● 12.11.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 11/12/2022: KaOS 2022.12 and More

Posted in News Roundup at 9:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• New York, officially known as the State of New York, is a state in the Northeastern United States. The state is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont to the east; it has a maritime border with Rhode Island, east of Long Island, as well as an international border with the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the north and Ontario to the northwest.

Audiocasts/Shows

• 00:00:00.000 Introduction 00:19.320 Emacs 29 release cycle 00:42.400 Overlays 01:29.080 Eglot 01:46.480 Tree-sitter 02:30.840 Very long lines 03:35.240 SQLite 03:50.080 XInput 04:11.320 Pure GTK build 04:24.640 Drag and drop 04:31.400 Double-buffering on Microsoft Windows 04:35.240 Emoji input 05:00.080 End

Benchmarks

• Linux is now performing even better with Intel Alder Lake and other hybrid CPU platforms thanks to new patches this week.

Applications

• The PCMan File Manager, or PCManFM for short, is a fast and lightweight file manager that’s full of features. It was developed for the LXDE desktop environment, but is a stand-alone application and can be used with the desktop or window manager of your choice.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Scala Programming on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Scala is a programming language that is designed to be concise, scalable, and high-performing. It is a statically-typed language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and it can be used to build a wide range of applications, from the web and mobile apps to data analysis and machine learning tools.

• 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 Scala programming language 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.

• Today, you are about to learn how to display a welcome message after authorized or unauthorized users log into the system.

• In all previous posts about cascade layers I’ve used named layers in the demos, but it’s actually not required to name them.

• What if you could host your own instant messaging service for you and your friends, to communicate privately and securely, away from the prying eyes of big tech? Turns out you can, and it’s actually quite easy to do.

• We all know that it is important to secure your machines. I am going to show you some ways to do so. Some are trivial and should be set immediately, and some require some more work. Part 2 will follow with the advanced options.

• I’ll use a random Linux machine with a SSH server as reference (OpenBSD Secure Shell server according to systemd and config file). For the upcoming changes of the config, I have to edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config. It might differ from your setup.

• This post hopefully will help you to get started with tmux. I’ll cover more topics and features of tmux in the future.

• Let’s learn the simple steps to set Visual Studio Code as the default editor in Git. This will help the developers to edit their code directly in VSCode instead of Notepad or other editors.

• Git is a popular free version control software that was created initially to develop the Linux kernel. So that multiple developers can easily work and collaborate on the same project. Git allows developers to split project data into individual snippets. This makes it possible to work in a team and easily find the extensions or adjustments done to code by the individual team member.

• The beauty of the Git version control system is it can track all the changes to files and allows multiple users to coordinate updates to those files. In addition, Git can also be used to manage file updates of any kind, is the version control standard for GitHub and other source code management systems, and is widely used in DevOps initiatives to implement CI/CD. Although Git is not a programming language, become an important part of software development.

Games

• Need some turn-based tactics for the weekend? The Tactician’s Bundle is a really good deal and there’s some great looking games included.

• More quick fixes from Valve for the Steam Deck this weekend, with a small bug fix release out for the Steam Deck Client Beta.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• KaOS is pleased to announce the availability of the December release of a new stable ISO.

• With over 70% of the distribution rebuilt, a new ISO is more than due. Updates to the base of the system included a new GCC 12.2.0, Glibc 2.36 and Binutils 2.39 based toolchain, CLang/LLVM 15.0, ICU 72.1, Boost 1.80.0, kernel moved to Linux 6.0.12, Systemd 252.3, Libffi 3.4.4/Glib2 2.74.3 stack, Python 3.10.9, Texlive packages moved to 2022, Bash 5.2, Gawk 5.2, and Shadow 4.13.

• The move to include ZFS exposed a shortcoming in the installer Calamares. A generated hostid for ZFS during the installation did not copy over to the installed system, thus the installed system failed to match the hostid on system updates where a new initramfs was created. This is now corrected by adding a new zfshostid module to Calamares. This module was presented to upstream Calamares, but is not included yet in a release, at this point it is a KaOS-only option.

• Powered by the latest Linux 6.0 kernel series, KaOS Linux 2022.12 comes with the latest KDE Plasma 5.26.4 desktop environment, which is accompanied by the recently released KDE Gear 22.12 and KDE Frameworks 5.101 open-source software suites, so you can enjoy the best possible Plasma desktop experience on top of the best possible hardware support.

• The KDE Project announced a while ago that KDE Plasma 5.27 will be the last update in the 5.x series of its popular desktop environment as the development team is already working on the KDE Plasma 6 series, which will be fully ported to the latest Qt 6 open-source application framework. KaOS Linux is one of the distributions where you can take a dive into the upcoming KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment series.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Recently I ran across a Python program we’re interested in, and discovered that it required prometheus-client. Normally this would mean creating a virtual environment and installing the module into it, possibly along with the program (although you don’t have to put the program inside the venv it uses). But when I looked out of curiosity, I saw that Ubuntu packages this module, which got me to thinking.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Alif Semiconductor E5 single and E7 dual-core Fusion processors can run Linux on the Cortex-A32 core, and target security, AI/ML, graphics, and imaging applications such as building automation, EV charging station, PoS, robotics, home appliances, and HMI control panel. The E1 and E3 single and dual-core microcontrollers should be in barcode scanners, failure prevention systems, portable healthcare devices, lighting control systems, smart home applications, and industrial control systems.

