● 04.06.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 06/04/2023: StarFive-Based Star64 and Identity 0.5

Posted in News Roundup at 3:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Have some spare cash and in the market for a pricey and powerful Linux laptop? TUXEDO would like a word with you for their Stellaris 16 (Gen5). For those of you who want desktop-class performance in something easier to move around, perhaps it might be interesting.

Server

• Since v1.19 (released in 2020), the Kubernetes project provides 12-14 months of patch releases for each minor version. This enables users to qualify and adopt Kubernetes versions in an annual upgrade cycle and receive security fixes for a year.

• The Go project releases new minor versions twice a year, and provides security fixes for the last two minor versions, resulting in about a year of support for each Go version. Even though each new Kubernetes minor version is built with a supported Go version when it is first released, that Go version falls out of support before the Kubernetes minor version does, and the lengthened Kubernetes patch support since v1.19 only widened that gap.

• At the time this was written, just over half of all Go patch releases (88/171) have contained fixes for issues with possible security implications. Even though many of these issues were not relevant to Kubernetes, some were, so it remained important to use supported Go versions that received those fixes.

Audiocasts/Shows

• On this episode of This Week in Linux, we talk about my SCALE 20x Experience, the release of GNOME 44, Red Hat celebrating their 30th Anniversary, Kali Linux also celebrating a milestone and so much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews! Chapters

• This week, Linux Out Loud chats about past projects they miss. Welcome to episode 57 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.

• A fresh take on open-source funding, Fedora’s plan for better encryption out of the box, and our impressions of the latest Ubuntu Beta.

Applications

• My go-to Linux image compressor is Curtail — and it just got even better.

Instructionals/Technical

• To that end, I’m writing a patch for PHP Markdown which will display the first ~200 characters of a footnote in the pop-up title text. Hover over the superscript number and you’ll get a preview of the footnote1.

• As a Linux Mint user, you are likely interested in optimizing your experience with efficient, secure, and user-friendly applications. One application that has gained significant traction among privacy-conscious individuals is Signal Messenger.

• Linux Mint users looking for a powerful and versatile vector graphics editor need not look further than Inkscape. Inkscape is a free, open-source software that has quickly become the standard choice for graphic designers, illustrators, and artists. This introduction will explore what makes Inkscape an exceptional tool for Linux Mint users and its key features.

• VeraCrypt is a powerful open-source encryption software that has gained widespread popularity among privacy-conscious users. With its roots in the TrueCrypt project, VeraCrypt builds upon the original software by providing enhanced security and many advanced features.

• As a Linux Mint user, you’re likely familiar with the power and flexibility of the Vim text editor. However, you may not be aware of its modern, highly extensible cousin: Neovim. Designed to address the limitations of Vim while maintaining its core functionality, Neovim has quickly become a favorite among developers and Linux enthusiasts.

• The Kate Text Editor is a highly versatile, feature-rich, and powerful text editor designed for developers and users, offering many options and capabilities that set it apart from other text editors.

• Linux system administrators often need to manage user accounts and their passwords. The chage command is a powerful tool that helps in managing user password expiry and aging information in Linux.

Games

• It took quite a while for the issues to be figured out but Halo: The Master Chief Collection (MCC) now has improved Steam Deck support. This should also mean it works better on desktop Linux too.

• No Man’s Sky works great on Linux desktop and Steam Deck with Proton and now I need to jump back in because the Interceptor update sounds great. Update: a small patch went up in version 4.20.1 shortly after, to fix issues on Steam Deck.

• Fanatical and JSAUX have done a little teaming up between a Steam Deck bundle of games and and some Docking Stations. What’s the deal? Well if you shop with either of them, you’ll get a voucher for the other.

• Valve has now revealed their latest list of the most popular games on Steam Deck through March 2023. As usual, plenty of them are expected and have been on the list before.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• I am very thankful to the KDE community for inviting me to be a part of this amazing Free & Open Source project through their annual program Season of KDE (SoK). I am writing this blog as a follow-up to a previous blog post. Please check out that post for some background information about the work described here.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• My university studies and work revolve around image- and video-processing algorithms. I frequently need to compare similar but subtly different output videos: to see how various algorithms solving the same problem behave, or to see the progress as I’m tweaking my own algorithm.

