● 02.04.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 04/02/2023: FOSDEM Happening and Ken Thompson in SoCal Linux Expo

Posted in News Roundup at 9:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Applications

• The Qt file manager called QtFM has great features, such as storing custom commands so you don’t need to open a Linux terminal window to run them. The only drawback is getting it installed. Let’s look at what makes this file browser special and how you can (maybe) try it out.

• Zsh has many strengths such as interactive tab completion, regex integration, automated file searching, advanced shorthand for defining command scope, and a very rich theme engine.

• We highly recommend installing a framework with Zsh as it makes dealing with configuration, plugins and themes a lot more straightforward. Frameworks are essentially collections of plugins and themes, which you can enable very easily, without needing to manually configure and make everything work together.

Instructionals/Technical

• While we have already discussed the cksum command line utility, there’s another tool that you can use in scenarios where, say, you need to verify the integrity of files during transfers. The tool we’re talking about here is md5sum. In this tutorial, we will discuss the basics of this command using some easy to understand examples.

• Wine is the solution that we can use to install the SourceTree software on Linux systems including Ubuntu. Here is the tutorial to learn the steps we need to follow to get this free Git Client software.

• This tutorial will help you to add version 7.3 of OnlyOffice Desktop Editor to your Ubuntu computer. You can do it easily using Ubuntu Software or alternatively Terminal. Happy writing!

• Upgrading a system can be a daunting task, especially if it is an off-line system. An off-line system is one that is not connected to the internet and cannot access online resources. The good news is that you can still upgrade your system even when it is not connected to the internet.

• Learn how to convert MKV to MP4 on Ubuntu using Handbrake in this step-by-step guide. Convert high-quality MKV videos to widely supported MP4 format for use on various devices.

• Introduction Yum (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) is a package manager for Red Hat based Linux distributions, including Fedora and CentOS. It helps in managing and updating the software packages on the system, including their dependencies and conflicts. In this article, we will learn how to configure Yum to manage packages on your Linux system.

• Are you tired of having to use different software just because you prefer using Ubuntu instead of Windows? Look no further, ’cause you can now have the best of both worlds!

• Introduction Yum is a package manager used in Red Hat-based systems like Fedora, CentOS, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With Yum, users can easily install, update, and remove packages from the terminal. In this article, we’ll explore the basic Yum commands and their options, with examples to help you get started.

• Introduction YUM (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) is a popular open-source package management system used to install, update, and remove packages in Linux distributions such as Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and CentOS. YUM makes it easier to manage packages by resolving dependencies, downloading packages from a central repository, and installing them.

• In case you want to know how to configure IPv6 using CenturyLink’s 6rd tunneling service.

• The tail command in Linux is a powerful tool used for displaying the end of a file. By default, it displays the last 10 lines of a file, but this can be modified by specifying a different number of lines to display.

• An Orphan Process is a process that has lost its parent process, which normally takes care of cleaning up the process’s resources. In Unix/Linux, when a parent process terminates, its child processes become Orphan processes and are adopted by the init process, which becomes the new parent.

• Not only is deploying pods and services to a cluster a

WINE or Emulation

• More weekend goodies from Valve have arrived! Proton 7.0-6 is officially out now, fixing up many bugs like with the EA App and Ubisoft Connect. Pulling over a bunch of changes from Proton Experimental, this is a smaller release mainly aimed at fixing up issues across a bunch of games that appeared over the last few months.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora Family / IBM

• VirtualBox 7 enables organizations, for the first time, to centrally manage their development and production VMs running on-premises and on OCI instances using any OS that supports VirtualBox, such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS.

• Last year, with the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF)’s release of Rocky Linux 9, CentOS and Rocky Linux co-founder Gregory Kurtzer also released a completely cloud-native Linux distribution build stack called Peridot. Then, Kurtzer said, “anyone can create, build, enhance, and manage Rocky Linux, or other distros for that matter. Now, CIQ engineers have also released the Rocky Linux 9 errata subsystem as an open-source project, which is fully integrated with Peridot.

• What that means is you can now build and enhance your own take on Rocky Linux, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone with full access to the latest bug fixes, security patches, and feature enhancements. RESF will continue to maintain the project, providing users with more granular control over their systems.

