● 12.24.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 24/12/2022: Mabox Linux 22.12 and MIT/GNU Scheme 12.0.90

Posted in News Roundup at 7:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• This week in the Privacy News, Eufy responds to their critics, Google wants you to feed it your prescriptions, and ID theft of Driver’s Licenses is not considered serious. Also, Epic has an Epic fine, Roomba AI photos leak, and a creepy case of Facial recognition software.

• The amount of bad advice I see people giving either new to or people interested in switching over to a Linux based OS from existing or experienced Linux users is mindbogglingly bad.

• As we slide into the Christmas break, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney look at the best and brightest of this week’s hacks. It wasn’t an easy task — so much good stuff to choose from! But they figured it out, and talked about everything from impossible (and semi-fractal) 3D printing overhangs and the unfortunate fishies of Berlin’s ex-aquarium, to rolling your own FM radio station and how a spinning Dorito of doom is a confusing way to make an electric vehicle better.

Kernel Space

• While AMD provided upstream open-source driver support for the Radeon RX 7900 series launch, the initial user experience can be less than desirable if running a new Radeon GPU but initially running an out-of-date kernel or lacking the necessary firmware support. With a new patch series posted AMD is looking to improve the experience by being able to more easily fallback to the firmware frame-buffer when their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver fails to properly load.

Instructionals/Technical

• MySQL is a free, open-source database management system based on SQL or Structured Query Language with the current release is MySQL 8. The following tutorial will teach you how to install MySQL 8.0 Community Edition release on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa using the MySQL official APT repository, which will give you the latest version available on your system using the command line terminal instead of relying on Ubuntu to push updates to MySQL.

• [...]

• MySQL Community Edition is a free, open-source database software package offered by Oracle. It is often seen in web-based applications, given its easy-to-use interface and comprehensive library of functions available. The MySQL Community Edition has no limitations on the number of databases or customers you can have, so it’s great for businesses that need to store large amounts of customer data without having to fork out extensive money. The software can be part of a distributed system with secure connectors, allowing users to access and manage multiple databases from different systems in different locations.

• A terminal is an application that provides access to the user shell of an operating system (OS). Traditionally, the shell is the place where the user and the OS could interface directly with one another. And historically, a terminal was a physical access point, consisting of a keyboard and a readout (a printer, long ago, and later a cathode ray tube), that provided convenient access to a mainframe. Don’t be fooled by this “ancient” history. The terminal is as relevant today as it was half a century ago, and in this article, I provide five common file management tasks you can do with nothing but the shell.

Games

• A few years ago, playing on Ubuntu was a mission impossible. Now that’s a thing of the past. Now there are many titles and with different quality, so we have prepared this post for you to know what is the Top 10 Games for Ubuntu.

• The idea is not to categorize these games because in the end everyone has their tastes and preferences. However, we want to present you some games with a high-quality standard and that can entertain you.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This is a light week as KDE contributors have been taking well-deserved breaks during this holiday season. Nevertheless, all was not quiet and many nice improvements and bugfixes were merged!

• In the Plasma Wayland session, you can now zoom in and out on images in Gwenview using pinch gestures on your touchpad!

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Be Inc created BeOS in the mid-1990s as a super-modern operating system, but it failed to catch on. Over 20 years later, the open-source Haiku OS project is picking up where it left off, and there’s a new beta release available.

• The Haiku project has been developing an open-source continuation of BeOS for years, based partially on some BeOS code, but much of it has been built from scratch. Haiku R1 Beta 4 is now available, as the first major release in a year and a half. It might be the most significant upgrade yet, as it makes Haiku much more viable as a typical desktop operating system.

New Releases

• After more than a year of development, the new major release of Mabox Linux 22.12 Istredd is ready for download.

• In addition to numerous improvements, Istredd brings us two exciting and original features: Colorizer and context menus for Conky.

• After months of hard work, the Manjaro Linux team released today Manjaro Linux 22.0 “Sikaris” as the latest version of this widespread Arch Linux-based distribution for the masses bringing some of the most exciting GNU/Linux and Open Source software.

• Coming six months after the Manjaro Linux 21.3 “Ruah” release, Manjaro Linux 22.0 “Sikaris” is powered by the just-released Linux 6.1 kernel series for the best possible hardware support at the moment of writing and features the amazing Xfce 4.18 desktop environment for its flagship edition. This probably makes Manjaro Linux the first stable distro release to ship with both Linux 6.1 and Xfce 4.18.

