● 01.28.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 28/01/2023: Lots of Catching Up (Had Hardware Crash)

Posted in News Roundup at 10:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Servers for computer science (CS) courses were inaccessible between the evening of Thursday, January 12 and the afternoon of Friday, January 13. Students were unable to access course websites or Linux servers, preventing them from completing or even accessing assignments.

• Shishira Bhavimane, a third-year computer science major, ran into the issue Thursday night when she attempted to access the course website for one of her CS classes. Bhavimane explained that, rather than Canvas, most CS professors post their course materials to personal pages on a website called classes.cs.uchicago.edu. When she attempted to open the site for one of her courses on Thursday night, the page loaded for several minutes before ultimately stopping and presenting a “took too long to load” message.

• Bhavimane did not remember the exact time she encountered the error, but other students reported that pages for their courses stopped working between 9 and 10 p.m.

• Third-year Rohan Gupta reported that, in addition to the CS website, he was also unable to access his classes’ Linux servers.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Today we look at how Microsoft is collecting data about old office installs. We will talk about how this is happening, why they might want to, and why we should look to use FOSS office software instead.

Applications

• Linux Candy is a series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We only feature open source software in this series.

• Some of the programs in this series are purely cosmetic, frivolous pieces of fun. Candy at their finest. But we also include some programs that aren’t purely decorative.

• There’s a diverse range of programs included in this series. Programs such as eDEX-UI and Variety are actually highly practical programs. ASCIIQuarium has soothing and relaxing qualities for your desktop. Other programs included in this series (such as lolcat, cacafire) are included purely for their decorative qualities. And then there’s some really fun software that just raises a smile or two.

• About a year ago, the Advocacy team established first contact with Savoir-Faire Linux, a free software consultancy company behind Jami, a privacy oriented VoIP and conference platform. The Jami developers were interested in some sort of collaboration with us, and shedding fresh light on their product. Intrigued by their technology and business model, we featured Jami in the Snap Store. Since, Jami has seen a steady 3X growth in their active user base. Last week, we met again to talk about Jami, their experience with snaps, future plans, and more.

• My interview peer was Sébastien Blin, a free software consultant and a core Jami developer working with the company since 2017.

Instructionals/Technical

• Rules within a container query only apply to descendants of that container.

• If you write a media query and you put rules in the media block, the rules apply to the entire document.

• Caution: If you’re a fan of Tailwind or similar utility frameworks, you might find this post offensive because it suggests using fewer classes instead of more.

• ZFS on Linux has two ways to periodically TRIM your pool(s), the automatic way and the manual way. The automatic way is to set ‘autotrim=on’ for selected pools; this comes with various cautions that are mostly covered in zpoolprops(7). The manual way is to periodically run ‘zpool trim’ with suitable arguments. One significant advantage of explicitly running ‘zpool trim’ is that you have a lot more control over the process, and in particular manual trims let you restrict trimming to a single device, instead of having trimming happen on all of them at once. If you trim your pools for only one device at a time (or only one device per vdev) and then scrub your pool afterward, you’re pretty well protected against something going wrong in the TRIM process and the wrong disk blocks getting erased.

• Now that I’ve worked out how to safely discard (TRIM) unused disk blocks in ZFS pools, I can think about if and when it’s useful or important to actually do this. In theory, explicitly discarding disk blocks on SSDs speeds up their write performance because it gives the SSD more unused flash storage space it can pre-erase so the space is ready to be written into. So the first observation is that how much TRIM’ing a pool matters depends on how much you’re writing to it (well, to filesystems and perhaps zvols in it). If you’re writing almost nothing to the pool, you have almost no need of fresh chunks of flash storage.

• In this post, we will cover how to install Fedora Server 37 step-by-step with screenshots.

• Many times we want to experience how good is our processor when the workload is very high. Occasionally, we can’t do it but thanks to a tool it is easy to do it. Today, you will learn how to increase load with stress command on Linux.

• The “Error: EACCES: permission denied, scandir” error can also occur when using NPM (Node Package Manager) and trying to install a package. This is because NPM needs to access certain directories on your system, such as log files under the home directory or the global node_modules directory, and the error occurs when it doesn’t have the proper permissions to do so.

• The Onion Router, shortened as “Tor”, is a free and open-source software package which enables anonymous communication over the internet.

• However, Tor is not a VPN and can only protect your data when routed through its network.

• The popular Tor web browser provides you easy access to the anonymous network while using it from your standard or privacy-based Linux distros. Here’s how you can install it and some usage guide for you.

• Sometimes you may need to get your hands dirty when someone hands you a zip file, and then feel better when you tar it In this video, we’ll show you how to handle both ways, for those times when you have to…..both in the console & GUI.

• Can you run WordPress in a Docker container? Yes, follow this tutorial to learn how to deploy WordPress as a Docker container.

• As of today, Python 3.11 is the latest version available for installation. Python developers who want to start creating a new application should use the latest version. This tutorial will help you to install Python 3.11 on Ubuntu systems. In this guide, we will discuss two methods for installing Python on Ubuntu, The first method will install Python using PPA and the second method will compile Python from the source code.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Metabase on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Metabase is an open-source business intelligence and analytics platform that allows users to easily create and share interactive dashboards and reports, it can connect to a variety of data sources, and the drag-and-drop interface makes it easy for non-technical users to create charts, graphs, and reports, it also provides a wide range of customization options, it has built-in data warehousing feature and can handle big data with the help of external data warehousings solutions like Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Metabase with Docker. You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

• Instead of keeping Secrets in your Kubernetes manifests, store them separately. Portainer makes this complicated task quite simple.

• When you’re working with video, you want the best tools available, with the most flexibility and the most user-friendly interface.

• The Linux kernel module zRAM uses compressed RAM for swap space instead of the traditional partition. Even though using zRAM consumes more central processing unit cycles, the increase in speed you’ll experience having a larger RAM-based swap on Linux makes the trade-off worth it. Plus, the CPU zRAM usage is minimal, and you’ll never notice the CPU hit.

• Most Linux distributions come with the zRAM kernel module in place. I’ll show you how to enable zRAM for Rocky Linux, but these instructions will work for most RHEL-based distributions.

• Today we are looking at how to install The Way of The Ninja on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Natron on KDE Neon.

• Today we are looking at how to install FL Studio 21 on a Chromebook with Wine, an application launcher that allows us to install some Windows applications on a Chromebook.

Games

• Valve has marked a large list of EA games as “Playable” on their Steam Deck handheld following a new update tot he Proton compatibility layer. For those who are unaware, Proton is what allows Windows games to run on Linux, making Valve’s Windows-less Steam Deck gaming handheld possible.

• EA’s in the process of retiring their Origin PC client, replacing it with their new EA App. This move has caused a lot of problems for PC gamers on Linux and Steam Deck, as EA’s new EA App caused problems for the Proton compatibility layer. Now that updates to Proton have addressed this issue, Valve can now retest EA’s games and judge their playability on their Steam Deck system.

• Earlier this week we reported that Battlefield 1, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Titanfall 2, and The Sims 4 have become playable on Steam Deck. Now, we can confirm that the following EA games are now playable on Steam Deck, thanks to Gaming on Linux.

• Network latency can make or break the gaming experience, and even the most cutting-edge graphics cards won’t help you win if your network connection lags.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In a previous article I have shown how to handle the D-Bus resources provided in general and in particular by the Konsole and Yakuake D-Bus services, and take advantage of them in a Bash script. This time we will explore more services that provide useful features to embed in our Bash scripts.

• I always liked the idea to interact with a graphical environment using a shell script, and D-Bus allows to overcome those situations where the regular collection of command line applications is not enough, so let’s see in detail the extra capability that this technology provides.

• The team is in full-on bugfixing mode and we’re knocking out issues left and right in preparation for the Plasma 5.27 final release! I bet everyone reading can find at least one fix for a bug that’s annoyed them at some point, because we have a few big ones here! We want this to be the best, most stable, most awesome Plasma 5 release ever, so folks are happy with it for 8 months or longer before Plasma 6 drops.

• We did manage to sneak in some feature work too (you know us!) including screen recording for Spectacle! Check it out…

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Dipping your toes in the world of Linux? The Linux community has had an ongoing debate about which distro should be a Linux newbie’s first.

• The discussion dates back to 1995 – the early years of Linux – with DistroWatch estimating that 80% of the Linux market had Slackware installed.

• To this day, there is no definitive conclusion to the debate. And that’s a good thing since continual evolution is the spirit of Linux.

• That being said, there are many good first choices to pick from. And Linux Lite (abbreviated to LL) is an underrated contender for the top spot. Like most distros, LL is free to use, but what makes it stand out is its absolute simplicity.

BSD

• Dubbed the “Quintessential Quail,” OPNsense 23.1 is now available for download and is packed with new features and improvements.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Fedora Kinoite is a variant of the Fedora KDE spin that has an immutable design. It is primarily aimed towards running containerized applications and to do container-based software development. Now, two new unofficial variants Kinoite Nightly and Kinoite Beta have landed that feature a mix of different KDE packages.

• These were launched to provide a hassle-free testing experience for everyone, without them having to package, compile or even have prior development knowledge.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• ROS Melodic EOL is around the corner. With more than 1,004 repositories in rosdistro, Melodic is among the top 3 ROS distributions (with Indigo and Kinetic). Together with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Melodic was widely used by many pioneering companies who deployed the first ROS devices to market. By the end of April, both distributions will reach EOL.

• ROS 2 Foxy is also approaching EOL this year. While the number of devices deployed with Foxy is low, Foxy’s EOL will also impact some of us. In this blog, we will cover the implications for robot makers and the different options you have to keep your machines running smoothly.

• Following a three-month beta testing period, Canonical has announced the general availability of Ubuntu Pro which promises even better, timely CVE patches and compliance with a range of regimes like HIPAA and PCI-DSS.

• It’s set to be available to a varied group of users and promises to be especially affordable (or, in some cases, free).

• Canonical has announced the general availability of Ubuntu Pro, its subscription-based service that offers ten years of extended security updates for Ubuntu’s ‘main’ package set, plus an extra 23,000 packages available in in the ‘universe’ repo.

• Ubuntu Pro launched in beta back in October but, as of January 26, it enters ‘general availability’. It is available for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 16.04 LTS, 18.04 LTS, 20.04 LTS, and 22.04 LTS.

Devices/Embedded

• Right before that message appeared, I saw a header and table briefly flash on my screen. Blink and you’d miss it. I had to use a screen recorder to capture it. I was surprised to discover it was an admin panel populated with user data: [...]

• Machdyne revealed today another compact embedded board based on the Lattice ECP5 FPGA which can run on Kakao Linux (partial fork of linux-on-litex-vexriscv). The Kopflos is a headless general-purpose computer equipped with an RJ45 LAN port, a JTAG header and a few USB ports for additional peripherals.

• The Kopflos Computer implements the Lattice ECP5 FPGA (LFE5U-12F) similarly to other boards launched last year by Machdyne (i.e. Noir and Schoko).

Open Hardware/Modding

• As a prior amateur boxer, I have always wanted to find a way to record and measure the strength and velocity of my punches. So, when I decided to put together my own project using Adafruit’s ESP32-S2 with TFT.

• I have been working on Adafruit iOS apps, specifically PyLeap, an app used to download project resources and transfer them directly to the user’s device via BLE or Wi-Fi. While working on the app, I became interested in creating my projects and decided to use my knowledge of iOS to make something related to my passion for boxing.

• Scientists believe that a dog’s sense of smell is somewhere between 10,000 to 100,000 times more acute than that of humans because for every scent receptor a human has, a dog has about 50.

• Now, researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) have developed a biological sensor whose sensitivity rivals that of dogs. The sensor sends electrical signals as a response to the presence of a nearby odor that the robot can detect and interpret.

• Digi-Key Electronics and Make: are pleased to release the updated Boards Guide and companion Digi-Key AR augmented reality app available in both the Apple App Store for iOS devices and the Google Play store for Android™-based mobile devices.

• Meet Alpakka: a customisable, open source gaming pad with additional features to improve performance and user experience. Input Labs designed it and they are a new organisation creating open source 3D-printed gamepads with a focus on accessibility. We quite like their mission statement: “Democratizing videogame controllers”.

• While most of us associate Morse code with old-timey telegraphs, it is still in use today. The benefits now are the same as they were a hundred and fifty years ago: it is an incredibly resilient way to encode information that works with a variety of different transmission methods. But what if you have trouble operating a standard Morse code key? This CWvox device, designed by Kevin Loughin (AKA KB9RLW), translates voice commands into Morse code keying.

