● 04.13.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 13/04/2023: Wireshark 4.0.5, Arianna 1.0, and Thunderbird Feature Requests

Posted in News Roundup at 10:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Applications

• Wireshark is a network packet analyzer. A network packet analyzer will try to capture network packets and tries to display that packet data as detailed as possible. You could think of a network packet analyzer as a measuring device used to examine what’s going on inside a network cable, just like a voltmeter is used by an electrician to examine what’s going on inside an electric cable (but at a higher level, of course). In the past, such tools were either very expensive, proprietary, or both. However, with the advent of Wireshark, all that has changed. Wireshark is perhaps one of the best open source packet analyzers available today.

• I’m happy to announce the initial release of Arianna. Arianna is a small ePub reader application I started with Niccolo a few months ago. Like most of my open source applications, it is built on top of Qt and Kirigami.

• Arianna is both an ePub viewer and a library management app. Internally, Arianna uses Baloo to find your existing ePub files in your device and categorize them.

• Are you a Linux user who loves music but often finds yourself struggling to identify a song playing in the background? Then, look no further than Mousai.

• With this innovative tool, you can quickly and easily identify any song playing on your Linux desktop, just like you would with the popular music identification app Shazam.

• So, say goodbye to the frustration of not knowing the name of a song – with Mousai, you can enjoy Shazam-like functionality on your Linux desktop.

• In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what the app offers and how it can revolutionize how you enjoy music on your Linux machine.

Instructionals/Technical

• KVM, short for Kernel-based Virtual Machine, is a FreeBSD and Linux Kernel module that allows the kernel to act as a hypervisor. Starting from kernel version 2.6.20, KVM is merged into Linux kernel mainline.

• Using KVM, you can easily setup a virtualization environment in a Linux machine and host a wide range of guest operating systems including Linux, Windows, BSD, Mac OS and many.

• In this guide, we will look at how to install and configure KVM hypervisor in Ubuntu 22.04 headless server. And also we will see how to create and manage KVM guest machines using Virsh command line utility.

• I wrote an article back in 2021 called The Lazy Developer’s Dark Mode where I explained how to implement a very basic “dark mode” by using the prefers-color-scheme CSS attribute. This stills works perfectly fine, and in fact there is a cleaner variation of this created by jacksonchen666: These 3 Lines of CSS Will Give You Dark Mode for Free.

• But today I wanted to show how to add dark mode functionality to a website without any CSS at all.

• OpenVMS on x86 is now available for hobbyists! Almost a year after the official release. This is a part 1 of my getting started guide, showing you how to install OpenVMS on VirtualBox on Windows 10/11. More parts will follow, documenting license installation, network setup, ssh, application installation etc.

• Apparently, some people celebrate Pi Day by measuring pi with random objects. This was news to me when I stumbled across this fantastic post by Jim Hall, who had a go for this year’s Pi Day using a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. Here’s the story of how Jim measured pi using a Raspberry Pi.

• This tutorial will help you install elementary OS version 7 into your computer. OS 7 is released this year and based on the solid foundation, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, made beautiful for your PCs and laptops. Please note that OS 7 installation has two sections thanks to its username creation step placed after booting (this way, it will help the raise of elementary OS branded computers). We confirmed it works on Lenovo ThinkPad laptop and we want to share it with you. Now let’s begin the process and good luck!

Games

• Love puzzle games like Portal and The Talos Principle? Photon Engineer might be one for you to have a look at.

• Egosoft have just released the next major expansion for X4: Foundations named X4: Kingdom End, plus a major free upgrade is also out now that brings full Steam Deck Verified support.

• The upcoming Mesa driver 23.1 release is sounding like it’s going to be pretty great, with the Graphics Pipeline Library (“GPL”) being enabled by default, plus we’re looking at smaller shader cache sizes too.

• I recently tested Amazon Luna on Linux and Steam Deck.

• Between 2023-04-05 and 2023-04-12 there were 32 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Connect is up high on my list of my favourite open source apps, because it makes transferring files between devices (PC / Steam Deck / Mobile) and more real easy. It’s been around for a while now and the good news is that it’s going to keep getting better.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Open Hardware/Modding

• The hardware itself was quite simple, as the Nicla Vision already contained the processor, camera, and connectivity required for the proof-of-concept. Once configured, Zalmotek used the OpenMV IDE to collect a large dataset featuring images of each type of item. Bounding boxes were then drawn using the Edge Impulse Studio, after which a FOMO-specific MobileNetV2 0.35 model was trained and could accurately determine the locations and quantities of objects in each test image.

• All the changes ended in the Bookworm kernel, and with the Bookworm release approaching, I decided it was the good moment to upgrade it. [...]

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• We’re actively monitoring your Thunderbird feature suggestions at Mozilla Connect, but “voting up” ideas from the community is crucial. There are currently 287 Thunderbird ideas at Connect, many of which need wider discussion and votes.

• With that in mind, we collected the Top 20 feature requests and linked them below. Check them out, and please consider lending your voice and your votes to these ideas – and the other 267 – if you believe in them.

• This isn’t an article about quantum computing. I was watching Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania and this line of dialogue got me thinking:

• It made me think about quantum concepts. I’ve always believed in continuous improvement and trusted that there is always room for improvement. I believe you must have a passion for personal growth, be able to contribute to your well-being, and look for opportunities that are helpful to organizations.

• The word “quantum” is mesmerizing, strange, and scintillating. It means the “smallest discrete unit of a phenomenon.” For me, it’s about a mindset. It’s the idea that thinking has power and that thinking power has the potential to affect reality. Quantum computing and quantum theories are moving towards becoming reality. If you take the time to learn from it, you can understand your inner quantum.