• In 2020, I made a GNOME app, Identity, to assist me. It plays multiple videos at once in sync, and lets you switch between them like tabs in a browser. This way you can easily examine the differences at any point.

• Identity has seen a number of releases since then and grown a number of helpful features, like zooming or viewing media properties. And now, in v0.5, I have implemented a side-by-side comparison mode. All files are arranged in a row or a column, and their zoom and pan positions are synchronized. You can explore different parts of an image or a video and see how they look across all versions that you opened. This is a quite useful comparison mode, and also more obvious for first-time users.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Debian Family

• There are lots of Linux distros geared toward low-powered hardware. Emmabuntüs is one such distribution that aims to make Linux and computing more accessible to people who otherwise might not get to use computers.

• Let’s take a look at Emmabuntüs and see if it’s the right Linux distro for you.

• Emmabuntüs is a Linux distribution focused on educational use. It’s designed to run on older, previously used machines, so hardware requirements are kept low.

• The distro is primarily developed for use in France and Africa, hence the language of the official homepage is French, but for English-speaking users, it’s translated via Google.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• In just a few short weeks, Ubuntu and the various official Ubuntu flavours will release version 23.04 dubbed Lunar Lobster. This cycle will be a bit more spicy with the introduction of two new members to the Ubuntu flavour family.

• The first of the new flavours is an old face from Ubuntu history. Edubuntu was once an official Ubuntu edition that sought to bring the freedom of the Linux desktop and the vast library of open source education software into the classroom. Almost a decade later, Edubuntu has been resurrected by Amy and Erich Eichmeyer. Amy, an early childhood educator, and Erich, the project lead for Ubuntu Studio, felt inspired to revive the project after attending the Ubuntu Summit in fall of 2022. This revitalised Edubuntu carries with it the same mission of its predecessor built upon the latest Ubuntu desktop plus some helpful tools crafted with educators in mind. Edubuntu provides a fast, stable, secure and privacy conscious option for schools, universities and other institutions of learning.

• Announcing this visual buff in its latest monthly update, Mint says the feature will simplify the Cinnamon desktop’s extensive customisation capabilities whilst still satisfying those looking to fine-tune the way their desktop looks and feels.

• “A style has up to three modes: mixed, dark and light. Each of these modes can contain color “variants”. A variant is a combination of themes which work well together,” Mint says of its new feature.

• Effectively, Linux MInt’s new “Styles” are “one-click” combinations of UI elements that work well together. Instead of users needing to individually select matching components (e.g., gtk theme, icon theme, shell theme, etc) in different pickers they simply select the overarching style instead.

Devices/Embedded

• The router runs the OpenWrt Linux operating system with support for OpenVPN, IPSeC, GRE, PPTP, L2TP, and Stunnel for secure data transmission, Modbus, MQTT, HTTP, and other IoT protocols, and Docker to run containers.

• I had never heard about Queclink Wireless Solutions, but it’s a publicly-traded company listed on the Shenzhen stock market with almost a one billion dollar market cap. Additional information about the WR300FG 5G industrial router can be found on the product page and in the press release.

• Powered by the StarFive JH7110 Quad-Core SiFive RISC-V U74 64-bit 1.5GHz processor and featuring an Imagination Technology BX-4-32 600Mhz GPU, the Star64 Model-A SBC supports up to 8GB 1866MHz LPDDR4 memory and comes with an embedded 32-bit RISC-V E24 CPU for real-time control.

• The RISC-V CPU that powers Star64 is fully compliant with the RISC-V ISA specification (RV32IMFC RISC-V ISA support) and also includes an RV64IMAC S7 monitor core, 16 KB L1 I-cache with ECC, 8 KB DTIM with ECC, 2MB L2 cache with ECC, and virtual memory support with up to 47 physical address bits.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Tomography is a way to look at the internal structure of an object (a cell, your brain, a priceless artefact that you suspect is a forgery) without cutting into it mechanically. There are lots of different types of tomography, but in general, you aim some kind of wave (X-rays, visible light, gamma rays…) at the object you want to investigate, and measure what gets through to the other side.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Bloomberg — yes that Bloomberg — is offering financial help to open source projects through its new FOSS Fund.

