● 03.29.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 29/03/2023: Parted 3.5.28 and Blender 3.5

Posted in News Roundup at 9:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• The System76 Meerkat is a compact desktop computer with support for up to 64GB of RAM, up to two storage devices (for as much as 16TB of total storage), and up to an Intel Core i7 mobile processor.

• It’s basically a rebranded Intel NUC. But since System76 is a Linux PC vendor, the Meerkat comes with a choice of Pop!_OS or Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. Previously available with a choice of 10th or 11th-gen Intel Core processor options, the Meerkat now also supports 12th-gen Intel chips.

Audiocasts/Shows

• We have updated the Development Release Highlight Notes for Makulu Max, you can Click Here to see what’s happening on the Development front. Some Really exciting things happening, especially on the AI and Widget development side of things. See the Video Below for a Demo of widgets and AI integration in MakuluLinux Max.

Graphics Stack

• Developer Mike Blumenkrantz has continued blogging about Linux graphics driver improvements, with a fix from developer Samuel Pitoiset landing to stop the AMD RADV (Vulkan) driver eating up RAM.

Applications

• Highlights of the Blender 3.5 release include support for Vector Displacement Map (VDM) brushes for the Draw brush, a new Extrude Mode for the Trim tools, light sampling support for Cycles to more effectively sample scenes with many lights, as well as Open Shading Language (OSL) support for OptiX.

• It also supports non-uniform object scales for spot lights, improves adaptive sampling for overexposed scenes to reduce render time, improves GPU rendering performance on Apple devices, adds “Select Linked Vertices” to weight the paint mode, and makes it easier to add F-Curve modifiers to multiple channels.

• Are you planning to leave Twitter and join Mastodon? Use these free and open-source Mastodon clients for your Linux desktop.

• Mastodon is a free and open-source microblogging platform similar to Twitter. It is designed as a decentralised platform that can communicate with other Fediverse protocols such as GNU Social and Pleroma. With the recent news stories about Twitter, many users are trying Mastodon and migrating to the platform.

• With that in mind, we give you a list of free Mastodon clients for Linux desktops as well as Windows and macOS in this post.

• Recently, I updated my VirtualBox installation to version 7.0.0, I noticed some nice updates on the graphical user interface (GUI). The first was the improved theme support, then the new notification center unifying most of the running processes and error reporting around the GUI. Additionally, in VirtualBox 7 you can navigate and search through the user manual easily via a new help viewer widget.

• But importantly, the new VM wizard has been reworked to integrate the unattended guest OS installation and to have a more streamlined workflow. This was the most intriguing feature for me, I had never used it before, so I decided to give it a try.

Instructionals/Technical

• If you intend to restore only one or a few schemas from a PostgreSQL backup file, you can use the pg_restore command, which is used for restoring a particular PostgreSQL database….

• Android Debug Bridge (adb) is the most used command-line tool that enables communication between a personal computer and a connected Android-powered device or emulator instance over a USB cable or TCP/IP (wirelessly).

• However, all of this strict TXG ordering goes out the window once you introduce the ZFS Intent Log (ZIL), because the ZIL’s entire purpose is to persist selected operations to disk before they’re committed as part of a transaction group. Renames and file creations always go in the ZIL (along with various other metadata operations), but file data only goes in the ZIL if you fsync() it (this is a slight simplification, and file data isn’t necessarily directly in the ZIL).

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Kontact on Debian 11.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to setup UFW Firewall on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

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

Games

• Here we are, another big release on Steam and sadly it’s just seemingly not a good experience from my early testing. Even though it seemed like we might see good support, the result is nothing of the sort.

• Alwa’s Awakening is now up for grabs if you’re in need of a free game, plus there’s a whole lot of discounts in GOG’s Spring Sale. To claim the free game, you need to be logged in. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see the giveaway banner where you can grab it. You have until March 30th 2PM UTC to grab it.

• Giving you another easy way to download and keep it up to date, the Dolphin Emulator for GameCube and Wii is coming to Steam. Even though it’s going to be on Steam, they don’t dare mention Nintendo directly on the Steam page: “Dolphin is an emulator for the big N’s 6th and 7th generation consoles, featuring enhancements such as increased resolution, save states, and netplay.”

• Steam Deck and Steam desktop both got a fresh Beta release, with plenty of bug fixing involved and Valve are dropping support for older versions of Windows.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

Announcing KTechLab 0.51.0I’m happy to announce KTechLab release version 0.51.0. KTechLab is an IDE for microcontrollers and electronics.This new release contains the following changes:updated and improved translationsthe Serial Port component, for better compatibility, uses Qt’s QSerialPort, instead of operating-system specific library callsexperimental support for Windows; it requires MSVC 2019 compilervarious stability fixesmodernisation of the codebase, porting away from some deprecated APIs

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• Pinning FreeBSD against Linux is a tale as old as time. But it removes from the necessary conversation about which technology is most suitable for its users. Both Linux and FreeBSD are mature operating systems with a myriad of resources and features to offer. At times, one will be more suitable than the other depending on the use case and aim. In this article, we take time to discuss where does it fit, and provide the audience with more reading material before making a decision.

• Any Google account that has 2-factor authentication enabled prohibits the so-called “less secure” apps from using the standard Google password. In order to overcome this problem, navigate to the Security page in Google Account and then move to Two-factor Authentication section. Generate a new special App Password for the service here.

• Once you have self-hosted email up and running, you may want to add the Calendar and Addressbook features to your service bag. Nowadays, the standard protocols regarding those subjects are CalDAV and CardDAV.

• I decided to go with Baikal, the dedicated CalDAV+CardDAV server based on the sabre/dav framework ; the same framework used in Nextcloud DAV services AFAIK.

• It relies on PHP and is available as a package on OpenBSD.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• As Red Hat slowly loses its open culture under IBM’s ownership, SUSE might be set to finally become an important global open-source player, but only if its board allows the former Red Hatter who will take the helm on May 2 to bring “the open source way” to a secretive and “top-down” corporate culture.

• [...]

• Melissa Di Donato is out as CEO of SUSE, effective immediately, and Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen is in, or will be on May 1. In the meantime, SUSE’s CFO Andy Myers will be holding the reins as he continues with his CFO role. According to a press release from SUSE, Di Donato is leaving to “embark on the next chapter of her career.” My guess is that she was let go, and gently pushed out the door with a generous separation package.

• She left quickly and without fanfare. Although a press release was written and posted online last week, the PR people at SUSE didn’t bother to notify many of the tech journalists they typically turn to when they want to get the news out about a new hire or product release. Jonas Persson, chair of SUSE’s board, praised her she was walking out the door, with something of a “the king is dead; long live the king” statement.

Arch Family

• Archinstall 2.5.4 is here to implement an initial swapfile prototype to enable the creation of a swapfile and hibernation, an updated profile for the Sway window manager to allow you to install it with polkit or seatd, as well as the ability to generate a -fallback variant of boot entries for systemd-boot.

• This release also introduces the ability to save your entire encryption configuration, adds a sector unit for parted to make creating partitions easier, removes the archlinux-keyring package update since it’s been replaced by a service that populates keys, and adds support for using the pacstrap -K command to initialize a new pacman keyring.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Waiting for Ubuntu 23.04 next month?

• Well, we already mentioned that one of the exciting things about the Ubuntu 23.04 release includes a new official Cinnamon flavor (originally, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix).

