● 12.03.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 03/12/2022: KDE Report and Canonical Lying to Staff

Posted in News Roundup at 9:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Dolphin 22.12 is going to be released in a few days so it is high time that I report on its big new feature which I have implemented: the selection mode. In this light-hearted video I will present it next to problems, whose solutions have not been implemented yet.

• My Lenovo Flex 5i is a 2-in-1 laptop with the ability to use the touch screen with a finger or an included stylus on the screen. Ubuntu MATE provides support for touch screens by default. I did have to make some adjustments to the stylus/screen mapping when using the stylus. In this episode I describe those adjustments and link to our article that describes some optional additional setup steps that make it more convenient to use the laptop in tablet mode.

• Tech Mentorship! Please enjoy the video and if you have any questions, leave a comment below. My goal is to expand the Linux community.

Applications

• Computers are fancy filing cabinets, full of virtual folders and files waiting to be referenced, cross-referenced, edited, updated, saved, copied, moved, renamed, and organized. In this article, I’ll take a look at a file manager for your Linux system.

• The XFCE desktop is well-known and respected for its careful and methodical development cycle. It’s actively maintained and has continued to evolve over the years, its focus tends to be on delivering a consistent experience with just the right amount of new features. It’s a pleasure to use XFCE on everything from the old computer you’ve repurposed as a home server to the new PC you’ve just built and are too greedy to waste GPU cycles on fancy desktop effects. XFCE is a budget desktop that doesn’t make you skimp on experience, and its file manager exemplifies that.

Instructionals/Technical

• Something I was tripping over when I began learning about :has() was the combination with :not().

• Let me show you what I got wrong by using an example. Let’s say we have two cards, each with a heading and some text. One of them also contains an image.

• You can use @import to load entire style sheets into a cascade layer.

• Mastodon is a free and open-source software that allows you to self-host your own social network on your Raspberry Pi.

• This software is a microblogging platform that is very much like Twitter However, unlike Twitter, it is possible to use Mastodon to run a private social network.

• Please note that Mastodon is a relatively heavy piece of software. You will have the best experience using a Raspberry Pi 4 with at least 2GB of memory.

• Additionally, you must be using a 64-bit operating system due to the newer release of PostgreSQL we will be utilizing.

• Creating the PiRS232 and playing with the Pi over serial has been leading towards an idea – I wanted to create a small, battery powered device, a sidecar that I could carry with my Psion and use as portable Linux terminal. I also managed to turn it into an Internet gateway, leading to some interesting experiences.

• The idea was straightforward: take a Pi Zero, add an RS232 board that already handles the null modem side, add a Lipo battery, power management and charging, and print a case for it. It’s taken a few months from initial idea to final design, but I’m happy the result, it’s usable and practical, and you can build one too.

• Services like Linode or DigitalOcean offer backup services for your VPS. Save your money, you don’t need it. Here’s how to backup your data safely, and with no extra costs…

• I mentioned recently that we were hopefully going to move away from the Apache prefork MPM when we upgraded our primary web server from Ubuntu 18.04 to Ubuntu 22.04. We had tried to switch over to the event MPM back in 18.04, but had run into problems and had reverted to the prefork MPM as a quick fix. Specifically, we had run into Apache stopping serving requests and reporting the following in the error log: [...]

• A neat feature in OpenBSD is the program authpf, an authenticating gateway using SSH.

• Basically, it allows to dynamically configure the local firewall PF by connecting/disconnecting into a user account over SSH, either to toggle an IP into a table or rules through a PF anchor.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nessus Scanner on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Nessus is an open-source network vulnerability scanner for vulnerability assessments and penetration testing. With the help of this web-based GUI scanner, you can stay apprised of any issues that might arise on your network servers. Nessus does a fantastic job of checking for vulnerabilities and breaches in your company’s infrastructure.

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

• Renaming files is one of the most fundamental tasks on a Linux system. On the command line, the mv (move) command is used not only to move files to different locations, but also to rename them.

• Learn how to install Oracle VirtualBox 7 on Fedora 36 and Fedora 37 via command line.

• In this post, you will learn a simple trick in practice but quite useful for those who work a lot with the terminal. Today, you will learn how to turn off beep / bell on Linux terminal on Rocky Linux / Alma Linux / Red Hat 9.

• It turns out that when a person uses Linux and his terminal a lot, it is because he is working in demanding or important situations. So, imagine that every time you use the tab key, then a noise comes out of nowhere. Once is fine, but frequently? I think that’s not ideal.

• There are other, more extreme situations where the terminal starts making sounds out of nowhere, making the situation worse. So for this, we have the solution, and it is nothing more than disabling the beep / bell of the terminal.

• Let’s go.

• Nginx is a free and open source web server. It can also be used as a reverse proxy, HTTP cache, and load balancer. In this article, we will learn how to restart Nginx in Linux.

• AlmaLinux and other RHEL-based Linux distributions use firewalld to manage firewall rules. Note that firewalld is simply a frontend for iptables, which is the system firewall baked directly into the Linux kernel. firewalld makes firewall rules easier to manage by setting up “zones.”

• In this tutorial, you will see how to disable or enable the firewall on AlmaLinux. It’s generally recommended that you keep your firewall enabled for security, but there may be instances where it’s appropriate to turn it off.

• By default, Kali Linux doesn’t give us the option to log in to the GUI with the root account. If you want to circumvent this security recommendation and use the GUI with your root account, follow the steps below.

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Google Chrome on Manjaro. Google Chrome is available in the Arch User Repostiroy (AUR) so we can install it from there by either downloading and compiling it, or using an AUR helper like yay or pamac as you’ll see below.

Games

• Valve put out a small and sweet update for Steam Deck OS (SteamOS) 3.4 Preview, which adds in support for the 8BitDo Ultimate Wireless controller dongle.

• With the closing of Stadia fast approaching, Google has already run through plenty of refunds for Stadia game purchases and now they’re moving onto Stadia Hardware refunds.

• Not only has Team Fortress 2 been updated but it seems like quite a huge one thanks to the addition of VScript, and you can now run Linux inside it. That’s right, TF2 came to Linux back in 2013 and now TF2 itself can run Linux. What a time to be alive.

• Proton Experimental has a now update available as of December 1st, so here’s a run over what’s new in the latest build for Linux desktop and Steam Deck. This is the special testing version of Proton from Valve, that you can manually swap over to that includes the latest changes before they roll out to the main version of Proton.

