● 02.25.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 25/02/2023: ScummVM’s Google Money and GNOME 44’s Background App

Posted in News Roundup at 9:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Join Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they explore the best and most interesting stories from the last week. The top story if of course the possibility that at least some of the unidentified flying objects the US Air Force valiantly shot down were in fact the work of amateur radio enthusiasts, but a quantitative comparison of NASA’s SLS mega-rocket to that of popular breakfast cereals is certainly worth a mention as well.

Graphics Stack

• Well, this is certainly fun to see. X-Plane 12 now makes use of the open source Zink driver, for doing OpenGL over Vulkan.

• As Zink developer Mike Blumenkrantz mentioned in their blog post “Zink has been commercialized” and they sound very happy about that. Zink is now a driver that “runs real games in production for real, existing people”. A pretty impressive milestone for the project.

Applications

• There are cases when AppImage is the right choice and other cases when snap is a better choice. This guide will help you decide when to use each Linux software packaging tool.

Instructionals/Technical

• Python is an open-source and object-oriented interpreted programming language. Anaconda is a Python, R, Data Science, and machine learning platform and used as a package manager. It comes with 1,500+ open source packages.

• Looking to use your MongoDB server from another machine? If so, you must configure it for remote access.

• I spent my lunch, and most of my mortgage payment, on 4 x 4TB Blue 4TB SSD 3D NAND (WDS400T2B0A).

• Vivaldi is one of the popular browsers that comes with lots of features and one of them is an inbuilt email client. Just like Opera, the mail client is integrated into the same browser and full of options at the level of any desktop application. The best thing is it is free, thus the users don’t need a separate application to access their mails such as Thunderbird. Although, the features in Vivaldi will not be extensive as Thunderbird, yet enough.

• Now imagine this. You download Linux (Mint), make a live USB and install it on all the systems. And then you have to do the same configuration and install the same set of applications on all of them.

• What if I tell you there was a way to save your time from doing these repetitive tasks? How about creating a modified ISO and put this customized Linux Mint on the live USB? This way it installs the same customized Linux distro on all the systems.

• There is a handy GUI tool called Cubic that allows you to pre-configure your installs in the easiest way possible.

• Let me walk you through its features and how you can use it to customize Linux Mint 21 ISO.

• Git is an open-source version control system that keeps track of your software changes at the source level. This tutorial will explain setting up an HTTP Git repository server with Nginx on Ubuntu 22.04.

• Sometimes you need to move a web site from one server to another. Instead of downloading the web site from the old server to your PC via FTP and uploading it from your PC to the new server, it would save a lot of time to simply copy the web site from one server to the other. This tutorial explains how to use Wget to download/move a web site from one server to the other via FTP.

• Jitsi is a free, open-source solution for building a secure video conference platform. This article will go through the installation and configuration of the Jitsi Video Conference on the latest Debian 11 Bullseye.

• Gradle is an open-source build automation tool based on Groovy and Kotlin. It is mostly used for building Java projects, but it supports multiple languages, including Java, C/C++, and JavaScript.

• Linux Mint is a popular open-source operating system with a user-friendly interface and a stable and reliable platform. One of the most significant advantages of Linux Mint is its customizability, allowing you to personalize the system to your preferences. Customization makes the design more aesthetically pleasing and enhances its functionality, making it more efficient and helpful.

• Plex Media Server is a digital media player that can host multiple online content channels from non-local sources. This tutorial shows you how to install Plex Media server on Debian 11.

• Pydio Cells also known as a Pydio is an open-source file-sharing and synchronization application written in the Golang language. This guide will explain how to install the Pydio file-sharing application on Ubuntu 22.04.

• ProFTPD is a free, open-source, and feature-rich FTP server written for Unix and Unix-a-like operating systems. This tutorial will show you how to install the ProFTPD FTP server on Ubuntu 22.04.

• WonderCMS is an open-source and extremely small flat file CMS that provides a simple and easier way to create and manage websites. This tutorial will show you how to install WonderCMS with Nginx and Let’s Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 22.04.

• Memcached is a free, open-source, and general-purpose distributed memory-caching system used to cache database data. It is a high-performance memory caching system used to speed up dynamic web applications by reducing the database load.

• GitHub Desktop is a popular software with a user-friendly interface for managing and interacting with Git repositories. Git is a widely used version control system essential for software development, allowing multiple people to collaborate on the same codebase and keep track of changes over time.

• WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS) that allows users to create and manage websites easily. While there are two versions of WordPress, the self-hosted version is the most popular. In this version, users must download and install WordPress on their hosting provider instead of using the hosted version on WordPress.com.

• LibreWolf is an open-source web browser that has gained popularity among privacy enthusiasts due to its emphasis on user privacy and security. It is a fork of Mozilla’s Firefox, with additional features and modifications prioritizing user privacy and control over their online experience.

Games

• This year our project was accepted to the Google Summer of Code program for the eighth year in a row (and 16th time in total).

• The intention of the program is to bring new contributors to open source projects, and the eligibility rules for participants are the same as last year, with both students and non-students welcome to participate. Check the Google Summer of Code website for details of eligibility.

• Participants can apply for either short tasks (about 175 hours) or long tasks (about 350 hours). The coding period typically runs from the start of June to the end of August, but there is some flexibility and the participants can opt to use a longer coding period if they are not available to work full time on the project during the summer.

• Oh wow, I loved my old SEGA Dreamcast before it sadly ended up at a tech graveyard. For fans of emulation, the Flycast emulator has a new release out. I must gives this a try, maybe good for Steam Deck in bed…

• Busy weekend? No? How about some fresh games! Humble Bundle has put up a pretty darn good collection in the latest bundle. The Unparalleled Puzzlers Bundle is live for 14 days and you don’t want to miss it.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In a GitHub post announcement, the Plaintext group proposed to the GNOME foundation and KDE, e.V. that they will introduce “systemic improvements in the open source software ecosystem – rather than just funding a specified list of OSS projects” and apply it to improve the current Flathub ecosystem for Flatpaks.

• Here are all the details.

• Something funny happens when you take something that was super broken and you make it work a lot better: people start to use it more! And then they submit bug reports for all their unusual use cases that you failed to anticipate or that hadn’t been getting exercised in a long time. So in the short term it looks like things are worse, but in fact they’re better because the bug reports are becoming about more and more exotic use cases over time.

• I saw this happen starting 2 years ago with the Plasma Wayland session (which has since become very robust), and now it’s happening again with multi-monitor setups. We finally nailed the basics, so people are trying it out again, abandoning their xrandr hackaround scripts, and submitting bug reports about the issues with their wild and wacky screen arrangements. And this is great! So we spent a ton of time this week working on fixing all those edge case bugs to make our new multi-monitor system even more robust. With a strong foundation, fixing the bugs isn’t that hard!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME and KDE are the most popular desktop environments in Linux, so the open-source community eagerly anticipates each new release. With just over three weeks until GNOME 44, scheduled to be released on March 22, the race to hype its new features has continued. One of them, however, caught our attention: the new Background Apps functionality. So first, let’s briefly explain what it is all about.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• Today I noticed that all the drives in the R730 host had 150MB/s speeds mentioned in the boot messages. They are all SSDs on an SAS bus. They should be at 600.000MB/s.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the launch of Red Hat Partner Subscriptions, a no-cost subscription model that allows partners deeper access to the Red Hat open hybrid cloud portfolio. Red Hat Partner Subscriptions offer a simplified path for partners to acquire Red Hat product subscriptions that can be used to develop software solutions and proof-of-concepts, test product offerings, deepen technical skills and more.

• Keeping a tight grip on security when using Red Hat’s container orchestration platform means managing access and permissions at a granular level. To ensure that users only have the access they need when they need it, read on.

• Across industries and business sectors, senior leadership has to execute at an ever-increasing pace, and today’s technology decisions must balance short-term risk with long-term gains. Join host Stu Miniman as he leads insightful and candid discussions with a broad spectrum of experts, executives, and decision-makers on diverse and hot technology topics. In this episode of In the Clouds, Stu Miniman gets chatting with Ju Lim, a Senior Product Manager for OpenShift, about the new OpenShift 4.12 product release.

• During early phases of 5G deployments, service providers have been tempted to go with vertically integrated stacks to achieve reduced time-to-value.

• Start making incremental changes now, and soon you’ll build habits that can help your career grow.

• Ansible Network Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) validated content collection focuses on platform-agnostic network automation and enhances BGP management.

Devices/Embedded

• Recently, I got into a mess with the Arduino IDE going wonkers with a variable on my NodeMCU32-S. I wanted to make a Wi-Fi access point with it, but it just wouldn’t change the variable for the SSID name. Turns out, it still had data from an old project of mine when I used it for the same purpose a few months back. In a way, this was a discovery for me.

• Now taking pre-orders, ExperimentalPi’s latest handheld shrinks the Game Boy form factor but loses none of the fun.

• Stemma QT and Grove are solderless connections to connect a plethora of different sensors, displays and components to your Raspberry Pi, Arduino or ESP32. We show you the best that we have personally used in projects.

• Two tiny televisions, powered by the Raspberry Pi RP2040 play up to 40 hours of video and can stream your desktop.

• Engineer Zero started with a cheap OWI-535 “Robotic Arm Edge” kit, which isn’t much more than a toy. It comes with a cheap little controller that lets the user manually operate the arm, but that’s it. To upgrade it into a “real” robot arm, Engineer Zero connected its five motors to an Arduino Uno board through L9110 motor drivers. That let them control the robot arm from their computer and provided the potential for other kinds of control.

• Anyhow, the reason I dwell on the color coding of the jumpers is because I originally tested the system with just one motor controller connected to one motor, and it was a confusing jumble because I just randomly attached jumpers to Get ‘Er Done. Then I looked at the mess and wondered, “How am I going to do this for five motor controllers without becoming totally confused?” But then I used color coding, and I had only a couple wiring issues, one of them being the classic bungle of forgetting to tie the grounds together.

