● 02.12.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 12/02/2023: Microsoft Has Another Round of Layoffs, Almost 30,000 Dead in Quake

Posted in News Roundup at 1:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• The Linux kernel’s general IP environment has a system for marking packets with what is generally called a fwmark, short for ‘firewall mark’. Fwmarks can be set through iptables, using the MARK target (documented in iptables-extensions), or by facilities such as WireGuard, and can then be used by firewall rules or by ‘ip rule’ policy based routing. Fwmarks are how I solved the general recursive routing problem when I set up my WireGuard environment. All of my uses of fwmarks have been simply picking a value, setting it, and checking for it. I was recently working with something that also uses fwmarks, and I saw unusual things in ‘ip rules’ and ‘iptables’ output: [...]

Instructionals/Technical

• Pacman is a powerful package manager for Arch Linux and its derivatives, like Manjaro Linux. It allows you to install, update, and manage packages easily and efficiently. But what about when you want to remove a package from your system?

• As a Linux user, one of the essential tools you need to know is a package manager. A package manager is a program that helps you manage and install software packages on your operating system. In this article, we will focus on Pacman, the package manager used in Arch Linux. What is Pacman?

• In today’s digital world, software is an essential component of our daily lives. From our smartphones to laptops, software plays a crucial role in enabling us to perform various tasks with ease. Keeping software up-to-date is important for security, functionality, and bug fixes.

• Zypper is a command-line package manager for the openSUSE operating system and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. It allows you to install, update, and remove packages from your system, as well as perform a variety of other package-related tasks. This guide will provide an overview of how to use Zypper, including examples of common commands.

• When it comes to network analysis and troubleshooting in Linux, two of the most commonly used commands are ss and netstat. Both of these commands allow you to display information about network connections and sockets, but they differ in terms of their features, speed, and efficiency.

• The ss command is a powerful utility in Linux that allows you to monitor and display information about network sockets. Unlike netstat, ss provides more detailed information and is faster and more efficient. This makes it an essential tool for system administrators and network engineers.

• Fedora Linux is a popular open-source operating system known for its stability, security, and user-friendliness. However, Fedora does not have pre-installed proprietary fonts, such as Microsoft Fonts..

• Nginx is a popular open-source web server that serves dynamic and static web pages. It is known for its high performance and low resource utilization, making it a popular choice for web administrators. Nginx Mainline is the latest version of Nginx, an open-source web server and reverse proxy.

• Google Translate is great, until it’s not. The quality of translation is undeniably impressive, and the apps have some genuinely useful features. But even if you choose to ignore the fact that Google lives off our data, there is a matter of Google Translate not working offline—not on a Linux system, anyway. And even if it could do that, there is still a case to be made for using and supporting an open-source alternative free from the shackles of surveillance capitalism.

• On February 2nd, the base-devel package group has been replaced by a meta package of the same name. If you installed the base-devel package group prior to this date, explicitly re-install it to get the new base-devel package installed on the system:

• pacman -Syu base-devel

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In KDE Frameworks 5.103, the KDE developers improved support for Flatpak apps as they addressed a major bug causing your system to hang while installing or updating Flatpaks, especially when using the Btrfs file system.

• They also improved the Plasma Wayland session by fixing a bunch of weird and random clipboard issues, as well as Spectacle’s “Copy to clipboard right after taking a screenshot” feature, which now works as expected on Plasma Wayland.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Fast animation speed, more dash icon sizes, and overview spacing size are among the new features in Just Perfection 23.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• EndeavourOS Cassini Neo’s latest bugfix release brings improved stability and bug fixes for Intel & ARM machines. Here’s what’s new!

Open Hardware/Modding

• StarFive VisionFive 2 should be viewed as a RISC-V development board at this stage, and it’s not suitable for integration into projects/products until further progress is made on the software side. Since since Linux RISC-V is still pretty new, especially from a video/graphics point of view, it should be expected. There are already features that work fine such as Gigabit Ethernet, GPIOs, the audio jack, and USB, but others like HDMI and storage performance still need a lot of work. System stability needs to be improved too since my SSH connection dropped a few times and I was unable to reconnect, nor did the serial console work, requiring a hard reboot. But I can see a decent amount of activity in the forums and the company is working on mainlining the Linux kernel.

• 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. The Arithmetic/Logic Unit (ALU, lower left) is split in two. The circuitry for the flags is in the middle, giving it access to the ALU’s results for the low byte and the high byte. I’ve marked each flag latch in red in the diagram below. They appear to be randomly scattered, but there are reasons for this layout.

