● 03.25.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 25/03/2023: Decade of Docker, Azure Broken Again

Posted in News Roundup at 7:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Yesterday Framework had an exciting set of announcements regarding their line-up – we don’t usually cover all sorts of press release, but this is certainly significant enough to make an exception.

Server

• Today, billions of containers on clouds run the applications we use every day. And, while container technology dates back to 2000 with FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones, Docker, the open-source platform designed to simplify the creation, deployment, and run applications within containers in 2013, is what changed the world.

• Containers are lightweight, portable environments that bundle the application’s code, runtime, libraries, and other dependencies, ensuring consistency and efficiency across various environments. This has revolutionized the way software is developed, shipped, and deployed.

• Docker issued an apology and some clarification after the end of its Free Team subscription roiled the open source community last week, but concerns about the transition remain for some users.

• Docker clarified that it will not delete container images from Docker Hub, after the first communication from the company mentioned that data might be subject to deletion and access to accounts frozen after 30 days.

• Everyone knows that MicroK8s is an extremely lightweight, extensible, reliable, CNCF-compliant distribution of Kubernetes. What you didn’t know until now is that it is even easier to install and manage as part of your AWS marketplace experience.

• First, a quick reminder of why MicroK8s is great: [...]

Applications

• Birdtray is a system tray icon for Thunderbird, which shows the unread email count, with some extra features.

• The application has stopped working a while back—it no longer shows the unread email count with newer Thunderbird versions (both the latest Thunderbird 102.* stable and the latest beta—112 at the time I’m writing this article), and it doesn’t work properly on Wayland either. I have updated the Linux Uprising Apps PPA for Ubuntu and derivatives (and Linux distributions based on it, like Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, etc.) with fixes/workarounds for these issues, and I’ll also explain what I did so you can replicate this on other Linux distributions if you want to use Birdtray.

Instructionals/Technical

• This is something worth repeating: key rotation doesn’t give you key revocation, and the two are different things. Key rotation gets people to accept and use a new key; key revocation gets them to not accept the old one. Of course if you revoke the current key you generally want people to rotate into using a new one, but you can want people to rotate into a new key without any particular revocation of the old one.

• Today was update day1. Then the expected unexpected happened: The ZFS module was missing from initramfs. Desktop’s dead in the water. I boot up my laptop to quickly flash an Arch live ISO onto a USB drive, and while at it also upgrade that one. Knowing that what went wrong on my desktop would likely also fail here, I pay a bit more attention and there it is, in the post-transaction hooks2. Most notably here: pacman does not exit with an error code causing yay to just keep going with AUR upgrades.

• Groups on Linux-based operating systems are used to assign a set of privileges to a group of users. There are mainly two types of groups in the Linux distribution operating systems.

• Whenever a Linux user creates a file or directory, then the files within it are allocated to a primary group, which has the same name as the one of the current user. Every user has at least one primary group associated with them. Whenever a new user is created, it is allocated within a primary group. Apart from their primary group, Linux users can also belong to other groups known as secondary groups.

• To get some information about the existing domain name, you might have used some online WHOIS lookup tool. However, if you are a Ubuntu user then you can use your Command terminal to get information about Domain names or public IP addresses by installing the WHOIS protocol.

• WHOIS is an easy-to-use protocol for querying databases that store registered users or assignees of an Internet resource. It’s a reliable way to access a range of information, from domain names to IP addresses.

• The information WHOIS reveals the domain name’s creation and expiration dates, the registrar who manages the registration, and the contact information of the registrant, administrative contact, and technical contact. This information can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as verifying the authenticity of a website or identifying potential trademark infringement.

• Linux is an open source operating system that is widely used as an alternative to Windows and macOS. Learn about Linux features, how it works, and more.

• Do you want your Documents folder to look different from your Software Projects folder? Linux is very customizable in that regard and allows you to do that efficiently.

• Having different folder icons makes your system more intuitive and user-friendly. Plus, it’s very easy to find folders at a glance. Here’s how you can easily change directory or folder icons on Linux.

• You might have encountered the “pip command not found” error while installing any Python package or module. This error occurs when the system cannot locate the pip package manager used to install and manage Python packages.

• Here’s how to fix it.

Games

• The Wine team just announced the release of vkd3d version 1.7, their Direct3D 12 to Vulkan translation layer. Not to be confused with VKD3D-Proton, Valve’s own fork of it with a focus on gaming with Proton.

• These Vampire Survivor-like horde survival games are still all the rage, and I keep discovering more. Rogue: Genesia is another, with Native Linux support and it is rated Steam Deck Playable.

• Revhead, a racing sim all about actually building your own vehicle, recently had an upgrade with the developer now supporting the Steam Deck. It also has Native Linux support. Not one I’ve actually written about at all before, somehow the original release was missed in a sea of games back in 2017.

• Another fresh tasty release of GE-Proton is now available, two actually were released in the last day so here’s what’s new as of GE-Proton 7-53 for Steam Deck and Linux desktop gaming. GE-Proton is built and maintained by the community, it is not affiliated with Valve and the official Proton. See my full Proton guide for more.

• Humble Bundle just launched another bundle full of games, and it looks like many are compatible with Steam Deck and Linux desktop with Proton. I’ll be going over the compatibility rating for each title, saving you some clicking around.

• AMD had plenty to show off at GDC, and they’ve done a bit of a summary and some of it is quite exciting for future games.