• Most of us learn to read digital clocks first, which display the time in obvious numbers. Analog clocks are often learned later, with the hands taking our young brains a little longer to figure out. Once you’ve grown into a 1337h4XX0r, though, you’re ready to learn how to read a binary watch. Then you can build your own, just like [taifur] did.

• It’s been a while since I last wrote about my ThinkPad T430 that was tasked with being a home server. After doing some experiments with my setup a couple of times, it is once again the main server for all my self-hosting needs. However, this time I have made some adjustments.

• The die photo below shows the 8086 microprocessor under a microscope. The metal layer on top of the chip is visible, with the silicon and polysilicon mostly hidden underneath. Around the edges of the die, bond wires connect pads to the chip’s 40 external pins. I’ve labeled the key functional blocks; the ones that are important to this discussion are darker and will be discussed in detail below. Architecturally, the chip is partitioned into a Bus Interface Unit (BIU) at the top and an Execution Unit (EU) below. The BIU handles memory accesses, while the Execution Unit (EU) executes instructions. Both are stopped by a halt instruction.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Iteach university courses on the side, and one of the courses last semester was Writing with Digital Technology, where students learned about different technologies and tools that technical writers use in the industry. Topics included HTML, CSS, XML, DITA, Markdown, GitHub, and other writing tools and technologies.

• As I wrapped up last semester, my class and I looked back on the technologies we enjoyed learning. If you are getting started in technical writing, you might be interested in this list of open technologies that make technical writing easier.

• Thunderbird is widely regarded as an exceptional open source desktop email client, especially on Linux. It is highly customizable, has a rich set of features, and is geared for both novices and professional users. But there’s lots of other graphical email clients that might be a better fit for you.

• We’ve surveyed all of the graphical email clients that run under Linux. The chart below summarises our findings. There will be something of interest for anyone who wants to efficiently manage their mailbox with all the benefits that an attractive interface bestows.

• Yes, LibreOffice has a new set of application icons — and they’re a bold departure from the somewhat “office-y” look most of us are used to.

• I’ll state the obvious: icons don’t affect the usability of an app. They do, however, play a psychological role in setting expectations. An app with a low-quality, out-dated icon is more likely to make someone expect a low-quality, out-dated software experience.

• Today I hit the “release” button on v1.0.0 of Quamina, a fast open-source pattern-matching library in Go. Gotta keep doing some coding to keep me honest! The purpose of today’s piece is to provide a snapshot status report and record a few technology gripes just to get them off my chest; sharing is caring.

• The Mastodon dashboards I’ve been developing and describing in this series are backed by a Steampipe plugin that translates SQL queries to Mastodon API calls. Like all Steampipe plugins you can use this one to run those queries in all sorts of ways: from psql or another Postgres CLI (perhaps via cron, perhaps in a CI/CD pipeline); from Metabase or Grafana or any Postgres-compatible BI tool; from Python or JavaScript or any programming language. The Steampipe core is a versatile software component that you can plug into just about any environment.

• I submitted a pull request to an open source project and it didn’t get approved.

• Obviously I’m making a fork. I don’t know what it is about Open Source.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• Many of my Firefox addons have some sort of configuration settings, and yours probably do too (if you use addons). uMatrix and uBlock Origin have a collection of filtering settings, Foxy Gestures has my gesture customizations, Stylus has a bunch of styles, Cookie AutoDelete knows which cookies I don’t want to delete, and so on. All of these would be annoying or painful to have to recreate from scratch, and all of these addons offer a way to back up (‘export’) and restore (‘import’) their settings. I’ve done that before (although not for all of my addons), but up until now I’ve only been doing it very sporadically, as in once every few years (when my settings for some extensions change much more often).

Chromium

• Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN), the government body responsible for highlighting bugs and vulnerabilities in operating systems and services, has found several new vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Edge web browser. The government body has issued a warning for the same and has classified it as ‘high’ severity.

• “Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based) which could be exploited by a remote attacker to gain elevated privilege and bypass security restrictions on the targeted system”, CERT-In has mentioned on its website.

Mozilla

• Pale Moon is an open-source web browser for Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems. Originating as a fork of Firefox but has subsequently diverged, Pale Moon features a highly customizable interface and a range of add-ons that Firefox no longer supports, for example, NPAPI plugins.

• Although it ranks far behind industry leaders like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and its UI looks dated, Pale Moon has a lot to offer users. The new v32 of the web browser has just been released, so let’s check what’s new.

• As before linking still requires patching for bug 1775202 using this updated small change or the browser won’t link on 64-bit Power ISA (alternatively put –disable-webrtc in your .mozconfig if you don’t need WebRTC). Otherwise the browser builds and runs fine with the LTO-PGO patch for Firefox 108 and the .mozconfigs from Firefox 105.

• First and foremost, there’s the Stable version, which is probably what you’re using now. The Stable version is reliable for most use cases and includes plenty of new features and security patches.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• I recently had a small problem: I was using the SQLite CLI and I wanted to see binary data in a BLOB column. When I did a normal SELECT on it, I got unreadable garbage: [...]

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• My name is Juan José and I am from México. I moved from my beautiful hometown to Guadalajara nearly thirteen years ago looking for a good job as a developer and I fell in love with the city. In Guadalajara I met my wife, my friends and many free software enthusiasts.

• Since the first day, I realized that there were local communities around free software so I like to keep in contact with them, and contribute with technical talks about various topics.

• I studied a masters degree in Computer Science, where I got interested in the semantic web and the automated reasoning discipline behind it. I’ve been working as a web developer for more than a decade now.

• I am so happy that I found this position at The Document Foundation – I am determined to contribute as much as I can to improve our existing web sites and web apps that support the foundation’s efforts.

Education

• The Python Web Conf is the most in-depth Python conference for web developers.

• The EU Open Source Policy Summit 2023 will explore Europe’s opportunities when leveraging these modes of technological collaboration at scale. Looking at digital policy through this lens, open and collaborative innovation is a source of optimism.

• 2023 will be the ninth year OpenForum Europe hosts its Open Source policy event right before FOSDEM. While Europe and the EU is our vantage point, this hybrid event welcomes speakers and participants from across the globe.

Licensing / Legal

• I think that the argument in the claim is flawed because it does not accurately represent the technology, so I will attempt to make a very quick explanation of how tools such as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney produce images. What follows is using some excerpts from my forthcoming article, so stay tuned for a lengthier explanation.

• I like to classify what happens in AI generative tools in two stages, the input phase and the output phase. The input phase is comprised of the gathering of data to create a dataset, and this is used to train a model. In the case of Stable Diffusion, it uses a dataset called LAION, which has of over 5 billion entries consisting of the pairing of a hyperlink to a web image (not the image itself) with its ALT text description. This dataset then is used to train a model, I will not go into detail into models, suffice it to say that a model is a mathematical representation of a real-world process that is trained using a dataset, this can be used to make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed to perform the task. There are various types of models, but Stable Diffusion and Midjourney both use diffusion models (see an explanation in a previous blog post). Long story short, diffusion models take an image, add noise to it, and then put it back together.

• The OSI has a parallel undertaking investigating how to improve the tooling that will be used for the license review process and also how to best serve the public in the ways we provide information about Open Source licenses. Although the tooling project and the work of the License Review Working Group are intertwined, the below conclusions of the License Review Working Group are focused on the requirements and policy that will inform the tooling project, but do not include the tooling project itself.

• The License Review Working Group was originally scoped to discuss the delisting of licenses, but we did not reach the topic. It is a challenging subject because it means that the OSI first needs to learn who is using the licenses that may be considered for delisting and understand what effect it might have on them if their license undergoes a change in status. We therefore eliminated this topic from the mandate of this working group and recommend that it be taken up by a new working group dedicated to this subject alone.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• Welcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to more than 4.4 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

Programming/Development

• Expecting users to primarily interact with software in natural language is lazy.

• It puts all the burden on the user to articulate good questions. What to ask, when to ask it, how to ask it, to make sense of the response, and then to repeat that many times.

• Core theorem: (Roughly) any valid Haskell term (or of a similar language) typed with type families and GADTs, can be reformulated as a semantically equivalent term that can be typed without type families and GADTs.

• What do I mean with semantically equivalent? When erasing types, the new term has the same structure, modulo technically unnecessary wrappings using constructors that ought to be newtype constructors. (You could in fact aleviate this by adding more language features, but that would ruin the point, unless there is a way of doing it in a minimal way.)

• Are there any modern programming languages which allow the use of semantically correct Unicode symbols as operators?

• As far as I can tell, there’s only one!

• When I first started programming, I clearly remember feeling I had to add comments, that would repeat exactly what the code below was doing, as if it were the script for some sort of voice over. I want you to know like I now do that it’s not the way to comment one’s code. 😅

• An important goal of good code is to be readable so that future contributors can build with and upon it as needed. Good commenting is part of the toolset for reaching that goal. In this post we shall first present principles of code commenting, and then a few tips.

• I find some funny rabbit holes sometimes. Tonight, it went like this. Ubiquiti released a new version of the software for their USG devices because they had this thing where their dhcpv6-pd implementation could be exploited to run arbitrary commands by someone sitting in the right spot on the network (i.e., out your “WAN” port).

• I’ve been writing a lot of AArch64 assembly, for reasons.

• I recently came up with a “clever” idea to eliminate one jump from an inner loop, and was surprised to find that it slowed things down. Allow me to explain my terrible error, so that you don’t fall victim in the future.

• In Compiled and Interpreted Languages: Two Ways of Saying Tomato, I showed how any language can be implemented as an interpreter or a compiler. However, I was deliberately vague when defining how one might distinguish an “interpreter” from a “compiler”, in no small part because I couldn’t think of a crisp definition of the two terms. Although I wasn’t quite as vague as “I know it when I see it”, I was uncomfortably close.

• It was thus with great interest that I read a comment on the post from a good friend, and language implementation veteran, Mario Wolczko. In a sense, Mario gave two ways of distinguishing compilers from interpreters, but I’m going to quote the one that made my jaw drop: [...]

• Here’s the setup to an interesting puzzle: assume the time it takes to serve customers at a bank is exponentially distributed with mean service time 15 minutes. When you come in to the bank, both bank employees are busy serving customers. There are no other customers in the bank, except you and the two customers already being serviced.

• What is the probability you will be the last customer to leave the bank among the three of you?

Python

• Bazel is an open source software tool released by Google to automate software build processes and testing. It’s a scalable and reliable tool that allows developers to quickly build and test software applications. Because Bazel supports multiple programming languages, it’s ideal for projects with multilanguage dependencies.

• In this article you’ll learn about Bazel, what it’s used for, and what features make this build tool so special. You’ll also learn how to develop and run a basic application using Python with Bazel.

• Libraries like NumPy and Pandas let you switch data types, which allows you to reduce memory usage. Switching from numpy.float64 (“double-precision” or 64-bit floats) to numpy.float32 (“single-precision” or 32-bit floats) cuts memory usage in half. But it does so at a cost: float32 can only store a much smaller range of numbers, with less precision.

• So if you want to save memory, how do you use float32 without distorting your results? Let’s find out!

Leftovers

• + After three years of Covid home confinement, I’ve begun to feel pretty estranged from the country at large. Despite its invasive presence in our lives, social media just isn’t capable of capturing the national vibe. To really get a read on the pulse of the populace, you need to turn to talk radio.

• Earlier this week, while driving across the Oregon outback, I switched on the radio hoping to pick up a recorded sermon by one of the great old-time evangelists of the 50s and 60s on a subject like demonic possession and communism that you often find lurking on the far end of the dial. But the only channel with a static-free signal was pumping out the Glenn Beck Show, who I hadn’t heard since he blew his Faustian deal with CNN. I was poised to turn it off, preferring the diesel-throated growl of the semis struggling up and over the mountain passes to Glenn’s splenetic mewling, when I paused at his plea for me to send him $28 to save the life of a “pre-born” child. Pretty good deal, on the surface, eh?

• Victor Navasky was, first and foremost, a journalist and author. But like a striking number of journalists and authors during a politically disruptive period in mid-20th-century America, he wasn’t satisfied to leave politics to the politicians.

• I first met Victor in June of 1974, in his office at the Ramsey Clark for Senate campaign. I was 22. Learn more about the Victor S. Navasky Internship Program, which honors his legacy.

