Desktop/Laptop

• Tuxedo Computers Releases Powerful New Linux Laptop

  Tuxedo Computers has announced the InfinityBook Pro 14 Linux laptop, Tuxedo, featuring a 3K high-resolution “Omnia” display packed with 2880×1800 pixels in a 16:10 aspect ratio.

  According to the website, the additional vertical screen space afforded by the 16:10 aspect ratio provides more effective use of space for improved productivity, compared to a conventional aspect.

• Entroware Unleashes a Beast of a Linux Laptop

  If you’re looking for a portable workhorse, look no further than the Entroware Proteus laptop.

  Are you on the lookout for a Linux-powered laptop that can go the distance and exceed your needs of power, size, and battery life? If that sounds like the perfect machine to fill your dance card, and you’re not looking for the most brilliant display on the market, Entroware has the laptop for you.

Audiocasts/Shows

• What Really Is A Vendored Dependency?

  In a recent video about Audacity I had a few people ask me what is means to have a vendored dependency, I had assumed this was common knowledge so I didn’t both explaining but here’s a dedicated video on the topic anyway.

• A Candid (And SCARY) Conversation About Internet Privacy

  Legendary Bash creator Brian Fox sits down with Jason to discuss the scary state of internet privacy and the dangers of centralized services. Brian’s new project is a decentralized, open-source VPN layer called Orchid.

• Linux in the Ham Shack (LHS) Episode #414: IRCsome Internet Politics

  Hello and welcome to the 414th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts discuss the Young Ham of the Year Award, new EM exposure limits in the UK, privacy at the FCC, the impending demise of Freenode, expensive keyboards, medical device hackers, wfview, js8call and much more.

• GNU World Order 408

  **CVS** from the **d** software series of Slack.

• WP Briefing: Episode 9: The Cartography of WordPress

  In this episode, Josepha Haden Chomphosy provides a map of how to navigate WordPress teams and communication channels, along with her small list of big things.

• Full Circle Weekly News #211

  Bodhi 6 64-bit release

  https://www.bodhilinux.com/2021/05/12/bodhi-linux-6-0-0-released/

  KDE Plasma 5.22 testing has begun:

  https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.21.90

  Zabbix 5.4 release:

  https://www.zabbix.com/rn/rn5.4.0

  NetBSD 9.2 released:

  https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_9_2_released

  The OpenPrinting project and CUPS printing system:

  https://openprinting.github.io/OpenPrinting-News-March-2021/

  Vulnerabilities in Please, the Rust alternative to sudo:

  https://github.com/edneville/please

  First release of DogLinux:

  https://gumanzoy.blogspot.com/2021/05/liveusb-1100mb-doglinux-debian-11.html

  Solaris 11.4 SRU33 available:

  https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/announcing-oracle-solaris-114-sru33

  1Password password manager offers full Linux support:

  https://blog.1password.com/welcoming-linux-to-the-1password-family/

  GeckoLinux Distribution Release:

  https://github.com/geckolinux/geckolinux-project/releases/tag/210517.999

  Wayward – a custom wrapper based on Weston composite server:

  https://github.com/varmd/wayward

  Perl 5.34.0 released:

  https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2021/05/msg260110.html

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Released:

  https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/stability-plus-innovation-red-hat-enterprise-linux-84-now-ga

  Lakka 3.0, for creating game consoles:

  https://www.lakka.tv/articles/2021/05/22/lakka-3.0/

Kernel Space

• Intel AMX Support Continues Being Prepped For The Linux Kernel – Phoronix

  Intel engineers have been publishing open-source/Linux enablement patches around Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for nearly one year now. While Intel Xeon “Sapphire Rapids” with AMX support is expected around the end of this year, one of the key pieces yet to land is the Linux kernel support.

  Sent out on Sunday was the fifth iteration of the kernel patches for supporting Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions. AMX is Intel’s new programming paradigm with a focus on better AI performance both for training and inference. AMX is built around the concept of “tiles” as a set of two-dimensional registers for representing a larger memory image and accelerators that can operate on said tiles. The initial AMX implementation is focused on BFloat16, TILE, and INT8 while the design is extensible for expanding in the future.

• Graphics Stack

  • Intel P-State Driver Begins Preparing For Hybrid Processors (Alder Lake) – Phoronix

    Intel’s Linux preparations for Alder Lake — and more broadly the concept of hybrid x86_64 CPUs with a mix of large Core and small Atom cores — continues with the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver seeing new work to prepare for Intel’s hybrid era.

    The P-State CPU frequency scaling driver that is responsible for CPU frequency handling under Linux with modern Intel CPUs is being adapted to properly support hybrid architectures like the upcoming Alder Lake series.

  • A possible light at the end of the tunnel for GPU shortages thanks to Ethereum

    Ethereum, the stupidly popular cryptocurrency is moving from a Proof-of-Work model which needs powerful machines to a Proof-of-Stake method which will cut actual electrical power use dramatically and need less computing power to work with.

    Why is this important? Well, there’s a reason why NVIDIA have been making steps to reduce the Ethereum hash rate with new GPUs. Miners end up buying them, lots of them and it has been one of the primary causes of the ridiculous demand issues we’ve seen that end up stopping us all buying a new graphics card. Not only that, but it’s pushed up prices of existing cards too.

Applications

• Sublime Text 4 Released with Huge Set of Improvements

  The first stable release of Sublime Text 4 is now available to download.

  Sublime Text 4 comes packed with a wealth of workflow improvements, user interface tweaks, and even some new platform capabilities, including dark mode auto detection, side-by-side document viewing, and GPU acceleration. This release is also the first to offer support for 64-bit ARM Linux and Apple’s M1 processors.

  “We’ve worked hard on providing improvements without losing focus on what makes Sublime Text great. There are some new major features that we hope will significantly improve your workflow and a countless number of minor improvements across the board,” the team behind the app say of its release.

  Read on for an overview of the key changes, or skip to the download section to learn how to try Sublime Text 4 for yourself.

• Why KeePass instead of self-hosting Bitwarden

  Here’s why I decided to move my passwords to a KeePass database file instead of using Bitwarden with a self-hosted server. It comes down to keeping my passwords out of the browser, and my setup simple and manageable.

  For years, I was (and still am) unwilling to trust hosted password manager services. I eventually got with the time and started using LastPass. Three years ago, I migrated to Bitwarden as LastPass just kept cutting features and platform support.

  Bitwarden is an open-source alternative to the proprietary LastPass password manager. Bitwarden offers browser extensions and apps for all common operating systems. Even the server-side synchronization component is open source. You could, theoretically, host the backend infrastructure yourself.

• Shutter Screenshot Tool May Soon Make its Re-entry to the Ubuntu Repository

  Only a few months back, Shutter had its first major release in years getting rid of the old libraries and dependencies.

  Now, with a new 0.96 update, Shutter is prepping to make its way to the Ubuntu universe repository and other Linux distro repositories.

  In case you did not know, Shutter was removed from the main Ubuntu repository and some other repos because outdated Gnome 2 libraries were dropped as well. Considering it is one of the best ways to take a screenshot in Linux, Shutter getting back to repositories will be a good thing.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to create a Clone of VM (Virtual Machine) in VirtualBox – Create a Linux or Windows Clone

• First steps with Raspberry PI Pico for Beginners

  In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to move your first steps with Raspberry PI Pico, installing the open source Thonny IDE (integrated development environment) and running a very simple command.

• Openstack RDO && KVM Hypervisor: Setup PostgreSQL 13.2 and PyQT5 to run CRUD App in PyCharm 2021.1.1 on F34

  Running PyQT5 CRUD (PostgreSQL 13.2 ) Application you might experience problem with importing psycopg2 . Posting below briefly provides the way to solve the issue and also describes in details database setup which is tuned specifically for Fedora 34 .

• LFCA: How to Improve Linux System Security – Part 20

  As we all know, the root user is king and wields unlimited privileges over the Linux system. However non-root users are limited to basic tasks. In addition, sudo users are only granted a certain degree of root privileges as deemed fit by the root user to perform specific elevated tasks.

  Issues arise when regular users have uncontrolled access to resources or are escalated to root unintentionally. This is a serious security risk that could cause breaches, undesired modifications, and in the worst-case scenario, crashing of the system. Another potential risk is when files have less secure file permissions. For example, boot files with write permissions for global users could easily be modified or corrupted resulting in a broken system.

• Keep tabs on your Linux computer specs with this desktop application

  Whether I’m using a laptop my employer assigned to me or a workstation I built from vendor parts, I seem to have an endless capacity to forget my computer’s specifications. One of the great things about Linux is its /proc filesystem, a dynamically populated virtual expression of the system’s hardware. It’s convenient when you want to see the specifics of your CPU (cat /proc/cpuinfo), uptime (cat /proc/uptime), a list of mounted filesystems (ls -R /proc/fs/), and so on.

• 4 steps to set up global modals in React | Opensource.com

  A modal dialog is a window that appears on top of a web page and requires a user’s interaction before it disappears. React has a couple of ways to help you generate and manage modals with minimal coding.

  If you create them within a local scope, you must import modals into each component and then create a state to manage each modal’s opening and closing status.

• How To Install Nano on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nano on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, GNU Nano is a free, open-source command-line text editor for Unix-like operating systems. It was designed to be an easy-to-use replacement for the Pico text editor. Nano includes all the basic functionality same as other text editors such as UTF-8 encoding, syntax highlighting, search and replace with regular expression support, multiple buffers, spellchecking, and more.

  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 Nano text editor 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 install Sqlite Browser on Linux

  The Sqlite Browser is a GUI editor for SQLite databases. It is an excellent tool for any workstation that is used for heavy SQLite database manipulation, editing, etc. In this guide, we’ll go over how to set up the Sqlite Browser on Linux.

• How to Install OpenRazer on Linux – Make Tech Easier

  One of the things that’s most frustrating about building a new computer for Linux is peripherals, especially for gamers who are looking for lots of functionality out of their peripherals. If you have Razer peripherals, you may be in luck, because the OpenRazer project has a solution for you. Here we go over how to install OpenRazer on Linux.

• How to Install Chromium Browser via PPA in Ubuntu 20.04, 20.10 | UbuntuHandbook

  Since Ubuntu replaced Chromium in its universe repository with Snap package, users are looking for deb package or apt method to install the browser.

  The Linux Mint team has been maintaining the chromium deb package for a while. You can install the package in Ubuntu and keep updated. It’s stable and trustworthy, however the installing process is not as easy as an Ubuntu PPA does.

