● 02.28.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 28/02/2023: qBittorrent 4.5.2 and Godot 4.0 RC 6

Posted in News Roundup at 4:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

• SmartOS isn’t nearly as well known as some of the other UNIX or Linux-like operating systems built for virtual machines

• Moving to the cloud is a critical business initiative for many organizations. According to Flexera’s 2022 Tech Spend Pulse, 65% of respondents state that cloud and cloud migrations are one of their top priorities for the year ahead. As organizations press forward on digital transformation plans, they are moving more

Audiocasts/Shows

• This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we will be discussing what makes Linux secure? Then we talk about Flatpaks getting their eviction papers in Ubuntu Flavors. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks.

• Coming up in this episode

• 1. Plasma’s Kind of Hot Right Now

• 2. Brush your passwords

• 3. Browser Watch!

• 4. A little feedback

• 5. And a little FOCUS

• 0:00 Cold Open

• 1:33 Akademy Awards

• 3:22 Plasma 5.27

• 24:33 Your Last Pass… Word

• 47:05 Browser Watch!

• 55:36 The Mailbag

• 1:05:35 Community Focus: Vashinator

• 1:08:08 App Focus: ClamAV

• 1:20:24 Next Time: EndlessOS History

• 1:22:25 Stinger

• Listen now (20 min) | The Lunduke Journal of Technology Podcast – Feb 27, 2023

• Gearing up for the big radio show later this Spring!

• Join Josepha as she discusses her top 3 takeaways from the first-ever WordCamp Asia in Bangkok!

Applications

• The qBittorrent project aims to provide a Free Software alternative to µtorrent. qBittorrent is an advanced and multi-platform BitTorrent client with a nice user interface as well as a Web UI for remote control and an integrated search engine. qBittorrent aims to meet the needs of most users while using as little CPU and memory as possible. qBittorrent is a truly Open Source project, and as such, anyone can and should contribute to it.

Instructionals/Technical

• How can you install Docker desktop on Linux? In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Docker desktop on Kali Linux.

• This brief tutorial explains how to solve “error: required key missing from keyring” in Arch Linux, EndeavourOS and Manjaro Linux.

• Nano is a popular text editor used in Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It is a powerful and easy-to-use tool that can help you create and edit files quickly and efficiently. However, if you are new to Nano, you might be wondering how to save and quit your work.

• It’s very simple and easy to create a hotspot from your network card to get other devices to connect with the internet using the linux-wifi-hotspot tool that turns your network card into a hotspot.

• In this guide, we will show you how to install and use Neovim on Ubuntu systems Neovim is a refactor, and sometimes redactor, in the tradition of Vim.

• In this guide, we will show you how to install Discord on Ubuntu Systems with two different methods. D

• If you are working with Linux and managing a network or a server, chances are you have heard about iptables. iptables is a powerful tool used to manage network traffic by filtering packets, and its use is essential to ensure the security of your system. However, iptables can be complex and challenging to master, especially when understanding chains and targets.

• This is is mostly written after-the-fact without good notes.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LXDE Desktop on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Jellyfin Media Server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Prometheus on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Prometheus is a powerful and flexible monitoring solution that is well-suited for modern cloud-native applications and infrastructure.

Games

• The Steam Deck has been about a year on the market now (it started shipping at the end of February 2022). This first anniversary is a good chance to review what has happened since then.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

•  The version of SteamOS that first came with the Steam Deck wasn’t Valve’s first attempt at making a Linux distro. It was actually version 3.

• Before then, SteamOS used the GNOME desktop environment. But for the Steam Deck, Valve chose KDE Plasma instead.

• GNOME is a more popular and arguably more mobile-oriented Linux interface. So why go with Plasma instead? We can’t speak for Valve, but here are several good reasons.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• ImageMagick is an incredibly popular image processing library that a huge number of open source image editors make use of — the latest being Conjure.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• When it comes to modern operating systems for PowerPC-based systems like pre-Intel Macs, or other PowerPC-based systems like older or newer AmigaOS-compatible systems, there is an increasing lack of options. For 32-bit PPC, official Linux support has been dropped already, leaving only unofficial builds and of course AmigaOS as well as AmigaOS-like operating systems. So what do you do if you have a PPC-based Mac system lying around which you do not simply want to run the same old, unsupported copy of MacOS on? In a recent video, [Michael MJD] decided to give MorphOS 3.17 a shot on a Mac G4 Cube.

