● 03.30.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 30/03/2023: LibreOffice 7.5.2 and Linux 6.2.9

Posted in News Roundup at 9:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

• Admission control is an important part of the Kubernetes control plane, with several internal features depending on the ability to approve or change an API object as it is submitted to the server. It is also useful for an administrator to be able to define business logic, or policies, regarding what objects can be admitted into a cluster. To better support that use case, Kubernetes introduced external admission control in v1.7.

• In addition to countless custom, internal implementations, many open source projects and commercial solutions implement admission controllers with user-specified policy, including Kyverno and Open Policy Agent’s Gatekeeper.

• While admission controllers for policy have seen adoption, there are blockers for their widespread use. Webhook infrastructure must be maintained as a production service, with all that entails. The failure case of an admission control webhook must either be closed, reducing the availability of the cluster; or open, negating the use of the feature for policy enforcement. The network hop and evaluation time makes admission control a notable component of latency when dealing with, for example, pods being spun up to respond to a network request in a “serverless” environment.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Welcome to the 502nd episode of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short-topics episode, the hosts take on a variety of topics including: ham radio during tornado season, operators…

Kernel Space

Applications

• Continuing to show how great open source is, the Blender team have released Blender 3.5 with some really fancy new features. Blender is used across many different industries from games to films and more.

• The team working on the free and open source video recording and livestreaming software OBS Studio, have released the first Beta for version 29.1 with a big new feature.

Instructionals/Technical

• GlusterFS is a distributed file system that provides scalable and highly available network storage solutions. It aggregates disk storage resources from multiple servers into a single global namespace. GlusterFS allows you to easily create a virtual pool of storage that you can use for various applications.

• Learn how to copy files and directories in Linux using the command line in this part of the Terminal Basics series.

• If you have accepted the default option of using the entire disk while installing Ubuntu, or if your computer came with Ubuntu preinstalled, you are likely to have a Home folder in the same partition as all of your system files. Under any normal circumstances, this would be fine.

• notify-send uses the Desktop Notification spec that relies on DBus to propagate a request to show a notification. This is a widely supported standard in the Linux ecosystem powering all notifications, regardless of which desktop environment you use.

• However my simple approach doesn’t work as soon as I’m logged into a remote machine. At my current job, I’m nearly always logged into a remote machine.

• Fortunately, because of how DBus is implemented, it turns out to be trivial to have a remote notify-send execution show a local desktop notification! Here is how.

• There’s a relatively new jq track on Exercism, and I’ve been working through some of the exercises. There are at least a couple of features that appeal to me; one is the ability to easily write and submit solutions from the command line (see Working Locally) and the other is the community solutions that are available to you after you submit your own first solution.

• As well as the direct benefit of practice, I’ve learned and been reminded of aspects of jq while looking through the community solutions. So I thought I’d write some of them up here, because writing will also help me remember.

• I’ll start with some simple observations.

• The MIME Content-Transfer-Encoding header is supposed to tell you the encoding of the MIME part in question, including the implicit top level part of the email. Typical values are things like ’7bit’, ’8bit’, ‘quoted-printable’, or ‘base64′. Needless to say, this email’s C-T-E is complete garbage, and a picky email client would say that it couldn’t decode the message because it doesn’t understand the ‘amazonses.com’ encoding.

• Many software projects sign their prebuilt software or source code. These signatures can be verified to establish the authenticity of the work. This can happen in the form of detached signatures for files or signatures on version control objects, such as signed git commits and tags and establishes a verifiable link between a certificate and a public artifact. To rely on the signatures, we need to also authenticate the certificates that made them. A WoT makes it easier to verify these certificates.

• A notable similar application (and inspiration) to what is described in this article is wotmate which provides visual graphs for the Linux Kernel’s pgpkeys project.

Games

• Love running around blowing everything up? There’s a quality new game selection in the Best of Boomer Shooters bundle. To save you some clicking around I’ll show what kind of support to expect for each game included, using Steam Deck Verified ratings, ProtonDB or Linux Native depending on what’s there.

• I’m not big on life sims personally but add creature collecting into the mix? I’m there. Moonstone Island looks sweet. Set in an open world where you have over 100 island to explore, it certain sounds like it’s overflowing with content. Make friends, brew potions, collect spirits and go through various card-based encounters.

• Ready to collect creatures? How about transforming into them? Okay how about fusing them together? Cassette Beasts is what you need then.

• After closing up shop back in 2022, Farsky Interactive have now revived their game FarSky and made it free on itch.io.

• Activision Blizzard and NetEase could not agree on a new deal to distribute video games in China, cutting millions of players from the games in January.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Another month in the year, another collection of bugfixes and features I contributed to KDE!

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• This guide will focus only on FreeBSD part of configuring and building packages with needed options to make it connect (and work with) FreeIPA/IDM properly. To have a working FreeIPA/IDM server you need to do instructions from the FreeIPA section of the mentioned above article – up to the FreeBSD Client section. Then – when specified in the article – also the Finish Setup with Web Browser in FreeIPA/IDM Page section needs to be done from the earlier article.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• The Ubuntu OpenStack team at Canonical is pleased to announce the general availability of OpenStack 2023.1 Antelope on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish).

• Details of the Antelope release

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

• The Ubuntu Cloud Archive for OpenStack 2023.1 Antelope can be enabled on Ubuntu 22.04 by running the following command:sudo add-apt-repository cloud-archive:antelope

• [..]

• For a full list of packages and versions, please refer to the Antelope version report.

• Edubuntu is a popular open-source educational operating system based on Ubuntu Linux. It targets students and teachers primarily and aims to be the “classroom Linux distro” with a solid Ubuntu base. The new release, Edubuntu 23.04, comes with exciting new features and updates that make it even more valuable for educators and students. This article will explore the best new features of Edubuntu 23.04.

