● 04.20.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 20/04/2023: News Still Dominated by ‘Lunar Lobster’

Posted in News Roundup at 6:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• After updating the Oryx Pro and Gazelle laptops earlier this year, System76 now offers updated versions of the Serval WS, Adder WS, and Bonobo WS models featuring HK-class processors from the 13th Gen Intel Core i9 13900HX “Raptor Lake” series, up to 64GB DDR5 RAM, NVIDIA 40 series of graphics cards, 4K displays, and refresh rates as high as 165Hz.

• Starting at $1599 USD, the new Adder WS laptop is System76’s first notebook offering featuring the NVIDIA 40 GPU series up to GeForce RTX 4070. It’s also equipped with an Intel Core i9 13900HX CPU with 24 cores and 32 threads, and DDR5 RAM.

• System76 is one of the brands Linux enthusiasts geek out the most about, and with good reason. The company is not only behind the Pop!_OS Linux distribution but also has a lot of hardware of its own. It is now releasing a range of new Linux-powered laptops for you to check out.

• System76 recently announced one new laptop, the Gazelle, but today’s announcement is seeing three new offerings added to the fray. We have the Adder WS, the Serval WS, and the Bonobo WS, ordered from least to most premium. The Adder WS’s big step up compared to the Gazelle is the addition of NVIDIA’s RTX 4000 GPUs, with the Adder coming with up to an RTX 4070. It can also be outfitted with up to an Intel Core i9-13900HX CPU, with a total of 24 processing cores, as well as DDR5 RAM.

• Kubuntu Focus focuses on laptops that run the Kubuntu operating system. For those that aren’t aware, Kubuntu is an official spin of Ubuntu that uses the KDE Plasma desktop in place of GNOME.

• KDE Plasma offers many of the same elements most users are accustomed to (panel, system tray, desktop menu, clickable desktop icons, etc). It’s similar to the Windows desktop UI, only with more flexibility and customization. And given how elegant KDE Plasma is, one would expect a laptop to power that desktop to be equally so.

Audiocasts/Shows

• ZFS Optimization Success Stories, Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man’s Plan 9 Namespaces, better support for SSH host certificates, Fast Unix Commands, Fascination with AWK, and more

Kernel Space

• My name is Lars Wirzenius, and I was there when Linux started. Linux is now a global success, but its beginnings were rather more humble. These are my memories of the earliest days of Linux, its creation, and the start of its path to where it is today.

• I started my computer science studies at the University of Helsinki in the fall of 1988, and met Linus Torvalds, who was the other new Swedish speaking student in computer science that year. Toward the end of that first year, we had gotten access to a Unix server, and I accidentally found Usenet, the discussion system, by mistyping rm as rn, the Usenet reader. I told Linus about it and we spent way too much time exploring this.

• After the first year, we both went away to do the mandatory military service, though in different places. We returned to our university studies in the fall of 1990, and both took the course on C and Unix programming, which included a fair bit of theory of the Unix kernel architecture as well. This led to us reading about other operating system kernels, such as QNX and Plan 9. Linus and I discussed with some enthusiasm how an operating system should be built correctly. We had all the overconfidence of 20-year-old second-year university students. Everyone is better off that this wasn’t recorded for posterity.

• In January 1991, Linus bought his first PC from a local shop that assembled computers from parts. The PC had a 386 CPU, which was relatively fancy at that time, because Linus wanted to explore multitasking. Also, since he came from a Sinclair QL with a 32-bit Motorola 68008 CPU, he wanted a 32-bit CPU, and did not want to step down to a 16-bit one, so a 286 was not an option. Linus’s first PC had a whopping 4 megabytes of RAM and a hard drive.

• He got a copy of the game Prince of Persia, which occupied most of his spare time for the next couple of months. He later also bought a copy of MINIX, because after using Unix at the university, he wanted something like that at home as well.

• Operating systems have traditionally used all of the memory that the hardware provides to them. The advent of virtualization and confidential computing is changing this picture somewhat, though; the system can now be more picky about which memory it will use. Patches to add support for explicit memory acceptance when running under AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization and Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP), though, have run into some turbulence over how to handle a backward-compatibility issue.

