● 12.09.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 09/12/2022: Kubernetes 1.26 and Linux 6.1 Ready This Weekend

Posted in News Roundup at 10:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Well, this year has been a long and crazy one for me and I wanted to upgrade the style of my first mechanical keyboard. Even though it’s not my fav one to type on, it is still a memorable part of my collection and it’s a great WFH keeb. I bought a wood case which raises it up a little but it’s much more solid, better sounding and nicer styling compared to the cheaper, thinner, and hollow plastic case that comes with ducky keyboards!

• Their idea for their original Launch keyboard, according to their press release, was a desire to provide customers of their Thelio desktops “with additional USB-C and USB-A ports that were easily accessible” and a “fully configurable keyboard allowed them to accomplish this while creating a holistic experience with the comprehensive list of shortcuts introduced in COSMIC” (COSMIC being their GNOME Shell customisations). Later the Launch Lite did away with the USB hub to provide a more affordable and smaller option. Now, they’ve gone super-sized, well — compared with the previous models anyway.

• If you’re a keyboard enthusiast, System76’s Launch lineup of keyboards is perhaps among the best keyboards out there. They’re a little on the expensive side, but they allow unparalleled tweaking allowing you to get it to work just how you like to. And you can now get it with a numpad, even.

• The Kubuntu Focus team today announced the immediate availability of kfocus-source, a unified GitHub repository containing the Kubuntu Focus Suite. This software has always been published under the GPLv2 license, but now with kfocus-source, it’s easier to review and contribute within the standard GitHub interface.

• The HP, however, hated running Handbrake in an Ubuntu VM under VMware Workstation and crawled over the file conversion finish line after more than 30 minutes. The combination of VMware and Ubuntu has often proven problematic in my tests, so I shan’t single out this machine for condemnation on its late arrival.

Server

• In the cloud-native space, where applications are purpose built and delivered to run in the cloud, one technology in particular rises above all others — Kubernetes.

• Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system, originally developed by Google in 2014. Since 2015, Kubernetes has been developed under the governance of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is part of the Linux Foundation and benefits from the support of thousands of developers and hundreds supporting organizations.

• In 2022, all the major public cloud providers use Kubernetes, including Microsoft Azure’s Managed Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) service and the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

• Kubernetes also benefits from the support of numerous vendor distributions, including Red Hat’s OpenShift, Canonical Kubernetes and the SUSE Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE). Sitting upstream from all the cloud and software vendors’ efforts is the open-source project that is being updated today to version 1.26.

Audiocasts/Shows

• The Morevna Project has released two episodes of the Pepper&Carrot Motion Comic. Most of the artwork, including some frame-by-frame animation scenes, is painted using Krita.

• We challenged ChatGPT to create a Linux news podcast outline and then put it to the test.

• Hello and welcome to Episode #492 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short-topics episode, the hosts discuss Youth on the Air Camp for 2023, ham radio in local media, Open Source Hub, Hack Club, Asahi Linux, CatRadio and much more. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful week.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds is happy to tell you that Linux release numbers aren’t a big deal.

• As the Linux supremo said of the 6.0 release: “Despite the major number change, there’s nothing fundamentally different about this release – I’ve long eschewed the notion that major numbers are meaningful, and the only reason for a ‘hierarchical’ numbering system is to make the numbers easier to remember and distinguish.”

• With 6.1, however, there is something fundamentally different. For the first time in Linux’s history, in addition to C, you’ll be able to use another language, Rust, for kernel development.

• Why? As Wedson Almeida Filho of Google’s Android Team said, “We feel that Rust is now ready to join C as a practical language for implementing the kernel. It can help us reduce the number of potential bugs and security vulnerabilities in privileged code while playing nicely with the core kernel and preserving its performance characteristics.”

• Kernels 6.0.12 and 5.15.82 are now available in the PCLinuxOS Software Repository.

Graphics Stack

• Significant news arrives from Asahi Linux (opens in new tab), the project that’s attempting, and actually succeeding, to get an operating system that’s not macOS running natively (opens in new tab) on Apple Silicon Macs. It has hit an important milestone: a graphics driver that brings work-in-progress OpenGL 2 support to the distro. Meanwhile, the M-chips’ journey toward mainstream Linux support took a step forward too.

• After announcing quite a few new features recently, the Asahi Linux project has just taken a big step forward: support for Apple GPUs with (partial) display acceleration.

• After two years of continuous reverse engineering work on Apple hardware, the Asahi Linux team released the first alpha version driver of the Apple GPU. The team (Alyssa R, Asahi Lina and team) promises that you can now use this driver via Asahi Linux in Apple M1 and M2 devices and experience a smooth desktop experience.

• Currently, V3D only has three basic IGT tests: v3d_get_bo_offset, v3d_get_param, and v3d_mmap. So, the basic goal of my CE project was to add more tests to the V3D driver.

• As the general DRM-core tests were in a good shape on the V3D driver, I started to think together with my mentors about more driver-specific tests for the driver.

• By checking the V3D UAPI, you can see that the V3D has eleven ioctls, so there is yet a lot to test for the V3D on IGT.

• First, there are Buffer Object (BO) related-ioctls: v3d_create_bo, v3d_wait_bo, v3d_mmap_bo, and v3d_get_bo_offset. The Buffer Objects are shared-memory objects that are allocated by the GPU to store things like vertex data. Therefore, testing them is important to make sure that memory is being correctly allocated. Different from the VC4, the V3D has an MMU between the GPU and the bus, allowing it to not allocate objects contiguously. Therefore, the idea was to develop tests for v3d_create_bo and v3d_wait_bo.

• Next, there are Performance Monitor (perfmon) related-ioctls: v3d_perfmon_create, v3d_perfmon_destroy, and v3d_perfmon_get_values. Performance Monitors are basically registers that are used for monitoring the performance of the V3D engine. So, tests were designed to assure that the driver was creating perfmons properly and was resilient to incorrect requests, such as trying to get a value from a non-existent perfmon.

• Qt 6 introduced a new way to access platform specific objects and functionality in the QNativeInterface namespace. Starting with Qt 6.5 it will be possible to obtain handles to wayland object handles this way. Let’s look at what’s new and how it improves on the past method.

• In Qt 5 there were to two options to access platform-specific API and native handles of the current platform. If you were lucky, your platform had an ‘Extras’ module like Qt Max Extras, Qt X11 Extras or Qt Android Extras. However these were removed for Qt 6 and if you ever needed something that was not exposed this way or the platform had no ‘Extras’ module (like Wayland), it was also possible to access functionality via QPlatformNativeInterface. An example usage of would look like this:

• First up, I read Antoine Beaupré’s Wayland to Sway migration with interest. While he said it’s done and dusted or something similar, the post shows there’s still quite a ways to go. I wouldn’t say it’s done or whatever till it’s integrated so well that a person installs it and doesn’t really need to fiddle with config files as an average user. For specific use-cases you may need to, but that should be outside of a normal user (layperson) experience.

• I have been using mate for a long long time and truth be told been very happy with it. The only thing I found about Wayland on mate is this discussion or rather this entry. The roadmap on Ubuntu Mate is also quite iffy. The Mate Wayland entry on Debian wiki also perhaps need an updation but dunno much as the latest update it shares is 2019 and it’s 2022. One thing to note, at least according to Antoine, things should be better as and when it gets integrated even on legacy hardware. I would be interested to know how it would work on old desktops and laptops rather than new or is there some barrier? I, for one would have liked to see or know about why lightdm didn’t work on Wayland and if there’s support. From what little I know lightdm is much lighter than gdm3 and doesn’t require much memory and from what little I have experienced works very well with mate. I have been using it since 2015/16 although the Debian changelog tells me that it has been present since 2011. I was hoping to see if there was a Wayland specific mailing list, something like debian-wayland but apparently there’s not :(. Using ‘mate desktop wayland’ (tried few other variations on the keywords) but search fails to find any meaningful answer :(. FWIW and I don’t know the reason why but Archwiki never fails to amaze me. Interestingly, it just says No for mate. I probably would contact upstream in the coming days to know what their plans are and hopefully they will document what their plans are on integrating Wayland in both short-term and long-term with an update, or if there is something more recent they have documented elsewhere, get that update on the Debian wiki so people know.

• The other interesting thread I read was Russel Coker’s Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 entry. I would be in the market in a few months to find/buy a Thinkpad but probably of AMD rather than Intel because part of recent past history with Intel as well as AMD having a bit of an edge over Intel as far as graphics is concerned. I wonder why Russel was looking into Intel and not AMD. Would be interested to know why Intel and not AMD? Any specific reason ???

Applications

• It has often been said that information confers power, and that the most important currency in our culture today is information. Keeping track of bits and pieces of information is a minefield.

• In part, this is because of passable short term memory, coupled with what can only be described as ‘brain fog’. To combat this, we arm myself with open source software that helps us efficiently capture a lot of information. We generally prefer to keep our information local and cloud-free, primarily for security reasons. And we primarily advance software which doesn’t tie itself to any specific company or service, whether it’s Evernote, Google, or Microsoft.

• Note-taking apps are the online equivalent of notebooks, and because they’re digital, they can do more for you than paper can. Note-taking apps also include text search, so in a matter of seconds, you can find whatever notes you need.

• In 2009, I was working hard at a startup in Pittsburgh, and in the late evenings of coding, I developed a GNU Emacs habit. The thing about Emacs is that it’s just too versatile to close. Whether you’re writing code, writing articles about open source, jotting down a task list, or even playing music, you can do it all from within Emacs. And every time you think you’ve found a task outside of Emacs, you discover an Emacs mode to prove you wrong. One of my favorite reasons to not close Emacs is its file manager, called directory editor or just Dired.

• Kabmat is a command line software written in C++ that uses the ncurses that facilitates the management of Kanban boards.

• Kanban is a style of organizing and executing tasks in real time, that is, it avoids the famous: procrastination, in short it would be:

• Scheduled? Knife!

• It was developed by Toyota (a multinational automotive manufacturer of Japanese origin).

• Kabmat coupled with the terminal, which is easy to access, makes it even easier for you to schedule and run your tasks.

• Brief: In this tutorial, we explore 10 of the best PuTTY alternatives for SSH clients.

• Putty is one of the most popular and widely-used SSH and Telnet clients that allows users to log in to remote devices such as servers and network devices such as routers and switches. It is a user-friendly Linux terminal emulator that provides a simple and intuitive user interface that makes establishing remote connections easy.

• Hi everyone, the minimum CPU instruction set for x86-64 that is required to launch Blender and stated on the requirements page is SSE2 at the moment.

Instructionals/Technical

• PostgreSQL is a very powerful object-relational database management system. It is SQL complained designed to handle many concurrent users and a range of workloads. PostgreSQL is compatible with different operating systems such as macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux, which this blog post will explain.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install TeamViewer on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, TeamViewer is a popular application to access remote desktops. It enables devices to be controlled and serviced without having to be physically on location. TeamViewer has features including chat, file sharing, video conferencing, and remote printing.

• 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 TeamViewer remote desktop on Rocky Linux. 9.

• Today we are looking at how to install the Brave browser on a Chromebook.

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

• In this post, you will learn how to check the last system reboot. Although it may not seem like it, the truth is that it is quite useful in administrative matters.

• Occasionally, it is necessary to know when was the last time the system was rebooted. Especially for administrative purposes.

• Fortunately, there are many ways to do this. So, we won’t have any problems doing it.

• This post looks into hyphenation with pure CSS.

• Hyphenation is more of a thing in print than web, but sometimes it comes handy if dealing with long words in tight spaces like sidebars etc. Also some language, like German, have long compound words that can easily break a layout, too bad most browsers support hyphenation only in English.

• The TOR Browser 12.0 makes it more inclusive by providing multi-locale support to desktop users. So, if you want to switch the TOR browser to any other language besides English, you don’t need to go through language searches and downloads. The browser supports all languages in one pack without loading up the size. Just restarting the web browser after changing the language will do the work.

• Have you ever wished you could relay outgoing emails based on the sender’s address? Well, now you can! With the help of sender_dependent_default_transport_maps, you can easily configure Postfix to route outgoing emails based on the email address of the sender. All you need to do is configure the ‘sender_dependent_default_transport_maps’ parameter in the main.cf file. This is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used to easily route emails sent from different domains through different mail servers. It can also be used to route emails from different parts of your organization to different mail servers.

