● 02.27.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 27/02/2023: DistroWatch Reviews elementary OS 7.0

Posted in News Roundup at 7:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Ubuntu Linux has a very interesting history and there was once a time where it was popular to call it spyware and that’s not just because people liked to whine there was a legitimate reason for this.

Instructionals/Technical

• As a server administrator, the uptime of your Linux server is one of the most critical metrics to keep track of. The longer the uptime, the better it is for your server’s performance and reliability.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Cockpit on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, Cockpit is a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) for Linux servers.

• How do I set up a local certificate authority server on Linux? Well, in this tutorial you will learn how to setup a Local CA Server on Ubuntu. You might want to setup a Local CA server for various reasons including to issue private certificates for your users and applications.

• All of the following interaction was as the user sandra with ellen% being the prompt (hostname + percent sign, zsh’s default). I’m in the dialout group. /tmp is sticky but that doesn’t seem to matter here, as you’ll see.

• Another issue is that a university wide account is sometimes too powerful of a thing. If there is an outside professor or researcher visiting one department for a month, the university as a whole may not want to issue them an account that will give them central email, enroll them in various things the university is licensed for, and so on. And then when they leave at the end of the month, the university may want to deactivate the account but the department may not, because the department wants to foster an ongoing relationship with that person.

• Linux is a popular operating system used by programmers, developers, and system administrators around the world. While it may seem intimidating to beginners, mastering the basic Linux commands can help you navigate through the system with ease. In this article, we will discuss the top 10 basic Linux commands for absolute beginners, and provide you with a clear understanding of their purpose and how to use them.

• Linux is an open-source operating system that offers a wealth of possibilities and flexibility for users. But for beginners, navigating through the terminal and using command-line tools can be a bit intimidating.

• Kubernetes relies on Linux containers and cgroups, so you can’t run Kubernetes or even docker containers directly on OpenBSD, but Alpine Linux runs great under OpenBSD’s VMM hypervisor. Alpine shares a lot of the same ideologies as OpenBSD, and it has become a favorite in the Linux container ecosystem.

• Ubuntu doesn’t have an option for a guest session, but a workaround can add this functionality to your PC. This method lets other users use your PC while keeping your data and settings safe.

• Whether you’re a home user, a business owner, or an IT administrator, setting up the option for a guest session will come in handy at some point. So let’s look at how you can enable a guest session on Ubuntu.

Games

• The seminal 1993 first-person shooter from id Software, DOOM, has become well-known as a test of small computer platforms. We’ve seen it on embedded systems far and wide, but we doubt we’ve ever seen it consume as little power as it does on a specialized neural network processor. The chip in question is a Syntiant NDP200, and it’s designed to be the always-on component listening for the wake word or other trigger in an AI-enabled IoT device.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• A new version of TUXEDO OS has been released.

• TUXEDO OS is primarily (though not exclusively) designed for owners of TUXEDO Computers laptops and PCs. The latest release, TUXEDO OS 2, is (surprise) the second major update to the Kubuntu-based distro, following last year’s debut release.

• Users get to enjoy the latest KDE Plasma 5.27 release (back ported from KDE neon) riding atop Linux kernel 6.1, with Mesa 22.3.6, PipeWire 0.3.66, and Mozilla Firefox 110 along for the ride. Also included are the latest versions of both KDE Frameworks (v5.103) and KDE Gear (v22.12.2).

• In all, some of the latest open source tech atop a dependable Ubuntu-based base.

Reviews

• Because elementary OS 7′s focus is on relatively unskilled new Linux users, most people who have been using Linux for a while are probably not going to be interested in the distribution. That includes users who prefer so-called easy-to-use distributions such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or Pop!_OS, mainly because of the distribution’s almost total reliance on Flatpaks for software packaging.

• This release also has some rough edges that need to be refined, which isn’t necessarily surprising since this first of the 7.x series was developed during a time when the elementary project was going through turmoil. Hopefully, most of these issues will be gone by the time version 7.1 is released, likely later this year.

• However, if they get the installer fixed so that the OS can be easily installed alongside an existing OS by a novice user, this release might be just the thing for not only for those new to Linux, but for casual users in general who just want to use a computer for fun or work, without having to understand what’s going on under the hood.

Fedora Family / IBM

• With the continued evolution of 5G, RAN and now virtualized RAN (vRAN), modern networks are increasingly relying on software-defined architecture and cloud-native technologies. This requires streamlining the deployment and management of applications across different environments. The transition to 5G often results in higher electricity consumption from increased site density and sub-optimal use of the underlying resources. As a result, service providers are beginning to explore new ways to improve energy efficiency and reduce their environmental impact, such as optimizing network design and operations with energy-efficient hardware, and implementing power and thermal management techniques.

• Sustainable computing is a multidimensional challenge across all industries, with service providers keen to reduce power consumption and support sustainability goals, particularly in regards to the RAN. According to a Red Hat-sponsored sustainability study, RAN is responsible for 75% of a service provider’s total power consumption. Adopting more energy efficient compute technologies will reduce power consumption and help service providers meet environmental impact standards set by governing bodies without losing key network functionalities.

• Private 5G networking is on the rise. Why? The emergence of edge computing in recent years coupled with macroeconomic trends are pushing service providers to rethink the way they operate networks and enable applications for faster results, improved connectivity and efficiency. From new use cases in Industry 4.0 manufacturing to smart infrastructure to the cloudification of radio access networks (RAN), service providers want the flexibility and autonomy offered by private 5G networks to embrace new innovations.

