● 03.07.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 07/03/2023: More Technical News Sites Shut Down, Rust for Linux Explained

Posted in News Roundup at 11:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• The 6.3-rc1 kernel prepatch is out, and the merge window is closed for this development cycle.

• This article describes target-specific details about AArch64 in ELF linkers. AArch64 is the 64-bit execution state for the Arm architecture. The AArch64 execution state runs the A64 instruction set. The AArch32 and AArch64 execution states use very different instruction sets, so many pieces of software use two ports for the two execution states of the Arm architecture.

• Thanks to community contributions, our engineer Luca Ceresoli has recently published a fix to the zynqmp-pmufw-builder repository that allows building a fully working PMU Firmware binary. Rebooting had previously been broken for a long time.

• In Linux 6.1 users could get a glimpse of the Rust-implementation for the first time – although they had to content themselves with a simple “Hello, World!”. We spoke with Miguel Ojeda, software engineer and maintainer of Rust for Linux, about the current state and future of the project:

Applications

• Pano, a next-gen clipboard manager for GNOME Shell, has been updated with some major improvements such as user interface customization options, the ability to favorite items, content-aware notifications, as well as support for GNOME Shell 44.

• This is a clipboard manager implemented as a GNOME Shell extension that displays previews of your clipboard items, with support for text, images, code blocks, color codes, links, files, and with the latest release, Emoji. It supports GNOME 42, 43 and 44.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we are going to explain in step-by-step detail how to install ReactJS on Debian 11 OS. React is an open-source Javascript library used in web development. You can use the User Interface (UI) library to build interactive elements based on UI components. React has broad community support, and it was voted the 2nd most popular web framework in 2022.

• Taking measure of a process’s RAM usage on Windows has always been straightforward.

• You launch the Task Manager and browse through the processes to find their corresponding CPU, memory, and disk usage, among other usage metrics.

• The ability to add repositories on Linux is essential to get software from third-party sources other than the official repos. On Ubuntu, you can add a repository using the add-apt-repository command or by editing the sources.list file.

Games

• Paradox Interactive just held their own announcement show, and there will quite a few interesting upcoming games, so here’s a round-up.

• In the mood for a free game? How about a whole bunch of cheap games on sale? Come and have a look at what’s going on.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

Fedora Family / IBM

• Endless CEO and GNOME board president Rob McQueen has shared a new blog post to bring the Linux community bang up-to-date on the effort going on behind the scenes to get Flathub here, and what will be required to get Flathub to where it wants to go next.

• And (to be a party pooper and spoil that post) the key aims for this year are…

Devices/Embedded

• Don’t have the app? For us, that would have meant saying goodbye to all of the reasons we bought the car, such as pre-conditioning the cabin, remotely unlocking the doors or trunk, or planning a route with Tesla Superchargers along the way. There’s simply no way to use most of the car’s advanced features in a browser. Nor would we have been able to get any notifications from the car, or to view captured camera footage in case of an accident.

• And for the most part, the same situation applies to the smart home today. Last time I checked our house, we were up to around 40 connected devices, which work with Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, and Google Home. A few work across all three, thanks to Matter. But how many can be used with a standard browser connection instead of a dedicated phone app? Far fewer than those that can’t.

• RAKwireless “All-in-One 5G” is a programmable 64-bit Ubuntu indoor device that integrates AGW (access gateway) through a Raspberry Pi CM4 as well as 5G and 4G LTE cellular and LoRaWAN connectivity.

• The device is powered through its 2.5GbE PoE++ port and designed for private 5G networks for industrial automation, public safety, and transportation, and RAKwireless says you can also “start earning cryptocurrency by providing LTE cellular and LoRa coverage”, but I could not find details about monetization at this time.

Open Hardware/Modding

• With an optimised version of the B-Em emulator, Raspberry Pi 400 can take us back to the heyday of the British micro that inspired it. It’s #MagPiMonday, so let’s take a look at this tutorial from the latest issue of the official Raspberry Pi magazine.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• A few weeks ago, we announced that Medium is embracing short-form writing by launching our very own Mastodon server at me.dm. Starting today, we’re opening up me.dm access for our member community. If you’re a Medium member, you can create an account on me.dm.

• If you’re wary of committing your data to cloud services controlled by a corporation but love the convenience of remote storage and easy web-based access, you’re not alone. The cloud is popular because of what it can do. But the cloud doesn’t have to be closed. Luckily, the open source Nextcloud project provides a personal and private cloud application suite.

• It’s easy to install and import data—including contacts, calendars, and photos. The real trick is getting your data from cloud providers like iCloud. In this article, I demonstrate the steps you need to take to migrate your digital life to Nextcloud.

• Apache parquet is an open-source file format that provides efficient storage and fast read speed. It uses a hybrid storage format which sequentially stores chunks of columns, lending to high performance when selecting and filtering data. On top of strong compression algorithm support (snappy, gzip, LZO), it also provides some clever tricks for reducing file scans and encoding repeat variables.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Data protection and privacy is very important to us – and our users – in the LibreOffice project, so we’re happy to see that the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) is piloting the use of LibreOffice Technology.

• The EDPS is the European Union’s (EU) independent data protection authority, which monitors and ensures the protection of personal data and privacy when EU institutions and bodies process the information of individuals. From their announcement…

Education

• Open Education Week (OE Week), launched in 2012 by Open Education Global (OE Global), is an annual global event that aims to raise awareness about the benefits of open education and promote its widespread adoption. It is a week-long celebration of open education and the open education movement.

• OE Global is supported by over 250 member organisations and open educators, with Moodle being one of them.

• The aim of the week is to promote and highlight the importance of open education. Since 2012, OE Week has become an important event for educators, researchers, students, and advocates of open education around the world. This year, OE Week takes place on March 6–10.

Programming/Development

• The reactions to my previous post were interesting—it wasn’t a “unit test.” At best, it might have been an “integration test” but because it involved actual work (i.e. interaction with the outside world via nasty nasty side effects, aka I/O) it immediately disqualified it as a “unit test.” And to be honest, I was expecting that type of reaction—it appears to me that most unit test proponents tend to avoid such “entanglements” when writing their “battle tested” code (but I’m also willing to admit that’s the cynical side of me talking). There were also comments about how 100% code coverage was “unrealistic.”

• Your commit history is not for you, at least not for you of right now. You of right now are full of context and understanding that despite how much we may convince ourselves that we’ll remember with perfect clarity tomorrow, I rarely find that to be the case. To solve this problem it’s important to approach our commit history like a story.

• If we call this API on the UI thread, we might block user interaction for two seconds. That’s probably long enough to cause “Application Not Responding” timeouts (crashes!) on some devices. And it’s definitely long enough to annoy users.

• It’s a shame that this logically static data is fetched from a general-purpose asynchronous API, backed by the manufacturer’s hardware-abstraction-layer drivers, which could be arbitrary code.

• When you communicate out an idea, you are eminently trustable. Usually you’re right, and you have the bona fides to back that up. And you’re also persuasive and somewhat naturally convince people that your idea is right.

• This is a challenge. As a staff+ engineer, you are still human, so you will still *gasp* be wrong sometimes. But when you’re wrong, you’re less likely to get pushback. As a staff+ engineer, you have to be more careful with your ideas, and actively seek out checks on your own ideas. Pushback won’t come as naturally and immediately as it did earlier in your career.

• Here are a few of the things that I do to validate my ideas and elicit checks on them. Some are the same as when I was a senior software engineer, while others are unique to the leadership role of staff+ engineering.

