● 01.11.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 11/01/2023: Microsoft is Bricking Windows Again

Posted in News Roundup at 9:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• Microsoft’s RNDIS protocol, short for Remote Network Driver Interface Specification, is a proprietary USB protocol for virtual Ethernet functionality on computers. The most common use case of this would be using your phone’s mobile network to connect to the internet on your computer via USB, also known as Tethering. Even though it mainly works on Windows, it has been part of the Linux kernel for a while now. But that is set to change soon.

Graphics Stack

Instructionals/Technical

• Container queries come with their own units.

• Container query units work the same as viewport units. 80cqi equals 80svi.

• The logical alternative for width is inline-size and the alternative for height is block-size. Here’s an example of how using inline-size over width makes a difference.

• I keep getting asked how my setup works, how I use tmux and nvim over ssh… all that good stuff.

• I wrote this series of posts in an attempt to explain it.

• Filippo Valsorda has a neat SSH server that reports the GitHub username of the connecting client. Just SSH to whoami.filippo.io, and if you’re a GitHub user, there’s a good chance it will identify you. This works because of two behaviors: First, GitHub publishes your authorized public keys at https://github.com/USERNAME.keys. Second, your SSH client sends the server the public key of every one of your key pairs.

• Ward Cunningham wants a smarter edge to view his site (and to “improve server performance” if you read the comments in the web page returned from the site) and I can’t begrudge him that—I like smart edges! It makes more sense to me than a smart network. But at the same time, I want a web site to just return text to a “dumb browser,” even if the browser I’m using is not particularly dumb.

• Lea explains how LCH is designed to represent the entire spectrum of what humans can see. As such, chroma for example, is theoretically unbounded in the syntax allowing for increased saturation values as hardware improves: [...]

• Anyway, pretty much any remote work requires an Internet connection. So when I’m on the narrowboat, I’ll need one too. While cable or FTTP is appealing, I don’t think there’s a cable long enough to make things work as I navigate the canal networks. So the solution needs to be a little more mobile than that.

• I did a lot of research, and ended up going for a 4G/5G mobile data based solution. I’ve actually been using this solution for a while already, I’ll explain shortly. Here’s what that solution looks like.

• The ls command is one of the basic yet essential Linux commands. You cannot imagine surviving the terminal without it.

• And yet, there is a new tool that aims to be a replacement of the ls command. This new tool is exa.

• This tutorial will cover how to block certain packages from being installed or upgraded and how to block specific versions of packages or kernels…

• Rustdesk is an open source remote desktop software, just like Teamviewer, that you can use to remote control your devices. Rustdesk supports the most popular Operating systems, which means you can easily remote control your computer from your phone.

• In this tutorial you will learn how to install Rustdesk on Linux mint 21.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Moodle on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Moodle is a free and open-source learning management system (LMS) used by educators and institutions around the world to create online learning environments. It is designed to be flexible and customizable, offering a range of tools for course creation, collaboration, assessment, and mobile support.

• 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 Moodle online Learning Management System (LMS) on Rocky Linux. 9.

• osTicket is a free and open-source support ticket system used to scale and streamline your customer service and improve your customer experience.

• Have you ever been curious to know who is connected to the remote machine or server you have been working on? I mean, who doesn’t want to do that?

• Look, listing all the user accounts in your Linux system is quite an easy task, but that doesn’t mean that all those users are connected to the target machine.

• However, you can read this article to learn four simple ways to list all the logged-in users on the target machine. Once you find them, you can kick them out of the target machine or say “hi” to them using the write command.

• Just like traditional package managers, Flatpak relies on software repositories in order to download applications. Repositories are a necessary component of Flatpak as they allow users to install applications and dependencies from a central location. A repository contains a catalog of installable software and will provide future updates to the packages as needed.

• Flatpak does not automatically come with repositories added in its configuration. It is up to the user to find Flatpak repositories (such as FlatHub) and add them to Flatpak on their system. To keep track of all of the added repositories, users can get a list of them in terminal.

• In this tutorial, you will see how to get a list of all Flatpak repositories configured for your system. This will take place in the command line terminal and will be applicable for any Linux system, as Flatpak is distribution independent and the commands work the same across any of them.

• Flatpak is a third party software deployment and package manager application that can be installed on OpenSUSE Linux or any other major Linux distro. It allows applications to be packaged in a self contained format, which can then be installed and run on any Linux system, without needing to worry about which distribution you are running. One of the biggest benefits of Flatpak is that you can install programs which are not ordinarily available in the default OpenSUSE software repository.

• Having access to Flatpak means that you will have the ability to install a lot of additional applications than what is available through installation in the official repos with zypper. To use Flatpak on OpenSUSE, we simply need to install the program, add the repos that contain the flatpak packages you wish to install, and then search for and install the packages. Flatpak will also let us manage and update the apps that we install.

• In this tutorial, you will see how to install Flatpak package manager on OpenSUSE Linux. Then, we will take you through some basic usage of Flatpak so you can get started with adding repositories and installing custom software of your choice.

• Applications that have been installed via Flatpak, just like those from other sources, will occasionally need to be updated. The Flatpak service can be used to keep your installed applications up to date. In this tutorial, you will see how to update all your Flatpak applications either individually or all at once on a Linux system.

• It is always a good idea to keep your Flatpak applications up to date. Developers will regularly release new editions of their software with security patches, bug fixes, and new or improved features. By keeping all your applications up to date, you can take advantage of the newest features and are less likely to run into issues. This is an essential part of system administration and keeping your PC stable and healthy.