• For service providers, private 5G networks offer an opportunity to play a more leading role within an enterprise’s critical business operations providing a platform that hosts the private network in addition to business applications that can run at the edge. This reduces the footprint, increases flexibility and manageability of the network while lowering the total cost of ownership.

• For many, the term “sustainability” evokes images of reusable water bottles, paper straws and household compost bins. Or perhaps you envision “reduce, reuse, recycle” posters and canvas tote bags at your local farmer’s market–but maybe not data centers, right? As sustainability has become a cornerstone of many government policies, enterprise initiatives and consumer trends, tech leaders have been hard at work building technologies dedicated to helping users monitor how their software usage might drive energy consumption.

• In recent years, the rapid growth in workloads handled by data centers has resulted in greater energy usage, increasing 10-30% per year, and accounting for 1-1.5% of global energy consumption, as reported by the International Energy Agency. In order for enterprises to make a meaningful environmental impact, it has become critical for IT leaders to take a harder look at the efficiency of their equipment and the tools they use to evaluate the sustainability of their data centers1.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• While there’s nothing to download or test (yet – that I’m aware of) a good overview of the project was shared on the Ubuntu developer mailing list at the weekend. Interestingly, the effort is being headed up by Dan Bungert, the maintainer of Subiquity, which is the tech underpinning Ubuntu’s new Flutter-based installer).

• “The ubuntu-mini-iso is a small bootable iso that can be either downloaded and used on a CD/USB-drive or even via UEFI HTTP that brings up a dynamic TUI menu of what Ubuntu images you want to download/install to your target system,” Canonical’s Lukasz Zemczak explains.

• On February 21, 2023, Philipp Kewisch, Community Engineering Manager at Canonical announced on the Ubuntu Discourse Forum that the approved flavors would no longer come with Flatpak support by default.

• Alluding to “fragmentation”, Kewisch continued: [...]

Devices/Embedded

• SDMC DV9286 is an 8K TV box for operators running Android 13 TV OS on an Amlogic S928X octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor with 4GB to 8GB RAM, WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity, an HDMI 2.1a port, and 8K AV1, H.265, VP9 video decoding support. We had started to see 8K TV boxes based on the Amlogic S928X processor at IBC 2022 last September, but with few details. SDMC DV9286 announcement brings a few more details such as the GPU used in S928X and which version of Android will be used.

• Makerfabs recently launched a compact board integrating the ESP32-S3 microcontroller along with a round LCD with capacitive touch. This product also includes a MicroSD slot for storage, a 3.7V battery connector and two Mabee connectors for I/O expansion.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• In Mastodon relationship graphs I showed how to use Steampipe to map Mastodon network neighborhoods. When I use the word map here, I’m channeling Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps: Every map shows this — but not that, and every map shows what it shows this way — but not the other way.

• I took a risky jump and did a in-place upgrade from Stretch to Buster to Bullseye. So now that I was up to date on my operating system I could resume my upgrades on the Pi-hole. Once done I completed the upgrades from Pi-hole 5.11 to 5.18: [...]

• This update brings a new plugin to analyze MSI files: plugin_msi_info

• Week highlights: new release of darktable and Zrythm, new WIP features in Krita, new AVL drumkit, Blender changes release schedule with the 4.x. series. Less software news, more artworks this time.

• Not much going on in the main development branch, but CmykStudent is as active as ever in Git branches and the merge requests section. Theyrewrote old GIMP’s code to import ACO palette files to use babl. As the result, GIMP can now handle ACO file where colors are defined in CIE LAB. There’s also further progress with importing SwatchBooker files.

Programming/Development

• This is the Barnum Effect – sometimes called “Forer Statements” – when people read generic statements they often believe them to be highly personal.

• The data comes from everybody who has contributed to the common knowledge of humanity, and everyone who is on the internet. We are each, in a small way, an author – perhaps more aptly, a ghostwriter – of ChatGPT. All this information has been collected and re-interpreted in a way that the intentions and subjectivity of any one individual have disappeared from the final product. ChatGPT uses a “large language model” (LLM) that, by learning patterns in data, can itself generate text; it is a sort of mechanical author who operates by leveraging and destroying all other authors at one and the same time.

• On my main machine I use an excellent cross-platform tool called Docuum that automatically cleans up unused docker images. This allows me to use Docker without the need to periodically wonder why I’m out of disk space, run docker system prune and recover half my disk.

• Beyond questioning AI’s future autonomy and whether that bodes the end of humanity, much of the conversation surrounding AI has been about how people can use AI for their own horniness. On Twitter images of voluptuous AI-generated women have repeatedly made the rounds, supposedly highlighting just how real and attractive they can look. In some cases the sentiment even appears to be that they are even more appealing than non-AI images of women. “Apparently this picture and others are going viral on socials because women are SEETHING and debating whether these girls are AI generated,” one user tweeted alongside a picture of what appears to be four blonde quadruplet women in lingerie. “It’s so over,” the same account later tweeted alongside four other AI-generated photos of women in lingerie and bikinis.

• Exchangeable arrays have been studied since the late 70’s (Aldous (1983), Kallenberg (2005)). Eagleson and Weber (1978) and Silverman (1976) establish Strong Law of Large Numbers and Central Limit Theorems for such arrays. Because non-sparse networks and multiway clustering are related to exchangeable arrays, they have received recent attention in statistics and econometrics (Davezies, D’Haultfœuille, and Guyonvarch (2018), Davezies, D’Haultfœuille, and Guyonvarch (2021), Menzel (2018)). We focus below on non-sparse networks and present uniformity results at the basis of the asymptotic normality of many nonlinear estimators. We also show the general validity of a bootstrap scheme adapted to such data.

