● 04.21.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 21/04/2023: SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 5, More Trouble at Microsoft

Posted in News Roundup at 10:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

• Kubernetes 1.27 introduced a new feature called Node log query that allows viewing logs of services running on the node.

• Cluster administrators face issues when debugging malfunctioning services running on the node. They usually have to SSH or RDP into the node to view the logs of the service to debug the issue. The Node log query feature helps with this scenario by allowing the cluster administrator to view the logs using kubectl. This is especially useful with Windows nodes where you run into the issue of the node going to the ready state but containers not coming up due to CNI misconfigurations and other issues that are not easily identifiable by looking at the Pod status.

Applications

• Coming a year after QEMU 7.0, the QEMU 8.0 release is here to improve support for ARM and RISC-V architectures. For ARM, it adds emulation support for FEAT_EVT, FEAT_FGT, and AArch32 ARMv8-R, CPU emulation for Cortex-A55 and Cortex-R52, support for a new Olimex STM32 H405 machine type, as well as gdbstub support for M-profile system registers.

• For the RISC-V architecture, QEMU 8.0 brings updated machine support for OpenTitan, PolarFire, and OpenSBI, additional ISA and Extension support for smstateen, native debug icount trigger, cache-related PMU events in virtual mode, Zawrs/Svadu/T-Head/Zicond extensions, and ACPI support.

Instructionals/Technical

• While navigating the file system via the command line on Linux systems, in order to move back into a parent directory (in a long path), we would normally issue the cd command repeatedly (cd ../../..) until we land in the directory of interest.

• This can be so tedious and boring much of the time, especially for experienced Linux users or system administrators who carry out so many various tasks, and therefore hope to discover shortcuts to ease their jobs while operating a system.

• Gogo is an impressive way to bookmark directories inside your Linux shell. It allows you to create shortcuts to long and complicated paths in Linux. This way, you don’t have to type or remember long and complicated paths anymore in Linux.

• For example, if you have a directory ~/Documents/Phone-Backup/Linux-Docs/Ubuntu/, using gogo, you can create an alias (a shortcut name), for instance Ubuntu to access it without typing the whole path anymore.

• Docker Desktop is an easy-to-use cross-platform GUI (Graphical User Interface) application used to manage Docker images, containers, and apps from your local computer. It can be utilized either independently or in conjunction with the command-line interface client.

• A comprehensive Docker development environment can be quickly installed and set up using Docker Desktop, which also supports a variety of programming languages and frameworks. It comes pre-installed with the most recent version of Kubernetes, the Docker engine, the Docker CLI client, Docker Buildx, Docker Compose, extensions, and the Docker Content Trust.

• Okay, that’s not quite true. You can tune a piano, but only approximately. It turns out that the mathematics behind the 12-tone scale used in most Western music hides some sinister secrets.

• Let’s start with the basics. Behind every key on a piano are 1–3 strings, which have been tensioned so that when the strings are struck they will ring out at a specific frequency. Each note is associated with a distinct frequency, and keys are arranged such that the pitch of the notes increases from left to right.

• Of course, the burning question remains: how do we know what frequency to assign to each note? The answer to this is pretty nuanced, but luckily we get one freebie. Every tuning system requires us to start by assigning a specific frequency to an arbitrary key to use as a reference point; we call this the pitch standard. The most common pitch standard in modern times is A440, which sets the frequency of the first A above middle C to 440 Hz.

• When a build goes wrong, the amount of error messaging can easily scroll off the screen. Usually the error is on the first line reported. Here’s a couple ways to make it easier to read just the lines you want.

• This article spotlights alternative tools to ping. All software featured here is free and open source goodness.

• PhpMyAdmin runs with the help of MySQL and Apache. You’ll need to set up both of these tools to get it working on your Ubuntu Server system. Open up a terminal on your Ubuntu Server via SSH (or physically), then use the apt update command to check for software updates.

• When we talk about music streaming, Spotify is usually the first thing that comes to our minds. It’s one of the best music streaming services out there and is supported on multiple platforms, including Linux. While installing Spotify could take more than a few clicks depending on the distro you are running, you may prefer using, say, the Flatpak variant over Snap or DEB or vice versa. In that case, here’s how to install Spotify on Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and most of the popular Linux distributions.

• Linux is renowned for being a powerful and reliable operating system that offers unparalleled security, stability, and flexibility. In order to maintain the integrity and safety of the system, Linux implements specific settings in the form of “Permissions.” These permissions control who can access, modify, or execute the files and directories. Whether you are a new Linux user or a seasoned veteran, understanding Linux permissions is extremely important for a safe and secure system. In this article, we will dive deep into what Linux permissions are and how to keep your files and directories secured in the best way.

Games

• When the video game The Last of Us was released in 2013, its creator, Neil Druckmann, said that more than anything else, the game was about love. Recently adapted as an HBO series by Druckmann and screenwriter Craig Mazin (Chernobyl, The Hangover Part II), The Last of Us takes place in a postapocalyptic world in which a gruff Texan war veteran, Joel (Pedro Pascal), escorts a teenage girl, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), across a ravaged, abandoned Midwest teeming with plant life and haunted by extremely dangerous people. Human society has collapsed, decimated by a fungal pandemic that turns its victims into mindless, flesh-eating predators, their features replaced by mushroom-like carapaces as the disease progresses. A few walled cities are governed by the vestiges of the military; outside, in addition to hordes of the “Infected,” are raiders, cannibal cults, and overzealous revolutionaries. But Ellie represents possible salvation: She was bitten but didn’t succumb to the disease, so her body may contain the key to developing a cure.

• Lutris is an all-in-one game manager to brings your games from different places under one roof, and a second Beta is now available for v0.5.13. With this release it will have support for Steam, GOG, itch.io, Humble Bundle, Battle.net, Epic Games, Emulators and much more.

• I can safely say co-op is not something I ever expected for a strategy game like Stellaris but it’s coming. You can even test it now. Version 3.8 is now in Open Beta on Steam, you just opt into the 3.8 version in the Properties -> Beta window.

• When Slay the Spire launched, back in January 2019, it represented the pinnacle in what became a well recognised genre – Deck Builders. Let’s delve into that genre and see lies beneath the surface.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• Yes, you’re reading it right, KaOS is one of the very first GNU/Linux distributions to offer you a live ISO image with a pre-release version of the KDE Plasma 6 desktop, which, of course, is compiled against the latest Qt 6 open-source application framework.

• Now, don’t expect this to be a stable environment since work on KDE Plasma 6 just started a few months ago. But it’s nice to get a glimpse of the future, and since the KaOS Linux team is dedicated to bring us the latest KDE goodies, this just happened.

BSD

• This tutorial (for lack of a better name) is an expanded and polished form of my personal notes on how to install OpenBSD and configure my Theological Dotfiles on a Lenovo ThinkPad X270. I hope that these notes will help at least one other person configure OpenBSD for mobile research and writing.

• Although these notes probably would be helpful (to varying degrees) for persons using a variety of laptop computers for mobile research and writing, they will be the most relevant for other persons using ThinkPads from circa 2015-2019, especially models with hardware specifications that are similar to those of the X270. Examples include the X260, X280, T460/T560, T470/T570, T480/T580, T490/T590, and the various X1 Carbons from the same model years.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• We are thrilled to start our Public Beta Program for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 5 with the release of PublicRC-202304.

• The Public SLE Beta webpage is now live! Please check it out for all the Public information.

• SLE 15 SP5 is a “Consolidation” Service Pack. And so, the focus is on Bug/Security fixes as well as improving our existing features however you will find new selected features in this release but we have not made any major updates of our stacks compared to SP4.

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro, a lightweight operating system, is purpose-built for containerized and virtualized workloads. It is fully integrated with Rancher and available as part of SUSE Edge 2.0. Organizations using SUSE Edge can manage both Kubernetes and operating systems (SLE Micro) from a single dashboard of Rancher.

• For over 20 years, SAP and SUSE have delivered innovative business-critical solutions on open-source platforms, enabling organizations to improve operations, anticipate requirements, and become industry leaders. Today, the vast majority of SAP customers run their SAP and SAP S/4HANA environments on SUSE. Meet the SUSE team. SUSE is a Platinum Plus sponsor.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Earlier this week, Thorsten Leemhuis published a thoughtful post about what he’d change if he magically became the supreme leader of Fedora. In that post and subsequent commentary on Mastodon and Fedora Discussion, he talked about changing Fedora’s release cycle. Since the Fedora Linux release process is my job, I figured I should explain why I disagree.

