● 01.21.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 21/01/2023: GCompris 3.1 and General News

Posted in News Roundup at 11:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• We cover events and user groups that are running in the US state of Utah. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.

Server

• The past year saw significant discussion around security, growing use of open-source tools to run enterprise systems, and how an expanding developer ecosystem may reduce Kubernetes complexity. Within these key topics can be found another important dynamic. There is a great deal of innovation in the container space, and this will set much of the cloud-native agenda during the coming year.

• “Containers have gone supernova with Kubernetes, with a complete ecosystem of opportunity to create the next operating system in software development,” said John Furrier, industry analyst for SiliconANGLE Media, during a discussion at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2022. “To me, KubeCon is at the center of Software 2.0 or 3.0. It’s not where the old school is; it’s where the new school is.”

• Container technology is almost as old as VMs, although IT wasn’t talking about the topic until Docker, Kubernetes and other tech made waves that caused a frenzy of activity.

Audiocasts/Shows

• In This Video We Are Looking At Drauger OS is a Linux desktop gaming OS. It attempts to bring the console and PC gaming experiences together onto one unified platform while offering insane speeds and low latency for the large install size by using a Xfce desktop, configured to resemble a gaming console, as well as a low latency Linux kernel.

• In This Video We Are Looking At Regata OS 22.1.0

• Join 31K listeners learning how to build an open-source startup from the founders of HashiCorp, Chronosphere, Vercel, MongoDB, DBT, mobile.dev and more!

Kernel Space

• eBPF enables users to instrument a running system by loading small programs into the operating system kernel. As a safety measure, the kernel “verifies” eBPF programs at load time and rejects any that it deems unsafe. However, using eBPF is a CI / CD nightmare, because there’s no way to know whether a given eBPF program will successfully load and pass verification without testing it on a running kernel.

Graphics Stack

• NVIDIA have put up a smaller stable update for their Linux driver with a couple of noted fixes included. Here’s the details. Since this is a stable driver in their Production Branch, all users should be okay to upgrade.

Applications

• Available today, maintenance release 7.0.6 includes improvements and bug fixes for Oracle VM VirtualBox 7.0.

• Oracle VM VirtualBox 7.0.6 delivers the January 2023 Critical Patch Update (CPU) to address security vulnerabilities.

Instructionals/Technical

• Registering typed custom properties can be useful in container style queries.

• If you have created a new user in MariaDB and cannot login remotely via database management tools such as DBeaver, you are the sure the password is correct, your next step is to make sure that the host value for the specified user is not set to localhost

• CodeIgniter is a widely used PHP framework that is helpful for developers to create robust web applications. One of the challenges that developers face while working with CodeIgniter is removing the index.php file from the URL. If you have deployed the CodeIgniter web application with the Apache web server, there is a quick and easy way to handle this. This can be done by creating the .htaccess file, which is a configuration file that allows developers to control the behavior of the Apache web server.

Games

• Who can say no to a free game? GOG are giving away the relaxing Haven Park for 27 hours during their freshly launched New Year Sale 2023.

• Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania is an upcoming mini expansion for the popular action-platformer metroidvania game from Motion Twin / Evil Empire coming early this year.

• Another release of GE-Proton is already available, the third in the space of a week and GE-Proton 7-46 includes some DirectX 12 fixes for Steam Deck and Linux desktop. The previous release also removed DXVK-Async, a popular patch people were using to improve the shader cache stuttering issue.

• Interested to learn a little about the people who make cool open source programs? Today I have interview with Flávio, the creator of the popular Heroic Games Launcher used on Linux desktop, Steam Deck, macOS and Windows.

• Valve has put up another Beta update for the Steam client on Desktop and Steam Deck with plenty of fixes. Here’s all the details.

• Welcome to 2023 and let me start a first article of this new year with a … guest post by @NeoMoevius from Twitter. That is right. I did not invented it. I did not created it. I only partially wrote it – treat me as a ghost writer here. ll the thanks and welcomes goes directly to @NeoMoevius – I am just a messenger here

• This post will be about playing (and first building – of course) the Urban Terror game on FreeBSD system. It is about how to build and install Urban Terror 4.3 on FreeBSD without Linux emulation or using WINE. Natively. This will be on the latest and supported FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE system.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Two weeks ago KDE Frameworks 5 has been branched off as planned. Meanwhile we have also gotten the fallout of that on the CI under control, and so KDE Frameworks 6 development is entering its next phase.

• All KDE Frameworks repositories (including the deprecated ones) have a kf5 branch now, all future KF5 releases will be made from that, the master branch will become KF6.

• This means you need to pay special attention to submitting changes to the right branch, and/or backporting relevant changes from master to kf5 when applicable. If you landed changes in the past two weeks you might want to double-check they ended up in the kf5 branch as well.

• We are pleased to announce the release of GCompris version 3.0.

• [....]

• On the translation side, GCompris 3.0 contains 36 languages. 25 are fully translated: (Azerbaijani, Basque, Breton, British English, Catalan, Catalan (Valencian), Chinese Traditional, Croatian, Dutch, Estonian, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Norwegian Nynorsk, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Ukrainian). 11 are partially translated: (Albanian (99%), Belarusian (83%), Brazilian Portuguese (94%), Czech (82%), Finnish (94%), German (91%), Indonesian (99%), Macedonian (94%), Slovak (77%), Swedish (94%) and Turkish (71%)).

• A special note about Ukrainian voices which have been added thanks to the organization “Save the Children” who funded the recording. They installed GCompris on 8000 tablets and 1000 laptops, and sent them to Digital learning Centers and other safe spaces for children in Ukraine.

• Croatian voices have also been recorded by a contributor.

• As usual you can find packages of this new version for GNU/Linux, Windows, Android, Raspberry Pi and macOS on the download page. This update will also be available soon in the Android Play store, the F-Droid repository and the Windows store.

• For packagers of GNU/Linux distributions, note that we have a new dependency on QtCharts QML plugin, and the minimum required version of Qt5 is now 5.12. We also moved from using QtQuick.Controls 1 to QtQuick.Controls 2.

• Today we are releasing GCompris version 3.1.

• As we noticed that version 3.0 contained a critical bug in the new “Comparator” activity, we decided to quickly ship this 3.1 maintenance release to fix the issue.

• It also contains some little translation update.

• Are you using Kubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu, our current stable release? Or are you already running our development builds of the upcoming 23.04 (Lunar Lobster)?

• We currently have Plasma 5.25.90 (Plasma 5.27 Beta) available in our Beta PPA for Kubuntu 22.10 and for the 23.04 development series.