• Regarding screen recording in Linux, specifically Ubuntu, Kazam should be your go-to tool. The tool offers an easy-to-use and well-designed interface for capturing screenshots and screencasts. This software records desktop video and multiple audio streams concurrently with control over audio levels and the captured screen region. Kazam newbies should find it easy to configure the software as it requires a small configuration setup. With Kazam, you can capture a particular window, an entire screen, or even a selected screen area.

• You can make use of Kazam’s hotkeys that aid in helping you start, pause, resume and finish recording. With the current version of Kazam that we will install, you can even record your mouse clicks and keyboard presses. Also, it is vital to remember that the videos intended to be captured by Kazam can be played by any video player that supports VP8/WebM video format. Just so you know, Kazam records a crystal-clear sound, and the recorded video can be saved in several different file formats.

• The UNIX/Linux CD command is popularly used to move into different directories from the current working directory using the command line (or terminal).

• When you open your terminal, Linux will use your home directory as the current working directory, so to navigate into a different directory, you can use the cd command.

• Rsync is a fast and extraordinary utility used to copy and synchronize files locally, copy files to a remote system or copy files from a remote server to your local machine.

• Unlike the popular SCP command that copies files securely between two Linux systems, Rsync is much faster as it uses the “delta algorithm.” With this algorithm, Rsync does not copy an entire file over a network. Instead, it only copies parts of the file that were modified.

• That feature greatly reduces network congestion as only a small amount of data is sent over the network. During file synchronization, Rsync uses the quick check algorithm, which checks for files that have changed in size or have been recently modified.

• The Linux lsof command does more than list open files; you can also use it to diagnose potential bottlenecks.

• Here’s the VirtualBox default user id and password, and how to enable and disable unattended installation.

• The Oracle team completely changed the VirtualBox VM creation user interface from the VirtualBox 7.0 release. The multi-screen wizard is replaced by one single screen (here’s a tutorial showing the new screens).

• Most of the options remain the same. However, a new option is introduced in VirtualBox 7.0, which is “unattended installation”. This is available under the “Name and operating system” section as a toggle check box.

• Is your mouse cursor not visible in Wayland sessions in Fedora or Ubuntu? This is how you can fix it.

• Many users have reported a recent issue over the web, which caused your mouse cursor to become invisible in the Wayland session. I personally also got this error in the latest Fedora 37 workstation with GNOME 43 Wayland session.

• The behaviour is like when your cursor arrives in a certain GTK window, the cursor becomes invisible. However, you can still see the cursor focus in the target window. This includes the pointer, the resize handle and everything related to the cursor theme.

• OpenLiteSpeed is the open source version of LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise. It is a web server like Apache or NGINX, and can be installed on all Linux systems. OpenLiteSpeed is developed to be highly scalable, can accelerate WordPress performance, and work on minimal hardware specs.

• In this tutorial, you will see the step by step instructions to get OpenLiteSpeed web server installed on all major Linux distros. Specifically we will cover instructions for Debian Linux based systems such as Ubuntu, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux based systems like AlmaLinux, CentOS, Rocky Linux, Fedora, etc.

• The read command is a built-in Linux utility for shell script writers (and for you) to take single line input from the keyboard or from the file descriptor and store it in a variable.

• The applications for this command are wide ranging, like asking for user input in plain or private text, specifying the idle wait time for user input, using a custom internal field separator, etc.

• Want to change system power mode between Performance, Balanced, and Power Saver automatically when plug / un-plug power supply?

• Here’s an extension can do the job for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 22.10, Fedora 36/37, Arch and other Linux with GNOME 42 & 43.

• GNOME introduced setting options to switch power mode since v40. For laptop running on AC power supply, user may use ‘Performance’ mode for gaming or doing heavy work. To prevent from draining power fast after un-plug AC power, it’s better to switch to ‘Balanced’ mode, or even ‘Power Saver’ mode when battery level is low. To automate this work, ‘Power Profile Switcher’ extension was born.

Games

• When the EA App replaced Origin on Steam, it came with a whole bunch of problems for gamers on Steam Deck and Linux desktop. Now, it should hopefully be sorted in Proton Experimental.

• Free for owners of the original, Portal with RTX has released on Steam from Lightspeed Studios / NVIDIA.

• Between 2022-11-30 and 2022-12-07 there were 37 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 348 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 10.6 % of total released titles.

• The first time you get to know Linux and decide to learn Linux, there is a term that is foreign to your ears, namely “Linux Distro.”

• When you want to use Linux, you have to choose the type of Linux, for example, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux, CentOS, and so on. This type of Linux is called a “Linux distro”.

• There are hundreds of Linux distros published on the internet, all of which are different and made for their own purposes.

• You must first understand what a Linux distro is and get to know the different types to determine the best one for your needs.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The updated collection of KDE’s apps and frameworks brings a useful selection mode to Dolphin, Gwenview adds (more) editing features, Kwrite and Kate get keyboard macros and much, much, more.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora and Red Hat

• Voting in the Fedora Linux 37 elections is now open. Go to the Elections app to cast your vote. Voting closes at 23:59 UTC on Thursday 22 December. Don’t forget to claim your “I Voted” badge when you cast your ballot. Links to candidate interviews are below.

• First version I very quickly drew up, playing off of the design team’s banner with the gradient. I think I’ll see what this looks like with the characters in full color.

• However, they modify some of the Linux images they offer. This ensures every image looks similar when it boots, but it means that Fedora in one cloud doesn’t behave like Fedora in another cloud.

• From my earliest memory, I’ve had a natural inclination toward all forms of exploration, adventure, and inquiry: ‘How does XYZ work?’ ‘Why would he/she/they act like that?’ Life’s how’s and why’s have always been at my fingertips.

• Consequently, I enjoy engaging with the world in ways that support my fascination with humans and all forms of life, from traveling abroad and experiencing other cultures, traditions, and food to observing alternative ways of being in relationships and connecting to natural landscapes.

• Finding the right job can feel like trying to solve a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle – everything looks like it works, but it can take a while to find the perfect fit.

• The IT job market – especially during the last two years – has been flooded with technical roles as companies rush to transform their digital infrastructures.

• Conversely, candidates’ growing concerns surrounding a looming recession, workplace flexibility following the pandemic, and employee wellness have placed a new emphasis on the importance of finding a career, not just a job. IT candidates are looking for opportunities with strong internal programs, competitive salaries, and of course, flexibility.

• All these factors mean that employees and job seekers must think strategically about finding a fulfilling career path that supports their needs. Below are three tools to help IT job seekers stand out from the competition and explore various tech roles.

• There are many sophisticated forms of access control nowadays. Yet breaches are still common. Why does access control fail? This article answers that question by describing some of the flaws that lead to broken access control (also known as broken authorization or privilege escalation) and demonstrates secure coding.

• Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE.

• His guest is Narayanan Raghavan, senior director of site reliability engineering of OpenShift at Red Hat.

• If you are reading this post, you will most likely know what SCADA systems are. But in case you don’t, SCADA is an acronym for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. SCADA systems refer to control system architectures for high-level supervision of machine processes. These architectures combine hardware (edge devices, like sensors and control valves, programmable logic controllers and remote terminal units) with software (for the human-machine interface and for monitoring) to receive data from processes that the operators can use in order to optimize them.

• SCADA systems can be spread over a wide geographical area, but they can also reside in just one physical location.

• The adoption of SCADA systems has been particularly strong in utility companies, especially in the delivery of water, electricity and natural gas.

• Before I joined Red Hat, I was working as a J2EE developer. I had heard about the company through using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in university. However, impostor syndrome prevented me from applying back then—I didn’t think I was experienced enough to work here.

• Luckily, at the time, my friend Lucas was a solutions architect at Red Hat (he’s since switched to software engineering). He helped convince me that I had what it took, told me what a great place it was to work and encouraged me to apply for a JBoss consultant position in Madrid. I wanted the red fedora, so I decided to go for it!

• Recent shocks to the world economy – such as supply issues, the Russia/Ukraine conflict, and inflation – have led to economic uncertainty and probable contraction.

• Organizations worldwide are preparing for what’s ahead. According to our survey, leaders of organizations are planning for the possibility of tougher times while simultaneously prioritizing investments in new technology to help them overcome future challenges.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Ubuntu Linux is one of the most well known Linux distributions available. You have probably seen Canonical’s ubiquitous logo and the familiar look of Ubuntu Desktop running GNOME. What you may not have realized is that Ubuntu also has a very popular server edition of their operating system.

• Many distributions choose to concentrate on a single computing environment – either desktop PCs or servers. But Ubuntu’s massive popularity and strong footing in the Linux community have allowed it to produce a very viable server edition and still maintain their desktop release. If you are considering downloading and installing Ubuntu Server, you should first make sure that your computer meets the recommended and minimum system requirements.

• In this tutorial, you will learn about the minimum and recommended system requirements for the latest version of Ubuntu Server Linux. All you need to do is make sure that your computer’s hardware is meets these requirements, which means it can run Ubuntu Server. You will also need a CPU with the proper architecture as laid out below.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Supported operating systems include Android 12, Debian 11, and Ubuntu 20.04, and the company mentions support for Buildroot built system.

• You might have already given some thought to powering your home with solar. Solar photovoltaic panels, which convert sunlight directly into electricity, have fallen so far down in cost that it makes economic sense everywhere. That is why large companies have put in a lot of solar, and even the electric utilities have started installing massive solar farms—it simply costs less than antiquated fossil fuels. Like most homeowners, you would like to save money and eviscerate your electric bill, but you are probably cringing a bit at the upfront cost. To get a rough idea of the cost, a 5kW system that would power an average home installed at $3/W would cost about $15,000, while a larger home might need 10kW to offset all of their electricity purchases and cost $30,000. If you want batteries, double the cost (you don’t need batteries as most solar arrays connect to the grid, but if the grid goes down, so does your solar array until it is turned back on.) Paying for all your electricity for the next several decades is an investment, even if you save a lot of money.

• There is some good financial news. First, both the US and Canada have enacted a 30% tax credit for solar. This credit drops the price down to about $2/W. Second, Opensource.com previously discussed how you could get a free book, To Catch the Sun, that walks you through how to design your own system (you will still need a certified electrician and inspections to attach it to the grid). If you are a little handy, you can cut the remaining cost by about 50%. These costs are primarily for materials, including solar panels, wiring, electronics, and racking. Amazingly, solar panel costs have dropped so low for small solar systems (like the ones for your house) the racking (mechanical structures that hold the solar panels up) can cost more than the panels!

• When you think of synth music, racks of keyboards, or massive DJ rigs, Korg probably comes to mind. And if those thoughts are accompanied by memories of handfuls of glowsticks and whistles as necklaces, we can be friends.

• The iconic instrument makers have being going since the 1960s and were responsible for Japan’s first synthesizer. As electronic music got bigger in later decades, so did Korg, and they’re still at the forefront of music-making with the help of Raspberry Pi.

• Iconic instrument maker Korg began life in Japan in the 1960s, bringing to market first drum machines, then Japan’s first synthesizer and the world’s first needle-type tuner. It came to international prominence with the rise of electronic music in the 1970s and 1980s. Demands for ever more capable synthesizers — as well as more affordable models — saw Korg expand its product lines into both home hobbyist and professional performer arenas. Keen to capitalise on the exciting possibilities of electronic music production, which was developing at a rapid pace alongside the exponential growth of home and office computing, Korg took an early interest in DSP-based synthesizers. A DSP, or digital signal processor, is a specialised chip for rapidly manipulating the digitised version of real-world analogue signals — audio input, for example.

• I started playing with Raspberry Pi hardware at home around the same time I started using Linux at work. I have used Raspberry Pi a lot in various police tactics over the years. They were dependable, low-cost, portable, and supported by such an awesome community. I tried almost every ‘fruit-based’ single-board computer out there, but I always came back to Raspberry Pi.

