● 04.17.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 16/04/2023: Trisquel GNU/Linux 11.0 Reviewed and World IP (International Propaganda) Day 2023 Approaching

Posted in News Roundup at 1:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• This has been another slow week due to the Easter holidays, but we still got a few goodies to play with starting with new releases of the popular Firefox web browser and digiKam professional photo manager, and continuing with new releases of the independent 4MLinux distribution and lightweight LXQt desktop environment.

• On top of that, I take a look at the upcoming educational-focused Edubuntu 23.04 distribution and tell you about the release schedule of the upcoming GNOME 45 desktop environment. Check out the hottest news of this week and access all the distro and package downloads in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for April 16th, 2023, below.

Audiocasts/Shows

• We’re delighted to tell you that we’ve got the band back together for a new podcast. Linux Matters.

• So, while the podcast is new, the presenter lineup will be familiar to you.

• We’ll be back every two weeks, talking about Open Source, Technology, gaming, software development and all the Linux matters that matter.

• Stay tuned to this feed, and you’ll start getting the new epsiodes, or search for Linux Matters wherever you get your podcasts.

• **solid** , **sonnet** , and **spectacle** from the **kde** software series of Slackware.

Kernel Space

• The AMD ROCm library was introduced in 2016 to compete with NVIDIA’s CUDA software, with full support for Linux.

Applications

• A nifty clipboard manager that offers a visually-rich interface and valuable options.

• du (abbreviated from disk usage) is a standard program used to estimate file space usage—space used under a particular directory or files on a file system.

• du is part of coreutils, a package of software containing implementations for many of the basic tools, such as cat, ls, and rm, which are used on Unix-like operating systems.

• If you execute du without any options it will output the sizes of all files starting in your current directory and all subdirectories of your current directory.

• There are lots of budding developers who have developed software to improve on du in a number of regards. The tools featured here are all command line tools or ncurses interface.

• We make the following recommendations captured in our ratings chart.

Instructionals/Technical

• ZFS sometimes benefits from having a logging drive. Usually, you need to assign a whole device or partition to it. Unfortunately, I had already partitioned my SSD and didn’t feel like repartitioning it.

• A zone digest is a cryptographic digest, or hash, of the data in a DNS zone which is embedded in the zone data itself as a ZONEMD resource record. It is computed upon publishing the zone, and it can be verified by zone recipients. ZONEMD is specified in RFC 8976.

• In order to compute the hash, zone data is fed to a digest function using a well-defined and consistent record ordering and format. The data given to the hash excludes the ZONEMD record itself and its signatures if the zone is signed. The digest is then added to the apex of the zone itself and signed with DNSSEC (for signed zones).

• If you’ve tried FreeCAD, you know that it has a daunting number of workbenches and options. [MangoJelly] has a large number of video tutorials on FreeCAD, and the latest one, below, covers working with STEP and STL with the tool.

• As a system admin on a Linux system, you might have to parse through a huge log file in Linux. It might seem a painstaking task, especially in the instances where you have to match patterns. Thankfully, grep command in Linux is a boon for such situations. If you are wondering what is grep command and how it works, below, we have prepared an easy guide to help you understand this useful Linux command.

Games

• About a decade ago I launched my first site responsible for obtaining stats from the then-current Halo game. When Halo Infinite launched Leaf was reborn as another site with a new stack of technology.

• Laravel with Livewire and Bulma joined together to build a quick responsive template to take a more clean minimal approach to Halo stat design. I was just getting upset with the other sites in this ecosystem that either had ads everywhere or some heavy interface.

• Between 2023-04-09 and 2023-04-16 there were 93 new games validated for the Steam Deck. We use many criteria to come up with this Best Steam Games list every single week, such as popularity, ratings across several platforms, and more…

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• As someone who has been doing test automation for past ~3,5 years (and desperately wanting out towards doing just development), I have done a lot of bug reports.

• Then I switched to Linux based OS and that amount has doubled.

• I have been asked what are good bug reports. Since I’m both dev and tester, I’d say I have an alright idea of how to do it. So, here’s what I’ve learned about making good bug reports.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• OpenVMS on x86 is now available for hobbyists! Almost a year after the official release. This is a part 3 of my getting started guide. Part 2 ended with a working network setup and SSH access. In part 3 we’ll do something very exciting, installing the WebUI, a web based management interface for OpenVMS. I’ll also share a few smaller tidbits, like how to use the interactive text editor via an ssh session and how to use unzip.

