08.11.21
Posted in News Roundup at 8:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Today, I’m taking a quick look at the recently released Elementary OS 6.0 “Odin”. Elementary is an Ubuntu-based Linux distro that has its own desktop environment and its own custom applications. It is very Mac-like in its “walled garden” approach to how a desktop should look and function.
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KDE Gear 21.08 comes out Tomorrow! KG⚙️21.08 brings updates and new features to your favorite apps. We made ads for some of them, using different styles and perspectives. Here is an ad for Elisa, KDE’s simple, but fancy music player.
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Is there a secret motive behind Apple’s announced plans to scan iMessage and iCloud Photo Library content?
Plus how using a common SDK just cost Zoom $85M.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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It’s been less than one week since the AMDVLK 2021.Q3.3 update for this official open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver while today AMD has issued its latest update.
Given the short turnaround time since the prior update, when seeing AMDVLK 2021.Q3.4 tagged this morning, the immediate thought was this would be to provide official Radeon RX 6600 XT support given its retail launch today. That’s not the case and AMDVLK 2021.Q3.4 is just for shipping one driver fix.
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And according to the list of changes to the Linux kernel, Intel is ironically removing support for its Cannon Lake graphics driver in the upcoming Linux kernel version 5.15. These chips were famously shipped without the integrated graphics engine active, meaning the graphics drivers weren’t even needed. Interestingly, the chips did have an integrated Gen 10 graphics engine, but Intel disabled the graphics in a sure sign that there were yield problems with its 10nm process that it wasn’t being entirely forthcoming about. In fact, Intel also limited these chips to the China region to keep them away from Western audiences. What followed was a long string of further 10nm delays that gave its competitor AMD a massive advantage, and Intel still hasn’t fully recovered from the impact.
Perhaps the biggest news, besides the enablement code for DG2, is the removal of support for Intel Cannon Lake graphics. The i915 GFX driver will no longer support Cannon Lake graphics in the upcoming Linux kernel version 5.15. This means that Intel considers Cannon Lake’s graphics driver as a bloated addition to the i915 GFX driver, and hence, it is removing it. The driver didn’t matter anyway — the graphics engine never worked.
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Benchmarks
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With yesterday’s launch day Radeon RX 6600 XT Linux review the benchmarks were conducted using the popular Mesa RADV open-source driver used by many Linux gamers considering it’s the driver Valve has been relentlessly optimizing and is the default on most (or all) Linux distributions. For those wondering how the performance of RADV is comparing to that of AMD’s closed-source “PRO” Vulkan driver distributed as part of the “Radeon Software for Linux” package, here are some benchmarks exploring that difference.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Have you ever wondered how much time it takes for your system to boot? Maybe someone you know has claimed that their system boots faster than yours and you’re curious about the exact time. While not everyone is interested in the numbers, you might be. You’ll certainly want booting to be as fast as possible.
By the end of this guide, you’ll have a brief understanding of what affects your Linux system’s boot time and how to calculate its total duration. You’ll also learn ways to decrease the boot-up time and transform your computer into a fast and responsive beast.
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Decreasing video sizes becomes necessary when space is limited in cloud services, disks, or personal storage drives. You can easily hold onto larger files by chopping them down to a lower size.
The world of open-source video editing tools is huge. So, choosing one can be tricky. This article explains how you can efficiently decrease video sizes using FFmpeg in Linux.
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The official PPA for Shutter screenshot tool is back! So far contains packages for Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 21.04.
Shutter is one of the most popular screenshot tool for Linux. Other than basic screen capturing feature, it supports plugins, profiles, uploading to Imgur, Dropbox, etc., and has a built-in editor.
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Following below is a brief set of instructions setting up KDE Plasma on RockyLinux along with Gnome Desktop Manager which is actually needed to support graphical login, otherwise system might be started via text login followed by “startx”
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ImageMagick is a free and open-source image manipulation tool. It is mainly used to create, edit, compose or convert bitmap images. Its uses include resizing, rotating, shearing images, applying various special effects, or drawing text, lines, and curves. Most of its functionalities are performed from the command line.
ImageMagick supports a variety of image formats such as PNG, JPEG, GIF, HEIC, TIFF, DPX, EXR, WebP, Postscript, PDF, and SVG. ImageMagick is compatible with Linux, Windows, Mac Os X, iOS, Android OS, and others.
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We all are aware of the most popular command called ‘useradd‘ or ‘adduser‘ in Linux. There are times when a Linux System Administrator is asked to create user accounts on Linux with some specific properties, limitations, or comments.
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A process, in POSIX terminology, is an ongoing event being managed by an operating system’s kernel. A process is spawned when you launch an application, although there are many other processes running in the background of your computer, including programs to keep your system time accurate, to monitor for new filesystems, to index files, and so on.
Most operating systems have a system activity monitor of some kind so you can learn what processes are running at any give moment. Linux has a few for you to choose from, including GNOME System Monitor and KSysGuard. Both are useful applications on the desktop, but Linux also provides the ability to monitor your system in your terminal. Regardless of which you choose, it’s a common task for those who take an active role in managing their computer is to examine a specific process.
In this article, I demonstrate how to find the process ID (PID) of a program. The most common tools for this are provided by the procps-ng package, including the ps and pstree, pidof, and pgrep commands.
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This one might seem obvious, but I’ve seen it go wrong several times. When organizing Terraform code, either standardizing the directory structure or defining naming conventions, it’s vital to consider the intended audience. Will your team be using these Terraform scripts and modules? Are you handing the work over to another team? Will new people be joining your team sooner or later? Are you working on this project solo? Will you be using this setup in six months or a year, or will it be assigned to someone else?
Questions like these affect several decisions. Ideally, you should have Remote State and State Locking in place regardless of the team size now or in the future. Remote State will ensure your laptop is not the only place your Terraform works, and State Locking will ensure that only one person at a time is changing the infrastructure.
The naming convention should make sense to the eventual owners of the project, not just the team that is writing the code. If the project is for another team, make sure they have a say in the naming convention. If non-technical stakeholders or internal security/GCR teams review the code, make sure they check the naming convention. In addition to resource names, you should leverage resource tags to highlight any data classification/privacy requirements (high, medium, low) for more careful examination by reviewers.
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I have a cheap no-name UPS acquired from Jaycar and was wondering if I could get it to connect to my Synology DS918+. It rather unhelpfully identifies itself as MEC0003 and comes with some blob of non-working software on a CD; however some investigation found it could maybe work on my Synology NAS using the Network UPS Tools nutdrv_qx driver with the hunnox subdriver type.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Grafana on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Grafana is the open-source analytics and monitoring solution for every database such as Elasticsearch, Graphite, OpenTSDB, Prometheus, and InfluxDB. The application gives a beautiful dashboard and metric analytics.
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 Grafana open-source analytics & monitoring on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.
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Google Chrome is the most used Internet Explorer software on the earth, with a recent update in 2021 that Chrome is currently the primary browser of more than 2.65 billion internet users. As you would know, installing Rocky Linux 8, like most Linux distributions, only install Mozilla Firefox. However, installing Google Chrome on Rocky Linux 8 is a straightforward task.
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For your Linux system, it’s possible to have multiple users connected to a computer at the same time. The good thing is, you can easily find out who is on board and connected to the system. Learn how to list logged-in users on your Linux computer.
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Wine or Emulation
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I am going to make this section extra difficult, but the result will be all the more satisfying. First, getting Caesar III to run. Even in the XP days, things weren’t always trivial, and they got worse over time. In the Windows 7 era, you could use the compatibility mode to get things working. Now, interestingly, you can run it without any great tricks in Windows, thanks to Steam, but then, what about Linux?
So, I tried setting up Caesar III using Proton. Great success! This worked absolutely fine. But as I mentioned, the resolution is limited to the best of Windows 98 at the time of Caesar’s release. This is where Julius comes in. The project lives on GitHub, and it’s had, unsurprisingly, quite an active development. There are versions available for all major operating systems, Linux included.
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Julius is a great contribution to humanity. Like OpenTTD, it’s a blessing. And also evidence that awesome games never really die. Caesar III remains the ultimate city builder. You may say, wait a minute. What about SimCity 4, Cities Skylines and Workers & Resources? Yup, those are amazing in their own right. But while they focus more on transport or industry or society, Caesar III has the perfect balance of all. Aesthetic, style, music, gameplay difficulty, variety. And you just can’t beat the simple elegance of the Roman architecture.
If you were or are a fan of Caesar III, you can still play it today. GOG and Steam already let you do that. Julius helps you bring the excitement and fun to a new level, with a fullscreen, wholescreen experience. So here we have, a game made 23 years ago, and today, it’s even more brilliant than ever. It’s these moment of joy that redeem the modern technology. I’m done here. Your turn. What are you waiting for?
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Games
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Did I just see what I think I saw??? The Back 4 Blood Open Beta begins August 12, and there’s a nice surprise waiting for you.
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Unity Technologies, maker of the Unity game engine, has entered an agreement to acquire the streaming service Parsec.
Parsec has proven to be rather popular, especially with quarantines forcing people to work remotely. Not only that but Parsec also does gaming services too, allowing you to rent a server from them to host games that you then connect to which works like GeForce NOW and Stadia but it uses all of your own stuff. We actually tested Parsec on Linux back in 2017 and it was really impressive.
Another interesting use of Parsec has been AAA studios using it to demo their games. Again, due to the quarantines going on thanks to COVID-19. Some, like Ubisoft, had accounts with Parsec setup and ready for press to take a look. There’s lot of different ways it’s being used and they’ve seen strong year-over-year growth.
Unity are buying them for around $320 million in cash, with the deal expected to close (pending all the usual regulation stuff) during their third quarter.
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You have to hand it to Creative Assembly and Feral Interactive for their commitment to Total War: ROME REMASTERED, with version 2.0.2 out now and it’s absolutely massive. Since this was developed directly with Feral, we don’t need to wait around for patches either, the Linux support is first-class here.
This patch touches on practically all parts of the game with major modding improvements adding in expanded limits, new features, new modding tools and documentation, plus a number of bug fixes. Features previously only in the expansions were added to the main game for modders to hook into including: swimming, shield wall, religion, hording, loyalty and much more. Overall there’s just a lot more that modders can now do with the game.
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DXVK has proven to be a huge success for improving the experience of running Windows Direct3D 9/10/11 games on Linux by translating those D3D calls to Vulkan. DXVK-Native meanwhile is the newer spin-off effort around providing a DXVK-based build native for Linux to help in game ports that still can then rely on their Direct3D renderer path.