• After several plumbers, exchanges with Geberit’s technical department, and the expensive replacement of the entire mechanism, I was still getting a failure rate of over 50% for the small flush. I finally managed to decrease this rate to 5% by applying two 8 mm silicone bumpers on the back of the plate. Their locations are indicated by red circles on the picture below: [...]

• Online weather services are great for providing generic area forecasts, but they don’t provide hyperlocal data specific to your location. [Harald Kreuzer] needed both and built a Raspberry Pi Weather Station that provides weather forecasts for the next 7 days as well as readings from local sensors. The project is completely open source and based on a Raspberry Pi base station which connects to ESP32 based sensor nodes and online services to nicely present the data on a 7″ touch screen display.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Week highlights: new version of CadQuery, new features in Krita, Inkscape, Kdenlive, Olive.

• For Krita, the merge requests section is probably a little more interesting than what’s going on in the main development branch right now. There’s anode editor for vector layersproposed, as well as variousUX/UI improvements and minor featuresfor the bundle and resource manager. All that coming to version 5.2 later on.

Events

• We’re in full-on prep mode for our first event in Europe in four years: Hackaday Berlin. And while we’ve got a great slate of speakers lined up, and to be announced soon, I’m personally most excited for the lightning talks.

• Last weekendFOSDEMhappened in person again, for the first time since2020, as fully packed with talks, discussions and people as always.

Education

• At the recently-concluded FOSDEM 2023 conference, Stefan Sperling (stsp@) presented a talk on Game of Trees. Video and slides of Stefan’s presentation are now available.

Programming/Development

• Since then, I have syndicated most of my coffee shop recommendations to the wiki and have made a number of improvements. b&c has been the subject of numerous discussions in the IndieWeb community, resulting in new ideas on how to improve the site.

• Hello! We released The Pocket Guide to Debugging back in December, and here’s a final update: the print copies are done printing and they’ve arrived at the warehouse, ready to ship to anyone who wants one.

• You can buy the print or PDF version now, and if you preordered it, your copy should already have shipped. Some people have told me that they already received theirs! Email me if you haven’t gotten the shipping confirmation.

• I can not keep track of Github notifications, for too many years. Yesterday, I thought of rewritingretaskfor Python3 only, and noticed aPRwaiting for 7 years only, fromMiro.

• Now it is merged. Took some time, but the patch went in. Miro alsonoticed

• This past weekend I released a new version of InvoicePrinter, my Ruby library for generating PDF invoices. Here’s what’s new.

• First of all,InvoicePrinterdependencies got updated forPrawn 2.4and to supportRuby 3.1.

• Remember that if you cannot use a particular version on your project, you can run InvoicePrinteras a server.

Java

• One of the fastest ways to advance in Java programming is using SolarLint’s IDE extension. It helps you avoid common problems and ensures your code is clean. SonarLint is a linting tool for code quality analysis and improvement.

• A common interview question for Java developers is to write some code inside a try / catch / finally statement so that the finally statement is not reached. At first glance, this is not possible. A finally statement in Java is used in conjunction with a try/catch statement.

• A deadlock is a situation in computer programming where two or more processes are blocked, each waiting for the other to release a resource that they need in order to continue executing. As a result, all the processes remain blocked indefinitely and are unable to make further progress.

Leftovers

• Several fire departments, including the Kent Fire Department, provided aid to the East Palestine community after a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed from its tracks.

• Two professors from Kent State recall the moment they found out their families were affected by a deadly earthquake that left thousands dead and displaced in Turkey and Syria.

• A new exhibit at the National Gallery of Art displays how the U.K. changed in the 1970s and ’80s.

• Electronic fraud is on the rise in Greece, due not only to the high penetration of the internet and smartphones, but also to the fact that cybercriminals are constantly discovering new ways of deception.

• The figures provided by the Ministry of Citizens’ Protection in response to a parliamentary question, concerning the period 2019-2022, reveal the rapid rise of cybercrime. Considering that these are only the cases of computer fraud under Article 386A of the Criminal Code that are reported to the authorities – often small amounts of money in defrauding are not reported to the police – then the real size of electronic crime is likely much higher.

• Six pregnant Russian citizens, who were detained by Argentina immigration authorities at an airport in Buenos Aires, have been allowed to enter the country, says Christian Rubilar, lawyer to three of the women.

