● 09.02.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 02/09/2023: POWER, KDE, Copyrights

Posted in News Roundup at 8:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• Released by Linus Torvalds last Sunday, Linux kernel 6.5 brings new features like Wi-Fi 7 support, MIDI 2.0 support, ACPI support for the RISC-V architecture, Landlock support for UML (User-Mode Linux), better support for AMD “Zen” systems, and much more.

• Linux kernel 6.5 is now available for installation on Ubuntu systems from their official Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Archive and it’s supported on amd64 (x86_64), AArch64 (ARM64), ARMhf, PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64el), and IBM System z (s390x) architectures.

• [...] There’s not a lot notable for Power ISA, though ELFv2 is now the default for 64-bit big-endian kernel builds, and if you’re running Power10 this release adds support for the DEXCR SPR (Dynamic Execution Control Register) which helps to reduce speculative execution risk. [...]

Instructionals/Technical

• Apcupsd is short for APC UPS daemon and is used to interact with and monitor APC UPSes. While initially designed for the APC, it can also talk with some other brands of UPS, including some by Cyberpower.

• One of the advantages of using Apcupsd over something like NUT on your Raspberry Pi is that it can be considerably simpler to get up and running.

• The downside is that it doesn’t support nearly as many UPSes and lacks other functionality that the NUT server supports.

• By the end of the following sections, you will have APCUPSD running on your Raspberry Pi and have it monitoring the status of your attached UPS.

Games

• Paradox Interactive announced today that following the recent released of Wards & Wardens for Crusader Kings III, that on the 3 year mark they’ve now hit 3 million sales. Crusader Kings III has Native Linux support, and it is rated Steam Deck Playable by Valve.

• Gaijin Entertainment have teased the next big update for War Thunder, named Sons of Attila and they continue to work through their roadmap to improve other parts of the game. War Thunder has Native Linux support and it is Steam Deck Verified.

• Studio Supersoft and publisher Raw Fury have announced the cute creature-collecting life-sim Moonstone Island launches September 20th. As far as I know, it’s launching with Native Linux support too which was confirmed some time ago and Steam still shows this. Looks like it will be a delightful game to take with you on Steam Deck too.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Today I read Wayland breaks your bad software (via), which is in large part an inventory of how Wayland is technically superior to X. I don’t particularly disagree with Wayland’s general technical merits and improvements, but at this point I think that they are mostly irrelevant. As such, I don’t think that talking about them will do much to shift more people to Wayland.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This was a big week for KRunner! In addition, the number of open Plasma 6 issues continues to tick down. Thanks to everyone who’s been making this happen!

• You can now manually configure certain types of search results in KRunner to be high priority and hence always appear first in the results list!

• KRunner has also received a lot of performance work

• Landed some nice performance work for KWin as well, including making it do less unnecessary work by avoiding repainting layers of the screen that haven’t changed at all

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora Family / IBM

• Automation is a game-changer. It promises to decrease time to deploy, reduce errors, and increase reliability and efficiency. But you can’t automate change.

• What does it take for teams to actually reach that finish line? And how does it affect how they actually work? Season 2 of Code Comments goes beyond the sales pitch and features teams who’ve tackled automation. Because there’s no script for adjusting to automation.

• Jim Palermo, VP and CIO at software company Red Hat, agrees.

• BlueAlly is a Red Hat Advanced Build (AB) partner focusing on network and cloud automation using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. In May of 2023, the BlueAlly Consulting team was invited to the Cisco Federal Innovation Challenge (CFIC) hosted at the GSA Workplace Innovation Lab 1 in Washington, DC.

• The goal of the CFIC is to bring together ideas to accelerate modernization across the federal and defense landscape. The focus is NetDevOps, IT modernization, telemetry and visualization.

• Monitoring and optimizing power consumption is crucial for efficient resource management in Kubernetes environments. To address this need, a powerful tool called Kepler (Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter) has emerged. Leveraging software counters, custom machine learning (ML) models, and the Cloud Native benchmark suite, Kepler offers accurate energy estimates and detailed reporting of power consumption at the pod level.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• The release notes for Trisquel 11.0 “Aramo” mention support for POWER and ARM architectures, however the download area only contains links for x86, and forum posts suggest there is a lack of instructions how to run Trisquel on non-x86.

• [...]

