● 04.14.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 14/04/2023: More Twitter Losses and H-1B Exploitation

Posted in News Roundup at 3:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Fresh from giving us affordable entry to the exciting world of RISC-V with their new single-board computers, Pine64 has announced the PineTab-V, a tablet powered by the FOSS-friendly RISC-V architecture.

• The PineTab-V was announced on April 1 in a post on the Pine64 blog that featured a lot of wordplay and unicorn references (!). Thus some folks (myself included) assumed the whole thing was an April fools’ prank.

• But it’s not.

• The PineTab-V is real and it’s available to order right now.

Server

• Virtualization used to be a big deal. For a while, it was the primary way to run services in a “sandbox” environment. IT departments used virtual machines by the hundreds. And then containers happened, doing much of what a virtual machine could do with a fraction of the resources required. While container technology made virtual machines seem cumbersome, it didn’t make them entirely redundant. In fact, virtualization is as useful today as ever, and here are five reasons why.

• While container technology made virtual machines seem cumbersome, it didn’t make them entirely redundant. In fact, virtualization is as useful today as ever. Whether you’re…

Instructionals/Technical

• The ncdu command provides a very convenient way to review your files and the disk space you’re using on your Linux system, but the file sizes may appear a little strange at first.

• The ncdu command provides a fast and very easy-to-use way to see how you are using disk space on your Linux system. It allows you to navigate through your directories and files and review what file content is using up the most disk space.

• Wireless hotspots allow you to share your Wi-Fi connection with others without revealing your password. Here’s how to create a Wi-Fi hotspot on Linux.

• Want to get started with 2D designing and raster drawing on Linux? Install Krita, a cross-platform and open-source drawing software for Linux.

• Back in 2011, I bought an HP Proliant Microserver G6 for £250. Last week I upgraded to… A Proliant G8 for £270. Nice! Hurrah for Moore’s Law!

• Of course, setting it up is a bit of a mare. So here’s a tangled mess of notes to hopefully remind me what to do…

• The email was a ‘X has shared a file with you’ email with a link to a page on what claimed to be a travel company’s Sharepoint aka OneNote site (under ‘<…>-my.sharepoint.com’, which you probably aren’t going to be able to block). Based on the URL, this may have been a page created by and for a particular user, instead of a corporate page, meaning that just this user had their Sharepoint access compromised. This page said: [...]

• Probably everyone is familiar with a regular VPN. The traditional use case is to connect to a corporate or home network from a remote location, and access services as if you were there.

• But these days, the notion of “corporate network” and “home network” are less based around physical location. For instance, a company may have no particular office at all, may have a number of offices plus a number of people working remotely, and so forth. A home network might have, say, a PVR and file server, while highly portable devices such as laptops, tablets, and phones may want to talk to each other regardless of location. For instance, a family member might be traveling with a laptop, another at a coffee shop, and those two devices might want to communicate, in addition to talking to the devices at home.

Games

• A few weeks ago I reached a point on the sidescrolling flight simulator where I can now realistically call it “a game”, even if it’s not as polished as I would have liked it to be. For more information as well as a link to play it, go to https://xkqr.org/flightle

• After waiting a while to see if Valve issued any corrections, it seems that the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey for March 2023 is staying as it is, with a huge surge of Simplified Chinese. The last time we saw such a thing, it was an error in the Steam Survey, as it was over-counting cyber cafe customers. This time, maybe not then.

• Blending features from city builders and dungeon crawling roguelikes, Landnama sounds pretty unusual, especially with the non-violent theme too.

• I am aiming at weaning myself off Windows by 2025. This is when Windows 10 goes EOL, and I’m not in the mood to use Windows 11, fight ads, use an online account, or any of that nonsense. So Linux is vital for this future plan, but more importantly, I need to be able to play all of my sweet games there! Among the more critical titles is ArmA 3, so as soon as I had my new Slimbook Titan laptop configured, I set about testing.

• The survival game Grounded from Obsidian Entertainment and Xbox Game Studios is gearing up to launch version 1.2.0 that’s now available to test. With it comes Steam Deck support.