• Over the years, Red Hat and Oracle have gotten along like cats and dogs. The main reason for this was that in 2006, Oracle released its own version of Linux, Unbreakable Linux, which was little more than a copy and paste of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with Red Hat’s name and Red Hat’s trademarks globally replaced with Oracle’s name and trademark. That went over like a lead brick in Red Hat circles. Now, RHEL is available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Open Hardware/Modding

• Similarly to all electronic computers, the Raspberry PI computer boards need a stable power supply in order to work correctly.

• This project replaces the brains of a classic talking toy with a modern, CircuitPython-powered KB2040 microcontroller, with a collection of typical urban sounds and custom illustrations.

• One of the fun things about “old school” computers is that it was fairly easy to get kids into programming them. The old Basic interpreters were pretty forgiving, and you could do some clever things easily with very little theory or setup. These days, you are more likely to sneak kids into programming via Scratch — a system for setting up programs via blocks in a GUI. Again, you can get simple results simply. With Scratch or Basic, complex things have a way of turning out complex, but that’s to be expected. If you want to try a Scratch-inspired take on microcontroller programming, check out MicroBlocks. It will work with several common boards, including the micro:bit and the Raspberry Pi Pico. You can use it in a browser or download versions for Linux, Windows, Mac, or even Chromebooks.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Back on February 3rd, 1998, shortly after the Netscape web browser source code –Firefox’s ancestor–was released, a group of developers came together to label and define a pragmatic, business approach to sharing software code. Of course, there was already “free software,” but that term, then and now, came loaded with a particular business/political take that not everyone cares for. So, it was that at the meeting Christine Peterson came up with the term “open source.” The group that would shepherd this idea going forward is the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

• OSI to contribute to Digital Public Goods Alliance’s mission to address world’s most pressing economic challenges by furthering adoption of Open Source software.

• Moxie Marlinspike, former CEO of Signal, wrote a veryinteresting blog post about “web3″, the crypto-scam1. It’s worth a read if you are interested in that stuff.

Events

• Pasadena, CA. March 9-12, 2023

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Chromium

• The upcoming Kirkstone-series had chromium 106.0.5249.119, have compiled a later version in OE, and some more packages:

• There was interest expressed in tesseract OCR package on the forum, so compiled that. No GUI though. One of the best-looking GUIs for tesseract seems to be gimagereader, but it has lots of dependencies. I could compile it if there is sufficient interest.

Mozilla

• Mozilla‘s more than justFirefox. There’sThunderbirdfor e-mail,BlueGriffonfor creating web pages, and ye oldeSeaMonkey Application Suite. Once upon a time, there was the ability to create custom front-ends on top of Firefox using the-appoption. (It’s still there but not really supported.) Mozilla’s source code provides a rich ecosystem to build atop of.

• Recent publications byConsumer Reportsand theNSAhave launched countless conversations in development circles aboutsafetyand its benefits.

• In these conversations, I’ve seen many misunderstandings about what safety means in programming and how programming languages can implement, help or hinder safety. Let’s clarify a few things.

Programming/Development

• Git is a powerful version control system that helps developers manage and track changes in their codebase.

• I have long admired albums2hear, a Twitter bot that posts albums. You can read a bit more about it here. There was no mastodon equivalent and so I decided to build one. You can follow the bot – currently called Albums Albums Albums (or AlbumsX3) – here.

• ‘Vendors have worked out a model where they can get more money out of you’

Python

• I drafted this blog post in 2016 (at least), but held off publishing it until I could have it fact checked. Well, 6 years have passed… I am 99% sure the information in this blog post is correct. But if you find an error with my explanation of the userspace-kernel-device dataflow then please send me an email so I can understand it better and update this post.

Leftovers

• Perseverance is something working parents demonstrate daily. “Full Time,” filmed like a thriller, offers a lens on that life – and on the strength people draw on to get through tough times.

• Skilled specialists from Lithuania are often recruited by companies operating in Western Europe that offer remote work. The arrangement is most common in IT companies, although telework is spreading to other fields too.

Hardware

• Nerf Blasters are great fun to play with, but you really shouldn’t eat the foam darts. Conversely, Pez dispensers are fussy and kind of boring, but the candy is a tasty treat. [Soloprototype] has presented us the best of both worlds, in the form of a 3D-printed Pez blaster, with a firm note that this toy is for grown-ups only.

• [Tom Verbeure] recently found himself lamenting the need to take screen grabs from an Advantest R3273 spectrum analyzer with a phone camera, as the older gear requires you to either grab tables of data over an expensive GPIB interface card, or print them to paper. Then he realized, why not make a simple printer port add-on that looks like a printer, but sends the data over USB as a serial stream?

