● 04.20.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 20/04/2023: KDE Gear 23.04 and RISC-V Supercluster for Very Low Cost

Posted in News Roundup at 6:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Applications

• Looking for an RSS feed reader that should aggregate content from your favorite websites, blogs, podcasts, and YouTube videos, then let me show you the right RSS feed reader for you.

Instructionals/Technical

• Outcome:

• Server automatically suspends to RAM when idle

• Server automatically wakes when needed by anything else on the network, including SSH, Time Machine backups, etc.

• You can criticize the API here for being stringly typed, but I think that it’s actually natural to do something like that, especially if you’re initially designing the API in the old world, before “rsa-sha2-256″ and when “ssh-rsa” was the (only) key algorithm you used with ‘ssh-rsa’ keys. In that world, the official names of key types and key algorithms were the same; making them two separate programming types and forcing people to explicitly convert between them is likely to strike people as perverse. Do you want to write or even have to use a function that converts ‘keytype.Ed25519′ into ‘keyalgo.Ed25519′? Most people are going to say no. Just call it ‘Ed25519′ and be done.

• This section will show you how to change your user’s password without leaving the Raspberry Pi’s desktop interface.

• Fedora 38 has been released!! This step by step tutorial explains how to upgrade to Fedora 38 from Fedora 37 and older versions. If you’re already using Fedora 37, you can now safely upgrade to Fedora 38 desktop or server edition for latest features, performance and stability improvements.

Games

• POSTAL 2 from Running With Scissors just had a big upgrade for the 20th anniversary and there’s lots of improvements to this classic violent first-person adventure.

• Fusing together the best elements of deckbuilders and tactical turn-based battles, Takara Cards is a little unusual to get into but full of charm to keep you wanting more. It feels like an evolved idea from their previous game, NEXT JUMP: Shmup Tactics, which was also a lot of fun.

• Seems like the next update for Godot Engine is going to be a nice one for game developers, with multiple graphics enhancements on the way. Detailed in a new blog post they revealed some of the focus for Godot 4.1, now that the dust has began to settle on the huge Godot 4.0 release that provided Vulkan support.

• HYPERCHARGE: Unboxed is a shooter all about toys, a bit like the classic movie Small Soldiers and back in late March, it had a huge free upgrade. Honestly, this would have been my dream game to play through growing up. With movies like Small Soldiers and Toy Story, I probably would have had a tiny heart attack of excitement seeing this.

• Europa Universalis IV: Domination is the latest expansion for the popular strategy game from Paradox Interactive and there’s also a free update for all players.

• Doom has a larger cultural footprint than the vast majority of video games ever made. That inspired [Theor] to see if it was possible to laser-cut some of the game’s maps to create a real-world model of those famous original levels.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Gear 23.04 brings much-needed updates to the Dolphin file manager like the ability to configure how permissions are shown in the Details view, support for browsing Apple iOS devices using the native afc:// protocol, the ability to run it in superuser mode, and support for showing a document’s number of pages in the metadata display.

• The Gwenview image viewer has been beefed up for the Plasma Wayland session allowing users to zoom in and out on images using touchpad pinch gestures, the ability to inhibit sleep and screen locking during a slideshow, more reliable rotating of images, and smooth zooming when using Ctrl + scroll on a touchpad.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• This article shows you how to install HAProxy on OpenVMS 9.2 for x86. I’ve often used HAProxy in my career as a sysadmin and find it a very useful tool. HAProxy is an open source, fast, reliable load balancer for TCP and HTTP-based applications. This guide assumes you’ve set up your OpenVMS system via my guide and the second part of my guide, that will give you a fully licensed OpenVMS installation with networking and SSH access. Since I’ve used HAProxy so very often to set up high-available clusters and load balancers, I was surprised but happy to see it ported to OpenVMS. This guide shows the setup but also a few OpenVMS specific quirks, like file paths and troubleshooting error messages / logs.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Are you ready for this year’s openSUSE Conference? It will once again take place at the Z Bau, which was converted into a cultural center in 2014.

• The conference schedule is now online abd live every year, and is packed with tons of great talks. It’s a great place to do some hacking, socializing and learning new things about openSUSE and open-source software.

Fedora Family / IBM

• The developers of Fedora Linux have gifted us with yet another stellar release, by way of number 38. It’s a surprise, given the team rarely delivers early but it’s certainly an early gift from a dedicated team.

• Fedora 38 stars GNOME 44 and Linux kernel 6.2. The version of GNOME used in Fedora is straight-up standard, so there are zero changes made by the Fedora team.

• Some of the new features found in GNOME 44 include expandable folders in the Files file manager as well as the icon/thumbnail mode for the file picker.

Debian Family

• The WIPO UDRP verdict is 12 pages long and surrounded by a lot of ugly noise. The Debian cabal’s interpretation sounds like a pack of dogs barking at a cat who is sitting in the tree. Is there any signal in the noise?

Devices/Embedded

• The Kolibri is a USB dongle that integrates the Lattice iCE40 FPGA, a RP2040 microcontroller and a PMOD connector for I/O expansion. The compact device is also compatible with the Open Source Project IceStorm.

• BIGTREETECH revealed a Single Board Computer integrating the Allwinner H616 System-on-Chip. The embedded device mirrors the Raspberry Pi SBC form-factor and it provides similar peripherals.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Initially, Murphy had researched constructing a pump that could take water from a pair of rain storing barrels and deliver it to the garden bed. However, this would have been costly to build and maintain, so he instead went with a gravity-fed setup. In this configuration, gravity would move water down-slope to a solenoid valve attached to the Arduino IoT Explorer Kit’s 24V relay pin. Once wired together, he added a soil moisture sensor for measuring the water content of the soil, along with a 12V battery pack and solar charge controller for off-grid power.

• As ARM continues to make inroads in the personal computing space thanks to its more modern and streamlined instruction set architecture (ISA) and its reduced power demands especially compared to x86 machines, the main reason it continues to become more widespread is how easy it is to get a license to make chips using this ISA. It’s still not a fully open source instruction set, though, so if you want something even more easily accessible than ARM you’ll need to find something like these chips running the fully open-source RISC-V ISA and possibly put them to work in a custom supercluster.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Kubernetes

• With the release of Kubernetes v1.27 the ReadWriteOncePod feature has graduated to beta. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at this feature, what it does, and how it has evolved in the beta release.

