● 04.07.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 07/04/2023: Haiku Report and credcheck 1.0

Posted in News Roundup at 3:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Consumer Linux hardware pioneer System76 is readying its first fully own-designed laptop. Codenamed “Virgo” the firm hopes to move beyond whitebook customizer status, with a range of fully bespoke Linux portables. Teasing this important milestone in the company’s evolution, Founder and CEO of System76, Carl Richell, took to Twitter with some images of prototype parts.

Audiocasts/Shows

• It’s time once again for The Weekender. This is our departure into the world of hedonism, random topic excursions, whimsy and (hopefully) knowledge.

Applications

• This article selects 100 TUI apps that largely reflects software our volunteers use as their daily drivers.

• Journal Is A Self-hosted Private Journaling System

• cowyo is a truly remarkable self-contained wiki server that makes jotting notes an incredibly easy and lightning-fast process. The most impressive feature of cowyo is its unrivaled simplicity, making it a perfect choice for anyone who values an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. But that’s just the beginning.

• Boost Note is a document driven project management tool that maximizes remote DevOps team velocity.

• Raneto is an open-source Knowledgebase platform that uses static Markdown files to power your Knowledgebase.

• Ever heard of an immutable Linux system? Learn about them in this edition of FOSS Weekly.

Instructionals/Technical

• This resulted in my spending more time fiddling with my Micro.blog site, or its related back-end, instead of actually…you know…posting. I decided there had to be a better way, but I had a few requirements for my self-hosted microblog: [...]

• The Linux “tar” stands for tape archive, which is used by a large number of Linux/Unix system administrators to deal with tape drive backup in Linux.

• The tar command in Linux is used to rip a collection of files and directories into a highly compressed archive file commonly called tarball or tar, gzip and bzip in Linux.

• RAR is the most popular tool for creating and extracting compressed archive (.rar) files. When we download an archive file from the web, we required a rar tool to extract them.

• RAR is available freely under Windows operating systems to handle compressed files, but unfortunately, the rar tool doesn’t pre-installed under Linux systems.

• If you have already achieved your Linux certification and are looking forward to securing a Linux job, it pays a great deal to prepare for an interview that tests your knowledge of the ins and outs of Linux.

• In this guide, we present to you some of the most commonly asked questions in Linux interviews and answers.

• CentOS 7 reaches the end of life on June 30th, 2024 marking the end of the CentOS Project after CentOS 8 was prematurely discontinued back on December 31st in favor of CentOS Stream.

• Thankfully, you can migrate from CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux 8 or any major Enterprise 8.x RHEL distributions such as Oracle Linux 8, Rocky Linux 8, or CentOS Stream 8 using the Elevate Project.Table of Contents1What is Elevate?Preliminary StepStep 1: Update CentOS 7 SystemStep 2: Install Elevate Repository in CentOS 7Step 3: Install Leapp Utility in CentOS 7Step 4: Migrate CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux 8Conclusion

• Need to install AnyDesk on your Ubuntu machine? This guide will walk you through the process step-by-step, making it easy to get up and running.

• Want to create your own proxy server? This step-by-step guide will show you how to set up a proxy server on your computer or server.

• Secure Shell (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol used for secure communication and remote command execution between computers. One of its most common use cases is transferring files securely over a network.

• In this tutorial, we are going to explain to you in step-by-step detail how to install Jetty on Ubuntu 22.04 [...]

• Varnish is a popular open-source web application accelerator, also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy [...]

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Pluma Text Editor on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Are you looking for a reliable and easy-to-use text editor for your Ubuntu 22.04 system? Look no further than Pluma! Pluma is a …

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

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WildFly on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, WildFly is a flexible, lightweight, and open-source application server that is written in Java.

• If you are a Linux user then you might come across this error “mount point does not exist” when you try to mount your device.

• Hello, friends. Today we are going with a post dedicated to Linux newbies and not so newbies. Today, we will tell you the best way to copy large folders on Linux.

• This step by step tutorial explains how to create a Ubuntu bootable USB drive and how to install install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS server version with screenshots.

• Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, released Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) on April 21, 2022, for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, and Ubuntu Core with a five years long term support guaranteed…

• CentOS 7 reaches the end of life on June 30th, 2024 marking the end of the CentOS Project after CentOS 8 was prematurely discontinued back on December 31st in favor of CentOS Stream. Thankfully,

• Daniel Stenberg has created a new tool for the open source community that allows for easy parsing and manipulation of URLs.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Thanks again to all who contribute to Haiku, and especially those donors who make my contract possible!

• Later this month, I intend to write up a long and technical article about Haiku’s kernel condition variables, which have some interesting properties not found on most other operating systems, and for which I rewrote the implementation between the beta3 and beta4 releases. So, stay tuned for that!