• Replacements for these are much cheaper than I thought, so I’m tempted to try swapping these out and see if it improves things. A scope isn’t in the budget right now alas!

• This one could potentially fit in the restoration series as this is around a problem I found and how it was solved. But it centres around one of the upgrades, so I’ve made it an “upgrades” post.

• One of the modifications that you can do to a ThinkPad T430 laptop is changing the CPU to a more powerful quad core model. That’s exactly what I did back in 2017, but due to the poor availability of compatible CPU-s in my region I went for one with a 45W TDP, which is a bit much for a laptop designed for CPU-s with a 35W TDP.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Tasks.org is a free open-source to-do list manager, and reminder for android devices. It comes with a straightforward interface for almost any sort of users, and include a dozen of useful productivity booster features.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Vikunja is a fairly new style open-source task management system that you can install it on your server or local machine.

• Vikunja features an organized workflow to manage your tasks and projects within a fancy clutter-free interface.

• Vikunja is formed of two parts an API core which is written in the Go programming language and a frontend which uses the Vue framework.

• Ambar is an open-source document search engine with automated crawling, OCR, tagging and instant full-text search. Ambar defines a new way to implement full-text document search into your workflow.

• Here is everything that has happened in the open source world in the past week. The highlights include a preview of Thunderbird on Android, the availability of Apple Silicon GPU driver in Asahi Linux, and releases from Blender, Tor Browser, PipeWire, etc.

• ActivityPub, WebFinger, and Mastodon are getting some attention because of chaos at Twitter

• It’s anyone’s guess how this all shakes out. As an active user of Twitter, it’ll be sad if it goes away. But in the meantime, let’s have some fun with ActivityPub.

• Markdownify is a simple yet feature-rich Markdown document editor for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

• It is built on top of Node.js technologies, Electron, and using Marked library to parse Markdown, Showdown library, CodeMirror, and highlight.js.

• Although it is a lightweight app, it comes packed with many useful features, clutter-free interface with full-screen distraction free mode, LaTeX support, and PDF file export.

• Task Coach is an open-source lightweight task management app that help you keep track and organize your messy task and project workspaces.

• It is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. There is also an Android separate project.

• With Task Coach, you can add your tasks, organize them in lists, categories, or tags, export them to software and programs as Outlook, Claws Mail, Apple Mail and Thunderbird.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• RSS is more than plumbing, just as blogging is more than advertising. It’s a shame one of the world’s largest blog hosting platforms misses this potential. Heck… they may even be more money it for them! cough.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• A couple of years ago I found a way to unify those ingredients: Run the script inside the database. You can do a lot with Postgres’ built-in procedural language, and even more if you activate Python inside Postgres. I went deeply into both and explained why in an earlier episode.

• Where are the users? Most assuredly, they are here on our planet, but where on Earth are they? For software released under proprietary licenses, one knows ones licensees at least in theory. But for code released under a free / open source software (FOSS) license that is free to anyone to use and redistribute, as all YottaDB software is, that is not as easy. To best serve users, whether or not they are customers, software developers should really understand the applications for which their software is used.

Programming/Development

• Last week, I wrote about cargo culting in a much more general context, so this week I’m going to come clean. The file that had me thinking about the topic was the worst case you’ve probably ever seen: I have a .emacs file kicking around that I haven’t really understood since I copied it from someone else – probably Ben Scarlet whose name is enshrined therein – in the computer lab in 1994! Yes, my .emacs file is nearly 30, and I still don’t really understand it, not exactly.

• [Mikhail] released a handy GUI editor/generator tool for the Flipper Zero multipurpose hacker tool, making layouts and UI elements much easier and more intuitive to craft up.

• I also thought that it would be cool to be able to say that GoAWK is the only AWK implementation we know with code coverage support.

• Thanks to Volodymyr’s efforts, GoAWK version 1.21.0 includes the code coverage feature. There was some refactoring that needed to happen before the main code change – thanks again, Volodymyr, for having the patience to see this through.

• Icon is a very high-level imperative language with a rich repertoire of string and structure processing facilities. It is available on a wide range of computers and is in wide use.

• In Icon, values, not variables, are typed. Built-in data types include numerics, character sets, strings, sets, lists, associative tables, records, and procedures. The aggregate types – sets, lists, tables, and records – can hold values of any type. Tables can be indexed by values of any type. Numerics, character sets, and strings are atomic values; operations on them produce new values. Aggregates use pointer semantics; operations on them can change existing values as well as produce new ones. Strings and aggregates can be of arbitrary size, and their sizes can change during execution. Memory management is automatic.