Mozilla

• Welcome to a brand new feature called “Meet The Team!” In this ongoing series of conversations, I introduce you to the people behind the software you use every day. We kicked things off by talking to Thunderbird’s Product Design Manager Alex Castellani. Now let’s meet someone much newer to the team: Wolf-Martell Montwe.

• Having recently joined us from Berlin as a full-time Android developer, Wolf brings his passion for building mobile applications to the Thunderbird team. He’ll be helping to develop new features and an updated interface for K-9 Mail as we transform it into Thunderbird for Android. I spoke with him about his first computer and early gaming memories, what he hopes to accomplish for the Thunderbird mobile app, and how our community of contributors can help.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• Drupal 10 was released in December 2022. If you’re a current Drupal 9 user, you may be strategizing your website’s Drupal 9 to 10 migration. Luckily, the Drupal 9 to 10 migration is being heralded as the easiest upgrade in Drupal’s history. That’s because Drupal 10 is backward-compatible with Drupal 9 and is not a major overhaul of the core system. But the planning and development process still requires time and attention to ensure the migration goes smoothly.

• This article takes a deep dive into the Drupal migration process and how your organization’s marketing team can provide support along the way.

Education

• The APNIC 56 Program Committee (PC) is seeking presentations, panel discussions, lightning talks, and tutorials — particularly content that would suit technical sessions — for the APNIC 56 conference to be held in Kyoto, Japan from 12 to 14 September 2023.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• The sharing economy is a new industry built around sharing resources  instead of buying things new from a factory. If an asset is not being used to capacity by the owner, there may be others who can use it so the asset is utilized to its full potential. The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism, by Arun Sundararajan, gave me many new insights about this business model and how it relates to many open organization activities.

Programming/Development

• There are a thousand programming languages out there (Literally, it seems, according to people who actually count such things.) A classification of so many species is bound to be complex and subject to much debate. However messy and controversial things get low down in the classification, let’s have just four branches at the top level. I attach to the name of the class of programming language what I consider to be the first exemplar of the class, in chronological order:

• — imperative (1956, Fortran)

• — functional (1959, Lisp)

• — object-oriented (1972, Smalltalk)

• — logic (1974, Prolog)

• This post explores the enhanced type-based optimizations and the other performance improvements in Erlang/OTP 26.

• Thankfully, C++ now has the equivalent to a Go or Java interface, and it is called a concept (it requires a recent compiler with support for C++20). You would implement it as so…

Python

• Open source tools have been instrumental in advancing technology and making it more accessible to everyone. Data analysis is no exception. As data becomes more abundant and complex, data scientists always look for ways to simplify their workflow and create interactive and engaging visualizations. PyGWalker is designed to solve such problems.

• PyGWalker (Python binding of Graphic Walker) connects a working environment of Python Jupyter Notebook to Graphic Walker to create an open source data visualization tool. You can turn your Pandas dataframe into a beautifully crafted data visualization with simple drag-and-drop operations.

Leftovers

• These billionaires seem to care more about their bottom lines than fan safety.

Science

• A few weeks ago, we looked at a video showing water “solving” a maze. [AlphaPhoenix] saw the same video, and it made him think about electrons “finding the path of least resistance.” So can you solve a maze with foil, a laser cutter, a power supply, and some pepper? Apparently, as you can see in the video below.

Education

• Institutions of higher education in the United States are in crisis. Essential research is suffering. Highly qualified instructors lack job security and struggle to make ends meet. Students graduate saddled with debt. Public universities, the backbone of our system of higher education, have been starved of funding. Recently though, a ray of hope, in the form of a series of innovative strikes launched by segments of the higher education faculty at universities around the US, has emerged from the debacle. Most recently, last week’s tentative victory in a strike of the three faculty unions at Rutgers University in New Jersey has shown a way forward. At the three Rutgers campuses, graduate employees, adjunct instructors, non-tenure-track professors, tenured faculty, and others had been working without a contract since July 2022. Although represented by different unions, they faced down together the administration’s threats of court injunction to secure a victory against the short-term contracts and low wages that have long bedeviled American colleges and universities.

• The library’s homegrown system has been replaced with ArcLight, an open-source system widely used by academic libraries and archives.

• Finding aids describe the contexts of archival collection boxes or folders, and help researchers discover and request the materials relevant to their work for viewing in designated reading rooms.

• Remote learning. If you have kids and are at all familiar with the ebbs and flows of the remote education process, you probably realize it kind of sucks, that for all of its innovation, it puts distance between learners and educators—which is a good thing when you’re dealing with a once-in-a-century disease, but not so great when you’re trying to maximize the learning process. Nonetheless, when you get a distance from that learning process, remote education can feel extremely innovative, even in its most rudimentary forms. Distance learning is something that, when it first emerged, felt like a new frontier—even at a time when that frontier admittedly was a bit limited compared to what we have today. Especially when all we had to push it forth was the radio dial. Today’s Tedium tries its best to capture the excitement of educational radio in the 1920s and 1930s—even though, in a world of podcasts, we’d probably take it for granted today. — Ernie @ Tedium

Hardware

• The White House is preparing to take unprecedented action to limit US investments in China’s tech sector, POLITICO reported on Tuesday. The action would come in the form of an executive order signed by President Biden that would require American companies to notify the government of new investments in Chinese tech. It […]

• After a long production run, AMD will accept last orders for the SOC used in our apu2/3/4/5/6 boards by end of June 2023.

• From around 2012 onwards, there was a 3D viewing and VR renaissance in the entertainment industry. That hardware has grown in popularity, even if it’s not yet mainstream. However, 3D tech goes back much further, as [Nicole] shows us with a look at Sega’s ancient 8-bit 3D glasses [via Adafruit].

• [Old Alaska] had a problem. He needed a second remote for his apartment garage door, but was quoted a fee in the hundreds of dollars for the trouble of sourcing and programming another unit. Realizing this was a rip-off given the cheap hardware involved, he decided to whip up his own sneaky solution instead.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Almost 120 million people–or more than a third of the U.S. population–are exposed to unhealthy levels of ozone or particulate matter pollution where they live.