• And, that is now official, as the Technical Board of Ubuntu approved it with enough votes.

v/Embedded

• Mekotronics provides Android 12, Debian 11, and Ubuntu images, as well as support for Buildroot. The new model uses the exact same motherboard as the Mekotronics R58X-4G and as such, they rely on the same OS images. One of the images (Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy) has been built with the Armbian build system, or even by the Armbian team themselves since Mekotronics thanks Armbian…

• I could find videos of the new device in action, but they should perform the same as the Mekotronics R58 mini PC which we reviewed earlier, although the software must have improved since July 2022. However, the company did upload a video showing how the 2.5-inch SATA bay works on the R58X-HDD model.

• This month, RAKwireless launched a LoRa/BLE5 module based on the Ambiq Apollo3 Blue SoC and the Semtech SX1262 optimized for IoT applications. These new RAK11720 modules start at $7.99 and are compatible with Arduino programming.

• We slightly amended Max’s original design for the 3D-printed parts so they fit our newest Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3. You need to print just two small support pieces so that the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and the camera module will sit nicely inside an Apple iSight shell. You can find the parts on Printables, and download them for free. We found an Apple iSight on good old eBay and we’ve made a disassembly video to show you how to remove the internals.

• If you wanted to create a VGA card, you might think about using an FPGA. But there are simpler ways to generate patterns, including an old-fashioned EPROM, as [DrMattRegan] points out in a recent video.

• We’re not sure, but the number of recognizable alphanumeric characters that a seven-segment display can manage seems to have more to do with human pattern recognition than engineering. It takes some imagination, and perhaps a little squinting, to discern some characters, though. Arguably better is the fourteen-segment display, which has been pressed into service in this just-for-funsies IOT message board.

• Rack Robotics’ Powercore is an Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) kit that converts your existing 3D printer (or CNC router) into a machine capable of cutting high-precision and detailed metal parts. We’ve already seen 2-in-1 3D printers and laser engravers such as the Creality Ender 3 S1 Pro, but while this type of machine can usually cut plywood or engrave stainless steel, the laser is not powerful enough to cut through aluminum.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• Hi curl admins, Alyssa here from the Bloomberg Open Source Program Office. I wanted to let you know that curl was selected as a winner in our inaugural FOSS Contributor Fund! We wanted to let you know of the results before we transferred funds via Open Source Collective. Can you confirm you’ve received this message? Again, we’re super excited to support your work and excited that you were selected in our inaugural vote! Please let us know if we can be of any further support. All best, Alyssa.

• The quote above was received by the curl team on March 27, 2023 and…

• A few years back we actually did a build and a test run in our CI setup that used one of those cloud services that would monitor the code coverage and warn if we would commit something that drastically reduced coverage.

Education

• If you were anywhere near Hackaday over the weekend, you certainly noticed that we launched the tenth annual Hackaday Prize! In celebration of the milestone, we picked from our favorite challenges of years past and came up with four of our favorite, and even one new one just to keep you on your toes. But the first challenge round is running right now, so get your hacking motors turning.

• We ran a successful French translation, as well as the first ever Spanish language sprint for the CC Certificate course reading content. Thanks to the efforts of CC Certificate graduates and additional translators,2 569 million more people will have access to CC Certificate open educational resources (OER) in their native languages. These published works enable 493 million native Spanish speakers and 76 million native French speakers to access translations in their languages — not to mention others who have Spanish or French as a second language.

• The following are the prepared remarks by American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten delivered on Tuesday, March 28, 2023 at the National Press Club.

• American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten on Tuesday defended the egalitarian legacy and goals of public education and outlined a participatory plan to strengthen it nationwide as right-wing lawmakers intensify their long-standing assault on the institution.

FSF

GNU Projects

Licensing / Legal

• Funded by European Commission DG-DEFIS, the National Land Survey of Finland (NLS) distributes and share under the European Union Public Licence the HASlib program, an open-source software package intended to facilitate the implementation of the Galileo High Accuracy Service (HAS).

• HASlib is available for download at the GitHub platform under the European Union Public License (EUPL). Its design is described in the Master’s thesis by Oliver Horst, and a shorter description can be found in the publication Horst et al. 2022. HASlib was developed in the project Precise and Authentic User Location Analysis (PAULA), funded by European Commission DG-DEFIS contract DEFIS/2020/OP/0002.

Programming/Development

• Qt Creator 10 comes more than four months after Qt Creator 9 and introduces new features like the ability to temporarily drag the progress details out of the visible area and support for the “Open as Centered Popup” option to remember the last search term typed into the input field.

• This release also adds support for the latest LLVM 16 compiler infrastructure to further improve C++ 20 support in Clang, as well as the interaction between Qt Creator and Clangd. Also for C++ support, Qt Creator 10 enables the ClangFormat plugin by default for indentation.

• This post represents an overview of an MVP “linear types” design which we could probably start implementing and validating today if we wanted to. What I’m sharing here is a combination of conversations I’ve had with Gankra and Jonas Sheevink.

Rust

• In the first chapter of the Rust programming series, you learn to write and execute your first program in Rust.

Leftovers

• Science fiction has always served as a source of inspiration for real technological progress. Sometimes that’s great, but other times it enables abuse or leads people to make terrible assumptions that result in harmful decisions. This week we’re joined by the hosts of the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, authors Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, who recently began tackling this very subject, to discuss the relationship between Silicon Valley and science fiction.

• Over the din of a Korean barbecue restaurant in Los Angeles, Reed, the hero of Ryan Lee Wong’s debut novel, Which Side Are You On, tells his parents that he plans to drop out of Columbia University after spring break. Guilt-stricken after Peter Liang’s killing of Akai Gurley, Reed (of Korean-Chinese heritage) argues that “everything in college is designed to insulate us from the world.” It is 2014. Politically awakened through protests and the left-wing corners of Twitter, he decides he wants no part of “the great American ladder climb, where East Asians hoard resources and try to become white at the expense of Black and Brown people.” This impending change forces his parents to divulge more about their own pasts as activists—admitting that they faced the same choice in university, only to realize life is easier in the long term when you’re not a partisan.

Education

• About 75% of New York public school students currently get free meals, according to the Hochul administration, but lawmakers from both parties say more can be done.

• A common theory of teen unhappiness says that kids these days are under an inordinate amount of pressure to compete. The evidence is all over social media.

Hardware

• For some gamers, having a light fast polling mouse is key. [Ali] of [Optimum Tech] loved his 23-gram mouse but disliked the cord. Not seeing any options for a comparable wireless mouse, he decided to make one himself.

• Have you ever watched a movie or a video and really noticed the quality of the camera work? If you have, chances are the camera operator wasn’t very skilled, since the whole point of the job is to not be noticed. And getting to that point requires a lot of practice, especially since the handwheel controls for professional cameras can be a little tricky to master.

• [RetroBytes] nicely presents the curious history of the SPARC processor architecture. SPARC, short for Scalable Processor Architecture, defined some of the most commercially successful RISC processors during the 1980s and 1990s. SPARC was initially developed by Sun Microsystems, which most of us associate the SPARC but while most computer architectures are controlled by a single company, SPARC was championed by dozens of players.  The history of SPARC is not simply the history of Sun.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has signed a bill to provide free school meals to all students, setting aside more than $22 million to fund the program. The legislation aims to combat food insecurity rates, boost local agriculture, and reduce food waste.

