● 04.05.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 05/04/2023: GTK 4.11.1, Wayland 1.22, and Gajim 1.7.3

Posted in News Roundup at 10:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• System76 has been selling PCs that ship with Linux pre-installed for years. But for most of that time the company has worked with third-party manufacturers. A few years ago System76 announced plans to establish its own factory in Denver. Since then, the company has begun building its own desktops and keyboards.

• Now the company’s CEO says the first System76 laptop built in-house is on the way, and he’s posted pictures of an aluminum LCD panel that he says will be part of the upcoming notebook.

Linux Magazine’s Latest (New) Issue

• This month in Linux Voice.

• Whiptail interfaces add menus and information pages to your Raspberry Pi projects.

• Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the little links that bring us closer within the Linux kernel community.

• Linux and other Unix-based systems use the ELF file format for executables, object code, and shared libraries. Take a peek inside to learn how an ELF file is organized.

• Graham has finally taken delivery of a couple of RISC-V development boards for Linux experimentation. Expect plenty of cross-build tools in future issues!

• Coreboot is an open source firmware alternative with an emphasis on speed and simplicity.

• Network traffic remains a closed book for many users. Sniffnet lets less experienced users monitor their network traffic with ease.

• Since 2008, DuckDuckGo has been making waves as an efficient and much more private search engine alternative to Google. The unaffiliated command-line tool ddgr is designed to make running DuckDuckGo searches from the terminal a breeze.

• In a crowded field of search applications, FSearch offers many interesting functions for quickly searching files and folders, with more promised in the future.

• You can automate Flatpak updates without a package manager using systemd’s services and timers.

• A new effort to record the history of open source is underway.

• Is the whole high-tech scene imploding? If so, it won’t be the first time, but every time it implodes, it comes back a little different, so even temporary implosions are relevant.

• Fedora 37 Workstation and TUXEDO OS 2

• LinkAce and floccus synchronize and manage bookmarks while storing your data locally.

• In the news: Gnome 44 Release Candidate; Flathub Vying to Become the Standard Linux App Store; Debian 12 to Ship with KDE Plasma 5.27; Planet Computers Launches ARM-Based Linux Desktop PCs; Ubuntu No Longer Shipping with Flatpak; openSUSE Leap 15.5 Beta; Linux Kernel 6.2 Released with NewHardware Support; Kubuntu Focus Team Releases NewMini Desktop; and US National Cybersecurity Strategy Released.

• Filter rules for firewalls can be tricky. As the successor to iptables, nftables simplifies the process of creating and maintaining firewall rules.

• A number of open source projects offer tools for analyzing energy usage in software.

• The popular Linux PC forge TUXEDO extends Ubuntu to include the latest KDE packages and says goodbye to Snap for its in-house TUXEDO OS distribution. The latest version is suitable for any PC.

• Linux users have long gotten used to the standard hardware in their systems working perfectly. Recently, however, things have gotten dicey for webcams supporting the MIPI specification. We’ll tell you why and what to do about it.

• Armed with no more than a Raspberry Pi photo trap, you can discover who pays a visit to your garden at night.

• With the dict client, you can quickly search dozens of natural language dictionary databases for the perfect word.

• Go has a reputation for producing energy-saving applications, but you still have to know what you are doing.

• The electronic brain behind ChatGPT from OpenAI is amazingly capable when it comes to chatting with human partners. Mike Schilli picked up an API token and has set about coding some small practical applications.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

Applications

• Gajim 1.7.3 enables you to mute notifications for specific contacts and brings some improvements and bug fixes. Thank you for all your contributions!

Instructionals/Technical

• In Ubuntu, Fedora and other Linux with GNOME desktop, you may found that many applications have child dialogues attached to parent windows.

• I’ve been writing regularly for years now about one of my favorite topics, Linux.

• Out of many different Git commands ‘Git Pull‘ and ‘Git Fetch‘ allow users to update their local repository with changes made in a remote repository. Although they are relative, however, work differently.

• Percona XtraDB Cluster is a fully open-source database clustering solution for MySQL. It allows you to create a robust, high-availability MySQL server deployment that provides high performance.

• Erlang which is also known as Erlang/OTP, or Open Telecom Platform (OTP) is a programming language with similar syntax to other functional languages such as Haskell and Lisp. It is designed to build scalable, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. At Ericsson Telecom in Sweden, it was created by Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding, and Mike Williams around 37 years ago, which makes it quite trustable. That’s why Erlang has been used to build many high-profile systems, including the telephony infrastructure of Ericsson, WhatsApp, and RabbitMQ, among others.

• Debian 11 is an excellent server OS to run the LAMP stack. PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language especially suited for web development. However, Debian 11 comes with PHP version 7.4. Here is how to install PHP 8.2 with Apache server on Debian 11 using the CLI or over ssh based session.

• We’ll walk you through the step-by-step process of copying all files from one directory to another using the cp command. We’ll also provide examples to help you understand how to use the command in different scenarios. By the end of this guide, you’ll have a good understanding of how to copy files in Linux using the cp command.

• In Linux, the bc command is a versatile tool that can be used to perform complex mathematical calculations, automate tasks, and write scripts. The bc command supports a wide range of functions, operators, and variables that allow you to perform calculations with great precision and flexibility. In this article, we will discuss 15 practical examples [...]

• In Linux, the bc command is a powerful tool for performing mathematical calculations. The bc command can be used in scripts or on the command line to perform calculations, set variables, and even write scripts. In this article, we will discuss the bc command in Linux and provide practical examples to illustrate its use.

• Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install checkmk on Rocky Linux 9 / Alma Linux 9.

• FileZilla is an incredibly powerful and user-friendly File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client that allows users to transfer files between a local computer and a remote server. With its cross-platform compatibility, FileZilla supports Windows, macOS, and Linux systems, making it a preferred choice for webmasters, developers, and casual users alike.

• Python 3.11 is one of the latest iterations of the popular programming language and brings many improvements and changes to enhance the overall coding experience. Building upon the solid foundation of Python 3.10, this new version introduces several enhancements that streamline development, boost performance, and refine syntax.

• As a Linux Mint user, you might seek efficient, user-friendly video editing software that caters to your needs. Look no further because VidCutter is here to save the day! This robust, open-source video editor offers many features and is perfect for novice and experienced users.

• VLC Media Player is a versatile and powerful multimedia player renowned for its ability to play virtually any media file format without the need for additional codecs. Developed by the VideoLAN organization, VLC is free, open-source software compatible with multiple platforms, including Linux Mint.