• You may have seen some of the EEVblog dumpster dive videos, where [Dave Jones] occasionally finds perfectly good equipment that’s been tossed out. But this time, rather than a large screen monitor, desktop computer, or a photocopier, he features a stash of 283 electrical outlet double adapters that he found last year. He decided to perform a test in the parking lot, connecting all 283 adapters in series.

• “I really like your floating banana.” If that’s something you’ve always wanted your guests to say when visiting your living room, this levitating banana project from [ElectroBing] is for you.

• The mechanical keyboard community is a vibrant, if not fanatical, group of enthusiasts determined to find as many possible ways of assembling, building, and using as many high-quality keyboards as possible. With so many dedicated participants, most things that can be done with a keyboard already have been done. So when something as unique as this split keyboard that also doubles as a mouse pops up, we take notice.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• JACKSON, Miss. — The freeze of early 2021 wasn’t the origin of Jackson, Mississippi’s water system collapse. But the winter storm introduced the country to Jackson’s aging and improperly maintained pipes and water plants, which failed and left residents without clean water for over a month.

• The crisis surged back in the summer of 2022, leaving residents without clean water for two months and drawing comparisons to Flint, Michigan’s lead-poisoning scandal, another banner example of America’s ruinous infrastructure systems. Here, as in Flint, the federal government stepped in: In November, the Department of Justice appointed a federal manager to take control of the beleaguered utility, and less than a month later, Congress approved $600 million exclusively for the city’s water system.

• Since the seven Colorado River Basin states failed again this week to reach a consensus on a plan to conserve the region’s dwindling water resources, environmental justice campaigners have implored officials to prioritize combating the “overuse and abuse” of water by agribusiness and fossil fuel corporations.

• As a deadly strain of avian influenza continues to decimate bird populations around the world and spread among other animals, some scientists are warning that mammal-to-mammal transmission has emerged as a real possibility with potentially catastrophic consequences for humans.

• After decades of criminalization, Australia’s government said Friday that it will legalize the prescription of MDMA and psilocybin for the treatment of two medical conditions, a historic move hailed by researchers who have studied the therapeutic possibilities of the drugs.

• A real gift.

• Not that we needed an excuse to drink it.

• It’s time to return oversight to industry groups and the states.

Privatisation/Privateering

• Postal jobs have long been a road to the middle class for Black Americans. The Postal Service began employing Black workers shortly after the Civil War and became a major source of good, middle-class jobs for this share of the workforce in the early 20th century.

Security

• A cyberattack caused a nearly daylong outage of the nation’s new 988 mental health helpline late last year, federal officials tell The Associated Press

• What triggered it is that I started a newprojectbecause I wanted to explore two things I have been putting off for a while, and I had some time on my hands on a long weekend.

*

• What’s interesting about this project is that, on paper, it is straightforward, we just wire up one API to another, and given both deal with simple cryptography primitives it should be pretty simple… or is it?

• Well of course it isn’t, first of all we are talking about cryptography, which is notoriously finicky in terms of API for various legitimate, and less so, reasons. But the actual calls that need to be made to implement the cryptography are the least problematic, for the most part. What really makes things hard are the lack of documentation about OpenSSL providers, and the impedance mismatch between the way OpenSSL goes about handling some of the operation and the way PKCS#11 envisions applications should handle the cryptography engine.

• After French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo’s launched a cartoon contest to mock Iran, an Iranian cyber retaliated in January.

• It turns out that security concerns in the cloud-native world look a lot like what’s keeping practitioners up at night in the rest of the technology ecosystem.

• As it became known to “Kommersant”, the investigative department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation completed the investigation of the criminal case of the so-called international group of hackers REvil, information about which was provided to Russia by the FBI. According to its results, the investigation was able to accuse eight alleged intruders of only two remote thefts of funds, and even then committed in the United States by who knows where and for what amount: there are no victims, as well as damage, in the criminal case. Lawyers for the defendants say that two weeks would be enough for them to study the materials, but the procedure seems to be delayed.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• Watch our video to see how the latest phishing scam works

• Fraudsters attempt to cash in on chaos in the rental market

Privacy/Surveillance

• Geofence warrants get all the hype. But Google also stores other data of interest to law enforcement: Google searches.

• The ACLU on Friday filed a federal lawsuit against top U.S. intelligence agencies that have failed to respond to public records requests for information about a “sweeping law that authorizes the warrantless surveillance of international communications,” including those of Americans.

