● 12.10.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 10/12/2022: OpenShot 3.0 and Mesa 22.2.5

Posted in News Roundup at 9:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• A smart home is incomplete without a smart TV. So, if you are also searching for the best Linux Smart TVs, you have arrived at the right place. Read on to know more. Linux Smart TVs are a great alternative to Android TVs. However, you need to have prior knowledge of its feature. The best Linux Smart TVs provide a top-notch visual and audio experience. Here are the best ones out there

Audiocasts/Shows

• A fork bomb is a piece of code that, if run via a script or entered into the terminal, will create a process that continually forks itself until the computer completely runs out of memory and locks up. Essentially, it is a denial of service (DoS) attack. You often see the “shell fork bomb” posted on Linux forums and chat rooms. It looks like a random string of characters. What do those characters actually do?

• I’ve you’ve dug around your Linux file system you may have seen a Lost+Found folder but what is and why does it actually exist?

• Fedora 37 and Zorin OS 16.2 are the hottest releases of this year-end, and if you’re wondering which of these to install, you’re not alone. Fedora and Zorin could not be further away from each other. They have completely different origins, different bases, and different package managers and they both provide completely different experiences. But they both are remarkable at what they do.

• This week in the Weekly News Roundup, law enforcement are tracking people through their vehicle infotainment system, Google’s signing key leaked…oops, and Microsoft has another way to get you to switch to Windows 11. Will you go for it?

Graphics Stack

Applications

• Over a year in the making, OpenShot 3.0 brings 4K (HiDPI) display support, enhanced real-time video playback performance, the ability to simultaneously export multiple clips and videos, expanded compatibility with more video formats and codecs, and Blender 3.3 LTS support.

• It also comes with many improvements to the timeline and usability, including snapping, keyframes, waveforms, and default folders, improved EOF (end of file) and file duration detection, support for new export presets like animated GIF, MP3 (audio only), YouTube 2K, YouTube 4K, and MKV, better support for anamorphic video profiles, as well as improved location preferences and documentation.

• Download OpenShot Video Editor 3.0 – the latest & greatest version of our FREE, open-source video editor! Over 12 months in the making and more than 1000 improvements!

• A system profiler is a utility that presents information about the hardware attached to a computer. Having access to hard information about your hardware can be indispensable when you need to establish exactly what hardware is installed in your machine. For example, the information will help a technical support individual diagnose problems, or help to evaluate whether a system will support certain software or hardware.

• This type of software lets individuals establish hardware details without opening the computer case. This may not be an option if you do not have direct access to the hardware, relying on the internet to connect to the machine. System profilers let you remotely interrogate a system.

• In Windows circles, CPU-Z is a popular freeware tool that gathers information on the main devices of a system without having to conduct technical and manual searching. CPU-Z lays out the raw technical data out to read in easy-to-read tables and is well presented. For Linux, there are a number of good utilities that offer the same type of information, providing essential and extended hardware about the entire system.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Elixir on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Elixir is a functional, concurrent, and general-purpose programming language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine (VM).

• 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 Elixir on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

• To enable SSH on all ESXi hosts connected to a vCenter Server, using PowerCLI, you can use the following steps:

• I believe almost all Linux users keep their systems updated.

• But that update is usually for the default package manager. For example, updating Ubuntu often means updating all the APT packages.

• However, there are other packaging formats like Snap and Flatpak. The Snap applications get updated automatically but not the Flatpak ones.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nginx Mainline Version on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Nginx is a well-known web server with open-source access and is used by top-rated companies because of its extensive support. The software is known for its low impact on memory resources, high scalability, and modular, event-driven architecture which can offer secure, predictable performance. More than just a web server, Nginx also works as a load balancer, an HTTP cache, and a reverse proxy. Since it’s free open-source software (FOSS) and high-performance HTTP web server, you can use, modify and distribute it freely without spending money at all.

• 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 Nginx mainline version on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• This simple tutorial shows how to install the latest version of TimeShift, to backup your Ubuntu system by creating ‘system store‘ points.

• Timeshift is a popular system backup tool originally developed by Tony George. It’s now a project maintained by Linux Mint, though the original developer is still one of the top contributors.

• And, he is maintaining a PPA repository contains the latest packages so far for Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 22.10 and their derivatives.

• Kubernetes is hard. There’s no way around that. With so many moving pieces, all of which have to interconnect, and complicated manifests, the technology can be rather daunting. Should you dive in too fast, you might become overwhelmed to the point where you’re not sure which way to go1

• That’s why it’s important to approach Kubernetes slowly and with a one-step-at-a-time approach. In this Kubernetes 101 series, we’ve previously covered deploying MicroK8s to a single server, powered by Rocky Linux.

• This time around we’re going to add nodes to our first Kubernetes machine to create a cluster. These nodes are all managed by the original machine, which I call the controller. You’ll want to make sure to have followed the “Kubernetes 101: The easiest route to installing Kubernetes on Rocky Linux” tutorial and make sure to do this on all of the nodes you need for the cluster. Once you’ve taken care of those steps on every machine, you’re then ready to start adding nodes to the cluster.