• While Linux Mint doesn’t ship with snapd preinstalled, having Flatpak installed is usually enough for most users. Some may wish to enable Snap and still use the system that Linux Mint provides. For those interested in doing this, this tutorial will cover everything you need to know to turn on Snap and ensure it’s running correctly.

• Being the most popular open-source version control system, Git is one of the most crucial skills that you can adopt for software development.

• And in this guide, I will walk you through how you can install git on Ubuntu with basic configuration.

• Handbrake is a free and open-source video transcoding tool for those looking to convert their videos from one format to another. Compatible with various popular formats such as MP4, AVI, MKV, and M4V, Handbrake offers users the ability to reduce the file size of a video, change the container or codec of a video, and also extract audio tracks from a video. On top of its transcoding capabilities, Handbrake takes things further by providing features like adding subtitles, cropping and resizing videos, and adjusting both video and audio settings.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Handbrake on Linux Mint 21 or Linux Mint 20 using the command line terminal with various methods to install the transcoding software and update and remove the software if needed.

• Discord is an innovative communication platform that has quickly become the go-to solution for gamers across various platforms. It provides users with multiple features such as voice chat, text messaging, media sharing, custom emojis, and integrations with various games and services. This makes it particularly useful for Linux gamers who may not be able to use voice chat solutions built into some games. The platform’s robust API also unlocks exciting new possibilities by allowing developers to create custom integrations and bots that can significantly enhance the user experience.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install Discord on Linux Mint 21 or Linux Mint 20 using two different methods with the command line terminal.

• Rsync is a powerful command-line tool that allows you to synchronize and transfer files between different systems. One of the key features of Rsync is the ability to exclude files and directories from the synchronization process. This feature can be incredibly useful for a variety of tasks, such as backups, codebase synchronization, and data management.

• FTP, or the File Transfer Protocol, is the most widely used network protocol for transferring files and data between two systems over a network. FTP does not encrypt traffic by default, which is not a secure option and can result in an assault on a server. VSFTPD, which stands for Very Secure FTP Daemon, is a secure, dependable, and speedy FTP server.

• VSFTPD is licensed under GNU GPL and is the default FTP server for most Linux systems. This article will demonstrate how to install and configure the FTP server on the Linux Mint operating system.

• Rsync is a command-line utility that is used to synchronize files and directories between two locations. It is commonly used to copy files from one location to another while preserving file attributes such as permissions, timestamps, and ownership. One of the powerful features of rsync is the ability to copy only the files that are missing or have been modified in the destination location. This can be useful when you want to keep a backup of your files, or when you want to update a website or server with the latest changes.

WINE or Emulation

• Once upon a time, gamers everywhere dreamed of bringing their beloved video games on the go. With the advent of the Nintendo Gameboy, portable gaming devices became mainstream. Thanks to technological advances, many powerful handheld gaming consoles can now play all your favorite games through emulation.

Games

• This is awesome and something more developers should do with games they shut down. Counterplay Games have made their mix of a collectable card game and a turn-based strategy Duelyst fully open source.

• Game store Fanatical have put up another Steam Deck Verified game bundle and there’s some great looking gems inside. All of the games included are Deck Verified (at least at time of writing), and so they should work just fine on Linux desktop too.

• It seems people haven’t learned from the debacle with the dbrand Project Killswitch case using magnets that causes problems with certain Steam Deck fan speeds.

• We are back with our usual monthly update! Boiling Steam looks at the latest data dumps from ProtonDB to give you a quick list of new games that work (pretty much? see ratings) perfectly with Proton since they were released in December 2022 – all of them work out of the box or well enough with tweaks…

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Haiku is an open source OS with a few differences. The big one is that it’s not a Unix. The next is that it’s pretty close to being a realistic, usable alternative OS for ordinary, everyday use.

• The Haiku Project has released a new beta version of its unique desktop OS. After the project was founded in 2001, it took 17 years to get to Beta 1 in September 2018. Writing a whole new OS is a big project. Since then, though, progress seems to have sped up, and Beta 4, out a few weeks ago, is shaping up well. The new version supports HiDPI displays, image thumbnails in the file manager, and has significantly improved Wi-Fi support, including via some USB Wi-Fi adapters, and support for the 802.11n and 802.11ac standards – which puts it ahead of even FreeBSD.

BSD

• So, when will the print book be in stores?

Debian Family

• Recently a few of my Ubuntu 20.04 and Debian 11 servers failed to run an apt update because it insisted that the HTTPS certificate for a repository could not be validated, while curl on the same system had no issues connecting. Join me on a deep dive into certificate validation and troubleshooting apt, digging into the C++ source code for apt and GnuTLS and in the end, it turned out to be my own fault due to permission on a folder. However, the error messages were totally unhelpful resolving the mysterious validation problem. This article was written over the period of a few days, chronologically during troubleshooting.

Devices/Embedded

• This review looks at the BrosTrend AC650 AC5L Linux WiFi Adapter.

• Unlike most Wi-Fi sellers, BrosTrend provide Linux support for Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros. Their Wi-Fi adapter chipsets and drivers are developed by Realtek.

• The AC5L adapter sells for around $25. The device consists of a small USB key with an attached 5dBi long range WiFi antenna. The antenna can be set to 3 different positions. The image to the left shows the antenna in a vertical position. It can also be arranged at 45 degrees, or in a horizontal position. This should help you obtain optimal wireless signal connection.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978, and its influence still remains through the popular x86 architecture. The 8086 was a fairly complex microprocessor for its time, implementing instructions in microcode with pipelining to improve performance. This blog post explains the microcode operations for a particular instruction, “ADD immediate”. As the 8086 documentation will tell you, this instruction takes four clock cycles to execute. But looking internally shows seven clock cycles of activity. How does the 8086 fit seven cycles of computation into four cycles? As I will show, the trick is pipelining.

