● 07.11.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 11/07/2023: SUSE’s RHEL Fork and “Oracle Linux” Takes on RHEL Too

Posted in News Roundup at 8:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• The merge window for Linux Kernel 6.5 is now closed, followed by the two weeks of merge window since Kernel 6.4 release. While announcing, Linus mentioned that it is normal cycle with some minor issues, however the testing phase may drag a little more due to vacation seasons in Europe.

• Let’s take a look at briefly what’s new in this Kernel release.

Applications

• Cross-platform open source RGB controls continue getting better, with OpenRGB version 0.9 now available so here’s what’s new. Since RGB can be a huge mess (even on Windows), with many vendors doing their own proprietary apps, OpenRGB can save the day.

• One of the most commonly used and reliable ways of getting help under Unix-like systems is via man pages, which are the standard documentation for every Unix-like system and they correspond to online manuals for programs, functions, libraries, system calls, formal standards, and conventions, file formats and so on.

• However, man pages suffer from many failings one of which is they are too long and some people just don’t like to read too much text on the screen.

Games

• The Heroic Games Launcher currently supports GOG, Epic Games and manual side-loading but Amazon Games support is also being worked on.

• Fanatical put up another good looking bundle with their newest Platinum Collection for July 2023, here’s all the games and what compatibility to expect on Steam Deck and desktop Linux. Another nice way to build up your game collection and spend a bit less.

• Lost for Swords is an in-development turn-based roguelike card game with a unique twist, playable in your browser via itch.io it has sucked away a fair amount of my time recently. It has downloads for Windows, which I haven’t checked via Wine, because it works great in the browser.

• MineClone2 continues getting better and better as a free and open source replacement of Minecraft, with version 0.84 out now. Here’s a run over what’s new and improved. To play it you need Minetest.

• SteamVR will now play better with various types of controllers, thanks to the release of SteamVR version 1.26 bringing with it automatic controller rebinding.

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• In light of the Red Hat/IBM drama happening these days after Red Hat announced that it will restrict access to its public repositories limiting the forking of RHEL by community distributions like AlmaLinuxOS or Rocky Linux, SUSE announced today that it plans to offer a free alternative to RHEL and CentOS users.

• SUSE already develops SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), a commercial RPM-based distribution for businesses who want to invest in Open Source technologies, but now that company announced that it will fork Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) using publicly available sources and develop a RHEL-compatible distribution that will be available to everyone without any restrictions.

• SUSE, a leading global provider of enterprise open-source solutions, made a significant announcement today. The company revealed its plans to fork Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), a widely used Linux distribution, and develop its own version. This move aims to create a RHEL-compatible distribution that will be accessible to all users without any restrictions. SUSE has committed to investing more than $10 million into this ambitious project over the next few years.

• German open source vendor SUSE has said it will invest more than US$10 million (A$14.97 million) to fork the publicly available source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and make it available to world+dog with no restrictions.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Smart homes are changing. A modern smart home typically isn’t a self-contained, set-it-and-forget-it, custom installation. It’s a hyper-connected set of devices that work together to automate and enhance the users’ living space. Today’s smart homes contain devices from many manufacturers, running dozens of protocols, interfacing with multiple cloud backends. Navigating this ecosystem is challenging both for the consumer and for businesses determining their optimal business model in the space.

• Smart homes evolve constantly; the business models associated with them should, too. Device manufacturers need to find sustainable business models that work for their customers, while matching the technology landscape as it evolves. In this blog, I’ll highlight a few approaches to smart home business models as well as tradeoffs and use cases associated with each.

Devices/Embedded

• 2. Vendors need to rethink how they handle their quality assurance testing for their gear in the wake of vulnerabilities.

• 3. With remote access to systems becoming essential, companies operating essential infrastructure need to think about how to allow remote access safely.

• The rest of the packages include a product brief for the module, a Quick Guide for the development kit, a USB-A to USB-C cable, an Ethernet cable, and two antennas with SMA connectors for WiFi and Bluetooth. The Quick Guide provides extra details about the hardware and instructions to flash Linux to the board, but we won’t need the latter as the board comes preloaded with Linux.

