● 05.09.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 09/05/2023: KDE Plasma 5.27.5, More Microsoft Layoffs

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

GNU/Linux

Server

• There are countless Linux distributions available, a vast majority are free to download and use. Some are more appropriate for performing particular tasks than others.

• For example, Ubuntu, Mint, and Elementary OS are more recommended in desktop and laptop PCs than Arch Linux or Alpine.

Instructionals/Technical

• if the spice tools are installed, copy & pasting text and even images…

• Nagios is a powerful open-source monitoring solution that allows you to monitor your servers and network infrastructure. The Nagios Remote Plugin Executor (NRPE) is a client-side component that allows the execution of Nagios plugins on remote systems.

• In this post, you will learn how to remove a Remote Git repository. The process is simple, but it is good to keep in mind to avoid surprises in the future. Git is a decentralized version control system that allows you to add repositories locally or remotely.

• Swap space is an integral part of Linux memory management, helping to maintain system stability and performance when physical memory is insufficient. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll delve into various methods for checking swap usage size and utilization, as well as discuss why swap space is crucial and how to troubleshoot common issues.

• OpenOffice, also known as Apache OpenOffice, is a popular open-source office suite that offers a range of applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and more. As a viable alternative to LibreOffice, OpenOffice provides compatibility with various file formats, making it an excellent choice for Ubuntu users.

• Eigen is a valuable library for those who code in C++ for linear algebra computations.

• Vue.js is a progressive, incrementally-adoptable JavaScript framework for building user interfaces. Developed by Evan You in 2014, it has quickly grown in popularity due to its simplicity, flexibility, and approachable syntax.

• Linux gaming has been on a steady rise, and one of the major players in this domain is the Steam gaming platform. Valve, the company behind Steam, has actively embraced Linux as an important platform for gaming.

• Pluma is an open-source text editor that is specifically designed for the MATE desktop environment. With its lightweight design and user-friendly interface, Pluma has become a popular choice for developers, writers, and users who need a simple yet powerful text editor for their daily tasks.

• Python, a versatile and powerful programming language, continues to evolve with each new release. The Python 3.9 release was a major milestone for developers with more advanced features and improvements that make writing efficient and maintainable code a breeze.

• Cockpit is a powerful, modern, and user-friendly web-based interface that simplifies the administration and management of Linux servers. It allows system administrators to monitor, configure, and troubleshoot their servers with ease.

• iperf3 is a free open-source, cross-platform command-line-based program for performing real-time network throughput measurements. It is one of the most powerful tools for testing the maximum achievable bandwidth in IP networks (supports IPv4 and IPv6).

• In this article, we will discuss what is Kitty Terminal Emulator, explore the features of Kitty Terminal Emulator, and show you how to install and use Kitty Terminal Emulator on your Linux system.

• File management is one of the common tasks that a user undertakes on a Linux system, which includes creating, copying, moving, modifying, and deleting files and directories.

• This article provides a few command-line tips on how you can delete a large directory that contains thousands of files in a Linux system.Table of Contents1Delete Files in LinuxDelete Directory in LinuxDelete a Large Directory with Tons of FilesDelete Files With Inode Number in LinuxCreate a Directory with Thousands of FilesFastest Way to Delete Directory in LinuxDelete Large Directory with Find CommandDelete Large Directory with Perl CommandConclusion

• Swapping or swap space represents a physical memory page that lives on top of a disk partition or a special disk file used for extending the RAM memory of a system when the physical memory fills up.

• Using this method of extending RAM resources, inactive memory pages are frequently dumped into the swap area when no RAM is available. However, due to the spinning speed of classical hard disks, swap space is way lower in transfer speeds and access time compared to RAM.

Games

• This is going to be a good one.

• A rather great sounding update to Proton Experimental landed on May 5th, so here’s a run over what’s new and improved. Since there’s many different Proton versions it can get a bit confusing, so head on over to my beginner’s guide on Steam Play and Proton for more info.

• In the latest Beta release for Steam from May 5th, Valve finally did some more work on scaling the UI of the Steam Client. Quite overdue isn’t it?

• Have you been someone who loved playing games like Starcraft and Age of Empires primarily in multiplayer mode with your friends, or do you still play them? Then I might have something for you that could make your competitive RTS heart beat faster and bring some fresh ideas.

• Recently I was sent over a package with the Nreal Air, so I’ve spent a fair bit of time testing out these AR glasses with the Steam Deck to see what all the fuss is about.

• Another fresh Humble Bundle landed recently, this time focusing on games to have a bit more of a relaxed time with. Here’s what’s in the Easy-game Games Whitehorn Showcase bundle and what compatibility to expect on Linux and Steam Deck.

• Valve announced a fresh upgrade to the Steam store search, making it a lot more useful so here’s a run over what’s new and improved.

• If you enjoy first-person puzzlers like Portal and The Talos Principle then you’ll likely feel right at home with Re:Touring.

• You might have seen recently that I covered the upcoming updates for Roblox, and now it’s here blocking Wine with their new anti-cheat. This means you won’t be able to play it on Linux any more, at all, unless you find some sort of special workaround.

• If you love anything remotely similar to Vampire Survivors and other horde-style auto-shooters, you might want to take a look at Swarm Grinder.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Plasma 5.27.5 is here five weeks after the KDE Plasma 5.27.4 update and improves the accuracy of estimated battery life by refining the way its estimated, improves Plasma’s Disks & Devices widget so you won’t see useless “Mount” actions for MTP-connected devices, and updates the “Highlight Changed Settings” feature to also work on the new Flatpak Permissions page in System Settings.

• Talking about System Settings’ new Flatpak Permissions page, this update fixes a bunch of significant bugs so that it no longer generates broken overrides configurations, improves custom environment variable support, which is now enabled by default, fixes the “read-write” option of “All User Files”, and improves adding of new file system paths to no longer interfere with the state of other items in the list.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Debian Family

• I decided to leave my job (Principal Software Engineer) after 4 years. I have no idea what I want to do next, so I’ve been having loads of chats to try and work that out.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• The Operator Day at KubeCon EU 2023, hosted by Canonical, took place on Monday, 17 April  2023. We thank everyone for attending the event. Our thanks go out especially to those who engaged with each other during the sessions, asked questions and contributed to our  interactive event. If you missed this 6th edition of Operator Day, we have good news: The recordings are available as a playlist on YouTube!

