drive is cut off for all customers.

• Ransomware gangs increasingly use their own or stolen computer code, moving away from a leasing model that made their activities easier to monitor, new research shows.

• Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts a victim’s computers. The attackers then demand a ransom payment to unlock them. Ransomware payments have skyrocketed in recent years, U.S. government data show, as many groups have adopted a type of double extortion. In addition to encrypting files and demanding money, they also are stealing private troves of data and threatening to release it if their demands aren’t met.

• The Treasury Department said that U.S. financial institutions reported nearly $1.2 billion in likely ransomware-related payments in 2021, usually in response to breaches originating with Russian criminal groups.

• The payments more than doubled from 2020, underscoring the pernicious damage that ransomware continues to wreak on the private sector.

• Email and collaboration cyber security provider Mimecast says that recent data from its threat research team has revealed that social media platforms, as well as delivery businesses and services, are most likely to be attacked or impersonated this year.

• According to company documents publicly filed in Russia and reviewed by Reuters, Pushwoosh is headquartered in the Siberian town of Novosibirsk, where it is registered as a software company that also carries out data processing. It employs around 40 people and reported revenue of 143,270,000 rubles ($2.4 mln) last year. Pushwoosh is registered with the Russian government to pay taxes in Russia.

• On social media and in US regulatory filings, however, it presents itself as a US company, based at various times in California, Maryland and Washington, D.C., Reuters found.

• The acquisition values SurePrep at $500 million. Thomson Reuters plans to finance the acquisition in cash and expects to receive a tax benefit worth about $60 million as part of the transaction. According to the companies, the transaction is set to close in the first quarter of 2023.

• If you’ve used a corporate VPN or an online-banking system in the past fifteen years or so, chances are you’ve got a few of those little authenticator key fobs lying around, still displaying a new code every 30 seconds. Today such one-time codes are typically sent to you by text message or generated by a dedicated smartphone app, which is convenient but a bit boring. If you miss having a dedicated piece of hardware for your login codes, then we’ve got good news for you: [Cameron Kaiser] has managed to turn a Commodore SX-64 into a two-factor authenticator. Unlike a key fob that’s one gadget you’re not likely to lose, and any thief would probably need to spend quite some time figuring out how to operate it.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• There’s something oddly comforting about the idea that “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product,” namely, the corollary: “If you can afford to pay for a product, you won’t be the product.” But it’s bullshit. Companies don’t make you the product because you don’t pay – they make you the product because you can’t stop them.

• The attorneys general said that the agreement was the biggest [Internet] privacy settlement by U.S. states. It capped a four-year investigation into the [Internet] search giant’s practices from 2014-2020, which the attorneys general said violated the states’ consumer protection laws.

• Google said it had already corrected some of the practices mentioned in the settlement. “Consistent with improvements we’ve made in recent years, we have settled this investigation which was based on outdated product policies that we changed years ago,” said José Castañeda, a spokesman for the company.

• Companies like NSO Group facilitate human rights abuses — it is time they are held accountable for how their invasive spyware like Pegasus is used. Access Now supports a civil lawsuit filed today in Thailand against Israeli spyware company, NSO Group, for violating the rights, including privacy, of eight people whose phones were infected by Pegasus. This is the first lawsuit that the company is facing in Southeast Asia.

• “Companies that peddle their products to actors seeking to invade the privacy of people, target them for harassment, and threaten their security must be stopped,” said Dhevy Sivaprakasam, Access Now’s Asia Pacific Policy Counsel. “Pegasus victims deserve judicial protection. Thai law allows them to claim damages for this Pegasus hack, and a ruling against NSO Group will send a strong message from the judiciary that fundamental rights are respected, and civic space will be protected in Thailand.”

• Earlier this year, Thai organizations, Internet Law Reform Dialogue (iLaw) and DigitalReach, supported by forensic research from Canadian Citizen Lab, released a report documenting Pegasus infections in the devices of 35 victims — including 24 activists, mostly students from the pro-democracy youth movements, who have been critical of the government and the monarchy. Five members of the political opposition, three academics and three human rights defenders were also identified as victims.

Defence/Aggression

• Loveland, Colorado has a police problem. The problem isn’t that there are too few, or that they’re being underfunded. The problem is the ones they already have — the ones that keep getting sued.

• Police said 21 migrants who claimed Syrian citizenship were found in the van following the chase, and that the two suspects will be charged with people smuggling and violence against an official.

• In France, for example, Muslims commit almost all of the violent crimes and constitute almost 80 % of the prison population. According to Hugh Fitzgerald, “[Muslim migrants] are creating a parallel society, hostile to French authorities and contemptuous of the non-Muslim French.”

• In response to the Muslim crime wave, Didier Lallement, the recently-retired head of the Pari police has written a book warning of social breakdown and civil war. He’s not alone. Pierre Brochand, the country’s former top intelligence director has also warned of civil war due to mass immigration. Moreover, in 2021 about 1,000 active servicemen and women, including twenty retired generals signed an open letter to the government warning of civil war due to “religious extremism” (i.e., Islamism.)

• Afghanistan’s supreme leader has ordered judges to fully implement aspects of Islamic law that include public executions, stonings and floggings, and the amputation of limbs for thieves, the Taliban’s chief spokesman said.

• Zabihullah Mujahid tweeted late Sunday that the “obligatory” command by Hibatullah Akhundzada came after the secretive leader met with a group of judges.

• NAMP is now publicly calling for an update of policing and counter terrorism terminology, with Islamist replaced by ‘anti-western extremism’ or something similar. It has also raised concerns about the disproportionate number of Muslims being referred to the counter terrorism programme – with the West Midlands among the highest.

• The Ukrainian authorities in the liberated part of the Kherson region have announced “stabilization measures” that are slated to last “several weeks.” The measures will include a curfew from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. and police inspections of the newly liberated territory for remaining Russian soldiers. The first day after Ukrainian forces reclaimed the territory, however, there was no curfew; Kherson residents celebrated the victory with soldiers from the Ukrainian Armed Forces until late into the night. Police have also begun documenting evidence of war crimes committed by the Russian army (400 cases were recorded on the first day).

• Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the news that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited liberated Kherson on Monday.

• Evidence of more than 400 war crimes has been documented since Russian troops retreated from Ukraine’s Kherson region last week, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The president said law enforcement officers have uncovered numerous bodies of both civilians and soldiers.

• Demand for private bunkers capable of withstanding artillery shells, mortar attacks, and blast waves sharply increased after Russia launched its full-scale war in Ukraine, and again after Vladimir Putin’s September mobilization announcement, according to the news outlet RBC.