• Normally, when the operating-system kernel boots, it discovers the available memory and happily sets itself up to use that memory. Version 2.9 of the UEFI specification, though, added the concept of unaccepted memory; when this mechanism is in use, a system (normally a virtualized guest) will be launched with its memory in an unaccepted state. That system will not be able to make use of the memory provided until that memory has been explicitly accepted. On such systems, the bootloader will typically pre-accept enough memory to allow the guest kernel to boot; that kernel must take responsibility for accepting the rest before using it.

• The kernel’s handling of concurrency has changed a lot over the years. In 2023, a kernel developer’s toolkit includes tools like completions, highly optimized mutexes, and a variety of lockless algorithms. But, once upon a time, concurrency control came down to the use of simple semaphores; a discussion on a small change to the semaphore API shows just how much the role of semaphores has changed over the course of the kernel’s history.

• At its core, a semaphore is an integer counter used to control access to a resource. Code needing access must first decrement the counter — but only if the counter’s value is greater than zero; otherwise it must wait for the value to increase. Releasing the semaphore is a matter of incrementing the counter. In the Linux kernel implementation, acquisition of a semaphore happens with a call to down() (or one of a few variants); if the semaphore is unavailable, down() will wait until some other thread releases it. The release operation, unsurprisingly, is called up(). In the classic literature, as defined by Edsger Dijkstra, those operations are called P() and V() instead.

• The extended BPF (eBPF) virtual machine allows programs to be loaded into and executed with the kernel — and, increasingly, other environments. As the use of BPF grows, so does interest in defining what the BPF virtual machine actually is. In an effort to ensure a consistent and fair environment for defining what constitutes the official BPF language and run-time environment, and to encourage NVMe vendors to support BPF offloading, a recent effort has been undertaken to standardize BPF.

• BPF programs are written in C, and compiled into BPF bytecode. Like other bytecode instruction sets, BPF programs are platform-independent and just-in-time (JIT) compiled. For a long time, “platform-independent” for BPF simply meant the ability to run BPF programs on multiple different architectures on Linux. That definition has expanded in recent years, with Microsoft implementing a version of BPF for Windows, and network-interface vendors, such as Netronome, providing the ability to offload BPF networking programs. NVMe vendors are also looking into supporting offloading functionality to BPF for storage devices with a new framework called eXpress Resubmission Path (XRP), though this effort is currently stalled due to BPF not being standardized.

Benchmarks

• Staunch Linux advocates have been saying for some time that the Unix derivative’s application performance outstrips that of Windows, assuming all other factors are equal. Valve even proved it back in 2012 by porting Left 4 Dead 2 to Linux as part of its original Steam Machine push.

Applications

• Safety management software is a crucial tool for businesses to effectively manage workplace safety, reduce risks, and maintain compliance with industry regulations. In today’s world, safety management systems are essential for preventing workplace accidents and ensuring employee well-being. But what makes Linux a great platform for safety management software? Let’s find out!

• If you are looking to perform a fire inspection of a building or facility using software on a Linux system, you can use a combination of tools to help you plan, visualize, and analyze building layouts with regard to fire safety

• Writing a novel is hard, and it’s difficult to keep track of character arcs, branching plot lines, and random ideas which drift into your head and then vanish before you have a chance to flesh them out.

• Manuskript is an open-source utility for Windows, macOS, and Linux, which can help you to organize your thoughts, lay out your chapters, and explore motivations.

Instructionals/Technical

• The Backdrop CMS system requires several dependencies that the user must install, including the Apache web server, MySQL, PHP, and several PHP extensions. To start the installation of these dependencies, launch a terminal and SSH into the server or launch a terminal physically.

• Bitwarden is a password manager that offers both SAAS service and the opportunity for admins to create their own password manager server using the open-source Bitwarden server.

• Keep your Docker container images up-to-date effortlessly with Watchtower! Learn how to update them automatically with our guide.