• However this is a beta release, and we should re-iterate the disclaimer from the upstream release announcement…

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• ChatGPT (Chat Generative-Pre-Trained Transformer) has only been around for a couple of months, but it is fair to say that it has made its mark. Millions of users have used the service for all manner of queries, but each time it required the user to open a browser, log in and then enter a prompt. Well, for Linux users it seems that these steps can be skipped over thanks to a Gnome extension from Rafal Mioduszewski, aka HorrorPills.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Screenshots/Screencasts

• Everything starts from dreams And each person evaluates these dreams in his own way Perhaps childish, grandiose, trivial, or impossible Lives begin with the first childhood dream, which is the dream of walking on two legs And then our dreams get bigger as we get older And when we achieve a dream The march is not over the Difficulties begin

BSD

• A secure system does not necessarily provide integrity – and vice versa. Let’s examine the differences between these two concepts. Data security is about preventing data from being disclosed, ensuring that only the correct people can access it. Data integrity ensures the data is correct, that it has not become corrupt due to hardware failure or other issues. With ZFS, you can get both. This may be the reason these two concepts can be so difficult to distinguish from each other. This article explains the differences and focuses on the ZFS features that help keep your data correct and secure.

• I’ll be packing Patronizer and sponsor books first, then complicated preorders, then single-copy preorders. I don’t know if I’ll have them all done today. I might. Paperbacks arrive tomorrow, so I hope so.

• Please test aggressively.

• We look forward to the next steps hinted at in the first of these commit messages.

• If this works out, there are indications other early-boot network daemons will get similar treatement sooner rather than later.

• After booting, my vms are not started by sysutils/vm-bhyve. Why?

• A quick one explaining how I easily gained disk space on one of my FreeBSD servers.

• [...]

• A quick and easy way to gain space on a FreeBSD machine – I’ll add this to my maintenance routine

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• SUSE, a leading Linux and open-source company’s Q4 2022 results for the quarter ending October 31, 2022, are out and look pretty darn good. According to its financial statement, SUSE’s adjusted revenue was up 11% year-on-year to $170.3 million, and adjusted Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation (EBITDA) was up 37% year-on-year to $65.9 million.

• SUSE’s strong close to the financial year also delivered FY22 adjusted revenue of $658 million, up 14%, and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 37%. The company also expects to see adjusted EBITDA margin expansion from FY22 and, in the medium-term, expects adjusted revenue growth around the mid-to-high teens’ percentage., and an adjusted EBITDA margin in excess of 40%. Not bad! Not bad at all!

Fedora Family / IBM

• Our readers have spoken, and Fedora takes home the prize in our our Readers’ Choice poll to determine which Linux distribution wins our Best Linux Distro award! Unlike our previous polls in this category, this year the winning distro gets more than just bragging rights — they get some cool, groovy, nifty, and useful prizes as well.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Turning a Raspberry Pi into a retro gaming machine is relatively easy; we even have a step-by-step video tutorial for those ready to dive in. But turning a Raspberry Pi mini PC into a retro gaming machine with style?

• The Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 brings autofocus and HDR images to the oldest Raspberry Pi accessory and we show you how to take the best pictures with the latest camera.

• There is a lot going on right now about PiStorm32-Lite and the delays in production due to some soldering issues. We now know why this is happening, so I figured I would summarise for everyone what is happening and why things are delayed.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• The GNU Project was founded forty years ago, in September 1983, in reaction to a printer company restricting access…

Events

• The insight I gained into the world of open source software was invaluable, and it got me hooked on the world of free software. I got to listen to various speakers talk about their projects. They were all unique projects, yet also very forward-thinking in their ideas and fantastic in their application.

• [...]

• My favorite topic was Gcompris, an application designed to teach children how to use a computer running the Linux OS. The graphics were bold, colorful, and clearly intended to get children (hey, and adults, too) involved in the UI. There was also a very inspirational speaker who spoke about the future of Linux and how it would advance to make all software free to share, modify, and improve. Fourteen years later, and I think Linux is well on its way to its promise of free everything!

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• In This Video We Are Looking At The 109.0 version of Mozilla Firefox , a fast, functional and open source internet browser, has been announced. You will be able to review the release notes to learn about version 109.0

Programming/Development

• Release Candidate versions are available in testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS / Alma / Rocky and other clones) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests, and also as base packages.

• Ping patch. We really would like the patches to enable the possible future MMA+ instructions into GCC 13.

• Sometimes you need a quick and easy UI for your application. In the past, these were bare-bones buttons, inputs, and other displays barely usable by even technical users. But the quality has improved for even the quickest-built UIs, and they’ve become easier to build. Now it’s for everyone, from machine learning engineers who need a quick interface to customer support workers who need a wrapper around an internal system.

• There’s a paradigm that’s been tried over and over again – drag-and-drop diagrams for software configuration, especially infrastructure.

• This blog post will demonstrate a concrete example of that, by using D2′s language API to build a diagram that visualizes the schema after each line of SQL statement.

• However, the real purpose of AI and the path we’re going is not exactly what I believe we had in mind when we first started working on it. We built artificial intelligence to make our lives easier so we can be able to focus on what truly matters to us as human race. I believe when we starte the machines and when we first started to replace part of the labor and work with automatons what we had in mind was to finally replace humans with machines not in what we enjoyed doing but in what we believed is exploiting our essence.

R

• A new major version of the curl package has been released to CRAN. This release both brings internal improvements as well as new user-facing functionality, in particular with respect to concurrent downloads.

• We are excited to announce that, with the support of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, NumFOCUS, and the R Consortium…

• During the pandemic, the stock prices almost doubled, but their trends have recently declined. One of the reasons for that might be the interest rates. To examine this, we will take a consideration ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK), which is a long-term growth capital by investing mostly in tech companies.

• Top Data Science Skills In 30 days! Learn the craft by following the step-by-step instructions.

• Avoid falling for these traps. It takes a lot of effort, time, and work to develop into a good data scientist. Not a cakewalk, this.

• However, if you are willing to master data science properly, this brief amount of time will serve as one of your lifetime investments.

• Recent years have seen a rise in interest in data science. It is considered to be The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century, according to Harvard Business School.

• While I am no expert in political economy, it seems intuitive that voters are happy if their representatives manage to provide federal money for local investment projects. But how large is the effect in terms of additional votes in future elections?

• In his great article Stimulating the Vote: ARRA Road Spending and Vote Share (AEJ Policy, 2019) Emiliano Huet-Vaughn studies this question for road infrastructure investments financed by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

• If you want to empirically explore this topic yourself, you can take a look at this nice interactive RTutor problem set that Philipp Klotz wrote as part of his Bachelor thesis at Ulm University. Besides learning about political economy, you can also hone your skills in R.

• Mirai RiskMetrics (MiRiM) is a Shiny app based on the RiskMetrics methodology enhanced to analyze the market risk of a portfolio.

• MiRiM is freely available on our Website Gallery and is designed for desktop view.