• Two years ago I started a new book: Predicate Logic for Programmers. In it I said

• Canonical is excited to announce it is now an official member of the Eclipse Software Defined Vehicle Working Group (SDV WG). Eclipse SDV focuses on software-defined vehicles (SDVs) and pushes innovations in automotive-grade solutions using open-source software.

• In the days before computers usually used off-the-shelf CPU chips, people who needed a CPU often used something called “bitslice.” The idea was to have a building block chip that needed some surrounding logic and could cascade with other identical building block chips to form a CPU of any bit width that could do whatever you wanted to do. It was still harder than using a CPU chip, but not as hard as rolling your own CPU from scratch. [Usagi Electric] has a Centurion, which is a 1980s-vintage minicomputer based on a bitslice processor. He wanted to use it to write assembly language programs targeting the same system (or an identical one). You can see the video below.

Python

• Nox is an incredible tool, I use it for all my Python projects, highly recommend it. One of the best features of nox and tools like it is parameterization. Usually this is done for the test suite portion where you want to run your test suite on many different Python versions (and maybe other things like dependency versions): [...]

Leftovers

• This domain used to point to a WordPress site that hosted content for a candidate in the local elections, at least around 2011-2014.

• The biggest change borrowed from the playbook of independent bookshops: Daunt gave local Barnes & Noble stores much more authority to order what their readers, in their area want to see.

• It’s “a huge shift, frankly, in philosophy for us as a bookseller,” DeVito says.

• “It’s not an algorithm. It’s not something that’s dynamically pulled from a code,” she says. “It’s very much a — I read this, I loved it, I know this area really gravitates towards beekeeping books, so I’m going to create the best beekeeping display I can because this is my local store.”

• In 2019, Oakland-based artist and writer Jenny Odell published her first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. In that work of dazzling hybridity, Odell drew together scholarship and artistic practice to argue that our attention is our most vital personal asset, and also the most difficult to protect. This March, Odell is back, with Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock (Random House), a follow-up to HTDN that subverts dominant notions of time in order so that we might reclaim it for ourselves and one another. The Nation spoke with Odell about her intentions for the book, and how writing it has shaped her own thinking and practices.

• Africa’s most important music festival is a breeding ground for new and unheard sounds.

• “There will be safe sex in Jinja”.

• Among the admittedly less than scintillating cohort of Americans who read the Sunday New York Times, I would hazard that there are few who remain immune to the temptations of the lifestyle pages—even enclosed, as they are, by the powerful anesthetic of the business and opinion pages. All of us, after all, contain multitudes; in each of us homo editorialus jostles with a Balzacian desire to know how the other half—of the upper quarter—lives.

• If, as Henry James remarked, literature satisfies two tastes—for the sensation of recognition, and for that of surprise—then no one can doubt that the taste satisfied by the ‘Sunday Routine’ page of the Metropolitan section is a literary one. No one, that is, should indict himself for frivolity if his own Sunday routine consists of the careful perusal of this page, though he must admit that recognition is more frequent than surprise.

Science

• In school, you probably learned that an atom was like a little solar system with the nucleus as the sun and electrons as the planets. The problem is, as [The Action Lab] points out, the math tells us that if this simplistic model was accurate, matter would be volatile. According to the video you can see below, the right way to think about it is as a standing wave.

Education

• But Chalkbeat was able to obtain the latest teacher turnover numbers from eight states: Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Washington. These figures encompassed turnover between the 2021-22 year and this school year.

• In all cases, turnover was at its highest point in at least five years – typically around 2 percentage points greater than before the pandemic. That implies that in a school with 50 teachers, one more than usual left after last school year.

• The Temple University Graduate Student Association (TUGSA 6290), a union that represents more than 750 graduate student workers at Temple has entered the second month of their strike. TUGSA, the only graduate student union in Pennsylvania, continues to fight for a living wage, greater parental and bereavement leave, and dependent healthcare. Founded in 1997, TUGSA is on strike for the first time, making this the first graduate student strike in Pennsylvania’s history.

• TUGSA’s Demands

• Over the last week or so, Australian politicians and representatives of the university sector got busy pressing flesh in India, hoping to open avenues that have largely remained aspirational.  It was timed to coincide with G20 talks in New Delhi, which has seen a flurry of contentious meetings traversing security, economics and education, all taking place in the shadow of the Ukraine War.

• A starring outcome of the various discussions was an agreement between Canberra and New Delhi to ensure the mutual recognition of qualifications.  On March 3, the Australian Minister for Education, Jason Clare, stated in a media release that the Mechanism for the Mutual Recognition of Qualifications was “India’s most comprehensive education agreement of its type with another country.”

Hardware

• IKEA tend to stock Swedish translations of popular titles on their bookshelf displays, but over the weekend Clara and I chanced upon a 1990 volume of the Lexicon Universal Encyclopedia. I’d never heard of it before, so of course I had to rifle through it for some goodies!

• It’s possible quite a few of our older readers will remember the period from the 1960s into the ’70s when an electronic calculator was the cutting edge of consumer-grade digital technology. By the 1980s though, they were old hat and could be bought for only a few dollars, a situation that remains to this day. But does that mean calculator development dead?

• We see a lot of clocks here at Hackaday, so many now that it’s hard to surprise us. After all, there are only so many ways to divide the day into intervals, as well as a finite supply of geeky and quirky ways to display the results, right?

• [A. Cemal Ekin] over on PetaPixel reviewed the Apexel 200X LED Microscope Lens. The relatively inexpensive accessory promises to transform your cell phone camera into a microscope. Of course, lenses that strap over your phone’s camera lens aren’t exactly a new idea, but this one looks a little more substantial than the usual piece of plastic in a spring-loaded clip. Does it work? You should read [Cemal’s] post for the details, but the answer — as you might have expected — is yes and no.

• There is a bit of a paradox when it comes to miniaturization. When electronics replaced mechanical devices, it was often the case that the electronic version was smaller. When transistors and, later, ICs, came around, things got smaller still. However, as things shrink to microscopic scales, transistors don’t work well, and you often find — full circle — mechanical devices. [Breaking Taps] has an investigation of a MEMS chip. MEMS is short for Micro Electromechanical Systems, which operate in a decidedly mechanical way. You can see the video, which has some gorgeous electron microscopy, below. The best part, though, is the 3D-printed macroscale mechanisms that let you see how the pieces work.

• China will invest an additional $1.9 billion in Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC), the country’s biggest memory chip producer, to spur the growth of its domestic semiconductor industry, which is currently being cramped by US sanctions.

• China’s National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, a government-backed investment body also known as the Big Fund, will inject the capital into YMTC, Bloomberg reported Friday. The magnitude of the investment shows China’s effort to boost its struggling home-grown chip industry, which is currently facing constraints on its manufacturing capabilities from the US and other countries.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Has it really been 25 years, a whole quarter of a century? I was forced to acknowledge last week that it has been, and in doing so I couldn’t help but think about how Andrew Wakefield paved the way for COVID-19 quacks everywhere, and he did 22 years before the pandemic hit.

• The pop star recently revealed that she’s deleted all social media apps off of her phone as a way to protect her mental health. “I don’t look at it anymore,” she explained on an upcoming episode of the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast. “I deleted it all off my phone, which is such a huge deal for me. Cause, dude, you didn’t have the [Internet] to grow up with.” Eilish went on to explain in the preview clip, published Thursday, “For me, it was such a big part of–not my childhood, I wasn’t like an iPad baby, thank god–but honestly, I feel like I grew up in the perfect time of the [Internet] that it wasn’t so [Internet]-y that I didn’t have a childhood. I really had such a childhood, and I was doing stuff all the time.”

