● 03.14.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 14/03/2023: KDE Plasma 5.27.3 and Fedora Linux 38 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 11:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Instructionals/Technical

• Having a disaster recovery strategy for my most important data that is easy to maintain.

• The offline backup should be stored offsite in a secure and trustworthy location. The data must be saved on at least two mediums to reduce the risk of data loss due to hardware failure. The data must be encrypted to secure my data in case of theft. The case should be easily transported and protect the mediums against common risks like shock and water. The frequency of the offsite backup should be around every 1-2 weeks.

• For more information, please visit my backup guide.

• One of the main things to consider is: I must be able to recover everything with just this one offsite backup.

• DigitalOcean peers on some of the largest peering exchanges in the world, with thousands of bilateral peering sessions. To become compliant with this action, we engineered a solution to scalably ensure that our peers were sending legitimate prefixes on our bilateral peering sessions. In the process, we had to work within the hardware and software scaling bounds of our current network. For this process to be operationally sound, it must be automated with no operator intervention and must use information already published by peers — mostly, Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) and Internet Routing Registry (IRR) objects.

• To understand the scaling concerns of filtering bilateral peers, we built the histogram below (Figure 1) based on the published IRR objects of our peers. Each histogram bucket represents the size of the prefix list we’d need to generate and apply — the y-axis being the number of peers that would require a prefix list of that size. For example, there are roughly 30 peers that would need a prefix list with 200 to 300 entries.

• These days we have a Grafana Loki server that collects system logs from our Linux servers (which has sometimes been an exciting learning experience), along with our long standing central syslog server and, of course, the system logs on servers themselves (both in the systemd journal and the files written to /var/log by syslog and programs like Exim). As I’ve written before, we have both because Loki doesn’t duplicate our central syslog server, but that old entry sort of begs the question of when I use Grafana Loki instead of looking at another source of logs.

• I also appreciate their optimism. I didn’t connect the dots before, but retrocomputing fans are natural allies to the right to repair and homebrew tech communities. Keeping these systems alive, and expanding upon them with modern enhancements, hints to an alternative future which is more inclusive, empowering, and fun.

• In Linux, everything is a file, even physical devices such as disk drives, CD/DVD ROM, and floppy disks are represented using files. However, these files are not regular data files. Instead, these special files are called device files and they can generate or receive the data.

• Usually, all the special files are present under the /dev directory. Some of the common examples of special files are /dev/null, /dev/zero, /dev/full, and /dev/sr0.

• Icinga2 is a powerful free and open-source monitoring tool that keeps an eye on your network resources and sends alerts or notifications in case of failure or outages. It also collects metrics from network resources that can help you generate performance data and create reports.

• Icinga2 is scalable and it can monitor small to large and complex networks across various locations. In this guide, you will learn how to install the Icinga2 monitoring tool on Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04.

• The bash shell incorporates some of the best features of the C and Korn shells, such as job control, directory manipulation, and aliases.

• Aliases are very helpful to users who often type long commands or search their bash histories for a command they typed earlier.

• {

• # statements

• }

• {

• # statements

• }

• {

• mkdir $1

• cd $1

• exampleFunction(){

• mkdir $1

• cd $1

• t=531

• echo “The value of t is $t”

• echo ‘The value of t is $t’

Games

• I think it might be seriously time to play a whole lot more Volcanoids, with the new Ground Support update adding in special drones you can build and it looks awesome. The update also adds in new achievements, a few performance improvements, Japanese and Dutch translations, audio improvements and lots of bug fixes.

• After a while in Early Access, Terraformers from Asteroid Lab and Goblinz Publishing / IndieArk is officially out now with the 1.0 update. Another great looking game that offers Native Linux support.

• A day many players have been waiting for, Last Epoch has finally added in multiplayer amongst a number of other big changes to this action RPG. It’s been in Early Access on Steam since April 2019, but also had a Beta outside of Steam back in 2018 so it’s been going for some time now but the full release is due later this year and this is a big step towards it.

• Playing classic games, whether they are games from the golden age of arcades or simply games from consoles that are long out of production, tends to exist on a spectrum. At one end is grabbing a game’s ROM file, finding an emulator, and kludging together some controls on a keyboard and mouse with your average PC. At the other is meticulously restoring classic hardware for the “true” feel of what the game would have felt like when it was new. Towards the latter end is emulating the hardware with an FPGA which the open-source MiSTer project attempts to do. This build, though, adds ATX capabilities for the retrocomputing platform.

• Railbound looks great, a relaxing puzzle game about fixing train connections and travelling the world and now it’s Steam Deck Verified. It released back in September 2022 and it has an Overwhelmingly Positive user score on Steam.

• Over the weekend NVIDIA released a fresh small update to their developer-focused Vulkan Beta driver. Primarily meant for those who need all the very latest in the Vulkan API world, to help with game development or work on projects like Proton / DXVK / VKD3D-Proton and so on.

• Relic Space combines together smooth turn-based movement (think like Jupiter Hell) with tactical combat, RPG mechanics and 4X elements. With Native Linux support, this could be your next game?

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Plasma 5.27.3 is here two weeks after KDE Plasma 5.27.2 and enables the Night Color feature on ARM devices that don’t support Gamma LUTs but support Color Transform Matrices, such as the Acer Spin 513 Chromebook with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c SoC.

• The Plasma Wayland session continues to be improved, and KDE Plasma 5.27.3 comes with an improvement to the SDDM login screen for touchscreens that was also implemented in the KDE Frameworks 5.104 software suite released last week. This allows opening the virtual keyboard by tapping on its button and scrolling of the keyboard layout list with a swipe gesture.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• It’s Kali Linux’s 10th anniversary. And the team have a few goodies for you. Kali Linux 2023.1 is the usual package refresh of Kali Linux, which is arriving with the latest desktop environments and mainline Kernel updates.