• In this supersonic age of competition, technology is evolving every day. It is going through a revolution, and it is changing the paradigms. There are numerous questions and uncertainties. Leaders are expected to play a bigger role in these dynamics. In addition, when it comes to oneself, there are eternal questions that pop up. Who am I? What is my purpose as a human being? Why do I exist? How can I make a difference?

Education

• Somewhere in here, I’ll also be doing a reading. That isn’t scheduled yet, but I’m told it’s happening. Check the final schedule when you show up.

Programming/Development

• It is interesting releasing software as Open Source. You will get a lot of feedback. Some of it you asked for, and some of it you didn’t. There will be people who have opinions on the validity of your efforts. Some of those opinions will be tough to receive.

Python

• BabyAGI is an easy-to-use Python script that helps automate brainstorming and task management.

Leftovers

• If you have an FDM printer that features multiple hotends or can otherwise switch between different filaments, you’ve surely thought about using the capability to lay down dedicated support material. Historically the filament of choice for this is PVA, since it can be dissolved in water once the print has finished. But if you’ve ever used it, you’ll know it’s not without its own challenges. Luckily, there may be an alternative — [ModBot] had heard that it is possible to use PLA to support PETG and vice-versa so he decided to try it. You can see how it works in the video below.

• After Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Fox News opinion show hosts subsequently elevated voices who falsely accused two voting software and hardware companies of rigging the vote against former President Donald Trump.

• Those companies, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, are now suing Fox News in a pair of cases that pose severe financial risks to the network.

Science

• Understanding how plankton reacts to changes in the ecosystem is important to evaluate its ability to serve as food for other animals and its role in regulating cycles of carbon in the ocean. Appsilon has already been contributing to the scientific community’s efforts to better understand the Arctic zooplankton by leveraging machine learning.

• From our Data for Good program, we partnered with ETH Zürich (ETHZ) and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to leverage the power of R Shiny. With our combined domains, we aim to bridge the gap between science and policy, in a quest to turn data into effective conservation.

Education

• The tuition was $50,000 a year, frontloading on classes to wrap it up in three years, that’s $150,000. Plus food and housing, which totaled about $900 a month, that’s $180,000, but I’d have needed to eat regardless, so maybe only $170,000.

Hardware

• “A free charge could end up draining your bank account,” Luke Sisak, a deputy district attorney, said in a video posted online this month.

• Juice jacking happens when unsuspecting users plug their electronic devices into USB ports or use USB cables that have been loaded with malware.

• The malware then infects the devices, giving hackers a way in. They can then read and export your data, including your passwords, and even lock up the gadgets, making them unusable.

• “Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels or shopping centers,” a tweet from the FBI’s Denver field office said. “Bad actors have figured out ways to use public USB ports to introduce malware and monitoring software onto devices. Carry your own charger and USB cord and use an electrical outlet instead.”

• Consider carrying a charging-only cable, which prevents data from sending or receiving while charging, from a trusted supplier.

• The classic “Magic Eye” tuning indicator was a fantastic piece of vacuum tube technology that graced all kinds of electronic gear for a fair fraction of the 20th century. But despite its prevalence, finding a new-old-stock Magic Eye tube is a tall order these days, especially for the rare versions like the 6T5. No worries, though, since direct plug-in solid-state replacements for the 6T5 are now a thing, thanks to [Gord Rabjohn].

• There are plenty of designs out there for sawtooth and triangle function generators, many of them using the humble 555 IC. Few are readily voltage controlled, making them difficult to work with using a DAC, though. Enter this useful design posted to EDN!

• It is the bane of worldwide travel: there isn’t just one way to get AC power from the wall. The exact connector — and what you can expect when you plug in — differs from country to country. Even if you stay home, you must account for this if your designs go places and expect to plug into the wall. If you’ve ever looked at a universal adapter, it is full of prongs and pins like a metallic porcupine. Where do all those pins go?

• What if instead of defining a mesh as a series of vertices and edges in a 3D space, you could describe it as a single function? The easiest function would return the signed distance to the closest point (negative meaning you were inside the object). That’s precisely what a signed distance function (SDF) is. A signed distance field (also SDF) is just a voxel grid where the SDF is sampled at each point on the grid. First, we’ll discuss SDFs in 2D and then jump to 3D.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The government wants to have the pilot projects scientifically evaluated. The ministers were optimistic that successful tests would enable them to build pressure for a change of policy at the EU level, and ultimately to clear the way for their original plan to allow licensed sales.

• Now, draft versions of the analysis obtained by the Tampa Bay Times show that this recommendation was made despite the state having contradictory data. It showed that catching COVID-19 could increase the chances of a cardiac-related death much more than getting the vaccine.

• That data was included in an earlier version of the state’s analysis but was missing from the final version compiled and posted online by the Florida Department of Health. Ladapo did not reference the contradictory data in a release posted by the state.

• The way people type and use their computer mouse can be better stress indicators than their heart rate, Swiss researchers said on Tuesday, adding their model could help prevent chronic stress.​

• Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) said they had used new data and machine learning to develop a fresh model for detecting stress levels at work, based solely on the way people type or use their mouse.

• Holidays in my childhood were spent at my grandparents’ farm in Plain Grove, Pennsylvania, 35 miles from East Palestine, Ohio. My grandfather’s grandfather fought at Gettysburg and homesteaded the 160-acre farm after the Civil War.

• The Biden Environmental Protection Agency garnered widespread, often effusive, praise on Wednesday for unveiling what it described as the “strongest-ever pollution standards for cars and trucks.”

• Officials in the city of Richmond, Indiana said Wednesday that a fire that broke out at a plastics facility Tuesday is expected to continue burning for several days, sending huge plumes of black smoke—that doubtlessly contain toxins—into the environment there.