Reviews

• While using Trisquel, two reoccurring ideas kept coming to mind. The first was that Trisquel is not only one of the most user-friendly, polished libre distributions available, it feels like one of the more friendly and polished Linux distributions in general. Even with the main edition (as opposed to the Mini edition), the system is unusually light and fast. Trisquel finds a pretty good balance between providing useful applications for a wide range of tasks and not making the application menu crowded. The system looks fairly nice, in a classic way, and I find it easy to navigate.

• Trisquel often manages to present pop-ups and update indicators in a way that draws attention without being annoying. Its installer is easy to set up and the settings panel is a breeze to navigate. One of my few issues was having the screen reader enabled by default. This is, of course, a good option for people who are visually impaired, but for someone who doesn’t need the screen reader (and who hasn’t used MATE before) it required digging down about four levels in the settings panel to find the toggle to turn off the reader. Even then, the reader re-enabled itself every time I logged in, despite it being clearly turned off in the settings panel and this is likely to frustrate anyone who has their speakers turned on.

• So that was my main train of thought with regards to Trisquel – it’s nice, fast, polished, and easy to use. However, the second thought was that it’s a shame I’ll probably never be able to use Trisquel as my daily operating system. It’s unfortunate, but most devices these days need non-free firmware to access the Internet and are not much use without this key feature. I suppose the alternative would be to buy a USB wireless card which works with free firmware, but I’ve found those to be rare and they take up one of a limited number of USB ports available.

• In brief, I think Trisquel is doing a great job presenting the world with what can be achieved by using free software only. However, using it also reminds me of the (sometimes harsh) limitations a free software only system imposes. People wanting wireless networking, video drivers for gaming, a 3-D desktop, or possibly access to other non-free items like some printer drivers, are out of luck with Trisquel. Likewise, anyone wanting to use a non-free browser or service like Steam will also need to venture outside their default repositories.

• This is, of course, the point of Trisquel, being a beckon of free-only software. People who download Trisquel probably are not interested in non-free components (software or hardware). This distribution offers a narrower path to walk, but it is a very smooth, pretty path.

Slackware Family

• I have uploaded fresh packages for VLC 3.0.18, targeting Slackware 15.0 and -current. I realized that it was already nine months ago that I did the last refresh of this mediaplayer package. The prior update also took a long time, 11 months to be precise.

Fedora Family / IBM

• For Red Hat, which turned 30 on March 27, it was a cause for celebration. From a business that got started in one of its co-founder’s wife’s sewing room, it became the first billion-dollar pure-play open-source company and then the engine driving IBM. It has been a long strange trip. Sure, today, the tech world is dominated by Linux and open source software, but in 1993, Linux was merely an obscure operating system known only to enthusiasts. Red Hat played a significant role in transforming the “just a hobby” operating system into today’s major IT powerhouse. Red Hat co-founder Bob Young, who previously ran a rental typewriter business, was one of those who became intrigued by Linux. In 1993, he established ACC Corporation, a catalog company that distributed Slackware Linux CDs and open-source software.

Debian Family

• The theme for World IP Day 2023 is Women and IP: Accelerating innovation and creativity

• Over many years, I’ve done a lot to help women get an equal footing in free and open source software development. In return, Debian appears to be spending over fifty thousand Swiss Francs (equivalent $50,000) to try and get a Swiss judge to rubber stamp rumors of a relationship with my last female intern.

• This could be one reason why nobody else is contesting the position of Debian Project Leader. They are cowards and they are hiding behind Jonathan Carter because he lives far away in South Africa. Carter, in turn, is hiding behind lawyers to torture volunteers.

• The fee Jonathan Carter paid to the Tribunal of Lausanne is CHF 18,500, the fee paid to the lawyer is likely to be even bigger.

• In comparison, I think the intern only received EUR 2,500 from Google Summer of Code for 12 weeks work.

• An important philosophical issue is being discussed on an open source mailing list and all of a sudden somebody insists that it must stop.

• Somebody sends you an insult and they CC other people on the same email.

• Any publicly visible insult in social media, Github or any other platform.

