● 03.16.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 16/03/2023: OpenSSH 9.3 Released and WordPress 6.2 Release Candidate 2, Lapdock News

Posted in News Roundup at 9:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Applications

• Simulide is a free/open source electronic workbench software, that is, a real-time circuit simulator with PIC, AVR and Arduino simulation. It is suitable for hobbyist and student in electronic engineering. It is available for GNU/Linux, Windows (32-bit and 64-bit) and MacOS. It reached version 1.0.0 release candidate III on Wednesday, 12 October 2022. Here at Ubuntu Buzz we want to convey the message to all to try, use and, if you can, join the development. Happy studying!

• If you’re worried about your digital privacy, you probably know that using Google apps is not ideal. Although the tech giant has taken steps to give people more choices about the data they share, it still has a lot of work to do. Fortunately, open source apps can help you keep your data secure, as none of your data within the app can be tracked or shared without your knowledge.

• Google Calendar is an excellent calendar app. Still, there are plenty of open source alternatives available for Android. If you’re willing to sacrifice some functionality, these apps should fulfill most of your calendar needs. If you’ve just picked up a new Android phone, install one immediately to keep your data secure.

Instructionals/Technical

• This is the eleventh part of my syslog-ng tutorial. Last time, we learned about message parsing using syslog-ng. Today, we learn about enriching log messages.

• Hello, friends. We already know that many home servers are deployed with CentOS 9. So by enabling BBR you will be able to get better bandwidth usage and thus improve their speed. Let’s get started. What is BBR? BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT) is a congestion control algorithm written by Google software engineers.

• Not able to install or use GNOME Shell Integration on your browser? Then don’t dwell too much because you can also manually install extensions from a zip file using the following steps: After installing a fresh distribution/operating system, we all customize the system according to our preferences.

• Looking for a WhatsApp client application similar to the Signal desktop client? Then you should try “WhatsApp for Linux,” which is not an official client but does all the most important things to connect with users.

• In this guide, we will walk you through the steps to solve Bluetooth connectivity on Ubuntu 22.04 issues step by step. Whether you’re struggling to pair your devices, experiencing problems connecting, or dealing with annoying disconnections, we’ll share some troubleshooting techniques that will help you fix common Bluetooth issues on your Ubuntu system.

• Getting up to speed with Ansible Middleware Collections is easy, and installing the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform only requires a few steps. This tutorial demonstrates six steps to configure a WildFly instance using Ansible by preparing a local machine with the necessary tooling and then deploying an instance of WildFly using the WildFly collection provided by the Ansible Middleware.

• First, let’s get Ansible Automation Platforminstalled on the control node. A control node is a machine from which we will push the configurations to the managed nodes/hosts. Managed nodes are the ones we would like to configure and they can be defined under inventory. You can install AnsibleAutomation Platform using your preferred method. Refer to the installing Ansible documentation for details.

• As you already know Kali is an open-source, Debian-based Linux distribution that was previously known as BackTrack. It aims for advanced penetration testing and security auditing. If you have forgotten your root password and want to reset Kali Linux password this is the best tutorial.

• Ping sweep is the ability to ping multiple devices at once. This can be a lifesaver when looking at which devices are up from the stack of machines while troubleshooting.

• In this tutorial, we will explain how to install Grafana on AlmaLinux 9 OS.

• Moodle is an open-source platform for online learning. It is a Learning Management System used by educational institutions that enable them to create online courses, training, learning and assignments. Originally, Moodle was known as an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Moodle on AlmaLinux 9.

• In most modern Linux distributions, the latest version of Firefox has been already installed from the default distribution package manager and configured as the default browser.

• In this article, we will explain other ways of installing the latest version of Firefox on RHEL-based distributions such as CentOS Stream, Fedora, Rocky, and AlmaLinux and Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint.Table of Contents11. Install Firefox Using Package Manager2. Install Firefox Using Flatpak3. Install Firefox Using Snap4. Install Firefox from Source in LinuxUninstall Firefox from Linux System

Games

• I recently saw a comment online that the ‘polls’ screen in Democracy 4 was horribly slow for a particular player. This worried me, because I pride myself in writing fast code, and optimizing to a low min spec. The last thing I want to hear is that my game seems to be performing badly for someone. I thus went to work on improving it. This involved about 15 mins looking at the code, about an hour musing, while trying to sleep, and about 20 mins coding the next day, plus an hour or more of testing, and profiling. Here is what I did, and how I did it.

• Trains underwater? It’s happening. The frantic and hilarious Unrailed! just got a big free content upgrade.

• Valve have put out a fresh update for Proton Experimental for Steam Deck and Linux Desktop, bringing more compatibility for Windows games. Here’s all the latest and how to switch to it.

• Valve has now promoted the recent Steam Deck OS Preview to Stable, giving all Steam Deck owners an updated graphics driver that brings Ray Tracing for DOOM Eternal.