DXVK-Native is what Valve is already using for offering a Vulkan rendering path with Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux and even Windows. There are also a few other games so far relying on DXVK-Native for Linux and/or Google Stadia support.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In one of our previous blog posts we wrote about the new development in the spreadsheet and the extension in the statistics dialog that now make use of new visualization elements. One of these elements is the Box Plot…
Of course, this new visualization type is not only available in the statistics dialog in the spreadsheet, but it can also be used in the Worksheet, in the area where LabPlot plots the data. In this blog post we will introduce this important new development, as it is going to be part of the next release.
A box plot (also known as a box-and-whisker plot) provides a quick visual summary of the important aspects of a distribution of values contained in a data set…
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New Releases
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he Linux distribution elementary OS 6 Odin is finally here, coming in years after their last release and honestly – it really is a thing of absolute beauty. elementary OS 6 is built on top of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with the 5.11 Linux Kernel making it good to use for years to come.
Unlike a lot of other Linux distributions elementary OS is a lot more than a different style and a few tweaked packages. It has their own desktop environment with Pantheon, which has a very clean and clear design. The Pantheon desktop gives you a bottom icon-style dock with a top panel that gives you access to their applications menu, time / date and indicators. All together, it does look very slick.
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After two years of development, the Elementary OS team has released the new version of its Linux distribution. Elementary OS 6 is code-named “Odin”. The developers have further refined the look and now enable users to adapt the given user interface more closely to their own preferences. However, many changes have an effect in the background. The new AppCenter programs are now only imported as flat packs. The updated base on Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS ensures better hardware support.
The first noticeable change is the new installer. Instead of Ubuntu’s Ubiquity, its own front end ensures a simple installation in just a few steps. The installation routine only asks for the language settings, the desired installation target and recommends the optional data carrier encryption. Partitions can also be specifically selected for installation; the installer uses GParted to make changes to the partition table. The network connection and user account are only set up after the actual installation after the first reboot, which means that the installation is done very quickly. When you log in for the first time, an assistant greets you and helps you with the first steps.
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The latest release of elementary OS is now available for download, and according to the announcement by James Cassidy Blaede, it’s the biggest update to the platform yet.
elementary OS is designed to be easy to use but also “empower you to take control of your own devices and data,” Blaede says.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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In this post we’ll explore how to monitor a Red Hat Virtualization environment so you can visualize performance, resources and trends.
As an administrator, it can be difficult to get the right level of visibility across your infrastructure. With the Red Hat Virtualization monitoring portal and Grafana dashboards, you can see resources that are about to run out and catch problems early, see underutilized resources to ensure they are used efficiently, and view trends over time to see the big picture. Your infrastructure activity can be seen from a minute back to five years of history.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has offered the ability to encrypt disks for many years, but the network bound disk encryption (NBDE) functionality, which can automatically unlock volumes by utilizing one or more network servers (referred to as Tang servers), can make implementing disk encryption easier. This post will cover how to get started with the NBDE Client and NBDE Server roles by walking through a simple implementation with a single Tang server.
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Microservices are a hot topic. Web pages, architectural dissertations, conference talks… The amount of information and number of opinions is staggering, and it can be overwhelming. If ever there was a hot topic in IT, microservices are “it” right now. Create super-small services. Use Functions as a service (FaaS). Embrace serverless. Spread the workload, loosely coupled and written in any mix of software development languages. Go forth and be micro!
But have you noticed that very few are talking about the data part of all this? “Distribute the data, one database per microservice” is the standard, one-size-fits-all (which, at least in clothing, means “one size fits no one”) answer.
Yeah. Sure. That’s easy for you to say.
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One of the conveniences offered by Red Hat 3scale API Management is simplified load balancing on API gateways. This article shows how to use a route on Red Hat OpenShift and 3scale API Management to load balance two API gateways installed on an OpenShift instance.
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While Libre-SoC began as “Libre RISC-V” envisioned as a low-power graphics/Vulkan accelerator, it has morphed into a hybrid CPU/GPU design built on OpenPOWER and in very early form seeing test fabrication on a TSMC 180nm process. The latest funding received is now working on adding cryptographic improvements to it and/or the upstream OpenPOWER ISA.
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Organizations seeing the most benefits from Artificial Intelligence (AI) work are more likely to be true believers in cognitive capabilities. Indeed, AI high performers, as identified by McKinsey, invested more of their digital budgets in AI than their counterparts, were more likely to increase their AI investments in the next three years, and employ more AI-related talent, such as data engineers, data architects, and translators, than their counterparts.
“Winning support for AI across the business is crucial for CIOs and other IT leaders hoping to scale their programs.”
Winning over the end users of AI-enabled capabilities is just as – if not more – important to your success.
“Winning support for AI across the business is crucial for CIOs and other IT leaders hoping to scale their programs,” says Dan Simion, vice president of AI & Analytics at Capgemini North America.
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Debian Family
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Several issues were brought before the Debian Community team regarding responsiveness, tone, and needed software updates to forums.debian.net. The question was asked, ‘who’s in charge?’
Over the course of the discussion several Debian Developers volunteered to help by providing a presence on the forums from Debian and to assist with the necessary changes to keep the service up and running.
We are happy to announce the following changes to the (NEW!) forums.debian.net, which have and should address most of the prior concerns with accountability, tone, use, and reliability:
Debian Developers: Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana (phls), Felix Lechner (lechner), and Donald Norwood (donald) have been added to the forum’s Server and Administration teams.
The server instance is now running directly within Debian’s infrastructure.
The forum software and back-end have been updated to the most recent versions where applicable.
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Igalia developers have been continuing to work on the Mesa V3DV driver under contract with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Over this summer they have been implementing many more Vulkan extensions including ones around dedicated allocations, external fences and semaphores, multi-view, variable pointers, and others as required by Vulkan 1.1. Notably is also basic support for sub-groups and geometry shaders.
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Geniatech’s “DB10” AI dev kit runs Android 11 or Linux on Amlogic’s hexa-core -A73 and -A53 A311D with up to 4GB LPDDR4 and 64GB eMMC plus HDMI in and out, MIPI-CSI, USB, GbE with PoE, 802.11ac, and mini-PCIe.
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Aaeon’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake powered” UP Xtreme x11” SBC is open for pre-order starting at $299 (barebones), with shipments due in September. Highlights include 3x M.2, PCIe x4, 1GbE, 2.5GbE, 3x USB 3.2 Gen2, and USB 4.0 Type-C.
Last November, Aaeon Europe’s UP! Bridge the Gap community announced the UP Xtreme i11 SBC based on Intel’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake-U processors with plans to start pre-orders in 1Q 2021. The SBC has finally opened for pre-order with prices ranging from $299 to $969 without RAM, storage, or wireless. Shipments are expected next month.
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I also really liked the updated webOS 5 interface. WebOS is a Linux-based system that could have been a smartphone and tablet contender, but its original creator, HP, gave up on it. Fortunately, LG saw its potential. Today, webOS is my favorite smart TV interface over both Android and Roku. Combined with the newest LG Magic remote, it’s a pleasure to use. In addition, the remote supports both Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Our Individual seat winners are Aeva Black and Catharina Maracke — both new to the OSI Board. We are also welcoming Hong Phuc Dang back and are excited to have Thierry Carrez join us as a new Affiliate Board Member. Thank you to all our members and affiliates for your discussions, your participation and your votes.
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Board member seats expire at different times so that we can maintain some continuity. Our next election will take place early next year. There will be two Individual seats and one Affiliate seat up next year.
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One of the most popular destinations in syslog-ng is Elasticsearch. Due to the license change of the Elastic stack, some people changed quickly to Grafana/Loki and other technologies. However, most syslog-ng users decided to wait and see. Version 1.0.0 of OpenSearch, a fork of the Elastic code base from before the license change is now available. Elastic also published a new release last week.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 91 is the seventh major browser update in 2021. Let’s cover some of the notable changes in this new browser update.
Firefox is one of the few remaining browsers with its own rendering engine. Firefox 90 arrived last month with new rendering features and new update system, and now Firefox 91 is starting to roll out.
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With the release of Firefox 91, Mozilla has introduced a bigger hammer for smashing the cookies that websites, advertisers and tracking companies can use to record your online behavior. The new feature, called enhanced cookie clearing, is designed to block tracking not just from a website, but also from third parties whose code appears on the site.
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Mozilla Firefox 91.0 is available with more than 1200 bug-fixes, new major privacy enhancement, and other features.
The release introduced more comprehensive logic for clearing cookies. With Firefox Strict Mode, you can clear a site data including embed content, such as images, videos and scripts, from other websites. This “cross-site” content was previously left behind.
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Thunderbird 91 comes a little over a year after the Thunderbird 78 series and brings a revamped account setup wizard with support for setting up signatures, encryption and CalDAV calendars, a new user interface for adding attachments, the ability to change the order of accounts in the UI, and the ability to redirect emails.
This new Thunderbird release also allow you to encrypt your emails to BCC recipients, though these will be exposed in the list of keys. New keyboard shortcuts are now available to access the To, CC and BCC fields of the compose window, and Thunderbird now allows showing of empty CC and BCC rows in the compose window.
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Programming/Development
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LibreOffice Start Center working with GTK4 widgets
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Pooja Mistry focuses on partner developer advocacy, specifically around hybrid cloud and application modernization. She has worked with startups and enterprise-level partners as well as ISVs like Infosys and TCS to promote best practices in AI, machine learning, and microservices. I sat down with Pooja to talk about her recent experiences in DevRel and how a focus on partners helps drive metrics for developer advocacy programs.
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A few days ago, contributors to Opensource.com were asked to share our personal stories about how we got into programming. Many entertaining and fascinating responses were submitted. It would be interesting to quantify these data in time. Intriguing patterns emerged. The 70s generation was nostalgic about Fortran, punch cards, and dial-up access to shared mainframes. 80s kids (amongst which I qualify) shared stories of C, BASIC, or Pascal and their beloved Atari and Commodore computers. Surprisingly few stories from the 90s arrived. Almost like there’s a generation gap. Maybe teenagers were running away in horror from C++, MFC, and the dreaded Hungarian notation, which was the order of the day. Then there’s strange silence from the youngest generation. Maybe our young Raspberry Pi enthusiasts are too busy making things.
