● 11.29.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 29/11/2022: Bodhi Linux 7.0.0 Coming

Posted in News Roundup at 8:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA has today rolled out the 525.60.11 driver, following on from the 525.53 Beta earlier this month. It is largely the same as the Beta, with a few extra fixes included and since it’s not tagged as a Beta driver you should be all fine to upgrade to it.

Instructionals/Technical

• Ghost is an open-source powerful NodeJS-based Content Management System (CMS) for creating blog oriented websites. It has full support for Markdown and provides an easy-to-use web interface for administration purposes.

• In this tutorial we will show you how to install Ghost CMS on a Ubuntu 22.04 OS.

• FastAPI is a web framework for developing RESTful APIs in Python. It is based on pydantic and type hints to validate, serialize and deserialize data and automatically auto-generate OpenAPI documents.

• Try this DIY project to learn (or teach your family) to write code that interfaces with real hardware.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FileZilla on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, FileZilla is a cross-platform and free software FTP application, consisting of FileZilla Client and FileZilla Server which allows us to upload or download files to the FTP server. It supports many different file-transfer protocols, like FTP, SFTP, and many others. Its are available for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

• 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 FileZilla FTP clients on a Fedora 37.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FileZilla on Fedora 37, as well as some extra requirements by FileZilla

• To make system ready for VitualBox 7 setup via rpmfusion repos,

• install the Linux kernel “header” files matching the current kernel for adding new hardware support to the system. The distribution packages containing the headers is probably: kernel-devel-6.0.9-300.fc37.x86_64. Kernel packages installation has been done as follows.

• In this quick guide, I will walk you through the steps to Install Google Chrome Extensions in Microsoft Edge Browser.

• Microsoft announced its latest browser a couple of years back – Microsoft Edge for Ubuntu and other Linux as a preview. Edge is based on the open-source Chromium project. And Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are both forked from it.

• Pi-hole is a DNS-based advertisement blocker. Unlike a Chrome or Firefox extension, a Pi-hole can block ads even on your TV! So let’s see how to install and take advantage of this amazing tool!

• This tutorial will help you join, message and call people freely using Matrix/Element Chat. You can use Matrix Chat on web (recommended), desktop and mobile. You are suggested to exercise this together with at least one friend of yours. We hope you will quickly find your community and happy with Matrix like us and others.

• This article shows various ways to install and use Viber, a free voice and video call, and messaging app in Linux.

• Viber is a well-known, free, and secure voice/video calls and messaging app, which works on desktops, mobile, as well as tablets and keeps all communications synced between devices.

• It offers a wide range of communication features such as making voice and video calls, group chats and calls, communities, disappearing messages, deletion and editing of seen messages, and much more.

• A jump host (also known as a jump server) is an intermediary host or an SSH gateway to a remote network, through which a connection can be made to another host in a different security zone, for example, a demilitarized zone (DMZ). It bridges two dissimilar security zones and offers controlled access between them.

• A jump host should be highly secured and monitored especially when it spans a private network and a DMZ with servers providing services to users on the internet.

• By default, cascade layers are stacked in the order they are defined, but you don’t have to rely on it. You can determine the order in one place.

• In the following example, the border color of the paragraph is first red, then blue, then rebeccapurple, and finally green.

• Nostalgia is a dangerous drug and it’s always risky to wallow in it. So those of us who fondly remember the early blogosphere, and now want to draw parallels to the fediverse, should do so carefully. But we do want to learn from history.

• Here’s one way to compare five generations of social software along the five dimensions named in the title of this post.

• How do we get the DOM? The browser knows how to create it from an HTTP request consisting of a URL, some headers, and some HTML. For example, this is a simplified representation of (the beginnings of) the webpage for www.jim-nielsen.com.

• To understand this blog post, you need to know two things.

• 01. There exists a class of numbers which are illegal in some jurisdictions. For example, a number may be copyrighted content, a decryption key, or other text considered illegal.

• 02. There exists a class of algorithms which will take any arbitrary data and produce a fixed length text from it. This process is known as “hashing”. These algorithms are deterministic – that is, entering the same data will always produce the same hash.

• In theory, the official metric (power of ten) prefixes are written as ‘T’, ‘G’, ‘M’, and ‘k’. This isn’t in accordance with customary computer use, which upper-cases the ‘k’ to ‘K’. According to Wikipedia, binary prefixes are written as ‘Ti’, ‘Gi’, ‘Mi’, and ‘Ki’, although Wikipedia also notes that there’s plenty of usage (my phrasing) of plain ‘T’, ‘G’, and so on to mean the binary versions. However, both usage leave it ambiguous whether you’re writing about bytes or bits.

• So to create a great picture I’ve decided to make a better setup. I’ve used several components for this. The most important one is two external flashes controlled with a wireless transmitter. I’ve added softboxes to the flashers to minimize the sharp shadows usually created when using a flash. This produces quite nice board pictures with even lighting.

WINE or Emulation

• The Wine 7.22 development release is now available for the open source Windows compatibility layer, as they continue working towards the Wine 8.0 release. 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

• Half-Life: Alyx LEVITATION is an incredibly ambitious mod for Valve’s amazing VR FPS and it’s out now! To this day, Alyx remains as one of my all time favourite gaming experiences and so I’ve been eagerly awaiting more of it with this free expansive mod.

• Starting off a 12 month long cycle of updates, The Long Dark: Tales from the Far Territory is the first DLC for the survival game acting as an expansion pass. That, plus a bunch of free updates too. This is the first paid DLC for the game that released in 2017, with the full story not yet complete this is largely focused on the survival game mode.

• Black Ice is an indie first-person looter-shooter about hacking in cyberspace, I’m quite fond of it but it’s not very well known even though it’s a lot of fun. A big new update just rolled out with a bunch of extra content.

• Have the official Steam Deck Docking Station and find your Steam Deck doesn’t fit in it with a protective case on? JSAUX are back with another new product, the CaseKiller Anti-Slip Stand.

• Dome Keeper is one of my favourite indie releases this year, blending together casual underground mining with frantic base-defence and a new update just rolled out making it even more interesting.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Lubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish” was released on April 2022 this year which has the ancient version of the LXQt desktop 0.17. Since the release, there have been two point releases of LXQt desktop – 1.1.0 and 1.2.0. Although LXQt 1.1.0 is already featured on Lubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu (released in October), the LTS users are still with the older version.

• Keeping that in mind, Lubuntu devs have now prepared the backports PPA with the necessary updates to enjoy the latest LXQt desktop in Lubuntu 22.04, which has been supported for four years. A few days back, the backport PPA was refreshed with the 1.1.0 version and now with the latest 1.2.0.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• So I’m trying KDE Plasma again, I hear 5.26 has many great improvements and the last time I ran KDE for more than a day was in 2014. I mainly run Gnome and Phosh and Sway on my devices and I feel like I don’t use KDE enough for the amount of times I complain about it.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• Bodhi Linux is based on Ubuntu LTS and features the Enlightenment-based Moksha desktop environment. Moksha desktop is lightweight while being an eye-candy desktop. In addition, it only includes base applications to get you started.

• At its core, it is based on Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS aligned with Ubuntu 22.04. With that, you get the improved Mokhsna desktop environment based on the latest Enlightenment desktop/Enlightenment foundation library (efl).

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• South African Managed Service Provider (MSP) resellers (distribution partners), Axiz and Linux Warehouse, hosted two very successful Partner day events on October 18th and 19th. The days focused on the growing market for SUSE solutions as a service, being delivered via MSPs to meet evolving customer requirements. Bring together over 45 C-Level MSP delegates, the days provided very informative discussion around building managed services with SUSE technologies, and how this has accelerated business growth. With representatives from both newly on-boarded and established MSPs, there was some great interaction and sharing of how to leverage the SUSE One Partner Program to unlock new opportunities.

• The events were able to demonstrate how MSPs can monetize the SUSE Solution Stack and the benefits of partnering with SUSE. The event concluded with new opportunities for pipeline building and identifying joint customers as a focus for FY23.

Fedora Family / IBM

• One year after PHP 7.3, and as announced, PHP version 7.4.33 was the last official release of PHP 7.4

• It’s no secret that the CIO role has changed a lot over the years. It’s evolved from focusing on infrastructure, the help desk, and operational efficiency, and today is firmly rooted in technology, strategy, growth, and revenue. More of the C-suite and boards are looking at IT as a value creator rather than just as an operator.

• To support and propel IT as a value creator today and into the future, CIOs must hone and master new competencies. These non-negotiable skills for successful technology leaders help to fortify their strategic role in the organization, build strong, resilient teams, and cultivate loyal clients.

