● 12.01.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 01/12/2022: Release of Arti 1.1.0, Date for Red Hat Summit 2023

Posted in News Roundup at 4:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

• Frontier is the clear winner of the race to exascale, and it will require a lot of work and innovation to knock it from the top spot.

• The Fugaku system at the Riken Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan, previously held the top spot for two years in a row before being moved down by the Frontier machine. With an HPL score of 0.442 EFlop/s, Fugaku has retained its No. 2 spot from the previous list.

• The LUMI system, which found its way to the No. 3 spot on the last list, has retained its spot. However, the system went through a major upgrade to keep it competitive. The upgrade doubled the machines size, which allowed it to achieve an HPL score of 0.309 EFlop/s.

• When speaking about observability in the cloud native space, then probably everyone will mention OpenTelemetry (OTEL) at some point in the conversation. That’s great, because the community needs standards to rely on for developing all cluster components into the same direction. OpenTelemetry enables us to combine logs, metrics, traces and other contextual information (called baggage) into a single resource. Cluster administrators or software engineers can use this resource to get a viewport about what is going on in the cluster over a defined period of time. But how can Kubernetes itself make use of this technology stack?

Audiocasts/Shows

• joel hates crappy corporate software.

• Setup a Homelab to learn and improve your Tech skills. Also someone asked me to share my setup. You don’t need much. I run a bunch of virtual machines and containers on that one server.

• First up in the news: Network-crashing leap seconds to be abandoned, Asahi Linux Improves Apple Silicon Support

Kernel Space

• The scalability of Linus Torvalds was a recurring theme during Linux’s early years; these days maintainer struggles are a recognized problem within open-source communities in general. It is thus not surprising that Sean Christopherson gave a talk at Open Source Summit Europe (and KVM Forum) with the title “Scaling KVM and its community”. The talk mostly focused on KVM for the x86 architecture—the largest and most mature KVM architecture—which Christopherson co-maintains. But it was not a technical talk: most of the content can be applied to other KVM architectures, or even other Linux subsystems, so that they can avoid making the same kinds of mistakes.

• As a general rule, one need not have worked in the technology industry for long before the value of good data backups becomes clear. Creating a backup that is truly good, though, can be a challenge if the filesystem in question is actively being changed while the backup process runs. Over the years, various ways of addressing this problem have been developed, ranging from simply shutting down the system while backups run to a variety of snapshotting mechanisms. The kernel may be about to get another approach to snapshots should the blksnap patch set from Sergei Shtepa find its way into the mainline.

• The blksnap patches are rigorously undocumented, so much of what follows comes from reverse-engineering the code. Blksnap performs snapshotting at the block-device level, meaning that it is entirely transparent to any filesystems that may be stored on the devices in question. It is able to create snapshots of a set of multiple block devices, so it should be suitable for RAID arrays and such. The targeted use case appears to be automated backup systems; the snapshots that blksnap creates are described as “non-persistent” and are meant to be discarded once a real backup has been made.

• Since blksnap works at the block level, it must be given space to store snapshots that is separate from the devices being snapshotted. Specifically, there are ioctl() operations to assign ranges of sectors on a separate device for the storage of “difference blocks” and to change those assignments over time. There is a notification mechanism whereby a user-space process can be told when a given difference area is running low on space so that it can assign more blocks to that area.

• The algorithm used by blksnap is simple enough: once a snapshot has been created for a set of block devices (using another ioctl() operation), blksnap will intercept every block-write operation to those devices. If a given block is being written to for the first time after the snapshot was taken, the previous contents of that block will be copied to the difference area, and a note will be made that the block has been changed since the snapshot was created. Once that is done, the write operation can continue normally. The block devices thus always reflect the most recent writes, while the difference area contains the older data needed to recreate the state of those devices at the time the snapshot was created.

• The high-frequency-trading (HFT) industry is rather tight-lipped about what it does and how it does it, but PJ Waskiewicz of Jump Trading came to the Netdev 0×16 conference to try to demystify some of that, especially with respect to its use of networking. He wanted to contrast the needs of HFT with those of the traditional networking as it is used outside of the HFT space. He also has some thoughts on what the Linux kernel could do to help address those needs so that HFT companies could move away from some of the custom code that is currently being developed and maintained by multiple firms in the industry.

Applications

• Arti is our ongoing project to create an next-generation Tor client in Rust. In September, we released Arti 1.0.0, our first stable release. Now we’re announcing the next feature release, Arti 1.1.0.

• Arti 1.1.0′s claim to fame is its support for Tor’s anti-censorship features: You can now use Arti with bridges and pluggable transports! (We have tested it with obfs4proxy and snowflake.)

Instructionals/Technical

• In this guide, we will show you how to install Memtester on Ubuntu systems.

• Memtester is an effective userspace tester for stress-testing the memory subsystem. It is very effective at finding intermittent and non-deterministic faults. Note that problems in other hardware areas (overheating CPU, out-of-specification power supply, etc.) can cause intermittent memory faults, so it is still up to you to determine where the fault lies through normal hardware diagnostic procedures; memtester just helps you determine whether a problem exists.

• Memtests are memory-testing programs that check for faults in the RAM of your system. Memtest or Memtest86+ reads data, writes the memory address patterns, and checks the errors. It can output a list of bad RAM regions usable by the BadRAM kernel patch so that you can still use your old RAM with one or two bad bits.

• CSS has a whole slew of different color formats: hex codes, rgb(), hsl(), lch(), the list goes on!

• Which one should we use? It might seem like an inconsequential decision, but there are some pretty important differences between them. And, honestly, I think most of us are prioritizing the wrong things. 😅

• In this tutorial, I’ll take you on a tour of the different options. We’ll see how they work, how we can decipher them, and how we can use them to our advantage. Later, I’ll show you how modern CSS lets us make on-the-fly adjustments, if we pick the right color format.

