● 04.10.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 10/04/2023: Linux 6.3 RC 6 and LibreSSL 3.7.2 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 1:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• joel is a year older

Kernel Space

• The 6.3-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for testing.

• The final batch of work from Intel for the Meteor Lake graphics “drm-intel-gt-next” has been uploaded to the Linux 6.4 kernel, patiently awaiting the merge window that should open in a few more weeks. The window will open shortly after the new version of Linux (v. 6.3) becomes life for download.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

• You may have seen a weird line starting with a “#!” at the beginning of Linux scripts and wondered what that was. That’s called the “shebang line” and it allows Linux to tell which interpreter to use. Here’s how it works.

• In this guide, we shall bring to light a simple yet important concept in process handling in a Linux system, which is how to completely detach a process from its controlling terminal.

• Linux Filesystems are responsible for organizing how data is stored and recovered. One way or another, with time, the filesystem may become corrupted and certain parts of it may not be accessible. If your filesystem develops such inconsistency it is recommended to verify its integrity.

• This can be completed via a system utility called fsck (file system consistency check), which checks the root file system automatically during boot time or ran manually.

• We have various host-related alerts in our Prometheus and Alertmanger setup. Some of those are about things on the host not being right (full disks, for example, or network interfaces not being at the right speed), but some of them are alerts that fire if the host is down; for example there’s alerts on ping failures, SSH connection failures, and the Prometheus host agent not responding. Unsurprisingly, we reboot our machines every so often and we don’t like to get spammed with spurious alerts, so in our Alertmanager configuration we delay those alerts a bit so that they won’t send us an alert if the machine is just rebooting. This looks like: [...]

• [James Turk] has a novel approach to the problem of scraping web content in a structured way without needing to write the kind of page-specific code web scrapers usually have to deal with.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This is a continuation of my previous blog post where I shared my mid-journey experience while being a Season of KDE mentee.

• This is a call for people out there to help us test the major version upgrades on Fedora KDE via Discover.

• In short: no more Dnf System Upgrade for us!

• A bit of context/history: for those of you who follow Nate’s blog you might already know what I am talking about. Thanks to the awesome work done by aleasto on this MR, we closed this bug.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• While waiting for a bug fix affecting majority of 2-in-1 laptops running on GNOME Wayland session, gnome-shell-extension-screen-autorotate is now available in Fedora repository and EPEL 9. Give a try on your device Possibly this extension will get added on the incoming Fedora Design Suite 39 as default for the owners of convertible laptops.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• OpenVMS x86 is now available for (most) hobbyists! Almost a year after the official release most hobbyists can now login to the Service Portal to download their copy of OpenVMS 9.2 for x86, X86E921OE.ZIP and the PAK (license) files (x86community-20240401.zip), valid until April 2024.

Reviews

• In short, carbonOS appears to offer an immutable root filesystem and uses OSTree to handle software management and updates. The project tries to offer a central utility for managing the operating system and offers search functions to assist users in finding things. All of this is provided in a 2.2GB ISO file. So far, carbonOS sounded promising.

• I soon discovered carbonOS boots in UEFI mode exclusively, Legacy BIOS mode is not supported. Booting from the live media brings up a menu offering to launch a live session, either running from the removable media or from RAM. Selecting either option immediately fails, causing the screen to briefly go blank and then display the menu again. In short, carbonOS did not boot to a point where I could try using or installing it.

• To be fair to the carbonOS developers, they seem to agree the distribution is not yet ready for daily use. The project’s download page carries a warning: “Please be aware that this is an early development build of carbonOS. carbonOS is still unfinished. There will be breaking changes.” I’m planning to try this interesting project again when it has had more time to mature.

Fedora Family / IBM

• EasyOS uses ext4 encrypted folders. This includes the ‘.session’ and the ‘files’ folder. I have been fighting with the Flatpak sandbox, but have given up; it just won’t work properly with ext4 encryption.

• The Flatpak app runs as its own user, just like AppImages, with home folder /home/<app>. This is in the ‘.session’ folder, hence encrypted — well, encrypted if you entered a password at first bootup.