• Artificial intelligence (AI), continues to be a huge growth driver for companies of all sizes going through digital transformation, with IDC predicting that AI spending will reach $500B by 2023. AI is helping organizations identify new business models, increase revenue, and gain a competitive advantage.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The developers of the Orange Pi board are planning to release an Arch-based Linux distribution available for its hardware as an alternative to Orange Pi OS.

• The developers of the Orange Pi board have made available four operating systems supported for their hardware – Orange Pi OS, Ubuntu, Debian, and Manjaro. Soon, they will be adding another distribution into the mix, one based on Arch Linux.

• This version of Arch Linux will be user-friendly and highly compatible with open source drivers. Orange Pi OS (Arch) will ship with LibreOffice and will support most of the major Linux desktops, such as GNOME, KDE, and Xfce.

• Remember when consoles weren’t glorified PCs? The 1999 Sega Dreamcast remembers. Sega’s final console and introduced on “9/9/99 for $199″ before the Sony PlayStation 2 hype machine overwhelmed it, it came on the heels of the Saturn, which had sophisticated hardware but was difficult to program and Sega lost millions on manufacturing them. In some ways the Dreamcast is the Saturn done right: the same SuperH architecture, just way faster (instead of dual SH-2s at 28.6MHz, one big SH-4 at 200MHz), a more conventional GPU (rather than the odd 3D VDP of the Saturn which used quads instead of triangles), and a straightforward uniprocessor design instead of the Saturn’s sometimes rickety dual CPU bus. It was also much cheaper to manufacture even considering its use of the Yamaha GD-ROM format; nothing else supported it, but it stored up to a gigabyte and was backwards compatible with CDs.

• Hopefully by the time you read this, the fears over the bird app will have all (thankfully) come to nothing and service will resume as normal. In case it doesn’t though, Raspberry Pi has launched its own Mastodon server at raspberrypi.social, and we at The MagPi will likely follow suit. Otherwise, Raspberry Pi is also exploring braver, younger frontiers with videos on TikTok.

• Of course, the magazine will still be published, and I’m sure we’ll find you all again, wherever we end up.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• You might have read our previous blog VMware alternatives: discover open source where we discussed why you should consider open source-based infrastructure if you’re looking for VMware alternatives. We also held a webinar on the topic, where we received quite a lot of relevant audience questions that we wanted to elaborate on further. Read on for some of the most important considerations when thinking about migrating from VMware to Ubuntu-based open-source infrastructure.

• [...]

• Canonical has a wide range of infrastructure products that can be combined in different ways to deliver a full solution for your specific needs. It is difficult, and it would be misleading, for us to recommend one single option as a like-for-like alternative.

• If you are after a full private cloud on a mid to large scale, our Openstack solution might be the right one for you. If you are looking for a virtualisation layer, you might be interested in LXD, or an LXD-based micro cloud for a small-scale deployment. If you are interested in running cloud-native workloads our Kubernetes offering is the one to go with. Our Charmed Ceph solution might be suitable for your storage needs. There is no one-size, or rather a one-solution-fits-all approach.

• As described in previous articles (Introduction to PipeWire, Hands-on installation of PipeWire), the PipeWire daemon is responsible for running the graph execution. Nodes inside this graph can be implemented by any process that has access to the PipeWire socket that is used for IPC. PipeWire provides a shared object library that abstracts the communication with the main daemon and the communication with the modules that are required by the client.

• In this blog post, our goal will be to implement an audio source node that plays audio coming from a file, in a loop. This will be an excuse to see a lot of code, showing what the library API looks like and how it should be used. To introduce some dynamism to a rather static setup, we’ll rely on an input from a Wii Nunchuck, connected using a custom Linux driver and relying on the input event userspace API.

• Giving Tuesday is always a reminder to me to consider how to give back to open source projects, communities, and organizations. In 2012, GivingTuesday was created to encourage people to simply do good. “Since then, it has grown into a year-round global movement that inspires hundreds of millions of people to give, collaborate, and celebrate generosity.”

• When I think about all the ways I have benefited from “standing on the shoulder of giants,” both professionally and personally. I start to think about all the individuals and organizations that have made being part of the open source community such a rewarding experience. Many have used an open source project or joined an open source community and immediately benefited from the contributions of past and current members.

• When you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that many of the organizations listed below have volunteer opportunities, ways to get involved with their community, and simple things like sharing information about why you support the organization or joining a newsletter to stay updated. They offer a variety of ways to support them beyond just financial donations.

• The list below is not an endorsement from myself or my employer, it is a collection of organizations for you to consider as you look at groups to support and ways to donate time, money, expertise, and other skills you might offer. I would encourage you to do your own research before making a donation, particularly if you are looking for any tax deductions.

• CryptoTracker is a free open-source web-based cryptocurrency data tracker and monitor. You can install it on your local machine or self-host at your remote server.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• Around the last weekend I worked on several package updates. In the meantime I had to battle home infrastructure breakdown, as well as the realization that I had inadvertantly opened up my SMTP server as an open relay and had to do some fast infrastructure redesign

• Shadow DOM is a kind of retcon for the web. As I’ve written in the past, shadow DOM upends a lot of developer expectations and invalidates many tried-and-true techniques that worked fine in the pre-shadow DOM world. One potentially surprising example is ARIA.

• Quick recap: shadow DOM allows you to isolate parts of your DOM into encapsulated chunks – typically one per component. Meanwhile, ARIA is an accessibility primitive, which defines attributes like aria-labelledby and aria-describeddby that can reference other elements by their IDs.

• Do you see the problem yet? If not, I don’t blame you ‒ this is a tricky intersection of various web technologies. Unfortunately though, if you want to use shadow DOM without breaking accessibility, then this is one of the things you will have to grapple with. So let’s dive in.

FSFE

• We already blogged about the amateur sysadmins at FSFE and their exposure of members’ financial data.

• In a fresh leak, we reveal that Amandie “Cryptie” Jambert, who works at CNIL as a privacy specialist, was formally responsible for the FSFE GDPR compliance (or lack thereof).

• FSFE failed to report the breaches to the members and donors. The GDPR requires mandatory reporting of breaches.

• FSFE has been deliberately publishing the names of volunteers in a defamatory context. FSFE created the growing scandal of leaks and accusations, including the Outreachy grooming scandal. This outcome is the very opposite of what CNIL and the GDPR stands for.

Programming/Development

• It’s not unusual for a Firefox test to have to wait for various things such as a tab loading. But recently I needed to write a test that loaded a content tab with a web worker and wait for that before observing the result in a different tab. I am writing this for my own reference in the future, and if it helps someone else, that’s extra good. But I don’t think it will be of much interest if you don’t work on Firefox as the problem I’m solving won’t be relevant and the APIs won’t be familiar.

• I don’t think of myself as a JavaScript programmer – I’m learning what I need to know when I need to know it, but mainly to write tests. So I’m not sure I’ll pitch this article at any particular level of JS knowledge, sorry.

• Most computer commands consist of two parts: The command and arguments. The command is the program meant to be executed, while the arguments might be command options or user input. Without this structure, a user would have to edit the command’s code just to change the data that the command processes. Imagine rewriting the printf command just to get your computer to greet you with a “hello world” message. Arguments are vital to interactive computing, and the Lua programming language provides the {…​} expression to encapsulate varargs given at the time of launching a Lua script.

• [...]

• Finally, in the go section, parse the index and values in the args variable (the arguments provided by the user at launch). In this sample code, the first for loop just prints each index and value for clarity.

• The second for loop uses the index to examine the first argument, which is assumed to be an option. The only valid option in this sample code is –say. If the loop finds the string –say, it calls the echo function, and the index of the current argument plus 1 (the next argument) is provided as the function parameter.

• In the seminal book Accelerate, Forsgren and her co-authors provide empirical evidence that Continuous Delivery has a positive impact on the performance of software development organisations. If organisations neglect some of the principles and practices of Continuous Delivery, their performance will suffer. They will reach the point where simple changes will take ages to implement. Not so with Continuous Delivery.

• A few weeks ago I was digging into a pretty complex issue that was only affecting less than 1% of users in the field with an application. With a constant mix of emotions working with React Native I appreciate how I can normally go all the way to the source during an investigation.

• When you want to understand what a legacy program you’re working on is supposed to do, what’s your first instinct? Often it’s to look at the code.

• But unfortunately legacy code is often so convoluted and inscrutable that it’s virtually impossible to tell what the code is supposed to do just by looking at it.

• In these cases it may seem that you’re out of luck. But fortunately you’re not.

• This thought was pressed into my mind as I looked over all that I had created. Facing the inevitable end of one life chapter as it transitions into a new one, I recognized one possible way to improve our individual impact through documentation. Software and product documentation are classified as technical writing. While they differ in scope, they share a connection to other forms of written works like novels and newspapers; they are collections of a commonly understood, codified language meant to convey a meaning to other humans. The goal of writing yourself into obsolescence is not to create content for content’s sake. The goal is to create information pathways that leave behind a guiding light for those who come after us. The goal is to create some form of media or content that communicates information of value to someone else (even including your future self).