• Using Linux network commands, you can manage and troubleshoot network connections, interfaces, routing tables, and other networking-related functions. Command Description arp This command is used to display and manipulate the kernel’s ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) cache. ifconfig This command is used to display and configure network interfaces on the system.

• Linux user management commands create, modify, and delete user accounts and groups. Similarly, these commands are used to manage user account properties such as login shells, primary groups, and passwords. User management commands help system administrators control access to resources and manage user permissions on Linux systems to ensure security and accessibility.

• A Linux operating system provides system information commands that provide information about various elements of the system, such as hardware, software, and configuration. A variety of information can be obtained from these commands, including kernel version, distribution name, distribution version, processor type, memory usage, networking configuration, and running processes.

• Text Processing Commands are a set of built-in commands that are used to manipulate text. These commands allow users to quickly and efficiently search, modify, and extract data from text files.

• In Linux, file management commands are used to manage files and directories. Those who regularly work with the Linux operating system, whether they are users, system administrators, or developers, will find these commands invaluable.

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

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Node.js on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, Node.js is a powerful and flexible runtime environment for building scalable, efficient, and high-performance network applications.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install NTP on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, NTP is a client-server-based protocol that is used to synchronize the time between different devices on a network.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Here is the first GTK snapshot of the new development cycle. A lot of things fell into place recently, so it is worth taking some time to go through the details of what is new, and what you can expect to see in 4.12.

• The family of GtkListView, GtkColumnView and GtkGridView widgets was one of the big additions in GTK 4. They are meant to replace GtkTreeView, but up until now, this was clearly still a bit aspirational.

• In GTK 4.10, we’ve finally taken the big step to port GtkFileChooser away from tree views—a sign that list views are ready for prime time. And the next GTK 4 release will bring a number of missing features…

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• Linux Lite is known for its lightweight and Windows-like layout that provides users with a familiar operating system experience.

• The last major release, Linux Lite 6.2 saw the inclusion of various user interface tweaks/bug fixes, and now another release is here that also has various improvements on offer.

• Let me take you through the Linux Lite 6.4 release.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Today is the day! The eagerly awaited SUSECON Call for Papers is open!

Fedora Family / IBM

• Both Apple and IBM have started to remove staff, though at a lower rate than contemporaries like AWS, Microsoft and Meta.

• Let’s start with Apple.

• So far the iPhone maker has avoided layoffs, despite growing headcount by tens of thousands over the past five years. Other Big Tech firms have blamed over-recruiting in the pandemic as the main reason for the mass redundancies they are currently enacting.

• Instead Apple has preferred to cut costs by other means, for example by ending contractor relationships, delaying bonuses and limiting work travel.

• That’s not to say that the company has completely avoided criticism. After 18 months of threats, Apple told employees to return to the office three days a week back in February, and has since started tracking badge swipes and issuing warnings to employees who fail to do so.

• It’s been about two months since our last blog post was out. The team wants to give everyone an update on our progress and let you know that we are nearly at the finish line!

• WAAAAAY back in early September 2022, we sent out an email to the community to lay out the reasons for replacing Fedora Messaging Notifications (FMN). At the time of writing the last blog post, we had deployed our code to the staging environment and were in the process of bug hunting. Some of our feature sets had been finished, like users receiving message notifications via IRC, but most were still in a “in progress” state. We were quietly optimistic about delivering the finished project on time.

Linux Mint

• Recently, Linux Mint has been focusing on its look and feel more than usual.

• With Linux Mint 21.1, you get a new default theme and several subtle visual refinements.

• And it looks like more such changes are in progress for the upcoming Linux Mint 21.2. As usual, a new monthly blog post highlighted some progress planned for the next release.

• Work on the Cinnamon desktop is being performed by the Linux Mint team all of the time. This month, it unveiled significant improvements to the themes that users can pick and introduced “styles”.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Makerfabs ESP32-S3 Round SPI TFT with Touch 1.28′ is a small ESP32-S3 with a 1.28-inch round color touchscreen display, a microSD card, support for USB and battery power, and two’Mabee’ extension connectors.

• 0xC0FFEE’s RP2040 PHAT is both a Raspberry Pi RP2040 development board and a pHAT for Raspberry Pi and Pi Zero Linux SBCs that exposes the I/Os through the 40-pin GPIO header traditionally found in Raspberry Pi single board computers. The board comes with all features of the Raspberry Pi Pico board including a USB port for power and programming, an SPI flash, and a BOOT button, but also adds a Reset button.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Organizations are increasingly adopting open source software development models and open source aspects of organizational culture. As a result, interest in how open source communities succeed is reaching an all-time high.

• Until recent years, measuring the success of open source communities was haphazard and anecdotal. Ask someone what makes one community more successful than another, and you will likely get observations such as, “The software is great, so the community is too,” or “The people in this community just mesh well.” The problem with these evaluations is not that they are necessarily wrong, but that they don’t provide information that others can use to reproduce successful results. What works for one community is not necessarily going to work for another.

• Research universities, businesses, and other organizations interested in determining what makes open source projects successful have begun to collaborate on finding ways to measure aspects of community in a qualitative and data-driven way. One of the more prominent efforts is CHAOSS, a Linux Foundation project focused on creating metrics, metrics models, and software to better understand open source community health on a global scale. Unhealthy projects hurt both their communities and the organizations relying on those projects, so identifying measures of robustness isn’t just an interesting project. It’s critical to the open source ecosystem.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• Mullvad x Tor Project collaborates on building a new web browser with its VPN integration!

• The Tor Project and Mullvad VPN, two organizations that are all about user privacy, released a new privacy-focused web browser, called Mullvad Browser, on Monday. The browser is free to download and works on Windows, MacOS and Linux. There’s also a Firefox extension in beta you can download.

• “The mass surveillance of today is absurd,” Jan Jonsson, Mullvad VPN’s CEO, said in a news release. “The Mullvad Browser is all about providing more privacy alternatives to reach as many people as possible and make life harder for those who collect data from you.”

Programming/Development

• Because, sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand pull requests.

• What is a landing page?

• A landing page is a specialized web page designed to create a strong first impression and encourage visitors to take a specific action. It’s not just another page on a website, but a standalone page crafted in response to a marketing campaign or offer. Landing

• EverShop is an eCommerce platform based on GraphQL and React that includes essential commerce features. It is built with React, is modular, and fully customizable. The platform is easy to install, set up, and customize.

• As the work on Godot 4.1 continues, more fixes and enhancements become available to existing 4.0 users as patch releases. Meet Godot 4.0.2, addressing more of your reports, including several regressions from 4.0.1, and improving platform support for Android, macOS, and Windows!

Python

• To remove a file only if it exists, use the remove() method and the unlink() methods. However, you need to wrap these methods in try-except statements.

