● 09.16.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 16/09/2023: IBM and Canonical Pushing Wayland

Posted in News Roundup at 11:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Applications

• Time is money, as goes an old saying, therefore you need to manage it very well. This then calls for proper planning of your daily schedule, future events, appointments, and several other daily activities.

• But you can’t keep all your plans in mind, I guess no, at least a few but not all. So you need to have certain things around you to always keep reminding you of what you want to do, the people you are hoping to meet, events you plan to attend, and many more.

• For starters, Markdown is a simple and lightweight tool written in Perl, that enables users to write plain text format and convert it to valid HTML (or XHTML). It is an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text language and a software tool for text-to-HTML conversion.

• In this article, we shall review some of the best Markdown editors you can install and use on your Linux desktop. There are numerous Markdown editors you can find for Linux but here, we want to unveil possibly the best you may choose to work with.

Instructionals/Technical

• On the server side, it’s pretty vanilla. Postfix, Dovecot, SpamAssassin, WKD.

• On the client side, I use mbsync and notmuch and I have a ton of automatic filters via nmsync.

• Before delving into some log formatting best practices, let’s take a closer look at some of the most prevalent log formats you’re likely to come across.

• Suppose, not hypothetically, that for some reason you’re trying to create a GNU Emacs ELisp macro that defines a function, and for your sins you don’t want to directly specify the name of your new function. In my case, I want to create a bunch of functions with names of the form ‘mh-visit-<something>’, which all use mh-visit-folder to visit the (N)MH folder ‘+inbox/<something>’. Ordinary people using macros to create functions probably give the macro the full name of the new function, but here it’s less annoying if I can put it together in the macro.

• I want to be able to display something like “Join 1,234 subscribers and receive updates via email”. So, how do I get the subscriber count from the API?

• TL;DR: My new employer has built their software as many separate services, communicating through well-defined networked interfaces. I have spent the past few years working on monoliths, so this takes some adjustment.

• Sometimes the files that we need to download and access are not accessible directly on remote servers, and we need to configure a proxy so we can download them on our machine. That is why we need to configure Yum to use a proxy server.

Games

• As some of you undoubtedly have heard Unity, the company behind one of the most prolific game engines of our time called Unity Engine, recently announced some changes to their pricing. On the surface this may sound like quite a big nothing burger if you aren’t familiar with the process of how software is made, let me assure you: This announcement is rocking the entire gaming world.

• Note: This post is a follow-up to my 2019 post “My Modern Gaming Escape Plan”. If you haven’t read it or have gasp had the audacity to forget it over the last four years, I strongly advise you to read it (again) first.

• APICO is a really sweet game about saving and breeding Bees, and the free 3.0 update is now set for flight on September 26th with plenty of fun sounding additions. Taking ideas from real-life with a bit of fantasy mixed in, APICO blends together beekeeping, gardening, crafting and exploration into a cute relaxing gem. A portion of the proceeds from sales also goes towards bee conservation.

• Dig Dug meets Bomberman? Yes that exists. Meet Murtop, a fast-paced arcade game packed with action, as if it was taken out directly from the 80s made with Godot Engine. The developer emailed in to mention it works perfectly on Linux desktop and Steam Deck!

• A sequel to the qomp, a minimilist and supremely clever reimagining of Pong was not on my bingo card but here we are. Atari and Graphite Lab recently revealed qomp2. The first game in the series qomp was short but a damn fine experience, and actually one of my indie highlights from 2021 because it really was fun. So a proper full expansive follow-up sounds great to me.

• One of the best modern creature collectors released in recent years is Cassette Beasts, and it’s set to expand next month on October 4th with the Pier of the Unknown DLC. Cassette Beasts has Native Linux support and it is Steam Deck Verified, made with Godot Engine.

• CD PROJEKT RED have now revealed the 2.0 update for Cyberpunk 2077 releases on September 21st, plus there’s a new cinematic trailer for Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty DLC that releases September 26th.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• Having done that, I set out to run KDE for the first time on OpenBSD when testing rsadowski@’s amazing work on getting Plasma Desktop ported. While not exactly my cup of tea, it’s definitely a neat desktop experience, and the port feels right at home on OpenBSD.

Fedora Family / IBM

• As you probably know, the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment is under heavy development these days. It will likely see the light of day sometime in early Spring 2024 with its Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 porting.

• KDE Plasma 6 will be a massive update with major changes like full Wayland support. The Fedora Linux KDE Spin already defaults to the Plasma Wayland session, but users who have graphical issues with Wayland can switch to the X11 session with the current KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS offering.

Debian Family

• You May Get “Failed to load signature: Need more input” Error on Debian 12 and Other Distributions With LVFS.

• This problem occurs due to a signature mismatch issue with the “Linux Vendor Firmware Service” repository.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Development on Ubuntu 23.10 kicked off in late April this year, quickly after the release of Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster) and it initially shipped with its Linux 6.2 kernel, which has already been backported last month to the long-term supported Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) series with the release of Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS.