• Fanatical are doing some great bundles lately! They have another Build your own Play On The Go Bundle for Spring 2023 now available. The point of these bundles, is to provide you options to pick and get a bigger discount across 3, 5 and 8 games together and all of them are Steam Deck Verified!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I figured that I only have two options. I could manually compile the controller module, load it into memory, and then manually issue brightness and pattern commands to the following path: /sys/class/leds/, specifically the qc71_laptop struct. The other option is to use the Slimbook RGB tool. Not happy with either, I must say.

• In the end, I decided that perhaps, for now, the easiest option is to use the software provided by Slimbook. After all, the team maintains a dozen plus utilities for their different laptop models, and they are trying to give the user the best possible experience, considering the limitations. By and large, the keyboard tool isn’t as ugly or ungainly as I’ve feared. It’s quite elegant, in fact. So I think, we might call this a happy ending. More Titan adventures coming your way soon!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Recently, GNOME added an option into GNOME Settings to adjust pointer acceleration, which was a feature that the developers and designers were originally against. One person managed to convince them, by giving one reason. Thanks to them, pointer acceleration options are now available in GNOME Settings!

• Firstly, I’m going to summarize the relevant parts of the proposal and discussion behind the addition, and explain how it was accepted. Then, to build on top of that, GNOME’s philosophy and the importance of taking it into consideration. And lastly, how to propose features to GNOME and what to avoid.

• However, this article is not about whether GNOME is successful with their philosophy, and the tone of developers and designers. Additionally, this isn’t about where to propose features, rather how to formulate the proposal and what to consider.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Barry Kauler ☛ AppImage Installer can now updateAppImage Installer (aii) is a recent exciting project, see previous blog posts:AppImage Installer simplified info window — March 19, 2023AppImage Installer bug-fix and more apps — March 19, 2023Wrapping up AppImage Installer — March 15, 2023AppImage Installer for EasyOS — March 14, 2023

New Releases

• Our most ambitious release to date, Trisquel 11.0 Aramo is out! After extensive work and thorough testing, we are proud to declare Aramo to be production-ready. This release brings many improvements and covers more grounds both in terms of machines supported and in installation options. Here are some highlights of the main accomplishments included in this release:

• we’re very excited to announce the release of Proxmox Virtual Environment 7.4. It’s based on Debian 11.6 “Bullseye” but using a newer Linux kernel 5.15 or 6.2, QEMU 7.2, LXC 5.0.2, and ZFS 2.1.9.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• We – that is to say the storage team at SUSE – have a tool we’ve been using for the past few years to help with development and testing of Ceph on SUSE Linux. It’s called sesdev because it was created largely for SES (SUSE Enterprise Storage) development. It’s essentially a wrapper around vagrant and libvirt that will spin up clusters of VMs running openSUSE or SLES, then deploy Ceph on them. You would never use such clusters in production, but it’s really nice to be able to easily spin up a cluster for testing purposes that behaves something like a real cluster would, then throw it away when you’re done.

• I’ve recently been trying to spend more time playing with Kubernetes, which means I wanted to be able to spin up clusters of VMs running openSUSE or SLES, then deploy Kubernetes on them, then throw the clusters away when I was done, or when I broke something horribly and wanted to start over. Yes, I know there’s a bunch of other tools for doing toy Kubernetes deployments (minikube comes to mind), but given I already had sesdev and was pretty familiar with it, I thought it’d be worthwhile seeing if I could teach it to deploy k3s, a particularly lightweight version of Kubernetes.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Trisquel 11 is officially released at the time of LibrePlanet Conference 2023 on 19 March marking its nineteenth years. The website announcement is published on Monday, 20 March, by emphasizing that now it is based on Ubuntu 22.04 “Jammy Jellyfish” LTS, will be supported for five years until 2027 and supporting even more architecture including ARM64 and POWER. Now as the tradition goes, we publish the news with the download links, mirrors, torrents and checksums including necessary how to’s like making bootable and installing it to all dear readers. Happy downloading!

Open Hardware/Modding

• Bandwidth may have increased dramatically over the past couple of decades, but internet connections are often still quite unreliable. For people with unreliable connections, it becomes a chore to check a browser over and over again to find out when the internet is back up. To avoid that hassle, Emily Velasco built this monitor.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Just over 27 years ago, John Perry Barlow’s declaration of the independence of Cyberspace claimed that governments “have no sovereignty” over the networked world. In 2023, we have ample reason to know better than that, but we still expect the free-software community to be left alone by the affairs of governments much of the time. A couple of recent episodes related to the war in Ukraine are making it clear that there are limits to our independence.

• The free-software community has, indeed, proved resilient to many events in the wider world. The dotcom bust mostly brought an end to the silliness and accelerated our work toward useful goals. The September 11 attacks (and the horrors that followed) had little direct effect on the community; the same is true of the 2008 economic crisis. The pandemic closed down much of the world, but seemingly sped up free-software development. Even the war in Ukraine and the upheavals around it have, apparently, barely touched our community. All of these events had (and are still having) horrific consequences for many of the people involved, but the development community as a whole was often able to carry on as if many of the world’s troubles were taking place in another universe.

