● 02.28.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 28/02/2023: New KDE Release and Some Politics

Posted in News Roundup at 9:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• You wanna hear something crazy: I’ve had a Steam Deck for a year. Yeah. Valve sent me a review unit and it arrived here on February 24th, 2022. To think back on the state of the Deck when I first got mine. How far it has come in that time… The question is: should you buy a Steam Deck in 2023?

• What do you think about Ubuntu and Snap vs. Flatpak? I dig into some of your comments and answer your questions… This is going to be fun.

• As much as I love my rolling release distro being Arch Linux I know that this kind of system is absolutely not for everyone and shouldn’t be, so let’s go over some things to consider before picking yourself up a rolling release.

Applications

• There are a wide range of EDA tools out that are released under an open source license which let developers customize, and create their latest designs. To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we’ve compiled a list of 9 high quality free Linux EDA applications. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants to design electronic systems.

• Here are the latest updates to our compilation of recommended software. Open source software at its finest.

• It’s been an extremely busy month in February with a smorgasbord of new and updated group tests published.

• As always, we love receiving your suggestions for new articles or additional open source software to feature. Let us know in the Comments box below or drop us an email.

Instructionals/Technical

• The Linux operating system provides multiple filesystems, including ext4, xfs, tmpfs, securityfs, and many more. This guide demonstrates various ways to list all mounted

• In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk you through the process of building a powerful ML deployment stack on Ubuntu 22.04, complete with step-by-step instructions and commands.

• In this guide, we will show you how to download and install NoMachine on AlmaLinux, RockyLinux and CentOS systems. NoMachine is a cross-platform, fastest, and highest quality remote desktop tool that enables you to access the desktop of any other machine with NoMachine installed.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Bitwarden on your CentOS, AlmaLinux and RockyLinux systems.

• In this guide, we will show you how to install Discord on CentOS, AlmaLinux and RockyLinux Systems with two different methods.

• This is the ninth part of my syslog-ng tutorial. Last time, we learned about macros and templates. Today, we learn about syslog-ng filters. At the end of the session, we will see a more complex filter and a template function.

• You can watch the video or read the text below.

• https://youtu.be/2JZNuRbZc_8

• Filters are expressions to select, or in other words, filter log messages. They make sure that the right messages reach the right destinations. For example, you can use filters to discard debug level log messages, or make sure that all authentication-related messages are routed to your SIEM system.

• A filter definition is a collection of one or more filter functions. It consists of two parts. It starts with the word “filter”, followed by an identifier for the filter which you will use later to refer to the given filter. After that, it lists the filter functions with their parameters. You can combine multiple filter functions using boolean operators. Here is how its syntax looks like:

• Forum member tallboy asked how to install Vivaldi web browser in EasyOS. Forum member kinoe replied with a link to a Vivaldi appimage.

• I also posted a couple of replies. Yes, appimages will work in Easy, and .deb packages can be installed just by clicking on then. There are some caveats though, see my replies:

• LibreOffice comes in two variants. The latest version by number is the community edition which contains the latest features and enhancements and targets early adopters. And the business version is a little behind on features but it’s stable and solid.

• However, in the Arch Linux package repository, the names remained as “fresh” and “still”.

• Here’s how to install it.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The KDE team has announced the second point release of the Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment series: Plasma 5.27.2. This release brings fixes for reported user issues, as well as a more streamlined experience with improved usability and efficiency overall.

• Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.27.2.

• Plasma 5.27 was released in February 2023 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

• This release adds a week’s worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include…

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora Family / IBM

• CentOS hosted its annual CentOS Connect at FOSDEM 2023. CentOS Connect is a series of mini-conferences where people from across the Enterprise Linux ecosystem can connect at learn. CentOS Connect at FOSDEM is the largest of these events.

• This was our first return to being in person at FOSDEM, and we were very happy with the turnout and overall experience. We also ran the event virtually. We’re committed to running hybrid events, and we’ll continue to improve on the virtual experience. If you attended, either in person or virtually, check your email for a post-event survey. It only takes a few minutes, and it really helps us create better events for you in the future.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• The number of robotics applications being distributed by snaps just keeps growing! From toolkits and plugins to dedicated robotics launch files and ROS-based snaps, robotics developers keep sharing their apps with snaps

Open Hardware/Modding

• A circular saw is a must-have tool for anyone who wants to do even basic woodworking. But getting clean, straight cuts is a skill that takes practice to develop. To automate the process in order to perform clean cuts every time with zero effort, Red Tie Projects created this self-guided circular saw.

• You can build a simple and accurate clock with any Arduino board, an RTC (real-time clock) module, and a four-digit seven-segment display. But if you want to be inspired by a more unique design, check out Hans Andersson’s Time Slider. This clever clock features four sliders — one for each digit of the time.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Licensing / Legal

Programming/Development

Leftovers

• The Russian Union of Shopping Centers has signed a cooperation agreement with the Belarusian company Swed House, a home goods firm that sells items intended to look like IKEA products.

• Belarusian opposition leaders Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and Pavel Latushko are being tried in absentia in Belarus. They have been charged with conspiracy, organizing an extremist group, and undermining the government of Belarus and its state security.

• Human remains were found on a Caspian Sea beach in Makhachkala, Dagestan, the Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti reported on Monday, citing local law enforcement.

• If you were a kid anywhere in the last 30 years, it was nearly impossible to avoid at least some exposure to the Pokemon franchise. Whether that’s through games like Red and Blue to Scarlet and Violet, the brief summer everyone played Pokemon Go, or to other media such as the trading card game or anime, it seems to have transcended generations and cultures fairly thoroughly. And, if you’ve consumed all there is of official Pokemon video gaming, you may be surprised to know there are a number of slightly modified games floating around out there that can be translated onto game carts just like their official counterparts.