• Update 13/04/23, 17:11 UTC: the developer involved is playing it down noting it didn’t go anywhere and it’s not a recent thing…

• GE-Proton version 7-55 was released a few days ago, and it’s an essential update for those of you preferring it to the official Valve Proton on Steam Deck and Linux desktop.

• LIVE A LIVE originally released in the 90s for the Super Famicom, and now it’s being revived with the same style as OCTOPATH TRAVELER and it’s already Steam Deck Verified.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The renowned international free software community KDE is developing a new ePub reader application, Arianna. The app is built on top of Qt and Kirigami, providing a sleek and modern user interface.

• Arianna serves as both an ePub viewer and a library management app. The application utilizes Baloo, KDE’s file indexing and search framework, to find and categorize existing ePub files on the user’s device.

• Here are all the details.

• What happened at the very early start of Plasma – if I understood it correctly, I wasn’t there – was the idea that Plasma had to be flexible to adapt to different form factors and devices. Even before Plasma Mobile there was a project called Plasma Active, with a very similar goal. So everything in Plasma was thought not as a Desktop Enviroment, but as a way of doing shells for different devices.

• Or, as Aleix Pol said it during his above-mentioned Akademy talk, “Plasma is a UX for a number of devices, designed by us”.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• While Linux might not be the favored operating system for casual users, it’s the go-to choice for most developers and programmers. Linux is a more practical OS explicitly designed with programming and developers in mind.

• There are over 600 Linux distros, so even experienced users may seldom struggle to find their current project’s ideal flavor. Linux distributions can vary hugely from one another, even though they are based on the same source.

• If you want to learn more about programming-focused Linux distros, here’s a list of the 10 best Linux distros for developers.

BSD

• [...] FreeBSD has a longer track record on OpenPOWER and in my cursory estimates is the most commonly installed BSD on modern Power ISA. [...]

Red Hat / IBM

• As IT environments become more complex, especially as cloud-native technologies, cloud services and traditional hardware all interact to meet evolving business demands, automation remains a key organizational strategy. Automation helps manage and maintain operations at a greater scale, speed and agility. Greater IT complexity also dovetails with requirements for enhanced cybersecurity postures, with threats and vulnerabilities changing on a near daily basis. Automation and IT security are not mutually exclusive, but a guidebook to effective configurations that help keep operations moving smoothly without compromising IT security needs.

• For nearly two decades, Red Hat has been helping both public and private entities adapt to changing IT security requirements and concerns. Red Hat achieves a wide range of cybersecurity validations for our products in global markets and by providing actionable information for organizations to improve their system security footprint.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has a storied history, standing at the intersection of our customers, communities and partners, helping each achieve their goals while answering key end user needs, from enterprise-grade development practices and system security enhancements to a stronger software supply chain and end-to-end support backed by Red Hat’s unique expertise..

• In 2021 we announced no-cost RHEL options for developers, in certain use cases, which include our proactive analytic capability, Red Hat Insights. Since then, we have listened to and learned from individuals and organizations and have evolved our offerings to meet a broader set of needs.

• Adam Clater, chief architect at Red Hat, explores how cloud services are helping agencies retire their legacy IT systems. “Legacy IT systems can be difficult because they’re deeply entrenched in the infrastructure and hard to move out,” he says; however, he explains how some agencies are taking advantage of cloud FinOps to drive financial accountability and accelerate business value.

• One of the fascinating things I keep encountering in my journey to learn everything I can about the mainframe world is how my expertise in Linux distributed systems and open source tooling carries over into this realm. I recently discovered zigi, an independently developed open source (GPLv3+) Git interface for IBM z/OS ISPF (Interactive System Productivity Facility).

• I had been aware of zigi for some time, but it wasn’t until I joined a recent z/OS Open Tools guild call that I could soak in the demo that zigi contributor Lionel B. Dyck gave. That led me to a call with zigi founder Henri Kuiper, who explained that zigi was an answer to a specific pain point of his. That sounds familiar! I could definitely appreciate the story of an open source project born from frustration.

• I need to explain ISPF for you to have a good understanding of what zigi provides.

• IBM’s new rack mount Z16 mainframe gives edge locations the ability to process workloads locally, taking the burden off systems running workloads in larger data centers.