• I have done a lot of work that involves compressing and uncompressing data. Most often, I work on data that has specific characteristics, e.g., sorted integers. In such cases, one can do much better than generic compression routines (e.g., zstd, gzip) both in compression ratios and performance.

• Tutorial for you on how to enable dark mode in LibreOffice in Ubuntu, Linux and Windows systems.

• LibreOffice, the free and open-source office productivity software, is used by millions worldwide. This cross-platform software runs on Windows, Linux, and other distributions.

• Millions of users around the world use LibreOffice. Probably that includes you. And everyone seems to prefer dark mode these days. And there are some advantages as well.

Games

• Want to win a Steam Deck? Valve directly are giving you quite a few chances, with a whole bunch of them being given away during The Game Awards.

• After many years of development and going through multiple different names like Subvein, Mutant Factions and Gene Shift — the online mode has gone free to play as Gene Shift Auto. Offering a lot of fun for the price of nothing, this Native Linux game is inspired by Grand Theft Auto 2 for a lot of it.

• Starcom: Unknown Space is entering Early Access in December from Wx3 Labs, LLC set in the same universe as their previous game Starcom: Nexus. In their FAQ post on Steam, the developer made it clear that Linux support is a “high priority” and they did provide a Native Linux build on their previous game too.

• Two Point Campus: Space Academy is the first expansion for the popular university building sim from the makers of Two Point Hospital. Releasing on December 6th it brings with it a whole universe of new features including three stellar campus locations, six student archetypes to welcome aboard, six far-out courses and classrooms and more.

• A big release of the Transport Tycoon Deluxe inspired game OpenTTD is upcoming, with a second Beta available now with some great new features like variable interface scaling. While based on TTD, OpenTTD had a wide array of improvements including bigger maps, better multiplayer, dedicated servers, better AI and so much more.

• Valve and Komodo have officially announced the Steam Deck will arrive in Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan on December 17th.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Red Hat

• Red Hat Summit is the place for our customers, partners, community members and IT professionals to come together to innovate, learn and help shape the future of the enterprise. This year, we are returning to Boston, Massachusetts, and encourage you and your team to join us on May 23-25, 2023 for engaging keynotes, customer and partner stories, access to Red Hat experts, hands-on labs and much more.

• In this month’s customer success highlights, learn how Colombia’s Superintendence of Industry and Commerce, Westech and Kaizen Gaming used Red Hat OpenShift to accelerate time to market, improve scalability and expand services while also meeting stringent security and compliance requirements.

• Today, we are announcing several new capabilities to Red Hat OpenShift Data Science, our managed cloud service for data scientists and developers of intelligent applications. Red Hat OpenShift Data Science now includes new features for deeper data analysis and better collaboration between ITOps, data scientists, and intelligent application developers. Furthermore, customers can now use committed AWS spend to purchase and run Red Hat OpenShift Data Science directly through AWS Marketplace, providing easier accessibility and flexibility for deployments. This is included as part of Red Hat’s latest announcement for its expanded portfolio of open solutions publicly available in AWS Marketplace.

• Nearly 10 years ago this week, at the very first AWS re:Invent, Red Hat took a leap of faith with our technology portfolio. We built on the success of our flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Middleware solutions and launched Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise 1.0, Red Hat’s fully open source, hybrid Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering geared for enterprise developers.

• In a world where the term “automation” often triggers fears of job eliminations, in the tech industry that couldn’t be further from its intent. Imagine that you no longer needed to check the mail, stop for gas, recharge your cell phone, or restock groceries. Think of how much extra time you’d gain to spend with your family and friends, perhaps travel the world, invest in a hobby or even just…rest. You might already be automating some of these chores in your own life, and you’re thinking “I already have my groceries delivered to my door, and my phone charges itself when I set it on my desk.” That’s exactly what I’m getting at. Does that make you less valuable? Or are you more productive because of it?

Debian Family

• Sipeed provides a Debian 11-based Linux operating system for the development board booting from the MicroSD card.

Open Hardware/Modding

• FriendlyELEC provides several Linux images for the board/router, namely FriendlyWrt 22.03 64-bit based on the latest OpenWrt 22.03, Debian Buster Desktop, and FriendlyCore Lite based on Ubuntu 20.04 with all images relying on the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel. The company also supports buildroot for people wanting to roll out their own custom Linux distribution. More details can be found in the Wiki.

• Thinking outside the box a little, we sought out a connected battery pack module to add some wireless functionality to Jon’s current lights. Unfortunately, we came up empty on that front. Device makers would rather sell you a new product in most cases rather than retrofit hardware to upgrade an older product.

• We’re all familiar with WiFi. It runs our home, let’s us stream our favorite movies, and keeps us from having to talk with other people when we’re at a coffee shop. But there’s more ways to use WiFi than simply accessing the internet through different applications. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to set up your own peer-to-peer network to sense data from one area and send that data to an LCD screen somewhere else without needing any internet connection or routers. This a great first step in being able to remove the wires from any embedded physical computing application.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Yet it’s also been a bit of a reality check I wasn’t expecting. Much of the world has at least moved on from dialup, but this low-speed, high-latency connection is closer to how more people use the Internet than I probably appreciate.

• You do use a connection like this differently. You ration what you’re downloading, use plugins like NoScript to more actively filter dynamic content and images, and you check the size of a package before downloading it. You even get used to unitasking, because you probably can’t be loading too many concurrent things before your primary task gets painful.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Slotix s.r.o. is pleased to announce the first public release of DBConvert Streams v0.5.0.

• DBConvert Streams (DBS) is an event-driven data replication platform for database administrators who require zero downtime database migration and continuous data replication as workloads move to the clouds and more data needs to be transferred.

• DBS source readers use Change Data Capture (CDC) technology to respond in real time to all data changes in a particular source table or the entire database.

Licensing / Legal

• The GitHub Copilot offering claims to assist software developers through the application of machine-learning techniques. Since its inception, Copilot has been followed by controversies, mostly based on the extensive use of free software to train the machine-learning engine. The announcement of a class-action lawsuit against Copilot was thus unsurprising. The lawsuit raises all of the expected licensing questions and more; while some in our community have welcomed this attack against Copilot, it is not clear that this action will lead to good results.

