● 04.12.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 12/04/2023: ‘Youtube-dl Hosting Ban Paves the Way to Privatised Censorship’

Posted in News Roundup at 8:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Instructionals/Technical

• Network operators can implement filtering anywhere within their network. However, best current practices (BCPs) recommend they perform it close to the edge of the network. To this end, most equipment vendors support ingress filtering in some form and MANRS provides an extensive guide for network operators to implement SAV in their network. This includes:

• Outbound SAV (oSAV) — filtering applied at the network edge to traffic coming from inside the customer network to the outside.

• Inbound SAV (iSAV) — filtering applied at the network edge to traffic coming from the outside to the customer network.

• Network operators must implement both of these best practices to mitigate IP spoofing attacks.

• If you have documented cases where there is a problem for users, you are almost certainly better off changing wording to avoid or clarify pronunciations (sometimes replacing extended characters). If re-writing will not satisfy your audience (or boss), then be certain to test your approach with those same users to see if it genuinely improves their experience.

• Today, we are going to learn some simple tips and tricks to read man pages effectively in Linux. As you might already know, a man page is divided into several parts, each with a distinct heading. You might have to scroll down for quite a long time when you’re looking for a particular information on the specific flag/option. It is really inefficient and time consuming task. This is why it is important to learn to use Linux man pages efficiently to find out what exactly you want to know.

• Due to security concerns, you may want to force the user to change the password on the next login.

• Boost is a portable set of C++ programming language libraries. It contains libraries for pseudo-random number generation, linear algebra, multi-threading, image processing, regular expressions, and unit testing.

Games

• Free and open source voxel sandbox game engine Minetest, largely known for comparisons to Minecraft, has a big update out in version 5.7.0. Sounds like a really great release too with plenty of new features and upgrades to the engine.

• Open Hexagon is very much Super Hexagon hyped up to max, open source and just absolutely nuts to play. A fresh upgrade is out now and it sounds great, especially for Linux desktop and Steam Deck players.

• ProtonUp-Qt gives you a hassle-free way to install various compatibility tools like GE-Proton, Wine-GE, Luxtorpeda and others for Steam, Lutris and the Heroic Games Launcher.

• Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a rather popular roguelike, quite possibly one of the best, and now it’s available on Steam.

• Here’s one for Steam Deck fans, and everyone else also looking for some good deals, as Humble Store just recently put up a Games on the Go Sale. With their listed games targeting the Steam Deck with either a Verified or Playable rating.

• There’s been a few efforts to get Half-Life: Alyx playable without VR and the latest is HLA-NoVR, out now and it’s now possible to play it through, even on Steam Deck too.

• Thanks to Steam, Linux gaming is becoming better by the day. And to-day, we have a tutorial showing how to set up and run GTA: Vice City in Linux using Steam Proton compatibility layer, plus some extras like in-game display resolution tweaks, old save game conversion and import, and more. Have total fun!

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• OpenBSD 7.3 has been officially released, marking the system’s 54th release. This latest version builds on OpenBSD’s impressive track record of maintaining a secure and reliable operating system, with only two remote holes detected in the default installation during more than twenty years of use.

• This is what’s new.

Devices/Embedded

• They do, however, have to maintain a connection to the cloud in order to work. Indeed, despite presenting at the TinyML summit and showing off models running on Tensor Flow Lite, the big value is in sending the data up to the cloud for analysis, and alerting clients in a cloud-based dashboard. That’s not to say that some alerts might happen locally, but in the case of monitoring harsh or remote environments, even an alert delivered on the spot through a local model would be like a tree that falls in the forest when no one is there to hear it.

• The Cool Pi CM5 EVB (RCP-CM5-EVB-2GNORK3588) is only offered with the commercial-grade CM5 module with 8GB RAM and 64GB flash, but the system-on-module itself is customizable and can be produced to be industrial grade with the Rockchip RK3588J processor.

• Just like the Cool Pi 4 Model B, the Cool Pi CM5 SoM and EVB can run Android 12, Ubuntu, and Debian operating systems with images and more technical details provided in the Wiki, and support offered in a bilingual (Chinese/English) forum. The board has a fanless design with cooling achieved via a heat spreader placed underneath the board in direct contact with the Rockchip RK3588 processor.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Something of a rarity in the US, the MSX computer standard was rather popular in other parts of the world but mostly existed in the computer-in-a-keyboard format popular in the 80s. [Aron Hoekstra aka “nullvalue”] wanted to build an MSX2 of their own, but decided to build it in a period-appropriate luggable form factor.

• Playing around with servos and Raspberry Pi was the entry point for Daniele’s plotting device project. Moving them around was easy enough, but he was keen to see a practical result: “What can we actually do?” With nostalgia for pantographs and XY aerial plotters in common, Daniele explains he found “their ability to reproduce something we do with our hands intrinsically fascinating. When you see a pen moving around, it looks like it has a purpose”.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• As website accessibility continues to be a growing concern, website owners and developers need to ensure that their websites comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Drupal, a popular open source content management system (CMS), offers various tools and modules to ensure your website is accessible to all users, regardless of their abilities. This article discusses the importance of website accessibility, the basic requirements of ADA compliance, and how Drupal can help you achieve compliance.

• Website accessibility is important for several reasons. First, it ensures that people with disabilities can access and use your website. This includes people with visual, auditory, physical, and cognitive disabilities. By making your website accessible, you are not only complying with the law but also providing a better experience for all users.

• In addition, website accessibility can improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) and increase your website’s usability. Search engines prioritize websites that are accessible, and users are more likely to stay on your website longer and engage with your content if it is easy to use.

• Over the weekend, I worked on adding a new feature to my personal website: videoconfencing. I was motivated to explore this space by Angelo ^1, who used Twilio to run a video conference on his personal website. Twilio is reliable but is not free, so we explored alternatives. Angelo told me about a piece of software called MediaSoup ^2, an open-source project that enables you to run video calls through self-hosted infrastructure.

• Firefox is rolling out Total Cookie Protection by default to more Firefox users worldwide, making Firefox the most private and secure major browser available across Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. Total Cookie Protection is Firefox’s strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.

• You might think assembly language on a PC is passe. After all, we have a host of efficient high-level languages and plenty of resources. But there are times you want to use assembly for some reason. Even if you don’t, the art of writing assembly language is very satisfying for some people — like an intricate logic puzzle. Getting your assembly language fix on a microcontroller is usually pretty simple, but on a PC there are a lot of hoops to jump. So why not use your browser? That’s the point of this snazzy 8086 assembler and emulator that runs in your browser. Actually, it is not native to the browser, but thanks to WebAssembly, it works fine there, too.

• After reviewing the proposed Cyber Resilience Act and Product Liability Act, the PSF has found issues that put the mission of our organization and the health of the open-source software community at risk. While we support the stated goals of these policies of increasing security and accountability for European software consumers, we are concerned that overly broad policies will unintentionally harm the users they are intended to protect. We feel that it is important to consider the role vendor-neutral nonprofit organizations—especially public software repositories—play in the modern development of software.