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 786 for the week of April 30 – May 6, 2023. The full version of this issue is available here.

Devices/Embedded

• iWave Systems recently announced the iW-RainboW-G54S STM32MP13x LGA System on Module aimed at low-power embedded and consumer applications. The company also unveiled a compatible SBC to provide access to extensive peripherals.

• ARCTOS is a 6-DOF robot arm based upon 3D printed mechanics running a modified version of GRBL firmware. Let’s get this straight now, the firmware is open source, but the hardware plans are a paid download, but for less than forty euros, we reckon the investment would be well worth it, judging from the quality of the build instructions and the software support already in place.

• Thinger.io is a decently popular IoT platform for a number of reasons. It’s completely open source, hardware-agnostic and features a user-friendly Admin console with a proven zero coding experience.

• Upgrade your smart home game with Home Assistant’s latest voice features! Assistant pipelines, ESPHome smart speakers, VOIP, and more!

Open Hardware/Modding

• Playing the guitar is a great way to impress people at beach parties, but learning to play the guitar isn’t easy. Even grasping the basic theory is a big task and that’s before you even start to practice finger positioning and movement.

• The fantastic thing about Arduino boards and maker hardware as a whole is that they make creativity accessible.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• With Firefox 113 hitting the stable channel today, we are already looking forward to the Firefox 114 release, which is currently in the beta channel and promises to introduce several new security features to make our Internet surfing session safer.

• One of the biggest changes in Firefox 114 is the revamp of the DNS over HTTPS feature, a privacy-focused feature that sends your request for a domain name through an encrypted connection, creating a secure DNS and making it much harder for third parties to see the websites you’re visiting.

• In a previous post about read receipts & notifications in Matrix I briefly mentioned that push rules generate notifications, but with little detail. After completing a rather large project to improve notifications in Matrix I want to fill in some of those blanks. [1]

• Note

• These notes are true as of the v1.6 of the Matrix spec and also cover some Matrix spec changes which may or may not have been merged since.

• A new version of Mozilla Firefox is rolling out across Windows, macOS and, more importantly to us, Linux. Firefox 113 is an interesting update that enhances the browser’s capabilities in a number of areas. While none are singular upsells that might convince someone to switch browser wholesale they are, nonetheless, further finesse that faithful fans of this FOSS browser are sure to enjoy.

• Welcome back to the ThunderCast, the official podcast of Mozilla Thunderbird! In this episode, we’re thrilled to welcome our first special guest: Mike Conley, Principal Software developer at Mozilla. Mike is a software mechanic, musician, livestreamer, and self-described “pre-internet phenomenon” among many other awesome things.

• We had a wonderful, energetic conversation about the early days of the internet, Mike’s early work on Mozilla Messaging, and his current work on Firefox. He also gives us a peek behind the curtain of upcoming Picture-in-Picture features, and some fresh changes to Firefox’s migration tools.

• We also asked Mike about some of the more underrated features of Firefox. Plus, we get the community involved by asking you which Thunderbird features more people should know about.

• Hope you enjoy listening to this one as much as we enjoyed recording it!

• The W3C is holding its regular annual Advisory Board (AB) election this month. I was elected in the special election about six months ago to fill seats for departing AB members who were elected to the W3C Board of Directors. This is my 2023 AB election personal statement posted on my blog, in addition to the official Nominations and Statements for W3C Advisory Board 2023 Election page.

• MathML lets you insert math formulas with just HTML.

• Last March, during the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Mozilla issued a call to builders and technologists all over the world to create trustworthy AI solutions when we relaunched the Mozilla Builders program and unveiled our Responsible AI Challenge — a one-day, in-person event designed to inspire and encourage a community of builders working on trustworthy AI products and solutions.

Programming/Development

• A recent edition of [Babbage’s] The Chip Letter discusses the obscurity of assembly language. He points out, and I think correctly, that assembly language is more often read than written, yet nearly all of them are hampered by obscurity left over from the days when punched cards had 80 columns and a six-letter symbol was all you could manage in the limited memory space of the computer. For example,  without looking it up, what does the ARM instruction FJCVTZS do? The instruction’s full name is Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed Fixed-point Rounding Towards Zero. Not super helpful.

• I reported recently that unable to include Zoom in Flatpak Installer (Flapi), as only got a blank window. Did a search, and found this:

• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/696849/zoom-windows-launch-with-a-completely-blank-window

• …that says the fix is required for wayland; however, it works in Easy for X11.

• I have implemented a mechanism for applying a hack when install a flatpak, same as did for AppImage Installer. See commit: [..].

• Happy to announce a new package: crc32c. This arose out of a user request to add crc32c (which is related to but differnt from crc32 without the trailing c) to my digest package. Which I did (for now in a branch), using the software-fallback version of crc32c from the reference implementation by Google at their crc32c repo.

• However, the Google repo also offers hardware-accelerated versions and switches at run-time. So I pondered a little about how to offer the additional performance without placing a dependency burden on all users of digest.

• Lo and behold, I think I found a solution by reusing what R offers. First off, the crc32c package wraps the Google repo cleanly and directly. We include all the repo code – but not the logging or benchmarking code. This keeps external dependencies down to just cmake. Which while still rare in the CRAN world is at least not entirely uncommon. So now each time you build the crc32c R package, the upstream hardware detection is added transparently thanks in part to cmake. We build libcrc32c.a as a static library and include it in the R package and its own shared library.

Perl / Raku

• Haytham Elganiny wrote an introduction on how to use the Pakku package manager for the Raku Programming Language, with what it looks like the first implementation of a recommendation manager.

Leftovers

• Malaysia felt big quakes that originated in Indonesia on April 4 and 25, with magnitudes of 6.2 and 7.

Science

• Since the United Arab Emirates’ Hope (“Al-Amal”) orbiter made it safely into orbit around Mars on February 9, 2021, it’s been busy using its onboard instruments to measure everything it could about not only the planet’s atmosphere but also its surface and how both change seasonally. The first months of results of these detailed captures of Mars have now been released in the form of the full-color Mars Atlas website, and a pretty well made PDF version of the Atlas that can be downloaded from the website.