• The phenomenon has become evident in recent weeks. “Only last night in the last Ethiopian [Airlines] flight, 33 Russian citizens entered with pregnancies of approximately 32, 33, 34 weeks,” the national director for migration said.

Education

Hardware

• Anyone who’s owned a game console from the last couple of generations will tell you that the machines are  becoming increasingly like set-top computers  —  equipped with USB ports, Bluetooth, removable hard drives, and their own online software repositories. But while this overlap theoretically offers considerable benefits, such as the ability to use your own USB controller rather than being stuck with the system’s default, the manufacturers haven’t always been so accommodating.

• My toilet is equipped with aGeberit Sigma 70flush plate. The sales pitch for thishydraulic-assisted devicepraises the “ingenious mount that acts like a rocker switch.” In practice, the flush is very capricious and has a very high failure rate.Avoid this type of mechanism!Prefer a fully mechanical version like theGeberit Sigma 20.

• Almost 2 years ago I made a Dell PowerEdge T320 my home server [1]. It was a decent upgrade from the PowerEdge T110 II that I had used previously. One benefit of that system was that I needed more RAM and the PowerEdge T1xx series use unbuffered ECC RAM which is unreasonably expensive as well as the DIMMs tending to be smaller (no Load Reduced DIMMS) and only having 4 slots. As I had bought two T320s I put all the RAM in a single server getting a total of 96G and then put some cheap DIMMs in the other one and sold it with 48G.

• I’ve retrobrighted my HP Brio desktop,Commodore 128,Commodore 64C, and mentioned I’m in the process of doing it for my newly-arrivedVC-20. Retrobrighting is the process of removing superficial yellowing from old computer plastics using hair developer and sunlight to bleach the surface. It has workedshockinglywell for me.

• We’ve seen a number of people create plasma speakers over the years here at Hackaday, so at first blush, the latest Plasma Channel video from [Jay Bowles] might seem like more of the same. Even his overview of the assembly of the 555 timer circuit at the heart of the setup, as detailed as it may be, is something we’ve seen before.

• Back in 2019, Giant Food Stores announced it would outfit each of its 172 stores in the United States with their own robot — at the time, the largest robotic deployment in retail. The six foot (1.8 meter) tall robot, nicknamed “Marty”, was designed to roam autonomously around the store looking for spills and other potential hazards. In an effort to make these rolling monoliths a bit less imposing in their stores, Giant decided to outfit them with large googly eyes.

• This SLA printer is no taller than a matchstick, but it works and appears to work well.

• Dear lazy web, help me pick the right hardware to make my shiny new laptop work better. I want a new USB-C dock and travel power supply.

• This machine looks nearly identical to an original Commodore 64 but without the legacy ports that were on it. There is no Expansion port, RF modulator, Analog AV out in the DIN connector, IEC port, Tape deck or Userport.

• In response to a post about my latest laptop I had someone ask why I chose an Intel CPU. I’ve been a fan of the Thinkpad series of laptops since the 90s. They have always seemed well constructed (given the constraints of being light etc) and had a good feature set. Also I really like the TrackPoint. I’ve been a fan of the smaller Thinkpads since I got an X-301 from e-waste [1] and the X1-Carbon series is the latest and greatest line of small Thinkpads.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Cannabis consumers should have the same commercial leisure spaces that alcohol drinkers do.

• Over 88 percent of opioid overdose deaths now involve either heroin or fentanyl. Targeting prescriptions is not an efficient way to address mortality.

• This staffing strategy has permeated hospitals, and particularly emergency rooms, that seek to reduce their top expense: physician labor. While diagnosing and treating patients was once doctors’ domain, they are increasingly being replaced by nurse practitioners and physician assistants, collectively known as “midlevel practitioners,” who can perform many of the same duties and generate much of the same revenue for less than half the pay.

• That’s what happened during the Trump years, when rail lobbyists secured the repeal of a long-overdue, hard-won safety regulation that would have required rail companies to replace the Civil-War-era brakes on their rolling stock with modern electronically controlled pneumatic brakes (ECPs): [...]

• The recent train derailment in Ohio shows the need for more stringent safety rules for train brakes, especially for trains carrying hazardous materials. Transportation regulators are instead bending to the interests of rail industry lobbyists.