• Connect Tech introduced a carrier board compatible with the new Jetson AGX Orin module from NVIDIA. Some notable features of the Rogue Carrier are its dual 10GBASE-T ports, 2x NVMe M.2 Key M slots, wireless support and multiple camera interfaces.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Open source culture has demonstrated how transparent and collaborative innovation can support modern digital services, data, and infrastructure. Yet, despite its transformative impact and use within an estimated 97% of digital products, the potential of open source for developing environmentally sustainable technologies is not well understood.

• Open source software (OSS) accelerates the transition to a sustainable economy by supporting traceable decision-making, building capacity for localization and customization of climate technologies, and most importantly, helping to prevent greenwashing. This transition requires technological innovation and new opportunities for society to participate in developing and adopting technologies.

• Open source technology provides greater flexibility in hybrid and multi-cloud environments so that developers can focus on what’s most important—building with greater speed and innovation, all while using a tool they enjoy.

• The biggest barrier to growth and innovation is a stagnant data platform. Legacy proprietary systems aren’t technically viable for most enterprises anymore. The enhanced capabilities of adopting a cloud-centric, open source approach to database management systems are critical to thriving in today’s business landscape.

• Presentations and slideshows are essential tools for marketeers, strategists, teachers, and ofcourse students.

• Basically, a slideshow is a presentation of series of still images on a projection screen or a projector (displaying device).

• Microsoft powerpoint carries the same technique with more of magic transition effects, ability to add interactive diagrams, videos, and videos.

• Five years ago, I started a journey to build a better Mastodon client – one focused on performance and simplicity. And I did! Pinafore is the main Mastodon client I’ve used myself since I first released it.

• After five years, though, my relationship with social media has changed, and it’s time for me to put Pinafore out to pasture. The pinafore.social website will still work, but I’ve marked the repo as unmaintained.

• It’s little surprise that most hackers have a favorite text editor, since we tend to spend quite a bit of time staring at the thing. From writing code to reading config files, the hacker’s world is filled with seemingly infinite lines of ASCII. Comparatively, while a hex editor is a critical tool to have in your arsenal, many of us don’t use one often enough to have a clear favorite.

Licensing / Legal

• Obviously, this would be a rude and unfair thing to do to people who have accepted the invitation of the open gaming license (OGL) to create new games and stories that build upon Dungeons and Dragons. But would it be legal? Even more interesting, would revoking the OGL actually give some third parties more freedom to operate, given that the OGL forced them to promise not to do some things that copyright and trademark law otherwise permit? Let’s find out.

• What is an open license? An open license is an offer to allow people to use your materials in the ways you specify, despite some legal right such as a copyright that would otherwise entitle you to withhold permission. For instance, the Creative Commons Attribution license provides rights to adapt and share a copyrighted work, so long as the user gives you credit, or “attribution.”

• If you have a copyrighted work and you want to give people reassurance that they can make use of it, open licenses are a handy way to do that. You might do this because you want your work to be freely shared far and wide or because you want to build a community of creativity.

Programming/Development

• For years now I’ve been handling my local changes to upstream projects by committing them and rebasing on (Git) pulls, and it’s been a positive experience. However, over the years the exact Git configuration settings I wanted to make this work smoothly have changed (due to things such as Git 2.34′s change in fast-forward pull settings), and I’ve never written down all of the settings in one place. Since I recently switched to Git for a big repository where I carry local changes, this is a good time to write them down for my future reference.

• I have long wanted to write this article but I never knew how to structure it. I still don’t, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. Like in the past few articles, there’s some probability theory underlying this article, but I will gloss over it entirely to make it approachable for practically-minded people.

• It’s over a year late, I know, but the 2021 Newsletter collection is now available to purchase as a PDF. 70,000 words, 250 pages, 20 bucks. Unlike last year, there’s no private subscriber-only emails, so this is purely for people who want to read it on the go / give me money. I might add a postmortem review or an introduction piece if there’s enough interest.

• I also wrote a bunch of automation so later editions get out a lot faster, I’ll try to get around to the 2022 edition by the end of the month.

• What we might think to be a settled truth often isn’t. I was reminded of this recently after I publicly stated that there is no such thing as a compiled or an interpreted programming language: many people have made clear to me that they believe strongly that languages clearly fall into one of these two categories. Indeed, a simple web search suggests that the vast majority of pages describing compiled and interpreted languages propose a crisp delineation between the two.

• I certainly sympathise with the temptation to classify languages in this way, because most programming languages are commonly implemented using one technique or the other. However, experience has taught me that it’s important not to conflate the most common implementation choice with inherent properties of a language.

• In this post I’m therefore going to show, using a series of programming language implementations, why languages shouldn’t be classified as compiled or interpreted. Before I do that, I need to start by clarifying the difference between a programming language specification and an implementation of that specification.

• This time last year, we wrote about the more than 190 Trail of Bits-authored pull requests that were merged into non-Trail of Bits repositories in 2021. In 2022, we continued that trend by having more than 400 pull requests merged into non-Trail of Bits repositories!

• Why is this significant? While we take great pride in the tools that we develop, we recognize that we benefit from tools maintained outside of Trail of Bits. When one of those tools doesn’t work as we expect, we try to fix it. When a tool doesn’t fill the need we think it was meant to, we try to improve it. In short, we try to give back to the community that gives so much to us.