• If you haven’t read the post, you should. But here’s the short version: Fedora Linux uses a release model rooted in the 1990s and should move to a “modern” model. Thorsten suggests a one-month cadence for those who want the latest versions and a one-year “steady” release. Such a model has worked well for Firefox, he argues, and so it should work for Fedora.

• The key reason I think this is wrong is because Firefox is a development project whereas Fedora is an integration project. Integration projects don’t write a lot of code, they take the work of others and turn it into a coherent whole. This is a fundamentally different kind of work and it takes longer by necessity.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• After months of clawing our way through development, testing, and bug fixing, the Lubuntu team is thrilled to shell-ebrate another successful release cycle!

• Canonical released the Ubuntu 23.04 operating system (codenamed Lunar Lobster) today. Ubuntu 23.04 is based on the Linux kernel 6.2 as well as the recently released GNOME 44 desktop environment.

• The new version of Ubuntu will be supported for nine months. Canonical suggests that users who require longer support stay on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, which is supported for 5 years.

• Canonical, the company behind open source operating system (OS) Ubuntu, has a large enterprise customer base – with end users typically using the Linux distribution to run servers, including in the cloud, where Ubuntu has significant market share. Ubuntu desktop adoption in the enterprise? That’s far less common…

Open Hardware/Modding

• 294 teams of young people participating in Astro Pi Mission Space Lab 2022/23 will have their experiments run in space on the ISS.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Some of the most familiar examples of the online sharing economy started small. Consider Airbnb, which started from three airbeds and became AirBed and Breakfast in 2008. As of 2016, 70 million guests have stayed in a stranger’s home via Airbnb. The internet-based platform connects people who have a resource not used to capacity—excess space—with others who can use it and provides a means for them to establish trust. It’s a perfect example of the sharing business model.

• In an earlier article, I introduced the principles behind businesses based on social connection, drawing from the book The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan. I will discuss several examples of the sharing business model in this article.

Events

• If you are near Portugal this September, so is EuroBSDCon 2023.  Registration and the call for papers are both out.

• Spring is in bloom in the northern hemisphere, and with it comes three tech events we’ll be attending – PyCon US, Shell & Display Next Hackfest, and Linaro Connect!

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• I’m really excited to share what I’ve been working on these last few months: KiCanvas, an interactive, browser-based, open source viewer for KiCAD files.

• KiCanvas is early alpha but I feel it’s time to let it out into the world for all of you to try out and break. Presently, KiCanvas functions as a standalone web application that can view files stored on GitHub – providing an easy way to share your designs with others. However, this is just the beginning of my plans for this project. You can head over to kicanvas.org right now to to try it out, but if you’d like to read on you can learn more about the history of the project and the future plans.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• It includes a mention of MariaDB’s February 10-Q warning that the company’s current cash and cash equivalents “would not be sufficient to fund our operations, including capital expenditure requirements for at least 12 months from… February 13, 2023, raising substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.”

• The March 24 statement said it anticipated that the money raised by database subscriptions and services would not be enough to meet its projected working capital and operating needs.

Education

• Turns out I have additional Penguicon events. I also need a place to list the books I’ll refer to in my talk. Rather than rewrite the old blog post, I’m starting over. First, the references.

• A highlight of this release is the addition of gitwrapper(1), a utility facilitating co-existence with git.

• Over my relatively short career (6+ years), I’ve noticed a change in the way I approach building things. When I was still an inexperienced junior developer who barely survived operating in a Linux environment and saw backend development as a black box, I was happy to get things working at all.

• Nowadays, no matter what I do, I have to take maintenance into account.

• qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more.

• In order to understand why a CI test run is more susceptible to flakiness than a local test run, we can go through all the root causes for flakiness one-by-one and consider how a CI test run has a different susceptibility to that specific flaky test cause than a local test run.

• The root causes we’ll examine (which are all explained in detail in this post) are leaked state, race conditions, network/third-party dependency, fixed time dependency and randomness.

• I rewatched Lea Verous’s talk about custom properties recently and learned something I missed the first time I watched it.

• A declaration of a custom property can be invalid at computed-value time, if its value is invalid. Depending on the property’s type, this results in the property being set to unset, so either the property’s inherited value or its initial value, depending on whether the property is inherited or not.

• That’s confusing, I know; here’s an example to better understand why it’s essential to know that.

• I sometimes get asked why I use Perl so much. Am I not a fan of strongly typed functional programming? Yeah, I am. Ask me to write something that is known, for sure, to become a big system and I’ll pick strongly typed functional programming without hesitation.11 And, of course, put me in a team that uses Blub, and I’ll pick up Blub in a heartbeat. Except php. I tried to give php an honest chance recently (“It has changed”, they said, “It is much better with modern practices”) but it was painful all the way through, even when I tried to do everything right. But most of the software I write is not for sure going to become a big system. Here’s what Perl does well: [...]

• While learning OCaml I’ve noticed one curious feature – it has two types of string literals. The first type are the common and quite familiar “double-quoted string literals” (or perhaps simply “string literals”?): [...]

• The source fortification is a security mitigation that replaces certain function calls with more secure wrappers that perform additional runtime or compile-time checks.

• The fifth release of the still new-ish qlcal package arrivied at CRAN just now.

• qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more.

• I got a second external monitor. Overkill? Probably, but I like having a dedicated space to instant messaging (now left monitor) and also a dedicated space for a web browser (right monitor).

• But, when I moved signal-desktop to the left monitor, clicks stopped working. I moved it back to my laptop screen, clicks started working. Other apps (like gajim) worked fine. A real mystery.

• In a previous blog post, I showed how you could define ‘an interface’ in C++ using concepts. For example, I can specify that a type should have the methods has_next, next and reset: [...]

• Recently I started using KTimeTracker to record the time I spent working, and I really like it. So far it’s the only productivity app that meets my needs. So I began playing with porting it to Qt6.

• I’m weak with algorithms, but I know my way with building programs. I made a long fluff post about compilation, even. So I was feeling confident that I would make at least some progress.

• Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will you take everywhere.

• (Einstein)

Python

• Since their introduction in Python 3.7, data classes have emerged as a popular choice for Python classes that store data. In a previous tutorial, we talked about what data classes are and some of their features, including out-of-the-box support for object comparison, type hints, and default values of fields. In this follow-up tutorial, we’ll continue to explore some more features of Python data classes.

• We’ll take a closer look at setting default values with default_factory, initializing new fields from pre-existing fields with __post_init__, and much more. We’ll also discuss the improved support for __slots__ in data classes since Python 3.10.

Rust

• The Rust team is happy to announce a nice version of Rust, 1.69.0. Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

Standards/Consortia

• TXT records are perhaps the most flexible type of DNS records available – but have you ever wondered how they’re really used? To see if we can answer this, the TXT records of 1 million domains are examined to see if there’s any rhyme or reason as to how people employ this quirky, open-ended record type.

• The numpy devs did a bad thing. Don’t be like the numpy devs.

Leftovers

• The Starship Blowed Up.

• Do you know core memory? Our prehistoric predecessors would store data in the magnetic fields of ferrite rings, reading out the ones and zeroes by setting the magnetic field and detecting if a small current is induced in a sense wire, indicating that the bit flipped, or not detecting the current, in which case it didn’t. Core memory is non-volatile, rad hard, and involved a tremendous amount of wire weaving to fabricate. And it’s pretty cool.

• Water cooler talk at the office usually centers around movies, sports, or life events. Not at Hackaday. We have the oddest conversations and, this week, we are asking for your help. It is no secret that we have a special badge each year for Supercon. Have you ever wondered where those badges come from? Sometimes we do too. We can’t tell you what the badge is going to be for Supercon 2023, but here’s a chance for you to contribute to its design.

• You don’t need to understand blockchains and cryptocurrencies to enjoy the story, but I do so, below the fold, I can’t resist picking some nits with the technical details.

• There’s little doubt that AI images are now plausible enough to fool both experts and the general public. Earlier this week, the German artist Boris Eldagsen turned down his Sony world photography award after revealing his prizewinning portrait of two women was AI-generated, while last month a fake picture of the Pope in a white puffer jacket (also courtesy of Midjourney) went viral on social media, where it was widely assumed to be a genuine snapshot.

