● 02.24.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 24/02/2023: EasyOS Progress and China Claims It Wants Ukraine Ceasefire

Posted in News Roundup at 1:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• FreeBSD Status Report Fourth Quarter 2022, How to limit a jail, the parallel port, Hello System 0.8, Solbournes in space, and more

Kernel Space

• It was only a matter of time before somebody tried to bring BPF to the kernel’s CPU scheduler. At the end of January, Tejun Heo posted the second revision of a 30-part patch series, co-written with David Vernet, Josh Don, and Barret Rhoden, that does just that. There are clearly interesting things that could be done by deferring scheduling decisions to a BPF program, but it may take some work to sell this idea to the development community as a whole.

• The core idea behind BPF is that it allows programs to be loaded into the kernel from user space at run time; using BPF for scheduling has the potential to enable significantly different scheduling behavior than is seen in Linux systems now. The idea of “pluggable” schedulers is not new; it came up in this 2004 discussion of yet another doomed patch series from Con Kolivas, for example. At that time, the idea of pluggable schedulers was strongly rejected; only by focusing energy on a single scheduler, it was argued, could the development community find a way to satisfy all workloads without filling the kernel with a confusion of special-purpose schedulers.

• The field of confidential computing is still in its infancy, to the point where it lacks a clear, agreed, and established problem description. Elena Reshetova and Andi Kleen from Intel recently started the conversation by sharing their view of a potential threat model in the form of this document, which is specific to the Intel Trust Domain Extension (TDX) on Linux, but which is intended to be applicable to other confidential-computing solutions as well. The resulting conversation showed that there is some ground to be covered to achieve a consensus on the model in the community.

Graphics Stack

• Mesa 23.0.0 has been released today upgrading open source graphics drivers for Linux. As usual you should wait for the first point release for stability.

Applications

• In essence, Machine Learning is the practice of using algorithms to parse data, learn insights from that data, and then make a determination or prediction. The machine is ‘trained’ using huge amounts of data.

• In other words, Machine Learning is about building programs with tunable parameters (typically an array of floating point values) that are adjusted automatically so as to improve their behavior by adapting to previously seen data.

• astroML is a Python module for machine learning and data mining built on NumPy, SciPy, scikit-learn, matplotlib, and Astropy.

• The aim of the project is to offer a repository of Python implementations of common tools and routines used for statistical data analysis in astronomy and astrophysics, and to provide a uniform and easy-to-use interface to freely available astronomical datasets.

• This is a new series looking at practical applications of Machine Learning from a Linux perspective. We only feature free and open source software in this series.

• Let’s clear up one potential source of confusion at the outset. What’s the difference between Machine Learning and Deep Learning? The two terms mean different things.

• In essence, Machine Learning is the practice of using algorithms to parse data, learn insights from that data, and then make a determination or prediction. The machine is ‘trained’ using huge amounts of data.

Instructionals/Technical

• This guide explains what is Proxmox Backup Client, how to install Proxmox Backup Client and how to create file level backups using Proxmox Backup Client application.

• Over the last couple of days I’ve been looking at a refcounting issue in GLib’s D-Bus implementation.

• As with many things in GLib, the allocations in this code use refcounting, rather than new/free, to manage object lifecycles. This makes it quite hard to debug lifecycle issues, because the location of a bug (a ref or unref call which isn’t correct) can be quite far removed (in time and code) from where the effects of that bug become visible. This is because the effects of refcounting problems only become visible when an object’s refcount reaches zero, or when the program ends and its refcount still hasn’t reached zero.

• ClamAV, short for Clam AntiVirus, is an open-source, cross-platform antivirus software tool designed to detect and remove malicious software from computer systems, such as viruses, malware, and spyware.

• Cockpit is a powerful and popular web-based interface allowing users to easily manage Linux servers. A simple and intuitive design provides a user-friendly way for system administrators to manage multiple servers from a single interface, making it an increasingly popular choice in recent years.

• The Linux kernel (developed by Linus Torvalds) is a basic fundamental component of the operating system. It is responsible for managing all the essential hardware and software components by acting as a bridge between them, hence without it we cannot have Linux-based systems.

• Ubuntu is one of the most popular operating systems built on top of the Linux kernel, developed by Linus Torvalds.

• If we trace the evolution of computers, we can see that initially, we don’t have Mouse. So, we used to interact with computers having

• Sometimes, you might be interested to know when a file was created on a Linux system. In this guide, we will check out how

• Over the past few days, I’ve posted a lot about transferring jails from two hosts into one host. One of the steps involves using zfs send | zfs recv to send the files from one host to another. I’m using syncoide for that transfer.

• A new fileystem’s recordsize defaults to 128K. In my case, that is usually OK, except for some specific datasets. For example: [...]

• ● Corruption: data is changed unintentionally

• Here’s what you do. First, configure a strict DMARC policy for your domain, one that tells receivers that you want them to reject any email that doesn’t pass DMARC. Then, set up a restrictive SPF policy, one that definitely only passes things sent from your server. Finally, the important step: don’t sign your outgoing email with DKIM.

• In our previous tutorial titled “Getting Started with Proxmox Backup Server”, we discussed how to backup and restore Proxmox VMs and Containers. Today, we will learn how to create file level backups using Proxmox Backup Client application. Proxmox Backup Client comes in handy when you want to backup certain files instead of backing up the whole VM or Container. It also can be useful when you want to backup files from non-VMs or non-Containers (i.e. a physical machine).

• The Ubuntu Mainline, Kernel Installer tool is a popular utility for Ubuntu users who wish to install the latest stable version of the Linux kernel on their system. This tool provides a simple way to install and manage the mainline kernel on Ubuntu, which can offer better hardware support, improved performance, and new features.

• Linux Kernel 6.2 introduces an impressive array of new and improved features that enhance its performance and expand its hardware support.

• Welcome to MySQL, a popular and widely-used open-source relational database management system. New users of MySQL and Linux might feel overwhelmed when first learning to work with databases in the MySQL terminal. However, creating a database is an essential and straightforward process you can easily accomplish with simple commands.

• FFmpeg 5 is a major release of the popular open-source multimedia framework, offering a powerful command-line tool for processing and converting audio and video files. This update has many new features and improvements that make it an attractive choice for developers, video editors, and anyone needing to work with multimedia files.

• Magento is an open-source, cloud-based eCommerce platform owned by Adobe. The community version of the e-commerce platform can be self-hosted by users who wish to start their e-commerce website.

• Android Studio is a widely used integrated development environment (IDE) for developing Android applications. It is a powerful tool that is used by millions of developers around the world. With comprehensive features, it is the go-to IDE for Android development.

Games

• ChimeraOS, the Linux distribution designed for couch gaming much like SteamOS, has version 39 out now. This is the first release since Valve swapped to the New Big Picture Mode from the Steam Deck. Designed very much to be just like SteamOS, except with a bunch of added extras, it boots directly into Steam Big Picture Mode.

• Another fresh Beta update is now available for Steam Deck and Steam Desktop, pulling in some good sounding fixes for various controllers. According to both changelogs, it’s the same across both since they’re now sharing most things since the new Big Picture Mode has been moved over to desktop (although they’re still cleaning all the Steam Deck specific bits from it).

• No Man’s Sky has another big update out now that includes an overhaul of quite a few features like much better VR support, and a new Expedition. The game continues to run nicely on Steam Deck and Linux Desktop with Proton.

• Valve has now revealed most of their upcoming big Steam Sales and Steam Fests, here’s all the details. They’re giving out all the dates, to enable developers to get in early on planning a year of promotional activities. Nice that it’s public, as it gives us normal people the ability to build up our wallets ready to unload them on Valve for some new goodies.

• Totally Accurate Battlegrounds got upgraded recently due to needing to implement new anti-cheat, and thanks to that this free to play game now works on Linux Desktop and Steam Deck.

• Paradox have announced that the Stellaris: First Contact Story Pack will be releasing on March 14th, along with the Canis Minor free update for all players.

• Mental health charity, Safe In Our World, which focuses on the video game industry has teamed up with Fanatical for a full charity bundle full of games. 100% of the proceeds go to Safe In Our World.

FSF ☛ FSF Blogs: Experience the fifteen years of LibrePlanet celebration firsthand as a volunteerDaniel Stenberg ☛ Restocked on stickersI attended FOSDEM 2023 and over the two days of conference I gave away well over a thousand curl stickers. Every last curl sticker I had in my possession.FSFE ☛ Call for Papers for foss-north open (Gothenburg, April 2023) foss-north is a Free Software conference in Gothenburg that brings together Nordic Free Software communities. This year, the Free Software Foundation Europe is organising a track covering political and legal aspects of Free Software, as well as best practices from Scandinavia. We’re looking forward to your contribution by March 5!

Distributions and Operating Systems

EasyOS

• Jon (scsijon in the forum) posted a warning about security vulnerabilities in ‘openssl’ and the need to update to version 3.0.8 (or 1.1.1t):

• https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=80939#p80939

• As I compile every package in OpenEmbedded, and the recipe for ‘openssl’ is rather complicated, I had to wait until the OE devs have updated. Within the last few days, they have:

• http://layers.openembedded.org/layerindex/recipe/68561/

• I downloaded the 3.0.8 recipe and compiled the package. Commits: [...]

• JJM (esmourguit in the forum) has been maintaining the French langpack for years. Now that there are no longer langpack PETs, emourguit has booted Easy 4.101 and used MoManager to examine the current state of translations.

• He has contributed some fr translations:

• https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/679002f6dcfb3094a9d5ae9aaca8464e4080e961

• There was a problem with translating the ‘vobcopy’ binary executable, discussed on the forum: [...]

• A few days ago, I posted that YouTube Downloader is broken:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202302/youtube-dl-youtube-downloader-is-broken.html

• Smithy had sent me an email, with an alternative download URL, but I misunderstood.

• The official youtube-dl site last release was December 17, 2021. The project is very active, with regular commits, but the “Update” button in the menu “Internet -> YouTubeDL YouTube downloader” only downloads the Dec. 2021 release. That was one of my misunderstandings; it only downloads the latest tagged release, not from the latest commit.

• I posted about the problem in the Easy 4.101 announcement, issue-1:

BSD

• One of the primary draws to a modern Walkman is that it presents as a generic storage device, meaning my FreeBSD tower can now act as a media hub, rather than relying on dedicated software like iTunes or Apple Music.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• This week’s openSUSE Tumbleweed roundup will look at five snapshots that have been released since last Friday.

• Snapshots include switching the default Ruby for the rolling release along with software updates for packages like pidgin, parole, OpenSSL, php, sudo, tigervnc and more.

• Snapshot, 20230222 updated just four packages. The major release of gnu-unifont-fonts 15.0.01 arrived in the snapshot and it introduced a couple new subpackages and cleaned up the spec file. The curses emulation library ncurses 6.4.20230218 added a patch and provided some configuration script improvements. The ibus-m17n 1.4.19 update added a parrot icon emoji and made some Weblate translations for the Sinhala language, which is spoken in Sri Lanka. There was also an update for Ark Logic video cards with the xf86-video-ark 0.7.6 update, which brings a decade worth of accumulated changes that has the ability to build against xorg-server 1.14 and newer out of the box.

Fedora / Red Hat / IBM

• While Flatpak itself is an architecturally decentralized way to distribute apps, Flathub embraces the convenience for people to come to one place to install apps. There’s some fairly big changes coming to Flathub that I’m extremely excited about, that will make sure the new wave of Linux apps doesn’t fizzle out and we’ll maintain a sustainable application ecosystem.

• Akashdeep Dhar and Sumantro Mukherjee, who are both members of the Fedora Council and work at Red Hat as software engineers, explained how they use Fedora CoreOS as the base operating system to run multiplayer game servers in containers. As described in its documentation, Fedora CoreOS is “an automatically updating, minimal, monolithic, container-focused operating system”.

• Fedora CoreOS (sometimes abbreviated FCOS) provides the host operating system for these containers; it only includes those packages that are needed for a minimal networking-enabled and container-ready setup. At the time of this writing, the latest stable release had 415 packages. It supports the x86_64, aarch64 (including the Raspberry Pi 4), and s390x architectures; it runs on bare metal, virtualized, or on various cloud platforms.

• A Fedora CoreOS machine is provisioned using Ignition, which is a tool that partitions disks, formats partitions, enables systemd units, and configures users. Ignition only runs once during the first boot of the system, from the initramfs. An Ignition configuration file is formatted as JSON, but for end users Fedora CoreOS recommends using a Butane configuration, which is a YAML file that Butane translates into an Ignition configuration. The “System Configuration” section in Fedora CoreOS’s documentation shows some examples of how to configure storage, network, containers, users and groups, time zones, and more in a Butane configuration. In their talk, Dhar and Mukherjee showed a Butane configuration to set up a Minecraft server in a container, and they also published it in their GitHub repository.

• When installing Fedora CoreOS, you choose one of three update streams. “Next” is for experimenting with new features, “testing” represents what is coming in the next stable stream, and “stable” is the stream with changes that have spent a time in the testing stream. Most end users should choose the stable stream. You refer to the Ignition file with your customizations, in a manner that depends on your installation type. For instance, when installing from PXE you append the coreos.inst.ignition_url=URL option to the kernel, referring it to the location of the Ignition file on a web server.

• Examine your data in a user-friendly dashboard that shows multiple views of the same data.

• This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat.

• We provide you both infographics and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.

• This article showcases rpmdistro-repoquery, and describes how to use it to simplify doing RPM-based package operations across multiple distributions. This does not require using SSH to log into another host or starting a container or VM.

• Whether you’re a packager, system administrator, or a user of Fedora Linux, CentOS Stream, or their derivatives (RHEL, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux etc.), you might already be familiar with dnf repoquery. This tool allows you to query the repositories configured on the system for information about available packages, whether or not they are currently installed on the local machine.