• Recently, though, our community has been lightly touched in a couple of ways. The ipmitool repository at GitHub was locked, and its maintainer denied access, as a result of his status as an employee of the sanctioned Russian firm Yadro. And, in the kernel community, a developer with the Russian firm Baikal Electronics was told by a networking maintainer that “We don’t feel comfortable accepting patches from or relating to hardware produced by your organization”. The specific reasons for this discomfort were not spelled out, and no policy for the kernel project as a whole has been expressed, but one possible motivation, as described by Konstantin Ryabitsev…

Events

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• In 2020, Mozilla released a paper, Creating Trustworthy AI. In it, its analysts defined “trustworthy AI as AI that is demonstrably worthy of trust, tech that considers accountability, agency, and individual and collective well-being.” So, for example, this action plan seeks to eliminate bias; protect privacy and security while avoiding the centralization of AI power in the hands of a few big tech companies.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• If you’ll stop interrupting me, I had a dream last night where I implemented a blog engine in PL/pgSQL, broadly the Postgres equivalent to PL/SQL. I wrote posts in pgAdmin on my desktop, and the stored procedures wrote out static HTML based on the posts in the database. Other queries were passed down from nginx to generate archive pages as needed.

Licensing / Legal

• Since the earliest days of Mac OS X, Apple has complied with the licenses for the dozens of open source components it includes in the OS by posting (sometimes a little belatedly) updated versions of the source code to its Open Source at Apple web page.

• This resource is useful primarily to developers, but may also interest curious technophiles who want to take a peek “behind the curtain” to see how much of the magic just beneath our fingertips is made.

• Instead of creating its own model from scratch or using LLaMA, Databricks took a much older and open-source LLM called GPT-J, which was created by EleutherAI several years earlier. GTP-J was the foundation on which Dolly was built. The model, Databricks said, “has not made a huge splash, presumably because it does not exhibit magical instruction-following capabilities.”

• Databricks wants enterprises to train their own AI models using its software. Ghodsi said the company’s researchers had taken a two-year-old model that was freely available and trained it with a small amount of data for three hours on single computer that anyone with a credit card could rent.

Programming/Development

• Copyright notice: The text is not in the public domain. It is copyrighted material (© Bertrand Meyer, 1995, 2023), made available free of charge on the Web for the convenience of readers, with the permission of the original publisher (Prentice Hall, now Pearson Education, Inc.). You are not permitted to copy it or redistribute it. Please refer others to the present version at bertrandmeyer.com/success.

• So you are aware: you are reading the written version of a conference talk. This is written in a different style that is more lighthearted, conversational and different than the content normally on this blog. The words being said are the verbatim words that were spoken at the conference. The slides are the literal slides for each spoken utterance. If you want to hide the non-essential slides, please install this userstyle: No fun allowed. If this isn’t enough, please edit it to also hide this CSS class: xeblog-slides-essential. Doing this may make the presentation page harder to understand.

Python

• This article will introduce you to some of the new features of Python 3.11. These features include: [...]

Standards/Consortia

• Today, March 24th 2023, the HTML specification added a new grouping content element. The search element.

• Please be aware that this element landing in the HTML spec today does not mean it is available in browsers today. Issues have been filed to implement the search element in the major browsers, including the necessary accessibility mappings. Keep this in mind before you get all super excited and willy nilly add this new element to your pages.

Leftovers

• It’s hard enough to give candid feedback to a friend or subordinate. Giving it to your boss is so much harder — and can get you booted if you botch it.

• A downpour on Friday afternoon inundated several areas in Johor Bahru as areas in Malaysia’s southern state Johor continues to be stricken by floods.

• Riyuewan’s future is at a crossroads after the end of China’s zero-Covid policy and borders are open.

• This new culture was raised in a vacuum, cultivated and refined in lonely highschooler bedrooms and basements all across the world. The platform was used by various communities which compounded their identities by sharing outfits, music, and art with like minded and similarly isolated people. The content, as eye catching as it is, lacks an essential ingredient to the growth of concert culture, people.

• With older music fans having learned from those older than them, a whole generation of teenagers were left behind; creating an education gap and a bookend in US live music history. They were robbed of the subtle guiding hand of a million judgmental stares and belligerent concert goers showing them the ropes. This time, no “old heads” were around to demonstrate how to mosh safely, drink responsibly, and act in a way that allows all to enjoy themselves. The result is rude behavior that creates an unwelcoming environment not worthy of the almost holy feeling live shows provide.

Science

• The “hole” isn’t really a hole, but rather is a large region much cooler than the rest of the Sun, causing it to appear black. As explained by NOAA in its alert on Wednesday, the dynamics of the coronal hole were expected to speed up the solar winds, and so the agency warned of minor-to-moderate geomagnetic storms as a result, falling under the classifications G1 and G2 (on a scale that goes all the way up to G5).

Education

• On March 21, the 25,000 custodians, cafeteria workers, campus aides, bus drivers, teaching assistants, special education aides, building and grounds workers who are members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99, walked off the job in a three-day unfair labor practices strike against their employer, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The decision by 35,000 mostly teacher colleagues—myself among them, members of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA)—to refuse to cross SEIU’s picket line led a total of 60,000 workers across two unions to go on strike together, hitting the streets united, and creating one of the largest labor actions Los Angeles has ever seen. In a deepening of the last 13 years of national upsurge among education workers—often called “Red for Ed”—the SEIU members’ strike added a distinctly purple (the SEIU’s traditional color) hue.

• At the start of March, Tiffany Cappellari, my colleague, and I made our way to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy NY, to deliver ROS2 Training to members of our ROS-Industrial community. Rensselaer Polytechnic, in addition to being a prestigious academic institution, has been a proud partner in project work with many other ROS-Industrial Consortium members, collaborators, and those in need of more advanced capability. RPI kindly hosted our first in-person training of calendar year 2023.