• Washington’s vaunted “rules-based international order” has undergone a stress test following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and here’s the news so far: it hasn’t held up well. In fact, the disparate reactions to Vladimir Putin’s war have only highlighted stark global divisions, which reflect the unequal distribution of wealth and power. Such divisions have made it even harder for a multitude of sovereign states to find the minimal common ground needed to tackle the biggest global problems, especially climate change.

• Representatives from Russia and the U.S. are holding talks in Ankara on Monday, according to the Russian news outlet Kommersant.

• Russian oligarch Evgeny Prigozhin has asked Russian Attorney General Igor Krasnov to investigate the circumstances surrounding the murder of Yevgeny Nuzhin, a former prisoner and Wagner PMC mercenary who was summarily executed as a “traitor.” Prigozhin’s statement was published by his company Concord.

• The Council of the European Union has imposed sanctions against eight people suspected of participating in the poisoning of opposition politician Alexey Navalny in August 2020.

• The UN General Assembly has adopted a resolution to hold Russia financially responsible for invading Ukraine.

• The Soviet-era “Heroic Mother” award is back as an official state award in Russia.

• On October 12, former Usolye-Sibirskoye City Duma deputy Sergey Uglyanitsa was charged with inciting hatred against the Russian military, the police, and Vladimir Putin himself. Uglyanitsa soon learned that his “crime” consisted of comments and posts he’d made months earlier on social media — and that he’d only caught the authorities’ attention because the priest at his church of 10 years had reported him to the Russian FSB based on a single conversation. Both the deputy and the priest spoke to journalists from the independent Russian outlet Mediazona about the case. In English, Meduza summarizes what they learned.

• First of all, the mid-terms will affect Biden’s agenda for Ukraine, particularly the ability to continue the current pace of military assistance to President Volodymyr Zelensky. Since the war began nearly nine months ago, the Biden administration has authorized and the Congress has approved more than $60 billion in aid to Ukraine. McCarthy has already stated that a Republican-led House would be unwilling to approve “blank check” assistance to Ukraine.  Three of the leading Republican supporters of military assistance to Ukraine—Rob Portman (OH), Richard Burr (NC), and Ben Sasse (NE)—are leaving the Senate, and the Republican leadership in 2023 will be far more concerned with beating up the Biden administration over the withdrawal from Afghanistan than with challenging the Russian occupation of Ukraine.

• The mainstream media as well as the British Economist believe that Russia needs to suffer a decisive defeat in Ukraine so that Vladimir Putin’s failure is unambiguous, but it is already obvious—even to some Russian politicians and oligarchs—that Moscow has failed miserably.  Continuing the war could lead to an expanded conflict that involves the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), particularly the United States, and could lead to the use of tactical nuclear weapons.  If Ukraine suffers greater economic losses, then there is great risk to the kind of democracy that Zelensky and his colleagues say they want to create.  Greater conflict will also test the patience of West and East European states that will have to get through the winter with limited access to Russian oil and natural gas.

• For example, last July the Justice Department secured an indictment against a Russian citizen named Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov who heads up an organization based in Moscow named Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, which allegedly receives funds from the Russian government.

• The charge? Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen declared, “Ionov allegedly orchestrated a brazen influence campaign, turning U.S. political groups and U.S. citizens into instruments of the Russian government.”

• For every Ukrainian battlefield victory, there is Russian retaliation as the conflict threatens to engulf Europe in a regional conflict or world war with direct combat between the two most heavily armed nuclear countries: Russia and the United States.

• Meanwhile, an estimated 100-million Americans, almost a third of the country, are steeped in medical debt; 34-million, or 10 percent, are food insecure; over 30-million lack access to clean drinking water due to contamination from sewage, uranium mining and industrial carcinogens.

• In fact, it’s now reasonable to ask whether an international community connected by a consensus of norms and rules, and capable of acting in concert against the direst threats to humankind, exists. Sadly, if the responses to the war in Ukraine are the standard by which we’re judging, things don’t look good.

• The Myth of Universality

• If the powerful leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senators Jack Reed (D) and Jim Inhofe (R), have their way, Congress will soon invoke wartime emergency powers to build up even greater stockpiles of Pentagon weapons. The amendment is supposedly designed to facilitate replenishing the weapons the United States has sent to Ukraine, but a look at the wish list contemplated in this amendment reveals a different story.

• A long-standing call for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to face impeachment proceedings was renewed Monday after the right-wing judge indicated in an unsigned dissent that he would have blocked enforcement of the House January 6 panel’s subpoena for the communications records of Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward.

• The House committee investigating the deadly January 6 insurrection “is seeking Ward’s records related to her role in former President Donald Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election as a fake elector casting ballots in the Electoral College for Trump,” HuffPost reported.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Winner, a former U.S. Air Force member and NSA contractor, served in prison after she leaked an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Her five and a half years behind bars is the longest sentence ever given to someone charged under the Espionage Act for leaking a government document.

• While working as a national security contractor in Fort Gordon, Georgia, in 2017, Winner printed out a document that detailed how Russian military officials [broken] into at least one supplier of voting software and attempted to breach at least 100 local election systems during the 2016 election.

• What is it like to be so ashamed of the company for whom you work that you cannot bring yourself to admit you work there? Ashamed of the products they manufacture, the innocent people those products kill, the hundreds of billions of dollars of public taxpayer money squandered in a gluttonous pursuit of profits?

• This is life as seen on November 10th, 2022, at Raytheon Technologies in Arlington, VA. Members and supporters of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, a public tribunal, served “subpoenas” on four United States weapons manufacturers charging them with War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, Theft, and Bribery.

• By Kevin Gosztola / The Dissenter The top lawyer for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in the United States has come out strongly against workplace surveillance and management technology that may be used to disrupt union organizing and discourage whistleblower complaints. Jennifer Abruzzo, who is general counsel for the NLRB, wrote a memo in […]

Environment

• But this year Saleyo says the rains have become unpredictable, and he fears his crop could be yet another victim of climate change.

• “When it should have rained, it didn’t, it didn’t rain,” Saleyo said as he inspected the ripeness of one of his cocoa pods. “It’s raining now, but its already too late.

• Climate change is a global problem that requires cooperation between all nations. That’s why today more than 30 newspapers and media organizations in more than 20 countries have taken a common view about what needs to be done. Time is running out. Rather than getting out of fossil fuels and into clean energy, many wealthy nations are reinvesting in oil and gas, failing to cut emissions fast enough, and haggling over the aid they are prepared to send to poor countries. All this while the planet hurtles toward the point of no return—where climate chaos becomes irreversible.

