● 04.13.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 13/04/2023: Nanonote 1.4.0 and LWN Looks at Mobian

Posted in News Roundup at 12:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Mobile Version: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.afrikalan.tuxmath/ Desktop Version: also if the user has been using rss reader apps, the user probably knows that StarShip fully-stacked maiden flight is said to be this week 😀 and: it might very well be GNU Linux powered!

Kernel Space

• The kernel has a well-developed mechanism for the control of tracing of events in kernel space. Developers often want to be able to trace user-space activity as well, using the same interfaces, but that mode is rather less well supported. One year ago, an attempt to add an API for the control of user-space trace events ran into trouble and has never been fully enabled. Now, Beau Belgrave is back with a reworked API that may finally result in this mechanism becoming generally available.

• User-space trace events, like those in the kernel, tend to be inactive most of the time; nobody is listening, so no data should be generated. In the kernel, inactive tracepoints are patched out of the binary entirely, but that sort of run-time patching is not readily available in user space. So user-space code must actually check whether a given trace event is enabled and, if so, produce the requisite data. Since any given event is almost certainly inactive, that check should be as fast as possible.

• As a general rule, the purpose behind mounting a filesystem is to make that filesystem’s contents visible to the system, or at least to the mount namespace where that mount occurs. For similar reasons, it is unusual to mount one filesystem on top of another, since that would cause the contents of the over-mounted filesystem to be hidden. There are exceptions to everything, though, and that extends to mounted filesystems; a “tucking” mechanism proposed by Christian Brauner is designed to hide mounted filesystems underneath other mounts — temporarily, at least.

• Brauner’s cover letter describes the intended use case in great detail; the text below is an attempt to boil that discussion down a bit. His explanation leans heavily on the concepts of shared subtrees and mount propagation; a review of this article provides some context that may make the description easier to follow.

• The kernel’s hierarchical maintainer model works quite well from the standpoint of allowing thousands of developers to work together without (often) stepping on each others’ toes. But that model can also make life painful for developers who are trying to make changes across numerous subsystems. Other possible source of pain include changes related to licensing or those where maintainers don’t understand the purpose of the work. Nick Alcock has managed to hit all of those hazards together in his effort to perform what would seem like a common-sense cleanup of the kernel’s annotations for loadable modules.

Applications

• In essence, Machine Learning is the practice of using algorithms to parse data, learn insights from that data, and then make a determination or prediction. The machine is ‘trained’ using huge amounts of data.

• Lama Cleaner is a fully self-hostable inpainting tool powered by state-of-the-art AI models. This software lets you remove unwanted objects, defects, people from your pictures or erase and replace anything from your pictures. There’s also support for erase and replace courtesy of Stable Diffusion and Paint by Example.

• The software is free and open source written mostly in Python.

• After a very long pause, I am happy to announce the release of Nanonote 1.4.0.

• Nanonote is a minimalist note-taking application. It consists of a text area, a context menu and… that’s about it!

• It’s handy to jot down short term notes, as a temporary place to collect copy’n’paste blocks, to draft a long response for an instant messaging app without having to fear pressing Enter too soon or any other use you can come up with!

• Nanonote can also be used to write TODO lists. This is even better now in 1.4.0 thanks to the new task feature from Daniel Laidig, which lets you quickly create and toggle checkable tasks with Ctrl+Enter.

Instructionals/Technical

• Set up a quick application observability solution that records metrics in real time and pipes them into a database for analysis.

• This is our ongoing series of Linux commands and in this article, we are going to review lsof command with practical examples. lsof meaning ‘LiSt Open Files’ is used to find out which files

• File compression is a powerful mechanism to save storage space and facilitate easy file transfers, especially when the file size is huge. There are various formats of compressed files such as .zip, .rar, etc. But, zip remains the most commonly used format. If you’re on a Linux system, zipping and unzipping files (compressing and decompressing) is a task that you can accomplish from the command line interface as well as the GUI. So, in this article, we have discussed how to zip and unzip files in Linux using these two methods.

• For those unaware, zipping means compressing a file or multiple files of different formats into a single file, such that it occupies less space and can be transferred using less bandwidth. Unzipping a file means extracting all the compressed files from a zip file. That said, let’s look at how you can zip and unzip files in Linux:

• Archives have always been the conventional way of distributing software on Linux. This has spawned an utmost need for archive managers, and this is precisely why Linux distros ship with command-line utilities to handle archives and tarballs, some of which are overwhelming to newcomers.

• How convenient would it be to install WinRAR on Linux, an archive manager that almost every computer user is familiar with?

• Sometimes, your Linux system may throw an incorrect password error even after typing in the correct sudo password. This can be both surprising and annoying when you’re trying to get stuff done.