• Sounds great, but I can hear a good security-minded engineer ask, “If all infrastructure can be managed in one place, is this actually safe?”

Hardware

• Like Garrit, I use Bitwarden’s built in TOTP multi-factor tokens for most things, as I think it’s a good balance between security and convenience. Yes, it can probably be compromised, but it would have to be an extremely knowledgeable and motivated threat actor. So the risk is worth it for me.

• I’ve been thinking about this for some time now, but I ultimately don’t think the benefits outweigh the hassle of always carrying around another device that I risk losing or breaking.

• Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was just a few years old when Metcalfe arrived and set up the lab with that internet precursor, ARPANET.

• But that didn’t connect the hundred new Alto personal computers and laser printers, so Metcalfe drew on his experiences with the University of Hawaii’s AlohaNet, and together with the late David Boggs built a hundred node network – now known as the first Ethernet – in two years.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• According to this poll, Europeans want to be asked explicitly for consent before doctors or researchers are given access to their patient files and data. The majority of patients thus prefer an approach different from what the European Commission (no choice) and the Rapporteurs (opt-out only) propose. Specifically, 54% of Europeans want to allow access by doctors to their patient records only with their explicit consent, whereas 37% support the principle of automatic access. When it comes to research, 75% of citizens are willing to grant researchers access to their patient records and data only with their explicit consent, while only 20% support the opposite approach of automatic access (as a rule).

• Our tiny computers and microcontrollers do all sorts of cool things. One application sees them powering portable device monitors which allow CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machines to check oxygen levels, and display information on LCD screens for the patient. We’re also inside an oxygen concentrator that lets the user adjust their own flow while making efficient use of the oxygen in ambient air.

• Speaking at a joint news conference with U.S. President Joe Biden in Ottawa, Trudeau said: “Our concerns around TikTok are around security and access to information that the Chinese government could have to government phones. It’s just a personal side benefit that my kids can’t use TikTok anymore.”

• France announced Friday it is banning the “recreational” use of TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and other apps on government employees’ phones because of concern about insufficient data security measures. The move follows similar restrictions on TikTok in democratic countries amid fears about the popular video-sharing app’s Chinese connections.

• “You’ll have seen the concerns we’ve expressed over the years about any use of depleted uranium given the consequences of such usage. And those would apply to anyone who provides such armaments. We have made clear… concerns about any use of depleted uranium anywhere,” Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for the UN Secretary, said.

• Depleted uranium is the main by-product of uranium enrichment and is a chemically and radiologically toxic heavy metal, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

• Utah became on Thursday the first state to enact legislation that restricts children and teens from using social media without their parents’ consent.

• The Environmental Protection Agency took an unusual step last week: It opened a new period in which the public can comment on its proposed asbestos ban. The agency had gotten new information, officials said, including a series of ProPublica reports on dangerous working conditions in factories that use asbestos to make chlorine.

• Asbestos has been long known to cause deadly cancers and other serious illnesses. While dozens of countries have outlawed the substance, the U.S. still imports hundreds of tons each year, mostly for use in chlorine manufacturing.

Proprietary

• Thanks to the hospitality of OpenVirtualization.pro community and the proficous collaboration with Storware I have the pleasure to share with you some interesting news about Oracle Cloud Native Environment, the Kubernetes distribution for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments developed and maintained by Oracle.

• Oracle is set to make a number of job cuts at Cerner, the electronic health records company it acquired last year, as its shift workloads to its cloud infrastructure.

• Big Red paid $28 billion for Cerner in June, promising an expansion of its health sector of activity.

• However, a report from Bloomberg suggests that Oracle has begun a round of layoffs in an effort to reduce costs. Staffers were told last week that jobs had been eliminated, with marketing, creative services, and technical positions affected.

• In retrospect, I feel kinda bad for not paying attention to this sooner. Back in November a friend excitedly told me that ChatGPT is sentient, because it gave him good answers to a lot of “tough questions.” I tried (and failed) to explain that it was just statistical prediction and wasn’t actually conscious. It didn’t occur to me that this friend was not a programmer and couldn’t call an API to save his life, and yet had no problem accessing and using ChatGPT. That’s where the revolution happens.

• On the second day of the contest in Vancouver, Canada, Synacktiv’s researchers created an exploit chain that used a heap overflow and an out-of-band (OOB) write vulnerability to pop the Tesla-Infotainment system. The [crack] was described as “Unconfined Root” and scored the Synacktiv team a $250,000 cash prize.

• Microsoft Corp has threatened to cut off access to its [Internet]-search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence chat products, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.

• The reader’s info said the mess was caused by “a recent deployment applied to an infrastructure for regulating user geolocation had inadvertently provided incorrect IP location data.”

• This resulted in users who had an IP-based conditional access policy experiencing the sign-in issues mentioned above.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, libdatetime-timezone-perl, and tzdata), Fedora (flatpak and gmailctl), Mageia (firefox, flatpak, golang, gssntlmssp, libmicrohttpd, libtiff, python-flask-security, python-owslib, ruby-rack, thunderbird, unarj, and vim), Red Hat (firefox, kpatch-patch, nss, openssl, and thunderbird), SUSE (containerd, hdf5, qt6-base, and squirrel), and Ubuntu (amanda, gif2apng, graphviz, and linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-raspi).