• Edubuntu was an official Ubuntu flavour until the Ubuntu 14.04 “release “Trust Tahr” release. The last release of Edubuntu was on April 2014, i.e. Edubuntu 14.04. Since then, it has been discontinued.

• It has been revived now from Edubuntu 23.04 release onwards. Here’s what’s new.

• Ubuntu’s Technical Board has voted and passed the motion: as of Ubuntu 23.04, Ubuntu Cinnamon will become the ninth official flavor.

• The youngest member of the Ubuntu family will become official as of the next release: Ubuntu Cinnamon 23.04 will be an authorised option, joining the existing eight others. It’s not the only one: the Edubuntu project, discontinued since 14.04, is being revived.

• The Cinnamon team’s proposal notes that there have been seven previous releases, since the first, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 19.10. Project lead Joshua Peisach was just eleven years old when he had the idea.

Devices/Embedded

• The company has also unveiled a compatible development board providing access to peripherals such as 1x GbE LAN ports, 1x HDMI, 2x USB 2.0 ports, 1x RGB connector, 1x LVDS connector, 1x MIPI CSI connector, a 40-pin expansion pin header and many other peripherals.

• MYIR indicates that the development board supports Linux 5.10 and Android OS. Additionally, they will provide peripheral drivers to speed up product development. See the Software section on the product page for more details.

Open Hardware/Modding

• For those of us too young to remember (I wish that were the case), River Raid was released in 1982 for the Atari 2600 games console (I remember playing it on a Commodore 64). The goal of the game is to fly your jet fighter down a river, attacking enemy vehicles as you fly. You have to dodge attacks and vehicles and make sure you have enough fuel to carry on your mission — “Don’t shoot the fuel tanks,” is what I would tell my younger self.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• I tend to describe it as a build system that pretends to be a package manager or the other way around. If you take Make, the grandfather of all build systems, Make has this nice interface where you just describe everything that you want to be built. You describe your dependencies, and then you build that…and it’s nice; it’s declarative.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• According to Mozilla, Information Communications Technology (ICT) is expected to emit more carbon by 2025 than any single country besides China, India, and the United States. We tend not to think of the physical scale of the internet, but it is a massive machine. It is critical that we consider the energy that is consumed to both run the internet and allow for its exponential growth.

• It is estimated that today digital technology uses between 5-9% of global electricity. This estimate is particularly concerning as only a quarter of our electricity comes from renewable resources. There is an increasing demand for electrical infrastructure as fossil fuels transition out of consumer and industrial uses.

• There are also carbon implications for building and disposing of digital devices. Electronics are not generally designed for longevity, repair, or recycling. Digital tools consume rare minerals and water, and e-waste is a growing problem.

• I will explore these aspects of web sustainability and others in this article. While my focus is on Drupal, these general principles apply to most of the web, particularly open source tools and ways to leverage the work of these communities. Likewise, I will also provide practical steps that people can take to reduce the environmental footprint of their sites.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• LibreOffice 7.5.2 Community, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 7.5 line, the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, is available from from our download page for Windows (Intel/AMD and ARM processors), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel processors), and Linux.

• The LibreOffice 7.5.2 point release is here almost a month after the LibreOffice 7.5.1 point release to address a total of 96 bugs that have been reported by users or discovered by the LibreOffice developers in the LibreOffice 7.5 series.

• LibreOffice 7.5.2 is available for download right from the official website as binary installers for DEB or RPM-based GNU/Linux distributions, as well as a source tarball for system integrators and those who want to compile it from sources.

FSF

Programming/Development

• In the previous article Fascination with AWK we discussed why AWK is great for prototyping and is often the best alternative to the shell and Python. In this article I want to show you some interesting technical facts I learned about AWK.

• More than 30,000 people—including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, politician Andrew Yang, and a few leading AI researchers—have signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

• The letter immediately caused a furor as signatories walked back their positions, some notable signatories turned out to be fake, and many more AI researchers and experts vocally disagreed with the letter’s proposal and approach.

• The missive also warns of political disruptions “especially to democracy” from AI: chatbots acting as humans could flood social media and other networks with propaganda and untruths. And it warned that AI could “automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones.”

• The letter called on civic leaders — not the technology community — to take charge of decisions around the breadth of AI deployments.

• Our code often relies on external dependencies. For example, even a simple hello-world program written in C depends on the C stdlib for the printf function. These external dependencies are expressed as symbolic references, which I will henceforth refer to as just symbols. Symbols are names of data or functions that have unknown addresses and are resolved or fixed up during the linking process.

Leftovers

• The purpose of David Hollinger’s new book, Christianity’s American Fate, is twofold. Hollinger, the Preston Hotchkis Professor of History emeritus at UC Berkeley, first seeks to explain how Christianity in the United States became synonymous, in large measure, with conservative white evangelicalism. He then seeks to offer explanations for the decline of mainline liberal Protestantism’s influence on American culture and society.

• One legend about Leonard Cohen goes like this: It’s the early 1970s, and the Canadian musician and poet is performing in Jerusalem. As was his custom at the time, he and his band are on a tremendous amount of mescaline. He feels self-conscious and fears the music isn’t reaching its full potential. Standing before the microphone, he confesses his doubts to the audience and offers a refund. “You know, some nights one is raised off the ground,” he says, “and some nights you just can’t get off the ground.” He takes a break backstage, where he is struck by a sudden impulse: He needs a shave. Standing before the mirror, he takes a razor to his face and begins the process with irrepressible joy, then performs the rest of the set, rejuvenated and with a slight razor burn. (This scene was caught on tape by Tony Palmer for his 1974 documentary, Bird on a Wire.)