• Let’s look at a few quick fixes you can try when your correct sudo password does not work on Linux.

• $ for f in *php; do echo $f >> ~/temp/errors.txt; phpcsw $f | grep GET >> ~/temp/errors.txt; done

• Are you writing a script and some command doesn’t accept hostnames and you don’t want to inline the IP address? dig +short is your friend!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In the open-source world, we’re quite familiar with projects. Write some code to solve a problem, make sure it works for you, maybe put it in a Git repo, and voila! A product is mostly personal; you scratch an itch and improve your life a bit. It’s how everything starts.

• Then you put your Git repo online to share your project with others, and it begins to transform into a product. A product is outward-focused; its purpose is to be of value to others. To succeed, it must grow organizational components such as defined scopes of features and support, documentation, promotion and advertising, methods of distribution and updating, formalized feedback channels, decision-making processes, and so on.

• This transition is hard, and it can burn out FOSS maintainers of productized projects who suddenly find themselves corresponding with rude strangers without pay and lacking the time to focus on the parts of the project they found fun. It takes a very special and rare kind of volunteer to consistently do this work for free.

• In the commercial world, product development and maintenance is sustained by the money people pay to buy the product. But in the FOSS world, we’re in this awkward valley where our products are frequently competitive in functionality and reach with the commercial ones, but we don’t generally charge money or benefit from a funding stream to keep them going sustainably.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Linux is a powerful open-source kernel that powers servers and desktop operating systems. One cool feature of Linux is that you can modify and change it to your liking, which has resulted in thousands of Linux distributions spawning over the years.

• If the idea of thousands of Linux distros gets your head spinning, let’s take a look at how Linux distros are broadly categorized. Knowing these different categories will help you make an informed decision when choosing a Linux distro for your servers or workstation.

• Out of all the operating systems in existence, Linux (also known as GNU/Linux) is the most frowned upon, and there are a few reasons for the same. While overall adaptability, software support, and user experience remain the most common issues with Linux, OS saturation is also a huge issue. That said, most people involved in Linux treat the overwhelming number of choices as a plus point, as it gives them the ability and flexibility to try out different desktop environments and flavors and, ultimately, settle for what they like the best. However, if you haven’t tried Linux yet and want to start using it for whatever reason, here are some of the best Linux distros you should use and get started with.

• There’s no such thing as the Best Linux Distribution. Like Windows or any operating system for the fact, every Linux distro has its own set of flaws. What matters is choosing the one that caters to your needs, and for that, this list is a compilation of distros that are considered all-rounders.

New Releases

• 4MLinux is a distribution aimed at systems with fewer resources that can run on machines with as little as 128 MB of RAM, turning them into viable workstations or servers. 4MLinux also can be used as a rescue disc to recover data from a malfunctioning system.

• The latest stable version is 42.0 and includes software like LibreOffice 7.5.2, AbiWord 3.0.5, GIMP 2.10.34, Firefox 111.0, Chromium 106.0.5249, Thunderbird 102.8.0, Audacious 4.3, VLC 3.0.18, Mesa 22.2.3, Wine 8.3, AlsaPlayer, Baka MPlayer, GNOME Mplayer, GNOME MPV, mp3blaster, and XMS.

• You’ll also find updated toolchains, including PHP (versions 5.6.40, 7.4.33, and 8.1.17), Perl 5.36.0, Python (versions 2.7.18 and 3.10.8), and Ruby 3.1.3. On the server side, you’ll find Apache 2.4.56 and MariaDB 10.6.12. The kernel shipped with 4MLinux 42.0 is version 6.1.10. You can view the entire package list included with 4MLinux.

Fedora Family / IBM

• NetSuite and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are two different types of software, designed for different purposes.

• NetSuite is a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that provides business management solutions for various industries such as retail, wholesale distribution, manufacturing, and professional services. It offers a range of features including financial management, order management, inventory management, e-commerce, CRM, project management, and more. NetSuite is designed to help businesses streamline their operations, reduce costs, and improve overall productivity.

• On the other hand, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial Linux distribution that is widely used in enterprise environments for its stability, security, and reliability. It offers features such as system administration tools, security enhancements, and application development frameworks. RHEL is designed to be a stable, secure, and reliable operating system that is suitable for use in mission-critical environments.

• The state in current desktops (in Fedora 37) seems somewhat mixed. Cinnamon gives you control over what sounds its desktop shell makes, but not over what notification sounds its applications generate (never mind applications from other desktops). GNOME, in its ‘Notifications’ section, offers specific controls over sound usage by notification by application, but only for GNOME applications. If you dig deep enough in KDE settings, KDE seems to have quite fine grained control over notification sounds from certain KDE applications, but this doesn’t seem to include applications that are merely KDE-based, like kdiff3.