• Github accidentally committed their SSH RSA private key to a repository, and now a bunch of people’s infrastructure is broken because it needs to be updated to trust the new key. This is obviously bad, but what’s frustrating is that there’s no inherent need for it to be – almost all the technological components needed to both reduce the initial risk and to make the transition seamless already exist.

• Matthew Garrett looks at the recent disclosure of GitHub’s private host key, how it probably came about, and what a better approach to key management might look like.

• A cyberattack on Our Lady of the Lake University’s computer network compromised personal data on its faculty, students and even individuals who applied to the university but never attended.

• The private Catholic university on San Antonio’s West Side this week confirmed that it recently found evidence that “unauthorized access” to its network occurred about Aug. 30 and that “a limited amount of personal information was removed.” It declined to detail the types of information taken.

• Fitzpatrick’s arrest and the disruption of BreachForums comes nearly a year after the Department of Justice announced the seizure of a predecessor hacking marketplace, Raidforums, and unsealed criminal charges against RaidForums’ founder and chief administrator, who is the subject of extradition proceedings in the United Kingdom.

• U.S. cybersecurity firm Fortra said suspicious activity was identified within its GoAnywhere software nearly two months ago, a day after Rio Tinto in a staff memo said personal data of some of its Australian employees may have been stolen.

• The internal memo seen by Reuters on Thursday revealed payroll information, like payslips and overpayment letters, of a small number of the mining giants’ Australian employees from January 2023 had possibly been seized by a cybercriminal group.

• The Pension Protection Fund (PPF) has confirmed that data belonging to current and former employees has been exposed in the wake of the GoAnywhere breach.

• In a statement to IT Pro, the fund, which manages pension assets for nearly 300,000 clients, said it has informed affected staff and is providing support and monitoring services for those impacted in the breach.

• Hundreds of thousands of Americans’ personal information is at risk after Medicare’s data was breached. Now, lawmakers want answers.

• House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and House Committee on Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., sent a letter demanding a range of documents and communications from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

• Seemingly immune for so long, here’s a reminder that MacOS and Linux need to protect themselves against malware, too.

• Parents are still looking for answers weeks after hackers stole the personal data of thousands of users from kids’ tech coding camp iD Tech, with some fearing that their children’s data was compromised in the data breach.

• iD Tech, which provides on-campus classes and online tech and coding courses for kids, has yet to acknowledge the breach or notify parents.

• On the first day, Pwn2Own Vancouver 2023 hacking challenge participants compromised Windows 11, Tesla, macOS, and Ubuntu Desktop.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The internal memo seen by Reuters on Thursday revealed payroll information, like payslips and overpayment letters, of a small number of the mining giants’ Australian employees from January 2023 had possibly been seized by a cybercriminal group.

• Last week, 41 MEPs from different political groups had sent an open letter to the French Parliament, calling to stop the unprecedented plans to automate the mass surveillance of citizens’ behaviour in public using artificial intelligence. MEPs warned against the crippling effect of such mass surveillance of public spaces, which had never been conducted before in Europe, and which is setting a precedent. The signatories to the open letter include several negotiators of the proposed EU Artificial Intelligence Act which committed to ban biometric mass surveillance, including co-rapporteur Brando Benifei (Socialist Group).

• Pirate Party Member of the European Parliament Patrick Breyer, initiator of the letter, comments: [....]

Defence/Aggression

• Foreign Affairs Commission of the Parliament of Turkey approved the protocol for Finland’s NATO membership yesterday while Finland’s president Sauli Niinisto signed the NATO legislation of his country in a ceremony the same day.

• The UN published a report Friday highlighting summary executions, torture, and other instances in which Russia and Ukraine violated international human rights laws in their treatment of prisoners of war.

• Such a test would be a first for Kim Jong-un’s weapons program. But there was no independent confirmation that it had happened.

• Despite Pentagon resistance, a bipartisan group stressed that Congress had voted to legalize support for the court’s Ukraine war investigations.

• Five Chinese nationals were taken away Monday, and the company, which does corporate investigations, and its law firm have been unable to contact them.

• After multiple accounts of tourists behaving badly, its governor wants Russia and Ukraine to lose access to Indonesia’s visa-on-arrival program.

• Deals on migration and trade emerge from a meeting that restored ties between the two nations after four years of tension under the former U.S. president, Donald J. Trump.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked Finland for its latest defence shipment.

• On the 20th Anniversary of “Bowling for Columbine” winning the Oscar, you can watch it for free

• In April 1953, newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a retired five-star Army general who had led the landings on D-Day in France in June 1944, gave his most powerful speech. It would become known as his “Cross of Iron” address. In it, Ike warned of the cost humanity would pay if Cold War competition led to a world dominated by wars and weaponry that couldn’t be reined in. In the immediate aftermath of the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Ike extended an olive branch to the new leaders of that empire. He sought, he said, to put America and the world on a “highway to peace.” It was, of course, never to be, as this country’s emergent military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) chose instead to build a militarized (and highly profitable) highway to hell.1

Environment

• The first case being heard next Wednesday focuses on the health impact of climate change-induced heatwaves, in a case brought by thousands of elderly Swiss women against the Swiss government as part of a six-year legal battle.

• Also on Wednesday, the court will hear a case brought by Damien Carême, a member of the European Parliament for the French Green party, who is challenging France’s refusal to take more ambitious climate measures.

• The third case, due to be heard after the summer concerns six Portuguese youths, who are taking on 33 countries – including all 27 European Union member states, Britain, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey and Ukraine.