• Icon has an expression-oriented syntax; even control structures are expressions. Procedures consist of zero or more expressions separated by newlines or semicolons. Icon programs consist of one or more procedure definitions, and execution begins by calling the procedure named main.

• This is a 5×5 grid, and every number denotes the height of a tree. For part 1, we must find out how many trees are visible from the outside of the grid.

• Today someone asked in OCaml’s Discord “How do you call a variable that refers to a filename without its extension?”. I always thought there was no specific term for this and I always named such variables filename-sans-extension (or similar), but it turns out I was wrong. It’s never too late to learning something new! But first a bit of (subjective) terminology: [...]

• Sometimes you’ll be tempted to add things to your application code that don’t affect the functionality of your application but do make testing a little easier.

• The drawback to doing this is that causes your application code to lose cohesion. Instead of doing just one job—making your application work—your code is now doing two jobs: 1) making your application work and 2) helping to test the application. This mixture of jobs is one straw on the camel’s back that makes the application code just that much harder to understand.

• As generative AI becomes more advanced, it’s likely that we will see an increase in spam that is difficult to distinguish from human-generated content. Some ways that we can combat the next wave of AI-generated content.

• That doesn’t look half bad, I thought. It could make for smaller diffs in some cases. For instance, I have this: [...]

• To kick off the Chapel blog and gain some experience with the site during this month’s “soft launch”, we plan to spend the next few weeks writing daily articles about participating in Advent of Code 2022 (AoC 2022) using Chapel.

• Axios is one of the most popular JavaScript libraries to perform HTTP requests. Axios interceptors are powerful mechanisms built into Axios for making changes to requests and responses in a non-intrusive way. In this guide, you will walk through the basics of Axios interceptors and step through a useful example of how they can be used. By the end, you should have a good understanding of how to use Axios interceptors in your own applications.

• Consider this tale of I/O and performance. We’ll start with blocking I/O, explore io_uring and kqueue, and take home an event loop very similar to some software you may find familiar.

• [...]

• When you want to read from a file you might open() and then call read() as many times as necessary to fill a buffer of bytes from the file. And in the opposite direction, you call write() as many times as needed until everything is written. It’s similar for a TCP client with sockets, but instead of open() you first call socket() and then connect() to your server. Fun stuff.

• In the real world though you can’t always read everything you want immediately from a file descriptor. Nor can you always write everything you want immediately to a file descriptor.

• You can switch a file descriptor into non-blocking mode so the call won’t block while data you requested is not available. But system calls are still expensive, incurring context switches and cache misses. In fact, networks and disks have become so fast that these costs can start to approach the cost of doing the I/O itself. For the duration of time a file descriptor is unable to read or write, you don’t want to waste time continuously retrying read or write system calls.

• As a programming language, Lisp has been around longer than any other active language except for Fortran. To anyone who regularly uses it, it’s easy to see why: the language allows for new syntax and macros to be created fluidly, which makes it easy to adapt it to new situations, like running it on a modern Atmel microcontroller to control the LEDs on this star pendant.

• When the third major release of the Dart programming language debuts in mid-2023, null values will no longer be allowed where they’re not expected.

• Null in this context is an assignment value indicating the absence of a value or referenced object. Null references date back to around 1964 when British computer scientist Tony Hoare introduced the concept in the ALGOL family of languages. He considered them his “billion dollar mistake” for the amount of time and money they’ve cost in error repairs – an issue to this day.

• Dart, an object-oriented, garbage-collected C-like language that once aspired to replace JavaScript, supported sound null safety – a way to prevent errors from accessing variables set to null – as of version 2.12. But it maintained modes for running code without null safety or with partial null safety.

• Dart 3 will no longer entertain those suboptimal possibilities.

R

• How to Calculate Ratios in R? The following two techniques can be used in R to determine the ratio of values in two columns.

• The following data frame, which displays the total number of shots taken and attempted by different basketball players, is used to demonstrate how each strategy should be used in practice.

• Dr. Shirin Elsinghorst recently shared her great experience with the R language, motivating her to start the Münster R useR Germany. Shirin shared how R has become a very important part of her life, from her first contact with the language while receiving her Bachelor’s degree, in the workplace, and even as part of her spare time activities. She also emphasizes how significant is the presence of women in the IT world, describing herself as a staunch supporter of the R-Ladies.

• The #30DayMapChallenge is a month-long mapping, cartography, and data visualization challenge aimed at the spatial community. Here are the things I’ve learnt from participating in the challenge for a second time.

• The correlation between two values in a time series is known as autocorrelation. In other words, the name comes from the fact that the time series data are self-correlative.

• We use the term “lags” to describe these connections. By measuring a feature at regular intervals, such as daily, monthly, or yearly, analysts collect time-series data.

• The lag is the total number of time gaps between the two observations. For instance, there is a one-observation lag between the current and previous observations.