• One of my production machines is running Debian 11 “bullseye” on a Talos II Lite machine from Raptor Computing Systems, and migrating the virtual machines running on that host (including the VM that serves this blog) to a x86 machine running Trisquel felt unsatisfying to me. I want to migrate my computing towards hardware that harmonize with FSF’s Respects Your Freedom and not away from it. Here I had to chose between using the non-free software present in newer Debian or the non-free software implied by most x86 systems: not an easy chose. So I have ignored the dilemma for some time. After all, the machine was running Debian 11 “bullseye”, which was released before Debian started to require use of non-free software. With the end-of-life date for bullseye approaching, it seems that this isn’t a sustainable choice.

Devices/Embedded

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Seventeen new GNU releases in the last month (as of August 29, 2023): [...]

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• Now that the Talos II is upgraded and tuned up, it’s back to development work, starting with (after a TenFourFox patch dump) Firefox 117. [...]

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• tl;dr I’ve enabled full content text rather than summaries in the RSS feed for this blog. The irony that I am then summarising the entire post in one line here at the top, is not lost on me.

• I’ve used various tools for my blog over the years. Initially in the late 1990’s it was hand-crafted HTML and some FrontPage extensions. Later I used Polarblog through the mid 2000’s then dropped that in 2006 for Drupal and subsequently WordPress.

• Most recently I tried Nikola before “finally” settling on Hugo. Originally my blog was hosted on some free webspace I got from my ISP. Later I self-hosted at home on a Linux server in my garage. Eventually I moved it onto a VPS form Bitfolk.

• Most of the “modern” (HAH!) blogging platforms have had the ability to present content via RSS (Really Simple Syndication). I used to avidly view news in an RSS reader, but like many others, these have fallen out of favour.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• Used to be, so many people did it. Just look at the old, grainy black-and-white photos. You went to a baseball game; you kept score.

• But not anymore. Keelean and the hearty bunch just like him are part of a small, dedicated breed these days. Fewer and farther between.

Programming/Development

• Round two is here! The R Consortium Infrastructure Steering Committee (ISC) orchestrates two rounds of proposal calls and grant awards per year to fortify the R ecosystem’s technical infrastructure. We have one key goal: to make meaningful infrastructure improvements that serve the R community.

• I recently wanted a command that would endlessly repeat a string at the command line. Like the yes command, but without newlines.

• As Baldur notes, “Low variability opens up its own possibilities.” Dependencies are a definite point of variability, so lowering your dependence on other software opens up its own possibilities, e.g. less risk and more stability. It’s kind of interesting to think about how adding dependencies can give you more velocity, but taking them away can too. It’s trade-offs all the way down.

Leftovers

• I’m sitting here late on a Friday night at the breakroom of Equinix’s fancy facilities in Port Melbourne, chewing on a delightful cookie from the vending machine and having a decaf nightcap, of sorts!

• This is going to sound weird, but this work trip means a lot. It was Febuary 2020 when I was last sitting here, right when we all started getting an inkling that something dreadfully serious was brewing. I don’t think any of us knew when we’d be back. Covid is still everywhere, and is an evolving threat I think too many have become lax about, but in my own weird way it feels like I’ve taken another step being here.

Science

• Jack Potter Jr. was on the University of California at Berkeley campus to pick up the bones of a grandmother and five of her grandchildren. He said he could hear noises: “like white noises, but even stronger.” He stared at a structure in the distance when a representative of the university asked him, “What do you keep looking at over there?”

Education

• Giving schools more money doesn’t make them better.

• While the chatbots are not yet great at simulating long-form personal essays with authentic student voices, I wondered how the A.I. tools would do on some of the shorter essay questions that elite schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth are requiring high school applicants to answer this year.

• So I used several free tools to generate short essays for some Ivy League applications. The A.I. chatbots’ answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

• “Students on some level are going to have access to and use AI,” Clark said. “The big question is: How do we want to direct them, knowing that it’s out there and available to them?” “Students on some level are going to have access to and use AI,” Clark said. “The big question is: How do we want to direct them, knowing that it’s out there and available to them?”

• Robins is fitted with two OAK-D cameras that rely on artificial intelligence. One interprets sign language while the other monitors the user’s face for various emotions while completing the activities. The robotic dog can also respond to the user’s progress in real-time with expressions by moving its mouth, eyes, and eyebrows.

