Desktop/Laptop

• Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition review: The perfect machine for normies to try Linux

  Linux, it’s a scary word for some and an unknown realm for others. For many, Linux is a way of life, and they’ve been using it for a very long time. Even if you’ve never heard of Linux and are scared to try it, you probably already use it daily. This review of the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition isn’t for those who are experienced. This review is for the normies.

  Linux is widely used on server farms all over the world. Your email, your website host, and even your employer likely use Linux in some form. Even your Android device is a flavor of Linux, so you’re probably using it day in and day out. The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition brings Linux to the average person’s fingertips with no need to go through installing or configuring ahead of time.

  While I have installed and configured many Linux distros on many different laptops over the years, I have to admit having the work done for you is half the battle. I know many Linux lovers will disagree with me, but they’re not thinking with the same head a normal user would. Turn back now Linux purists; this particular Dell XPS 13 Developer Editon review is not for you. If you’re just a normal Windows or Mac user looking for an alternative and wondering what this device is all about, let’s jump into it.

Kernel Space

• Linux Kernel 5.12 Released

  After two months of development, Linus Torvalds has released the latest version of the Linux kernel, saying that “despite the extra week, this was actually a fairly small release overall.”

  According to the KernelNewbies page, this release introduces idmapped mounts, which let you “map the user id of a mount to a different one. This makes it possible to share files more easily between multiple users or multiple machines especially in complex scenarios.”

• BPF: Application Development and libbpf

  A while back, I posted a blog series on BPF, including some suggestions about setting up a BPF development environment. Much has changed since then in terms of BPF features, so it’s worth revisiting how BPF applications are developed now.

  The key change – at least for the BPF projects I work on – is that libbpf has become central to BPF application development. Why?

  The SYS_BPF syscall is the Swiss Army knife of BPF; it allows you to for example inject a BPF program into the kernel and verify it, create associated maps and attach the program to its target. When these basic tasks were all that was needed, they could be carried out using simple wrappers to the SYS_BPF system call.

  However BPF programs do a lot more now and there’s a huge amount of interplay between userspace and kernel required to set up a program to run. libbpf solves a bunch of problems for you. I’ll try and describe a few of them here.

• [ANNOUNCEMENT] Yocto Project 3.3 (hardknott-25.0.0) is Released

  We are pleased to announce the Yocto Project 3.3 (hardknott-25.0.0) Release is now available for download.

• Yocto Project 3.3 (hardknott-25.0.0) released

  Yocto Project, a system to build embedded Linux distributions, released version 3.3 “Hardknott”. In this version all OE-Core recipes build reproducibly regardless of host distro/build location except golang recipes and ruby’s docs package. There are many more new features, upgrades, and bug fixes. The release notes have more details.

• Intel Bus Lock Detection Merged For Linux 5.13 – Phoronix

  Intel’s code for Linux kernel bus lock detection that works in conjunction with newer Intel CPUs has landed in the Linux kernel.

  Last year Intel contributed split lock detection for Linux 5.7+ for finding out when an atomic instruction ends up spanning multiple cache lines. Those split locks can incur significant performance penalties and now that kernel code has been extended to cover bus lock detection too with Linux 5.13+ on recent Intel processors.

• Updated FUTEX2 System Call Patches Posted For Helping Wine/Proton, Other Use-Cases – Phoronix

  It’s been several months since the last round of FUTEX2 patches for this system call to address the shortcomings of the current FUTEX system call. FUTEX2, which is designed in part with Wine/Proton in mind for better matching Windows semantics, has now seen a third iteration of the patches.

  FUTEX2 aims to better match the behavior of Windows and can wait on multiple futexes, among other improvements over the original system call. It’s important for Wine/Proton and ultimately Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux with optimal performance and reliability.

• Linux Kernel Runtime Guard 0.9.1 Is Released – LinuxReviews

  The Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG) is a Linux kernel security module developed by Openwall for security enthusiasts, Internet-facing production servers and hosting providers that provides additional run-time integrity and security checks for the Linux kernel. The latest version adds support for CONFIG_HAVE_STATIC_CALL on Linux 5.10+ and a fix for a false positive bug on machines with SELinux enabled. make install no longer enables it by default. There is, instead, a message explaining how to enable it using the systemd service file it provides.

• Stupid RCU Tricks: A tour through rcutorture – Paul E. McKenney’s Journal — LiveJournal

  Although Linux-kernel RCU gets most of the attention, without rcutorture, RCU would not be what it is today. To see this, note that the old saying “If it ain’t tested, it don’t work!” is if anything more valid today than it was back then. After all, software has not gotten any simpler, workloads have not become less demanding, and systems have not grown smaller, except in terms of physical size. That said, the decrease in size has been truly impressive. Back when Jack and I invented RCU, the hardware contained in my laptop would have filled no fewer than fifteen standard racks, and that ignores the hardware that simply was not available back then, and also ignores the reliability issues that would have resulted from such an imposing agglomeration of hardware.

• Graphics Stack

  • Farewell Old Friend

  • Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Now Correctly Rendering… Glxgears – Phoronix

    While Zink implements OpenGL 4 and is running an increasing number of games with good performance, one of the simple “demos” it hasn’t been able to render correctly in recent years has been glxgears. But that milestone is now crossed once again with the latest Mesa code.

Applications

• 3 Best Free NAS Software Solutions For Network Storage

  Nowadays, NAS is used by everyday families who simply want to share photos and enjoy access to a digital library of entertainment, no matter where they’re at. So whether you’re looking to build your own private network, gather movies, music, and TV shows, or just to take data backup to the next level, NAS might be what you’re looking for.

• MusE 4.0 Digital Audio Workstation Released with Tabbed UI, All New Dark Theme

  More than nine months in the works, MusE 4.0 is here with a completely revamped user interface that features a tabbed UI with docks supporting common utility editors like Event List, Marker List, and Mastertrack List, an all new dark theme with lots of icons in vector format, more customizable colors, as well as new toolbars to replace the separate transport window and make it easier to access common operations.

  The new release also introduces several new keyboard shortcuts to make your workflow faster if you fancy using your keyboard when creating music, and adds support for listing related keyboard shortcut in menu operations.

• Connectagram 1.3.0 released

  Added dark mode
  Added option to reset new game to defaults
  Added support for Qt 6
  Look up definitions in web browser
  Improved high scores dialog
  Refactored code
  Translation updates: German, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Turkish
  Word list updates: Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish

Instructionals/Technical

• Linux Software Raid 1 Setup

  RAID 1 is a hard disk configuration where the contents from one hard disk are mirrored onto another. This provides the user with some redundancy in case a disk fails. On your Linux system, the two hard drives are represented as a single file system. But in the background, making changes to your files is actually writing the changes to two disks at the same time. You can also add more than two disks to the configuration, as long as you keep the number even. Otherwise, something like RAID 5 will be more suitable.

  There are many ways to configure a RAID setup. One of the easiest and most accessible ways is through the mdadm software package, which can be installed and used on any major Linux distribution. This is easier than some other RAID setups, since it doesn’t require any special hardware (like a RAID controller) and isn’t that hard to configure.

  In this guide, we’ll go through the step by step instructions to install and setup mdadm on Linux, and create a RAID 1 configuration for two hard disks. Our example scenario will consist of two empty hard disks that are each 10 GB in size. This is in addition to our main hard disk, which is just used for the operating system.

• How To Delete A Pool In TrueNAS

  This article will show you how to delete safely a pool in TrueNAS. What is TrueNAS? It is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) software that shares and protects data from modern-day threats like ransomware and malware. So lets start right away. First open the web browser and type your nas ip address, you will enter the dashboard like in the picture bellow…

• How To Watch Netflix on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to watch Netflix on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. If you want to watch Netflix without any effort, simply use Google Chrome. Google Chrome is the one browser that supports Netflix without any additional requirements. For non-supported browsers, you will need to install additional tools and packages to watch Netflix.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the FFmpeg extra codes to watching Netflix on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• How to create a Windows 10 VM in VMware on Linux

  Do you want to set up a Windows 10 virtual machine in VMware Workstation 16 on your Linux PC, but find it too complicated and can’t figure it out? If so, this guide is for you! Follow along as we show you how to set up a Windows 10 VM in VMware!

• How to access a VMWare shared folder on Ubuntu

  Do you have an Ubuntu VM in VMware Workstation and want to share a folder with it but can’t figure it out? If so, this guide is for you! Follow along as we go over how to access VMware shared folders on Ubuntu!

• How to exit Vim editor

  When you are using the VIM editor on Linux and you would like to exit, you just need to follow the tips below. First press the Esc key in order to access the Normal mode. Now to access the Command-line mode, you can just type in : .

  You will then notice a colon (:) that pops up at the bottom of your current screen session.

• How to Install and Run a VNC Server on Ubuntu Linux

  Ready to unleash the power of remote computing on your Ubuntu machine? Here’s how you can easily set up a VNC server.

  Accessing a computer via remote desktop is an important part of work-life. Remote desktop programs allow you to access and control other systems that are not physically available to you. Work from home jobs have made remote computing even more relevant by allowing people from distant regions to work remotely using their computers.

  This guide shows you have to install a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) Server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to make remote computing possible on your system.

• How to block access to a server by IP address on Linux

  Sometimes you might want to block connects to your server by IP address. E.g. when someone tries to attack your system. This can be done in several different ways, e.g. with iptables (firewall) rules or by setting up a reject route.

• How to install Brew on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux – Linux Shout

  Homebrew is one of the popular package managers for Mac OS X but can be installed on Linux as well to download and install various packages. Homebrew Cask extends Homebrew with support for quick installation of applications like Google Chrome, VLC, and more.

  On Linux, it is known as Linuxbrew. On Ubuntu Linux, we already have an APT package manager with a wide range of applications and other packages to install, then what is the need for Linuxbrew?

• Jon Chiappetta: Small Network Speed Testing Web Server

  So I wanted to test the internal LAN speeds of our wireless bridge, switches, and cables in between – from one end of the network to the other. There is an old iMac running on one side of the bridge and I didn’t want the speed test to slow down due to disk I/O reasons. I wrote a small python based web server which pre-initializes a memory buffer with random data and then sends random chunks inside of it throughout the fake “download” process (jumps around from index to index).

• Fix Your Shell Scripts With Shellcheck

  Shellcheck is a piece of free and open source software that gives warnings and suggestions for shell scripts. Using shellcheck, you can find errors earlier than you would otherwise. It’s a tool that everyone that scripts should have in their toolbag.

• Compute newest kernel version from Makefile on Torvalds’ git repository

• Oracle Enterprise Manager for Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager: Cloud environment monitoring made easy with short training videos

  In this week’s Training Tuesday blog, we present a set of free, short training videos that demonstrate the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager monitoring features introduced in Oracle Enterprise Manager 13.4.

• Run entire shell script as root Using sudo

  Placing sudo in the shebang line of a shell script runs the entire thing as root. Useful for scripts designed to, e.g. automate system upgrades or package manager wrappers — makes prepending everything with sudo no longer necessary

• Implementing a quick and easy way to check from the Linux Desktop Environment if the ClamAV signatures database is up-to-date

  This can happen for a number of reasons. The Freshclam daemon may not have been enabled, for example. Or you purposely configured your installation not to use the Freshclam daemon but forgot to run Freshclam manually (either from the command line or via ClamTk) during the past seven days to update the database. Or there is a problem with the Freshclam configuration or software installation itself. And so on.

• USBView compiled in OpenEmbedded

  Someone posted about USBView not working, running BionicPup I think, and they installed it from the PPM package manager.

• How To Install Apache Ant on Debian 10 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Ant on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Ant is a Java library and command-line tool and it supplies a number of built-in tasks allowing to compile, assemble, test, and run Java applications. Ant can also be used effectively to build non-Java applications, for instance, C or C++ applications. Ant is extremely flexible and does not impose coding conventions or directory layouts on the Java projects which adopt it as a build tool.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Apache Ant on a Debian 10 (Buster).

• How to Install and Configure Terraform in Linux Distributions

  Terraform is a free and open-source application that can automate and manage your infrastructure. Terraform helps to build services and platforms using declarative language; this means you don’t need to define every step of automation; it can learn by itself. You don’t have to worry about every step of your systems to automation; it can take care of that. If you a newbie on Terraform, it allows you to start from the starch. Terraform supports Ubuntu, Fedora, Arach, Red Hat, and other major Linux distributions. After installing Terraform on your Linux, it can be integrated with AWS, cloud, VM, and other systems.

• How to install Brave Beta on Deepin 20.2

  In this video, we are looking at how to install Brave Beta on Deepin 20.2.

• How To Upgrade To FreeBSD 13 From FreeBSD 12

  The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is recently announced the availability of FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE. This is the first release of the stable/13 branch. FreeBSD 13.0 is shipped with many updated set of features. It supports several architectures including amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv6, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64. If you prefer a fresh installation, head over to the FreeBSD 13.0 download page and get a suitable version for your architecture. If you already have older versions, you an directly upgrade FreeBSD 12 to FreeBSD 13. In this step by step guide, let us see how to upgrade to FreeBSD 13 from FreeBSD 12.

• Monitor Nginx Log Files Using ngxtop on Ubuntu 20.04

  ngxtop is a free, open-source, flexible and real-time monitoring tool for Nginx web servers. It can parse the Nginx access log and print the information about request count, requested URI, the number of requests by status code, and much more. It is a simple and easy-to-use tool to monitor the requests coming to an Nginx web server.

  In this post, we will show you how to install and use ngxtop monitoring tool on Ubuntu 20.04.

• Linux Essentials – The find command

  In this episode of Linux Essentials, I’ll teach you the basics of the find command. The find command is a powerful command-line tool you can use in order to find just about anything in the filesystem, and with this video, you’ll learn all the basics you need in order to start using it.

• How to install NetBeans in Ubuntu 21.04 – LateWeb.Info

  Apache NetBeans is an integrated development environment (IDE) for Java. It allows applications to be developed from a set of modular software components called modules. NetBeans runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and Solaris. In addition to Java development, it has extensions for other languages like PHP, C, C++, HTML5, and JavaScript. Applications based on NetBeans, including the NetBeans IDE, can be extended by third party developers.

• 5 Cool Linux Monitoring Tools you should check out

  In this article we are going to check out 5 very cool monitoring tools that can be used in the terminal. Some of them you may know , some of them no , please comment if you find them interesting or you can suggest other.

• How to install Funkin’ FPS Plus on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install Funkin’ FPS Plus on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

Games

• Linux Gaming vs. Windows Gaming: Everything You Need to Know

  Linux has made significant strides over the last couple of years when it comes to gaming. But has it reached the stage where it can be considered as a viable alternative to Windows? Well, the answer depends on you – what games you play and how you use your OS apart from gaming.

  If you are looking for the OS with the most natively supported games, then Windows takes the cake – no argument!

  However, it’s more than likely you don’t plan on playing “every” PC game out there! Maybe you have a few favorites! And Linux’s gaming catalog covers almost all the popular titles, so you are extremely likely to find your favorite game compatible on Linux. Also, believe it or not, but some games actually perform better on Linux than Windows – provided you are running on the same hardware.

  As such, it’s clearly understandable why the PC gaming community is constantly engaged in a heated debate over Linux vs. Windows gaming – which is better. And so, for this read, we have decided to shed some light on the topic – giving you the pros and cons of both OSes in terms of gaming.

• GNU dico Version 2.11

  Version 2.11 of GNU dico is available for download. This version fixes several bugs and inconsistencies in the gcide module and the gcider utility. Also, this version drops the support for Python 2.7.

• Metro Exodus and Hellpoint in May’s Humble Choice, along with a new subscriber discount

  Looks like the next Humble Choice bundle is going to be reasonably good, with Metro Exodus headlining.

  Now that there’s a Linux port available that performs well, this might perhaps entice a few people into Humble Choice to pick up a good deal. Usually it costs $39.99 on Steam without any discounts, so the Humble Choice for May is a good way to get it which usually costs about $19.99 for the whole set. Humble have also announced that for May’s Humble Choice there will be Darksiders Genesis, Hellpoint, and 9 more games so it seems like overall it’s going to be quite a good one.

• Open Source Game Helps You Learn Git

  A free and open source game, called Oh My Git!, turns the Git version control system into an interactive game that can be used to help beginners learn more about Git’s features and to help instructors teach Git fundamentals.

• Anger Foot: A Game of Kicking Ass

  You’ve probably seen a movie or TV show where someone from the FBI kicks open a door. That officer is likely wearing SWAT clothing, complete with a riot shield, a nine millimeter, boots, and a helmet.

  In Anger Foot, it’s like you’re actually playing the role of that FBI agent. Except you’re an alligator without the armor. Just wearing jeans and all you start off with is your trusty foot.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Kdenlive 21.04 released

    The Kdenlive team is happy to announce the release of version 21.04 with lots of interface and usability improvements and many bug fixes. This version also comes with new Typewriter and Strobing effects as well as Effect Zones, which give you the ability to apply effects to track and/or timeline regions. There is also new Speech-to-Text feature to automatically transcode audio to text and a Media Browser widget to easily browse and add your source material to your project. The Online Resources has been converted into a widget and buffed with more media providers. Not to mention tons of under the hood polishing in preparation for Qt6 and MLT7.

    We would like to thank the contributions of Rafal Lalik (Typewriter effect), Vivek Yadav (Media Browser), Martin Sandsmark (Alpha Strobe effect) and Julius Künzel (Online Resources), and also welcome Julius as a core team member. While the devs were busy hacking the bug squashing team managed to close these past months more than 500 bugs in the tracker.

  • Kdenlive 21.04 Released with Media Browser, Speech-to-Text, Typewriter Effect

    KDE’s Kdenlive video editor 21.04 was released today with lots of usability improvements and some great new features.

    Kdenlive 21.04 introduced new Speech-to-Text feature which automatically transcode audio to text, and it supports for 17 languages and dialects using the official models.

  • Plasma Mobile: More Applications and an Improved Homescreen

    The Plasma Mobile team is happy to present the Plasma Mobile updates for March and April 2021. During the last two months, most of the work has been focused on applications. While we continued to improve existing applications making them more stable and featureful, we also worked on new applications, extending the Plasma Mobile app ecosystem. We also made noticeable improvements to the Plasma Mobile shell.

    But, before we get into that, we would like to thank Pine64 for their generous donations for every KDE community device sold, and their support to our project. We would also like to extend our thanks to you, the owners of PinePhone KDE community edition devices: Your purchase helps us so much.

  • Plasma Mobile picks up new apps, app updates, and the beginnings of multiple home screens

    The Plasma Mobile team has announced a number of updates to their user interface and suite of applications for mobile Linux devices. Among other things, there are updates to chat, music, and video apps, new features for the default web browser, and new applications for email, music streaming, and more.

    Developers are also working to improve the look, feel, and performance of the Plasma Mobile shell itself, and developing new features including support for multiple pages on the home screen.

  • KaOS 2021.04

    Time goes fast, it is eight years ago this week that KaOS started, so this is kind of an April anniversary release.