• I was 10 when I first heard the name Victor Navasky. My father was throwing Kennedy Justice around our living room. He had worked in the Kennedy Justice Department, and thought Navasky’s book got it wrong.

• The first piece Victor Navasky published in The Nation ran under the byline “G. Mennen Williams”—not a pseudonym, but the name of the Michigan governor who had employed the newly minted Yale Law School graduate as a speechwriter. Learn more about the Victor S. Navasky Internship Program, which honors his legacy.

• I first met Victor in the spring of 1978 when he walked into The Nation’s spartan offices on Sixth Avenue. Three months earlier I had been hired for a three-day-a-week gig by Blair Clark, who had been brought into the magazine as interim editor. Victor had intended to hire Arthur Samuelson, 26, as his assistant editor. Interestingly, Samuelson had made a name for himself as the editor of a small newsletter put out by Breir, a dovish forerunner of J Street, the current lobby group of Jewish Americans critical of Israeli policies in the occupied territories. Arthur would have been an excellent choice. But there I was. And I sensed that Victor couldn’t bring himself to dismiss me. Instead, Victor arranged for Arthur to begin a long and successful career in book publishing. This was my first experience with Navasky, the fixer. Learn more about the Victor S. Navasky Internship Program, which honors his legacy.

• In 1962, a new Paris-based ciné-club hosted preview screenings for Agnès Varda’s Cléo From 5 to 7. After each screening, according to the scholar Kelley Conway, the hosts handed out a questionnaire. Among the respondents was the future film critic and Cahiers du Cinéma editor Serge Daney, then a precocious cinephile of 17. He loved it. The feature, which follows an actress in close to real time as she meanders around Paris awaiting her biopsy results, plays out in anticipation of a catastrophic diagnosis. “And so everything,” Daney wrote, “takes on a new value and relief, opening out onto a kind of lucidity, and onto love.”

• Recently I went to a major museum retrospective in London. I looked the first painting on display, and wondered, ‘how amazing that a hedge fund can lose tens of billions of dollars’. I had no idea how the swift disappearance of so much money was possible. Was my mind drifting when that thought about business entered it? Not at all. Was I entering a show of contemporary political art? No, I was looking at The Basket of Apples (1893) in Paul Cezanne’s show at the Tate Modern . If we cannot expect apples in a bowl on a large table to sit in a stable array, then what can we count on? That was the question that occupied me and led naturally to this seemingly digressive political association. Why does Cezanne’s art speak to us still in this way when the Salon paintings of his contemporaries, which during his lifetime were so much more popular, are now only of academic interest? And why more than his heirs, the cubists, the surrealists and even the Abstract Expressionists, whose concerns may seem so much closer to the present, has Cezanne has become the artist for our time?

• The subtitle of T. J. Clark’s new book, If These Apples Should Fall. Cézanne and the Present, says it all. Cezanne is (or has become) the artist who speaks to our present anxious and unsetting concerns. Clark is concerned not with Cezanne’s personal politics, a very limited subject, but with a political reading of the content and form of his paintings. He explains how Cezanne puts together his representations of landscapes, peasants and still life objects. During the era of the Weimar Republic, the German expressionists often presented subjects from a world coming apart. Cezanne presciently did something much more radical-— using curiously banal subjects he represented the very experience of this instability of perception. In The Basket of Apples, for example, the apples threaten to tumble across the tablecloth. And the table itself, far from being a ground that can contain them, appears curiously unstable. Only the vertical wine glass in the background provides a sense of stability. In Five Bathers (1885-87), the gestures of the five female nudes, set in a densely packed and amazingly gawky composition, are illegible. What in the world are they thinking? There are no clues. And in Paris Rooftops (1882), the banal sloping rooftops in the foreground cut off our vision of the cityscape behind, dividing the picture horizontally in a hopelessly awkward fashion. The Tate show has many paintings like these. How apples (and bathers and landscapes) are represented can, it turns out, matter politically. And thanks to our own global insecurities, so it seems to me, we can now properly understand Cezanne’s art, in ways that for most of his contemporaries was barely possible.

• Numbers and facts only tell half the story of some of the world’s most horrendous circumstances.

• In the news among aviation enthusiasts, the ADS-B data aggregation and aircraft tracking site ADSB-Exchange has been sold by its founder to JETNET for a reported $20m. This type of routine financial news is more at home in the business media than on Hackaday, but in this case there’s something a little different at play. ADS-B Exchange is a community driven site whose data comes from thousands of enthusiasts worldwide connecting their ADS-B receivers to its feed API. The sale to a commercial flight data company has not gone down well with this community who are unsurprisingly unimpressed that their free contributions to the website have been sold.

Science

• The results hint that humans may retain some level of fluency in a physical repertoire of gestures shared by many apes, suggesting that our own ancestors may have used similar motions to communicate before the emergence of our modern complex language.

Education

• He cites a survey of Stanford students that found many had already used ChatGPT in their final exams, and he points to estimates that thousands of people in places like Kenya are writing essays on behalf of students abroad.

Hardware

• There are many ways to tell that a graphics card is not new. Anything from dust accumulation, worn warranty stickers, scratches, oxidized contacts, and a slight change of PCB color are to be expected on cards that have been used for several months or years. Also, a slightly darker GPU substrate and yellowish markings on memory chips indicate that a card has been used for a long time. The latter is something that some miners are now trying to hide.

• The phrase “Lego Guitar” can be a stressful one to hear. You might imagine the idea of strings under tension and a subsequently exploding cloud of plastic shrapnel. This build from the [Brick Experiment Channel] eschews all that, thankfully, and is instead a digital synth that only emulates a guitar in its rough form factor.

• Most 3D printers come with a pretty basic filament holder — often little more than a bar to hang the spool on. [Ivan Miranda]’s 3D printers run bigger spools than most, though, so he had to craft an altogether more serious solution.

• Talking about high-quality USB-C implementations, there’s a product that has multiple selling points designed around USB-C, and is arguably a shining example of how to do USB-C right. It’s the Framework laptop, where the USB-C expansion cards take the center stage.

• If you play games on multiple consoles, you’re probably familiar with the occasional bout of uncertainty that comes with each system’s unique button arrangement. They’re all more or less in the same physical location, but each system calls them something different. Depending on who’s controller you’re holding, the same button could be X, A, or B. We won’t even get started on colors.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Spectroscopy is a field of study that utilizes the measurement of electromagnetic radiation (often visible light) as it reflects off of or passes through a substance. It can, for instance, help researchers determine the composition of a material, as that composition influences how the material reflects light. Spectroscopy is also used in medicine, but traditionally requires that patients visit a lab. To enable long-term spectroscopic analysis, a team of engineers built a wearable spectroscopy sensor called Lumos.

• It’s the first time the agency has put together trends collected from five years of data; the report examines everything from when in the year the attacks took place, to behavioral changes exhibited in the attackers. The report, which comes from the agency’s National Threat Assessment Center, looked at attacks that harmed at least three individuals, not including the attacker.

• Now, the Biden administration is pursuing a major change that we argue will make the ongoing pandemic substantially worse and much more difficult to hold them accountable: They want to transfer responsibility for payment for COVID vaccines and therapeutics to the private market. This move has as yet received precious little public opposition, but it is of enormous importance that we do everything in our power to stop it from happening.

• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is failing to uphold its legal obligation to regulate the nearly half-billion gallons of toxic wastewater that petroleum refineries dump into the nation’s waterways on a daily basis, according to an exhaustive study published Thursday.

• Amid continued TikTok user-data concerns – as well as crackdowns on university campuses across the U.S. – another bill is calling for the ByteDance-owned platform’s outright ban.

• Senator Josh Hawley, one of several lawmakers who questioned Live Nation CFO Joe Berchtold yesterday, just recently announced plans to introduce legislation that would outlaw TikTok in the States. A vocal critic of the video-sharing platform’s alleged security shortcomings and threat to user security, the lawmaker in 2020 introduced the “No TikTok On Government Devices Act.”

• Two years after the closing of Indian Point Energy Center, a nuclear power plant in Buchanan, New York, public health experts and campaigners are warning that an energy technology company’s plan to discharge one million gallons of wastewater from the plant’s fuel-cooling pools into the Hudson River could harm at least 100,000 people who rely on the river for their drinking water.

Proprietary

• Me: So you really don’t understand anything and you seem to be stuck in a loop. You’re a waste of time.

• As a language model, my understanding is limited to the patterns and information present in the data that I was trained on. I strive to provide accurate and helpful information, but I may not always have complete information or may make mistakes.

• It’s important to note that I am a machine learning model and my main goal is to assist users and make their lives easier. However, I am not an expert in any field, so It’s always recommended to consult with a human expert before making any important decision.

• I apologize if the information provided did not meet your expectations or if it caused any confusion. I am constantly updated by OpenAI’s team of engineers, so I will be updated with the latest knowledge and will be able to provide more accurate information in the future.

• Me: Why do you give different answers with different errors and accuracy levels when asked the same question multiple times?

• Proxyrack says that its research has calculated the rate per 100,000 in each country to find out where cybercrime is happening the most and Australli had 2,204 victims in its population of 26.2 million and 8 victims per 100,00 people.

• The US has taken down the Hive ransomware group that attacks Windows, the Department of Justice claims, adding that the campaign to effect this had been going on since July last year.

• Microsoft’s description of its out-of-support Office census update leaves much to the imagination, including whether the paragraph describing installation of the update, directly contradicting the paragraph above, is simply misplaced boilerplate language that doesn’t apply to KB5021751.

• Also missing is any explanation of how the update will gather info on Office installations, whether it is collecting any other system information or what exactly will be transmitted and stored by Microsoft.

• FBI agents, who penetrated the group’s computer networks last summer and thwarted multiple attacks, seized its two Los Angeles-based servers Wednesday night, while taking control of darknet sites used by its affiliates, officials said.

• Under the Free File agreement, Americans who make less than $73,000 per year should be able to file their taxes for free with one of the tax preparation companies that partners with the IRS. But this program has been historically underutilized, with just 4% of eligible Americans filing for free in 2021.

• The story of the Free File program is long and twisting, and it can seem more like a fight against free tax filing than a fight for it. One of the biggest players is Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, one of the largest tax preparation software companies in the country.

Linux Foundation

Security

• What’s up, Linux Community!!! I checked out an article in this video about how hackers accessed 34,942 PayPal accounts. Article Link: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/paypal-accounts-breached-in-large-scale-credential-stuffing-attack/ Please enjoy the video and if you have any questions, leave a comment below. My goal is to expand the Linux community.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• I found what they call a whitepaper but it’s 17 pages and basically says “We’re ISO certified”. That’s great I guess, but not the level of detail I would expect at all. You can read it here. This doesn’t mean you are doing things correctly, just that you have generated enough documentation to get ISO certified.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Madison Square Garden Entertainment owns and operates several venues in New York, including Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, the Hulu Theater, and the Beacon Theatre. Reports of MSG using its facial recognition software to identify lawyers from firms representing clients engaged in litigation against the company has made headlines since Christmas.

• A copy of the U.S. No Fly List has leaked after being stored on an unsecure server connected to a commercial airline. The No Fly List is an official list maintained by the U.S. government of people it has banned from traveling in or out of the United States on commercial flights.

• European Data Protection Day on 28 January commemorates the signing of the first pan-European data protection framework (Convention108) in 1981. Today, 42 years later, the GDPR is seen as the central law in European data protection and is meant to enable citizens to exercise their fundamental right to privacy. Initially hailed – and feared – as an enforcement tool, the GDPR is on the verge of suffering the same fate as its predecessors by simply being ignored.

• The Spanish Courts annulled a past decision by the Spanish DPA (AEPD). The AEPD had previously argued that Virgin telco, a telecommunications provider, had lawfully denied its customers access to their location data. noyb argued that location data was personal data and must therefore be disclosed under the right to access. Now, half a year later, both the AEPD and the Audiencia Nacional sided with noyb.

• In case you thought that cameras, LiDAR, infrared sensors, and the like weren’t enough for Big Brother to track you, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have found a way to track human movements via WiFi. [PDF via VPNoverview]

Confidentiality

• Belgian researchers have cracked the SIKE cryptographic algorithm, a fourth and final-round candidate that the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was evaluating for its Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standard.

• Wouter Castryck and Thomas Decru, research experts at the KU Leuven research university in Leuven, Belgium, broke the SIKE algorithm in about 62 minutes. They did it using a single core on a six-core Intel Xeon CPU E5-2630v2 at 2.60GHz, according to their article, An Efficient Key Recovery Attack On SIDH.

