● 04.26.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 26/04/2023: Microsoft / Activision Deal Blocked and Qbs 2.0 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 12:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• When it comes to operating systems, Unix and Linux are two of the most popular choices. Both are widely used in the tech industry, but what exactly sets them apart? In this article, we’ll delve into the key differences between Unix and Linux.

• Before we dive in, it’s worth noting that Unix and Linux are related but not identical. Unix was developed in the late 1960s by Bell Labs, while Linux was developed in the early 1990s by Linus Torvalds. Linux is actually based on Unix, but it’s an open-source operating system that can be freely modified and distributed.

Server

• The latest version 1.27 of Kubernetes adds a range of capabilities that promise to give IT teams more granular control over pods within individual clusters. Xander Grzywinski, release lead for this version and a senior product manager for Microsoft, says the capabilities that stand out most are an instance of

Kernel Space

• Released earlier this week, Linux Kernel 6.3 brings thousands of new lines of code to improve the core kernel, architectural support, networking and filesystems.

• Linux 6.3 has been released yesterday, right on schedule. As usual, see the LWN.net articles that covered the 6.3 merge window (part 1 and part 2) as well as the KernelNewbies page.

• The latest version of Linux, Linux 6.3, has been released following a “nice, controlled release cycle,” according to project boss Linus Torvalds.

• The latest Linux kernel boasts security, speed, and power improvements for Intel, AMD, ARM, and RISC-V architectures.

• I’ve been working through John Madieu’s Book on Linux Device Driver Development. When typing in the Sample code for the Platform device, I got a Segmentation fault registering the device (insmod).

• Intel is making a new L4 cache specifically designed for improving boot times on its next-gen Meteor Lake processors. This means we could expect faster booting on next-gen Windows 11, and more.

Applications

• If you regularly use YouTube to listen to music you may enjoy using a dedicated YouTube music player on your desktop. On Linux, there are several to choose from.

• Some generalities about the life of a GUI application. What problems are usually encountered as developers, with solutions.ons need to be taken.

• [...]

• Once the GUI toolkit (and version) chosen, plus the HIG, the development starts!

• One thing to note already is that the application developer is – in practice – limited by what the GUI toolkit provides (and what is easily consumable). Even though it’s possible for the app developer to implement custom widgets based on lower-level API, it’s much harder to do so and many app developers don’t go that route.

• So what the GUI toolkit provides shapes what the application looks like, how features are presented to the user and how they are implemented.

• We would prefer to have as few frontend code as possible, to focus on the backend and features, but in practice we realize that the frontend is not that easy to implement, after all. A GUI application is not a batch program! Especially if we want to create a real product with a long lifetime, and a revenue stream (incidentally).

• It’s obvious to have a good download manager for Linux or other operating systems you are using. Though all modern browsers have a default download manager, it’s not good enough to handle an effective downloading system.

Instructionals/Technical

• OpenRGB is an innovative open-source project that offers users a versatile solution for controlling RGB lighting on various devices. This software breaks the chains of proprietary ecosystems, enabling users to take control of their RGB configurations without the need for multiple vendor-specific applications.

• Version 4 of syslog-ng works perfectly well in version 3 compatibility mode. However, if you want to use the syslog-ng 4 features, you need to be aware of some significant changes. If you have a simple configuration, like those in Linux distributions, then simply rewriting the version string is most likely enough. However, if you use PatternDB or JSON parsing, any Python code, or an Elasticsearch, or MongoDB destination, you have to be aware of the changes.

• Version 4 of syslog-ng works perfectly well in version 3 compatibility mode. However, if you want to use the syslog-ng 4 features, you need to be aware of some significant changes. If you have a simple configuration, like those in Linux distributions, then simply rewriting the version string is most likely enough. However, if you use PatternDB or JSON parsing, any Python code, or an Elasticsearch, or MongoDB destination, you have to be aware of the changes.

• From this blog you can learn about type support, how this can affect you, changes in Python support, and some tips how to prepare for the upgrade.

• In today’s fast-paced digital world, effective communication and collaboration are essential for success. With numerous tools available, it can be challenging to find one that meets your team’s unique needs. Slack, a robust and versatile collaboration platform, has quickly emerged as the go-to choice for organizations of all sizes.

• As a database administrator or a developer working with MySQL, you may need to change the password of a user for various reasons, such as security updates or user requests.

• MySQL, an extensively utilized open-source relational database management system (RDBMS), is favored by developers across the globe for its performance, dependability, and user-friendliness. In this article, we will examine a variety of approaches to display a comprehensive list of all MySQL databases, employing diverse tools and techniques.

• Are you working with dates and time in MySQL and need a way to calculate the difference between two dates? Look no further! In this article, we’ll dive into the DATEDIFF() function in MySQL, discussing the concept behind it, its syntax, and providing practical examples.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install TeXworks on Debian 11. If you are a writer, researcher, or student, you know how important it is to have a reliable text editor for creating documents, articles, or papers.

• The worst case is when the virus takes over your system, and you can’t boot it up. When this happens, you may want to use a live Linux distro to remove the Windows viruses. This tutorial shows you how to get it done.

• Greetings, Ubuntu enthusiasts! As a passionate Ubuntu user, I take great pleasure in sharing valuable tips and insights that can enhance your experience with this versatile operating system. In today’s guide, we’ll dive deep into the world of Recovery and Rescue Mode in Ubuntu, two powerful tools designed to help you troubleshoot and resolve various system issues.

• In this comprehensive guide, we explore the essential aspects of filesystem management in Ubuntu. Learn how to repair, optimize, and maintain your filesystem with our expert tips and tricks.

• Learn how to empty or clear system log files in Linux using various methods, including manual commands, logrotate, and Stacer. Keep your system organized and save disk space by managing log files efficiently.

• In Ubuntu You might come across the “Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)” Error In Ubuntu while trying to install software or upgrade the Ubuntu. This happens because of corrupt or broken packages.

• In this Linux tutorial, we will show how to fix  “Failed to mount ‘/dev/sdax’: Input/output error, NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it’s a SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware” error on Linux.

• In this Linux tutorial blog, We are going to show you the multiple ways to recover your deleted files from Linux based operating system.

Games

• As I explained in my previous status update, I decided not to dive into LAN based multi-player for Pixel Wheels. Instead I am reworking the existing shared screen multi-player mode. It’s going to use split screen again and support up to 4 players.

• And then on Sunday, April 23, oldschoolmtg uploaded a video titled “The Aftermath of The Aftermath … Everything Is Gone!” He described how Pinkerton agents allegedly showed up at his door that morning, demanding the return of the Magic cards. You might be familiar with the name; Pinkerton is a risk management and security firm that many people associate with agents sent to undermine unions in the early 1900s, infiltrating those unions in order to prevent unionists from gaining employment, recruit goon squads, act as security guards for management, and undermine strikes. Pinkertons were also a part of the Battle of Blair Mountain—the largest labor uprising in the United States. It is the kind of company you hire when you want to intimidate people and force them to comply immediately.

• It is true that Linux doesn’t have a good name for the gaming sectors like Windows and macOS. But still, there are a lot of interesting games, including many 3D games available for Linux users. Indeed, gaming companies are now getting interested in Linux, and so they are producing more games for this system.

• Between 2023-04-19 and 2023-04-26 there were 28 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 283 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 9.9 % of total…

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• g10 Code GmbH joins the ranks of KDE patrons! g10 Code provides custom development, enhancements, and audits of cryptographic software — in particular for the popular GnuPG encryption and digital signature tools.

• I have to say I’m really pleased with the upgrade. Yes, there were some niggles, but Kubuntu 22.04 has infused a lungful of fresh air into my Slimbook Pro2. It’s now quieter, cooler and more responsive than before, which is a really nice thing considering we’ve moved almost five years since. All of my software and games work just as before. Now compare this to some other other operating systems out there. Just sayin’.

• Well, if you’re pondering should you move off your older Linux, a Kubuntu in particular, in this case, the answer is a wholehearted yes. Plasma 5.24 is just solid gold. Now, I need to see whether I can get a new battery for the Pro2, because the way the software behaves, I see no reason why it cannot live another happy five years without breaking into sweat. But this has been a thoroughly good experiment. Two upgrades, two hours, excellent results. Take care, Tuxers.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• I’ve been posting in this new pattern for a while now.  The content is mostly the same – DragonFly updates, BSD user meetings, oddball mostly history links – but I’m posting as I see them instead of doing a weekend summary.  Which do you prefer?  The summary or the drip?

Fedora Family / IBM

• Back in late January, we distributed a survey focusing on partitioning preferences for Anaconda Installer (OS Installer for RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora). We were able to get 1269 responses! Thank you to all who participated. The data we collected will help the Anaconda team continue to provide an installer that best suits the majority’s needs.

• Given the high participation rate, we’re excited to share the main results and findings with you!

Open Hardware/Modding

• A Chinese take-out in Houston, Texas has six Raspberry Pi 4 powering a sci-fi themed digital display.

• If you’re an engineering student or a robotics fanatic, I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about the Raspberry Pi and Pi projects. The regular Raspberry Pi boards and Pi projects are more often for robotics and simulations. The Pi board 3B, 4B, and higher versions are similar to a single-board computer (SBC).

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

Firefox Nightly: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, Prettier – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 136HighlightsItiel improved themes support for the findbar, previously there was very little contrast. Themes with background images have their images used in the findbar.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Previously on Extreme Learning, I discussed all the ways I’ve broken production using healthchecks. In this post I’ll do the same for PostgreSQL.