• In the United States, children with severe disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities, face an ignominious juncture around age 20. Aging out of school is referred to as “the cliff,” as students go abruptly from the structure and services provided in school into… nothingness as adults. During our son’s last Individual Education Plan (special needs) meeting, we argued for funding for his Covid makeup year (an additional year offered to some special needs students turning 21 in New York). The Department of Education representative refused, then actually laughed when I described what it was like living at home full-time with Jason, diagnosed with autism and intellectual disability. The representative apologized later, saying only that he was surprised it was “that bad.”1

Science

• In less poetic terms, an einstein is an “aperiodic monotile,” a shape that tiles a plane, or an infinite two-dimensional flat surface, but only in a nonrepeating pattern. (The term “einstein” comes from the German “ein stein,” or “one stone” – more loosely, “one tile” or “one shape.”) Your typical wallpaper or tiled floor is part of an infinite pattern that repeats periodically; when shifted, or “translated,” the pattern can be exactly superimposed on itself. An aperiodic tiling displays no such “translational symmetry,” and mathematicians have long sought a single shape that could tile the plane in such a fashion. This is known as the einstein problem.

• Neural interfaces have made great strides in recent years, but still suffer from poor longevity and resolution. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed a biohybrid implant to improve the situation.

• A researcher recently claimed to have solved the mystery of Stonehenge’s purpose, but new work claims to debunk the explanation that it’s a calendar.

Education

• Searching: I love the saying “A short pencil beats a long memory”, but there’s something that beats even a pencil since it can help you if you forget where you wrote it down. That’s right! Good old Ctrl-F! Their crusty old paper boxes can’t grep this.♥

• First of all, searching can help us do editing and linking more effectively. That’s the key benefit. Searching can also help us find connections that we didn’t even know about. A great index or linking system can make us find specific cards that we have deliberately referenced. Searching can make us find things that we had forgotten about entirely.

• The student council of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (“MFTI”) has launched a petition protesting the new requirement that all students must study Chinese to graduate.

• Having recently changed jobs, I had the pleasure of onboarding for the first time in four years again, definitely a change of pace. Being quite senior at this point, I have been worrying a bit about how to join a new organisation and perform on my level, not having benefited from working directly on the ground for a long time, thus lacking direct technical experience and also social legitimacy.

Hardware

• While we might all be quick to grab a microcontroller and an appropriate sensor to solve some problem, gather data about a system, or control another piece of technology, there are some downsides with this method. Software has a lot of failure modes, and relying on it without any backups or redundancy can lead to problems. Often, a much more reliable way to solve a simple problem is with hardware. This heating circuit, for example, uses a MOSFET as a heating element and as its own temperature control.

• If there’s one thing we’ve learned from [Chris] at Clickspring, it’s that a clockmaker will stop at nothing to make a clock not only work perfectly, but look good doing it. That includes measures as extreme as this complete re-toothing of a wheel from a clock. Is re-toothing even a word?

• Whether you’re making coffee or beer or complex chemicals, weighing your ingredients carefully and tracking them is key to getting good results. [Tech Dregs] decided to build a logging scale that would work seamlessly with his smartphone, and shared the design on YouTube.

• The 64kB is a category in the demoscene where the total executable size must be less than 65,536 bytes, and at that size, storing vertexes, edges, and normal maps is a waste of space. [Ctrl-Alt-Test] is a French Demoscene group that has been doing incredible animations for the last 13 years. They’ve written an excellent guide on how they’ve been procedurally generating the meshes in their demos.

• Limitations placed on any creative process often paradoxically create an environment in which creativity flourishes. A simple overview of modern pop, rock, or country music illustrates this principle quite readily. A bulk of these songs are built around a very small subset of music theory, often varying no more than the key or the lyrics. Somehow, almost all modern popular music exists within this tiny realm. [DeckerEgo] may have had this idea in mind when he created this tiny MIDI device which allows the creation of complex musical scores using a keyboard with only 12 buttons.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Firearms accounted for nearly 19% of childhood deaths (ages 1-18) in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wonder database. Nearly 3,600 children died in gun-related incidents that year. That’s about five children lost for every 100,000 children in the United States. In no other comparable country are firearms within the top four causes of mortality among children, according to a KFF analysis.

• The Vatican said the 86-year-old pontiff was taken to a hospital in Rome, where he was being treated for a respiratory infection.

Proprietary

• The IBM Aspera Faspex is a centralized file-exchange application that large organizations use to transfer large files or large volumes of files at very high speeds. Rather than relying on TCP-based technologies such as FTP to move files, Aspera uses IBM’s proprietary FASP—short for Fast, Adaptive, and Secure Protocol—to better utilize available network bandwidth. The product also provides fine-grained management that makes it easy for users to send files to a list of recipients in distribution lists or shared inboxes or workgroups, giving transfers a workflow that’s similar to email.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• As a rebellious teenager in the 80s, “because I said so” was a phrase I heard all too often at home. I wasn’t really a rebel. I just wanted to be heard and seen as a person starting to articulate their thoughts and emotions.

• The feeling I had of not being heard or listened to led me to believe that it’s important to raise kids who are not afraid to speak up, but who can also learn to adapt. Listening to them and collaborating with kids can also help them be creative and, eventually, allow them to be part of a successful organization.

Security

• Misconfigurations are the most common modus operandi for hacks, says study “As we analyze the hacking landscape from 2019 to 2022, it’s evident that the most prevalent forms of cyber attacks were misconfigurations and data breaches. Additionally, Ransomware remains a persistent threat, leveraging weak credentials to gain access to valuable data which can then be held for ransom. Other types of hacks, such as Social Engineering, Cyber Espionage, Insider Threats, Supply Chain Attacks, and Spear Phishing, pose significant risks to organizations and must be taken into consideration as part of a comprehensive security strategy,” adds Tyagi.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• Don’t click on links in emails claiming to be from Twitter

• Savvy phone and text scammers pretending to be from banks have cost Australians more than $20 million, with losses across industries amounting to nearly $170 million.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Agnès Diallo now oversees biometric databases sold to the EU by her former employer. Interesting to see how she deals with claims for compensation against Atos.

