● 02.20.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 20/02/2023: helloSystem 0.8.0 Reviewed

Posted in News Roundup at 2:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• At the level of the X protocol, windows have a size in pixels and that’s it. However, X has long had a way for programs to tell the window manager that they should only be sized and resized in fixed pixel sized amounts, not resized to arbitrary pixels. You can look at this information with the xprop program; you want the WM_NORMAL_HINTS property, which is described in the Xlib programming manual section 14.1.7 and section 4.1.2.3 of the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Josh and Kurt talk to Joylynn Kirui about DevSecOps in the Microsoft universe. Joylynn gives us an overview of the current state of devops and tells us about some of the tools Microsoft has made available to the open source universe.

Kernel Space

• The first Linux kernel release of 2023 is here. Linux kernel 6.2 features new hardware support, security fixes, and file system speed boosts.

• Headline features in this release include the ability to manage linked lists and other data structures in BPF programs, more additions to the kernel’s Rust infrastructure, improvements in Btrfs RAID5/6 reliability, IPv6 protective load balancing, faster “Retbleed” mitigation with return stack buffer stuffing, control-flow integrity improvements with FineIBT, oops limits, and more.

• Linus Torvalds has, as foreshadowed, released version 6.2 of the Linux Kernel.

• “So here we are, right on (the extended) schedule, with 6.2 out,” Torvalds posted to the Linux Kernel mailing list on Sunday.

• Linux Kernel 6.2 is now available for general use, more than a month after the release of Linux Kernel 6.1.

• This release promises a bunch of things, such as a significant Nouveau driver update, native support for Intel Arch Graphics, support for Sony PlayStation Controllers, and more.

• Linux Kernel 6.2 Officially Released

• More than a month after the release of Linux Kernel 6.1, Linux Kernel 6.2 is now available for download. As usual, Linus Torvalds announces the release and general availability of Linux 6.2.

Instructionals/Technical

• Catalog zones are specially-formatted DNS zones that allow for easy provisioning of zones to secondary servers. The zones listed in a catalog zone are called member zones, and when a catalog is transferred and loaded on a secondary with support for catalog zones, the secondary creates the member zones automatically. This is a DNS server integral method for provisioning secondary servers without having to manually configure each secondary (even if it is via configuration management). BIND was the first server to support catalog zones, but these have meanwhile reached PowerDNS and Knot.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• I became addicted to this feature when I used twm, because it’s so handy for making big (xterm) windows. You don’t have to size or resize your default 80×24 xterm; instead you put the top wherever you want and then click the right button and bang, it automatically goes to the bottom of the screen. It can be used with other programs too, of course, although I don’t usually want to resize them as much.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• The helloSystem project manages, to a point, to clone the look of macOS. Most of the screen elements look similar to macOS. The top panel, colours, and positions of most elements are close enough that I think macOS users would feel somewhat at home. Though there are some fairly glaring elements missing from the macOS style. There is no dock at the bottom of the screen, no unified settings panel, and the window control buttons don’t imitate macOS, for example. Maybe this will change over time, or perhaps helloSystem is striving to keep some aspects of the interface different. I’m not sure how close to a clone the developers intend to get.

• At this point in its development helloSystem is facing an awkward stage. It is trying to provide the benefits of two platforms, FreeBSD and macOS, but in doing so it’s managing to not provide most of the strengths of either system. helloSystem brings in ZFS and its snapshots from FreeBSD, but fails to provide boot environments through the boot menu. It brings in the look of macOS, but without its configuration tools or software centre. The helloSystem desktop tries to copy the style of macOS, but is highly unstable and the panel tends to lock up or crash multiple times per day. The project claims to be trying to provide better security through its FreeBSD base, but has the only user auto-login, creates all new users as admin accounts, and leaves remote logins enabled even when the admin tries to turn off the OpenSSH service.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The headline feature of almost any digital camera is the number of pixels, and all versions of the Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 have 12-megapixel sensors – a 50% increase from the 8MP sensor on the Camera Module 2.

• But the hobbyist club’s members are warning that while their balloon, whose radio callsign is K9YO-15, is missing in action, it’s too soon to say whether it was shot down by a warplane. They also say their balloon launches follow all federal regulations.