• “We’ve never really seen this before.”

• Time to go to work.

• “I’m not stressed,” I insisted to my doctor, even as my bloodwork results suggested otherwise. “Your cortisol level, the stress hormone your body produces, is through the roof, and something needs to change,” my doctor replied sternly. Despite swearing I was solid, not stressed, I was clearly in denial.

• An epic migration lasting 12,000 years.

• A new world of perception.

• The shocking truth.

Hardware

• If you’re one of the more than 180,000 subscribers to [Alan Wolke]’s YouTube channel W2AEW, you’ll know he’s a lover of old test gear and ham radio hardware. You may have followed one of his tutorials, or referenced his work while repairing or upgrading your own equipment. But when we got a chance to talk to him one-on-one during Vintage Computer Festival East 2023, we were treated to a more personal look at the man himself.

• [Koraks tinkers] was gifted a gargantuan photographic enlarger, a Durst Laborator 138 s, which is a unit designed specifically for black and white usage only. This was not good enough for [Koraks] so down the rabbit hole of conversion to colour we go! The moral of the story is this: if you can’t find it, build it. The hacker mentality. After wasting time and effort trying to source a period colour head for the thing, [Koraks] did the decent thing and converted what was already in front of them.

• We’re still in the early days of generatively-designed objects, but when combined with the capabilities of 3D printing, we’re already seeing some interesting results. One example is this new copper aerospike engine. [via Fabbaloo]

• In the realm of test equipment, there are a number of items that you don’t know you need until you need one. That’s probably the case with the HP11720A pulse modulator. [Tom] acquired two of these even though, by his own admission, he had “no need for these things.” We’d like to say we don’t get that, but — alas — we do.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Some of my colleagues have been surprised at the number of really awful papers that have been published during the pandemic and reach conclusions that are at odds with thus-far established science. Examples abound, a number of which we have written about, including articles by academics whom I used to admire (or at least view more favorably than unfavorably), such as John Ioannidis, Vinay Prasad, and a number of others, some, admittedly, noto particularly admirable before the pandemic (such as Peter Doshi). Seemingly, even the Cochrane Collaborative has gotten in on this action, along with past leaders. Most were in the peer-reviewed biomedical literature, too, although not all. (The utter crapfest of an anonymously authored study that wasn’t peer-reviewed that was published by the Florida Department of Health last fall and suggested that COVID-19 vaccines are more dangerous than COVID comes to mind. Surprise! The paper went through multiple iterations personally overseen by Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo and clearly designed to make the vaccines look worse than the disease.) They shouldn’t have been. Publishing academic research articles as a form of misinformation and propaganda for quackery is a longstanding tactic used by advocates of unscientific medicine, such as proponents of alternative medicine and antivaxxers.

• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has flagged an Ohio oilfield waste processing facility with a history of radioactive contamination for possible inclusion under the agency’s Superfund program, reserved for the nation’s most contaminated hazardous waste sites.

• Last year, EPA toured the Martins Ferry facility, operated by Pennsylvania-based Austin Master Services, at the request of Concerned Ohio River Residents (CORR). This local advocacy group has documented a lengthy list of concerns. In a March 31, 2023 letter to CORR, EPA said the agency “primarily evaluated potential chemical and radionucleotides releases from [Austin Master Services] based on prior operations, and treatment and processing of fracking waste.”

• From cereal maker General Mills, which relies on local farmers around the world to supply grains and nuts for its products, to tech firms like Microsoft and Amazon that need dependable supplies of freshwater to cool data centers, the list of companies vulnerable to water-related disruptions is growing.

• “I’m 72 and now live with my daughter after losing everything because of medical bills. I had $250K saved up for retirement and then disaster hit—several bouts of cancer and a stroke in 2009.”

• The problem of poor physical condition in young people has become apparent. Over the past five years, Cabinet regulations have already twice reduced the requirements of the authorities of the Ministry of Interior in physical checks because young people find it difficult to comply with them, Latvian Television reported on May 6.

• Novavax on Tuesday said it would lay off 25% of its global workforce as part of its restructuring and cost reduction plan. The layoffs would affect about 498 employees, Reuters noted citing the company’s latest regulatory filings. The biotech firm recorded a net loss of $294 million in Q1 as demand for its COVID-19 vaccines depleted.

• Mounting evidence.

• During its six-month trial, Mental Health Ambulances provided specialised emergency care to some 1,300 people in Pirkanmaa.

• Jacinta Miller says she phoned Acacia Prison to speak to an Indigenous liaison officer about her brother Stanley Inman Jr’s mental health days before he took his own life.

• Abortion providers in three states filed a lawsuit Monday aimed at preserving access to the widely used abortion pill mifepristone

• The country’s supply of nursing home beds has not kept pace with its rapidly aging population, leading some families to seek unlicensed alternatives.

Proprietary

• Employment platform LinkedIn has announced it is slashing hundreds of jobs and phasing out its app in China…

• With this move, LinkedIn joins a slew of tech companies including Meta, Google, Amazon, and Twitter that have announced a stream of layoffs. Amid the wavering global economic outlook and a looming recession, LinkedIn has joined the of companies that have massively cut down jobs in the past six months.

• In a statement released Monday, the company announced that it would be laying off 716 people from its workforce of over 19,000.

• The layoffs and InCareer’s phasing out are part of LinkedIn’s efforts to revamp its Global Business Organization (GBO) and China strategy.

• Professional networking platform LinkedIn says it’s laying off more than 700 workers and shuttering its China jobs app, in the latest round of tech industry downsizing.

• Microsoft’s social network for suits, LinkedIn, announced on Tuesday that its localized Chinese app is shutting down and the company is embarking on a layoff process.

• “As we guide LinkedIn through this rapidly changing landscape, we are making changes to our Global Business Organization (GBO) and our China strategy that will result in a reduction of roles for 716 employees,” read a message from CEO Ryan Roslansky.

• LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, has announced it will cut 716 jobs from its global workforce (4 per cent of its staff).

• The professional network and career development tool, LinkedIn, is laying off 716 workers and terminating its Chinese app, ‘InCareers’, amid a ‘weakening global economic outlook’ and a ‘drop in demand.’

