● 11.28.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 27/11/2022: Linux 6.1 RC 7

Posted in News Roundup at 2:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• This week has been very interesting and full of cool news, starting with the release of the VLC 3.0.18 media player and a new production-ready NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux gamers, and continuing with new versions of the Tails and Alpine Linux distributions, as well as the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-24 update for Linux phone and tablet users.

• On top of that, I talk about what’s coming in the OBS Studio 29.0 screen recording and streaming software, give you a heads up about the Ubuntu 23.04 daily builds, and tell you all about the latest software releases. Below, you can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for November 27th, 2022.

• Welcome to this week’s Linux Weekly Roundup!

• We had a peaceful week in the world of Linux releases with mainly PCLinuxOS 2022.11.20 and Bodhi Linux 7.0.0 alpha3.

• I hope you have a wonderful week!

Server

• Starting with Kubernetes 1.25, our container image registry has changed from k8s.gcr.io to registry.k8s.io. This new registry spreads the load across multiple Cloud Providers & Regions, functioning as a sort of content delivery network (CDN) for Kubernetes container images. This change reduces the project’s reliance on a single entity and provides a faster download experience for a large number of users.

• [...]

• registry.k8s.io is a secure blob redirector that connects clients to the closest cloud provider. The nature of this change means that a client pulling an image could be redirected to any one of a large number of backends. We expect the set of backends to keep changing and will only increase as more and more cloud providers and vendors come on board to help mirror the release images.

• Restrictive control mechanisms like man-in-the-middle proxies or network policies that restrict access to a specific list of IPs/domains will break with this change. For these scenarios, we encourage you to mirror the release images to a local registry that you have strict control over.

Audiocasts/Shows

• AMD’s raytracing implementation vastly lags behind what Nvidia is capable but AMD isn’t just sitting on there buts, they recently went open source with a useful piece of dev tooling called the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer

• Josh and Kurt talk about end to end encrypted messages. This has been a popular topic lately due to the Mastodon popularity. Mastodon has a uniquely insecure messaging system, but they aren’t the only one. The eternal debate of can security and usability exist together? We suspect it can’t be, but it’s a very complicated topic.

• In this video, we are looking at how to install OpenTTD on Linux Mint 21.

• **Krita** , **kross** , **kross-interpreters** , **kruler** , **krunner** , **krusader** from the Slackware **k** software series.

Kernel Space

• Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has warned contributors that the rhythm of the project’s development cycle will clash with Christmas, so developers need to make sure they ready their work before the holiday season.

• The warning came in Torvalds’s weekly kernel development update in which he announced release candidate 7 for Linux 6.1 and observed that – contrary to his predictions – the Thanksgiving holiday did not slow work on the kernel.

• “The end of the week was the usual ‘people send me their stuff on Friday’, and the weekend hardly slowed people down,” he wrote, before describing the work left on version 6.1 as “just a bit more than I’m comfortable with. It should just have slowed down more by now.”

• “As a result, I’m now pretty sure that this is going to be one of those ‘we’ll have an extra week and I’ll make an rc8′ releases,” he added, noting that one consequence of that decision is the two-week merge window during which developers submit code for the next cut of the kernel “will be solidly in the holiday season.”

• The 6.1-rc7 kernel prepatch has been released for testing.

Instructionals/Technical

• Now that Fedora 37 launched, I decided to wipe my main laptop and do a clean installation. I made some poor configuration choices while in a hurry over the past year and the mess finally caught up with me.

• The latest version of the i3 spin caught my eye and I used it for the installation. Once my laptop booted up, I noticed a volume icon in my system tray that appeared automatically. I’ve normally used pasystray for this task, but volumeicon came with the i3 spin.

• Like most operating systems, Linux distros also continuously run processes (both individual processes and groups of them) in the background. The term for these processes is “daemons.” They wait for clients to make requests and act accordingly.

• The typical Linux distro runs a range of daemons to facilitate the working of the many services it offers.

• Some essential services that run on Linux include system services such as syslog, process management, and cron. Network services such as domain name resolution, email, and file transfer are also essential.

• There are many ways to manage (start, restart, auto-start, stop, etc.) daemons on Linux systems. But it’s typically done using a service or process manager.