Fedora Family / IBM

• Red Hat’s 30th anniversary is a testament to the power of Open Source and the strength of the Linux community. Happy Birthday, Red Hat!

• At our hackfest earlier this year, the Council agreed that we want to drop the distinction between full and auxiliary positions on the Council. Instead, we should have all members on an equal footing. The concerns expressed by some on the former Fedora Board (the predecessor to the Council) haven’t come to pass. But we have seen a negative impact: people in these roles feel less empowered to act, and unsure about their standing as a “real” member of the Council.

• This is the latest in our monthly series summarizing the past month on the Community Blog. Please leave a comment below to let us know what you think.

• In 2022 I was one of the bloggers who analyzed the tragic Debian Day Volunteer Suicide.

• Shortly after that, people began asking me to publish something about suicides in Brno. In the Debian case, all of us Debian Developers have full access to the debian-private history so we can all verify the authenticity of the messages. I’ve never worked for Red Hat and I’ve never been to Brno so there is no easy way for me to verify an email and publish it on my blog.

• Furthermore, in the case of Frans Pop, it is hard to deny a connection to Debian because he resigned to commit suicide the night before the Debian Day anniversary. Red Hat employs 1180 people in Brno, that is a large enough number that if one person did commit suicide it may be completely unrelated to their workplace.

• Find mistakes in your playbooks with Ansible Lint

• The stock market can rise and fall; a pandemic can overtake the globe; overall employment rates can fluctuate wildly – but one thing will stay the same: the demand for tech talent.

• Over the last decade – and especially in the last few years – the tech sector has shown itself to be curiously invulnerable to wider trends in employment. Unemployment in the sector has hovered at around 2 percent, even with the recent layoffs and much to the frustration of recruiters, who work tirelessly to secure top talent in an ultra-competitive field.

• Accordingly, the usual perks employers use to lure in high-quality candidates – say, lax remote work policies, employee perks, salary, and benefits – are less effective when it comes to recruiting tech candidates.

• The evolving technology landscape has spurred business transformation across industries – driving efficiency and unlocking new opportunities for companies to scale and increase impact.

• But as businesses evolve, potential threats are expanding too. Business leaders must navigate an increasingly complex, ever-changing world of cybersecurity imperatives that require innovative approaches to mitigate these new risks.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, released Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) on April 21, 2022, for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, and Ubuntu Core with a five years long term support guaranteed on software and updates until April 2032.

• The scope of this tutorial is to present a classic installation of Ubuntu 22.04 Server made from a CD media or a USB bootable stick and also, a basic installation of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) packages stack with basic configurations.Table of Contents1Download Ubuntu 22.04 ServerStep 1: Installing Ubuntu 22.04 ServerStep 2: Basic Network ConfigurationsStep 3: Install LAMP Stack in Ubuntu 22.04

Devices/Embedded

• Acting as the bridge between the past and the present, this Raspberry Pi Pico W project uses original Nintendo controllers with its latest console.

• “Adafruit Feather RP2040 with DVI Output Port” is another Raspberry Pi RP2040 board with an HDMI port that can output DVI video signal (no audio) to most TVs or monitors with an HDMI input port thanks to the PicoDVI project.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Corvo Precision Payload Delivery System (PPDS) costs less than $3,500 apiece, a price made possible by the craft’s use of FOSS and commercial-off-the-shelf hardware.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Have you ever admired the facets of a gemstone? The angles and slants are a thing of beauty. You can see that a multi-faceted gemstone shines brighter than a flat one. You may also see this kind of beauty when analyzing a multi-faceted design system. A design system is a collection of guidelines, standards, and resources for creating consistent and unified user interfaces (UI). Like the facets of a diamond, an open source design system rich with diverse contributions and community engagement ultimately leads to better product experiences.

• The PatternFly project is an open source design system for Red Hat products. But open source doesn’t end with PatternFly’s code. Behind PatternFly is a team of people who create designs completely in the open. From designers and developers to researchers and writers, we work together to operate as an open source community.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• I’ve been spending more time on Gemini, and enjoying the experience. It’s not just a lightweight protocol for computers, it’s quick to download and easy to read for us too. You don’t realise just how much we’ve sacrificed on the modern web until you use something that unabashedly usable.

• There is a new application available for Sparkers: Mullvad Browser What is Mullvad Browser? The Mullvad Browser is a privacy-focused web browser developed in a collaboration between Mullvad VPN and the Tor Project. It’s designed to minimize tracking and fingerprinting. You could say it’s a Tor Browser to use without the Tor Network.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

PostgreSQL ☛ credcheck v1.0 releasedPostgreSQL credcheck extensionThe credcheck PostgreSQL extension provides general credential checks, which will be evaluated during the user creation, during the password change and user renaming. By using this extension, a set of rules can be defined:allow a specific set of credentialsreject a certain type of credentialsenforce use of an expiration date with a minimum of day for a passworddefine a password reuse policy

FSF

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) awarded Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the Free Software Gigabit Mini VPN Router (TPE-R1400) from ThinkPenguin, Inc. The RYF certification mark means that this product meets the FSF’s standards in regard to users’ freedom, control over the product, and privacy. This is ThinkPenguin’s first device to receive RYF certification in 2023, adding to their vast catalogue of certified devices from previous years.