• Readers outside of the US may not be entirely familiar with the concept of a class-action lawsuit as practiced here. It is a way to seek compensation for a wrong perpetrated against a large number of people without clogging the courts with separate suits from each. The plaintiffs are grouped into a “class”, with a small number of “lead plaintiffs” and the inevitable lawyers to represent the class as a whole. Should such a suit prevail, it will typically result in some sort of compensation to be paid to anybody who can demonstrate that they are a member of the class.

• Class-action lawsuits have been used to, for example, get compensation for victims of asbestos exposure; they can be used to address massive malfeasance involving a lot of people. In recent decades, though, the class-action lawsuit seems to have become mostly a vehicle for extorting money from a business for the enrichment of lawyers. It is not an uncommon experience in the US to receive a mailing stating that the recipient may be a member of a class in a suit they have never heard of and that, by documenting their status, they can receive a $5 coupon in compensation for the harm that was done to them.

• Compensation for the lawyers involved, instead, tends to run into the millions of dollars. Not all class-action lawsuits are abusive in this way, but it happens often enough that it has become second nature to look at a new class-action with a jaundiced eye.

• In fact, open source is the foundation of so many of the digital technologies we take for granted today. Not only was open source code the origin of the World Wide Web, it has also made remote collaborative development possible which, since the pandemic, has become absolutely essential to the way we work.

• Moreover, because the open source community is built around the idea of collaboration, open source projects have the benefit of multiple perspectives and areas of expertise coming together, creating something stronger and more robust than the sum of its parts.

Programming/Development

• There is a story behind how Tektronix Smalltalk became branded as an AI language in 1984.

• In the 1960s-70s, Tektronix Inc had grown to become an industry leading electronics competing head-to-head with Hewlett-Packard. In the early ’80s Tektronix was rapidly going digital and money was being poured into establishing a Computer Research Lab (CRL) within Tek Labs. Two early successful CRL projects was my effort to create a viable performance Smalltalk virtual machine that ran on Motorola 680xx family processors and Roger Bates/Tom Merrow’s effort to develop an Alto-like 680xx based workstation for use in the lab.

• The Git source-code management system exists to track changes to a set of files; the stream of commits in a Git repository reflects the change history of those files. What is seen in Git, though, is the final form of those commits; the changes that the patches themselves went through on their way toward acceptance are not shown there. That history can have value, especially while changes are still under consideration. The proposed git evolve subcommand is a recognition that changes themselves go through changes and that this process might benefit from tooling support.

• Some patches are applied to a project’s repository soon after being written, but other take more work. Consider, for example, support for stackable security modules, which has been through (at least) 38 revisions over many years. If and when this work lands in the Linux kernel mainline, it will bear little resemblance to what was initially posted years ago. Each revision will have undergone changes that will have rippled through much of the 39-part patch set. Git can support iteration on a series like that, but it can be a bit awkward, leading many developers to use other tools (such as Quilt) to manage in-progress work.

• You can Build-Depend on debhelper-compat (=version) and get rid of debhelper as a build-dependency, and of debian/compat (details)

• Frank Framework is a free open-source low-code messaging framework that allows developer to connect systems, integrate services and create a data applications. It is an open-source platform to quickly build enterprise applications. To have an enterprise application, or as we say a Frank, you have to deploy the Frank!Framework in combination with XML configuration files.

• The first puzzles will unlock on December 1st at midnight EST (UTC-5). See you then!

• With that said, I just don’t understand the obsession with testing in Erlang? Did we lose sight of the essence of Erlang? Or are some of us Erlangutans bored, need to fill in the day with busy-work, and thus spend too much time writing tests in Erlang?

• Although C is a very, very popular language, it is also known to be quite tiny: memory is handled manually, and much of what is available in its standard library is a given in all other languages. But C being a low level language also means it lacks a lot of other stuff other popular languages have; for instance, dynamic arrays are present in the library of most popular languages, be it JavaScript, C++, Rust and so on, but C’s simplicity forbids them from being there. If you want it in C, you have to implement it –which is exactly what I did!

• I’ve had some discussions online and in the real world about this blog post and I’d like to restate why containerization is needed for reproducibility, and do so from the lens of functional programming.

• When setting up a pipeline, wether you’re a functional programming enthusiast or not, you’re aiming at setting it up in a way that this pipeline is the composition of (potentially) many referentially transparent and pure functions.

• Here’s weird thing about me: I’m pro-dynamic types. This is weird because I’m also pro-formal methods, in fact teach formal methods as a career, which seems completely antithetical. So on one hand I teach people how to do static analysis, on the other I use languages which make static analysis impossible.

• Of course, handing over huge sectors of our society to black-box algorithms that we barely understand creates a lot of problems, which has already begun to help spark a regulatory response around the current challenges of AI discrimination and bias. But given the speed of development in the field, it’s long past time to move beyond a reactive mode, one where we only address AI’s downsides once they’re clear and present. We can’t only think about today’s systems, but where the entire enterprise is headed.

• The systems we’re designing are increasingly powerful and increasingly general, with many tech companies explicitly naming their target as artificial general intelligence (AGI) — systems that can do everything a human can do. But creating something smarter than us, which may have the ability to deceive and mislead us — and then just hoping it doesn’t want to hurt us — is a terrible plan. We need to design systems whose internals we understand and whose goals we are able to shape to be safe ones. However, we currently don’t understand the systems we’re building well enough to know if we’ve designed them safely before it’s too late.

Standards/Consortia

• China is attempting to “game the global system” by advocating international tech standards that favor “authoritarian standards and values,” Raimondo said in a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Such efforts not only disadvantage American companies, the secretary argued, but threaten the free flow of information and data privacy.

• “In recent years, China has purposefully and aggressively assumed leadership positions in several important international tech standard-setting bodies,” Raimondo said, endorsing American collaboration with allies against China’s aggression.