BSD

• Somehow, I’ve written 28 “We Get Letters” columns for the FreeBSD Journal. The latest is out.

Fedora Family / IBM

• At the Mobile World Congress, Red Hat today extended its effort to make the Kubernetes-based Red Hat OpenShift platform a foundation for edge computing by extending alliances with NVIDIA and partnerships with Samsung, Airspan, Druid Software and OMRON.

• At the Mobile World Congress event today, Red Hat, in collaboration with IBM Research, launched an open source project to capture power usage metrics from Kubernetes clusters.

• When the ENIAC computer was introduced in 1946, it was housed in a huge room—1,800 square feet—and weighed 30 tons. It had to be assembled in place, and it wasn’t going to be moved. The era of electronic computers had arrived, but only for an elite few. The idea of edge computing was science fiction—unbelievable science fiction at that. My, how things have changed.

• The IBM mainframe computers, introduced in 1952, became the standard of computing for corporations and government agencies in the 1960s and 1970s. Those of us old enough can remember, for example, getting their home water bill in the form of a punched card with the words “Do not fold, spindle or mutilate” on it. These mainframe computers moved processing to the corporate headquarters. Sales from cash registers, for example, would be sent to headquarters on punched paper tape where it could be read into the mainframes for reporting.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Answering a question from an Ubuntu user about the possibility of a minimal Ubuntu ISO image, the developers confirmed that an official minimal ISO image (less than 200MB) is under development.

• The said work is already underway and has progressed a lot. The plan is to introduce an alternate minimal installer for the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster release.

• Here are all the details.

Devices/Embedded

• NanoPi R6S is both a mini PC and a router based on Rockchip RK3588S processor. I received some samples in November and started the NanoPi R6S review with OpenWrt/FriendlyWrt quickly testing the 2.5GbE interfaces and routing with iperf3, and it worked pretty well. But using a system with an octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor and 8GB RAM as an OpenWrt router only feels like a waste of resources, so I wanted to install a more versatile operating system – Ubuntu 22.04 – for further testing.

• FriendlyELEC provides various images on the Wiki either booting from an SD card, installing from a MicroSD to the eMMC flash (aka eFlasher imagers), or flashing through USB with Windows tools. I like the eFlasher images since the OS runs from the internal eMMC flash and no special tools are needed. I had just used the FriendlyWrt eFlasher image, so I thought switching to the Ubuntu 22.04 eFlasher imager image would be a breeze.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Two years ago I started an experiment to see if I could replace my personal laptop with my Librem 5 with a lapdock (spoiler: I could). A year later I wrote a follow-up post that talks about my impressions of the Librem 5 and lapdock kit as a personal computer.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Rundeck is an open source software used to quickly automate manual tasks. Use it to create workflows consisting of commands, scripts, and APIs. These workflows might include software management, configurations, and scheduled events. Rundeck logs these activities for transparency and troubleshooting. How can Rundeck address the example of a developer needing an environment in the organization’s cloud? Consider the following points.

• In today’s digital age, hospitals increasingly rely on technology to provide quality patient care and manage operations. However, the high cost of proprietary software solutions can be a significant barrier for hospitals, particularly in low-resource settings.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• The Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) 2023 took place on the 4th and 5th of February. This was the first in-person FOSDEM since 2020, and for this reason, coming back to the good ol’ ULB building felt very special. The event was just like we left it in 2020: lots of people, queues in front of the most popular rooms, queues for the food trucks, mud, booths, many many developer rooms and talks to see, and this was just like a reunion between old friends.

• As the Profiler team is very distributed, just like the rest of Mozilla, it’s been also great seeing each other again, living this event together, and strengthening our relationships around some carbonade flamande, meatballs, waffles, and (edible) mushrooms.

• The Firefox Profiler was very much represented there, with no less than 5 talks in 3 different rooms!

• Here is a quick overview of these talks as well as links to the slides and videos.

• The talk took place in the JavaScript room, at the very last slot on Sunday.