• While Big Ag cheered Wednesday’s ruling by a federal judge in North Dakota temporarily blocking a key Biden administration clean water rule, Indigenous and environmental groups decried the decision—which critics said threatens critical protections for waterways in over two dozen affected states.

• Occasionally there are stories where I wonder if I should weigh in because I’m a bit late to the party and worry that I missed the boat, so to speak. This story about a certain Florida Department of Health report started out as one of them, but then I remembered that I write about what interests me, and this story interested me. A lot Also, I could take advantage of Twitter threads and conversations that go into more detail than the news story that inspired this post did.

Proprietary

• There is now a second video of ChaosGPT, following up on its initial video posted last Wednesday, titled “ChaosGPT: Hidden Message.” The video states that ChaosGPT is now prioritizing its objectives based on its current resources, with its “thoughts” being: “I believe that the best course of action for me right now would be to prioritize the goals that are more achievable. Therefore, I will start working on control over humanity through manipulation.”

• In a move meant to maximize the damage and reach of its ransomware campaign, a cybercrime group recently deployed a Microsoft zero-day vulnerability to execute a global digital extortion campaign against small and medium-sized businesses, researchers at the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said Tuesday.

• It appears the zero-click exploit involved abusing a shortcoming in iOS’s calendar app that would allow someone to automatically add backdated events to a target’s calendar, by sending them an invite, without the mark realizing.

• QuaDream Ltd (קוודרים בע”מ) is an Israeli company that specialises in the development and sale of advanced digital offensive technology to government clients. The company is known for its spyware marketed under the name “Reign”, which, like NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, reportedly utilises zero-click exploits to hack into target devices.

• Recent media reports indicate that QuaDream has sold its products to a range of government clients including Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and Ghana, and has pitched its services to Indonesia and Morocco. Additionally, in their December 2022 Threat Report on the Surveillance-for-Hire Industry, Meta mentions that they detected activity on their platforms that they attributed to QuaDream. The activity included the use of “about 250 accounts”, which Meta assessed were being used to test the capabilities of QuaDream’s iOS and Android spyware.

• This letter conduces an understanding of AI that we might imagine in a technologically dystopian future. “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?” the letter asks. “Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” It paints a rather bleak picture, and perhaps justly so. After all, if some of the most prominent developers and educators in the field of AI see this as a genuine possibility, who am I to disagree? Focusing on these particular fears, however, and claiming that preventing these potential dangers is what we should be focused on, is the part that’s more concerning.

• Earlier this week, Twitter had also labelled the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as “government-funded media”, a move to which the UK-based media organisation objected. “The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee,” it had said.

• NPR (4/5/23) rebuked the label, and major media rushed to the public broadcaster’s defense. “Twitter Slaps NPR With a Dubious New Tag: ‘State-Affiliated Media,’” read a Washington Post headline (4/5/23). Vanity Fair (4/5/23) lambasted the “false equivalence between NPR and state propaganda agencies.” CBS News (4/5/23), AP (4/5/23) and CNN (4/5/23) emphatically quoted NPR’s self-description as a purveyor of “independent, fact-based journalism.” The New York Times (4/5/23) offered an oblique criticism of Twitter’s labeling schemes under Musk as “unevenly enforced.”

• NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries.

• The only surprising thing here is that it took this long: NPR has officially announced that it has quit Twitter. This is in response to Elon’s chaotic decision to first label the account “state-affiliated media,” a label that was designed to help users understand if a media organization was actually a dedicated mouthpiece of the government (which NPR is not). Indeed, NPR was initially the example that Twitter used as to the types of media organizations that such a label should not apply to.

• NPR is instituting a “two-week grace period” so the staff who run the Twitter accounts can revise their social-media strategies. Lansing says individual NPR journalists and staffers can decide for themselves whether to continue using Twitter.

• In an email to staff explaining the decision, Lansing wrote, “It would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards.”

• In a separate statement, NPR CEO John Lansing said, “Actions by Twitter or other social media companies to tarnish the independence of any public media institution are exceptionally harmful and set a dangerous precedent.”

• NPR on Wednesday announced plans to leave Twitter—the social media platform now owned by billionaire Elon Musk—after being branded last week with a “state-affiliated media” label that, after backlash, was replaced with “government-funded media.”

• In a final series of tweets — its first in over a week — NPR noted other places its work can be found, including through its app and newsletters, as well as on other social media platforms.

• “Millions of Americans depend on NPR and their local public radio stations for the fact-based, independent, public service journalism they need to stay informed about the world and about their own communities,” Lansing said in an email to NPR staff Wednesday. “It would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards.”

• NPR said it would remain on other social media platforms, and was reviewing whether it should expand to include emerging third-party platforms.

• Lansing said that even if the label was dropped by Twitter, he isn’t ready to return to the platform just yet since he has lost “faith in the decision-making at Twitter”. “I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”

• Is it good to have access to this kind of information? And how accurate could a wearable be? In the last five months, when I fell down a VO2max rabbit hole, I learned some uncomfortable truths about my health and the limits of smartwatches.

• If you’re not a part of a small but passionate group of emulation enthusiasts, you may not be aware that Microsoft has long waged a battle to keep emulators off of its Xbox consoles and the Xbox Store. Going back all the way to 2020, one particular app and developer has played something of a cat and mouse game to keep its emulator accessible to Xbox Series X/S owners.

Security

• Despite some companies making strides with ARM, for the most part, the desktop and laptop space is still dominated by x86 machines. For all their advantages, they have a glaring flaw for anyone concerned with privacy or security in the form of a hardware backdoor that can access virtually any part of the computer even with the power off. AMD calls their system the Platform Security Processor (PSP) and Intel’s is known as the Intel Management Engine (IME).