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Hardware
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Amlogic A311D hexa-core Cortex-A73/A55 AI processor has found its way into a limited number of platforms including Khadas VIM3 SBC, Zora P1 development board for Orbbec 3D cameras, as well as the upcoming Jevois Pro AI camera.
Another development board that takes advantage of the Amlogic A311D processor is Geniatech DB10 which ships with up to 4GB LPDDR4, up to 64GB eMMC flash, and offers interesting features like a digital TV tuner, HDMI input, support for 3G/4G modems, and more.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Linux Foundation
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The need to strengthen and secure the software supply chain has gained heightened awareness in recent months. The Biden administration, for example, issued an executive order that outlined security measures for critical software use and specifically mentioned open source provenance and the need for companies to provide a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) as part of their efforts to improve software supply chain security.
In this article, we’ll explain what an SBOM is and point you to additional resources outlining best practices and other key information.
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The transparency made possible by an SBOM, however, is not about dictating what is good or bad, says Friedman. “It is about allowing everyone to make the right, risk-based decisions… And, you can’t make good risk-based decisions unless you know what you have.”
As NTIA states, an “SBOM will not solve all software security problems, but will form a foundational data layer on which further security tools, practices, and assurances can be built.”
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, and co-host Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a nonprofit whose mission is to accelerate adoption of open source software, standards and best practices in financial services, today announced the conference agenda for Open Source Strategy Forum London 2021 (OSSF). The event takes place October 4-5 in London, England. The schedule can be viewed here.
The event will gather experts from financial services, technology and open source who will come together for thought-provoking insights and conversations, providing unique opportunities to hear from and engage with those who are leveraging open source software to solve industry challenges. OSSF is the only conference dedicated to driving collaboration and innovation in financial services through open source.
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Security
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I recently picked up this portable projector for a reasonable price. It might also be called a “M5″ projector, but I can not find one canonical source. In terms of projection, it performs as well as a 5cm cube could be expected to. They made a poor choice to eschew adding an external video input which severely limits the device’s usefulness.
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David A. Wheeler lists some of the security-related projects he is overseeing at the Linux Foundation.
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (ceph), Fedora (buildah, containernetworking-plugins, and podman), openSUSE (chromium, kernel, php7, python-CairoSVG, python-Pillow, seamonkey, and transfig), Red Hat (microcode_ctl), SUSE (kernel and libcares2), and Ubuntu (c-ares).
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Series index:
- An EPO Administrative Council Exposé — Part I: A New EPO Balkan Affair?
- An EPO Administrative Council Exposé — Part II: A Mysterious Fist-Bumping Masquerade in Skopje
- An EPO Administrative Council Exposé — Part III: A Longtime Associate of the Doyen
- An EPO Administrative Council Exposé — Part IV: A Party Political Animal
- An EPO Administrative Council Exposé — Part V: Sharing Out the Spoils of Public Office
- You are here ☞ A Learned Legal Luminary
Emruli obtained his doctorate in law from the University of Tirana in Albania.
Summary: A closer look at a long-running EPO delegate from North Macedonia and his background (leading to a dubious appointment and defense of Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos proposals)
In the last part we saw how Safet Emruli’s career seems to have profited from his political connections to the DUI, which is the leading ethnic Albanian party in North Macedonia.
“In 2008 Emruli had the good fortune to be elevated from his position as a junior teaching assistant at the Faculty of Law at the State University of Tetovo to become Director of the State Office for Intellectual Property in the North Macedonian capital Skopje.”In 2008 Emruli had the good fortune to be elevated from his position as a junior teaching assistant at the Faculty of Law at the State University of Tetovo to become Director of the State Office for Intellectual Property in the North Macedonian capital Skopje.
At the time of his SOIP appointment in 2008, Emruli was the proud holder of a recently awarded master’s degree in law from the Faculty of Law of the University of Tirana in Albania.
“During the period between 2010 and 2013 he managed to enhance his academic credentials by completing a doctorate in law, once again at the University of Tirana.”The subject of his master’s thesis submitted in Albanian was “Control of Constitutionality in the Republic of Macedonia”.
Despite his busy schedule as SOIP director, Emruli managed to use his spare time productively. During the period between 2010 and 2013 he managed to enhance his academic credentials by completing a doctorate in law, once again at the University of Tirana.
The doctorate was awarded in 2013 on the basis of a thesis submitted in Albanian on the subject of “Development of the Constitutional Court in the Republic of Macedonia”.
“The choice of the University of Tirana as the location for pursuing his post-graduate legal studies is most likely connected to the limited opportunities for third level education available to the Albanian ethnic minority in North Macedonia.”It’s worth noting that although he pursued his postgraduate studies abroad at the University of Tirana in Albania, Safet Emruli’s alma mater is the State University of Tetovo in his home country.
The choice of the University of Tirana as the location for pursuing his post-graduate legal studies is most likely connected to the limited opportunities for third level education available to the Albanian ethnic minority in North Macedonia. We will return to this topic in more detail in the next part.
Cover page of Emruli’s doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Tirana in Albania.
It’s also worth noting in passing that Emruli’s name appears on a number of publications in reputable journals such as the European Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies (EJMS), which describes itself as “a professional, double-blind-peer-reviewed, open-access journal publishing high-quality scientific articles in the fields of sociology, education, economics, business studies and related multidisciplinary fields” and the Journal of Law, Policy and Globalization, (JLPG), a peer-reviewed journal published by the International Institute for Science, Technology and Education (IISTE).
For example:
• Trademark Protection, Absolute and Relative Grounds for Refusal of Trademark, EJMS Jan-Apr 2016, Vol.1 Nr. 2; and
• Copyright and Copyright Protection, EJMS Sep – Dec 2016, Vol. 2, Nr. 4.
• “Ignorantia Legis Neminem Excusat” In the Area of Equality and Non-Discrimination – The Case of Macedonia, JLPG, Vol.43, 2015; and
• General Reviews of the Independent Work of the Constitutional Courts, JLPG, Vol.71, 2018.
The co-authors of the EJMS papers are listed as:
- Safet Emruli, PhD in law, Professor at the Faculty of law, State University of Tetova;
- Agim Nuhiu, PhD in law, Professor at the Faculty of law, State University of Tetova;
- Besa Kadriu, MSc in law, Faculty of law, South East European University.
The co-authors of the first JLPG paper are listed as Agim Nuhiu, Naser Ademi, Safet Emruli and the second JLPG paper is attributed to Safet Emruli as the sole author.
As can be seen, all of the above-mentioned papers are attributed to Emruli in his capacity as “Professor at the Faculty of law, State University of Tetova” and most of them were co-authored with Agim Nuhiu also designated as “Professor at the Faculty of law, State University of Tetova”.
The significance of these details will become apparent later on when we report on the fallout from an inspection conducted at the Faculty of Law of the State University of Tetova in June 2019.
But before doing so, we will first of all turn our attention to Emruli’s alma mater.
Stay tuned for the next part where we take a closer look at the State University of Tetovo, best described as an academic institution with a political mission and close links to the DUI. █
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Posted in Site News at 10:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Today (moments ago):
Summary: With 5 times more channels than users (because they’ve imported the database) Freenode looks like its death has been all but confirmed
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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If you aren’t yet using a Linux operating system on any of your devices and would like to try out an easy to install version designed for gaming, creativity and professional applications. You may be interested in a video created this month showing how to install Linux from scratch using the well-established Pop!_OS created by the development team over at System 76. The Pop!_OS is an operating system designed for STEM and creative professionals who are planning to use their computer as a tool to “discover and create” say the development team behind the Linux Pop!_OS.
The Pop!_OS Linux operating system has been specifically designed to provide users with fast navigation, easy workspace organization, and fluid, convenient workflow. “Your operating system should encourage discovery, not obstruct it” writes System76. Check out the video below to learn how you can install Linux on your computer either on your main drive or a separate SSD or flash drive to start with to test it out with your current setup and applications. Anthony from LTT guides you through the entire process of installing Linux on your laptop or desktop PC allowing you to experience the freedom and versatility Linux has to offer users.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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2:17 The News
27:55 Security Update
42:15 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:05:45 Announcements & Outro
First up in the news, Linux Mint working on the website, more on the SteamDeck, Ubuntu debuts its new installer, and some release dates
In security, Open Source Security has a big problem!
Then in our Wanderings, I’ve been arching, Tony has been watching Cricket, Joe has been working on games consoles.
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Kernel Space
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Intel has another big batch of open-source kernel graphics driver updates it sent out to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.15 cycle. The DG2 graphics card is getting wired up while this pull request does also finally remove the Cannon Lake “Gen 10″ graphics that never materialized in commercial products.
In early July Intel began posting DG2 graphics driver support as well as XeHP SDV support. This second Intel graphics card is getting brought up on Linux now with DG1 getting squared away finally with all the changes around device local memory, transitioning to TTM memory management, GuC handling, making use of the DRM scheduler, and much more that has been ongoing for months while various patch series are still working their way to mainline.
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The latest patch series from Intel engineers worth noting for the Linux kernel is around implementing support for on-demand “unaccepted memory”. Unaccepted memory is supported by the latest-generation AMD EPYC processors but not yet supported under Linux for on-demand/as-needed handling while Intel is preparing the kernel support for their next-gen Xeon CPUs having this capability.
What’s unaccepted memory? With the UEFI v2.9 specification update from earlier this year, it introduces the notion of unaccepted memory / memory acceptance. Principally it’s focused on virtual machines and that the memory must first be “accepted” by the guest before it can be allocated and used within the guest’s confines. The actual accepting handling process is dependent upon the specific VM hypervisor.
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Applications
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This is the latest in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small, indispensable utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. For details of all tools in this series, please check the table in the Summary section. article.
The Command Line Interface (CLI) is a way of interacting with your computer. To harness all the power of Linux, it’s highly recommended mastering the interface. It’s true the CLI is often perceived as a barrier for users migrating to Linux, particularly if they’re grown up using GUI software exclusively. While Linux rarely forces anyone to use the CLI, some tasks are better suited to this method of interaction, offering inducements like superior scripting opportunities, remote access, and being far more frugal with a computer’s resources.
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The excellent free and open source video / audio recording and livestreaming application OBS Studio appears to be doing really well and they’ve made some fun announcements recently. We use it here for all of our podcasts and livestreaming, it’s pretty much the gold standard.