• The components for this project include an Arduino Nano, a BME280 temperature, humidity, and pressure sensor, and a 16×4 character LCD display. Normally, a display like this can only show alphanumeric characters, but Pavleski was clever and used custom character blocks to create the bar graph. The components reside inside of a PVC enclosure with self-adhesive wallpaper to give it a classic look.

• While banging on about NASA and the astronauts (yes, plural, there were four) we saw at Space Center Houston a couple of weeks ago, I was reminded of this space-themed project closer to Pi Towers. Engineering students at Harlow College in Essex, UK have designed a CubeSat platform to take their homemade hardware to space.

• The company Active Firmware Tools has just introduced the Active-Pro Firmware Debugger which can simultaneously capture the output from up to four microcontrollers, analog channels, digital logic channels, hardware decoded bus traffic, current measurements and decoded packet information.

• The competition is organized by Cyberbotics Ltd., a Swiss-based company developing the open source Webots robot simulator. It aims at promoting the use of open source software tools, including cloud-based simulations, to achieve incremental progress in robotics research. By relying on open source software, running in virtual machines in the cloud, research results in robotics become easily reproducible by anyone. This allows researchers to build their own research on top of the results achieved by their colleagues, paving the way to incremental research in the spirit of open science.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Purism has unveiled its vision for convergence with the Librem 5 smartphone and an intriguing docking station.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• OpenSCAD is usually used for 3D modeling. But it also supports a “2D subsystem” for two dimensional drawings (stuff like circle and square). This article teaches you how to make stencils and templates that will match your target measurements exactly. For example, you could make a stencil for a painted sign or guideline for a wood project that uses a jigsaw.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• pgtt is a PostgreSQL extension to create, manage and use Oracle-style Global Temporary Tables.

• The main interest of this extension is to reproduce Oracle behavior with GTT when you can not or don’t want to rewrite the application code when migrating to PostgreSQL. In all other case best is to rewrite the code to use standard PostgreSQL temporary tables.

• This is a maintenance release to fix a too much lock issue in multi parallel process environment.

Licensing / Legal

• Free Software Foundation (FSF) has updated their by-laws so that approval by 66% of its Directors is required to approve any new versions of the GNU General Public License (GPL). They’ve also announced a call or nominations to select new Directors.

Programming/Development

• it is with great pleasure that the Haskell.org Committee is announcing the availability of the Haskell Playground at https://play.haskell.org!

• The playground is a work of love by @tomsmeding, now with support from Haskell.org. He deserves all your encouragement!

• I few days ago I read “Lessons learnt while trying to modernize some C code” (via Lobsters) and one of the problems of C stated stood out to me: “Avoid constructs like char ***. I thought it was a joke, but people do pass around char *** and it’s insane—almost impossible to comprehend why do you need a pointer to a pointer to a pointer.” Yes, it happens, but come on! That doesn’t happen often enough to complain about!

• In keeping with our planned timeline we have begun selecting 15-20 projects per quarter that will have their code repositories moved in the following quarter, and as you may have guessed your project has been selected as part of next quarters moves.

• Stefan Sperling had some particular changes of note on the FediVerse announcement excerpted (sans special emoji unique to bsd.network) here: [...]

• Apart from committing the cardinal sin of failing to produce polling numbers until the sixth paragraph, ChatGPT’s take on how Americans see it and other chatbots was suspiciously positive. “A 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 71% of Americans believe it is generally a good thing for society if robots and computers become more capable and sophisticated, while only 27% believe this would be a bad thing,” ChatGPT wrote. “This suggests that people are increasingly open to the idea of AI and see it as a potential source of innovation and progress.”

Qt

• The Qt Company is expanding the number of supported releases for VxWorks with the latest Qt 5.15.12 Long Term Support (LTS) version for commercial license holders. The release is a source code release made on top of the Qt 5.15.12 LTS Commercial release. Further Qt releases with VxWorks support are also being planned.

• Qt is known for its good documentation, and in the recent years the number of users that rely on the documentation has grown considerably. Some of these users also prefer using the documentation in a specific language, so they use the auto-translation tools for the purpose. Most of these tools translate everything on a page to the chosen language, unless they are told not to. For example, the following screenshot shows the Google translate output of the QString API reference in French language: [...]

Leftovers

• When this year’s Oscar nominations dropped on January 24, two perennially problematic issues for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences met in a head-on collision in the Best Actress category: Hollywood’s historic lack of representation, and the vast economic imbalance between indie movie producers and billion-dollar media behemoths competing for the same awards. Andrea Riseborough received a surprise nomination for her little-seen but excellent work in To Leslie, while two actors widely considered favorites in the category, Viola Davis (The Woman King) and Danielle Deadwyler (Till), did not. The latter two were nominated for this Sunday’s SAG awards, but not Riseborough.

• The Nordic nations have a very similar sense of humour, according to one researcher.

• If there was any doubt about whether we were in an advertising recession, Q4 media earnings solidified those suspicions. Execs from the biggest media giants all cited a challenging macroeconomic environment affecting their ad businesses, and the numbers proved it.

• Take time to run through these nine security steps soon after getting a new laptop: [...]

• Many years ago, I worked as a product manager for pre-smart phones. Remember that old Nokia phone you had? Yeah, them!

• This was a common complaint we heard back then: “Ugh! Why do phones have all these useless, overcomplicated, random functions? People only want their phones to do three thing – calls, texts, and…”

• But after X-raying it, the police confirmed that it was not explosive. It was just a large, spherical piece of scrap metal — a reminder that the oceans, like the skies, are full of mystery and trash.

• This relative lack of full-time managers means the temptation to mess with what ain’t broken just largely isn’t there. So many other pursuits call out for our attention – designing, programming, writing, and judoing the product calls.

• Idle managerial hands run’s the devil’s workshop. Make sure they all have a hobby to soak up the excess energy, should it present itself.

Science

• Much like with a zebra’s stripes or a leopard’s spots, Turing patterns explain how the distinctive patterns of human fingerprints form, a study finds.

• When operating large, globally distributed networks, hardware failures, provider outages, and other changes in behaviour are regular occurrences. Therefore, systems that can raise alarms at the first signs of trouble can alert human operators or automated systems and enable faster corrective action. To this end, we developed ShakeAlert, an alerting system built on publicly available external data to alert to sudden Internet changes.

Education

• After a new statewide policy removed books from school libraries, Governor Ron DeSantis called the video Brian Covey posted a “fake narrative.”

• In another looming decision, the Supreme Court is set to rule on broad-scale student debt relief — President Biden’s signature executive policy that could zero out the student loan accounts of 20 million Americans, the beneficiaries of which are disproportionately Black.

• “So far, they’ve removed degree requirements from certain job postings and have worked with other organizations to help workers progress from lower- to higher-wage jobs,” McKinsey said in a November report.

Hardware

• AMD execs will enjoy substantial bonuses, but its business structure is far less affected by semiconductor manufacturing cycles than Intel’s.

• Before video games, there were pinball machines. Not that they don’t exist today, but a modern pinball machine will likely have microprocessors and other fancy things that traditional pinball machine designers could never dream of. [Eli] had one of these mechanical machines from 1974 as a kid and, later, encountered a more modern machine with a rudimentary microprocessor and other integrated circuits onboard. One thing this enabled is the ability to remember high scores. But you have to physically look at the machine, and you can only see the top four scores. [Eli] decided to adapt the machine to upload high score data to the Internet, and it is a fun project.

• Moore’s law isn’t strictly holding anymore, but it is still true that most computing systems are at least trending towards lower cost over time, if not also slightly smaller size. This means wider access to less expensive hardware, even if that hardware is still an 8-bit microcontroller. While some move on to more powerful platforms as a result of this trend, there are others still fighting to push these platforms to the edge. [lcamtuf] has been working to this end, stretching a small AVR microcontroller to not only play a classic video game, but to display it on a color display.

• Over the past two decades, e-paper has evolved from an exotic and expensive display technology to something cheap enough to be used for supermarket price tags. While such electronic shelf labels are now easy to find, actually re-using them is often tricky due to a lack of documentation. Luckily, [Aaron Christophel] has managed to reverse engineer many types of shelf labels, and he’s demonstrated the results by turning one into an ultra-low-power clock called Triink. It’s based on a 128×296 pixel e-ink display paired with an nRF52832 BlueTooth Low-Energy SoC and uses just 65 micro-amperes on average: low enough to keep it running for more than a year on a single battery charge.

• Pat Gelsinger: Both internal and external 3 nm projects are on track.

• Make security a priority to help avoid a data-breach disaster if your laptop is stolen

• Take time to run through these nine security steps soon after getting a new laptop: [...]

• [Shelby] at Tech Tangents recently wrapped a project / obsession to obtain an old HP ScanJet 4C, get it running on a PC and put it through its paces. After after nearly five years, three scanners, and untold SCSI cards and drivers later, he finally succeeded. The first big problem was getting a working scanner. These don’t stand up well to shipping, and one arrived with broken mirrors. And when he finally got one that worked, sorting out SCSI controller and driver issues was surprisingly complicated, though ultimately successful.

• A regular pair of pliers is fine most of the time, but for delicate work with squarish objects you can’t go wrong with a pair of parallel pliers. [Neil Paskin] decided to make his own pair from scratch. (YouTube)

• HF radios often use toroidal transformers and winding them is a rite of passage for many RF hackers. [David Casler, KE0OG] received a question about how they work and answered it in a recent video that you can see below.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The derailed equipment included 11 tank cars carrying hazardous materials that subsequently ignited, fueling fires that damaged an additional 12 non-derailed railcars.

• Suffering in silence, especially for prolonged periods, is rarely good for your mental health or career.

• Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, reported on Telegram Friday that he had been hospitalized. “Nothing critical. I’m under medical supervision. They’ll release me today or tomorrow,” he wrote.

• Three weeks after the lives of East Palestine, Ohio residents were upended by a fiery wreck involving a Norfolk Southern-owned train overloaded with hazardous materials, rail union leaders on Friday implored federal regulators and lawmakers to “focus on the primary reasons for the derailment and take immediate action to prevent future disasters.”

• The Biden White House ushered in February with a new salvo of regulation targeting junk fees — those really annoying surcharges that don’t accomplish anything other than making the corporations more money. One particularly cruel example being targeted is a practice of airlines charging parents extra to be seated with their children. President Biden doubled down on the issue in his State of the Union address as well, saying that “airlines can’t treat your child like a piece of baggage.” Some airlines would charge customers to sit next to their children who were still in diapers.

• Residents and officials in Harris County, Texas have expressed alarm since learning that contaminated water used to extinguish a fiery train crash in East Palestine, Ohio has been transported more than 1,300 miles to a Houston suburb for disposal.

• Almost half of U.S. voters surveyed by progressive think tank Data for Progress blame rail company Norfolk Southern for the February 3 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio which forced 1,500 residents to evacuate, contaminated soil and water, and has been blamed for causing a number of symptoms even as officials claim air and water monitoring hasn’t shown dangerous levels of pollution.

• Residents of East Palestine, Ohio, continue to demand answers about how a Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic chemicals derailed February 3, releasing hazardous materials into the air, water and soil. The National Transportation Safety Board has released a preliminary report on the accident, blaming a wheel bearing failure for the crash and saying the derailment was “100% preventable.” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who has faced widespread criticism over his response to the disaster, visited the village on Thursday for the first time since the derailment, a day after former President Trump also visited East Palestine. For more, we speak with Emily Wright, development director of River Valley Organizing, who lives a few miles from the derailment site; Gregory Hynes, the national legislative director at SMART, the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers; and reporter Topher Sanders, whose latest ProPublica story details how Norfolk Southern officials are allowed to order train crews to ignore safety alerts.

• I planned to write about Donald Trump’s visit to East Palestine, Ohio, on Wednesday, though I knew I couldn’t actually watch his speech. I just assumed it would dominate the news. It didn’t, and thus I didn’t write about it. And now I am—but not directly. I have come to think Trump’s Ohio flop might matter.

• The Environment Services of the City of Helsinki is investigating a number of suspected cases of food poisoning that are believed to be related to dining at several different restaurants and a pop-up event since the beginning of February. Currently, there are about 20 known cases of illness.

• The individuals who have fallen ill all consumed oysters, and environmental services have taken food samples from the restaurants as well as patient samples from the city’s epidemiological action. Norovirus has been found in the samples.

• Kela sends late payment reminders to higher education students studying for a degree who registered as attending by 31 January 2023 but did not pay the student healthcare fee by the due date.

• The due date for the student healthcare fee was 31 January 2023 for students studying for a degree who registered as attending for the spring term by 31 January 2023.

• FINLAND is developing rapidly into a competitive economy powered by low-emitting hydrogen-based solutions, views the Finnish Climate Change Panel.

• The green transition, it envisions, will create substantial business opportunities for low-emission solutions and product and service innovations, with many of the solutions linked to hydrogen-based innovations, the circular economy and measures to reduce the consumption footprint.

• One of the oldest antivax tropes is that vaccines some how “poison” you with “toxins,” thereby causing a whole host of health problems that antivaxxers blame on vaccines but whose causation is not supported by science. Indeed, when I first made a splash (sort of) debunking antivax misinformation in 2005, I was addressing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s conspiracy theory that the mercury in the thimerosal preservative used in a number of routine childhood vaccines up until around 2001 or so was the cause of an “epidemic” of autism. Around that same time, chelation therapy was a major topic of this blog, because “autism biomed” quacks used it to chelate the mercury from vaccines that they blamed for autism; it was a long-failed hypothesis, but that didn’t stop the quacks. Indeed, “detoxification” of “toxins” (from vaccines) was and remains a key pillar of “autism biomed” quackery, regardless of whether the vaccines contained thimerosal or not. (To these quacks, they’re all equally nasty.) So it was with some interest that I saw bubbling up from antivax social media about a new way of “detoxing” the spike protein from COVID-19 vaccines to which antivaxxers attribute all the horrible things they blame on these vaccines. The method? Using nattokinase to digest the spike protein that supposedly hangs around after vaccination against COVID-19 to do all sorts of nefarious things.

• Adding to the body of research that highlights the deadly effects of air pollution, a study published Friday in JAMA Network Open connects long-term exposure to fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, to heightened risk of having a heart attack or dying from heart disease.

• To this day, there exist communities surrounding “traumatic” media, the iceberg trend persisting and repackaged in new ways. I came across a TikTok on my For You page just this month, the caption reading, “POV: you watched a disturbing movie and now you can’t stop.” The comments on this were particularly fascinating, too — many claim that the films recommended in the video are boring despite their long lists of trigger warnings. Most illuminating to me was one particular comment: “I want movies to disturb me so much nothing anyone says to me hurts me, ever.” Among these comments and videos, I can’t help but notice the almost addictive nature people attribute to these films. Once they consume one, they are compelled to seek out more, getting more and more gruesome as they descend underneath the iceberg. To comment something akin to “Megan is Missing was boring” is a flex to unseasoned viewers, to say that you have experienced media darker than they can ever imagine.

• I don’t want the underlying concept behind Modern Health to fail. I want more people to get the help they need in a reliable and safe way. However, I wish we as an industry would stop promoting and rewarding the wrong things.

• We’ve lost the plot. Performance, accessibility, and usability are more than inconvenient truths you can pretend don’t exist. They have a direct impact on the quality of someone’s life.

• “Roots play a very important role in plants,” he said. “The root absorbs the water and the nutrients to support plants’ growth. This finding is a useful tool to engineer root systems to improve yield under drought conditions in wheat.”

• Much has been done to improve wheat production but losses from water stress can erase other improvements. Plants that can adapt to low water conditions but have increased yield will be key to growing enough food for a growing population in the face of global warming.

• Last week, the U.S. senators from Ohio, sent a letter to the state’s environmental protection agency expressing concern that dioxins may have been released when some of the chemicals in the damaged railcars were deliberately burned for safety reasons. They joined some of the town’s residents and environmentalists from around the U.S. calling for state and federal environmental agencies to test the soil around the site where the tanker cars tipped over.

• Here’s a look at dioxins, their potential harms and whether they may have been created by burning the vinyl chloride that was on the Norfolk Southern train.

• Later that day a rather better-known presidential candidate would appear in the town, also with plans to distribute food and water, and limited plans to speak to locals. By 1pm at least 100 people were gathered on Market Street awaiting the arrival of Donald Trump. Two stands had been set up to sell T-shirts, hoodies and flags. Dozens of journalists, YouTubers and TikTok influencers wandered up and down conducting interviews and performing pieces to camera. When Mr Trump finally arrived, just visible through the darkened tint of his SUV, the crowd cheered and broke into a chant of “Let’s Go Brandon”, a meme that means, roughly, “Fuck Joe Biden”.

Proprietary

• US states encouraged experimentation by dropping regulatory barriers, with cities, citizens and transport policymakers having little say. After a period of testing with safety drivers, some cars are now fully driverless.

• While the companies learn to drive safely in complex environments, San Francisco and Phoenix are learning whether the technology is creating more problems than it promises to solve.

Security

• This is really interesting research from a few months ago:

• In this week’s CYBER, Joseph Cox talks us through how he created a clone of his voice and used it to bypass his bank’s security checks.

• A security firm has discovered that a six-year-old crafty botnet known as Mylobot appears to be powering a residential proxy service called BHProxies, which offers paying customers the ability to route their web traffic anonymously through compromised computers. Here’s a closer look at Mylobot, and a deep dive into who may be responsible for operating the BHProxies service.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• Cofense issued its report while commenting that the first steps in traditional phishing emails have remained the same for decades, with the email containing either a malicious URL or an attachment.

• According to Cofense its data from the past year shows that the dominance of URLs over attachments continued in 2022 for several reasons, including abusable trusted domains, free services on the web that provide phishing infrastructure, and the evasive effects of redirects.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Hongkongers who failed to link their SIM cards with their real names awoke to find their mobile phones disconnected on Friday, as the government’s registration deadline arrived. Around 12 million pre-paid and service plan SIM cards had been registered with users’ full name, date of birth, and identity card, as of Tuesday, RTHK reported.

• Indian law students are reporting for JURIST on law-related developments in and affecting India. This dispatch is from Samar Veer, a third-year law student at National Law University, Delhi.

• Messaging app Signal has announced that it will withdraw its services from the UK if it is forced to undermine encryption through proposals in the Online Safety Bill.

• Large language models have shown promise in generating text and conversations, summarizing written material, and in performing complicated tasks like solving math theorems or predicting protein structures, Zuckerberg said.

• Earlier this month I posted “Transparent Telemetry for Open-Source Projects”, making the case that open-source software projects need to find an open-source-friendly way to collect basic usage and performance information about their software, to help maintainers understand how their software is used and prioritize their work. I invited feedback on a GitHub discussion and over email.

• In general, the feedback was mostly constructive, and mostly positive. In the GitHub discussion, there were some unconstructive trolls with no connection to Go who showed up for a while, but they were the exception rather than the rule: most people seemed to be engaging in good faith. I also saw some good discussion on Twitter and Mastodon, and I received some good feedback via email.

• People who read the posts seemed to agree that there’s a real problem here for open-source maintainers and that transparent telemetry or something like it is an appropriately minimal amount of collection. By far the most common suggestion was to make the system opt-in (default off) instead of opt-out (default on). I have revised the design to do that.