• The change that I have made, just for Flatpaks, is /home/<app> is now a symlink to an unencrypted folder in the working-partition. No encryption, also all read and write operations are direct to the working-partition, outside the current session.

• From the user point of view, it is pretty straightforward, nothing complicated to think about. Just use the “Flapi” Flatpak Installer, and it is easy. You end up with a menu entry and optionally an icon on the desktop, and off you go.

Debian Family

• I chose to start with the Xfce version. After all, MX Linux is all about being frugal and light. Now, now, now, this used to be an important distinction re: desktop environment a few years ago, but it isn’t anymore. Back in the day, the so-called “heavy” desktops would indeed be heavy, memory usage and performance wise. Nowadays, the underlying distro choice is probably more important when it comes to system toll, i.e., Xfce alone won’t do miracles. The gap to some of the heavy desktops has also narrowed a great deal. You want speed and all of the modern conveniences? Plasma. When it comes to lightweight, both Xfce and Plasma will deliver.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Data pipelines are the backbone of Machine Learning projects. They are responsible for collecting, storing, and processing the data that is used to train and deploy machine learning models. Without a data pipeline, it would be very difficult to manage the large amounts of data that are required for machine learning projects.

• For this long, complex, fragile ML data pipeline, as we illustrated in the diagram, there are four major challenges for Data Engineers and Data Scientists: Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Veracity. They are collectively known as 4”V”s.

• Canonical announced the release of Landscape 23.03 with broader CPU architecture compatibility and improved management and monitoring capabilities for Ubuntu. Landscape 23.03 manages all Ubuntu versions and derivatives from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS onwards, in addition to Debian Bullseye. Launching and configuring Landscape is faster and simpler than ever before. With this release, out-of-the-box support for Landscape is included in Ubuntu Pro.

Devices/Embedded

• We’ve already checked out Cytron’s CM4 Maker Board kit with a Raspberry Pi CM4 system-on-module and booted the system with the included 32GB “MAKERDISK” Class 10 microSD card preloaded Raspberry Pi OS in the first part of the review. For the second part of the CM4 Maker review, I’ve mostly used the 128GB NVMe SSD provided by the company and played with other features of the board including the RTC, the buzzer, some Seeed Studio grove modules, and even got help from ChatGPT for one of the Python programs I used.

• The SI-111 is a palm-size fanless 4K digital signage player featuring Atom/Celeron low power processors. The new IBASE device includes a 2.5 GbE LAN port, 1x HDMI 2.0 port and multiple serial interfaces.

• This month, BananaPi unveiled a compact development board equipped with a 1.9″ LCD display. The BPI-Centi-S3 is built around the ESP32-S3 microcontroller enabled with 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 connectivity.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Identity plays videos clips at the same time, in sync, in the same window, and controlled by the same seek bar. You switch between them using on-screen tabs or keyboard shortcuts (e.g., 1 to show video one, 2 to show video two, and so on).

Programming/Development

• I hate machine learning so much, to the point that I’m almost willing to consider bad arguments against them! But ideally let’s stick to good arguments against them, and see how far we can get.

• I started hating ML from a gut feeling first, and had to come up with arguments and reasons later. Feels over reals.

• The table is in long format. Below we turn it into a table in wide format. We also convert the temperatures to Celsius degrees and we rename the months which are given as numbers in the original data.

• I used to work at a place that had an internal task tracking system. Big deal, you think. Lots of places do that. Well, at this particular company, it was sometimes a pit of sorrow into which you would issue a request and never hear from it again… unless you went to some lengths.

• Let’s back up a little to set the stage. It’s June of some year quite a while back, and it’s about 9:30 at night. I guess I’m on call for the “last line of defense” debugging team, and I get pinged by the manager type who’s wrangling an outage. It seems this team did some kind of code push and now they were completely down in some cluster: “0 online users” type of thing.

Python

• [BioBootloader] combined Python and a hefty dose of of AI for a fascinating proof of concept: self-healing Python scripts. He shows things working in a video, embedded below the break, but we’ll also describe what happens right here.