• But now that uncannily convincing images can be extracted from these programmes by anyone with an idea and an internet connection, does that mean Hollywood-grade image-making is now within the reach of ordinary members of the public?

• The All Points North podcast explores what fierce competition for English-language high school places means for those left behind.

Science

• Neuroscientists have been mapping and recreating the nervous systems and brains of various animals since the microscope was invented, and have even been able to map out entire brain structures thanks to other imaging techniques with perhaps the most famous example being the 302-neuron brain of a roundworm. Studies like these advanced neuroscience considerably but even better imaging technology is needed to study more advanced neural structures like those found in a mouse or human, and this advanced MRI machine may be just the thing to help gain better understandings of these structures.

• The first feature film shot in space premiered in Russian cinemas on Thursday, as Moscow exulted in beating a rival Hollywood project amid a confrontation with the West.

• SpaceX’s giant new rocket blasted off on its first test flight Thursday but exploded minutes after rising from the launch pad and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico.

• This feels like sad news.

• Finally!

• Why is the Sun’s atmosphere hotter than its surface?

Education

• Now, in 2023, North Carolina is considering making coding a high school graduation requirement. If lawmakers enact that curriculum change, they will be following in the footsteps of five other states with similar policies that consider coding and computer education foundational to a well-rounded education: Nevada, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Nebraska. Advocates for such policies contend that they expand educational and economic opportunities for students. More and more jobs, they suggest, will require “some kind of computer science knowledge.”

Hardware

• Magnetic stirring bars are the coolest piece of equipment you’ll see in a high-school chemistry lab. They’re a great way for agitating a solution without having to stand there manually and do it yourself. [Applied Science] has now made a magnetic stir bar that features an integrated temperature sensor.

• [CelGenStudios] has an impressive collection of vintage hardware. One that really struck us came from a thrift store in Canada, so the original provenance of it is unknown. It looks like someone’s handmade interpretation of a SOL-20. There’s a wooden and sheet metal box containing a keyboard looted from an old dedicated word processor (back when a word processor was a machine, not a piece of software). Inside? Some vintage-looking hand-drawn PC boards, including a backplane with two boards. One contains an RCA 1802 and a little bit of memory. There’s also a video card with more memory on it than the CPU.

• Neon lamps are fun and beautiful things. Hackers do love anything that glows, after all. But producing them can be difficult, requiring specialized equipment like ovens and bombarders to fill them up with plasma. However, [kcakarevska] has found a way to make neon lamps while bypassing these difficulties.

• We’ve all picked up a radio and switched it on, only to hear an awful scratchy noise emitting from the speaker. [Richard Langer] is no stranger to this problem, and has identified a cheap and unusual solution—using toilet paper!

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Between May 10, 2022 and Mar. 7, 2023, more than 30,200 people in the US contracted mpox (formerly: monkeypox). The majority of cases occurred between the end of June 2022 and early September 2022, though new infections were recorded as recently as the week of Feb. 26, 2023.

• Washington State approved a bill on Wednesday and is expected to sign it into law. The ban on dozens of semi-automatic rifles would prevent the sale, distribution, manufacture, and importation of more than 50 types of guns, including AR- or AK-style rifles.

• The Supreme Court pushed its self-imposed deadline of Wednesday to Friday for deciding whether women seeking access to a widely used abortion pill would face more restrictions while a court case plays out. There was no given reason for the delay.

• Drug dealers are mixing xylazine, an animal tranquilizer relied on by veterinarians, into fentanyl, with deadly results. But controlling it is tricky.

• When Russia’s war blocked vitally needed grains at Ukrainian ports, officials succeeded in finding other routes out. But the solution brought its own problems.

• As cannabis enthusiasts across the United States and around the world celebrated 4/20 Thursday, more than 80 advocacy groups urged the administration of President Joe Biden to remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act and to back comprehensive legal reform.

• China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA) has announced a three-year plan to reduce the amount of soybean meal in animal feed to help decrease reliance on imports.

• The promise to help Brazil protect the Amazon must be approved by Congress, where Republicans are opposed to foreign climate aid.

• US China trade of pharmaceutical and active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) is rapidly increasing. Supply chain mapping will be key to risk management

• Policymakers should equalize inheritance rights and support women’s entrepreneurship as ways to enhance food security.

• One expert said the blood-clotting syndrome was estimated to occur in one in 50,000 people under 40 and one in 100,000 over 40 who received AstraZeneca’s vaccine.

• Maybe this has been our fate all along, to achieve final communion with our own garbage.

Proprietary

• The newly identified zero-click attacks affected an unknown number of targets using devices running iOS 15 or iOS 16 and at least two human rights defenders in Mexico. Two of the new exploits mentioned in the report targeted iPhone’s FindMy feature, while another exploited Apple’s iPhone’s HomeKit and iMessage functionalities. The last exploit affecting HomeKit could reportedly work even if a target had never actually configured a “home.”

• Turns out, no. The backlash was so strong, that Twitter even started letting those who did pay for Twitter Blue to hide the checkmark, because it started being associated with supporting Musk. Meanwhile organizations started coming out strong with “hell no we won’t pay your protection racket money”, as to them it seemed (pretty on-point I’d say) as if Chief Twit was basically saying: “fancy Twitter profile for an organization you have there; it would be a shame if someone impersonated it!”

• He cited a recent study showing only some 7% of Swedes are on Twitter daily and said the platform “has simply changed over the years and become less important for us.”

• “The audience has simply chosen other places to be. And, therefore, Sveriges Radio now chooses to deactivate or delete the last remaining accounts,” Gillinger said.

• While writing this post, I quickly became overwhelmed by the number of acronyms used for a simple feature, such as logging into an external app.

• Here are a few primers: [...]

• Established in 2021 as the merger between Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and Tufts Health Plan, Point32Health is the second largest health insurer in Massachusetts, serving more than 2 million customers.

• In a notification published this week, the organization revealed that it fell victim to a ransomware attack on April 17, which forced it to take systems offline to contain the incident.

Linux Foundation

Security

• Microsoft plans to use weather-themed naming of APT actors as part of a move to simplify the way threat actors are documented.

• Former and current customers whose personal information including key identity documents was compromised during the Optus data breach have launched a lawsuit against the telco.

• The software supply chain security firm adds the Open Policy Agent to its risk analysis engine, increasing flexibility for the creation and enforcement of custom policies on the use of open source software.

• VMware warns of two critical vulnerabilities — CVE-2023-20864 and CVE-2023-20865 — in the VMware Aria Operations for Logs product.

• Cisco this week released patches for critical-severity vulnerabilities impacting its Industrial Network Director and Modeling Labs applications.

• The Air Force is investigating how a lone airman could access and distribute possibly hundreds of highly classified documents, and in the meantime has taken away the intelligence mission from the unit where the leaks took place

• What is a CVE? When a security vulnerability in a given software package becomes known, a response must be mounted in order to minimize the probability of malicious actors gaining access to protected computer systems and networks.

• The incident is the first known case of one supply chain attack leading to a second supply chain attack.

• 3CX hack is the first known cascading supply chain attack, with the breach starting after an employee downloaded compromised software from a different firm.

• The notorious North Korea-aligned state-sponsored actor known as the Lazarus Group has been attributed to a new campaign aimed at Linux users.

• This new targeting was discovered by ESET’s researchers, who say it also helps confirm with high confidence that Lazarus conducted the recent supply-chain attack on VoIP provider 3CX.

• We learned some remarkable new details this week about the recent supply-chain attack on VoIP software provider 3CX, a complex, lengthy intrusion that has the makings of a cyberpunk spy novel: North Korean hackers using legions of fake executive accounts on LinkedIn to lure people into opening malware disguised as a job offer; malware targeting Mac and Linux users working at defense and cryptocurrency firms; and software supply-chain attacks nested within earlier supply chain attacks.

• Fortra has shared a summary of its investigation into the GoAnywhere zero-day incident that hit dozens of the company’s customers earlier this year.

• Print management solutions provider PaperCut warns that exploitation of a recently patched vulnerability has commenced.

• The UK government’s information security arm warns of Russian state-aligned groups aiming to disrupt and destroy critical infrastructure in Western countries.

• Some companies will tell you when support ends before a product is released. Canonical, for instance, gives a five-year support and updates guarantee for Ubuntu LTS releases, although this can be extended by another ten years with an Ubuntu Pro subscription.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• The Florida Division of Emergency Management said the early morning alert was not supposed to disturb people who were asleep.

