● 03.05.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 05/03/2023: ScummVM for Android and GNU/Linux ‘App Store’

Posted in News Roundup at 12:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• The 6.2 kernel was released on February 19, at the end of a ten-week development cycle. This time around, 15,536 non-merge changesets found their way into the mainline repository, making this cycle significantly more active than its predecessor. Read on for a look at the work that went into this kernel release.

• The work in 6.2 was contributed by 2,088 developers, which just barely sets a new record; the previous record was the 2,086 developers contributed to 5.19. Of those developers, 294 made their first contribution to the kernel in this cycle, a fairly typical number.

• The splice() system call is built on an appealing idea: connect two file descriptors together so that data can be moved from one to the other without passing through user space and, preferably, without being copied in the kernel. splice() has enabled some significant performance optimizations over the years, but it has also proved difficult to work with and occasionally surprising. A recent linux-kernel discussion showed how splice() can cause trouble, to the point that some developers now wonder if adding it was a good idea.

• Stefan Metzmacher is a Samba developer who would like to use splice() to implement zero-copy I/O in the Samba server. He has run into a problem, though. If a file is being sent to a remote client over the network, splice() can be used to feed the file data into a socket; the network layer will read that data directly out of the page cache without needing to make a copy in the kernel — exactly the desired result. But if the file is written before network transmission is complete, the newly written data may be sent, even though that write happened after the splice() call was made, perhaps even in the same process. That can lead to unpleasant surprises (and unhappy Samba users) when the data received at the remote end is not what is expected.

• When LWN looked at the composefs filesystem in December, we reported that there had been “little response” to the patches. That is no longer the case. Whether composefs (or something like it) should be merged has become the subject of an extended debate; at its core, the discussion is over just how Linux should support certain types of container workloads. Composefs is an interesting sort of filesystem, in that a mounted instance is an assembly of two independent parts. One of those, an “object store”, is a directory tree filled with files of interest, perhaps with names that reflect the hash of their contents; the object store normally lives on a read-only filesystem of its own. The other is a “manifest” that maps human-readable names to the names of files in the object store. Composefs uses the manifest to create the filesystem that is visible to users while keeping the object store hidden from view. The resulting filesystem is read-only.

• This mechanism is intended to create the system image for containers. When designing a container, one might start with a base operating-system image, then add a number of layers containing the packages needed for that specific container’s job. With composefs, the object store contains all of the files that might be of interest to any container the system might run, and the composition of the image used for any specific container is done in the manifest file. The result is a flexible mechanism that can mount a system image more quickly than the alternatives while allowing the object store to be verified with fs-verity and shared across all containers in the system.

Applications

• SSH was designed as a replacement for Telnet and for unsecured remote shell protocols such as the Berkeley rsh and the related rlogin and rexec protocols. Those protocols send information, notably passwords, in plaintext, rendering them susceptible to interception and disclosure using packet analysis. The encryption used by SSH is intended to provide confidentiality and integrity of data over an unsecured network, such as the Internet. The SSH protocol supports port forwarding.

• Ásbrú Connection Manager (Ásbrú) is a user interface that helps organizing remote terminal sessions and automating repetitive tasks. The project began as a fork of PAC (Perl Auto Connector) Manager.

• Darktable, the free open-source photography application and raw developer, released version 4.2.1 a few days ago.

Instructionals/Technical

• Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn How to configure HTTP proxy exceptions on Linux. This post, although simple to execute, can be quite useful when working with proxy. Introduction A proxy is a tool known to provide anonymity on the Internet by hiding the user’s public IP address.

• Linux Mint has always been known for its simple interface and ease of use. One of its many benefits is its ability to share files and folders across a network, which can be helpful for businesses or individuals who need to collaborate on projects or transfer data between computers. These files can be shared through various methods, including Samba, NFS, and FTP. This article will focus on Samba, a popular and widely used file-sharing tool on Linux systems.

• Ubuntu is a popular operating system used by developers, system administrators, and other technology professionals. There has been a growing trend toward using Ubuntu in cloud computing environments in recent years. This is due to its flexibility, security, and availability of various cloud platforms that support Ubuntu.

• Backing up the Linux Mint system is an essential task every user should perform regularly. Without proper backups, you risk losing all of your important data, settings, and configurations in the event of a hardware failure, software malfunction, or other unforeseen circumstances. This article will show you how to back up and restore your Linux Mint system, ensuring you can recover quickly and easily during a disaster.

• Regular expressions are a powerful tool for text processing in awk. They allow you to search for patterns in a text file, and manipulate the data based on those patterns. In this article, we will explore how to use regular expressions in awk with examples.

• Conditional statements are one of the most powerful features of awk, allowing users to execute different commands based on the values of variables or expressions. This enables the creation of complex logic within awk scripts, and facilitates the performance of advanced text processing tasks.