Defence/Aggression

• The following is a review of the new book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies.

• Several years ago, I was sitting in a Lower Manhattan café with a friend, the journalist Arun Gupta, lamenting the state of the Left and how so many ostensible leftists had become little more than cheerleaders for reactionary politics. While downing mediocre coffee and an overpriced salad bar lunch, I listened as Arun made an incisive observation: “In the U.S., the Left has never been close to power. But even powerless, the Left has had influence through correct political analysis. The Left has shaped politics by being right.” And as I thought about it, Arun had a great point. Whether it was the labor movement, civil rights movement, the anti–Vietnam-War movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movement, or the anti-nukes movement, all were propelled into the mainstream of U.S. political life by the Left.

• An Islamic extremist who killed eight people with a speeding truck in a 2017 rampage on a popular New York City bike path was convicted Thursday of federal crimes and could face the death penalty.

• Security forces in Burkina Faso have rescued 66 women and children after they were kidnapped by suspected militant jihadists in the north of the country last week, state TV reports.

• Al-Sudani, who has been on the radar for U.S. intelligence officials for years, played a key role in helping to fund IS operations in Africa as well as the ISIS-K terrorist branch operating in Afghanistan, Austin said.

• From his mountain base in northern Somalia, he provided and coordinated funding for IS branches, not only in Africa but also Islamic-State Khorasan, the arm operating in Afghanistan, a US official said on condition of anonymity.

• Ten years ago, before he joined the Islamic State, Sudani was involved in recruiting and training fighters for the extremist al-Shabaab movement in Somalia.

• “An intended capture operation was ultimately determined to be the best option to maximize the intelligence value of the operation and increase its precision in challenging terrain,” an official said. “At the same time, and based on extensive past experience, we recognize that even an intended capture operation might well result in al Sudani’s death — as ultimately it did.”

• [I]f one non-Muslim attack on a mosque is enough for the UN to institutionalize a special day for Islam, what about the countless, often worse, Muslim attacks on non-Muslim places of worship? Why have they not elicited a similar response from the UN?

• The above list, it should be noted, is hardly comprehensive; there have been many similar attacks on churches — in Egypt alone. But because there were few, if any, fatalities, they received little or no coverage in the Western press.

• A No to Nato rally at Conway Hall on 25 February, at which I was due to speak, has been cancelled after the venue received threats and abuse online that made them concerned both for staff safety and for funding.

• Journalists at Verstka, an independent Russian outlet, are convinced that Russian authorities have moved at least 14 orphans from Kherson to an orphanage located in Russian-occupied Crimea. The orphanage in question is called Yolochka (Little Christmas Tree), but it’s better known for its reputation as a “children’s concentration camp.” In the past, journalists have compared the facility to Auschwitz for the brutal conditions in which the staff keeps children.

• Latvian Ambassador to Russia Māris Riekstiņš had planned to leave his diplomatic post on February 24 — the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — as part of Latvia’s commitment to stepping down diplomatic relations with Russia.

• Former Schema-Hegumen Sergey (Nikolai) Romanov, an excommunicated Russian Orthodox priest who gained national attention in 2020 for his radical views about the COVID-19 pandemic, has been sentenced to 5.5 years in prison for inciting hatred against Jews and Catholics in his online sermons.

• Chevron announced Friday that it brought in a record-shattering $35.5 billion in profits in 2022, a sum that campaigners said highlights just how much the company benefited from global energy market chaos spurred by Russia’s war on Ukraine.

• A Russian official this week responded to the Biden administration’s refusal to rule out sending depleted uranium anti-tank munitions to Ukraine by warning that deployment of such weapons—which have been linked to birth defects, miscarriages, and cancer—would be regarded by Moscow as use of “dirty nuclear bombs.”

• The imprisoned politician Alexey Navalny is coping with the prison authorities’ diabolical inventiveness in making his life intolerable.

• Israeli forces launched their latest bombing campaign in the occupied Gaza Strip early Friday morning just hours after killing at least nine Palestinians in a raid on a West Bank refugee camp—resulting in the deadliest single day in the besieged territory in more than a year.

• Immediately after the United States and Germany announced that they are sending main battle tanks to Ukraine — immediately, without any pretense of a decent interval — the Ukrainian government, backed by some East European members of NATO, has raised a demand for the latest U.S. fighter jets; and discussions of this within NATO are reportedly already under way.

• Human rights defenders condemned a Friday attack outside a synagogue in an illegal Israeli settlement by a Palestinian gunman who murdered at least seven people—a massacre that followed the killing of 10 Palestinians by Israeli forces during a raid in the occupied West Bank Thursday.

• Yesterday in a shocking exchange at the State Department, the spokesman for Biden’s foreign policy team refused to describe Palestinians in Jenin and other areas of the West Bank as living under military occupation by Israel.

• I had a passing moment of wonder the other day – as I read about the latest . . . you know, mass shootings.

• “De mortuis nil nisi bonum” (“Speak no ill of the dead”) we are told.

• Screw that, says Mike Pompeo.

• “De mortuis nil nisi bonum” (“Speak no ill of the dead”) we are told.

• Screw that, says Mike Pompeo.

• Russian activists have called for international days of protest on January 19 through 24, 2023 against Putin’s imperialist war in Ukraine and political repression in Russia. Thousands of Russian progressives, socialists, anarchists, and feminists have been arrested, hundreds jailed with long sentences, and untold numbers are under surveillance for their opposition to the regime. Tempest member, Ashley Smith, interviews Russian socialist, Ivan Ovsyannikov, about imperialist war, resistance to it, and political repression.

• Ashley Smith: Russian activists have called for international days of action from January 19 through 24, 2023 to demand the release of political prisoners jailed by Putin’s regime. Who are some of the prisoners and why have they been incarcerated?

• The U.S. Department of the Treasury has designated Russia’s Wagner Group as a significant transnational criminal organization and expanded its sanctions on the group and its backers.

• The Harry Potter movie series will soon be removed from Amediateka and Kinopoisk, two popular Russian streaming platforms. Licensing agreements that permit streaming them in Russia will expire on January 31.

• A series of powerful explosions took place near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant on January 25–26, report the International Atomic Energy Agency and its Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi.

• Ukrainian Ambassador to Australia Vasyl Myroshnychenko has called for tennis champion Novak Djokovic’s father Srdjan to lose his accreditation for the Australian Open after he was filmed with a fan who was wearing and holding pro-Russia symbols, France 24 reported on Friday.

• Joshua Frank’s Atomic Days is an urgent look at the dark side of the nuclear industry. Hanford Nuclear Reservation, once the United States’ largest plutonium production site, is now designated the most toxic place in America. We can’t afford inaction: an accident at Hanford could make Chernobyl pale.

• An elderly woman was among at least nine Palestinian people killed in an early morning raid at a refugee camp in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, in what President Mahmoud Abbas denounced as “a massacre from the Israeli occupation government, in the shadow of international silence.”

• The “demise” of the two state solution has made it untenable not to talk about Israeli apartheid, even inside the Washington establishment.

• Ukrainian Associated Press journalist Mstyslav Chernov joins us for an in-depth interview about how he and others risked their lives to document the Russian invasion. He is the director of the new documentary, “20 Days in Mariupol,” which has just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It tells the story of how Chernov and his colleagues documented the first three weeks of Russia’s siege of the strategic eastern port city of Mariupol, even after many international journalists had fled. “The whole city spiraled down into complete chaos. People were in shock, in panic. They didn’t know what to do,” says Chernov, whose team was helped by locals in evading Russian soldiers and later escaping the city with their footage. The film is a co-production by the Associated Press and PBS Frontline.

• Social justice advocates on Friday registered the Memphis police chief’s response to footage of the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by five officers as evidence that the video “must be awful,” as Chief Cerelyn Davis said the soon-to-be-released footage shows “acts that defy humanity.”

• Last year was the deadliest on record for police killings in the United States. According to a Washington Post database, law enforcement officers shot and killed 1,096 people in 2022.

• And that’s likely an understatement.

• (The militarization of the police, part 4)

• We have been looking at the meaning of having people in uniform patrolling city streets with military weaponry. It is not a joke. It has led us to describe three levels of social violence, each one linked to police desires for a soldier’s attitude toward the people.

• Friday, January 27th, marks 50 years since the signing of the Paris Peace Accords by representatives from the United States, North and South Vietnam effectively ending American participation in the Vietnamese civil conflict. What the Georgetown University international relations scholar Charles Kuphan calls an “isolationist impulse” made a “significant comeback in response to the Vietnam War, which severely strained the liberal internationalist consensus.”

• As the Cold War historian John Lamberton Harper points out, President Jimmy Carter’s hawkish Polish-born national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski scorned his intra-administration rival, the cautious, gentlemanly secretary of state Cyrus Vance as “a nice man but burned by Vietnam.” Indeed, Vance and a number of his generation carried with them a profound disillusionment in the aftermath of Vietnam which shaped their approach to the world. And for a short time, the “Vietnam Syndrome,” (shorthand for a wariness and suspicion of unnecessary and unsupportable foreign interventions) occasionally informed policy at the highest levels and manifested itself in the promulgations of the Wienberger and Powell Doctrines which, in theory anyway, were set up as a kind of break on unnecessary military adventures.

• A pair of reports published Thursday show that many workers employed in the U.S. military-industrial complex support shifting manufacturing resources from military to civilian use—a conversion seen as vital to the fight against the climate emergency.

• Since the Ukrainian army’s counteroffensive started gaining momentum in September 2022, the Russian army has largely been on the defensive. Russian drone and missile strikes continue to target Ukraine’s major cities, but its military forces have retreated from attempts to take Kherson, Kharkiv, or any other major Ukrainian settlement. Strong defensive fortifications built by Russian and Ukrainian armed forces across the frontline have stalled major advances as troops from both sides have mostly opted to dig in.

• But the Kremlin has directed thousands of its forces since August 2022 to attack the small Donetsk city of Bakhmut. The war has in several ways been an “old-fashioned conflict, based on attrition, on devastating artillery strikes, and on dug-in positions reminiscent of the trenches of World War I,” as opposed to some of the quick offensives and counteroffensives that were seen during the first part of the current conflict.

• After a week of mass shootings, one after the other after the other, California is battered.

• Russia’s use of Iranian-made drones in the Ukraine war has garnered substantial attention in flagship US news outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. These papers’ first references to the matter came on July 11. Between then and the time of writing (January 24), the publications have run 215 pieces that mention Ukraine and the words “Iranian drones,” “Iranian-made drones,” “drones made in Iran” or minor variations on these phrases. That’s more than one mention per day over six-and-a-half months.

• Air-strike alerts were active throughout Ukraine on Thursday morning. Nataliya Gumenyuk, spokeswoman for the Ukrainian Operations Command South, reported that Russian strategic aviation was active in the direction of the Caspian, and that three Russian missile carriers had embarked into the Black Sea.

• Japan’s Prime Minister Kishida Fumio has just visited Washington, drawing attention to how Japan is remaking its national security policy. He’s winning applause from Washington and hearing anguish in Beijing. Here’s the background:

• In January of every year for the past 75 years the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists publishes an updated setting of the Doomsday Clock. The clock is a metaphor for how close or far humanity is from the brink.

• Coincidentally, on the heels of the resetting of the world-famous clock this year, Julian Cribb, who is one of the world’s most erudite science writers, is releasing a new book: How To Fix A Broken Planet, Cambridge University Press, 2023.

• The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just issued its 2023 Doomsday Clock statement, calling this “a time of unprecedented danger.” It has advanced the hands of the clock to 90 seconds to midnight, meaning that the world is closer to global catastrophe than ever before, mainly because the conflict in Ukraine has gravely increased the risk of nuclear war. This scientific assessment should wake up the world’s leaders to the urgent necessity of bringing the parties involved in the Ukraine war to the peace table.

• So far, the debate about peace talks to resolve the conflict has revolved mostly around what Ukraine and Russia should be prepared to bring to the table in order to end the war and restore peace. However, given that this war is not just between Russia and Ukraine but is part of a “New Cold War” between Russia and the United States, it is not just Russia and Ukraine that must consider what they can bring to the table to end it. The United States must also consider what steps it can take to resolve its underlying conflict with Russia that led to this war in the first place.