Hardware

• Today in Tedium: The great thing about a lot of technology is that even if its ideas fail, they often re-emerge elsewhere, influencing the thinking of others in the field to come up with something better and more interesting. But often isn’t always, and sometimes ideas just die on the vine, with no innovator coming up behind to make it better. It was an idea that deserved to fail, but that nobody thought might be worthy of giving a proper follow-up for whatever reason. Tedium is a place where failure deserves to live forever, where we embrace it, so with that in mind, today’s Tedium brings you a list of 10 examples of hardware features, devices, and gadgets that did not change the world, or really even influence it much. They mostly just ended in disappointment for everyone involved. — Ernie @ Tedium

• Thermoforming — which includes vacuum-forming — has its place in a well-rounded workshop, and Mayku (makers of desktop thermoforming machines) have a short list of tips for getting the best results when 3D printing molds on filament-based printers.

• If you look back at it now, especially with the advent of massively parallel computing on GPUs, maybe the techies at Tera Computing and then Cray had the right idea with their “ThreadStorm” massively threaded processors and high bandwidth interconnects.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley called Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) second apparent freeze-up during a news conference this week “sad,” but added: “you have to know when to leave.”

• A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked Arkansas from enforcing a new law that would have required parental consent for minors to create new social media accounts, preventing the state from becoming the first to impose such a restriction.

• U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks granted a preliminary injunction that NetChoice — a tech industry trade group whose members include TikTok, Facebook parent Meta, and X, formerly known as Twitter — had requested against the law. The measure, which Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed into law in April, was set to take effect Friday.

• From Judge Timothy Brooks’ opinion yesterday in Netchoice, LLC v. Griffin (W.D. Ark.): [...]

• As for tech exhaustion… it’s ultimately just a phase — which is lasting longer than in previous periods of time when innovation felt like an unstoppable force. In photography and music, there seems to be a trend where people are appreciating more and more a return to more ‘analogue’ habits, mindsets, and æsthetics. I’ve been doing the same even before it was cool, because I basically never stopped listening and buying vinyl records, CDs, and MiniDiscs. And I never really stopped engaging in film photography with 40–50-year-old equipment. With writing, I’m trying to go back to using pen & paper even more than before, as I found many many times that this really improves my creative process.

• The study was published Thursday in the journal JAMA. It involved 104 adults diagnosed with at least moderate clinical depression. The volunteers were randomly assigned to either receive a single 25 milligram dose of psilocybin or niacin, in conjunction with several sessions of therapy. Niacin was chosen as a placebo since it can induce temporary physical sensations like flushed skin, making it harder for volunteers to know which group they belonged to. The therapy included a session on the day of dosing as well as “postdose integration sessions” where people were encouraged to talk about their experiences.

• A week ago, I wrote about the reaction of COVID-19 vaccine quack Dr. Pierre Kory to learning that the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) had informed him that its Credentials and Certification Committee had voted to strip him of his board certifications in internal medicine, critical care, and pulmonary medicine. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Kory’s reaction was to weaponize legitimate complaints about the ABIM that a number of physicians enrolled in its maintenance of certification program have made regarding its onerous expense and time commitment in order to portray the organization and its president as utterly corrupt and in the thrall of the powers that he views as forcing harmful vaccines and public health mandates in response to the pandemic in order to control the population. He also portrayed himself and his fellow quacks from the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) as brave maverick “innovators” whose “innovation” frightened the powers that be, such as the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) and the ABIM.

• The anticipated late summer COVID wave is here – but it’s tougher than ever to measure.

• The big picture: With the end of federal COVID case tracking and the prevalence of rapid at-home testing, virus-related hospitalization rates and wastewater analyses are the best bet for monitoring spread.

• One of the reasons for the daigou slump is that Chinese consumers are increasingly buying local products.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• He pointed to VMWare’s CVE-2023-34039 advisory (CVSS severity score of 9.8 out of 10) that describes the bug as a network authentication bypass and warns that the issue is being mischaracterized.

• “Interestingly, VMware has named this issue “Networks Authentication Bypass”, but in my opinion, nothing is getting bypassed. There is SSH authentication in place; however, VMware forgot to regenerate the keys,” Kheirkha said.

Security

• Domain names ending in “.US” — the top-level domain for the United States — are among the most prevalent in phishing scams, new research shows. This is noteworthy because .US is overseen by the U.S. government, which is frequently the target of phishing domains ending in .US. Also, .US domains are only supposed to be available to U.S. citizens and to those who can demonstrate that they have a physical presence in the United States.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Under the Texas law, which was set to go into effect Sept. 1, 2023, porn sites would have been required to use “reasonable age verification methods” to “verify that an individual attempting to access the material is 18 years of age or older.” In addition, pornography sites would have been forced to display a “Texas Health and Human Services Warning” in at least 14-point font — one such warning was specified to read, “Pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography” — along with a national toll-free number for people with mental health disorders. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed H.B. 1181 into law on June 12.