• This was mostly an introduction talk about the Firefox Profiler. Julien talked about what a profiler is, described how to capture a profile, and showed how to navigate in the Firefox Profiler UI like a pro. He explained that measuring is always better than guessing in the performance world.

• Indulge me for a minute; I’d like to tell you about a conference I’m helping organize, and why. But first, I want to tell you a story about measuring things, and the tools we use to do that.

• Specifically, I want to talk about thermometers.

• Even though a rough understanding of basic principles of the tool we now call a thermometer are at least two thousand years old, for centuries the whole idea that you could measure temperature at all was fantastical. The entire idea was absurd; how could you possibly measure an experience as subjective and ethereal as temperature?

Programming/Development

• In short: in my experience, if a single programmer builds something, it’s often hard for others to maintain later. There are several possible reasons why. Even great programmers fall into this trap!

• This post is anecdotal from my own experience, so it might not be right or apply to you. But here goes:

• A lot of software is built by one person. It might be an entire product built by a lone developer or a significant piece of a system.

• When this happens, I’ve observed that code written by a single developer is usually hard for others to work with. This code must’ve made sense to the author, who I think is very smart, but it doesn’t make any sense to me!

• One more time! We’ve now fixed all critical regressions we are aware of, so things are looking great for the stable release!

• With the release of more flexible I/O support, the moteus controller auxiliary port can be used to monitor encoders using an onboard UART. Now, with firmware release 2023-02-01, those UART pins can be used as an arbitrary logic level serial port controlled by the application!

• I’ve managed to come up with a static site workflow that I think is as good as WordPress. Here’s the details…

• Cast your mind back to January 2022, dear reader, when I wrote a post about managing content with Jekyll. Shortly after writing it, I realised it was bloody hard to do, so I went back to WordPress.

• I didn’t make the decision to go back to WP lightly; I considered my options (of which there were many) but decided, at the time, that good old WP was the best of the bunch.

Perl / Raku

• The Raku Programming Language Documentation Team has released the newly reformatted documentation site after what has been a multi-year project in separating content from presentation, and bringing a more modern outlook to the documentation.

Python

• Python is a powerful programming language that can be used for various purposes, including file and directory management. In this article, we will explore the various ways in which Python can be used for managing files and directories.

• Python is a popular programming language that is widely used for developing a variety of applications. One of the features that makes Python stand out is its ability to return multiple values from a function.

• When working with files in Python, it’s often necessary to check the size of a file.

Standards/Consortia

• I want to interest those that haven’t used IRCs for a while through this article. This article generally leans toward the Debian Community but I hope it gives you some perspectives into IRCs and also interests you in joining the Debian Community as well.

• Most Generation Z developers I know have at least used slack, discord, discourse and so many other communication tools but so few have used IRCs so heavily and this could be because they find it boring and limited to what kind of content they can share and what community they are participating in. I got interested in using IRCs when I joined Debian and was able to navigate my way through using some online resources. While IRC may not be as popular as other communication tools like Slack or Discord, it remains a valuable tool for communication and collaboration within the open-source community. Its open-source nature and lightweight protocol make it a flexible and customizable tool that can be used in various settings.

• Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a communication protocol that has been around since the late 1980s. Despite its age, it is still a popular tool for communication and collaboration, especially within the open-source community. It is mostly known to be used by people that work on ‘boring’ projects or maintain legacy code (I can’t state how true this is though). Interesting facts about IRC include that it was created by a Finnish developer named Jarkko Oikarinen, who wanted to create a communication tool that would allow him to chat with his friends in real-time (the FaceBook of those days). The first IRC network was called EFnet, and it quickly grew in popularity as more and more people began to use the protocol for communication and collaboration.

• IRC allows users to connect to servers and join channels (chat rooms) where they can communicate in real time with other users who have also joined the same channel. Many open-source projects use IRC channels for communication and collaboration among developers. The Debian project has a number of IRC channels that are used for communication and collaboration among developers and users. I have at least interacted with three of them which include;-

Leftovers

• Imagine this: you walk into an office building on the day of a big client meeting. You’re feeling anxious, apprehensive. As you approach the receptionist and check in digitally for your appointment, you see a new option to receive a “personalized bio-soundscape” while you wait. You could use a distraction, so—why not?…

• While not primarily useful for telling the time, nuclear clocks could allow scientists to test humankind’s fundamental understanding of how reality works.