• Barotrauma, a game that’s about exploring the ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa, where many horrors wait below the surface of the water. A game that can go from gentle hums to chaos at any moment, it certainly something if you manage to gather a few people together. It does also have a single-player mode too.

• Love your mechs? Lancer Tactics was announced recently, as a video game adaption of the popular crowdfunded tabletop roleplaying game.

• Up for a challenge? Marble-rolling platformer Marble It Up! just recently gained Native Linux support in a Beta.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• The next Core Update is ready for testing: IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 174. It is a traditional spring clean release which updates major parts of the core system and comes with a large number of bug fixes throughout.

• This update also comes with a number of security patches in Apache, cURL and more, but none of them have been assessed as being exploitable on IPFire. Nevertheless, we intend to bring those updates to all of our users as soon as possible, and encourage speedy installation of Core Update 174 after its testing phase has been completed successfully.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Fedora 38 is finally available for download… in Beta. Yes, the pre-release version of the Linux-based operating system can be installed now, but keep in mind, it is mostly intended for testing. Remember, folks, it is never wise to run an early version of a Linux distribution on your main machine due to bugs and potential data loss.

• If you understand the risks and decide to give the operating system a go, you will be treated to some exciting things, such as the GNOME 44 desktop environment and improvements to the rpm package manager. A full changelog can be seen here.

• Fedora 38 beta is available to download ahead of a planned stable release in late April.

• The beta version of the upcoming Fedora Linux 38 operating system is now available for download. Fedora Linux 38 Beta is powered by the latest Linux 6.2 kernel and it features  GNOME 44 Release Candidate desktop environment.

• Fedora won “Most Memorable Booth” at the So Cal Linux Expo 20x. I’ve had multiple people ask me why and if we had some kind of gimmick. To be fair, we did have excellent swag this year and a great crew of people at the booth, but in my opinion, it was our enthusiastic community of users who made it truly exceptional.

• This year, instead of asking overly generic questions like “Do you use Fedora?” and “Have you tried Kinoite or Silverblue yet?”, I decided to ask “What’s something fun or interesting you’re doing with Fedora these days?” and the answers very much did not disappoint.

• Laptop boots to U-Boot. Then Grub is loaded and then it was Fedora Linux 37 system with custom kernel and some modifications. So far there is no installer support — mostly due to Apple partitioning and how boot selection is done.

• I will not go with what works and what does not as it is work in progress all the time. Asahi Linux project has “Feature Support” wiki page for it.

• Spent some time on customizing system to have encrypted /home partition, boot progress instead of kernel output etc. Then copied some settings and data.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Ubuntu 23.04 is due for release next month.

• It is not a Long-Term Support version. So, not everyone needs this upgrade.

• Whether you want to upgrade or not, it is always exciting to check out the upcoming features, right? Let us take a look at them.

• The legacy Ubuntu Desktop installer is beginning its descent this year to be replaced by Subiquity, a new installer that aligns the desktop and server codebases alongside a refined first time user experience. Finally, the desktop environment will soon complete its transition to GNOME 44 to ensure good health and usability improvements for all users.

Devices/Embedded

• The Rock 3 Model C is another single board computer powered by the Rockchip RK3566 with 0.8 TOPs NPU. Radxa’s new SBC supports up to 8GB RAM, 128GB eMMC and it can be powered with PoE HATs.

• [...]

• The ethernet port supports PoE (Power-over-Ethernet), with an additional PoE HAT. Radxa also mentions that this board is mechanically compatible with “many of the existing Raspberry Pi 4 accessories”.

• The Getting Started page indicates that the Rock 3 Model C can boot up from the eMMC module or from a microSD card. The Downloads page currently lists images (Pre-release) for Debian Bullseye and Ubuntu Server 20.04.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Librem 5 and Librem 5 USA is our pocket-sized computer running nearly the exact software as our Librem 14 Laptop. Some desktop applications don’t yet adapt to the Librem 5 screen, but with a Lapdock Kit you can run a full suite of desktop applications like on the Librem 14. Let’s look at some of the full-sized desktop software you can run today on the Librem 5 attached to a Lapdock or external monitor.

• For visual artists

• Visual artists will be happy to find helpful tools tucked away in our software repos. For instance, Krita and GIMP are both powerful painting and image manipulation programs.

• The Librem 5 by Purism is a smartphone powered by the Linux kernel. Is it good enough to replace Android or iOS as a daily driver smartphone?

• Is Purism’s Librem 5 usable as your daily phone? If you’ve grown accustomed to the apps available in the Play Store or Apple App Store, then the answer is no. Purism’s device simply doesn’t offer that type of experience.

• But there are many people looking for something different. They’re not asking if the Librem 5 can beat Android or iOS at being Android or iOS. They’re asking whether the Librem 5 is actually usable as a phone, period. And, well, yes, but also no. It depends.