• Learn how to install Adobe Acrobat Reader on Ubuntu using Wine and Snap, or the Linux edition, or an alternative reader.

• Have you ever wondered where a website is actually hosting its content from? You can geolocate domain names and IP addresses right from the Linux command line with geoiplookup. Here’s how to use it.

• The vdir command is an equivalent to the “ls -l -b” command, printing the content in long list format and showing escape characters on the file or directory name, just like the dir command is equivalent to the “ls -C -b” command.

• Practically, you might rarely or not use this command on a daily basis, but knowing about it will add something to your Linux knowledge that will separate you from others.

• In the Linux world, two common commands, “ls” and “dir“, replicate each other so well that most Linux users think one of them is an alias or symbolic link to the other (it’s not true).

• Another mistake most people make is judging the output of ls (which by default displays the color) and dir (which does not without specifying an option) and again failing to judge it because “ls” is an alias to “ls –color=auto“.

• To verify this, execute the “alias ls” command, or check the result after executing “unalias ls” (it will remove the color from the output).

• The cd command is a very popular tool for navigating through multiple directory paths in the Linux filesystem, but there is one problem with that, what?

• A directory with a short path can be easily navigated, but a directory with a long path might become troubling while going back and forth multiple times.

• It’s true, you can create an alias for directories with a long path, but when you interact with multiple directories nested deeply inside your filesystem, your only option is the cd command.

• I’ve assumed that sending emails via a CLI would be easy. That might even be the case, but sending them in a way that they actually show up in the receiver’s mailbox is quite a different story. After following multiple tutorials and using tools from sendmail to mailx, not a single email arrived. Since I wanted to send the mail from within a Python script anyway, I moved on to a Real Python tutorial. This is the snippet they use to send an email.

Games

• We are pleased to announce that ScummVM now supports Adibou 2, a popular educational game developed by Coktel Vision in 1996.

• Designed for children from 4 to 7 years old, the world of Adibou is warm and full of surprises. It offers an intelligent and appealing introduction to essential knowledge like reading and math.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• 2022 has been a year of surprises, and Linux distributions have fared no differently. From new releases full of happening features to various desktop options, there is always something to look forward to.

• When you have so many options spoiling you for choices, why not splurge and pick the one which is the most effective and close to your heart? If you are rearing to pick a favorite from the list of best Linux distributions of 2022, here are a few options you need to consider today.

Reviews

• My NovaCustom NV41PZ laptop arrived a couple of days ago, and today I had some time to install it. You may want to read about my purchasing decision process first. I expected a rough ride to get it to work, given the number of people claiming that modern laptops can’t run fully free operating systems. I first tried the Trisquel 10 live DVD and it booted fine including network, but the mouse trackpad did not work. Before investigating it, I noticed a forum thread about Trisquel 11 beta3 images, and being based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and has Linux-libre 5.15 it seemed better to start with more modern software. Everything installed fine, and I didn’t need to adjust anything except to manually install GNOME since I prefer that over MATE. I’ve been running it for a couple of hours now, and here is a brief summary of the hardware components that works.

New Releases

• The next stable version of Puppy Linux has been released.

• Deepin Linux is an open-source operating system based on the popular Linux distribution, Debian. It is known for its user-friendly interface and custom desktop environment. Deepin Linux is popular in China and has also been gaining popularity in other parts of the world. It is a good choice for users who want a stable, easy-to-use operating system that is stable and reliable, And are comfortable using software from the origin country.

• Deepin 20.8: What’s New

• The latest version of Deepin Linux, 20.8, includes a new application called “Deepin Home” that improves communication between the Deepin team and its users. This will help the team focus on improving product quality, software, and hardware ecology. The update includes an upgrade to Qt version 5.15.6, updates to the DTK development library, fixes for underlying vulnerabilities, and improved system compatibility and security.

Fedora Family / IBM

• CERN and Fermilab will make AlmaLinux the standard distribution for experiments at their facilities based on feedback from stakeholders.

• Following CentOS’s withdrawal from the enterprise server distribution market, AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux have emerged as the two best RHEL-based derivatives in this segment. As a result, it is not surprising that when looking for a free alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the choice frequently comes down to one of the two.

• Probably two of the world’s leading scientific laboratories, the Swiss-based CERN and the US-based Fermilab, faced a similar dilemma. But first, let’s say a few words about each of them.

• The European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, is the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Located near Geneva, Switzerland, CERN has gained worldwide attention with its Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

• Developers are increasingly turning to automated development and deployment processes to meet the challenge of building cloud-native applications. In the era of cloud computing, your apps must react to event-driven systems in scalable and flexible ways. Learn more about how Red Hat Developer readers used Ansible and Helm to make this possible in 2022.

Debian Family

• Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• More than a year after its 4.0 major upgrade, Apache Cassandra is set to release its 4.1 iteration next week, promising pluggable schema management and new guardrails to help ops professionals keep those devs in line.