• Valve released a Steam Deck Client Update with a bunch of nice fixes, and they also revealed the top 20 most played games on Steam Deck for November 2022.

• November is over which means a fresh Steam Hardware Survey, and it continues the trend we’ve been seeing with the Linux user share rising and now it’s bigger than ever.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KWin got a very cool new feature this week: a built-in advanced tiling system that you can use to set up custom tile layouts and resize multiple adjacent windows at a time by dragging on the gaps between them!

• This feature is still in its infancy and not designed to completely replicate the workflow of a tiling window manager. But we expect it to grow and advance over time, and also the new APIs added for it should benefit 3rd-party tiling scripts that do want to let you turn KWin into a tiling window manager. Thanks very much to Marco Martin for contributing this work, which will be released in Plasma 5.27!

• But there’s much, much more as well!

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Here’s a blast from the past. Years ago, back in the early 1990s, there was an operating system called Coherent. The price wasn’t so bad – $99. A few years ago, it was made freely available. Coherent never claimed to be UNIX, but UNIX-like. I learned a lot with that OS.

• When the Mark Williams Company closed in 1995, Coherent was a closed-source product. In 2015, it was released under a 3-clause BSD License so, if you’re interested, you can grab a free copy of Coherent at Internet Archive or here.

• Here’s a little look-back at Coherent.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Aside from this notification apparently not being tied properly into the KDE notification system (it doesn’t show in the list of recent notifications that’s available from the system tray notifications widget, and so therefore seems to be using a different notification system), this highlights a particularly annoying (and anti-user) line of thinking by the Snap development team.

• A little background, before going into detail on the issue here (skip down to the next image if you’re up to speed on Linux packaging). As is standard operating procedure in the Linux ecosystem, competing systems are vying to become a standard to solve a particular problem, and as usual we’ll end up with segmented user bases, inefficient use of sparse developer resources, and multiple ways to achieve the same thing. Human nature, ftw. The problem that’s being addressed in this case is that of software distribution.

• The status quo for obtaining software for Linux distributions until fairly recently was the idea of repositories, i.e. managed collections of software, and tooling baked into the distributions to allow installing and updating software from these repositories. (Linux repositories preceded the popularity of “app stores”, but it’s basically the same idea.) Part of the differentiation between competing Linux distributions is how (and how often) they curate their repositories. While some distributions opt to be “bleeding edge”, and allow highly streamlined updates from developers to make it through to end users with a minimal amount of testing, many other (and most mainstream) distributions opt for periodical release cycles, whereby critical security updates (and some important bugfixes) can be made and pushed out quickly, but generally most other significant updates will be held until the next big release of the distribution.

• This was both good and bad for users. If your system was in a fairly stable state, you could expect that applying updates when prompted to do so would leave your system in at least as stable a state as it was prior to the update, at least until the next distribution wide release (and then, your mileage might vary depending on hardware, drivers, amount of upstream testing, your own customizations, etc). “Long term support” releases were introduced, and if you opted into these, you’d be protected from distribution releases for years at a time, giving you stability at the expense of recency. Unfortunately, this meant if that if you needed an important feature update from an application, you’d either have to “sideload” it, or you’d need to wait for the distribution to include that update in the next release.

• I would really, really suggest moving away from Ubuntu, and opting for the countless better alternatives instead, like Fedora (the best desktop, in my view), Linux Mint (a great desktop, but a bit more conservative than Fedora), any of the Arch derivatives (for bleeding edge and tons of fooling around with AUR), or Void (for those of us with taste). Or any, any of the others.

• The reason? Those who know me well might suspect that it’s related to some complications with that fact that I’m living in Russia, or maybe with some remarks I might have made about the war in Ukraine or about other current events, since I tent to be quite outspoken and provocative. Nothing of all that: it’s about my refusal to get vaccinated against COVID-19; unfortunately, it has now become apparent that I’m not the only one leaving, and other employees who have refused either to get vaccinated or to disclose their vaccination status are also being shown the door (including people who have been in the company for more than 10 years). This has sparked some internal discussions in the company, and several different point of views have been voiced: from those who welcome this policy and would like to see it extended to flu vaccinations (which makes a lot of sense, since once you’ve accepted to renounce your freedom in order to protect the weak, you should accept it for all transmissible diseases), to those who voiced concerns about the legality of this move, or would have found this reasonable one year ago but not in the current situation as restrictions are getting lifted and the current variants are less scary than the previous ones; those who pointed out that being vaccinated has little impact on transmissibility of the virus; that we are mostly a remote company and we could instead have exceptions to allow unvaccinated people (or people with a weak immune system) to remotely attend the few in-person meetings we have; that as long as there are no vaccination mandates for plane flights and other guests attending the same hotel premises where we meet, mandating employees to get vaccinated might not help a lot; and whether this is a decision that a company should make, or shouldn’t it rather lobby the politics to have it mandated at state level. I think there’s merit to all these arguments, but I’m personally not particularly interested in discussing any of them, since my point is another.

• Before talking about that, though, let me clearly set one thing straight: I hate lies, and Canonical’s management is lying about this matter. The vaccination mandate measure is being justified on the grounds that it allows employees to travel (something that I’ve been able to do as unvaccinated throughout the last two years, even when restrictions were at their peak) and, most importantly, to protect our weaker colleagues. This is what I find most disgusting: using genuine feelings like love and compassion to justify repressive measures. No, dear Canonical, this has nothing to do with protecting the weak; not only because a vaccinated person can still spread the virus (and our employees know this from first-hand experience), but also because, if this was the real reason, then you’d accept people who have recently recovered from COVID-19, since immunisation after recovery is not worse than that of vaccination; but you don’t, as I was explicitly told by HR that any previous infection is irrelevant. It’s also significant that you didn’t establish clear rules about how often one needs to get vaccinated, since all recent scientific literature on vaccine efficacy shows that this is not a minor detail. Why not just be honest with ourselves, and admit it’s just for business? Being open about the fact that having a fully vaccinated workforce can grant us access to more business deals would not change a lot in the practical life of the (ex-)employees, but at least we won’t feel that the company is treating us as fools while embellishing its image with fake care and compassion. Or, if there are other reasons, state them, because these ones don’t stand up to logic scrutiny.

