● 04.28.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 28/04/2023: Dropbox Collapses, Promises ‘Hey Hi’ (AI) to Shareholders

Posted in News Roundup at 2:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Today the Kubuntu Focus team announces their latest Linux laptop: The Focus Ir14 developed in partnership with Carbon Systems of Santa Rosa, CA. This laptop is an affordable, enterprise-ready system designed to exude quality everywhere the customer looks and touches. This is the fourth Focus model featuring Kubuntu LTS and the KDE Plasma interface.

Audiocasts/Shows

• FreeBSD 13.2 Release, Using DTrace to find block sizes of ZFS, NFS, and iSCSI, Midnight BSD 3.0.1, Closing a stale SSH connection, How to automatically add identity to the SSH authentication agent, Pros and Cons of FreeBSD for virtual Servers, and more

Kernel Space

• Although it’s not a Long Term Release candidate, Linux 6.3 includes features that will benefit end users.

• As Microsoft makes more progress with ReFS on Windows 11, Linux is also getting performance optimizations and improvements on some of its major file systems, namely, F2FS, Btrfs, and EXT4.

• In the Embedded Linux ecosystem, the Embedded Linux Conference is the most important event, covering all topics related to the usage of Linux in embedded systems, and probably gathering the largest audience of embedded Linux developers and maintainers.

Applications

• Mousai is a song recognition app for Linux built in GTK4/libadwaita and Rust. It uses the AudD song recognition API to match the music you ask it to listen to with songs to established work.

Instructionals/Technical

• Forgot the root password in Fedora? Do you want to change the root user password in your Fedora system? No problem! This brief guide explains how to change or reset root password in Fedora.

• In this guide, we will explore various methods to find the default gateway IP in Linux, using both command-line tools and the graphical user interface. Whether you’re a seasoned Linux user or just starting your journey, these techniques will equip you with the knowledge you need to navigate the world of Linux networking with confidence.

• For whatever reason, I’m only able to mount the share if used the TCP option. I’m not sure if this is a me issue, an OpenBSD issue, or a FreeBSD issue, but I’m putting it out there in case anyone else runs into the same problem.

• Grafana Loki is often (self-)described as ‘Prometheus for logs’. Like Prometheus, it theoretically has a simple all in one local installation mode of operation (which is a type of monolithic deployment mode), where you install the Loki server binary, point it at some local disk space, and run Promtail to feed your system logs (ie, the systemd journal) into Loki. This is what we do, to supplement our central syslog server. Although you might wonder why you’d have two different centralized log collection systems, I’ve found that there are things I like using Grafana Loki for.

• However, I can no longer recommend running such an all-in-one Grafana Loki setup for anything serious, including what you might call ‘production’, and I think you should be wary about attempting to run Grafana Loki yourself in any configuration.

• Microsoft Edge is a modern web browser developed by Microsoft, designed to provide users with a fast, secure, and feature-rich browsing experience.

• In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of mounting and managing external storage devices on Ubuntu. We’ll cover detecting devices, mounting and unmounting, file system compatibility, and using external drives with Ubuntu Server.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to run an Ubuntu update – how to update your software/packages on Ubuntu and how to update the version of Ubuntu you’re running.

• In this post, you will learn how to batch convert JPG to PNG files. The process is simple, but believe me, many times it can save you. Imagine you have many JPG files and, for whatever reason, you need to convert them to PNG.

• As a Linux user, you might have encountered various gaming and emulation platforms like Citra or Dolphin. However, if you are a true retro gaming aficionado, there’s one software that you should consider installing: RetroArch.

• Terminator is a sophisticated terminal emulator program designed for users requiring a more advanced and customizable environment than traditional terminal emulators.

• whois searches for an object in a RFC 3912 database. We spotlight alternative tools to whois.

• Redis, which stands for Remote Dictionary Server, is a powerful, open-source, in-memory data structure store that has taken the world of data storage by storm. It is renowned for its versatility, as it supports various data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, and more.

• Welcome to the fascinating world of Citra, a high-performance open-source 3DS emulator designed to bring the incredible Nintendo 3DS gaming experience to your Ubuntu computer.

• The bat command works just like the cat command does on Linux. The difference is that the bat command is more modern, boasting a more readable design and features like Git integration and syntax highlighting.

• 2015 was a great year for gaming – some of the top games of the year included Witcher 3, Super Mario Maker, Bloodborne, Rocket League, and Until Dawn.

• You might come across this error when you try to boot a live cd on Windows 10 or Windows 11 or even Windows 8 too.

• The main purpose of a “docker-compose.yml” file is to simplify the process of deploying and managing multi-container Docker applications.

• Docker uses a client-server architecture whereas Podman is a Daemon less container engine. Podman is more secure, lightweight, and portable than Docker.

• A Docker bind mount is a type of mount that permits users to map a directory or file on the host system to a directory or file inside a container.

• If you are new to Linux or have used it for a few months, then you must have heard or read statements such as “In Linux, everything is a File”.

• A Pi-Hole is a network-wide ad blocker that intercepts ads on any device on your network. It targets a list of thousands of ad-serving domains and directs their content to a black hole, removing them from sight. It can work any any device that’s connected to your network, without additional software. It even runs in mobile device apps, reducing bandwidth usage and improving performance. This tutorial shows how to run Pi Hole on your Linux machine.

• Linux audio and video commands refer to command lines for tools and utilities for processing, converting, playing, and recording audio and video. The following commands are useful for developers, audio engineers, and video editors who work with multimedia files on Linux. Command Description ffmpeg Tool used to convert and process video and audio.

• This article spotlights alternative tools to find.

• Linux users may encounter the “Temporary failure in name resolution” error while trying to access websites or execute networking commands. This error indicates that the system is unable to translate a domain name into its corresponding IP address. Several factors can contribute to this error, including network connectivity issues, incorrect configuration of the resolv.conf file, and firewall restrictions. In this guide, we will explore the common causes of this error and provide solutions to help you resolve the issue.

• We can use GUI and the command line method to install Google Chrome on Ubuntu Linux, however, the terminal is the best way to configure the Chrome browser.

• The ISC DHCP server (dhcpd) was traditionally used to set up a DHCP server in Linux, but the software is reaching end-of-life, and the Internet Systems Consortium is now recommending their own Kea DHCP server or alternatives such as Dnsmasq or udhcpd (as found in Busybox) as a replacement.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Cacti on Fedora 38. If you’re a network administrator, you know the importance of monitoring your network’s performance. One of the best tools for doing this is Cacti, an open-source network monitoring and graphing tool.

• This tutorial serves as an introduction to Kubernetes: What is it and why do you need it? If you are into containers, there are high chances that you have heard about Kubernetes, commonly abbreviated as K8s. So what is Kubernetes? Why do you need Kubernetes, how does Kubernetes work?

• Have you tried playing around with the Raspberry Pi Pico file system? Have you tried storing anything else besides Python script files?

• To install MySQL server on your Linux machine, follow this article step-by-step, which provides you with clear instructions on how to download and install MySQL as well as how to configure and secure it.

Games

• The Ukrainian army has demonstrated a remote machine gun turret that appears to be powered and/or controlled by Valve’s Steam Deck.

• We interviewed Jay and Tom from Bytten Studio about Cassette Beasts.