• Many modern software companies rely on open-source software from public repositories without notifying the author, and certainly without entering into any kind of commercial or contractual relationship with them. If the proposed law is enforced as currently written, the authors of open-source components might bear legal and financial responsibility for the way their components are applied in someone else’s commercial product. The existing language makes no differentiation between independent authors who have never been paid for the supply of software and corporate tech behemoths selling products in exchange for payments from end-users. We believe that increased liability should be carefully assigned to the entity that has entered into an agreement with the consumer. We join our European open source colleagues at the Eclipse Foundation and NLnet Labs in voicing our concerns over how these policies could affect global open source projects.

• Their achievements are unmistakable: we must offer them our gratitude and admiration for decades of accomplishments in establishing and advancing our cause. The principles of software freedom are more important than ever, and the products of these institutions remain necessary and useful – the GPL license family, GCC, GNU coreutils, and so on. Nevertheless, the organizations behind this work are floundering.

• The Free Software Foundation must concern itself with the following ahead of all else:

• 1. Disseminating free software philosophy

• 2. Developing, publishing, and promoting copyleft licenses

• 3. Overseeing the health of the free software movement

• It is failing in each of these regards, and as its core mission fails, the foundation is investing its resources into distractions.

• I recently had the opportunity to visit two technical conferences in February 2023, both geared towards open source software. I was a presenter at Config Management Camp, in Ghent, Belgium, and an attendee at FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. This article aims to highlight my experiences at the conferences and to provide you with some tips on how to make the most of such an opportunity whenever it arises.

• Last week, a German court ruled that Uberspace is liable for hosting the website of youtube-dl, an open-source tool that allows people to download content from YouTube. The owner of the hosting company warns that this “ridiculous” and “devastating” verdict opens the door to privatized censorship.

• More than three years have passed since Tesla announced its Cybertruck, and while not a one has been delivered, the first Tesla truck, Truckla, has kept on truckin’. [Simone Giertz] just posted an update of what Truckla has been up to since it was built.

Programming/Development

• I was happy to be able to recognise a pattern in a tiny submission I made this evening to a repo of different language based implementations of a simple LED number display from Blag, an old friend of mine from the SAP world.

• So why were scammers still sending such obviously dubious emails? In 2012, researcher Cormac Herley offered an answer: It weeded out all but the most gullible. A smart scammer doesn’t want to waste their time with people who reply and then realize it’s a scam when asked to wire money. By using an obvious scam email, the scammer can focus on the most potentially profitable people. It takes time and effort to engage in the back-and-forth communications that nudge marks, step by step, from interlocutor to trusted acquaintance to pauper.

• Long-running financial scams are now known as pig butchering, growing the potential mark up until their ultimate and sudden demise. Such scams, which require gaining trust and infiltrating a target’s personal finances, take weeks or even months of personal time and repeated interactions. It’s a high stakes and low probability game that the scammer is playing.

• To get started, I first had to register my washing machine to my email address with Miele’s app. It’s not the smoothest experience: I had to give it a couple of tries before it worked, but at least it’s a one-off task.

• With my washing machine registered to my email address, I then needed to set up OAuth2 so that I can use the API from my computer. First, I needed an OAuth2 client ID and client secret [1]. Miele allows anyone to generate their own client ID and client secret by registering ourselves as a developer with Miele which means giving them a random “app name” and the same email address used to register the device in the app. I then had to register that app as one I’m allowing to use on my Miele account.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• This is part of a series covering ‘glue’ knowledge. This is stuff that may be difficult to find in any normal training material. If you’re a new developer or programmer you will hopefully find it useful. I try to explain more of the implementation side if it helps understanding.\

• We’ve learned a bit more about the shell with how it handles environment variables, and learned a bit about processes more generally in Linux. This knowledge should be useful throughout the rest of your career, whether it’s building AWS Lambda Functions, writing React, or hacking at the kernel.

• This can be useful in scripts. Zero being ‘success’ might seem a bit weird. Generally a programming language treats 0 as false and any other number as true. It makes a bit of sense here since generally a command only has one way to succeed, but many ways to fail.

• It’s worth noting that a command in a pipeline failing does not stop the pipeline, and the pipeline will even mask the failure of a command part way through it. This can be changed with pipefail for bash.

Standards/Consortia

• Data portability is an important front in the war for an open internet. A few years ago, it seemed like some major movement was coming, with the joint announcement of the Data Transfer Project from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter — but recently, news of any progress was running thin. That is, until now: the project has morphed into the nonprofit Data Transfer Initiative, with a real team led by new Executive Director (and returning podcast guest) Chris Riley, who joins us on this week’s episode to discuss the push to liberate data and make it portable.

Leftovers

• Magnetic loop antennas are great if you are limited on space since they are just a potentially small loop of wire. The problem is, they are sharply tuned. You normally have an adjustment capacitor to tune the antenna to different frequencies. [TekMakerUK] built one with a motor and an Arduino that he can tune from an Android phone. You can see more about the project in the video below.

• Finally if you’re in need of Debian QEMU images for various architectures, I recommend the Debian Quick Image Baker pre-baked images page instead.

• Blog comments are back. Use them… or not.

• Just recently we had Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders on the Techdirt podcast to discuss their very own podcast mini-series “Silicon Valley v. Science Fiction.” Some of that discussion was about this spreading view in Silicon Valley, often oddly coming from AI’s biggest boosters, that AI is an existential threat to the world, and we need to stop it.

• In the summer of 2001, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s sitcom The Office began airing on BBC Two and observably altered the television landscape. Chronicling the mundane lives of white-collar employees at a paper company managed by a boorish boss, the series helped mainstream the single-camera mockumentary mode and a style of humor derived from social awkwardness and secondhand embarrassment—i.e., “cringe comedy.” It spawned an international franchise, including the Emmy-winning American remake, which has sustained significant popularity through its second life on streaming platforms. The pop-cultural omnipresence of The Office’s American version is the product of executive producer Greg Daniels’s adaptation, which morphed the series into a more traditional romantic workplace sitcom and softened the harsher edges of the original.

Education

• Three unions representing faculty members and graduate student workers at Rutgers University in New Jersey on Tuesday rejected the school president’s accusation that their strike, now in its second day following nearly a year of contract negotiations, is disrespectful of Rutgers students.

Hardware

• This sucks! These displays may technically be third-party, but Google itself introduced these smart displays when it first debuted the Assistant on screen, and pitched them as the way to interact with it. Initially, the company led its smart home foray with smart speakers like the Google Home in 2016. Then in 2018, it partnered with Lenovo to launch its first batch of smart displays: the Smart Display 8 and Smart Display 10. They arrived at a time when Amazon’s Alexa was the only digital assistant with a screen—useful in answering questions, helping you through complicated recipes, and displaying casted content.