Programming/Development

• Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web application framework that uses the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern to create web applications. Taylor Otwell created it in 2011, and it has since become one of the most popular PHP frameworks, widely used by developers worldwide.

• We attended the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this year.

• When optimizing software, we routinely measure the time that takes a given function or task. The typical assumption is that we get a normal distribution, and so we should therefore report the average time.

• Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1052 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 28.6 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 522 times according to Google Scholar.

Python

• I wondered if there is some tracking for differences between packages published on pypi, something that stores this information in a format similar to debdiff..

• I failed to find something on the web, so created a little utility which watches the pypichangelog for new releaes and fetches the new and old version.

• In this article we’ll use both two APIs and see how Polars lets you transition from looking at the data to something we can run even more efficiently in production.

• To replace a string in a file, open the file with open(), read the data with read(), replace the data with replace() and store it back in the file with write().

• To read a file into a string in Python, use the read() method, the readlines() method with string concatenation and the read_text() method from Path package.

• UnboundLocalError is caused when a local variable is accessed before the assignment of value. Or due to the confusion between local and global scope.

• To generate random boolean values in Python, first generate random numeric values and then use the bool() method to convert them into a boolean.

• To convert a Python String into a Dictionary, use the json.loads() method, the ast.literal_eval() method, or generator expressions.

• To use quotes within a string in Python, use a different set of quotes to declare the string and in between a string or use backslash “\” before quotes.

• To print the values of the Numpy Array with specific precision in Python, use the set_printoptions() method and define the precision argument.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• When computer displays had a limited color palette, web designers often used a set of web-safe colors to create websites. While modern websites displaying on newer devices can display many more colors than the original web-safe color palette, I sometimes like to refer to the web-safe colors when I create web pages. This way I know my pages look good anywhere.

• You can find web-safe color palettes on the web, but I wanted to have my own copy for easy reference. And you can make one too, using the for loop in Bash.

Standards/Consortia

• I will here indulge in the traditional practice of using my blog to talk about how I’m using my blog. This page is built with the Hugo static site generator. I recently updated it to use the latest version of the beautifulhugo theme, which unbeknownst to me included a dark mode colorscheme. Recent browsers use the prefers-color-scheme option to automatically choose light or dark mode CSS styles, if the website supports it. And my website did support it, not that I knew it until people started commenting that my syntax-highlighted code blocks were unreadable! I figured out how to toggle light/dark mode in Firefox (ctrl+shift+I to open the inspector pane then click the sun/moon icons), perused my website, and found an even greater problem: my treasured vector diagrams that I put so much time & effort into were completely invisible against a dark background! Here’s a quick post about supporting dark mode on my blog by inlining SVGs and setting their color with the currentColor CSS variable.

Leftovers

• Earlier this week, I evaluated whether I should create a Fun with Words series on this blog in which I talk about interesting and amusing words and phrases ^1. I was looking through my open tabs in Firefox on my phone and saw an idea for a Fun with Words theme: jargon in computer science comprised of two words that are not usually next to each other. Specific? Yes indeed. Fun? Yes!

• At last night’s Homebrew Website Club meetup, I noted that I struggled to find the utility of a digital gardens for myself. Ender ^1 said that digital gardens are a different “mood” for writing. We discussed Maggie Appleton’s ^2 “topography over timelines” principle, and other features that make digital gardens distinct. The “mood” framing made a lot of sense to me.

Science

• Only 320 million years after the Big Bang.

• A controversial breakthrough.

• It’s complicated.

• The core of our planet could be surrounded by the warped remnants of an ancient sunken ocean floor, a new study says.

• “Like blood, then turned into darkness.”

• Later, losers!

• Wait, what?

Education

• The resumption of in-person schooling didn’t generate an automatic return to normalcy. What can school systems learn from students nearing the end of their K-12 experience?

• I’ve got to say, it has been… an experience. I’ve relentlessly blogged about the process. The academic content was pretty good, but the administration by QA.com was nothing short of atrocious.

Hardware

• It all started when a Toyota RAV4 belonging to one of the tech gurus suffered suspicious damage to the front wing and headlight housing, and was eventually successfully stolen. Some sleuthing and reverse engineering revealed how the motor was finally nicked.

• It’s been a long time since I last saw a physical piece of hardware used to run our services at 37signals. I vaguely remember doing a tour of our Chicago data center over a decade ago, but somewhere along the line, I just lost interest in the iron itself. Now the interest is back, because hardware is fun again, so let me share my excitement with you!