• Edgar Cabanas, co-author of the book Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives, believes that this phenomenon “is a form of magical thinking,” according to which material things are just a product of the imagination or the individual perception. “Thinking that we can change circumstances, manipulate results or change as persons only by adopting positive thoughts and attitudes, although tempting, is not only misleading, but also, among other consequences, causes guilt,” he added, “because when things don’t turn out as we envision them, we tend to take the responsibility for the result not being as we wanted or expected. In addition, it produces the false feeling that everything that happens is under our control, when – fortunately or unfortunately – that is not the case.” The act of manifesting, to begin with, chooses to ignore the fact that it is not the same to wish for things from a privileged position than to do it when you have everything against you.

• It said employees “are required to uninstall TikTok on service phones and other official devices as soon as possible if they have previously installed it.”

• It wasn’t immediately known how many members of the defense ministry have TikTok installed, nor whether the ban also applied to the armed forces.

• Global demand for collagen—touted as an anti-aging “wonder product”—is driving deforestation and abuses against Indigenous people in Brazil, an investigation published Monday revealed.

• Local organizers in East Palestine, Ohio on Monday said their activism has successfully pressured rail company Norfolk Southern to agree to a limited relocation plan for some residents affected by last month’s train derailment, but added they have no intention of backing down from their demand for justice for thousands of people in the area who are struggling in the aftermath of the accident.

Proprietary

• The ransomware attack occured on Feb. 8, knocking some of the city’s information technology systems offline. A state of emergency was then declared on Feb. 16 following what the city described as ongoing network outages caused by the attack. The attack did not affect 911 services, but certain nonemergency systems were forced offline.

• A month after the attack, the Play ransomware group, which first emerged in August following an attack on Argentina’s Judiciary of Córdoba, has started releasing the stolen files.

• It remains to be seen whether customers will welcome robo-communiqués – mechanical missives that can be detected most of the time. So it may not be long before message filters can block them as we do with normal spam. The automation of phone calls certainly hasn’t endeared many people to marketers.

• Customer service reps can use tools similar to those available to sales personnel Microsoft said. For Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Copilot supports drafting answers to queries – using both knowledge base content and conversation history data – in both email and chat.

• A ransomware cyberattack on one of Barcelona’ s main hospitals has crippled the center’s computer system and forced the cancellation of 150 nonurgent operations and up to 3,000 patient checkups, officials said Monday.

• The attack Sunday on the Hospital Clinic de Barcelona shut down computers at the facility’s laboratories, emergency room and pharmacy at three main centers and several external clinics.

• The cyberattack started on February 8 and was disclosed on February 10, when Oakland announced that it had taken systems offline to contain the incident, but that emergency services were not impacted.

• One week later, while continuing restoration efforts, the city declared a local state of emergency, to speed up the procurement of equipment and materials.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (apache2, libde265, libreswan, spip, syslog-ng, and xfig), Fedora (edk2, libtpms, python-django3, stb, sudo, vim, and xen), Red Hat (libjpeg-turbo and pesign), SUSE (kernel, python36, samba, and trivy), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux, linux-aws, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-oracle, linux-aws-hwe, linux-oracle, and linux-bluefield).

• We are proud to announce the release of PowerDNS Recursor 4.8.3 This release is a maintenance release. The most important fixes concern the serve-stale functionality which could cause intermittent high CPU load. The serve-stale function is disabled by default. Please refer to the change log for the 4.8.3 release for additional details.

Privacy/Surveillance

• You know how you can feel when someone is looking at you? Thanks to a person detector, [Michael Rigsby’s] little robotic light switch also knows when you are looking at it. As you can see in the video below, when it notices you are looking at it, it lights up an LED. If you continue to gaze at it, it will turn to stare back at you. Keep staring it down and it will toggle the state of a remote control light switch.

• In January, Salvadoran newspaper El Faro revealed that the country’s police have purchased three Israeli surveillance tools. Through the approximately $2.2 million contract, El Salavador’s police acquired the Wave Guard Tracer, from Wave Guard Technologies, designed to trace calls, text, and data, the GEOLOC system sold by an unknown Israeli firm, […]

• Among its other elements, OHICP allows officials to interview nearly anyone in the U.S., including those held in detention centers and Customs and Border Patrol facilities, local jails and federal prisons, while bypassing interviewees’ lawyers. According to the program’s documentation, interviewers must explicitly state that they work for DHS, participation is voluntary and an interviewee may end the interview at any time. But the document doesn’t prohibit interviews with people who are awaiting trial, and a law enforcement officer must reportedly be present when these interviews take place. Critically, there’s nothing in the program’s rules that would to stop such an officer from sharing whatever they overhear, whether with their superiors and colleagues, prosecutors or others.

• In another document, some employees were so concerned about the legality of their activities that they wanted DHS to cover legal liability insurance, the news outlet reported. Keep up with today’s most important news

• Others feared retaliation for voicing concerns.

• “If you speak out, you’ll find yourself on the [southwest] border or in Portland, recalled by [Field Operations Division] HQ, or moved,” one employee said in a document. “If HQ finds out that you’ve spoken to others outside the Division (e.g. OCG, Ombuds), you’ll get in trouble.”

• The program allows officials to conduct interviews with just about anyone in the United States without their lawyers present.

• That specific element of the program, was paused last year after a number of employees expressed concerns about its legality and potential violations of civil liberties.

• We’ve long known so-called “predictive policing” is garbage. It’s the same old biased policing, except shinier and more expensive. Every system in place relies on data generated by policework — data instantly tainted by the things cops do, like hassling minorities, engaging in very selective enforcement, and treating people as inherently suspicious just because of where they live. These acts generate the garbage data that ensures that, when all the digital gears stop turning, more garbage data will be generated.

• Under the domestic-intelligence program, officials are allowed to seek interviews with just about anyone in the United States. That includes people held in immigrant detention centers, local jails, and federal prison. DHS’s intelligence professionals have to say they’re conducting intelligence interviews, and they have to tell the people they seek to interview that their participation is voluntary. But the fact that they’re allowed to go directly to incarcerated people — circumventing their lawyers — raises important civil liberties concerns, according to legal experts.

• The European Cybersecurity Certification Scheme for Cloud Services (EUCS) is intended to put in place an EU-wide certification framework for IT services.

• However, the proposals would also impose “sovereignty” requirements that force cloud providers to host services for EU customers on infrastructure sited within the EU, and to demonstrate their “immunity” from foreign law enforcement authorities demanding access to data.

• Most relevant in the U.S. is California’s law, which does not require strict age verification but age “estimation” and the rollout of corresponding privacy and data protections for the age group.

• The legal action by the two US companies came after the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) decided in September last year to slap a combined fine of 100 billion won ($77.2 million) on them for collecting personal information without users’ consent and using it for personalised online advertising and other purposes.

• The fines marked the highest-amount ever imposed for alleged violations of the personal information protection law, reports Yonhap news agency.

• The findings are based on a new inspector general report that contains details on the chaos that ensued after American troops withdrew from the country in 2021.

• In the 148-page report, an ex-Afghan military intelligence officer said that the members of Taliban are going after former Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF) “on a daily basis”.