• The clock is ticking for CentOS 7 Linux. While it will get maintenance fixes through June 2024, some sysadmin vendors, such as cPanel, are getting ready to drop support for it.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Like any old, grizzled Unix/Linux administrator, I used to do everything with shell scripts. But, when you’re dealing with multiple servers or workstations, you need more. That’s where programs such as Red Hat Satellite and Canonical Landscape come in. Now, Landscape 23.03, offers broader CPU architecture compatibility and improved Ubuntu Linux management and monitoring capabilities.

• Landscape 23.03 manages all Ubuntu versions and derivatives from Ubuntu 16.04 Long Term Support (LTS) onwards, as well as Debian Bullseye. The latest version simplifies the launch and configuration of Landscape, with out-of-the-box support now included in Ubuntu Pro, Canonical’s comprehensive security and compliance subscription.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Last year I floated the idea of a custom PCB to ‘plug a computer into a graphics card’ to Mirek. He didn’t immediately say ‘no’, so I started pursuing the idea, coming up with this quite basic post-it note illustration: [...]

• Miraculously, through a series of emails, we refined that concept into a working PCB design. Mirek had it printed by JLCPCB, soldered on a bunch of SMD components, and shipped the PCBs (along with some metal brackets he had his friend Adam fabricate) by February.

• Because this pans and tilts, it needs two motors. Those are stepper motors controlled by an Arduino Nano Every board through two TMC2208 stepper motor driver modules. A joystick on the remote lets the user pan or tilt, while an LCD provides information. The remote connects to the main unit via an Ethernet cable. The enclosures and most of the mechanical parts are 3D-printable, but this project does require some hardware like pulleys, bearings, and aluminum tube.

• So I’ve been searching for a holy grail: combination of smart (or smartified) light switches on the walls and smart light bulbs (with colors and dimming) that works with automations when Home Assistant is online and also just works directly to power lights on and off when Home Assistant is offline.

• And I think I have found a solution that will be acceptable for me. The solution involves taking a normal dumb light installation, putting in smart light bulbs (any that Home Assistant can manage) and then wiring in a Shelly next to an existing dumb wall switch. For design consistency sake it would be good if the wall switch is of impulse type (so only connecting the connectors when the button is being pressed, like a doorbell button), but the setup should also work for normal toggle wall switches with minimal changes. Some settings on the Shelly and a custom Shelly script will take care of offline functionality. Note: Gen1 Shelly devices do not have scripting capabilities, you need a Gen2 device to do this, like the linked Shelly Plus.

• Tobias Mann’s Los Alamos Taps Seagate To Put Compute On Spinning Rust describes progress in the concept of computational storage. I first discussed this in my 2010 JCDL keynote, based on 2009′s FAWN, the Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes by David Anderson et al from Carnegie-Mellon. Their work started from the observation that moving data from storage to memory for processing by a CPU takes time and energy, and the faster you do it the more energy it takes. So the less of it you do, the better. Below the fold I start from FAWN and end up with the work under way at Los Alamos.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• I have a headless server – one without a GUI – which I use as a NextCloud client. My laptop, phone, tablet, and server all sync with a cloud-based NextCloud instance.

• Recently I wrote about learning about the extra hazards of mutual TLS in web server programs, where the extra hazard is that your Apache or other web server program must now parse TLS X.509 certificates and understand ASN.1 encoding and so on, which is a lot of code that it probably doesn’t currently run. When writing that entry, it occurred to me to wonder if (Open)SSH had the same problem, since OpenSSH supports user authentication through signed certificates (instead of personal keypairs). It turns out that the answer is no.

• This tutorial will focus on customizing the Django Admin site. You will create a simple SocialApp to work with. The SocialApp app will have two models, the Author model, and the Post model. The Author model will have a first and last name field, as well as an image field. The Post model will include the author, the content posted, and the date it was created.

Events

• Last offline opensuse Asia Summit is 2019 held at Information Technology Department, Faculty of Engineering, Udayana University, Bali, Indonesia, 3 years ago.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• Here at Mozilla, we are the first to admit the internet isn’t perfect, but we are also quick to point out that the internet is pretty darn magical. The internet opens up doors and opportunities, allows for people to connect with others, and lets everyone find where they belong — their corners of the internet. We all have an internet story worth sharing. In My Corner Of The Internet, we talk with people about the online spaces they can’t get enough of, what we should save in Pocket to read later, and what sites and forums shaped them.