• The major highlight of this release is the “Kali Purple”, a new variant of Kali Linux with tools for “defensive security”. Kali team is currently releasing it as a technical preview.

• Here are all the updates.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Powered by the latest Linux 6.2 kernel series, Fedora Linux 38 Beta comes with the GNOME 44 Release Candidate desktop environment for its flagship Workstation edition, as well as the KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS, Xfce 4.18, Cinnamon 5.6, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.26, Budgie 10.7, LXDE, i3, and SoaS desktop flavors.

• New Sway and Budgie spins are included in this release as well, which also introduces a new image for the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture with the lightweight LXQt desktop environment.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Many users were unhappy when Canonical announced they would drop default Flatpak support for Ubuntu’s flavors starting from the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster) release.

• If you were one of those users, we have some good news

Devices/Embedded

• Toradex new System-on-Modules are built around the Texas Instruments TI AM62x processor for commercial and industrial applications. The Verdin AM62x is equipped with 4GB eMMC, up to 1GB LPDDR4, two displays, one MIPI CSI and many other peripherals.

• Firefly announced today a single board computer based on the BM1684X Octa-core processor. The AIO-1684XJD4 can be configured with up to 16GB RAM, 128GB eMMC and it includes multiple storage interfaces.

• Last week, ASRock launched their newest Mini-PCs featuring a LGA1700 socket for Intel 13th/12th Gen CPUs. The Jupiter H610/B660 supports up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM, 2x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI port and multiple USB interfaces.

Open Hardware/Modding

• For Pi Day this year, I wanted to write a program to calculate pi by drawing a circle in FreeDOS graphics mode, then counting pixels to estimate the circumference. I naively assumed that this would give me an approximation of pi. I didn’t expect to get 3.14, but I thought the value would be somewhat close to 3.0.

• I was wrong. Estimating the circumference of a circle by counting the pixels required to draw it will give you the wrong result. No matter what resolution I tried, the final pi calculation of circumference divided by diameter was always around 2.8.

• I wanted to write an article demonstrating “How to automate XYZ with the Raspberry Pi” or some other interesting, curious, or useful application around the Raspberry Pi. As you might realize from the title, I cannot offer such an article anymore because I destroyed my beloved Raspberry Pi.

• The Raspberry Pi is a standard device on every technology enthusiast’s desk. As a result, tons of tutorials and articles tell you what you can do with it. This article instead covers the dark side: I describe what you had better not do!

• Lua is a sometimes misunderstood language. It’s different from other languages, like Python, but it’s a versatile extension language that’s widely used in game engines, frameworks, and more. Overall, I find Lua to be a valuable tool for developers, letting them enhance and expand their projects in some powerful ways.

• You can download and run stock Lua as Seth Kenlon explained in his article Is Lua worth learning, which includes simple Lua code examples. However, to get the most out of Lua, it’s best to use it with a framework that has already adopted the language. In this tutorial, I demonstrate how to use a framework called Mako Server, which is designed for enabling Lua programmers to easily code IoT and web applications. I also show you how to extend this framework with an API for working with the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins.

• Lua is a programming language designed for simplicity and performance, used by video game and multimedia companies as a front-end scripting language. Whether you want to want…

• After a few years of working in IT for big corporations, they then made another change to photography, with a side of making to go with it.

• “We’ve always been early-adopters and interested in getting stuff to do new things that are a touch outside of the originally intended use-case,” the two tell us. “We also benefited from open-source tools when we were using Linux wa(aaaaa)y back in the 1990s, so we are keen to share what we do in case anyone finds it useful.”

• Overwhelmingly the recommendation was the Framework, which I’ve looked at before but completely forgot. Their website doesn’t make it easy to find the display resolution, but other sites report it as 2256×1504, which is excellent.

• Each of the “Nixie tubes” used in this project is actually made entirely with 1206 SMD (surface-mount device) LEDs. But instead of soldering those onto PCBs, 4Dcircuitry attached them to formed 0.8mm brass rods to create tiny circuit sculptures. Those plug into custom PCBs which arrange the circuit sculptures, each a single segment, in a horizontal stack. Glass tubes cover each stack, making them look like Nixie tubes when viewed from the front.

• The man was traveling with an aerial drone. The following day, he tied his cellphone to the drone and typed out a text message to a friend that explained his ordeal and location. The man then flew the drone several hundred feet into the air with the phone attached.

• “The increased elevation allowed his phone to connect to a tower and send the message, which resulted in our teams being deployed and assisting him out of his situation,” the report said.

• But perhaps I am being too pedantic. Elevator control systems are complex and highly configurable. Whether or not the door close button is “hooked up” or not is mostly irrelevant if the controller is configured to ignore the button, and it’s possible that some of these articles are actually referring to a configuration issue. So what can we find about the way elevators are configured?

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• As is always inevitable in software, we are back with a new release of Kodi 20.x “Nexus”.

• To reduce the number of keyboards and mice you can get a physical KVM switch but the down side to the physical KVM switch is it requires you to select a device each time you want to swap. barrier is a virtual KVM switch that allows one keyboard and mouse to control anything from 2-15 computers and you can even have a mix of linux, Windows or Mac.

• Don’t confuse Keyboard, Video and Mouse (KVM) with Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) they are very different and this article will be covering the former. If the Kernel Virtual Machine topic is of interest to you read through this Red Hat article https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/virtualization/what-is-KVM that provides an overview of the latter type of KVM.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• Shocked? Course you’re not! The latest release arrives bang on schedule, one month to the day of the Firefox 110 release (which was notable for featuring WebGL improvements on Linux).

• Alas, the change-log this time around is a little (perceptually) leaner.

• Mozilla say Windows users will find that native notifications are enabled by default (which is great for them, I guess), and that users of Firefox Relay can ‘opt-in to create Relay email masks directly from the Firefox credential manager’ (which is great for them too, I guess).