• At this point, you’re likely aware that you can store your wireless network’s credentials in a QR code, so that anyone who wants to connect with their smartphone need only scan the 2D barcode. Whether you print it out on paper, extrude it out of plastic, or paint the thing on the wall, it still works the same. It’s a neat trick for when you’ve got friends and family over, and saves you having to explain your ponderously long WPA key.

• It is at least the third PIR motion wireless board from Smart Bee Designs, as the company previously introduced the ESP32-S2 powered Bee Motion board and the ultra-small Bee Motion Mini with an ESP32-C3 SoC. The new Bee Motion S3 adds a few more I/Os, a light sensor, and the ESP32-S3’s AI vector extensions could potentially be used for faster and/or lower-power TinyML processing.

• The newly released Arduino PLC IDE supports the five languages defined by the IEC 61131-3 standard: Ladder Diagram, Functional Block Diagram, Structured Text, Sequential Function Chart, and Instruction List.

• With Arduino focusing more and more on the industrial side with its Arduino Pro family, the company unveiled the Arduino Opta Micro PLC for industrial application last month and said it could be programmed with traditional PLC languages such as Ladder and FCB as well as the Arduino 2.0.0 IDE. The company now seems to have created an all-in-one integrated development environment for such hardware with the Arduino PLC IDE supporting PLC languages with Arduino Sketches.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Finland-based Aiven, an open source cloud data platform provider, has announced a complete open source streaming ecosystem for Apache Kafka, delivering a robust and fully open source real-time data ecosystem with the latest additions of its beta service of Aiven for Apache Flink, a stream processing framework, and Klaw, a data governance tool for Apache Kafka.

• The highlight of this edition of FOSS Weekly is the interview with Vanilla OS creator. Would you like to read more such interactions? If yes, who should we interview next from the Linux world? I welcome your suggestion.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Chromium

• We announced in October that passkey support was available in Chrome Canary. Today, we are pleased to announce that passkey support is now available in Chrome Stable M108.

• Hi everyone! We’ve just released Chrome Dev 110 (110.0.5462.3) for Android. It’s now available on Google Play.

• Hi everyone! We’ve just released Chrome Beta 109 (109.0.5414.33) for iOS; it’ll become available on App Store in the next few days.

• Hi everyone! We’ve just released Chrome Beta 109 (109.0.5414.34) for Android. It’s now available on Google Play.

• The Beta channel has been updated to 109.0.5414.36 for Windows, Mac and Linux .

• A full list of changes in this build is available in the log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how here. If you find a new issues, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.

Mozilla

• I joined the Firefox privacy and security team in 2016. For years, the privacy engineers here at Mozilla have known that online trackers use every identifier they can get to track and re-identify people all over the internet. Over the last six years, I’ve been able to contribute to Private Browsing, Tracking Protection, Containers, Monitor, Relay and other privacy features and products. In all that time, in the back of my mind, I always felt like we weren’t protecting all the major identifiers… yet. In October, we launched Firefox Relay phone masking, a major milestone in years of anti-tracking work by Mozillians past and present. Now, we can protect four major identifiers: cookies, IP addresses, email addresses and phone numbers.

• It’s been a while since our last monthly update. Ever since our internal dashboard was broken, we didn’t have an easy way to export the platform data. Now that we got access to our data back, let’s talk about what we’ve missed.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Version 2.1.0 of a cross-platform, feature rich PostgreSQL C++ driver released. This release provides a various bug fixes, minor API changes, performance improvements and a new transaction guard facility.

• The extensive data ecosystem includes MySQL as one of its most popular technologies. It is a Relational Data Base Management System (RDBMS) developed by Oracle based on Structured Query Language. MySQL is an essential component of many of the most popular stacks for developing effective web applications.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

Funding

• Tea is an open-source unified package manager used by many developers worldwide.

• If you didn’t know, Tea is a project by the creator of Homebrew.

• In a recent announcement, they announced that they have raised $8.9 Million in seed funding and are planning to introduce a new web3 protocol that will help open-source developers get paid for their work.

• I came across this via an article posted on TechCrunch, where they had a chat with the founders of Tea.

• Let’s take a look at what’s in store for Tea.

FSFE

• Are you thinking about registering for the second edition of Youth Hacking 4 Freedom? But you are not yet sure? Two participants from the last edition, Héctor and Leonardo, talked with us about the projects they developed and their journey throughout the Free Software world! Discover their experiences during the first edition of YH4F.

• While the second edition of the YH4F contest is now open for registration, the first edition of the Youth Hacking 4 Freedom contest has ended with 35 amazingly well done projects. There are no limits to the possibilities of projects that could be submitted and every technical idea is welcome. Among those great inspiring ones were Héctor’s and Leonardo’s projects: LibreHomework and Presents, respectively.

• Leonardo is studying Computer Science Engineering in Milan. He has been an active member of the European Youth Parliament since 2019 and among his hobbies was already hacking, even before participating in the contest. Our second guest is Héctor, the youngest winner of the first edition of the Youth Hacking 4 Freedom contest. Héctor has always been interested in science and in understanding the world around him in greater detail. He has created LibreHomework out of the desire to help others with learning and organising their homework.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• Oregon Tech faculty are partnering with Oregon Tech Library’s Open Educational Resources (OER) program to reduce student costs associated with textbook materials, and over the past three years have saved Oregon Tech students $1,216,866 in textbook costs.

• According to University Librarian John Schoppert, OER are freely accessible, high-quality coursework materials made accessible to students to alleviate the high costs of mainstream publisher textbooks. OER describes openly licensed materials and resources for any user to use, remix, reuse, repurpose, and redistribute.

Programming/Development

• RC7 was GOLD, so version 8.2.0 GA is just released, at planed date.

• A great thanks to Perrick Charron, Sergey Panteleev and Ben Ramsey our Release Managers, to all developers who have contributed to this new long awaiting version of PHP and thanks to all testers of the RC versions who have allowed us to deliver a good quality version.

• RPM are available in the php:remi-8.2 module for Fedora and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 and as Software Collection in the remi-safe repository.

• Read the rest of the article here. It is quite a story, with lessons to be considered by anyone working on code that’s been around a few years or decades.

• ping(8) is ancient:

• * Author -* Mike Muuss* U. S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory* December, 1983

• What we know today as ping(8) started to become recognizable in 1986, for example see this csrg commit.

• FreeBSD identified a stack overflow in the pr_pack() function and I expected a lot of similarity between the BSDs. This stuff did not change a lot since the csrg days.

• Regular expressions are one of the most useful tool to extract information from raw data. Developers, sysadmins, data scientists and even editors can benefit from learning this powerful language. In this guide we will try to learn regex through practical examples.

• Hanukkah of Data is a set of short data challenges released over 8 days of Hanukkah in 2022. The same fictional dataset is used for all puzzles. Explore this dataset with the tools of your choice to figure out the answers light the hannukah candles.

• I loaded up this title with buzzwords. The basic idea is that IM systems shouldn’t have to only use the Internet. Why not let them be carried across LoRa radios, USB sticks, local Wifi networks, and yes, the Internet? I’ll first discuss how, and then why.

• ABI stands for Applications Binary Interface. One way to understand the concept of an ABI is to consider what it is not. Applications Programming Interfaces (APIs) are more familiar to many developers. Generally, the headers and documentation of libraries are considered to be their API, as are standards documents like those for HTML5, for example. Programs that call into libraries or exchange string-formatted data must comply with the conventions described in the API or expect unwanted results.

• When you run into a bug, the natural instinct is to try to fix it as fast as possible. And of course, sometimes that’s what you have to do – if the bug is causing a huge production incident, you have to mitigate it quickly before diving into figuring out the root cause.

• But in my day to day debugging, I find that it’s generally more effective (and faster!) to leave the bug in place, figure out exactly what’s gone wrong, and then fix it after I’ve understood what happened.

• Trying to fix it or add workarounds without fully understanding what happened usually ends up just leaving me more confused.

Perl / Raku

• Santa, having a little time off earlier this year, was looking at all of the modules that the Raku elves had made over the years, now over 2000 of them! But then he noticed something: not all of the modules appear to come from the same ecosystem? So what’s going on here, he asked one of the Raku core elves, Lizzybel. “It’s complicated”, she said. And continued:

Standards/Consortia

• The recently released VK_EXT_surface_maintenance1 and VK_EXT_swapchain_maintenance1 extensions resolve a number of longstanding issues with Vulkan’s WSI extensions. These extensions will be ratified as KHR.

• Most importantly, it is now possible for applications to know when resources associated with a present operation can be destroyed, e.g. the semaphores provided in VkPresentInfoKHR::pWaitSemaphores. This is done by providing a fence in VkSwapchainPresentFenceInfoEXT that is chained to VkPresentInfoKHR. Once the fence is signaled, the application can destroy said semaphores. Additionally, with the outstanding present operations processed according to these fences, the application is able to safely destroy swapchains (retired or otherwise).

Leftovers

• The FCC said in a release on Thursday that providers must take “all necessary steps” to avoid carrying this robocall traffic, which is the target of an ongoing investigation from the agency’s Enforcement Bureau.

• As creative problem solvers, we like to “think outside the box,” and we should strive for that. But what happens if your strange idea isn’t kept in check by cooler heads? There is a real danger — especially if you work alone — to falling so in love with your idea, that you lose sight of what it really means to be better.

• Ryan Coogler’s biggest triumph in Black Panther was that he made a very hokey superhero cool. For longtime comic fans, Black Panther, who was created in the 1960s by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee and was the star of the comic Jungle Action in the 1970s, represents the casual racism and lack of imagination that have plagued the medium. Although writers as talented as Christopher Priest, Reginald Hudlin, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have taken stabs at T’Challa and his mythical home of Wakanda, corniness has clung to the Marvel hero like a stench. Even well-written versions of T’Challa and his resource-rich, isolationist nation reek of the white gaze that he is supposed to defy. His power often seems to stem from his nobility rather than his identity or actions, a conservative vision of Blackness that clashes with the character’s colorful life as a crime-fighting guy in a catsuit.

• Nor did I get my MRS degree to marry one. However, I did marry a Prince—with no principality, fortune nor (truth be told) pot to pee in—and we’ve stayed married for over 30 years.

• My profession—and passion—is that of “sexologist,” the only one in my class… at least the only one that’s out of the closet about it.

Science

• I’ve spent considerable time, while preparing many of the new exercises, attempting to improve on expositions that I found in the literature. And in several noteworthy cases, nobody has yet pointed out any errors. It would be nice to believe that I actually got the details right on my first attempt. But that seems unlikely, because I had hundreds of chances to make mistakes. So I fear that the most probable hypothesis is that nobody has been sufficiently motivated to check the finer points out carefully as yet.

• I still cling to a belief that such details are extremely instructive. Thus I would like to enter here a plea for some readers to tell me explicitly, “Dear Don, I have read exercise N and its answer very carefully, and I believe that it is 100% correct,” where N is one of the following exercises: [...]

• Adopted November 18 at the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures in Versailles, France, ronna- and quetta- describe exceedingly large numbers while ronto- and quecto- describe the exceedingly small. This is the first time that the International System of Units, or SI, has expanded since 1991, when the prefixes zetta-, yotta-, zepto and yocto- were added (SN: 1/16/93).

• Numerically, ronna- is 1027 (that’s a digit followed by 27 zeroes) and quetta- is 1030 (30 zeroes). Their tiny counterparts ronto- and quecto- also refer to 27 and 30 zeroes, but those come after a decimal point. Until now, yotta- and yocto- (24 zeros) capped off the metric system’s range.

Education

• The law is designed to protect Ukrainian education and science from Russian propaganda and the “chauvinistic, aggressive geopolitical doctrine of the ‘Russian peace’,” according to Ukrainian parliament officials.

• It comes after scholars in Ukraine said methodologically flawed work in the social sciences and humanities helped justify Russia’s revanchist foreign policy under president Vladimir Putin.

Hardware

• If there’s one thing that for decades of desktop PCs have given us, it’s a seemingly endless supply of relatively capable power supplies. If you need 5 volts or 12 volts at a respectable current they’re extremely useful, so quite a few people have used them as bench power supplies. Some of these builds box up the mess of wires into a set of more useful connectors, but [Joao Pinheiro] has taken his to the next level with a very neat 3D printed case and a set of variable switching regulators to make a variable bench supply with a top voltage of 60 volts.