    It has also been eight years that the same initramfs creation tool has been used (Mkinitcpio), but with Dracut being the more widely used and constantly maintained, it is time to move to this new tool for KaOS. For almost two years Mkinitcpio did not have a maintainer and upstream had talks about abandoning this tool. This will be a major change and will require lots of work for the ISO creation, but a start has been made, the linux-next kernel already defaults to Dracut for initramfs creation.

  • KaOS Linux Celebrates 8th Anniversary with New ISO Release Featuring KDE Gear 21.04

    KaOS 2021.04 is here as the first ISO snapshot to switch to Dracut as the default tool for creating the Linux boot image (initramfs), replacing Mkinitcpio, which is no longer supported. This is a major change and requires a lot of work to be fully integrates, but, for now, the linux-next kernel defaults to Dracut for initramfs creation.

    Since KaOS focuses on Qt and KDE, the KaOS 2021.04 release ships with the KDE Plasma 5.21.3 desktop environment, which is accompanied by the latest KDE Gear 21.04 and KDE Frameworks 5.81 software suites, all built against the Qt 5.15.2 open-source application framework.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Budgie Desktop 10.5.3 Released with GNOME 40 Stack Support, Many Improvements

    Budgie Desktop users rejoice, a new version of your favorite desktop environment is here and it’s packed with lots of goodies, starting with support for the GNOME 40 stack, which makes Budgie compatible with GNOME 40 apps/components like the GDM (GNOME Display Manager) login screen or a dedicated screensaver.

    Budgie Screensaver, a fork of gnome-screensaver, is now used as the default screensaver in the Budgie Desktop 10.5.3 release, not only allowing Budgie to co-exist in an installation environment alongside GNOME Shell and GDM components from the GNOME 40 stack, but also facilitate its ability to lock the session.

Distributions

• Screenshots/Screencasts

  • Lubuntu 21.04 overview | Welcome to the Next Universe.

    In this video, I am going to show an overview of Lubuntu 21.04 and some of the applications pre-installed.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

  • librewolf browser updated to 88.0

    LibreWolf is designed to minimize data collection and telemetry as much as possible. This is achieved through hundreds of privacy/security/performance settings and patches. Intrusive integrated addons including updater, crashreporter, and pocket are removed too. LibreWolf is NOT associated with Mozilla or its products.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • IBM reaffirms support for open-source devs after internal Linux kernel maintainer argument goes public

    I must confess, I was guilty of being reactionary when I first read and wrote about a situation between two IBM employees, one of whom is a Linux kernel maintainer. I reacted because open-source is near and dear to my heart, something I’ve been passionate about since the late nineties. But my initial reaction was based on only one side of the story, the kernel maintainer’s. Since then, I’ve had a chance to speak with IBM, hear their account of what happened and gain a better understanding of how the company works to support the Linux open-source community.

  • Hidden Features of Fedora 34 | LINUX Unplugged 403

    The new release of Fedora has more under the hood than you might know. It’s a technology-packed release, and nearly all of it is coming to a distro near you.

    Plus the questions we think the University of Minnesota kernel ban raises, and more.

  • F34 elections nominations now open

    Candidates may self-nominate. If you nominate someone else, please check with them to ensure that they are willing to be nominated before submitting their name.

    The steering bodies are currently selecting interview questions for the candidates.

    Nominees submit their questionnaire answers via a private Pagure issue. The Election Wrangler or their backup will publish the interviews to the Community Blog before the start of the voting period. Fedora Podcast episodes will be recorded and published as well.

    Please note that the interview is mandatory for all nominees. Nominees not having their interview ready by end of the Interview period (2021-05-19) will be disqualified and removed from the election.

  • Fedora Linux 34 Now Generally Available

    The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. sponsored and community-driven open source collaboration, today announced the general availability of Fedora Linux 34, the latest version of the fully open source Fedora operating system. Fedora Linux 34 further improves the overall user experience with key updates like GNOME 40, while still providing a foundation for new use cases, like edge computing, with improved support for hardware watchdogs for automated system recovery.

  • What’s new in Fedora Workstation 34

    Fedora Workstation 34 is the latest version of our leading-edge operating system and this time there are major improvements heading your way. Best of all, you can download it from the official website. What’s new, I hear you ask!? Well let’s get to it.

  • Fedora Linux 34 released

    The Fedora 34 release is now available. “This release features GNOME 40, the next step in focused, distraction-free computing. GNOME 40 brings improvements to navigation whether you use a trackpad, a keyboard, or a mouse. The app grid and settings have been redesigned to make interaction more intuitive.” LWN recently reviewed the Fedora 34 Workstation release.

  • Fedora 34 Released With GNOME 40 And Wayland By Default

    Fedora Linux 34 is one of the major releases in Fedora’s history and a bold one. The Fedora Project’s emphasis on delivering the latest open source updates with all levels of users in mind, from beginners to experts.

    Fedora team announced the Fedora 34 release across workstations, spins, and servers. The latest version on this popular Linux distribution comes with Linux Kernel 5.11 which brings support for the latest hardware across processors, graphics cards, ports, and other devices.

    [...]

    Btrfs has been the default filesystem for Fedora Workstations since Fedora 33, but the Fedora Project team has done one better in Fedora 34. In this release, the zstd compression is made as default when using Btrfs. This compression will be essential for increasing read and write performance of larger files, with the potential to speed up related workflows.

    Fedora 34 has successfully managed to switch over to PipeWire from PulseAudio for its audio needs. Overall, PipeWire is more secure and offers a better audio experience in Fedora 34 than with PulseAudio sound daemon, which was the default in previous Fedora releases.

  • Fedora 34 Releases with GNOME 40, Linux Kernel 5.11, and a New i3 Spin

    After the release of the Fedora 34 beta a week ago, Fedora 34 stable release is finally here with exciting changes and improvements.

    As expected this release of Fedora arrives with the latest Linux kernel 5.11 along with significant changes such as Gnome 40, PipeWire, availability of a Fedora i3 Spin, and various other changes.

    Let’s take a look at the important changes coming to Fedora 34.

    [...]

    One of the biggest highlights is the arrival of the GNOME 40 desktop. Fedora 34 is one of the few distributions in which you can experience the latest Gnome 40 right now. So, this change is worth noting.

    Taking a look at KDE Plasma, Wayland becomes the default display server for KDE Plasma in Fedora 34. Moreover, KDE Plasma Desktop image is available for AArch64 ARM devices as well.

  • 10 Things to Do After Installing Fedora 34 [Workstation]

    The massive Fedora 34 release is here with cutting-edge technology across modules and packages. And I’m sure you have downloaded/upgraded to Fedora 34 already. Keeping that in mind, we present a list of 10 things to do after installing Fedora 34.

  • AlmaLinux vs. CentOS Comparison: Is AlmaLinux Up to the Challenge?

    With the announcement from Red Hat that they’re choosing to sunset CentOS and focus on CentOS Stream, many users have been wondering what’s next. The community was able to step in and take over the CentOS legacy in the form of AlmaLinux. Still, this has left many users wondering if AlmaLinux is up to the task. Here we discuss AlmaLinux and CentOS and whether AlmaLinux is up to the challenge of replacing CentOS.

  • CentOS Alternative AlmaLinux to Get Commercial Support from CloudLinux

    CloudLinux Inc. will start providing multiple support options next month for the AlmaLinux OS — including regular patches and updates for the Linux kernel and core packages, patch delivery service-level agreements (SLAs), and 24/7 incident support, the company announced today.

    AlmaLinux OS is the open-source enterprise-level Linux distribution created as an alternative to CentOS with a committed support lifecycle of a decade per release, that was developed by the team at CloudLinux and now owned and governed by the user community.

  • Red Hat touts safety in future Linux OS for cars

    Red Hat has announced plans to create a new Linux-based operating system for the automotive industry. With this push, the enterprise-focused open source software company is touting safety and continuous certification as core selling points.

    Red Hat, which IBM acquired for $34 billion in 2018, is already well known for its enterprise-grade Linux distribution, which will serve as the basis of its new platform for road vehicles. For the initiative, Red Hat has partnered with Exida, a company that specializes in functional safety and product certification, to provide ongoing certifications spanning a range of applications, from “infotainment to driver operations,” according to a press release.

  • Red Hat Summit: Managed Cloud Services, Linux Updates Center Stage

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 doubles down on edge computing

  • Red Hat’s RHEL 8.4 Release Targets Edge Deployments | IT Pro

    Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.4, the latest version of Red Hat’s flagship enterprise offering, embraces edge computing with new edge-focused improvements.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 arrives and take Linux to computing’s edge

    Arpit Joshipura, The Linux Foundation’s general manager of networking, once said “edge computing will overtake cloud computing” by 2025. By edge computing, Joshipura meant open compute and storage resources that are five to 20 milliseconds away. That used to be common. They were the computers in our server room. Now, we often rely on cloud computing instead. But, Red Hat, primarily a hybrid-cloud company now, is reminding us that its latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is also great for your local and edge servers.

  • Red Hat To Deliver First Continuously Certified Linux Platform For Vehicles

  • Red Hat Expands Open Hybrid Cloud Technology Portfolio

  • Stratis 2.4 Released With Multi-Threaded Daemon, Root File-System Support – Phoronix

    While Fedora Workstation has been moving along with its Btrfs file-system usage and beginning to make greater use of its functionality, Red Hat does continue investing heavily in Stratis-Storage as their path forward for next-generation Linux storage with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Today marks the release of Stratis 2.4.

    The Stratis 2.4 release finally brings multi-threading to its daemon, support for using Stratis as the root file-system, and encrypted pool handling improvements, among other changes.

  • Red Hat Sets Sights on Delivering the First Continuously Certified Linux Platform for Road Vehicles

  • 4 reasons you’ll love using Red Hat OpenShift Data Science

    Red Hat OpenShift Data Science is a managed cloud service built from a curated set of components from the upstream Open Data Hub project. It aims to provide a stable sandbox in which data scientists can develop, train, and test their machine learning (ML) workloads and then deploy results in a container-ready format. This article summarizes the advantages of using OpenShift Data Science in your machine learning projects.

  • Red Hat Linux 8.4 announced and powering the next wave of edge computing

    Red Hat has announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4, forming the foundation of the company’s new Red Hat Edge Initiative to power the next wave of edge computing.

    Red Hat announced the latest release of its enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.4, during this week’s virtual Red Hat Summit.

    RHEL 8.4 furthers the operating system as a foundation for the open hybrid cloud from the data centre to the edge, adding new Linux container, deployment and management capabilities scaled for the needs of edge computing.

    Red Hat’s “The State of Enterprise Open Source” research identified 72% of IT leaders expect open source to drive adoption of edge computing over the next two years. The Linux Foundation’s “2021 State of the Edge” report predicts that the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge-related devices will produce around 90 zettabytes of data by 2025.

  • The Mosquito and the Hurricane: Jim Whitehurst on the Past, Present, and Future of IBM

    The modern consumer has taken a much more active role in corporate policy development and direction than in decades past. “Vote with your dollar” campaigns and boycott movements have gone from mosquitoes to hurricanes, forcing dramatic shifts in how investors and corporate executives navigate change and interact with their customers. While social and environmental issues were once considered both opaque and risky, they are now front and center in every conversation about our new digital economy’s future. Though many activist discussions used to be reserved for the camps of Occupy Wall Street, it is clear that a monumental shift has occurred. Impact investing has manifested itself as the logical market response to a rapidly growing cohort of consumers that expect higher ethical standards from the businesses and institutions they support.

    After almost two decades of innovation, seemingly for innovation’s sake, the digitally transformed economy so many yearned for seems to be within reach. Activated like a bolt of lightning by the global pandemic, this transformation reaches further into citizens’ daily lives than anyone, save maybe Orwell, could have ever imagined. Whether or not this new digital economy will serve the best interests of humanity will be a question answered by the actions of citizens and corporations alike. It is no longer a debate; we are living through an era of enlightenment many futurists and forward-looking evangelists have spent decades preparing us for. It is essential to take a moment to recognize this prescience, take a step back, and examine how we got here.

    There aren’t many people more qualified to help the world understand this historical trajectory than Jim Whitehurst, president of IBM, former CEO of Red Hat, and possibly most influential proponent of open-source computing in history. Whitehurst led Red Hat to become the first $1B open-source software company, seven years before being acquired by IBM in 2019 for $34B the single largest acquisition in IBM’s 110-year history.

  • At Red Hat Summit, It’s All About Open Hybrid Cloud

    Change has always been constant for Red Hat as the Linux and open source powerhouse in the marketplace. Since its founding in 1993 with Red Hat Linux, it has over the years matured as an open source company, then as an even more specialized enterprise Linux and enterprise open source company.

    But over the last two years, Red Hat, which was acquired by IBM in 2019, has been morphing again, this time as an open hybrid cloud platform vendor that has found a way to wrap its heritage up with new components in an always changing world of IT.

• Debian Family

  • Tails: Call for testing 4.19~beta1

    Tails 4.19, scheduled for June 1, will completely change how to connect to the Tor network from Tails. We would like as many people as possible to test this beta version to be able to fix as many problems as possible before we release 4.19 to all users.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu Blog: Design and Web team summary – 27 April 2021

    The web team at Canonical run two-week iterations building and maintaining all of Canonical websites and product web interfaces. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.

  • Ubuntu in the wild – 27th of April 2021 | Ubuntu

    The Ubuntu in the wild blog post ropes in the latest highlights about Ubuntu and Canonical around the world on a bi-weekly basis. It is a summary of all the things that made us feel proud to be part of this journey. What do you think of it?

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi CM4-based computer turns NEC displays into signage systems

  Sharp NEC Display Solutions’ RPi CM4 based “MPi4 NEC MediaPlayer” kit turns its large format displays into 4K signage systems and offers features including a watchdog, RTC, GbE, and 2x USB ports.

  Sharp NEC Display Solutions Europe has launched an embedded Linux signage computer designed to retrofit its large format display systems with digital signage capability. The MPi4 NEC MediaPlayer is built around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. The system is designed for retail environments, passenger information, and quick service menu boards.

• $20 add-on provides Real-Time Clock for the Raspberry Pi

  On Kickstarter: a $20 “USB RTC for Raspberry Pi” Real-Time Clock add-on that plugs into a Pi’s USB port with a USB-to-UART/I2C converter to enable accurate timestamps.

  A start-up led by Amrit Singh has successfully launched a Real-Time Clock add-on for the Raspberry Pi to record the passing of time and provide timestamps. The $14 USB RTC for Raspberry Pi early birds are gone, but for $20 you can receive the device in May.

  The USB RTC for Raspberry Pi is not a HAT, but an add-on board/dongle that plugs into a Raspberry Pi USB port. The USB interface is said to avoid the need for jumper cables, soldering wires, or integrating an external PCB to add an RTC to the Pi.

• Jasper Lake Mini PC offered with up to Celeron N5095 processor

  Intel officially launched the Jasper Lake processors at the beginning of the year. The new family provides an upgrade to the Gemini Lake processors that have been found in low-cost low power mini PC in the last few years.

• Transport PC runs hardened OpenWrt hypervisor on Elkhart Lake

  Kontron’s “TRACe-B104-TR/IV” transport computer has an SEC-Line OpenWrt hypervisor that runs on Intel’s Elkhart Lake with hot-swap SATA, 3x GbE, PoE+, 3x USB, DP, DIO, 3x M.2, and mini-PCIe.

  Kontron announced a transport computer designed for a “wide range of demanding rail and bus applications, from onboard gateways and network video recorders to passenger infotainment, Wi-Fi, diagnostic and smart vehicle servers, as well as ticketing systems and UCPe/SDWANs.” The TRACe-B104-TR/IV runs on the quad-core, 1.8GHz/3.0GHz Atom x6425E from Intel’s latest, 10nm Elkhart Lake generation and is the first Elkhart Lake based transport system we have encountered.

• Librem 14 in Video

  Security is one of the core pillars we build upon. The Librem 14 offers the most advanced security feature set so far.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino Mbed Core for RP2040 boards | Arduino Blog

    Arduino support for the Raspberry Pi RP2040 chip is available now using the official Arduino Mbed Core. This is obviously very important, and exciting, for the upcoming Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect. But it goes beyond the Arduino device to also bring support to other boards built around the RP2040 chip.

  • Playing Connect Four against a mini golfing AI opponent | Arduino Blog

    Have you dreamed of combining the two incredible activities putt-putt and Connect Four together into the same game? Well one daring maker set out to do just that. Bithead’s innovative design involves a mini golf surface with seven holes at the end corresponding to the columns. The system can keep track of where each golf ball is with an array of 42 color sensors that are each connected to one of seven I2C multiplexers, all leading to a single Arduino Uno.

    The player can select from six distinct levels of AI, all the way from random shots in the dark to Q Learning, which records previous game-winning moves to improve how it plays over time. It can putt by first loading a golf ball into a chamber and then spinning up a pair of high-RPM motors that launch it. For the human player, there is a pair of dispensers on the left that give the correct color of ball.

  • SGET OSM (Open Standard Module) compliant SoM features NXP i.MX 8M Mini SoC – CNX Software

    The company provides supports for Buildroot & Yocto to build a custom Linux image running on the Cortex-A53 core(s) and FreeRTOS for the Cortex-M4 microcontroller. The module will be available until 2029.

  • SiFive Intelligence X280 64-bit RISC-V processor integrates AI extensions – CNX Software

    The last RISC-V core announced by SiFive was the U8-Series out-of-order RISC-V Core IP that aims to compete against Arm Cortex-A72 Core. But in their latest announcement, the company built upon the 64-bit RISC-V U7-series with the SiFive Intelligence X280 multi-core, Linux capable RISC-V processor adding vector extensions and SiFive Intelligence Extensions, and optimized for AI/ML compute at the edge.

    [...]

    SiFive further explains that in addition to ML inferencing, the new Intelligence X280 core is also suited for applications requiring high-throughput, single-thread performance while under power constraints citing AR/VR, sensor hubs, IVI systems, IP cameras, digital cameras, and gaming devices as examples.

    The first customer integrating the RISC-V core into their design will be Tenstorrent, a company that provides AI training and inference processors. More details may be found on the product page and press release.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Forget iOS 14.5 — Android 12 just got a supercharged dark mode | Tom’s Guide

  • The best features coming to Android 12

  • Here’s every feature your phone will get with Android 12

  • [Updated] Android 11 update tracker for major OEMs/skins (One UI 3/3.1, MIUI 12, OxygenOS 11, Funtouch OS 11/OriginOS, ColorOS 11 & Realme UI 2) – PiunikaWeb

  • OnePlus 6 and 6T get new update, but it’s still not Android 11

  • Surprise! The Android 11 / One UI 3.1 update is live for the Galaxy A41 – SamMobile

  • Nokia 2.4 Android 11 OS update starts rolling out – Android Community

  • Yellow Masked Android Statue At Google

  • Can you change IMEI number of your phone? A guide for Android users

  • Android bug exposed COVID-19 contact tracing logs to preinstalled apps – The Verge

  • What is the release date for the Pro Sports update for Android users in BitLife? | Gamepur

  • Top 10 Best Android TV Devices

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Open Source: More Dominant Than You Think

  Though open source has taken over in enterprise networking over the last several years, open source isn’t a new concept. Open source software spun off of the related, but different, free software movement. Richard Stallman, a programmer at MIT’s artificial intelligence lab said he would create a free alternative to the AT&T-owned Unix operating system in 1983.

