● 03.18.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 18/03/2023: Tor Browser 12.0.4 and Politics

Posted in News Roundup at 11:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

• As Kubernetes develops and matures, features may be deprecated, removed, or replaced with better ones for the project’s overall health. Based on the information available at this point in the v1.27 release process, which is still ongoing and can introduce additional changes, this article identifies and describes some of the planned changes for the Kubernetes v1.27 release.

Applications

• Looking for suggestions for web browsers or internet browsers for Linux then this blog post is definitely for you. There are many more internet browsers available these days for Linux-based operating systems.

Instructionals/Technical

• Want a Hexadecimal dump (a hexadecimal view) of your data? The xxd command can do that for you.

• If you are blogging about your work, at some point, you’ll want to share your experience with a movie or in a podcast. In this post, I want to share the tools I’m using and give some advise to get you started with a small (or bigger) budget…

• This article intends to focus on what Docker and Docker Compose are, their usage and drawbacks, and how to install them in major Linux distributions. Tutorial Details Description Docker and Docker Compose Difficulty Level Moderate Root or Sudo Privileges Yes Host System and Architecture Ubuntu

• In this demo, we are going to learn how to install DokuWiki on Debian 11. ‘DokuWiki’is an opensource software written in PHP that allows users to create and edit pages using a web browser. It works on plain texts and requires no database.

• Learn the steps to install Nomacs, an open-source image viewer & editor on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Linux using the command terminal. This software on our Linux system can be considered a free basic alternative to commercial Photoshop, however, not as powerful but enough to fulfill regular image editing requirements.

• Nomacs was started as a part of the Image Lounge project in 2011 and has been actively developed ever since. It is a cross-platform application that supports Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and BSD platforms.

• SSH and TELNET both let you connect to remote, networked computers and to use them as if you’re sitting in front of them.

• Tuxedo OS is a custom Linux operating system for Tuxedo computers. It is based on KDE Plasma and has tons of optimizations for Tuxedo hardware. However, did you know that you can install and run Tuxedo on any PC? Here’s how to install it on your computer.

• Gaming has been an essential part of the PC experience since the days of IBM mainframes. But a focus on the latest graphics and AAA titles has left the classics neglected.

• Embrace the nostalgia of computerized single-player card games by playing Klondike Solitaire within your Linux terminal.

• While working in Linux you would have seen files downloaded from the internet ended up with either “.tar” or “.tar.gz”. Now, what are these extensions? Both of these imply the file is in Archived format that could contain a single file or multiple folders but still if both the Tar and Gz produce archive files then what is the difference between them? In this article, we will explain exactly what these formats are and how to use them.

• To set a color scheme in Neovim using Lua add the following line to the init.lua file In the example above, I am using onedark as the color scheme. You can change this to whatever you want to use.

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

• Have you ever encountered a situation where you’re unable to update or install packages on your RHEL-based or CentOS system due to an overloaded YUM cache? This issue could be frustrating, especially when you’re working on critical tasks.

Games

• Bring your favorite card game to the Linux terminal by installing solitaire-tui on Linux.

• The game store itch.io is having another Creator Day where they take no cut from sales. They also have a site-wide sale for the whole weekend. The Creator Day lasts until 7am, March 18th (UTC), so if you want to give that little bit of extra support to a game developer, now is a good time to do it.

• Half-Life: MMod just released on Steam, a mod for the original Half-Life that overhauls many parts of it to create something that feels fresh.

• WorldBox – God Simulator is a fun way to spend a coffee break, giving you a world to mess about with and a big new update is out now to give it a little bit more depth. This is a great casual game that does not take any part of it seriously, it’s all about doing whatever the heck you want.

• Cities: Skylines 2 is on the way but Paradox and Colossal Order aren’t done just yet with Cities: Skylines. Multiple new content additions were just announced. They said they plan to continue to support the game for the rest of the year, but it seems like that may be it.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• It’s become almost a running joke on Phoronix at this point, but this week we do indeed have more Wayland fixes! …And other things as well, including some good UI improvements to various KDE apps in addition to the background work of Qt 6 porting that is continuing full steam ahead, and reaching a position of increasing stability. Come see!

• After my last post a few things have happened. First, I want to thank all of you for your support, monetary and moral. The open source community is amazing and I love being a part of it. We are surviving thanks to all of you. Despite my failed interview, a new door has opened up and I am happy to announce that Canonical is funding me to work part time for a period of 3 months on KDE Snaps! While not the full time role I was hoping for, I’ll take it, and who knows, maybe they will see just how awesome I am!

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Independent Linux distributions are interesting to look at.

• These are not the best options for someone new to the Linux world. However, each comes with a unique offering—some known for their customization, control, and various other aspects of an operating system.

• carbonOS is one such upcoming independent distro that got my attention

• Before anyone starts – “Why do we need this distro?” in the comments section. Let us always appreciate the time and effort developers put into “trying” to create something new and valuable.

• Blender is a fantastic application. Or rather, it looks fantastic from reading the homepage; I haven’t actually got to use it, apart from just starting it. Looks like there is a bit of a learning curve. Homepage:

• This is a follow-up from the introduction to AppImage Installer blog post yesterday:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202303/appimage-installer-for-easyos.html

• I have put some time into testing AppImages. Have tested 24, of which 15 work. Of the 9 that don’t work, most failure is due to library mismatch with the host system.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Once upon a time, open-source projects existed in the free-wheeling, wild west of the Internet, the bailiwick of hobbyists and iconoclasts. Projects ran without formalities, or legal entity structures, or oversight. And that was a powerful and effective model to kickstart the free software movement. It worked pretty well for years, when open-source was a niche in the technology world.

• But as open-source became the backbone of modern computing, cracks started to sprout in that model. There were some problems that loose collections of developers could not easily solve. A string of notorious security breaches (Heartbleed, Log4shell, and others), along with and other kinds of personality-driven discontinuity (the Left-Tab fiasco) demonstrated how vulnerable our world–and its businesses–are to the quality of open-source project governance. Projects running on shoestring budgets were an industry-wide problem, and there were calls for corporate interests to put their money where their tech was, and start supporting community projects.

• I’m a developer. Well, I like to think that I am; I spent twenty-odd years as a software engineer before joining Red Hat ten years ago, and since then, I’ve been evangelizing the company’s tools and products from a developer perspective. I’ve seen the agile revolution and the rise of containers, and I was there when Kubernetes crawled out of the sea and into our hearts.

• During a 2013 speech to the United Nations (UN), then-16-year-old Pakistani activist and UN Messenger of Peace Malala Yousafzai said, “I raise up my voice—not so that I can shout, but so that those without a voice can be heard… We cannot all succeed when half of us are held back.”