• The company we mentioned previously is in the news. Seen at Blocks And Files:

• If MinIO want to discourage software developers from including its code in their products it is managing this very well.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• One of the irritating ongoing changes in Firefox over the past N years is Firefox’s slow but steady encroachment on the space in the URL bar. One of those things is the ‘star’ button for bookmarking the current page (or unbookmarking it), which Mozilla added at one point and doesn’t let you remove, even if you don’t use bookmarking and want the space so you can actually see more of the page’s URL. So after grousing about it, I wound up removing the star button in my custom Firefox build, through the means of commenting out the entire snippet of browser ‘HTML’ that defines it. It turns out that this breaks Ctrl-D, apparently because the normal pop-up bookmark dialog wants to manipulate the state of the star. With no star element at all to manipulate, Firefox starts raising internal Javascript errors.

• This got a bit delayed due to $DAYJOB interfering with my important hacking and writing time (darn having to make a living), but Firefox 111 is out. [...]

Programming/Development

• Here’s a short report of a time I used TLA⁺ at work, with interesting results. TLA⁺ is a formal specification language that is particularly effective when applied to concurrent & distributed systems. TLA⁺ made it tractable for an ordinary software engineer to reason about a tricky distributed systems problem, and it found a bug introduced by an “optimization” I tried to add (classic). The bug required 12 sequential steps to occur and would not have been uncovered by ordinary testing.

• If you grew up with computers in the 1970s and 1980s, as I did, you probably learned a common programming language for personal computers called BASIC, or the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. You could find BASIC implementations on every personal computer of the era, including the TRS-80, Apple II, and the IBM PC. Back then, I was a self-taught BASIC programmer, experimenting with AppleSoft BASIC on the Apple II before moving to GW-BASIC on the IBM PC and, later, to QuickBASIC on DOS.

• But once upon a time, a popular language for scientific programming was FORTRAN, short for FORmula TRANslation. Although since the 1990 specification of the language, the name is more commonly stylized as “Fortran.”

• When I studied physics as a university undergraduate student in the early 1990s, I leveraged my experience in BASIC to learn FORTRAN 77. That was when I realized that BASIC derived many of its concepts from FORTRAN. To be clear, FORTRAN and BASIC differ in lots of other ways, but I found that knowing a little BASIC helped me to learn FORTRAN programming quickly.

• I want to show some similarities between the two languages by writing the same program in both. I’ll explore the FOR loop in BASIC and FORTRAN 77 by writing a sample program to add a list of numbers from 1 to 10.

• Terminal emulators came up as a topic for me recently, and it got me thinking: What’s everyone’s favorite terminal font?

• So I asked Opensource.com contributors to share what font they like to use. Here are their answers.

• This post is about exposing field errors programmatically. I have already shared some opinions (such as a caution about displaying messages below fields or avoiding default browser field validation), but this post dives into using ARIA to convey them to screen reader users.

• With fields that produce error messages on blur, I compare two types of live regions along with aria-describedby and aria-errormessage. This post does not address whether or not it is ideal to validate fields on blur. You can find plenty of opinions elsewhere.

Leftovers

• In these trying times, it is of utmost importance to be prepared for anything at all times. The concept of EDC, short for “EveryDay Carry”, has steadily grown in popularity over the last couple of years. An EDC is a highly personal assortment of helpful items, varying with the carrier’s demeanor, profession, location and outlook on life. Honing and curating this small collection of useful tools and necessities has become an art, shared on the Internet by everyone from computer geek to rugged outdoorsman.

• Here is mine. This is what I bring with me every day, no matter where I go. Be impressed, amazed – and hopefully inspired.

• I’m glad that people enjoy my writing. It’s great that people find it a useful resource for explaining tough technical issues in a way that a general audience can understand and absorb. I’m delighted when people tell me that my blog helped them in their career, or helped their company avoid a security disaster due to misused cryptography.

• But I’m just some guy, writing about things for fun. I’m probably going to get things wrong, and you should always consult an expert if you’re taking my writing seriously for the design or implementation of anything that might matter to anyone. They’ll spot errors or omissions that I missed.

• In the following edited transcript from proceedings at ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue, Michael Pezzullo, secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, interviews Eric Schmidt…

• Samoa’s prime minister, Fiame Naomi Mata‘afa, gave the opening keynote address on Day 2 of ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue.