  Another Ubuntu PPA now contains the latest packages (90.0.4430.212 at the moment) for Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 20.10. The PPA also contains most recent versions of other useful apps, e.g., avidemux, filezilla, youtube-dl, and more. And it’s also trusty.

• Intro to Managing ACLs using the Getfacl and Setfacl Commands

  Access Control Lists (ACLs) are a flexible method to set permissions in Linux. Every operating system has some level of ACLs, which assign permissions to users and groups on files and directories.

  In most Linux variants, ACLs either exist, or a package can be installed to use them. With the use of ACLs, we can assign permissions to individual users.

  For example, let’s assume we have two users, john and matt. We can assign read and write permissions to john and read, write, and execute permissions to matt.
  Let’s proceed to take a look at this concept.

• How to disable the Linux login banner – TechRepublic

  When you log in to Linux, either by way of SSH or the console, you are greeted with a banner that offers up a few important bits of information. If you’re doing everything you can to secure that Linux server, the information shared by that banner can be a gold mine to ne’er do wells and would-be attackers. Information like kernel release, distribution type, available updates, and more can be revealed.

  So how do you prevent that information from being displayed when users log into your Linux systems? Let me show you.

• 5 Tips to Supercharge Your VirtualBox Linux Machines

  VirtualBox is a great way to install Linux distributions alongside other operating systems without having to reboot, but the system performance of a virtual machine is nothing compared to an installed operating system.

  Did you know there are ways to increase the performance of VirtualBox and make your virtual machines more useful? We’ll find out in this article.

• How to Expose or Publish Docker Port

  In a multi-container setup, the services running in the containers communicate with each other over a common network. In the same setup, some containers also interact with the outside world.

  This internal and external communication is handled with exposed and published ports in Docker respectively.

  In this tutorial, I’ll discuss dealing with ports in Docker. I’ll go on to the difference between exposing and publishing ports, why they are used and how to use them.

• How To Manage Nodejs Versions With n In Linux – OSTechNix

  This guide gives you a brief introduction to “n”, an unofficial node version management tool and then explains how to easily manage nodejs versions with n in Linux operating systems.

• How To Install And Use Ulauncher On Linux To Boost Your Efficiency?

  Default application launcher on almost all Linux distributions limits itself to only searching and launching apps installed on your system.

  But if you want your app launcher to do more than what it can offer, Ulauncher is a Linux productivity software that you should check out right now.

• Deploy Helm charts with Jenkins CI/CD in Red Hat OpenShift 4 | Red Hat Developer

  Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. Helm uses a packaging format called charts, which include all of the Kubernetes resources that are required to deploy an application, such as deployments, services, ingress, etc. Helm charts are very useful for installing applications and performing upgrades on a Kubernetes cluster.

  In this article, I will show you how to deploy a Helm chart using Jenkins continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and Red Hat OpenShift 4. Figure 1 shows a high-level view of the process.

• Transient prompt with Zsh ⁕ Vincent Bernat

  Powerlevel10k is a prompt for Zsh. It contains some powerful features, is astoundingly fast, and easy to customize. I am quite amazed at the skills of its main author. Be sure to also have a look at Zsh for Humans, a complete Zsh configuration including this theme.

  One of the nice features of Powerlevel10k is transient prompts: past prompts are reduced to a more minimal configuration to save space by removing unneeded information.

• Linux sysadmins: How my six year-old learned to do my job

  What would your initial reaction be if someone asked you if a six-year-old with no prior Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) experience or knowledge would be able to create a new user account, reset the root account’s password, start the chronyd service, turn on SELinux, and install updates on a RHEL 8 server?

  Your initial thought might be that there is simply no possible way an untrained six-year-old could complete these tasks. I recently put this to the test and you might be surprised by the results.

• How to Work with File and Shell Provisioner in Vagrant

  Provisioners are tools that allow you to automate your workflow when you are booting up a virtual machine. Vagrant support provisioners like file, shell, ansible, puppet, and salt stack. You can use any of these tools and automate your virtual machine deployment workflow.

• How to Upgrade Debain 10 Buster to 11 Bullseye Linux – Linux Shout

  Although while writing this tutorial the Debian 11 Bullseye was in RC1 state, however, it doesn’t matter you can use the steps given here even to upgrade Debian 10 Buster to 11, once you have the stable release…

  We have tried to make the tutorial- how to upgrade Debian 10 to 11 as simple as possible. Here, we have simply changed the repository to perform the upgrading process. Well, while performing the steps given here we didn’t face any problem but we recommend you backup your system before following this article.

• How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 8 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is an open-source, cross-platform, document-oriented database management system. MongoDB features include full index support, replication, high availability, and auto-sharding. It is cross-platform and it makes the process of data integration faster and much easier. Since it is free and open-source, MongoDB is used by a number of websites and organizations.

  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 MongoDB NoSQL database management on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.

Games

• Theme Hospital game engine reimplementation CorsixTH gets a big new Beta | GamingOnLinux

  Doctor needed in the surgery! CorsixTH, the wonderful free and open source game engine reimplementation for the incredible classic that is Theme Hospital has a big new Beta out.

  This will be the first release of CorsixTH in almost a year, so there’s quite a lot to look forward to. Why use CorsixTH though? Well, on top of adding native support for modern operating systems it offers up many enhancements like high resolution, more translations, new game modes, bigger maps and so much more.

• Have you played Code 7? It’s a thrilling episodic story-driven hacking adventure

  Now and then I go back to the big long list of games that was included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality and come across a gem. This time it’s Code 7, a really engrossing hacking adventure.

  Okay, to be truthful, I was poked about this by our contributor and podcast co-op star Samsai who mentioned some time ago how good it is. Sadly, it continued slipping down my list until I said — no more! I’m seriously glad I put my gaming finger down and clicked play because Code 7 is genuinely great. A massive surprise that you should seriously check out if you like a wild story adventure.

• Space sci-fi drone sim Duskers hits five years, dev talks sales and returns to indie

  Misfits Attic, developer of Duskers are celebrating the well-received game hitting five years and they’re returning to indie development once again. We also have sales info across platforms.

  What is Duskers? It’s a space sci-fi game where you take on the role of a drone pilot. You pilot drones into derelict spaceships to find the means to survive and piece together how the universe became a giant graveyard. It’s incredibly atmospheric and feeling a bit Alien-like and a previous contributor of ours liked it a lot.

• GZDoom 4.6.0 rolls out with widescreen graphics for Heretic and Hexen

  GZDoom continues maturing as a game engine to play the classics including the Doom series, Heretic and Hexen and more along with developers using it to make their own games (like the upcoming Selaco).

  The latest and greatest is out now with GZDoom 4.6.0 as it continues to polish up the experience.

• Cartoon-like action-adventure Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread coming Linux | GamingOnLinux

  Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread from Allods Team Arcade and publisher MY.GAMES has recently been confirmed as getting a Linux version.

  Ready to blast your way through another colourful action adventure? Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread sounds like it will be pretty sweet, even though that name is a tad on the long-winded side and not exactly easy to remember.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Kget Goodness

    Why is it so hard to have a proper download manager in today’s day ? We had it in the previous decade. Or do tech giants self-proclaim that the world lives only in their cloud.

    At one point, there used to be great download managers for all major web browsers, either in-built, or external. Then came the latest trend with Chrome and Firefox, where they make it difficult to have an external download manager work proper. On either one’s extension store, I find it difficult to see a proper download manager.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME Foundation Board Elections 2021

    The election process for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors is currently underway. Three positions are up for election this year, and Foundation members are able to nominate themselves until May 31st.

    I’ve been sitting on the board since 2015, and have been acting as chair for the past two years. In this post, I’m going to talk a bit about how the board has evolved in the past year, and what sitting on the board involves.

    Board Evolution

    As I’ve talked about previously, the GNOME Foundation Board has been evolving over recent years. When I first joined the board in 2015 we had a staff of one and a half, and the board was busy keeping the organisation running. We approved conference proposals, helped to organise events, dealt with legal issues when they arose, and attempted to manage our staff.

    Nowadays we thankfully don’t have to do these things, because we have an Executive Director and their staff to do them for us. This has allowed the board to increasing move into the role that a board is supposed to have: that is, governance and oversight.

    This is of vital importance since, to have a successful Foundation, we need to have a group which is responsible for taking a hard look at its strategy, plans and organisational health. This isn’t something that a board that is focused on day-to-day operations is able to do.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Lakka Linux 3.0 Released: This Linux Gaming Distro Just Got Better!

    Linux gaming has always been a hot topic in the Linux community. Thanks to the combined effort of the community, Linux can run most of the AAA titles available on Windows, for instance, GTA V and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. But there is another category of Linux people that hold great affection for retro console games, and that’s why we have distros like Lakka and RetroPie.

    In this article, let’s talk about the recent Lakka Linux release, Lakka 3.0, the new features it brings to the table to make the retro gaming experience better on devices like the Raspberry Pi.

    [...]

    The developers are also working on bringing the 64-bit release of Lakka 3.0 for Raspberry Pi 3 in the upcoming versions. Apart from that, developers will also push new versions of Lakka with updated cores twice a month. The next major release will be based on LibreELEC 10.

  • Lightweight Linux distribution for retro gaming Lakka 3.0 is out now

    Lakka is a lightweight Linux distribution that transforms a small computer into a full blown retrogaming console, and it’s the official RetroArch Linux distribution. Good for the Raspberry Pi and other small devices.

    If you’ve got a low-end device laying around, or a single-board like the RPi, then Lakka might be a great way this week to revive it and turn it into a lovely retro-gaming media centre. Over a year since the last release, Lakka 3.0 is out bringing with it a ridiculously huge amount of upgrades.

  • Lakka: Turns Your Raspberry Pi Into Gaming Console

    Lakka is a lightweight Linux distribution that transforms a small PC or Raspberry Pi into a full blown retro gaming console.

    Lakka is built purely for turning your Raspberry Pi into a finely tuned retro gaming console. It only contains the packages and services required to run the RetroArch software allowing the Raspberry Pi’s hardware to run as fast it can. Lakka features numerous features that make it a fantastic choice for setting your Raspberry Pi into console for gaming.

    Built on top of LibreELEC, Lakka uses RetroArch to emulate a huge selection of retro gaming systems. It’s designed to operate out-of-the-box and comes only with cores that work with whatever architecture you choose to download. Cores contain the code necessary to emulate a specific system like NES or PlayStation.