• During the development cycle of Ubuntu 23.10, the development team upgraded the kernel to Linux 6.3, which was the default until today. The latest daily build ISO image from September 16th is powered by Linux kernel 6.5, which is also offered as an upgrade option for those who are already using Ubuntu 23.10.

• In an attempt to gather feedback from users and make Firefox’s native Wayland support ready for the masses ahead of the next Ubuntu LTS (Ubuntu 24.04) release, due out in April 2024, Canonical will enable Wayland support by default in the Firefox Snap web browser.

• In the latest Ubuntu release, the Firefox Snap defaults to the XWayland implementation when using Ubuntu’s Wayland session, but starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 23.10 release, due out on October 12th, 2023, the XWayland support will be replaced by Firefox’s native Wayland mode.

• Services are processes that run in the background, performing various tasks on your Ubuntu system. NGINX and Apache are some programs you might be familiar with that are often run as a service.

• We often create services within our Ubuntu guides to get the software to start at boot and run continually in the background.

• Knowing what services are currently set up is crucial to managing your system.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Purism Librem 5 is an unusual smartphone, because it’s made from a company that sells Linux hardware with an emphasis on privacy and security. It ships with a GNU/Linux distribution called PureOS, has hardware kill switches to disable the mic, cameras, and wireless hardware when you’re not using it. And it’s expensive: when the phone went up for pre-order in 2017, Purism was charging customers $599. But the company raised the price repeatedly and as of last week it was selling for $1,299.

• Now Purism has announced the first ever price cut for the Librem 5. It’s now available for $999. And that’s… still a lot of money to pay for a phone that has hardware that was mostly sourced in 2017 and software that still feels like a work in progress.

• Facing a discontinued crucial part, Unicomp pivoted and dropped the Raspberry Pi Pico into its range of keyboards.

• The foam elements, tiny screws, and electronics are the only parts of Ploopy headphones that aren’t 3D-printed. Even the squiggly bendy headband piece which adjusts the size of the headphones is 3D-printed.

• An Arduino UNO R3 board monitors all 64 of those switches through a matrix similar to keyboard. When a player picks up a piece, the Arduino notes the square that changed states. Then, when the player puts down the piece, the Arduino records that square, too. It can then output PWM (pulse-width modulation) audio to an amplifier board that says, for example, “B7 to B6” using the Talkie library.

• This blog post explores our architecture decisions. Watch the companion video for more of the overall experience and challenges implementing the architecture.

• The Raspberry Pi has proven to be a unique choice for quite a few musicians over the years. Today, we’re sharing a custom performance put together by artist Max Björverud, who’s using a Raspberry Pi to power his interactive art display. The project is called Technoframes and features artwork that plays techno music when you touch any of the hands in the pictures.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Mastodon is a useful case study here. The system bears a superficial similarity to Twitter, but its architecture, lack of advertising, longer character limits, content warnings, optional search and RSS, and the ability to self-host yield a fundamentally different experience. I have many former Twitter friends in my Mastodon circles, but there are plenty of new people too that have sprung up without my active involvement.

Programming/Development

• Histograms are powerful tools for visualizing the distribution of a single variable, but what if you want to compare the distributions of two variables side by side? In this blog post, we’ll explore how to create a histogram of two variables in R, a popular programming language for data analysis and visualization.

• We’ll cover various scenarios, from basic histograms to more advanced techniques, and explain the code step by step in simple terms. So, grab your favorite dataset or generate some random data, and let’s dive into the world of dual-variable histograms!

• This week someone mentioned that C supports casting from int to bool. That naturally triggered my curiosity – what does the generated code look like?

• First I think it’s important to point out most casts in C are “free”. “Free” in the sense that the compiler changes its internal understanding of an expression. But in actual assembly nothing really changes – registers don’t have types. (NB: architecture dependent)

Python

• I recently wrote about my new simple system to open URLs on my desktop from remote machines, where a Python client (on the remote server) listens on a Unix domain socket for URLs that programs (like mail clients) want opened, and reports these URLs to the server on my desktop, which passes them to my browser. The server and client communicate over SSH; the server starts by SSH’ing to the remote machine and running the client. On my desktop, I run the server in a terminal window, because that’s the easy approach.

• The Selenium WebDriver is a brilliant way to programmatically interact with websites. You can write little Python scripts which can click around inside browser windows and do “stuff”.

Standards/Consortia

• After many years of designing and selling a variety of different cables to power and charge its devices, Apple has slowly switched to USB-C chargers for all of its products.

• The last device to swap is the iPhone, and it happened against Apple’s will. In October last year, the European Commission requested all phones and laptop producers switch to the USB-C connector (which had earlier been agreed on as a common standard).