• Fifty-four percent of young Americans would become an influencer if given the chance. This statistic, from a 2019 Morning Consult report, has made the rounds and been profusely ridiculed by people online. But if you look a little deeper, this desire reflects a deep economic pessimism on the part of Gen Z. A 2022 survey found that 23 percent of the generation never expects to retire, while 59 percent does not own or expect to own a home in their lifetime, numbers that were higher than for any other generation surveyed. Gen Z was also more likely to work multiple jobs and do independent work, despite many of them wanting more permanent roles.

• Second, in what has unfortunately been an under-discussed risk, TikTok could continue to skew its video recommendations in line with the geopolitical goals of the CCP. This threat continues to worsen as more and more people get their news and information from online platforms such as TikTok over which the Chinese party-state can control, curate and censor content.

• There’s ample evidence that TikTok has done this in the past. Leaked content moderation documents have previously revealed that TikTok has instructed ‘its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong’, among other censorship rules. TikTok insists that those documents don’t reflect its current policy and that it had since embraced a localised content moderation strategy tailored to each region.

• Since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, wounded civilians and soldiers who were initially stabilized in Ukrainian and Polish hospitals have been transferred to neighboring countries for further treatment. Between March and December last year, 47 patients from Ukraine were treated at the Musculoskeletal Surgery Center at the Charité-Berlin University of Medicine.

• In the past few years, many dangerous trends had kids falling prey to online games and challenges that caused them grievous harm and claimed their lives. One such was a Blue Whale challenge, alleged to be linked to numerous deaths worldwide. A similar challenge took a life of a 13-year-old boy, Jacob Stevens, from Ohio, US. The boy tragically died after overdosing on over-the-counter medication while attempting a viral TikTok trend called ‘Benadryl Challenge’. As per reports, Jacob Stevens ingested 12-14 pills of Benadryl while his friends shot the video. This challenge encourages viewers to take large doses of the antihistamine to “experience hallucinations”.

• The life-threatening challenge urges viewers to take as many as 12 tablets at a time to experience hallucinations. It is to be noted that the maximum allowed dose in a 24-hour period is six tablets for children 6 to under 12 years of age and 12 tablets for adults and children over 12 years of age. Taking more than the recommended amount can lead to nausea, seizures, or even death.

• For years, U.S. pharmaceutical companies have relied on drugs produced overseas to meet Americans’ medical needs. And for years, it’s been clear that federal drug regulators couldn’t keep up with inspections of the plants that made those drugs.

• But a series of recent deaths linked to eyedrops produced overseas that were tainted with bacteria points to just how seriously behind the Food and Drug Administration is. Three people died and eight others were blinded in the United States from the drops, which were made in a plant in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu that the agency had never inspected prior to the outbreak. Worse, public health officials say they have detected the drug-resistant bacterial strain, which had never been seen in the U.S., among patients who never used the eyedrops, meaning it has likely achieved community spread.

• Unbeknownst to most people with loved ones in nursing homes, it’s often nearly impossible to determine if the facility you’ve entrusted your family member to is owned by a private equity firm–an ownership structure that has been shown to result in worse health outcomes for patients, at greater cost. Within the past two decades, the once-obscure private equity industry has ballooned in size from $1 trillion in 2008 to nearly $4.5 trillion in 2021. Millions of people in the United States have been directly impacted by an industry that was once known mostly to finance insiders like institutional investors and financial journalists.

• A ban on evictions. Required paid leave. Continuous Medicaid coverage. Free school meals. Emergency SNAP allotments. An extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits. Child tax credit expansion. Thousands in stimulus checks. These measures were part of a suite of policies the US government passed […]

• Why Depleted Uranium Should Have No Place There.

• It seems as though Neil deGrasse Tyson‘s massive error in agreeing to debate antivax propagandist Del Bigtree on his home ground (namely his The Highwire podcast) is the blogging gift that keeps giving, both from people defending his decision but, far more, from antivaxxers who approve of it and use it as a cudgel to attack skeptics and science communicators like me (i.e., the ones who refuse to debate cranks and science deniers on general principles). One such science communicator is Timothy Caulfield, a professor of law at the University of Alberta and the research director of its Health Law Institute, and one such science denying antivaxxer upset at such science communicators is Dr. Byram Bridle, who dropped an article on his Substack yesterday entitled We Need to Follow the Science of Our ‘Misinformation’ ‘Experts’. In it, Dr. Bridle, in an act of projection typical of cranks like him, accuses Caulfield of “misinformation” and not “following the science,” because of course he does.

• United Nations humanitarian officials on Tuesday renewed warnings that as many as 48 million people across West and Central Africa will likely go hungry in the coming months due to severe food insecurity driven by armed conflict, Covid-19, inflation, and the worsening climate emergency.

• Hundreds of millions of people throughout Asia are suffering Wednesday as a deadly heatwave turbocharged by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis continues to pummel large swaths of the continent, with little relief in sight—reigniting calls for immediate action to slash greenhouse gas pollution.

Proprietary

• SR stated that it has for a long time de-prioritised its presence on Twitter and has now decided to stop being active on the platform together. It attributed its decision to quit Twitter due to a loss of relevance to Sweden’s audience, claiming that the audience has simply chosen other places to be. As a result, SR chose to deactivate or delete its remaining accounts.

• The state’s second-largest insurer suffered large technical outages due to a cybersecurity ransomware incident.

• “There are many digital signatures of Microsoft products in the leak. Many of them have not been recalled,” the gang continued. “Go ahead and your software will be the same level of trust as the original Microsoft product.”

• Obviously, this could be a dangerous level of trust to give miscreants developing malware. Below is Callow’s summary of the purported dump of source code presumable obtained or stolen somehow from Microsoft.

• Announced earlier this week, the contract is set to provide a licensing subscription service for Microsoft, or equivalent, products and incorporates a number of product suites used by the DWP, including Office 365, Windows and Server products.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• You know you’re fucked when the only way out of your current SEO/PR nightmare is to distance yourself… well, from yourself. Some of this predates Google’s search engine stranglehold. But altering public perception sometimes means hoping someone will look at your shiny new logo, rather than your disturbing past.

• The complaints arose from accusations that Facebook allowed political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to access the personal data of 87 million Facebook users, information the firm allegedly used to target voters with political ads, both on and off Facebook, during the 2016 election seasons in the US and UK.