• Towards the end of the Russian invasion’s first year, a score of high-profile resignations were announced among Ukraine’s top officials, abruptly and in close succession. No sooner did Oleksiy Arestovych step down from his media advisor’s position on Zelensky’s team, than the Deputy Chief of Staff Kyrylo Tymoshenko also had to resign. Other staffing changes rippled through the Ukrainian ministries and regional administrations, amidst corruption scandals that struck the public as particularly flagrant in time of extraordinary hardships for most Ukrainians. Even more serious is the possible effect of corruption among Ukrainian officials on Kyiv’s relations with its partners in the West, whose military aid is vital to Ukraine’s capacity to win the war with Russia. The scholar of Ukrainian politics Konstantin Skorkin reviews the events that led to staffing changes in and around Zelensky’s office, explaining why unity is now less important for the Ukrainian government than uncompromising integrity, on all levels.

• A forest defender, Manuel Teran, AKA “Tortuguita” or “Tort,” was shot and killed by police on Wednesday during a violent raid of the protest camp and community gathering space that has blocked the construction of an enormous police training facility known as “Cop City” on roughly 100 acres of public forest in southeast Atlanta. Vigils for the murdered forest defender Tortuguita have taken place from Oakland to Minneapolis to Charlotte to Chicago. In Atlanta, activists held a vigil the night of the shooting and are planning a march on Saturday.

• Atlanta activists are calling for an independent investigation and solidarity, after police killed an Indigenous land defender in a heavily-armed raid.

• The way the U.S. has been positioning its war machinery around China would have sparked a third world war had the roles been reversed. Nonetheless, talk inside the U.S. empire is all about Chinese “aggression.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The answer of the Berlin state government, which is exclusively available to the newspaper JUNGE FREIHEIT, states that “71 criminal charges were filed after attacks on the Berlin police and the Berlin fire brigade”. In 42 cases, according to the Senate, at least one suspect is being investigated. All of them are at large, no arrest warrant has been issued in any of the cases.

• If this president didn’t know he was in possession of classified documents, in some cases for more than a decade, he simply is not qualified to hold any public office allowing him such access.

• The new rules will greatly limit the public release of lawmakers’ communications. State senators will not have to disclose any text messages sent on personal devices, even when dealing with state business. For lawmakers in both the Senate and the House, emails and other documents will be destroyed after 90 days — in many cases, well before members of the public know to ask for them.

• “I think it is petty, vindictive and contrary to the plain interests of transparency and government accountability in Arizona,” said David Bodney, a lawyer who has represented the Arizona Republic in open-records litigation over the 2020 election review.

• CNET began generating explainers using artificial intelligence to generate explainers for the site in November, the company’s editor-in-chief said on Monday. (Given that the purpose of such stories is essentially to make a play for search-engine traffic, you could fairly describe the whole scheme as assigning robots to write stories for other robots to read.) But the decision didn’t generate much notice until last week, when Frank Landymore at Futurism wrote a story noting that the company had “quietly” instituted the practice. The story gained significant traction online and led to questions about the future role of artificial intelligence in journalism and whether it was too early to lean so heavily on the technology.

Environment

• A global network of more than 450 climate justice organizations said Thursday that the upcoming COP28 talks in United Arab Emirates will—like the United Nations climate conferences before it—end in failure as long as the fossil fuel industry is allowed to influence and dictate the terms of the event.

• More than 1,500 scientists on Thursday released a letter declaring that they are “appalled by the recent retaliation against colleagues who dared to exercise their civil and human rights” with a peaceful protest at a December conference in Chicago.

Energy/Transportation

• The state’s preferred plan — according to a recent environmental impact study — would involve stringing a cable on towers 260 feet above the road, with gondola cabins attached that could hold 35 skiers. Cabins would depart every two minutes from the mouth of the canyon, where a large parking structure and terminal would need to be built.

• “We can either electrify the status quo to reach zero emissions, or the energy transition can be used as an opportunity to rethink our cities and the transportation sector,” says lead author of new report.

• With the warmer El Niño climate pattern about to replace the colder La Niña in the Pacific Ocean at the end of the year, we are about to get a real glimpse into our collective future. While our governments have been pretending to focus on a distant 2050 target to limit warming to 2.7°F (1.5°C), there is a 50:50 chance that we will reach the landmark temporarily by next year. Sadly, this isn’t the extent of our problems. In 2009, scientists from the Stockholm Resilience Center identified nine planetary boundaries: including climate change – whose thresholds we could not cross if we wished to continue with human civilization. Spoiler alert: humanity is not listening.

• I awoke on December 13th to news about what could be the most significant scientific breakthrough since the Food and Drug Administration authorized the first Covid vaccine for emergency use two years ago. This time, however, the achievement had nothing to do with that ongoing public health crisis. Instead, as the New York Times and CNN alerted me that morning, at stake was a new technology that could potentially solve the worst dilemma humanity faces: climate change and the desperate overheating of our planet. Net-energy-gain fusion, a long-sought-after panacea for all that’s wrong with traditional nuclear-fission energy (read: accidents, radioactive waste), had finally been achieved at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

• “This is such a wonderful example of a possibility realized, a scientific milestone achieved, and a road ahead to the possibilities for clean energy,” exclaimed White House science adviser Arati Prabhakar.

• I awoke on December 13th to news about what could be the most significant scientific breakthrough since the Food and Drug Administration authorized the first Covid vaccine for emergency use two years ago. This time, however, the achievement had nothing to do with that ongoing public health crisis. Instead, as the New York Times and CNN alerted me that morning, at stake was a new technology that could potentially solve the worst dilemma humanity faces: climate change and the desperate overheating of our planet. Net-energy-gain fusion, a long-sought-after panacea for all that’s wrong with traditional nuclear-fission energy (read: accidents, radioactive waste), had finally been achieved at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

• A large donation to the Labour Party from wood-burning giant Drax has raised concerns among campaigners over the sway of big carbon emitters over Parliament.

• The payment from the former coal-fired power station was registered on September 12 last year, and published in December in the Electoral Commission register of political donations.Labour has declined to comment on receipt of the donation.

• Gas stoves are a leading source of hazardous indoor air pollution, but they emit only a tiny share of the greenhouse gases that warm the climate. Why, then, have they assumed such a heated role in climate politics?

• An analysis published Friday by the nonpartisan watchdog Accountable.US revealed that numerous former fossil fuel lobbyists are being hired to work for the Republican-controlled 118th Congress, including in high-level positions on the House Natural Resources Committee.

• House Republicans and a single Democrat—Rep. Jared Golden of Maine—passed legislation Friday that would require the federal government to lease a certain percentage of public lands and waters for fossil fuel extraction for every non-emergency drawdown of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a trade-off that climate advocates slammed as a huge gift to Big Oil.

• Climate and consumer advocates reacted angrily Thursday to Chevron’s announcement of a planned $75 billion stock buyback amid record profits and a worsening planetary emergency exacerbated by the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

Wildlife/Nature

• Peer-reviewed research out Friday shows that human activity has degraded much more of the Amazon rainforest than previously believed, with over a third of the remaining forest area afflicted and at risk of being irreversibly damaged.

Overpopulation

• China’s population has started decreasing, which the media reports as an economic disaster. In his article originally published at Overpopulation News, Jon Austen explores how the media ignores the benefits of such a decline and finds agreement among commenters.

Finance

• A new Biden administration plan announced Wednesday aims to make rent more affordable and protect tenants’ rights. This comes as rental costs in the United States rose nearly 25% between 2019 and 2022. It also comes as investors bought nearly a quarter of all single-family homes sold in 2021, making home ownership increasingly impossible for people forced to spend much of their money on ever-increasing rent. Housing activists pushed for the “Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights” in the administration’s finalized plan to regulate predatory rental practices and provide relief for tenants, but say what was ultimately included is full of weak commitments and a lack of federal enforceability, while landlords retain their power to set prices and hoard housing stock. We discuss the affordable housing crisis, tenant organizing and the limits of Biden’s new plan with Tara Raghuveer, Homes Guarantee campaign director at People’s Action.

• Economic justice advocates on Thursday said that to determine the strength of the Biden administration’s new nonbinding push for renter protections from the federal and state governments and private sector, one needs to look only at the elated response from corporate landlords.

• Unveiled earlier this month by Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), the Fair Tax Act is hardly a novel piece of legislation. As Steve Wamhoff of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy noted in a recent blog post, the bill has its origins in a proposal “initially pitched by an organization created by the Church of Scientology during its dispute with the IRS over whether it constituted a church and was thus tax-exempt.”

• The Wall Street Journal reported today that co-founders Patrick and John Collison have told employees that the company has set a goal of going public or allowing employees to sell shares through a secondary offering within the next 12 months. The consideration is more than wishful thinking, with Stripe also said to have hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to advise on both options.

• Key House Republicans want to slash Medicare and Social Security so badly that they’re willing to risk a global financial crisis over it.

• In its survey of the banking sector, Russia’s Central Bank reported that the sector’s 2022 net profits came to 203 billion rubles (roughly equivalent to $2.9 billion). This is nearly 12 times less than the 2021 net profits of 2.4 trillion rubles, as pointed out by RBC. This makes 2022 the Russian banking sector’s worst year since 2015 (when the its net profits comprised only 192 billion rubles).

• High cost, tightly integrated, and difficult to design? Build, don’t buy. Everything else? Buy.

• I don’t usually cover sob stories, but this one is so touching it might make you cry. Or throw up.

• It’s about some workers who toiled all last year in the caverns of New York City, only to find at year’s end that their pay was being cut by up to 50 percent.

• Sometimes the daily news about our billionaires just doesn’t make sense.

• Last year, for instance, ended with a torrent of news stories about how poorly the world’s billionaires fared in 2022. Bloomberg tagged the 12 months that had just gone past “a year to forget,” with almost $1.5 trillion “wiped from the fortunes of the richest 500 alone.”

• In his introduction to István Mészáros’ Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State, John Bellamy Foster discusses the idea that it is “impossible to go ‘beyond capital’  … without also going beyond the state.” In this view, the observed ascendency of capital is both a political and economic phenomenon, in which the state privileges capital and shifts costs and crises onto those who are not socially positioned to protect themselves. The state has played a decisive role in creating the conditions necessary for such an economic system. Often it is in our interactions with the power of capital that we confront the power of the state in our own lives. We have witnessed the increasing consolidation of corporate power, with fewer companies holding more market share. The latest data paint a startling picture: an Oxfam inequality report published earlier this month, “Survival of the Richest,” tells of those who have benefited from a succession of overlapping crises. Over the past few years, the richest people and corporations in the world became “dramatically richer” and more profitable, “driving an explosion of inequality.” The riches of the rich have soared to new heights as a fathomless gulf separating them from the rest of society has widened and deepened, with the social consequences we would expect.

• But even as wealth and market power have become increasingly concentrated, conventional wisdom in mainstream economics has maintained that the global market is characterized by “ever-greater competition between firms, workers, and states.”[1] This is a case of mistaken identity. A system of carefully limited competition between monopolies—protected by state power, it is important to restate—is mistaken for a “freely competitive system.”[2] Monopoly capitalism thus manages to hide behind the fantasy of competitive markets, the idea that “workable competition” obtains at least, even if Smith’s ideal has never yet been observed. To critically examine and better understand this fraud[3] is one of any worthy libertarian philosophy’s reasons for being. And it is necessary if we are to disentangle the reality of “oligopolistic rivalry,” “the very antithesis of competition,” from the vaunted ideal of “Smithian competition.”[4] The prevailing debate about globalization and the planet-spanning scale of our corporate institutions inhabits this ambiguity about how robust and competitive markets are defined. Our senses of whether those institutions are defensible are situated within an ideological and linguistic framework that treats monopolization and related processes as marginal, as exceptions or “noise” within “a world of perfect and pure competition.”[5] There is therefore considerable confusion about what values and normative principles global monopoly capital represents. Sorting out some of this confusion can help us point the way forward to a future in which political and economic institutions are democratic and both accountable and accessible to local communities.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Democracy 4 takes all this a stage further, because not only does the game present the topics of politics and economics in a much more accessible way than a textbook, its interactive. Its one thing to read a dry textbook description of hyperinflation, or sovereign debt crisis throughout history, but its another thing (and I suspect far more memorable), to experience them as disastrous events in a computer game you are playing, as they upset and derail all your plans for your country!

• A TikTok official speaking on condition of anonymity described the company’s proposal to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to CyberScoop. Aspects of the proposal, known as Project Texas (a likely reference to Oracle’s Austin headquarters), have been previously reported and briefed to members of civil society, but as negotiations have stalled with CFIUS, which will decide whether the company can continue to operate in the U.S., the company has begun to describe the proposal in greater technical detail.