• The common thread linking most of these gotchas is scalability. They’re things that won’t affect you while your database is small. But if one day you want your database not to be small, it pays to think about them in advance. Otherwise they’ll came back and bite you later, potentially when it’s least convenient. Plus in many cases it’s less work to do the right thing from the start, than it is to change a working system to do the right thing later on.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Every major release of LibreOffice includes new features, thanks to our community of volunteer and ecosystem developers. But what can you do, if you want a new feature in LibreOffice but don’t have the technical know-how to implement it?

FSF

• How did you file your taxes this year? Millions of US taxpayers file their taxes using proprietary software such as TurboTax. Many feel they have no other option than to use nonfree software or a Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS), giving up their freedom as well as their most private financial information to a third-party company, in order to file taxes. Fortunately, upcoming legislation gives us a chance to change this. The Inflation Reduction Act requires the IRS to research a government-operated gratis tax return system. $15 million of the $80 billion that was approved for the tax agency by the Act is allocated for this. On April 5, the IRS released a plan for how it intends to improve the tax system. This plan includes the promise to further explore an “electronic service to prepare and file tax returns directly with the IRS.” To do so, the IRS intends to “study taxpayer preferences for products. The results of the study will inform if and how the IRS should design such a service.”

• This is an invitation to tell the IRS about the importance of free (as in freedom) software. The Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund launched a petition calling for a gratis, “simple tax filing system that saves taxpayers time and money.” This is not enough! We need a tax filing system in which every taxpayer can file their taxes entirely with free software. There are already some providers who allow eligible people to file their taxes free of charge, but none of the software offered is free as in freedom.

Programming/Development

• The primary reason I started my blog was to have a repository of code snippets that I could re-use. Anytime I had to do something for my thesis or for work, I would write instructions around the code that I’ve used to explain how and why things worked out. But I needed a spot to save these scripts, and it turns out that a blog was the best solution for this: it doesn’t require any subscription to a (very often proprietary) service to store my notes for me, and I need 0 discipline to maintain a blog. Simply write a post, push to Github, website gets updated. If I would store the notes myself on my computer instead, this would mean a lot of work, and I would need to think about how to make them available across devices.

• The other reason is that I thought that this would be a good way for me to contribute to the wider free software and open source ecosystem. I’m not a programmer, so contributing code would be quite difficult for me. I’ve recently published a package, so in the end I ended up contributing code, but that was more due to “luck” finding an actual problem that hadn’t been solved (well, that’s not really the case, logging in R had been solved, but not using a monad and for some reason I had become obsessed with monads in 2022) and also thanks to the help of much better programmers than myself. So writing and posting these blog posts would be my way to contribute to the community. I think that this was the right decision, as I’ve had many people throughout the years thank me for some of my blog posts that helped them with some of their tasks.

• It’s often taught in programming that duplication is to be avoided. But for some reason it’s often stated that duplication is more acceptable in test code than in application code. Why is this?

• We’ll explore this, but first, let’s examine the wrong answers.

• Unfortunately, much of Sydney is the same suburban “stroad” wasteland like you see in post-WWII New Zealand or North America. Weirdly enough, my first experience with this lifestyle was in Malaysia; my parents wanted a house again after living in high-rise Singapore, so we moved into a residential development on the periphery (to put it charitably!) of Kuala Lumpur. It was a beautiful, isolated prison accessible only by car, and I promised myself to never live in one again!

• Which leads me to this epiphany about online retail. Living in a remote house distorts your view of the world in so many ways, but this might be one of the more economically consequential.

• Kotlin Coroutines are usually integrated in Java code via Java’s CompletableFuture, but a tighter integration might be possible with Cats-Effect. I played around to see if I can convert Kotlin’s coroutines, built via suspended functions straight to cats.effect.IO. Turns out I could.

• Users who work with git patches through email most likely use a terminal-based program such as aerc or mutt. CLI email clients tend to have built-in support for easily applying patches directly to their local repos. But what about people who prefer to use graphical email apps?

• Lucky for us, it is actually fairly simple to replicate a similar workflow to that of a CLI client. In this example I will be focusing on the Evolution email client, but the core principles should work in most other GUIs.

• It was time again to update CMake on FreeBSD. That’s always a guarantee for a good time, since there are about 2500 FreeBSD ports (software packages) that use CMake directly as their (meta-) build system. An update is a special moment to try to break them.

• Rust is a hugely popular compiled programming language and fully supporting it was an important goal for Firebuild for some time.

• Firebuild’s v0.8.0 release finally added Rust support in addition to numerous other improvements including support for Doxygen, Intel’s Fortran compiler and restored javac and javadoc acceleration.

Qt

• Graphics are an essential element of UI applications. Indeed, what differentiates UI applications from other types of software is the presence of a visual interface enhancing user interaction. Visuals make software more intuitive and immediate, easier to use and to understand. Colors, icons, and animations provide visual cues or status updates in a non-invasive way. Charts, graphs, or maps help display complex information and data. Advanced 3D graphics represent real-world objects and life-like situations on the UI. And in addition to their utility, there is an undisputed aesthetic value in the creation of visually appealing software—good UX design and pleasant visuals attract more users and reinforce brands.

• The latest release of Qt for Android Automotive (QtAA) is out, based on Qt 6.5 LTS and with many new and improved features.

• The Qbs build tool version 2.0.0 is available.

• Qbs is a community-driven language-agnostic build automation system. It is fast and offers an easy-to-learn language based upon QML.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• Welcome to this tutorial on resolving the “unary operator expected” error in Bash! This error often occurs when working with Bash scripts and can be challenging to diagnose and fix.

Leftovers

• The quake was at a depth of 20km.

• You might be a little surprised how many Techdirt posts have been done that involve donuts. I know, right? What a sentence! Still, we’ve got square donut trademarks, we’ve got donuts made to look like college sports teams, and we even have donut crumbs that some Joe Friday out there thought for sure was meth.

• We’re hard at work on a very cool new project that will be released very soon, so I didn’t have time to record a podcast this week. However, there were two recent (much more well known) podcast episodes that I heard that Techdirt readers might really like. Rather than do longer posts about each, I figured I’d just lump them together in this post with a short summary, and if they sound interesting, you should go check them out.

• Back in 2016, around the time that both Theranos and Zenefits were engulfed in scandals that involved their superstar founders/CEOs being caught lying to investors, we had a podcast discussing the issues around innovation and the marketing mantra of “fake it ‘til you make it” for startups. One of the points raised is that there is a difference between outright fraud and the kind of usual puffery and exaggeration that happens in both startups, and that it’s important for startup founders not to get carried away.

Science

• The multi-year bureaucratic clash over the environmental impact of the world’s largest rocket considered everything from endangered birds and historical monuments to exhaust and construction noise, but the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) didn’t anticipate one thing: dust.

• If you ever work with a circuit that controls a decent amount of current, you will often encounter a FET – a Field-Effect Transistor. Whether you want to control a couple of powerful LEDs, switch a USB device on and off, or drive a motor, somewhere in the picture, there’s usually a FET doing the heavy lifting. You might not be familiar with how a FET works, how to use one and what are the caveats – let’s go through the basics.

• *blink*

• Influencer.

• We’ve finally detected seismic waves passing through the Red Planet.

• Curiouser and curiouser.

• An incredibly rare find.

• Japanese company ispace is aiming to be the first company to successfully land a robot on the moon this week.

• ispace’s Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander will start its descent towards the lunar surface at around 11.40pm, Singapore time.

• An unforeseen pile-up of dust most likely affected power generation and Zhurong’s ability to wake up

Education

Hardware

• Dirty little secret time: although amateur radio operators talk a good game about relishing the technical challenge of building their own radio equipment, what’s really behind all the DIY gear is the fact that the really good stuff is just too expensive to buy.

• During the Middle Ages much of Ancient Greek and Roman scientific, legal and similarly significant texts written on parchment were commonly erased, mostly because of the high cost of new parchment and the little regard given to these secular texts. Although recovery attempts of the remaining faint outlines of the old text has been attempted since at least the 19th century, these often involved aggressive chemical means. Now researchers have managed to recover the text written by Ptolemy on a parchment that suffered such a previous recovery attempt.

• The LattePanda Sigma is a new single board computer featuring a 13th gen i5 processor along with an ATmega32 coprocessor. The device is equipped with multiple interfaces and flexible expansion ports.

• Remember fax machines? They used to be all the rage, and to be honest it was pretty cool to be able to send images back and forth over telephone lines. By the early 2000s, pretty much everyone had some kind of fax capability, whether thanks to a dedicated fax machine, a fax modem, or an all-in-one printer. But then along came the smartphone that allowed you to snap a picture of a document and send it by email or text, and along with the decrease in landline subscriptions, facsimile has pretty much become a technological dead end.

• The 1970s was a great time to be an electronics hobbyist, as a whole new world of analogue integrated circuits was coming down in price while new devices would appear to tempt the would-be constructor. Magazines and project books were full of simple circuits to do all manner of fun things, including many synthesizers and sound generators.

• [mat kelcey] was so impressed and inspired by the concept of a very slow movie player (which is the playing of a movie at a slow rate on a kind of DIY photo frame) that he created his own with a high-resolution e-ink display. It shows high definition frames from Alien (1979) at a rate of about one frame every 200 seconds, but a surprising amount of work went into getting a color film intended to look good on a movie screen also look good when displayed on black & white e-ink.

• AAEON’s UP Squared Pro 7000 Edge fanless mini PC is powered by a choice of Alder Lake-N SoCs from the Processor N50 up to the Intel Core i3-N305 octa-core processor and designed for IoT, automation, robotics, and industrial applications. The system is based on the UP Squared Pro 7000 4-inch SBC and ships up to 16GB LPDDR5, up to 64GB eMMC flash, and supports triple display setups with HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB-C ports.