• In the first release, MiRiM was mainly a PoC serving as an example for the application of the J.P.Morgan/Reuters RiskMetrics methodology to a portfolio of commodities to be provided as a CSV input, where a default portfolio of commodities from LME was initiated at the start of the app. RiskMetrics is a set of tools that enables participants in the financial markets to estimate their exposure to market risk, under what has been called the ‘Value-at-Risk framework’, in portfolios of foreign exchange, fixed income, equity and commodity products.

Python

• A subtle issue is that from the perspective of the program running the script, its exec succeeded the moment your shim got loaded, even if your shim then can’t exec the real interpreter (for example, because trying to load it exceeds some resource limit). If the program would have done something different when the exec of the script failed, well, it’s too late. This is probably not too likely, though; an exec usually doesn’t fail if the program is there.

Rust

• Why Rust? A correct but uninteresting answer is the community – both existing libraries and the opportunity for aspiring developers to build those libraries.

Leftovers

• Just before Christmas a Google Doodle offered tribute to the Dutch Golden Age painter, Judith Leyster (1609-1660). Leyster fell into obscurity in the centuries after her death partly because she did not sign her work. In her lifetime she had enjoyed early fame, mentioned when she was just nineteen in a guide to her native Haarlem, a city rich in artists. Later, a history of Haarlem from 1647-8 praised her by punning on her name, calling her a “leading-star in art” (Leyster=lodestar, taken from the family brewery’s brand in Haarlem).

• Leyster’s monogram, rediscovered in several paintings by the Dutch art historian Cornelis Hofstede de Groot only in 1893, overlays a curving J with the L and bisects the figure with the tail of a shooting star—a clever and confident logo.

• Most of us agree that the U.S. immigration system is in dire need of reform. But inflammatory rhetoric and policies designed to keep immigrants away won’t get us there.

• Three unidentified U.S. airlines are under federal investigation for potentially scheduling flights the companies know they ultimately will not be able to fly—a revelation The New York Timesreported Friday, just two days after United Airlines’ CEO suggested competitors are doing just that.

• What’s better than 3D printing a tank chassis with working tracks? How about 3D printing the entire thing, moving parts and all, as a single piece? That’s [3D Honza]’s PiPBOT-1, and it’s the culmination of a whole lot of design work.

• Extrusion is a process for forming materials by forcing them through an opening, which can allow for complex shapes. Aluminum extrusion beams are what most of us are probably thinking of, but plenty of other things are made from extruded material like pipe, heat sinks, and even macaroni. Extrusion can also be used for modelling clay to create uniform sections of rounded clay as a starter material for producing other pottery, and [Justins Makery] has built a custom extruder to do just that.

• While some people are happy with a simple coffee table to hold their snacks while watching Star Trek reruns, others want their furniture to go where no furniture has gone before. [Olivier Gomis] has definitely satisfied this need with his Wormhole Coffee Table. [YouTube]

Science

• This article pretends to be about dishwashers, but it’s really about something much more general.

• For years, scientific researchers have warned that Elon Musk’s Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband constellations are harming scientific research. Simply put, the light pollution Musk claimed would never happen in the first place is making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can be mitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated.

Hardware

• [Bruce Land] of Cornell University will be a familiar name to many Hackaday readers, searching the site for ‘ECE4760′ will bring up many interesting topics around embedded programming. Every year [Bruce] releases yet more of the students’ work out into the wild to our great delight. This RP2040-based project is a bit more abstract than some previous work and shows yet another implementation of an older hack to utilise the DMA hardware of the RP2040 as another CPU core. While the primary focus of the RP2040 DMA subsystem is moving data between memory spaces, with minimal CPU intervention, the DMA control blocks have some fairly complex behaviour. This allows for a Turing-complete CPU to be implemented purely with the DMA hardware and a sprinkling of memory.

• DRS, or the Drag Reduction System, has become a key part of Formula 1 in the past decade. [Engineering After Hours] decided to implement the same system on an RC car instead.

• Fascinated by art generated by deep learning systems such as DALL-E and Stable Diffusion? Then perhaps a wall installation like this phenomenal e-paper Triptych created by [Zach Archer] is in your future.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Here’s a graph of the Fediverse as it appears from my perspective right now.

• If the coronavirus pandemic confirmed anything about Big Pharma, it was that the business model of the pharmaceutical industry is based on unrelenting and unapologetic profiteering. Corporations seek to leverage their access to research by public institutions, their connections with oversight agencies, and their influence on politics to assure that they can maximize their windfalls. It’s not a pretty picture. So it will come as no surprise that the pharmaceutical giants would prefer that their business practices not be examined or debated. In particular, they want to avoid sharp scrutiny from public health activists, consumer advocates, and campaigners for access to safe-and-affordable vaccines and medications.

• Republicans in the Iowa House introduced legislation this month that would impose a slew of fresh restrictions on the kinds of food people can purchase using SNAP benefits, sparking outrage among local groups who say the measure would exacerbate hunger in the GOP-dominated state.

• Medicare Advantage is a money-making scam. I should know. I helped to sell it.

• Dr. Leana Wen, a well-known medical commentator for the Washington Post and CNN, wants us to believe that society has overcounted Covid deaths and hospitalizations. She first made this claim in the Post (1/13/23), and again during an appearance on CNN (1/17/23).

Proprietary

• Mandiant is tracking a suspected China-nexus campaign believed to have exploited a recently announced vulnerability in Fortinet’s FortiOS SSL-VPN, CVE-2022-42475, as a zero-day. Evidence suggests the exploitation was occurring as early as October 2022 and identified targets include a European government entity and a managed service provider located in Africa.

• Google ads are a common vector for malware distribution. Do a Google search for any popular free software download. Review any search results marked “Ad” or “Sponsored,” then check the link to see if anything is unusual.

• [...]

• Shown above: Windows Defender doesn’t like this type of downloaded EXE file.

• Ransomware victims have realized that even if they pay the ransom, there’s no guarantee they will get their data back or that the ransomware actor will delete the “stolen” files without selling them to third parties on the dark web. The public perception of the ransomware phenomenon has matured as well, so data leaks don’t carry the same risks for brand reputation of the last few years.

Security

• One of the more unfortunate trends that have been taking shape in recent years is the increasing prevalence of cyber attacks. As businesses have become more reliant on digital platforms, hackers and other malicious actors have been quick to take advantage of any weakness they can find in a company’s system.

• To get TLS certificates from Let’s Encrypt, you must create and register an ‘account’, which is really a keypair and some associated information. The normal practice is to have a separate LE account for each machine that you use to get TLS certificates, and I think this is a good idea, because authorization to issue TLS certificates for a given name is tied to the account, not to a host. If you move a (HTTPS) website from one host to another, there are two interesting effects that can happen.

• Today we have released PowerDNS Recursor 4.8.1 due to a high severity issue found.

