● 04.09.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 09/04/2023: Easter’s Slow New

Posted in News Roundup at 12:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

• Hackaday readers fit into two broad categories: those who experienced the wild and woolly early days of the Internet, and those who are jealous that they missed it. And it’s safe to say that both groups will get something out of this aggressively Web 1.0 retro experience, courtesy of a server that was actually part of it.

Applications

• OpenShot Video Editor is a free, open-source video editor licensed under the GPL version 3.0. OpenShot can take your videos, photos, and music files and help you create the film you have always dreamed of. Easily add sub-titles, transitions, and effects, and then export your film to DVD, YouTube, Vimeo, Xbox 360, and many other common formats. What really sets OpenShot apart from other video editors is the easy-to-use user interface.

• OpenShot has many great features, such as trimming and arranging videos, adjusting audio levels, transitions between videos, compositing multiple layers of video, chroma-key / green screen effect, and support of most formats and codecs.

• I posted that the “pkg” desktop icon now offers four package managers:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202304/package-manager-wrapper-improved.html

• Now have updated the tutorial:

• The update has, hopefully, explained the concepts more clearly.

• Note, if you have viewed the tutorial previously, do a page-refresh by holding down the CTRL-key then click on the “page reload” button in the browser. Reason for that, is that just clicking on “page reload” may not update the images.

• Last week the Chromium source code major version was upped to 112. According to the developer blog, this release addresses 16 security issues, none of them critical. Nevertheless, better safe than sorry, so the Slackware packages (15.0 and -current) for Chromium are now ready for downloading from my repository or any of its mirrors.

Instructionals/Technical

• In today’s world where data becomes increasingly crucial for businesses and organizations, the ability to manage and analyze data efficiently is more important than ever. More specifically, MySQL is a popular database management system

• In this post, we’ll walk you through the steps to setup an SFTP server on Ubuntu 22.04.

Games

• Well, here we are at the last of our series of posts showcasing the winners in all six categories of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927. So far we’ve featured Best Remix winner Lucia, Best Visuals winner Urbanity, Best Adaptation winner To And Again, Best Deep Cut winner The Pigeon Wager, and Best Digital Game winner Escape from 1927. Today, we’re wrapping things up with a look at the winner of the Best Analog Game category: Tower Tree Stories by David Harris.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• Another stable branch update with some usual package updates for you.

• New ISOs of Archcraft XFCE and LXDE is now available to download.

Devices/Embedded

• ThePiHut featured this week an open source ePaper watch powered by an ESP32 module. Some of the peripherals featured include a 3-axis accelerometer, a vibration motor, a LiPo battery connector and many other features.

Open Hardware/Modding

• I recently examined multiplication in the 8086, and now it’s time to look at the division microcode.1 (There’s a lot of overlap with the multiplication post so apologies for any deja vu.) The die photo below shows the chip under a microscope. I’ve labeled the key functional blocks; the ones that are important to this post are darker. At the left, the ALU (Arithmetic/Logic Unit) performs the arithmetic operations at the heart of division: subtraction and shifts. Division also uses a few special hardware features: the X register, the F1 flag, and a loop counter. The microcode ROM at the lower right controls the process.

• There was a time when a digital camera was a surprisingly simple affair whose on-board processor didn’t have much in the way of smarts beyond what was needed to grab an image from the sensor and compress it onto some storage. But as they gained more features, over time cameras acquired all the trappings of a fully-fledged computer in their own right, including full-fat operating systems and the accompanying hackability opportunities.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

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• Commit: https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qt5/-/commit/4c0d35b0991216766ca301de205599d1daa72057

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• Commercial release announcement: https://www.qt.io/blog/commercial-lts-qt-5.15.9-released

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• OpenSource release announcement: https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/announce/2023-April/000406.html

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• As usual I want to personally extend my gratitude to the Commercial users of Qt for beta testing Qt 5.15.9 for the rest of us.

• It’s been a month since my first post about my work as KDE Software Platform Engineer, so let’s have a look at what I have been doing since then.

• This new conference will kick off at quite a momentous occasion, too: Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Ruby on Rails! I started working on the framework in the summer of 2003 as part of the development of Basecamp. By October, the framework had a shape that would be completely recognizable today, with Active Record and Action Pack in place.

• Like the first Easter egg in 1968, Robinett’s attempt to bestow credit on himself was an act of political protest. But the protest he was making was against the practices of the industry in which he worked—because it reflected how creative work that made Atari millions of dollars was simply not valued at anywhere close to what it earned the company.