• Hey there, fellow database enthusiasts!

• In this article, we’ll explore various tips and tricks that can help you optimize your Linux device performance, ensuring that your system runs smoothly and efficiently. We’ll cover topics such as choosing the right distribution, optimizing system settings, managing resources, and maintaining a clean file system.

• In this guide, we will explore the numerous community and support resources available to help you get the most out of your Pop!_OS experience. From vibrant online forums to official documentation, you’ll never feel lost or alone as you navigate your way through this powerful operating system.

• Sometimes a process or application can cause problems on a Linux machine. When that happens, you’ll need to know how to kill the wayward process.

Games

• Between 2023-04-12 and 2023-04-19 there were 23 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Gentoo Family

• “It cut my total time spent waiting for this Gentoo install to complete by almost half!”

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• The ground-breaking combination of IBM and SUSE security and sustainability initiatives pave the way to better choices for our customers. This is exemplified by IBM’s recent announcement of the new IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 and IBM z16 Single Frame platforms.  These latest systems: Launch a new era of sustainability with a more cost-effective rackmount system.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Today Canonical announces the release of Ubuntu 23.04, codenamed “Lunar Lobster”. Available to download and install from https://ubuntu.com/download.

• “This Ubuntu milestone release demonstrates our progress in raising the bar for the enterprise developer desktops, thanks to our best-in-class Linux integration with Active Directory Domain Services and now Azure Active Directory”, said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. “Our expanded investment in Ubuntu gaming means your downtime is just as satisfying”.

• Every new release of Ubuntu Desktop comes packed with new features and functionality to enable developers, gamers, creators and tinkerers. Ubuntu 23.04 is no exception.

• Our focus, as always, has been improving quality, performance and enjoyment for all our users, whether that’s more elegant update handling for snaps, improved UI for installation and quick settings or a more accessible gaming experience.

• The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 23.04, code-named “Lunar Lobster”. This marks Ubuntu Studio’s 33rd release. This release is a regular release and as such, it is supported for 9 months (until January 2024).

• Since it’s just out, you may experience some issues, so you might want to wait a bit before upgrading. Please see the release notes for a complete list of changes and known issues.

• Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster is here! Congratulations to all computer users especially Ubuntu community as Canonical releases Lunar Lobster on Thursday, 20 April 2022. This is a regular release with 9-month support that comes with a lot of new technologies. Continuing the surprise of Ubuntu Unity in the previous release Kinetic Kudu, in this release we are surprised by the official introduction of two flavors Cinnamon, the user friendly interface flagship of the famous Linux Mint, and Edubuntu, the revival of the school-oriented operating system. In this article, you will be able to download Ubuntu 23.04 and all official flavors to later install one into your desktop PC, laptop, and server. Happy downloading!

• Ubuntu 23.04, codenamed “Lunar Lobster”, is here. This release continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, partnering with the community and our partners, to introduce new features and fix bugs.

• Ubuntu Desktop 23.04 features a new installer, unifying the Ubuntu server and desktop installation engine, enabling the same autoinstall configuration workflows for both desktops and servers. The UI sports a refreshed user interface with a modern but familiar first-time user experience.

• This release includes GNOME 44, delivering further usability improvements with a focus on new quick settings options for bluetooth device management and dark mode. And desktop snaps now benefit from new refresh functionality for quicker application of updates.

• Canonical has today released Ubuntu 23.04, their latest short-term new-feature release (it’s not an LTS) that will be supported until January 2024.

• One of the big user-facing additions is the new installer that they say offers a “streamlined and more intuitive user experience”. While it offers up a refresh look the code behind the scenes is the biggest change, since it now shares the code-base with Ubuntu Server so they can give a more consistent experience.

• Ubuntu 23.04, codenamed “Lunar Lobster”, has been released as the first short-term version of 2023. It will receive support for nine months until January 2024. This version focuses on enhancing Ubuntu’s core backend and adopting new packages and technology to prepare for next year’s LTS release (Ubuntu 24.04).

• This is what’s new.