• Last week I’d rushed back to my desk for a client meeting, when I heard the sound of a large truck idling outside. A driver had decided the street under our balcony was a fabulous place to stop and idle their behemoth while they did who knows what.

• “Welcome to pre-9/11 New York City, when the world was unaware of the profound political and cultural shifts about to occur, and an entire generation was thirsty for more than the post–alternative pop rock plaguing MTV. In the cafés, clubs, and bars of the Lower East Side there convened a group of outsiders and misfits full of ambition and rock star dreams.“

• Music was the main reason I wanted to move to New York – I wanted to walk the same streets that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the National, Interpol, the Walkmen, the Antlers and Sonic Youth were walking. In my mind they’d meet up and have drinks with each other at the same bars, live close to each other, and I’d just run into them all the time myself. I’m not sure that romantic version of New York ever existed. Paul Banks used to live on a corner inbetween where I live and where my kids go to school now, but that is two decades ago (though for a while, we shared a hairdresser). On one of my first visits to New York before moving here, I had a great chat with Thurston Moore at a café right before taking the taxi back to the airport. And that’s as close as I got to living my dream.

• But now the documentary “Meet me in the Bathroom” (based on the book of the same name) shows that version of New York that only existed for a brief moment in time.

• “Meet Me In The Bathroom — ??inspired by Lizzy Goodman’s book of the same name — chronicles the last great romantic age of rock ’n’ roll through the lens of era-defining bands.“

• First days at work are scary. I still recall many instances where I lay awake at night before my first day at work, having an internal meltdown over what would happen the next day. Starting a new job is uncharted territory for most people. Even if you’re a veteran in the industry, there’s no denying that there can be a part of you that’s a bit terrified of what is to come.

• Understandably, a lot is happening. There are new people to meet, new projects and technologies to understand, documentation to read, tutorials to sit through, and endless HR presentations and paperwork to fill out. This can be overwhelming and, coupled with the considerable degree of uncertainty and unknowns you’re dealing with, can be quite anxiety-inducing.

• Two reasons motivated me to write about this subject. The first one being that back when I was a student, most of the discussion revolved around getting a job in tech, and no one talked about what happened next. How do you excel in your new role? Now that I look back, I think I assumed that the hard part is getting the job, and whatever comes after, I could probably figure out myself.

• Similarly, once I started working in the industry, most of the career-related content I came across was about how to go from one senior level to another. No one really talked about what to do in the middle. What about the interns and the junior engineers? How do they navigate their early careers?

• After completing three years of full-time professional experience as a software engineer (and a couple of internships before), I reflected on my time. I put together a list of tips and tricks I’ve employed while settling into a new tech role. I wanted to look beyond just the first couple of months and prioritize helping achieve long-term success.

Science

• President Tessier-Lavigne rejected Daily’s allegations, saying, “the first publication is almost never the final word.” The Faculty Senate also discussed the topic of graduate affordability concerns and upcoming accreditation.

Education

• The National University of Indigenous Languages will teach Indigenous tongues using immersion and initially offer four related degrees.

• Hello everyone! It’s finally March, or at least close enough to March for my purposes. First thing, we’re a month off from April Cools! April cools is a less-cringe version of April fools, where content creators like me publish content that is both genuine and totally out of genre. Last year I took a break from software engineering to write about microscopy. Other people wrote about singing church music, marathon food, and how to read rot13. If you’ve got a blog, I’d heartily recommend joining! It’s a lot of fun.

• Anyway, between that and a bunch of work obligations, this is going to be a real busy month for me. I’m still committed to updating the newsletter six times a month, but it might be a bit erratic: instead of the alternating 1-2-1 schedule I’ve been on, it might be 2-2-0-2 instead. Just a heads up.

Hardware

• He suggests split keyboards duplicate certain keys that straddle the split, such as B and Y. Alternatively, they could be made detachable.

• Like Daniel, I have an injury on one of my fingers that makes typing difficult. The damaged nerves and muscle in my right pinkie make it hard to strike Return or colon reliably, so over the years I adapted by using my ring finger to perform double duty.