• You’ll note that the devkit does not come with a power supply by default, but I found a 5V/3A power supply that should do the job for most use cases. I also connected the board to a TV through HDMI, added an Ethernet cable, and two RF dongles for a mouse and keyboard…

• and pressed the power switch, and within a few seconds, some Linux-based interface showed up on the TV display. Please ignore the vertical lines on my test TV, as it’s just a problem with my LG 42UB820T 4K television which has been that way for close to 7 years…

• Now that we are in the terminal, we can get some information about the board and the Yocto-based Linux distributions installed on the board.

Open Hardware/Modding

• This is a very simple device to build and it only requires four components: an Arduino Nano board, an HMC5883L compass module, a ring with 60 WS2812B individually addressable RGB LEDs, and an OLED screen. If you want to use it on the go, a standard 9V battery will provide portable power. Those components fit into a basic 3D-printable case that protects the electronics and puts everything in the correct orientation.

• We’re inviting all UK-based teachers of computing subjects to apply for an ‘all expenses paid’ place at the WiPSCE 2023 conference in Cambridge.

• Raspberry Pi itself is shaking off the effects of the supply chain problems that have plagued everybody for the last couple of years. There is now steady supply of Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi 3A+, and an increasing supply of Raspberry Pi 4 models.

• AnalogLamb is set to release three affordable RISC-V breakout boards. These boards are based on the CHV32 Series microcontrollers offering support for standard interfaces such as I2C, SPI, UART, CAN, DMA, among others.

• With this challenge, in its first hour, I realized my current workflows don’t allow me to use computers with 512 MB of memory, this is quite sad. A solution would be to use the iBook G4 laptop that I’ve been using since the beginning of the challenges, or my T400 running OpenBSD -current, but they have really old hardware, and the challenge is allowing some more fancy systems.

• I’d really like to try Alpine Linux for this challenge, let’s wrap something around this idea.

• When I look around my motorcycle shop, pneumatic tools are everywhere. From handheld tools such as impact guns, sanders, shears, saws and grinders to large equipment including a sandblast cabinet and tire machine; air is a vital part of taking on a wide variety of tasks.

• The air compressor I’ve used since the 1990’s uses a 220V, 7hp electric motor to turn a two stage air pump at 800 rpm, which fills the 80 gallon tank to 150 psi in about five minutes. It has been a very reliable machine, to the point where I hardly ever think about it. Only when there is a power outage do I realize how much I rely on a ready supply of compressed air.

• In a rapidly changing world where inexpensive and reliable energy going forward is no longer a given, I set out to build a system to fill my air tanks without the use of electricity or fuel. My design would be free of electronics of any type, and with minimal maintenance the components should last a lifetime. I wanted to use as many second hand parts as possible, in an effort to reduce costs and inspire recycling and repurposing.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• I love using the most bleeding-edge tech and I have spent all my life doing the best I can to get my hands on the most advanced toys. But we all know that this can fast become a very expensive hobby and to still be able to manage this, there are some corners I personally cut. I buy my smartphones second-hand just like 26.4% of Zimbabweans. So far my success rate has been really great but I recently had the biggest inconvenience as a result of buying a second-hand phone.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Licensing / Legal

• Oracle, who maintains an RHEL Clone as “Oracle Linux”, has responded to Red Hat’s decision to restrict public access to its source code by promoting openness, collaboration, and compatibility. Oracle offers to maintain binary compatibility with RHEL while extending support to independent software vendors (ISVs) and ensuring a seamless transition to Oracle Linux. This blog post takes a subtle dig at IBM, who recently discontinued the public release of RHEL source code.

• We leave it as an exercise for the reader to puzzle out the rationale for Oracle’s failed $10 billion lawsuit against Google over Android’s use of copyrighted Java APIs.

• Oracle launched what’s now called Oracle Linux back in 2006, and the plan was to provide an RHEL-compatible Linux distribution, in order not to fragment the Linux community and to support a common platform for customers and independent system vendors (ISVs).