• Hard Off is a chain of second-hand stores in Japan that sell computers, retro consoles, Hi-Fi gear, camera lenses, scientific equipment, electric guitars, toasters, and everything in between. Their logo suggests they’re related to the Book Off chain of second-hand book stores.

• I’d never been to one in Japan before, but Clara and I tracked down a branch on the outskirts of Kyoto one evening. It was a bit of a trek; the sheer size of the warehouse presumably makes it difficult to afford rent or floor space in the centre of town. Fortunately, there was a Hankyu line station within a fifteen minute walk.

• We reached out to industry contacts to find out why AMD’s Ryzen 7000 processors are burning out.

• Arm reportedly forms solutions team to develop advanced SoC prototypes.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Africa continues to carry a disproportionately high share of malaria cases, according to the latest world malaria report by the World Health Organization.

• The Guinean Navy found more than 1.5 tons of cocaine on board a fishing vessel off the coast during an inspection in early April.

• Intriguing…

• More than an ‘old wive’s tale’.

• Cases, hospitalizations and deaths are lower than they’ve been in years. We asked experts how to think about personal risk — and what the future likely holds.

• Kenyan police have recovered 73 bodies, mostly from mass graves in a forest in eastern Kenya, thought to be followers of a Christian cult who believed they would go to heaven if they starved themselves, a police officer said on Monday.

• Air pollution still causes more than 1,200 premature deaths a year in under 18′s across Europe and increases the risk of chronic disease later in life, the EU environmental agency said Monday.

• The Group of 7 (G7) Agriculture Ministers Sunday agreed to assist Ukraine as it rebuilds its agriculture system and condemned Russia’s “war of aggression” on Ukraine.

• The governor approved the state’s prohibition on Monday, just a month after the State Supreme Court blocked an earlier ban.

• A medical examination confirmed they were unconscious due to lack of oxygen in their bodies.

• Modern insulin pumps are self-contained devices that attach to a user’s skin via an adhesive patch, and are responsible for administering insulin as needed. Curious as to what was inside, [Ido Roseman] tore down an Omnipod Dash and took some pictures showing what was inside.

• Amid a 72-hour truce in Sudan, a United Nations official revealed Tuesday that that one of the warring parties had seized control of a national laboratory in the capital Khartoum that holds samples of multiple diseases, posing a public health threat.

• It’s OK for diners to bring dogs to restaurants’ outdoor seating areas if state and local laws — and the restaurant — allow it, the Food and Drug Administration says in new guidance.

• Why it matters: The agency weighed in on this hot-button issue just in time for spring, the high season for disputes over Fido’s right to dine alfresco — and as cities grapple with whether to extend COVID-era outdoor dining rules.

Proprietary

• Amazon New Zealand staff have been called to a midday meeting, where they expect to hear how they will be impacted by the multinational’s latest round of layoffs.

• It gets worse: In a survey of AI experts conducted last year, almost half said the chance that AI would lead to human extinction was 10 percent or more. Even Elon Musk, a founding member of OpenAI and someone rarely seen as concerned about consequences, said last week that AI “has the potential of civilization destruction.”

• We are at an inflection point with AI. New technology demands new regulations. But AI development is outpacing regulators’ ability to act, or even to understand. To avert the worst possible outcomes, leaders need to listen to the experts who can anticipate the ramifications, and regulate now—before it’s too late.

• Google Maps’ main purpose is to enable people to get directions and look up businesses. But along the way, it has become a social space too. Sort of. To fill out the world map it created, Google invited people to add snippets to all the digital places. You upload your photos; you leave your reviews; you look at the artifacts others have left behind. The pictures of a restaurant on Google Maps are often a mismatched succession of interior-design shots, flash photos of messy plates, and outdated menus. There’s plenty of detritus too: irrelevant photos, businesses that don’t exist, three-star reviews without an explanation.

Security

• Today, members of Google Project Zero and Google Cloud are releasing a report on a security review of Intel’s Trust Domain Extensions (TDX). TDX is a feature introduced to support Confidential Computing by providing hardware isolation of virtual machine guests at runtime. This isolation is achieved by securing sensitive resources, such as guest physical memory. This restricts what information is exposed to the hosting environment.

• Threat actors have been observed abusing Kubernetes RBAC to create backdoors and hijack cluster resources for cryptocurrency mining.

• Learning how to spot the signs of narcissism and identify narcissists will help us ensure that we do not bring these people into our security and fraud teams, or our enterprises.

• Rather than focusing on arrests, U.S. law enforcement is trying to prevent additional victims of online crime.

• During the 2023 RSA Conference, top officials provided rare insight into sharing information to protect U.S. networks from malicious hackers.

• The biggest companies working in industrial cybersecurity are building an early-warning platform called ETHOS to share threat intelligence.

• More than 3,000 participants from 38 countries took place in NATO’s 2023 Locked Shields cyber defense exercise.

• Critical vulnerability found in Inea RTU can be exploited to remotely hack devices and cause disruption in industrial organizations.

• North Korea-linked hacking group BlueNoroff/Lazarus was seen using the RustBucket macOS malware in recent attacks.

• SolarWinds has patched two high-severity vulnerabilities that could lead to command execution and privilege escalation.

• Several OT cybersecurity firms have teamed up to create an information sharing platform designed to serve as an early warning system for critical infrastructure.

• Researchers warn that majority of Windows and macOS PaperCut installations still vulnerable to critical vulnerability already exploited in malware attacks.

• WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems in the world due to the ability it gives non-technical, inexperienced users to create professional, effective websites. According to data from W3Techs, WordPress was used by 43% of all websites on the Internet in 2022.

• This widespread usage, combined with persistent security vulnerabilities, has put a target on WordPress’s back. Malicious hackers have come to view attacks exploiting WordPress vulnerabilities as an easy and effective way to gain access to valuable credentials and infect systems with harmful software.

• Securing WordPress sites against damaging attacks is a challenge, as new vulnerabilities are constantly being discovered, and even sites that are considered secure are frequently breached with emerging attacks. In this article, we introduce a minimum impact solution that leverages predictive analysis detection and automated remediation, and demonstrate its effectiveness in securing WordPress sites against attacks exploiting both new and known flaws.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Section 702 allows the government to conduct surveillance inside the United States by vacuuming up digital communications so long as the surveillance is directed at foreigners currently located outside the United States. It also prohibits intentionally targeting Americans. Nevertheless, the NSA routinely (“incidentally”) acquires innocent Americans’ communications without a probable cause warrant. Once collected, the FBI can search through this massive database of information by “querying” the communications of specific individuals.

• In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted up to 3.4 million warrantless searches of Section 702 data to find Americans’ communications. Congress and the FISA Court have imposed modest limitations on these “backdoor searches,” but according to several recent FISA Court opinions, the FBI has engaged in “widespread violations” of even these minimal privacy protections.

• After a string of scandals, these newly released documents demonstrate some of the steps the FBI took to train personnel who apparently did not understand how to stay within the law’s extremely broad mandate. Namely, to query the collected communications of U.S. persons only if they are investigating foreign intelligence, a crime, or both, still without judicial review. According to FBI director and media reports, these guidelines led to a significant drop in unauthorized searches, but even this “dramatic” drop still allegedly resulted in over two hundred thousand warrantless searches of Americans’ private communications in 2022 alone. That’s two hundred thousand too many; Congress should close the “backdoor loophole” and require the FBI to get a search warrant.

• The controversy over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica was back in the spotlight in Canada as the Federal Court sided with Facebook and against the Privacy Commissioner of Canada in a decision arising from a 2019 investigation into the matter.

• The EHDS also proposes to legally compel hospitals or physicians to hand out your medical records to a newly created government agency, which in turn, can allow access to anyone who claims a research interest. That includes not only academics but also pharmaceutical companies, wellness app startups and even data harvesting Big Tech corporations like Google and Facebook.

• This became obvious in the middle of the first chapter, when a character began explaining the operation of a trusted execution environment and its various digital signing keys. While it’s always fun to read about gangsters and exploding cars, there’s something particularly nice about a book whose plot hangs around a piece of technology that most people don’t even think about. (And if that isn’t your thing, there are exploding cars and gangsters.)

• This still leaves the question of how a cryptography blog reviews a work of fiction, even one centered on cryptography. The answer is pretty simple: I’m not going to talk much about the story. If you want that, there are other reviews out there. While I did enjoy the book immensely and I’m hopeful Cory will write more books in this line (with hopefully more cryptography), I’ll mainly focus on the plausibility of the core technical setup.

• The visitors noted that Russian authorities recorded the IMEI codes of their smartphones as they crossed the border. The 15-digit IMEI codes are device-unique, allowing mobile phone service providers to identify individual devices on mobile phone networks. That code is attached to the device itself and is not changed if a different SIM card is used, for example.

• Following the burglary of a French logistics company in 2019, facial recognition technology (FRT) was used on security camera footage of the incident in an attempt to identify the perpetrators. In this case, the FRT system listed two hundred people as potential suspects. From this list, the police singled out ‘Mr H’ and charged him with the theft, despite a lack of physical evidence to connect him to the crime. The judge decided to rely on this notoriously discriminatory technology, sentencing Mr H to 18 months in prison.

• In the future, every police headquarters in Rhineland-Palatinate will be equipped with such a mobile speed camera system.

• The Minister of the Interior announced that in the next amendment of the Police and Public Order Act, “we will draw up a proposal, the legal basis of which will allow the permanent use of the Monocam. We will of course also take into account data protection issues.”

• The Monocam system, developed in the Netherlands, detects in real time when a car or lorry driver grabs their smartphone or tablet while driving and automatically takes a picture.

