● 03.08.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 08/03/2023: FEX 2303 Tagged and Investing in RSS

Posted in News Roundup at 8:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Asahi Lina has posted an initial version of a Rust-based driver for Apple AGX graphics processors; the posting includes a fair amount of Rust infrastructure for graphics drivers in general.

Applications

• File sharing software increases the efficiency in both personal and business tasks. Here is the list of 15 file transfer software for Linux.

• Deep Learning is a subset of Machine Learning that uses multi-layers artificial neural networks to deliver state-of-the-art accuracy in tasks such as object detection, speech recognition, language translation and others. Think of Machine Learning as cutting-edge, and Deep Learning as the cutting-edge of the cutting-edge.

• An extremely interesting area of research relates to deep learning text-to-image models such as Stable Diffusion. These models can generate highly detailed images based on text descriptions.

• InvokeAI is a Stable Diffusion toolkit. It provides a streamlined process with various new features and options to aid the image generation process. The project has spent considerable effort finetuning the installation process as well as developing a convenient web interface and an interactive command line interface.

Instructionals/Technical

• Gedit offers almost all the features expected from a basic text editor, but if that’s not enough for some reason, you can add more functionality to it through plugins. This tutorial covers three of the most useful Gedit plugins for programmers.

• In this article, we will discuss the basics of the head command using some easy to understand examples. Sometimes, while working on the command line in Linux, you might want to take a quick look at a few initial lines of a file. For example, if a log file is continuously being updated, the requirement could be to view, say, first 10 lines of the log file every time.

• UFW or Uncomplicated Firewall is an application to manage an iptables based firewall on Ubuntu. UFW is the default firewall configuration tool for Ubuntu Linux and provides a user-friendly way to configure the firewall, the UFW command is just like English language so the commands are easy to remember. The UFW firewall supports IPv4 and IPv6.

• Apache Web Server is one of the most popular HTTP servers on the Internet today, due to its open-source nature, rich modules, and features, and can run on almost major platforms and operating systems.

• While on Windows platforms there are some built-in development environments that provide a Graphical Interface to manage Apache configurations, such as WAMP or XAMPP, on Linux the entire management process must be performed entirely from the Command Line, in most cases.

• Linux has evolved into one of the easiest operating systems on the market to use. The GUIs are (for the most part) so well-designed that anyone can use them. And for those who might be afraid of having to use commands… those days are long past.

• Sure, if you really wanted to make the most out of the raw power that comes with Linux, you could make use of the command line, but you don’t have to. That’s the point.

Games

• Oh jeez, another month already? I guess it’s time for another FEX-Emu release. Let’s pick a commit, spin the roulette wheel, and hope for the best! Surely that’s how releases work?

• Vangers is a thoroughly weird racing role-playing adventure originally released in 1998, and it’s still being upgraded.

• Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania is a fresh content expansion for the popular rogue-lite, metroidvania inspired, action-platformer and it’s available now.

• Do you feel like you’re falling behind on all the Steam Deck news? Here’s a round-up of a few things to keep you going.

• The latest major update to Dota 2 from Valve has landed, bringing with it the removal of OpenGL support and the new hero Muerta.

• Kujlevka from developer Callback and publisher Crytivo is a quirky adventure about a flying saucer crash landing into a small distant Russian village. Now, they have a new trailer up and a release date teaser for sometime in April.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• It has been many years that I have provided up-to-date builds of KDE/Plasma for Debian stable, testing, unstable. It is now more than a year that I don’t use Debian anymore. Time to send this off.

• As already mentioned in some comments to various blog posts here, I will not invest more work into the current repositories. I invite anyone with interest in continuing the work to contact me. I will also write up a short howto guide on what I generally did and how I worked with this amount of packages.