• I keep playing this game regularly. I enjoy it immensely in single player and multiplayer alike and I’m not just going down the rabbit hole; I’m actively digging it deeper.

• I’ve already mentioned that I’ve made my own mod for it, called Tea Tea Deluxe. That was some time ago by now, of course. A lot has happened since.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• To me, it feels like only yesterday that GNOME 44 was released but it has in fact been a month — and the first point release is now available.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• I am pleased to announce the release of dragora 3.0-beta2.

• Dragora is an independent GNU/Linux distribution project which was created from scratch with the intention of providing a reliable operating system with maximum respect for the user by including entirely free software. Dragora is based on the concepts of simplicity and elegance, it offers a user-friendly Unix-like environment with emphasis on stability and security for long-term durability.

• It has been a long time since there was an announcement about a version of Dragora, and it is that work continues on it, as who says “better late than never!”.

• It is worth mentioning that Dragora series 3 is a new development that started back in 2012 to give rise to new research and to try to improve the quality taking into account the previous experience in the achieved series. This series offers a fully automated build process, made from scratch to achieve a distribution without any contamination from the host system, in order to obtain a controlled and pure system.

• The current technical scheme consists of the C Musl library, SysV init, Perp for reliable monitoring of services (or critical system daemons), own text-menu based tools (for configuring the keyboard map, console mouse, and an interactive installer), plus a local package manager called Qi to complement a powerful tool called Graft for local package management under a single directory hierarchy; packages are installed in the /usr/pkg hierarchy where it is possible to enable/disable, or change package versions via graft.

• In terms of security, Dragora offers the security that can be found in commercial distribution projects. This is by using LibreSSL, the security features provided by the C library plus the security options provided by the GNU C compiler (GCC). Added to the good practices that are intended to be put in Dragora.

• We are not mentioning the ethical part here, since Dragora is the first distribution to fully adopt the Linux kernel of our preferred flavor, Linux-libre!. Being a controlled build process, it is assumed that the distribution remains 100% libre (or free as in freedom). If it is not, please report it immediately for correction. Note: this also helps security in the sense that we don’t have problems with cumbersome or un-auditable code in an honest way.

• Changes in this version:

• Many, many things have happened since the release of dragora-3.0-beta1. The bad news is that it is still not complete as we would like it to be, the good news is that it has been completing as follows.

• * The performance has been greatly improved compared to -beta1.

• * The hybrid live ISO creation has been enhanced. Now the ISO image includes all software packages to date, the initial screen where you can choose to run the current (full) version of the live system, or where you can install it on hard disk. The packages are located inside the /var/cache/qi/packages directory. It is worth mentioning that the password requirement has been removed.

• * All Dragora tools have been improved, including better messaging and bug fixes in the code. Thanks to all who contributed to this.

• * Dragora now features the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE). Thanks to the developers of TDE for the feedback!.

• * The LLVM compiler (v15.0.7) has been added to this beta, along with the Rust programming language (v1.64.0).

• * As part of version control systems, this beta now includes: fossil-2.20, mercurial-6.4.2, cvs-1.12.13, rcs-5.10.1.

• * The shipped kernel is linux-libre-6.1.23 with a new generic configuration. Also we ship linux-libre-firmware-1.4.

• * GNU Wget2 has been added, version 2.0.1.

• * The Python 2 support has been removed, we provide Python 3.9.16 instead.

• * Meson 1.1.0 and Ninja 1.11.1 have been added to Dragora.

• * The Lua programming language and luarocks have been added to Dragora.

• * We offer xorg-server-21.1.8 along with an upgraded stock; i.e, drivers, libraries, applications.

• * On this occasion, Connman, IW, and IWD have been added to complement the networking support on user-space.

• It would take too long to mention the rest of the changes here, and it’s not meant to be boring; rather communicate that the project continues to improve, respectively the website plus the ongoing documentation. We appreciate your interest in trying Dragora, as well as any help you can provide. Thank you!

• The homepage is at https://www.dragora.org

• Dragora can be downloaded from an available mirror, please check

• https://dragora.org/en/mirrors.html

• The SHA256 sum is:

• c40f4a1a8755cde20cd69289e1c595524d69862a1d178ce8697334684f828014 dragora-3.0-amd64-beta2-dvd.iso

• Please test and send suggestions to <dragora-users@nongnu.org>.

• Best regards, Matias Fonzo, Dragora author and maintainer.

• The nickname for the Flatpak Installer is “Flapi”. I recently reported on a showstopper problem:

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

• …the report was ‘ldconfig’ failing when attempted to run QGIS. Well, it is worse then that. It is not just QGIS, the showstopper affects all installed Flatpaks. Something happened that triggered this need to run ‘ldconfig’ and create a temporary cache under /run. Once this has happened, that’s the end of the line, finito for Flatpaks.

• In EasyOS, the inbuilt browser is Chromium; however, there are two menu entries in the “Internet” category, “Download latest Firefox” and “Download latest Vivaldi”.

• Alfons sent me an email that Firefox does not work in a container.

• When Firefox is downloaded and installed via the menu entry, it will run in the main filesystem, as user “firefox”. Firefox has its own sandbox and in combination with running as user “firefox”, this is already a pretty secure situation. Maybe not quite as good as running in a container, but pretty good.

Fedora Family / IBM

• This is a summary of the work done by Red Hat’s Community Platform Engineering (CPE) Team. Each quarter, the CPE Team, together with CentOS and Fedora community representatives, chooses initiatives to work on. The CPE Team is then split into multiple smaller sub-teams that will work on chosen initiatives + day to day work that needs to be done. Some of the sub-teams are continuous efforts in the team and some are created only for the initiative project.

• Now that your environment has been set up, deploy a sample application on an OpenShift Local cluster.

• Now that your environment has been set up, deploy a sample application on an OpenShift Local cluster.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Further, Takashi Sakamoto says that his work will help users transition from Firewire to more modern technology standards (like perhaps USB 2.0). Apparently, Firewire still has a dedicated fanbase that is big enough to warrant six more years of support. But we suspect this will be the final stretch for Firewire support, surrounding Linux operating systems. Once 2029 comes around, there’s a good chance Firewire will finally be dropped from the Linux kernel altogether.

• We’ve seen portable games projects before, but nothing quite this small! Maker James Brown took on the huge challenge of embedding a playable game of the classic first-person shooter Doom in a LEGO brick, powered by Pico’s RP2040 chip and featuring a tiny OLED screen.

• For our new Neo6502 design, we needed to use all 30 GPIOs on the RP2040. Although the RP2040 has 30 GPIOs, only 26 of them are available for the user, as GPIO23 controls the power supply, GPIO24 detects if USB is connected, GPIO25 is connected to the status LED, and GPIO29 measures the power supply after the 3.3V voltage regulator. While all these features are nice to have, there are many situations when you need to use ALL available GPIOs.

• [...]

• This board is currently in the prototype stage and will be available for sale in late May. [...]

• So, let’s say you’ve got a few Teensy’s lying around or have been interested in working with the Teensy line. Maybe you’ve been sitting on a Teensy or two, just waiting to be inspired to make your next project. This crazy fast microcontroller equips makers with a wide-range of potential use cases and possibilities – so many that it might even get a bit overwhelming. Good news! We’ve assembled some creative fodder from around the web for you to chew on while you contemplate what to make next with a Teensy.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• An in-depth i3 customization guide, Opera’s new browser and a real open source chatGPT alternative are the highlights of this edition.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions out there, and it’s also one of the best choices for people looking for a stable, secure, and easy-to-use operating system. One of the critical components of any operating system is its web browser. Ubuntu comes with a built-in web browser called Firefox, but there are also many other excellent web browsers available that you can use.