• The rest of this post discusses the reasons for the change to opt-in as well as the effects on the rest of the design.

• Bills in Congress that would ban TikTok, the Chinese social media platform, are raising concerns over the precedent they would set. But they have also prompted hopes for substantive, broader deliberations over data security and privacy.

• The bills, which enjoy some rare bipartisan support among lawmakers, might prove difficult to enforce and wouldn’t get at privacy concerns related to American social media platforms, two Duke scholars said Thursday.

• Duke’s Robyn Caplan and Phil Napoli, both of whom teach in the Sanford School of Public Policy, discussed these issues with reporters Thursday in a virtual media briefing.

• Since 2008, German police authorities have been using a facial recognition system to identify unknown persons. The facial database queried in this way has grown dramatically in the past year.

• We’ve noted for a very long while how most of the explanations that corporations use to insist that your privacy is protected are effectively worthless.

• Revelations that a new type of junk science known as 911 call analysis has infiltrated the justice system have triggered calls by prosecutors, judges and defense attorneys nationwide to ban the use of the technique, review past convictions in which it was used and exact sanctions against prosecutors who snuck it into court despite knowing it was inadmissible.

• The actions follow a two-part ProPublica investigation published last year that many judges and other court officers said took them by surprise. “I never anticipated that prosecutors — officers of the court — would engage in systematic organized frauds,” a judge in Ohio wrote in an email to ProPublica. She said she had alerted fellow judges to be on the lookout for 911 call analysis, which ProPublica found to be pervasive throughout the justice system: “I’m sure that some will care and share my outrage that innocent people are going to prison.”

Defence/Aggression

• Ransomware attacks, in which hackers gain control of an organization’s computer systems and demand large sums of money to return access, were among the biggest concerns when Russia invaded Ukraine a year ago. While there were some isolated ransomware attacks on Ukraine and Poland late last year that Microsoft attributed to Russian military-affiliated hackers, attacks on the scale that hit Colonial Pipeline and meat processor JBS in 2021—resulting in millions of dollars of ransom payments—have largely been absent from the conflict. Ransomware payments declined by double-digit percentages across the board in 2022, according to cybersecurity firms and analysis groups.

• As the illegal invasion hits the one-year mark, new research suggests the conflict also disrupted Russia and the former Soviet Union’s criminal ecosystem, which has “far-reaching consequences affecting nearly every aspect of cybercrime,” according to Alexander Leslie, associate threat intelligence analyst for Recorded Future’s Insikt Group.

• The campaign aims to raise $1.3 million to purchase technology and equipment that will help Ukraine’s cyber forces conduct digital operations that could impede Russia’s advances on the real battlefield.

• The commander of the cyber forces unit, which is part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, asked the organization for help to build infrastructure and boost cyber warfare capabilities, the organization told The Record.

• The Hindus in India celebrated Mahashivratri, a religious festival dedicated to the Hindu deity Shiva, on Saturday, February 18. It has become commonplace in the country in the past few years for Muslims to attack, disrupt, and commit violence against Hindus and Hindu venues holding Hindu celebrations. Hence it was not a shock for anyone when news of disturbances started being reported from various states of India days ahead of the festival.

• Why it matters: The war in Ukraine is the first physical war that’s involved a top-tier cyber adversary, setting a template for what cyber’s role in future wars could look like.

• It can be argued that Russia stepped up its military engagement with Africa – including the injection of Wagner – even before Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February last year. But let’s not forget that, as any Ukrainian will remind you, Russia’s war against Ukraine didn’t start on 24 February 2022 but on 20 February 2014, when it invaded and annexed Crimea.

• The majority of Finland’s parties are opposed to making changes to the current conscription model, according to the results of Yle’s security policy survey.

• As February 24 marks one-year of the Russia-Ukraine war, UN chief Antonio Guterres on Wednesday (local time) urged Russia to end the war in Ukraine saying, “War is not the solution, war is the problem.”

• In a remark to the General Assembly Emergency Special Session on Ukraine, he said, “War is not the solution. War is the problem. People in Ukraine are suffering enormously.

• We live in “a time of unprecedented danger.” The Doomsday Clock was moved to ninety seconds before midnight by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on January 24, 2023. This is the closest to apocalypse the clock has been set since its founding in 1947, largely because of “the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine.” Specifically, “Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk.” The seriousness of the threat of war’s escalation, says the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board, requires the US, NATO, and Ukraine to find “a path to serious peace negotiations” with Russia.

• One hundred and twenty-five years ago, the USA’s imperialist/militarist interventions outside the borders of the continental United States began in earnest with the Spanish American War, in 1898. During this war, the U.S. replaced Spain as the colonizing power over Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines.

• The CIA expert and Russia specialist who served seven presidents under risks of nuclear war is alarmed that the war in Ukraine has brought us to the most dangerous moment yet.

• Will President Biden, Congress and other Americans recognize the massive war crimes committed against the Iraqi people with appropriate declarations and actions on March 19, 2023?

• Today marks the beginning of the second year of the war in Ukraine. As a career physician, lifelong peace activist, and nuclear abolitionist, I have been pondering this day and just how to respond.

• This article condenses propaganda statements made by the Kremlin’s media machine in a campaign to justify and popularize the Ukraine invasion among Russians. Below, you’ll find some of the slogans, cliches, malicious jokes, and sentimental truisms spread by the state media, by Russia’s self-styled “war correspondents,” pro-Kremlin talking heads, bloggers, and other public personalities. To be more exact, there are two different compilations here: one from the early days of the war (when the expectations of an easy victory galvanized the Kremlin) and another from after Moscow’s initials hopes were dashed. The rhetoric is still manipulative, but the manipulations have changed. Here is Putin’s war propaganda, then and now.

• Speaking at a Kyiv press conference, Volodymyr Zelensky said he hopes that China will not supply Russia with weapons.

• On the anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States has introduced new restrictions on Russia.

• Tigran Khachikyan, an Uzbekistan native living in St. Petersburg, has critically wounded a National Guard policeman on Nevsky Prospect.

• After Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin attacked several of Russia’s regions for what he described as “openly shitting” on Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, Sverdlovsk Governor Evgeny Kuyvashev publicly told Prigozhin to “stick to making meatballs” and stop meddling in regional politics.

• Throughout Russia, police have begun arresting citizens for protesting and placing flowers at memorials to mark the one-year anniversary of the full-scale war against Ukraine.

• At least 15,136 Russian military servicemen died in the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to a new report from Mediazona. Journalists from Mediazona and BBC News Russia worked with a team of volunteers to calculate the number from open sources.

• On February 24, one year will have passed since the Russians invaded Ukraine. With the conflict settling into a grinding war of attrition, both sides have marked the anniversary with an escalation of both rhetoric and armaments. Any chance for peace—for even a cease-fire, much less a settlement—will require a dramatic intercession by countries not enmeshed in the conflict.

• Evgeny Prigozhin, the ex-convict who founded Russia’s now-infamous Wagner Group back in 2014, spent much of the last week publicly blasting Russia’s Defense Ministry for failing to provide ammunition to his mercenary company. Then, on Thursday, he reported that his outbursts had worked. Despite Prigozhin’s claims that the issue had life-or-death consequences for Russian fighters, Russia’s state-controlled news outlets devoted almost no coverage to the dispute. According to a new report, that was no accident: citing sources from the Kremlin-controlled media and the Russian Defense Ministry, the independent outlet Verstka reported Thursday that state journalists have been ordered not to quote Prigozhin unless absolutely necessary — and that the Putin administration has a smear campaign against the Wagner boss ready to launch if needed.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told a press conference addressing the nation on Friday that Ukraine needs a “peace plan” to recover from the ravages of the war, on the first anniversary of the Russian invasion.

• Iranian state television on Friday offered an extended defense against an accusation attributed to international inspectors that it enriched uranium to 84% purity, with an official calling it part of a “conspiracy” against Tehran amid tensions over its nuclear program.

• China called Friday for Russia and Ukraine to hold peace talks as soon as possible while insisting that nuclear weapons must not be used in their conflict. China made the comments in a 12-point paper on the “political settlement” of the crisis, timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) Bruno Lemarquis Wednesday indicated in a report that the UN will need to raise $2.25 billion to combat widespread the mass displacement of people in the DRC.

• A man from Texas was sentenced on Wednesday for charges related to an assassination threat he made against US lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as to his participation in the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol.

• A Russian T-72B tank, destroyed by the Ukrainian army, goes on display in front of the Cathedral Square in Vilnius.

• Lowkey speaks to former MP and Shadow Minister Chris Williamson about the new campaign to pull Britain out of the NATO military alliance.

• Discover the truth about US foreign policy and the impact of propaganda on mainstream media with journalist Rania Khalek, as she challenges simplified narratives and advocates for critical reporting in this thought-provoking interview.

• One Russian soldier told his wife he’s drunk because it makes it easier to kill civilians.

• Taiwan also plans to send hundreds to soldiers to the United States for military exchange.

• Vietnamese captain was forced to destroy his own fishing net with a knife

• Amid a brutal crackdown on dissent by the authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s regime, unknown activists in Belarus raised a large Ukrainian flag on a high-rise building in Minsk on February 24, the first anniversary of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

• Two Pakistani brothers who had spent the past two decades at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been released and returned to Pakistan, the Pentagon said.

• Chinese Deputy UN Ambassador Dai Bing told the General Assembly on February 23 that one year into the Ukraine war “brutal facts offer an ample proof that sending weapons will not bring peace.”

• In the debate in Berlin over Ukraine, many are concerned that by supplying weapons, Germany has become party to the war. In an interview, international law expert Claus Kress dispels false arguments and discusses how Russian President Vladimir Putin could be brought to justice.

• FINLAND has decided on its 13th package of defence materiel to Ukraine.