Education

• Dragos Ruiu recently announced that Theo de Raadt will be presenting at this year’s CanSecWest, March 22-24 2023 in Vancouver, BC.

Programming/Development

• Version 0.86 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated): [...]

• I was doing a bit of retro computing over the weekend, writing 6809 code and running it on a Color Computer emulator (because the Color Computer was my first computer and the 6809 is a criminially underrated 8-bit CPU in my opinion). Part of the coding was enabling all 64K of RAM in the machine. Normally, the Color Computer only sees the lower 32K of RAM, with the upper 32K being ROM (the BASIC interpreter). To enable all 64K of RAM, all that’s needed is to stuff any value into memory location $FFDF, which can be done with “POKE &HFFDF,0”. The problem with that is once the ROM goes away, so does BASIC, and the CPU starts executing Lord knows what since the RAM isn’t initialized. So the actual procedure is to copy the ROM contents into RAM, which is simple enough: [...]

• In October last year, I was part of a webinar to talk about “Managing Large Codebases in R” with Alex Bertram of ActivityInfo. It is a bit late to write a blog post about this, I know, but I realized I never created one to spread the word around a lot more even though I did refer to it on social media… so here you go: [...]

• Esoteric programming languages were a big part of learning to code for me.

• These are creative, often minimalist programming languages that push the boundaries of what a programming language even is. Could you design a language that only has 5 commands? Or is only made up of whitespace? Or where every program must be a valid image file too? It is a puzzle both to design the language and to use the language.

• These are the aliases you should always have: [...]

• I needed a way to generate a TOTP secret using a fairly locked-down Mac. No Brew. No NPM. No Python. No Prolog, COBOL, or FORTRAN. No Internet connection. Just whatever software is native to MacOS.

• As I’ve mentioned before, the TOTP specification is a stagnant wasteland. But it does have this to say about the secret: [...]

Leftovers

• An Austrian or German woman approached us close to Prime Meridian in Greenwich Park last week. I didn’t ask her where she was from exactly but she was full of the joys of spring. This was right before the latest cold snap spoiled the party. One or two bright young yellow crocuses were pocking the green grass sloping away from us, while tiny buds in the trees had created a kind of faint green mist around One Tree Hill. The fact the Austrian or German woman was preaching to the converted didn’t matter; it was her delight at everything which had been so winning to us. We even took the liberty of imagining her holidaying alone and therefore craving this kind of interaction, forgetting again that many people who live alone are perfectly happy with their own company. For all we knew, she may have just killed an abusive husband and was celebrating the fact.

• At the risk of sounding technical, funny to think that solar time is actually less reliable — this is Greenwich, after all — because solar time keeps changing throughout the year, and the actual time interval between the sun crossing a set meridian line changes. A simple clock, on the other hand, tick-tocking away as if inhabiting some kind of rare Dickensian silence, measures always exactly the same length. The reason Prime Meridian is here and not somewhere else is because the Americans had already selected Greenwich as the starting point for their own federal time zone system, and because in the ship-savvy late 19th century almost three-quarters of the planet’s commerce depended on sea-charts using Greenwich as Prime Meridian. Brits by deliberately confusing the distant past with the more recent past like to take all the credit for Prime Meridian remaining here, but it was in fact an American decision. Which is not to forget about the illustrious longitude backstory with Harrison and giant telescopes and the cosmos feeding into Greenwich Observatory — nor more recently the shrewd success of ‘Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time’ by Dava Sobel, recounting this time. When this book came out in 1995 I can well remember a number of shaking heads among the elite and often male academic maritime community, as if this American outsider, a woman no less, had stolen their idea, forgetting of course that no one ‘owns’ history.

• I’m listening for the Eastern garter snakes. Any day now, they’ll arise from hibernation, rustle the Pennsylvania leaves, then tumble down the hills into the bright edge of the vernal equinox.

• Also this week, we’ll have Saint Patrick’s Day. And someone—there’s always someone—will solemnly say that we’re celebrating the Great Enlightener Who Drove the Serpents From Ireland Into the Sea.

• In a city that honors the new and newness, islands of the past disappear almost every day. In spanking new neighborhoods like Dogpatch, where glass and steel buildings tower over the streets, the past hardly exists. Elsewhere, too, history has been effaced. Alas, the San Francisco Art Institute is no more. The famed school, known locally and globally as SFAI, shuttered last year. No classes are held on the campus. But the elastic, indomitable spirit of the place at 800 Chestnut Street lives all across The City, and wherever graduates have set down roots and are making art, which is all over the world.

• On the afternoon of Sunday, March 26, 2023, at the Minnesota Street Project on Minnesota, of course, lovers and friends of SFAI will gather to celebrate the institution and its colorful history as one of the oldest art schools in the US. Founded in 1871, and formerly known as the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), it has been a birthplace and a home over the past 150 years to nearly every cultural movement and artistic expression, whether in film, sculpture and painting. What’s more, the roof terrace offers a singularly spectacular view of the whole city that’s not to be missed if it’s urban beauty you want.

• On March 16, 2021, a man shot eight women to death in Acworth, Georgia, a small town outside of Atlanta. Six were Asian, and two were white. All worked in massage parlors.

• The gunman, Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white, had grown up in the conservative Crabapple Southern Baptist Church in Milton, Georgia. Crabapple preached that sex outside of marriage was strictly forbidden. Long was a tormented soul who believed his visits to the massage parlors caused him to “fall from grace.” Obsessive guilt drove him to commit his depraved act.

Science

• The true reason to celebrate Pi Day is that mathematics, which is a purely abstract subject, turns out to describe our Universe so well. My book, The Big Bang of Numbers, explores how remarkably hardwired into our reality math is.

• Perhaps the most striking evidence comes from mathematical constants: those rare numbers, including pi, that break out of the pack by appearing so frequently – and often, unexpectedly – in natural phenomena and related equations, that mathematicians like me exalt them with special names and symbols.