• In July last year, the 4.0 release of the popular NoSQL database was the first major upgrade in six years, with an emphasis on stability, speed and consistency.

• Building on that foundation for enterprise-grade systems, Mick Semb Wever, Apache Cassandra PMC chairman told The Register: “Four point one is the next natural step. We’re looking at who our users are, and what the major concerns are.”

Programming/Development

• I attempted to update my Mageia desktop yesterday and, although almost everything went well, I got this error message telling me that imagemagick could not update because “nothing provided lib64raw20″.

• In the 2021 movie Silk Road, at around 19:23-19:26 into the film we can see Ross Ulbricht, the lead character, write a program on his laptop that uses curl. A few seconds we get a look at the screen as Ross types on the keyboard and explains to the female character who says I didn’t know you know how to code that he’s teaching himself to write code.

• ALP – The Adaptable Linux Platform – is a new operating system from SUSE to run containerized and virtualized workloads. It is in early prototype phase, but the development is done completely openly so it’s easy to jump in to try it.

• For this trying out, I used the latest encrypted build – as of the writing, 22.1 – from ALP images. I imported it in virt-manager as a Generic Linux 2022 image, using UEFI instead of BIOS, added a TPM device (which I’m interested in otherwise) and referring to an Ignition JSON file in the XML config in virt-manager.

• Good day, hackfolk. Today’s article is about semi-space collectors. Many of you know what these are, but perhaps not so many have seen an annotated implementation, so let’s do that.

• Just to recap, the big picture here is that a semi-space collector divides a chunk of memory into two equal halves or spaces, called the fromspace and the tospace. Allocation proceeds linearly across tospace, from one end to the other. When the tospace is full, we flip the spaces: the tospace becomes the fromspace, and the fromspace becomes the tospace. The collector copies out all live data from the fromspace to the tospace (hence the names), starting from some set of root objects. Once the copy is done, allocation then proceeds in the new tospace.

• The prefix kwarg that most compiler check functions support now accepts an array in addition to a string. The elements of the array will be concatenated separated by a newline.

Perl / Raku

• Santa’s elves are in charge of updating the e-Christmas site every year and, since that site uses WordPress, it needs a full rebuild each time to make sure that it is ready for all the kids to Post their Christmas lists without drooping under the weight of traffic.

Leftovers

• Much has been made, since the days of the ancients, of art’s desire to imitate lived experience—an absurd expectation, as Plato would have it. But for a seasoned critic, the inverse might also make for a truism: that the hours spent defining, investigating, and understanding the possibilities of artistic expression can incline you, for good or ill, to see life itself as a problem of creativity, form, and genre.

• I spend half my time trying to remind other Queer people that the state won’t protect us and the other half trying to convince hillbillies that the state doesn’t represent Queer people. This isn’t exactly easy when the feds drape themselves in rainbow flags to prove their newfound benevolence while they continue to secretly ferry us fairies away to glorified concentration camps for the high crime of survival sex. But just try explaining the complexities of assimilation and FOSTA-SESTA to your local Rust Belt militia and wait for the eyes to roll.

• It’s a shit job, but I actually feel like I was making some assemblance of progress in building bottom unity across these tribal divisions before the Republicans decided to double-down on QAnon style transphobia for the Midterms. Even supposedly moderate Republicrats have adopted demonizing gender outlaws like me by labeling us as groomers and pedophiles and too many conservative libertarians on the fringe have boughten into this horseshit hook, line and sinker. I don’t think that words exist in any language that can properly display the horror that I feel in the pit of my soul when people that I have spent years trying to convince to become allies start throwing these sickening words around.

• Irene was a beautiful multitalented artist, whose gifts, at an early age, were fostered by nurturing artistic parents. Her polished abilities primed and blooming by the late 60s, made her stand out in just about all the projects she auditioned for in the 70s, and by 1976 she was considered one of the best young actors of her generation—the same year producer David De Silva was developing an idea for a film, about young artists and their growing pains, at the High School of the Performing Arts.

• The film, Fame, was released in 1980 and featured Irene as the main protagonist, Coco Hernandez. Delivering the film’s title song, and the touching ballad, “Out Here on My Own” with power and conviction, while wringing every ounce of intrigue out of a subpar screenplay, Irene was instrumental in the film’s surprising success: two Academy Awards (best original song and best original score) and a Golden Globe (best original song).

Education

Hardware

• Fair warning for readers with a weak stomach, the video below graphically depicts an innocent rubber band airplane being obliterated in mid-air by a smug high-tech RC helicopter. It’s a shocking display of airborne class warfare, but the story does have a happy ending, as [Concrete Dog] was able to repair his old school flyer with some very modern technology: a set of 3D printed propeller blades.

• It’s a rare person who can pick up a cheap laser pointer and not wield it like a lightsaber or a phaser, complete with sound effects. There’s just something about the “pew-pew” factor that makes projecting a laser beam fun, even if it’s not the safest thing to do, or the most efficient way to the light from one place to another.

