● 04.06.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 06/04/2023: PipeWire 0.3.68, Ofcom/Competition and Markets Authority May Study Microsoft’s Antitrust Abuses

Posted in News Roundup at 11:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• We are not shown any software because that thing is currently a brick… But eventually, the PineTab-V should run Debian and other Linux distributions, or why not, even Android if that’s your thing. Pine64 is probably half joking when they say the top photo in this post is of the PineTab-V in 2025…

• As mentioned above, the Pinetab2 will launch on April 11 for $159 and up, and run DanctNix Arch Linux with KDE Plasma Desktop, and the PineTab-V will also launch on April 11 with the same price and run… nothing. It will be a bit like the PinePhone “BraveHeart Edition” where you had to install the OS yourself, except I’d except software support to be even further away since I don’t think there’s an OS image that boots with a working display yet, so you may have to roll your own own. It should probably be called the PineTab-V “Lost Souls” edition or “Fools” edition :), and it will definitely be for developers only and end users should stay away from it until software support improves.

Audiocasts/Shows

• First up in the news, Chrome does fractions with Wayland, new Framework laptops, Docker changes their mind, ARM needs more money, Midnight BSD released, GnuCash is updated, Cinnamon Remix goes official, and PineStar64 is announced; In security and privacy, Mélofée happens, and Linux Tech Tips gets hacked;

• Then in our Wanderings, Joe has been sick, and Moss replaces a hard drive. In our Innards section, we beg for new hosts and talk about our experiences with mintCast.Download

Applications

• This release contains a huge number of changes, some of which might cause regressions. Please report anything that seems to fail after the upgrade. UCM devices in particular might have changed names, profiles and ports that might require changes in custom scripts.

• h-m-m is billed as a simple, fast, keyboard-centric tool for working with mind maps.

• Butterfly is a cutting-edge note-taking app that places your ideas at the forefront. With Butterfly, you can effortlessly add text and draw pictures, and export your notes with ease across all your devices.

Instructionals/Technical

• User management is a crucial aspect of Linux system administration, as it allows administrators to create, modify, and delete user accounts, manage permissions, and control access to system resources. This article presents a practical approach to Linux user management for system administrators.

• Taking screenshots is a common task when using a computer, whether for troubleshooting, sharing information, or documenting your work. In Pop!_OS, the process of capturing screenshots is simple and versatile, offering multiple ways to grab the perfect snapshot of your screen. This guide will walk you through the various methods for taking screenshots in Pop!_OS, so you can quickly and easily capture the information you need.

• By mastering these shortcuts, you’ll not only save time but also enjoy a more efficient and seamless computing experience. So, let’s dive in and explore the world of Pop!_OS keyboard shortcuts that will transform the way you interact with your computer.

• We will discuss the reasons for changing permissions, the advantages of using the terminal, some helpful tips & tricks, and common troubleshooting methods. Let’s dive in!

• Follow the simple commands for installing Node.js 16.x and NPM 9.x on Amazon Linux 2 running on AWS Ec2 servers for developing web applications. Node.js is a popular server-side Javascript runtime environment used by thousands of developers around the globe.

• How can I monitor Docker swarm service metrics? In this tutorial, you will learn how to monitor Docker swarm service metrics using Grafana. Coupled with other tools such as Prometheus, cAdvisor, Grafana can let you create visualization for all your Docker swarm services metrics for monitoring.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• Devotion and Corrosion is now out. I had this cunning master plan. I was going to set everything up beforehand for Devotion and Corrosion’s release, so that on release day I wouldn’t have to run around like a maniac and hit buttons.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Existing users of Ubuntu Touch on Stable channel (which is selected by default in the UBports Installer) will receive the OTA-25 upgrade by using the Updates screen of System Settings.

• Canonical recently released Ubuntu 23.04 “Lunar Lobster,” the latest version of the popular, free-and-open-source Linux operating system. It comes loaded with new features and updates to offer you a better user experience and make the operating system more efficient. Plus, the new packages and the latest Linux kernel make a great choice for both work and casual usage. So, whether you are a seasoned Ubuntu user or planning to try out this Linux distro, here is a comprehensive overview of the new features and changes in Ubuntu 23.04. This guide will help you make an informed decision about whether to upgrade to this version or not.

Devices/Embedded

• 01Space has designed a tiny ESP32-C6 IoT board with WiFi 6 and Bluetooth LE 5.0 connectivity built around the ESP32-C6-WROOM-1 wireless module, and exposing I/Os through two 10-pin headers. Espressif launched their ESP32-C6 modules and development kits last January, and the 01Space is the first third-party ESP32-C6 board we’ve covered.

• We wrote about the new Z-Wave Long Range (LR) standard aka “Z-Wave Plus LR” promising four times the range and 10-year battery life in September 2020 but hadn’t heard much about it since then, at least until now, as Zooz has launched the ZST39 LR USB Stick and ZAC93 LR GPIO module based on a Z-Wave 800 Series chip, with the GPIO module compatible with Home Assistant Yellow and Raspberry Pi SBCs.

• Another great Raspberry Pi Pico project from the GurgleApps team: a quick and simple web interface to run your Pico MicroPython code via a browser.

• Renesas RZ/T2L is a cost-optimized single-core Arm Cortex-R52 microprocessor (MPU) with an EtherCAT controller based on the same architecture as the higher-end Renesas RZ/T2M dual-core Cortex-R52 processor introduced last year, but at about half the size. The new MPU enables high-speed and accurate real-time processing performance required for AC servo drives, inverters, industrial robots, collaborative robots, etc.. used in factory automation (FA), medical equipment, building automation (BA), and other sectors and applications where EtherCAT is being adopted.

• If you think designing a new CPU from scratch is hard, you ought to try raising money to do it.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Over the years, we’ve seen some modern microcontrollers turn out to be 5V-tolerant – now, RP2040 joins the crowd. Half a year ago, when we covered an ISA card based on a Pi Pico, [Eben Upton] left a comment saying that RP2040 is, technically, 5V tolerant for GPIO input purposes. The datasheets don’t state this because the reality of 5V tolerance isn’t the same as for natively 5V-tolerant chips – for instance, it doesn’t extend all the way to 5.5V for it to be ‘legally’ 5V-tolerant, as in, what 5V tolerance typically means when mentioned in a datasheet.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Clean Scan is the ultimate mobile document scanner that effortlessly digitizes paper documents into PDFs, making it easy to store and share important information. With its user-friendly interface and a wide range of features, document scanning has never been simpler.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Microsoft plans to raise the prices of its office software in Germany – and other services – significantly (article in German here). And not just once, but every six months there are to be “price adjustments”.

• This is of course a problem for many businesses, organisations, schools and local governments that have limited resources. But it is also a good time to explore alternatives like LibreOffice.