• A good example of this comes from my trip to FOSSASIA. The Debian Project Leader (DPL) Chris Lamb insisted that I should spend another hour looking on AirBNB to find cheaper accommodation.

• This type of thing demonstrates a total disrespect for the value of my time. Accommodation in Singapore is expensive, there is no easy way around that.

Devices/Embedded

• The following nine apps where added in the first quarter of 2023: [...]

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Open source continues to grow, as shown by data provided by reports of analysts (top left & right) and by declarations of users (bottom left & right).

• In two years, proprietary software is expected to shrink from 45% to 37% while enterprise open source is expected to grow from 29% to 34%. Community based OSS is also expected to grow from 21% to 24%. In total, in two years open source software will reach an estimated enterprise market share of 58%.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• On Saturday, the hashtag “National Security Education Day” was viewed over 480 million times on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like Chinese social media platform.

• To educate people about national security threats, the Ministry of Public Security released a documentary, via the platform, about the case of an amateur radio enthusiast named Zheng who received a free Automatic Identification System (AIS) from a foreign company to collect marine data. The AIS allows tracking of maritime traffic by capturing the signal emitted from a ship.

• The equipment Zheng received was collecting data from the military naval port three kilometres from his house in an unknown province of China. Zheng was reprimanded for installing the equipment and transmitting sensitive ‘national security data’ — his sentence hasn’t been revealed.

• With the new move, Beijing is trying to close all access to open-source data which can provide insights into the People’s Liberation Army’s naval activity, including irregular maritime militia used by the PLA in the South China Sea.

Programming/Development

• For a while I wanted to write a post to compile some of the tricks I’ve learnt over the years of using rmarkdown. I also wanted other people’s input so I asked for suggestions on Mastodon. So here are the 12 tips I decided to include in no particular order.

• How much thought vs. leg-work is in your content? The more leg-work the more vulnerable you are.

• This is a look at what types of creation there are, and which might be most vulnerable to replacement by artificial intelligence.

Standards/Consortia

• Having gotten the basic graphical output or A4PDF working I wanted to see if I could make PDF form generation work.

• This was of course a terrible idea but sadly I lacked foresight.

• After a lot of plumbing code it was time to start defining form widgets. I chose to start simple and create a form with a single togglable check button. This does not seem like an impossibly difficult problem and the official PDF specification even has a nice code sample for this…

• [...]

• No matter how much I tried I could not make form generation actually work. The output was always broken in weird ways I could not explain. Unfortunately this part of the PDF spec is not very helpful, because it does not give out full examples, only snippets, and search engines are worthless at finding any technical content when using “PDF” as a search term. It may even be that information about this is not available in public web sites. Who knows?

Leftovers

• Noise is all around us, and while acoustic noise is easy to spot using our ears, electronic noise is far harder to quantify even with the right instruments. A spectrum analyzer is the most convenient tool for noise measurements, but also adds noise of its own to whatever signal you’re looking at. [Limpkin] has been working on measuring very small noise signals using a spectrum analyzer, and shared his results in a comprehensive blog post.

• Usually, the problem comes before the solution, but for [Stavros], the opposite happened. A 4.7″ E-Ink screen with integrated battery management and ESP32 caught his eye, and he bought it and started thinking about what he wanted to do with it. The Timeframe (hackaday.io link as well) is a sleek desk calendar based around the integrated e-ink screen.

Science

• The Fourier Transform (FT) is a mathematical operation used to analyze and process signals and data. It converts a time-domain signal (e.g., audio waveform or series of data points from a sensor) to its frequency-domain representation (a series of sine and cosine components with unique frequencies and amplitudes).

• The Fourier Transform is so interesting because it has real applications in our everyday technology. And it’s not just limited to a single field – it’s generally applicable across nearly every domain.

• Although neutrinos are exceedingly common, their near-massless configuration means that their presence is rather ephemeral. Despite billions of them radiating every second towards Earth from sources like our Sun, most of them zip through our bodies and this very planet without ever interacting with either. This property is also what makes studying these particles that are so fundamental to our understanding so complicated. Fortunately recently published results by researchers behind the SNO+ neutrino detector project shows that we may see a significant bump in our neutrino detection sensitivity.