• The Ministry of Defence on Thursday revealed that the over 160-million-euro package will include heavy weaponry, ammunition and three mine-clearing Leopard 2 tanks, as well as related training and maintenance. Finland has thereby pledged around 750 million euros worth of defence materiel assistance to Ukraine.

• The most recent defence materiel shipment will mark Finland’s 13th since the war began in February last year.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Independent experts, skeptical of Beijing’s official data on COVID deaths, have been forced to calculate their own estimates—which indicate much higher and more disturbing numbers than the government claims. These estimates range from about 1 million to 1.5 million deaths, suggesting that, in absolute terms, China may have suffered more fatalities from COVID in two months than the U.S. did in three years.

• After years of work, more than a thousand pictures of Kent State’s history have been digitized.

Environment

• Political activists are also being offered posts ahead of the July general election.

• Research into koala numbers before and after cultural burns on the world’s second largest sand island has fueled a push to merge Aboriginal knowledge with cutting-edge science to mitigate the dangers of bushfires across Australia.

• University of the Sunshine Coast researchers and Quandamooka land custodians have hailed the success of the two-year collaboration on Minjerribah/North Stradbroke Island.

• The first breath of spring can make us feel that all is right with the world. But when it comes as eerily warm temperatures in the 80s in February amid weather whiplash doled out by our overheated planet—not so much. It feels wrong because it is wrong. Welcome to the new abnormal.

Energy/Transportation

• Have you ever heard of the hydrogen rainbow? While hydrogen gas is colorless, the industry sometimes uses colors as shorthand to describe which of the many possible processes was used to make a particular batch. There’s gray, green, and blue hydrogen, along with more vibrant tones like pink—a whole rainbow (kind of).

• This story is part of a DeSmog series on the influence wielded by the gas lobby in Europe and was developed with the support of Journalismfund.eu

• Europe’s gas industry has ramped up its messaging since Russia invaded Ukraine, exploiting fears over energy security to justify projects that risk locking the continent into long-term dependence on fossil fuels, DeSmog can reveal.

• The power cuts only lasted a short time, but affected a number of neighbourhoods and prompted a Prisma market to shut down.

• The mild weather led to electricity prices stopping their near-vertical trajectory after the reimbursement plans were put in place.

• The story is partly one of reduced demand. Most cobalt goes into the battery packs which power smartphones, tablets and laptops. Appetite for these, already strong in the 2010s, exploded during the covid-19 pandemic. It has since waned as people spend less time staring at their screens: as demand for consumer electronics fell, so did that for cobalt. Even a boom in electric vehicles has not been sufficient to counteract this, since manufacturers have done their best to reduce use of the formerly super-expensive metal.

• At the same time supply is rising, and fast. Susan Zou of Rystad Energy, a consultancy, forecasts that Congolese production will jump by 38% this year, to 180,000 tonnes. Most striking is a surge in Indonesian exports, which are projected to hit 18,000 tonnes this year, up from virtually none a few years ago. The world could find itself swimming in cobalt.

• For households in particular, electricity savings were considerable – a reduction of over 20 percent on the norm.

• The results follow on the heels of three months in 2022 where household electricity reduction dipped by around 15 percent.

• But even as hybrids go mainstream, they are losing traction among their original enthusiasts: Environmentalists.

• Many say it’s time for hybrids to fade into history; that they are at best a detour, and at worst an obstruction, in the fight against climate change.

• “Right now we are facing a climate crisis, and we absolutely need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel cars,” says Katherine Garcia, who directs the Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All campaign.

• Here’s what to know about the environmental debate over hybrids.

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

• That’s what Bankman-Fried didn’t want, say prosecutors. He wanted to play all sides of the political system and spread his influence, but he “did not want to be known as a left-leaning partisan, or to have his name publicly attached to Republican candidates,” they allege. He also wanted to steer more money to candidates to whom he had already given the maximum allowable donations, according to the indictment.

• So, he got two FTX executives to play those roles — one to be the “left-leaning partisan,” and one to be the Republican donor. The executives aren’t named in the indictment, but the details and public campaign disclosure information strongly suggest that they are Nishad Singh and Ryan Salame, respectively. Each gave tens of millions in campaign donations in the 2022 cycle, but the money really came from Bankman-Fried’s companies, the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and hedge fund Alameda Research, prosecutors say.

• Sam Bankman-Fried was hit with new criminal charges on Thursday, in an expanded indictment accusing the founder of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange of conspiring to make more than 300 illegal political donations.

• Bankman-Fried now faces 12 criminal charges, including four for fraud and eight for conspiracy, up from eight charges in an earlier indictment, to which he has pleaded not guilty.

• The University of Michigan is planning to build on-campus solar installations with a capacity of 25 megawatts across the Dearborn, Flint and Ann Arbor campuses, including Michigan Medicine and Athletics.

• None of the specifics have yet been laid down. The acceptable profit margins are still to be determined, as are the penalties, and it’s likely this bill will provoke a furious reaction from both the GOP and the energy industry as it makes its way through the legislature. To date, more than 80 environmental advocacy groups have come out in favor of the legislation. Meanwhile, the GOP has doubled down on opposing windfall penalties, arguing instead for gasoline tax holidays and for allowing cheaper but more polluting blends of gas to be sold year-round in the Golden State. Given the power of the fossil fuel industry, it’s by no means a given that the legislation will ever see the light of day. If it does, however, it will be a huge populist feather in presidential hopeful Newsom’s cap, and could serve as a template to rein in some of the world’s most powerful companies’ worst profiteering instincts.

• St. Louis, Mo.—According to a Harvard study, transportation is the single most important factor in an individual’s ability to escape poverty. In July 2022, a one-in-1,000-year flooding event hit St. Louis, dumping 25 percent of the normal yearly rainfall on the city in 12 hours.1

• People across French-speaking Burundi have been regularly queueing for hours at petrol stations (gas stations) across the country – hoping, but with no guarantee — that there will be some petrol when they finally reach the pump. The country has been experiencing a petrol shortage since February 11 and it’s the fourth such crisis since November 2022. For many, this situation demonstrates the severity of the economic consequences of a political crisis that has gripped this small African nation since 2015, a nation that is often listed as one of the world’s poorest.

• Sam Bankman-Fried has been hit with new criminal charges in an expanded indictment accusing the founder of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange of conspiring to make more than 300 illegal US political donations.

• The recent ice storm that swept through southeast Michigan has left more than 500,000 homes without power as of early Friday morning. In Ann Arbor, more than 25,000 households powered by DTE faced power outages following a major ice storm that hit the area Wednesday night.

• An independent scientific agency that advises the federal government on policies that could impact marine mammals said there is no evidence linking site preparation work for offshore wind farms with a number of whale deaths along the U.S. East Coast.

• The former FTX CEO built up a benevolent self-image, but criminal allegations paint a very different picture.

Wildlife/Nature

• While looking up at the night sky on the University of Michigan’s campus, the reflection of the city’s lights can be seen on the clouds as a result of light pollution.

• [...]

• Ann Arbor is classified as a Bortle 7, or an area in which the entire sky has a vague, grayish white color and strong light sources are evident, on the Bortle scale, which measures the brightness of the night sky in a particular location. Due to this high level of light pollution, the Ann Arbor light pollution ordinance places a curfew on when businesses and private properties can have outdoor lights on and requires partial or full shielding of lights to prevent light trespass. The ordinance has a 90-day exception for the holiday season and requires businesses to turn off all decorative or landscape lighting between midnight and 6 a.m. unless they are open during those hours.

Finance

• Digital payments processor Stripe Inc is close to raising $4 billion in fresh capital at a valuation of about $55 billion, people familiar with the matter said.

• [...]

• Stripe, which is aiming to turn profitable before it lists shares on stock exchanges, is raising capital because it needs to cover a big tax bill associated with restricted stock units (RSUs) of employees that are set to expire soon, the sources said.

• In a previously unreported discussion, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders urged President Joe Biden to ensure Social Security is fully funded through the end of the century by increasing taxes on wealthier Americans, according to a report published Thursday.

• French workers have shut the country down with general strikes three times in the last month to defend their time. They’re protesting a proposal to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. It’s enough to make you cry. Here, the Social Security retirement age was ratcheted up to […]

• While unemployment benefits can be a huge help when you’ve lost your job, at tax time, they can leave you with more questions than answers. Here’s what you should know about your unemployment benefits when it comes to filing your taxes.

• Generally, yes. The federal government will tax your unemployment benefits, and most states will as well. Unemployment benefits count toward your income and are taxed by the federal government at rates according to the IRS’ tax brackets.

• A federal consumer watchdog group has fined one Georgia-based company $15 million for predatory lending practices. TitleMax, which is headquartered in Savannah, offers short-term loans — at exorbitant interest rates — in exchange for a lien on the title of the borrower’s car.

• In its order, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said TitleMax had intentionally evaded laws meant to protect military families from predatory lenders and, separately, charged illegal insurance fees to more than 17,000 customers.

• Many of the young offenders being targeted in Labor’s latest crackdown, which will set aside human rights considerations, are under child protection orders.

• While incomes in Lithuania grew significantly last year, they could not keep pace with inflation, according to data presented by the country’s national social security fund administrator, SoDra.

• “It is up to the custodians of the leading economies and monetary systems of the world to bring back stability, confidence and growth to the global economy,” PM Modi stated.

• A World Economic Forum study published this week noted that household energy prices around the world have nearly doubled since the start of the conflict, pushing inflation to record highs in many countries in Europe and beyond.

• The government has agreed with three opposition parties on a package providing financial help to 40,500 young families in Denmark.

• Economic headwinds are continuing for Scandinavian airline SAS, which has posted a loss of 2.7 billion Swedish kronor for the first quarter of this year.

• Denmark is known for having having high income tax but is it really the highest tax in the world?

• Norwegians are spending less money cross-border shopping in neighbouring Sweden, the latest figures from Norway’s national data agency show.