• Please find the full text of the advisory below.

• Attribution matters, but to what extent? The game of cyber whodunit is often perceived as a clean and binary question, where threat activity is either attributed or it is not. Yet, it is typically a more complex process that regularly involves difficult trade-offs.

• Different forms of attribution—ranging from simply linking threat clusters together to identifying the names and faces of an adversary—present vastly different challenges and resource requirements. Analysts making attribution judgements must also weigh up several competing priorities, including the deadlines set by stakeholders, the completeness of data, and the confidence level behind their assessments.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• One thing I particularly wanted to see was how my smaller systems would work. It’s basically a given that my 64 bit Linux boxes are going to be fine since time_t is already wider, and it won’t explode in 2038. But that’s far from the whole story. 32 bit machines still exist, and are more common than some would think thanks to the existence of things like Raspberry Pis.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The issue was her law firm was involved in litigation against Radio City Music Hall’s parent company, Madison Square Garden Entertainment (MSGE). As a result, Conlon — as well as lawyers at other firms pursuing litigation against MSGE — had been placed on an “exclusion list” at a string of popular venues owned by the group.

• The story has become a flashpoint in the debate around facial recognition technology. While proponents say it has the ability to keep people safer, critics counter that there is little to support this idea, and warn that unchecked use of the technology could have untold consequences.

• Maybe it’s time for the Israeli government to put a moratorium on Mossad-based startups. Israeli intelligence services have been the petri dishes for a particular strain of techbro — ones who have the smarts to create zero-click exploits but none of the common sense needed to cull baddies from their customer lists.

Defence/Aggression

• The announcement of the Ukraine Solidarity Network is a small step in breaking a strange combination of silence, ambivalence, and complicity within some left-leaning circles regarding the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Code Pink, for instance, which is outspoken on international affairs, falls into the “ambivalent” category, criticizing the Russian invasion—but not supporting Ukrainian resistance. Black Alliance for Peace is an example of a group that is complicit through its support of the invasion.

• Legendary Ukrainian film director Alexander Dovzhenko had a keen eye for scenarios. His diary contains an idea for the film Ukraine in Flames, which he was working on in 1943. He imagines a concentration camp guard and an inmate, both Ukrainians, striking up a conversation across the barbed wire that separates them, a conversation made “all the more terrible” he writes, “because of its fervent hatred.” In the final scene, they seize each other through the barbed wire, the guard trying to choke the prisoner, the prisoner refusing to let go for fear of being shot.

• Late last month, President Biden signed a bill that clears the way for $858 billion in Pentagon spending and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy in 2023. That’s far more than Washington anted up for military purposes at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars or even during the peak years of the Cold War. In fact, the $80 billion increase from the 2022 Pentagon budget is in itself more than the military budgets of any country other than China. Meanwhile, a full accounting of all spending justified in the name of national security, including for homeland security, veterans’ care, and more, will certainly exceed $1.4 trillion. And mind you, those figures don’t even include the more than $50 billion in military aid Washington has already dispatched to Ukraine, as well as to frontline NATO allies, in response to the Russian invasion of that country.

• January 30 this year marks the 90th anniversary of the corporate-facilitated appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of a deeply divided Germany. There is an alarming lesson in this disastrous historic development for a deeply divided America today: Cutting deals with fascists to catapult a voraciously power-hungry politician to high national office places a nation in grave peril.

• The package will include more Bradley armored vehicles and for the first time, Stryker armored vehicles.

• Two years ago, British soldiers were cooking on an army exercise in Kenya when things suddenly spiralled out of control. Sparks from their small stove ignited the grass at Lolldaiga, on the foothills of Mount Kenya.

• This might have been a minor incident, had the area not been so dry. Unfortunately, these were “tinderbox” conditions, as Britain’s high commissioner Jane Marriott would readily admit. The grass went up in smoke. Trees exploded from the heat. Before long, what started as a cooking accident was a full blown forest fire.

• At least 7,000 acres, an area larger than the 11 square mile London borough of Lambeth, was torched. Water turned black as smoke rained down on the nearest town, Nanyuki. “The roads were thrown into darkness,” environmental activist James Mwangi Macharia recalled. “You had to drive with your headlights on – in the middle of the day.”

• At the centre of the inferno, headlights were not enough to stop accidents. As one truck carried volunteers to fight the fire, it collided with Lolldaiga ranger Linus Murangiri, crushing him to death. “If it was not for the fire, Linus would still be alive,” his widow Karen Gatwiri told me.

• Sitting with her two small children in a dark tin shack, she confided: “Linus used to complain that anytime the British army visited Lolldaiga they were rowdy, causing explosions and lighting fires that the workers had to extinguish.”

• Twenty years ago, Tony Blair provided the British public with false information about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction in order to make the case for the illegal invasion of Iraq.

• [...]

• Meanwhile, those who revealed the illegality and barbarism of the war have suffered. Julian Assange, who revealed so many of the war crimes committed by US forces, now languishes in jail.

• More than ten percent showed damage potentially caused by frequent blows to the head by blunt instruments or stone axes. Several examples of penetrative injuries, thought to be from arrows, were also found.

• Some of the injuries were linked to mass burials, which could suggest the destruction of entire communities, the researchers say.

• Sergey Mironov, the chairman of the party A Just Russia, posted a tweet on Friday in which he thanked Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin for sending him a sledgehammer as a gift.

• The Wagner Group is sending empty coffins to the families of its mercenaries in Ukraine, according to a new report.

• Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili has issued a statement expressing disapproval over the government’s move to resume direct flights between Russia and the Republic of Georgia.

• Challenging the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, the man behind the unlawful case against his mother Zarema Musaeva, Musaeva’s son, the human rights advocate Abubakar Yangulbaev invited Kadyrov to release his mother and arrest him instead.

• Chechen officials have announced a plan to begin manufacturing military “Jihad-mobiles” at the ChechenAuto car assembly plant in Argun, Chechnya.

• At a press briefing on Friday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov responded evasively when asked about a statement from the Putin administration uncovered by journalists this week that said Russia’s mobilization order is still in force.

• Is There a World Beyond War?

• The criticism Harry has faced about his comments on Afghanistan is an opportunity to dig deeper and take on the dominant narratives in our society about war more broadly.

• Police in Moscow have prohibited taking photos near the city’s monument to Ukrainian writer Lesya Ukrainka, where an unofficial memorial for those killed in the January 14 missile strike on Dnipro has appeared in recent days.

• We look at calls for police accountability in Los Angeles, where officers killed three men of color within 48 hours earlier this month, including 31-year-old Black school teacher Keenan Anderson, who died hours after he was repeatedly tasered. We speak with Anderson’s cousin Patrisse Cullors, a Black Lives Matter co-founder, who has joined in protests over the police killings. “The last two weeks have been a nightmare,” says Cullors. “No human being deserves to die in fear, to die publicly humiliated and without their dignity.”