Perl / Raku

• By default, the test actions of both ExtUtils::MakeMaker and Module::Build test t/*.t in lexicographic order (a.k.a. ASCIIbetical order). Under this default, some Perl module authors who want tests performed in a given order have resorted to numbering tests: t/01_basic.t, t/10_functional.t, and so on.

• My personal preference is to take the lexicographic ordering into consideration when naming test files: t/basic.t through t/whole_thing.t. But the price of this choice is a certain number of contrived test names, and even the occasional thesaurus lookup.

Standards/Consortia

• The Open RAN specification, which the O-RAN Alliance introduced in 2018 and now maintains, is a reference architecture for a set of interoperable hardware, software and interfaces that can be built from off-the-shelf hardware. Supporters say it could have the same impact on the telecommunications industry that Unix and TCP/IP had on the data center in the 1990s when open standards disrupted the proprietary – and highly profitable – domain of a few large equipment makers, brought prices crashing down and changed the economics of data processing.

• The Alliance will be out in force at MWC 2023, the former Mobile World Congress event, in Barcelona this week with an assortment of technical sessions and addresses by some major wireless carriers and businesses building compatible products. (SiliconANGLE and its mobile video studio theCUBE will be onsite to report and analyze the news and interview top executives and experts.)

• A RAN is the radio element of a cellular network. It links wireless devices to transceivers and ultimately to the core network that connects to the internet. RANs are typically installed in each of the cells that make up a cellular network.

Leftovers

• Been a lazy Sunday of doing some light pre-Spring cleaning/organizing and quality time with the cats. Here’s a few interesting sites, articles, and such that have been idling in tabs for a little while.

• The Markup has an article about how grocers, specifically Kroger, are harvesting and selling data about you to advertisers and such. “Many grocers systematically infer information about you from your purchases and “enrich” the personal information you provide with additional data from third-party brokers, potentially including your race, ethnicity, age, finances, employment, and online activities. Some of them even track your precise movements in stores. They then analyze all this data about you and sell it to consumer brands eager to use it to precisely target you with advertising and otherwise improve their sales efforts.”

• This isn’t exactly new info, but it’s worth reading to see the amount of data they’re collecting about you as part of “loyalty programs” and using the data not just to sell you things, but to resell. In a sane society this practice would be flat-out illegal or at least heavily, deeply regulated.

• This includes in-store cameras, Bluetooth tracking, GPS, unique identifiers w/loyalty prorgrams, etc.

• The president of FESPACO’s organising committee, Fidele Aymar Tamini, said the festival’s 28th edition would embrace the theme of “African cinemas and peace cultures” in the context of the crisis.

• The prime minister of neighbouring Mali, the festival’s guest country of honour which is also grappling with a bloody jihadist insurgency, said culture had an “avant-garde role to play in the peace process”.

• Training robots to execute tasks in the real world requires data — the more, the better. The problem is that creating these datasets takes a lot of time and effort, and methods don’t scale well. That’s where Robot Learning with Semantically Imagined Experience (ROSIE) comes in.

• James Abourezk, who represented South Dakota from 1973 to 1979, breathed life into issue after issue.

• He represent the Iranian government for a time and remarkably tried to broker an agreement over the hostage crisis which might have saved Jimmy Carter’s presidency and dramatically altered history, but Carter turned it down, see below.

Science

• They initially found themselves in the open courtyard space, an area that was difficult to excavate, being “open and exposed to the outdoors,” Reed Goodman, an archaeologist from the University of Pennsylvania, told CNN.

• After returning to the mysterious courtyard a few months later, in fall 2022, field director Sara Pizzimenti, from the University of Pisa, broadened the trench.

• The team then discovered the industrial-sized oven, a moisture-wicking ancient “fridge,” to keep food cool, and dozens of conical bowls, many containing fish remains, revealing the purpose of the courtyard to be an outdoor dining area.

• Scientists at Osaka University were part of a particle accelerator experiment that produced an exotic and highly unstable particle, and determined its mass. This could contribute to a better understanding of the inner workings of ultra-dense neutron stars.

Education

• Evaluating teachers on their students’ performance is an issue that has elicited much comment over more than a decade. In essence, this view assumes that if students aren’t learning, the fault lies squarely with their teachers alone. While the logic of this view seems compelling at first, a moment’s reflection shows that it ignores several factors over which teachers have no control, factors that have an enormous influence on students’ ability or willingness to learn, or if they are able and willing, a multiplicity of distractions get in the way.

Hardware

• The semiconductor shortage thrust chip powerhouse Taiwan into the spotlight.

• Everyone knows we’re big fans of displays that differ from the plain old flat-panel LCDs that seem to adorn most devices these days. It’s a bit boring when the front panel of your widget is the same thing you stare at hour after hour while using your phone. Give us the chunky, blocky goodness of a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) any day of the week for visual interest and retro appeal.

• Sometimes it would be helpful if a 3D printed object could stretch & bend. Flexible filament like TPU is one option, but [NagyBig] designed a simple bracelet to ask: how about embedding rubber bands or o-rings into the print itself?

• If you’re making a lot of wiring harnesses, wrapping them can become a bit of a drag. [Well Done Tips] wanted to make this process easier and built a wiring harness wrapping machine.

• If we were to talk to engineers about the childhood toys which most inspired them, it’s likely that the older among them would mention either Meccano or Erector Set. These similar construction toys using metal components originated independently around the turn of the 20th century in both Britain and America, and eventually became part of the same company.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Masks are still required for visitors to medical institutions and elderly homes or on public transport.