• The lag increases by one if you go back one more interval, and so on.

• The observations at yt and yt-k are mathematically separated by k time units.

Python

• Lighting is a fairly new project that adds a low-code flavor into your Django project in a matter of minutes. It allows you to generate a comprehensive admin panel for your data models, with minimal configuration.

• It uses Django, React and Ant Design frameworks to create a smooth user experience. However,

• Lighting requires Python 3.6, and Django 2.2.x. However, Django 3.x is not yet supported, but it may be in the near future.

• Recently I read Itamar Turner-Trauring’s It’s time to stop using Python 3.7 (via). On the one hand, this is pragmatic advice, because as the article mentions Python 3.7 is reaching its end of life as of June 2023. On the other hand it gives me feelings, and one of the feelings is that the Python developers are not making upgrades any easier by slowly deprecating various standard library modules. Some of these modules are basically obsolete now, but some are not and have no straightforward replacement, such as the cgi module.

Leftovers

• Carmakers say that electric vehicles generate more electromagnetic interference than gas-powered cars, which can disrupt the reception of AM signals and cause static, noise and a high-frequency hum. (FM signals are more resistant to such interference.)

• “Rather than frustrate customers with inferior reception and noise, the decision was made to leave it off vehicles that feature eDrive technology,” BMW said in a statement, referring to the system that powers its electric vehicles.

• As I come up on the end of my batch at Recurse Center, I’ve been doing some reflecting on my time here. One of the standout themes is how much I’ve learned through struggling with other people. In particular, this learning together has make some difficult topics approachable, where I may have given up or gotten stuck on my own.

• [...]

• Some of the proofs in chapter 5 were just absolute beasts to get through until we figured out the particular techniques we needed. In particular, we had to remember to always include eqn:E (or similar) for every destruct tactic; it doesn’t hurt (just adds more into the context, which can be overwhelming), but if you don’t do this you sometimes get into a situation where you lack what you need in the context, so the goal is not provable! Getting to this technique required a lot of back and forth between a couple of us.

• You acquire a skill or experience through time and effort, then downplay the impact of writing and sharing the learning process.

• Professionals seem naturally to imagine a high bar for what is worth writing about.

• I think that’s misguided. This article is not criticism of folks with these beliefs, but rather encouragement for folks looking for a reason to write.

• There are (at least) a few concrete reasons to write about what you’ve learned, even when you don’t think it’s novel.

• [...]

• When I learn a topic I normally go through dozens of posts, papers, videos or books to find a version that clicks. If I can. I prefer to start with blog posts and often there are not blog posts on the subject. Books, videos, and academic papers aren’t often as accessible.

• Even if you’re writing about a popular topic, there’s still a chance your post gets through to someone where other posts do not.

• For programmers there are notorious topics you can avoid if you’d like (“What is a monad”, “Why is lisp interesting”, “Kubernetes sucks”). Or not. I’ve fallen into those traps.

• Additionally, as you gain experience as a programmer (or product manager, or whatever), your perspective and approach becomes both more interesting and more valuable.

• Twilight Sparkle and the cheese grater both try to remind them that there are more important things to focus on, like the importance of mental health and the need to be prepared for any future threats.

• Despite their differences, the group comes together to enjoy the holiday season and celebrate their victory. They exchange gifts, enjoy festive meals, and spend time with their loved ones.

• As the year comes to an end, they reflect on the events of the past year and make plans for the future. They vow to continue to work together and support each other, no matter what challenges they may face.

• Despite their differences, they remain united in their determination to protect Earth and its inhabitants from any threats that may come their way.

Science

• It was the corona, the outermost layer of the Sun’s atmosphere, that most interested him. His love of eclipses was partly because he could study the corona properly while the Sun’s disc was dark, noting its flares, its loops of ionised gas and the plumes from the polar regions. With the data he recorded he could try to discover why the corona, one millionth as bright as the disc, was 300 times hotter. Was that heat generated by thousands of constantly erupting nanoflares? Or was it caused by vibrations in the gas loops, which were held in place by the Sun’s magnetic field? Both were plausible, but there were at least a dozen other theories around.

• The unadventurous wondered why he had to see so many eclipses. (He also studied the much rarer transits across the Sun of Mercury and Venus.) But no two were alike, because the Sun, he explained, was never the same twice. It was like a river, forever changing, not least because it was married to the sunspot cycle. Sceptics also asked why he did not rely on space-based telescopes, with coronagraphs that could block out the Sun’s photosphere. But those either hid too much of the corona, or failed to block the disc entirely; and even with 99% of it obscured, the sky would be 10,000 times brighter than in a total eclipse.

• AI knoweth everything, and as each new model breaks upon the world, it attracts a new crowd of experimenters. The new hotness is ChatGPT, and [Jonas Degrave] has turned his attention to it. By asking it to act as a Linux terminal, he discovered that he could gain access to a complete Linux virtual machine within the model’s synthetic imagination.