    In addition, Akka has plenty of features like USB controller recognition, custom wallpapers, and online multiplayer, that turns your Raspberry Pi into a full blown retro gaming console.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

  • OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 RC Now Ready for Testing with Linux 5.12, Official AMD Vulkan Driver

    In early April, the OpenMandriva team announced their plans to release one more point release for the OpenMandriva Lx 4 series before they move to the OpenMandriva Lx 5 branch, which is currently in heavy development.

    As such, OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 “Nickel” is now taking shape as the third installment in the OpenMandriva Lx 4 series, shipping with the latest Linux 5.12 kernel and KDE Plasma 5.21 desktop environment series, which is accompanied by the recently released KDE Gear 21.04.1 and KDE Frameworks 5.82 software suites, all compiled against the Qt 5.15.3 application framework with all patches proposed by the KDE Project.

  • OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 RC available for testing

    We have good news: Cooker, our development branch, is working very well right now.
    Our internal testers have been reporting that the system looks very responsive and already brings many user visible advantages over OMLx 4.2.

    Hence we decided to publish a unscheduled stable release to permit the Rock users to enjoy of a good amount of updates they would otherwise not get (unless they upgrade to Rolling) before moving ahead with the more ambitious plans for OMLx 5.0.

    Here is the Release Candidate.

    [...]

    Another feature that will be interesting to some is that we’ve fully integrated support for the new JPEG-XL picture file format. JPEG-XL is significantly more efficient than traditional JPEG, and also adds all major features of PNG (such as transparent images and support for lossless compression).

  • OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 RC Released With LLVM 12 Toolchain, Linux 5.12 Kernel

    With the OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 release candidate they have upgraded to the Linux 5.12 kernel (currently v5.12.4), they make use of LLVM 12 as their main compiler toolchain, systemd 248, KDE Plasma 5.21.5 + KDE Frameworks 5.82 + Qt 5.15.3, Mesa 21.1.1 provides the latest open-source graphics drivers, and there are a variety of other package updates. Beyond bumping to the latest packages, OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 is adding fully integrated support for JPEG-XL images, AMDVLK is now available as an alternative AMD Vulkan driver, and OpenMandriva’s port to the PinePhone continues to be improved upon.

• Arch Family

  • Move of official IRC channels to libera.chat

    As some of you may have read over the past days, there has been an ownership dispute over the freenode.net network. The IRC network has been used by Arch Linux and many other projects over the past decades as a platform for discussion and support

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Fedora Linux 34 Is Now Powered by Linux Kernel 5.12

    Users of the Fedora Linux 34 operating system rejoice! The latest and greatest Linux 5.12 kernel series has landed in the stable software repositories of the distribution, and you can now update your installations to replace the now deprecated Linux 5.11 kernel.

    Fedora Linux 34 was officially released on April 27th, 2021, and it shipped with the Linux kernel 5.11 by default. Since then, users received regular updates almost every week, but now that Linux kernel 5.11 reached end of life, it’s time to say goodbye and upgrade to Linux kernel 5.12.

  • Red Hat Scores A Huge DM Optimization For Linux 5.14 – Phoronix

    Red Hat engineers have scored an impressive performance optimization to the DeviceMapper (DM) code that is now queued up for merging with the Linux 5.14 cycle.

    The commit dm space maps: improve performance with inc/dec on ranges of blocks was summed up as, “When we break sharing on btree nodes we typically need to increment the reference counts to every value held in the node. This can cause a lot of repeated calls to the space maps. Fix this by changing the interface to the space map inc/dec methods to take ranges of adjacent blocks to be operated on.”

  • Build lean Java containers with the new Red Hat Universal Base Images OpenJDK runtime images

    Red Hat Universal Base Images (UBI) contain the full Red Hat build of OpenJDK. Universal Base Images is available to anyone under the terms of the UBI end user license agreement and is fully supported for Red Hat customers. These “builder” images are designed to be suitable for building and running a wide range of Java-based applications, particularly when used in a Red Hat OpenShift environment. They contain the full Java Development Kit (JDK) including the development tools, Java compiler, Maven, and related build tooling.

    The OpenShift source-to-image (S2I) process makes it straightforward to build and update your application’s source code within an OpenShift cluster, and your deployments will be updated whenever the underlying image or your application sources are updated. With this workflow, the application is layered on top of the builder image, so the deployment contains the full JDK and Maven tooling. Some developers want their deployments to be based on a slimmer base image; perhaps without Maven, or without the full JDK tooling, or both.

    To address this need, Red Hat has released new OpenJDK runtime container images, which do not contain the full JDK or other build tooling. This article explains how to use these new images within an OpenShift environment to automatically deploy your application using the S2I workflow. We will use a Quarkus quickstart as the application source.

  • Visualizing performance in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 web console

    Performance is a critical focus area of improvement with every release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). With RHEL 8.4, we introduced several key performance enhancements for system administrators and performance engineers to enable simpler troubleshooting experiences, richer visualization of performance metrics, and deeper performance insights. In this blog, we will go over some of these capabilities.

  • IBM LinuxONE and SUSE – Key Components of Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure for Every Business

    Evolved for the digital economy, IBM LinuxONE gives businesses the security of confidential computing, lightning-fast processing speed, and unparalleled reliability and availability features.

    IBM recently announced IBM LinuxONE III Express, the latest edition to the LinuxONE family, and for the first time, LinuxONE is available in an off-the-shelf configuration that is designed to get clients up and running quickly. This new system, coupled with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for IBM Z and LinuxONE, now affords every business the security, performance, and open source critically needed in an open hybrid cloud. It presents a viable consolidation platform that both saves on licensing costs and enables technologies such as virtualization, cloud, containerization, and cryptography that are vital to surviving in today’s economy.

• Debian Family

  • Antoine Beaupré: Leaving Freenode

    This matters if you care about IRC, the internet, open protocols, decentralisation, and, to a certain extent, federation as well. It also touches on who has the right on network resources: the people who “own” it (through money) or the people who make it work (through their labor). I am biased towards open protocols, the internet, federation, and worker power, and this might taint this analysis.

  • Preliminary thoughts about save-file in EasyOS

  • Steinar H. Gunderson: LZ24

    I cooked together a new compression format over the weekend; it’s based on experiences I had way back when I worked on Snappy, and intends to be as kind as possible to the branch predictor. I don’t intend to productionize it because it isn’t competitive (see below), but I still think the idea is interesting enough to put out there.

    The implementation isn’t much; it’s generally slightly less dense than Snappy, but decompresses faster than it, but it thoroughly trounced by LZ4 still (factor 2–3x!). I don’t know if that’s LZ4′s format being inherently faster or just if it’s about the massive amount of tuning in the implementation; back when we open-sourced Snappy, it was in the same league as LZ4 (well, faster to begin with, and then LZ4 picked up a lot of the same tricks and had a simpler format), so evidently, a lot of things have happened, and I don’t have the patience anymore to tweak individual cycles.

  • RiseupVPN

    There is a new application available for Sparkers: RiseupVPN

    [...]

    License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT features 25.5W PoE+

  Raspberry Pi announced a second-gen “Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT” that keeps the $20 price while advancing to 802.3at PoE+ for powering the Pi with up to 25.5W. A new diode rectifier enables cool running.

  For the first time we can recall, Raspberry Pi Trading has announced a new product without supplying an order button. The replacement for the original Raspberry Pi PoE HAT will be available in June for Raspberry Pi 3B+ and 4 models, selling at same $20 price as the original.

• Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT Announced With Greater Power Capability For $20

• New Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT handles up to 25.5 Watts

  The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced the Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT compliant with 802.3at (aka PoE+) and 802.3af standards and support for up to 25.5 Watts input.

  It will replace the Raspberry Pi PoE HAT introduced in 2018 which was limited to 802.3af standard with a maximum of 15.4 Watts input and will become available around mid-June for $20 plus taxes and shipping.

• Formula Student racer runs Ubuntu on Comet Lake Mini-ITX

  ASRock has revealed that its 10th Gen Comet Lake based “IMB-1222” Mini-ITX board is being used by Dynamis PRC for a Linux-driven autonomous driving system participating in the 2022 Formula Student Championship.

  ASRock Industrial has announced a design win with Dynamis PRC Team, the Formula SAE championship racing team from the Politecnico di Milano. ASRock is providing its IMB-1222 Mini-ITX board, built around Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake-S as the mainboard for a self-driving car system prototype that will compete in the 2022 Formula Student Championship.

• Qualcomm 315 5G IoT modem announced for 5G IIoT applications

• TOPTON D3 mini desktop features AMD Ryzen 5 4500U mobile processor

  TOPTON D3 is an AMD Ryzen 5 4500U mini (desktop) PC that adds to the list of compact computers such as ASRock Mars 4000U or ASRock 4×4 BOX-4800U based on 15W AMD Ryzen 4000-series mobile processors.

  The mini PC offers two DDR4 SODIMM sockets, NVMe SSD storage, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, WiFI 6, as well as three 4K video outputs through HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB-C ports.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • The Librem 14 comes with new software — here’s some of the new things coming your way

    PureOS 10 is going to be our new release for the Librem 14, Librem 5, and Librem Mini. You may already be familiar with its code name “Byzantium” but what happens next is that it moves to our stable release and stops being our rolling release. This means that the character of updates changes from drinking from the firehose to a steady drumbeat of security and stability updates. It also means that it will have had some testing on our hardware and working with other Purism innovations like PureBoot. I’m writing this on my Purism Mini running PureOS 10 and I’ve never been so happy to eat my own dog food.

    Aside from the myriad small changes in the various packages in PureOS, a number of rather large changes are worth mention. The most important is the way that GNOME applications have learned to adapt to multiple window sizes. The software library libhandy was built for our Librem 5 phone but works on all our devices. It enables the various chat, email, and other application windows to resize their contents to elegantly present the information inside them. While this has obvious uses on our phone, it can be useful on any device including your car or TV. Simply resize your libhandy enabled app and you’ll find you can use your laptop screen real estate efficiently without important info scrolling off the sides. All this magic is called “convergence”.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Oppo starts rolling out Android 11-based ColorOS 11 for Oppo Find X2, Oppo F17 Pro and more- Technology News, Firstpost

  • Android 11 Update Released For The Motorola One Action

  • Defective Android apps to have leaked personal data online – DevOps Online

  • Android Malware Named TeaBot Banking Trojan Targets Sixty Banks in Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands – CPO Magazine

  • Will Battlegrounds Mobile India (PUBG) be released for low-end Android devices? All you need to know

  • Honor’s next Android phone will come with Google apps – here’s why that matters | TechRadar

  • Who wants an Android-powered music player with an e-ink screen?