• The Thread Controller 2 digital Jacquard looms recently integrated at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design combine the aspects of traditional weaving with today’s innovation.

Science

• As the amount of human-created debris in space grows, so does a search for solutions. A first step, some experts say, is to think of space not as an infinite junkyard but as a shared area that calls for agreed-on norms of behavior.

• To detect small effects in experiments you need to reduce the experimental noise as much as possible. You can do it by working with larger sample sizes, but that doesn’t scale well. A far better approach consists in controlling for covariates that are correlated with your response.

• I recently gave a talk at our company on the design of online experiments, and someone pointed out that our automated experiment analysis tool implemented “slicing”, that is, running separate analyses on subsets of the data. Wasn’t that the same thing as controlling for covariates?

Education

• Here’s a mnemonic to remember: [...]

• I remain convinced that English could still play a meaningful role in liberal education, so I feel a duty to explain exactly what went wrong. Nevertheless, it must be said at the outset that even with a correct diagnosis, the English department probably won’t be saved. Sadly, most English professors would rather watch it die. Let me explain.

Hardware

• Coprocessors were optional silicon that performed floating point arithmetic in hardware at much faster speeds than the host CPU could in software. They were especially popular with CAD and spreadsheet users, who could justify the additional cost. By the time 586-class CPUs like the Pentium came out, their functions were integrated into CPUs.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• These chemicals, coined “endocrine disruptors,” are used to produce beloved everyday items like toilet paper, personal care products, cosmetics, food packaging, and detergents. Since their introduction into modern manufacturing practices in the 1950s, endocrine disruptors have become ubiquitous in our environments and bodies. Some of these disruptors are known as “forever chemicals” due to how difficult they are to break down. They’ve weaseled their way into tap water, food, and even into 97 percent of Americans’ blood. As you might imagine, that’s not a good thing.

• The Florida Senate passed a bill Monday that would ban most abortions after six weeks gestation and punish medical professionals who knowingly perform a prohibited abortion with up to five years in prison.

• A new rule would reduce mercury, arsenic, nickel and lead emissions, which the Biden administration said would protect public health.

Proprietary

• In an interview with FRANCE 24 in New York, former US counterterrorism czar Richard Alan Clarke described the main threats facing the United States’ cyberspace and warned that Russia’s cyber weapons could potentially “do a lot of damage” in the US. To explain why this hasn’t happened so far, he cited an “unwritten rule” he believes the US and Russia are both following: “[if] you don’t attack me, I won’t attack you”.

• Mandiant has observed a new ALPHV (aka BlackCat ransomware) ransomware affiliate, tracked as UNC4466, target publicly exposed Veritas Backup Exec installations, vulnerable to CVE-2021-27876, CVE-2021-27877 and CVE-2021-27878, for initial access to victim environments. A commercial Internet scanning service identified over 8,500 installations of Veritas Backup Exec instances that are currently exposed to the internet, some of which may still be unpatched and vulnerable. Previous ALPHV intrusions investigated by Mandiant primarily originated from stolen credentials suggesting a shift to opportunistic targeting of known vulnerabilities. This blog post covers the UNC4466 attack lifecycle, indicators, and detection opportunities.

• A Chromebook is a tablet or laptop with the Linux-based Chrome OS as its operating system. The chromebook market has high growth prospects owing to increasing demand from the education sector. Market players such as HP, Asus, Acer, and others are focusing on technological advancement and new product launch in the Chromebook market. For instance, Asus launched a new Chromebook Flip C434 with 8GB RAM up to 128GB of storage. Further, increasing demand from the developing economies propelling market growth.

• On a recent Internet of Things Podcast episode, we took a voicemail from Sherry on our hotline. She has a 1,400 square foot home and is wondering if it’s worth buying a mesh router. Most routers today are advertised as covering at least that much space, so it’s a valid question. But there’s more than just square footage to consider when it comes to routers and smart homes.

• What’s a potential Cloud PC buyer to do as they try to assess the service’s suitability for their workloads?

Security

• The incident on Tuesday was not noticed by end users, as the public broadcaster’s IT team managed to keep the site from crashing.