• ANDSF had received funding worth tens of billions of dollars for training and equipment for over two decades. The US withdrawal resulted in the complete collapse of the force.

• The officer said, “They search their homes and if they cannot find the individual they will go after their family members.”

• “The Taliban are going after former ANDSF on a daily basis,” one former Afghan military intelligence officer told investigators. “They search their homes, and if they cannot find the individual, they will go after their family members. They punish their family until the person they are looking for surrenders.”

• The former director of criminal investigations for the national police said people came to his home to track down his gun. The Taliban gained access to official records on firearm ownership that the U.S.-backed government kept.

• The Taliban control systems holding sensitive biometric data that Western donor governments left behind in Afghanistan in August 2021, putting thousands of Afghans at risk, Human Rights Watch said today.

• These digital identity and payroll systems contain Afghans’ personal and biometric data, including iris scans, fingerprints, photographs, occupation, home addresses, and names of relatives. The Taliban could use them to target perceived opponents, and Human Rights Watch research suggests that they may have already used the data in some cases.

• To Paglen, art is a conversation with the past and the future – artifacts of how the world looks at a certain time and place. In our time and place, it’s a world dogged by digital privacy concerns, and so his art ranges from 19th-century style photos of military drones circling like insects in the Nevada sky, to a museum installation that provides a free wifi hotspot offering anonymized browsing through a Tor network, to deep-sea diving photos of internet cables tapped by the National Security Agency.

Confidentiality

• One good security practice is to not store any unencrypted credentials at rest. If you can run cat on a file and see the credentials appear on the screen this means that are unencrypted at rest and just waiting for an attacker to read that file and pull the credentials out for nefarious purposes. Typically credentials in your profile would look something like…

Defence/Aggression

• A man in military camouflage and allegedly carrying a grenade was arrested in the suburban town of Domodedovo outside of Moscow. The incident was reported by the Telegram news channels Baza and Mash.

• The Yalta International Economic Forum, which has been postponed for the last several years, may be held in Moscow in September 2023, according to Sergey Aksyonov, the Moscow-appointed head of Crimea.

• In January, the Philippine and US governments announced plans to allow U.S. military access to four additional bases in the Philippines. This agreement to base more U.S. military assets in the Philippines poses a threat to peace.

• Signaled by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton writing in Foreign Policy in 2011, the Obama administration made a “pivot” from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific.

• By Unicorn Riot Atlanta, GA – Atlanta-area forest defenders, community activists and their allies from around the country and the world are initiating a ‘week of action’ against a proposed ‘Cop City’ urban warfare campus and a movie industry facility that would demolish much of the largest urban forest in the country.  The upcoming week […]

• On March 6, a video surfaced online that appears to show the murder of a Ukrainian POW by Russian soldiers. At the start of the clip, a man is seen standing and smoking. Someone out of frame says, “Film it.” The man then says, “Glory to Ukraine,” after which the sound of gunfire is heard and the man falls to the ground. A voice then says, “Die, bitch.”

• In October 2022, Mikhail Benyash, a lawyer from Krasnodar who used to represent activists and protesters in court, was declared a “foreign agent” by the Russian authorities. On February 17, 2023, Benyash was reported to have been disbarred. But a week earlier, on February 10, a Russian court heard his appeal of the “foreign agent” designation. Unsurprisingly, the appeal was denied, but the hearing did force the Russian Justice Ministry to respond to some uncomfortable questions about the aggressive nature of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Benyash sent Meduza the documents from the case. In English, we’re publishing some excerpts from the court transcript.

• Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said Tuesday that a “terrorist from Ukrainian intelligence” and his “accomplices” have been arrested for their alleged involvement in last week’s “sabotage” attempt at a military airfield in Machulishchy, according to the Belarusian state-owned news agency Belta.

• Echoing the “reds under the beds” scare campaigns of the fifties, Nine Media mastheads want us to believe that war with China is imminent. Elsewhere, we are led to believe that China is a model citizen of the world and means no harm to anyone. Both positions belie the reality in a world besieged by the extremes of misinformation.

• Joseph McCarthy – the US Senator who fronted those communist scare campaigns – would have approved of how The Age and The SMH even added a “Red Alert” monicker to a headline screaming that war is imminent and that we are not prepared. And although our preparedness is indeed lacking, the headline and illustration of Chinese jets attacking are both irresponsible.

• In an interview with the Chamber of Commerce, US Ambassador Nicholas Burns referred to China as a “threat”, “great challenge”, and “very difficult government”, stating arrogantly, “The United States is staying in this region. We’re the leader in this [Indo-Pacific] region”.

• Two Very Different Paths to Peace

• Two proposals for bringing peace in Russia’s war on Ukraine were issued on nearly the same day last month: a UN General Assembly resolution on February 23 and a Chinese plan on February 24. Neither proposal has a ghost of a chance of being implemented, even though one—the UN resolution—received overwhelming approval.

• The Zelensky administration has published a press release saying that Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny and the commander of Ukraine’s Ground Forces Oleksandr Syrsky agree that Ukraine should continue defending Bakhmut.

• Hundreds of Jewish New Yorkers rallied and marched on the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday to protest his embrace of far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amid growing violence against Palestinians—violence that demonstrators said is enabled by the U.S. government’s unwavering military and diplomatic support.

• In the conflict-ridden realm of international relations, certain terms are particularly widely used, and one of them is “red lines.” Derived from the concept of a “line in the sand,” first employed in antiquity, the term “red lines” appears to have emerged in the 1970s to denote actions one nation regards as unacceptable from other nations. In short, it is an implicit threat.

• Kyiv—We sat in red velvet seats under the Kyiv opera house’s soaring dome decorated with baroque flourishes of black and gold, and we waited for a ballet adaptation of one of Ukraine’s most celebrated literary works to begin. It was February 23, the eve of the first anniversary of the invasion, and I was not surprised that much of the building was empty.

• By Unicorn Riot Dekalb County, GA – At least 30 people were arrested on Sunday evening in the South River Forest during a ‘week of action’ music festival taking place near the location of the proposed controversial ‘Cop City’ facility. UPDATE: 3/6/23 – According to the Atlanta Police Department press release, there were at least 35 […]

• Cambridge police shot and killed Arif Sayed Faisal just four days into 2023, and officials are no closer to releasing the names of the officers responsible.

• Draftees serving in a territorial defense unit for Russia’s Belgorod region alleged in a video posted to Telegram late Monday that they were forced to join an “assault brigade” from the “Donetsk People’s Republic” and sent to the front without appropriate training.

• As the grim one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine neared last month, President Biden and Vladimir Putin gave competing speeches laying the blame for the tragedy at each other’s feet. The western press showed great analytical skill in breaking down Putin’s speech for falsehoods and half-truths. The same can’t be said of Biden’s speech. Although the western press fact checks and criticizes much of Biden’s domestic policy, mainstream journalists applaud rather than analyze his pro-war rhetoric. Accordingly, the BBC chided the Russian President by stating, “Truth was an early casualty of Mr Putin’s lengthy speech”, while praising Biden for his strong statement that autocrats only understand: “No, no, no!”

• This type of white hat vs. black hat narrative makes for good copy and confirms western stereotypes.  If peace is going to prevail, however, a more nuanced examination of Russia’s response to US political and military meddling in Ukraine is needed. This should also include a more honest analysis of NATO expansion eastward and a sober look at the threat that far-right Ukrainian militias pose for Europe.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• On Monday, the FOI Commissioner, Leo Hardiman PSM KC, quit his $398,630 job over his inability, for reasons beyond his control, “to increase timeliness of IC reviews and access in a way which best promotes the objects of the FOI Act”.