• PeriscopeFilm owners [Doug] and [Nick] just released a mini-documentary about the rescue of a large collection of old 35 and 16 mm celluloid films from the landfill. The video shows the process of the films being collected from the donor and then being sorted and organized in a temporary storage warehouse. There is a dizzying variety of films in this haul, from different countries, in both color and black and white.

• The rapid damage assessment report after the February 6 earthquakes also acknowledges that recovery and reconstruction costs will be much larger, potentially twice as large.

• Higher education will continue online, with earthquake survivors placed in university dormitories.

• When I was writing this post, I was in a unique level of flow state working with Talon. It’s probably gonna come across a little bit weird. Sorry!

• In my last article I discussed the voice control challenge, it is a very simple thing: put your hands at your sides and use only your voice to do your daily tasks. In essence, doing this makes you get exposed to what it is like for people who have to rely in these technologies on a daily basis.

• For many of you reading this post, this is just a thought experiment. This is something that you try once or twice and then go back to normal. It can be frustrating, none of your applications will work correctly. Selecting some UI elements may be difficult or even impossible.

• One way to look at a challenge like this is to help you train empathy for those who have to rely on this technology. it can make you feel powerless. This is a feeling that we rarely get to have as technologists.

• The thing that I really feel exemplifies the difficulty of the voice control challenge is controlling a text editor. Text editors require arbitrary keyboard inputs. They require pressing weird key binds. Doing this with voice control on a mac or iPad can be difficult to impossible.

• I made a nostalgic venture back into London’s Soho last week to meet up for a coffee and chat with writer and journalist Christopher Howse. We had arranged to meet at well loved patisserie Maison Bertaux on Greek Street, enjoyed by CNN only a few weeks ago, I noticed. It was not exactly Marlow getting the ship fixed and setting off upriver again but the drums of my past were certainly beating as I wandered up from Charing Cross. Not often these days did I meet with a broadsheet journalist, either. I have known my fair share, some also who gave up once it became impossible to make a living from it. Two I knew actually became barristers — funny, as, also last week, I had come across Harry Mount’s ‘My Brief Career’ in one of those appetising piles of free books you find at overland London railway stations. The kind you are encouraged to pluck like fruit and take back once read. As my train was late, I began reading Mount’s expose, and was immediately thankful to be taken away from news on my phone from Ukraine. It is a tidy account of how Mount travelled in the opposite direction from the two barristers by journeying instead from law to journalism. ‘A hilarious account of the splendid miseries of being a pupil in a barrister’s chamber,’ John Mortimer wrote. Mount is now editor of The Oldie, whose founding editor was former Private Eye and Soho luminary Richard Ingrams, and I wonder how the view is for him now.

• At least London seemed its usual eccentric and capricious self. I couldn’t help but notice the man in Leicester Square marching in front of me with the word ‘ELECTRICITY’ on the back of his high-vis jacket. ‘I’m shocked,’ he kept saying into his mobile phone, rather troublingly for an electricity man. ‘I am shocked!’ he repeated, perhaps too loudly this time. Leaving him to whatever power game he was playing, I sneaked a left into Chinatown and suddenly found myself beneath a marvellous sea of tethered bright orange lanterns, as if each chuckling away at the big grey sky. There were so many of them, all so light and crisp and beautiful, that I had to take a photograph. Only later did I realise each was bearing the name of a giant casino. In fact, serious gambling among London’s Chinese community is sufficiently common nowadays for the many first-time Chinese students heading to our universities being made aware of the impending risk of unlimited access to it. This sounds like something they may have once said to communists about to experience capitalism. On my left, meanwhile, was Wan Chai Corner, where many years ago I would eat delicious dim sum with a gracious backgammon-playing friend. By now I was really looking forward to seeing Christopher again. We are two quite different people who share many of the same interests — poetry, travel, the cosmos — or so I like to think. I reviewed his book ‘Soho in the Eighties’ in these pages a few years ago, and if ever a London memoir demonstrates an acute power of observation, it is this one. In equal measure, I am also a fan of his crescent-like ‘A Pilgrim in Spain’ based on years of travelling across the Castilian interior.

• This story, too, begins with noise. I was browsing the radio waves with a software radio, looking for mysteries to accompany my ginger tea. I had started to notice a wide-band spiky signal on a number of frequencies that only seemed to appear indoors. Some sort of interference from electronic devices, probably. Spoiler alert, it eventually led me to broadcast a webcam picture over the radio waves… but how?

Science

• Reinforced concrete is the miracle material which made possible so many of the twentieth century’s most iconic structures, but here in this century its environmental footprint makes it something of a concern. As part of addressing this problem, a team at TU Dresden in Germany have completed what is believed to be the world’s first building made with carbon-reinforced concrete, in which the steel rebar is replaced with carbon fiber.

Hardware

• Would you like to have a small digital oscilloscope? Do you have a spare BlackPill (STM32F401) board and a TFT display laying around? [tvvlad1234] presents us with a simple and educational digital storage oscilloscope design that barely needs any components for you to build one, and it’s packed with features just like you would expect from a self-respecting open-source project. Not just that — it can even stream data to your computer, in a format compatible with the TekScope software!

• Back in the 18th century, clockmakers were held in high esteem, as turning pieces of metal and wire into working timepieces must have seemed like magic at the time. The advent of mass production made their profession largely obsolete, but today there are several hardware hackers whom you could consider modern heirs of the craft. [Hans Andersson] is one of them, and has made a name for himself with an impressive portfolio of electromechanical clocks. His latest work, called the Time Slider, is every bit as captivating as his previous work.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• One of the last major international cities requiring face coverings on Tuesday announced it will end its controversial Covid mask mandate nearly three years after it was enacted to prevent the spread of the virus.

• A sugar replacement called erythritol — used to add bulk or sweeten stevia, monk-fruit, and keto reduced-sugar products — has been linked to blood clotting, stroke, heart attack and death, according to a new study.