• AAEON UP Squared Pro 7000 is an upcoming single board computer (SBC) based on a choice of Alder Lake-N SoCs up to the Core i3-N305 octa-core processor, up to 16GB LPDDR5 RAM, and 64GB eMMC flash. The board supports up to three displays and comes with a MIPI CSI port, dual 2.5GbE networking, three USB 3.2 ports, two RS232/RS422/RS485 interfaces, as well as several M.2 sockets for storage and wireless expansion that makes it suitable for machine vision solutions for smart factories, robotics applications, and retail/digital signage.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• >

• That the US is a deadly country for new mothers, particularly Black mothers, has become a well-known fact.

• Latvian dairy farmers have been experiencing a crisis for several weeks. This week, the Ministry of Agriculture will present a plan to support the sector to the government, while the industry is planning protests, Latvian Television’s broadcast De Facto reported on February 26.

• Did the coronavirus originate in animals or leak from a Chinese lab? Governments and health agencies around the world have been trying to answer that question since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Now, the U.S. Department of Energy has assessed with “low confidence” that it began with a lab leak. That’s according to a person familiar with the report who was not authorized to discuss it and was granted anonymity by The Associated Press to confirm its contents.

• Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are sounding the alarm over a diarrhea-causing superbug. The CDC’s data shows a noticeable rise in extensively drug-resistant strains of Shigella bacteria over the past half-decade.

• The woman shared her experience on TikTok, calling her BBL surgery “traumatizing.”

• In a letter issued today, four international medical and human rights organisations call on Turkish authorities to drop the baseless charges against the leadership of the Turkish Medical Association (TMA) at a time when doctors are urgently needed to tend to victims of the 6 February earthquake that have caused over 50,000 deaths in Türkiye…

• National Hawks Head, Lieutenant General Godfrey Lebeya, has commended the Directorate’s Serious Commercial Crime Investigation team for seizing R30 million worth of suspected illicit cigarettes in Limpopo.

• Due to a shortage of certain fruits and vegetables, British supermarkets have been forced to ration their supplies. This situation is likely to continue for some time, leading to fears of price hikes. But how did the UK get to this point? While most officials say that bad weather and rising energy prices are to blame, some observers are pointing the finger at Brexit.

• Former Queens community board member Richard Huber said he was “vindicated” by a classified US intelligence report that said the COVID-19 most likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.

• The largest analysis of how reproductive factors can influence women’s heart health found a direct link to increasing a woman’s risk of heart attack and stroke.

• As the city approaches the third anniversary of COVID lockdowns, Manhattan’s skyscrapers hover around the 50% occupancy mark.

Security

• In recent weeks OneNote has gotten a lot of media attention as threat actors are abusing the embedded files feature in OneNote in their phishing campaigns.

• In this post we will analyze this new way of malware delivery and create a detection rule for it.

• LastPass DevOp engineer’s home computer hacked and implanted with keylogging malware as part of a sustained cyberattack that exfiltrated corporate data from the cloud storage resources.

• A cyberattack on the Boston-based Pipefitters Local 537 union’s health fund resulted in the loss of $6.4 million.

• Threat actor uses the PureCrypter downloader to deliver malware to government entities in Asia-Pacific and North America.

• New QNAP Systems bug bounty program covers vulnerabilities in applications, cloud services, and operating systems.

• News Corp says a threat group, previously linked to the Chinese government, had access to its systems for two years before the breach was discovered.

• 5MB (or 4.8MiB) import limit. Sure. My modest pubring (111 keys) is 18MB. The Debian keyring is 28MB.

• May be, just may be, add another 0 to that if statement?

• So, until that happens, workarounds …

• Export each pubkey into a separate file. The import dialog allows to select them all in one go. But – of course – it will ask confirmation for each. So prepare some valerian tea.

• Now the changed defaults in gpg to “mitigate” this issue are trickling down to even the conservative distributions. Debian Bullseye has self-sigs-only on gpg 2.2.27 and it looks like Debian Bookworm will get gpg 2.2.40. This would add import-clean but Daniel Kahn Gillmor patched it out. He argues correctly that this new default could delete data from good locally store pubkeys.

• This all ends in you getting some random combination of self-sigs-only and / or import-clean depending on which Linux distribution and version you happen to use.