Hardware

• CPUs can’t do anything without being told what to do, which leaves the obvious problem of how do you tell a CPU to do something in the first place. On many CPUs this is handled in the form of a reset vector – an address the CPU is hardcoded to start reading instructions from when power is applied. The address the reset vector points to will typically be some form of ROM or flash that can be read by the CPU even if no other hardware has been configured yet. This allows the system vendor to ship code that will be executed immediately after poweron, configuring the rest of the hardware and eventually getting the system into a state where it can run user-supplied code.

• [CuriousMarc] has a pile of 8-inch drives, all marked bad. You can’t just pop over to the computer store and buy a new one these days, so it was off to the repair bench. Although the target drive would do a quick seek,  once it was in use, it just kind of shut down. So [Marc] started sending low-level commands to the device to see if he could isolate the fault. You can watch the whole adventure in the video below.

• [Jack]’s design for a 3D-printable foaming nozzle works by mixing air with a fluid like liquid soap or hand sanitizer. This mixture gets forced through what looks like layers of fine-mesh sieve and eventually out the end by squeezing the bottle. The nozzle has no moving parts but does have an interesting structure to make this possible.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Despite universal health care being the norm in almost every other wealthy country, it remains a distant possibility in the United States. A divided Congress means that bold health proposals are unlikely to advance this year or next. Yet this also opens up a window to craft a fresh political approach, particularly one that rises above the rhetorical ruts of socialized medicine and fearmongering over fictitious “death panels.”

• As legal fights raise concerns about the future accessibility of the abortion medication mifepristone, reproductive rights supporters on Saturday rallied outside the U.S. Supreme Court and in cities across the country.

• New public health research on women’s prisons exposes medical neglect, sexual violence and inhumane living conditions.

Proprietary

• Europe’s national privacy regulators said on Thursday that the decision came following discussions about recent enforcement action undertaken by the Italian data protection authority against OpenAI regarding its ChatGPT service.

• In a statement posted on its website, the EDPB said the task force was intended to “foster cooperation and to exchange information on possible enforcement actions conducted by data protection authorities.”

Security

• Josh and Kurt talk about a blog post about pip and virtual environments. This eventually turns into a larger conversation around packaging tools and how we see incremental changes over time. The package ecosystems were what we needed a few years ago, but our needs have changed.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Ten years ago Edward Snowden was helped to escape by Wikileaks and to publish his revelations by The Intercept, Guardian, New York Times and others.

• Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits the U.S. government to engage in mass, warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications, including phone calls, texts, emails, social media messages, and web browsing. The government claims to be pursuing vaguely defined foreign intelligence “targets,” but its targets need not be spies, terrorists, or criminals. They can be virtually any foreigner abroad: journalists, academic researchers, scientists, or businesspeople. And in the course of this surveillance, the government casts a wide net that ensnares the communications of ordinary Americans on a massive scale—in violation of our constitutional rights.

• As Congress debates the reauthorization of Section 702, it’s vital that we tell our representatives in Congress that we want an end to warrantless mass surveillance. Here’s what you need to know to follow the debate and speak up for your right to privacy.

Defence/Aggression

• Recently, there have been troubling revelations about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — a leading 2024 GOP presidential aspirant — concerning his conduct as a Navy JAG officer at Guantanamo Bay. His responsibilities at the detention facility apparently included responding to claims of mistreatment from the war-on-terror prisoners there. Relatively few of these detainees had any connection with al Qaeda, and many had simply been handed over to US forces in exchange for bounty payments. But DeSantis seemingly viewed them all as wily and unrepentant terrorists.

• Chechnya head Ramzan Kadyrov said that five Chechen soldiers have returned to Grozny from Ukraine, where they were captured. He urged them to return to the front.

• Search and rescue work has concluded at a five-story apartment building in Sloyansk, in the Donetsk region, reports Donetsk governor Pavlo Kyrylenko. A Russian heavy artillery attack destroyed the building on April 14.

• World leaders are advocating for a cease-fire in Sudan, where fighting between the African nation’s military and a paramilitary group throughout the weekend—much of it in the capital, Khartoum—has left dozens of people dead and hundreds more injured.

• The Arabic press is reporting violent assaults Saturday evening by Israeli police against Palestinian Christian worshippers in Jerusalem attempting to make their way to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for the “Saturday of Light” commemoration. The police attacks took place at the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in response to Christians objecting to the barriers the police had erected to keep crowds away.

