● 01.25.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 25/01/2023: Stratis 3.5.0 and Many Political Links

Posted in News Roundup at 12:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Pop!_OS and Ubuntu both include the GNOME desktop environment by default. A desktop environment is responsible for the look and feel of the graphical desktop, and includes many of the key programs that get used every day.

• You can install an alternative desktop environment using the instructions below.

Applications

• Stratis 3.5.0 includes one significant enhancement as well as several smaller improvements.

• Most significantly, Stratis 3.5.0 extends its functionality to allow a user to add a cache to an encrypted pool. The cache devices are each encrypted with the same mechanism as the data devices; consequently the cache itself is encrypted.

• Console is proprietary software and it’s not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.

• For many years system and kernel logs were handled by a utility called syslogd. Most Linux-based operating systems have since moved to systemd, which has a journal. That’s a giant log file for the whole system.

Instructionals/Technical

• There are a bunch of properties you can use to adjust the styling of the mask.

• The property takes two arguments. The first one defines the size of the initial letter in terms of how many lines it occupies. The optional second argument defines the number of lines the initial letter should sink. If it’s omitted, it equals the initial letter size.

• That is why owning a domain (and publishing your content there) is like planting a tree: it’s value that starts small and grows. The best time to own a domain and publish your content there was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

• This page contains everything I’ve ever wanted when working with CSS named colors: groups, palettes, favorites, factoids and more.

• The main RFCs for mDNS appear to be RFC-6762 and RFC-6763 and to support them in full requires breaking changes to my library. The first are a bunch of flags, defined in RFC-6762 and it affects pretty much the entire codebase. The first deals with “Questions Requesting Unicast Responses.” Most flags are defined in the header section, but for this, it’s “the top bit in the class field of a DNS question as the unicast-response bit.” And because mDNS specifically allows multiple questions, it’s seems like it could be set per-question, and not per the request as a whole, as the RFC states: “[w]hen this bit is set in a question, it indicates that the querier is willing to accept unicast replies in response to this specific query, as well as the usual multicast responses.” To me, that says, “each resource record needs a flag for a unicast reponse.” The other bit the “outdated cache entry” bit. which again applies to individual resource records and not to the request as a whole. And again, to me, that says, “each resoure record needs a flag to invalidate previously cached values.”

• Today, in theory, you can use any Unicode character you like as part of a domain name, including emojis. Whether that is wise is something else.

• What does the standard says? Given a domain name, we should identify its labels. They are normally separated by dots (.) into labels: www.microsoft.com has three labels. But you may also use other Unicode characters as separators ( ., ．, 。, ｡). Each label is further processed. If it is all ASCII, then it is left as is. Otherwise, we must convert it to an ASCII code called “punycode” after doing the following according to RFC 3454: [...]

• Today I did some work on the disk setup of my home desktop and I got shot in the foot, because when you remove disks from Linux software RAID arrays and then reboot, the boot process may reassemble those RAID arrays using the disks you removed (or even just one disk), instead of the actual live disks in the RAID array. There are a number of reasons that this happened to me, but one of them is that I didn’t make a checklist for what I was doing and instead did it on the fly.

• I love working with spreadsheets, and my favorite spreadsheet application is LibreOffice Calc. A spreadsheet is a grid of cells where each column is represented by letters and rows are numbered. You can perform all kinds of calculations using a spreadsheet. If you can perform a calculation based on other values, you can do that in a spreadsheet.

• Here I illustrate how to use the LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet to perform a particular calculation called the Fibonacci Sequence. Fibonacci Sequence numbers pop up everywhere in mathematics and the sciences and are often used to model a simple population growth.

• New Linux users often install a lot of unnecessary APT packages that they might rarely use in the future. Also, a few bulky distributions come with many pre-installed APT packages.

• When the Linux system is running low on disk space, it becomes necessary to clean the APT packages to free up some space, as they can cause performance issues and even prevent the system from booting properly.

• There are several ways to find the APT packages that are taking up the most space on your Debian or Ubuntu system; however, we will only cover two of them in this article.

• If you want to develop web applications using PHP on Pop!_OS, you may need to install multiple versions of PHP for testing or compatibility purposes. One way to install multiple versions of PHP on Pop!_OS is to use a Personal Package Archive (PPA). At the day of writing this tutorial PHP 8.2 is the latest version available.

• Python 3.11 is recently launched with multiple improvement and security upgrades. This version provides developers to easily debug their code with fine-grained error locations in tracebacks. The new “Self” annotation provides a simple way to annotate methods that return an instance of their class.

• Mostly the latest operating systems comes with the latest Python versions. But the OS versions released before the release of Python 3.11 may not have the latest version . This tutorial will help you to install Python 3.11 on your CentOS, Red Hat & Fedora operating systems by compiling it from source code.

• OnlyOffice (formerly TeamLab), stylized as ONLYOFFICE, is a free software office suite developed by Ascensio System SIA, a subsidiary of “New Communication Technologies”, a company from Russia, but headquartered in Riga, Latvia. In Russian market branded as P7-Office. It features online document editors, platform for document management, corporate communication, mail and project management tools.

• MySQL is one of the most popular open-source relational database management systems. It is used by many websites and applications to store and retrieve data. In this article, we will be discussing how to install MySQL on a Linux machine using the generic binaries.

• Before we begin, it’s important to note that there are different distributions of Linux, such as Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora. The instructions in this article are for Ubuntu and Debian, but the process is similar for other distributions.

• MySQL is a widely used open-source relational database management system. It is commonly used for web applications and can be used to manage and store data for various types of applications. MySQL 8 is the latest version of the software, and it comes with many new features and improvements. In this article, we will discuss how to start and stop MySQL 8 on different operating systems.

• MySQL is a popular open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) that is widely used for web applications and data management. However, sometimes, you may need to uninstall MySQL 8 from your system for various reasons, such as upgrading to a newer version or removing it to free up space. In this article, we will discuss how to uninstall MySQL 8 from Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

• Customize how you run containers in Podman by changing the user namespace while in rootless mode.

WINE or Emulation

• Wine 8.0 is out now, a big improvement over the last stable release with many upgrades for Windows to Linux compatibility across thousands of games and apps. This is part of what makes up Steam Play Proton, the compatibility used on Steam Deck to run Windows games.

• Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows applications that has been the primary choice of many Linux users who rely on running such programs.

• Over the years, it has received numerous updates that allow it to run Windows apps with ease on a variety of hardware.

• The last major release was Wine 7.0, that offered several important improvements. It was also receiving regular bi-weekly development releases ever since.

• With the recent announcement, Wine 8.0 has officially landed that unified all the changes from the 7.x release and makes it better.