• And the answer may horrify you. It sure did me. The summary is simple enough: LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night, which impacts sleep quality. Poor sleep quality has all sorts of nasty effects on human health – but it’s worse. Melatonin is also involved in the suppression of tumors and cancers. If your melatonin levels are low at night (from disruption or from simple night shift work), your risk of various cancers goes up by somewhere in the 30-80% range, depending on the cancer and study. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), back in 2007, considered “shift work” to be a “probable human carcinogen,” and plenty of other studies have demonstrated the link as well. Lighting, especially in the evenings and nights, is quite literally deadly serious. And we’ve gone about utterly screwing it up in the pursuit of “efficiency.”

• The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Friday announced that there will be “superfund” projects to clean up 22 toxic waste sites across the US. These projects will receive $1 billion from the federal superfund program to help remove the backlog of hazardous sites. Under the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill,

• By restricting private health care choices, the NHS and other beloved single-payer systems were doomed from the start.

Proprietary

• Surveying six million customers spanning nine industries across 12 regions. Nexthink (opens in new tab) looked at over 30 popular software tools and uncovered that 50% of all licenses were not being used.

• The cost for the unused licenses alone was said to be putting a $45 million drain on the companies every single month, which each year adds up to almost $537 million worth of wasted software.

• Yahoo has laid off 1,000 workers, or about 12% of its remaining staff, in a move aimed at restructuring the company’s advertising technology business unit and reallocating its finances more efficiently.

Security

• This ishauntinglysimilar to how I got into a photocopier/print server in my high school library in the mid-2000s. I couldn’t believe the password was delivered to the endpoint for local comparison. It also delightfully dropped every non-alphanumeric character, and translated every letter into lowercase before evaluation, just to remove some more entropy.

• (I disclosed the issues, because I’m a square)!

• Confidential computing is a technology that aims to enhance data privacy and security by providing encrypted computation on sensitive data and isolating data from apps and other host resources in a fenced off enclave during processing.

• Reddit has acknowledged a recent cyberattack that resulted in the theft of sensitive company information. The company referred to the breach in a security alert as a “sophisticated and highly-targeted phishing attack”. Reddit stated that it does not believe the breach impacted its users. A spokesperson from Reddit said that the company is “actively investigating and closely monitoring the situation.”

• The Islamic Republic marked the 44th anniversary of the Iranian revolution on Saturday with state-organized rallies, as anti-government hackers briefly interrupted a televised speech by President Ebrahim Raisi.

• In August 2021, DataBreaches noted reports that Electromed had been hacked, and the incident affected employees and customers. Electromed later reported the incident to HHS as impacting 47,200 patients. According to subsequent disclosures, this was a ransomware incident that Electromed had discovered in June. In September 2021, a potential class action lawsuit was filed against the Minnesota firm.

• Top Class Actions reports that Electromed settled the lawsuit for $825,000 without admitting wrongdoing or liability. The case is Lutz, et al. v. Electromed Inc., Case No. 0:21-cv-02198-KMM-DTS, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota.

• A police sergeant who was suspended from the RCIPS last year and a former employee of a local telecommunications company have both been summoned to appear in court next week in relation to a data breach investigated by the Office of the Ombudsman (OMB), the RCIPS has confirmed. The former telecoms worker is alleged to have unlawfully shared a customer’s phone number with the sergeant, who is accused of using it for personal reasons. The officer has been charged with misconduct in public office and unlawfully obtaining personal data. The telecom worker faces one count of unlawfully disclosing personal data.

• A spokesperson for the institution confirmed the attack to Ynet, who reports that despite the cyber attack, exams at the Technion are taking place today as usual. However, the students were asked to disconnect their personal computers from the network and reduce email traffic until further notice. In email to DataBreaches, however, Dasa reports that all exams have since been canceled for the 13th and 14th.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Russ Cox, a Google software engineer steering the development of the open source Go programming language, has presented a possible plan to implement telemetry in the Go toolchain.

• However many in the Go community object because the plan calls for telemetry by default.

• But Ms Yang wasn’t in a celebratory mood. She had been under heavy surveillance since speaking to the media about losing her daughter to Covid.

• She has been protesting on the streets, and has been trying to file a lawsuit against the government. She says she wants “an explanation”.

• China is a one party-state which does not tolerate protests that challenge the leadership.

• The media and the internet are also heavily censored, with many foreign news outlets being banned in the country. People who talk critically about the country to foreign media often face retribution – from warnings to even detention.

• With technology, China has also established an extensive surveillance network that monitors mobile device data and tracks movements.