• In addition, there’s a built-in accelerometer that can be used alongside other tamper prevention methods if you so choose, to detect if the device was picked up, or was subject to shock attacks. There’s an entire API to interact with the physical security features.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• It starts with equality.

• We found something.

• Nearly three decades old, HIPAA appears obsolete and riddled with new technology-induced gaps.

• Why it matters: With regulators unable and politicians unwilling to address the shortcomings of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, private companies are offering a fix.

• I’d like to issue a PSA to all of the parents who outlawed “SpongeBob SquarePants” in the late aughts: A yellow cartoon sponge did not awaken the signs of my adolescent ADHD. It was Club Penguin’s Pizzatron 3000, thank you very much.

• 3,000 years ago in a Spanish cave, humans were tripping.

• The effects could start before birth.

• In a letter issued today, four international medical and human rights organizations call on Turkish authorities to drop the baseless charges against the leadership of the Turkish Medical Association (TMA) at a time when doctors are urgently needed to tend to victims of the 6 February earthquake that have caused over 56,000 deaths in Türkiye…

Proprietary

• Poets say rumors of their obsolescence at the hands of AI has been greatly exaggerated.

• In response to Amazon’s shuttering of the bedrock digital photography community, developers are taking steps to protect the crowdsourced data and revive the community on brand new websites like DPRevied.

• Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Chair of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, was left shocked when he realised ChatGPT named him as part of a research project on legal scholars who sexually harassed someone.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• Change is hard. It often brings discomfort, anxiety, and confusion. Even as an Agile enthusiast, I sometimes feel I’m not welcoming change the way I should.

• Change is often hard because the predecessor of change is chaos. Being in chaos is a natural part of the change process and an integral part of evolution. If chaos is handled poorly, it may result in inefficiencies, stress, demotivation, loss of direction, and poor performance. However, it also presents an opportunity to rethink, reorganize, refresh, reboot, experiment, and invent.

• Open leadership is critical here. The Open Organization defines open leadership as a mindset and set of behaviors that anyone can learn and practice. Open leaders think and act in service to another person, group, team, or enterprise attempting to accomplish something together.

• Open leaders acknowledge change, lead it with a generative-lean-agile mindset, and welcome it with intuition, focus, and enthusiasm.

• At the heart of Twitter’s business model is the recommendation algorithm. It is a set of rules that enables the platform to deliver content based on users’ interests and preferences. It is with the help of this system that advertisers promote their brands. Content flows into a user’s timeline through two channels. One pipeline channels content posted by people that the user follows and the other is filled with posts flowing from accounts that could potentially interest the user.

• The latter timeline, called ‘For You’, acts as a predictive tool to suggest feeds that a user may be interested in. It helps the micro-blogging site find answers to questions like — what is the probability a user will engage with another user in the future, what communities on Twitter might a user be interested in and what tweets are trending within them. Answers to such questions help the platform recommend relevant content.

Security

• The Play ransomware group shared 600 gigabytes of data on its leaks site in its second release, including Oakland Police Department files, council members’ communications and city staff’s medical records. By contrast, the first release of stolen data in March was a more modest 10 gigabytes.

• The ransomware attack took place on Feb. 8, knocking some of the city’s information technology systems offline. The city declared a state of emergency on Feb. 16 because of ongoing network outages caused by the attack. The attack did not affect 911 services, but certain nonemergency systems were forced offline.

• Cisco has released patches for high-severity vulnerabilities impacting Secure Network Analytics and Identity Services Engine (ISE) products.

• The action against illicit versions of legitimate Cobalt Strike applications represents the culmination of a year-long investigation.

• [...]

• Cobalt Strike, an adversary emulation tool that information security professionals use to evaluate network and system defenses to enable better security, like other legitimate hacking tools, is regularly abused by cybercriminals as part of attacks ranging from financially motived cybercrime to high-end state-aligned attacks.

• An innocent-looking portable speaker can hide a hacking device that launches CAN injection attacks, which have been used to steal cars.

• [...]

• Specifically, the thieves pulled off the bumper and unplugged the headlight cables in an attempt to reach wires connected to an electronic control unit (ECU) responsible for the vehicle’s smart key.

• Law enforcement announced the takedown of Genesis Market, but the impact on the cybercrime marketplace’s infrastructure may be limited.

• Several high-impact security vulnerabilities were recently discovered and fixed in the Linux kernel. These flaws could result in memory exhaustion, system crashes, denial of service (DoS), the exposure of sensitive information, cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, privilege escalation attacks, or the execution of arbitrary code.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Tesla employees passed around videos taken in car owners’ private garages and other interesting recordings captured by the cameras built in to the company’s vehicles, Reuters reported today. “We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids,” according to one of nine former employees who told the news agency about the practice.