• We’ve talked about feature creep plenty of times around here, and it’s generally regarded as something to be avoided when designing a prototype. It might sound good to have a lot of features in a build, but this often results in more complexity and more difficulty when actually bringing a project to fruition. [Brendan] has had the opposite experience with this custom handheld originally designed for Game and Watch games, though, and he eventually added NES and Game Boy functionality as well.

• Hacks that bring a vintage flair to modern electronics never get old, and [Jeffrey Stephenson] delivers with his Project Clean Slate inspired by vintage tube amps.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Environmental justice advocates on Friday condemned a move by a district judge in Michigan to drop two misdemeanor charges against former Republican Gov. Rick Snyder in connection with the 2014 Flint water crisis that killed dozens of residents of the predominantly Black city and poisoned thousands more.

• The Detroit Free Press reports Genesee County Judge F. Kay Behm signed an order remanding willful neglect of duty charges against Snyder, who served two terms as Michigan’s governor from 2011 to 2019.

• A congressional panel on Friday published its final report on the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting the Trump administration’s “failed stewardship” and detailing how a “persistent pattern of political interference undermined the nation’s ability to respond” to a crisis that has claimed more than a million lives in the United States.

• The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis report notes that “the United States was underprepared for a major public health crisis for years before the coronavirus pandemic,” and that “chronic underfunding and long-standing health disparities put many Americans at heightened risk of becoming infected and developing severe illness as a result of the coronavirus.”

• “Racism, xenophobia, and discrimination are fundamental determinants of health globally.”

• That’s the conclusion of a series of research papers published Friday in the eminent British medical journal The Lancet examining how “historic systems and structures of power and oppression and discriminatory ideologies have shaped policy and practice today.”

• In November, millions of voters in red, blue and purple states voted on the future of our health care directly on the ballot. And Senator Warnock ran his re-election campaign and run-off on health care. Health care, and Warnock, won decisively.

• On December 7, the 2022 open enrollment period for Medicare—the time of year when millions of seniors can choose the best Medicare plan to meet their health care needs—closed. But the truth is that for too many seniors, the choice can be both overwhelming and confusing. One of the main contributors to this confusion is a scheme by private insurance companies to prey on seniors and profit off of the Medicare brand, all in the name of padding their corporate profits and shareholder returns.

• As regulators in the United States and European Union prepare to review and potentially reauthorize the controversial weedkiller glyphosate, a new report reveals the stealth tactics and narrative spin deployed by the chemical’s manufacturer to discredit inconvenient science and protect profits.

• The report, published by Friends of the Earth and nonprofit investigative organization U.S. Right to Know, uses the case study of Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) and its widely used glyphosate-based product Roundup to illustrate the pesticide industry’s deceptive tactics and communications strategies — which mirror those of the tobacco and fossil fuel industries.

• Europe’s leading farming lobby group Copa-Cogeca has used the war in Ukraine as a pretext to push back behind the scenes against bold EU laws to protect nature, DeSmog can reveal.

• The meeting records reviewed by DeSmog are the latest evidence to emerge of a long-running effort by agribusiness lobby groups and pesticide firms to roll back rules aimed at safeguarding birds, bees, and butterflies.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• The ruling is not final, or even public. The Board has sent the matter back to Ireland’s Data Protection Commission to issue an order, and reportedly to assess fines. Meta can still appeal. If the decision is finalized and enforced, Meta will need to change its surveillance and consent practices, and ads on Facebook and Instagram will start working significantly differently. Meta would have to seek affirmative consent from users before sending them targeted ads based on surveillance of their online behavior. Meta could pivot to “contextual ads” based only on the content a user is currently interacting with.

• The surveillance-based advertising in question here involves how people use Meta’s own apps. Since 2020, Meta has offered settings to opt out of ad targeting based on information from other apps, websites, and businesses that Meta knows you have visited. Meta tracks its users off-site through tools like Facebook Login, Facebook’s tracking Pixel, social widgets such as Like and Share buttons, and other less visible features for developers. But Meta offers its users no similar option to opt out of ad targeting based on what users click, like, watch, and interact with on Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta properties.

• The company should be offering all of its users an affirmative, opt-in consent option—and not track its users, either on-site or off-site, unless they opt in. Instead, Meta stuck language about its ad targeting practices into its platforms’ Terms of Service. Then Meta claimed that this means that, when someone uses Facebook or Instagram, they’ve supposedly “consented” to the use of their information to target ads. This sleight of hand takes advantage of the GDPR concept of “contractual necessity,” in which the GDPR allows data processors to collect and use information as necessary to deliver services for which the data subject contracted. One canonical example is that if you ask a company to send you a package, it can collect your address and use it to send you the package, even without separate explicit consent.

• The new language affects the EU’s electronic identification, authentication and trust services (eIDAS) rules, which are supposed to enable secure online transactions across countries in the EU. It contained a range of updates that raised privacy concerns for EU citizens about the European Digital Identity Wallet, a government app for storing personal information like drivers’ licenses and bank cards and making electronic payments via smartphones.