• As the U.N. climate conference takes place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, we look at the effects of the climate crisis for the host country, such as rising temperatures and sea levels in the Nile Delta. Ahmed El Droubi, Greenpeace regional campaign manager for the Middle East and North Africa, says “the most significantly impacted sector in Egypt is definitely the agricultural sector.” Egyptians are calling for wealthy nations to be held accountable for causing the bulk of the climate crisis, only to be met with “temporary solutions that do not address the core of the climate crisis,” he adds.

• This has been a year of climate catastrophes for every corner of the globe. From floods in Pakistan and Nigeria to the worst droughts on record across the Horn of Africa, no one on the planet is insulated against our rapidly worsening climate. Among the most disproportionately affected are women and girls. Yet their story is all too often just a footnote in the news.

• Democracy Now! is in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where the COP27 U.N. climate conference has entered its second week amid protests against the host government’s repression and world leaders’ inaction on the climate crisis. We speak with Asad Rehman, executive director of War on Want and lead spokesperson for the Climate Justice Coalition, who risked arrest to participate in a climate justice protest along with hundreds of others in Egypt on Saturday. “You can’t have the very people burning the planet sitting here and pretending to be drafting the solutions to it, and that’s exactly what’s happening in these climate negotiations,” says Rehman. He says imprisoned Egyptian British activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah is “part and parcel of our struggle,” as calls to free El-Fattah continue after he sent proof of life in a letter for the first time since beginning a full hunger and water strike last week. We also speak with Nigerian environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey, who says the perception that this is an African COP is “a big misnomer,” as the African delegates feel largely excluded.

• Commercialization of the Amazon Rainforest is rampant in a pattern of ignorance amidst reckless abandon with a level of stupidity that’s nearly beyond comprehension, as the iconic nature reserve has been pushed to the edge of ruin. It is hard to believe that pure ignorance and greed could wreck the world’s most critical asset, but it is happening, way too rapidly.

• According to the WWF report, 35% of the Amazon rainforest is either totally lost or highly degraded. (Source: Living Amazon Report 2022, World Wildlife Fund publication, November 8, 2022)

• A growing body of research continues to firmly establish that greater gender equity leads to better climate outcomes. For example, a one unit increase in a country’s score on the Women’s Political Empowerment Index demonstrates an 11.5% decrease in the country’s carbon emissions.

• In the wake of high-profile climate protests that target priceless works of art or block streets and other public infrastructure, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania on Monday published a survey showing such actions broadly decrease support for addressing the climate emergency.

• Shawn Patterson Jr. and Michael E. Mann of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media wondered if acts like last month’s soup-splashing of Vincent van Gogh’s famous glass-protected painting Sunflowers in London by Just Stop Oil activists helped or hindered the cause of boosting support for climate action.

Energy

• The bitcoins were stolen by 32-year-old James Zhong from the dark web. The police found the stash hidden in a popcorn tin at his house in Gainesville, Georgia. Zhong had successfully managed to steal more than 50,000 bitcoins, worth £2.9 billion, from the dark web marketplace Silk Road.

• At issue, the sources said, is whether FTX violated securities laws when it reportedly gave customer funds to Alameda Research, the trading firm of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

• A new analysis released Monday details why nations across Africa would be wise to set their sights on massive investments in renewable solar energy and avoid the pitfalls of the so-called “Dash for Gas” paradigm that would staddle economies with stranded assets, waste billions in costly fossil fuel infrastructure, and increase financial instability over the coming years.

• The new Carbon Tracker report—titled African Sun: Why Solar Not Gas Offers Continent the Best Economic Opportunity in the Transition—argues that a rejection of dirty fossil fuels in favor of renewables means that “electricity will be the backbone of Africa’s economic future, with solar leading the way.”

Wildlife/Nature

• After decades of population declines, the future is looking brighter for several tuna and billfish species, such as southern bluefin tuna, black marlins and swordfish, thanks to years of successful fisheries management and conservation actions. But some sharks that live in these fishes’ open water habitats are still in trouble, new research suggests.

Finance

• To many of its younger population, London once again feels like the musical capital of the world, but this does not make living here right now a breeze. That’s because music has so much of society’s heavy lifting to do these days — it has to soothe people, educate, destroy, elevate, act as trusted therapy for the liberally overwrought. In defiance of the great beasts like Spotify and their relentless grab at what always feels like other people’s profit, it’s as though music is simply with us to defy us all to stop listening to it. Because my daughter and son are both hard-working musicians I can at least say I feel its vibrant imperative every day. Remember, their generation inherited Brexit. Many of them were not old enough to vote at the time. Along came the pandemic next and all it bestowed. And now we have the Bank of England warning of the longest recession in 100 years. And yet still they rise to the microphone or instrument or Ableton software every day and give it some. Frankly, I am not even sure one or two people could survive without their music. There are some genuine casualties even with it. I know one super-talented young musician working so hard at getting back to where he was after a difficult period of time in his life. Indeed we shook hands outside the local hospital the other day. I am positively gunning for him.

• Just Brexit alone constitutes a mash-up of problems here. Brexit-related travel restrictions are so badly haemorrhaging jobs in the sector that change is now essential. An example of just how utterly friendless the situation is for those bravely setting out on a career path in music today, or even just simply wanting to play a series of small dates in Europe, was at its clearest only a few weeks ago when a group of music experts were invited to a hearing at the House of Lords. This was to present a freshly formulated prediction list on the impact of new touring rules for musicians and crews in Europe since Brexit. Not an especially disastrous number of MPs turned up, but not one of them was a Conservative. In short, the majority party — admittedly in a field famed for protest and not overflowing with Tory voters — revealed their hand as basically unbothered. This is particularly frustrating because all musicians want is for government to sit down and work in a positive manner with the EU to get restrictions removed. ‘Like most things Brexit-related there is huge denial going on,’ said a friend and exceptional figure in the music business to me privately last week. ‘The government pretend there are no problems — so do nothing — while the people affected battle like mad to solve them.’ What is worse, they had been led to believe this was all in the bag. Musicians as a result are sick and tired of being played like stringless guitars when they know full well that the UK in 2019 received an income of roughly £5.8bn from the music industry. You might have thought a government besotted with financial gain over expressions of human creative skill might have rallied to such figures, especially during our new economic crisis.