• After a couple of months of development, testing and RC phase, the Wine team announced the release of Wine 8.0 stable version. This major release brings several improvements over its predecessor to this Windows compatibility layer for UNix-based systems. Changes spread across exe, DLL support, 32-bit execution of apps, gaming performance improvements via Wine, input hardware controller support and many more.

• Here’s a quick summary of this release.

• DXVK, one of the secret sauces included with the Proton compatibility layer, has a big new release out now. DXVK 2.1 adds in some big new features like HDR!

Games

• Between 2023-01-18 and 2023-01-25 there were 28 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 256 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 10.9 % of total released titles.

• We’re getting dangerously close to the first Release Candidate for Godot 4.0, and focus on finalizing many of the remaining high priority issues. The beta snapshots cadence allows us to better measure the overall stability and quickly catch regressions, especially when a lot of features are worked on at the same time.

• Update 25/01/23: Valve are now forcing the spoofing of a Steam Deck server-side, so the workaround is no longer needed.

• Valve gave Proton Experimental a small update with two improvements, plus for users of GE-Proton you may want to know about an important version bump there too for Steam Deck and Linux desktop gamers.

• Valve has again continued to go through various EA games that were previously problematic on Steam Deck due to the new EA App, with lots of them now marked as Steam Deck Playable.

• A Steam Deck plugin for Decky Loader that I recently mentioned, ControllerTools, has a fresh update out to make it more useful.

• The developers of the awesome Factorio have announced that the price is about to go up, so if you still haven’t purchased it now is the time. Honestly this truly is one of the best indie games ever made, with full Native Linux support and it is Steam Deck “Playable” too.

• Valve continues to roll out new unstable releases of the Steam Client for Desktop and Steam Deck, with a new update giving the ability to move the on-screen keyboard. Looks like someone has been reading my wishlist.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• New year, new digiKam Recipes book release. The new version features the completely rewritten Tag faces with the Face Recognition feature chapter and an all-new example workflow section in the Batch process photos and RAW files chapter. Several chapters have been revised and improved, including Edit tags with Tag Manager, Color management in digiKam, and Move digiKam library and databases. All screenshots have been refreshed, too. As always, the new revision includes plenty of tweaks and fixes.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora Family / IBM

• Despite increasing layoffs across the country, demand for IT pros remains high, especially for software developers and senior software developers.

• According to our recent IT & Development Outlook Report, 89 percent of CIOs and CTOs say that the global shortage of software developers has impacted them. According to another recent report, over 100,000 jobs for IT pros have gone unfulfilled in the U.S.

• Returning to the office can be a jarring experience after years of working at home. When my company, Alphawave IP, began its transition to a hybrid model, I had to re-incorporate a long commute and break the work-from-home routine I had become accustomed to, balancing work and life as a full-time CTO, professor, husband, and father.

• However, by structuring each day and optimizing work based on the changing environment, I found that I can create a healthy work/life balance and experience the joy of meeting with my colleagues and students in person again.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Aetina unveiled earlier this month an embedded platform compatible with the Jetson ORIN NANO 8GB and Jetson ORIN NX 16GB SoM models. This industrial grade AI platform offers 1x RJ45 GbE port, 1x HDMI port, 1x M.2 2242 slot and many other peripherals.

• He’s been testing 40 of these in a rack at Jetbrains for months, and they’re about to go live on Kickstarter.

• But why build a cluster with these Blades? And what good are they if you can’t even buy a Compute Module 4 from Raspberry Pi? Do any alternative compute modules work? I’ll get to ALL those questions in this blog post.

• This tutorial was inspired by the Entaniya waterproof case for the Raspberry Pi Camera Module. This case protects the Camera Module without distorting the image. With it, we can submerge a camera into the depths of an aquarium and keep an eye on our fishy pals by streaming video. If that doesn’t appeal, you can adapt this tutorial to be able to monitor a video stream of anything you like, whether it be indoors or outdoors. Combined with Home Assistant, you can soon be monitoring your cameras from anywhere in the world.

• Barely a week goes by without another hack blessing the RP2040 with a further interfacing superpower. This time it’s the turn of the humble PAL standard composite video interface. As many of us of at least a certain vintage will be familiar with, the Phase Alternate Line (PAL to friends) standard was used mainly in Europe (not France, they used SECAM like Russia, China, and co) and Australasia, and is a little different from the much earlier NTSC standard those in the US may fondly recollect. Anyway, [Fred] stresses that this hack isn’t for the faint-hearted, as the RP2040 needs one heck of an overclock (up to 312 MHz, some 241% over stock) to be able to pull off the needed amount of processing grunt. This is much more than yet another PIO hack.

• SOCORAD32, aka ESP32 Software Controlled Radio, is a hackable, open-source hardware ESP32-based amateur radio board for walkie-talkie and data communication applications.

• The board comes with an ESP32 module with WiFi 4 and Bluetooth connectivity, an RDA Microelectronics RDA1846 RF IC used in many commercial walkie-talkies and offering a range up of to 5 km, a small display, a speaker, and a 18650 battery holder.

• In our first seminar of 2023, we were delighted to welcome Dr Katie Rich and Carla Strickland. They spoke to us about teaching the programming construct of variables in Grade 3 and 4 (age 8 to 10).

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• A common point in the Linux community is that escaping the walled garden of ecosystems like Android or iOS is already a means to higher security: no contact with Google or Apple servers ever again, nor cloud providers snooping on private files or contacts.

• The ability to freely sideload applications, switch and update kernels, plus a deeper knowledge of what data apps send to remote servers means that total control of one’s device is finally achievable. And, of course, the mainline Linux kernel is intrinsically safer than the half-baked-often-abandoned-heavily-patched manufacturer kernels (“downstream”) that most mobile devices rely on.

• There is no catch here: the above are perfectly sound points. But while Linux phones can be potentially more secure devices in the entire control of their owners, it is important to realize that most Linux systems are not any that secure by default, as most distributions prioritize freedom over strict internal isolation. Don’t panic, though: we’ll go through it.

• In a press conference on Thursday, India announced a new mobile operating system, BharOS, as part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s goal to make India self-reliant in the tech sector, including telecommunications and chip-fabrication.

• Before you get too excited about having a new mobile operating system to fiddle around with, it’s not quite that new. It’s based on Android, or more specifically AOSP, the Android Open Source Project.

• The BharOS is an Indian government-funded project to develop a free and open-source operating system (OS) for use in government and public systems.

• However, there is no official date disclosed yet for when mainstream users will be able to access and install BharOS. There is also no official information about when BharOS will be available on Android/iOS app stores and smartphones.