• From the vantage point of three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, at times October 2020 seems like ancient history, although I do still remember it well. The pandemic was building as the first deadly winter approached, and it was not clear when (or if) there would be safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19. There was hope, of course, because the reports coming out about the clinical trials of the mRNA-based vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna sounded promising, but even the most optimistic wouldn’t have predicted that the vaccine would receive emergency use authorization (EUA) and start rolling out to high risk frontline workers a mere two months later and then to the high risk general public not long after that. The 2020 Presidential election was in full swing, as much as it could be given the pandemic-driven restrictions on large gatherings. It was truly a bizarre election.

• Anti-abortion counseling centers, often called “crisis pregnancy centers,” may soon face an existential choice in Minnesota: Leave behind their explicit agenda of dissuading people from having abortions or risk losing state funding.

• While some center operators could see that as a nonstarter, state Democrats may leave the door open for them to continue receiving taxpayer dollars — albeit under a battery of rules some Minnesota lawmakers hope could expand services for pregnant people amid the country’s rapidly shifting abortion landscape.

• As a devastating outbreak of Ebola spread to Tommy Garnett’s homeland of Sierra Leone in 2014, the conservationist had a hunch.

• Garnett long lamented the deforestation from farming, mining and logging in the region and wondered if tree loss had anything to do with the outbreak that had swept into Sierra Leone from a forested area of Guinea. With activities in his country at a standstill due to the outbreak, Garnett asked the ERM Foundation, the nonprofit arm of a sustainability consulting firm in London, to help him analyze patterns of deforestation.

• Generations ago, families fleeing tribal violence in southern Guinea settled in a lush, humid forest. They took solace among the trees, which offered cover from intruders, and carved a life out of the land. Their descendants call it Meliandou, which elders there say comes from words in the Kissi language that mean “this is as far as we go.”

• By 2013, a village had bloomed where trees once stood — 31 homes, surrounded by a ring of forest and footpaths that led to pockets residents had cleared to plant rice. Their children played in a hollowed-out tree that was home to a large colony of bats.

• As of Wednesday, the city will no longer require people to wear masks indoors, outdoors or on public transportation.

Security

• Plenty of cheesy quotes often say that total security stands on the opposite of total freedom. Undeniably, in computers and operating systems this is a fact. However, universal privilege used to be the norm, and restricting actions was a concept that wasn’t part of the vocabulary. Today, this idea is a must. Our machines are constantly interacting with the external world, exchanging information, and deliberately fetching and executing pieces of code and software from servers hosted in places we might never visit. Meanwhile, we trust and intertwine our lives with these machines.

• A system that is trustworthy is not the same as a system we must trust. This distinction is important because systems that need to be trusted are not necessarily trustworthy.

• This article will focus on the topic of access control on Unix-like systems. Sit back and relax as it transports you on a journey of discovery. We’ll unfold the map, travel to different places, allowing to better understand this wide, often misunderstood, and messy territory. The goal of this article is to first and foremost describe what is present, allowing to move forward, especially with the countless possibilities already present. How can we better shape the future if we don’t know the past.

• Government issues warning about latest tax office impersonation scam

Privacy/Surveillance

• An estimated 17 pieces of privacy legislation backed by both Democrats and Republicans are pending across the country.

• If anyone can call a government’s bluff, it’s Signal. It’s a nonprofit, which means it doesn’t need to make a bunch of shareholders happy by capitulating to ridiculous government demands in order to retain market share.

• While we’re waiting to see if the Trump-stocked Supreme Court is going to end the internet as we know it, the nation’s top court has been rejecting, without comment, other essential cases that really could have used another set of judicial eyes.

Defence/Aggression

• The German and French leaders have told Ukraine they must seek peace with Russia in exchange for a post-war defense pact, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

• Russian political scientist and political strategist Gleb Pavlovsky has died at 71, according to Simon Kordonsky, the head of the local self-government department at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. He reportedly died from an unspecified illness.

• Military anti-aircraft systems and units that previously belonged to Russia’s Ground Forces have been reassigned to the main command of the Russian Aerospace Forces, writes TASS, citing sources close to Russia’s Defense Ministry.

• Russian forces attacked multiple regions of Ukraine with Iranian-made Shahed drones on Sunday night, the Ukrainian General Staff reported on Monday. According to preliminary data, Ukrainian forces shot down 11 of the 14 drones that were used.

• Vladimir Putin expected a short and victorious war that would extinguish Ukrainian independence and force the country back into the Russian orbit. One year on, Ukraine has never been stronger, writes Vitaly Sych.

• The conventional wisdom at the tragic first year mark of the Russian-Ukrainian War is that President Joe Biden and his national security team have done an excellent job of managing support for Ukraine and challenging Russia’s invasion.  The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, an excellent Kremlinologist, summed it up this way in the current issue: “Biden has conducted a foreign policy of competence and moral clarity, skillfully balancing strength, diplomacy, and restraint.”  Well, I would take issue with the conventional wisdom.

• Biden and his secretaries of state and defense have pursued a policy of dual containment of both Russia and China that has contributed to the strengthening of Sino-Russian bilateral relations and created a worsening Cold War situation with both Beijing and Moscow.  Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger have been credited with manipulating the U.S.-Soviet-Chinese triangle in a way that gave the United States stronger relations with both China and the Soviet Union than China and the Soviet Union had with each other.  Biden will probably be credited with contributing to the worsening of these bilateral relations and weakening the U.S. geopolitical situation in general.

• The uprising in Iran has transformed into a postponed earthquake, one that is inevitable and most likely will be very destructive. The pent-up anger and frustration will surely come to the surface again but in what shape or form is to be determined. Maybe it will take place when Ali Khamenei dies.

• The regime has lost all credibility and is a dead man walking. The voting that is taking place against the regime is through the dumping of the currency and the purchase of dollars and gold. Within the past month the dollar has gone from 37,000 tomans to 54,000 tomans, and all indications are that by the end of the Norouz holidays the dollar will go above 60,000 tomans.