• LibreOffice is a free (as in zero cost) office suite, but it also offers fundamental freedoms to study, modify and share the software. Businesses benefit from the software’s data protection and security, and they can also take advantage of professional support. Other advantages…

Programming/Development

• Labeling errors are common in present open-source 3D perception datasets, which could have impactful consequences. To tackle this issue, we used Carlafox to automatically generate an error-free synthetic dataset for 3D perception.

• There are still times where being able to quickly search JSON data can be useful, especially if a SIEM option is not immediately available.

• When starting a new React project, many developers turn to create-react-app as their go-to command tool for project setup and configuration. However, Vite is a better alternative. It offers faster development times and better performance.

• Precedent is a free and open-source collection of opinionated components, hooks, and utilities for your Next.js project. It enables Next.js developers to boost their production time by allowing them to create reactive apps quickly.

• Qt for MCUs 2.4 enables developers across industries to create next-generation smartphone-like graphical user interfaces for resource-constrained and cost-efficient embedded devices, with more ease and flexibility than ever before. Thanks to the continuous feedback from our users, this new release includes several new features and improvements, including support for sprite animations, a more flexible code generation and build process, and more!

Leftovers

• In the final session on Day 1 of ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue, Mike Horowitz from the US Department of Defense led a panel discussion on global technology trends.

• The way history is repeating itself in Italy is a bit on the nose as of late, with the current government trying to revive laws put in place a century ago during the fascist regime and abolished with the country’s liberation.

• For this summer, I’ve just made a nice sleeveless dress, but that doesn’t mean that I’m planning to go around with bare arms like, I don’t know, a peasant or even somebody with no health issues, perish the thought!

• Instead, at the end of last season I’ve bought a remnant of white ramie / viscose jersey that is a bit too transparent to be decent when worn on its own, but should still give some protection from the sun without being unconfortable in the heat, with the intent to make myself a new top.

• Because of the transparency I wasn’t sure whether to actually use it for a top, or just to make camisoles, but with the decency preserved by the dress the choice was made: I had enough fabric for a top, a camisole and maybe something small.

• I already have a trusted pattern for the top and camisole, but they still had to be published, so I took care to write down instructions and take step-by-step pictures; maybe the white fabric isn’t the best, but it’s better than nothing, and I can still take better pictures the next time I’ll do another make. They are of course on my pattern webiste: top and camisole.

• Making room for in-flight productivity has long been a source of both consternation and electronic interference. But for some reason, it persists.

• I am not above stunt journalism. One of my greatest pieces involved me grabbing a book from 1994 and testing to see if any of the links still worked. (Spoiler alert: They did not.) But in-flight productivity, a concept I have read much about, evades me in large part because in-flight comfort evades me. Planes simply suck. They’re frustrating. They are built for the preferences of many but make no room for exceptions. And when you’re the exception, it’s no fun.

• It’s not the career choice for many in their twenties, but Ming Tai has amassed more than 47,000 followers on his Instagram page, where he shares stories from his work in the funeral industry.

• In the opening minutes of Knock at the Cabin, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, four strangers show up uninvited at a secluded Pennsylvania cabin occupied by two men and their adopted daughter. Dressed in jeans and tucked-in button-down shirts, the strangers could be door-to-door evangelists or the stars of a Wrangler ad. Their actual purpose is more sinister: They carry edged weapons that look sourced from a medieval armory.

Science

• NASA officials found it more difficult than they expected to surprise the astronauts of the Artemis II mission with the news that they were going to the moon.

• When the future meets its own history.

• Rather disturbing trophies…

• Nobody likes to be dead tired.

• Hello?

• A story of fire and ice.

Education

• One student, accepted at a Georgian school, had her visa application rejected. Another, 18 months from his medical degree, received a deportation order from Germany. “It just makes you want to stop in the street and scream,” he said.

• Alabama’s House education committee advanced legislation requiring kids to attend kindergarten or take a test to show their “readiness” for first grade

• Think of every teacher you’ve ever had. Consider each of them, both your favorites and the ones you wish you could forget.

Hardware

• Vintage typewriters can be beautiful and elegant devices. But there’s a limit to their value if, as with the 1903 Remington owned by [Daniel Ross], they are fire-damaged and have a seized mechanism. What did he do with what was essentially a piece of scrap metal? Produce an unholy mashup of the vintage machine and a 1988 Sharp daisy wheel typewriter to make a steampunk-style teletype, of course!

• We’re no strangers to unusual clocks here at Hackaday, and some of our favorites make time a little more tangible like [Kyle Rankin]’s knitting clock.

• We’ve seen some absolutely gorgeous freeform circuit sculptures. There’s a mystic quality to taking what has normally been hidden away for safety and reliability reasons and putting it on display for everyone to see. Of course, creating these unique circuit sculptures takes considerable time and effort. [Inne] created several silicone soldering jigs to help with these tricky joints.

• When we first saw this 1944 US Office of Education film about hand soldering, we figured it might still have some good information. Well, perhaps it does, but the 1944 soldering was with a giant iron, and the work looked more like metal bricks than anything we’ve soldered lately. Of course, the physics is all the same, but some of the terminology, like “sweating in” isn’t anything we’ve heard before, although we have heard of sweat soldering.

• In the home of the future, everything is automated. Some of us are already there, in dwellings fully tricked-out with IoT and smart home devices. But they don’t somehow look as futuristic as a home in which everything is motorized. We don’t know whether this was the intention, but we certainly get a futuristic vibe from [Sam Baker]’s home cinema projector mount. It’s no mere bracket, instead on command the projector descends from concealment in the ceiling on a custom scissor lift mechanism.

• The odds are that if you’ve heard about application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) at all, it’s in the context of cryptocurrency mining. For some currencies, the only way to efficiently mine them anymore is to build computers so single-purposed they can’t do anything else. But an ASIC is a handy tool to develop for plenty of embedded applications where efficiency is a key design goal. Building integrated circuits isn’t particularly straightforward or open, though, so you’ll need some tools to develop them such as OpenRAM.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• As it grapples with continued government scrutiny – including a possible stateside ban – ByteDance’s TikTok has officially been slapped with a nearly $16 million fine in the UK “for misusing children’s data” between May of 2018 and July of 2020.

• Prosecutors in Paris have opened a criminal investigation into allegations that pollution in the capital’s metro system is putting travellers’ lives at risk, an NGO and authorities said on Wednesday.

• For decades, chemical companies fought attempts to ban asbestos, claiming they needed the potent carcinogen to manufacture chlorine. As recently as last April, in fact, the CEO of one of the last major companies still clinging to the toxic substance argued for it to remain legal. Acceptable alternatives “do not exist,” Olin Corp. CEO Scott Sutton told regulators.

• In a dramatic turnaround, Olin said on Tuesday that it would support a federal ban on the deadly mineral.