Python

• Before I actually tried it, I expect the dict to start out with either two or three entries and end up with one or two, given that boolean True and False are actually ints with False being the same as zero. In fact the dict starts out with one entry and ends up with none, because in Python all three of these zeros are equal to each other: [...]

Rust

• The Rust team has published a new point release of Rust, 1.66.1. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

• [...]

• Rust 1.66.1 fixes Cargo not verifying SSH host keys when cloning dependencies or registry indexes with SSH. This security vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-46176, and you can find more details in the advisory.

Standards/Consortia

• One of the nice things about USB-C is its simplicity, right? No more figuring out which side is up to plug into a device. The connector is super-friendly. But… that’s where the simplicity stops.

• Over the past few years I’ve acquired an increasing number of devices that use USB-C connectors as well as Thunderbolt devices with a USB-C type connector as well. All cables, alas, are not created equal.

Leftovers

• August of last year brought the sad news of Barry Boehm’s passing away on August 20. If software engineering deserves at all to be called engineering today, it is in no small part thanks to him.

• “Engineer” is what Boehm was, even though his doctorate and other degrees were all in mathematics. He looked the part (you might almost expect him to carry a slide rule in his shirt pocket, until you realized that as a software engineer he did not need one) and more importantly he exuded the seriousness, dedication, precision, respect for numbers, no-nonsense attitude and practical mindset of outstanding engineers. He was employed as an engineer or engineering manager in the first part of his career, most notably at TRW, a large aerospace company (later purchased by Northrop Grumman), turning to academia (USC) afterwards, but even as a professor he retained that fundamental engineering ethos.

• What’s amazing about these phrases — like “Follow us wherever you get your podcasts” — is that they are are paid advertisements that point you to nowhere in particular! It’s not “Stream it now on _Netlix_” or “Follow us on _Facebook_” or even “Visit _ourwebsite.com_”. These are paid advertisements with no “call to action” to any one commercial, corporate platform.

• The next morning I stayed in the Aparthotel writing, while Niels went out to the airport, to pick up the BMW 4×4 he had hired. Our destination was Halle an der Saale, near Leipzig. It was, I think, our first – and overdue – foray into the former East Germany.

• Sometimes the journey itself is the destination. This one started when [Samy] was 10 and his mom bought a computer. He logged on to IRC to talk with people about the X-Files and was WinNuked. Because of that experience, modulo a life of hacking and poking and playing, the talk ends with a wearable flex-PCB Tesla coil driving essentially a neon sign made from an ampule of [Samy]’s own breath around his neck. Got that? Buckle up, it’s a rollercoaster.

• Typical nutcrackers rely on simple pin hinges to join two handles for the cracking task. However, [adam the machinist] has demonstrated that a single-piece nutcracker is possible by using the flexural properties of the right grade of steel.

Science

• A country’s first orbital satellite launch from home soil is a proud moment, even when as is the case with Virgin Orbit, it’s not from the soil itself but from a Boeing 747 in the stratosphere over the sea. The first launch of the under-wing rocket took place yesterday evening, and pretty much every British space enthusiast gathered round the stream to watch history being made somewhere over the Atlantic south of Ireland. Sadly for all of us, though the launch itself went well and the rocket reached space, it suffered an anomaly in its second stage and failed to reach orbit.

• People often are surprised to find out how prevalent Fortran is in the real world. For instance many climate models were originally written, and continue to be maintained in Fortran (languages like Julia are attempting to unseat it, but I think Julia would be a better language if it had an ISO standard associated with it).

• One of the reasons Fortran still works is longevity. It’s much easier to build on something that was originally developed in Fortran (which is backwards compatible), rather than starting from scratch. People always make is seem so easy, but many a re-engineering project has come unstuck because of a failure to understand how the original software worked. Fortran is also exceptionally good at doing math, and climate models are nothing if not all about crunching data and doing math.

• The Data team are using a strange and weird datastructure: the dataframe. Dataframes are different to the usual nested hashtables and arrays. They are optimised for bulk operations – those are the operations you tend to do when analysing data.

• When you write code with objects they call it “object-oriented programming”. I think when you code with dataframes they should probably call it “dataframe-oriented programming”. For whatever reason they tend to call it “data science” instead.

Education

• Have you heard the latest Republican lie?

• Last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called the thought police on college educators. The Chronicle of Higher Education published two articles revealing that the DeSantis administration demanded information—including employee titles and funding levels—on “programs and initiatives” focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion or “critical race theory” at Florida’s 12 public universities. DeSantis also appointed a group of right-wing ideologues to the New College of Florida’s board of trustees, including the anti–critical race theory and anti-LGBTQ propagandist Christopher Rufo, who admits to promoting disinformation campaigns and says he wants to “transform” New College by “recapturing higher education.”

Hardware

• If you’ve been pining for a retro-chic 16×2 LCD display to enhance your Windows computing experience, then [mircemk] has got you covered with their neat Windows-based LCD Info Panel.

• When [Zach Hipps] was faced with a locked safe and no combination, it seemed like calling a locksmith was the only non-destructive option. Well, that or doing something crazy like building a safe-opening robot. Since you’re reading this on Hackaday, we bet you can guess which path he took.