• The e-CNY network has expanded over the last year, and China’s goals have only become clearer. Domestically, the People’s Bank of China is still in test-and-learn mode, globally, China is more focused on setting defining international standards.

• Monday’s Fourth Circuit opinions from Judges Robert King, Marvin Quattlebaum, and Henry Floyd (Smith v. Towson Univ. and Doe v. ABA Accredited Univ.) were nonprecedential, and upheld the lower court decisions under an “abuse of discretion” standard.

Defence/Aggression

• A German air force tweet included a number of photographs of the Russian jets.

• An upcoming documentary series The Silent Civil War will share the epic, poignant and often challenging testimonies of family members of a number of those who were involved in the Civil War in Ireland between 1922 and 1923. The two-part series will begin on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player on Wednesday 26th April at 9:35pm.

• When the incoming Albanese Government tasked former Defence Minister Stephen Smith and former Chief of Defence Force Sir Angus Houston with writing the Defence Strategic Review (DSR), they spelled out the clear need for prioritisation…

• New NATO Baltic defence plans, which have been presented to member states, meet Lithuania’s expectations, President Gitanas Nausėda has said.

• A drone loaded with 17 kilos of C-4 explosives was found on the outskirts of Moscow, Russian state news agency TASS reported on April 24, quoting an unnamed source in law enforcement.

• Moscow has come under blistering attack at the United Nations over its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that the world was at “a dangerous threshold.”

• A court in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian region of Crimea has sentenced a local resident, whose identity was not disclosed, to four years in prison for taking part in the activities of an illegal armed group.

• The Moscow City Court has rejected an appeal filed by Darya Trepova against her pretrial detention for her alleged role in the assassination of a prominent Russian war blogger at a St. Petersburg cafe earlier this month.

• A Kazakh student at Tomsk State University in Siberia who joined Russia’s private mercenary group Wagner in March, may face up to nine years in prison for being in a mercenary group if he returns home.

• A monument to Lithuanian and Polish victims to Stalin’s deportations has been demolished in Russia’s Perm region, the Russian NGO Memorial said.

• The foreign ministries of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia on Monday summoned the heads of their respective Chinese embassies to protest a statement by the Chinese ambassador to France that former Soviet Union countries “do not have effective status under international law”.

• Even though the Lithuanian government suspended visas for Russian and Belarusian nationals soon after the start of the Ukraine war, more of them moved to the country last year than before. Are they a threat to national security, as the government claims?

• A private helicopter has been prevented from taking off from Kaunas Airport for a flight to Pskov in Russia on suspicion of circumventing international sanctions, the Lithuanian Transport Safety Administration (LTSA) said on Monday.

• Lithuania should remove regulation in order to encourage the development of arms industry, several officials said on Monday.

• The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry is summoning the chargé d’affaires of the Chinese Embassy in Vilnius to demand explanations about the statements made by the Chinese Ambassador to France on the national sovereignty of the Baltic states.

• China said on Monday that it respects the sovereign status of all former Soviet countries, walking back on the statements of its ambassador to France who seemingly questioned their sovereignty.

• Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have summoned Chinese envoys in their countries to explain recent comments by Beijing’s ambassador to France that questioned the sovereignty of former Soviet states amid Russia’s war against Ukraine.

• China said it respected the “sovereign state status” of all ex-Soviet countries on Monday, after Beijing’s ambassador to France sparked outrage in Europe by questioning the sovereignty of those nations.

• This past winter, the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and the Global China Hub convened experts and officials in a private workshop to discuss how China views technological competition with the United States.

• On March 30, the International Court of Justice issued its final judgment on a case between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States on the fate of “Certain Iranian Assets.” The judgment contains wins and losses for both sides.

• A French court halted the controversial clearance of a slum due Tuesday aimed at expelling migrants from its Indian Ocean island territory of Mayotte — a plan that has sparked clashes between locals and security forces and sparked tensions with neighbouring Comoros.

• Sudan’s battling generals have agreed to a three-day ceasefire, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday, after 10 days of urban combat killed hundreds, wounded thousands, and sparked a mass exodus of foreigners.

• Insecurity in Haiti’s capital has reached levels similar to countries at war, the United Nations said Monday in a report that highlighted a surge in murders and kidnappings in the country.

• Comoros said Monday it had refused to allow a boat carrying migrants from Mayotte, where French authorities have announced a controversial operation against illegal migrants, to dock.

• Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei on Tuesday pledged support for “solid diplomatic ally” Taiwan during a visit to the self-ruled island that has been slammed by China.

• Russian forces unleashed more waves of assaults on Bakhmut over the past day, but neither side managed to make critical advances in the monthslong battle for the city in the eastern region of Donetsk, the Ukrainian military said on April 25.

• The USS Nimitz performed a dramatic U-turn en route for unknown reasons.

• During a visit to Ukraine, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said she backed Kyiv’s efforts to join NATO and the European Union “as soon as conditions allow.”

• Pakistani police say at least 15 people were killed and dozens injured after two explosions destroyed an anti-terrorism police headquarters in the Swat Valley in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, but officials said the blasts were caused by stored ammunition and not terrorism.

• Myles Cosgrove, who was fired by the Police Department in Louisville, Ky., after the fatal raid on Ms. Taylor’s apartment, has a new job in Carroll County in northern Kentucky.

• Without a decisive victory, Western support for Ukraine could weaken, and Kyiv could come under increasing pressure to enter serious peace talks to end or freeze the conflict.

• Taking advantage of its turn as president of the Security Council, Moscow sent Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov to preside over a session on peace and diplomacy.

• Meanwhile, reports emerge that the latest airstrike killed nearly 20 of junta’s own troops.

• One activist was assaulted by men with metal batons; another was rammed into by a car while driving.

• As its ambassador sparks a diplomatic row, Beijing says it respects the sovereignty of former Soviet Union states

• Locals say around 80 of them are still being interrogated by the junta.

• A Moscow court arrested Bogdan Tsyganenko in absentia. Tsyganenko is the second suspect in the murder of Daria Dugina, a pro-war pundit and the daughter of Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin.

• An unknown suspect has accessed a 50-year-old Sakhalin resident’s personal account on the government electronic paperwork website Gosuslugi (“State Services”) and signed up the victim for contract service in the Russian army.

• The 65-year-old Marina Novikova from the Tomsk region of Western Siberia is a defendant in one of the first two criminal cases opened in Russia since a new law against “fakes” about Russia’s combat operations was adopted in 2022.

• Earlier this month, Russia’s State Duma and Federation Council passed a new military conscription law. The bill, approved on an expedited basis, was designed to close the remaining loopholes that until then permitted the most determined of draft-dodgers to escape military duty. The new law enables the Defense Ministry to distribute digital summonses, also restricting the draft evaders’ ability to leave the country. Russia is now set to develop a unified digital register containing comprehensive personal data on every male citizen subject to military duty. Observers were quick to call the new system a “digital gulag,” but government officials greeted the new data project with enthusiasm, not least thanks to its gargantuan anticipated budget. Meduza’s correspondents Andrey Pertsev and Svetlana Reiter investigate who will benefit from building a new digital system of mass control.

• Red Square will be closed to the public from April 27 to May 10 due to preparations for the parade in honor of the 78th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War, said the Russian Federal Guard Service.

• According to Ukrainian intelligence (SBU), a Ukrainian court has seized assets from Oksana Marchenko, wife of Viktor Medvedchuk, worth more than one billion hryvnias (~$27 million).

• Russia has put together a new history textbook for 11th graders which contains a section on the “special military operation” (the Kremlin’s official term for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine). Russian Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov presented the textbook on April 24 at the educational marathon “Knowledge. Firsts.”

• The Russian Defense Ministry said on the evening of April 24 that another extension of the grain deal is in jeopardy due to the attacks by “unmanned boats” in annexed Sevastopol and Crimea. The Russian military blamed Ukrainian authorities for the attacks.

• As the trial begins for the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people in 2018, hearts and lives are still shattered from the recent mass shootings at an Alabama birthday party and the Louisville bank. Ongoing are calls for gun reform along with cries to “deal with mental illness” by lawmakers, as happened in Nashville. In the January California shootings, a congresswoman speculated that if older Asian Americans were able to access appropriate mental health treatment, “things could have been different.”

• China is taking an increasingly assertive role in world affairs, helping to broker a restoration of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, offering a 12-point peace plan for Ukraine, and strengthening its relationships with European and Latin American powers. Last week, China continued its diplomatic outreach by offering to hold talks between Israel and Palestine. “China doesn’t want the United States to be the preeminent power. It wants to live alongside the United States,” says economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has also served as adviser to three U.N. secretaries-general and currently serves as a sustainable development solutions advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres. His latest article is headlined “The Need for a New US Foreign Policy.”

• There are more pyramids in Sudan than there are in Egypt; there’s a network of them in Meroe, about an hour-and-a-half drive from Khartoum. Although smaller than the pyramids in Egypt, Meroe’s pyramids are older, built as crypts for the Kingdom of Kush that once stretched across the region. Historians say that these are the prototypes for the pyramids of Giza, and they are inscribed with drawings and hieroglyphics, though they have images of people with curly hair instead of the straight locks featured in Egypt.

• After the Chinese-brokered rapprochement between Saudi Araba and Iran, another diplomatic coup is unfolding in the Middle East. This one is orchestrated by the Russians.

• Responsible Statecraft interviewed the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction on Ukraine aid.

• Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind the largest and perhaps most consequential disclosure in U.S. history, said the latest intelligence leaks show that the war between Russia and Ukraine is at a “stalemate,” drawing similarities to the Vietnam War.

• But nearly eight decades after the invasion that led to the liberation of Western Europe, the students are learning something new about the wartime experience as they embark on an unprecedented staff ride with the University of Michigan Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC).