Devices/Embedded

• The WaveShare RP2040 is an open-source embedded platform based on the Raspberry Pi 2040 microcontroller. This board is equipped with one 1.28” IPS LCD, one 6-axis IMU, various GPIOs and one connector for a 3.7V Lithium battery.

• As its name implies, the Waveshare RP2040 is equipped with the RP2040 microcontroller…

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• In Vantaa, the 3,800-student Varia college has found a chatbot app that helps students stay in school. The Annie-bot is one of many similar services offered by different educational institutions to try and stem the flow of dropouts.

• The Annie bot sends students text messages at regular intervals or when there are issues with their studies. The bot clarifies if the student needs support or not. If they do, the bot directs them to the right member of staff.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Open source provides fertile ground for innovation, not only in the cloud but in the classroom. Whether you are homeschooled, in a traditional K-12, university, someone looking to learn new skills, open source provides rich opportunities for personal and professional development. This year, Opensource.com writers provided readers with a considerable list of opportunities for continuing education regardless of where you are on the continuum.

• [...]

• Did you know that only 51% of the high schools in the United States offer courses in computer science? Only 4.7% of students are enrolled in the courses available. This statistic is telling at a time when the US News and World Report recently ranked software development as one of the best jobs in America in 2022. Candace Sheremeta provided us with a list of three open source efforts to reverse that trend in her article about open source tools to introduce students to computer science.

GNU Projects

• This is the first testing release for version 12. Please test it out and report any bugs, either on the bug-mit-scheme@gnu.org mailing list, or the bug tracker https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=mit-scheme.

Programming/Development

Perl / Raku

• In our last edition, we learned about some of the work that Santa’s elves put into automating how they make their lists. What you probably didn’t know is that the elves stay on top of the latest and greatest technology. Being well-known avid Raku programmers, the elves were excited to hear about RakuAST and decided to see how they might be able to use it. One of the elves decided to rework the list formatting code to use RakuAST. What follows is the story of how she upgraded their current technology to use RakuAST.

Leftovers

• Robot delivery has long been touted as a game-changing technology of the future. However, it still hasn’t cracked the big time. Drones still aren’t airdropping packages into our gutters by accident, nor are our pizzas brought to us via self-driving cars.

Science

• What’s better? Harmonic or cycloidal drive? We aren’t sure, but we know who to ask. [How To Mechatronics] 3D printed both kinds of gearboxes and ran them through several tests. You can see the video of the testing below.

• Laser scanning microscopes are useful for all kinds of tiny investigations. As it turns out, you can build one using parts salvaged from a Blu-ray player, as demonstrated by [Doctor Volt].

Hardware

• The original Ghostbusters movie is a classic that’s still delivering nearly 40 years after its release — just let that sink in for a minute. Almost every aspect of the film, from hand props to quotes, is instantly recognizable, even to people who haven’t based their lives on the teachings of [Venkman], [Stantz], and [Spengler]. To wit, we present this PKE meter-style WiFi scanner.

• The Apple II is one of the most iconic microcomputers, and [James Lewis] decided to use the Mega-II “Apple IIe on a chip” from an Apple IIgs to build a tiny Apple IIe.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Nearly every day during the almost three years that have passed since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, I have continued my work as a documentary photographer of urban areas, recording the outward signs of how people and government agencies are dealing with the virus. I wondered how the pandemic might be changing our public spaces. how people of limited income were adapting, and how the pandemic might be influencing race relations.

• This report exposes not only the malfeasance at the hands of Bayer/Monsanto for its “promotion” of its glyphosate-based herbicide products, including the infamous Roundup, but it also sheds light on the broader landscape of corporate efforts to white- or green-wash products that companies know are harmful to people and the environment while paying off experts to give third-party testimony. If this strategy sounds familiar to you, it should. These are the very same landscape of disinformation tactics employed decades earlier by the tobacco industry.

• The authors note that their report comes at a moment of wider industry consolidation between the agrichemical and seed sectors, noting how the focus of this report is to provide “a deep dive” into Monsanto. This report reveals Monsanto’s intense defense campaign to promote glyphosate-based herbicides sold under the brand name Roundup and how this company labored and lobbied to keep these products from threat of regulation. Building from an earlier 2015 white paper written by Friends of the Earth’s Kari Hamerschlag along with Stacy Malkan and Anna Lappé, this report evidences the interconnected lobbies Monsanto has employed to promote and defend of genetically engineered crops (GMOs) first commercialized in the mid-1990s.