• Virtually all modern Linux machines employ the SystemD service manager by default. It is a suite of software tools for process management, working as a “drop-in replacement” for the init process.

• SystemD is compatible with LSB and SysV init scripts and offers the systemctl command, primarily used to manage SystemD.

• In this brief guide, we will walk you through using the command to list running services and other types of services in Linux.

• SQLite is free, open-source software that is not a client-server database engine but is embedded into the end program.SQLite is ACID-compliant and implements most SQL standards, generally following PostgreSQL syntax. However, SQLite uses a dynamically and weakly typed SQL grammar that does not guarantee the domain integrity of data inserted into a column designated with one data type will be of that type. Various programming languages support SQLite, including C, C++, Go, JavaScript, Java, .NET Framework 4.5+, Objective-C, Perl 5.24+, PHP 5+, Swift 3+, and many more through language-specific libraries and extensions are also available to improve performance and add additional features such as full-text search and spatial indexing.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install SQLite with Fedora 37/36/35 Linux using the command line terminal using the standard DNF package manager or manually installing straight from the project’s Git for users that require the latest version at all times.

• When you do a fresh install of CentOS on your laptop and try to run any command using sudo, you will likely get this error message…

• The MATE Desktop Environment uses GNOME 2 to provide an attractive environment while preserving the traditional GNOME essence. It is under active development.

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

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

• Please use the video as a visual guide, and the commands and links below to install it on your Chromebook.

• In this short post, you will learn a fabulous trick that allows you to save disk space, and that is to clean the APT cache. This way, you can quickly remove unnecessary files that are just taking up disk space.

• Learn how to shut down or reboot Linux from the command line using commands like poweroff, reboot, shutdown, halt, and systemd.

• FileZilla is one of the most popular FTP clients, and for a good reason. It’s easy to use, free, and has cross-platform support. FileZilla makes it easy to transfer files between your computer and your web server to transfer files between two different systems, all you need is a username and password, and you’re good to go. FileZilla also supports SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol), so you can transfer files securely over the internet, given how sensitive data can be in the wrong hands. Whether you’re a web developer or a casual user, FileZilla is an excellent choice for an FTP client for Fedora users.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install FileZilla on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux using the standard Fedora repository, which often has the newest version, or the alternative natively installed Flatpak manager using the command line terminal.

• PHP 8.1 is a significant update of the PHP language released on November 25, 2021. This is a standard upgrade the future from the existing PHP 8.0 release. The new PHP 8.1 brings enums, fibers, never return type, final class constants, intersection types, and read-only properties among new features and changes. I would visit the official PHP website release announcement section for the complete changelog list constantly updated when minor releases are pushed.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to import the REMI PHP Module and install PHP 8.1 on your Fedora 37/36/35 server or workstation desktop, along with some tips about configuring Nginx with FPM using the command line terminal.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SQLite on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, SQLite is a free, lightweight, fast relational database management system contained in a C library. It’s a popular solution for applications that need to use on-disk files formatted as lightweight databases to run efficiently. The software is a popular choice for local/client storage such as web browsers, Android devices, and much more. The list is quite extensive.

• 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 SQLite on a Fedora 37.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Reviews

• The Void project produces an unusual Linux distribution with a number of special characteristics. The project is described on its website as follows:

• Void is a general purpose operating system, based on the monolithic Linux kernel. Its package system allows you to quickly install, update and remove software; software is provided in binary packages or can be built directly from sources with the help of the XBPS source packages collection.

• Void is a rolling release distribution which features the fast XBPS package manager which can work with both binary and source-based software. The distribution uses the super lightweight runit init software for booting the system and managing services. Void is also unusual in that it provides multiple builds, based on different C libraries. A C library is a core component of the operating system. While most Linux distributions use the glibc library, Void offers both glibc and musl libc varieties for most supported architectures. Speaking of CPU architectures, Void provides 32-bit (x86), 64-bit (x86_64), and ARM builds of its distribution. Most of these builds are available in both muslc and glibc variants. I decided to focus on the x86_64 editions and selected glibc as I figured it would be more likely to work with a wide variety of software.

• At this point I could also choose whether to take a minimal Base edition or an edition with the Xfce desktop. I decided to take the desktop edition. The Base edition is 650MB in size while the Xfce edition is still relatively small by modern standards, weighing in at 983MB.

