The scene of the terror attack in Tel Aviv yesterday was an ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Yet two of the five victims were non-Jewish Ukrainian workers. Another victim, an Arab policeman, was the hero who rushed to the scene and shot the attacker, preventing further killings. Two of the three policemen killed in the latest wave of violence have been Arabs.
So Ukrainians who probably thought themselves safer than the majority of their compatriots just happened to be in the line of fire of a gunman with different targets in mind, and finally a heroic Palestinian Israeli policeman ended up saving Jewish lives while dying at the hands of a shahid who was trying to take them.
In the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinians, I won’t presume to judge which actions are legitimate and which not. Murder is repugnant, but is of course just one of the forms of violence being perpetrated. Both sides play a role in perpetuating this blood feud, though Israel has the greater responsibility as the occupying power. The conflict is intractable but Jews and Palestinians are highly creative and intelligent. As neither people is going to give up their homeland, ever, they owe it to themselves to find a way of living together in which everyone can enjoy dignity and respect.
Palestinians weren’t offered much respect this week in the summit meeting between Israel and other Arab states: they weren’t even invited.
There are a few articles and YouTube videos on how to do what I spent a few hours fiddling with today. But eventually I grew convinced that the reason I stopped using my old router was that it simply doesn’t work – in any capacity. Not even after several attempts and a firmware upgrade. Also another old range extender didn’t work. I do have one range-extender working, and I’ve done this before. Never mind; now I know just to ditch these old devices.
I stared at the following picture in my feed today:
And I thought: That’s not it. I’m not an anarchist. Just a nobody. I love it when there are others whose job it is to collect the garbage. In the early days of the village, before we were formally recognized as one, we had to take turns with the garbage. Goodness, that was a smelly job. One day there was a dead sheep in one of the bins, crawling with maggots. The guy who was on collection duty had to empty everything into a big green container – I suppose even then, it was the state’s responsibility to remove that at least. But today I pay my taxes and it’s somebody else’s function to remove the garbage from its varicolored bins. I’m told that the salary isn’t so bad.
My ideal state is one in which the recycling bins get emptied and the trains run on time. It doesn’t involve complicated matters like citizenship and patriotism. It doesn’t require a flag. Those who live there pay their taxes, treat each other as equals and abide by a reasonable set of laws.
Recently we have a wave of stabbings and shootings. Five people were shot dead tonight in Tel Aviv. Ayelet Shaked, the Interior Minister, came on and yapped about cancelling citizenships. I don’t have one of those either, come to think of it. I do have a foreign passport, though its only current utility is to allow the brief respite of traveling from one corrupt, racist, soul-destroying country to yet another corrupt, racist soul-destroying country. They are in many ways the same.
No, I’m not an anarchist; just a nobody; one of those stateless, allegiance-less world citizens that Margaret Thatcher said are “citizens of nowhere” and whom nationalists everywhere love to malign. For me, countries are purely a matter of convenience. We give something and get something back. I would be happier if the groupings were a little smaller than these hateful conglomerations of unknown millions, who are pleased to kill each other on the slightest whim, vandalize anything that is not their personal property, and shrug off the destruction of the biosphere as if it is of no concern of theirs. Human beings find it hard to relate to each other or the earth fairly, as soon as their numbers grow too high or the territory too large.
We need treaties and covenants – all those declarations of the rights of the child and of women; international days for peace remembrance of past holocausts – they should be taught in school and shown to us in place of cola ads. We need frameworks to manage the delicate matter of how communities deal with other communities. It’s just that the whole thing should be based on a modus operandi of cooperation instead of rivalry. Let there be a NATO. Give it a more inclusive name. Rename it the Russian Federation for all I care, but bring China and India in too. Once everybody is in the alliance, nobody will be left outside of it to fight with.
These ideas, like nations, like anarchism, are too vast. Better to remain a nobody.
I managed to update Thunderbird from version 78, which was from the MX Testing repository, to version 91, which I found as a flatpak. Transfering the old profile was not so easy, but when it worked, it worked painlessly.
Along the way, I had to grow the size of the root partition on my my hard drive, by skimping on the swap directory, but that also worked easily. It turns out that you can grow an ext4 partition to the right, even when it is mounted.