• North Korea says leader Kim Jong Un presided over a major political conference dedicated to improving the farming sector. The meeting held Sunday comes as outside experts have assessed the country’s chronic food insecurity as worsening. North Korea’s official media said Monday that members of the ruling Workers’ Party’s Central Committee reviewed last year’s work under state goals to accomplish “rural revolution in the new era.” The report said the committee will meet for at least another day as members debate unspecified “urgent tasks” involving economic development.

• An internationally renowned Queensland air-quality expert has warned we have not learned a key lesson from the pandemic.

• The Department of Energy now assesses that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely began as the result of a leak from a government laboratory, the Wall Street Journal reports.

• CNN — The US Department of Energy has assessed that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely came from a laboratory leak in China, according to a newly updated classified intelligence report.

• Last December, I testified in the US Senate at its first-ever public hearing about plastics. I called for a 50 percent reduction in the nation’s production of plastics over the next decade. That was immediately met with criticism by the plastics and chemical lobbyists. These lobbyists are not the ones living in East Palestine, Ohio, where a train derailment spewed dangerous chemicals into the air, soil, and water. They’re not the ones living in neighborhoods next to railroad tracks. They’re not the ones facing health risks from plastic production plants in their backyards every single day.

• For the “privilege” of using medical marijuana without being arrested, about one of every 25 Floridians pays the state government $75 per year for a special identification card, and up to another $200 for periodic visits to a small sub-set of authorized doctors who can prescribe the common plant for a limited number of ailments.

• Put a different way, just getting permission to use a common plant for medical purposes is a quarter-billion-dollar per year industry in the Sunshine State.

Proprietary

• Microsoft has admitted that ineligible devices were being offered Windows 11 upgrades. Those that accepted the upgrade invite couldn’t complete the process.

• Microsoft said the issue was resolved and it might take 24 to 48 hours to propagate to all affected devices.

Security

• Josh and Kurt talk about SBOMs. Quite a bit has happened in the world of SBOMs in the last year or so. There are going to be different types of SBOMs, like build, source, or runtime. Each will tell us different things depending on what we need to know. We also cover some of the community efforts happening around SBOMs. They’re still not easy to use, but it’s better better.

• Investigators are looking at potential ties between the Chinese government and an ex-employee accused of stealing data from ASML Holding NV — a company critical to producing the world’s most advanced computer chips.

• According to Istio’s support policy, minor releases like 1.15 are supported until six weeks after the N+2 minor release (1.17 in this case). Istio 1.17 was released on February 14th, and support for 1.15 will end on March 28th, 2023.

• At that point we will stop back-porting fixes for security issues and critical bugs to 1.15, so we encourage you to upgrade to the latest version of Istio (1.17.1). If you don’t do this you may put yourself in the position of having to do a major upgrade on a short timeframe to pick up a critical fix.

• We care about you and your clusters, so please be kind to yourself and upgrade.

• Web hosting giant GoDaddy made headlines this month when it disclosed that a multi-year breach allowed intruders to steal company source code, siphon customer and employee login credentials, and foist malware on customer websites. Media coverage understandably focused on GoDaddy’s admission that it suffered three different cyberattacks over as many years at the hands of the same hacking group.  But it’s worth revisiting how this group typically got in to targeted companies: By calling employees and tricking them into navigating to a phishing website.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• “It was increasing at such a rate that we figured that by the end of the month, we would have double the number of submissions we normally have. And that the rate it had been growing from previous months, we were concerned that we had to do something to stop it.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• The General Services Administration is failing to act on data linked to access cards used to enter federal facilities, according to a new oversight report.

• A two-year audit conducted between 2020 and 2022 revealed over 32,000 failed access attempts at GSA-managed facilities, the Office of Inspector General report said, possibly indicating attempts to gain unauthorized access to information technology systems and secure federal facilities.

• The IG report also found that GSA was not evaluating the data collected from access cards “to identify and assess the risks to its personnel and federal property,” despite federal guidance recommending agencies monitor access card activity as part of their risk assessment and oversight processes.

• GSA operates 132 sites across the country with active access card readers that allow federal personnel with the appropriate permissions to use their card and gain access to certain facilities. Data from all GSA access cards in use is added into the agency’s Enterprise Physical Access Control System database, which can provide insights about card usage, access attempts and more.

• One of the difficulties with respect to a healthcare provider is that you can have set policies and procedures in place that are best practices and still be the victim of a breach cybersecurity attorney Elizabeth Litten of Fox Rothschild said.

• Foreign countries have sought to lure information from people, including government officials, journalists and bankers.

• In recent years, wearable devices have been widely used for activity tracking and monitoring of health. Apple is focusing on tracking mental health, walking steadiness features, and tracking menstrual cycles said Dr Sumbul Desai at BioAsia 2023.

Confidentiality

• Recently I discoved “Web OpenSSL” on CrypTool: a WebAssembly implementation of OpenSSL.

Defence/Aggression

• Maksym Levin started documenting war “to become famous.” After seeing conflict up close, his motivations shifted.

• A young globe-trotting Russian woman who found herself living in Australia is now the centre of a murder investigation.

• Examining and mitigating the risks related to the involvement of private technology companies in the war in Ukraine is crucial and looking forward, the United States government must also examine the same questions with regard to its own security and defense: [...]

• The news organization controlled by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei urged on Wednesday that the Iranian authorities seize and prosecute German diplomats in Tehran in response to Berlin’s expulsion of two Iranian diplomats.