• Booting from the live media brings up a menu offering to run the distribution from the media or to load Void entirely into RAM to run from memory. The distribution boots unusually quickly, even from the live media, and presents us with the Xfce desktop in under five seconds.

Arch Family

• Following a long discussion and a recent vote, the role of “Trusted User” has been renamed “Package Maintainer”:

• https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/ … /7/commits https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/li … XV2KS5OSC/

• The role remains the same. The forum titles have been updated accordingly.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Rocky Linux 9.1 features updated developer tools and Keylime, an open-source, scalable trust system based on TPM Technology.

• In less than two years of existence, Rocky Linux has established itself as one of the best RHEL-based distros, earning the trust of enterprise-oriented Linux users. Rocky 9.1 is now available for download only 11 days after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1. So let’s look at what’s new.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• The Lubuntu Team is happy to announce that an update to LXQt 1.2 through the Lubuntu Backports PPA is now available as a beta.

• Our friends at Ardour have released Version 7.1, and we would like to offer them huge congratulations! While the source code and their own builds were available on release day, many of you have been waiting for Ardour 7 to come to Ubuntu’s repositories.

• That day has come. Ardour 7.1 will be landing in Ubuntu Lunar Lobster (future 23.04) and will be on Ubuntu Studio’s daily spins of Lunar Lobster very soon.

• Unfortunately, it is not possible to backport Ardour 7.1 into Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or 22.10, nor would we want to. This is because if we do, we might disrupt the workflow of people who are currently working with projects in 6.9 that are relying on its functionality and sound. Ardour 7.1 projects are not backwards compatible with Ardour 6.9 projects; once a 6.9 project is opened in 7.1, it is converted to a 7.1 project and cannot be used in 6.9 again unless restored from a backup.

• I’ve just made a new 5.3.1 release of Grantlee. The 5.3.0 release had some build issues with Qt 6 which should now be resolved with version 5.3.1.

• We had a call for nominations for the Ubuntu Membership Board and then voted in the Community Council.

• The following people have been elected to the Ubuntu Membership Board for the next two years:

• Khairul Aizat Kamarudzzaman (fenris) Dani Llewellyn (diddledani) Billy D. Quinn (Bashing-om) Mattia Rizzolo (mapreri) Miles Sharpe (Kilos) Larry Tarvin (wild_man)

Devices/Embedded

• LOLIN S3 Pro is a WiFi & Bluetooth LE IoT board built around the ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 modules with various I/Os including a display port, a microSD card slot, and a LOLIN I2C connector.

• The wireless module ships with 16MB QSPI flash and 8MB PSRAM, and the board also features two 16-pin headers with ADC, DAC, I2C, SPI, UART, etc…, a USB Type-C port, and support for a LiPo batteries with 500mA charging.

• Shenzhen Xunlong Software, better known under the Orange Pi brand, has launched a 14-inch Full HD portable monitor for $59 plus shipping on Aliexpress, or a little more on Amazon.

• The company is better known for its low-cost Arm-based single board computers with Rockchip or Allwinner processors, but this time, they launched an accessory with a 14-inch display taking HDMI or USB Type-C input with up to 1920×1080 resolution.

• When you think of a luggable computer, you might think of the old Compaq or — if you are old enough — a Kaypro. But you don’t see as many Commodore SX-64 computers. [The 8-Bit Guy] has wanted one for a while and finally got one, but it wasn’t working. No problem! Just fix it!

Open Hardware/Modding

• Good thermal paste can have a profound impact on your performance, because it will allow your processor to transfer more of its waste heat to your cooler, keeping your processor running cool. Choosing the best thermal paste is also important if you plan on overclocking your rig to its fullest. Even the best CPUs for gaming can often hit slightly higher CPU overclocks if they’re paired with a good thermal paste.

• Today we’re going to talk about Over-the-Horizon Radar, or OTH; a key innovation of the Cold War that is still found in places today but mostly lacks relevance in the modern world. OTH’s short life is a bit of a disappointment: the most basic successes in OTH were hard-won, and the state of the art advanced rapidly until hitting a standstill around the ’90s.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Also: biktorgj’s PinePhone Modem Firmware gets even more features, SailfishOS gets support for the PinePhone keyboard, a new, but familiar Mastodon client and a lot more!