• I feel sad about leaving this behind, but also relieved from the amount of work, not to speak of the insults (“You are a Nazi” etc) I often get from the Debian side. I also feel sorry for all of you who have relied on these packages for long time, have given valuable feedback and helpful comments.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

BSD

• As part of this, the OpenBSD tcpdump has some special additional filtering options that are useful for selecting interesting traffic on this pf logging interface. These are covered in pcap-filter; many or all of them can be found by searching for mentions of pf(4). Here are the most notable ones that I want to remember.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Robert McQueen, CEO of the Endless OS Foundation and GNOME Board President, has given a big update on what’s going on with Flathub. A lot of work has been going in towards updating Flathub from a list of apps, into a full build service and app store complete with payment processing. This includes developer verification, user accounts and more.

• The Flathub organization (in the form of Robert McQueen) has posted a lengthy update on the state of Flathub and its plans for the coming year.

• Everyone uses their computer in different ways, according to their needs. You may work as a designer, so you need various design software on your computer. Or maybe you’re a gamer, so you need an operating system that supports the games you like. Sometimes we don’t have enough time to prepare an operating system that supports our needs. Fedora Linux Lab editions are here for you for that reason. Fedora Labs is a selection of curated bundles of purpose-driven software and content curated and maintained by members of the Fedora Community. This article will go into a little more detail about the Fedora Linux Lab editions.

• You can find an overview of all the Fedora Linux variants in my previous article Introduce the different Fedora Linux editions.

Debian Family

• Well, there are a few reasons.

• Firstly, there’s clue in the distro’s name: vanilla. It wants to ship a desktop as close to source as possible, in this instance GNOME. Ubuntu makes a number of modifications to GNOME and unpicking those changes is, frankly too much darn effort, all considered.

• Secondly, Snaps. Vanilla OS devs aren’t that enamoured by them as they continue to have performance and integration quirks. Plus, some of Ubuntu’s deb-to-snap transitional packages (like Mozilla Firefox) get tangled up inside of their APX package manager.

• Thirdly, Vanilla OS wants to be in charge of its own release cadence, rather than kowtow to Ubuntu’s six-monthly drops. Switching over to Debian Sid gives it more control in this area.

• Synced with the Debian Testing (Debian Bookworm) repositories as of March 6th, 2023, the SparkyLinux 2023.03 release is powered by Linux kernel 6.1.12 LTS and brings a new Debian repository that provides non-free-firmware, which should translate into better hardware support.

• The latest KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment series is included as well in this release as a standalone live edition, along with the recently released KDE Frameworks 5.103 and KDE Gear 22.12.2 software suites.

Devices/Embedded

• ESP 360 Remote is an ESP32-based IR and 433 MHz RF remote with built-in sensors used to control home appliances over WiFi and that also integrates with Home Assistant open-source home automation framework.

• The open-source hardware design is comprised of a mainboard with an ESP32-WROOM-32E module, temperature, humidity, and light sensors, and a board on the top with nine infrared LEDs, one IR receiver, as well as a 433 MHz (or 315 MHz) RF receiver and transmitter with the receivers used for learning the code from the remote controls.

• The new Secure Compute Module (SCM) Pro is an embedded platform built around the Raspberry Pi CM4 for IoT and edge applications requiring security features such as Verified Boot, Hardware Root of Trust, File System Encryption, Physical Tamper Sensors, etc.

• As of publication date, the SCM Pro is offered with the Pi CM4 with 8GB RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage.

Open Hardware/Modding

• At the time of publication, the defaced pages were still accessible online. However, in anticipation of the eventual removal of the vandalized pages, Anonymous has created archived versions of the defacement, balloons, and control panel.

• First of all, I had to DuckDuckGo what “theremin” means. To save some of you the same administrative task, I can tell you that it’s named after the person who invented it in 1928 — someone called Leon Theremin — and it’s that eerie-sounding instrument you play by moving your hands near it without touching it.

• So, yeah. One of those metal sticks that people wave their hands around rhythmically to coax sound out of. For my money, it’s as close to wizardry as the music world gets.

• pico-lorawan is a library to enable LoRaWAN communications on a Raspberry Pi Pico or any RP2040 based board using a Semtech SX1276 radio module.