• So, what other mathematical constants are worth celebrating? Here are my proposals to start filling out the rest of the calendar.

• Students, staff, alumni, and bibliophiles remain outraged that libraries at Vermont’s public college are set to lose vast portions of their book collections, despite a new “refined plan” to potentially retain volumes that “have been deemed academically valuable.”

• Writing festivals are often tired, stilted affairs, but the 38th Adelaide Writers’ Week did not promise to be that run-of-the-mill gathering of yawn-inducing, life draining sessions.  For one thing, social media vultures and public relations experts, awaiting the next freely explosive remark or unguarded comment, were at hand to stir the pot and exhort cancel culture.

• The fuss began with the festival organisers’ invitation of two Palestinian authors, Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed El-Kurd.  Abulhawa was specifically targeted for critical comments on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, notably regarding NATO membership, and for being a mouthpiece of “Russian propaganda”, while El-Kurd has been singledout for social-media commentary on the Israeli state, calling it “sadistic”, “demonic” and “a death cult”.

Education

• In 2014, MIT’s Technology Review wrote a very interesting article about an attempt to have Isaac Asimov be part of a group of scientists attempting to think outside of the box. In this article they included a 1959 essay that Asimov wrote instead of continuing to taking part in this (classified) government work. In this essay on “cerebration”, he described ways to get people to have truly new ideas.

• Recently, for some reason, this article disappeared from technologyreview.com, and I had to hunt quite a bit to find the document again, hidden somewhere as a badly OCRd PDF. The Technology Review article is back now (thanks!), but a single source is not good enough for an article with so many interesting thoughts.

• So here’s another copy for the archives, with some additional context and links.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Specifically, Shelgikar said that when the time shift happens there’s a “more exaggerated” mismatch between circadian rhythms and the world around us. When the clocks change and the times spring ahead, work and school responsibilities don’t change and that can lead to sleep deprivation because it’s harder to go to bed and wake up earlier.

• Cars are a clear threat to public safety, and they have been since they hit the roads over a century ago. Appleyard does dedicate some space to discussing Ralph Nader’s landmark 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, which effectively forced federal safety standards to be established for automobiles. But even as he notes the contribution of Nader’s work, he pokes holes in it to downplay its importance. Appleyard claims that Nader’s book “launched a backlash against the car that is with us to this day,” as if opposition to the automobile hasn’t existed since it first started taking over our streets. The long fight against the car does not get placed alongside the supposedly heroic actions of Henry Ford to push them onto the public. As Peter Norton writes in his study Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, there was widespread opposition to cars in North American cities in the first several decades of the 20th century, as they began killing pedestrians in ever-larger numbers and people organized to stop them. Among the tactics used, people would hold large funeral parades for the automobile’s victims, ring the bells of churches and fire halls to mark road deaths, and draw up propaganda that went so far as to label cars “the modern Moloch”—a god that requires child sacrifice.

• I know that, since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I keep repeating the mantra, “Everything old is new again.” I even know that I probably repeat it so much that it sometimes gets annoying. So be it. It’s a message that is important to me due to my simple hope that, if the newbies who have joined “our side” understand that none of this is new, they will learn the recurring themes, narratives, and forms of quackery, misinformation, and disinformation, the better to be prepared for the future. That brings us to homeopathy.

• The 10.5% jump over 2020 numbers was the largest percentage increase since the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) began its fatality data collection system in 1975. Exacerbating the problem was a persistence of risky driving behaviors during the pandemic, such as speeding and less frequent use of seat belts, as people began to venture out more in 2021 for out-of-state and other road trips, analysts said.

• “TikTok exploits recorded music to build an audience, drive engagement, and boost company revenues to stratospheric heights. TikTok’s actions in foreign markets to manipulate access to American music raise profound red flags about the service’s commitment to U.S. licensing policies—and fly in the face of its promises to consumers. 75% [of consumers] say they come to the platform to engage with music.”

• Ahead of a major hearing scheduled for Wednesday in a closely watched case which could further limit abortion access across the United States, reproductive rights advocates and journalists are decrying what one attorney called a right-wing judge’s “informal gag order… bordering on judicial misconduct.”

• One day late last summer, Dr. Barry Grimm called a fellow obstetrician at Vanderbilt University Medical Center to consult about a patient who was 10 weeks pregnant. Her embryo had become implanted in scar tissue from a recent cesarean section, and she was in serious danger. At any moment, the pregnancy could rupture, blowing open her uterus.

• Dr. Mack Goldberg, who was trained in abortion care for life-threatening pregnancy complications, pulled up the patient’s charts. He did not like the look of them. The muscle separating her pregnancy from her bladder was as thin as tissue paper; her placenta threatened to eventually invade her organs like a tumor. Even with the best medical care in the world, some patients bleed out in less than 10 minutes on the operating table. Goldberg had seen it happen.

Proprietary

• The initial breach was first reported last week after a House official warned lawmakers that they could have been exposed. But over the weekend, the scope of the breach and the number of lawmakers affected became clearer after a user of a hacking forum posted online what they claimed was the full set of data stolen from D.C. Health Link.

• As for ransomware attacks, the FBI received more than 2,300 complaints last year, with adjusted losses reaching more than $34 million. Over 800 of these complaints came from organizations across 14 of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors. The most targeted, with over 100 incidents each, were the healthcare, critical manufacturing, government facilities, and IT sectors.

• While Ting has been focused on tweaking its algorithms to provide even more details about potential fire hazards in the last year, it has also started working with utilities to share data about their electrical networks. Every Ting sensor tracks not just electrical variations within the home, but also variations and power issues coming into the home.

• A ransomware gang claims to have breached the massively popular security camera company Ring, owned by Amazon. The ransomware gang is threatening to release Ring’s data.