• In this blog post, I explain the multiplication process inside the 8086, analyze the microcode that it used, and discuss the hardware circuitry that helped it out.3 My analysis is based on reverse-engineering the 8086 from die photos. The die photo below shows the chip under a microscope. I’ve labeled the key functional blocks; the ones that are important to this post are darker. At the left, the ALU (Arithmetic/Logic Unit) performs the arithmetic operations at the heart of multiplication: addition and shifts. Multiplication also uses a few other hardware features: the X register, the F1 flag, and a loop counter. The microcode ROM at the lower right controls the process.

• Greetings. I trust you had a splendid March 14th or, if you’re one of us, Pi Day, yesterday. Yes, we know it doesn’t really work unless you use the American date format, but for one day a year, we’re glad our friends across the pond put the day and the month the wrong way round. Just for the one day.

• Bruton built this centipede robot as a scaled-down prototype, as he plans to construct a ridable version sometime in the future. This robot, which is still quite large, let him test the unusual walking mechanisms. The robot has five segments, each of which contains two pairs of legs. The mathematicians among you will have deduced that that equals 20 individual legs. But the legs don’t operate independently. In fact, all 20 of those legs are connected mechanically. Each segment has a drive shaft that moves its legs through gears and linkages, and universal joints connect the drive shafts between segments.

• This is a small mat designed to sit by the user’s bed. When the alarm goes off in the morning, the user must get out of bed and stand on that mat for five to 10 seconds. Until they do so, the alarm will continue blaring. Snooze is not an option here and the simple act of getting out of bed and standing up should be enough for most people to shake the sleep off, ensuring that they won’t fall back asleep. Best of all, this is affordable and easy to build.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Animation has become an increasingly popular and important medium in the entertainment industry and other fields, such as education and marketing. As technology advances, so does the complexity and sophistication of animation software.

• DreamWorks Animation is a name that needs no further introduction. Founded in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, the company has created some animation masterpieces, including Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, etc.

• Today, however, will be remembered as a more special day in the memories of all animation artists. Why? Because DreamWorks Animation, a major player in the industry, has made a significant move by releasing its in-house developed animation software, MoonRay, available to the public as an open-source project.

• This release contains fixes for a security problem and a memory safety problem. The memory safety problem is not believed to be exploitable, but we report most network-reachable memory faults as security bugs.

• New features

• * ssh-keygen(1), ssh-keyscan(1): accept -Ohashalg=sha1|sha256 when outputting SSHFP fingerprints to allow algorithm selection. bz3493

• * sshd(8): add a `sshd -G` option that parses and prints the effective configuration without attempting to load private keys and perform other checks. This allows usage of the option before keys have been generated and for configuration evaluation and verification by unprivileged users.

• Returning to the open source community after a period of grief can be challenging. It’s also an opportunity to reconnect with something you are passionate about and make a positive impact in the world. In time, you’ll find that you’re able to pick up where you left off, and re-engage with the community once again.

• Initially, it may take some time to get back to the rhythm of contributing. It helps to schedule some time in your calendar for open source work. It can be weekly/bi-weekly, depending on your availability. Remember, every contribution counts, and that is the beauty of the open source world. This trick will help you to get into a regular routine.

• Want to build an open source knowledge base? Learn everything about this solution, its pros and cons, including tools to use with our article.

• Why is this a problem?

• Paid team plans cost 420USD per year (paid monthly)

• Many open source projects including ones I maintain have published images to the Docker Hub for years

• Docker’s Open Source program is hostile and out of touch

• If you’re reading this, it means my blog source (mmm, sauce) backup has successfully migrated to Codeberg. I’ll update my source namespace references and other links in the coming days.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• WordPress 6.2 Release Candidate 2 is now available for download and testing.

• This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you test RC2 on a test server and site.

Education

• Keeping in mind the Pythonic principle that “simple is better than complex” we’ll see how to create a web map with the Python based web framework Django using its GeoDjango module, storing geographic data in your local database on which to run geospatial queries.

• One thing I love about Python is how it can be used to very quickly prototype or try stuff thanks to its interactive interpreter, also often called REPL.1 In this article, I’ll show you how I use it to run quick tests and verify assumptions.

Programming/Development

• One might object that you can choose to only enable assertions for the debug version of your binary… but this choice is subject to debate. Compilers like GCC or clang (LLVM) do not deactivate asserts when compiling with optimizations. Some package maintainers require all asserts to remain in the release binary.

• You can use this to split/join arguments in a function definition or call into multiple lines or split/join items in a json doc.

• You might think it is a simple job that a “split by comma” can do, but you would be wrong. What if you have a , in a string argument or if one of the arguments is a function that has arguments inside it or a list within a list. What if the user just puts a lot of empty newlines in between? The package function deals with all of this by letting things built by smarter people (tree-sitter) deal with it. We just ask it to get us the list of arguments which we arrange how it supposed to be.