• When Yousafzai said, “half of us,” she referred to women, who make up half of the global population yet face disproportionate barriers to opportunities and resources around the world. Today, on International Women’s Day, I’d like to call attention to the opportunity all Red Hat associates, customers, partners and peers have to share our support for gender equity and diversity.

• Today the Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora Linux 38 Beta, the latest version of the free and open source Fedora Linux operating system. Fedora Linux 38 Beta reflects the community’s desire for workstation, security and developer innovations. Users can look forward to the release of Fedora Linux 38 in late April.

• Red Hat announced that the Ansible Automation Platform will be available on Google Cloud Marketplace, providing customers with a way to simplify self-deployments.

• Open source solutions provider Red Hat has deepened partnerships with some of the leading cloud computing providers, Google Cloud, SAP, and Oracle, through a flurry of new integration and expanded partnership announcements.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• We want you to join our Ubuntu circle, and help us document MAAS. More minds, more eyes, more hands make better doc.

• Do you game on Ubuntu or one of their flavours like Kubuntu or Xubuntu? Canonical want your help in further testing of the Steam snap. For anyone confused: there’s many different types of packages on Linux. There’s deb, rpm, flatpak, snap, appimage and more. Snap is what Canonical (who make Ubuntu) are rolling with.

• Cloud repatriation is undoubtedly one of the hottest trends in the cloud infrastructure space as of 2023. It enables organisations to regain control of their cloud spend, workloads and data.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Raspberry Pi monitors the beacon’s output power, dump power, PA voltage, PA temperature, and back-up battery voltage. It also runs a web interface so you can check on the status of the beacon from the comfort of the indoors. We love the night sky as much as the next person, but we also really love the indoors.

• This is an infinity mirror in the form of a dodecahedron, which is a regular polyhedron with 12 sides. Each face is a one-way mirror facing inwards, so light inside reflects while the user can see through the faces. The frame, which follows the edges between faces, contains inward-facing LEDs. The light from those LEDs bounces off the of them mirrors inside the dodecahedron, resulting in an interesting lighting effect. That effect is enhanced by the animations of the RGB LEDs.

• Multiplexing is a common technique for driving a grid of LEDs and it works by setting the rows and columns to either HIGH or LOW. An LED will only turn on if its row is HIGH and its column is LOW (or vice-versa, depending on the LED’s orientation). This means a microcontroller can control a number of LEDs equal to the number of column pins multiplied by the number of row pins. An 8×8 grid (16 pins) can therefore contain 64 LEDs.

• Charlieplexing is more complicated, but allows for far more LEDs. That number is equal to the number of pins (N) squared, minus the number of pins (N). So with 16 pins, a microcontroller could control 240 LEDs (16^2 – 16). This works because of a pair of pins can control two LEDs (one for each flow direction), and two pairs can control their two LEDs each plus another pair. That extends, resulting in a schematic that looks like a pyramid. Jeremy Cook has an in-depth explanation of charlieplexing here if you want to know more.

• OnLogic launched a fanless mini-PC based on 12th Gen Hybrid-Core processors for industrial IoT applications. The Helix 401 offers 4x 4K simultaneous displays, 2x GbE LAN ports and supports Red Hat Linux.

• Matthias Kirschner, President at Free Software Foundation Europe, recently launched Ada & Zangemann: A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream. This children’s book is delightfully illustrated by Sandra Brandstätter.

• Kyle Rankin, President caught up with Matthias Kirschner to talk about the inspiration behind the book and the need to raise awareness about free software. Here is the snapshot of the email interview.

• Kyle: Children’s literature has a long history of fables, such as with Grimm and Aesop that serve as either cautionary tales (be careful going into the forest!) or moral lessons (slow and steady wins the race). Your story takes a similar approach, but in the modern age with a modern set of lessons. What fables inspired you when writing this story?

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Between late 2022 and early this year, Google’s Project Zero found and reported 18 of these bugs in Samsung’s Exynos cellular modem firmware, according to Tim Willis, who heads the bug-hunting team. Four of the 18 zero-day flaws can allow internet-to-baseband remote code execution. The baseband, or modem, portion of a device typically has privileged low-level access to all the hardware, and so exploiting bugs within its code can give an intruder full control over the phone or device. Technical details of these holes have been withheld for now to protect users of vulnerable gear.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Two years ago, I got an interview with Sauce Labs when they opened an internship in the Open Source Program Office (OSPO). There was a lot of competition, and I didn’t have the usual technical background you might think a tech company would be looking for. I was stumbling out of a career in the arts, having taken a series of technical courses to learn as much Python and JavaScript as I could manage. And I was determined not to squander the chance I had at an interview working in open source, which had been the gateway for my newfound career path.

• It was in the PyLadies of Berlin community that I met Eli Flores, a mentor and friend who ultimately referred me for the interview. I would probably not have had a chance for an interview in Sauce Labs if it hadn’t been for Eli.

• As 2023 unfolds, there are five areas of infrastructure technology that will play a big part in shaping the year ahead. Read on to learn why new cloud requirements, platform architectures, essential technologies, controlled automation, and artificial intelligence for IT security need to be on organizations’ watch lists.

• Amanda Brock, CEO of Open UK explains how the open technology advocacy organisation is trying to make open source a more inclusive environment

• The Open Source Initiative announced today that it’s extending the voting period in the current election for two individual member seats on its board of directors. Voting began on March 10 and was originally slated to run through March 20. Voting will now run through March 21.

• This is a satisfactory ending to a small kerfuffle that began last night when I reported on a mistake in an email I received from Open Source Initiative that I feared could have consequences on election results. The email, sent to OSI’s individual members in an effort to get out the vote, erroneously stated that voting would end on “Monday, March 21” instead of Monday, March 20. A small thing, to be sure, but an error that had the potential to cost OSI members their vote if they made a mental notation of “March 21” and then put off voting until the last minute.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• Tor Browser 12.0.4 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

• This release updates Firefox to 102.9.0esr, including bug fixes, stability improvements and important security updates. We also backported the Android-specific security updates from Firefox 111.

• In mutual TLS (authentication), clients send the server a certificate just as the server sends one to clients. The server can then authenticate the client, just as the client authenticates the server (hence ‘mutual TLS’). In both cases, by ‘authenticates’ we mean verifying the TLS certificate and also extracting various pieces of information in it.

Education

• Running your own email is a struggle against an opponent you can’t see. That’s why the cover is a take on Battle of Vimy Ridge. You’ll be able to buy Eddie Sharam’s original painting, either through the Kickstarter or direct auction. It will be a full wraparound cover, but here’s the first draft of the front.