• This article will explore the 10 best web browsers for Ubuntu in 2023. We’ll review each browser’s features, pros, and cons and provide installation guides. Whether you use the internet frequently or perhaps occasionally, there’s a browser on this list that will suit your needs.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• PGConf.be 2023 will be held in Haasrode, Leuven, about 25km from Brussels.

• The conference will take place on May 12th, 2023. Registrations are open until May 4th, after that you can still register, but you will have to provide your own food.

• Schedule and speakers are available online. The spoken language will be English.

• The PostgreSQL Community Code of Conduct Committee Annual Report for 2022 is now available at:

• https://www.postgresql.org/about/policies/coc/reports/2022/

• All complaints, actions, and statistics are anonymized and aggregated to protect the identities of all parties involved.

• You can contact the Committee with questions or comments by email: [...]

• Regards,

• Michael Goldberg

• PostgreSQL Community Code of Conduct Committee, Chair

FSF

• Hello all! My name is Nick Shrader, and I’ve recently completed my internship with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) tech team from December 12, 2022 to March 3, 2023. I also assisted the tech team at this year’s LibrePlanet conference in person in Boston, MA, which was held March 18-19, just a few weeks after completing my internship.

• I am thirty-three and relatively new to free software. I became interested in free software approximately four years ago, after a bad case of proprietary software rot led me to start my journey up the freedom ladder. My Windows 8 computer had started routinely giving me one-hour-or-longer software upgrades. I had already reinstalled the operating system (OS) maybe twice when I thought, “Am I getting prodded into upgrading the OS on my fairly new computer already?” The computer was only a year or two old, so I expected it to work without unwanted “upgrades.” Mainly, I used my computer for music production and gaming, and, after some cursory Internet searches, I found that the software I needed for those were available on free operating systems. Soon thereafter, I installed a distribution of GNU/Linux. Nowadays, for music production I use Ardour, and for gaming I use Freeciv, Red Eclipse, and Warzone 2100. Moreover, my free operating system doesn’t prod me into unwanted “upgrades.”

Programming/Development

• Systems should behave in a way that is least surprising to the user. This idea is the overarching theme of many of my thoughts on product development. It shows up again and again in different places.

• Developers often believe that software performance follows a Pareto distribution: 80% of the running time is spent in 20% of the code. Using this model, you can write most of your code without any care for performance and focus on the narrow pieces of code that are performance sensitive. Engineers like Casey Muratori have rightly criticized this model. You can read Muratori excellent piece on his blog.

• Golang (or Go) is an open-source programming language that was developed by Google engineers. It was designed to build efficient, reliable, and robust applications, and it is a statically compiled language used for building modern and scalable applications. Go is known for it’s concurrency support, which makes it easy to write programs that can perform multiple tasks simultaneously. It has a garbage-collected runtime and a rich standard library, making it easy to develop applications without relying on external dependencies.

• It has gained popularity among developers over the years for a variety of reasons. One of the main reasons is its simplicity. Go has a clean, easy-to-learn syntax, which makes it easy for new developers to pick up and start using. Additionally, it places a strong emphasis on readability, which makes it easier for teams to collaborate and maintain code. Go is also known for its performance. It is a compiled language, which means that it is compiled into machine code that can be directly executed by the computer’s processor. This makes Go programs fast and efficient, especially when compared to interpreted languages like Python or Ruby. However, when learning Golang, there are common mistakes made by beginners or experienced developers in understanding basic concepts.

• In this article, we will go over these five common mistakes and how to ensure we avoid them.

• Qt 6.5 sees a quiet revolution in QDateTime’s API, built on one in QTimeZone.

• InfluxData is betting on Rust (the programming language) to power the newest version of its InfluxDB time series database product portfolio.

• In Golang, a structure is a composite data type that consists of zero or more named fields, each of which has a specific type. Read more in this guide.

• Yep. XXX. Oooooh, boy! You know what that means!

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• String manipulation is a vital skill for any programmer or developer, and the ability to work with strings effectively can significantly enhance your efficiency and productivity. In Bash, one of the most common string operations is removing substrings from a given string.

Java

• Doubly linked list is a data structure that has reference to both the previous and next nodes in the list.

Leftovers

• Elizabeth Holmes has managed get a bail extension one day before she was due to report to prison.

• If someone demanded I summarily declare why I have achieved my modest success where so many other writers haven’t, I would have to say it’s because I mercilessly separate dreams and goals and only act upon the latter. What’s the difference? A goal is something I control.

• Mark Stewart made several contributions to the canon of protest music as part of the pioneering UK post-punk band The Pop Group, his solo work, and various other projects. He died on April 19, 2023, at the age of 62, and no cause of death was immediately shared.

Science

• “Balto’s fame and the fact that he was taxidermied gave us this cool opportunity 100 years later to see what that population of sled dogs would have looked like genetically and to compare him to modern dogs,” said Katherine Moon, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the main author of the study.

• It was published Thursday in the journal Science.

• It might not be alone, either.

• It really is everywhere.

• Look what I made mom!

• This could help us figure out what’s causing them.

• Just too powerful.

• True bonfires among the stars.

• Oh the stories it could tell us.

• Who chose whom?

• The research rocket landed in a mountain range across the border, creating some rare friction between the two neighbors, with Norway saying protocols hadn’t been followed.

• Hopes were high, but viewers watching the faces of the flight controllers at ispace headquarters in Tokyo could see the news was bad.

• A new twist to the story of the double helix.

• You might not even notice.

• Hopes were high, but viewers watching the faces of the flight controllers at iSpace headquarters in Tokyo could see the news was bad. The company lost contact with its Hakuto-R moon lander as it sped toward the lunar surface, and now fears that it is lost.

• Japanese startup ispace inc said its attempt to make the first private moon landing had failed after losing contact with its Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) lander, concluding it had most likely crashed on the lunar surface.

• It’s a question of opportunity, not skill.

• Different priorities.

Education

• Celikates argues that while this mainstream ‘critical’ turn across the social sciences over the past 20 years or so may be well-intentioned, it is sorely lacking some of the defining qualities traditionally associated with the critical tradition. In particular, Celikates highlights a drift away from the principle that critical scholarship is entwined with the emancipatory struggles of our times. This is the idea that critical scholarship arises from the concerns, grievances and struggles of minoritized and marginalised groups – extending these struggles by making connections to other social movements, and then working to raise a broader critical consciousness.

• Without starting from these emancipatory struggles and conflicts, Celikates reasons that the current cohort of critical scholars runs the risk of simply talking amongst themselves. More specifically, these are likely to be conversations around issues that academics have themselves identified as ‘critical’, while superciliously presuming that others have not had the time or insight to notice for themselves.

• The esteemed CHI conference is happening this week, and I’m jealous that I can’t be there.

• Instead, I’m going through the proceedings and reading all of the papers related to programming, of which many involve AI.

• Here are some papers that stood out to me: [...]