• Apple could have chosen to ignore the request and stop selling in the EU, or to produce versions with USB-C for the European single market only. Instead, it chose to comply and follow the EU rules everywhere. The common charger for all devices is thus becoming a reality, at least until the world moves completely to wireless charging.

Leftovers

• It’s hard to believe you could make an observation in the early days of such a significant technology that still feels poignant, let alone a joke that still makes people laugh after all that time. But in those seven words, Steiner’s dogs captured one of the key factors that makes the [Internet] so strange, and an element of what’s made the world wide web so significant.

• In my opinion, this is especially true for US culture. People keep showing me pictures of outrageously bad pop tarts, and I don’t know what a normal one is supposed to look like. People assume that I know who the cartoon character in their avatar is. And so on. Europeans generally don’t know these things, as they are not available in their country. I assume it’s the same for Asian people.

• Some A+ journalism from Anne Dingus [sic] in TexasMonthly in… 1994. I think it’s smart for long-standing publications to make sure their old gold is properly published online.

• Officials from the California Highway Patrol and San Francisco and Los Angeles law enforcement agencies made the announcement Friday. It follows a string of brazen luxury store robberies in recent months, where dozens of individuals come into a store and begin stealing en masse.

• 2.Exploration of Free Will: At its core, the novel is a philosophical exploration of the concept of free will. It raises profound questions about the nature of choice, moral agency, and the consequences of attempting to control or manipulate human behavior. These themes continue to be relevant and thought-provoking for readers of all backgrounds.

Education

• Claude (Anthropic’s LLM) was given this prompt: Please summarize the themes and arguments of Bruce Schneier’s book Beyond Fear. I’m particularly interested in a taxonomy of his ethical arguments—please expand on that. Then lay out the most salient criticisms of the book.

• The best way to understand capitalism is to live it. We have no choice. The second best way to understand it is to read about it. Below are five new-ish books, and one very old one, that I read while reporting the series.

Hardware

• Time is almost up for magnetic storage from the 80s and 90s. Various physical limitations in storage methods from this era are conspiring to slowly degrade the data stored on things like tape, floppy disks, and hard disk drives, and after several decades data may not be recoverable anymore. It’s always worth trying to back it up, though, especially if you have something on your hands like critical evidence or court records on a nearly 50-year-old floppy disk last written to in 1993 using a DEC PDP-11.

• Second in my series of Tales From Tech Support. Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives – mostly me.

• In the early 1990s I worked as a Technician at a local college. I would set-up and tear down experiments for students. I’d also have to look for ‘booby-traps’ they’d set for us. But that’s another story.

• I would sometimes get called upon to perform technical support for external organisations. I was young, full of hope, and had a sunny disposition. So I was always happy to help. This is one of those occasions.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Viewing sexualized Instagram posts by online influencers increases the negative mood and body dissatisfaction of young female adults who view them, and promotes negative effects among viewers beyond striving for thinness and attractiveness.

• A new study by Flinders University researchers published in Body Image highlights the negative impact of sexualized images on social media and the need for enhanced regulation in relation to influencer advertising.

• Australia was abuzz with this year’s R U OK? campaign, billed to:

• inspire and empower everyone to meaningfully connect with the people around them and start a conversation with those in their world who may be struggling with life.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Thanks to a recent episode of QI, I am finally able to explain machine learning to people. The show included a visit from Matthew Scroggs, a Research Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at University College London. Scroggs demonstrated a MENACE machine (a classic researcher backronym, in this case standing for the Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine). The original MENACE machine was built by Donald Michie, an AI researcher who had worked alongside Alan Turing during the War.

• Voting rights activists sound alarms over private tool that could lead to cancelling voter registrations: [...]

• “Today both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store have many applications that are used by the Indians. We are tracking one set of applications which are loan applications…We have issued an advisory to both Google and Apple that they must not onboard unsafe applications or illegal applications”, the minister told news agency ANI.

• “It is our government’s objective and mission to keep the internet safe and trusted for all ‘digital nagriks’…We intend to have the earliest meeting with the RBI to make sure there is a whitelisting that means to make a norm of only allowing permitted loan applications on these two stores”, he added.

• Now, while MSN has yet to respond to our initial request for comment, it appears to have taken down the offending article, alongside several other Race Track articles identified by Futurism. The deleted articles include a recent piece about Kevin Porter Jr’s arrest for domestic violence and another particularly egregious piece about “Corridor of Fame” football player “Pleasure Taylor,” likely a deeply confused reference to NFL Hall of Famer Joy Taylor.

• Despite MSN taking down the articles, Race Track is still publishing a barrage of barely intelligible gibberish — and MSN keeps syndicating them. Just an hour before press time, the shadowy publication published a story titled “7 Causes to Strive Golfing as a Scholar,” which appears to be a ripoff of a 2022 article put together by Golf Monthly.