• Colin todhunter It’s a zero-sum situation. The rich are robbing the poor to swell their coffers – and their bellies. In April 2022, Oxfam reported a terrifying prospect of more than a quarter of a billion people falling into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 alone.

• A local Democratic lawmaker in Baltimore on Tuesday credited community members and clean water advocates for helping to secure an environmental victory, as the City Council unanimously approved a resolution to block shipments of contaminated wastewater from East Palestine, Ohio.

• About 26% of the global population does not have access to safe drinking water and about 46% of people lack access to safely managed sanitation services, according to a new report by the United Nations.

• The UN World Water Development Report 2023 was released right before the first UN conference on global water scarcity in nearly a half-century, which is set to start on Wednesday. While launching its new report, the United Nations warned of an “imminent” international crisis.

• The Italian antitrust authority on Tuesday accused TikTok of breaching its own guidelines by failing to remove content related to suicide, self-harm and poor nutrition.

• A recent face-marking challenge, dubbed “French scar,” has taken the app by storm. The challenge involves pinching one’s face until it bruises.

• All occupational diseases start somewhere. Sometimes they have a well-known history and treatment, as with certain cancers, tuberculosis, and more common stress-related ailments and fractures. Coal miners develop pneumoconiosis, also known as black lung. Meatpacking and poultry-plant workers get repetitive stress injuries. Other occupational ailments are so specific they almost sound comical: Mad hatter’s disease, which afflicted Victorian-era hat makers who fell victim to mercury poisoning that damaged the nerves and brain (“mad as a hatter,” get it?); workers and artists who used lead-based paint and found themselves poisoned and in pain had painters’ colic; and as potters worked at their kilns, they breathed in tiny shards of silica dust, which lodged in and scarred their lungs, giving them potters’ rot.

• No matter what an occupational disease is called, the reality has always been uglier. Sometimes capitalism extracts its pound of flesh metaphorically, and sometimes more literally, but it’s always the workers who pay the price.

• In response to an EPL question, in an interview with the daily, asking whether the Estonian state has weighed up banning apps such as TikTok on official phones, Järvan said: “This will be closed down on all centrally managed devices, this month.”

• I’m a North Carolina–based journalist who specializes in countering misinformation on social media. I know that Twitter, Facebook, and other networks amplify bad information; that their algorithms feed on anger and division; that anonymity and distance bring out the worst in some people online. And yet I had never anticipated that anyone would mock and terrorize a grieving parent. I’ve now received thousands of harassing posts. Some people emailed me at work.

• 40 percent of Finns received Kela reimbursements for private healthcare in 2022, according to a press release from the Social Insurance Institution of Finland (Kela). This represents a slight increase from the drop caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of those receiving Kela reimbursements for private healthcare were located in Varsinais-Suomi, Satakunta, and Helsinki.

Proprietary

• Legacy backups are no longer a reliable defence mechanism against ransomware attacks, the evolving threat landscape calls for more advanced security measures. Attackers can now infiltrate systems and remain undetected for long periods, giving them ample time to encrypt backup data too. Relying solely on legacy backups could lead to businesses losing critical data permanently. Legacy data backup contains a lot of weaknesses, and lacks the following elements: [...]

• We’re at a weird time with AI and Intellectual Property. Well, IP has been in a weird place since Napster launched at the turn of the century! None of the issues around sharing, remixing, and controlling have been properly resolved. Copyleft is a noble goal – but seems more honour’d in the breach than the observance.

Security

• The UK’s National Crime Agency has been running several DDoS-for-hire websites to collect information about individuals looking to launch such attacks.

• The United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency (NCA) has been busy setting up phony DDoS-for-hire websites that seek to collect information on users, remind them that launching DDoS attacks is illegal, and generally increase the level of paranoia for people looking to hire such services.

• OpenAI has confirmed a ChatGPT data breach on the same day a security firm reported seeing the use of a component affected by an actively exploited vulnerability.

• Australian financial services provider Latitude says roughly 14 million user records were stolen in a recent cyberattack.

• A South Asian espionage group named Bitter has been targeting the Chinese nuclear energy sector.

Privacy/Surveillance

• With the Atlas group, the EU has a powerful police network of 38 member states. On Germany’s initiative, a „surveillance group“ has now been added.

• [...]

• However, the governments have decided in the Council that the agency may coordinate its special units. Since 2019, a „support office“ for the so-called Atlas Group has been located at Europol’s Counter-Terrorism Centre in The Hague. It organises 38 special task forces from the Schengen states as well as Great Britain, which will be allowed to continue participating in police cooperation in Europe even after Brexit.

• Not everyone in Russia is happy with Moscow’s war in Ukraine, but protesting can be dangerous. On March 4, 20022—a week after it launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine—Russia made it illegal to publicly criticize the war. Some protesters even found themselves rounded up and sent to the frontlines. The father of a 13-year old girl who drew an anti-war picture was recently sentenced to a year in a penal colony.

• The report from Reuters details how facial recognition software has aided the Kremlin in its crackdown against dissidents. There are more than 160,000 cameras in Moscow and 3,000 of them are connected to facial recognition software. According to Moscow court records, the technology has aided in the arrest of hundreds of protestors.

• “By viewing these towers on the map,” says Maass, “you can really get a sense of how these towers are installed in residential communities, be it urban or rural, and not just in the remote expanses of the Southwest.”

• The government hasn’t disclosed much about the towers beyond their expense, leaving the people who study and live in the borderlands with incomplete information. Sam Chambers, a geography and migration researcher at the University of Arizona, says that those studying surveillance in the borderlands previously “had to rely on documents such as environmental impact statements or other public records to know where a tower may be or had been built—and that was limited to specific districts and had to be verified.” Otherwise, researchers had to “learn by word of mouth or searching for them themselves.”

• Amazon has opened up its Sidewalk low power wide-area network for all developers Tuesday, touting coverage for 90% of the U.S. population. The online retailer will provide free test kits so developers can suss out where Sidewalk has coverage, and how robust that coverage is.

• When I walked into the shop for the first time, it did indeed feel a bit like science fiction. You first pass your phone through a scanner at the turnstile to log in as an Amazon customer. You then pick up products while cameras over the ceiling film you; there are many of them and they seem to cover every inch of the store. The shopping experience is rather smooth, as there is no protocol to follow and no one tells you what to do—you can put products in a shopping bag, place them in a backpack, or carry them in your hands. Once you’re finished, you head to the exit and the gate opens automatically—no payment, no cashier, no app.

• But then something sketchy happens: Almost immediately after walking out of the store, you receive a message from Amazon saying “thank you for your shopping” and explaining that they’re “preparing your receipt,” which you should receive soon. It usually takes a couple of hours until the itemized receipt is delivered to you and the payment is taken. The waiting time varies and can be as long as 50 hours according to some reports. If Amazon Fresh was truly powered by artificial intelligence, why the delay?

• The Russian FSB has developed draft legislation that would give intelligence agencies “constant remote access” to the databases kept by taxi companies that are included on the government’s registry of “organizers of information dissemination” (which includes Yandex).