• Stanford Housestaff Union was invited to speak at the Faculty Senate to share its motivations around unionization, but a week before the meeting, that invitation was rescinded. “To that end I want to make available the message that we were planning on sharing at the Faculty Senate,” writes Philip Sossenheimer, one of the Union’s organizers, “so that any faculty member who wants to understand our position has the opportunity to do so.”

• The decision comes after the University announced they have rejected the request to voluntarily recognize the union. If the petition is passed, the National Labor Relations Board will supervise an election.

• The Latvian Education and Science Workers’ Trade Union (LIZDA) and the government’s representatives have reached a conceptual agreement on the increase in teachers’ pay, with additional funding of €4.168 million, LIZDA’s head Inga Vanaga and Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš (New Unity) said after a meeting on Tuesday, April 25.

• On Wednesday, April 26, the government approved amendments to the Cabinet rules submitted by the Ministry of Education and Science (IZM), granting an additional EUR 4,168,067 for targeted grants to local governments to increase teacher pay.

• The three-day teacher strike ended on Wednesday, so on Thursday, April 27, teachers will return to work, Inga Vanaga, head of the Latvian Education and Science Workers Union (LIZDA), said in the “Today’s Question” program of Latvian Television on Wednesday evening.

Hardware

• IBASE recently launched a Mini-ITX compatible with AMD Ryzen processors from the Embedded R2000 family. The MI993 includes 2x GbE LAN ports, 1x SATA port, up to 4x display ports and various serial interfaces. The product announcement mentions that the MI993 can be equipped with the following AMD processors with 14nm process.

• Colorado governor Jared Polis signed a “right to repair” bill on Tuesday (April 25), ensuring the rights of farmers to fix their own tractors and combine harvesters. The law also mandates that manufacturers of farm equipment provide the necessary manuals, tools, parts, and software to their customers.

• Colorado has become the first state to legally protect farmers’ right to fix their own equipment. The legislation, passed Tuesday, also requires manufacturers to provide tools and parts needed for repairs.

• Semtech Corporation and “Connected Development” engineering firm have launched the XCVR development board and reference design based on Sentech SX1261, SX1262, or LLCC68 transceivers with the last one targeting Smart Home applications.

• For some time, I’ve come to the conclusion that would not actually be possible for us to establish a colony on another planet — Mars, for example — which is independent of Earth with our existing systems of technology.

• I don’t just mean with our existing technology; obviously, we would need many technological advances beyond what we currently have to make such a thing happen. Rather, I believe that our entire system of technology is fundamentally unsuitable for such a task. This isn’t something that can be rectified simply by creating more contemporary manmade technologies.

• The reason for this is simple: it seems apparent that it is simply not possible to solve the spare parts problem with any technology we possess. This is not necessarily a problem with a colony if we accept it being dependent on Earth for a supply of spare parts. Even then, the logistics of delivering such parts in a timely fashion poses serious issues. But to form a colony which is entirely independent of Earth, it poses a seemingly intractable problem.

• Two innovation powerhouses in Silicon Valley are joining forces.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• British American Tobacco Plc has agreed to pay more than $635 million to US authorities after a subsidiary pleaded guilty to charges that it conspired to violate US sanctions by selling tobacco products to North Korea and commit bank fraud, a US court filing and the company said on Tuesday.

• Malaria is both a curable and preventable disease but it remains deadly in several parts of the globe, claiming the life of one child every two minutes according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). To mark World Malaria Day on Tuesday, FRANCE 24 reported from the state of Odisha in eastern India to look at efforts there to eradicate the disease.

• In order to get values for the air quality index (AQI), CO2, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and temperature/humidity, Karthik selected the Nicla Sense ME due to its onboard Bosch BME688 sensor module. In addition to providing this data over Bluetooth® Low Energy, the Nicla Sense ME also sends it over I2C to a MKR WiFi 1010 which is responsible for parsing the data. Once done, a comment is generated for the current AQI ranging from “excellent” to “hazardous.” This reading is displayed on an attached OLED screen and a ring of 24 NeoPixel LEDs are illuminated according to the level of dangerous pollutants.

• Health Minister Mark Butler has accused pharmacy peak bodies of scaremongering on upcoming changes to prescription medicines. As many as six million Australians will be able to pay less for medicines, with the government to allow people to buy two months’ worth of subsidised medicines on a single prescription, rather than two separate prescriptions.

• Many changes had to be made to health care in many African countries to address the COVID pandemic. Things that otherwise would have taken years happened overnight. A number of hospitals have succeeded in finding a silver lining in the global tragedy.

• This is… fine?

• Luckily there’s a vaccine!

• What exactly are we giving them?

• Leaked materials include unsubstantiated intelligence about a Ukrainian politician’s claim that the Russian leader is undergoing chemotherapy.

• More than 600,000 people die each year of malaria, mostly children. An effective vaccine has now been developed at Oxford that could save hundreds of thousands of lives.

• U-M’s Center for Global Health Equity has awarded $1. 9 million to two research teams working to ensure eligible recipients have full, affordable access to recommended vaccinations.

Proprietary

• Opera One, planned to replace the flagship Opera Browser, will please users with new features and a liquid navigation experience.

• More AWS employees are being let go by the Bezos machine. Does this mean there’s worse to come for tech careers—DevOps in particular?

• Amazon has begun laying off workers at its cloud and HR divisions, after announcing 9,000 job cuts earlier this year – which came after 18,000 layoffs in the months before then.

• The company has started notifying employees in the US, Canada, and Costa Rica whether they have been laid off. Employees in countries with stronger labor laws will learn their fate in the months to come.

• Thousands of Amazon employees learned they are out of job Wednesday morning as the company carried out its latest round of layoffs.

• Last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced 9,000 positions would be cut by the end of April, bringing the total to 27,000 this year. The layoffs were primarily concentrated in Amazon’s cloud and human resources departments.

• “It is a tough day across our organization,” said Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky in an email to employees shared with KUOW. “I fully realize the impact on every person and family who is affected.”

• Amazon’s latest layoff is part of a broader trend across the tech industry. Microsoft, Meta, Google, and other large and mid-sized tech companies have been slashing thousands of jobs amid an uncertain economic environment.

• Seattle-based companies account for 15% of tech layoffs so far this year, according to Roger Lee, an entrepreneur and creator of the site Layoffs.fyi. Lee began tracking layoffs early in the pandemic in the hopes of recruiting talent to his startup. He took his tool public so that others in the tech industry and media could keep track of the trend.

• In recent years I’ve posted a quick analysis of Amazon’s results each quarter in a Twitter thread. I don’t use Twitter much any more, and Mastodon doesn’t make it easy to post threads, so the blog it is; this is the second outing. Summary: Amazon’s retail business loses money (as usual) but the AWS and Advertising businesses are huge, throw off loads of cash, and continue to grow fast. They subsidize the money-losing retail operation in a way that seems deeply unfair to me.

• Ransomware, a malware that prevents or limits users from accessing their system until a ransom is paid, has become increasingly sophisticated, with cybercriminals often targeting supply chains to maximize impact by threatening the entire ecosystem of an organization that impacts multiple businesses. Shipping and Logistics companies are on the radar of cybercriminals. Phishing is the practice of cybercriminals pretending to be legitimate people or organizations to contact target businesses via email, phone, or text message. As a result, to track and monitor cargo, transportation and logistics firms increasingly rely on sensors and internet of things (IoT) gadgets. Cybercriminals have a chance because many businesses do not treat operational and IoT technology with the same level of attention as they do information technology.