Standards/Consortia

• Public administrations are often described as very big ships that need time to move. My vision is rather one of a diverse fleet of boats navigating together, with agility, around all obstacles along the way. What facilitates this is interoperability.

Leftovers

• How did we get here? We always knew that Amazon didn’t care about its suppliers, but being an Amazon customer has historically been a great deal – lots of selection, low prices, and a generous returns policy. How could “Earth’s most customer-centric” company become such a bad place to shop?

• The answer is in Amazon’s $31b “ad” business. Amazon touts this widely, and analysts repeat it without any critical interrogation, proclaiming that Amazon is catching up with the Googbook ad-tech duopoly. But nearly all of that “ad” business isn’t ads at all – it’s payola.

• Weaving is one of the oldest crafts in the world, and was also among the first to be automated: the Industrial Revolution was in large part driven by developments in loom technology. [Roger de Meester] decided to recreate that part of the industry’s history, in a way, by building his own desktop-sized, fully automatic loom. After a long career in the textiles industry he’s quite the expert when it comes to weaving, and as you’ll see he’s also an expert machine builder.

Science

• Driving the news: Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano — located on the Big Island — began erupting late Sunday night, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

Hardware

• The Intel answer is that while Intel won’t say that you have to have an overclockable K-series Core desktop CPU in order to use XMP, all of their examples of qualified DIMMs and systems with desktop CPUs use overclockable ones as far as I can see. Intel certainly wants you to buy a K-series Core i5/i7/i9 CPU if you want to use XMP and it will clearly do quite a lot to nudge you that way without actually saying anything untrue that could get it in trouble with authorities (such as ‘on desktop CPUs, you must have a K-series overclockable CPU’, which is likely false today since Intel isn’t actually saying that).

• Few CPUs have had the long-lasting influence that the 8086 did. It is hard to believe that when your modern desktop computer boots, it probably thinks it is an 8086 from 1978 until some software gooses it into a more modern state. When [Ken] was examining an 8086 die, however, he noticed that part of the die didn’t look like the rest. Turns out, Intel had a bug in the original version of the 8086. In those days you couldn’t patch the microcode. It was more like a PC board — you had to change the layout and make a new one to fix it.

• For those who model CAD models regularly, a pair of calipers is essential as it allows reasonably accurate measurements to fit a specific part. However, [Jason Harris] is taking that concept to the next level with a signed distance function-based CAD tool, SDFX.

• A modchip is a small PCB that mounts directly on a larger board, tapping into points on that board to make it do something it wasn’t meant to do. We’ve typically seen modchips used with gaming consoles of yore, bypassing DRM protections in a way that a software hacks couldn’t quite do. As software complexity and therefore attack surface increased on newer consoles, software hacks have taken the stage. However, on more integrated pieces of hardware, we’ll still want to return to the old methods – and that’s what this modchip-based hack of a Starlink terminal brings us.

• There’s a plethora of mini PCs on the market, but due to their size, the ports are often placed on several sides which may make cable management troublesome. The JX1 mini PC, equipped with an Intel Celeron N5105 Jasper Lake processor, does not have this issue since all ports are accessible on the rear panel.

• The computer ships with 8GB RAM, up to 256GB SSD, and the rear panel comes with two USB Type-C port, one for power only, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, an HDMI ports, and three USB 3.0 ports. You’ll still find the power button on the front panel, and wireless connectivity is supported through a WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 module

• Allwinner V3LP is a single-core Cortex-A7 processor for dual-camera systems with the exact same specifications as the Allwinner V3S processor introduced in 2016, except it should be more power efficient with a lower DDR operating voltage of 1.5V instead of 1.8V.

• Sochip explains that procuring the integrated DDR2 in the Allwinner V3s design is challenging, so Allwinner has replaced the memory in the pin-to-pin compatible Allwinner V3LP with more broadly available and lower power RAM.

• Want to hack on brand new 8-bit 1980s hardware? Until recently you needed a time machine, or deep pockets to do this. All that has recently changed with the NABU PC. A retro machine that can be bought brand new for $59.99, (plus shipping) no time machine needed.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Registering false dates of birth: Findings from the study would suggest that around 93% of all 11–17-year-olds in the UK have a personal account with one or more of the major social media platforms. With over five million people in the UK aged between 11-17, each with an average of around three social media accounts, this age group is estimated to hold over 15 million social media accounts. Our findings would suggest that on at least 11% of these accounts, children are registered with a date of birth that suggests they’re 18 or older, implying that over 1.6 million social media accounts held by children in the UK are falsely registered with an adult age. Our report also found that 86% of 11–12-year-olds have their own account on at least one social media platform. Since they fall below the minimum age of registration (13) on social media, their submitted date of birth almost certainly signifies they’re older than they actually are.

• Children are signing up to social media at an increasingly young age, the study found. Some 67% of accounts held by 11 to 12 year olds – younger than the minimum age of registration – were set up between school years one and seven, whereas just 21% of the accounts held by 13 to 17 year olds were set up in the same period.

• Some 75% of accounts were set up by a child without a parent or guardian’s supervision, while 94% of those who access social media do so through devices only they use.

• The sad truth is: TikTok is just mimicking what social media in the West looks like. Instagram, Youtube, and Facebook all have the same toxic business model: Maximizing reach to maximize ad revenue. Social media in the West is hooked on advertising, and there is no plan B. Meta tried e-commerce with live shopping — and failed. Elon Musk is trying to sell blue check marks for US$8 a month — but nobody seems to be buying. Google never really tried to diversify. Most of the Western Internet still is a one-trick pony. Good luck pushing educational content on a service built on such a model.

• Social media firms will be forced to bar underaged children or face multi-million pound fines under a new law to protect them from harm online.

• The Government will unveil the revamped Online Safety Bill on Tuesday, which will compel companies by law to publish how they enforce age limits so parents, as well as the watchdog Ofcom, can test their credibility.

• The phrase “do your own research” or “DYOR” has long been a fixture in conspiracy theory circles. During the height of the pandemic, you might have seen Halloween gravestone decorations engraved with “I did my own research” or photos of a scientist in a lab juxtaposed against some guy looking at his phone. The phrase has been coopted by anti-vaxxers and talking heads like Alex Jones, who have evangelized taking means into your own hands rather than following the advice of trained and certified scientific experts.

• Before the pandemic, a frequent topic of this blog was the documentation of how rank quackery was being “integrated” into medicine to produce an unholy fusion dubbed “integrative medicine” or “integrative health” by its advocates. Rebranded from its previous name, “complementary and alternative medicine”—with the pithy acronym CAM, which was tossed aside because CAM adherents didn’t want the nostrums that they added to science-based medicine to be described as “alternative”—”integrative medicine” falsely promised patients the “best of both worlds,” the assumption being that there was a “best” of unscientific medicine based largely on religious prescientific understandings of how the body works and what causes disease to “integrate” into science-based medicine. Then the pandemic hit, and blogging about COVID-19 seemed to push nearly every other topic aside (for me, at least). However, just because I haven’t been paying as much attention as I used to do to the infiltration of what I used to like to call quackademic medicine into medical academia and then into community medical centers doesn’t mean that it didn’t continue during the pandemic, and not just in the form of claiming that various forms of alternative medicine could be used to treat or prevent COVID-19.

• One of the challenges of diagnosing diseases is identifying them early. At this stage, signs may be vague or confusing, or difficult to identify. Early diagnosis is often tied to the best possible treatment outcomes, so there’s plenty of incentives to improve methods in this way.

• Over the years, Marsha Farmer had learned what to look for. As she drove the back roads of rural Alabama, she kept an eye out for dilapidated homes and trailers with wheelchair ramps. Some days, she’d ride the one-car ferry across the river to Lower Peach Tree and other secluded hamlets where a few houses lacked running water and bare soil was visible beneath the floorboards. Other times, she’d scan church prayer lists for the names of families with ailing members.

• Farmer was selling hospice, which, strictly speaking, is for the dying. To qualify, patients must agree to forgo curative care and be certified by doctors as having less than six months to live. But at AseraCare, a national chain where Farmer worked, she solicited recruits regardless of whether they were near death. She canvassed birthday parties at housing projects and went door to door promoting the program to loggers and textile workers. She sent colleagues to cadge rides on the Meals on Wheels van or to chat up veterans at the American Legion bar. “We’d find run-down places where people were more on the poverty line,” she told me. “You’re looking for uneducated people, if you will, because you’re able to provide something to them and meet a need.”