• The government of Hungary has banned the import of agricultural products from Ukraine until June 30, 2023, reports the country’s Cabinet of Ministers.

• Andriy Yermak, adviser to the President of Ukraine, reported that 130 soldiers have returned to Ukraine as part of a prisoner exchange.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

Environment

• It’s only now that Washington appears to be rolling out required rules – with an eye to getting the cuts in climate pollution that could come with them. The stalling of the 2007 law stands as a warning to the Biden administration: passing laws, like the sweeping Inflation Reduction Act and disbursing money, is just the start of work on climate change, especially when there’s persistent industry pushback.

• “The law doesn’t matter if it is flouted or never implemented,” says Alexandra Teitz, a former senior counsel for Rep. Henry Waxman, who introduced the section. “To make a difference, we have to seize that opportunity and do the work to bring the benefits into the real world and people’s lives.”

• LNG is not a bridge fuel to a clean energy future. The production and transportation of LNG results in significant emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is responsible for approximately 30% of global warming. The carbon footprint of LNG is often larger than that of coal, due to the leakage of methane during the production and transportation process. It’s a bridge that ends in a hotter, more dangerous world for all of us, especially the world’s most vulnerable people and ecosystems.

• Advocacy groups on Sunday expressed frustration with a joint statement in which climate, energy, and environment ministers from the world’s top economies committed to tackling “the unprecedented triple global crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution” but also left the door open to investments in planet-wrecking fossil fuels.

Energy/Transportation

• Amid fossil fuel corporate fury at any move to tax them or cap their soaring price rises, the tax reform moves of the Albanese government have been yet modest. The country-by-country reporting initiative however has drawn international plaudits. Callum Foote and Michael West report on the progress and the challenges in funding Australia’s future.

• In the gas sector’s version of a Miss Universe speech the other day, the chief executive of Japanese juggernaut Inpex, Takayuki Ueda, declared Australia’s gas policies were a threat to world peace. No kidding.

• Millions of people worked towards this day for years. People who protested against reprocessing plants, nuclear waste transport, unsafe nuclear waste storage facilities, and the construction of new nuclear power plants. Those decades of resistance were worth it.

• Attorney General Dave Yost is now suing the Norfolk Southern rail company on behalf of Ohio for the reckless endangerment of residents’ health. The recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio required locals to evacuate their homes, adding to the ongoing list of recent environmental disasters in the US. Since then, the crisis has garnered much-deserved attention, including a federal attempt to utilize multiple agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Transportation to support the community following the event.

Overpopulation

• All those trillions of stars out there—all those planets—and we haven’t seen anyone. Maybe they’re just too far away. Some experts believe that. But maybe billions of civlizations got to where we are and they just couldn’t make it past the Maloch Barrier.

• Maybe they couldn’t find a way to exit the race before they killed themselves with AI, nukes, bioweapons, or whatever. We need to find a way out of this race.

• Nothing is more important.

• Chen’s comments come at a time when youth unemployment is running at around 20% in China, with around 10 million graduates about to enter the labor market to compete with those who are already unemployed.

Finance

• At a March speech in Frankfurt, ECB executive board member Fabio Panetta warned that “opportunistic behaviour by firms could also delay the fall in core inflation,” and that “some producers have been exploiting the uncertainty” created by inflation to pump up their profit margins. “We should monitor the risk that a profit-price spiral could make core inflation stickier,” he urged.

• Later that month, ECB economists noted the unusual fact that business profits were still going up despite a cyclical economic slowdown, arguing that the cost rises companies were facing in making their products “also made it easier for firms to increase their profit margins, because they make it harder to tell whether higher prices are caused by higher costs or higher margins.” They concluded that “the effect of profits on domestic price pressures has been exceptional from a historical perspective.”

• This seems to be recognized across the continent. The central bankers of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have recently made the same points as these ECB officials, cautioning that “price hikes exceeded cost rises in several sectors” and had contributed to inflation, and promising to watch for a “profit-inflationary spiral.”

• The majority of us support debt relief, but lobbyist-backed lawsuits are holding back Americans from achieving a better life.