• Thirty years ago today, terrorists left a bomb weighing more than a half-ton in a rented van parked beneath the World Trade Center, a workplace for tens of thousands. Its smoldering fuse took about 12 minutes to close the gap between the everyday and the horrific.

• At least 58 migrants died when their overcrowded wooden boat smashed into rocky reefs and broke apart off southern Italy before dawn on Sunday, the Italian coast guard said. Survivors reportedly indicated that dozens more could be missing.

• Kevin McCarthy just came back from a press trip to our southern border, full of talk about how bad the Biden administration is doing with asylum and immigration. Today, another group of House Republicans are “holding a hearing” at the Mexican border. If you watch Fox “News” you know all about it.

• The boat took off from Turkey and was believed to be carrying over 170 migrants when it ran into trouble in the Ionian sea at dawn, according to UN bodies. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration therefore expected the death toll to climb, they said in a joint statement

• Riled up against China, GOP congressmembers have long felt that Washington’s new cold war needed a special venue. So as soon as the baton passed to Republicans in the House, they set up a select committee on China. This is majority leader Kevin “Trump’s the Man” McCarthy’s baby, and if […]

• Mobilized soldiers from Russia’s Irkutsk region recorded a video appeal to Vladimir Putin, asking him to “deal with lawless and criminal orders from command.” The news outlet Lyudi Baikala published the video.

• Croatia is prepared to send 14 Mi-8 transport helicopters to Ukraine, says a source for the Croatian publication Jutarnji list.

• Several explosions occurred at a military airfield in Machulishchy, Belarus, around 12 kilometers (about 7.5 miles) outside of Minsk, reports BYPOL, an organization of former law enforcement employees in Belarus who work against the current government. Initially, BYPOL activists wrote that the explosions damaged a Russian military transport plane and snow removal equipment. The cause of the explosions was not specified in the first reports.

• “Light at the end of the tunnel” was an iconic phrase used by the warmongers who kept the U.S. in Vietnam long after the War had been lost. The implication was that insiders could see through the fog of war and know that things were getting better. It was a lie.

• “There are Ukrainians, Russians and Finns here, and it seems that some foreign tourists have also joined,” an organiser told Yle.

• The Hungarian parliament will not vote on Finland’s and Sweden’s applications until late March, an official said.

• Russia’s war against Ukraine has been reshaping European politics.

• European Commission Meeting Brussels, 24 Feb 2023 Ms. Stella Kyriakides holds a videoconference call with the Ukrainian Minister of Health Mr Viktor Liashko

• The War on Terror and the Battle for Young Minds.

• I wrote the following column ten years ago. Note the absence of any accountability or regret by Bush, Cheney and their co-war criminals.

• Ten years ago [now 20 years ago, on March 19, 2003] George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, as war criminals, launched the sociocide of the people of Iraq – replete with embedded television and newspaper reporters chronicling the invasion through the Bush lens. That illegal war of aggression was, of course, based on recognized lies, propaganda and cover-ups that duped or co-opted leading news institutions such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

• President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky published a Telegram post marking the anniversary of a rally that took place at the Crimean parliament building in Simferopol in 2014, where pro-Ukrainian activists opposed Crimea separating from Ukraine.

• At the G20 meeting in Bengaluru, India, the United States arrived with a simple brief. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said at the February 2023 summit that the G20 countries must condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and they must adhere to U.S. sanctions against Russia. However, it became clear that India, the chair of the G20, was not willing to conform to the U.S. agenda. Indian officials said that the G20 is not a political meeting, but a meeting to discuss economic issues. They contested the use of the word “war” to describe the invasion, preferring to describe it as a “crisis” and a “challenge.” France and Germany have rejected this draft if it does not condemn Russia.

• Just as in Indonesia during the previous year’s summit, the 2023 G20 leaders are once again ignoring the pressure from the West to isolate Russia, with the large developing countries (Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa) unwilling to budge from their practical view that isolation of Russia is endangering the world.

• The emergency service in Kyiv reported that a fire in a warehouse in the Podilskiy district has been extinguished.

• More than 600,000 Germans signed a petition two weeks ago, calling for an end to heavy weapons delivery to Ukraine, and urging Chancellor Olaf Scholz to lead diplomatic efforts for a cease-fire and peace negotiations. The petition, co-authored by Left Party lawmaker Sahra Wagenknecht and feminist author Alice Schwarzer, gathered 607,000 signatures as of Thursday on change.org website.

• Russia’s invasion should have jolted the West out of its welfare-state reverie.

• The Pioneer Press granted anonymity to five Harding teachers who wanted to talk about school safety but say they feared reprisal.

• The Swedish JAS Gripen fighter jet is one of the planes Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has asked for to “close the sky” and protect Ukraine from Russian air and missile attacks. In this article, Loukas Christodoulou looks at how suitable they are for the job.

• The European Union on Friday, the first anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, agreed to a new round of sanctions against Moscow, Deutsche Welle (DW) reported.

• This comes as the tenth sanction package to be adopted by the EU member states.

• A group of archaeology researchers were taken hostage last Sunday by men demanding a cash ransom.

• An Australian professor has been released in Papua New Guinea more than a week after he was kidnapped.

Environment

• Used face masks, supermarket bags, and food packaging all hold an abundance of potentially usable raw materials. Yet, producing more of these single-use plastics has proven to be considerably less expensive than recovering and recycling them.

• Used face masks, supermarket bags, and food packaging all contain a wealth of potentially usable raw materials.

• A stand-off over the federal government’s climate plan is intensifying as the Greens refuse to back the policy in its current form.