• First, there’s four … That’s the number of harmful per- and polyfluorinated chemicals, or PFAS, that the Environmental Protection Agency released new concentration guidelines for this year. This is the good news.

• Then, there’s four thousand seven hundred … That’s roughly the number of different PFAS chemicals out there, globally. They’re present in thousands of products you buy and use. They’re even in your drinking water. And this entire category of chemicals, including the ones developed to be “safer” replacements, have increasingly been shown to be dangerous to human health.

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation, a global nonprofit organization enabling innovation through open source, today announced that its AgStack project will host a new open source code base, alongside a fully automated, continuous computation engine, to create, maintain and host a global dataset of boundaries’ “registry” for agricultural fields to aid in such things as food traceability, carbon tracking, crop production, and other field-level analytics.

• AgStack will utilize machine learning and artificial intelligence to manage global field boundaries data for public use.

Security

• LastPass CEO, Karim Toubba, has confirmed that a threat actor has stolen customer password vaults. This follows a disclosure in August that an unauthorized party had successfully hacked development servers and stolen source code and some LastPass technical information. At that time, Toubba said there was no evidence of customer data or password vaults being accessed. Fast forward to the end of November, and LastPass stated information obtained during that earlier compromise had enabled a threat actor to access “certain elements” of customer data within a third-party cloud storage service. Again, it was stressed that customer passwords remained “safely encrypted.” In a Forbes report published December 1, a security expert explained it was unclear what information had been obtained by the attacker. Now, it would appear we know. And it doesn’t make for very reassuring reading.

• LastPass, one of the leading password managers, said that hackers obtained a wealth of personal information belonging to its customers as well as encrypted and cryptographically hashed passwords and other data stored in customer vaults.

• The revelation, posted on Thursday, represents a dramatic update to a breach LastPass disclosed in August. At the time, the company said that a threat actor gained unauthorized access through a single compromised developer account to portions of the password manager’s development environment and “took portions of source code and some proprietary LastPass technical information.” The company said at the time that customers’ master passwords, encrypted passwords, personal information, and other data stored in customer accounts weren’t affected.

• Last month, the company announced that threat actors had accessed “certain elements” of customer info. Just as many US workers are leaving for a holiday break, the company reveals that meant their encrypted passwords.

Privacy/Surveillance

• About two weeks before Conlon was barred, her firm filed a complaint against the company’s policy with the New York State Liquor Authority, alleging that MSG Entertainment’s liquor license requires it to admit members of the public to its venues, other than people who may be disruptive and cause security threats, they told NBC New York.

• To date, the People’s Bank of China has distributed the digital yuan, called e-CNY, to 15 of China’s 23 provinces, and it has been used in more than 360 million transactions totaling north of 100 billion yuan, or $13.9 billion. The country has literally given away millions of dollars worth of digital yuan through lotteries, and its central bank has also participated in cross-border exchanges with several nations.

• If e-CNY continues to be adopted and becomes the de facto standard for international commercial and retail payments, the privacy of those using digital currency, as well as the US dollar’s days as the world’s reserve currency, could be at risk.

• Bogert lives in a town called Houston, about an hour and a half north of Anchorage. She says she and her husband moved to their home in 2020 and got the Ring camera in 2021 for “security purposes,” but have mostly ended up capturing footage of the local wildlife.

• In February, EFF called for the FTC to investigate a class of stalkerware apps uncovered by TechCrunch journalist and security researcher Zack Whittaker. The network of consumer-grade spyware apps wasn’t just pernicious, it was insecure. Whittaker discovered that the apps shared a security flaw that exposed the private data of approximately 400,000 people. TechCrunch identified the compromised apps, which are practically identical in look and operation, as Copy9, MxSpy, TheTruthSpy, iSpyoo, SecondClone, TheSpyApp, ExactSpy, FoneTracker, and GuestSpy. Not only did TechCrunch provide instructions for how to identify and remove the Android spyware from a device, but they also launched a tool to help Android users know if their device was compromised.