• However, the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI actually began several years ago. According to a report by Bloomberg, Microsoft had already spent “several hundred million dollars” prior to this year on the computing infrastructure required to develop ChatGPT.

• The money was spent to build a massive supercomputer that would be used to train ChatGPT, Bloomberg said. And in a pair of blog posts today, Microsoft discussed what went into building the AI infrastructure and how it’s planning to make that system even more robust, so it can power more advanced models.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Cyber-security researchers on Monday said they have discovered a massive 200-300 per cent spike in YouTube videos containing links to malware that can steal sensitive financial data from the computers.

• In 2015, the Supreme Court finally addressed reality: people were carrying around computers in their pockets capable of accessing, storing, and maintaining far more information than could be expected to be found in their physical houses.

• Everybody agrees child sexual abuse material is a serious problem. Unfortunately, far too many supposedly serious people are coming up with very unserious “solutions” to the problem.

Defence/Aggression

• The figures presented by the UNHCR at the Mocadem meeting are quite striking. Last year, 78 676 sea departures from Libya took place, an increase of about 13 per cent compared to 2021. With 53 173 boat passengers, many people made it to Italy, and a few hundred also to Malta. However, about a third of the boats were intercepted by the Libyan coast guard, according to the count, a 23.5 per cent drop from the previous year.

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, conceived by Vladimir Putin as a lightning-speed “special military operation,” has entered its second year without any remaining sense of clear military or political objectives. Nor is there any plausible account of how any gains from the invasion could possibly offset Russia’s losses from the war. For Meduza’s Ideas editor Maxim Trudolyubov, this absence of stated rational goals is not accidental. Putin’s reasons for prolonging the war, he writes, have less to do with foreign policy than with the Russian president’s need to buttress his autocratic power at home. The less successful he is in his “military operation,” the more likely it is that Putin will continue embroiling Russia in routinized warfare, in order to postpone the defeat that might signal the beginning of the end for Putin’s seemingly limitless presidency. It is for the sake of keeping the domestic threats at bay that Putin is now trying to reorganize Russian society around perpetual warfare.

• The Ukrainian serviceman Oleksandr Matsiyevsky, whose brutal execution by the invading Russian military was caught on video, was a Moldovan citizen by birth.

• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has just committed Australia to spending $368 billion on somewhere between three and five second-hand US Virginia Class submarines, and a follow on build of eight next generation British AUKUS nuclear submarines. It’s a strategic blunder, writes former submariner Rex Patrick, and it’s not even going to happen the way the PM has suggested.

• I just want a Ferrari. All my mates tell me they’re great cars. Never mind that, financially, I’m already struggling to keep up with the house repayments and, over time, the wife and kids are going to have to miss out on some of life’s niceties and even essentials; no orthodontic treatment to straighten my daughter’s teeth, no tutor to assist my son through extension maths and the wife won’t be able to afford to go back to uni to get her masters.

• Journalists at Cherta Media investigated the role of Russian “football [soccer] hooligans” in the invasion of Ukraine, focusing on the so-called Española detachment. After reorganizing themselves from a neo-Nazi brawling community into a “private military company” active in occupied Donetsk, Española started recruiting new combatants in February 2023. The group is even doing outreach to children in Donetsk. Ilya Khanin and Alexey Trifonov act as its main “humanitarian wing,” and they recently helped create a boys’ soccer team in Horlivka named after Española with a pirate mascot, modeled on the real group’s skull-and-crossbones iconography. Meduza summarizes Cherta Media’s report about the history of soccer hooliganism in Russia, the authorities’ efforts to “tame” these violent groups, and why men in this neo-Nazi community are now going to Ukraine to join the Kremlin’s “de-Nazification” campaign.

• Russia “doesn’t recognize” the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Tuesday, responding to a question about recent media reports that the court intends to open two war crimes cases related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• At least one person was killed and at least three were injured by a Russian missile strike on the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Tuesday, Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko reported.

• The Russian FSB announced Monday that it had arrested an activist from the “I / We are Furgal” movement, whose members oppose the criminal charges against former Khabarovsk Governor Sergey Furgal, for allegedly providing financial support to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

• Phone scams involving FSB impersonation are on the rise in Russia.

• A group of State Duma deputies headed by the Security Committee Chair Andrey Kartapolov have presented a bill to raise the maximum conscription age for serving in the Russian army to 30 years, instead of 27 under the current law.

• From Aug. 7, 1789, when it was created, to September 18, 1947, the American people knew that their government had a Department of War and that it had an Army and a Navy for that purpose, both to defend the country against attack, as it did in 1812, and to make war, as it did in the Barbary War of 1801-1805. Since then the US military has engaged in wars over 80 times including in the Civil War. Most of those wars, whether against Native peoples as the expanding US sought their lands, or against Middle Eastern or Asian countries to gain access to their resources.

• But all that time, the American people knew that their government was at war and that their tax money, whether they liked it or now, was being spent on efforts to kill or be killed, for defense and for offense.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Ellsberg served in the US Marine Corps and in 1959, took a job at RAND Corporation as a strategic analyst and served as a consultant to the Defense Department and the White House on matters of nuclear war. He joined the Defense Department in 1964 and returned to RAND in 1967, where he began working on a secret study of US policy in Vietnam from 1945 through 1968 that had been commissioned by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

• This was in the midst of the Vietnam War (1955-1975). And in 1969, Ellsberg, with the help of former RAND colleague Anthony Russo, began providing Senator William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with material from the McNamara study in an effort to oppose the escalating conflict.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• While no data supported this emotional appeal to children, Boerner Horvath obliged the governor and made the 2022 version of her bill, AB 1713, apply only to bike riders 18 and over. It again passed the Assembly, but was never called to a vote in the Senate because the author received word Newsom planned to veto it again—confirming that his reference to children had been empty concern-trolling.