• This is great, within limits. For instance, on Fedora Linux, you can query packages built for stable and branched Fedora Linux releases and, if you install fedora-repos-rawhide, packages in the development branch. Sufficient care is required to make sure you don’t enable repos meant for different Fedora Linux releases by default and thus accidentally upgrade the running system.

• Prior to 1980, IBM had mainly been known for manufacturing computers for businesses to use, and they were falling behind in the market for at-home microcomputers where companies like Apple, Tandy and Commodore were excelling. Other large companies like HP were starting to enter the space, and IBM buyers were buying Apple devices for at-home computers. IBM got to work with designing the first PC.

• Mark Dean is an inventor and engineer who had a long career with IBM. During that time, he was part of the race to design the first personal computer and holds three of the nine patents associated with IBM’s first PC.

Debian Family

• The first update to the official operating system for Raspberry Pi devices in 5 months features a handful of interesting changes, new drivers, and always-important bug fixes.

• Chief amongst the changes is a new touchscreen driver available from the Screen Resolution tool, which also sees some ‘minor’ UI changes. There’s also support for a new msdri3 video driver, and the kms++-utils package is now included by default (saving you an apt install).

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Canonical has announced a change in the packaging defaults for the various “flavours” like Kubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Budgie and so on to exclude Flatpak and stick with Snap. Yes that’s flavours, not flavors but also flavors in the announcement.

• The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.

• Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, Lubuntu 22.04.2 LTS has been released. With the codename Jammy Jellyfish, Lubuntu 22.04 is the 22nd release of Lubuntu, the eighth release of Lubuntu with LXQt as the default desktop environment.

• Harnessing the potential of 5G with Kubernetes 5G is the fifth generation of wireless technology which is transforming the way we connect and communicate. With data transfer speeds up to 100 times faster than 4G, 5G technology enables faster download and upload times, lower latency and a higher number of connected devices.

• Welcome to this three-part blog series on real-time Linux. Throughout the series, we will assess the key features of a real-time system. We will understand how a real-time capable Linux kernel differs from mainline, and touch upon the performance trade-offs you should consider when choosing real-time versus a low-latency kernel, for instance.

• Open Source MANO (OSM) has announced its thirteenth version which is supported for six months (short-term support). This release targets feature enhancements for VNF vendors residing in the OSM ecosystem. It features new scalable architecture for service assurance and closed-loop operations, using Apache Airflow and Prometheus. It is capable of handling service assurance scenarios including auto scaling and auto healing in cloud environments and various edge locations. Additional features include enhancements in the deployment of Network Services (NS), execution environments, life cycle management (LCM), air-gapped installation, improved persistent volume management, and a few advancements in the OSM client.

• Service providers are adopting new technologies such as 5G and IoT, each with its own set of needs. OSM is model-driven and offers convenience in designing complex network functions (NFs) having interconnectivity with each other. The reusability of NFs abstracts the underlying details of network function virtualisation (NFV). On the whole, release THIRTEEN’s new features offer opportunities for service providers to address scalability challenges and expand their range of orchestration features.

• The Ubuntu Flavors offerings (Kubuntu and the like) have decided that the way to improve the user experience is to put more emphasis on the Snap package format.

Devices/Embedded

• Firefly mentions that they will provide support for Android 12.0, Ubuntu, Debian 11, Buildroot, RTLinux and Kylin Linux. It appears that the Resource page for this device isn’t available yet.

• There might be a compatible development board for the Core-3588SG that looks similar to the ROC-RK3588S-PC as shown above, but there isn’t much information available on the product page.

• SONOFF MINI Extreme (aka MINIR4) is a ridiculously small WiFi smart switch based on ESP32 wireless microcontroller and designed to be connected to a load such as a light bulb and a wall switch that can be a momentary switch, a door exit switch, an SPDT switch, a latching switch, or even dry contact sensors. The tiny form factor (39.5×33 x16.8mm) enables the WiFi smart switch to fit into various boxes, even the smaller European gang boxes.

• Embit EMB-LR1280-mPCIe-4x is an mPCIe (mini PCIe) module based on four Semtech SX1280 2.4 GHz LoRa transceivers and designed for OEM gateways that can work worldwide thanks to the use of the 2.4GHz ISM band and supports ranging. We first covered 2.4GHz LoRa and the SX1280 transceiver two years ago as a solution to design region-independent products specially suited to maritime and intercontinental logistics applications.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Rossignol’s model railroad features DCC (Digital Command Control), which controls the amount of power and its polarity going to the tracks, as well as switches. Rossignol just needed a way for his Atari to communicate with the DCC. For that, he chose an Arduino Mega 2560 board. The Atari talks to the Arduino via an RS232-to-TTL converter, and the Arduino, in turn, talks to Rossignol’s DCC-EX via I2C.

• Librem-EC 1.12 for the Librem 14 has been released with a fix to the PL4 power limit to address sudden shutoffs that still remained in the 1.11 release.  Once again, the issue was in a subtle corner case, which we were able to identify with help from testers.  Update to 1.12 with our update instructions, and check out the source code. Thank you to all those who helped us troubleshoot and fix this issue!

• The Lapdock Kit allows you to experience the full potential of the Librem 5 and the Nexdock 360 while getting expert support from the Purism support team. Have all of your apps and all of your data in one device that can fit in your pocket and act like a phone when you need it to, but then transform into a laptop when you want to type out an email, do some image editing or watch a video on a larger screen.

• Desert Eye is also a great showcase for Raspberry Pi 4, which Aviv chose for its video processing capabilities – “a large consideration in this robot” – as well as controlling its motion and communications. Aside from the cameras, Raspberry Pi 4 controls the two main DC motors, a stepper motor so the camera can rotate while being stabilised, the GPS and wireless connectivity, and a three-axis sensor and fan.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• These are just a few services you can install on any Linux PC or laptop. You need a server that’s always on to ensure your services are constantly available. That doesn’t necessitate a major investment, though. You can use many kinds of computers as Linux servers. The easiest and most inexpensive is a Raspberry Pi, which has excellent support with a helpful and enthusiastic community.

• Getting a Raspberry Pi set up is “as easy as pie,” thanks to the Raspberry Pi imager. It only needs about 5W of power, so it doesn’t take much energy to keep it running. There are many similar low-powered devices, including the Odroid, Orange Pi, and Rockpi.

• You can also install Linux on any PC or laptop and run it as a server. It’s a great way to repurpose old computers.

• Google Earth is a very popular virtual globe app. While it’s available for Linux the software is freeware, and therefore not open source. In this article we recommend the best free and open source virtual globe software. We also include related software in this roundup.

• While none of the software applications featured in this article have all of the features offered by Google Earth (although some offer some different features), and they are not exactly comparable, they are all worthy of investigating.

• The Luxchat services provide end-to-end encryption and retain all messages in decentralised servers located in Luxembourg. Luxchat and Luxchat4Gov will offer the same features, but the infrastructures are kept separate, as the government version is intended for professional use in the public sector.

• I learned that you can’t keep up with your notifications when this happens (especially if you don’t check them that often). You just have to accept it.

• We are very happy to release the first candidate of what will become dnsdist 1.8.0!

• This release contains a significant amount of changes since the last major release, 1.7.0, which was released a bit over a year ago. We try to stick to a major release every six months, but this one took a bit longer than expected as we tackled a few challenges: [...]

• Sadly, they’ve taken the same xenophobic attitude as GitHub and insist that only good ol’ American letters and numbers can be used. No fancy accents, right-to-left languages, or Korean Hangul.

• Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see if this prompts a surge in Signal take-up. Especially important as Signal are dropping SMS support

• Hello! We are very happy to release the first candidate of what will become dnsdist 1.8.0!

• From the moon landing to the James Webb Space Telescope and many other scientific missions, software is critical for the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Sharing information has also been in the DNA of the space agency from the beginning. As a result, NASA also contributes to and releases open-source software and open data. In a keynote at FOSDEM 2023, Science Data Officer Steve Crawford talked about NASA and open-source software, including the challenges NASA has faced in using open source and the agency’s recent initiatives to lower barriers.

• Software has always been a big part of NASA’s work. Who hasn’t seen the photo of computer scientist Margaret Hamilton next to a hard-copy stack of the Apollo software she and her team at MIT produced? The stack of code is as tall as she is. In 2016, the original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer source code for the command and lunar modules was published on GitHub in the public domain. You can even compile the code and run it in a simulator.

Events

• foss-north is a Free Software conference in Gothenburg that brings together Nordic Free Software communities. This year, the Free Software Foundation Europe is organising a track covering political and legal aspects of Free Software, as well as best practices from Scandinavia. We’re looking forward to your contribution by March 5!

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• I attended FOSDEM 2023 and over the two days of conference I gave away well over a thousand curl stickers. Every last curl sticker I had in my possession.

Education

• This is a headlamp I designed to be used to complete the BSA Electronics Merit Badge. All you should need to complete the merit badge is included in the PowerPoint slides that are also included. It takes about 3 hours to finish all the requirements. You could also use this to teach anyone about basic circuit design using KCL and KVL.

FSF

Programming/Development

• Last September, Dan Olson of Folding Ideas released a documentary about a pair of grifters who underpaid gig-econonmy ghost writers to churn out audio book spam. The books are designed to exploit trending topics in Audible in lieu of any expertise, and achieve “passive income” with as little effort (on your part) as possible: [...]

• After digging deeper and swapping notes with software engineers daily for the last 3 years, here’s what we believe are the stickiest CI/CD situations developers face daily.

• A monorepo is a version controlled code repository that contains many projects. Although these projects may be related, they are usually logically separate and maintained by different teams.

• The opposite of a monorepo is a multirepo, where each project is stored in a completely separate, versioned repository. Multirepos come naturally – most of us do it when we start a new project.

• At first glance, choosing between monorepos and multirepos may not seem like a big deal, but it’s a decision that will greatly affect your company’s development workflow.

• Having a forge set up to provide a fancy schmancy UI around send-email (like sourcehut) and/or pull-request would solve everything. No need for ForgeFed when we’ve already got email.

• There are three use-case a good forge needs to support.

• Last year I got deep into using MusicBrainz Picard to help tag music before I add it to my collection. The MusicBrainz database is fantastic, and it saves me a lot of time tweaking metadata. Most of the time I can just look up an album and it finds the correct info automagically. As an added bonus, it’ll rename the files so that the folder and filenames all match the same scheme. You know, the right way to name and organize music files.

• I think I downloaded my first MP3 somewhere around 1997, using a super-speedy 56K modem. This was when you had to have a download manager for huge downloads that measured in the multiple megabytes, and a 1GB disk drive would be consider spacious.

• My MP3 collection grew pretty slowly, since portable MP3 players were still a few years off and CDs were still the most convenient way to listen to music. Digital downloads were just for novelty or rarities that I couldn’t get on CD like some unofficial Tori Amos tracks off a fan page.

• My collection grew slowly and organically, and there wasn’t much organization to it. Eventually I got a Creative Nomad player the size of portable CD player. It had, I think, a whopping 6GB of space. Eventually I got an iPod and kept adding to the collection.

• At some point, after the collection passed the 200GB mark, the digital mess started bugging me and I started experimenting with naming schemes and attempts to clean up the structure and tagging of all the files.

• Given a strictly positive integer i, this code will calculate i+1 “equally spaced” values between 1 and 0:

• If you’re looking for a trap, this does actually work for any i > 0. One can verify it experimentally; run the code with i from 1 to INT_MAX.

• For simplicity, just consider the case j = i (the maximum for j, in the last loop of iteration above):

• Arun Gupta, VP and General Manager of Open Ecosystems at Intel Corporation, joins Doc Searls and Simon Phipps on this episode of FLOSS Weekly. Gupta has been an open source strateg…

• In this article, I will discuss the recent problems with compiling LibreOffice using Microsoft Visual Studio, things that I did to debug and find the root cause, the source of problem itself – which is problems in Microsoft’s telemetry – and how I could fix it.

Rust

• The Rust community has been working to reform its governance model; that work is now being presented as a draft document describing how that model will work.

Leftovers

• Our visual culture, focused on art of the immediate present, identifies three old masters as grand culture heroes: Piero della Francesca; Vermeer; and of course Caravaggio. (And now, Artemisia Gentileschi also belongs on that short list, as a feminist hero. ) Almost nothing is known about the lives of Piero and Vermeer, but we know something about Caravaggio (1573-1610). And this relatively short lived, gay, violent superstar, a rebel as if sent from central casting, inspires not only art historical research, but fictional biographies and even movies. A quarter of a century ago, I summarized this literature, little knowing how much was still to be written. A great deal more is known about Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). We have, for example, his extensive correspondence. He is most famous nowadays for saying that Caravaggio came into the world to destroy painting. Indeed, one French book about Caravaggio is simply called: To Destroy Painting. But unlike Caravaggio, Poussin doesn’t have a mystique. And outside of France, he isn’t a culture hero.

• Caravaggio and Poussin never met, for by the time that Poussin got to Italy Caravaggio had died. Caravaggio has a great story. His fame is justified. But recent research has revealed that Poussin, too, has a story, which deserves to be better known. Born in Northern France, it took him some years to make his way to Rome, which was the center of the European art world in the way that in the 1940s New York City was the epicenter of ours. Poussin arrived only in his late twenties. Along the way he painted some pictures, which recently have been rediscovered. One of these early works, The Sack and Destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem by Titus (1625-6), discovered in a London auction house by the famous connoisseur, Denis Mahon, has found an appropriate home, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. This large picture is recognizably in the style of Poussin’s later best known history paintings. A number of other early works, Sleeping Venus and Cupid and Venus (or a Nymph) Spied On by Satyr are two, from this period are more puzzling. They have been questioned for an interesting reason: these frankly lascivious scenes, textbook examples of male voyeurism, seem inconsistent , as one catalogue puts it, with “the conventional view of Poussin as an austere and serious artist.” And just last year the museum at Lyons presented an exhibition centered around another recently rediscovered work, also found in a London auction, La Mort de Chioné (1622). The subject is rare and disconcerting: Chione, who was the lover of Apollo and Hermes, vainly compared her own beauty to that of Artemis, and so Apollo’s sister killed her by shooting an arrow through her tongue. Learning that this painting was made in Lyons, it’s possible to fill in some of the gaps in Poussin’s early movements to Rome.