With the help of SoundCloud I continue my exploration of mainly MENA Music. It just turns out somehow that one thing leads to another and almost all the tracks and the musicians I follow end up being from there.
“Ibrahim Maalouf is a trumpeter who is also a composer and arranger for trumpet. He also teaches trumpet. He was born on December 5, 1980 in Beirut, Lebanon, but now lives in France.
He is the son of trumpeter Nassim Maalouf and pianist Nada Maalouf, a nephew of the writer Amin Maalouf, and the grandson of journalist, poet and musicologist Rushdi Maalouf. He is currently the only trumpet player in the world to play Arabic music with the trumpet in fourth tones, using a technique his father invented in the 1960s. Ibrahim is also the winner of some of the greatest classical trumpet competitions in the world.”
I don’t have the courage to run my own mail server. First, there’s the difficulty with getting the security right. Second, there’s the problem that my home server goes down whenever there’s a problem with the electricity (I will get a UPS one day). Third, there’s the likelihood of getting blacklisted by the big companies.
I mainly use Fastmail for my personal email. Fastmail has a tiered accounts system. I pay $25 a year for 2GB mail storage; my wife pays $45 for 30GB mail storage. The cost is a bit higher for new users. Only the higher-priced plan permits the use of a personal domain but, because we have a shared plan, I can use it too, as well as having Fastmail manage also a couple of other domains. The cheaper plan also provides a gigabyte of file storage, which is handy.
I will never run out of mail storage, because I can use Fastmail offline and store the mail on my own computer. Today I realized that since I have stopped using email on my phone, I may as well archive all of it locally. I will continue to use IMAP, rather than POP3 in case I am travelling without a computer and wish to reinstate the account on my phone.
Using Fastmail (or another service) locally in this way ensures that mail is not left on the server for a hacker to snoop on, and it is possible to set up PGP so the email provider is unable to read encrypted email at any point.
If it were not for the shared plan, and the awkwardness of asking my wife to move herself (and our domain name) to a different service, I would probably replace Fastmail with Disroot.org, which suits my ideals better. Although it lacks Fastmail’s superior webmail experience, it would be ample for my needs. Links of the day
EU officials have agreed on landmark rules clamping down on anti-competitive abuses by the world’s largest technology platforms, in a move that will set the standard for leveling the playing field across global digital markets.
In an agreement brokered Thursday evening, negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council reached a political agreement on the Digital Markets Act, which establishes a series of prohibitions and obligations for companies including Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon, and a number of smaller platforms. It is likely to include accommodation platform Booking and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.
The new rules for so-called gatekeeper platforms, derived from years of antitrust enforcement in the digital economy, include restrictions on combining personal data from different sources, mandates to allow users to install apps from third-party platforms, prohibitions on bundling services, and a prohibition on self-preferencing practices.
Parliament also succeeded in convincing the Council of interoperability requirements for messaging services, meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms. For group chats, this requirement will be rolled out over a period of four years.
I am home alone for a long weekend while D is away on a mindfulness retreat. Plenty of work to do though – both for the office and around the house – some gardening if the weather permits. Just woke up at around 5 AM and am sitting here listening to Cafe de Anatolia music [1], a little loud.
When I look at the headlines from Ukraine and Russia with an eye, a mind, and a back-of-my-mind understanding that there is disinformation everywhere, it still computes to the fact that a big military giant is bearing down on a smaller neighbour with an army that has recently been committing despicable and hardly noticed atrocities across Syria. I’m pretty certain that the Russian leader is facing a growing wave of discontent at home, and that this will eventually explode, in ways that we will probably be clueless about. I don’t think the guy is a madman, but just badly out of touch. And yet, with his help, Assad, similarly aloof, has managed to keep his chokehold on a nation. That’s the way it is with dictators and strongmen. Their rule eventually wizzens and dies, but not always according to a predictable time-frame.
Likely Zelenskiy is similarly facing opposition and discontent, although it hasn’t been reported, in the name of presenting a united front. His position is equally tenuous. Meanwhile Ukraine is being destroyed, and all for what? To score points against NATO? Wars serve no purpose other than allowing angry people to let off steam. The motivations and the outcomes are clouded in fog. The narrative can be made up, the facts doctored. History becomes a jumble of divisive narratives, as with the tkuma and the nakba. A people will always remember what it wants to remember. Meanwhile, humans die for stupid unnecessary reasons.