• “You read about the Allies’ invasion in the books and learn details about this specific operation, the high cliffs, but you don’t think much of it,” said Army Cadet Alexis Gonzalez, one of 30 cadets and midshipmen who explored the Normandy site this spring as part of a unique military staff ride. “Once you step in here, you see—in person—the masses of the cliffs, their height and the difficult terrain the rangers had to climb; it’s kind of a shock.”

• Now, lab workers are unable to return to the facility and secure the hazardous materials. “This is the main concern: no accessibility to the lab technicians to go to the lab and safely contain the biological material and substances available,” Nima Saeed Abid, the WHO’s representative in Sudan, told reporters on Tuesday.

• Makaryan attempts to educate the Stanford community about the Armenian genocide of 1915 and its generational impact on Armenian students at Stanford.

• Who killed nine Chinese nationals at the Chimbolo gold mine in the Central African Republic (CAR)? The government of CAR President Faustin-Archange Touadéra has promised to investigate the murders at the mine owned by China’s Gold Coast Group, which was attacked by gunmen a few days after it opened in March.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• To conduct the research, several young women called 34 hospitals in the state with a script, saying they were pregnant for the first time, trying to decide which Oklahoma hospital to go to for care, and wanting to understand the hospital’s policies and processes for providing abortions if pregnancy complications arose. “It’s called the ‘secret shopper’ methodology – we called it a ‘simulated patient’ methodology,” says Dr. Michele Heisler, professor at the University of Michigan and medical director of Physicians for Human Rights, who is one of the study’s authors.

• “What we hadn’t anticipated is what we found – the confusion, the contradictory statements, the misinformation,” Heisler says. “Three of the 34 hospitals said they’d just never provide abortions,” for example, even though there are exceptions written into the laws. Four hospitals said doctors needed to go through an approval process to be able to provide a medically necessary abortion, and 14 hospitals provided unclear answers about whether there was such an approval process.

Environment

• Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam has announced plans to discontinue private jets and small business planes from using its runways. Private jets, a luxury form of travel, are quite noisy and are very bad for the environment.

• As President Biden officially announces his reelection bid for 2024, we look at his recent executive order establishing a new Office of Environmental Justice within the White House and requiring all federal agencies to weigh the environmental impact of policies on marginalized communities. Environmental groups welcomed the announcement but cautioned that Biden remains a major supporter of fossil fuels, including the controversial Willow project in Alaska, and that he has approved drilling projects on federal land faster than Trump did during his first two years in office. For more, we speak with Jade Begay, director of policy and advocacy at the NDN Collective. She is on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and joins us today in a personal capacity.

• Green groups on Tuesday blasted U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto for introducing legislation that would reverse a recent judicial decision and alter federal mining policy in ways welcomed by industry but lambasted by land defenders.

• Activists on Tuesday lamented their failure of various climate and Indigenous rights resolutions at the annual shareholder meetings of some of the nation’s biggest banks, with one campaigner accusing the financial institutions of prioritizing “profit over people and our planet.”

• Scientists are so alarmed by a new study on ocean warming that some declined to speak about it on the record, the BBC reported Tuesday.

• Experts and community members say that particulates from the Thursday explosion of Elon Musk’s Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket rocket spread much farther than SpaceX predicted, raising concerns about the impact on human health and endangered species.

• The climate crisis is full of interconnected problems—but some are more connected than others.

• Despite his aggressive moves to try to slash greenhouse gas emissions, President Biden has angered young climate voters upset by a drilling project in Alaska.

• Some logs are centuries old.

• We’re not quitting coal fast enough.

Energy/Transportation

• Nine European countries held a summit on Monday aimed at scaling up wind power generation in the North Sea, spurred by the fallout of the Ukraine war and the push for renewables.

• It’s not often that conservative lobbyists beat the drum for increased environmental oversight and regulation. But that’s what happened this month when the far-right Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), through its legal arm, filed a brief in federal court demanding that the Department of Homeland Security conduct an extensive environmental impact study examining, of all things, immigration policy.

• Ahead of a public hearing scheduled for Tuesday evening regarding Holtec International’s plan to discharge 1 million gallons of wastewater from the former Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, New York, more than 100 organizations wrote to Gov. Kathy Hochul this week demanding she take action to stop the plan for good.

• In reply to a query, Mr.Vaishnaw said a decision would be taken on the Silver Line project only after resolving the environmental and technical hurdles and after consultation with the State government.

• The research team zeroed in on a catalyst – that they suspected could help blaze a chemical pathway toward ammonia – which consisted of an iron oxide, magnetite, and a synthetic membrane invented in the 1960s that is composed of repeating chains of two large molecules.

• In this report, “The imperative of the Versatile Test Reactor for Nuclear Innovation,” authors Jackie Toth and Khalil Ryan argue that the US will lose its competitive edge against adversaries (especially Russia) if it lacks a fully realized nuclear energy innovation ecosystem, of which the VTR is a crucial component.

• The US Supreme Court Monday declined to hear five appeals from fossil fuel companies requesting to have their cases moved from state to federal courts. All five petitions concern whether federal common law, which is law developed over time by courts, or state law applies to lawsuits over greenhouse-gas emissions that cross state lines.

• By Poornima Weerasekara China has approved a major surge in coal power so far this year, prioritising energy supply over its pledge to reduce emissions from fossil fuels, Greenpeace said Monday.

• Willem Klumpenhouwer’s article in the Globe and Mail

• But there’s just one nagging issue that no amount of technical innovation can solve: Electric cars are still cars. Outside of tailpipe emissions, they come with all the problems of cars, whether those problems relate to the environment, social equity or public health. The focus on electric cars stands in the way of truly transformative change: better public transit and better laid-out cities that encourage active modes of getting around, such as cycling.

Wildlife/Nature

• The pinkish chick is the first Asian king vulture to be bred in Asia and second in the world.

• We feel seen.

Overpopulation

• The projection announced on Monday is based on more recent data.

• In a recent Op-Ed in Göteborgs-Posten (GP) we pointed out that Swedish ‘Public Service’ (national state-financed TV, ‘SVT’, and radio, ‘SR’) is silent on population growth and its effects. For instance, SR had only positive comments in November when humanity passed 8 billion people, and they even had people joke about it. After writing to several journalists (without answers) it nevertheless appears that our and other op-eds have been influential. On April 13, SVT had a 10-minute discussion of population growth in ‘Aktuellt’, a news program typically viewed by about a million Swedes.

Finance

• The United Services Union (Ver.di) Saturday announced that it has reached a bargaining agreement with the German government for over 2.5 million workers in the federal and public services. The agreement comes after a lengthy dispute for pay raises in reponse to high inflation, which reached 7.4 percent in March.

• Workers from several industries in Iran, including the oil sector, continue to strike in protest of inadequate wage increases and deteriorating living conditions amid spiraling inflation and a widening gap between household income and expenses.

• A country renowned for its cuisine is turning to pots and pans to express discontent with French President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms.

• The move comes following the conclusion of restructuring talks aimed at dealing with a worsening global business environment.

• First Republic, which found itself at the center of a brief banking panic in March following the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, now holds $104.5 billion in deposits, down more than 40% from the $176.4 billion it held at the end of last year.

• The regional bank received a $30 billion lifeline from big banks last month, but depositors and investors remain worried about its prospects.

• Stocks fell broadly, while the US dollar also weakened early on Tuesday, as investors weigh corporate earnings and economic growth outlooks in a busy week. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was down 0.7 per cent by 0220 GMT.

• In 2015, a private equity firm called BC Partners bought PetSmart, the ubiquitous pet supply chain, and began a campaign of, in its words, “improving corporate efficiency.” As detailed by Vice News, these efficiencies came from understaffing PetSmart shops, which had a gruesome effect. With too few employees to transport animals that died in stores, carcasses allegedly piled up in PetSmart freezers across the country. One employee shared a photo that she said was filled with two months’ worth of dead animals; another employee said their store had a freezer with 10 months’. A third said that, for lack of time, she would simply throw bodies away. “Sometimes I was doing it weekly because we didn’t have staff to take a vet trip to properly dispose of them, so I was instructed to dispose of them myself,” she told Vice.

• Our tax dollars should make life better — not go to waste on bloated military contracts and Pentagon boondoggles. Here’s what the numbers show.

• As Washtenaw County faces increased housing insecurity in recent years with a surge this past winter, county officials and nonprofits around Ann Arbor are hoping for relief in the form of funding from the American Rescue Plan.

• After months of trying to avoid bankruptcy, Bed Bath & Beyond filed for Chapter 11 proceedings yesterday (April 23).

• The retailer is closing its stores, leaving many longtime customers scrambling to make sure they get their goods — at a discount.

• A revised pay structure has reportedly upset Zomato’s Blinkit employees so much that around 1,000 of its instant delivery executives have quit in Delhi and its neighbourhood.

• A fight over ethanol is putting House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the unhappy position of accepting revisions to his debt ceiling bill — or offering future promises to members who privately don’t trust him.

• Credit Suisse is still bleeding—even after its rival UBS promised to buy it out.

• President Erdoğan had promised to solve the problem after the May elections.

• The S&P 500 is off to a relatively tepid start for “Earnings Season” while the Bloomberg Barclays US Aggregated Bond Index continues to reverse last year’s losses. While it is perhaps too soon to take a victory lap, the first two days of the week didn’t go over so well for the stock market.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Police in Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second-largest city, have detained a former leader of the city’s Uzbek culture center, Karamat Abdullaeva, who was sentenced in absentia to 16 years in prison for her alleged role in deadly ethnic clashes more than a decade ago.

• Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik has again called for a union between Serbia and Republika Srpska — one of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s two entities — amid already high tensions in the region.