• It’s an honourable thing for him to have done and demonstrates that we’ve lost a man of great integrity from public service.

Environment

• An updated framework to protect marine life in the regions outside national boundary waters, known as the high seas, had been in discussions for more than 20 years, but previous efforts to reach an agreement had repeatedly stalled. The unified agreement treaty was reached late Saturday.

• “We only really have two major global commons — the atmosphere and the oceans,” said Georgetown marine biologist Rebecca Helm. While the oceans may draw less attention, “protecting this half of earth’s surface is absolutely critical to the health of our planet.”

• Why it matters: The High Seas Treaty moves to protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030 with the aim of halting and reversing the current extinction crisis, per Axios’ Ben Geman.

• The United Nations has convened 27 conferences on climate change. For nearly three decades, the international community has come together at a different location every year to pool its collective wisdom, resources, and resolve to address this global threat. These Conferences of Parties (COPs) have produced important agreements, such as the Paris Accords of 2015 on the reduction of carbon emissions and most recently at Sharm el-Sheikh a Loss & Damage Fund to help countries currently experiencing the most impact from climate change.

• And yet the threat of climate change has only grown larger. In 2022, carbon emissions grew by nearly 2 percent.

Energy/Transportation

• About 30,000 Vladivostok residents lost heating and hot water Tuesday after a water main burst, according to the Primorsky Krai Prosecutor’s Office.

• More than 1,000 “super-emitter” incidents—human-caused methane leaks of at least one tonne per hour—were detected worldwide last year, mostly at oil and gas facilities, and policymakers must prioritize cutting this planet-heating pollution to avoid “triggering catastrophic climate tipping points.”

• More than 100 organizations on Monday urged the congressional sponsors of a new proposal that would boost the tax credit for certain carbon capture projects to shift their focus to solutions that will actually address the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.

• An analysis published Monday by the watchdog Accountable.US revealed that the biggest oil companies operating in the United States raked in a collective $290 billion in profits last year while they “consistently prioritized shareholder returns over alleviating the pressure of high energy prices.”

• As of Monday, more than 500 physicians and other medical professionals had signed on to a letter urging federal regulators to prevent the expansion of a fracked gas pipeline in the Pacific Northwest.

• Oreskes says pay attention when you see a “climate solution” that means increasing the use of fossil fuels. She says an example is [fossil] gas, which has been sold as a “bridge fuel” from coal to renewable energy. But [fossil] gas is still a fossil fuel, and its production, transport and use release methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide.

• “I think we need to start by looking at what happens when the fossil fuel industry comes up with solutions, because here is the greatest potential for conflict of interest,” Aronczyk says.

• Oil sands producers plan to spend billions of dollars on emissions-reducing technologies so that they can boost production and sell more of their climate-warming products overseas, an industry lobby group explained to Canada’s federal government on multiple occasions.

• “As our sector decarbonizes, we believe that the oil sands can play an even bigger role in producing energy for Canada and the world,” said the Pathways Alliance, an organization representing the six largest oil sands producers, in a submission last fall during consultations over the federal government’s 2023 budget.

Wildlife/Nature

• Some representatives of the Chumash, Tataviam and Gabrielino (Tongva) peoples argued that samples taken during the necropsy should be buried with the rest of his body in the ancestral lands where he spent his life. Some tribal elders said keeping the specimens for scientific testing would be disrespectful to their traditions. Mountain lions are regarded as relatives and considered teachers in LA’s tribal communities.

• Tribal representatives, wildlife officials and others discussed a potential compromise in recent weeks, but a consensus was not reached before P-22 was buried in an unspecified location in the Santa Monica Mountains on Saturday.

• The first-ever international treaty to protect the oceans was agreed to by negotiators from more than 190 countries at a United Nations conference this weekend, capping nearly two decades of efforts by conservation groups. The legally binding pact could help reverse marine biodiversity loss by establishing marine protected areas covering nearly a third of the world’s seas by 2030. We hear more from one of the treaty’s scientist-negotiators, Minna Epps, a marine biologist and director of the Ocean Team at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

• Jocelyn knew only one way to live. Growing up next to the Manombo Special Reserve in southeast Madagascar, his family taught him from a young age to see the forest as a source of income. His grandfather had been a logger, cutting trees for timber and burning wood to make charcoal to sell. His grandfather taught his father, and his father taught him.

• It was dangerous work. He risked landing in jail for illegal logging every time he ventured into the protected reserve. “I needed to feed my family,” recalled Jocelyn, who doesn’t use a surname; the vegetables he grew near his house weren’t enough. He also needed money for health care. Once, when his wife was pregnant and fell ill, he sold all of their plates and pans to pay for treatment at a government clinic. She wound up losing the baby anyway.

Overpopulation

• As much of the world reeled from high energy and food prices that left millions struggling to heat their homes and feed their families, commodity trading firms that benefit from extreme market volatility brought in record-breaking profits in 2022, capitalizing on chaos spurred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Finance

• Kenya is facing an acute foreign exchange crunch, with US dollar reserves dropping to their lowest in eight years as its currency keeps plummeting against major global currencies.

• The right-wing “justices” seemed impervious to the economic plight of tens of millions with debilitating student debt.

• “Nobody’s telling the person who is trying to set up the lawn service business that he doesn’t have to pay his loan,” said U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts during oral arguments about President Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan. Roberts continued his logic on behalf of this hypothetical lawn service operator, saying, “he still does, even though his tax dollars are going to support the forgiveness of the loan for… the college graduate, who’s now going to make a lot more than him over the course of his lifetime.”

• It’s remarkable how concerned Roberts and other conservatives have been about the exploitation of the average American when it comes to loan forgiveness. The Supreme Court’s chief imagines that college graduates will go on to make enough money to pay back their loans and they are choosing not to—apparently in order to take advantage of business owners like lawn care operators.

• The subtlety of language is a big thing for central bankers and the hordes of economists who hang on their every word. The key change in language from the RBA today was “further tightening”. They replaced “further increases in interest rates” with “further tightening”. What’s the scam?

• The scam is that there are other tools at the Bank’s disposal to contain inflation besides the big one, lifting the cash rate. The subtle change suggests a more sophisticated attack on inflation.

• Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in America, defended stock buybacks in his highly anticipated annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, released a few days ago.

• Survey data released Monday shows that a majority of U.S. voters want the Federal Reserve to stop raising interest rates before it plunges the economy into recession, a position that aligns with the view of many economists and lawmakers who fear the central bank is on the verge of needlessly throwing millions out of work.

• Supporters of U.S. President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel over $400 billion in college debt to more than 43 million borrowers reacted angrily Monday to a lawsuit filed by an online finance company trying to overturn his administration’s latest pause on student loan repayments—a policy that has cost the firm more than $100 million in lost profits.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• In an analysis for Haaretz last week, former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas asks a pertinent and important question: “When will the U.S. stop pretending that things are normal in Netanyahu’s Israel?” It’s a rhetorical question, but nonetheless crucial after the United States embarrassed itself yet again by touting a completely phony “agreement” reached in Aqaba, Jordan, between the far-right Israeli government and the quisling Palestinian Authority while Israeli settlers were burning the town of Huwwara. But Pinkas addresses this question, ultimately, with an equally empty line: “Friends don’t let friends rescind democracy.”