• You can now say goodbye to big commercial cloud providers and manage your appointments, contacts, and other data in your own home network. Install NextcloudPi on your Raspberry Pi in less than 30 minutes, synchronize your mobile devices with your own Nextcloud, and gain total digital sovereignty and privacy!

• I remember when the first Raspberry Pi hit the market in 2012. My Linux friends and I were absolutely thrilled: a tiny computer, available for little money, but with enough computing power to be useful. It has a fully-fledged Linux system running on it, too! We started all sorts of DIY projects, set up media centers, web servers, blogs, control centers for our smart homes, and even a monitoring solution for bee hives.

• Last year in December, I decided to install and run my own cloud on the Raspberry Pi. After some digging around, I settled on NextcloudPi, a ready-made instance of Nextcloud. The open source software runs not only on the Raspberry Pi, but on many other single-board computers and other operating systems.

• This article shows how to install and configure NextcloudPi. I also explain how to secure the system and talk about different backup and restore methods.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• We are used to the term “career change” as if it were a break in a trajectory. But in my experience, that’s never really the case. A person cannot erase themselves from what they consist of, and this richness of diverse backgrounds resulted in several breaking points. Individual journeys, often far from computer science, hold accountability for the social implication of technology and bring richness and creativity to the technology industry.

• Being an artist has always given me freedom and opened doors to explore several fields, from architecture to sciences. A great part of my artistic experience took place in hackerspaces in Brazil, surrounded by the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) ideology, the open free/libre culture of sharing. Nowadays, for several ideological and practical reasons that do not fall within the scope of this article, the most common term is “open source”. And lucky for me, my career switch started with an internship in an Open Source Program Office (OSPO), which made this switch feel — almost — like home.

• A journey through open source is rarely something you do alone. Your hobby, career, and your life has been affected by others in the tech space, and statistically some of those people have been women. That’s one of the many reasons International Women’s Day exists, and it’s a good excuse to reflect upon the women who have inspired your career in tech. We asked Opensource.com contributors for their thoughts.

Events

• I had a few snarky opening lines for this post, but decided that was a bit unfair. Let’s just say that people get very impassioned about tech events and getting talks accepted. If you’re on the conference committee, it can be… intense, sometimes, managing the needs of an event versus people’s deep interest in being one of the speakers. I thought it’d be helpful to give some insights into why talks are and aren’t accepted.

GNU Projects

Licensing / Legal

• Last reply by swmech on Mon, 06 Mar 2023 20:36:13 +0000

• The basic problem here is that an “upgradable smart contract” isn’t worth the bits it is printed on, because the terms of the “contract” can be changed after the parties agreed to it by the owner of the “contract”, or by the owners of any “upgradable smart contracts” used by the “contract” in question, who may or may not be one of the parties.

Programming/Development

• But all these tools, frameworks and techniques boil down to two acronyms that I like to keep in my head at all times:

• DRY: Don’t Repeat Yourself;

• WIT: Write It Down.

• DRY WIT: by systematically avoiding not to repeat yourself and by writing everything down, projects become well-tested, well-documented, trustworthy and reproducible by design. Why is that?

• STMicroelectronics has launched a new family of Linux microprocessors based on ARM’s Cortex-A core for embedded applications such as displays.

Java

• In Java, both Boolean and AtomicBoolean are used to represent Boolean values, but they have different characteristics and use cases. Boolean is a wrapper class that represents a Boolean value as an object.

Standards/Consortia

• Opening up my RSS reader, a cup of coffee in hand, still feels calm and peaceful in a way that trying to keep up with happenings in other ways just never has. There’s more room for nuance and thoughtfulness, and I feel more in control of what I choose to read, and what I don’t.

• The act of spending that time in those feeds still feels like a very deliberate, intentional act. Curating a set of feeds I find interesting and making the time to read them feels like an investment in myself.

• Format=Flowed is otherwise a fantastic format. It solves a lot of email’s problems. The next section (4.2) in the RFC is still great. Non–space-stuffed lines starting with a > are marked as quoted. Perfect, that’s exactly what we want. In other words, I am not suggesting changing the format or the on-the-wire protocol. I’m only talking about a way to make generating this format more palatable for text area based interfaces.