• Decision by Austrian DPA in noyb case: Data of millions of Austrians have to be deleted

• Most tech companies handling data requests from governments now publish transparency reports. As everything moves towards always-online status (including, you know, your fridge), social media platforms and other online services have become the favored targets of government data requests. It just makes sense to look there first rather than out there in the real world, where people (and their communications) are that much more difficult to locate.

Confidentiality

• Earlier this week, I did a big no-no. I deliberately published an AWS Access Key and its associated secret to GitHub.

• While I suspect many of you now think, “what a horrible cloud security person he is”, I figured I’d share my learnings.

• Timeline of events & quarantine

• The property giant contacted around 1900 staff and guests to inform them their data may have been accessed in the latest cyber incident involving an Australian company.

Defence/Aggression

• The Norwegian defense company Nammo said it can’t expand its factory and make new ammunition because TikTok’s new data centers nearby are using up all the electricity.

• Except for some senior Taliban officials who claim to have seen him in person, Akhundzada, believed to be in his 70s, is an enigma to Afghans — and the world — because there is no information about the man who rules Afghanistan without being seen, elected or accountable to anyone.

• A Foreign Ministry statement in Islamabad thanked Washington for the invitation but did not specify any reasons for skipping the event. However, critics attributed the exclusion of longtime ally China from the event as a likely reason for Pakistan to opt out, as it did when Biden hosted the first summit in December 2021.

• Islamabad does not want to upset its “all-weather friend” Beijing, Pakistani English-language Dawn newspaper reported. Turkey, which maintains close ties with Pakistan, also has not been invited to this week’s gathering in Washington.

• Chiu, who was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to Canada, said he later found out through Disinfo Watch, Quebec-based McGill University and the Atlantic Council that he was smeared by a disinformation campaign that sought to influence ethnic Chinese voters. He said false rumors started spreading online and on the Chinese instant messaging app WeChat, that the Conservative Party and Chiu himself were going to ban the platform in Canada.

• WeChat is the only messaging service that many in Canada’s Chinese community can use to communicate with friends and family in China.

• This past Saturday marked the eighth anniversary of the launch of Operation Decisive Storm, the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen.

• Genuine Ukrainian independence will only come with the country as a member of the European Union and NATO, writes Victor Pinchuk.

• Some wars acquire names that stick. The Lancaster and York clans fought the War of the Roses from 1455-1485 to claim the British throne. The Hundred Years’ War pitted England against France from 1337-1453. In the Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648, many European countries clashed, while Britain and France waged the Seven Years’ War, 1756-63, across significant parts of the globe. World War I (1914-1918) gained the lofty moniker, “The Great War,” even though World II (1939-1945) would prove far greater in death, destruction, and its grim global reach.

• THE HUNGARIAN PARLIAMENT on Monday approved the Finnish application to join Nato by a vote of 182 in favour and 6 against.

• Helsingin Sanomat on Monday reported that all the ratification was opposed only by members of Our Homeland Movement, a far-right opposition party that believes expanding the defence alliance would geographically escalate Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.

• And We’re Paying the Price (and What a Price It Is!)

• The EU Commission supports the Libyan Coast Guard financially and with equipment. In at least five cases, the units have used firearms in maritime distress cases outside their territorial waters.

• The recent accord between Saudi Arabia and Iran, facilitated by China, signifies a seismic shift in geopolitical dynamics. This was followed by a three-day summit between the presidents of China and Russia in Moscow where they signed agreements that deepen their cooperation.

• The U.S. celebrates the charges against Putin, but pressures the ICC to refrain from prosecuting Israelis and Americans.

• Two police officers were injured in a shooting at a patrol post between Ingushetia and North Ossetia, the North Ossetian Investigative Committee reported on Tuesday.

• Alexey Moskalev is a single father from Yefremov, a town in Russia’s Tula region. Back in April 2022, his 12-year-old daughter Masha “shocked” her school teachers and principal by drawing an antiwar picture in art class. The girl’s drawing depicted a woman with a Ukrainian flag defending her child from flying missiles. Above the picture, the sixth-grader had written two slogans: “Glory to Ukraine!” and “No to war.”

• On the afternoon of January 14, Russian troops subjected Ukraine to yet another round of shelling. One of the missiles they fired, a five-ton Kh-22, hit a nine-story apartment building on Dnipro’s Victory Embankment, completely destroying 63 apartments and damaging more than 200. The strike killed at least 46 people, six of whom were children, and injured 81, while nine people were still unaccounted for as of the authorities’ last public report in late January. While many of the survivors found new homes after the incident, others have continued living in the building, where they can still see the wreckage of neighboring apartments from their windows. Meduza traveled to Dnipro to speak to residents of Building No. 118 about what it’s like to live in the aftermath of such a devastating attack.

• Three cadets at the Budyonny Military Academy in St. Petersburg recently died at the institution, according to the Russian news outlet Fontanka and multiple Telegram channels.

• On Monday morning, The Washington Postpublished a series of 3D animations to show “how bullets from an AR-15 blow the body apart.”

• The police shot and wounded the assailant at the Ismaili Center in Portugal’s capital. His motive was not immediately clear.

• Danish-owned tanker Monjasa Reformer has been attacked and potentially hijacked by pirates in the Gulf of Guinea. The ship, which belongs to Danish oil trading company Monjasa, is currently located roughly 100 kilometres from the southerly coast of Cameroon.

• To help soldiers quickly distinguish friend from foe, the Pentagon is issuing playing cards with pictures of 52 different NATO weapons systems.

• The former director of Europe’s largest nuclear facility describes abuse of Ukrainian workers and careless practices by the Russians who took control of the plant.

• In Avdiivka, as in Bakhmut and other devastated places on the front lines, most residents left long ago, but there are holdouts.

• Moscow has struggled to capture new ground in eastern Ukraine but its bombardment has laid waste to cities and towns.

• The United Nations Security Council on Monday rejected a Russia-led effort to launch a fresh international probe into last year’s sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in the wake of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s reports accusing the U.S. of carrying out the attack.

• The remnants of a handcrafted drone have been discovered in New Moscow, part of the Moscow metropolitan area.

• Rights activists worry that the separation of a teenage girl and her father after they criticized the war in Ukraine might signal a toughening of the crackdown on dissent.

• The vice president leaned into her heritage during a three-nation trip to Africa to strengthen U.S. relations on the continent.

• Nashville is in mourning after a gunman killed six people at a private Christian elementary school Monday before being killed by police. The victims were three adults who worked at the school and three 9-year-old students. Police identified the shooter as 28-year-old Audrey Hale, a former student, who entered the school through a side door armed with two assault-style weapons and a handgun. The shooter had written a manifesto laying out plans for the attack that included maps of the building, but no motive has been established. Monday’s massacre was the 129th mass shooting in the United States this year alone, including 13 school shootings. “People here are still just in shock,” says Holly McCall, the editor-in-chief of the Tennessee Lookout. “It’s just not difficult at all in Tennessee to get any type of weapon. Over the last six or seven years, we’ve seen the Legislature increasingly passing laws that even law enforcement officials and law enforcement organizations oppose.”