FSF

Licensing / Legal

• The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has called upon farm equipment maker John Deere to comply with its obligations under the General Public License (GPL), which requires users of such software to share source code.

• In a blog post published on Thursday, SFC director of compliance Denver Gingerich argues that farmers’ ability to repair their tools is now in jeopardy because the makers of those tools have used GPL-covered software and have failed to live up to licensing commitments.

• “Sadly, farm equipment manufacturers, who benefit immensely from the readily-available software that they can provide as part of the farming tools (tractors, combines, etc.) they sell to farmers, are not complying with the right to repair licenses of the software they have chosen to use in these farming tools,” said Gingerich.

• AI liability road rules in the U.S. and E.U. are developing. One thing is clear: under what circumstances a company will be liable for its AI depends on whether a defect was present upon the AI’s release and whether, in the E.U. at least, the application is “high-risk.”

• The law has been relatively slow to regulate AI. There has been some case law in the United States concerning the regulation of computerised robotics. For example, in Jones v. W + M Automation, Inc., New York’s Appellate Division dismissed the plaintiff’s complaint about product defect against a manufacturer and programmer of a robotic loading system. In the court’s view, the defendants were not liable for the plaintiff’s injuries at the GM plant where he worked because these defendants showed they “manufactured only non-defective component parts.” As long as the robot – and associated software – was “reasonably safe when designed and installed,” the defendants were not liable for plaintiff’s damages.

• Today, many Linux users would be shocked to know that there was once a lawsuit aimed squarely at Linux’s heart: Its intellectual property (IP). Some people even thought SCO’s lawsuit against IBM might end Linux. That didn’t happen, but it did make the Linux community realize it had to understand its IP’s legal and source code history.

• Curiously, The SCO Group had started as an x86 Unix company. SCO was then acquired in a complex deal in August 2000 by Caldera, then a leading Linux company. The plan, as Ransom Love, then Caldera’s CEO, “was to see how Unix could expand and extend Linux.” That was not what happened.

• Instead, the combined company was renamed SCO, and a new CEO Darl McBride was appointed. McBride then led SCO’s legal assault on IBM and Linux. To sum up his start and tenure, a former McBride co-worker, said it best, “Congratulations. In a few short months, you’ve dethroned Bill Gates as the most hated man in the industry.” That was true.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Every interaction we have with another person is influenced by our emotions. Those emotions have ripple effects, especially when it comes to how you do business. A happy customer patronizes your business more, recommends it to family and friends, writes a positive review, and ultimately leads to more money being spent at your business than if they’d been disappointed. The most basic known variable of providing good customer service influences this: If something isn’t going as expected, work to make it right (within reason), and you’ll save the relationship.

• In tech, you can respect this in a few ways. If you listen to customer feedback, create products they’ll find useful and intuitive, and nurture those positive associations with your project, then you’ll do well. But there’s an oft overlooked component to your customer’s emotional perception of your business, and that’s the customer support team.

Programming/Development

• In both cases, the software could have noticed its detachment from reality but failed to do so. Instead, it sort of insisted in its own reality, this way not being dependable. In the worst case, such a behavior can lead to harm or worse, especially these days as IT and OT grow together more and more tightly.

• Based on the observation, I derived a pattern-based description of how such systems need to check if they are still in sync with their encompassing world and what they need to do if they are not.

• When faced with a bug they have to diagnose, many developers will start making guesses as to what the problem is.

• Guessing can be fine, especially when the guesses are good ones and when the guesses are inexpensive to test. But often, the guesses quickly degrade into long shots and the developer spends his or her time flailing around randomly rather than progressing steadily toward a solution.

• My name is Neil Naveen, and I’m a 14-year-old middle schooler who’s been coding for seven years. I have also been coding in Golang for two years.

• Coding isn’t my only passion, though. I’ve been practicing Jiu-Jitsu for four years and have competed in multiple competitions. I’m passionate about coding and Jiu-Jitsu, as they teach me important life lessons.

Leftovers

• In other words, it’s a meme! The original idea of memes as units of cultural transmission, I mean. I tried learning more about old-school memetics but my cursory research suggests it became a navel-gazey sort of uberfield that got too focused on how Memes Are Important without actually doing much with it.

• So let’s try to pretend that whole field never happened and see what we can do with creating a new topic.

• (I thought up this specific concept while on a walk earlier today. I have no idea how consistent the actual idea is, I’m just using it as an example of memetics.)

• What’s the difference between an American movie producer and an American secretary of state?  The one dreams of winning an Oscar, the other makes sure the awards go to the right global players.

• American foreign policy has long been committed to flooding the world with Hollywood films. Inseparable from this open market ideology is the recognition of the moving image’s literal projection of American power and the universal rightness of the American Way.

Education

Hardware

• Rather than see Taiwan’s semiconductor factories fall into the hands of the Communist Party of China, the US and its allies would simply pull a Nordstream.

• By now you’ve all seen the tiny LEGO brick with a working screen in it. The work of one [James “Ancient” Brown], it was truly a masterpiece of miniaturization and creativity. Since then, [James] hasn’t stopped innovating. Now, he’s demoing a playable version of DOOM running on a single plastic brick.

• [IMSAI Guy] has an old HP 3488A Switch Control Unit that he wants to dismantle for parts ( see video below the break ). The 3488A is pretty simple as far as HP test equipment goes — a chassis that can hold various types of relay cards and is programmable over GPIB. He notes up front that these are plentiful and inexpensive in the used test equipment market.

• One of the best things about hanging around with other hackers is you hear about the little tricks they use for things like 3D printing. But with the Internet, you can overhear tips from people you’ll probably never meet, like [3D Printer Academy]. His recent video has a little bit of a click-bait title (“10 Secret 3D Printing Tricks…“) but when we watched it, we did see several cool ideas. Of course, you probably know at least some of the ten tips, but it is still interesting to see what he’s been up to, which you can do in the video below.

• One of the first tools that is added to a toolbox when working on electronics, perhaps besides a multimeter, is a soldering iron. From there, soldering tools can be added as needed such as a hot air gun, reflow oven, soldering gun, or desoldering pump. But often a soldering iron is all that’s needed even for some specialized tasks as [Mr SolderFix] demonstrates.