Defence/Aggression

• About 45% of Africa’s 1.3 billion people have [Internet] access. Nigeria has the continent’s largest number of internet users at more than 109 million and is one of the countries in Africa most frequently targeted for cyberattacks.

• “Every day, people play games set in conflict zones right from their couch. But right now, armed conflicts are more prevalent than ever,” the website said. “And to the people suffering from their effects, this conflict is not a game. It destroys lives and leaves communities devastated. Therefore, we’re challenging you to play FPS by the real Rules of War, to show everyone that even wars have rules—rules which protect humanity on battlefields IRL.”

• Referencing the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, which was also abetted by social media giants, Arduini added that “we’ve now seen this happen in two of the world’s [...]

• Somalia’s Deputy Minister of Information, Abdirahman Yusuf Al-adala, recently gave a startling update on the country’s war against the powerful and deeply embedded al-Qaida-linked extremist insurgency it has fought since 2006.

• Leaked U.S. intelligence documents have exposed Western disinformation about Ukraine winning the war. Now the heavy fighting moves to Washington, writes Joe Lauria.

• The U.S. corporate media’s first response to the leaking of secret documents about the war in Ukraine was to throw some mud in the water, declare “nothing to see here,” and cover it as a depoliticized crime story about a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who published secret documents to impress his friends. President Biden dismissed the leaks as revealing nothing of “great consequence.”

• For several years, Ghana has been preparing for terror groups expanding southward from the Sahel. Groups aligned with al-Qaida and the Islamic State group have intensified attacks in the northern parts of Gulf of Guinea states, including Benin, Côte d’Ivoire and Togo.

• Bawku also has seen more than 4,000 refugees from Burkina Faso settle in nearby camps after fleeing extremist violence across the border.

• The government already has acknowledged that terrorist groups operating in West Africa are recruiting Ghanaians.

• Two years ago, Joe Biden’s agenda signaled that the Democratic Party wing of our governing class was finally ready to face the long-­accumulating economic, political, and social crises facing the country. It was never going to be easy. The costs of transition to a secure and prosperous future are enormous—and it is a task of decades.

• Leaked Pentagon documents revealed the US and other NATO members have US special operations forces inside Ukraine.

• The school shooting in Columbine, Colo., 24 years ago should have marked a turning point for gun policy in the United States. But as the nation reels from yet another deadly attack in 2023—this time in Nashville, leaving six dead—it’s clear that when it comes to the safety of our children, the US is headed in the wrong direction. In fact, 2022 was a record-breaking year, with 46 incidents. As of April 6, 377 school shootings have taken place since Columbine, according to The Washington Post.

• Seventy years ago this month, on April 16, 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave an historic address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors titled “The Chance for Peace.” The speech offered a searing indictment of the policies of nuclear buildups and excessive military spending:1Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.2

• “It is time,” President Biden announced in April 2021, “to end the forever war” that started with the invasion of Afghanistan soon after the tragic terror attacks on this country on September 11, 2001. Indeed, that August, amid chaos and disaster, the president did finally pull the last remaining US forces out of that country.

• FSB officers detained a resident of Kerch, who is suspected of planning to sabotage energy infrastructure in Crimea. The FSB reports that the suspect holds both Russian and Ukrainian citizenship.

• Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Interior Ministry’s internal security division are conducting a joint inquiry into the data leaks allegedly enabled by the Moscow police. The news outlets Baza, TASS, and RBC all report on the inspections now taking place across police departments in Moscow’s Central Administrative District.

• On April 14, Vladimir Putin signed a law that allows the Russian military to issue draft summonses electronically, closes the country’s borders to draftees who don’t report for service, and deprives “draft evaders” of numerous rights. Unlike the president’s mobilization announcement in September, the new legislation didn’t provoke an especially strong reaction inside Russia, and there’s no sign that draft-eligible citizens are leaving the country en masse. Meduza asked our readers who plan to stay in Russia to explain how they feel about the new policies — and why they’re not convinced they need to go abroad. We’re publishing some of the most notable responses below.

• The State Duma’s Security Committee chair Andrey Kartapolov says this spring’s conscription drive will involve a test distribution of electronic summonses. The deputy claims that these digital notices will not be legally binding for the recipients.

Environment

• Jerry Mander died recently in Hawaii after a long illness, according to his wife, the filmmaker Koohan Paik-Mander.

Energy/Transportation

• $100 billion: How much FTX was willing to pay the celebrated singer-songwriter. They had reached the late stages of negotiating a sponsorship deal a little before the [cryptocurrency] exchange crumbled last November. A report in Rolling Stones cites an anonymous source saying Swift “would not, and did not, agree to an endorsement deal,” but smaller-scale partnerships, like a ticketing arrangement involving NFTs for her Eras Tour, was on the table. But she turned that down, too.

• How much energy do Bitcoin mines use?

• A lot. The biggest Bitcoin mine in the U.S. — operated by Riot Platforms in an abandoned Alcoa aluminum smelting plant in Rockdale, Texas, about an hour outside of Austin — uses the same amount of electricity as the nearest 300,000 homes, the Times reports. Add in the Bitdeer mine about a mile away, and Rockdale’s Bitcoin mines use more power than all the houses in a 40-mile radius.

• A 1 megawatt mine consumes more energy per day than a typical U.S. home does in two years. Lee Bratcher, president of Bitcoin lobbying group the Texas Blockchain Council, estimates that Bitcoin miners use about 2,100 MW of power in Texas each day, while the Texas state comptroller’s office said cryptocurrency mining operations consume 3,000 MW.

• Leader of the House of Commons Penny Mordaunt and Conservative MP Liam Fox have each received £10,000 from companies owned by a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – one of the UK’s leading climate science denial groups.

• New parliamentary records show that Mordaunt received £10,000 on March 28 from the management consultancy First Corporate Consultants. The firm is owned by Terence Mordaunt, a director at the GWPF who served as its chair from April 2017 to November 2019.

• The Environmental Protection Agency’s Administrator Michael Regan announced a new proposed rule to govern toxic chemical air emissions at an April 6 press conference choreographed to have the Denka Performance Elastomer Plant, a synthetic rubber manufacturing facility in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, as a backdrop.