• They, too, argue those countries have violated their rights and should be ordered to take more ambitious action to address climate change. Six other climate cases are pending.

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released the “summary for policymakers” section of the group’s forthcoming Synthesis Report, the final portion of its massive Sixth Assessment Report. Two messages in particular have stood out in both media coverage and the report itself. The 1.5 degrees C warming threshold scientists say is the line between relative stability and extreme volatility—which may be irreversible—is more likely than not to occur within around five years, even under scenarios positing very low carbon emissions. This has accompanied the urgent message that there’s still time to avert calamity. As the IPCC report notes, the consequences of crossing the 1.5º C threshold will linger for thousands of years. But halting greenhouse gas emissions entails removing fossil fuels from the world’s ships, planes, cars, farms, factories, militaries, homes, and buildings. Doing this in a few years would be like turning the world’s biggest ship 180 degrees at a moment’s notice—without using fossil fuels. The assessment report’s 3,675 pages tells us what technology has to change to avert disaster. But changing technology is a deeply political process; even swapping in renewable energy for fossil fuels has proven to be a politically fraught and difficult prospect. So how, exactly, are these massive changes supposed to happen?

• It’s no secret that climate change discourse is shrouded in obfuscation, disinformation, greenwashing and lies, both outright and of omission. But a recent leak of a draft of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released on March 20 has been particularly enlightening when it comes to just how…

• Relocating entire communities at once is the most extreme way to adapt to climate change. Relocations are likely to become more common as conditions worsen, with dozens, if not hundreds, of mostly Indigenous communities forced to relocate. Managed retreats are disruptive, uprooting entire communities and cultures, adding complicated layers to each community’s exodus, from choosing new locations to allocating the funds provided by the Interior Department.

• The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, in collaboration with several other law enforcement agencies, charged 23 more people with ‘domestic terrorism’ for their alleged involvement in the ongoing effort to stop ‘Cop City’ and to defend the Weelaunee Forest in unincorporated DeKalb County…

Energy/Transportation

• The European Union’s race to rid itself of dependence on Russian fossil fuels is well underway. The International Energy Agency says widespread bids to beef up energy security “turbocharged” growth of green power in 2022, and EU parliamentarians hope to ramp up renewables targets to reach 45% of bloc-wide energy consumption by 2030.

• The word “renewable” often conjures up images of wind farms or solar panels — less so scenes of burning trees. But biomass, which includes firewood, plants and other organic materials, makes up 60% of the EU’s renewable energy mix according to the European Commission.

• As the bloc now reviews its landmark renewable power legislation, a political battle over firewood’s future is playing out in Brussels.

• Years before Hurricane Katrina levee failures flooded New Orleans, a Louisiana hurricane expert warned federal officials of the potential for the levees to break. Now, Ivor van Heerden, the former deputy director of Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center, is concerned about the disastrous and potentially lethal consequences of a hurricane hitting a liquified natural gas (LNG) export terminal under construction south of New Orleans.

• “Once again we’ve got politicians and state agencies ignoring the facts, just like they did with Hurricane Katrina,” van Heerden said. “We’re going to have another catastrophe.”

Wildlife/Nature

• It’s the latest clash over a river basin in New South Wales, Australia, in an arid land where social, economic and environmental interests collide over water issues.

Finance

• Once upon a time, “too big to fail” was shorthand to villainize big banks — these days, it’s a way to say “your money is safe.”

• The U.S. banking system appears to be stabilized, for now, following extraordinary government actions to head off an all-out disaster after Silicon Valley Bank’s failure.

• For President Emmanuel Macron, who has been the target of widespread fury and protests after he pushed through an increase in the retirement age, a planned royal visit was particularly ill-timed.

• In November, CNBC published an article arguing that borrowers benefiting from President Biden’s student debt cancellation plan will largely spend their savings on “non-essential” items, citing a poll from Intelligent.com: “73 percent of anticipated recipients say they expect to spend their debt forgiveness on non-essential items, including travel, dining out and new tech.” The article caused quite a stir, including on Real Time with Bill Maher earlier this month. Maher, citing the poll to his guest, Senator Bernie Sanders, called President Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 of student loan debt per borrower a “giveaway.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The Digital Markets Act ruled that users on different platforms should be able to exchange messages with each other. This opens up a real Pandora’s box. How will the networks manage keys, authenticate users, and moderate content? How much metadata will have to be shared, and how?

• In our latest paper, One Protocol to Rule Them All? On Securing Interoperable Messaging, we explore the security tensions, the conflicts of interest, the usability traps, and the likely consequences for individual and institutional behaviour.

• The official communication has said that while using different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. or Instant Messaging applications like WhatsApp, Telegram etc., employees have been seen to air disparaging views on subjects that they are expressly barred under rules to comment upon. Employees have been seen to comment or act or behave in a manner that does not conform to the acceptable standards of official conduct, as envisaged in the aforementioned guidelines and the rules.

• Donald Trump might be in legal trouble, but in the world of Republican politics, he’s still the top dog. Polls consistently not only show him leading in the race to become the Republican nominee but also indicate that his domination over rivals such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former vice president Mike Pence is actually increasing. This is evident in both polling aggregations such as Morning Consult and  individual polls such as Monmouth’s. As New York Times reporter Nate Cohn noted on Wednesday, Monmouth shows Trump continuing to gain in the presidential primary, with Trump up 41-27. This is longest-long-term trend from a high-quality poll in the race. Since December, Trump has gained 15 points while DeSantis has lost 12 points.