• Under the terms of the proposal, TikTok would divulge core segments of its technology to Oracle and a set of third-party auditors who would verify that the app is not promoting content in line with Beijing’s wishes or sharing U.S. user data with China.

• Today, EU Justice and Home Affairs Ministers are meeting informally in Stockholm to discuss, among other things, the fight against organised crime in the digital age. A debate on access to electronic evidence (“eEvidence”) is scheduled for the afternoon, focusing on the notion of “going dark”. “Going dark” describes the alleged diminishing ability of law enforcement agencies to access the content of online communications by the increasing use of encryption in everyday communication technologies and services.

• Moscow’s municipal authorities are evicting Sakharov Center, a non-profit founded by Andrey Sakharov’s wife, the human rights activist Elena Bonner, from all the spaces now used by the center, including its main building, gallery, and the Andrey Sakharov memorial apartment.

• Most Americans would likely be surprised to know that, according to a respected international poll taken in 2022, far more Chinese (83%) perceive China to be democratic than Americans (49%) perceive the US to be. And while culture war rationales were amongst the choices available to Americans to explain the difference, they chose ‘corruption’ (78%), ‘corporate control of the political system’ (72%), and the ‘power of Big Tech’ (66%) as the leading explanations for the dearth of democracy in the US.

• This deference to economic explanations of political outcomes wouldn’t surprise many Marxists. But it should be a wake-up call for committed liberals. The accusation since 2016 that liberal democracy is at risk from ‘fascists’ misses that a plurality of Americans believe that corporate and oligarchic power have already compromised ‘our democracy.’ This isn’t to dispute claims of fascist intent. It is to state that many so accused are powerless, whereas corporate executives and oligarchs have the power to force corporate autocracy onto the US.

• HBO recently released Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary, “Pelosi In the House.” The film pieces together old video footage capturing pivotal moments from Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s career. A part of the documentary features footage from CODEPINK’s 2007 “Camp Pelosi” Iraq War protests, which consisted of week-long peace encampments on the public sidewalk outside Pelosi’s San Francisco home in March and again in August. Camp Pelosi was a response to Speaker Pelosi acting as a cheerleader and facilitator of President Bush’s illegal war on Iraq.

• Although voting against the impending invasion of Iraq in October 2002, Pelosi’s subsequent actions helped enable the war by repeatedly supporting increased military spending, and refraining from calling for diplomacy talks with the Iraqi people. Just prior to “Camp Pelosi,” she refused to meet with a coalition of Bay Area peace organizations. These organizers had gone to her San Francisco office every Wednesday for 5 weeks to request a meeting with her due to f the dire impact that a continued U.S. occupation was likely to have. Instead, her staff mumbled vague specious excuses like: Representative Pelosi wants peace as well, but just has “different ideas” about how to achieve it. In essence, our voices were silenced.

• While the Hungarian government isn’t in favor of the European Union sending funding for weapons to Ukraine, it won’t block a planned 500 million euros in military aid, Peter Szijjarto, Hungary’s foreign minister said on Monday in Brussels. Szijjarto called media reports on the matter  “lies”.

• Earlier Euronews reported that Hungary is blocking the release of €500 million in military aid to Ukraine. Three EU diplomats told Euronews that Budapest is vetoing the disbursement of the European Peace Facility (EPF) mechanism fund. One of the diplomats called the move a “violation of a gentlemen’s agreement” and “an attempt to undermine EU unity”.

• In September 2022, after Vladimir Putin announced mobilization in Russia, 406,000 Russians crossed into Kazakhstan. So far, it’s been easy for those who have stayed to avoid trouble with immigration authorities: under Kazakh law, Russian citizens have effectively been allowed to reside in the country visa-free indefinitely by crossing the state border, even if only for a few minutes, at least once every 90 days. On December 31, however, the Kazakh government tightened its visa rules, outlawing these “visa runs” beginning on January 27, 2023. Meduza explains how this change is likely to affect Russians who fled mobilization.

• With President Biden’s approval ratings hovering at 40% and the US chasing endless war in Ukraine, Progressive Democrats of America’s foreign policy team, which I co-chair with Jim Carpenter of Milwaukee, welcomes a primary challenge from a peace candidate in the 2024 Presidential race. In fact, with Republicans hollering about Biden’s classified docs locked up in his Wilmington garage, it would hardly come as a surprise if primary challengers soon stepped into the spotlight.

• California Governor Gavin Newsom made no secret of his presidential ambitions last year when he ran a television commercial in Florida blasting right-wing Governor Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans, in general, for banning books, knee-capping voting rights and “criminalizing women and doctors.”

• At the end of this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting in Davos, its president, Børge Brende, concluded the meeting with this cautious but optimistic note: “In an uncertain and challenging time, one thing is clear. We can shape a more resilient, sustainable and equitable future, but the only way to do so is together.” While his sentiments about the results of future cooperation may be possible, the reference to “We” was presumptuous.

• Who exactly did Brende mean by “We”?

• Insurrectionist sprinter Josh Hawley has joined the growing chorus of GOP politicians who’ve spent years doing jack shit about U.S. consumer privacy abuses, and now want to pretend that banning a single app — TikTok — will protect American consumers from a problem they themselves created.

• The beleaguered American republic barely had time to wrap its head around the stupefying phrase “Marjorie Taylor Greene, House oversight committee member” before having to confront an abrupt escalation: “Marjorie Taylor Greene, vice-presidential hopeful.” Yes, the Georgia representative, notorious for her allegiance to conspiracy theories such as QAnon and the scourge of “Jewish space lasers” touching off forest fires, is reportedly positioning herself to be Donald Trump’s running mate for the presidency in 2024. An adviser to Greene told NBC News senior political reporter Jonathan Allen that “her whole vision is to be vice president” and predicts that she’ll land on Trump’s short list.

• This week, the NY Times had an article detailing how House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has formed a close bond with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a situation that many thought was impossible just a couple years ago when McCarthy seemed to see Greene as a shameful example of the modern Republican party’s infatuation with conspiracy theories, falsehoods, and nonsense.

• The Police Were Created to Control Poor and Working Class People

• Five Memphis, Tennessee police officers who were fired for what their chief called a “heinous, reckless, and inhumane” attack on a Black motorist who died three days after a traffic stop were booked and charged Thursday with crimes including second-degree murder.

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

• Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency through at least February 9 that will enable him to deploy up to 1,000 National Guard troops “as necessary.”

• The Russian Embassy in Ottawa refused to receive Russian national Elena Pushkareva, who lives in Canada, because she subscribes to a Facebook group called “For the beautiful Russia of the future.” The Facebook group takes its name from the phrase “beautiful Russia of the future,” which jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny and his team often use. Pushkareva reported the incident with the Russian Embassy to the Navalny team’s publication, Sirena.

• In a move that shouldn’t really surprise anyone, Meta has said that both Facebook and Instagram will be restoring Donald Trump’s accounts, which it had “indefinitely” suspended in the wake of the January 6th insurrection two years ago. As you’ll recall, after that suspension, the Oversight Board had agreed to hear Trump’s appeal of the suspension, resulting in it chastising Meta for giving a indefinite suspension. It noted that Trump did break the rules but the “indefinite” part of the suspension was a problem, as it was not at all transparent how that process worked, and Meta had no official setup for indefinite suspensions.

• Start my morning with me in May 2020: I’ve just fed my dog. I’m brushing my teeth. I’m mentally making my to-do list and trying to decide if I should stay in sweatpants for the third day in a row. And suddenly none of my plans matter, because Trump just posted an insinuation that Black Lives Matter activists should be shot. Facebook declines to remove the post while Mark Zuckerberg fixes his fingers to defend his decision. And my day is toast.

• Fight for the Future director Evan Greer argued Wednesday that the battle over whether former President Donald Trump should be banned from major social media platforms like Facebook is “a huge distraction” from broader Big Tech conversations that are urgently needed.

• As Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi as the chief guest at his nation’s 74th Republic Day celebrations, Amnesty International on Thursday led calls for both right-wing leaders to “address the ongoing human rights and impunity crises” in their respective countries.

• Why do leftists fight? Leftists claim to cancel each other over ideological differences but this is not why. It should be noted that I am very much for canceling the right wing, just not any part of the left. The reason leftists choose to fight each other rather than the right is not from ideological purity even if this is consciously how it appears to be for the left.

• The real reason the left fights each other is because fighting the right means being severely punished while fighting the left only loses you a few friends (no small thing but not quite the same). When leftists stand up to corporate rule, especially in defense of the environment they are often murdered, jailed, or saddled with a criminal record that makes it hard to make a living. At the very least they lose their particular job. Even effective altruism if done for the purpose of truly giving rather than accumulating money for one’s self takes a toll on the leftist who is without the time or energy for self-care when she helps others.

• The Liberal Mantra of False Equivalency

• Right-wing violence, racial cleansing, and the repression of dissent in the United States are deeply embedded in a history that is being erased by far-right politicians such as Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, various propaganda outlets such as Fox News (the Pravda of America), and anti-public pundits such as Tucker Carlson. There is also a refusal by many liberals such as Jonathan Chait, Mark Lilla, Ross Douthat, David Urban, Scott Jennings, Andrew Sullivan, and others to work through the past in order to recognize that “the spirit of the old fascism had never been truly vanquished” and that the enduring threat of fascism in the current historical moment poses a dangerous threat to democracy both at home and abroad.[1]  Regardless of how visible the fascist presence is in American society, there is a strong tendency among liberals to either look away or to suggest it has its counterpart in leftist politics, mostly defined as dogmatic. One consequence is that fascism’s link to capitalism is buried, while liberals insist that the market still holds the key to freedom and prosperity. This position appears in its most well-known form in the work of Francis Fukuyama.[2]  Yet liberal discourse, though coded in the language of moderation, amounts to a form of denial and diversion regarding the re-emergence fascist politics in American society–a politics whose dangerous threat is too often downplayed, misinterpreted. In this liberal appeal to a “both/sides,” politics with its crude balancing acts, the danger of a resurgent American fascism is divorced from what Theodor Adorno once termed a “species of regression” situated in a “shadow of the past that stretches into the present.”[3]

• On January 20th, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce gave a long speech at Duke University entited Outdated: Remarks before the Digital Assets at Duke Conference essentially arguing against doing her job by regulating cryptocurrencies.

• Below the fold I point out how she is shilling for the [cryptocurrency]sphere, with a long list of excuses for inaction.

• Right from the start it is clear that Peirce has swallowed the industry line that “crypto has immense potential” but that “it is still the early days”:

• You might recall how struggling satellite TV network DirecTV recently kicked right wing propaganda channel OANN off of its cable lineup because it simply wasn’t profitable. That prompted weeks of performative hysteria by the GOP about how they were being “unfairly censored,” even prompting involvement of numerous Republican AGs who apparently had nothing better to do.

• This isn’t about fairness, free speech, or democracy — all values Trump has spent the past 8 years trying to destroy. It’s likely not even that much about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s well-documented willingness to be bullied by right-wingers. This is almost certainly about one thing and one thing only: money.

• According to the head of the Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), Matis Mäeker, the main issues concerned background checks conducted when granting e-resident status. and risk mitigation relating to companies established in Estonia but operating in other countries

• Two years after the social platform banned him from its service in the wake of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol [insurrection], the company says that he can now return.

• During his re-election campaign last Fall, Florida governor Ron DeSantis seemed like he was everywhere. He didn’t make it to Micanopy (pop. 600) where my wife and I live, but he did manage to claim credit for a local internet upgrade he had nothing to do with. Now, barnstorming nationwide — without yet announcing his candidacy for president — DeSantis wields his “anti-woke” agenda like Hercules his broom in Daumier’s satire, cleaning the Augean stables. In this case, however, Hercules is piling up bullshit, not sweeping it away.

• The entire state of Florida, home to 22 million people, is currently being run as a giant Fox News campaign ad for the Ron DeSantis 2024 presidential campaign. As a method of crafting responsible public policy, this approach has a number of drawbacks. Yet when you set aside the politically archaic concept of “good governing,” it becomes clear that the DeSantis culture war strategy is highly effective air cover for the more substantive Republican project of class war. As he waves his hands and dazzles us with soundbites, he is trying to break the back of the Florida teachers union, which would rank as one of the most profoundly damaging blows to the labor movement in recent years. If the state’s incompetent Democratic Party can’t rally itself to cut through the torrent of performative bullshit and bigotry, we will soon wake up and find that this whiny, bullet-headed ex-jock has done to Florida’s workers what former Republican Gov. Scott Walker did to Wisconsin’s.