  • TomTom GO Navigation Arrives On Android Auto

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Blog about what you’ve struggled with

  But if you don’t remember what was hard about something, not all is lost! It’s definitely possible to write about a topic that somebody else is struggling with. I find that the easiest way to do this is to first teach the topic, so here’s a quick story about that.

  In 2019, I wrote a zine about SQL. When I started, I thought it would be easy because I was pretty comfortable with SQL – I’d done a LOT of data analysis in SQL and so I thought I could explain it.

  But I couldn’t have been more wrong. It turned out that when I started I had no idea what was actually challenging about learning SQL.

  I spent a lot of time talking to a friend who was new to SQL about how it worked, and we realized that one of the blockers was that it wasn’t obvious to them in what order a given SQL query was running. So I wrote SQL queries don’t start with SELECT, and a bunch of related examples and that helped a lot of people understand SQL queries better!

  The cool thing about this is that when I dig into something that I think is easy but someone else is struggling with, often I learn something new too. For example I did sort of know in what order SQL queries ran but I’d never really thought about it explicitly. And being more explicit about how it worked helped me understand window functions better, which was something I was a bit shaky on!

• Intel Open-Source Stack Enables oneAPI Level Zero For Rocket Lake, Alder Lake S

  A bit late to the game on the Rocket Lake side but ahead as usual when it comes to Alder Lake S, Intel’s engineers maintaining the open-source Compute Runtime for Linux systems have now flipped on the Level Zero support.

  Rocket Lake and forthcoming Alder Lake S processors with Xe Graphics should now have working Level Zero support with Intel Compute Runtime 21.20.19883. Enabling Rocket Lake and Alder Lake S Level Zero support is the main highlight of today’s Compute-Runtime update plus the cl_intel_sharing_format_query extension is also now enabled.

• Daniel Stenberg: The curl user survey 2021

  For the eighth consecutive year we run the annual curl user survey again in 2021. The form just went up and I would love to have you spend 10 minutes of your busy life to tell us how you think curl works, what doesn’t work and what we should do next.

  We have no tracking on the website and we have no metrics or usage measurements of the curl tool or the libcurl library. The only proper way we have left to learn how users and people in general think of us and how curl works, is to ask. So this is what we do, and we limit the asking to once per year.

• Events

  • Ubuntu Blog: Canonical’s first DockerCon

    May 27th will be Canonical’s first time at a DockerCon event. That’s exciting!

    Since our joint announcement back in November, the relationship between Canonical and Docker has become stronger as more projects arise. There’s still a lot to be done in a cloud-native world to make Open Source available to everyone in its purest form.

    We strongly believe in Open Source Software, and our mission hasn’t changed. Our vision, however, has been more focused recently on Cloud and Security. Now is a very special time as we’ve got the motivation, the ability, and the opportunity.

  • Call for Papers – Qt Developer Conference – KDAB

    The Call for Papers for KDAB’s upcoming event, Qt DevCon, is now open. We are planning to make this our first in-person event after the shut-down. The event will take place September 28-30, featuring 1 training day and 2 days of technical talks from developers, for developers.

    [...]

    This conference aims to help the attendees become even better Qt programmers. Talks about general aspects of programming may be off-topic for this conference (as interesting as they may be). For instance, a talk like “C# for Qt developers” is off-topic; a talk like “Here’s what Qt should steal from WForms” could be accepted.

• Web Browsers

  • Chromium

    • Chrome crashing on Windows 10 and Linux now has a fix

      A lot of people rely on the Web these days not just to say informed or connected but also to work. Web browsers have become critical pieces of software on any platform, so when those break, the Internet is filled with complaints and demands for explanations. That is what transpired over the weekend when Google Chrome on Windows 10 started crashing left and right. Google did quickly push out a fix and its solution is just as strange as the bug it fixes.

• Programming/Development

  • Jonathan Dowland: OpenJDK Runtime Containers

    The UBI OpenJDK containers are full fat developer containers: they’ve got the full OpenJDK distribution in them (including javac etc.); they include Maven and there are various quality-of-life additions such as a Prometheus agent for metrics gathering in OpenShift and a run-java script to control launching the eventual application, as well as OpenShift Source-To-Image (S2I) integration.

  • Jonathan Dowland: Answering my own Template Haskell question

    A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a Template Haskell question on the Haskell sub-reddit. This was quite exciting because I rarely see TH questions, and this one was by someone working on something which was quite similar to what I had done: they were writing a code generator, and had pure functions of type Exp -> Exp -> Exp, but wanted to leverage TH’s quasi-quotation syntax (e.g. [| \p -> p + 1 |]) as a syntactic short-hand. Alas these quasi-quotes are of type Q Exp, so the question becomes, how to escape Q?

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.10.5.0.0 on CRAN: New Upstream

    Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 865 other packages on CRAN.

    This new release brings Armadillo 10.5.0 which was released early on Friday. We had done one full test in the ‘10.5 rc1’ prerelease one week earlier, and did another test on 10.5.0 and this 0.10.5.0.0 RcppArmadillo release just for added rigour. The package was then uploaded to CRAN late Friday (my timezone). The automated process flagged one NOTE as a false positive (yet another instance of the well-known (yet dreaded) issue of ‘Suggests != Depends’ by one these 865 packages). This lead to a need of an inspection by one of the CRAN maintainers, and the weekend being the weekend it was only processed just now.

  • Charles Plessy: Trying R 4.1

    I am trying R 4.1 in a schroot experimental container, while waiting that Bullseye’s release will allow the package to be uploaded to Sid and the needed dependencies to be recompiled.

Health/Nutrition

• More Seniors May Need Rehabilitative Therapy Due to Sheltering During COVID

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • More than 80 Linux devs called on to help to fix ‘mess’ created by rogue contributors

          It took over 80 developers to review the Linux kernel and ensure it was free of tainted code recently submitted by University of Minnesota (UNM) researchers.

          The “Hypocrite Commits” row erupted last month when senior kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman urged the community to review all contributions made by UNM after catching researchers from the university deliberately sending compromised code submissions to the kernel.

          Turning in a set of fixes for the current under development kernel release, Kroah-Hartman last week, noted that the majority of the changes are the result of the thorough review.

  • Security

    • PowerShell Is Source of More Than a Third of Critical Security Threats

      PowerShell was the source of more than a third of critical threats detected on endpoints in the second half of 2020, according to a Cisco research study released at the RSA Conference today.

      The top category of threats detected across endpoints by Cisco Secure Endpoint was dual-use tools leveraged for exploitation and post-exploitation tasks. PowerShell Empire, Cobalt Strike, PowerSploit, Metasploit and other such tools have legitimate uses, Cisco noted in the report, but they’ve become part of the attacker toolkit too. Such “living off the land” tactics can avoid detection when deploying foreign tools or code to compromise systems.

    • Security updates for Monday

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (libx11, prosody, and ring), Fedora (ceph, glibc, kernel, libxml2, python-pip, slurm, and tpm2-tss), Mageia (bind, libx11, mediawiki, openjpeg2, postgresql, and thunderbird), openSUSE (Botan, cacti, cacti-spine, chromium, djvulibre, fribidi, graphviz, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, libass, libxml2, lz4, and python-httplib2), and Slackware (expat).

    • TuxCare Services from CloudLinux Help Support U.S. Department of Defense and Space Force National Security Mission

Finance

• Opinion | Blowing Up the Billionaires’ Con That’s Shattering America

  As this nation recovers from a deadly pandemic and rightwing hate groups that are trying to provoke a second Civil War, let’s remember how this all came about. And all for a few extra pieces of gold.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Opinion | The Republican Party and the End of Enlightenment

  “Republican discourse is a never-ending torrent of lies, idiocies, and absurdities—the very antithesis of Reason.”

• Opinion | AP Firing Shows Right-Wing Hypocrisy, Illusion of ‘Objectivity’

  “Beyond the censorious power of the right, there’s something else in corporate journalism’s culture to blame here, and that is its obsession with ‘objectivity’.”

• Finance Execs Are Pouring Millions Into Super PAC Supporting Yang’s Mayoral Run

Monopolies

• Patents

  • KOL190 | Part 2: On Life without Patents and Copyright: Or, But Who Would Pick the Cotton? — Panel Discussion, Hoppe, Dürr, Kinsella, van Dun, Daniels (PFS 2015)

    Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 190-2. In 2015 I delivered this talk: “On Life without Patents and Copyright: Or, Who Would Pick The Cotton?” at the Property and Freedom Society, 10th Annual Meeting, Bodrum, Turkey (Sep. 13, 2015), which is here: KOL190 | On Life without Patents and Copyright: Or, But Who Would Pick the Cotton? (PFS 2015). There was a panel discussion with Q&A from the speakers for that day, to-wit: Hans-Hermann Hoppe, David Dürr, Stephan Kinsella, Frank van Dun, Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple). Transcript below.

  • UC Berkeley CRISPR Patent Revoked in Europe Due To Invalid Priority Claim [Ed: Why on Earth are patents being granted on life and nature as if those are inventions? Because lobbying, bribery and entryism basically shadow-write the laws? Or break the law ever so nonchalantly?]

    CRISPR patents continue to face priority challenges in Europe. Following an earlier revocation of CRISPR patent EP2771468 based on a successful priority challenge, another foundational CRISPR patent EP3241902, co-owned by University of California Berkeley (UCB), was revoked in its entirety last month by the European Patent Office (EPO) based on an invalid priority claim. This is the first significant loss of UCB’s CRISPR patent rights in Europe.

    UCB patent EP3241902 (“the ‘902 patent”) has been revoked following oral proceedings at the EPO on April 12 and 13, 2021. As is common for CRISPR patent challenges at the EPO, multiple opponents sought revocation of the patent on multiple grounds. While the written decision setting out the grounds for revocation by the EPO Opposition Division (OD) has not yet been published, preliminary non-binding opinions by the OD cite a pivotal June 28, 2012 UCB publication (“Jinek 2012”) as potentially relevant prior art to support revocation of the patent on the basis of lack of inventive step under Article 56 EPC.

  • Chief Judge Kimberly Moore [Ed: As expected, the wonderful Prost is moving on. She did a great job at CAFC and crushed many software patents in the US. Moore should carry on her legacy...]