• The second part of our password manager series looks at business-grade tech to handle API tokens, login credentials, and more

• Protections against cross-site request forgery could be bypassed

• Victor Zhora has been at the forefront of coordinating Ukraine’s cyberdefense and describes lessons learned from fending off Russian attacks.

• Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly said the cybersecurity burden should no longer be placed on consumers.

• Why did it take 553 days from discovery to notify patients? Is the delay acceptable? Applying the standards for HIPAA-covered entities, and having reported on many breaches by now, DataBreaches believes a delay that long is not acceptable unless there are factors we do not know about in play. DataBreaches sent inquiries to both DHMS and their external counsel at Wilson Elser to ask for an explanation for the serious delay. No replies have been received.

• There is currently no notice on HHS’s breach site (but they often have a delay in posting), and there is nothing on the Texas Attorney General’s breach site. Nor is there any notice on DHMS’s website.

• Ransomware attacks have crossed a red line for many countries with continued merciless attacks. The threat to national economies and critical infrastructure marked a turning point. Governments are fighting back, and one of the strategies now routinely employed is infiltrating the servers and infrastructure of ransomware gangs. A recent offensive action against a top ransomware gang shows it can be a powerful tool both to rattle ransomware groups and provide real-time help to victims.

• The latest occurred last month. Top U.S. prosecutors revealed Jan. 26, 2023, a law enforcement operation involving 13 countries that infiltrated the Hive ransomware group’s infrastructure starting in July 2022. As a top U.S. law enforcement official characterized it: “Simply put, using lawful means, we hacked the hackers.” Hive was one of the most prolific ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) groups, with affiliates using its ransomware to execute attacks and extort more than 1,500 victims. For seven months, investigators had “clandestine, persistent” access to Hive’s control panel and database. That enabled investigators to swipe decryption keys without Hive’s knowledge and distribute those keys to 336 victims actively under attack. More than 1,000 decryption keys were provided to previous Hive victims, and authorities estimated the action meant US $130 million was not paid to the gang. What does this mean for the Hive gang, and what influence will this action have with respect to the broader ransomware environment?

• The websites of nine hospitals in Denmark went offline on Sunday evening following distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks from a group calling itself Anonymous Sudan.

• Copenhagen’s health authority said on Twitter that although the websites for the hospitals were down, medical care at the facilities was unaffected by the attacks. It later added the sites were back online after “a couple of hours.”

• The state shipped thousands of Texas driver’s licenses to an international organized crime group in a security lapse that is still under investigation, Department of Public Safety Chief Steve McCraw said Monday.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Flying killer robots used to be a nightmarish sci-fi fantasy—something that only existed in James Cameron movies or Michael Crichton novels.

• A heated controversy over audio recording in Green Bay, Wisconsin has resurfaced an important privacy issue that we have been monitoring for years: the placement of surveillance microphones in public places. When it emerged that live microphones had been installed in public hallways as part of the security system in city hall, a number of politicians objected, including a city alderperson and members of the Wisconsin State Senate, who subsequently filed a lawsuit. City officials, meanwhile, defended the mics.

• Similar deployments have come to light in the district attorney’s office in Nashville, and the city clerk’s office in East Providence, Rhode Island. The deployment of surveillance microphones in this manner needs to stop.

Defence/Aggression

• The United Nations is making a new push to convince Libya’s rival factions to hold presidential and legislative elections this year. But any optimism was dampened Monday by a lack of details and continued disputes. Abdoulaye Bathily, the top U.N. diplomat for Libya, told the Security Council in New York that the latest initiative aims for elections within 10 months.

• Joe Biden must think that he’s the world’s Rich Uncle. In a meeting with the so-called Bucharest Nine today he promised these former Warsaw Pact nations – which should never have been admitted to NATO in the first place – unlimited economic and military support. Nine more Ukraines if need be.

• America’s twenty-year involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated that nation building is often more expensive, prone to failure, and politically unpopular than expected at the outset.

• The violence in Ukraine is unimaginable. But before the violence, there was violence. The military conflict in Ukraine has received an unprecedented amount of media coverage. The major US networks have given more coverage to Russia’s war in Ukraine than they did to America’s war in Iraq.