• We thought it was time to give the analog side of Hackaday their chance to shine, and what’s the quintessential analog IC? The op amp! Whether you’re doing tricky signal conditioning, analog computations like it’s 1960, or just making music sound good, op amps are at the heart of many designs. This contest, starting right now, is your chance to show off what you can do with a good op amp, or a few.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The United States claims to be the leader of the free world. We pride ourselves on democracy, education, and wealth, but these hold very little value if we can’t live long enough to enjoy them. And our falling life expectancy is no accident: It is a direct result, and failure, of policy.

• On a muggy late-summer day in September 2022, dozens of disabled protesters lay on the sidewalk outside the White House. The ground was hot, and sweat clung to their faces under their masks. Many would pay the price with their health in the weeks to come. But the protesters felt they had no choice. The night before, President Biden had announced that “the pandemic is over.” The protesters knew that this wasn’t true. Long Covid, they argued, is a national emergency.

• A coalition of 13 green groups on Tuesday sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for failing to set limits on harmful chemicals that petroleum-based industries dump into the nation’s waterways on a daily basis.

• Finnish hospitals are still struggling to clear the backlog of patients needing treatment that built up during the Covid pandemic.

• New Mexico health officials are reporting the first pediatric death during the state’s current flu season

Proprietary/Finance

• MANILA (Reuters) – Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s approval ratings edged lower due to public dissatisfaction…

• A progressive coalition representing 62 million people and nearly 500 member organizations on Tuesday urged new Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan to end the coffee giant’s hostility toward unioned workers and organizers across the United States.

• Lisa Ruiz was at her home in Eden Isle, Louisiana, a community of about 8,000 nestled on the eastern shore of Lake Pontchartrain, when her mother called.

• “You need to turn on the news!” her mother said that afternoon in early February. “The governor just announced the state is forgiving all the Road Home lawsuits.”

• As upheaval rocks the technology sector, including its own large round of layoffs, tech giant Cisco Systems on Tuesday officially opened a $41M collaboration center in Midtown Atlanta.

• Workers at Facebook’s parent have been increasingly alarmed by job cuts and the company’s direction.

• Among the digital giants there has also been an admission of over-hiring during the pandemic, cited as the key reason behind Amazon’s record cull of 27,000 jobs around the world.

• The major technology firms still have room for cuts, they say. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Twitter have collectively chopped around 70,000 staff — but ongoing concerns about profitability and over-hiring means they could slim down more.

• Apple was once the darling of the retail world, but its stance on labor unions is a tough sell.

• One of Virgin Orbit’s outgoing executives has hit out at the firm’s leadership, saying employees “deserved better” after the company declared bankruptcy…

• In a farewell email to employees, Chief Operating Officer Tony Gingiss apologised to workers while criticising the firm’s senior figures for apparently not addressing the workforce at the critical moment.

• The satellite launch company, founded by billionaire Richard Branson, went bust after struggling to secure long-term funding following a failed launch in January.

• It also announced the lay off of roughly 85% of its 750 employees. Among those departing the business was COO Tony Gingiss who, in his goodbye message – acquired by CNBC – told employees they “deserved better than this!”

• The year 2023 began on a heartbreaking note for many techies as a significant number of them lost their jobs due to layoffs by multiple tech giants globally including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft among others. However, it now looks like Google is preparing for another round of layoffs. In one of his latest interviews with the Wall Street Journal, Google CEO Sundar Pichai hinted that more layoffs could follow very soon at the company.

• In his discussion with the Wall Street Journal, Pichai said that the company is ‘very, very focused’ on their current opportunities and that there is a ‘lot of work left’. He also added that the company is now prioritising the most crucial areas and is thereby moving people accordingly. A few months ago, Sundar Pichai said that Google is looking to become more efficient and in his recent interaction, he explained that Google is “literally looking at every aspect”. He further added that they are working on re-engineering the cost base in a durable way.

• With a growing number of companies including Facebook, Twitter and McDonald’s announcing recent layoffs – many employees may be curious if their company is next.

• And, a decades-old labor law, called the WARN Act, could give workers a heads-up about impending layoffs.

• “I have companies calling me up asking about WARN, because they’re thinking about laying some people off,” Gary Lafayette, an employment and labor attorney with Lafayette & Kumagai, told FOX Television Stations Tuesday. “It’s important for them to know what the rules are.”

• Microsoft today released software updates to plug 100 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including a zero-day vulnerability that is already being used in active attacks. Not to be outdone, Apple has released a set of important updates addressing two zero-day vulnerabilities that are being used to attack iPhones, iPads and Macs.

• The share of people with jobs receiving Kela’s housing allowance has risen from 24 to 39 percent since 2015.

• Last term, Mitchell input calculus problems his students were solving into the AI bot, then asked the teens to review the answers that emerged.

• “The tool made some great first steps in solving its equations, but after it got a few steps in, it started to do really wild, crazy, wrong things that the students picked up on,” he said.

• Though the tool may be good enough to fool people who don’t understand calculus, Mitchell said because his students know the subject matter quite well, “it was almost impossible to fool them.”

• Do people enjoy the experience? Do they find it useful? Does it cause them physical distress? What are their attitudes to the Metaverse in general? Is this the future?

• The answers were: yes, maybe, not really, mixed to poor, possibly.

• The primary aim was to extract cybersecurity data relating to domain names, create a 3D visualisation of the data, and build a prototype Metaverse environment in which to test an interactive model with real users. A further aim was to solicit participants’ feedback and use this to assess what problems may be faced by organisations moving their workforce into the Metaverse. These aims were successfully met.

• Recorded Future says that Microsoft vulnerabilities were once again the most prominent, accounting for two of the “very critical vulnerabilities” – and 4 of the 5 vulnerabilities identified had risk scores of 99 in the Intelligence Cloud, meaning they had a score of “very critical”.

• American allies may also hesitate before sharing secrets. A vast number of Americans have access to classified information. Around 1.3m of them, including many contractors, like Mr Snowden, have clearance for top secret files. And after the September 11th attacks, which occurred in part because intelligence was not shared quickly and widely enough between agencies, sensitive information was distributed far more widely. The result was a leakier system. Ukrainian generals were already wary of revealing their secrets for this reason. Now they might clam up at a vital moment. “If this kind of thing happened in the UK, or in Israel, or Germany, or Australia,” says Mr Rid, “the US would have stopped sharing [intelligence] completely.”

• Roughly 100 activists marked the opening day of the World Bank Group spring meetings by riding bicycles through the streets of Washington, D.C. on Monday night, calling on incoming bank president Ajay Banga to halt fossil fuel financing and ramp up clean energy and climate justice investments.

Security

• You might recall that the FCC under both Trump and Biden has made a big deal about forcing U.S. telecoms to rip out Huawei gear from their networks, under the allegation that the gear is used to spy on Americans (you’re to ignore, of course, that the United States spies on everyone, constantly, and has broadly supported backdooring all manner of sensitive telecom products globally).

Privacy/Surveillance

• Additionally, spyware allows governments to manipulate data on devices, including corrupting, planting, or deleting data, or recovering data that has been deleted, all while erasing any trace of the intrusion. There is a growing concern about law enforcement taking control of suspects’ digital devices and tampering with their content.

