Desktop/Laptop

• The evolution of Linux on the desktop: Distributions are so much better today

  It’s been 30 years since Linus Torvalds created Linux. It’s been almost 25 years since I first experienced Linux on the desktop.

  I remember like it was yesterday. The very first time I booted into the Linux desktop. The distribution in question was Caldera Open Linux 1.0, which installed with kernel 2.0 and the desktop was Fvwm95. I cannot confirm what I had assumed the desktop would have looked like, but I can assure you I had no idea it would have taken on a rather Windows 95 clone-ish look about it.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Second-Class Desktop | Coder Radio 427

  Chris makes a big mistake on the road, and Mike drops some reality-based sage wisdom.

  But it’s really all just a ruse to get you to email the show.

• mintCast 367.5 – Not Talkin’ Shop

  2:03 Linux Innards
  43:38 Vibrations from the Ether
  52:35 Check this Out
  55:29 Announcements & Outro

  In our Innards section, we talk hobbies

  And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

• Setting up a Windows to Linux Game Streaming Server – Invidious

  There are many tweaks, hacks, and work-arounds for forcing Windows games to run on Linux.

Kernel Space

• Asahi Linux August progress report

  Asahi Linux, the effort to port Linux to Apple’s new M1 SoC, has posted its second progress report.

• Asahi Linux progress: Apple Silicon OS works – though it’s ‘rough around the edges’ and has no GUI acceleration • The Register

  Developer Hector Martin has reported on progress with Asahi Linux, a port for Apple Silicon Macs, and said that the OS now works but with some limitations, notably a lack of accelerated graphics.

  In his August progress report, Martin talks further about the challenges of porting Linux to a platform that was created by Apple for the sole purpose of running its own operating systems.

  He calls the M1, the Arm-based SoC (System on a Chip) used in the Mac Mini and iPad Pro, “a massive reverse engineering challenge.” Rather than attempting to dissemble the macOS drivers, Martin created a hypervisor to sit between macOS and the M1 hardware, for the purpose of “transparently intercepting and logging hardware access.”

  Python code running on a separate machine can control the hypervisor.

• PREEMPT-RT Locking Infrastructure Possibly Ready For Linux 5.15 – Phoronix

  Six dozen patches working on the PREEMPT-RT locking infrastructure for real-time kernels is now queued up in TIP’s “locking/core” branch and will presumably be sent in for the Linux 5.15 merge window coming up quickly.

  These 72 patches are part of the Linux real-time (RT) work by Thomas Gleixner and others. This locking infrastructure work for real-time kernel builds is replacing mutex, ww_mutex, rw_semaphore, spinlock, and rwlock with RT-Mutex-based primitives. For non-real-time kernel builds there should be no functional changes with these locking changes.

• Proposed: Allow Building The Linux Kernel With x86-64 Microarchitecture Feature Levels – Phoronix

  A set of two patches posted this week would allow the Linux kernel to be easily built with the different x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels supported by the latest LLVM Clang and GCC compilers.

  Rather than just having per-CPU/core family targeting by the code compilers, over the past year the “x86-64 micro-architecture feature levels” have gained adoption as some common levels for both AMD and Intel processors to group CPU capabilities into a few tiers.

• Graphics Stack

  • Mike Blumenkrantz: Submerged

    Just a quick update today while I dip my toes back into the blogosphere to remind myself that it’s not so scary.

    Remember when I blogged about how nice it would be to have a suballocator all those months ago?

    Now it’s landed, and it’s nice indeed to have a suballocator.

Applications

• 10 of the best email clients for Linux

  Email is an indispensable medium of communication. Services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook provide a web-based client to let users use Email services with the help of the internet and a browser. However, while accessing emails from web browsers may be the de-facto way of accessing emails, it might not be the quickest or efficient.

  Email clients for Linux provide an efficient way to manage both online and offline emails and lets you easily sync email accounts with the system and notify users of any new email. In addition, email clients can add multiple email accounts and supports plugin-ins that add additional features to increase productivity and functionality.