• What does this week’s NLRB decision mean for the people who already signed such non-disparagement clauses but deeply want to disparage their terrible former bosses? The answer is unclear, almost chaotically so.

• The Which? supermarket food and drink inflation tracker shows the cheapest ranges are rising fastest in price

• U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday nominated a private equity executive and former Mastercard CEO to lead the World Bank, drawing furious backlash from climate and anti-corruption campaigners who said the pick would ensure the key global financial institution remains a tool of corporate interests and funder of climate chaos.

• When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million in 2013, he didn’t transform it into a paper that elevated the perspectives of the wealthy elite—it had already been that for decades. What he did do was put it on steroids: Over the next three years, the Post doubled its web traffic and surpassed the New York Times in its volume of online postings. One result: The paper’s traditional hostility to federal retirement programs has become only more amplified.

• A Healthcare Worker’s Fight for Martin Luther King Jr. Day

• Sabrina Chaumette is an Oakland, CA resident and a licensed clinical social worker and a member of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) at Kaiser Permanente’s Oakland Medical Center. The past half dozen years has been the scene of a war between the California HMO behemoth and its clinical health care workers. There have been strikes and threats of strikes, contract fights and contract rejections; last summer’s open-ended strike lasted ten weeks; NUHW won an array of major concessions, above all on staffing and scheduling, including MLK Jr. Day off with pay.

• Our educational house most definitely is burning, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders told a town hall on America’s teacher pay crisis at the U.S. Capitol earlier this week.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The invasion of Ukraine is not the first war to be documented on social media, but it is uniquely positioned to be the most viral. One year after the Russian invasion began, keeping the conflict in global consciousness is crucial for Ukraine to ensure financial support. The war for our attention is being fought with memes, viral tweets, and video clips.

• The European Union’s two biggest policy-making institutions have banned TikTok from staff phones for cybersecurity reasons, marking growing concerns about the Chinese short video-sharing app and its users’ data.

• [...]

• TikTok, which is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, is under scrutiny from governments and regulators because of concerns that China’s government could use its app to harvest users’ data or advance its interests.

• EU industry chief Thierry Breton, who announced a ban by the European Commission, declined to say whether the Commission had been subject to any incidents involving TikTok.

• Rupert Murdoch said that he was “delighted” by the purchase of McCarthy and noted that Fox had snapped him up at an attractively low price.

• The Hill (2/17/23) announced last week, “DeSantis Approval Drops in GOP Primary: Poll.” The article, by Max Greenwood, went on to say:

• New York State is now, almost counterintuitively, a crucial battleground for control of Congress. There are 18 congressional districts where Joe Biden won the popular vote that are currently represented by Republicans. A third of those are in New York. This even though the state’s 26 districts make up less than 6 percent of seats in Congress. If the Democrats want to win back Congress, the path lies more through New York than any other state. The fact that New York, despite its reputation as a liberal stronghold, has a disproportionate number of swing seats is due to the disarray and infighting of the New York State Democratic Party.1

• Watch out, 2024 GOP primary contenders: There’s a new presidential hopeful in the mix, and he’s pandering to all the trademark grievances of the conservative movement with a bold entrepreneurial elan. Meet Vivek Ramaswamy, cofounder of Strive Asset Management, Fox News scourge of the pompous elite virtuecrats, and author of not one, but two jeremiads against elite social engineering: Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence and Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.1

• In Wales’ first pass at this project, Nupedia, all articles were peer-reviewed by a panel of experts before publication. But he later hit on the idea of collaborative articles written by amateur members of the public, and Wikipedia was born.

• That was 22 years ago now and the world has since become used to the risks posed by online misinformation on everything from global politics to [COVID]

• The EU executive and the EU Council, which brings together representatives of the member states to set policy priorities, said on Thursday that staff will also be required to remove TikTok from personal mobile devices that have access to corporate services.

• In all, Bankman-Fried and the two associates “made over 300 political contributions, totaling tens of millions of dollars, that were unlawful because they were made in the name of a straw donor or paid for with corporate funds.”

• The grand jury indictment, which supersedes a previous indictment from December, charges him with conspiracy to make unlawful political contributions and defrauding the Federal Election Commission.

• Ericsson detailed the move in an internal memo. “The way headcount reductions will be managed will differ depending on local country practice,” Ericsson Chief Executive Officer Borje Ekholm (pictured) wrote in the memo, which was obtained by Reuters. “In several countries the headcount reductions have already been communicated this week.”

• On Monday, the company, which employs more than 105,000 worldwide, announced plans to cut about 1,400 jobs in Sweden.

• While Ericsson did not disclose which geography would be most affected, analysts had predicted that North America would likely be most affected and growing markets such as India the least.

• The teacher, Tamar Herman, has been kept out of the classroom for 16 months based on that “hyperbole.” She has filed lawsuits in state and federal court saying she is being punished by “a malicious and antisemitic campaign.”

• The Commission implemented the measure over data protection concerns regarding the TikTok app. These concerns are shared globally and have been mounting in recent times. In September 2021, the Irish Data Protection Commission launched an investigation into whether Tiktok was complying with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The investigation pertained to TikTok’s transfer of data to China and the processing of childrens’ personal data. In November 2022, TikTok disclosed that some of its China-based personnel could access European TikTok user data. Furthermore, a Forbes magazine report from December 2022 revealed that TikTok employees had been monitoring journalists’ physical location using their IP addresses.

• As with the initially mentioned state-level bans in the U.S., the European Commission’s TikTok prohibition doesn’t extend to employees’ own cell phones (and different devices) that are attached to non-corporate networks.

• The bans address some politicians’ concerns that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is sending information to the Chinese government.

• Can there be any question that we’re in a mad—and loud—new age of McCarthyism? Thank you, Kevin! And don’t forget the wildly over-the-top members of the so-called Freedom Caucus and their Republican associates, including that charmer, lyin’ George Santos, Jewish-space-laser-and-white-balloon-carrying Marjorie Taylor Greene, and—once again running for president—the man who never lost, Donald Trump-em-all.

• It was the scare campaign of the week. Treasurer Jim Chalmers suggested a few superannuation tweaks might be in order and the backlash in corporate media was savage. What’s the scam?

• The scam is the media has turned a “review” into a “raid”. Super was intended to provide retirement incomes for all but it has become a super tax shelter which allows wealthy families to pass on their publicly subsidised superannuation balances to future generations.

• With Democrats hoping to confirm dozens more federal judges following President Joe Biden’s milestone of appointing 100 new members of the judiciary, progressives on Friday said the party has no choice but to eliminate a tradition they say has been exploited by Republicans to block the president’s nominees.

• Last month, Havana was the seat of the first high-level talks between Cuba and the United States since 2018, fueling speculation that the Biden administration may be contemplating removing Cuba from the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SST), an easy first step that wouldn’t require congressional approval.

• On Saturday, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban gave his annual speech on the state of the nation in which he highlighted the importance of maintaining economic relations with Russia. “We will maintain economic relations with Russia, and we suggest the same to our allies because, without relations, there will not be a ceasefire nor peace talks,” Orban said. The Hungarian PM expressed that he does not consider Russia a threat to Hungary”s society.

• He spoke at great length on the war in Ukraine. “A year ago the West decided not to isolate the conflict, but to elevate it to a pan-European level. It could have declared it a local, a regional war, or a military conflict between two Slavic states. This is their war, not ours, ”the nationalist leader said. Orban who is currently serving his fourth consecutive term, stated that Europe is “already indirectly at war with Russia.”

• One year ago, Russia unleashed a brutal aggression against #Ukraine. Thinking it can invade its peaceful neighbour. But it failed.The EU stands in support of #Ukraine. Our commitment to the European future of Ukraine remains unwavering. Our joint message: pic.twitter.com/jM0dpjw6qe

• The Hungarian Parliament is due to debate the membership bids by the two Nordic nations next week.

• It is almost inconceivable for Palestinians to describe Israel as a “democracy.” That is also the case for many Israeli human rights activists. Seventy-five years of ethnic cleansing, military rule, Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian-owned land, an established system of discrimination that amounts to apartheid have all rendered, in their eyes, the terms “Israel” and “democracy” incompatible. The latest Israeli raid in Nablus, in which 11 Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers is just another flagrant example.

• A former U.S. ambassador to Israel on Friday sharply criticized the far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for seeking to annex Palestinian land in the illegally occupied West Bank.

• Palestinians held a general strike in the West Bank Thursday after Israeli forces killed 11 Palestinians and injured nearly 500 in a military raid in the city of Nablus. So far this year, Israel has killed at least 65 Palestinians, including 13 children, drawing concern and criticism from supranational actors including the U.N. and Amnesty International. We speak to Amira Hass, a correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and Issa Amro, a prominent Palestinian human rights defender from Hebron in the West Bank. Amro was recently beaten by an Israeli soldier while being interviewed by the American author Lawrence Wright. “There is a huge anger among the Palestinians from what is happening these days from the Israeli racist and fascist government, who are inciting to kill more and more Palestinians,” says Amro of the protests.

• Though it has been argued that the so-called American dream is long dead, Nikki Haley is proof that the dream is still alive. Unfortunately, the “dream” is hers alone.

• North Korea has test-fired four strategic cruise missiles into the sea, state media said Friday, adding that the drill demonstrated the conflict readiness of Pyongyang’s “nuclear combat force.”

• Harvey Weinstein, the onetime Hollywood titan who came to epitomize a culture of pervasive sexual misconduct by powerful men that ignited the #MeToo movement, was sentenced on Thursday to 16 years in prison for the 2013 rape of an actress in Los Angeles.

• Some young inmates have been instilled with hatred of the Hong Kong government during prison visits, the city’s security minister has alleged, as he warned of “soft resistance tactics” used to endanger national security.