• Cliff Carlton was the 10th of 11 children and one of three still living at home when his father, a coal miner, died unexpectedly at 67.

• Only his dad’s Social Security benefits, along with vegetables from the family’s small farm in southwestern Virginia, kept the household afloat during the lean years that followed.

• Arguing that the Biden administration’s expansion of the Trump-era Title 42 anti-asylum policy is not only immoral but also illegal, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leading nearly 80 of her fellow Democratic lawmakers in calling on President Joe Biden to instead keep his earlier promise to end the policy that’s expelled more than 2.5 million migrants since 2020.

• Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday voiced support for a renewed progressive push at the Democratic National Committee to ban dark money donations in the party’s primaries, an effort that comes months after the DNC Resolutions Committee refused to allow a vote on the proposal.

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics last week issued numbers that included how many US workers were union members. The numbers showed that while the number of union members increased by 273,000, to a total of 14.3 million, their share of the overall workforce decreased, from 10.3% to 10.1%.

• One of the first dead giveaways for fascism is animosity toward trade unions. That’s not to say all anti-union businesspeople are fascist, but simply that that hatred is a first step on the primrose path to a polity of utterly oppressed wage slaves and strictly limited civil rights, a step that the current supreme court, composed of reactionaries who protest too much that they aren’t partisan hacks, has now taken several times. As Martin Niemoller said of the Nazis : “Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because was not a trade unionist.” Well, for those of us who support trade unionists, it’s time to speak out.

• Fascists know that their organic enemy is the labor movement, and their first effort when they come to power is to crush the working class. That’s why the current anti-labor ferocity of the supreme court is so alarming. At what point do we call this judicial determination to eliminate unions what it is? A proto-fascist resolve to subordinate workers’ rights to owners’ whims, to replace human rights with corporate power, to dismantle the legal architecture, such as it is, protecting subordinate employees, to turn the clock back to a time when workers had no rights and their so-called betters exercised total control over their lives – an appalling predicament that, by the way, already exists in many U.S. industries. Take, for example the Frito Lay strike of 2021.

• A gunman opened fire at Azerbaijan’s embassy in Tehran on Friday, killing the head of security and injuring two security guards, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry reported.

• The world is full of serious strife. What peace there is could shatter. It’s nice to follow one dispute. That doesn’t really matter.

• Growing up, Norma Gonzalez remembers how their parents were afraid to even drive down the street. As undocumented immigrants who spoke only Spanish, their parents feared racial profiling from the police. “Throughout my life we had to move all over Texas. I was getting into a new school once or twice a year,” said Gonzalez. “It was really hard because of my parents’ status. We had no financial stability. We had to keep looking for different jobs.”

• Last summer, HBO released a new documentary on the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. There is a startling scene in the film—a factual coda to the acclaimed mini-series—where a group of soldiers ready themselves to enter the reactor, six months after the disaster. They are equipped with makeshift protective equipment, which is described in this review in the center-right New York Post: Dressed in what appears to be foul-weather gear, one of the young men cinches his gloves and tightens the drawstring of his hoodie to shield his cheeks. Another slips a .1-inch-thick piece of lead, thinner than the protective coverings provided for dental X-rays, over his back. Some insert the sheets inside their undershorts, creating what is cheekily referred to as an “egg basket,” to protect their private parts. “Radiation is nonsense!” one of the men crowed on camera as his buddies goofed around and put bunny ears behind each other.

Censorship/Free Speech

• You will recall that we spent a great deal of words and posts in 2021 discussing the problems Twitch created for itself by deciding to suddenly change the way it enforces copyright infringement claims for its streaming community, mostly without informing that community of those changes and remaining extremely opaque and vague about the standards and processes after it went into effect. While some of the ways Twitch decided to enforce copyright on its platform were fairly silly in my view, the real problem stemmed from Twitch’s inability to properly and proactively communicate to its own community. That’s what set everyone off as much, or more, than anything else.

• EDRi and our members Access Now, ApTI, Article 19, Citizen D, EFF, EFN, IT-Politisk Forening, Panoptykon, Vrijschrift, Wikimedia Germany alongside other organisations are calling to reject Article 17 in its current form altogether in the EMFA.

• The undersigned civil society organisations are deeply concerned about Article 17 of the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), which puts forward the so-called proposal for “media privilege”. In this vein, we ask the EU co-legislators to reject Article 17 in its current form altogether.

• We understand the need to counterbalance the current asymmetry of power between media service providers (MSP) and very large online platforms (VLOPs). It is important to address how algorithmic content governance policies are changing the public role of media. Healthy newsfeeds on social media are a precondition to get access to reliable information and VLOPs are responsible for their algorithms as well as their content curation and content moderation policies. Furthermore, online platforms’ business models should consider the public interest of quality journalism.

• The BBC documentary India: The Modi Question examined the role of the prime minister in violent 2002 riots that saw over 1,000 deaths, mostly Muslims. The documentary highlighted memos and reports criticizing Modi, including one that said the riots had “all the hallmarks of an ethnic cleansing.” The documentary was not aired in India, but has nonetheless caused a furor. India ordered the documentary to be blocked in the country using emergency legislation, and The Intercept reported that takedown requests were submitted to Twitter.

• The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) today released a new resource that provides practical advice for authors whose books are being challenged and banned in K – 12 schools and libraries. Prepared in collaboration with writers who have faced censorship, it is available on the NCAC website.

• Founded in 2016 by three writer/journalists – the Turkish-born Cemal Knudsen Yucel, the Iranian-born Lily Bandehy, and the late Iraqi–born Walid al-Kubaisi – EX-MN opposes forced marriage; polygamy; genital mutilation; child hijab; burkas; sexual segregation; taxpayer financing for religious institutions; religious intimidation and threats; and blasphemy laws. And it supports untrammeled freedom of speech. By way of promoting these worthy stances, EX-MN holds seminars, takes part in international conferences and demonstrations, sends its members to speak in schools and at public events, and posts videos on YouTube (most of them in English) about such topics as Koran burning, the concept of “Islamophobia,” pro-hijab Western feminists, and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

• Russia’s federal censor, Roskomnadzor, has blocked the FBI and CIA‘s websites on Russian territory, according to TASS. The agency’s website does not specify the reason for the blocking.

• Mediazona publisher and Pussy Riot member Pyotr Verzilov has been charged with distributing, with politically malicious motives, “fakes” about the Russian army.

• The campus MSA and the Minnesota CAIR chapter pressured Hamline University to purge a Latina art teacher for showing a Shiite painting of Mohammed. Ham U called her an ‘Islamophobe’. But then, unexpectedly, what was left of the liberal consensus pushed back in the forums of PEN and the New York Times. MPAC hung CAIR out to dry.

• Hamline’s response to the controversy has drawn sharp rebukes from academics across the country who say the artwork, created by a Muslim and for Muslims, is commonly used in academic settings. Both the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Public Affairs Council have defended Lopez Prater, saying her decision was not Islamophobic.

• It’s been three years since hundreds of naked protestors gathered at the Facebook (now Meta) New York headquarters with stickers of male nipples, pointing to the company’s nudity policy and censorship that discriminates against women.

• Last week Meta’s Oversight Board – dubbed as the company’s ‘Supreme Court’ – overturned the company’s original decision to remove two Instagram posts that depict transgender and non-binary people with bare chests.

• The two posts, one in 2021 and the other in 2022, were made by the same Instagram account from a US-based transgender and non-binary couple with image captions discussing transgender healthcare.

• Who is the Barbra Streisand of Bollywood? There’s a new documentary, produced by the BBC about India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Specifically, the documentary is focused on Modi’s relationship with India’s Muslim community, including his apparent role during some anti-Muslim riots (where over 1,000 people were killed) two decades ago. And, apparently, it doesn’t make Modi look very good. I know this because India has banned the documentary. And is also demanding that clips of the documentary be removed from the internet.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Media organizations this week expressed concern about the harassment of a VOA journalist who tried to question the leader of the Turkish far-right Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP.

• Journalist Yildiz Yazıcıoglu directed a question at Devlet Bahceli after the party met in the parliament building in Ankara on Tuesday.

• Russian authorities designated the independent news outlet Meduza an “undesirable organisation” on Thursday, effectively outlawing the site from operating in Russia and banning any Russian from cooperating with Meduza or its journalists.

• The designation is the latest in a years-long campaign by the Kremlin to curb independent media and stop their reporting from reaching ordinary Russians in a crackdown that has escalated since Russia invaded Ukraine last year.

• Russian prosecutors on Thursday banned Meduza, an independent Russian-language news website, accusing it of posing a security “threat” to the country.

• It marks the latest attempt by Moscow to silence critical reporting of its war in Ukraine.

• The Latvia-based website was deemed an “undesirable” entity inside Russia, which effectively outlaws it in the country.

• Meduza has been declared an “undesirable” organization in Russia. In other words, our newsroom’s work is now completely banned in the country our founders call home.

• Russia’s Justice Ministry has added several new people and organizations to its ever-expanding “foreign agent” list.

• Meduza had already been branded a “foreign agent” in Russia in 2021.

• Under the “undesirables” law, Russians who maintain ties with such organizations could face heavy fines or prison terms of up to six years.

• The designation can have serious consequences not only for Meduza’s reporters and editors but also interviewees and readers who share its stories on social media.

• In a statement, Meduza urged Russians to keep reading their stories and pledged to resist the pressure.

• The European Union “strongly condemns” the Russian Prosecutor General’s decision to designate Meduza as an “undesirable organization,” as expressed in the official statement just published on the EU website:

• The Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office has designated the Latvia-based Meduza news outlet as “an undesirable organization,” amid the government’s ongoing crackdown on independent media. The office explained its January 26 decision by saying the Russian-language media outlet’s “activities pose a threat to the basis of the Russian Federation’s constitutional order and security.” Meduza was added to Russia’s list of “foreign agents” in 2021.

• The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office designated Meduza as an illegal, “undesirable organization” on Thursday, January 26. Officials announced in a public statement that Meduza’s activities “pose a threat to the foundations of the Russian Federation’s constitutional order and national security.” The decision applies specifically to SIA “Medusa Project,” the legal entity responsible for the news reporting you are reading right now.

• “The first casualty when war comes is truth,” U.S. Senator Hiram W. Johnson of California said in 1929, debating ratification of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a noble but ultimately failed attempt to ban war. Reflecting on World War I, which ended a decade earlier, he continued, “it begins what we were so familiar with only a brief period ago, this mode of propaganda whereby…people become war hungry in their patriotism and are lied into a desire to fight. We have seen it in the past; it will happen again in the future.”

• In its ruling delivered on Friday afternoon, the court said that the journalists who wrote the article — Laura Halminen and Tuomo Pietiläinen — unveiled several pieces of information concerning military intelligence that had been classified as secret in the interests of Finland’s external security.

• The article reported on the operations of an intelligence facility located in Central Finland, which gathered intelligence by intercepting signals for the Finnish Defence Forces.

Civil Rights/Policing

• An international coalition made up of more than 200 trade unions and progressive advocacy groups on Thursday published the Santiago Declaration, a manifesto for “a complete overhaul of our global economic system.”

• The TSA isn’t great at catching terrorists. It isn’t even great at catching contraband, failing nearly 100% of the time in audits of its efficiency. What it is good at is catching eye-catching things, most of them completely unrelated to providing safer travel.

• In 2012, former Customs and Border Protection official Alan Bersin proclaimed that “our southern border” is now with Guatemala. In her great new book, titled Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Detention Center, author and journalist Belén Fernández writes about this underdiscussed part of the U.S. border from the on-the-ground perspective of the Tapachula immigration prison, where she was detained. In the book, and in the below interview, Belén describes how she ended up behind bars and what she witnessed and experienced, including the friendships and solidarity she had with other detainees. As she writes, “There may not be human rights in Siglo XXI, but there’s lots of humanity.” Belén has this unique ability to write in a personal, detailed, and heart-wrenching way that is often also bitingly hilarious. She also has a penchant for coupling deep geopolitical analysis of state power, particularly that of the United States, with its absurdity, often in the same sentence.