• The Toniebox is a toy that plays stories and songs for kids to listen to. Audio content can be changed by placing different NFC enabled characters that magnetically attach to the top of the toy. It can play audio via its built-in speaker or through a wired headphone connected to the 3.5 mm stereo jack. Using the built in speaker could sometimes be quite an irritant, especially if the parents are in “work from home” mode. And wired headphones are not a robust alternative, specially if the kid likes to wander around or dance while listening to the toy. We guess the manufacturers didn’t get the memo that toddlers and cables don’t mix well together. Surprisingly, the toy does not support Bluetooth output, so [g3gg0] hacked his kids Toniebox to add Bluetooth audio output.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• It sometimes feels harsh to treat a magazine that has often delivered stellar reporting that way, but New Yorker staff writer Emma Green’s profile (12/28/22) of the People’s CDC delivers the kind of elitist, out-of-touch pearl-clutching that inspires this imperious image of the magazine.

• What this massive upheaval of literally hundreds of years of analysis shows us, is that human beings are incredibly irrational. We are extremely good at backwards-justification, where we pretend our choices make sense, but if you actually look at how we make decisions its an absolute car-crash. We are massively irrational, and so far from the happiness-maximizing creatures that classical economists imagined. Even given really, really simple choices such as ‘eat these nibbles now… or more of the main course in 15 minutes’, our brains completely and utterly collapse with the stress. Only PHYSICALLY removing the nibbles from our immediate vicinity enables us to make what we think is the ‘correct’ choice.

Security

• CCertificate compression improves performance of Transport Layer Security handshake without some of the risks exploited in protocol-level compression.

• Microsoft has fixed a known issue affecting Windows apps using ODBC database connections after installing the November 2022 Patch Tuesday updates. This issue impacts both client and server Windows platforms, from Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 SP2 up to the latest released Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022.

• Microsoft has addressed a known issue causing Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) crashes with 0xc000021a errors after installing the Windows 10 KB5021233 cumulative update released during the December Patch Tuesday.

• Microsoft started off the new year by resolving a Windows zero-day, while it closed the door on further fixes for systems in its extended support update program. Microsoft addressed 101 vulnerabilities on January Patch Tuesday with 98 new bugs and three revisions for earlier security updates. In total, the company corrected 11 critical vulnerabilities and 90 rated important.

• Microsoft today released updates to fix nearly 100 security flaws in its Windows operating systems and other software. Highlights from the first Patch Tuesday of 2023 include a zero-day vulnerability in Windows, printer software flaws reported by the U.S. National Security Agency, and a critical Microsoft SharePoint Server bug that allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to make an anonymous connection.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Investigators identified Greenwood and Crahan almost immediately after the attacks took place by using cell phone data that allegedly showed both men in the vicinity of all four substations, according to court documents. Surveillance images cited in the court documents also showed images of one of the men and of the getaway car.

• Shot-spotting tech is notoriously unreliable. The industry leader, ShotSpotter, continues to claim it’s helping solve gun crime even as many law enforcement customers shift from “current” to “former.”

Defence/Aggression

• Volodymyr Zelensky has stripped Verkhovna Rada deputy Viktor Medvedchuk, the former leader of the pro-Kremlin party Opposition Platform – For Life who was charged with treason in 2021, of his Ukrainian citizenship, the president announced in an address on Tuesday.

• In his January 9 court hearing, the anti-war protester Igor Paskar, charged with terrorism for setting fire to the FSB building in Krasnodar, told the court that he was tortured by FSB operatives after throwing a Molotov cocktail at their headquarters in June 2022.

• Colonel General Alexander Lapin, who previously served as the commander of Russia’s Central Military District, has been appointed chief of staff of the country’s ground forces, according to sources from the Russian Defense Ministry who spoke to RBC and Ura.ru. The ministry itself has not officially commented on the claims. Russian presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin can neither confirm nor deny the reports. “There are open decrees, and there are decrees marked ‘secret.’ Among the decrees that are released publicly, there are no such decrees,” he said in response to a question about Lapin’s appointment.

• The Wagner Group’s mercenary formations appear to have gained control over the greater part of Soledar, a salt-mining town just north of Bakhmut in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, as reported by the British Defense Ministry in its January 10 morning intelligence update. Over the past four days, the Russian forces have stormed the city, fighting in part for control over the entrances to the disused 200-kilometer (125-mile) salt-mine tunnels running beneath the district, which can be used by both sides to move past enemy lines. Bakhmut itself, notes the UK’s Defense Intelligence, probably remains the main objective of the Russian offensive, but it’s unlikely to be fully surrounded in the nearest future.

• Let me start with a confession: I no longer read all the way through newspaper stories about the war in Ukraine. After years of writing about war and torture, I’ve reached my limit. These days, I just can’t pore through the details of the ongoing nightmare there. It’s shameful, but I don’t want to know the names of the dead or examine images caught by brave photographers of half-exploded buildings, exposing details — a shoe, a chair, a doll, some half-destroyed possessions — of lives lost, while I remain safe and warm in San Francisco. Increasingly, I find that I just can’t bear it.

• And so I scan the headlines and the opening paragraphs, picking up just enough to grasp the shape of Vladimir Putin’s horrific military strategy: the bombing of civilian targets like markets and apartment buildings, the attacks on the civilian power grid, and the outright murder of the residents of cities and towns occupied by Russian troops. And these aren’t aberrations in an otherwise lawfully conducted war. No, they represent an intentional strategy of terror, designed to demoralize civilians rather than to defeat an enemy military. This means, of course, that they’re also war crimes: violations of the laws and customs of war as summarized in 2005 by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

• The Los Angeles Times reports that “the audacious gamble by the U.S. government to…restore democracy” suffered a “spectacular failure” in Venezuela. What this State Department stenographer masquerading as a newspaper considers a “democratic” setback consisted of failing to impose unknown US security asset Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s president.