Education

• Trey Hunner’s guide on going to your first PyCon is from 2018, and has a lot of good advice! Many items in it are more helpful if this will also be your first time going to an industry conference at all. So here’s some PyCon US-specific and 2023-specific stuff that assumes you have other cons to compare it to: [...]

• Our approach to describing AI and machine learning in AI education resources for young people.

Programming/Development

• Why create plots in R and not Excel? To a programmer this may seem like a very obvious question, but it is still a common question asked by Excel users — If you have a data set, could you select it, hit a couple of buttons and generate plots? This is one of the trickiest questions to answer, especially if you have limited Excel experience as many new age data scientists do. Hopefully, some of the reasons below will encourage you to make the switch from Excel to R.

• Everyone seems to be running some version of VSCode as their main editor these days. But not me. I find VSCode to be too bloated for my needs – not to mention being built on top of electron instead of native code. I prefer running programs that don’t try to devour all of my machine’s available memory or spike my CPU.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• I work on a command-line shell called Nushell (Nu for short) with some internet friends, and I think it’s pretty cool. To convince you that it’s cool (or at least worth a try), here’s a whirlwind tour.

Leftovers

Science

• We designed the rOpenSci Champions Program with a mentorship aspect. Mentoring plays a significant role in the growth and development of both mentors and mentees alike. In our program, each Champion has a mentor who accompanies them during their training and development of their project.

• In this series of blog posts, we introduce you to the ten teams of this first cohort and what they will be working on in the program.

• First, meet Paola Corrales from Argentina and Adam Sparks from Australia!

• To create a visualization of source code in the form of a diagram, a domain-specific language (DSL) is required to describe the visualization. A DSL is a programming language designed to solve problems in a specific domain or context. In this case, a DSL would be used to describe the structure and layout of the visualization of the source code.

• Currently, there is no existing DSL that can be used to describe the visualization of source code. Therefore, as part of the master’s thesis, the focus will be on creating a context-free grammar (CFG) capable of generating the DSL required for the visualization. The CFG will define the syntax and structure of the language, including the rules and patterns used to create the visual representation of the code.

• Once the CFG is created, the DSL can be generated and used to create the visualization of the source code in the form of a diagram. This visualization will enable users to reason about their code in a high-level manner, helping to identify and understand complex code structures and relationships.

Education

• Brandon Johnson’s victory in the Chicago mayoral race last week is a major victory for the education justice movement, the 21st-century Black freedom movement, and the left in general. Johnson is a former teacher and Chicago Teacher’s Union (CTU) leader, a protégé of a legendary union president, the late Karen Lewis. One of 10 children from a Black working-class family that struggled to make ends meet, Johnson comes out of social movements more than from the Democratic Party. And he brought movement organizing, movement demands, and trusted movement allies into his mayoral race with him.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• President Biden has declared an end to the COVID-19 national emergency, but people living with long COVID say the pandemic is far from over. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found nearly one in five people infected with COVID-19 go on to experience symptoms of long COVID. We speak to science writer Ryan Prior about the movement to expand research and resources for those with long COVID, and his own experience living with the chronic illness. Prior is the author of The Long Haul and writes the “Patient Revolution” for Psychology Today.

Proprietary

• A lot of tech and outsourcing companies are exploiting the highly-skilled H-1B visa program by hiring individuals who were laid off by bigger giants like Meta, Amazon, Microsoft etc.

• 13 of the top 30 H-1B visa employers were outsourcing firms that underpay migrant workers and offshore US jobs to countries where labor costs are much lower. “Most employers hire H-1B workers because they can be underpaid and are de facto indentured to the employer,” the EPI research said.

• The chatting app Discord, which is one of the most popular ways gamers communicate online, finds itself at the center of an investigation into the leak of classified documents about the war in Ukraine.

• The investigation is unfolding as Discord makes an ambitious push to recruit more users and expand the way they use the versatile app.

• Discord said it is cooperating with law enforcement in the investigation of the leak, which is believed to have started on the site. A Massachusetts Air National Guard member reportedly posted on Discord for years about guns, games, favorite memes and, according to some who chatted with him, closely guarded U.S. secrets.