Windows TCO

• On Monday, MGM Grand casinos across the US were forced to shut down after a mass cyberattack compromised the company’s computer systems, granting bad actors access to casino and hotel operations in “Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York and Ohio,” a casino rep confirmed to the Associated Press on Tuesday.

• Assistant Chief Constable Colin McFarlane of Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said: “We are aware of a ransomware attack affecting a third-party supplier of various UK organizations, including GMP, which holds some information on those employed by GMP.”

• It is understood it concerns thousands of ID badges, which contain the names and pictures of police officers. Two police sources confirmed the hack to the M.E.N.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• The bill would empower the U.K. government, in certain situations, to demand that online platforms use government-approved software to search through all users’ photos, files, and messages, scanning for illegal content. Online services that don’t comply can be subject to extreme penalties, including criminal penalties.

• Such a backdoor scanning system can and will be exploited by bad actors. It will also produce false positives, leading to false accusations of child abuse that will have to be resolved. That’s why the OSB is incompatible with end-to-end encryption—and human rights. EFF has strongly opposed this bill from the start.

• TikTok has been fined €345 million ($370 million) for breaching privacy laws regarding the processing of children’s personal data in the European Union, its lead regulator in the bloc said on Friday.

• TikTok was fined $368 million by a European regulator that said the platform failed to protect children’s privacy, the latest issue to incur scrutiny amid increased global concern over TikTok and other social media platforms’ handling of users’ privacy.

• The Irish watchdog, which plays a key role in policing the EU’s strict General Data Protection Regulations, gave TikTok three months “to bring its processing into compliance” with its rules.

• The DPC in September 2021 began examining TikTok’s compliance with GDPR in relation to platform settings and personal data processing for users aged under 18 years old.

• The breach in question spans from 31 July 2020, to 31 December 2020, with TikTok found guilty of multiple infringements of EU privacy regulations. As the DPC pointed out, one of the major infractions involved the default setting of accounts for users under the age of 16, which were automatically set to “public” during 2020. Additionally, TikTok failed to adequately verify whether individuals claiming to be a child’s parent or guardian through the “family pairing” feature were genuine guardians.

• TechCrunch reports that the EU found TikTok in violation of the Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) based on how it handles the data from accounts belonging to minors. The fine of €345 million, which is approximately $367 million at the time of writing, was issued to TikTok by the Irish Data Protection Commission. The regulators found TikTok guilty of violating two of the GDPR’s articles, including breaches of lawfulness, fairness, and transparency of data processing and the rights of the subject to receive communication of data handling.

• The investigation found that the sign-up process for teen users resulted in settings that made their accounts public by default, allowing anyone to view and comment on their videos. Those default settings also posed a risk to children under 13 who gained access to the platform even though they’re not allowed.

Confidentiality

• In this article, I’ll talk about the “high side” (the high-security or high-sensitivity systems) and the “low side” (the lower-sensitivity or general-purpose systems). For the sake of simplicity, I’ll assume the high side is a single machine, but it could as well be a whole network.

Defence/Aggression

• TikTok’s role in the music industry for discovery can’t be understated, either. The TikTok-to-Spotify pipeline is a very real phenomenon that occurs when a song goes viral on the platform—with that success directly translating to a boost in Spotify streams. While the virality of a TikTok song can fade as trends move like ocean waves, the boost provided to Spotify streaming can have a much longer tail.

• Hundreds of thousands of migrants are now pouring through a sliver of jungle known as the Darién Gap, the only land route to the United States from South America, in a record tide that the Biden administration and the Colombian government have vowed to stop.

• But the windfall here at the edge of the continent is simply too big to pass up, and the entrepreneurs behind the migrant gold rush are not underground smugglers hiding from the authorities.

• They are politicians, prominent businessmen and elected leaders, now sending thousands of migrants toward the United States in plain sight each day — and charging millions of dollars a month for the privilege.

• The government believes the role of education is to dissolve ethnic or religious identity in a shared commitment to the rights and responsibilities of French citizenship and so, as Mr. Attal put it, “you should not be able to distinguish or identify the students’ religion by looking at them.”

• Most of the migrants landing in Italy this year set off across the Mediterranean from Tunisia, many in transit from other African countries. In July, in an agreement strongly supported by Ms. Meloni, the Tunisian government promised to tighten its sea borders and speed the returns of those who arrived illegally in Europe from Tunisia, in exchange for a hefty package of aid for its troubled economy. That money has yet to be disbursed.

• I recently spoke by phone with Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, and an expert on how immigration policies at the federal, state, and local levels intersect. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why so many migrants have chosen to come to New York City specifically, why the Biden Administration cannot necessarily fulfill the Mayor’s requests, and how congressional inaction on immigration policy has exacerbated the problems that immigration hawks say they care about most.