• A few days ago, I received an email from a reader of one of my books. Among other things, he said that he was having trouble getting to one of the websites I’d referenced in the book. I responded that I would check it out. Usually, something like this is due to a misprinted URL in the referring article or book, or it could be that I’d deleted or changed a page on my website.

• That was not the case this time. When I clicked on the link to my website, I was faced with—horror of horrors—an online casino.

• I thought this would turn out to be a simple case of DNS man-in-the-middle or something similar. Certainly, nothing would be wrong on my own server.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Central to the ICO’s decision to fine TikTok are the estimated 1.4 million UK children under 13 years of age, who were allowed to sign up for the platform in 2020, despite the company’s own rules barring such use.

• That’s a violation of UK’s General Data Protection Regulation (similar to the EU’s GDPR), the ICO said in a statement. The UK GDPR requires that companies that use personal data to offer services to children under 13 need a parent or guardian’s permission to do so. The regulator also noted that “senior employees” at TikTok were aware of underage users on the platform, and did not respond adequately to the issue.

• The Australian federal government Tuesday banned TikTok on government devices following advice from national intelligence agencies. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus announced that the viral media platform will be prohibited on devices issued by Commonwealth departments and agencies.

Defence/Aggression

• The French president hopes Beijing can be useful in pressing Russia to end the war in Ukraine. How exactly is not clear.

• House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) met with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in California on Wednesday despite warnings from Beijing that the meeting would provoke “severe confrontation” with the U.S.

• The Ireland for Ukraine Fund, launched by leading media outlets, has for a year been delivering essential support to men, women and children whose lives have been changed forever by the war in Ukraine.

• The leader of Belarus is in Russia for talks on Thursday.

• 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.

• Polish leaders backed Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership, but even without that, Russia’s invasion is making the alliance’s eastern flank more united, and more important.

• As students across the United States today join a nationwide school walkout to demand lawmakers take action on gun control, we go to Tennessee, where Republicans are trying to expel three Democratic lawmakers for supporting student-led gun control protests at the state Capitol after last week’s school shooting in Nashville. “We’re demanding that lawmakers hear that we can’t be ignored anymore,” says Ezri Tyler, a student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and a national organizer for March for Our Lives. “This is authoritarianism,” Tennessee state Representative Justin Jones says of attempts to remove him. “This is an assault on our democracy.”

Environment

• About 500,000 hectares of forestland are currently in occupied territory, Strilets said, along with 10 national parks, eight nature preserves, and two biosphere reserves. Altogether some 600 species of fauna and 750 species of flora are under threat of destruction, he added.

• Meghan Duffy and María Natalia Umaña, faculty members in LSA’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, have been chosen as 2023 fellows of the Ecological Society of America.

Energy/Transportation

• Even as Chinese rare earth players cement their footholds in international markets, other countries are slowly making progress in rebuilding their rare earth supply chains. They have a singular purpose: to loosen China’s grip on these precious metals.

• E-scooters are frequently the topic of outrage on social media and newspaper opinion pages. Parking, inebriated users and speeding are among the most common complaints.

• The airline says it’s ending the routes for economic and environmental reasons.

• Easter holiday weekend is the year’s first opportunity for many people to visit summer cottages.

• Last October I wrote Non-Fungible Token Bubble Lasted 10 Months. The NFT market is still dead, a fossil relic of a massive wave of typical cryptocurrency pump-and-dump schemes and wash trading. But the great thing is that this all happened on a public blockchain, so data palaeontologists have an unrivalled dataset with which to unearth the inner workings of a speculative bubble.

• A gas company has been accused of “greenwashing” in a North Yorkshire community ahead of a crunch decision on the UK’s first ‘hydrogen village’.

• Northern Gas Networks (NGN) is bidding to host a two-year government-funded trial in Redcar, Teesside, to replace gas with ‘green’ hydrogen in around 2,000 homes.

• This story was published in collaboration with ExxonKnews, a project of the Center for Climate Integrity. This reporting was made possible in part due to a media briefing sponsored by Beyond Plastics, Inclusive Louisiana, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and The Descendants Project, which included local meals in Louisiana.

Finance

• General Motors’ drive to make employees leave out of their own volition is working.

• The economy hit a quiet milestone in recent months: The labor market is seeing more equitable employment outcomes across racial groups than it has in years.