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Sunday said congressional Democrats should use the upcoming lame-duck session to eliminate the U.S. debt ceiling for good, warning that leaving the borrowing limit intact gives Republicans an opening to hold the economy hostage.

• “I’d get rid of the debt ceiling altogether,” Warren (D-Mass.) told NBC’s Chuck Todd, arguing that the arbitrary limit “serves no function except to create leverage for people who are willing to blow up the economy.”

• When Robert Ball turned 63, he was looking forward to retirement in his wife’s hometown of Savannah, Georgia. The couple had a comfortable house with a lush garden, the certainty of his pension and the hope of spending more time with their grandchildren.

• That dream shattered when Ball’s wife, Gloria Ball, developed severe health problems. They faced huge medical bills, yet their bank refused to refinance their mortgage. Left with few options for raising cash, Robert Ball drove to TitleMax, a business that prospers in Georgia’s banking deserts and lends money at terms that would be illegal for other financial institutions. “I was desperate” for quick cash, Ball said. “They welcome folk like me.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Look, by now it’s pretty clear that Elon Musk is deeply, deeply in above his head at Twitter, in ways that could have some pretty significant legal consequences. Even so, it’s still not the job of politicians to make decisions for him. He is free to destroy the company (and a good chunk of his fortune) on his own. Yet, for whatever reason, senators from both parties feel the need to weigh in.

• Spaceboy Elon Musk promised the Twitter he was pretty much sued into purchasing would bring an end to all the free speech violations he claimed were happening every day under its liberal overlords. But being an edgelord troll rarely converts into competent management. Musk is speedrunning the moderation learning curve. But he is also discovering there are no God codes available to make the moderation game easier.

• As the overlapping dramas of the 2022 midterms and Elon Musk’s catastrophic acquisition of Twitter unspooled, America also witnessed the breaching of a new benchmark in the financial world: the largest-scale overnight destruction of personal wealth in modern history. In early November, Samuel Bankman-Fried, who presided over the lavishly capitalized crypto currency exchange FTX, saw his $15.6 billion net worth plummet to zero after a protracted run on the service’s holdings revealed lethal levels of debt exposure. By November 11, FTX had filed for bankruptcy, after the unceremonious collapse of an 11th-hour deal for the rival crypto platform Binance to acquire the company.

• The world is burning and Ukraine is trudging into a winter of war. Prices are spiralling and the NHS is limping. The US and Brazil have held the line against fascism, just, while Italy has fallen to the far right. Watching the disastrous takeover of Twitter by the world’s richest bam can feel a little frivolous. So what if it becomes a rich boy’s toy? It often felt like that anyway.

• Rajan Menon, only recently back from Ukraine, lays out just why that war qualifies right now as a true act of madness on Planet Earth.

• 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. What is known is that the Red Wave predicted by pollsters and trumpeted by the New York Times and other media […]

• The Congressional Progressive Caucus welcomed around a dozen newly elected members to its ranks on Sunday after bold candidates across the country—from Summer Lee in Pennsylvania to Greg Casar in Texas—delivered midterm wins that helped the Democratic Party stave off the widely predicted GOP “red wave.”

• Buoyed by strong youth turnout, a majority of the candidates that the CPC’s campaign arm endorsed for the November 8 contests emerged victorious last week, an outcome that will push the progressive bloc’s membership above 100 in the 118th Congress.

• Another Election Day, another sigh of relief — from America’s deepest pockets.

• CNN reports the State Department is on the ‘opposite side of the pole’ as Milley, who says now is a good time for peace talks.

• Democrats successfully characterised the “Make America Great Again” (Maga), Trump-dominated Republicans as a threat to democracy in the eyes of many voters. Not for nothing did the Democratic Party funnel money in some cases to the primary campaigns of extreme Maga supporters to ensure that they became the Republican candidates. But they could probably have saved themselves the money, because the Trumpian version of the Republican Party has put down deep roots.

• The Republicans may have the worst of all possible worlds: a Trump too powerful to displace as party leader because he has the support of party activists; but, come election day, a leader who alienates more voters than he attracts, and is becoming an in-house political Jonah, ensuring the Republicans’ continued under-performance in future elections.

• It happened because masses of people cast ballots, defying long-standing historical trends of low midterm turnout. Voters almost matched the high turnout of the 2018 elections when outrage over Donald Trump’s first two years in office pushed Congress into the hands of Democrats. Stung by their opposition’s showing and by Trump’s reelection loss two years later, Republicans ramped up voter suppression efforts, hoping to blunt the impact of an increasingly young, diverse, and enthusiastic electorate.

• Liberal-leaning voters showed up to the polls during this latest midterm election largely in response to the overturning of abortion rights, but also to stave off right-wing extremism.

• Then, of course, there’s his $44 billion investment. Musk — who brought on outside backers including Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, VC fund Sequoia Capital and cryptocurrency exchange Binance; convinced current equity holders Jack Dorsey and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal to retain their stakes in the company; and took out more than $13 billion in loans to fund his takeover — says the company is hemorrhaging money.

• The apparent public firing adds to what has already been a tumultuous run for Musk since he took control of the company late last month. He has laid off large chunks of the company’s workforce, overseen the chaotic rollout-rollback-rollout-rollback of the platform’s new paid verification service and sparred with critics.

• Misinformation is also everywhere, and bad actors are sophisticated at crafting it to make it seem authentic and help it go viral. Easy access to verification certainly helps with that goal. A 2018 study found that fake news spread faster than accurate reporting on Twitter from 2006 to 2017 — especially about political topics. The reason is that fake news is designed to seem new and elicit strong emotional reactions.

• An estimated 4,400 of its 5,500 contract workers were cut, according to the tech news publication Platformer, which first reported the cuts. CNBC has not confirmed the total number.

• Some of Twitter’s contract workers were based overseas in India, among other locations. Full-time employees, who asked to remain unnamed because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of Twitter, said they had no internal notice before contractors they were collaborating with were let go.

• Twitter has dismissed all of its internal communications team, according to the employees. They cracked bitter jokes that media outlets covering the company are now filling the role of internal communications.

• Citing anonymous sources, the Times reported that the layoffs will be concentrated on Amazon’s devices group, including the Alexa voice assistant, along with its retail and HR groups. The job cuts — which would be the largest in Amazon’s history — would represent about 3% of corporate headcount. The layoffs would represent less than 1% of Amazon’s total employee base of more than 1.5 million, mostly comprised of hourly workers.