Education

• Every year I’m asked to produce a very peculiar number: how many gigabytes of storage my department has reserved at cloud providers. This is apparently useful input into some methodology for estimating the environmental impact of renting cloud resources.

Hardware

• Video effects and mixing are done digitally today, but it wasn’t always so. When analog ruled the video world, a big switch panel was key to effective results.

• The EBOX-58 from ICOP is an industrial Mini-PC equipped with Braswell Series low-power processors from Intel. The device supports up to 8GB DDR3L, SATA 3.0, 1x HDMI port, 2x GbE RJ45 and optional serial interfaces. Additionally, it’s compatible with legacy OS such as DOS, Win7/10/11, QNX, Androidx86 and many more.

• We feature a lot of clocks here at Hackaday, but alarm clocks seem to be less popular for some reason. Maybe that’s because no-one enjoys being woken up in the morning, or simply because everyone uses their smartphone for that purpose already. In any case, we’re delighted to bring you [Manuel Tosone]’s beautiful Nixie tube alarm clock that cleverly combines modern and classic technologies in a single package.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• But while brewer’s yeast is common enough, how the lager yeast’s other parent wound up in Bavaria has been harder to trace. It was first spotted in the wild in 2011, when biologists discovered the cold-loving yeast, S. eubayanus, living happily in the forests of Patagonia in South America. Then there were some tantalizing traces found in the Italian Alps, Tibet, western China and North Carolina.

• As I sat down to write this, I realized that this weekend (tomorrow, actually) is my 18th blogiversary. Yes, it will be 18 years ago tomorrow since I first sat down in front of my computer on a gray, cold December Saturday afternoon to write my first ever post for this blog. True, the blog was then on Blogspot—does anyone remember that or still use it?—and I didn’t know what I was doing, but that was the start. So perhaps it’s appropriate that the post I noticed yesterday that I wanted to write about involved a massive case of projection by an old “friend,” über-quack Joe Mercola, doctor who started out selling “natural health” and then became a “pioneer” selling quackery on the Internet in the late 1990s, which led to him becoming fabulously wealthy, to the tune of a net worth upwards of $100 million. Naturally, with the arrival of the pandemic, Mercola pivoted to the even more profitable selling of COVID-19 disinformation. So it’s not surprising that he’d now publish an exercise in projection that combines old antivax tropes with newer COVID-19 disinformation, all with the help of a doctor who’s recently gone from “soft antivax” to totally antivax, Dr. Aseem Malhotra.

Proprietary

• There are quite a few publications sharing information regarding the pricing of Twitter’s Blue subscription, that it will be more expensive from an an iPhone. This is to cover the revenue cut that Apple take from all purchases on the App Store and their in-app payment system.

• This isn’t exactly a solution that everyone can suddenly adopt. However, I think for large companies such as Twitter, it’s a clever decision. That’s as long as there is an alternative method to start a subscription from another device at a lesser price.

• [...]

• I’m not sure how this will play out. Especially as to some, Twitter isn’t even a place to be for free, let alone pay for it.

• “As you know, on Friday, December 2nd, 2022, we became aware of suspicious activity and immediately took proactive measures to isolate the Hosted Exchange environment to contain the incident. We have since determined this suspicious activity was the result of a ransomware incident,” the company stated in the newest released service announcement.

• “Alongside our internal security team, we have engaged a leading cyber defense firm to investigate. Our investigation is still in its early stages, and it is too early to say what, if any, data was affected. If we determine sensitive information was affected, we will notify customers as appropriate.”

• The confirmation came just a few hours after the publication of a press release on the situation, in which Rackspace said the security incident “may result in a loss of revenue for the Hosted Exchange business, which generates approximately $30 million of annual revenue in the Apps & Cross Platform segment,” and that they expect to have “incremental costs associated with its response to the incident.”

• The company did not share details about how the attackers got in and deployed the ransomware.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• EU Interior Ministers today discussed the proposal to automatically search all private correspondence for suspected content (so-called „chat control“). They insisted in pursuing an approach of mass surveillance. Member of the European Parliament Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party), negotiator for the Greens/EFA group, comments: [...]

• Most of the public sector banks have installed their core banking system more than 15 years ago much before the advent of smart phones. However, many have upgraded their systems during the consolidation exercise which saw ten banks merge into four. The merger of psu banks has also increased their capacity to invest in technology.

• In November, we published a story about three New York City teenagers who struggled to get mental health services that the city’s public schools are legally obligated to provide. We identified one of those teenagers by her full name and the second by his first name only. For the third teenager, we agreed to use just his middle name and — unlike the other two — to refrain from naming a parent at all.

• We followed families’ stated preferences for their children’s privacy. But in doing so, we wrestled with difficult questions about how to best serve readers and the kids we were writing about.

Defence/Aggression

• A Justice Department (DOJ) release states that 35-year-old Ronald Sandlin from Millington, Tenn., was sentenced to 63 months in prison and three years of supervised release for conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and assaulting, resisting or impeding officers during the riot.