• What exactly do software architects do? When you think of a software architect, you think of a primarily technical position within the development organization. In many people’s minds, a software architect is just a title applied to the most senior developers working on a project. After all, if you are

Leftovers

• As U.S. Republicans call for using troops against Mexican cartels, the SRE told its U.S. diplomats to challenge narratives about Mexico.

• Deep Transformation Network – Artists and Creatives Group,hosted by Christina Conklin and Michele Guieu Tuesday, March 21, 2023.12:00 pm  to 1:15 pm PST – OnlineTHE LINK TO THE EVENT IS HERE. You will access the zoom link.

• What’s Next for Earth is a participative art project on Instagram that invites artists to respond to a bi-monthly topic, reflecting on the human predicament. An online exhibition will be on view on this website and on the the What’s Next for Earth’s website.

• It’s more common than you’d think.

• Buckle up.

Science

• We had a look at two sorting algorithms: gnome sort and bozosort. The purpose of a sorting algorithm is to operate on an array and rearrange its elements in order. The two algorithms presented are not the most efficient sorting algorithms, but that is not of our concern: instead, we will look at them from the perspective of their correctness.

• The main questions answered in this article are:

• What is the (intuitive) argument of correctness of these algorithms?

• How to write down a proof outline for these algorithms?

Education

• Falwell Jr. left Liberty in August 2020 after Giancarlo Granda, a young Miami pool boy who later became the Falwell family’s business partner, said he had a years-long sexual relationship with Falwell Jr.’s wife.

• A possible strike by the teachers’ unions will not change anything, because more money will not be found to increase teachers’ salaries, said Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš (New Unity party) in an interview on Latvian Television’s “Morning Panorama” program March 15.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost Tuesday filed a complaint against Norfolk Southern over the February 3 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The complaint contains 58 counts for relief under numerous state and federal environmental laws.

• Drunk mice are a real problem.

• “It needs to be taken seriously.”

• According to both Coop and Sailing Group, hand sanitiser sales have dipped to pre-pandemic levels again, even though many people vowed to change their hygiene habits forever in light of corona.

• “It underlines that we forget quickly. It shows how much it takes for us to change our habits. Two years of hand sanitiser was not enough,” Professor Michael Bang Petersen, the leader of the HOPE project, which studied the behaviour of Danes during the pandemic, told DR.

• Even though the virus seems far away, more than 100 Danes are testing positive every day, and more than 8,000 Danish citizens have died because of the pandemic.

• [...]

• “It is unbearable that so many good goods are going up in smoke. During the pandemic, we shopped in bulk – too much,” Peter Westermann, a SF councillor, told TV2 Kosmopol.

• It was thought better to destroy the pallets because they were costing between 6,000 and 10,000 kroner every day in insurance – an annual cost of 4 million. Destroying the 6,988 pallets will cost between 5.6 and 7.7 million kroner.

• The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Tuesday proposed a regulation to limit the amount of six different per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in drinking water. The regulation would set the maximum contaminant level at 4 parts per trillion for any individual PFAS or mixture of multiple PFAS.

• In a study of a new form of cancer vaccination, Stanford researchers show that cancer cells can be reprogrammed into cells that stimulate the immune system to fight the disease.

• “Faces are like water in my head.”

Proprietary

• OpenAI will also use Stripe’s payment processing engine to charge its users, including for its ChatGPT Plus subscription, as well as to buy credits for the DALL-E image-generation product, according to Stripe.

Security

• This month we got patches for 76 vulnerabilities. Of these, 9 are critical and 2 are already being exploited, according to Microsoft.

• Microsoft has warned users of two zero-day vulnerabilities that have been exploited as it issued a total of 80 patches on its monthly Patch Tuesday.

• Four of these vulnerabilities were assigned by GitHub, the security firm Tenable pointed out.

• Tenable’s senior staff research engineer Satnam Narang said of the remaining 76 fixes, nine were rated critical, 66 rated important and one was rated moderate.

• March 14, saw the Latvian government approved the draft “Latvian cyber security strategy 2023-2026″ developed by the Ministry of Defense, which defines the main directions of action of national cyber security policy and identifies future challenges.

Privacy/Surveillance

• On Thursday, the European Parliament is expected to formally adopt its final position on the European Electronic Identity (e-ID), before going into trilogue negotiations with the Council of the European Union. In addition to privacy successes in the leading industry Committee, Pirate Party MEPs were able to implement additional data protection safeguards into the final text via the Civil Liberties Committee (LIBE). Most importantly the content of a user’s identity wallet, which may include sensitive medical data, payment data or criminal records, would be stored on the user’s device only unless they explicitly choose that an external cloud copy should be kept. The text also protects the right to use digital services anonymously by providing that digital services should be provided without electronic identification or authentication where reasonably possible.