• A man is on trial in the NSW District Court after his former wife claimed to have found a VHS videotape in a garage showing him allegedly assaulting an unknown woman.

• James Dolan has lately stirred controversy over his use of facial-recognition technology to keep his enemies out of Madison Square Garden — but supermarkets and other retailers say they’ve begun using it for a legitimate purpose: to bust shoplifters. Grocery stores, drug chains and other mass merchants are increasingly using high-tech innovations — including facial-recognition…

Defence/Aggression

• At least one of the objects downed was believed to be a spy balloon from China, but the other two have not yet been publicly identified.

• The U.S. cannot adequately address its national security challenges related to China, which are increasingly driven by technology, without the help of a potentially surprising partner: the Department of Commerce, reveals Jonathan Panikoff, a former career U.S. intelligence officer, now a senior fellow in the geoeconomics program and director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security…

• The United States’ recent promise to ship advanced M1 Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine was a swift response to a serious problem. The problem is that Ukraine is losing the war, writes “The New York Times”.

• In the early hours of February 11, the Russian army launched two air strikes on the Odesa region, according to Ukrainian Armed Forces Operation Command South.

• The FAA issued a notice on Saturday banning flights in an area about 50 by 50 nautical miles around Havre, Montana, close to the Canadian border.

• “The lights are thought to be from a remote-sensing altimeter satellite ICESAT-2/43613” — a NASA craft, the agency said.

• Thousands of Europe-based Iranians, including relatives of victims of repression in the Islamic republic, lawmakers, and campaigners, have urged the European Union at a rally in Paris to list Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a “terror” group. Speakers at the rally on February 11 insisted that such a listing for the IRGC was the biggest contribution EU ministers could make to help the protest movement that erupted in September. The rally came as Iran marked 44 years since the Islamic Revolution that ousted the shah, with pro-regime rallies inside the Middle Eastern nation.

• The incident was the latest in a string of similar assaults and legal moves against Christians in the one-party communist state with a mostly Buddhist population despite a national law protecting the free exercise of their faith.

• The terrorist cell was responsible for supplying the ISIS cells with weapons and equipment and planning for terrorist acts that target the safety and stability of the region, according to the SDF statement released on Saturday.

• The war in Ethiopia has largely been ignored by the outside world, and information has been hard to come by. But what we know about the conflict is horrific: at least 500,000 civilians have been killed, and 5 million have been displaced.

• The Ukrainian Security Service has charged Alexander Bastrykin, who is the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, in absentia.

• Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valeriy Zaluzhny told Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, that Russia has used naval surface drones.

• The campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—a strident supporter of loosening gun regulations—tried to ban firearms at an election night event in Tampa last year and blame the city for the policy, The Washington Post said in a report published Friday that had critics on both sides of the political aisle calling the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential candidate a hypocrite.

• Just four days into the new year, 20-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant and student Arif Sayed Faisal was shot and killed by police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after appearing to have a mental health crisis. The Cambridge Police Department was quick to call the killing an “officer-involved shooting,” using language that police departments across the US use to shift the blame off of officers who kill or maim civilians. Cambridge police claimed that Faisal advanced towards officers with a knife in hand, implying that the police had no choice but to shoot him dead.

• Destroyed buildings in Russian-occupied Mariupol are being turned into concrete chips, which will in turn be used in road construction, according to Dmitry Khadzhinov, a representative of the occupying forces.

• Thousands of Europe-based Iranians, including relatives of victims of repression in the Islamic republic, lawmakers and campaigners, on Saturday urged the EU at a rally in Paris to list Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a “terror” group.

• VERDICT: Mistaken.

• Sudan’s ruling military has concluded a review of an agreement with Russia to build a navy base on the Red Sea, two Sudanese officials said on February 11.

• Two former fighters of the Russian private military company Wagner have told CNN of their horrific experiences on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine, and how anyone who faltered was immediately shot by their own commanders.

• Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand shares what she knows about the unidentified object that was shot down by NORAD over Canada. CNN’s Arlette Saez reports.

• Russia’s tourism, both in-bound and out-bound, is severely hit by the war-ravaged crisis that unfolded in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine late February. For more than two years, the tourism industry was badly affected due to the widespread Covid-19 that shattered the world.