• The Denka plant is located next to the Mississippi River in the middle of an 85-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans lined with chemical plants and refineries that President Joe Biden referred to as “Cancer Alley” when he rolled out his environmental policy, is one of many that will be subjected to new regulations included in the proposed rule, if it is finalized and enacted.

• A best-case scenario in which the United Kingdom fully transitions to renewable energy with no nuclear generation would save more than £100 billion—over $124 million—toward achieving net-zero by 2050 and produce 20% fewer carbon emissions, an analysis published this week concludes.

Wildlife/Nature

• Watching an anthill brings an air of fascination. Thousands of ants are moving about and communicating with other ants as they work towards a goal as a collective whole. For us humans, we project a complex inner world for each of these tiny creatures to drive the narrative. But what if we could peer down into a miniature world and the ants spoke English? (PDF whitepaper)

Overpopulation

• Radhia Essamin, from the Tunisian Water Observatory, said the decision to cut the water supply was not surprising, given the country’s worrisome water shortage. But it should have been handled differently, she said, notably with a campaign so people could prepare themselves ahead of time.

• “That is why we consider these measures incomplete. Before taking any measures, the citizen must be … made aware of the importance of water rationing,” she said. “A booklet should have been published [explaining] water consumption, storage, timing, and the quantity allowed to be stored.”

• Instead, India addressed its fears of overpopulation and reduced the growth rate through more organic and gradual ways, including serious efforts to promote contraception and smaller families. As mass education has spread, especially among girls and women, the fertility rate has dipped to just above the level required to maintain the current population size.

• In agricultural regions, decades’ worth of fertilizers applied to orchards and row crops, and tons of cow manure stored in ponds, releases nitrogen into the ground. As much as 40% of nitrogen in fertilizer may eventually enter groundwater supplies.

• Thousands of households have wells contaminated with nitrate. For public water systems, about one in every 10 water samples collected from 20,000 wells in the Tulare Lake Basin and the Salinas Valley exceeded the drinking water standard for nitrate, according to a 2012 UC Davis report to state officials. But the full scope of the problem is unknown, partly because Central Valley residents have an estimated 150,0000 private drinking water wells, which are not routinely monitored for pollutants.

• The Collins’ Reddit habits, at least under those usernames, have died down in recent years; they’re busy seeding the earth, after all. But a true poster never retires. They’re still on Twitter, posting as a joint account, defending their ideas by praising the fascist Terran Federation from Starship Troopers.

Finance

• Billions for AUKUS submarines are not a good look in light of Welfare Report showing rising poverty. Ben Phillips reports on Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ Budget conundrum.

• Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth established an Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee in December 2022 to advise the government on ways to lift economic inclusion and reduce disadvantage.

• As working-class households continue to struggle amid a cost-of-living crisis driven largely by corporate profiteering, a new investigation shows that large companies operating in the United States have paid nearly $100 billion in fines and settlements since 2000 “to resolve allegations of covert price-fixing and other anti-competitive practices in violation of antitrust laws.”

• Our guest Hannah Dreier, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The New York Times, has published a bombshell new investigation headlined “As Migrant Children Were Put to Work, U.S. Ignored Warnings.” It reports that the Biden administration has repeatedly ignored or missed warnings about a surge of migrant children as young as 12 working in factories across the United States under grueling and often dangerous working conditions in serious violation of child labor laws. “People were punished for bringing this to the attention of their supervisors,” says Dreier.

• As corporate interests continue to attack Julie Su, dozens of progressive organizations on Wednesday pressured a U.S. Senate panel to swiftly advance the labor secretary nominee, who “has devoted her life to fighting for workers’ rights, holding exploitative employers accountable, leveling the playing field for high-road employers, and doing pioneering work to protect the most vulnerable of workers.”

• Research published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that poverty was linked to at least 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019 among people aged 15 or older, making inadequate income the nation’s fourth-leading mortality driver that year behind heart disease, cancer, and smoking.

• An alliance of senior advocacy groups, progressive organizations, and labor unions demanded Wednesday that Congress quickly approve legislation to increase the debt limit without any conditions, warning the House GOP’s pursuit of steep spending cuts is risking an “economic calamity” and imperiling key benefits.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• As anyone who has tried ChatGPT will know, at the bottom of each response is an option to ask the AI system to “regenerate response”. Despite increasing pressure on the government to move ahead with Bill C-27’s Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA), the right response would be to hit the regenerate button and start over. AIDA may be well-meaning and the issue of AI regulation critically important, but the bill is limited in principles and severely lacking in detail, leaving virtually all of the heavy lifting to a regulation-making process that will take years to unfold. While no one should doubt the importance of AI regulation, Canadians deserve better than virtue signalling on the issue with a bill that never received a full public consultation.

• As you likely know, Elon Musk has been shilling Twitter Blue as his plan to save Twitter since basically four hours after he took over the company. In theory, pushing Twitter Blue was a good idea. Twitter Blue was the plan to offer a premium service to loyal Twitter users by upselling them on some useful premium features. It existed pre-Musk, but the company had never done a particularly good job marketing it (you can say that about many of old Twitter’s services).

• “We’re not at that point yet,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told HuffPost when asked if he’s considering scrapping the so-called “blue slip courtesy”—a non-binding rule that Republicans tossed aside for circuit court nominees when they last controlled the Senate.

• Before the recent mass shootings, Louisville, Ky., was best known for bourbon, baseball bats, and horse racing. The races can sometimes surprise you. Just last year, an unknown horse named Rich Strike—with the second-longest odds against him in the Kentucky Derby’s entire 147-year history—finished ahead of an elite field. In another upset, in this right-to-work state where only 7.9 percent of the workforce are covered by union contracts, the members of Local 1447 of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) beat back racist divide-and-conquer proposals by management last November to win a great contract. But their victory relied on method—not luck.

• As pressure grows on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to resign over his decades-long relationship with a billionaire benefactor, we speak with legal journalist Adam Cohen, who says there is a precedent that should guide lawmakers in how to address the growing scandal. In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas was forced to resign after his financial relationship came to light with businessman Louis Wolfson, who paid Fortas to consult for his foundation. Fortas was a Democratic appointee, but the scandal led to a bipartisan call for his resignation — even though his replacement would be named by Republican President Richard Nixon and shift the balance of the court. Cohen writes in a guest essay for The New York Times that the strong, bipartisan outrage against Fortas “is both a blueprint for how lawmakers could respond today and a benchmark of how far we have fallen.”