• [...]

• Last week, Agnès Diallo took office as the new director of the Tallinn-based Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems (eu-LISA). The EU has thus once again given an important post to a highly-paid employee of the French software giant Atos: in 2019, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had already appointed the then Atos CEO Thierry Breton as Commissioner for Industry and Internal Market.

• At Atos, Diallo held various management positions, most recently for the executive board. There she was responsible, among other things, for „improving the sales processes“ of the group of companies. In this context, she already worked together with eu-LISA, the agency confirmed in response to a question from „nd“.

• The network, which Amazon says covers more than 90% of the U.S. population, provides internet access for connected devices. Currently, only a relatively limited number of devices can use Sidewalk. Amazon now hopes to change by making the network more widely accessible to developers and hardware makers.

• For years the DEA has used paid informants inside airline, bus, and parcel companies to bypass needing to get a warrant. A pair of bipartisan Senators now want the DOJ to put an end to it.

• A High Court judge has agreed with Open Rights Group and the3million that the immigration exemption in the UK Data Protection Act 2018 is incompatible with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

• In India, the increased digitization of services has led to greater government surveillance and false arrests, activists say. The authorities say the surveillance is needed to curb rising crime.

Defence/Aggression

• China’s Taiwan Affairs Office on Wednesday warned the U.S. that the country will take “resolute countermeasures” if an expected meeting between U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen goes forward this month following Tsai’s trip to Central America.

• On Tuesday, March 29, it is 19 years since Latvia became a NATO member. According to experts, Latvia’s participation in the world’s most powerful military alliance is the most important thing that has happened in the area of national security.

• Russia will deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, the first time Moscow has based arms outside Russia in decades. Defence experts warn this could reduce NATO response time in the case of an attack.

• Niger, one of the world’s poorest countries, has a reputation as one of the most welcoming when it comes to refugees. That generosity brings benefits.

• Chechen police killed two “militants” in the town of Gudermes on Tuesday evening, Chechnya Governor Ramzan Kadyrov reported on Telegram

• The Ukrainian General Staff is planning to launch a counteroffensive this spring, said Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov to the Estonian broadcasting network ERR.

• Peace campaigners cheered Wednesday’s vote by the U.S. Senate to repeal the authorizations for the 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq, while calling on the House of Representatives to follow suit.

• The latest IPCC report confirmed once again that we are about to approach the point of no return in the climate crisis. The political silence that followed its release is a reminder of our cowardice in the fight for the planet’s survival.

• The U.N. General Assembly adopted a landmark resolution Wednesday that will ask the International Court of Justice to issue an advisory opinion on the obligations of states under international law to protect the rights of present and future generations from the impact of climate change.

• It is currently in the Committee Stage, where a detailed examination of the bill takes place. If successful, it will then enter the Report Stage, where all MPs can suggest amendments to the bill or new clauses they think should be added.

• The proposed legislation aims to “prevent and deter unlawful migration, and in particular migration by unsafe and illegal routes, by requiring the removal of certain persons who enter or arrive in the United Kingdom in breach of immigration control”.

• “We see how state propaganda is preparing people to think that nuclear war isn’t a bad thing,” he says. “On TV channels here, nuclear war and nuclear weapons are promoted as if they’re advertising pet food.”

• “They announce: ‘We’ve got this missile, that missile, another kind of missile.’ They talk about targeting Britain and France; about sparking a nuclear tsunami that washes away America. Why do they say this? So that people here are ready.”

• The Senate is expected to repeal the 2002 measure that authorized the US invasion of Iraq. Lawmakers in both parties are increasingly seeking to claw back congressional powers over U.S. military strikes and deployments.

• Sumy, Ukraine—Olena, 71, has lived and worked almost her entire life in Bilopillya, a village of about 15,000 in northeastern Ukraine, less than 10 kilometers from the Russian border. Sitting outside her apartment building on March 24, she wore a red scarf that framed her worn and wrinkled face and told me how her children used to travel to Russia for work building houses, and how years ago, during Soviet times, she used to peddle vegetables in Moscow. Butter from Bilopillya was for sale in Moscow, too; Olena remembered that the same butter was scarcely available to buy in the village where it was made, a reminder that Russia’s colonial exploitation of Ukraine is not the distant past.

• “It is obvious that military activity is increasing in this whole region, so every possible measure and precaution should be taken so that the plant is not attacked,” the U.N.’s top nuclear official said.

• Some wars acquire names that stick. The Lancaster and York clans fought the War of the Roses from 1455 to 1485 to claim the British throne. The Hundred Years’ War pitted England against France from 1337 to 1453. In the Thirty Years’ War, 1618–48, many European countries clashed, while Britain and France waged the Seven Years’ War, 1756–63, across significant parts of the globe. World War I (1914–18) gained the lofty moniker, “The Great War,” even though World II (1939–45) would prove far greater in death, destruction, and its grim global reach.

• The U.S. military’s top-ranking women shared a stage recently and recounted discrimination, but also the positive impact – and growing welcome – of female troops.

• Arkady Gostev, the director of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service, sent a letter to Sergey Chemezov, head of state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec, reports newspaper Kommersant. In it, Gostev invites the state corporation to use prisoners’ labor for developing, producing, and exporting industrial products.

• And now we have another mass school shooting, this time in Tennessee with three 9-year-old girls dead as well as 3 adults. Immediately followed by another pathetic Republican congressman claiming that Congress can’t do a thing.

• In what was seen around the world as a “menacing” and “sinister” show of Russia’s nuclear capabilities, thousands of Russian troops on Wednesday began exercises in Siberia with the nation’s Yars intercontinental ballistic missile system.

• The only members who voted in favor of investigating the sabotage were Russia, China, and Brazil.

• On March 13, the Pentagon rolled out its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2024. The results were—or at least should have been—stunning, even by the standards of a department that’s used to getting what it wants when it wants it.