• The executive order arrived only days before revelations that the United States, which was previously thought to have steered clear of some of the most infamous foreign spyware products, actually had a contract to test and deploy the notorious Pegasus created by Israeli company NSO Group. The contract was signed under a fake name on November 8, 2021 between an organization that acts as a front for the U.S. government and an American affiliate of NSO group. Only five days before, on November 3, 2021, the U.S. Commerce Department added NSO Group and other foreign spyware companies to a blacklist —the “Entity List for engaging in activities that are contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.” So the signing of this straw contract was in apparent breach of this ban.

• NSO Group is just one of the companies that should be covered by the new executive order. Foreign spyware like Karma has been used to abuse human rights as well, purchased by the UAE-based cyber-espionage company DarkMatter. DarkMatter went a step further than even the NSO Group, deploying the spyware to targets themselves and closely coordinating with its government customers in operations using spyware. One such operation involved the arrest and torture of prominent women’s rights advocate Loujain AlHathloul. Representing AlHathloul, EFF took DarkMatter to court for their violation of U.S. anti-hacking and international human rights laws.

• This is so bizarre. Last month, we highlighted the ridiculousness of Arkansas’ age verification for social media bill. These bills are showing up everywhere, from California to Utah and lots of other places as well. It’s bipartisan nonsense.

Confidentiality

• Many people set up new fast relays and then wonder why their bandwidth is not fully loaded instantly. In this post I’ll walk you through the lifecycle of a new fast non-exit relay, since Tor’s bandwidth estimation and load balancing has gotten much more complicated in recent years. I should emphasize that the descriptions here are in part anecdotal — at the end of the post I ask some research questions that will help us make better sense of what’s going on.

Defence/Aggression

• Instead, these officials caution Russia’s cyber warriors remain actively engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with Ukraine, while learning from each attack and preparing, possibly, to expand their operations beyond Ukraine’s borders.

• Thomas has spent decades accepting lavish trips from the billionaire Crow. He’s made repeat trips on Crow’s private jet, taken cruises on Crow’s private yacht, and spent time at Crow’s private resort, all for free. Thomas did not disclose any of these freebies on his judicial disclosure form, as he would be legally required to for at least some of them. But because Supreme Court justices are not held to any statutory code of conduct, there’s no way to hold Thomas accountable other than through the constitutional means of impeachment. As long as Republicans control the House and half of the Senate, that will never happen.

• The fact that Thomas won’t be punished shouldn’t detract from the turpitude of his behavior. It would be bad enough if these trips were merely high points in a bromance between two old friends, but Crow regularly invites other powerful and wealthy Republicans on these jaunts, and those people get to bend Thomas’s ear about whatever matter is on their minds. This access was, incredibly, memorialized in a painting Crow commissioned that showed Thomas surrounded by conservative legal power brokers like Leonard Leo and Mark Paoletta (who just happens to be the former chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence). Imagine being so bold as to literally commission artwork of your secret cabal with a Supreme Court justice.

• The country’s coastguard has already rescued around 2,000 people in other operations since Friday, after a number of boats arrived at the Italian island of Lampedusa, one of the main arrival ports for people wanting to reach Europe, over the weekend.

• The four departures left residents without a functioning registrar’s office; there was no way to register to vote or certify candidate paperwork, at least temporarily.

• A state elections worker arrived in town a week later to try to pick up the pieces, looking through drawers and opening the mail, as the two remaining members of the electoral board — both Republicans, because the one Democrat had also recently quit — began the difficult process of restaffing a completely barren department.

• Russia’s penal system regulator (“FSIN”) has withdrawn the proposal to require public monitoring commissions to provide 48-hour notice before visiting a detention center.

• Alexey Navalny’s attorney Vadim Kobzev reports that paramedics had been summoned to Navalny’s cell late on the night of April 7–8, due to acute symptoms that the prison personnel refuses to explain.

• Russia’s State Duma has passed a set of amendments that will make it much harder for Russia’s pacifists and those who don’t want to join the military to evade the draft. Once the amendments are signed into law by the president, summonses will be published and delivered electronically; people who are subject to army service will not be able to leave Russia; and draft evaders will be barred from driving a vehicle, buying and selling real estate, and applying for credit. A unified digital register will give the draft officials access to personal data on potential conscripts. Meduza spoke about these changes with a military attorney and member of the Russian Human Rights Advocates’ Coalition for Conscientious Objection to Military Service. Our source chose to remain anonymous for the sake of personal safety, but Meduza is confident of his qualifications. Here’s a summary of the legal situation as it now confronts the draft-eligible Russians.

• By Jonathan Landay and Aleksandar VasovicWASHINGTON/BELGRADE (Reuters) – Serbia, the only country in Europe that has refused to sanction Russia for…

• China has warned that a deepening security alliance between the United States and the Philippines should not harm its security and territorial interests and interfere in long-simmering territorial disputes in the South China Sea

• More than 30 human rights and antiwar organizations have signed an open letter from the Antiwar Initiatives Congress to the European authorities, asking them to prevent the extradition of Alexey Moskalev from Belarus to Russia.

• The Russian State Duma has approved the third and final reading of a bill that legalizes electronic military summonses and makes it illegal to ignore them.

• The document says just under 100 troops from the US, Britain, France, and Latvia are in Ukraine.

• A federal watchdog called for ending the practice nearly 50 years ago, but the military pushed back. Now, soldiers leave the Army with a negative discharge, avoiding possible federal conviction and with little record of the allegations against them.

• A set of amendments that the Russian State Duma will consider on Tuesday would ban “citizens liable for military service” from leaving the country from the time they receive a military summons until they report to a military conscription office.

• In November 2022, two Kremlin insiders told Meduza they believed Kremlin-backed tycoon Evgeny Prigozhin had plans to launch a conservative movement that could eventually transform into a full-fledged political party. Prigozhin’s political aspirations are nothing new; back in 2020, after years of wielding influence as an entrepreneur, election meddler, and mercenary boss, he reportedly considered running for office himself. Now, according to Meduza’s sources, the Wagner Group founder has a new strategy: rather than create a new party from scratch, he hopes to seize control of a major branch of an existing party. But some sources are skeptical that the Kremlin will stand idly by and let someone so unpredictable assume so much power.

• Multiple Telegram channels reported that a drone carrying an explosive device crashed into a fence outside of the airport in Russia’s Belgorod region on Monday.

• Russian State Duma Defense Committee chairman Andrey Kartapolov said Tuesday that upcoming legislative amendments making it illegal to ignore electronic military summonses will apply to all draft-eligible citizens and not only to annual conscripts.

• On April 4, 2023, Finland officially became the 31st member of the NATO military alliance. The 830-mile border between Finland and Russia is now by far the longest border between any NATO country and Russia, which otherwise borders only Norway, Latvia, Estonia, and short stretches of the Polish and Lithuanian borders where they encircle Kaliningrad.

• More than 100 people including at least 30 children were reportedly killed Tuesday in airstrikes by Myanmar’s military dictatorship targeting opponents of the coup regime.