• In April, Maryland’s legislature unanimously passed SB 134, a bill that requires law enforcement agencies to learn, as part of their standard training, to recognize the common tactics of electronic surveillance and the laws around such activities. This bill, which was inspired by conversations between Senator Barbara Lee’s Office and EFF, aims to mitigate the frustration and gaslighting so many survivors of tech-enabled abuse have felt when trying to report their experiences to law enforcement.

• In July, Australian police arrested Jacob Wayne John Keen, the creator of Imminent Monitor stalkerware. Keen allegedly sold the app, designed to spy on Windows computers, to 14,500 people in 128 countries over a period of seven years before the website was shut down. The website specifically advertised features designed to keep the presence of the app secret from the user. 85 warrants were executed in Australia and Belgium, 434 devices seized, including the app-maker’s custom-built computer, and 13 of the app’s most prolific users were arrested. The investigation involved actions in Colombia, Czechia, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. EFF hopes to see more such actions in the future.

Defence/Aggression

• In a recent visit to Washington, Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said he would like the Afghan Taliban to demonstrate the will and capacity to curb terror groups operating from its territory, signaling that Pakistan would not hesitate to act against terrorists inside Afghanistan.

• Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in August 2021, attacks by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, also known as the Pakistani Taliban or TTP, an offshoot and ally of the Afghan Taliban, have killed more than 500 people, mostly security personnel.

• After failure of EU missions in Mali, troops move to its neighbouring country

• Fifty-three years ago this month, as US troops were fighting in Vietnam, John Lennon and Yoko Ono paid for billboards in cities across the United States that declared, “WAR IS OVER! If You Want It—Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.” The pair would continue their anti-war activism in the years that followed, eventually releasing the 1971 single “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” which has since become something of a holiday standard with its enduring message that peace is always more possible than the presidents and the prime ministers, the media moguls and the war profiteers, would have us believe.

Environment

• Now, the once-bustling mine called Lila Canyon faces permanent shuttering, which would leave its over 230 workers idled and result in gaps in raw materials for statewide energy production. The coal mine is one of the busiest in the state and produces about 28% of Utah’s coal.

• We speak with Guyanese environmental lawyer Melinda Janki about how she’s taking on the oil giant ExxonMobil to stop the company from developing an offshore oil field that would turn Guyana into a “carbon bomb.” Guyana is currently a carbon sink, but Exxon plans to produce more than 1 million barrels of oil a day, which could transform the South American country into one of the world’s top oil producers by 2030. Janki is suing the Guyanese government and Exxon under the constitution’s guarantee of a healthy environment to both current and future citizens. Her legal battle is profiled in a new article in Wired, “The Quest to Defuse Guyana’s Carbon Bomb,” written by independent journalist Antonia Juhasz, who also joins us.

• From rogue Tory backbenchers to North Sea profits for Putin, in the past year the DeSmog UK team has kept tabs on the people, money and PR machines that work to slow meaningful action on climate change.

• In 2022 this has led us to stories that have unmasked all manner of trickery: from the minutiae of misleading stickers marketing “hydrogen-ready” boilers to the sinister presence of sanctioned coal barons at this year’s COP27 climate summit.

Energy

• In a post published on his social media channels, politician Alexey Navalny condemned Russian shelling of Ukrainian energy infrastructure.

• Caroline Ellison, former chief executive of Alameda Research, said she agreed with Bankman-Fried to hide from FTX’s investors, lenders and customers that the hedge fund could borrow unlimited sums from the exchange, according a transcript of her Dec. 19 plea hearing that was unsealed on Friday.

• “We prepared certain quarterly balance sheets that concealed the extent of Alameda’s borrowing and the billions of dollars in loans that Alameda had made to FTX executives and to related parties,” Ellison told U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams in Manhattan federal court, according to the transcript.

• The popularity of Bitcoin mining—officially illegal in Libya—has skyrocketed in recent years. In 2021, Libyans reportedly mined about 0.6 percent of all of the Bitcoin in the world. That put Libya ahead of every country in the Arab world and Africa, and ahead of every European country but Norway. The reason is Libya’s low cost of electricity.

• Bitcoin mining uses high-power computers to solve complex math problems in exchange for payment in newly minted coins. The requisite computational power sucks up a lot of energy. Mining a single Bitcoin can use electricity equivalent to what a typical U.S. household uses in nine years. Libya prices a kilowatt hour (KWh) of electricity as low as $0.004—1/40 the U.S. average of $0.16 per kWh and about 1/16 the price in China, the world’s largest producer of Bitcoin. And many Libyans don’t even pay their electrical bills amidst lax enforcement.