Privacy/Surveillance

• This week’s show has lots of updates and small updates. We start off with a story about a golf course near San Diego that has saved millions of gallons of water using connected soil sensors.

• Meta owes a settlement payment to any US-based individual with a Facebook account active between May 24, 2007 and December 22, 2022.

• In October 2022, Turkey’s parliament passed a 40-article bill that included amendments providing more detail about the existing obligations of social media companies and other online service providers, such as messaging apps. This included requirements for platforms with over one million users to open local offices and assign local representatives, allowing the authorities to prosecute them, and making it easier for Turkish authorities to access users’ personal data.

• Journalists should protect themselves and their sources by keeping up to date on the latest digital security news and threats such as hacking, phishing, and surveillance. Journalists should think about the information they are responsible for and what could happen if it falls into the wrong hands, and take measures to defend their accounts, devices, communications, and online activity.

• This digital safety kit is designed to be a general starting point for journalists looking to increase their digital safety. For more detailed security advice, please see our Safety Notes. Journalists are encouraged to do a risk assessment before starting their assignments.

• On April 18 at least six police officers from the National Operations Department (NOA) of the Swedish Police visited the Mullvad VPN office in Gothenburg with a search warrant.

• In line with our policies such customer data did not exist. We argued they had no reason to expect to find what they were looking for and any seizures would therefore be illegal under Swedish law. After demonstrating that this is indeed how our service works and them consulting the prosecutor they left without taking anything and without any customer information.

• The European Parliament’s lead LIBE Committee yesterday circulated the draft report by conservative Rapporteur Javier Zarzalejos on the proposal to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAR), also known as “chat control”. While committing to preserve end to end encryption, the Rapporteur proposes to add “voluntary detection orders” and metadata scanning. Pirate Party Member of the European Parliament and long-time opponent of the chat control proposal Patrick Breyer analyses the proposals and their implications.

• It’s been a minute since Linkletter’s case arose, so I’ll give you a little recap here. Proctorio is a massive, wildly profitable ed-tech company that sells a surveillance tool to monitor students while they take high-stakes tests from home. The tool monitors the student’s computer and the student’s face, especially their eye-movements. It also allows instructors and other personnel to watch the students and even take control of their computer. This is called “remote invigilation.”

• This is ghastly in just about every way. For starters, Proctorio’s facial monitoring software embeds the usual racist problems with machine-learning stuff, and struggles to recognize Black and brown faces. Black children sitting exams under Proctorio’s gimlet eye have reported that the only way to satisfy Proctorio’s digital phrenology system is to work with multiple high-powered lights shining directly in their faces.

Defence/Aggression

• The response to the first voluntary draft into the state defense service (VAD) has been very good, said Defense Minister Ināra Mūrniece (National Alliance) in an interview with Latvian Radio on April 20.

• European Commission Press release Brussels, 20 Apr 2023 Today Ukraine becomes a Participating State of the EU Civil Protection Mechanism – the European solidarity framework that helps countries overwhelmed by a disaster.

• The Lithuanian parliament on Thursday overrode President Gitanas Nausėda’s veto and gave its final approval for imposing different sanctions on Russian and Belarusian citizens over the war in Ukraine.

• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will attend a NATO security conference in Europe.  The conference is set to be held in Lithuania from July 11 to 12.

• Verdict: True

• The U.S. Treasury Department has slapped sanctions on one individual and six entities for what it said was a “sanctions evasion network” that has “facilitated Iran’s procurement of electronic components for its destabilizing military programs, including those used in unmanned aerial vehicles.”

• Estonia on April 20 announced the delivery of more weapons to Ukraine ahead of talks in the German town of Ramstein on Western military aid to the war-torn country.

• Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on April 20 met with Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel and Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez in Havana, the latest in a series of visits to shore up support among Russia’s closest allies in Latin America.

• No one was injured as most residents had either been killed or were in hiding.

• The United States has made no determination the Russian private military Wagner Group is a “foreign terrorist organization,” despite its ongoing actions in Ukraine, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.

• The capital of Sudan, Khartoum, has been embroiled in violent clashes between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support forces (RSF) since April 15, leading to scores of casualties. Images received by the FRANCE 24 Observers team show lifeless bodies littering the streets of the city. Our Observer, a doctor in Khartoum, laments that aerial bombardments and continued fighting are making it impossible for residents to leave their homes to take the wounded to hospital or bury the dead.

• The escalation of hostilities in Sudan could degenerate into a security crisis on a devastating scale, President Ruto said.

• Troops killed 5 People’s Defense Force members during fierce fighting.

• As Ukraine did with Russia’s invasion, the Philippines now exposes China’s hostile actions in the legal domain of Philippine waters and islands.

• Mr. Baldwin had been charged with involuntary manslaughter after the gun he was practicing with went off on a film set, killing the cinematographer. The film’s armorer still faces charges.

• Prosecutors in New Mexico will dismiss an involuntary manslaughter charge against actor Alec Baldwin in the fatal 2021 shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the Western film “Rust.” However special prosecutors Kari Morrisey and Jason Lewis also said Thursday that their investigation is not over and Baldwin has not been absolved. Baldwin’s attorneys said in a statement that they are pleased with the decision to dismiss the felony charge. The film’s weapons supervisor Hannah Gutierrez-Reed is still charged with involuntary manslaughter in the shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. Baldwin was pointing a pistol at Hutchins during a rehearsal when it when off, killing Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza.

• After more than 20 years of losing wars, recruiting for the US Army is now officially a mess. Last year, that service fell short of its goal by 15,000 recruits, or a quarter of its target. Despite reports of better numbers in the first months of this year, Army officials doubt that they will achieve their objective this time around either. The commanding general at Fort Jackson, the South Carolina facility that provides basic training to 50 percent of all new members of the Army, called the recruiting command’s task the hardest since the all-volunteer military was launched in 1973. The Army’s leaders were alarmed enough to make available up to $1.2 billion for recruitment incentives and related initiatives.

• Who am I to say that the hawk circling above the deck wasn’t really the murdered sister of our host, as she insisted? Who says the dead stay dead, or even human—for all I know our souls stream out and leap into the nearest form, manzanita, termite, light pole, to begin the challenges of figuring out when to break into blossom, how to find a mate or glow softly each evening without a single glass of wine. Our host was downing grape juice and growing wild-eyed about the government, unable to stop reliving the day her sister died on the Kent State Commons when the Guardsmen turned in unison and fired on the students. She was right about politics and false narratives but wrong about the winged creatures swarming from the eaves as we talked. Those weren’t moths but they were sort of lovely until we realized they were busy eating her guest house on the California coast, in the pleasant weather we were enjoying thanks to the drought, grateful that smoke from the wildfires had drifted elsewhere. As she kept on I felt sympathy leak out of me until all I could think of was how to get away, to be alone with my lover and forget about my country’s many crimes, one of which was killing a college girl. Who, why not, might have been coasting the thermals all day looking to survive by killing something else. Who am I to say a word. It’s not my story. My love and I excused ourselves and went inside to make dinner. In the nearby cove the breaking waves endlessly bashed themselves against the rocks.

• Two business owners in Perm, Danil Guryanov and Danila Shishkin, posted Instagram stories making toasts “For Ukraine” and were shown saying “Glory to the heroes.” They soon received numerous threats on social media and were called “traitors” who could “only be saved by volunteering to go to the front.”

• The Russian military carried out a drone attack against Ukraine on the night of April 20–21, the Ukrainian military’s General Staff reported.

• In the wake of Jack Teixeira’s arrest over the publication of classified documents shedding light on the U.S. intelligence assessments of the Ukraine war, Meduza’s correspondent Andrey Pertsev spoke with a number of anonymous insiders in the Russian government, the Kremlin, and the state-controlled media, trying to grasp what consensus members of Russia’s political establishment had developed with regard to the leak, its real motives, and its most plausible effects. A source two handshakes removed from Putin, for example, encapsulated what seems to be the most widespread impression: “The West, and even the U.S., are not that single-minded about the war.” What other informed speakers had to say about the scandal happens, once again, to say a great deal about how Russia’s political elites think about the outside world.

• Kyiv City Council has terminated the Russian embassy’s lease of the diplomatic premises in the Ukrainian capital.

• The State Duma passed a bill that will allow Wagner Group mercenaries who have taken part in the Russia-Ukraine war to receive veteran and combat disabled status.