• Sergey Mamontov, a former United Russia district deputy from the Novosibirsk region, has been found guilty in a hit-and-run case.

• The human rights group Gulagu.net has stopped evacuating people from Russia who had ties to the Russian army and Russian security forces, founder Vladimir Osechkin reported on Wednesday.

• The Ukrainian military carried out a shelling attack on Melitopol Wednesday morning, Interfax reported, citing the Russian-installed regional authorities.

Environment

• A Canadian company has begun drilling near the protected Okavango River Delta, promising jobs for locals and endless fossil fuel for investors. So far, there’s been no oil — but there have been big profits for the founders

• The European Court of Human Rights on Wednesday heard arguments in a case brought by a group of elderly Swiss women who are suing their country’s government, alleging that its “current climate targets and measures are not sufficient to limit global warming to a safe level.”

• Survey data published Wednesday shows that the U.S. electorate’s approval of President Joe Biden’s handling of the climate crisis has declined since October.

Energy/Transportation

• EU ministers Tuesday adopted legislation to phase out sales of new carbon-emitting cars and vans by 2035. The approved law amends Regulation 2019/631 and sets higher standards for reducing carbon emissions.

• Lithuania welcomes the decision to allow EU’s member states to limit imports of natural gas from Russia, said Deputy Energy Minister Albinas Zananavičius.

• The Central Finance and Contracting Agency (CFLA) has launched an additional call for municipalities to use the financing of the Recovery Fund for the purchase of electric cars for school transport. The fund still has €3.7 million available for this purpose, the CFLA said March 29.

• A U.S. charge that an American crypto-currency leader bribed Chinese officials might bring China into the global campaign against transnational corruption.

• According to the nonpartisan National Association of Attorneys General, a state attorney general’s job is to represent the public interest—not private, special interests—by, among other things, “enforcing federal and state environmental laws.” Attorneys general (AGs) in the five states most vulnerable to climate change, however, are doing the exact opposite: Instead of defending their constituents, they are defending the fossil fuel industry.

• Monday’s emissions pact struck by Chris Bowen and Adam Bandt has hit shares in Beetaloo Basin gas frackers Empire and Tamboran. Yet confusion reigns. Bandt says the deal has “derailed” the Beetaloo and Barossa gas projects. The frackers say it’s business as usual. Callum Foote reports.

• Just a week after Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced moves to reform Australia’s monopoly share market operator, ASX, and improve the integrity of financial markets, a classic case of market integrity arose.

• The report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group analyzed Department of Transportation data on consumer complaints about airline travel and airline performance. The report found consumer complaints have quadrupled from 2019 to 2022, which was the worst year since 2001 (not including 2020 data). This doesn’t include data from December, when Southwest Airlines melted down and canceled a quarter of its flights during the Christmas travel period, because DOT received so many complaints that month it hasn’t been able to review and process the data yet.

• “In a nutshell, just about everything negative got worse in 2022: complaints, cancellations, delays, involuntary bumping and baggage handling,” the study’s author, Teresa Murray, wrote on PIRG’s website, “all while the number of air travelers for the full year of 2022 was below 2019 levels.”

• A historic regulation that will ensure that all new automobiles sold starting in 2035 must have zero emissions has been passed by member states of the European Union (EU), according to Reuters.

• Italy, Bulgaria, and Romania voted no, and Poland abstained.

• While hundreds of activists blockade the European Gas Conference in Vienna to stop further climate chaos and poverty, we call on all movements and organizations to push back against the power of the fossil fuels industry. To end the cost of living crisis and avert climate chaos, we need to guarantee the rapid phase-out of fossil gas in Europe, and to build a new energy system for people and planet. Next winter needs to be the Last Winter of Gas in Europe.

• In March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its sixth assessment report, summarizing the current knowledge of the impacts and risks of climate change. “Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health. There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all,” reads the 2023 report. “The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”

Wildlife/Nature

• Righting a wrong? Or playing God? Emerging efforts to revive extinct species raise questions about the promise – and ethics – of bioengineering.

Finance

• Although the volume of e-commerce in Latvia has been growing rapidly in the last three years, the pace has started to slow slightly in the last three months. Was the breakthrough in e-commerce a temporary boom during the Covid-19 pandemic time, or is Internet shopping to stay? Latvian Radio spoke to industry representatives on March 29.

• The annual minimum wage for Australia’s low paid workers should rise by seven per cent, the ACTU says. The union body made the recommendation in a submission to the Fair Work Commission’s national minimum wage review ahead of a decision in June this year.

• The Senate Finance Committee on Thursday published the results of a two-year investigation showing that the scandal-plagued Swiss bank Credit Suisse has been complicit in a “massive, ongoing conspiracy” to help wealthy U.S. citizens dodge taxes.

• We speak with journalist Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, about her new book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, which examines myths about individualism and self-reliance that underpin the U.S. economy and the inequality it fosters. She says a focus on succeeding through hard work obscures the degree to which many rich and powerful people have benefited from social support, resulting in a cycle of “shame and blame” for those who fall short.

• This grant is essentially the best-case scenario for funding this project. It’ll be able to remain independent, open-source, and non-profit.

• I won’t start in earnest for a few months as I’ve got loose ends to tie up before I can devote that sort of time. More details to come, but I’ll say as much as the first step is a tidying up of the sources and a move off my self-hosted git instance to an external git host yet to be decided.

• This post is to flag two great posts by authors always worth reading, both related to the sad state of the venture capital industry upon which I have pontificated several times:

• Molly White’s The venture capitalist’s dilemma.

• Fais Khan’s Zero Knowledge Influencer: Are ZKPs Worth the Hype?.

• Each will reward your time. Below the fold I comment on both of them.

• The struggles among Republicans to put forth a budget reflect the perilous path ahead for lawmakers who must broker a debt deal by the summer to avert a catastrophic default.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The trial could hinge on the “catch and kill” practices at the National Enquirer.