• Awk is a powerful text processing and manipulation tool that provides a range of advanced features for experienced users. Some of the most useful advanced features of awk include regular expressions, conditional statements, arrays, functions, and string manipulation functions.

• When working with Linux, one of the most powerful tools available for text processing is the awk command. It’s a versatile command-line tool that can be used for a wide range of tasks, including searching, filtering, and manipulating text data.

• AWK is a powerful text processing tool that can perform various mathematical operations, including basic arithmetic operations. In this article, we will discuss how to perform basic arithmetic operations in AWK and provide examples to help you get started.

• In our quest to bring a number of services to our home network, it’s now time to add an in-house, cloud-based office suite.

• Make more of your photos, plus the easy way to turn your old albums into digital copies you can share with friends and family

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

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to enable the open_file_cache feature on Nginx. For those of you who didn’t know, Nginx is a popular web server that offers many features to optimize website performance.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Cinnamon Desktop on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, Cinnamon is a desktop environment based on the GNOME desktop environment.

• Follow through this tutorial to learn how to install VirtualBox guest additions on AlmaLinux. We are installing the VirtualBox Guest additions on AlmaLinux Desktop.

• Are you using Rocky as your regular desktop operating system and looking for a way to install Slack Application on Rocky Linux by following simple steps?

• Ansible is a very popular configuration management tool designed to streamline the process of controlling a large number of servers. In this guide, we will learn how to install and configure Ansible on an Ubuntu 20.04 server.

• LAMP is an open-source software stack containing an Apache web server, MySQL or MariaDB database, and PHP programming language. It is one of the most popular web development platforms allowing web developers to build, deploy, and manage websites and applications online.

• Jellyfin is a free and open-source media streaming application that organizes, manages, and shares digital media files to networked devices. It allows you to stream the uploaded media files to your PC, Laptop, Mobile, and Roku.

• This tutorial covers installing Grafana, Prometheus, and node exporter on Ubuntu 22.04 server. You’ll build a powerful monitoring stack with Grafana as the dashboard and data visualization tool, Prometheus as the data source where all your monitoring data will be stored, and the node_exporter is an application that gathers information and metrics about your systems and send all those metrics to the Prometheus.

• Nginx is a lightweight and high performance web server/reverse/email(IMAP/POP3) proxy.

• Have you ever wondered how you can extract individual files from a Debian file (.deb) without actually installing any software?

• WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) allowing users to create and manage websites easily. It was first released in 2003 and has since become one of the most popular website-building platforms, powering over 40% of all websites on the internet.

• Pulsar Edit IDE is a community-led, hyper-hackable text editor created as a successor to the original Atom text editor. While a community build for Atom was already available, the developers of Pulsar wanted to create a new version that would bring feature parity with the original Atom while introducing modern features and updated architecture.

• OnlyOffice is a highly versatile and comprehensive office suite quickly gaining popularity as an alternative to established names such as Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, and FreeOffice.

• With the rise of containerization technologies, software packaging and distribution have also seen major advancements in the past few years. Flatpak and Snapcraft are two of the most popular container-based package management systems that aim to make software installation and distribution more accessible, reliable, and secure.

Games

• The ScummVM Android port returns with a new update to the Google Play Store, in the beta testing channel. The new version includes all the latest features of ScummVM 2.7.0 as well as Android-specific improvements and bug fixes.

• First off, our team developers have implemented a significant update to the file access system in order to use the Secure Access Framework (SAF) API for secure file access on external memory space, such as SD Cards or USB drives. This effectively should resolve a long-standing issue with modern Android devices, in particular those running Android 11 and above, whereby users could not properly access the game data folders or the save game files in the external storage.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• We discussed the “landlock” security feature in the forum:

• https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=8023

• Up until now, the kernel in Easy has left out user-namespace support due to some perceived security issue. Though, that is a vague concern, and after reading recently that Vivaldi needs that kernel feature when run non-root, I decided to enable it.

• I posted about a new Vivaldi SFS:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202303/vivaldi-browser-now-a-sfs.html

• In EasyOS 5.0 (and earlier), the Internet category of the menu has “Download latest Firefox”. After downloading, a new menu entry is created to run Firefox.

• I like this for two reasons. Firstly, Firefox runs securely as user “firefox”. Secondly, can choose “Download latest Firefox” to update to the latest version.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

Fedora Family / IBM

Open Hardware/Modding

• Recalbox 9 brings enhancements and new features for Raspberry Pi and PC based retro gamers

• Microsoft Office’s “beloved” mascot, Clippy receives an AI boost thanks to Raspberry Pi and ChatGPT

• SparkFun Thing Plus Matter – MGM240P board targets the development of applications using the Matter IoT protocol and features the MGM240P module based on Silicon Labs EFR32MG24 Arm Cortex-M33 wireless microcontroller with an 802.15.4 radio for Zigbee and OpenThread plus a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 5.3 radio. The board also offers two rows of I/Os for upto 21 GPIOs and a Qwiic connector for expansion, another EFRM32 MCU acting as a J-link debugger, a microSD card, and can be powered via USB-C or a LiPo battery.

• Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi board brings the STM32H7 dual-core Cortex-M7/M4 microcontroller found in the Portenta H7 boards to the larger Arduino Mega/Due form factor with up to 76 GPIO pins.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• There is something undeniably satisfying about coming up with clever solutions to hard problems. There is a joy when you challenge yourself to use recursion instead of iteration, for example, or when you create elegant, cascading layers of abstraction that ensure code is never duplicated.

• My favourite outlet for this kind of programming is Project Euler.

• Project Euler is a repository of challenges based around advanced mathematics, meant to be solved with software. The catch is that your program should run in under a minute, on 2004-era hardware. That means that a brute-force solution often won’t cut it, and you’ll have to come up with a smarter solution.

• We were supposed to release this feature three weeks ago.

• One developer got caught in a framework update. Another got stuck reorganizing the feature flags. A third needed to spelunk a long-abandoned repository to initiate the database changes. The team is underwater. Every feature release will feel like this until we get a few weeks to dig ourselves out of tech debt. We have no idea how to even get the business to consider that.

• Does this sound familiar? It’s a disheartening conversation.

• Rewriting bmaptool in Rust to remove Python dependencies, create statically linked binary, and allow the bmap sparse file format to be used in other Rust projects.

• On January, 19th 2038 at 03:14:07 UTC the 32bit time_t counter will overflow. For more information about this I suggest to start with the wikipedia Year 2038 problem article. That problem is long known and several groups are working on a solution for 32bit systems, but many people don’t know that pure 64bit systems could be affected, too.

• The general statement so far has always been that on 64bit systems with a 64bit time_t you are safe with respect to the Y2038 problem.

Python

• I remember my own struggle with calculus at university. Limits, integrals, differential equations. Lots of practice, lots of homework. Pages and pages of exercises. I loved math, loved the connection between algebra and geometry, loved the very pleasure of solving problems by making different concepts work together. But I hated doing the “paperwork”.

• Taking it seriously, I still studied through the semester, studied harder the week before the exam, studied even harder the night before. I got 62/100. That’s 1 point above the lowest possible passing grade.

• Well, maybe math is not for everyone. But wait a minute! The next semester I took part in the Math Olympiad, went through the faculty round, then through the university round, went to the nationals, and even managed to score a few points there. Which counted as a pass on that semester’s exam.

• As we have seen in earlier articles, the packaging landscape for Python is fragmented and complex, though users of the language have been clamoring for some kind of unification for a decade or more at this point. The developers behind pip and other packaging tools would like to find a way to satisfy this wish from Python-language users and developers, thus they have been discussing possible solutions with increasing urgency, it seems, of late. In order to do that, though, it is important to understand what specific items—and types of Python users—to target.

Java

• If you still run your Java code with JVM 8, it’s probably high time to move on and starting using a newer JVM version such as 11. For this reasons, you have to ensure your Java code is Java 11 compatible.

• In programming, boilerplate refers to sections of code that are repeated in many places throughout a project or across multiple projects.

• Code analysis tools are software tools that analyze source code for potential issues, errors, and vulnerabilities.

• A common dilemma while writing unit tests in Java is whether to use Mockito’s when/thenReturn or doReturn/when stubbings. Both when/thenReturn and doReturn/when are used in Mockito, a popular Java testing framework, to mock behavior of methods in an object.

Standards/Consortia

• Early in my management days, I found myself in an unforeseen situation. A new and unexpected frontend framework was added to our early-stage startup stack from one week to another. We were not in production yet, so the thought of maintaining two utterly different parallel client-side stacks this early wasn’t a problem I was anticipating. Opinions about technical decisions replicate almost as fast as frontend frameworks, so as the news spread, so did the backchannel feelings.

• A few months later, we introduced the Request for Comments (RFCs) practice as a team’s decision-making tool. Over time, we became more aligned, better informed, and technical decision-making became less painful. Since then, RFCs have become one of my favorite tools, and with this guide, you may be able to pilot them with your team as well. Let’s dig in.

Leftovers

• Founded by a group of economists, the ENAG has been releasing inflation figures since 2020. The group’s calculations are much higher than those of TurkStat, whose reliability has been widely questioned by economists and opposition parties.

• The number of detentions and arrests is expected to further increase as investigations are continuing.

• Swedish multinational tech giant Ericsson pled guilty this week to bribery and agreed to pay the Department of Justice $206 million dollars.

• Sylvia Shawcross Now I was looking at February 22. Nobody really cares about February 22 because it isn’t special or so you’d think.