• Dubbed Lunar Lobster, Ubuntu 23.04 introduces several new features and improvements, such as the latest Linux 6.2 kernel for better hardware support, the latest GNOME 44 desktop environment, a new Mesa graphics stack for gaming, as well as some of the most recent GNU/Linux technologies.

• Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) was released on October 20th, 2022, and it’s only supported for nine months, until July 2023. Since this isn’t an LTS (Long Term Support) release, users might want to consider upgrading to Ubuntu 23.04 as soon as possible.

• The Ubuntu 23.04 release is out. Headline features include a new installer, GNOME 44, Azure Active Directory authentication, and more.

• Canonical has officially released Ubuntu 23.04, codenamed Lunar Lobster, which is the latest version of its Linux distribution and it boasts improvements for enterprise developer desktops, gaming enhancements, a revamped installer, and an expanded focus on gaming.

• “This Ubuntu milestone release demonstrates our progress in raising the bar for the enterprise developer desktops, thanks to our best-in-class Linux integration with Active Directory (AD) Domain Services and now Azure Active Directory,” said Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth.

Devices/Embedded

• He was in a “Raspberry Pi phase” a year or so later and thought he could use that device to help in the search. He put up a block diagram of the Raspberry-Pi-based camera system that he built. It uses an infrared camera to continuously take pictures of a target flower. It is powered by two “very heavy, unfortunately” sealed lead-acid (SLA) batteries using a power distribution board that allows him to swap batteries in the field without shutting down. He also designed a companion board with a realtime clock, small display for power monitoring, and that could drive an infrared floodlight at night.

• He started out taking full-resolution photos, but “it was taking too long to take a photograph, relatively speaking”; he reduced the resolution to 1920×1080, which allowed him to take a photo every 0.8 seconds. The “3.2 million photographs” from the title of his talk referred to what he gathered in a normal month-long season: a bit over 100K photos per day for roughly 30 days. Over a season, five different flowers were monitored in succession.

• The 100ASK-V853-Pro board is a development kit consisting of an Allwinner V853 system-on-module board (SoM) and a feature-rich carrier board with a large number of interfaces. Allwinner V853 supports up to 1TOPS of NPU computing power and is mainly for AI vision application development. The core board contains a DDR and eMMC as well as a PMU chip (AXP2101) and is connected to the carrier board through a board-to-board connector.

• WisdPi ArduPico is an Arduino UNO-shaped baseboard designed for the Raspberry Pi Pico and compatible boards that enables makers to reuse most Arduino shields available on the market and also adds for few I/Os and features.

• Now that I’m done reviewing the latest Matter devices from Nanoleaf, it’s time to turn my attention back to Home Assistant. Since I haven’t taken a deep dive on this open source smart home platform in a few years, I recently set it up on a spare Raspberry Pi.

• The dream of smart home unity may finally be here thanks to Matter. This next-gen smart home protocol helps all your various smart home devices play well together without numerous apps or complicated setups. Ideally, this will drastically change the future of smart home technology for the better.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• As technology keeps evolving, the demand for top-notch Android emulators for Linux has exploded. Android emulators are nifty software that lets you run Android apps on your computer, creating a virtual Android environment for testing, development, or gaming.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Events

• 13 open source industry bodies have published a letter asking the Europe to reconsider aspects of its proposed Cyber Resilience Act.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Aerospike is releasing Aerospike Database 6.3, delivering operational, quality, performance, and stability improvements.

• Aerospike Database 6.3 adds support for OpenSSL 3, which means that it runs well on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL) and its many clones, as well as Ubuntu 22.04. The release continues to support RHEL and Debian-compatible Linux distributions that come with OpenSSL 1. One caveat is that support for Debian 10 on ARM64 hardware has been discontinued, however, server 6.3 still runs on Debian 10 on x86_64.

• Ubuntu 18.04 was removed from the list of supported Linux distributions, starting with server 6.3.

Programming/Development

• The Developer Sandbox for Red Hat OpenShift offers you free access to a Red Hat OpenShift cluster. It’s a great way to learn about and experiment with containers, Kubernetes, OpenShift, and microservices.