• [Josh] over at mjbots just released a new version of the moteus controller board, dubbed the moteus-n1. One change is that the volume and footprint size has been reduced. Considering many people, [Josh] included, use these controllers to operate robotic dogs, smaller is better. The previous moteus controller maxed out at 44 V, but the n1 can run at up to 54 V, allowing use of 48 V power supplies. And [Josh] improved the interface circuitry, making it much more flexible than before. This comes at an increased price, but he sells both versions — parts availability permitting. And like the previous versions of the moteus controller, this is an open source project and you’re free to build it yourself. You can check out the complete design package at the project’s GitHub repository.

• Pocket watches are all well and good, but they have some caveats. They either need regular rewinding, or they need batteries. Sundials on the other hand need only the light from our One True Sun. [JGJMatt] has just the project to convert your broken or disused pocket watches to the solar way of telling the time.

• Beef soup! You’d normally expect it to be somewhere from reddish-brown to grey, depending on how well it was cooked and prepared. However, strangely, an assistant professor found the beef soup in their fridge had mysteriously turned blue. That spawned an investigation into the cause which is still ongoing.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• A surprising result.

• “The most powerful country in the world should not be accepting this as a reality.”

• The meal kit company’s decision follows an advocacy group’s report claiming that some monkeys in Thailand are forced to climb trees and pick the fruit.

• East Palestine, Ohio residents’ concerns about the enduring impact of last month’s fiery train derailment are likely to intensify following the release of data showing that levels of dioxin in the soil near the wreck site are far higher than the cancer risk threshold recommended by federal scientists.

• Ahead of the first United Nations conference on water in more than four decades, experts from the Global Commission on the Economics of Water released a landmark report Friday to warn the international community that the world is “heading for massive collective failure” in the management of the planet’s water supply and demand that governments treat water as a “global common good.”

• Two trains operated by BNSF derailed in Washington state and Arizona on Thursday as the rail industry and its Republican allies in Congress fight bipartisan safety legislation introduced in the wake of the toxic crash in East Palestine, Ohio.

• At least tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of cities and towns across Greece Thursday to protest the government’s handling of last month’s Tempi railway disaster and the capitalist system that puts profits before people.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (sox and thunderbird), Fedora (containerd, libtpms, mingw-binutils, mingw-LibRaw, mingw-python-werkzeug, stargz-snapshotter, and tkimg), Slackware (mozilla and openssh), SUSE (apache2, firefox, hdf5, jakarta-commons-fileupload, kernel, perl-Net-Server, python-PyJWT, qemu, and vim), and Ubuntu (abcm2ps, krb5, and linux-intel-iotg).

• Critical security flaws expose Samsung’s Exynos modems to “Internet-to-baseband remote code execution” attacks with no user interaction. Project Zero says an attacker only needs the victim’s phone number.

• Ring offers security products. Shame they’re not all that secure. Sure, things have improved in recent years, but there was nowhere to go but up.

• Firefox 111 patches 13 CVEs, including several vulnerabilities classified as high severity.

• Microsoft says Russia targeted at least 17 European nations in 2023 — mostly governments — and 74 countries since the start of the Ukraine war.

• A decryption tool for a modified version of the Conti ransomware could help hundreds of victims recover their files for free.

• The utility works with data encrypted with a strain of the ransomware that emerged after the source code for Conti was leaked last year in March [1, 2].

• Note: this joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) is part of an ongoing #StopRansomware effort to publish advisories for network defenders that detail ransomware variants and ransomware threat actors. These #StopRansomware advisories include recently and historically observed tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and indicators of compromise (IOCs) to help organizations protect against ransomware. Visit stopransomware.gov to see all #StopRansomware advisories and to learn more about other ransomware threats and no-cost resources.

• Google has warned that some of its smartphones running the company’s own Android operating system, as well as other devices from manufacturers such as Samsung and Vivo, could be accessed by third-party actors without owners ever becoming aware of such a breach.

• TopClassActions reports that a class action lawsuit against Orlando Family Physicians (OFP) has settled for an undisclosed sum. The settlement, which doesn’t include any admission of guilt by OFP, resolves claims surrounding an April 2021 data breach.

• Russia-backed threat group Winter Vivern has targeted government entities in Poland, Ukraine, Italy, and India in recent campaigns

• Health services company Independent Living Systems has disclosed a data breach that impacts more than 4 million individuals.

• On February 22, DataBreaches received a tip about a listing offering patient data allegedly from El Camino Health in California. The listing was not on any of the usual leak sites, markets, or forums, and the poster was unknown to DataBreaches.

• Ukraine’s cyberpolice has arrested the developer of a remote access trojan (RAT) malware that infected over 10,000 computers while posing as game applications.

• “The 25-year-old offender was exposed by employees of the Khmelnychchyna Cybercrime Department together with the regional police investigative department and the SBU regional department,” reads the cyberpolice’s announcement.

• Federal agents have arrested a Peekskill, New York, man they say ran the notorious dark web data-breach site “BreachForums” under the name “Pompompurin.”

• Conor Brian Fitzpatrick was arrested by a team of investigators at his home around 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, an FBI agent said in a sworn statement filed in court the next day. Fitzpatrick is charged with a single count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud.

• The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) this week arrested a New York man on suspicion of running BreachForums, a popular English-language cybercrime forum where some of the world biggest hacked databases routinely show up for sale. The forum’s administrator “Pompompurin” has been a thorn in the side of the FBI for years, and BreachForums is widely considered a reincarnation of RaidForums, a remarkably similar crime forum that the FBI infiltrated and dismantled in 2022.

Privacy/Surveillance

• This exercise of fitting a square into a circular peg is precisely what now guides New Jersey’s contemporary policing regime. The Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC), the only Department of Homeland Security-affiliated fusion center within the Garden State is led by a former CIA agent trained in international espionage, not state and municipal law enforcement tactics that must adhere to constitutional rights. As New Jersey’s experience makes clear, the way fusion centers operate render them rife for abuse, and offer outdated models of policing.

• In 2014, Twitter sued the DOJ over its National Security Letter (NSL) reporting restrictions, which limited the company from producing transparency reports with much transparency in them. NSLs were only allowed to be reported in bands. And what broad bands they were. If Twitter received 20 NSLs, it had to report it as 0-499. If it received 498, it had to use the same band. And the band started at zero, so even if Twitter didn’t receive any, it would still look like it did.

Defence/Aggression

• Conscription officials in Russia’s Mari El Republic have begun issuing summonses to draft-eligible men to report to their local enlistment offices, supposedly for the purpose of updating records, according to the regional government’s website.

• The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) condition that Pakistan secure confirmation from bilateral partners of the Gulf region to bridge the gap of USD 6 billion is simply an attempt to ensure its credibility. Non-materialisation may result in Islamabad sliding into default, The News International reported.