• “These new electric uses can significantly alter the nature of how the system is going to be operated and what it needs to be able to provide,” Mark Olson, manager for reliability assessments at NERC, which is responsible for the reliability of U.S. power grids, said on a webcast.

• Citing estimates from the California Energy Commission, NERC said electrical load from plug-in EVs by 2030 could lead to an increase of 5,500 megawatts of demand at midnight and 4,600 megawatts of demand at 10 a.m. on a typical weekday, a jump of 25% and 20%, respectively, compared with current levels.

• Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Alexander Novak confirmed, in an interview on television network Russia 24, that Russia will prohibit supplying oil to countries that support an oil price cap. A presidential decree is forthcoming in the near future.

• We’re all familiar with how regular bikes work, with the pedals connected to the rear wheel via a simple chain drive. This setup is lightweight, cheap, and highly efficient. It’s not the only way to drive a bike though, and there’s plenty of buzz around the concept of “digital drive” bikes.

Finance

• Last week, during Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s first days in office, Bass declared a state of emergency over the spiraling homelessness crisis in the city. It is intended to last for at least six months, though it will need to be reapproved by the LA City Council every 30 days.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The class action lawsuit was prompted in 2018 after Facebook disclosed that the information of 87 million users was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy firm linked to former President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.

• The case was broadened to focus on Facebook’s overall data-sharing practices. Plaintiffs alleged that Facebook “granted numerous third parties access to their Facebook content and information without their consent, and that Facebook failed to adequately monitor the third parties’ access to, and use of, that information,” according to the law firm behind the lawsuit.

• This time Eric provides an analysis by way of update on the fate of the early leaders of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics.” Eric explains the context of 2014, the role of the pro-Russian political parties and Alexander Dugin’s Eurasianist movement, how Russia took control in the DPR and LPR, and much more.

• While I am a suburban boy from Wilmington, Delaware and Don a farm boy from Vermont, he was in Vietnam during a time of war and I am here during a time of peace and relative prosperity, separated by a generation, I feel a connection to him engendered by our mutual love of and respect for Vietnam, our commitment to justice, and our penchant for speaking truth to power when need be.

• In death as in life, Don is an inspiration to me and countless others. Evidence of the global outpouring of grief, condolences, and memories from so many in the US, Vietnam, and elsewhere who knew, or knew of, him. Below are edited versions of a few of them. Many were written for Dr. Mark Bonacci, Don’s husband and companion of 43 years.

• News consumers hear about the titans of podcasting regularly these days: Spotify, iHeartMedia, Amazon Music. But there is one name that’s curiously absent: Liberty Media.

• The House select committee on the January 6 attack released its final 845-page report Thursday, and the word “racism” appears only once throughout the entire document — despite the central role white supremacist groups played in the insurrection. “Those who stormed the Capitol … didn’t merely come in defense of Donald Trump,” says Stanford professor Hakeem Jefferson, an expert on issues of race and identity in American politics. “They came in defense of white supremacy and white Americans’ hold on power.”

• The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol released its final 845-page report on the insurrection at the Capitol and Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The report names former President Trump as the central cause of the insurrection and calls for expanded efforts by the government to combat far-right and white supremacist groups. We’re joined by John Nichols, The Nation’s national affairs correspondent, to discuss the full report.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• You might have noticed that my posting has been a bit…light…this week. That’s because I had been thinking of (mostly) taking the last two weeks of the year off from the blog to refresh, recharge, and chill a bit. However, as has frequently happened before, I found myself not entirely able to do that, particularly when yesterday I saw a post by Dr. Vinay Prasad on his well-monetized Substack entitled The Tragedy of COVID-19. Dr. Prasad, regular readers will remember, is the UCSF oncologist with a large Twitter following who is a self-fancied meta-critic of the science supporting medical interventions. Before the pandemic, he actually did some halfway decent work discussing “medical reversals,” basically the abandonment of previously accepted medical interventions and practices based on better, more rigorous clinical studies, and how the accelerated approval pathway for new drugs is not serving patients well. When the pandemic arrived, however, he pivoted fairly quickly to COVID-19 misinformation, even once likening public health nonpharmaceutical interventions to incipient fascism. Seeing Dr. Prasad whine about all the “ad hominem” supposedly directed against him and his fellow COVID contrarians led me to do a quick pre-Christmas response, particularly in light of his previous history and another post with his entirely take based on methodolatry about bivalent COVID-19 boosters, Latest MMWR analysis of bivalent booster is irredeemably flawed.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Somali officials are denying that a member of the presidential office made calls to several media outlets ordering them to submit content for review.