• Walmart CEO Doug McMillan threatens to close stores and raise prices due to rampant shoplifting.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Seven progressive Democrats from the House of Representatives have signed a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland calling for the Biden administration to drop the charges against Julian Assange and cease seeking his extradition. It’s a good letter as far as these things go. It lists the major press freedom advocacy groups […]

• On his first day in the country, the president also visited Huawei and had meetings with executives from other companies.

• While the Australian government’s response can be explained through this logic, questions remain.

• Given the ban only affects government devices, couldn’t the same people be susceptible to foreign interference through their use of TikTok on personal devices? And what about other apps, such as Facebook, that collect significant amounts of user data. Are they more secure than TikTok?

• Even if other digital platforms don’t have connections with China, couldn’t they share or sell data to other entities, such as advertisers, data brokers or business partners? And mightn’t those third parties have connections with China? Or other countries with similar laws?

• The focus on protecting children online follows a high-profile congressional hearing in 2021 on secret Facebook documents that were leaked to The Wall Street Journal by a whistleblower. Those included internal Facebook studies showing that nearly one-third of teenage girls said that “when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse” and that “14% of boys in the U.S. said Instagram made them feel worse about themselves.” One of the Facebook presentations found that among the 6% of U.S. teen users who reported having suicidal thoughts tracked these thoughts to Instagram.

• One possible avenue for Congress is the Kids Online Safety Act, authored by Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., which would require social media platforms to give children and their parents more tools and safeguards to prevent harm to minors’ health and well-being.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The case of 13-year-old Masha Moskaleva, who drew an anti-war picture in school art class in April 2022, has captivated certain segments of the Russian population. The drawing set off a cascade of legal problems for Moskaleva and her single father, Alexey Moskalev, who was sentenced, on April 5, to two years in prison for his own posts on social media. At a concert in Moscow on April 15, Alexander “Chacha” Ivanov, frontman for the punk band Naive, wore a T-shirt emblazoned with Masha Moskaleva’s name and spoke to the audience about her case.

• Dylan said: “I don’t think censorship applies to me. It applies more to top 40 artists. People who have hit records might have to be concerned with that, but I don’t have those kinds of records that I’d have to be concerned about what I say. I’m just going to write any old song I feel like writing. The way I feel about it, I don’t buy any of those records, anyway.”

• Microsoft has removed all references to Joseph Cantrell from Bing News, which has made its way into DuckDuckGo as well.

• Google News still returns results for the drug addled Nazi that Microsoft hired and now tries to hide. No doubt, having him stab another employee was very embarrassing.

• This is just one example of how Microsoft can run damage control. As his case winds its way through the court system, people will increasingly wonder what kind of company hires people who self-admit to extensive drug usage and Nazi ideology, and then further admit that nobody on their team of 4, which costs the company over a million bucks, can figure out bugs in Azure, and have to resort to posting questions on Stack Exchange.

• When a former colonel in the Saudi police force, now seeking asylum in the United Kingdom, took to TikTok in mid-March to explain live why he had left the police, internet vigilantes immediately put a price on his head. In the time since, a horde of Twitter accounts has been harassing the 44-year-old online, calling him a “traitor” and “doxxing” him, revealing information about his whereabouts. He says he now fears for his life.

• Moscow police have opened a criminal case regarding a video that was posted online and shows a burning Quran, reports TASS.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Glenn Greenwald details the real story of Julian Assange and why the government attacks certain journalists and not others.

Civil Rights/Policing

• On April 11, the United Nations instructed its national staff in Afghanistan — more than 3,000 men and women — to not report to offices “for their own safety, especially for our female staff,” according to spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric. About 400 Afghan women work for the U.N.

• There’s another element involved in most incidents of hoax swatting calls: the complicating factor of social media.

• Within minutes of the Twin Falls Police Department receiving the report of a shooting at Canyon Ridge High School, Josh Palmer, the city’s public information coordinator, took to Facebook and other official social media accounts to share updates with citizens.

• However, almost immediately, nondescript Facebook accounts began replying to official updates by posting strange videos in the comments section. The people posting the videos alleged to have footage from the scene, but it was clear from the background of the videos they were not taken in Twin Falls, said Palmer. Later on, other anonymous Facebook users shared links to news stories purporting to cover the shooting, leading people to click on what appeared to be fake news sites plastered with advertisements.