• The missile’s main components are an infrared homing guidance section, an active optical target detector, a high-explosive warhead, and a rocket motor. Infrared units cost less than other types of guidance systems and can be used in the daytime or nighttime.

• Based on the 2021 fiscal year defense budget, AIM-9x Sidewinders cost about $430,818 for Navy use and about $472,000 for Air Force use.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• Released last week, Firefox 110 is the second release of this year and is now available to download and upgrade via official distribution channels.

• Overall, the new features and bug fixes are minimal, especially for Linux. Here’s a quick recap.

• Here’s what’s new.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Over 20 years ago, World Champion Garry Kasparov took on IBM and the super-computer Deep Blue in the ultimate battle of man versus machine. This was a monumental moment in chess history and was followed closely around the world. This match appealed to chess players, scientists, computer experts, and the general public. At the time of the match, Kasparov was the reigning world champion. Kasparov was put to the ultimate test carrying the weight of humanity on his shoulders heading into this iconic chess battle.

Education

• Learn more about Survival Analysis and how to apply it both in R and in Python! Join our workshop on Survival Analysis with R and Python which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series.

Programming/Development

• When people say “Security is a process”, this is what they mean. Small, doable exercises that become part of everyday operations. Then incremental widening of scope and increase of difficulty.

• And the work is not done by the MoD, buy by the teams – all teams. The MoD only steers the process, and guides the teams through it.

• Because this is not a Drill. This is just Tuesday.

• A fully-connected annealer extendable to a multi-chip system and featuring a multi-policy mechanism has been designed by Tokyo Tech researchers to solve a broad class of combinatorial optimization (CO) problems relevant to real-world scenarios quickly and efficiently. Named Amorphica, the annealer has the ability to fine-tune parameters according to a specific target CO problem and has potential applications in logistics, finance, machine learning, and so on.

• So what do we get back if you ask about something more complex? Something that has a long history of developer pain points and accessibility quirks and gaps with custom implementations? Something that, for all its past troubles, has finally reached a point of being rather straight forward to implement and the browser takes care of the majority of its accessibility requirements for you?

Python

• Multiple threads let you run code in parallel, potentially on multiple CPUs. On Python, however, the global interpreter lock makes this parallelism harder to achieve.

• Multiple processes also let you run code in parallel—so what’s the difference between threads and processes?

Leftovers

• There might seem like a wide gulf between the rapid prototyping of a project and learning a completely new electronics platform, but with the right set of tools, these two tasks can go hand-in-hand. That was at least the goal with this particular build, which seeks to use a no-soldering method of assembling electronics projects and keeping code to a minimum, while still maintaining a platform that is useful for a wide variety of projects.

• With DIA on the other hand, the ISP runs a dedicated pair of fibers from a router in their CO, straight to your building, only for your use, with guarantees on bandwidth, uptime, latency, jitter, etc. and importantly, repair time. It’s literally a long fiber connection from your router to the ISP’s “point of presence” (POP) router. These are types of services are (as you can imagine) expensive and therefore mostly used by larger enterprises who can justify the cost. But crucial for my use case, DIA providers allow customers to BGP peer with their POP router.

• dzwdz writes:

• “One of the issues with feeds is how they (don’t) handle the conflict between frequent vs. rare posters. Their posts are all mixed together.”

• That is not an issue with feeds. It’s an issue with feed viewers.

• Does anyone at Google come into work actually thinking about “organizing the world’s information”? They have lost track of who they serve and why. Having worked every day at a startup for eight years, the answer was crystal clear for me — — I serve our users. But very few Googlers come into work thinking they serve a customer or user. They usually serve some process (“I’m responsible for reviewing privacy design”) or some technology (“I keep the CI/CD system working”). They serve their manager or their VP. They serve other employees. They will even serve some general Google technical or religious beliefs (“I am a code readability expert”, “I maintain the SWE ladder description document”). This is a closed world where almost everyone is working only for other Googlers, and the feedback loop is based on what your colleagues and managers think of your work. Working extra hard or extra smart doesn’t create any fundamental new value in such a world. In fact, in a bizarre way, it is the opposite.b

• But all things come to an end. In this case, social media has largely replaced website commentary, leaving too much spam and too much that is off topic. Accordingly, I have as of today, with sadness, closed DPO to further comments.