• Houstonians voiced outrage Monday after authorities took six hours to issue a boil water advisory to more than 2.2 million residents of Texas’ largest city—and the nation’s fourth-biggest—in the wake of a power outage at a purification plant.

• “I learned about the boil water notice in Houston from a monkey.”

Security

• A recent scoop by Reuters revealed that mobile apps for the U.S. Army and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were integrating software that sends visitor data to a Russian company called Pushwoosh, which claims to be based in the United States. But that story omitted an important historical detail about Pushwoosh: In 2013, one of its developers admitted to authoring the Pincer Trojan, malware designed to surreptitiously intercept and forward text messages from Android mobile devices.

• The ClamAV 1.0.0 feature release is now stable and available for download on ClamAV.net or through Docker Hub.

• ClamAV 1.0.0 includes the following improvements and changes.

• Yeah, again, because this bug was supposed to be fixed.

Privacy/Surveillance

• MEP Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) comments on the text:

• “The declaration promises ‘effective protection of communications against access by unauthorised third parties’ and protection against illegal surveillance. The promise to promote interoperability, transparency, open technologies and standards is also a positive achievement. However, the plans for indiscriminate scanning of private communications („chat control“) and the blanket data retention laws in force in many European countries call into question the credibility of the agreed commitments. [...]

Defence/Aggression

• When the Afghan republic collapsed last year, so too did its U.S.-backed military. Overnight, tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers lost their jobs and suddenly found themselves living under the thumb of those they spent two decades fighting.

• Recently, an agent of the Department of Homeland Security called me and started asking questions about a childhood acquaintance being investigated for extremism. I put him off. My feelings about this were, to say the least, complex. As a military spouse of 10 years and someone who has long written about governmental abuses of power, I wanted to cooperate with efforts to root out hate. However, I also feared that my involvement might spark some kind of retaliation.

• By ScheerPost Staff ScheerPost’s Diego Ramos and Max Jones talk to journalist Alex Rubinstein about his recent work. Alex is an investigative journalist whose work has appeared in publications like The Grayzone and MintPress News. He has written extensively and broken news about the international effects of neoliberalism and regime change policies of the United […]

• Officials are unhappy with the Inflation Reduction Act and its subsidies that could drive investment out of Europe.

• If the US or Israel were to attack the main Iranian nuclear facility producing weapons-grade nuclear fuel, Iran would most likely retaliate by using its drone and missile arsenal to close the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf, through which tankers daily carry almost a fifth of the world’s oil and gas.

• The confrontation escalated sharply this week when Iran announced that it intended to make near bomb-grade nuclear fuel at its Fordow plant, located inside a mountain to protect it from bomb and missile attack. Iran decided to ramp up its nuclear programme after the failure of talks to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal agreed in 2015 by President Barack Obama but denounced and dropped three years later by President Donald Trump.

• Moscow has canceled a planned meeting of the New START treaty’s bilateral consultative commission, which was scheduled to begin tomorrow in Cairo, running from November 29 to December 6. Officials from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow told the newspaper Kommersant, “The Russian side informed the United States that Russia has unilaterally postponed the meeting and stated that it would propose new dates.” Russia’s Foreign Ministry also confirmed this information, but it provided no explanation.

• By Mitchell Plitnick / Mondoweiss At the beginning of November, when Israel and the United States held elections within days of each other, it seemed clear that the pull in opposite directions embodied in the disappointing showing for the American far-right and the strong showing for their Israeli counterparts portended tension in the “unshakeable” alliance […]

• The FSB claims to have prevented “preparations for a series of terrorist attacks” on crowded places in the Kremlin annexed part of the Zaporizhzhia region.

• The Biden administration is considering an offer from military-industrial complex giant Boeing to supply Ukraine with long-range precision-guided bombs capable of striking targets up to nearly 100 miles away, Reuters reported Monday.

• The Pentagon is reviewing Boeing’s proposal to send Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDB)—manufactured jointly with Sweden’s SAAB—to Ukrainian forces, a move that would enable them to hit targets deep behind enemy lines as they fight to repel invading Russian troops.

• In an interview with RBC-Ukraine, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said power outages in Kyiv may continue until the spring.

• In November, conscripts and their families began complaining about their inability to access the debt relief which was promised to them by the Russian government. Kommersant noticed an increase in references to the “unfair approach” of banks on the forum Banki.ru.

• New information has emerged about Vladimir Putin’s early professional life as a KGB officer. A St. Petersburg-based historian discovered a document which shows that Putin participated in investigating one of the first instances of protest art in the USSR. In 1976, at age 23, Putin helped to search the home of an artist who painted the slogan “You may crucify freedom, but the human soul knows no shackles!” on the wall of St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress. Two artists served time in prison for the action, but the slogan – and Putin – live on.

• Russian service members, who were held in basements for two weeks after they refused to fight in Ukraine, have demanded that the Russian Investigative Committee open a criminal case concerning unlawful imprisonment, kidnapping, and abuse of power, reports Pavel Chikov, head of the human rights group Agora.

• The human rights organization Memorial called journalist Ivan Safronov, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison on treason charges, a political prisoner.

• Yulia Boiko, the widow of the deputy head of Russia’s Pacific Higher Naval School, Colonel Vadim Boiko, wrote an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In it, she asked Putin to oversee the investigation into her husband’s death, which media outlets have reported was by suicide.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Progressive Congressman Jesús “Chuy” García on Monday filed his nominating petitions for mayor of Chicago, submitting signatures from nearly 50,000 residents of Illinois’ biggest city.

• “I’m proud to officially start our journey towards a safer, more prosperous Chicago for all.”

Environment

• Surprisingly, it is a real possibility. As climate change worsens, the threats against coffee plants are rising, meaning one day many species of coffee could be extinct in the wild. Drought, floods, heatwaves and the spread of pathogens like fungus and viruses are already making it more difficult for coffee to grow in some regions. If this trend continues, one of humans’ favorite substances may become scarce and extremely expensive, with some estimates warning that 50 percent of the land used to grow coffee will be unproductive by 2050.

• As Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers have spent the past few days taking advantage of deals for holiday gifts, climate activists and reporters worldwide have highlighted the negative impact that the clothing industry—particularly fast fashion—has on the planet.

• “The ‘fast fashion’ model we’re in is an endless cycle of companies forcing people to spend more money and sell more products—all while they make huge profits off their exploitation.”

• In March, there was a collective cheer when United Nations member states adopted a historic resolution to end plastic pollution during the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi. Governments agreed to start work on a global, legally binding agreement that addresses the full lifecycle of plastic and that will come into effect in 2024. The decision has been called ambitious, revolutionary, and historic.

• As climate Sahrawi activists in occupied Western Sahara accuse Morocco of greenwashing, the Spanish Film Academy, the Spanish equivalent to the Oscars, has just given its social justice award to the Western Sahara International Film Festival and its film school. We feature our interview at the U.N. climate summit with Mahfud Bechri, who explains how Morocco sells the natural resources and wealth of Western Sahara without the consent of the Sahrawi people as part of an effort to greenwash its military occupation of Western Sahara, and his larger campaign to demand companies end complicity with the occupation. The new social justice award from the Spanish Film Academy recognizes how Spanish support for the Moroccan occupation has led to “a complete media blockade” of the conflict, says María Carrión, executive director of FiSahara, the Western Sahara International Film Festival.

• Since the end of COP27 in Egypt, it’s important to remark at the number of oil lobbyists who flocked to the desert oasis of Sharm El Sheikh. It’s hard to imagine how an international climate conference could allow such a thing. A meeting of the nations like COP seems important on paper, but in practice, the event has raised multiple questions on the ethics of a performative “green” space. Beyond the “Green Zone”‒where academia, youth groups, businesses, and artists are allowed to “participate” in the conference‒lies the “Blue Zone,” where powerful heads of state in conjunction with the United Nations engage in substantive negotiations.

• For example, the tenth (10th) meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity was held in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan from October 18-29, 2010. More than 13,000 delegates from around the world. The Aichi targets were designed to help, or in the best of cases, save or revive biodiversity.

• Zoom forward twelve years to November 11th 2022: A news release by Climate Change News announces the upcoming COP15 biodiversity conference scheduled for Montreal December 7-19, 2022: “In the past decade, countries agreed to a ten-year plan called the Aichi targets, aimed at halting biodiversity loss. A UN summary report shows countries failed to meet a single one of those targets.” (Source: UN Nature Pact Nears Its ‘Copenhagen or Paris’ Moment, Climate Change News Nov. 11, 2022)

Energy

• Another [cryptocurrency] company has fallen, as contagion from the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX spreads across the industry: BlockFi says it has filed for bankruptcy.

• BlockFi was one of a handful of companies FTX bailed out in recent months, and its prospects worsened considerably as FTX imploded.