• BharOS is actually based on Android Open Source Project (AOSP) so it is more similar to Android than iOS. The only difference between Android and BharOS is that the latter doesn’t include any Google services, allowing users to download any application of their choice.

• Reports suggest that BharOS will be available on a range of devices including laptops, phones, as well as desktops, however, it is still being developed and its release date has not been announced yet. Furthermore, unlike Windows OS, a single build of BharOS cannot be installed on all Android phones, therefore, even after the wider roll-out might not be available for all devices. So far, it is reportedly said to be compatible with Google Pixel smartphones but there is no official confirmation by the developers.

• Area 120 was created in 2016 to create experimental apps and services which could be subsequently absorbed into Google. Some of the important projects that have emerged out of Area 120 include HTM5 gaming platform GameSnacke (integrated with Google Chrome), conversational ads platform AdLingo, and video platforms Tangi and Shoploop. Since 2021, the Area 120 group has been housed in the new Google Labs division headed by Clay Bavor. Before the recent cuts, Area 120 was downsized and half the projects were cancelled in September 2022.

• The job cuts were applied across the megacorp, including 16 percent of the Fuchsia team reportedly getting the bullet, along with folk in the datacenter maintenance team, product designers and user experience researchers, according to the New York Times. The Other Bets portion of Google has also come under the spotlight for investing in innovations that have yet to show a sustained return in terms of profit, notably Waymo.

• Reports are still coming in about what impact these layoffs will have on the various divisions of Google, with the Fuchsia and Area 120 divisions said to be disproportionately affected.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Often our first interaction with open source is through community knowledge bases.

• This past year, I have had the fantastic opportunity to work with the many authors here at Opensource.com (and bring in some new ones!). I am fortunate enough to meet with our Correspondents program authors weekly and see some authors at in-person and virtual conferences. We are diverse in our knowledge, locations, backgrounds, and uniquely lived experiences.

• Each January, we celebrate the community of authors at Opensource.com. So, (drumroll please), I’m pleased to present the People’s Choice Award winners for 2022!

• The Southern California Linux Expo, better known as Scale (commonly printed as SCaLE), one of the big tent events on the Linux and open source conference circuit, is bouncing back from the lean Covid years very well.

• Last year, back in the saddle after shutting down due to Covid lockdown in 2021, the event snagged as a keynote speaker none other than Vint Cerf, creator of TCP/IP and widely regarded as one of the, if not the, father of the internet. Who wouldn’t want to see that?

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• Up until now, U-boot would only support the User datagram protocol (UDP) allowing for TFTP and NFS boot, but Linaro has now added support for TCP and HTTP in U-boot in order to boot Linux from common web servers.

• TFTP boot from U-boot has been supported for years, as around the year 2006 I remember implementing TFTP Linux boot for a Karaoke system in order to lower the BoM cost by selecting a smaller flash device, and I also explained how to boot Linux on a TV box with TFTP back in 2014. This requires installing a TFTP server on your server, which is quite a trivial task, but HTTP servers are omnipresent, so it’s a welcome addition to U-boot.

• I do not often include videos on my blog, but when I do, I test to make sure they work. And to my dismay, these HTML5 videos could start, they could pause, but any time I attempted to seek the video playback position, it would fail.

Education

• As a result, the pay scale for data scientists is fairly decent, which is one of the primary reasons why people are gravitating toward this field.

• However, as simple as it may sound, becoming a successful data scientist necessitates a set of skills that employers seek.

• I am taking away many learnings from this talk. First, preparation upfront, and adequate rehersal time, is crucial. I prepared my demos and tested them in advance of the talk, leaving enough time to ensure I could make any changes as needed. This made me feel a lot more comfortable as I was talking. In addition, rehersal time helped me ponder what auxillery resources I should prepare that would make the talk more seamless. For example, I prepared some short code snippets that freed up time in my talk to walk through more of the how to of Webmention.

• Anyway, on to the main thing. A couple of years ago I started work on a Logic for Programmers pamphlet, then ADDed into some other project. I started work on it again last week with the hope (the hope) of having an early version available by the end of winter. I’m writing the book in Sphinx but compiling it to LaTeX and then a pdf. I like using Sphinx because it’s (relatively) easy to create “directives”, or new types of content with special processing rules.

Programming/Development

• I’m working on a database system that stores and queries chess games and positions. Right now, it contains 240 million unique positions1 from 3.8 million games. One of the things it needs to do is quickly find all the games where a particular position occurs. I’d also like it to do things like find games where this position occurs and it ends in a draw.

• Bitmaps are really useful here, and with some care they can achieve unbelievable efficiency. They can also be really slow if you’re not careful. It’s a journey.

• We’ll start by looking at how my bitmaps are implemented, and then we’ll see how an assumption punished me severely and how I fixed it to make things a lot faster.

• Complexity is bad. Simple software is better than complex software.

• But software is complex for a reason. While people like coming up with grand theories of complexity (Simple Made Easy, No Silver Bullet) there’s very little info out there on the nitty-gritty specific sources of complexity. Without that, all the theories feel to me like the four elements theory. We just don’t have the data needed to come up with something more predictive. 1

• I think a lot about the different sources of complexity. This article is about one particular source.

Leftovers

• I hate leaderboards. I think competition tends to corrupt the incentives people have to contribute to a goal.

• Yet, at the same time, I was delighted to see that I was the top mapper in the whole of Aotearoa New Zealand.

• One such bouncing question deals with port numbers. It seems like every time I run npm start on a web project, it’s a roll of the dice as to which port of localhost I’ll get a local dev server on.

• For most of us, an 8-bit microcomputer means one of the home computers which set so many of us on our way back in the 1980s. But this ignores an entire generation of 1970s 8-bit machines which filled the market for affordable office and industrial desktop computing before we were seduced by Pac-Man or Frogger. It’s one of these, an SWTPC 6809, that’s found its way into the hands of [Look Mum No Computer], and in direct contradiction to his branding, he’s used it to control a synthesizer.

• After seeing White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s acclaimed 1985 novel, at the New York Film Festival, I discussed the movie with a couple of friends as we walked back to the subway. They had mixed to negative reactions, for a bevy of reasons, but they shared one thing: They felt that the film’s thematic concerns—consumerism as an American religion, the media’s power to shape human behavior, the collapse of high and low culture—were fundamentally dated and quaint. The story of college professor Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig), and their brood of children and stepchildren confronting an “airborne toxic event”—a noxious cloud from a chemical spill that threatens the fictional town of Blacksmith—comports broadly with the tropes of a disaster film, but the fixation on contemporary pop culture can feel tired when depicted on-screen. We live in the age of watered-down postmodernism; contemporary audiences are trained to closely analyze cultural flotsam, inured to metatextuality and pastiche in forms as varied as Quentin Tarantino films and single-camera sitcoms.