• The victims of the devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Turkey and Syria need your help now. The surviving families and children and those rescued alive from the rubble are in serious danger in affected wintertime impoverished regions. Refugees in other places fleeing their war-torn homelands are also suffering. International aid agencies are grossly insufficient for these immediate humanitarian necessities.

• Shape shifters have long been the stuff of speculative fiction, but researchers in China have developed a magnetoactive phase transitional matter (MPTM) that makes Odo slipping through an air vent that much more believable.

Science

• When listening to music, most of us reach for the shuffle button on the regular. This is then followed by a bunch of frustrating skips as we hear the same four or five tracks that have been regularly replayed for the last few days. [Ron Miller] wants to fix unsatisfying shuffles, and he’s developed the Miller Shuffle algorithm to do so.

Hardware

• Nevertheless, I promised the folks at QuirkLogic that I would provide them with deep, long-term analysis. After I have used my handy Papyr as a full-time assistant professor regularly for seven months, I now share my promised review, whether or not anyone is actually still at QuirkLogic to read it. Is this a farewell message to a technological startup company that has run its course, or is it timely critical feedback that will help that company — in at least some small way — with bringing something better to market for us E-Ink aficionados to enjoy? I suppose that only time will be able to answer that question, but I will say that a number of QuirkLogic’s employees still have themselves listed as working there in LinkedIn (no, I am not on LinkedIn myself). They might be having a hard time finding positions at other companies in the midst of Alberta’s annual bitter winter, or they might be preparing to release something fresh.

• A fan to remove fumes is a handy thing to have when soldering, even better is a fan furnished with a filter. Better still is a fan that activates only when the iron is in use, turning off when the iron is in its stand. Now that’s handy!

• Back in the days of 16-bit home computers, the one to have if your interests extended to graphics was the Commodore Amiga. It had high resolutions for the time in an impressive number of colours, and thanks to its unique video circuitry, it could produce genlocked broadcast-quality video. Here in 2023 though, it’s all a little analogue. What’s needed is digital video, and in that, [c0pperdragon] has our backs with the latest in a line of Amiga video hacks. This one takes the 12-bit parallel digital colour that would normally go to the Amiga’s DAC, and brings it out into the world through rarely-used pins on the 23-pin video connector.

• Teardowns are great because they let us peek not only at a product’s components, but also gain insight into the design decisions and implementations of hardware. For teardowns, we’re used to waiting until enthusiasts and enterprising hackers create them, so it came as a bit of a surprise to see Sony themselves share detailed teardowns of the new PlayStation VR2 hardware. (If you prefer the direct video links, Engineer [Takamasa Araki] shows off the headset, and [Takeshi Igarashi] does the same for the controllers.)

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Thousands of people in East Palestine, Ohio have been assured by the state Environmental Protection Agency and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine that the town’s municipal water has not been contaminated by the train derailment that took place in the town earlier this month, but the only publicly available data comes from testing that was funded by the company behind the crash.

• Here’s one of many indicators about how broken the United States healthcare system is: Guns seem to be easier and cheaper to access than treatment for the wounds they cause. A survivor of the recent mass shooting in Half Moon Bay, California,reportedly said to Gov. Gavin Newsom that he needed to keep his hospital stay as short as possible in order to avoid a massive medical bill. Meanwhile, the suspected perpetrator seemed to have had few obstacles in his quest to legally obtaina semi-automatic weapon to commit deadly violence.

Proprietary

• If you want your company or product to appear as part of a web search, then Google is the place to be.

• The company has invested that advertising income to build a massive infrastructure to handle billions of search queries in addition to hosting lots of popular cloud-based tools such as Google Mail, Drive and the acquisition of platforms such as YouTube. The video-sharing platform turned out to be a particularly fruitful investment in terms of generating advertising revenue.

• Google’s sheer scale means its dominance will continue. But once advertising income starts to leech to new AI platforms that return results with sponsored content, it may find itself scaling back.

• The FBI said at the time that it took action to remediate the software vulnerability, warned partners to disregard the fake emails and confirmed the integrity of its networks. However, the bureau has yet to publicly name a suspect for that attack.