• Email is a text format and having to reach for a formatting menu or toolbar just to mark some text as quoted falls apart pretty quickly, as does trying to interleave your own responses in between the quoted lines. Those interfaces work for top-posting and bottom-posting, and that’s great, but they make inline-posting impossible.

Leftovers

• Where the stolen catalytic converters end up is unclear.

• There are many other examples of easy money toxicity, but we need to turn to something even more poisonous: large organizations’ loss of meaning. And the resulting hardening of corporate blood vessels. We can illustrate loss of meaning as follows: in a healthy organization, everyone from the friendly receptionist to the CEO can concisely say what the company’s mission is. Even drunk at three am under the rain, the person can utter words such as “we organize the world’s information” or “we make personal computers”. Once a group of people loses that ability, that cohesive force, psychic energy is rerouted towards individual power acquisition and preservation. Now, compound this with easy money and grandiose projects and you get dangerously inward-looking organizations. There, the rules are clear: advancing one’s rank and compensation demands getting more staff on one’s project. A sad and unfortunately not completely obsolete story of organization toxicity is aptly told in a Vanity Fair article titled Microsoft’s Lost Decade. To be fair to Microsoft’s current leadership, company culture has considerably evolved and the Vanity Fair piece should just be seen as more generally describing ailments that threaten large rich organizations.

• IDC now predicts 403.1 million units will be shipped this year instead of the 429.5 million it forecast at the end of 2022. Tablets are expected to make up 142.3 million of these shipments and traditional form factors will account for the rest.

• And I’d add: here, be your own librarian and archivist for a dizzying variety of formats, media, interpersonal communications platforms, etc. so you can immediately re-find that resource you ran across yesterday or ten years ago. Argh!

Education

• President Santa J. Ono’s approachability was on full display at a community reception, where a long line of people waited for the opportunity to meet the new president and share a few words.

• In his inauguration as U-M’s 15th president, Santa J. Ono declared, “Today, it is time for a new vision, a new punctuation, a new opening of possibilities for the University of Michigan. It is time to dare great challenges and dream bold dreams.”

• The goal is to give a bit of exposure to each other’s audience about what the other role is about, what are the challenges and opportunities for collaboration and how the two roles complete each other.

• Around 20 million Nigerian children do not go to school, according to figures from UNICEF, one of the highest numbers of out-of-school children anywhere in the world. [...]

Hardware

• The $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act is designed to use federal grants and investments to encourage domestic production of advanced semiconductors and will also fund research into further advanced technologies, including further improved microchips; quantum computing; and artificial intelligence (AI).  Although many advanced chips are still primarily designed in the US, almost all of them are currently manufactured abroad (primarily in Taiwan and Korea). And, China is rapidly developing its own capabilities for advanced chip manufacture.

• It’s easy to forget the progress that people in tech have made. In the early 2000s, most local user groups held regular install fests. Back then, to configure a single machine to run Linux well, we had to know intimate details about hardware and how to configure it. Now, almost twenty years later, we represent a project whose core ideal is to make getting a single computer to run Linux as easy as an API call. In this new world, operators and developers alike no longer have to worry about the hardware in their servers. This change has had a profound impact on the next generation of operators and developers.

• In the early days of computer technology, you had to put your hands on the hardware frequently. If a computer needed more memory, you just added it. As time passed, technology also evolved in big ways. This ended up moving the operator further from the hardware. What used to be a trip to the data center is now a support ticket to have remote hands on the hardware. Eventually, hardware was disposed of altogether. Instead, you now summon and destroy “servers” with simple commands and no longer have to worry about hardware.

• Here is the real truth: hardware exists because it is needed to power clouds. But what is a cloud, really?

• Small in size, low-resolution, blocky segments, and a limited color palette — all characteristics of the typical vacuum fluorescent display, any of which would seem to disqualify them as the display of choice for a lot of applications. But this is Hackaday, and we don’t really pay much attention to what we’re supposed to do, but rather to what’s fun and cool to do. So when we see something like a VFD game console, we just have to sit up and take notice.