• Where it stands: For the half-century data has been available, white workers have enjoyed higher rates of employment than Black workers. That gap still exists, but it has been shrinking notably.

• New figures suggest that more people in Finland were in financial difficulty last year.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A senior ministerial official has denied charges of a conflict of interest over her ownership of stock options with Estonian mobility solutions app company Bolt, adding that she did not take a job at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications either to aid Bolt in its lobbying and influence over regulation, or as a scheme to inflate the potential value of those stock options, should Bolt float on the stock market.

• The key to this revolution lies in the ability of AI to process vast amounts of data and make it available for natural language questions. This is achieved through the use of context and questions, which allows AI to build a comprehensive understanding of a given subject and provide clear, concise answers to complex queries.

• One particularly intriguing application of this technology is what we might call “Follow the Money.” This approach seeks to uncover the hidden connections between political actors, lobbyists, and donors, revealing the true extent of their influence on policy and decision-making.

• In this effort, Urban shares a lot of his analysis with the likes of John McWhorter, whose book Woke Racism also came from the perspective of a progressive dismayed by what he saw his “own side” turn into. But Urban zooms further out. Trying to analyze not just a particular dysfunction, such as a woke nonsense, but all forms of nonsense that occurs once our baser instincts take over.

• Kaius Niemi resigned as editor-in-chief of Finland’s largest circulation newspaper after the incident last November.

• RTÉ has today announced a diverse array of special programming about the Irish Civil War and the revolutionary period in Ireland that will be available across television, radio and online. As part of its continuing commemoration of the Decade of Centenaries, RTÉ will mark significant moments in modern Irish history with broadcasts….

• The European Union relies heavily on Tunisia to stem migration, giving its increasingly authoritarian president leverage in negotiations with the bloc.

• One of the only new details in the statement of facts regarding Trump’s NY indictment relates to Robert Costello.

• Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern delivered a final speech to Parliament Wednesday, reflecting on her tenure and asking lawmakers to take politics out of climate change. “We have what we need to make the progress we must,” she said.

• As we cover the historic arraignment of former President Donald Trump, we look at the crimes for which he has not been charged. We speak with Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate. Nader says that though “all presidents violate laws,” Trump has “taken it to a new and diverse height.”

• Donald Trump has been formally charged with 34 felonies in an indictment unsealed on Tuesday. After surrendering to authorities at a New York courthouse, Trump was placed under arrest and fingerprinted. He then appeared in a courtroom, where he pleaded not guilty to all 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection to hush-money payments he paid out during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump is the first U.S. president to ever be charged with a crime. For more on the charges levied against Trump and their significance, we speak to Bobbi Sternheim, a criminal defense lawyer who has tried several high-profile federal cases in New York. Sternheim outlines what observers expect from the legal strategy in the case, and the risks of harassment facing the judge and prosecution team.

• Democrat-backed Judge Janet Protasiewicz won a high-stakes Wisconsin Supreme Court race Tuesday, giving liberals a majority on the court for the first time since 2008 and renewing hopes the state’s abortion ban can be reversed. Protasiewicz’s rival, former Justice Dan Kelly, had support from Republicans and anti-abortion groups. The Wisconsin Supreme Court is also likely to weigh in on gerrymandering and voting access, with the potential to impact national elections for Congress and president. We get an update from John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation, who joins us from Madison, Wisconsin.

• We get an update on a major victory for progressives in Chicago’s mayoral race, where union organizer and former teacher Brandon Johnson narrowly defeated Paul Vallas in a runoff election Tuesday. Johnson called for community investment, while Vallas, who was backed by the police union, focused his campaign on crime. “Now comes the difficult part of governance,” says Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, who is in Chicago and notes Johnson faces a hostile police force and skepticism from the city’s business community.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• A lobbying and marketing group representing top Canadian oil sands producers paid Google to link its website to hundreds of search terms related to climate change over the past three months, according to advertising data reviewed by DeSmog.

• That means that when people went on Google seeking information about global temperature rise or federal climate policy, one of the first links that appeared was the website for the Pathways Alliance, a group whose members account for 95 percent of oil sands production.

