● 04.18.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 17/04/2023: GNU poke 3.1 and Deepin 20.9 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 5:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• I’ve been using Linux since 1997. Years ago, I reached the point where I was certain there was nothing that could surprise me anymore. Fast forward to this past weekend when Jorge Castro reached out to me and proved me wrong.

• Jorge used to work with Ubuntu but is now working on a new project, called Universal Blue. Without going into the technical details of what this distribution does (because most average users don’t really care what happens “under the hood,” they only care that things work), let’s see if I can describe what Universal Blue is. Understand, this is really new stuff we’re talking about… and it’s cool.

• [...]

• First, I tried KDE Plasma but was quickly reminded why I didn’t much care for that desktop environment (it’s too much like Windows). Then I tried Enlightenment, but that environment didn’t much care for Wayland, so it was a no-go. I was going to install standard GNOME, but that would break Pop!_OS. Pantheon? Nope. I soon realized it was probably time to switch to a different distribution, but I don’t really have the time to do so at the moment. Now, if I were using Universal Blue, I could simply run the rebase command and make the switch. There would be no breakage, no complicated dependencies to deal with, and no mess. It’s clean, fast, and simple.

Server

• In Kubernetes v1.19, Pod topology spread constraints went to general availability (GA).

• As time passed, we – SIG Scheduling – received feedback from users, and, as a result, we’re actively working on improving the Topology Spread feature via three KEPs. All of these features have reached beta in Kubernetes v1.27 and are enabled by default.

• This blog post introduces each feature and the use case behind each of them.

Kernel Space

• The 6.3-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. “”Let’s hope we have just one more calm week, and we’ll have had a nice uneventful release cycle. Knock wood””.

• Version 6.3 of the Linux kernel is on track to debut next week after what emperor penguin Linus Torvalds has described a “nice uneventful release cycle’”.

• Torvalds used the epithet quoted above in his announcement that release candidate seven for version 6.3 of the kernel is now available for testing. The Finnish FOSS boss’s preference is for seven release candidates, followed by a full release. But versions 6.2 and 6.1 both needed an eighth release test edition.

• Ahead of work commencing on version 6.3 Torvalds urged developers to start lodging their desired additions, and later thanked them for doing so as his queue of pull requests considerations was pleasingly busy once work on the new kernel cut commenced.

• By the time release candidate one rolled debuted, Torvalds was effusive in his praise for kernel contributors’ efforts.

• “So after several releases where the merge windows had something odd going on, we finally had just a regular ‘two weeks of just merge window’,” he wrote when announcing the first cut of version 6.3.

Graphics Stack

• AMD has uploaded additional AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver updates to fix some previous issues with the DRM-next (the upcoming AMD Direct Rendering Manager) features and add more updates to the driver for GPUs such as RDNA 3 and more. These updates are to see the Linux 6.4 merge window, which should open next week.

Applications

• These days, you can search the internet for the usage and examples of any command.

• But it was not like this when the internet didn’t exist, or it was not as widely available to everyone.

• For this reason, commands in Linux (and the operating systems before it) come with a help or manual page (man pages). This worked as a reference and users could access it anytime to see what options were available for a command and how it worked.

• The man pages are still relevant in this age of information abundance.

• First, they are the original command documentation and hence the most trusted source on command usage.

• Another downside highlighted by the developer is that only ESP8266 and ESP32 boards are supported.

• Developer Michał Leśniewski further told Hackster.io that PicoMQTT doesn’t have all the features that Mosquitto has and it’s much slower than a Raspberry Pi, but it’s good enough for a few devices that do not send a large number of messages. He found his own setup with a few ESP boards to be very stable. You’ll find the source code, documentation, and a benchmark sample on GitHub with everything licensed under GNU LGPLv3.

Instructionals/Technical

• I needed to copy 3TB of data from my old homeserver to my new one. I decided to spend as much time “sharpening my axe” as possible. I spent ages dicking around with ZFS configs, tweaking BIOS settings, flashing firmware, and all the other yak-shaving necessary for convincing yourself you’re doing useful work.

• …if you’re using javascript:void(0) as the value of the href attribute, the element you’re actually looking for is <button>.

• As covered, the critical ARC size parameter for determining if it will grow, shrink, or stay the same size is ‘c’, also known as ‘arc_c’, which is what the ARC considers the overall target size. ZFS also exposes three memory sizes, memory_all_bytes, memory_free_bytes, and memory_available_bytes. The ‘all’ number is how much total RAM ZFS thinks the system has; the ‘free’ number is how much memory ZFS thinks is free in general, and ‘available’ is how much memory ZFS feels it has available to it at the moment, which can go negative. If the ‘available’ number goes negative, the ARC shrinks; if it’s (enough) positive, the ARC can grow.

• So, you installed Git on your system, cloned a Git repo, made some changes and now want to commit your changes.

• When it comes to scheduling tasks in a Linux environment, system administrators and developers often use the cron command for recurring tasks. However, there is another powerful tool for scheduling one-time jobs, known as the at command. This article will provide an in-depth exploration of the at command, including its syntax, usage examples, and best practices.

• Did you try running a Bash script and got a “/bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory” error message? The output isn’t very helpful and almost gives the impression your script is missing. Fortunately, that’s not the case, and the fix is very simple.

• Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) is an open-source type 1 hypervisor based on Debian. It is used to power high-availability servers and enterprise or hobbyist labs. Proxmox is free to use, but in case you want service support, you can choose to pay for a service subscription.

• You can install and run any server or desktop operating system on Proxmox. The only limiting factor will be your hardware capabilities. Let’s take a look at how to get started with Proxmox by installing a Linux distro.

Games

• Inspired might be pushing it a bit eh? MineClone2 as the name suggests really is a clone of early Minecraft, although this is free and open source powered by the Minetest game engine. A big new release is out now following the recent Minetest upgrade.

• One of the most popular games on Steam (and one of the most played Steam Deck games too), Stardew Valley is coming back for another update in version 1.6.

• I built this game from start to finish in 76 days. In the course of developing it, one of the running themes I noticed on the Phaser forums was that most developers were tackling their first game and were unsure about how to implement common game features like saved games, multiple levels, different experiences for mobile and desktop, etc.

• Shogun Showdown: Prologue is a demo of the upcoming turn-based combat game with rogue-like and deck-building elements. It will have full Native Linux support at release, with a version available in the Prologue now too. From Goblinz Publishing, Gamera Games and Roboatino, the Prologue has so far been gathering some rather positive user reviews on Steam.

• One I missed recently that you should check out: Black Reliquary is a free total conversion mod for the original Darkest Dungeon, and it’s available now with a whole lot of content to play through. While it’s completely free, it will need you to own the full game of course but it also needs the The Shieldbreaker DLC, and the Crimson Court DLC since it pulls features from them.

• Developer Darenn Keller previously worked on the likes of Assassin’s Creed and Ghost Recon, but now they’re going indie with their city-building survival game Lueur.

• After a bit of a wait since the Wine 8.0 release, Valve has now released Proton 8.0, the latest version of their Windows translation layer for Steam Deck and Linux desktop. This is the tool that runs some of the most popular games around!

• King under the Mountain was a pretty nice colony-building game from Rocket Jump Technology, and it was going through a huge upgrade. Sadly, their publisher cancelled on them so they’re having to re-release as Mountaincore.

• According to Valve, Proton 8.0 is the biggest update to date bringing support for numerous Windows games that you can now play on your Linux box. These include Forspoken, Samurai Maiden, Dead Space (2023), Creativerse, Nioh 2 – The Complete Edition, One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4, Blue Reflection, Disney Dreamlight Valley, ToGather:Island, Exceed – Gun Bullet Children, Gungrave G.O.R.E., and Chex Quest HD.