• The Russian Ministry of Justice updated its list of “foreign agents,” which now includes the singer Monetochka (Elizaveta Gyrdymova) and Vladimir Osechkin, founder of the anti-corruption and anti-torture project Gulagu.net.

• Nevertheless, the scope of the problem as reported is large, and increasing. Since 2013, when researchers at the Mapping Police Violence project began aggregating reports of law enforcement killings, the number has always been more than 1,000 per year. In 2017 it was 1,089; in 2018, 1,140; in 2019, 1,097; in 2020, 1,152; in 2021, 1,145. Between 2013 and 2022, 98.1 percent of law enforcement personnel involved in these killings went uncharged and only 0.3 percent of law enforcement personnel were convicted of any crime for their conduct. All this resulted in there being only twelve days in 2022 when law enforcement did not kill at least one person. Furthermore, killings by sheriffs are on the rise, making up 36 percent of all killings by law enforcement in 2022. In 2013, these types of killings made up 26 percent of the dataset.

• The protester was shot and killed on Wednesday during a chaotic raid of the “Stop Cop City” forest defense camp.

• We get an update on calls for an independent investigation into the Atlanta police killing of an activist during a violent raid Wednesday on a proposed $90 million training facility in a public forest, known by opponents to the facility as “Cop City.” Law enforcement officers — including a SWAT team — were violently evicting protesters who had occupied a wooded area outside the center when they shot and killed longtime activist Manuel Teran, who went by the name “Tortuguita.” Police claim they were fired on, though protesters dispute this account. We hear a statement from an Atlanta forest defender about what happened, and speak with Kamau Franklin, an anti-“Cop City” activist and the founder of the Atlanta organization Community Movement Builders.

• The NYPD maintains poor storage practices because there is no law stopping them from doing so.

• It is always the same when Japanese premiers travel to Washington to summit at the White House. Nothing seems to happen and nobody pays much attention even when important things happen, when we should all pay attention, and, when we do pay passing attention, we usually get it […]

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Mishandling classified documents, as both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are now accused of doing, is just one type of crime for which America increasingly has one justice system for the rich and powerful and another, far harsher system for everyone else.

Environment

• Attitudes to climate-friendly policies often align with individual political leaning and associated media consumption patterns, but the mechanisms explaining this relationship are not well understood. This study presents an in-depth qualitative analysis of portrayals of political actors from 229 articles published in six German and US news outlets during May–July 2019. The results show that the outlets consumed by left- and right-leaning audiences emphasise oppositional identity portrayals, portraying features that are likely to trigger a negative response towards political identities typically opposed by their recipients. The outlets with a more balanced or centrist audience offer a wider array of identity portrayals and emphasise policy questions over fundamental beliefs. Observed patterns differ considerably between Germany and the US, reflecting political and media system differences. The results offer insight into how media reporting can contribute to political polarisation and consensus-building regarding climate change.

• Changes in ocean heat content (OHC), salinity, and stratification provide critical indicators for changes in Earth’s energy and water cycles. These cycles have been profoundly altered due to the emission of greenhouse gasses and other anthropogenic substances by human activities, driving pervasive changes in Earth’s climate system. In 2022, the world’s oceans, as given by OHC, were again the hottest in the historical record and exceeded the previous 2021 record maximum. According to IAP/CAS data, the 0–2000 m OHC in 2022 exceeded that of 2021 by 10.9 ± 8.3 ZJ (1 Zetta Joules = 1021 Joules); and according to NCEI/NOAA data, by 9.1 ± 8.7 ZJ. Among seven regions, four basins (the North Pacific, North Atlantic, the Mediterranean Sea, and southern oceans) recorded their highest OHC since the 1950s. The salinity-contrast index, a quantification of the “salty gets saltier—fresh gets fresher” pattern, also reached its highest level on record in 2022, implying continued amplification of the global hydrological cycle. Regional OHC and salinity changes in 2022 were dominated by a strong La Niña event. Global upper-ocean stratification continued its increasing trend and was among the top seven in 2022.

Energy/Transportation

• This is an essay about the long-standing evidence that gas stoves harm children and why so many of us persist in liking them anyway. But it begins with pesticides.

• You walk into your kitchen to make pasta. After filling a pot with water, you place a small silicone mat in the middle of your counter, then set the pot above it and open a stovetop app on your phone. A short time later the water is boiling, although there’s no heat source in sight.

• Sound like science fiction? The products that enable this scenario are available on the market today. Florida-based InvisaCook is one of several companies selling cooking hobs designed to be installed directly under porcelain or granite countertops, freeing up workspace in the kitchen and creating a clean, modern aesthetic.

• A think tank with ties to senior Conservative politicians has appointed a businessman who claims environmentalism is part of a “totalitarian” plan to control the public, and says there is “no causal link” between human-made carbon emissions and global warming.

• Michael John Cole, chairman of a Newcastle-based health foods distributor, joined the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s (GWPF) board of trustees on December 30, according to Companies House documents filed last week.

Wildlife/Nature

• The European Union’s highest court ruled Thursday that member states must stop authorizing the use of bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides.

• The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday announced that an internal investigation failed to identify the person who leaked a draft of the Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that had established a constitutional right to abortion.

Overpopulation

• Low fertility presents China not only with challenges, but also with opportunities. Low fertility and shrinking population size can reduce overcrowding and resource use, and make it more feasible to meet climate targets and reduce pollution. Low fertility makes it easier to reduce poverty, as more resources can be invested in each child born. Increased competition for labor could potentially drive an improvement in wages and working conditions. Low fertility also provides women the freedom to invest their time, energy, and talent in things other than childbearing, and thus help to advance the position of women in society. An older population may also contribute to less violence and crime.

• Recent news articles about a breakthrough in nuclear fusion research heralded the potential for “limitless” energy. Whenever I read that word limitless I wince, because I’ve learned to view it as a subtle instruction to readers to “please stop thinking now.” After decades of false promises to deliver limitless energy, we need to start thinking instead, and search for limits both obvious and hidden. Doing so usually leads to a better understanding of how things really work.

Finance

• Unhoused people in shelters earned more on average than those who were both unsheltered and unhoused. In 2015, the mean pre-tax income excluding benefits for the former group was $8,169, while the mean income for the latter was $6,934. Even the top income earner in each group, when accounting for inflation, could neither afford a one, nor two bedroom apartment in 2022. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s Out of Reach Report, as cited by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, one would need to make approximately $23 an hour, or $46,967 per year, to afford an average two-bedroom apartment, when paying fair, market rate rent.