• “It is time,” President Biden announced in April 2021, “to end the forever war” that started with the invasion of Afghanistan soon after the tragic terror attacks on this country on September 11, 2001. Indeed, that August, amid chaos and disaster, the president did finally pull the last remaining U.S. forces out of that country.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• We must not allow our movements for justice to be silenced by laws that criminalize dissent.

• In just a few words—”those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future”—George Orwell summed up why narratives about history can be crucial. And so, ever since the final helicopter liftoff from the U.S. Embassy’s roof in Saigon on April 30, 1975, the retrospective meaning of the Vietnam War has been a matter of intense dispute.

• The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into a recent leak of highly classified Pentagon intelligence documents revealing secrets about the war in Ukraine, as well as details about the U.S. spying on a number of its adversaries, as well as its allies, including Israel and South Korea. We discuss the documents, the agencies they come from, how and where they were released, and more with investigative journalist James Bamford, whose latest book is Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence.

Environment

• This study builds upon two previous findings from Meuti’s lab: For her dissertation, Meuti found that circadian clock genes differ between diapausing and non-diapausing mosquitoes, strongly suggesting that day length dictates when diapause should start. And more recent work led by Fyie found that female mosquitoes exposed to dim light at night averted diapause and became reproductively active—even when short days indicated they should be dormant.

• In the current study authored by Wolkoff, the researchers pursued both lines of inquiry, comparing daily activity and nutrient accumulation by mosquitoes reared in two lab conditions—long days mimicking the insects’ active season and short days that induced dormancy—with and without exposure to artificial light at night.

• Among those stuck in queues driving to work this morning, perhaps there were some contemplating whether public transport might be a better option.

• And with good reason – at least according to city guide publisher Time Out, which has ranked Copenhagen as among the best cities in the world for public transport.

• Time Out ranked the Danish capital fourth overall, behind top guns Berlin, Tokyo and Prague.

• Industrial-scale bitcoin mining facilities in the US create as much carbon pollution as 3.5 million gas-powered cars, and Texas, which boasts the largest number of mining facilities in the country, will see the cost of electricity rise nearly 5% by mid-2023 due to cryptocurrency mining.

• Regulators ASIC and ACCC have put Australian businesses on notice that those caught deceiving consumers or investors through greenwashing are facing potential prosecution. It’s the new battleground of business ethics, David Gilchrist reports.

• Among the industries of most concern to regulators are the cosmetic, fashion, footwear, and food and drink sectors that the ACCC Internet sweep of 247 businesses identified in late 2022 as having the highest proportion of doubtful environmental claims or greenwashing.

Energy/Transportation

• As the race towards the first commercially viable nuclear fusion reactor heats up, the UK-based Tokamak Energy has published a paper on its recent achievements with its ST40 spherical tokamak. Most notable is the achieving of plasma temperatures of over 100 million Kelvin, which would put this fusion reactor firmly within the range for deuterium-tritium fusion at a rate that would lead credence to the projection made by Tokamak Energy about building its first commercial fusion plants in the 2030s.

• A trade association representing petroleum companies and a controversy-ridden waste management firm are sponsoring dinners at this year’s Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference, DeSmog can reveal.

• The agenda for the conference, which is being hosted in Boise, Idaho, shows that the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) and the waste management company Veolia North America are sponsoring two of the “beat dinners” hosted on Friday, April 21 — the third day of the event.

• The Environmental Protection Agency is facing a lawsuit filed by a community group and questions from a U.S. senator over the agency’s approval of fuels made from discarded plastic under a program it touted as “climate-friendly.”

• The new scrutiny is in response to an earlier investigation by ProPublica and the Guardian that revealed the EPA approved the new chemicals even though its own scientists calculated that pollution from production of one of the plastic-based fuels was so toxic that 1 in 4 people exposed to it over their lifetime would be expected to develop cancer. That risk is 250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA division that approves new chemicals, and it’s higher than the lifetime risk of cancer for current smokers.

• For as much old coal mines are a blight upon the face of the Earth, they may have at least one potential positive side-effect. Where the coal mine consists out of tunnels that were drilled deep into the soil, these tend to get flooded by groundwater after the pumps that keep them dry are turned off. Depending on the surrounding rock, this water tends to get not only contaminated, but also warmed up. As the BBC explains in a recent video as a follow-up to a 2021 article, when the water is pumped up for decontamination, it can be run through a heat exchanger in order to provide heat for homes and businesses.

Wildlife/Nature

• “An interested spectator was Professor Henry B. Roney, a charter member of the Michigan Sportsmen’s Association, of East Saginaw. As barrel after barrel of pigeons left the nesting area, he could not but deplore the slaughter. Although the professor sadly estimated that this was the greatest butchery of the passenger pigeon in history, not even he could foresee that in less than 40 years the species would be exterminated from the face of the earth.”

• Of course, as history has shown, the pigeons did not possess the ability to rebound from such a large drop in numbers.

Overpopulation

• Zambia’s population has grown rapidly in recent years, with a 3.4% annual growth rate between 2010 and 2022. According to the preliminary 2022 Census of Population and Housing report, the country’s population now stands at 19.6 million, up from 13.1 million in 2010. With a 3.4% annual growth rate, Zambia’s population is estimated to double in 20 year’s time. The high population growth rate is due to the persistent high fertility and declining mortality which has resulted in a very youthful population, with about 79% under 35 years, coupled with high youth unemployment (19%) and poverty levels (54%). Inequality levels in Zambia are also very high, with a Gini Coefficient of 0.69.

Oligarchy

• With global finance leaders set to gather in Washington, D.C. this week for the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Oxfam is warning rich countries against using accounting gimmicks to artificially inflate their global climate funding commitments.

• Unequal access to clean water in cities around the globe—an injustice poised to grow worse this century as the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis intensifies droughts—can be attributed in large part to “unsustainable consumption” by high-income residents, according to peer-reviewed research published Monday in Nature Sustainability.

• Riley Waggaman Twelve months ago (plus a few days) we participated in a roundtable discussion moderated by Whitney Webb and Kit Knightly, “Russia & the Great Reset – Resistance or Complicity?” A short summary of our position (“Yes, Russia is complicit in the Great Reset”; April 3, 2022) quickly became the second most-read article on this blog.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Mr Cook is likely to preside over the opening of the twin outlets in India’s financial and political capital, people familiar with the matter said, asking to remain anonymous discussing private plans. Apple said Tuesday it’ll open a store in Mumbai on April 18 and another in New Delhi on April 20.

• “We knew there would be national surveys that policymakers and the media would be looking to, and we felt those surveys would be incomplete because there would be important differences across states, both in how people were reacting to what an individual state was doing and then just individual state cultures,” Druckman said.

• In a panel discussion at ETCISO’s recently-concluded annual conclave, Secufest 2023, CISOs deliberated on how cybersecurity becoming a core business driver, compounded by the constantly-evolving threat landscape has led to the emergence of new cybersecurity roles in the C-Suite and its consequent impact on key responsibilities, collaboration, and reporting structure.