• The 19th century landscape paintings hanging in London’s Tate Britain museum looked awfully familiar to climate physicist Anna Lea Albright. Artist Joseph Mallord William Turner’s signature way of shrouding his vistas in fog and smoke reminded Albright of her own research tracking air pollution.

Energy/Transportation

• Some Michigan residents faced a fourth straight day without power as crews worked to restore electricity to more than 165,000 homes and businesses in the Detroit area after last week’s ice storm. In hard-hit southeastern Michigan, the state’s two main utilities — DTE Energy and Consumers Energy — reported about 165,000 homes and businesses without power Sunday evening. Wednesday’s ice storm coated lines and trees with a half an inch of ice or more. California, meanwhile, was getting a brief break Sunday from a powerful weekend storm that left Los Angeles area rivers swollen to dangerous levels and brought snow to low-lying areas.

• The government has “significantly underestimated” coal and gas emissions in its Safeguard Mechanism to curb big carbon polluters, according to new analysis by Climate Analytics. Callum Foote reports.

• A new report by Climate Analytics has found that emissions from the LNG and coal industries in Australia would continue to increase by 2030, not fall, and this would be driven by the unlimited availability of cheap carbon offsets. There is a significant chance this availability would also enable new gas and coal developments which do not presently exist.

Wildlife/Nature

• When Don’t Look Up came out, many film critics didn’t seem to get it, or, more generously, didn’t like what it had to offer. The New York Times called it “frantic, strident and obvious.” Rolling Stone said it was a “bomb of a movie, all inchoate rage and flailing limbs.” The film has a 56 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is not good.

• As an animal activist, I found it extremely relatable, both when the movie first came to Netflix and on my most recent rewatch. The plot centers on a group of scientists trying to raise the alarm about an approaching comet. It was intended to bring to mind climate change. But the film could be about any issue which the public, and more importantly, the government, finds too unbearable to acknowledge.

• As the number of grizzly bears has grown, so has interest in removing them from protection of the Endangered Species Act.

• It’s too soon. Despite the truth of more bears, some lingering trends have potential to put their still-tentative recovery in reverse.

Overpopulation

• “The fundamental problem is not that people cannot have children, but that they cannot afford it,” said Lu Yi, a 26-year-old nurse in Sichuan, the province that recently lifted birth limits. She added that she would need to earn at least double her current monthly salary of 8,000 yuan, or about $1,200, to even consider having children.

Finance

• The United States was sharply critical of Germany’s energy dependence on Russia, imposing sanctions on the construction of pipelines carrying Russian gas beneath the Baltic Sea to Germany (if not, as a now-refuted report by …

• The Washington Post favors cuts over human welfare. Exactly the kind of perspective Bezos deemed well worth putting his money behind.

• They have become the outsourcing mandarins, consultancy companies which have served to degrade expertise in the public sector while diminishing the quality of services.  Along the way, they have charged astronomical fees in giving repeatedly flawed advice.  Consultants, packaged as all wise gurus, have become the great confidence tricksters.

• Embracing the inner voodoo of consultancy had the effect of discouraging in-house contributions and solutions within government and the broader economy.  The result was a strange plea to those outside the public sector, resulting in what can only be described accurately as the consultacracy.

• I remember sometimes in 1980, the last year of the Jimmy Carter administration, when a couple of economists from the US Department of agriculture visited a few of my colleagues at the US Environmental Protection Agency. They wanted to discuss the costs of transforming conventional agriculture to sustainable farming.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Former Democratic US President Jimmy Carter, who is spending the last stage of his life in home hospice care at the age of 98, will be most remembered not only for his humanity and humility…

• European Commission Meeting Brussels, 24 Feb 2023 Vice-President Schinas receives Mr Chuck Robbins, CISCO CEO

• Twitter laid off at least 200 of its employees on Saturday night, three people familiar with the matter said, or about 10 percent of the roughly 2,000 who were still working for the company. Elon Musk, who acquired the social media platform in October, has steadily pared back its work force from about 7,500 employees as he has sought to reduce costs.

• In a timely twist of fate, we now learn that the EU’s buttoned-up bureaucrats are not as squeaky clean as they make themselves out to be. Greek MEP Eva Kaili, also a European Parliament vice-president, was caught red-handed by Belgian authorities with bags of cash stashed away in her house, along with four other ex-officials also supposedly in on the scheme. It turns out that the “unidentified Gulf state” involved was indeed Qatar – a sheikhdom that is no stranger to blank cheque diplomacy and getting influential figures to do their bidding. Whether this was just a case of quid pro quo gone wrong is anyone’s guess. In many ways, FIFA was Qatar’s gateway drug to the upper echelons of the European Union.

• Switzerland, where football’s governing body happens to be headquartered, is considered the gold standard insofar as upholding ethics and morals is concerned. The fact that the Qataris managed to sway FIFA’s vote in their favour for the World Cup hosting rights via backchannel wheeling and dealing may well have rendered senior EU politicians fair game in their eyes.

• Earlier, Jennifer Vaden Barth, a creative Strategist at Google, said that the “layoff impacted very talented and highly rated professionals”.

• Barth, who had worked at Google for 15 years said that “layoffs hit women particularly hard, especially women over 40″.

• The government will announce the new post – the coordinator for cyber security – on Monday when it assembles business and government leaders for a meeting that aims to step up defences in corporate and public systems.

• The new co-ordinator, who is yet to be named, will be backed by a National Office for Cyber Security within the Department of Home Affairs to co-ordinate work across the government.

• My 72 hours in Karachi have been really crazy.