• Musk tweeted a screenshot on Monday evening which appeared to show him signed into a second account. That profile photo pointed to another account on the platform.

• Visit comes after shadowy anti-junta group assassinates deputy head of Election Commission.

• Ethnic Serbs have boycotted en masse local elections in four municipalities in northern Kosovo with ethnic Serb majorities where local mayors resigned in November 2022 to protest a cross-border dispute over vehicle registrations.

• History and reality are being altered to suit Beijing.

• Three workers died on April 24 while repairing an auxiliary dry dock at the Korsakov port on Russia’s Pacific island of Sakhalin.

• The European Union on Monday imposed sanctions on cousins of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over the trafficking of stimulant drug captagon, a key source of income for the regime.

• The UK government on Monday toughened its sanctions against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as part of new restrictions on Tehran for alleged human rights violations.

• Hong Kong’s district-level administration will be overseen by “patriots” appointed through “multiple channels,” Chief Executive John Lee has said, following a two-month review of the District Council system.

• Arfiya Eri’s election gives hope to second-generation Uyghurs living in exile, advocates say

• Jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny has been given just over one day to get acquainted with 700 pages that form a new criminal case launched against him, the details of which have yet to be made public.

• Karim Masimov, the former chief of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee (KNB), has been sentenced to 18 years in prison over his role in deadly events that followed unprecedented anti-government protests in the Central Asian country in January 2022.

• Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that it is expelling five Russian diplomats for engaging in activities considered to be incompatible with their diplomatic status.

• As calls grow for the impeachment or resignation of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas over undisclosed gifts from a billionaire Republican megadonor, one of his right-wing colleagues came under fire Tuesday following a report that he sold a property to the head of a law firm subsequently involved in over 20 cases before the court.

• Earlier this month, ProPublica released a report documenting decades of undisclosed lavish gifts Justice Clarence Thomas and his family received from Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow. These gifts included a yacht trip around Indonesia, flights on Crow’s private jet, free stays at Crow’s private country club, and more. One week later, the news outlet published a follow-up report detailing how Thomas also sold property to Crow without disclosing it. Thomas’s mother has continued to reside at that property rent-free while Crow funds significant renovations.

• The staff writer discusses the latest financial-disclosure scandal involving the judge, and the decline in public trust in the Supreme Court.

• In response to U.S. President Joe Biden’s Tuesday announcement that he is seeking reelection in 2024, four youth-led advocacy groups urged the incumbent to push for progressive priorities during the remainder of his first term and campaign on policies that motivate young voters to cast ballots for him.

• The departure of Susan Rice from the Biden White House and news of her likely replacement—senior adviser and staff secretary Neera Tanden—may have triggered a flash of campaign-themed PTSD for left-aligned veterans of the past two Democratic primary cycles. Rice has captained the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, coordinating reform agendas in a host of arenas, from immigration to LBGTQ+ rights; prior to that, she had served as UN ambassador and national security adviser in the Obama administration. Tanden had long helmed the Center for American Progress—the think tank that eagerly advances the agendas of Democratic White Houses in power, and served as a prime recruitment arm for the incoming Obama and Biden administrations. But she was best known for her extramural baiting and trolling of Bernie Sanders supporters on social media—a colorful digital paper trail that upended her nomination to serve as Biden’s director of the Office of Management and Budget back in 2021.

• One morning in September 2017, Judge Christopher Plourd opened an unusual hearing at the Imperial County Superior Courthouse, a half-hour north of the California-Mexico border. It involved three illegal drug possession cases that were unrelated to one another.

• Each of the cases had relied on the results of chemical field test kits used by corrections officers at nearby state prisons. The kits indicated crumbs and shreds of paper that guards found on the inmates contained heroin and amphetamine. But a state forensic laboratory later analyzed the debris utilizing a far more reliable test and found no trace of illegal drugs. The defendants were factually innocent.

• It’s a tabloid banner day in Manhattan today as jury selection begins in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit against Donald Trump. Carroll’s case, accusing Trump of sexual assault in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s, serves as a bookend to the Access Hollywood tape, which cemented Trump’s reputation for both sexual assault and immunity to consequences. But it also raises the question: Will Trump slither away again?1

• Even though Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema left the Democratic Party and registered as an independent last December, she remains awkwardly aligned with the Senate Democratic Caucus. As frustrated as they may be with Sinema, top Democrats in Washington, conscious of the fact that the party maintains only a narrow 51-49 majority in the Senate, have been notably reluctant to criticize the filibuster-backing, Wall Street–friendly senator. That’s been the pattern since, after Sinema announced her split from the party, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) declined to say whether he would support her or an actual Democrat for the Arizona seat.1

• “False endorsements violate FTC rules, legally exposing Musk,” said Tim Karr of the advocacy and watchdog group Free Press.

• Am I the only American to travel overseas and feel embarrassed by the conduct of the diplomats Washington sends abroad to speak for our republic? It is pretty strange to find yourself, an ordinary citizen, apologizing for the intrusive, cajoling, bullying, badgering and otherwise crude utterances….

• By Ralph Nader In early March 2023, President Joe Biden embedded in his proposed 2024 budget to Congress revenue increases through tax measures that the rich and corporations do not like. Like his predecessors Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, he doesn’t really mean what he says. Biden’s four proposed increases are significant because they would […]

• The detention of Ernest Moret raises urgent questions about British authorities’ targeting public intellectuals at the request of other nations.

• The great TikTok moral panic of 2023 shows no sign of slowing down.

• The next chapter will be trickier. Start with Fox, the larger company, with a market capitalisation of $24bn. The pandemic has speeded the decade-long decline of American cable TV. Last year cable subscriptions fell by 7.3%, to levels not seen in nearly 30 years. Fox, whose gross operating profit in the last financial year was $2.8bn, has been insulated from this trend by its focus on news and sport, which streaming companies have yet to snatch. But something has changed. Whereas Fox used to trade at a premium to ViacomCBS and Discovery, two cable rivals, it now trades at a nearly 30% discount (see chart 1).

• The status of the investigation was unclear Monday, but the grand jury could represent one of a handful of opportunities nationally for criminal charges related to the push to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

• Of late, Apple has been remarkably calm, even-keeled, no big layoffs. The upcoming June 5th Worldwide Developer Conference is likely to quell some rumors — and perhaps kindle new ones.

• The list — on which services from Amazon, Google, Meta, Instagram and Microsoft also feature — all have more than 45 million monthly active users.

• That puts them in a category under a new EU law, known as the Digital Services Act (DSA), imposing measures from August such as annual audits and a duty to effectively counter disinformation and hate content.

• In four months’ time, “these platforms and search engines will not be able to act as if they were ‘too big to care’,” Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner, said in a statement.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• IPSO did not uphold Paul Blanchard’s complaints in relation to two Times articles.

• As the situation in Sudan continues to be volatile, Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) spokesperson, Clayson Monyela, says the latest number of verified South African nationals stuck in the country is 77. “They’re all in a WhatsApp group with embassy staff who are also still stuck there,” Monyela said on Sunday.

• Last week, the US Department of Justice unsealed a significant criminal complaint.

• Compared to pro-Russian users, pro-Ukrainian activists and bloggers from Lithuania have experienced account restrictions and blocking by Facebook owner Meta on a more frequent basis. The most common reason justifying such measures is content being labelled as “hate speech”. Lithuanian Chancellor of the Government Giedrė Balčytytė has stated that the most active punitive measures occurred in November and December of 2022. This included the blocking and restriction of accounts belonging to fundraisers, influencers and activists raising money for victims of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Expressions of criticism towards the Kremlin have also been used as the basis for restrictions and bans. Former Lithuanian member of parliament Nijolė Oželytė announced on February 22th 2023 that Facebook had warned her she was going to be blocked for a post dated October 3rd 2022. The platform’s moderators deemed Oželytė’s contribution about a pro-war meeting at a Moscow stadium to contain “hate speech”. The former MP issued a strong response: “Facebook admins – are you on the side of the terrorists or those who fight them?”.

• Russia’s propaganda aims are not necessarily to persuade people to accept its position, Roozenbeek said, but to “sow doubt or uncertainty or to raise pulses and raise emotions” and make sure the Russian position is heard as much as possible in mainstream discussion.

• It could have steered conservatives in a better direction.

• Resentment and contempt catch up to Fox News’s No. 1 demagogue.

• Tucker Carlson got fired!

• Fox’s share value dropped 4% after the announcement.

• Fox News Media and top-rated host Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways, the media company said, less than a week after it and its parent Fox Corp settled a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million.

• Longtime CNN host Don Lemon is out at the US cable news network a little over two months after apologising to viewers for on-air comments about Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, CNN has announced.

• In a surprise announcement, Fox News said Monday it was cutting ties with its top-rated host Tucker Carlson, effective immediately. Although a precise reason wasn’t given, the move came just days after the cable network settled a $787.5 million defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems over lies propagated by the cable network about the 2020 presidential election. Since taking over the primetime slot in 2016, Carlson has also spread far-right talking points about immigrants, Black people and the LGBTQ community. For more, we speak with Madeline Peltz of Media Matters for America, where she has helped to expose Carlson’s extremism. “It creates a major vacuum in the right-wing media ecosystem,” Peltz says of Carlson’s departure.

• Mr. Lemon, one of the network’s most recognizable stars, had been under scrutiny since an uproar over on-air remarks he made about women and aging in February.

• Hadley Gamble, a correspondent at CNBC, produced messages to investigators that documented instances of harassment by Jeff Shell, according to her lawyer.