Python

• Python 3.12 approaches. While the full feature set of the final release—slated for October 2023—is still not completely known, by now we have a good sense for what it will offer. It picks up where Python 3.11 left off, improving error messages and performance. These changes are accompanied by a smattering of smaller changes, though Linux users will likely make use of one in particular: support for the perf profiler.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• Bash, or the Bourne-Again SHell, is a powerful and versatile scripting language widely used in the Linux and Unix environments. One of the key features of Bash scripts is the ability to create conditions and control the flow of execution using logical operators.

• The Bourne shell is one of the oldest shells still in use on modern Linux systems, even though it’s not as widely used as Bash. Here’s what you need to know about the Bourne shell on Linux.

Leftovers

Science

• It’s a physical need.

• Up close, it looks very different.

• Anything you can do, it can do .

• We’ve totally underestimated it.

• What a time to be alive.

• We’re only beginning to see the potential.

Education

• The teacher’s salary is influenced by a variety of factors, meaning that for the same position, one can be overloaded and underpaid whereas another can work a decent load and get decent pay. Latvian Television met with two physics teachers on April 19, Solveta and Kārlis, with vastly different loads and wages.

Hardware

• Ivan Sutherland played a key role in foundational computer technologies. Now he sees a path for America to claim the mantle in “superconducting” chips.

• AAEON BOXER-8224AI is a thin and lightweight AI edge embedded system solution based on NVIDIA Jetson Nano system-on-module and designed for drones, or other space-constrained applications such as robotics. AAEON BOXER products are usually Embedded Box PCs with an enclosure, but the BOXER-8224AI is quite different as it’s a compact and 22mm thin board with MIPI CSI interfaces designed to add computer vision capability to unmanned areal vehicles (UAV), as well as several wafers for dual GbE, USB, and other I/Os.

• The sale of the drives took place between August 2020 and September 2021.

• Seagate has now changed its stance, and agreed to settle the matter by paying the fine.

• The two other main hard drive manufacturers, Toshiba and Western Digital, were found to be in compliance with the strictures put in place in 2019.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• An E.U. proposal would pause Ukrainian grain exports to five countries that say their farmers are being hurt by a glut of cheap imports. Here is what we’re covering:

• The European Commission has proposed measures for wheat, maize, sunflower seed, and rape seed from Ukraine after a joint complaint from five EU countries — Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia — over a drop in prices on local markets because of the influx from Ukraine.

• Ms Cao Zhixin and Ms Zhai Dengrui were released on Wednesday, according to their friends.

• Bangkok and Chiang Mai were among the most polluted cities in the world on Thursday morning.

• Thirty media outlets in the Forbidden Stories consortium of investigative journalists, including FRANCE 24, are continuing the work of Colombian journalist Rafael Moreno, who was murdered in October 2022. In particular, Moreno was investigating Cerro Matoso, an open-pit nickel mine in Colombia’s northern Córdoba region. For 40 years, its operation by an Australian company has been eating away at the ancestral land of the Zenú Indians, who accuse the mine of spreading disease and desolation on their land.

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the incorporation of the Open Compute Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) into the open source DENT Network Operating System (NOS) project. This move marks a milestone in the collaboration between the Linux Foundation and the Open Compute Project (OCP), aimed at benefiting the entire open-source community by providing a unified and standardized approach to networking across hardware and software.

Security

• EFF has a good explainer on the problems with the new UN Cybercrime Treaty, currently being negotiated in Vienna.

• CitizenLab has identified three zero-click exploits against iOS 15 and 16. These were used by NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in 2022, and deployed by Mexico against human rights defenders. These vulnerabilities have all been patched.

• Simple mistakes and configuration errors is still a major cybersecurity issue, according to security firm Censys.

• The group known as PLAY is using custom tools researchers say allow it to be faster and more efficient when carrying out ransomware attacks.

• By call volume, the top problem that most Helpdesks face is expired or forgotten passwords.