• It was not a good day for TikTok’s prospects in the US. In the hours before Chew’s testimony, a spokesperson for China’s commerce ministry announced that Beijing would “firmly oppose” a move to force the sale of TikTok. Multiple committee members seized on the comments as supposed evidence of the precise link that the company insists does not exist.

• “The CCP believes they have the final say over your company,” Rodgers told Chew. “I have zero confidence in your assertion that ByteDance and TikTok are not beholden to the CCP.” She described the app as a threat to national security, US citizens’ privacy and the mental health of the country’s children, telling Chew: “Your platform should be banned.”

• The Foreign Ministry rebuffed claims by U.S. lawmakers that TikTok could be a tool of surveillance for the Chinese government.

• Legacy blue tick account holders on Twitter have just over a week left to pay to retain their verification badges.

• Former President Donald Trump’s rally in Waco, Texas, this weekend comes amid the 30th anniversary in the city of the infamous deadly standoff at the Branch Davidians compound

• A powdery substance was found Friday with a threatening letter in a mailroom at the offices of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg

• Survivors of North Korean prisoners have spoken of the awful conditions they endured.

• As tensions in the US intensify, the attorney overseeing the investigation into the former president has also received a death threat.

• A comic novel from the 1930s opens a window on days when what would become a dangerous political movement was seen as a silly hobby.

• Nicola Sturgeon said the practice, which was relatively common until the 1970s, was among the gravest injustices in Scottish history.

• TikTok posts by Finns Party supporters appear to be resonating with younger and first-time voters, according to Helsingin Sanomat.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A federal judge spoke at Stanford Law School. Chaos ensued.

• [An excerpt from my forthcoming article on "Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Outputs."]

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The account of the weekly Kurdish newspaper Xwebûn with 29 thousand 488 followers that was blocked on February 22 was restored by Twitter.

• Apê Musa’s son, Dicle Anter believes that unidentified murders are the black box of Turkey. 31 years after his father, a prominent Kurdish writer, and journalist was assassinated, he will be a candidate for MP.

• The charge against her stemmed from her online posts about an attack by Russian military jets against a theater in the Ukrainian port of Mariupol that killed hundreds of civilians, including children.

• Ponomarenko said in July that while in pretrial detention she was forcibly taken to a psychiatric clinic where she was ordered to undergo a “psychiatric evaluation” and forcibly injected with unknown substances when she demanded her personal belongings or hygiene items.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Supreme Court was eager to revoke reproductive rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in part so that Republican governors and legislatures would be free to come up with ever-more-draconian methods to force pregnant people to give birth against their will. Red states have answered the call and passed laws that treat pregnant people as second-class citizens, depriving them not just of bodily autonomy but also access to life-saving medical care. To call it a “race to the bottom” undersells the depths to which theocratic state governments are willing to sink to in their zeal to control women and girls.

• Asian Americans’ psychological state over the last few years has been one of hypervigilance and pretending — constantly having to act as if everything is “business as usual” even amid high-profile anti-Asian attacks and the aftereffects of collective trauma, health advocates and experts tell Axios.

• A decade as a right-to-work state made Michigan better off.

• The first step would be to finally repudiate the myth of central bank competence on inflation. The belief that central banks can successfully manage prices, if made “independent” of governments, rests on the 15 years of economic stability before the 2008 financial crisis. The Great Moderation saw inflation level out at low levels across the developed world, and coincided with a fad for declaring central banks “independent” of their governments when making interest rate decisions.

• The general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board issued a clarifying memo on Wednesday regarding the “scope” of a February ruling by the federal agency’s board that said employers cannot include blanket non-disparagement clauses in their severance packages, nor demand laid-off employees keep secret the terms of their exit agreements.

• That the deputies tampered with his camera system brings home that the raid was malicious rather than investigatory–and serves as a reminder that security cameras should dump to the cloud, not just to a local DVR or NAS. Even the dumbest home invaders know to find and take them nowadays.

• The clips I picked verified what I was saying. I didn’t want people to think I’m yelling wolf. When I lie to a cop, that’s a charge. It’s called false information to a police officer. But this guy can lie to me and it’s not a charge. It’s nothing. It’s “Oh, whoop-dee-doo, big deal and your doors on the ground, and your gate’s effed up, and I’m leaving. I lied on the warrant. I tore your house up. And fuck you, nigger. God bless America.” That’s why I picked those clips. Look at these guys going through my pockets for kidnapping victims, right? Where are the kidnapping victims in my suit pockets? Look at these guys going through my CDs. They probably stole some of my masters and then they go have them on eBay and stuff. Is that why they wanted to turn the cameras off, so they can take some memorabilia or whatever?

• Four deputies, two sergeants, and a detective claim that Afroman, whose real name is Joseph Foreman, took footage of their faces during the raid and used it in music videos and social media posts without their consent — a misdemeanor under Ohio state law.

• The officers are also suing on civil grounds with claims that Foreman’s use of their likeness in videos and social media posts result in their “emotional distress, embarrassment, ridicule, loss of reputation, and humiliation,” asking for an injunction to take down all videos and posts containing their likeness.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirms universal service fund and the FCC’s actions to connect us all are constitutional.

• Public Knowledge has the pleasure of inviting you to a multifaceted program focused on training and developing the next generation of tech policy experts and public interest advocates that reflects the diversity of voices and experiences in our society.

Monopolies

• The U.K.’s antitrust regulator will narrow the focus of its probe into Microsoft Corp.’s plan to buy Activision Blizzard Inc. for $68.7 billion.