• Long time without a blog post, but I have been active on social media. I had an issue on the website with posting new article and I fixed it this afternoon (oh, the joy of self hosting… -_-`). Anyway:

• Wayne Shorter, one of the greatest American jazz saxophonists, has died in Los Angeles, aged 89. A central force in the 20th-century jazz scene, Wayne Shorter’s career as a saxophonist spanned bop, fusion, and other eclectic jazz movements. His publicist confirmed that he died in a Los Angeles hospital, aged 89.

• Wayne Shorter, an influential jazz innovator whose lyrical, complex jazz compositions and pioneering saxophone playing sounded through more than half a century of American music, has died. He was 89.

• The authorities prevented aid deliveries in at least 20 cases, 17 people were subjected to torture and 11 journalists were hindered by law enforcement officers, according to the TİHV.

• Egypt’s antiquities authorities on Thursday unveiled a newly discovered, sealed-off chamber inside one of the Great Pyramids at Giza, just outside of Cairo, that dates back some 4,500 years ago.

• What to say about this month – well, I’m a few days late to the Recently, because I’ve been pretty busy! Things are good. Building products is fun but also a lot of work. Pretty excited about what I’m working on. Ready for winter to end.

• I enjoyed reading Ross Barkan’s What to Do About Police, though it’s bound to generate some controversy. Barkan is, I think, a geniunely ‘center’ or balanced commentator, if you consider the political spectrum of major American cities as the guide. He also has a sense for reading polls and knowing people enough to identify surprising but true disconnects between what we think people believe and what they do.

• As of Thursday night, 48 people remain hospitalized, six of whom are in intensive care.

Science

• You don’t design your engineering culture by writing blog posts or printing posters. It’s shaped by the people you hire, the things they do, and the traits you reward and celebrate.

• Choose wisely, and deliberately. Know what you value, and why. It’s easy to form this list in hindsight, but for anyone growing an engineering team, I urge you to think upfront, spelling out what you value most, then fight to hire for, encourage, support and celebrate those traits.

• I’ve helped grow our engineering team from 4 to more than 90, and hope to keep building the best possible team for many years to come. Here are some of the traits and skills that I think make good engineers great, and why they’re important to me.

• Many students are being left behind by an educational system that some people believe is in crisis. Improving educational outcomes will require efforts on many fronts, but a central premise of this monograph is that one part of a solution involves helping students to better regulate their learning through the use of effective learning techniques. Fortunately, cognitive and educational psychologists have been developing and evaluating easy-to-use learning techniques that could help students achieve their learning goals. In this monograph, we discuss 10 learning techniques in detail and offer recommendations about their relative utility. We selected techniques that were expected to be relatively easy to use and hence could be adopted by many students. Also, some techniques (e.g., highlighting and rereading) were selected because students report relying heavily on them, which makes it especially important to examine how well they work. The techniques include elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, summarization, highlighting (or underlining), the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, rereading, practice testing, distributed practice, and interleaved practice.

• To offer recommendations about the relative utility of these techniques, we evaluated whether their benefits generalize across four categories of variables: learning conditions, student characteristics, materials, and criterion tasks. Learning conditions include aspects of the learning environment in which the technique is implemented, such as whether a student studies alone or with a group. Student characteristics include variables such as age, ability, and level of prior knowledge. Materials vary from simple concepts to mathematical problems to complicated science texts. Criterion tasks include different outcome measures that are relevant to student achievement, such as those tapping memory, problem solving, and comprehension.

Education

• All you need to know about the current condition of West Virginia’s public-education system is summed up in one recent headline: “West Virginia public schools are underfunded, understaffed and underperforming.” To take one marker, only 28 percent of students in the state are proficient in science. These are big problems that require expansive, thoughtful solutions. Lawmakers should be devoting all available time and resources to protecting public-school students’ educational futures. Instead, they’re working to pass a bill, SB 619, that would exacerbate these crises. If enacted, the bill would allow public schools to teach intelligent design — a form of creationism — as a “theory of how the universe and/or humanity came to exist.”

Hardware

• The central banks of the world, led by the European Central Bank and the US Federal Reserve, want to curb inflation and they are willing to cause a small recession or at least get very close to one to shock us all into controlling the acquisitive habits we developed during the lockdowns of the early years of the coronavirus pandemic.

• Declining NAND Flash memory prices are leading to great savings on SSDs. These are the cheapest right now.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Experts are concerned about the adequacy of protein intake by older people.

• Facebook-parent Meta on Friday announced a revamp of its “cross-check” moderation system after facing criticism for giving VIPs special treatment by applying different review processes for VIP posts versus those from regular users.

• Concerns about North Korea’s chronic food shortages are growing, with multiple sources suggesting this week that deaths due to starvation are likely.

• One month after a Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, residents gathered for a town hall on Thursday night. It was the first time Norfolk Southern was in the town since the derailment.

• Canadian biosciences company Sunshine Earth Labs announced Thursday it has been licensed to produce and sell cocaine, reflecting the federal health agency’s bid to improve safety conditions for the country’s addicts.