Rust

Leftovers

• to put it bluntly: stop developing new, especially proprietary, garbage. if that doesn’t work for you, print it out. having a physical copy that is observable with our immediate senses rather than through a document reader, browser, etc. is one way to fix this problem. however, that doesn’t work with music, videos, and other digital media. also, let’s not forget, it’s the future. paper is kind of boring compared to a computer (sorry). let’s create truly standardized version formats that are free and open, and build devices that run off of long-term energy sources and are designed to do one thing, which is to allow access to those formats.

• we don’t have to throw profits out the window just because there’s no money to be made on open formats and protocols — just make a good format-access client and sell it! contrary to popular belief, there’s certainly some incentive on the consumers’ end. what’s the number one thing people buy? *goods and services that make their lives easier.* in my opinion, the best way to achieve this is to create a universal digital ecosystem, regardless of how you access it. the best way to do that?

• free and open protocols and format standardization.

• In our minds and our computer screens, we live in an ideal world. Wires don’t have any resistance, capacitors don’t leak, and switches instantly make connections and break them. The truth is, though, in the real world, none of those things are true. If you have a switch connected to a lightbulb, the little glitches when you switch are going to be hard to notice. Hook that same switch up to a processor that is sampling it constantly, and you will have problems. This is the classic bane of designing microcontroller circuits and is called switch bounce. [Dr. Volt] covers seven different ways of dealing with it in a video that you can see below.

• Two dogs walking. One of them says to the other: “I bark and I bark, but I never feel like I effect real change.”

Science

• This year at McMurdo, the 24×7 “midnight sun” period ended on February 20. There will be daily sunrises and sunsets until April 25, at which point McMurdo will enter “polar night”. The sun will stay below the horizon until August 19. Then there will be daily sunrises and sunsets until October 24, followed by another round of midnight sun.

• Black holes are usually destructive. They grow by gobbling up nearby matter, and can rip apart stars and swallow clouds of gas and dust. Nothing can escape their pull once past the event horizon, not even light. That said, a team led by Yale University scientists have discovered one hole that has created a whopping 200,000-light-year-long chain of newborn stars behind it.

Education

• [^2]: I later found an article that walks through a system they built to suggest changes to ensure a piece adheres to their style guide. An interesting aside that comes from the story is that a member on the Guardian’s digital team had written “About 13,000″ regex rules to catch issues that should be fixed prior to an article going into print. Intriguing.

Hardware

• In a recent article on The Chip Letter [Babbage] looks at the Intel iAPX 432 computer architecture. This was an ambitious, hyper-CISC architecture that was Intel’s first 32-bit architecture. As a stack-based architecture, it exposed no registers to the software developer, while providing high-levels pertaining to object-oriented programming, multitasking and garbage collection in hardware.

• In VR, a blink can be a window of opportunity to improve the user’s experience. We’ll explain how in a moment, but blinks are tough to capitalize on because they are unpredictable and don’t last very long. That’s why researchers spent time figuring out how to induce eye blinks on demand in VR (video) and the details are available in a full PDF report. Turns out there are some novel, VR-based ways to reliably induce blinks. If an application can induce them, it makes it easier to use them to fudge details in helpful ways.

• Why use quite outdated (released in 2016) Dell Wyse 3030 LT terminal under FreeBSD? There are probably many answers to that question. I recently started to use these for my backup purposes … and to be honest I am really pleased with them.

• The 3D5000 still leverages LoongArch, Loongson’s homemade instruction set architecture (ISA) from 2020. The chipmaker was previously a firm believer in MIPS. However, Loongson eventually built LoongArch from the ground up with the sole objective of not relying on foreign technology to develop its processors. LoongArch is a RISC (reduced instruction set computer) ISA, similar to MIPS or RISC-V.