• The number of layoffs remains fluid and is likely to roll out team by team rather than all at once as each business finishes plans, one person said. But if it stays around 10,000, it would represent roughly 3 percent of Amazon’s corporate employees and less than 1 percent of its global work force of more than 1.5 million, which is primarily composed of hourly workers.

• The reported layoffs would affect at least 3 percent of the company’s corporate workforce and less than 1 percent of its global workforce, which is around 1.5 million employees.

• Nowhere is that clearer than in India, where before Musk’s acquisition, Twitter had been fighting a legal battle to protect its users from government censorship. The real question now is if Musk’s commitment to “free speech” extends beyond conservatives in America and to the billions of people in the Global South who rely on the Internet for open communication.

• Last month, Freedom House released its annual report on freedom on the Internet. Allie Funk, one of the researchers who wrote the report, told me that while much of the focus has been on countries like China, which overtly restricts access to huge swaths of the Internet, the real war over the future of Internet freedom is being waged in what she called “swing states,” big, fragile democracies like India.

• The winning side will not be decided in Silicon Valley or Beijing, the two poles around which debate over free expression on the Internet have largely orbited. It will be the actions of governments in capitals like Abuja, Jakarta, Ankara, Brasília and New Delhi. Across the world, countries are putting in place frameworks that on their face seem designed to combat online abuse and misinformation but are largely used to stifle dissent or enable abuse of the enemies of those in power.

• Lawyers for Trump, a Republican, told the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a filing that the ban from Twitter marked “overtly partisan censorship” and was “contrary to First Amendment principles deeply rooted in American history and law.”

• The legal brief filed in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals compares social media platforms censoring users to the condemnation of astronomer Galileo Galilei nearly 400 years ago for believing the earth was not at the center of the universe.

• But experts are worried that if Elon Musk tanks the company, these rich seams of media and conversation could be lost forever. Given his admission to employees in a November 10 call that Twitter could face bankruptcy, it’s a real and present risk.

• So what, right? What does that have to do with me? Well, I run one of the largest tech-focussed Mastodon instances on the fediverse. So for the last couple weeks we have been absolutely battered with Twitter migrants.

• BTW, this is a good thing. I love that our little community is growing in both population and topics being discussed, but it has been really hard work keeping up with the folks coming over.

• Qatar is a World Cup conceived of by some of the wealthiest men in the world, and made a reality by some of its poorest people. All powerful empires have been built on cheap labour, in many cases, including Britain’s, enslaved or coerced. No-one forced the workers to come to Qatar, of course, but needs must. This is the 2022 variant on a theme as old as life itself. It is there in the vast stadiums, shiny metro, airport-sized media centre. You see it in the eyes of the hotel lobby security guard, thousands of miles from home, or in those of the labourers on the back of the flat-bed truck, after a day grafting in the heat.

• The mistreatment of a vast imported labour force, the proverbial bulldozer driven through the football calendar, the corruption of Fifa and the bonfire of its reputation for a generation at least. All this was considered worth it by certain people to get to where we are now, although what that was can be hard to remember.

• What Graphika and SIO revealed about CENTCOM’s apparent five-year campaign represented something of an “I told you so” moment for students of U.S. counterinfluence and counter-disinformation efforts. As Ambassador Dan Fried and Dr. Alina Polyakova warned in their sweeping report on disinformation from 2020, “We must not become them to fight them.” By embracing tactics of obfuscation and inorganic amplification, countries such as the United States risk undermining “the values that democracies seek to defend, creating a moral equivalence (one that would bolster the cynical arguments of Russian propagandists about democracy being mere fraud),” Fried and Polyakova argued.

• In their view, there’s another, more practical reason for Western states to avoid covert information operations: “If the history of the Cold War is any guide, democracies are no good at disinformation.”

• About 18 months after he lost the 2020 election, Election Conspiracist in Chief Donald Trump sued Hillary Clinton and dozens of other Democrats over the election he had won nearly six years earlier.

• On Saturday night, news outlets declared the Nevada senatorial race for incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto, a victory ensuring that the Democrats will retain control of the Senate. The House remains unsettled, but even if the Republicans win that chamber, they will have so narrow a margin as to be unable to achieve much (or, more accurately, to do much damage).

• Vladimir Putin has submitted proposed amendments to a law on Russian citizenship to the Russian State Duma, Russian state media reported on Monday. The new legislation would expand the list of reasons for which a person with acquired (rather than birthright) Russian citizenship can lose that citizenship.

• Citing unnamed Indonesian officials, The Associated Press reported Monday that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was hospitalized after arriving in Bali for the 2022 G20 Summit.

• Progressives are criticizing Democratic leaders for withholding support from Jamie McLeod-Skinner, a left-leaning candidate for Oregon’s 5th Congressional District whose close loss to her millionaire Republican opponent, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, could cost the party a chance to retain control of the U.S. House.

• “This seat could have made the majority, but the national Democratic PACs walked away and left Jamie to twist in the wind,” Working Families Party national campaigns director Joe Dinkin said Monday in a statement. “The GOP knew it was competitive and their spending showed it. WFP did its best to fill the gap.”

• The intrepid John Hudson at the Washington Post reports that the US National Intelligence Council has produced a secret report detailing the ways in which the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has intervened in US politics, sometimes in ways that appear to be illegal and to shade over […]

• For the first time since taking office, President Biden met in person with Chinese President Xi Jinping Monday in Bali, Indonesia. We discuss how the meeting might affect rising tensions over Taiwan, where Nancy Pelosi visited earlier this year, and concerns over China’s human rights violations. The goals of the meeting should be “for the two leaders to find a way to cool those tensions down and to find ways to reduce the risk of a military clash arising in the Pacific,” says Michael Klare, defense correspondent at The Nation. As Chinese military drills near Taiwan threaten instability in the region, “the question is what’s the best way to deter China from doing anything,” says Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society.

• It was Alito who led the charge to finally accomplish what the vast majority of male Republican members of Congress and state legislatures across the country have been dreaming of doing for almost half a century: overturning the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade precedent barring states from outlawing a woman’s right to abortion and to control her own body’s reproductive system.

• Alito, who wrote the legal opinion justifying the 6-3 decision he made along his five  radical right-wing Federalist Society justices on the bench — all guilty of  lying in their confirmation hearings testimony by many claiming that they viewed Roe v. Wade as “settled law,” wrote that, “”It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

• I was thinking sympathetically about these pressures on my colleagues in Washington this week as they had to give definitive opinions about the outcome of the midterm elections while the most important races were still in the balance.