• below: a time traveling resource monitor

  One of the kernel’s primary responsibilities is mediating access to resources. Sometimes this might mean parceling out physical memory such that multiple processes can share the same host. Other times it might mean ensuring equitable distribution of CPU time. In all these contexts, the kernel provides the mechanism and leaves the policy to “someone else”. In more recent times, this “someone else” is usually a runtime like systemd or dockerd. The runtime takes input from a scheduler or end user — something along the lines of what to run and how to run it — and turns the right knobs and pulls the right levers on the kernel such that the workload can —well — get to work.

  In a perfect world this would be the end of the story. However, the reality is that resource management is a complex and rather opaque amalgam of technologies that has evolved over decades of computing. Despite some of this technology having various warts and dead ends, the end result — a container — works relatively well. While the user does not usually need to concern themselves with the details, it is crucial for infrastructure operators to have visibility into their stack. Visibility and debuggability are essential for detecting and investigating misconfigurations, bugs, and systemic issues.

  To make matters more complicated, resource outages are often difficult to reproduce. It is not unusual to spend weeks waiting for an issue to reoccur so that the root cause can be investigated. Scale further compounds this issue: one cannot run a custom script on every host in the hopes of logging bits of crucial state if the bug happens again. Therefore, more sophisticated tooling is required. Enter below.

• Foliate eBook Reader for Linux is a Must Have

  Have you heard of Foliate ebook reader? It’s one of the best Ubuntu apps available. In this post we show you its features, and detail how to install Foliate on Ubuntu so you can try it yourself.

  Foliate is a GTK app for Linux desktops (though it may work on Linux phones like the PinePhone). The back-of-the-book blurb described it as a “simple and modern ebook viewer”.

  But it’s so much more than that.

  Most of probably prefer to read ebooks on an e-reader device like an Amazon Kindle or a Nook. But there are features that an eBook viewer for your PC can offer that a dedicated ebook reader can’t.

  And it’s precisely those features you’ll find within the ‘pages’ of Foliate.

• Budgeting tools

  On the advice of many friends, I tried to use You Need A Budget. I gave it a seriously long, proper evaluation: over a year. But I just couldn’t get it to work for me. I don’t want to try and explain why. To be honest, those same friends who advocated for it fairly strongly, also gave me a pretty hard time for giving up on it!

  [...]

  Jimmy Kaplowitz suggested back in 2012 that I should take a look at GNUCash. It took me a few more years before I did. The eventual trigger point for me was organising an event where I paid for a load of things on behalf of others and needed to track who had paid me back. It excelled for that.

  I’ve continued to use GNUCash to manage my personal money &emdash that is, my “play money” and anything I’ve accumulated &emdash but I haven’t committed to it for my family finances. Practically speaking that would lock my wife out of them, which wouldn’t be fair. But also because GNUCash’s shortcomings (and despite its strengths, it certainly has some) mean that I don’t expect I will be using it into the indefinite future, even for my personal stuff.

  The most significant drawback, in my opinion, is GNUCash’s support for scripting. Sometimes, there’s a laborious but easily-mechanisable (in theory) task I need to perform that would be ideal to script. GNUCash has built-in scripting support using Guile &emdash the GNU lisp/scheme dialect &emdash but this is limited to Reports only, I don’t think it can be used for a task such as “match a series of transactions using one or more filters or regular expressions, and apply a transformation to them, such as change the account to which they are posted”, etc.

  It also has a C library and auto-generated bindings for other languages. This has a horrible API, which is carried over into the language bindings. Documentation for the whole lot is basically non-existent too.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to run Apache Spark on MicroK8s and Ubuntu Core, in the cloud: Part 1

• How to run Apache Spark on MicroK8s and Ubuntu Core, in the cloud: Part 2

• How to run Apache Spark on MicroK8s and Ubuntu Core, in the cloud: Part 3

• How to run Apache Spark on MicroK8s and Ubuntu Core, in the cloud: Part 4

• Set up KVM && Cockpit WEB Console on Ubuntu DDE 21.04

• How to Check Battery Status Using Linux Command Line | Linux Journal

  Checking the battery status through GUI is easy. Hovering the mouse cursor over the battery indicator given in the Laptop task bar simply shows the battery level. But, did you know you can find the battery status through the Linux command line as well?