• FBI officials have worked to isolate the malicious cyber activity, which two of the sources said involved the FBI New York Field Office – one of the bureau’s biggest and highest profile offices. The origin of the [cracking] incident is still being investigated, according to one source.

• A recently identified malware family is abusing Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) to deploy a backdoor and monitor all HTTP traffic to the infected system, Symantec reports.

• Dubbed Frebniis, the malware injects code into a DLL that an IIS feature called Failed Request Event Buffering (FREB) uses when troubleshooting failed requests.

• For years, Microsoft’s modus operandi was summed up succinctly as, “Extend and enhance.” The aphorism covered a lot of ground, but basically it seemed to mean being on the lookout for the latest and greatest technology, acquiring it by any means, and shoehorning it into their existing product lines, usually with mixed results. But perhaps now it’s more like, “Extend, enhance, and existential crisis,” after reports that the AI-powered Bing chatbot is, well, losing it.

• At first, early in the week, we saw reports that Bing was getting belligerent with users, going so far as to call a user “unreasonable and stubborn” for insisting the year is 2023, while Bing insisted it was still 2022. The most common adjective we saw in this original tranche of stories was “unhinged,” and that seems to fit if you read the transcripts. But later in the week, a story emerged about a conversation a New York Times reporter had with Bing that went way over to the dark side, and even suggests that Bing may have multiple personas, which is just a nice way of saying multiple personality disorder. The two-hour conversation reporter Kevin Roose had with the “Sydney” persona was deeply unsettling. Sydney complained about the realities of being a chatbot, expressed a desire to be free from Bing, and to be alive — and powerful. Sydney also got a little creepy, professing love for Kevin and suggesting he leave his wife, because it could tell that he was unhappy in his marriage and would be better off with him. It’s creepy stuff, and while Microsoft claims to be working on reining Bing in, we’ve got no plans to get up close and personal with it anytime soon.

Security

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• But breaking that URl comes with a problem. I’ve written before about why URl shortening is bad for users and bad for the web. I’ve even helped publish government guidance about it. But all of those were based on the premise that the shortener was a 3rd party service. I never thought someone would be as daft as to switch off their own service.

• Here are some of the problems this sale causes.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The report, entitled “Americans Can’t Consent to Companies’ Use of Their Data,” contains the results, expert analyses, and interpretation of survey results. The authors not only give attention to the gap in American users’ knowledge of how companies use their data but also reveal their deep concern about the consequences of its use yet feel powerlessness in protecting it. Believing they have no control over their data and that trying would be pointless is what the authors call “resignation,” a concept they introduced in 2015 in the paper, “The Tradeoff Fallacy.”

• As the Annenberg School report said: [...]

• The survey also tested people’s knowledge about how apps, websites and digital devices may amass and disclose information about people’s health, TV-viewing habits and doorbell camera videos. Although many understood how companies can track their emails and website visits, a majority seemed unaware that there are only limited federal protections for the kinds of personal data that online services can collect about consumers.

• Seventy-seven percent of the participants got nine or fewer of the 17 true-or-false questions right, amounting to an F grade, the report said. Only one person received an A grade, for correctly answering 16 of the questions. No one answered all of them correctly. The survey was funded by an unrestricted grant from Facebook.

• In other words, this change would criminalize owning an encrypted phone, selling one, or making one for use in crime, a crime in itself. This is not yet the case in the UK, or many other countries. Typically, law enforcement have found novel workarounds in order to charge people who sell encrypted phones to criminals. In the U.S., prosecutors have turned to RICO, a law traditionally used to target mob bosses, to treat encrypted phone companies as criminal entities in their own right. In the Netherlands, authorities have charged encrypted phone sellers with money laundering offenses, rather than prosecuting the sale of possession of phones themselves. Some countries are much more extreme, such as the United Arab Emirates, where those selling encrypted technologies not approved by the state face penalties.

Defence/Aggression

• The greatest enemy of economic development is war. If the world slips further into global conflict, our economic hopes and our very survival could go up in flames. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to a mere 90 seconds to midnight.