• When you have look at Martijn Braam’s excellent mainline.space you’ll quickly note that the PinePhone with megi’s kernel has a comparatively large number of changes from mainline. You may be shocked. But don’t worry, it’s mostly (~91% of added lines) the non-mainlined driver for the PinePhone’s Realtek RTL8723CS 802.11 b/g/n WiFi with Bluetooth 4.0 chip.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Homebrew computing — as epitomized by the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley — consisted of hobbyists designing and assembling their own computers. But like Nóva and her fellow Hachydermians, these hobbyists were in fact experienced engineers; their “homebrew” was just them building for themselves, for fun. Yes, homebrew computing was fragmented and incoherent; the participants at the time were not possibly thinking that the machines that they developed would form the basis (for better and for ill!) for all future computing. But by the late 1970s, the time for radical decentralization of compute had indisputably arrived — and its spirit would burn so bright that it would endure long after the homebrew became commercial, as viscerally expressed in Apple’s iconic 1984 Superbowl ad.

• All these issues are outlined very well in Richard Seymour’s excellent The Twittering Machine, and if the site does die, nobody will miss them. But, for the most part, until very recently, I enjoyed Twitter. I enjoyed its accessibility, the way that I could instantly ask or be asked all sorts of things. I learned a lot through it, and I met many lovely people. Years ago, when reading a well-meant account of the 2017 election that seemed oddly deficient, I realized what it was missing. Twitter — and the hysterical momentum of the campaign as it was expressed on there, with Corbynite accounts becoming ever more giddily euphoric as it became clear what was happening. Put simply, you’ll never understand the fact — and it is a fact — that Jeremy Corbyn came within a few thousand votes of being prime minister in June 2017 if you don’t understand the “Absolute Boy” meme.

• Depending on who you speak to, Twitter is (or isn’t) in turmoil, and Mastodon is (or isn’t) here to supplant (or backup (or not)) the “de facto town square”. Whether any of that is true or not, there’s been a surge in people signing up, and trying out the Mastodon experience.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• While working with Readwise on optimizing their database for the impending launch of their Reader product, I found myself asking the question: How much faster is a composite index compared to letting the database do an index merge of multiple indexes? Consider this query: [...]

Programming/Development

• A quine is a computer program that produces an exact copy of its own source code as its output. It must not consume any input, so tricks involving reading its own source code and printing it are not permitted.

• We don’t seem to be making the same mistakes as 2016 in the era of generative AI. Some companies are solving for distribution using someone else’s proprietary model (e.g., Jasper AI/GPT-3), but these products deliver real value to customers today – with no human in the loop. If LLM performance plateaued, these companies would likely still have some intrinsic value.

• One thing I’ve noticed on my journey to learn OCaml was that reading (text) files wasn’t as straightforward as with many other programming languages. To give you some point of reference – here’s how easy it is to do this in Ruby: [...]

• While JavaScript might not be the ideal language to write a production compiler, you might enjoy the “Create Your Own Compiler” tutorial that does an annotated walkthrough of “The Super Tiny Compiler” and teaches you the basics of writing a compiler from scratch.

Leftovers

• It is a remarkably odd book. The title is already somewhat of a hint – this is not a memoir of Stefan Zweig the person. Although we do learn of his impressive artistic and literary achievements, he barely appears in the book himself. This is a memoir of a lost Europe, and how we lost it, in the First World War, during the run-up to the Second World War and finally during that war itself.

• In recent times, the “staycation” became a popular alternative to forays far afield: you could take time off and enjoy your local surroundings without having to get stamps in your passport. But I don’t need to go to a museum or visit an amusement park, much less catch up on Stranger Things. I’ve got a project burning in my brain, and what I need is a few days of good solid time in the basement workshop to make some headway. What I need is a Hackation.

• [Georgi Gerganov] recently shared a great resource for running high-quality AI-driven speech recognition in a plain C/C++ implementation on a variety of platforms. The automatic speech recognition (ASR) model is fully implemented using only two source files and requires no dependencies. As a result, the high-quality speech recognition doesn’t involve calling remote APIs, and can run locally on different devices in a fairly straightforward manner. The image above shows it running locally on an iPhone 13, but it can do more than that.