• Over the last couple years, we’ve seen an absolute explosion of masked stereolithography (MSLA) 3D printers that use an LCD screen to selectively block UV light coming from a powerful LED array. Combined with a stepper motor that gradually lifts the build plate away from the screen, this arrangement can be used to produce high-resolution 3D prints out of photosensitive resins. The machines are cheap, relatively simple, and the end results can be phenomenal.

• While most people don’t care whether they use one finger or ten, some people want to better themselves by learning how to touch-type. And honestly, there’s no easier way to do that than by getting into the ergo keyboard game. Even if you consider yourself a touch-typist already, an ortholinear or column-staggered keyboard may teach you otherwise, as you find yourself trying to type ‘c’ with your index finger (for example) and failing miserably.

• Since February 2018 I have been using a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen1 [1] as my main laptop. Generally I’ve been very happy with it, it’s small and light, has good performance for web browsing etc, and with my transition to doing all compiles etc on servers it works well. When I wrote my original review I was unhappy with the keyboard, but I got used to that and found it to be reasonably good.

• Lattice Avant is a new low-power and small form factor mid-range FPGA platform, manufactured with a 16nm FinFET process, and equipped with 25 Gb/s SERDES, hardened PCI Express, external memory PHY interfaces, a high DSP count, and a security engine.

• Lattice Semi is better known for its entry-level FPGAs such as the iCE40 which is popular in the community thanks to low-cost hardware and support for open-source tools, but the Avant platform marks the company’s entry into the mid-range FPGA market, defined by chips with 100k to 500k logic cells (LCs).

• A recent development is cheap Gallium Nitride based power supplies that provide better efficiency in a smaller space than other technologies. Kogan recently had a special on such devices so I decided to try them out with my new Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 5 [1]. Google searches for power supplies for that Thinkpad included results for 30W PSUs which implies that any 30W USB-C PSU should work.

• I bought a 30W charger for $10 that can supply 15V/2A or 20V/1.5A on a single USB-C port or 15W on the USB-C port and 15W on the USB-2 port at the same time and expected it to work as a laptop charger. Unfortunately it didn’t, I don’t know whether the adverts for 30W Thinkpad PSUs were false or whether the claim of the GaN charger I bought being 30W was false, all I know is that the KDE power applet said that the PSU couldn’t supply enough power.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• In our analysis, 73% of the studies reported higher mental health symptoms and behaviors in humans and animals, such as rats, that were exposed to higher than average levels of air pollution. Some exposures that led to negative effects occurred in air pollution ranges that are currently considered “safe” by the Environmental Protection Agency’s standards. In addition, we discovered that 95% of studies examining brain effects found significant physical and functional changes within the emotion-regulation brain regions in those exposed to increased levels of air pollution.

• Most of these studies found that exposure to elevated levels of air pollution is associated with increased inflammation and changes to the regulation of neurotransmitters, which act as the brain’s chemical messengers.

• Maryland Governor Larry Hogan issued an emergency directive urging government employees to delete their devices’ highly favourite video app ‘TikTok’, which originated in China. Hogan added that the cyber vulnerabilities that support their everyday lives might pose the greatest threat to their personal safety and our national security. He stated that they were releasing this emergency directive against foreign actors and groups that want to damage and split their systems to defend them better.

• Central Helsinki is attracting significantly fewer people than it did before the coronavirus pandemic, reveal mobile phone data-based statistics presented to Helsingin Sanomat.

• Telia Finland utilised its mobile phone data at the newspaper’s request to tally daily averages for each month for the number of people visiting the city centre, the rectangular area between the Parliament House, Helsinki Cathedral, Kasarmitori Square and Kamppi.

• Flushing a toilet generates an energetic turbulent flow that releases droplets and aerosols into the air1,2,3,4, reaching heights in excess of 1.5 m5 in scenarios that present increased risk of aerosol- and fomite-mediated disease transmission from feces6,7,8,9. The largest droplets settle out within seconds, but smaller aerosols (\(<5\ \mu\)m) remain suspended10, 11. The presence of pathogens on toilet bowl sidewalls or in bowl water contributes to contamination of the aerosols4, and contamination of bowl water may persist after dozens of flushes12, 13. Bioaerosol concentrations released from a flushed toilet vary depending on the type of toilet14, 15, ventilation performance16, radial position around the bowl17, water supply pressure level18 and the presence of fecal waste11. While growth of the aerosol plume is reduced—but not eliminated—by the presence of a closed lid2, 10, 19, toilets in public, commercial, or healthcare settings typically do not have lids. While previous studies document where toilet aerosols end up, very little is known about the physics and kinematics of how they get there.

• Since the discovery of S. eubayanus isolates in Patagonia in 2011 (Libkind et al. 2011) it has been hypothesized that isolates would be found in Europe, and indeed modelling by Langdon et al. (2020) showed that Europe is a suitable location. Our discovery of isolates in Ireland is consistent with the ‘Out-of-Patagonia’ hypothesis, that S. eubayanus evolved in Patagonia where it adapted to cold and harsh conditions, and then spread to the rest of the world, probably in the postglacial period (Langdon et al. 2020, Nespolo et al. 2020). Our observation that some of the alleles in S. pastorianus isolates are closely related to alleles from the Irish S. eubayanus strains but that more of the genomes are close to alleles from Tibetan strains is consistent with the hypothesis that no one isolate of S. eubayanus is the direct ancestor of the parent of the lager yeasts, due to incomplete lineage sorting, backcrossing, or possibly multiple hybridization events (Peris et al. 2016). The maltotriose transporter gene AGT1, for example must have been acquired from isolates similar to the Tibetan strains. It is, therefore, likely that alleles in both Saaz and Frohberg strains of S. pastorianus are derived from standing variation in the S. eubayanus population (Peris et al. 2016).

• However, it is also likely that isolates that share more similarities with S. pastorianus remain to be discovered in Europe. Langdon et al. (2020) speculate that competitive exclusion with S. uvarum or Saccharomyces paradoxus may have restricted the range of S. eubayanus in Europe, but it also possible that we are not looking in the right place, or the right ecological niche. This report, and the intriguing indication from metagenomics data from Italy (Alsammar et al. 2019), suggest that more European isolates from the Holarctic lineage will be discovered in the future.

• People ask how I’m doing and I usually say, “I’m okay.” But the truth is, I’m not. I just want to be a teenager, but I have to worry about doctors and insurance. Pain now runs down the front of my leg when I stand for too long. I worry about the first time a boyfriend will see my scar, whether he’ll find it gross or weird. I wonder if my college classmates will understand why I immediately start to cry during lockdown drills. I think about why Dominic died and I didn’t. I wonder if my whole life will be like this — if the pain will ever stop or if I’ll just become numb to it.

• Nothing really brings me peace, but turning to activism has given me purpose. Maybe the bullet stopped before it hit my major artery so that I could be a voice for my friends who no longer have one. Maybe I’m here to help fix our broken system, one in which people care more about what books kids are reading than the fact that they are literally dying at school. If I can help save even just one life, maybe I’m still alive for a reason.

• This lesson from offline spaces can be applied to digital habits, especially the ones that shape our experience of time. ‌Which digital rhythms are we actively following because they make us feel good, and which are we entrained to? Entrainment, a term that originated in biology and then spread to the social sciences, refers to the alignment of an organism’s physiology or behavior with a cycle; the most familiar example would be our circadian rhythm. The signal driving entrainment, in this case light and dark, is called a “zeitgeber” (German for “time giver”).

• A Canadian judge has approved a class-action lawsuit brought by three parents who say their children became addicted to video game Fortnite.

• The plaintiffs say their children would forgo sleeping, eating and showering because they were hooked on the game.

Proprietary

• Curry explained that there appeared to be a ‘pre-flight’ check when JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) were generated during an app’s email/password credential check.

• However, as the server did not require email address confirmation, it was possible to add a CRLF character to the end of an existing victim email address during registration and create an account that bypassed the JWT and email parameter check.

• The app’s HTTP response returned the victim’s vehicle identification number (VIN) during testing. Curry then sent an HTTP request with the crafted account details, and after a few seconds, Specters confirmed his car had been remotely unlocked.

• “Digitizing an entire health care system without really safeguarding it can pretty much kill an entire hospital. It suddenly stops functioning,” said Srinivas Kodali, a researcher with the Free Software Movement of India.

• That is what happened to the hospital in New Delhi. Healthcare workers couldn’t access patient reports because the servers that store laboratory data and patient records had been [breached] and corrupted.

• During this window, all customer services branches will be closed and customers won’t be able to access Medibank or ahm services. HICAPS will not be available for on-the-spot claims.

• Microsoft’s cybersecurity [sic] experts [sic] will oversee the upgrade.

• Email hosting provider Rackspace Technology confirmed on Tuesday that a ransomware attack is behind an outage that has been disrupting its email service since Friday.

• The company said it has retained a cyber defense firm to investigate the attack and has since discovered that the incident only impacted its Hosted Exchange business while its other products and services are fully operational.

• In a new Chromium Repository first discovered by 9to5Google (which is no longer available to the public, but you can see it above), Nest Audio is being discussed and the repo displays a ‘Fuchsia’ tag. This clearly denotes that the current operating system built into these devices is being ditched in favor of the shiny, new one.

Linux Foundation

Security

• This blog post details an exploit for CVE-2022-42703 (P0 issue 2351 – Fixed 5 September 2022), a bug Jann Horn found in the Linux kernel’s memory management (MM) subsystem that leads to a use-after-free on struct anon_vma. As the bug is very complex (I certainly struggle to understand it!), a future blog post will describe the bug in full. For the time being, the issue tracker entry, this LWN article explaining what an anon_vma is and the commit that introduced the bug are great resources in order to gain additional context.

• The Fedora Project has announced that Fedora 35 will reach EOL (end-of-life) on 2022-12-13. We strongly recommend that all users upgrade their Fedora templates and standalones to Fedora 36 no later than 2022-12-13.

• Welcome to yet another report from the Reproducible Builds project, this time for November 2022. In all of these reports (which we have been publishing regularly since May 2015) we attempt to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As always, if you interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

• Let me say it up front: breaking up end-to-end-encrypted HTTPS connections is bad. No matter why you think that you need to inspect and/or modify the contents of an HTTPS connection, please consider not doing it. And if you still think that you absolutely need it, please sit down and consider again just not doing it.

• Unfortunately, I know that way too often this advice won’t be followed. And I don’t mean tools like the Burp Suite which only break up end-to-end-encryption of HTTPS connections temporarily to aid developers or security researchers. No, it’s rather the antivirus applications which do it because they want to scan all your traffic for potential threats. Or companies which do it because they want to see everything happening on their network.

• Usually this results in privacy and/or security issues of varying severity. A while ago I already discussed the shortcomings of Kaspersky’s approach. I later found a catastrophic issue with Bitdefender’s approach. And altogether I’ve seen a fair share of typical issues in this area which are really hard to avoid. Let me explain.

• Security researcher and professor Daniel Gruss is an internationally known authority on security vulnerabilities. Among the exploits he’s discovered with his research team are the Meltdown and Spectre bugs, and their software patch for Meltdown is now integrated into every operating system. Frequent collaborator Martin Schwarzl, a PhD student in Daniel’s CoreSec group at Graz University of Technology (Austria), joined Daniel for an interview with Red Hat Vice President of Product Security Vincent Danen.

• Ransomware groups are constantly devising new methods for infecting victims and convincing them to pay up, but a couple of strategies tested recently seem especially devious. The first centers on targeting healthcare organizations that offer consultations over the Internet and sending them booby-trapped medical records for the “patient.” The other involves carefully editing email inboxes of public company executives to make it appear that some were involved in insider trading.

• The people who are here to help are still in harm’s way. The Supreme Court may have mitigated a bit of this damage in its 2021 Van Buren decision, but its limitations on readings of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act’)’s (CFAA) language means more on paper than it does in real life. All this did was suggest CFAA cases should only target criminal hacking efforts, but left the definition of “criminal” wide open, allowing it to remain a tool of abuse for private companies that refused to fix problems but felt justified in suing security researchers in court for exposing unfixed security flaws.