• Therefore, it is often desirable to work with HTML versions of the articles instead of using the wikitext versions. Though, in practice this has remained largely impossible for researchers. Using the MediaWiki APIs or scraping Wikipedia directly for the HTML is computationally expensive at scale and discouraged for large projects. Only recently, the Wikimedia Enterprise HTML dumps have been introduced and made publicly available with regular monthly updates so that researchers or anyone else may use them in their work.

• However, while the data is available, it still requires lots of technical expertise by researchers, such as how different elements from wikitext get parsed into HTML elements. In order to lower the technical barriers and improve the accessibility of this incredible resource, we released the first version of mwparserfromhtml, a library that makes it easy to parse the HTML content of Wikipedia articles – inspired by the wikitext-oriented mwparserfromhell.

• Function tables::tabular() is a powerful tool that let users easily create simple and complex cross tables. Function as_flextable() is simple to use, it transforms ‘tables’ objects into ‘flextable’ objects and let you enrich the table with extra information and or formats.

• At this point you might wonder why the Go toolchain is dynamically linked against the system glibc. Although I haven’t tried to analyze symbol usage, the obvious assumption is that it’s dynamically linked because various Go tools want to download packages over the network, which requires looking up DNS names, which is a very common cause of dynamically linking to glibc.

• A hypothesis is that YAML is not only popular because it is more human-readable/writable than JSON but also because it is significantly more machine writable as a raw string.

• Some data-poisoning attacks might just degrade the overall performance of an AI tool. More sophisticated attacks could elicit specific reactions in the system. Dr Tramèr says that an AI chatbot in a search engine, for example, could be tweaked so that whenever a user asks which newspaper they should subscribe to, the AI responds with “The Economist”. That might not sound so bad, but similar attacks could also cause an AI to spout untruths whenever it is asked about a particular topic. Attacks against LLMs that generate computer code have led these systems to write software that is vulnerable to hacking.

• Looking back on what programming used to be like can be a fascinatingly entertaining thing, which is why [Tough Developer] decided to download and try using Turbo C and C++, from version 1.0 to the more recent releases. Borland Turbo C 1.0 is a doozy as it was released in 1987 — two years before the C89 standardization that brought us the much beloved ANSI C that so many of us spent the 90s with. Turbo C++ 1.0 is from 1991, which precedes the standardization of C++ in 1998. This means that both integrated development environments (IDEs) provide a fascinating look at what was on the cutting edge in the late 80s and early 90s.

Standards/Consortia

• It doesn’t matter how you pronounce it, because whichever way you choose to say “GIF” is guaranteed to cheese off about half the people listening. Such is the state of our polarized world, we suppose, but there’s one thing we all can agree on — that a mechanical GIF is a pretty cool thing.

Leftovers

• Specifically, stuff that’s pushed to you via targeted ads costs an average of 10 percent more, and it significantly more likely to come from a vendor with a poor rating from the Better Business Bureau. This may seem trivial and obvious, but it’s got profound implications for media, commercial surveillance, and the future of the [Internet].

Science

• Are you watching closely?

• Old habits.

Hardware

• If you enjoy old military hardware, you probably know that Harris made quite a few heavy-duty pieces of radio gear. [K6YIC] picked up a nice example: the Harris RF-130 URT-23. These were frequently used in the Navy and some other service branches to communicate in a variety of modes on HF. The entire set included an exciter, an amplifier, an antenna tuner, and a power supply and, in its usual configuration, can output up to a kilowatt. The transmitter needs some work, and he’s done three videos on the transmitter already. He’s planning on several more, but there’s already a lot to see if you enjoy this older gear. You can see the first three below and you’ll probably want to watch them all, but if you want to jump right to the tear down, you can start with the second video.

• We all make things. Sometimes we make things for ourselves, sometimes for the broader hacker community, and sometimes we make things for normal folks. It’s this last category where it gets tricky, and critical. I was reminded of all of this watching Chris Combs’ excellent Supercon 2022 talk on how to make it as an artist.

• The Buzzer, also known as UVB-76 or UZB-76, has been a constant companion to anyone with a shortwave radio tuned to 4625 kHz. However, [Ringway Manchester] notes that there is now a second buzzer operating near in frequency to the original. Of course, like all mysterious stations, people try to track their origin. [Ringway] shows some older sites for the Buzzer and the current speculation on the current transmitter locations.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• “Pornography is primarily made for men; experience shows that it changes the way boys perceive girls, with female classmates increasingly being perceived as sexualized objects,” said Freitag. “Girls, on the other hand, think they are expected to do certain things that they find really painful or disgusting because they think that is what is expected of them, and they fear they will be seen as prude, or will perhaps lose their relationship.”