Education

• There are three specific activities I have loved in some product managers I’ve worked with (and missed in others).

• On October 6 of last year, Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor of art history, showed a well-known medieval image of the Prophet Muhammad to her students. What happened in the classroom is a matter of some dispute and an ongoing lawsuit, but afterward, a Muslim student lodged an official complaint with the university, and eventually the chair of her department informed López Prater that she would not be returning in the spring to teach another course as previously planned. By December, the story had become the latest anecdote in the narrative about political correctness on college campuses, evidence that the “woke mob” was running amok.

• It’s a reworking of Graeber’s anthropology doctoral research, studying the Zana-Malata people of Madagascar, the living descendants of the feminist, anarchist pirates who ruled the island in the early 18th century.

• Now that I know a li’l bit more, I think one reason for why they couldn’t is because sentence division is on the syntax layer while paragraph division is on the semantic layer. My guideline is that a paragraph should start and end “being about the same thing”, unlike a DJ segueing from talking about one song to another. Introduce a new concept? New paragraph.

• It took almost 10 years of teaching before I finally grasped the extent to which secondary American history textbooks fostered misunderstanding and confusion.  The depth of the problem became apparent following class discussions of a 12-page reading assignment on the “Origins of the Cold War.” When I made […]

• Teachers in at least one Florida county this week began removing or covering books in their classrooms to avoid running afoul of a new law requiring every volume to be vetted by a state-trained “media specialist”—violation of which could result in felony charges.

Hardware

• While you could 3D print a lampshade, there’s something to be said for having a more active role in the process of creating an object. [THINKK Studio] has made custom lampshades as easy as riding a bike.

• Picking the best resin (SLA) printer is not an easy task. Every large and small 3D printer manufacturer offers a range of models covering many features that are backed by an equally extensive range of customer support. Although review sites and user feedback on forums can help with making a decision, especially for beginners it can feel like just a wild guess. Even for advanced users, it is a chore to stay on top of all the goings-on within the world of resin printers. This is where [VOG] (VOGMan, formerly VegOilGuy) as a popular resin printer review site is asking for feedback (video also linked below) from his viewers on their printer experiences.

• In a recent episode of [The Retro Shack], a new Commodore VIC-20 is built, using a ‘Vicky Twenty’ replacement PCB by [Bob’s Bits] as the base and as many new components as could be found. The occasion for this was that a viewer had sent in a VIC-20 that turned out to be broken, so in order to diagnose it, building a new one with known working parts seemed incredibly useful.

• When the first radios and telegraph lines were put into service, essentially the only way to communicate was to use Morse code. The first transmitters had extremely inefficient designs by today’s standards, so this was more a practical limitation than a choice. As the technology evolved there became less and less reason to use Morse to communicate, but plenty of amateur radio operators still use this mode including [Kevin] aka [KB9RLW] who has built a circuit which can translate spoken Morse code into a broadcasted Morse radio signal.

• The Internet has allowed us to communicate more easily than ever before, and thanks to modern cell-phone networks, we don’t even have to be tied down to a hard line anymore. But what if you want something a little more direct? Maybe you’re in an area with no cell-phone coverage, or you don’t want to use public networks for whatever reason. For those cases, you might be interested in this Secure Communication Network project by [Thomas].

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Jeff Zients seems to be coming into the role of White House chief of staff out of central casting. At a moment of economic uncertainty, the former private equity executive radiates can-do confidence. As the Covid pandemic drags on through the winter, Zients can cite his last résumé entry—Covid czar for the first year and half of the Biden administration—as another high-profile exercise in building public confidence and managing public expectations. Perhaps most crucially, Zients can draw on his private-sector bona fides to ensure the major legislative victories of the Biden White House are secured and translated into palpable gains for ordinary Americans in the run-up to a prospective Biden bid for reelection in 2024. At the same time, Zients’s critics say that his record of equivocal deal-cutting has been a serious liability throughout his career in both the private and public sector.

• Biodiversity defenders have sounded the alarm about the United Kingdom government’s Monday decision to provide another so-called “emergency” exception for the use of an outlawed neonicotinoid pesticide lethal to bees.

• To reach this conclusion, the researchers compared levels of perfluorooctanoic acid (or PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) in rainwater from around the world with the drinking water guidelines established by environmental agencies in the United States and Denmark, “which are the most stringent advisories known globally.” Based on the latest US guidelines for PFOA in drinking water, “rainwater everywhere would be judged unsafe to drink,” the lead author of the study, Ian Cousins, stated in a press release.

• During his contentious campaign to become Nevada governor, Joe Lombardo accused the Democratic incumbent of catering to the family of a donor and their lobbyist who helped an error-prone COVID-19 testing lab get licensed in the state.

• Shortly after he won the race, Lombardo, a Republican, quietly turned to that same lobbyist for help building the state budget, giving him access to confidential documents and putting him in a position that allowed him to advocate for state funding sought by his clients.

Proprietary

• Microsoft Corp on Wednesday was hit with a networking outage that took down its cloud platform Azure along with services such as Teams and Outlook, potentially affecting millions of users globally.

• Data from outage tracking website Downdetector showed more than 5,000 reports in the UK alone.

• Fast forward to today and the situation is far more murkier and less clear. For starters, MacOS lacks a wide variety of quality of life features that you can basically expect out of the box in Windows along with most high end Linux desktop environments. For example the ability to easily move application windows between multiple monitors using keyboard shortcuts, or snap windows into place so they partially occupy portions of a particular screen are completely missing out of the box. Yes there are third party applications like Rectangle that will add these features to MacOS at no cost, but I can’t help but to wonder why a modern OS in 2023 requires third party addons for something that basically became standard functionality when they first debutted with Windows 7 in 2009.

• Ransomware payments are dropping even as there’s been a shift in hackers’ tactics toward using wiper malware to delete data rather than ransom it, according to data released in two reports issued this week. First up, Chainalysis, which tracks cryptocurrency payments to and from known hackers’ accounts, says ransomware groups extorted $311 million less in 2022 compared to the $768 million they scored from victims in 2021.

• The article starts with the rise and fall of Java EE, then it goes through the rise and fall of (SOAP/XML based) web-services, and finally it lands on the current hot topic of containerized deployments.