• The German company Henkel reached an agreement about the sale of its Russian business to a consortium of investors for 54 billion rubles (around $662 million). Russian regulators have approved the deal.

• An explosion in Belgorod has left a large crater in the ground at one of the city’s intersections.

• The Latvian parliament has passed a bill to ban all public celebrations on May 9, the only exception being the international Europe Day. The Latvian outlet Delfi reports that the Saeima considered the legislation on an expedited basis.

• Kyiv residents observed a “bright glow from an aerial object” on Wednesday evening, Kyiv City Military Administration head Serhii Popko reported on Telegram.

• The commander of the Russian Navy’s Pacific Fleet, Admiral Sergey Avakyants, has been removed from his post, according to Vladimir Putin’s envoy to the Far Eastern Federal District.

• The European Parliament has passed a resolution condemning the “politically motivated conviction” of Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza and the continued imprisonment of opposition politician Aleksei Navalny.

• A Kazakh student at Tomsk State University in Siberia, Marghulan Bekenov, was forced to join the Russian private mercenary group Wagner in March, his mother says.

• Hungary on April 20 called for “progressive” aid from the EU to help move Ukraine’s grain through Central European countries whose farmers are having to compete with its cheaper imports.

• Iran’s navy claims to have forced a U.S. submarine to surface as it entered the Persian Gulf in the latest report of an apparent confrontation between Iranian and U.S. forces in the Gulf.

• A man from the Russian region of Kalmykia has been granted asylum-seeker status in Kazakhstan after he left a military unit to avoid taking part in the war in Ukraine.

• While the war in Ukraine often resembles the trench warfare of the twentieth century, the battle for cyber dominance is highly innovative and offers insights into the future of international aggression, writes Vera Mironova.

• Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, said that since February 24, 2022, shelling in the region has killed more than 30 civilians. He blamed Ukraine’s Armed Forces for the deaths.

• Early Sunday morning, 10 July 2022, gunmen entered Mdlalose tavern in Nonzamo informal settlement in Soweto, South Africa, and opened fire with automatic rifles, killing 16 patrons and injuring seven others.

• UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed to Sudan’s warring factions to observe a ceasefire over the Muslim Eid al-Fitr holiday to allow mcivilians to reach safe areas as rival forces battled for a sixth day on Thursday.

• Some skeptics question the feasibility and wisdom of a military campaign to de-occupy Crimea, but no lasting peace with Putin’s Russia will be possible until the Ukrainian peninsula is liberated, argues Mariia Zolkina.

• The transfer was the sixth of a cleared prisoner in six months in a Biden administration surge to reduce the prison population.

• “I am here today with a simple message: NATO stands with Ukraine,” Jens Stoltenberg, the alliance’s secretary general, said at a joint news conference with the Ukrainian president.

• “Test” electronic military summonses were sent out in St. Petersburg, reports outlet Fontanka, citing Sergey Kachkovsky, the city’s chief enlistment officer.

• The whole mess over the stolen top-secret documents and the damage they’ve done to our national security is a wake-up call to the danger posed by radicalized white youth. Because many of them are comparatively sophisticated with technology, their power to burrow into important parts of the country like our military and police forces makes them inherently dangerous.

• But more than anything else, deepfake technology has fueled an online economy centered on creating fake pornography. Sensity, an Amsterdam-based company that detects and monitors AI-developed synthetic media for industries like banking and fintech, found that 96% of deepfakes are sexually explicit and feature women who did not consent to their creation.

• An NBC News review of free deepfake apps on Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store found more than 17 deepfake apps available to download from companies based all over the world, including Russia, Ukraine, the U.K., the U.S., Italy and China.

• “The intent and purpose of this meeting was never to discuss recognition of the Taliban, and any discussion at the meeting about recognition of the Taliban would be unacceptable,” a U.S. official told VOA on Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• A number of stupid lawmakers have attempted to basically outlaw filming cops by proposing imaginative legislation that would prevent all but the most ineffective documentation of public employees performing their public duties.

Environment

• Climate groups called out U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration on Thursday after a federal agency gave a green light to three liquefied natural gas projects in Texas despite local opposition and scientists’ calls to swiftly transition away from fossil fuels.

• The Ohio River forms in Pittsburgh’s backyard, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers converge to create a waterway that spans nearly a thousand miles to Cairo, Illinois.

• The river is much healthier than it was 50 years ago. Congress passed groundbreaking legislation, the Clean Water Act, in 1972, which helped to clean up polluted waterways like the Ohio River.

• The river – which supplies drinking water to 5 million people and is home to more than 150 species of fish – is still under threat, according to a report released this week from the conservation advocacy organization American Rivers.

• Businesses dependent on fossil fuels want to keep doing the business they’ve always done and using the infrastructure they’ve already invested in, said Mark Agerton, a professor of agriculture and resource economics at the University of California, Davis. This is part of why environmental policy in the United States has moved away from “sticks” — such as putting a price on carbon or capping emissions — and toward “carrots” — such as incentivizing consumers to choose lower-emission energy in the form of subsidies and tax rebates, Agerton said.

• But the experts I spoke with also said that climate policy has become a partisan playing field, bound up in identity and opposition — a way of drawing lines between “their” side and “ours.” For example, America has been a net energy exporter since 2019 and a net petroleum exporter since 2020, and oil and gas production in this country has largely been on the rise since 2008. Yet the Kansas Legislature passed a resolution calling for energy independence and for the Biden Administration to stop curtailing production of oil and gas.

• The Vanguard Group, one of the world’s largest asset management firms, has surpassed its competitor BlackRock as the planet’s leading investor in fossil fuels, according to a report released Thursday.

• Backed by climate, health, and labor groups, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey on Thursday reintroduced the Green New Deal Resolution, which the progressive leaders have been fighting for since they first unveiled it in February 2019.

• A fierce drought melted glaciers during Europe’s hottest recorded summer last year, a phenomenon that could repeat as the continent warms at nearly twice the global rate, the EU’s climate observatory said Thursday.

Energy/Transportation

• St. Charles Clean Fuels, a development company jointly owned by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Sustainable Fuels Group, is exploring the feasibility of building a $4.6bn ammonia production and export facility in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana.

• The American Clean Power Association has been billed as “the nation’s top renewable energy trade group,” but lurking beneath its green luster is a dirty reality.

• A Morrison government report into the obvious solution to the gas crisis – a domestic gas reservation policy – is being hidden by Energy Minister Madeleine King’s Energy Department. Rex Patrick has sought access to the document but now the government has hired big-charging law firm Clayton Utz to fight him. Rex Patrick reports.

• We’re in the middle of self-inflicted gas price crises. Everyday Australians and businesses are suffering from high gas prices (which also cause high electricity prices), not because there’s a shortage of gas, but because successive governments have handed over the keys to our natural gas resources to a cartel. The cartel has profited from Australia’s gas while biting the hand that’s been feeding them.

• A great way to honor Earth Day 2023 (April 22) would be to accelerate our efforts to end our destructive addiction to oil.

• Clean electricity, the backbone of the Biden administration’s strategy for slashing carbon emissions, is becoming daunting to expand.

• Similar to other years, part of Vabaduse Puiestee will be closed to cars from the Market Building to Kaarsild Bridge. This year’s event runs from June 29-August 6.

Wildlife/Nature

• The birth this week of an endangered seal at Hawaii’s most popular tourism hubs highlights the tension between protecting the islands’ fragile ecosystems and maintaining access to the pristine white-sand beaches that attract millions of visitors each year. Hawaii officials are expected to hold a news conference Thursday to remind beachgoers to stay away from the pup. Officials this week fenced off a large stretch of a popular Waikiki neighborhood to protect the Hawaiian monk seal pair. Last summer, a mother seal injured a tourist who got too close. There are fewer than 1,600 Hawaiian monk seals in the wild and it’s a felony to disturb them.

• While official rhino poaching numbers are down, a lack of conservation personnel – specifically rangers – could see the small gains in numbers disappear. Warning bells on the lack of rangers in South Africa’s iconic Kruger National Park as well as in KwaZulu-Natal come from Democratic Alliance (DA) public representatives at national and provincial level.

Overpopulation

• The distribution of people across our planet is changing pretty dramatically, with populations booming in sub-Saharan Africa and shrinking in parts of Europe and East Asia, including China.