• 3D printing by painting with light beams on a vat of liquid plastic was once the stuff of science fiction, but now is very much science-fact. More than that, it’s consumer-level technology that we’re almost at the point of being blasé about. Scientists and engineers the world over have been quietly beavering away in their labs on the new hotness, nanoscale 3D printing with varying success. Recently IEESpectrum reports some promising work using holographic imaging to generate nanoscale structures at record speed.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The latest report from the United Nations on the direction the environment is heading is the scariest so far. In order to turn things around, the UN recommends—among other things—that each of us eat more plant-based foods. I’m willing to accept that eating plant-based food is good for the climate and for animals. But as someone who has eaten meat my entire life, I had to ask the question—is plant-based food good for me?”

Proprietary

• Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist and author famous for releasing Twitter Files, quit the microblogging platform after he claimed that it blocked access to embedding tweets in posts on the online publishing platform Substack

• Twitter also won’t allow any retweets, likes, or engagement with posts that contained links to Substack articles, Taibbi claimed.

• In a statement shared with The Verge, Substack founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Seth said they are “disappointed that twitter has chosen to restrict writers’ ability to share their work.”

• Amazon Games was the latest victim of the broader Amazon corporation’s latest round of mass layoffs this week, specifically the San Diego branch whose top office John Smedley vacated earlier this year. Curiously, Amazon Games’ VP says that “the New World team in Irvine will grow as [execs] shift some resources to further support its continued development” – in perhaps yet another sign that New World is doing OK enough to keep getting resources.

• Meanwhile, NCsoft is suing Kakao and XL Games, No Man’s Sky launched its Interceptor update, Ghostcrawler is forming a new MMO studio, and CCP Games doubled down on its blockchain babble.

• Read on to catch up with the very best of this week’s MMO news and opinions today as every Sunday (since 2010!) in Massively Overpowered’s Week in Review!

• Amid the overall decline in venture capital funding, investors are taking more time to scrutinise startup business models before closing deals. The lack of easy funding has led to a deeper analysis of the market. This and more in today’s ETtech Morning Dispatch.

Security

• Josh and Kurt talk about some data on the size of NPM. Josh wrote a blog post and a report about the amount of SEO spam in NPM was released. Open source is enormous, and it’s mostly one person. It’s hard to imagine how this all works sometimes and this lack of understanding can create challenges.

• A team of South Korean spies and American private investigators quietly gathered at the South Korean intelligence service in January, just days after North Korea fired three ballistic missiles into the sea.

• For months, they’d been tracking $100 million stolen from a California cryptocurrency firm named Harmony, waiting for North Korean hackers to move the stolen crypto into accounts that could eventually be converted to dollars or Chinese yuan, hard currency that could fund the country’s illegal missile program.

• When the moment came, the spies and sleuths — working out of a government office in a city, Pangyo, known as South Korea’s Silicon Valley — would have only a few minutes to help seize the money before it could be laundered to safety through a series of accounts and rendered untouchable.

• One thing is clear about cyber insurance in the spring of 2023: The status quo is not sustainable.

• And now, Lloyd’s of London, a major player in the global insurance market, is calling for dramatic changes in the cyber insurance market. According to The Financial Times (FT), “From next month, Lloyd’s will require the dozens of insurers that operate in the market to include exemptions that would prevent policies paying out if a major attack is judged to be ‘state-backed.’

• “Exclusions for acts of war have long been a staple of policies ranging from property to motor, shielding insurers from the potentially crippling claims that a physical conflict generates. But Lloyd’s, a powerhouse in the global industry, believes war exclusions need updating for the Internet age, when cyber warfare can be government sponsored even in the absence of conventional conflict. Failure to exclude significant state-backed attacks from policies would leave insurers exposed to ‘systemic risk,’ Lloyd’s said when it first announced the plan last summer.”

• The “exceptional situation” is also associated with a reduction in the size of the print edition. According to media reports, the attackers are demanding a ransom for the blocked system.

• The “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” continues to struggle with problems two weeks after a cyber attack on its computers. The publisher shut down central systems for newspaper production and had to pre-produce the Saturday edition on Thursday. The company announced on Saturday that this “exceptional situation” was also associated with a reduction in scope. Due to the cyber attack, some systems and services are still not available.