• Calls continue to grow for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to step down or to be impeached, after ProPublica uncovered more damning information about his relationship with Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. According to the new report, Thomas and his family sold a house and two vacant lots in Savannah, Georgia, to Crow for around $130,000 but never disclosed the sale, which appears to be a violation of the 1978 Ethics in Government Act. In addition to being a major benefactor to Thomas and the GOP, Crow is also an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia, including a copy of Mein Kampf signed by Hitler, paintings by Hitler, Nazi medallions, swastika-embossed linens, and a garden filled with statues of 20th century dictators. We speak to Justin Elliott, a reporter for ProPublica who helped break the story.

• In Moscow, investigators arrested Russia’s former deputy minister of culture, Olga Yarilova, for allegedly embezzling over 200 million rubles (around $2.5 million) while participating in a project called the Pushkin Card. TASS, citing a source in law enforcement, and the Telegram channel 112 both reported on the case.

• In 2011, after grossly falsified parliamentary elections triggered mass protests and a wave of political arrests in Russia, journalist Grigory Okhotin and software engineer Daniil Beilinson began publishing data about nationwide political persecutions. The project, dubbed “OVD-Info,” is now one of Russia’s key civil-liberties advocacy organizations, providing both information and pro-bono legal services to people faced with real or potential political persecution. After more than a decade of observing protest dynamics in the country, Okhotin is convinced that depriving citizens of basic rights threatens not only the country’s well-being but also the safety and prosperity of the outside world. In an essay for Meduza, Okhotin reflects on more than two decades of Putin’s policies and explains how the consistent erosion of the Russians’ political rights ultimately resulted in the invasion of Russia’s closest neighbor, Ukraine.

• Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been spending plenty of time out of state as he promotes his book and continues his maybe run for president. He signed an unpopular six-week abortion ban just before 11 pm Thursday, then headed to Liberty University in Virginia, where he weirdly didn’t discuss it with the heavily right-wing students and staff. Huh.

• When Thomas Dewey, arguably the most nationally prominent Manhattan district attorney before Alvin Bragg, was running for the post in 1937, he made it clear that he was prepared to go after political wrongdoers. A young special prosecutor who had made a name for himself taking on gangsters, Dewey announced his candidacy on the Republican Party line because, he said, he believed it was necessary to go after Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine that once dominated the politics of New York City. He said, “[I]t has become clear to me that there is an alliance between crime and certain elements of Tammany Hall. For twenty years Tammany Hall has controlled criminal prosecutions and for twenty years the power of the criminal underworld has grown. This alliance must be broken.”

• Again rebuffing calls from people across the United States, congressional Democrats, and President Joe Biden for a clean debt limit hike, GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday officially unveiled a 320-page bill full of proposed cuts.

• By now everyone is familiar with the derailment of Norfolk Southern (NS) freight train 32N on February 3 in East Palestine, Ohio. After a nearly two-mile long train carrying toxic chemicals derailed, a controlled burn of the chemicals in several railcars resulted in the release of noxious gases into the air. These included phosgene, a substance used in gas warfare in World War I. After many days of contradictory explanations, foot-dragging, and buck-passing, the railroad and all levels of government finally conceded the seriousness of the incident.

• On the eve of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russian propagandists and pro-Kremlin bloggers started to publish pictures of military equipment located near the border with Ukraine and painted with the Latin letters Z and V. The letter Z, in particular, soon became a key element of the propaganda campaign justifying the Kremlin’s war of aggression. In the 13 months since the start of the war, the letter’s popularity and visibility have not waned. Today, Z is a distinctive symbol of the most radically inclined faction of the “party of war,” which supports the most brutal combat methods, including terrorism. Acolytes of that ideology currently share a tenuous alliance with the Kremlin. Though the so-called Z-heads’ goals hardly align with those of Putin’s inner circle, many less powerful politicians are eager to appropriate Z for their own benefit. Meduza explains the ideology behind Z and the subculture most strongly associated with this odd symbol.

• During a hearing at Moscow’s Perovsky District Court, the prosecution requested that Sergey Klokov (Vedel) serve nine years in a penal colony. Klokov, who previously worked at Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, was charged with “spreading war fakes,” reports Mediazona and Network Freedoms. The prosecution asked the court to strip Klokov of his title and to suspend him from government employment for a period of five years.

• President of Russia Vladimir Putin suggested that a new Russian youth organization consider using naming itself Pioneers, the name of a mass youth organization in the Soviet period. The organization chose the name Movement of the First for itself in December 2022. It took three votes for the organization to decide on its name at its first meeting. Eventually, Movement of the First won, and Pioneers came in fourth place out of five in the final round of voting.

• Four jurors in the case against Elina Sushkevich and Yelena Belaya, two Kaliningrad doctors charged with murdering a newborn baby to keep their hospital’s official infant mortality rate low, have said the judge for the case pressured them into returning a guilty verdict, the website Medvestnik reported on Wednesday, citing Sushkevich’s lawyer.

• There are ways for your location to be pegged to your digital identity. Many data sources on your phone—GPS signals, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks, and the pinging of nearby cell towers—can be used to estimate your whereabouts, sometimes with startling precision. Different shows and movies are offered by streaming platforms such as Netflix depending on which country you’re in (an instance where the general locations offered by IP addresses are precise enough), and gambling sites will lock you out if you manually enter a zip code where their services are illegal. But none of these examples demonstrate how an app store could prevent users in a given state from accessing one specific app.

• Either the legislators passing the bill simply didn’t understand the technology, Wheeler argued, or they broke an old military adage: “Don’t give an order you know can’t be followed.” To actually implement something like this effectively—feel free to enjoy the irony here—America would need to have an internet structured and governed more like China’s, with a mass-surveillance infrastructure built in.

• I don’t really buy that “the cruelty is the point.” I’m a materialist. Money talks, bullshit walks. When billionaires fund unimaginably cruel policies, I think the cruelty is a tactic, a way to get the turkeys to vote for Christmas. After all, policies that grow the fortune of the 1% at the expense of the rest of us have a natural 99% disapproval rating.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Fox Corp. agreed Tuesday to pay $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems to settle a defamation suit over false claims aired by Fox News about voting machines used in the 2020 election. The deal was announced on what would have been the first day of a high-profile trial in a Delaware court that was widely seen as a test of First Amendment protections for news organizations.