Defence/Aggression

• U.S. fighter jets successfully shot down the high altitude spy balloon launched by and belonging to China.

• US fighter jets have shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon, but the tensions linger in the world’s most important bilateral relationship. Our experts float their takes.

• Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky said the situation on the front lines in the east of the country was getting tougher, with Russia throwing more and more troops into battle, hours after the two sides agreed to exchange dozens of prisoners of war. Earlier on Saturday, Ukrainian officials said a serious accident at a high-voltage substation had caused widespread power outages in and around the southern port city of Odesa, leaving half a million people without power. Follow our live blog to see how the day’s events unfolded. All times are Paris time (GMT+1).

• The United States on Saturday downed a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the Carolina coast on orders from President Joe Biden after it hovered over sensitive military sites across North America, becoming the latest flashpoint in tensions between Washington and Beijing.

• Last week, in a federal courtroom in New York City, a jury found Sayfullo Saipov guilty of intentionally driving a truck down a crowded lower Manhattan bike path, killing eight people and injuring several more.

• Jan. 6 defendants who faced with jail time often professed remorse. Now, more are now backpedaling or even celebrating their actions in the Capitol riot.

• …the Department of Defenseannounced.

• The big picture:The balloon, which the Pentagon accused China of using to collect information on U.S. military sites, has heightened tensions between the two nations.

• Secretary of StateAntony Blinkenon Fridaypostponed his planned tripto Beijing, saying the surveillance balloon in U.S. airspace “is a clear violation of U.S. sovereignty and international law.”

• The US military shot down the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon over the Atlantic Ocean off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, a US official said.

• CNN’s Rafael Romo reports on a sighting of another suspected Chinese balloon in San José, Costa Rica.

• The United States downed the Chinese balloon off the Carolina coast after it became the latest flashpoint in tensions between Washington and Beijing.

• Xi wants China’s military ready to invade within four years, CIA Director William Burns said.

• Bunker constructed in the 1960s, which lies 60 metres below ground level, is equipped with a special ashtray for Her Majesty

• There are plenty of valid reasons to seek a search warrant. Investigating a crime you can’t punish anyone for (because you’ve killed them) isn’t one of them.

• We gotta love hacker Dads and Moms for being so awesome. Sooner or later, their kids get to play with some amazing toy that every other kid on the block is jealous of. [Meanwhile in the Garage aka MWiG] is one of those super hacker Dads who built a frickin’ Tank for his son (video, embedded below.). But it’s so much fun driving that beast around that we suspect Dad is going to be piloting it a lot more than the kid. The tank features metal tracks, differential steering, a rotating turret, periscopes and a functional paintball gun with camera targeting.

• The Danish government said on Friday it opposed Russian athletes competing under a neutral flag at the 2024 Paris Olympics, which the International Olympic Committee is considering despite Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

• The Congressional Budget Office has a new report highlighting some of the drawbacks of the much hyped hypersonic weapon.

• Following the 2 April elections, Finland could see weeks or even months of political paralysis as parties seek to form the next coalition government.

• New police raids across Brazil on Friday followed comments by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva about the alleged involvement of his right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, in planning an attack on government buildings in Brasília last month.

• Ted Olson—the former U.S. solicitor-general in the George W. Bush administration who argued against basic legal rights for Guantánamo Bay prisoners and defended their indefinite detention and torture—made a stunning admission Thursday: The Gitmo military commissions don’t work and should be shut down, and the government should strike plea deals with 9/11 defendants held at the prison.

• The award-winning Swedish crime reporter and author Diamant Salihu features in this Saturday’s Sweden in Focus podcast, where he talks about Sweden’s shockingly high number of gang shootings, what’s behind them, and what to do about it.

• Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced on January 19 that the company no longer considers Ukraine’s Azov Regiment to be a “dangerous organization.” The far-right paramilitary group grew out of the street gangs that helped topple Ukraine’s president in the US-backed 2014 coup. Originally funded by the same Ukrainian oligarch that backed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s rise to power, Azov was on the front lines of civil war in Eastern Ukraine, and was later fully integrated into the Ukrainian national guard.

• In a perfect world, all videos would have transcripts, and live videos would have captioning. It’s not just a requirement for people without hearing to be able to participate in pop culture and video chats, it’s a luxury for people with hearing who just prefer to read what’s been said. Not all software has captioning built-in though, and some that does relies on third-party cloud services to function. Live Captions is an application for the Linux desktop that provides instant, local, and open source captioning for video.