• More than 43,000 deaths in Turkey from an earthquake have raised painful and angry questions over whether some of those fatalities could have been avoided with better building standards.

• The devastating earthquakes on February 6 revived the fears of an anticipated powerful earthquake in the metropolis.

• With international aid still struggling to reach Syria two weeks after the devastating February 6 earthquakes, calls are mounting for Western countries to lift diplomatic sanctions on the Syrian regime and facilitate the flow of aid. A local doctor helping the humanitarian efforts in Aleppo, in northwestern Syria, tells FRANCE 24 that people feel abandoned by the West.

• Several aftershocks followed the initial earthquake, which was felt at 05H37 local time

• As of this Friday, the university will no longer hold public worship services. “I have been asked if Asbury is ‘stopping’ this outpouring of God’s Spirit and the stirring of human hearts,” the university president said in a statement. “I have responded by pointing out that we cannot stop something we did not start.” Indeed, the phenomenon has been reported to have spread to other schools, including Samford University, Lee University, and Cedarville University.

• Confession: I have a few books out there that no one knows about because I haven’t written them . . . well, finished them.

• I’ve talked in previous columns about “wrestling with infinity” — the match I always lose — by which I mean, picking a subject too large to reduce to words and eventually getting hopelessly lost in it, e.g.: shifting human consciousness, transcending what we think we know, truly creating peace (whatever that is).

• Software systems and marriages have many things in common and there are differences too. In this post, you will learn about 5 things that are similar in both software systems and marriages, let’s get going!

Science

• YNYS ENLLI, Wales, UK – Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island), north Wales, has received International Dark Sky Sanctuary (IDSS) certification from the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA).

• A research group from VTT Technical Research Center of Finland has unlocked the secret behind the extraordinary mechanical properties and ultra-light weight of certain fungi. The complex architectural design of mushrooms could be mimicked and used to create new materials to replace plastics. The research results were published on February 22, 2023, in Science Advances.

• Forces that discourage brilliant action and timely investigation of hypotheses are bad for science. One such force is excessive regulation. When rules and regulations are illogical and overly burdensome, their primary effect is to dampen enthusiasm for research and to delay scientific progress. In the realm of medical research with human subjects, the Institutional Review Board (IRB) is often the culprit. To get a sense of the costs of over-regulation by the IRB, it is instructive to look back to episodes that predate the IRB entirely, predate the modern all-encompassing IRB, or were outside the IRB’s purview.

Education

• As we launch our third RIPE Labs article competition, we’re again looking to be reminded of just how interesting a phenomenon the Internet is. As always, we’re looking for articles about where the Internet came from, where it’s going, and how we measure and understand where it is right now. That’s quite an open brief, for sure. But the important thing to keep in mind is that we’re looking for stories and analyses that are truly eye-opening for the people who help keep the Internet running.

• De Danske Sprogcentre recommends abolishing the rule that the right to free lessons disappears after five years of residence

Hardware

• Some design choices on manufacturing equipment really leave you scratching your head for a while, as recently happened to [Chris Cecil] when the belt on a reflow oven’s conveyer snapped. Although the solution seems simple enough, getting a new belt on the thing would involve essentially taking the entire machine apart, before reassembling it again. Thus the frayed belt went through the oven over and over until during a recent production run of Smoothieboard controller boards until [Chris] heard a funny noise and the conveyer ground to a halt.

• Imagine you had a rich uncle who wanted to fund some of your projects. Like, seriously rich — thanks to shrewd investments, he’s sitting on a pile of cash and is now legally obligated to give away $5,000,000 a year to deserving recipients. That would be pretty cool indeed, but like anything else, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, right?

• Sometimes a project needs to go big, and [Evan and Katelyn] threw portability to the wind to build the “world’s biggest” laptop.

• We have a soft spot for devices that subvert purpose and expectation, and that definitely sums up [Guy Dupont]’s Clock That Is Wrong. It knows the correct time, but whether or not it displays the correct time is another story. That’s because nestled just above the 7-segment display is a person sensor module, and when it detects that a person is looking towards it, the clock will display an incorrect time, therefore self-defeating both the purpose and primary use case of a clock in one stroke.

• The amount of information the humble seven-segment display can convey is surprising. There are the ten numerals, dead-ringers or reasonable approximations for about half the alphabet, and even a few not-quite-canonical symbols. But when you put 12,288 segments to work, you get all that and much more.

• Employee doubts are rising about Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s $40 billion investment in an Arizona factory.

• The state has become a hub for chip makers including Intel and TSMC, as the government prepares to release a gusher of funds for the strategic industry.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The “Forever Pollution Project” has found more than 17,000 sites in Europe that are contaminated by perfluorinated alkylated substances (PFAS). More than 2,000 of these sites can be considered hotspots.

• Known as “forever chemicals” by experts, they could be damaging human health.

• Roland Weber, an environmental consultant with the United Nations, describes them as “one of the most threatening chemicals ever invented.”

• Rail carriers are operating longer, heavier freight trains, and with fewer workers than ever. The train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, is a reminder that the issues railworkers nearly struck over last year are far from resolved.

• Norfolk Southern’s toxic train wreck disaster in East Palestine, Ohio is one of America’s worst environmental catastrophes in memory. The Trump regime’s slash-and-burn approach to government regulation is a clear culprit for the railroad safety issues that paved the way for the crash, yet the Biden administration’s hands aren’t clean either since President Biden busted a potential railroad worker strike by forcing their union to take a deal the majority didn’t like.

• The situation highlights a disturbing level of regulatory capture in America by corporations that always prioritize profits over people and safety, regardless of which party occupies the White House. Then there are the citizens of East Palestine and the surrounding region who are left to pick up the pieces, with grave concern about whether the air, water, and soil in their town are still safe.

• The train derailment in Eastern Ohio has spawned conspiracy theories and contradictory narratives, with politicians from both parties parading through town to further their agendas.

• U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna led several Democratic members of Congress in calling on the Food and Drug Administration to take more aggressive action to ensure families and healthcare providers have access to common over-the-counter medicines that have been depleted on drugstore shelves across the U.S. this winter.

• Children between 14 and 17 are increasingly becoming addicted to the drugs. For many it is their first taste of narcotics

• The compulsory Covid-19 mask mandate – which has been in place for over two-and-a-half years – is to be extended for another 14 days again on Thursday.

• The typical cost of a pack of 20 cigarettes has risen by HK$12, from around HK$62 to HK$74. Finance Secretary Paul Chan increased the duty on individual cigarettes by 60 cents with immediate effect in a bid to encourage Hongkongers to quit smoking.

• Activist is taken away by Shenzhen authorities after tweeting video of rallies in Wuhan and Dalian

• Rail operator Norfolk Southern is getting slammed for its response following the derailment of one of its trains carrying hazardous materials near East Palestine, Ohio, this month.

• The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Tuesday announced that it has ordered Norfolk Southern to manage cleanup operations resulting from a February 3 train derailment in Ohio.

• Federal investigators on Thursday released a highly anticipated preliminary report about the February 3 derailment of a train carrying hazardous materials in East Palestine, Ohio, where residents are now worried about health and environmental effects.

• All 59 Republican members of the Illinois General Assembly are calling for legislative hearings on a state-run mental health center in rural southern Illinois, citing findings of a culture of abuse, cover-ups and poor patient care from a monthslong investigative series by Lee Enterprises Midwest, Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica.

• Late last week, the members sent a letter to key Democratic committee chairs in the Illinois House and Senate asking them to schedule a bicameral public hearing on the facility.

• Sahak said she thinks girls’ levels of sadness might be more serious than what was reflected in the survey. Teens her age are trapped in a cycle of comparison on social media, she said — viewing themselves relative to friends, celebrities and influencers, which can worsen insecurities and feelings of inadequacy.

• As an example, she pointed to a trend on TikTok in which people compare their faces from the side to see whether they have “good profiles.”

• “In Detroit, there is a tobacco retailer within 1,000 feet of every school,” said Jones. “The tobacco industry spends nearly $300 million in Michigan each year to keep people addicted and attract new, young customers.”

• The costs of their addictions in public health costs and loss of life will only be amplified as these children age into tobacco-consuming adults. Health care costs for smoking-related illness in Michigan total around $4.5 billion in a year.

• The ban also means that European Commission staff cannot use the Chinese-owned video-sharing app on personal devices, including phones, that have official apps installed, the spokesperson said, confirming a report by news website Euractiv.

• The European Union’s executive branch said Thursday that it has temporarily banned TikTok from phones used by employees as a cybersecurity measure, reflecting widening worries from Western officials over the Chinese-owned video sharing app.

• In a first for the European Commission, its Corporate Management Board suspended the use of TikTok on devices issued to staff or personal devices that staff use for work.

• The European Commission has banned TikTok from official devices because of concerns about cybersecurity, a move sharply criticized by the company in its latest run-in with Western governments over how it handles user data.

• I’m one of the 84 million Americans who get our health care through Medicaid. And I’m one of the 18 million who might lose it starting this spring unless our policymakers take action.

• I went to college, got a degree, and planned on being self-sufficient. But in my early 20s, I was struck by an autoimmune condition that caused painful, chronic flare ups that affected my ability to stand or walk.

• Your doctor is out and unable to see you now. Not out for lunch or out on vacation — but out of medical practice.

• America’s perverse health care system, which sublimates care to the profiteering demands of Wall Street speculators who essentially own today’s system, has been driving out hordes of nurses, pharmacists, and now doctors too.

• Guess so since it gave Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, plenty of space to say things that are extremely deceptive, if not outright lies. The gist of Riedl’s piece is that it will not be possible to sustain Social Security and Medicare without tax increases on the middle class.

• Much of the piece is the standard line about an aging population posing an impossible burden that we have been reading about in the NYT and elsewhere for many decades. For example, Riedl includes an old favorite:

Proprietary

• Compared with the attention heaped on Bob Iger’s return to the helm of Disney and the stepping back of Reed Hastings at Netflix, news on February 16th that Susan Wojcicki would resign from YouTube after nine years as ceo caused barely a rustle in the media pages. That is a sign of two things. First, how little attention Wall Street analysts and entertainment-industry scribblers pay to the business of YouTube, even though it has become a hub—as well as a byword—for global video. Second, how overshadowed it is by the teetering ramparts of its parent company, Alphabet. Sundar Pichai, the tech giant’s beleaguered boss, is fighting wars on so many fronts, from Microsoft’s ChatGPT-inspired encroachment on Google search to trustbusters and the Supreme Court, that the goings-on at YouTube must seem like a sideshow.

• Once best known for tools like Photoshop used to create websites and digital marketing materials, Adobe has expanded its business to include software for managing those materials and tracking how well they work at bringing customers in the door.

• Pankov stands accused of developing NLBrute — also known as nl.exe or nlbrute.exe — and advertising it for sale on an underground forum as early as June 2016, according to an indictment unsealed this week. During that time he also sold more than 35,000 compromised login credentials for access to systems around the world, including in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Australia. At least two of those sales were to undercover U.S. law enforcement officers, according to the indictment, and involved login credentials for two separate Florida-based law firms.

• It might sound strange to hear that Microsoft, a company who goes to great lengths to protect computers and networks, is one of the biggest contributors to phishing and fraud on the planet. It’s true unfortunately.

• They aren’t actually committing the acts themselves of course, but they are enabling the problem by withdrawing support for standards designed to help stop it. Here’s why this is such a big deal.

• This is part 1 of an ongoing series on why you should use R. Future blogs will be linked here as they are released.

• The era of data manipulation and analysis using programming languages has arrived. But it can be tough to find the time and the right resources to fully switch over from more manual, time-consuming solutions, such as Excel. In this blog we will show a comparison between Excel and R to get you started!

• When choosing between R and Excel, it is important to understand how both solutions can get you the results you need. However, one can make it an easy, reputable, convenient process, whereas the other can make it an extremely frustrating, time-consuming process prone to human errors.

• Here’s how to call ChatGPT using an Apple Shortcut in 3 steps.

Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

• Even now, I run into those who think Linux and open source software is made by people living in their parents’ basement and writing the code out of the goodness of their hearts. Wrong. So, so wrong.

Security

• Experts provide insights into ways for the United States and its allies to bolster their cyber workforces.

• Elon Musk was right: Text messages are not the most secure way to protect your account.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• A SSO system is very convenient when it works, but if and when it’s down for some reason, it’s a single point that prevents you from using anything else (unless you happen to be lucky). Many of the staff things that we could protect with SSO are in fact exactly the things we most want to be available when the rest of our systems are falling over; for example, it would be pretty bad if our metrics system’s dashboards weren’t accessible during an outage. Grafana Loki? Our searchable archive of our worklogs? All things that we really, really want to have access to if at all possible, and that need access restrictions.

• Banks in the U.S. and Europe tout voice ID as a secure way to log into your account. I proved it’s possible to trick such systems with free or cheap AI-generated voices.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The FBI has retracted a document showing that its “Richmond division launched an investigation into ‘radical traditionalist’ Catholics and their possible ties to ‘the far-right white nationalist movement,’” because, as the FBI said, the document “does not meet our exacting standards” (Catholic News Agency, 2/9/23).