• The series of vetoes shows how much elite resistance there is, even today, to reforming the laws that made the car king of our streets. Stop signs, after all, had no place in the pre-car streets of American cities, where people walking, bicycling, and riding horses freely mingled and the pace of traffic was much less. Like traffic signals, stop signs were introduced as part of the automobile industry’s highly successful effort to redefine streets as places where only cars belonged—not people on foot, who were “jaywalking,” a newly invented crime, and were blamed for their own deaths if they stood in the way of cars2.

• According to the International Energy Agency, global clean energy investments are likely to increase by 50% or to $2 trillion by 2030 from approximately $1 trillion today. While this is monumental, the value of these investments will only be realized if it is matched with the pace required for clean energy deployment. Given New York’s upcoming energy storage incentives, we are moving in that direction, with the New York State Department of Public Service (DPS) and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) already a step ahead.

• Climate, environmental, and Indigenous advocates in recent days condemned the skyrocketing cost of expanding the Canadian government-owned Trans Mountain oil pipeline, which is now expected to carry a CA$30.9 billion price tag—44% higher than last year’s estimate and nearly a six-fold increase from the original appraisal.

• Five weeks after the Norfolk Southern toxic train derailment and so-called controlled burn that blanketed the town with a toxic brew of at least six hazardous chemicals and gases, senators grilled the CEO of Norfolk Southern over the company’s toxic train derailment. The company has evaded calls to cover healthcare costs as residents continue to report headaches, coughing, fatigue, irritation and burning of the skin. For more on the ongoing fallout from the toxic crash, and its roots in the plastics industry, we are joined by Monica Unseld, a biologist and environmental and social justice advocate who has studied the health impact of endocrine-disrupting chemicals used in plastics like those released in East Palestine. She is executive director of Until Justice Data Partners and co-lead for the Coming Clean science team. Also joining us is Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator and president of Beyond Plastics whose recent Boston Globe op-ed is headlined “The East Palestine Disaster Was a Direct Result of the Country’s Reliance on Fossil Fuels and Plastic.”

Wildlife/Nature

• The film’s plot revolves around a family who adopts two orphan baby elephants in Tamil Nadu’s Mudumalai Tiger Reserve.

• These are the facts. Almost half of the Ashland Ranger District of the Custer-Gallatin National Forest in southeastern Montana has burned in recent wildfires. This has severely impacted mule deer habitat, resulting in a declining mule deer population which will continue to fall if the Forest Service goes forward with its proposed South Otter logging and burning project on 292,000 acres (456 sq. miles) of public lands.

• The 1990 Ashland Deer Guidelines were developed jointly between the Forest Service and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks to limit logging impacts on what they note is “the most stable and important population of mule deer in southeastern Montana.” Yet, by ignoring its own scientists and arbitrarily changing existing standards, the South Otter project will destroy even more of what’s left of this vitally important mule deer habitat.

• People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals on Monday implored the U.S. military to reinstate a ban on the intentional wounding of animals in experiments and to stop radiation testing in an attempt to determine the cause of the mystery ailment popularly known as “Havana syndrome” that has afflicted U.S. government officials posted at diplomatic facilities in Washington, D.C. and several foreign countries.

• Following his administration’s Monday morning approval of the Willow oil drilling project, environmental justice advocates slammed U.S. President Joe Biden for betraying the voters who sent him to the White House and vowed to do everything in their power to stop ConocoPhillips from proceeding with its climate-wrecking venture on federal land in Alaska’s North Slope.

• Progressives on Capitol Hill joined climate advocates and Indigenous leaders across the country Monday in blasting U.S. President Joe Biden for his administration’s approval of ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil project on federal land in Alaska.

• The Biden administration has approved a massive oil and gas development in Alaska known as the Willow project, despite widespread opposition from environmental and conservation groups that argue Willow will amount to a carbon bomb. The administration also announced Sunday it will ban future oil and gas leasing for 3 million acres of federal waters in the Arctic Ocean and will limit drilling in a further 13 million acres in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska’s North Slope. For more, we speak with Siqiñiq Maupin, executive director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic, who says Willow would undermine Biden’s larger climate goals. “This project would emit so much carbon, it would actually double the amount that Biden had promised he would reduce,” they say.

Overpopulation

• Many futuristic novels and films have explored what the world might look like without water. But water scarcity isn’t a problem for the far-off future: It’s already here.

• In its 2021 report, UN Water outlined the scale of the crisis: 2.3 billion people live in water-stressed countries and 733 million of those people are in “high and critically water-stressed countries”.

Finance

• For the last six years, I have been running the architecture blog McMansion Hell, which highlights the most ridiculous examples of bloated, nouveau riche residential architecture in the United States. When I began the blog in 2016, the Internet was rife with prime examples of genuinely weird specimens. However, in the last couple of years, particularly since the onset of the pandemic, it has become more and more difficult to find unique houses—houses with interiors that exhibit the true whimsy of people for whom money is no issue. In their place are empty, vast rooms painted gray, wood floors replaced by what’s already being recognized in social media circles as a new “landlord special” flooring type: beige-gray (greige) laminate. When there is furniture in these rooms, the furniture itself is white, gray, or greige. The rugs are white or extremely muted colors. Occasionally, you’ll see some pastels or other earth tones thrown in—or the obligatory HGTV “pop of color” in the form of a cushion or poster—but the trend is overwhelmingly gray. Some rooms are so colorless one wonders if the photograph itself is in grayscale.

• My long-dead father used to say, “Every human being deserves to taste a piece of cake.” Though at the time his words meant little to me, as I grew older I realized both what they meant, symbolically speaking, and the grim reality they disguised so charmingly. That saying of his arose from a basic reality of our lives then — the eternal scarcity of food in our household, just as in so many other homes in New York City’s South Bronx where I grew up. This was during the 1940s and 1950s, but hunger still haunts millions of American households more than three-quarters of a century later.