• It’s perhaps a bit of dry writing, however it boiled down the situation quite nicely. (Although I might be extremely biased…)

Linux Foundation

• Who knows? It’s a mess of old ideas–I’d declared AR was old hat back in 2009–dressed up with new language. But, combined, there may be something novel and worthwhile here. But, neither Meta nor any other company will pull that off. You know who might, though? The newly minted Open Metaverse Foundation (OMF), that’s who.

• Why do I think an open-source approach might succeed when Meta Reality Labs alone has spent billions on the metaverse? Indeed, Meta’s already lost over $10 billion in 2022 alone. Looking ahead, Meta CFO, Dave Wehner, said, he expected, “that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year.”

• Ouch!

• I believe the open-source way can win out for the same reason it has in so many other fields. By enabling people to work together via the Linux Foundation-sponsored Open Metaverse Foundation, they can create an open metaverse that will enable everyone to play and profit from it. By enabling everyone to work with open hardware, open code, and open standards, the market pie will be larger for everyone.

Security

• Before Christmas 2022, there was a truly nasty security hole in the Linux 5.15 in-kernel Server Message Block (SMB) server, ksmbd. It could be used to execute code in the kernel context. In short: Bad. But, the newest ksmbd security problem, discovered by the Sysdig Threat Team, is relatively minor.

• Ksmbd, introduced to the kernel in 2021, was developed by Samsung. Its goal was to deliver speedy SMB3 file-serving performance. SMB is used in Windows and Linux–via Samba–as an important file server protocol. Most distributions do not have Ksmbd compiled into the kernel or enabled by default.

• On our tour of South Korea’s so-called security applications we’ve already took a look at TouchEn nxKey, an application meant to combat keyloggers by … checks notes … making keylogging easier. Today I want to shed some light on another application that many people in South Korea had to install on their computers: IPinside LWS Agent by Interezen.

• The stated goal of the application is retrieving your “real” IP address to prevent online fraud. I found however that it collects way more data. And while it exposes this trove of data to any website asking politely, it doesn’t look like it is all too helpful for combating actual fraud.

• Denis Emelyantsev, a 36-year-old Russian man accused of running a massive botnet called RSOCKS that stitched malware into millions of devices worldwide, pleaded guilty to two counts of computer crime violations in a California courtroom this week. The plea comes just months after Emelyantsev was extradited from Bulgaria, where he told investigators, “America is looking for me because I have enormous information and they need it.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• We are excited to announce the result of our open call for board members – three new members are joining the Tor Project’s Board of Directors: Esra’a Al Shafei, Sarah Gran and Christian Kaufman! Each new member comes to Tor with a different set of expertise that will help the organization and our community. At the end of this post, you can read each of their bios.

• Please join us in welcoming Esra’a, Sarah, and Christian to the board!

• Automated web scraping can be problematic. Just look at Clearview, which has leveraged open access to public websites to create a facial recognition program it now sells to government agencies. But web scraping can also be quite useful for people who don’t have the power or funding government agencies and their private contractors have access to.

• `Such digital surveillance would be illegal in Germany. This is the conclusion of a study by the Scientific Services in the Bundestag, commissioned by Andrej Hunko, a member of the Left Party. „Intelligence activities of foreign intelligence services in Germany are fundamentally inadmissible as an exercise of foreign state power, unless the Federal Republic permits them,“ the experts write. However, there is no legal basis for such permission. This also applies to the surveillance of telecommunications.

• This is also the view of intelligence services expert Thorsten Wetzling, who heads the „Surveillance, Fundamental Rights and Democracy“ department at the Berlin-based Stiftung Neue Verantwortung. He further refers to the case law of the Federal Constitutional Court on foreign telecommunications surveillance by the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), according to which independent surveillance measures by foreign services in Germany should not depend on simple tolerance on the part of the federal government in Berlin.

• The EU Parliament is probing one of Europe’s biggest espionage scandals, but has little power to do so. Europol should investigate the misuse of „state trojan „Pegasus“ in the EU, MEPs demand. However, this would only be possible with the permission of governments, which would be violating fundamental rights.

• Governmental surveillance software such as „Pegasus“ is used to monitor mobile phones remotely. The programmes, known in Germany as „state trojans“, can be installed on devices of targeted persons via manipulated links. This turns the mobile phone into a bug: attackers can switch on the microphone and camera, read out location data and listen in on all communications.

• The Canadian civil rights organisation Citizen Lab was able to prove in 2016 that some EU states were using „Pegasus“ to spy on political opponents, their lawyers and even critical journalists. This violates the fundamental rights of many of those affected, but also the confidential lawyer-client relationship or the protection of sources, which is important for media professionals.

Defence/Aggression

• It is far past time to reenact an assault weapons ban and get these weapons of war out of our communities.

• Around 15 advisers, deputy ministers and regional governors either resigned or were fired as a massive corruption drive shakes up the Ukrainian government.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has approved amendments to the country’s Criminal Code that impose harsher penalties for soldiers who commit certain offenses during wartime.

• Across the regions it annexed last year in Ukraine, the Putin administration and its domestic politics team are busy laying the groundwork to “elect” parliamentary and local officials. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev spoke with several Kremlin insiders about the preparations and who is in charge of forming collaborationist governments in occupied Ukraine.

• Given the secrecy typically accorded to the military and the inclination of government officials to skew data to satisfy the preferences of those in power, intelligence failures are anything but unusual in this country’s security affairs. In 2003, for instance, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq based on claims—later found to be baseless—that its leader, Saddam Hussein, was developing or already possessed weapons of mass destruction. Similarly, the instant collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021, when the United States completed the withdrawal of its forces from that country, came as a shock only because of wildly optimistic intelligence estimates of that government’s strength. Now, the Department of Defense has delivered another massive intelligence failure, this time on China’s future threat to American security.

• You can judge an audience by how much bullshit they tolerate from the podium. By that standard, the World Economic Forum attendees in Davos, Switzerland last week were either depraved or craven. Why else would FBI chief Christopher Wray not get hooted down for portraying his agency as “good guys?”

• Why was the FBI boss even making an appearance at a conference chockful of political weasels, billionaires, and depraved activists like former Vice President Al Gore? Actually, Wray was part of a panel on national security that included luminaries such as Ukrainian Vice-Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, who could have offered insights from her government’s perpetual failed war against pervasive corruption. Wray boasted that “the level of collaboration between the private sector and the government, especially the FBI has, I think, made significant strides.”

• The West’s recent approval of more military assistance for Kiev risks nuclear nightmare, fails Ukrainian expectations and rebukes the World War II history enshrined in a prominent Soviet war memorial in Berlin.

• Former CIA analyst Fulton Armstrong told The Guardian that, in Cuba, “a lot of the so-called independent journalists are indirectly funded by the US”. They spread anti-government disinformation with the support of the NED.