• The Public Broadcasting Service has followed National Public Radio in quitting Twitter after the social media network labeled both organizations as government-backed media.

• “PBS stopped tweeting from our account when we learned of the change and we have no plans to resume at this time,” PBS spokesman Jason Phelps said in an email. “We are continuing to monitor the ever-changing situation closely.”

• Though it’s right to impugn the whims of Elon Musk, the outrage against Twitter’s labeling policy is highly selective.

• It’s also because I had a couple days ago a hard time to reread my words on this article I published last year: “How proprietary social-medias are shaping the future of Pepper&Carrot”. I write on this blog-post my efforts to adapt and comply to this system, trying to get my piece of the cake by guessing the secrets rules of an algorythm that deboost or boost contents. Changing my format, my art style, anything to get the grace of a bit of attention of an algorythm…

• It’s never have been in my nature to conform into such a submissive position and it hurts me to read it. It feels like I was ask to sit up and beg to get my sugar, and I was in the process. I rebelled stronger against situations for fewer reasons in the past. That’s why I’m not painting with proprietary software, that’s why I’m not on proprietary operating system, that’s why I don’t sign usual contract with my publishers, that’s why I’m using the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license… etc…

Security

• What’s old is new again as multiple security updates from the past made a comeback this month to push the total number of vulnerabilities addressed to 102.

• Red teams and blue teams use password cracking to gain access to systems and to detect weak user passwords or test defenses during red team-blue team exercises.

• Password crackers can be online or offline. Online password crackers, such as Hydra, are used when brute-forcing online network protocols and HTML forms. Situations where online brute forcing might be impractical include a remote system that limits the rate of sign-in attempts or a system that locks users out indefinitely after a predefined number of invalid login attempts.

• Application-level gateways, also known as proxy firewalls, are a type of network security solution that takes action on behalf of the apps and programs they’re set to monitor in a network. They’re primarily responsible for filtering messages and exchanging data flow at the application layer.

Privacy/Surveillance

Defence/Aggression

• The Defence Department has outdone itself with the AUKUS submarine project. In Paul Keating’s words, “it’s the worst deal in all history”. That’s not just because of the staggering $386 billion price tag, but because of the form the program is to take. Former submariner Rex Patrick looks at the most astonishingly irrational part of the announcement.

• Our senior Defence bureaucrats, both uniformed and civilian, have a remarkable but unexplainable knack when it comes to acquiring new equipment. When simplicity confronts them, they always find some way to make it complex. In the face of something manageable, they’ll always find a way to make it unmanageable. SNAFU is the order of the day.

• Britain has three times more special ops soldiers in Ukraine than any other NATO ally, leaked Pentagon papers indicate.

• The New York Times routinely tells bigger lies than the clumsy nonsense it published about weapons in Iraq. Here’s an example. This package of lies is called “Liberals Have a Blind Spot on Defense” but mentions nothing related to defense.

• Once again . . . once again . . . once again . . .

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• While the window for avoiding the most catastrophic consequences of climate change narrows, the global banking sector continues to funnel huge sums each year into fossil fuels, finds a new report. Last year alone, the 60 largest banks financed fossil fuels to the tune of $673 billion.

• That’s according to a new analysis released today by Rainforest Action Network and partner organizations. The latest Banking on Climate Chaos report, which annually examines global fossil fuel financing from major commercial and investor banks, reveals the extent to which banks are backing various categories of fossil fuels and their expansion.

• In October 1989, Shell researchers wrote a confidential report warning that climate-fuelled migration could swamp borders in the United States, Soviet Union, Europe, and Australia. “Conflict would abound,” the document said. “Civilisation could prove a fragile thing.”

• Few recent books on the climate movement have so flustered audiences like Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Since its publication in 2021, the left commentariat has spilled much ink weighing the potential benefits and costs of Malm’s call to sabotage fossil-fuel infrastructure because—to echo the IPCC’s bleak annual reports on climate change—we’re running out of time. But in other corners of opinion, a familiar blend of fascination and disdain emerged. “The problem with violence,” The New York Times noted in its initial review, “is that ultimately it’s impossible to control.” David Remnick of The New Yorker fretted that the property damage might “backfire and damage the movement.” Later, on her SiriusXM talk show, Megyn Kelly smirked at the book’s title and said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”1

• Clean Creatives, the campaign for public relations and advertising professionals who want to stop fueling the climate crisis, on Thursday announced a major milestone: 500 agencies worldwide have “committed to refusing work with fossil fuel polluters.”