Devices/Embedded

• PiTalk is a 4G cellular connectivity solution based on Quectel EG25-G LTE Cat 4 module intended for M2M and IoT applications, and available either as a Raspberry Pi HAT or as a USB dongle. There’s also a PiTalk 2G HAT, but we’ll focus on the 4G hardware in this article.

• PiTalk supports data rates up to 150 Mbps downlink and 50 Mbps uplink, integrates GNSS support, and as its name implies you can also make and receive calls, or send/receive SMS messages for the device provide you connect a display, speaker, and microphone to the Raspberry Pi or other host device.

• Setup and use a WizFi360-EVB-Pico microcontroller with MicroPython and test it with MQTT.

• The great thing about the wide availability of single-board computers (SBCs) is that it offers such a large selection of options, in terms of CPU performance, GPU features, RAM size, I/O options and much more. This is however also the largest issue, especially with the annual surge of new boards with new feature sets. Trying to make sense of all these offerings is the recently overhauled Board-DB, also known as Hackerboards.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Filmed a cool new video you’d like to share on social media or with friends, but the audio is not quite up to par? Not to worry, as you can easily remove the annoying background noises or audio straight from your Android phone in a matter of just a few seconds. This tutorial shows you how.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• This release includes the following changes to the previous release: [...]

• Here’s how Mastodon works. Its servers (instances) operate semi-independently of each other, and users register with servers geared toward communities that interest them. But users can follow and interact with others from across the Fediverse — users hosted on other Mastodon instances as well as other services utilising the open-source ActivityPub protocol from the Worldwide Web Consortium.

• Active users of Mastodon nearly doubled between October 27 and November 6, according to the company’s CEO Eugen Rochko, causing some growing pains. The distributed nature of Mastodon and ActivityPub have strengths in terms of keeping the service community driven both at the instance and Fediverse level, but some users are starting to notice a warts here and there that seem related to their architecture.

• Decentralisation: Robust, not necessarily efficient

• This is honestly a very hastily written selection of various snippets, with text extracted, and notes. No real editing thought was put into this, so I hope it’s not too confusing. This blog post will be kept up to date as I find out more information and publish my findings.

• It’s currently organized in no particular order with a bunch of micro fragment thoughts split out in a row.

Events

• Thank you to everyone that attended Linux Plumbers 2022 both in person or virtually. After two years of being 100% virtual due to the pandemic, we were able to have a very successful hybrid conference, with 418 people registering in-person where 401 attended (96%), and 361 registered virtually and 320 who actually participated online (89%), not counting all those that used the free YouTube service. After two years of being 100% remote, we decided to keep this year’s in-person count lower than normal due to the unknowns caused by the pandemic. To compensate for the smaller venue, we tried something new, and created a virtual attendance as well. We took a different approach than other hybrid conferences, and treated this one as a virtual event with an in-person component, where the in room attendees were simply participants of the virtual event. This required all presentations to be uploaded to Big Blue Button, and the presenters presented through the virtual platform even though they were doing so on stage. This allowed the virtual attendees to be treated as first class citizens of the conference. Although we found this format a success, it wasn’t without technical difficulties, like problems with having no sound in the beginning of the first day, but that’s expected when attempting to do something for the first time. Overall, we found it to be a better experience and will continue to do so in future conferences.

• We had a total of 18 microconferences (where patches are already going out on the mailing lists that are results of discussions that happened there), 16 Refereed talks, 8 Kernel Summit talks, 29 Networking and BPF Summit track talks, and 9 Toolchain track talks. There were also 17 birds-of-a-feather talks, where several were added at the last minute to solve issues that have just arrived. Most of these presentations can still be seen on video.

Education

• Being able to post social interactions on your own site and have them show up on another website excites me. You can retain ownership over the interactions you post and curate them in a way that you would like. For instance, I have a separate website where I publicly show my comments. There’s so much I can do with this information. I could start adding tags and curate by tag. I could use some natural language processing to understand what categories of content I consume and bookmark the most.

• I just now realized I’ve released a version of mod_blog during the holiday season going back as far as 2016. With that in mind, and with the fact that I finally received my first webmention on my blog couple of days ago, I have just released the latest version for this Christmas season. The big change this release is that I now show webmentions per post, even though I’ve only so far received one.

Programming/Development

• In the context of ACME today the large majority of clients have no failover or logic. This means if the enrollment fails due to connectivity issues to the specified CA, the CA has an outage, or the CA suspends operations for one reason or another the enrollment will fail.

• I loaded it up on my dev environment and got cracking. Sure enough, something was wrong with it, and the first time through, it would blow up. It was something dumb like the code was throwing an exception but the exception handling path was making the wrong sort of log call so that would then blow up the whole request. I fixed the logging so we’d actually get to see what the exception was, and that’d give us a chance to fix any real problems. Simple enough, right? I sent the change to the last person to touch the code… who had just touched it that morning, oddly enough. They thanked me and it was applied.

• Then I tried to get my credit, and this time it blew up again, but now it logged what was wrong. I could see this on the dev environment. It was something about calling some function with the wrong number of parameters.

• I’ve been doing Advent of Code in Rust for the past couple of days, because I’ve never really gotten comfortable with the language and I thought doing some Advent of Code problems might help.

• My solutions aren’t anything special, but because I’m trying to learn, I’ve been trying to take a slightly more rigorous approach than usual to compiler errors. Instead of just fixing the error and moving on, I’m trying to make sure that I actually understand what the error message means and what it’s telling me about how the language works.

• This can be a problem on social media. You might be following someone for their insightful takes on RuPaul’s Drag Race but can’t be bothered with their opinions about football. In my ideal social network that wouldn’t be a problem – people would post to “Channels” which you could subscribe to. We’re not there yet, so we have to do with keyword filtering.

• Here’s a quick guide to setting up a filter on the Mastodon social network.

Leftovers

• Electronic fuel injection was a big leap forward for engine control. However, early implementations often left something to be desired. This was the case for [Rob] and his Porsche 944, which had relied on an old-fashioned mechanical air flow meter (AFM). He decided to replace this with a modern mass air flow (MAF) sensor instead, and documented the process online.

• This repair/tutorial video by the telephone Connections Museum of Seattle features an amazing piece of electro-mechanical technology from the 1950s — the 5XB trouble recorder. Museum volunteer Sarah the “Switch Witch” has a deep passion for old phone equipment, and gives an excellent description of the trouble recorder, the problems it solved, and how it works, and how they went about fixing it.