• For the first time in U.S. history, the Justice Department has criminally charged the child of a sitting president. Federal prosecutors have indicted President Biden’s son Hunter Biden on felony charges of illegally possessing a handgun and making false statements in order to obtain a revolver in 2018. Special counsel David Weiss brought the charges after a Trump-appointed federal judge in July rejected a deal that would have seen Hunter Biden plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax counts in order to avoid jail time. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison and fines of up to $750,000. This comes as Republican lawmakers have opened an impeachment inquiry of President Biden. “Maybe this will become the norm … to impeach the president if the president is from the opposite party,” says Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief for The Intercept, who adds that Republican infighting is threatening House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s leadership and likely to lead to a shutdown of the federal government. “It does seem like they are headed for a shutdown of their own making.”

Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Many agencies have updated their public records systems in order to ensure their systems work with FOIA.gov, a requirement established in a 2019 White House memo, according to a recent FedScoop review of 2023 Chief FOIA Officer reports and subsequent inquiries sent to agencies. But others are still running into technical and logistical issues.

• The Secret Service and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have yet to meet these requirements, according to Wyn Hornbuckle, deputy director of the Department of Justice’s public affairs office. The DOJ, which tracks compliance with interoperability requirements, is also still catching up on the requirement. The agency says that all of its components should become interoperable within a matter of weeks.

Environment

• “SUVs and 4x4s are a disaster for our climate. SUVs are the second-largest cause of the global rise in carbon dioxide emissions over the past decade – more than the entire aviation industry.

• Between the lines: The fossil fuel industry plans to continue to rely on fossil fuels as its core business, Gore argued. He blasted their talk of becoming more diverse energy players, or moving beyond their oil and gas divisions, as mere greenwashing and distraction.

• New York University announced it plans to divest from fossil fuels in an August letter addressed to Sunrise NYU. We speak with co-founders of the campus climate group, Alicia Colomer and Dylan Wahbe, about the university finally divesting after decades of pressure from student advocates. “I would encourage every single student to get organized and join the movement,” says Wahbe, who says a broad coalition of student groups and university unions ultimately forced the board of trustees to move on this issue. “Stop the fossil fuel money from coming and polluting our universities in the first place so that universities can become real climate leaders,” says Colomer, who is also managing director of Fossil Free Research, which works to end the fossil fuel industry’s influence on higher education and climate research.

• Ahead of a March to End Fossil Fuels in New York City on Sunday, some 400 scientists endorsed the demands of the march in an open letter to President Biden, blasting him for claiming he would “listen to the science” while his policies “fail to align with what the science tells us must happen to avert calamity.” We speak with Rose Abramoff, an Earth scientist and one of the signatories, who was arrested last week blocking construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. “We feel like the science has come to such a complete consensus and we just want fossil fuels to stop,” says Abramoff. “I wouldn’t feel the need to risk my job with activism, to risk felony level charges by locking myself to a pipeline drill if I felt like the voice of the scientific community was being properly heard.”

Energy/Transportation

• Milton Barnes used to oversee packed subway stations in Washington, D.C., a far cry from the sparsely filled buses he drove after moving to Wilson, North Carolina, to care for his elderly parents. Although transit ridership plummeted almost everywhere due to the pandemic, it has been surging in Wilson since its September 2020 switch from a fixed-route system to an on-demand one powered by a smartphone app.

• “All day long I’m picking up people and dropping them off,” Barnes, 59, the only driver to work under both systems, said while driving his van on a typically busy morning. “When you’ve got door-to-door, corner-to-corner service, it’s going to be more popular.”

• In its ruling, the consumer ombudsman said the marketing of the offer was illegal because it gave a false impression of when the promotion would begin and also failed to specify the quantity of promotional products available. In addition, the office noted, Auto-Bon’s social media posts lacked any mention of the limited quantity of cars.

• Germany’s Transport Ministry and the state-owned rail service provider Deutsche Bahn (DB) on Friday laid out plans for a major modernization of the country’s rail network, to be completed by 2030.

• The government in Berlin plans to make a total of €40 billion (roughly $42.5 billion) available, around one-third of that in the form of a capital injection for DB itself, for renovations in the next few years.

• The leader of Cold Lake First Nations has revealed the initiator of a major carbon capture project in Northern Alberta has not consulted with local Indigenous communities.

• Chief Kelsey Jacko told an Edmonton crowd that the Pathways Alliance, a lobbying and marketing effort by Canada’s top oil sands producers, has neglected to consult his community on a massive carbon capture storage network project Pathways claims will be able to store 1,100 megatonnes of carbon dioxide.

• When Pathways to Dairy Net Zero (P2DNZ) made its debut ahead of the United Nations Food Systems Summit in 2021, it looked like the kind of group that could meet an important but largely neglected area of global climate response.

• Armed with a seat at the highest levels of food policy, and well-connected – to dairy producers, distributors, and scientists – the initiative described itself as a “growing movement” dedicated to “reducing dairy’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the next 30 years”.