• Several games in the Atelier video game series are also playable in Proton 8.0. These include Atelier Meruru, Atelier Lydie & Suelle The Alchemists and the Mysterious Paintings, Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book DX, and Atelier Rorona The Alchemist of Arland DX.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• LXQt, the lightweight desktop environment, has released version 1.3.0 with many improvements and new features. Let’s dive into the details.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• digiKam, the popular KDE photo management software, released new major 8.0.0 version! Here are the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu users.

• digiKam 8.0.0 is a big release after two year of development. It features new online documentation that is well written with plenty of screenshots and screencasts. An EPUB is also available for offline use.

• The digiKam photo-management tool has announced its 8.0.0 release, after two years of development, bug fixing, and testing. Major new features include a documentation overhaul (with a new web site), support for more file formats, a new optical character recognition (OCR) tool, improved metadata handling, a neural-net-based image quality classifier, better integration with G’MIC-Qt, a Qt6-compatible code base, and lots more. See the announcement for all the details.

• Rant over, technical details provided, problem solved. I absolutely hate these papercut-style issues, because they should never happen. I also hate the fact that something as trivial as media playback from a network share cannot be taken for granted, 100% of the time. Why do I need to worry about these odd things, and why does the behavior need to change every now and then?

• I do not know for how long my anti-tweak will work and last. Hopefully, I won’t have to revisit this exercise in the future, but apparently, you never know. Well, if you’re one of those people who experience this odd behavior with VLC, try the prefetch filter read size value. Until next time, fellas.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• Deepin, a Debian-based Linux distribution developed by the Chinese company Deepin Technology, aims to provide a user-friendly, visually appealing, and efficient desktop operating system right out of the box.

• Aimed at the average computer user, Deepin sets itself apart with the in-house developed DDE, one of the best-looking Linux desktop environments known for its sleek, modern, and intuitive design.

• Today, just over four months after its previous Deepin 20.8 release, this shining Linux distribution has pleased its users with the brand-new Deepin 20.9. So, let’s see what’s new.

• Deepin 20.9 is a modest ISO release for those who want to deploy the Debian-based distro on new computers without having to download hundreds of updates from the repositories after the installations, albeit existing Deepin 20.8 users don’t need to download it in order to keep their installations up to date.

• The new ISO image includes an updated file manager that no longer crashes when renaming files and no longer displays an error when opening the custom screen saver settings.

BSD

• It’s based on OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems, of course.

• OpenBSD -current just grew a new tool for developers working on OpenBSD to detect unsafe behaviors in their code. OpenBSD lets you more easily track memory allocations and whether allocations are properly freed after use.

Fedora Family / IBM

• The recording of the April CentOS Board meeting is now available. Watch the recording Read the minutes The recording has timestamps so you can skip to the parts that interest you.

• The saga continues. Previous post:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202304/still-struggling-with-the-flatpak-sandbox.html

• Starting some flatpaks from a terminal, they reported SSL errors. Microsoft-Teams-for-Linux Flatpak starts, but only a blank window. Errors, cutdown:

• [...]

• TLDR: The `kernel-headers` packages in Fedora, RHEL, or CentOS do not carry the files you get by installing `linux-headers-$(uname -r)` on Debian based distros. If you want to build add-on modules for the kernels in Fedora, RHEL, or CentOS, you need to install `kernel-devel` instead. Fun fact: I consider both approaches to package naming flawed.

• Packages in different, unrelated distros sometimes have similar names, but nevertheless contain something entirely different. People that don’t keep this in mind are sometimes going to have a bad time.

• GitHub Actions allows the use of containers with different Operating Systems. Although, it does not mean that everything is seamless when you are using them. I’ve discovered this the hard way! Below are my findings and the process I followed to make the GitHub Action pipeline work properly with containers.

• It all started with the addition of a new tool in the pipeline, which was not installable on Ubuntu (the GitHub Actions default operating system), due to a packaging issue.

• bcache is a simple and good way to have large disks (typically rotary and slow) exhibit performance quite similar to an SSD disk, using a small SSD disk or a small part of an SDD.

• In general, bcache is a system for having devices composed of slow and large disks, with fast and small disks attached as a cache.

• This article will discuss performance and some optimization tips as well as configuration of bcache.

Devuan Family

• After fixing some quirks, building Devuan GNU+Linux 4.0 Chimaera was fairly quick since they do not modify that many packages, and I’m now able to reproduce 46% of the packages that Devuan Chimaera add/modify on amd64. I have more work in progress here (hint: reproduce/pureos), but PureOS is considerably larger than both Trisquel and Devuan together. I’m not sure how interested Devuan or PureOS are in reproducible builds though.

Devices/Embedded

• Welcome to Part 3 of our “optimise your ROS snap” blog series. Make sure to check Part 2. This third part is going to present safe optimisations consisting of removing duplicates and unnecessary files. We will present three different methods as well as their cumulative benefits for the performance of ROS snaps.

• When snaps are bundling all their dependencies, unnecessary files are bundled too. Most dependencies are coming from APT packages. These packages are also bundling files that are not useful for our snap at runtime (documentations, build tools, etc.). All these unnecessary files count in the size of our snap and affect the “cold start”. Reducing the number of files in our snap would make it smaller and potentially start faster.

• Some time ago was a day when I reached “ten” years at Linaro. Why “”? Because it was 3 + 7 rather than 10 years straight. First three years as Canonical contractor now seven years at Red Hat employee assigned as MemberEngineer.

• [...]

• It is very difficult to gather reliable data from any tests, either with real cases or with special programs. They always give extremely variable, different, unstable values. The various caches present and the type of filesystem (btrfs, journaled, etc.), make the values very variable. It is advisable to ignore small differences (say 5-10%).

• The following performance data refers to the test below (random and multiple reads/writes), trying to always maintain the same conditions and repeating three times in immediate sequence.

• The BIGTREETECH Pad 7 is an Open Source handheld device designed for 3D printing applications and compatible with Klipper firmware. The Pad 7 features an RJ45 ethernet port, CAN port and many other interfaces.

• The product page indicates that the new Pad 7 includes the BIGTREETECH CB1 module with Klipper and KlipperScreen pre-installed, but it can be upgraded with the Raspberry Pi CM4 instead and turn it into a Linux mini-computer.

Open Hardware/Modding

• So, Veeb’s fresh take on the concept began percolating and, armed with a Raspberry Pi Pico W, a metre-long piece of frame from a hardware shop, a plastic light diffuser, and a one‑metre, 144-LED, 5 V addressable LED strip, the duo set to work.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• Do you know someone who’s shaping the future of the internet? Tell us about them!

• Artificial intelligence has entered a new era. From search to education to art, recent advancements in AI promise to shake up the way we work and live.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Apache ShardingSphere is an open source distributed database toolkit. It enhances any database with data sharding, elastic scaling, encryption, and many other capabilities. Deploying and maintaining ShardingSphere-Proxy clusters and load balancing manually can be labor-intensive and time-consuming. To address this issue, Apache ShardingSphere offers ShardingSphere on Cloud, a collection of cloud-based solutions.

• ShardingSphere-on-Cloud includes automated deployment scripts to virtual machines in cloud environments. It also includes tools for a Kubernetes cloud-native environment and a variety of hands-on content for high availability, observability, security policy compliance, and more. This includes Helm Charts, an Operator, and automatic horizontal scaling.