• Things are escalating more and more rapidly between the US-centralized power structure and the few remaining nations with the will and the means to stand against its demands for total obedience, namely China, Russia, and Iran.

• Wizz Air, one of Europe’s largest budget airlines, is suspending flights to and from Moldova beginning on March 14. The company’s press service told the news outlet RBC that the decision is “difficult, but it’s the responsible one” given “recent events” in Moldova and the “elevated risk” in the country’s airspace. (It didn’t specify what “recent events” it was referring to.) Since the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, missile fragments have been found on Moldovan territory multiple times.

• TV and radio broadcasts in multiple Russian regions were interrupted by messages warning of impending missile strikes on Tuesday morning.

• In April of last year, an art teacher in Russia’s Tula region asked her sixth-grade class to draw pictures to show support for the Russian military in Ukraine. When one girl drew an anti-war image instead, the teacher immediately called the police. By the end of the following day, the Russian FSB and child protective services were involved. Now, the student’s single father is facing felony charges, and the student herself is at risk of being sent to live in a shelter.

• Vladimir Putin has signed a decree to honor the American actor Steven Seagal with the state Order of Friendship. The reason for the decoration is Seagal’s “significant contribution to the development of international cultural and humanitarian cooperation.”

• On February 20, the United Nations Security Council approved a statement, described in the media as a ‘watered-down’ version of an earlier draft resolution which would have demanded that Israel “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

• The intrigues that led to the scrapping of what was meant to be a binding resolution will be the subject of a future article. For now, however, I would like to reflect on the fact that the so-called international community’s relationship with the Palestinian struggle has always attempted to ‘water down’ a horrific reality.

• On February 20, the United Nations Security Council approved a statement, described in the media as a ‘watered-down’ version of an earlier draft resolution which would have demanded that Israel “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

• I’m not sure what’s happening inside Israel’s intelligence services, but it’s not sending the world its best when it’s done with them.

• Israeli settlers tore through the occupied West Bank on Sunday, violently attacking Palestinians and setting fire to their cars, houses, and businesses in what one rights group called a “pogrom” sanctioned by the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

• Campism generally splits the world into two antagonistic orders, or great ‘camps’ – in simplistic terms, it is the split between the camp of capitalism and the camp of socialism; the great Cold War rivalry between the United States, its NATO allies and (neo)colonies, versus the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics and its Iron Curtain puppet states; today, it’s the imperialist and capitalist West versus the other(s) opposed to Western hegemony – China, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela. With these distinctions in mind, reflecting heavily on the original split between capitalism and socialism that constitutes the very foundation of the campist worldview, an important question must be asked – why are some Western socialists and avowed anti-imperialists today proclaiming bourgeois capitalist states like Russia to be fighting for the great camp of socialism?

• Arguments made on social media platforms by anonymous commentators, publishings by pro-Putin ‘patriotic socialist’ political formations, and even the Russian communist party all claim that Moscow’s brutal invasion of Ukraine serves the purpose of destabilising US hegemony, challenging imperialist expansion through military organisations like NATO, and disrupting the exploitive Western global economic system. Frankly, these are selective claims that are as dishonest as they are delusional. Moreover, these are grotesquely revisionist and historically unfounded claims, flying disrespectfully in face of the theoretical contributions and revolutionary analysis of Marx and Lenin. We must turn towards historical and political fact in order to debunk such positions, ensuring that the revolutionary and socialist spirit and character of the Marxist tradition are not dishonestly distorted and denigrated to support a reductionist and campist view on the inter-imperialist capitalist rivalry underpinning the Russia-Ukraine war.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• One of the key things that Elon Musk promised in taking over Twitter was about how he was going to be way more transparent. He’s mentioned it many times, specifically noting that transparency is how he would build “trust” in the company.

Environment

• Demanding that all countries center climate justice as they take steps to transition away from fossil fuel-sourced energy, Fridays for Future leader Greta Thunberg joined dozens of Norwegian Sami people and their supporters Monday at Norway’s Energy Ministry to protest wind turbines that have been constructed on Indigenous lands.

• The hotter weather pattern might push the Earth into unprecedented territory next year.

Energy/Transportation

• Greenpeace warned Monday that nations are “once again stalling” as they enter the final week of talks on the United Nations Ocean Treaty, a pact the environmental group says would “safeguard marine life and be the biggest conservation victory for a generation” if negotiators get it right.

• It’s hard to imagine any place in the United States that is more precarious, more rugged, or home to people more tenacious than the North Slope of Alaska. A frigid region of tundra and coast roughly the size of Oregon, it is home about 10,000 residents scattered across eight communities, the largest of which is Utqiagvik, formerly named Barrow. The region’s economy is driven mostly by activities on and near the largest oil field in the country, Prudhoe Bay, which operates under some of the most extreme conditions on Earth. The North Slope is also defined by the rhythms of a much older set of Alaska Native subsistence practices, such as fishing, whaling, and caribou-hunting.1

• A fire broke out at an oil terminal in the town of Tuapse in Russia’s Krasnodar Krai early Tuesday morning, according to town officials.

Wildlife/Nature

• An unlikely confluence of factors, including climate change and online shopping, appears to be at least partially to blame for the uptick.

Finance

• Striking down President Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan would have devastating impacts on millions of borrowers, advocacy groups warned in a report released Monday, one day before the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments over the White House’s cancellation bid.

• One of the last remaining major COVID relief programs — the expansion of SNAP benefits, aka food stamps — ends this month, pushing about 32 million Americans off a “hunger cliff.”

• Chip makers who want access to billions of dollars in new federal funding will first have to figure out how workers will access affordable child care, per a new requirement from the Commerce Department.