• There was a very minor 4.8% increase in cybercrime density between 2021 and 2022, but Australia remained the fourth country in the world by cybercrime density in both years.

• Stanford and Georgetown have a new report on the security risks of AI—particularly adversarial machine learning—based on a workshop they held on the topic.

• Most of that work cited academic studies, as opposed to attacks in the wild. So when Stanford and Georgetown convened a group of experts last summer for a workshop that informed our new report, I specifically asked if there was any doubt that real-world implementations of AI were vulnerable to malicious compromise. Or was this merely a theoretical concern? Uniformly, participants from industry and government—those developing and using AI—agreed that the problem was real. Some pointed out that there are so many vulnerabilities in digital systems that the AI in those systems is not yet an attack vector of choice, but all agreed that, with the continued incorporation of AI models into a wider range of use cases, the frequency of deep learning-based attacks will grow. Moreover, all agreed the time to begin addressing the problem is now, as new systems are being designed and new deployments are occurring. (It actually would have been better to start years ago, before AI technologies had begun to be deployed in a wide range of commercial and government contexts, but now is second best.)

Privatisation/Privateering

• Around 55% of India’s water bodies are privately owned, with most lying in the states of West Bengal, Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, and Jharkhand.

Security

• The Xen Project has released one or more Xen security advisories (XSAs). The security of Qubes OS is not affected. Therefore, no user action is required.

• VMware this week released patches for a critical vulnerability disclosed at the Pwn2Own Vancouver 2023 hacking contest.

• Kaspersky believes that Russia-linked threat actors Tomiris and Turla are cooperating at least at a minimum level.

• Iranian hackers broke into to a system used by a local government to support its election night operations but were kicked out before any attack could be launched, according to U.S. military and cybersecurity officials.

• Attackers can exploit Apache Superset installations with default configurations to gain administrator access and execute code on servers and databases.

• Last year, the number of cyber-attacks in Latvia increased by 40%, with four times more attacks on public authorities and seven times more searches for different vulnerabilities in the system. Most of these attacks were not noticed by the majority of the public, according to the body “Cert.lv” and the Latvian State Radio and Television Centre (LVRTC), Latvian Radio reported April 26.

• Russian cybercrime group FIN7 has been observed exploiting a Veeam Backup – Replication vulnerability patched in March 2023.

• From time to time and as much as my limited time permits, I often explore the Internet and my DShield logs to see if I can uncover any interesting artifacts that suggest nefarious behaviour. Time-driven events such as tax filing are also considered when I perform such hunting activities. I recently discovered one such site masquerading as the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) and observed some interesting points.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Critics of the bill say the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling and state laws targeting LGBQT+ rights make the stakes higher than ever.

• In 2021, Access Now collaborated with Latin American civil society organizations on the report Surveillance Tech In Latin America: Made Abroad, Deployed At Home [...]

• Amazon is winding down its health-focused Halo devices and membership as the tech giant continues to cut costs.

• The EHDS would make physicians and other medical professionals complicit in the forced commercialisation and monetisation of every aspect of your health without ever asking for your consent. It would destroy the Hippocratic oath of confidentiality by which every medical professional is supposed to be bound.

• Following a report on its activities, the Israeli spyware company QuaDream has shut down.

• This was QuadDream:

• The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, commonly known as the AI Act, is the first of its kind. Not only will it be a landmark as the first binding legislation on AI in the world – it is also one of the first tech-focused laws to meaningfully address how technologies perpetuate structural racism.

Defence/Aggression

• Sweden’s largest military exercise in twenty-five years highlights the strategically important island of Gotland in defending NATO allies.

• US President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol are navigating political tensions around nuclear weapons and microchips to find a common future.

• Russian hackers are targeting Ukrainian and European supply chains to disrupt the flow of humanitarian goods and lethal aid into Ukraine.

• The United States on Wednesday pledged to give South Korea more insight into its nuclear planning over any conflict with North Korea amid anxiety over Pyongyang’s growing arsenal of missiles and bombs.

• France’s Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna began a visit to Azerbaijan on Wednesday to hold talks with longtime leader Ilham Aliyev on easing tensions with Baku’s arch-foe and Caucasus neighbour Armenia.

• Washington state Governor Jay Inslee Tuesday signed House Bill (HB) 1240, prohibiting the sale, manufacture, import and distribution of assault weapons in the state.

• Congresswoman says poor US treatment of American Samoa could be win for China in the Pacific

• Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Kremlin-connected businessman who controls the notorious Wagner mercenary group, has accused “decision-makers” in Russia of treason for not providing his troops and military units of Russia’s regular armed forces with ammunition needed to fight in Ukraine.

• The Hungarian government’s call for a cease-fire in Ukraine is “cynical” given large swathes of the country are occupied by invading Russian forces, the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman said on April 26.

• President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol are set to sign an agreement including plans to have U.S. nuclear-armed submarines dock in South Korea for the first time in more than 40 years. That’s according to three senior Biden administration officials who briefed reporters on the conspicuous show of support to Seoul amid growing worry about North Korean nuclear threats. Wednesday’s announcement of the dock visits is a key element of what’s called the “Washington Declaration,” aimed at deterring North Korea from attacking its neighbor. The agreement also seeks to ward off South Korea from restarting its own nuclear program. The declaration is being unveiled as Biden hosts Yoon for a state visit.

• American and Filipino forces sank a ship with a barrage of high-precision rockets, airstrikes and artillery in their largest war drills in Philippine waters facing the disputed South China Sea which are likely antagonize China. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. watched the American show of firepower from a tower in northwestern Zambales province. It’s the latest indication of his strong backing of his country’s treaty alliance with the U.S. His order for the Philippine military to shift its focus to external defense amid China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea is in sync with the Biden administration’s aim of reinforcing an arc of Indo-Pacific alliances to better counter China.

• Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on April 26 that it had summoned Norwegian Ambassador Robert Kvile over Oslo’s expulsion of 15 Russian diplomats earlier this month.

• “…the attendees proceeded to pay their respects to the heroic firefighters who tragically lost their lives…”

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is using the 37th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear disaster to repeat his warnings about the potential threat of a new atomic catastrophe in Ukraine amid his country’s war with Russia. Zelenskyy drew a parallel between the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986 to Moscow’s brief seizure of the plant and its radiation-contaminated exclusion zone following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year. He said Wednesday in a Telegram post in English that Moscow “endangered the entire world again” with its occupation. Russian forces have also been stationed at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant since capturing the site early in the war.

• When Israel launched a war against the Gaza Strip in August 2022, it declared that its target was the Islamic Jihad only. Indeed, neither Hamas nor the other Gaza-based groups engaged directly in the fighting. The war then raised more questions than answers. Israel rarely distinguishes between one Palestinian group and another.

• Recent statements by two Biden administration officials hint that the US is finally noticing that the world around them is changing On April 11, CIA Director William Burns spoke at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

• The UK government Tuesday announced that officials began a “large scale evacuation” effort to help British nationals leave Sudan amidst ongoing fighting in the region. The operation follows the 72-hour ceasefire agreement between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), over a week after fighting began.