• More than halfway through President Biden’s term, there remain numerous critical appointed positions across the executive branch that remain empty. My colleagues have writtenextensivelyabout the scope of this confirmation crisis. Some notable remaining vacancies include a seat on the Federal Communications Commission, around two dozen US Attorneys, and a seat on the National Transportation Safety Board. While much of this is due to obstruction by Senate Republicans, the importance of advancing good nominees remains. The fixes to the procedural delays are beyond Biden’s control (though not necessarily beyond Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s). But fighting to get the right people into positions of authority is still a top priority. As the mantra goes: personnel is policy.

Proprietary

• At a recent OpenUK meetup, one of the participants declared that Open Source had comprehensively won. While businesses might not always release their proprietary source code, 100% of everything they wrote used an open source programming language.

• Including, inevitably, professional communications, and that is where the trouble starts. WhatsApp combines the immediacy of the water-cooler chat, with the permanent record of the minuted meeting, and this is quite obviously a recipe for disaster. It’s easy, even natural, to use it for the kind of casual chat once reserved for face-to-face communications. The problem is they’re then preserved forever.

• Microsoft will pay more than $3.3 million to settle allegations it busted US sanctions by selling software and services to blacklisted companies and individuals in Russia, Iran, and other countries.

• (That figure is about 25 minutes of quarterly profit for Microsoft; it banked $17.4 billion in net income in just the final three months of 2022.)

• Indeed, the gang claims to have all the tools necessary to develop a potentially malicious BIOS and then digitally sign it in a way that it appears legitimate and can be installed on victims’ PCs once they’re lured into downloading it. Assuming the miscreants haven’t poisoned MSI’s downloads, you’ll really want to avoid installing what turns out to be malware at the firmware level and instead stick to the official updates.

• The back has the usual warnings, and I’ll point to the upper right corner as a case of “Wait, really, now?” This is one of the many LED bulbs not rated for use in “totally enclosed fixtures,” or in “recessed fixtures.” What this means is that unless it’s a bare bulb in a lamp, it’s likely to overheat and fail long before rated lifespan – because most home light fixtures are either enclosed or recessed. I’m unclear as to if this includes “downward facing bulbs with a glass shroud, open at the bottom” – that’s an area of future research. The short of it is, it’s cheap, and it needs very good cooling to avoid early death. But, at least, you can use it in an upright table lamp! Does anyone still use those? My nice “table lamp” burns kerosene (it’s a rather beautiful Aladdin mantle type, and I really should review it soon).

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• Are you looking for content that is openly licensed that you can reuse? Then you might be interested in Openverse. Openverse is an innovative tool that searches over 300 million pictures from an aggregation of different databases. It goes beyond just searching for an image by giving users access to tags created by machine learning models and one-click attribution. With so many visuals to explore, users can find the perfect image to make their project more engaging. The content comes from a variety of sources, including the Smithsonian, Cleveland Museum of Art, NASA, and the New York Public Library.

• In 2019, the CC Search tool provided by the Creative Commons site was adopted by the WordPress project. Openverse is the new incarnation of CC Search.

• Currently, Openverse only indexes images and audio-visual content.  Searches for video are available from external sources. Plans are in place to add additional representations of open-access texts, 3D models, and more. They have one common goal: Grant access to the estimated 2.5 billion Creative Commons licenses and public domain works available online. All the code utilized is open source.

• Please be aware that Openverse does not guarantee that the visuals have been correctly provided with a Creative Commons license or that the attribution and any other related licensing information collected are precise and complete. To be safe, please double-check the copyright status and attribution information before reusing the material. To find out more, please read the terms of use in Openverse.

Security

• Rogers’ leak includes data from the company’s active directory, including information on customers, the attackers claim. The company confirmed the leak, saying some of Rogers’ employees “business contact information” was exposed.

• The development of new technology in healthcare and the massive expansion in sources of healthcare data have both created many complications when it comes to protecting and securing sensitive information about individuals. Inevitably, the discussion then turns to the role of HIPAA, which then turns to HIPAA not meeting current needs.

• he Iranian nation-state group known as MuddyWater has been observed carrying out destructive attacks on hybrid environments under the guise of a ransomware operation.