• This makes the Microsoft-owned app the latest in a long line of tech companies to slash headcounts — with Amazon and Meta taking similar actions just last month.

• Sales, operations, and support teams have been impacted the most. However, LinkedIn’s CEO, Ryan Roslansky, claims that affected workers will be able to apply for 250 new roles that will be created within the company.

• LinkedIn has become the latest tech firm to axe jobs, closing 716 roles out of a 20,000 workforce.

• The social media network which focuses on business professionals will also phase out its local jobs app in China.

• In a letter by the company’s chief executive Ryan Roslansky, he said the move was aimed at streamlining the firm’s operations.

• In the last six months, firms including Amazon, LinkedIn’s parent Microsoft, and Alphabet have announced layoffs.

• It’s more bad news for the tech industry as another major platform has announced layoffs. LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, is cutting 716 positions. The cuts come after LinkedIn laid off an undisclosed number of workers on its talent acquisition team back in February, as reported then by The Information. The new cuts also follow the massive layoffs that owner Microsoft made across its other divisions in January.

• LinkedIn is set to cut 716 jobs and close down its China-focused job application. The move by the Microsoft-owned company comes amid a weakening global economic outlook and a drop in demand. Although LinkedIn has grown revenue every quarter for the last year, it has joined a host of major technology companies in laying off workers, including its parent company, Microsoft. LinkedIn employs around 20,000 employees, which takes translates to job cuts of around 3.5 per cent.

• LinkedIn generates income through ad sales and subscriptions to recruiting and sales professionals using the network to find potential employees. CEO Ryan Roslansky wrote a letter to employees stating that the job cuts were aimed at streamlining the company’s operations and would remove layers to make faster decisions.

• Although the China-focused job application will be closed, LinkedIn will still have a presence in China to assist companies operating there to hire and train employees outside the country.

• In the past six months, over 2,70,000 tech jobs worldwide have been cut, with large companies such as Amazon, Facebook and Google parent company Alphabet accounting for the bulk of the layoffs.

• Intel layoff: Though it is still not known how many workers would be affected by this decision, what looks certain is that the job cuts would take place across the company.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Fedora (rust-cargo-c, rust-coreos-installer, rust-fedora-update-feedback, rust-git-delta, rust-gst-plugin-reqwest, rust-pore, rust-rpm-sequoia, rust-sequoia-octopus-librnp, rust-sequoia-policy-config, rust-sequoia-sq, rust-sevctl, rust-tealdeer, and rust-ybaas), Mageia (avahi, git, imagemagick, libfastjson, libxml2, parcellite, and virtualbox), SUSE (containerd, dnsmasq, ffmpeg, git, indent, installation-images, java-17-openjdk, maven and recommended update for antlr3, minlog, sbt, xmvn, ncurses, netty, netty-tcnative, openssl-1_0_0, python-Django1, redis, shim, terraform-provider-helm, and zstd), and Ubuntu (erlang, mysql-5.7, mysql-8.0, ruby2.3, ruby2.5, ruby2.7, and webkit2gtk).

• A ransomware attack at one healthcare system had a significant impact on two neighboring emergency departments (EDs) that weren’t targeted in the attack, researchers found.

• Daily mean ED volume rose 15.1% at the two facilities, from 218.4 in the pre-attack period to 251.4 in the attack period (P<0.001), Christian Dameff, MD, MS, of the University of California San Diego, and colleagues reported in JAMA Network Open.

• Mean ambulance arrivals rose 35.2% from 1,741 prior to the attack to 2,354 during the attack (P<0.001), and there was a 127.8% increase in visits where patients left without being seen (from 158 to 360, P<0.001).

• The researchers also reported increases in patients who left against medical advice (50.4% increase), median waiting room times (47.6% increase), and median total length of stay for admitted patients (33.9% increase).

• 911 and 311 intake and dispatch continue via phone and radio dispatch while Computer Assisted Dispatch (CAD) components including 1900 mobile devices (1600 for DPD and 300 for DFR) and the server routing calls are tested to ensure no reinfection when redeployed. Completion of device cleaning to allow resumption of CAD is anticipated early this week

• NOTE: No files or stolen information are by RedPacket Security. Any legal issues relating to the content of the files should be directed at the attackers

Privacy/Surveillance

• Last fall, millions of public school children in Texas brought home envelopes that bore the state seal and read, “A gift of safety, from our family to yours.”

• Tucked into each envelope were an inkpad and a piece of paper prompting parents to take their children’s fingerprints, record their physical attributes and get a DNA sample by having them suck on the corner of the form.

• Guest Post: Investigating tensions that impact the public interest, introduced by DNS privacy measures.

Confidentiality

• NextGen Healthcare Inc., a provider of electronic health record software and practice management systems, has suffered a data breach that resulted in the theft of about 1 million individuals’ records.

Defence/Aggression

• Five people were injured in the attack on the vehicle used for announcements for the election campaign in Tarsus, Mersin, the windows of the vehicle were broken and the tires were cut with knives. The meeting of İstanbul’s Mayor in Erzurum also witnessed an attack and had to be stopped on Sunday.

• The İstanbul mayor said the police did nothing to stop the attackers, even though they were only a few meters away from them.

• I turn 60 this year. My health is generally good, though I have aches and pains from a form of arthritis. I’m not optimistic enough to believe that the best years of my life are ahead of me, nor so pessimistic as to assume that the best years are behind me.

• Israeli aircraft are conducting strikes on Islamic Jihad targets in the Gaza Strip and the group confirms three senior commanders were killed in the attacks. The Palestinian Health Ministry said a number of people were killed and injured in the airstrikes. It did not elaborate. Local media reported the strikes targeted the residences of senior Islamic Jihad commanders. There was no immediate confirmation from the group. Witnesses said an explosion hit the top floor of an apartment building in Gaza City and a house in the southern city of Rafah. Airstrikes continued in the early hours, targeting militant training sites.

• Reflections on a Long-Ago Tour of Los Alamos and the Trinity Atomic Test Site.

• Renfrey Clarke is an Australian journalist. Throughout the 1990s he reported from Moscow for Green Left Weekly, of Sydney. He is the author of The Catastrophe of Ukrainian Capitalism: How Privatisation Dispossessed & Impoverished the Ukrainian People published by Resistance Books in 2022.