  Stallman’s alternative was about more than giving away software, it was about giving users the freedom to use, modify, or share the software as they saw fit.

  In September 1983, Stallman launched the GNU Project, in 1985 he started work on the GCC system, and by 1989 the project launched the first General Public License — this license gave users freedom but required them to share modified source code. This requirement to share modified source code is what ultimately allowed free software and open source to take off.

  By the mid 90s, Linux gained popularity and free software was borderline mainstream. In 1997, the essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” was published. The essay compared and contrasted the development of Linux and GCC. The principles introduced in the essay would later be central to the DevOps movement. The essay also brought the concept of free software to a broader audience and swayed software executives into trying free software licenses.

  The author of the essay, Eric S. Raymond was pivotal in coining the term open source and the creation of the Open Source Institute. After Netscape released Mozilla’s source code in 1998, Raymond and peers gathered to rebrand free software. Christine Peterson coined the term and Raymond and Bruce Perens started the institute.

  Serving as the foundation of the internet in the 90s, open source became widely used in the 2000s. Open source serves as the foundation for Twitter and Kickstarter, in 2006 companies like eBay and Facebook started contributing to open source software data analyst Hadoop, and in 2008 Google moved open source to your pocket with the release of the Android phone.

• Events

  • SUSECON Digital is nearly here – join us for an out of this world experience!

    We have been busy working on our Linux World keynote, and realized just how much we are looking forward to joining you all at SUSECON Digital on May 18-20, for the latest chapter of SUSE’s world-renowned open source festival.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • The screenshot option in Firefox has moved. Here’s how to find it.

      If you have updated Firefox recently, you may have noticed that Take a Screenshot is not in the page actions menu. Don’t fret. The feature is still in Firefox; it has just been moved.

    • Phabricator Etiquette Part 2: The Author
      

      Just as with reviewers, the author is also responsible for making sure the revision is in the appropriate state. As a reminder, ambiguous states happen when the revision needs action from someone, but doesn’t show up in their queue.

      As the author, a common way to get into this predicament is failing to re-request review when no changes are submitted. A typical review might start with the revision in Needs Review (in the reviewer’s queue). The reviewer may request some changes and set it to Needs Revision, which is now back in the author’s queue. The author will then fix the problems and re-submit their patch. Importantly, moz-phab (or maybe Phabricator itself?) will automatically set the state back to Needs Review and all is right with the world.

    • Examining JavaScript Inter-Process Communication in Firefox – Attack & Defense

      Firefox uses Inter-Process Communication (IPC) to implement privilege separation, which makes it an important cornerstone in our security architecture. A previous blog post focused on fuzzing the C++ side of IPC. This blog post will look at IPC in JavaScript, which is used in various parts of the user interface. First, we will briefly revisit the multi-process architecture and upcoming changes for Project Fission, Firefox’ implementation for Site Isolation. We will then move on to examine two different JavaScript patterns for IPC and explain how to invoke them. Using Firefox’s Developer Tools (DevTools), we will be able to debug the browser itself.

      Once equipped with this knowledge, we will revisit a sandbox escape bug that was used in a 0day attack against Coinbase in 2019 and reported as CVE-2019-11708. This 0day-bug has found extensive coverage in blog posts and publicly available exploits. We believe the bug provides a great case study and the underlying techniques will help identify similar issues. Eventually, by finding more sandbox escapes you can help secure hundreds of millions of Firefox users as part of the Firefox Bug Bounty Program.

      [...]

      In this blog post, we have given an introduction to Firefox IPC using JavaScript and how to debug the child and the parent process using the Content Toolbox and the Browser Toolbox, respectively. Using this setup, you are now able to simulate a fully compromised child process, audit the message passing in source code and analyze the runtime behavior across multiple processes.

      If you are already experienced with Fuzzing and want to analyze how high-level concepts from JavaScript get serialized and deserialized to pass the process boundary, please check our previous blog post on Fuzzing the IPC layer of Firefox.

      If you are interested in testing and analyzing the source code at scale, you might also want to look into the CodeQL databases that we publish for all Firefox releases.

      If you want to know more about how our developers port legacy MessageManager interfaces to JSActors, you can take another look at our JSActors documentation and at how Mike Conley ported the popup blocker in his Joy of Coding live stream Episode 204.

      Finally, we at Mozilla are really interested in the bugs you might find with these techniques – bugs like confused-deputy attacks, where the parent process can be tricked into using its privileges in a way the content process should not be able to (e.g. reading/writing arbitrary files on the filesystem) or UXSS-type attacks, as well as bypasses of exploit mitigations. Note that as of April 2021, we are not enforcing full site-isolation. Bugs that allow one to impersonate another site will not yet be eligible for a bounty. Submit your findings through our bug bounty program and follow us at the @attackndefense Twitter account for more updates.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Annual Report: LibreOffice in 2020

    On January 29, LibreOffice 6.4 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at Collabora, CIB, Red Hat, SIL and other companies – along with volunteers – worked on many new features. For instance, a QR Code generator was added to the suite, making it easy to add QR codes (which can be read by mobile devices) to documents.

• CMS

  • Curious About Full Site Editing?

    The second major release of the year is right around the corner. You might have heard a bit of buzz about full site editing around your WordPress circles, so this post will give you some big picture things to know as well as a few wayfinding links for anyone who wants to know more.

    [...]

    If you extend the functionality of the WordPress CMS for clients, updating to version 5.8 should also be seamless. As always, it’s smart to spot-check custom implementations in a staging environment or fully test when the release candidate is made available. Want to test your products and get everything client-ready? Check out any of the testing options below.

• FSFE

  • Bundestag Election 2021: Demands for a Digitally Sovereign Society

    Digital civil society organisations make four demands for a digitally sovereign society to politicians for the 2021 federal election. Among them is the Free Software Foundation Europe, which works to ensure that software developed with public money shall be published under a Free Software licence.

    On 1 April 2020, civil society organisations working for an independent digital infrastructure and free access to knowledge called on politicians: Learn from the crisis – strengthen digital civil society! (German) In an open letter, the undersigned organisations also made concrete recommendations for action. However, far too little has happened since then. The past year has made it clear that politics and public administration are overwhelmed with their own digital transformation and are setting priorities in digital policy that do not meet the needs of society. We are far from a digitally sovereign society.

    [...]

    At the launch event, Julia Reda (former member of the EU Parliament), Henning Tillmann (software developer and co-chair of D64) and Julia Kloiber (co-founder Superrr Lab) will discuss these four demands on 5 May 2021 from 18:00 to 19:30. The panel will be moderated by Katja Jäger (betterplace lab). Afterwards, all participants will have the opportunity to exchange ideas on solutions, measures and calls for action in four thematic rooms. FSFE’s Alexander Sander will moderate the room on “Public Money? Public Code!”.

• Programming/Development

  • CMake Bitrot

    CMake is a (meta-)buildsystem that handles finding-dependencies and building-things. It’s been around for many years, and has been in use by the KDE community for 14 years. In that time, CMake itself has changed quite a bit: there’s “legacy CMake”, version 2.8, and “modern CMake” which is roughly everything after version 3.0. But even within the 3.0 series there is a slow shift in language and tooling. This means that for released software, the CMake buildsystem “bitrots”, to some extent. I’ll give some examples revealed by the CMake 3.20 release.

    [...]

    Up-to-date software with current releases tends to have fewer issues – even when a change unexpectedly introduces build failures, we can count on the Open Source community to contribute fixes. So GNOME evolution-data-server had fixes in upstream git before I even noticed (and I spotted them only after I’d independently writted roughly-the-same-patch).

    Ancient MySQL releases, on the other hand, need new patches. This can be a somewhat frustrating rabbit hole of building old stuff for no other purpose than fixing the old stuff you don’t use anyway.

    Patches all end up in the FreeBSD ports collection git tree. Search for “CMake 3.20” for the kind of things that needed updating.

  • Enrique Ocaña González: GStreamer WebKit debugging by instrumenting source code (1/3)

    This is the continuation of the GStreamer WebKit debugging tricks post series. In the next three posts, I’ll focus on what we can get by doing some little changes to the source code for debugging purposes (known as “instrumenting”), but before, you might want to check the previous posts of the series:

    [...]

    The gobject-list project, written by Thibault Saunier, is a simple LD_PRELOAD library for tracking the lifetime of GObjects. When loaded into an application, it prints a list of living GObjects on exiting the application (unless the application crashes), and also prints reference count data when it changes. SIGUSR1 or SIGUSR2 can be sent to the application to trigger printing of more information.

  • Qt Roadmap for 2021

    With Qt 6.1 soon to be released, it is time to take a look at what the year 2021 has to offer for Qt users. In this post, I’ll go through the Qt framework plans and then talk a bit about tools and other items we are currently developing. As always, there are so many different things in the works that it is not possible to fully explain everything in a single post, but I’ll try to provide a good overview.

  • The Qt Company Publishes 2021 Roadmap – Phoronix

    With Qt 6.1 being released next month, The Qt Company has published their 2021 road-map outlining some of their plans for the remainder of the calendar year.

    As previously noted, with the upcoming Qt 6.1 release there are some libraries now ported to Qt 6 like Qt Virtual Keyboard, Qt Lottie, Qt State Machines, and more. Meanwhile with Qt 6.2 due out this autumn they expect to have many more libraries/add-ons ported from Qt5 to Qt6. Among the libraries expected to be ready for Qt 6.2 are the Bluetooth, Multimedia, Quick Dialogs, Remote Objects, Sensors, SerialBus, SerialPort, WebChannel, WebEngine, WebSockets, WebView, NFS, and others.

  • The MIR C interpreter and Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler

    For the past two years I’ve worked on a project implementing a universal lightweight Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler known as MIR. The cornerstone of the project is a machine-independent medium-level intermediate representation (MIR).

    A big part of the project consists of code that compiles C source code into MIR. Because MIR can be interpreted and just-in-timed, I easily extended this C-to-MIR compiler into a C interpreter and JIT compiler.

    I have previously written about other parts of the MIR project (see MIR: A lightweight JIT compiler project, but I never wrote in detail about the C-to-MIR compiler, C interpreter, or JIT. In this article, I would like to correct these omissions.

    [...]

    Also, I want to extend the C language in the future to mark program points where the C-to-MIR compiler should profile the code and generate speculative and de-optimized code depending on the execution profile. For example, the C code implementing the CRuby virtual machine’s plus bytecode for integers checks the operand types. It also checks that the plus method for integers was not redefined, that there is no overflow, that it doesn’t need to use multi-precision numbers, and so on. All these checks would be the marked program points I am talking about.

    It is hard to implement such extensions for GCC or Clang, get approval to include them into GCC or Clang repositories, or support them on the side.

    So I decided to write my own C-to-MIR compiler first. It should implement standard C11 without rarely used optional standard features such as variable arrays, complex numbers, and atomic data.

    The major implementation goal was simplicity, not compilation speed. This makes studying the code easier for other people and reduces the effort required to maintain it.

  • Josef Strzibny: Improving IRB experience with a custom .irbrc

    Ruby’s IRB is a lovely interactive console. By leveraging a custom .irbrc configuration file, we can make the experience even better.

    The .irbrc file is nothing else than a Ruby file that gets evaluated whenever we start the console with irb or rails c. We can place it in a home directory (~/.irbrc) or in the project directory (to scope it per project). But only one of these files will take effect, and the global one has precedence.

  • Perl/Raku

    • gfldex: The absence of a riddle

      Raku riddles have become popular. By chance, I came across a riddle generated by Rakudo — an emergent riddle so to speak.

  • Python

    • Peter Czanik: Sending alerts to Discord and others from syslog-ng using Apprise: blocks and Python templates

      A returning question I get is: “I see, that you can send alerts from syslog-ng to Slack and Telegram, but do you happen to support XYZ?” Replace XYZ with Discord and countless others. So, last week I showed you how to send alerts to Discord using the http() destination of syslog-ng and introduced you to Apprise, a notification library for Python.

      From this blog, you can learn how to make your syslog-ng destination developed in Python more flexible using templates, and how to make it easier to use with using blocks. We use the Apprise notification library again. On the feature side, the Python code is a lot closer to being production ready. It has most features a user would want to use. Still, it is rather just an inspiration, not something production ready, as among others, it is missing error handling and reporting.

  • Rust

    • Using Rust to Write Safe and Correct Linux Kernel Drivers

      As part of the Rust for Linux project, aimed to make it possible to use Rust for Linux driver development, the Android team at Google is working on evaluating the benefits that using Rust would bring.

      Rust for Linux was announced by Miguel Ojeda approximately one year ago on LKML, the Linux Kernel Mailing List, as an attempt to bring a second language to Linux kernel development by extending the Linux build system. Specifically, the project seeks to enable the use of Rust to write drivers and other “leaf” kernel modules, but not for the kernel core or the major kernel subsystems.

    • The Rust Programming Language Blog: Announcing Rustup 1.24.0

      The rustup working group is happy to announce the release of rustup version 1.24.0. Rustup is the recommended tool to install Rust, a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

      [...]

      Rustup’s component unpacker has been changed to have a smaller memory footprint when unpacking large components. This should permit users of memory-constrained systems such as some Raspberry Pi systems to install newer Rust toolchains which contain particularly large files.

  • Java

    • Shadow over Fedora 34 as maintainer of Java packages quits with some choice words for Red Hat and Eclipse

      Fedora 34, a feature-packed new release of Red Hat’s leading edge Linux distribution, was released today, though the main Java package maintainer has quit, urging “affected maintainers to drop dependencies on Java.”

      Fedora 34 is used by Red Hat to try out new features that are likely to end up in first CentOS Stream and then Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the commercial offering.

      [...]

      Spoiling the celebrations, Fedora’s main Java package maintainer Fabio Valentini said yesterday: “I can no longer in good conscience be the primary maintainer of (most) Java packages in Fedora.”

      It is worse than that; in a post entitled “The Death of Java (packages)” he said “new versions and even security issues have been piling up for months,” that “Java package maintainers from Red Hat have been exceptionally unhelpful, and have not substantially contributed to Java packages in Fedora in years,” that the Eclipse Java-based IDE (the packages for which are maintained by someone else) is a “dumpster fire” and that “I see no way for the situation to improve.”

      Valentini decided to orphan “all Java packages I am the main admin of” adding that “since this is the majority of remaining Java software in Fedora … I expect a decent amount of dependent packages will be affected.” His solution is to “urge affected maintainers to drop dependencies on Java, if at all possible.”

Science

• How automation can transform storage provisioning

  The diversity of systems and software running business operations has increased to the point where managing all the components can consume most of a data center teams’ energy, taking precious time away from planning and implementing new initiatives that move an agency’s mission forward.

  To ease the burden on team bandwidth, data center leaders frequently rely on monitoring software that continually checks for system faults and outages so operations don’t fail. That’s useful for meeting uptime and data protection service level agreements (SLAs). However, it still doesn’t provide real-time monitoring that can ensure systems and software are optimized both individually and holistically. That optimization should cover adjusting applications, hypervisor, servers, networks and storage for peak performance and uptime.

• Artificial Intelligence Is Misreading Human Emotion [Ed: Can we quit calling every computer and computer program "hey hi"?]

  At a remote outpost in the mountainous highlands of Papua New Guinea, a young American psychologist named Paul Ekman arrived with a collection of flash cards and a new theory. It was 1967, and Ekman had heard that the Fore people of Okapa were so isolated from the wider world that they would be his ideal test subjects.

  Like Western researchers before him, Ekman had come to Papua New Guinea to extract data from the indigenous community. He was gathering evidence to bolster a controversial hypothesis: that all humans exhibit a small number of universal emotions, or affects, that are innate and the same all over the world. For more than half a century, this claim has remained contentious, disputed among psychologists, anthropologists, and technologists. Nonetheless, it became a seed for a growing market that will be worth an estimated $56 billion by 2024. This is the story of how affect recognition came to be part of the artificial-intelligence industry, and the problems that presents.

Hardware

• Arm Outlines More Neoverse N2 + Neoverse V1 Platform Details

  Arm published today a set of blog posts outlining more power/performance and feature details of their forthcoming Neoverse N2 and Neoverse V1 platforms.

  As announced last September, Arm’s Neoverse V1 platform is for delivering the highest performance from any Arm-designed core. The Neoverse V1 while based on the N1 has a “radical redesign of the CPU microarchitecture”. The Neoverse V1 platform supports multi-chiplet and multi-socket solutions and can support DDR5/HBM3 memory, PCI Express 5.0, and CXL 2.0 attached memory and coherent accelerators.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Openwashing

      • Amazon announces it’s open sourcing DeepRacer device software

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation and Istio

        • How To Get A University Banned From The Linux Kernel

          Once again the Linux kernel was in the news and not for anything good, but they weren’t the cause, the cause was a certain University, the University of Minnesota that allowed for a fairly questionable study to take place of the course of the previous year.

        • Minnesota University Apologizes for Contributing Malicious Code to the Linux Project

          Researchers from the University of Minnesota apologized to the maintainers of Linux Kernel Project on Saturday for intentionally including vulnerabilities in the project’s code, which led to the school being banned from contributing to the open-source project in the future.

          “While our goal was to improve the security of Linux, we now understand that it was hurtful to the community to make it a subject of our research, and to waste its effort reviewing these patches without its knowledge or permission,” assistant professor Kangjie Lu, along with graduate students Qiushi Wu and Aditya Pakki, said in an email.

          “We did that because we knew we could not ask the maintainers of Linux for permission, or they would be on the lookout for the hypocrite patches,” they added.

        • University of Minnesota responds to Linux security patch requests

          If you’re just catching up on this story, here’s the quick recap: University of Minnesota researchers deliberately submitted patches that would have put the Use-After-Free (UAF) vulnerability into the Linux kernel. When it appeared they were trying once more to put garbage patches into the kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux kernel maintainer for the stable branch, banned UMN developers from submitting to the kernel and pulled existing suspicious UMN patches. The Linux Foundation followed up with a list of requests for the UMN to comply with if they wanted to work with the Linux kernel again. Now, ZDNet has obtained a copy of UMN’s response to the Linux community.

        • University Of Minnesota Apologizes To Unwavering Linux Community Over Kernel Kerfuffle

          Last week, we reported on a Linux Kernel developer banned The University of Minnesota for some ethically questionable research. Since then, UMN issued an apology and started an investigation into how this all happened, but some people are having none of it. This week in the Linux Kernel security saga, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced that the Linux Foundation and its Technical Advisory Board sent a letter to UMN outlining what must be done to regain the trust of the Linux community, and no further discussion will be had.