• I then did a battery reset (there is a small hole at the bottom of the ThinkPad which you need to press with a small pin) and voila: Everything worked again …

• Bar bots, or robotized bartenders, are a fun feature of events in our community, because there’s nothing like a cocktail untouched by human hand. Usually they have a row of bottles and a slide on which you put the glass, but [SecurityWriter] relates a tale of an altogether much grander affair. Given a weekend with a group of friends and an enterprise-grade IBM tape library robot, they did what any sensible engineer would do. They turned it into a bar bot.

• With soldering irons being so incredibly useful, and coming on the heels of the success of a range of portable, all-in-one soldering irons from the likes of Waveshare and Pine64, it’s little wonder that you can get such devices for as little as 10 – 15 Euro from websites like AliExpress. Making for both a great impulse buy and reverse-engineering target, [Aaron Christophel] got his mittens on one and set to work on figuring out its secrets.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The US is planning to relax Covid-19 testing restrictions for travelers from China as soon as Friday, a source familiar told CNN Tuesday, citing a decline in Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths and more data surrounding the variants that were circulating in China.

• In many ways, Sibley was a preview of East Palestine, Ohio, the train derailment that sparked an evacuation and widespread concerns about air, water, and soil contamination. Less than two years before international media focused its attention on the small Ohio town, Sibley experienced many of the same hardships: forced evacuations, contaminated soil and water, physical symptoms among some residents, and an uncertain future. But the biggest difference, as Huls tells it, was not anything to do with the derailment itself, but the attention it got. The only news crews that showed up in Sibley were local outlets.

• The case marks the first time that pregnant women themselves have challenged the state’s three abortion bans: a criminal ban that pre-dates Roe v. Wade, a trigger ban passed in anticipation of Roe being overturned, and Senate Bill 8, an effective ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. All three bans have exceptions for medical “emergencies,” but advocates say they are unclear and have resulted in “widespread confusion” over who and what qualifies.

• What happened to each of them sounds like, as Zurawski put it, the “sick and twisted plot to a dystopian novel — but it’s not.”

• The effort — led by Mark Warner, D-Va., the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and John Thune, R-SD, the Senate Republican whip — comes after Republicans on a House committee rammed through a bill on Wednesday that would effectively ban TikTok on mobile devices in the U.S over opposition from Democrats, who said that it could ensnare U.S. businesses that don’t pose a national security risk. The bipartisan bill introduced on Tuesday represents what could be the most achievable legislative solution to address concerns that the data TikTok collects on more than 100 million American users can be leveraged by the Chinese government to advance its interests.

• 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.”

• Eilish, by the way, isn’t the only celebrity who has recently discussed removing social media apps from her phone. Selena Gomez spoke to Vanity Fair about why TikTok is the only platform she has on her phone and how she has had her assistant post to her other platforms for years now.

Proprietary

• I chose the life, it didn’t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long time ago, and I’ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold the heft and halter, the one standing at the death of all things, and while it means a lot of moments of rescue and recovery, it also means knowing, looking across at that which thrives and bustles, the desiccation and destruction to come. The only part of the fog of the future that’s guaranteed is the moment it switches from theory to a wall of iron and then darkness.

• All this to say: Discord.