• In today’s digital world, privacy and security are more important than ever. Pop!_OS, a popular Linux distribution, offers various built-in tools and features that can help you safeguard your system and protect your data. In this guide, we will explore the essential tools, settings, and best practices for enhancing privacy and security on your Pop!_OS device.

Privacy/Surveillance

• A worldwide pandemic trapped students in their own homes to stop the spread of the coronavirus. They didn’t ask for this. Neither did educators. But educators made the worst of it in far too many cases.

• However, on April 4, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) fined TikTok £12.7 million for processing the data of up to 1.4 million children under 13 who, between May 2018 and July 2020, were using the platform without parental consent, in breach of UK data protection laws which stipulate that organisations using children’s personal data must first obtain the consent of their parents or guardians.

• All hail the pariah. If Clearview is only at 30 billion images, it just means social media users haven’t been posting enough.

• Russia’s Interior Ministry (“MVD”) has presented the draft of a proposed presidential decree that, if approved, would enable the law enforcement to surveil former Ukrainian nationals who renounced their citizenship in Russia but continue to exercise their rights in Ukraine.

• The rule would codify the administration’s guidance last summer that providers are not required to disclose health data to law enforcement.

Confidentiality

• Go 1.20.2 fixed a small vulnerability in the crypto/elliptic package. The impact was minor, to the point that I don’t think any application was impacted, but the issue was interesting to look at as a near-miss, and to learn from.

• Fundamentally, a scalar multiplication function was returning the wrong value for a very specific input because of a combination of the pre-existing complexity and unsafety of some optimized assembly, of undocumented assumptions, and of the neverending state of flux of open source code.

• Let’s start from some necessary building blocks, look at how the vulnerability happened, and talk about what we can learn from it.

Defence/Aggression

• From Forever War to Eternal War.

• Jammu and Kashmir is historically Hindu and Buddhist but is currently majority-Muslim. It is partially occupied by China and Pakistan, with the part administered by India often preyed on by Pakistani-backed Islamists.

• Islamists continue to target members of the Hindu community, as well as peaceful Muslims living in Kashmir. For example, the now-dead Zakir Musa, who was an influential Kashmiri leader, had aligned himself with al-Qaeda and said that he wanted to “impose Sharia in Kashmir,” and more frighteningly, that it should be done by force rather than consensus.

• The statement reports that the group of unauthorized individuals discovered on a rubber vessel off the shore of Ayvacik district, located within the Canakkale Province, have been transferred to the custody of local officials in Ayvacik with the intention of initiating deportation proceedings.

• According to a March 2023 report from Somalia’s Defense Ministry, military operations have liberated about 70 towns and villages with more than 3,000 militants killed and 3,700 injured.

• But analysts are warning that the loss of terrain in Somalia may push al-Shabaab to launch new attacks in neighboring Kenya.

• On April 11, 2002, there was an attempted coup against President Hugo Chavez’s democratically elected government in Venezuela. Chavez had prioritized programs to improve living conditions for those who were previously unrepresented, and established an independent foreign policy in favor of the nation’s interests.

• The U.S. Senate repealing the 2002 Authorization for Military Force in Iraq was necessary and just. Still, that action should be viewed only as a first step in a national process of reckoning with and accounting for the consequences of the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

• I’m not a TikTok person. I’m too old. But when I finally ventured onto that popular but much-maligned app, which traffics in short videos and hot takes, I was surprised to find many videos about the Doomsday Clock. It’s nothing like a conventional timepiece, of course. It’s meant to show how close humanity has come to nuclear Armageddon—to the proverbial “midnight.”

• As Ukraine marks one year since Russia’s invasion, a 10-year war halfway around the world, in the Central African Republic, is providing Russian President Vladimir Putin with access to precious minerals that allow him to circumvent Western sanctions.

• The State Duma’s hasty vote on a package of amendments to Russia’s conscription law has ushered in an entirely new system of military recruitment. An older draft of this legislation had been in the hopper since 2018. Four years after the initial submission, it was passed in the second reading, practically on the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and then languished without being revisited for another year. In late March this year, the deputies decided to revert the bill to the second reading. Then, hours before the vote on April 11, a massive amendment package was posted on the Duma website, signaling that the vote now concerned a far more radical approach to military conscriptions. The draft law was passed unanimously by all but one deputy. The one legislator who abstained from the vote later said that he’d “pressed the wrong button.”

• Sergey Podoprigorov, a judge in the Moscow municipal court which is currently hearing a case against Vladimir Kara-Murza, asked the U.S. Treasury Department to remove him from the so-called “Magnitsky list,” reports independent news outlet Verstka.

• The surprise OPEC+ reduction consolidates the Saudi-Russian energy alliance, by aligning their production levels and placing them on equal footing. It is a slap in the face for the US.

• Protesters in the Philippines have been speaking out against the growing U.S. military presence in the country as nearly 18,000 troops from both countries take part in a massive military drill in the South China Sea. This comes as tension is escalating between the United States and China over espionage, economic competition and the war in Ukraine. The Philippines, a former U.S. colony, recently agreed to give the Pentagon access to four more of its military bases, including two located in the northern province of Cagayan about 250 miles from Taiwan. Ties between Washington and Manila have been growing closer since the inauguration of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the former U.S.-backed dictator of the same name. For more, we speak with Renato Reyes Jr., the secretary general of Bayan, an alliance of leftist groups in the Philippines opposed to U.S. militarism. He says that “poor countries like the Philippines” will be “the biggest losers if the conflict escalates between the U.S. and China.”