• We reveal what should – and shouldn’t – be in your fridge, and the foods to store separately to prolong their life. Plus: the science-based tactics to reduce food waste and save money

• On cold nights when an extra pair of bed socks won’t cut it, discover your best alternative

• Financial podcasts have been featuring ominous headlines lately along the lines of “Your Bank Can Legally Seize Your Money” and “Banks Can STEAL Your Money?! Here’s How!” The reference is to “bail-ins:” the provision under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act allowing Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFIs, basically the biggest banks) to bail in or expropriate their creditors’ money in the event of insolvency. The problem is that depositors are classed as “creditors.” So how big is the risk to your deposit account? Part I of this two part article will review the bail-in issue. Part II will look at the derivatives risk that could trigger the next global financial crisis.

• The Equal Rights Amendment, which would codify gender equality in the U.S. Constitution, has been introduced in every session of Congress since 1923. It was finally passed in 1972, and yet never ratified. This week, the ERA will get its first hearing in 40 years when, on Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee meets to discuss a joint resolution to finally affirm the ERA. We speak to Zakiya Thomas and Linda Coberly of the ERA Coalition for more on the historic significance of this hearing and the century-long fight for constitutional protections against sex discrimination.

• A new analysis released Monday shows that insurance giants are benefiting hugely from the accelerating privatization of Medicare and Medicaid, which for-profit companies have infiltrated via government programs such as Medicare Advantage.

• More than 175 civil society groups spanning 45 countries urged the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—an alliance of mostly rich nations—to end export financing for oil and gas, warning in a joint statement Monday that failure to do so would compromise global efforts to keep “a livable future within reach.”

• Last year, President Joe Biden used his authority—as defined by the HEROES Act of 2003—to cancel up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt per borrower. The executive action was taken in response to the lingering health and economic impacts caused by Covid-19, and would help families and borrowers recover while closing racial disparities that widened during the pandemic. Right now, Americans owe nearly $1.8 trillion in student loan debt. On February 28, the Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments for two cases challenging this plan, Biden v. Nebraska and Department of Education v. Brown.

• Politically motivated consumer boycotts have played a central role throughout U.S. history.

• For all their supposed benefits, homeowner’s associations (HOAs) have a reputation of quickly turning otherwise quaint neighborhoods into a sort of Stanford prison experiment, as those who get even the slightest amount of power often abuse it. Arbitrary rules and enforcement abound about house color, landscaping, parking, and if you’ve ever operated a radio, antennas. While the FCC (at least as far as the US is concerned) does say that HOAs aren’t permitted to restrict the use of antennas, if you don’t want to get on anyone’s bad side you’ll want to put up an antenna like this one which is disguised as a set of HOA-friendly holiday lights.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The White House has mandated that federal agencies remove TikTok from phones and systems in a bid to keep U.S. data safe, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced Monday.

• Centre for Cyber Security warned last week that there was a risk of espionage in connection with having the Chinese app on state devices

• Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, acknowledged in a deposition taken by Dominion Voting Systems that some Fox News hosts endorsed false claims the 2020 election was stolen.

• When Rupert Murdoch is forced to answer questions about the 2020 election under oath, it becomes clear the extent to which Fox News was — is! — covering up what a loser (Rupert knows that) Trump is.

• Were early societies “states” in the modern sense? Nope.

• In testimony before the January 6 Committee, Ivanka and Eric Herschmann both failed to recall key details of Trump’s refusal to ask his rioters to leave the Capitol. For several reasons, one or both may end up remembering more of those details before a Jack Smith grand jury.

• On January 12, a tornado tore across central Alabama, including the historic city of Selma. Since then, community groups have been clearing roads and picking up the pieces from the damage. Simultaneously, the city is preparing for its annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee: a recognition of Bloody Sunday, the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

• As the ACLU of Alabama prepares for our annual trip to Selma to commemorate the historic bridge crossing on March 5, amidst such devastation in the city, I feel the immense tradition and history of Selma, a place where our elders accomplished so much to make voting rights possible. 58 years after the historic movement that led to the 1965 enactment of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and the legal enfranchisement of Black voters, I remain struck by the duality of what voting rights in Alabama has meant for this nation.

• On 24 February, marking one year since Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine began, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs published China’s position on the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis. In theory, its 12 points form the basis …

• Timothy Noah is an incisive commentor on U.S. politics. His recent New Republic essay, “How the GOP Lost Its Brain,” nicely documents the ways that the Republican party has become both increasingly anti-intellectual and incoherent since the days of Reagan. The GOP deserves to be skewered for its inconsistencies, absurdities, and lunatics. And its very real fissures ought to be analyzed with care, for they can grow, and contribute to the party’s weakening if they do. But it does not follow from these fissures that the GOP is an agglomeration of nihilists and no longer has “ideas.” It has ideas, and they are summed up in the acronym MAGA, which now defines both the Republican base and its major leaders and presidential aspirants.

• When Ron DeSantis was asked by a Fox News host two years ago if the United States is “systemically racist,” the Florida governor quickly responded: “It’s a bunch of horse manure.” He went on to boast that he had banned such ideas in Florida’s schools.

• It’s become frustrating how often people insist that losing this or that social media account is “censorship” and an “attack on free speech.” Not only is it not that, it makes a mockery of those who face real censorship and real attacks on free speech. The Washington Post recently put out an amazing feature about people who have been jailed or sent away to re-education camps for simply reposting something on social media. It’s titled “They clicked once. Then came the dark prisons.“

• In 1983, just before signing legislation that cut Social Security benefits, then-President Ronald Reagan declared that “we’re entering an age when average Americans will live longer and live more productive lives.”

• Calling her victory “a clear mandate for real change,” left-wing Italian politician Elly Schlein on Sunday was named the new leader of her country’s Democratic Party after winning against a centrist supported by the political establishment.

• Sen. Bernie Sanders warned Monday that without swift congressional action, the $5.8 billion in federal funding relied on each year by community health centers around the United States will expire on September 30, resulting in a devastating “primary care cliff.”