• CIQ, the company building the next generation of software infrastructure for enterprises running data-intensive workloads atop the Rocky Linux enterprise Linux distribution, has been named Technology Company of the Year by NCET, Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. Recognition in this category honors CIQ’s contribution to enhancing the growth and prestige of the technology community in Northern Nevada.

Debian Family

• Mobian is a project that aims to bring the Debian distribution to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. By building on the flexibility, stability, and community-driven development of Debian, Mobian aspires to create a powerful and user-friendly alternative to existing mobile operating systems. The project is actively working on reducing the delta between Mobian and Debian, and its ultimate goal is to be absorbed back into its parent distribution and to make it easy to run Debian on mobile devices.

• [...]

• Mobian’s default graphical environment is Phosh, which is a Wayland-based shell for GNOME specifically designed for mobile devices. The Wayland compositor used under the hood is Phoc. Both packages were originally developed by Purism for its Librem 5, but their development has moved to GNOME.

• All essential software for a mobile device is pre-installed in Mobian. There’s GNOME Calls for phone or Voice over IP (VoIP) calls, Chatty for messaging (SMS messages or XMPP), the Geary email client, the GNOME Web and Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) web browsers, the minimalist file manager Portfolio, and more.

• The user can swipe up on the home bar at the bottom of the screen at any time to bring up an overview of the running applications in the top half of the screen and the available applications in the bottom half of the screen (see the image at right). A swipe up on a window in the overview closes the window. Similarly, swiping down from the top of the screen gives access to quick settings, including screen brightness, audio volume, WiFi, and Bluetooth. This area also shows notifications, for example when updates are available.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Phoenix Systems, a Swiss company, partnered with IBM and Canonical to create a hyper-secure OpenStack cloud focused on data sovereignty and data protection.

• Switzerland is a country where data must be hosted within its borders, and for many workloads, public clouds are not an option. Phoenix Systems stepped in to fill this niche by building a hyper-secure cloud within Switzerland that gives customers access to high performance and unsurpassed data protection from a single source.

• Following the release of upstream Kubernetes on 11th of April, Canonical Kubernetes 1.27 is generally available in the form of MicroK8s, with Charmed Kubernetes expected to follow shortly.

• We consistently follow the upstream release cadence to provide our users and customers with the latest improvements and fixes, together with security maintenance and enterprise support for Kubernetes on Ubuntu.  This blog is a quick overview of the latest development highlights available in Canonical Kubernetes 1.27.

• All upstream Kubernetes 1.27 features are available in Canonical Kubernetes for both its distributions, MicroK8s and Charmed Kubernetes. The following highlights are new in Canonical Kubernetes 1.27.

• Run an MLOps toolkit within a few clicks on a major public cloud Canonical is proud to announce that Charmed Kubeflow is now available as a software appliance on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace. With the appliance, users can now launch and manage their machine learning workloads hassle-free using Charmed Kubeflow on AWS.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Pine64 makes plenty of hardware geared towards fans of Linux and open-source hardware. Now the company is about to release a new ARM-based Linux tablet, as well as its first RISC-V tablet.

• The PineTab 2 (pictured above) was already announced last year, as a successor to the company’s original limited-run Linux tablet, and pre-orders for it start tomorrow. At the same time, the company will open orders for the PineTab V, which also runs Linux but with a RISC-V processor instead of ARM. On the outside, they look the same — Pine64 says the only thing differentiating the two is the chassis color. However, the PineTab 2 goes safe with an ARM chip (the RK3566, more specifically), while the PineTab V goes with a RISC-V CPU, a JH7110.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• There’s just something about trains—model trains in particular. At Everything Open 2023, Paul Antoine spoke about his experiences with the DCC-EX project, which has a variety of model-railroad automation hardware designs and software tools, all of which are freely available. There is a long legacy of sharing within the model railroading hobby, which continues today in the form of free and open-source software for it.

• He began with some “model railway ground rules”. They are not toys, but are generally detailed models and these days can have lots of microprocessors and software. “Not all model railroaders are Sheldon Cooper types, though some of us are.” Meanwhile, “you may not say ‘choo choo’ every time you see a train or hear mention of model railways”, which is a ground rule that he wishes he could convince his partners to follow.

• Discover how OpenZFS provides scalable storage architecture for petabytes of data with flexible storage configurations, RAID levels – disk addition/removal.

• ][...]

• OpenZFS is well-suited to address many of the modern storage challenges that organizations face today. It provides a highly scalable storage architecture that can support petabytes of data, with a wide range of storage configurations including RAID levels, and the ability to add or remove disks from storage pools. But before we go into the specifics of OpenZFS and its potential competitors, let’s take a step back and talk about what some of the modern storage needs are.