• Developers of Android applications will be required by Google to allow users to delete their account and data from within the app and online.

• Tesla Inc assures its millions of electric car owners that their privacy “is and will always be enormously important to us.” The cameras it builds into vehicles to assist driving, it notes on its website, are “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.”

• But between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.

• The report [PDF] from the National Physical Laboratory found that when face-match thresholds in Neoface were set to 0.6 (the default setting), correct identification occurred 89 percent of the time someone walked into a recognition zone. False positive rates, per the report, were just 0.017 percent.

• TikTok has been fined almost $16m by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for breaching data protection laws, including misusing children’s data. The regulator estimated that more than one million users, under age 13, used the platform in contradiction of its own rules last year. The fine covers breaches committed between May 2018 and July 2020.

• The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which bills itself as “the UK’s independent body set up to uphold information rights,” just recently announced the multimillion-dollar fine against TikTok. Of course, it’s long been known that the highly controversial video-sharing app has a generally young userbase.

• The undersigned organisations work to defend human rights in the digital era. We are writing this joint letter as we are deeply concerned with with the disregard for international human rights standards and the planned attacks against encryption in the leaked notes from the EU-US Senior Officials Meeting on Justice and Home Affairs, held in Stockholm on 16 and 17 March.

• Charter Communications is recommending the Federal Communications Commission require device manufacturers seeking equipment authorization to add a layer of authentication security to protect against cyberthreats.

• In a letter to the commission on Friday, the telecommunications company suggested the commission require, as a condition of certification, devices pass a security authentication step to connect to the user’s network. When an [Internet]-connected device connects to a network, it can also access sensitive information being shared on it – leaving the door open to malicious activity.

Defence/Aggression

• It is in the ranks of the Party, and above all the Inner Party, that the true war enthusiasm is found.

• In the 27 months since a mob of Trump supporters breached the Capitol, more than 1,020 people have been charged in connection to the insurrection and around 533 have pleaded guilty, the Department of Justice said Thursday.

• The U.S. acknowledged its evacuations from Afghanistan in 2021 should have begun sooner — but largely blamed the Trump administration, according to a newly released National Security Council document outlining key moments.

• Why it matters: The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in summer 2021 — a pain point in Biden’s presidency that’s drawn bipartisan criticism — has also become a growing target of GOP-led congressional investigations.

• It does acknowledge that the evacuations should have started sooner.

• The United Nations has said it will not accept a Taliban order this week that bars women in Afghanistan from working for the U.N. In response, the U.N. said it will be working with Afghan authorities to end the “unparalleled violation.”

• An interagency review led by the National Security Council of the chaotic 2021 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan largely lays the blame on former President Donald Trump, saying President Joe Biden was “severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor.”

• When Finland cleared the last hurdle for NATO membership last week, major Western newspapers buried the story. Yet Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto justly celebrated ‘these historic days’—the end of 75 years of neutrality.

• Now diplomatic relations are set to be restored between Syria and two behemoths of the Arab League: Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who are the holders of the all-important veto on Assad’s return to regional respectability.

• Chinese and US aircraft carriers are sailing near Taiwan as Beijing accuses Washington of ‘crossing the line’.

• Ukrainian and Russian forces battled on April 6 in the eastern city of Bakhmut, while in the Kherson region Russian strikes injured seven people.

• China cannot act as a peace mediator over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as Beijing’s peace plan would result in the loss of Ukraine’s sovereignty, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis has said.

• Microsoft has agreed to remit about $3 million to settle its potential civil liability for more than 1,300 apparent sanctions violations in relation to restrictions on Cuba, Iran, Syria and Russia involving the export of services or software from the US to sanctioned jurisdictions, the US Treasury Department said in a statement.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• That Russia is locked in an existential struggle is evidenced in the coffins coming back from Ukraine and fresh graves in the cemeteries. And those losses are adding to the hatred people have for the West, not the Kremlin. The fact that TV Rain, which now has 15 million viewers in Russia after moving to the Netherlands, changes nothing.

• Of course, Russian residents are not in favor of the war. They do not like it that they and their country are criticized in the West. They also do not like the fact they can no longer travel to Europe for vacation and studies. That several Western products that people had gotten used to have disappeared is also highly inconvenient, as is the fact that the ballooning cost of living is a problem for most people in Russia. However, none of it matters one little bit.

Environment

• Unfortunately, our efforts are strongly opposed by two newcomer businesses that feel entitled to park there for free, indefinitely: the private preschool Mission Kids and the ISP Monkeybrains. This Tuesday, their opposition crossed over into personal insults, harassment, intimidation, threats of violence, and the destruction of two of our garden beds—all over the course of three hours from noon to 3pm.