• It’s hard to find words after yet another brutal police killing of a Black person, this time of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee, captured in horrifying detail on video footage released last week. But the words we use—and in that “we,” the journalists who frame these stories figure critically—if we actually want to not just be sad about, but end state-sanctioned racist murders, those words must not downplay or soften the hard reality with euphemism and vaguery.

• For as long as the CDC and other health organizations have collected data on suicide, they’ve reported that suicide rates among Black people are the lowest among any racial category, and Black women and girls, more specifically, are least likely to end their lives of all demographic groups. It’s a statistical finding so counterintuitive that researchers dubbed it the racial/gender “suicide paradox”—that despite enduring more simultaneous marginalizing oppressions than any other group, Black women, instead of taking their lives at rates that surpass, or even equal, more privileged identities, just keep on keepin’ on. This idea—that suicide is correlated with whiteness, negatively correlated with Blackness, and irrelevant to Black femaleness—crept out of the sociology and mental health realms to establish itself within the broader American cultural psyche. Black women’s purported immunity to suicide has been regarded as such an open-and-shut case that studies on Black female suicidality are extremely scant. Corrections to that dangerous oversight have been slow to take hold, even in recent years, as Black teenage girls and young women have begun killing themselves at unprecedented rates.

• Since last summer, Kremlin-backed tycoon Evgeny Prigozhin has traveled around Russia’s penal colonies, recruiting inmates into the Wagner Group ranks, in exchange for pardons and cash payments. Witnesses claim, however, that the mercenary group has its own means of punishing fighters for desertion and other offenses, and that extrajudicial killings are a common practice. Mediazona spoke to a former prisoner who first signed up to go to war, and later escaped from his Wagner Group formation. Here’s his story, in brief.

Environment

• “We learned last week that certain fossil fuel producers were fully aware in the 1970s that their core product was baking our planet. And just like the tobacco industry, they rode rough-shod over their own science.

• Extreme cold broke longstanding records Friday into Saturday as the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic U.S. continues dealing with temperatures in the single or negative digits, along with gusty winds.

Energy/Transportation

• Republicans and right-wing commentators suddenly want to save the whales—and much of the news media is buying it.

• Those damn bureaucrats in Washington are at it again.

• A serious accident at a high-voltage substation in Ukraine’s Odesa region has caused emergency power outages…

• Sen. Joe Manchin on Thursday responded dismissively to a reporter’s question about the glaring conflict of interest posed by his family’s ownership of a business that is profiting from coal waste—a toxic energy source that the West Virginia Democrat is actively promoting in the Senate.

• Over the next three years, the Latvian Hydrogen Association, waste management company ZAAO, the Vidzeme Planning Region and partners from Estonia and the Netherlands will work together to plan, develop and test the potential of green hydrogen in the transport sector in smaller regions, using the cooperation between Estonia’s Tartu and Latvia’s Vidzeme region as an example.

Overpopulation

• In the desert, life depends on death.

Finance

• PwC was commissioned to do a report on Robodebt in 2017 but but can’t recall if it was finalised, or not, or why. What’s the scam?

• Surprising most analysts and forecasters, employers added a whopping 517,000 jobs in January, according to Friday morning’s monthly labor report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This was almost twice the growth from December’s 260,000 jobs. The unemployment rate fell to 3.4 percent, the lowest since 1969.

• After REI employees in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio walked off the job Friday morning, the recreational equipment retailer agreed to schedule a union election vote next month and stopped pushing to exclude certain workers.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• While it might be sad to see E3 2023 carry on without big announcements from Nintendo, Sony, or Xbox – as is being reported by IGN – this latest development might be for the better. Viewers might not see trailers for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 or Starfield at E3, but these and many more first-party titles could show up at a designated PlayStation State of Play or Xbox Showcase later in the year. Microsoft is already planning such an event for June, right around the time that E3 2023 is set to take place. Likewise, Nintendo always has a new Nintendo Direct livestream just around the corner, and a Direct specifically for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is expected prior to the Breath of the Wild sequel’s May release.