Defence/Aggression

• After the long-awaited AUKUS submarine announcement, ASPI director Bec Shrimpton and senior analyst Malcolm Davis give their views on the decisions unveiled in San Diego this week.

• Vast quantities of lies from top US government officials led up to the Iraq invasion. Now, marking its 20th anniversary, the same media outlets that eagerly boosted those lies are offering retrospectives.

• Originally posted at TomDispatch. News flash! Ten thousand Marines and other U.S. troops recently invaded southern California and captured Twentynine Palms in the Mojave Desert — 1,200 square miles of desert seized! Oh, wait, my mistake!

• The announcement of the agreed pathway for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs) under the AUKUS deal provides clarity about how and when Australia will have this important capability.

• Speaking at a summit in San Diego on Monday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a decades-long strategy to deliver the most costly defence project in Australia’s history.

• Dive into the details of the AUKUS submarine partnership just announced in San Diego by US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

• The US military Tuesday announced a Russian fighter jet collided with and downed a US drone over the Black Sea. The US claims Russia downed the drone in international airspace while it was acting in accordance with international law.

• France has delivered a first batch of VAB armoured vehicles to the Beninese Armed Forces, which will use them for counter-terrorism and other security tasks. The eight ex-French vehicles were handed over in Cotonou on 20 January by Marc Vizy, the Ambassador of France to Benin.

• Anyone could be forgiven for not having heard of Ferdinand de Lesseps — a French engineer, he was obsessed with shortening travel distances to enhance commerce, among other things.  But a case can be made that he extended British rule in India by nearly a century.  Is this a wild exaggeration?  Judge for yourself.

• Reform of Islamic jurisprudence was the elephant in the room when two prominent Saudi clerics recently clashed publicly on whether apostasy was punishable with death under Islamic law. The debate’s timing on a Saudi state-controlled, artsy entertainment channel, Rotana Khalijiya, suggested as much.

• Analysts in the United States are saying increasingly that the ‘conflict in Ukraine should be resolved through negotiations.’ Nevertheless, RAND is issuing another report calling for a settlement. They understand that the Ukrainian side, with all the support of the West, began to lose heavily.

• Following the audit that authenticated the posts, FRANCE 24 notified the production company which employs Joëlle Maroun in Lebanon that the channel is ending all collaboration with this journalist because of the intolerant messages posted on her personal accounts, which are the antithesis of the values defended by the international channel and are criminally reprehensible. FRANCE 24 will also file a complaint against her for the damage done to the channel’s reputation and to the professionalism of its newsroom.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The legendary whistleblower has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.

Environment

• “So, palm oil causes 2 percent of major deforestation and climate change,” Sophia said, reciting from memory what she found through online research and books. “Because of palm oil, 1,000 to 5,000 orangutans are killed every year. There are also ties to child labor, human trafficking, and slavery in the harvesting of palm fruit.”

• Freight rail workers across the industry have been sounding the alarm for years that safety practices have become secondary to profits, as Motherboard has previously reported. Car inspections which could detect mechanical malfunctions that cause derailments have been reduced to save time and money. After company notices started prioritizing efficiency, speed, and reduced dwell time ahead of safety, some Norfolk Southern workers adopted a new mock slogan for the company: “Safety Fourth.”

• President Biden’s National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi joined former U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu in a conversation on job growth, the administration’s goals and approval of the Willow Project at Stanford on Monday.

• And it’s even bigger underneath.

Energy/Transportation

• The Atlantic Council proudly co-hosted with the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) “A Grand Bargain for Europe’s energy and climate challenge,” a workshop on the European Union’s energy and climate policy from a geopolitical perspective.

• Hydrogen’s chemical properties determine its most optimal uses. Policymakers should orient deployment toward areas in which hydrogen makes the most sense as a tool for decarbonization and away from areas in which it does not.

• In the wake of a year when consumer energy prices across Europe skyrocketed, making it difficult for some people to heat their homes or cook, the European Commission today announced a new power market plan with ambitious targets: phase out gas, the fossil fuel that underpins much of the bloc’s power production…

Wildlife/Nature

• This is wild.

Finance

• During the pandemic, the U.S. mortgage market avoided collapse without any bailouts. Here’s how.

• UK Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will announce his spring budget on Wednesday (March 15), delivering a speech amid a week of strikes across Britain’s health, education, and transport sectors.

• The Covid-19 pandemic set back decades of progress towards gender equality, according to a report by the International Labour Organization. On average, the report says, women are currently paid 20% less than men globally.

• A California appeals court ruled on Monday (March 13) that companies like Uber, Lyft, and Doordash can classify their gig workers as independent contractors under Proposition 22, a ballot initiative state voters passed in 2020.

• A growing number of US states and localities have laws mandating pay transparency, with requirements varying from state to state. Beginning in 2021, Colorado required all companies to include a salary range and benefits on their job listings.