• Announcing its plans to file for Chapter 11 reorganization in New Jersey, where the company is based, BlockFi noted FTX’s own bankruptcy proceedings will lead to delays.

• But that agreement meant that BlockFi was financially entangled with FTX, and its stability was thrust into uncertainty this month after a series of revelations about corporate missteps and suspicious management at FTX. A few days after the exchange collapsed, BlockFi suspended withdrawals, explaining that it had “significant exposure” to FTX, including undrawn amounts from the credit line and assets held on the FTX platform.

• Hong Kong-based digital asset company Amber Group posted a statement announcing the death of Tiantian Kullander, who passed away unexpectedly in his sleep on November 23, 2022.

• The statement revealed that Kullander, a former Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs trader affectionately known as “TT”, “unexpectedly” died in his sleep. It did not share any other details.

• Earlier this year, the start-up reached a staggering $3 billion valuation after scoring a $200 million funding round.

• Tiantian Kullander, the former Morgan Stanley trader who co-founded digital-asset trading platform Amber Group, has died. He was 30.b

• The blockchain technology behind cryptocurrency was supposed to make events like this a thing of the past. But FTX’s business was to serve as a gateway into (and out of) cryptocurrency. That business still depends on humans to serve as honest gatekeepers. And we’ve seen over and over that humans can’t resist the main temptation that comes with this role: to use their customers’ money for their own purposes.

• The FTX collapse could be the start of a wave of cryptocurrency exchange failures. Because these exchanges are largely unregulated, they don’t face the same rules placed on other exchanges to keep their customers’ money safe. And there’s nobody looking over the shoulders of the exchange managers to keep them honest. Given that — and given my experience in studying financial market development and regulation — I think it’s pretty likely that other firms are doing what FTX did with its customers’ money, and that some of them will blow up in the same way, especially now that [cryptocurrency] investors are nervous and looking for signs of trouble.

• Now that the Ponzi has collapsed, the investors who trusted him look to be out of luck. And, of course there is no money for the philanthropies that he supported, many of which will are now struggling because they won’t get contributions they had been counting on.

• That all looks pretty reprehensible, but maybe that’s the point. See, Sam Bankman-Fried was so committed to his philosophy of effective philanthropy that he was prepared to make himself appear to be the epitome of a despicable human being, and spend many years in prison, all to teach us that finance is a wasteful cesspool that needs to be reined in for the good of humanity. And, the place to start is his particular corner of the cesspool: crypto.

Wildlife/Nature

• Because Australia’s efforts to protect the Great Barrier Reef from damages wrought by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, pollution, and overfishing are falling short, the planet’s largest coral reef system should be placed on a list of World Heritage sites considered “in danger,” a pair of experts said Monday.

• “Despite the unparalleled science and management efforts” made by Australia in recent years, the Great Barrier Reef is “significantly impacted by climate change factors,” Eleanor Carter of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Hans Thulstrup of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) wrote in a report.

Overpopulation

Finance

• Over a half-century ago, back in the mid-1960s, books about poverty abounded. But publishers paid relatively little attention to wealth’s concentration. A generation earlier, Americans had obsessed about grand private fortunes. By late mid-century, that obsession no longer excited either the media or the public.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Qatar’s beIN group was caught in the crosshairs of a bitter political dispute between Riyadh and Doha in recent years. Saudi Arabia in 2017 led a group of four Arab countries in imposing a boycott on Qatar over its support for political Islamists, ties with Iran and its funding of Al Jazeera, a satellite news channel that has at times harshly criticized other Gulf Arab governments.

• [...]

• The Saudi government is believed to hold a controlling stake in MBC Group after a series of arrests in 2017 ordered by Prince Mohammed over corruption allegations that helped him centralize power in the kingdom.

• The email below also demonstrates the manner in which at least one member of the women’s clique, Amaya Rodrigo, was trying to convince Ted’s date that Ted might be dangerous. This is a hideous example of backstabbing and sabotage.

• After much thought, I’m making @mwl@io.mwl.io my main fediverse/Mastodon account. There’s no need to burden my pals over at bsd.network with moderating me or the attention I attract. I also don’t care if government accounts follow my business posts. Heck, as Terry Pratchett said, I will happily offer special rates for governments!

• Over on Mastodon, there are many people who enjoy not being in the grip of software like Facebook or Twitter that single-mindedly tries to maximize “engagement”, which means the amount of time you stare at the screen so they can show you ads. These algorithms don’t care what they’re showing you and if it turns out that showing you exclusively stories vilifying or praising Donald Trump (depending) maximizes engagement, then that’s what you’ll see. So the chant over there is “No algorithms on Mastodon!” This chant is wrong, and the discussion around it teaches us that we need clarity on what algorithms are, what moral weight they can carry, and whether they can be avoided. (Spoiler: They can’t.)

• In one such opinion piece, appearing recently here in Quillette, Angel Eduardo disagreed with Musk’s characterization of Twitter. In “Twitter is Not the Town Square,” Eduardo declared that “No matter what we think, want, or feel, Twitter is not, has never been, and likely can never be a public square.” His argument was that because Twitter is a private company, it “can have whatever rules it likes—and it can apply them with whatever level of consistency it likes.” A social media company is a business, he says, and businesses don’t come to have obligations simply because of how we use them or what we’ve decided they’re for.

• The commission’s action seeks to prevent Chinese tech companies deemed to be national security threats – such as Huawei and ZTE – from gathering data on and surveilling American citizens. The Chinese Communist government can force, under law, private companies to hand over data from their products, thus putting Americans at risk, experts and government officials have said.

• The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said it has adopted rules banning communications equipment that are “deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to national security from being authorised for importation or sale in the U.S.”. The new rules adopt the Bipartisan Secure Equipment Act of 2021, signed into law by President Biden last November, requiring the Commission to adopt such rules.

• Racist language and misinformation have reportedly surged on Twitter since Musk’s acquisition, and left-leaning watchdog Media Matters for America found that 50 of Twitter’s leading 100 advertisers appear to have halted their work with the site.

• Millions of people use Apple’s iPhones to access the Twitter app, which is downloaded through the tech giant’s App Store. The social network has around 260 million active users.

• Apple has previously blocked or delayed updates to other apps over safety concerns, such as by banning rival social network Parler last year.

• The tech giant can also choose to block companies from issuing updates to their apps if they break the terms of its iPhone store, such as by trying to avoid paying fees to Apple.

• Something like that happens to me at the broader scale when I think of Canada’s foreign policy: big words but mean actions. What great eloquence we get from the prime minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers! The government of Canada presents itself – to itself, to its people, to the world, as great defenders of human rights, great lover of humanity, of law and order, of humanitarian actions.  And yet, what shabby, incongruous, filthy foreign policies it has!

• Canada’s role in Libya, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, has not been anything to boast about. Furthermore, Canada has voted against every UN resolution upholding Palestinian rights, and its support for Saudi Arabia -even when it is chopping up journalists- extends to making arms deals with them.[i]  And in Latin America, Canada has been responsible for outrages in Haiti, Honduras, in Añez’s Bolivia, in Bolsonaro’s Brazil…and for 20 years of vile persecution of the beleaguered Venezuela, nation that has done no wrong to Canada or any Canadians.  Hence Ottawa’s silence on the kidnapping by the USA of the Venezuelan ambassador, Alex Saab.

• The Priorities of the United Nations are peace, development and human rights.  Most importantly, the world community must demand peace and condemn propaganda for war, which is already prohibited in article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

• Art. 2(3) of the UN Charter already obliges all States to settle disputes by peaceful means.  This obligation to negotiate means good faith dialogue with the goal to reach a compromise, a quid pro quo.  There is no right to intransigence in the UN Charter. If one party refuses to talk, it is violating article 2(3) and actually provoking the other to the use of force.  Moreover, this constitutes a potential threat to international peace and security for purposes of article 39 of the UN Charter. It is bad faith in contravention of article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

• Pro-democracy advocates are expected to sue a rural Arizona county after a pair of GOP officials on Monday refused to certify this month’s electoral outcomes despite a complete lack of evidence of miscounting.

• Heeding the calls of former President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans who have repeatedly lied about voter fraud and advocated for rejecting the popular will, the Cochise County Board of Supervisors declined to certify the results of the November 8 midterm elections in which Democratic candidates won races for governor, secretary of state, and state attorney general.

• Pressure is growing for Missouri to stop the execution of Kevin Johnson set for Tuesday. At a hearing Monday before Missouri’s Supreme Court, a special prosecutor will request a stay in order to fully investigate how the case was tainted by racism. Meanwhile, Johnson’s 19-year-old daughter has been barred from witnessing his lethal injection because she is under 21. “We understand that the death penalty does not solve anything,” says Michelle Smith, co-director of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, who says Johnson is being “punished more severely” because of his race. Lawmakers are also urging Missouri’s governor to grant Johnson clemency.