• This man just got the boot from his own fractious opposition group, which voted 72-29 to disband his “interim government.” The Hill reports that the pretend president still claims the post and retains a “powerful network of support,” although not in his home country.

• Republicans who have pledged to use their narrow majority in the House to pursue steep federal spending cuts have sent a clear message in recent days: The bloated Pentagon budget is safe, but Social Security, Medicare, and other key government programs are not.

• At least 17 people were killed by state security forces in southern Peru Monday while protesting the government of unelected President Dina Boluarte and the ouster and imprisonment of former leftist leader Pedro Castillo.

• There are plenty of governments operating on platforms of pure evil, but the Saudi government is one the few that continues to be given a pass by other governments who fear alienating a source of oil located in the Mideast.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

Environment

• They’ve given it a snappy little acronym, one that is perhaps supposed to masquerade as a sort of scientific-sounding calculus — C2N. After the failure of the much-trumpeted “nuclear renaissance” that never was, the nuclear lobby and its federal lackeys have come up with another PR clunker — Coal 2 Nuclear (hence, C2N). In reality, this is less C2N than CPR for an ailing nuclear power industry.

• Unfortunately, to arrive at this dangerously out-of-touch scheme, our tax dollars had to be wasted on yet another U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report. Its conclusion was that, “hundreds of U.S. coal power plant sites could convert to nuclear power plant sites, adding new jobs, increasing economic benefit, and significantly improving environmental conditions.”

• On September 24, 2022, more than 30,000 people occupied the main roads of downtown Seoul, South Korea, for the nation’s largest climate justice march. The sheer turnout of people from all walks of life and the participation by a wide range of advocacy groups were a testament to the impact of climate change on every aspect of life: human rights, women’s rights, religion, food insecurity, and labor rights. For many of these advocacy movements in Seoul, recent crises like COVID-19 have brought home the urgent need to address the climate crisis.

• Opening with a rally in Namdaemun Plaza at 3 p.m., the two-hour march occupied four out of six lanes of Seoul’s main Sejong-daero Boulevard. Standing on moving flatbed trucks, people spoke about the intersectionality of the climate crisis and other issues, including labor insecurity, housing instability, and social discrimination.

• For the second year in a row, U.S. carbon emissions increased in 2022—reversing a trend that was evident even before emissions declined significantly in 2020 during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic.

• Ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden’s Tuesday meeting with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Greenpeace implored the two men to commit to ending all new oil and gas development in the Permian Basin, increasing clean energy investments, and securing a just transition for fossil fuel workers.

Energy/Transportation

• A climate action coalition applauded New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s announcement Tuesday in support of legislation that would require all new construction in the state to be fossil fuel-free starting in 2024, following pressure from campaigners.

• Climate and public health advocates on Tuesday welcomed comments by a federal official teasing a potential ban on new gas stoves amid a growing body of peer-reviewed research warning that the appliances threaten the warming planet and human health.

Wildlife/Nature

• A significant percentage of our nation’s protected public lands are found within the boundaries of one state. On the first day of my Public Lands and Waters class, I ask my smart, upper division university students to guess which state contains approximately 60% of all National Park lands, over 90% of all National Wildlife Refuge Wilderness lands, and our country’s largest National Forest. Some students start guessing: “Utah?” “Colorado?” “California?”

Finance

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Despite having already fired a huge percentage of Twitter’s trust & safety team handling issues around content moderation, including the teams handling child sexual abuse material and election denialism, last week Elon apparently fired another chunk of the team. Just in time for organizers of the insurrection in Brazil to make use of social media to help them organize.

• On January 9, Alexey Navalny’s Twitter account was updated with the news that the imprisoned politician had been sent on New Year’s Eve into “punitive confinement” — for the tenth consecutive time. Although the maximum time of permitted confinement in the so-called “ShIZO” is 15 days, the penitentiary where he serves his term is evading this limit by locking Navalny in a “punishment cell” for “separate,” back-to-back stretches. What’s worse, according to Navalny’s lawyer Vadim Kobzev, his client is confined to a penal cell with “a fever, chills, and a cough.” The prison, meanwhile, refuses to deliver any medicines mailed or brought by visitors. Alexander Polupan and Alexander Vanyukov, two Russian doctors gravely concerned about Navalny’s health, are now gathering signatures for an open letter from Russia’s medical community addressed to Vladimir Putin. In their letter posted on Facebook, the physicians demand “an end to tormenting Navalny” in prison. More than 170 doctors have signed the letter. Meduza in English has translated what it says.

• The New York Times recently asked the question: “Have the Anticapitalists Reached Harvard Business School?“ In past generations, Students at Harvard Business School, Yale School of Management, and other similar institutions would almost certainly learn that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception fraud.”

• An officially commissioned bas-relief sculpture of former Yekaterinburg Mayor Evgeny Roizman, who Russian authorities declared a “foreign agent” in November and who’s currently facing felony charges for “discrediting” the Russian army, has been installed in the city administration building.

• If anything shows the unconscionable attacks of the American media on decent politicians, it is what is happening now to Congressman George Santos. A man of notorious bad memory, he made some statements that have made him the object of ridicule. A careful analysis of this phenomenon, however, should help establish the accuracy of the comments on his personal integrity and on the veracity of his assertions. A man who has devoted his life to serving his country deserves no less.