• You may have seen the many cool things that Qt 6.5 includes, so now we want to talk about everything being developed by the Qt for Python team.

• Graphical user interface, or GUI, as it’s more commonly known, is one of the three main cornerstones of any application, along with security and performance. Maintaining the right balance between these three vital aspects can help you ensure an intuitive and seamless user experience. We can’t stress enough how important it is to have a user interface that’s minimalistic and, at the same time, robust. Gone are the days when developers would lose their minds creating the perfect user interface in the absence of powerful tools like frameworks.

Leftovers

• Switzerland will host the 2025 Women’s European Championship, European soccer’s governing body UEFA said on Tuesday.

• As you may have heard, some big mob boss got arraigned today in New York for the first 34 of his bounteous crimes, sins, grifts and unholy transgressions, and as Biden likes to say, it’s a big fucking deal. It seems law enforcement offered to do it quietly, but the mobster wanted it splashy. So it will be, with “law enforcement zoo,” snipers, perp walk, shrieking zealots. Says one poor cop burdened with it, “It’ll be a shitshow.” Update: It was.

• The subheading to Joan Walsh’s article declares “ecstasy and community return on Bruce Springsteen’s 2023 tour” [“Our Lost Years,” March 6/13]. If that’s the case, it must be a community of the wealthy and privileged. I once had the pleasure of meeting Bruce Springsteen at a campaign stop in Columbus for John Kerry, but I cannot afford seats for his current tour. In Tampa, tickets went for $199 for the “cheap seats,” other tickets selling for $299 and soaring with “dynamic pricing” to as much as $5,000. Part of the problem is Ticketmaster’s monopoly. But performers like The Cure have found ways to respect their fans and keep ticket prices more affordable. Springsteen could certainly afford to do the same.Mary Jo Kilroy columbus, ohio2

• Nothing could have prepared us for what we sawin the wake of the Türkiye-Syria earthquake.

• [Chris Combs] is a full time artist who loves using technology to create unique art projects and has been building blinky artwork since about a decade now. In his 2022 Supercon talk “Art-World Compatibility Layer: How to Hang and Sell Your Blinky Goodness as Art” (Slides, PDF), [Chris] takes us behind the scenes and shows us how to turn our blinky doodads in to coveted art works. There is a big difference between a project that just works, and a work of art, and it’s the attention to small details that differentiates the two.

Hardware

• Scooter hacking is wonderful – you get to create a better scooter from a pre-made scooter platform, and sometimes you can do that purely through firmware modifications. Typically, hackers have been uploading firmware using Bluetooth OTA methods, and at some point, we’ve seen the always-popular Xiaomi scooters starting to get locked down. Today, we see [Daljeet Nandha] from [RoboCoffee] continue the research of the new Xiaomi scooter realities, where he finds that SWD flashing is way more of a viable avenue that we might’ve expected.

• Videostrong HC1 Home Care Hub is a Smart Home/IoT gateway designed for the elderly that also serves as a smart speaker with 10-meter far-field voice recognition, a video phone with a video built-in camera and speaker, and a 4K Android TV box.

• It was only a matter of time, perhaps, but the skyrocketing costs of designing chips is colliding with the ever-increasing need for performance, price/performance, and performance per watt.

• It’s clear there is huge demand for low-power, smarter sensors at the edge, and Legato Logic has a chip that it thinks can do just that using less than a milliwatt of power.

• Upgrading and repairing vintage laptops is often a challenge — even if their basic hardware is compatible with ordinary PCs, they often use nonstandard components and connectors due to space constraints. The Sharp PC-4600 series from the late 1980s is a case in point: although it comes with standard serial and parallel ports, the only other external interface is a mysterious connector labelled EXPBUS on the back of the case. [Steven George] has been diving into the details of this port and managed to design a module to turn it into a pair of standard ISA ports.

• Beijing’s security review of Micron Technology, which has deep roots in China, could have wide-ranging ramifications for other foreign businesses.

• When making a PCB informative and self-documenting, there’s often just not enough space to silkscreen all the labels you want, and slowly but surely, you collect a set of tricks: using different through-hole pad shapes to denote ground or power pins, standardized pinouts for connectors, your own signal name shortening notations, and so on.

• In 1996, the 3Dfx VooDoo VGA chipset changed computer graphics forever. Because of the high cost of memory, most of the boards had only 4 MB of memory — which seemed a lot back then. However, the chipset could actually handle up to 8 MB. [Bits and Bolts] couldn’t stand that his board only had 4 MB, so he did what any good hacker would do: he figured out how to add the missing memory!

• For most of us, vacuum tubes haven’t appeared in any of our schematics or BOMs in — well, ever. Once mass-manufacturing made reliable transistors cheap enough for hobbyists, vacuum tubes became pretty passe, and it wasn’t long before the once mighty US tube industry was decimated, leaving the few remaining tube enthusiasts to ferret out caches of old stock, or even seek new tubes from overseas manufacturers.

• Projects can often spiral, not down or up, but out. For [Derek] he started playing around with a 3D-printed escapement mechanism and thought it was a wonderful bit of engineering. But with a simple drum and weight, it only had a runtime of a few minutes. What started as a simple “can I make it run longer” spiraled into a full-blown beautiful grandfather clock.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The company faces a flood of lawsuits claiming its talc products caused cancer. The proposed settlement requires approval by a bankruptcy court, but has the backing of plaintiffs’ lawyers.

• A battery that charges itself in salty fluids starves tumors of oxygen, helping improve some drugs treat cancer, a study finds.

• Nothing kills cops like fentanyl. I mean, I don’t think it’s actually killed any cops yet, but any cop in the general vicinity of it acts like they’re dying and heads off the ER, surrounded by enablers, cop shop PR staff, and journalists willing to act as stenographers.

• “This is a devastating day for our state and freedoms,” said one Democratic Florida state lawmaker. “This six-week abortion ban is deeply unpopular, dangerous, and un-American.”

• In 2011, Jeffrey Motts was executed in South Carolina. More than a decade later, the state hasn’t carried out another execution because officials have struggled to obtain the drugs needed for lethal injection. Now, to resume executions, lawmakers are debating a bill that would further shroud the state’s lethal injection […]

• If you squint at it long enough, the abortion debate can look like an opportunity for conservatives to act like liberals—at least rhetorically. In arguing against abortion rights, conservatives cast themselves as brave advocates for an inconvenient moral truth. By standing up for the “little guy”—that is, the fetus—they claim to take the side of the oppressed. Like the most annoying of liberals, anti-choice conservatives can also treat this “oppressed class” as an ornament for their own self-regard, insisting that in their opposition to abortion rights, they provide “a voice for the voiceless.”