• We think of computers as being purely digital objects—computational beasts that work with abstracted collections of 1s and 0s. As complexity increased, so did the tactics to making the computing devices smaller, to the point where we can have one implanted in our brain as if that’s something we wanna do. Of course, computers are reliant on power these days, but there was a time when computers didn’t need things like batteries, because they weren’t electronic. Really, they were machines. Complicated machines, or simple ones. Hand-held, or not. But machines nonetheless. Tonight’s Tedium takes a nice long look at one specific machine—a machine that melded many of the things we now take for granted from our computers, but did all of them with tiny cranks and dials. Meet the Curta Calculator.

• Hackaday has been around long enough to see incredible changes in what’s possible at the hobbyist level. The tools, techniques, and materials available today border on science-fiction compared to what the average individual had access to even just a decade ago. On a day to day basis, that’s manifested itself as increasingly elaborate electronic projects that in many cases bear little resemblance to the cobbled together gadgets which graced these pages in the early 2000s.

• There are plenty of electric vehicle (EV) chargers out there that are underutilized. This is particularly common where older EVs are involved, where the cars may only be able to charge at a few kW despite the charger being capable of delivering more. [Nick Sayer] regularly found 6.6 kW chargers being used by vehicles that could only draw down 3.3 kW at his work. Thus, he built the J1772 Hydra as a nifty double-adapter to charge two cars at once.

Science

• China and NASA are racing toward the moon, each vying for the first human moon landing since 1972. Two recent launches show that NASA may have the edge, but there is no clear winner yet.

• Scientists have made a magnetic field discovery that could help make fusion reactors a practical reality..

Education

• This is the easiest reason. While practice does not imply improvement, you cannot improve without practice.

• Every time you learn something is a chance to write down both what you’ve learned and also how you learned it.

• For professional developers this chance happens all the time. Daily, really. But most developers, even those who want to write more, let the opportunity slip.

• This session brings lightning talks presented by 10 European junior researchers in the field of linked data & semantics to the front. The first talks deal with different aspects of linked data followed by talks about how data interoperability and AI are enablers. The session continues with three talks about the associated governance and policy issues. The intention is that these inspiring talks from the next generation will enhance the quality of the discussions on linked data and semantics and thus interoperability.

Hardware

• Minisforum recently launched a mini-PC powered by the 12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900H processor. The NAD09 is offered as barebone or it can be configured with up to 64GB DDR4 and 2TB SSD. Additionally, the NAD9 Mini-PC includes 1x GbE LAN port, 4x displays supporting [email protected], 2x 2.5” SATA slots, etc.

• Getting up on a ladder to hang Christmas lights is a great way to hurt yourself if you’re not careful, and winter conditions only add to the peril. One enterprising hacker has whipped up a neat way to avoid ladders entirely, by hanging their lights while planted safely on the ground.

• [Attoparsec] wondered what if you could carry a typewriter in your pocket, then followed through with that and built one. (Video, embedded below.) Kind of. The plan was to use an existing set of striker bars, but not wanting to destroy a perfectly good typewriter, they realised that you can easily source just the bar set on eBay.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The tire fire that Elon Musk seems to be making out of his new toy, Twitter, is leading some to call for an overdue, society-wide jettisoning of the whole “if he’s a billionaire, that means he’s a genius” myth.

• Original to ScheerPost China’s “zero Covid” policy has sparked rare protests across the nation of nearly a billion and a half people. Which led me to think about our very own failed “zero” policy here in the United States. Zero corporate tax. To be fair, it’s not a policy per se, but is […]

• Peace and economic justice advocates responded to the imminent unveiling Friday of the United States Air Force’s new $750 million-per-plane nuclear bomber by reiterating accusations of misplaced priorities in a nation where tens of millions of people live in poverty and lack adequate healthcare coverage.

• Military-industrial complex giant Northrop Grumman is set to introduce its B-21 Raider on Friday. The B-21, whose development was 30 years in the making and whose total project cost is expected to exceed $200 billion, is tapped to replace the aging B-2 Spirit.

Proprietary

• I guess it’s a rule now. So you could argue that Coinbase just have to get on with it. But this all does seem like yet another greedy move from Apple.

• As more businesses began to rely on online networks to remain productive and profitable over the past two years, the amount of data and data usage has skyrocketed. Along with the ever-increasing connectivity and data creation, the potential risks of cyberattacks have also increased.

• Was the security breach of LastPass limited? In its official statement, the company said that the breach was limited to the development environment and couldn’t reach the customers’ data and encrypted passwords. The company didn’t specify what information was accessed as the investigation is currently ongoing. It further stated that the production environment lies in a different physical environment than the development environment.

Security

• NVIDIA today put out an official Security Bulletin, noting multiple flaws found in their Windows and Linux drivers. The good news is that drivers are already out that fix the problems, which I’ll detail below.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• Since the beginning of the Internet, determining the trustworthiness of participants and published information has been a significant point of contention. Many systems have been proposed to solve these underlying concerns, usually pertaining to specific niches and communities, but these pre-existing solutions are nebulous at best. How can we build infrastructure for truly democratic Webs of Trust?

• Let’s start with the background. Pretty much every Linux system (really, every Unix system) has a ‘system CA root store’, by which we mean ‘the list of all CA root certificates that are trusted by default by most TLS-using software’. For various sensible reasons, many Linux distributions reuse Mozilla’s CA root store for their system root store, possibly with some tweaks.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Directions 20(3)/2022 – CERT-In came into effect on June 28th, sixty days after being published without stakeholder consultation. Astonishingly, India’s Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Rajeev Chandrasekhar said the government wasn’t required to get public input because the directions have “no effect on citizens.” The Directionsn itself states that they  were needed to help India defend against cybersecurity attacks, protect the security of the state and public order, and prevent offenses involving computers. Chandrasekhar said the agency consulted with entities “who run the relevant infrastructure,” without naming them.

• Cybersecurity law and policy directly impact human rights, particularly the right to privacy, freedom of expression, and association. Across the world, national cybersecurity policies have emerged to protect the internet, critical infrastructure, and other technologies against malicious actors. However, overly broad and poorly defined proposals open the door to unintended consequences, leading to human rights abuses, and harming innovation. The Directions enable surveillance and jeopardize the right to privacy in India, raising alarms among human rights and digital rights defenders. A global NGO coalition has called upon CERT-in to withdraw the Directions and initiate a sustained multi-stakeholder consultation with human rights and security experts to strengthen cybersecurity while ensuring robust human rights protections.