• US consumer prices rose by 0.4% from January to February, while the year-on-year rise in prices dropped from 6.4% in January to 6% in February, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

• Prices rose by 0.4 percent in February and core inflation was up 0.5 percent, the third consecutive month that it has increased.

• Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has rid himself of political contributions tied to the failed Silicon Valley Bank, giving the campaign funds to charity, according to multiple reports on Tuesday.

• The start-up, which provides payment processing software to companies including Amazon, raised $6.5 billion in its new financing from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and Thrive Capital. Stripe, which said it didn’t need the money to run its business, plans to use the funding to help employees sell their company shares and cover the taxes related to their stock compensation.

• The bank’s collapse has had a unique impact on the area, said San José State University Assistant Professor Matthew Faulkner. The school is roughly 10 miles from the bank’s headquarters in Santa Clara.

• I’d never heard of Silicon Valley Bank before it exploded in a shower of pretty sparks last week. Amazingly, upon just hearing the name my brain made a bunch of associations that proved to be mostly correct ‒ it WAS indeed a nasty cross-section of Wall Street and Sand Hill Road, thoroughly infested with both their money and their questionable politics. The whole fracas is obviously going to shake out badly for me and my programmer brethren in the trenches, these things always do, but that’s for my dreary future: now is a time for drinking, giggling, and gloating.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• China will once again start issuing a range of visas to foreigners as of Wednesday, the country’s foreign ministry said, in a major easing of travel restrictions in place since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The move marks the latest step towards reopening China to the outside world, as Beijing breaks with the strict […]

• A European Union spokesperson’s criticism of the conviction of three Hong Kong Tiananmen vigil activists has “scandalised” the city’s judicial system, the Hong Kong government and the Commissioner’s Office of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Hong Kong have said.

• Meta has announced an additional round of 10,000 layoffs and a pivot away from NFTs. CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote the move is one to streamline the company in terms of efficiency.

• Meta announced another round of layoffs affecting about 10,000 employees, or about 13% of its global workforce, on Tuesday (March 14). CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the downsizing in an update to the company’s “year of efficiency” plan, a blueprint for making Meta more profitable amid a squeeze in the tech industry.

• Mark Zuckerberg has started delivering on his promise to make 2023 a “year of efficiency.”

• I often joke that I survived Washington because I had low expectations, but last week’s hearing of the House Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee would have tested the lowest of my low expectations.

• Unlike some other Chinese companies that use Arm and x86 instruction set architectures controlled by Western companies, Loongson’s CPUs rely on the company’s proprietary LoongArch ISA, which is backwards compatible with the MIPS architecture. As a result, it is impossible for the U.S. government to cut Loongson’s access to the latest CPU technologies. But Loongson uses American electronic design automation (EDA) software to develop its processors, whereas its manufacturing partner SMIC uses wafer fab equipment that originates in the U.S.

• The Boston-based Rapid7 said it spent $38 million in cash [sic] and stock to snap up Minerva Labs, an early-stage startup that raised $7.5 million venture capital funding.

• Here’s a terrible reason to support the SVB bailout: because if we let all the tech companies who did business with it fail, you might not be able to get into your house anymore after your smart-lock fails because the cloud service it depends on cuts off the startup that made it because their bank account went up in a puff of smoke:

• https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-bank-collapse-fallout/

• Look, if you think the fact that my Internet of Shit door-lock failed because the company that designed it made no plan to let me into my house if they went out of business would make me sympathetic to that company, you are out of your fucking mind. If that happened to me, it would make me want to tear the lock out of my door, hunt down the CEO of the company that made it, set the lock on fire, and throw it through their front window.

• The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or Cfius—a multiagency federal task force that oversees national security risks in cross-border investments—made the sale demand recently, the people said.

• TikTok executives have said that 60% of ByteDance shares are owned by global investors, 20% by employees and 20% by its founders, though the founders’ shares carry outsize voting rights, as is common with tech companies. The company was founded in Beijing in 2012 by Zhang Yiming, ByteDance Chief Executive Liang Rubo and others.

• Ceraolo previously provided Motherboard with details on the underground SIM swapping community, where hackers hijack phone numbers to steal victims’ cryptocurrency or their valuable social media handles. One 2020 article focused on how SIM swappers phished telecom company employees to access internal tools; another showed that SIM swappers had escalated from bribing employees to using remote desktop software to gain direct access to T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint tools.

• ByteDance Ltd. was valued at around $220 billion in a recent private-market investment by Abu Dhabi AI firm G42, a significant discount to the $300 billion that TikTok’s owner set during a recent share buyback program.

• G42, controlled by United Arab Emirates royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, acquired a $100 million-plus stake from existing investors in recent months through its 42XFund, people with knowledge of the deal said. Another fund bought into ByteDance at $225 billion shortly after, one of the people said, asking not to be identified describing non-public information.