• The mortal remains of Sergeant Vusimusi Mabena, killed by a sniper in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), will be received today (Sunday, 12 February) at Air Force Base (AFB) Waterkloof in Centurion.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Polish MEP Radoslaw Sikorski sent an open letter to Dutch newspaper NRC blasting a report it ran about regular payments the lawmaker received from the United Arab Emirates for acting as an adviser and allegedly undeclared paid luxury trips to Dubai.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• [Yuichiro Morimoto] wanted to create a decorative lamp, one that wasn’t burdened with batteries or wires, but used just the ambient light in the room to create a directed glow effect. Using a coloured circular acrylic sheet, with a special coating (not specified) ambient light impinging on the surface is diffused toward the edge. This centre sheet is embedded in an opalescent sheet, which scatters the light from the center sheet, giving a pleasant glow, kind of akin to a solar corona. An additional diffuser cover sheet on the front covers over the edge to hide it, and further enhance the glow effect.

• A leak discovered in a gas pipeline that runs between Los Angeles and Las Vegas has led to a state of emergency in Nevada as state and local officials rush to stem possible shortages.

• Driving the news:The leak, discovered at a pumping station in a city near Los Angeles, has forced several associated fuel lines to shut down. Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, which operates the pipeline, said that the cause for the leak is currently unknown and that an investigation is underway.

• Several fire departments, including the Kent Fire Department, provided aid to the East Palestine community after a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed from its tracks. TV2’s Jacob Brooks spoke with Lt. Craig Peeps from the Kent Fire Department to learn more about how they helped in the efforts to contain the fire.

Overpopulation

• At a news conference Friday, Safe Haven Baby Boxes founder and CEO Monica Kelsey said the child was dropped off within the last seven days at a Bowling Green Fire Department location, declining to be more specific to protect anonymity. She said fire department staff was able to tend to the child in less than 90 seconds.

• The child is the 24th in the country to be surrendered at one of more than 130 baby boxes and drawers the organization has established across nine states.

Finance

• It’s the airline that came back from the dead — and then died again.

• President Biden’s State of the Union speech earlier this week included the president’s observation that Republicans want to cut Social Security and Medicare, something that’s been demonstrably true since 1935. That triggered a heated exchange between the president and his Republican hecklers, who insisted it wasn’t true. “So, folks,” said Biden, “as we all apparently agree: Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right? All right, we’ve got unanimity!”

• A group of 33 Democratic lawmakers on Friday implored the U.S. Labor Department “to take immediate action to rid Hyundai’s supply chain of child labor and hold those responsible to the fullest extent of the law” after a Reuters investigation revealed that dozens of kids as young as 12 years old—most of them Central American migrants—were working in Southeastern factories supplying the Korean auto giant.

• Including but not limited to working as a dog-walker and trainer and acting as a public-relations specialist.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• If the United Arab Emirates can take such a dramatic and historic step as entering Holocaust Studies to its school curriculum, why can’t the Palestinians recognize the historical connections between the land of Israel and the Jewish people? Regrettably, if the Palestinian leaders and those who run its institutions dwell on hatred and on the destruction of Israel rather than improving the lives of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza, their lot won’t be much better than that of Afghanistan. The Palestinian-Arabs are the most educated people in the Arab world. With the right mental attitude and with a focus on the betterment of life in the West Bank and Gaza, Palestine could become a Middle Eastern Singapore.xs

• The government in Tehran claimed victory over the protests sparked by the death of Jina Mahsa Amini. But Iranians abroad held large protests against the Islamic Republic.

• Under the guise of the regressive legal theory of “originalism,” the United States Supreme Court Republican-appointed majority has issued a series of ultra-right rulings on such vital issues as votingrights, gerrymandering, unionorganizing, the death penalty, environmental protection, guncontrol, abortion, and campaign finance. The end goal appears to be nothing less than the dismantling of the last vestiges of the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement.

• While Democrats defied historical trends in the 2022 midterm elections by blocking the Republican “red wave” that many pundits predicted would overtake the U.S. Congress, last year’s election resulted in significant GOP gains in Southern state legislatures, bolstering their control of the region’s politics.

• This could be India’s decade if it plays its cards right. The subcontinental state is poised to be the next China, even if its path will likely be less straightforward than that of China and more of a Leninist two steps forward, one step backwards.

• Indonesia is one of the developing countries in Asia with a large number of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). In 2016, the Bureau of Statistics recorded that 99 percent of businesses in Indonesia could be classified as MSMEs and as many as 65 million MSMEs contribute 61 percent of the country’s total Gross Domestic […]

• Gaming outlets and major breweries are making contingency plans to guard their earnings.