• Court documents state that Sandlin and two co-conspirators planned to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power starting in December 2020. On Dec. 31, he posted on Facebook that he was organizing a caravan to travel to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6.

• Since at least 2013, the Nigerian Army has run a secret, systematic and illegal abortion programme in the country’s northeast, terminating at least 10,000 pregnancies among women and girls, many of whom had been kidnapped and raped by Islamist militants, according to dozens of witness accounts and documentation reviewed by Reuters.

• Odesa is completely without electricity, with the exception of some pieces of critical infrastructure, following a Russian attack on energy targets, says the Telegram channel Odesa Official, citing the DTEK Odesa energy company.

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

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• This latest portion of uncovered information regarding Twitter’s content moderation pre-Musk focused on employees’ reactions to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, leading up to the ban of former President Trump instituted on Jan. 8, 2021.

• Shellenberger shared screenshots of a conversation on Jan. 7 between former Twitter Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth and an anonymous coworker where he asked to blacklist the terms “stopthesteal” and “kraken,” which propped up the conspiracy that Trump won the 2020 election.

Environment

• Two numbers. One long-term goal. In 2015, nearly 200 countries agreed to “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change”. It was at COP21, where the Paris Agreement, the most important climate pact to date, was enshrined.

• The cause of the leak, which occurred in Kansas about 20 miles (32 km) south of a key junction in Steele City, Nebraska, is unknown. It is the third spill of several thousand barrels of crude on the pipeline since it first opened in 2010.

• An estimated 14,000 barrels of oil spilled into a creek in Washington County, Kan., south of the Nebraska border, TC Energy said in a statement on Thursday. Washington County has a population of about 5,500, according to government data.

• Canada’s TC Energy (TRP) said it launched an emergency shutdown of the Keystone Pipeline System at 9 p.m. ET on Wednesday after alarms were triggered and pressure dropped in the system. The company said the system remains shut as “our crews actively respond and work to contain and recover the oil.”

• Calgary-based TC Energy said there has been a “confirmed release of oil” into a creek located about 20 miles south of Steele City, Nebraska. An estimated 14,000 barrels of oil have been discharged as of late Thursday, the company said.

• The amount of oil spilled has been estimated at 14,000 barrels, making it larger than all of the 22 previous spills combined on the Keystone pipeline since it was opened in 2010, according to Zack Pistora, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club in Kansas.

• “This is going to be months, maybe even years before we get the full handle on this disaster and know the extent of the damage and get it all cleaned up,” he said.

• The TC Energy permit included more than 50 special conditions, including on its design, construction and operation, the GAO report said. Bill Caram, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy Pipeline Safety Trust, said Friday that he would have thought that the additional safety measures would have been enough to offset the pipeline’s higher pressure.

• “When we see multiple failures like this of such large size and a relatively short amount of time after that pressure has increased, I think it’s time to question that,” Caram said, noting the 2017 and 2019 spills.

Energy

• The IT industry business model is built on a range of environmentally unsustainable practices – such as the extraction of rare minerals and metals, alongside sucking up massive volumes of water. The scale of this natural resource consumption is staggering – for example, one 2021 study reckoned Google to have used 15.8 billion litres of water, with many observers noting that such IT industry figures are routinely under-reported.

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and decision to throttle natural gas exports to Europe — has sent energy prices and utility bills higher. The rising costs have forced many households to get creative to save money.

• In this Tuscan town, some cooks have rediscovered the energy-saving cooking box, a tool their grandparents used during World War II. An enterprising nonprofit here is producing useful — and stylish — insulating boxes that use less gas than traditional Italian cooking.

• Or, in this modern age, you could use your money to buy a bitcoin, or even multiple bitcoins, or some other form of cryptocurrency, which if you’ve been reading the headlines lately, can turn out to be a little like taking your money and exchanging it for chips at a casino and putting piles of them on every single number or red or black or odd or even betting line at a roulette table and then watching the croupier — wow, there’s a guy in a vest and a bow tie called a croupier, kind of like a fancy teller! — spin the roulette wheel and wait for the little ball to fall into a slot that allows the croupier to take all of your money except for however much of it you put on the number or color or odd or even that won.

• Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) has agreed to testify before the House Committee on Financial Services after the committee’s chair, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, politely tweeted inviting him to testify several times.

Wildlife/Nature

• During the United Nations biodiversity summit in Montreal, an international conversation group on Friday highlighted how humanity is dangerously failing marine life with illegal and unsustainable fishing, pollution from agricultural and industrial runoff, and activities that drive up global temperatures.

• “If we are to secure a new future for the world’s oceans and the essential biodiversity they harbor, we must act now.”

• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly 74 years ago, enshrines a host of fundamental rights for all people. Today, human rights remain under attack from the usual suspects—authoritarian governments and greedy corporations—as well as from the Western conservation industry that garners much international respect.