• Indulge me for a moment. This is how “The Prophecy” in my 1962 high school yearbook began. It was written by some of my classmates in the year we graduated from Friends Seminary in New York City. Being an historian, I am jotting down these notes out of habit, but what I saw and experienced two days ago I am sure no one else as civilized as I am will ever see. I am writing for those who shall come a long time from now. First of all, let me introduce myself. I am THOMAS M. ENGELHARDT, world-renowned historian of the late twentieth century, should that mean anything to whoever reads this account. After the great invasion, I was maintaining a peaceful, contented existence in the private shelter I had built and was completing the ninth and final volume of my masterpiece, The Influence of the Civil War on Mexican Art of the Twentieth Century, when I was seized by a strange desire to emerge from my shelter, have a look at the world, and find some companions. Realizing the risk I was taking, I carefully opened the hatch of the shelter and slowly climbed out. It was morning. To my shock, I was in a wide field overgrown with weeds; there was no sign of the community that had been there…

• The decision by the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin over the deportation of thousands of children from Ukraine to Russia is by far the boldest assertion of international justice in history. Faced with Russia’s naked aggression in invading Ukraine, followed by a daily stream of brazen war crimes, the world, or at least part of it, is living a Nuremberg moment, pushing the boundaries of the possible.

• What to say. More gun carnage, this time in Nashville, where three children and three adults were shot dead at a private Christian school – so much for God’s protection – in America’s 90th school shooting this year. But GOP legislators and Gov. Bill Lee are on it: They’ve eliminated permits, licenses, registration or background checks to get more guns, they’ve banned drag shows and trans health care, and they’re praying with all their hearts (and bloody hands). One more time: #ItsTheFuckingGuns.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• By designating WikiLeaks a spy outfit, the U.S. government has stacked the deck against Julian Assange and leveled an unprecedented threat against journalism.

• [...]

• When Yahoo News sought comment from Pompeo, the former CIA director did not respond to requests. However, during an event at Hillsdale College following publication, a student questioned him. “Don’t believe everything you read in Yahoo News,” Pompeo replied, as he scratched his forehead nearly the same way Director of National Intelligence James Clapper did when he lied to senators about NSA warrantless surveillance.

• At the same time, I find bike advocacy in the United States to be extremely frustrating. Our cities deserve better bike infrastructure because cyclists deserve to live and to go about their lives free of mortal danger. That, it must be remembered, is the central task. The numbers are unacceptable. In 2018 alone, a bicyclist was killed approximately every third day in the greater Chicago area. Each of these unnecessary deaths is blood on the hands of feckless politicians who refuse to do the necessary work to create streets that would ameliorate the carnage because it requires inconveniencing a certain type of crank who thinks the city exists as a place to park their car. When the life of a bike rider is torn from their friends and families, often nothing is done because infrastructure requires money, and funding things like bike lanes (or, while we’re at it, other public goods like schools or transportation) means diverting money from other interests (like, say, violent, lawless police forces who terrorize the poor and protect only private property). In America, a bicyclist is usually not envisioned as being on par with someone who drives a car. They are stereotyped as either a rich hobbyist in spandex or as drunks who lost their driver’s license and have to rely on a lesser form of transport. While in Ljubljana, everyone rides their bike because the space has been made for them to do so. It is that simple.

Environment

• As the government prepares to announce its revamped net zero strategy on Thursday, the Greens have urged Grant Shapps, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, to choose the policies that will bring the most benefit to households across the UK as well as to the environment.

• By Lisa Göldner, Lead Campaigner from Greenpeace Germany for the Fossil Free Revolution campaign

• France, Nigeria, Finland, South Sudan, Italy, Peru, Romania. What do all of these places have in common? They are just some of the countries in which Europe-headquartered fossil fuel companies stand convicted or credibly accused of criminal, civil, or administrative offences.

Energy/Transportation

• In 2022, electricity generated from renewable energy passed coal electricity production in the United States for the first time. Experts say renewables are now the most affordable source of new electricity for much of the country.

• Climate and consumer advocates on Tuesday hailed California lawmakers’ passage of legislation aimed at tackling Big Oil price gouging as the proposal headed to the desk of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said he will sign the measure into law.

• By Audrey Carleton This story originally appeared in Capital & Main, and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

• Longhorn Pad C is located about half a mile south of a small cemetery and a little over a mile north of a Methodist church in Elk County, in northwestern Pennsylvania. With a population of around 30,000, this county sits squarely in the center of the path the Marcellus Shale formation takes as it curves through the commonwealth.

• It’s a reasonable answer. Amid the smoldering crater that is the [cryptocurrency] market, bitcoin has somehow made maybe not a comeback, but at least a stand. For all the tokens, coins, forks, chains and NFTs, bitcoin remains the gold standard in cryptocurrency.

• “Bitcoin mining in the United States uses as much power as we need to light every single home in our country, and that demand on our grid is only going to grow,” Markey said in opening remarks.

• Markey’s bill, introduced Monday, would require cryptocurrency asset operators to report emissions to the Environmental Protection Agency, and would mandate the agency to conduct a study of energy usage required by thousands of robust, special-use computers to add new transactions to the decentralized digital accounting ledger, he said. The text of the bill was not yet published.

• Unlike other North Korean hacking units engaged in cryptocurrency-related cybercrime, researchers at Mandiant believe that APT 43 is using its loot to fund its own hacking and cyberespionage activities, not sending it back to the regime for a nuclear weapons program. Instead, the group takes the cleaned funds to purchase infrastructure such as website domains to further espionage activities.

• “They don’t need $100 million to rent servers to run C2 nodes. They need much smaller amounts,” said Joe Dobson, Mandiant Principal Analyst. “We see them targeting everyone. I like to say, ‘There’s no fish too small.’ If someone has funds in their [cryptocurrency] wallet, they will get targeted.”

• Mandiant flags APT43 as a “moderately-sophisticated cyber operator that supports the interests of the North Korean regime.”

• Solomon Ekunke Okpe was sentenced to four years in prison in the US for his role in a BEC fraud ring.

• Tracked since 2018, APT43’s collection priorities align with the mission of the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), North Korea’s main foreign intelligence service. The group’s focus on foreign policy and nuclear security issues supports North Korea’s strategic and nuclear ambitions.

Wildlife/Nature

• Climate action can be politically divisive. But a love for nature is bringing people together – even in Washington.

• The federal government has announced plans to increase funding for the Columbia River Basin’s salmon hatcheries, the often-crumbling facilities that maintain the river’s dwindling salmon populations. But tribes and state agencies say the influx of funds is only a fraction of what is needed.

• The Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that’s required to pay for salmon recovery using proceeds from selling power generated by hydroelectric dams, is putting an additional $50 million toward repairs at hatcheries operated by tribes and states. The agency also plans to increase annual funding for hatchery upkeep from $500,000 to $2.7 million.

Finance

• Private equity funds taking listed companies private is never an act of benevolence. They spot an undervalued company, buy it, strip assets where possible, take out the cash, borrow to the hilt and sack as many of the staff as they can get away with; and then presto, a couple of years later, the company is re-listed or on-sold, at great profit.

• It’s a great scam if you can afford it, but not so much for minority shareholders who just have to take what they get and lose out on the value uplift.

• This raises a simple question: Is this banking system the best we can do? New York progressives see room for an alternative. Even before this latest bank failure, they were pushing for the passage of the New York Public Banking Act—one of many proposals across the country that could transform American finance by introducing a public banking option.

• Woo June Jung, Founder of the R Korea Group (also on Facebook) recently talked to the R Consortium to discuss his efforts to promote the use of R in Korea. He stressed the importance of communities and also shared the group’s experience of hosting an annual R User Conference in Korea for six consecutive years. They R Korea Group stopped hosting the conference during the pandemic but are hopeful to start again this year. He also discussed his work on two accounting projects developed in R.