  Yes, there are some utilities in Linux that can be of help in this regard.

  This article explains 4 different methods of checking laptop battery status using the Linux command line. So,

• How to Download and Install Zoom on Linux

  Zoom is one of the popular video conferencing solutions out there. It’s essentially a cloud-based app that lets you organize meetings and team up in real-time to conduct webinars and group calls.

  Although you can access Zoom on the web via its web client or progressive web app (PWA), it is advisable you download its desktop client for quick and easy access.

• How to Install and Use Neofetch on Linux

  Neofetch displays an ASCII logo of your Linux distribution along with information related to your system in the terminal. Many Linux users will use it in screenshots of their desktops just because they think it’s cool. And they’re right. You can use it to show off your setup in screenshots too.

  Since the utility doesn’t come preinstalled on Linux, users have to install it manually on their system. By the end of this, you’ll have a decent understanding of how to install and use Neofetch on a Linux machine.

• How to install Webmin on Debian 11 Bullseye Server Linux – Linux Shout

  Webmin is an open-source application platform that gives a web-based graphical user interface to manage Linux servers. Here we learn how to install Webmin on Debian 11 Linux server to manage web hosting using its repository.

  Managing command line servers can be tricky especially for beginners, hence a Webmin-like admin control panel can make all this easy. Because of the web-based system administration interface for Unix. Any modern web browser can be used to set up user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing, and much more.

  Webmin eliminates the need to manually edit Unix configuration files such as /etc/passwd and allows a system to be managed from the console or remotely. Further extension of Webmin features is possible with the help of built-in or external modules.

• How to install Debian 11 “Bullseye” – Invidious

  In this video, I am going to show how to install Debian 11 “Bullseye”.

• How to Install Debian 11 (Bullseye) Step by Step

  Hello Geeks, Debian has finally released its stable OS version 11 and It’s code name is ‘bullseye’. Debian 11 is a LTS version which means we will get updates and support till 2025. It has come up with brand new theme ‘Homeworld’ and new Linux kernel 5.10. Apart from this, it also supports 32-bit systems and exFat file system. Other noticeable feature of Debian 11 is that it has updated version of desktop environments like GNOME 3.38, KDE plasma 5.20, Xfce 4.16 and other OS package updates.

• How to Install Bagisto eCommerce Platform on Ubuntu 20.04

  Bagisto is the popular open-source eCommerce platform built on the hottest technologies Bagisto is the popular open-source eCommerce platform built on the hottest technologies Laravel & Vue.js. A complete eCommerce solution built for merchants to cater to their online shop needs and very easy for developers to contribute and build. Bagisto has a built-in easy navigable admin panel and is bundled with functionalities like Multi-Currency, Multi-Localization, Access Control Level, Multi-Channel, Payment integration, and much more.

• How To Install Pritunl VPN Server on AlmaLinux 8 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Pritunl VPN Server on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Pritunl VPN is currently one of the most secure open-source VPN tools that can be used for multi-cloud VPN peering. Pritunl VPN server uses MongoDB and can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure.

  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 the step-by-step installation of the Pritunl VPN on AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.

• How to pair the Nintendo Switch Pro controller on Linux

  Do you want to play games on your Linux PC using your Nintendo Switch Pro controller but don’t know how to get it to pair to your computer? We can help! Follow along as we go over how to pair the Nintendo Switch Pro controller on Linux!

• Access Your Database Remotely Through an SSH Tunnel | RoseHosting

  Secure Shell or SSH is a client-server-based communication protocol that is used to connect securely from one machine to another. It uses a network port to create a connection session between the server that listens on the chosen port and the client which sends the SSH connection request on that port.

• How To Install UrBackup on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install UrBackup on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, UrBackup is a free and powerful network backup solution for personal and enterprise. It has almost all the features you need from backup software. It provides a web-based interface to manage all backups. It is cross-platform and can be installed on Windows, Linux, and many Linux-based NAS operating systems.

  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 the step-by-step installation of the UrBackup open source network backup on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• How to Install Grafana Monitoring System on CentOS 8 – VITUX

  Grafana is a widely used open-source system monitoring solution for Linux servers. It is e.g. used by PayPal, eBay, and Red Hat. Grafana is a good choice for all engineers who want to use a scalable and robust dashboard monitoring tool. This monitoring tool monitors various data sources. Using Grafana, you can bind time-series databases like Prometheus or Influx DB and relational databases like PostgreSQL or MySQL.