• Telecommunications industry regulator the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has received responses from 22 stakeholders and interested parties to a discussion paper it released on exploring future use of the 1.9 GHz band.

Leftovers

• Imagine Homes is an example of an “automated landlord,” a company that uses new data tools and technologies to minimize the costs of on-site human labor while collecting profits from rental properties. They are essential to the new and growing sector of companies backed by Wall Street investment firms that buy up thousands of single-family rental homes across several states.

• Well, they may start from that, but humans that they are, some of them try to rationalize their hates and fears into theories that, though detached from reality, literally provide the ammunition that enables their followers to wreak havoc, like the guy did who descended on a store frequented by Black people in Buffalo several months ago in order to kill as many African-Americans as possible.

• Matthew Rose’s A World After Liberalism (Yale University, 2021) brings together and critically analyzes the thoughts of people that most of us probably have not heard of but are worshiped in far right networks around the world. Rose says we better listen to what these guys are saying, even if we find them utterly distasteful, because their ideas have consequences.

• Making narrative film just keeps getting easier. What once took a studio is now within reach of the dedicated hobbyist. And Neural Radiance Fields are making it a dramatic step easier. The guys from [Corridor Crew] give an early peek.

Science

• On a macroscopic scale, the realm of baseballs and planets, objects tend to have well-defined locations and velocities. This is the realm of “classical” physics. But the rules of physics operate slightly differently in the world of the very small. On a quantum scale — in this sense, we mean “tiny” — individual atoms or particles don’t have fixed points, but a probability that they exist within a certain place at a certain time. Odder still, individual particles can have connections to other particles in different points in space.

• Still, this idea that quantum mechanics is implicated in consciousness is still not very popular among most neuroscientists or physicists, who believe consciousness happens via classical physics, not the quantum level. It’s especially hard to test the idea because it requires measuring living human brain activity at mind-bogglingly small levels.

• I recently had the opportunity to visit a nearby field camp and assist with some IT tasks! This was a short, couple-hour trip to help get the camp ready for summer science work.

Hardware

• Tabletop games and cardboard tokens go hand-in-hand for a good reason: they are economical and effective. However, their tactile attributes leave a little to be desired. There’s something really great about high-quality pieces possessing a shiny, pleasing smoothness and click-clack handling that cardboard simply can’t deliver, but that all changes with [Dzhav]’s simple method for converting cardboard tokens into deluxe versions of themselves with a little work and a resin coating.

• Inspired by a prank tweet, [Sam Ettinger] endeavored to create an SMD seven-segment display.  The NanoRaptor NanoSegment implements a panel of seven-segment display modules sized at “0806” each or just a bit wider than a standard 0805 SMD footprint.  Each of the seven segments is a single 0201 LED.  Six I/O lines and three resistors are required to operate each module.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Experiences will, of course, vary. Romper ran the headline “Yes, Your Baby Monitor Is Making Your Anxiety Worse.” In The New Yorker, Karen Russell writes, “Perhaps the scariest thing is how quickly I’ve gotten over my unease; I’ve become addicted to live-streaming plotless footage of our baby.” And the author Megan Stielstra wrote for The Rumpus more than a decade ago about the baby cam as a kind of portal. A rougher example of the technology, her camera flipped between two frequency channels and was thus able to connect, unexpectedly, to a neighbor’s unit of the same model: “Whenever The Baby would fall asleep, I’d stare at his Day-Glo body on the monitor, making sure he wasn’t choking—or levitating or exploding or whatever horrible thing I’d imagine—and then, assured of his safety, I’d flip the channel to see how that other mother was doing.” Here she found a connection that helped her through the gloom of postpartum depression, whose symptoms, she said, can be “as varied as the flowers in a greenhouse.”

• Noem’s executive order prohibits state employees and contractors from accessing the app on state-owned devices

• “Today, Governor Kristi Noem signed Executive Order 2022-10, which bans the Chinese social media platform TikTok for state government agencies, employees, and contractors using state devices,” announced the governor in a press release.

• “This order is in response to the growing national security threat posed by TikTok due to its data gathering operations on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” the statement added.

• TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company that moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020. It has been targeted by Republicans who say the Chinese government could access its user data like browsing history and location. U.S. armed forces also have prohibited the app on military devices.

• South Dakota’s governor signed an executive order on Tuesday banning state agencies, employees and contractors from accessing TikTok on government devices, citing “the growing national security threat” posed by the Chinese-owned social media platform.

• “South Dakota will have no part in the intelligence gathering operations of nations who hate us,” Gov. Kristi Noem said in a press release. “The Chinese Communist Party uses information that it gathers on TikTok to manipulate the American people, and they gather data off the devices that access the platform.”

• The order goes into effect immediately.

• Although they’re both owned by ByteDance, Douyin — China’s version of TikTok — offers a different version of the social media app that is unavailable to the rest of the world, especially for children.

• “It’s almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world,” Tristan Harris, a former Google employee, and advocate for social media ethics, said of China’s approach to TikTok.

• One of the most direct impacts of a rail shutdown would be a potential shortage of clean drinking water for millions of households that rely on publicly owned water systems.

• Treatment plants use chlorine and other chemicals to clean the water that eventually flows out of the tap, and the vast majority of those chemicals are transported around the country by rail from factories to distribution centers.

• But then, shrewd white men arrived and discovered that the soil of this desert was in fact a rich alluvial plain of Colorado River silt that could be cleared, ploughed, harrowed, irrigated, planted and made to grow profitable crops for export on the railroad. So, they bought a great deal of land, developed a small canal from the Colorado, sold land to other white men, who began the new form of gaining food – not by gathering the fruits of this rich desert, but by planting crops and gambling on markets.

• Soon, the gamblers started a more ambitious canal, the All-American Canal. It blew out and flowed north into the Salton Sink for three years, creating the Salton Sea. It took the resources of Southern Pacific to stop the flow in 1907.