    We have a new Chief Judge at the Federal Circuit: Chief Judge Kimberly Moore. Prior to law school, Judge Moore worked as an electrical engineer for the Navy’s Naval Surface Warfare Center. Her BSEE and MS are both from MIT. Judge Moore then attended Georgetown Law Center; clerked for Judge Archer at the Federal Circuit; and also worked for a short time at Kirkland & Ellis. She was a law professor from 1997-2006 (Chicago-Kent; Maryland, and then George Mason) before being appointed to the Federal Circuit by President George W Bush with unanimous consent from the Senate. Throughout the past 30 years, Chief Judge Moore has primarily focused her attention on patent law issues.

  • Japan Compulsory License [Ed: When you grant people a monopoly but still refuse to enable exclusivity (albeit at a cost to competitors)]

    The legal basis for compulsory licenses under Japanese Patent Law is Article 83 of the Japanese Patent Act (Patent Act), which stipulates that, “Where a patented invention is not sufficiently and continuously worked for 3 years or longer in Japan, a person intending to work the patented invention may request the patentee or the exclusive licensee to hold consultations to discuss granting a non-exclusive license; provided, however, that this shall not apply unless 4 years have lapsed from the filing date of the patent application in which the patented invention was filed.”

    Additionally, Article 92 of the Patent Act stipulates that, (1) Where a patented invention falls under any of the cases as provided in Article 72[1], the patentee or exclusive licensee may request the other person under the said Article to hold consultations to discuss granting a non-exclusive license to work the patented invention or a non-exclusive license on the utility model right or the design right.

  • EPO: NO BACKDOOR ENTRY FOR NEW THIRD PARTY OBSERVATIONS IN APPEAL PROCEEDINGS; T 2255/15 [Ed: This helps distract from the major Boards of Appeal scandal, a case in which the practice of outsourcing courts to GAFAM+ in violation of GDPR and EPC will be discussed by a kangaroo court]

    In the recent appeal proceedings T 2255/15 before the European Patent Office´s Boards of Appeal, third party observations (TPO) were submitted only during the appeal stage. The (recently tightened) Rules of Proceedings of the Boards of Appeal (RPBA) on late-filing only impose constraints on late-file submissions by parties, as does Art. 114(2) EPC. A third party does not become party to the proceedings; so there arose the question: are these rules on late filing applicable to Third Party Observations?

    The deciding Board of Appeal in T 2255/15 said: they can (and must).

    Albeit observations by third parties pursuant to Article 115 EPC can in principle be filed during the appeal stage, Article 115 EPC must not be interpreted in such a way as to grant third parties rights which extend beyond those of the parties to proceedings (a finding that was already issued before, e.g., in G 2/19). Hence, the criteria laid down in Article 12(2) RPBA 2020 for parties to the proceedings are to be taken into consideration in deciding whether and to what extent Third Party Observations must be considered.

  • The tangible benefits of intangible IP rights [Ed: Please quit calling patents "rights" and "property"; such dishonesty is a sign of desperation from those unable to win an argument, and then citing the hugely corrupt EPO for evidence or 'proof'. This is rather appalling.]

    The Australian economy is dominated by SMEs, which account for 99 per cent of all companies, and thus have the potential to play a key role in re-building post-COVID-19.

    As we look for ways to build the post-COVID-19 economy, a recent comprehensive study by the European Patent Office (EPO) has provided some insights on the positive role that innovation and Intellectual Property (IP) rights plays in increasing profitability and creating jobs.

  • Protecting Intellectual Property in the Chemical Engineering Field [Ed: Can we stop calling patents "Intellectual Property"? They're not property, they're not protection (but protectionism), and definitely not rights. All those loaded terms are lies and propaganda, intended to tilt the premises in debates, rendering them meaningless]

    ALTHOUGH historically, chemical engineering has primarily focussed on process engineering, the discipline now encompasses high-performance material design and is frequently linked with biological or biomedical engineering. As the sector continues to develop, new strategies are required to protect the intellectual property that’s created. In this article I explore what these new strategies involve.

    Intellectual property (IP) rights created by a chemical engineering company may encompass technologies not only at the borderline of chemistry and engineering, but also physical processes, and biotechnology. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) classifies patents according to the different areas of technology they involve. Patents relating to chemical engineering cover a huge range of classifications, from “performing operations” such as “physical or chemical processes or apparatus in general”, “separation of solid materials”, “centrifugal apparatus or machines for carrying out physical or chemical processes”, and “cleaning” – to categories relating to textile treatment, mechanical engineering, electricity production and specific areas of chemistry. It’s clear just how diverse the technologies are when you consider the companies which are filing the most patent applications in chemical engineering (see Figure 1).

  • Gnubiotics gains allowance of patent of microbiome markers for prediction, identification and treatment of pet obesity from the European Patent Office [Ed: Gnubiotics has nothing to do with GNU or with animals; it's just another monopolisation attempt, making money from overweight animals]

    Gnubiotics Sciences SA (Gnubiotics), a Swiss biotech company pioneering novel microbiome targeted solutions for humans and companion animals, today announced the allowance from the European Patent Office (EPO) for its patent application 19812838.1 (EPO pubication 3695018). This is a key patent filing covering the microbiome-based prediction, identification and treatment of feline obesity.

  • The Patent Pilot Program is ending – what next? [Ed: Patrick Wingrove still battling for litigation, losing sight of the real purpose of patents because his owners, the sponsors, profit from lawsuits]

    With July marking the end of a project that filters patent cases for certain judges, counsel set out how litigation plans might change

  • Cannabis and patents? Focus on current trends [Ed: If you legalise drugs, then the lawyers and other vultures will claim to 'own' them, calling it "property" and stuff]

• Trademarks

  • Confusion in the INDUSTRY [Ed: Who owns "the industry"? Who turned trademark law into such a farce?]

    IN 2015, Finchley applied to register the word mark BLUE INDUSTRY for its apparel. P&S opposed registration — arguing both confusion and dilution. Opposition proceedings are initially decided by a panel of Trademark Trial & Appeal Board (TTAB) judges. In this case, the judges sided with Finchley and found no likelihood of confusion and no potential for dilution. On appeal, the Federal Circuit has affirmed.

• Copyrights

  • [Guest post] De minimis uses and the German implementation of Art 17 DSM Directive

    As readers may know, Germany passed their implementation of Article 17 of the Digital Single Market (DSM) Copyright Directive on Thursday 20th May 2021. This new copyright legislation is controversial and has potentially dramatic implications for copyright users, rightsholders and platforms. As such, I am extremely grateful to our friend Ansgar Kaiser, who is a Junior Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, who has kindly provided us with this detailed explainer of just what exactly it all means:

    On May 20th 2021, the German Parliament passed a bill containing the most relevant copyright reform in years: the implementation of Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market (DSM Directive) into German law. Many important copyright topics including platform liability, text and data mining, caricature, pastiche, parody, contractual provisions and new related rights for publishers were addressed.

    Already at the European level, the Directive was controversially debated by stakeholders, including citizens, politicians and researchers. The implementation into German law was, and still is, the equally debated sequel on a national level. From the beginning, the most controversial topic was the use of copyright protected works on certain internet platforms, now regulated in Art. 17 DSM Directive.

9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: May 23rd, 2021

This week has been a bit slow in Linux news and releases, but we saw some interesting things along the way, such as the launch of two new Linux-powered laptops from TUXEDO Computers and Entroware. We also saw the end of life of the Linux 5.11 kernel series, so make sure you upgrade to Linux kernel 5.12 or an LTS series soon.

On top of that, this week brought us new releases of the openSUSE Tumbleweed-based GeckoLinux, MX Linux-based AV Linux multimedia production distro, Debian-based antiX Linux, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for May 23rd, 2021, below!

Linux Weekly Roundup #131

We had a peaceful week in the world of Linux, with these releases Robolinux 12.05, GeckoLinux 999.210517.0, and antiX 19.4.

KDE Plasma 5.22 Beta has also been released.

Desktop/Laptop

• Eventually migrating back to GNU/Linux on a recent Lenovo ThinkBook.

  I bought a Lenovo ThinkBook 15 ITL Gen2 last year during the Black Friday sale, and it’s been great so far, except that I’ve been underwhelmed by Windows 10.

  Apparently, this laptop is “Ubuntu Certified” with their 20.04 “OEM Kernel” package. I asked around and got the answer that Ubuntu’s installer detects when that package is necessary and uses it.

  I also gathered that there’s no real difference between the OEM kernel and the regular kernel of those series (other than the usual Ubuntu patches being applied). This means, in theory, any recent kernel series should work fine. But….Then I found this.

  Seems when someone tried installing a GNU/Linux distribution, it installed, and then they rebooted and it couldn’t actually start up……and Windows was gone. Oh, Lenovo. Never change!

  But it also seems that they updated the BIOS sometime in December of 2020 with a fix to make “Ubuntu” (which I’m guessing is just short for “Linux”) possible to install on the units that came with Windows 10, and this person just jumped the gun and put GNU/Linux on there with the original factory BIOS.

  I noticed after upgrading to the latest BIOS revision that numerous small problems that my computer had went away after it was applied. So it appears that it was just super sketchy and they went ahead and released the computer like this to hit a deadline and then fixed it after it shipped.

  Which is actually an improvement for them!

• Run Linux on Refurbished Mini PCs – Other Factors – Part 6

  If you need a fast computer but don’t have much to spend, consider picking up an off-lease refurbished system. These PCs are a few years old and have seen some use, but they are often heavily discounted and offer a lot of bang for your buck.

  In our previous articles we examined the various components that make up a mini PC. Let’s finish the series by looking at some other factors that may be important to your purchase decision.

• Chrome OS Is Officially Leaving Beta For Linux

  After three years of consistent support, Chrome OS is officially leaving the Beta feature support for Linux Apps. Moreover, Chrome OS’s next release will enter a more stable channel in a couple of weeks.

  Although Chrome OS has always been based on Linux, the Linux development environment has provided access to a Linux terminal that developers can use to run command-line tools. Hence with the end of the beta app, numerous improvements are said to be made to the Linux functionality in Chrome OS which will include a new terminal app, a faster update process as well as better support for USB devices.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Josh Bressers: Episode 272 – The Biden Cybersecurity Executive Order

  Josh and Kurt talk about the Biden Administration new cybersecurity executive order. There are some good ideas in there, but at the end of the day it’s an unfunded mandate. Unfunded mandates are difficult to implement.

• The Freenode sky is FALLING

  According to some folks, Freenode’s time is up. But is this yet another example of the FOSS community overreacting?