Privacy/Surveillance

Confidentiality

• Overall, the primary concern driving preparedness from a security perspective is that encryption is breakable due to advancements in post-quantum computing for both asymmetric and symmetric cryptography. Most researchers put this possibility 10 to 15 years out from now, but they acknowledge we could be surprised by technological advancements.

Defence/Aggression

• Recently, the US Senate voted on a bipartisan basis to rescind the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq. President Biden, who voted for that AUMF in 2003, has said he will sign it if it gets to his desk.

• Overnight on April 9, Russian troops shelled the city of Zaporizhzhia. According to regional emergency services, the attack partially damaged a private home and started a fire.

• Serhiy Cherevaty, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Armed Forces, says that Russia is now sending regular troops to Bakhmut where Wagner Group mercenaries have been done the bulk of the fighting for Russia. Ukraine says deploying regular troops is necessary due to heavy losses among Wagner fighters — around 100 people a day, “counting only the dead.”

• Although U.S. officials believe the documents are most likely authentic, at least one of those obtained by NBC News appears to have been doctored, with two versions of the document appearing online, providing different estimates of Russian casualty figures.

• The leak will also raise fresh questions among U.S. allies about whether Washington can be trusted with secret information. It remains unclear whether the leak is the result of a hack by a foreign adversary or whether the disclosure came from within the U.S. government or through a U.S. ally with access to American intelligence reporting.

• It’s not yet clear whether all the material surfacing online is legitimate, though unnamed U.S. officials have told CNN and the New York Times that the documents appear to be real.

• However, some have also noted that, even if the documents are authentic, some of the information in them may have been altered.

• At least 23 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa were missing on Saturday, after their two boats sank off the coast of Tunisia. They were trying to cross the Mediterranean sea to Italy, said a judicial official.

• The European Commission, and countries such as Spain and Germany, are against the use of EU money to build more walls, believing that there are more effective tools to curb irregular immigration. But those in favor, headed by the Visegrad group comprised of the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary and supported by Italy, Greece and Austria, argue their position using a kind of domestic logic: to be able to close doors, they must first exist. Ultimately, the issue is more about where Europe is heading in the face of the migration challenge, and whether it will continue to use ever tougher policies to meet it. Right now, everything points to the affirmative.

• Alarm Phone said people on board were panicking, with several of them requiring medical attention. The vessel was out of fuel and its lower deck was full of water, while the captain had left and there was nobody who could steer the boat, they said.

• Metropolitan Epifany of the Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church announced that he will conduct Orthodox Easter services in the Uspensky church at the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. He said the exact timing of the services is yet to be determined, but that they will probably will be held during the morning on April 16, rather than Easter night, because of Kyiv’s current curfew.

• The deficiencies in the American character have rotted the world.

• Policing is neither reformable nor redeemable.

• From the School of the Americas to Cop City, the U.S. has long been complicit in the death of environmental activists.

Environment

• Due to their resemblance to fish eggs, birds and other sea life will eat the tiny pellets—which also absorb toxic pollutants—adversely affecting the entire food chain, Arnold says.

• United Nations panel shows climate change is outrunning emissions goals. Our only option is to adapt.

Energy/Transportation

• Meanwhile, in the husk of a onetime aluminum smelting plant an hour outside of Austin, row upon row of computers were using enough electricity to power about 6,500 homes as they raced to earn Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency.

• If we want to live on a habitable planet in a hundred years, humanity cannot keep building cars and roads at the same pace that we have been. Environmentalists have been advocating for a shift to public transit and walking- or bicycle-oriented city planning for decades; and yet, in the United States, the necessary social and infrastructural paradigm shift clearly isn’t happening, as evidenced by how car-dependent we remain. Is a post-car future actually realistic, or a mere pipe dream?

• Surprisingly, experts with whom Salon spoke say that it isn’t a utopian fantasy. There are clear ways we could transition humanity to a car-free — or at least, car-lite — existence without compromising on other quality-of-life facets.