• On May 4, theater director Zhenya Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk were detained in Moscow and brought to the headquarters of Russia’s Investigative Committee, where they were interrogated in connection with a case on “justifying terrorism.” Both women were named suspects, and the authorities raided Berkovich’s mother’s home in St. Petersburg the same day. The case was sparked by “Finist the Bright Falcon,” a play about Russian women recruited by the Islamic State that Berkovich’s independent theater company, SOSO Daughters, produced. Authorities also detained the company’s director, Alexander Andriyevich, in connection with the charges, though he was released after questioning. Theater critic Anton Khitrov explains the topics and themes explored in “Finist the Bright Falcon” and outlines Berkovich’s career more broadly.

• I turn 60 this year. My health is generally good, though I have aches and pains from a form of arthritis. I’m not optimistic enough to believe that the best years of my life are ahead of me, nor so pessimistic as to assume that the best years are behind me. But I do know this, however sad it may be to say: the best years of my country are behind me.

• The senseless slaughter of World War I began with the murder of a single man, a Crown Prince of a European empire whose name no one was particularly familiar with at the time. Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria was the presumptive heir to the Austrian-Hungarian empire in June of 1914.

• Eight people were killed and several others injured Sunday when a man drove an SUV into a crowd of people who were waiting for a bus outside of a migrant center in the border city of Brownsville, Texas.

• In early May, Wagner paramilitary cartel Evgeny Prigozhin published a video online that showed him standing in front of numerous dead bodies and shouting obscenities at Russia’s top military leadership, demanding they provide his forces with the ammo they need after months of heavy losses. Later that day, the catering tycoon announced that Wagner Group would withdraw from Bakhmut, where its forces have been locked in a struggle to gain ground for months. Soon afterward, the Russian authorities vowed to give Prigozhin the equipment he demands. Nevertheless, the mercenaries appear to have already abandoned some of their positions around Bakhmut. This is consistent with the story of a Russian soldier named Zaruyar Tetragrammaton Ar-Rakhim (he went by the name Alexey Kamilov until August 2022; more on that below). Tetragrammaton served in one of the Russian Defense Ministry units that were supposed to replace Wagner Group around Bakhmut. Wagner fighters in the area, however, mistook him for a Ukrainian intelligence officer and subjected him to hours of torture and abuse. Meduza is publishing a summary of Tetragrammaton’s story.

• Police in Russia’s Leningrad region have arrested artist and activist Katrin Nenasheva for 48 hours on misdemeanor charges that she disobeyed police, according to the human rights media project OVD-Info.

• On the evening of May 8, the Russian military shelled the city of Kharkiv and the surrounding region. Oleh Synyehubov, head of the regional military administration, says Ukraine recorded at least six hits from S-300 missiles, with some striking targets in the Kharkiv region. Information about casualties and the extent of the damage is still being assessed.

• A German court has upheld the ban on public display of Soviet and Russian flags and military insignia during the Victory Day events of May 8–9, commemorating the end of World War II in Europe.

• Until the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia’s Foreign Ministry had a reputation for being perhaps the country’s most forward and progressive government agency. During the Medvedev presidency, the ministry pursued goals like “rebooting” Russian-U.S. relations and expanding cooperation with European countries. In the context of post-annexation Russia, though, Russia’s foreign relations became increasingly defined by hardline tropes resembling the Cold War rhetoric, interspersed with spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s openly offensive and provocative statements, apparently calculated to alienate the West. Meduza has spoken with several former and current diplomats about life inside the Foreign Ministry and how its culture conditions the staff’s attitudes and personal views. (The following remarks have been abridged and edited for clarity.)

• The Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov condemned Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov’s statements in a Yahoo News interview published last week.

• Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev will make an official visit to Russia on May 8–9 to mark Victory Day, his spokesperson Ruslan Zheldibai said on Monday.

• Alexander Permyakov, the man accused of carrying out the car blast that injured Russian nationalist politician and writer Zakhar Prilepin on May 6, has officially been charged with the illegal storing of explosives by an organized group and with committing a terrorist attack.

• A Russian missile strike in the Odesa region killed one person and injured at least three on Sunday night, according to local authorities.

• Moscow’s military parade marking the 78th anniversary of the Soviet Victory in World War II has concluded.

• “They are safe and have returned to Yangon,” a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman said.

• But Indonesian president says ASEAN’s efforts to bring peace to Myanmar will continue.

• BEIJING (Reuters) – The European Union ambassador to China said on Tuesday he was not sure that the opening up of the Chinese economy is compatible…

• The meeting was one of the highest-level engagements between American and Chinese officials since the downing of a suspected Chinese spy balloon in February.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• For most of the past 50 years, the only workforce data US public companies have been required to disclose is the number of employees, which was mandated in 1973.

Environment

• McDonald’s is at the forefront of a campaign against new laws to reduce packaging waste in the EU, in what has been described by some insiders as the largest-scale lobbying effort they have ever witnessed in the European Parliament.

• The fast food chain, alongside a number packaging producers and trade associations, wrote to European policymakers at the end of April, demanding a pause to the legislation, which would champion reusable packaging in Europe.

• A glacier in the north of Greenland is melting faster and in a different way than scientists previously thought, and this has troubling implications for the future speed of global sea-level rise.

• Temperature records were shattered across Southeast Asia this past weekend as tens of millions of people throughout the region continue to endure a weekslong heatwave intensified by the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.

• The Official Project Censored Show Demanding Accountability From Chevron with Steven Donzinger and the Struggle of Frontline Community Journalists with Matilda Bliss and Veronica Coit

Energy/Transportation

• FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is seeking a dismissal of criminal charges against him, saying prosecutors have improperly turned civil and regulatory issues into federal crimes

• At H2 View’s 2023 Renewables and Ecosystem Snap Summit, Christopher Barker, Managing Partner at Hyve1, told the viewers that hydrogen businesses now have the opportunity the ‘set the stage’ through the introduction of new legislations.

• Although China is investing less in Europe overall, Chinese battery producers are building factories to meet the demands of the region’s growing need for electric vehicles.

• The past two years have been a bonanza for private aviation.