• A new proposal by the Biden administration to strengthen standards limiting emissions of mercury and other toxins could save lives in disproportionately low-income communities that lie near coal- and oil-fired power plants, said public health advocates on Wednesday as they urged the Environmental Protection Agency to quickly implement the rule.

• The scientists said that it remained unclear how the pandemic began.

• As COVID-19 sends demand for research macaques soaring, a U.S. court case is raising questions about their origins.

• The pollutant ‘forever chemical’ PFAS can be filtered out of drinking water, use of a new facility on a Danish island has shown.

• Save your money.

• A regimen using supercharged immune cells appears to work against tumors in children with a rare kind of cancer, researchers reported Wednesday.

• Polish Agriculture Minister Henryk Kowalczyk has resigned amid rising anger among farmers over the impact of Ukrainian grain imports on prices.

• AMLO said he sent the missive after pressure from U.S. lawmakers concerned about the trafficking of fentanyl across the Mexico-U.S. border.

• Johnson & Johnson (J&J) is willing to pay $8.9 billion to settle tens of thousands lawsuits alleging its talc-based baby powder cause cancer—an allegation the company continues to deny.

• Riley Waggaman The masterminds behind Moscow’s Sanitary Shield—a medley of PCR testing facilities and “vaccine” development centers—met in late March to review the progress of their not-fit-for-purpose biosecurity Iron Curtain.

• It’s an “environmental train wreck”.

Proprietary

• They’re down by about 2.3% right now.

• Microsoft cut a key team focused on ethical AI product development.

• Microsoft has abandoned plans to establish a new 500,000 sq ft office complex in London, months after announcing it would lay off 10,000 staff worldwide.

• According to property website React News, the American tech giant had been on the lookout for a location in London as a replacement for its current office leases in Reading, due to expire in 2026.

• However, Microsoft seems to have postponed any plans for a new office complex for the time being, in light of the current economic conditions.

• “We are committed to the UK and have facilities across the country,” a spokesperson for Microsoft told The Register.

• “We regularly review our portfolio to make sure it meets the needs of our people and our long-term business.”

• Microsoft established its Thames Valley Park headquarters in the 1980s in the busy M4 corridor, along with many other tech businesses. The lease was renewed in 2010, when approximately 2,000 employees were working at the site.

Security

• Android’s April 2023 security updates were released this week with patches for two critical-severity vulnerabilities leading to remote code execution.

• The seizure comes along with the arrest of nearly 120 people around the world, including Americans, officials said.

• The FBI has seized Genesis Market, a major cybercrime website offering stolen device fingerprints.

• A Chinese site that sells stolen accounts and personal information has been found to have exposed over 600,000 records of stolen data and customer information. Detailed by security researcher Jerimiah Fowler at vpnMentor, the site is called Z2U and operates as a gaming market.

• Online tax return filing service eFile.com was injected with malicious JavaScript code serving malware to visitors.

• Chrome 112 was released to the stable channel this week with 16 security fixes, including 14 for vulnerabilities reported by external researchers.

• Google LLC’s Threat Analysis Group today released new information on a subset of the North Korean hacking group known as APT43 and what it’s doing to protect users from this group.

• International police have shut down what they called “one of the world’s largest” online markets dealing in millions of stolen identities and account details, Europol and U.S. officials said on April 5.

• Genesis Market is shut down:

• Queensland Police Service and Victoria Police on Thursday said the investigation that led to the seizure of the site had been led by the FBI and assisted by the AFP, NSW Police Force, Victoria Police, Queensland Police Service and Western Australia Police Force.

• It said at the time the site was taken down, it was offering access to more than 1.5 million compromised computers, each containing information for dozens of accounts.

• Genesis offered login credentials, browsing history, autofill form data and other sensitive data taken from compromised devices.

• I don’t write about my employment. A few people have contacted me since I started blogging to ask if I worked for a specific tech company. And my answer will always be the same: Radio silence.

• Part of what makes blogging here fun for me is that I’m not bound by any obligations to any company.

• When I publish security vulnerabilities, it’s in the interest of protecting end users from the products and services that could harm them. I don’t give a damn if the company in question gets egg on their face. I similarly don’t give a damn if I make them look good. Not my circus.

• In a world where cyber threats are constantly evolving, securing your Linux environment is crucial to protect sensitive data and system resources. One of the most effective ways to enhance security is by enforcing strong password policies for users.

• Military and intelligence agencies, hospitals and corporations all deploy air-gapped environments to protect their sensitive information from breaches and theft. An air-gapped environment aims to isolate and limit access to classified and sensitive data.

• Nexx has ignored repeated attempts to report critical product vulnerabilities that can be exploited to remotely open garage doors, and take control of alarms and smart plugs.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The game of love is a game of cat and mouse. I should know. In that game, a phone number is a precious tool to corner your prey. Oh, you should see the high fives that are dished out by the predator’s friends when one finally gets those all-important digits.

Defence/Aggression

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in Poland on Wednesday to strengthen ties with a neighbouring country that has played a big role in galvanising Western military and political support for Kyiv against Russia’s full-scale invasion. His Polish counterpart said Warsaw was ready to send all its MiG-29 jets to Ukraine “in the future”, provided Poland’s NATO allies provided adequate security guarantees.

• China says the meeting has seriously broken the commitment made by Washington to Beijing on the Taiwan issue.

• Ajamu Baraka joins Lee Camp to discuss how the media demonizes enemies of the US empire, the US military’s global command structure, neocolonial behavior, and the white supremacy inherent to its hegemony.

• International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said he held talks on April 5 with Russian officials on the Moscow-held Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine.

• A Baku court has ordered four suspects in the attempted assassination of a member of Azerbaijan’s parliament be placed in pretrial detention.

• US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy sits down with Taiwan’s president on Wednesday for a highly symbolic meeting in California that has already prompted outrage and dire warnings from China.

• Tsai meets US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in Los Angeles despite Beijing’s warnings.

• The moment was historic — a U.S. House speaker meeting with the president of Taiwan for a rare visit on American soil. The high-profile encounter Wednesday between Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was designed to boost support for the island government. But the meeting at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California also was drawing rebuke from China, which announced patrols Wednesday in the Taiwan Strait. It was most sensitive stop on Tsai’s transit through the U.S. and Latin America. For McCarthy, who is outspoken on China, it was the start of his foray into foreign affairs as House speaker.

• House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has welcomed Taiwan’s president in a rare high-level meeting on U.S. soil. It was a face-to-face session with President Tsai Ing-wen that risks anger from China. More than a dozen Democratic and Republican lawmakers joined Republican McCarthy for the talks at southern California’s Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. The meeting underscored strong support among U.S. lawmakers for the self-ruled island as tensions rise with rival China. For Tsai it’s the most sensitive stop on a weeklong journey meant to shore up alliances with the U.S. and Central America. China views any interaction between U.S. and Taiwanese officials as a challenge to its claim to the island as its territory.