• Notion is an exceptional online platform for collaborative note-taking and knowledge sharing among individuals, teams, and organizations.

• Take your coding experience to the next level of ease by integrating GitHub into VS Code.

Programming/Development

• … right?

• This article describes an interesting overflow bug in the ELF hash function.

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

• In the late twenty-teens, I sold a story “Hero of Fire Life” to Pulphouse Magazine. They put it in their anthology “Snot-Nosed Aliens.” And now, they’re giving the anthology away. They’re not asking for an email address or anything, it’s just free. Don’t ask me why. I have no idea.

Science

• The footage is intense!

Education

• Medical workers will also take part in the planned protest march of the Latvian Education and Science Workers Union (LIZDA), which is scheduled to take place on April 24. Overall, at least 7,500 people could take part, head of LIZDA Inga Vanaga said on April 11.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Even better than your heart rate.

• Two-thirds of patients with oncology diseases have a risk of not receiving medical treatment services, the Chairman of the Board of the Latvian Hospital Association, Jevgēnijs Kalējs, said in an interview with Latvian Television on April 12.

• As the first buds and sprouts begin to appear outside, greenhouses are already very green. Mārupe and Getliņi Eko tomato and cucumber growers say the winter has been a success despite high energy prices, Latvian Television reported on April 12.

Proprietary

• I currently have more than 900 connections on LinkedIn. Realistically, I probably only know about 200 of them. On a weekly basis, my inbox is inundated with emails urging me to accept “invitations to connect” with strangers and to explore the profiles of our mutual connections — and I hate it.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium, ghostscript, glusterfs, netatalk, php-Smarty, and skopeo), Mageia (ghostscript, imgagmagick, ipmitool, openssl, sudo, thunderbird, tigervnc/x11-server, and vim), Oracle (curl, haproxy, and postgresql), Red Hat (curl, haproxy, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, and postgresql), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (firefox), and Ubuntu (dotnet6, dotnet7, firefox, json-smart, linux-gcp, linux-intel-iotg, and sudo).

• Cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered and reported to WebsitePlanet a non-password protected database that contained a large number of PDF documents.

• The PDF documents that were made public included invoices from both individuals and businesses who used an app to pay for products and services. The invoices contained names, email addresses and physical addresses, phone numbers, and more. In addition, the documents also included notes about what the payment was for, the total amount, due date, and some even contained tax information such as a tax id number.

• Upon further research, it was identified that the database belonged to NorthOne Bank, a financial technology company that is used by over 320,000 American businesses (based on information on their website). It is worth noting that NorthOne is not a full service bank. Banking services to NorthOne Bank are provided by The Bancorp Bank, which is also a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), a government agency that provides deposit insurance to financial institutions. NorthOne Bank has offices in New York, USA and Toronto, Canada and its services are available throughout North America.

• And they have added two medical entities to their leak site today — Medicalodges in Kansas and Petaluma Health Center in California. They provide no proof for either claim, and neither entity has any notice on their respective sites about any incident, so for now, these are unconfirmed claims.

• Data breach class action litigation continues to occupy center stage in the ongoing struggle to secure compensation and redress for legitimate victims of actionable cybersecurity shortcomings of data owners. The underlying scenarios in these cases encompass criminal hacking episodes, rogue employees, carelessness and unforeseen material gaps in cybersecurity and patch management. The one-size-fits-all approach to typical class actions, however, frequently places health care providers at the mercy of the plaintiff class action bar, and courts may be reluctant to dismiss or meaningfully curtail these cases in the early phases. Yet hope may be on the horizon. For example, in a new wave of cases, certain federally funded community health centers have used the Federal Tort Claims Act as an avenue for substituting the United States as the proper defendant in data breach cases.

• The Australian government is being pushed to ban the payment of cyber ransoms, usually demanded in cryptocurrency, following a local business suffering a mass data breach and subsequent ransom demand.

• Car thieves have found a sophisticated new way to snatch vehicles off the streets, and it’s called “headlight hacking.” The method involves accessing a car’s Controller Area Network (CAN) bus, a system that allows multiple devices within a vehicle build to communicate with each other in real time.

• Ian Tabor, an automotive cybersecurity researcher, first began tracking the trend last spring. Tabor woke up to find the front bumper missing from his Toyota RAV4 and the headlight wiring plug yanked out. A screwdriver mark indicated that the vandalism had been intentional. Three months later, Tabor found that someone had pulled the bumper away in the middle of the night to unplug the driver’s side headlight. Then, after three days, whoever had been playing the long game with Tabor’s car finished the deed: The RAV4 disappeared from the curb in front of Tabor’s home.

• Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announces that the Notifications of Enforcement Discretion issued under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act during the COVID-19 public health emergency will expire at 11:59 pm on May 11, 2023, due to the expiration of the COVID-19 public health emergency.

• “OCR exercised HIPAA enforcement discretion throughout the COVID-19 public health emergency to support the health care sector and the public in responding to this pandemic,” said Melanie Fontes Rainer, OCR Director. “OCR is continuing to support the use of telehealth after the public health emergency by providing a transition period for health care providers to make any changes to their operations that are needed to provide telehealth in a private and secure manner in compliance with the HIPAA Rules.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• Poor economy has driven workers to steal parts to sell outside

• Police say the lawyers broke the law by discussing their case on YouTube.

• “PUR Abo” on derStandard.at illegal according to Austrian DPA

• Next year, the Mexico City subway’s paper tickets will be a thing of the past: riders will have to use a rechargeable card for all trains.

Defence/Aggression

• The defence ministry’s decision will green light the development of various versions of Mitsubishi’s Type 12 missiles. This is the latest in a series of decisions that will see Japan nearly double its military spending over the next five years.

• The fallout from French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to China rippled across the seas on Tuesday as Chinese warships continued to operate near Taiwan, a day after military drills officially ended. Across the Atlantic, Macron’s remarks on Europe risking entanglement in “crises that aren’t ours” in relation to Taiwan sparked criticism even as the French president attempted to outline his vision for the future of European sovereignty on a visit to the Netherlands.

• After three decades of conflict that left 3,500 people dead, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement reached by the political protagonists in Northern Ireland found common ground for power-sharing between unionists, who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, and republicans, who call for a united and independent Ireland. Today, 25 years on, Northern Ireland has become a largely peaceful society. Our corrrespondent Hervé Amoric has been meeting Belfast families from both unionist and republican backgrounds whose lives were transformed by the Agreement.

• The signing of the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998, opened channels for cooperation between businesses on either side of the Irish border and the emergence of an “all-island economy”. A quarter of a century later, shared economic ties are an important source of collaboration between north and south.

• US President Joe Biden was set Wednesday to promote the potential of enduring peace as well as business investment on his trip to Northern Ireland.

• Did Ukrainians really set a Russian Orthodox church on fire? A video purporting to show just that has been circulating online since April 5, 2023. However, it turns out that this video was filmed in Russia more than ten years ago and shows an accidental fire.

• Serbia, the only country in Europe that has refused to sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, agreed to supply arms to Kyiv or has sent them already, according to a classified Pentagon document.

• Ukraine says its forces have repelled dozens of attacks by Russian forces in the east as intense fighting continued around the devastated city of Bakhmut.

• The US Supreme Court Tuesday denied to block the execution of an inmate in Florida. With no listed dissents, the court denied Louis Gaskin’s petition for a grant to stay his upcoming execution. Louis Gaskin, who is set to be executed Wednesday, was convicted of two counts of first degree murder in 1990.

• The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) Tuesday released a report detailing Americans’ experiences with gun violence. The report demonstrated a disproportionate effect of gun violence on people of color. The report surveyed 1,271 U.S. adults about their personal experience with guns.

• The UN Tuesday said they are forced to make an “appalling choice” on whether to continue operations in Afghanistan since the Taliban government decided to ban women from working for the UN.

• Wang Dongsheng was responsible for the destruction of a venerated Buddha statue.

• White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan spoke by phone with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Tuesday amid signs that the Saudis and Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen are making “remarkable progress” toward finding a permanent end to their nine-year conflict. The call came after a Saudi diplomat met with Houthi officials in Sanaa on Sunday for talks that were aimed at accelerating negotiations to end the war. A non-governmental official familiar with the ongoing negotiations said a deal could be reached within the next seven to 10 days. The official was not authorized to comment and requested anonymity.

• U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan spoke with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on April 11 and discussed Iran and steps aimed at ending the war in Yemen, the White House said.

• The United Nations High Commissionner for Human Rights says he is “horrified” by the strikes in central Myanmar that have killed as many as 100 people. Among the dead are school children who were performing dances.

• A witness and independent media say airstrikes by Myanmar’s military have killed as many as 100 people, including many children, who were attending a ceremony held by opponents of army rule. The military is increasingly using airstrikes to counter a widespread armed struggle against its rule, which began when it seized power from an elected government in 2021. More than 3,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed since then by security forces. A witness says a fighter jet dropped bombs directly into a crowd of people who were gathering Tuesday for the opening of a local office of the country’s opposition movement. He says a helicopter appeared about half an hour later and fired at the site, killing more people.