• Seven groups on Monday filed a legal challenge to the U.S. Interior Department’s Lease Sale 259, which would offer 73.3 million acres of public waters in the Gulf of Mexico to the highest-bidding oil and gas drillers.

• In 2015, according to the talking points being floated by former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley and her team, she alone heroically removed the Confederate flag that flew on the grounds of the state capitol and so healed racial wounds. She implied as much right after it happened, again at the 2020 Republican National Convention, and in subsequent interviews. This “achievement” remains a critical part of her story about why she aspires to become president. Given the weakness of the South Carolina governorship, Haley doesn’t have a lot to show for her time in office or, for that matter, defending President Donald Trump as his ambassador at the United Nations.

• Still, even her claim to that is problematic on multiple levels. First, she and other state Republicans like Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott had ignored decades of resistance to that flag by African Americans and their local allies. And unlike Haley and crew, those protesters, of course, never bought into the “Lost Cause” rhetoric of the Confederacy, the historical revisionism filled with intentional mythology that has long suggested the stars and bars are nothing but a benign neutral symbol of “our” past.

• In 2015, according to the talking points being floated by former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley and her team, she alone heroically removed the Confederate flag that flew on the grounds of the state capitol and so healed racial wounds. She implied as much right after it happened, again at the 2020 Republican National Convention, and in subsequent interviews. This “achievement” remains a critical part of her story about why she aspires to become president. Given the weakness of the South Carolina governorship, Haley doesn’t have a lot to show for her time in office or, for that matter, defending President Donald Trump as his ambassador at the United Nations.

• Pence guards his White House prospects, hence He’s planned resistance that’s intense. He wouldn’t want to give offense To MAGA types. That makes no sense— Though, purely by coincidence, They’re folks who chanted “Hang Mike Pence.”

• J. Edgar Hoover, we’ve always assumed, became the most powerful unelected American of his time because he had the goods on everybody: the mistresses, financial shenanigans, and underworld connections of presidents who might fire him and legislators who might investigate him. Two new books about the longtime FBI chief make you realize that there was something else as well. Hoover’s half-century of immense influence rested on his mastery of a very American art—the crafting of his image.1

• Atlassian has announced a five percent reduction in its workforce as part of an effort it founders described as a “rebalancing” that will allow the collaboration upstart to focus on its changing priorities.

• As advertisers continue to move away from Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover in October last year, the microblogging platform reported a drop in revenue and adjusted earnings for December, The Wall Street Journal reported citing sources.

• Twitter reported a 40% year-on-year decline in revenue and adjusted earnings for December in an investor update.

• Donald Trump is more of a performer than an orator. Those who complain that his speeches routinely violate the codified norms of rhetoric and grammar by giving vent to meandering digressions and bizarre interjections miss the point of how he communicates. Trump is not vying with Pericles, Abraham Lincoln, or Winston Churchill in a contest to achieve timeless eloquence. Rather, he belongs to the tradition of insult comedians such as Joan Rivers or Don Rickles, wrestling-ring braggarts such as Hulk Hogan, and radio shock jocks such as Rush Limbaugh. Like these other performers, Trump aims not to persuade but to electrify and polarize by conjuring up a memorable persona that the audience can identify with as an avatar of their socially frowned-upon anger and unspoken desires.

• White House officials are weighing whether to support legislation being developed by Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, that would give the government more authority to police apps and services that could pose a risk to Americans’ data security or be used in foreign influence campaigns, two of the people said. That could be used to target TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

• Forbes found “strong ties between TikTok’s parent business, ByteDance, and the Chinese government’s propaganda arm, which has been extensively utilising social media to propagate disinformation that supports the Chinese Communist Party.”

• ByteDance and TikTok, according to the article, did not dispute that the 300 LinkedIn profiles were current workers or deny their ties to Chinese official media.

• According to a ByteDance spokeswoman, the business makes “hiring choices based solely on an individual’s professional capacity to accomplish the job.”

• I know, I know, there are no room for facts in the modern GOP, just feelings. But, still, it’s kind of remarkable just how much they seem committed to the bit that Twitter was actively trying to suppress Republicans to help Joe Biden. There remains zero proof of this. Zero. Over the course of the various “Twitter Files” all we’ve seen is Twitter literally pushing back on anything that suggests political bias, and instead trying to review things based on whether or not they legitimately broke the rules.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Butler’s recent piece on the Lemon affair was published by Ms. Magazine, and her rejoinder to Lemon in USA Today. Higdon’s latest op-ed with Huff on Russiagate was published numerous places, including as a Dispatch at Project Censored.

• A number of bombshell revelations about the inner workings of Fox News have come to light as part of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against the network. Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, has admitted under oath that many hosts on his network “endorsed” Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election for financial, not political, reasons, stating, “It is not red or blue, it is green.” In court filings, Dominion also revealed that Murdoch had given Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner confidential information about Biden’s campaign ads and debate strategy in possible violation of election laws. Our guest, Angelo Carusone, is president of the watchdog group Media Matters for America, which recently sent a Federal Elections Commission complaint against Fox News based on evidence from the Dominion lawsuit. “All the way from Rupert Murdoch on down to the show producers, they knew what they were saying was not true, that it was actually a lie, and they did it anyway,” says Carusone.

• “This is direct evidence of knowing falsity” exclaimed RonNell Anderson Jones, Professor of Law at the University of Utah, in a February 2023 interview with Jon Stewart. Jones noted that in most defamation cases “the likelihood that you will find evidence of them [news outlets] saying, ‘We know this is a lie and we would like to move forward with it anyway is deeply unlikely.’” However, in the case of Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News, “the filing contains just this trove of evidence of emails and text messages and internal memos that are ‘rare’ both in terms of the ‘volume of the evidence and as to the directness of the evidence.’” This sentiment was echoed by Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe who noted, “I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues.”

• Bye-bye, Larry Hogan. On Sunday, the former Maryland governor finally answered a question nobody was asking, except maybe his family: No, he will not challenge Donald Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.1

• Over the past 11 months, someone created thousands of fake, automated Twitter accounts — perhaps hundreds of thousands of them — to offer a stream of praise for Donald Trump.

• Besides posting adoring words about the former president, the fake accounts ridiculed Trump’s critics from both parties and attacked Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador who is challenging her onetime boss for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Hours after the order was announced on Sunday, PEMRA suspended ARY News’ license for broadcasting a speech by Khan, according to those sources and ARY News CEO Salman Iqbal, who spoke to CPJ by phone. ARY News remains off the air as of Monday evening, Iqbal said.

• The ban by the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority was imposed on Sunday and went into effect on Monday. It covers airing of both recorded and live speeches by Khan, who was ousted in a no-confidence vote in Parliament last April. The ban followed a particularly fiery speech by Khan, who has a large grassroots following, lambasting Sharif’s government and the country’s all-powerful military.

• Renowned geologist Prof. Dr. Övgün Ahmet Ercan has been detained in the eastern province of Elazığ on the grounds of one of his media posts, according to reporting by state-run Anadolu Agency on Feb. 28.

• A Turkish prosecutor seeks up to three years in prison in their final opinion for famous pop singer Gülşen who is facing charges of “inciting hatred and hostility among the public” over her comments about Islamic Imam Hatip schools.

• Gülşen was jailed pending trial on Aug. 25 on a charge of incitement to hatred, after a video of her comments from four months ago surfaced on a website of a pro-government newspaper Sabah.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Filonova is now in jail, allegedly for “assaulting” two policemen with a ballpoint pen, while being transported to a hearing in another protest-related case against her. She was under house arrest until late October, when her husband had a heart attack while visiting another region. Filonova went to see him in the hospital, and also tried to find her son, who was missing from home at the time.