• How to Install UrBackup Server and Client on Ubuntu 20.04

  Regularly backup the live server is a very important task of any system administrator. It will help you to recover your data in the event of data loss or system failure. There are a lot of free and commercial backup tools available in the market.

  UrBackup is an open-source and client/server backup system for Linux operating systems. It supports both file and image backups in a live system without interrupting current processes. It provides a web-based interface to manage all backups. It is cross-platform and can be installed on Windows, FreeBSD, Linux, and many Linux-based NAS operating systems.

• wget – CentOS: How to Install and Use Wget

  Wget is used to download files via the CLI. In this beginner-friendly tutorial, we’ll show you how to install and use the wget command on CentOS.

• How to set up and use Python virtual environments for Ansible | Enable Sysadmin

  It’s vital to test new technology before rolling it out into your production environment. I like to use Python virtual environments provided by the venv module for developing and testing Ansible playbooks and features. Instead of using the default Python and Ansible commands installed on your system, you can easily set up multiple Python environments and test different versions of Ansible and its component libraries.

• Install and Use Curl on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux – Linux Shout

  cURL is an open-source command-line program integrated into Linux systems for a long time. It enables files to be transferred from or to a server without user interaction. In addition to HTTP, the program supports a variety of other network protocols such as FTP, FTPS, HTTPS, GOPHER, TELNET, DICT, FILE, and LDAP. It is controlled via command-line parameters that are specified when the program is called.

  Furthermore, since 2018 cURL is also the part of the Microsoft operating system. It is also used in cars, televisions, routers, printers, smartphones, tablets, and many other devices. cURL uses the libcurl library for all functions relating to data transfer. It is often used for working with REST used -ful services, such as for the development or debugging of such services.

• Easy guide to monitoring your systems with Checkmk

  This tutorial will show you how to take your first steps with Checkmk, a comprehensive IT monitoring system that identifies issues across your entire IT infrastructure. Checkmk monitors servers, applications, networks, cloud environments and many other systems. I will show you how to install Checkmk on Ubuntu 20.04 and add hosts (systems to be monitored) to the monitoring. Checkmk also runs on other Linux distributions such as Debian, RHEL, CentOS or SLES, in a Docker container, or also as a virtual appliance. You can download the latest version for all platforms from the official Checkmk website. For this tutorial I will use the Checkmk Raw Edition, which is completely open source.

  The goal of this article is to give you a quick start into Checkmk and the world of IT monitoring. Checkmk comes with numerous powerful features, and I recommend checking the documentation online for further reference. You will see that it is fairly easy to set up a first monitoring, as many configuration tasks are performed automatically, and thanks to the around 2,000 official monitoring plug-ins, Checkmk supports many systems right out of the box.

• Connect to an external PostgreSQL database with SSL and Red Hat’s single sign-on technology | Red Hat Developer

  This article shows you how to connect securely to applications and data sources using Red Hat’s single sign-on technology. The example connects to an external PostgreSQL database in secure Single Sockets Layer (SSL) mode, first locally and then on Red Hat OpenShift. As you will see, it is usually much easier to carry out the integration first on a standalone instance of Red Hat’s SSO, and then deploy it on OpenShift.

Games

• Save your school in Kraken Academy!! with the help of a time-loop on September 10 | GamingOnLinux

  Kraken Academy!! sounds like a wonderfully weird game where you attending the most unusual high-school that’s full of ghosts, cultists, crocodiles and a magical Kraken. Described in their email as “groundhog-day adventure inspired by 90s comedy anime” and that pretty much sold me right away.

  In the game you need to find a traitor who is trying to apparently destroy everything and they could be anyone at your school. Thankfully some friendly magical Kraken decides to bestow upon you the ability to time travel so you loop over and over, each time getting that little bit closer to find out who this traitor is. Sounds wild.