Wildlife/Nature

• The experiment was set up by the University of Oxford’s Professor Andy Hector and colleagues over 20 years ago as part of the SE Asia Rainforest Research Partnership (SEARRP). This assessed the recovery of 125 different plots in an area of logged tropical forest that were sown with different combinations of tree species.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Secure Repairs (securepairs.org), an organization of cybersecurity and information technology professionals who support a legal right to repair, celebrates passage this week of California Senate Bill 244, the Right to Repair Act.

• Secure Repairs sends its thanks and congratulations to California state Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman as well as CalPIRG, iFixit, and the Repair Coalition, state consumer and environmental advocacy groups and the many residents and small business owners who testified in favor of SB 244 before California lawmakers.

• This noteworthy event marked the culmination of the largest initial public offering (IPO) of the year, raising an impressive $4.87 billion for its owner, SoftBank Group.

• Arm’s shares concluded Thursday’s trading session at a staggering $63 each, reflecting an astonishing climb of nearly 25 per cent from their initial price of $51 per share during the IPO. This meteoric rise in share price has been interpreted as a resounding vote of confidence in the company’s prospects, despite concerns about its exposure to various risks in the Chinese market.

• There have been a lot of accusations of bad faith thrown around recently. Has anybody stopped to check what bad faith actually means? What is the difference between bad faith and fraud? Fraud is often quite unambiguous, like the FSFE using the name of FSF to raise millions of euros in donations. Bad faith seems to be a gray area that can mean whatever you want it to mean.

• He became a legend to Romans — twice given unbounded power and twice relinquishing it as soon as he had fulfilled his duty.

• The European Parliament condemned Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó in a resolution for defying EU policy over talks with Belarus. The EP’s resolution details the crimes committed by the Lukashenka regime. MEPs condemn in the strongest possible terms “the ongoing unrestrained repression and systematic and widespread human rights violations by the Lukashenka regime, including numerous cases of ill-treatment and torture, as well as the total isolation and inadequate medical treatment of political prisoners and other politically persecuted persons, such as journalists, human rights defenders, independent trade unionists, and others”.

• The document also includes a line on Szijjártó: “We find the official visit of the Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade to Minsk in February 2023 unfortunate, which contradicts the EU policy on Belarus, Russia, and the aggressive war against Ukraine.”

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The researchers found that, while Facebook expended significant effort to remove a lot of anti-vaccine content during the COVID-19 pandemic, overall engagement with anti-vaccine content did not decrease beyond prior trends—and, in some cases, even increased.

Censorship/Free Speech

• But strict linguistic regulation is counterproductive, especially if the goal is a happy and cohesive population. It would be impossible to regulate how 8.8 million Quebecers speak without engaging in some silly and strange battles. The government has tried to ban that favorite Montrealer greeting, “bonjour, hi,” including at private businesses. A British-themed restaurant in Montreal was cited for using the term fish and chips on its menu and hanging a “gents” sign on a bathroom door. A manager “opening a newly-renovated [Adidas] store spoke a few apologetic words in French—then switched entirely to ‘cooler’ English,” reported the Montreal Gazette, causing a huge stir. The provincial premier even denounced the episode in the National Assembly.

• The RICO indictment focuses intensely on forest defenders, but the Stop Cop City movement has been much more than that. There have been solidarity protests in cities around the country, and a referendum campaign in Atlanta that’s got over 100,000 signatures. Why do you think the indictment ignores that mass movement while framing this as a fringe organization?

Theocracy

• Ahead of the one year anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini, Iranian authorities heightened their presence in cities across the country Friday in anticipation of protests. Saturday marks the anniversary of the death of Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died in custody after Iranian morality police arrested her for “improper” hijab. Her death triggered nationwide demonstrations against the morality dress codes and the subsequent crackdown by authorities.

• A new law is under discussion in the Iranian parliament that would increase the penalties for the improper wearing of hijab from the equivalent of 1 euro to 3,000 euros, and the maximum prison sentence from two months to 10 years. The proposed law has special measures for so-called “celebrities”, including the confiscation of 10 percent of their assets.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The US granted Mexican journalist Emilio Gutiérrez Soto asylum on Thursday after a 15-year battle. Gutiérrez Soto had to flee Mexico in 2008 after his critical reporting on the Mexican military drew negative attention from Mexican authorities. Since then, Gutiérrez Soto has fought to obtain safe asylum status in the US.

• “The growing reports of possible hacker attacks against at least three independent journalists based in Latvia are all the more worrying given the recent revelation that exiled Russian journalist Galina Timchenko’s phone was infected with Pegasus spyware,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Latvian authorities must conduct a swift and transparent investigation into these allegations and ensure the digital and physical safety of journalists who are temporarily or permanently residing in the country.”