• Let’s be clear. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is a direct result of an absurd 2018 bank deregulation bill signed by Donald Trump that I strongly opposed. Five years ago, the Republican Director of the Congressional Budget Office released a report finding that this legislation would ‘increase the likelihood that a large financial firm with assets of between $100 billion and $250 billion would fail.’

• Unfortunately, that is precisely what happened. During the debate over the legislation I said: ‘Are our memories so short that we learned nothing from the 2008 Wall Street crash? Have we learned nothing from the Savings and Loan disaster of the early 1990s or the thievery of Wells Fargo over the last couple of years or the dishonesty of Equifax or the accounting fraud at Enron and Arthur Anderson or the failure of Long-Term Capital Management or the billions of dollars in fines that financial institution after financial institution has paid out for illegal or deceptive activities?’ Sadly, the Republican Congress and the Trump Administration answered all of these questions with a resounding NO.

• Barney Frank, a former House Democrat from Massachusetts, has been the subject of criticism since federal regulators took over Signature Bank on Sunday.

• The failure of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) shows us, once again, that unrestrained greed isn’t good. For even modest greed to have a positive effect in society, it must be regulated.

• U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday weighed in on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, taking to The New York Times’ opinion section to offer her view on how the financial institution failed, while also looking ahead and detailing “what Washington must do—quickly—to prevent the next crisis.”

• The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and other similarly sized banks in recent days has put a spotlight on Congress’s 2018 bipartisan banking deregulation law, which was signed by then-President Donald Trump.

• We’ll never know what might have happened if the law hadn’t been enacted. But given that Silicon Valley Bank would have been subject to stricter oversight under the old rules, more regulation may have slowed — or even prevented — the panic that set in last week as depositors rushed to withdraw their funds.

• The bank’s blowup has sent shockwaves across the tech sector, Wall Street, and Washington, DC, amid concerns that other banks could be in trouble or that contagion could set in. In the days after Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, the panic appeared to spread, leading to the failure of additional banks, including Signature Bank of New York, which had bet on crypto. But it’s not clear how serious the fallout would be.

• The root problem with SVB was that the bank specialized in serving the “start-up” community in Silicon Valley. These were companies that flourished in the era of low interest rates that lasted from roughly 2008 (when rates were lowered to combat the onset of the Great Recession) until 2022 (when inflation worries sparked a rise in rates). In that time of cheap money, tech start-ups found it easy to get venture capitalist funding, which they needed more as they grew. As new and often gimmicky ventures, the start-ups weren’t expected to make money immediately—but instead to burn through it. SBV emerged as the bank of choice, since it followed a strategy of keeping money in long-term bonds. As the Financial Times reported in February, this supposedly conservative strategy of investing in bonds was tied to the bank’s role as a safety-deposit box for start-ups. The bonds, the FT noted, were “part of a plan to shore up the bank’s balance sheet in case venture funding of start-ups went into freefall.”

• On Friday, Silicon Valley Bank, a lender to some of the biggest names in the technology world, became the largest bank to fail since the 2008 financial crisis. By Sunday night, regulators had abruptly shut down Signature Bank to prevent a crisis in the broader banking system. The banks’ swift closures have sent shock waves through the tech industry, Wall Street and Washington.

• Here’s what we know so far about this developing story.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday had a “fruitful meeting” with Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark during which they discussed India’s strides in building next-generation digital infrastructure.

• Since its founding, Cicero has churned out model legislation and research papers calling into question the need for permanent housing, instead advocating for criminalization of people sleeping outdoors. (In addition to influencing policy, Cicero uses its 501c3 status to act as a fiscal sponsor for Substack writer Bari Weiss’s unaccredited university, University of Austin.) The organization also has a lobbying arm called Cicero Action, a 501c4 that is legally permitted to advocate for legislation.

• This would require WhatsApp to remove end-to-end encryption from its product. If the app refused to comply, it would either have to pull out of the UK market or have its parent company Meta face fines of up to 4% of its annual turnover.

• “The reality is, our users all around the world want security,” said Cathcart. “Ninety-eight per cent of our users are outside the UK. They do not want us to lower the security of the product, and just as a straightforward matter, it would be an odd choice for us to choose to lower the security of the product in a way that would affect those 98% of users.”

• Politico kicked off the weekend with a big scoop: Former vice president Mike Pence was going to use his star turn as the Gridiron Dinner keynote speaker “to deploy a trait he has for the most part kept under wraps over the past half dozen years: his humor.” He’s funny, his aides say. Mostly dad-joke funny, but still funny. Did you know he wrote a comic strip during law school, “Law School Daze”? I didn’t either. It was awful.

• When Elon Musk moved to take over Twitter, Jack Dorsey, who endorsed the deal, talked to him about making the site more open, specifically turning it into a protocol that anyone could build on. This would have been a good plan. Indeed, it’s one that seems to now be gaining traction for basically every company not named Twitter. Elon Musk, however, went the other direction entirely.

• Iran and Saudi Arabia have agreed to reestablish diplomatic relations after seven years and reopen their respective embassies within months, in a deal brokered Friday by China and signed in Beijing. The rapprochement between the two rivals is the latest sign of China’s growing presence in world affairs and waning U.S. influence in the Middle East amid a shift in focus to Ukraine and the Pacific region. “If we have a more stable Middle East, even if it’s mediated by the Chinese, that ultimately is good for the United States, as well,” says author and analyst Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He adds that the U.S. focus in the Middle East is mainly on helping Israel normalize relations with Arab states while “all of the pressure is taken off of Israel to end its occupation” of Palestinian territory.

• The nonpartisan League of Women Voters has been facing a nationwide backlash after decades of going about its business of surveying candidates, registering voters, hosting debates and lobbying for its causes with little fuss.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Dozens of Iranian students across the country say they have been banned from entering their universities after they protested the suspected poisoning of pupils that has hospitalized scores, mainly schoolgirls.