• ID.me made its disastrous news cycle debut as COVID-19 continued to wreak havoc worldwide. With ID verification and other government services mostly still being handled remotely, multiple governments continued to wrestle with these unprecedented logistical problems.

• South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem put on a bit of a performance this week by announcing that the state would be banning government employees from installing TikTok on their phones. The effort, according to the Governor, is supposed to counter the national security risk of TikTok sharing consumer data with the Chinese government:

Defence/Aggression

• During his nightly address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (NSDC) had instructed the government to submit a bill “on the impossibility of religious organizations affiliated with the centers of influence in the Russian Federation to operate in Ukraine” to the Verkhovna Rada.

• A MiG-31 fighter-interceptor crashed in Primorsky region, TASS reported, citing emergency services.

• Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin has published a Telegram post about his visit to the Russian army’s “line of defense” in Ukraine:

• The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) reported that it had conducted “counterintelligence activities” in monasteries and churches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Zhytomyr, Rivne, and Zakarpattia regions.

• How Democrats, their pro-war Republican cohorts and the media canceled the U.S. Senate campaign of ex-Marine and US foreign policy official Matthew Hoh.

• Leadership at TV Rain fired host Alexey Korostelev after the channel received criticism for Korostelev’s “ambiguous” remarks. In an evening broadcast on December 1 of the program “Zdyes & Seychas” (Here and Now), Korostelev promoted the station’s hotline for information about frontline conditions for Russian draftees, soliciting questions and tips for TV Rain’s email address and Telegram bot. “Many of the stories sent to us or to the Telegram bot are now public. We hope that we can help many service members, for example, with equipment and basic amenities at the front,” he said.

• When she learned that the Manhattan district attorney was finally asking the presiding judge to dismiss the murder charge she was facing in the death of her estranged husband, Tracy McCarter’s first response surprised even her.

• Oleg Nikolenko, an official representative of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, says that several Ukrainian diplomatic missions in European countries have received threatening packages:

• A crucial function of a free press is to present perspectives that critically examine government actions. In major articles from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal discussing the escalation of the war in Ukraine, however, such perspectives have been hard to come by—even as the stakes have reached as high as nuclear war.

• Institute for Social Research On 21 November 2022, Mali’s interim prime minister, Colonel Abdoulaye Maïga, issued a statement on social media announcing the government’s decision ‘to ban, with immediate effect, all activities carried out by [French] NGOs operating in Mali’. This announcement came a few days after the French government cut Official […]

• Part of the answer lies in Russia’s missteps. It limited its initial strikes because it assumed that Ukrainian infrastructure would soon come under its control. Russia’s cyber-forces also have less experience of integrating cyber-operations with military ones than their American counterparts, who have been doing it for 30 years.

• Assaults of this sort on civilian infrastructure are hard to keep quiet. But what is happening to military kit is a different matter. Ukraine’s armed forces have maintained tight operational security throughout the war, giving away nothing about how their own networks were penetrated or disrupted (which they were). Even so, the visible effects of Russia’s campaign have been surprisingly limited. “I think we were expecting much more significant impacts than what we saw,” said Mieke Eoyang, a senior cyber-official at the Pentagon, on November 16th. “Russian cyber-forces as well as their traditional military forces underperformed expectations.”

Environment

• Living in confinement also means domesticated mink are riddled with disease, a problem that does not exist for their wild counterparts. In the words of Hannah Connor, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, “these naturally solitary animals are often maintained in extreme confinement and unhygienic cages, circumstances that facilitate the spread of disease among the animals and, as we saw with COVID-19, can facilitate the spread of disease back and forth between the confined mink and humans.” This has long been a cause of concern from a public health standpoint, and quite obviously “if released into the wild, diseased farmed mink can pose a threat to public health and native wildlife.”

• Environmental campaigners implored French President Emmanuel Macron to stop inhibiting sorely needed climate action by weaponizing global trade rules during a Thursday night protest outside the White House, where U.S. President Joe Biden hosted Macron for the first state visit of his tenure.

• “We simply do not have time for governments to continue using outdated trade agreements to attack and undermine climate action.”

• We are at a crucial turning point for the future of life on Earth. For decades, deforestation, overfishing, corporate agri-business mega-farming, and extraction of natural resources have contributed to the disappearance of species at an alarming rate that is unprecedented in human history. Between climate change and ecosystem loss, one million species are now threatened by extinction.

• Nearly 25 years ago, oil major Shell predicted in an internal 1998 report that a class-action lawsuit would be brought against fossil fuel companies following “a series of violent storms.” That prediction is finally coming true: A group of Puerto Rican communities, which were ravaged by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, are suing Shell and other fossil fuel producers in a first-of-its-kind, class action climate liability lawsuit.

• The groundbreaking case — filed November 22 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico — is the first climate-related class action lawsuit in the United States filed against the fossil fuel industry to target the industry with federal charges of racketeering. It alleges that the fossil fuel defendants engaged in a coordinated, multi-front effort to promote climate denial and defraud consumers by concealing the climate consequences of fossil fuel products in order to inflate profits.

• Fire Drill Fridays—the climate action protest launched three years ago by actor and activist Jane Fonda—returned Friday morning to Washington, D.C., where participants rallied and marched against U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin’s “dirty deal” while demanding President Joe Biden declare a climate emergency.

• “What we do or fail to do in the next eight to 10 years to cut our fossil fuel emissions in half will determine how much of a livable future we will have.”

• Stan and Priti Gulati Cox explain that the countries of the Global South can’t afford to pay for what’s happening to them.

Energy

• “Commingling” is too euphemistic. Even though Alameda and FTX were nominally classed as separate entities, both controlled by SBF, they both drew from the same enormous pot of money for banking purposes. FTX customers often wired money to an Alameda bank account at Silvergate, a crypto industry-focused bank. This was a major oversight that SBF has yet to explain away, but it was consistent with FTX’s flagrant lack of financial controls or proper accounting.

• Turmoil in the cryptocurrency industry has rattled major exchanges and sent the value of digital assets tumbling, but at least one group stands to gain: bankruptcy lawyers.

• High-profile bankruptcies involving [cryptocurrency] exchange FTX, hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and crypto lenders BlockFi, Celsius Network and Voyager Digital Ltd are generating new opportunities – and big fees – for law firms that counsel troubled companies.

• Large law firms can rake in more than $100 million in legal fees during a long-running bankruptcy, experts said.