• Dashing from pillar to post trying to squeeze in visits to relatives and friends alongside interviews of 2 feminist activist-artists for my unfolding book project on Queer Pakistani Performativities, and a third with the first Black Pakistani woman elected to parliamentary office for the major political party in the province of Sindh, the PPP or Pakistan People’s Party; chatting with my friend’s driver (who has been kindly transporting me hither n thither), about the economic meltdown that is making it almost impossible for the working classes to make ends meet; to being invited to dine in style at Karachi’s poshest restaurants and homes— all of this has reminded me yet again, how paradoxical and class-riven a place is Pakistan.

• Two siblings in Utah have barricaded themselves in a bedroom at their mother’s home in defiance of a judge’s order to return to the custody of their father, despite state child welfare investigators determining that he had sexually abused the children.

• Joe Biden’s recent performance in the State of the Union message delivered to the U.S. Congress is being hailed as the start of his campaign for reelection as President in 2024. Nevertheless, the best thing that Biden could do right now would be to announce that he will not be a candidate, thus inaugurating an open contest for the Democratic nomination.

• According to a new poll, 63% of U.S. Democrats think that Biden should not run again, and the reason cited by virtually all of them is his advanced age (80) or characteristics related to age (halting speech, for example). These seem to me the least important reasons for Biden to decline to run again. In fact, the cavalier ageism of many people who would not dream of opposing someone’s candidacy on the basis of race or gender is contemptible. Three factors seem far more important: the advantages of an open fight for the nomination, Biden’s deficit of charisma, and, most important, his uncritical commitment to a bellicose, imperialist foreign policy.

• 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.

• Until recently, a close confidante of former US President Donald Trump and his pro-Israel circle, Haley wants to be the next United States president. On February 14, she officially declared her candidacy and, starting February next year, she will be officially competing against her former bosses in the Republican primaries.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Wow, can you believe all these features? Designed in the U.S.A.? Eco-friendly? And look at this packaging! Solid. Solid try, but no!

• In another text chain, the two, along with fellow host Sean Hannity, discussed getting a reporter fired for tweeting out the fact that there was no evidence of voter fraud. (The host eventually took down the tweet.) The documents also show extensive chatter from Fox executives indicating that they knew Biden had won, even as they encouraged the Big Lie on-air.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Several independent publishers have had their books removed from Kindle Unlimited because they breached an exclusivity agreement with Amazon. The actions of the book giant are covered by the mutually agreed terms. However, in many cases, it’s not the authors who breached the agreement, but pirate sites who copied them, as pirates do.

• A group of human rights lawyers condemned what it said was the heavy-handed way the boys were treated.

• What is it about the past that some young people find unbearable? After all, no one is expecting them to live through it. Indeed, some of us who did find the present infinitely worse. The vandalism of Roald Dahl’s writings for children by “sensitivity readers” to make them “suitable”, has brought the wickedness of rewriting, or eliminating, the past and evidence of it to the forefront of our discourse. It would also have Dahl (with whom I once spent an evening: shrinking violet he was not) turning in his grave. Sadly, it goes far beyond children’s books, and indeed books generally: films, statues, television programmes, indeed, whole historical ideas must now be modified to please ill-educated and inexperienced tyros, if they are allowed into the public arena at all. Are we really so delicate? Why tolerate this lunacy?

• “It is not the earthquake, but a corrupt and profit-oriented order that is to blame for the death of the people” was roughly the motto of the meeting that was to take place at the harbour in the district of Kadıköy to issue a public press statement. The police were deployed with a large contingent and practically sealed off all entrances. However, most of the members of the crisis coordination managed to get to Khalkedon Square, where the police encircled the participants at several points. Demonstrators responded by chanting “Government, resign!”

• The Amed (tr. Diyarbakır) based organisation is outraged that even after a disaster like the 6 February series of earthquakes, the Turkish authorities continue their “war on the free press” and alarmingly deteriorate the working conditions of media professionals. The accusations against the government range from intimidation and harassment to physical violence, arrests and arbitrary investigations, to digital persecution aimed at preventing critical reporting on the state’s failures in the aftermath of the earthquakes.

• A Spanish woman imprisoned in Iran for three months on espionage charges after she was arrested during anti-government protests has been released, Spain’s government said Sunday.

• Ana Baneira Suarez was 24 years old when she was arrested, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) revealed at the time.

• A Spanish woman imprisoned in Iran since November on espionage charges after she was arrested during anti-government protests in November has been released, Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares said on February 26. [...]

• Iran, which has blamed “foreign adversaries” for protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in morality police custody.

• In September, Tehran said nine Europeans had been arrested for their involvement in the protests.

• When I learned last month that Turkey had placed a $500,000 bounty on my head, part of me was flattered.

• Turkey has targeted me for years because I have used my platform as a professional basketball player to denounce its strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. His regime has revoked my passport, filed 12 lawsuits against me, and put my name on Interpol’s “Red Notice” list. It has come after my family too. The government raided my home in Turkey and imprisoned my father. It also seems to have gotten my brother fired from his basketball team and prevented my sister from finding a job. I was pretty sure I had been a headache for Erdoğan—the $500,000 was proof.

• According to human rights defense group OVD-Info, the basis of the latest case against the activist was a one-man anti-war picket that he held on February 24, 2023, the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. At his solo action, he held a sign that read “I’m sorry, Ukraine.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Prosecuting Assange for newsgathering or publishing sets a precedent that can be used against all media outlets. This would criminalize standard journalistic practices.

• Media outlets need to join together to defend the right to publish. Major outlets like The New York Times, Der Spiegel, LeMonde, El Pais and The Guardian have spoken up: “Publishing is not a crime.”