• Why e-book? So, I wrote a small e-book compiling all the knowledge I have from researching and training more than 200 people on efficient threat modeling. I decided to push it as an e-book for a few reasons: How is this threat modeling e-book different from the others on the market?

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• A deepfake detector can spot fake videos of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy with high accuracy. This detection system could not only protect Zelenskyy, who was the target of a deepfake attempt during the early months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but also be trained to flag deepfakes of other world leaders and business tycoons.

• “We don’t have to distinguish you from a billion people – we just have to distinguish you from [the deepfake made by] whoever is trying to imitate you,” says Hany Farid at the University of California, Berkeley.

• Since their emergence a few years ago, artificial intelligence (AI)-synthesized media—so-called deep fakes—have dramatically increased in quality, sophistication, and ease of generation. Deep fakes have been weaponized for use in nonconsensual pornography, large-scale fraud, and disinformation campaigns. Of particular concern is how deep fakes will be weaponized against world leaders during election cycles or times of armed conflict. We describe an identity-based approach for protecting world leaders from deep-fake imposters. Trained on several hours of authentic video, this approach captures distinct facial, gestural, and vocal mannerisms that we show can distinguish a world leader from an impersonator or deep-fake imposter.

Privacy/Surveillance

• It is noteworthy that these markets differ from other dark web markets in that they can obtain large amounts of data about a single person in a single location. After selling the bot, they guarantee the buyer that the victim’s information will be updated for as long as the device is infected by the bot.

• The study by NordVPN of Lithuania’s Nord Security has revealed that the stolen information included user logins, cookies, digital fingerprints, screenshots, and other details.

• Surveillance has been creeping unabated across schools, universities, and much of daily life over the past few years, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in October, however, graduate students at Northeastern University were able to organize and beat back an attempt at introducing invasive surveillance devices that were quietly placed under desks at their school.

• When short seller Matthew Earl anonymously co-authored a report detailing explosive allegations of wrongdoing at German fintech champion Wirecard, his life was turned upside down.

• Within months of the research’s publication in 2016, the London-based investor says the company tracked him down, placed him under surveillance, and began trying to [break] into his emails.

• Nigeria’s Central Bank this week announced a new policy that restricts large amounts of cash from being withdrawn from bank accounts. The announcement comes two weeks after authorities unveiled redesigned currency in an attempt to curb cash hoarding and check corruption and crimes. But some critics say the decision will have a negative effect on small businesses.

• The Central Bank’s directive this week restricting cash withdrawals from individual and corporate accounts will take effect on Jan. 9, 2023.

• Russia’s largest online service for job seekers, HeadHunter, was added to the registry of organizations that disseminate information, according to Russian anti-Internet censorship organization Roskomsvoboda.

• Rasmus Tantholdt, a reporter for Danish network TV2, was attending Iran’s final group game against the United States last week when he was detained for filming Iranian fans allegedly being attacked by supporters of the country’s regime.

• In March, the Italian government not-so-politely asked Clearview to leave, bestowing upon the toxic facial recognition tech company a $21 million fine as a parting gift. Citing the company’s, um, clear violations of the GDPR, the government added to the tab Clearview has racked up in Europe, now surpassing $50 million.

• There are indications that Twitter is working on end-to-end encrypted DMs, likely building on work that was done back in 2018. This made use of libsignal, the reference implementation of the protocol used by the Signal encrypted messaging app. There seems to be a fairly widespread perception that, since libsignal is widely deployed (it’s also the basis for WhatsApp’s e2e encryption) and open source and has been worked on by a whole bunch of cryptography experts, choosing to use libsignal means that 90% of the work has already been done. And in some ways this is true – the security of the protocol is probably just fine. But there’s rather more to producing a secure and usable client than just sprinkling on some libsignal.

• [...]

• Another issue with this app was its handling of one-time prekeys. When you send someone new a message via Signal, it’s encrypted with a key derived from not only the recipient’s identity key, but also from what’s referred to as a “one-time prekey”. Users generate a bunch of keypairs and upload the public half to the server. When you want to send a message to someone, you ask the server for one of their one-time prekeys and use that. Decrypting this message requires using the private half of the one-time prekey, and the recipient deletes it afterwards. This means that an attacker who intercepts a bunch of encrypted messages over the network and then later somehow obtains the long-term keys still won’t be able to decrypt the messages, since they depended on keys that no longer exist. Since these one-time prekeys are only supposed to be used once (it’s in the name!) there’s a risk that they can all be consumed before they’re replenished. The spec regarding pre-keys says that servers should consider rate-limiting this, but the protocol also supports falling back to just not using one-time prekeys if they’re exhausted (you lose the forward secrecy benefits, but it’s still end-to-end encrypted). This implementation not only implemented no rate-limiting, making it easy to exhaust the one-time prekeys, it then also failed to fall back to running without them. Another easy way to force DoS.

• Today, Public Knowledge joined more than 20 public interest, labor, consumer advocacy, and civil rights groups in a letter urging Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to move the “American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA)” to a vote by the full House of Representatives. The bill would introduce stronger online protections for minors, including a ban on targeted advertising for anyone under 17 years old, and install strict limitations for the collection, use, and sharing of private information. The groups contend that this comprehensive federal privacy and civil rights legislation “not only protects people’s privacy, but also ensures that everyone will have their civil rights protected online.”

• The following is an excerpt from the letter:

• “[We the undersigned groups] strongly believe that this Congress presents the best opportunity to pass comprehensive privacy legislation over the next few years, which is even more vital in a post-Dobbs world.

Confidentiality

• Eufy cameras claim to be local only, but upload data to the cloud. The company is basically lying to reporters, despite being shown evidence to the contrary. The company’s behavior is so egregious that ReviewGeek is no longer recommending them.

• This will be interesting to watch. If Eufy can ignore security researchers and the press without there being any repercussions in the market, others will follow suit. And we will lose public shaming as an incentive to improve security.

Defence/Aggression

• According to this theory, state legislatures are the only arbiters of election rules in their states. Never mind the state Constitution (which is approved by the state legislatures) or the state courts (which interpret the Constitution the state legislature agreed to) or the governor (who can override the state legislature by veto) or the board of elections or other commissions (vested with power given to them by the state legislature), and never mind the voters themselves (who elect the state legislature and, in some states, adopt statutes or constitutional amendments through popular referendum): The independent state legislature theorists would have you believe that the only check on state legislatures’ election-setting powers is the federal Constitution.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged this week that the war in Ukraine has taken longer than expected, and predicted the conflict could be a “long process.” He also warned the risk of nuclear war is increasing, but vowed not to use nuclear weapons first. Putin’s comments come as Russia continues pounding civilian targets across Ukraine, including energy infrastructure, leaving much of the country in the dark and cold with winter approaching. The United Nations reports more than 17,000 civilians have been killed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, including 419 children. For more, we go to Moscow and speak with Russian dissident Boris Kagarlitsky, who says war fatigue is sweeping Russian society. “It will end badly for us in Russia,” says Kagarlitsky, who adds that Russian elites are increasingly uncomfortable. “Russia is losing the war, and Russia is going to lose the war inevitably.”

• Sorry, but we have too many other needs in this country to spend $847 billion on a department that can’t even pass an audit.

• Kremlin-linked Russian billionaires Iskander Makhmudov and Andrey Bokarev, who have served as contractors for the Russian Defense Ministry, are still doing business in Latvia directly and through intermediaries, a new investigation has found.

• That we are in the throes of an existential crisis is no longer news. An endless supply of podcasts and books are at your disposal. But none of these assessments has been delivered by a polymath counterculture poet, with an accent of prophecy submerged in, and sometimes showing through, the learned, rational surface. Enter Charles Potts, known in word-of-mouth literary circles as a poet. A man of many parts, Potts has on occasion defected to the precinct of prose, most notably in his formidable How the South Finally Won the Civil War: and Controls the Political Future of the United States (1995), which in 2022 stands as a prophecy fulfilled.

• Another major work, Across the North Pacific (2002), poems in the main, hones in on language and its effect on culture, concentrating on Chinese and Japanese. (He spent time in China and a year in Japan “studying the language to correlate it with Japanese behavior and apply what I knew about language to behavior.”) The final line of a short poem in ANP is, well, prophetic:

• Senate candidate Diane Sare has been very outspoken against US funding and arming the proxy war in Ukraine, landing her on the Ukrainian government’s notorious list of “information terrorists.”

• Karen Greenberg ponders how Gitmo was opened in the first place, let alone how it’s lasted for 7,627 days to date.

• Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that the Kremlin has said nothing about “new territories,” seemingly contradicting Vladimir Putin’s earlier statement that Russia’s acquisition of “new territories” in Ukraine had been a “significant result” of the war.

• In May 2022, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate published a list of 2,425 Chechen volunteer soldiers who have fought in the war against Ukraine. Using social media and Russian court records, journalists from the independent Russian outlet Verstka have verified the identities of many of the fighters listed — and found that 14 of them have been included on the Russian Federal Financial Monitoring Service’s list of terrorists. Five of the soldiers were still on the list when they were sent to Ukraine. One of the men had close ties to terrorist insurgent Shamil Basayev — and even received an award for his role in the 1995 hospital hostage crisis in Budyonnovsk, Russia, in which more than 100 civilians were killed. In English, Meduza summarizes Verstka’s findings.

• American basketball star Brittney Griner, sentenced to nine years in a Russian penal colony for carrying vape canisters and cannabis oil in her luggage, has been exchanged for the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, reports CNN.

• This is a breaking story… Please check back for possible updates…

• U.S. Women’s National Basketball Association player Brittney Griner on Thursday was freed from a Russian penal colony and is headed home thanks to a prisoner exchange for arms dealer Viktor Bout.

• As Cherelle Griner smiled and said, “Today, my family is whole,” it was impossible not to feel moved by the enormity of the moment—yet some have insisted upon trying. But let the haters rot. Cherelle Griner’s wife is coming home. WNBA superstar Brittney Griner is at long last leaving a Russian penal colony. As this space has argued, don’t believe the nonsense that all this has been about a vape cartridge. Until today Brittney Griner was a political prisoner in Russia. She was sentenced to nine years of hard labor in Mordovia’s “land of prisons” because there is an increasing hot/cold war between the United States and Russia. She was sentenced because she had the misfortune to be profiled, targeted, and caught at a Moscow airport, right when Russia was launching what it thought would be an easy invasion of Ukraine. Ever since, she has been part of what is politely called “hostage diplomacy.”

• President Vladimir Putin described the Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian energy facilities as a response to the actions of the Ukrainian military. During the Kremlin Golden Star award ceremony, Putin said to the guests:

• Supplies of components were intended for ambulances, company says

• Unlike right-wing extremism in general, the number of known cases of „Citizens of the Reich“ among police and military is conspicuously low

• Peace advocates on Thursday slammed the House of Representatives’ passage of a mammoth $858 billion military spending bill as an early holiday gift for the Pentagon and the weapons corporations who benefit from the United States’ ongoing—but largely forgotten—War on Terror.

• “While working families are being crushed by inflation, we shouldn’t be spending $45 billion MORE than the president requested in the NDAA.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Justice, it seems, is hard to find. Thousands of grassroots organizations across the country seek justice for their concerns. In the US, over 13,785 nonprofits work for civil rights and social justice. Organizations focused on international justice such as peace, refugees, and international aid number 23,532. Environmental groups number 27,402.

Environment

• Researchers are racing to understand this new hazard, which adds a new layer of air pollution concern for the Salt Lake City area and threatens to dismantle the progress made to improve air quality in a region where oil refineries, a power plant and a gravel mine are part of the city skyline and the surrounding mountains trap pollution. In neighborhoods on the city’s historically redlined west side, lake dust is raising concern in areas that have experienced decades of environmental disparities and the most vulnerable people some days struggle for a breath of clean air.

• Americans over the past decade have increasingly tried to elude the effects of the climate crisis by moving away from hurricane zones and areas where summers have grown hotter—only to end up in states where they are at greater risk for facing devastating wildfires.

• Researchers at the University of Vermont (UVM) published a new study in Frontiers in Human Dynamics on Thursday following the largest-ever nationwide investigation of how the climate crisis and related factors are influencing U.S. migration patterns.