• Experts say bilateral oil and gas exploration with China may cause friction within ASEAN.

• North Korea has reacted furiously to the exercises, calling them a rehearsal for invasion.

• The failed Beitbridge fence project led by former Public Works and Infrastructure minister Patricia de Lille was “a total disaster” her successor said.

• Cutting off al Shabaab’s estimated $100 million in extortion-generated annual revenue will require restoring the integrity of Somalia’s compromised financial, judicial, and intelligence agencies. Despite setbacks, al Shabaab remains a resilient and destabilizing threat in Somalia. In the past year, it was linked to 2,553 violent events and 6,225 fatalities.

• Although Ukraine is aiming to become a NATO member, the alliance is divided on the issue of accepting Kyiv to the club, Politico has reported.

• Lithuania is initiating cross-border proceedings against Belarus over migrant smuggling, accusing Minsk of facilitating irregular migration in order to pressure Vilnius and the EU.

• Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, told a UN Security Council meeting on April 5 that Moscow is coordinating with international organizations to return Ukrainian children to their families.

• Poland’s fencing federation has withdrawn from hosting a World Cup competition this month after the International Fencing Federation ruled that athletes from Russia and Belarus could compete at the event under neutral status if they are not linked to Moscow’s full-scale aggression in Ukraine.

• Russia accused the West of the same charge the International Criminal Court has leveled at the Moscow: abducting Ukrainian children. Fifty countries issued a joint statement saying Russia was spreading falsehoods.

• Speaker Kevin McCarthy became the most senior elected official to meet with a Taiwanese president on American soil since the United States established diplomatic relations with Beijing.

• US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in California on Wednesday, becoming the most senior US figure to meet a Taiwanese leader on US soil since 1979 despite threats of retaliation from China, which claims self-ruled Taiwan as its own.

• Bob Lee, a technology executive who created Cash App and was currently chief product officer of MobileCoin, has been fatally stabbed in downtown San Francisco. The San Francisco Police Department has disclosed little about the stabbing. A press release from the department says officers responding to a stabbing in Rincon Hill neighborhood at 2:35 a.m. Tuesday found a wounded 43-year-old man who later died at a hospital. Police did not identify the man but MobileCoin confirmed Lee’s death in response to an email from The Associated Press on Wednesday. MobileCoin CEO Josh Goldbard says Lee made large contributions to Android at Google and was the first chief technology officer of Square before coming to MobileCoin.

• Mr. Lee, 43, was chief product officer at the cryptocurrency start-up MobileCoin. The case remains under investigation.

• The U.S. State Department has blocked four Georgian judicial officials from entering the country due to their involvement in “significant corruption,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

• In March, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, where they not only “reaffirm[ed] the special nature of the Russia-China partnership,” but “signed a statement on deepening the strategic partnership and bilateral ties which are entering a new era.”

• President Emmanuel Macron of France spoke of the need for a “shared responsibility for peace and international stability.”

• French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday that China had a “major role” to play in finding a path to peace in Ukraine, as he kicked off a three-day visit to Beijing.

• French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen arrive in Beijing on Wednesday for a three-day state visit in a bid to dissuade China from supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But will the latest European leaders to visit China be able to manage the fine balance between trade and geopolitics?

• By Francesco Fontemaggi French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Beijing on Wednesday for a visit in which he hopes to dissuade China from supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while also forging closer ties with a crucial trade partner.

• Students across the United States walked out of their classrooms Wednesday to take part in a nationwide protest demanding gun control legislation amid relentless shootings that have already claimed more than 10,000 lives in a little over three months this year.

• The LRT Investigation Team has uncovered a Russian network facilitating aircraft purchases from the EU and circumventing sanctions. The scheme involves companies in Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Italy, and Russia. A private Russia-bound plane has been stranded in Lithuania’s Palanga for several weeks, with the pilot missing.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has arrived in Poland for a state visit, a senior Polish official told the broadcaster TVN24.

• Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova said Tuesday that life with the 16-year-old from Mariupol who she “adopted” after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine is not always “smooth,” but that they “love each other.”

• 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.

• The civil war in Tigray is over – for now. Up to 380,000 civilians are thought to have died, and tens of thousands of women raped. Can peace hold in the face of such atrocities?

• Tehran could be capable of building a nuclear weapon within just a few weeks. In an interview, scholar Nasser Hadian says that Tehran is interested in more than just calculated provocation – and discusses what the West should do next.

• Belarusian authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka is headed to Moscow on April 5 for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine.

• Tibetans related to protestors are denied university exams and job opportunities

• Xu Guang is ‘very weak’ after months of hunger strike and forced feeding to commemorate the Tiananmen massacre.

• Russia’s announcement that it will station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus shows that a Russia-China joint statement days earlier amounted to “empty promises,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said.

• French President Emmanuel Macron said on April 5 that he wants to “engage China toward a shared responsibility for peace” in Ukraine when he meets Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week.

• The false details in the CIA’s cover story.

• Here’s something we seldom focus on when it comes to war, American-style, even during the just-passed 20th anniversary of our disastrous invasion of Iraq: Many more soldiers survive armed conflict than die from it. This has been especially so during this country’s 21st-century War on Terror, which is still playing out in all too many lands globally.

• The ambassador, Fu Cong, said China was not on Russia’s side in the war in Ukraine. “‘No limit’ is nothing but rhetoric,” he said, referring to a statement from last year about the countries’ relationship.

• VR therapy takes the next step with group therapy classes set in a virtual Kyiv.

• State Duma Deputy Yana Lantratova called on Russia’s Investigative Committee to conduct an inquiry into a parody performance mocking the assassination of the war propagandist Vladlen Tatarsky.

• Social media users who follow accounts belonging to Daria Trepova, the 26-year-old accused of killing pro-Kremlin war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, are being targeted by online threats and harassment, the Telegram channel Rotonda reported on Wednesday, citing multiple St. Petersburg activists whose names were posted in groups dedicated to “investigating” Tatarsky’s murder.

• The Latvian Saeima (unicameral parliament) has passed in the final third reading a law that reintroduces mandatory service in the military for Latvian men aged 18–27.

• On Wednesday, the Latvian parliament Saeima decided to reintroduce compulsory military service in the country, Latvia’s public broadcaster LSM has reported.

• On Wednesday, April 5, the Saeima decided on the re-introduction of the compulsory national defense service in Latvia by adopting the draft law on the State Defense Service and related bills in the final reading.

• Following the much-publicised removal of a Soviet-era monument last year, Victory Park (Uzvaras parks) in Rīga will this year receive 6 million euros’ worth of investment to make it a more pleasant place to be, Rīga City Council said April 5.

• The Latvian Foreign Minister, Edgars Rinkēvičs, congratulated Finland on joining NATO on April 4, saying the historic milestone will contribute to the security of the Baltic Sea region and the Alliance in general.