• DNS Over HTTPS: Next Step In Internet Privacy

  The internet is an incredibly complicated beast and one place that you data is being leaked is with DNS as these requests are made in plain text, luckily there is a solution that is being rolled out known as DNS Over HTTPS, but it’s not perfect.

Kernel Space

• Linux 5.13-rc3

  Hmm. rc3 is when usually the other shoe drops, and we start having a
  lot more fixes for fallout from the merge window.
  
  Not so this time. It's been a very calm rc3 week, and at least in pure
  number of commits this is the smallest rc3 we've had in the 5.x
  series.
  
  Considering that the merge window was not in any way small, this is a
  bit surprising, but I suspect it's one of those "not everybody sent in
  fixes this week" things that will rectify itself next week. I got no
  networking pull this week, for example.
  
  Anyway, enjoy the small rc while you can. I don't think there are any
  huge and scary issues going on, and the appended shortlog certainly
  doesn't have anything that I would consider odd or unusual. If
  anything, maybe some of the fallout from the umn brouhaha stands out.
  
  The diff looks normal too, with about 60% drivers (gpu, habanalabs and
  sound is most noticeable, but there's noise elsewhere too). Other than
  that, it's arch updates (x86, powerpc, arm64), filesystems (btrfs,
  cifs, xfs) and some tooling work. And a bit of noise elsewhere
  (locking, vm, signal info).
  
  For details, see the shortlog (or for even more details, the git tree
  itself, of course).
  
                 Linus
  

• Linux 5.13-rc3 Released With The UMN Reverts+Fixes But Otherwise Small

  Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 5.13-rc3 kernel as expected as the newest weekly test release of the forthcoming Linux 5.13.

  Most notable about Linux 5.13-rc3 is the three dozen patches reverted as part of dropping questionable patches from the University of Minnesota researchers and other clean-ups stemming from the fallout over their “hypocrite commits” research. After reviewing all UMN.edu patches to the Linux kernel over the past month, in Linux 5.13-rc3 the questionable commits have been reverted while some partially address genuine problems in many cases they could be further improved upon or are of limited usefulness.

• Kernel prepatch 5.13-rc3

  The third 5.13 kernel prepatch is out for testing. “It’s been a very calm rc3 week, and at least in pure number of commits this is the smallest rc3 we’ve had in the 5.x series. Considering that the merge window was not in any way small, this is a bit surprising, but I suspect it’s one of those ‘not everybody sent in fixes this week’ things that will rectify itself next week.”

Applications

• Sublime Text 4 Brings in a Refreshed UI, GPU Rendering Feature, and More Exciting Improvements

  A lot of software developers rely on Sublime Text to do their jobs seamlessly.

  This first stable release of the latest major version features a lot of changes that will dramatically enlighten the experience of the users.

  [...]

  Due to its elegant UI and diverse functionalities, Sublime Text makes text editing easier and efficient. This release presents changes ranging from icons’ positions to GPU Rendering and platform integration.

• Sublime Text 4

  The first stable release of Sublime Text 4 has finally arrived! We’ve worked hard on providing improvements without losing focus on what makes Sublime Text great. There are some new major features that we hope will significantly improve your workflow and a countless number of minor improvements across the board.

  A huge thanks goes out to all the beta testers on discord and all the contributors to our packages.

• Gromit-MPX Lets You Draw Anywhere On Linux Desktop Screen

  Have you ever wished that you could freeze your Linux desktop screen and draw anything on it? Or, you may want to point out or highlight a part of your app or desktop to someone else while screen recording on Linux?

  If so, Gromit-MPX is an easy-to-use on-screen annotation tool that you could use right now.

Instructionals/Technical

• Install, Configure & Use Fail2ban on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Server

  Bloggers and Developers who are running and managing their own servers, well of course they are responsible for its security as well. If in today’s world we don’t give heed to security then there is the possibility that our server would become a target of attackers – and cause damage. Well, although there are various online WAF, however, to harden the server an open-source program is available called Fail2Ban. It ensures that the IP address of an attacker is blocked for a certain period of time after several unsuccessful attempts and thus prevents an unlimited number of attempts that could later lead to finding out the password.

• How to install Fail2ban on Debian 10 or 11 Bullseye

  fail2ban is a package of client, server, and configuration files that uses to protect the system from various malicious attacks. It secures Linux server services against Denial of Service (DoS) as well. Whereas, other basic functions are monitor log files, searches for predefined patterns, and temporarily block IP addresses. It is published under the GNU General Public License Version 2 and is based on Python.

  It can run in the background (as a demon) as well as in the foreground. The program is useful, for example, in ssh server you want to limit the number of login attempts. The fail2ban program examines the system’s log files for failed login attempts and then blocks the attacker’s Internet address (IP) for a certain period of time.

• How to Install Themes in Ubuntu

  Many themes from Ubuntu’s software repositories can be installed in a terminal window. Some themes must be manually extracted using Archive Manager. To apply installed themes in Ubuntu, you must download and install GNOME Tweaks from the Ubuntu Software Center.

• How to install the PokeMMO launcher on a Chromebook as an APK

  Today we are looking at how to install the PokeMMO launcher 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.

• How to install Flightgear on Deepin 20.2

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

• Setup Wireless interface on Ubuntu

  Setting up the wireless interface on Ubuntu Linux is likely one of the first things you’ll need to do after installing the operating system and booting into it for the first time. As long as you have the proper hardware, Ubuntu can easily connect to Wi-Fi networks configured with various types of security like WEP, WPA, and WPA2.

  In this guide, we will cover the step by step instructions to connect to a Wi-Fi network from the GNOME GUI (the default desktop environment) on Ubuntu. We will also show how to connect to Wi-Fi from command line, which is handy in the case of headless servers or those running without a desktop environment. Follow along with us below to find out how.

• How to Create Your Own Repository for Packages on Debian

  There are various reasons why you would want to build your own local repository. It is a great way to create a local mirror repository for caching frequently used packages used by many computers to save bandwidth usage, or you might have a few modified packages that you want to make internally available for the dev team.

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to easily create a local Debian package repository, compatible with Debian and Ubuntu versions.

• How to install MySQL 8.0 in Debian | LibreByte

  MySQL is a fast, efficient, secure, stable, easy-to-use, multi-platform, multi-threaded, multi-user, and well-documented relational database manager/server. Currently Oracle guides the development of MySQL, however the community version is available under the GPL license so it is still free software.

• How to Monitor Linux System with Glances Command

  In the past, we have covered quite a number of command-line monitoring tools in Linux. These include vmstat, htop and top command to mention a few. The top command is the most widely used command since it comes preinstalled and gives a real-time performance of the system in addition to displaying the running processes. In this guide, we will pay more attention to an intuitive and user-friendly command-line tool known as glances.

  Based in Python, Glances is a free and opensource cross-platform command-line monitoring tool that provides a wealth of information about your system’s performance. You can monitor system metrics such as memory & CPU utilization, network bandwidth, Disk I/O, File systems, and running processes to mention a few.

Games

• Talking Point: how about a monthly Steam Game Pass from Valve

  Subscriptions, they’re everywhere and more seem to appear all the time. So, what IF Valve were to announce their own Steam Game Pass to give you access to a great many games?

  Let’s be realistic here though – Valve doesn’t need one. Steam is and will be for a long time to come, a money printing machine because of the user share they have across PC platforms (Linux, macOS and Windows). However, Valve do have competition increasing all the time. Not just from the Epic Games Store but thinking more on the likes of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate – which includes a ton of games along with upcoming game streaming support too. That has proven extremely popular for Microsoft and services like that absolutely will pull people away from buying more games on Steam. Why would you, after all, if you can get 100+ (and growing) AA/AAA and indie games often close to release in a single subscription?

• Ian Jackson: Otter game server – now with uploadable game bundles

  Otter comes with playing cards and a chess set, and some ancillary bits and bobs. Until now, if you wanted to play with something else, the only way was to read some rather frightening build instructions to add your pieces to Otter itself, or to dump a complicated structure of extra files into the server install.

  Now that I have released Otter 0.6.0, you can upload a zipfile to the server. The format of the zipfile is even documented!

• Derivation: Pepper in Super Tilt Bro (Nes game)

  Retro gaming is a big part of my life. So, when Sylvain Gadrat (aka sgadrat or Roger Bidon) contacted me last week to show the new playable character of his Nes game −Pepper− I had suddenly a large grin like a Cheshire cat and I started to see rainbows.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • New Wallpaper for KDE Plasma 5.22 is Here. And It’s Very Artful

    The KDE Team shared the KDE Plasma 5.22 default wallpaper with us. Have a look.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Review: TeLOS and snakeware 0.0.6

    This past week I decided to pick a couple of projects at random from the DistroWatch waiting list to see what new, different, or interesting distributions are being developed. The first project I decided to try was TeLOS. TeLOS is a Debian-based project which uses Debian’s Testing and Unstable branches as its foundation. The distribution runs the KDE Plasma desktop and its website lists an odd combination of features. The TeLOS website claims the distribution is lightweight and full-featured; customizable and not bloated. It also reportedly honours open source software while including non-free firmware, Steam, and the proprietary Chrome web browser. In other words, each line of the project’s description seems to contradict the previous line…

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo IRC presence moving to Libera Chat

    The Gentoo Council held an emergency single agenda item meeting today. At this meeting, we have decided to move the official IRC presence of Gentoo to the Libera Chat IRC network. We intend to have this move complete at latest by 13/June/2021. A full log of the meeting will be available for download soon.

    At the moment it is unclear whether we will retain any presence on Freenode at all; we urge all users of the #gentoo channel namespace to move to Libera Chat immediately.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Lubuntu IRC channels are moving networks!

    Following the Ubuntu IRC Council resolution, Lubuntu will be moving all of the Lubuntu IRC channels to LiberaChat as well. Some of the channels have already moved at the time of this announcement and the others will follow shortly. We are also working on updating our links to reflect the change.

  • Comparison of Ubuntu and Android

    There are Ubuntu and Android two similar but distinct computer operating systems. The main difference lies on Ubuntu being known for desktop while Android being known for phone. There are other differences such as Companies behind, how Publishing done, Hardware Architectures supported, actual Systems inside, and more.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • How to get clean analog audio from a Blue Yeti microphone into a Sony a6400 camera using a Raspberry Pi Zero

    You can connect the headphone out of a Blue Yeti microphone into the mic in of a Sony a6400 camera but the quality of the audio you get will depend on how clean the USB source powering your Blue Yeti is.