• Stingrays have an elegant, undulating swimming motion that can be hypnotic. [Vimal Patel] re-created this harmony with his fantastic mechanical mechanical stingray using LEGO pieces and a LEGO Technics Power Functions motor. The motor is set in a clever arrangement that drives the motion remotely, so that it and electrical elements can stay dry.

Finance

• For many, it began with canceling a doctor’s appointment, not buying clothes for their children, giving up on visiting relatives because of the cost of transportation, and paying only the most urgent bill. Quickly, they were forced to cut back on food, by reducing first quality and then quantity, and then even skipping meals. Even though they are working and receiving a salary, today, they find themselves lining up at food banks to feed their children and themselves.

• Right around the time I heard lawmakers were considering a year-end package of tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, my 12-year-old son’s bike broke. It felt like just another thing I couldn’t fix for him.

• “It’s been a lot,” Ashley told the judge in the Indianapolis eviction court where my law students and I represent tenants each week. Fighting back tears, she described how first she and then two of her three kids got sick. Then the car she used to get to her home healthcare jobs broke down. Ashley (I won’t use tenants’ real names here) missed shifts, lost one of her jobs, and fell behind on rent.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• They also argued that Musk’s comments saying that he wanted to prioritize keeping employees who were in engineering-related roles cannot explain the disparity. They said 63 percent of female employees in these roles were laid off, while only 48 percent of men in these roles were.

• Twitter earns nearly 90% of its revenue from selling digital ads. Musk recently attributed a “massive drop in revenue” to civil rights organizations that have pressured brands to pause their Twitter ads.

• It’s one thing to offset the commission that Apple take, but I would imagine it also makes the cut that Apple take off all payments, a bit more visible.

• Not long after commandeering Twitter in October for a sum of $44bn, Elon Musk—who is also the CEO of SpaceX and the self-branded “Technoking” of Tesla—dispatched an ultimatum to Twitter employees giving them two options. The first was to commit to being “extremely hardcore” and working “long hours at high intensity”. The second was to quit.

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

• Failed Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake on Friday followed in the footsteps of her political ally former President Donald Trump by challenging her loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs in state court.

• However, subscribers won’t automatically get the blue check-mark. That will occur only “after your account has been reviewed,” Twitter said in announcing the service relaunch Saturday. In addition, subscribers will be able to change their handle, display name and profile photo, but “if they do they’ll temporarily lose the blue check-mark until their account is reviewed again.”

• The following Tuesday I was on a call talking about a new project, end-to-end encryption on direct messages. About 15 minutes into the conversation my video stopped: I’d been signed out of my work email. I tried to log back in, but a message flashed up saying that my password had just been changed. Then my laptop screen turned grey. I wondered if I’d been hacked – I’d received a text message from corporate security during the meeting saying that they needed to speak to me urgently.

• I never found out what they wanted: a few minutes later my boss’s boss called me to tell me I was fired, with immediate effect. As far as I know I was the first Twitter engineer this happened to. Musk has sacked about half the workforce since then. My boss was fired. So was his boss. And his boss’s boss. And their boss.

Censorship/Free Speech

• One day after announcing the execution of an anti-government protester, Iranian state media said Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and other government officials pledged to continue to crack down on unrest in the country despite widespread condemnation from the West.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• “Talking about regular journalism, it started with Esmaspäev in 1922, which was a weekly. Oh the sensation of it all. Whether we’re talking about stories about important, let us say princes and princesses, pieces about local movie stars or athletes or articles on crime – everything was used,” scholar of journalism Tiit Hennoste said.

• One innovation Esmaspäev imported were so-called reader games that quickly proved very successful.

• An institution founded by former CIA director Michael V. Hayden hosted a panel on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s case. They billed it as a debate over whether he was a “techno spy” or “modern day journalist” and drew the attention of several Assange supporters. While press freedom advocates and […]

Civil Rights/Policing

• Dr. Kligman would die in 2010 at the age of 93. His New York Times obituary described his many accomplishments and the critical role he played in bringing a “scientific base to dermatology.” It mentioned his “innovative” and “very charismatic” personality, his coinage of new terms such as “photoaging” and “cosmeceuticals,” and his wildly profitable commercial products, Retin-A and Renova. However, the Times also mentioned my book, Acres of Skin, which illuminated Kligman’s darker side—his use of vulnerable populations for medical research and the many “ethical questions that dogged his career.” In fact, the last 10 years of his life would be, in some respects, a bulwark action in defense of his scientific contributions as he fended off attacks that cast him as a modern day Mengele, who used institutionalized back men as grist for his research mill and personal enrichment.

• Yan Rachinsky, who heads Memorial, said he was told not to accept the prize because the two other co-laureates – a Ukrainian human rights organisation and jailed Belarusian rights defender – were deemed “inappropriate”.

• Memorial is one of Russia’s oldest civil rights groups, and was shut down by the government last year.

• The Russian co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize said the country’s authorities ordered him to decline the award because his fellow co-winners were a Ukrainian human rights organization and a jailed Belarusian rights defender.