• A U.S. appellate court panel on Monday unanimously struck down a key water permit for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a nearly completed fracked gas project long opposed by people living along the over-300-mile route through Virginia and West Virginia.

Proprietary

• When I was a child, I spent a lot of my life in Microsoft Word and later in Microsoft Publisher, its desktop publishing equivalent, making everything from menus for fruit stands to faux Crate & Barrel catalogs. My parents bought me Greeting Card Factory software for my birthday. Graphic design, it could be said, was my passion. In each of these projects, I used clip art, the stock imagery that usually came bundled with software or on a dodgy CD-ROM you’d get at Borders called something like “50,000 Best Clip Art Images.” For children such as myself, clip art was the digital equivalent of a sticker book—it was also an incredible way to play pretend, housed in harmless office software isolated from the Internet. It was free—at the point of purchase—meaning it could be used on everything from school flyers to actual menus in actual businesses, “CurlzMT” typeface and all. If you are older than 25, you probably remember clip art’s mix of vague abstraction (e.g., gestural line figures in oversize ’90s suits holding briefcases) and goofy cartoonishness. These aesthetics remain indelible parts of early digital kitsch, along with GeoCities (itself populated with clip art) or WordArt.

• A security researcher found a series of vulnerabilities with the Nexx brand of smart garage openers. He says he could remotely find garages to target, and then open them across the internet.

• They hope to create an agent that can do a number of tasks on its own, such as developing a website, creating a newsletter, and writing on a Google doc.

• The year 2023 started off on a sombre note for many tech professionals as several major companies, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Salesforce, announced mass layoffs in an effort to cut costs. This wave of job cuts has left thousands of techies around the world without employment, and social media platforms are filled with stories of people sharing their layoff experiences.

• Roku, Lucid and Microsoft have revealed plans for fresh Bay Area job cuts, together adding hundreds of workers to the region’s worsening layoffs.

• The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 112 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.

• Chrome 112.0.5615.49 (Linux and Mac), 112.0.5615.49/50( Windows) contains a number of fixes and improvements — a list of changes is available in the log. Watch out for upcoming Chrome and Chromium blog posts about new features and big efforts delivered in 112.

Security

• CISA has added to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog a Zimbra vulnerability exploited in attacks targeting NATO countries

• The WiFi flaw discovered by researchers from Northeastern University and KU Leuven can impact a wide range of operating systems, including Linux, iOS, and Android, leaving them vulnerable to potential interception of network traffic if exploited by hackers.

• Wireless networking stacks found in a wide range of operating systems were left vulnerable due to an ambiguity in the WiFi specification, explained academics from Northeastern University and KU Leuven in a paper (PDF) titled “Framing Frames: Bypassing WiFi Encryption by Manipulating Transmit Queues.” The ambiguity can allow exposure of network traffic if exploited by threat actors.

• Yesterday, I wrote about efile.com serving malicious ake “Browser Updates” to some of its users. This morning, efile.com finally removed the malicious code from its site. The attacker reacted a bit faster and removed some of the additional malware. But luckily, I was able to retrieve some of the malware last evening before it was removed.

• The FBI led “Operation Cookie Monster” to shutter the site linked to millions of instances of fraud and cybercrime globally.

• News:

• 3CX supply chain attack appears to have been conducted by North Korean hackers with the goal of targeting cryptocurrency firms.

• NATO is looking for penetration testing vendors to assess the security of its internet-facing web assets.

• The sophisticated, self-propagating Rorschach ransomware is one of the fastest at encrypting victim’s files.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• Tel Aviv- and Boston-based CardinalOps has extended its detection posture management capability with MITRE ATT&CK Security Layers.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The U.S. military and FBI have previously bought access to netflow data from a company called Team Cymru. Now the IRS wants to buy products from the company too.

• We’ve explained our opposition to the RESTRICT Act and urged everyone who agrees to take action against it. But we’ve also been asked to address some of the concerns raised by others. We do that here in this post.

• At its core, RESTRICT would exempt certain information services from the federal statute, known as the Berman Amendments, which protects the free flow of information in and out of the United States and supports the fundamental freedom of expression and human rights concerns. RESTRICT would give more power to the executive branch and remove many of the commonsense restrictions that exist under the Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA) and the aforementioned Berman Amendments.

• But S. 686 also would do a lot more.

• Smart locks come in many forms. At the most basic level, they are physical locks that can be opened with a nontraditional key like a smartphone or fingerprint. Most significantly from a privacy perspective, they allow the lock company (and sometimes landlords) to collect data each time you or any of your guests unlock your physical door. To do this, the locks themselves may be connected to the internet, or they can rely on an app you must install on your phone (the key) to transmit the data to the lock company’s servers. Depending on the model, the lock might also record other data—like an image of the person trying to unlock the door.

• Smart locks have become increasingly popular in recent years, specifically with landlords. For example, in 2019, tenants in New York City forced a settlement after a landlord attempted to require tenants to use smart locks. The settlement required an option for physical keys. The smart lock at issue in that case was made by a company called Latch. While Latch was not named in the lawsuit, the company changed its privacy policy to remove reference to marketing and collection of other location data. Its software is reportedly in more than 125,000 dwelling units or commercial spaces. Many other companies make smart locks as well. They are part of the growth of smart home devices.

• Supporters of expanding the federal police state have found a new bogeyman to scare the people into surrendering their liberty: TikTok. TikTok is a social media platform that allows users to upload their own videos. It is used by tens of millions of Americans and is one of the most popular websites in the world.

• Now, Congress must do its part. We’ve created a campaign that will easily allow you to contact your elected federal officials and tell them to support the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act.

• The Information Commissioner’s Office estimated that the app allowed up to 1.4 million UK children under 13 use the platform in 2020.

• The UK’s data protection regulator fined TikTok £12.7 million for “failing to use children’s personal data lawfully”

• Twitter’s source code apparently revealed how it’s possible to game the company’s software to reduce access to specific accounts.

• A new kind of machine-learning model built by a team of researchers at the music-streaming firm Spotify captures for the first time the complex math behind counterfactual analysis, a precise technique that can be used to identify the causes of past events and predict the effects of future ones.

• Not all of your home devices are smart, and you might not want to replace them either. This is where a Wi-Fi enabled smart plug comes in handy as you just need to plug it in and connect to a mobile app.

Defence/Aggression

• Max Rozenfeld has spent much of the war imagining how the destruction of Kharkiv presents opportunities for reinventing its future.