• That’s according to new findings from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team, which discovered the threat actor targeting both on-premises and cloud infrastructures in partnership with another emerging activity cluster dubbed DEV-1084.

• Mastodon, a social network based on software for servers of the same name, has been found to have a vulnerability that could have allowed attackers to read individual pieces of information. The problem was caused by inadequate filtering of the data transferred during LDAP authentication. The vulnerability allows attackers to smuggle in an LDAP database query, which can be used to read information about users bit by bit. Despite the vulnerability, it was not possible for attackers to get password hashes.

• The vulnerability has been labelled CVE-2023-28853, with a risk assessment of “high”. Mastodon versions from 2.5.0 were affected, but the developers have since closed the security gaps in versions 4.1.2, 4.0.4, and 3.5.8. The release notes for the three new Mastodon versions include a description of the vulnerability and version 3.0.6 of Ruby as a security update to address a previous ReDoS vulnerability.

• For years, online alcohol recovery startups Monument and Tempest were sharing with advertisers the personal information and health data of their patients without their consent.

• Monument, which acquired Tempest in 2022, confirmed the extensive years-long leak of patients’ information in a data breach notification filed with California’s attorney general last week, blaming their use of third-party tracking systems developed by ad giants including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Pinterest.

• A recently fixed security bug at a popular platform for supporting creators shows how even privacy-focused platforms can put creators’ private information at risk.

• Throne, founded in 2021, bills itself as “a fully secure, concierge wishlist service that acts as an intermediary between your fans and you.” Throne claims to support more than 200,000 creators by shipping out thousands of their wish list items per day, all the while protecting the privacy of the creators’ home address.

• The cyberattack that the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona suffered at the beginning of March, and which disrupted its activity, is still open and bothers the Catalan authorities. After the recent steps taken by the Mossos d’Esquadra to end the case, blocking the pirate gates at the beginning of the week, now the authors of the “hack” have threatened this Thursday to publish new stolen data.

• In particular, they warned that “in the near future” they will publish information about patients with infectious diseases and information about the use of experimental drugs in the elderly that the Barcelona center carries out. The ‘hackers’, the Ransom House collective, have already published thousands of controversial data from the hospital in the first ‘deep web’.

• PharMerica, owned by BrightSpring Health, is a national pharmacy network serving partners in over 3,100 long-term care, senior living, IDD/behavioral health, home infusion, specialty pharmacy, and hospital management programs. BrightSpring® Health Services provides comprehensive home and community-based health services to complex populations needing specialized care. Both are headquartered in Kentucky.

Privacy/Surveillance

• After they have been identified, violators will receive “warning text messages as to the consequences”, police said in a statement.

• The move is aimed at “preventing resistance against the hijab law,” said the statement, carried by the judiciary’s Mizan news agency and other state media, adding that such resistance tarnishes Iran’s spiritual image and spreads insecurity.

• A police statement published by the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency said the system used so-called “smart” cameras and other tools to identify and send “documents and warning messages to the violators of the hijab law”.

• In the last 24 hours we became aware of a dump of the Kodi user forum (MyBB) software being advertised for sale on internet forums. This post confirms that a breach has taken place.

• MyBB admin logs show the account of a trusted but currently inactive member of the forum admin team was used to access the web-based MyBB admin console twice: on 16 February and again on 21 February. The account was used to create database backups which were then downloaded and deleted. It also downloaded existing nightly full-backups of the database. The account owner has confirmed they did not access the admin console to perform these actions.

• On an episode of The Time of Monsters, Jeet Heer spoke with Professor Myles W. Jackson about the implications of DNA databases and the question of who “owns” this information, particularly as it pertains to 23andMe and its customers [“Big Pharma Wants to Own Your DNA Info,” December 21, 2022]. This is an important topic and one that deserves healthy debate. We’ve always maintained at 23andMe that our customers own their DNA, and that testing is first and foremost a choice. Those who are not comfortable with DNA testing, for any reason, should not get tested. We carry this ethos of choice—and transparency—throughout our product and the manner in which we conduct business. Choices presented to customers when they decide to test include what types of information they’d like to receive from our test, whether or not they’d like 23andMe to store their DNA sample (they can elect to have it discarded), and, crucially, how their data may or may not be used by 23andMe or third parties. We talk publicly about our research collaborations, such as those with academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, and pharmaceutical companies, so that customers are aware of how their information may be used, if they do in fact choose to opt in to our research program.