• With the US right using the FBI’s investigation into former President Donald Trump as proof that the federal law enforcement agency is run by the radical left (Mother Jones, 9/4/22), the latest news has become new ammo in the conservative cultural offensive.

• Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), passed in 2008, continues to be the Little Legislation That Could. While occasionally hijacked by opportunistic litigants whose privacy hasn’t actually been violated, it’s also been used to achieve some objective good.

• Amazon and 1Life Healthcare, Inc. (One Medical) Wednesday announced Amazon’s completed $3.9 billion acquisition of One Medical. Amazon announced its intended acquisition of the membership-based healthcare provider in July 2022.

• [...]

• However, there may be ramifications for both One Medical customers’ health data privacy and the accessibility of healthcare. Although the FTC declined to challenge the acquisition, spokesperson Douglas Farrar said the FTC will continue to investigate any potential harm to competition the merger may cause, as well as potential consumer harm resulting from Amazon’s control and use of One Medical’s sensitive consumer health data.

• Providing support and necessary tools for those who find themselves in places where Tor access is restricted has become one of our top priorities. And as our community continues to grow, we are constantly looking for ways that make it easier and safer to connect with us. That’s why, over the last two years, we have been working on improving Tor online user support: from launching the Tor Forum and bridging Tor IRC channels to Matrix in 2021 to rolling out support channels on messaging apps like Telegram and Signal in 2022.

• Today, we are excited to announce the addition of our WhatsApp user support — providing another option for users across the world to get in touch with us.

• The UK government has made no secret of its desire to convert providing encryption into a criminal act. The fact that some things are beyond the government’s reach is unacceptable. While lawmakers may suggest this will only target “criminal” purveyors and users, there’s no reason to believe this won’t be expanded every time law enforcement finds it slightly difficult to access information it believes it’s entitled to.

• In 2021, Apple updated its mobile OS so that users could opt out of app tracking with one click. More than 96% opted out, costing Facebook $10b in one year. The kicker? Even if you opted out, Apple continued to spy on you, just as invasively as Facebook had, as part of its competing targeted ad product: [...]

• Mozilla, the not-for-profit organization behind the Firefox browser, looked at the 20 most popular paid and free apps in the Google Play app store for its report.

• It found that nearly 80 percent of the 40 apps reviewed had “some discrepancies” between the app’s privacy policies and the information the app reported on Google’s data safety form.

• Some attempts to join Meta Verified from Sydney found the service was not available on the first day of the rollout.

• I don’t like this proposal, as I told Joseph Cox at Motherboard. (Joseph is a journalist who’s both British and, as the foregoing links reveal, has extensively covered secure phone networks and their infiltration by the police, including for his upcoming book on ANOM.) It would effectively turn owning or offering one of these devices into a strict liability crime. That’s because the only defense the proposal carves out is one that would be impossible for defendants to invoke in practice, due to the Government’s stance (which it states overtly in the proposal) that everyone who owns one is a criminal.

Defence/Aggression

• As 2023 unfolds, we fear that American policy will continue to be characterized by both mission creep and the absence of any sort of diplomatic engagement with Russia.

• Throughout the course of the war, the Biden administration has slowly, steadily, even stealthily increased America’s involvement. Calls from Kiev for more and more weapons have, at every turn, been met with President Biden’s acquiescence. Meantime, Congress has continued in its decades-long abdication of its constitutional responsibilities, opting instead to act as a rubber stamp on ever-increasing amounts of financial and military assistance to Ukraine. All the while, Kiev’s appetite has grown larger with the eating.

• Moldova, a small landlocked country in Eastern Europe is the poorest nation in Europe. Despite its natural beauty, cultural richness, and strategic location, the country has been struggling with economic, political, and social challenges that have hindered its development and prosperity. There are several reasons why Moldova is so poor and there are numerous challenges it faces in its journey towards growth and stability.

• The economy heavily relies on agriculture, particularly on wine and fruits production, which account for a significant portion of its exports. However, the country faces challenges in terms of modernizing its agricultural practices and infrastructure, which limits its competitiveness in the global market. Additionally, corruption, limited foreign investment, and weak economic policies have hindered the country’s economic growth.

• During a Veterans Day celebration in my small Maryland community, a teacher clicked through a slideshow of smiling men and women in military uniforms. “Girls and boys, can anyone tell me what courage is?” she asked the crowd, mostly children from local elementary schools, including my two young kids.

• A boy raised his hand. “Not being scared?” he asked.

• Here we are one year after Russia’s blood-drenched invasion of Ukraine, the country that has always been the leading tripwire for a global nuclear war in the post-Soviet era. The subsequent United States (US)-Russia proxy war that has unfolded and escalated there is a rolling slaughterhouse with a body count in the tens if not the hundreds of thousands. It feels increasingly like a chapter in a dystopian novel depicting the march to World War III.

• And, of course, the fog of propagandistic stupefaction surrounding this deadly conflict has been extremely thick on all sides, including what’s left of the shattered and lame US “left.” The intra-portside polarization over Ukraine is darkly comedic at this point. If you stake out a consistent communist anti-imperialist position on the Ukraine War, as I try to do in this essay, one group of white male lefties calls you a NATO fan and another group of white male lefties calls you a Putinist. Both charges are absurd and idiotic.

• UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said he disagrees with the Duke of Sussex’s decision to reveal how many Taliban fighters he killed while serving in the British Army in Afghanistan, saying “boasting about tallies” lets down others in the armed forces.

• The assembly overwhelmingly adopted a resolution calling for a peace agreement that guarantees Ukraine’s sovereignty. Several of Russia’s key allies abstained, including China, Iran and India.

• Demonstrations, marches, speeches and commemorations will take place across the country in support of Ukraine today

• Well over a billion kroner and counting

• In a clip from an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin discusses Russia’s war with Ukraine, the role of the United States, and his predictions.

• China’s government called for a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine and for the start of peace talks to end the yearlong war.

• Reports obtained by CNN appear to show China is sending parts labeled for military use to Russia as aid in Ukraine war. CNN’s Will Ripley explains.

• This means that these UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) will be able to identify their targets easily by just looking at their faces.

• For some individuals, this is a great innovation since it will make defense drones more accurate. However, this technology raises fears among other people because they can easily kill specified individuals.

• China reacted quickly, with a Foreign Ministry spokesperson accusing Blinken of spreading disinformation. But information obtained by DER SPIEGEL indicates that the planned cooperation between Beijing and Moscow goes even further than Blinken makes it sound.

• Since the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria and the emergence of Islamist-Salafist groups in northern Mali in 2013, the Sahel has increasingly been caught in the maelstrom of Islamist terrorism.

• A group of herders were tending to their cattle in a pasture near Airamne village in Nigeria’s restive northeastern borderlands when the shooting began.

• Boko Haram fighters emerged from their camps in Gajiganna forest on December 24, 2022 to launch an attack. The herders returned fire.

• The Aspen Institute has published a good analysis of the successes, failures, and absences of cyberattacks as part of the current war in Ukraine: “The Cyber Defense Assistance Imperative ­ Lessons from Ukraine.”

• Informed by the ongoing work of a variety of organizations providing operational cyber support to Ukrainian institutions through the Cyber Defense Assistance Collaborative, this paper seeks to define cyber defense assistance, outline its primary component parts, and identify key lessons learned that can help inform how such assistance can be provided in future geopolitical conflicts. It also makes the case that an effective national security toolkit requires the ability to deliver cyber defense assistance to allies.

• Less than 24 hours after claiming Ukraine is preparing to carry out a false-flag attack in Transnistria, Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Thursday evening that it had detected a “significant build-up” of Ukrainian troops and military vehicles near the “Ukrainian-Transnistrian border.”

• During a Veterans Day celebration in my small Maryland community, a teacher clicked through a slideshow of smiling men and women in military uniforms. “Girls and boys, can anyone tell me what courage is?” she asked the crowd, mostly children from local elementary schools, including my two young kids.

• After the 9/11 attacks, terrorism became the ultimate entitlement program for America’s political elite. Whether it is illegally spying on Americans or blowing Somali dissidents to smithereens, invoking terrorism justifies any attack favored by for Washington policymakers. But the disastrous results of granting politicians a blank check should have been undeniable almost 60 years ago.

• Back in the 1960s, terrorism was what the communists did. Antiterrorist moral fervor and ideological blinders propelled the U.S. into its biggest foreign policy blunder since World War Two.

• In January 2022, armed Russian militants operating under the banner of the notorious Wagner Group of mercenaries – a Private Military Company (PMC) operating internationally with Kremlin support – began a security operation targeting the villages of Aïgbado and Yanga, 600km to the east of Bangui, the capital city of the Central African Republic. The result was the brutal massacre of almost 70 Black African men, women, and children, conducted in both villages at the hands of the Russian mercenaries and their comrades among the Central African government troops. Countless more were injured and displaced – with images across various social media reports and news sites indicating the graphic torture and murder of unarmed civilians, hands bound behind their backs[1] as they are subjected to violence well past the legal threshold for war crimes. The United Nations (UN) Mission in the country, MINUSCA, confirmed through a statement released by Stéphane Dujarric, also the spokesperson for Secretary-General António Guterres, that they had received reports of violence involving government troops and unnamed external “security personnel”, with many casualties and displacements running in the hundreds[2].

• A UN Probe was subsequently announced earlier this year amid increasing media attention and reports, local accusations and international speculation concerning the Wagner Group’s involvement; it has been long confirmed by the Central African Republic’s (CAR) government that Russian mercenaries are indeed present in the country, having been hired as ‘advisors’. Further online reports have since suggested the UN probe was hampered by the intentional placing of landmines to prevent access for UN Peacekeepers and investigators – but information confirming this fact is hard to find. What can be verified regarding the UN investigation of this Wagner-perpetrated massacre is this:

• It isn’t clear to us how [mrsylvain59] came into possession of a late-model piece of military gear from the German airforce, but we enjoyed watching the teardown below anyway. According to the documentation, the thing has a huge price tag, although we all know that the military usually pays top dollar for various reasons, so we are guessing the cost of the parts is quite a bit less than the price tag.

• This article is a very brief summary of what Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Chief Kyrylo Budanov told Forbes Ukraine, in an extended interview that surveyed the first year of Russia’s invasion, what it revealed about Russia to Ukrainian intelligence, and what predictions can be made on that basis. The full interview is available in Ukrainian and Russian. Here are Budanov’s main insights, in our own words.

• On September 23, 1973, just 12 days after the bloody military coup in Chile, one of the world’s most famous poets, Pablo Neruda, died in the Santa María medical clinic in Santiago, where he was being treated for prostate cancer. At the time of his death at age 69, a private plane sent by the Mexican government was waiting to transport the Nobel laureate into the safety of exile. Given his long history as a leading member of Chile’s Communist Party, and his close ties to the deposed government of Salvador Allende, Neruda had many reasons to flee Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s forces.

• Every morning, as I take my daily walk up toward the nearby Andes mountains, I pass by the Aeródromo Tobalaba, an airfield catering to a wide variety of private planes.

• For most neighbors in La Reina, the district in Santiago where my wife and I keep a house, this is a welcome open space in a congested city—a guarantee that no high-rises will blot out the horizon. For me, in a year that marks the 50th anniversary of the coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, the Aeródromo stirs up less-warm feelings.

• Poland has begun installing anti-tank barriers on its borders with Russia and Belarus, the country’s defense minister, Mariusz Błaszczak, announced Thursday evening.

• Without mentioning the Uvalde mass shooting, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott last week declared school safety a priority for the current legislative session and again dismissed calls for more laws that would restrict access to guns.

• “Some want more gun laws, but too many local officials won’t even enforce the gun laws that are already on the books,” the governor said during his annual State of the State address. Without providing a source or clear data, he then asserted that “most gun crimes are committed by criminals who possess guns illegally.” Abbott proposed a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for people who are not legally allowed to have a firearm but have them anyway.

• When news first emerged over explosions endured by the NordStream pipelines, known collectively as Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, an army of guessers was mobilised.  The accusation that Russia had done it seemed counterintuitive, given that the Russian state company Gazprom is a majority shareholder of Nord Stream 1 and sole owner of NordStream 2.  But this less than convenient fact did not discourage those from the Moscow-is-behind everything School of Thinking.  “It’s pretty predictable and predictably stupid to express such versions,” snarled Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov.

• The first reports noted three leaks in both the NordStream 1 and NordStream 2 pipeline systems.  A fourth was subsequently revealed.  Then came news that the first explosion had taken place in a Russian built section of the pipeline.  Der Spiegel summed up the various questions.  Was Moscow behind it?  Or the United States, which had always been implacably opposed to the project?  And what of Ukraine or perhaps “rogue” agents?  For those wishing for a more savoury sauce, there was babbling that Mossad might have been behind it.

• In a recent article a retired Republic of Korea Army [ROKA] Lieutenant General talked about how important the F-35 is to the security of his country. General Chun In-bum said: “For reasons of interoperability and to maintain the highest quality armed forces, the South Korean military uses U.S. arms to conduct its mission to maintain peace. These include Apache attack helicopters, F-15 and F-16 fighters, and the F-35 stealth fighter. The South Korean Air force [ROKAF] operates forty F-35s and is planning to acquire twenty more to supplement its capabilities.”

• But he is concerned that political issues will make the F-35 even more expensive than it already is and it is the most expensive fighter plane in history. He continued: “The main concern is the ongoing dispute in Washington about the F135 engine that powers the F-35. There are those in the Pentagon and Congress who have called for an upgrade to the propulsion system—and rightfully so, given the F-35’s need for better thrust and vertical lift—but there are also voices calling for a completely new engine system called the Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP). Thus far, we have seen hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for the development of this new engine and this year is a pivotal year for the future of the F-35 program. The proposed creation of an entirely new engine, compared to upgrading the existing F135, would greatly burden South Korea and other allies who operate the F-35.”