• Now that RHEL compatibility is uncertain, Screven and Coekaerts say Oracle Linux will maintain compatibility through version 9.2 and after that Big Red plans to work with customers and ISVs to fix any issues that arise.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• At the start of a recent webinar, the moderator invited the panellists to identify the biggest challenge for editors. While my fellow panel members were sharing some diverse, crucial, and lasting (as well as emerging) challenges, I was struck by the geographical aspects of editors’ challenges.

• We all understand that the challenges of the editors from the Global South are different from those in the Global North. Or, do we? For example, while the editors and their journal publishers in the North are struggling to address increasing demand for open access by experimenting with different business models, in the South, open access is not an emerging issue since most of society and institutional journals are already Diamond open access journals. Here the challenge is around recognition.

Programming/Development

• I am presenting two “Tips and Techniques” papers at the ITiCSE 2023 conference in Turku, Finland on Tuesday July 11th. The papers are presenting the same scaffolded sequence of programming languages and activities, just in two different contexts. The complete slide deck in Powerpoint is here. (There’s a lot more in there than just the two talks, so it’s over 100 Mb.)

• When I met with my advisors on our new PCAS courses (see previous blog post), one of the overarching messages was “Don’t scare them off!” Faculty told me that some of my arts and humanities students will be put off by mathematics and may have had negative experiences with (or perceptions of) programming. I was warned to start gently. I developed this pattern as a way of easing into programming, while showing the connections throughout.

• I don’t need any expensive plugins, or fancy (read: complicated) code to make this all work. It’s all just RSS, and it’s lovely.

• Fortunately my subscribers are technically literate, and I’m certain you all have their RSS readers set to check my feed every day or so rather than every fifteen minutes. If you catch posts appearing and disappearing while I sort this out, maybe check your reader’s settings?

• It’s been over three years since Fitzgen published: “Announcing Better Support for Fuzzing with Structured Inputs in Rust”, and a little over two years since arbitrary 1.0 was released. A few years agoI wrote a property-testing crate based on arbitrary, but never ended up writing about it. So I wanted to take a moment to change that. We’ll start by taking a look at automated testing, then cover the different approaches to it, explain how to work with structured inputs, and finally introduce heckcheck – a small property-testing library.

Python

• However, if you just want to prototype a Rust extension, packaging and integration boilerplate can get in the way: every extra bit of friction prevents you from just doing the experiment of whether or not Rust will help.

Leftovers

• Megan Rapinoe, the most important US soccer player of the last 20 years, is retiring. The 38-year-old with a goal-scoring flair as striking as her kaleidoscopic coif announced that she will be saying goodbye after the 2023 World Cup. In telling the world now, Rapinoe has created the possibility of a dramatic sendoff, driving even more interest in what will be a rollicking tournament.

• Mendoza enabled my own consistent site-wide style. When I needed to rewrite the HTML for different CSS styling, I did not have to rewrite or edit any of the prior documents.

• This level of customization in combination with my writing style — using lots of stickers and other media along the way — came at a significant cost.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• In 14 states, these councils have the ultimate say on use of the money, which comes from companies that made, distributed, or sold opioid painkillers, including Purdue Pharma, Johnson & Johnson, and Walmart. In 24 other states, plus Washington, D.C., the councils establish budget priorities and make recommendations. Those will affect whether opioid settlement funds go, for example, to improve addiction treatment programs and recovery houses or for more narcotics detectives and prisons.