• More than 40 U.S. lawmakers signed a letter Monday to “sound the alarm” on the recent expansion of liquefied natural gas infrastructure and capacity and call on the Biden administration to give “greater scrutiny” to the LNG supply chain from wellhead to shipping overseas.

Wildlife/Nature

• He uses two natural resources to grow mangoes – snow and onsen hot springs.

• An amazing organism.

• We never knew the source.

Overpopulation

• Days after the flooding began, survivors are still pulling victims from the rubble and mud, and thousands have been left homeless. More rain is likely in the coming days.

Finance

• Economist Michael Hudson discusses the collapse of four US banks in two months, giant JP Morgan Chase taking over First Republic Bank, and how government regulators are in bed with the bankers.

• Federal Budget this evening will likely be an anti-climax. At least as far as good news is concerned such as the first surplus in years. The leaks have been coming thick and fast as is political custom. Callum Foote reports before he descends into the hollow vaults of the Budget lockup this afternoon.

• Looks like everyone got their share of the leaks, from the ABC to Sky News. Each frontbencher also had their time in the sun over the last month, flying around Australia carrying “announceables”.

• As congressional leaders prepare for a Tuesday meeting at the White House, Congressman Jamie Raskin, a constitutional scholar, affirmed Sunday that if GOP lawmakers won’t raise the debt ceiling without major spending cuts, President Joe Biden can invoke the 14th Amendment to keep borrowing and avert a catastrophic first-ever U.S. default.

• Bryan Sherbacow, the founder and former CEO of sustainable aviation fuel company Alder Fuels, was charged in a multimillion-dollar embezzlement scheme by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Friday (May 5).

• Prior to 2008, the majority of Americans, up to 63% in 2002, owned stocks. That all changed during the Great Recession, when stock ownership plummeted. And then it fell some more. The lowest year for stock ownership was five years after the recession, in 2013, when 52% of Americans owned stock.

• Chinese exports grew in April by 8.5% to $295.4 billion compared with a year earlier, despite weakening global demand

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• It remains kind of shocking just how badly Elon Musk has screwed up Twitter. He drove away somewhere between 40% and 70% of the advertisers on the site before he took over. And the advertisers have been pretty blunt that the problem is that Elon Musk himself is a real liability. He’s made advertising on Twitter a brand risk. Hell, he’s actually made just using Twitter a brand risk.

• Far-right figures from both sides of the Atlantic have gathered in Budapest this week for the second time at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Hungary is the only European country hosting the event so far. The second day of CPAC Hungary kicked off on Friday in Budapest with a surprise video message from former US President Donald Trump. Trump praised far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and called him a “tremendous man, a tremendous leader”. This year he closed his virtual speech a message to the conservative crows: “Keep up the fight, and never waiver in defense of our freedom and our civilization. We have the communists globalists and in retreat and as long as we press confidently ahead, we will absolutely win. We are winning now and we will close it out.”

• The first day of the event featured Orban as the keynote speaker who last year won his fourth consecutive term. Orban said the reason CPAC comes to Budapest is that “Hungary is an incubator where the conservative policies of the future are being tested.”  The nationalist prime minister likened liberalism to a “virus” that “targets the most vulnerable part of the Western world: nations.” The Hungarian President also mentioned the war in Ukraine briefly saying he is sure if Trump would still be president there would be “no war in Ukraine and Europe”.

• When Putin decided to show the world that his government is so wildly incompetent that it turned what was supposed to be a weeks long takeover of Ukraine into a prolonged conflict in which Russian victory of any kind is very much an open question, he also attempted to keep the truth from reaching Russians. Russia took all kinds of steps in this quest, including putting demands on internet and social media sites to stop fact checking government assertions, as well as making it illegal to publish any “false” information about the war. I couldn’t possibly make those scare-quote marks big enough, so unburdened is the Russian government with anything resembling credibility. And so some news organizations complied. Some shut down. Many foreign outlets around the world found their content blocked in Russia.

• BE THE TERRORISM YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD.

• In another defeat for Chilean President Gabriel Boric and his fellow leftists, the country’s right-wing parties on Sunday won a majority of seats on a 50-member commission tasked with rewriting the constitution imposed more than 40 years ago by Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.

• We look at the question of whether Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is on the Judiciary Committee, should resign due to mental deterioration, and how the media has failed to fully address the issue, with longtime Supreme Court reporter Dahlia Lithwick. As a result of Feinstein’s current condition, “we’re not getting judges confirmed at rates that we need to see,” Lithwick says. This should lead to “soul-searching above and beyond competency to say, ‘How am I hampering this institution from doing the essential work of government?’”

• We speak with longtime Supreme Court reporter Dahlia Lithwick about the mounting evidence of apparent financial impropriety by the court’s conservatives. ProPublica recently reported that Republican billionaire Harlan Crow paid two years of private school tuition for Clarence Thomas’s grandnephew — payments that Thomas did not include on his annual financial disclosures. This comes after previous reporting revealed Crow also paid money to Thomas and his relatives in an undisclosed real estate deal, and that Thomas accepted luxury travel from Crow virtually every year for decades, while failing to follow a federal law that requires him to publicly report most gifts. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, to be paid at least $80,000 for consulting work over a decade ago and asked that the payments not specify Ginni Thomas’s name in any paperwork. Thomas later cast the deciding vote in a 5-4 ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, in a case supported by Leo and his conservative legal network. “Members of the Senate are beginning to understand that it is going to be incumbent on them to step in and issue some ethics rules or demand that the court issue ethics rules for itself,” says Lithwick, who covers the courts and the law for Slate and hosts the podcast Amicus.

• Uzbekistan will hold a snap presidential election on July 9, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev announced Monday, just one week after constitutional amendments that reset his term count to zero passed in a referendum.

• A Senegalese court on Monday handed opposition figure Ousmane Sonko a six-month suspended sentence in an appeal of a defamation case that could jeopardise his run for president next year.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Hong Kong government will ask the city’s top sporting committee to punish the Hong Kong Ice Hockey Association (HKIHA) for failing to “thoroughly follow” national anthem guidelines which led to an anthem mix-up at a recent international match, the city’s sports minister has said.