• Twenty years ago — on February 15, 2003 — the world said no to war. People rose up in almost 800 cities around the world in an unprecedented movement for peace.

• The world stood on the precipice of war. U.S. and U.K. warplanes and warships — filled with soldiers and sailors and armed with the most powerful weapons ever used in conventional warfare — were streaming towards the Middle East, aimed at Iraq.

• When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1978, I lived in East Oakland.  My friend and I shared a run down three-bedroom Victorian with a couple guys we met at a daily free meal in Berkeley.  Our house was a block away from Foothill Avenue on East 17th Street.  We were the only white-skinned folks for a couple blocks.  A dozen or so blocks to our east was a neighborhood where lots of Hells Angels lived.  Although the Oakland police were constantly stopping young Black people in the streets, emptying their pockets, rolling  up their sleeves and either arresting or punching them, I was only bothered once by those uniforms.  It was while I waited for the bus that would take me to Berkeley, where I hung out.  Fortunately, I had no marijuana or other illegal substances on me.  After the cops emptied my pockets, took my name and called it in to see if I had any warrants, they let me go and told me I was stupid for living around so many n**gers.  Both the cops were white.

• Unfortunately, my interactions with the police in Berkeley were not as uneventful.  I was knocked around by them, harassed too many times to count, arrested on bullshit charges a half-dozen times, and even taken to the hills, threatened with a severe beating and then told to get out and walk back.  But, that’s another story.  The only real link to the subject of this piece–the Oakland Police Department–is that one of the cops who relished harassing me and many other people on the Berkeley streets had been fired for “accidentally” shooting a four-year old in an Oakland police raid of questionable legality.  That same cop broke the arm of a friend of mine when he challenged an arrest he was making.

• Over the last few decades, we’ve seen numerous bad actors escape punishment for their bad acts — ranging from theft to sexual misconduct to summary execution — for no better reason than that they were government employees, under the doctrine of “qualified immunity.”

• Now the US Supreme Court appears to have dropped the “qualified” part in favor of just plain immunity, full stop.

• 1991, Leningrad. The private office of the deputy mayor of the city. A reporter for the city’s television channel interviews a young official from Anatoly Sobchak’s team. In the frame — a man with a childish face in a white shirt. Behind him, you can see window blinds, a television, a table lamp, a telephone, open folders with papers. A typical Soviet office environment. But something does not add up. From behind the scenes, the voice of the journalist says that yesterday, he could still see a bust of Lenin in this office, but today it had disappeared somewhere. What had happened?

• ‘I find it difficult to answer what happened. Because this, probably, was done by one of my assistants,’ the official answers. ‘If you are interested in my opinion of this person, of the doctrine he supposedly represented, then I would say […] that all this is no more than a beautiful and harmful fairy tale. Harmful because the implementation, or attempt to implement it in the life of our country has caused it enormous damage. And in this regard, I would like to speak about the tragedy we are experiencing today. Namely, the tragedy of the collapse of our state. You can’t call it anything but a tragedy. I think it was the leaders of October 17th who laid a time bomb under the foundation of the unitary state called Russia. What did they do? They split our fatherland into separate principalities, which previously did not appear on the world map at all, endowed these principalities with governments and parliaments, and so now we have what we have […] it’s largely those people’s fault, whether they wanted it or not.’

• Riled up against China, GOP congressmembers have long felt that Washington’s new cold war needed a special venue. So as soon as the baton passed to Republicans in the House, they set up a select committee on China. This is majority leader Kevin “Trump’s the Man” McCarthy’s baby, and if it sounds to you like a forum for much grandstanding and frothing about the communist menace, the yellow peril and the need to beef up the FBI, CIA, DIA and NSA, so they can hunt down China’s spies from the halls of government to the groves of academe – “they’re everywhere” supposedly – you may be onto something. I’m not sure what that something is, but it’s a good bet it ends with U.S. navy aircraft carriers steaming toward Taiwan. In fact, a four-star general, Mike Minihan, said as much January 27. “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025,” he wrote in a memo to his subordinates. In which case it’s time to head for the hills – since every place else will be radioactive.

• Proving the veracity of Minihan’s talkative gut, we learned February 8 that the U.S., U.K. and Australian militaries engaged in joint air drills over the Nevada desert, in preparation for…war with China. Specifically, reported Reuters February 8, “to simulate high-end combat operations, against Chinese fighter aircraft and defenses.” Also in early February, there bubbled up more murmurings in the press about Tokyo beefing up its military and boosting ties with the Philippines, the better to confront Beijing – at Washington’s behest, of course. So the storm clouds gather, as China, too, speeds up its production of nuclear missiles and muscles up its army, the better, Beijing hopes, to deter the U.S. from provoking the invasion of Taiwan that it would use as an excuse for war. Kinda like the Ukraine incitement redux, except this time the Washington sociopaths are ready to make the China war nuclear from the get-go.

• Radar technology, automatic rifles and air defense systems sold to junta despite human rights abuses

• Canberra pushes for joint patrols with the Philippines, as Manila and Washington discuss same

• The Idaho Ways and Means Committee Wednesday introduced House Bill 186 in the Idaho House of Representatives, which would provide for execution by firing squad.

• Members of the US foreign policy establishment are wrong to prioritize a “China First” perspective at a time when Putin’s Russia is waging a major war of aggression in Ukraine, writes Richard D. Hooker, Jr.

• There is fear of escalation, fear of having Ukraine fully in the European family, fear of a defeated Russia, and fear of a defeated Ukraine.

• Opening in the coming months, the Superhumans Center war trauma hospital in western Ukraine is a symbol of Ukrainian defiance as Russia’s brutal invasion enters its second year, writes co-founder Andrey Stavnitser.

• To prevent further damage to the rules-based international order, the United States and its allies will need a strategy of containment to deter Russia militarily and decouple Russia from the international community, until Moscow has earned the right to be considered a partner once more.

• The communication breakdown between the United States and China could prove disastrous if a crisis arises that’s bigger than a balloon—which is why they need to start talking now.

• From the very start of the war, the Kremlin emphasized demoralizing Ukrainian audiences and destroying their will to fight. Building on daily monitoring of the Kremlin media ecosystem, this report analyzes Russia’s attempts to undermine Ukraine by targeting local, regional, and global audiences since February 2022.

• Russian troops managed to break through Ukrainian defenses near the eastern town of Kreminna on February 21 but were pushed back and lost some of their heavy equipment, a senior Ukrainian official said.

• Ream Naval Base now has two new piers

• Aziz Abdullah, a Uyghur detainee, died after falling sick at the Suan Phlu Immigration Detention Center in Bangkok.

• Ukraine’s international partners are gradually providing the country with the weapons it needs to beat Russia, but excessive caution and continued delays could still allow Vladimir Putin to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

• U.S. President Joe Biden met NATO and European leaders in Warsaw on February 22, with the allies vowing in a statement afterward to further “reinforce our deterrence and defense posture across the entire Eastern flank from the Baltic to the Black Sea.”

• The U.S. ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina has issued a scathing condemnation of longtime Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik’s latest denial of a genocide in the massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia in 1995, calling such efforts “reprehensible,” illegal, and destabilizing.

• United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has denounced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a violation of the founding UN Charter and international law and called out Russian threats about its possible use of nuclear weapons.

• The UK Special Immigration Appeals Commission Wednesday rejected 23-year-old Shamima Begum’s appeal against the government’s 2019 revocation of her British citizenship. The East London native was only 15 when she traveled to Syria to align with ISIL and marry an ISIL fighter.

• Qian Bo, who was China’s envoy to Fiji, will attempt to strengthen ties with small island states.

• In the weeks and months leading up to Russia invading Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Kremlin and pro-Kremlin media employed false and misleading narratives to justify military action against Ukraine, mask the Kremlin’s operational planning, and deny any responsibility for the coming war. Dive into a full accounting of the road to war.

• Vladimir Putin’s February 24, 2022, speech launching a war of aggression in Ukraine was full of false, misleading narratives that Putin, official Kremlin channels, and pro-Kremlin Russian media outlets had been circulating since 2014. Experts unpack the narrative themes that Russia used to justify the war.

• The Ukrainian government says Russia has illegally deported more than 16,000 children to Russian territory since 2014, a practice that intensified after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine a year ago. Not all children are taken by force, but evidence is mounting of a coordinated effort to indoctrinate Ukrainian children and send them to Russian foster families. In the southern city of Kherson, witnesses say Russian forces took children from at least two orphanages as they pulled out of the city last October.

• Tunisia’s President Kais Saied denounced undocumented sub-Saharan African immigration to his country on Tuesday, saying in comments criticised by rights groups that it was aimed at changing Tunisia’s demographic make-up.

• Jailed former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has alleged a widening plot by officials and others to “murder” him and appealed via social media for his country and the world to prevent “this criminal corporation” from carrying out “their evil intentions.”

• Two senior U.S. lawmakers say Austria erred by issuing visas to the Russian delegation — all of whom are under European Union sanctions due to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine — for this week’s meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Vienna.

• U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will meet with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on the sidelines of a UN Security Council ministerial meeting this week coinciding with the first anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

• Hungarian lawmakers will vote on the NATO bids by Finland and Sweden in early March, according to the parliamentary agenda published on February 22.

• Ukraine’s top diplomat, Dmytro Kuleba, said his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, shared “key elements of the Chinese peace plan” during their meeting in Germany earlier this week.

• U.S. President Joe Biden once again reassured countries on NATO’s eastern flank, all of which used to be under the thumb of the former Soviet Union, that the Western defense alliance would help them in the event of an attack.

• Russia and China showcased their deepening ties on February 22 in meetings others are watching for signs that Beijing might offer the Kremlin stronger support for its war in Ukraine.

• Genaro Garcia Luna, formerly the highest-ranking law enforcement official in Mexico, was convicted Tuesday by a federal jury in New York for assisting the Sinaloa drug cartel.

• “They wish the holidays would just disappear.”

• US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s meeting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara on Monday came in the wake of the devastating earthquakes that have rattled the Turkish leader’s projection of his country as a regional hegemon. With Turkey turning into a recipient of generous US humanitarian aid, will Ankara play the role of Washington’s friend rather than foe?

• Germany on Wednesday said it was expelling two diplomats from the Iranian embassy in Berlin over the death sentence an Iranian court handed down against an Iranian-German national.

• A teenage pupil stabbed to death a teacher in the middle of a lesson at a school in southwest France on Wednesday, the regional prosecutor said.

• In the early stages of the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian ingenuity and ability to adapt commercially available equipment helped stem the Russian advance. It proved less useful on the eastern front line, when Ukraine needed heavy weapons. But a year after the invasion, there’s little doubt that Ukraine’s DIY ingenuity has left a lasting mark on modern warfare.

• US President Joe Biden on Wednesday criticised Russia’s decision to suspend a key nuclear treaty, but said there was “no evidence” that Moscow was moving closer to actually using an atomic weapon. Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia will maintain increased attention on boosting its nuclear forces in an address to mark Thursday’s Defender of the Fatherland public holiday and a day before the first anniversary of his invasion of Ukraine.

• All members of the Bucharest Nine, the nations on NATO’s eastern flank that joined the alliance after being dominated by Moscow during the Cold War, have jointly condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine, a Polish presidential adviser said on February 22.

• The UN’s top court has ordered Azerbaijan to allow free passage through the Lachin Corridor, which extends between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, a part of Azerbaijan clawed back from ethnic Armenians in 2020 in a six-week intensification of a decades-old conflict between the post-Soviet foes.

• Finland and Sweden are proceeding “hand in hand” toward NATO membership but that the decision to ratify the applications for the two Nordic countries lies with Turkey, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said on February 22.

• Moldovan President Maia Sandu said on February 22 that at a meeting the previous day in Warsaw she invited U.S. President Joe Biden to “revisit” her country, which shares a 1,200-kilometer border with Ukraine.

• President Volodymyr Zelensky is planning to travel to Vilnius for NATO’s summit in July, Petro Beshta, Ukraine’s ambassador to Lithuania, has told BNS in an interview.

• It was supposed to be Russia’s secret weapon for a swift and efficient victory in Ukraine. But in the year since Wagner Group mercenaries were dispatched to Kyiv to hunt down Ukraine’s president, what was once an elite murder squad has become a group of mostly ill-trained and unequipped convicts who today serve as “cannon fodder”.

• Since the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria and the emergence of Islamist-Salafist groups in northern Mali in 2013, the Sahel has increasingly been caught in the maelstrom of Islamist terrorism. The region is now described as the new global epicentre of violent extremism.

• Russian tanks destroyed by the Ukrainian forces will go on display in Lithuania and three other European countries.

• While Beijing insists on neutrality in the Ukraine war, Lithuania’s foreign minister insists that a recent visit by China’s top diplomat to Moscow shows its sympathies lie with Russia.

• Russia and Belarus are constantly looking for ways to get round EU sanctions, but it is necessary to find ways to prevent this from happening, says Marius Vaščega, head of the European Commission Representation in Lithuania.

• The China-Russia relationship, which has stood the test of the drastic changes in the world situation, is mature, tough and as stable as Mount Tai.

Environment

• Record warmth in February — a time that’s supposed to still feel like winter — might not sound like such a bad thing, but its negative consequences spread across the plant world, sports, tourism and agriculture. And it is another clear sign that our planet is warming rapidly, experts say.

• “Whenever we get these events, we should always be thinking there’s the possibility or likelihood that human-induced climate change is increasing the likelihood of strange weather,” Richard Seager, climate researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, told CNN. “The more it goes on, the more they can bring such tremendous damage.”

• Over 300 wildlife species showed traces of the nearly indestructible synthetic chemicals, according to a report from the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) PFAS Project Lab released on Wednesday.