• This week, I could not avoid thinking yet again how much it is the case with antivaccine messaging since the COVID-19 pandemic hit that “everything old is new again.” Unfortunately, this would appear to be more the case than ever since longtime antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced that he was challenging President Joseph Biden for the 2024 Democratic nomination for President. Unfortunately, his move has led to more publicity than ever before for his antivaccine beliefs and conspiracy theories. (Just Google his name if you don’t believe me.) While it is true that some media outlets are appropriately reporting his antivaccine conspiracy theories (and many other conspiracy theories and lies) for what they are, totally bonkers, much of the media is also being unduly respectful of his tinfoil hat worthy ideas—even stories that report on his conspiracy theories also can’t resist the Kennedy allure enough not to include photos of him as a child with his father and/or President John F. Kennedy and portray the ostracism that he experiences because of his antivaccine views as him “sacrificing” to speak up for what he believes—while RFK Jr. has also managed to attract what Judd Legum appropriately characterizes as a “pernicious obsession” by elites. Despite his previous reputation as a lefty environmentalist RFK Jr. also epitomizes the far rightward shift of the political center of the antivaccine movement over the last decade or so, having embraced issues besides resistance to vaccine mandates that traditionally championed by the right, such as cryptocurrency, antimask and anti-“lockdown” views, and even free market fundamentalism. The interesting thing is that initially RFK Jr. assiduously avoided the issue of his long history of antivaccine activism but of late seems to have not just acknowledged it but made it a centerpiece of his campaign, leading to vigorous discussions about how the media has failed and can “ethically” and responsibly cover his campaign.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• The same is true of almost everything else we buy – not just online, but in supermarkets and high-street shops; when we pay our rent and our bills. Pricing has become a game played by machines, which analyse millions of data points and can adjust prices many times a day, maximising the possible returns with a constant stream of feedback. These systems are becoming the focus of a growing body of research which suggests they could upend our ideas about competition, make inflation hit consumers faster, and keep prices higher for longer.

• What’s more, it’s not clear exactly what independent auditing will achieve, as the auditing industry is currently so immature. BSA, an influential tech trade group whose members include Adobe, Microsoft, and IBM, filed comments to the city in January criticizing the law, arguing that third-party audits are “not feasible.”

• This post is very short, it’s just to say that Lima seems nice and much simpler to get started with than Vagrant.

• A group of authors are suing various vendors of Large Language Model AIs. The authors claim that the AIs are trained on material which infringes their copyright.

• Is that likely? Well, let’s take a quick look at the evidence presented.

• The book traverses a millennium of disruptive technologies, from medieval agriculture and ship design all the way up to the foothills of generative AI. Along the way, they argue that innovation has proven just as likely to cause misery as it has prosperity. On their list of examples is the cotton gin, which turned the United States into the world’s largest cotton exporter, while also deepening a system of enslavement that spread across the American South. When prosperity does win out, it’s usually because citizens organized to demand more equitable arrangements than those enriching a narrow elite.

• Microsoft to downsize further, cutting 276 jobs in Washington. Part of typical restructuring at start of new fiscal year, similar to last year.

• Microsoft (ticker: MSFT) is cutting at least 276 jobs, according to a local government filing in Washington. The layoffs look to be largely focused in customer service, support and sales according to technology-news website GeekWire, which first reported the cuts, and appear to be on top of the 10,000 jobs which Microsoft said it would cut earlier this year.

• In a response to an inquiry by the GeekWire magazine, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has confirmed it’s implementing a new round of layoffs, reportedly affecting customer service, support, and sales teams.

• While some people manage to maintain a calm demeanour during the layoffs and take it like a decision that the company had to take, others tend to take things to the heart. Some people also revealed how emotional the entire layoff process has been for them.

• Microsoft confirmed another round of job cuts, starting a potentially challenging 2024 fiscal year. The 276 new cuts are substantially smaller than the January layoffs, which resulted in approximately 10,000 job losses.

• The move aligns with the general atmosphere in the tech industry, with other tech giants, including Amazon and Google, cutting into their workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic. The threat of a recession in the U.S. and cost-cutting by clients has pushed these job cuts throughout the industry.

• The gaming division does not appear to be impacted

• Microsoft has announced it is embarking on a new round of job cuts internally which is expected to impact an unknown number of employees in customer service, support, and sales…

• Tech Giant Microsoft announced a new round of layoffs that would affect various positions in customer service, support and sales, GeekWire reported on Monday. The report stated that Microsoft laid off 276 employees out of which 210 were sacked from the company’s Redmond, Wash and Bellevue locations while 66 employees worked remotely.