• The Competition and Markets Authority, or CMA, disclosed the development today.

• [...]

• The CMA plans to publish its final report about the deal on April 26.

• “It’s over. The old days are gone,” Neil Young begins his complaint. He says he gets letters from fans who are angry at $3,000 tickets for a benefit concert. “That money does not go to me or the benefit. Artists have to worry about ripped off fans blaming them for Ticketmaster add-ons and scalpers,” he continues. “Concert tours are no longer fun.”

• Neil Young then shares a bit of a news article about The Cure and Robert Smith’s attempts to keep ticket prices low for fans. They opted out of dynamic pricing, with each ticket costing $20. But after service fees and facility fees and order processing fees, the price paid by fans was double the face value of the ticket. What should have been $80 for four tickets eventually cost $172 at checkout.

Copyrights

• But it’s not over—we will keep fighting for the traditional right of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books. We will be appealing the judgment and encourage everyone to come together as a community to support libraries against this attack by corporate publishers.

• We will continue our work as a library. This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.

• Cloudflare helps to provide access to millions of websites on the regular web. The company also offers an IPFS gateway, making it easier to access content on the censorship-resistant storage network. Unlike its CDN and DNS services, Cloudflare reports that it disables IPFS access in response to copyright abuse complaints.

• One of the claims raised in the suit against Stable Diffusion and Midjourney is that AI tools should be held vicariously liable for copyright infringement because their users can use the systems to create infringing works. Typically, legal liability arises where someone directly commits an act that harms another person in such a way that the law can hold that person responsible for their actions. This is “direct liability.” If a distracted driver hits a cyclist, the cyclist might ask the court to make the driver pay any damages, because the driver is directly liable for the accident. Normally, third parties are not considered responsible for the acts of other people. So, the law would probably not hold anyone but the driver liable for the accident — not a passenger, and not even one who was helping to navigate or who had asked the driver to make the trip. And unless the car was faulty, the manufacturer of the car would not be liable either, even though if no one had made the car the accident would not have happened: the car could have been used without harming anyone, but in this case it was the driver who made it cause harm.

• The two sides went to court on Monday, with HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House joining Hachette as plaintiffs.

• In his ruling, Judge Koetl considered whether the Internet Archive was operating under the principle of Fair Use, which previously protected a digital book preservation project by Google Books and HathiTrust in 2014, among other users. Fair Use considers whether using a copyrighted work is good for the public, how much it’ll impact the copyright holder, how much of the work has been copied, and whether the use has “transformed” a copyrighted thing into something new, among other things.

• Four publishers sued the Archive, alleging that CDL violates their copyrights. In their complaint, Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House claim CDL has cost their companies millions of dollars and is a threat to their businesses.

• They are wrong. Libraries have paid publishers billions of dollars for the books in their print collections, and are investing enormous resources in digitization in order to preserve those texts. CDL helps ensure that the public can make full use of the books that libraries have bought and paid for. This activity is fundamentally the same as traditional library lending, and poses no new harm to authors or the publishing industry. Libraries have never been required to get permissions or pay extra fees to lend books. And as a practical matter, the available data shows that CDL has not and will not harm the publishers’ bottom line.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I read an interesting, brief article in the March 2023 Reflector magazine, called “IS THE SOLAR SYSTEM STABLE?”, exploring the question of whether our solar system should remain stable over very long periods of time. Author Berton Stephens gave a short summary of historical methods that have been used to calculate future astronomical positions. And then he discussed the challenges involved in modeling the solar system accurately.

• Over the past few years, I’ve developed some health consequences associated with a now decades-long desk-job life. The solution is simple enough in theory, but in practice I can’t easily walk away from my income source.

• That’s a lie which I don’t believe–I could just walk away. We like to tell ourselves that we don’t have choices, but we do. I’ll put it this way instead: I don’t want to walk away from my income source. Instead, I want to believe I can solve the problem through more mindfulness.

• I’m playing in a German multi-referee game using AD&D 1st ed in Greyhawk. Each referee runs a region and characters can cross over from one region to the other. In practice, as a player, I’ve found it easier to just create a character for every region I want to play in because time records are strictly kept and yet time drifts between the regions. Currently my region is one month “ahead” of a neighbouring region, for example.

• I’m also playing in a mostly German and some English multi-referee game using H&H where we all have characters in a starting town and each referee runs an adjacent region or a nearby dungeon. We have Stonehell and Barrowmaze as well as two wildness hex-maps.

Technical

• I’ve been running Systemd-free distros for the past few years.

• When I first got into Linux in 2016, it seemed like all the “cool” Linux people used Systemd-free distros and hated on Systemd, but now it seems like this group is not held in the same esteem as they once were. More frequently I hear people more so making fun of this mentality and seeing it as overly dogmatic. By the time I had started using Linux Systemd was already ubiquitous so I ended up learning it in the process of learning how to use Linux.

• When I first tried out Void, I remember trying to start sshd and being utterly baffled when I got the message “command not found: systemctl” since on every other distro I had used, that was the way you started things. It wasn’t until then that I finally understood really what Systemd was.

Programming

• Usually a sleep(3) call of some sort will be added to ensure that one thing happens after the other. This is a false promise, as the system might become busy beyond that of the sleep interval and then who knows which bit of code happens first. Usually it works out, if you don’t mind the waiting and guessing at what a suitable delay should be.

• 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

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.