• These businesses know they have no serious legal argument to any rights to the parcel and that the neighbors don’t support their land grab. They’re desperate to hold onto their free parking, so they’re trying to create a toxic environment for our volunteers and visitors so we give up.

• Estonia has lower amounts of pharmaceutical residues in its waters than other more populous countries. However, scientists say the country should nevertheless develop a strategy to further reduce these levels.

• Planet A Updates to Australia’s emissions reduction ‘safeguard mechanism’ will limit new gas and coal investments while hard-capping total greenhouse gas emissions.

Energy/Transportation

• From now on, shared electric scooters and bicycles may only be parked in designated places in the city centre and parts of the inner city. Leaving an electric scooter or bicycle in other places in the area is unequivocally a parking violation.

• The parking reform will be implemented with regional road signs prohibiting the parking of shared electric scooters and bicycles.

• FINNAIR on Wednesday announced its decision to discontinue flights to Turku and Tampere as of 1 May 2023.

• The Finnish majority state-owned airline revealed that the flights – the shortest in its domestic route network – will be replaced with coach services primarily because of the economic and environmental issues arising from their low passenger load factors, around 35 per cent.

• Anglo-Swiss coal giant Glencore has confirmed it intends to transform the Wandoan mega coal mine into a feedstock for dirty hydrogen production in the Surat Basin hydrogen project. That means even more pollution than using the fuels directly, Callum Foote reports.

• Glencore has confirmed it will not pursue what would have been one of Queensland’s largest thermal coal mines and is instead doubling down on what analysts say is an increasingly dubious coal-fired hydrogen and ammonia project.

Wildlife/Nature

• XICHONG, Shenzhen, China – Xichong, Shenzhen, is now an International Dark Sky Community certified by DarkSky International. Becoming the first International Dark Sky Community in China, this recognition is a milestone for Shenzhen to achieve […]

Overpopulation

• On my daughter Abby’s ninth birthday, I promised her “the greatest gift of all: I’m going to teach you ancient Greek. And just wait until you go to college—you’ll have your pick.” By the time she entered her senior year, Abby was singing Homer, while I dreamt of admissions officers hand-springing over her application.

• But above all, the expansion of human activities and increased interactions with wildlife increase the risk that viruses capable of infecting humans will “find” their host.

Finance

Axios ☛ Layoffs via Zoom, once novel, will outlast the pandemicBorn out of necessity in the pandemic, the once-reviled virtual layoff seems here to stay.Why it matters: The practice of firing people via Zoom or email is picking up steam alongside an uptick in layoffs — particularly among the professional classes where many folks are still working either fully or partly remotely.“Asking somebody to commute into an office they rarely go to anyway, just to let them know they lost their job in a public setting feels cruel in a way that it never did before,” says Andy Challenger, senior vice president at outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.

• Asian stocks and US equity futures have sunk while bonds and the safe-haven US dollar and Japanese yen were bid as mounting evidence of a US slowdown fuelled worries for a global recession.

• Nearly two-thirds of Australians are staying home this Easter as a combination of cost of living pressures, wet weather and travel warnings scupper holiday plans for the long weekend.

• With demand outstripping supply in the rental market, tenants continue to be hit with high rent

• The 11 nations agreed to a joint statement addressing increased regional trade and cooperation in an effort to mitigate inflation.

• Pretty much every Thursday morning this year, we’ve had a head-scratching mystery about the number of people filing new claims for unemployment benefits being exceptionally low, amid reports of layoffs and a softer job market.

• “If he doesn’t say anything, but just removes the logo, will everyone get out at that point?” mused one Dogecoin investor.

• New forms of work are only slowly gaining acceptance in Germany. Some 8 percent of German companies offer their employees the opportunity to also work from their vacation destination, finds the latest Randstad ifo Personnel Manager Survey. In some cases, this involves a reduction in working hours. “In the competition for skilled workers, this can be a means of giving employees a better work-life balance,” says Julia Freuding from the ifo Institute’s Fürth Branch.

• Jes Staley, the former JPMorgan Chase & Co private banking chief and Barclays Plc chief executive, accused JPMorgan of “slanderous” attacks as he seeks to delay a trial in the bank’s lawsuit accusing him of concealing what he knew about Jeffrey Epstein.

• For nearly two decades, the battle for talent has shaped how firms around the world are run and governed. With firms deriving value mainly from their human capital, rather than from the physical assets they owned, a talented workforce came to be coveted more than plants or machines. In 2001, the celebrated management consultant Peter Drucker published an article entitled The Next Society, in which he argued that giving more freedom to what he called knowledge workers is essential, as the key battle of this century is the war for talent. And he was almost right.

• THE NUMBER of tower cranes on the horizon – an indication of how well the economy is doing, according to an old adage – has decreased, reports YLE.