  • Indian tech cos join hands to make open source based oxygen concentrators; to be priced at around Rs 40k

    Indian tech cos join hands to make open source based oxygen concentrators; to be priced at around Rs 40kA group of small and medium Indian technology companies and a defence PSU have joined hands to manufacture oxygen concentrators based on an open source design project Marut, initiated by robotic and automation startup Technido to meet the immediate need of patients and reduce dependency on imports.

    According to the companies involved in the project, the oxygen concentrator (OC) with 10 litres per minute flow with purity of above 93 per cent and capability to operate round-the-clock can be retailed at about half the price of imported units in the range of Rs 65,000-70,000 per piece.

    The prices can further reduce to Rs 35,000-40,000 apiece on bulk purchase of 100 units or more, according to Technido.

  • Stryde is an Arduino Nano Every-powered MIDI preset loader

    MIDI-controlled instruments are awesome, as custom sounds can be loaded and dynamically changed while you play. However, accessing these effects often requires an external controller that can get expensive and complicated. That is why music enthusiast Joe King created the Stryde, which is a fully integrated MIDI preset loader within a small enclosure. Stryde uses an Arduino Nano Every at its core to store presets, display information, and select effects.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Mi TV P1: Xiaomi Malaysia’s affordable Android TV line up priced from RM999 | Tech/Gadgets | Malay Mail

  • Realme X7 Max 5G, 4K Android TVs with Dolby Cinema to launch in India on May 31 – Technology News

  • OnePlus TV 40Y1 launches with Android 9, Full HD display for Rs 21,999

  • Android users can now tap to pay for transit rides in the Bay Area | Engadget

  • Data of 100M Android users exposed from exposed cloud storage syncing – SiliconANGLE

  • These Samsung smartphones will reportedly receive Android 12 update

  • OnePlus Denniz (DN2101) Spotted on BIS India, OnePlus DE2117, DE2118 Running Android 11 Appears on HTML5TEST – MySmartPrice

  • The Best Android Games for 2021

  • Best New Android Games this Week: Woven Pocket Edition, Samarost, My Hero Academia, and More – Droid Gamers

  • Android 12: Google’s major new revamp changes your phone from head to toe. Here’s how – CNET

  • Pixel Buds showing remaining battery in hours on Android 12 – 9to5Google

  • Samsung Confirms It Won’t Dump Tizen OS For Its Android TV Lineup – TechStory

  • F-Droid Spotlight: Infinity for Reddit

    I found a useful app for accessing Reddit in the F-Droid store, which is called Infinity.

    Like most apps that come from the Google Play store, the official Reddit app is packed full of tracking libraries, it displays a lot of ads, and it just generally doesn’t work very well.

    I was surprised to find Infinity in the F-Droid store. I had been using RedReader, but I felt that too much functionality was missing and that it had clearly been designed for a very old version of Android.

    I value being able to move through Reddit quickly and not seeing their annoying “sponsored post” advertisements (garbage) while being able to access all of its features, plus being able to get at and download media that Reddit normally tries to hide. Infinity delivers on all of this.

    When I’m on my laptop, of course, none of this is a problem, but on mobile, nobody invests anything in their “mobile sites” and they add “incentives” to use their apps, like breaking basic functionality that a mobile browser could run to compel people to get their app, where they can data mine their entire device and the ad blocker will be ineffective. On Facebook’s mobile site, they even removed access to Messenger to try to force people to move over to their Android spyware.

    Some blame, of course, goes to Apple, for deliberately holding back the web platform features available to WebKit on iPhones, which all “browsers” on that platform must use, but site owners certainly have no incentive to shift things to a site where people may block their trackers.

  • Google Play Spotlight: GasBuddy, Grindr, or how I informed Facebook using Android. F-Droid Spotlight: TrackerControl.

    As everyone should know already, privacy on an Android phone, in general, is pretty much a joke.

    In fact, the more “apps” you install from Google, the worse things get. Not only does every application published in the Play Store phone home, at a minimum, to give Google crash and analytics data about you (even if the underlying program is Free Software), but developers generally have every incentive to include more.

    When Facebook was forced to reveal “Off Site Activity Data” under recent privacy laws like the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA, it made them very hard to get at, but when you eventually find the link that gives you limited control over it, you’ll find that most Android apps are spying on you when you open them and are sending them data.

    In fact, Facebook publishes a tracking library that app developers can bundle in exchange for money.

    When you “learn more”, Facebook admits that it gets more data than it tells you about here, and it’s not even clear what really happens to the data when you clear it and set it so that they don’t use this activity later.

    So what does that have to do with apps like GasBuddy? Well, I opened it up and TrackerControl revealed that there are no less than 25 tracker libraries included in this one app, and but one of them is Facebook.

  • Failure is not an option, it comes with every Samsung Galaxy phone. (Thanks to Microsoft and T-Mobile.) Swap out the photo gallery with F-Droid.

    We used to joke about Windows that failure was not an option. It came bundled with every copy.

    Under Microsoft’s tutelage (and threats of patent aggression), Samsung phones have been getting excessively annoying. I keep saying that my next phone might just be a Google device, but next time I don’t think I’d consider a Samsung, even if they’re really cheap.

    When I bought my Galaxy S20 FE last year at Best Buy, I did not know that the Microsoft “integration” went deeper than some apps that the salesman assured me, could mostly be gotten rid of.

    While the apps are mostly gone, Samsung has integrated a lot of things directly into the firmware.

    Samsung’s Android phones have tended to be a disjointed mess of their own homegrown crap, which has been accumulating, and still there despite users constantly mocking it (Bixby) , Google’s crap, which all has to be preloaded per the Google Play Certification, and now Microsoft’s crap, which is there because Microsoft threatened them with software patent lawsuits if they didn’t bundle it.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla outsources newsgroups to Google, development to Microsoft GitHub, and stuffs proprietary tracking into Firefox for Android. The user experience is falling apart.

      Many years ago, Mozilla used to stand for things. The years have not been kind. They ran out Brendan Eich over political views that are not illegal to have or express, but rather due to Cancel Culture, then they proceeded to tear down the things that made Firefox different and special.

      Today, Firefox is packed full of proprietary programs and is pretty much a thrall of Google and Microsoft.

      [...]

      OpenBSD, an operating system concerned foremost with security, patched DNS-Over-HTTPS to set the preference to OFF because the end result is essentially a supercookie which lets Cloudflare keep tabs on a user everywhere they go if it is turned on, and which might cause the user to be tracked, even if they’re in a VPN.

      In closing, the number of things the user needs to turn off in Firefox is growing to be nearly as big as those “Windows 10 Privacy” lists. This is insane. Users don’t want to be tracked, fingerprinted, advertised to, and experimented on.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • pgAdmin 4 v5.3 Released

    The pgAdmin Development Team is pleased to announce pgAdmin 4 version 5.3. This release of pgAdmin 4 includes 25 bug fixes and new features. For more details please see the release notes.

    pgAdmin is the leading Open Source graphical management tool for PostgreSQL. For more information, please see the website.

  • Pgpool-II 4.2.3, 4.1.7, 4.0.14, 3.7.19 and 3.6.26 released.

• Programming/Development

  • Perl/Raku

    • The Witch and the Witch-hunt

      A lot has been said about the recent CAT report and updates. It feels to me like we’re not getting anywhere because the critical matters aren’t being addressed.

      [...]

      These different worldviews make it almost impossible for people to talk about the issue at hand, because they’re talking past each other. Almost any discussion on the subject quickly devolves to bickering between people saying “How can you defend this toxic person” versus people saying “how can you defend this miscarriage of justice”. For a lot of people it becomes a “you’re either with us or against us” type of issue. Without splitting these conversations, we can’t actually meet each other eye-to-eye. One can admit that what happened here was a cockup without denying that it tries to deal with an actual issue.

Monumentalizing Iniquity

Health/Nutrition

• Workers Matter and Government Works: Eight Lessons from the Pandemic

  1.  Workers are always essential.

• How to Fight Big Pharma — And Win

• China is using vaccines to push its agenda in Latin America, and the U.S. is behind the curve, experts say

  Honduras and Paraguay, however, face a shortage of vaccines but have not received any Chinese-made doses. Both countries say they have been offered Chinese-made vaccines in return for cutting diplomatic ties with Taiwan, which China insists is part of its territory.

Integrity/Availability

• DDoS [cracking] attempts drop in Q1 2021: Report

  In the first quarter of 2021, the number of DDoS attacks dropped by 29 per cent compared to the same period in 2020, but increased by 47 per cent compared to the fourth quarter in 2020, says a report.

• Failed DNS server restarts caused Salesforce outage

  Configuration change “exposed a design issue in the shutdown process”.
  Domain name servers that did not restart as expected after a configuration change caused Salesforce’s services to go down worldwide on May 12, the company said in a final root cause analysis of the incident.

  On that day, “a configuration change was made as an emergency fix at the network tier, which was designed to address a functional gap in preparation for an upcoming maintenance activity,” Salesforce said.

Defence/Aggression

• Gun Availability Worsens Domestic Abuse, But Gun Bans Don’t Create Safety Either

• Air Force held first information warfare test exercises

  The U.S. Air Force conducted its first information warfare-focused exercises to test the concept at a new range in the New Mexico desert.

  To date, Air Combat Command led 10 “proof of concept” exercises, Jeffrey Phillips, commander of the 67th Cyberspace Wing, said May 18 during an AFCEA Alamo Chapter online event.

  These information warfare flags followed the theme of “convergence,” a key concept championed by Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh, commander of 16th Air Force, the service’s first information warfare numbered force that integrates global intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, cyber, electronic warfare, and information operations under a single commander.

• Iran Says Inspectors May No Longer Get Nuclear Sites Images

  Iran’s hard-line parliament in December approved a bill that would suspend part of U.N. inspections of its nuclear facilities if European signatories did not provide relief from oil and banking sanctions by February. The IAEA struck a three-month deal with Iran to have it hold the surveillance images, with Tehran threatening to delete them afterward if no deal had been reached.

• Fighting with facts: Jewish law students respond to Muslim law student lies

  I’m the president of the UIUC College of Law’s Jewish Law Students Association, JLSA. This evening the entire law school received the statement forwarded below. There was no prior correspondence or contact made with JLSA prior to this statement being issued to the whole school (yet the statement was provided to relatively all minority student orgs besides JLSA before being sent).