• Hong Kong’s long-standing universal mask mandate was dropped on Wednesday after almost 1,000 days. The act was largely seen as signalling the official end to a turbulent epidemic era in the Asian financial hub.

• This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. This week, I’ve been working on a big story about a controversial treatment that creates babies with three genetic parents.

• One of the earliest stages in the process of identifying a potential new drug is to expose cells to the compound in a lab dish and scour microscope images to see the effects.

• US President Joe Biden, 80, had a cancerous skin lesion successfully removed from his chest in February, his doctor said Friday.

• A skin lesion removed from President Biden’s chest last month was cancerous, the White House announced Friday.

• Cohesin mutations cause dysregulations in alternative splicing, contributing to tumor initiation and progression, a study finds.

Proprietary

• More than 220 people were reportedly waiting to begin a call about inflation when someone named “Dan” started streaming porn.

• Nearly 70% of drivers say they’re afraid of fully self-driving cars, according to a new AAA survey — up from 55% a year ago. About a quarter say they’re unsure, while just 9% say they trust them.

Security

• FIDO2 is a standard for authenticating users without the need for passwords. While the technology has been introduced mainly to protect accounts on web sites, it’s also useful for other purposes, such as logging into Linux systems. The same technology can even be used beyond authentication, for example to sign files or Git commits. A couple of talks at FOSDEM 2023 in Brussels presented the possibilities for Linux users.

• The FIDO2 standard is a joint effort between the FIDO Alliance (FIDO stands for Fast Identity Online) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to develop standards for strong authentication. Users can securely authenticate themselves with a FIDO2 security key (a hardware token), which is more convenient, faster, and more secure than traditional password-based authentication. The security key can ask the user to touch a button or enter a PIN for authentication; alternatively, it can include a fingerprint reader or other means for biometric authentication. FIDO2 can be used as an extra factor added to a traditional password as part of multi-factor authentication or as the only means of authentication. In the latter case, this is called passwordless authentication. Note that a previous FIDO standard, FIDO U2F, was primarily designed for two-factor authentication.

• The FIDO2 standard consists of two parts. Web Authentication (WebAuthn) is a W3C recommendation with broad browser support that describes an API allowing web sites to add FIDO2 authentication to their login pages. FIDO’s Client to Authenticator Protocol (CTAP) complements WebAuthn by enabling an external authenticator, such as a security key or a mobile phone, to work with the browser. So in short: the browser talks WebAuthn to the server and CTAP to the authenticator device.

• Many software companies rely on open-source code but lack consistency in how they measure and handle risks and vulnerabilities associated with open-source software, according to a new report.

• A friend and colleague of mine, DhaeyerWolf, asked me for a bit of help with the design of a YARA rule.

• The Biden administration is set to release an aggressive new national cybersecurity strategy on Thursday that seeks to shift the blame from companies that get hacked to software manufacturers and device makers, putting it on a potential collision course with big technology companies.

• The 35-page strategy, shared in advance with a group of reporters, asserts that software makers must be “held liable when they fail to live up to the duty of care they owe consumers, businesses or critical infrastructure providers.”

• Hackers breached a website that allows people to buy and sell guns, exposing the identities of its users, TechCrunch has learned.

• The breach exposed reams of sensitive personal data for more than 550,000 users, including customers’ full names, home addresses, email addresses, plaintext passwords and telephone numbers. Also, the stolen data allegedly makes it possible to link a particular person with the sale or purchase of a specific weapon.

• Play does not indicate how much data they acquired, but threaten to start dumping it tomorrow (March 4). They claim to have: “Private and personal confidential data, financial, gov and etc. IDs, passports, employee full info, human rights violation information.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• Wearing face masks for anti-epidemic purposes at a legal assembly may not be a reasonable defence against Hong Kong’s anti-mask law, a government advisor has said. F

• Cabinet says it is pleased the South African Police Service (SAPS) has nearly cleared the DNA testing backlog at its forensic service laboratories. Addressing a Post Cabinet media briefing held in Pretoria on Thursday, Minister in the Presidency, Mondli Gungubele, said this breakthrough will ensure that gender-based violence-related cases are speedily resolved.

• Police discovered the suspected offences while investigating a Helsingin Sanomat report on an intelligence facility in Central Finland.

Confidentiality

• In February, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) published a blog post that elucidated key security principles from recent FTC data security and privacy orders. Specifically, the FTC highlighted three practices that the Commission regards as “effectively protect[ing] user data.” These practices include: (1) offering multi-factor authentication (“MFA”) for consumers and requiring it for employees; (2) requiring that connections within a company’s system be both encrypted and authenticated (e.g., deploying a “zero trust” methodology); and (3) requiring companies to develop data retention schedules. The FTC noted that while these measures “are not the sum-total of everything the FTC expects from an effective security program, they are a sample of provisions [that the FTC has] seen recently that speak directly to the idea of attacking things at their root cause to produce uniquely effective results.”