• Elissa Slotkin, the first Democratic hopeful seeking to replace retiring Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow, is the sort of candidate national Democratic strategists fantasize about. She represents a closely divided district in Lansing, after initially getting elected to a solidly Republican one, and she has a solid centrist voting record likely to appeal to the highly coveted white suburban mom demographic. She’s also a former CIA analyst who served three tours in Iraq. She has the same political CV, in other words, that delivered a clutch of traditional GOP congressional seats to security-minded women during the 2018 blue wave that granted House Democrats a strong majority in the midst of the Trump years. Pundits eagerly dubbed that landmark ballot “the year of the badass woman”—and they will no doubt be closely monitoring Slotkin’s Senate bid for further confirmation of this reassuring political trendlet.

• When Ron DeSantis recently threatened to end AP courses for all high schoolers in Florida, he did more than escalate the culture war that right-wing reactionaries are waging against “critical race theory” and anti-racism. DeSantis signaled his willingness to join a long line of Southern governors who have used racism to deflect attention from their failure to help people hurting in their states, especially poor and low-wealth people. Even if DeSantis never attacked Black history or trans people, moral leaders and impacted people should be standing up, speaking out, organizing, and voting because of the way his policy decisions have sacrificed the well-being of Floridians, especially the more than 10 million poor and low-wage people, be they Black, white, Latino, Asian, Native, LQBTQIA, or straight. DeSantis wants to argue about whether white students feel guilty when they learn the truth about America’s past, but he has been silent about the fact that 47 percent of Florida’s citizens are poor and low-income, including 39 percent of all white people in his state. Since 1979, income for the top 1 percent of Floridians has nearly doubled. But for everyone else, real income has actually fallen over the same four decades. That’s as true for poor white folks as it is for poor Black folks.

• If you want to suffer through Hollywood at its sappiest, you could waste an afternoon watching Mary Pickford’s 1917 tearjerker The Poor Little Rich Girl and its 1936 remake of the same name starring Shirley Temple (the original source material being a 1913 Broadway play by Eleanor Gates). Both films, as one could guess from the titles, explore the difficulties of being the child of plutocratic wealth. Pickford plays Gwendolyn, the neglected offspring of a mother who prefers high society to her daughter and a father mired in moneymaking schemes. Growing up in a chilly household, Gwendolyn finds friendship in the rowdy company of the warm if ragged working class, including an organ grinder and a plumber. Temple’s suffering young princess, Barbara Barry, has only one, and a negligent, parent, a widowed father immersed in business. Like Gwendolyn, Barbara also discovers nurturing kindness in the company of the immiserated, including yet another organ grinder.

• Argentine President Alberto Fernández wasted no time in sounding the alarm. A little more than two weeks removed from a January 6–style insurrection in Brazil—and following a series of violent crackdowns by Peru’s newly formed government—Fernández opened the seventh summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States in Buenos Aires with a warning: “We believe in democracy, and democracy is definitively at risk. After the pandemic, we have seen how the ultra-right has stood up, and it is threatening each of our countries. What we can’t allow is for this recalcitrant and fascist right to threaten our institutions.”

• When Sara Nelson agreed to come to Madison, Wis., to discuss the future of labor at an ideas festival on the University of Wisconsin campus in the fall of 2021, it was supposed to be just another appearance by one of America’s most engaged and energetic labor leaders. Then, Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, ended up having a pair of surgeries that required her to use a wheelchair for several months. Of course, she could have canceled the trip. But that’s not how Sara Nelson rolls.

• We speak with author Malcolm Harris about his new book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, in which he writes how his hometown in the heart of Silicon Valley and home to many tech billionaires has helped to reshape the economy by exporting its brand of capitalism to the rest of the United States and around the world. “It’s important to see the internet and its history as this relation between capital and the government,” says Harris in a wide-ranging interview.

• In October 2022, about eight months after the war in Ukraine started, the University of Cambridge in the UK harmonized surveys conducted in 137 countries about their attitudes towards the West and towards Russia and China.

• Argentina’s nominee for Best Foreign Film offers an urgent warning to democracies in Latin America and across the West.

• A study by the elite EU-funded European Council on Foreign Relations found the West is out of touch politically with the rest of the world. Most people in China, India, and Türkiye see Russia as an important ally, and they want multipolarity, not continued “American global supremacy”.

• On the edge of a forest just south of Atlanta, I sat in the shade of a gazebo on a hot day in May of 2022, speaking to two activists. Parkgoers sweated in their short sleeves as they strolled past a concrete wall, on which graffiti said DEFEND THE FOREST over a fist sprouting up from roots like a squat tree trunk.

• The two activists, along with many others, had taken the graffiti’s message to heart and were trying to stop large tracts of the South River Forest from being developed into a privately owned soundstage and a sprawling training center for police, dubbed Cop City. Since that day, the gazebo has been ripped apart by heavy equipment, eighteen activists have been charged with “domestic terrorism,” and one forest defender has been shot and killed by police.

• As chief U.S. House counsel for four years, Douglas Letter advised then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi through tense legal standoffs with the Trump administration. He helped shape strategy for the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, leading to contempt of Congress charges against Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro and subpoenas for five sitting members of Congress.

• Now, Letter, a Justice Department attorney for 40 years, has begun a new role as legal counsel for the Brady campaign, defending victims of gun violence and taking on gun laws, such as a local statute in Highland Park, Illinois, that restricts assault weapons like one used in a July 4 parade massacre. Letter said he carries with him lessons learned counseling House Democrats as they faced growing partisan hostilities and concerns for their safety.

• Responding to the deal agreed between the UK and the EU on the Northern Ireland protocol, Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay said:

• “We welcome closer cooperation between the UK government and the EU. Boris Johnson had promised an ‘oven-ready’ deal which has caused pain, division and turmoil for communities and businesses in Northern Ireland.

• “Hopefully today’s agreement marks a turning point when we can begin to heal these problems and strive towards much closer relationships.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• The AAUP,  the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) issued the following statement condemning the introduction of Florida HB 999.