• In late March, the United Nations issued a new report on war crimes being committed by both Russian and Ukrainian forces. The document provides a shocking litany of brutal behavior on the part of both militaries, although the investigators concluded that Russian units have committed the majority of offenses.

• The most significant loss of Australian lives in Switzerland was the crash of Lancaster ED531 at Thyon in Canton Valais.

• The 80th anniversary of the crash is in June 2023.

• Various web sites have appeared with reasons for the crash. Some suggest the aircraft collided with high-tension wires. The power poles are visible in the photos. Some web sites suggest the aircraft was shot at. Witness reports explain that the aircraft had discharged its bombs in an unpopulated area before colliding with the mountain: this would have been a normal course of action after being shot at but also after a mechanical failure. The photos show the aircraft was largely intact when it crashed. It may have been shot at but that does not prove why it crashed.

• Russian private paramilitaries like the Wagner Group are a symptom of the institutionalized corruption at the heart of Putin’s regime and not just another instrument in Russia’s hybrid warfare toolbox, writes Allen Maggard.

• ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue is already on its way to becoming the world’s premier policy summit on critical, emerging, cyber and space technologies.

• The Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center convened a panel of experts for a virtual event in March to discuss how to prevent the use of Western technologies in Russian weapons, reports Aleksander Cwalina.

• Australia’s deputy prime minister and defence minister, Richard Marles, opened ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue with a warning that Australia must establish a much stronger technological base. An edited version of his speech follows.

• Seventeen months ago the US State Department officially declared the US will “NEVER” recognize Crimea as part of Russia. Three months ago Ukrainian President Zelensky vowed to “take back” Crimea. Is this possible? In June 2016 I visited Crimea with a delegation from the Center for Citizen Initiatives (CCI).

• Unless Australia can develop its skilled workforce, it will struggle to acquire the advanced defence capabilities outlined in the AUKUS agreement.

• Turkey is not yet ready to greenlight Sweden’s NATO accession but significant progress has been made. Here’s a possible outline of a compromise.

• An upcoming meeting between Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen and US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy will “further damage” relations between Beijing and Washington, China warned Monday.

• Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene isn’t exactly famous for her restraint, but on March 15 she posted a tweet that was berserk even by her standards. The tweet showed a photograph of an onion-shaped ball of duct tape, which Greene claimed was an “explosive found by Border Patrol Agents.” This homemade bomb, Greene argued, justified a military response.1

• Belarus KGB claims having averted a terrorist attack on the Russian consulate in Grodno, a Belarusian city near the Polish and Lithuanian borders.

• A district court in Moscow has granted the prosecution’s motion to remand Daria Trepova, arrested after the blast that killed the pro-Kremlin war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky on Sunday.

• Leaders from the US, the UK and Germany celebrated Finland officially joining the Nato alliance on Tuesday, while urging holdouts Turkey and Hungary to accept Sweden into the alliance.

• “A territorial dispute,” he said. Attacks on him for that became widespread. Assuming that he’d rather not provoke, Perhaps he’d better stick to bashing “woke.”

• March 2023 marked 12 years since the beginning of the war in Syria. The exact death toll is unknown because the violence won’t stop long enough to count the dead, but reliable sources estimate that at least half a million people have died and 6.7 million more have fled their homes. March 2023 was also the first anniversary of Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has led to some 200,000 casualties. In the same month, the situation in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo deteriorated, as armed groups intensified attacks against civilians. In Mexico, at least 38 people died in a detention center for refugees and migrants, most of whom were fleeing the crisis in Venezuela. In the Mediterranean, more than 100 people died while trying to navigate cruel border policies to seek refuge in Europe.

• French judges have ordered senior officials of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria to stand trial for collusion in crimes against humanity, a first in France, according to court documents seen by AFP Tuesday.

• Two Syrian civilians were killed in an Israeli air strike Tuesday, state media reported, the fourth such attack on government-held areas of the war-torn country in less than a week.

• Human rights advocates in Russia believe that a new policy floated by Russia’s federal penal system regulator FSIN will be “the beginning of the end” of human rights advocacy in Russian prisons.

• To the would-be tactician, all of life is an opportunity to imagine military-style maneuvers.

• France was on Tuesday set to try 11 alleged senior members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), accused of extortion, terrorist financing and propaganda for the organisation.

• Finland’s formal accession to NATO reinforces the security of the Baltic Sea region and the entire Eastern flank of the alliance, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda has said.

• Just a few weeks ago, Vladimir Putin praised the non-sharing of nuclear weapons during his meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Now, he is promising to deploy them in Belarus. According to experts, the move is aimed at pressuring the West and the US, but the power of Russia’s scare tactics is waning.

• Russia’s Investigative Committee has formally charged Darya Trepova for terrorism offenses for her alleged role in the assassination of a prominent Russian war blogger at a St. Petersburg cafe.

• An overnight raid by Taliban forces in Afghanistan’s northern Balkh Province killed six members of the extremist Islamic State (IS) group, a Taliban spokesman said on April 4.

• Finland officially became the 31st member of NATO on Tuesday, after completing ratification in well under a year – the fastest membership process in the alliance’s recent history. As Western allies strengthen ties, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview published on Tuesday that Russia may get “tough” with a hostile European Union.

• Finland formally joined the NATO military alliance on April 4 in a historic policy shift brought on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, drawing a threat from Moscow of “countermeasures.”

• Finland is joining NATO just as its center-left government lost a general election. Here’s what to expect with the center-right National Coalition Party in charge.

• Finland becomes the 31st member of NATO on Tuesday, in a historic strategic shift provoked by Moscow’s war on Ukraine, which doubles the US-led alliance’s border with Russia.

• Moscow has blamed Ukrainian security services and supporters of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny for the killing of a prominent Russian ultranationalist blogger in a St Petersburg café. Kyiv and Navalny’s supporters have denied the allegations. But the attack on a figure with close links to the Wagner Group has underscored blowback threats from the war in Ukraine.

• Ukraine unveiled on Sunday a 12-point plan outlining how it would reintegrate Crimea back into the country if it regained the territory militarily. Kyiv has repeatedly said that seizing the peninsula back from Russia is one of its key war aims. But Washington is tacitly sceptical.

• The former president of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci, has expressed “regret and pain” for all those who lost their lives during the war in Kosovo in the late 1990s.

• Veterans advocacy groups sued the U.S. Department of Defense on April 3 seeking records of toxic conditions at an air base in Uzbekistan blamed for causing cancer and other illnesses among U.S. troops who served there in support of the war in Afghanistan.

• Baku has summoned Iran’s ambassador in objection to a note of protest alleging that media in Azerbaijan were disseminating anti-Iranian reports.