• I used to get some silent amusement when I was in Washington as a correspondent on hearing distinguished incoming colleagues from Europe tell me grandly how their editor back home had told them to avoid getting bogged down by day-to-day news coverage and take a longer view about what was going on in America. But Washington does not do “long term”, and I suspected that within weeks my friend would most likely be calling me up to cancel our lunch at the last minute because his or her editors were demanding a quick 1,000 words on the latest twist in the Monica Lewinsky affair or some other Washington melodrama.

• A day ahead of his expected 2024 announcement, former President Donald Trump on Monday was hit with a campaign finance complaint that accuses him of unlawfully transferring a “colossal sum” of money from his leadership PAC to a super PAC that spent millions on this year’s midterms—and is positioned to spend millions more on Trump’s presidential bid.

• The Campaign Legal Center (CLC), the watchdog organization that filed the complaint, alleges that Trump “directed the transfer” of $20 million last month from the cash-flush leadership PAC Save America to Make America Great Again, Inc., which dumped nearly $12 million into the midterm elections to boost Trump-friendly candidates.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Art restorers in the Italian city of Florence have begun a six-month project to clean and virtually “unveil” a long-censored nude painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the most prominent women in the history of Italian art.

• Swirling veils and drapery were added to the “Allegory of Inclination” some 70 years after Gentileschi painted the life-size female nude, believed to be a self-portrait, in 1616.

• The practice of censorship has long been a source of controversy in Pakistani filmmaking.

• It is safe to say that censorship and political repression have severely harmed Pakistan’s film industry. Here, we are noting down a list of ‘Pakistani’ movies that couldn’t make it to the big screen in Pakistan throughout history.

• As per the police report, a copy of which has been extracted by News18.com, they pushed and mishandled the student by “punching him on face, slapping him, kicking him on the abdominal areas, touched his genitals and forced him to eat certain chemicals and powders. One student, named Reva (3rd Year BBA Student, IBS Hyderabad) even attempted to put his genetics into his mouth. They further tried to torn his clothes, make him naked, and kept beating him one after the other with a slogan “beat him till he dies”. His video and images were widely surfaced among college student groups and he was the subject of mockery now and he have bruises all over his face, his bones are aching and he have swollen eyes sockets and nose.”

• The Auckland Feminist Action’s plan to hold a counter-protest outside the venues of Jordan Peterson’s speaking tour should be the primary, not backup, response to his speech. Auckland and Christchurch Councils must reject calls to deny Peterson the use of public venues, says Jonthan Ayling, spokesperson for the Free Speech Union.

• “Calling for the cancellation of a speaking tour, rather than engaging with its content and combatting it with better ideas is no way to ensure those ideas can be properly tested. If Peterson’s ideas are as toxic as his opponents say, then it should be no problem for them to let his views be publicly beaten with better speech.

• The Russian Ministry of Culture has revoked the screening license issued to “Famine,” a documentary made by Alexander Alrkhangelsky, Maxim Kurnikov, and Tatiana Sorokina.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• One letter, sent by police to a London-based journalist, warned that Iranians had been lured back to countries near Iran and then abducted by the Iranian government and sentenced to death. It also warned that the Iranian government has been seen to “direct physical attacks against dissidents in Europe.”

• The statement on the market watchdog’s website suggested that Gautam Adani-led conglomerate’s open offer received the Sebi go-ahead Monday. The company has revised the open offer launch date to November 22 and the same shall close on December 5.

• Multiple journalists from foreign news organizations have lost their media accreditations in Ukraine for violating government rules on reporting in combat zones, the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ General Staff reported on Monday.

• The film Ithaka, about the quest of Julian Assange’s father to save his son, made its U.S. premiere on Sunday in New York City. It is reviewed by Joe Lauria.

• A Russian court has charged Timofey Yefremov, deputy editor-in-chief of the news site Yakutia.info, with “discrediting the Russian army” for a comment he made in an interview with the television channel Dozhd about women in Yakutsk who protested against the war in Ukraine on September 25.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A well-known Iranian Azeri blogger and activist who was hospitalized over the weekend was in stable condition, Iran officials said Monday, although his family and the international community are concerned.

• Hossein Ronaghi, who was arrested September 24, is one of dozens of prominent rights activists, journalists and lawyers who have been arrested amid Iran’s crackdown on protests that were ignited by the death of Mahsa Amini.

• Melika Balali protested against the forced wearing of the hijab on the winner’s platform of a the British Wrestling Championships in June.

• The 22-year-old said her family has since cut contact with her.

• Small groups of women have staged frequent flash protests in Kabul and other major cities, risking the wrath of Taliban officials who have beaten and detained them.

• Earlier this month, the United Nations voiced concern after the Taliban disrupted a press conference in the capital, submitting female participants to body searches and detaining the event organiser and several others.

• “We do not have freedom in the Islamic Republic,” he retorted. “Where is the freedom? Where is the freedom of the press? Where is the freedom of expression? Everything is censored. Everything is restricted,” Abdolhamid was quoted as saying by the Independent.

• The majority of people in Iran have objections, and therefore, regime leaders should listen to them, urged Abdolhamid.

• The tweet was accompanied by a picture of what appeared to be Palestinians beating or striking to death a dog with sticks. Such barbaric behavior for what is otherwise considered in the USA as “man’s best friend” is not uncommon in the Muslim world.

• Macron last month said France “stands by” the protesters in Iran and expressed his “admiration” for women and youths demonstrating in the country, while condemning what he called “repression” by the authorities.

• [...] In a letter addressed to the council president, the German and Icelandic ambassadors to the UN in Geneva requested “a special session…to address the deteriorating human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially with respect to women and children.” [...]

• Despite the horrible working conditions of residency (which can include 80 workweeks, 28-hour shifts, verbal abuse, or a maternity leave limited to a single week), doctors haven’t historically been big lifters in the labor movement. For Montefiore residents, this is the furthest any unionization effort has gone in decades. But if doctors at Montefiore and more broadly embrace the opportunity to tell a different story about who we are, we could contribute to one of the most important labor struggles of the coming year.

• It was Alito who led the charge to finally accomplish what the vast majority of male Republican members of Congress and state legislatures across the country have been dreaming of doing for almost half a century: overturning the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade precedent barring states from outlawing a woman’s right to abortion and to control her own body’s reproductive system.

• Alito, who wrote the legal opinion justifying the 6-3 decision he made along his five  radical right-wing Federalist Society justices on the bench — all guilty of  lying in their confirmation hearings testimony by many claiming that they viewed Roe v. Wade as “settled law,”  wrote that, “”It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

• Lula has proven, throughout the years, to be a genuine friend of Palestine and Arab countries.