• On Oct. 28, ProPublica and Vanity Fair published a story about an interim report on the origins of COVID-19 released by the Republican oversight staff of a Senate committee. The interim report was the product of a far-reaching investigation into the question of how the pandemic began, and we wanted to give readers an inside view of the team’s work and share independent experts’ views of its findings.

• The debate over COVID-19’s origins has been contentious from the start, and the report’s conclusion that the pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident” triggered criticism. Scientists, China observers and others questioned the Senate team’s findings and our reporting about them.

Proprietary

• Contrary to popular wisdom, Javelin and NLAW anti-tank missiles supplied by America and Britain did not save the day, despite featuring heavily in video footage from the first week of the conflict. Nor did Turkey’s TB2 drones, which struggled to survive after day three. “The propaganda value of Western equipment…was extremely high at the beginning of the war,” noted Jack Watling of RUSI, one of the report’s authors, recently on “The Russia Contingency”, a podcast on Russian military issues. “It didn’t really have a substantial material effect on the course of the fighting…until…April.” The decisive factor was more prosaic, he added. “What blunted the Russians north of Kyiv was two brigades of artillery firing all their barrels every day.

• The agreement will provide Atos’ customers with large infrastructure outsourcing contracts to quicken their workload migrations towards the cloud, the firms said, adding that Atos will consult with over 800 customers to offer a new hybrid cloud service with the option to move selected workloads to AWS.

• John Purcell, chief product officer at custom developer DoiT International Ltd., tells of one customer who made a keystroke error that caused the company to spin up an Amazon Web Services Inc. instance much larger than what was needed. A job that was supposed to finish on Friday was never turned off and ran all weekend, resulting in $300,000 in unnecessary charges. “There is a small single-digit percentage of companies that manage cloud costs well,” he said.

• Moving to the cloud for cloud’s sake can become a recipe for disappointment. The reason? Many organizations are simply attempting a “lift and shift“ moving their code to the cloud but not modernizing it in any meaningful way. As a result, they don’t get any of the benefits in terms of improved performance, reliability, or new capability. The return on the effort just isn’t there and can create a recipe for other headaches.

Linux Foundation

• The ELISA (Enabling Linux in Safety Applications) Project announced that Robert Bosch GmbH and XPENG Motors have joined the project, marking its commitment to Linux and its effective use in safety-critical applications in connected cars. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, ELISA is an open source initiative that aims to create a shared set of tools and processes to help companies build and certify Linux-based safety-critical applications and systems.

Security

• We say “no way.” Along with our friends at EPIC, and with assistance from Morgan & Morgan, EFF recently filed an amicus brief arguing that negligent data breaches inflict grievous privacy harms in and of themselves, and so the victims have “standing” to sue in federal court – without the need to prove more. The case, In re Marriott Customer Data Breach, arises from the 2018 breach of more than 130 million records from the hotel company’s reservation system. This included guests’ names, phone numbers, payment card information, travel destinations, and more. We filed our brief in the federal appeals court for the Fourth Circuit, which will decide whether the plaintiff class certified by the lower court shares a class-wide injury.

• Our brief explains that once personal data is stolen, it can be used against the breach victims for identity theft, ransomware attacks, and to send unwanted spam. The risk of these attacks causes psychological injury, including anxiety, depression, and PTSD. To avoid these attacks, breach victims must spend time and money to freeze and unfreeze their credit reports, to monitor their credit reports, and to obtain identity theft prevention services.

• Courts have long granted standing to sue over harms like these. Intrusion upon seclusion and other privacy torts are more than a century old. As the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized: “both the common law and literal understanding of privacy encompass the individual’s control of information concerning [their] person.”

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• For the uninitiated, TOFU is an acronym for Trust On First Use. The basic idea is that the user makes the trust decision associated with a communication channel on the first visit.

• To understand the concept here, you need to know what we mean by “communication channel” and what we “trust” them for.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The Wall Street Journal reports that protesters are using encrypted apps like Telegram to organize, start group chats, and communicate about possible sites to organize and avoid the police. And Chinese police, in turn, are using whatever tools they have to try to track the protesters through social media and their phones. The Journal writes: [...]

• Over the past decade, Google’s Android has become the most popular operating system for smartphones. Android serves a dual purpose: for the user, it powers the phone’s functionality, and for Google, it transmits information about the user for the purpose of displaying relevant advertising.

• Such information-gathering capability is unprecedented. Google has become the world’s largest spy organization, also known as a digital advertising company, without the constraints imposed on government spy agencies. Gathering information about users is big business for many technology companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft).

• This article presents steps that an Android user can take to minimize the amount of information being collected while preserving the essential functionality of the phone. I wrote this article based on my experience with Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow on the Moto G4 Play.

Defence/Aggression

• The evidence of a seditious conspiracy introduced in the Oath Keepers’ trial was damning, yet obvious. This is an organization whose stated goal is to confront a federal government it sees as illegitimate, openly using the rhetoric of revolution.

• More than 200 celebrities and entertainment execs, including Mila Kunis, Debra Messing and Mayim Bialik, signed an open letter calling on Amazon (as well as and Barnes & Noble) to stop selling the antisemitic documentary and book “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America.”

• “The migration we have seen so far as a result of a conflict in some cases or economic migration will be as nothing compared to the migration which the northern countries in the hemisphere are going to see as people move away from areas that are uninhabitable,” she said. “And that is a very strong reason to address the climate issue. Because if we don’t address it fully and properly, this is going to happen.”

• The Tehreek–e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a separate entity from the Taliban in Afghanistan but sharing a similar Islamist ideology, have been responsible for hundreds of attacks and thousands of deaths since emerging in 2007.

• They agreed to a truce earlier this year after Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers took a prominent role in brokering peace talks, but negotiations made little progress and there were frequent breaches.

• During opening statements in Manhattan Supreme Court on Monday, prosecutors described Shaikh Abdullah Faisal, 59, as an Islamic State recruiter and marriage broker who had committed “far reaching crimes of terrorism.”