• The effort to get private citizens out of Sudan by countries around the globe continues, by military airlift, ship and over land. But thousands of Americans remain as violence escalates between Sudan’s two warring factions. While the U.S. has said it won’t conduct a large-scale military evacuation for Americans still in Sudan, it is considering how Navy ships or establishing an increased State Department presence at a key Sudanese sea port or across the sea in Saudi Arabia could help get people out. The State Department has advised U.S. citizens for years not to travel to Sudan and continues to advise them to shelter in place.

• Fighting between the army and paramilitary forces has wracked Sudan since April 15, resulting in civilian casualties due to bombings, gunfire, and other forms of deadly violence. In the midst of this crisis, various social media posts are claiming to document events in Sudan using videos as evidence. However, some of these videos have been taken out of context, and may not accurately represent the situation on the ground.

• President Cyril Ramaphosa has called for those involved in the conflict in Sudan to immediately cease the violent activities. President Ramaphosa was addressing a media briefing at the Union Buildings where he hosted his Finnish Counterpart President Sauli Niinistö on a State Visit.

• Sudan’s army and a paramilitary force battled on Khartoum’s outskirts on Wednesday, undermining a truce in their 11-day conflict, but the army expressed willingness to extend the ceasefire.

• Sudan’s army and a paramilitary force battled on the outskirts of the capital on Wednesday, eroding a truce in an 11-day conflict that civilian groups fear could revive the influence of those loyal to ousted autocrat Omar al-Bashir.

• Eight Sudanese and international health and human rights organizations condemn the continued attacks on hospitals and health care in Sudan amid the escalating conflict in the country.

• The Presidency has moved to clarify that South Africa remains a signatory to the Rome Statute and a participant in the International Criminal Court (ICC). “This clarification follows an error in a comment made during a media briefing held by the governing African National Congress (ANC) on South Africa’s status with regard to the ICC.

• Following Beijing’s clarification that its ambassador to France expressed his personal view when he questioned the sovereignty of ex-Soviet nations, the issue is now “closed”, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis has said.

• On Monday, Lithuanian public figure and journalist Andrius Tapinas questioned the price of services purchased for the Vilnius NATO Summit due to take place at the Lithuanian Exhibition and Congress Centre Litexpo in July. Authorities say the procurement was transparent, while the prices were increased by the urgency of the process.

• Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda is leaving for a working visit to Berlin on Wednesday.

• The group says it obtained nonexhaustive data from an organization monitoring hostilities in Syria that documented 277 individual incidents between October 2015 and April 2023.

• Syrians on opposite sides of the battle lines have different views on the normalization of ties between Assad’s government and Syria’s neighbors. Government-held residents hope for economic relief, while those in opposition-held areas feel isolated.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• Seven companies are combining their hydrogen projects in northwest Germany to support industrial consumption.

• Carrier Global Corp., plans to acquire a unit of Viessmann Group that produces heat pumps, seen in Berlin as the heating solution for Germany’s green future.

• Electricity distribution system operator AS “Sadales tīkls” rates could increase by 32% on average from July 1 this year, while the tariffs of the electricity transmission system operator AS “Augstsprieguma tīkls” (AST) will increase by 36%, company representatives told journalists on Wednesday, April 26.

• A short circuit encountered during maintenance near Stockholm forced the closure of two nuclear reactors in Forsmark, Sweden.

Overpopulation

• Geoff Holland – Your academic focus began with plant-based agriculture. What attracted you to become a leading researcher on farming and food plants? Jane O’Sullivan – I had a sense that humanity was facing limits to planetary resources.

Finance

Axios ☛ McCarthy’s debt ceiling lesson for House RepublicansHouse Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s debt ceiling maneuver taught his members a valuable lesson about how to get what they want, GOP sources tell Axios.Why it matters: Republican lawmakers have seen an example of rabble rousers rewarded, and loyalists burned.McCarthy loyalists felt unheard by the speaker after backing him throughout the grueling speakership election — only to perceive the Freedom Caucus as having the influence now, a senior GOP aide told Axios. Zoom in: Midwestern Republicans and Biden-district Republicans are both in that McCarthy loyalist camp — and were both told that the debt ceiling bill wouldn’t be revised with their wish lists.

• Financial stability concerns, sanctions, and inflation contributed to the largest net purchases of gold in over seventy years last year—raising questions about its potential role in de-dollarization.

• Asian shares extended losses on Thursday as troubles at US lender First Republic Bank continued to unnerve investors amid concerns that growth in the world’s biggest economy could very well surprise to the downside.

• On Wednesday, April 26, the prosecutor’s office handed over the criminal case of the murder of insolvency administrator and lawyer Mārtiņš Bunkus, in which three persons have been charged in aggravating circumstances, said the prosecutor’s office.

• French President Emmanuel Macron announced Thursday that France is investing €1.5 billion to reinforce accessibility to public places for people with disabilities, a day after associations protested in Paris, angry about decades of unmet promises and showing how difficult it is for them to travel alone by public transport in Paris, ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

• First Republic Bank’s stock continued to sink Wednesday, an ongoing rout that has erased 60% of its value just this week on concerns about the bank’s financial health in the wake of two other bank collapses.

• Consumers are moving away from nice-to-have spending to necessities as high inflation and interest rates take their toll.

• Australia’s rental crisis has reached new heights with tenants on a full-time minimum wage only able to afford less than one per cent of the listings on offer.

• The mass layoffs that have affected nearly everyone in the tech industry claimed another company today. The cloud storage and collaboration company Dropbox announced it would lay off 16 percent of its workforce, or about 500 of its employees.

• In a blog post today, Dropbox’s co-founder and CEO Drew Houston stated that while the company remains profitable, it has seen its growth slow down in recent times. Also, he stated that the greater growth of AI-driven products and services has caused the company to put more emphasis on projects that use AI.

• Dropbox has announced that it will be reducing its global workforce by 16 per cent in a cost-cutting move amid slowing cloud growth. The San Francisco-based firm will be hiring new talent with the necessary skills to develop and deliver AI-powered products. Dropbox had 3,118 full-time employees at the end of 2022. This amounts to around 500 job cuts in the cloud storage business.

• It’s not just WestJet pilots who are fed up with their working conditions. Workers across the aviation industry are fighting unpaid work and low wages

• The bank is sitting on big losses and paying more to borrow money than it is making on its loans to homeowners and businesses.

• As of March 31, this U.S. regional bank had US$104.47 billion of deposits, down 40.8 percent from Dec. 31, 2022.

• The bill, approved in the Lower House Tuesday, also states that for every five eight-hour work days, Mexicans must get at least two days off.

• Australia will end a decade-old freeze on the minimum wage for skilled migrant workers as part of an overhaul of what the government describes as a broken migration system. It says the current system fosters exploitation and favors attracting low-paid employees over filling critical skill shortages. Australia has long had a high immigration rate, but the migrant workforce has become increasingly temporary. The Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold had been frozen by a previous government at $35,600 a year since 2013. Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said Thursday a new threshold of $46,300 would apply from July 1. She says all temporary skilled workers in Australia will be given clearer pathways to permanent residency by the end of the year.

• Data published on April 25 by the Central Statistical Bureau show that in March 2023, compared to March 2022, the level of producer prices in the Latvian industry increased by 16.2 %.

• The laws governing Australia Post must change for there to be any hope the struggling service can survive.