Energy

• Globally, the fossil fuel industry receives subsidies of $11 million per minute, primarily from lack of liability for the externalized health costs of deadly air pollution (42%), damages caused by extreme weather events (29%), and costs from traffic collisions and congestion (15%). And two-thirds of those subsidies come from just five countries: the United States, Russia, India, China and Japan. These are key findings from a study of 191 nations published by the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, in September 2021, that were reported in The Guardian and Treehugger the next month, but have been ignored in the corporate media.

• Canadian pipeline company TC Energy is aiming to expand the volume of methane gas that it ships through a long distance pipeline in the Pacific Northwest, potentially locking in higher gas use despite laws in western states that chart a path away from fossil fuels in the years ahead.

• TC Energy’s existing GTN pipeline carries methane gas from British Columbia down through much of the U.S. Pacific Northwest, passing through Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, and connecting to northern California.

• The idea of sending robots into conditions that humans would not survive is a very old concept. Robot’s don’t heed oxygen, food, or any other myriad of human requirements. They can also be treated as disposable, and they can also be radiation hardened, and they can physically fit into small spaces. And if you just happen to be the owner of a nuclear power plant that’s had multiple meltdowns, you need robots. A lot of them. And [Asianometry] has provided an excellent synopsis of the Robots of Fukushima in the video below the break.

• This is a developing story. Please check back for updates…

• Climate campaigners on Thursday were outraged but unsurprised as TC Energy in Canada—the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline proposal defeated last year—announced the 22nd spill from its original pipeline.

Overpopulation

• “As of January 1, 2022 according to first preliminary data, the (resident) population has fallen to 58.983 million,” Istat president Giancarlo Blangiardo said in a parliamentary hearing in Rome.

• Blangiardo, a renowned demography expert, said the national population has been shrinking steadily since 2014, with a cumulative loss since then of more than 1.36 million residents.

Finance

• Jessica Corbett reports on the historic New York Times union workers strike over pay and benefits planned for Thursday.

• Today, more than 1,100 unionized newsroom employees at The New York Times will walk out, refusing to work for an entire day. For the past 20 months, they’ve been bargaining with management over basic issues like keeping wage increases in line with inflation and maintaining employee pensions. These workers deserve a fair contact. As freelancers for the New York Times and organizers with the Freelance Solidarity Project—the digital media division of the National Writers Union, more than 600 members strong—we and dozens of our fellow freelancers will be joining the one-day walkout in solidarity.

• Music is often an outlet for songwriters to express their political and personal frustrations. That was the case with the New Orleans singer-songwriter Earnest Jackson, who in 1975 composed the song“Inflation” in response to being adversely affected by the high cost of living.Jackson collaborated with the instrumental funk band Sugar Daddy and the Gumbo Roux, to record the topical tune. But it remained unreleased until recently.The group’s keyboardist Kinny Landrum sent an email to NPR’s “Planet Money.” He was in possession of a demo cassette of the song, and due to the renewed timeliness of the subject matter, he reached out to inquire if “Planet Money” could feature the tune. “Planet Money” ended up forming a record label for the sole purpose of distributing the song and giving it the long-overdue exposure that it deserves.Jackson sings, “Inflation is in the nation, and it’s about to put us all away.” Just like in the 1970s, folks are now being crushed by low wages and rising prices. This 47-year-old ditty is the perfect anthem for our current times.Several members of the funk band went on to have careers in the music industry, most notably music executive and former American Idol judge Randy Jackson (no relation to Earnest). For Earnest, success mostly eluded him. He had a #22 US Billboard Hot 100 hit in 1973 with a cover of Al Green’s “Love and Happiness,” but he missed out on royalties—only receiving a one-time fee of $150. Feeling exploited and discarded by the music industry, he pursued a different path and worked as a waiter for 30 years. Thankfully, he is now receiving another opportunity to share his music with the world.Listen to ‘Inflation’ By Earnest Jackson and Sugar Daddy and the Gumbo Roux

• Four railroad workers comment on Congress’s handling of the rail contract dispute, and how Wall Street’s destruction of the freight rail system is only going to get worse for workers, shippers, and all of us.

• Mark Fiore’s latest animation is on how bipartisan lawmakers sided with multibillion dollar rail corporations instead of workers.

• In November 2019—precipitously close to the Christmas holiday—Teamsters Canada shut down the Canadian National railroad. The Canadian Parliament has similar powers to the U.S. Congress to intervene in rail strikes. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came under incredible pressure from business groups to pass “back-to-work” legislation, but he refused.  The strike plowed on for 9 days, and the workers largely won the struggle.

• My partner and I had just returned from four months in Reno, working with UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union, on their 2022 midterm electoral campaign. It’s no exaggeration to say that, with the votes in Nevada’s mostly right-wing rural counties cancelling out those of Democratic-leaning Las Vegas, that union campaign in Reno saved the Senate from falling to the Republicans. Catherine Cortez Masto, the nation’s first Latina senator, won reelection by a mere 7,928 votes, out of a total of more than a million cast. It was her winning margin of 8,615 in Washoe County, home to Reno, that put her over the top.

• Our friend was full of admiration for the two of us, but the people who truly deserved the credit were the hotel housekeepers, cooks, caterers, and casino workers who, for months, walked the Washoe County streets six days a week, knocking on doors in 105-degree heat and even stumping through an Election Day snowstorm. They endured having guns pulled on them, dogs sicced on them, and racist insults thrown at them, and still went out the next day to convince working-class voters in communities of color to mark their ballots for a candidate many had never heard of. My partner and I only played back-up roles in all of this; she, managing the logistics of housing, feeding, and supplying the canvassers, and I, working with maps and spreadsheets to figure out where to send the teams each day. It was, admittedly, necessary, if not exactly heroic, work.

• Social Security was on the ballot in Georgia’s December 6 run-off election.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• What’s up, Linux Community!!! In this video, I cover an article on FBI Director Christopher Wray, who is raising national security concerns about TikTok, warning Friday that control of the popular video-sharing app is in the hands of a Chinese government “that doesn’t share our values.”

• Peruvian President Pedro Castillo was ousted from power Wednesday and arrested hours after he moved to dissolve the country’s Congress, with Vice President Dina Boluarte sworn in to replace him. Castillo is a left-leaning former teacher and union leader who was in office for less than a year and a half, during which time he faced sustained attacks from his political opponents for corruption. His announcement Wednesday that he would dissolve Congress came as lawmakers were preparing for a third time to impeach him. Peruvian scholar Javier Puente, associate professor and chair of Latin American and Latino studies at Smith College, says this week’s dramatic events are just the latest in an “enduring crisis” in Peru that started with dictator Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s. “This is yet another manifestation of the lack of institutional stability that the country has experienced for at least three decades as a result of the legacy of Fujimorismo,” says Puente.

• Independent investigators at the Dossier Center have uncovered a new connection between the construction of “Graceful,” a yacht investigative journalists say belongs to Vladimir Putin, and a Panama-based offshore corporation that made $1.12 billion on the resale of stock from the Yamal SPG gas extraction company a decade ago. The new report sheds light on an important source of Putin’s wealth and the way it’s managed by a complex network of holding companies and offshore corporations. Meduza summarizes the Dossier Center’s key findings.

• The contract will be awarded in parts, with a total estimated completion date of June 2028, the Pentagon said in a statement.

• Competition is intense to snap up big corporate and government cloud contracts – awards to build global computing networks where information is stored, shared and secured over the internet instead of on local computer systems. The Pentagon’s award is seen as one of the most coveted because it’s a stamp of approval in a market where ensuring a client’s data security is important.

• The announcement came in the form of a fairly mundane, routine announcement of Department of Defence contracts, but is notable for both the size of the dollar value of the contract and that it has been issued to four cloud computing providers together.

• The Pentagon announced today that Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google LLC and Oracle Corp. have each been awarded a share of a $9 billion cloud computing contract that will run through 2028.

• Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle will share the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract, which aims to modernise IT standards and enable the Department of Defense (DOD) to acquire commercial cloud services directly from providers.

• Set to run until 2028, a DoD spokesperson confirmed that the JWCC award is comprised of four separate contracts with a shared ceiling of $9 billion.

• The JWCC was previously said to comprise a three-year base with one-year options. A competition for a future multi-cloud environment is expected to follow.

• JWCC is just one of several multibillion-dollar cloud contracts the government has awarded over the past few years. In late 2020, the CIA awarded its Commercial Cloud Enterprise, or C2E, contract to five companies: AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM. The contract could be worth “tens of billions” of dollars, according to contracting documents, and the companies will compete for task orders issued by various intelligence agencies.

• Wednesday’s announcement on the marquee government contract was a big win for a wider swath of technology firms. The largest of them had pushed aggressively for the earlier JEDI contract, which was seen as the way to transform and modernize the military’s cloud-computing systems. Oracle was among the companies that lobbied for the Pentagon to give cloud-computing and other government contracts to multiple firms.

• Wednesday’s result is a boon in particular for Oracle, which analysts don’t see in the top tier of companies offering cloud-based computing services. Oracle generated $900 million in cloud infrastructure revenue in the quarter that ended Aug. 31, a small fraction of the $20.5 billion total for Amazon’s cloud subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, in the third quarter.

• All four of the technology companies have won indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity, or IDIQ, contracts, meaning that they can involve an indefinite amount of services for a specific period of time.

• In recent weeks, Musk has rolled back those policies and restored a number of previously banned users as he pursues his vision of a “free speech” platform, moves that have earned him cheers from conservatives and public scorn from many liberals.

• In what experts and observers of the tech and media industries say is the latest attempt by Musk to woo right-wing users back to Twitter amid a largely chaotic revamp of the company, the eccentric billionaire last week shared with an independent journalist a series of documents about Twitter’s previous content moderation procedures, seemingly in a bid to show bias at the highest level of the company’s leadership against the political right before his arrival.

• New York-based firm BCW published its 2022 Twiplomacy World Leader Power Ranking on Wednesday, an index that shows that only 13 leaders are more influential than AMLO on the social network that was recently purchased by the world’s wealthiest person, Elon Musk.

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, U.S. President Joe Biden and Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ranked No. 1, 2 and 3, respectively.

• Holding tech companies liable for the presence of terrorist content on their platforms risks substantially limiting their ability to effectively moderate content without overly restricting speech, according to several industry associations and civil rights organizations.

• The Computer & Communications Industry Association, along with seven other tech associations, filed an amicus brief Tuesday emphasizing the vast amount of online content generated on a daily basis and the existing efforts of tech companies to remove harmful content.

• A separate coalition of organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy & Technology, also filed an amicus brief.

• The Estonian Consumer Protection and Technical Regulatory Authority (TTJA) said that media services providers need to remove Russian independent TV Rain (Dozhd) from their selection as it is prohibited to carry channels that lack a valid media permit.

• The National Electronic Mass Media Council (NEPLP) has decided to cancel the broadcasting authorization for the Russian independent TV channel “TV Rain” (“Дождь”/“Dozhdj”) currently operating in Latvia, said Ivars Āboliņš, chairman of NEPLP, December 6.

• On Tuesday, December 6, the Latvian National Electronic Mass Media Council (NEPLP), the country’s media regulator, canceled the outlet’s broadcasting authorization “due to a threat to national security and public order” and accused the broadcaster of violating the country’s media law, according to multiple media reports, a statement by the regulator, and its official decision.

• The regulator ordered the channel to stop broadcasting on Thursday, December 8, and ordered its programming on YouTube to be blocked in Latvia as well, those reports said.

• Trump appears to stand in opposition to the establishment, but in fact helps it grab more.

• Two years after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election by more than 7 million votes, he is still angling for a redo. The twice-impeached president thinks he was cheated out of what he imagines should have been his second term, completely overlooking the fact that voters chose by a 51.3-46.8 margin to place their trust in Joe Biden.

• On Oct. 15, 2020, federal prosecutors took the remarkable step of arresting former Mexican Defense Minister Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda on charges that he conspired to protect drug traffickers. Even in retirement, Cienfuegos was the most important Mexican official ever charged in a U.S. court. A month later, however, the Justice Department took the even more extraordinary step of dropping the charges.