• Despite the Biden administration’s pledge to crack down on corporate crime, a new analysis of Justice Department data shows that business prosecutions fell to a record low in fiscal year 2022 even as there appeared to be no shortage of wrongdoing—from healthcare fraud to large-scale price gouging.

• Experts said Friday that Elon Musk’s large sale of Tesla shares shortly before the company announced lower-than-expected vehicle deliveries should draw scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, an agency that has previously investigated and charged the billionaire for fraud.

• In the 14-second video now seen by millions, San Francisco gallery owner Collier Gwin stands nonchalant yet intent, his legs crossed casually, his age-folded face glaring as he pummels a Black homeless woman on the sidewalk with cold water spray.

• The super successful mega-investor, Warren Buffett, CEO of the giant conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, was heard to say: There are only 535 members of Congress, why can’t 300 million Americans control them? That’s a pretty fundamental question since our senators and representatives are given their sovereign power by the people. Remember the preamble to our Constitution?

• In 2021 alone, Wall Street bonuses rose twenty percent, far outpacing inflation at seven percent, and nominal private sector earnings at 4.2 percent. That year Wall Street bonuses, in aggregate, amounted to $45 billion, much higher than the $37.1 billion in bonuses paid out in 2020, even as employment in the sector remained essentially flat at about 180,000 workers. It’s important to note that while only five percent of New Yorkers who work in the private sector work in securities, these workers make twenty percent of all private sector earnings in New York City. The bonuses paid out in 2021 are the highest since 2006, which is likely fueled by banking industry lobbyists successfully delaying the implementation of Section 956 of the Dodd-Frank Act. This legislation prevents large financial institutions from awarding pay packages which encourage “inappropriate risk.”

• The very rich are getting wealthier at a faster rate even than their merely wealthy peers. The top 0.1 percent made about 1.6 percent of all annual earnings in 1979, though by 2021 that number had increased to 5.9 percent, about a 3.7 fold increase. Furthermore, the EPI report explained, “Of the 7.3% point rise in the share claimed by the top 1% [between 1979 and 2021], 4.3 percentage points (roughly 60%) can be explained by the rise of the top 0.1% share.” This is despite the 0.1 percent being definitionally, only 10 percent of the top 1 percent.

• On 8 January, large crowds of people dressed in colours of the Brazilian flag descended on the country’s capital, Brasília. They invaded federal buildings, including the Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace, and vandalised public property. The attack, carried out by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, came as no […]

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Large scale union activity took place at Starbucks, which held 354 union elections, this number being more than a quarter of all union elections held. Workers at Starbucks prevailed in four out of every five elections. Workers at Chipotle, Trader Joe’s, and Apple unionized for the first time, while workers at Microsoft and Wells Fargo also had wins. These trends make sense in light of  labor history, as union activity most often spikes in times of societal upheaval. During the Great Depression from 1934 to 1939, the percentage of American workers in a union rose from 7.6 percent to 19.2 percent, while during World War Two between 1941 and 1945 it rose from 20 percent to 27 percent.

• Thousands of Peruvians took to the streets of the nation’s capital on Thursday demanding the resignation of Dina Boluarte—the unelected U.S.-backed president—justice for the more than 50 people killed during the six-week uprising, the return to power of jailed former President Pedro Castillo, and the dissolution of the Congress that ousted him.

• Kansas voters left little room for interpretation when a sizable majority voted in August to reject a ballot measure that would have paved the way for a statewide abortion ban—but that isn’t stopping Republicans from attempting to force residents to continue unwanted pregnancies by imposing city-by-city bans.

• More than 250 organizations from 29 countries came together Friday to pressure the Salvadoran government to drop the charges against and release five water defenders who were instrumental in achieving a 2017 legislative ban on metal mining in El Salvador.

• Two years after President Joe Biden was inaugurated, his administration continues to advance Trump-era legal positions in dozens of court cases, a progressive watchdog group revealed Friday.

• The Russian trolls were overhyped.

• That’s the implication from a new study in Nature Communications, written by a team of six academics who tried to assess whether the Russian government’s Twitter propaganda effort during the 2016 campaign actually changed users’ minds. “We find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior,” the authors wrote.

• This isn’t a surprise to me — I’ve long believed the Russian troll farms had little impact. But with the afterlife of the Trump-Russia scandal remaining fiercely contested — with many on the right and some “heterodox” leftists continuing to question whether Russia did anything at all of significance — it’s worth looking back and taking stock of what the Russian government did do that year. Because it wasn’t nothing.

• Twitter’s fourth quarter revenue fell about 35% year over year to $1.025 billion, a top ad executive revealed at a staff meeting Wednesday, the most detailed sign yet of how much revenue has fallen. That was 72% of Twitter’s internal goal for the quarter, according to a slide showed to employees.

• The executive, Twitter’s global sales and marketing chief Chris Riedy, also said the company is hoping to generate $732 million in revenue in the first quarter, which would be a drop of 39% from the first quarter of last year.

• As you’ll recall, Elon Musk’s first “big idea” for “saving Twitter” was to get rid of the existing verification program, oddly and uncomfortably merge it with Twitter’s subscription program, Twitter Blue, and… um… profit? Lots and lots of people (including Twitter’s existing trust and safety team) explained why this was a stupid idea, but Musk insisted that the team of developers he was likely going to fire anyway had to get it ready in a week or he’d fire them.

• The bill for Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is coming due, with the billionaire facing unpalatable options on the company’s enormous debt pile, ranging from bankruptcy proceedings to another costly sale of Tesla shares.

• Three people close to the entrepreneur’s buyout of Twitter said the first installment of interest payments related to $13 billion of debt he used to fund the takeover could be due as soon as the end of January. That debt means the company must pay about $1.5 billion in annual interest payments.

• The Tesla and SpaceX chief financed his $44 billion deal to take Twitter private in October by securing the huge debt from a syndicate of banks led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and Mitsubishi. The $13 billion debt is held by Twitter at a corporate level, with no personal guarantee by Musk.

• Since the takeover, Musk has raced to cut costs, such as firing half the company’s staff, while seeking new revenue streams, such as launching its Twitter Blue subscription service.

• Alphabet’s job losses affect teams across the company including recruiting and some corporate functions, as well as some engineering and products teams.

• The layoffs are global and impact U.S. staff immediately.

• But before we can get at the prospect of more durable solution, it’s worth understanding why the Twitter polls are such charlatanry.

• First, Musk’s polls are more like push polls—surveys designed to produce a specific result by using manipulative or biased questions. In his first of two polls about unbanning several journalists whom he had suspended from the site for reporting critically on him, he framed the question by asking: “Unsuspend accounts who doxxed my exact location in real-time: now, tomorrow, 7 days from now, longer?” When none of the four options received above 50 percent, he scrapped the poll, though “now” won the plurality with 43 percent. The next poll offered only two options: now or seven days. But the brazen question remained, presenting it as axiomatic that the journalists doxxed his exact location when none of them did. It should be obvious why such framing is coercive and frowned on by reputable pollsters and statisticians.