• We are currently witnessing dramatic advances in the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). They are already being adopted in practice and integrated into many systems, including integrated development environments (IDEs) and search engines. The functionalities of current LLMs can be modulated via natural language prompts, while their exact internal functionality remains implicit and unassessable. This property, which makes them adaptable to even unseen tasks, might also make them susceptible to targeted adversarial prompting. Recently, several ways to misalign LLMs using Prompt Injection (PI) attacks have been introduced. In such attacks, an adversary can prompt the LLM to produce malicious content or override the original instructions and the employed filtering schemes. Recent work showed that these attacks are hard to mitigate, as state-of-the-art LLMs are instruction-following. So far, these attacks assumed that the adversary is directly prompting the LLM. In this work, we show that augmenting LLMs with retrieval and API calling capabilities (so-called Application-Integrated LLMs) induces a whole new set of attack vectors. These LLMs might process poisoned content retrieved from the Web that contains malicious prompts pre-injected and selected by adversaries. We demonstrate that an attacker can indirectly perform such PI attacks. Based on this key insight, we systematically analyze the resulting threat landscape of Application-Integrated LLMs and discuss a variety of new attack vectors. To demonstrate the practical viability of our attacks, we implemented specific demonstrations of the proposed attacks within synthetic applications. In summary, our work calls for an urgent evaluation of current mitigation techniques and an investigation of whether new techniques are needed to defend LLMs against these threats.

• Our requirements for our migration are quite straightforward: we need to migrate trillions of messages with no downtime, and we need to do it quickly because while the Cassandra situation has somewhat improved, we’re frequently firefighting.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (kopanocore), Fedora (golang-github-projectdiscovery-chaos-client, rust-sequoia-octopus-librnp, rust-sequoia-sop, rust-sequoia-sq, and usd), Oracle (libjpeg-turbo and pesign), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, osp-director-downloader-container, pesign, rh-mysql80-mysql, samba, and zlib), SUSE (mariadb), and Ubuntu (fribidi, gmp, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-kvm, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux-raspi, nss, python3.6, rsync, systemd, and tiff).

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• We anticipated this type of workload when creating the initial version of Earthly compute. However, there was one issue that made container orchestration frameworks unsuitable: the workload. Earthly compute needs to execute customer-submitted Earthfiles, which are not dissimilar to Makefiles. Anything you can do on Linux, you can do in an Earthfile. This meant – from a security point of view – we were building remote code execution as a service (RCEAS).

• Not so fast! A certificate’s issuer field is frequently a lie that tells you nothing about the organization that really issued the certificate. Just look at the certificate chain currently served by doordash.com: [...]

• The domain name registrar Freenom, whose free domain names have long been a draw for spammers and phishers, has stopped allowing new domain name registrations. The move comes just days after the Dutch registrar was sued by Meta, which alleges the company ignores abuse complaints about phishing websites while monetizing traffic to those abusive domains.

Privacy/Surveillance

• As evidence mounts that facial recognition technology is racially biased and has led to wrongful arrests of people in the U.S., Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Tuesday reintroduced their legislation to impose sweeping prohibitions on the use of the technology by federal agencies and entities that receive federal funding.

• Thousands of records about U.S. government involvement in the research and development of facial recognition technology—unveiled due to an ACLU lawsuit and first reported on Tuesday by The Washington Post—fueled fresh calls for a federal ban on such tools.

Defence/Aggression

• New security screening equipment will allow travellers to keep liquids and electronics in their carry-on luggage when departing from Helsinki Airport.

• An overview of the “tools” theory of the Proud Boy prosecution.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about his military strategy as Russian forces continue to make gradual gains in the city of Bakhmut. Watch the full exclusive interview on Wednesday, March 8 at 9 p.m. ET.

• China’s leader Xi Jinping hit out at the United States with unusually direct comments as he called on the country’s private companies to “fight” alongside the Communist Party at a time of mounting challenges at home and abroad.

• While the world has been distracted, even amused, by the diplomatic tussle around China’s recent high-altitude balloon flights across North America, there are signs that Beijing and Washington are preparing for something so much more serious: armed conflict over Taiwan. Reviewing recent developments in the Asia-Pacific region raises a tried-and-true historical lesson that bears repeating at this dangerous moment in history: When nations prepare for war, they are far more likely to go to war.

Environment

• Janet Napolitano, former University of California president, U.S. secretary of homeland security and Arizona governor, joined U-M sustainability experts for a panel discussion on climate action.

Wildlife/Nature

• The chief investigator says the neglect likely continued for a long time, but that it was difficult to tell exactly how long.

Finance

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The Minister of Economic Affairs said that alcohol has not impacted his official duties, despite multiple reports surfacing this past week.