• The News.com wrote a top official that now, all eyes are on Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar to bail out the struggling economy of Pakistan. There is no other game plan than to wait and pray for getting confirmation from bilateral partners from the Gulf region.

• The U.S. State Department has said that Moscow can’t just leave the last remaining nuclear weapons treaty between Russia and the U.S. if it wants to. Unilaterally leaving the treaty, it said, is a violation of the treaty itself. According to Washington, Russia is still bound by the treaty even if it said it’s not.

• “Russia’s claimed suspension of the New START Treaty is legally invalid,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement released on Wednesday. “As a result, Russia remains bound by its obligations under the treaty.”

• According to data from GS Group cited, Chinese brands remained the leading PC suppliers — including Lenovo and Huawei — in Russia in 2022, with about 38% market share. On the other hand, Taiwanese vendors — such as MSI, Acer, and Asus — captured a 35% share of the Russian PC market, whereas U.S.-originating PC OEMs (Apple, Dell, HP, etc.) controlled approximately 19% of the market in 2022, down from 36% in 2021. By contrast, Russian vendors supplied 9% of PCs sold in the country, up from 4% in 2021 and 3% in 2022.

• Who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines? In February, veteran journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell report detailing how President Joe Biden ordered the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines.

• A peer-reviewed paper initially approved and praised by a prestigious academic journal was suddenly rescinded without explanation.

• “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” — Viet Thanh Nguyen

• Congresswoman Ilhan Omar on Friday marked the upcoming 20th anniversary of the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq—where thousands of U.S. troops remain today—by asking if Americans have learned anything from the “failed war of aggression” and warning that waging another such war will have even more dire consequences.

• Leave it to George W. Bush to misspeak his way to the truth about the Iraq War that he launched 20 years ago. Last May, in a speech addressing Ukraine, he lambasted Vladimir Putin’s “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.”1

• This week, the United States and South Korea kicked off their springtime joint military drills—the largest in five years. North Korea has long protested these war drills, calling them a rehearsal for invasion. Not surprisingly, then, North Korea conducted submarine-fired cruise missiles tests on Sunday.

• In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski defined “the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy” as follows: “to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.” Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser was summarizing in his signature Machiavellian language a policy that his Republican opposite number, Henry Kissinger, had daringly designed and implemented in bringing a Cold Warrior par excellence, Richard Nixon, to effect a turnabout in the US attitude toward the People’s Republic of China.

• With the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 20, we speak with Oxford University international relations professor Neta Crawford, who says the region is still reeling from the impact of the war. “The story continues. It’s not over,” she says. Crawford is co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, where her latest report pegs the cost of U.S. wars in Iraq and Syria since 2003 at nearly $2.9 trillion. Since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 under the false pretext of preventing Saddam Hussein from developing weapons of mass destruction, more than half a million people have been killed in Iraq and Syria. Millions more were displaced or died from indirect causes like disease. “It wasn’t quick, it wasn’t easy, and it certainly wasn’t cost-free,” says Crawford.

• Is China really on the verge of invading the island of Taiwan, as so many top American officials seem to believe? If the answer is “yes” and the United States intervenes on Taiwan’s side—as President Biden has sworn it would—we could find ourselves in a major-power conflict, possibly even a nuclear one, in the not-too-distant future. Even if confined to Asia and fought with conventional weaponry alone—no sure thing—such a conflict would still result in human and economic damage on a far greater scale than observed in Ukraine today.

• Who will control the Tomahawk Missiles? News that Australia will purchase up to 220 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles might seem like just another Defence purchase, but there’s a hidden sovereignty issue that needs to be examined. And that’s what Rex Patrick is here to do.

• The United States Congress has just approved the sale of as many as 20 Block IV Tomahawks and 200 Block V Tomahawks for $1.3 billion dollars. The US will provide support consisting of unscheduled missile maintenance, spares; procurement, training, in-service support, software, hardware, communication equipment, operational flight test, engineering, and technical expertise.

• The sabotage, the Polish interior minister said, was planned “at the request of Russian intelligence” and “aimed at paralyzing the supply of equipment, weapons and aid to Ukraine.”

• Polish counter-intelligence has dismantled a Russian spy ring that gathered information on military equipment deliveries to Ukraine.

• The hawkish senator wants the US to escalate in response to the downing of the US MQ-9 Reaper drone over the Black Sea

• How did we get here? 20 years after the U.S.-led invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq, we still refuse to reckon with the last decades of war as yet another decade of violence unfolds. Since the invasion, tens of thousands if not over a million lives have been lost. Millions of Iraqis are still displaced, while tens of millions have endured relentless violence ever since the destabilization of their country beginning in the 1990s through bombing, sanctions, multiple military invasions, and the occupation that began in 2003.

• The AUMFs have long been used as justification for further military action even after the U.S.’s supposed withdrawal.

• The International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin.

• The International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin along with Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova. Russia’s president is accused of ordering the illegal deportations of children from occupied territories of Ukraine following Moscow’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.

• The International Criminal Court on Friday issued international arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for allegedly abducting Ukrainian children and transporting them to Russia.

• Russia’s Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has decorated the military pilots who intercepted the U.S. MQ-9 reconnaissance drone over the Black Sea.

• On February 6th, 2023, Northern Syria and Southern Turkey was struck by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. For reference, the famous 2010 Haiti earthquake that dominated headlines for weeks was a 7.0 on the Richter Scale. For Syria – a country already war-torn from over a decade of conflict – the tremors brought devastating results.

• It may have been “a Freudian slip of the tongue,” as Russia’s ambassador to Canada called it, but at a press conference on March 10, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Mélanie Joly, raised the possibility of regime change in Russia.

• Twenty years ago on March 16, the world got a tragic glimpse into what the state of Israel was going to become.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The leaks are cumulative. By combining data from one leak with another, we can build out a far more detailed picture of the conspiracy – and it is a conspiracy – among the utlrawealthy and their Renfields in the law, real-estate and accounting trades to duck their responsibilities and mound ever-more treasure on their hoards.

Environment

• More than 1 million bottles of drinking water are sold globally every minute, which comes at a significant environmental, climate, and social cost, a new U.N. report said.

• In 2021, global bottled water sales reached 350 billion liters, valued at an estimated U.S.$270 billion that is expected to cross half a trillion by 2030, said the report released Friday by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health.

• Last November in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, the climate ministers of all the UN nations agreed on a loss and damage fund. Next week, from March 20-21 in Copenhagen, they will meet again to secure the implementation of these results in order to set the course for an ambitious COP28, which will be held in Dubai from November 30 to December 12.