• The new cloud project provides the following capabilities [...]

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• Just because I share content online doesn’t mean I want to share control over it.

• My website is a perfect example of what I mean. I take photos nearly everywhere I go: To date, I have more than 10,000 photos uploaded to my Drupal site. Using something like Instagram might be easier, but my photos are precious to me, which is why I feel so strongly about preserving the open web.

• There are many reasons proprietary platforms don’t meet my requirements for sharing. First, I like to own my data. If you think back to early social media sites like MySpace, they infamously lost massive amounts of user data. Artists lost their music. People lost their photos. This sort of thing still happens on Facebook and other social media sites.

GNU Projects

• I am happy to announce a new release of GNU poke, version 3.1. This is the first bugfix release in the 3.x series. See the file NEWS in the distribution tarball for a list of issues fixed in this release. The tarball poke-3.1.tar.gz is now available athttps://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/poke/poke-3.1.tar.gz. GNU poke (http://www.jemarch.net/poke) is an interactive, extensible editor for binary data. Not limited to editing basic entities such as bits and bytes, it provides a full-fledged procedural, interactive programming language designed to describe data structures and to operate on them. Thanks to the people who contributed with code and/or documentation to this release. Happy poking! – Jose E. Marchesi Frankfurt am Main 17 April 2023

Programming/Development

• I am by no means a Rust expert, and I’m no expert on declarative macros. I was merely solving an issue I had: there was a lot of redundancy in the way my error types were coded. I didn’t want to repeat the same coding patterns all the time, yet the types also seemed too heterogenous for declarative macros. And going with procedural macros wasn’t worth the effort in this case.

• After some experimentation I figured out how declarative macros could work in this scenario after all. I doubt that this approach is very original, and maybe I solved something in a sub-optimal way. I couldn’t find any helpful online sources however, which is why I’m documenting this in my own article. Edit: After publishing this article, I found that the pattern used here is called TT munching.

• From your boss’s perspective it’s the same thing, though: you’re solving a problem for them that they then don’t have to worry about anymore. It’s “I gave that ticket to Anna, she’ll take care of it”, then “I put Anna on it, she’ll implement this with the new junior dev”, then “Anna’s our domain expert there, she says we should do X”, then “Those teams? Yeah, Anna works with them and makes sure they perform well and solve the business problems we have in this area”.

• Most devs are average, but many strong opinions in IT are shared by people that are better than average. Because of this, there is a gap between what most people need, and what they get told to do.

• You may not notice it, but it’s very possible you are making your life more difficult than it should be. To avoid the trap of dealing with more complexity than is good for you, you should always re-calibrate whatever you read and hear to your context. This calls for more introspection than you think.

• I really like using (and making!) programming playgrounds, and I got thinking the other day about how I didn’t have a great list of playgrounds to refer to. So I asked on Mastodon for links to cool playgrounds.

Python

• Django is a powerful Python web framework loaded with many useful built-in features that make building complex web-focused products a lot easier; one such feature is its templating engine.

• The Django templating engine allows you to build reusable and dynamic HTML pages that change based on data passed to the template language. It provides filters that are used to transform data in the HTML templates. Template filters can be used to transform the values of variables and tag arguments.

Leftovers

• Emma Cline’s new novel, The Guest, opens with Alex, a 22-year-old woman, getting ready to dive into the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean. First though, she turns and scans the beach for a moment, taking it in: the “immaculate” sand, the light that “made it all look honeyed and mild,” the infectious yawns of the leisure class, their bodies “tanned to the color of expensive luggage.” Can they tell, she wonders, out there in the land of “unattended bags” and “cars left unlocked,” how hard she’s pretending to be used to all of this? Alex turns back and starts swimming. “In the water,” she decides, “she was just like everyone else.” In the sea, every body relies on the same center of gravity. It is only on land that some swim and others sink, for no discernible reason except that this is how we have ordered things.2

Science

• Those who’ve sent me videos to debunk or comment on know this about me: I rarely watch videos, especially from cranks. If the video is longer than about five or ten minutes, your chances of getting me to watch and comment on it are damned near close to zero (and they’re not so great even if the video is short). The reason is simple and all about me. I find videos to be a highly inefficient way to imbibe information and, when it comes to blogging, an even more inefficient use of my time given that I might have to spend an extra one or even two hours watching the video, stopping to transcribe relevant parts, and the whole thing always ends up taking a lot more time than just doing one of my regular blog posts, which already takes up a lot of time given my tendency towards verbosity. That’s not to say that I don’t occasionally make exceptions to this rule, in particular for antivaccine propaganda movies like VAXXED and The Greater Good, for cancer quackery movies like The Beautiful Truth or the documentary by Eric Merola about Stanislaw Burzynski plus its sequel (and even laetrile!), or even movies about how COVID-19 is a “plandemic.” However, I tend to make fairly rare exceptions to my rule for notable pieces of propaganda that allow me to illustrate larger points.

• Ever looked at Wolfram Alpha and the development of Wolfram Language and thought that perhaps Stephen Wolfram was a bit ahead of his time? Well, maybe the times have finally caught up because Wolfram plus ChatGPT looks like an amazing combo. That link goes to a long blog post from Stephen Wolfram that showcases exactly how and why the two make such a wonderful match, with loads of examples. (If you’d prefer a video discussion, one is embedded below the page break.)

• What these astronomers see is the potential for a new type of telescope that mega-constellations could provide. In a forthcoming proposal that Dr. Burns and his colleagues intend to share with private companies building satellite constellations, they hope that thousands of tiny gamma-ray detectors can hitch a ride into space with the satellites. Taken alone, each individual detector would be weak. But operating together inside a mega-constellation of many thousands of satellites, the power of such a system would rival Swift and Fermi, two gamma-ray observatories in space that are managed by NASA.

Education

• Hall is now featured as one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the year. She took her role during the pandemic and has been based in Chicago for 20 years.

• If you read anything about writing, you can’t avoid running into the advice to simply be consistent. This advice seems simple on the face of it, seems hard when you try it, and really is simple once you get the hang of it.

• On the face of it, the advice is straightforward. If you want to do something, do it consistently, and you will improve. This is the technique behind many programs where you improve by just showing up and over time, you build those physical or metaphorical muscles. It’s hard not to get faster when you run three times a week. It’s hard not to improve your latte art when you pour it every day. Naturally, it’s hard not to improve as a writer when you write every day, every week.

Hardware

• Consider purchasing a charging-only cable from a trusted supplier. Charging-only cables prevent data from sending or receiving while charging.

• A new Commodore C128 cartridge in 2023?  That’s what [idun-projects] set out to do and, as you can see in the video below, did. I did the original C128 hardware design and worked with the amazing team that turned this home computer out in 1985. Honestly, I am amazed that any of them are still working 38 years later, let alone that someone is making new cartridges for it.

• [Oli Wright] is back again with another installation of CRT shenanigans. This time, the target is the humble analog oscilloscope, specifically a Farnell DTV12-14 12 MHz dual-channel unit, which features a handy X-Y mode. The result is the Velociraster, a simple (in hardware terms) Raspberry Pi Pico based display driver.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Luna Abadía, an 18-year-old who served as US Public Delegate at CSW67, states that although banning TikTok “could have benefits on mental health and undo some of the damage it has done to our social infrastructure and democratic processes, such a ban does not come close to addressing the root causes of the issues we are facing.”

• There have been 161 mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year, [...]

• A householder in the US state of Missouri has been charged with shooting a teenager who rang the wrong doorbell while picking up his younger brothers.