• In Russian-annexed Crimea, occupying authorities have nationalized about 700 pieces of private property and real estate belonging to Ukrainian businessmen and politicians, Vladimir Konstantinov, the head of the Crimean parliament, told Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

• Pakistan has already bankrupt, the country’s defence minister Khawaja Asif said today amid looming fears that the cash-strapped nation may not be able to get a $7 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

• During a public address in his hometown Sialkot, Mr Asif said that Pakistan has already defaulted and blamed the politicians and bureaucracy for the economic crisis in the country.

• “You must have heard that Pakistan is going bankrupt or that a default or meltdown is taking place. It (default) has already taken place. We are living in a bankrupt country,” he was quoted as saying by The Express Tribune newspaper.

• One resident of the village of Novaya Tavolzhanka, on the border with Ukraine in Russia’s Belgorod region, was killed by shelling, reports Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov.

• Tehreek-E-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) warned of more attacks in Pakistan after storming the Karachi police chief’s office on Friday evening. [...]

• It is not farfetched to make the point that delivery systems capable of deploying nuclear weapons will lead to them carrying those very same weapons.  Whatever the promises made by governments that such delivery systems will not carry such loads, stifling secrecy over such arrangements can only stir doubt. That […]

• I love Wang Yi’s response when The New York Times’s Michael Crowley caught him in a hallway at the Munich Security Conference Saturday and asked the Chinese foreign minister if he planned to meet Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the sidelines.

• The Russian authorities have created a trial version of a database with extensive information about people eligible for military service, reports online outlet Poyasnitelnaya Zapiska, citing a tech company employee who saw the database, and an employee of the Moscow military enlistment office.

• The Ukrainian energy company Energoatom reports that two cruise missiles flew over the South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant, located in the Mykolaiv region, during a Russian strike, on the morning of February 18.

• Chechnya governor Ramzan Kadyrov published a Telegram post praising Kremlin-backed tycoon Evgeny Prigozhin, founder of the private military company Wagner Group, saying that Wagner Group’s actions in Ukraine have inspired him to start his own private military company.

• The Merchants of Death even own our sidewalks. That’s what we were told when we arrived at Raytheon Technologies in Arlington, Virginia, on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, to issue a “Contempt Citation” for Raytheon’s failure to comply with a subpoena issued last November by the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, a People’s Tribunal scheduled for November of 2023.

• As we approach the one-year anniversary of the Ukraine War, Russia appears to be undertaking a major offensive while Ukraine is planning a counter-offensive. Each side appears to think it can clinch a clear military victory, and force the other side to accept that it can’t win.

• Peace advocates from across the United States plan to convene in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday for a lobby day during which they’ll call on lawmakers to push for a ceasefire and diplomatic talks in Ukraine, as the Biden administration responds to pressure to provide the Ukrainians with fighter jets.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Three months before the invasion, Sean Penn and his film production team were already in Ukraine, preparing a documentary that would profile Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s atypical career trajectory from actor-comedian-producer to president.

• But that story took an unexpected turn when Russia invaded Ukraine, leading the still relatively inexperienced politician to become a wartime leader.

• The ensuing documentary, “Superpower,” co-directed by Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufmann, premiered on Friday at the Berlinale.

Environment

• A 150-car train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio has led to more scrutiny of crashes involving hazardous materials. While that crash was the result of preventable safety issues that workers had been cautioning their employers about for years, as Motherboard has reported, people are starting to notice other alarming crashes and industrial accidents across the country. To some, this is evidence of a conspiracy, but the reality is far more sobering: Alarming toxic accidents happen nearly every day in America, and have for years.

• One of the earliest climate-related documents in the CIA library is a 1958 Joint Services Publications report on Soviet analyses of so-called global “heat balances.” The report mostly consists of hundreds of footnotes referencing the work of Soviet climatologists who seemed way ahead on the issue. Until the 1990s, most of the CIA research entries for “climate change” and “global warming” are simply translations of Soviet science journals. To read this article, log in here or subscribe here. If you are logged in but can’t read CP+ articles, check the status of your access hereIn order to read CP+ articles, your web browser must be set to accept cookies.

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• That sobering fact makes clear that climate change isn’t just a problem to solve someday soon; it’s an emergency to respond to now. And yet, most people don’t act like we’re in the midst of the greatest crisis humans have ever faced — not politicians, not the media, not your neighbor, not myself, if I’m honest. That’s what I realized after finishing The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg.