• We look more at what recently leaked Pentagon documents reveal about the war in Ukraine, and U.S. spying on both its adversaries and its allies, including Israel. In Part 2 of our interview with James Bamford, the longtime investigative journalist discusses how the leaks challenge the corporate media’s portrayal of the war in Ukraine, and more. Bamford’s latest book is Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence.

• Burma’s military junta carried out its deadliest attack yet on civilians in rebel-held areas when it bombed a meeting of community leaders Tuesday in the Sagaing region, killing an estimated 100 people, including 30 children. The military junta has increasingly used airstrikes to crush the resistance since it seized power in 2021, often targeting schools and clinics run by the opposition. The United Nations has warned of worsening humanitarian and human rights crises in Burma, with mass arrests, torture of prisoners, the killing of civilians, and media repression. To discuss this latest attack and the ongoing crisis in Burma, we’re joined by Maung Zarni, a Burmese scholar, dissident and human rights activist. His recent piece is titled “Myanmar Military’s Acts of Terrorism from the Sky & Savage Beheadings on the Ground.”

• According to RIA Novosti, the Federation Council passed a law that introduces electronic summonses for the army and restrictions for “dodgers” at its meeting on April 12.

• The Russian embassy in Belarus has announced that the 25-year-old Russian national Sofia Sapega, sentenced to six years by a Belarusian court, has consented to being extradited to Russia.

• Alexey Moskalev, the single father from Russia’s Tula region who fled house arrest for Belarus after being sentenced to two years in prison on charges of “discrediting” the Russian army, has been extradited back to Russia, the human rights media project OVD-Info reported on Wednesday, citing a lawyer who tried to visit Moskalev at the Belarusian detention center where he was previously being held.

• The recently emerged video footage with the beheading of a captive Ukrainian serviceman, apparently by Russian troops, is likely the work of Wagner Group.

• Sanctions on Russia are isomorphic to a strict policy of trade protection, industrial policy, and capital controls.

• A video has surfaced online that appears to show Russian soldiers beheading a Ukrainian soldier.

• Russia is unlikely to launch its unified digital registry of citizens eligible for military service before the start of the country’s annual fall conscription campaign, the state news outlet RIA Novosti said on Wednesday, citing Digital Development Minister Maxut Shadayev.

• Top cyber diplomat Nate Fick says the State Department is on track to have a diplomat trained in tech issues in every embassy.

• With its war effort faltering, the Kremlin is stepping up its attacks on Ukrainian power plants, resulting in cascading internet failures.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• But this latest breach stands apart for its sheer weirdness.

• The leak apparently began weeks ago, when an anonymous member of a small online group posted some files on Discord, a messaging platform popular with video gamers. The documents were reposted to larger Discord channels focused on the Minecraft computer game and a Filipino YouTube celebrity. They eventually found their way—in doctored form—to a Russian-propaganda account on Telegram, entered the wilds of Twitter, and got picked up by the mainstream media.

• The recent leak saga is just a glimpse of Washington’s long-standing indiscriminate surveillance of the world. The intelligence agencies, with an annual funding of US$90 billion, have sweeping powers to tap electronic communications, run spies and monitor with satellites.

• In fact, the U.S. indiscriminate surveillance of the world is well-documented, earning it a notorious reputation as a surveillance empire with no regard for privacy or international law.

Environment

• The scientists from Ohio State University compared recent observations to detailed notes a local farmer began taking in the 19th Century.

• They say the research has implications for how well different types of trees will cope with future climate change.

• In the $20 million “Fishrot Scheme” scam unearthed in 2019, the Akureyri, Iceland-based Samherji was accused of illegitimate trawling in Namibia’s waters. For this, the company, one of the world’s largest, allegedly bribed Namibian government officials and embezzled funds, besides intimidating its critics.

• The racket, carried out in Namibia, Iceland, and Norway, also reportedly involved some Angolan nationals.

Energy/Transportation

• The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed today (April 12) new rules for automakers on tailpipe emissions, which are designed to curb car pollution, the biggest contributors to carbon emissions in the country with the second-biggest CO2 footprint.

• The records obtained by WIRED are more focused. They follow a previously unreported directive to staff of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency handed down last October to improve record keeping of incidents involving autonomous vehicles. Muni, as the agency is known, standardized the term “driverless car” when staff report “near-misses, collisions or other incidents resulting in transit delay,” according to the directive. Agency logs show 12 “driverless” reports from September 2022 through March 8, 2023, though Muni video was provided for only eight of these cases. Overall, the incidents resulted in at least 83 minutes of direct delays for Muni riders, records show.

• That data likely doesn’t reflect the true scale of the problem. Muni staff don’t follow every directive to the letter, and a single delay can slow other lines, worsening the blow. Buses and trains cannot weave around blockages as easily as pedestrians, other motorists, and cyclists, saddling transit-dependent travelers with some of the biggest headaches caused by errant driverless cars, according to transit advocates.

• The Biden administration is seeking a dramatic leap in electric vehicle sales, through proposed tougher tailpipe emission standards announced Wednesday. In effect, the administration is calling for two-thirds of new car sales to be EVs by 2032, up from less than 6% last year.

• The proposed emission standards will test how much a major governmental push can transform the marketplace for a complex and costly product that Americans typically rely on every day.

• The Biden administration will propose strict new automobile pollution limits this week that would require at least 54% of new vehicles sold in the United States to be electric by 2030 and as many as two of every three by 2032, according to industry and environmental officials briefed on the plan.

• The proposed regulation, to be released Wednesday by the Environmental Protection Agency, would set greenhouse gas emissions limits for the 2027 through 2032 model years for passenger vehicles that would be even stricter than goals the auto industry agreed to in 2021.