          Earlier this year, three researchers from UMN published a paper that proved that vulnerabilities could be slipped past Linux Kernel maintainers. The team used three easily fixed bugs in the Linux kernel, which all had the trappings of becoming a vulnerability, and submitted them to see if the maintainers detected a problem. Once the maintainers replied to the patch, the UMN researchers explained the bug and gave an actual patch instead of the one originally submitted.

        • The Linux Foundation Has a Few Demands for Banned University

          The researchers who got the University of Minnesota (UMN) banned from contributing to the Linux kernel are going to have to do more than apologize for their actions. ZDNet reported that the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory board sent a list of demands the university will have to meet before it can seek forgiveness.

          A quick recap: UMN researchers contributed intentionally flawed code to the Linux kernel in August 2020 for a paper on these so-called “hypocrite commits” that was published in February. A separate project meant to “automatically identify bugs introduced by other patches” then drew the ire of Greg Kroah-Hartman, the developer who oversees the Linux kernel’s stable release channel last week.

          Kroah-Hartman banned the entire UMN system from contributing to the Linux kernel as a result of the research projects. That decision was followed by an apology from the UMN Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), a significant amount of discussion amongst the Linux community, and then a separate apology from the faculty and students who actually conducted the controversial research.

        • Linux kernel security uproar: What some people missed

          Recently the Linux kernel community was aflame due to efforts by researchers at the University of Minnesota to intentionally torpedo Linux security by submitting faulty patches. While the University’s Department of Computer Science apologized, the damage was done, and Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman banned the University from contributing to the kernel.

          However you feel about what these researchers did (Chris Gaun, for example, argued, “A researcher showed how vulnerabilities can EASILY make it through [the] approval process”), this isn’t really about Linux, or open source, security. It’s always been the case that it’s possible to get bad code into good open source projects. Open source software isn’t inherently secure. Rather, it’s the open source process that is secure, and while that process kicks in during development, it’s arguably most potent after vulnerabilities are discovered.

        • The Linux Foundation Announces Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021 Will Move From Dublin, Ireland to Seattle, Washington

          The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced today that Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021, along with Linux Security Summit and OSPOCon, will take place in Seattle, Washington, USA, from September 27 – October 1.

        • Unikraft at Eurosys

          The open source Unikraft project is proud to announce that its paper titled “Unikraft: Fast, Specialized Unikernels the Easy Way” has not only been accepted at Eurosys, one of the top systems conferences in the world, but that it has been bestowed with the prestigious Best Paper Award.

          [...]

          Unikraft is part of the Xen Project, a hosted project at the Linux Foundation and can be found at www.unikraft.org. We’d be more than grateful if you took Unikraft out for a spin and gave us feedback on what you think. Contributions are, of course, more than welcome!

        • Introducing the Production Engineering Track of the MLH Fellowship, powered by Facebook

        • Announcing Istio 1.9.4

          This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.9.3 and Istio 1.9.4

  • Security

    • Security updates for Tuesday

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (gst-libav1.0, gst-plugins-bad1.0, gst-plugins-base1.0, and gst-plugins-ugly1.0), Fedora (kernel, kernel-headers, kernel-tools, and rust), openSUSE (firefox), Oracle (firefox, mariadb:10.3 and mariadb-devel:10.3, thunderbird, and xstream), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-alt, kpatch-patch, nss, and openldap), Scientific Linux (firefox, thunderbird, and xstream), SUSE (firefox), and Ubuntu (file-roller, firefox, and ruby2.7).

    • SniperPhish: An all-in-one open-source phishing toolkit

      “The idea to develop SniperPhish came to me in a period during which the company I previously worked with did many social engineering assessments. Most of the assessment included phishing campaigns, which means creating and hosting phishing websites and crafting email campaigns. The available tools had certain limitations and were not very effective at simultaneously tracking data from the phishing emails and websites,” security consultant Gem George, the tool’s creator, told Help Net Security.

      “For example, the client didn’t want us to capture the users’ passwords that were submitted to the phishing website. For each project, we were required to code for tracking data from phishing websites. Additionally, the data captured from this website needed to be mapped to the mail campaign, which was a time-consuming and often resulted in errors.”

    • Linux Kernel Bug Opens Door to Wider Cyberattacks

      The information-disclosure flaw allows KASLR bypass and the discovery of additional, unpatched vulnerabilities in ARM devices.

      An information-disclosure security vulnerability has been discovered in the Linux kernel, which can be exploited to expose information in the kernel stack memory of vulnerable devices.

      Specifically, the bug (CVE-2020-28588) exists in the /proc/pid/syscall functionality of 32-bit ARM devices running Linux, according to Cisco Talos, which discovered the vulnerability. It arises from an improper conversion of numeric values when reading the file.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Adobe sees opportunity in the death of the browser cookie [Ed: Browser cookies are unfortunately not dead]

Monopolies

• Patents

  • EPO-IEA study highlights need to accelerate innovation in clean energy technologies to meet climate goals [Ed: It is outright ridiculous that people who break the law now hijack climate change to make themselves seem ethical; this is what leads to some people to disdain over greenwashing and climate action]

    The number of patents for inventions related to low-carbon energy technologies around the world grew by an average rate of 3.3% per year in the 2017-19 period, a new joint study published today by the European Patent Office (EPO) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows.

  • EPO adopts new environmental policy, aims for carbon neutrality [Ed: Criminals at the corrupt EPO are greenwashing themselves. Never mind if their staff calls them “Mafia”… they’re “green”]

    The European Patent Office (EPO) has adopted a new environmental policy that outlines its plan to be carbon neutral by 2030. The policy will serve as an agreed framework that outlines the Office’s overall strategy and defines measurable objectives. The EPO recognises that as a large employer with sites across Europe, it has a responsibility to contribute to environmental efforts at local and global levels.

  • How patents transformed the world of architecture

    People widely describe architecture as a meeting of science and art, says associate professor of art history Peter Christensen at the University of Rochester. But his latest project, still in the early phases of research, aims to look at that characterization in detail. He’s using the measure of patents and patentability in the history of architecture to tease apart the distinctions people have made between technology and art—and to see how architectural “authorship” has functioned.

    [...]

    “The Architectural Patent” will be Christensen’s third sole-authored book, following on Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure (Yale University Press, 2017) and “Materialized: German Steel in Global Ecology” (currently in production at Penn State Press).

    When the pandemic lifts and he can travel safely again, he plans to visit major European archives, including the European Patent Office in Munich, the National Archives in the UK and the National Archives in Paris, to carry out some of his research.

    Christensen is excited that his newest work will take him in a new direction as a scholar. Rather than drilling down into a highly specialized topic, as he did in his first two books, Christensen sees his latest work, with his exploration of authorship as it pertains to architecture, as an opportunity to make a broader—or what he calls a more “horizontal”—contribution to the field of art history.

  • Software Patents

    • EPO challenge filed against ETRI and KAIST

      On April 16, 2021, Unified Patents filed an opposition in the EPO against EP 2627085. The EP ‘085 patent is owned by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). The patent is related to patents that are designated essential to the HEVC Advance patent pool as well as SISVEL’s AV1 patent pool.

      Read the entire filing below. Unified is represented by Leythem Wall at HGF Law, and by in-house counsel, Jessica L.A. Marks and Roshan Mansinghani.

Server

• Easily deploy and manage Mattermost on Kubernetes with the new Juju charmed operator

  The Mattermost Operator is part of Canonical’s Open Operator Collection, the largest collection of application operators, and can be deployed on Windows and Linux across Kubernetes and virtual estates. Features include PostgreSQL support on the backend, an Ubuntu SSO option for Mattermost Enterprise Edition E20, clustering, the storage of images and attachments in S3 and a Prometheus exporter for performance monitoring. This charmed operator also offers seamless Mattermost version upgrades, initiated by switching to an image with a newer version of Mattermost than the one currently deployed.

  As a high trust collaboration platform for enterprises, data security and developer productivity are vital to our customers – across the full operational life cycle of our software,” says Mattermost co-founder and CEO Ian Tien, “With the Canonical open-source operators, Mattermost can be installed in minutes with the assurance the implementation utilizes best practices – not just for deployment, but also for patching, upgrading and even re-architecting. In addition to full automation of day-to-day operations, these capabilities enable a unique combination of effortless ease of use across the entirety of the service life alongside a compliance-level rigor to data integrity and security.”

Kernel Space

• Char/Misc Brings Binder Freeze, PVPANIC, Habana Labs Improvements To Linux 5.13 – Phoronix

  The “char/misc” continues to be the random catch-all subsystem for the Linux kernel for drivers and buses not fitting well into other areas of the Linux kernel. Increasingly char/misc is hosting various accelerator/offload devices with the kernel still not yet introducing its own formal accelerator subsystem. With Linux 5.13 the “char/misc” pull continues to be heavy on a wide assortment of changes.

  The char/misc pull request submitted on Monday by Greg Kroah-Hartman has around fifteen thousand lines of new code added to the kernel.

• EROFS Sends In “Big Pcluster” Support For Linux 5.13, Other Improvements – Phoronix

  The EROFS read-only file-system developed by Huawei is seeing some new feature work with the in-development Linux 5.13 kernel.

  The main feature being added to EROFS with Linux 5.13 is “big pcluster” support, which will allow EROFS to compress data into more than one file-system block. Basically, EROFS big pcluster allows for compressing variable-sized input to variable-sized blocks. Performance figures and more technical details on the implementation can be found via this patch series.

• USB + Thunderbolt Updates Hit Linux 5.13 – Phoronix

  Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the big batch of USB and Thunderbolt subsystem updates on Monday for the in-development Linux 5.13 kernel.

  While no single “big ticket” USB/Thunderbolt feature for Linux 5.13, there is a wide assortment of smaller changes this cycle.

• EasyOS: Linux kernel 5.10.32 compiled

  Ramachandra has reported the internal SSD not recognized by EasyOS booted from USB stick, on his new HP laptop.

• Graphics Stack

  • Vulkan gets a new extension to aid API-translation layers like OpenGL on top of Vulkan

    The Vulkan API has been updated once again with the latest 1.2.177 spec update available, and curiously it pulls in a new extension to help API translation layers.

    VK_EXT_provoking_vertex is the new extension worked on by the likes of Google, ARM, Valve, NVIDIA, AMD and others. This isn’t the first time Vulkan has gained an extension to help a translation layer, as we’ve seen in the past developers who work on DXVK also help with extensions.

Benchmarks

• Benchmarking transparent versus 1GiB static huge page performance in Linux virtual machines

  It is one of the Linux kernel’s responsibilities to manage the translation between virtual and physical addresses for each process. Memory is organized into pages; a page table is consulted when performing virtual-to-physical address translation. In order to avoid repeatedly walking the page table, a cache known as the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) is utilized to improve performance. The size of the TLB is limited, so on machines with large amounts of physical memory, it can be advantageous to use larger page sizes to reduce the number of TLB misses.

  On the x86-64 architecture, the default page size is 4KiB, though larger page sizes of 2MiB and 1GiB are both supported. The 1GiB huge pages are supported only on processors with the pdpe1gb CPU flag.

  QEMU/KVM, by default, attempts to allocate virtual machine memory using the transparent huge page mechanism, which uses 2MiB pages. Larger 1GiB pages may be allocated to the virtual machine if both the virtualization host and virtual machine have been configured to use them. These 1GiB huge pages may be allocated either statically at boot time or dynamically at runtime. I ran my experiments using static boot-time allocation. Dynamic allocation is somewhat more complicated; other resources should be consulted if you want to use dynamic, non-transparent huge page allocation. It should also be understood that 2MiB pages may be statically allocated, but doing so is not as compelling because the transparent huge page mechanism already uses this page size.

Applications

• 10 Most Popular Download Managers for Linux in 2021

  Download managers on Windows are one of the most things that are missed for every newcomer to the Linux world, programs like Internet Download Manager & Free Download Manager are very wanted, too bad they are not available under Linux or Unix-like systems. But fortunately, there are many alternative download managers under the Linux desktop.

  [...]

  You can download the Motrix AppImage and run it directly on all Linux distribution or use snap to install Motrix, see GitHub/release for more Linux installation package formats.

  These are one of the best download managers available for Linux. Have you tried any one of them before? How did it go with you? Do you know any other download managers that should be added to this list?

• 5 Best To-Do List Apps for Linux Desktop in 2021

  Although some big-name software companies tend to stay away from Linux Desktop, Linux still has no lack of apps that can completely replace those. Whether it’s MS Office alternatives, Photoshop alternatives, or something else, Linux has plenty of good alternatives and for free. When it comes to task managing apps there’s plenty to choose from. In fact, there are so many To-Do list apps on Linux desktop you might even get confused. That’s why we have compiled a list of the 5 best To-Do list apps for Linux desktop.

  To-Do list apps are one of the most abundantly available apps. This is because like a calculator or calendar app, the feature set is rather limited and there isn’t a lot to do. These are simple apps meant for simple things. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t bad and good To-Do list apps. Some can be too basic and stick with letting users organize themselves. Others could be packed with features such as calendar integrations or integration with your emails. You’ll find all kinds of apps on this small list. If you own an Android device, here are some of the best to-do list apps that you should try.

Instructionals/Technical

• LFCA: Learn Fundamentals of Cloud Computing – Part 13

  Cloud computing is a popular buzzword that refers to an on-demand technology that has taken over the technology world by storm and simplifies the way we provision IT resources and access data. To better understand and appreciate the concept of Cloud computing, let’s go back in time and see how the technology environment looked like before the advent of cloud technology.

  Traditionally, an organization would procure physical servers and set them up in its own office. As the company grew, the growing business demands would compel the company to shift its resources to a data center where it would procure additional resources such as servers, networking equipment, backup power, and cooling systems. Now, this worked just fine but the setup presented a couple of challenges.

• Examples on how to use xargs command on Linux

  The xargs Linux command allows a user to execute command lines from standard input. If that sounds confusing, it might be easier to look at a basic example. The following command would use xargs to cat all the files listed by the ls command.

• Doing simple backups to Google Drive on Ubuntu 20.04

  Like everyone else I am one of those people who like to speak about the importance of backups, in reality, I rarely follow through on my own advice especially when it comes to important files on my computer. That changed this weekend when I decided to roll my sleeves and implement automatic backups on my primary laptop. It wasn’t at all what I expected.

• Manipulating the Ubuntu dock to keep favorite apps handy

  If you’re a Linux user, you are undoubtedly familiar with the “dock”–that column of icons lined up on the side of your screen that includes important applications, your favorites. It allows you to open the applications simply by left clicking on one of the icons.

  But did you know that you can add or remove applications from your dock and sometimes even change the location of the dock on your screen? This post shows you how to make these changes on Ubuntu.

  To add an application to the dock, start the application in the usual way. Once it’s open, you should see that it’s been temporarily added to the dock. If you want it to stay there for future use, just click on its icon in the dock and select “Add to Favorites” from the menu that opens. In this screenshot, the terminal window is being added to the dock.

• 10 monitoring tools for Linux system administrators you should know about

  Our job as system administrators has always had two things that never seem to disappear, the first one is backing up data and the second one is to monitor this and to monitor that. In this article we are going to check out some of the best Linux monitoring tools in the terminal, starting with number 10 the all well known and built in top command.

• File transfer protocols: FTP vs SFTP

  You have both secure and non-secure choices for file transfer, and each can have different advantages in different situations.

• How to install Free Download Manager on Debian-based distros (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS…)?

  If you are a previous/current Windows user you might hear about Free Download Manager as a free opensource alternative to IDM. Previously FDM was only available on windows but recently the Team behind it make it available for Linux users. With plenty of choices you may have as a penguin user, The features-rich FDM is a big addition to your apps arsenal. In this article, we will learn how to install it on a Linux system, specifically on Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu.

• Maybe a local, on-machine caching DNS resolver should be standard (for us)

  So far, we’ve been aggressive about disabling systemd-resolved in our install system (and haven’t set up any other local caching resolver). However I’m starting to wonder if we should change that, especially if Ubuntu switches to normally wanting systemd-resolved on (so that, for example, netplan is unhappy with you if resolved isn’t running).

• [Old] Speech to birdsong conversion

  A proof-of-concept script using the Perl-SoX-csdr command-line toolchain is available (source code here). The result sounds surprisingly blackbird-like. Even the little trills are there, probably as a result of FM noise or maybe vocal fry at the end of sentences. I got the best results by speaking slowly and using exaggerated inflection.

• How to Generate Strong and Random PSK Keys on Linux

  During data encryption, a PSK key is required for authentication purposes. It is an effective security protocol as someone who doesn’t know about the key won’t be able to decrypt the data. Therefore, choosing a strong PSK key is important if you are serious about protecting your data from intruders.

  But why are PSK keys important and how you can generate strong and random PSK keys automatically in Linux?

• How To Install Apache on AlmaLinux 8 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache is one of the most popular and longstanding HTTP servers. It’s an open-source and cross-platform web server software providing powerful features which can be extended by a wide variety of modules. Developed and maintained by Apache Software Foundation.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Apache webserver on an AlmaLinux 8.

• How To Install GNOME 40 On Ubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo For Testing Purposes [PPA] – Linux Uprising Blog

  This article explains how to install GNOME 40 on Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) for testing purposes, using a third-party PPA.

  GNOME 40 includes a new Activities Overview design with workspaces arranged horizontally and Dash at the bottom of the screen, updates to the GNOME apps, and much more, which you can read here. Ubuntu 21.04, which was released recently, continues to use GNOME 3.38, so you’ll have to wait another 6 months to get GNOME 40 on Ubuntu, unless you use something like the PPA mentioned in this article.

  It’s very important to note that the PPA is neither official nor stable. It should only be used for testing purposes. Below you’ll find instructions for reverting the changes and purging the PPA, but that doesn’t always work properly!

  For example, I had this PPA for a few days, and this morning when trying to purge it, it wanted to remove half the GNOME packages installed on my Ubuntu 21.04 desktop. I was able to fix this, but if you don’t know how to do this, you’ll end up with a broken desktop.

• How to Delete Files and Directories Using the Terminal in Debian 10

  We have already covered how to search for a file in Debian. In this article, I am going to demonstrate how you can delete files and directories using the terminal. There are several commands and I’ll explain them one by one with examples. I am using Debian 10 here. However, the commands and procedures mentioned below should be almost the same across different Linux distributions.

• How to Generate UUID in Linux

  UUID (Universally Unique identifier) is a 128-bit unique number standardized by the Open Software Foundation. This number is universally unique and really impossible for a user to guess.

  This tutorial shows how to generate UUID in Linux using uuidgen command line utility tool.

• How to Install LEMP Stack on Ubuntu 20.04

  The LEMP stack is a group of software used to create and deploy dynamic websites and web applications. This group of software comprises Linux, Nginx, MySQL or MariaDB, and PHP.

  Linux is the host operating system, Nginx handles HTTP requests from web clients, MySQL or MariaDB manages the storage, retrieval, and manipulation of data, and lastly, PHP handles the dynamic processing of web contents.

• How to Upgrade Fedora Linux 33 to Fedora Linux 34

  Users of the Fedora Linux 33 release can now upgrade their installations to the recently released Fedora Linux 34, so here’s a quick and painless tutorial for those who don’t know yet how to upgrade their Fedora Linux installations.