• Lawyers for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit against U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, who as chair of the House Judiciary Committee has launched numerous attempts to interfere with the prosecution of former Republican President Donald Trump.

• Democratic Representative Justin Jones has returned to the Tennessee state House, just days after Republicans voted to expel him. The Metropolitan Council of Nashville voted 36 to 0 on Monday to reinstate him. Following the vote, Jones’s supporters marched to the Tennessee Legislature, where he was sworn in on the steps of the Capitol. Justin Pearson of Memphis, who was also expelled last week, could be reappointed to the Tennessee House Wednesday if a majority of the Shelby County Commission’s 13 members agree to it. We air highlights from Monday’s proceedings, as well as Pearson’s speech Sunday in Memphis to his supporters.

• Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott says he is “working as swiftly” as possible to pardon a U.S. Army sergeant who was just convicted Friday of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020 just blocks from the Texas state Capitol. Daniel Perry was also convicted of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for fatally shooting 28-year-old Air Force veteran Garrett Foster. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles said Monday it is now launching an investigation into Governor Abbott’s request for an expedited pardon. We’re joined by Hiram Gilberto Garcia, an independent journalist who live-streamed that night and was the first witness on the stand to testify at Daniel Perry’s murder trial, and Rick Cofer, a former Travis County assistant district attorney.

• I hate to say this, but America no longer has two parties devoted to a democratic system of self-government. We have a Democratic Party, which — notwithstanding a few glaring counter-examples such as what the Democratic National Committee did to Bernie in 2016 — is still largely committed to democracy. And we have a Republican Party, which is careening at high-velocity toward authoritarianism. Okay, fascism.

• 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.

• Rights advocates in Florida are warning that several anti-immigration measures will tear at “the fabric” of the state and risk turning family members against one another as the state GOP seeks to secure votes for Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2024 presidential election by attacking immigrants across the state.

• C’mon, you know you’ve watched it. That video of expelled but now reseated Tennessee state Representative Justin Jones singing “We Shall Overcome” with none other than Joan Baez, who sang that song at the 1963 March on Washington alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Serendipitously, they met on a flight from Nashville to Newark Sunday night. You’d have to be a cabbage not to feel hope stirring.

• In what Palestine defenders and even one mainstream U.S. Jewish group called a perilous provocation, leaders of Israel’s far-right government accompanied thousands of settlers shielded by a heavy military presence on a Monday march to an illegal colony in the occupied West Bank.

• Republicans started planning scandal hearings last summer—before voting even began in the midterm elections. They needed the extra time because there was so much to do. Representative Elise Stefanik, the enterprising young New Yorker who serves in the House leadership, said in July that President Joe Biden not only had corrupt relationships with criminals and foreign adversaries but that “Joe Biden profited from that.” Not surprisingly, Stefanik said, “We intend to investigate.”

• Former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, the anti-union zealot whose scorched-earth “divide-and-conquer” politics helped pave the way for Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s lurch toward antidemocratic extremism, was in a frenzy as the high-stakes Wisconsin Supreme Court election approached. Walker campaigned across the state at the side of billionaire-funded conservative candidate Dan Kelly, appeared on Fox News and right-wing talk radio, wrote fervent articles for The Washington Times, and flooded social media with posts that declared, “Radicals want to undo our common sense conservative reforms via the courts. We cannot let that happen. The grassroots will make the difference on Tuesday!”

• The western third of Hispaniola is the most mountainous region of the Caribbean. It rises to nearly 8,800 feet and undulates between altitudes before descending into blindingly white beaches that roll into the sparkling blue sea. The territory is lush but cultivated, its tree cover compromised by a growing population that relies on subsistence farming for most of its food. In summer, tornadoes break on the hills, and torrential rains soak the valleys below. For those who visit, the views are stunning, the people warm, and the history fascinating, but it can be difficult to wade through the morass of contemporary politics.

• By Akriti Sharma(Reuters) – Twitter Inc CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday the social media company is “roughly breaking even,” as most of its…

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The rapid rise of AI globally has raised the promise of benefits, such as in health care and the elimination of mundane tasks, but also fears, for example over its potential spread of disinformation, threat to certain jobs, and to artistic integrity.

• Kuwait ranked 158 out of 180 countries and territories in the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) 2022 Press Freedom Index.

Censorship/Free Speech

• They informed Kahvecioğlu that he was being investigated for “insulting the president” as per article 299 of the Turkish Penal Code because he had painted Erdogan’s portrait with the word “slut” underneath it and had shared it on social media with the caption “Look at the slut, it’s everywhere with the Turkish flag! You can access the album on YouTube.”

• The artist was released after giving a statement but later received a notification that the investigation had turned into a trial.

• Is nonstop free pornography liberating, or is it shackling, leaving us less humanlike than ever? This is one of the contemporary conundrums that the sociologist Kelsy Burke explores in The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession. The answer depends on how you define “us,” because those producing the stuff, as is true of other content providers laboring in the digital sweatshops of our time, are barely scraping a living together. Though Pornhub alone gets more visits a month than either Netflix or TikTok, according to one online guide for budding porn entrepreneurs, a video garnering 1 million views will net its producer roughly $500.

• Unlike back in the 1970s and ’80s—the heyday of XXX-rated features with multiday shoots and catering budgets, of ample profits and thriving stars—the new porn economy generates its revenues primarily from ads, accruing to site owners, not performers. The subscription site OnlyFans produces big paydays for a few stars, but elsewhere the story for workers is depressingly familiar, and porn performers are doubly screwed, so to speak. They’re kept busy, as Burke details, creating new content—one-on-one interactions with customers in “camming” sessions, for example—to supplement the content they’re barely being paid for. But even that material often finds its way to free sites.

• Russia’s ongoing campaign to block VPN providers, hound them out of the country, or have them delisted from search results, is massive and ongoing. Realizing that not everything can be achieved by brute force, a video campaign financed by the government is now trying to persuade citizens that using a VPN is much worse than not using a VPN at all.

• A few weeks ago we wrote about how Elon Musk’s Twitter was now blocking tweets in India at the request of the government. As we noted, there’s a lot of important history here. India had demanded such blocking in early 2021 and the old regime at Twitter had pushed back strongly on it. After fighting about it, Twitter agreed to geoblock some tweets, but said it would not agree to do that for tweets from journalists, activists, or politicians.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• There is a worrying trend in which journalists are being used as tokens to broker deals, the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Kalin told Arab News.

• The US letter said: “The prosecution of Mr Assange marks the first time in US history that a publisher of truthful information has been indicted under the Espionage Act,” and went on to warn how a conviction on these charges would change the media and political landscape of the country:

• “The prosecution of Mr. Assange, if successful, not only sets a legal precedent whereby journalists or publishers can be prosecuted, but a political one as well,” it added.