• Never in our nation’s history have we allowed a player to pass Go without collecting two hundred dollars, and we cannot start now.

• In prepared testimony for a Senate Banking Committee hearing slated for Tuesday morning, the chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation reveals that the 10 largest deposit accounts at Silicon Valley Bank held a combined $13.3 billion, a detail that’s likely to intensify criticism of federal regulators’ intervention in the firm’s recent collapse.

• In the wake of recent bank collapses and protests across the United States demanding financial institutions end fossil fuel financing, 50 climate, environmental justice, and Indigenous rights groups on Tuesday advocated for new regulations.

• On a new day of strikes and marches, President Emmanuel Macron’s government rejected a call by labor unions to suspend his pension overhaul.

• High inflation prices has prompted famous Copenhagen amusement park to increase entre fee despite raking in record turnover last year

• Protests against President Macron’s retirement reforms have inflamed France. Yet in a country where demonstrating is practically de rigueur, how much difference does marching really make in a situation like this?

• Launching this fall, the revamped Automotive and Mobility Systems Engineering master’s program is built for an industry being transformed by electrification and autonomy.

• Finnish housing is often owned by co-operative companies, with shareholders paying monthly fees for maintenance and repairs.

• Maintenance fees for apartment buildings are increasing rapidly in Finland, according to a survey conducted by the Finnish Real Estate Federation. The survey revealed that more than 20% of housing companies are threatened by the increase in maintenance costs, with just over 2% facing significant risk. Although the majority of housing companies believe their financial situation is stable, the cost of living varies significantly from municipality to municipality.

• Officials blamed executives at Silicon Valley Bank for its failure on March 10, while adding that Federal Reserve oversight is in for a revamp.

• Over 31,000 people arrived for a job in 2022, which was a 24 percent increase compared to the previous year…

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The Pirate Party Members of the European Parliament are launching OpenRequest, a unique participatory tool giving citizens the opportunity to suggest issues that should be raised in the European Parliament. For example, citizen suggestions can trigger parliamentary questions to Commission or Council, research tasks to the European Parliament’s Research Service or the sending of an open letter by Members of the European Parliament. On top of that, the OpenRequest website publicly documents the status of the proposals.

• The European Pirates have long advocated for more direct democracy and transparency in the European project, which this new tool promotes. In view of the recent Qatargate corruption scandal, Pirates specifically seek citizen suggestions on how the EU could better prevent corruption, conflicts of interest and intransparency.

• The result is an uncomfortable disparity between who does the work that enables these AI models to function and who gets to control and profit from them. This sort of disparity is nothing new in Silicon Valley, but the development of AI is shifting power further away from those at the bottom at a time when layoffs have already resulted in a sense of wide-ranging precarity for the tech industry. Overseas workers won’t reap any of these profits, nor will the people who might have aspects of their work—or even their entire jobs—replaced by AI, even if their Reddit posts and Wikipedia entries were fed into these chatbots. Well-paid tech workers might eventually lose out too, considering AI’s coding abilities. In the few months since OpenAI has blown up, it has reminded Silicon Valley of a fundamental truth that office perks and stock options should never have been able to disguise: Tech workers are just workers.

• The European Commission is working on a legislative proposal called chat control. If the law goes into effect, all EU citizens will have their communications monitored and audited. Now is the time to stop it.

• Elon Musk said that only verified accounts will appear in Twitter’s “For You” recommendation feed, as the billionaire further shakes up the social media platform.

• US-based job search platform Indeed on Wednesday said it will let approximately 2,200 people go. This is roughly 15 per cent of the company’s headcount.

• The elimination of Disney’s Next Generation Storytelling & Consumer Experiences group, led by company veteran Mike White, affects about 50 employees, Variety confirmed. The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. A Disney rep declined to comment.

• The shutdown of Disney’s metaverse group came Monday with the first wave of the company’s move to slash 7,000 jobs under interim CEO Bob Iger, which is part of its attempt to reduce $5.5 billion in costs. Following this week’s layoffs, there will be a larger second round of cuts next month, Iger told employees in a memo Monday. A final round of layoffs will hit “before the beginning of summer,” according to Iger.

• Musk’s verification policy has raised concerns about misinformation on the site, as virtually anyone willing to pay the price could attempt to impersonate a public figure under the guise of verification. However, Twitter has taken steps to prevent this by reviewing Twitter Blue accounts before granting them verification.

• The tech industry has been hit hard by a wave of job cuts as companies try to adjust to new market realities. GitHub, the world’s leading code-hosting platform for software development, has fired about 85% of its workforce in India. Out of 216 employees, 183 have been asked to leave, including the entire engineering team responsible for building GitHub for the world, said a source on condition of anonymity.

• The bet is this: Can you fund a social network with user payments? In contrast to the current established wisdom that only targeted ads will do it. We don’t know! Nobody has ever tried to do it at this scale. All the attempts have usually been baked in from the beginning, thus posing a real challenge to reaching critical mass. But Musk is now going to try the experiment on a network that already has critical mass. THAT’S INTERESTING!

• U.S. Congressman Tim Burchett was accused of saying “the quiet part out loud” after the Tennessee Republican responded to the massacre in Nashville on Monday by arguing there’s not much Congress can do to prevent mass shootings.

• Former U.K. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn is expected to seek reelection as an independent next year after current Leader Keir Starmer and his establishment allies on Tuesday made good on their pledge to formally block the leftist member of Parliament from running under the party’s banner.

• Elon Musk says he’s against a “lords and peasants” system on Twitter.

• This report seeks to catalyze support for nonviolent pro-democracy movements fighting against authoritarian rule by proposing new approaches and tools to support civil resistance movements, advancing a new international norm — the “Right to Assist” pro-democracy movements — and developing strategic and tactical options to constrain authoritarian regimes.

• Researchers like Carlos Moreno, the professor behind a popular urban planning concept, are struggling with conspiracy theories and death threats.

• [...]

• For high-profile figures, such as the infectious-disease expert Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, misinformation and the hostility it can cause have long been a part of the job description.

• After lawmakers grilled TikTok’s chief executive last week, the app’s users argued that the platform should not be banned in the United States over national security concerns.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed to delay a push to overhaul and weaken Israel’s judiciary until the next parliamentary session. The retreat came after months of unprecedented mass protests and a general strike on Monday that shut down much of Israel. Netanyahu had earlier fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for suggesting a delay to judicial changes. In a concession to his far-right governing allies, Netanyahu has also agreed to establish a new national guard under the control of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the ultranationalist national security minister who was once convicted of racist incitement against Palestinians and supporting a terrorist group. “He already has an immense amount of power over police forces that regularly inflict violence on Palestinians. Now there is talk of him having this national guard,” journalist Natasha Roth-Rowland, an editor with +972 Magazine, says of Ben-Gvir. We also speak with Palestinian American analyst Yousef Munayyer, who says the public outrage over the judicial plan is due to many Israelis seeing their own rights threatened for the first time. “The rights of Palestinians … have not been upheld by these courts for a very long time,” says Munayyer.

• Scotland’s new leader, the first Muslim to lead a Western European state, adds to a growing embrace of values over personal identity.