• Top Class Actions reports there is a settlement involving Preferred Home Care in New York. The lawsuit alleged the provider failed to protect employee and patient data from an attack in January 2021. The data breach allegedly compromised the information of 92,283 patients and employees, including sensitive health information and personal identifiers such as Social Security numbers.

Defence/Aggression

• Two teenagers captured by junta forces were apparently beheaded alive.

• “The United States is the world’s biggest source of nuclear threat,” Mao Ning said.

• On March 2, the White House released the 2023 US National Cybersecurity Strategy.

• The opposition leader languishes in a Russian prison. His colleague Maria Pevchikh talks about the attempt on his life, and Russia’s future. Plus, the pop music producer Chloe Bailey.

• When Alex and Halyna arrived at the Ukrainian border, a Russian agent looked at them like they were crazy. “Do you even know what’s going on there?” he asked.

Environment

• Activists are taking radical steps, like gluing themselves to streets, to draw attention to the climate crisis. Such acts, if unpopular, fall in line with earlier, violent moral crusaders like British suffragettes.

Energy/Transportation

• Billions of kroner could be lost

• One of them, Tesla’s Model Y, was the most sold model in the country in February

• The folks handling the ongoing FTX bankruptcy admitted Thursday it is still on the hook for around $9 billion in customer funds that it simply cannot locate under the morass of financials left over from the exchange’s collapse.

• Cryptocurrency miners operating on public lands haven’t been paying their dues, according to a new report from federal watchdog group, the Office of the Inspector General for Department of the Interior (DOI OIG).

• The adoption by European Union member countries of new carbon dioxide emission standards for cars and vans has been postponed amid opposition from Germany, the presidency of the EU ministers’ council says.

• Electricity prices were similar in January 2022 and January 2023, but consumers in Denmark used around 10 percent less power this year compared to last.

Wildlife/Nature

• California has been enduring a winter of wild weather, and it’s not just humans that have suffered for it.

Finance

• It would appear that the days of crisp dollar bills and shiny pennies are falling behind us. The number of ATMs in the U.S. is reportedly on the decline as we move to a society hellbent on credit cards, mobile payments, and tap-to-pay.

• The National People’s Congress will likely see a reshuffle of security, intelligence and financial powers.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to plunge Ukraine into darkness and cold this winter. But the country’s economy continues to survive, and supermarket shelves are full. How has Ukraine managed to do it?

• CPU developer Loongson and server maker Inspur added to the U.S. DoC’s Entity List.

• It is estimated that half of the mobile phones and two-thirds of the laptops used in Finland are produced in China.

• Amazon is pausing construction on its sprawling second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, the company confirmed to Axios on Friday.

• The big picture: The stoppage comes as the tech giant has announced sweeping job cuts in the wake of slowdowns in consumer and corporate spending.

• Since the Fed began raising interest rates a year ago this month, the central bank has moved more aggressively than nearly anyone expected at the time. It has raised target interest rates by 4.5 percentage points, with more to come, and shrunk its balance sheet by more than $600 billion.

• It finally happened. Median home sale prices are lower than they were a year ago for the first time since 2012, according to new data from Redfin out Thursday.

• You may trigger the Money Purchase Annual Allowance if you’ve dipped into a pension you still contribute to

• Debtors have gotten out of the habit of making monthly payments.

• Three Burmese companies have also been added to the Entity List, banning American exports to them.

• Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska told the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum on March 3 that Russia could run out of money as early as next year without new foreign investment from “friendly countries” and warned government policies are hurting the financial environment.

• Just over a year since Andrei Rublev wrote “No War Please” on the lens of a TV camera on his way to winning the Dubai title, the Russian issued another call for peace on March 3, saying it was “crazy” to see citizens suffering and dying.

• French soccer club Nice has advised its fans not to travel to Moldova for a European game next week amid unrest in the country, where authorities have alleged Russian-backed attempts to destabilize the government.

• The first of Copenhagen’s premium Irma supermarkets will close this weekend after parent company Coop began rebranding its stores.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Governments have expressed concerns that TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, may endanger sensitive user data.

• TikTok is really good at keeping users entertained, most notably with its barrage of filters. Filters on TikTok have been harmless fun for some time now, mostly serving as the punchline about getting arrested or masking your own voice, but two new filters are freaking out TikTokers far and wide.

• Party membership in Lithuania continues to decline, the latest figures from the Justice Ministry have shown.

• Shock sites shaped the way we use the internet.

• Only 260 candidates under the age of 30 are running in the upcoming Finnish parliamentary elections in spring 2023, making up just 10.7% of all candidates. This means that young candidates are once again underrepresented in candidate selection, as 18-29-year-olds make up 13.9% of Finland’s population. The Green Party put forth the highest number of young candidates, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of their total candidates.

• DOJ wrote a cautiously crafted amicus opining that inciting a mob was not within Donald Trump’s job description.