• The first song I ever “scrobbled” was, apparently, “Outdoor Miner” by Wire. That was 2006, several years after Last.fm made its debut. This year the service turns 20, having never quite lived up to its promise after being acquired by CBS.

• In its prime, Last.fm tried its hand at being a social network and tried to make connections between people with similar listening habits. It’ll still show you the compatibility with other users, but has taken its foot off the gas in trying to foster conversations between users.

• The site offers a pro feature for $3 a month, but its perks aren’t very compelling. In fact, CBS’ tenure has been more marked by features removed, like its custom radio and streaming services. Instead Last.fm has tied itself to Spotify and quietly pokes users to sign up for the Pro account. (Has anyone subscribed to this? Seeing any value?)

• It seems to exist in kind of a limbo, still chugging along but doing very little to call attention to itself or offer a compelling reason for users to visit. I look at my stats sometimes, or go back to see what I was listening to last year, five years ago, ten years ago

• My laptop was stolen from me on the Vienna to Frankfurt train on Saturday.

Education

• When home computers were launched, it seems even the manufacturers didn’t quite know what to make of them. Of course everybody knew they were for games, but what else were they good for? Plenty of use cases, some more contrived than others, were made up: Keep track of your recipes, give yourself an edge in school work, do your home accounts and write nice letters to grandma.

• Some products have been and are still marketed exclusively at either boys or girls, but I’m of the firm conviction that home computers aren’t one of them. It’s true that there were ads for home computers clearly directed at boys – but there were also plenty directed at girls, families and of course at nobody in particular – that is to say, at everyone.

• With conditions in US schools now at a particularly brutal point, Jacobin’s Nora De La Cour spoke with Madeloni about how ordinary teachers’ union members can fight back.

Hardware

• Digital media provides us with a lot of advantages. For something like recording and playing back music, digital copies don’t degrade, they can have arbitrarily high quality, and they can be played in a number of different ways including through digital streaming services. That being said, a number of people don’t feel like the digital experience is as faithful to the original sound as it could be and opt for analog methods instead. Creating analog copies of music is a much tougher matter though, as [Marco] demonstrates by using a laser engraver to produce vinyl records.

• As the chip shortage hit, a lot of the familiar ATtiny chips have become unavailable and overpriced, and it mostly stayed the same since then. If you ever searched for “ATtiny” on your favourite electronics component retailer website, however, you’d notice that there’s quite a few ATtiny chips in stock most of the time – just that they’re from a much newer generation than we commonly see, with incompatible pinouts, slightly different architecture and longer model numbers like 412 and 3227. [David Johnson-Davies] from [technoblogy] is here to clarify things, and provide a summary of what the new ATtiny generations have to offer.

• Yesterday I had cause to visit Bristol in the west of England. I live in Farnborough, in the South East of England, so it’s a two-hour journey each way. Ok, it’s about one and a half hours, but I need to factor in a recharge point because I’m an insufferable EV owner who crowbars it into the conversation at every opportunity. Anyway, moving on.

• There are some chips that no matter how much the industry moves away from them still remain, exerting a hold decades after the ranges they once sat alongside have left the building. Such a chip is the 386, not the 80386 microprocessor you were expecting but the LM386, a small 8-pin DIP audio amplifier that’s as old as the Ark. the ‘386 can still be found in places where a small loudspeaker needs to be powered from a battery. SolderSmoke listener [Dave] undertook an interesting exercise with the LM386, reproducing it from discrete components. It’s a handy small discrete audio amplifier if you want one, but it’s also an interesting exercise in understanding analogue circuits even if you don’t work with them every day.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Older and more heavily polluting vehicles will have to pay to enter the entire metropolitan area of London from next August, the British capital’s mayor said Friday.

• Sadiq Khan said the ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ) would be expanded beyond its current confines from August 29, to encompass the entire nine million people of Greater London.

• Richer people have better health, as measured by mortality rates, than poorer people. However, adding an additional ten thousand dollars, say, to the income of a very rich person does little or nothing to improve their health, while adding that amount to a poor person’s income has substantial health benefits. Such a relationship is observed in nearly all societies.