• The U.S. government is set to green-light a more aggressive ‘hack-back’ approach to dealing with foreign adversaries and mandatory regulation of critical infrastructure vendors.

• US Department of Treasury has announced a fresh set of sanctions against entities helping Russia in the war against Ukraine.

• The U.S. military is intensifying its commitment to the development and use of autonomous weapons, as confirmed by an update to a Department of Defense directive. The update, released Jan. 25, 2023, is the first in a decade to focus on artificial intelligence autonomous weapons.

• Today marked 4th anniversary of “Operation Swift Retort” when Pakistan Armed Forces responded appropriately to India’s failed misadventure. It all started on February 26, 2019, when Indian Air Force planes carried out airstrikes in Balakot, a town in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

• Does President Joe Biden truly want to end the war in Ukraine?

• The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog, has grey listed South Africa because it deems the country’s financial controls being not strict enough to prevent financing of terrorist organisations and money laundering.

Environment

• Fresh volatility may hit the red hot global lithium market, potentially disrupting supplies of the critical metal needed for batteries that power the energy transition.

Energy/Transportation

• As smart contract security constantly evolves, property-based fuzzing has become a go-to technique for developers and security engineers. This technique relies on the creation of code properties – often called invariants – which describe what the code is supposed to do.

• South Africa’s power problem is taking a huge chunk out its GDP after its central bank estimated that $51 million is lost every day due to load shedding.

• Last year there was a boom of solar panels in Latvia. In total, 12,300 households have already installed solar panels or microgenerators with a total capacity of more than 80 megawatts (MW). More state aid is still available for those who want to install them, Latvian Radio reported on February 27.

• The world needs a new crypto crackdown, or else there’s the nuclear option—at least according to one of the world’s biggest financial bodies.

• Students advocate for the reinstatement of weekend and late-night public shuttle lines, citing affordability, public safety and equity concerns.

Wildlife/Nature

• In the livestreamed nest of white-tailed eagles in Durbe, Latvia, the eagle couple Milda and Voldis are preparing to lay eggs, ornithologist Jānis Ķuze told Latvian Radio on February 27.

• A dead dophin washed up on a Latvian beach on Saturday, February 25, reports LSM’s Latvian language service.

Finance

• Dozens of Twitter employees have reportedly lost their jobs last week, despite CEO Elon Musk promised layoffs had ended in November, after he made drastic cuts to the company’s workforce shortly after completing his $44 billion takeover.

• Twitter CEO Elon Musk has a message for employees: Loyalty means nothing. Over the weekend, Musk laid off more than 50 employees at the social media company, including one of his most vocal supporters, product head Esther Crawford.

• Data publushed on February 27 by the Central Statistical Bureau show that in January 2023, compared to January 2022, the level of construction costs in Latvia increased by 17.6 %.

• Tesla may receive over $300 million in tax abatements over the next two decades for a massive new expansion of its northern Nevada facility, the product of a 2014 deal for when the company first came to the area on the promise of new jobs and major investments in the area. The long-awaited sum will be voted on Thursday by the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development. Tesla projects it will bring in 3,000 jobs at an average rate of $33.49 per hour and invest $3.6 billion into the economy.

• A Tesla deal may come to fruition for its facility in Nevada on Thursday, which may allocate more than $300 million in tax abatements to the company. The Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development will hold a vote on Thursday to decide whether the company will receive the sum over the course of two decades.

• If Congress wants to spend taxpayer money on child care services, it should pass a bill authorizing that.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reached an agreement with the European Union (EU) on Monday (Feb. 27) on a new Brexit deal that defines the trade status of Northern Ireland.

• British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has struck a new deal with the European Union on post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland and he said it would pave the way for a new chapter in London’s relationship with the bloc.

• What would the deal mean for regional trade and diplomacy? What does it say about Sunak’s approach to foreign policy? Our experts ship off their answers.

• A rising star of the Italian left has won election to the leadership of the Democratic Party, the country’s second-largest political group.

• The protests happened four days after the Senate approved reform legislation that critics say poses a threat to Mexican elections’ integrity.

• Cairo’s relationship with its Gulf ally has become increasingly fractious in recent weeks after a Saudi official made clear that any future Gulf assistance ”will come with strings attached.”