• People keep claiming that Mastodon isn’t scaring Elon Musk, but it’s pretty clear that he’s worried about the exodus of people from Twitter. With his bizarrely short-sighted decision to end free access to the Twitter API, driving developers over to Mastodon, some people realized that the various tools that people use to find their Twitter followers on Mastodon are likely to be cut off. It’s unclear if this was part of the motivation for ending free access to the API, but it did create a surge in people checking out those tools. But then, last night, just hours after the API announcement, Elon’s Twitter cut off API access to Movetodon, which was the nicest, easiest to use tool for finding and following your Twitter followers on Mastodon.

• Thirteen advocacy groups filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee this week, requesting an investigation into Sen.Kyrsten Sinema(I-Ariz.) and allegations about tasks she requires of her staff.

• Driving the news:In a letter first reported byThe Hill, Sinema is accused of requiring her Senate staff to “conduct a wide variety of activities unrelated to their job responsibilities,” including personal errands, household tasks at her private residence and advancing their own money for her personal purchases.

• A former Arkansas lawmaker who admitted to accepting thousands of dollars in bribes and filing a false income tax return has been sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison

• On 25 January, roughly six weeks after being sworn in following her predecessor’s removal, Peruvian president Dina Boluarte finally recognized that elections were the only way out of political crisis. Elections were rescheduled for April 2024, much earlier than the end of the presidential term she’s been tasked with completing, but not soon enough for thousands who’ve taken to the streets demanding her immediate resignation.

• The Belarusian government’s pick for the new foreign minister indicates that Minsk is not shutting the door to engagement with the West, however fraught it is at the moment.

• Tyre Nichols has gone home, as we say in the Black church tradition. But he was sent there violently and prematurely by police officers who broke his neck. Others that helped sign his death certificate with their silence or approval, including Emergency Medical Technicians who stood over his badly beaten body with what we would later learn was a broken neck, helped to send him there. Another funeral of a beloved family member sent home too soon and by the mean and the murderous. Tyre Nichols’s death hits home for so many of us, but it is personal for many of us who are Black in America. It was also a different kind of assault on the senses to open Black History Month. There is nothing historic about an unarmed Black person being killed by police for driving while Black. Even walking or jogging while Black is dangerous.

• On Tuesday November 3, 2020—back when votes for the presidential election were still being counted—Republican Senator Josh Hawley tweeted out, “We are a working class party now. That’s the future.” Hawley’s tweet was based on early exit polls showing that Donald Trump was outperforming expectations and had won Florida. His claim has a basis in reality: Trump’s success in 2016 and his near-victory in 2020 (Joe Biden’s narrow triumph resting on fewer than 44,000 votes in three states) was due to the former reality-show star’s strong appeal to white non-college-educated voters. To be sure, the white working class was trending toward the GOP before Trump arrived on the scene. But in 2016 he solidified and intensified this trend through a shrewd message of economic populism: Trump eschewed traditional Republican calls for cuts to Medicare and Social Security, hinted that he’d replace Obamacare with his own better version of health care, criticized globalism in the form of trade agreements that led to the loss of manufacturing jobs, and called for immigration restrictions as a way to bolster wages.1

• Gas stoves. M&Ms. Xboxes. There is no consumer product or domestic practice too banal to serve as fodder in the culture wars now raging on the American right. Indeed, the vigilantes sworn to stamp out wokeness across the nation’s dens and kitchens seem to serve as an Orwellian domestic makeover crew, commandeering the sort of hearth-themed authoritarianism normally reserved for reality TV franchises and self-help bestsellers.

• Nevada Democratic Party Chair Judith Whitmer said Friday that progressives won’t stop working to stem the flow of untraceable cash into national primary contests after the DNC Resolutions Committee blocked a vote on her proposed dark money ban for the second time.

• Nikki Haley will reportedly announce the start of her campaign for the Republican presidential nomination on February 15, becoming the first GOP 2024 candidate after Donald Trump. Since it’s likely that Haley will emphasize foreign policy issues in pitching her candidacy, it’s worth examining her public record more closely to see what kind of foreign policy she thinks the U.S. should pursue.

• After Ilhan Omar was elected to Congress in 2018, she explained why one of her first priorities as a member of the US House of Representatives was to serve on the Committee on Foreign Affairs. While the Minnesota Democrat was intent on representing her constituents in Minneapolis, and on addressing all the pressing domestic policy concerns that tend to dominate coverage of Congress, she told me, “You can’t really speak to domestic policy without first having a conversation about our foreign policy.”