• In 2022, India shut down the internet at least 84 times — more than any country, for the fifth consecutive year. Read “Weapons of control, shields of impunity: Internet shutdowns in 2022.”

• Access Now’s new report, “Weapons of control, shields of impunity: Internet shutdowns in 2022,” unpacks internet shutdowns in Myanmar and globally.

• Access Now’s new report, “Weapons of control, shields of impunity: Internet shutdowns in 2022,” unpacks internet shutdowns in Africa and globally.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• In a feature article published last Thursday, the well-known German weekly magazine Der Spiegel pointedly asked whether the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was “hunting” associates and supporters of Julian Assange.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Standing in the Seattle City Council chambers on February 21, an Indian-American tech worker named Naresh recalled the caste discrimination he has faced beginning at age 5 in India. His voice quivered with anger as he thought about the dignity denied to him. If he touched a dominant-caste person, he said, they would claim that they needed to “take a shower because they consider me untouchable.” Over the course of the meeting, many other oppressed-caste speakers joined Naresh, sharing their own experiences with caste discrimination—often in their own workplaces in the United States.

• When I was growing up, my Florida high school required me to endure a course called “Americanism vs. Communism.” I was hardly alone. Between 1962 and 1991, Florida mandated the class for all high school juniors or seniors in public schools. Each lesson had the same takeaway: “Americanism” was all good and “Communism” all bad.

• Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova said at a briefing on Monday that she’s received more than 50 complaints from jailed Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny, according to the Russian state news outlet TASS.

• Legal action has been initiated against 612 suspects so far, the justice minister has said.

• To residents of Memphis’s resource-poor, predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods, the Scorpions were easy to spot. The plainclothes patrols were known for driving their unmarked Dodge Chargers through the streets, often all too recklessly, sowing fear as they went, spitting venom from their windows, jumping out with guns drawn at the slightest sign of an infraction.

• To residents of Memphis’s resource-poor, predominantly non-white neighborhoods, the Scorpion units were easy to spot. The plainclothes patrols were known for driving their unmarked Dodge Chargers through the streets, often all too recklessly, sowing fear as they went, spitting venom from their windows, jumping out with guns drawn at the slightest sign of an infraction.

• After his creator went on a loathsome tirade declaring black people “a hate group” that white people should “get away” from, once-amusing office drone and comic anti-hero Dilbert has been dropped by hundreds of newspapers, his distributor and his book publisher in a rare move of decency and solidarity befitting the close of Black History Month. Online, his still-bellicose creator Scott Adams is whining he’s been “cancelled” for “being white.” Nope, many argue. It’s for “being a racist douchebag.”

• A coalition of more than three dozen progressive advocacy groups based in the United States and the European Union on Monday implored E.U. policymakers to stop pursuing challenges to the Inflation Reduction Act and urged governments on both sides of the Atlantic to start prioritizing decarbonization over corporate-friendly trade rules.

• As many Native Americans on Monday marked the 50th anniversary of the militant occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, participants in the 1973 uprising and other activists linked the deadly revolt to modern-day Indigenous resistance, from Standing Rock to the #LandBack movement.

• The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding, a move that was welcomed by some advocates as an opportunity for the nation’s highest court to protect American consumers from a lower court ruling.

• Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, in a recent interview with CNN’s Poppy Harlow, proudly showed off his newest invention: a tablespoon of olive oil added to a cup of coffee to bring out rich, complex flavors. The conversation took place in Italy and was meant to showcase Schultz’s commitment to the innovation and quality of Starbucks coffee as he gets ready to step down as CEO of the company for the third time.

• When Harlow asked him why he was in Italy doing interviews rather than sitting down with representatives from Starbucks Workers United (SWU) to negotiate a contract, he responded, “We want to and are willing to enter into bargaining, but we want to do it face to face. That’s what we think is the right thing to do.”

• On Monday morning, the FSB raided the homes of several Moscow anarchists, in connection with an inquiry into the existence of a Moscow branch of Network (“Set”), a leftist political association labeled “terrorist” and banned in Russia.

• With the police ever better funded (just as the U.S. military is), war has come home to roost in our streets, no less disastrously than it did abroad in the years of this country’s war on terror.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• We look at two cases before the Supreme Court that could reshape the future of the internet. Both cases focus on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which backers say has helped foster free speech online by allowing companies to host content without direct legal liability for what users post. Critics say it has allowed tech platforms to avoid accountability for spreading harmful material. On Tuesday, the justices heard arguments in Gonzalez v. Google, brought by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in the 2015 Paris terror attack. Her family sued Google claiming the company had illegally promoted videos by the Islamic State, which carried out the Paris attack. On Wednesday, justices heard arguments in the case of Twitter v. Taamneh, brought by the family of Nawras Alassaf, who was killed along with 38 others in a 2017 terrorist attack on a nightclub in Turkey. We speak with Aaron Mackey, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who says Section 230 “powers the underlying architecture” of the internet.

• After years of criticism about their inaccuracy, the FCC recently spent another $50 million (on top of the $350 million they’d already spent) on supposedly better broadband maps. But the end result is still a bit of a mess, with entrenched telecom monopolies like Comcast being repeatedly caught claiming to deliver broadband in areas that can’t receive service. Often to glean subsidies the company doesn’t deserve.

• Guest Post: How to maintain continuous network connectivity during movement.

• APRICOT 2023 starts today in Manila, Philippines! Here are some highlights.

• Guest Post: Investigating IETF activities relevant to the APNIC community at APRICOT 2023.

Monopolies

Patents

Trademarks

• And if that title didn’t really confuse you all that much, then you’ve managed to get the point. Eminem hasn’t been shy about asserting his intellectual property rights in the past, though much of his efforts on that front have actually been to the benefit of artists from his fights with record labels. That doesn’t mean that Em’s team isn’t capable of some IP missteps, however.