• In the Aug. 31 ruling, Senior U.S. District Judge David A. Ezra of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas wrote, “The Court finds that H.B. 1181 is unconstitutional on its face.” The ruling enjoined Angela Colmenero, acting attorney general of Texas, from taking any enforcement action under H.B. 1181 “pending further order or final judgment.”

• Almost 2.3 million people globally have signed up to have their irises scanned by Worldcoin’s “orb” devices in exchange for a digital ID and free cryptocurrency.

• Those who pay for Facebook and Instagram subscriptions would not see ads in the apps, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plans are confidential. That may help Meta fend off privacy concerns and other scrutiny from EU regulators by giving users an alternative to the company’s ad-based services, which rely on analyzing people’s data, the people said.

Defence/Aggression

• Not so long ago, the consensus around defending democracy on the internet was nearly a settled matter. A sort of de facto understanding held that to fight disinformation and defend democracy, we should resist the impulse to try to control information or the behaviour of authoritarians we oppose.

• How one of Montana’s top elected officials made banning the app a top priority, putting the state at the center of a geopolitical storm.

Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

Environment

• The SJR 2 resolution was introduced by California Senate Majority Whip Senator Lena A. Gonzalez, and co-sponsored by Indigenous Environmental Network, Stand.earth, and SAFE Cities. The resolution calls on President Biden to support Pacific nations moving ahead with seeking a negotiating mandate for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.

• The number of satellites in space may exceed 100 000 by 2030, according to forecasts. Small satellites are increasingly being sent into low orbits 500 to 1 000 kilometres above Earth to do everything from improve remote communications to guide driverless cars.

Energy/Transportation

• Paid family and medical leave, a 100% clean energy standard and codifying protections ensured by the Affordable Care Act are among the issues that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is directing Democrats to tackle in the final months of the year.

• August is meant to be full of gloriously hot days. An endless parade of sunshine and drinks in the park. This year it seemed mostly grey, miserable, and prone to pissing it down at a moment’s notice.

• The ultrawealthy family of West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice is looking to reopen a shuttered industrial plant that for decades emitted chemicals that have harmed historically Black neighborhoods in Birmingham, Alabama. But the family faces a series of new regulatory and financial hurdles — including a push by local regulators to throw the governor’s son in jail over thousands of dollars in unpaid penalties connected to the plant’s pollution.

• The century-old facility, which burns coal to make coke, a key ingredient for manufacturing steel, was the subject of a 2022 ProPublica investigation that showed how the family’s company and the plant’s past owners repeatedly failed to make necessary repairs. Without timely maintenance, Bluestone Coke released more cancer-causing chemicals into the air breathed by residents of three surrounding communities on Birmingham’s north side. In 2021, local regulators declined to renew Bluestone’s permit because of its repeated violations of air pollution regulations, but the plant kept operating as Bluestone appealed the decision. Months later, the company idled its coke ovens because of major equipment problems.

Finance

• Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas reported three reimbursements for travel and meals from Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow in 2022, according to his newly released annual financial disclosure.

• Australia’s consumer commission said in legal proceedings that Qantas, the country’s national carrier, had sold tickets for routes it never intended to fly.

• Spending on pleasure boats continues to hover near remarkable highs.

• Why it matters: You don’t buy a boat unless you’re fairly confident the economic wind is at your back, so this is a good sign that Americans — despite what they tell pollsters — are actually feeling pretty good.

• Over 400 employees in Bellevue will be impacted by T-Mobile’s recently announced layoff plans, according to the U.S. Labor Department and Washington’s Employment Security Department.

• The Labor Department’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) reported last week 401 employees in Bellevue will be impacted. The department reports the “layoff start date” as Oct. 24.

• The information comes as the company recently announced it will lay off 5,000 employees, about 7% of its workforce.

• Back in 2020, when schools were still virtual and city dwellers were living their lives in masks, Jamie Dimon emerged as one of the earliest critics of remote work.

• “There’s a huge value to working together in terms of collaboration and creativity and training the younger people,” the CEO of JPMorgan Chase told MSNBC in August that year.

• Three years later, Dimon’s message is unchanged. The difference now is that the sentiment has gone mainstream.

• Today, even Zoom’s leadership is extolling the benefits of in-person work.