Energy/Transportation

• Alas, whatever experiment they were running on pedestrian accessibility came to an end, and now it takes me two more minutes to cross this intersection every day. It was a nice idea having motorists wait by default for once; they’re the ones sitting in air-conditioned bubbles that make the rest of us wait in the beating sun or rain.

• Xcel Energy in late November told Minnesota and federal officials about a leak of 400,000 gallons of water contaminated with radioactive tritium at its Monticello nuclear power plant, but it wasn’t until Thursday that the incident and ongoing cleanup effort were made public.

• Climate justice advocates celebrated Friday after a half-dozen island nations committed to building a “fossil fuel-free Pacific” and urged all governments to join them in bringing about an equitable phaseout of coal, oil, and gas.

• Near the end of this month, from March 27 to 28, the European Gas Conference (EGC) organized by Energy Council takes place in Vienna. This is a conference bringing together Europe’s main gas suppliers to discuss “the security of supply and the new role for LNG on the continent” and how to “diversify supply and decarbonise supply chains to future-proof gas’ role in the energy mix.”

• One by one, Big Oil firms have touted their investments in algae biofuels as the future of low-carbon transportation—and one by one, they have all dropped out. Now in the wake of the last remaining algae proponent, ExxonMobil, announcing its withdrawal, insiders say they are disappointed but not surprised. This article by the Guardian is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

Finance

• Eleven big US banks came to the rescue of First Republic Bank on March 16, depositing a combined $30 billion in the troubled lender and halting a slide in its stock.

• The most likely scenario to resolve Credit Suisse’s crisis is an acquisition by fellow Swiss bank UBS, analysts from JPMorgan wrote in a research note on Thursday.

• CEOs started the year feeling slightly more optimistic about the economy, according to a survey of more than 100 chief executives of America’s biggest companies by the Business Roundtable.

• Nigeria has launched a $672 million fund to support its tech startups amid the upheaval caused by the recent collapse of three key US banks.

• For 40 years, the institution catered to the fact that high-growth, high-risk tech start-ups and their backers do not adhere to normal business practices. These companies put a priority on breakneck growth, shift strategies frequently and celebrate failure as a learning opportunity. They are often worth billions before ever turning a profit, and they can go from silly idea to behemoth at astonishing speed. Most crucially, they rely on a tight network of money, workers, founders and service providers to function.

• We’ve had thousands of bank failures throughout American history, but it’s hard to recall another that happened overnight. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) went from “a one-stop shop for tech visionaries,” as Bloomberg put it, to a corpse circled by vulture capitalists hungrily picking over its remaining valuable assets, with a speed that Valley types normally celebrate. The industry that lives by Mark Zuckerberg’s motto, “move fast and break things,” screamed in pain when the forces of creative destruction took down one of theirs. Their discomfort rose to high comedy with the spectacle of hardened libertarians bellowing for a government bailout—which they got after being forced to wait for several very painful hours while the authorities were figuring out just what to do.

• Silicon Valley has been dominating the news this week. The obscenely badly managed Silicon Valley Bank went belly-up, its hundreds of billions of dollars of deposits, much of it banked by start-up companies, put at risk. As a result, California’s tech industry, already retrenching as the economic climate has shifted, suddenly faced the real possibility that many of its most creative young companies would be unable to pay their workers come mid-month and would accelerate rounds of lay-offs that are already causing havoc in the industry. In the last year, the tech industry has shed over 200,000 jobs, with layoff rates accelerating in 2023. Meta alone has, in a series of layoff announcements, now slashed more than 20,000 people from its payrolls.

• The collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank this past weekend were the end point in an all-too-familiar cycle: first the boom, then the breathtakingly speedy bust and then the bailout. We are now at the postmortem moment — when everyone wonders where the regulators were.

• Silicon Valley Bank has already become notorious for how obvious its red flags were. Perhaps the most telling was the rapid growth of its borrowing from the Federal Home Loan Banks system. Banking experts know this Depression-era group of government-sponsored lenders as the second-to-last resort for banks. (The Fed is, as always, the lender of last resort.) At the end of last year, Silicon Valley Bank had $15 billion of FHLB loans, up from zero a year earlier.

• Briahna Joy Gray and Matt Stoller discuss the collapse of SVB, and anti-trust in relation to East Palestine and the prospective merger between Jet Blue and Spirit Airlines.

• I hadn’t intended to spend so much time this week on the banking crisis. I’m old enough to remember a time when banking was boring. But since the 1980s, banking has become hugely profitable for bankers and wildly dangerous for the rest of the economy. This week shows why.

• On Sunday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) bailed out the depositors of two midsize failed banks (Silicon Valley Bank and the Signature Bank) on the theory this would stanch a potential panic that could engulf the entire financial sector. The bailout might yet work, but the Band-Aid has only stopped some of the bleeding.

• Every systemic banking crisis has a trigger that sets it off. In the case of SVB, the reason for its bankruptcy is twofold.

• In 1937, the American folklorist Alan Lomax invited Louisiana folksinger Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly) to record some of his songs for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Lead Belly and his wife Martha searched in vain for a place to spend a few nights nearby. But they were Black and no hotel would give them shelter, nor would any Black landlord let them in, because they were accompanied by Lomax, who was white. A white friend of Lomax’s finally agreed to put them up, although his landlord screamed abuse at him and threatened to call the police.

• Days after U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren expressed outrage over the bonuses that Silicon Valley Bank executives were handing out hours before the bank failed, President Joe Biden on Friday called on Congress to strengthen regulatory powers to hold officials at failed banks accountable.

• The Federal Reserve was the primary regulator of both Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, whose back-to-back collapses sparked panic in financial markets and concerns about cascading impacts on the U.S. economy.

• Former Silicon Valley Bank CEO Greg Becker sold $3.6 million worth of shares on February 27, just days before the bank disclosed a large loss that triggered its stock slide and collapse. Over the previous two years, Becker sold nearly $30 million of stock.

• Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sought to reassure Congress Thursday that the U.S. banking system remained “sound” after a week of market tumult.

• Driving the news: Yellen’s testimony comes days after the government moved to fully guarantee depositors in failed Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, helping stem the immediate panic, Axios’ Neil Irwin writes.

• The tech and startup community has a major perception problem that has been highlighted by the Silicon Valley Bank fallout.

• Emergency loans to banks spiked to a new record in the week through Wednesday, surpassing previous highs reached during the 2008 financial crisis.

• News of a new $30 billion financial lifeline for First Republic sparked a broad market reversal that bolstered stocks and drove down bond prices, while momentarily allaying simmering investor fears about a banking crisis.