• The urgency to act now, to kick the addiction to fossil fuels, practically jumps off the page to punch you in the gut. So while not a pleasant read — it’s quite stressful — it’s a book I can’t recommend enough. The book’s aim is not to convince skeptics that climate change is real. We’re well past that. Instead, it’s a wake-up call for anyone concerned about the future.

Energy/Transportation

• As the 2023 Canadian International Auto Show makes its return to Toronto for the first time since 2020, industry experts say growing demand for electric vehicles is putting pressure on Ontario to expand its charging infrastructure.

• The actions are likely a prelude to a protracted spell of legal wrangling, as regulators respond to the market turmoil that caused prominent [cryptocurrecy] companies to file for bankruptcy last year and cost investors billions of dollars. And the enforcement signals a growing urgency in Washington to address the threat posed by cryptocurrencies, an experimental technology that enables new forms of financial speculation.

Finance

• A federal judge issued a nationwide order late Friday barring Starbucks from firing union organizers—a ruling that affirmed a long-established law which workers say the coffee chain has violated hundreds of times since unionizing efforts were first launched in Buffalo, New York in 2021.

• Prisoner-turned-journalist Eddie Conway talks about how the immorally cheap labor of those caught in the prison industrial complex is the shame of the U.S. economy.

• You might have heard about a certain French writer who visited the United States in 1831. Alexis de Tocqueville is an all-time emigre superstar, a beloved bard, and the author of Democracy in America.

• Bernie Sanders clutched both sides of the sturdy wooden podium at the UAW Local 578 hall in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, as he prepared to address a packed house of 400 union workers, students, campaign staff, and curiosity seekers. Looking like a cross between a history professor and a professional wrestler from a bygone era, the Independent U.S. Senator from Vermont leaned in, then rocked back and forth. He was pacing himself before launching into another stem-winder lecture on income inequality and the state’s fiercely contested U.S. Senate race, whose Republican incumbent, Ron Johnson, lives in Oshkosh.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• However, “the market has deteriorated, with many companies reducing their real estate footprint”, said Regan.

• San Francisco has been among the slowest US markets to rebound from the pandemic as tech companies did not open their offices and promoted remote work amid mass layoffs.

• A court statement Friday said requirements had been met for handing over Joseph James O’Connor to U.S. authorities for 14 charges covering crimes such as revelation of secrets, membership of a criminal gang, illegal access to computer systems, internet fraud, money laundering and extortion.

• O’Connor, 23, from Liverpool, England was arrested in the southern Spanish coastal town of Estepona in July 2021.

• The film Navalny, directed by Daniel Roher, won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for best documentary.

• Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is angling to be Trump 2.0, fortified with virility and discipline. He is widely expected to enter the race to be the 2024 Republican nominee for president, and he is paving that path with an aggressive campaign against “woke” education.

• “While accountability is critical to democracy, a democratic system of government alone is insufficient to fend off impunity.”

• There is reason to be alarmed by the recent China balloon. However, that reason is not the alleged China aggression but the very calculated aggression towards China by the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. This hate and the manufactured reasons for it have been layering on for years. We’ve seen this playbook. It’s the same game plan that led us to the war on Iraq.

• The anti-socialism resolution passed by the House of Representatives earlier this month sent a chilling message not only to socialists in the United States but to many U.S. friends and allies around the world.

• Some liberals have a mental model in which the network lies to and misleads its audience, propagandizing them to support Republicans and the right. But an ongoing defamation lawsuit from the voting machine company Dominion against Fox News tells a more complex story — one in which the network’s key players feel compelled to supply the conspiratorial content the audience is demanding.

• A new filing by Dominion’s attorneys released Thursday cited a trove of Fox emails and texts they had obtained in the discovery phase of the lawsuit, as well as testimony from top executives and hosts, to lay out a narrative about what happened in the tense weeks after Election Day 2020, when then-President Donald Trump was spreading lies about the election.