• The mapping of over 125 peer-reviewed scientific studies is the first global scoping of the problem in wildlife, the authors said.

• Climate Code Red, a very thorough and well-respected source on climate change/global warming, recently issued a three-part study on where things stand with the climate system via looking through the rearview mirror at 2022 and reflecting that charred image into the future: Faster, Higher, Hotter: What We Learned About the Climate System in 2022 by David Spratt, Research Director, Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, Feb. 20, 2023.

• For starters, several aspects of global warming are at all-time highs, for example, coal use is at an all-time high and not surprisingly all three of the major greenhouse gases CO2, CH4, and N2O hit record highs in 2022. According to the Global Carbon Project: Carbon emissions from fossil fuels hit a new record of 37.5B tons. Topping off these all-time records, the International Energy Agency expects fossil fuel emissions to possibly peak in 2025 but remain at a “high plateau at a high level” for a decade or more with no significant decline expected in the foreseeable future. Good luck with Net Zero.

• In September 2020, India and Denmark marked a historic partnership. By launching the first Green Strategic Partnership of its kind, the two countries chose each other as preferred partners to fast-track climate solutions and reconcile economic growth with ambitious green

Energy/Transportation

• A team of influential economists has urged China to adopt a new development model based on “wellbeing” rather than GDP growth in order to fulfil its 2060 net-zero emissions goals and head off the mounting threats of climate change.

• An explosion in proposed clean energy ventures has overwhelmed the system for connecting new power sources to homes and businesses.

• The move appears to have come at the right time: EV battery investment topped $73.6 billion in 2022, up from about $25 billion a year earlier, according to data from the Chicago Federal Reserve. The increase underscores the urgency of automakers to ramp up EV production and move the vehicles’ critical supply chains to the U.S.

• Despite being unable to feed its people, North Korea has found innovative ways to fund its missiles programme, including by forging foreign currency, committing insurance fraud and making and selling arms and narcotics. A more novel revenue stream is stolen cryptocurrency. Last year its hackers pinched a record $1.7bn of the stuff, according to a report published this month by Chainalysis, a data firm based in New York.

• Cryptocurrency has an energy consumption problem. Bitcoin alone is estimated to consume 127 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year — more than many countries, including Norway. In the United States, cryptocurrency activity is estimated to emit from 25 to 50 million tons of CO2 each year, on par with the annual emissions from diesel fuel used by US railroads.

• Electricity usage from global [cryptocurrency] mining quadrupled from 2018 to 2022, according to the U.S. government. By mid-2022, [cryptocurency] assets were using upward of 240 billion kilowatt hours per year—more than the annual electricity of countries such as Argentina or Australia. [Cryptocurrency] electricity usage made up nearly 1 percent of all annual global electricity usage, and [cryptocurrency] operations consume up to 1.7 percent of all U.S. electricity usage.

• A former employee of a Massachusetts town is facing charges of allegedly setting up a secret cryptocurrency mining operation in a remote crawl space at a school, police said.

• Nadeam Nahas, 39, was scheduled to be arraigned Thursday on charges of fraudulent use of electricity and vandalizing a school, but he did not show up and a judge issued a default warrant after rejecting a defense motion to reschedule, a spokesperson for the Norfolk district attorney’s office said.

• Kamilaroi elders, farmers and politicians gathered under a temporary pavilion on the Gunn property east of Gunnedah this week, right in the middle of the Liverpool Plains. They want to stop the fossil fuel developments that threaten our food supply, reports Callum Foote.

• Farmers and landholders organised a conference this week with the sole intent of stopping Santos’s expansion into the Liverpool plains through the proposed development of the Hunter Gas Pipeline; and if possible, stop the development of the Narrabri and Pilliga gas fields. Cattle farmer Rosemary Nankivell told the meeting:

• Bioenergy is often seen as a more environmentally-friendly alternative to other forms of energy generation. But the truth is that it can actually be quite harmful to the environment. Bioenergy has a dark side: It contributes to air pollution.

• Biomass, or bioenergy, creates energy by burning living materials like plants and trees. The wood pellet industry uses trees to make wood pellets. It then ships them to Europe and Asia and burns them in power plants to create electricity. Wood pellet plants are as dirty and problematic as coal plants.

• A trio of advocacy groups on Thursday launched the world’s first climate lawsuit against a commercial bank, alleging that the Paris-based firm BNP Paribas is violating its legal obligations by continuing to finance planet-wrecking oil and gas development on a massive scale.

• Federal prosecutors announced new criminal charges against Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of crypto trading platform FTX, expanding his potential liability in what authorities allege is a billion dollar fraud.

• Serial litigant Craig Wright recently won a procedural ruling in a London court that allows a multi-billion-dollar Bitcoin-related lawsuit to proceed. This case has raised a fair amount of concern within the free-software community, where it is seen as threatening the “no warranty” language included in almost every free-software license. As it happens, this case does not actually involve that language, but it has some potentially worrisome implications anyway.

• Wright is known for, among other things, claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the author of the original paper describing Bitcoin, and for filing numerous lawsuits within the cryptocurrency community. In the case at hand, he (in the form of his company “Tulip Trading Limited”) claims to own about $4 billion in Bitcoin sitting in the blockchain — a claim that, like his others, is not universally acknowledged — but to have lost the keys giving access to that Bitcoin after his home network was broken into. It is, Wright claims, incumbent upon the maintainers of the Bitcoin network software to develop and merge a patch allowing the claimed Bitcoin to be transferred to a key that he controls.

• The various Bitcoin developers, it turns out, are unconvinced by Wright’s claim to that Bitcoin and even less convinced that the Bitcoin miners would accept a software update that included such a patch. Wright, allegedly backed by some deep pockets with eyes on part of a $4 billion prize, has taken 15 of these developers (and one organization) to court. The case fared poorly in in its first round, but now an appeals court has issued a ruling allowing an appeal to proceed, saying that there are issues of interest to be litigated.

• At a first look, this case appears to be a warranty issue, and many observers have seen it that way. Wright is asserting that a bug in the Bitcoin system is keeping him from getting his hands on his well-earned billions, and that the maintainers of that code owe him a fix. The code in question is covered by the MIT license, which explicitly disclaims the existence of any warranty; if the court were to find that a warranty obligation exists anyway, the resulting precedent could put free-software developers at risk worldwide. It is not surprising that people are concerned.

Wildlife/Nature

• The carcasses were likely meant to be used for traditional medicine

• A Chinese pangolin has been born in the Prague zoo, the first birth of the critically endangered animal in captivity in Europe, and is doing well after initial troubles, the park said on Thursday.

Finance

• Semiconductor companies, which united to get the CHIPS Act approved, have set off a lobbying frenzy as they argue for more cash than their competitors.

• For Bill Clinton and Dick Morris polls were everything. Morris developed what he called a “neuro-psychological profile” of the American voter, and established an iron rule that no initiative could be undertaken by the White House unless polling showed an approval rating of 60 percent. By constant polling, he concocted what he called a “values agenda,” for Clinton. At the top of the list was affirmative action. “Mend it, don’t end it” was the mantra, which meant, in practice, destroy affirmative action from the inside while professing support for the general principle.

• Next came TV violence. Intimidate the networks, Morris advised, into adopting a “voluntary” system of ratings for TV shows and movies. Soon media executives were summoned to the White House for a session with Clinton and Al Gore. Simultaneously Clinton pushed for the installation of the so-called V-chip in all new TV sets, which would allow parents to block all offensive material. Next came teen pregnancy, an issue pounded on by the Clinton White House, even though the rate had been falling. Education: go after tenured teachers, an attack increasingly popular in Morris’s focus groups, and demand that at least they be tested. Youth: advocate school uniforms and curfews for teens. Gay marriage: on Morris’s advice Clinton embraced the Defense of Marriage Act, a purely grandstanding piece of legislation that preemptively barred gay marriages from recognition under federal law for any purpose. Immigration: the poll numbers were off the chart, and the Clinton White House duly set a goal to double the number of turn-backs by the Immigration and Naturalization Service–among other things, enlisting the Labor Department to help speed the pace and breadth of workplace raids. Taxes: Morris believed that Main Street America was now playing the market, so that a 20 percent reduction in the capital gains tax rate would be hugely popular.

• The CCI in its two rulings — one on October 20 and the second on October 25 — had directed the American company to make close to 20 changes in the operation of its services in India which included providing alternative payment options to developers.

• But costs aren’t just about the bottomline, they’re also a measure of efficiency. I have a distinct distaste for waste. Money spent on the frivolous or the ill-considered is money that can’t be spent elsewhere. Like an engine drinking too much oil just to run. Tight tolerances (but not too tight!) are a joy in themselves.

• As it leverages the Terminal, Tap to Pay is fully integrated with Stripe, thus aiming to support businesses with managing both in-person and online payments in a single place. This lets them track customer transactions across channels, offer improved customer experience, and simplify reporting and revenue reconciliation. What is more, the Terminal and Tap to Pay solutions are fully compatible with Stripe Connect, which helps platform businesses to offer their users the capability of accepting in-person payments in an easy manner. Businesses running on platforms that can now accept these payments on Android devices include Squire, Fareharbor, Oddle, and GiveTap.

• Folke introduced its no-tipping policy when the vegan restaurant opened in June 2022. Deo says employees earn well above minimum wage ($15.65 per hour in B.C.) and get full benefits. All overhead costs, including salaries, have already been factored into the menu prices, so customers simply pay the bill.

• “It was really important to us to have an inclusive work environment where everyone was compensated fairly,” said Deo. “It’s not our customers’ responsibility to pay our staff properly. … It’s our responsibility to make sure that our staff are taken care of.”

• When dozens of security personnel crowded onto the runway of New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Airport on Thursday, it was not to capture a terrorist or fleeing criminal mastermind, or even to apprehend an unruly passenger.

• A Ukrainian court seized the property of Oksana Marchenko, wife of former Ukrainian pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk. Marchenko is suspected of financing Russian law enforcement agencies.

• One of my acquaintances, a university employee, told me that she was shocked when she heard in a high-level staff meeting a senior administrator say, “we are quite aware of the trending ‘quiet quitting’ culture, and we warn our staff that doing so will result in quiet firing.” She was shocked partly “because I didn’t even know at the time how widely this debate has been circulating in the mainstream media. I don’t follow the news. But even more shocking to me is that a place like a university would use such a threatening tone to address an issue that may have much more serious underlying causes.” My acquaintance’s concerns are legitimate. In that same conversation, I asked: “did it occur to that senior university administrator that there would be no quiet quitting if people didn’t feel that they are being quietly marginalized and bullied in the first place?” “Well, people would not have resorted to this approach if they felt fulfilled, are paid decent living wages, and allowed to create and contribute rather than just serve as cogs in a bigger machine,” she added. We both found that countering “quiet quitting” with “quiet firing” is immature and vindictive, because it totally ignores the causes that got people to this point.

• Our conversation took place around the time the narrative of “the great resignation” and “quiet quitting” began trending in the mainstream media, so I decided to interrogate the mainstream narrative, while at the same time talk to as many people on the ground as I can, and research as many resources as possible to capture what the working and struggling people at the receiving end of this serious issue have to say about it. Not surprisingly, I found a frightening discord in the ways the mainstream media is framing the issues by focusing almost exclusively on the neoliberal, elitist, and privileged viewpoints, while deliberately ignoring the workers’ side of the story. This is when I decided that, as an independent anthropologist with a great interest in labor issues, I needed to dig deeper and share what I find publicly. My hope is not only to raise critical questions that we must wrestle with in the U.S., but also to expose the extent to which the ruling class totally disregards people’s voices. After all, it is these hundreds of millions of working people who struggle to make a living, and when all their struggle doesn’t result in living fulfilling, dignified, and meaningful lives, we are ignoring serious issues that could have detrimental effects on the entire society.

• Business Name Generator rated 50 countries on its 2023 Global Startup Index and the Danes came in the top 10

• But economy minister cautions that new law will not open the floodgates, setting a provisional limit of 15,000 on the number that can be employed

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has submitted a resolution to lawmakers endorsing a decision by his National Security and Defense Council to impose sweeping sanctions against Russian financial institutions, including the Russian central bank, insurers, and a host of other enterprises.

• Squeezed by sanctions, Russia has turned to Chinese yuan and gold, but both introduced new vulnerabilities and inconveniences.

• From February 14-16, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was in Beijing for his first foreign trip of the year and the first official visit to China for an Iranian leader in twenty years.

• The Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday announced charges against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its investment management company for failing to file necessary forms and providing inaccurate information. The SEC first raised concerns about the church’s reporting practices in 2019.

• Hong Kong’s finance chief said the city must be cautious how it spends its surplus after a radio caller chided him for a “stingy” decision to halve the value of the consumption voucher to HK$5,000 in the budget for the coming year.

• Hongkongers are set to receive another round of consumption vouchers totalling HK$5,000, Finance Secretary Paul Chan has announced.

• The international community must apply pressure so that China and private-sector lenders join in facilitating a collective haircut that includes all lenders.

• Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary Paul Chan announced the first budget of Chief Executive John Lee’s administration on Wednesday. The city is expected to see a HK$140 billion deficit, over double of the original estimation of HK$56.8 billion.

• Tax cuts for Hong Kong taxpayers have been scaled back as the city’s financial minister announced a series of measures to alleviate economic pressure on the public.

• Hong Kong’s finance chief unveiled a HK$761 billion (US$97 billion) budget on Wednesday, plunging into the coffers to pay for the recession-hit city’s post-Covid recovery. Hoping to kickstart the finance centre’s economy, Finance Secretary Paul Chan announced tax cuts and more consumer spending vouchers.

• Funding for the Hong Kong Police Force is to remain largely frozen in the coming financial year, though the “plant, vehicle and equipment” budget was increased by 59 per cent in finance chief Paul Chan’s 2023 budget.