  Fedora Linux 34 is out today and it’s packed with lots of goodies, including the latest GNOME 40 desktop environment for the Fedora Workstation edition, Linux kernel 5.11, improved Btrfs file system, Wayland by default for the KDE Plasma spin, PipeWire as default sound management system, and much more.

  As expected, Fedora Linux 33 users will want to upgrade their installations right now to enjoy the new features. And, to achieve that, you will first have to ensure that your Fedora Linux 33 installation is up to date by installing all the updates that are available in the software repositories.

• 4 Ways to Install deb Files in Ubuntu [Beginner's Guide]

  This absolute beginner’s guide explains the steps required to install deb (*.deb) files in Ubuntu. This applies to all Ubuntu-based Linux distributions such as Linux Mint, elementary OS, etc.

Games

• Save islands from sinking by spreading life across them in Regrowth

  On the surface Regrowth seems simple, with you growing plants across islands to stop them from sinking. However, it’s surprisingly challenging and quite lovely. It reminded me instantly of Terra Nil, with the same basic idea of spreading life across the land. Here though, it’s down to the Earth warming and some unhappy gods.

  You’ve been tasked to help the planet cool down with greenery, with various levels giving you different island layouts and different gameplay features to complete the task. Note: the developer provided a key to our Steam Curator.

• Become an owl in Down Ward, an upcoming flight-platformer set in the haunted wilds

  Planned to release for Linux along with a successful Kickstarter campaign, Down Ward from solo developer Fisholith.

  With what the developer says is a unique flight system, it gives your little Owl unlimited airtime but you need to keep up your momentum and some skilful manoeuvring to keep going. You set out on an adventure to “rekindle the dormant relics of a land long abandoned to ruin”.

• Co-op News Punch Podcast – Episode 29

  We’re back, we’re early this time! As usual, it’s a very casual and frank chat between two friends (myself – Liam) and GOL contributor / Linux livestreamer Samsai about many different Linux-related topics.

• Block-pushing puzzler with horror elements Dark Sheep is out with music made on Game Boy

  Block-pushing puzzles with a horror twist? What more could you possibly need in such a Sokoban game? Well, Dark Sheep has some twists and turns to it you might enjoy.

  It’s a love-letter to the classic world of Commodore 64 gaming, it puts a twist on it as “Two sheep cannot take the same path, forcing you to find even more creative solutions and more!”. Not only that, the soundtrack was made using a real modified 1989 Nintendo Game Boy. The sound effects used are also retro made using “SID chip emulation”. Everything about it screams retro.

• Europa Universalis IV: Leviathan expansion is out now, plus the free Majapahit update

  Europa Universalis IV: Leviathan brings with it a number of new diplomatic and domestic options, with more opportunities for expanding and improving your nation’s position as it competes for power from the Renaissance to the Age of Revolution. The first expansion to be developed by the newer Paradox Tinto studio too.

• Silicon Dreams is a pretty rad cyberpunk interrogator sim out now

  Clockwork Bird have managed to created a thoroughly unique cyberpunk experience with Silicon Dreams, which is out now with Linux support.

  You take on the role of an interrogator android, in a “corporate-controlled dystopian future where the lines between the real and the artificial have blurred to almost nothing”. During these interviews you get to monitor their emotions including joy, sadness, anger, disgust, shock, and fear – while also using each to your own advantage. Not all is as it seems of course, secrets are hidden beneath the surface and eventually you will need to pick a side resulting in multiple endings depending on your choices.

• Microsoft fixes Windows update that impairs gaming performance

  PC gamers have been complaining about impaired gaming performance in the wake of one of two Windows 10 patches; the KB5001330 update, or the preview version of the same which was dubbed KB5000842. An official Nvidia staff member on the GeForce forums has already recommended those affected by slower gaming after these updates to ‘roll them back’. Now Microsoft has at last acknowledged the problem and started an action to fix the mess.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Plasma Mobile Update Introduces New App to Listen to YouTube Music, Multiple Homescreen Pages

    Now that PINE64 choose to ship their latest PinePhone Linux phones with the KDE Plasma Mobile UI on top of the Arch Linux-based Manjaro Linux ARM distribution, the KDE Project is working day and night to improve Plasma Mobile by offering more new features, new apps, and whatnot to make your Linux phone experience better.

    The Plasma Mobile updates for March and April 2021 brings several new apps to the ever-growing collection of mobile apps. These include AudioTube, a new application to listen to YouTube Music, DayKountdown, a new application for managing countdowns of special dates, Keepassk, a client for the KeePass password manager, OptiImage, an image optimizer, and Kolibri, a basic email client that currently only lets you read emails.

Distributions

• [Reposted] 5 Linux Distributions That are Inspired by the Look and Feel of macOS

  There are several beautiful Linux distributions already present in the Linux world. But for some reason, people are fixated on the looks of Apple’s macOS.

  Now, not everyone can afford or would want to buy a MacBook just to use macOS. You could go for a Hackintosh but that would mean ditching Linux, something a Linux lover like me wouldn’t do.

  The good thing about Linux is that it has endless possibilities. When it comes to tweaking its looks, you can do wonders. Imagine making Ubuntu look like MacOS. It’s totally possible.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

  • tor-browser-bundle updated to 10.0.16 » PCLinuxOS

    The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: It prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.

  • strawberry updated to 0.9.3 » PCLinuxOS

    Strawberry is a audio player and music collection organizer. It is a fork of Clementine. The name is inspired by the band Strawbs.

  • worker updated to 4.8.0 » PCLinuxOS

    Worker is a graphical filemanager for the X Window System. It use the classical two-panel-view of the files and directories. It hast many intern operations while any extern program can also be used for operate on the selected items. You can easily add actions to filetypes or buttons with the builtin configuration program.

  • telegram-desktop updated to 2.7.2 » PCLinuxOS

    Telegram is an Open Source instant messaging platform for mobile and desktop focused on privacy.

  • solaar updated to 1.0.6 » PCLinuxOS

    Solaar is a Linux device manager for Logitech’s Unifying Receiver peripherals. It is able to pair/unpair devices to the receiver, and for most devices read battery status.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Fedora Linux 34 Officially Released with GNOME 40, Linux Kernel 5.11, and More

    The first biggest change in the Fedora Linux 34 release is, of course, the inclusion of the latest and greatest GNOME 40 desktop environment in the Fedora Workstation edition. This change alone brings many changes to the way Fedora Workstation looks and feel due to the Activities Overview redesign of the GNOME 40 release.

    Fedora Linux will now start in the Overview mode after login. Due to this change, the GNOME Welcome Tour app has been adapted to the new design for an integrated and cohesive look, according to the Fedora Project, but this change will probably only affect newcomers, not those who will upgrade from Fedora Linux 33.

  • Fedora 34 Released with Cutting-Edge Tech. What’s New and Download Details

    Fedora team made available the Fedora 34 release .iso across workstations, spins, and servers. Fedora 34 release brings massive changes and cutting-edge tech across desktops, servers, and packages. This is what’s new.

  • Fedora 34 Released As A Hugely Exciting Update For This Linux Distribution

    It’s Fedora 34 day! Fedora 34 is now officially available and it’s quite exciting on the feature front especially with the changes to be enjoyed in Fedora Workstation 34.

    Fedora 34 has successfully managed to switch over to PipeWire from PulseAudio for its audio needs, Fedora Workstation 34 continues making use of Btrfs as the default file-system while now has enabled Zstd-based transparent file-system compression by default, systemd-oomd is being used for handling out-of-memory / memory pressure situations, toolchain upgrades with GCC 11 / Binutils 2.35 / Glibc 2.33 / LLVM 12 are exciting for developers and those with newer processors, and Wayland by default for the Fedora KDE Plasma desktop version, and HarfBuzz has been enabled in FreeType for better looking font rendering. XWayland is also in better shape with Fedora 34 thanks to using the standalone XWayland build.

  • Fedora Linux 34 is officially here!

    Today, I’m excited to share the results of the hard work of thousands of contributors to the Fedora Project: our latest release, Fedora Linux 34, is here! I know a lot of you have been waiting… I’ve seen more “is it out yet???” anticipation on social media and forums than I can remember for any previous release. So, if you want, wait no longer — upgrade now or go to Get Fedora to download an install image. Or, if you’d like to learn more first, read on.

    The first thing you might notice is our beautiful new logo. Developed by the Fedora Design Team with input from the wider community, this new logo solves a lot of the technical problems with our old logo while keeping its Fedoraness. Stay tuned for new Fedora swag featuring the new design!

  • Fedora Community Blog: The Fedora Podcast is back! But it needs your help

    The Fedora Marketing team is bringing back the Fedora Podcast. We have two main people working on it currently: Eduard (x3mboy) and me (Grayson/computerkid). That has been working great to get things rolling but there is plenty to do and. We need to bring in more of the community After all, Fedora is Friends and we need help from our friends! We also want to have a diverse group of folks involved in the Fedora Podcast project.

  • Using open hybrid cloud to take full advantage of cloud computing

    To gain all the benefits of the cloud, a hybrid approach is a must.

  • The evolution of computing and open hybrid cloud

    For cloud computing to evolve, we need to democratize its tremendous power through open standards at every level – from service APIs to hardware.

  • RHEL 8.4 brings continuous stability plus innovation

    Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.4 will be available in the coming weeks. In this post we’ll take a look at some of the highlights and important features coming in 8.4 for RHEL subscribers and on-demand public cloud users as well. Across the hybrid cloud, all the way to the edge, RHEL 8.4 has improvements that will help simplify the deployment and management of applications and infrastructure.

  • Assess. Build. Deploy. Manage. Every CIO is now a cloud operator.

  • Insight into Red Hat Insights: From open hybrid cloud visibility to supporting innovation

  • Introducing Red Hat OpenShift API Management

  • Introducing Red Hat OpenShift Data Science

  • Introducing Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka

  • CloudLinux Announces Commercial Support for its CentOS Alternative AlmaLinux OS

    CentOS alternative AlmaLinux announced the availability of their first stable release a month back.

    If you are planning to replace your CentOS deployments or have already started to utilize AlmaLinux OS, you will be happy to know that you are about to get commercial support and premium support soon.

    CloudLinux, the sponsor of the project announced that it will start providing multiple support options next month.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • ELBE: automated building of Ubuntu images for a Raspberry Pi 3B

    Typical embedded Linux systems include a wide number of software components, which all need to be compiled and integrated together. Two main approaches are used in the industry to integrate such embedded Linux systems: build systems such as Yocto/OpenEmbedded, Buildroot or OpenWrt, and binary distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora. Of course, both options have their own advantages and drawbacks.

    One of the benefits of using standard binary distributions such as Debian or Ubuntu is their widespread use, their serious and long-term security maintenance and their large number of packages. However, they often lack appropriate tools to automate the process of creating a complete Linux system image that combines existing binary packages and custom packages.

  • Ubuntu 21.04 released

    Ubuntu 21.04 is an important release, if only because of the switch to Wayland, following in Fedora’s footsteps. Ubuntu did opt out of shipping GNOME 40, though, so it comes with 3.38 instead. The step to Wayland is surely going to cause problems for some people, but overall, I think it’s high time and Wayland is pretty much as ready as it’s ever going to be. Remember, Wayland is not X, as I said a few months ago..

  • Upgrading to Ubuntu 21.04 Is Not a Good Idea Right Now

    Last week, Canonical released Ubuntu 21.04, which as usual results in a rush of upgrades from the previous version. However, Ubuntu users are now being told not to upgrade manually, and won’t be seeing the upgrade notification pop-up for some time.

    As OMG!Ubuntu reports, the unusual situation where developers are telling users not to upgrade to the latest version of their operating system has come about because of a serious bug.

    Brian Murray, Ubuntu Bugmaster working at Canonical, wrote an email to the Ubuntu developer mailing list explaining, “In case you missed it in the release notes[1] and hear people asking about it, I wanted to let you know that users of Ubuntu 20.10 are not being prompted to upgrade to Ubuntu 21.04 … This is due to a bug[2] with the current version of shim in Ubuntu 21.04 which can cause systems with an early version of EFI to fail to boot after the upgrade.”

  • Ubuntu 21.04 is out, here is why you shouldn’t upgrade yet

    Everybody loves shiny new things and those who love Ubuntu are no different. The latest shiny thing in the Ubuntu world came out last Thursday in the form of the latest Ubuntu release 21.04 code-named Hirsute Hippo. As I have already hinted in my brief review of the beta version, while Ubuntu 21.04 doesn’t look that different from its predecessor, it does come with plenty of changes under the hood.

Devices/Embedded

• Unofficial PS5 Remote Play Comes to Raspberry Pi

  Being able to play your PlayStation 4 and 5 games all around your house via Remote Play streaming is a neat feature, but the small number of officially supported devices means you’re stuck with Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, or another PlayStation. Enterprising coders determined to get an open-source Remote Play client running on a wider selection of devices have had it happily streaming on Linux for a while, and the humble Raspberry Pi, with its Debian-based OS, is the latest target, as shown in this video from Philippines-based Evoneg Tech.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • How can we design inclusive and accessible curricula for computer science?

  • Refurb weekend: Hewlett-Packard 9000/350

    In 1987 this would have been a heck of a computer, but you would have paid somewhere north of $50,000 for this configuration which would be a whopping $115,000+ in 2021 money. For comparison, the most I’ve ever personally paid for a computer was $11,000 for my POWER6, purchased used in 2010 (in 2021 about $13,300), whereas this machine I got for “come and get it” over a decade and a half ago (tip of the hat to Stan and Kevin). It also came with a separate 9000/319C+ system unit, but that’s in storage since the 350 is much more powerful (the 319C+ is essentially a consolidated, cost-reduced and minimally upgradeable 330). The Homer Simpson doll was included.

  • How TSMC has mastered the geopolitics of chipmaking

    The most important firm in this critical business is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). It controls 84% of the market of chips with the smallest, most efficient circuits on which the world’s biggest technology brands, from Apple in America to Alibaba in China, rely to make their snazzy products and services possible. As demand for the most sophisticated chips surges thanks to the expansion of fast communication networks and cloud computing, TSMC is pouring vast additional sums of money into expanding its dominance of the cutting edge.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Realme X2 users can now try out Realme UI 2.0 with Android 11

  • OnePlus 6 & 6T Android 11 update: Here’s what we know – PiunikaWeb

  • Motorola Android 11 update: List of eligible devices & release date

  • Nokia 2.4 receiving Android 11 update – GSMArena.com news

  • Realme X7 Pro Gets Android 11-Based RealmeUI 2.0 Early Access, And it Might Be a Long Wait For a Stable Rollout – MySmartPrice

  • Oppo A53 ColorOS 11 (Android 11) beta update program opens up

  • The aging Galaxy A9 (2018) has secured the latest Android security update – SamMobile

  • Bleak warning issued to anybody with an Android phone in the UK – Manchester Evening News

  • Top 10 Best Nvidia Android Tvs 2021 – Bestgamingpro

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• 5 Open-Source Software Options You Should Know About

  In a world seemingly dominated by a few tech giants and closely kept company secrets, open-source software bucks the trend. Encouraging the sharing of knowledge and collaboration on tech projects, some companies are proving that giving everyone the opportunity to improve and innovate can accelerate progress.

  Open-source software is where users are able to view, access, and edit source code. This can be carried out by an individual or as a collaborative project among users working towards a common goal. The ability to call upon the knowledge and experience of people from a variety of backgrounds can often lead to more effective solutions and greater innovations.

• Perform Linux memory forensics with this open source tool

  A computer’s operating system and applications use the primary memory (or RAM) to perform various tasks. This volatile memory, containing a wealth of information about running applications, network connections, kernel modules, open files, and just about everything else is wiped out each time the computer restarts.

  Memory forensics is a way to find and extract this valuable information from memory. Volatility is an open source tool that uses plugins to process this type of information. However, there’s a problem: Before you can process this information, you must dump the physical memory into a file, and Volatility does not have this ability.

• Upgrade your Linux PC hardware using open source tools

• How Xiaomi Became an Internet-of-Things Powerhouse

  When Xiaomi entered the fiercely competitive smartphone market in 2010, it did so without even offering a real phone. The company only offered a free Android-based operating system (OS). Yet, within seven years, Xiaomi became one of the world’s largest smartphone makers, reaching $15 billion in revenue. Accelerating its growth rate, Xiaomi transformed into the world’s largest consumer IoT (Internet of Things) firm by 2020, with its revenue surpassing $37 billion and more than 210 million IoT devices (excluding smartphones and laptops) sold across more than 90 countries.

  [...]

  Xiaomi released a new OS version for download every Friday afternoon, as its tech-savvy consumers were heading home for the weekend. Its engineers followed up on user suggestions as soon as they were received, often corresponding with users to resolve issues together. This co-development process enhanced Xiaomi’s brand awareness and likability and prepared a segment of potential consumers for the entry of Xiaomi’s phones, without spending money on traditional advertising.

• A ransomware gang made $260,000 in 5 days using the 7zip utility

  A ransomware gang has made $260,000 in just five days simply by remotely encrypting files on QNAP devices using the 7zip archive program.

  Starting on Monday, QNAP NAS users from all over the world suddenly found their files encrypted after a ransomware operation called Qlocker exploited vulnerabilities on their devices.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • New Release: Tor Browser 10.5a15

      Tor Browser 10.5a15 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

      Note: This is an alpha release, an experimental version for users who want to help us test new features. For everyone else, we recommend downloading the latest stable release instead.

• Programming/Development

  • GCC 11.1 Released

    The GCC developers are proud to announce another major GCC release, 11.1.
    
    This release switches the default debugging format to DWARF 5 [1] on most
    targets and switches the default C++ language version to -std=gnu++17.
    It makes great progress in the C++20 language support, both on the compiler
    and library sides [2], adds experimental C++23 support, some C2X enhancements,
    various optimization enhancements and bug fixes, several new hardware
    enablement changes and enhancements to the compiler back-ends and many other
    changes.
    
    Some code that compiled successfully with older GCC versions might require
    source changes, see http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-11/porting_to.html for
    details.
    
    See
    
    https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-11/changes.html
    
    for more information about changes in GCC 11.1.
    
    This release is available from the WWW and FTP servers listed here:
    
    https://sourceware.org/pub/gcc/releases/gcc-11.1.0/
    
    
    https://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html
    
    The release is in the gcc-11.1.0/ subdirectory.
    
    If you encounter difficulties using GCC 11.1, please do not contact me
    directly.  Instead, please visit http://gcc.gnu.org for information about
    getting help.
    
    Driving a leading free software project such as GCC would not be possible
    without support from its many contributors.
    Not only its developers, but especially its regular testers and users which
    contribute to its high quality.  The list of individuals
    is too large to thank individually!
    

  • GCC 11.1 Released With Initial Work For Intel AMX / Sapphire Rapids, More C++20/C++23 – Phoronix

    GCC 11.1 is out today as the first stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection 11.