• The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek spoke with Meduza about the Russia-Ukraine war, framing it as part of a global ideological conflict, in which Vladimir Putin himself is befriending other authoritarian regimes to create a new, ultra-conservative axis of global power. A self-described pessimist, Žižek cautions the West against settling into a complacent sense of moral superiority. The Neo-Fascist ideological turn that now serves Putin’s imperialist ambitions is not, he says, a specifically Russian problem. Instead, it’s a case study in how things go wrong when political competition devolves into struggle among oligarchs. This is a condensed version of the philosopher’s interview first published by Meduza in Russian.

• Kevin Ryan Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet published his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism in June 2022. The book brings attention to the need to understand our own psychology in this time of global crisis. It outlines the process of mass formation by which the masses find themselves to be hypnotized members of a totalitarian state.

• Todd Hayen I know I am beating a dead horse here, but I am still fuming about The Atlantic article from October 2022. How dare they?! I am also a bit perturbed by all the folks prematurely declaring victory over this totalitarian abomination.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Canada on Friday imposed sanctions on 38 individuals and 16 entities it said were “complicit in peddling Russian disinformation…”

Censorship/Free Speech

• California law protects people against lawsuits known as SLAPPs, or Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. The state’s anti-SLAPP law allows for motions such as Winslow’s, which should allow for meritless defamation lawsuits to be dismissed quickly.

• “The district court’s decision encourages meritless lawsuits against online speakers by allowing plaintiffs to strip disputed statements of their context and evade California’s robust anti-SLAPP statute,” EFF’s brief argues. “Yet the First Amendment requires courts to examine the fuller context of any alleged actionable statement to protect hyperbole and avoid chilling speakers.”

• The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has blocked Wikipedia after slowing access to the website for 48 hours over content it considers “sacrilegious.”

• That did not happen in a case on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Amin v. Winslow, and EFF filed a friend-of-the-court brief last month describing the potential danger to speech when courts let these cases linger.

• A whistleblower alleges that the plaintiff, Dr. Mahendra Amin, performed unnecessary medical procedures on women at an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention facility. When news reports described the whistleblower’s allegations, author Don Winslow shared news stories about the allegations and criticized Amin over a series of tweets.

• Amin’s lawsuit focuses on a single Winslow tweet that he alleges is defamatory. But the First Amendment requires courts to analyze the broader context surrounding any statement. The federal district court hearing the case disregarded this long-standing principle when it denied Winslow’s motion to dismiss the case, according to EFF’s brief.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Authorities recommend Nguyen Lan Thang be charged with spreading anti-state information.

• by Su Xinqi and Jerome Taylor The trial of 47 of Hong Kong’s most prominent pro-democracy figures begins on Monday, in the largest prosecution under a national security law that has crushed dissent in the city. The proceedings are expected to last more than four months, and the defendants face sentences of up to life […]

• BDG Media is suspending Gawker and will lay off 8% of full-time staff, according to an internal memo from CEO Bryan Goldberg that was obtained by Axios.

Civil Rights/Policing

• As Finland seeks to attract more workers from abroad, prominent business people have highlighted the “irresponsible damage” caused by the Finns Party’s statements on work-based immigration.

• Chief Minister Himata Biswa Sarma Friday reported more than 4000 cases of men marrying underage girls in the Indian state of Assam with over 1800 arrests.

• As some families seek restitution for the suffering caused by former President Donald Trump’s family separation policy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Thursday acknowledged that nearly five years after the policy was first enforced, 998 children have yet to be reunited with their relatives.

• On the morning of January 18, agents from nine agencies, including the FBI and its local counterpart, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, descended on a section of Atlanta’s South River Forest occupied by activists. For the past two years, hundreds had lived in the section of the Weelaunee forest, in tents and treehouses, in order to block its planned conversion into a police training facility—a “cop city” complete with a mock village, firing ranges, and a Black Hawk landing pad. That morning, the agents were under orders to “eliminate the future Atlanta Public Safety Training Center of criminal activity.”

• U.S. Sen. Ed Markey on Friday joined thousands of scientists from across the globe in demanding that the American Geophysical Union answer for its decision in December to expel two climate researchers from its Fall Meeting after they staged a brief, peaceful protest urging their colleagues to engage in climate activism.

• Douglass is best-known for his role in the abolitionist movement that helped end slavery. But much of his thought is also relevant to contemporary issues.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The evidence-free moral panic over social media keeps getting stupider, and when things get particularly stupid about the internet, you can pretty much rely on Utah politicians being there to proudly embrace the terrible ideas. The latest are a pair of bills that seem to be on the fast track, even in Utah’s short legislative session. The bills are HB311 from Rep. Jordan Teuscher and SB152 from Senator Michael McKell (author of a number of previous bad bills about the internet).