• After three days and many hours of talks, French President Emmanuel Macron emerged from Beijing and made a number of statements that, presumably to the alarm of the US, seemed to align several key foreign policy positions more closely with Beijing than with Washington.

• 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.

• Those unaware of Dan Ellsberg’s 2002 Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002) may think the leak of the Pentagon Papers was Dan’s first unauthorized disclosure. Not so. Arguably, his first such leak, in March 1968, was even more consequential.

• 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.

• The Biden administration is scrambling to assess and contain the fallout from a major leak of classified Pentagon documents that has rattled US officials, members of Congress and key allies in recent days.

• U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on April 11 that the United States will investigate the recent purported leak of classified documents until the source is found.

• If reports of an alleged leak of top-secret US intelligence documents are true, this would also undermine Lithuania’s security, says Asta Skaisgirytė, chief foreign policy adviser to the Lithuanian president.

• Senior defense officials and top diplomats of the two nations hold five-hour huddle in Washington.

• U.S. women’s basketball star Brittney Griner says she is working on a memoir in which she will share the story of her “unfathomable” experience of being arrested and incarcerated in Russia.

• The defense ministries of Armenia and Azerbaijan reported a total of seven deaths in renewed fighting at one of the sections of the restive border between the two South Caucasus nations.

• The Department of Defense (DoD) Tuesday announced that it opened a criminal investigation into the apparent leak of classified documents online in recent weeks. The leaked documents include classified Ukrainian war plans and sensitive materials regarding US allies.

• The first group of Lithuanian instructors on Tuesday left for Germany to train Ukrainian troops as part of the EU Military Assistance Mission in support of Ukraine (EUMAM Ukraine).

• The European Union has “strongly” condemned a decision by Russia to declare the activities of the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum as “undesirable.”

• Speaking at the Hague on Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of his vision for a new era of “European sovereignty” in which the Continent can choose its own partners and “shape its own destiny”. His address was briefly disrupted by protesters who attempted to shout him down.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• Incredible physics.

• Australia generated a quarter of its electricity from solar and wind in 2022, more than double the global average, a think tank says. Wind and solar are also accelerating worldwide, research released on Wednesday shows, with last year’s global rise in solar generation enough to have met the annual electricity demand of Australia.

• Police in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, have detained dozens of oil workers from the Central Asian nation’s southwestern town of Zhanaozen, who were demanding jobs after their company lost a tender in recent weeks that would have provided work.

Overpopulation

• U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed for “massive international support” for Somalia on Tuesday during his visit to the East African country, which is facing the worst drought in decades.

Finance

• A court has declared the troubled airline officially bankrupt and says its assets must be sold to pay off up to US $2.2 billion in debt.

• The International Monetary Fund has downgraded its forecast for the Lithuanian economy and expects the country’s GDP to decline by 0.3 percent this year.

• Asian equities inched lower on Wednesday ahead of a crucial US inflation report that will likely influence the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy path, with markets wagering another hike in interest rates at the central bank’s next meeting. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was 0.17 per cent lower in choppy trading.

• Treasurer Jim Chalmers says Australia is on track to avoid a recession despite the nation’s outlook being downgraded and a stalling international economy. The International Monetary Fund delivered a downbeat prediction for the global economy in its latest outlook, warning high inflation coupled with financial system turmoil could bring near-recession conditions.

• The International Monetary Fund has trimmed its 2023 global growth outlook slightly as higher interest rates cool activity but warns that a severe flare-up of financial system turmoil could slash output to near recessionary levels.

• Canada and Ukraine will update their free trade agreement, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on April 11 after meeting in Toronto with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who announced new sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and pledged fresh military support for Kyiv.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Taiwan’s ruling party nominated Vice President William Lai as its candidate for next year’s presidential elections on Wednesday, choosing a contender who has been more outspoken on Taiwanese independence than incumbent Tsai Ing-wen.

• Two former members of the defunct Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU) – once the city’s largest pro-democracy union coalition – have applied for police approval to organise a public demonstration on Labour Day.

• Twitter owes three former executives more than $1 million in legal fees, according to a lawsuit filed with the Delaware Court of Chancery.

• For the first time since it gained its independence in 1963, the government of Kenya has failed to pay its employees.

• An online campaign which called on people not to vote for candidates who failed to join an unofficial legislative primary poll would have violated the city’s election laws, a former politician has said at a high-profile national security trial involving 47 pro-democracy figures.