• They have been joined by a wide array of human rights, press freedom and civil liberties groups who have condemned the prosecution of Assange.

• The cost of keeping AM services running has surged since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which sent global energy prices soaring. Climbing electricity costs have forced some stations to reassess whether they really need AM channels anymore.

• Politico Europe deputy editor-in-chief Kate Day, who heads the news organisation in Westminster, told an audience in London’s County Hall on Tuesday: “Back in December we had 18 journalists in London. We’re now at 32, I think — I lose track a little bit. We badly need new offices.”

• The media caters to a particular demographic, telling that demographic what it already believes — even when it is unverified or false. This pandering defines the coverage of the Trump-Russia saga.

• On February 7, Seymour Hersh – arguably the most credible investigative journalist of our era – published a bombshell exposé revealing that the United States was guilty of blowing up the Nord Stream II undersea pipeline that was supposed to deliver natural gas from Russia to the Federal Republic of Germany.

• Hersh’s revelations were based entirely on classified information leaked to him by a member of the government with first-hand knowledge of the planning and implementation of the attack on the pipeline – a member of the government who clearly broke the law by violating his fiduciary duty not to reveal classified information to an unauthorized source.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In a campaign to begin on Monday, the AFP will ramp up its fight against foreign interference operations in Australia’s multicultural communities.

• Hillel, Black United Students and the Center of Pan-African Culture celebrated a Shabbat Friday focusing on Beta Israeli culture welcome to anyone. Student contributors decorated the multipurpose room in Oscar Ritchie Hall with pictures and biographies of influential Beta Israelis on every table. They also gave every student a pamphlet with facts about the community,…

• Consequently, Kamel declares that “those Jews will be annihilated in that war, and they will never rise again.” He reminds his congregation that Muhammad told his followers during a battle to shoot arrows at the enemy when that enemy got close enough, and adds: “This hadith [report] encourages shooting, using any available means – be it using arrows, like in ancient times, or bullets, rockets, grenades, like in modern times, or any other means, because shooting is one of the elements of force that Allah ordered. [Allah] said: ‘Prepare for them whatever force and steeds of war you can.’” Kamel thus issued a clear warning, and the local authorities and media should be paying attention.

• Speaking in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, Indian Islamic cleric Shabbir Ahmed Siddiqui, who is the imam of Jama Masjid in Ahmedabad, said that “Whoever gives [election] tickets to Muslim women is rebelling against Islam… This will weaken our religion.” Siddiqui argued that women should be forbidden from participating in elections on the same grounds that they are forbidden from attending mosques.[1] Siddiqui made the comments in an interview uploaded to the YouTube channel of The Indian Express daily.[2]

• In cities across Russia, for at least the second day in a row, police have been arresting teenagers who are allegedly part of a new youth subculture called PMC Redan, inspired by the Japanese manga series Hunter x Hunter. The teenagers are allegedly planning mass fights. Publication Baza reports arrests in St. Petersburg, Kursk, Novosibirsk, and Kazan.

Monopolies

Patents

Trademarks

• The new logo comprises five different shapes forming the word NOKIA. The iconic blue color of the old logo has been dropped for a range of colours depending on the use.

• “There was the association to smartphones and nowadays we are a business technology company,” Chief Executive Pekka Lundmark told Reuters in an interview.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• After several weeks of weird on and off snow, I think it’s finally starting to look spring-ish in Colorado! (I say until the inevitable March snowstorm happens)

• I’ve begun to wake my plants up for spring, so they’re slowly getting juiced up with fertilizer again. I moved two of my begonias (the angel wing, referred to as Judas Priest, and the black mamba, referred to as Limp Bizkit) into bigger pots because Judas Priest was choking itself to death and Limp Bizkit has gotten big enough to tip itself over if even breathed on the wrong way. Which I have done.

• The first quarter moon looked like an worthy target, so I decided to do some moon gazing, starting about 8pm. I focused mainly on the southern half, along the terminator line.

• I came across this forum after surfing the web… It is very cool to see people who want the old web back!! After making a gemini cap, I decided to make a forum account here…

Technical

• The title is gonna make people reading this from Gemini mad. Saw that a mile away. But hear me out.

• I just came back from g0v hackathon and decentralizing and Web3 has been a huge topic there. Heck even the Ministry of Digital Affairs joined discussion. That got me thinking. What can Web3 really do better than existing architectures? What is the value proposition? That led me thinking about my recent dive into GNUNet and rethinking about it’s capabilities.

• Don’t get me wrong; if you’re in a position to make email encryption work better, please keep up the good work.

• It’s just that if you’ve heard the cool kids say “I have such-and-such super supreme secure cipher app, that’s what people should use for communication, and email shall be insecure”, I’m like… what I hear is someone saying “I’ve got locks on my house so I don’t need to wear pants in public”. It’s kind of a non-sequiteur. Of course we want secure email.

• A couple of really good things have happened since the era of PGP. Remember, PGP preceded SSL and TLS (and with them HTTPS). It was released in 1991 when an email was less secure than a postcard. Everyone could read everything, and spoof as anyone.

• These days, we have DKIM to fight against tampering and spoofing (this also helps against “efail” type attacks, and against mitm), and we have TSL encryption between client and server and between server and server.

• I ordered a Pinetime smartwatch a couple weeks ago and it finally came on Friday. Here’s some of my first impressions so far, which I hope might be useful to someone seeing as how most of the videos and articles you find out there are at least a year old and it looks like the software has come a long way since then.

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

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