On August 3 the team announced that developer Dillon Pentz has joined full-time, after being part of the community since 2017 working on various features already. Technically, according to what they said, Pentz has been working fully already since 2017 and only now they’re announcing that it’s a done deal for Pentz to be a properly paid developer alongside Hugh “Jim” Bailey. Seems like funding is going well with approximately £3,301per month from their Open Collective and a further £2,001 a month from Patreon.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Open Project is an open-source application for project management that is completely web-based written in Ruby on Rails and Angular js. It provides agile as well as classical management for the entire project life-cycle. Generally, the open project is distributed in three versions: community, cloud, and enterprise edition. In this article, we will install a community version of the open project that is released under the General Public License Version 3. To demonstrate the example I have used the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system.
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When deploying applications to Red Hat OpenShift, it’s useful to check the status and health of the components. First, I’ll show you how deployments work, and then you can check out some health reports.
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The one thing you’ll notice that files in Linux usually do not contain names. Your teacher or colleague use underscore instead of spaces in file and directory names.
It’s not that you cannot use spaces in file names in Linux terminal. It’s just that it creates additional pain and that’s why you should avoid it wherever possible.
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In Linux, processes and ports have a symbiotic relationship. One cannot exist nor function without the other. Processes tend to share ports and some processes rely on a specific port to meet an operating system objective.
This article guide gives you a walkthrough on how to free a port used by one process in order to use it on another process.
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Metasploit is an open-source framework used to identify threats and vulnerabilities, offensive security testing, and research. It is designed for security researchers to find and exploit vulnerabilities in various systems, networks, and software. By default, Metasploit comes with a lot of exploits, it also allows you to create your own exploits and add to them.
In this post, we will show you how to install Metasploit Framework on Ubuntu 20.04.
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ModSecurity or often referred to as Modsec is a free, open-source web application firewall (WAF). ModSecurity was created as a module for the Apache HTTP Server. However, since its early days, the WAF has grown and now covers an array of HyperText Transfer Protocol request and response filtering capabilities for various platforms such as Microsoft IIS, Nginx, and of course, Apache.
How the WAF works, the ModSecurity engine is deployed in front of the web application, allowing the engine to scan the incoming and outgoing HTTP connections. ModSecurity is most commonly used in conjunction with the OWASP Core Rule Set (CRS), an open-source set of rules written in ModSecurity’s SecRules language and is highly regarded among the security industry.
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The Grub Customizer is a graphical tool that allows users to customize the bootloader GRUB 2 or Burg on Linux Mint, 20.01, Ubuntu, and other similar operating systems. This GUI tool helps to change simple things such as the boot sequence (sequence of menu entries) to be made or the waiting time for the standard entry to start automatically. The Grub Customizer does not provide a complete graphical user interface for configuring all the subtleties of GRUB 2.
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fThis tutorial will be showing you how to install FileRun on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with Apache/Nginx web server. FileRun is a self-hosted Google Drive/Photos/Music alternative.
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A screenshot is a digital picture that depicts the information of a computer screen. Screenshots allow you to capture exactly what is on your screen, so you may share it with others or refer to it later. You may either take a screenshot of your screen or capture a video of what is occurring on it (screencast). This is important if you want to show someone how to use a computer.
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Generally, we can find the IP address of a Linux machine using ip command or ifconfig command in the older Linux distributions. It doesn’t matter whether it is a physical or a virtual machine. If we have access to the system, we could easily view its IP address with ip or ifconfig commands. How do you find a Vagrant machine IP address, without logging into it?
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On the internet, you will find plenty of tools for checking disk space utilization in Linux. However, Linux has a strong built-in utility called ‘df‘.
The ‘df‘ command stands for “disk filesystem“, it is used to get a full summary of available and used disk space usage of the file system on the Linux system.
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Linux administrators should be familiar with the CLI environment. Since GUI mode in Linux servers is not common to be installed. SSH may be the most popular protocol to enable Linux administrators to manage the servers via remote secure way. Built-in with SSH command there is SCP command. SCP is used to copy file(s) between servers in a secure way.
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Fedora IoT Edition is aimed at the Internet of Things. It was introduced in the article How to turn on an LED with Fedora IoT in 2018. It is based on RPM-OSTree as a core technology to gain some nifty properties and features which will be covered in a moment.
RPM-OSTree is a high-level tool built on libostree which is a set of tools establishing a “git-like” model for committing and exchanging filesystem trees, deployment of said trees, bootloader configuration and layered RPM package management.
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Wine or Emulation
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CrossOver 21 includes an update to Wine 6.0, bringing with it thousands of improvements to a variety of applications. One of the more exciting features of Wine 6.0 is the Vulkan backend for wined3d. This feature is on by default on macOS for 64-bit Direct3D 10/11 games if DXVK is not enabled. Our testing results have largely been positive, but we know of a few games that run with DXVK but do not currently run with wined3d. We also have found a few games that work with wined3d but not DXVK. Notably, NieR:Automata should run on all platforms with wined3d on CrossOver 21, and Skyrim Special Edition should be newly playable on M1 Macs with wined3d.
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Games
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Here is yet another post about the survey we have conducted back in Q2 2021 (April to be precise) with close to 2000 Linux Gamers. This time we will focus on the Linux distro of choice of respondents in the survey. Before we jump to the results, keep in mind this is probably not representative of Linux users at large in the whole wide world, but rather of the Linux Gaming demographic found on places like r/linux and r/linux_gaming for example (as well as our readership). How should we describe them? Typically younger audience, well connected and following the news of the Linux gaming world? That’s probably one way to put it.
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Polychromatic as the long-running, third-party, open-source project to allow Razer’s gaming peripherals like mice and keyboard to be configured under Linux is out with a major update.
Polychromatic 0.7.0 is out this week with a overhauled user-interface and improving support for newer peripherals supported by OpenRazer. The Polychromatic UI has been rewritten now in PyQt5 rather than leveraging WebKitGTK. With the transition of the underlying interface also comes a new tab and sidebar interface, new dialogs, and other enhancements. Polychromatic also now features an effect editor for creating your own RGB animated effects.
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SteamOS and Debian
When it comes to the features that define a given Linux distribution, Arch and Debian are just about diametrically opposed. Debian aims to provide a relatively generic base and strives for maximal stability via a conservative approach—current stable releases are composed of software that sysadmins tend to describe as “proven” but enthusiasts are more likely to describe as “stale.”
In the quest for predictable stability, Debian relies on intermittent major releases, which require fairly heavy-duty upgrade procedures when migrating from one to the next. This trade-off enhances predictability—although your major release upgrade might encounter problems, it can be scheduled for a time when you’re ready to deal with those problems. In the meantime, the software you use on a daily basis changes as little as possible.
Debian is an excellent base for a distribution aiming to provide a simple, stable desktop with a minimum of development work—but SteamOS isn’t intended to be any of those things.
SteamOS and Arch Linux
Arch Linux, by contrast, provides neither a generic base experience nor a release cycle. Arch is a rolling release of what might be described as a “build your own distribution kit.”
A brand-new Arch installation doesn’t give the user a graphical interface at all—because there are myriad options ranging from back-end graphics server (e.g., Xorg or Wayland) to window manager (e.g., Metacity or Compiz) to desktop environment (e.g., Gnome or KDE). Arch doesn’t want to assume how the user wishes their system to work, so it makes very few choices for the user in the first place.
Arch Linux is also big on providing the user with the freshest software possible—so rather than provide periodic cohesive releases with a known configuration of known versions of the same software, Arch just updates all its components to newer versions as frequently as possible.
Going with a rolling release means breakage happens much more frequently on Arch than it does on stable distributions—but occasional breakage is an expected part of the Arch ecosystem, which means that resolving breakages is equally expected and planned for.
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One thing all stores need is a healthy selection of games of all genres and it seems Google have started to expand the types of games they’re now offering with Stadia. There’s also some free play days coming for Rainbow Six Siege.
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Hi,
As opposed to previous futex2 patchsets, this one adds only one syscall:
futex_waitv(). This way we can focus on this operation that already have
a well defined use case and has been tested for months now.
The patchset reuses as much as possible of original futex code for the new
operation, so the first commit move some stuff to futex header to make
accessible for futex2.
Ideally, I would completely replace futex_wait_setup() with
futex_wait_multiple(): it is basic the same logic, but for n futexes,
so for existing operations it was a matter of calling it with nr_futexes=1.
This worked pretty well for futex_wait(): I tested with glibc tests,
tested with a complete distro running on top of it and perf benchs
presented no performance difference. However, it didn't work for
futex_wait_requeue_pi(), since the wait path for it is slightly different
of the normal wait, that would require some refactor to get it in a way to
be easily replaced. So I decided to not replace it at all.
Use case
The use case of this syscall is to allow low level locking libraries to
wait for multiple locks at the same time. This is specially useful for
emulating Windows' WaitForMultipleObjects. A futex_waitv()-based solution
has been used for some time at Proton's Wine (a compatibility layer to
run Windows games on Linux). Compared to a solution that uses eventfd(),
futex was able to reduce CPU utilization for games, and even increase
frames per second for some games. This happens because eventfd doesn't
scale very well for a huge number of read, write and poll calls compared
to futex. Native game engines will benefit of this as well, given that
this wait pattern is common for games.
Testing
Selftest is provided as part of this patchset. As stated above, I used
the futex_wait_multiple() in FUTEX_WAIT path and it worked fine in a
full distro. Throught Proton, I've tested futex_waitv() with modern games
that issue more than 40k futex calls per second.
André Almeida (4):
futex: Prepare for futex_wait_multiple()
futex2: Implement vectorized wait
selftests: futex2: Add waitv test
futex2: Documentation: Document futex_waitv() uAPI
Documentation/userspace-api/futex2.rst | 79 ++++++
Documentation/userspace-api/index.rst | 1 +
arch/x86/entry/syscalls/syscall_32.tbl | 1 +
arch/x86/entry/syscalls/syscall_64.tbl | 1 +
include/linux/compat.h | 9 +
include/linux/futex.h | 75 ++++++
include/uapi/asm-generic/unistd.h | 5 +-
include/uapi/linux/futex.h | 17 ++
init/Kconfig | 7 +
kernel/Makefile | 1 +
kernel/futex.c | 224 ++++++++++++++----
kernel/futex2.c | 198 ++++++++++++++++
kernel/sys_ni.c | 4 +
.../selftests/futex/functional/.gitignore | 1 +
.../selftests/futex/functional/Makefile | 3 +-
.../selftests/futex/functional/futex2_waitv.c | 154 ++++++++++++
.../testing/selftests/futex/functional/run.sh | 3 +
.../selftests/futex/include/futex2test.h | 72 ++++++
18 files changed, 812 insertions(+), 43 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 Documentation/userspace-api/futex2.rst
create mode 100644 kernel/futex2.c
create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/futex/functional/futex2_waitv.c
create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/futex/include/futex2test.h
--
2.32.0
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After attempting for some time now to get their futex2 work into the Linux Kernel, Collabora have cut it all down to focus on one part that has seen thorough testing to help Windows games on Linux with Steam Play Proton.