• The Global Firepower ranking was published on January 6. The annual report classifies the world’s strongest militaries based on over 60 factors, including size, spending and technological advancements.

• The report, which placed the United States military on top, followed by Russia, China, India and the UK, raised more questions than answers, with some accusing GFP, the organization that compiled the report, of being biased, sloppy and highly politicized.

• February 19, New Anti-Interventionist Coalition To March To White House from Lincoln Memorial.

• On February 19, Washington, DC, will witness a protest against the war in Ukraine that marks a sharp departure from past demonstrations.  The lead demand is simple and direct, “Not One More Penny for war in Ukraine.”  It is a demand that emphasizes what we in the US can do to end the war, not what others can do.  After all, the only government we have the power to influence is our own.

• As California is reeling after three mass shootings over the past three days, we go to Oakland to speak with Connie Wun, co-founder of the AAPI Women Lead organization and a researcher on race and gender violence, and look at the state of gun control with Nick Suplina, managing director for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety.

• Given the secrecy typically accorded to the military and the inclination of government officials to skew data to satisfy the preferences of those in power, intelligence failures are anything but unusual in this country’s security affairs. In 2003, for instance, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq based on claims — later found to be baseless— that its leader, Saddam Hussein, was developing or already possessed weapons of mass destruction. Similarly, the instant collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021, when the U.S. completed the withdrawal of its forces from that country, came as a shock only because of wildly optimistic intelligence estimates of that government’s strength. Now, the Department of Defense has delivered another massive intelligence failure, this time on China’s future threat to American security.

• The Pentagon is required by law to provide Congress and the public with an annual report on “military and security developments involving the People’s Republic of China,” or PRC, over the next 20 years. The 2022 version, 196 pages of detailed information published last November 29th, focused on its current and future military threat to the United States. In two decades, so we’re assured, China’s military — the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA — will be superbly equipped to counter Washington should a conflict arise over Taiwan or navigation rights in the South China Sea. But here’s the shocking thing: in those nearly 200 pages of analysis, there wasn’t a single word — not one — devoted to China’s role in what will pose the most pressing threat to our security in the years to come: runaway climate change.

• The January 18 helicopter crash that killed 14 in Brovary was probably due to bad weather and a convergence of wartime factors, reports the Ukrainian news outlet Strana.ua, citing sources in the Ministry of the Interior. Flying in the fog, with poor visibility, the pilot was late to notice a high-rise building, sources claim.

• Moscow’s All-Russian Decorative Art Museum has removed a painting by contemporary Russian artist Dmitry Shagin, the founder of the art group Mitki, from its display. The painting shows six people in the blue and white striped shirts traditionally worn by many Russian military servicemen holding up a sign that reads, “Mitki don’t want to defeat anybody!”

• In a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov told him that 25 residents had been killed, and 96 more injured, as a result of Ukrainian shelling since the start of the war (which he called a “special military operation”).

• Last month, attorney Pavel Chikov joined Meduza’s Russian-language podcast “What Happened” to discuss Russia’s main legal trend in 2022: the strengthening of the police state inside the country against a backdrop of the war in Ukraine. The show’s host, Vladislav Gorin, premised the interview on the thought that Russia’s increasingly repressive regulation of society is both the domestic equivalent of the Kremlin’s fear-based foreign policy and an instrument of achieving Putin’s military goals by forcing the population to power the invasion. Pavel Chikov described Russia’s changing legal landscape from his perspective as a practicing attorney and the head of the Agora human rights organization. The interview addressed major changes in Russia’s repressive machinery since the start of the invasion and assessed this system’s capabilities now, a year into the war. Anna Razumnaya distills the show’s key highlights.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• With a sitting president, a former president, and a former vice president now implicated in the mishandling of classified information, the classification system itself is coming under scrutiny. This attention is long overdue. But there’s a danger that some observers will conclude we need stronger protections for our nation’s secrets, such as tighter handling restrictions or enhanced penalties for violations.

• Through the course of his political life, the current US president has often been injudicious. He has stumbled, bungled and miscalculated.  His electoral victory was fortuitous, aided by a number of factors, not least the conduct of his opponent and the murderous gift of a global pandemic.  Along with his fellow Democrats, he has made the issue of Donald Trump a matter of pathology rather than politics.

• It is precisely that pathological approach that has come back to haunt his administration.  While Trump continues to be characterised as the proto-authoritarian in waiting, squirreling off classified documents that should have been deposited in the national archives, Biden claimed to be above such behaviour.

Environment

• Killing of environmental activists have been concentrated in the Global South, with 68 percent occurring in Latin America. Three-hundred-forty-two killings occurred in Brazil, 322 occurred in Columbia, 154 occurred in Mexico, 177 occurred in Honduras, and 80 occurred in Guatemala. Outside Latin America, the Philippines accounted for 270 killings and India accounted for 79.

• When I was a teenager, I knew global warming was caused by fossil fuels. So did Exxon.

• For decades, Exxon has been hiding the truth about the climate crisis, burying their own scientific reports. From 1970 to 2003, the oil company ran studies that accurately predicted the disastrous consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels.

• As the worsening climate emergency creates an increasing number of migrants around the world, the economic effects of the planetary crisis are paradoxically making millions of people throughout the Global South too poor to escape its ravages.

Energy/Transportation

• Louisiana Democratic Party leaders are accused of funneling thousands of dollars from utility companies to the campaign of a fossil fuel–friendly candidate who ran for reelection on the state’s utility regulatory committee.

• Campaign finance records filed this week show that the Party received more than $90,000 in donations from utility companies, energy producers, and their executives during the elections for two Louisiana Public Service Commissioners. The same utility companies — Entergy, Cleco, and CenterPoint Energy — also donated directly to incumbent Lambert Boissiere III, whose campaign was largely sponsored by industry groups. Entergy, Cleco, and CenterPoint Energy did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

• Taking aim at Wall Street banks financing the oil, gas, and coal extraction fueling the climate crisis, a coalition of institutional investors on Tuesday announced the filing of climate-related shareholder resolutions in an effort to force “more climate-friendly policies that better align with” the firms’ public commitments to combating the planetary emergency.

Wildlife/Nature

Finance

• Each of these problems is fixable. The government could and should do more for young parents. That child care is unaffordable is not a fact of life, as any German can attest. That Britain’s homes are small and dear is not a law of nature, but a choice of successive governments. That Britain’s taxation system is tilted too far towards income, while property wealth is left undertaxed, is a policy decision. The government could choose differently. Spread some light on the Dark Ages and everyone would be better off.