• Play through a sci-fi cooking competition show in Galactic Chef | GamingOnLinux

  Thoughtquake Studios are currently developing Galactic Chef, a fun spin on cooking games with a sci-fi theme where you take part in a competitive cooking show.

  Featuring procedural generation to make it meals fresh each time, along with plenty of voxels you will make up some fancy looking delights while being scored by alien judges on flavour, texture, ambition, technical execution, and the unique requirements of each challenge. It honestly sounds great with it being simulated quite a bit behind the scenes on how the different ingredients and their voxels react to heat, moisture, damage, and more.

• ScummVM continues keeping games alive with early Macromedia Director support | GamingOnLinux

  Remember any classic games made with Macromedia Director? Well you’re in luck, as the ScummVM project is adding in some early support for it.

  For those unaware ScummVM is a free and open source application that allow you to run tons of classic graphical adventure and role-playing games, as long as you have the data files needed. This allows you to easily play them on modern systems, often with enhancements to make the experience a bit smoother.

• Icculus has released MultiZork, making the 1980 classic Zork multiplayer | GamingOnLinux

  Some games live on forever and that’s very much the case with Zork, a true classic interactive fiction adventure from 1980 and thanks to Ryan “Icculus” Gordon there’s also now MultiZork.

  In a post on Patreon, Icculus gives a brief history of their love for Zork, a game that “not only uses its own programming language, it uses its own CPU” and so it’s been made to run practically everywhere. As long as a system had a working Z-Machine emulator it would work, and that was needed as this was back in the days where there wasn’t much of a standard for PC systems. All it needs is a working text interface and so you can play it across so many places.

  For fun Icculus wrote MojoZork, a “single C file that is just enough of the Z-Machine to complete Zork 1 (and probably several other early Infocom games)” and it seems due to the way it was made there’s just enough room to squeeze in a couple of extra players and so that’s what Icculus did.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Krita 5.0 Enters Public Beta Testing with All-New Resource System, Many New Features

    Development on Krita 5.0 kicked off a few months ago, and, as a major release, it promises numerous new features and improvements. The biggest change being an all-new resource system that has been in development for a few years now.

    With the new resource system in place, Krita 5.0 will no longer load all brushes, gradients, patterns, etc. during start-up. Instead, it will cache all these information during the first run, which means that the app will be a bit faster when starting up, yet the first run will be slower as all the info needs to be cached.

  • First Beta for Krita 5.0 released

    Today, the Krita team releases the first beta for Krita 5.0. Krita 5.0 is a major release, with a lot of new features and a lot of changes.

    We intend to release the final version in September, but that is not a hard promise! We will continue fixing issues that come in from testing the beta and the nightly builds so we can release a solid Krita 5. Please consider supporting Krita’s development through the development fund…

  • Krita 5.0 Beta Released With Better Performance, UI Polishing – Phoronix

    Krita 5.0 is on the way as the next major feature release to this popular, open-source digital painting program.

    Krita 5.0 beta debuted today to help in vetting this major update. Krita 5.0 is introducing a new resource system, adds support for HEIF / AVIF / WebP image formats, improves its TIFF support, brings the all new MyPaint brush engine, support for gradient dithering and wide-gamut gradients, various performance improvements, a redesigned animation timeline docker, an in-stack transform tool preview, and UI improvements.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • MATE 1.26 released

    This release might have taken a little longer than usual but now after 18 month of development we are very pleased to release MATE 1.26. A big thank you to all contributors who helped to make this happen.

  • Dhanuka Warusadura: GSoC 21: Final report

    This is my last GSoC blog post. And the purpose of writing this blog post is to share the work I have completed during the past 10 weeks of Google Summer of Code 2021.

  • How to Gradient When You Can’t

    While this topic isn’t anything new (the asset in question is probably a decade old) I never shared a dirty little secret about some of our symbolic assets.

    UI icons in GNOME are to a major extent monochrome. They behave like text and can be rendered with various foreground colors depending on context. In a small subset of icons we use partially shaded elements. Those are done as a solid fill as well, but lowered opacity. Then can still remain recolorable at runtime.