• Faisal is accused of communicating with the undercover NYPD officer by e-mail, text and video chat in a bid to encourage her to join ISIS and carry out attacks overseas from 2015 to 2017.

• These San Francisco supervisors seem not only willing to approve dangerously broad language about when police may deploy robots equipped with explosives as deadly force, but they are also willing to smear those who dare to question its possible misuses as sensationalist, anti-cop, and dishonest.

• When can police send in a deadly robot? According to the policy: “The robots listed in this section shall not be utilized outside of training and simulations, criminal apprehensions, critical incidents, exigent circumstances, executing a warrant or during suspicious device assessments.” That’s a lot of events: all arrests and all searches with warrants, and maybe some protests.

• When can police use the robot to kill? After an amendment proposed by Supervisor Aaron Peskin, the policy now reads: “Robots will only be used as a deadly force option when [1] risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and [2] officers cannot subdue the threat after using alternative force options or de-escalation tactics options, **or** conclude that they will not be able to subdue the threat after evaluating alternative force options or de-escalation tactics. Only the Chief of Police, Assistant Chief, or Deputy Chief of Special Operations may authorize the use of robot deadly force options.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The Estonian Safety Investigation Bureau (ESIB) will ask the government for additional funding within a week. The current phase of the investigation involves the creation of a digital twin of the MS Estonia ferry to model the hull damage caused by a collision with the seafloor.

Environment

Energy

• Nonetheless, questions are swirling now about loans made from FTX to one of Bankman-Fried’s other companies, Alameda Research, before FTX was discovered to have solvency issues and problems paying back its regular customers.

• Bankman-Fried spoke for more than an hour, wearing his signature T-shirt and appearing apologetic when the interviewer, journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, read messages from FTX customers who said they had lost their life savings.

• The man once hailed as a legendary figure in the [cryptocurrency] industry told The New York Times he had had a “bad month” and had almost no money left.

• The global [cryptocurrency] exchange, that was at one point valued at $32bn (£26.5bn), collapsed earlier this month.

• Bankman-Fried, appearing at the New York Times DealBook Summit, insisted in an interview with CNBC anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin over a video call that he was “shocked” by his firm’s collapse.

• “I was excited about FTX a month ago. … I was shocked by what happened,” Bankman-Fried said, adding, “I substantially underestimated what the scale of the market crash could look like and the speed of it.”

• Puerto Rico’s financial oversight board has voted to extend a contract with LUMA Energy — the private U.S.-Canadian corporation that took over the island’s power grid and is widely denounced by residents on the island for its inconsistent service and high prices. The privatization of Puerto Rico’s power grid, supported by an unelected board appointed by the U.S. government, represents the “everyday consequences of colonialism,” says independent reporter Bianca Graulau, whose latest documentary is called “País de Apagones,” or “Country of Blackouts.”

Wildlife/Nature

• The warbler is fortunate. In the contest between birds and cities, cities are winning. Scientists estimate that collisions with buildings kill as many as 1 billion birds a year in the United States. The light from ever-expanding cities is disrupting the movement of creatures that evolved to migrate in the dark. And the modern architectural penchant for glass has proved deadly.

• Lights Out programs, in which owners and managers agree to switch off exterior lights during peak migration times, have spread to 45 U.S. cities. Some architects and developers are using specially treated glass that birds can see. Grassroots activists are asking homeowners to consider their own windows as well.

• The issue is bigger than birds, conservationists say.

• I spoke with Jeff Sikich, a wildlife biologist who monitors the lion’s whereabouts, to discuss tracking the famous cat and its contemporaries, as well as the issues that mountain lions face in urban environments. (When pressed to tell me which local lion was his favorite, Sikich declined to name one, saying only that P-22 was “up there.” He spoke much more tenderly about a female named P-19.)

• The first-ever ranking to compile a database of geological sites of scientific value, the project had the support of UNESCO and seeks to accomplish a worldwide inventory of geological heritage of international relevance.

• Sac Actun, the only site in Mexico to have made the list, is the largest underwater cave system in the world and the second largest cave after the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, United States.

Finance

• By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost On November 2, 2022, less than a week before the recent national election, President Biden delivered a speech warning against voter intimidation, political violence and threats to democracy. He also added that those who question the results of any election they lose are attempting to “subvert the electoral […]

• But not with accounting. Accountancy has dwindled to four massive, structurally important, terminally conflicted companies: EY, KPMG, PWC and Deloitte, and all four make more money selling “consulting” to companies than they do for signing off on their books.

• That means that the Big Four routinely sign off on fraudulent books, because a failure to make nice with companies that are cheating the taxman and/or their investors and/or their creditors will cost the Big Four those fat consulting contracts.

• For months, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has pushed a controversial plan to turn over public housing land to a professional soccer team owned by an influential billionaire.

• In mid-November, that billionaire owner of the Chicago Fire Football Club, Joe Mansueto, donated $25,000 to the mayor’s reelection campaign.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• This is especially critical for companies who want to access a new market, but forfeit their intellectual [sic] property [sic] or trade secrets in the process of simply selling their products. In that case, a country like China can simply replicate the technology, and put the American company out of business. I know from meetings in my state that Hoosier businesses can’t afford that risk, especially as they come off the heels of a pandemic in a weakened economy.

• Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for digital policy, told the billionaire Tesla CEO that the social media platform will have to significantly increase efforts to comply with the new rules, known as the Digital Services Act, set to take effect next year.

• The two held a video call to discuss Twitter’s preparedness for the law, which will require tech companies to better police their platforms for material that, for instance, promotes terrorism, child sexual abuse, hate speech and commercial scams.

• Jean-Pierre replied that “[Biden] has always said and he has been very clear in his belief that it is important for social media platforms to continue to take steps to reduce hate speech and misinformation. And we’ll continue to say that. But media platforms make independent choices about the information that they present.”