Copyrights

• Just this week, the United States Copyright Office (USCO) provided a bit more clarity, at least as to its views about US law and works generated by AI. While it affirms some of the limits that we articulated, it leaves open many questions about where exactly the boundaries of copyrightability lie.

• In 2018, Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN targeted a middle-aged couple who uploaded pirated content in breach of copyright. In exchange for a relatively small settlement and a promise not to infringe again, BREIN took no further action. After being caught for a second time, harsh financial consequences mean that the man and woman are no longer a couple.

• After more than a decade of litigation in Germany, key questions emerging from a Sony lawsuit targeting cheat maker Datel have been referred to Europe’s highest court. The lawsuit concerns cheat mechanisms created for Sony’s long-dead Playstation Portable that affected gameplay but ran alongside copyrighted code without directly modifying it.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Over the last 4 months (since my dance with c0v1d) I’ve been having ongoing health issues. So much so that I can no longer work full time. Of course the bills have to be paid so I find myself looking for alternative modes of operation.

• At first I though that freelancing might be the answer but that lacks stability.Some weeks you have income and others you don’t. One might think that a higher hourly rate is the answer but that approach is getting harder and harder to do in such a competitive market. A part time role could be the answer.

• I feel like I’m going overboard with the references. When I listen to podcasts, I practically never check the pages with references. But in this case, the four of us bring so much stuff to the table that deserves a link. If you can think of more stuff that needs to be added, please do so.

• One link I was unable to find was a post by James Raggi where he first mentioned the specialist class in Lamentations of the Flame Princess and ditching percentage thieves’ abilities for X-in-6 rolls with the d6.

• I was born and spent the first 32 years of my life in Oklahoma. I hate the place with a passion. For an example of how terrible it is: a couple years after I left, the governor called for a statewide day of prayer for the petroleum industry. I still try and keep an eye on the place. Occasionally I browse the r/okc and r/oklahoma subreddits, to get an idea of what’s going on down there. Last night, I stumbled on a very wonderful article, that I’m going to reproduce in full here.

• Fairbanks was inside a high-pressure bubble last night, and skies were clear. Not knowing how many more such opportunities I would get before we were overwhelmed by Alaska’s increasing daylight hours, I decided to head out to the boat launch for some stargazing. I was dressed quite stiffly in multiple layers of artic gear, expecting the temperatures to get extremely cold, and in fact they did drop down to -26 deg F at my viewing location.

• As I enter the Midnight, along the counter a few new heads turn to see, who’s coming in. It’s only me. As I carefully close the door to leave the cold wind outside, a whizzing sound can be heard — apparently emanating from my backpack. Ya ya, I know, it’s my trusted notebook grinding away on a build of emacs 29 … I turn to my favorite table in the corner, because it has a power outlet close. Hastily I retrieve the machine from my backpack and plug in the power supply. That very moment the whizz dies. make completed. Puh. No errors. Lucky me, I guess.

• Sometimes I read posts on Mastodon about allyship and it always reminds me of a longer discussion I had with my wife about the rights of women and microagressions and related topics and she didn’t care much about all that. The main point she came back to again and again was: I don’t care about this, I just want equal pay for equal work.

• I think what she was getting at is that the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon: Talking about being an ally is not the same as actually being an ally for real people in your life.

• As a child, I entered the flow state naturally. Simply by attending to what interested me. Then I gradually lost access to it. Now, having passed the halfway point of my life expectancy, I’m regaining it again.

Technical

• Of course it is not exactly as I would have imagined. I had meant to only work with decimal time directly when using the watch. My plan was to memorise a handful of decimal equivalents to my regularly daily events and just use the watch to compare how close I was to them throughout the day. As a secondary usage the watch gives me something to glance at and see the day pass without really caring about the specific time.

• My assumption was that the above two use cases would account for the overwhelming majority of my watch usage. The other use case I imagined was ad hoc times, like catching a bus and needing to compare against a time table that uses traditional time. Here I had already decided I would just use other time sources, like pulling out my phone (or looking at nearby clocks). I was OK with this because I suspected it would not do it often.

• I wasn’t sure if this was worthwhile, and although I’ve used it occasionally myself, I largely forgot about it. But recently I got email from someone who found it helpful, which put it back in my mind.

• Links rot. It’s unfortunate, but it’s just a part of the web. Content disappears and links rot; if you don’t host your own images, then you can’t guarantee that your images will always appear. In this situation, alt-text can be the difference between your piece still making sense and it being completely useless. This is because many browsers show the alt-text with the missing image icon, so descriptive alt-text can make sure your audience still gets the necessary information.

• I’ve spent most of my adult life laying out PCB boards (not all the time…). I go through phases when I do a lot of PCB layout. I’ve used various software to do so, but in the end, my favorite way to do it is punking it with PCB.

Internet/Gemini

• Sometime in the next few days I will be updating the server certificate on skyjake.fi with a new one that includes “*.skyjake.fi” as a DNS wildcard.

• The private key of the certificate will remain the same, so your client may trust the new certificate automatically.

Programming

• English has zoning rules against placing the sound represented by ŋ at the head of the word–that would be using English wrongly, you see. The discussion spawned from NixOS and nginx and whether the two alliterate, or not. Probably it’s just that nginx is popular, and is favored by certain perhaps too vocal commentators who also happen to use NixOS. These words alliterate by regular expression, qr/\b(?i)n/, which we might term a visual alliteration, just as one can have visual rhymes, “I love that stove”.

• A leading ŋ could make an appearance in comic-book, perhaps the Penguin was preparing to pontificate when that protector of peace, Batman, punched him in the paunch. Speaking of children’s materials, I am informed that /vr/ is likewise verboten at the start of a word–vroom, vroom! But these are not serious examples, and doubtless they will be grown out of in good time. After all, Don Quixote put an end to the sale of chivalric romances.

• 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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