“Killing people is so easy,” I said to D after the stabbing attack that killed 4 in Beer Sheba the other day. Our bodies are fragile. Sometimes a disease gets us, or a storm, or a radicalized Islamic militant. It makes little difference. On a recent car journey, the truck just ahead swerved out suddenly into my lane, which meant that I swerved into the next lane, with no time to look. It could easily have been the end for me, my wife and for other unfortunates. We are fragile and can die for no reason at all, kill others senselessly. In the arithmetic of causes and effects nothing adds up but the final balance is always a zero.
If we want to look for the reasons behind the reasons, we need to look to the metaphysical. The other day, into the office walked a gardener. A big scary guy in dark attire; a beard in the style that only religious Muslims wear, a large skull cap. He was looking for work, but ended up giving me a sermon. He asked if I “believed” and I said sure – I believe that the god of the Muslims and all the other gods are one and the same. He was very happy with this answer, asked if I knew the kalima, and I repeated after him La Illaha Il Allah. He departed after giving me a hug.
It is the same god that sends militants on a stabbing spree, the same that rescues us from a car wreck, and both the killers and the rescued praise him. Both are right to do so. We are just agents in an agency at the top of which stands an aloof and unknown owner – an oligarch – sailing somewhere in his super-yacht. Perhaps even he is unsure whether the next port will allow him to dock, will turn him away, or will seize his boat in the name of trumped-up sanctions.
When we moved from Yorkshire to Virginia in 1969, my Auntie Alice gave my mom a handwritten notebook of her cake and dessert recipes.
EPSON MFP image
My mom treasured the book and used it a lot – it had everything from her syrup sponge puddings to her Christmas cakes. When I was there one time I scanned the notebook and have now collected all together into a 20-page PDF[1] which I have placed in Hubzilla’s file storage.
If I would use it I’d want to substitute for ingredients like eggs and suet in some of them, but it’s a nice thing to pass down to future generations. I tried in various ways to get the PDF size down, eventually settling on a batch conversion in XnView. Finally I got it down from 162 MB to just under 15.
On the way, I have added a wiki post [4] describing what I like about SeaMonkey.
Zelensky and Palestine
Zelensky is to address Israel’s parliament on Sunday. (The speech will be also broadcast in Tel Aviv’s main square). The mainly Arab Joint List party may boycott it, though Mansour Abbas of the United Arab List says he will attend. He spoke on Israeli TV saying that evidently this was because they (with their communist roots) consider Russia to be a continuation of the former communist state. But Ilan Pappé, an Israeli historian who self-exiles in the UK, writes in the Palestine Chronicle [6] why Palestinians might not feel so enthusiastic about Zelensky:
The Ukrainian establishment… is also disturbingly and embarrassingly pro-Israeli. One of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s first acts was to withdraw the Ukraine from the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People – the only international tribunal that makes sure the Nakba is not denied or forgotten.
The decision was initiated by the Ukrainian President; he had no sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian refugees, nor did he consider them to be victims of any crime. In his interviews after the last barbaric Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip in May 2021, he stated that the only tragedy in Gaza was the one suffered by the Israelis.
Thanks to Manuel for sharing a Spanish version of the article.
The Libre Planet conference [7] has some interesting speakers. Unfortunately my attempts to listen to it have resulted in failure so far, due to the buffering lag. Perhaps afterwards I will manage to watch/listen to the recordings. Links
In the morning we were busy with a guest. In the afternoon I had another look at a couple of things that have been bothering me regarding Hubzilla.
1: Menu system in Hubzilla mobile view. It is possible to create a custom menu that can be displayed on every page. However, the menu is not shown in the mobile version of the site; only the default menu is shown. For me, this means that, when giving a link to friends, it is better to send them directly to my blog, which is a website under Hubzilla’s cloud file system. Here, I now have a responsive menu, which displays a “hamburger” menu on phones. (I have written how this is done in my technology wiki).
2: Access tokens. I find Hubzilla “dropbox style” guest access (which involves using links that contain access-tokens) a bit hit-or-miss. Today, when testing in a private browsing window, I found that the access token had stopped working completely, though it had been set to never expire. I went through the motions of saving the token again, and then the link did allow access – no idea why. But it worked for one private photo album, and not for another.