• On the fourth anniversary of Julian Assange’s arrest, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaibled six other progressive lawmakers in calling on U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to “uphold the First Amendment’s protections for the freedom of the press by dropping the criminal charges” against the Australian WikiLeaks founder and withdrawing the extradition request of the U.K. government.

• Marking the four-year anniversary of Julian Assange’s arrest and imprisonment in a high-security London jail, dozens of Australian lawmakers signed an open letter on Monday urging U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to drop his efforts to extradite the WikiLeaks founder to the United States.

• Australian parliamentarians from across political sides, MPs and senators, have signed a letter to US Attorney-General Merrick Garland urging him to end the pursuit of the WikiLeaks co-founder, coinciding with the fourth anniversary of Assange’s imprisonment in the UK prison.

• U.S. policymakers cosigned a letter to AG Merrick Garland calling on the Department of Justice to uphold the First Amendment’s protections for the freedom of the press by dropping the Trump-era charges against Australian publisher Julian Assange and withdrawing the American extradition request currently pending with the British government.

• The British MPs are joined by lawmakers in the United States, Australia, Mexico, and Brazil who are also writing to the US government asking for proceedings against Assange to be dropped.

• According to the Dicle Fırat Journalists Association (DFG) Report on Rights Violations Against Journalists in the month of March, the crackdown on the press is increasing gradually as the elections are approaching. The association reported that 8 journalists were attacked, 16 others were detained, one journalist was jailed, and 330 news were blocked in March.

• [...] Ivanov’s wife said police informed the couple that three probes have been launched against the journalist over unspecified online posts he made. [...]

• His killing became a symbol of the struggle for a free press in the Balkan nation.

• Independent media organizations, both local and international, warn that critical journalists still face threats because of their work. The government of populist President Aleksandar Vucic – who was information minister at the time of Curuvija’s death – maintains tight control over mainstream media outlets.

• Four state security officials were charged with planning and carrying out the killing, but no final verdict has been reached despite several retrials and appeals.

• Blinken predicted Russia’s refusal to grant consular access would “do even more damage to Russia’s standing around the world– standing that has been in freefall particularly since its reinvasion of Ukraine last year.”

• John Kirby, the White House’s National Security Council spokesperson, said this was just the beginning of what could be a lengthy battle to bring Gershkovich home.

Civil Rights/Policing

• In the novel 1984, George Orwell remarked, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever”. The prophecy made by him in 1949 is now being witnessed in today’s world, the testament to which are the gross injustices and human rights violations being suffered by women in Afghanistan. In that sense, the boot belongs to the Taliban leadership in power, and the face is of the dreams that Afghan women once saw for their prosperous future. From banning girls to access education and public jobs, restrictions on their dress code and the recent ban on Afghan Women from working with the United Nations, the heterodox conservatism and misogyny of the Taliban know no bounds.

• But a confidential ShotSpotter document obtained by The Associated Press outlines something the company doesn’t always tout about its “precision policing system” — that human employees can quickly overrule and reverse the algorithm’s determinations, and are given broad discretion to decide if a sound is a gunshot, fireworks, thunder or something else.

• Such reversals happen 10% of the time by a 2021 company account, which experts say could bring subjectivity into increasingly consequential decisions and conflict with one of the reasons AI is used in law-enforcement tools in the first place — to lessen the role of all-too-fallible humans.

• But other research has found fewer benefits of Shotspotter, including a recently completed 15-year study of the program in Kansas City.

• Professor Eric Piza, director of Crime Analysis Initiatives at Northeastern University, began to study the ShotSpotter program there in 2019, where it had been in operation since 2012. The study considered crime data dating back to 2005, prior to ShotSpotter being implemented.

• “We find very little crime prevention benefit of this technology,” he said of the study’s findings.

• GEO President Jared Eno told reporters after the hearing that he hopes Kuhnke’s decision will change the University’s tone for bargaining.

• “I hope that this finally shows the University that they should work with us to collaboratively solve the serious problems that we’ve brought to the table that grad workers are facing, that are not only making a lot of hardship for grad workers but also meaning that we can’t do the best we can for our students,” Eno said.

• President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers have backed the sentiments in the PRO Act, which would impose heftier penalties on employers who try to squash unionization drives.

• Last summer, editor Jen Parker reached out to the tenant activist group KC Tenants with an invitation. Would the group write for the inaugural issue of a new publication on Black politics and culture that she and the historian and writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor were launching? KC Tenants’ remarkable successes preventing evictions and winning protections for tenants in Kansas City had come up when Parker and her team brainstormed organizing victories they wanted to highlight, and she wanted to give the group the floor to report on their wins and analyze their challenges. Parker offered the group plenty of space to tell their story and told them to write for an audience of activists passionate about racial justice.

• The vision of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 50 years later, and the relevance of his economic ideas today.

• For years, California residents were allowed to know almost nothing about some of their public servants. While most of the government was a (relative) open book, law enforcement officers and their misconduct records were shielded from public view by a law that exempted plenty of police wrongdoing from public records requests.

• The Biden White House on Monday said it would not simply ignore a Trump-appointed judge’s ruling that could imperil access to a safe abortion medication, dismissing a demand from progressive lawmakers who characterized the decision as a flagrant abuse of judicial power with far-reaching implications.

• The conflicting federal district court rulings on the continued distribution of mifepristone, a drug that is used to induce abortions, provides the Supreme Court the opportunity to show that it follows the law and not just conservative ideology.

• Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling against the FDA’s 23-year-old approval of one of the two drugs used in the most common form of abortion in the country will reverberate through history as a shining example of what happens when ideology fuses with power. The Friday ruling, which was stayed for seven days while the Biden administration appeals, perfectly ratifies the logic and language of the anti-abortion strategists who brought the case. Kacsmaryk promotes the false claim that medication abortion is dangerous, even though he himself can point to only two deaths last year out of hundreds of thousands of abortions. He says the 1873 Comstock Act bans the mailing of abortion pills. He calls embryos “unborn humans” and abortion providers “abortionists.” As Elie Mystal pointed out, he invented a rationale for giving legal standing to anti-abortion doctors in part by speculating that abortions are so “deeply traumatizing” that people who have them can’t bring lawsuits like this themselves.

• To err is human. To forgive is beyond me. Sorry. That’s just the way it is. If we’re paying outsized portions of local budgets to law enforcement agencies more interested in selective enforcement, rights violations, complete abdication of personal/professional responsibility, and seeing what hot war kit they can acquire via 1033.gov, it behooves us to punch up, even if that occasionally means kicking them when they’re down.

• Vitaly Borodin, head of the Federal Security and Anti-Corruption Project and lately an author of frequent denunciations, is asking Russia’s Prosecutor General to launch a criminal case against Liya Akhedzhakova, the 84-year-old state-honored actress known as an icon of Soviet and Russian cinema.

• Tens of thousands of Facebook employees had been working from home for just two months when Mark Zuckerberg made a bold prediction: in a few years, half of the company’s employees would not regularly come into the office.

Monopolies

• We need more than just the right to bypass DRM, however, she said. We need positive rights as well; rights of access and the freedom to exit a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the community you are leaving behind. That means you can still enjoy the media and data you bought and have access to the content you created.