    GCC 11 as the annual feature release to this open-source, multi-language code compiler is now officially out in the form of v11.1. GCC 11 is already found in Fedora 34 while it will work its way into more Linux distributions and other environments as the year progresses.

    GCC 11 features include support for a number of recent and upcoming Intel, AMD, and Arm processors. GCC 11 also now defaults to C++17 mode by default, improves its C++20 support, adds in more early C++23 features, works on its C2X language coverage, has begun preparing for Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX), and much more as outlined in the aforelinked article.

  • Excellent Free Tutorials and Resources to Learn J

    The J programming language, developed in the early 1990s by Kenneth E. Iverson and Roger Hui, is an array programming language based primarily on APL (also by Iverson). It’s available on a wide variety of computers and operating systems. J is distinguished by its simple and consistent rules, a large set of built-in capabilities, powerful facilities for defining new operations, and a general and systematic treatment of arrays.

    The J system provides: an engine for executing J; various front ends that provide user interfaces to the J engine; a library, written in J, that provides an IDE (interactive development environment), numerous tools, utilities, demos, tutorials; and online documentation.

    J is a very terse array programming language, and is most suited to mathematical and statistical programming, especially when performing operations on matrices. It has also been used in extreme programming and network performance analysis.

    J supports function-level programming via its tacit programming features.

    J is free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License version 3.

  • Stephen Kelly: Location, Location, Location

    As of a few days ago, a new feature in clang-query allows introspecting the source locations for a given clang AST node. The feature is also available for experimentation in Compiler Explorer. I previously delivered a talk at EuroLLVM 2019 and blogged in 2018 about this feature and others to assist in discovery of AST matchers and source locations. This is a major step in getting the Tooling API discovery features upstream into LLVM/Clang.

  • A theory of how developers seek information

    Researchers have been developing a theory, Information Foraging Theory (IFT), of how people seek information, whether it be on the web, in a filing cabinet, or even in source code. It follows a metaphor that stems from animals looking for food in the wild.

  • Some useful regular expressions for programmers

    In my blog post, My programming setup, I stressed how important regular expressions are to my programming activities.

    Regular expressions can look intimidating and outright ugly. However, they should not be underestimated.

    Someone asked for examples of regular expressions that I rely upon. Here a few.

  • 11 Most Common Mistakes That Android Developers Make

    Android is a reliable, customizable, free, and widely used operating system. During the process of developing an android app, we make a lot of mistakes and most of them are common. That’s not the issue that we are making mistakes, but it is always a bigger issue than anything else if we are not learning something by doing a mistake. Learning from mistakes should be in our attitude as an android app developer.

    Also, It is advisable by experts that we should not make the same mistake repeatedly. To doing so, we have to identify that mistake and after learning from it, we should try our best to not make that mistake again. That approach will be an overall development approach for ourselves. The first step is the identification that what we are doing wrong. In this article, we will know about the Top 11 most common mistakes that android developers make.

The Craft of John Edgar Wideman

John Edgar Wideman has outlived many of his peers. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1941, he grew up in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh and went on to attend the University of Pennsylvania. In 1963, he became the second African American to win a Rhodes scholarship, and in 1965, he began an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied under Kurt Vonnegut, among others. In 1967, Harcourt published his first novel, A Glance Away, and he was off to the races. Since then, Wideman has published nine more novels, six collections of short stories, and five memoirs, earning nearly every award possible in the process. Despite this long career, and despite the deaths of many of his contemporaries, Wideman shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. His commitment to finding new stories to tell, his attentive chronicling of persistence through loss, and his dedication to craft have made him one of the greatest living Black writers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The Billionaires Who Couldn’t Kick Straight

Jesus on a Spike

Why did they shoot Jesus? They ask Confronted by these idols For Jesus said: let’s share the bread Help the poor None should go hungry When there is such plenty None should be homeless

Let’s care for each other And healed people’s blindness

Short Cuts: Films From the Vault

Au Hasard Balthazar, Robert Bresson (1966) +++

Le Proces de Jeanne d’Arc, Bresson (1962) +

A Mistaken Take on Revolutionary Strategy, the Case of 1905

To date the most important revolutionary movement that wrested power from the powerful and placed it firmly in the hands of organised workers was the Russian Revolution of October 1917. As such critical lessons can be learned from this historic event. First off, we should note that the transfer of power to the Russian masses is commonly disparaged by its ideological opponents as representing a coup d’état that was carried through by a small band of revolutionaries. This is a lie: because the October Revolution’s success was built upon the power of a genuine mass movement of millions. Secondly, the Revolution is presented by its critics as an act of violent bloodletting when it was nothing of the sort. The real violence came through the capitalist counterrevolution. Rather than let Russia’s democratic workers’ state remain intact, more than twenty foreign states unleashed a vicious civil war on the Russian people.

Violence on trial

Science

• CSC joins the OpenMP effort

  32 vendors and research organizations now collaborating on developing a standard parallel programming model.

  CSC has joined the OpenMP ARB, a group of leading hardware vendors, software vendors, and research organizations creating the standard for the most popular shared-memory parallel programming model in use today.

• Space is the Place

  Recently I read an article in one of my favorite alternatives to the MSM, Business Insider, “Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have profound visions for humanity’s future in space. Here’s how the billionaires’ goals compare.” As the title suggests, the two billionaires, when not fucking around with gadgetry and automation and the realignment of democracy on Earth, have their minds entangled in ideas of space colonization and exploitation. The article details the differences in their goals and approach.

  Elon Musk scares me. Something doesn’t smell right.  Maybe it’s the pigs he’s implanting mind control devices in that bothers me; the oinkers shitting themselves as Musk keeps their eyes open — ala Clockwork Orange — and forces them to watch the animated Animal Farm film and choose between Napoleon and Snowball. Fascism or Socialism. Supplementary feed is up for grabs. No time to wallow in the mud.

• The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 85: Céline Castets-Renard on Europe’s Plan to Regulate Artificial Intelligence

  Credits:EuroNews, ‘The higher the risk, the stricter the rule’: Brussels’ new draft rules on artificial intelligence

Education

• Washington State Lawmakers Approve Capital Gains Tax on Wealthiest to Fund Public Education

  “This is the most equitable change to Washington state’s upside-down tax code in nearly 90 years,” says the Washington State Budget and Policy Center.

• A White Providence Public School Teacher Writing in Tears

  I don’t doubt that a few of my colleagues have some rather retrograde opinions. I know that some of my coworkers voted for Trump. But on a very simple gut level, none of us want to see our kids end up getting killed over an iced tea and Skittles.

  When I saw the news about the Chicago Police murder of Adam Toledo, I sat in my car and burst into tears. As I have watched the news coverage of Duante Wright’s mother speaking to the press, a woman who looks like the majority of the membership of the Providence Teachers Union, I cannot help but imagine how they would feel about a cop shooting their kid. Ma’Khia Bryant resembles so many girls that I have joked around with in class over the years about the most shallow of topics in the catty banter that helps build student-teacher relationships, from television to music to mall shopping.

Health/Nutrition

• ‘They think one healthy X chromosome is enough’: Russians doing battle with rare diseases are also fighting government officials to get the medications they need

  There are many people in Russia battling rare diseases. But no one knows exactly how many. Their treatment is often expensive with some drugs costing millions of rubles. Though the Russian state claims to be helping them, in practice its officials find many ways to “save money” on such people — in some cases, they even ignore court rulings obliging them to provide seriously ill patients with necessary medicines. Meduza investigates why this is happening and whether there might be a way to fix it.

• Scores of House Dems Demand Biden Act on ‘Important Expansion of Medicare’

  “Lowering the Medicare eligibility age and improving its benefits package would provide immediate and substantial relief for millions of individuals throughout the United States.”

• Biden Admin Plans to Help 34 Million Kids Losing School Lunches in Summertime

• At India’s Request, Twitter Blocks Posts Critical of Modi COVID Response

• The COVID-19 Catastrophe in India Keeps Growing

  It is difficult to overstate the grip of COVID-19 on India. WhatsApp bristles with messages about this or that friend and family member with the virus, while there are angry posts about how the central government has utterly failed its citizenry. This hospital is running out of beds and that hospital has no more oxygen, while there is evasion from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Cabinet.

  Thirteen months after the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the world was in the midst of a pandemic, the Indian government looks into the headlights like a transfixed animal, unable to move. While other countries are well advanced on their vaccination programs, the Indian government sits back and watches a second wave or a third wave land heavily on the Indian people.

• Why Do We Forget Pandemics?

  The second Moderna shot made me sick—as predicted. A 24-hour touch of what an alarmed immune system feels like left me all the more grateful for my good fortune in avoiding the real thing and for being alive at a time when science had devised a 95 percent effective vaccine in record time.

• Parents Want Justice for Birth Injuries. Hospitals Want to Strip Them of the Right to Make That Decision.

  Ashley Lamendola was still a teen when medical staff at St. Petersburg General Hospital delivered the awful news that would change her life forever: Her newborn son, Hunter, had suffered profound brain damage and would do little more than breathe without help.

  “It was like an atomic bomb went off in my life,” she said.

• Christian Elliot’s “18 Reasons I Won’t Be Getting a Covid Vaccine”: 18 antivaccine lies

  As a general practice, I tend to be reluctant to do point-by-point rebuttals of listicles published by antivaxxers, quacks, conspiracy theorists, and other cranks, not so much because it isn’t worthwhile to do so, but generally because, the longer the listicle, the longer the rebuttal. Worse, these disinformation vehicles tend to be written in such a way that each rebuttal tends to take a lot of verbiage, ballooning the rebuttal to levels of verbosity that to make even me hesitate. Still, enough readers have sent me a post by someone named Christian Elliot that appeared a week ago on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s antivaccine website Children’s Health Defense entitled “18 Reasons I Won’t Be Getting a COVID Vaccine”. Apparently, he originally published it on his own website, Deconstructing Conventional, a week and a half before even that. Somehow I missed it when it first showed up, but now I’m seeing both versions everywhere, posted by antivaxxers as though they were Gospel about COVID-19 vaccines. In fact, Mr. Elliot’s listicle is nothing more than a “greatest hits” of antivaccine tropes, both general and specific to COVID-19 vaccines, all gathered in one handy place for antivaxxers to share. No wonder his post went viral.

• Spermageddon: everyday chemicals lead to 50% drop in sperm count in Western men

  Women will struggle to get pregnant naturally in the next few decades without stronger regulation of chemicals. Rates of miscarriages, abnormalities in penis development and intersexuality are all increasing at alarming levels. Professors Alex Ford and Gary Hutchison report.

  The sperm count of Western men has plunged by more than 50% in less than 40 years according to a raft of evidence detailed by epidemiologist Shanna Swan in her new book “Countdown”.

  If the data is extrapolated to its logical conclusion, men could have little or no reproductive capacity from 2060 onwards. And one of the main causes of the declining sperm levels is the chemicals we’re surrounded by in our everyday lives.

• Beware Of Humans

  Coleman knew those risks because of his job. Researchers had figured out a little more than a decade ago that scientists themselves were spreading white-nose syndrome from bat colony to bat colony. Full of good intentions but lacking gloves, researchers had become partly responsible for the epidemic. Obviously a horrific loss for the bats themselves, it has also affected humans. That’s because bats are an important part of our food supply, eating insects that would otherwise attack crops and pollinating some of our favorite fruit trees. White-nose syndrome has killed at least 7 million bats in North America since 2006. Humans have helped spread it, worsening the crisis.

  That realization changed how research like O’Keefe’s is done. After that discovery, she began to wear gloves, changed them between handling each bat and boiled her teams’ gear and clothes in a daily dance of decontamination. Reverse zoonosis put the fear of God into the bat research community.

  But, more broadly, reverse zoonosis is still a risk that isn’t taken as seriously as it should be, scientists told me. It’s probably more common for viruses to spread from humans to animals than we even know, said Kevin Olival, vice president for research at the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance. And a virus that does this is a virus you can’t eradicate. It becomes endemic, waiting patiently, changing in ways that can make it able to infect us again.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • EU-backed tool to combat cheating in online exams finally ready

    Amid reports of a spike in cheating, technology companies rushed out online proctoring products during 2020. But many faced a backlash from students who found tools such as video monitoring intrusive, while academics questioned the efficacy of such products.

  • Roku Warns Users That YouTube TV May Be Pulled Over Google Dispute

    Roku, in a message sent to YouTube TV subscribers that use its platform, said that Google demanded that Roku prioritize YouTube content in its search results, and demanded that it use certain chips or memory cards that would force the company to raise the prices of its hardware.

  • The erosion of personal ownership

    These problems share a legal history. Traditionally, in US law, the so-called “first-sale doctrine” (also known as exhaustion) limits sellers’ ability to control what a customer does with their copy of a copyrighted work after purchase (e.g., reselling a book). But with the advent of intangible goods like software, which could be copied identically from a purchased version, rights holders grew concerned over a single sale’s potential widespread duplication. Courts struggled to apply the laws concerning traditional property to goods that did not exist in physical space. As Washington and Lee University law professor Joshua A.T. Fairfield writes in his book Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom, intellectual [sic] property [sic] law filled the void.

    A crucial decision came in 1993 when the Ninth Circuit of the US Court of Appeals ruled in MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer Inc. that the local, impermanent copy of an operating system that is loaded into a computer’s RAM upon its booting up — a necessary component of a computer’s operation — is, by virtue of making a copy of intellectual [sic] property [sic] (the operating system), subject to copyright law. This “deeply stupid ruling,” Fairfield tells Vox, laid a trap, making the use of any software (broadly meaning nearly anything used on a computer system) a copyright violation unless the user followed rules set unilaterally by the manufacturer and/or seller. “That was the case that handed the keys to the kingdom to these companies,” Fairfield says.

    These legal principles have carried over to the so-called Internet of Things, in which tangible objects are embedded with copyrighted software (a.k.a. smart devices, like smart refrigerators and televisions and cars). As discovered by those John Deere customers, even wholly purchased real-world objects are subject to user agreements imposed by the seller. Here Fairfield cites the tech principle known as Doctorow’s First Law: “Anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, and won’t give you a key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.”

  • Apple will spend $1 billion to open 3,000-employee campus in North Carolina

    Apple’s expansion will be located in North Carolina’s Research Triangle area, which gets its name from nearby North Carolina State University, Duke University and the University of North Carolina. Apple CEO Tim Cook and COO Jeff Williams have MBAs from Duke. Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue, who is in charge of the company’s online services, graduated from Duke.

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Trust and Taint – University of Minnesota Banned By Linux

          The irony of this situation is that the controversial project that led to loss of trust in the University of Minnesota was intended to improve the security of Linux. The research, conducted in August 2020, was by Kangije Lu, Assistant Professor and graduate student Qjushi Wu and their paper “On the Feasibility of Stealthily Introducing Vulnerabilities in Open-Source Software via Hypocrite Commits” has been accepted for 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The research, which was supported by the NSF (National Science Foundation), included explicit safeguards to ensure that no bugs were merged into the Linux Kernel as a result of the experiment, although it now seems that a mutex close error many have slipped though, an error that has been fixed.

          The ban however wasn’t made as a response to this paper. Instead the trigger was a more recent set of “obviously-incorrect patches” submitted by Aditya Pakki, another of Lu’s Ph.D students who has explained that they were submitted as a result of his work on “a new static analyzer”.

          For Kroah-Hartmann, who as the main Linux kernel maintainer, has the ultimate responsibility for its safety and security, the submission of new buggy patches was the last straw and his suspicion was that it again part of some research experiment as reflected in his tweet:

        • Linux Foundation demands action from university found meddling with kernel

          Following the recent “Hypocrite Commits” row, it’s now being reported that the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board, representing the interests of the kernel community, has asked the University of Minnesota (UMN) to undertake certain actions before their people will be allowed to contribute to Linux again.

          This follows the recent incident where a couple of UMN computer scientists riled up Linux developers by intentionally submitting questionable code to the mainline kernel.

          The dubious code submissions were done for the purposes of a research paper, titled, “On the Feasibility of Stealthily Introducing Vulnerabilities in Open-Source Software via Hypocrite Commits.”

        • The Linux Kernel Team May Not Be Entirely Happy with University of Minnesota’s Apology

          Recently, University of Minnesota was banned from contributing to Linux Kernel code.

          If you have been following up with that news, you probably know that it was all supposedly a part of study (research) to review the process of submitting Linux kernel patches and assessing the security risks associated.

          However, without consulting the Linux Kernel maintainers or taking any permission, it was a breach of trust, which is a big deal for the Linux developers.

        • Get to Know GitOps [Ed: LPI seems to be in the bag of the Linux Foundation, i.e. overlapping interests that are Free software-hostile and buzzwords-leaning (to misleading people)]

          If you’re working in today’s IT world, you probably know about DevOps, but you may not be familiar with the more recent concept of GitOps. That’s ok; both the definition and practices of GitOps are still evolving. And, although GitOps is difficult to explain in a few words, the resources provided in this article will help you understand the basics.

  • Security

    • Hashicorp revoked private key exposed in Codecov security breach [Ed: Centralisation as security risk that extends to Microsoft servers, which often serve malware (e.g. GitHub/NPM)]

      Codecov’s breach is a form of supply chain attack, where attackers target a company’s suppliers or vendors. By compromising Codecov, the attackers got their hands on all kinds of API keys, login credentials, and other security information. In the case of HashiCorp, if the attackers had tampered with the company’s tools, that would be yet another supply chain attack because those tools are widely used within enterprises.

    • Experian’s Credit Freeze Security is Still a Joke

    • Signal Founder Cracks Cellebrite Phone Hacking Device, Finds It Full Of Vulns

      A pretty hilarious turn of events has led to Cellebrite’s phone hacking tech being hacked by Signal’s Moxie Marlinspike, revealing the tech law enforcement uses to pull data from seized phones is host to major security flaws.

    • Microsoft Teams was down worldwide for many users for two hours

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Louisiana Drug Warriors Bungle Surveillance So Badly Their Target Catches Them Placing A Tracking Device On Her Car

        You’d think a team of highly trained professionals working in the narcotics enforcement field would be a bit more careful than this. (via Jalopnik)

      • Ban facial recognition in Europe, says EU privacy watchdog

        Facial recognition should be banned in Europe because of its “deep and non-democratic intrusion” into people’s private lives, EU privacy watchdog the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) said on Friday.

        The comments come two days after the European Commission proposed draft rules that would allow facial recognition to be used to search for missing children or criminals and in cases of terrorist attacks.

        The draft rules, which need to be thrashed out with EU countries and the European Parliament, are an attempt by the Commission to set global rules for artificial intelligence, a technology dominated by China and the United States.

      • English Soccer Will Boycott Social Media to Protest Online Abuse

        English soccer officials said Saturday that they would conduct a social media blackout next weekend to protest “the ongoing and sustained discriminatory abuse received online by players and many others connected to football.”

        The boycott has the support of a coalition of groups, including the Premier League, the richest and most high profile soccer league in the world, but also England’s soccer federation; the top two professional tiers of men’s and women’s soccer; referees; the country’s players union, and others.