• It is the media silence that hurts the most. Retired Miami Heat superstar Dwyane Wade and his wife Gabrielle Union have been loving and supportive parent to their trans teenage daughter, Zaya. They have shown the public the doting normality of caring for a trans child.

• The internet has revolutionized communications, sales, and information distribution, and has enabled historic levels of porn consumption. These are all unequivocally good things. (Fight me.) What it has also done is revolutionize court precedent.

• Police in England arrested at least 52 people Saturday around the coronation of King Charles, including numerous anti-monarchy activists who say they were detained before they even started protesting. Charles and his wife Camilla were crowned king and queen in a lavish ceremony at Westminster Abbey that is expected to cost over £100 million, or about $125 million USD, taking place against the backdrop of a severe cost-of-living crisis in the U.K. Despite growing disinterest in the monarchy, criticism of the institution has been very “muted” in the mainstream U.K. media, says Priya Gopal, Cambridge professor and author of Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent. “The media and the police are colluding in essentially suppressing criticism of the monarchy and what has been going on around the coronation,” she says.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• ‘The press, which defends freedom of the press, does nothing to free this citizen.’

Civil Rights/Policing

• Hong Kong’s District Councillors have been compared to the city’s migrant domestic workers by a former government official, who said he often used the analogy to say that district-level administrators could be fired if they did not obey their employers’ orders.

• Oklahoma death row prisoner Richard Glossip’s execution was stayed by the Supreme Court on Friday, marking the ninth time he had an execution date put on hold. Glossip has maintained his innocence throughout his 25 years of incarceration; his accuser has previously attempted to recant his testimony. In an unprecedented move earlier this month, Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed a joint motion with Glossip’s defense team to halt his May 18 execution, saying he did not receive a fair trial. For more, we are joined in Oklahoma City by Sister Helen Prejean, one of the world’s most well-known anti-death penalty activists and Richard Glossip’s spiritual adviser, who says she is hopeful the Supreme Court’s intervention will mark the end of Glossip’s legal battles. “I believe Richard’s going to walk out a free man,” says Prejean. She is the author of Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty and River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey.

• 60% were in favour for married couples to have dual surnames, while 50% supported same-sex marriages.

• The highest number of work-related deaths were recorded in the construction, accommodation and transportation sectors.

• Glossip’s execution date was set for May 18, despite requests from Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general to vacate Glossip’s conviction.

• It’s 1948, and Joe Louis is ready to quit boxing. He has been heavyweight champion for more than a decade, longer than any fighter before him. After carrying a near-messianic burden, he gets in touch with Henry Ford II himself to see if he can open a car dealership in Chicago.

• Simone Weil House is a century-old arts-and-crafts bungalow with cheerful red siding located in Portland, Ore. The house is on a large corner lot in the city’s historically Black, rapidly gentrifying Northeast neighborhood.1

• Outside, a hand-drawn chalkboard on the front porch invites strangers and friends to community dinners on Wednesday nights. In the front yard, a free fridge and clothing closet signal a commitment to mutual aid. In the backyard of the double lot, housing-insecure guests live in three tiny homes. Inside is a revolution.2

• Holocaust literature at its core is inevitably Eurocentric, yet when seen globally, its geographic scope is stunning. In Latin America, for instance, a vigorous fount of memoirs, fiction, poetry, and drama has emerged over the last half-century examining the experiences and reverberations of the Shoah. For example, the Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman’s celebrated autobiography, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, describes scenes of torture in which military officers proudly tell Timerman that the persecution of Jewish dissidents in Argentina during the Dirty War should be seen as an extension of the “final solution” to the Southern Hemisphere. An array of novelists and poets have explored the lives of Holocaust survivors and their descendants in Chile, Cuba, and Venezuela after the liberation of Auschwitz and other extermination camps. José Emilio Pacheco’s novel Morirás lejos, which remains untranslated into English, tells of a survivor who spots a former Nazi in his Mexican neighborhood. Jorge Volpi’s best-selling In Search of Klingsor is about Allied scientists racing against Hitler to make the first atomic bomb, while Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas offers a Borgesian encyclopedia of invented fascist writers.

• “I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process,” says Griffin Mill, the fictional studio executive in Robert Altman and Michael Tolkin’s 1992 satirical thriller, The Player. Tim Robbins, who plays Mill, delivers the line wistfully, imagining a Hollywood without all the creative mess of dealing with creative people. Mill, who might be the chairman of a streaming platform today (or ex-chairman, after a sexting scandal involving an employee he could not murder), and his real-life counterparts, are on the cusp of that dream.

• The late Jeffrey Epstein was a college dropout with a spotty educational history who remade himself as a habitué of Ivy League schools, with a particularly close connection to Harvard. This was not the biggest deception in Epstein’s squalid life, but his closeness to the most prestigious precincts of academia offers an important window into the workings of the American elite.1

• Over the past quarter-century, former NFL player Kenny Hansmire has leaned on government officials across the country to grow the National Child Identification Program. The Texas-based company sells kits that it claims help track down missing kids.

• Steven Spainhouer’s son worked at one of the stores in the Allen, Texas shopping mall chosen by America’s most recent mass shooter (as of Saturday: there were seven this weekend).

• Last Thursday, I spent my night in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s office, singing and linking arms with to my fellow Floridians – who are Dream Defenders, members of Florida Rising, Showing Up for Racial Justice, and others- before police officers peeled us from each other and booked us into the local jail.

• Republican State Rep. Bryan Slaton of Texas resigned his seat Monday in order to avoid a public expulsion hearing after an investigation determined one of the party’s loudest voices promoting the baseless threat of “groomers” in the LGBTQ+ community had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a 19-year-old member of his staff that included furnishing her with alcohol.