• Data from Statistics Finland reveal that building contractors began construction on a total of 1,734 flats in January, signalling a drop of 835 from January 2021. At the same time, the number of vacant newly built flats is high partly because of a high number of newly completed flats and partly because of a slowdown in sales.

• The ruble fell against the U.S. dollar in trading on April 6 to the value it held just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Alex Saurez, author of “The Diplomat,” a book about the US kidnapping of Venezuelan Diplomat Alex Saab, joins Lee Camp to discuss the exreajudicial kidnapping, the court case that followed, and much more.

• As the anniversary of the U.S. taking Veracruz nears, we look at how Mexicans reacted to the fourth invasion of Mexico in under a century.

• Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda has described joining the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a “youthful indiscretion”.

• A senior lawyer at Twitter submitted his resignation on Thursday, four people familiar with the matter said, becoming the latest in a string of executives to leave the company since Elon Musk took it over nearly six months ago.

• The lawyer, Christian Dowell, rose to the top of Twitter’s legal department in recent months after the company’s legal leaders resigned or were fired by Mr. Musk. Mr. Dowell had been intimately involved in Twitter’s recent negotiations with the Federal Trade Commission, two people familiar with those discussions said.

• Australia banned TikTok this week from all federal government-owned devices, citing security concerns, as the latest US-allied country to take action against the Chinese-owned short video app. Additionally, more US states, including Arizona and Florida, continue to ban TikTok at the federal level.

• These bans highlight the growing concerns that the Chinese government could use the platform, owned by ByteDance Ltd., to harvest user data to advance its political agenda. But in the case of Australia, the ban risks renewing diplomatic tensions between the country and China, its largest trading partner.

• According to the Fortinet 2023 Global Cybersecurity Skills Gap Report, challenges facing enterprises related to the cybersecurity skill deficit are affecting organizations worldwide.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Moscow used its rotating presidency of the Security Council to host a session on deported Ukrainian children, leading some officials to walk out.

• French President Emmanuel Macron has urged Beijing to talk sense into Russia over the war in Ukraine, telling his Chinese counterpart that Russia’s aggression had dealt a blow to international stability.

• One of the biggest pornstars in the world has been hacked to spread hateful content and Twitter hasn’t done anything about it for days.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Kremlin has worked hard to create the impression of overwhelming Russian public support for the invasion of Ukraine but anti-war sentiment may become more visible if Putin’s army suffers further battlefield defeats, writes Christopher Isajiw.

• Salman Khan made some controversial remarks regarding OTT content at an event recently after he urged filmmakers to make “clean content”. The Bollywood actor asked for censorship of digital platforms and said that filmmakers should not cross the limit.

• Chinese-supported student groups in the West are being used to control discussion about China, censor critics, and lead protests against invited speakers

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• U.S. Ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy and a top Russian diplomat met on April 6 to discuss a Wall Street Journal reporter who was arrested last week on espionage charges.

• Much of the losses at Sun publisher News Group Newspapers were down to provisions made for legal cases.

• Former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann has hit the ABC with a defamation lawsuit more than a year after it aired Brittany Higgins’ speech about violence against women. The litigation is part of Mr Lehrmann’s continuing attack against media reporting of Ms Higgins’ rape claims.

• In August 2015, shortly after announcing his candidacy for president, Donald Trump convened a meeting at his namesake Manhattan skyscraper to hatch a plan to “suppress negative stories” that might threaten to derail his White House bid, prosecutors claimed in charging documents on Tuesday.

Civil Rights/Policing

• This week’s order by the Taliban to fire all female employees was the first time the world body has received such an order since its inception in 1945. The order followed the Islamist group’s previous edicts terminating women’s right to work, education and many other basic liberties.

• The selected essays below comprise the observations, reflections, and insights from students in the Bail Practicum after they litigated bail hearings for people who were detained because they are poor. In every case, students are not just advocates but direct witnesses to the harm, suffering, and deeply rooted unfairness embedded within the criminal legal system. These essays point to the myriad harms of pretrial detention that will persist unless transformative action is taken by the county.

• It has sparked fears of a critical shortage of truck drivers that could leave a third of all cargo undelivered.

• Many think robot waiters are the solution to the industry’s labor shortages. But others say they aren’t much more than a gimmick.

• Last year’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade proved to be a major galvanizing moment for people who support abortion rights in communities across the country as some bans already on the books began to go into effect. One of those states is Michigan, where a grassroots coalition had growing concerns about an archaic 1931 abortion ban that could go into effect if the Supreme Court overturned Roe, and had already been working to prepare. Their tireless work put abortion rights on the ballot with Proposition 3, which secures the right to reproductive freedom in Michigan, protecting abortion, prenatal care, birth control, and all reproductive health care.

• He didn’t report them on financial disclosure forms, ProPublica reports.

• Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has traveled aboard a major Republican donor’s superyacht and personal jet for more than 20 years.