• “What we were seeing was a very targeted misinformation campaign to the city of Twin Falls,” he told NPR.

• Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee is investigating 10 criminal cases involving citizens of Kazakhstan who took part in the Russia-Ukraine war, reports Kazakh publication KazTAG.

• Some of what explains that decline is the fact that, under US labor law, unionization happens at the individual workplace level. That means that, unless the workplace is part of a company-wide agreement, as with the UPS or GM contracts, new workplaces are “born” nonunion unless and until there is a successful campaign to organize and bargain a first contract for that workplace. Meanwhile, unionized workplaces that close aren’t replaced, meaning that unions must “run to stand still,” or just to retain membership.

• Some of this is due to all the rules that make it incredibly hard to organize unions, as anyone who has followed the organizing campaigns at Amazon and Starbucks is well aware. These rules, along with employers’ increasingly savvy and brutal use of them, led to a nationwide collapse in the number of union representation elections starting in the early 1980s, as shown in the following graphs taken from my book Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada. The first graph shows the steep decline in the overall number of union representation elections, and the second shows a similar decline in the number of workers eligible to vote in representation elections. The collapse of new organizing has meant that unions have been unable to stem the tide as existing unionized establishments have closed, leading to union decline.

Monopolies

Patents

Copyrights

• Following a Steam ban over potential copyright problems, Korean game developer studio Ironmace decided to use BitTorrent for the latest playtest release of its highly anticipated game Dark and Darker. The torrent release was a massive success but also triggered new disputes, including a swift Twitter takedown, which the devs hope to overcome with Base64 encoding.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• It was a lovely Spring day today, around 24c / 75f. The air was thick and sweet and warm and so what better way to spend it than … gardening. It was my SO’s idea, and the yard needed it, so I could hardly say no. So I spent a good part of the day getting my hands dirty pulling weeds and trimming trees and avoiding bugs. I now sit in the evening sunset with a nice cold drink.

• Society seems to run as some kind of megaslavery system. Depending on the POV, it’s not quite as bad as actual slavery some mere centuries ago: the majority of us don’t work in back-breaking conditions, we’re not (as) starved, we’re not whipped, we have some sort of “dignity” (whatever this word means), and health is also mostly improved (apart from the usual suspects: cancer, sleep deprivation, obesity, diabetes, … that I guess are kinda recent “inventions” but not sure).

• I’ve taken a little while to update this one. In truth, I wanted to do it yesterday, but in my overconfidence I kayaked Friday Evening and Saturday Morning, with sporty waves, resulting in my poor specimen of 52 years of hubris getting totally knackered by Saturday evening.

• Anyway, I’ve been able to get through the rules of the first three scenes, with the following notes (These are semi-intelligible but you’d benefit from having the Mythic Game Master Emulator book, available in DriveThruRPG and perhaps other places but that’s where I found it in PDF form).

• The only athletic pursuit I’ve ever had any success at is ironically the one I’ve also had the least success at. When I was seven, I joined my school’s cross country team, and in a famous incident, not only managed to finish 120 out of 120, but was so far behind that I went off course and they had to go looking for me.

• After that I did some sprinting, and wasn’t bad, but wasn’t up to the same class as the naturally athletic kids. So I focused on academics and the arts through the tail end of elementary school and then high school, and into university. I started running again at the end of undergrad. I’d put on 30 lbs. My mental image of myself was slender and delicate. The mirror didn’t agree.

• It has been a dream of mine to create my own personal weather station (PWS). I’ve been working on this project for over 6 years now. Due to school and scope creep: I have not been able to complete this project. This time will be different. I have a plan. This plan has been split up into two parts: hardware and software. In previous iterations, I have developed hardware and software at the same time without a clear plan, which I believe is part of the reason why it has taken me so long.

• With this semester is almost over, I have done a bit of planning so I can hit the ground running with this project. I want to have the hardware installed as soon as reasonably possible so that I can start work on the software remotely.

• We were supposed to help clean up Fulton today, but lightning storms rolled through and the event was canceled. That’s OK, Fulton is actually a pretty clean town already. Instead, we cleaned our garage, which is not pretty clean, and during the skirmish I unearthed an old cast iron pan.