• After losing the House to Republicans, Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for the two years of gridlock ahead.

• The Republican Party that will take narrow control of the House of Representatives in January 2023 has gone through a dramatic transformation in the two years since Donald Trump and his allies attempted a violent coup to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The party that was once torn over how to respond to Trump’s assault on democratic norms is no more. It was replaced in 2022 by one that did not merely tolerate Trump’s election denialism but embraced it by nominating January 6 insurrectionists and apologists for congressional and statewide posts—a strategy so noxious that it cost Republicans key US Senate contests and the “red wave” GOP strategists were counting on. But postelection pundits who imagine that the party will do an about-face and suddenly adopt a more politically rational course are sorely mistaken. The new Republican Party has a base—and many leaders—that does not merely fall for Trump’s lies. Republican partisans are increasingly looking beyond the scandal-plagued former president and taking inspiration from right-wing European nationalist leaders with politics rooted in a fascist sensibility that employs racism, xenophobia, and a win-at-any-cost approach to elections and governing. This transformed Republican Party will exploit its control of the House and state posts for a 2024 presidential election in which Trump and a rising generation of ruthless partisans will plot a return to unitary power—with a vision that is dramatically more authoritarian than anything seen in the 45th president’s first term.1

• An analysis released Monday by NPR details what one rights advocacy group called the Republican Party’s “obsession” with curtailing the rights of transgender people, with U.S. state legislators proposing more than 300 pieces of legislation targeting the community over the past two years.

• Lawmakers in every region of the United States have put forward a total of 306 anti-trans bills since 2020, with 86% of the bills focusing on transgender youths.

• Talking of depths, the international mining community came into town last week to attend a conference in the City of London. I don’t know what the collective noun for miners should be but given the fact that they are pretty much banished as a topic from certain quarters of polite society these days, an ‘underground’ of miners might work. Indeed, so toxic is mining’s image that the Red Cross won’t take its money anymore, and many of the academic institutes which used to train people in this field have had to shut down. Those remaining — for example, Camborne School of Mines and Royal School of Mines at Imperial College here in London — no longer offer mining or petroleum engineering degrees. Incredibly, London University has banned all mining and oil companies from campus recruitment events. But maybe what some people learn at these places is over-rated, anyway. One very good English friend of mine tells me of a successful miner he knows who never listens to his geologists and finds ore using a jade staff like a water diviner. This is the same friend who called it right by saying the establishment in this country would soon be exploring new ways back into Europe because the entire economy was going down the one-seater otherwise. We have all heard of data mining — as everyone knows, Brexit had data written all over it — so maybe we should be mining asteroids instead.

• It is disheartening for some of us living here in London to witness the persistent disgruntlement. It hangs in the air like the prospect of an over-expensive Christmas. It is rather like watching a city which has had it so good for so long that it no longer knows what to do with itself. Traditionally, there was always stoicism to the English character. Now this feels more like belligerence or bloody-mindedness. This of course just as the investigation into whether Boris Johnson misled parliament or not over partygate was delayed last week after what was described as a hold up with Downing Street evidence. Not only that, Johnson was on the attack against Germany, as if taking the crazy Churchill stuff one or two marching steps too far. (Memo to Johnson: you are no longer in power.) Tally that if you can with the fact one of Johnson’s former Conservative county councillors quit last week after photos emerged of the man in uniform at an openly fascist group. Just as one lot continue to grow extreme, however, another will find it harder in the face of what my friend predicted to defend Brexit at all, and I am not just thinking of the recent YouGov poll revealing that only 32% of Brits now believe it was right to leave Europe and 56% think it was wrong. Perhaps tellingly, fewer cars than normal here in London during a World Cup have been flying England flags. As for our immigration numbers on Brexit’s so-called watch, these show net figures of a record 504,000 in the year to June.

• The man who coined the term “virtual reality” and helped create Web 2.0, Jaron Lanier, recently told a reporter for The Guardian there’s an aspect to the internet that could endanger the literal survival of humanity as a species. It’s an amazing story, and I believe he’s 100% right.

• There’s this narrative out there that “it has been decided” that social media is “bad for children” and that it is such a big danger that “regulation is needed.” A few months ago, we wrote about a Berkeley professor who claimed that this was settled and that there was “no longer any question as to the nature of the harm to children around the globe.” In that post we went through all of the linked research showing it proved nothing of the sort.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Wagner was referring to the thaub, the traditional white full-length robes with long sleeves worn by many men in the region.

• Wagner’s comments led to furious reactions on social media.

• Then came Australia’s own uniquely celluloid performance: videos from the players claiming sympathy with the various efforts made by Qatar in improving the record on human rights in various areas yet frowning about the fact that more could be done.

• From the moment the first ball was kicked, even these feeble efforts were bound to be found wanting. FIFA President Gianni Infantino made his position clear from the outset, playing the role of defender of the Qatari state and mocking detractors for obsessing with such niggling things as human rights.

• Unprecedented protests have erupted in multiple Chinese cities over President Xi Jinping’s strict zero-COVID policies, which have resulted in extended strict lockdowns across the country. The protests were triggered by a deadly fire Thursday at an apartment building in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, where local COVID restrictions reportedly prevented firefighters from reaching the trapped residents. This comes as hundreds of workers at the world’s largest iPhone factory, Foxconn, clashed last week with police over restrictions that have forced many workers to live at the factory. “China now for three years has seen a level of lockdown that is simply inconceivable,” says Cornell labor scholar Eli Friedman, who calls the cross-class, cross-ethnic protests a “movement against surveillance.” Friedman says although China enforces the country’s COVID restrictions, top U.S. corporations like Apple and Tesla are implicated in upholding the closed-loop management system at Foxconn and other Chinese manufacturers.

• Numerous Chinese-language accounts, some dormant for months or years, came to life early Sunday and started spamming the service with links to escort services and other adult offerings alongside city names.

• The result: For hours, anyone searching for posts from those cities and using the Chinese names for the locations would see pages and pages of useless tweets instead of information about the daring protests as they escalated to include calls for Communist Party leaders to resign.

• Search any major Chinese city on Twitter, and you will see a cascade of spam tweets showing porn, escort services, and gambling content that are published every few seconds, making it impossible to get any legitimate results.

• There has been a “significant uptick” in these tweets over the last three days, according to a China-focused data analyst. The surge in such bot content coincides with an unprecedented wave of protests that have swept across major Chinese cities and universities over the weekend.

• Police have been asking people for their phones to check if they had virtual private networks (VPNs) and the Telegram app, which has been used by weekend protesters, residents and social media users said. VPNs are illegal for most people in China, while the Telegram app is blocked from China’s internet.

• According to the plan, any interaction with any Western institutions and media, including social media, will be considered cooperation and criminalized under the title of “corruption on earth” a charge — often leveled in cases allegedly involving espionage or attempts to overthrow the government — that is punishable by death.

• Chinese authorities on Monday appeared to be moving to frame a wave of nationwide anti-lockdown protests at the weekend as the work of “hostile foreign forces,” with university students ordered to leave campus and go back to their hometowns aboard specially arranged train services, state media and a university source said on Monday.

• “In mainland China, it is more easy to organise such protests than in Hong Kong. This is sad… I am just doing what I can do,” he said.

• The unrest triggered by a deadly fire in the city of Urumqi last week sputtered Monday night, with Beijing deploying a heavy police presence to clamp down on protests. Cities including Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing and elsewhere saw fewer demonstrations, while censorship of protest-related discussions ramped up across social media platforms that had been used to vent public anger.

• Throughout 2021, the #KeepItOn coalition witnessed governments in Uganda, Zambia, Russia, Niger, and the Republic of the Congo hit the kill switch during elections, disconnecting millions of people from the internet — and their civic rights.

• When governments shut down the internet during elections, they rob people of their opportunity to participate in the democratic process. Without a fair, open, accessible internet, people — from voters to monitors, journalists to political opponents — cannot fully exercise their rights to access information, communicate, and hold authorities accountable for their actions.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• This group of editors and publishers, all of whom had worked with Assange, felt the need to publicly criticize his conduct in 2011 when unredacted copies of the cables were released, and some of us are concerned about the allegations in the indictment that he attempted to aid in computer intrusion of a classified database. But we come together now to express our grave concerns about the continued prosecution of Julian Assange for obtaining and publishing classified materials.

• Poet Luis García Montero, director of the Cervantes Institute and columnist for infoLibre, spoke on a large screen that dominated the stage. “We live in a world in which it is increasingly essential to defend the independence of journalism. We cannot commit ourselves to being in possession of the truth, but we can commit ourselves not to lie,” concluded and thanked the Almudena Grandes Award for the defense of the right to information, awarded to Julian Assange.