Finance

Axios ☛ McCarthy at risk of falling short on GOP votes for debt ceiling billHouse Republicans are feeling a debt ceiling hangover, with senior GOP sources worrying they’re significantly short on votes now that members have read the 320-page bill.Why it matters: “The whip count on this is not good,” a senior GOP source told Axios Thursday afternoon.Much of the skepticism is coming from swing-district Republicans such as Reps. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), who have both indicated they are unhappy.“The Freedom Caucus plan is wagging the conference dog,” one House Republican told Axios, referring to the right-wing members who pushed McCarthy hard to include their priorities.

• 14 Vietnamese migrants lost their lives trying to get to Taiwan on a boat from China

• Digital media company BuzzFeed will shut down its news division and cut another 15 per cent of its staff across the company, adding to lay-offs made earlier this year. BuzzFeed has approximately 1200 total employees, according to a recent regulatory filing.

• We’ve just passed through tax time again. (Unless, like me, you live in one of several states ravaged by recent extreme weather events brought on by climate change. In that case, you can wait until October.) It’s also that moment when the War Resisters League—slogan: “If you work for peace, stop paying for war”—publishes its invaluable annual “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes” pie chart and publicizes a series of Tax Day events nationwide.

• As Democratic lawmakers renew their push for a stock trading ban on Capitol Hill, an analysis released Wednesday found that several members of Congress or their close relatives sold bank equities last month as fears of a financial crisis spread in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse.

• The Democratic chair of the Senate Finance Committee said Wednesday that the House GOP’s newly released debt ceiling legislation shows that the often fractious right-wing caucus is unified around at least one common objective: “Helping rich people cheat on their taxes.”

• Most of us rely on some cash assistance to get by at some point, whether we realize it or not.

• Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan for addressing the state’s housing shortage met resistance in places like Westchester County and Long Island.

• Forbes’ annual billionaires list for 2023 includes 110 Russian citizens, which is 22 more than in 2023, the magazine’s Russian edition noted on Thursday.

• Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Meduza has adopted a consistent antiwar position, holding Russia responsible for its military aggression and atrocities. As part of this commitment, we regularly update an interactive map that documents combat operations in Ukraine and the damage inflicted by Russia’s invasion forces. Our map is based exclusively on previously published open-source photos and videos, most of them posted by eyewitnesses on social media. We collect reports already available publicly and determine their geolocation markers, adding only the photos and videos that clear this process.

• When the pandemic began and businesses were abruptly shuttered en masse, cutting millions of workers off from their incomes, many predicted a huge wave of evictions. Instead, the federal government, along with state and local governments, implemented unprecedented bans on eviction, eventually followed by billions in rental assistance, to keep people housed. The bans worked, and eviction filings fell across the country, forestalling at least 1.36 million cases from being filed that otherwise would have in a typical year.

• Some House Democrats are beginning to question President Biden’s refusal to sit down with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on the debt limit.

• Why it matters: It signals that House Republicans’ debt ceiling bill is, at least in part, having the intended effect of serving as the GOP’s starting position in debt ceiling negotiations.

• French police fired teargas Thursday in a village in southern France where President Emmanuel Macron visited a school, a day after he was booed and heckled over his unpopular pension reform.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• After several false starts, Twitter is removing the blue checks that help high-profile users verify their identity and distinguish them from impostors on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform. Twitter began making good on its promise on Thursday to remove the blue checks from accounts that don’t pay a monthly fee to keep them.

• A Moscow court has ordered the arrest of former Russian Deputy Culture Minister Olga Yarilova on suspicion of involvement in a fraud that led to the alleged embezzlement of 200 million rubles ($2.5 million).

• Lithuanian lawmakers on April 20 reiterated their move to impose softer restrictions on Belarusian citizens and place stricter limits on Russians, overriding a bid by President Gitanas Nauseda to keep the restrictions the same for citizens of both countries.

• Tennessee Rep. Scotty Campbell, the vice chair of the state House Republican Caucus and a leader behind the effort last month to expel three Democrats who joined a gun control protest, resigned on Thursday weeks after a state House investigation found that he had sexually harassed at least one intern.

• Elon Musk has been on a tear of late, attacking the “mainstream media” at every turn. It’s true that this started about five years ago, when Tesla started getting some negative press (after about a decade of extremely positive press), and Musk seemed to absolutely lose his shit. It kinda comes with the territory, though, that every single successful tech company eventually goes through a round or two of media scrutiny, and some of it will be wrong and unfair.

• Alan MacLeod’s reporting on the influx of former government employees at TikTok, Meta, Twitter and other social media companies helps define the scope of the U.S. censorship regime.

• Elon Musk seems to take a personal affront to anyone who says “dude, we’re not going to pay your crazy prices for stuff.” For example, he pulled the NY Times “verified” badge weeks before everyone else was set to lose it after they announced they wouldn’t pay.

• My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, a die-hard supporter of former President Donald Trump who offered a $5 million reward to any cybersecurity expert who disproved his conspiracy theory about the 2020 U.S. presidential election, was ordered Wednesday by an arbitration panel to pay up after a Trump voter called his bluff.

• “We sail the ocean blue and our saucy ship’s a beauty. We’re sober men and true, and attentive to our duty.” —Gilbert and Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore

• Calls for impeachment proceedings against U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas intensified Thursday amid new reporting that revealed several specific conflicts of interest related to the justice’s financial ties to right-wing real estate magnate and Republican donor Harlan Crow.

• American lawmakers defending Israel have often fallen back on what they call the countries’ shared democratic values. But defending the current far-right government is proving a lot harder.

• The Hungarian parliament passed a bill last week, that makes it possible to anonymously report rainbow families to authorities, Bloomberg reports. According to the new law, citizens are allowed to report those who contest the “constitutionally recognized role of marriage and the family” and those who contest children’s rights “to an identity appropriate to their sex at birth.”  The new law is part of the Orban government’s efforts to protect the “Hungarian way of life.”

• The bill passed just a week after France and Germany joined thirteen other EU member states in a lawsuit against Hungary by the European Commission at the European Court of Justice over a 2021 discriminatory law that bans gay people from featuring in school educational materials or TV shows for minors.

• An atmosphere of conviviality greeted Republican attorneys general arriving in New Orleans for their recent winter conference. It was Mardi Gras, and tourists traipsed through the lobby of the historic Roosevelt Hotel wearing colorful beaded necklaces and clutching cocktails.

• A few feet from the check-in desk, if any of the attorneys general stopped to notice it, stood a replica of former U.S. Sen. and Louisiana Gov. Huey Long’s “deduct box,” which reportedly contained more than $1 million in cash donations from businesses and wealthy individuals when the notoriously corrupt Long was assassinated in 1935. The attorneys general were in New Orleans on their own fundraising mission, albeit aboveboard. That evening, in a ballroom one flight up, the Republican Attorneys General Association hosted an invite-only Super Bowl party, where they mixed and mingled with donors, and alcohol flowed freely. There was reason to celebrate. Having endured its worst crisis since it became a standalone entity in 2014, RAGA was thriving again.

• The collapse of the governing party of the Scottish colonial administration is a direct consequence of the Union. It shows the need for Independence.

• Going forward, the Alphabet staff will work on “multimodal” AI, like OpenAI’s latest model GPT-4, which can respond not only to text prompts but to image inputs as well to generate new content.Google has for decades dominated the search market, with a share of over 80%, but Wall Street fears that the Alphabet unit could fall behind Microsoft Corp in the fast-moving AI race. Technology from OpenAI, funded by Microsoft, powers the rival software maker’s updated Bing search engine.

• In a disappointing show, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review CyberDefense Index (CDI) 2022/23 has put India at No. 17 position out of 20. MIT’s CDI is the ‘first-of-its-kind’ annual comparative ranking of the world’s 20 largest and most digital economies on their preparation against, and response and recovery from, cybersecurity threats. It also seeks to measure how such economies are using technology as well as digital practices against hacks and cyberattacks, and how policy is promoting secure digital transactions.

• Buffett went on to explain that when questioned about why Berkshire Hathaway owns so many AAPL shares, it comes down to Apple being a “wonderful business” for both users and investors. “How the hell could we develop a business like that? And so, we own a lot of it,” he said. “And our ownership goes up a little bit every year because they buy back their stock. And Tim does not issue it, he buys it. And we love it.”