Wildlife/Nature

Finance

• TLDR: Each of my grant budgets included the university’s cut, a fraction of a month of salary for me per year, a graduate student, conference travel for both of us, and a very small amount to conduct user studies. This amounts to a little under $100,000 per year per grant.

• Last Monday, McDonald’s became another major company to announce layoffs amidst looming recession fears. In an internal email sent out, the mega-chain notified corporate employees and some overseas workers to stay home as they would be informing staff about their job statuses and closing offices for a few days. Earlier this year, McDonald’s released a strategic plan titled ‘Accelerating The Arches’ which detailed their growth strategy in the next chapter; now, potentially hundreds of employees are facing layoffs and pay cuts as they reign in this next chapter.

• A social media user has sparked outrage after exposing the sky-high prices at a McDonald’s restaurant, specifically of the popular combo meals.

• The video, which shows the cost of combo meals from the food menu of a McDonald’s location in Connecticut, has left users expressing disbelief over the exorbitant prices.

• In the video, which has attracted hundreds of views, TikTok user @xconmedia can be seen filming the menu of a McDonald’s restaurant in Connecticut, as he expresses his shock at the jaw-dropping prices.

• Tech sector layoffs for 2023 have already surpassed the whole of last year amid a bloodbath in Silicon Valley.

• Almost 169,000 people have been sacked since January, compared to the 164,411 who were let go in the entirety of 2022, according to data tracker Layoffs.fyi.

• “The Party Is Ending for French Retirees.” That’s the headline the Wall Street Journal (3/14/23) went with just days before French President Emmanuel Macron invoked a special article of the constitution to bypass the National Assembly and enshrine an increase in the retirement age in national law. The Journal proclaimed:

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• On first rollout, Musk publicly dismissed concerns that impostors would impersonate verified people or organizations by fooling readers with a paid blue checkmark. However, some companies had to deal with the fallout from impersonation or fake accounts that paid for verification.

• A chief concern raised by critics of the bill is that individuals who seek to use TikTok or any service banned under the rules it lays out would be punished.

• The digital rights groups Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future, along with the ACLU, have all come out against the proposal. The groups are among critics that argue the bill could potentially punish individuals that seek to gain access to banned apps, possibly through VPNs, or virtual private networks.

• Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott drew widespread condemnation from legal experts after he said Saturday that he is “working as swiftly” as the law allows to pardon a man who was convicted the previous day of murdering a racial justice protester in 2020.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

Censorship/Free Speech

• Mr. Moskalyov’s posts on the Russian social networks Odnoklassniki and Vkontakte came to the attention of the authorities last April after an art teacher at Masha’s school tried to generate support among the students for the Russian military. Masha’s contribution: a picture of a mother and daughter holding a “Glory to Ukraine” flag and standing in the path of a Russian rocket. “No to War,” she wrote underneath.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Twitter has backtracked after an uproar for labeling the US radio network NPR as “state- affiliated media” and now calls it “government-funded.”

• Elon Musk’s social media network has also applied that new label to the BBC, which is funded predominantly by British households paying a license fee. Britain’s beloved national broadcaster has reached out to Twitter for clarification, news reports said.

• The change in how Twitter refers to Washington-based National Public Radio happened quietly overnight Saturday and comes after the network complained that the term “state-affiliated” was disparaging and inaccurate.

• The journalists, Serenje Radio Manager Mr. Male Kapema, Finance Personnel Mr. Enoch Champo, and Reporter Sheila Kalunga, had rushed to the police station following a phone call with Serenje DC Mr. Paul Masuwa. They were attacked by suspected UPND cadres who had reportedly been imported from outside Serenje.

• The US empire does not care about press freedoms, it cares about power and domination.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The study outlined several areas in developed countries where internet access is essential to exercise socio-economic human rights, like education, health, housing, work and social security.

• For people in developing countries, [Internet] access can also make the difference between receiving an adequate level of healthcare or receiving none.

• Although managers tend to value employees perceived as loyal, for example, a new study shows they also tend to exploit loyal workers when assigning unpaid work or extra tasks.

• These managers are not necessarily nefarious, the researchers note. Some may be oblivious, failing to grasp the ethical results of their decisions.