• VOA this week spoke with members of at least four news outlets who all said they had received such calls from a person who identified himself as Abdikadir Hussein Wehliye. The caller claimed to be from Villa Somalia, the presidential office.

• Some outlets have hinted that not all is well, with state news agency Xinhua and state broadcaster CCTV this week running reports urging people to use Covid medicines “rationally” and highlighting government efforts to guarantee supply.

• But government-run publications have refrained from reporting the grimmer side of the exit wave, instead seeking to calm fears of the pathogen’s potency and depicting the policy shift as a logical, controlled and triumphant withdrawal.

• China’s government keeps a tight leash on the country’s media, with legions of online censors on hand to scrub out content deemed politically sensitive.

• The book examines the confrontations between Margaret Thatcher’s government and British broadcasters that culminated in the 1988 ban, offering new insights into episodes such as the attempt to prevent the screening of a Real Lives documentary about Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness and the DUP’s Gregory Campbell.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• China-based ByteDance, the parent company of short-form video making app TikTok, allegedly accessed data of at least two US journalists and a “small number” of other people connected to them.

• However, the Post reported on Friday that the journalists were required to delete the tweets at issue in order to regain access to their accounts — a precondition that was not noted in Musk’s public poll.

• The journalists who have refused to delete the tweets — maintaining that they represent legitimate reporting — remain locked out of their accounts.

• From abortion rights activism to climate strikes to unionization to calls for debt relief to record turnout in the midterm elections, students continued to organize with exceptional clarity and focus in 2022. Throughout the year, StudentNation worked tirelessly to give voice to the emerging generation. We remain proud, as well as astonished, to be virtually alone among national news outlets in regularly publishing student perspectives. StudentNation published more than 100 original articles this year; we’ve selected 15 to highlight the extraordinary writing and reporting of this generation of student journalists. We’re deeply grateful to the Puffin Foundation whose great generosity to The Nation Fund for Independent Journalism made this work possible. —The Editors

• The Kremlin has banned government-controlled media from publishing any statements concerning mobilization, reports The Moscow Times, citing their own source in Russian media.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Steven Thrasher, PhD, assistant professor and Daniel H. Renberg Chair of social justice in reporting at Northwestern University, released his book The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide this past summer, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. The longtime journalist and academic wrote the book as an offering to explore how viruses – including the COVID-19 pandemic, but also AIDS and others – intersect with axes of identity and marginality to place their burdens on particular populations. In October it won the 2022 POZ Award for Best in Literature; the book was also longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

• Sharon Kleinbaum, U.S. commissioner for international religious freedom, said, “The Iranian government’s relentless persecution of Mahvash Sabet and Fariba Kamalabadi is the latest in the government’s decadeslong campaign against Baha’i religious freedom.”

• “The Iranian government is targeting the women of the Baha’i community,” Kleinbaum said, “as part of a larger attack on the religious freedom of Iranian women by trying to frustrate and control the demands of the Iranian people for freedom.”

• The EFF fights for your right to repair, but we’re not the only ones working hard. The successes we have to celebrate from 2022 come from collaborations with many people working on everything from legislation to education.

• Thanks to the hard work of legislative activists, policy makers, and everyday activists, the New York State legislature passed the Digital Fair Repair Act (A7006-B/S.4104-A), proposed by Assemblymember Patricia Fahy and Senator Neil Breslin. It was supported by the Repair Coalition. This landmark legislation requires manufacturers to sell parts and special tools at “fair and reasonable terms” to users and third-party repair technicians. Manufacturers are also required to provide access to repair information, software, and the ability to apply firmware patches. New York’s bill comes after a narrow success in Colorado for wheelchair users, and a loss in California.

• Perhaps most entertainingly, an Arkansas state prosecutor and former Fog Data Science trainer told the Associated Press that objectors to this location surveillance are part of a “cult of privacy.” We responded with a Slate article titled: “If caring about your digital privacy makes me a cult member, sign me up.”