• For example, in 2010, as a president, he spoke of his dream of seeing “an independent and free Palestine” during a visit to the occupied West Bank. He also refused to visit  the grave of Theodor Herzl, the father of Israel’s Zionist ideology. Instead, he visited Yasser Arafat’s tomb in Ramallah.

• No one should be surprised to find Benjamin Netanyahu back as prime minister of Israel, with decisive support from far-right religious extremists. With the recent election, the religious bloc called Religious Zionism put Netanyahu’s Likud party comfortably over the top in the Knesset and now, as a leading member of the governing coalition, it is strongly positioned to pursue its volatile agenda aimed at reclaiming Israel as a Jewish state.

• Among things that might follow, based on their leaders’ public statements, are the deportation of “disloyal” Palestinian citizens, legal challenges to Palestinian-owned buildings in the West Bank, restrictions on access to Al-Aqsa–the Temple Mount in Jerusalem sacred to both Jews and Palestinians–and massive changes in Israel’s legal system pertaining to the selection of judges and the authority of the Supreme Court to overrule laws on constitutional grounds.

• After jetting into the capital of Ghana, the international arms broker who called himself “Excellence” greeted his buyers at the Golden Tulip hotel and proposed a secret sale: millions of dollars in missiles and grenades for use against American forces.

• “Who else knows I’m with Hezbollah?” Faouzi Jaber asked as night fell on the four-star hotel with a life-sized sculpture of a giraffe in the lobby.

• A first-of-its-kind global investigation by ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists identified at least 500 current and former honorary consuls who have been accused of crimes or embroiled in controversy, including those convicted of serious offenses or caught exploiting their status for personal gain. The problem dates back decades, yet few governments have publicly called for reforms to the largely unregulated system of international diplomacy.

• Here are snapshots of prominent honorary consuls whose personal, business or diplomatic activities have drawn scrutiny, in some cases from the highest levels of government.

• “Shadow Diplomats” is a first-of-its-kind investigation of a largely unregulated and under-the-radar system of international diplomacy that allows volunteer diplomats working from their home countries to represent the interests of other nations.

• “Shadow Diplomats” marks the first collaboration between ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. One hundred and sixty journalists from 46 countries joined the reporting.

• The investigation shines light on one of the least-examined roles in international diplomacy: the honorary consul. These volunteer diplomats work from their home countries to promote the interests of foreign governments, typically in places without an embassy or consulate.

• Relatives of Alaa Abd El Fattah said Monday that they’ve received proof in the form of a letter that the jailed, hunger-striking Egyptian-British dissident is alive.

• “I’m so relieved. We just got a note from prison to my mother, Alaa is alive, he says he’s drinking water again.”

• GYPT’S GOVERNMENT had hoped that COP27, a big un climate conference taking place in Sharm el-Sheikh, would be a chance to polish its image. Instead it has drawn attention to Egypt’s dismal human-rights record. Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a British-Egyptian activist, is the most high-profile of the country’s estimated 65,000 political prisoners. He was jailed most recently in 2019 for alleged offences ranging from joining a terrorist group to spreading false news on social media. He has been on hunger strike for more than 200 days. Since Sunday, when climate talks began, he has also refused water. Campaigners, celebrities and world leaders have called for his release. Who is Alaa Abd el-Fattah?

• A concert by Russian singer Polina Gagarina that was to be held in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on February 14, has been canceled after backlash from local residents due to the pop star’s support for the war, Kazakhstani news site Arbat.media reported on Monday.

• Multiple members of Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council has asked Federal Investigative Committee Head Alexander Bastrykin to investigate the circumstances surrounding a video that allegedly shows the murder of former prisoner and Wagner PMC recruit Yevgeny Nuzhin.

• From “The Fields of Golden Grain”

• Connie was the devoutly Catholic draftsman son of a semi-prestigious but down-on- his-luck, alcohol-challenged architect in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He was the older and beloved brother of my then ten-year-old mother Jane, who was known as “Bugs” (because of her bulging eyes as a baby) to her family.

• It was the mundane pleasures that Patrick Julney missed the most: a cold glass of water out of the refrigerator; a warm handshake with a friend on the street; the unique comfort of a familiar bed; a plate of chicken and waffles.1

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Despite a lot of political lip service paid toward bridging the digital divide, U.S. policymakers still don’t fully know where broadband is or isn’t available in the U.S. They have some well-informed notions, but outside analysts have long made it clear that the maps the government uses to shape policy and award subsidies are often an idiotic hallucination (plug your address into their current map if you need evidence).

• Today, Public Knowledge joined 24 public interest and civil society groups, schools, and libraries in a letter urging Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Ranking Member Roger Wicker (R-MS), and other members of Congress to renew the Federal Communication Commission’s spectrum auction authority in a way that promotes a vibrant, diverse wireless ecosystem. The groups argue that taking a “balanced approach” will “allow innovators, local anchor institutions, and technology companies – not just incumbent wireless providers – to access the spectrum they need to serve the American public.”

• The following is an excerpt from the letter:

• “Congress has extended the FCC’s authority to auction spectrum until December 16 of this year. Congress should renew a further extension of the Commission’s authority that does not prioritize exclusive use licensed spectrum over unlicensed or shared spectrum models. Limiting the Commission’s auction authority in a manner that only allows the FCC to provide licensed spectrum access to mid-band spectrum for exclusive use is shortsighted. It would gift spectrum to a highly concentrated industry whose neglect of Tribal lands and rural communities is only now being remedied by the widespread deployment of Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) shared spectrum. Indeed, failing to provide more mid-band spectrum for CBRS-like sharing and for next generation Wi-Fi would further entrench incumbents by eliminating spectrum access for the incumbent carriers’ most successful competitors. It would choke innovation in the fastest growing and most innovative segment of the wireless economy – private 5G networks.

Monopolies

• Recently the U.S. federal antitrust enforcement agencies have been considering novel and creative approaches in their review of transactions that traditionally would not have triggered close antitrust review. Start-up acquisitions, in particular, have been receiving extensive scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ). One of the tools the U.S. agencies have deployed in their merger review is an ever-narrowing relevant market analysis. However, as FTC Commissioner Christine Wilson’s study underscores, the trend toward drawing ever-narrower relevant markets has significantly altered traditional antitrust rules and changed the merger review standards that have been applied in the U.S. for decades. A key example as to how the agencies are further experimenting with redrawing merger enforcement is the FTC’s recent lawsuit attempting to block Meta’s acquisition of Within, the company behind the virtual reality (VR) fitness app Supernatural.