• Pretrial revelations about how Fox fed misinformation to its viewers about the 2020 vote to maintain its ratings had already embarrassed the country’s most powerful conservative media outlet. And Dominion’s attorneys have claimed victory for its defense of the truth. But the settlement – among the largest ever paid by a media company – doesn’t appear to compel Fox to admit wrongdoing or issue public apologies.

• Documents released prior to the trial produced a steady torrent of damning evidence showing that Fox executives and on-air personalities knowingly broadcast claims about rampant Democratic-orchestrated election fraud in the 2020 presidential balloting that weren’t remotely factual. The raft of pretrial revelations also included prime-time Fox personalities venting against Trump as—in Tucker Carlson’s words—a raging “demonic force” principally known for “destroying things.” “I hate him with a passion,” Carlson announced, in one of his only truthful utterances on the subject. Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch wasn’t much more restrained; he directed the Fox operation to try to “make Trump a nonperson” during the run-up to the January 6 insurrection, and made the case to call the 2020 election early and accurately for Biden.

• Say this for Carlson, he can pack a lot into a few words. There’s an implicit agreement here: Whether or not you, the viewer, are correct in the technical sense, you are right in the larger sense. You are the authentic voice of this country. So you deserve to feel right about your beliefs, about your enemies, about how you have been cheated. You deserve — through whatever combination of insinuation or hypotheticals or myths — to have the space to keep believing it, without us making that harder.

• All this, trial or no trial, makes clear what Fox News really is. It’s a service provider. That service is the maintenance of a reality bubble and the deference to beliefs that Fox’s hosts helped shape.

• Davis prohibited Fox from arguing that the network was merely reporting on allegations made by Donald Trump and his lawyers, which Fox contended were newsworthy whether or not they were true. So the case would turn not on whether Fox had aired defamatory falsehoods, which Davis determined it had, but on whether, in airing defamatory falsehoods, Fox had displayed “actual malice” — essentially, reckless disregard for the truth.

• They repeat Russian propaganda lines, accusing the West of causing the war and the Ukrainian Army of shelling homes in order to force people to leave.

• “They are doing it on purpose,” Natasha said. “They said people need to be evacuated. They need the land.”

• Ukrainian soldiers call them “waiters,” people who refuse to be evacuated and are holding out in their homes in anticipation of a Russian takeover of their region, even as the Russian bombardment endangers their lives. They represent a diminishing minority in Ukraine, which overwhelmingly supports independence from Russia, but nevertheless amount to thousands of civilians.

• Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems have agreed to settle Dominion’s defamation lawsuit for $787.5 million. (Dominion had sued for $1.6 billion over allegations that Fox defamed the voting company by knowingly or recklessly airing false claims tying voting machines to a conspiracy to undermine the 2020 presidential election.)

• A new edition of the Russian fourth-grade textbook The World Around has removed several references to Kyiv in chapters about the history of Kyivan Rus, reports Mediazona.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Vadim Prokhorov, the defense attorney who represented the Russian politician Vladimir Kara-Murza during the trial that concluded on April 17, has left Russia, amidst threats of being disbarred and prosecuted.

• The Moscow City Court has rejected Russian opposition politician Ilya Yashin’s appeal against his 8.5-year prison sentence for allegedly spreading “disinformation” about the Russian military, the independent outlet Mediazona reported on Wednesday.

• Lawyers and human rights workers have reportedly been unable to find Alexey Moskalev, the single father from Russia’s Tula region who was arrested in Belarus after escaping house arrest, for the past six days.

• Moscow’s Bolshoy Theater has permanently canceled Kirill Serebrennikov’s production of “Nureyev,” a ballet celebrating the Soviet-born star dancer and choreographer. The production has now been dropped from Bolshoy’s repertoire.

• The nonsense never ends. As you’ll recall, there was a big kerfuffle (that still hasn’t fully ended) over a decision by Twitter in October of 2020 to block the sharing of a NY Post article about the contents of what was then alleged to be (and since mostly confirmed) Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop hard drive. What has since come out is that there was thorough debate within Twitter about whether or not this was a good idea, but the decision was made in an abundance of caution, as the provenance of the information was still unclear, and there were some questionable aspects to the information being released.

• One of the central arguments for a recent rash of age verification laws across the country is to “protect the children.” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called his signing of controversial social media laws a means for “protecting our kids from the harms of social media.” Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a press conference that her signing of the so-called Social Media Safety Act will help prevent the “massive negative impact on our kids.” Once he entered office, Sen. Josh Hawley, said that loot boxes in popular video games placed “a casino in the hands of every child in America.” Louisiana State Rep. Laurie Schlegel called her unconstitutional age verification bill in order to access pornography in the state a measure to counter how “pornography is destroying our children.” This all sounds the same.

• It’s always a mixed bag when entertainment industry stars get roped into supporting this or that internet regulation. Remember how there was a Hollywood-backed campaign to have a bunch of big name stars support FOSTA, the bill that sounded good to people who didn’t understand intermediary liability law, but has literally ended up killing women and increasing sex trafficking, while making it harder for law enforcement to stop sex trafficking?

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The agreement by Fox News to settle for $787.5 million — among the largest payouts ever in a defamation lawsuit — means that the scope of the Sullivan ruling will not be tested this time.

• In that 1964 decision, the justices ruled that to win a libel suit, public officials had to do more than show that factual inaccuracies in an article harmed them. They also had to prove that those falsehoods were the product of “actual malice” — in other words, they were intentional or caused by a reckless disregard for the truth.

• Russian authorities denied Gershkovich bail and ordered that he be held in Russia’s Lefortovo prison to await trial until May 29, after which they can request a time extension. Gershkovich’s lawyers were prepared to guarantee bail of 50 million rubles ($600,000) and to agree to constraints on his movements and house arrest if granted bail, WSJ reported. The court still refused to grant bail or the appeal.

• The Gershkovich case represents one of Mr. Putin’s most drastic attacks to date on freedom of the press. It is the first time that the Russian government has brought such serious charges against a journalist officially accredited by the country’s Foreign Ministry, and the first time a Western journalist in Russia has been charged with espionage since the Cold War.