• This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter. Become a monthly paid subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism.In August, a lawsuit against the CIA, former CIA director Mike Pompeo, UC Global, and UC Global director David Morales was filed that alleged Americans who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange when he was living in the Ecuador embassy had their privacy rights violated.Attorney Richard Roth filed a complaint on behalf of two attorneys, Deborah Hrbek and Margaret Ratner-Kunstler, and two journalists, Charles Glass and John Goetz. They say they were spied upon by the CIA-backed operation when they met with Assange.The lawsuit will be deliberated over in a United States court in the Southern District of New York. It was assigned to Judge John Koeltl.Kevin Gosztola recently spoke with Richard about the status of the lawsuit and what happens next.

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• The case against Mr. Assange is complicated and does not turn on the question of whether he is considered a journalist, but rather on whether his journalistic-style activities of soliciting and publishing classified information can or should be treated as a crime.

• The five major media outlets that collaborated with WikiLeaks in 2010 to publish explosive stories based on confidential diplomatic cables from the U.S. State Department sent a letter Monday calling on the Biden administration to drop all charges against Julian Assange, who has been languishing in a high-security London prison for more than three years in connection with his publication of classified documents.

• “Twelve years after the publication of ‘Cablegate,’ it is time for the U.S. government to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets,” reads the letter signed by the editors and publishers of The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País. “Publishing is not a crime.”

• Lawrence, working in the country as an accredited journalist, was detained for several hours, during which time he was beaten and kicked by police, according to the BBC. He was later released.

• Lawrence tweeted on Monday to thank his followers, adding he believed “at least one local national was arrested after trying to stop the police from beating me.”x

• “The terrorist gunmen are trapped inside a room in the building and the security forces are about to end the siege very soon…so far we have confirmed the death of four people,” Mohamed Dahir, a security official told AFP.

• Reuters reports Somalia’s parliament canceled sessions for both of its houses because of the militants’ hotel attack.

Civil Rights/Policing

• If they’re right, the Queens DA would be guilty of a Brady violation, meaning a failure by the prosecution to provide the defense with exculpatory evidence. If the DNA match and confession in the Vetrano investigation came from a search tactic that was never disclosed in court, that evidence could be ruled inadmissible, and Lewis’s conviction could be overturned.

• Police technology goes through mission creep–meaning equipment reserved only for specific or extreme circumstances ends up being used in increasingly everyday or casual ways. We’ve already seen this with military-grade predator drones flying over protests, and police buzzing by the window of an activist’s home with drones.

• As the policy is currently written, the robots’ use will be governed by this passage:

• This is incredibly broad language. Police could bring armed robots to every arrest, and every execution of a warrant to search a house or vehicle or device. Depending on how police choose to define the words “critical” or “exigent,” police might even bring armed robots to a protest. While police could only use armed robots as deadly force when the risk of death is imminent, this problematic legal standard has often been under-enforced by courts and criticized by activists.

• When cops decide they’ve found the right perp, very little can persuade them to look elsewhere. This tunnel vision has the tendency to take years of freedom away from innocent people. And it would be terrible enough if officers simply refused to consider exonerative evidence. But in this case (like far too many others), the investigators went beyond simply ignoring other evidence to falsifying the “evidence” they had to ensure the person they picked out for the job ended up in jail.

• Warning that the looming U.S. railroad strike “would devastate our economy,” President Joe Biden angered labor advocates on Monday after he implored Congress to take legislative action to force union members to keep working under a contract that many of them have rejected, mainly due to its denial of paid sick days.

• “Paid sick leave is both a basic part of fair employment practices and an absolutely essential part of national public health policy.”

• A House Republican from Pennsylvania said Sunday that Congress will intervene to stop a nationwide strike if rail companies and unions don’t reach a contract agreement soon, a step that would likely force workers to accept a deal without any paid sick days.

• Acknowledging that rail workers “have a very reasonable ask” for better benefits and wages as they continue to labor under a punishing scheduling system, Rep. Brian Kevin Fitzpatrick said in a Fox News appearance Sunday that “Congress will not let this strike happen, that’s for sure.”

• The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the grassroots Poor People’s Campaign, presented the latest evidence on Sunday that the Democratic Party stands little chance of winning congressional majorities and the White House in future elections if it continues ignoring low-income communities.

• The push by progressives including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and others to focus on the economic struggles facing working families across the country during the midterm elections was not just based on a theory, Barber suggested, but was a strategy that was ultimately backed up by data.

• Galvanized by the remarkable organizing successes of Starbucks employees across the United States, workers at two Peet’s Coffee locations in Davis, California filed for union elections with the National Labor Relations Board on Monday in an effort to win higher wages, better working conditions, and a voice in day-to-day shop operations.

• “I’m organizing because we deserve a say in how our workplace is run and we deserve to be fairly compensated for the value we create,” said Schroedter Kinman, a worker at the Peet’s location in downtown Davis. “It’s also about having a support system and a set of procedures if we’re mistreated by our company.”

• Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is set to be met on Wednesday by workers from his company’s first unionized warehouse when he arrives at a New York Times event, as the Amazon Labor Union calls on him to support negotiations for a fair contract for the people who help make sure billions of products are delivered by the company each year.

• Members of the union, which is headed by former warehouse worker Christian Smalls, plan to rally at Lincoln Center where Jassy is speaking at the Times’ DealBook Summit. The summit features talks by “high-level executives and emerging leaders” from sectors including financial services, media, private investment, venture capital, and banking.

• It was an election with massive stakes, perhaps the most important of 2022 in any country, a vote that, in the best-case scenario, will impact not only Brazil but the whole world, especially in terms of the unfolding climate emergency.

• As Brazil controls the largest part of the Amazon region, the fate of the region is in its government’s hands. Under the far-right reactionary Jair Bolsonaro, who has ruled Brazil since 2018, the meager protections in place to protect it were removed, leading to an orgy of both legal and illegal mining and logging and the subsequent encroachment of large agribusiness interests that threaten to transform the region from a forest into a savannah.

• Hundreds of supporters of incarcerated Native American rights activist Leonard Peltier rallied at the nation’s capital on Sunday to demand President Joe Biden grant clemency to the long-held prisoner.

• “He’s 78-years-old, he has type 2 diabetes and an abdominal aortic aneurysm that’s fatal if it ruptures. He had a stroke where he lost 80 percent of the vision in one of his eyes,” Rachel Thunder, one of the organizers for the rally, told Shadowproof. “He should be spending the remainder of his life with his family, not locked up in a cage.”

• In situations of armed conflicts and other crises, people use social media and messaging platforms to document human rights abuses or war crimes, access information, mobilize for action, and crowdsource humanitarian assistance. But governments and other actors leverage these same platforms to spread disinformation and hate speech, incite violence, and attack or surveil activists, journalists, and dissidents. In light of the increasingly important role social media companies play during crises, Access Now and partner organizations have co-authored a Declaration of principles for content and platform governance in times of crisis.

• This Declaration, jointly developed by Access Now, ARTICLE 19, Mnemonic, the Center for Democracy and Technology, JustPeace Labs, Digital Security Lab Ukraine, Centre for Democracy and Rule of Law (CEDEM), and the Myanmar Internet Project, sets out guidelines to help platforms protect human rights before, during, and after a crisis.

• Social media platforms continue to fail the global majority during armed conflict, crises, and war. From Ethiopia to Syria and Myanmar, human rights are repeatedly ignored or deliberately discounted by companies like Twitter, Meta, and Google who allow disinformation to flourish, hate speech to fester, and unjust and inconsistent take down practices to control the narrative.

• Not anymore. Through the new Declaration of principles for content and platform governance in times of crisis launched today, November 29, at the Internet Governance Forum, Access Now and partners lay out principles for these platforms to overhaul the status quo and help ensure privacy, freedom of expression, and access to information for all. Read the full declaration and snapshot.

• “The amount of damage social media companies’ opaque, under-resourced, and ignorant policies and practices have caused during times of crisis and turmoil is immeasurable,” said Marwa Fatafta, MENA Advocacy and Policy Manager at Access Now. “Their modus operandi has been: if it’s not in English, if it’s not happening in ‘the west’, and it’s not affecting their profit margins, then it’s not worth investing time and energy into. It’s time to change how these companies think.”

• Lots of people like to pretend California is home to certifiable Communists — a socialist collective masquerading as a state. But California is not beholden to socialist ideals. It has its own dictatorial ideological bent, one that’s only slightly tamed by its election of liberal leaders.