• Riley Waggaman It was a big week for Russia-China experts, who collectively managed to write 10,000 hot takes about what happened in Moscow without explaining what actually happened in Moscow. Is there a reason why all Russia-China commentary disintegrates into esoteric abstractions by the second paragraph?

• U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Monday led two dozen House Democrats in urging Congress to allocate at least $1.2 billion in humanitarian aid for Yemen—whose people have suffered eight years of U.S.-backed Saudi war—in next year’s budget.

• Progressive U.S. lawmakers including Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Katie Porter on Tuesday joined a call for the Biden administration to take steps to form a national institution that would monitor and promote human rights within the United States, noting that the U.S. considers itself an arbiter of human rights standards across the globe.

• Independent MP Rebekha Sharkie has just dropped a bombshell in Federal Parliament. The Labor Government has been caught in a blatant pork barrelling. Rex Patrick explains the corruption that is “Solar Rorts”.

• Pork barrelling is defined by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption as “the allocation of public funds and resources to targeted electors for partisan political purposes”. It’s corruption. It’s taking taxpayers’ money and directing it at projects that are intended to ‘buy’ votes to allow people to stay in power. That is, using taxpayers’ money for personal benefit.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Pope Francis’s rad parka fooled savvy viewers because it depicted what would have been a low-stakes news event—the type of tabloid-y non-news story that, were it real, would ultimately get aggregated by popular social-media accounts, then by gossipy news outlets, before maybe going viral. It’s a little nugget of internet ephemera, like those photos that used to circulate of Vladimir Putin shirtless.

• Should we be worried? Web culture expert Ryan Broderick has called the pope image “the first real mass-level AI misinformation case”. But the issue has actually been brewing for a few weeks, following an update to Midjourney that significantly improved the standard of output. Earlier in March, Midjourney-created images of former US president Donald Trump being arrested similarly went viral. Those images were generated from prompts provided by Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, an investigative journalism group.

• Children are drawn to “dramatic” content online and videos made by professional “influencers” but often fail to distinguish between what is real and what is fake. “For the children in this study, it often seems that it matters more whom something has been said by than whether it’s true,” Ofcom said in its annual Children’s Media Lives report.

• The authors of the study said: “Much of the content the children were consuming seemed designed to maximise stimulation and minimise the investment required of them. Videos were fast-paced, short-form, with deliberately choppy editing.

• [...]

• For some children, TikTok is replacing Google as a primary source of information. [sic]

• “So much of who we are and how we understand the world is related to the stories we receive. If we are vulnerable to bad stories, we can do horrendous things,” he said.

Censorship/Free Speech

• British women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen, also known as Posie Parker, is the prototypically impolite gender crit, often engaging in aggressive and confrontational tactics that, at times, have turned her into something of a pariah. Yet by sheer doggedness, Keen now has managed to thoroughly discredit her trans-activist opponents, by rousing them to scenes of misogynistic violence that are even now circulating on social media as viral sensations.

• Roger Waters has noted with pleasure the decision of the Munich City Council that his 21.05.2023 concert in the Olympiahalle Munich will take place as planned :

• “I am very happy to be able to perform in Munich for my fans. A ban on my concert would have been illegal. The City of Munich’s decision is good news for freedom of speech in Germany.”

• Program Think had so closely guarded their identity that no supporters knew who the blogger was – except that they had been a programmer inside mainland China with a decade-long career in information security.

• Now, almost two years later, the wife of a blogger recently sentenced to seven years in a Chinese prison for “inciting subversion of state power” believes she has the answer to the question: What happened to Program Think?

• Aleksei Moskalyov did not wait to hear his sentence for “discrediting the Russian Armed Forces” on Tuesday. Years behind bars for posts on social media seemed like a foregone conclusion in contemporary Russia. So Mr. Moskalyov slipped off his geotracking ankle bracelet and fled from house arrest.

• In escaping, Mr. Moskalyov, a single parent, left behind not just his home but his 13-year-old daughter, Maria — though even before the verdict had been read, she appeared lost to him. For the past month, the child, known as Masha, has been in a state-run orphanage, forbidden to communicate with her father.

• It was by no means certain that the internet would enjoy full First Amendment protection. The radio is not shielded from the government in that way. Nor is broadcast television. Both Congress and the President supported placing online speech under some degree of state control. In Reno v. ACLU (1997), however, the Supreme Court could find “no basis for qualifying the level of First Amendment scrutiny that should be applied to this [new] medium.” Liberty won out.

• An effigy of Turkish President Reccep Tayyip Erdogan was confiscated at a demonstration in Helsinki on Saturday.

• Ever since the Russian authorities cracked down on independent news outlets, foreign social networks, and all manner of anti-government speech in the wake of their full-scale invasion of Ukraine, observers have been anticipating a ban on YouTube, one of the country’s most popular sites and a haven for anti-war content. More than a year later, Russians can still access the service freely, but according to sources from the country’s telecommunications industry who spoke to Forbes Russia, the homegrown social media site Vkontakte recently began expanding its network of servers — possibly in anticipation of a future YouTube ban. Here’s what we know.

• Moomin Characters, the Finnish branded goods company run by the heirs of the popular artist and writer Tove Jansson, has declined to renew or extend Moomin product licenses for partners in Russia.

• Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay “Maurice Merleau-Ponty est vivant,” written after the death of his philosopher friend, contains the following maxim: “Tout anticommuniste est un chien.” “Every anticommunist,” that is, “is a dog.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Over 150 journalists have been assassinated in Mexico since 2000. Behind the killings is a nexus of corruption and violence that links organized crime, police, and government.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Progress roundup: Spain passes Europe’s first menstrual leave law, Chile’s fishers sacrifice catch for marine refuges, Singapore makes a High Line.

• A coalition of Democratic U.S. lawmakers led by Reps. Cori Bush and Ayanna Pressley on Tuesday announced the launch of a new caucus aimed at realizing the centurylong goal of adding an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.

• Hypocrisy and humanity’s failure to “unite around consistently applied human rights and universal values” expose a system unfit to tackle global crises, according to a report published by Amnesty International on Monday, the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• FAIR’s commentary by Conor Smyth (2/28/23) on former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr.’s anti-objectivity manifesto (Washington Post, 1/30/23), and New York Times columnist Bret Stephens’ overwrought response to it (2/9/23), was right on point.

• At least 39 migrants were declared dead Tuesday after a fire was started overnight at a detention facility in Ciudad Juárez, close to the U.S.-Mexico border.

• We continue to remember the lawyer and human rights activist Randall Robinson, the founder of the racial justice group TransAfrica, who died last week at age 81. Robinson was a leader in the U.S. movement against South African apartheid and was a prominent critic of U.S. policy in Haiti, including the U.S.-backed coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. Democracy Now! spoke to Robinson in 2007 about that episode and how foreign powers have interfered in Haiti throughout the country’s history, beginning with the slave revolt against France that established Haiti as the first free republic in the Americas in 1804. “The Haitians believed that anybody who was enslaved anywhere had a home and a refuge in Haiti. Anybody seeking freedom had a sympathetic ear in Haiti. But because of that, the United States and France and the other Western governments, even the Vatican, made them pay for so terribly long,” said Robinson, who had just published the book An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President.