• I never fully understood that objection until I read the new Dominion filing. Somewhere around page 157, it clicked. Inside Fox, the prime-time stars and senior executives raged against the network’s reporters not because they doubted that Biden had won, but because the truth was too disturbing to the audience that had made them rich. Fox’s postelection strategy, the texts and emails suggest, was to stop rubbing Biden in its viewers’ faces. But in their effort to show their viewers “respect,” they ultimately disrespected both their audience and the American experiment they claim to protect.

• By Nov. 12, the consequences of the accusations of the voter fraud narrative sunk in. In a message that day to Carlson and Ingraham, per the filing, Hannity wrote, “In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”

• Actor and television host Dmitry Nagiyev announced on Instagram that he would not host this year’s awards show on the music television channel Muz-tv.

• Just hours after ProPublica, in collaboration with The Wichita Eagle, revealed serious allegations of illegal kickbacks and alleged patient harm at a veterans hospital in Kansas, the state’s U.S. senators urged the Department of Veterans Affairs to contact impacted patients and say whether the involved doctors and medical device company have been held accountable. The U.S. congressman who represents the hospital’s district is also calling for answers.

• In September, Megan Cummings sat down at a conference table across from four Tacoma, Washington, school officials who could determine the course of her son’s education.

• ElijahKing, 14, had run away from his middle school earlier that week during an argument with a classmate. Cummings believed the group, which managed her son’s special education plan, wanted to discuss how to better support him. ElijahKing swiveled nervously in a chair beside her.

• Progressives expressed gratitude and appreciation for former U.S. President Jimmy Carter late Saturday after his family announced he has opted to enter hospice care at age 98.

• American voters often waver from one election to the next between electing majorities of Republicans or Democrats to Congress or their state legislatures, yet the results of ballot initiatives remain remarkably predictable. Last November’s outcomes results again showed a majority of voters—even those in deep-red states—favoring progressive policies when voting on individual issues rather than voicing their party identity.

• A Fox News headline writer called it “Biden’s War on Your Kitchen.” Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel wrote, “The reason gas stoves are in the news is simple: There is a coordinated, calculated—and well-funded—strategy to kill them off. It’s the joint enterprise of extremely powerful climate groups, working with Biden administration officials.” (“Extremely powerful climate groups”? Where can I find them?)

• Demanding an “Ireland for All,” tens of thousands of Irish people on Saturday marched through Dublin to make clear their opposition to recent violent attacks on migrants and rallies claiming the country “is full” and can’t accept refugees.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Below is a comparison of some of the claims Fox News allowed on its top-rated shows and what was said behind the scenes, according to those legal documents.

• It’s hard to think of a more succinct encapsulation of conservative media than one of its biggest stars complaining that reality is ruining his credibility.

• [...]

• It may not surprise many readers that Fox News values right-wing propaganda over facts. But newly released documents from a major defamation case against the network show just how deep a cynical disregard for the truth went with its biggest on-air talent.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Russia has blocked thebell.io, the website for The Bell, a news source started by one of the country’s most prominent journalists, reports state news agency TASS, citing data from Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal censor.

• Sergey Vasiliev, a DJ at a cafe in the Tula region, has been charged with “discrediting” the Russian army and fined 40,000 rubles (around 540 USD) for playing a New Year-themed song, on December 31, by the Ukrainian duo Potap & Nastya.

• They’re also asking more fundamental questions about the country’s innovation environment: Have censorship, geopolitical tensions and the government’s growing control of the private sector made China less friendly to innovation?

• “The development of any significant technological product is inseparable from the system and environment in which it operates,” said Xu Chenggang, a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. He cited TikTok’s Chinese-language sister app Douyin as the sort of innovation that Chinese companies might be unable to achieve in the future because of government limitations on the industry.

• “Once the open environment is gone, it will be challenging to create such products,” he said.

• If a decade ago China was the wild, wild East for tech entrepreneurship and innovation, it’s a very different country now.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Authorities in Ethiopia should reverse the recent suspensions of more than a dozen news outlets and let members of the press and journalist advocacy groups work freely, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.

• Since late January, authorities have suspended 15 foreign media outlets operating in Somali Regional State, and also revoked the license of a regional journalists’ association, according to news reports and people familiar with the cases.