• In broadening the financial aid in this way, the government hopes to expand the circle of beneficiaries. In November last year, the government introduced financial incentives for companies who install charging points on their premises.

Wildlife/Nature

Overpopulation

• California’s ongoing drought and a poor forecast is forcing the state’s water management agency to cut back on its fresh water supply to nearly 27 million residents.

• The state’s Department of Water Resources announced Thursday an initial allocation of 5% of requested supplies for 2023 for 29 local water agencies across California.

Finance

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The FTC and four state attorneys general this week struck a $9.4 million settlement with Google over allegations that Google covertly paid celebrities money to promote a phone none of them had ever used.

• Rolling Stone has a fun article quoting multiple former Twitter employees highlighting that polls are the least secure tool on the platform, and are regularly open to manipulation by bots:

• No single company seems to be able to take on Apple — it’s just too big. But as Apple competes in more areas and creates more enemies, will it ever stretch itself too thin? Can a conglomerate of large tech companies overtake Apple (or convince the government to distribute its power)?

• The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on Friday that its Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) will begin conducting a review of recent [breaches] associated with Lapsus$, a global extortion [cracking] group that has been tied to numerous data breaches targeting major tech firms.

• DHS said the cyber criminal group has reportedly used various techniques to circumvent a range of security controls and has successfully infiltrated several companies across multiple industries.

• Meta reportedly purged millions of content from its social media services Facebook and Instagram in India in October. According to a report by IANS, the social media giant has removed over 29.2 million pieces of bad content across 13 policies for Facebook and over 2.7 million pieces of such content across 12 policies for Instagram. These numbers were reported by the company in its monthly compliance report which is mandatory under the IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.

• According to the new IT Rules 2021, major digital and social media platforms with more than 5 million user base need to publish monthly compliance reports. Meta also claims to count the number of content pieces (including posts, photos, videos and comments) the company has taken action on for going against its standards. However, taking action doesn’t always mean removing a piece of content from Facebook or Instagram. At times, Meta covers photos or videos with a warning for content that some audiences may find disturbing.

• Company managers over the last few days, however, have been told that they should try to identify work performance problems among employees, as part of an effort to lay off about 20,000 people, according to sources. Twenty thousand employees are the equivalent of about 6% of corporate staff, and about 1.3% of Amazon’s total 1.5 million-strong workforce including global distribution center and hourly workers.

• These examples concerning Iraq highlight a feature of Arab public life: politicians roar emotional messages in speeches to their masses and sotto voce speak in tactful off-the-record remarks to Western interlocutors.

• That raises two questions: Should an outsider heed the shouts or the whispers? Which is the better guide to policy? (This differs from asking about true personal beliefs because how a politician acts matters more than how he thinks deep down.) A historical review finds the answer to be quite easy – and perhaps surprising.

• The Biden Administration and Congressional Democrats purport to be pro-union, but in their desperation to prevent a rail strike they fail to understand something fundamental about collective bargaining: Sometimes workers have to inconvenience the public in order to achieve their legitimate goals.

• When President Joe Biden helped to engineer a tentative agreement to avert a threatened railroad workers’ strike earlier this fall, a narrative of benevolent patrician governance locked immediately into gear. Knowing that a massive work stoppage would upend an already beleaguered supply chain, Biden acted swiftly to resolve the wage-and-hours issues that separated rail owners and the four major rail workers’ unions. And amid much pundit-brokered anxiety over runaway inflation in the run-up to the 2022 midterms—a trend that would surely be accelerated by a rail strike—the prospective deal also earned praise for its political savvy.

• Despite winning reelection by just 550 votes in a race that’s now undergoing a recount, Rep. Lauren Boebert this week won a vote of confidence from her fellow Republican members of the U.S. House as she was elected to join the party’s policy committee.

• The office of Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold on Thursday announced Boebert’s unexpectedly close race with her Democratic challenger, Adam Frisch, would go to a recount under state law.

• The midterm elections took some time to sort out. But one thing was made clear quickly: Gen Z voters are a force to be reckoned with—for both parties. That’s a lesson elected officials need to start taking now—from this year’s lame duck session to next year’s divided government.

• On Wednesday, House Democrats unanimously elected Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) to serve as their party’s new leader following Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) recent decision to step down from her leadership role.

• Recent exposés have uncovered an emerging pattern of improper lobbying of right-wing Supreme Court justices by wealthy evangelicals. They reveal serious threats to the independence of the judiciary. But equally alarming is that the Supreme Court is unconstrained by a code of judicial ethics.  From 1995 to 2018, the right-wing […]

• U.S. Senator-elect John Fetterman on Friday announced two key staff hires for his office on Friday, including tapping the author of a book calling for the abolishment of the arcane Senate filibuster to be his next chief of staff.

• The Pennsylvania Democrat said in a statement that he has hired Adam Jentleson to oversee his D.C. office as chief of staff and that longtime party operative and labor organizer Joseph Pierce will be his state director.

• Having spent nearly a decade in occupation prisons, Hammouri was most recently placed under administrative detention in March. In 2020, Israel revoked his residency status, an often-used tool of ethnic cleansing deployed against Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

• As we slide closer to what was once considered the ultimate insanity—nuclear Armageddon—corporate media seem to be egging on reckless leaders.

• “Senate Republicans and Joe Manchin have yet AGAIN failed working Americans by voting down seven days of paid sick leave for rail workers,” lamented Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

• It took U.S. House lawmakers more than three-and-a-half years to get their hands on former President Donald Trump’s federal tax returns, but with Republicans assuming control of the chamber next month, Democrats are quickly running out of time to examine and publish the highly sought-after records.

• “There is no one in this country… that is above the law.”

• U.S. House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva and committee member Rep. Katie Porter are investigating an alleged bribery scheme in which they believe a real estate developer donated to a super PAC aligned in support of former President Donald Trump in exchange for pardons for two other men.

• “The parallels between the Vigneto case and the Hammonds’ pardons raise significant concerns about another potential case of bribery under the Trump administration.”

• Appearing on Alex Jones’s Infowars show on Thursday, the musician Kanye West, who now goes by the name Ye, did something remarkable: He made Alex Jones seem comparatively reasonable. Jones, you will recall, is the unhinged conspiracy theorist infamous for insisting that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax fabricated with actors. Jones has also frequently indulged in anti-Semitism, and even on the interview with West agreed that there is a “Jewish mafia,” after West at length accused Jews of being pedophiles. But elsewhere in the interview West, by repeatedly praising Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, went too far even for the vile, shamelessly mendacious Jones.