• Expedia Group informed an unspecified number of workers in its technology organization Thursday that it’s eliminating their positions, the latest in a series of moves by the Seattle-based travel giant to overhaul its workforce.

• Those impacted by the cutbacks include employees in Expedia Group’s Traveler Products team, which is part of Expedia Group Chief Technology Officer Rathi Murthy’s larger Product & Technology organization.

• More concerning than Bethesda’s decision to withhold early review codes from certain outlets is how heavily some sites are relying on the game to drive their business

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• US-based Pegasystems (Pega) said in public filings that it plans to cut approximately 4% of its employees across various geographies, citing a reorganisation of its customer success roles, reports Boston Business Journal.

• Food ads have long made their subjects look bigger, juicier and crispier than they are in real life. But some consumers say those mouthwatering ads can cross the line into deception, and that’s leading to a growing number of lawsuits.

• In newly public testimony, Donald Trump boasts about building a multibillion-dollar brand and saving “millions of lives” as president. He spars with the New York attorney general suing him for fraud, telling Letitia James “the whole case is crazy” and accusing her staff of trying to trip him up like old-time TV lawyer Perry Mason did to witnesses. Trump’s lawyers posted a transcript of his April deposition in a flurry of court filings Wednesday related to James’ lawsuit. A video recording of his testimony could be played when the lawsuit goes to trial Oct. 2.

• federal court allows the case to go forward.

• The United Nations insisted Thursday it was still pushing for accountability for abuses in China’s Xinjiang region, after rights groups accused it of inaction.

• UK Justice Secretary Alex Chalk announced Wednesday that the UK will enact new laws to force criminals to attend their sentencings in court, with offenders potentially being subject to longer sentences. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak commented saying “Criminals shouldn’t be allowed to take the coward’s way out by refusing to face their victims in court.

• Newly released testimony shows Donald Trump defending his real estate empire and his presidency in a face-to-face clash with the New York attorney general suing him for fraud. Testifying at a closed-door session in April, he said his company is flush with cash and claimed he saved “millions of lives” by deterring nuclear war when he was president. Trump said it was a “terrible thing” that Attorney General Letitia James was suing him over claims he made on annual financial statements. James says evidence shows Trump fraudulently inflated his net worth by more than $2 billion in some years. Trump’s testimony was made public Wednesday.

• The 2024 presidential race is looking less like a function of democracy than it is a Greek tragedy. Complete with huge egos and fatal flaws, you know from the beginning that it ends poorly for everyone.

• Viktor Orbán urged Americans. to “call back Trump,” in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. According to Hungary’s far-right prime minister, “Trump is the man who can save the Western world and probably human beings”. After the interview was published the four-times indicted, twice-impeached former president took to Truth Social to thank Orban for the gesture.

• The interview was focused on the relationship between the US and Hungary and the war in Ukraine. Carlson presented the interview as a way for American viewers to understand what is happening in Ukraine. The conservative commentator began by saying that everyone in the United States is convinced that Ukraine will win this war:

• Russian President Vladimir Putin will host Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan for talks in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on September 4.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The Daily Beast itself got caught up in the hall of mirrors surrounding Trump’s nasally and awkward audio. The outlet first claimed it spoke to Robert Sigg, the owner of Performance One Media, the parent company of Real America’s Voice. Sigg supposedly said that Trump sounded like “ChatGOP” and the network is launching an internal investigation. But later, the Beast updated the story saying a reporter had texted a number that had once belonged to Sigg according to public records, and the network has subsequently contacted the publication to inform them they were never communicating with the real Sigg.

• Shortly before he was removed from his position, Garbuzov published a column in the publication Nezavisimaya Gazeta, in which he debunked myths about the West favored by Russian propagandists and described Russia’s place in the world. In the article, which appeared on August 29, the scholar wrote that Russia has not left behind “the charge of foreign policy expansionism.” First, he argued, the country’s leaders constructed the myth of world communism, and then invented several others, including about American imperialism.

• Garbuzov suggests that the myths propagated by the current Russian authorities are spread via a state propaganda machine composed of “well paid professional political manipulators and participants in a number of televised talk shows.” The myths include the supposed crisis of globalization and the “Anglo-Saxon” world, anticolonial revolutions, the loss of American dominance, a global anti-American revolution, and the collapse of the West.

• Russian students began the first day of a new school year with words of encouragement from President Vladimir Putin and a revised history textbook that critics say is intended to “incite anger toward Ukrainians” and explain to future conscripts “why they are putting on uniforms and boots.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• A retired teacher in Saudi Arabia was recently sentenced to death for his tweets criticizing the country’s leadership to his handful of followers, according to rights advocates and his family.