• Russian national Denis Dubnikov has been sentenced to time served after he pleaded guilty to charges related to laundering money for the Ryuk ransomware group.

• Discarded enterprise routers are often not wiped and contain secrets that could be highly useful to malicious hackers.

• Google warns of another zero-day vulnerability in Chrome, only days after addressing a similar issue.

• Deceptive Bytes is thrilled to announce the release of the first Linux version of its Active Endpoint Deception solution with support for enterprise server distributions: Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, and SLES.

• The recent data breach of personal information for thousands of users of Washington D.C.’s health insurance exchange, including members of Congress, was caused by basic human error

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (golang-1.11), Fedora (chromium, golang-github-cenkalti-backoff, golang-github-cli-crypto, golang-github-cli-gh, golang-github-cli-oauth, golang-github-gabriel-vasile-mimetype, libpcap, lldpd, parcellite, tcpdump, thunderbird, and zchunk), Red Hat (java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, and kernel), SUSE (chromium, dnsmasq, ImageMagick, nodejs16, openssl-1_0_0, openssl1, ovmf, and python-Flask), and Ubuntu (dnsmasq, libxml2, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-oem-5.17, linux-oem-6.0, linux-oem-6.1, and linux-snapdragon).

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• The Pakistan-based advanced persistent threat (APT) actor known as Transparent Tribe used a two-factor authentication (2FA) tool used by Indian government agencies as a ruse to deliver a new Linux backdoor called Poseidon.

Privacy/Surveillance

• A leaked document revealed that Antonio Guterres was “not happy” about having to travel to Kiev to meet Ukrainian President Zelensky in early March.

• The president was responding to a leaked U.S. military document reacting to the prospect of Mexico’s armed forces running civilian aviation.

• Lawmakers also raised concerns about how data brokers sell Americans’ health data, including mental health and reproductive information.

• EDRi member and Reclaim Your Face partner La Quadrature du Net charts out the chilling move by France to undermine human rights progress by ushering in mass algorithmic surveillance, which in a shocking move, has been authorised by national Parliamentarians.

• In the run up to the AI Act vote in the European Parliament, civil society organisations call on the European Parliament to prioritise fundamental rights and protect people affected by artificial intelligence systems.

• In this edition of the EDRi-gram, we are inviting you to share your feedback on a draft programme for an initial decolonising process for the digital rights field in Europe.

• Multiple voices are raised against the EU CSAR proposal amidst plans revealing the wish to systematise government access to data.

Defence/Aggression

• Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, certain domestic justice systems allow prosecutions in national courts for crimes committed abroad, regardless of the victim’s or perpetrator’s nationality. This manual outlines the universal jurisdiction process in selected European states for those pursuing prosecutions of crimes committed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

• Latvia’s cyberspace security risks are still at a high level, said Baiba Kaškina, head of the Information Technology (IT) Safety Incident Prevention Institution Cert.lv, in an interview with Latvian Television April 19 morning.

• Planet A The G7 has pledged to increase the pace of renewable energy development by collectively increasing offshore wind capacity by 150 gigawatts and solar capacity to more than a terawatt by 2030.

• President Egils Levits is the keynote speaker at an event April 20 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Riga Graduate School of Law (RGSL).

• The Latvian Ministry of Defense said April 19 it had dismissed an official from post over a controversial military procurement contract.

• Russian hacking operations in support of intelligence gathering and information operations related to the war show no signs of slowing down.

• Developments include new harbors, helipads and radar domes but no military installations.

• The UK on Wednesday promised to get tough on authoritarian regimes operating overseas, after newspaper claims about a London-based businessman’s links to a secret Chinese police station.

• A documentary being aired by Scandinavian public broadcasters on Wednesday evening claims Russia has a spy programme in the North Sea planning the sabotage of energy infrastructures in Northern Europe.

• The United States has imposed sanctions on a network of companies and suppliers — mostly based in China — that the Treasury Department says support Iranian drone manufacturing.

• The commander of Russia’s Pacific Fleet, Admiral Sergei Avakyants, has resigned following a snap inspection of the military preparedness of the fleet’s units.