• The Hong Kong government expects to record a deficit of HK$140 billion in 2022-23, more than double the HK$56 billion initial estimate. The estimated fiscal deficit was revealed by Financial Secretary Paul Chan when he delivered the budget for the upcoming fiscal year at the Legislative Council on Wednesday.

• The US Supreme Court Wednesday issued a 6-3 opinion ruling that Michael Hewitt, an oil rig employee making over $200,000 annually, qualified for overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA). The court held that Hewitt, a daily-rate employee, was not an executive exempt from the FSLA’s overtime pay guarantee.

• The US Department of Justice (DOJ) Wednesday announced a policy incentivizing companies to voluntarily self-report criminal conduct. The United States Attorney’s Offices’ Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy, which is effective immediately, aims to nationally standardize these disclosures and encourage companies to maintain effective compliance programs, efficiently remediate misconduct and cooperate with the government in corporate investigations.

• The US Supreme Court Wednesday ruled in a slip opinion that a Chapter 7 bankruptcy debtor cannot discharge a debt that resulted from her partner’s fraudulent activity under 11 U.S.C. § 523(a)(7)(A). Justice Amy Coney Barrett authored the unanimous opinion.

• The measures to curb inflation are mostly focused on energy. However, food prices are also driving inflation in Europe’s largest economy.

• The European Commission says Bulgaria’s adoption of the euro by next January is “no longer realistic” because of inflation, an acknowledgement that sheds greater light on the caretaker government in Sofia’s announcement last week that its new “target date” is January 2025.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The Democratic Party – the largest remaining opposition party in the city – has been forced to postpone its spring dinner after three restaurants pulled out of hosting the party and its supporters.

• Ahead of a judicial overhaul that could transform the country and frighten away investors, the executives of Start-Up Nation are mulling an exodus.

• Israeli troops killed 11 Palestinians, including at least four gunmen and four civilians, and wounded more than 100 people during a Wednesday raid on a city in the occupied West Bank, witnesses, militant groups and medical officials said.

• Mexico’s Senate on Wednesday approved a reform of the country’s electoral institute, a move that opponents say will undercut democracy but which the president contends will save money and reduce political privileges.

• In an interview with FRANCE 24′s Gulliver Cragg in Kyiv, the head of the parliamentary faction of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party discussed the situation in Ukraine, one year after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. David Arakhamia said Russian President Vladimir Putin had “lost influence in the world” as a result of Moscow’s military setbacks in Ukraine. Arakhamia said “everyone” should worry after Putin said he would suspend his country’s participation in New START, the last remaining major nuclear arms control treaty between the US and Russia.

• UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, calling it “an affront to our collective conscience” as the General Assembly met in a special session two days before the anniversary of Moscow’s attack. Read FRANCE 24′s blog to see how the day’s events unfolded. All times are Paris time (GMT+1).

• Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba expressed confidence that Ukraine would win the war against the invading force of Russia, in an interview with FRANCE 24. Speaking in Brussels a few days ahead of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion, the top Ukrainian diplomat explained why he thinks President Vladimir Putin represents a global threat for the international community, saying that the Russian president’s strategy was “destruction and undermining stability”. Kuleba added, “No one is interested in having a UN Security Council member and a nuclear power messing up the world.”

• Le Minh The recently served a 2-year sentence on the same charge.

• The current generation is challenged by democracy’s enemies. On the feeblest pretexts, a charismatic dictator has sent soldiers into a neighboring nation. Once again, the dictator imagines his prey is weak because it is a democracy, backed by other democracies.

• Nonresident Senior Fellow Ilva Tare interviews Tatjana Lazarevic, the Editor-in-Chief of the KoSSev news portal and a resident of the Kosovo Serb-majority city of Mitrovica in the north of Kosovo.

• In a previous era, the warning might have remained private, at least for some time. But a new intelligence playbook honed just before and during the war in Ukraine has redefined how the United States uses its classified knowledge to undercut Russia and its partners.

• The playbook is not just about naming and shaming Russia and its allies; it has become a powerful tool in the United States’ arsenal to try to stymie the Kremlin’s offensive by exposing Russia’s military plans and in aligning support for Kyiv’s war effort in allied capitals.

• In a statement shared with Meta employees, co-founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg had said going ahead, the company would make further cuts on discretionary spending and extend the freeze on fresh hiring until March 2023.

• SAP Labs, research and development business unit of German technology firm SAP, last week laid off around 300 executives across its India centres, people aware of the matter told ET.

• The layoffs majorly impacted Bengaluru and Gurgaon offices, they said.

• It was a result of shuttering of a global delivery centre that housed custom development roles to undertake SAP implementation projects, one of the sources said.

• Many of Wednesday’s arguments hinged on specific interpretations of the ATA, which states that liability for injuries caused by international terrorism “may be asserted as to any person who aids and abets, by knowingly providing substantial assistance, or who conspires with the person who committed such an act of international terrorism.”

• It was a result of shuttering of a global delivery centre that housed custom development roles to undertake SAP implementation projects, one of the sources said.

• The affected employees, some of whom with 10-15 years of experience, have been provided severance packages of salaries equating the number of years they served at the company, among other benefits, the person said.

• Alibaba, which still has a workforce of 239,740, per its latest report, remains one of China’s biggest private-sector employers.

• Despite promising in November 2022 that there will be no more layoffs, Elon Musk has fired more employees from Twitter, as per a report in The Verge. Tech site The Information first reported about layoffs hitting the sales team last week. In the third round of job cuts since November, dozens of employees from the sales and engineering departments were affected.

• It’s worth noting that the EU’s approach to regulation has been very implementation-specific when compared to the U.S. approach to similar regulation, as seen with the EIdAS, the EU’s digital signature legislation, and the associated supporting efforts which choose which technologies must be used. The first version of which left the topic of interoperability as a footnote and ignored the concept of reciprocity. This essentially created member-state monopolies around the legislation where country-to-country transactions would still be signed on pen and paper. That did change a few years ago, but better technological approaches to solving the associated problems were established and proven since the initial legislation was proposed two decades ago, and their adoption was held back due to this legislation’s technical specificity.

• In this interview the director of the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) sits down with Risky Business podcast host Patrick Gray to talk about: [...]

• The battle between Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez and Internet giants Google and Facebook continues to head toward a seeming inevitable collision in which the government repeatedly says it will not be intimidated even as the two Internet companies block or reduce access to news content on their platforms in Canada. Reports last night indicate that Google is now testing blocking news links for a small percentage of Canadian users, with the company saying it needs to assess potential responses to Bill C-18. This follows earlier Facebook comments indicating that it would consider blocking news sharing on its platform if the bill is enacted in its current form.

• Since the start of the new year, reading about Israel in the Hebrew-language press has been an unnerving experience.

• One article described a maternity ward in which a Palestinian woman from Nazareth was persuaded to move rooms after a Jewish woman complained about sharing the same space with a non-Jew.

• A January 2023 publication from the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) spawned the latest round of spin and shifting baselines from Russiagate apologists. Russiagate refers to the claims that Russia meddled in and influenced the outcome of the U.S. election in 2016, had direct connections to Donald Trump and his associates, and worked to help defeat Hillary Clinton for the presidency. A recent article from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, written by investigative reporter Jeff Gerth, utilized exiting media reports, and “dozens of people at the center of the story—editors and reporters, Trump himself, and others in his orbit,” to conclude that the legacy news media inaccurately covered the connection between Russia and Donald J. Trump during his Presidency. While this may be news to some diehard Democrats and their allies in the “liberal” press, the media’s reporting failures on the matter were not missed by all.

• In addition to concluding Russiagate was a failure of the Fourth Estate, Gerth’s report reveals that rather than reckoning with their failures, many in the news media continue to avoid the topic altogether. Gerth explained that “my final concern, and frustration, was the lack of transparency by media organizations in responding to my questions. I reached out to more than sixty journalists; only about half responded.”

• The last few years have seen the emergence of one of the largest progressive movements in history – Black Lives Matter – which spotlights America’s continued crisis of white supremacy. Progressive movements historically provoke significant rightwing backlash, and the modern era is no exception. A new poll sponsored by the Marcon Institute for anti-racist studies and social justice provides comprehensive evidence of how white Christian nationalist politics are mainstreamed in contemporary society. Yet the purveyors of hate, who vehemently deny their role in normalizing white supremacist politics, are making it increasingly difficult to expose bigotry.

• The Marcon poll contacted a nationally representative sample of 1,021 Americans and asked them a battery of questions to gauge their level of support for white Christian nationalism. In an era marked by record inequality, the poll also provides hints about whether this ideology is fueled by economic insecurity. In a comprehensive examination of white supremacy and public opinion, our poll asked many questions about race in America. The results paint an ugly picture – large numbers of people embrace all sorts of white nationalist-compatible beliefs, even as they insist that they are not racist or affiliated with extremist ideology. We include each of the questions in our white nationalism index immediately below, along with information about how Republicans, Democrats, and the public overall reacted.

• During the recent Balloongate, the United States Secretary of Defense, Lloyd J. Austin III, tried to call someone in the Chinese military to ease tensions. The fact that he apparently asked to speak to someone in the Central Military Commission instead of the Defense Minister is not crucial. What is of primary concern is that Beijing reported that Austin’s calls were rejected three times.

• Direct communication between the defense ministers of the world’s leading military powers in the 21st century seems like a no brainer. Whatever tensions may exist between China and the United States, instant communication between the military leaders should be indispensable to guaranteeing that a major confrontation doesn’t begin because of some trivial misunderstanding.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Russia’s defence ministry alleged, with no evidence, that Ukrainian saboteurs would stage an invasion of Transnistria dressed as Russian soldiers as a pretext for a Ukrainian invasion.

• Moldova has warned for weeks that Russia is plotting to seize power.

• And officials rejected Russia’s claims as “psy-ops” as part of the war.

• The new assessment of Russian influence operations comes from data that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, released Thursday just as the war in Ukraine nears its one-year anniversary. Similarly, data out this week from other social media researchers concludes that Russian state-sponsored media influence operations aren’t as potent as they once were.

• Sociologist Karolis Jonutis has been studying populism, but recently turned his attention to conspiracy theories. In an interview with LRT.lt, he discusses what gives rise to unsubstantiated beliefs and whether arguments on social media can be effective.

• Fox News is in serious hot water.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The law, known as Bill C-18, makes it compulsory for companies like Google and Meta, the parent of Facebook, to work out deals with media companies for the re-use of their content.

• The Canadian Press quoted Google spokesman Shay Purdy as saying on Wednesday: “We’re briefly testing potential product responses to Bill C-18 that impact a very small percentage of Canadian users.”

• The holiday comes just before a politically sensitive anniversary on March 10, commemorating the Tibetan uprising of 1959 during which tens of thousands of Tibetans took to the streets of the regional capital Lhasa in protest against China’s invasion and occupation of their homeland a decade earlier.

• Much of the hearing was devoted to a careful parsing of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), the law under which the Tammneh family brought their lawsuit. Their argument, essentially, is that Twitter is liable for providing a platform to terrorists who used it to communicate and plan the attack. Twitter, for its part, argued that it couldn’t be held responsible without a demonstration that it had been informed of a specific attack and failed to do anything about it.

• Last summer, we wrote about New York’s law to require websites to have “hateful conduct” policies, noting that it was “ridiculous” and “likely unconstitutional.” The law was passed in the wake of the horrific Buffalo super market shooting, where the state’s Governor and Attorney General sought to blame the internet, rather than the government’s own failings that contributed to the death toll.

• Photo Credit: Clifford McDonald, Good Trouble, 2023 The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) are alarmed by reports of the apparently politically motivated censorship of an art exhibition entitled “Embracing Kindness” at the State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota’s Bradenton campus.

• NEW YORK – On February 17, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) delivered a letter to the Forest Hills Public School Board in Grand Rapids, Michigan, identifying 10 books that were secretly removed by Superintendent Dan Behm in violation of the school district’s reconsideration policy.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The International Federation of Journalists has suspended with immediate effect the Russian Union of Journalists over its action since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its role in annexed Ukrainian territories.

• Final decisions about which jobs will be cut are expected to be made by March 20, in consultation with unions representing NPR’s workers, according to a memo NPR CEO John Lansing sent to staff Wednesday. The not-for-profit organization has a yearly budget of about $300 million; in 2023, revenue is likely to fall short of that by $30 million-$32 million, he said, according to an NPR report.

• A BBC spokesperson said: “The Income Tax Authorities remain at the BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai. Many staff have now left the building but some have been asked to remain and are continuing to cooperate with the ongoing enquiries. We are supporting our staff during this time and continue to hope to have this situation resolved as soon as possible. Our output and journalism continues as normal and we are committed to serving our audiences in India.”

• The BBC says it will not be “put off” from reporting in India after the government prevented a documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi from airing in the country and raided the broadcaster’s offices.

• Mina said the two journalists – a photographer and reporter – were on the scene to cover the homicide that morning and were shot in or around their vehicle.

• While authorities have not previously seen violence against media in the area, Mina said they are investigating.

• “But certainly we have seen (violence against media) around the nation and around the world,” Mina said. “So that’s something we’re definitely going to be taking a look at and see if we can put the pieces together and see why this happened.”

• For some reason, Maggie Haberman went to FEC filings to understand a prong of the January 6 investigation that might implicate her sources rather than the January 6 Committee transcripts where she is named personally.

Civil Rights/Policing

• By design, the corporation is not a democratic enterprise. Its management is hierarchical, its imperatives are growth and profit, and its structure is a de facto class system of owners, managers, and workers. You could argue that in the earliest days of capitalism, something like the concept of free enterprise actually existed: firms of various sizes competed, with even the largest dwarfed in both size and influence by most nation states. Today, the world’s biggest companies not only wield monopolistic power and exert considerable political influence, but in many cases have market capitalizations exceeding the GDPs of entire countries.