• Damning new evidence has been published as part of the inquiry that will determine whether or not former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson misled Parliament over his conduct during the so-called Partygate scandal.

• Royals speak through actions more than words, which often leaves royal commentators reading into what they do without the benefit of an explanation. This week, it came down to a handshake.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Our political roundtable explores the fallout from the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against one of the most powerful TV networks in America.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A rights group says there is ‘no acceptable reason’ for the move and called for his release.

• They include HK pro-democracy activist and barrister Chow Hang-tung.

• The corporate context in which the changes were made is what should really worry us.

• The ban came after Fenerbahçe fans protested against the government during a match over its presumed inadequate response to last month’s massive earthquakes.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The MIB banned re-sharing & uploading of links of the BBC Documentary using emergency powers under the IT Rules, 2021. The Income Tax Department carried out 3 day long survey operations at the BBC India offices in Delhi & Mumbai. We elaborate on our concerns with these actions in this post.

• Trends of anti-media violence, censorship, and legal intimidation could have disastrous consequences for the world’s largest democracy.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Members of Congress are pressing for changes to the law and the Biden administration’s approach as federal and state enforcement agencies begin a crackdown on companies that employ underage migrants.

• The Nevada Senate Judiciary Committee Friday considered Senate Bill 142, also called the “Homeless Persons’ Bill of Rights.” Mirroring the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights, the senate bill outlines a set of rights for unhoused people in Nevada.

• A Belarusian court Friday sentenced Ales Bialiatski, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize co-recipient, to ten years in prison for allegedly attempting to overthrow the government through financing anti-government demonstrations in the region.

• Belarusian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Beliatski was sentenced by a court in Minsk on Friday to 10 years in a maximum-security penal colony, Russia state news agency TASS reports. He was found guilty on the charge of smuggling, according to TASS.

• Michael Friend was arrested in 2018 for holding a sign that read “Cops Ahead” near a police checkpoint. That arrest violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights, a federal appeals court has ruled.

• Children across the nation are working in dangerous, sometimes lethal jobs in American factories, farms and mills — according to a New York Times exposé that has rattled corporate America, President Biden, and Congress.

• The kids, who are here without their parents, have fled countries rife with violence and poverty. Many are seeking asylum and other protections under the law. But in the meantime, they are laboring in the shadows — in physically demanding jobs that employers often have trouble filling. These children are helping to put food on our tables and clothes on our backs — sometimes suffering serious injuries as a result. The moral implications are chilling.

• The Biden administration responded swiftly, promising an inter-agency task force that will rightly focus on the direct problem of failed child labor protections. But this moment also calls for big policy solutions — without them, children and adults will remain vulnerable to exploitation, in ways that intersect profoundly with our daily lives.

Monopolies

Patents

• The EPO has offered another meeting with the Industry Patent Quality Charter, while a committee representing EPO staff endorsed the group’s criticisms An EPO staff committee has backed a group of in-house counsel’s claims that quality standards at the office are in decline, Managing IP can confirm.

• Meanwhile, it is understood the EPO has offered a follow-up meeting with the counsel, who are members of the Industry Patent Quality Charter (IPQC).

• The IPQC and EPO met initially on February 3 to discuss the group’s claims that the EPO no longer prioritises full search and examination over speedy patent grants.

• A date for a second meeting has not been set at the time of publication.

• [...]

• The EPO declined to comment on this article.

• Stephen Thaler, creator of AI machine Dabus, has already lost three rounds in the UK. The latest blow came in September 2021, when the Court of Appeal upheld that an inventor can only be a ‘natural person’, and not a machine.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• This afternoon I’m bottling a bitter. Should clock in just over 4% ABV. Pale malt, bittered with Northdown and East Kent Goldings, dry hopped with Tettnanger.

• Brewing is a hobby I took up around five years ago, something I’d always wanted to do. I love it. It makes beer cheap, gives a sense of pride in creation. I’ve never graduated from extract-with-steeped-grains to all grain, and I don’t care. What I make tastes good. It makes me happy.

• In a break of routine for some reason I went to work by car on Thursday morning and arrived there maybe a quarter to seven in the morning. The sky was overcast, dawn was well underway. It was cold, just above freezing and windy. On my way from the most distant parking lot to the main entrance I noticed a large group of crows heading East towards some secret meeting place, or whereever the crows were heading. I looked up for a lengthy moment. Several large groups were flying above in what would amount to maybe seven minutes of my walk. Absolutely fascinating, even though I have seen this a few times since I work in this place.