• But some of the updates also impact web security that could expand beyond the EU, as other governments could choose to follow the EU’s example and adopt similarly flawed frameworks.

• In a nutshell, the EU is mandating that browsers accept EU member state-issued Certificate Authorities (CAs) and not remove them even if they are unsafe. If you think this sounds bad, you’re right. Multiple times, EFF, along with other security experts and researchers, urged EU government regulators to reconsider the amended language that fails to provide a way for browsers to act on security incidents. There were several committees that supported amending the language, but the EU council went ahead and adopted this highly flawed language.

• In September, 2022, SnTHostings filed a petition before the Delhi High Court, challenging the legality of Direction No. 20(3)/2022-CERT-In dated April 28, 2022 (‘2022 Directions’) by The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (‘CERT-In’). SnTHostings provides hosting, Virtual Private Network (‘VPN’) and Virtual Private Server (‘VPS’) services. The 2022 Directions presented an existential crisis to SnTHostings as they mandated it to collect a range of personal data and share it with CERT-In on demand and / or on the occurrence of a cyber-security incident. On the last date of hearing, the Delhi High Court directed CERT-In to reply to the Petition within four weeks. CERT-In filed a reply on December 8, 2022. On December 9, 2022, Justice Prathiba Singh of the Delhi High Court granted four weeks to SnTHostings to file a rejoinder to CERT-In’s reply and listed the case for March 9, 2022. Advocate Samar Bansal appeared on behalf of SnTHosting, and IFF provided legal support.

• [...]

• Justice Prathiba Singh of the Delhi High Court heard the matter on December 9, 2022 where Advocate Samar Bansal argued that the 2022 Directions were vague, beyond the statutory framework and affected the right to trade of SnTHostings. He further informed the court that the CERT-In had filed a counter affidavit to the Petition on December 8, 2022, but it was not on record yet. We note that the counter affidavit is now on record, and we are making it public in the interest of transparency and public conversation. It is available here. We will file a response to it in the next 4 weeks and will update you when it is filed.

• We are grateful to Advocate Samar Bansal for representing SnTHostings. He was assisted by Advocates Gautam Bhatia, Vrinda Bhandari, Abhinav Sekhri, Tanmay Singh, Krishnesh Bapat, Ramya Dronamraju and Gayatri Malhotra.

• The 2022 Directions have a substantial impact over the internet by restricting how service providers can conduct their business, in detriment to the privacy of their users. Its prohibitions on VPN Services which are a privacy-advancing technology, puts the viability of small or medium size service providers at risk. This petition on behalf of SnTHostings seeks to protect innovation, VPN service providers and privacy of internet users in India. IFF will continue to provide legal support in this case and advance its mission of securing digital rights of Indians.

Defence/Aggression

• Two dogs walking. One of them says to the other: “I bark and I bark, but I never feel like I effect real change.”

• We speak with Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, about the campaign to hold Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman responsible for the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This week a U.S. federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against Prince Mohammed filed by DAWN and Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancée Hatice Cengiz, ruling that the crown prince has sovereign immunity from prosecution after being named prime minister of Saudi Arabia earlier this year. “We believe, as a matter of law and a matter of fact, this was a fake, manipulative ploy to title-wash himself with a bogus title and bogus powers as head of government,” says Whitson.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

Environment

• “Loss and damage” refers to unavoidable suffering caused by climate change — that which countries cannot mitigate or prepare for. Recent examples include the disappearance of land from Pacific Island nations, a historic drought in the Horn of Africa displacing 1.5 million people as they searched for food and water, and this year’s floods in Pakistan, which submerged a third of the country, killed more than 1,700 people, and caused $30 billion in economic damage. Developing countries came to COP27 insisting on the creation of a fund to address loss and damage, noting that they did little to cause climate change and don’t have the money to withstand these damages themselves.

• But the fund benefits the economic and national security of the United States too. We wouldn’t have agreed to it otherwise.

• With a global biodiversity summit underway in Montreal, Guardian columnist George Monbiot on Friday took aim at the United States for its “active, and deadly, cavalier attitude” toward the rest of the world, “an example other nations follow.”

• “Its refusal to ratify treaties such as the Convention on Biological Diversity provides other nations with a permanent excuse to participate in name only.”

• A trove of internal documents from companies including BP, ExxonMobil, and Chevron reveal how the fossil fuel industry has continued to make massive long-term investments in oil and gas extraction even as the corporations have publicly claimed to be committed to aiding in a transition to a renewable energy economy.

• Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, joined Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who chairs the panel’s Subcommittee on the Environment, in releasing a roughly one million pages of documents uncovered as part of the committee’s yearlong investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s role in spreading climate misinformation.

• Although dozens of US municipalities and states have attempted to sue fossil fuel corporations for climate change-related damages, the class action suit filed by Puerto Rican municipalities is the first to do so under RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, established in 1970, to enhance the control of organized crime.