• Olohan, a New Jersey resident, says in the complaint, which was first reported by Bloomberg, that he suffered workplace retaliation by Miller after rejecting advances from her and reporting them to Google’s human-resources department.

• Activists with the Poor People’s Campaign and relatives of some of the 13 inmates who died at West Virginia’s Southern Regional Jail last year held a press conference Thursday to implore the Biden administration to investigate conditions at the notorious lockup, as well as the deaths of more than 100 prisoners in the state during the last 10 years.

• After police officers tased, choked, and severely beat Dijon Sharpe during a traffic stop, he decided that next time he was in a car that was pulled over, he would livestream and record the encounter. Ten months later, in October 2018, Sharpe, sitting in the passenger seat of a stopped car, took out his phone and started livestreaming on Facebook.

• When an officer saw that he was livestreaming, he grabbed Sharpe and tried to take the phone. The officer explained that Sharpe was free to record the encounter, but he could not livestream due to supposed concerns about officers’ real-time safety (a policy later ascribed to the city of Winterville, NC). Sharpe sued to vindicate his First Amendment rights.

• It’s great that the Fourth Circuit held that individuals have a First Amendment right to livestream their own traffic stops. The court rightly acknowledged, “Creating and disseminating information is protected speech under the First Amendment.”

• Ph.D. candidate Bryan Ijames followed his ear, his heart and some scholarly detective work to resurrect a forgotten piece by composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor that will be performed March 16 at Hill Auditorium.

• Olohan said he reported the issue to Google’s human resources department the following week, but nothing ever came of the complaint.

• Olohan also accused Miller of false complaints against him for “microaggressions” in retaliation for reporting the 2019 incident to HR, which caused him anxiety. Olohan continued to face hostility as he was publicly reprimanded by an inebriated Miller at a Google event in December 2021. Although Miller apologised, she repeated the same behaviour at a bar in April 2022. Olohan’s lawsuit accuses Google of taking no action despite knowing that “Miller’s harassment stemmed from his rejection of her sexual advances”.

• The number of U.S. workers who staged work stoppages in a wide array of industries in 2022 surged by nearly 50% from the previous year, new federal data shows—but the resolve among employees demanding fair pay after years without a raise, better working conditions, and paid sick leave may be under threat as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs a key labor case.

• Democrats learned the wrong lesson about Social Security in the 1990s. That incorrect lesson was unfortunately reinforced in 2005. Now is the time to learn the right lesson. President Joe Biden is on the right track, but to truly succeed, he must shake off the wrong lessons of the past.

• Since the start of the new year, reading about Israel in the Hebrew-language press has been an unnerving experience.

• To say that it was a decision for me to put my name on the open letter to The New York Times condemning the publication for its continuous anti-trans rhetoric suggests that it required more thought than it actually did. I received an email at 11:02 on a Saturday evening from a friend who was one of the organizers of the letter, and I replied at 11:04 pm that “I would absolutely love to sign the letter.”

• Tommie Smith can still make the craven recoil like a vampire confronted with sunlight. And the track legend, who along with John Carlos raised his fist following their 200-meter race at the 1968 Olympics, is still needing to fight to have his story told. Smith and Carlos felt compelled to act on the medal stand because their personal glory was less important to them than standing up against racism, white supremacy, and poverty. But in some parts of the United States, just acknowledging that moment has been barred or even criminalized.

• Tunisian police detained two prominent dissidents and surrounded the home of a third on Wednesday, part of an escalating crackdown on critics of President Kais Saied, who has labelled his opponents traitors and criminals.

• A court in Russia has stopped a posthumous case against Maksim Martsinkevich, a notorious Russian ultranationalist who died while in detention in 2020, at the request of his parents, the family’s lawyer, Aleksei Mikhalchik, said on February 22.

• Lithuania has made minor improvements in protection of human and social rights, NGOs say, but they are “tepid”.

• The American Bar Association’s (ABA) Plea Bargain Task Force Wednesday released its 2023 report, which found that 98 percent of criminal proceedings end in a plea bargain instead of a jury trial.

• Seattle’s city council Tuesday voted to ban discrimination on the basis of caste. Seattle is the first city to adds “caste” to other anti-discrimination provisions of its municipal code, following the California state university system’s decision last January to prohibit discrimination on this basis.

• The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit Wednesday ruled that two South Carolina school disturbance laws cannot be used to prosecute students for disruptive behavior. The could said that children as young as seven were referred to prosecutors by their schools under these laws.

• Moscow courts have ordered the deportation of at least four trans women under the new law on “LGBT propaganda,” reports Mediazona.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• A former Australian government lawyer Tuesday informed a royal commission that he withheld legal advice that the Robodebt scheme, an automated debt assessment and recovery method utilized by Services Australia from 2015 through 2019, was illegal.

• The case, arising from an attack in Istanbul, was a companion to a case argued a day before that tested a shield for technology platforms.

• The US Supreme Court Tuesday heard oral arguments in Gonzales v. Google, a case that could upend how social media companies handle content distribution. At the heart of the case is a question of whether tech giants like Google can face liability when their algorithm recommends ISIS recruitment videos.

• The US Supreme Court Wednesday heard oral arguments in Twitter v. Taamneh and considered whether internet service providers are liable under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act when users post terrorism-related content.

• It’s getting to be somewhat exhausting watching people who don’t understand Section 230 insisting they have a simple solution for whatever problems they think (mostly incorrectly) are created by Section 230. And, of course, the NY Times seems willing to publish all of them. This is the same NY Times that had to run a correction that basically overturned the entire premise of an article attacking Section 230. And it did so twice.

• I have a new website at notes.jim-nielsen.com where I’ll publish my reading notes going forward (a link, excerpt, and sometimes brief commentary from things I read). You can subscribe to the RSS or JSON feed if you feel so inclined, but it’s really more for me than anybody else.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• More shakeups are headed for Spotify’s podcast division after Dawn Ostroff’s departure. Max Cutler, Head of Audio Talk Shows & partnerships is departing to start a new venture. According to a company memo obtained by Bloomberg, Cutler will depart his position on May 1.

• In Latin America, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Venezuela, among others, have seen a reduction in subscription costs, as have Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines in Asia, the report said.

• Netflix has in some cases reduced the price of subscriptions by up to 50%.

• U.S. consumer protection in general has had an ugly few decades. One bright spot however has been the shift in the “right to repair” movement from niche nerdy fare to the mainstream.

Monopolies

• The government said Google “falsely” told the U.S. in 2019 that it had suspended “auto-deletion” and was preserving chat communications as it was required to do under a federal court rule governing electronically stored information.

Patents

• To end their ongoing global proceedings, Alcon has reported making a one-time payment of $199 million to competitor AMO, which settles litigaton over medical devices for cataract surgery.

• C.R. Bard, Inc. v. Med. Components, Inc., 2023 WL 2064163 (Fed. Cir. Feb. 17, 2023)

• In Blonder-Tongue Laboratories, Inc. v. University of Illinois Foundation (1971), the Supreme Court held that a judgment of invalidity in a suit against one infringer accrues to the benefit of any other accused infringer unless the patent owner shows that he did not have a fair opportunity procedurally, substantively and evidentially to pursue his patent claim the first time.  Collateral estoppel (i.e., issue preclusion) under Blonder-Tongue is non-mutual.  While a judgment of invalidity binds the patent owner and its successors in interest because it is a party to the suit with adequate opportunity to contest the matter, a judgment of validity cannot operate in the patent owner’s favor to bind persons who are neither parties nor in privity with parties to the suit.

Copyrights

• The Streisand Effect. Some folks know it. Some folks even think that some people that know it use it purposefully to their own advantage. Other times people who should know better simply flail around and end up turning content viral which they had intended on burying. So, whenever we do these kinds of posts, someone will inevitably show up in the comments to suggest we’re being gamed by even reporting on a thing, typically absent any actual evidence that such gaming is occurring.

• The CreativeFuture coalition, which represents companies and individuals in the film, TV, music, and publishing industries, wants pirate site blocking put back on the political agenda. CEO Ruth Vitale finds it incomprehensible that an anti-piracy measure commonplace in other Western democracies is unavailable in the United States.

• Canadian copyright lobby groups have repeatedly tried to convince the government that the 2012 copyright reforms and Supreme Court fair dealing jurisprudence created a free-for-all in which education refuses to pay licence fees due to their reliance on fair dealing. The data from yesterday’s post on massive shift to site licences tells a different story, namely that Canadian educational institutions spend hundreds of millions annually on licences that provide both access works and the flexibility to use them in a myriad of ways. My Fair Dealing Week series on Canadian copyright, fair dealing and education (Setting the Record Straight) continues with another type of licence that has grown in importance in recent years: the pay-per-use or transactional licence. These licences, which grant access to, and use of, individual works, demonstrate that lobby group claims bear little relationship to reality. Indeed, if the lobby groups were right about unlimited uncompensated copying, why would education still spend millions a pay-per-use licences? They obviously wouldn’t, but since fair dealing represents a fair approach to both creators and users, education recognizes that fair dealing does not lead to the complete elimination of licensed copying.

• Copyright seems to serve the public well enough – there’s no shortage of books, music or films being produced each year. But here, too, there are problems, albeit of a less obvious kind – for example, the issue of orphan works. These are works, typically books, that are still covered by copyright, but unavailable because the original publisher has gone out of business, or simply isn’t interested in keeping them in circulation. Copyright means that unless the current owner can be located – a difficult task for obscure works that were created decades ago – it is against the law for someone else to reprint them. Nobody benefits from this, but attempts to address this situation, like the EU’s Orphan Works Directive have been half-hearted and ineffectual, and the problem remains.

• The situation is arguably worse in the world of cinema. While books held in libraries are durable, and are likely to survive until such time as their copyright expires and reprints may be made, that’s not true for films, which often exist as a unique copy on extremely flammable or delicate media. It is estimated that already half of all U.S. films made before 1950 have been lost, while the figure for films shot before 1929 is over 90%. Copyright restrictions prevented copies being made of the films, which could have preserved them for posterity.

• These factors may be exacerbated by the fact that it is challenging for music companies to know who among the growing pool of creators will be successful. This inherent uncertainty combined with consumer tastes that tend to tip to a relatively small number of artists means that it is challenging for creators to succeed. We do not think that these factors arise from how firms compete in the market.

• We have found that it is unlikely that the outcomes that concern many stakeholders are primarily driven by competition. Consequently, it is unlikely that a competition intervention would improve outcomes overall, and release more money in the system to pay creators more. In such circumstances, there is a greater risk that a competition intervention will result in unintended consequences and worse outcomes for both consumers and creators. The costs, risks and uncertainty created by a market investigation (which could run for 2 years) would be imposed on the industry and borne, ultimately, by consumers. We have therefore decided to not undertake a market investigation.

• The images themselves, however, “are not the product of human authorship,” and the registration originally granted for them has been canceled. To justify the decision, the Copyright Office cites previous cases where people weren’t able to copyright words or songs that listed “non-human spiritual beings” or the Holy Spirit as the author — as well as the infamous incident where a selfie was taken by a monkey.

• The U.S. Copyright Office has ruled that illustrations in a new comic book that were created with the AI program Midjourney are not protected by copyright law, according to a letter issued by the Copyright Office. News of the decision, first reported by Reuters, comes as internet users become accustomed to a new world of content creation that increasingly depends on artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney.

• Images in a graphic novel that were created using the artificial-intelligence system Midjourney should not have been granted copyright protection, the U.S. Copyright Office said in a letter seen by Reuters.

• “Zarya of the Dawn” author Kris Kashtanova is entitled to a copyright for the parts of the book Kashtanova wrote and arranged, but not for the images produced by Midjourney, the office said in its letter, dated Tuesday.

• Last September, the USCO approved an application for Zarya Of The Dawn, a graphic novel created by Kristina Kashtanova, registering the work as intellectual property protected by copyright. The decision reinvigorated the legal debate over whether digital artwork created by the latest AI text-to-image tools could be copyrighted or not.

• However, the USCO has reversed its initial decision and scrapped the copyright certificate previously issued for Kashtanova’s comic book. After reviewing the case officials ruled that the text, selection, coordination, and arrangement of images used to create the novel are the work of Kashtanova and can be protected by copyright – but the individual software-generated images themselves cannot be.

• As the USCO sees it, the layout of the novel and its text is copyright Kashtanova, but the images in the frames – created from written prompts – is not copyright protected because no person created it.

• While the deluge has become a nuisance, the stories are easy to spot. The writing is “bad in spectacular ways,” one editor said.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• i’ve actually been thinking about the geminispace for a while. i made a little post on station a few weeks ago, i think. what’ve i been up to? well, in the past six months i: learned how to drive again. still need to fill out the logbook and get my hours. i’m still incredibly behind, since i’m scared i procrastinate. but right now my car is being worked on, and when it comes back i’m motivated to finally get it done! i only need 14 hours logged, and then i can take the big test for my full license. wish me luck in that regard! started making a lot more art again, and i also coded my website from scratch this time. learned to crochet. changed my name. switched insurance providers, started mastectomy process.

• There are protests in Israel against the Judicial Reform and for democracy. Recently, I sam a post on LinkedIn calling hi-tech employess to change their job titles to “Chief Democracy Officer”. That’s a great opportunity to be promoted to CXO.

Technical

Programming

• For the past two weeks, I’ve been working on a little Interactive Fiction side project. It has been a nice palate cleanser between all the daily routines and longer-term projects like Lagrange.

• There’s something about Interactive Fiction engines that has fascinated me for a long time. I bought a copy of TADS version 2.2 back in ~1994 and had some fun times building little games with it.

• 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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