• Jeff Shell, the head of US media giant NBCUniversal, has stepped down following a probe into his misconduct with a female colleague.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A group of Tesla investors asked CEO Elon Musk for more commitment to the electric vehicle (EV) company in an open letter published last week, specifically requesting that he spend less time posting “derogatory tweets.”

• An independent short film has been withdrawn from a Hong Kong film festival after it failed to gain approval from censors. Independent short film group and film festival organiser Phone Made Good Film released a statement last Friday announcing the cancellation of the screening of its nine-minute film Wake In Silence.

• China should conduct a “review and reconsideration” of Hong Kong’s national security law to ensure it is “in compliance with China’s international human rights obligations,” A United Nations (UN) human rights expert has said.

• Hong Kong’s security chief has criticised the organisers of a proposed Labour Day march for making “irresponsible” comments that played down the “safety risks” of public rallies. The duo had earlier urged the police not to “exaggerate” the risk of demonstrations being “hijacked.

• The US Supreme Court Monday agreed to hear two cases concerning public officials’ First Amendment rights on social media platforms under the US Constitution.

• Border guards are asking people bound for Hong Kong whether they have onward travel plans, and why.

• Sometimes lawsuits are filed to chill speech or harass people, rather than resolve legitimate legal disputes. These types of censorious lawsuits have been dubbed Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or SLAPPs. Those who bring SLAPPs hope that the time and money people need to defend themselves against the claims—and the stress that results—will intimidate them into silence. Anti-SLAPP laws such as the TCPA protect people from this kind of harassment. For example, thanks to the TCPA’s protections, a Texas court in 2016 dismissed a $1 million lawsuit that a pet-sitting company filed against a Dallas couple just for leaving the business a one-star Yelp review.

• Effective anti-SLAPP laws like the current TCPA allow judges to quickly review whether someone’s been hit with a lawsuit for speaking out on a matter of public concern. During that time, other court proceedings are put on hold. If it’s determined that the case is a SLAPP, the lawsuit gets thrown out and the SLAPP victim can recover their legal fees. HB 2781 would remove this automatic stay if a motion to dismiss a SLAPP suit is found to be frivolous, untimely, or subject to a statutory exemption.

• This is a mistake. Courts, after all, are not always right. Recent Texas Supreme Court cases such as Kinder Morgan v. Scurry County and Montelongo v. Abrea show that both trial courts and courts of appeal considering anti-SLAPP motions can easily decide timeliness issues incorrectly.

• Nearly five years ago, California resident Susan Porter sued local law enforcement for deciding her honk in support of anti-Rep. Darrell Issa protesters was worth citing her for. When she expressed her support for the protesters in a way people have always considered to be an appropriate display of support, she was pulled over by Deputy Klein of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department.

• A German court on Monday ruled that the city of Frankfurt cannot cancel an upcoming Roger Waters concert amid accusations of antisemitism stemming from the Pink Floyd co-founder’s outspoken criticism of Israeli apartheid and other crimes against Palestinians.

• Blume says having her books banned is a “very emotional” experience — particularly when she was just getting started. “I was a new-ish, young-ish writer and it was hard to take,” she says. Still, she adds: “It never stopped me from writing.”

• In the new documentary Judy Blume Forever, she describes how she went from trying to fit in the role of conventional suburban wife, homemaker and mother to a literary superstar. At one point, Blume was receiving 2,000 letters from young readers each month — many of whom were pouring their hearts out to her.

• The group stated that the Office for Film, Newspaper and Article Administration (OFNAA) had refused to issue a permit for the scheduled screening, allegedly because the film showed a flag containing “potentially seditious intent.” Wake In Silence contained a scene in which a flag with the words “100% freedom” could be seen.

• The scene was then modified by the film crew, who replaced the flag in post-production with a government national security poster. However, they later withdrew their screening application after being asked to seek permission from the government for using the poster.

• A worldwide pandemic in 2020 altered the contours of pretty much everything. Entire cities shut down. Retailers shrunk hours to time periods normally only witnessed prior to the introduction of the 24-hour clock. Shit got exceedingly weird.

• The former chair and ten board members of the İzmir Bar Association have been acquitted of “openly insulting religious values.”

• Police carried out raids on Amed City Theater, Dicle Culture and Arts Association, Mezopotamya Culture and Arts Association and BKM also in today’s Diyarbakır centered operations and taken many into custody.

• “It is not necessary to be a lawyer to understand that there is no crime in this news report,” said Nazan Özcan’s lawyer in the hearing. Özcan was acquitted by the court.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The police raided homes and offices across 21 cities. Theater artists are among the detained.

• Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov Sunday condemned the US for prohibiting Russian journalists from covering Lavrov’s speech before the UN in New York. Lavrov called the decision “a really stupid thing” in an appearance before reporters in Russia.

• Some 126 people were detained in police raids in 21 cities.

• Last week, BuzzFeed CEO and founder Jonah Peretti stunned the Internet by announcing the closing of BuzzFeed News. In a memo to staff, Peretti blamed “a pandemic, a fading SPAC [special purpose acquisition company] market that yielded less capital, a tech recession, a tough economy,” etc., while feebly acknowledging his own responsibility for the disaster (“I could have managed these changes better”). Presumably, though, the decision to take his company public through an ill-fated SPAC sits squarely on Peretti’s shoulders. (SPACs, a risky IPO alternative, give investors the option, but not the obligation, to buy shares in a newly formed public company.) The eventual sale realized only $16.2 million from a $288 million equity offering, and the stock has steadily tanked, losing more than 90 percent of its value since the company went public in December 2021.

• As a non-Communist Party member, he was one of the most pro-reform voices at Guangming Daily and wrote articles in favor of an independent legal system, his family said. He was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University in 2006-07 and became a visiting fellow at Keio University in Japan in 2010. Four years later, he served as a visiting professor at Hokkaido University in Japan.

• “His family didn’t share any details about his detention with the public for more than a year, because they feared it would affect the outcome,” a former colleague told AFP.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Activists attribute the prevalence of the crime to the low status of women and fast-developing technology.

• Imprisoned ex-chairperson of People’s Democratic Party referred to the claim made by journalist Amed Dicle that a delegation from President Erdoğan’s AKP talked to Abdullah Öcalan in the İmralı prison but was not able to get the answer they desired.

• Members of the groups targeted in the raids and other rights defenders protested the detentions in several cities.

• Drivers in California have joined the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, in one of the first driver-specific unionization efforts in the company.

• Workers at Sega of America would form the first multi-departmental video game union in the U.S.

• The US Supreme Court Monday heard oral arguments in Lac du Flambeau Band v. Coughlin, which focuses on the effect of the Bankruptcy Code on the sovereign immunity of Native American tribes.

• The United States on Monday sent its first deportation flight to Cuba since 2020, months after Cuba agreed for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic to accept flights carrying Cubans caught at the US-Mexico border.

• Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó said he was expelled from Colombia hours after he crossed the border from Venezuela to try to meet with some participants at an international conference Tuesday to discuss his country’s political crisis.

• A professor at the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Tehran says he has been fired from the university after he came out in support of nationwide protests over the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody.

• The Bar Council of India (BCI) Sunday passed a resolution to urge the Supreme Court of India to leave the issue of same-sex marriage for legislative consideration. The resolution came after a joint meeting of the BCI and all State Bar Councils.

• When the Supreme Court overturned a half-century of precedent last June and eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion first recognized in Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion politicians claimed that the court was doing nothing more than sending the issue back to the states, allowing each to decide for itself how to regulate abortion. Late last month, Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador made crystal clear just how false that claim was.

• A group of pro bono civil liberties lawyers working with the advocacy group OVD-Info have petitioned Russia’s Constitutional Court to repeal a law that currently makes it a misdemeanor to criticize the Russian military and its combat operations.

• Russia’s State Duma has withdrawn a proposed bill on taxing remote workers “for clarifications,” according to the State Duma press service. The bill was first submitted for consideration on April 24.

• Harry Belafonte, the beloved singer and civil rights activist who never wavered from his commitment to a better and more just world, has died at the age of 96.

• Stepping into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Shyanne Beatty was eager to view the Native American works that art collectors Charles and Valerie Diker had been accumulating for nearly half a century. But as she entered the museum’s American Wing that day in 2018, her excitement turned to shock as two wooden masks came into view.

• On July 29, 2022, Omali Yeshitela and his wife, Ona Zene, awoke at 5 o’clock in the morning to the sound of flash grenades and drones, as heavily armed FBI agents stormed into their home searching for evidence of organizational ties to the Russian government. Yeshitela is the 80-year-old chair of the African People’s Socialist Party, a pan-Africanist political party founded in 1972 and headquartered in Florida. His wife is the deputy chair.

• “It seems more and more that we live in a world of moral dislocation,” Anna Badkhen writes in the preface to her new essay collection, Bright Unbearable Reality. In the essays, Badkhen roams across that world, tracing a line from a protest against police violence in Philadelphia to the war-torn region of Nagorno-Karabakh in the South Caucasus, from the Mauritanian Sahara to the dacha outside St. Petersburg where she spent her childhood summers, from the military cemetery in Oklahoma where Geronimo is buried to the Sierra Madre mountains of northern Mexico where his Apache descendants now live. As her preface signals, this expansive range is accompanied by a stark sense that something is wrong: Violence and suffering haunt the people who make the book’s many journeys. Yet Badkhen is insistently attentive to small, marvelous details: The kitchens of the Sierra Madre, she notes at one point, are laid out exactly like the ones in the dachas of her youth.1

• Police in Tehran have referred the case against Katayoun Riahi and Pantea Bahram to Iran’s judiciary, accusing them of “the crime of removing the hijab in public and posting photos on the [Internet],” the Tasnim news agency said late Monday.

• If prosecuted, the pair could face fines or prison terms.