• The United States has an alarming problem: civic negligence. The signs of civic decline and decay are all around us – threats of extremist violence, book bans and legislative efforts to restrict honest discussions of history in schools. Renewing schools as civic spaces will require ending punitive testing policies to restore rich educational experiences. It will take shelving book bans to reaffirm trust in the freedom of thought. And it will call for repealing laws that seek to disrupt academic discussions to assert the value of freedom of speech. Urgent action is needed for our beloved public schools to renew civic life.

• Almost no pardon applications ever actually make it to the president’s desk if you don’t go gobble gobble.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• We’ve written a number of posts about the problems of KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act from Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn (both of whom have fairly long and detailed histories for pushing anti-internet legislation). As with many “protect the children” or “but think of the children!” kinds of legislation, KOSA is built around moral panics and nonsense, blaming the internet any time anything bad happens, and insisting that if only this bill were in place, somehow, magically, internet companies would stop bad stuff from happening. It’s fantasyland thinking, and we need to stop electing politicians who live in fantasyland.

• Nearly 100 LGBTQ+ and human rights groups warned in a Monday letter to Congress that while “privacy, online safety, and digital well-being of children should be protected,” proposed legislation intended to do so would instead negatively impact all internet users.

• “While KOSA has laudable goals, it also presents significant unintended consequences that threaten the privacy, safety, and access to information rights.”

• The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental, historical disaster. AT&T spent $200 billion (including debt) to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and basically stumbled around incompetently for several years before recently spinning off the entire mess for a song.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Back in July, BMW raised a bit of a ruckus when the company announced that it would be making heated seats a luxury option for an additional $18 per month. Now, Mercedes aims to take the concept one step further by announcing that buyers of the company’s new Mercedes EQ electric models will need to pay a $1,200 (plus taxes and fees) yearly subscription to unlock the vehicles’ full performance.

Monopolies

• The CMA in June concluded a year-long study of the market for mobile software, hardware, and services. Based on its findings – that Apple and Google have “a stranglehold over operating systems, app stores and web browsers on mobile devices” – the UK competition watchdog said at the time that it intended to escalate by opening a formal investigation.

• That inquiry has now begun and it should conclude in no more than 18 months. At that point, the CMA may choose to impose remedies, such as demanding a change in the way certain products are sold, requiring the divestment of business units, or insisting upon the removal of anti-competitive restrictions.

Copyrights

• P2P release group EVO has built quite a reputation for being the first to release pirated copies of screeners and popular movies online. The group is well-known for its steady and prolific release schedule, but last Friday things went quiet. EVO’s mysterious absence fuels rumors of a potential bust, but nothing is confirmed thus far.

• A torrent site user accused of downloading and uploading at least 120TB of movies, TV shows, eBooks, music and software, has avoided an immediate prison term. The 28-year-old was arrested as part of a police operation against DanishBytes. A member of the same site was sentenced earlier this month after he uploaded Netflix content obtained using hacked credentials.

• A clear demonstration that the EU Copyright Directive is a badly-drafted law is the fact that it has still not been implemented in national legislation by all the EU Member States three years after it was passed, and over a year after the nominal deadline for doing so. That’s largely because of the upload filters of Article 17. The requirement to block copyrighted material without authorization while fully preserving users’ rights is probably impossible to put in place in any straightforward way. As a result, national legislators have had to come up with various kinds of approximations when drawing up their local laws.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• When it comes to “future paperwork” like “I’m gonna need these bus tickets next Wednesday”, and I’m talking actual paper here, for most people who only have like three or four such paper pieces in a given month (usually), it’s enough to have a li’l basket or bag or folder or envelope or stack or tray for them and make a note of them in your normal calendar or reminder app, which is where you need to be checking anyway.

• The Getting Things Done book recommends a system where you have an actual physical folder dedicated to every day, that you then also need to get in the habit of checking every day. This is great, but only worth it if you actually have a lot of physical paperwork incoming, which most people and professions in this digital era don’t. (I wanna say 99% don’t but I’d be pulling that number out of my hat since I don’t have actual stats. Not everyone has a digital profession, like if you, I don’t know, make pottery or something, but professions that deal with sorting a lot of incoming information usually are digital.)

• i made a no zip cushion cover in my sewing class – very much like a pillow case but with a much larger inside tongue. time to use that design to make a pillow case for my exped medium pillow.

• My SO had flu last week, and for some reason I thought – as I think every year (barring Corona) – that I’m somehow stronger or more immune to it. I wasn’t keeping my distance from her, sharing the same food she’d dipped her spoon in, and in general acting like I was an untouchable god.

• So I got a new job at the local, small-scale hardware store.

• Roomie has been working there the past 6 months or so and has really enjoyed it. There were a couple other times when spots had opened up and he had urged me to apply, but each time I found a different excuse to not do it.

• Happy Birthday SpellBinding! The first official game was logged on Nov. 25 2021.

• For the last few weeks SpellBinding has been running as an autonomous system, picking words all by itself, and logging solutions on its Wordlog and Antenna.

• I have the option to schedule manually-generated puzzles, but I’ve been letting it run free, and it hasn’t been too bad. There are a few bad words in the dictionary, and I keep my fingers crossed that they won’t be picked for the pangram, spoiling the game.

• [...]

• Every day a bunch of people play SpellBinding. It’s gotten me through some hard days, and I hope you spend a few minutes pushing your brain in a different direction.

• I’m really fascinated by alternative time formats. Last night I found out about Arvelie dates, and felt the need to adopt them for my own needs. The coolest thing about the Arvelie format, in my opinion, is that there isn’t a defined year zero. It was designed with the purpose of recording “daily activity logs starting at year 0 when the tracking started.” It’s always relative to something different, making it a little more personalized. It also does not obey the classic 12 month system. Instead, there are 26 months (corresponding to the 26 letters of the alphabet,) each with 2 weeks consisting of 7 days. This leaves the 365th day without a month, and is treated as a special day of new years. Date strings are formatted as YYMDD. The current date as I write this is 2022-11-28, but the Arvelie date (relative to the creation of my website in 2021) is 01X10. A very pleasant date.

• [...]

• I think I like these alternative time formats so much because I don’t have a very good sense of time. A single, standardized form doesn’t really mean much to me, so I prefer to play around with different ways to quantify the 4th dimension.

Politics

• Recently I set up a capsule that hosts content from The Anarchist Library

Technical

• These are my thoughts on a topic I have tried to argue for at work for quite some time, and I think I am getting some support for it, but a solution is a much tricker thing to arrive at.

• Imagine a business where the product is backed up by internal software to help with deliveries. Imagine this software having been built upon and added to for quite some time now. We are seeing some technical debt accumulating, and it can be hard to add new features as they will not easily fit with the existing codebase. This means developers will have to say no or give really long estimates when someone from operations or sales comes along and says that we could do this really good customer project if only we had some feature X or could do the slightly different Y version of existing feature Z. The thing that they ask for is actually a sensible thing to do, not just easily implemented in the current state of the internal company software, or simply there are a million other more prioritized things to do currently, from the point of a Roadmap or Strategy.

• [You know these round tuits have been sitting on your desk for many years now, right? —Editor / I … um … erm … —Sean] [1] I once mentioned updating `mod_litbook` [2] to run under a later version of Apache [3]. I wanted to do that because I’ve been running two instances of Apache—a later version that reverse proxies back to Apache 1.3 which just runs `mod_litbook` and nothing else, just to save me the agony of porting the code at the time. It only took me twelve years to locate the round tuit on my desk, but hey, better late than never.

• I did do a `mod_lua` version of `mod_litbook [4]` first, based on the version running on my Gemini server [5]. With that (twelve years after I first played with `mod_lua` [6]) and two hours of time, I was able to match the output from the original version [7] (nice!). But it should be easy to update the actual `mod_litbook` source code to the latest version of Apache [8], right?

Science

• Unlike his much more famous colleague Albert Einstein, John von Neumann is not a household name these days, but his discoveries shape the possibilities of life for every creature on this planet. As a teenager, von Neumann provided mathematics with new foundations. He later helped teach the world how to build and detonate nuclear bombs. His invention of game theory furnished the conceptual tools with which superpowers today decide whether to wage war, economists model the behavior of markets, and biologists predict the evolution of viruses. The pioneering programmable computer that von Neumann and his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., completed in 1951 established “von Neumann architecture” as the standard for computer design well into the 21st century, making first IBM and then many other corporations fabulously wealthy.

Announcements

• Cosmos has been running for about 10 months without major issues. However, I’ve been noticing some glitches here and there, so it was time to make a few upgrades.

Programming

• After the previous post, I intermittently worked on sml_tk. In particular, as mentioned I wrote a usable .smackspec and .use files for package management and build system respectiely. Of interest is that I wrote the .use file to only expose core Tk functionality and not any of the test code or SML extensions.

• 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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