• In a brief notice on Twitter, the Ankara Police Department said that the shared video showed the pair tearing up Turkish banknotes, adding that authorities have initiated “legal measures.”

• Turkish police noted that the detained Finnish citizens were born in Somalia and that they were in Turkey to take part in a Erasmus student exchange programme

• Under the chaotic changes unleashed by Elon Musk, Twitter users in the U.S. are confronting problems that have long plagued the social network in other parts of the world – and which are at risk of getting even worse under its new billionaire owner, according to human rights and freedom of expression advocates.

• Russian tech giant Yandex has said it is reorganizing its operations, moving to cut its ties with Russia in a restructuring that solidifies government control over a company once seen as a bellwether for the country’s digital economy.

• The announcement comes after months of internal turmoil, with executives departing, the sale of the two of the company’s best-known products, and company shares hitting basement prices prior to being frozen on international stock exchanges.

• To hear some tell it, a Supreme Court case set for argument on Dec. 7 could spell the end of democracy in the United States. If the Republicans who brought the case, Moore v. Harper, prevail, state legislatures will effectively be free to override the votes of their citizens in presidential elections, the doomsayers predict. That might allow a future presidential candidate to undo an election, much as Donald Trump attempted, but failed, to do in 2020.

• The Atlantic warned that the “Court’s right-wing supermajority is poised to let state lawmakers overturn voters’ choice in presidential elections.” The Guardian opined that a ruling in favor of the GOP would mean that “whether Republicans win or lose elections via the popular vote will not matter because they will be able to maintain power regardless.” And Slate called Moore v. Harper “the Supreme Court case that could upend democracy.”

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The hundreds of tips and calls provided to local, state and federal investigators as a result of cyber sleuthing can help — both to pinpoint plausible leads and to rule out potential suspects — but former FBI agents and law enforcement experts say they more often than not are a hindrance to an investigation, divert resources and attention, and can even be harmful by ensnaring innocent people.

• Taylor’s erudite and engaging debut vividly demonstrates the challenges of transmitting information in the early modern age. In the 17th century, British commercial vessels were the colonists’ primary source for foreign news. When a ship arrived at port, its captain would distribute letters he’d been asked to deliver upon reaching his destination; in addition, the crew and passengers would provide oral accounts of noteworthy events back in Europe.

• Both of these information sources had obvious shortcomings: letters took months to arrive and were frequently lost at sea, while oral reports might be little more than unsubstantiated rumors. The rise of newspapers, whose numbers expanded throughout the 18th century, made the distribution of news more centralized and hierarchical. As a result, elites began to exert more influence over the information that was transmitted. “Compared to the letter-writing and oral cultures that preceded them,” Taylor writes, “newspapers were more likely to obey the whims of the mighty.”

• TikTok’s algorithms are very good at finding videos to keep people glued to their phone screens for hours on end. What they are not so good at, a new report has found, is detecting ads that contain blatant misinformation about U.S. elections.

• Bernard’s lawyers argue Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, who is stridently anti-abortion, has been spreading false or misleading information about the doctor with his investigation allegations for several months.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Taliban authorities have announced a ban on FM radio broadcasts from Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) stations in Afghanistan, citing complaints they have received about programming content.

• The ban will be enforced on December 1, according to a directive issued by the Taliban’s ministry of information and culture.

• Three months after the murder in a pizzeria in Neustadt am Rübenberge (Hanover region), the public prosecutor’s office in Hanover has requested that the Somali Abdi R. (22) be placed in a psychiatric ward.

• Detention instead of jail!

• AS a former member of the Central Board of Film Censors (CBFC), Islamabad, I wish to share with the public the procedures followed when feature films, publicity films and cartoons meant for public viewing are presented for approval.

• In a video that went viral on Twitter, people are seen removing a banner that reads ‘Humanitarian Movement of the Indonesian Evangelical Reformed Church’ and one man is heard saying ‘destroy them’, referring to the blue tents provided for disaster survivors. Another man, wearing a long robe and a white cap – clothes usually worn by radical and conservative Muslims – can be seen smilingly filiming the episode.

• Isfahan’s judicial chief, Asadollah Jafari, was quoted on November 27 as saying that Salehi faces other charges, including “propaganda activity against the establishment, forming an illegal group with the intention of disrupting the security of the country, cooperating with hostile governments, and spreading lies and inciting others to commit violence.”

• A U.S.-based rights group said on November 26 that Toomaj Salehi’s trial had begun “without a lawyer of his choice,” and his family said his “life is at serious risk.”

• Perhaps most tellingly, even before a ball had been kicked, Qatari authorities had reached for their playbook of draconian measures to neuter coverage and dissent, banning everything from beer to banners and arm bands, and preventing journalists from reporting freely.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• La Union Mayor Fabian Echeverria told AFP that gunmen on the back of a motorbike had shot Cordoba, who was “around 40 years old,” three times as he traveled in a rural area on Monday afternoon.

• Cordoba was the director of a local television channel who “published information criticizing local government and about insecurity in the region on his Facebook page,” the Colombian Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP) wrote on Twitter.

• In a letter sent to the President of the United States, Joe Biden, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, the parliamentarians are against the extradition of Assange to be tried in North American territory and warn that this fact would create a negative precedent for freedom of expression and the free exercise of the press throughout the world.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Rosebud Sioux are intent on expanding the reservation’s herds as a reliable food source.

• Others have grander visions: The Blackfeet in Montana and tribes in Alberta want to establish a “transboundary herd” ranging over the Canada border near Glacier National Park. Other tribes propose a “buffalo commons” on federal lands in central Montana where the region’s tribes could harvest animals.

• “What would it look like to have 30 million buffalo in North America again?” said Cristina Mormorunni, a Métis Indian who’s worked with the Blackfeet to restore bison.

• Iranian authorities have arrested the two actors behind a viral video where a group of film and theatre figures stood silently without headscarves in solidarity with the protest movement, a rights group said Wednesday.