• Young people aged 15 to 24 are more likely to believe fake news and share it, according to a new media literature study by researchers at Hogeschool Utrecht. They tend to rely on their gut feeling and think they are quite capable of recognizing fake news, researcher Sophie Duvekot told RTL Nieuws.

• Twitter added a “state-affiliated media” tag to NPR’s main account on Tuesday, applying the same label to the nonprofit media company that Twitter uses to designate official state mouthpieces and propaganda outlets in countries such as Russia and China.

• NPR operates independently of the U.S. government. And while federal money is important to the overall public media system, NPR gets less than 1% of its annual budget, on average, from federal sources.

• “Publicly available sources indicate about 15 percent of NPR’s overall budget includes taxpayer funds authorized by Congress, and make clear that the U.S. government exercises no editorial control over NPR whatsoever. For Twitter to unilaterally label NPR as state-affiliated media, on par with Russia Today, is a dangerous move that could further undermine public confidence in reliable news sources,” Liz Woolery, PEN America’s digital policy lead, said. “It’s a gift to disinformation purveyors and to authoritarian regimes the world over. Twitter should reverse course and remove this designation from NPR immediately.”

• NPR, which is headquartered in Washington D.C., has more than 1,000 public radio stations in the U.S. It was established as an act of Congress and does get some of its budget from the federal government, but only about 1%. NPR has always said that it operates as an independent entity, certainly not as a government mouthpiece.

• Now NPR has been tarred with the same brush as China’s Xinhua News Agency and Russia’s RT, Russia Today. The former, according to Reporter’s Without Borders is the “world’s biggest propaganda agency,” while the latter has spent much of its existence denying it’s a mouthpiece for the Russian government. The British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, has also faced criticism that it serves up regular doses of bias.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Supreme Court of India today came down heavily on the government’s use of national security as a ruse to deny citizens basic rights, including free speech.

• Idaho could be at the center of a free speech battle over abortion care.

• Driving the news: The American Civil Liberties Union announced Wednesday that it’s suing the Idaho Attorney General for “threatening health care providers who exercise their First Amendment right to give patients information about out-of-state abortion care.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The former editor-in-chief of Tampere-based newspaper Aamulehti Jussi Tuulensuu resigned last month after behaving inappropriately at a student party.

• Gershkovich was able to meet with his lawyers on Tuesday for the first time since that arrest.

• The Journal’s editor-in-chief confirmed the meeting in a message to staff on Tuesday.

Civil Rights/Policing

• While Afghanistan’s leaders roll back rights for women, gender equality is starting to reshape a region emerging from outdated social norms.

• Edward Blum has spent decades trying to end what he considers a harmful practice: affirmative action in college admissions. The Supreme Court will rule on two cases by the end of term that may do just that.

• Democrat-backed Janet Protasiewicz won the Wisconsin Supreme Court race after beating out Republican opponent Dan Kelly. The new court controlled 4-3 by liberals is expected to decide a pending lawsuit challenging the state’s 1849 law banning abortion.

• The university will have the opportunity at an April 10 circuit court hearing to present its case that the ongoing Graduate Employees’ Organization strike has caused “irreparable harm” to the institution.

• I struggled for a little while to come up with a place to start Canada’s story. If I waited until the idea of Canada as a place and a people emerged, we’d be missing out on most of the story, and thousands of years of history. But reach too far back and it becomes difficult to talk about Canada with any coherence. For a long time, the peoples of Canada were divided into several loosely connected groups, many with zero knowledge of or contact with one another. Arranging that into one, unified narrative, would be ahistorical, and trying to tell every Canadian story would risk incoherence.

• But, in the end, I decided the best place to start was the beginning, and we’ll just have to strike a compromise between the forward trajectory of the narrative, and a few individual stories to focus on along the way.

• The clerical establishment has responded by issuing increasingly severe warnings and raising the cost for girls and women who refuse to wear the Islamic head scarf in public.

• Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on April 4 said the removal of the hijab in public was politically and religiously banned. He blamed Tehran’s enemies for encouraging women to ditch the head scarf, which is a pillar of the Islamic system in Iran.

• The United Nations said Wednesday that it will not comply with a Taliban decree banning Afghan women from working for the organization and called on them to revoke it.