• Prosecuting attorney Zachary Thompson said at a news conference that there was a “racial component” to the incident last Thursday night when Andrew Lester twice shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, who is recovering at home after being released from the hospital. But nothing in the charging documents says the shooting was racially motivated, Mr Thompson clarified.

• Senior prosecutors in one of New York’s largest counties have known for years that drunk driving convictions of Spanish-speaking motorists may have been tainted by faulty evidence. But the Westchester District Attorney’s Office failed to investigate until defense attorneys contacted the unit that reviews wrongful convictions.

• From at least 2014 to 2018, records show, New York State Police troopers gave some drivers mistranslated instructions about what it means to refuse a blood alcohol test. Legal experts, including three former prosecutors in Westchester, told ProPublica that those incorrect directions could, at a minimum, confuse or mislead drivers and may have pressured some into a decision that resulted in severe consequences.

• Specifically, the poll found about one in five people report having a family member who was fatally shot. The same share say they have been threatened with a gun. One in six said they have personally witnessed a shooting.

• As bright green plumes of toxic algae spread over Lake Erie in the summer of 2014, suffocating one of the largest lakes on earth, reporter Dan Egan was there. He had arrived in Toledo, Ohio, to investigate what had sickened the water — and how treatment plants might not be able to purify it.

• Indeed, that’s exactly what happened. The day after he returned home to Wisconsin, Toledo warned people to stop drinking, boiling or bathing in tap water. Ohio’s governor declared a state of emergency. And Egan soon published an expansive report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about how we got to a place where people living by such an abundant source of life-giving freshwater could not drink it or even touch it.

• The new report comes less than a day after a shooting that claimed at least four lives in Louisville, Kentucky. Mass shootings have escalated in recent years, reaching a record pace in 2023. There have been at least 146 incidents so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, leaving more than 200 people dead and hundreds more injured.

• About half of all gun-related deaths are suicides, federal data shows. And the suicide rate has also recently increased, reversing years of decline and returning to near-record levels.

• Kaylin Gillis, 20, was traveling through the rural town of Hebron with three other people Saturday night when the group made a wrong turn onto the property.

• They were trying to turn the car around when the homeowner, Kevin Monahan, 65, came out onto his porch and fired two shots, according to Washington County Sheriff Jeffrey Murphy.

• Much of the train’s vinyl chloride freight — which was ultimately incinerated by emergency responders to avert a wider explosion — came from a chemicals plant in La Porte, just outside Houston, Texas, that is run by OxyVinyls, the chemical arm of Occidental Petroleum, according to the shipment records released by the Environmental Protection Agency. The chemicals were on a 1,600-mile journey to an Oxy plant in Pedricktown, N.J., that makes plastic used in PVC flooring.

• The details of the cargo were included in an administrative order filed last month by the E.P.A. that was based on shipment data provided by Oxy and other shippers. Oxy had more than 700,000 pounds of vinyl chloride on the train that derailed, the records show. An E.P.A. official on Monday confirmed the accuracy of the information.

• “Just like the rest of the nation, we are struggling with a multi-facility outbreak of C. auris in southeast Michigan,” she said. “This invasive candida infection can cause very high morbidity and mortality, particularly in patients who are at very high risk, like long-term care facility patients, those in nursing homes, older adults.

• The state health department said Monday about 199 unique patients in Michigan have contracted Candida auris, an emerging fungus that the CDC said “presents a serious global health threat” because it is difficult to identify with standard laboratory procedures, is resistant to anti-fungal drugs and causes outbreaks in hospitals and can lead to “severe illness.”

Proprietary

• In recent years, most large tech corporations have begun pushing anti-racism public relations and touting their donations to Black causes. There is no company more steeped or skilled in this practice than the elder of the group, Microsoft. By deploying fleets of flacks, messaging professionals and hired intellectuals, the company has managed to maintain a pristine image as a “moral leader” of Big Tech, while avoiding and deflecting attention from its deep and sordid history of collaboration with police, prisons, intelligence agencies and militaries.

• Microsoft has been so effective at keeping public attention away from these activities that it has largely avoided the so-called “tech-lash” that’s bruised the reputations of its peers. It owes this success, in no small part, to a large squadron of traditional company spokespersons. But above these employees is a lesser-known Microsoft-funded network of researchers, academics and journalists that operates at the highest levels of public and academic debate, and who together constitute a kind of “shadow” PR operation. This network has generally flown under the radar in recent years, even as some of its members have achieved prominence and even fame.

• It’s time to meet them and see how they function.

• The notorious LockBit ransomware group is apparently developing a piece of malware that can encrypt files on devices running Apple’s macOS operating system. Researchers have analyzed the malware to determine how much of a threat it actually poses.

• NCR is suffering an outage on its Aloha point of sale platform after being hit by an ransomware attack claimed by the BlackCat/ALPHV gang.

• In a statement today, NCR said it detected a “cyber ransomware incident” on April 13 in a single data center, resulting in an outage that affected the “functionality for a subset of its commerce customers.” The company then ticked off a standard list of responses — informing affected customers, implementing its response plan, engaging a third-party cybersecurity company and informing federal law enforcement.

• The BlackCat ransomware has been around since at least November 2021 and its leak website currently lists more than 300 victims. The group has been known to target industrial companies.

• Here we go again. Another NSO-alike, founded in Israel by former government snoops, is selling powerful phone exploits to bad people who, unsurprisingly, use it to do bad things.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, rails, and ruby-rack), Fedora (firefox, ghostscript, libldb, samba, and tigervnc), Mageia (ceph, davmail, firefox, golang, jpegoptim, libheif, python-certifi, python-flask-restx, thunderbird, and tomcat), Oracle (firefox), Red Hat (firefox), Scientific Linux (firefox), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, aws-nitro-enclaves-cli, container-suseconnect, firefox, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, harfbuzz, java-1_8_0-ibm, kernel, liblouis, php7, tftpboot-installation images, tomcat, and wayland), and Ubuntu (chromium-browser, imagemagick, kamailio, and libreoffice).

• On April 11, Cornwall Community Hospital (CCH) in Ottawa reported some “network Issues” and for patients to expect some delays as they worked to restore systems. The hospital’s EHR system was not affected by the attack.

• Another day, another ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) provider, or so it seems. We’ve observed the “Read The Manual” (RTM) Locker gang, previously known for their e-crime activities, targeting corporate environments with their ransomware, and forcing their affiliates to follow a strict ruleset. Is this yet another ransomware gang, or is there more to this gang and their locker than meets the eye? This blog investigates the actor, along with a technical deep dive into their Windows ransomware executable.

• AN INVESTIGATION IS underway into a ransomware attack on a data management company in Northern Ireland that holds data for charities and non-profits, including several organisations working with sexual assault survivors.

• The PSNI has confirmed that it received a report of a cyber incident on 30 March and referred the case to specialist detectives in its Cyber Crime Investigation Team, where enquiries are still ongoing.

• The company, Evide, manages data for its clients, who are charged between £720 and £1,200 a year for its services, according to the company’s website.

• The Data Protection Commission and National Cyber Security Centre have been notified of the breach.

• Over the last several years, LockBit has become one of the most powerful ransomware gangs. While it has focused on Windows, Linux, and virtual host machines, it looks like the group has developed its first ransomware for Macs.

• Discovered by MalwareHunterTeam (via Brett Callow), what seems to be the first ransomware build designed for macOS has surfaced on the web. While it’s not fully clear, it may also be the first time a major ransomware gang is targeting Apple devices.

• Pineland Schools in Vineland, New Jersey, was added to LockBit’s site with some files as proof of claim.