• Let’s start. He claimed that he earned a degree from Baruch College and that he held a Master of Business Administration from New York University. Both institutions, however, have no records of his enrollment or employment. Santos later said that he had embellished his resumé and told The New York Post, “I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning. I’m embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my résumé…we do stupid things in life.” Agree.

• The story started in a bustling port city in West Africa, where a prominent Lebanese businessman was accused by the U.S. government of funneling money to the terrorist group Hezbollah.

• In sanctioning Ibrahim Taher, the Treasury Department made a rare reference in the eighth paragraph of a press release to an obscure and largely unregulated diplomatic arrangement that allows private citizens in their home countries to represent the economic and cultural interests of foreign governments. In exchange for their service, these honorary consuls receive some of the same coveted legal protections and privileges provided to career diplomats, including the ability to move bags across borders without inspection.

• Republican Kevin McCarthy of California sold his soul and the House of Representatives to the Devil of Congress, the juvenile far-right flank of his party, in exchange for enough votes to elect him speaker.

• We’re in for a lot of trouble with a Congress dependent on children to get anything substantive done.

• As I read the Guardian’s “Israel unveils controversial plans to overhaul judicial system,” January 4, 2023, which highlighted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s work in lessening the impact of Israel’s supreme court, I thought of how even atrophied dreams die hard. The article relates how Netanyahu’s far-right government is attempting to allow a cabinet minister to serve who has been convicted of tax offenses. As we’ve seen in the US, the right will chip away at each branch of government until there is no one in an official position to resist fascism. It’s as if the right-wing populist movements, the ultra-nationalist movements, and the white supremacist movements across the globe, and in the US, serve as a template for right-wing populism elsewhere. It’s a pandemic of a different sort.

• Israel needs no script from other places to write its own version of its military hegemony in the Middle East and its refusal to grant human rights or the right of autonomy to the Palestinian people. It provides, both viciously and lethally, a system of apartheid to its bullied Palestinian victims. Democracy Now’s report “Diana Buttu and Gideon Levy: Israeli’s New Far-Right Gov’t Entrenches Apartheid System with US Support,” January 5, 2023, is an up-to-date primer on how Israel’s might continues to put the lives of Palestinians under its boot and how both the US and the vast majority of the rest of the West, including the EU, could give a damn about this human rights catastrophe. In the oil rich and strategically located Middle East, with far-right regimes in control of many countries, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is one of many outrages. Dare to speak out or act against the government in Saudi Arabia and imprisonment or death will be the result. When many Middle East regimes reconfigured their foreign policy, such as in the notorious example of Saudi Arabia, and aligned with Israel, the plight of the Palestinian people further deteriorated. The vicious war in Yemen is yet another example of the West, and especially the US, turning a blind eye to outrage and war crimes.

• My sister in Canada once had an ardent although not excessive interest in British royalty. She has followed successive generations of The Windsors from the 1940s into the 21 Century. Now, she says, that’s over. First, she refused to indulge the latest ‘Crown’ film series; now she’s determinedly ignoring the newest BritRoyal wrangles and confessions displayed on Netflix’s ‘Harry and Meghan’ run.

• I’m joining the boycott. Not because I might not sympathize with a young couple’s reported difficulties with their family. But because they have taken on a narrative that they cannot possibly control, one that simply provides a captivated public with a new chapter in an endless loop; it’s unarguably mere entertainment. So, are they exploiting the family name? Or is the media machine exploiting them?

• Here we are on the second anniversary of Trump’s lie-fueled violent insurrection to try and halt Congress from certifying a duly elected president of the United States. Despite the death and destruction in its attempted takeover of the Capitol, the MAGA mob failed — and many are now paying the price in prison. But lo and behold, a tiny band of MAGA clowns has managed to halt the function of Congress by refusing to vote for Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House — and without a speaker, the House cannot even swear in its members, let alone perform its constitutional duties to the American public.

• There are 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The 20 MAGA extremists — including Montana’s own MAGA clown, Rep. Matt Rosendale — comprise a mere 4.5 percent of the members. That such a tiny fraction of the House can grind its wheels to a stop isn’t a victory for these deluded members. It’s a tragedy and a tremendous stain on the reputation of the American governing process.

• Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies’ Melissa Crow about asylum policy for the January 6, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• It has always been clear that a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives would signal real danger for American democracy. Last week’s drama surrounding Kevin McCarthy’s ascension to the House Speakership was a sideshow. The demands of the so-called “far-right” Gaetz Gang—“so-called” because the entire House Republican leadership and most of its members are far-right—for House rules changes was never a sincere effort to promote greater transparency and deliberation.

• Democratic Congresswoman Katie Porter on Tuesday announced her 2024 campaign for U.S. Senate, just two months after winning a tight race to represent California’s 47th Congressional District.

• Thousands of Brazilians hit the streets of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo on Monday night to demand jail time for the right-wing activists who attacked the country’s capital along with everyone who aided and abetted them.

• It feels great to see the surprisingly rapid recovery of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin. It feels great to see him moved from a Cincinnati hospital so he can return to Buffalo. It feels great to hear about him Zooming with his teammates, flexing his muscles from a hospital bed, and cheering them on. It feels great to see fans support a charity that Hamlin started in college and that provides toys to at risk kids who were harmed by the pandemic. All of this feels great—but Hamlin almost dying on national television is not a feel-good story.

• Like passengers in a car veering away from the edge of a cliff, a big collective “whew” went up from Democrats (including the writer) everywhere on the evening of November 8. But in the past two months, where’s any after-report or commentary explaining how Democrats also allowed the most lawless, lying, reactionary, party in American history to take over one chamber of Congress?