The work, funded by Valve, is to help Windows game compatibility when they’re run through Wine and Steam Play Proton to ensure they actually work and perform well. The current implementations in the Linux Kernel aren’t ideal and so they’ve tried rewriting them. Now they’re focusing on adding one specific syscall with “futex_waitv()” so that they “can focus on this operation that already have a well defined use case and has been tested for months now”.
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For developers looking to bring their games to Linux officially, DXVK Native can be a good option to help reduce the time and complexity involved in doing so. Developed by Joshua Ashton who has been involved in DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, updating a few Valve games and more. Be sure to check out our interview!
Built against the Steam Runtime, the idea is that developers would use DXVK Native to get Vulkan support in their native Linux builds of games cutting out a chunk of the work needed on bringing up a whole new graphics API. It’s the native version of DXVK, which does not need the Wine compatibility layer to work.
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Charles Games announced recently that their historical adventure Svoboda 1945: Liberation, the follow up to their hit Attentat 1942, will be releasing officially for Linux soon. They didn’t have an exact date to share other than around a month but they confirmed it is coming.
Svoboda 1945: Liberation is a game full of rare historical material, footage, and memorabilia for you to explore. Featuring a mix of adventure gameplay, full-motion video interviews with real actors, and historically accurate interactive memories of people who lived through the chaos of the aftermath of World War 2.
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New Releases
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Finally, elementary OS 6 released at 10 August 2021. It is the continuation of elementary OS 5 released three years ago. Here’s a very short glimpse of it with the official links, torrents, and how to download it for everyone plus a web store to buy a laptop with elementary OS. We’re happy with this release and now let’s try it together!
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Windows 11 was released recently, and fans are pretty happy about its new features and UI redesign. However, something more massive has been cooking in the Linux community, the elementary OS 6 “Odin.”
The OS is now available on the official elementary OS website, and it’s one of the colossal releases of 2021. In this article, let’s look at the new features and how to upgrade from older elementary OS versions.
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BSD
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Now that alone wouldn’t be particularly groundbreaking. After all, Google has implemented an entire operating system with web frameworks in Chrome OS, so is making the installer a web app really that much of a stretch? But what makes [Yang]’s installer so interesting is that the web interface isn’t limited to just the local machine, it can be accessed by any browser on the network.
That means you can put the install disc for FreeBSD into a headless machine on your network, and use the browser on your laptop or even smartphone to access the installer. The Graybeards will point out that savvy users have always been able to access the text installer from another computer over SSH, but even the most staunch Luddite has to admit that simply opening a browser on whatever device you have handy and pointing it to the target machine’s IP address is a big usability improvement.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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Thunderbird the standalone email client from Mozilla Corp. has been updated to 78.13.0 and shipped to the PCLinuxOS Software Repository.
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Superpaper is an advanced multi monitor wallpaper manager for Linux and Windows operating systems. Features include setting a single or multiple image wallpaper, pixel per inch and bezel corrections,
manual pixel offsets for tuning, slideshow with configurable file order, multiple path support and more.
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Firefox browser has been updated to version 91.0 and now available in the PCLinuxOS Software Repository. Firefox now includes extra privacy protections that can block super cookies that track your activity on the web.
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FileZilla is a fast and reliable FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.
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In brief: With Russia trying to lessen its reliance on US-sourced technology, one of the country’s big PC makers, iRU, has started mass production of systems that use domestic components, creating what could be described as all-Russian PCs.
As reported by The Register, iRU’s PCs come with ARM SoCs from Russian fabless semiconductor company Baikal. The Baikal-M chip isn’t going to threaten Apple’s similarly named M1 SoC. It features eight Arm Cortex-A57 cores running at up to 1.5GHz, an eight-core Mali-T628 GPU, 35W TDP, dual-channel DDR3/4 support, 4MB L2 cache and 8MB L3 cache, PCIe 3, USB 3.0 and 2.0, and four Ethernet controllers (two at 10GB, two at 1GB). It is based on TSMC’s aging 28nm process.
The ARM Cortex-A57 was launched in 2012 and used in the Snapdragon 810 SoC that arrived in 2015 and the Tegra X1, which powers the Shield TV. Its successor, the A72, is part of the quad-core Broadcom BCM2711 SoC found in the Raspberry Pi 4.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Tor Browser 10.5.4 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
This version updates Firefox to 78.13.0esr. This version includes important security updates to Firefox.
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Meanwhile — and perhaps not coincidentally — a thread on Reddit begun two days before the video hit pointed out that the browser had lost 50 million monthly active users (MAUs) in the last two-and-a-half years.
What’s going on? Is Firefox in an existential crisis?
Let’s take it chronologically.
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Programming/Development
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The 2005 book, “Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory,” exposed biological meltdowns, infected workers and virus outbreaks at the facility including lab leaks that were seriously underreported by mainstream media.
Recently, a French laboratory worker was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) leading to an immediate moratorium on the prion research the worker and others conduct at five public research institutions in France. Prions, misfolded infectious proteins, cause the fatal brain diseases of scrapie in sheep, mad cow disease in cattle (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE), chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk and CJD in humans. The prion-caused CJD brain-based fatal has been confused with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases in humans because of the severe cognitive and mobility impairments it causes.
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Seated on an armless mustard-green chair, Margaret Evans is nude and pregnant. The evidence of pregnancy’s toll appears throughout her body: in the blue vein that ripples along one breast, her mottled legs, her flushed face. She looks out at us, confident and calm, but also carries some tension, as her arms seem to grip the seat, perhaps to hold herself upright in the pose.1
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Hardware
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Eh, is is this a used device? The static bag it arrived in was sealed.
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Cincoze GP-3000 is an expandable high-performance GPU computer. It consists of either a 9th or 8th generation Intel processor-powered embedded computer which can be expanded with Cincoze’s proprietary GPU Expansion Box (GEB) capable of housing up to dual 250W full-length graphic cards. Additional I/O expansion is also possible through the use of various modules. With a total 720W power budget the GP-3000’s additional GPU performance massively accelerates complex industrial AI and machine vision tasks.
As a rugged computer, the GP-3000 has passed a series of stringent quality assurance tests and industry standards including MIL-STD-810G military standard, E-mark for in-vehicle applications, and EN50155 (EN 50121-3-2 only) for rolling stock environments. It can withstand hot and cold temperature extremes, shock and vibration, and high electromagnetic radiation.
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Health/Nutrition
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A coalition of global health justice organizations on Monday urged Congress to ensure that the $3.5 trillion budget resolution recently introduced by the Senate Democratic Caucus includes $34 billion in funding to ramp up the worldwide manufacturing of Covid-19 vaccines.
“The significant funding needed is paltry compared to the staggering cost of continued inaction, in lives and livelihoods.”—Peter Maybarduk, Public Citizen
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“Monsanto’s conduct evidenced reckless disregard of the health and safety of the multitude of unsuspecting consumers it kept in the dark.”—1st Appellate District in the Court of Appeal for California
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According to the analysis of 90 studies, it also found that agricultural pesticides sold to farmers ready-mixed into “cocktails” can kill twice as many bees, and that regulators underestimate the dangers of pesticides in combination, including the synergistic effects.
This is because both the health and environmental risk assessments undertaken prior to the approval of pesticides have, to date, been based on exposure to just one individual pesticide at a time which of course is not the reality of farm pesticide use.
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We continue to look at the state of school reopenings amid a surge in COVID-19 infections among children in the U.S. with Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. Weingarten, who had favored voluntary vaccinations for teachers, now backs a vaccine mandate for educators because the Delta variant “significantly changes the circumstances.” Weingarten notes that almost 90% of teachers represented by the American Federation of Teachers are already vaccinated, saying it’s time to stop “scapegoating” teachers for the challenges in reopening schools. “The teachers in the country understand the importance of being back in school and the importance of vaccinations,” she says.
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I have gone on at length before about the need to vaccinate the world. The spread of the Delta variant should make the point obvious to everyone. The more the virus spreads, the more it has opportunities to mutate.
We are actually fortunate with the Delta variant since it seems our vaccines are still effective in reducing the risk of infection and very effective in reducing the risk of severe illness or death. But this is just luck. If the pandemic spreads enough, we will see more mutations. It is entirely possible that a new strain will develop against which our vaccines provide us little or no protection.
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For more than a decade we’ve noted how the US broadband industry’s biggest problem is a lack of healthy competition. In countless markets consumers either have the choice of a terrible phone company or a cable giant. The nation’s phone companies have spent the last decade refusing to upgrade (or in some cases even repair) their aging DSL lines, because they don’t see residential broadband as worth their while. That, in turn, is giving giants like Comcast and Spectrum an ever greater monopoly in many markets, reducing the already muted incentive to compete on price or shore up comically terrible customer service.
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Support independent cartooning: join Sparky’s List—and don’t forget to visit TT’s Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky!
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Eleven coronavirus patients died in a hospital in Russia’s North Ossetia after the intensive care unit lost its oxygen supply on Monday, August 9. According to the region’s acting head, the oxygen supply was cut off after an oxygen pipe burst underground. The 11 patients who died were reportedly in serious condition and on ventilators. The regional health authorities have mobilized additional intensive care physicians to monitor the surviving ICU patients, and oxygen supplies are being sent to the hospital from other regions. The head of Russia’s Investigative Committee has taken personal control of the criminal investigation into the incident, which was launched on charges of failure to meet safety standards.
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Republicans object to masks While going about their daily tasks. To rule that folks must vaccinate, They say, makes this a Nazi state. The surges now are all located Among those proud unvaccinated. And counties voting red have two Times Covid cases more than blue. If leadership maintains this pace, They may someday kill off their base.
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A district judge in Bexar County, Texas ruled Tuesday that local officials can impose mask mandates in schools in defiance of Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order barring local governments from requiring face coverings.