• The State Security Service (VDD) has released its annual public report reviewing its activities during 2022.

• Vitaly Votanovsky, an activist from Krasnodar Krai who used Telegram to draw public attention to the high number of Wagner Group mercenaries being buried in the town of Bakinskaya, has reportedly left the country.

• A 25-year-old man burst into a preschool in southern Brazil and killed four children with a hatchet-like weapon Wednesday before turning himself in to police, an attack President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva condemned as “monstrous”.

• Darya Trepova will be remanded in custody for two months, until June 2, 2023.

• The victim, later identified as 21-year-old Tanner Cook, was found nearby with a gunshot wound to his abdomen. He was transported to a local hospital for treatment.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The Supreme Court of India today (April 5) criticized the government for its tendency to place information before it in sealed covers with the information inside them accessible only to the judges.

Environment

• Two historic developments last week are putting the climate crisis squarely on the docket of some of the world’s highest courts. On March 29, an international human rights court in Europe held a pair of hearings addressing government responsibility on climate change for the first time. That same day, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution asking the International Court of Justice to weigh in on nations’ legal obligations to ensure protection of the climate system.

• The outcomes of the proceedings, experts say, could significantly advance climate justice and accountability as well as clarify the requirements under international law for governments to curb climate breakdown.

• A small miracle happened in New York on March 29. A humble campaign that began three years ago on the Vanuatu campus of the University of the South Pacific culminated in the adoption of a UN General Assembly resolution requesting an advisory opinion on climate change from the International Court of Justice.

• Climate groups celebrated Wednesday once top officials revealed that after outraging campaigners and fellow Democrats, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul no longer sees rewriting a landmark state law to allow more planet-heating emissions as a top priority for budget negotiations.

• On the heels of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (3/20/23), which featured scientists running out of ways to emphasize how urgently deep cuts in fossil fuel use are needed, a troubling new climate study has emerged. Published in the prominent peer-reviewed science journal Nature (3/29/23), the study found that a little-studied deep ocean circulation system is slowing dramatically, and could collapse this century. One IPCC author not involved in the study declared it “headline news.” Unfortunately, science doesn’t guide US corporate media, which were virtually silent on the landmark study.

• Peer-reviewed research out Wednesday shows that parts of a huge ice sheet covering Eurasia retreated up to 2,000 feet per day at the end of the last ice age—by far the fastest rate measured to date.

• Rising seas from climate change is bringing saltwater into freshwater supplies in India, where less than half the population can access clean drinking water. In Chellanam increased salinity in the aquifer has forced residents to retrieve freshwater by hand.

• The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Wednesday vacated a preliminary injunction blocking Executive Order 13990.

• March in Hong Kong was “unseasonably warm,” the Hong Kong Observatory has said, with the monthly mean temperature almost 2 degrees Celsius warmer than normal.

• It all adds up.

Energy/Transportation

• Lithuania continues negotiations with Sweden, its major electricity provider, after the European Commission told Sweden to sign an agreement with Lithuania on sharing electricity producers’ excess revenue, Lithuanian Energy Minister Dainius Kreivys says.

• Australia’s largest solar farm capable of powering 235,000 homes, is close to being switched on in Queensland.  The 400-megawatt Western Downs Green Power Hub, about 300 kilometres west of Brisbane, has more than one million solar panels.

• Images released Tuesday by the operator of Japan’s destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant showed significant damage on the inside of one of the facility’s three melted reactors, heightening fears that another earthquake in the region could spark a fresh radioactive catastrophe.

• A report published Wednesday by the Environmental Working Group examines how the “mining” process behind popular cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Monero creates a wide range of pollution that is harming communities and fueling the climate emergency.

• Despite pledging to take action on the climate emergency, including by ending international fossil fuel financing, Group of 20 governments continue to pour billions of dollars into gas infrastructure expansion, according to an analysis released Wednesday.

• The state, heavily dependent on the auto industry, is a case study in whether electric vehicles will create or destroy jobs.

• Progress roundup: Tests show recycled glass aids Louisiana marshlands, floating PV panels slow evaporation, non-invasive imaging uncovers mysteries in Giza.

• In this letter to the Stanford community, various members of The Coalition for a True School of Sustainability advocate for the need for an open dialogue about about Doerr’s collaboration with fossil fuel companies. They write, “As we navigate this latest paradigm shift of removing bias in sustainability and environmental research, we believe it is crucial to find a path together, through shared dialogue.”

Wildlife/Nature

• On Wednesday, April 5, the Nature Conservation Agency (DAP) captured a bear cub who had wandered along the Limbaži-Aloja road for several days. The bear has been delivered to the Rīga Zoo and placed in quarantine, DAP said.

Finance

• Every year, Latvian residents lose several million coins of one and two cents. They are dropped on the streets and lying around in drawers and pockets, and sucked up in vacuum cleaners. For this reason, the Latvian central bank (Bank of Latvia) intends to reduce the circulation of these nominals, Latvian Radio reported April 5.

• I rode a cable car on my trip to San Francisco earlier this year. The cable car may be the closest I have been to a rollercoaster in terms of the uneasiness of the journey. We went up a big hill, then went down. I rode the full cable car on the Powell / Hyde journey. One experience from the journey that I recall vividly, aside from the beautiful views and excitement I felt on the journey, is one passenger trying to figure out how to buy a digital ticket on the cable car journey.

• Iain Davis In Part 1 we noted that “money” is no more than a medium of exchange. If we cooperate in sufficient numbers, we could create an economy based upon an entirely voluntary monetary system.

• Russia’s second-largest bank VTB, one of the first banks to be excluded from the SWIFT global payments system over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, reported a loss of 612.6 billion rubles ($7.7 billion) for 2022 on April 5.

• Top leaders in the North Carolina Senate want to reduce the state’s already falling individual income tax rate even further than what’s already set to happen

• The director of the Nebraska Department of Economic Development has resigned a day after a news report saying that a business he owns received $24,000 in pandemic relief grants from the agency he headed

• Under America’s current loophole-ridden tax law, rich people — even billionaires — can pass unlimited investment gains to their descendants without paying a dollar in income tax. These rich don’t even have to do any fancy planning. All they have to do is die, a step everyone, of course, takes eventually.

• The labour shortage is triggering room rate inflation and a drop in the quality of hospitality.

• The president of the World Bank, speaking at the Atlantic Council as he prepares to hand over the reins to his successor, has one big worry about the global economy: a “reversal in development.”

• The headline rate, which has dropped almost two points since last year’s peak, is slightly below the 6.89% consensus forecast.

• Further interest rate rises for squeezed mortgage-holders remain firmly on the table as the head of the Reserve Bank warns of stubbornly high rents and energy prices in the long-term.