• At 23andMe we conduct research to help advance science, develop our product to return new insights to customers, and develop new medicines for serious unmet medical needs. Thus far, 23andMe research has led to more than more than 200 publications, most of which are in collaboration with academic researchers. This program is conducted pro bono for the purpose of publishing genetic insights that may allow the field to advance research in a number of areas, including the genetics of cancer, Covid-19, Parkinson’s, and many more. We’ve also been able to expand our ancestry composition to include areas of the globe that historically have been underrepresented in genetics. These include regions in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Research is conducted in-house by 23andMe scientists, studying de-identified, aggregate information from customers who have consented to participate under our Main Research Consent. The process of consenting to research is separate from the terms of service and is entirely voluntary. Notably, this is an opt-in process, meaning customers must proactively elect to participate and are not defaulted into participation. Customers have the option to change this consent at any time. Our research is overseen by a third party institutional review board, or IRB, to ensure that the work is conducted to the highest ethical standards and guidelines and that proper, informed consent is carried out. 23andMe will not share any customer data with third parties for research purposes without a customer’s explicit consent.

Defence/Aggression

• Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki Thursday said that officals may fast-track Moldova’s application for accession to the European Union.

• Tennessee lawmakers Thursday voted to expel two Democratic lawmakers for participating in a March 30 protest in the capitol, in which lawmakers joined students and activists in calling for an end to gun violence.

• In early February, residents of Moscow’s Kosino-Ukhtomsky District started protesting in opposition to the rumored construction of a new mosque in their area. Over the weeks that followed, the demonstrations grew into a bizarre and ugly spectacle on which everyone from MMA fighters to Chechnya Governor Ramzan Kadyrov to Russian Orthodox Church head Patriarch Kirill felt compelled to weigh in. On April 5, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin announced that the protesters would get their wish, and that a new site had been chosen for the mosque. The solution was sold as a win-win, but public figures from Dagestan and Chechnya say the incident triggered xenophobia that will leave Russia’s Muslims worse off in the long run.

• Russian prisoners who have been recruited by Russia’s Defense Ministry since February 2023 are now signing contracts to serve the Russian military for 18 months, reports Olga Romanova, head of the NGO Russia Behind Bars, on Telegram. Romanova writes that she learned of the new practice in the Sverdlovsk and Yaroslavl regions.

• Mariupol was almost completely destroyed during the Russian army’s invasion of Ukraine. While the city took artillery fire, many residents, including a number of children, hid in the Priazovskyi State Technical University. The kids sheltering there wrote messages on the building’s walls. After Russian troops captured Mariupol, construction workers from Russia entered the city. Among them was Alexey, a native of Mykolaiv, who left Ukraine for Bashkortostan, in Russia, in 2014. He found the messages left by children hiding from shelling on the basement walls of Priazovskyi University. Journalists from news outlet The Village published photos of the children’s words and drawings. With The Village’s permission, Meduza is sharing photos and English translations of the words left by children hiding in a basement from Russian bombs.

• A new batch of classified documents that appear to detail American national security secrets from Ukraine to the Middle East to China surfaced on social media sites on Friday, alarming the Pentagon and adding turmoil to a situation that seemed to have caught the Biden administration off guard.

• The scale of the leak — analysts say more than 100 documents may have been obtained — along with the sensitivity of the documents themselves, could be hugely damaging, U.S. officials said. A senior intelligence official called the leak “a nightmare for the Five Eyes,” in a reference to the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the so-called Five Eyes nations that broadly share intelligence.

• According to Tarasova, the court found Vasilets guilty of not following orders during combat, an offense which carries a sentence of three years in prison. The prosecution sought the maximum sentence for Vasilets, reports Telegram channel Military Ombudsmen.

• War blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, who was killed on April 2 in an explosion in a St. Petersburg cafe, was buried in Moscow’s Troyekurovo Cemetery.

• The charitable organization Save Ukraine reports that 31 children have returned from Russian-controlled territories to Ukraine.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• On Saturday afternoon, our colleagues from RTL Radio hosted a roundtable discussion on urban planning. Their guests were ProVëlo President Monique Goldschmit, Urbanist Tom Becker from the University of Luxembourg, and Senior Advisor at the Ministry of Mobility Christophe Reuter.

• One of the conclusions of the roundtable was that people have been thinking from the perspective of the car for far too long. The guests agreed that bicycle traffic must be expanded, among other things to reduce car congestion in cities.