• In a move completely at odds with decades of federal merger policy and precedent, the FTC is challenging Meta’s acquisition of Within after overruling agency staff’s recommendation not to block the deal. In this case, the FTC doesn’t seem to be following its own merger enforcement principles reflected in its 2021 OECD submission on potential and nascent competition issues; in fact, as former FTC Chair William Kovacic put it, the Meta/Within FTC challenge is “deliberately experimental.” The FTC’s lawsuit is based on the unsubstantiated assumption that “the Acquisition is presumed likely to create or enhance market power and is presumptively unlawful.” Beyond the unsubstantiated assumption in this matter, blocking start-up acquisitions under rigid presumptions of competitive harm and narrow market definitions could lead to significant unintended consequences and real harm to the start-up ecosystem, innovation, and the U.S. economy.

Patents

• Dozens of progressive advocacy groups marked World Diabetes Day on Monday by urging Congress to pass legislation that would ensure people in the United States have access to the insulin on which their survival depends and prevent Big Pharma from price gouging on the lifesaving medicine.

• In a letter addressed to Senate and House leaders, Public Citizen, T1International, and more than 50 other organizations wrote: “World Diabetes Day marks the birthday of Frederick Banting, who discovered insulin and famously sold its patent for $1 and stated, ‘Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.’ Despite its discovery more than 100 years ago and the generosity of Banting and the co-inventors, many people living in the United States still struggle to afford access to the insulin they need.”

Copyrights

• Another artist warned others in the community, “Fellow artists: Deviantart isn’t only allowing AI to use your art by default, but you ALSO have to submit a form to opt-out of it. BEFORE YOU DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT, if you planned to do so, I suggest you use Redact to mass delete your posts.”

• Meet Roland “Spanky” Macher. Spanky, a name by which I really must insist on calling him throughout this post, was a restaurant owner and real estate businessman before going to prison for 30 months for failing to pay his taxes and lying to the bankruptcy court. While in prison, he crafted his a how-to-business opus, which he titled “Slumlord Millionaire,” the title being an homage to the movie Slumdog Millionaire, except focused I guess on how to be a real estate douche. That book was self-published.

• While Haeckel turns jellyfish into baroque spectacles of color and flowing form, Mayer’s medusae are more sober, their tentacles subdued, their umbellate bells transparent.

• When people speak of culture, and preserving it, they usually mean the works of recognised artistic giants like Shakespeare, Leonardo Da Vinci, Charlie Chaplin, and Miles Davis. They rarely mean things like live streams of Korean pop music, generally known as K-pop. And yet K-pop is undoubtedly an expression – some would say a particularly vibrant expression – of a characteristic modern culture.

• The operator of popular sports streaming site Rojadirecta is personally liable for copyright infringement, Spain’s Supreme Court has ruled. Rojadirecta is already outlawed in Spain and with this verdict in hand, sports rightsholder Mediapro will seek hundreds of millions of euros in damages.

• A UK man who generated more than £2.3 million selling piracy-configured Android devices has been sentenced to 30 months in prison. More than eight years ago and over the space of just a few months, Halton Powell’s ‘Droidsticks’ brand and associated Kodi add-on package were known all over the UK. After ignoring many obvious warnings, his eventual arrest was no surprise.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I’m writing this mostly for my own sake since I’ve had a hard time remembering who can use scrolls and maybe this time the mental model will stick.

• Scrolls (and if you use the widespread, and by me much beloved and appreciated, house rule that you can also use other small items like bells, potions, snap-twigs, jars etc, it doesn’t have to be a roll of paper although that’s OG awesome too) are good because…

Technical

• During the period immediately before and immediately after the release of the “Merced” Itanium, HP and ST Micro had a close partnership around a new, programmer-friendly embedded CPU called ST200. While neither party ever emphasized the connection, ST200 has an undeniable similarity to Itanium, and one could probably make a strong case for it being an EPIC processor.

• In the 1970 archetypical disaster movie “Airport”, a Boeing 707 undertakes an international flight from Chicago to Rome. One scene shows a passenger on the flight complaining to a stewardess about a stale snack, and he comments bitterly that his ticket cost him $474 US dollars. That amount is equivalent to approximately $3500 in 2022 dollars. Today, even in our inflation-ridden economy, a flight from Chicago to Rome can be purchased for under $500–an 85% drop in price.

• In 1939, Pan American World Airways offered a comparable service from New York to Marseilles, France, via Azores and Portugal. That trip cost $675 in those days, or a staggering $13000 in today’s dollars. Iberia and Lufthansa now offer the same flight for $700.

• In order for FOSS to garner market share, it needs to provide the end users with mostly the same features as their proprietary competitors. This can end up in libre software adding “anti-features”, such as typing indicators.

• A more recent example is Signal adding stories. They mentioned it was one of the most requested features, many refusing to move from WhatsApp because the lack of the aforementioned feature. Signal ended up in adding them, you can easily disable them in settings if you dislike them, like I. It’s debatable whether they could’ve spent their resources better.

Announcements

• I’ve been a long time user of both Sxiv and Feh, great image viewers for tiling window managers.

• Sxiv has been discontinued, its development is resumed in a fork called Nsxiv, while Feh is actively maintained and packs more features such as wallpaper setting. I’ve recently found out about Imv[1], it’s similar to both of the aforementioned programs, but it works on both X11 and Wayland, while having similar features such as keybinding and supporting animated GIFs, SVGs, RAW formats and proprietary formats such as PSD (use a FOSS alternative if you can). If you switch in between an X11 instance and Wayland, it can be useful to have a program that does the job in both environments.

• Releasing Offpunk 1.7 today which fixes a handful of crashes and brings some nice features:

• 1. Autocompletion on your list names with “add”, “move” and “list” command. This is really useful if, like me, you are playing with 20 different lists. 2. In Gemini and Gopher, plain text links are added to the list of links of the page. This is really useful with Gopher posts where the culture is to add a bunch of links at the end of the post with a number. After reading a post, simply press “enter” (keep the command empty) to see the list of links in that post, including in Gopher. 3. Added a configurable “search” command which, by default, uses kennedy.gemi.dev. 4. Added a configurable “wikipedia” (or “w”) command which, by default, uses vault.transjovian.org. Also added shortcuts for English, French and Spanish: “wen”, “wfr” and “wes”.

• 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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