• Donald Trump is not being targeted for the misdemeanors and serious felonies he appears to have committed but for discrediting and undermining the entrenched power of the ruling duopoly.

• If you’re going to expose yourself and your assistants to Espionage Act prosecution, the binder full of Crossfire Hurricane documents that Trump has obsessed about ever since is one dumbass document to do so over.

• Rep. Jamaal Bowman and Sen. Bernie Sanders are circulating a letter this week urging the Biden administration to “undertake a shift in U.S. policy in recognition of the worsening violence, further annexation of land, and denial of Palestinian rights” by Israel.

• Following immense pressure, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has delayed his government’s plan to weaken the Israeli Supreme Court. The self-proclaimed pro-“democracy” camp, which was protesting the plan so that the court could be saved from the grips of the pro-government camp for whom the judiciary is laughably “too leftist,” has, for the moment, declared victory. But the pro-government camp also has reason to cheer; in exchange for his acquiescence to the delay, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was granted a long-sought “national guard,” which would function as his own private militia.

• What does it take for a mass movement to translate public anger into political results? Leverage.

• Nine months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending nearly 50 years of federal protection of abortion rights, the impact of the landmark ruling known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization continues to ripple across the nation.

• Following the 2022 midterm elections, Gen Z were largely credited by Democratic politicians and pundits for stopping the red wave. “Young voters cancel out every single vote of those over 65. Under 30 and under 40 were the only age group to go to the Democrats and they went overwhelmingly to the Democrats,” said the student chair of the Harvard Public Opinion Project, Alan Zhang, in an interview with ABC News. “Without the youth vote, there was no firewall that stopped the red wave from taking over.” According to data from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, about 27 percent of voters who cast a ballot during the 2022 midterm elections were under 30, making it the second-highest youth voter turnout in about 30 years.

• Reproductive rights advocates and Democratic state lawmakers in Idaho on Wednesday condemned a Republican proposal to create a new crime in the state using the invented term “abortion trafficking,” which would criminalize people who help minors to obtain out-of-state abortion care.

• U.S. President Joe Biden’s vow to veto a Republican-led resolution that would gut his administration’s water protections did not stop four Democratic senators and one ex-Democrat from helping the GOP send the measure to his desk on Wednesday.

• Ylva Johansson is the EU Commissioner in charge of the Chat Control Bill. In recent days she has taken part in several interviews in Swedish media and also spoken in front of EU parliament members.

• It’s obvious during the interviews that Ylva Johansson does not understand her own bill and what consequences it would have. She constantly repeats misleading and incorrect arguments. Above all, she continues to claim that it’s possible to scan end-to-end encrypted communication without breaking the encryption. It’s remarkable that the responsible EU Commissioner gets away with this, without tremendous criticism from media and members of the EU Parliament (we know, there are some speaking up, but it’s not enough).

• Here are some of her statements during the last week and our comments.

• A bipartisan group of senators has introduced the RESTRICT Act, which would allow the federal government to potentially ban technology from countries the U.S. considers to be adversaries, including China. Last Thursday, congressmembers grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew during a five-hour hearing on the app’s ties to the Chinese government, its data practices and its effects on children’s mental health. Critics say this China-focused scrutiny largely ignores similar privacy concerns over the use of U.S.-owned apps and social media platforms. We hear more from Julia Angwin, an investigative journalist and contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, whose latest guest essay is titled “How to Fix the TikTok Problem.”

• (6) software designed or used primarily for connecting with and communicating via the internet that is in use by greater than 1,000,000 persons in the United States at any point during the year period preceding the date on which the covered transaction is referred to the Secretary for review or the Secretary initiates review of the covered transaction, including— [...]

• In addition to Sens. Warner and Thune, the legislation is co-sponsored by Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Jerry Moran (R-KS), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Susan Collins (R-ME), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), and Mitt Romney (R-UT).

• Also known as the Restrict Act, the measure would authorize the White House – through the commerce department – to review technologies which arrive from abroad. The commerce department could then move to ban those technologies or seek to force their sale, depending on any review’s findings.

• The bill could have implications not just for social networks, but potentially security tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs) that consumers use to encrypt and route their traffic, one said. Although the intention of the bill is to target apps or services that pose a threat to national security, these critics worry it may have much wider implications for the First Amendment.

• Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) has partnered with Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-SD) on the RESTRICT Act, a White House-endorsed bill to address those concerns that has so far garnered 21 co-sponsors, 10 Democrats and 11 Republicans.

• I know we’re deep, deep, deep into the moral panic about social media being uniquely awful, especially for kids. It’s driving all sorts of nonsense, including the false idea that we’re in a uniquely excessive period of depression, or that it’s been “proven” that social media makes kids feel bad. But… that’s not what the data actually show.

• Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar on Tuesday joined the ranks of progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups voicing opposition to proposals to ban TikTok as Republican Sen. Josh Hawley plans to force a vote on his bill sometime this week.

• Microsoft acquired GitHub for USD 7.5 billion in a stock deal on June 2, 2018.

• These actions are expected to be completed by Sept. 30, 2023.

• On Wednesday, newly-installed CEO Robert Kyncl told staff via an internal memo that “we’re reallocating resources towards new skills for artist and songwriter development and new tech initiatives.” About 6,200 employees worked at Warner Music as of last September, per its annual report.

• Burger King fans in Michigan will soon have to find a new spot to satisfy their burger cravings. The fast-food chain is closing 26 restaurants across the state after EYM King, the Burger King franchisee in Michigan, failed to renew its deal with the company. As per Fox Business, the announcement was made recently, and The Daily Mail reports that the store closure began on March 17, 2023, and will continue throughout the next month of April. The franchisee cites “unforeseen business circumstances” for the closure and expects to shut down all 26 locations by April 15, 2023.