Judge Toni Arteaga granted a temporary restraining order to San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who sued the governor on Tuesday over his directive, arguing he does not have the authority to “suspend state laws that give local officials the needed authority to cope with an emergency.”
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As the highly contagious Delta variant continues to spread, many hospitals are reporting record numbers of children being hospitalized, especially in areas with low vaccination rates, including Arkansas, Florida, Missouri and Texas. Dr. Christina Propst, a pediatrician in Houston, says children under 12 who are still ineligible for COVID-19 vaccines are at risk. “They are currently our most vulnerable population, just as this highly transmissible variant is surging across the country,” Propst says. She says Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s order banning mask mandates in schools is a purely political decision that ignores science. ”What he is doing is a direct threat to the health and well-being of the children of Texas,” says Propst.
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Purdue will be bankrupt, but members of the multi-billionaire Sackler family – who were responsible for the decisions that led to these deaths and profited the most from Purdue’s opioid dealings – will gain near-total immunity from future litigation. By the time the settlement is paid out they most likely will be as wealthy as they ever were.
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ProPublica reporter Neil Bedi published a disturbing story recently about a heart pump called the HeartWare Ventricular Assist Device, or HVAD. HeartWare is for patients who are suffering from heart failure. Surgeons implant it on patients’ hearts, and it helps pump blood, often until a patient can receive a transplant. But there’s a problem: The device itself comes with serious risks. Risks that the Food and Drug Administration was aware of but most patients did not know about.
Here are Neil’s findings:
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This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.
Jailhouse lawyers are no strangers to the enormous challenges brought about by waging legal battles on behalf of themselves and other incarcerated people. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, they have worked through even greater challenges stemming from a lack of safety measures, and increased restrictions on privileges and mobility.
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“A vocal biomarker is a feature or combination of features of the voice that can be associated with a particular clinical outcome and is therefore a valuable tool for monitoring patients, making a clinical diagnosis, assessing the severity of a disease and even assisting in the development of new drugs.”
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Microsoft today released software updates to plug at least 44 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and related products. The software giant warned that attackers already are pouncing on one of the flaws, which ironically enough involves an easy-to-exploit bug in the software component responsible for patching Windows 10 PCs and Windows Server 2019 machines.
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A spokesperson for the agency confirmed to The Hill that it “recently awarded a contract for cloud computing services to support the Agency” and that another company bidding for the contract has filed a protest.
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The contract is already being challenged. Tech giant Microsoft filed a bid protest on July 21 with the Government Accountability Office two weeks after being notified by the NSA that it had selected AWS for the contract.
The contract’s code name is “WildandStormy,” according to protest filings, and it represents the second multibillion-dollar cloud contract the U.S. intelligence community—made up of 17 agencies, including the NSA—has awarded in the past year.
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The NSA is pursuing a “Hybrid Compute Initiative” to meet its processing and analytical requirements while also holding onto intelligence data (although it might not need as much storage as it used to). AWS already holds many government cloud contracts, but the JEDI process revealed Microsoft as a formidable competitor. Last year the CIA split up its Commercial Cloud Enterprise contract between five companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle, and IBM. Last year, a Microsoft blog post said it was pursuing US government accreditation for its Azure Government Top Secret regions to “meet the demand for greater agility in the classified space.”
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The final new feature scans iCloud Photos images to find child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, and reports it to Apple moderators — who can pass it on to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC. Apple says it’s designed this feature specifically to protect user privacy while finding illegal content. Critics say that same designs amounts to a security backdoor.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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As part of a one-year project on “deceptive designs” and “dark patterns”, noyb aims to scan, warn and enforce the GDPR on up to 10.000 websites in Europe. After sending a written warning and a “draft complaint” to more than 500 companies on May 31st, 42% of all violations were remedied within 30 days. However, 82% of all companies have not fully stopped violating the GDPR. Accordingly, noyb filed 422 complaints with ten data protection authorities today.
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Why it matters: Since the 2018 Cambridge Analytica affair, Facebook has moved to provide more transparency and oversight, but its programs are limited, selective and slow, leaving journalists and scholars as the de facto whistleblowers for problems on its platform.
Driving the news: Last week Facebook shut down the accounts of New York University researchers whose tools for studying political advertising on the social network, the company said, violated its rules.
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Confidentiality
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TLS is one of today’s most widely used and best-analyzed encryption technologies. However, for historical reasons, TLS for email protocols is often not used directly but negotiated via STARTTLS. This additional negotiation adds complexity and was prone to security vulnerabilities such as naive STARTTLS stripping or command injection attacks in the past.
We perform the first structured analysis of STARTTLS in SMTP, POP3, and IMA P and introduce EAST, a semi-automatic testing toolkit with more than 100 test cases covering a wide range of variants of STARTTLS stripping, command and response injections, tampering attacks, and UI spoofing attacks for email protocols. Our analysis focuses on the confidentiality and integrity of email submission (email client to SMTP server) and email retrieval (email client to POP3 or IMAP server). While some of our findings are also relevant for email transport (from one SMTP server to another), the security implications in email submission and retrieval are more critical because these connections involve not only individual email messages but also user credentials that allow access to a user’s email archive.
We used EAST to analyze 28 email clients and 23 servers. In total, we reported over 40 STARTTLS issues, some of which allow mailbox spoofing, credential stealing, and even the hosting of HTTPS with a cross-protocol attack on IMAP. We conducted an Internet-wide scan for the particularly dangerous command injection attack and found that 320.000 email servers (2% of all email servers) are affected. Surprisingly, several clients were vulnerable to STARTTLS stripping attacks. In total, only 3 out of 28 clients did not show any STARTTLS-specific security issues. Even though the command injection attack received multiple CVEs in the past, EAST detected eight new instances of this problem. In total, only 7 out of 23 tested servers were never affected by this issue. We conclude that STARTTLS is error-prone to implement, under-specified in the standards, and should be avoided.
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Defence/Aggression
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That the United States has enforced an Asia-Pacific empire since 1898, that human rights do not exist in Guantanamo, that racist Republicans – like Modi, Washington’s new partner in India – are disenfranchising minority voters, and that the United States is deeply allied with repressive governments around the world are inconvenient truths consigned to an Orwellian memory hole.
At root are the inevitable tensions between rising and declining powers, the Thucydides Trap, that many times in history has climaxed in catastrophic wars. Compounding the Cold War analogy, there are disturbing parallels to the years before World War I: tensions between rising and declining powers and complex alliance structures that now include the QUAD, intense nationalism with attendant hatreds, territorial disputes, arms races with new technologies, international economic integration and competition, autocracies, and wild-card actors.
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“Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.” —Amelia Earhart
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Janine Jackson interviewed IPS’s James Early about the Cuban blockade for the August 6, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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His creative brilliance is certainly evident in aspects both large and small of those aircraft, not only in the overall concept of “brilliant simplicity” but in such apparently mundane features such as his insistence on the separation of the A-10’s engines from the combustible fuel tank (contrary to traditional, deeply unsafe, design practice) or his suggestion of a under-fuselage air intake on the F-16, which cut the plane’s weight and boosted its maneuverability. His battles to develop and produce the planes, and, in the case of the A-10, save it from the air force’s untiring efforts to consign the entire force to the boneyard, were powered by his ironclad intellectual honesty. He believed fiercely that form must follow function; any attempts to deviate from that course, such as by freighting a machine with unnecessary and inevitably costly electronic features, was dismissed as rank intellectual corruption. He deemed such dishonesty unforgiveable. Anyone, however formerly close, whom he detected trimming their beliefs in furtherance of career or other earthly rewards were deemed “sellouts”–his harshest criticism, and rarely if ever regained his trust.
That theme ran through his work, from weapons design to the music recording he turned to after dropping out of defense consulting (because, he told me at the time, the Pentagon was now “completely overrun with crooks and thieves.”) Just as he ensured that an A-10 pilot should be able to fly low in safety and observe potential targets with his own eyes, rather than relying on some complex electronic interface, so he crafted a recorder that captured live music with extraordinary fidelity by dispensing with multi-track mixing boards and other artificial barriers to truth in recorded sound. (He was certainly no Luddite; his creations, whether airplanes or the wires he developed for enhancing audio device quality, were masterpieces of technological ingenuity.)
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The Taliban seized a sixth Afghan provincial capital on Monday following a weekend blitz across the north that saw urban centres fall in quick succession and the government struggle to keep the militants at bay.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Nearly two years ago — prior to the 2020 repeal of 50-a, the statute that codified law enforcement opacity in the state of New York — the Brooklyn DA’s office released part of its “Brady list” to Gothamist. The “Brady” (or “Giglio,” depending on who’s naming it) list tells prosecutors (and [supposedly] defense attorneys) which cops aren’t to be trusted, thanks to previous perjury/severe misconduct/evidence-planting/etc. This keeps prosecutors from calling witnesses who can be easily impeached. And it helps defense lawyers know which government witnesses are ripe for undermining.
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Amnesty International on Tuesday urged President Joe Biden to drop the U.S. government’s extradition request for Julian Assange and end its “farcical prosecution” of the WikiLeaks founder.
“President Obama opened the investigation into Julian Assange. President Trump brought the charges against him. It is now time for President Biden to do the right thing,” Nils Muižnieks, Amnesty’s Europe director, said in a statement.
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Environment
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The series of currents in question is known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC for short. The current system is sometimes likened to a series of conveyer belts: one “belt” flows north with warm water that, upon reaching the northern Atlantic, cools and evaporates, in the process increasing the salinity of water in that region. The saltier water becomes colder and heavier, sinking and flowing south to create a second “belt.” Those two currents are in turn connected by other oceanic features in the Southern Ocean, the Labrador Sea and the Nordic Sea.
The study reinforces earlier scientific studies which found the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation system to be at its weakest in 1,600 years.
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Governments and companies are happy to make net zero carbon pledges. Their real cost could be ruinous for the poor.
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As the U.S. Senate voted Tuesday to approve a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups denounced the measure for funding “false” solutions to the climate emergency, while underscoring what they say is the critical need for a filibuster-proof reconciliation package that centers human needs, including bold climate action.
“Instead of facing the climate crisis, the Senate has chosen to invest billions into propping up the fossil fuel industry.”—Natalie Mebane, 350.org
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In the wake of a highly anticipated United Nations report about humanity’s ongoing destruction of the planet, scores of advocacy groups on Tuesday detailed their demands for the forthcoming climate finance plans that President Joe Biden ordered top U.S. officials to develop by next month.