Energy

• The System at Work:  Example One

• Up for consideration was a massive oil and gas project to be developed in Aurora, the second largest city in Colorado and a seamless part of the Denver metropolis.  The applicant calls itself Civitas, a Latin term meaning the citizen base in ancient Rome for political decision making.  Embracing the Roman designations, the COGCC would have been known as civitates foederatae, or loyal satellite state—a roll it played with great distinction on this day.

Finance

• I am not an economist, though economist and economics derive from the Greek words for household (οικονομικός, οικονόμος, οίκος, οικία). The activities of the household were taking place in a home / house. This was extremely important, taking care of the needs of the family living in a house. Home economics (primarily cooking, baking bread, craftsmanship, architecture, and farming) sparked the economics of communities and poleis (city-states). Cosmology, democracy and law and justice emerged to give rise to civilization.

• I grew up in such a household culture in a tiny Greek village. Despite World War II and Italian and German occupiers, my father managed to keep us self-reliant in food. Eventually I realized we had very little: a few acres of land dotted with olive trees and a few vines for grapes and sweet wine, as well as raising our own wheat, barley, lentils. We also had very small flocks of goats and sheep, a mule and donkey, a couple of dogs, cats, and chicken.

• Central banks’ unwavering determination to increase interest rates is truly remarkable. In the name of taming inflation, they have deliberately set themselves on a path to cause a recession—or to worsen it if it comes anyway. Moreover, they openly acknowledge the pain their policies will cause, even if they don’t emphasize that it is the poor and marginalized, not their friends on Wall Street, who will bear the brunt of it. And in the United States, this pain will disproportionately befall people of color.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The same day when the Russian president hosted a press briefing on the results his Bishkek visit, a Moscow court sentenced the opposition leader Ilya Yashin to 8.5 years in a penal colony for hosting a live stream on Russian war crimes in Bucha.

• In part the quality of hip glamour that clings to the NYC cats comes from things Orin and I learn beforehand as we prepare for publicizing the show. The artist’s pedigree, Olympian-level names he or she has played with, not to mention the artist’s website reviews by DownBeat, Jazz Times, etc., have us anticipating out-of-the-ordinary talent.

• For someone who is vulnerable to intimidation by NYC glamor and superiority, as I am, the aura of “hip” accompanying such musicians is notable in that it does not intimidate. Their very real New-York vibe does not exude superiority. Its particular “other-orientation” is not to things that exclusivize, like wealth, sophistication, trendiness and travels. Rather, it orients to something in-common, if rarely invoked in my social circles. That orientation, indicated in every note of improvisational expression coming “from bottom up,” up out of the body, mystically inspired, includes me in a culture counter to the dominant materialist one, not necessarily defiantly or anarchistically, but lovingly alternative. Though I am very much an Upstate “square,” this culture provides a perspective that allows me to see what I die for lack of in these cowed, servile times – that is, some indication in this my world of the reality of the embodied heart.

• As America’s celebrity president gathered his cabinet for its first official meeting of 2018, he sat in a leather chair at the center of a long mahogany table and quipped to the press, “Welcome back to the studio. It’s nice to have you.” It was an obvious reference to the boardroom scene in the president’s reality TV show The Apprentice in which contestants sat before him to be judged at a similar kind of table, with Trump seated in a leather chair—oversized, to emphasize his authority. As president-elect, Trump told his aides to consider each day of their administration as an episode of a TV show in which he “vanquishes rivals.” That debased, throw-down manner marked his long, storied career from Atlantic City casinos, to Miss Universe and WrestleMania, to golf resorts and New York City skyscrapers and the for-profit Trump University—an all-around showman of the P. T. Barnum “a sucker is born every minute” variety.

• Last Thursday marked forty-two years since John Lennon was killed. Many people, including me, lament his death and can recall where we were when we heard the heartbreaking news. This holiday season, we can heed John’s and Yoko Ono’s 1969 “Happy Xmas, War is Over, If You Want It” call by acting to end US military, intelligence and logistical support for the Saudi-led coalition in the horrendous war in Yemen. Over 400,000 Yemenis have perished since the war broke out in 2014, making it the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe, according to the United Nations.

• Progressive lawmakers including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez led dozens of their colleagues Friday in calling on President Joe Biden to take executive action to ensure railroad workers are afforded the paid sick leave they have long called for, but which was left out of a contract brokered by the White House.

• “While this agreement was much better than the disastrous proposals put forward by the rail industry, it still does not guarantee a single paid sick day to rail workers who work dangerous and difficult jobs, have risked their lives during the pandemic to keep our economy moving, and have not received a pay raise in over three years,” the Democratic lawmakers wrote of the agreement which freight rail workers were forced to accept even though four unions that represent the majority of the workforce had rejected it.

• On the heels of New York Times workers walking off the job, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday made the case for revamping the nation’s news media system by giving reporters around the United States the resources necessary to produce high-quality journalism for the benefit of society.

• In an email to supporters, the Vermont Independent described how profit-maximizing media outlets have undermined reporting on the most pressing problems facing the country and called for significant reforms and investments to support the accountability and public interest journalism on which democracy depends.