• By Lee Camp

• A growing number of parents see the war on drugs as an abject failure that harmed their kids.

Security

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• Fraudulent text message are numerous and seem to be multiplying in the Grand Duchy. In recent months, many organisations had to inform the public of ongoing scams.

• Post, BCEE, BGL, and, more recently, Guichet.lu issued warnings to their users. The last official message on the issue was released on 7 October, but the phishing attempts have picked up in frequency again in recent days.

Privacy/Surveillance

• As a result of the regulators demands, Meta has agreed that users who want to use the Quest 2 VR headset offered by Meta Quest (formerly Oculus) no longer need a Facebook account to do so.

• Meta has responded to the Bundeskartellamt’s competition concerns and now also offers the possibility to set up the headset using a separate account, the Meta account.

Defence/Aggression

• While manufacturing modern firearms and bullets depends on a global supply chain and fossil fuels, bows and arrows can be made anywhere out of anything, using only human power and simple hand tools.

• Second, how the bow performs depends to a large extent on the skills of the archer. 467 Both the bow and the firearm require the shooter to develop aiming skills. However, the archer first has to master “pulling the trigger.” He or she needs to perform a sequence of actions flawlessly to make an accurate shot even possible. A slight variation in body posture or a jerky string release is enough to make the arrow go off the mark. In comparison, pulling the trigger of a firearm requires less practice. Aiming is more difficult with a bow than with a firearm as well. Unless the target is very close, the archer needs to compensate for gravity and shoot the arrow in an arc – hence the word archery. 8 Because bullets travel much faster than arrows, a gunner can aim in a straight line, which is easier.

• The hotel’s website describes the Villa Rose as the “most secure lodging arrangement in Mogadishu” with metal detectors and a high perimeter wall.

• Al-Shabaab, a militant group affiliated with Al-Qaeda that has been trying to overthrow Somalia’s central government in Mogadishu for 15 years, claimed responsibility for the attack.

• Scores of people were rescued from the hotel and security forces have launched an operation to remove the assailants, police spokesman Sadik Dodishe told state media.

• The Villa Rose hotel, where the ambush took place, is a short walk from the presidential palace in central Mogadishu.

• The latest attack comes amid a new, high-profile offensive by the Somali government against al-Shabab, which still controls large parts of central and southern Somalia.

• A married couple Russian were arrested in Sweden last week on suspicion of spying for the Russian Federation. Investigative outlet Bellingcat has now discovered that the couple owns an apartment in a Moscow building, which houses several other high-ranking employees of the GRU, the Russian Federation’s military intelligence agency. Other notable residents include alleged participants in Novichok poisonings and the supervisor of a disinformation campaign about Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

• The Council of Wives and Mothers group, which was organized by the relatives of mobilized Russian soldiers, has been blocked on Russian social networking site VKontakte at the Russian Prosecutor General’s request.

• The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces claims that, beginning December 10, the Russian army could see a new wave of “covert mobilization.” In its morning report on November 27 the department said:

• A daily report from the US-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War says that the overall pace of operations on the front lines in Ukraine has slowed in recent days due to adverse weather conditions, but that the intensity of fighting could grow again in the first week of December.

• The “Feminist Anti-war Resistance” movement and an organized group of mothers of mobilized and contract soldiers have issued an open letter, demanding an end to the war and the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory. The document coincides with Russian Mothers’ Day and is addressed to members of relevant State Duma and Federation Council committees.

• Among our mentally impaired president’s more prominent campaign pledges during the 2020 political campaigns was that his national security people would negotiate America’s return to the multi-sided accord governing Iran’s nuclear programs. Without hesitation, I offered excellent odds that this would stand tall in Joe Biden’s forest of […]

Environment

• Computer scientist, composer, artist, and author Jaron Lanier has for years been outspoken about his total avoidance of social media platforms because of the harm that they inflict on their users and the detrimental impacts that they have on societies. In a 2018 conversation with Vox producer Eric Johnson, Lanier decried people who refuse to delete their accounts even though they can.

• Moreover, environmental impact has many components and is context-dependent. While, overall, being rich is the worst thing one can do in terms of the environment, even someone who is barely surviving could – precisely for that reason – personally contribute to irreversible environmental damage, with desperate actions like cutting down the last tree for firewood or hunting threatened species for food.