• Yan Rachinsky — who leads one of Russia’s oldest civil rights groups, Memorial — told the BBC in an interview that he was told to turn down the prize because the other winners were deemed “inappropriate,” but he ignored the advice.

• One of the main reasons was his work towards the Memorial which has been the oldest Civil Rights Group and has also documented historical Soviet repression. The group had its first chairman, Arseny Roginsky, who was punished in Soviet labor camps for “anti-communist” study of history. Memorial was founded on the idea that “confronting past crimes is essential in preventing new ones”, said the Nobel committee while announcing Nobel Peace Prize winners.

• Despite the occasional polite nod to Alfred Nobel, the committee — which will name this year’s award on Saturday — has never made known his vision of peace through global demilitarization, writes Fredrik S. Heffermehl.

• The coup against Pedro Castillo was led by an odious right-wing that refused to accept the people’s aspiration for a progressive project.

• Leaked messages show Argentina’s corrupt judges and prosecutors conspired with right-wing media oligarchs to launch a judicial coup against left-wing ex President and current VP Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, sentencing her to six years in prison and banning her from running in the 2023 elections.

• An embattled Russian rights group that received this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was pressured by the Kremlin to decline the honor because of the Ukrainian organization and jailed Belarusian activist who also received the award, BBC News revealed Saturday.

• “Maybe we should take this award not only as an assessment of what we have managed to do in 35 years, but also as a kind of advance on what we aim to do.”

• The original sin of both tech boosterism and tech criticism is to focus unduly on what a given technology does, without regard to who it does it to and who it does it for. When it comes to technology’s effect on our daily lives, the social arrangements matter much more than the feature-sets.

• This is the premise behind my idea of the “shitty technology adoption curve”: if you want to do something horrible to people with technology, you must first inflict it on people without social power and then work your way slowly up the privilege gradient, smoothing the tech’s rough edges by sanding them against the human bodies of people who can’t fight back.

• Thus we see the rise of all disciplinary technology, especially bossware, which started off monitoring forced prison labor, then blue-collar workers, then pink collar workers (like the largely female, largely Black work-from-home customer service reps who work for Arise)…

• “It is my honor to utter the four most powerful words ever spoken in a democracy: The people have spoken,” Senator Raphael Warnock said on Tuesday night before a cheering crowd, after winning the runoff election for the U.S. senate in Georgia. Warnock ran against Republican Herschel Walker, a retired football star. Walker, recruited to run by former president Donald Trump, proved to be a deeply flawed candidate. Nevertheless, the Warnock campaign had to overcome a complex array of voter suppression laws and tactics deployed by Georgia Republicans.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• I tried to explain to them that DRM always fails; you can’t make data which can’t be copied. I explained that artificial scarcity was harmful. They didn’t care.

• But, their proposed solution was intriguing. And, with their kind permission, I’m posting it here. To be clear, I don’t think this is good but I think it is vaguely interesting.

Monopolies

• The case is shaping up as a test of Ms. Khan’s belief that the F.T.C. must become more aggressive to check the power of corporate giants in the modern economy, including the biggest tech companies. Appointed to lead the agency by President Biden, she has signaled she wants to take more lawsuits to court — instead of settling with companies — to push the boundaries of antitrust law and return to the kind of trustbusting not seen since the last century.

Copyrights

• With the FIFA World Cup in full swing, U.S. law enforcement authorities appear to have seized the domain names of several popular sports streaming sites. The targeted sites, which include score808.com, hesgoal.com, freestreams-live1.com, and weakstreams.com, each have millions of monthly visitors.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Last Friday, my Grandad died. He had been ill for a pretty long time.

• His quality of life hasn’t been great for the past 5 years but it has

• really tanked in the last year. He had a few strokes and heart attacks

• which left him bed ridden. I am glad he is not sufferring any more and

• I am glad for my Grandma. She was making herself ill trying to care

• for him. Since he fell ill again last Tuesday, she has spent all of

• her time with him and moistening his lips. Thankfully she no longer

• has to do that.

• [...]

• Death can be a terrible thing but it can also be good. It all depends

• on when and how it happens.

Technical

• So I have bought a new laptop. This is a bit unusual for me as I have

• previously bought second hand as a rule. However, I have been looking

• for a replacement smallish laptop to replace a Thinkpad Helix2. This

• is a convertible affair where the keyboard detaches. I have found it a

• fairly annoying machine physically as it is heavy and tends to suffer

• from wobble. I also find I cannot carry it around without worrying

• about bits flexing. With a recent business trip, I found the keyboard

• part to have started rattling. It appears a speaker has become loose.

• The performance side is pretty good though. The battery has reached a

• point where it is being a pain too. I have started having to carry the

• power cable for meetings.

• I was watching a video about setting up a Teleguard BBS in 2021(22?), and found it fascinating. One of the rules a mod/admin would implement, is to require the members of a BBS to post every so often. Like a couple times a week, or something. To keep things interesting, moving along. So, I do this with…everything I participate in (most of the time).

• 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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