• A ProPublica investigation alleging Justice Clarence Thomas accepted luxury trips from an influential Republican megadonor is fueling calls for strict ethics guidelines on the Supreme Court.

• Why it matters: Recent controversies involving big donors and chummy D.C. friendships have put a harsh spotlight on the high court as public trust in the institution falls to historic lows.

• One. Two. Three.  I closed my eyes as each number echoed in my head and my anxiety grew. I focused on my internal counting, hoping to prevent a shut down. However, it couldn’t mask the sound of my family circling around me as they spoke about a deportation in our local Mexican store.

• I don’t wanna be driving no smartphone, do you? Here’s an article discussing the pointless trend of all-touch dashboard consoles in modern cars, focusing on safety, ergonomics, efficiency, proven driving test results with touch versus buttons, other considerations, and more. Enjoy.

• [...]

• As you well know, I love cars. I also hate stupidity. The question is, which of the two emotions is stronger? Recently, I started having to face this question while driving more recent models from various manufacturers. I noticed a steady and worrying trend of the “cockpit digitalization”, that is more and more stuff being moved away from physical controls into pointless touch interfaces. At first, it was trivial things. But now, it’s come down to important things like media and climate control.

• This prompted me to write this article. While I normally “only” do car reviews in my car section, that does not mean I have to exclusively limit myself to just this domain. Furthermore, I think this topic is so important that is merits discussion. Well, not really discussion. More sort of disdain. Let us begin.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• IFF’s statement on the notified IT Amendment Rules, 2023, in relation to online gaming and fact checking by a government unit. Read our concerns regarding the impact on online free speech here.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Have you ever had a sense of déjà vu browsing the web, as though you’ve seen something before? Wait, as opposed to a sense of déjà vu having not seen something before? How does that make sense? Where am I? What am I looking at? Have I made this mistake before?

• Well today I’m thrilled, excited, and amazed to introduce you to the Lese store! Not your thing? What about Razo? Too expensive? I’m sure Buto has you covered. Or Zono. Or Dazo. Or Bupo, surely you can trust a name like that.

Monopolies

• Like Apple, Amazon is not a traditional entertainment company but a huge retailer with a side hustle in Hollywood. Amazon’s view is that the more hours you spend watching Prime Video, the more likely you are to renew your membership and the more likely you are to shop on the site. As Amazon, like Netflix, pursues overseas growth in the wake of saturation in the U.S., Salke notes that in some countries like South Africa and Argentina, Amazon’s programming is the tip of the spear, entering the territory before retail sales or fast, free shipping is even available. “International is everything,” she says. “It is our business to deliver global shows for a global audience.”

• The UK’s communications watchdog has called for a probe into Microsoft and Amazon’s dominance of the country’s cloud computing market in the latest challenge to the tech giants from global regulators.

• Ofcom said on Wednesday it was “particularly concerned” by the practices of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, which together control between 60 and 70 percent of the UK cloud market. It has proposed referring the sector to the Competition and Markets Authority for further investigation.

• Cloud computing is dominated by Amazon and Microsoft, and has become a crucial driver of revenue at the tech giants.

Patents

• Despite varying widely, the structure of legal systems among democratic, free countries are built on consistent underlying principles. Promoting equality, freedom, and justice is a common theme among them.

• The Unified Patent Court is struggling once more with technical issues. In the meantime, the registrar has stated he cannot give legal advice on the UPC’s opt-out procedure. Two days ago, the court announced that technical maintenance was needed due to technical difficulties, and that the CMS would not be available for three days [...]

• On 21 March 2023, Meade J gave a bumper judgment in the revocation action brought by Gilead in respect of two of NuCana’s patents from the same family (EP (UK) 2 955 190 and EP (UK) 3 904 365, the “Patents”), which relate to nucleoside analogues.

Trademarks

• In re Cameron Sexton for State Representative, Serial No. 90211624 (March 31, 2023) [not precedential] (Opinion by Cindy B. Greenbaum). [Refusal to register PEOPLE BEFORE POLITICS for poster, t-shirts, political information services, political fundraising services, and on-line journals featuring politics, on the ground that the proposed mark fails to function as a trademark.]

Copyrights

• The copyright lawsuit between the data-software company SAS Institute and its scrappy copycat World Programming has been interesting to follow over the past several years, and the Federal Circuit has now issued a controversial opinion in the case.  SAS Inst. v. World Programming Ltd., — F.4th — (Fed. Cir. 2023).  The majority opinion authored by Judge Reyna and joined by Judge Wallach affirmed the lower court ruling that SAS failed to establish copyrightability of its claimed program elements.  Writing in dissent, Judge Newman argued that the majority’s rejection of copyrightability represents a “far-reaching change” not supported by either precedent or good policy.  I called this outcome controversial. The outcome would also be controversial had Judge Newman’s position prevailed.

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