• Zangkar Jamyang, now 45, disappeared on the night of June 4, 2020, when authorities in Kyungchu county of Ngaba, a Tibetan region in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, hauled him away without a trace.

• For a very long time, his family had no clue about his whereabouts, or even that he had been arrested, said a Tibetan from inside the region.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• This is an abridged version of an address by John Pilger in Sydney on 10 March to mark the launch in Australia of Davide Dormino’s sculpture of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, ‘figures of courage’. I have known Julian Assange since I first interviewed him in London in 2010. [...]

• Several top employees of Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) shared links to a free and presumably pirated online version of the film Navalny, which won the Academy Award for best feature documentary on Sunday, on Twitter and Telegram.

• In his Monday press briefing, the Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov commented on Sunday’s Academy Awards and the Oscar awarded to Daniel Roher and the documentary team behind “Navalny.”

• Nearly six months ago, The New York Times released audio of phone calls Russian soldiers had made to their families while deployed in the Kyiv region at the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine. In the calls, the men complained about the incompetence of Russia’s military leadership and recounted atrocities they had witnessed or participated in. Though The New York Times didn’t reveal the soldiers’ full names, journalists from the independent Russian outlet Mediazona managed to use information accidentally left in the article’s metadata to contact the servicemen and their relatives. In English, Meduza summarizes what they learned.

• In investigative journalism, impact is the coin of the realm. But impact is unpredictable. At ProPublica, our hope is that by exposing problems — or things not working as they should — legislators and policymakers will make changes.

• Sometimes, the impact is immediate. In 2009, my colleagues and I reported that the California Board of Registered Nursing took years to discipline problematic nurses, putting patients in harm’s way. Within two days of our story, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced the majority of board members; a day later, the executive director of the board resigned. Our boss had to call ProPublica’s founder to tell him not to expect this to happen every time ProPublica published a big investigation.

• Russian authorities have also labeled more than 30 RFE/RL journalists as foreign agents, and a number of the broadcaster’s affiliated websites were blocked after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

• Starting March 2, law enforcement officers in the capital, Tbilisi, attacked and obstructed the work of at least 14 journalists covering protests against proposed “foreign agent” legislation, according to news reports, statements by the Georgian Charter of Journalistic Ethics and Media Advocacy Coalition local trade groups, the charter’s executive director Mariam Gogosashvili, who spoke to CPJ by phone, and seven local journalists who spoke to CPJ.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The practice of requiring repayment for training programs aimed at recent nursing school graduates has become increasingly common in recent years, with some hospitals requiring nurses to pay back as much as $15,000 if they quit or are fired before their contract is up, according to more than a dozen nursing contracts reviewed by NBC News and interviews with nurses, educators, hospital administrators and labor organizers.

• Hospitals say the repayment requirement is necessary to help them recoup the investment they make in training recent nursing school graduates and to incentivize them to stay amid a tight labor market. But some nurses say the system has left them feeling trapped in jobs and afraid to speak out about unsafe working conditions for fear of being fired and having to face thousands of dollars in debt.

• What began as anger at the hijab law grew into a bigger movement as Iranians said they were fed up with the regime’s corruption, economic mismanagement and oppression of its citizens. Now, a visible minority of women in Iran are refusing to wear headscarves, in defiant protest against the government and all of its policies.

• That there was a strike at all related to claims of a reduced base wage for couriers who use the Wolt platform, from its earlier level of €3 per delivery, and a lack of transparency over a newly installed tax system for workers using the app, whereas soon after the strike began, at 4.30 p.m. Friday, a courier told the daily that he and other couriers who were actively striking could not access Wolt.

• The courier said that the strikers had announced their intentions via Facebook, and found that while they were unable to access Wolt, a friend who used the Bolt taxi app and was also aware of the strike action, had been able to log on to that platform.

• The opponents of the proposition argued that the ballot measure was unconstitutional under several grounds. It set limits on the State Legislature’s ability to oversee workers’ compensation for gig drivers. It included a rule restricting them from collective bargaining that critics said was unrelated to the rest of the measure, and it set a seven-eighths majority vote of the Legislature as the bar for passing amendments to the measure related to collective bargaining — a requirement that was considered nearly impossible to achieve.

• The Service Employees International Union was less than impressed, saying, “Every California voter should be concerned about corporations’ growing influence in our democracy and their ability to spend millions of dollars to deceive voters and buy themselves laws.”

• How can you understand a problem if you are not allowed to name it?

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• “And I hope that songwriters want to get a Garth Brooks cut. One, because I hope that they think that it would be cool. But two, right behind it closely, I hope it’s because they know that if you’re a Garth Brooks songwriter, you’re going to get paid.”

Monopolies

• Google India has approached the court to challenge the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal’s order declining to stay a Rs 1,338 crore penalty imposed on the company by the Competition Commission of India for unfair and anti-competitive practices.

Copyrights

• The second hurdle – and there’s been no mention by Apple about this ­– ­relates to how performers are paid. Pop singers get money every time their song is streamed for 30 seconds or more, with an average payment of 0.0025p per listen. This system is fine for three-minute, regularly played pop songs. But a single movement of a symphony can last half an hour. Per-track payments won’t cut it. Orchestras need to eat. This issue must be addressed.

• 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. Siobhan is a volunteer for various Wikimedia projects including Wikicommons, Wikidata, and Wikipedia.

• It was a couple of weeks back when we highlighted the story of how one game, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, was suffering as the victim of very clear DMCA abuse. If you don’t recall the post, you can get all the details in the link. The short version of it is: a fan of the game and member of the game’s community wrote a guide for making the game more realistic, the publisher liked it so much that they wanted to incorporate some of it into a new “realistic” game mode they were already creating, they offered to give him credit after the game mode was released, and then everything went sideways.

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