• When the Cienfuegos family landed at Los Angeles International Airport on Oct. 15, 2020, they looked excited and maybe a bit relieved. With the pandemic still ravaging Mexico, they had come to vacation in Southern California. Arranging such a visit wasn’t a problem, even on short notice: The patriarch, retired Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, had made powerful American friends during his six years as Mexico’s defense minister. When he needed a favor — like visas for his wife, daughters and granddaughters — he could still call someone at the Pentagon or the CIA.

• But as the family approached the passport line, an immigration officer waved them to one side. A trim, middle-aged man — dressed, like the general, in a blue blazer and jeans — stepped forward and introduced himself in Spanish as a special agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Could he speak with the general privately? he asked.

• “Welcome back!” read my friend Allan’s e-mail. “So happy to have you back and seeing that hard work paid off. Thank you for all that you do. Please don’t cook this evening. I am bringing you a Honduran dinner—tacos hondureños and baleadas, plus a bottle of wine.” The tacos were tasty indeed, but even more pleasing was my friend’s evident admiration for my recent political activities.

• On this episode of the Start Making Sense podcast, Nation national correspondent Joan Walsh comments on Democratic incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock’s beating Herschel Walker in the Georgia runoff, and what that means for the future of American politics. Powered by RedCircle

• Might we hope that the Ninth Summit of the Americas marked a turning point in Latin America’s relationship with the Biden administration? Held last June in Los Angeles—and the first hosted by the United States since the inaugural summit in 1994—the summit suffered a partial boycott, led by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, protesting Biden’s decision to exclude Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. This October, when Secretary of State Tony Blinken traveled to Colombia and Chile to meet with newly elected presidents Gustavo Petro and Gabriel Boric, he got an earfull of what progressive Latin American leaders think is wrong with US policy, especially on Cuba and Venezuela. Just last month, 18 former Latin American and Caribbean presidents and prime ministers wrote to Biden calling on him to resume President Barack Obama’s policy of rapprochement with Havana.

• As the Democratic Party wrestles with reforming the 2024 presidential primary schedule, President Biden is pushing a proposal that would put South Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, Michigan, and Georgia in the early contest window. Implementing this proposal faces challenges—in particular the need for Republican-controlled states like Georgia’s to go along with it, as well as the continued insistence by states like New Hampshire and Iowa that they go earlier regardless of what the party dictates.

• The Republican state lawmaker behind legislation that’s pushed some LGBTQ+ teachers in Florida to leave education is facing federal charges for allegedly defrauding a federal program meant to provide aid for small businesses of his during the Covid-19 pandemic.

• State Rep. Joseph Harding was indicted by a grand jury and has been accused of falsifying bank statements and making illegal bank transfers in order to wrongfully obtain $150,000 in federal pandemic relief funds for businesses that were not actually operating at the time.

• We don’t know what dishes were served at the dinner Trump hosted last month for Ye (aka Kanye West) and Nick Fuentes, but the meal has given much of the country indigestion. Real or feigned, following Trump’s dining with Fuentes, who describes himself as being “just like Hitler” and diminishes Jim Crow, numerous leaders of the Republican Party offered sanctimonious denunciations and apologies.

• Signals from U.S. Supreme Court justices during oral arguments in Moore v. Harper on Wednesday heightened concerns that the right-wing majority may issue a ruling that partly or fully embraces a “dangerous” legal theory and would radically transform federal elections.

• “Their theory would invalidate constitutional provisions in every single state, many tracing back to the founding.”

• The Supreme Court is considering a North Carolina redistricting case that could have far-reaching implications for voting rights in the 2024 election and beyond. At stake in Moore v. Harper is whether North Carolina Republican lawmakers had the authority to overturn a state Supreme Court ruling that redrew the state’s congressional map due to partisan gerrymandering. The plaintiffs want the Supreme Court to embrace the notion of “independent state legislature theory,” a radical conservative reading of the Constitution that claims state lawmakers have sweeping authority to override courts, governors and state constitutions. “The stakes are really, really high,” says law professor Franita Tolson, who teaches at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.

• Progressive criticism of President Joe Biden’s move to make South Carolina the first-in-the-nation Democratic presidential primary was given a boost Wednesday when More Perfect Union launched a petition imploring the Democratic National Committee to pick a diverse swing state instead.

• “If we really want to pick a diverse primary electorate, look to South Carolina’s neighbor to the north—an actual battleground state.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• New albums from Western artists that haven’t been added to Russian streaming services’ official libraries due to their labels’ exit from the Russian market have nonetheless been appearing on the services.

• There are lots of shitty ways game developers and publishers can handle their games getting crappy reviews. The best bet would obviously be to read the reviews from customers, learn something from them, and make a better product. Far too often, however, developers and publishers instead try to disappear bad reviews, fake reviews, or otherwise juice their review scores.

• A key way to affect this dynamic is for allies to provide open and secure [Internet] access to the Russian and Iranian people, giving them access to information without the prying eyes of their governments and without the content being filtered or their actions being tracked. Allowing citizens to access Western media and up-to-date, accurate news from the field can help the United States and our allies break the grasp of the Russian and Iranian internal propaganda machines.

• With such access, Russians and Iranians would be able to see more clearly for themselves the violence being imposed on Ukrainians and Iranian women, learn the truth of their leaders’ mounting failures and potentially hear the voices of alternative leaders. Furthermore, open and secure [Internet] access will help Russian and Iranian citizens to organize and mobilize by reducing the risk of being caught by the deep digital surveillance conducted by the Putin and Khameini regime.

• Zhao, not his real name, is a 22-year-old Shanghai native who recently graduated from a university in Beijing. As hundreds took to the streets across China last month to protest the Chinese Communist Party, he staged a one-man demonstration on campus where he held up a blank piece of paper—a symbol of everything protesters want to say but do not dare.

• Chinese social media platforms like Wechat, Sina Weibo, and Douyin are heavily censored and monitored for rule-breaking content. They also require new users to link their national ID information to any accounts they create. As a result, Webster says users have had to become creative in expressing any views critical of the Chinese government.

• One method of getting around social media censors is by communicating with people outside of the country, sending them videos, photos, and other materials that would otherwise be wiped from Chinese platforms. Once those materials are posted to a non-censored platform like Twitter, users in China would then be able to re-import and reshare them, using oblique language and rotating, editing or flipping the videos to bypass filters.

• “It deals with racism by coming at it right, straight, out front, making you think and laugh about it, because, listen, it’s not just racism, it’s all the isms, he hits all the isms,” Goldberg said (via Entertainment Weekly). “‘Blazing Saddles,’ because it’s a great comedy, would still go over today. There are a lot of comedies that are not good, okay? We’re just going to say that. That’s not one of them. ‘Blazing Saddles’ is one of the greatest because it hits everybody.”

• “If you’ve never seen ‘Blazing Saddles,’ you should do yourself a favor, get some popcorn, get a glass of wine, and put it on, because it’s magnificent,” Goldberg added before telling the film’s critics: “Leave my ‘Blazing Saddles’ alone. Don’t make me come for you!”

• Iran says it has carried out the first execution linked to huge anti-government protests that have taken place over the last four months.

• Protester Mohsen Shekari was hanged on Thursday, state media reported, after being found guilty by a revolutionary court of “waging war against God.”

• The execution comes as other detainees also face the possibility of the death penalty for their involvement in the protests, which began in mid-September, first as an outcry against Iran’s morality police. The protests have since expanded into one of the most serious challenges to Iran’s theocracy since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

• Activists warn that others could also be put to death in the near future, saying that at least a dozen people so far have received death sentences over their involvement in the demonstrations.

• Mohsen Shekari was convicted and sentenced to death for blocking a street and wounding a paramilitary during the early phase of the protests in mid-September.

• At least a dozen other people are currently at risk of imminent execution after being sentenced to hang over the protests in recent weeks, human rights groups warned.

• Mohsen Shekari was hanged on Thursday morning after being found guilty by a Revolutionary Court of “moharebeh” (enmity against God), state media said.

• He was accused of being a “rioter” who blocked a main road in Tehran in September and wounded a member of a paramilitary force with a machete.

• An activist said he was convicted after a “show trial without any due process”.

• South Africa’s Internet Service Provider Association (ISPA) has said that ISPs must register with the Film and Publications Board (FPB) by 27 January 2023.

• This comes after the FPB issued a legal notice at the end of October demanding that South African ISPs comply with amendments to the Film and Publications Act.

• It gave ISP 90 days to comply.

• The report further noted that, while existing globally for several decades, the trend of suicide bombing only penetrated Southeast Asia in the years following the 2002 Bali Bombings, which saw multiple members of the violent Islamist group Jemaah Islamiyah attack a tourist district on the island of Kuta, killing 202 people and injuring a further 209.

• This article highlights trends of suicide bombing in Southeast Asia and factors that influence certain groups’ reasons for employing this tactic. A 2018 suicide attack in Surabaya initiated the trend of family suicide bombings in Southeast Asia. It also sparked media and academic curiosity because it highlighted the exploitation of women and children in terrorist attacks.

• Suicide bombings have since been concentrated in the Philippines, mainly in the Sulu Archipelago. In 2019 alone, there were four suicide bombing attacks and attempts, primarily conducted by foreign families.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The general public may well have a hard time understanding why reporters are concerned about going to a White House Christmas party when most Americans have never been to the White House. At the same time, as a reporter who wasn’t invited, I’m far more concerned about the president showing up and taking questions from the press — which he rarely does — rather than being present for a quick “grip and grin” photo with him at a party. I’m not part of that crowd, and never want to pretend I am. I consider it a compliment that both the Democrats and Republicans apparently think so little of me that neither of them want me at their Christmas party. In short, I don’t care. The only time I want my picture with a president is when I’m either interviewing one or getting them to answer a question in a news conference.

• The news network said the journalist’s killing was part of a “wider attack on Al Jazeera, and journalists in Palestine.”

• “The PRESS Act is the most important free press legislation in modern times because it would finally stop the government from spying on journalists and threatening them with arrest for doing their jobs,” explained one advocate.

• It is good to be joined by Niels Ladefoged on this tour. Niels was the Director of Photography on the film Ithaka, and as such a fly on the wall of the Shipton/Assange family for two years. But his commitment to Wikileaks goes back much further. He is a very helpful and calming influence to have around when facing a crisis like a stolen laptop.

• Press freedom and rights organizations on Thursday expressed “grave concern” about the Biden administration’s “relentless pursuit” of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian who is jailed in London while he fights against extradition to the United States.

• “It is more than a year since our coalition sent a joint letter calling for the charges against Assange to be dropped,” 21 groups wrote to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. “Today, we repeat those concerns, and urge you to heed our request. We believe that the prosecution of Assange in the U.S. would set a harmful legal precedent and deliver a damaging blow to press freedom by opening the way for journalists to be tried under the Espionage Act if they receive classified material from whistleblowers.”

• Natalia Sindeeva, CEO of TV Rain, posted a brief comment about the network’s situation on her personal Telegram channel.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The execution was announced just as the US pointman on Afghanistan, Thomas West, met in Abu Dhabi with a Taliban delegation led by their defense minister Mohammad Yaqoob, the son of the group’s founder Mullah Omar.

• Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement the criticism had “unfortunately” stemmed from a lack of understanding and research about Islam as well as Afghanistan, where he said more than 99% of the population are Muslim.

• The app was first found towards the end of November by Twitter users in South America, who noticed that the app could make any photo into an anime-style artwork. News of the application spread like wildfire on the microblogging platform, so much so that Tencent was forced to shut it down to prepare it for the influx of users. Even today, trying to use the service results in an error message stating that the “service is being upgraded”.

• A yearlong investigation by ProPublica and NBC News has explored inequities across the U.S. child welfare system, looking at mandatory reporting requirements, frequency of investigations and more.

• By some estimates, the likelihood of Black youths experiencing an investigation by a child protective services agency is far higher than their likelihood of being stopped by police.

• In 2015, Nydea Richards decided to move her family to the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan area, in search of lower crime and better weather than in her hometown of Milwaukee. She was pregnant at the time.