Energy

• Though brief, the exchange between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Indonesia on November 16 has become a social media sensation. Xi, assertive if not domineering, lectured the visibly apprehensive Trudeau about the etiquette of diplomacy. This exchange can be considered another watershed moment in China’s relationship with the West.

• Canada’s Trudeau government touts the country as a climate champion. COP27, where Canada was the only OECD country to have fossil fuel delegates in tow, offered a more telling snapshot of the government’s priorities.

• Petro Kotin, president of Ukrainian state nuclear power company Energoatom, said he sees signs that Russian troops are planning to leave the area around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

Overpopulation

• Nigeria, in particular, is expected to record the fastest population growth by 2100 (527m). China, soon to be surpassed by India as the world’s most populous country, is expected to see the biggest decline (327m).

• While typically richer countries produce fewer babies, Professor Sarah Harper, director of Oxford University’s Institute of Population Ageing, says parts of sub-Saharan Africa may well defy UN projections. She and her colleagues have conducted research which suggests the ideal number of children wanted by women in sub-Saharan Africa is between three and five, compared to roughly two elsewhere in the world. “When you give them the choice and empower them through education, health and family planning, they seem to want larger families,” she says.

• In October, two men in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province were arrested after police were tipped off that a 5-year-old girl had been forced into a marriage contract.

• The girl’s uncle said that a local man had insisted the girl marry his son, and forced her father to accept a marriage contract.

• “We insisted that she is too young to contract a marriage,” the girl’s uncle told DW, adding that the exchange between the two men had been filmed and then reported to police.

Finance

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The image is loading from the Intranet. So it isn’t visible to those on the outside. I suspect this bug wasn’t caught by testing because the testers were all connected to their intranet.

• This missing image is bad for two reasons.

• Western Australian school students can be recruited as the cybersecurity workforce of the future as part of a Curtin University-led cybersecurity program, which has been supported by the Federal Government.

• Award-winning journalist Kyle Spencer’s new book, Raising Them Right — The Untold Story of America’s Ultraconservative Youth Movement and Its Plot for Power explores a decades-long campaign — online and off — to lure unsuspecting young people into the far-right fold, capitalizing on magnetic celebrities like Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, the thermodynamic Black conservative Candace Owens, and frat-boy-handsome Will Witt, who uses his good looks and winning smile to peddle white-boy victimization and resentment.

• In this exclusive excerpt, Spencer chronicles life on the campus front lines, dispelling myths about who gets heard on the campus quad, and showing that right-wing activists aren’t suppressed victims of censored speech, but loyal recipients of donor money that is being artfully used to amplify their raging rhetoric, and affording them not less but more and more free speech inside higher-ed institutions and beyond.

• Former Tory universities ministers Lord Johnson of Marylebone and Lord Willetts were among peers from all parties to restate earlier opposition to the bill’s plan for a “statutory tort” that would enable individuals to sue English universities and students’ unions for compensation “if they have suffered loss” as a result of a breach of institutions’ duties to protect free speech on campus.

• Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor left Twitter following complaints of Elon Musk’s takeover. Now the billionaire is calling the producer a ‘crybaby.’

• Trent Reznor spoke about his decision to leave the platform with The Hollywood Reporter before he deactivated his account. “I’m about to depart. We don’t need the arrogance of the billionaire class to feel like they can just come in and solve everything,” Reznor said. “Even without him involved, I just find that it has become such a toxic environment. For my mental health, I need to tune out. I don’t feel good being there anymore.”

• It’s one of many dubious methods Musk has adopted to balance the budget at a company he’s paid far too much for, at a sum of around $44 billion. Culling half of Twitter’s 7,500 workforce just weeks into his reign and continuing to fire employees that have voiced criticism, the richest man in the world has had no qualms with adopting either the most ruthless or most frivolous methods of saving an extra buck.

• Why it matters: Musk’s word is law inside Twitter now, but his disdain for rules will encounter tough pushback from governments around the world — just as the company has lost most of the people who managed its relationships with regulators and legislators.

• Twitter’s biggest challenges lie abroad, particularly in Europe, which has been steadily tightening tech regulations for years.