• Microsoft will begin layoffs affecting over 270 people including remote workers after thousands of other layoffs since last year.

• Software giant Microsoft, in an internal announcement, revealed a new round of job cuts that will affect various roles in customer service, support, and sales. These cuts extend beyond the 10,000 global layoffs that Microsoft had previously announced on January 18.

• Microsoft layoffs July 2023 have hit the departments of customer service, sales, and support. Announced by Microsoft on January 18, the cuts are expected to go over 10,000 jobs.

• Earlier today, it was reported that Microsoft had announced yet another round of layoffs. The company showed the exit door to 276 employees based out of Washington, USA. The impacted employees reportedly belonged to customer service, support, and sales departments. 66 of these employees were working remotely.

• Evernote, the once popular note-making service, which at one time was included in the list of “unicorns” – startups from with a capitalization of more than $1 billion, announced significant layoffs as it prepares to move its operations from the US to Europe, reports SFGate. The company has been based in Redwood City, California for the past decade, but declining demand for its core product, an online note-taking service and mobile apps, led to the sale of Evernote to Italian firm Bending Spoons last November.

Security

• Although Linux operating systems are fairly stable and secure, they may not completely be immune to threats. All computer systems can suffer from malware and viruses, including those running Linux-based operating systems.

• However, the number of critical threats to Linux-based operating systems is still way lower than threats for Windows or OS X.

Privacy/Surveillance

• It’s this mix of backgrounds that makes the draft so interesting. Stephen is the IETF’s Security Area Director concerned with reviewing drafts and proposals for their security context and risks, as well as the documents focusing on security as their main topic. Farzaneh is a human rights advocate, and Bruce is a cryptographer and a cryptography advocate. He was one of the people selected to sift through the cache of materials in the ‘Snowden Revelations’ released to the media 10 years ago now. Steven is an academic in cryptography and law and has also been a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner.

• “​​As companies continue to make public roadways their testing grounds for these vehicles, everyone should understand them for what they are—rolling surveillance devices that expand existing widespread spying technologies,” said Chris Gilliard, Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center. “Law enforcement agencies already have access to automated license plate readers, geofence warrants, Ring Doorbell footage, as well as the ability to purchase location data. This practice will extend the reach of an already pervasive web of surveillance.”

• Third attempt of the European Commission to get a stable agreement on EU-US data transfers will be likely back at the Court of Justice (CJEU) in a matter of months. The allegedly “new” Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework is largely a copy of the failed “Privacy Shield”. Despite the European Commission’s public relations efforts, there is little change in US law or the approach taken by the EU. The fundamental problem with FISA 702 was not addressed by the US, as the US still takes the view that only US persons are worthy of constitutional rights.

• The European Commission decided that the U.S. has provided adequate protections to E.U. citizens’ data after Washington implemented safeguards for Europeans against U.S. surveillance, including redress in front of a new data protection review court for E.U. citizens who believe American intelligence collected their personal data in a way that violates the agreement.

• The agreement is the result of years of diplomatic negotiations between the U.S. and EU over differences in privacy standards and clashing over America’s spy programs.

• The decision adopted by the European Commission is the final step in a yearslong process and resolves — at least for now — a dispute about American intelligence agencies’ ability to gain access to data about European Union residents. The debate pitted U.S. national security concerns against European privacy rights.

• The accord, known as the E.U.-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, gives Europeans the ability to object when they believe their personal information has been collected improperly by American intelligence agencies. An independent review body made up of American judges, called the Data Protection Review Court, will be created to hear such appeals.

• We are elated to celebrate the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s 33rd anniversary today. EFF has officially been working toward internet freedom longer than many people have been online. I’m grateful to EFF’s supporters for ensuring that digital rights remain important and vital, even as the internet itself becomes a crucial yet often overlooked fact of life for most.