• The former president is attempting to cast the investigations into his actions as politically motivated uses of the justice system. In office, he regularly sought to use government powers against his foes.

• The video game company, whose popular titles include “Madden NFL,” “EA Sports FIFA 23,” “Apex Legends” and “The Sims,” is restructuring to focus on “strategic priorities,” CEO Andrew Wilson said in a memo distributed to employees Wednesday. As part of the cost-cutting moves, EA will wind down certain projects, according to Wilson, although he didn’t specify which titles are getting axed.

• So far techies themselves have been mostly spared, observes Tim Herbert of the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), a trade body. Instead, the axe has fallen mainly on business functions like sales and recruitment. These had grown steadily as a share of tech-industry employment in recent years, a telltale sign of bloat (see chart 2). Between the depths of the pandemic in the spring of 2020 and peak employment at the start of 2023, the tech sector added around 1m workers. Simply hiring such numbers required hiring plenty of recruiters; as a headhunting rule of thumb, one recruiter can hire 25 new employees a year. Many of those recruiters may now be surplus to requirements.

• “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!”

• For decades, Richard Kahlenberg has pushed for a class-conscious approach to college admissions. He may finally get his wish, but it comes at a personal cost.

• Two years into President Biden’s signature initiative, successful democracies from around the world are co-hosting a second democracy summit. What lessons can they provide?

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The network used to be a safe space for the former president. But Brian Kilmeade, Jason Chaffetz and others had tough words for his appearance on “Hannity,” his first Fox interview in months.

• I wanted to share the following two links. I’ve read some sections that interested me, and indeed it was very interesting and I learned new things.

• Harmful internet use – Part I: Internet addiction and problematic useHarmful internet use – Part II: Impact on culture and society

• It explains why I more or less refused a job related to developing video games (it was about adding some kind of addictive features to old/legacy video games). Some people are addicted to (stupid) video games where you need to connect daily to collect “presents” or points, I definitely didn’t want to “play this game”. It also explains well the reasons why I’m on no social networks. I totally deleted my Facebook account several years ago, which is a daunting task: very difficult to find where to delete the account, the need to confirm a ~dozen times by clicking on the small links (not the green or blue button), and then waiting a month without logging in again! Completely crazy.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Internal Security Bureau of Latvia (IDB) has detained an officer in the Latgale administration of State Police on suspicion of providing access to television channels banned in Latvia, IDB said on March 29.

• A couple of years ago, Utah became the first state in the union to mandate that content filters be enabled on all mobile devices sold by manufacturers like Samsung, Apple, Lenovo, or TCL. The measure was a hit among the anti-porn crowd because it created a precedent for other states which sought to curtail the viewership of otherwise legal, consensual, regulated pornography among minors. The Utah law, House Bill 72, was passed through a religious-conservative state legislature and signed into law by Republican Gov. Spencer Cox back in 2021. Since then, the law has sat dormant.

• As you’ll recall, Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist” but his definition of free speech… is not free speech supportive at all. It’s the opposite.

• When the Adams County (OH) sheriff’s office raided rap artist Afroman’s home, he didn’t just sit back and assume everyone involved operated in good faith. The raid was captured on Afroman’s security cameras, which the artist soon converted into a viral video/rap song entitled “Will You Help Me Repair My Door.”

• Meta Platforms and Alphabet Google appeared before Brazil’s Supreme Court on Tuesday to defend a law that says [Internet] companies are not responsible for content that users post unless the companies are subject to a court order.

• The companies are appealing a 2017 lawsuit by a Brazilian woman who wanted Facebook to remove a profile and sued the company for compensation.

• Pussy Riot activist Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has been added to the Russian Interior Ministry’s wanted persons database. The observers at Mediazona were first to spot the publication.

Freedom of Information

• Burkina Faso Monday announced that it will suspend broadcasts from France 24, a French international news network, after the network aired an interview with the head of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The interview effectively classifies France 24 as a “communications agency for these terrorists,” according to Minister of Communication Jean-Emmanuel Ouedraogo.

• Lewis Lapham once said of the late Molly Ivins, “She reminds us that dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• UN Secretary-General António Guterres Monday stated that education is critical to combating racism and other vices bred by decades of slavery. Guterres’ comments occurred at a UN General Assembly session to observe the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

• The UN Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Monday released a report on the impact of forced disappearance and abductions in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) on victims and their families.

• The Soviet-era statues removed from Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius will be moved to the Grūto Parkas, which houses dozens of Soviet monuments in the southern city of Druskininkai, the Vilnius authorities decided on Wednesday.

• Lithuania’s government has stepped back from previous plans, which would have banned Belarusian and Russian nationals from acquiring the country’s citizenship.

• Lithuania has welcomed a political agreement in Brussels to establish an Anti-Coercion Instrument, which would help against China’s de facto trade sanctions.

• Most states have at least considered initiatives to do away with, or to reduce the use of, isolation in their prison systems, according to the latest major report on the subject. But there’s bad news too.

• Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is testifying Wednesday morning before a Senate committee chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders, who used his time to grill the billionaire on the coffee giant’s scorched-earth union-busting campaign that has drawn hundreds of unfair labor practice charges and dozens of complaints from the NLRB.

• Congressional Democrats reiterated their opposition to steep federal spending cuts on Tuesday after Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy issued a vague outline of his caucus’ demands, which include more punitive work requirements for aid recipients and steep cuts to non-military spending.

• As late as the 1960s, prisoners were forced to pick cotton from early morning to late evening, with physical and sexual abuse commonplace.

• To be fair, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals doesn’t always hand out immunity while waving away egregious, often horrific rights violations perpetrated by law enforcement officers. But it certainly seems to frequently find creative ways to let cops exit lawsuits, no matter how awful their behavior.

• In psychology, the psyche/ˈsaɪki/ is the totality of the human mind, conscious and unconscious.[1]

• Over the weekend, Biden bragged about his support for even more resources than “MAGA Republicans.” to “secure the border” on Twitter. This is “lesser evilism” in action.