• The actor and director Soheila Golestani, who appeared without her headscarf in the video, and the male director Hamid Pourazari, who also appeared prominently, have both been arrested, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said.

• That so-called incompetence arose when Mr. T refused to comply with Cubik’s “fun” values that the court said involved engaging in excessive drinking and other problematic behaviors. As his refusal to participate was given as a reason for his dismissal, the judge deemed he had been wrongfully fired.

• But only a few manage to not fall into the pressure and hold their ground. This man employed by a French company is one of them. Despite the pressure and his surroundings, this man identified as Mr T, whose full name is not disclosed, refused to be part of his company’s ‘fun’ environment, but that cost him his job.

• Yes, you read that right. Mr T was, who worked at a consulting firm called Cubik Partners, was fired for being “insufficient professionally” because he didn’t become a part of the team’s building activities with colleagues and was “boring” in his job.

• After losing his job, the man knocked on Paris court’s door, where he won the legal battle against his employer.

• Following the accusations, Mangaluru police have lodged a case of forced conversion against all three. Detailed investigation in the matter is underway.

• Mehr news agency reported that the bank manager in Qom province, near Tehran, “had provided bank services on Thursday to an unveiled woman”. As a result, he was “removed from his position by order of the governor,” Mehr quoted deputy governor Ahmad Hajizadeh. Mehr added that the video of the unveiled woman “elicited a lot of reaction on social media.”

• Kominsky-Crumb was a founding member of the influential all-female collective that produced the anthology Wimmin’s Comix, a long-running feminist comic published by Last Gasp from 1972-1985. Kominsky-Crumb, along with artist Diane Noomin, broke with the group in the mid-1970s to do their own publication, Twisted Sisters. Both comics were some of the first to deal squarely with the political issues around female empowerment, criticism of the patriarchy, sexual politics, lesbianism and other topics central to feminist ideology.

• Ahmed is also known as the Director of the Fenix Helsinki organisation, which works with immigrant women and children, as well as an outspoken critic and activist against the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) and so-called “honour” killings.

• President Biden is pushing Congress to block a pending nationwide rail strike and push through a contract deal that includes no sick days and is opposed by four of the 12 rail unions. Biden’s latest request is an attempt to “legislate us basically back to work, before we’ve even had a chance to strike,” says locomotive engineer and Railroad Workers United organizer Ron Kaminkow. “Workers should have the right to take off work for a reasonable amount for whatever reason they need it,” says labor professor Nelson Lichtenstein, who urges the rail workers to strike anyway.

• The largest higher education strike in U.S. history has entered its third week in an effort to secure livable wages, more child care benefits, expanded family leave and other demands. Some 48,000 academic workers at all 10 University of California campuses are on strike, including teaching assistants, postdoctoral scholars, graduate student researchers, tutors and fellows. We speak with a professor and graduate students at three campuses in the UC system, as a tentative deal with postdoctoral scholars and academic researchers was announced Tuesday by the University of California that does not cover graduate student employees who make up the vast majority of those on strike. “We are the ones who are producing the work. We’re teaching the classrooms. And yet, most of these student workers qualify for food stamps,” says UCLA doctoral student and local union head Enrique Olivares Pesante. UC Davis student researcher Aarthi Sekar describes how international graduate students have also been impacted. We also speak with Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at UC Santa Barbara.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• He’s a controversial figure: Rogan came under fire this year for spreading misinformation about the COVID vaccine on his show, prompting a boycott of Spotify by Neil Young and a few other artists. Rogan also faced a backlash over his use of the N-word in older episodes of his podcast. Earlier this year, Spotify removed 70 episodes “The Joe Rogan Experience” that included “racially insensitive language,” which Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said were pulled at Rogan’s request.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• Fritz Lang’s iconic 1927 silent film, Metropolis, is set to enter the public domain on January 1, 2023. This is great news for film fans around the world, who will now be able to freely access, view, and enjoy this beloved classic. Metropolis is often considered one of the most influential films of the silent era. Its groundbreaking visual effects, futurism-inspired set design, and compelling story about class struggles and the two-edge sword of technological progress have inspired countless filmmakers throughout the years.

• The UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit recently revealed the arrest of a man as part of a movie piracy investigation. No further details have been made public but TorrentFreak understands that the matter was so serious that the government, PIPCU, an organized crime unit, a specialist anti-piracy team, and cinema operators teamed up to track the suspect down.

• Telegram has complied with an order from the High Court in Delhi by sharing the personal details of copyright-infringing users with rightsholders. The order, which was issued despite fierce opposition, sets a precedent in India. The Court, meanwhile, clarifies that the information can also be shared with the Government and police.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• In the fourth grade I made a mistake that has probably impacted my life more than anything else. Me and another kid, Marcus, had birthdays 2 days apart from each other. Marcus was having his birthday party on the Sunday closest to our birthdays, and there was a school event on the Saturday before it. Me, being an impatient 9 year-old, got very upset that I would need to wait a whole extra week before I could have my birthday party, and I had a bit of a temper tantrum, with all my anger being directed towards Marcus for having his party then. I also had a youtube channel at the time where I would post really bad Lego review videos and little skits with the Lego characters. Well in the heat of my temper tantrum I thought it would be a good idea to make a video about my dire predicament. I think the actual content of the video was actually fairly tame, just an angry 9 year old crying to the camera about the situation, but I let my emotions take control when I titled the video “KILL MARCUS LASTNAME” and made the description “If anyone sees Marcus in real life please hurt him badly”. My friend Ken ended up reporting me to the school for it and I was suspended for 2 days and barred from using any computers at the school for a month as well as being banned from using the internet for anything besides school at home for a month.

• Today I took a look at the tourist websites for a few cities that I might want to visit. I’m excited to go travel, especially because these cities are places I’ve never been to, and are in an environment I’ve never visited before.

• One of the cities had a really broken website which talked more about the tourism bureaucracy than cool things to do in the city; I probably won’t go all the way there. That same city has a lot of problems in its economy and a high crime rate, which is another factor pushing me away from visiting.

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