• World stock markets have stumbled as signs the economic outlook is weakening spurred caution, while a bigger-than-expected interest-rate hike from New Zealand lifted its dollar. European stocks fell on Wednesday with the broad STOXX 600 index pulling away from Tuesday’s one-month highs.

• When Barbara Ehrenreich founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project in the aftermath of the 2008 economic recession, she envisioned that the nonprofit would publish “quality journalism about inequality.” Alissa Quart, who worked alongside Ehrenreich at the EHRP and now serves as its executive director, embodies this ethos in her own trenchant cultural criticism and reporting, picking apart American delusions from the ads marketed to teens (Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers) to the stability of a middle-class life (Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America).1

• Victoria commits around $80m dollars a year for Melbourne’s Formula One Grand Prix, an event with no business case and no updated cost-benefit analysis to show if the event generates value for money. Joan and Peter Logan of the Save Albert Park group debunk the spin.

• Victorians may remember their then Premier Jeff Kennett assuring them that the Australian Grand Prix would not cost taxpayers a cent when he announced in 1993 that the race would move from Adelaide. He was right. So far it has cost Victorians more than one billion dollars, with a further billion expected to be added to that by the contract‘s end in 2037.

• Flying to Ireland to inhale the seaside air as you drive a golf ball into the scenic distance. Crossing the country to reach your enormous yacht, which is ready for your Hudson River pleasure cruise. Hosting a governor’s wife on your very own aircraft. These are only a few of the joys that the richest Americans have experienced in recent years through their private jets. And what made them all the sweeter is that they came with a tax write-off.

• Over the past two years, ProPublica has documented the many ways that the ultrawealthy avoid taxes. The biggest or most daring maneuvers scale in the billions of dollars, and while the tax deductibility of private jets isn’t the most important feature of U.S. tax law, the fact that billionaires’ luxury rides come with millions in tax savings says a lot about how the system really works.

• For Pamela Lang, a realtor in the Phoenix area whose son developed learning disabilities after surviving a typically fatal brain tumor at nine months, it seemed like a dream come true. Lang was unhappy with the special education accommodations at her son’s local public school, and now Arizona was offering more than $30,000 in a private bank account to cover the cost of private education.

• Since January, French citizens have held massive demonstrations to reject this reform, which proposes to delay the retirement age to 64 years by 2030.

• French unions said last-ditch talks with the prime minister on Wednesday had failed to ease tensions over a divisive pension reform and called for record turnout at protest rallies the next day.

• Over three quarters (77%) of tech talent in the UK are unhappy in their current jobs and actively seeking out new roles, according to a new report out today.

• The What Do Tech Talent Want in 2023 report, by Europe’s biggest technology talent hub hackajob, surveyed over 1,000 UK technology workers from developers and engineers, to data scientists, analysts, designers, product managers and more.

• According to the report, only 11% of UK tech talent are content to stay in their current role.

• The US House of Representatives has voted to strip China of its status as a developing country. China has condemned the move and refuses to join the ranks of developed or “wealthy” nations. At stake are critical economic and geopolitical issues for the world’s second-largest economy.

• “Among the sanctions measures was the expulsion of chosen Russian banks from the SWIFT system…”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Accurate. And sometimes a foreign country wants to be the past. Somewhere between a faded photo of Benito Mussolini’s inverted corpse and an ill-received performance by the Stormtroopers of Death at the Teatro alla Scala lies this inexplicable decision to return Italy to its nationalistic roots.

• The 86-year-old businessman-turned-politician, now a senator, was admitted to an intensive care unit in Milan. He was said to have a “problem related to a previous infection.”

• Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the son of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, has attracted international attention with a range of striking tweets in recent months – starting with a veiled threat to invade Kenya in October and most recently last week, when he offered to deploy Ugandan troops to defend Moscow from “imperialists”. But the running theme in his tweets is the suggestion that he will soon take over from his father.

• While at UC Irvine School of Law, Cheyenne Hunt clerked for Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

• President Gitanas Nausėda joined the Communist Party in the late 1980s, just around the time when Lithuania started a movement for independence.

• The threat of imprisonment for contempt of court again looms over me if I tell you (again) too much of the truth about the arrest of Nicola Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell. But I can make a few observations.

• Peter Murrell, a longtime Scottish National Party official, was detained by the police for about 11 hours over the handling of donations raised to campaign for a second independence vote.

• At the criminal court in downtown Manhattan today, nothing important happened. Believe me. I was there. There were no meaningful occurrences of true consequence. Certainly nothing worthy of a claim on your limited attention. I wouldn’t bring it up at all, except that I fear that my friends and I in the media may be about to gleefully poison this nation, one more time.

• Iran has appointed an ambassador to the United Arab Emirates for the first time in seven years as Tehran continues to attempt to thaw relations with several of its Gulf state neighbors.

• With great fanfare, a former American president has been formally arraigned on criminal charges for the first time. Donald Trump, ever vengeful and sullen before the workings of justice, appeared before Judge Juan M. Merchan in Manhattan after reporting to the district attorney’s office and getting fingerprinted. News cameras were barred from the courtroom, but every other facet of the legal proceeding was chronicled and pundit-parsed, from footage of Trump’s private plane en route to New York from Florida, to his security motorcade’s journey downtown from Trump Tower, to the motley gaggle of pro-Trump protesters outside the courthouse.

• The leader of Bulgaria’s center-right GERB party, coming off a narrow victory in snap parliamentary elections, has invited all other parties that gained seats in parliament to join talks on forming a government.

• Since the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in 2016, Britons have lost their automatic right of residence in EU member states. Last year, 60 British citizens were told to leave Latvia, according to EU figures published March 31.

• Chicago, Ill.—Anyone who doubts the power of organized labor to reshape the world should look to the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and its allies’ electing one of their own as mayor of the third-largest city in America last night. Brandon Johnson, a black 47-year-old Cook County commissioner and former CTU member and staffer, shocked this city by winning its mayoral runoff, besting former Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Paul Vallas by about 16,000 votes as of late last night, after running an unabashedly progressive campaign calling for expanding social services and new taxes on the rich. This despite Vallas’s austerity- and crime-obsessed campaign (funded principally by the wealthy) outspending Johnson’s campaign (funded principally by unions) nearly two to one.

• Progressive Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson defeated conservative Democrat and school privatizer Paul Vallas in Chicago’s mayoral runoff on Tuesday, a victory he called a “gateway to a new future” for the nation’s third-largest city.

• Seeing Trump arraigned in New York on Tuesday was satisfying even if the outcome of the trial cannot be foreseen and he has a presumption of innocence. There is obviously evidence that he falsified his business records for the purpose of hiding material facts from the American people in October 2015, so as to defeat Hillary Clinton even after the release of the Billy Bush interview in which he boasted of grabbing random women by the genitals. Major Republicans began peeling away at that point, and the revelation of the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal affairs (while Melania was pregnant with Baron) would likely have finished him off.