• Die Jim Crow Records, the first record company to work exclusively with musicians impacted by the United States prison system, has collaborated with another formerly incarcerated artist named EL BENTLY 448.Wrongfully convicted, EL BENTLY 448, who is also known as Leon Benson, spent 25 years in an Indiana prison. Ten of those years were spent in solitary confinement. He was released on March 8, 2023, after he was exonerated.Shadowproof is honored to debut “Innocent,” a hip-hop track from Leon’s forthcoming EP that will be available on June 26. (Another track, “Mugabe,” was shared on April 26.)Leon told Shadowproof, “I was innocent, but I wasn’t an innocent person.” He recorded the track to explore this idea of being innocent, but born guilty.“You’re innocent born guilty if you’re born a different gender than somebody, if you’re born to a particular racial group, if you’re born in a particular time, in a particular location, in a particular economic status, or under a particular religion or culture,” Leon described.Leon added, “If you look at it, nobody had a choice of coming to the world. So when you come into the world, we are already made guilty by the powers that be in our life.”The lyrics for the track are autobiographical in the first verse. The second verse questions those who may believe that they are somehow more innocent than anyone who has been incarcerated.Leon wrote the track in 2012 while he was in solitary confinement. He hoped the track would help him bring awareness to his case so that he could be exonerated.As Leon recalled, he took that solitary cell that was meant for sensory deprivation, a “torture chamber,” and he transformed it into “a university, a place that I had to heal, learn, [and] grow.”“That’s where I got over a lot of anger because it was a place that I knew was meant for me to smother in, and even go crazy,” Leon shared.Fury Young founded Die Jim Crow in 2013. In 2014, Fury connected with Leon after an activist named Zulay Velasquez shared an announcement on the Facebook group for the Innocence Network that indicated Die Jim Crow was looking for artists. “I’d never heard from someone in prison directly before (via cell phone) so we had a long uninterrupted conversation a couple hours later,” Fury shared. “We instantly hit it off, bonding about certain philosophy shit and world history. Then we continued to build!”

• The Indiana Department of Corrections denied Die Jim Crow access to record music with Leon at least twice. So Leon found a way that he could record without them while he was in prison.

• We get an update from South Texas, where eight people were killed and at least 10 more injured Sunday in Brownsville after a driver rammed his SUV into a group of people near a shelter for migrants. The incident comes just days before the Trump-era Title 42 policy is set to expire and more migrants are expected to seek asylum at the southern U.S. border. “I can only describe it as a hate crime. It was motivated by hate,” Jennifer Harbury, a longtime human rights lawyer and activist with the Angry Tias and Abuelas, says of the car-ramming attack. She also talks about the history of U.S. interventions in Central America that destabilized the region.

• The Russian political movement Feminist Antiwar Resistance (FAR), along with Israel’s Human Rights Defenders Fund, has won the 2023 Aachen Peace Prize

• Svetlana Petriychuk’s documentary play, “Finist the Bright Falcon,” won a prestigious Golden Mask award in recognition of its powerful portrayal of a whole class of Russian women: “Maryushkas,” as they’re referred to in the play, are women who chose to convert to radical Islam and move to Syria, later finding themselves in trouble with the Russian law. Last week, Petriychuk was arrested while trying to leave the country, and is now being prosecuted for “justification of terrorism” in a play that, in reality, dissects radicalization as a social problem. On the same day, May 4, theater director Zhenya Berkovich, who directed an award-winning production of “Finist the Bright Falcon,” was also taken into custody in connection with the play, which the authorities present as a specimen of illegal terrorist propaganda. Petriychuk’s husband, theater director Yury Shekhvatov, spoke to Meduza about why Svetlana’s arrest did not come as a surprise — but still took the couple off guard.

• In its daily intelligence update on Tuesday, the British Defense Ministry said that the Russian-occupied territories in eastern Ukraine are experiencing a worsening water shortage.

• In Odesa, a Russian missile strike destroyed a Red Cross of Ukraine warehouse, the humanitarian organization reports.

• Five people have been injured in today’s shelling attacks on Shebekino, a town in Russia’s Belgorod region. Three of them had to be hospitalized, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote on his Telegram channel.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Microsoft has apparently realized that it’s just good business sense to get itself on the right side of history, and the right side of the growing “right to repair movement.” The company has increasingly been urging lawmakers to support the Washington State Fair Repair Act, which would ensure that consumers and indie repair shops have the parts, tools, and documentation to repair their own gear.

Monopolies

• As American monopolies fix prices higher and higher, the Federal Reserve bizarrely has concluded that employment is to blame for inflation. For months, Fed chairman Jerome Powell has increased interest rates in the hopes of throwing workers out in the street and thus supposedly reducing prices.

Trademarks

• Unsurprisingly, the Board dismissed Professor Rebecca Curtin’s opposition to registration of the mark RAPUNZEL for dolls and toy figures, finding that Curtin, as a mere consumer of fairytale-themed products, failed to prove her entitlement to a statutory cause of action. The Board addressed this single, threshold question: “[I]s Opposer Rebecca Curtin, as a purchaser of goods bearing the challenged mark, entitled to oppose the mark’s registration under Section 13 of the Trademark Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1063, when she alleges the proposed mark is both invalid and the subject of a fraudulent application?” The Board said no. Rebecca Curtin v, United Trademark Holdings, Inc., 2023 USPQ2d 535 (TTAB  2023) [precedential] (Opinion by Judge Michael B. Adlin).

*

Copyrights

• Going on six months after its acrimonious split with rapper Kanye West, Adidas is still sitting on a mountain of Yeezy merch. A $1.3 billion mountain, by some estimates.

• AMC Networks, the company behind such cable channel brands as AMC, IFC and Sundance TV, as well as such streaming services as AMC+, Acorn TV and Shudder, said its streaming subscribers dropped by around 300,000 to 11.5 million as of the end of the first quarter.

• As part of an ongoing piracy liability lawsuit, Internet provider Grande must share the personal details of 125 subscribers with a group of filmmakers. Several subscribers had filed objections and denied any wrongdoing. However, the Texas federal court concludes that they may be able to offer key evidence, while noting that their privacy is adequately protected.

• Hacking software and hardware, to achieve functionality that was never intended, can be fun and rewarding. When motivation is directly linked to restrictions perceived as unnecessary or unfair, that can lead to moral justification. That’s understandable in some cases, but when a company like Nintendo counters by targeting a tool like Lockpick, that’s not surprising; it’s inevitable.

• To hear the recording industry tell the story, copyright is the only thing protecting musicians from poverty and despair. Of course, that’s always been a myth. Copyright was designed to benefit the middlemen and gatekeepers, such as the record labels, over the artists themselves. That’s why the labels have a long history of never paying artists.

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