Defence/Aggression

• Biden Is Reviewing US Policy in North Korea. The Brutal Sanctions Must End.

• Did They Miss Yet Another F-35 Cost Overrun?

  A compressed summary of the hearing and an explanation of the apparent overrun follow.

  The Joint House Armed Services Subcommittees hearing on the F-35 was summarized effectively by USNI News, Bloomberg, Breaking Defense and Defense News. The hearing started with aggressive (F-35 critical) statements from the two Democratic Subcommittee Chairmen: Rep. Donald Norcross, D-N.J., of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee and Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., of the Readiness Subcommittee. (See Breaking Defense and Defense News.) Additional important content of the hearing, covered by Bloomberg and USNI News, centered on the huge and growing costs to operate and support (O&S) F-35s – currently estimated to be $1.266 trillion in GAO’s testimony. Recurring O&S subjects in the hearing included the growing cost to update the F-35 with what are called Block 4 and Technology Refresh Three (TR 3), ongoing and future problems with the engine, inadequate spare parts and the low readiness of all variants of the F-35 as measured by Mission Capability (MC) or – better – Fully Mission Capability (FMC) rates.

• How to be a German Neo-Nazi Girl

  Eventually Irma Grese managed to get out of the far-right world of violence, authoritarianism and strict adherence to the code of Nazism. able to escape largely because she had, during those dark decades, continued contact with what Neo-Nazis call “the outside world” – that is, Germany’s civil society. Irma Grese’s son also played a crucial role in her decision to leave the stinking swamp of Nazism behind.

  Irma Grese left the far-right scene in 2008. Afraid of the vindictiveness of her old Neo-Nazi companions, only today is she willing to tell her story. For Germany’s local police as well as its secret police – the Verfassungschutz – Irma Grese’s unexpected departure was sensational news. At that time, both police forces could hardly believe their good luck, that a hard-core member of the Neo-Nazi’s inner circle left the movement. It came as a complete surprise. They wondered if she would talk and reveal the long-sought-after secrets of these extremist groups.

• Ethiopia: Violence Instability and the Need for Law and Order

  With around 117 million people, Ethiopia has the second largest population in Africa, made up of 80 or so tribal groups, all with their own cultures, language or dialect. Three big ones dominate: The Oromo (35% of population), Amhara (27%) and Tigrayan (6%). Historic disputes over land and power exist between these powerful groups; grievances which are being aggravated by pernicious elements attempting to destabilize the country.

  On November 5th 2020 an armed conflict erupted in the Tigray region, between the federal government and the armed wing of the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF). It had been brewing for some time and both sides were prepared, itching for a fight. The Ethiopian government invited Eritrean troops to the party and then denied they were fighting side by side against a common enemy — the TPLF, widely hated in Eritrea and by many Ethiopians.

• Opinion | America’s Ruinous Pursuit of Mission Impossible in Afghanistan

  The graveyard of empires redux.

• Global Military Spending Grew to Nearly $2 Trillion in 2020 Despite Pandemic

  At $778 billion, U.S. military expenditure—4.4% higher in 2020 than in 2019—accounted for 39% of the world total.

• Justice Department Investigations Don’t Actually Challenge Police Violence

• A Kinder, Gentler Foreign Policy

  Sadly, an equally urgent need for structural change is missing from his foreign policy agenda.

  The progressive steps taken by the Biden administration so far are important and commendable. Reaffirmations of the steps needed for protection against the spread of the Covid virus have gone remarkably well. Provisions for an economic stimulus targeting the neediest of our society are welcome. In addition, there is much to admire in the goals on environmental sustainability, the new levels of visible concern over violent actions whether by police or civilians, and the appointment to cabinet positions of competent indigenous and union leaders are all signs that this administration may be leading an important historical change. Progressive critics are reluctant to declare this another FDR moment citing the depth of problems still remaining. Nevertheless the Biden overtures represent a dramatic opening for continued dialogue on needed policies.

• Opinion | Even During an Ongoing Pandemic the World Cant Quit Weapons

  A new report found that military spending around the world got a boost last year despite floundering economies due to COVID-19.

• Moscow prosecutors suspend the work of Navalny’s political movement pending court ruling

  The Moscow Prosecutor’s Office has suspended the activities of Alexey Navalny’s political network, pending a ruling from the municipal court on a lawsuit seeking to declare it an “extremist organization.”

• Alexey Navalny’s lawyers file three lawsuits against prison officials

  Alexey Navalny’s lawyers have filed three lawsuits against the administration of the prison where he is serving his sentence, the Russian state news agency TASS reported on Monday, April 26, citing the secretariat of the Vladimir region’s Petushinsky District Court. 

• As Alexey Navalny’s Life Hangs in the Balance, the Movement’s Momentum Flags

  Imprisoned in Penal Colony No. 2 outside Moscow, Alexey Navalny had spent 24 days on a hunger strike before Russian authorities granted his request to be seen by civilian doctors on Friday. Although it is not clear that public pressure forced the government’s hand, the Kremlin’s concession followed protests in 23 Russian cities and several foreign capitals, in which thousands of people demanded Navalny’s release.

• A new type of ‘countersanction’ Maxim Trudolyubov explains how torturing Alexey Navalny and repressing his supporters may fit into the Russian government’s larger foreign policy strategy

  The Russian authorities recently threatened to designate the Anti-Corruption Foundation, the Citizens’ Rights Protection Foundation, and Team Navalny’s offices as “extremist organizations.” In Russia’s hierarchy of “internal enemies,” any connection to an “extremist” organization can carry even more severe consequences than a connection to an “undesirable” organization or a “foreign agent.” Designating Navalny’s organizations as extremist would bring with it a wave of repression, implicating the many people who have helped these groups either through personal participation or financial contributions. The Russian authorities issued the threat immediately after the U.S. government announced new sanctions against Russia. Maxim Trudolyubov, editor of Meduza’s Ideas section, believes that the current wave of pressure on Navalny and his associates might be Moscow’s new way of issuing “countersanctions” in the absence of other options.

• The Cold War Truth Commission – The Project Censored Show

  Notes: Jim Lafferty is former executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, Los Angeles Chapter. Peter Kuznick is Professor of History at American University, and coauthor of The Untold History of the United States. Alice Slater is a board member of World Beyond War, and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. Norman Solomon is an author, media critic, and founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy. Rachel Brunke (Witness for Peace Southwest) and Frank Dorrel (Veterans for Peace) were the hosts of the event.

• Police Violence: the Standards are Topsy-Turvy

  That seems obvious, but when it comes to police officers, the American justice system routinely gets it backward.

  I’m not just talking about “qualified immunity,” a pernicious judicial doctrine that sets a higher bar for holding government employees accountable for criminal acts. That’s part of it, but not even close to the whole story.

• Opinion | Media Evasions on Racism and the Role of Derek Chauvin

  Although it’s acknowledged that Black people and other people of color are consistently at the bottom of the caste system, there’s no examination of the powerful interests that put them there.

• The Backlash to Derek Chauvin’s Conviction Is Already Here

  A few hours after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd, Fox News host Tucker Carlson opened his nightly white-power hour with a typically misinformation-filled rant about the decision.

• Media Evasions on Racism and the Role of Derek Chauvin

  They’ve even learned to throw around the phrase “systemic racism” – while avoiding scrutiny of the corporate systems that propel and reinforce racism.

  The view of the world projected by such coverage is typically that of victims without victimizers. Although it’s acknowledged that Black people and other people of color are consistently at the bottom of the caste system, there’s no examination of the powerful interests that put them there – the profiteers who, for so many generations, have had their knees on the necks of poor people of color.

• Killer Cop Derek Chauvin is Guilty, But the Struggle Continues!

  A giant cheer went up from the crowds of expectant protestors gathered near the courthouse and at George Floyd square when the verdict was announced. The City of Minneapolis has been on edge for weeks throughout the trial as security measures, including concrete barriers and barbed wire went up downtown. Some 2,000 National Guard forces were mobilized in Minneapolis and nearby cities. The cop and Guard presence served as an ominous warning that city and state officials were fully prepared to repress mass protests in the event of a Chauvin acquittal. Armored trucks and gun-carrying Guard members patrolled the streets. Storefronts were boarded up. The immediate area around the courthouse was closed down completely.

  Last week, union members kicked the National Guard out of the St. Paul Labor Center after they stationed their trucks there and partially headquartered at the labor facility. The police murder of a 20-year old Black man, Daunte Wright, a week earlier in nearby Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, had sparked mass protests across the state and nationally. On Monday high school students across the state walked out of their schools to call for justice for George, Daunte and other people killed by police.

• Outrage in Kenosha as Cop Who Shot Jacob Blake Returns to Work

• “Our Demand Is for Him to Be Fired”: Outrage in Kenosha as Cop Who Shot Jacob Blake Returns to Work

  Relatives and supporters of Jacob Blake staged a sit-in with arrests outside the Kenosha police headquarters in Wisconsin to protest the department’s decision to allow police officer Rusten Sheskey to return to work. Sheskey, who is white, fired seven shots at point-blank range into the back of Jacob Blake last August, leaving the 29-year-old African American father partially paralyzed and sparking massive protests. Sheskey had been on administrative leave but faced no charges for the shooting. “There’s been so many injustices carried on through this investigation,” says Jacob Blake Sr., the father of Jacob Blake, who has also filed a lawsuit against the officer. “Our demand is for him to be fired.”

• GOP Criminalizes Dissent with Anti-Riot Laws Targeting Black Lives Matter & Anti-Pipeline Protests

  We look at a slew of anti-protest laws pending in Republican-led states, and some that have already passed, such as in Florida, where Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed a controversial measure known as the “anti-riot bill” that is widely viewed as a response to the Black Lives Matter movement and calls to “defund the police.” Under the new law, a public gathering of three or more people can be classified as a “riot,” and anyone who “willingly” participates in such a gathering can be charged with a third-degree felony. Many of the anti-protest bills pending in other states have the exact same language as the Florida plan. “These are really extreme laws,” says Nick Robinson, a senior legal adviser with the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which has tracked 81 anti-protest bills introduced in 34 states so far this year. They “expand the definition of rioting” in order “to target protesters,” Robinson tells Democracy Now!

• Florida Governor Signs Law That Punishes Protesters For Protesting, Denies Them Bail

  Even though Florida didn’t see many of the anti-police violence protests that spread across the nation in the wake of the George Floyd killing, its legislature and its governor have apparently decided protesters have it too easy. Governor Ron DeSantis feels the best approach to handling people fed up with police brutality and their lack of accountability is to throw more protesters (and rioters) in jail more often, and for longer.

• “Open Season”: Heather Heyer’s Mother Slams New Laws Giving Immunity to Drivers Who Hit Protesters

  Many of the anti-protest laws pushed by Republicans include measures that provide civil or criminal immunity to drivers who hit demonstrators with their vehicles. A pending Oklahoma measure would offer both. “It’s declaring open season,” says Susan Bro, whose daughter Heather Heyer was killed in 2017 when a white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. “Since when do we allow the public to become judge, jury and executioner? Because that’s what this amounts to: Let’s go hunt protesters.”

• Biden’s MacArthur Moment

  Truman biographer David McCullough reports that in November 1950, Gen. “MacArthur called on the administration to recognize the ‘state of war’ imposed by the Chinese, then to drop 30 to 50 atomic bombs on Manchuria and the mainland cities of China.”

  MacArthur then urged that the US “‘sever’ Korea from Manchuria by laying down a field of radioactive wastes, ‘the by-products of atomic manufacture,’ all along the Yalu River.” In April 1951, President Truman fired MacArthur, replacing him with Gen. Matt Ridgeway.

• Biden Recognizes Armenian Genocide of 1915, Despite Decades of Lobbying & Denialism by Turkey

  As President Joe Biden makes history by explicitly describing the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as a “genocide,” we speak with Peter Balakian, Pulitzer Prize-winning Armenian American poet and professor at Colgate University. On April 24, 1915, the Ottoman Empire began a systematic, premeditated campaign targeting the Armenian people, an unarmed Christian minority living under Turkish rule. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture and forced death marches. Another million Armenian people fled into permanent exile. “It’s an important statement,” responds Balakian to Biden’s decision. “The plan was systematic,” he says of the genocide. “It involved the implementation of parliamentary acts, military intervention, mobilization of killing squads in order to arrest and deport every Armenian family from Turkey.”

• The Armenian Genocide and my grandmother’s secret

  And just to bring things full circle, consider the primary role model for caliphate-wannabes like ISIS. No, it’s not Hitler, even though ISIS and Hitler share an infinite hatred for Jews. Rather, it’s the world’s previous Sunni Islamic caliphate – namely, the Turkish Ottoman Empire, whose martyrdom of 1.5 million Armenian Christians is being remembered today.

• Afghan interpreters rejected for resettlement ‘face death’ after UK exit

  “There is a suspicion that the dismissals were used for HR management. There is very little evidence for why people were dismissed. What we’re asking for is that their cases are all reviewed.”

Environment

• California will be able to set its own tailpipe standards again

  California is on track to regain its power to set tougher vehicle emissions standards than the rest of the US. The Environmental Protection Agency announced today that it’s reconsidering a Donald Trump-era edict that sought to strip California of that ability. The EPA plans to rescind the Trump decision altogether after a public comment period ends on July 6th, the Los Angeles Times reports. Last week, the Department of Transportation moved to repeal a related Trump-era rule that barred individual states from setting their own tailpipe standards.

  California has been able to set its own tailpipe standards since it was granted a waiver under the 1970 Clean Air Act. At the time, the Golden State was grappling with an air quality crisis that it sought to solve, in part, with tougher standards for tailpipe pollution. Since then, California has essentially set the tone for the country. In order to sell in California, the nation’s biggest auto market, automakers have had to adhere to the state’s stricter standards.

• A warmer, drier world’s deeper wells spell trouble

  A warmer world could for billions be drier. The resultant deeper wells spell trouble for those reliant on groundwater.

• Slashing Methane Emissions Must Play Larger Role in Fighting Climate Crisis, UN Says

  The report confirms that “natural gas is the precise opposite of a climate solution,” wrote author and activist Bill McKibben. 

• Virtual Bunny Hugging: Boasting About Climate Change Goals

  Ahead of the summit, Nobel Prize laureates had added their names to a letter intending to ruffle summit participants.  Comprising all fields, the 101 signatories urged countries “to act now to avoid a climate catastrophe by stopping the expansion of oil, gas and coal.”  Governments had “lagged, shockingly, behind what science demands and what a growing and powerful people-powered movement knows: urgent action is needed to end the expansion of fossil fuel production; phase out current production; and invest in renewable energy.”

  Deficiencies in the current climate change approach were noted: the Paris Agreement, for instance, makes no mention of oil, gas or coal; the fossil fuel industry was intending to expand, with 120% more coal, oil and gas slated for production by 2030. “The solution,” warn the Nobel Laureates, “is clear: fossil fuels must be kept in the ground.”

• Energy

  • Fossil Fuel Companies Are Promoting ‘Lower Carbon,’ ‘Responsibly Sourced’ Oil and Gas

    This month, EQT, the nation’s largest natural gas producer, plans to launch a pilot project that will certify it to start selling not just natural gas, but something it calls “responsibly sourced natural gas.”

    EQT’s move comes on the heels of a similar announcement from Chesapeake Energy, one of the pioneers of fracking which recently emerged from bankruptcy. Both EQT and Chesapeake will seek certification from outside providers, including a business called Project Canary, which touts its ability to collect data on methane emissions and pollutants from oil and gas wells and offers a certification it calls TrustWell™. 

  • Five questions with Dr. Chomora Mikeka, Greening the Internet Research Programme Grantee

    Associate Professor Chomora Mikeka is the Director of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI) in the Ministry of Education of Malawi Government, and former Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Malawi. His PhD research was about power autonomous sensor radio based on cellular and digital TV RF energy harvesting. He is a 2021 awardee of our Research Grant Programme that examines the impact of the Internet on the environment.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Opinion | Cottontail, Dead at 12

    Cottontail, one of about 350 remaining North Atlantic right whales, did not have an easy life.

  • How One of Australia’s Rarest Trees Was Saved From Wildfires

  • ‘Halt This Nightmare’: Alarm as Florida Set to Begin Release of Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes

    “The release of genetically engineered mosquitoes puts Floridians, the environment, and endangered species at risk in the midst of a pandemic.”

Finance

• Opinion | How Lifting Children Out of Poverty Today Will Help Them in the Future

  When families with young children get access to cash welfare, that support has even been linked to higher earnings in adulthood and longer lives.

• Want to Fix the Racial Wealth Gap? Start By Canceling Student Debt.

  Haz clic aquí para leer este artículo en español.

• How Venezuela is Rebuilding Its Industrial Base, One Volunteer at a Time

  Venezuela’s productive capacity has declined precipitously due to U.S. sanctions. The country is impeded from accessing the international financial system, leading to a fall in investment. Even importing spare parts or industrial equipment is next to impossible. As a result of this, factories have trouble completing regular maintenance and repairs.

  In 2016, Requena and others were invited to help La Gaviota, a fish meal plant and sardine cannery that was paralyzed due to a broken oven. They traveled 500 kilometers, spent five days sleeping and working inside the factory, and successfully repaired not just the oven, but five other pieces of damaged machinery as well. After their visit, the factory went from producing nothing to producing 260 tons of fish meal.

• How Not to Fix the Post Office or Government in General

  I threw the other nine letters away but decided to check out what DLCC was up to. When I tore it open, something like a bumper sticker fell out bearing seven decals, including SAVE USPS, THANK YOU POSTAL WORKERS, and DUMP DEJOY. Thanks for that, DLCC. I’ll stick a couple on my mailbox to express solidarity with my letter carrier.

  The envelope also informed me it held a petition to sign. You must have likely received any number of petitions from political pressure groups that always seem to come with an attached donation form, as did this one. If not petitions, than opinion surveys, with questions phrased such that it’s hard to disagree. (“Do you favor making polluters pay?”)

• 10 Years Ago Today, Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Sent His Final Message
  

  On April 26, 2011, Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto sent his final emails to fellow developers in which he made clear he had “moved on to other projects,” at the time handing over a cryptographic key he had used to send network-wide alerts.

  Flash forward to 2021 and the Bitcoin story is, in many ways, still just beginning. With the price reaching new highs above $60,000, there is increasing recognition of Nakamoto’s invention – a digital money free from the control of any central party or government – and its necessity.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Opposition figure Lyubov Sobol fined for repeatedly violating Russia’s protest regulations

  Moscow’s Simonovsky District Court has fined opposition figure Lyubov Sobol 300,000 rubles (about $4,000) for repeatedly violating the regulations for holding rallies (article 20.2, part 8, of the Russian Administration Code).

• Opinion | Progressives Urge Biden to Go Bigger, Bolder, Faster in Spending and Tax Plans

  Leading research and movement organizations and progressive Democrats call for rapid passage of legislation to transform the economy.

• To Serve and Protect?

• As SCOTUS Takes Up NRA-Backed Gun Case, Calls Grow for Dems to ‘Expand the Court’

  “The choice has never been so clear. And the stakes can be measured in human lives.”