• The Supreme Court will decide the case of a woman who lost her one-bedroom condo in Minneapolis over $2,300 in unpaid taxes, plus interest and penalties. Hennepin County sold Geraldine Tyler’s apartment for $40,000 and kept every penny. Lawyers for the now 94-year-old Tyler say the county violated constitutional protections against having property taken without “just compensation” and excessive fines. A legal foundation representing Tyler says Minnesota is among a dozen states and the District of Columbia allowing local jurisdictions to keep the excess money. The county says Tyler could’ve sold the property and kept whatever was left after paying off the mortgage and taxes. The Supreme Court hears arguments Wednesday.

• A German court says a landlord sunbathing naked in the courtyard of his building isn’t a reason for his tenants to reduce their rental payments. The case involved a building in an upmarket residential district of Frankfurt, which included an office floor. The landlord sued the human resources company that used the office after it withheld rental payments. The company objected, among other things, to his naked sunbathing. The Frankfurt state court rejected the company’s reasoning, finding that “the usability of the rented property was not impaired by the plaintiff sunning himself naked in the courtyard.” It said that it couldn’t see an “inadmissible, deliberately improper effect on the property.”

• TikTok user Sarah (@itsrah26) posted on Tuesday a now viral video of the unidentified man cutting open bags and boxes of food, and other damage in the fast food restaurant. As of Thursday morning, the video had nearly 101,000 views.

• Amazon.com Inc. is shutting down its Halo business unit, which had developed a series of fitness and sleep tracking devices for consumers. The company announced the decision in an internal memo that was obtained by The Verge today. In conjunction with the move, Amazon is discontinuing the Halo device series.

• Finding workers is no longer the top concern for leaders at middle-tier firms as the ultra-competitive jobs market starts to come off its peak. Battling for talent remains the second most pressing concern for mid-market business leaders as per new survey results, with costs and margin pressures now the number one worry.

• The pressure is on the Government to address a near $1 trillion debt and spiralling cost of living when it presents the Budget on May 9. How different things would be if we had the sense to make multinationals pay properly for the billions they make mining and drilling Australia’s natural resources. Daniel Bleakley reports.

• Moscow is browbeating foreign firms by seizing their assets in Russia.

• House Republicans narrowly passed a bill to raise the debt ceiling while cutting spending by nearly 14 percent over a decade. President Biden has vowed to veto the measure.

• House Republicans are putting the economy at risk to push spending cuts.

• Bain & Company employees were questioned less than a month after Chinese police officials raided the Beijing offices of another U.S. advisory firm.

• CNN– House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his top allies have reversed course and changed their bill for raising the nation’s borrowing limit – and agreed to make two major changes overnight in a bid to pass the package Wednesday in their standoff with the White House.

• Gap, Inc. announced on Thursday that it plans to cut about 1,800 jobs, joining the growing list of major U.S. companies engaging in corporate layoffs.

• The company said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it plans to lay off employees from its “headquarters and upper field workforce,” as part of a “restructuring plan” expected to result in about $300 million in annualized savings.

• More than 184,000 global technology-sector employees have been laid off since the beginning of 2023

• Meta and Amazon are the latest big-name tech companies in the layoffs spotlight, joining Dropbox, Electronic Arts, Palantir Technologies, Twilio, Zoom, eBay, Okta, Splunk, PayPal, IBM, SAP, Spotify, Alphabet, Intel, Microsoft, Coinbase, Cisco, and Salesforce.

• After 2023, General Motors will no longer manufacture its much-loved electric car, the Chevrolet Bolt.

• Usually in economic slowdowns, it’s low-income workers who get cut first, but the recent increase in unemployment insurance (UI) claims in the US has been more broad-based.

• President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday steered clear from close contact with the public as he made a new foray into provincial France in the wake of his signing of a hugely unpopular pension reform.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Prince Harry is newly pursuing News Group Newspapers over claims of unlawful information gathering.

• Nine days after being confirmed by the US Senate to a seat on the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch sold a 40-acre property in rural Colorado to the chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, a major law firm. Gorsuch reported earning between $250,000 and $500,000 from the sale in a legally required disclosure form…

• Donald Trump raped a prominent former American columnist then “ridiculed” her with defamatory comments, a US civil trial hearing a lawsuit against the ex-president was told Tuesday.

• A writer explained in graphic detail on Wednesday how Donald Trump allegedly raped her nearly 30 years ago, at a civil trial to determine whether the former US president assaulted her and then lied about it.

• After two decades in power as prime minister and as president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is hoping to win a final mandate in the 2023 presidential election next month. But amid mounting anger over his handling of the economy in recent years, the seasoned Turkish politician could be in for a tough fight against his main rival, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Turkish political scientist Ahmet Insel looks back at Erdogan’s time in power.

• It is ten years since Buzzfeed launched in the UK and shook up Fleet Street.

• Lessons for publishers from the end of Buzzfeed News.

• Harry claims he was “kept out of the loop” on hacking.

• Aaronovitch has launched his own Substack, Notes From The Underground, since leaving The Times in March.

• David Aaronovitch speaks to Press Gazette’s Future of Media Explained podcast.

• The party, Alternative for Germany, has been accused of radicalizing in recent years. Its youth wing is a threat to German democracy, the country’s domestic spy agency now says.

• South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol stunned President Biden and guests at the White House state dinner on Wednesday with his rendition of Don McClean’s classic song, “American Pie.”

• A bipartisan bill introduced today would stop anyone in the U.S. under 13 years of age from using social media as well as put limits on all young people from getting onto such platforms.

• Vice has a team of six or seven people working on Twitch and is now exploring monetisation.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has undertaken not to notify its Fact Check Unit until July 5, 2023.

• The Press Information Bureau’s (PIB) online Fact Check Unit (FCU) account claimed that an article published by The Wire, and authored by two IFF staffers, is misleading. We wrote to them seeking clarification on these claims.

• Tucker Carlson has emerged publicly two days after Fox News fired him

• The elimination of check marks that helped authenticate accounts has convulsed a platform that once seemed indispensable for following breaking news.

Censorship/Free Speech

• An administrative court in Frankfurt ruled in favor of Roger Waters in his dispute with the city over a live appearance. Frankfurt canceled an upcoming Roger Waters show, calling him “one of the world’s most influential antisemites.

• A Taiwanese man held by Chinese authorities for eight months was charged with “secession” by prosecutors on Tuesday, a move Taipei condemned as a rights violation meant to “create fear”.

• The Kremlin’s suppression of rights activists opposed to the war has led many to find new ways to make demands for peace and freedom.

• The jailed Russian opposition leader said he faced a terrorism case that he described as “absurd.”

• Jailed Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny says a new probe has been launched against him, this time on a charge of terrorism, and that he will be tried on the “absurd” charge by a military court.

• A federal judge in Brazil on Wednesday ordered a temporary suspension of messaging app Telegram, citing the social media platform’s alleged failure to provide all information Federal Police requested on neo-Nazi chat groups. The move is regarded as part of the country’s push against a rise in school violence.

• Network data confirm the restriction of messaging platform Telegram in Brazil as of Thursday 27 April 2023.

• Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny says he could be handed a life sentence on a set of new extremism and terrorism charges that he has described as a Kremlin-ordered political vendetta. Navalny exposed official corruption and organized massive anti-Kremlin protests in Russia, and survived a nerve-agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. He is currently serving a nine-year prison sentence for fraud. Speaking Wednesday via video link from a maximum security prison, Navalny asked for more time to study the 196 files that make up the extremism case. The judge gave him 10 days to study the case pending the trial, for which no date has been set yet.