• Fifty years ago, in late 1972, I was one of a multitude of Chileans who lined the streets of Santiago to support President Salvador Allende as he embarked on a trip abroad to tell the world about how his homeland was advancing toward socialism using democratic means—an unprecedented revolutionary process that was under siege from forces both inside and outside the country. Arrayed against the left-wing government were powerful adversaries: the CIA, Nixon and his éminence noir Henry Kissinger, multinational corporations, international financial institutions, allied with a rabid conservative opposition within Chile itself that was increasingly armed and violent.

• Incoming Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has racked up a formidable progressive voting record in Congress over the past decade. Having withstood a $100 million spending barrage from her opponent, Rick Caruso, in the mayor’s race, she will have an opportunity as head of the country’s second-largest city to realize her political vision on the ground in Southern California.

• Eve Alas Moran, a recent Hofstra University graduate, came to the United States to pursue her dream of becoming a professional dancer—a career, she says, that does not exist in her home country of El Salvador. “I made one of the hardest choices,” said Moran. Now, however, she worries that she may be forced to leave the US, giving up everything she has worked for over the past few years.

• U.S. Supreme Court watchdogs on Thursday applauded the House Judiciary Committee for announcing it will hold a hearing next week regarding allegations that Justice Samuel Alito leaked at least one of the court’s rulings to right-wing activists—and called on the Senate to follow suit in the next Congress.

• “The people of the country deserve real answers from justices we trust to wield the power of the highest court in the country.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• We’ve talked about the mess that is the UK’s Online Safety Bill a few times now, focusing mostly on the extremely serious concerns over requiring websites to take down “legal but harmful” speech, which is a ridiculous and impossible to meet standard that would lead to massive over-blocking of perfectly reasonable content. Many people, including activists pushing for this bill, seem to think that there’s some magic wand that can be waved to determine what content is “harmful” and then magically remove it.

• Szabo also informed Culbertson that Twitter’s decision to censor the laptop story was being viewed as “tech’s Access Hollywood moment,” a reference to the jaw-dropping audio of then-candidate Donald Trump making lewd comments on the show “Access Hollywood” back in 2005 that was revealed weeks before the 2016 election.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• More than six months since the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed while reporting in the occupied West Bank, “there is still no accountability in what happened,” says journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous. He is the correspondent on a new Al Jazeera documentary for the program “Fault Lines” that investigates Abu Akleh’s May killing. It draws on videos and eyewitness accounts of Abu Akleh’s killing to establish that Abu Akleh was fatally shot in the head by Israeli forces, a finding supported by numerous other press investigations. The Biden administration also recently opened an FBI probe into her killing, but Israel is refusing to cooperate and has continued to deny responsibility. Abu Akleh, who was one of the most recognizable faces in the Arab world, had worked for Al Jazeera for 25 years and held U.S. citizenship. We play excerpts from the Al Jazeera documentary, “The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh,” and hear from Shireen’s niece Lina Abu Akleh. “We want there to be accountability. We want there to be justice,” she says.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The bill, which gives rail workers seven paid sick days, passed the House but was defeated by a vote of 52-43 in the Senate, as Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., joined Republican members in rejecting the measure. A handful of Republican members, including Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla, voted in favor of the bill.

• “It is extremely disappointing that 43 Senators voted to prioritize the corporate greed of rail carriers and CEOs over the needs and quality-of-life improvements that our members so desperately deserve,” said the SMART Transportation Division, or SMART-TD, which represents about 28,000 conductors, making it the nation’s largest rail union.

• The law, if passed, would apply to Indonesian citizens and foreigners alike.

• It is nearly 11 months since the UK launched its scheme to help vulnerable Afghans come to the UK. But MPs and charities say the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS) has been too slow to get up and running and is leaving those who are in most danger stuck in Afghanistan.

• In a statement on Facebook, City of Valley police said they treated Ms Menefield respectfully and that they had notified her several times that she had not paid the bill for three months.

• Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for civil liberties in the digital realm, criticized the measure for using what he said is vague language that makes it “not at all unreasonable for us to assume that in standoffs with people in the midst of a mental health crisis or something police will now feel empowered to send out robots that are equipped with explosive charges.”

• Paul Scharre, the vice president and director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank focused on national security issues, said the San Francisco proposal was “the exact opposite of what we should be using robots for in a policing context.”

• A fire started in a building at the Mikoyanovsky meat-packing plant on Moscow’s Volgogradsky Prospekt.

• As the camera moved down the line of players, most of their faces registered only a pained and reluctant mumble. The possible exception was the first to be seen in close-up—Mehdi Taremi, the talented striker who plays in Portugal’s premier league when he is not sporting the uniform of his native country. A cynic might say he has the most to lose, given his value on the international football/soccer market. But even he looked robotic during the anthem, and his stand against the opening anthem was heroic.

• Campaigners across the United States celebrated the Biden administration’s step this week to safeguard Alaska’s Bristol Bay from the proposed Pebble Mine long opposed by conservationists, local fishery advocates, and tribal leaders.

• “We can’t afford to lose any more time to the uncertainty that has hung over Bristol Bay communities for years.”

• Denying qualified immunity to law enforcement officers who violate rights is a rarity. It doesn’t mean the sued cops lose. It just means they can’t dismiss the lawsuit. In theory, that means officers alleged to have violated rights will now make their case in front of a jury.

• U.S. rail workers and working-class allies are angry at President Joe Biden—the self-proclaimed “most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in American history”—and Democratic congressional leaders for betraying them this week.

• “You can’t be ‘pro-labor’ if you don’t stand in solidarity with workers when they decide to strike. Period.”

• A private border wall built along the Rio Grande in South Texas could collapse during extreme flooding, according to a federally commissioned inspection report that the government sought to keep secret for more than a year.

• The 404-page report, produced by the global engineering firm Arcadis, confirms previous reporting from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. It also shows for the first time that the federal government independently found structural problems with the border fencing before reaching a settlement agreement with the builder, Fisher Industries, in May.