• I picked this pan up years ago, I think, probably at a thrift store or garage sale. It’s small, and I intended to use it to melt pennies on the campfire (my kids like to play with the zinc, and it’s fun to watch the copper bubble… it’s a long story, but my brothers and I did this as kids, and so I do it with my kids from time to time; don’t tell Uncle Sam). However, as the kids are getting older now, I figured maybe that wasn’t going to happen anymore, so I decided to rehabilitate it instead. Lightning storm, stuck inside with most things unplugged.

• Over the last three months, my aubergines seeds have been developing into plants. 19/20 germinated. 3 of them failed early, and the remaining sixteen have been growing vigorously on the south-facing windows of the house. I was surprised to learn that they can be quite thorny.

• Fantasy Traveller, that is: Halberts and Knives. Halberts is the one where your character starts fully formed and Knives is the one where your character starts without any skills at all and you’re supposed to play an adventure per year, gaining a skill for every year.

• [...]

• And, like last time, feel free to take it and change it. The HTML, CSS, Javascript, and all the random tables are all in one single file. Download it and open it in your browser. Start changing stuff. 👍

• Tomorrow my mother in law is leaving after a nearly two month stay with us. On one hand: YEAH!… on the other hand: I somehow grew accustomed to have her around, even when her presence was … ehm… “strenuous” at times. (For a little background: My wife is vietnamese and a family visit allways takes a minimum 13 hour flight, so visits tend to be longer). I hope Junior will not miss her too much, but we will see.

• d1337 wrote with a few things he’d like me to write about. I love prompting; writing improves in conversation.

• First car I rode was a boxcar, with some dirty kids and their dogs. 19, I hitched 4200 km from a protest against threatened invasion of Iraq to a 100-hr Wilderness First Responder training hosted by street medics in an old church/union hall. My first time in mountain or pacific timezones.

• A lot happened: frostbite, roadkill elk steak, almost falling through lake ice I slept on out of sight of shore, and people. People who did heroin, people who drove truck, people who stripped, people who tended bar, people who challenged the Dept of Livestock and Fish & Game.

• Lojban will of course have great difficulty reproducing poetry where each and every word can bear multiple meanings, to say less of the links to Du Fu. At best one might convey a particular image, and hope that the image is both good and speaks of other things by word choice and association, especially given how spare the 5 7 5 or 5 7 5 7 7 forms are. Mostly this is me kicking the tires of what lojban can do, and nobody is yelling at me in #lojban about the efforts. So far.

Technical

• I honestly believe much less power-hungry computers for the average user are the way forward.

• I couldn’t sleep the other night, and instead of doing anything that might actually help me sleep I went down an internet rabbithole of self-made 8-bit computers built around the Zilog Z80.

• Now, the Z80 might need some introduction these days: It is a CPU that is 50 years old and still in production.

• My capsule has a Makefile in the root. One of the targets of that file is “journal”.

• In my case, using `hugo` to generate my web and capsule, I can leverage its nice templating system for new content called “archetypes”. This system allows you to have templates that will be used by the `hugo new` subcommand

• Back in 2020 I left San Francisco and rented a ranch house in Sonoma county together with my partner, Kim. We wanted to move to a remote place because of the COVID pandemic, and the place she found for us was perfect: 40 acres of land between Sonoma and Marin counties, with a renovated house that was mostly surrounded by trees — the exception being the view of the Estero Americano estuary.

• I didn’t have a car in San Francisco; I remember hearing about a research from Lyft saying that 95% of the rides inside of the city were faster on an electric bike than by car, and that’s what I did. But moving into a rural area I knew I needed a car, so I bought a 2010 RAV4.

• Just no. Bitcoin is not 3x better for the environment than cars, it’s at most just 3x less bad for the environment than cars. Entirely different things. If X and Y are both bad, X being less bad than Y doesn’t somehow make it good, it’s just less bad.

• You could argue, or try to, that X is more or less worth the badness in comparison to Y (considering their badness and what is gained by either). But concluding that X is more worth than Y does not imply that X is better than Y, nor does it even imply that X is less bad than Y (because badness is absolute while worth is relative).

Internet/Gemini

• Does anybody happen to know what has happened / is happening to the gopher server of the aussies.space tilde server? The website is up but I have not been able to connect to gopher for quite a long time now.

• 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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