• With Bill C-11 in the final stretch – Senate approval could come this week – the government finally provided a more detailed explanation for rejecting the Senate’s user content regulation fix. Indeed, after weeks of false or empty justifications for the rejection, Senator Marc Gold, the government’s representative in the Senate, at long last tried to make the case for rejecting the amendment. Leaving aside the fact that if there were problems with the amendment, it was open to the government – and is still open to the Senate – to fix any perceived problems by amending the amendment, the reality is that Senator Gold’s explanation gets the law wrong. It is sad that as the bill nears passage, the government doesn’t seem to understand or misleads on the impact of its own legislation. I realize that another long post isn’t going to change that, but the thousands of Canadian creators who spoke out on their concerns deserve better.

• Namely, Spotify takes issue with the fee it pays Apple when a user makes a purchase through the Spotify mobile app via the App Store and the restrictions Apple enforces on the marketing in which apps in its store are allowed to engage.

• Apple is notorious for charging third-party app developers as much as 30 percent in fees for sales made through the App Store. Regulators have accused the company of engaging in “anti-steering” practices, preventing services like Spotify from informing iPhone and iPad users about services they can purchase outside the App Store, mainly when those services directly compete with Apple’s ecosystem.

• Twitter on Thursday began removing legacy blue checkmarks from user profiles, with famous people including pop icon Beyonce and Pope Francis losing their verified statuses.

• An agent overseeing the agency’s portion of the investigation into the president’s son is asking Congress for whistle-blower protection to discuss what he says is misconduct in the case.

• Elon Musk, the owner of the social media service, has begun to charge a subscription fee for the verification symbol.

• Russian was once the lingua franca of influencers in Ukraine. Now, not so much.

• BuzzFeed is shutting down its BuzzFeed News division as part of wider effort to turn the struggling media group around and to squeeze profits from a company that’s lost 90% of its value since it listed in 2021.

• Why it matters: The move underscores the broader pressure facing the digital media industry and puts a spotlight on a company that failed to move quickly to address ways to boost revenues and manage expenses.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The protesters want the media to apologize for defaming the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader.

• We look at the historic settlement reached this week in Dominion Voting Systems’s lawsuit against Fox News for promoting lies about voting machines being rigged against Trump in the 2020 election. Fox repeatedly aired conspiracy theories even though some of the network’s most prominent hosts, including Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, as well as multibillionaire and Fox Corporation Chair Rupert Murdoch, were privately admitting they knew Trump’s election fraud claims were false. Earlier this week, shortly after a jury was picked for the trial, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million to settle the case. As part of the deal, Fox was not required to apologize for airing lies about Dominion. We look at the settlement and what is next with Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, which recently filed a Federal Elections Commission complaint against Fox News based on evidence from the Dominion lawsuit.

• This week, Dominion Voting Systems settled its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News Corp for $787.5 million. The settlement was reached just before lawyers for the two sides made opening statements in what was expected to be a blockbuster trial, but after Fox had lost nearly all of its pretrial motions.

• The reason Fox News czar Rupert Murdoch resisted settling Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation suit became clearer within 24 hours of the settlement, when a rival voting firm also trashed by Fox reiterated that it was immediately going ahead with demanding $2.76 billion in its own defamation action.

• The $787.5 million settlement, believed to be the largest in a defamation case, came together quickly.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Island officials say Li Yanhe is ‘safe,” but decline to give details, citing the wishes of his family

• We just wrote about Substack’s issue with content moderation and the Nazi bar problem. As I highlighted in that piece, any centralized service is going to be defined by their moderation choices. If you cater to terrible, abusive people, you become “the site that caters to terrible abusive people.” That’s not a comment on “free speech” because it has nothing to do with free speech. It has to do with how you keep your own corner of the internet and what people will associate with you and your brand.

• New laws imposed by right-wing state legislatures have been a driving force behind a rise in book bans since the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, a national free expression group reported Thursday.

• A Taiwanese publisher who published many books banned in China is believed detained in Shanghai, according to a leading Chinese literary figure, sparking comparisons with the cross-border detentions and kidnappings of five Hong Kong booksellers in 2015.

• Li Yanhe, known by his pen-name Fucha, or Fuchsia, was detained after traveling to visit relatives in China, writer Bei Ling told Radio Free Asia on Thursday.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Lachlan Murdoch has withdrawn his defamation lawsuit against the publishers of online news site Crikey. The case was marked “discontinued/withdrawn” on the Federal Court website on Friday morning.

• His lawyer said the website, Crikey, intended to exploit the outcome of the Fox-Dominion defamation case in the U.S.

• Lachlan Murdoch has dropped his defamation lawsuit against Australian news website Crikey, his lawyer confirmed in a statement Thursday.

• Iraqi Kurdistan authorities should immediately return equipment confiscated from the privately owned outlet Rast Media and ensure those who attacked a news crew for the local broadcaster KNN TV are held to account, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.

• Sharif had sought safety in Kenya after fleeing Pakistan in August 2022, following his ARY News interview with Shahbaz Gill, a close aide to former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who was ousted from power in a parliamentary no-confidence vote in April 2022. Gill was arrested on charges of sedition for comments made about the army during the interview and ARY News channel was taken off the air. Earlier in the year, Sharif was named as one of several Pakistani journalists being investigated by authorities because of their journalistic work.

• In a statement on Thursday, April 20, Washington Post Executive Editor Sally Buzbee said that George, the paper’s Islamabad-based Afghanistan and Pakistan bureau chief, was informed by the Taliban that she was barred from reporting from Afghanistan. The statement said her last reporting trip to Afghanistan was in November 2021.

• “The Taliban must immediately allow Washington Post journalist Susannah George to return to Afghanistan and continue her vital reporting,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “It is absurd to ban journalists for simply reporting the news. The Taliban must stop cracking down on journalism and finally allow members of the media to work freely.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• A new bipartisan caucus in the U.S. Congress is condemning the Iranian government over the recent poisoning of schoolgirls in the country, amplifying the growing criticism in Washington against the Islamic republic and its disregard for human rights.

• Information minister criticized for a recent sexist Facebook post.

• About 1,300 mentors and mentees presented their projects April 19 at this year’s UROP symposium, “Humanizing Research: The Quest for Authentic Action.”

• The Supreme Court appears poised to end affirmative action in college admissions by the end of June. What will that mean for students and their families?

• Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday used his opening remarks at Julie Su’s confirmation hearing to slam the corporate-led campaign against the labor secretary nominee, characterizing it as a desperate effort to tank a public official who is “prepared to take on powerful special interests and stand up for the needs of the working class of this country.”

• Along the South River, in the southwest corner of DeKalb County, Georgia, lies a forested area of about 300 acres that has been owned by the nearby City of Atlanta for over a century. It was once part of a vastly larger wooded landscape, home to the Muskogee (Creek) people. They gave the river and forest the name “Weelaunee.”

• Progressives expressed disgust Wednesday after DeKalb County released an autopsy showing that cops shot Atlanta forest defender Manuel Esteban Paez Terán 57 times and that there was no gunpowder residue on the victim’s hands—debunking the government’s claim Terán fired first.

• As the Supreme Court weighs whether to keep mifepristone available nationwide, we speak with Julie Burkhart, who is on the frontlines of the fight for reproductive justice. Burkhart is president of Wellspring Health Access, the only full-service abortion clinic in Wyoming, that was firebombed by an anti-abortion activist last year, as well as co-owner of Hope Clinic in Granite City, Illinois. Burkhart previously worked for eight years with Dr. George Tiller before his assassination in 2009. She describes the difficulties of providing abortion services in two states with different political and legal landscapes. “People in every part of this country deserve to have access to reproductive healthcare and to make their own decisions and determinations about their bodies,” says Burkhart. We also continue our conversation with law professor Michele Goodwin.

• As the abortion pill mifepristone remains available for at least another two days after a delayed U.S. Supreme Court ruling, we discuss the case with law professor Michele Goodwin. She notes the push to force more people to give birth is taking place against a backdrop of poor maternal health outcomes. “The United States is the deadliest place in all of the industrialized world to be pregnant,” says Goodwin, who notes that people are 14 times more likely to die from carrying a pregnancy to term than from abortion.

• So it’s dismaying to see a group of U.S. Senators attempting for a third time to pass the EARN IT Act (S. 1207)—a law that could lead to suspicionless scans of every online message, photo, and hosted file. In the name of fighting crime, the EARN IT Act treats all internet users like we should be in a permanent criminal lineup, under suspicion for child abuse.