• Not even a month after assuming the majority in the House, Republicans have begun seriously considering a range of proposals to cut Social Security, Medicare, and other federal programs that millions of people across the U.S. rely on to meet basic needs.

• Despite the lack of universal healthcare coverage in the US, the country spends significantly more on healthcare related costs than comparable countries.

• Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and other major tech companies have moved in recent days to lay off tens of thousands of employees, slashing jobs across the board amid mounting fears of a Fed-induced recession.

• We recently wrote about Cory Doctorow’s great article on how the “enshittification” of social media (mainly Facebook and Twitter) was helping to lower the “switching costs” for people to try something new. In something of a follow up-piece on his Pluralistic site, Doctorow explores the process through which basically all large companies eventually hit the “enshittification” stage, and it’s (1) super insightful (2) really useful to think about, and (3) fit with a bunch of other ideas I’ve been thinking about of late. The opening paragraph is one for the ages:

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Today, the European Parliament’s Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) adopted amendments [1] [2] to draft legislation which seek to restrict the use of personal data to target online political advertisements. Only personal data explicitly provided for this purpose by citizens with their consent would be allowed to use for targeting, excluding the use of behavioral and inferred intelligence on citizens private life. IMCO thus follows the position of the LIBE Committee, which has the lead regarding the proposed regulation of targeting.

• The Estate – which oversees a property portfolio belonging to the King – filed a claim against Twitter in the High Court in London last week, according to Reuters news agency.

• The alleged arrears relate to office space near Piccadilly Circus in central London, the BBC has been told.

• Gen Z voters are an increasingly powerful political demographic, especially for Democrats and progressives. That much was proven in the 2022 midterm elections, where high turnout among young voters helped fend off the anticipated “red wave,” keeping a Democrat-controlled Senate and near-equal split in the Republican-controlled House in the new Congress, which started its term this month. Indeed, the 2022 midterms saw the second-highest turnout among young voters in three decades (just behind 2018): An estimated 27 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 voted in the midterms.

• Although Adolf Hitler was a master of propaganda, he was continually flummoxed by one particular form of communication: the editorial cartoon. Perhaps because the Nazi leader had a high opinion of himself, he couldn’t stand to be caricatured. The very sight of an inky mockery of his goose-stepping gait and toothbrush moustache drove Hitler into a spittling, almost frothy, spasm of rage.

• That is obviously the only recourse left for Clarkson to make amends for the remarks that have caused so much outrage, now that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (aka Harry and Meghan) have (again) rejected his grovelling apology. My female mentor thinks he should be cut up into meat and sold in his farm, but that is, I think, a tad excessive, and would lead a bad taste in the mouth, something not entirely inappropriate.

• I am of course referring to Jeremy Clarkson’s comments about Meghan Markle in his Sun newspaper column. They have been judged in the court of public opinion as second only to Mein Kampf in their heinousness. The words causing the most offense are: “At night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.” I will return to his comments later, but must first address the reaction to them.

• For years Montanans have been subjected to the claim that “environmental extremists” have been flooding the court system with “frivolous lawsuits.”

• These absolutely false accusations have come from some of our top elected Republican officials including Sen. Daines, Gov. Gianforte, and Reps. Zinke and Rosendale to name a few. Strangely enough not one of these politicians has ever been able to actually cite a Montana judge tossing an environmental lawsuit as frivolous.

• Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday formally blocked Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from serving on the House Intelligence Committee and is expected to hold a floor vote to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar from the chamber’s foreign affairs panel, moves that the Democratic lawmakers slammed as “political vengeance.”

• Just over 24 hours after announcing his 2024 U.S. Senate candidacy for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s seat in Arizona, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego set multiple fundraising records and made clear the vast difference between his approach to public service and that of his opponent.

• We speak with The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill about the brewing scandals over the handling of classified documents by President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, and how they “point to deeper systemic problems with Washington’s obsession with secrecy.” While the details differ, Scahill says both cases show powerful players in Washington who routinely mishandle classified documents face different rules than whistleblowers who have endured the full brunt of the law for exposing government secrets in the public interest.

• With all eyes on the fight for democratic government in Brazil, with its obvious parallels to events in the United States, it’s easy to miss another equally alarming struggle in the region. Peru has been shaken by protests and violence since the Peruvian Congress removed President Pedro Castillo from office on December 7 following his own attempt to shutter Congress. As of this writing, 55 people have died so far in the unrest, with 18 killed in the town of Juliaca on January 9 alone.

• South Dakota’s Republican governor and attorney general on Tuesday issued a threatening letter directed at the state’s pharmacists in response to a recent move by the Biden administration to ease restrictions on dispensing abortion pills amid the GOP’s nationwide assault on reproductive freedom.

• The Democratic Party’s conservative Blue Dog Coalition has been slashed in half due partially to a disagreement within its ranks over efforts to attract more members, Politico reported on Tuesday, with a number of corporate lawmakers insisting on preserving the Blue Dogs’ “longstanding legacy” and name despite its reputation as a “Southern ‘boys’ club’.”

• “We are living in a time of unprecedented danger, and the Doomsday Clock time reflects that reality.”

• Thirty years ago this month, Bill Clinton launched a presidency he claimed, in his inaugural address, would “reinvent America.” Clinton was right: he did reinvent America, definitively shifting the Democratic Party away from a politics that saw economic security for American working people as the fundamental task of government, a path that had brought the party decades of political success. The disastrous consequences of that shift, limiting working Americans’ expectations about how our political system can improve their lives, are with us to this day. To save our imperiled democracy, we must definitively transcend the political circumstances Clinton brought us.

• Denial at the top of the Democratic Party about Joe Biden’s shaky footing for a re-election run in 2024 became more untenable over the weekend. As the New York Times reported, investigators “seized more than a half-dozen documents, some of them classified, at President Biden’s residence” in Delaware. The newspaper noted that “the remarkable search of a sitting president’s home by federal agents — at the invitation of Mr. Biden’s lawyers — dramatically escalated the legal and political situation for the president.”

• Donald Trump’s obstructive refusal to cooperate with the federal investigation into the far more numerous classified documents in his possession stands in sharp contrast with Biden’s apparently full cooperation with the Justice Department. Yet Biden now faces a documents scandal that’s sure to fester for quite a while — the average length of special counsel investigations has been upwards of 900 days — and the impacts on his plans to seek re-election are unclear.

• The Russian State Duma has passed the third and final reading of a law that lifts the requirement that lawmakers publicly declare their income.

• The Russian Federal Penitentiary Service (“FSIN”) has received a government order to set up 24 new penal colonies in the Russian-annexed regions of Ukraine. The order was signed by the Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• More than half of all Americans cannot read at a sixth-grade level. High quality primary and secondary public education, as well as the college and university system — which should create citizens who are capable of critical thinking and acting as responsible members of a democratic community — have been systematically targeted for destruction by the Republican Party and “conservative” movement….