• Defense officials have been required to submit a budgetary “wish list” every year since 2017.

• Rep. Tim Burchett’s response to the leading killer of U.S. children stands in stark contrast to his zeal for banning drag shows: “Dadgummit, we don’t put up with that crap in Tennessee.”

• The mass shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn., on Monday, which left six people dead, including three 9-year-olds, was the 13th school shooting this year that led to injury or death. Education Week, which has been tracking these massacres since 2018, reports that there were 51 such shootings last year and 157 since they began tabulating the body counts.

• Tennessee passed a law in 2018 to create a monument for “victims of abortion.” Five years later, the monument has yet to materialize, and the private fund for the so-called “Monument to Unborn Children” has yet to receive a single dollar, according to state sources.

• “Together with the Illegal Immigration Bill that will cast adrift thousands of people seeking protection in this country, these proposals will cause real harm to already vulnerable people.

• We go to Ciudad Juárez for an update on the fire that killed at least 38 men held at a Mexican immigration detention center just across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas. Surveillance video from the jail shows guards walking away as flames spread inside the jail cells, making no effort to open the jail cells or help the migrants who were trapped. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador blamed the fire on the men who were being held at the detention jail, alleging that they set their mattresses on fire to protest conditions, while U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar claimed the tragedy was a consequence of “irregular migration.” The deaths in Mexico came just hours after the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees urged the Biden administration not to adopt a proposed anti-asylum rule that would turn more refugees away at the border. We speak with the U.S.-Mexico border-based journalist Luis Chaparro.

• Calling for a full investigation into the fire that killed at least 38 people at a migrant detention center in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico this week, United Nations officials on Tuesday joined human rights groups in calling for an end to the U.S. and Mexican migration policies which led to the detention of dozens of men at the facility.

• The calls are believed to be “computer-generated swatting calls,” state police said. They are hoax calls made to emergency officials which aim to cause large police responses.

• The solution: “mass action and solidarity” in the vein of Amsterdam’s 1970s die-ins, of which Kate sees an echo in Chicago’s contemporary Bike Grid Now protests. (See also Safe Street Rebel in San Francisco.) That’s how we force the powers that be to change our streets and guarantee “the right to the city… a right to free movement.”

• The United Nations considers that the systematic deprivation of the rights of women and girls imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan may amount to gender persecution, a crime against humanity. Girls cannot study from the age of 12; women are not allowed to work in government agencies or for non-profit groups and now they have also been banned from entering parks and gardens. They cannot travel anywhere without a close male relative. Afghan women have been left with very few rights and even fewer possibilities to access knowledge.

• Since mid-March, they have also been deprived of one of the last remaining bastions of culture and freedom in Kabul: Zan Library. Two weeks ago, this center — the only one for women in the city — had to close due to threats and harassment from the Taliban, explains one of its founders, 28-year-old economist Laila Basim, via WhatsApp. When the library disappeared, she says, “a hope ended.”

• Kozacha Lopan exemplifies the complex reality of relocating children during an armed conflict, considered a war crime. Ukraine has identified more than 16,000 children who were relocated to Russia but estimates there may be 150,000. Only 300 have returned home, according to Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights. This led the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue an arrest warrant on March 17 for Putin and Russia’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova. “Everyone is against him [Putin],” says Vakulenko. “But I have no idea how he will react – nobody does.” The town she governs not only borders the invading country but is replete with families of dual nationality.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The broadband and cable industry has long perfected the use of bullshit fees to jack up subscriber bills. Countless cable and broadband companies tack on a myriad of completely bogus fees below the line, letting them advertise one rate — then sock you with a higher rate once your bill actually arrives. They’ll then pretend they haven’t actually raised rates because the advertised rate remains inaccurately low.

Monopolies

• Under draft legislation published today, the biggest broadcasters in the UK will receive additional privileges, like ensuring their on-demand services are easy to discover to encourage competition with global streaming giants. The draft Media Bill will enable new reforms to guarantee access to UK radio on smart speakers and require streaming services to provide subtitles, audio description, and signing to support those with disabilities.

• The new legislation will enable public service broadcasters (PSBs) like the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5, “to unleash their potential to grow, produce more top-quality British content and invest in new technologies to keep viewers tuning in amid fierce competition from subscription-based online platforms.”

Patents

• The American legal system gives lawyers vast powers over private citizens. In the United States, there are no “loser pays” rules, no limits on lawyers’ ability to file complaints, and a summons requires a defendant to respond, or suffer a default judgment.

• The concept of plausibility has caused great controversy in European patent law in recent years. It was hoped that the decision of the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) of the EPO in G 2/21 would bring clarity.

Trademarks

• Shoe manufacturer Adidas Wednesday reversed course and withdrew its claim against Black Lives Matter (BLM) alleging that the group’s logo violates Adidas’ trademark. Adidas filed the initial claim with the US Trademark Office on Monday.

Copyrights

• The life-plus-seventy-years sentence imposed on Winnie the Pooh by Cher’s ex-husband is finally over. Petitions for an early release went unheeded, forcing the butt naked childhood icon to perform tricks for the heirs of its creator’s estate until it was finally allowed to roam free — nearly 40 years after the bear’s sentence should have been commuted.

• Pirate ebook repository Z-Library is still recovering from U.S. Government cracked carried out late last year. Two suspects were apprehended but the site itself remains online. According to its current operators, the enforcement action caused substantial damage so users are being asked to donate. They’re reportedly doing so en masse.

• Meta and Italian broadcaster RTI have just announced a multi-year partnership to prevent the TV company’s content from being pirated on platforms such as Facebook. The deal will see RTI and Meta collaborate on the implementation of systems to protect RTI content, including live TV broadcasts. Here’s how that’s likely to work.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

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