• Earlier this month police said they would begin using “smart” technology in public places to crack down on women defying Iran’s compulsory dress code.

• University of California College of the Law professor Veena Dubal says that’s exactly what’s going on. In a recent paper, she says rideshare apps promote “algorithmic wage discrimination” by personalizing wages for each driver based on data they gather from them. The algorithms are proprietary, so workers have no way of knowing how their data is being used, Dubal says.

• “The app is their boss,” Dubal told Morning Edition’s A Martinez. “But unlike a human boss who you can negotiate with or withhold information from, the algorithms know so much about these workers.”

• I put script after script before people who just rejected them out of hand, and I just said there’s no point in trying to change this monster. . . . Hollywood was symptomatic, and the problem was the nation: I figured unless you change the national vocabulary, the national climate, the national attitude, you’re not going to be able to change Hollywood.

• But before he left, Belafonte made a defiant last stand, forming his own company called HarBel Productions in order to make two compelling films in rapid succession: Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), and The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959). Both are tough urban films, mostly set in New York City, and both tackle racism head-on.

• More than 120 people from political parties, media outlets and lawyers’ groups were detained in 21 cities.

• Seventeen rights and journalism groups have released a joint statement condemning yesterday’s raids where 126 politicians, journalists, lawyers and artists were detained.

• Twenty-five lawyers were among over 120 who were detained in simultaneous raids in 21 cities yesterday.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• The tool allows administrators to block users from copying and pasting data, taking screen captures or using screen-sharing tools. Printer access can be disabled as well. According to Google, ChromeOS Data Controls provides the ability to customize how and when each usage restriction is applied.

• Administrators can configure ChromeOS to block copying and pasting only when employees interact with a particularly important business application. It’s also possible to apply usage restrictions to specific URLs. A company could, for example, prevent employees from pasting data into a cloud-based file storage service not approved by administrators.

• Are AI-powered bots attacking Spotify? That’s the question some are asking after one listener uncovered what appears to be a single track uploaded north of 50 times under various titles and connected to an array of artist profiles.

Monopolies

• Amazon is very proud of its “flywheel”: at first, the company offered subsidies to customers, which lured in sellers. Then, it demanded that those sellers lower their prices, which lured in more customers. With more customers, more sellers piled in. Faster and faster, the flywheel spins, creating the “everything store”: [...]

• As we noted two and a half years ago when Epic filed its antitrust lawsuit against Apple, it seemed like a pretty big uphill climb legally speaking. The whole thing seemed more like “contract negotiation via antitrust judicial battle” rather than a legitimate antitrust claim. And, so far, it looks like we were correct. The district court ruling a year and a half ago mostly sided with Apple, noting that “the Court cannot ultimately conclude that Apple is a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws.”

• Are NDAs unenforceable when they protect more than trade secrets? The standard answer is no. NDAs can prevent disclosure of contractually-defined “confidential” information that is shared in the course of a confidential relationship, even if it is not technically a trade secret. NDAs can, in other words, go beyond trade secrecy.

Patents

• British American Tobacco (BAT) had attempted to revoke two Philip Morris patents, EP 3 266 323 and EP 3 741 225, on the grounds of added matter and obviousness over the prior art.

• Members of the USPTO, and fellow participants of this AI Listening Session, thank you for inviting me here today and for taking time to consider these important issues.  I want to also thank the prior speakers who have done a great job laying out many of the issues.  I am also happy to work with any of you to help figure this out and reach a workable system that truly encourages innovation.

• My name is Dennis Crouch, and I am a law professor at Mizzou and author of Patently-O. It is my privilege to discuss the role of generative AI in the realm of intellectual property and the need for clear guidance from the USPTO.

Copyrights

• India’s recorded music representative has inked a “historic agreement” with the Indian Singers Rights Association (ISRA), and the involved parties say that the pact will help the nation’s music industry to “become a global force.”

• Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Jessemusse is a Mozambican author who previously co-founded a publishing house in Mozambique focused on underrepresented languages and cultures in publishing. His work has evolved into more creative writing where his true passion lies.

• Time has no voice, but sundial inscriptions pretend otherwise.

• The new AI systems certainly have massive problems, not least in the sphere of privacy, as I have written about elsewhere. But the response by the copyright world to generative AI is increasingly extreme, rather as a Walled Culture post back in February warned it might be. The latest manifestation of that tendency is a “Call for Safeguards Around Generative AI in the European AI Act” from “over 40 associations and trade unions that joined the Authors’ Rights Initiative”. It is a typical anti-technology, anti-progress set of demands from the copyright industry. Its signatories “demand” regulation of generative AI, and they demand it “NOW” (sic).

• The new framework for vetted researchers’ access to data from very large online platforms and very large search engines is a key measure of the Digital Services Act, to increase platforms’ transparency and accountability. The Commission is to adopt delegated acts to further specify the conditions under which sharing of data should take place and, the purposes for which the data may be used and relevant procedures, taking into account the rights and interests of the actors involved and, if necessary, independent advisory mechanisms.

• Jury selection begins in Ed Sheeran’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ copyright infringement lawsuit in New York, which alleges that the 32-year-old singer’s ‘Thinking Out Loud’ bears more than a passing similarity to the Marvin Gaye classic.

• Gimme Radio launched more than five years ago with the goal of building global fan communities around genres of music. Now the service is shuttering on April 29. What happened? Gimme Media  was founded in San Francisco in June 2017 by Tyler Lenane (CEO), David Rosenberg (COO), Jon Maples (CPO), and Andrew Gilliland (CCO).

• I keep thinking about the arguments around content being used for AI data sets and the arguments around content being archived/offered by sites like Internet Archive.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Something that I really struggle with in regards to gratitude is how different it is as an adult vs a child. The naivety and optimism of childhood is a blessing. Simply not knowing how bad life can get pays off.

• Back as a child, I feel like anything you’d say you felt gratitude for was heartfelt, because it really did make you feel grateful and blessed to have it. But as an adult it’s hard not to associate gratitude with fear. Knowing so much, being bombarded with bad news even when you shield yourself from most of it, knowing how bad life can really be.. gratitude is suddenly so much about fear. About loss. You’re thinking about what to be grateful for and realize “I know some people have lost their legs, some people are homeless and starve, some people are currently enduring war.” and now you’re scared you could be next in all of this. One day it could happen to you. So you’re telling yourself you’re grateful – grateful to be healthy, to be able to walk, to have food and a roof over the head, no war..

• Theres a lot of talk about imposter syndrome. But no one ever really acknowledges the possibility that people can just suck at their jobs and be aware of it.

• Normality is setting in… at least for now. After my mother-in-law has left for home last week we had quiet a few stressfull days with our son (he had his first vaccinations which lead to some even more sleepless nights), but now things have quieted down a bit.

• Its also about a week since i discarded Fedora Silverblue (which i still find to be a very nice distribution) for MX Linux on the Acer Aspire Switch because Fedora turned out to be just too heavy for the quiet limited space on the Acer. So, why MX Linux? Its because the Acer has a weird 32 Bit UEFI system which is not supported by many distributions and without so much expendable time anymore i took what i did know to work out of the box. This is also my first attempt after a long time to ditch GUI completely. Why? Perhaps a bit of masochism, a bit of nostalgia and the realisation that i live mostly in the terminal anyway regardless of running an window manager.

• I’m ten years old. Sitting quietly in church with my mother and sister. I might be dressed up; or, my family might have abandoned that practice by then. Sitting quietly. I’ve practiced all week. The hymns are finishing, and it’s time for me to read the first lesson.

• My wife will be awake soon, and she’s so in the throes of “all this” that we’re talking serious trepidation trying to complete this sentence before hearing the bedroom door open. Soon I’ll be hearing about her girls, siblings, rants over political news, how so-and-so “looked at her funny” yesterday. There are times I wish I could become so lost in all the drama. And yet I can’t imagine it being a place of peace. But, then, neither is sitting back frustrated for not being able to let go of “all this” – starting, of course, with the alleged self allegedly expire-iencing it….

• In stillness lies a calm so true, A peace that’s felt, not seen in view. Between the words, a silence reigns, A space where nothingness sustains.

• The rhythm of this quietude, A tempo slow, yet never crude. A gentle beat, a steady flow, A cadence that we come to know.

• This hush that fills the empty air, A melody beyond compare. A symphony of tranquil grace, A song that time cannot erase.

• Nothing has ever rang more true to me than Sartre’s “hell is other people”.

• I don’t see how it could be otherwise. Imagine utterly separate be-ings modeling an alleged objective reality in their own utterly separate ways – i.e. in accord with their distinct experiences/biases/learnings – and said alleged objective reality with communication delays, slightly different meanings for the same word symbols, misspeaks, attempts to backup going awry, blah-die-fucking-blah-blah.

• Perhaps it would be better (in terms of locating the problem more locally) to say “hell is seemingly being a separate individual/self”.

Technical

• It needed a router change, and different fibre optics (SFP+) module; apparently the faster connection is over a different wavelength of light. And then, nothing worked.

• Given that I was working from home at the time this quickly became an urgent problem, since the slower connection had been switched off to provide the new one.

• After much experimenting I discovered that it was a problem with the port settings on the router; turning off speed negotation and some other arbitrary setting I can’t remember were enough to fix it. Mostly; more on that later.

Science

• The sunrise times are now reaching the point where it is possible for me to capture shots in the hour before work. One of the tricky parts, however, is that in Fairbanks it is difficult to find good, unobstructed views to the north-east, from where the sun is now rising. There is one place south of the airport which is decent, if you don’t mind a lot of airport equipment in your photo. However, the clouds were not quite right for good sunrise photos, and this is the best I could manage this morning:

• 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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