• A Tulsa woman filed a wrongful death lawsuit against officials in McCurtain County — the Oklahoma county where local leaders were caught on audio wishing they could still lynch Black people — saying her husband died last year from excessive force in the custody of sheriff’s deputies.

• Barbara Barrick, the wife of the late Bobby Barrick, said at a news conference Thursday morning, “It’s been a hard year not knowing what happened to my husband.”

• Despite all these brutal actions by the clerical establishment, many Iranian women are taking a prominent role at the forefront of the non-violent opposition to the gender apartheid system in Iran by defying the mandatory hijab.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Agency moves to ensure both incumbents and new service providers share the responsibility of mitigating interference.

• Yesterday we talked about Econet hiking tariffs. It was to be expected but the fact remains, local tariffs are too high, contrary to what the mobile operators say. When we look at data prices especially, we find that we are paying tooth and nail for our data in Zimbabwe.

• We’ve long noted how entrenched broadband providers have historically refused to upgrade areas that don’t deliver immediate, favorable returns (quite often poor, minority, and low income neighborhoods). That, combined with a monopoly assault on competition and regulatory oversight in most markets, has left the U.S. with patchy, substandard broadband networks we’re still struggling to track the full impact of.

• The Internet is not quite as young and spritely as you might’ve thought. Apple’s iPhone, released in 2007, is now 16 years old, and YouTube is an ageing teenager at 18 after its initial release in 2005.

• These two examples are relatively recent additions to the Internet. The first web browser, Mosaic, was released some thirty years ago in 1993. Going back further, the Internet emerged from its early ARPA roots in the form of NSFNET in 1986. At the start of 1983, ARPANET had a flag day and switched over to using TCP as its end-to-end transport protocol. Going back further, in 1974 Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn published the first academic paper describing both the protocol and the underlying architectural framework of a packet-switched network that became the Internet.

• It’s true: the internet “feels faster” once you step in the US. And it’s also true that Edge compute helps to make this better. But the moment you need to provide a dynamic experience, things get muddier. Likely your database is somewhere in the US, so fetching data from it will add a considerable amount of latency.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Starting next year, Colorado farmers will have a much easier time repairing their equipment thanks to a new state law protecting their “right to repair.”

• It’s been quite some time since we’ve talked about Denuvo and its once-vaunted anti-piracy DRM for video games. If I’m being totally honest, I had thought that part of the company’s business was simply gone, so poorly did the DRM perform. By the end, cracking groups were getting around Denuvo-protected games in days, sometimes a single day, and even sometimes in a matter of hours. If a DRM can be defeated in hours, what’s the point of it?

Monopolies

• The TTC must keep its forward-looking gaze, but also take steps to address challenging regulatory issues, either by oversight or direct discussion, or it will lose the essential support among stakeholders that can keep US engagement in the TTC alive.

Trademarks

• In re Charger Ventures, — F.4th. —, 22-1094 (Fed. Cir. 2023)

• In this trademark case, the Federal Circuit affirmed a decision by the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) denying registration of the mark SPARK LIVING for residential real estate, based upon the prior registration of SPARK for commercial real estate. The prior registration is tied to Spark Co-working spaces that started in Baltimore and have now expanded to several other cities.

Copyrights

• Ghanaian rapper Obrafour is suing Drake for $10 million for sampling his 2003 track ‘Oye Ohene’ for the song ‘Calling My Name’ without permission.

• Late last month a federal court ruled against the Internet Archive (IA) and its controlled digital lending (CDL) program. IA has 30 days from the district court’s judgment to file notice of appeal, and it has stated its intent to do so. At issue was whether a library could legally digitize the books it already owned and lend the digital copies in place of the print. The IA maintained that it could, as long as it lent only the same number of copies it owned and locked down the digital copies so that a borrower could not copy or redistribute them. It would be doing what libraries had always done, lend books—just in a different format. The publishers, on the other hand, asserted that CDL infringed on authors’ copyrights, making unauthorized copies and sharing these with libraries and borrowers, thereby depriving the authors and publishers of rightful e-book sales. They viewed CDL as piracy.

• When Brazil’s Ministry of Justice announced in February that two of the largest anime piracy sites in the country had been “taken down,” we suspected there might be more to it than ‘just’ that. We can now confirm that this wave of ‘Operation Anime’ was led by anti-piracy group CODA and involved several police operations, plus “knock-and-talks” at pirates’ homes. In total, 31 sites were shut down and another five threw in the towel.

• YTMP3.nu has sent a cease and desist notice to Google, urging it to prevent DMCA takedown abuse. The YouTube ripper believes its competitors are sending false and fraudulent takedown claims. To curb this abuse, it’s suggested that Google should begin verifying takedown senders. In addition, YTMP3.nu requests a litigation hold in anticipation of future legal action.

• This week Nintendo celebrated victory over French file-hosting service 1fichier.com. The story seemed straightforward; 1fichier refused to take pirated content down so the court found it liable for €442K in damages. With 1fichier set to file an appeal, TorrentFreak is informed that Nintendo had been offered tools to instantly take down all pirated content at zero cost. Instead, disagreement on the basics of valid takedown notices continues to fuel the dispute.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I’ve never had an account on Twitter, but had one on Facebook long time ago. Instead, I’ve had a Mastodon account. Twice. And deleted it twice too.

• The idea of social media just doesn’t sit well with me. What is a difference between a social media account and a blog/Gopher hole/Gemini capsule (I’ll call it “own space” in rest of this post)? If I want to post something, I can post it on my own space. If I want to get notified when someone post something on their space, there are RSS/Atom and other solutions.

• They had a round of layoffs today at work. It made me sad. I am still gainfully employed but it doesn’t make it easy. It takes me back to when I was laid off in September of 2020. Some of those feelings from before are coming back again. It does not seem fair and the reason seems understandable…money, as usual. But it does not seem right.

• My boss was one of those that were let go. I feel badly for him and his family. I experienced the same thing and can imagine what he is going through. When I lost my job of 17 years, I went through some rough times. I kept trying to make sense of, find some kind of reason as to why I was laid off. I could not find any. Even now, I still don’t know. I even asked and there wasn’t anything they could tell me. Sometimes I still wonder. It all just seemed so cold and impersonal, especially since I was told in a video conference meeting and I had put so much time, effort, and loyalty into my work.

Politics

• Only a few years ago, Corporate America at least took a stand, albeit performatively and superficially, when politicians of certain states enacted legislation that was homophobic, transphobic, or misogynist. Now AB InBev is apologetic and defensive over its Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light campaign. No corporations are boycotting Missouri, Florida, Texas, or Montana these days. Corporate America has capitulated to the fascists, no longer even pretending to care (although, Walt Disney & Co. seems to have a spine still). Neither are Democratic governors and mayors of the West Coast threatening boycotts and official travel bans these days. I have not in fact heard much from the likes of Jay Inslee, Tina Kotek, and Gavin Newsom in reaction to the recent waves of hate-based legislation in the red states.

• When republicans whine that the US is a republic not a democracy, they aren’t completely wrong. It is both, actually: a republic and a representative democracy. It is more of a republic than any sort of democracy, though. The US Constitution isn’t a democratic document. It establishes several powerful institutions of government to thwart the will of the people.

Technical

• I’ve come to think LLMs/GPTs/whatever are a threat to conventional search engines because the modern web is an unbelievably annoying dumpster fire.

• They don’t really provide better or faster answers, what they provide is an experience that is not a complete pain in the ass.

• This frog has been simmering for a long while now and we’re so used to it that seeing literally anything else seems revolutionary.

• Recently it has been too expensive to save it all. /usr/bin on unix came about because a disk ran out of space, so more binaries had to be placed on the user (usr) drive, and the user space got moved to /home. Or something like that. And that was at AT&T, which had mountains of monopoly money to spend. The problem here is that storing information costs energy; once storn, there are additional costs to maintain that information over time. Even if there are no or few ongoing costs–maybe the government is being nice, and does not tax your land–the storage medium and interfaces will degrade. I once found some tape drives optimistically labeled “40 year backup”. There was already no tape drive available to read them with. Who knows if those tapes were still good

Internet/Gemini

• Gopher is interesting, like so many other public or semi-public or seemingly-public spaces. People write about whatever they want. Some choose technical topics, others political. It makes sense, and it’s wild-westish, and I like it. I really enjoy the stories I find, about the lives people live.

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

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