• A favored tactic of Israeli prime ministers in trouble is to provoke a confrontation, or at least overreact to ensure one develops, and then send in the army.

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

• On January 30th, the US launched an R9X flying Ginsu knife bomb from a drone, killing Hassan al-Hadrami, the current leader of AQAP in Yemen, marking one of the few times this weapon has been used in combat.

• The US 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.

• Latvia’s authorities have announced a search for the country’s citizen, Aleksandrs Mališevs, who fought for Russian forces against Ukraine.

• NATO has drawn up defence plans for the Baltic states and has recently presented them to representatives from all member states, the 15min.lt news website reported on Wednesday.

• The Lithuanian parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defence has asked the country’s Defence Ministry to look into the idea of establishing a joint military training area with Latvia.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• As I write this, the Zimbabwe Power Company is producing 684MW of electricity, against a demand that is likely around 2200MW with this chilly weather. Pre-school maths tells me, that we are around 1500MW short, hence the load shedding. This is happening on most days.

• Taylor Swift avoided the class action lawsuit against FTX’s celebrity promoters by simply asking about unregistered securities — and coming to her own conclusions.

Finance

• The electric carmaker has reduced prices by thousands of dollars this year to bolster demand and fend off competition.

• Tesla slashed US prices for some Model 3 and Model Y vehicles for the sixth time this year, according to its website, as the world’s largest electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer looks to increase demand. The decision comes on the eve of its first quarter earnings report, which is expected to show a dip in profit.

• Estimates put the amount of leftover money between $50 billion and $70 billion. But even if Republicans could claw it back, it would not make much of a dent in the deficit.

• JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon will be questioned under oath about the bank’s alleged complicity in the sex trafficking ring run by Jeffrey Epstein.

• As a result of the strike, Canadians should expect that some federal public services will be delayed or unavailable.

• The biggest rent hikes were seen in Hämeenlinna, Oulu and Rovaniemi.

• India is now the world’s most populace country and will likely soon become the third largest economy on the globe. For decades, economists have been predicting that India’s time would come. Has it finally arrived?

• The International Investment Bank (IIB) says it will leave its headquarters in Budapest and return to Russia after the Hungarian government withdrew its representatives from the Moscow-led institution after the United States imposed sanctions on three IIB officials.

• Customers caught in building insurance limbo after the collapse of Porter Davis have been thrown a $15 million lifeline by the Victorian government.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Facebook, TikTok and Twitter seem to be increasingly connecting users with brands and influencers. To restore a sense of community, some users are trying smaller social networks.

• Legislation banning TikTok altogether should be the next next step in addressing security concerns about the social media app, a US commissioner has urged. A federal parliamentary inquiry is examining the risks posed to Australian democracy by foreign interference through online platforms such as TikTok.

• BuzzFeed News is shutting down.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Another election technology company, Smartmatic, is suing news outlets, including Fox, over false claims of election fraud, and Dominion has other cases pending.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A government webpage about the Chinese national anthem has replaced a Hong Kong pro-democracy song at the top of Google’s search rankings. The change came after multiple mix-ups that saw the protest tune played in place of the city’s official anthem at international sporting events.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• A trial would have demonstrated the full extent of the company’s practice of deliberate deceit.

• Those who argue that the news media should pay a steeper price for mistakes are pushing to have a landmark Supreme Court ruling overturned.

• The move has fuelled uncertainty over whether he will be able to contest an election due next year.

• A court in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg has ordered two months of detention for a local activist who was interviewed by Evan Gershkovich and helped the jailed Wall Street Journal reporter before the American journalist was arrested on espionage charges.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Russian lawyer Vadim Prokhorov, who has defended noted opposition figures such as jailed politicians Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, as well as the late Boris Nemtsov, has fled Russia fearing for his safety.

• French President Emmanuel Macron was loudly booed by crowds in eastern France on Wednesday as he embarked on his first trip to a French region since signing his unpopular pensions reform into law.