There is a separate problem that whereas the access token guest access seems to survive clicks across several Hubzilla pages, it does not survive the passage between my blog and the rest of Hubzilla. So if, as mentioned above, I use my blog as my primary give-out link, it does not help that I include there an access token. My conclusion is that, since most of my Hubzilla assets are public, this is important mainly for items like family photo albums. It is therefore better to keep those elsewhere, such as in my Fastmail storage. Although the links would be “public”, they are hard to find without obtaining a direct link; for example, Google is not going to crawl those photo albums if there are no links to them from another website. Basically it means that when I have personal-type photos that I wish to share with the family or friends who lack login credentials, I will share these somewhere else.
There are, very occasionally, bits of text that I do not want to share publicly or get into search engines. These should not be included in the blog, but can be included in Hubzilla Articles then shared privately. There is an example in this current post.
The upshot of these reflections is that I can use the link to my blog in places like my email signature. This has a mobile view from which my other Hubzilla assets can easily be reached. And I will no longer worry about access tokens. When I wish to share a family album, I will place it elsewhere and share the link directly through email.
Adobe Acrobat writer
One of the office staff has asked me to purchase Adobe Acrobat writer, or whatever it’s currently called. I pointed out that in the majority of cases it’s possible to manage without it, but she was not convinced. I think I have never managed to persuade anyone to use free open source software. But admittedly it’s a bit of a tough sell with PDF writers, because there is no exact fit among FOSS solutions. There are foundations to which we need to apply that require good PDF editing of their application forms. I personally haven’t had much experience with filling out complex PDF forms but have seen the frustration of those who have needed to do so. I am sure I would manage somehow, as I always do, but can’t expect that of others.
It seems that Adobe’s Acrobat software is not part of their Creative Suite, for which they have a specific discount for non-profit associations like us. Therefore it’s necessary to pay the full amount, which is quite expensive.
For simple editing of a PDF document, I personally find that InkScape has one of the best options. It imports a PDF document nicely (though only one page at at time), and allows one to edit both text and graphics quite well.
I had a problem with my server computer the last couple of days; apparently because of a failed update. In the meantime I tidied up the html on this blog – I was thinking there was something wrong with it because bluefish editor incorrectly highlights some of the syntax. SeaMonkey has a link to an html validator. It found a few errors, but these were not the reason for bluefish’s wrong syntax highlighting, which continues, though all the code now validates.
Besides valid code, I have some other wishes. I want the page to be light and quick to load, so I will keep the image sizes trimmed, and maybe allow a full column width image only in the lead article. I have also split up the articles, so that older ones go to an archive page, rather than just to the WordPress archive.
Also in the name of readability, I have moved the styles into a style sheet. I have also separated the blog from the “about” pages.
Another wish is to write html that it is easy to read, since I spend so much time in the editor. Most html tags are short and non-distracting. Image tags and hyperlinks seem to be the main problem. So, in order to make the html source easier to read, I have decided to lump all the hyperlinks together at the end, in the manner of Wikipedia. In the post itself, I will simply use page anchors, which are shorter and less distracting.
I got the idea of placing hyperlinks at the end from a blog post called “The Art of Plain Text” [1] in which the writer uses an even more minimalistic blogging style than this one. In place of paragraphs, he uses the “pre” html tag*. I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, because his site is hard to read on phones.
I am consciously using quotes here, rather than escape characters, because they too make the html really hard to read. Links of the day
After hearing from Ivan Zlax about Telegram and its founder Pavel Durov, I felt that it may be time to ditch the program from my phone. He dug up an old bio about him in the Internet Archive that has the following:
In 2005, Pavel completed his training at the Faculty of Military Studies of St. Petersburg State University with a specialization in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare. While training with the Faculty of Military Studies, he served as Platoon Commander of the Philology Department. Upon completion, he was awarded the title of Lieutenant of the Reserve Force.[2]
There have been numerous articles by Moxie and others regarding the security of Telegram, but this is the first time that I heard these details of Durov’s past. I don’t get the feeling from reading his posts on Telegram that he is turning over user data to three-letter agencies, but I also don’t feel like he is being sufficiently open about things.