• Democratic U.S. lawmakers and Asian-American and Pacific Islander advocates joined Rep. Judy Chu in condemning Congressman Lance Gooden on Friday after the MAGA Republican—who took part in an effort to overturn the last presidential election—cast aspersions upon the California Democrat’s loyalty to the United States.

• Politicians haven’t stopped deleting some of their most cringeworthy tweets, but Politwoops, our project that has tracked and archived more than half a million deleted tweets from candidates and elected officials since 2012, is no longer able to track them.

• Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the platform has disabled the function we used to track deletions — and the new method that Twitter says should identify them appears to be broken. We have been unable to find anyone who can help us, and with Twitter surprising developers by announcing a move to a paid model for gathering tweet data, it’s no longer clear that Twitter is a stable platform on which to maintain this work. It seems fitting to give Politwoops a sendoff, a farewell to not exactly a friend but an odd part of our national political discourse for a decade.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Facebook parent company Meta Thursday announced that it took down three state-linked “domestic influence operations” in the past quarter. Each operation used fake account networks to influence domestic politics and target opposition parties.

• All year long, cartoonists around the world have been putting their pens to paper, interpreting and documenting the events in Ukraine. To mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, international network Cartooning for Peace has released a special edition book featuring 120 drawings from cartoonists around the world. Among them are six illustrations from award-winning Ukrainian cartoonist Vladimir Kazanevsky. He joined us for Perspective to talk about how Russia’s invasion has drastically changed his work, and what it means to him to see cartoonists from around the world expressing their support for Ukraine.

• As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it – in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

• In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Baidu, which makes the country’s most popular search engine, is the closest to winning the race. But despite years of investment and weeks of hype, the company has not yet released Ernie Bot.

• AI experts suggest that the Chinese government’s tight control over the country’s [Internet] is partly to blame.

• The Swedish-language news outlet SVT reported Thursday that in the last few days, “two applications for Qur’an burnings have been denied.” Police spokesperson Ola Österling was unequivocal: “As a rule in Stockholm, we will not allow burning the Qur’an during public gatherings.” Some say that the police ban on Qur’an burnings violates the protection of the freedom of expression in the Swedish constitution, and Österling says that the police welcome this challenge: “We want to have it tested that our reasoning is legal. We are aware that it is a restriction on freedom of expression. And in order to be able to make decisions about restrictions on freedom of expression, which is a constitutionally protected freedom and right, it is required that it is stated in law.” So the police rule could be struck down, but in light of Sweden’s desire to enter NATO, this is unlikely.

• The functioning of newspapers like The Observer is only possible with the protection of speech; it would be impossible for media outlets to be critical of our institutions, discuss pressing social issues and hold people in power accountable otherwise. Additionally, freedom of speech is essential in educational institutions, including at Case Western Reserve University, where the exploration of new ideas and fields requires a willingness to approach difficult subjects with an open mind. Academic freedom is the bedrock of our universities, enabling our professors to investigate and teach about the most controversial topics. Yet, while freedom of speech is supposedly protected by the First Amendment, it is under more attack today than it has been in decades, especially at academic institutions—and not for the reasons you might think.

• There’s no reason anyone should look to Louisiana for legislative leadership. The state still has an oft-abused criminal defamation law on the books in 2023 — the sort of law that would have looked out of place a century ago.

• At this point it should be common knowledge that if it has to do with any kind of speech, there is nothing that China won’t try to control and/or censor. It’s something of an amazing self-contradiction: in order to be large and powerful, the Beijing government believes it has to behave as though it is weak and cowardly. Wherever there might be real or potential speech or action against the government, there is the Chinese Communist Party trying to proactively make sure such speech can never reach a wider audience. Beijing, it would seem, has long desired for its people to be simple, programmable robots.

• The company said Wednesday that it is temporarily limiting access to news content for under four per cent of its Canadian users as it assesses possible responses to the bill. The change applies to its ubiquitous search engine as well as the Discover feature on Android devices, which carries news and sports stories.

• The latest order by Pakistan’s electronic media regulatory body comes in continuation to the earlier ones asking TV channels to adhere to the provisions of the PEMRA Electronic Media Code of Conduct 2015, Geo News reported.

• “It has been observed with grave concern that despite repeated directives satellite TV channels are unable to comply with provisions of Electronic Media Code of Conduct-2015 in letter and spirit,” read a notification by the authority on Monday.

• You may have never heard of it, but Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the legal backbone of the internet. The law was created almost 30 years ago to protect internet platforms from liability for many of the things third parties say or do on them.

• Decades later, it’s never been more controversial. People from both political parties and all three branches of government have threatened to reform or even repeal it. The debate centers around whether we should reconsider a law from the internet’s infancy that was meant to help struggling websites and internet-based companies grow. After all, these internet-based businesses are now some of the biggest and most powerful in the world, and users’ ability to speak freely on them bears much bigger consequences.

• The Court briefly discussed whether algorithms may lose Section 230 immunity if they’re intentionally discriminatory—the example they entertained was a dating-app algorithm written to prohibit interracial matches. They seemed to be thinking through the role of intentionality: Would it matter if YouTube had written an algorithm that favored ISIS or other extremists over more benign material, or would any algorithm still be protected by 230? But these questions weren’t resolved; justices hinted that they would like to see Congress be the ones to finesse Section 230 if it needs finessing, and were sometimes self-deprecating about their own ability to understand the issues. “We really don’t know much about these things,” Justice Elena Kagan joked on Tuesday. “You know, these are not, like, the nine greatest experts on the [Internet].”

• Every time I think the world’s insanity has reached its lowest point, I turn around and something even more wacky stares me in the face.

• This week: the whole business of editing Roald Dahl’s work, what I personally consider to be the best children’s books in the world. It’s a shame.

• While Putin abuses Christian rhetoric in Ukraine, we have replaced our traditional foundation with a new, censorious religion

• French publisher Gallimard said it had no intention of making changes to translated versions of children’s books by the late British novelist Roald Dahl, unlike the author’s UK publisher.

• Earlier this week, on February 17 2023, an investigative news report about Eliminalia, a Spanish reputation management firm made headlines. The leaked documents in the report revealed that Eliminalia “worked for scammers, spyware companies, torturers, convicted criminals and others in the global underworld to hide public-interest information” under the guise of being a service that claimed “to remove unwanted and erroneous information” for clients.

• The move will tighten the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s control over who gets to practice religion, and how.

• The female engineer whose video protesting the mandatory hijab at the Tehran Engineers Forum went viral on social media last week has expressed her “regret” in a video many of her supporters allege was made under duress.

• The popular AI image generator Midjourney bans a wide range of words about the human reproductive system from being used as prompts,

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The sedition trial against defunct Hong Kong news outlet Stand News, which began last October and was supposed to last 20 days, will continue until the end of March, the court has heard. Stand News’ former editor-in-chief Chung Pui-kuen, former acting chief editor Patrick Lam and the outlet’s parent company have been charged with conspiring…

• Hong Kong prisons saw a decade-high average daily number of people on remand last year, as the head of the city’s corrections department rejected claims that a rehabilitation programme designed to deradicalise convicted protesters involved elements of “brainwashing.” A

• Rickey Rogers, global editor of Reuters Pictures, shares stories from photojournalists’ year in Ukraine.

• Nancy Dubuc took over from Vice co-founder Shane Smith in 2018.

• Steve Allen was LBC’s longest-serving presenter.

• Press Gazette’s monthly ranking of the top 50 news websites in the US, using Similarweb data.

• Dermot Murnaghan has presented for Sky News, BBC News, ITV News and Channel 4 News.

• Some critics of the National Security Bill still want a public interest defence for journalists.

• Freelance journalist Mir Ali Koçer was 200 miles from the epicentre when Turkey was struck by a deadly earthquake on 6 February. Grabbing his camera and microphone, he drove down to the affected region to interview survivors.

• He shared stories of survivors and rescuers on Twitter and is now under investigation on suspicion of spreading “fake news” and could face up to three years in jail.

• He is one of at least four journalists being investigated for reporting or commenting on the earthquake.

• Iranian-German journalist Jamshid Sharmahd, 67, has been convicted of “corruption of earth” and sentenced to death by an Iranian court, BBC Persian reported on Tuesday. Iran maintains that the conviction is related to terrorist activity on behalf of Sharmahd, according to the Iranian Mizan news agency.

• Mizan is an Iranian news agency that has a large focus on legal and judiciary matters in the country. As with other issues, on the issue of Sharmahd, Mizan adopts the position of the Iranian regime and reports that the Iranian-German journalist is connected with terrorist activity that has resulted in the deaths of innocent Iranians.

• I’d flown to Ukraine as a freelance journalist. I rented an apartment in one of the city’s Soviet-style high-rises and wandered the town every day, talking with those employed in the tech sector at the co-working space, going out for drinks and dinner at local restaurants and pubs, ice-skating and even getting a haircut at a barber shop that had been around for decades.

Civil Rights/Policing

• It was 21 years ago this month that I was flown in the belly of a U.S. cargo plane, hooded, blindfolded, gagged, and chained in an orange jumpsuit, for over 40 hours. I didn’t know where I was being taken, or why.

• ShotSpotter claims its gunshot detection tech is something cities battling gun violence just can’t (almost literally) live without. Data generated by cities paying millions for the tech often says otherwise.

• In Tennessee, Republican lawmakers are considering whether patients should be forced to continue dangerous pregnancies, even while miscarrying, under the state’s abortion ban — and how close to risking death such patients need to be before a doctor can legally intervene.

• At a legislative hearing last week, a lobbyist who played a dominant role in crafting the state’s abortion legislation made his preference clear: A pregnant patient should be in the process of an urgent emergency, such as bleeding out, before they can receive abortion care.

• In this episode of The Most Censored News, Lee Camp takes on the police state with facts, figures and, most importantly, proven solutions actually solve the problem.