• The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Tuesday that it secured a $365,000 settlement with General Motors Company (GM) over the company’s alleged discrimination against non-US citizens.

• Rapper Pras Michel testifies that he was an FBI informant when he received millions from current-fugitive Jho Low. On April 18, Pras Michel opted to testify in his federal conspiracy trial, explaining he made the decision “after consulting with my attorneys and the universe.

• The French finance minister’s pledge to crack down on immigrants abusing France’s welfare system has triggered a fresh row in a country reeling from a bitter battle over pension reform, casting doubt on President Emmanuel Macron’s ability to deliver on a pledge to “appease” and unify the nation in a hundred days.

• Travel promotional video comes amid domestic tourism campaign to visit Xinjiang

Monopolies

Copyrights

• Following a series of layoffs, shakeups, and controversies, Downtown Music Holdings is undergoing yet another re-organization. Life hasn’t been easy in the trenches of Downtown Music of late. The company recently announced a round of layoffs in March, with impacted people working at CD Baby, Songtrust, Downtown’s publishing unit, and Downtown Music Holdings.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Obedience is one of those virtues not commonly wanted nowadays. It can even be the least wanted one. That’s simply because we are being told that we should listen to noone but ourselves, that we are the decisive ones in our lives. Well… In some meanings those probably are true. But to say, that those statements are always true is a grave mistake!

• Just in case, you have not read my previous entries: this one is meant to be a story written with dice, i.e. the product of a solo, tabletop role-playing game.

• My dad’s parents owned a pool table when he was young. My grandfather taught him how to play, and when my dad attended university, he spent quite a bit of time at local pool halls and competing in small tournaments. When he and my mother moved to the town where I grew up, he purchased a table for himself, and he taught me and my sister the game.

• One of my high school friends frequented a pool bar near me, but I usually didn’t have the time to join him, especially during my college days. However, I’ve always enjoyed the game, and I’ve always wanted to get better than I am.

• It being the 20th April, I was curious about the status of drug laws in Cuba. It seems they’re defined in the Penal Code (Codigo Penal), which was updated in 2022. I couldn’t find an English translation offhand, so here’s my manual attempt for the relevant section.

• I have been in college for 3 years. I started when I was a junior in high school, and am now almost finished as the equivalent of a freshman in college. I was able to start as a junior because of my state’s program that allowed me to take college credits while in high school. I went to a small (and underfunded) school that had a very small course list, which mean that I met the requirements for graduation very quickly. Soon after taking the ACT, they allowed me to go to the Ohio State University, free of charge, for the remainder of my time in school (or I could graduate early, but that was a poor decision and would leave me in a tough spot at the time). So, I buckled up and joined 2 or 3 other students that were in the same boat as me, and headed to Ohio State. This was during the COVID-19 lockdown so it was all online but nonetheless I started taking courses. Long story short, I made it and was able to receive my degree from Ohio State before I even received one from my high school. I am very thankful for my opportunities and relatively proud of the work that went into accomplishing that. I am now on my way, with 50% completed, to receiving my bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering from Western Governor’s University. However, my accomplishments are not the main focus of this post; in fact, I very rarely like sharing it with people because it makes me uncomfortable and I’m sure it inspires bad feelings occasionally as well. No, this is about the many failures I endured throughout my school career.

Technical

• My wireless headphones have a battery that lasts for ages. Hooray! But eventually it goes flat, and then two things happen.

• Other reasons might include overly zealous firewalls, though there one might expect the packet to be dropped, not a signature mismatch–maybe it’s a zealous and buggy firewall? Such are not unknown. Even with a zealous firewall that blocks ICMP echo requests (or the responses, or both), all sorts of other protocols and ports could be open. Or maybe pings are rate limited and your system happened to be beyond the limit when you tested it. In this case one might try the same thing and expect a different result (Einstein).

• That pkg_add works indicates that HTTPS works and likely also DNS, too. Everything else could be broken–maybe the hypothetical firewall only allows DNS and HTTPS. Package requests could be done by IP address, in which case DNS could also be blocked. Unlikely, but possible.

• 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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