• However, the major surprise was the small number of ballot measures because since 1904, as the first state to use them, Oregon has averaged nearly eight per election, out of 446 offered in the last 118 years. Of 27 states permitting initiative measures, the champion is still Oregon, closely followed by California (439 since 1912 ) with seven on the ballot in this year’s midterms.

• But the initiative winner this year has to be Kansas because its August 2 primary vote of “no” (543,855 or 58.97% of 922,321 voters wrested an anti-abortion law from the state’s constitution. That also made Kansas the nation’s abortion law pacesetter in the midterms, underpinning victories for the dogged labors of pro-choice activists in five other states: California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, and Vermont.

• It is a loss for Republican politicians and their Wall Street donors who are determined to reach into our pockets and steal our hard earned benefits. If Herschel Walker had won, he would have rubber stamped the Republican agenda to cut Social Security’s modest but vital benefits.

• Walker proudly campaigned with and took money from Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), the author of a plan that would put Social Security on the chopping block every five years. If Walker had been elected, he would have been a rubber stamp for Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), whose plan would put Social Security on the chopping block every single year.

• The breakneck speed with which GOP leaders made condemnations might have caused someone not paying much attention to think the Republican Party suddenly, and with horror, had become “woke” to the damages of racism. But, the reality is far more cynical.

• As news broke of the dinner, reporters chased down prominent Republicans to see who would denounce and who would remain silent.

• During a press briefing on the results of his visit to Kyrgyzstan, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he is considering modifying the Russian nuclear doctrine, to include the possibility of a preemptive nuclear strike. His statement was published on the official Kremlin website.

• Moscow’s Meschansky District Court has sentenced the Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin to 8.5 years in a penal colony for spreading “disinformation” about the Russian military. The court claimed that, in hosting a livestream on the Russian war crimes in Bucha, Yashin was motivated by “political hatred.” After the judge announced her verdict, Yashin’s Telegram channel released a post, in which the politician wrote: “we have no reason for sadness — because, friends, we have won this process.” Meduza has translated the full text of Yashin’s comment on his trial.

• Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s election team on Thursday sued outgoing far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, his running mate, and two of his sons for attacking the country’s voting system and attempting to bribe voters.

• Both lawsuits, filed in Brazil’s electoral court, seek to ban all four men from running for public office in the future. Lula, a Workers’ Party member who previously served as Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010 and takes office again on January 1, defeated Bolsonaro by more than 2.1 million votes in a runoff election in late October.

• Any reader who thinks the gloom that darkened October (“Democracy itself is on the ballot”) was nothing but a silly mistake should stop reading here.1

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• One can fairly say the world of cinema got seismically rocked last week with the news that Chantel Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) took the number-one spot on Sight and Sound magazine’s once-every-10-years Greatest Films of All Time poll. Akerman’s three-hour domestic-malaise opus placed above the work of longtime listees Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Yasujirō Ozu, and Stanley Kubrick.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• One of the most explosive revelations in the just released House Oversight Committee report on Big Oil disinformation is that the oil industry never saw methane, what they euphemistically rebranded “natural gas,” as a “bridge fuel” to a clean energy future: they always saw it as a “destination,” an ongoing addiction they planned to do everything in their power to maintain.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Russian Ministry of Justice included publication The Bell in its list of “foreign agents,” according to a consolidated registry the ministry maintains.

• Kristaps Eklons, the interior minister of Latvia, has blacklisted the former TV Rain host Alexey Korostelev, banning him from entering Latvia.

Civil Rights/Policing

• As of December 8, 2022, Guantánamo Bay detention facility—a prison offshore of American justice and built for those detained in this country’s never-ending Global War on Terror—has been open for nearly 21 years (or, to be precise, 7,627 days). Thirteen years ago, I published a book, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days. It told the story of the military officers and staff who received the prison’s initial detainees at that U.S. naval base on the island of Cuba early in 2002. Like the hundreds of prisoners that followed, they would largely be held without charges or trial for years on end.

• State legislatures across the country put a target on the backs of LGBTQ people this year. Lawmakers introduced nearly 200 bills that would criminalize the health care LGBTQ people need and deserve, erase our history and culture, and render our very existence unspeakable. So, it came as somewhat of a surprise that the US Senate, and now the US House, passed a bill to secure marriage rights for same-sex couples. The Respect for Marriage Act requires the federal government to recognize the marriages of same-sex couples, and mandates that all states honor valid marriages from other states—specifically barring states from refusing to validate out-of-state marriages if the reason for doing so is the couple’s sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin. The bill now heads to President Biden for his signature.

• From peace to prison, the environment to economic inequality, many Americans fight for their cause, plead for justice. The dynamic is similar in other countries.

• Who, or what, are the forces behind so much injustice and suffering? Is there a common culprit, a common thread or threat?