• Before arriving here, Richards, like most Americans, never thought of child protective services as having a major presence in people’s lives, unless they’ve committed some sort of clear-cut child abuse. As a Black mother, she was more concerned about her kids encountering the police someday.

• The State Duma has passed a bill to restrict legal access to surrogacy services to Russian citizens. Prospective parents can be either married couples or single women unable to conceive and give birth for medical reasons. Foreigners married to Russian citizens can also legally resort to surrogacy options.

• Since cops are trained to view everything as suspicious, they tend to believe everything is suspicious. The list of things considered to be suspicious often contradicts other things on the list of things considered suspicious. That should be considered suspicious, but somehow cops never think it is.

• In writing online about a case about online expression, I’ll open with a reference to some more online expression: the popular meme featuring the caption, “The worst person you know just made a great point.” And that’s where we are with this case just heard by the US Supreme Court: 303 Creative v. Elenis, where a homophobic website designer does not want to be forced by Colorado law to have to make websites for same sex weddings.

• Civil rights proponents cheered Thursday after all 219 House Democrats and 39 Republicans voted to pass legislation enshrining recognition of same-sex and interracial partnerships, just over a week after the Senate did the same.

• The Respect for Marriage Act, which President Joe Biden is expected to sign into law as soon as this week, jettisons the definition of marriage as “between a man and a woman” and requires all states to recognize the validity of legally obtained marriage licenses regardless of gender or race. However, the bill stops short of codifying the right of same-sex and interracial couples to marry nationwide.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• They were innovators. Their goal was audacious. It was to provide a way for the many different kinds of networks being invented to talk to each other. These pioneers collaborated, building upon each other’s work, pushing the boundaries of what was possible. They opened up a new world of opportunity for the future of humanity.

• They were visionaries, but the vision may have seemed mad to some. Yet they believed billions of people would come to rely daily on their development: the Internet. And so here we are. The Internet has become a powerful, transformative force. It is easy to forget how much it has changed many societies for the better. Put simply, many people in the world can no longer function without it. But as each year passes, the Internet faces more and more threats.

• There were 349.9 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains at the end of the third quarter of 2022, according to domain name registry services provider Verisign.

• Yesterday we wrote about how all of the terrible anti-internet bills we were worried about being slipped into the “must pass” National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) bill were, thankfully, left on the cutting room floor. However, within the 4,400 pages, there was still plenty of other nonsense added, including a variation on a bill that we had worried about almost exactly a year ago: the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act.

• As people in Bangladesh exercise their fundamental rights to freedom of expression and assembly, authorities and telecommunications and internet service providers must keep them connected to the internet. Through an open letter, Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition are demanding unfettered access to all people across the country, at all times.

• “The government of Bangladesh must not use internet interference to control narratives, or deny people political participation,” said Felicia Anthonio, #KeepItOn Campaign Manager at Access Now. “By obstructing the rights to freedom of speech, access to information, and the ability to communicate in the build up to International Human Rights Day, authorities are showing disregard for people across the country.”

• We, the undersigned organizations, and members of the #KeepItOn coalition — a global network of over 280 organizations from 105 countries working to end internet shutdowns — write to urgently appeal to you, the BTRC and all relevant authorities, and telecommunication service providers, to maintain unfettered access to the internet for all, and to protect people’s fundamental rights and freedoms especially in times of protest. Open, secure, reliable, and accessible internet is vital to exercise and protect human rights.

• In direct violation of people’s human rights in Bangladesh, internet connectivity has been reportedly slowed down over the last few weeks, with a perceived link to the ongoing and imminent protests by the opposition party, including on December 10, 2022, which, ironically, is International Human Rights Day. Such throttling of internet access and undermining of human rights is taking place amid a continuing crackdown by government and law enforcement agencies to quell dissent. In a report unpacking trends during protests across more than 100 countries, CIVICUS — a global civil society alliance — highlighted attacks by Bangladesh government forces against protests organized by students, the opposition, and workers, and called on the government to ”halt its assault on the right to protest.”

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• As of Dec. 8, Disney+ Premium (with no ads) now costs $3 more per month for new and existing U.S. customers (who are not on special promotional plans), an increase of 38%. Concurrently, the company has launched Disney+ Basic, the plan that includes ads, which is available in the U.S. for $7.99/month (the previous price point of the ad-free version of Disney+).

• Hungry to boost municipal budgets, a growing roster of states and cities have spent the last five years or so trying to implement a tax on Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services. Sometimes (like in Chicago) this has involved expanding an existing amusement tax (traditionally covering book stores, music stores, ball games and other brick and mortar entertainment) to online streaming.

Monopolies

• The FTC has sued Microsoft in an attempt to keep it from acquiring Activision Blizzard, owners of Call of Duty and King games. The Xbox owner was hoping to purchase the gaming titan for almost $69 billion.

• Consumer advocates cheered a lawsuit filed Thursday by the Biden administration in a bid to block the proposed merger of two of the world’s leading video game companies, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard—a $69 billion deal the Federal Trade Commission argued would “harm competition” in the nearly $200 billion gaming industry.

• “Today’s action is of incredible importance in ensuring fair and open competition in gaming and across the larger digital economy.”

• Today, the Federal Trade Commission filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft to block the company’s $69 billion acquisition of video game maker Activision Blizzard. The agency acted in order to prevent Microsoft from harming competition in the gaming marketplace, including consoles and subscription services.

• The suit follows a letter sent this year by Public Knowledge and other organizations encouraging the agency to “closely scrutinize” the buyout of a “structurally important gaming developer and publisher.” The complaint mirrors several of the issues raised in Public Knowledge’s March 2022 blog post about the transaction. Public Knowledge has cautioned that the merger raises serious competition issues and risks harming gamers and the gaming industry.

• The FTC announced that the $68.7 billion proposed acquisition, which, if finalized, would be the most expensive in U.S. history, would “suppress competitors,” if Microsoft was to go ahead with the purchase.

• “With control over Activision’s blockbuster franchises, Microsoft would have both the means and motive to harm competition by manipulating Activision’s pricing, degrading Activision’s game quality or player experience on rival consoles and gaming services, changing the terms and timing of access to Activision’s content, or withholding content from competitors entirely, resulting in harm to consumers,” said the FTC in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

• The FTC filed an antitrust lawsuit seeking to prevent Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard, maker of video-game franchises including “Call of Duty,” “Overwatch” and “World of Warcraft,” alleging that it would let Microsoft “suppress competitors” in the sector.

• The proposed $69 billion deal, announced earlier this year, would be Microsoft’s biggest ever and the largest to date in the video-game. The Federal Trade Commission, in announcing the lawsuit, alleged that Activision Blizzard would let Microsoft “suppress competitors to its Xbox gaming consoles and its rapidly growing subscription content and cloud-gaming business.”

• The FTC said that the proposed transaction would enable Microsoft to stifle competition to Xbox and its “rapidly growing” game streaming service. It pointed to the tech giant’s history of acquiring competitors to “suppress competition from rival consoles,” including its purchase of ZeniMax, parent company of Bethesda Softworks and maker of The Elder Scrolls, Fallout and Starfield.

• “Microsoft has already shown that it can and will withhold content from its gaming rivals,” said Holly Vedova, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “Today we seek to stop Microsoft from gaining control over a leading independent game studio and using it to harm competition in multiple dynamic and fast-growing gaming markets.”

• The agency alleged Microsoft suppressed competition from rival consoles by acquiring companies in the past, including by deciding to make games like “Starfield” and “Redfall” exclusive to Microsoft devices after acquiring game developer ZeniMax.

• “Microsoft has already shown that it can and will withhold content from its gaming rivals,” the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition said in a statement. “Today we seek to stop Microsoft from gaining control over a leading independent game studio and using it to harm competition in multiple dynamic and fast-growing gaming markets.”

Software Patents

• Those events led EFF to file an amicus brief, in which we stood up for the public’s “right … to know who is controlling and benefiting from litigation in publicly-funded courts.” We filed this brief together with two other organizations that work with us on patent transparency issues, Engine Advocacy and Public Interest Patent Law Institute.

• Today, the Federal Circuit accepted our brief, and denied the petition filed by patent troll Nimitz Technologies that sought to halt the investigation. The Federal Circuit panel called out strong language in Judge Connolly’s Memorandum explaining the concerns that led to his investigation (see p. 4):

• Later in its order, the Federal Circuit pointed about that these concerns are all within Judge Connolly’s purview and responsibility.

Copyrights

• The European Commission has released its latest “Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List”, providing an overview of ‘notorious markets’ located outside the EU. The report is largely based on input from copyright holders and includes The Pirate Bay and other usual suspects. File-hosting service Mega, one of the newcomers, is not pleased with its inclusion.

• Many Americans read To Kill a Mockingbird in school. It’s a great book. It was also, curiously, the only book that author Harper Lee published — at least until shortly after her death, when an earlier draft of Mockingbird was published as Go Set a Watchmen. That book made plenty of money, but its release was also surrounded by questions of elder abuse, copyright infringement, and fraud.

• The dispute has a tortured timeline. In 1969 Lee gave Sergel rights to stock and amateur productions (but not Broadway productions) of “Mockingbird.” In 2011, according to the lawsuit, she notified Dramatic Publishing Company of her intent to terminate the exclusive rights, and in 2015 she agreed to let Rudin develop a new Broadway-bound adaptation; Rudin later hired Sorkin to write the play.

• Then a pair of legal disputes arose — the Lee estate and the Rudin producing team sued one another over the new script’s fidelity to the novel, while the Sorkin and Sergel rightsholders began to spar over which show could be staged where. The first of those disputes was settled; the second went to a lengthy arbitration, where Dramatic Publishing prevailed; the Lee estate challenged that ruling in court, but has thus far been rebuffed.

Gemini* and Gopher

Technical

• My project to use NetBSD on the Odroid-XU4 didn’t go over, unfortunately. Now I am using Ubuntu provided by Hardkernel, and let me say this is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen, but despite everything the experience is going very well so far except, of course, for Ubuntu and for the email client!

• cmus[1] uses a file called autosave (~/.config/cmus/autosave) to store configuration settings. This file is loaded every time cmus is launched. Settings changed during a session will be written to autosave on exit. This can make changing settings a bit finicky. A few times I’ve accidentally changed a setting by pressing the wrong hotkey, and then not been able to change it back. There is another file called rc (~/.config/cmus/rc) which can store persistent settings. These settings are loaded after autosave and will not be overwritten on exit.

Science

• If there is a recession underway – and we are not convinced that there is even a little bit – then the Ethernet switch market did not get the memo. And the Ethernet router market has stopped checking its email just in case.

• Don’t get us wrong. The global economy is skittish and stumbling in many areas. But IT is so integral to what everyone does that at least in the aggregate, the Ethernet market is continuing to show good vital signs. This is thanks to the ramping rollouts of 200 Gb/sec and 400 Gb/sec switching, which is necessary for modern applications and for balancing out the increasing compute and storage needs of all manner of applications.

• Most readers will be familiar with Ethernet networks in some form, in particular the Cat5 cables which may snake around the back of our benches. In a similar vein, we’ll have used power over Ethernet, or PoE, to power devices such as webcams. Buy a PoE router or switch, plug in a cable, and away you go! But what lies behind PoE, and how does it work? [Alan] has written a comprehensive guide, based on experience working with the technology.

Programming

• Like many others I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT, the OpenAI GPT-3 chat bot. With people now having open access, it’s been causing quite a stir.

• I asked it about Doomsday Engine (my Doom port), thinking surely that is too niche a topic for it to know about. But it promptly gave a brief description of the project and named me as the author, using my real name. 😯 Of course, all this is public information gathered from wikis and whatnot, but it still feels weird to be part of an AI data model, as opposed to a relatively simple and straightforward search engine index. With all the other examples of ChatGPT out there, the model must be mindbogglingly vast to include this, too.

• I still have to work within the confines of C, but here it’s easier to see that the string literal is one long literal and not four additional parameters, so that’s good. It’s a bit strange looking, but I could get used to it (I got used to “`char const`” over “`const char`” because `const` applies to the object to its right, *except* if starts the declaration; it makes parsing “`char const *const p`” easier for *me*—this declares `p` to be a constant pointer to constant data). And if I need to add to it:

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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