• United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Tuesday called for far-reaching global action to rid the world of landmines and other lethal remnants of war that endanger civilians for generations on end and impede socioeconomic development.

• Huntsville, Alabama police officer William Darby was the only officer on the scene who felt a suicidal man needed to be murdered. And he was the last to arrive, uninvited, to a scene apparently under control, handled by two other officers who were doing an admirable job de-escalating the situation.

• Russian forces carried out a drone attack on Odesa and the wider Odesa region early Tuesday morning, according to local authorities and the Ukrainian military.

• In a Telegram post on Tuesday, Chechnya Governor Ramzan Kadyrov referred to ongoing protests against the construction of a new mosque in Moscow as a “provocation.”

• Artyom (Artem) Uss, the son of Krasnoyarsk Governor Alexander Uss, is in Russia after having fled from under house arrest near Milan, RIA Novosti reports.

• Gleb Karakulov has the rank of captain in the Russian Federal Protective Service, also called the Federal Guard or “FSO.” His identity has been verified by the investigative team of the Mikhail Khodorkovsky-founded Dossier Center, whose journalist Ilya Rozhdestvensky interviewed Karakulov after his defection to Turkey. While in the Federal Guard, Karakulov worked as an engineer in the Presidential Communications department. His duties included ensuring the secrecy of Putin’s communications. Last October, the officer escaped to Istanbul, together with his wife and daughter, taking advantage of a work-related trip to the Kazakh capital Astana, where Putin had to make an appearance. According to Dossier, Karakulov is the highest-ranking secret service officer to escape from Russia and condemn the war with Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion. The Russian authorities are now prosecuting him for desertion, as reflected in the federal records that helped verify the facts of his story. Meduza is summarizing what Karakulov said in his interview with Rozhdestvensky. The full version is available from Dossier.

• The United States called Tuesday on its longtime adversary Iran to help end Yemen’s conflict by backing a peace process, one year after a truce dramatically reduced fighting.

• The US military said Tuesday it had carried out a strike in Syria killing a senior Islamic State group official responsible for planning attacks in Europe.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin has given his consent to transfer 94.8 billion rubles ($1.21 billion) to Shell for its stake in the Far East Sakhalin-2 gas project.

Environment

• The 1.5°C temperature target is difficult to honestly and openly discuss. Within the climate movement, it has become a locus of anguish, confusion, and even despair. Long a symbol of mobilization and hope, 1.5° has become central to both activist campaigns and scientific analysis. Yet it’s now clear that the planet will almost certainly warm more than 1.5°C.

• The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has agreed in principle on a new list of purportedly “green or climate-friendly” projects that are set to benefit from more favorable financial terms for export support after years of closed-door negotiations.

• Climate action groups and scientists are denouncing an effort by New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul to gut the state’s signature emissions reduction law—one of the most ambitious in the United States—as the governor’s office claims the move is aimed at saving money for consumers and attempts to disguise it as a technical accounting change.

• Gustavo Petro doesn’t just want to transform his own country; he wants to change the world. The new leader of Colombia, who took office last August, is targeting what he calls his nation’s “economy of death.” That means pivoting away from oil, natural gas, coal, and narcotics toward more sustainable economic activities. Given that oil and coal make up half his country’s exports — and Colombia is the world’s leading cocaine producer — that’s not going to be easy.

• The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), a UN agency with climatologists from over 70 counties included) has just come out with a new report about climate change. The news is not good.

• “Despite internal awareness, the company systematically downplayed the problem to the public, instead promoting more and more fossil fuel use despite the dangers,” said one expert. “Now, five decades later, Shell continues to dawdle and delay.”

• Debate over Labor’s Safeguard Mechanism has raged like a fire through a Sumatran peat forest. One of the most controversial aspects of the program is the use of carbon offsets, which some of our biggest companies are now buying in Indonesia. Zacharias Szumer reports.

• Following credible claims that the Australian carbon offset system is riddled with errors, many are sceptical about the whole concept of offsets. Such scepticism was no doubt bolstered by a recent Four Corner’s episode, which cast doubt on carbon offset projects in Papua New Guinea.

• In October 2022, student activists at Harvard, MIT, and Brown pulled out the stops to challenge Big Oil, demanding during an Exxon recruitment event that the administrations divest from fossil fuels. “We showed up, we started to chant, and we did not allow them to give their presentation,” said Phoebe Barr, an organizer of the disruption.

Energy/Transportation

• Japan has today (April 4) announced ambitions to increase its annual hydrogen supply to 12 million tonnes in 2040 from its current two million tonnes.

• “After a decade of action, we are making a difference in the fight against climate change,”proclaims DivestInvest, the global divestment network. Dozens of leading climate organizations from 350.org to the World Council of Churches have enlisted as core partners or endorsers of DivestInvest.

• The Latvijas Gāze (Latvian Gas, LG) company will announce the prices of its universal natural gas service in the next few days for households, which will be effective from May, but has already suggested that the price of natural gas will be some 20-40% lower than at present.

Wildlife/Nature

• A stork couple has settled in the camera-equipped nest on top of the electricity distribution network Sadales tīkls (ST) power support pole. On March 28 one of the birds had settled in the nest, but on the evening of March 31,  the other joined, ST said.

• As the end of snowbirds’ high season draws near in many of Mexico’s expat enclaves, we-who-stay prepare for the time ahead without them.

Finance

• With a new president on the horizon and an appetite for reform in the US and beyond, the World Bank is ready for change. It can start by focusing on these five policy priorities.

• High Court Judge Cockerill ruled that such a fund has no legal standing to sue Cuba over the unpaid loans.

• Data compiled by the Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia (CSB) and published April 4 show that in 2022, compared to 2021, the price index of agricultural output rose by 33.9 %, mainly due to an increase of 41.7 % in the price index of animal products and of 29.3 % in price index of crop products.

• As he tried to build a New York business empire, Robert Maxwell attempted to capitalize on the American savings and loans crisis, calling upon a dense web of arms dealers, money launderers, serious financial criminals and intelligence agents.

• Late last year, Morris Chang, the legendary founder of Taiwan’s (and the world’s) leading semiconductor producer, proclaimed: ‘Globalisation is almost dead.’

• In New York, the real estate industry and the politicians in its pocket both reign supreme. These tenants have a plan to change that forever.

• The new Minister for Land and Property, Steve Kamper, will soon have to deal with the mess of Sydney’s cemetery sector bequeathed by the former NSW government. The cemetery operator is in disarray, with a damning report looming over the heads of its executives. Callum Foote reports.

• Sydney’s public cemeteries are running out of space with no plans to purchase more land and hundreds of millions of dollars in maintenance liabilities yet unaccounted for.