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Canada is banning TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices, reflecting widening worries from Western officials over the Chinese-owned video sharing app. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says it might be a first step to further action. TikTok is wildly popular with young people, but its Chinese ownership has raised fears that Beijing could use it to collect data on Western users or push pro-China narratives and misinformation.

• Canada has banned TikTok on all government-issued devices, citing an “unacceptable” security risk to privacy and security. TikTok is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, which has drawn scrutiny from around the world.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The BBC apparently isn’t a fan of porn puns, especially ones that pertain to its own name. A live performance by Sabrina Carpenter was cut a tiny bit shorter after it was uploaded to YouTube, removing the singer’s riff at the very end that refers to an obvious sexual innuendo.

• Dear NYT,

• Because of your repeated transphobia and your doubling down by silencing your internal critics, I can no longer support your publication.

• I tolerated you continuously giving the anti-choice Douthat a platform, or Dowd’s anti-Clinton hatred and your biased coverage in 2016 contributing to the decline of US democracy (that you never did a mea culpa on) … but now you are just ganging up against one of the most vulnerable groups in our society, and showing your own illiberalism in doing so.

• The freedom convoy commission has delivered its verdict: dissent is now illegal whenever the government declares it so! Find out about the commission’s final report and what it means for Canadians and freedom lovers the world over on this important edition of The Corbett Report.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Let’s do an experiment! I’m going to quote an article in the popular press about a chatbot, and we’ll see if anything sounds weird. We’ll start under the subtitle How does $CHATBOT work?:

• The journalist can’t even write a factual sentence without immediate embellishment. Ruben is a handsome, well-respected genius who’s wit and modesty are matched only by the delightful freshness imparted by his regular bathing regime and impeccable aftershave choices. AI clearly stands for awesome-smelling individual.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Former Emory University President and Charles Howard Candler Professor of Public Health Claire Sterk is no longer a member of the Atlanta Police Foundation Board of Trustees as of Feb. 7. Her departure follows pressure from an open letter —spearheaded by public health students and professionals — released on Feb. 5 calling for her resignation.

• The third week of the YouTube Music strike is in full swing, and around 40 team members (contracted by Cognizant) are continuing to speak out against a return-to-office order that they say violates the terms of their employment.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The rain outside here in San Francisco is unyielding. This is perhaps a sign that I should let my feet rest after two long days of walking outdoors. While the rain falls, I have taken an opportunity to do a bit of writing and design. I decided to make a poster that shows the IndieWeb principles.

• The undersigned organizations and associations call on the Tunisian government to postpone launching a digital platform for subsidies compensation.

Monopolies

• U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT) are calling for the Department of Justice to continue investigating Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s anti-competitive practices. In a bipartisan letter after the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, both Senators urge the DOJ to take action.

Trademarks

Copyrights

• Last week was Fair Dealing Week, a chance for a wide range of Canadians – educators, students, librarians, archivists, and creators – to celebrate the important role that fair dealing plays in facilitating both fair access and fair compensation to copyrighted works. I ran a series of posts on Canadian education, fair dealing and copyright that will continue into the coming week.

• London’s Musicians’ Union has announced the completion of a “significant round” of collective bargaining negotiations with the BBC, Sky, and others, which it says will deliver “meaningful pay increases” to its approximately 32,000 members in the approaching years.

• The US Copyright Office issues a notification of inquiry soliciting public comments on late fees for mechanical royalty payments under the Music Modernization Act. The US Copyright Office is asking for public feedback on digital music royalty late fees and whether it should consider revising the current system.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• There’s a deluge outside my apartment’s window. My cat and I both are enjoying it. I’ve always liked a nice rain, and today’s is particularly heavy. I can tell by the way it washes off the nearest streetlamp, flooding the cap at the light’s top which was designed to withstand this much a torrent, but none more. I suppose the cat and I are easily captivated by the mundane in the same way.

Technical

• Continuing the conversation around Ctrl-ZINE, I have made more progress with the assembly of Issue.1.

• First, I made an 11-point list of topics/suggestions that people can take “queue” from in regards to *what* should be submitted, but additional topics and suggestions are welcome, and are welcome for submission. Tech-oriented content is what this zine is going for, but it’s not set in stone.

• 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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