• When high school students in Rockland County, New York, invited renowned activist and professor Angela Davis to speak, the event got shut down in two different venues over protests that she was “too radical.” But the students persevered, and Angela Davis addressed a packed church Thursday night. “I talked about the importance of recognizing that through struggle, through organized struggle, through the efforts of people who come together and join hands and join their voices together, we’ve made changes in this country,” says Davis. We also speak with community activist Nikki Hines, who supported students at Rockland County High School when they invited Davis to speak and who says “misinformation” drove the protests.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Later today, the Canadian Heritage committee will continue its clause-by-clause review of Bill C-18, the Online News Act. The committee is virtually certain to expand the eligibility of news outlets, responding to concerns that the current criteria may exclude smaller, independent outlets from benefiting from the bill’s mandatory payment/arbitration system. However, earlier this week, just as the committee was hearing that the bill covers users Facebook posts with quotes and links to news content, it quietly expanded the scope of the definition of “eligible news business” in a manner that opened the eligibility door to some organizations that may not even produce news content. As a result, the bill faces another potential trade challenge as it evolves into a straight subsidy model in which the bulk of the payments go from Internet companies to Canadian broadcasters with little regard for value or any notion of actually use of news content.

• The gradual expansion of eligibility for news outlets is an interesting one. When the government first created new tax supports for Canadian journalism, it created the concept of the Qualifying Canadian Journalism Organization (QCJO). I’ve written about QCJO status in the past, which requires that organizations be Canadian, produce general interest news, and meet certain journalism standards. There are some criticisms of the system (including the lack of transparency), but it has clear standards and a review process to ensure eligible entities meet the criteria. Given its limited scope – broadcasters are not included nor are foreign entities with Canadian operations – the government expanded the scope of eligibility in Bill C-18 by adding a second avenue.

Monopolies

Patents

• This shouldn’t be the case. Earlier this week, EFF filed a brief seeking to protect an ongoing investigation of one of the nation’s largest patent-trolling companies, IP Edge.

• In recent weeks, Delaware-based U.S. District Court Judge Colm Connolly asked that owners of several patent-holding LLCs, which have filed 69 lawsuits in his court so far, testify about their histories and financing. The hearings conducted in Judge Connolly’s courtroom have provided a striking window into patent assertion activity by entities that appear to be related to IP Edge.

• Judge Connolly has also filed his own 78-page opinion explaining the nature and reasoning of his inquiries. As he summarizes (page 75), he seeks to determine if there are “real parties in interest” other than the shell LLCs, such as IP Edge and a related “consulting” company called Mavexar. He also asks if “those real parties in interest perpetrated a fraud on the court” by fraudulently conveying patents and filing fictitious patent assignment documents with the U.S. Patent Office. Judge Connolly also wants to know if lawyers in his court have complied with his orders and the Rules of Professional Conduct that govern attorney behavior in court. He has raised questions about whether a lawyer who files and settles cases without discussing the matter with their supposed client is committing a breach of ethics.

Copyrights

• Action role-playing game Genshin Impact is reported to have generated a record-setting $3.7 billion in sales in its first year alone. The game has a massive fanbase but, when fans can’t wait for the next piece of hot news, they turn to Ubatcha, one of Genshin Impact’s most prolific and popular leakers. Information obtained by TorrentFreak reveals that Ubatcha is now facing legal action after a court ordered Discord to hand over their personal details.

• The U.S. Government’s crackdown against Z-Library continues to make waves online. After the main domain names were seized, many book pirates switched to using alternatives such as Telegram bots. Several of these have since been removed by rightsholders. In response, a new bot was created with the power to unleash an ebook piracy hydra, for as long as it lasts.

• One of the murals created by the British street artist Banksy in the Kyiv region was cut away from the facade it decorated.

• The webinar will celebrate open access arts and culture as a vital digital tool for reimagining cultural narratives, challenging historical inequalities, and creating vibrant ecosystems of shared knowledge. As well as providing an opportunity to explore potential ways to bring open source metadata directly to the communities who created and care for their art and artifacts, this also allows for a more efficient and effective way to manage and catalog these items.

• In both webinars, we were looking to explore how the proliferation of AI connects to better sharing: sharing that is inclusive, just and equitable — where everyone has wide opportunity to access content, to contribute their own creativity, and to receive recognition and rewards for their contributions? And how the proliferation of AI connects to a better internet: a public interest vision for an internet that benefits us all?

• There’s a great post by Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive blog with the title “Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books“. He makes an important point about the work involved in providing and preserving digital books:

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I have a thing [1] for [2] Detroit [3] style [4] pizza [5] from [6] Buddy’s [7]. If it wasn’t so expensive to ship from Detroit, I would definitely have it more often. So it was with great joy that a few weeks ago Adam Ragusea [8] release a video about Detroit style pizza [9]. I had even more joy when I saw him make it from scratch [10]. It’s simple, it’s just dough (which you have to make because it’s not your standard pizza dough), pepperoni, Wisconsin brick cheese [11] (which looks like it’s only available via the Intarwebs if you aren’t in Wisconsin) tomato sauce, and several hours (to let the dough proof, and to heat the oven to its highest setting, which technically isn’t hot enough, but it will do).

• This is a record of the cider we made in 2022.

• We picked and pressed the apples on the 1st October. We collected 3 wheelbarrows full of apples. 1 Lady Sudeley[1] from the West Farm Orchard. 1 green eating apple and 1 green cooking apple from a neighbour’s garden.

• Last time it was about people affecting me, this time it’s about me affecting people. There are moments where I would be socially inadequate and say the wrong things that make some people mad, there are also times where I am aware that what I’m saying might causes interpersonal issues, and decided to say it out loud anyways.

Politics

• Adam Conover’s video on private equity firms [1] was interesting, but I would have liked a better explanation of how they make money from bankrupting the firms they buy (aside from the fees they apparently charge for their “services”). I would think that would be rather counter-productive over the longer term.

• And yes, I have some experience with private equity firms. When I worked at The Corporation, we were initially bought out by a larger company (but were left along for years for … um … reasons), then that company was bought out by a private equity firm. It was then when we sold off access to some critical databases we used to a competitor and leased the data back from them, which I’m sure this bought in a ton of money for the private equity firm itself directly. Indirectly, it most likely shifted expenses around for tax advantages for the next few years (like shifting capital expenses to operating expenses or something like that—I’m not an accountant though) until our contract with our competitor expired in a few years and it would become Somebody Else’s Problem to deal with (I think the hope of the private equity firm was that they would no longer own us by then). We also suffered hiring freezes because we “never had enough money to hire anyone” (odd, that, because we made millions per month from our customer, the Oligarchic Cell Phone Company).

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