Monopolies

• As we noted recently in reporting on the FEC dismissing the Republican’s laughably ridiculous complaint that Google was dumping their fundraising emails into the spam folder as an “in-kind contribution” to Democrats, there was still the GOP’s even more ridiculous lawsuit. Last week, Google filed its response, and it’s… worth reading to see how thoroughly and completely it dismantles the GOP’s silly complaint. Most of the news coverage of the complaint has been about how Google mentions in passing that it’s ending the “pilot program” it set up to allow politicians to avoid the spam folder. However, I think this is a misread of what’s in the filing. It just notes that “The Pilot Program is scheduled to run through January 31, 2023,” which is the nature of a “pilot program.” It’s unclear if Google will look to continue it or bring it back during the next election season.

• Roughly a year ago, we discussed Russia’s response to some of the sanctions the West was placing upon it, including its plan to simply legalize copyright infringement, so as to keep the country running despite the crippling sanctions. That blanket legalization plan morphed somewhat months later, when Russia instead pivoted to a plan to create a “unfriendly countries” list for which all kinds of copyright infringement would be legalized. Not surprisingly, that list of unfriendlies mostly amounted to any country that had sanctioned or criticized Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. While these laws have yet to be implemented, none of the announcements by Russia created even the mildest surprise to the West.

Trademarks

• After the commencement of this proceeding for cancellation of a registration for the markDISOfor various electronic devices, on the grounds of fraud and abandonment, the registration was subject to a USPTO audit regarding respondent’s Section 8 Declaration of Use, which resulted in deletion of many of the identified goods, leaving only “earphones and headphones; portable media players, namely MP3 players.” Observing that a registrant may not, by deleting goods from a registration, moot a proceeding to avoid a judgment as to the deleted goods, the Board allowed respondent twenty days to explain the reason for its deletions.

Copyrights

• Popular stream-ripping site Yout.com has filed its appeal brief at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The service aims to reverse a district court ruling that dismissed Yout’s claims against the RIAA. Yout seeks a declaration that it doesn’t violate the DMCA and accuses the music industry group of defamation and business disparagement.

• Join us for this introduction to CC licenses and tools to get your basic questions answered and practice sharing content to the commons: 10 February 2023, 2–7pm UTC (see the schedule in your local timezone).

• How modern songwriting evolved into a game of aggressive credit—even for the people who didn’t technically do the composing.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I’m not sure if I could fully tell you why, but I’ve had this compulson in my mind that I need to purchase The Beatles – Rubber Soul on vinyl – but specifically around the time that I’m moving in with my partner (next weekend). I guess I’ve been listening to this album a fair bit recently, and maybe it’s just that it reminds me of this moment – and I want to have something material as a kind-of calendar item to mark the moment.

• I seem to have settled in a nice “one page a day” routine with Knives. I’m not sure how many more pages there will be. Something about players gaining a talents. Something about them making plans. Something about finding campaign goals.

• Robotic lies are spread across the room. My modem howls in silent disbelief. Machines are parrots. Maybe so are we, as chafing bones are slouching to be born in fire, as I draw my final breath and sleep. Perchance to dream. Perchance to scream.

• So gently whispered is this lifelong scream while ghostly passing through my inner room. A chalkboard’s nail. A raspy smoker’s breath. A regent clad in finest disbelief. A crawling insect hatches to get born, and in the skylit evening, so were we.

Technical

• The claim is that “time” disagrees with the documentation for time(1) on OpenBSD, and the evidence for this may look pretty solid

Internet/Gemini

• One of those protection rackets, properly known as a performance rights organisation, recently sent out a news letter. There was a short paragraph that caught my attention. Since their business model is to rake in money for their members from all sorts of venues that play their music, they are in fact interested in increasing the number of such venues, including restaurants and shops. Studies, they claimed, have shown that customers enjoy the _right kind_ of music being played in the stores. So, what a win-win situation: entice the venues to play more music, make their customers buy more, and collect larger royalties for the composers.

Programming

• I wrote a bot that connects to Discord last year. It’s a nice bot. It keeps facts for channel, it keeps timestamped notes per channel, it also connects to IRC (all of which we don’t use) and it rolls dice (which is what we use).

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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