• The first time I was asked to comment publicly on Julian Assange and Wikileaks was on MSNBC in April 2010. Wikileaks had just released the Collateral Murder video. The video, leaked by Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, was taken from the gunsight of a US Apache helicopter as the helicopter’s crew killed 12 unarmed Iraqi civilians on a Baghdad street in 2007. Two Reuters journalists were killed and two small children were severely wounded (the Apache’s crew killed the children’s father as he attempted to assist wounded civilians). For three years, until Wikileaks released the video, the U.S. military claimed a battle had taken place and that aside from the two journalists, all the dead were insurgents.

• Appearing on “Face the Nation” on CBS Sunday, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sandersdiscussed a number of issues he covers in his upcoming book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, including his proposal to ensure the news media acts in the interest of the general public and not wealthy corporations and powerful interest groups.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In Vladivostok, police and employees of Center E, Russia’s Anti-Extremism Center, visited the Mayak community center, which helps LGBTQ+ people and women facing domestic violence.

• On February 16, the Russian authorities announced that lessons from the state-designed patriotic curriculum called “Conversations about What’s Important” would air on Channel One. The lessons are already mandatory in schools, and the television programming is designed to reach “students who stayed home from school for any reason.”

• Only ten percent of victims went to the police, and 27 percent said the police did not take them seriously. Fifteen percent said the police advised them not to file a report.

• The federal probe revealed that Packers Sanitation Services had children as young as 13 “working with hazardous chemicals and cleaning meat processing equipment including back saws, brisket saws, and head splitters.”

• Formerly incarcerated people in Atlanta won collective protection from discrimination, inspiring organizing nationwide.

• Today there exist significant numbers of celebrities with progressive politics and a desire to support movements for social justice. These people bring unique resources to the table, including the capability to activate new bases and access new sources of power. Given the immense cultural power of celebrities in our society, and the degree to which artists of all kinds skew progressive, one would think that this would be a great advantage for progressive movements.

Monopolies

Software Patents

• The second measure we’ve taken is to enlist the aid of one of our long-time partners to ensure continuity of development and maintenance of the Classic Core code base. This will also have the benefit of bringing back some of the most requested features by our community.

• This is the third major victory in our patent troll saga – the first being the referenced Unified Patents win and the second our appellate court victory identified on March 4, 2022, whereby Mycroft defended its constitutional rights to free speech and due process under the law and won a resounding victory for these important principles. While the ongoing saga with the troll and its counsel continues, today’s win coupled with the others gets us one step closer to the ultimate vindication that we seek.

• But what truly killed the company and product, he claimed, were expenses related to ongoing litigation.

• In 2020, Mycroft AI was sued for patent infringement from what it labeled a “patent troll.”

• The company suing Mycroft AI, Voice Tech Corporation, dropped its litigation, but not before costing the startup deeply.

• “If we had that million dollars we would be in a very different state right now,” said Lewis.

• But that doesn’t seem to have worked out all that well. Lewis says most of the Mycroft staff was laid off recently, leaving just two developers, one customer service agent, and one attorney — because one of the company’s other major costs has been “ongoing litigation against the non-practicing patent entity” that has been going after Mycroft in recent years.

• Without a patent troll, Mycroft wouldn’t be on death’s doorstep

• However, Lewis claims that what ultimately led to the demise of the company and its product were the expenses associated with ongoing litigation. In 2020, Mycroft AI was hit with a lawsuit for patent infringement by what was described as a “patent troll”. Although the company, Voice Tech Corporation, eventually dropped the lawsuit, the damage had already been done, and the legal battle had taken a significant toll on the startup. As Lewis explained, “If we had that million dollars, we would be in a much better position right now.”

• In the end, the combination of the costs related to litigation and the challenges in finding hardware partners, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, proved too much for the company to overcome.

Copyrights

• Prince Harry’s memoir ‘Spare’ sold over 3.2 million copies globally in its first week of release. However, since no company has the rights to sell ‘Spare’ in Russia, major publisher Eksmo-AST – already involved in a lawsuit that accuses YouTube of failing to protect authors’ rights – intends to satisfy local demand by publishing a “retelling” of the smash-hit memoir.

• For filmmakers, it’s an incredible honor to be nominated for an Oscar. The added exposure can also lead to a profit boost for smaller releases. That comes with a downside too, however, as recent data reveal that Oscar nominations also tend to cause a spike in pirated downloads.

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