• On Thursday, September 14, the 2nd Tatvan Court of Penal Peace granted bail to Yücel Baysali and Engin Kaplan, two bodyguards of the mayor of the eastern city of Tatvan who were arrested on charges of attacking local journalist Sinan Aygül in June.

• Cameroonian authorities should immediately lift an indefinite ban against The Post newspaper in the Southwest Region and stop any retaliatory action against the privately owned media outlet and its staff, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.

Civil Rights/Policing

• On the first anniversary of the ‘Jin Jiyan Azadi’ uprising in Iran, Amnesty International issued a statement saying that “the international community must pursue pathways for justice at the international level to address systemic impunity for Iranian officials responsible for hundreds of unlawful killings of protesters and widespread torture.”

• Amnesty underlined that “over the past year, Iranian authorities have committed a litany of crimes under international law to eradicate any challenge to their iron grip on power. These include hundreds of unlawful killings; the arbitrary execution of seven protesters; tens of thousands of arbitrary arrests; widespread torture, including rape of detainees; widespread harassment of victims’ families who call for truth and justice; and reprisals against women and girls who defy discriminatory compulsory veiling laws.”

• It’s been a year since 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, also known by her Kurdish first name Jina, died in the custody of Iranian morality police. Her death set off some of the most sweeping anti-government protests Iran has experienced in decades. Government security forces violently cracked down on the uprising, killing more than 500 people, detaining some 22,000 and executing several detained protesters, according to human rights experts and activists.

• “This is exactly how strikes are broken,” he wrote in rebuke, sharing Maher’s statement.

• The Writers Guild of America (WGA) isn’t convinced that Maher can run the show without violating the rules of the union that he’s part of. The WGA called Maher’s decision to go back on the air “disappointing” and said the union “will be picketing this show.”

• But just as remarkable as the substance of this new law is the path it took – a path that runs through a new sensibility, a new vibe, that is more powerful than mere political or legal procedure. The story is masterfully told in The American Prospect by veteran labor writer Harold Meyerson: [...]

• I can’t talk about sourcing for the recordings or the records, but what I can say is that what’s significant about this show is that it’s the first behind-the-scenes look at how the FBI infiltrated and investigated racial justice groups and the racial justice movement during the summer of 2020, which for two years now has always been an open question, which is: How did the FBI respond to the racial justice movement, given the context that the FBI had previously designated Black political activists as so-called Black identity extremists or anti-government extremists?

• The strike came after the automakers scoffed at the union’s ambitious demands for increased wages, benefits and job protections for its members. With all three automakers reporting record or near-record profits, the union was trying to recapture many benefits they had been forced to give up more than a decade ago when the companies were cash starved and on the brink of bankruptcy.

• For the first time in history, the United Auto Workers has launched a strike against the Big Three U.S. automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler — all at once. UAW President Shawn Fein announced targeted strikes at three facilities: a General Motors plant in Wentzville, Missouri; a Stellantis complex in Toledo, Ohio; and a Ford assembly plant in Wayne, Michigan. The action could grow to more locations in the coming days to ramp up pressure on the companies. “The members are fired up, and we’re ready and we’re united,” says electrician Marcelina Pedraza, a member of UAW Local 551 at a Ford assembly plant in Chicago. “This is an important moment in history for us to win back a lot of the things we’ve lost in these past few years.” As the three auto companies made a combined $21 billion in profits in the first six months of 2023, the UAW is looking to take back contract benefits they conceded in the 2008 financial crisis so manufacturers would not go bankrupt. “That partnership was a poison pill for workers. The UAW new leadership knows that,” says labor reporter Alex Press, who sees this strike as the labor movement “not just clawing back concessions, but going on the offensive.”

• But the automakers—which made a combined $21 billion in profits in the first six months of 2023 alone—claimed, as the Thursday expiration deadline for existing UAW contracts approached, that they could not afford to meet even the most reasonable, most basic demands of the workers. So, at midnight, UAW members joined picket lines outside selected GM, Ford, and Stellantis plants.

• It makes perfect sense, in a when-pigs-fly sort of way, that Concerned Women for America, a group that “promotes Biblical values and Constitutional principles” and declaims it’s “always abounding in the work of the Lord,” chose as keynote speaker for their summit a twice-impeached, thrice-married, multi-indicted, pussy-grabbing predator who’s been charged with sexual harassment and assault by over two dozen women, and found guilty of raping one. If we were them, we’d be concerned too.

• As journalists, we often talk to people about difficult things. We listen for themes and systemic issues that tie their stories together. Both of us have spent years hearing from those who say they were sexually assaulted — most recently dozens of women who told us about alleged misconduct by their Utah OB-GYN. These are not easy conversations to have, but they are important. They also teach us a lot about what women knew at the time of their appointments and what they wish they had known.