• Americans View Biden as Doing Much Better Than Trump Did in First 100 Days

• Biden’s First Hundred Days: A Historical Audit

  One of Joe Biden’s first acts in the Oval Office was to hang a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt, removing Donald Trump’s choice of Andrew Jackson. Then—against all expectations—he set out to meet the challenges of this FDR moment. In his first 100 days, Biden has shown he intends to marshal the resources of government to address the “cascading crises” we face with the most ambitious agenda in half a century.

• Opinion | Biden’s ‘America First Lite’ Policies on Vaccine Sharing and Refugees Are a Terrible Look for the US

  With people dying in India’s streets, Biden’s failure to share vaccine doses, ingredients, and tech is becoming a moral failure that will haunt America.

• How Ranked-Choice Voting Is Changing Progressive Politics in New York

  Go to the Working Families Party list of favored candidates in New York City’s June 22 Democratic primary election and you will find something unprecedented: an endorsement that ranks three contenders for the top job in the nation’s biggest city. In the race for mayor of New York, the WFP declares for City Comptroller Scott Stringer as the party’s first choice, former public school teacher and nonprofit CEO Dianne Morales as the second choice, and civil rights attorney and former MSNBC analyst Maya Wiley as the third choice.

• Kevin McCarthy Humiliates Himself Again

  House minority leader Kevin McCarthy blatantly lied to Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace. Is that really news, “Republican leader lies”? Let’s take it apart.

• Opinion | The 3 Democrats Who Are Standing in the Way of the PRO Act Coming to the Senate Floor for a Vote

  Facing pressure, Sens. Joe Manchin and Angus King have signed on to the landmark labor bill, leaving just three Democratic holdouts: Kyrsten Sinema, Mark Kelly and Mark Warner.

• Pentagon hands IP addresses to Florida company as part of a security pilot program

  The U.S. Department of Defense has given a Florida company control over about 175 million of its IP addresses as part of a security pilot program.

  The IP address range, registered as GRS-DoD, AS8003 became active Jan. 20 in the last minutes of the Trump administration, with several pundits suggesting that the timing may be conspiratorial in nature. The company handed the IP addresses is called Global Resource Systems LLC, a previously unknown company which the Associated Press described Saturday as “shadowy.”

• Book Review: Onus on the moderate Muslim to reclaim Islam’s heterodox legacy

  The author’s caveat is that the moderate Muslim even today has no voice or traction within the larger Muslim society. They are caught between the Hindu right wing that regards them as exceptional and thus invisibilises them and the Muslim right wing which disparages them for their apologism. She exhorts these people to give up their conformism and take responsibility for their beliefs. Simultaneously, she notes a rise of Muslim exceptionalism and reverse identity politics among community members in reaction to Hindutva, as evidenced in the La illah ila allah sloganeering during the 2019 CAA protests.

Censorship/Free Speech

• China censored social media posts about Chloé Zhao’s Oscar win

  But according to the Journal, early messages congratulating Zhao had been scrubbed from Chinese social media sites by midday Monday, and searches on Chinese search engines Baidu and Sogou had few links to the Oscar news. There was no news about Zhao’s win on China Central Television, the Xinhua News Agency, or the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily on Monday, the Journal reported; according to a state media reporter, the country’s propaganda ministry told the outlets not to report the win due to “previous public opinion.”

• Basecamp Follows Coinbase In Banning Politics Talk at Work

  Basecamp, a productivity software maker, said that it’s banning employees from “societal and political discussions” on internal workplace tools. The move, which was met with swift criticism online, mirrors the controversial no-politics-at-work policy set by crypto startup Coinbase Global Inc. last October.

  Political discussion at work is “a major distraction” that “saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places,” Basecamp’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Jason Fried, wrote in a blog post on Monday. “You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target.”

• Algeria: Islamic scholar sentenced to three-year prison term for “offending Islam”

  Said Djabelkheir told Amnesty International that he was not notified about his prosecution and that he first learned of it when friends alerted him in January 2020 about it. Said Djabelkheir said that during the course of the investigation into his case by the Sidi Mhamed first instance court judge he was never summoned for interrogation. He was not informed of his trial date, and again only learned of it via Facebook posts shared by the lawyers of the university teacher. His trial took place at the Sidi Mhamed court on 1 April.

  Said Djabelkheir is the victim of an ongoing online and offline harassment for expressing his views. He told Amnesty International that he received numerous death threats on Facebook since he joined the social media in 2007.

• Algerian scholar handed 3-year jail term for ‘offending Islam’

  The Algerian League for Human Rights condemned the court’s “criminalization of ideas,” and Amnesty International described the sentence imposed on Djabelkhir as “outrageous.”

  Djabelkhir, the author of two well-known works critical of dogma on Islam, had written that the sacrifice of sheep pre-dated Islam.

  He had also criticized the marriage of pre-pubescent girls and the mandatory use of head coverings in some Muslim societies, asserting that Islamic scriptures did not make these practices obligatory.

• Algerian Professor Gets 3-Year Jail Term for Offending Islam

  Before his conviction, Djabelkhir told the French daily Le Figaro that it is “the first time in the history of Algeria that a university professor is (being tried) for giving his opinion in his own domain of specialization.”

• Algerian author Said Djabelkhir sentenced to jail for offending Islam

  Speaking to AFP news agency after being released on bail, Mr Djabelkhir said: “The fight for freedom of conscience is non-negotiable. It is a fight which must continue.”

  Mr Djabelkhir, 53, has written two books on Islam.

  He has been quoted in media reports as calling for “reflection” on Islam’s founding texts.

• Algerian Islamic Scholar Gets 3 Years in Prison for “Offending Islam”

  [Algerian] law imposes a fine or prison sentence on “anyone who offends the Prophet or denigrates the dogmatic precepts of Islam, whether it be by writings, drawings, a statement or another means”….

• I Left Islam for Liberal Values. Now Woke Liberals Are Embracing a New Religion

  The dam broke. Once they started calling it racist to criticize Islam, it was easy to shut the conversation down completely. The accusation meant the accused was morally beyond the pale, and thus completely dismissible. Words like micro-aggressions, trigger warnings, and safe spaces became mainstream. An emphasis on pervasive racism grew exponentially. To even question the extent to which racism was everywhere resulted in accusations of being a racist. Like with religious blasphemy codes, you can only talk about certain topics in specific ways.

  I couldn’t help but notice there was an almost fundamentalist, faith-like aspect to these claims. It was as if in the years since I’d been gone, our society had decided to adopt the blasphemy codes of my youth. When I heard people asked to check their privilege or introspect the ways they have been racist, it sounded like the inner jihad that Muslims are supposed to perform to make sure they are on the correct path.

  How did this happen? How did the religious tenets I had abandoned come to take over the liberal culture I had abandoned them for?

• Student’s Snapchat profanity leads to high court speech case

  The case has its roots in the Vietnam-era case of a high school in Des Moines, Iowa, that suspended students who wore armbands to protest the war. In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court sided with the students, declaring students don’t “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

• Censorship in not a new thing for the Information & Communication Technologies Authority

  The Consultation Paper does not provide enough of what we may call supportive statistics & documentation. On radio programmes the ICTA Board Chair, Mr. Dick Ng Sui Wa, mentions « dérapages sur facebook » but does not provide any statistics on those ‘dérapages’ or what they are. He said that there are posts on Facebook that may disturb our social harmony.

• China Censors Chloé Zhao’s Oscar Win, but Fans Find Ways to Rejoice

  Chloé Zhao’s historic Oscar win should have been met with jubilation in China, the country of her birth. On Sunday night, she became the first Chinese and woman of color to be named best director, for “Nomadland,” which also took home the prize for best picture.

  Instead, the Chinese government imposed a virtual news blackout, and censors moved to tamp down or scrub out discussion of the award on social media.

  Chinese state-run news media outlets — which are typically eager to celebrate recognition of its citizens on the global stage — made nearly no mention of the Oscars, let alone Ms. Zhao. Chinese social media platforms raced to delete or limit the circulation of articles and posts about the ceremony and Ms. Zhao, forcing many internet users and fans to use homonyms and wordplay to evade the censors.

• China Mutes Reaction to Zhao’s Oscars as S. Korea Lauds Youn

  Instead, there was even censorship. A post announcing Zhao’s directing win by film magazine Watch Movies, which has over 14 million followers on the ubiquitous Weibo microblog, was censored a few hours after it appeared Monday morning. A hashtag called “Chloe Zhao wins Best Director” was also censored on the platform with users coming across an error message saying, “according to relevant laws and regulations and policies, the page is not found.”

  Some users resorting to using “zt” to post about Zhao, using the initials of her full name in Chinese, Zhou Ting. Typing in Zhou’s name in Chinese on Weibo brought up only unrelated posts from the beginning of April. A search for “Oscars” showed only official posts from the South Korean and U.S. embassies.

  Douban, an app popular with film buffs, banned searches for “Nomadland” and “Zhao Ting” saying that “the search results could not be displayed in accordance to relevant laws and regulations.” Multiple discussion threads about Zhao’s win were deleted on the app as well. A news article on WeChat, the largest messaging app in the country, was also deleted.

• Europe, why aren’t you protecting those who criticize Islam?

  A famous Algerian academic, Saïd Djabelkhir, was sentenced to three years in prison by a court in Algiers for “insulting the precepts of Islam”. It has never happened before. His lawyer said he was “shocked”. “It is a struggle that must continue for freedom of conscience, opinion and expression,” said the academician after the sentence. “It is a non-negotiable struggle,”

  Djabelkhir had criticized some practices such as the marriage of prepubescent girls and actions of Saudi Arabia (“since 1979 they have spent $ 64 billion to propagate Islamic fundamentalism,” he said).

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Meduza is a ‘foreign agent’ now. What’s next? Spoiler: We don’t know

  On Friday, April 23, the Russian Justice Ministry added Meduza to its list of “foreign agent” media outlets. Glance at the Russian-language side of our operation and the reverberations of this police action are unmistakable: Russian law requires us to notify readers about our new status in every message, whether it’s a news report or a post on social media. Crippling us further, these notifications must appear in a font that is twice the size of our actual content. That’s the law.

• Moscow court eases preventive measures for two ‘Doxa’ editors

  The Moscow City Court has eased the “ban on certain activities” affecting Armen Aramyan and Natalya Tyshkevich — two editors from the student journal Doxa, who are facing criminal charges for allegedly involving minors in illegal protests.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Libertarian activist Mikhail Svetov jailed for nine days

  On Monday, April 26, Moscow’s Savelovsky District Court jailed libertarian activist Mikhail Svetov for nine days. The “Civil Society” movement chairman was found guilty on administrative charges of organizing an unauthorized rally (a violation of Russian Administrative Code article 20.2, section 2). 

• If Biden is a “Union Guy” – Go After the Taft-Hartley Monster!

  Setting records for raising Wall Street campaign cash, Obama reneged on his 2008 promise to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.50 per hour by 2011. He reneged on a promise to the AFL-CIO to push for “card check” to facilitate workers wanting to form a union. He did nothing to preserve traditional earned worker pensions provided by corporations while bailing out Wall Street crooks whom he refused to prosecute.

  Obama stubbornly blocked an eager Biden from going to speak at a massive workers’ rally in Madison, Wisconsin at the critical time when Democrats were challenging corporatist Governor Scott Walker’s anti-union “budget repair bill.”

• How Sexism Is Coded Into the Tech Industry

  Let’s say you’re trying to decide where to order lunch. Once upon a time, you might have had a Zagat guide on the shelf—or depending on your lifestyle, a Michelin. Today, you’re more likely to go online. On a website like Yelp, you can find the same collection of opinions, the same star rating system, and the same index of logistical facts like addresses and phone numbers. But while that information was once collected by a staff of experts, it’s now provided by someone else: you. Whatever else Yelp is, it is an enormous repository of labor.

• EU project iBorderCtrl: Is the lie detector coming or not?

  A document made legible again reveals how the beneficiaries of EU security research have been pushing for legislative changes for the introduction of prohibited technologies. The EU Commission is now funding a follow-up project with 8 million euros.

• GOP Oklahoma Governor Signs Trio of ‘Cruel and Unnecessary’ Anti-Choice Bills Into Law

  “These extreme bills are designed to cut off abortion access for people in Oklahoma—a state that already has more abortion restrictions than almost any other.”

• ‘Stop This Bill’: GOP-Led Florida Senate Sparks Alarm With Attack on Voting Rights

  “We call on all legislators to break down—not erect—barriers to Floridians’ fundamental right to vote.”

• Rights Groups Demand Records on Trump Admin’s ‘Death Flight’ Deportations of Cameroonian Asylum Seekers

  “The government’s mass deportations of Cameroonian and other Black immigrants are inhumane and targeted.”

• House Dems Propose Lifting ‘Cruel’ Ban on Former Drug Felons Receiving Food and Cash Aid

  “Once a person has served their time, we should be ensuring they have the tools to succeed and become productive members of society.”

• Here Are 458 California Law Enforcement Agencies’ Policy Documents All in One Place

  At this moment in history, law enforcement agencies in the United States face a long-overdue reevaluation of their priorities, practices, and processes for holding police officers accountable for both unconscious biases and overt abuse of power. 

  But any examination of law enforcement requires transparency first: the public’s ability to examine what those priorities, practices, and processes are. While police are charged with enforcing the law, they too have their own rules to follow, and too often, those rules are opaque to the public. An imbalance in access to information is an imbalance of power. 

  Today, EFF in partnership with Stanford Libraries’ Systemic Racism Tracker project is releasing a data set with links to 458 policy manuals from California law enforcement agencies, including most police departments and sheriff offices and some district attorney offices, school district police departments, and university public safety departments. This data set represents our first attempt to aggregate these policy documents following the passage of S.B. 978, a state law that requires local law enforcement agencies to publish this information online. 

• How does ‘taking the knee’ help Qatar’s World Cup slaves?

  What was going through the minds of England players as they took the knee, yet again, prior to their victory over Poland in their 2022 World Cup qualifier at Wembley last week? George Floyd? Racism in sport? Nothing in particular?

  We’ll never know. But it seems unlikely they were thinking too hard about the destination where, if their good form holds, they will be representing their country next winter: the tiny gulf state of Qatar. If they had, they might have spared a thought, and perhaps a gesture, for the 6,500 migrant workers estimated to have died since Qatar won the right to host next year’s tournament.

• Police dealing with increase in reports of illicit video leaks

  Police are dealing with an increasing number of reports of sexually explicit videos and pictures being leaked and shared without the person’s consent, figures reveal.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• 5,000 T-Mobile Employees Lost Their Jobs Post-Merger While Ex-CEO John Legere Saw A $137 Million Golden Parachute

  To be clear, former T-Mobile CEO John Legere did some amazing things with T-Mobile. After regulators blocked AT&T from acquiring T-Mobile in 2011 (which wound up being a very good thing), he took the $3 billion break up fee and turned an also-ran into a major thorn in the side of AT&T and Verizon. Legere accomplished this by (gasp) generally treating consumers well, eliminating annoyances like long-term contracts, sneaky fees, and many other telecom industry mainstays. He also did it by embracing an entertaining, wise ass persona in an industry not known for having a sense of humor.

• How Do You Debate Section 230 When One Side Constantly Lies About It?

  The Federalist Society this week released an interesting and well-produced video all about the Section 230 debate. Whatever you might think about the Federalist Society, the video is worth watching. The video does not take a position on 230 but basically presents it as if there are two equally competing visions of 230 — one in which it’s good and one in which it’s a problem. And if you just watch the video, you might think that this is because there are just disagreements about how 230 works and the impact it has on speech online. But that’s only because one side of the debate is completely making shit up and the other is being accurate.

• The Case Against Deregulation, Repealing Section 230, Looking Back At AT&T’s Breakup

  An article published by The American Prospect argues why deregulation is not inherently pro-competition as the Biden Administration prioritizes universal broadband coverage for Americans.

  Sean Gonsalves and Christopher Mitchell penned a piece that detailed why properly funded, public, municipal broadband services are necessary to promote competition and affordability, particularly in rural and underserved communities across the U.S.

Monopolies

• Apple hit with German antitrust complaint

  The ZAW, the advertising federation, filed the complaint with a German competition regulator, arguing Apple is abusing its market power and violating antitrust law through the launch of its antitracking feature, according to the federation’s press release.

• Takeaways from tech giants’ latest lobbying disclosures

• Patents

  • Biden Is Providing Some Vaccines to India But Hasn’t Budged on Patent Waiver

  • As US Lifts Export Ban to Assist India, Biden Urged to ‘Keep His Word’ by Supporting Vaccine Patent Waiver

    “This is a start. But not nearly enough. President Biden promised that intellectual property law would not block the Global South from producing the vaccine.”

  • Billionaire Bill Gates Says “No” to Sharing Vaccine Recipes With Poor Countries

  • Patent Troll Sable Networks Apparently Needs To Learn A Lesson: Cloudflare Wants To Destroy Another Troll

    In The Princess Bride, the character of Vizzini famously says: “Ha ha, you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is ‘never get involved in a land war in Asia,’ but only slightly less well-known is this: ‘Never go in against a Sicilian when DEATH is on the line.’” I don’t know if it’s surpassed either of those yet, but quickly moving up the list would be “Never try to patent troll Cloudflare.” Apparently, the patent troll Sable Networks has just made exactly that blunder.

• Trademarks

  • Ocean Spray Seeks Declaratory Relief After Soda Company Threatens It With Confused Trademark C&D

    While we’ve seen plenty of instances of confused attempts at trademark bullying backfire on a company, this post will deal with one of the worst I’ve seen. Most of you will likely be familiar with the company Ocean Spray, best known as a purveyor of all kinds of cranberry-infused fruit drinks. You will likely be less familiar with Wedge Water, LLC, a company that makes fruit juice infused water products. The company also does business as Wave Soda, promoting its soda-alternative drinks.  

• Copyrights

  • Academics must stand up for their publishing rights

    If you are a critic of neoliberalism and capitalism in your life and writing, however, you might want to take a more equitable step and publish your monograph or essay as an open-source work or by using Creative Commons licences. You retain copyright but essentially allow anyone to reprint your work for free. Many scientists and computer techies are now doing this because they are mindful that intellectual achievements belong to everyone.

  • Man Sentenced For Selling Stolen Netflix and Spotify Accounts

    A man who ran a website that sold stolen credentials for services including Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime, HBO, Xbox Live, and EA Origin has been handed a 26-month sentence in Australia. The 23-year-old ran WickedGen, HyperGen, Autoflix and AccountBot, which according to police enabled customers to circumvent the technological protection measures put in place by official services.

  • Member of Busted Scene Piracy Group Hopes to Avoid Prison

    The U.S. probation service is recommending a six-month prison sentence for Jonatan Correa, who was part of the notorious Scene group SPARKS. According to Correa’s lawyer, his client shouldn’t go to prison at all. Aside from his limited involvement with the group, Correa had no financial incentive. The Scene was his hobby, which ran parallel to his family life and managing his company with 32 employees.