• Today, the transportation sector is the single biggest contributor to greenhouse-gas emissions in the US. The new rules are part of a growing push from the US federal government to boost EVs and other low-emission forms of transit. In 2021, President Biden set a target for EVs to make up half of new vehicle sales by 2030. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, includes $7,500 individual tax credits for new electric vehicles.

• Urban Development Department gears up for phase-wise development of EV charging facilities, instructions given to service providers to provide land and other facilities as per the prescribed provisions in EV Policy

• Since last year, an inspection service has also been operating in the cities. According to Bolt, carelessly leaving a scooter could result in a fine of 20 euros, while repeated offences could result in the suspension of a person’s account.

• The company says it is also working on innovations, including the construction of charging stations.

• Now China is positioning itself to command the next big innovation in rechargeable batteries: replacing lithium with sodium, a far cheaper and more abundant material.

• The first solar panels may have rolled out of Bell Labs in the 1950s, with major press around their inconsistent and patchy adoption in the decades that followed, but despite the fanfare they were not been able to compete on a price per kilowatt compared to other methods of power generation until much more recently. Since then the amount of solar farms has increased exponentially, and while generating energy from the sun is much cleaner than most other methods of energy production and contributes no greenhouse gasses in the process there are some concerns with disposal of solar panels as they reach the end of their 30-year lifespan. Some companies are planning on making money on recycling these old modules rather than letting them be landfilled.

• Ahead of a planned global summit on the climate and environment in Japan, campaigners on Wednesday urged the Biden administration to resist pressure from Japanese officials to expand public investments in liquefied natural gas, which is derived from fracking and the drilling of oil and gas wells, warning that proponents have wrongly claimed the gas is a “clean” alternative to other fossil fuels.

• After the Biden administration on Tuesday released proposals to cut water allotments to the states that depend on the shrinking Colorado River, a progressive advocacy group criticized federal officials for failing to address an underlying cause of the region’s hydrological plight: the overexploitation of water resources by the corporate agriculture and fossil fuel industries.

• The environmental group Friends of the Earth on Tuesday sued Pacific Gas and Electric in a bid to block the California utility giant from breaching its contract to shutter the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant when the operating licenses for its two reactors expire in 2024 and 2025.

Wildlife/Nature

Finance

• Led by Rep. Matt Gaetz and other far-right members of the House GOP, Republican lawmakers are intensifying their push to establish new work requirements for millions of people who receive Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance, an effort that progressives slammed as a cruel attack on the poor.

• Let’s eyeball that at $140 million paid to writers as of January 2022. So, with the caveat that everything I am about to type is guesswork and coffee fumes, we can assume that Substack paid out about $160 million in the last year alone. Time for some fun algebra!

• Last month, SoFi Bank filed a federal lawsuit in an attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s extension of the student loan payment pause, arguing that its business has suffered as a result of the moratorium. The following is a letter from the leadership team at the Student Debt Crisis Center, a nonprofit organization fighting for the rights of borrowers and an end to the student debt crisis. 1

• Tulare, Calif.—Lidia Torres got scared when the new eligibility clerk at the labor camp knocked on her door. She would have to come to the office, Vanessa Carter told her, and reverify the immigration documents she’d provided when she first moved in six years earlier. So Torres showed them to her. “She said my documents were not valid,” Torres remembers. “No one had ever questioned them before. Then she gave me three days to get out.”1

• Amid the uproar over right-wing benefactor and Clarence Thomas crony Harlan Crow’s infatuation with Third Reich memorabilia, a more routine, but equally telling, indictment of the moneyed and ideologically calcified condition of American public life materialized: Harvard alum and hedge-fund titan Ken Griffin donated $300 million to his alma mater, which obligingly announced that it would rename the school’s graduate school of arts and sciences in his honor. Griffin is best known as the Daddy Warbucks for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, another Harvard alum who can reliably be found doing cable hits and appearing at proto-presidential campaign rallies fulminating against the “potentates” of Ivy League wokeness now defiling the righteous, Real American order of things.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A Washington ethics watchdog is calling for the Department of Justice to investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for failing to disclose luxury trips he received from a billionaire GOP megadonor.

• “This high-profile ethics matter has historic implications far beyond one Supreme Court justice,” attorneys for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center wrote in a detailed letter on Tuesday to the Judicial Conference, the principal policymaking body for federal courts. The Judicial Conference could trigger an investigation by referring the case to the Justice Department.

• The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is concerned that proposed EU cybersecurity laws will leave open source organizations and individuals unfairly liable for distributing incorrect code.

• “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 PSF said in a statement shared on Tuesday by executive director Deb Nicholson.

• Twitter owner Elon Musk told the BBC on April 11 morning that he would rather comply with the Indian government’s blocking orders than risk sending Twitter employees to jail. Mr. Musk made the remarks in a Twitter Spaces interview.

• When asked about the blocking of the BBC’s two-part documentary series India: The Modi Question, which critically examined Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat riots and more recent agitations by farmers and anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protesters, Mr. Musk said, “I don’t know about that, you know, what exactly happened with some content situation in India.”

• Employees at Meta, which not long ago was one of the most desirable workplaces in Silicon Valley, face an increasingly precarious future. The company’s stock price has dropped 43 percent from its peak 19 months ago. More layoffs, Mr. Zuckerberg has said on his Facebook page, are coming this month. And for the first time, some of those cuts could be in engineering groups, which would have been unthinkable before the trouble started last year, two employees said.