• An article in the March 3 edition of The New York Times caught my eye as an illustration of what Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields describe as “racecraft”—the alchemy that vests the fiction of race with an apparent natural existence—and how it can obscure the class character of a political program through racial mystification.1

*

• The move is seen as a response to Washington’s curbs on China’s tech industry.

• Japan said last week it would restrict exports of 23 types of semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

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• For France’s Macron, the trip offers a chance for some economic wins.

• All our countries have long benefited from open economies. We trade freely, exchange ideas and innovate across borders. But as we’re all aware, the geopolitical climate is rapidly changing.

• French President Emmanuel Macron will visit China from Wednesday, hoping to dissuade Beijing from supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but without alienating a crucial trade and geopolitical player.

• Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Tuesday after the satellite launch company failed to secure the long-term funding needed to help it recover from a January rocket failure.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Roy McGrath, who was chief of staff to former Gov. Larry Hogan, was wanted by the F.B.I. for three weeks after he did not appear for a federal fraud trial in March.

• The US-western-centric idea of fake news, waged by Republicans against Democrats and vice-versa, betrays a much larger, more ominous threat.

• The Police Department, schools and CUNY won’t be spared in latest round of New York City budget reductions.

• Most people seem to agree that something should be done to protect kids from what sure looks like an addictive product. But almost no one knows what that something is.

• Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has ordered municipalities to stop certifying foreign birth certificates for same-sex couples who used surrogacy, leaving some babies in a legal limbo.

• The former president has used Truth Social to respond to news about the indictment.

• A marketing professor gave his students a challenge: If they made a video that got a million views, the final exam would be canceled.

• Firms allegedly paid to get on a list of rescue flight providers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• In February, Georgia lawmaker Josh Bonner introduced a bill that he hoped would fix a thorny problem that entangles tens of thousands of state residents in debt each year.

• The Republican state representative from Fayetteville, a southern Atlanta exurb, aimed to close a loophole used by title lenders, who offer short-term cash to customers in exchange for a lien on their car title. The industry can currently charge triple-digit annual interest, more than three times what state law allows other financial companies.

• The cover story of the April issue of The Atlantic is a riveting essay by executive editor Adrienne LaFrance entitled “The New Anarchy: America faces a type of extremist violence it does not know how to stop.”

• Tennessee House Republicans on Monday initiated the process of expelling three Democratic lawmakers who joined protesters in demanding stricter gun laws following the Nashville mass shooting that left three young children and three adults dead.

• Chicago residents are voting Tuesday in a mayoral runoff election that has been dominated by issues of public safety, with the two leading candidates coming from different ends of the Democratic Party’s political spectrum. Brandon Johnson is an organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union and backed by progressive forces in the city, and Paul Vallas is the former head of Chicago Public Schools who is endorsed by the police union. Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, who lives in Chicago, gives his analysis of the race and why it holds national implications. “It raises the question of ‘Can a progressive, multiracial coalition capture the mayoralty in the nation’s third-largest city, as Harold Washington did so 40 years ago back in 1983?’”

• It finally happened: Former president Donald Trump was charged this afternoon with 34 counts of falsifying business records by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. In a spectacle that played out almost entirely behind closed doors, but was still carried on television news like Trump was flying to the moon to be arraigned by Xenomorphs, Trump surrendered voluntarily at a downtown Manhattan courthouse, was arrested and booked, pleaded not guilty, and then went back to Mar-a-Lago on his own recognizance.

• Tuesday is going to be an all-Trump, all-the-time day. The American media won’t be able to get enough of the story of the former president’s arrival in New York and his arrest and arraignment on charges stemming from hush-money payments and other alleged crimes during his 2016 campaign. But Tuesday is also an election day that will see voters decide a critical Supreme Court contest in Wisconsin and choose a new mayor of Chicago, the nation’s third-largest and frequently most politically contentious city.

• The election for a swing seat on the court is likely to determine whether abortion remains illegal in Wisconsin, as well as the future of the state’s heavily gerrymandered political maps.

• Among the 34 charges is a conspiracy count that will sweep in a great deal of damning evidence.

• Anybody who thinks this is all cut and dried as Bragg makes it is a dope. To what extent we shall see.

• “What the heck is colonialist about carrots?” one might ask. An awful lot in the U.S.

• Their One-Party Rule Will Be Ruinous for the Earth.

• On the floor of Germany’s parliament, Left Party MP Sevim Dağdelen called for the c. 38,000 US soldiers in her country to leave, and to take their nuclear weapons with them. She lamented that Washington “doesn’t actually want allies, just loyal vassals”.

• The United States is a big part of that “extensive use” on both sides of the border.

• Amid widespread protests, the Prime Minister has halted a package of illiberal reforms. What are the roots of his effort—and of its rejection?

• Palestinian human rights lawyer and former diplomat Ghaith al-Omari, a prominent advocate of the two-state solution and negotiations with Israel, gave FRANCE 24 a lengthy interview on a recent visit to Paris. In this second of a two-part series, he lamented the Palestinian Authority’s stagnation under longstanding President Mahmoud Abbas.

• UK-focused stories such as the sentencing of Olivia Pratt-Korbel’s killer will still be broadcast.

• All of Rock Sound’s former editorial employees were let go in January.

• The post Music title Rock Sound saved by Gabriel Jagger’s Whynow appeared first on Press Gazette.

• Endpoints News and FT have “strong alignment” in their mission and reader revenues focus.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The worst situation to be in is where you know that what you have is not ideal but you have no idea what would be ideal. We find ourselves in this predicament in way too many facets of life for my liking. We end up sounding like serial murmurers because of it.

Censorship/Free Speech

• In the months since Moscow passed a law banning LGBTQ+ “propaganda,” some Russian publishing companies have begun looking for ways to access book markets in other CIS countries, Kommersant reported on Tuesday, citing industry sources.

• After law students disrupted a federal judge’s speech on campus, President Marc Tessier-Lavigne underscored Stanford’s commitment to academic freedom in an email marking the first day of spring quarter.

• “We need an organization,” writes the Graduate Student Council, “that will endure beyond any student government’s tenure and has institutional memory of past negotiations with University leaders.”

• The technician and “father of the motion picture,” Eadweard Muybridge, was a photographer and alleged murderer. “Exposing Muybridge,” a 2021 documentary, unveils how Muybridge’s moving picture originated from a fickle relationship with Leland Stanford, writes Alexandra Blum.