• As someone who regularly writes about the courts and the law, I often feel more like an obituary writer. Hardly a week goes by without Republican judges killing a fundamental right of Americans, often inventing a reactionary new legal doctrine from whole cloth to do so.

• Environmental attorney Steven Donziger was joined by a number of U.S. Supreme Court observers on Monday in denouncing a decision by seven of the nine justices, who refused to consider Donziger’s case regarding the appointment of three special prosecutors after he was charged with criminal contempt of court.

• What constitutes a crisis worthy of global attention? When a regional bank in the United States falls victim to the inversion of the yield curve (i.e., when short-term bond interest rates become higher than long-term rates), the Earth nearly stops spinning. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) […]

• The culture war that conservatives are currently waging over education is, like the culture wars in other areas of American society, a cover for a more material and ideological agenda.

• A Vladivostok court has overturned the acquittal of Yulia Tsvetkova, an LGBT rights activist and artist who was charged with “distributing pornography” for sharing art that depicted vulvas, a popular Russian Telegram channel reported on Tuesday, citing Tsvetkova’s lawyer.

• More than 2,000 women are taking the Swiss government to court claiming its policy on climate change is violating their right to life and health.

• The case is the first time the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) will hear a case on the impact of climate change on human rights.

• Some of its most striking restrictions have been around education, with girls barred from returning to secondary schools and universities, depriving an entire generation of academic opportunities.

• The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said Wesa was arrested in the capital Kabul on Monday and called on the Taliban to clarify his whereabouts.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• In this post, we analyse the 40 comments submitted in response to TRAI’s consultation paper titled ‘Consultation Paper on Introduction of Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) in Telecommunication Networks’, highlighting privacy concerns, especially in the absence of a data protection law.

• In 2021, I embarked on a journey to print out the content on my blog. The scope of the project was limited. I decided to print all of my coffee posts published both on this blog as well as Steampunk Coffee, for whom I had written numerous blog posts. I decided to print only the coffee posts so that the printed version would have a theme. I was excited by the prospects of being able to hold my writings on coffee in my hands, and looked forward to a day where I could print another volume. That time has come.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• For numerous years, automakers have been keen to boost consistent monthly income by pushing users subscription services. The problem: whether it’s a specific in-car 5G wireless broadband connection (made kind of irrelevant by the fact everyone has a tetherable smartphone), or subscriptions for app-based services like remote starting: consumers aren’t really interested.

Monopolies

• Timing, as they say, is everything. We’ve been talking about Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard a lot lately and for good reason. It’s a huge deal, both in terms of the size of the purchase relative to the video game industry, but also because of what it could mean for the overall competitive marketplace in the industry as well. The regulators have expressed varied levels of concern and Microsoft’s rebuttal to those concerns has mostly been to ink 10-year deals with other platforms to keep the key series Call of Duty non-exclusive, at least for that timeframe. All the while, throughout this and previous acquisitions taking place in a climate of market consolidation, Microsoft executives have made vague, non-committal statements about how it doesn’t actually want to go the exclusivity route with its titles generally.

Patents

• The Brazilian Patent Statute (Federal Law #9,279/96) establishes that foreign applicants must appoint and maintain a representative in Brazil for each patent application filed with the Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office (BRPTO). Only through a patent agent—be it a person or a legal entity—can a foreign application file and prosecute an application.

Software Patents

• The European Patent Office received 193 460 applications last year, an increase of 2.5% compared to 2021 and a new record. Digital communication (+11.2% over 2021) was the field with the highest number of patent applications, followed closely by medical technology (+1.0%) and computer technology (+1.8%). These are some numbers from the EPO’s Patent Index 2022, which was published today.

Copyrights

• In this essay on the ailments of sedentary lifestyles, reading and scholarly study have tragic and sometimes fatal consequences.

• Okay, this is just getting silly. We just explained why the various attempts to tax Google and Meta to fund the owners of news organizations (often hedge funds who have a long history of pocketing any cash and cutting jobs) is a clear attack on the open web. And yet, many people keep pushing these laws.

• Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Eric Luth is a Project Manager at Wikimedia Sweden where he organizes collaborations, events, and exchanges of practices in the cultural sector. Wikimedia Sweden also organizes edit-a-thons for Wikipedia articles.

• Anti-piracy group CODA is reporting the shutdown of B9Good, a pirate manga site that targeted Japan but was operated from China. In response to a criminal complaint filed by CODA on behalf of six Japanese companies, which were backed by 21 others during the investigation, Chinese authorities arrested four people and seized one house worth $580,000

• Artificial intelligence is now a mainstream topic but while most people focus on the positives, the music industry is concerned about potential threats. In IFPI’s latest Global Music Report, insiders stress that music’s ‘human’ element should stay at the forefront. According to Sony, the same applies to AI-synthesized voices, which should not replace human vocals.

• In 2021, Universal, Disney, Paramount, Warner and Columbia, partnered with Amazon and Apple in a lawsuit targeting two U.S-based pirate IPTV services. After the operator of AllAccessTV and Quality Restreams put up an early fight, including allegations that one of his services was disguised as a VPN provider, the studios have walked away with a $30 million damages award.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• My friend told me she was making spaghetti while her boyfriend was watching hockey. The point was the normalcy of it all, even if she should be in a bit of a culture shock.

• My girlfriend made a lasagna for our daughter and I. She said, “Someone said that lasagna is the way to a man’s heart.”

• She took her sweet time making sense to me. But finally, in that fluorescent interrogation chamber, she put words to what came out as a groan a year prior. I listened defensively. And shut out grimey thoughts meant for someone I knew better. Who leaves the country in a fit? I should’ve seen the signs. Not a renegade or a wanderer. She came here running.

• Short answer: it’s complicated Usually I would prefer sitting back and just let argument go on their own, unless the conversation gets to the point where either side points out something that’s very obviously just incorrect (not necessarily when the person is being highly emotional).

• Luke Gearing generously posted some side-by-side comparisons of bullet points vs prose.

Technical

• I’ve taken to stating measurements in metric, and then restating them in legacy units. “It’s 10 degrees, or 50 degrees in legacy units”. “It’s about a kilometer walk from here to there, or 3/5 of a mile in legacy units”.

• On another subject, everyone should definitely use YYYY-MM-DD (AKA big endian) for dates. Europeans seem to use little endian, DD/MM/YYYY. The US uses middle endian, MM/DD/YYYY, which is absolutely bonkers.

• Here’s an Emacs macro that lets you easily make modes turn on briefly and then turn themselves off after a while.

Internet/Gemini

• Actually, I moved twice since my last update, but this should be a more permanent location, I’m now a mortgage-haver. Often errantly referred to as “homeowner”, I’ve signed the next 15 years of my life away, so I think I’m a lot less likely to have another 10-month vacation to work fulltime on open source.

• I also got engaged and married to the beautiful woman who has been so encouraging over the last two years. (We met shortly after I started this capsule, so if you’ve also started writing in Gemini-space, maybe there are nuptials in your future?)

• I want to close my tabs, and it seems like a waste to just close them.

• So here we go.

• This started with someone on IRC bringing up an old topic we talk about every so often. They want some decentralized way to search the internet and my original reaction was something like, getting site authors to implement search on their own site using some common API, then users can search all of those sites through it. Usually my brain went into the OpenSearch direction where people

to xml documents that define a format for searching the site, with various output formats that clients can then parse reliably, like rss, or atom.* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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