• U.S. officials are concerned that the case appears to signal an even more severe Kremlin crackdown on independent news outlets and the free flow of information within Russia. On Monday, in another escalation, a Moscow court sentenced Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Kremlin critic and Washington Post contributor, to 25 years in prison — an unusually harsh sentence that is longer than what is often given for murder.

• People shouldn’t be punished for revealing the secrets of the government, governments should be punished for keeping secrets from the people.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A New York immigration judge on Tuesday ruled that Jean Montrevil, a Haitian immigrant and longtime activist, will no longer face deportation, after a decade of being targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for his activism. Montrevil was deported to Haiti in 2018 under the Trump administration but got a second chance in 2021, when Virginia Governor Ralph Northam granted him a pardon for two drug convictions from three decades earlier, which ICE had used as a pretext to deport him. Montrevil sought to regain his legal immigration status and was allowed to return to the United States on a 90-day special parole, but the threat of deportation continued to hang over his head — until Tuesday, when the decades-long saga came to a close. “It was huge for me,” says Montrevil in his first interview following the ruling. We also speak with Alina Das, part of Montrevil’s legal team and co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at NYU School of Law, who says Black people face much harsher treatment under immigration law than others.

• An anticipated ruling on access to mifespristone, one of two medications used in a majority of abortions in the U.S., was delayed by the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, giving the court until Friday to rule on the availability of the pill.

• Numerous shootings of people who have mistakenly approached the wrong property have raised alarm among gun control advocates, as the United States faces what one columnist called the effects of a “national experiment in freely giving deadly weapons to anyone who wants one.”

• After I cut my hair short for the first time, a friend at school saw me. “You look like a boy,” he said. It felt validating—especially coming from a boy—and it started to click that maybe I wasn’t the girl I thought I was.

• The authorities have intensified efforts to enforce the hijab as more women flout the law. Women have been emboldened by the nationwide antiestablishment protests that erupted in September following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini soon after she was arrested by the morality police for allegedly violating the hijab law. During the demonstrations, women and girls removed and burned their head scarves.

Monopolies

• Former T-Mobile CEO John Legere repeatedly promised in print that the Sprint merger would result in a massive surge in new jobs. In a rambling missive that took aim at critics of the deal who predicted job losses, the former potty-mouth CEO proclaimed that critics were lying, and that the deal would be “job positive from day one” and every day thereafter.

• It’s clear at this point it isn’t just a handful of senators and congresspeople – the US government has taken an interest in the Microsoft- Activision deal, and in Sony’s game industry dominance.

• The Microsoft – Activision deal has come up again in the most unlikeliest of situations – a US House Committee hearing. It probably won’t be a surprise, though, if I told you this hearing involves FTC chair Lina Khan.

Software Patents

• Whether it’s through the millions of dollars Google has funneled into development and advertising or the “convenience” that it offers users in exchange for freedom, the fact remains that Google Chrome is the arbiter of web standards. Firefox, through ethical distributions like GNU IceCat and Abrowser, can weaken that stranglehold. Google’s deprecation of the JPEG-XL image format in February in favor of its own patented AVIF format might not end the web in the grand scheme of things, but it does highlight, once again, the disturbing amount of control it has over the platform generally.

Trademarks

• The Rust Foundation’s proposed new trademark policy is far too restrictive, and will cause (more) drama unless it is substantially revised.

• It’s nothing new that famous and recognizable sports figures have gotten into the business of filing all kinds of trademarks around their names, nicknames, and other terms and phrases associated with them. Anthony Davis trademarked “Fear The Brow” as a result of his identifiable unibrow, for instance. Remember Jeremy Lin? You might not if you’re not a basketball fan of a certain age, but he likewise got into the trademark game for his moniker “Linsanity.” It’s all a little silly in most cases, but there are business reasons why this occurs, so it’s also not entirely out of the realm of the reasonable.

Copyrights

• Not that it needs to be demonstrated, but recent AI and deep-fake developments further demonstrate the need for meaningful Right of Publicity recognition.

• Brazil’s Ministry of Justice and Public Security has asked Google to remove 167 pirate site domains from its search results. The authorities cite an unpublished court order that lists Cuevana, Vizer, Novaflix, Overflix, Ultraflix, Pelisplushd, and many other unauthorized streaming and download sites.

• Over the past several days at least four pirate streaming sites have disappeared, with one stating it will never return. What prompted this sudden exodus is yet to be confirmed, but two of the sites were recently targeted in MPA/ACE DMCA subpoenas. Two also appear on the UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit’s ‘Infringing Website List’.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• “Music is my life” is a cliche, so I’ll refrain from saying it. Suffice it to say that my life has revolved significantly around music for a very long time.

• Starting from high school I was one of those kids who had headphones on at every possible second. While not quite so anti-social anymore, I have worked as a developer for more than 10 years at this point, and have spent every work day of all of those listening to music while coding. And that’s to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of miles driven, workouts worked, and dinners cooked while blasting tunes.

• I finally did it! I finally completed my goal! Even though it might never be seen by anyone… I’m so proud for finishing it. Especially in a time where my productivity levels are so low and everything seems exhausting. I still did it.

• My birthday is April 20, and I always like to treat myself by releasing a comic or album or something. This year’s comic is “The Divine Tapestry: No Respite For The Weary”.

• I normally avoid talking about politics outside of areas I feel like I have a strong enough understanding, and I usually don’t feel comfortable expressing strong opinions on day-to-day politics. I’m uncomfortable with the political system in general and with both major US parties, and I’m ashamed of some of my past bad takes. I’m also really bad at expressing a lot of this kind of thing.

• [...]

• I humbly ask you: please – please – don’t vote for the Republican Party, and please speak out against bigotry and discrimination when you see it.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

• The tags pages, despite being so sparse, are too cluttered, so I’ve removed any tag listings where there is only one tag. This means a much shorter all tags page, though that makes it something of a misnomer. I’m also hiding any tags on a note where that note is the only one with that tag.

• From the perspective of my notes, that tag is useful for searching, but from the perspective of the capsule, there’s no other page to navigate to from that link, so it doesn’t serve a purpose.

• [...]

• I’ve finally added a contact page. Not much more to say about it. Unless Agate does something with the Gemini mentions RFC, I have no plans to implement that on my own. It looks like a big headache.

• 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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