4,300 more Russians held a coordinated nationwide protest against Putin's invasion of Ukraine. That makes almost 12,000 antiwar protesters in prison.

I hope that people planning to protest inform their friends, so that their disappearance will be understood for what it actually was, rather than giving rise to mere curiosity.

US hotel owners have figured out how to use a financial instrument, REITs, as an excuse to exploit workers.

Deregulated lending causes a danger of financial crashes. That happened in 2008, and it can happen again. The results could hurt everyone. This illustrates a danger to freedom from the use of programs that are run jointly by various parties -- a danger that can happen even if the programs are free.

First, to explain the danger of deregulated lending. It comes from "leverage" -- the practice of borrowing to invest. I refer to Cory Doctorow's article for this topic.

Leverage is dangerous when it goes beyond a certain amount. When the market goes down, those who have invested with leverage are forced to put in more money, and that compels them to sell other property, which often accelerates the crash. This is what happened in 1929 to cause the great crash, and the worldwide great depression.

After the crash, the US assured this would never happen again by placing regulations on banks, designed to limit the amount level of leverage. What brought this vulnerability back, decades later, was the growth of lending that bypassed bank loans and thus evaded the regulations. That caused the financial crisis of 2008.

Due to the political power of finance (as distinguished to business in general), the US has not adopted new regulations to stop that from happening again. Meanwhile, "distributed finance" using smart contracts is pretty much equivalent and creates the same kind of danger of a crash.

Instead of a loan contract written in English but so complex you have no real chance of understanding it, you'd be asked to agree to an Ethereum smart contract so complex that you have no real chance of understanding it, even supposing you can read the language it's written in.

Now let's return to the issue of software and freedom.

Using a nonfree program is automatically an injustice, because someone else controls it and you can't change it. There are no exceptions to that.

A free program can't be unjust in that way. That doesn't mean a free program can't ever be unjust. In the simple case where you run it by yourself, it would be very difficult for the free program to be unjust. But other scenarios are not so simple. The use of a program jointly by multiple parties creates other ethical issues, other threats.

For instance, if you want to borrow money, and each lender insists that you must run, jointly, a particular Ethereum program which you can't change and which can make you owe thousands of dollars, that is dangerous. If that Ethereum program is free, that means a different lender can modify it and offer to lend using another version. But that does not directly give the borrowers (who have less power to start with than the lender) any freedom.

How does this differ from the classic case of a client program that talks to a server program on someone else's server? If the client program is free, you can use a modified version to talk to the same server. If the server wants some information about you, you control what information to send. You can lie, if you choose, and in some cases lying might be morally and/or legally legitimate.

When the program is part of a system that makes it impossible or ineffective to lie, that changes things. Such a program could be part of a web of social control, and there is no limit in principle to how much control it can exercise. Mostly we see this in nonfree programs for "test proctoring", but we also see the beginnings of it in free programs such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The UK has failed to deal with the problem of SLAPP lawsuits, in which rich people and businesses sue people for libel (or threaten to sue) to stop them from accusing wrongdoing. Even if the person sued is telling the truth, perse may not have the money to pay to defend the lawsuit.

Now Russian billionaires are using this to stop the UK from putting sanctions on them until they have time to sell their UK assets. So the UK is finally looking into how to block SLAPP lawsuits. That would be a change for the better, in general, as it would eliminate part of the unjust power of the rich.

Some US states adopted anti-SLAPP laws a few decades ago, but some have not done so.

More generally, the cost of defending a libel suit in the UK is enormous, so they are used to protect criminals as well as to deter criticism of tyrants such as Putin.

*Former National Security Advisor John Bolton says 'Putin was waiting' for Trump to withdraw the United States from NATO in his second term.*