• Twitter is “roughly breaking even” because most of its advertisers have returned, CEO Elon Musk says. He made the comments in an interview with BBC broadcast live on Twitter Spaces that attracted more than three million listeners.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Western Balkan countries are vulnerable to Russian and Chinese disinformation, “a big chunk” of which comes out of Serbia, a U.S. diplomat whose job involves exposing and countering foreign propaganda said on April 11 in an interview with RFE/RL.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Nguyen Lan Thang was charged with spreading anti-state propaganda.

• Content produced by generative artificial intelligence services should embody “core socialist values,” China’s cyberspace regulator has said as part of its latest draft measures to regulate AI technology firms. In a list of proposed regulations unveiled on Tuesday, the Cyberspace Administration of China said the country supported the independent innovation of artificial intelligence.

• The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) Tuesday released a draft law detailing new regulations for providers of artificial intelligence (AI) products. The new law will require these providers to report to the Ministry of Cyberspace affairs and ensure their product undergoes a security assessment before it can be released to the public.

• Amid the flurry of Baidu and Alibaba announcing AI products, China has been quick to propose regulation over the burgeoning generative AI industry.

• In a recently published open letter, some of the most prominent figures in technology urged for a full fledged six-month pause on developing certain Artificial Intelligence technologies, including Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp, among many, many others.

• A national anthem blunder involving a pro-democracy protest song being erroneously played at an international sporting final has affected “all of Hong Kong’s athletes,” the chair of the city’s ice hockey body has said.

• Vietnamese journalist and activist Nguyen Lan Thang Wednesday goes to trial on charges of “conducting anti-state propaganda,” after being arrested July 5, 2022 for his reporting on protests and human rights violations.

• Jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny says he has been moved back into “extremely hellish” solitary confinement just three days after finishing his latest 15-day sentence in the punishment cell.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Hong Kong journalists who have emigrated face a number of difficulties when trying to start their careers in media overseas, according to a report published by an overseas journalists’ body.

• The family of Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter Evan Gershkovich say they are encouraged that the State Department formally announced that he is being “wrongfully detained” and say they appreciated a call from U.S. President Joe Biden, who they said assured them the United States is doing everything it can to win his release.

Civil Rights/Policing

• This blog reflects on the end of the design phase of the decolonising digital rights in Europe process. It discuss our learnings and the next steps of the process as we begin to build and disseminate the programme.

• Rights activists say the move continues a bid to force ‘national unity’ on minority groups and erase their culture.

• Nefise Oghuz demands the Chinese government release him.

• Human Rights Watch (HRW) Tuesday reported that Pakistani authorities are evicting thousands of farmers to make way for an infrastructure project near the city of Lahore.  The organization also called on Pakistan to revise its land acquisition laws to ensure that individuals only have their land expropriated for legitimate purposes and are compensated fairly.

• A Hong Kong hospitality student has been handed a 21-day jail term with the sentenced suspended for 12 months after she admitted to contempt of court. Yip Sin-man, a student of hotel and catering management, appeared at the High Court in front of Judge Russell Coleman on Wednesday.

• Several opposition activists were arrested and convicted at the end of February, once again sparking a debate on free speech and freedom of assembly in the country. A few months ahead of municipal and regional elections this autumn, opposition groups and civil society actors are denouncing intimidation attempts and attacks on freedom of expression.

Monopolies

• Coinciding with the American Bar Association’s 71st Antitrust Spring Meeting, on March 29 the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA)…

• The consumer watchdog wants tougher merger laws to stop uncompetitive mergers that ultimately leave dominant firms in a position to jack up their prices. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb has taken up the mantle of her predecessor Rod Sims, who has long advocated for reforms to merger laws to encourage competition.

Patents

• IPCom has today announced the signing of a licence agreement with technology company Lenovo, which resolves patent litigation for the Bosch and Hitachi patents. However, the company did not disclose exact details of the settlement and negotiations.

• Case numbers at the court of the Netherlands’ main patent jurisdiction of The Hague are rising. In total, plaintiffs filed 149 new patent cases at the District Court of The Hague in 2022. This is in contrast to the previous year, where the court had received only 116 new cases.

• At the UK High Court, presiding judge Richard Meade has found two NuCana patents invalid for added matter, and for a lack of industrial applicability and plausibility. EP (UK) 2 955 190 B1 and EP (UK) 3 904 365 B1 are from the same family and are very similar….

• A decade ago, the US Supreme Court issued a pair of decisions that upended substantial aspects of patent practice. Mayo Collaborative Servs. v. Prometheus Labs., Inc., 566 U.S. 66 (2012); and Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank Int’l, 573 U.S. 208 (2014).  These cases broadened scope of the “abstract idea” and “law of nature” exclusions in ways that largely overlap with other patent law doctrines, such as obviousness, indefiniteness, and even enablement.  But, unlike those doctrines, subject-matter eligibility jurisprudence is more of free-wheeling approach that typically does not require evidence.  In court, these cases are often decided at pleading-stage, before any evidence is introduced or considered.