I have been looking at replacements for Telegram. One thing I considered was Delta Chat [3]. It has the advantage that one does not need to worry about not being able to communicate with existing contacts who do not use Delta Chat, because it simply repurposes email protocols. It sets up PGP automatically so that one can communicate securely with those who are on Delta Chat. This is a little like Signal, which uses ordinary SMS to send and receive messages for those who do not have Signal.
Parallel to my interest in privacy I have an interest in simplifying and minimizing interaction with my phone. This is also in line with recommendations for good operational security, because the less applications (and data) are on the phone, the smaller the attack surface. Some weeks ago I removed both email and NextCloud from the device. If one doesn’t intend to use a dumb-phone (which are considered to be very insecure due to their reliance on old-fashioned protocols), the best thing is to bring the use of a smartphone closer to the level of a dumb-phone.
For now I have left Signal on the phone, and use it as an SMS replacement. A few of my contacts have Signal and do the same. But i don’t feel inspired to recommend Signal to others. For one thing, it uses Amazon servers. If there were a decentralized messaging app that could also replace SMS as the phone’s default messaging service, I might use that instead, but I haven’t found one. I think it is possible to bridge between Signal and Matrix, but that defeats my purpose of minimalism.
Meanwhile, I continue to use Telegram on my computer as our family group is quite heavily invested in it (tons of family photos and videos, etc.) International Rescuers Day ceremony
Today we had the International Rescuers Day ceremony near the Spiritual Center. This emulates the event promoted around the world by the GARIWO organization. They actually refer to it as the “Int’l Day of the Righteous” but Prof. Auron, who initiated our local event, prefers the term “rescuer” to “righteous” due to the latter’s possible religious connotations.
This year the village awarded the prize (which has no monetary value) to the Ta’ayush organization [4] and to the Afghan journalist and feminist activist Atefa Ghafoory, who wasn’t present – she lives with her child in Sweden these days, after suffering quite badly at the hands of the Taliban. The annual event takes place in a dedicated area under the olive trees below the spiritual center, and we were lucky this year with the weather.
I was happy to hear from the Ta’ayush founder afterwards that David Shulman is still active in their activities and is writing a new book about these. His earlier short book, “Dark Hope” is excellent.
Int’l rescuers day
Einat, the new director of the spiritual center, invited a professional photographer for the event, which, though I haven’t seen the results so far, was a good idea as an olive grove has its challenges for photography: under the blotchy sunlight, many of my photos had areas that were either too dark or overexposed. I didn’t find a good way, in darktable to deal with the overexposed areas, though one article did at least address the issue.
I liked a photo that Manuel had posted on Hubzilla, so I thought to follow the photographer. She is on Diaspora, on which I currently have no current connections. I enabled the diaspora protocol in Hubzilla’s admin and added the add-on in the applications panel, but still no luck with adding her.
My solution for people in non-compatible social networks like Twitter and Facebook is a bookmark tool bar folder that I check occasionally. Works fine for me.
Channel 11 ran an article on the Big Tech companies that focused on several aspects: that they don’t pay taxes in this country; that they are virtually unreachable if they happen to close your account; that they invade privacy; that they are anticompetitive; that they manipulate the government and the legal system to insure their monopolies are not threatened, etc. It managed to get through all this material pretty well.
I’m beginning to think website “registration walls” are almost as bad as paywalls. They are just as effective at locking me out anyhow, because I usually refuse to register. I just tried to read an article on The Intercept and hit one of these. I’m more and more convinced that piracy is the way for those of us who value our privacy and are too poor to subscribe to umpteen journals. It feels scrappy, and it deprives journals of their incomes, but if they can’t honour our privacy and set up a sensible system for donations or occasional payments, I think it isn’t our problem.
The EFF has posted information (in English) intended to help Ukrainians and Russians use Telegram more safely: Telegram Harm Reduction for Users in Russia and Ukraine . It is kind of a shame that Telegram itself doesn’t do more to make this information available to its users. Telegram is not private by default and does not do enough to make its privacy features easily available. Durov, on his own Telegram channel, just wrote a long post describing his tribulations with the Russian government and his family connections with Ukraine:
Some people wondered if Telegram is somehow less secure for Ukrainians, because I once lived in Russia. Let me tell these people how my career in Russia ended.
It could have been an opportunity to address users in Ukraine and Russia in a similar way that the EFF has just done.