Overpopulation

• Wealthy residents use 12 times more water then those with lower incomes, study found

• More than 80 metropolitan areas around the world have faced severe shortages in the last two decades, a figure that’s only projected to rise, impacting more than one billion people in the next few decades.

Finance

• The International Monetary Fund insists that so-called “social spending floors” enacted as part of its loan programs for poor and middle-income countries help protect critical social services from the kinds of austerity that the powerful institution has historically imposed on borrowers.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• We discuss the debate over gun control, as well as Republican attacks on democracy, with author and academic Carol Anderson, who says U.S. gun culture has always been connected to “the inherent, fundamental fear of Black people.” She notes the expulsion of two Black Democratic state lawmakers in Tennessee for leading a gun control protest at the Capitol highlights how gerrymandered state governments uphold white supremacy in the face of “youth that are pushing forward for a different vision of America.” Anderson is professor of African American studies at Emory University and author of The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. She also comments on the right-wing assault on abortion rights and education.

• As the world watched, the Shelby County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously Wednesday to reappoint Justin Pearson to the Tennessee House of Representatives, less than a week after the Republican-led House voted to expel him and fellow state Representative Justin Jones from the body for joining peaceful protests against gun violence after the school massacre in Nashville. Pearson and Jones were the two youngest Black lawmakers in the Tennessee House. The Nashville Metropolitan Council unanimously voted Monday to restore Jones to office, and he was sworn in Tuesday. Pearson is being sworn back in today. We feature their remarks at the vote and rally Wednesday in Memphis.

• Ever since Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted Donald Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, Trump has responded by attacking Bragg as well as the district attorney’s wife; Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over the case; and the Biden administration, all while exhorting his supporters—some of whom attempted to violently overthrow the government—to rally to his defense again.

• Over the past few years, the hard-right majority on the Supreme Court has begun to emerge as a mounting threat to public health. As I wrote last June, the court’s recent decisions on abortion and gun rights imperiled American lives. Everyone can clearly see how far the court is from the “balls and strikes” fantasy articulated by Chief Justice John Roberts; with apologies to Von Clausewitz, the law in these cases was just politics by other means.

• Hours before Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas cast a definitional vote in the case that decided the 2000 president election in favor of Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush, a New York Times report revealed that the justice’s wife was “working at a conservative research group gathering résumés for appointments in a possible Bush administration.”

• The Supreme Court keeps tripping over its own robes. Last week, ProPublica revealed that a conservative megadonor has been secretly subsidizing the lifestyle of Justice Clarence Thomas. In a rare public statement, the justice claims he asked others on the Court and in the judiciary, who assured him he need not disclose such beneficence.

• After two fellow Democratic lawmakers urged her to resign, Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Wednesday that she has asked Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to move to temporarily replace her on the chamber’s judiciary committee, alluding to the impact her absence has had on the panel’s ability to advance President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees.

• At 85 years of age, having been a civil rights lawyer virtually all my professional life, at times my mind wanders toward despair.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Sometime in the mid–Russiagate years, when it became clear that America was on a swoon back into the collective neuroses of the 1950s, I began to think we would have to wait for future historians to retrieve the truth buried alive in the cesspit of lies and cynical […]

Censorship/Free Speech

• The risks associated with the government’s online harms (or online safety) plans is not limited to Canadian Heritage’s credibility gap, which as I’ve recounted has included omitting key information in its public reports on consultations and shocking efforts to exclude contrary voices altogether. A new report, based on the government’s response to a Parliamentary Written Question from Conservative MP Dean Allison (Sessional Paper No. 8555-441-1219) raises new concerns about efforts to censor social media. The written question asked the government for “requests made by the government to social media companies to take down, edit, ban or change in any other way social media content, posts or accounts since January 1, 2020.”