• The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that the Likud Party of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu signed a deal on Friday with what the paper calls the “fascist” Jewish Power party of Itamar Ben-Gvir giving the latter the post of minister of national security. Jewish Power will […]

• Hundreds of thousands marched with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Sunday in a massive demonstration through Mexico City to show their support for Lopez Obrador.

• The march is celebrating the “transformation of Mexico” four years into his six-year term. Lopez Obrador, known by his initials AMLO was elected in 2018 and heralded as the Bernie Sanders of Mexico.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The underside of Amazon’s explosive growth, however, is felt by the very people who generate its wealth: its workers. From the lack of masks and other protective equipment during the pandemic to injury rates twice as high as the industry standard to warehouses catching fire, Amazon workers are constantly put at risk — with fatal consequences all too often.

• In the supply chain, conditions are often much worse. Amazon has been found to sell clothing from dozens of blacklisted Bangladeshi factories that have been deemed too dangerous following the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse. The company is still refusing to sign the legally binding Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a central demand of workers, trade unions, and activists.

• For people who are incarcerated, mail offers a link to the outside world that extends beyond words or drawings on a page. Paper letters and cards let people in correctional facilities hold and touch an item that a loved one held, running their fingers over the handwriting, or smelling perfume on an envelope. In a recent article for the nonprofit outlet Truthout, Ryan Moser, who is currently serving a sentence in a Florida state prison, wrote about receiving a three-by-five glossy photograph of his father after he died unexpectedly. “I held [it] in my hands for hours, memorizing his features before placing it reverently in my photo album for safekeeping.” Increasingly, correctional systems are taking away those tangible ties to friends and family members.

Monopolies

Patents

• Albert was a judge in Los Ranchos Municipal Court. She was a practicing patent attorney who had previously served as a planning and zoning commissioner for the North Valley area, as a Los Alamos County commissioner and as president of the Bike Coalition of New Mexico, the Albuquerque Journal reported.

Software Patents

• While many expected the Federal Circuit precedent to make Section 101 dismissals at the pleading stage rare, that has not been the case. Despite the factual nature of Alice step two, over the past four years many patent owners have been unable to plausibly plead factual allegations showing their patent has an inventive concept, and have lost their patents shortly after filing suit.

• EA published an electronic patent on a piece of software called: “Detecting collusion in online games”. As to come, the publisher wanted to prevent players from losing games so they won’t help the enemy team. Punishments could range from rewards revoked to even being banned from the game altogether. But it’s not a matter of a lot of questions and could be an unreliable privacy nightmare for players.

• [...]

• The software carries many privacy concerns, since it can allow moderators to read their private messages. To be fair, the patent would work out to resolve that problem. This anti-cheat mechanic requires “seven percent respect to the laws of the player”

Copyrights

• As part of an anti-piracy campaign against people who allegedly streamed the Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren fight in 2021, Triller sued the operator of the YourEXTRA YouTube channel. Last week a California court found Arvin De La Santos liable for $150,000 in copyright infringement damages, a “landmark” win according to Triller. The details of the case provide a little more nuance.

Gemini* and Gopher

Politics

• Identity is colonialism. That is, less laconically, the ideology of identity as constituted in this era functions as an Occidentalist colonialist agent of discursive hegemony. I’m not very apt at the post-modern idiom, but I think I phrased that cogently. I don’t here hope to persuade anyone to this vantage, but in hopes the actuality of the word might at least register my aloofness with a prospective posterity. I almost said “my dissent” here. But even to dissent with a hegemony is to invite absorption by mimesis. Hence the title to this paper is intentionally ironical.

Technical

• Resurrected my fediverse account to a fugue of emotional ambivalence. I feel vaguely unclean about it, as if defeated by anthropogenic sludge on a long trek. But there are good people thereabouts, who I’ve missed. And many others on fedi are gifted by knowledge from whom I’ve benefitted, the nerd cabals with their wry digital magicks. That’s the carrot on the social media stick: people. The tragedy of the thing is how the medium entices people to dehumanize themselves, puts up funneling walls to pour ourselves into moulds of caricature. It’s not entirely a new problem, certainly, but by now it seems inarguable that contemporary social media are uncannily able at divesting humanity from its virtues.

Programming

• In some previous posts, I thought that SML was lacking for real-world use. However, this was a mistake.

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