• The sentencing of Mohammad Alghamdi, who is in his mid-50s, is the latest in an escalating crackdown on social media users in Saudi Arabia. While others are serving prison terms ranging from 20 to 45 years for their tweets and online criticism of the government, Alghamdi appears to be the first person to be sentenced to death based solely on his posts on X, formerly called Twitter, and YouTube activity.

• But the story may have roots in an elaborate ploy that began in Silicon Valley and sparked a federal case against two Twitter employees accused of spying for the kingdom.

• Russia has added journalist and Nobel Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov to its list of “foreign agents.” [...]

• After receiving a death sentence from the court, Kaveh — who was not allowed to be present at the trial — said he was finally allowed access to the case. He said after reviewing the materials that there was no concrete evidence supporting the crimes for which Rohi was sentenced to death and the ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court in June.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• On Aug. 11, when the Marion County Record was raided by local police, the strobe light of national attention swung toward Kansas journalism. An outpouring of support for the newspaper and the press’s preservation of First Amendment freedoms brought more than 4,000 new subscriptions, doubling the Marion County Record’s previous reach.

• Of course it’s our responsibility to champion publisher Eric Meyer’s determination to cover cops, courts and city and county without fear or favor. I encourage us to remember, once the attention drifts from Marion, that many small and smaller newspapers in Kansas also deserve our support.

• Zhang Zhan, who reported from the emerging COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, weighs just 37 kilograms.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Following his arrest, Babaians was stripped of his police powers and “assigned home” as he waits for the department to finish their administrative and criminal investigation.

• The appeal of remote work is all too often glossed over as a matter of “quality of life” or “work-life balance.” Those are, of course, important. But that framing also ignores the uncompensated caregiving that Vigil and millions of others provide for America’s young, sick, elderly, and disabled. Their efforts are not just a quality-of-life issue; they’re an enormously important and overlooked part of our economy. For a lot of caregivers, telecommuting allows them to manage a workload that is, if anything, way too big. Remote work, then, isn’t just a question of work-life balance; it’s a question of work-work balance. The traditional conception of “productivity” doesn’t account for this.

• In November 2022, the Graduate Employees’ Organization and the University of Michigan began negotiating a new contract for Graduate Student Instructors and Graduate Student Staff Assistants. Negotiations continued through the school year with no resolution, eventually leading GEO to go on strike March 27. The strike continued throughout the majority of summer before coming to an end on Aug. 25 when the union finally reached an agreement on a new three-year contract with the University.

• Though a lot happened between March 27 and Aug. 25, The Michigan Daily is here to catch Wolverines up on all the labor negotiation details. Here’s what the campus community might have missed from the GEO strike this summer.

• The USPS missed payroll for more than 45,000 rural postal workers this week due what their union called “an egregious payroll error.”

• Workers will instead have the option of effectively taking out a loan via money order. The timing is not the most auspicious as it comes during a push by some rural carriers to decertify their union, which is seen by many workers as not doing enough to protect their interests after more than two-thirds of them took a pay cut determined by an algorithm earlier this year.

Monopolies

• I have no idea why Microsoft thinks it’s ok to fire off these pop-ups to Windows 11 users in the first place. I wasn’t alone in thinking it was malware, with posts dating back three months showing Reddit users trying to figure out why they were seeing the pop-up.

• I’m sure Microsoft is legally covered by the myriad of license agreements that nobody reads, but in reality I never knowingly consented to Microsoft abusing its ability to analyze my PC usage to show me a Bing pop-up just because I use Chrome with Google search.

Copyrights

• Buried in the nether regions of Facebook’s Privacy Center—a part of the website most people probably never visit—you’ll find an entry called Generative AI Data Subject Rights. “This form is where you can submit requests related to your third party information being used for generative AI model training,” Facebook tells the weary travelers who’ve managed to stumble onto the page.

• After an extraordinary run, torrent site RARBG shut itself down in May with no advance warning. With no time to prepare for the site’s disappearance and no obvious ability to proactively take up the slack, users would simply have to stand by and let nature take its course. Three months later it appears that numerous well-known torrent sites have turned RARBG’s loss into healthy wins.

• YouTube has landed a major legal victory after defeating a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by movie tycoon Carlos Vasallo. According to a Florida federal court, Google’s video platform complies with the DMCA and has no legal obligation to use its piracy filtering tools to remove all potentially pirated videos.

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