• Donald Trump looked wounded sitting at the defendant’s table in court on Tuesday. Lips pursed, eyes glazed and sullen. Surrounded by his lawyers, he was nonetheless alone; they talked and even joked with one another, not with him. It almost moved me. If Trump were capable of empathy, I might have mustered some for him.

• Even within the booming anti-union consulting industry, this is an unusually high amount of spending.

• Blinken says he wanted to ‘thank’ Putin for giving Finland a reason to join NATO by invading Ukraine.

• For Americans, admitting that people in other parts of the world have and want different things from what they have and want can, in its subtle way, be devastating to their view of the world.

• North Carolina State Rep. Tricia Cotham formally announced Wednesday that she is switching from the Democratic Party to the GOP, handing Republicans a veto-proof majority in the House and potentially imperiling Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s ability to block right-wing attacks on reproductive freedom and voting rights.

• Poor People’s Campaign co-chair Bishop William J. Barber II on Wednesday stood in solidarity with three Democratic Tennessee state lawmakers facing a Republican-led expulsion effort over protesting for gun reform on the House floor after last week’s Nashville elementary school massacre.

• The United Nations has ordered its 3,300 employees in Afghanistan not to report to their offices for the next two days as the UN mission in the war-torn country seeks further clarification after Taliban rulers appeared to extend a ban on Afghan women working in UN offices.

• I have to concede one point: Today’s far-right Republican party does not discriminate against women. In fact, the GOP is giving its female political buffoons a higher profile than its male bozos.

• A tenants union in Kansas City on Tuesday credited a major grassroots effort with ensuring its six endorsed progressive candidates for city council seats moved on to the general election, bringing the city a step closer to what Mayor Quinton Lucas said could become “the most progressive city council that we have seen in Kansas City’s history.”

• “…there were hearings conducted for individuals implicated in the incident…”

• Israeli police brutally attacked Palestinians inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem on Tuesday night, injuring at least a dozen peaceful worshipers and arresting more than 400 during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

• The raid at the sensitive holy site set off Palestinian rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, followed by Israeli airstrikes on the territory. On Wednesday night, there was a second raid at the compound.

• Israeli Police Wednesday raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and arrested 350 people inside. Police said in a statement that they forced entry into the compound in a bid to counter “masked agitators.

• Israel edged closer to civil war over the weekend than at any point in its history. By Monday night, in a bid to avert chaos, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to put a temporary halt to his plans to neuter the Israeli courts.

• The historic arraignment of former U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday highlighted how infrequently American political leaders are held accountable for any crimes.

• The US and its allies and partners must pragmatically adapt to China’s growing regional influence by providing credible alternatives to Beijing.

• “Trump should be prosecuted for a variety of crimes, committed both as a private citizen and public official,” argues Jeremy Scahill. “But if we want to claim that our system is exceptional, then the same fate should be brought to bear on the Bushes, Cheneys, and Kissingers of the world as well.”

• The illusion of a cohesive Israel, an Israel that is a miraculous success, exists only in the minds of privileged Israeli and some diaspora Jews. Some European politicians may also believe this to be the case, having been convinced by Jews in their countries. But it was never the case.

• This is a talk Chris Hedges gave on April 4th at the Independent National Convention in Austin, Texas.

• “Despite an assault on human rights and the rule of law in many countries,” human rights defenders “showed remarkable courage and persistence in advocating for more democratic, just, and inclusive societies.”

• For years I’ve joked that everyone who hasn’t thought about trust & safety thinks that it’s easy: just do what I would do. The assumption is that there’s a “right” set of ways to handle these questions, when the reality is that there’s a very broad set of unclear areas, where there are reasonable arguments for a wide variety of possible ways to handle things. This is why good trust & safety teams focus on trying to craft clear policies that can be followed by a large distributed team, while realizing that there will be many difficult calls that don’t fit neatly. In those cases, the teams have to make a tough call, or consider whether or not the policies themselves need to be adjusted.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• This new AI tool rocking the art world is only “a year or two” from “perfection.”

• Star hosts for Fox News like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity may also appear in person at the high-profile trial, which is set to start April 17.

• Last week and this, I’ve been serializing my Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Output draft. For some earlier posts on this (including § 230, disclaimers, publication, and more), see here; one particular significant point is at Communications Can Be Defamatory Even If Readers Realize There’s a Considerable Risk of Error.

• Twitter labeled National Public Radio as “state-affiliated media,” a move that some worried Wednesday could undermine public confidence in the news organization

Censorship/Free Speech

• Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 is widely regarded as “the most important law in tech.”

• Russian sixth-grader Masha Moskaleva, whose anti-war drawing at school drew the ire of the Russian authorities and was followed by a felony conviction against her father, is now in the custody of her mother, Olga Sitchikhina, Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova said on Wednesday.

• The management of Triumph, a privately-owned concert hall in Perm, has announced the cancelation of the celebrity pianist Polina Osetinskaya’s April 5 concert.

• DeSantis signed a controversial law last year that makes banning books in schools easier.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says he has “no doubt” Russia has wrongfully detained a U.S. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), but that a formal determination must go through a process before a decision is announced.

• Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday said the US government is working to determine whether Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich is being wrongfully detained for espionage in Russia.

• Raconteur deputy editor Fran Cassidy explains the outcome of the first iteration of its New Voices Programme.

• Publishers were less affected by March’s core algorithm update than they were six months earlier.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A 463-page investigation released by the Maryland attorney general detailed the “enormous scope and scale” of scandal.

• More than 150 Catholic priests and others associated with the Archdiocese of Baltimore sexually abused more than 600 children over the past 80 years, the report said.

• A resounding victory by a liberal judge who ran on abortion rights showed that a largely unified political left is keeping up its momentum, and served as a new warning sign to Republicans.

• Which would be worse: being beaten by your partner, or having social services take away your children? That’s the choice facing many parents I’ve worked with as a social worker, and the answer is always the same. “I’d rather take the beating than catch a CPS case,” as one said to me.

• 4/5/1982: Justice Abe Fortas dies.

• A new program at Bowie State connects computing students directly with companies, bypassing an often harsh Silicon Valley vetting process.

• Critics say the intern selection process often favors wealthier students, just like the admission process at some elite colleges.

• Two Uyghur models participate in the event, wearing dresses by Chinese designer Louise Xin.

• Women are reluctant to have kids because they need to work to support families

• A glass door has been smashed at the Commonwealth parliament offices in Brisbane’s city centre during a series of mass union rallies held nationwide. The Brisbane rally was one of seven the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union held across the country on Wednesday morning.

• Wisconsin voters wrested control of the state Supreme Court from conservatives for the first time in 15 years on Tuesday by electing Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz—an outspoken supporter of abortion rights, ballot access, and union protections—to fill an open seat.