• What would the world be without any privacy or free expression online? You can see examples of that dark dimension in the battles we continue to fight every day: the rules that keep you from controlling the services you use and devices you own; corporate policies that censor the powerless; rampant data collection by both companies and governments; and laws that would break encryption.

• That’s why EFF works so carefully to nurture a web that puts civil liberties and human rights at its center. It’s with great pride that EFF takes on court and legislative battles that may last years. But simultaneously, our team works on—and wins—immediate policy and legal fights while we develop rights-enhancing technologies to bridge the gap. We’re committed to defending your digital freedom for as long as technology changes and grows. With support from people like you, we’re not going anywhere.

Defence/Aggression

• Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said last time the Marine Corps had an acting Commandant was from December 1, 1910 to February 2, 1911.

• “The longer these unprecedented holds remain, the greater risk the Department runs in experiencing knowledge and expertise gaps in certain critical and often difficult to fill positions,” Singh said.

• “The idea that we simply close out the hotel in full and make 95 members of staff and employees (redundant), to me, is unforgivable, particularly in this context of a cost of living crisis.”

• The Home Office has previously said the number of people arriving in the UK in need of accommodation had reached record levels.

• While he serves the sentence, he is required to compensate victims, undergo treatment for a mental health problem and either work or undergo training. During a previous hearing, the court was informed that Ouahioune had been treated by a psychiatrist for years before he committed his crimes.

• The Crisis Regulation now being discussed by the interior ministers is intended to relieve the burden on the particularly affected countries of arrival of refugees in the EU. The prerequisite would be that the Commission determines a “crisis”, “force majeure” or “instrumentalisation” of refugees by a neighbouring third country or a “non-state actor” with regard to increasing migration. Other EU states could then be obliged to take over protection seekers and process their asylum applications – or provide financial resources for “managing the situation”, including for migration management in “relevant third countries”. However, the redistribution of asylum seekers would also go over the heads of the people concerned, because they would not be able to decide which countries they would be sent to. This is not the only reason why the crisis regulation is heavily criticised from various sides. For it would also allow border procedures to be extended to up to five months under conditions similar to detention. Moreover, the protection quota stipulated in the Asylum Procedures Regulation would be raised to 75 percent, thus forcing even more people into the controversial border procedure. “This is a crisis of humanity and a crisis of human rights. It is also a crisis of the rule of law in the EU,” 55 organisations from Germany have therefore stated in an open letter.

• Mangue’s office announced the second visit to the CSSC subsidiary Hudong–Zhonghua Shipbuilding on 9 July to “negotiate the acquisition of a frigate and a civilian ship”. The PDGE added that the frigate will have state-of-the-art technology, but an order will not be placed before establishing its price, payment terms, and construction quality.

• Patrick Bateman, the main character of Brett Eaton Ellis’s incendiary 1991 novel American Psycho, is one of the most loathsome characters in literary history: an investment banker whose mind flits between delighting in the most shallow forms of consumerism and planning grisly acts of violence, including cannibalism, sexual defilement of the dead, and mass murder. In the novel, as in Mary Harron’s 2000 film adaptation starring Christian Bale as Bateman, it’s left unclear whether the sociopathic stockbroker actually acts on his vile fantasies or merely entertains them as a logical outgrowth of his antisocial worldview. The novel and movie remain hotly debated because of another ambiguity: Are they satirizing Bateman’s pathological violence, or reveling in it?

• Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when reports circulated regarding the Russian use of cluster bombs, a reporter asked then–White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki about the Biden administration’s response to an action that was “potentially a war crime.”

• The Biden administration is drawing outrage after announcing it will send cluster bombs to Ukraine as part of a new weapons package. When deployed, cluster munitions spread smaller “bomblets” across a wide area and regularly kill civilians, either on initial impact or from unexploded segments that go off later. Their use has been banned by 123 countries that signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, but the United States, Russia and Ukraine are not signatories to the treaty. This comes as a new Human Rights Watch report documents how Ukrainian civilians have been killed or injured by cluster munitions, including by Ukrainian forces. We speak to Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, who calls the Biden administration’s decision “appalling,” and to writer and activist Norman Solomon, author of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, who says the U.S.’s military hypocrisy demonstrates a “willingness to sacrifice human beings and human rights on behalf of [its] strategic interests.”