• Last week, Twitter (with no notice or explanation) seemed to cut off API access to the most popular 3rd party Twitter clients. It was unclear if this was done on purpose or not. Earlier this week, it became pretty damn clear that it was done on purpose, after one of those providers, Tweetbot, dug up an old unused API key and tried to switch it in… only to have it cut off soon after.

• In a self-congratulatory article published in the Atlantic in 2017, Yossi Klein Halevi describes Israeli behavior at the just-conquered holy Muslim shrines in Occupied East Jerusalem in 1967 as “an astonishing moment of religious restraint”.

• Hoo boy. Now that Kevin McCarthy’s sold the farm and House Oversight Committee to a ragtag band of shouty MAGA “chuckleheads” – Gym, Lauren, MTG who’s finally gonna get Hillary for killing RFK – the House is working hard to expose “the Biden crime family,” shred the safety net, and ignore news that serial fabulist George Santos was a drag queen. Their buffoonery offers black comic relief, but many warn the chaos also signals a perilous “slow civil war.” Jon Stewart: “We cannot mistake absurdity for lack of danger.”

• If you rely on the corporate media, the 15 ballots it took to elect Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House might seem like a triumph for the Democratic Party, whose “quiet competence and unity,” NBC declared, “is a stark contrast not just to GOP fecklessness” but also to the usual media storyline of “Dems in disarray.” For once, Bloomberg noted approvingly, Democrats flexed their “unity muscles.”1

• WaPo’s Revelations About Russiagate Reporting Failures Typify Legacy Media Failures.

• The Democratic Party went into the midterm elections uncertain. Over the summer, President Biden hit his lowest approval rating with young people, a crucial part of the Democrats’ coalition, after a year and a half of his perceived inaction. Yet it was young people who eventually prevented a Republican sweep, showing up with the second-highest turnout in three decades and higher youth voter registration than in 2018. With this support, a potential Democratic blowout was converted to an undeniable victory—defying historical precedent.

• Deputies for the United Russia and New People parties have submitted to the State Duma a new bill, whose aim is to enable the National Guard to temporarily attach its troops to the staff of any state-run organization, facility, or institution, as well as companies in the country.

• Logic often appears in short supply in politics. This is because great decisions of state are not taken on the merits of the ostensible subject matter, but according to what best advances the career interest of the politicians with the power to decide.

• For a political leader who’s so transparently self-serving and incredibly thin-skinned, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan sure seems to have a knack for bending other parts of the world to his will.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• As Julian Assange awaits the final appeal of his looming extradition to the United States while languishing behind bars in London’s notorious Belmarsh Prison, leading left luminaries and free press advocates gathered in Washington, D.C. on Friday for the fourth sitting of the Belmarsh Tribunal, where they called on U.S. President Joe Biden to drop all charges against the WikiLeaks publisher.

• Look for Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange, by Kevin Gosztola, which will be published by The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press on February 21, 2023. And, looking ahead to March, Going Remote: A Teacher’s Journey, by Adam Bessie with illustrations by Peter Glanting, drops on March 14, 2023. Publishers Weekly has already published a prestigious starred review of Going Remote. Stay tuned for more exciting news about Going Remote in the near future! In the meantime, our publishing partner, Seven Stories Press, is currently offering fantastic deals on the Ebook versions of The Media and Me, our new book on critical media literacy, and State of the Free Press 2023. The Ebook version of The Media and Me is now on sale for just $5.39, and State of the Free Press 2023 is discounted to $7.79 when you order either book directly from Seven Stories. Both of these publications are great for the classroom and come with expert accompanying teaching guides. Grab a bargain and support independent book publishing at the same time!

• The FBI, CIA, NSA and other agencies have historically exploited their power but their limits appear boundless in the modern age.

• In Washington, D.C., human rights and free speech advocates gather today for the Belmarsh Tribunal, focused on the imprisonment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange has been languishing for close to four years in the harsh Belmarsh prison in London while appealing extradition to the United States on espionage charges. If convicted, Assange could face up to 175 years in jail for publishing documents that exposed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Five major news organizations that once partnered with WikiLeaks recently called on the Biden administration to drop charges against Assange. We speak to British MP and former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is in Washington, D.C., to participate in the Belmarsh Tribunal, about Assange and freedom of the press. We also cover the state of leftism around the globe, from labor rights in the U.K. and Europe to the war in Ukraine, to political unrest in Brazil and Peru.

• On Jan. 20, Democracy Now! will live-stream the Belmarsh Tribunal from Washington, D.C. The event will feature expert testimony from journalists, whistleblowers, lawyers, publishers and parliamentarians on assaults to press freedom and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Watch here live at 2 p.m. ET on Friday, Jan. 20. Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman and Srecko Horvat, […]

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is expected to stand trial this year. His case is emblematic of how far the US government will go to hide the truth.

• Shadowproof’s Kevin Gosztola, along with Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, Steven Donziger, Stella Assange, Jeffrey Sterling, and several other distinguished panelists, will be speaking as part of the Belmarsh Tribunal. The event on the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will take place at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, at 2pm ET. It is sponsored by Progressive International, and the tribunal will be chaired by Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” and Srećko Horvat.The tribunal is modeled after the Russell-Sartre tribunals that were convened by activists during the Vietnam War to call attention to war crimes committed by the US government. (See this video for example.)

Civil Rights/Policing

• Iranian authorities Saturday executed dual British-Iranian national and former public official Alireza Akbari on charges of “corruption in the land and extensive action against the internal and external security of the country through espionage” for the UK. The execution was reported by the state-run judicial news outlet Mizan Online.

• The report laid out various unsubstantiated allegations against Akbari. Officials accused Akbari, among other things, of obtaining information training and anti-prosecution training from the British Intelligence Service MI6. Akbari allegedly carried out espionage activities with the incentive of gaining British citizenship and a vast sum of more than $2 million in various currencies.

• Washington education officials have launched an investigation into the state’s largest network of privately run schools for students with disabilities, following a series of stories by The Seattle Times and ProPublica that documented poor conditions at the schools, the state disclosed Thursday.

• The investigation was revealed in a seven-page letter from the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction on the same day lawmakers considered a sweeping reform bill that would give the state greater oversight of the publicly funded system of private special education schools, known as “nonpublic agencies.”

• Last week, the four largest hospice trade associations jointly sent a detailed memo of policy proposals to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which regulates the end-of-life care benefit. Their 34 recommendations, which span eight pages, directly address the alarming business practices outlined by a recent ProPublica-New Yorker investigation.