• “I wish I would have known that I could speak up, say that I am uncomfortable or just ask him to stop,” said Ashton Sorenson, who is one of more than 100 women who have come forward in various lawsuits to accuse the OB-GYN of sexual assault. “I wish I knew that I could ask for a nurse to be present. I wish I could have known that I could challenge and question a doctor even though he was in an authority position.” The doctor’s lawyer has declined an interview request but has said they believe the allegations “are without merit.” Next month, the Utah Supreme Court is set to hear an appeal in a civil case brought by his patients.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Feel free to skip this blog if you’re triggered by “Old man yells at cloud” or “Grandpa tells us about his childhood” style posts. This is the second in a row after a moan about my cellphone. A more lighthearted story will follow tomorrow, I promise.

Monopolies

• Amit Zavery, vice president, general manager and head of platform at Google Cloud, who talked to us about this in June when he described Microsoft’s actions as a “software tax” customers are forced to pay, says things haven’t changed.

• “I was meeting many customers this week,” he told The Register, “quite a few CIOs and others, and they’re still facing the same issues in terms of exclusionary licensing practices from Microsoft. They can’t move their existing licenses, and they’re having to pay a penalty or a tax to Microsoft.”

Copyrights

• According to a copyright lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York late Thursday, Libgen’s collection of infringing works now consists of over six million files. At least 20,000 of those files were published by plaintiffs Cengage Learning, Inc., Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group, LLC (d/b/a Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill LLC, and Pearson Education, Inc.) and distributed by Libgen without authorization.

• 2) Philosophy: In the past decade or so, my thoughts on how to reform the trademark and copyright laws in this country (and others, I suppose) have undergone something of a radical transformation. The current laws are a mishmash of unethical backroom deals to keep trademarks and copyrights in the hands of large corporations, who can largely afford to buy the outcomes they want.

• In my template for radical reform of those laws I would like it if any IP [sic] is owned by its original creator for up to twenty years from the point of first publication, and then goes into the public domain for any and all to use. However, at any time before that twenty year span bleeds out, you the IP [sic] owner can sell it to another person or corporate entity, who can have exclusive use of it for up to a maximum of ten years. That’s it. Then it cannot be resold. It goes into the public domain. So then, at the most, any intellectual property can be kept for exclusive use for up to about thirty years, and no longer, without exception.

• The DC that Willingham bargained with at the turn of the century isn’t the DC that he bargains with now. Back then, DC was still subject to a modicum of discipline from competition; its corporate owner’s shareholders had not yet acquired today’s appetite for meteoric returns on investment of the sort that can only be achieved through wage-theft and price-gouging.

• Millions of people use Plex as a platform to curate, organize, share and watch video content. The software can be used for perfectly legitimate purposes, but some also treat it as a piracy gateway. Yesterday, Plex informed users that it will no longer allow users to run servers at a hosting provider where lots of TOS violations occur. While copyright infringement isn’t specifically mentioned, the action appears anti-piracy focused.

• Back in March we were greatly dismayed by the the ruling in Hachette v. the Internet Archive over the legality of “controlled digital lending” and the Archive’s “Open Library.” It seemed clear that Judge John Koeltl did not understand some of the fundamentals of fair use (it also appeared that he went into their oral arguments with his decision made up, as he issued a 47-page ruling the very same week — which almost never happens). Koeltl’s analysis left a lot to be desired, as it really seemed to go against an awful lot of fair use precedent.

• As the US government stumbles around to try to come up with an AI regulatory policy, it seems like they’re focused on trying every bad idea on for size. You may have heard how Senator Schumer just had the first of his AI Summits, including a bunch of big name folks, who probably are not the right people to be in that room. I mean, you had Elon Musk, who has been bitching and complaining about the administrative regulatory state for years… asking for an administrative regulatory agency to regulate all AI. It’s almost like he knows (from experience) that when he’s in a regulated industry, it wipes out much of the competition and opens up billions in contract dollars for himself.

• For many years, we at CC have been examining the interplay between copyright and generative AI, exploring ways in which this technology can foster creativity and better sharing, i.e. sharing that is inclusive, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable — and it is through this lens that we strive to tackle some of the most critical questions regarding the potential of generative AI tools for creators, cultural heritage institutions, and the general public.

Gemini* and Gopher

Technology and Free Software

Internet/Gemini

• My website (spool-five.com) has now been online for three years. In the spirit of this anniversary, this is a quick look-back at some of the key points over that time.

• [...]

• At some point in the summer of 2020, early in my linux journey, I watched some Luke Smith videos. He inspired me to start my own website. He had some useful guides on things like getting a domain, self-hosting and syncing your site with rsync. I still like his philosophy around it and the general guide I would have followed from his videos is now available on landchad.net. I also had set up a mail server for the domain, using Luke Smith’s tools. This probably ran for a year or so. In retrospect, I do miss this, I am completely tied to gmail now for everything.

• Hola! Happy Hacking to all hackers, DIY, Creators and tinkers out there.

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