“The administration has a suite of existing authorities that allow it to take the decisive and necessary steps to mitigate further climate chaos and support the most vulnerable communities.”—STMP letter
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While Republicans dependent on fossil fuel and other billionaires in the “Koch Network” continue to deny even the existence of man-made global warming, the IPCC just came out with their first report to say that there’s absolute certainty that much of the extreme weather our planet is experiencing is caused by our burning fossil fuels into the atmosphere.
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Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change Jonathan Wilkinson attracted fury and ridicule when he said Monday—just hours after the United Nations warned in no uncertain terms that continuing to burn fossil fuels will result in catastrophic consequences—that the country needs to secure more revenue from the Trans Mountain pipeline to achieve its long-term decarbonization goals.
“The IPCC was clear yesterday: we must accelerate our transition off fossil fuels. Millions of lives are at stake. Knowing this, and still sinking billions into expanding the Trans Mountain pipeline, is criminal.”—350 Canada
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Energy
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On July 29, the two-day Wokisok Shark Calling Festival began at Kono village, New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. It’s not a new gimmick to capitalize on Shark Week or Sharknado movies—although foreign visitors are welcome. Nor do people stand on the beach and yell, Shark!
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After the shale oil and gas industry lost a half trillion dollars in what the Wall Street Journal recently called the “unprofitable American oil boom” and investors started fleeing, the U.S. shale industry is now telling investors that industry consolidation is the answer to its financial troubles — but this old adage is being disguised as a new approach, even though it didn’t solve anything in the past.
In February, the Financial Times wrote about the U.S. shale industry’s “new religion,” which is supposed to convince investors to have faith in shale.
Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts
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Wildlife/Nature
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But it didn’t stay that way.
A record run of over 18,000 spring Chinook has returned to Butte Creek, a Sacramento River tributary, the second largest since 20,000 fish ascended the creek in 1998, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, or CDFW. Allen Harthorn, Executive Director of Friends of Butte Creek, estimates the size of this year’s run to be even larger, around 25,000 fish.
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Determined to lead honorable lives, they sprang into action.
Three decades later, young people all over the world are rising to defend their inheritance. New Zealand, India, Pakistan, elsewhere, children are surveying a future of fire and floods with sinking hearts, and reacting.
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A coalition of Indigenous organizations filed a complaint at The Hague on Monday accusing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro of carrying out an “explicit, systematic, and intentional” assault on native peoples, pointing specifically to his systematic dismantling of environmental protections and aggressive campaign of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.
“We believe that there are ongoing acts in Brazil that constitute crimes against humanity, genocide, and ecocide,” Eloy Terena, the legal director of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), said in a statement. Global climate activists and legal experts are currently in the middle of a push to make ecocide an officially recognized crime under international criminal law.
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Finance
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The following remarks, as prepared for delivery, were given by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) Tuesday, August 10, 2021 as the Senate began consideration of the FY 2022 budget resolution and reconciliation instructions:
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We’ve talked a lot on Techdirt about the end of ownership, and how companies have increasingly been reaching deep into products that you thought you bought to modify them… or even destroy them. Much of this originated in the copyright space, in which modern copyright law (somewhat ridiculously) gave the power to copyright holders to break products that people had “bought.” Of course, the legacy copyright players like to conveniently change their language on whether or not you’re buying something or simply “licensing” it temporarily based on what’s most convenient (i.e., what makes them the most money) at the time.
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Responding to the U.S. Senate’s passage of a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill on Tuesday, electric school bus proponents promptly criticized the measure for not adequately funding zero-emission student transportation while giving billions of dollars to prop up the fossil fuel industry.
“No amount of tailpipe pollution is safe for children to breathe and new fossil fuel buses will aggravate the climate crisis across the next two decades.”—Alliance for Electric School Buses
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A new analysis released Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute finds that CEO pay in the United States rose by a staggering 1,322% between 1978 and 2020—a sharp contrast to the pay increase of the typical worker, which was just 18% during that same period.
“Exorbitant CEO pay is a major contributor to rising inequality that we could safely do away with.”—Lawrence Mishel and Jori Kandra, Economic Policy Institute
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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“In ‘the greatness of the lie there is always a certain element of credibility because the broad masses of the people can be more easily corrupted in the deeper reaches of their hearts’ than consciously or deliberately.
‘In the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves sometimes lie about small things but were too ashamed of lies that were too big.’”
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Shortly after the Senate passed a $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure package on Tuesday, the Congressional Progressive Caucus said a survey of its nearly 100 members showed that a majority of respondents are prepared to withhold their votes for the newly approved legislation until the upper chamber also greenlights a sweeping reconciliation bill.
“CPC members won’t support a bipartisan bill without a bold reconciliation bill to advance our priorities.”—Congressional Progressive Caucus
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Words to describe Democratic politicians as “moderate,” “centrist,” “center-left,” “center-right,” “leftist,” or House Democratic Caucus Chair, Hakeem Jeffries’ recent denunciatory nomenclature of “extreme left” Democratic candidates – are often recklessly bandied about.
Let’s start with the positions that invite journalists to describe politicians as “moderate” Democrats. Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA) is chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. His first statement on taking over as committee chair in January 2019 was that he was not in any way going to take up Donald Trump’s massive giveaway tax cuts to the super-wealthy and the giant corporations. He was OK with no hearings and no agenda to end those $1.7 trillion bonanzas, over ten years, and with revenue losses, which could have been put to good use rebuilding America’s infrastructure.
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“It sometimes felt,” he writes in his memoir Spike, “as if I had strayed on a set for The Third Man, that fantastic Carol Reed film of a Graham Greene novel, which features a black market for penicillin.”
The analogy is telling because Greene’s post-war Vienna and the Johnson government convey the same sense of pervasive sleaze. Furthermore, Johnson’s personality has much in common with that of Harry Lime, the anti-hero played by Orson Welles, who exudes bonhomie but is entirely egocentric and dangerous to anybody who gets in his way.
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Russian investigators have opened yet another criminal case against two of Alexey Navalny’s closest associates. His chief of staff, Leonid Volkov, and the head of his Anti-Corruption Foundation (the FBK), Ivan Zhdanov, are facing charges for raising funds to finance “extremist organizations” — the FBK and “Team Navalny.”
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Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring) has added Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (the FBK) and Citizens’ Rights Protection Foundation to its blacklist of groups accused of extremist activities or terrorism. This information appeared on Rosfinmonitoring’s website on Tuesday, August 10.
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Moscow’s Presnensky District Court rejected Alexey Navalny’s libel lawsuit against Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov, Interfax reported on August 10, citing the court’s press service.
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My father, Athan G. Theoharis, passed away on July 3rd. A leading expert on the FBI, he was responsible for exposing the bureau’s widespread abuses of power. He was a loyal husband, dedicated father, scholar, civil libertarian, and voting-rights advocate with an indefatigable commitment to defending democracy. He schooled his children (and anyone who would listen, including scholars, journalists, and activists from a striking variety of political perspectives) to understand one thing above all: how hard the powers-that-be will work to maintain that power and how willing they are to subvert democracy in the process. His life is a reminder that much of American politics in 2021 is, in so many ways, nothing new.
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Democratic legislators were urged to leave Texas on Tuesday after the state’s all-Republican Supreme Court voided a Travis County district judge’s order preventing the arrest of quorum-busters who fled Austin last month to prevent GOP anti-voter legislation.
Following the high court’s decision, present members of the GOP-controlled Texas House voted 80-12 to direct state authorities to track down absent members and return them to the state Capitol, “under warrant of arrest, if necessary.”
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There has been a lot of talk about bipartisanship over the past several days, as the US Senate plods through the process of approving a narrowly drawn $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which the Senate is expected to pass today. It represents a massive compromise by Democrats whose president had, in the spring, proposed a far more ambitious and socially responsible $2.3 trillion package. While there certainly are good items in the so-called “BIF” (bipartisan infrastructure) bill that was cobbled together by centrist Democrats and right-wing Republicans, much of what made Biden’s initial plan so appealing—especially its ambitious climate proposals and visionary investment in caregiving—was dialed back or eliminated altogether.
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Andrew Cuomo’s resignation marks the end of an era of political dominance such as we may never know again. Not since Nelson Rockefeller, the grandson of perhaps the richest man in history, has one governor so determined the affairs of New York. And not since Robert Moses, the original power broker, has one man lusted for such influence.
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This is a developing news story… Check back for possible updates…
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday that he will resign from office in 14 days as he faces an accelerating impeachment push over allegations that he sexually harassed multiple women, including current and former government employees.
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Lawmakers in New York are preparing impeachment proceedings against Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo after the state attorney general found Cuomo harassed at least 11 women in violation of the law — including unwanted touching and kissing, and inappropriate remarks. Cuomo’s former executive assistant, Brittany Commisso, has filed a criminal complaint against him, and other cases are expected to follow. “The governor is unfit to lead,” says New York state Senator Alessandra Biaggi, who first called on Cuomo to resign in February. She says the damage Cuomo has inflicted goes beyond sexual harassment and includes the state’s COVID relief programs, nursing homes deaths, transit funding and more. “It is very important that we act with a serious sense of urgency.”
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Minutes before New York Governor Andrew Cuomo belatedly but still shockingly resigned Tuesday, his lawyer Rita Glavin spent 45 minutes spewing ever more unbelievable excuses for the 11 credible accusations of sexual harassment and assault against him, attacking at least three of his accusers by name. “The complainants need to be scrutinized just as much as the governor, and that didn’t happen here,” she said. When Cuomo appeared, it looked like he was prepared to continue the pathetic defense he began a week ago. Instead, he resigned—a move both unavoidable and unexpected.
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Misinformation/Disinformation
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The latest piece, which was published Tuesday morning, is a frustrating read. Mike Gwin, a White House spokesperson, accuses Facebook of not living “up to our, or their own, standards and have actively elevated content on their platforms that misleads the American people.” For example, sources tell the New York Times that the White House “asked for data on how often misinformation was viewed and spread,” but “the company said it couldn’t provide that kind of data.” There is also the widespread problem of “content that wasn’t explicitly false, such as posts that cast doubt about vaccines but don’t clearly violate the social network’s rules on health misinformation.” For instance, many vaccine misinformers — Tucker Carlson at Fox News is a prominent example — skirt the line with the “just asking questions” gambit (i.e. JAQ-ing off), where lies about vaccine safety and efficacy are framed as “questions” so that they can spread rapidly while giving the anti-vaccine liars cover to say they weren’t lying exactly, just “asking questions” about it.