• Republicans refuse to worship the false idols of the Woke Democratic Left.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Online, that went down about as well as you might imagine. “I get death threats all the time, because I’m very vocal about a lot of things,” says Moore, without appearing remotely concerned. “I want to live forever, everybody does, but I’m not going to. So, do I want to die in some cheesy fall off a ladder kind of way? Or do I want to die fighting for what I believe?”

• Amid the rise of cancel culture, Moore refuses to be cowed by a fear of causing offence. “Just me getting out of bed with a vagina offends some people. So, what am I going to do?” she laughs. “These days, everybody wakes up offended. I’ve been cancelled so many freaking times. Here’s the thing about me: if I say something, it’s because I meant it. And if you don’t like it, that’s going to have to be your problem.”

• India-held Kashmir ranked alongside Russia — where Moscow moved to cut access to social media and news amid its invasion of Ukraine; Iran, where blocks came amid mass protests that started in September; and India, where Surfshark documented cuts in service at times of unrest.

• More than a fifth of all web blackouts took place in Kashmir, according to Surfshark, a virtual private network company headquartered in Lithuania.

• Its global report on internet censorship in 2022 — released mid-January — found 32 countries were hit by a total of 112 restrictions. Nearly all came during times of protest or unrest.

• Amid continued media denial of why he was attacked.

• Adelkhah has been in prison since her arrest in 2019 during a visit to Iran. She is one of seven French nationals detained in Iran, a factor that has worsened relations between Paris and Tehran in recent months.

• Iranian authorities on Friday released from prison French-Iranian academic Fariba Adelkhah, who was first arrested in June 2019 and was serving a five-year sentence on national security charges vehemently denied by supporters, a source close to her said.

• Mob attacks against people accused of blasphemy occur regularly in Pakistan. Rights groups say such accusations have often been used to intimidate religious minorities or settle personal scores. Blasphemy is punishable by death in Pakistan.

• Activists associated with the Sakharkovskoye Dvizheniye (Sakharov Movement, whose participants are interested in the legacy of Soviet nuclear physicist and peace activist Andrei Sakharov) suggested to members of the European Parliament that they should organize a prisoner exchange, trading Alexey Gorinov for “one or more of the accomplices of the Putin regime who are detained in the West.” Gorinov, a former Moscow city council member who opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is currently serving a seven-year prison term for spreading “false information” about the Russian army.

• On the evening of February 11, at least ten articles discussing the invasion of Ukraine, the treatment in prison of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, and other actions by Russian authorities, briefly appeared on the website of pro-Kremlin publication Komsomolskaya Pravda (KP).

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Around 5 p.m. on Wednesday, February 8, Lambert was giving a live report for cable network NewsNation about a recent train derailment when at least four law enforcement officers approached and asked him to stop speaking because Ohio Governor Mike DeWine was simultaneously giving a press conference, according to NewsNation and news reports.

• Lambert finished his report, and then the officers, some with “Trooper” insignias on their uniforms and others in dark green shirts and khaki pants, surrounded him, pushed him to the ground, and handcuffed him, according to those sources.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Leigh Thelmadatter interviews Mexican-expat pairings who’ve made love work despite language, culture clashes, and opinionated in-laws.

• Edward Curtin “No one knows who will live in this [iron] cage in the future….” Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism I would prefer not to relay the following very strange story given to me by a fellow sociologist, but he had done me a number of favors…

• One of the most severe hate crime laws in the world, India’s Prevention of Atrocities Act (PoA) seeks to punish and deter violence against Dalits (ex-untouchables) and Adivasis (tribals). However, worries over its efficacy in tackling historical oppression rule popular discourse in India and the international humanitarian community.

• John whitehead Step away from the blinders that partisan politics uses to distract, divide and conquer, and you will find that we are drowning in a cesspool of problems that individually and collectively threaten our lives, liberties, prosperity and happiness. These are not problems the politicians want to talk about, let alone address, yet we cannot …

• Sadaf Khadem trains at her boxing club in Royan on the south-west coast of France three nights a week. The Iranian-born boxer hopes one day to go professional.

• The White House did not respond to a request for comment from Radio Free Asia, but Tsering said Pelosi told him during a meeting at the Capitol on Wednesday, which also involved actor and Tibet supporter Richard Gere, that Biden would be open to meeting.