• IFF is alarmed that the governments of West Bengal and Bihar are deploying internet shutdowns as a response to recent instances of communal clashes and violence, including by impermissible means such as under Section 144 of the CrPC.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Earlier today Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF’s) Secretary-General Christophe Deloire and Director of Operations and Campaigns Rebecca Vincent arrived to visit Julian Assange inside Belmarsh prison but were denied access at the last minute.RSF’s representatives had been granted permission to visit Assange before the four-year anniversary of his imprisonment in Belmarsh, where he has been held since 11 April 2019.Christophe Deloire, RSF Secretary-General, said: “We are deeply disappointed by the arbitrary decision of the Belmarsh Prison Governor to prevent us from visiting Julian Assange, despite following all relevant prison procedures and rules. Julian Assange has the right to receive visitors in prison, and we are legitimate to visit him as a press freedom NGO. We call for an urgent reversal of this decision and to be allowed visitation access without further delay.”Rebecca Vincent, RSF Director of Operations, said: “This is the latest in a long series of ludicrous obstacles that we have faced over the past three years in campaigning for the release of Julian Assange. At every level, British authorities have defaulted to secrecy and exclusion rather than allowing normal engagement around this case – from refusing to accept RSF petitions, to making it nearly impossible to access court, and now this. What do they have to hide? Regardless, we continue our campaign to #FreeAssange.“

• On March 30, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced the arrest of our colleague Evan Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen and a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. Russian security forces claim he was engaged in espionage, and the Kremlin insists that he was “caught red-handed.” We, independent Russian journalists and representatives of civil society, do not believe these accusations and consider them unfounded.

• The Wall Street Journal reporter should be released immediately.

• Russia should release Evan Gershkovich; if as part of a prisoner swap it should be speedily concluded.

• Level Up say there should be a clause on domestic abuse stories as there is for suicide reporting.

• With automated journalism beginning to make its mark in UK newsrooms, new research looks at how local journalists perceive and use the technology.

Civil Rights/Policing

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• The University of Michigan announced Friday that it would be taking legal action against the Graduate Employees’ Organization by filing a complaint with Washtenaw County Circuit Court and seeking a preliminary injunction.

• EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell lashed out at China on April 4 for its support of Russia amid the invasion of Ukraine and called it “a blatant violation” of Beijing’s UN commitments.

• The Taliban government is compiling a list of Iranian nationals imprisoned in Afghanistan for possible release following Tehran’s recent handover of hundreds of Afghan prisoners.

• A group of seven international rights organizations have called on Dushanbe to immediately and unconditionally release lawyer Manuchehr Kholiqnazarov, who is serving 16 years in prison related to his human rights activities in Tajikistan.

• Two Florida Democratic leaders were among the protesters arrested late Monday during a demonstration against a proposed six-week abortion ban, which the Republican-controlled state Senate passed hours earlier.

• One of the biggest challenges to the future of American democracy is unfolding today, but not in Manhattan. It’s occurring in Wisconsin.

• Today is April 4th, or 04/04 no matter which direction you use for showing dates (and, look, while it’s ingrained in my head, I think we can all admit that the US version of month/day/year is kinda weird.).

• More than 130,000 people were deported from Hungary to neighbouring Serbia without an asylum application being registered. Now Croatia is returning refugees on a large scale to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

• For the past year in the southern French city of Marseille, the monthly ‘Cagole Nomade Party’ has been providing women with a place to enjoy a night of music and dancing without fear of harassment, with attendees asked to sign a ‘wall of consent’ promising to follow the rules upon arrival. The event also seeks to reclaim the word ‘cagole’, a regional and normally pejorative term for a coarse or provocative woman.

• Social workers are looking to place Masha Moskaleva with a foster family, due to the criminal prosecution of her father Alexey Moskalev, arrested last week in Belarus after fleeing house arrest. Russia’s Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova told the media about several foster families now being considered for Masha, during a Tuesday press-conference.

Monopolies

Patents

Trademarks

• In six consolidated appeals, the Board reversed refusals to register the marks THE NEW OLD AGE, GOOD APPETITE, HUNGRY CITY, WORK FRIEND, LIKE A BOSS, and OFF THE SHELF for “columns” on the subjects of business, office, money, careers, and worklife balance, rejecting the USPTO’s position that each mark identifies only “individual portions of [A]pplicant’s publications” and does not identify “separate goods in trade.” The Board concluded that, in light of changes in the marketplace for the delivery of news, a new test is required for the registrability of non-syndicated columns or sections in printed publications or recorded media, and under that new test the columns qualified as good in trade. In re The New York Times Company, Serial Nos. 90106071, 90112154, 90112577, 90115155, 90115491, and 90115337 (March 30, 2023) [precedential] (Opinion by Judge Angela Lykos).

Copyrights

• Bill C-11 took a major step forward late last week as the government cut off debate yet again and forced a vote on an amended bill that rejected the Senate’s fix to concerns about user content regulation. The vote has sparked heated debates on social media, including mistaken insistence by some that the bill does not affect user content (it clearly does) or that it will censor what Canadians can say online (it will not).

• “When the culture of openness is part of society it helps knowledge to grow” is what Nkem says to introduce her perspective on Open Culture. In this episode we learn about how the walls around culture discourage growth and discovery and how opening up knowledge and culture encourages inclusivity and fosters growth.

• Each month throughout 2023, we will be spotlighting a different CC-licensed illustration from the collection on our social media headers and the CC blog. For April, we’re excited to showcase “The More We Share, The More We Have (series 1/2)” by Brazilian illustrator and cartoonist, Pietro Soldi. The piece, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, was inspired by a quote from Cory Doctorow, science fiction author, journalist and tech activist:

• Legacy media operations really, really want tech companies that send them traffic to pay them as well. From Rupert Murdoch’s link tax in Australia to the very bad JCPA in America, these requirements are nonsensical and run directly counter to the core functioning of the internet. Currently, one of the biggest pushes for such a law is happening in Canada with the government’s Bill C-18 — and it’s certainly no exception. Nobody has been following C-18 closer than law professor and researcher Michael Geist, and this week he joins us on the podcast to discuss the status of the bill and why, like similar laws around the world, it’s a very bad idea.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• When I moved in with my him, his daughter was one and a half. Between the daycare and her mom who took her half the time, she wasn’t there much, but I cherished it. Time seemed lighter when she had left her trail of joy in the appartment.

• A couple of weeks ago I read a blog entry by Daniel Janus on what he calls the web of documents, tracing the idea of a digital document repository from Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project to the current state of the World Wide Web.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

• Recenly I got an idea of making a little website for sharing my drawings (im not an artist. yet.), and I wanted it to be like typical Geocities page. I shared the result with my friend. He answered “dude…” with attached screenshot of my code where I used “display: flex” for positioning.

• 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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