• These revelations were the result of more than a year of work. EFF spent months meticulously picking apart thousands of documents from public records requests, slowly building up Fog’s connections to dozens of police agencies and other data brokers. These documents were the product of public records requests to scores of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies across the country. We also carefully researched and reverse engineered Fog’s public-facing product in order to document how we believe it works, and uncovered several worrying and previously undocumented features in their code.

• The result of this work has been promising. After we revealed the problem, Rep. Anna Eshoo urged the FTC to investigate Fog and “work to ensure that surveillance advertising becomes a prohibited business practice.” Last month, EFF filed comments with the FTC also urging such an investigation. We explained that Fog “is mass surveillance, often with no judicial oversight, and flies in the face of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.”

• Janine Jackson interviewed the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative’s Rebecca Vallas about the economics of disability for the December 16, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• Brett Wilkins reports on human rights defenders in imploring South and Southeast Asian nations to rescue nearly 200 Rohingya refugees.

• Juan Cole writes that Israel’s right wing is visibly uncomfortable with Benjamin Netanyahu latest moves to grab power.

• The Russian Ministry of Justice updated its list of “foreign agents.” It now includes:

• When Judge Diane Kiesel dismissed the murder charge against Tracy McCarter for the 2020 death of her estranged husband, she criticized media coverage of the case. In her December 2 ruling, Kiesel noted that McCarter’s case “became the focus of an intense advocacy campaign which received extensive attention in the press.” The New York state Supreme Court judge added that nearly all of the coverage “adopted the defendant’s narrative that she was the victim of domestic violence and that prosecuting her for killing her husband was unjust.” The 11-page decision is replete with references to coverage of the case, including my reporting for The Nation.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Far from it. We took notice of the trend, observed and went for it, too. As of October 2022, FAST platforms like LG, Samsung, Pluto TV or Rakuten TV were offering between 45 and 140 FAST channels each in EU5 markets (France, U.K., Germany, Italy and Spain).

Monopolies

Copyrights

• Italy’s sustained ISP blocking campaign against IPTV services, web-streaming portals and other pirate sites, is stepping up to the next level. Rightsholders and government want to implement a rapid blocking system that will block live streams, football matches in particular, within minutes. A public consultation announced this week seeks additional input.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• From my friend Tom , who posted this on Me­Linked­My­Insta­Face­Space­Book­We­Gram­In, a TV sports caster forced to report on the weather [1]. He makes his opinion on the weather (in a live report) loud and clear. I can only hope he keeps his job.

• “That is *not* a tiny house,” said Bunny.

• “But it is, it’s only 480 square feet.” [45 square meters —Editor]

• “It feels big.”

• “It does, and the design is wonderful.”

• We were talking about this $80,000 home [1] in the Ashville, North Carolina [2] area. While it’s technically a tiny house, it manages to feel big (living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and recording studio), while being one of the more beautiful examples of a home I’ve seen (although we were not fans of the alternating tread stair cases, we do understand why they were used). You would never guess it was made from mostly recycled and unused materials. It’s just gorgeous.

Technical

• I don’t know why this is still going on, but it needs to be reiterated. Internet Service Providers are not content moderators. Essential Internet infrastructure should not become a mechanism for editorialization beyond the scope of the law. Abuses of power like this will cause the Internet to fracture into smaller ‘internets’ and harm the least powerful people who use it to communicate.

• i’ve gotten the hdd bays and the ethernet switches setup on the rack, working on building the 1u rails for the top of rack switches i’m wiring using dac cables, 10g sfp, 40g qsfp, 100g qsfp28. because i want to densely pack them i had to unrack and redo the screws so that the rails don’t need a buffer 1u wasting that space. should be fine. i’m going slow with the hardware because i still need a bunch of cpu, gpu, storage. once the basement rack is set and wired i’ll finish the 12u secondary rack then it’s back to managing xcp-ng and working on a deploy infra. probably terraform nomad vault consul, might play with some k8s, would like to automate xcp with tf but we’ll see.

• I’m always fascinated by alternative keyboards, especially when they’re hand made. Matthew Dockrey [1] has made two of them. The first is based on old print technology, the two-thirds keyboard [2], which involved creating his own keycaps. And then there is his pocket typewriter [3], which is exactly what it is—a manual typewriter that fits in your pocket. It’s mad stuff, but it’s fantastic at the same time.

Internet/Gemini

• Later the ISPs stopped providing newsgroups server, so I stopped using usenet. I didn’t know where to find a good newsgroups server until now.

• 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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