• [...]

• The screencaps provided as proof include an image of a directory that would likely contain a lot of personal information on both students and personnel (233 GB), but if LockBit is claiming they exfiltrated 64 GB, then they did not get all the data represented in that screencap.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• It’s still possible to encounter another problem, which is how the system itself copes when parts of the software model are 32 bits and parts are 64 bits. It is possible for a special Unix systems model of error coding to return a non-zero value. Zero in Unix and C denotes a ‘valid’ return from many tasks and a non-zero return means ‘something unusual happened’. This is, by far, the most likely response from modern systems, and it doesn’t mean that suddenly the entire world drops back to the flared jeans and cheesecloth shirts of the ’70s. Instead, some systems report errors. Some will report errors and quit and some silently quit.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Card payments took over cash as the most dominant form of payment for retail in 2016. By 2021, 85pc of payments were made electronically, through either card payments or bank transfers.

• Nine in 10 people use contactless payments and nearly a third of all UK adults now use mobile payment apps such as ApplePay and GooglePay.

• It is now commonplace for stores in major cities to be cashless.

• In the early days of the pandemic, the NHS contracted Palantir, controversially letting a £23 million ($28 million) contract without competition or prior scrutiny. Since then, the role of Palantir has expanded to extract patient-identifiable data from NHS hospital systems under the Faster Data Flows project.

• Among the uses of Palantir’s Foundry platform highlighted in the Parliamentary release is a project for “strike analysis.” It was a relatively small project, earmarked for just four users, compared with 1,225 looking at the NHS Performance Overview Dashboard and nearly 6,000 using the system for training.

• Pornography websites that don’t require their users in Louisiana to present proof of age, such as by uploading their license, could face fines of $5,000 a day under a bill advancing in the House.

• Lawmakers in the Louisiana House overwhelmingly approved the measure on Monday and sent it to the Senate for consideration. The legislation would allow the state’s Attorney General to investigate and fine pornographic websites that do not comply with the state’s recently enacted age verification law.

• The app encourages children to download it to their phones without telling their parents and use it to “report” people to the State government, including the Department of “Human Services”, which administers the State mental hygiene laws, and of course, the police.

• The app conveniently provides children with the ability to send pictures and video files with their report, but the Google Play description says the app can also just scan the phone and see who your contacts are, read your text messages, and upload the files on your phone all by itself without telling you.

• Despite the rigorous process controls for factories, anyone who has worked on hardware can tell you that parts may look identical but are not the same. Everything from silicon defects to microscopic variations in materials can cause profoundly head-scratching effects. Perhaps one particular unit heats up faster or locks up when executing a specific sequence of instructions and we throw our hands up, saying it’s just a fact of life. But what if instead of rejecting differences that fall outside a narrow range, we could exploit those tiny differences?

Confidentiality

• An audit of KeePassXC has been on the wish list since we started this project over six years ago. Today we are happy to announce the release of an audit conducted by Zaur Molotnikov, an independent security consultant, that was completed on January 19, 2023 against KeePassXC 2.7.4. This audit was conducted free of charge to the KeePassXC Team and the findings and writeup were reviewed for correctness.

Defence/Aggression

• Journalists at the independent news outlet Mediazona studied data in 35 regions across Russia and confirmed that the inmate population in these areas fell by 17,000 people in 2022. The findings corroborate reports that thousands of prisoners have left incarceration since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, often to fight alongside Russian troops as mercenaries in exchange for release.

• Tanks, field artillery, mortars, machine guns; almost any piece of military equipment can be replicated in inflatable form. The Russians, supposed masters of maskirovka, the art of military disguise and trickery, have hot air balloon factories producing inflatables including fighter planes that can be parked in rows to look like busy airbases. There are some issues recreating spindly parts of equipment that stick out, like antennae on radar systems. The Inflatech engineer explains that “for example, a tank cannon is too long and the pressure is not so high, so we have to use some aluminum tubes as supports.” Demand is rising; Inflatech has seen its orders increase by 30% since the start of the war in Ukraine.

• Much of the free world’s response has inevitably focused on conventional war, and rightly so. The aggressor must be defeated on the battlefield, and for that Ukraine needs military support. But Russia is also waging an energy war, an information war and a cyberwar. Democracies need to take steps to defend themselves in all these areas, as well as holding the line to defend a world where rules still apply, and where technology works for, not against, democratic societies. In this regard, there are four things of which we need to take note, and four things all free nations must do.

• Why is the Pentagon budget so high?

• The average U.S. taxpayer in 2022 spent over four times as much on Pentagon contractors than on primary and secondary education, according to the annual Tax Day analysis published in recent days by the Institute for Policy Studies’ National Priorities Project.

• The human rights activist behind the Gulag.net project, Vladimir Osechkin, has released recorded video calls with two former Russian prisoners who fought in Ukraine as commanding officers with the Wagner Group paramilitary cartel. In the conversations, Azamat Uldarov and Alexey Savichev describe numerous atrocities they say they committed against civilians and fellow mercenaries. (At the time of this writing, there is no independent verification that the events they describe actually occurred.)

• When I traveled to Ukraine for research in April, I expected to see a great surge in nationalism as a result of the Russian invasion, and I was not disappointed. As in all wars, public rage has fused with the need of the Ukrainian state and its propaganda machine to motivate and mobilize the population to fight. It is also both traditional and understandable that mendacious Russian propaganda claiming the nonexistence of Ukraine as a genuine nation should be met with the wholesale rewriting of history along Ukrainian nationalist lines; nor was it unexpected that the hatred of Ukraine spewed by much of the Russian media should be met with hatred directed not only at the Russian government and military but also at the Russian people in general.

• Amid the sordid crimes of the American Empire, running from the Mexican-American War under Polk to the Forever Wars that have marked the 21st century, there have been a few brave souls who have stood as the nation’s conscience. These dissidents have repeatedly mounted principled opposition to plunder, torture, and conquest. The roll call of anti-imperialist heroes includes Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, W.E.B. Du Bois, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King Jr., Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, and Barbara Lee.1

• Behind the latest clashes is a struggle for power between General Burhan and Mr Dagalo, and between the complex constellations of political parties, militias, rebel leaders and even foreign powers allied to them. At its heart is a fight over who will control the direction of Sudan’s political transition, which began four years ago with the overthrow of the brutal Islamist regime led by the former dictator Omar al-Bashir.

• We go to Khartoum, Sudan, for an update on fighting that began Saturday between the Sudanese military and a rival paramilitary force that has left at least 97 civilians dead and hundreds more injured. The fighting pits Sudan’s military against a powerful paramilitary group and has dashed hopes of a civilian-led, democratically elected government — a key demand of protesters who led Sudan’s mass mobilizations in 2019 — and sparked fears of civil war. “What should be the priority right now is a ceasefire,” says Sudanese activist Marine Alneel.

• As an armed conflict between Sudan’s military and a paramilitary group intensifies in the capital Khartoum and surrounding areas, Amnesty International on Monday implored the warring factions to protect civilians and ensure access to humanitarian aid.

• The raid sought the senior ISIS Syria leader, an unnamed operational planner responsible for orchestrating attacks in the Middle East and Europe, in a raid that “resulted in the probable death of the targeted individual,” CENTOM said in a statement.

• Celebrating a “freedom-filled weekend,” gun freaks just flocked to another NRA confab – Wall of Guns! Rifles for Two-Year-Olds! Defend Against Radical Lunatics! – to champion their sacred right to add to our bloody carnage. Among a swarm of GOP pols, the Orange Nazi memorably decried yuge gangs of “communist maniacs” attacking “apartment stores” and carting off refrigerators, air conditioners, “fur coats, not fur coats, everything.” No wonder they wanna vote for him.