• Sberbank’s supervisory board recommended that the bank pay a total of 565 billion rubles (7.3 billion USD), or 25 rubles (0.3 USD) per share, for 2022.

• A move used before by President Emmanuel Macron’s government can push bills through the lower house of Parliament without a vote. But detractors view it as an undemocratic tool to strong-arm lawmakers.

• Parties from the left and right erupted in anger after learning of the government’s plans to adopt the measure without a vote.

• Protests in Paris and across France have ramped up since President Emmanuel Macron’s government on Thursday used a controversial constitutional measure to force through a pension reform plan without a National Assembly vote.

• How can officials both tame inflation and ensure bank stability? It’s a difficult balance that for now, at least, appears to still include interest rate hikes.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• TikTok said the Biden administration was threatening to ban the app unless it sheds its Chinese ownership.

• The leaders stressed that a possible closure of the party months into the elections places the Turkey’s democracy in dire jeopardy.

• China’s brokerage of a diplomatic deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia heralds a drive to parlay economic influence into a global political role.

• In 2024, barring any unforeseen circumstances, Vladimir Putin will run for his fifth term as Russia’s president. According to Meduza’s sources, Kremlin political strategists have started briefing officials from around the country on the rhetoric they should use to convince voters that even after nearly two and a half decades, Putin’s still the best man for the job. Here’s what we know about the messages they’ve chosen.

• Chinese leader Xi Jinping will visit Russia on March 20–22, Russian state news agency Interfax reported on Friday.

• The proposed legislation would authorise police authorities during sporting events to use surveillance cameras and error-prone artificial intelligence to automatically report supposedly “abnormal” or “suspicious” behaviour. MEPs warn against the crippling effect of such mass surveillance of public spaces, which has never been conducted before in Europe, and which would set a precedent. The signatories to the open letter include several negotiators of the proposed EU Artificial Intelligence Act, which would ban biometric mass surveillance, including co-rapporteur Brando Benifei (Socialist Group). German signatories include Birgit Sippel (SPD), Cornelia Ernst (Left Party) and Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party).

• It is hard to overstate the broad scope of the disclosure demands. Canadian digital creators concerned with Bill C-11 who wrote to Youtube would find their correspondence disclosed to the committee. So would researchers who sought access to data from Google or Facebook on issues such as police access to social media records or anti-hate groups who contacted Facebook regarding the government’s online harms proposal for automated reports to law enforcement. Privacy advocates focused on how Google administers the right to be forgotten in Canada would ironically find their correspondence disclosed as would independent media sites that wrote to Facebook about the implications of Bill C-18.

• While the Department of Justice investigations into disgraced water salesman Donald Trump meander toward their politically inert conclusions, the state-level investigations into Trump’s various suspected crimes appear headed toward inflection points. In New York, Attorney General Letitia James’s investigation into the Trump Organization continues apace, while the Manhattan district attorney has extended an invitation to Trump to testify about his hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. Trump’s lawyer in that case, Joseph Tacopina, has popped up all over cable news this week making clownish claims, as if to prove that Trump continues to hire legal counsel based on their subway ads.

• Do not despair. There may be politicians who have abandoned any genuine intent to gain Scottish Independence, but the path is still open. It is a question of nerve and will.

• The obituaries for Pat Schroeder, the Colorado liberal who for 24 years served as one of the most dynamic members of Congress and who died on Monday at age 82, made only a brief mention of her thwarted bid for the 1988 Democratic nomination. But the “Schroeder for President” boomlet that played out during the summer of 1987 was more than a footnote.

• One of the common—and in my view, valid—criticisms of U.S. political journalism is that it tends to cover electoral politics as if they were horse races, with TV talking heads and print journalists ginning up the public’s excitement via exaggerated emphasis on any and every point that can service a narrative of entertaining competition.

• Because they oppose a woman having the right to terminate a pregnancy, Republicans claim to be the Party of Life. In fact, they’re the Party of Death.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Many of the night sky pictures seen plastered on social media, included in calendars or even available as desktop wallpapers involve some sort of alteration. As you can see in this set of photos collected by astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, there’s nothing stopping someone from sprinkling in some extra stars that weren’t actually there, adding some fancy colors, or even replacing the toenail clipping of a crescent Moon with a nice big full one, craters and all. Nordgren, who leads trips in Alaska to see the aurora borealis, says these images even have an effect on the way his guests perceive the wave of lights.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office has acknowledged that 19 antiwar paintings by Yelena Osipova, confiscated by the police from her solo exhibition, have been forwarded for “complex psycholinguistic evaluation.”

• Late last year, we wrote about the extremely misleading discussion around “shadow banning” on Twitter. The history of the term is important, as it originated as a tool to defeat trolls, and it had a very specific definition: making users who were deemed problematic to a site think their posts were still getting through, when no one else could actually see them. The concept began on the Something Awful forums as a tool against trolls, and migrated elsewhere. It was seen as a clever approach to trolls who especially live for reactions: they can keep posting, but they never get any reaction.

• Question Presented: Does Section 230 Protect Generative AI Products Like ChatGPT?

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The Minsk City Court handed down its verdict in the tax evasion case against former employees of Tut by Media LLC. The company was previously the largest independent publisher in Belarus, a status it had held since 2000.

• A panel of three European Court of Human Rights judges considered Mr Assange’s application. It ruled the application was inadmissible at this time because there are ongoing proceedings in the UK challenging the extradition on other points of law.The panel further stated, however, that should Mr Assange “be dissatisfied in the future with the progress or outcome of the domestic procedures, it would be open to him to reintroduce his … complaint.”

• Mainstream political news outlets like Axios have long been accused of “both sides” or “view from nowhere” journalism where they bend over backward to frame everything through a lens of illusory objectivity as to not offend. This distortion is then routinely exploited by authoritarians and corporations keen on normalizing bigotry, rank corruption, or even the dismantling of democracy.

• We continue our coverage of the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by looking at the imprisonment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been jailed for exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. One video released by WikiLeaks showed a U.S. helicopter gunship in Baghdad slaughtering a dozen civilians, including a Reuters journalist. Assange has been held in London’s Belmarsh prison since 2019 as he fights the U.S. campaign to extradite him to face espionage charges. If convicted, the publisher faces as much as 175 years behind bars. His legal fight is documented in the new film Ithaka that centers on Assange’s father John Shipton, who has been crisscrossing the globe to raise awareness of the case and the danger it poses to press freedoms. We speak with Shipton, as well as filmmaker Gabriel Shipton, Julian Assange’s brother and a producer of the documentary.