• The open ethos has a strong focus on equity, Giblin said; there’s little room for predatory middlemen that sit between creators and audiences—or buyers and sellers. Open access promotes equity without regard to socioeconomic standing, which is something that is lacking in the creative industries. There are only a few superstars who have the standing to negotiate equitable contracts (e.g. Taylor Swift in the music industry). The EU directive provides some hope in the form of a kind of “minimum wages for creative workers” in the form of rights to reasonable remuneration. In the new Australian cultural policy there is talk of giving creative workers employment rights in order to “treat arts workers as real workers”, which is also a good step.

• Many creative workers, as well as programmers, are required to sign away their copyrights to their employer, but the copyrights last for three generations or more, which is nearly always well beyond the life of the commercial interest in the work. The EU has a “use it or lose it” policy that allows creators to claw back their copyright if the work is not in use. That can help maintain access to works that have gone out of print, for example, as is being done by another project she worked on during lockdown: Untapped.

• 4200:01:44,880 –> 00:01:49,500our new book choke point capitalism

• 4300:01:46,799 –> 00:01:51,600pulls aside the veil on the tricks big

• 4400:01:49,500 –> 00:01:53,520Tech and big content used to lock in

• 4500:01:51,600 –> 00:01:55,799users and suppliers eliminate

• 4600:01:53,520 –> 00:01:59,000competition and ultimately Shakedown

• 4700:01:55,799 –> 00:01:59,000creators and producers

• 4800:01:59,520 –> 00:02:03,720we also share tons of ideas for how we

• 4900:02:01,740 –> 00:02:06,600can recapture creative labor markets to

• 5000:02:03,720 –> 00:02:08,940make them fairer and more sustainable

Copyrights

• “You can do it two ways: The industry can get together and say, ‘We’ve got enough people on our side to stop it.’ The other side is more difficult to do, but companies can absolutely sue under copyright law, copyright infringement will give you $150,000 per slug if you can do it,” he added. “The point is that publishers get immediately active and absolutely institute litigation, but also have a mass position of saying, ‘We are not going to let what happened out of free internet happen to post-AI internet if we can help it.’”

• In 2022 we were incredibly proud to mark twenty years of CC licensing and all the groundbreaking collaboration it has enabled as we closed our successful 20th anniversary campaign, which raised over $16 million dollars to support CC programs and our ongoing sustainability. As we look back on this remarkable journey, time seems to pass more quickly than ever — yet our gratitude for each milestone remains unwavering, as do words of thanks towards everyone who helped make it possible. I invite you to revisit important moments in CC’s history in our interactive timeline. If something is missing, you’ll see a way to suggest other events to include in the history.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Albums like this could really do with some period where they’re laid fallow for a while, and then re-evaluated again. There’s no reasonable way to argue against the accretion of reverence that Led Zeppelin albums get, and it’s not unwarranted either. It’s good. It was influential. Is it an essential listen, or is it just 50 years worth of praise that gets it on the list? Maybe it earns it, but it’s hard to tell. Is a squeaky drum pedal. Is a squeaky drum pedal evidence of incredible detail on the recording, or just a distraction?

• A friend of mine is a really big movie buff and she decided that we needed a movie club. Thus was born “Focus Group”.

• Each month she names a theme and one film that really demonstrates it well. Then the rest of us in the club chat and settle on a second film. Two films a month. Not so difficult.

• But also, because it’s funny, we have an optional 3rd bonus film. That film is ALWAYS a Nicholas Cage film that fits the theme as best as we can.

• I’ve been off Twitter, which was the last social media website I was using, for about 2 years now. About 10 years ago, though, the website du jour for me was Tumblr. I hadn’t touched Tumblr since probably around 2017.

• Cut to a little over a year ago. I started posting on my Tumblr art blog again to archive things for myself (and because I have absolutely no desire to deal with hosting an art blog on my own server). For a while, I managed to commit to only opening it with the express purpose of uploading an image before leaving. It was fine! Until it wasn’t.

• Babette’s Feast is a cinematic masterpiece that deserves no less than a 5-star rating. The movie is an adaptation of a short story by Isak Dinesen and has been directed by Gabriel Axel. It is a heartwarming tale of self-sacrifice and the power of food to bring people together.

• I may have mentioned in the past that I used to have a website where I tried to watch 365 movies every year. It was called “A Film a Day”, and my special hook was that every film received 5-stars.

• It was the goal of my review to properly set the tone for a viewer so that they could experience those 5-stars. Sometimes this meant diving into theme and cinematography, and other times it meant recommending large quantities of alcohol, or watching during a loud party.

Technical

• I try to keep from only talking about crypto, but some recent journalism has me annoyed.

• And by that I mean it’s definitely true. No doubt about it. So why do I say that Bitcoin is worse than cars?

• Because Bitcoin uses up energy without providing any value for society whatsoever. Energy that could and indeed should be used for replacing fossil fuel use in other areas.

• Sometime in February this year I picked up Cal Newport’s “Digital Minimalism” and decided I’d give a “digital detox” a try. The phlog posts definitely suffered, but it was a worthwhile experience.

• For most of March I tried to limit my outside of work screen time. I put my phone on my dresser instead of my bedstand. I put my laptop in my office instead of the bedroom. I tried hard to avoid the urge to surf the web or check the news at the first sign of a minute lull.

• And I felt better for it. Or at least I think I did.

• Many of the common microcontrollers available in the maker scene today are clocked at over 100MHz and will have more available RAM and flash memory than the Commodore C64 I had as a boy.

• It makes me wonder if it would be possible to build an operating system with a shell and programs you can interact with, input via keyboard, output to a relatively low-resolution, … on a microcontroller. Not a gaming emulator platform, but a computer with applications to do some actual work.

Internet/Gemini

• Around last August, I wrote about the fact that I was experimenting with writing physically, instead of on a computer. Although that practice didn’t hold for me, I picked up writing again with pen and paper around late March this year. What can I say, it’s been delightful. For one, I can write anywhere, aside perhaps public transportation where bumps in the road trip me up. Writing speed here is a big factor, but I see in a way it allows me to think. Writing on paper with a good pen, can’t say I have a good pen, but a decent one, helps a lot with the whole experience to be honest. It’s great to feel and hear the paper, perhaps even smell it. My handwriting is closer to hieroglyphs than the Latin alphabet, so it prevents shoulder surfing. My consistency of writing here hasn’t been all that great, although on paper I could journal daily for almost a month now. The fact that I can write when I wake up and go to sleep or whenever I feel the need to, without straining my eyes or picking up some distracting tech, really helps with me staying consistent.

Programming

• Whoops, silent data loss. POSIX requires that text files end in an ultimate newline to be considered text files, but in practice that ultimate newline may be absent and then…yeah. How many shell scripts are out there and how many ultimate lines have been lost this way?

• At best this is a code smell, you’ll maybe get some errors and go “whoops, my bad” while at worst it can be a total disaster.

• 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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