• Ukrenergo said on Saturday that Russia has launched more than 1,200 missiles and drones at its energy facilities so far during the war.

• The company described the assault as the largest attempt to destroy a European country’s energy system.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The fact check unit of the Press Information Bureau (PIB), which has been ‘debunking’ WhatsApp forwards and news articles on Central Government schemes and departments for years, will be notified as the official fact checker for the Union Government. As such, whenever any news is notified as fake, social media companies will lose their “safe harbour” for such content, opening them up to lawsuits or other legal action. Social media companies have traditionally enjoyed legal immunity for content posted by users, as the Information Technology Act, 2000 treats them as intermediaries. Under the IT Rules they lose this status if, among other things, they don’t have a grievance officer for India, or don’t address user complaints on time. Additionally now, with this amendment, they will lose their safe harbour immunity for posts that have been flagged by the government as misinformation.

• The purported classified documents surfaced on Twitter and Telegram, and immediately sparked a US Department of Defense probe. Uncle Sam said it is checking out the blueprints, which may well be misinformation.

• It was not clear on Saturday whether the Pentagon material was hacked or intentionally leaked — the images circulating appeared to be photographs of documents. The documents could fall into a gray area that, at least in the past, would have led to discussion among compliance officers inside the company about whether they qualified for a takedown.

• “The altered numbers expose them [the Russian intelligence services] completely. And it shows that the main reason of this was to convince the Russian public that only 17,000 [Russian] soldiers died,” said Andrey Piontkovsky, senior fellow at the Institute of Modern Russia, headquartered in New York.

• “This is a propaganda operation designed primarily for Russian public opinion,” Piontkovsky told VOA’s Russian Service on Friday, adding that what has been released does not contain “any detailed harmful military information.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The New York district attorney’s case against Trump is a strong one.

• ProPublica Thursday released a report purporting to show substantial, unreported gifts accepted by US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. ProPublica, a US-based news source, relied upon flight records, internal memos and individuals present at specific events to compile the allegations.

• As congressional Democrats scoffed at U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ attempt to defend taking luxury vacations funded by a billionaire Republican mega-donor, a group of 16 Democratic lawmakers on Friday urged Chief Justice John Roberts to investigate “allegations of unethical and potentially unlawful conduct” by a member of the nation’s highest court.

• Reproductive rights advocates and Democratic U.S. lawmakers on Saturday condemned a far-right federal judge’s ruling that threatens access to mifepristone—one of two drugs commonly used in abortion pills—while calling on the Biden administration to do everything in its power to ensure access to the medication.

• Plunging into totalitarianism, Tennessee’s GOP has boldly decreed the best way to end the slaughter of kids by guns is to expel two young black lawmakers urging we end the slaughter of kids by guns. In “a farce” of stunning contrasts, poised, eloquent Reps. Jones and Pearson blasted a venomous GOP who ousted them for doing their job – giving voice to their constituents. Jones: “We called for a ban on assault weapons, you called for an assault on democracy.” Now can we say they’re fascists?

• What is it about many modern day Republican candidates?

• The expulsion of two Black state legislators for peaceful protest in Tennessee April 6 has long roots in political repression and the legacy of racism in the U.S. But it also is a signpost of the chilling escalation of autocratic assaults on democracy that have mushroomed since the ascent of Donald Trump.

• For two consecutive nights this week, during the holy month of Ramadan, the Israeli military stormed Al-Aqsa mosque. They entered the mosque before prayer was over, firing rubber bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas at Palestinian worshippers. These events left at least 12 Palestinians injured, and over 400 were arrested on the first night. Following the raid, Israeli violence spread across the west bank. Dozens have been hurt by inhaling poisonous gas fired by Israeli forces, and a settler in occupied East Jerusalem shot a Palestinian child.

• Studies have shown that misinformation is a big issue on every major social media platform. In many cases, it is the content that most often goes viral on these sites, thanks to their own algorithms, and users – with varying motivations – who share such information. But, these platforms have also become an important tool for people – particularly from marginalised groups – to exercise their right to free speech.

• [...]

• The question that arises then is if social media companies will exercise their agency to decide whether they should let a piece of content labelled fake by the government on their platform. If they do, they could lose safe harbour and attract a lawsuit; and if they don’t, they will become party to a censorship exercise.

• In the US, companies can announce widespread job cuts and let go of hundreds if not thousands of workers within months — and many have. Meanwhile, in Europe, mass layoffs among tech companies have stalled because of labor protections that make it virtually impossible to dismiss people in some countries without prior consultations with employee interest groups.