• Those sent back will be persecuted because Burmese military ostracizes Muslims, says lawyer Lim Wei Jet.

• They have been complaining for months, but their children remain trapped.

• ICE has queried LexisNexis’ data more than a million times, and leadership encouraged officials to use the tool for finding non-citizens.

• This principle, in First Amendment jurisprudence, applies when a regulation of speech sweeps too broadly and prohibits a substantial amount of protected as well as non-protected speech. According to the Ninth Circuit, the Encouragement Provision is unconstitutionally overbroad because it prohibits, for example, “encouraging an undocumented immigrant to take shelter during a natural disaster, advising an undocumented immigrant about available social services” or “providing certain legal advice to undocumented immigrants.”We argue that the Ninth Circuit was correct, emphasizing the online speech rights of hundreds of immigration advocacy and services organizations which the Encouragement Provision threatens. For example, Informed Immigrant, which also filed a brief supporting Hansen, “maintains a Know Your Rights section in its online resource library with a wide range of information for undocumented immigrants and their families, including information about their rights inside and outside their homes, what to do if someone you know is arrested, how to prepare your family in the event of an immigration raid, and guidance for finding a lawyer.” If the Encouragement Provision is upheld, this type of speech, and any similar speech that emboldens undocumented immigrants online, will be silenced.We further emphasize in the brief that protected online speech directed to undocumented immigrants is especially vulnerable to the Encouragement Provision’s vagaries because online speakers rely on numerous intermediaries that don’t want to risk violating the statute. All online speakers rely on intermediaries like domain name registers, web hosts, and social media platforms. To avoid the risk of the Encouragement Provision’s criminal penalty and the burden of having to defend even meritless charges, intermediaries will likely censor users’ speech if it so much as approaches illegality.

• In our brief, we argue that when platforms face the threat of criminal penalties, “this inevitably results in the heckler’s veto, whereby any user can effectively censor another user by notifying the intermediary that the other user’s speech is unlawful, regardless of the merits of that notice.” This means that, if the Encouragement Provision is upheld, the speech of countless immigrants and immigrant rights advocates on the internet will be chilled.United States v. Hansen is set for oral arguments on March 23, 2023. Several years ago, in United States v. Sineneng-Smith, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to rule on this very same First Amendment issue, finding that the defendant in that case had not properly raised it. We hope that this time, the U.S. Supreme Court takes the opportunity to recognize the free speech rights of many individuals on an issue so highly contested in political debate.For the brief: https://www.eff.org/document/us-v-hansen-eff-brief

*  

• The German Federal Constitutional Court declared the use of Palantir surveillance software by police in Hesse and Hamburg unconstitutional in a landmark ruling on Thursday (16 February).

• The ruling concludes a case brought by the German Society for Civil Rights (GFF) last year, hearings for which began in December. The plaintiffs argued that the software could be used for predictive policing, raising the risk of mistakes and discrimination by law enforcement.

• The German state of Hesse has been using the software since 2017, though it is not yet in place in Hamburg. The technology is provided by Palantir, a US data analytics firm which received early backing from intelligence agencies, including the CIA, FBI and NSA.

• The German Federal Constitutional Court declared the use of Palantir surveillance software by police in Hesse and Hamburg unconstitutional in a landmark ruling.

• The ruling concludes a case brought by the German Society for Civil Rights (GFF) last year, hearings for which began in December. The plaintiffs argued that the software could be used for predictive policing, raising the risk of mistakes and discrimination by law enforcement.

• One of the attorneys for the family of Richard Ward said in the lawsuit filed this week in U.S. District Court that Ward, 32, was picking up his younger brother from middle school with his mother and her boyfriend when he stepped out of the car to take a “brief walk.”

• Attorneys said that after his walk, he mistook a similar-looking SUV for his mother’s vehicle, opened the door and got inside. Ward apologized to the driver and then returned to his mother’s vehicle, according to the lawsuit.

• Since seizing power in August 2021, the Taliban have curtailed women’s rights. Women cannot travel without a male guardian and have few work options. Most girls have been forbidden to attend high school since the takeover. Fewer than 12 percent of Afghan women feel treated with respect and dignity, according to a recent Gallup survey. Those women who express dissent against Taliban authorities are met with violent suppression of their protests, as well as imprisonment, intimidation and even torture, forcing many to flee the country.

• The Burt Lake Band is not currently recognized as a tribe by the federal government. On Oct. 15, 1900, the Cheboygan County sheriff and local residents forcibly removed the Band from their legally purchased land in the area before burning the land. Currently, the Band is in litigation to regain their status as a federally-recognized tribe.

• Police on Wednesday arrested the father of two Pakistani sisters living in Spain who were lured back to their homeland last year and killed by family members in a suspected honour killing.

• The Times found that it was not just the fact that Covid swept through already overcrowded prisons. It was also that prisoners are routinely subjected to substandard medical care. That’s the norm. That, coupled with crowded facilities and an aging inmate population combined to make the worst public health crisis in American prisons since the 1918-1919 Spanish flu pandemic.

• The international charity Medicins Sans Frontiers said late Thursday it is “assessing what legal actions” the group can take to contest a new anti-refugee law passed in Italy, under which the group was informed its rescue ship is being detained and prevented from rescuing migrants for 20 days.

• This rule will deny thousands of migrants fleeing persecution their right to seek asylum at the United States’ southern border.

• A judge denied a restraining order against initial construction of the $90 million militarized police training complex.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• “It doesn’t matter what we think about the Internet,” the Supreme Court Justice said. “What does God think about it?”

• The 30th edition of the Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium kicks off 27 February in San Diego, USA.

• We encourage everyone interested in defending an open Internet to contribute to the European Commission’s public consultation on the potential developments of the connectivity sector and its infrastructure.

• We’ve been talking a lot lately about the massive moral panic going on right now, claiming that the internet is somehow inherently dangerous for kids. As we’ve noted, the evidence simply does not support this. Over and over and over again we see the actual data and actual research shows no evidence of any inherent harm to children from the internet and social media. Indeed, much of the evidence suggests that most kids get real value out of the internet from the ability to communicate with friends and family to access information and people they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• We wrote a few times about the problems of Spotify’s attempt to colonize the podcast market. While it was, perhaps, an understandable move driven by the economics of our totally broken copyright systems which made it impossible to be truly profitable with just music, Spotify’s decision to go after the podcast market, shelling out massive dollars for podcast-focused companies like Gimlet Media and the Ringer, was all about taking a system based on open protocols — mainly mp3s and RSS — and trying to lock it up behind a proprietary moat.

Monopolies

• Mojang is cracking down on the browser-based Minecraft copy Eaglercraft. The company removed 92 repositories from GitHub, claiming that they infringed the company’s copyrights and trademarks. A repository of DIY decompiling tools and instructions remains online, however.

Patents

• From April, life sciences patent attorney Tung-Gia Du (49) is set to join Hoyng ROKH Monegier from Bird & Bird. He joined the firm in August 2012, and became counsel in 2018. Du began his career two years earlier at Maiwald in Munich, where he also completed his training as a patent attorney.

Trademarks

• Here’s a new edition of “Flotsam and Jetsam,” wherein I provide, on an irregular basis, timely tidbits to the TTABar. The last edition was a mere nine years ago.

*

• COHIBA Appeal: General Cigar has filed a complaint [.pdf here] in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, seeking Section 1071 review of the TTAB’s recent decision [TTABlogged here] ordering cancellation of two registrations for the mark COHIBA for cigars, based on violation of Article 8 of the Pan American Convention. We can surely expect a few more chapters to be written in this 25-year-old brouhaha.

Copyrights

• The Canadian government has accused Google of “borrowing from Facebook’s playbook”.

• The V&A Museum in London has acquired a massive 8,000-piece archive of material from the David Bowie Estate containing handwritten notebooks, letters, costumes, instruments, awards, photos, set designs, and more.

• The V&A Museum in London has confirmed its acquisition of a treasure trove of archive material from the estate of David Bowie. The archive contains items such as instruments, costumes, handwritten notebooks, letters, and much more, many of which were featured during the “David Bowie Is” traveling museum exhibit viewed by more than 2 million people from 2013 to 2018.

• Led by Bettina Fabos and Mariana Ziku, the Digital Community Heritage Working Group focused on international community-related heritage initiatives in the context of open access and inclusive digital transformation. The collaborative research carried out in the course of a year aimed to map and analyze the openness spectrum and typology of digital community heritage initiatives, which included collecting international cases, performing data analysis and visualization, providing insights into patterns and trends, and identifying good practices and common challenges in the field. The output of this research includes the publication of a data-driven multilingual study discussing digital community heritage and open-access, and a published machine readable dataset of 27 international digital community heritage initiatives with information structured into several categories. Read a summary of the study on CC’s Medium in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Swahili. You can find out more about the WG on their PubPub website. Access the dataset and data visualizations folder.

• When authorities in Japan shut down the world’s most popular manga piracy site, that should’ve been a deterrent. Instead, Mangamura’s demise led to an explosion of sites and even more piracy. Publishers face significant challenges but with the entertainment industries and government now on board, Japan’s systematic fight against piracy applies to all content, everywhere.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• So I was looking at the BitTorrent protocol specification (AKA BEP-0003) tonight, and I found this bit of muddy writing that confused me no end.

• “Interest state must be kept up to date at all times – whenever a downloader doesn’t have something they currently would ask a peer for in unchoked, they must express lack of interest, despite being choked. Implementing this properly is tricky, but makes it possible for downloaders to know which peers will start downloading immediately if unchoked.”

• There are two bugs in that paragraph. The second bug — the simplest — is in the last sentence: the first “downloaders” should probably be “uploaders”, because why would downloaders care about who is gonna download?

Technical

Programming

• I was an avid fan of assembly language back in my youth and I did a lot of 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

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.