• “In the history of the United Nations, no other regime has ever tried to ban women from working for the organization just because they are women,” said Roza Otunbayeva, the head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. “This decision represents an assault against women, the fundamental principles of the U.N., and on international law.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• This existing broadband network was built in 2021 mainly by three community cooperatives: Metro IAF, BlocPower and People’s Choice Communications (PCC). These cooperatives built this network after former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced New York City’s Internet Master Plan in January 2020, which set out to deliver broadband for low-income New Yorkers by investing in public fiber infrastructure. Since, then, the pandemic in 2020 exposed a digital divide that the current mayor’s office knows it must attempt to bridge. Yet instead of building off the network infrastructure already installed, it appears the Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI) is choosing to tear it down. In its place, the city is giving this massive three-year contract to big telecom companies—including one that has previously been untruthful to New York residents.

• Charter, the parent company of Spectrum, has been controversial in New York State for years. This is not only because of their five-year front-page fights with unions, but also because the company has a bad track record when it comes to meeting their promises. Charter Communications had to pay $174.2 million in a settlement with then New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood’s office, following a 2017 lawsuit in which the New York Attorney General’s office sued the internet provider over misleading claims of internet speeds. The lawsuit, which was then led by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, stated that speeds were up to 80 percent slower than Spectrum had advertised.  Included in that $174.2 million settlement were payments to 700,000 of their customers, ranging between $75 to $150. The Attorney General’s office at the time called it “the largest ever consumer settlement from an internet service provider.”

• All that has made many New Yorkers very skeptical of Spectrum. That’s one reason why alternative options from community cooperatives were so attractive. In fact, PCC’s origins are grounded in that worker strike: it was founded by members of IBEW Local 3 who went on strike in 2017 and started the cooperative to cover needs in the city that Spectrum wasn’t. Now PCC is now being told to take down their infrastructure, while this low-cost community broadband program is being scrapped in favor of a deal that potentially lands Charter half of a $90 million dollar contract. For many, that’s seen as a slap in the face. It certainly doesn’t help cable’s already bad reputation with consumers and workers in NYC.

Monopolies

• Ofcom, which started looking into cloud services last year, said it was particularly worried about the practices of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft because of their market positions, and planned to ask the competition regulator to investigate.

• Amazon and Microsoft have a combined market share of 60-70%. Alphabet’s Google, their closest competitor, has just 5-10%.

• [...]

• “High barriers to switching are already harming competition in what is a fast-growing market,” Ofcom director Fergal Farragher said. “We think more in-depth scrutiny is needed to make sure it’s working well for people and businesses who rely on these services.”

• The online retail front was founded in 2004 by Stuart Felton and former Amazon Employee Andrew Crawford. Their aim was to sell all sorts of books instead of only focusing on bestsellers. Eventually the Gloucester-based site was acquired by Amazon in 2011.

• The process, handled by a startup, New Era ADR, stifles customers’ due process rights by restricting evidence, prohibiting discovery and allowing arbitrators to rule on multiple customers’ claims at once without even holding hearings, lawyers for the plaintiffs allege.

• The changes — made amid mounting legal complaints — are so “unconscionable” that the Federal Arbitration Act, which protects valid arbitration procedures, shouldn’t apply, they claim.

Patents

• Later this month the USPTO will transition to electronic patent grants or eGrants.  This primarily a cost-savings mechanism, although it saves some paper too.  Going forward, patentees will be able to obtain a paper ceremonial copy for a $25 fee.

• This result does not have a direct major impact on patent practice, but as part of the change, the USPTO is issuing patents at a quicker pace following the issue fee.  That issue date is important because it is the final day for filing a follow-on application claiming priority.

• After coming up with a core idea for a new product, Inventor jumps on chatGPT and asks the AI to expand upon the product idea, including providing additional design elements based upon the inventor’s original description. ChatGPT comes through with flying colors and provides several detailed designs that inventor had not considered.  Inventor is diligent in their disclosure docs to include the chatGPT transcript.  Patent search reveals that Inventor’s original idea is not patentable by itself, but it is likely patentable when combined with the chatGPT input. The patent attorney sees value  in having claims directed solely to the features provided by chatGPT.

• EU institutions have recently paid attention to Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) and how the SEPs framework could be improved to encourage innovation while also promoting competition and satisfy consumers’ interests.

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