• Putin has met with military bloggers who support conquering Ukraine but are critical of how it is being done.

• History was made this week when Donald Trump became the first president to be criminally charged. He pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records. He has yet to be indicted, however, for the far more serious offense of promoting an insurrection and attempting to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election. Most prominent Republicans have refused to criticize Trump for any of his alleged crimes.

Twitter

• The designation of “state-affiliated media” for Washington-based National Public Radio — a label also applied to government-owned Chinese and Russian outlets — comes just days after Twitter stripped The New York Times of its verified status on the platform, the first sign of Musk’s updated policies for news media.s

Censorship/Free Speech

• Russian stores are out of Monopoly board games, reports state broadcaster RBC.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Investigators from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Friday formally charged Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter Evan Gershkovich with espionage. Nevertheless, Gershkovich and WSJ continue to deny the charges and maintain the American reporter’s innocence.

• Home to numerous violent Islamist extremists, the region suffers from political instability and sometimes regular coups, including two in Mali and Burkina Faso and one in Chad since 2020.

• In some Sahel countries, journalists are persecuted by armed Islamist factions and ruling military juntas alike — the former abducting or killing reporters, the latter restricting press freedoms or conducting arbitrary arrests.

• “We have seen the trends that after taking power, the military juntas have not hesitated to reshape the media landscape in order to better serve their interests,” said Sadibou Marong, sub-Saharan Africa director at Reporters Without Borders, which this week published a new report on the region. “This has been the case in Mali and Burkina Faso, where local broadcasting of several French media outlets has been suspended.”

• Five journalists have been killed in the Sahel in the past 10 years, while two others recently went missing. Hundreds of others have been threatened and can no longer work without putting their lives in danger. In the 40 pages of its latest report, What It’s Like to Be a Journalist in the Sahel, RSF reveals the extent to which the conditions for practicing journalism have worsened in this part of the world, and how it is becoming a “no-news zone”.

• Rebecca Vincent, the director of operations and campaigns for RSF, declared, “We followed all rules this morning. We were there very early with all required documentation. Without even checking our documentation, we were told that we would not be allowed in.”

• “The first official that we spoke to said that they had received ‘intelligence’ that we were journalists, and therefore we would not be allowed to visit,” Vincent added. “No further discussion was possible. We were informed that the decision had been taken by the prison governor directly.”

• Ordinary journalistic activity—indeed, the ordinary details of a young American man’s life—are recast as evidence of espionage. Under Russian law, it may indeed be evidence. In 2012, as Vladimir Putin cracked down in the wake of mass protests, Russia broadened the definition of espionage so that reporting and other professional activities could be interpreted as spying. Contrary to popular perception and common sense, in Russia, “espionage” does not need to mean working for a foreign intelligence service or even a foreign government—under the 2012 definition, espionage can include gathering information for any foreign organization the Russian government sees as threatening the security of the country. The F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., claims that Gershkovich was collecting classified information, but Russian law makes it possible to prosecute someone for espionage for using publicly available information; conversely, simply obtaining information, without sharing it with anyone, can be a crime. Finally, the law doesn’t require the prosecution to prove intent. Back when the law was changed, the F.S.B. argued that the previous version had been too restrictive and “lack of proof of ‘hostile’ intent was used by defense as an argument to release the accused and defendants from criminal responsibility.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• >China feels it has the “right to redefine the global world order”, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei told AFP on Wednesday ahead of the opening in London of his first design-focused exhibition.

• The pension of the average French person is already facing cuts over the coming decades.

• President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular pension reform, forced through undemocratically, will fuel support for the far right and further weaken voters’ faith in politics.

• The following is excerpted from David Barsamian’s recent interview with Noam Chomsky at AlternativeRadio.org.

• Investor purchases accounted for 24 percent of all residential real estate sales in Boston in the fourth quarter of 2022. A 10 percent tax on those sales could yield $82 million in revenue.

• This is a talk Chris Hedges gave on April 6 at a protest at Princeton Theological Seminary demanding the removal of hedge fund billionaire Michael Fisch as chair of the seminary’s trustee board.

• United States District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk outlawed distribution of the abortion drug mifepristone in a 67-page ruling Friday evening. The order revokes the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of one of the most commonly used methods to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, and his order could end access to the drug nationwide.