• Take, for example, the proposal of the European Commission on how to combat child sexual abuse. There are inherent risks in the proposal; not only will the proposed measures be barely effective, they will also have very harmful side-effects. They will also undermine the privacy of everyone’s communications, which is harmful for everyone, including the children and youngsters that lawmakers want to protect in the first place.

• But if these aren’t the right measures, then what are? Because sexual abuse of children and youngsters is a serious problem. This calls even more urgently for measures that are proven effective and legally sound, preferably without any negative side-effects. We are not experts in fighting child sexual abuse. Thankfully, we don’t have to be. There are plenty of experts out there, including in the Netherlands. We should listen to these experts if we want to know what needs to be done.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The report illustrates how digitally-mediated assemblies can be controlled, surveilled, or banned in an environment of censorship, for example through abusing content moderation, VPN blocking and detention of journalists.

• A series of four “Hell No Hong Kong” memes posted to lawmaker Regina Ip’s Instagram account were shared in error, she has told HKFP. The now-deleted graphics showed cut-outs of the Executive Council convenor in floral settings, in an apparent parody of the city’s “Hello Hong Kong” tourism reboot campaign.

• A member of the League of Social Democrats – one of Hong Kong’s last remaining active pro-democracy groups – will face trial with two others in July for allegedly displaying posters without government permission last May.

• CJ Hopkins I think something is seriously wrong with my brain. Yesterday, I hallucinated that Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before a subcommittee of the US House of Representatives about the Censorship Industrial Complex, i.e., the US arm of the global official propaganda and disinformation apparatus that has been waging an all-out war…

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The proposed amendment would not permit freelance or foreign journalists to report from those sites. The amendment will be reviewed by a parliamentary committee before coming to a vote, Naif told CPJ.

• The Maldives’ next presidential election is set for September.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in Counter-Terrorism, Fionnuala Aoláin, Tuesday expressed concern that digital technologies used to combat terrorism contribute to human rights violations around the world.

• As we mark 12 years of the Syrian conflict, a new report documents how targeted violence against health care personnel and infrastructure has impeded vital sexual and reproductive health (SRH) care, resulting in far-reaching tolls on the health and wellbeing of women, girls, and health care professionals. T

• Andrew Jackson’s 256th birthday is March 15, 2023. In recognition, we are posting this excerpt from Clarence Lusane’s new book, Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy. In the book, Lusane argues that not only should Harriet Tubman’s face replace Jackson’s on the front of the US $20, her vision of abolitionist democracy should replace Jackson’s racist patriarchal model.

• Negro Fort was a garrison that was abandoned by the British during the War of 1812 and subsequently became a refuge for people who escaped slavery, Native Americans, and free blacks. Located near what is now Sumatra, Florida, at the time it was an area that was outside the United States and became one of many autonomous maroon territories. Negro Fort—originally called Fort Magazine by the British—was left fully armed when the British fled in 1815. People on the run from their white enslavers came from as far away as Virginia, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Andrew Jackson’s role in the brutal seizure of the fort in July 1816 would be one of the signature campaigns that built his military fame and ultimately propelled him to the White House.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• HP doesn’t make clear which printers use the dynamic security feature, which is what Reddit users became infuriated about — HP apparently had permitted the use of third-party ink on the OfficeJet 7740 and the OfficeJet Pro 6970, then cracked down. But HP does list some printers which can be upgraded via a firmware update to eliminate the block on third-party ink.

• New, official ink cartridges are expensive, so introducing a feature that prevents HP printer owners from buying discounted third-party ink isn’t going earn the company a lot of goodwill. HP has already paid out millions in settlement fees after class-action lawsuits were brought by consumer groups and users accusing the firm of “underhanded” tactics and anti-competitive behavior. The most recent of these was a $1.35 million payout to customers in four European countries.

• The release notes for a firmware update for HP Officejet 6950, 6960, Pro 6960, Pro 6970 and another one HP DeskJet/Ink Advantage 2700, both mention that the software enables Dynamic Security on the printers. So it is possible this problem began then. A way to prevent this issue would be unplugging the printer from the internet to prevent automatic firmware updates. Of course, this would not be possible if you have a HP+ printer, since the cloud-based service also requires an HP account to be logged in to use the printer.

• Modern HP printers use something called “dynamic security” to detect and block unofficial ink carts. Third-party manufacturers often find ways to get around this DRM, and as a result, many HP customers grow accustomed to unofficial ink.

• But HP can update a printer’s dynamic security to patch workarounds. And this is where the problem lies—customers will spend months or years using unofficial ink carts, only to turn on their printer one day and see “Non-HP Chip Detected.” HP’s website mentions that this may occur, though customers are never warned ahead of time.

Monopolies

Software Patents

• I’m happy to announce, that after a long wait, patent US-11604662-B2 has been issued.

• I want to thank and recognize my co-inventors, Div Prakash and Subin George, who I’m privileged to be on paper with.