• The invasion of Ukraine confronted Russian society with the consequences of a decades-long transformation that began, among other things, with Vladimir Putin’s introduction of a new Labor Code. The new labor legislation, passed in December 2001, curtailed the rights of labor unions, contributing to social atomization and to the crumbling of solidarity politics. Historian and political commentator Ilya Budraitskis has been part of Russia’s leftist political scene since the 1990s, engaging in labor union activism and other civic initiatives. Meduza spoke with him about Russia’s wartime left-wing politics, the role of CPRF (Russia’s establishment communist party) in the large picture of the Russian left, the latter’s survival in what Budraitskis calls “the conditions of dictatorship,” and the goals its activists can embrace now to bring about a decentralized, democratic future Russia, where the state will genuinely serve the interests of the majority.

• The end of the Cold War was supposed to usher in a better world. After four decades of struggle, the great battle between liberalism and Bolshevism had ended in the former’s decisive victory. Many in the West hoped that liberalism would now have free rein to shape events around the world. Utopia, at least of a liberal form, was finally within humanity’s grasp.1

• ICC prosecutor general Karim Khan raised millions from NATO states by crafting an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin while freezing investigations into well-documented US and Israeli war crimes. Along the way, he won powerful friends in Washington, London, Kiev — and Hollywood.

Environment

• Or you could read an Atlantic article from April 1962. Written by a Kentucky lawyer named Harry Caudill, “The Rape of the Appalachians” was a broadside against a relatively new method of coal extraction—strip mining—and it managed to predict precisely the environmental catastrophe that befell eastern Kentucky this past summer.

• “By a process which produces huge and immediate profits for a few industrialists, the southern Appalachians are literally being ripped to shreds,” Caudill wrote. “Eventually every taxpayer from Maine to Hawaii will have to pay the cost of flood control and soil reclamation.”

• Air pollution negatively affects every stage of human life, from impairing fetal development and physical as well as intellectual growth during childhood to accelerating bodily and cognitive decline in adulthood.

Energy/Transportation

• In 2020 I wondered if I could run my blog on solar power, being inspired by Low-tech Magazine, doing the same thing (but better)1. The answer was ‘yes’, but only through spring and summer.

• I live in an apartment complex in The Netherlands and my balcony is facing east. This means it only receives direct sunlight from 16:00 onward during spring and summer. Most of the time, the panels only get indirect sunlight and therefore generate just a tiny fraction of their rated performance. The key issue is not solar, but the east-facing balcony (it should ideally be facing south).

• A thermal power plant in the Russian border city of Belgorod caught on fire on Sunday night. In the hours that followed, Telegram channels and local news groups reported that the blaze was a result of a drone attack.

• On the heels of a weekend rally, opponents of a fracked gas expansion project risked arrest Monday by blocking a construction site for a compressor station in New Jersey with signs calling on Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy to “protect West Milford.”

• Environmentalists in Europe and beyond cheered as Germany’s last three nuclear power plants went offline over the weekend, a controversial move the country’s environmental minister hailed as the start of “a new era of energy production.”

• Defenders of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Monday welcomed ExxonMobil’s statement to shareholders that the fossil fuel giant has no plans for drilling in ANWR but also renewed calls for Congress to pass legislation to protect the region once and for all.

• We discuss climate solutions and the need for broad involvement in the fight to avert climate catastrophe with writer and activist Rebecca Solnit and longtime Filipino climate activist Renato “Red” Constantino. Solnit is the co-editor of Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, which features an essay by Constantino about his role in the Paris Climate Agreement titled “How the Ants Moved the Elephants in Paris.” “This is the decade of decision, and we need as many people as possible engaged as fully as possible,” says Solnit.

• It’s been clear for a long time that the world has to move away from fossil energy sources. Decades ago, this seemed impractical, when renewable energy was hugely expensive, and we were yet to see much impact on the ground from climate change. Meanwhile, prices for solar and wind installations have come down immensely, which helps a lot.

• [Steven Gong] is attending the University of Waterloo and found himself with a 1/10th scale F1TENTH autonomous RC car. What better use of a fast RC car with some smarts than to race itself around your computer science building?

Wildlife/Nature

Finance

• U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told the New York Stock Exchange on Monday that his caucus will not pass legislation to raise the debt ceiling unless it includes steep federal spending cuts and work requirements for key aid programs, a position that Democratic lawmakers slammed as dangerous and foolish hostage-taking.

• House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is reportedly set to unveil a proposal Monday morning that would slash federal food aid for millions of people as part of Republicans’ broader plan to avert a debt ceiling crisis of their own making.

• In the cities of the American West, the number of homeless people is at near-historic highs. California is the epicenter of this crisis; fully half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless live here. Once restricted to well-known skid rows, tent encampments are now everywhere: in parks, along thoroughfares, on residential side streets, in parking lots, along freeways and riverbanks, behind restaurants, and near schools and businesses.1

• Three months after the Biden administration unveiled a nonbinding “Blueprint for Renters Bill of Rights” that was applauded by corporate landlords for doing little to rein in unfair rent increases and evictions, a new report by government watchdog Accountable.US showed on Monday that those same property owners reaped enormous profits in 2022 as they demanded more of their tenants’ incomes in rent and excessive fees.

• Ben & Jerry’s workers at the ice cream company’s flagship shop in Burlington, Vermont on Monday filed for a union election amid a wave of organizing efforts at Amazon, Apple, REI, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and other major employers across the United States.

• While millions of households across the United States are scrambling to file — or extend — their taxes by the April 19th deadline, members of our billionaire class are doing a great deal more smiling than scrambling.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• By SP Staff Last week’s Scheer Intelligence podcast featured a headline inspired by the late comedian George Carlin. The headline serves as an excuse to revisit his 2005 HBO special “Life is Worth Losing,” where Carlin includes one of his most iconic bits critiquing America’s consumerism, education, politics and the myth of the American Dream. […]

• Rustyam Abushayev, the mayor of a town in Russia’s Primorsky Krai who was put on Russia’s federal wanted list last month for allegedly committing fraud, said on Telegram that he’s joined the war in Ukraine.

• To be a leftist in the United States is a dispiriting experience, but in the last year one of the more dispiriting things has been to see the attitude of many leftists themselves on a subject of crucial importance: the war in Ukraine. The consensus of the Washington establishment remains that the U.S. must support Ukraine against Russian aggression, in the form of providing enormous amounts of military aid. Progressives in Congress largely share this consensus, having voted for military aid and even cravenly retracted their letter to Biden in October that suggested he pursue diplomacy. Outside the halls of power, too, many leftistseffectively support Washington’s policies. To be sure, they add the qualification that one must also oppose American imperialism—but when they’re supporting a U.S. proxy war that is providing pretexts to increase military spending and expand NATO (an instrument of U.S. power), this is an empty qualification. The sad fact is that there is little vocal advocacy in the U.S. today for the only moral position, namely to engage in immediate negotiations to end this horrific war.

• For quite some time, TikTok has been recruiting former State Department officials to run its operations.

• The problem with Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t just that he’s reactionary or morally bankrupt. It’s that he isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

• Draft legislation designed as a retaliation against the International Criminal Court has won committee approval in Russia’s State Duma, where lawmakers are moving forward with amendments that would introduce felony liability for “assisting in the implementation of decisions by international organizations to which Russia is not a party.”