• Pilar Pulgar, a 51-year-old supermarket cashier, feels her “legs tremble” when she sees a customer using an automated checkout. Estefanía García, 28, is “scared” by the automation at the new distribution center where she works, after years employed at a warehouse that used hardly any automation at all. José Luis, a 42-year-old sales representative, says his company regularly threatens him with the prospect of being replaced by a machine: “They convey this to us quite explicitly, to make us feel like we’re expendable.” Other workers in danger of being replaced by automation are more optimistic. “It’s hard for me to imagine how what I do could be automated,” says Beatriz Espinilla, 39, who is in charge of fitting car doors on an assembly line. “It requires very fine, detailed work,” she says. “There’s some uneasiness, but I’m not that worried,” adds Diego Martin, a 36-year-old train conductor.

Fentanylware (TikTok)

Monopolies

• Swift proved she was here to stay. Her tenth studio album, Midnights, broke several records. It became the most-listened record in history on Spotify on its release date, with 184.6 million plays in just 24 hours. In the United States, over 1.5 million copies were sold in a week, and its songs swept the Billboard Hot 100′s top 10. Swift’s albums also accounted for one of every 25 vinyls sold in the U.S. in 2022: Midnights topped the list with 1.7 million copies, and Folklore, originally released in 2020, took seventh place with 174,000. The streaming era may have ended the days of astronomic sales figures, but her numbers come close to those of pop artists at the end of the last century.

• “There’s a lot of conversation right now about combatting bots and making sure tickets get directly into the hands of fans, and at a reasonable price. Ticketing fees have never been higher and a lot of people, me included, are justifiably frustrated and concerned,” Rogers wrote in a Thursday post. “I’ve been thinking about this over the last few months and wanted to provide you with another option. So this time, in an effort to eliminate bots and lower fees — we’re going analog. Come buy an in-person ticket like it’s 1965.”

Patents

• In the next chapter in the FRAND-related battle between Nokia and Oppo, Nokia tried to obtain an injunction in relation to Oppo’s sales through Oleading and Reflection.

Copyrights

• Z-Library appears to be shrugging off a criminal investigation as if nothing ever happened. The site continues to develop its shadow library and, following a successful fundraiser, now plans to expand its services to the physical book market. Z-Library envisions a book ‘sharing’ market, where its millions of users can pick up paperbacks at dedicated “Z-Points” around the globe.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Hello all. You might be expecting me to be writing in Spanish, that if you expected me at all. Well, that was for two reasons: I’m much less confident in my English skills than I used to be, and I wanted to help growing the Spanish “sector” of the Gemini-verse. Yet the thing is that the Spanish Gemini-verse is not growing and might be even stalling, IMHO. So, without forsaking the Spanish language completely, I’ll be posting much more often in English. So help me God, and all that.

• I’m not sure if I could fully tell you why, but I’ve had this compulson in my mind that I need to purchase The Beatles – Rubber Soul on vinyl – but specifically around the time that I’m moving in with my partner (next weekend). I guess I’ve been listening to this album a fair bit recently, and maybe it’s just that it reminds me of this moment – and I want to have something material as a kind-of calendar item to mark the moment.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

• What the fuck!?

• (And don’t go “it’s not about your posts, Sandra” because those posts about Emacs and text semantics were from me .)

• I have, at the time of me writing this, 744 posts about non-techy stuff (compared to 205 about tech topics).

• Two weeks ago I made seven posts on Antenna in one day (March 25th). Only one of which was tech-related.

• I get shit from Planet Scheme people because I don’t post about tech enough. Drew left gemini because people on Gemini didn’t post about tech enough.

• I’ve read [How Anna gophers] and I thought that it’s a good idea for a new series. So I’d like to write how I gopher.

• The great thing is that you don’t need to install any software and the Gopher server is available at SDF.org out of the box. Just copy the text file to the gopher subdirectory located in your home directory. When this subdirectory does not exist, you need to run the mkgopher command and issue the setup command in it. In fact, the command only creates a symlink in our home directory, which could be done without it.

Programming

• Last week or so I finally sat down and wrote my pretty ideal binding macro for Common Lisp—basically a rite of passage for any Lisper given all the other ones I’ve stumbled across. I just fully rewrote it yesterday after using it in some real code and cleaning it up a bit; so I guess I should actually tell people about it in case anyone ends up interested in it since I really like it so far. Although like almost all of my projects it’s written for me and I don’t expect anyone else to end up using it (not necessarily a bad thing).

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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