War in Ukraine

• On July 8 and 9, ahead of the NATO Summit in Vilnius, another event took place: the NAFO (North Atlantic Fellas Organization) “summit.” According to NAFO’s founders, the organization was created to counter Russian propaganda and to troll Russian diplomats and propagandists.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• An anti-car activist organization called Safe Street Rebel seeks to return the streets to the people posted this compilation of folks placing traffic cones on the hoods of self-driving cars, disabling the vehicles.

• Safe Street Rebel have some very legitimate complaints about the self-driving cars, including concerns about pollution, traffic, mining issues (all of the self-driving cars are EVs) and accountability. They note that self-driving cars don’t get tickets when they commit moving violations, for instance. Stalled self-driving cars blocking buses and bike lanes contributes to the weight of such testing shifting on to poorer people, or those who choose not to have a car at all.

• The incident is another example of how difficult it is to develop and deploy self-driving vehicle fleets. Commercializing autonomous vehicles has been far more challenging than many predicted even a few years ago. The challenges have led to a consolidation in the autonomous vehicle sector after years of enthusiasm touting the technology as the next multitrillion-dollar market for transportation companies.

• The San Francisco Department of Emergency Management was notified and contacted Cruise about the problem, San Francisco Police Department public information officer Kathryn Winters told CNBC. She said no officers were dispatched to the scene.

Overpopulation

• The prolonged climatic setback has wreaked havoc in the countryside. It has also caused the main water supply in the south of the country – the Paso Severino Dam reservoir – to reach its lowest levels. The latest official report indicates that, at the moment, the reserve doesn’t exceed 1.1 million cubic meters of water, when it has the capacity to store 67 million. This means that less than 2% of the reserve water supply remains.

• Along with this data, the report presents another problematic statistic: the inhabitants of Montevideo and the metropolitan area – 1.7 million people in total, half of the country’s population – consume approximately 500,000 cubic meters of water per day. That is, half the amount that is available in the reservoir.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Twitter has fallen out of favor with many people since Elon Musk took over the company last year. Musk’s changes to verification and slackening moderation policy have led a lot of subject matter experts, advertisers, and regular users to flee the platform. The Taliban, however, seems to love it. Two Taliban officials even bought blue verification check marks after Musk started selling them in January.

• Haqqani noted that the biggest draw of Twitter was this lax moderation policy. After the American withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan central government in 2021, the Taliban became the legitimate leaders of the country. The Taliban is aggressive about using social media to push its message. Some former fighters have even bemoaned the amount of time they spend on the computer compared to their freewheeling past. Facebook and TikTok both view the Taliban as a terrorist organization and disallow them from posting. It’s a ban that persists to this day.

• That’s not how it worked out. Prior to ACA’s passage, 85% of Americans had health insurance. Today, it’s 90%. That’s not nothing! 5% of the US is more than 16m people. But what about the 85% – 282m people – who were insured before the ACA? Their insurance costs have doubled – from an average of $15,609 for a family of four in 2009 to $30,260 today. Obama promised that ACA would lower the average family’s insurance bill by $2,500/year – but instead, insurance costs increased by some $15,000.

• Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has insisted for months that Bill C-18, the Online News Act, is a market-based approach that would leave it to the Internet platforms and Canadian media outlets to negotiate deals based on the principle of mandated payments for links. Faced with the prospect of Meta and Google’s recent announcements that they would block news links in order to comply with the legislation, it would appear that the government has caved on the bill as it searches for a face-saving compromise. Rodriguez and Prime Minister Trudeau had tough talk last week, but behind the scenes they were seemingly ready to cast aside the core principles that they claimed were essential to the legislation.