• Daniel Kelly, the right-wing former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who lost his bid to re-join the high court on Tuesday as liberal circuit court judge Janet Protasiewicz won by a decisive margin, refused to concede to his opponent in a speech that one critic said personified the Republican Party’s approach to electoral politics in recent years.

• The choice in the Wisconsin Supreme Court contest that was broadly defined as “the most important election of 2023” could not have been starker. The stakes could not have been higher. And the results on Tuesday night could not have been clearer.

• The Virginia-based IT and staffing company first claimed a junior employee did it, then changed it to former employee. Its Twitter page, Facebook page, and company website have all been disabled.

• Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska was cleared of contempt of court by London’s High Court in a long-running legal battle with his former business partner.

• Prominent Belarusian activist and former presidential candidate Andrey Dzmitryeu has gone on trial over his participation in mass protests against the results of the contentious 2020 presidential election that kept authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka in power.

• A court in Sarajevo has sentenced Fadil Novalic, the prime minister of the Bosniak-Croat Federation to four years in prison after finding him guilty of corruption in a case regarding the purchase and importing of Chinese respirators during the coronavirus pandemic.

• Armed with better capital and experience, Chinese entrepreneurs enjoy a leg up in Laos.

• New bishop Shen Bin vows to carry forward a ‘patriotic’ form of Catholicism after transfer from Haimen diocese.

• Police arrested three people who opposed the work in the name of modernization.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• MeitY established three Grievance Appellate Committee(s) (“GAC”) on January 27, 2023 under Rule 3A of the notified IT Amendment Rules, 2022. We wrote to the Chairpersons of the three Committees, seeking clarification about the GAC’s establishment and functioning.

• We’ve noted for years how, despite a lot of political lip service to “bridging the digital divide,” the U.S. still doesn’t truly know where broadband is or isn’t available. Despite spending $400 billion and counting, the FCC has done an abysmal job accurately mapping broadband speeds and availability, or holding monopolies responsible for false coverage claims (or much of anything else).

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• It’s a mystery why this is all so complicated. And actually, it doesn’t have to be. You can skip all of this nonsense and just sell the files within an app that can handle all the downloading, unzipping, and playback behind the scenes. But every in-app purchase comes with a 30% commission to Apple or Google, which would explain why these two tech giants have completely enshittified direct downloading: the worse the direct download experience is, the better handing over a third of your gross revenue starts to look. It’s the mobile duopoly’s version of the airline industry continuously dreaming up new petty cruelties for their coach fares.

• Apple and Google have a financial incentive to make data loading that is on their platforms but outside of their marketplace as crappy as possible.

Monopolies

Patents

• “Evergreening” refers to the practice by pharmaceutical companies of making small changes to a drug, often about to come off patent, in order to gain a new patent that extends its manufacturer’s monopoly control over it. The first Techdirt post about evergreening appeared almost exactly ten years ago. It concerned the rejection by the Indian Supreme Court of an attempt to “evergreen” the drug Glivec. Now the Indian Patent Office has rejected Johnson & Johnson’s attempt to extend its monopoly on a lifesaving drug for treating tuberculosis, in what is arguably one of the most important wins against evergreening.

• Since 2020, Ocado and AutoStore have been locked in a fierce battle over numerous patents in the US, UK and Germany. In the most recent development, the UK High Court has found two AutoStore patents invalid and not infringed.

Copyrights

• Policing copyright infringement is hard. Hard for those operating websites that allow for the public to input content and hard for the rightsholders that far too often use automated systems that suck out loud at determining what is actually infringing and what isn’t. This is a lesson currently being learned by the European Union, as its website is being bombarded with DMCA notices that are getting parts of the site’s search results delisted.

• DMCA abuse is never going to go away. Plenty of IP protection firms send out unvetted takedown notices in bulk, resulting in the targeting of non-infringers by takedown demands. To maintain their safe harbor protections, entities hosting third-party content tend to side with those sending the notices. For platforms hosting millions or billions of uploads, not a whole lot of vetting happens on the receiving end either.

• The IT giant Yandex has launched a beta-version of Shedevrum, an AI-powered app that generates images using a neural network method.

• Portugal’s Polícia Judiciária and cybercrime unit UNC3T have confirmed responsibility for the arrest of the alleged leader of piracy release group EVO. The enforcement action followed a months-long investigation triggered by a complaint from Amazon, Disney, Netflix and other key movie industry players. The FBI assisted by taking down the group’s US-based servers.

• In 2021, Take-Two Interactive sued several people said to be behind the popular re3 and reVC Grand Theft Auto fan projects. Four key named defendants fired back, arguing that their game fixes & enhancements were fair use, not piracy. Despite having identified no other defendants, Take-Two has just dismissed its case against the four men, with prejudice.

• These watercolour images depict a lost 19th-century Manhattan of grand country estates and vast private gardens.

• Beneath the waves, off the Suffolk Coast, lies a city taken by the sea through centuries of erosion. Matthew Green revisits Dunwich, a once lively port transfigured into a symbol of loss, both eerie and profound, for generations of artists, poets, and historians drawn to its ruinous shores.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• This tree with the u-shaped branches has a certain majesty to it. I’m not sure, but I seem to recall it was furrowed at the bottom, indicating cottonwood.

Technical

• The Unix philosophy ship sailed a long long time ago. I recall a quote from Rob Pike along the lines of “Perl killed it”. I can’t find the exact quote, or I’d include it here with proper citation. The Unix philosophy is sometimes useful, but I’m no absolutist. I live inside emacs a lot of the time, so of course I’m not.

• I’ve heard at least one rando on the net say it’s hypocritical to love emacs and hate systemd. I call BS. Here’s the difference. Systemd is a honking huge C codebase. That’s all it is: an enormous pile of C. Emacs, on the other hand, has a small C core: a Lisp interpreter and some primitives. The really exciting stuff doesn’t happen in C; it happens in Emacs Lisp. The two things are not comparable.

• [...]

• All that being said, the init system I really like is dinit. It’s a C++ codebase with no dependencies. It is also small and has a well-defined scope: system and service management. It uses its own service file format, which is basically lines of key-value pairs. Some of the very same complaints I’ve made against systemd in the previous paragraph could be made against dinit. But dinit seems to be a much more approachable system to me.

• [...]

• It’s worth noting here that GNOME is not part of GNU. It was at one time, but now it isn’t. There’s a huge overlap between Red Hat, GNOME, freedesktop.org, and systemd. The creator of systemd has publicly expressed disdain for the BSDs.

• Wherein it may be learned that “Project Xanadu” was a big project that would do everything…instead, we got the web. Does this sound familiar? It should.

• I recently installed FreeBSD on a Dell Latitude D610 laptop (2005) and it worked directly with the default configuration.

Programming

• I use Homebrew to get a lot of random small programs that I otherwise never would have bothered to get. However, the output of `brew list | wc -l` is currently up to the mid-200s, and a lot of these are mere dependencies of things I actually care about.

• 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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