• In recent weeks, numerous reports have been published detailing moves by authorities to seal businesses, restaurants, cafes, and in some cases even pharmacies because of owners and managers failing to observe Islamic laws and mandatory hijab rules.

• The wave of closings comes amid the months-long public anger that eru pted after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in September while in custody after being detained by morality police in Tehran for “improperly” wearing a head scarf.

• According to Radio Free Europe, the 37-year-old professor caught the eye of the Taliban and was brutally beaten up by officials on Thursday. He was also subsequently arrested for the dissent. Abdul Haq Hammad, a Taliban official from the Information and Culture Ministry, accused Mashal of “provoking people against the [current political] system.”

• Since December last year, the Taliban have carried out beatings and detained several people who have protested against its ban on women from pursuing university education. As a result, Mashal decided to take matters into his own hands and carried dozens of books on a cart named ‘Iqra’, which is Arabic for ‘read’, to distribute the reading material among women of Kabul.

• The death of a young YouTube star at the hands of her father has sparked outrage in Iraq, where so-called “honor killings” continue to take place.

• Her “crime” was that her son was accused of being romantically involved with a Muslim woman. Islam assumes the man is superior, and that non-Muslims must never have authority over Muslims. Non-Muslim men may therefore never court or marry Muslim women, although Muslim men may court and marry non-Muslim women. Why do so many Western women support this unabashed discrimination?

• On February 2, Atlanta University Center Consortium (AUCC) student organizers occupied a weekly campus “social justice and leadership” forum at the historically Black college Morehouse, per the university paper, The Maroon Tiger, to lobby the university community over Cop City. The organizers read a list of demands, including that Morehouse “denounce and sever their support in building” Cop City and that the college president follow suit.

• That starts by being honest with ourselves about some discomfiting contradictions in the status quo. “We’ve somehow ended up with a justice system that treats kids as adults when it comes to policing and punishment but not when it comes to basic rights,” he writes, noting that each year 76,000 children who aren’t allowed to watch R-rated movies are prosecuted as adults. In some states, they’re deemed fully responsible for rash choices made under peer pressure but not responsible enough to sell a bike or go to the dentist alone. These rules aren’t just wildly inconsistent; they’re also backwards, according to science. Studies show that a teen’s “capacity to understand and reason her way to a decision is comparable to an adult’s ability in situations that allow for coolheaded deliberation,” Benforado explains. In other words, research on the adolescent brain says “yes” to letting them vote and “no” to prison.

• The UK government Thursday rejected a call by the Justice Committee to resentence prisoners facing indeterminate jail terms under the abolished Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) scheme. This poses a major challenge to nearly 3,000 prisoners who were sentenced when the legislation was still in place but remain in prison despite the Committee’s proposal…

• For centuries, cows have been considered sacred by India’s majority Hindu population, a symbol of both the Earth and the divine.

Monopolies

• This integration will bring new features to Microsoft Edge’s built-in PDF reader, including more accurate colours and graphics, improved text selection, and the ability to read documents aloud for greater accessibility. Additionally, these new capabilities will be available for free to all users. By joining forces, Adobe and Microsoft are taking a significant step forward in their goal of transforming the way people work with digital content and furthering their commitment to making technology accessible to everyone.

Copyrights

• With a reputation for quality and sporting one of the most recognized brands to ever exist in the pirate IPTV marketplace, a big legal win over PrimeStreams would’ve been a PR coup for any rightsholder. Instead, two PrimeStreams-related lawsuits worth tens of millions in damages were quietly settled this week, despite what appeared to be a mountain of evidence. So what went wrong?

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• you’ll need a shell account on my box already to do this

• there’s a suid program named “hijack-gre-over-udp” that will allow you to point the remote end of a gre over udp tunnel to wherever it gets a packet from next.

• I’m thinking of changing it so that this command runs from a TCP port, and requires that the next packet it receives is from the same IP that the TCP connection is made from…

Politics

• “The long boom” predicted growth that “could eventually double the world’s economy every dozen years”.

• [...]

• So. Question. How is the world economy going to double every 12 years and sustain that? One could quote Professor Al Bartlett who began his one-hour talk with the statement, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” And if one tells only of the boom one might miss the busts and the benefits going mostly to those not less equal than others. How fares the rest of this story?

Technical

• The other really big topic when it comes to package is how to identify them. This is a lot more complicated because I view packages in a polyglot manner instead of a single foreign ecosystem.

• 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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