• The resulting report is stunning as government departments have in fact pressured the social media companies to remove news links and a range of lawful content including tweets that are said to contain “offensive language” or an “offensive reply.” The use of government power to censor social media posts or news links is exceptionally dangerous and crystallizes the fears of regulatory powers without the necessary due process and oversight that could lead to censorship of lawful content online.

• Exclusive Twitter Files emails and publicly available documents show Mehdi Hasan’s accusation is false.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• I first learned how to be a radical, muckraking truth-teller as an intern at The Nation more years ago than I want to admit. Publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel and former Executive Editor Richard Kim nurtured my passion to become the journalist I am today, and I’ll always be grateful.

• I was standing on the street in the rain, speaking to a few dozen people, without a sound system. Remarkably this is captured brilliantly just on an inexpensive phone camera, and my words have already reached several thousand.

• Elected politicians in Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and the United Kingdom signed on to letters to United States Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding that the Justice Department drop the charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. A letter of opposition signed by four members of the U.S. House of Representatives, including […]

Civil Rights/Policing

• I think negotiators understand that if we give in to the impulse and best intentions to do everything possible, but fail to respect the legal limits imposed by fundamental rights, detection provisions will be struck down by the Court of Justice altogether, and we’ll be left with nothing, and fail to achieve anything to better protect children and victims. This disaster must be avoided at all cost. No one is helping children with a regulation that will inevitably fail before the European Court of Justice.

• What we really need instead of untargeted chat control and identification obligations for age verification is obliging law enforcement agencies to have known exploitation material removed from the internet, as well as Europe-wide standards for effective prevention measures, victim support and counselling, and for effective criminal investigations.”

• Camacho is known as a journalist and filmmaker critical of the police and has already uncovered several police scandals. His work is based, among other things, on portrait photos obtained from previous applications under the Public Records Act.

• Two Trump appointees on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision late Wednesday allowing parts of a Texas judge’s widely denounced abortion pill ruling to take effect, a move that will restrict access to mifepristone as the case proceeds.

Monopolies

• In the past couple of months, Americans have suffered disastrous consequences from deregulation initiated during the Trump administration: in transit, the East Palestine derailment threatening the lives and livelihoods of thousands; in banking, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank that are still roiling financial markets.

Trademarks

• The Board upheld a refusal to register the mark IMAGINE for educational services in the nature of early childhood instruction, finding confusion likely with the registered mark IMAGINE SCHOOLS for educational services at the K-12 grade levels. (SCHOOLS disclaimed). In an effort to weaken the cited mark, applicant submitted 13 third-party registrations for marks containing the word IMAGINE (or at least IMAGIN) for educational services, but the Board pooh-poohed them. In re Pa+hfinder, LLC, Application Serial No. 90338230 (April 11, 2023) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Elizabeth A. Dunn).

Copyrights

• Now an Italian court has confirmed a previous ruling that Cloudflare must block certain online sites accused of making available unauthorised copies of material. That’s unfortunate, since taken with the German court rulings it is likely to encourage the copyright industry to widen its attack on the Internet’s plumbing, regardless of the wider harm this is likely to cause.

• The Copyright Claims Board has dismissed a complaint filed by popular reading app AnyStories against Cloudflare. The app’s Singaporean parent company condemned the American CDN provider for sharing inaccurate contact information regarding an alleged pirate site. While this may be true, it’s not a proper copyright infringement claim, the board concludes.

• Italy’s plan to introduce an anti-piracy “mega-firewall” is causing alarm among ISPs. Alongside concerns that the system introduces a single “point of failure” that could undermine the security of national networks, ISPs believe they could be held liable when over-blocking enters the equation. More generally, consumers could end up paying for blocking, rather than the rightsholders set to benefit from it.

• American prisons are strict about television use. Typically they’re only to be used with headphones, and their enclosures need to be transparent so they can’t be used to smuggle goods. ClearTech makes TVs that meet these specifications, and when [Steve Pietras] got his hands on just such a unit, he set about modding it for use in the free world.

Gemini* and Gopher

Technical

Programming/Servers

• Short post. I’ve traveled to Indonesia for a few weeks and I’ve found sites like Reddit is blocked. Although I come prepared with my own WireGuard VPN to bypass it. It’s still annoyning. Mostly because the added latency.

• Amazing. I reboot on a regular basis and never hit those kinds of uptimes.

• 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

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.