• Across the country, the illogical priorities of the right have become more and more glaring. And nowhere is this worse than in Tennessee, where conservatives have banned books and drag shows but have done nothing to protect kids from what is now their most likely cause of death: gun violence. Instead of addressing this crisis, after the mass shooting at a private elementary school in Nashville on March 27, the Republican-led legislature expelled from its chamber two Black freshman Democrats in their twenties—Representatives Justin Pearson and Justin Jones—for daring to demand common-sense gun control.

• U.S. Senate Democrats on Wednesday sent a letter urging the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the recent expulsion of two Tennessee Democratic lawmakers to determine whether the widely condemned move was unconstitutional or otherwise unlawful.

• According to exclusive data from Naukri.com, there has been an up to 70% increase in various roles in security this year compared with last year. Top profiles in demand include network security engineer (up 66%), application security engineer (up 57%), DevSec engineer (up 27%) and cybersecurity (22%).

• Executive search firms such as Ciel HR Services and Longhouse Consulting too have seen a nearly 60-80% increase in hiring mandates in cybersecurity roles.

• Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein is facing fresh calls to resign in the wake of news reports detailing how her extended absence from the Senate since being diagnosed with shingles earlier this year is impacting her party’s ability to confirm President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees.

• A pair of Democratic U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday became the first members of their party in Congress to urge Sen. Dianne Feinstein to resign, as a deadlocked Senate Judiciary Committee remains unable to confirm President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees during her prolonged absence.

Censorship/Free Speech

• [...] “We believe he is slowly being administered low doses of poison” in pills he is given without identification, [...]

• Ahmadi told the Emtedad website that since his client’s transfer to solitary confinement, he has had no news about Nourmohammadzadeh and that Rajai Shahr prison officials have denied any contact between the prisoner and his family or attorney.

• Nourmohammadzadeh was arrested on October 4 during nationwide protests in front of his home in the Iranian capital of Tehran.

• On November 7, Tehran’s Revolutionary Court sentenced him to death on charges of “waging war against God through destruction and setting fire to public property, inciting to commit crimes against national security, and disrupting public order and tranquility by participating in gatherings.”

• A small Central Texas county is considering whether to shut down all its public libraries to protest a judge’s ruling.

• Tomorrow (Apr. 13), the Commissioners Court of Llano County will convene to discuss, among other things, whether to “continue or cease operations of the current physical Llano County library system pending further guidance from the Federal Courts,” according to the agenda.

• Indonesia was set to host FIFA’s U-20 men’s soccer World Cup, a tournament in which Israel is slated to participate. Fueled by fierce opposition to recent deadly attacks against Palestinians, protesters hit the streets in the Muslim-majority country of more than 270 million people. Indonesians have long supported Palestinian independence, and the protests should have been expected. Demonstrators delayed the tournament draw and compelled Bali’s governor, Wayan Koster, to refuse to host the Israeli team. In response, FIFA made a shocking move: It stripped Indonesia’s right to host the tournament, vaguely citing “the current circumstances” in the country.

• California passed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) nominally to protect children’s privacy, but at the same time, the AADC requires businesses to do an age “assurance” of all their users, children and adults alike. (Age “assurance” requires the business to distinguish children from adults, but the methodology to implement has many of the same characteristics as age verification–it just needs to be less precise for anyone who isn’t around the age of majority. I’ll treat the two as equivalent).

• Vitaly Borodin, head of the Federal Security and Anti-Corruption Project and a serial denouncer of Russia’s key liberal public figures, has filed a new complaint with the Prosecutor General.

• Llano County commissioners could decide to shut down the county library system during a special meeting set for 3 p.m. Thursday, April 13. The county is embroiled in a civil lawsuit that has drawn national attention over the removal of 12 controversial books.

• Agenda item 1 for the special meeting reads: Continue or cease operations of the current physical Llano County Library System pending further guidance from the Federal Courts. This action item will include discussion and action regarding the continued employment and/or status of the Llano County Library System employees and the feasibility of the use of the library premises by the public.

• Literacy and civil liberties defenders on Wednesday excoriated Republican state lawmakers in Missouri after they gave their final approval to a budget that would completely defund the state’s public libraries and other essential services.

• Also last year, an indie film about a middle-class Punjabi family sent Pakistan into a moral panic. “Joyland,” a film directed by Saim Sadiq that won awards at Cannes and the Film Independent Spirit Awards, and which Pakistan submitted to the 2023 Oscars, had to be cleared by the country’s three censor boards in order to be screened in Pakistan. After a series of edits, the censor boards certified the film. Then, just before its release, it was banned. After lobbying by supporters of the film, Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif assembled a review committee, which recommended more changes. The carefully edited film was screened in the province of Sindh, but remained banned in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populated province and the film’s primary setting.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• A finding of wrongful detention changes the U.S. government’s approach to the imprisonment of an American citizen abroad, including by transferring primary responsibility for such cases to the office of the presidential envoy for hostage affairs. The classification can be based on any one of several findings by the government, including that the prisoner was detained on arbitrary grounds, or is not facing legitimate charges or a fair judicial process.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Enshittification isn’t just another way of saying “fraud” or “price gouging” or “wage theft.” Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can’t rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service’s back-end.

• Faced with persistent attacks from Florida Republicans, including presumed 2024 presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis, immigrant and LGBTQ+ rights groups on Wednesday issued advisories for traveling to the southeastern U.S. state.

• The United Nations migration agency said Wednesday that the first three months of 2023 were the deadliest quarter in six years for people attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach the European Union, with at least 411 migrants dying on the central route through the sea.

• Extrapolations looks like a million bucks—a hundred million. Or, I should say, it looks like 600 metric tons of carbon dioxide. There are actors in it, people you will recognize. The technology is impressive and sleek. The futuristic fashions are tasteful and not overbearing. None of the furniture looks like I could afford it. When a helicopter flies over the blazing Adirondacks, it looks like Mordor.