• A study published Monday by researchers at New York University eviscerated liberal Democrats’ assertion that the Russian government’s disinformation campaign on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election had any meaningful impact on the contest’s outcome.

• Progressives in the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday blasted Republicans for using their narrow majority to establish a panel headed by a far-right congressman to “expose the abuses committed by the unelected, unaccountable federal bureaucracy.”

• When a pair of newly elected Democratic legislators from Milwaukee—the city that elected three Socialist Party mayors in the 20th century—took seats in the Wisconsin State Assembly last week, they promptly announced that they would be forming a socialist caucus.

• Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has denied Russian national Sofia Sapega’s request for a pardon, the independent outlet Mediazona Belarus reported on Tuesday, citing Sapega’s lawyer.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Cobb, dean of the Columbia Journalism School and a staff writer for The New Yorker, examines race, the historic challenges to democracy, the impact of the media, and how these inform society.

• “As a respected journalist he clearly sees the power of the media and other institutions to illuminate or obfuscate the critical issues we must face honestly to move forward as a society,” said Lynette Clemetson, the Charles R. Eisendrath Director of the Wallace House Center for Journalists.

• “We hope this conversation will prompt people to think deeply about their role individually and collectively in protecting and perfecting our democracy.”

• When ProPublica set out to report on Native American remains and cultural items held by U.S. institutions, we knew we would need to listen closely to Indigenous people and gather feedback.

• Repatriation can be a sensitive topic. Museums, universities and agencies in the United States hold the remains of more than 100,000 people and several hundred thousand funerary objects, a legacy of looting and the displacement of Native Americans during North America’s violent colonization.

• Use this database to find out where Native American remains were taken from and which institutions report still having them. Check on institutions near you.

• As the United States pushed Native Americans from their lands to make way for westward expansion throughout the 1800s, museums and the federal government encouraged the looting of Indigenous remains, funerary objects and cultural items. Many of the institutions continue to hold these today — and in some cases resist their return despite the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

• “We never ceded or relinquished our dead. They were stolen,” James Riding In, then an Arizona State University professor who is Pawnee, said of the unreturned remains.

• For the United Farm Workers and its allies on Capitol Hill, the failure of the Farm Workforce Modernization Act (FWMA) was a defeat for their campaign to win legal immigration status for undocumented field laborers.1

• Teresa Romero, UFW President, called it “a very bitter disappointment for farm workers across the country who have more than earned the right to legal status through the sweat of their brow.” She blamed the American Farm Bureau for withholding its support. “They know that an undocumented workforce is easier to intimidate and exploit,” she charged.2

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• There have long been attacks on the global, open nature of the internet. Traditionally these came from authoritarian regimes looking to wall off portions of the internet and exert greater control of them, but lately we’ve also been seeing growing threats from democratic countries in the form of problematic laws and regulations. Recently, we wrote about an article by Global Network Initiative executive director Jason Pielemeier and Annenberg Public Policy Center research fellow Chris Riley that made a case in defense of the global, open internet, and this week both Jason and Chris join us on the podcast to look at the past, present and future of the internet around the world.

Monopolies

Patents

• Expressing “very deep concerns” about the effects of corporate price gouging on public health and the financial well-being of working people, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday called on Covid-19 vaccine manufacturer Moderna to reverse its reported plan to significantly increase the price of its vaccine, representing a 4,000% markup over its estimated production cost of less than $3 and a quadrupling of the $26.36 the U.S. government has previously paid for each dose.

Trademarks

• It’s amazing how some people think trademarks work. In the last week or so, several media outlets briefly went into a frenzy over a trademark application that was filed for Tesla’s yet to be released Cybertruck specifically for vehicle categories other than “on land” vehicles. Notably, Elon Musk made some questionable claims that the Cybertruck, which has been delayed for over a year now, was waterproof enough that it could be used as both a truck and a boat. While this led to government officials hurriedly imploring the public to not attempt to drive their non-existent trucks into the water on the basis of the claim by Musk, that fact led many to believe that Musk was going to make good on his claim to make a half-truck, half-boat hybrid vehicle and, oh god, I cannot even believe I’m writing this sentence.

Copyrights

• Rap artist Afroman’s biggest hit is “Because I Got High,” a track that details how his best intentions were undone by his weed intake. So, one might reasonably suspect marijuana might be found at his residence. But there’s very little that’s reasonable about what happened to Afroman four months ago.

• A man who impersonated publishers and literary agents to fraudulently obtain digital copies of more than a thousand pre-release novels and other books has entered a guilty plea in the United States. Former Simon & Schuster rights coordinator Filippo Bernardini was arrested by the FBI in January 2022, after his flight touched down at JFK International Airport.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• As the new year rolls in, threatening once more to bring us to the brink of existentialistic ruin, as the chatbots and artbots tilt their heads towards destroying any sense of human genuineness… I can’t help but sit and admire the silence in my life.

• The father of one of my partners is in his final days of cancer, and could pass any day.

• I’m looking toward this new year. We wil probably get some deception from these long-awaited games (Zelda TotK, Silksong, the list goes on…), but some upcoming releases caught my attention anyway.

• I’ve been quiet here. My youngest child is a toddler now, and we moved into a new home that needs a bit of work, so I haven’t been making time for many of my interests. I haven’t been having much “fun”.

• That doesn’t mean that I’m unhappy — my day-to-day life is full of joy! But it’s a lifestyle where you can blink and miss years, and I don’t want to spend too much time like this. I know that if I wait until I feel like I have “free time” then nothing will change, so I simply need to start making commitments outside of the home.

• 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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