• Hi, my name is stug and I have a pen addiction. Perhaps a Kaweco pen addiction. Today, the postie brought a package with 2 new pens. Both are Kaweco but they are different materials. The first is the Sport in plastic with the Tamoma Teal colour. The sport is an interesting pen but the lid sort of puts me off. It is pretty bulky and has an octogon shape which helps with the rolling issue. The lid is like two thirds of the pen length. I wanted to get a feel for a sport as it is one of the main models from Kaweco so wanted to see what I was missing. The plastic versions are cheap and light. I can easily use the pen unposted which is good. There are mini convertors for this model. When I used the pen, I was using it with Diamine Blue Black which is becoming my preferred ink colour. It is different while being work appropriate. Well with the sport, I found it was a lighter colour than I expected. Turns out this pen is so light, the colour is more blue. The length is a bit longer than the Liliput. It does not feel as pocketable due to the increased thickness of the lid. The screwing of the cap on and off is a bit off putting with the plastic. It is a bit squeaky too. The colour is not as vibrant as I would like compared to what I saw online but it is still pretty nice. It is a nice pen to load up with an unusual ink I think. I got the extra fine nib and it performs well for me.

• After doing the grocery shopping and on my way home i suddenly remembred what i forgot to buy: Diapers! … Damn… ok, back to the city, but first a quick stop at the pub. I am lucky and its open so i walk to the bar and ask for a coffee, a black one, a really strong one… The pub is mostly empty and the bartender looks not overly busy so i start talking…

• I remain convinced that coffee drinkers don’t actually like coffee and only drink it for the caffine. I’ve tried really nice coffee brewed fancily and while it’s marginally better it’s still bitter and awful. Versus drinking loose leaf tea brewed semi-decently is legitimately tasty and very different from bad tea—“brewed decently” being the laziest method of putting leaves in a mug and pouring hot water over it, which is how I normally drink tea.

• Most tea drinkers I know including myself would still drink tea if it didn’t have caffine; while almost every coffee drinker I know are pretty open in saying they wouldn’t drink coffee if it didn’t have caffine in it. Also evidenced by it’s relatively rare to add a lot of stuff into hot tea; while with coffee it’s rather unusual to *not* add anything to it.

Technical

• I probably should talk about the xkcd:// thing. This form was invented by a past version of he who now types here, perhaps because it is shorter by about ten whole characters, and, why not? Certainly XKCD is important enough to have its own protocol, even (especially) if certain individuals want to remove teapot from the HTTP spec. The // is perhaps not necessary; a shorter xkcd:356 might have been used. However, a large part of the creative intent was to share such links over IRC, so the “link” needs to look a bit like a link, or that I’m rationalizing randomly after the fact. Hence the // in there to make it look like a web-type URL. The form hasn’t caused any comprehension problems, but then again I’ve only used it in IRC channels that are nerdy by the standard of being IRC channels, or more likely it’s that folks who have no idea what I’m going on about have gotten good at ignoring me. Of course there is no standards body hashing out these details, it’s just me making up stuff as I go along.

• I often stop and ponder (as many of us weirdos who actually make things do) on why I am drawn to some things and repelled by other. I haven’t found the answer, but I can identify a quality that seems to attract me: containment.

• Perhaps it’s the control freak in me, but I love things that are minimal and self-contained (and ideally, self-subsuming or metacircular, but not necessarily). As an example – I like old computers – it’s all just there. As much as I adore a modern system with Linux – it is completely out of control, and I can’t imagine acutally knowing what’s going on.

• Thinking about large chaotic systems such as macroeconomics just makes me want to vomit – especially when some jackass pretends to know something about it, or even worse – ‘control’ it by enforcing some of the parameters using coersion. But enough of that.

• I wrote a little web app for dice rolls because I couldn’t find a nice and simple, free, privacy-respecting app on my phone’s shop. And it seemed simple enough to do to be a feasible little project.

• Little did I know about the tar pit of progressive web apps (PWA). Oh well! I *think* it’s solved now, thanks to some advice by @frotz@mstdn.game and the Mozilla Developer Network series on progressive web apps…

• If you don’t want to use a monitor do this to use a serial cable on a pi4:

• echo ‘raspberry’ | openssl passwd -6 -stdin | awk ‘{print “pi:”$0}’ > /path/to/bootfs/userconf.txt echo -e “uart_2ndstage=1\nenable_uart=1″ >> /path/to/bootfs/config.txt

• Sometime around the past month, DuckDuckGo has begun promoting Reddit during user searches.

Science

• There’s this operation on graphs/relations called “transitive reduction” (I didn’t learn its name until very recently). It can be used on a graph/relation to compute another (possibly smaller) graph/relation that has no redundant edges (assuming transitivity). And I’ve been thinking about how to do it for about two years (dam), because I needed it for some POSet things (Scheme § poset). Some weeks ago I was walking home, not thinking about anything in particular, and an algorithm just popped into my brain out of nowhere!

Programming

• In this blog post, I’d like to share how I had fun using GitHub actions in order to maintain a repository of generic x86-64 Gentoo packages up to date.

• Built packages are available at https://interbus.perso.pw/ and can be used in your `binrepos.conf` for a generic x86-64 packages provider, it’s not building many packages at the moment, but I’m open to add more packages if you want to use the repository.

• 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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