• Brittney Griner’s release from Russia has brought renewed attention to the notorious Russian arms dealer whom the U.S. exchanged for the basketball star in a prisoner swap. Viktor Bout, the former Soviet military officer who became known as the “Merchant of Death,” was serving a 25-year prison sentence in the United States for conspiracy to commit terrorism. Authorities say Viktor Bout was involved in trafficking arms to dictators and stoking conflicts in Africa, South America and the Middle East. He has also been accused of furnishing weapons to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and achieved particular notoriety for selling arms in Rwanda in 1998, just four years after the Rwandan genocide. Kathi Lynn Austin, a former U.N. arms trafficking investigator, says that while Griner’s release is cause for celebration, “it is such a difficult time for those of us who are aware of how Viktor Bout can be easily deployed” in conflict zones. “He is a personified weapon of mass destruction, and he has always proven himself ready, willing and able,” says Austin.

• Basketball star Brittney Griner landed in the United States early Friday after nearly 10 months of detention in Russia. Griner was freed Thursday in a dramatic prisoner swap between the United States and Russia, with the Biden administration agreeing to free Viktor Bout, a convicted Russian arms dealer who was serving a 25-year sentence. Griner had been held in Russia since February, when she was arrested at a Moscow airport for possessing a small amount of cannabis oil, and her status as an openly gay Black woman made freeing her from a country with anti-LGBT laws a pressing concern for supporters. But journalist Dave Zirin says the sports world was still slow to rally to Griner’s cause due to sexism, racism and homophobia. “The amount of erasure and deliberate ignoring of Brittney Griner’s case was apparent to anybody who listens to sports radio or watches sports television,” says Zirin, sports editor for The Nation magazine and host of the Edge of Sports podcast. “If it was Steph Curry or Tom Brady imprisoned overseas … the cacophony would have been so loud. Yet with Brittney Griner there was silence.”

Monopolies

• Campaigners on Friday warned Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that the Democratic Party is on the cusp of rendering far-reaching antitrust legislation “a historical footnote” if the congressional leader fails to prioritize the passage of several bills that would rein in Big Tech before the new year.

• A coalition including the Tech Oversight Project, Accountable Tech, Fight for the Future, Public Citizen, and a number of other groups sent a letter to the New York Democrat intensifying their call to take “this historic opportunity to reinvigorate competition risks.”

• A leading musical act is attacking Ticketmaster. Condemning the company’s high fees and poor service, they are trying to mobilize their angry fans to force the government to end the ticketing giant’s dominance. The battleground is a highly anticipated tour with big money at stake. But the musician isn’t Taylor Swift, and it’s not happening now. It’s the grunge band Pearl Jam, and the year is 1994. The group wanted to keep ticket prices from rising above $20 (about $40 in today’s dollars), and that was impossible with Ticketmaster’s extra charges.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• For context, a death march is one of those lovely 80+ hour work-weeks to grind out some bit of software or the other, and the associated grind out some of those involved, by way of burn-out, health problems, etc. Or, a death march could be to keep the rails from falling off some Internet service as the load scales to handle the very Christian late-year consumerism bing, where someone may work all through Black Friday and still be working come Sigh Bear Monday.

• Shadowlands was an absolute disaster of an expansion for Blizzard. Many players were already wary of World of Warcraft after Battle for Azeroth, growing tired of contrived systems they were largely forced to do, and trudging through a ho-hum story. The follow up brought a new batch of systems that only succeeded in annoying a large portion of the player base and a story that was just terrible (highly questionable retconning, garbage characterization, etc.). Then there were all of the sexual harassment cases coming out about the studio coupled with a bunch of corporate nonsense from Blizzard. This all combined to cause a huge number of players to quit the game, and subscriptions tanked. As such, it was no surprise that Blizzard Activision wanted to put Shadowlands behind them as quickly as possible, releasing a new expansion that would allow a fresh start.

• Now here we are with Dragonflight. From a gameplay perspective, it certainly looks like Blizzard has listened to players’ concerns over the last two expansions. Gone are the frustrating systems and super mandatory rep grinds. Instead, things are more of a back to basics meat and potatoes experience. There are a lot of really nice quests, the story has improved substantially, the dungeons are pretty neat, and they brought back proper talent trees too. Blizzard even did what it does best and pinched an idea from another MMO, then made it a main feature in this expansion: They adding dragon riding, a more immersive form of mount riding that had been in Guild Wars 2 for years.

Technical

• I think most people would agree that the quality of search engine results is worsening. Half of them is either SEO spam or trying to sell you something. With AI written articles apparently being a thing now, the situation won’t be getting any better.

• When I mention this to people, they usually mention something like Searx, where you have a service aggregating results from multiple sites – Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, etc. This way you don’t get as many results from random sites – which avoids the spam ones… at the cost of also avoiding the well written personal sites. It throws the baby out with the bathwater.

Internet/Gemini

• GmCapsule, my Python-based Gemini server that runs skyjake.fi, is now available via PyPi.

• The capsule has been running continuously for several months without any hitches, so I’m declaring that this initial release version (v0.2.2) is Bug-Free™️.

• 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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