Copyrights

• The government’s online harms bill – likely rebranded as an online safety bill – is expected to be tabled by Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez in the coming weeks. The bill, which reports suggest will even include age verification requirements that raise significant privacy and expression concerns, is expected to emerge as the most controversial of the government’s three-part Internet regulation plan that also includes

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I’ve been running for a long time. I did cross-country as a kid (terrible), switched to sprinting (better, but still lost out to the more naturally athletic kids), and then got back into longer distances toward the end of university. When I started university I was just over 140 lbs at 5’10″. The blissful, ravenous metabolism of the teenage years. I ate and ate and ate. My dad would give me shit for the amount of milk I drank (sometimes almost 2L/day). And still if I laid on my back and pulled up my shirt, you could see my ribs, run your finger along my hip bone.

• I had thought breakup must be coming very soon, but instead we got a few weeks of cold, overcast weather. Today was warmer but with some fluffy snowfall. I recently received a tripod I had ordered, so I decided to try it out today, to get a few landscape photos. Near my work, there is a spot where there are layers of spruce, and then leafless trees, and then some taller spruce, which makes for nice photos.

• Ok, i admit: I made a mistake. I visited reddit again.

• After this infamous beheading video (don’t look it up, neither the threads that spawned as a reaction to it…) appeared on Telegram the sheer bloodlust i witnessed on reddit is simply unbelievable. Even if you consider that most of the posters are simply keyboard warriors or edgy teenagers, there is something in the air that reminds me of the time after 9/11. People are screaming for blood and they are fucking loud… and THAT is terrifying.

• Sometimes i have the feeling that immediately after i praise something it shows its backside: After my last positive post about Fedora Silverblue i am now running out of space on my little Acer… granted, 32 GB HD space is not really spacious and Flatpak IS requiring more space than traditional packages… but nevertheless, its a bit frustrating.

• Had a one day visit at a chemicals plant today. Tomorrow I fly from here to Salt Lake City. The next day is the first of three at a plant near Vernal, UT. When I get off from work on Saturday I need to drive home (around 2 hour drive). Then the next day I wake up at 0300 and fly to Detroit, MI for robot class.

• Waiting on my *delayed* (of course) flight to Salt Lake City. There I will rent another car and drive to Vernal for an action packed three days at a plant followed by a frantic drive home to fly the next morning. Never a dull moment.

• When I turned 18 there was a noticeable difference in how my life operated. No longer was I required to get parental signatures or have to have them present for everything. It certainly felt a little weird going to an appointment alone for the first time, but it’s become to feel more normal. Still I’ll worry in the moment that I won’t have a certain piece of documentation that I’d need to get from them, but so far that hasn’t come up. In the moment I truly felt adult, like there was a clear distinction from the time before my 18Th birthday and the time after. Now when I look back at that time I find it a little silly, I see how I was still very much a kid, just now with the abilities of an adult. I wasn’t paying bills, hell I didn’t have a job for another 6 months, but in the moment it just felt so impactful. Even then at 18, I was conscious of the fact that I was in fact NOT a real adult, but starting on the path.

Technical

• As my previous post says, the server that powers hd.206267.xyz is now open source. Yes, that wasn’t an April Fool’s Day joke: it’s a real social network thingy and not static content dumped from the fediverse to fool the first visitors.

• This a brief continuation of my previous post about internet over Coaxial.

• Someone posted recently saying that they’d heard a rumor that there wasn’t enough technical content in Gemini. Here’s another contribution to that sphere..

• I am definitely a minimalist when it comes to computing, and a bit of a “power user” (as much as I hate that designation, I guess it fits), but I’ve been hesitant to jump on the tiling WM train despite recognizing the benefits of that workflow. I think the reason has mostly been that I just couldn’t be bothered to learn a bunch of new keyboard shortcuts. But that’s frankly not much of an excuse since Sway is ultimately configurable however you like it.

Internet/Gemini

• I’m sure a lot of the capsules here have started out as totally hand written and managed, while slowly adding more automation as time goes by. My own capsule falls into that category as well. Currently I’ve got it down to two commands (plus the actual writing).

• Hey there. I am still here. I think I was right about gopher filling some therapeutic function for me: Now that I am in therapy I don’t feel the pressure build for expressing something in text as much. In some ways it is a shame, as I often found some interesting bits in what I ended up writing, but on the other hand, I express in a different realm now and see it there.

• I have been drawing a book of my dreams. The pressure is relieved through that activity and through the therapy sessions. There are different sort of weird things that manifest through these ways.

• 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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