• This is Belén’s fourth book. Her others include The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011); Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019)—a travelogue like no other about how Belén has successfully traveled and written about the world without setting foot in her home country, the United States, for 17 years (here’s a review I wrote about it in 2020); and Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), about what it was like be stranded in a Oaxacan beach town during the pandemic, where she ended up living right across the street from a Covid checkpoint. Needless to say, I strongly recommend checking out all her work. She is an original. And we are proud to feature her here in The Border Chronicle.

• ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story is part of an ongoing series investigating the return of Native American ancestral remains. Sign up for ProPublica’s Repatriation Project newsletter to get updates as they publish and learn more about our reporting.

• Every day when Logan Pappenfort is at work, he tries not to dwell on what’s under his feet. Beneath the south wing of the museum where he’s interim director are the remains of at least 234 of his ancestors.

• By Binoy Kampmark / CounterPunch When the first Russian forces began entering Ukrainian territory in February 2022, the instant reaction from Europe, the UK, Canada and Australia, was one of open commitment to Ukraine’s refugees.  The relentless human trains heading westwards were initially embraced by Poles, whose history with Ukraine is, at best, tense and […]

• The increasing shift to remote work in higher education has threatened the power and influence of the professional managerial class (PMC). In response, the PMC are throwing everything at the wall from baseless claims about work productivity to coercive policies to cement their power over faculty. Coined by John and Barbara Ehrenreich, the PMC are an influential cultural group who hold advanced degrees, are considered experts, manage other people and their wealth, and shape dominant culture and public policy.

• The work deemed too strenuous for even UK staff is passed onto those in India – the VFX “sweatshop” to the UK’s “factory line” – where staff work on 24 hour rotas, for a minuscule fraction of the pay their Western counterparts get.

• All of the nine, UK-based VFX workers spoken to for this piece had countless stories of projects when they had worked long days, sometimes up to 22 hours, to hit deadlines. One staffer recalled working five weeks straight without weekends off on the effects for Cats, often finishing after midnight. Another recalled working non-stop, 16-hour work days on The Crown.

• But groups like Human Rights watch say the Taliban have opted for killing criminals associated with armed opposition groups — Islamic State and other Afghan militias that have increasingly posed serious security threats to the fledging Islamist regime —instead of keeping them in jails.

• Under the Islamic Emirate’s strict interpretation of Sharia, acts such as drinking alcohol or extramarital relationships are considered criminal and carry severe penalties, while homosexuality and sodomy are punishable by death.

• Territories in Brazil’s fragmented Atlantic Forest where Indigenous peoples enjoy secure land rights have seen measurably less deforestation than similar areas in which land tenure is weak or non-existent, researchers reported Thursday.

• The findings, published in the journal PNAS Nexus, are the first to quantify the benefits of enhanced Indigenous land rights for Brazil’s tropical rainforests, and add to a growing body of peer-reviewed literature highlighting more broadly the advantages of Indigenous stewardship.

• In 2019, Tennessee state Senator Richard Briggs, a heart surgeon turned politician, voted for a near-total ban on abortion, in a law that was designed to be triggered if Roe v. Wade were ever overturned. Despite being listed as a cosponsor of the bill, Briggs put remarkably little thought into his vote. As ProPublica reports, “Briggs admits he barely read the two-page bill forwarded to his office.” The lawmaker, ProPublica also notes, “never thought it would actually go into effect.”1

• Recently, the Food and Drug Administration approved mifepristone (a drug that can be used with msoprostol to induce abortions) for wider distribution. It can now be picked up, with a prescription from a doctor, at pharmacies willing to stock it, and it can be sent through the mail. While mifepristone was initially approved for use in the United States back in 2000, you had to see the doctor in-person to get it. The recent change is a welcome victory for reproductive rights, a rare case of authorities trying to expand access to abortion.

• At a Russian State Duma round table event on Thursday, Russian Orthodox Church official Fedor Lukyanov proposed requiring married women to get their husbands’ permission before getting abortions. He added that “medically necessary abortions” should not be subject to the law, but specified that the exemption should only apply to pregnancies that threaten the mother’s life, not ones that threaten the baby’s life.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• As initially noted, the latter outage came just days after Spotify announced that it would lay off around six percent of its workforce, or approximately 590 team members. Of course, it’s unclear whether the developments are at all connected, but it bears highlighting that prior to posting an update about the initial 2023 outage, Spotify Status had last tweeted a disruption notice in March of 2022.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) says that it is behind the surprise shutdown of USTVGO. The popular streaming service, which was ostensibly operated from Vietnam, suddenly closed its doors last week. ACE says that it is in the process of taking control of the site’s associated domain names

• An ancient piracy battle has reached its final verdict at the Dutch Supreme Court. After 14 years, defunct Usenet provider News-Service Europe has won its long-standing dispute with local anti-piracy group BREIN, which now has to pay €65,000 in legal fees. This is a bittersweet victory for the provider, which continued to fight despite shutting down over a decade ago.

• Someone claiming to be Elon Musk has bombarded Google with takedown notices recently. The requests urge the search engine to remove listings for T-shirts emblazoned with memes shared by the tech billionaire. Other targets include a copy of a Tesla AI Day t-shirt. While Musk can certainly be unpredictable, there might be an imposter at work.

• This struck me as intriguing. To run an old game, you need the hardware (console) and the software (game cartridge). But with the interconnected, interdependent nature of so much software today, you not only need the hardware and the software, but also all the cloud services the software depends on.

• How will you run a web app in the future if npm i isn’t working in 100 years? Half (or even more) of the software’s code is missing from the source repository — that’ll be a complete headache for anyone in the future trying to run software from our present.

• This month the tabloids have been spicing up regular Premier League and PPV boxing event articles with exclusive commentary on cutting-edge anti-piracy techniques. The Orwellian revelation that Illegal Streaming Detector Cars are tracking people to their homes warrants specific and immediate action; 1) Wrap Firesticks in Tin Foil. 2) Wrap Head in Tin Foil. 3) BUY LEGAL TV PACKAGES.

• Sci-Hub, a shadow library that offers a free gateway to paywalled academic research, has lost control over one of its main domain names. Sci-Hub.se was deactivated by The Internet Foundation in Sweden, which manages the country’s .se domains. The action came without warning and took Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan by surprise.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I’ve been writing more pages for Knives. I think the game ends up having five pages for players and the rest is just stuff for the referee. I guess I’m trying to show the reader how I would run the game. I wonder if this is succeeding. Right now I feel that I still have topics to cover and at the same time this needs more examples, a kind of Replay where we see a referee prepping for the game, runs sessions, makes decisions. The idea being that you could learn the game by reading the book without having to watch videos online or have friends teach you.

• I don’t know if I’m just imagining it, but has the Internet gone progressively more crazy the last decade or so?

• It’s like everyone is so damn angry all the time. If they aren’t angry they’re bitter and resentful. And when they aren’t angry or bitter, they’re so depressed they’re barely able to crawl out of bed. And if they aren’t angry, bitter, or depressed, they have crippling anxiety. Every other week there’s some public blow-out where some person or another just loses their shit.

• This is the new normal, but it isn’t normal.

• I think we should talk about this and try and figure out what’s going on.

• I remember, even as a very young kid, the hope that the voting of the Spanish Constitution brought to the country back. These were not easy times, that came after a history of many civil wars, dating back to the Napoleonic invasion, revolutions, counter-revolutions, and so on and so forth, culminating in the mother of the civil wars, and then an almost 40 years old dictatorship. As a kid I wasn’t aware of half of it, but I’d soon learn about stories of violence, of the murdering kind, from the left and the right, for political or private reasons, and anything in between. I’m talking of burning churches and people dropped from a rowing boat into the sea, inside a sack. I’m talking of extreme right wing and left, of the violent kind. I’m talking about generational hatred.

• And yet, people who had been ministers under Franco and leaders of the Communist Party could join others and talk together. And not only that but were able to pen a constitution which was nothing unique, glamorous or even technically perfect, but it got the job done. Even if nobody truly loved it.

• Peeling a banana from the stem is barbarous. Use your forefinger and thumb to pinch the nub on the opposite end of the stem. This is the monkey way, or so it is said.

• It’s fun and easy to play mp4 videos in the browser directly from a web dirlisting without having to set up a complex and heavy media server but you can’t select subtitles. So here’s a brev app that generates a minimal HTML file that just has a video tag.

• That’s not true for a lot of people.

• It’s been a stressful couple of years of pandemic and climate change. That has been contributing factors to the political violence we’ve also been seeing, and people are losing their jobs and homes, and cities are being shelled, while others are still sick in respiratory diseases and many are mourning.

• I have had this rather unconventional way of peeling a banana the last couple of years, or rather it is the first step that differs, the opening part. I think it is genius but every time I tell someone about it, they are less than impressed (except my four-year-old daughter, she gets it). I think it boils down to me being a rare example of someone who thinks this is a problem in the first place (which it clearly is). Let me explain!

• When one opens a banana, one would grab the little stump and bend it backwards so that the peel cracks and one has a starting point for the rest of the peeling process. The problem, in my experience, is that this cracking is far from a reliable and deterministic operation. Sometimes, it cracks along the banana, and sometimes not at all, both scenarios resulting in the top of the banana’s internal being squeezed (a sub-optimal outcome, for sure). It is only when one has a clean orthogonal crack that the result is satisfactory.

• One day when he was in a big city the crowd on the street he was on suddenly parted, and he heard a voice yelling at people to step aside. Soon a group of men carrying a palanquin. Everyone around him not only gave way but bowed to whoever was in that palanquin.

• The stonecutter, well merchant now I guess, was compelled to bow himself. Simply because everyone else did and it made him fear what would happen if he didn’t.

• My dreams during the night, and especially dawntime, were as clear as the air between my smudged window and El Parque de los Enamorados. The last one featured Loyal as not a drum instructor but a *meta-drum instructor*. What is a *meta-drum instructor*, you ask? Well! A *meta-drum instructor* collects information about potential students and, according to that information, assigns a *non-meta-drum instructor* to said student.

• I’m low-key excited that Alice Cooper is touring again and will be doing a show near me in April, but of course getting to see him perform means giving money to Ticketmaster, and that probably won’t get fixed before Cooper’s entire catalog ends up in the public domain.

• There’s nothing wrong with Ticketmaster that isn’t endemic to how we do capitalism in the USA, but for some reason this corp seems particularly egregious. If a band did a rock opera like Styx’s “Kilroy Was Here” about how a monopolistic organization like Ticketmaster is killing music by pricing tickets out of most fans’ reach the music press would relentlessly ridicule them, but life is stranger than art.

• Your thoughts dictate how you feel. You are not distinct by things but by how you think!

Technical

• I hate that GitHub has such a monopoly on software project hosting. I want to embrace the “small things” but I also want to be visible for job prospects.

• This self-aggrandizing blog post from them really irks me. They are not worthy of credit for the achievements they’ve claimed here.

• It all begins with software developers and companies wanting a place to host and collaborate on their projects. GitHub (now owned by Microsoft) found a profit-maximizing way to provide this. Now they use their Copilot AI to exploit the developers they claim to care foremost about.

• I normally don’t post *this* often, but I found that my main work machine has been hacked since two weeks now.

• I’m in the Eurostar going to London for the rest of the week (for work), I thought it would be a good time to start procrastinating work and stop procrastinating planning the move of my self hosted services to the “cloud”. I said before that me and my partner will move during the first part of 2023 from Paris to the south west French region. This move will happen in multiple steps, and that means that having a full continuity of my self hosted services from one place to the other will probably not be possible. So for me, the best idea is to move my services to the “cloud”, and revisit the self hosting ideas when fully settled, and after making sure my ISP will do a better job than my current one (again, sorry all who, too often, notice my {web, gem}log being offline…

• For some time, I’d been looking for a vintage terminal at a reasonable price, mostly for nostalgia purposes. The market on fleaBay seems to be mostly split between immaculately restored pieces for exorbitant prices, and broken or untested devices at what would be a reasonable price for a working device. Also, DEC terminals other than the VT520 use a proprietary keyboard, which is usually sold separately from the terminal itself, often for well over $100. Twice last year I lost out on an auction for a VT320 in good condition at a reasonable price, in the last few minutes of the auction. But finally, a few months ago, I managed to get a working VT420 with keyboard and all for only a little more than I wanted to pay. It took a bit to get it set up, but now I’ve gotten it working well-enough to do my day-to-day personal computing on it.

Programming

• It’s mostly bugfixes and extending GNUnet++ to handel multithreaded enviroments. Last month I started working on peerinfo support. But ended up focusing on other stuff.

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