• C.I.A. whistleblower John Kiriakou told the Belmarsh Tribunal in Sydney, Australia on Saturday that the threat to Julian Assange is a threat to every national security reporter. (With transcript)

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Taliban have banned women from public life and girls education beyond the sixth grade, carried out public executions after sentences before Taliban courts and cracked down on minority communities.

• Amnesty International said the Taliban have also targeted women’s rights defenders, academics, and activists in recent months and detained them unlawfully. The arrests are arbitrary and those detained have no legal recourse or access to their families.

• Civil society, political parties, and rights organisations condemned the deputy commissioner for rejecting the plea to organise Aurat March on International Women’s Day on March 8.

• The JEN reported that he is so notorious in helping predatory men against innocent Hindu girls that he has been labelled as a “conversion factory”.

• A 23-year-old man stood trial in Besançon on Wednesday. He had beaten his wife for an entire day and night because she had concealed photos on her mobile phone that she had taken without wearing a veil. The judges found him guilty and sentenced him to 18 months in prison.

• The attacks have raised fears that other girls could be poisoned, apparently just for going to school. Education for girls has never been challenged in the more than 40 years since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran has been calling on the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan to allow girls and women to return to school and universities.

• It remains unclear how strictly the law could be enforced, and whether the country’s Federal Supreme Court will knock it back.

• In their appeal to the court, members of the Babylon Movement insisted the legislation was unconstitutional because it ignores the rights of minorities and restricts freedom.

• It also contradicts a government decree, adopted less than a week before the gazette was published on 20 February, setting duty at 200% on all imported alcoholic drinks for the next four years, they say.

• Over the last few years, we’ve written a number of stories about a (somewhat silly) trademark dispute between Jack Daniels, makers of whiskey, and VIP Products, makers of doggy chew toys, including one for “Bad Spaniels” that is a pretty clear parody of Jack Daniels.

• This Women’s History Month, out of touch lawmakers are rolling out economic plans that would set women back generations. Not this time!

• Despite decades of Indigenous activism and resistance, UC Berkeley has failed to return the remains of thousands of Native Americans to tribes. The university is still discovering more human remains.

• In 2022, 3,754 women were killed in Mexico, but only 33.7 percent were investigated as femicides. We need to build a movement that fights against misogynist violence.

• “Disability only becomes a tragedy when society fails to provide the things we need to lead our lives—job opportunities or barrier-free buildings, for example,” Heumann told one reporter.

• Disability rights advocates were joined by labor leaders, progressive politicians, and other advocates for justice on Monday in mourning the death of influential activist Judy Heumann, who began decades of advocacy work fighting for employment as a teacher and was credited with paving the way for numerous federal laws to protect people with disabilities. She was 75 and died on March 4.

• Multiple news outlets reported late Monday that the Biden administration is considering restarting migrant family detentions that were used extensively by previous administrations in an attempt to crack down on border crossings.

• Five Belarusian opposition leaders have been convicted of conspiracy and related charges, including organizing an extremist group, and undermining the government of Belarus and its state security.

• Russia’s Prosecutor General has officially declared the anti-corruption non-profit Transparency International “undesirable” in Russia.

• Ninety-four women whose sexual abuse lawsuit against a Utah OB-GYN was thrown out of court last year are celebrating a victory this month. But it’s a victory tinged with irony.

• Last week, the Utah Legislature passed a bill that will — if signed by Gov. Spencer Cox — put their rallying cry into law: Sexual assault is not health care.

• Texas lawmakers are working to plug a gap in a 2009 law that was meant to keep people with a history of serious mental health issues from legally acquiring firearms.

• We’ve known for a while that the Fifth Circuit is staunchly pro-cop. But, in recent months, it’s also shown itself to be no friend of the First Amendment.

• According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, “you cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.” Kindness, understanding, and love are so substantively intertwined that it is difficult to imagine any one of these without the other two, and all three are predicated on forgiveness. This article is a plea for real, radical forgiveness. There is ample blame to go around, and this has been more than adequately addressed by finger-pointing and what-about-ism by all sides. In fact, a veritable cottage industry of outrage and critique based in hatred seems to have grown exponentially on all sides in recent years. What seems to be missing is an acknowledgment that a) this society has become addicted to hate and outrage, and b) this hatred, like any other drug, has become a coping mechanism that has provided for the survival of the addicts. As we now finally recognize that addiction is a mental illness due to ongoing crises, we must go one step further and realize that the political hatred that has amplified exponentially isn’t evil, it too is a manifestation of mental illness. Enough with the what-about-ism, enough with the finger-pointing, enough with the inconsistent mirroring. Let us forgive.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• East Africa’s leading telecommunications company Safaricom is in trouble. Pressure is mounting on it, with two major lawsuits from its customers who are demanding accountability from the telco giant.

• Big Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime in both the US and EU, trying to get policymakers to force Big Tech to pay them billions in additional subsidies for no coherent reason. We’ve noted for several years how the push is self-serving bullshit by anti-competitive telecom giants, yet thanks to their lobbying influence, the effort shows no sign of slowing down.

• For much of the last year, European telecom giants have been pushing for a tax on Big Tech company profits. They’ve tried desperately to dress it up as a reasonable adult policy proposal, but it’s effectively just the same thing we saw during the U.S. net neutrality wars: telecom monopolies demanding other people pay them an additional troll toll — for no coherent reason.

Monopolies

• The European Union appears poised to clear the acquisition next month without asking Microsoft to divest any of its assets in return, according to a report late last week from Reuters. A go-ahead from the EU would remove one hurdle from the software maker’s path, but would still leave antitrust concerns in the US and UK to deal with.

• Citing three unnamed sources, Reuters said that Microsoft’s efforts to sign licensing deals with rivals is playing a role in the thinking of the EU, which is set to make its decision by April 25.

Software Patents

• The automotive industry is entering into its own subprime crisis. Even before the COVID pandemic led to supply chain issues that vastly inflated car prices, lenders were starting to extend loan periods to make things easier for underfunded purchasers, moving on from the industry standard 3-5 year loans to 84-month baselines that ensure people could purchase cars… but for a price they’d be paying for a long, long time.

Copyrights

• The addition of these translations is a significant milestone, as it enables even more people to access and use Creative Commons licenses in their native tongue. The Danish translation of CC 4.0 licenses and deeds was first started in 2019 by a team of official translators from the European Commission, coordinated by Pedro Malaquias. In 2022, the Danish Agency for Digital Government requested the translation to be completed, with the aim of recommending the use of CC licenses to public authorities and administrations. Peter Leth led the effort to complete the Danish translation.

• After Warner Bros. canceled several upcoming Scooby-Doo films, fans of the iconic show wondered when they’d ever catch a break. On the back of reports that Warner may have also canceled the upcoming film Scooby-Doo And Krypto Too!, this weekend the entire movie suddenly leaked online. Warner’s anti-piracy team is currently attempting to contain the leaks.

• Supporting community-driven solutions has always been at the heart of CC’s approach to sharing and creativity. In February, we held open meetings with our community to start to explore what CC might do new or differently in a world filling with AI-generated creations. Over 65 people registered to participate in the conversation from all over the world, including artists, educators, lawyers, librarians, policymakers, scholars, scientists, students, technologists, and more.

• Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Angie Cervellera is the Program Manager of Open Culture and Knowledge at Wikimedia Argentina and works with local organizations and institutions to open up collections.

• Recently, Walled Culture mentioned the problem of orphan works. These are creations, typically books, that are still covered by copyright, but unavailable because the original publisher or distributor has gone out of business, or simply isn’t interested in keeping them in circulation. The problem is that without any obvious point of contact, it’s not possible to ask permission to re-publish or re-use it in some way.

• The young son of an English friend who lives in Los Angeles presently enjoys a deep interest in visual effects. He is talented. His father is a scriptwriter. Film must run in the veins. VFX, as associates like to call visual effects, are to film what jewellery is to royalty — fascinating, opulent, not always necessary. I told my English friend I knew another Brit in Los Angeles, a former colleague, responsible over the years for some pretty impressive work in this sphere, no easy feat when you consider the restrictive nature of the briefs sometimes, and that we should attempt to put the two of them together, so that my friend’s son could at least benefit from what I know would be some pretty serious and sound advice. It got me thinking. London, never mind Los Angeles, or Vancouver for that matter, has a really intense relationship with VFX. In film circles, the VFX industry stands alone. Its death in London is often rumoured but survival seems assured. What is it about this sometimes dark art that makes it so prevalent here?

• It was in London one day that I first encountered this obsessively created imagery that is the world of VFX, its curious physical absence, its dizzying, often precocious, use of CGI, Compositing, Motion Capture; its 3D modelling, green screen filming, animalistic performances and capture. The expert I had mind for my friend’s son was Nicholas Lloyd. When I spoke to Nicholas on a video call last week about this he was characteristically willing. He lives in LA close to the airport (LAX). He likes California and California likes him. I knew Nicholas when he was Nick. Incredible to think he has been living and working over there for over 20 years now. I first knew him here in London when he used to ride a motorbike like a road-seeking missile, when not locked-on like one to two giant computer screens, at the same time as running code like a revolutionary might run guns. And all in the name of the boffinist of visual digitalia.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• My productivity went UP yesterday. I actually spent “quality” time practising guitar, plus I added a section to Gibbet. *Gibbet* is the working title. The piece doesn’t actually sound like a gibbet, as there are too many major 7 chords one after another, cascading. There is one Jazz Standard that also does that for a time. It may be Alice in Wonderland. That being claimed, the whole is not focused around major 7 chords. The main sequence seems to ever return to a harmonic major tonality. One day, some one will lock me up in a non-ergonomic pit because of my obsession with minor 6ths. A lesser spirit would make a terrible pun related to that last sentence. I am not that lesser spirit.

• Yesterday was also my first day to stroll around Pagan Park. I was alone except for a shambling mute hispanic man. Perhaps he sensed my love for minor 6ths and, offended, did not return my multiple greetings as we moved along the curving pavements, shambling opposite directions. Or perhaps he was mute for some altogether different reason, though I cannot think of any reason other than being offended by someone’s obsession for minor 6ths to be mute. In fact, it may be the most widespread cause of muteness in any sort of human, not just hispanic humans.

• This post got me thinking about works that, while not intended as satire or parody, are indistinguishable from it. I don’t know what to call them.

• A couple of examples will suffice.

• People who know me know that I’m a huge fan of Star Trek. I have been for most of my life. I watched the “Star Trek” 2009 movie when it came out on video, and I honestly could not tell the difference between it and a parody of the original series. “Are they fucking serious? This isn’t a Trek movie; it’s a parody!”

• I’m seeing a lot of “oh it’s great that we discovered these easily-pluggable, low-hanging fruit emitters like methane leaks and diked-out peatlands, yay” and on the one hand, yeah, fixing the low-hanging fruit, the 80/20, the squeakiest wheels is definitively something we’ve got to do…

• …we already knew we were in trouble before we discovered these issues and these sites. We need to fix a lot of the normal stuff too.

• We got food poisoning, a stomach flu, or something. I was on the child unit, on hold with pharmacies in the small out-of-the-way city one of my discharged kids went home to. A production issue caused short- age of methamphetamines. His family’s pharmacy couldn’t fill his prescriptions. I was trying to find a pharmacy that was holding.

• I couldn’t concentrate. I’d felt increasingly awful for hours. Nausea, hot-and-cold, brain foggy strug- gling to dial numbers, hyperfocusing, cramping. “Eum, just 11 hours work on 2 hours sleep,” I thought. “I’ll feel better if Amy lets me kick her the discharge for after she finishes med pass. I hate to shirk, his family’s been here an hour, but I’ll actually take my break today & feel better.”

Technical

• It has now been what, about two months(?) since i dabbled into the realm of Postmarketos… what is my conclusion so far?

• Well, it works. I switched from SXMO to phosh about a month after my initial installation of the system because i simply did not get used to the “tiling window manager on smartphone” thing after my initial enthusiasm faded. Phosh is much more touch oriented and mostly stays out of the way. I CAN imagine, that SXMO would work very well if you had a smartphone with an integrated keyboard, but with a touch only interface i simply could not get used to it.

• I’m not actually a keyboard junkie, I don’t have a pile of them around the house or anything, and I can’t relate to the obsessives on r/mechanicalkeyboards who appear to be spending whole life savings on input devices. I’m picky, though, to be sure, and I do get a new pair of keyboards every five years or so, one for home and one for work, then proceed to run them into the ground.

• We should be prepared for the shadow world where humans walk and talk surrounded by empty machines, sometimes remote controlled but usually without controllers, endlessly crawling the web, uploading the data, producing reports that nobody ever reads. We will have automated bullshit jobs because all the bot nets and crawlers and auto dialers and pseudo intelligence writing near-comprehensible text that mostly other pseudo intelligences read and so it goes.

• It will be important to connect with real people, read and listen to messages by real people, and from there the hundred thousand shadows flow, cast by real people sending real messages.

• [...]

• I have automated defences against bots on my servers, on my email inbox, and then I double check myself, looking for that human spark, that link back into the real network.

Science

• Friday and Saturday, there was a pretty cool conference, the conference of the Moral Psychology Research Group. I only attended the 2nd day, but it was a blast. But the highlight for me was Tania Lombrozo’s talk on a dual account of “to believe”.

Programming

• If I were to reinvent Search, where would I start? Page rank invites spam, we already know that. Endless crawling leads to the majority of web traffic being bots, we also know that. Crawling is also invasive, pulling things into the public square that were not intended for publication. So what are we to do?

• Here’s a different plan. Perhaps we need more different plans.

• Let there be a site map that contains all the pages you would like strangers to find, with the keywords associated with them.

• So I’m gonna argue against an RFC should here.

• The intent behind this particular should is to prevent lines that normally start with a greater-than character to be misinterpreted as if they were quote characters. I’m hard pressed to come up with even one example but I’m sure there are some math situation or something where it could conceivably come up. The intent was that there should be some sort of UI widget to explicitly mark text as “quoted”.

• My recommendation is that MUAs (including webmail interfaces) should not space-stuff lines that start with a “>” character, and if there is a line that starts with “ >” (a single space in front of the >), leave those alone too.

• I have started working on an Interactive Fiction side project. I have now set up a functional Gemini interface for this, although there is nothing publicly available yet. I have plenty of fine-tuning to do in the user interface to see what works best in this use case.

• I’ve collected some observations on the project so far. All in all, it feels very much like working on a point-and-click adventure game, but instead of graphics you have lots of text and get to use your imagination.

• 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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