• Beijing appears to be ramping up attempts to suppress political speech on the democratic island

• The Hong Kong government has slammed a report by a UK all-party parliamentary group that said the Beijing-imposed national security law had been used to “stifle free media and target individual journalists, which has crushed freedom of expression and media pluralism in Hong Kong.

• >A Taiwanese publisher reported missing while visiting Shanghai is under investigation for suspected national security crimes, Chinese authorities said Wednesday.

• Hong Kong government auditors have called on the department managing the city’s public libraries to “step up efforts” to make sure library materials do not threaten national security.

• We discovered over 60,000 unique censorship rules used to partially or totally censor search results across eight China-accessible search platforms analyzed. These findings call into question the ability of non-Chinese technology companies to better resist censorship demands than their Chinese counterparts.

• We discovered over 60,000 unique censorship rules used to partially or totally censor search results across eight China-accessible search platforms analyzed. These findings call into question the ability of non-Chinese technology companies to better resist censorship demands than their Chinese counterparts.

• India was one of the top countries to legally seek the removal of content from Twitter in the first half of 2022.

• Following the broad crackdown on media in Turkey in recent years, social media has become one of the last arenas where people can access independent news and express themselves. Online censorship and throttling of social media during sensitive periods remain a common practice in the country. In the run up to the highly contested 14 May elections, any remaining spaces for freedom of expression in Turkey face serious threats.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Chinese authorities have formally charged a prominent journalist with spying, over a year after he was detained while having lunch with a Japanese diplomat, a media rights group said. Dong Yuyu, a senior columnist at the Communist Party newspaper Guangming Daily, was detained in February 2022…

• Editors and publishers of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post are jointly calling for Russia to immediately release Evan Gershkovich, a Journal reporter.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Hundreds of indigenous peoples from across Brazil Tuesday marched in downtown Brasilia, the country’s capital, to demand government protection of their land and rights against invaders.

• A Mayotte, France court Tuesday ordered the government to stop its expulsion of migrants in the Mayotte island territory. Known as Operation Wuambushu, which translates to “Take Back,” the government sought to dismantle “slums” in Mayotte by removing the increasing population of undocumented immigrants on the island and demolishing shelters.

• In May 2020, a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on the neck of George Floyd for nine and a half minutes, ending his life. Nearly three years later, starting this week, United Nations experts on racial justice will embark on a first-of-its-kind visit to the United States to examine what has — and hasn’t — changed since George Floyd’s murder sparked a nationwide movement for Black lives.

• 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.

• North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum Monday signed one of the country’s most restrictive abortion bans into law.

• RightsCon offers a platform for thousands of participants around the world to convene, connect, and contribute to a shared agenda for the future. Join this global community of business leaders, activists, technologists, policymakers, journalists, philanthropists, researchers, and artists, and explore opportunities to advance human rights in the digital age.

• Whether you are a technologist, researcher, communications professional, community organizer, policy advocate, or any other profession, there is a career path for you in the digital rights field. Join the “Welcome to Digital Rights” Village and hear from diverse experts on how you can break into the digital rights field, no matter what your background.

• UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Steve Barclay Monday announced he is taking legal action against upcoming strike actions organized by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN).

• A planned Labour Day march in Hong Kong has been scrapped after one of its organisers was said to have gone missing for four hours on Wednesday morning.

• A Hong Kong NGO advocating for the rights of industrial accident victims has called on the government to look into the death of a cleaner, whose body was found at the bottom of a lift shaft inside a building where he worked.

• A former lawmaker and barrister, Tanya Chan, has been censured by Hong Kong’s Bar Association for bringing the profession into disrepute after being convicted three years ago over public nuisance offences related to the 2014 Umbrella Movement.

• US Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Peter Welch (D-VT) Tuesday are to introduce legislation to hold corporations accountable for their child labor practices.

• Accompanied by police officers, the prosecutor ordered all case files and digital materials be seized, including an indictment he had prepared for another case without making copies.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Karla Skarda gave an update of APNIC activities at ARIN 51, held from 17 to 19 April 2023 in Tampa, Florida.

• Guest Post: A brief guide to certificate best practices.

• Earlier this year, Public Knowledge published Back to the Spectrum Future: The 20th Anniversary of the Spectrum Policy Task Force, a white paper that proposes a backcasting model rooted in core public interest principles to help guide our spectrum policymakers toward a wireless future that serves and includes all Americans.

• I’ve been blogging for 10 years, actually even a bit more than that, my very first blog is not online anymore and if I remember correctly was in French. I think it was around 2010 when I was a Master’s student.

Facebook

• For Meta’s social media apps, Reels are proving the equivalent of a booster shot. If only the ad technology would catch up.

• The much-anticipated Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill was published on Tuesday.

• Son of a military officer, Sorn Dara routinely calls for prime minister’s ouster.

Monopolies

• TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon are facing rising pressure from European authorities as London and Brussels advanced new rules Tuesday to curb the power of digital companies.

Copyrights

• Ed Sheeran has taken the stand in the high-profile copyright infringement case that he’s fending off for allegedly lifting elements of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” (1973) to create “Thinking Out Loud” (2014).

• Meanwhile, content creators and corporations want copyright regulations for artificial intelligence.

• Sony Music Publishing is facing a lawsuit over unpaid royalties from the Lizzo track, “About Damn Time.” Peermusic and Satisfaction Fulfilled Ltd. are suing the publisher over the track “Hey! DJ”, a 1984 release from The World’s Famous Supreme team, which was co-written by Malcolm McLaren.

• Ed Sheeran is on trial, accused of borrowing from Marvin Gaye. Listen to the tracks at stake in lawsuits involving George Harrison, 2 Live Crew, Led Zeppelin and Katy Perry that may shape his case.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I caught these moments of a raven in the Fred Meyers parking lot, checking out a coffee container, and then taking flight. This is a common enough sight in Fairbanks, but it was the first time I came across one while having my S5300 camera at hand.

• It might not have come to your attention that I have uploaded a few fantasy maps. Most of them are made using an online tool called Inkarnate that with a little skill and a wee subscription allows you to produce some half-decent map. All of them, until now, I’ve created as an exercise in nostalgia, as a tool for my stories, or just for pure fun and pleasure with the added hope that it might get useful to somebody

Technical

• I keep playing this game regularly. I enjoy it immensely in single player and multiplayer alike and I’m not just going down the rabbit hole; I’m actively digging it deeper.

• I’ve already mentioned that I’ve made my own mod for it, called Tea Tea Deluxe. That was some time ago by now, of course. A lot has happened since.

• I recall there were some posts a while back — somebody complaining about there not being enough technical content in geminispace. Or was it too much? I can’t remember. Anyway, here are some notes on Mutt configuration.

• One of the great things about Mutt is that is can be configured, customized, and reprogrammed with much the same depth and flexibility as you get with other free software packages like Emacs. With Mutt, you don’t get a full-fledged lisp environment to write programs on top of it, like in Emacs. But it does have variables, functions, hooks, and programmable keyboard macros. It also has something called “MuttLisp” but it has less than a dozen words, not including any of the usual lisp primitives you would expect for writing programs or building syntax.

• 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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