• Earlier today, Canadian Heritage released a “next steps” document that outlines the planned forthcoming regulations. Those new regulations will effectively rework the legislation by shifting from mandated payments for links with uncapped liability to a threshold contribution customized for each company established by government regulation. Moreover, the contributions will incorporate existing deals and other contributions such as marketing dollars. The specific language from the government states: [...]

• In my latest book, A Hacker’s Mind, I wrote about hacks as loophole exploiting. This is a great example: The Wisconsin governor used his line-item veto powers—supposedly unique in their specificity—to change a one-year funding increase into a 400-year funding increase.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A prominent rapper who backed the large-scale protests that shook Iran last year has been jailed for six years and three months, his lawyer said on Monday.

• Toomaj Salehi was charged with “corruption on earth” — an accusation that covers a broad range of offenses including those related to Islamic morality and can carry the death penalty.

• The judicial decision to not put the prominent musician to death saved Salehi from the fate that led to the execution of at least seven other protesters.

• Journalists and activists in Belarus have faced large-scale repression since the August 2020 vote that handed a sixth term to President Alexander Lukashenko. Following the election, which was rejected as fraudulent by the opposition and the West, Belarus was swept by massive protests, some of which drew more than 100,000 people.

• Human rights activists say Peyman Golvani, a Kurdish political activist, has died while in custody at the Intelligence Detention Center at the northwestern Iranian city of Urmia, where another political prisoner, Mousa Esmaili, died less than 24 hours earlier.

Monopolies

• Occasionally, research into the history of telephony takes you into some strange places. There are conspiracy theories, of course, and there are people who insist on their version of events so incessantly that details of dates and places can become heated arguments. There is also the basic nature of the internet: the internet has a health of historical information but it is scattered across many sources of varying quality. Part of the role of the historian has always been assessing the credibility of sources, but this is particularly difficult in fields like technology history where so much information comes from archived AOL customer homepages (perhaps the best sources there are) and Usenet discussions (rarely correct about anything).

• And then there is the Beatrice Foods Company.

Copyrights

• But the copyright on the Steamboat-Willie-version will run out in 2024 after 95 years. Initially, copyrights only lasted 28 years. But, due in large part to Disney’s lobbying and legal efforts, copyrights were first extended to 75 years, then later to 95 years. Yet now that 95-year protection is about to run out on Steamboat Willie.

• Although the original Mickey Mouse’s copyright protection will expire at the end of 2023, Disney will still be able to protect the Mickey Mouse brand through trademark law. Mickey Mouse is protected as Disney’s property because it is a registered trademark. Trademark protection can theoretically last forever if Disney can continually show that Mickey Mouse is associated with its company. Disney will likely be able to continually show an association with Mickey Mouse.

• The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI and Meta trained their LLMs based on a large dataset of books from what is known as a “shadow library” of copyrighted works around the internet sourced from websites such as Library Genesis (also known as Libgen), Z-Library, Sci-Hub and Biblotik. Shadow library websites provide access to research papers, magazines, nonfiction and fiction books, images, comics and audiobooks without regard to copyright for mass download through link aggregation.

• The Meta complaint explains how authors believe that their books were included in one of these shadow libraries and assembled by a research organization called EleutherAI consisting of a dataset called ThePile. The data was then included in the training set for Meta’s LLaMA large language model. “These shadow libraries have long been of interest to the AI-training community because of the large quantity of copyrighted material they host,” the complaint read. “For that reason, these shadow libraries are also flagrantly illegal.”

• The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) has shut down 22 domains linked to the popular South American pirate streaming site, Cuevana. The anti-piracy group tracked down the Peruvian operator of the site that served hundreds of millions of visits over the past several years. While this Cuevana variant is a big fish, another popular Cuevana site remains online.

• Poland’s leading anti-piracy group has appeared in the media several times over the past few days to condemn IPTV piracy. The Signal Association shares several members with anti-piracy groups ACE and AAPA. Court documents obtained by TorrentFreak show that ACE is investigating a well-known Polish IPTV service plus Hungarian and Bulgarian domains worth millions of views each month.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

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