• The Justice Department is investigating the surveillance of American citizens, including several journalists who cover the tech industry, by the Chinese company that owns TikTok, according to three people familiar with the matter.

• The investigation, which began late last year, appears to be tied to the admission in December by the company, ByteDance, that its employees had inappropriately obtained the data of American TikTok users, including that of two reporters and a few of their associates.

Civil Rights/Policing

• On Tuesday, March 21, I’ll be sitting in a rocking chair in Washington, DC. Which doesn’t sound particularly daring, except that the rocking chair—and 50 more like it—will be blocking the doors of a Chase bank branch, part of a nationwide day of action largely orchestrated by a group called Third Act which draws it members from people over 60. We’re calling it the Rocking Chair Rebellion, and it’s one small sign of a promising new trend: older climate activists, ready to back up young leaders.

• This week nearly 400 human rights groups urged the Biden administration not to revive the controversial practice of migrant family detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Biden ended family detention when he took office two years ago but is now reportedly reconsidering it as part of a wider crackdown as his administration prepares to phase out the contested Trump-era Title 42 pandemic policy used to expel over 2 million migrants without due process at the southern border. We speak with Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, who says “the Biden administration has faltered and is going against all the promises that they made on the campaign trail.” We also speak with Mike Ishii, co-founder of Tsuru for Solidarity, which joined the call to stop family detention. He notes many Japanese Americans are still healing from the trauma of mass detention during World War II. “There’s an intersectional history here of always targeting communities of color and immigrant communities with this kind of state violence,” says Ishii.

• The Biden administration will soon implement a policy that will “encourage migrants to avail themselves of lawful, safe, and orderly pathways into the United States, or otherwise to seek asylum or other protection in countries through which they travel, thereby reducing reliance on human smuggling networks that exploit migrants for financial gain.” One could be forgiven for thinking that this regulation, slated to go into effect in mid-May, expands access to the asylum process. In fact, it does the opposite. The new policy “encourages” lawful pathways by further criminalizing the most common existing pathways. Once the rule goes into effect, anyone who passes through another country on their way to the United States and crosses the border between official entry points will be deemed ineligible for asylum unless they applied for asylum in that other country first. There are a few exceptions, but the new policy will affect virtually all non-Mexican nationals who arrive at the border.

• Nearly 30 pages of FBI documents obtained by Unicorn Riot reveal a pattern of monitoring of Pilsen Community Books, a worker-owned and collectively managed bookstore in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago.

• Yury Dmitriev, the 67-year-old former head of the Karelian branch of Memorial (an NGO devoted to restoring Russia’s historical memory) is serving a 15-year sentence in a high-security penal colony. Radio Free Europe and Memorial have both drawn attention to how the officials at the colony have tried to interfere with Dmitriev’s preparations for a court hearing that took place on Thursday.

• Earlier this month, after the Duke Graduate Students Union filed for an election with the National Labor Relations Board, the university initially told its graduate workers that the administration would “support the right of all eligible voters to freely consider and register their views” because, ultimately, “the decision about unionization is up to Duke students.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Remember Ajit Pai, the former Verizon lawyer Trump put in charge of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)? When he gutted net neutrality rules and kneecapped the agency’s ability to regulate telecom monopolies, voters from across the political spectrum were outraged. The internet erupted in protest.

• A bipartisan coalition of Senators including Roger Wicker (MS), Todd Young (IN), Mark Kelly (AZ) and Ben Ray Luján (NM) are poised to reintroduce legislation supported by telecom monopolies that could ultimately result in tech giants paying telecom giants billions of dollars for no coherent reason.

• Shortly after coming into office, President Joe Biden moved to restore net neutrality. He signed a sweeping executive order to promote competition, calling on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to bring back the Obama-era internet rules rolled back by the Trump administration.

• But close to two years later, the FCC remains deadlocked with only four of its five commissioner slots filled — and Biden may be running out of time.

• More than five dozen advocacy organizations on Friday implored U.S. President Joe Biden to swiftly select a Federal Communications Commission candidate who will serve the public interest, not the telecommunications industry.

• The case for and against DNSSEC deployment.

Monopolies

• The EU competition enforcer, which did not provide details in line with its policy, will now seek feedback from rivals and customers before making its decision by May 22.

• Microsoft President Brad Smith has said the U.S. software company was prepared to offer rivals licensing deals to ease competition concerns but not to selling Activision’s lucrative “Call of Duty” franchise.

Patents

• Just days after the announcement of a gender equality referendum in Ireland, which will be held in November, representatives of Irish industry urged the government to hold a referendum on ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement on the same date.

• Apple brought an action against the USPTO Director Vidal in district court under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U.S.C. §§ 701– 706, challenging the Director’s instructions to the Board regarding exercise of discretion in IPR institution decisions.

Copyrights

• Last weekend, ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ dominated the Oscars by winning seven awards, including one for Best Picture. The independent film had already enjoyed a great run at the box office but the renewed exposure is a game changer. Success at the Oscars elevated awareness to new heights and according to data collected by TorrentFreak, piracy skyrocketed.

• Artificial intelligence is hot in the architectural news space. I seem to be getting at least an e-mail a day from PR firms advertising some artist or architect “subverting” or “reimagining” the world through the lens of programs like Midjourney or DALL-E. The AI tag on design news aggregator designboom (always a reliable trend bellwether) encompasses everything from lazy listicles about what AI thinks supercars would look like if designed by famous architects to claims that XYZ designer’s AI images of buildings imagine the future of architecture. The virus has since spread to trade publications like ArchDaily and Architizer. While much of this content may be pablum, the implications of the technology involved asre not unremarkable.

• Joshua Streit, the former operator of IPTV service Hehestreams, has been sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay almost $3m in restitution. Known online as Josh Brody, Streit’s service granted access to official streams offered by MLB, NHL, NBA and NFL, among others. Earlier, Streit had discussed security vulnerabilities with MLB, which responded by calling in the FBI.

• On March 20, oral arguments will be heard in the publishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive, which was filed nearly three years ago. A lot has changed since then in the world of libraries. One surprising development is that the Internet Archive and its Open Library have suddenly become exponentially more valuable repositories of verifiable information.1

• Walled Culture is a big fan of the public domain. The amazing artistic uses that people are able to make of material only once it enters the public domain are an indication that copyright can act as an obstacle to wider creativity, rather than something that automatically promotes it. But there’s a problem: because the public domain is about making artistic productions available to everyone for no cost and without restrictions, there are no well-funded lobbyists who stand up and defend it. Instead, all we hear is whining from the copyright world that the public domain exists, and calls for it to be diminished or even abolished by extending copyright wherever possible.

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