• In news first reported by Mikael Thalen and David Covucci of of the Daily Dot, Swiss hacker maia arson crimew has found versions of the Transportation Security Administration’s “No-Fly” and “Selectee” lists dating from 2019 on insecure Amazon Web Services cloud servers used by the airline CommuteAir for software development and staging.

• CommuteAir is little known in its own name, but operates as a subcontractor to United Airlines for flights by regional jets between United hubs and secondary airports marketed under the “United Express” brand with United Airlines flight numbers.

• New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex has regularly made headlines for its outrageously inhumane conditions, brutal violence, many overdoses, and record number of deaths. Since 2015, a federal monitor has been assigned to oversee the jail, but the chaos, violence, and deaths have continued unabated. The year 2022 was the jail’s deadliest, with 19 deaths; the year before, another 16 died.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Recently, New York State passed a new law (pdf) demanding that regional broadband providers (Verizon, Charter Spectrum, and Altice) provide low-income consumers $15, 25 Mbps broadband tiers to help them survive COVID. The goal: to try and help struggling Americans afford the high cost of broadband during an historic health crisis. Under the proposal ISPs are also allowed to offer $20, 200 Mbps tiers, with any price increases capped at two percent per year.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• The good news: New York State recently passed landmark right to repair legislation that should improve consumer access to independent repair options. The bad news: despite passing the state assembly 147–2 and the senate 59–4, lobbyists managed to convince NY Governor Kathy Hochul to dramatically water down the legislation before it was passed, rendering it largely useless.

• Early 20th-century popular writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs loved writing about lost worlds: strange hidden kingdoms tucked away in the concealed and uncharted folds of the earth where antediluvian monsters like dinosaurs still stomped around or where the breakaway remnants of ancient Egyptian or Roman civilization continued unaware of the passage of the ensuing centuries.

• Thank you to everyone who wrote in to support these bills, and especially to our allies in the Repair Coalition who lead this fight. Despite these wins, however, it’s important that those who care about the right to repair keep pushing to build on these steps. Because while there are many victories to celebrate, there is still a long way to go. And the hard-won fights for the steps forward we took have exposed just how much opposition there is to the basic idea that you should be able to tinker with your own stuff.

• Take the New York law, for example. While it is indisputably a milestone, the law signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul took a huge step back from the version of the bill that had passed both houses of New York’s state legislature. It was significantly weakened at the last hurdle. Why? The Times Union (Albany, N.Y.) reported that TechNet, which represents tech industry groups, launched a targeted lobbying assault on New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, asking for her to veto the bill, to modify the bill, and exempt specific types of companies from being covered under it.

• They succeeded in a few major ways. The bill passed by the legislature would have covered all digital electronics, such as phones, tablets, and IT equipment. The law, as modified by the governor, will only cover products made after July 1, 2023. It also walked back language from the bill passed by the legislature by excluding products sold under “business-to-government” or “business-to-business” contracts. That could mean that schools, hospitals, and other organizations that manage a lot of devices will not benefit from the law. There are also a couple of loopholes added to the law, such as one that allows companies to offer assemblies of parts rather than the individual parts. Manufacturers may see this as an invitation to circumvent the spirit of the law, by making consumers buy unnecessary bundles of parts rather than just the one they need.

Monopolies

Patents

• One of the most common types of beekeeping hive is based around the Langstroth hive, first patented in the United States in 1852. While it does have some nice features like movable frames, the march of history has progressed considerably while this core of beekeeping practices has changed very little. But that really just means that beekeeping as a hobby is rife with opportunities for innovation, and [Advoko] is pioneering his own modern style of beehive.

Copyrights

• The latest higher-ed discourse is positively flooded with worries about ChatGPT, a free chatbot developed by the OpenAI research lab that produces fluent, if not always correct, responses to user prompts. Though there are anecdotal reports that it provides highly plausible and polished answers on occasion, ChatGPT still demonstrates obvious limitations and generally fails to provide perfectly coherent or accurate prose that meets academic standards of research and citation. But the technology is improving, and with a little fact-checking and revision, texts generated by current-generation AIs can be made to resemble original student submissions. Over winter break, many professors quickly revised their syllabi, anticipating a wave of machine-made writing that cannot be caught using conventional plagiarism checkers.

• Cuevana is not only South America’s most popular pirate streaming site, it’s one of the most visited in the entire world. In 2022, the MPA said that a recent iteration of ‘Cuevana3′ enjoyed more than 130 million visits in a single month. To date, Hollywood hasn’t been able to take the site down but could it be damaged by relentless DMCA notices and domain changes?

• Worldwide music industry group IFPI has obtained an interim order from the High Court in Delhi that requires local ISPs to block subscriber access to 18 YouTube-ripping sites. The action, coordinated by IFPI on behalf of Sony, Universal, and Warner, will attempt to encourage almost three-quarters of India’s music pirates to use legal sources exclusively.

• Each month throughout 2023, we will be spotlighting a different CC-licensed illustration from the collection on our social media headers and the CC blog. For January, we’re excited to showcase “Open Palms, Not Clutching Fists” by illustrator and visual artist, Burcu Köleli. The piece, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, was inspired by a quote from Maria Popova, founder and editor of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings):

• Yesterday, we wrote about the importance of fair use as a safeguard for free expression. But all too often, fair use and other legal limits on copyright are not enough to stop copyright enforcement from serving as cover for silencing critics.

• Time and again, we see copyright claims getting textbook fair uses erased from the internet, taking particular advantage of the Digital Millenium Copyright’s (DMCA) takedown regime. One culprit, the ironically named No Evil Foods, went after journalists and podcasters who reported on accusations of union-busting, claiming copyright in a union organizer’s recordings of anti-union presentations by management.

• Whether the presentations were even copyrightable was doubtful. And even if they were copyrightable, using such material to verify and strengthen news reporting is a textbook example of fair use. The public not only has an interest in this information; being able to hear the sources also helps us determine for ourselves how accurate the reporting is. By trying to silence critics using copyright, No Evil Foods was setting itself up for a lawsuit for its bad-faith use of the takedown system. So we sent a letter telling them to knock it off, explaining all of this in clear terms. The takedowns stopped after that.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I’ve read somewhere or other that there is solid evidence that the universe is still expanding. Perhaps the flipside of the big bang is a big crunch, where the universe reaches a certain size and then begins to contract? Maybe there have been infinitely many bang-crunch cycles before this one, and there will be many such cycles after our own big crunch has happened.

• To be honest, there are lots of unanswered questions here. Even closer to home, right here on Earth, there are unanswered questions. Like, what got life started here in the first place? There are proposed answers, but there are none that we can say is definitively correct. What we can say from the evidence is that life evolved from lower forms to higher forms over a process of billions of years.

Technical

Programming

• Recently I was learning a little bit of Lisp for something I may reveal in a few months. But a few days ago I hit a major roadblock, Lisp is running programs weirdly.

• 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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