• The effort that led to this work involved a group of engineers, many phone calls, some nerve-wracking presentations, culminating in a fantastic hackathon-winning outcome for a young and talented team, which I was proud to be a part of and privileged to lead.

Copyrights

• Offering hundreds of examples from religious history, this book was part of a larger Phallic Series of treatises by Hargrave Jennings.

• The photographer explained that he had given permission for his photos – of tulips, apparently – to be used for a wallpaper. But he had only given permission for the use of the photo as wallpaper, and claimed that further permission to display his image was required if a photo of it were put online. Unfortunately the Cologne Regional Court agreed with this interpretation. It’s a ruling that could have important ramifications for anyone taking pictures of furnished rooms, as the Pinsent Masons post explains:

• the ruling is not only relevant in relation to photo wallpapers, but could also be extended to other furnishing items that create an atmosphere, such as pictures, sculptures or designer furniture.

• Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have been hit with a copyright lawsuit alleging that their 2020 single, “Living in a Ghost Town,” uses material from two little-known songs by another artist.

• When it comes to streaming holdouts, Garth Brooks ranks as one of the biggest. But why has Garth steadfastly refused to allow his music on Spotify and Apple Music while exclusively licensing Amazon Music?

• Turning every streaming service into TikTok is bad for the internet. It’ll be disastrous for music.

• The Netherlands’ Pythagoras Music Fund has officially announced the acquisition of Barton Music’s publishing catalog, which includes the rights to songs popularized by Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, Nat King Cole, and several others.

• After reaching a substantial number of new fans with a Stranger Things placement last year – and as vinyl’s nearly two-decade-long commercial resurgence continues – Metallica has officially purchased an entire record pressing plant.

• Ahead of an infringement trial involving “Thinking Out Loud” creator Ed Sheeran and the estate of “Let’s Get It On” co-writer Ed Townsend, a federal court has ruled that the plaintiffs cannot stage a live performance of the latter song.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• About over-extending, Spain and the wonders of stack machines.

• This place has been quiet. I am completely and utterly spent. Haven’t been this tired in years. I took a break from working on my self hosting setup now that it is mostly functional — not complete! — and mostly stable. I also haven’t really worked on getting myself off the cloud in two weeks. I believe I have cleared and deleted two google accounts since I last spoke about it here and certainly I have requested deletion of a bunch more online accounts. But there is more to do. I’ll pick this up again once we’re back from our vacation.

• There is a little recreational road near my work, which leads to the river. During my lunch break, I took a little walk and snapped a few photos of the scenery, particularly focusing on the birch trees. Well, to be honest, I’m rather new to the study of trees, so I wasn’t really 100% certain what kind of trees those ones are. But at present the only trees I know anything about are paper birch, spruce, balsam poplar (cottonwood), alder, and aspen, and they didn’t fit what I know about the other four, so I figured they must be birch. It was not convenient, due to the snow, to get a closer look at the bark and branches.

Politics

• The answer from the site’s mostly left-leaning, mostly millenial male audience surprised me. These folks are typically quite enthusiastic of arguments in favor of public transport. But here, the response were of two kinds:

• 1. We should move women like her into communal living. 2. A person with dementia shouldn’t be allowed to walk alone, because they could get lost and die.

Technical

• I want to share some of my methods that help me to accomplish my goal to not miss out on interesting new indie games that can run on OpenBSD.

• There are several components to this that I am going to elaborate more on in the rest of the text. First of all, in order to know what’s new, I need to be well aware of what is not new (“Keeping Track of What Is Already Known”). Then I need sources that inform me regularly of upcoming or newly released games. Related, but not exactly the same is the goal of closing gaps in my awareness of games that have already been released. I need ways to get more information about the games’ engine information to screen if there is even a potential of running it on OpenBSD. Last, but not least, I need a way to keep an eye on games of interest until I can more definitely evaluate if they may be runnable on OpenBSD.

Programming

• I made a repo for useful bash scripts that can come handy in daily usage or for learning purposes. I will continue to push more scripts as I write more. I hope that others will contribute their own clever scripts and maybe in the future this repo becomes a bank of shell scripts in one place.

• I show you three closed doors, two of which have a car behind them and one of which has a donkey. You pick a door and I open a different door revealing a donkey. I then give you the option to change your decision. If you want to win a car, should you switch doors?

• Yes, you should switch doors. The probability of winning a car by initially choosing one of the three doors is 1/3. After one of the doors with a donkey behind it is revealed, the probability of winning the car by switching to the other closed door is 2/3, which is twice as likely as the initial probability of 1/3. This is because, when you first made your choice, the car was behind one of the doors you didn’t pick, and the host revealed one of those doors. So, by switching to the other unopened door, you have a higher chance of winning the car. This probability paradox is known as the Monty Hall problem, and switching doors is the optimal strategy to increase your chances of winning the car. Alex Wennerberg Are you sure that your probabilities are correct?

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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