• The Chancellor said there was no reason to suspect Katri Kulmuni (Cen) had committed a crime.

• Elon Musk publicly scoffed at a Twitter employee’s uncertainty about whether he had been laid off in a recent round of cuts and spoke dismissively of the employee’s disability in a series of tweets Monday night. It’s the latest example of the billionaire openly antagonizing his company’s current and former staffers.

• US Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger on Tuesday ripped into Fox News host Tucker Carlson over his commentary about footage from the January 6, 2021, insurrection that he aired Monday night, saying the host “cherry-picked” from the footage to present “offensive” and “misleading” conclusions about the attack.

• After Fox News’ Tucker Carlson falsely dismissed the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump as mostly nonviolent, numerous Republican senators including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday blasted the right-wing opinion host’s “whitewashing” of the deadly insurrection.

• The Montana Legislature just hit its half-way mark, called “transmittal,” in the 90-day session. That means they’ll be fleeing the Capitol to return to homes, businesses, and families for a few days.

Censorship/Free Speech

Civil Rights/Policing

• A Norfolk Southern conductor was killed in Ohio early Tuesday, elevating scrutiny of the rail giant and calls for dramatic improvements to industry safety regulations in the wake of a devastating derailment in the state last month.

• Having banned abortion and trans medical care, Tennessee is “upping their shame game” with the nation’s first (ludicrously ambiguous, likely unconstitutional) law criminalizing drag shows as part of the GOP’s histrionic assault on all things trans, queer or “other.” As critics blast the move as hateful “political theater” meant to “legislate gender non-conformity out of existence,” the country-punk band Vandoliers took a more direct, hairy approach, donning dresses for a Tennessee show and declaring, “Fuck a drag bill.”

• Reproductive rights supporters responded with disgust Tuesday after right-wing lawmakers in Florida’s GOP-controlled Legislature unveiled legislation that would prohibit abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• “I could not have imagined that legions of cable and media industry lobbyists, their bought-and-paid-for surrogates, and dark money political groups with bottomless pockets would distort my over 30-year history as a consumer advocate into an absurd caricature of blatant lies,” Sohn said in a statement. “The unrelenting, dishonest, and cruel attacks on my character and my career as an advocate for the public interest have taken an enormous toll on me and my family.”

Monopolies

• In “End to End,” my new column for Locus Magazine, I propose a policy framework for a better internet: the “End to End” principle (E2E), a bedrock of the original design for the internet, updated for the modern, monopolized web, as a way of disenshittifying it: [...]

• Consumer and labor advocates on Tuesday welcomed a U.S. Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit seeking to block JetBlue’s proposed $3.8 billion acquisition of Spirit Airlines, its biggest competitor, a deal that critics say would harm passengers and workers.

Patents

Software Patents

Trademarks

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• February started great with a small-honeymoon trip to the Archena Spa. This was our first trip without Bernat, who stayed with my sister for a couple of nights. Everything went well on both sides and we had a nice relaxing time in this beautiful location, including a fancy lunch near Murcia.

• A spectre is haunting the left: the spectre of ‘manifestos’.

• Do we really need another ‘manifesto’? Particularly if, as is likely, it’s pretentious and totalising and unable to survive contact with the enemy, i.e. the real world?

• The world is a complex mess. Specific aspects of the world are a complex mess. There usually aren’t straightforward solutions.

• If you’re dogmatically pushing a specific Understanding and a specific Solution, you’re actually part of the problem. It’s not all basically reducible to biology, but nor is it all basically reducible to social constructs.

Technical

• I’m so frustrated right now.

• Bunny can’t receive email, and we have no idea why that is. All we get is that there have been too many attempts to log into her account and she needs to reset the password. Now, her account is with `bellsouth.net` which is now owned by AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) but email for customers is handled by Yahoo, but trying to track down a human being to talk to is a Herculean effort these days, and even *if* we get ahold of someone, can they even help? Forget the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, it appears these days that the left hand doesn’t even know it has fingers!

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