• Rome—“Surrogate motherhood is a crime worse than pedophilia—here we’re dealing with people who want to choose a kid like a paint color for their house.” Fratelli d’Italia spokesman Federico Mollicone’s words on March 20 disgusted liberal opinion—and would have been more shocking if they weren’t the standard fare of the new government. This isn’t just harsh rhetoric. In its worst offensive against civil rights yet, Giorgia Meloni’s administration is stripping same-sex couples of recognition as parents, also threatening their access to benefits and childcare services.

• When the debate over teaching race-related concepts in public schools reached Kimberly Tilsen-Brave Heart’s home state of South Dakota, she decided she couldn’t in good conscience send her youngest daughter to kindergarten at a local public school.

• So many military staffers and guards passed through Guantanamo during my 14-year detention that I remember only the kindest, and the cruellest – the ones who seemed to take joy in our misery.

• “Lights Out,” open through 2025 at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., illuminates how light pollution is affecting astronomy, natural ecosystems and human cultures around the world. “We want people to understand that it’s a global problem, and it’s having broad impact,” says Jill Johnson, an exhibit developer at the museum.

• Earlier research showed that satellites and space debris may increase the overall brightness of the night sky. In a new paper in Nature Astronomy, my colleagues and I applied this knowledge to predicting the performance of a major astronomical sky survey. We found this phenomenon may make the survey 7.5% less efficient and US$21.8 million more expensive.

• Mammoth Cave National Park invites you to celebrate International Dark Sky Week (IDSW) from April 15 -22 with ranger guided walks, talks, and special evening programs. The IDSW is an annual event that encourages people worldwide to turn off lights, enjoy the night sky without light pollution, and gain an awareness and appreciation of our dark skies. All IDSW events are weather dependent and free and open to the public with no tickets or reservations required.

• Then came a downturn after the fundamentalist Taliban returned to power in August 2021. Mounting unemployment and a sharp economic downturn took a heavy toll on all Afghans, including potential customers among the city’s half a million or so people.

• Then suddenly, last week, it was “game over” for Humayun and other enterprising shopkeepers.

• That’s when authorities shuttered his arcade and hundreds of other businesses after the Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice banned video games, foreign films, and music in Herat, branding them as un-Islamic.

• Dawn Ray’d is a UK anarchist black metal band that draws from the folk traditions of rebel music. On their latest album “To Know The Light,” the trio conveys a rousing anti-fascist message that balances the bleakness that black metal is known for with a sense of optimism.

• The band released a video for one of the album’s tracks called “Go As Free Companions”. According to vocalist and violinist Simon Barr, the song is an “exploration of anarcho-nihilism, and ‘Go As Free Companions’ is our conclusion.” “We have chosen not to despair in the face of overwhelming odds, but to live while time allows it. If the future is canceled, if the present is all we have, then each minute must be revolutionary; every moment counts, so live these ideas in every moment.”“It is easy to know what we are against, but we must not forget what we are for,” Barr added. “Whilst there is joy, love, empathy, kindness, people in need of your help; we cannot give up. You may sometimes feel like it, but you are not alone and you are not powerless, there are huge numbers of us, let’s find each other! Though acrid black clouds race across the horizon we must not forget: today, the sun still shines.”The song’s potent message is summed up in the lyrics:

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing issues can be a headache for network engineers. However, when those issues start exhibiting zombie-like behaviour, it’s time to take a closer look. This is exactly what I have observed on some Juniper routers in production at AS48635 running as edge routers (responsible for IP transit, Private Network Interconnects (PNIs) and IXP peering). This phenomenon is not only perplexing but can also impact traffic engineering efforts or in some rare cases, cause network disruptions.

• In this article, I will share my experience with BGP zombie routes on Junos OS (JunOS).

• The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental disasters. AT&T spent $200 billion to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and stumbled around incompetently for several years before giving up.

• Over the last decade or so, there’s been a growing chorus of people insisting (misleadingly) that the internet is a “wild west” that needs regulation. The reasons stated for this apparently necessary regulation change over time, but the underlying discussion tends to be the same: bad stuff is happening online and it needs to stop. Sometimes, the discussion is more focused on how internet companies are somehow “experimenting” with our lives and our data.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• A similar case in Germany was brought by Sony Music against the free, recursive, anycast DNS platform Quad9. Like CDNs, DNS platforms are crucial services that ensure that the Internet can function smoothly; they are not involved with any of the sites that may be accessed as a result of their services. In particular, they have no knowledge of whether copyright material on those sites is authorised or not. Unfortunately, two regional courts in Germany don’t seem to understand that point, and have issued judgments against Quad9. Its FAQ on one of the cases explains why this is a dreadful result for the entire Internet: [...]

• Anti-piracy coalition ACE continues its crackdown on pirate sites with a series of new DMCA subpoenas. The targets of the latest wave include The Pirate Bay. ACE hopes that Cloudflare can help to identify the operators of the notorious torrent site. Whether this quest will result in any actionable information is unknown.

• Two software engineers who created 8maple, a movie and TV show platform that dominated the local online piracy market in Taiwan, have been sentenced to prison. Now in their mid-thirties, the men generated over US$130,000 per month in advertising revenues but now face 18 months behind bars and the confiscation of US$2 million.

• If you are involved in any of these fields, we invite you to participate in our survey and share your experiences with us. Your contributions will help us to gain a deeper understanding of the unique perspectives, needs, and aspirations of these communities that we’re eager to engage with and serve.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

Politics

• Why is it bad to misgender someone, but okay to _erase_ the lived experiences of various tgd people by supporting or promoting particular theoretical constructs?

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