• As Tennessee’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives prepared to vote on a bill that would allow teachers to carry guns in schools, hundreds of faith leaders and other demonstrators rallied outside the state Capitol in Nashville to protest gun violence and demand lawmakers enact firearm control legislation.

• Ah, remember Parler? They were the first of the “alternative” social media companies targeting the Trumpist crowd, in which I pointed out that their whole “we don’t moderate” schtick wasn’t going to work. The company speed ran the content moderation learning curve faster than most. But even from the beginning, the Trumpists who joined admitted it was just no fun when they couldn’t whine about how victimized they were.

• On February 26, Italy’s Democratic Party (PD) took an unexpected turn to the left. Elly Schlein, an openly bisexual 37-year-old woman who had quit the party eight years earlier, won the primaries and became the first woman to lead it since its inception in 2007. Given Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right agenda, many eyes are on the new PD leader, whom the international press has dubbed “Italy’s AOC.”

• Two years ago, I wrote that white supremacists are remarkably close to restoring Jim Crow, and that America urgently needs a Third Reconstruction to salvage and rebuild a true multiracial democracy. What I saw in the past two years as a member of the 117th Congress, and then as I watched the expulsion of two young Black Democrats from the Tennessee House of Representatives early this month, leaves me with an even greater sense of dread.

• Haiti is still in crisis. Out of the headlines, perhaps, but far from safe, secure, or stable.

• On Friday, Montana’s very silly legislature passed the first law in the nation banning Tiktok. The bill’s title is not subtle: SB 419: Ban tik-tok in Montana (they couldn’t even get the name right).

• “It’s hard to tell time by revolutionary clocks.” That observation by historian Lerone Bennett Jr. in an essay about the turbulent times of the late 1960s is equally apt today when trying to properly understand the dynamics of important political contests such as the 2024 race to replace California’s senior US senator, Dianne Feinstein.

• Facebook said Tuesday that it disabled accounts tied to a project from New York University that analyzed political ads on the social network. The company said researchers collected data from Facebook users without their consent. [joke of this century]

• Federal and provincial privacy commissioners jointly investigated the Cambridge Analytica case starting in 2018. That joint approach raised some concerns, but the final report identified serious privacy violations and included several recommendations for reform, including new measures to ensure “valid and meaningful consent”, greater transparency for users, and oversight by a third-party monitor for five years. Facebook disagreed with the findings and challenged the case in court. In fact, with no order making power under current Canadian privacy law and a federal court approach that examines each privacy case “de novo” – ie. over again – there is no deference given to the Privacy Commissioner’s prior findings as the case must be made from scratch (as an aside, this is one reason why I am less troubled than others by the creation of a Privacy Tribunal in Bill C-27, which likely would be treated with some deference by the courts).

• The case will test whether Fox’s brand of journalism — which includes a long record of spreading falsehoods (such as about where Barack Obama was born) — is legally vulnerable. Today’s newsletter will look at both sides of the case and its broader implications.

• Rival KPMG has also reportedly announced job cuts in the US, while Accenture and McKinsey are among the big names to have announced redundancies in recent months.

• Accenture is slashing 19,000 jobs or roughly 2.5% of staff globally, while McKinsey is reportedly cutting about 1,400 roles or 3% of its employees.

• Pichai added that without guidelines, AI could be abused by bad actors. The technology could be used to quickly create deepfake videos to spread disinformation and could “cause a lot of harm” at a societal scale, he told CBS’s Scott Pelley.

• Elon Musk keeps talking about how he’s saving Twitter, but it’s difficult to see how. He’s made the site much more unstable, has been messing up basically every part of “trust & safety 101,” is now facing a growing number of lawsuits (including many over unpaid bills), has no idea how the site actually works, and has regulators breathing down his neck. And, on the business side, well, it’s not going great. His grand solution to saving Twitter — charging for Twitter Blue — has been a flop, and each new “update” makes him more of a laughingstock. Rather than increasing the value of using Twitter, he’s made it worse by shutting down, or charging ridiculous fees for, API access.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The U.K. government has poured over £25 million into private “counter-disinformation” organisations since January 2018 and four of these are directed by people linked to the British or U.S. foreign policy establishment.

• Yet, while publishing information deriving from these groups, much of it on the Ukraine war, media outlets are failing to inform their readers of these organisations’ ties to the U.K. government.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A concert by the Russian band Naive scheduled for April 19 has been postponed until the spring of 2024, according to the band’s Instagram page. “The new concert date will be announced later. All purchased tickets are valid and do not need to be exchanged,” says the Instagram post. The group did not give a reason for the delay.

• The United Nations human rights chief on Monday condemned a Russian court’s decision to sentence Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian-British dissident who has publicly criticized the invasion of Ukraine, to 25 years in prison after a closed-door trial.

• A Moscow court has sentenced Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza to 25 years in prison, granting prosecutors’ request, the independent outlet Mediazona reported on Monday.

• The sentence given to Vladimir Kara-Murza, an opposition activist and journalist who had urged the American government to impose sanctions on Russian officials, is longer than what is often given for murder in Russia, and greater than the time being served by other imprisoned Putin critics, like Aleksei A. Navalny.

• It represents the latest chilling example of the Kremlin’s wartime repression 14 months after the invasion of Ukraine, and comes less than three weeks after the arrest on espionage charges of Evan Gershkovich, an American correspondent for The Wall Street Journal based in Russia.

• These very public cancellations, in philosophy and elsewhere, understandably grab all the attention. But they aren’t particularly frequent, which gives the impression that academic life chugs along as it should for long periods between outbreaks of intolerance. This essay is about why that impression is wrong. A kind of philosophical cold war prevails during peacetime, stifling debate and memory-holing inconvenient views. I cannot speak for other disciplines, but the fact that this happens in philosophy, with its traditional encouragement of gadflies and skeptics, bodes ill for the academy in general.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• National Association of Broadcasters president and CEO Curtis LeGeyt spoke out on the potential dangers of Artificial Intelligence on Monday at the NAB Show in Las Vegas. “This is an area where NAB will absolutely be active,” he asserted of AI, which is one of the buzziest topics this week at the annual convention. “It is just amazing how quickly the relevance of AI to our entire economy — but specifically, since we’re in this room, the broadcast industry — has gone from amorphous concept to real.”

• With his media platform WikiLeaks, Julian Assange exposed war crimes committed by US and European armies against Iraq and Afghanistan. Once grounds for a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, today his journalistic work is rewarded with a witch-hunt and imprisonment. On the outside, his wife Stella is fighting for his freedom.

• Mr. Gershkovich, 31, was detained by Russian security services in late March and charged with espionage, an accusation that his employer and U.S. officials vehemently deny. While Mr. Gershkovich has been able to meet with Russian lawyers, the State Department had repeatedly called for the Russian authorities to grant consular access.

• India lost 668,400 hectares (ha) of jungles on average between 2015 and 2020, a new report has said.

• The is only second to the scale of deforestation in Brazil, noted the report released last month by Utility Bidder, a UK-based utility costs comparison firm. Brazil lost nearly 1.7 million hectares of forest between 2015-2020, as climate change adversely affected forest growth.

• On April 11, authorities summoned Seif-Ali, editor-in-chief of the state-run news website Didbaniran.ir, and then arrested him and took him to an undisclosed location, according to news reports.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Yarl, 16, had been trying to pick up his 11-year-old twin brothers from a friend’s home but had gone to the wrong street and house. His family’s attorneys, Lee Merritt and Ben Crump, said he was shot twice after he rang the doorbell.

• The jury of three men and six women, which included two Black panelists, returned a “no bill” against the officers, authorities said.

• Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin isn’t done hurting city residents. He may be imprisoned but he’s still costing the city millions of dollars. And these cases aren’t related to the brutal act that saw him charged and convicted for murder.

• Efforts to dud Timor of its oil and gas are still kept secret as today’s justice system still covers up for Howard government machinations 23 years ago. Rex Patrick reports on his journey to reveal the truth and the real reason for the secrecy.

• Most people instinctively know that secret trials carry with them the risk of injustice, but having their suspicion confirmed is problematic because of the very secrecy that gives rise to the suspicion in the first place. However, in a recent dispute in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, where the presiding officer did a last minute reveal, the injustice was left lying in plain sight.

• Gun control advocates were among the progressives calling for criminal charges on Sunday for a Kansas City, Missouri resident who allegedly shot a Black teenager last week when the 16-year-old mistakenly knocked on his door.

• We speak with Ugandan LGBTQ activist Frank Mugisha about a draconian new anti-gay bill the country is on the verge of imposing, which makes it a crime to identify as queer, considers all same-sex conduct to be nonconsensual, and even allows for the death penalty in certain cases. Both the Biden administration and the U.N. secretary-general are urging Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni not to sign the bill into law. Mugisha says anti-LGBTQ measures in Uganda reflect the legacy of British colonialism, which introduced anti-sodomy laws across Africa, as well as the influence of the U.S. religious right. “The homophobia and transphobia we are seeing toward queer and trans people in Uganda is from the West,” says Mugisha, Uganda’s most prominent gay rights activist, who could face decades in prison for “promotion” of homosexuality under the new legislation.

• I met Malcolm Harris once, back in 2011. He was part of an escort of young activists who helped me navigate making a brief address, by means of a “human megaphone,” to the crowd at the People’s Library in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. I’d been living in California, and it was the first time I’d visited the park. Harris and some others steered me in, and afterward we ate Vietnamese food. I was able to place Harris as part of the crowd around a magazine called The New Inquiry. He made an impression.1

Monopolies

• ISPs for years have struck cozy deals with landlords effectively elbowing out competitors and allowing them to create building-by-building broadband monopolies. That stifled competition in turn results in higher costs for access to an essential utility. And while the FCC passed rules in 2007 trying to ban this, the rules were so full of loopholes as to be effectively useless.

Patents

• It is totally unacceptable to strip the competencies of the third seat of the central division of the Unified Patent Court now that it will not go to London but most likely to Milan.

• I recently was thinking back to 1996 and the start of my senior year at Princeton University. Although I was a mechanical & aerospace engineering major, I had become fascinated with AI and so focused my senior thesis on developing a new AI model within the department of electrical and computer engineering. Instead of employing traditional layers, I utilized a fractal metaphor to design the neural networks. The main theoretical advantage of this approach was its potential to offer a deeper understanding of how the network operated, allowing us to peer into the brain and gain insights into its learning process based on the structure created. Furthermore, the model facilitated greater human control and direction.

Trademarks

• The foundation, which steers the memory-safe programming language, had proposed fresh rules on the use of the word Rust and its logo, which included the recommendation that people not use ‘Rust’ in their Rust crate names, eg: vulture-rs would be preferred over vulture-rust. These draft changes triggered a backlash.

Copyrights

• The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has seized around a dozen new domains in its relentless war on pirate IPTV providers. The domains were all taken over during the past few days, but the appearance of a separate domain with unusual characteristics may represent a potential threat to ACE and pirates alike.

• Last year, a U.S. federal court handed a 40-month prison sentence to Gary Bowser. The Canadian pleaded guilty to being part of the Nintendo hacking group “Team Xecuter” and has now served his time. In part due to his good behavior, Bowser got an early release from federal prison. He’s now at the processing center, preparing for his return to Canada.

• So, there you have it, in short. Breaking any digital lock / TPM, without an exception being created during the rule-making every three years, is illegal. Even for fair use cases, like repairing a tractor, or jailbreaking your smartphone. DMCA Section 1201 takes precedence before any “Fair Use” claim.

• You might ask – wait a minute, jailbreaking my iPhone is illegal? Well, it actually used to be, but an exception was created for jailbreaking smartphones and tablets. However, guess what doesn’t have an exception yet: video game consoles. Well, they do have one exception – you can break digital locks, only to replace a broken disk drive, as long as you then put the digital lock back afterwards.

• Nintendo first began targeting the Zelda speedrunner’s YouTube channel on April 6 after he uploaded footage of a Breath of the Wild multiplayer mod he commissioned and released to the public. Despite making videos featuring challenge runs and other modded content for years, it appeared to be the first time Nintendo signaled it took any sort of issue with the content. Morino posted about it on Twitter at the time, criticizing the move and calling on the publisher to reverse its decision.

• He now says Nintendo has done the opposite, proceeding to copyright claim over 20 additional videos spanning his entire content making career. While most of them included the word “mod” in the title, at least one contained just vanilla gameplay with commentary. “These takedowns may have started with modded content, but they’ve spiraled into something else entirely,” Morino said in his latest video.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Superman eventually uncovers the plan and thwarts Webster’s attempt to steal the money. This storyline serves as a commentary on the potential dangers of technology and the importance of ethical behavior in the financial industry.

• I recently thought about how hypocritical it must come across that I am saving plastic waste in other areas of my life like prioritising packagefree, paper or glass containers and only drinking tap water, but also intending to own 18 kilograms of plastic toy bricks that look like a giant castle.

• A few days ago my family was out in the yard enjoying the sunshine, and I noticed the male catkins on the paper birch tree. I’m sure the male catkins were there already, but I just noticed them. So I took a few more photos.

• I grew up in a small town in South Africa, established in 1714 and with a population of 40,000. The weather there is amazing; winters are mild and the summers are hot with an omnipresent South Eastern Breeze that keeps you cool.

• As a kid I would never have imagined I would sit in Canada one day writing a blog on gemini. I had a great childhood and am extremely greatful for the experiences and friends I had in such a crucial time of one’s life. I do enjoy being nostalgic, always have, always will be. I find that music is perfect for experiencing nostalgia, but more on that in later posts.

Technical

• It’s easy but I always have to type the whole command. Moreover, directory name have to be typed twice. I have been doing this for years and on all my *nix machines.

• After 10+ years in the US, it finally happened: someone tried to open a credit card in my name today. I received an email from my bank congratulating me and, fortunately, telling me that the application was “pending”.

• [...]

• Upon arriving there, the person who helped me was also not super useful. All they did was call numbers and hand me the phone, so I had to explain what happened for the 5th, 6th, and 7th time while being transferred around. Some departments told me that since the application was still pending, they couldn’t do anything!

• Eventually, I got sent to the right place. I heard a familiar voice: “Hello, this is Ashley, how can I help?”

• “Hmmm, hi, Ashley… sorry for being rude and not believing you earlier today. I’m at the branch now.”

• She laughed and said she totally understood, then quickly helped me cancel the application and oriented me to freeze my credit.

Internet/Gemini

• If you haven’t been watching been watching the Official Project Gemini news feed, solderpunk is back and has been making some updates. The most recent update has been to the official CAPCOM aggregator and includes adding support for gemisub feeds, and better handling of inactive feeds.

• In my high school and university days, I attended multiple anime conventions a year. I even met my wife through volunteer work at a convention. After 2018, however, a combination of personal events, the COVID-19 pandemic, and evolving interests led us not to attend any anime conventions for three years. Last weekend we visited Anime Boston with a friend, and I had the best time I’ve had at an anime convention in almost a decade.

• 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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