• Yet, that’s little comfort for dedicated workers, left with excessive workloads as the apparent price of their loyalty.

• Progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned Sunday that if the U.S. Supreme Court upholds a right-wing federal judge’s ruling banning access to abortion pills, “it would essentially institute a national abortion ban.”

• A federal judge in Texas blocked the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. Another in Washington state issued a conflicting ruling. The matter now seems poised to head for the Supreme Court.

• If there was a giant composite lawsuit against Donald J. Trump, for his over forty years of recurring criminal and civil violations, (while a corporate boss and politician) the only recourse for his lawyers would be to plead the insanity defense.

• Can a Prime Minister use a Cabinet reshuffle to sweep government dirt under the carpet? That’s a question now before the Federal Court in a case which will draw out whether Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus KC is a leader who supports transparency, or just another politician interested, first and foremost, in protecting his patch. Rex Patrick explains.

• When the Auditor-General finalised his audit report into the Community Sports Infrastructure Grants Program on 15 January 2020, it quickly generated a huge ‘Sports Rorts’ controversy that began to damage the political prospects of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Coalition government.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

Monopolies

Patents

Trademarks

• A report published this week in Automaton, a Japanese media outlet, claims that Monster Beverage Corporation has complained over trademark registrations for Pokémon X, Pokémon Y, Pokémon Sun, and Pokémon Moon over the years, as well as the Monster Hunter brand and the videogame Monster Hunter Generations. The mobile game Monster Strike didn’t escape Monster Beverage Corporation’s all-seeing eye, either. The company opposed the game’s full title and its abbreviation, “Monst.”

Copyrights

• The Premier League and anti-piracy companies working on their behalf have the ability to conduct invasive online and physical investigations into those believed to be pirating. So, how far can they go, and are there any limits on information obtained in pursuit of potential pirates? In reality, there are limits. For practical purposes, none really matter.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• My car has had a troublesome year. I’ve got a new battery, new exhaust and new timing belt. The timing belt was replaced after it had broked, which meant taking the engine out of the car, taking the heads of the block of the engine, sending them to a machine shop to get restored and then putting it all back together again.

• I decided to enter this Pub today. I look around and things seems tidy. And not too crowded. Nice! As an introvert, I’ve always preferred quiet places, like libraries and small coffee shops.

• It’s a beautiful day. I took some time to write, and I am rediscovering the power of analog writing. It seems that when I want to draft ideas or just plan something, pen and paper gives me more freedom and I get into the zone. After the idea drafting is done, then I feel inspired to type. It’s a process, and sometimes the pen and paper writing takes me out of writer’s block. I forgot that I could start on paper and finish on my computer. Works great!

• Written on a phone while sitting in a tent undergoing some strong winds!

• The past 4 days have been rather eventful. I am part of a team taking 15 Explorers, Scouts aged 14 to 18, to Malta to complete their Explorer Belt. This is an award gained for spending 10 days in a foreign country completing 1 major task and 10 minor tasks. Each tasks can be something silly like see how many people you can take a selfie with or serious about learning how local economies work. The aim is simply to explore and learn about somewhere new. There are 5 leaders on this.

Technical

• For the last 2 years I’ve been running some of my internet infrastructure from my closet; I had a cluster of 3 Raspberry Pis that were running my personal Mastodon instance and my home automation, in addition to a Postgres database and a message queue. Since I’m planning to move fulltime into an RV in the next couple months I had to move the services to the cloud.

• [...]

• It took me a couple days to get everything working. The hardest part was probably migrating my personal Mastodon instance, since it was running an older version (3.5.4). But I was able to migrate to 4.1.2 running on Ubuntu 22.10, storing the files in S3.

Programming

• This is the first blog post about my Algorithms and Data Structures in Go series. I am not a Software Developer in my day job. In my current role, programming and scripting skills are desirable but not mandatory. I have been learning about Data Structures and Algorithms many years ago at University. I thought it would be fun to revisit/refresh my knowledge here and implement many of the algorithms in Go.

• 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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