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As we now know, the [I]nternet has also delivered a deluge of garbage that’s both unintentionally inaccurate (misinformation) and deliberately false or misleading (disinformation). Access to information is well and good; access to information without having the skills or inclination to distinguish truth from fiction can easily result in a situation where whatever appears at the top of Google’s search results or the Facebook news feed is regarded as gospel. But recognizing that misinformation is a grave problem isn’t enough to combat its spread — you have to understand how false and deceptive campaigns take root.
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Influencers who caught onto the sham turned out to be the undoing of a deceitful influence campaign orchestrated by marketing firm Fazze in Russia, according to Facebook.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Rosfinmonitoring (Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service) has added video blogger Yuri Khovansky to its list of organizations and individuals accused of involvement in terrorism or extremist activities.
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The Olympics tend to bring out the best in athletes and the worst in the Games’ organizers. The Tokyo 2020 Olympics were no exception, with athletes rising up and thriving under the extraordinarily difficult conditions thrust upon them when the International Olympic Committee opted to host the Games amid the coronavirus pandemic, not to mention the sweltering Tokyo heat.
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I went back to Ohio/but my First Amendment was gone
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An image of a poster for Oscar-winning Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar’s new film, which shows a nipple with a drop of milk, was briefly removed from Instagram, sparking controversy.
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He accompanied the text with a screen grab of a message he received from Instagram on Monday stating that the image had been taken down because it violated the network’s rules.
The poster for “Parallel Mothers” shows a black and white close-up image of a nipple with a drop of milk that simulates a crying eye and is set against a red backdrop.
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We’ve made this point before, but the moment you attempt to scale up copyright enforcement, you run into problems. Collateral damage from automated systems mistaking non-infringing content for infringing, the possibility of fraud and abuse, the blind eye towards Fair Use all become problems. But sometimes those problems are so silly that they expose what a pure fiasco this has become. Several years back, we discussed Universal Pictures asking Google to delist a bunch of supposedly infringing sites, listing one of them as 127.0.0.1. Depending on how computer savvy you are, you may recognize that this IP address is how a computer or system refers to itself. In other words, it essentially means “home.”
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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Lamb asked Hitchens, a British expatriate living in Washington, DC, if American journalists were freer than the ones in his home country. “Infinitely,” Hitchens replied, noting that Americans “have a constitution” that protects the freedom of the press.
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Jimmy Lai , 73, founder of Next Digital media group and its now defunct flagship newspaper , Apple Daily, was arrested on 10th of August, 2020 under the accusation of “collusion with foreign forces” following the Chinese regime’s imposition of the National Security Law in Hong Kong and later released on bail. Lai, who was arrested again in December, currently serves a 20-month prison sentence for “organizing” and “taking part” in three “unauthorized” pro-democracy protests in 2019 and risks a life sentence under six other procedures.
“The relentless harassment against Jimmy Lai, a symbolic figure of press freedom in Hong Kong, has not diminished since the forced closure of the media he founded and reflects the Chinese regime’s determination to permanently bury freedom of the press in Hong Kong”, says director of RSF’s East Asia office, Cédric Alviani, who calls for “all charges against the defendant to be dropped and to immediately release him and all other detained journalists and press freedom defenders”.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Noting the often punitive and discriminatory nature of GOP-sponsored state anti-protest laws, over 75 advocacy groups on Tuesday sent an open letter to top U.S. Justice Department officials asking them to condemn such measures and to support legal action against states that pass “legislation that censors and disrupts our First Amendment right to protest racial injustice.”
“These racist ‘anti-protests’ bills are inseparable from the wider political backlash against our movements fighting for Black liberation and freedom.”—Groups’ letter
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One of the great warrant exceptions is the “inventory search.” Stop a car in a high-traffic or “high crime” area, and officers will feel compelled to tow it away. But before it’s towed, they’ll make a list of everything in the car to ensure the vehicle’s owner gets all of their possessions back when they retrieve it from the impound lot. If there happens to be contraband in the car, it’s a win for the cops. The “discovery” (even if derived from a mostly-pretextual search) will be called “inevitable” and can be used against the person to deprive them of their freedom along with their car.
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Sanctions, called “unilateral coercive measures” by the United Nations, are illegal in international law, yet are deployed by the United States against 39 countries. The Reagan administration used them against Nicaragua in the 1980s in their most drastic form, even mining the country’s ports—for which Nicaragua successfully took action against the United States in the International Court of Justice. When the Sandinistas lost power in 1990, sanctions ceased. But then Daniel Ortega won reelection in 2006 and again in 2011, so his opponents began to lobby the United States to reimpose them. To give one of many examples, Ana Margarita Vijil, then leader of the Movimiento de Renovación Sandinista (MRS)—a party that broke away from the Sandinistas in 1995 and later aligned with right-wing parties—met Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) several times from 2015 onwards to push for sanctions. In 2016, Ros-Lehtinen introduced the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act, known as the NICA Act, in response to alleged fraud in the 2016 election process and the ending of presidential term limits, which had enabled Ortega to seek reelection. He was elected for a third consecutive term in November 2016 with 72 percent of the vote while Congress was still considering the Act.
The legislation fell in the Senate but was reintroduced in 2017 by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who argued that “Nicaragua and all freedom-loving people in Central America depend on U.S. leadership.” It was passed in December 2018 as the Nicaragua Human Rights and Anticorruption Act. By then a violent attempt to overthrow the Nicaraguan government between April and July 2018 had failed, spurring on the Act’s proponents. The legislation allowed targeted sanctions against Nicaraguan officials and required U.S. officials to oppose loans to Nicaragua from international financial institutions (IFIs), excluding those to address “human needs” or “promote democracy.” Sanctions apply until Nicaragua is “certified” as meeting various requirements, including having “free and fair” elections.
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The news from Nicaragua is bad. More than 30 opposition figures were arrested in June—a crackdown designed to nullify any resistance ahead of the November presidential elections. Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo had long ago left behind their roles as leaders of a revolutionary movement, and even former allies were now targets. Still, when I saw that Dora María Téllez had been arrested, I thought: It’s all over. If they have arrested her, then Ortega and Murillo are at their end point, and the only question is how long the dictatorship will bulldoze ahead before it crashes into pieces.
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There are six sisters in the Mirontsava family. In August 2020, three of them — Viktoriya, Aliaksandra, and Anastasiya — were detained during the opposition protests in Minsk. Aliaksandra managed to flee Belarus, but Viktoriya and Anastasiya were found guilty of “breaching public order” and “using violence against police officers” and sentenced to time in prison. The two sisters, who are now in a prison colony, are considered political prisoners. Prior to her arrest, Anastasiya was a student at the Belarusian State Academy of Arts in Minsk. She continued drawing even while in custody — first in a detention center and now inside the camp. Anastasiya passes her drawings and letters to close friends, who publish them on an Instagram account dedicated to her artwork. Despite the difficult conditions in which she lives and works, Anastasiya’s texts and drawings are full of curiosity and tenderness toward the world. With the artist’s permission, Meduza shares some of Anastasiya Mirontsava’s works and excerpts from her letters here.
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State investigators in Russia’s North Ossetia have arrested the republic’s former premier, Sergey Takoev, on charges of embezzlement on an especially large scale.
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Selective leaking has always been a part of the federal government’s day-to-day business. When there are narratives to massage, controlled leaking is tolerated. Leaks that make the government look bad tend to result in prosecutions, but leaks that act as highly unofficial PR or align with the motivations of the agencies they’re leaked from are largely ignored.
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Unable to gather in-person for workshops, book launches, or meetings, the Red Nation turned to media production. The aim, Yazzie says, was not only “to fill the gap in Indigenous people actually talking about our own issues in the media” but also “to bolster and to cultivate and to nourish movements themselves.” In March of this year, it announced the launch of Red Media—an Indigenous press by and for Indigenous peoples. And in April, the group published its first book, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth. In the introduction, the collective argues that the prospect of giving land back to Indigenous people “strikes fear in the heart of the settler” but that “it’s the soundest environmental policy for a planet teetering on the brink of total ecological collapse. The path forward is simple: it’s decolonization or extinction.”
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Rightscorp is a key player in several multi-million dollar piracy lawsuits. The company is a trusted anti-piracy partner of the RIAA, which uses its evidence in court. While we won’t make any judgments about the security of Rightscorp’s data collection, the company’s official website is a mess and throws up security warnings.
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Last year, YouTube-ripping service Yout.com sued the RIAA, hoping to have its platform declared legal after the music industry group allegedly damaged its goodwill and disrupted its business by sending DMCA notices to Google. The case has now been dismissed without prejudice, meaning that Yout is now free to file an amended complaint with additional facts.
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These ideas include:
All of this is terrible, but perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the proposal is that it would create a new internet speech czar with broad powers to ensure compliance, and continuously redefine what compliance means.
These powers include the right to enter and inspect any place (other than a home):
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft, OSI at 4:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum c6a3588f112e7222adebbac7ae5446ea
Summary: The corporate coup against software freedom has enlisted another person to deepen the coup with corporate fund-raising (more strings, becoming indebted to surveillance firms and monopolies, hiding behind the "open" banner); that person is connected to a longtime foe of software freedom [1, 2]
THE Open Source Initiative (OSI) has pushed out its very own founder and it does not tolerate critics. Because criticising corporations is “hate”…
“These are the very same people who worked overtime trying to oust Richard Stallman from his own organisation, which actually tries to accomplish something of importance.”This new press release, which showed up some hours ago in their front page, reaffirms the ‘new’ OSI’s commitment to companies like Microsoft. Most of the OSI’s budget is already devoted to Microsoft boosting.
Just as ‘new’ Freenode has nothing at all to do with Freenode anymore (it’s not even called that anymore; they just hijacked a tiny portions the users and decommissioned the network), the ‘new’ OSI has little to do with Open Source. It milks the name and its past reputation. It is about openwashing and it’s run by people who work for ICE and other forms of racism. And yet somehow they have the audacity to use “diversity” and “inclusion” as a weapon by which to demonise sceptics. These are the very same people who worked overtime trying to oust Richard Stallman from his own organisation, which actually tries to accomplish something of importance. █
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