  A number of Jewish law students have already reached out to me appalled by the statement. While this form of speech is protected under the 1st amendment, a substantial amount of the College of Law community does not have views aligning with the polarizing rhetoric displayed below. Many of my Jewish colleagues, coming from families with Holocaust survivors or loved ones currently living in Israel, were honestly quite hurt reading such hateful words.

  Here it is, replete with lies, fabrications and falsifications. It is followed by our rebuttal.

• PA mufti expelled from prayers at al-Aqsa for not supporting Hamas, Gaza

  In an unprecedented move, Muslim worshipers on Friday expelled Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem Sheikh Mohammed Hussein from al-Aqsa Mosque and prevented him from completing his sermon.

• Crowd swarms Tangerang housing complex after an alleged loud mosque complaint

  Meanwhile, a neighborhood unit (RT) chief and one of the mosque’s caretakers, Abdul Haer, said they met with MR following the alleged complaint. With no satisfactory outcome from the meeting, the story of the alleged complaint quickly spread to Sangereng villagers and stoked their anger.

  A couple of clips showing a crowd of villagers swarming Il Lago’s entrance has been widely circulating on social media.

• Israel-Hamas Ceasefire Holds, UN to Launch Gaza Aid Appeal

  A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas held into a third day on Sunday as mediators spoke to all sides about extending the period of calm after the

  worst outbreak of fighting in years.

  Egyptian mediators have been shuttling between Israel and the Gaza Strip, which is ruled by Hamas, to try to sustain the ceasefire and have also met the Islamist group’s rival, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, in the occupied West Bank.

Environment

• ‘We Can Change’: In New Film, Greta Thunberg Connects Dots Between Animal Exploitation, Climate Crisis, and Pandemics

  “We need to rethink how we value and treat nature in order to safeguard future and present living conditions for life on Earth.”

• Overpopulation

  • Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications

    A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for women. But the census announcements this month from China and the United States, which showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades for both countries, also point to hard-to-fathom adjustments.

    The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older. Imagine governments laying out huge bonuses for immigrants and mothers with lots of children. Imagine a gig economy filled with grandparents and Super Bowl ads promoting procreation.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Matt Taibbi: Journalists have shifted public opinion in support of intelligence agencies

  Author and journalist Matt Taibbi says that public opinion toward U.S. intelligence agencies has shifted in the past decade in large part due to a shift in media coverage away from intelligence abuses and more toward actions by members of former President Trump’s administration.

Censorship/Free Speech

• WSWS writer Evan Blake banned from “Badass Teachers Association” Facebook group

  On Monday, World Socialist Web Site writer Evan Blake was banned from the national Facebook group “Badass Teachers Association” (BATs) with no explanation. This act of censorship took place shortly after Blake attempted to post the WSWS Perspective, “Survey of epidemiologists exposes lies that children do not spread COVID-19,” which explained the dangers involved with school reopenings and the decision by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to end masking guidelines. The article calls for educators and the entire working class to oppose these policies.

• Censorship: A Personal Story

  Facts are no longer the bedrock of reason in many cases. A woman was taken to an EU court for hate speech. She had offended a Muslim for making a factual statement about Islam. But in the EU court, it was ruled that the words may be factual, but if they offended a protected class, in this case Muslims, the speaker should be fined.

  All of this bothers me, not about being personally abused, but that increasingly facts and critical thought are not the foundation of our civilization. Screaming, insults, persecution of opponents, and hatred are used instead of discussion and debate. And worse, we are being trained to self-censor, the ultimate censorship.

  Censorship is totalitarian, and today it attacks what are called conservatives and libertarians. However, once censorship is in place, the day will come when the sword will cut the other way.

• New Zealand and France host “Christchurch Call” summit to expand [Internet] censorship

  Its real aim is to promote mechanisms for governments and tech companies to increase their ability to censor online content that they deem to be promoting terrorism or “violent extremism.” What counts as extremism is determined by the state.

  The real target is not the far-right, but left-wing and socialist organisations and individuals. In every country, the ruling class is building up police state powers in preparation for suppressing mass opposition from the working class to austerity, war preparations, and the murderous policies that have allowed the COVID-19 pandemic to spread, killing millions of people.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Blinken condemns ‘shocking act’ of Belarus forcing plane carrying opposition journalist to land

  Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday condemned the forced landing of a Ryanair flight by Belarus and the arrest of an opposition journalist on board, calling it a “shocking act” that endangered the lives of U.S. citizens and everyone else on board.

  In a statement, Blinked vowed that the U.S. would respond with its allies in the region, and called for the “immediate release” of journalist Raman Protasevich, who according to reports, was detained by Belarusian security forces after the flight landed.

• Belarus’s dictator grounds a plane to arrest a critical journalist

  Alexander Lukashenko has committed what is tantamount to an act of piracy. On May 23rd the embattled dictator of Belarus forced a Ryanair passenger plane to make an unscheduled stop in his capital in order to arrest the editor of an internet channel, NEXTA, that has been reporting on his crackdown since he stole an election last August.

  Roman Protasevich, aged 26, was taken off the plane, which was flying from Athens to Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. Citing what it said was evidence that there were explosives on board, the authorities forced the aircraft to land in Minsk as it passed through Belarusian airspace on its way to neighbouring Lithuania, sending a MiG fighter plane to escort the Ryanair jet down. The state news agency later reported that no explosives had been found, and it seems certain that the incident was invented purely as a way of arresting the journalist.

• Activists call for new probe into killings of Turkish journalists

  Media rights groups on Sunday urged Turkish authorities to investigate explosive allegations by a mafia boss about the high-profile killings of two journalists in the 1990s.

  Sedat Peker, an underworld mobster exiled abroad, has accused members of the government and the ruling AKP party of corruption and various crimes in a series of YouTube posts over the past three weeks.

  In the latest, released on Sunday, he alleges former interior minister Mehmet Agar was the head of the “deep state” in Turkey and that Agar was involved in the 1993 murder of prominent investigative journalist Ugur Mumcu.

  Mumcu, who wrote for the Cumhuriyet daily, was killed in the capital Ankara after his car was rigged to explode when the ignition was switched on. The perpetrators were never identified.

• How Stanford College Republicans worked with right-wing media to get an AP reporter fired

  Former Associated Press reporter Emily Wilder was fired from the international media company late Thursday following a pressure campaign by right-wing media, including publications such as The Federalist and The Washington Free Beacon working in tandem with the Standford College Republicans. Wilder was “canceled,” if you will, for pro-Palestinian activism during her years in college — not at the AP.

  The campaign to have Wilder fired started on Monday with the Stanford College Republicans taking to Twitter to bill the reporter’s past pro-Palestine demonstrating as controversial, coming to the verdict that she would never be able to be impartial while covering national news.

Civil Rights/Policing

• It’s Time for “Whiteness as Usual” to End

• Opinion | Poor People’s Campaign and House Progressives Call for a ‘Third Reconstruction’

  A new Congressional resolution lays out a comprehensive vision for eradicating poverty and tackling racial and economic inequality.

• Business As Usual On Biden’s Border

• With No Churches Left to Close, Algerian Government Turns to Individuals

  With no more churches to close, it appears the Algerian government is turning its attention to individuals. Pastor Chalah shared with French newspaper Christianity Today that a new wave of persecution is now hitting the country. Algerian Christian Hamid Soudad lost his appeal and is sentenced to five years in prison on blasphemy charges. Pastor Rachid Sieghir and his bookshop assistant Nouh Hamami had their final appeal for two-year prison sentences also on blasphemy charges on May 16 and are awaiting a final decision, scheduled for May 30. Both cases date back at least 3 years.

• Mamnoor Rahman: ‘Honour killing’ son set for prison release

  Chomir Ali told his sons Mujibar Rahman and Mamnoor Rahman to kill a university student who had made his daughter pregnant.

  The body of Arash Ghorbani-Zarin, 19, was found with 46 stab wounds in his car in Oxford in November 2004.

  The Parole Board has decided Mamnoor Rahman is “suitable” for release.

• Cops Who Killed a Man While Holding Him in a Hog-Tie Position Got Qualified Immunity. The Appeals Court Wasn’t Having It.

  A group of police officers who hog-tied a man and held him face-down on pavement for five-and-a-half minutes, eventually resulting in his death from asphyxiation, are not entitled to qualified immunity and can thus be sued for damages, a federal court ruled last month.

  The decision overturns a lower court ruling, which held that the family didn’t have the right to bring any such suit before a jury. It’s another example of just how subjective qualified immunity decisions can be, which often prohibit victims from holding state actors accountable in civil court when the misconduct they’re alleging isn’t outlined almost exactly somewhere in a previous court precedent.

Monopolies

• Patent Docs: U.S. Trade Representative Releases 2021 Special 301 Report [Ed: Kevin E. Noonan disseminating notorious USTR propaganda, where they basically blackmail entire nations on behalf of US megacorporation to undermine competitors]

  Or maybe not. On April 30th, Ambassador Katherine Tai, U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), issued the 2021 Special 301 Report. In a press release, the USTR stated that “[i]ntellectual property rights incentivize our creators, manufacturers, and innovators to invent new products and technologies.” The press release notes that the review period underlying the Report took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, “the largest global health crisis in more than a century.”

• Patents

  • Nanomerics announces patents granted in the US, Europe and Japan and two key publications on the ocular use of its Molecular Envelope Technology

    These patents have been granted by the European Patent Office (EP3215119 ), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (US10987304) and the Japan Patent Office (JP6832276). Nanomerics Ltd. also today announced the publication of two key papers on the topical ocular use of its penetration-enhancing Molecular Envelope Technology (Pharmaceutics 2021, 13(5), 744; and Int J Pharm 2021, 599, 120364).

  • Question 11 from my Property Law Final Exam. [Ed: Misconception/misuse of the term 'ownership' from litigation firms-funded liars who call ideas "assets", call patents "rights" (complete BS), and just about everything -- even life and nature -- "property" (slave-owning mentality of privileged sociopaths). So some US universities (called "colleges") are run by and employ as teachers/lecturers pawns funded by #patent litigation firms. No conflict of interest there at all...]

    Who owns the bugs that Trachtenberg has captured?

• Copyrights

  • Do We Need a New Deal for Artists Today?

  • Watch Tower Ups Pressure on YouTube & Facebook To Hand Over Infringers’ Details

    After filing a lawsuit against the creator of the ‘DubTown’ Lego stop motion series, Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, the supervising body and publisher for the Jehovah’s Witness religious group, has yet more alleged infringers in its sights. In addition to targeting more YouTube users, Watch Tower is attempting to find out the identities of people posting its songs to Facebook.