• To some significant degree, the [Internet], social media and its algorithms, our ubiquitous smart phones and digital technology, and a larger media culture designed to drive what is euphemistically described as “engagement,” damages people’s ability to think deeply and critically about complex matters.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Under President Joko Widodo, Indonesia has gained international praise for its conservation policies. But now the government is clamping down on scientists who are questioning official claims that the country’s endangered orangutan and rhino populations are increasing.

• A prison administration has censored an inmate’s letter to his wife that told about his dream. The jail authorities argued that dreams “are used for organizational communication purposes within the crime group of the applicant.” The issue was taken to the Constitutional Court which ruled that the inmate’s right to communication was violated and ordered the state to pay compensation.

• Rasmussen referred to Paludan as a “Danish-Swedish” national, but he is Danish-raised, and it was in Denmark that he trained and worked as a lawyer before becoming a full-time agitator in the build-up to the 2019 Danish General Election, where his party Stram Kurs failed to win any seats.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Sixty-seven members of the press were killed in 2022, the highest number since 2018, according to the annual report from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

• At least 41 journalists, or more than 60%, were killed in retaliation for their work. A motive for the other 26 are being investigated by the CPJ.

• Richard Burgon MP is hosting a special parliamentary screening of Ithaka, an award-winning new documentary on the fight to free Julian Assange.

• Driven in large part by Russia’s war in Ukraine and a rise in violence in Latin America, 2022 was the deadliest year for journalists in four years and saw nearly a 50% increase in murders, killings in crossfire, and deaths as the result of dangerous assignments, according to a report released Tuesday.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Human rights advocates on Monday implored Eswatini authorities to launch a swift, rigorous, and independent investigation into the recent killing of renowned pro-democracy lawyer Thulani Maseko.

• Janine Jackson interviewed Friends of the Congo’s Maurice Carney about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba for the January 20, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• After years of pretrial procedures, Bini’s actual trial began in January of last year and resumed in May. This was not the end of trial proceedings because the defense still had evidence to present, and the court still had to hear Bini’s testimony and parties’ closing arguments. The trial was set to continue in August, but it was rescheduled given the absence of an expert Swedish-Spanish translator, a right guaranteed by Ecuadorian Law for foreign defendants. The court called a new hearing for November, with no information on whether or not an expert translator would be present. Again, resumption of the trial was delayed when the prosecutor did not show up for the hearing, presenting a medical certificate two days later.

• The next trial date is now set for January 31, though it is unlikely that this single day will be enough to complete the proceedings.  We hope the court carefully assesses testimonies and alleged evidence, ensuring Ola Bini’s rights; misunderstandings of technology and political implications must not guide the final outcome.

• The core accusation against Bini relies mainly on a printed image of a telnet session (telnet is an insecure communication protocol that has largely been abandoned for public-facing technologies). This image, which was supposedly taken by Bini himself and sent to a colleague, shows the telnet login screen of a router. Although the image’s authenticity is under debate, it is not even demonstrative of anything beyond the normal procedures that computer security professionals conduct as part of their work. Centro de Autonomía Digital, co-founded by Ola Bini, reported that expert witnesses on both sides of the case agreed the photo fails to sustain the prosecution’s accusations. In fact, the prosecution’s technical expert reportedly told the court that the report issued by Ecuador’s national communications provider about the alleged attack didn’t include sufficient evidence that any access has ever happened. Expert witnesses on behalf of the defense, including Tor co-founder Roger Dingledine, reiterated the lack of evidence of non-authorized access to a computer system.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• A coalition consisting of 37 electric utility companies serving 31 million households is warning the Federal Communications Commission that shifting the cost burden of replacing wood poles to house communications equipment onto utilities will make them less likely to take voluntary action to help telecoms expand.

• Another Section 230 case has made its way into the federal court system. Of course, the plaintiffs really doesn’t want this to be a Section 230 case, since their lawsuit is predicated on content created by users of two chat apps.

Monopolies

• Anti-monopoly advocates on Tuesday praised the Biden administration and eight states for launching a federal antitrust lawsuit that could break up Google, which is accused of illegally dominating the digital advertising market.

• Critics have long accused Ticketmaster of being a monopoly, especially after its controversial merger with Live Nation (now its parent company) in 2010. But outrage reached a new pitch after its botched presale process for Swift’s The Eras Tour in November, when long wait times, exorbitant fees and website outages left thousands of fans frustrated and empty-handed.

• After years of complaints about high fees, murky resale practices and other issues, the incident seemed to galvanize fans and lawmakers alike. Attorneys general of several states launched consumer protection investigations, many Democratic lawmakers called for Ticketmaster to be broken up and dozens of Swift fans sued the company for fraud and antitrust violations.

• You may have heard last week that Amazon has announced the end of its “AmazonSmile” program, in which you could shop at Amazon, and a portion of all of the money you paid would actually go to the charity of your choice. Amazon claimed that the program “has not grown to create the impact we had originally hoped” and (perhaps reasonably!) implied that the overhead of delivering small amounts to many different charities was not very efficient. The company noted that the “average” donation to charities was less than $230 per charity.

Copyrights

• Over a year ago, we discussed an annoying and strange set of actions taken by Rockstar and Take2, the companies behind the popular Grand Theft Auto series of games. Two actions were taken in sequence by those companies that were clearly related. First was that they worked to get a fan-made GTA 4 mod taken down, after learning that the mod essentially brought the cities and some of the gameplay from previous GTA games into GTA 4. Shortly after that was done, Rockstar released GTA Trilogy, which was a re-release bundle of those same older games the mod was incorporating. The problem is that GTA Trilogy was such a broken mess that the company had to pull the games out of online stores almost immediately. The launcher for the game was broken, the games were buggy as hell, and so on.

• Note: This post is an adaptation of what started initially as a Twitter thread.

• In June 2022, Bungie obtained a $13.5m copyright infringement judgment against defendants who supplied Destiny 2 cheating software ‘Wallhax’. New filings by Bungie claim that Wallhax logged users’ machines, including medical data of Department of Defense or “active military” personnel. Meanwhile, two defendants are now testifying on behalf of Bungie.

• Season 23 of Big Brother has just got underway in Brazil, and broadcaster Globo is taking no chances. In a leaked email, Globo staff are informed that when people share too much BBB23 content on social media, it hurts the show and the company, and it needs to be stopped. And if staff suspect people of sharing their passwords, they should be reported too.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

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