    What we don’t have is the ability to draw a gradient that remains recolorable, because we’d need more somphisticated machinery to rewrite the stops of the gradient definition. Or can we? Unless you’re reading this on Planet or in your fancy RSS reader, you can see the spinner we’ve been using for well over 7 years now:

    It actually isn’t filtered particularly well in Firefox, but is nice and clean in gtk. Firefox amplifies one of the big downsides of this method, it’s quite prone to moiré. If you hover over the spinner, it reveals the nasty hack how the fade to transparency has been achieved.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Not-a-Linux distro review: SerenityOS is a Unix-y love letter to the ‘90s

    Today, I test-drove an in-development operating system project that seems almost disturbingly tailored to me specifically: SerenityOS. I cannot possibly introduce SerenityOS more accurately than its own website does…

    Every word of this introduction is almost surgically accurate. To someone in SerenityOS’s target demographic—someone like myself (and likely many Arsians), who grew up with NT4 systems but matured on modern Linux and BSD—SerenityOS hits like a love letter from the ex you never quite forgot.

  • Manjaro 21.1 Pahvo Released With GNOME 40, Plasma 5.22 and Xfce 4.16 – It’s FOSS News

    Manjaro 21.1 “Pahvo” is now available. This release brings many major improvements, especially in terms of desktop environments and the installation process.

    Although the version number suggests a small upgrade, that can’t be anything further from the truth, especially if you use GNOME or KDE.

    [...]

    As you may remember, many community members disliked the looks of GNOME 40, causing them to stick with older versions such as GNOME 3.38. Fortunately, it appears that the Manjaro team has come up with a solution for those disgruntled by the changes.

    This comes in the form of Manjaro Legacy Layout, which aims to modify GNOME to look similar to the GNOME 3.x series. In my experience with Manjaro 21.1, it does this quite convincingly, although the new theme does give it away slightly.

• New Releases

  • Zorin OS 16 Released! New Modern Beginner Friendly Linux based on Ubuntu 20.04

    Zorin OS 16 was officially released! Features Ubuntu 20.04 LTS package base, Kernel 5.11, and modified Gnome Desktop 3.36.

    Zorin OS is an open-source Linux distribution for personal computers. It provides an user friendly desktop appearance based on Gnome. With built-in utility, it allows to single click changing UI layout to original Gnome, classic or modern Windows style.

    A lightweight version is also available for old computers based on XFCE desktop environment. And it features “Zorin Connect”, GSConnect / KDE Connect similar implementation to link your Android phone and computer together.

  • Manjaro 21.1.0 Pahvo Released, Brings GNOME 40 to the Scene

    Manjaro just dropped the latest version of its beginner-friendly Arch-based distro – Manjaro 21.1.0 Pahvo. Let’s see what’s new.

    Over the years, Manjaro has attracted many users by delivering an easy-to-use, intuitive user experience that’s backed by the power of Arch Linux. It features a rolling release model that means you can apply updates and upgrades without reinstalling the operating system.

    Now, with their latest Pahvo update, the distro just got even more user-friendly and perfect for everyday use.

  • IPFire Linux Firewall Distro Is Now Powered by the Long-Term Supported Linux 5.10 Kernel

    The biggest change in the IPFire 2.27 Core Update 159 release is a new major kernel update as the firewall/router distribution is now powered by the long-term supported Linux 5.10 LTS series, which will receive updates for five years, until December 2026.

    As expected, the new kernel version brings better hardware support with its many new and updated drivers, especially network drivers, increased networking throughput through zero-copy TCP receive and UDP and Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT congestion control (BBR) for decreased latency of the firewall in the network when forwarding packets.

  • IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 159 released [New Kernel Inside]

    This is the official release announcement for the next major release of IPFire: IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 159. It comes with a brand new kernel based on Linux 5.10 and an updated toolchain as well as general bug fixes and a large number of improvements.

    Before we talk about what is new, I would like to ask you for your support for our project. IPFire is a small team of people from a range of backgrounds sharing one goal: make the Internet a safer place for everyone. Like many of our open source friends, we’ve taken a hit this year and would like to ask for your continued support.

• Screenshots/Screencasts

  • Zorin OS 16 – The BEST DISTRO to move to LINUX? – Invidious

    Zorin OS 16 was just released a few days ago. This distro gets a ton of praise from beginners and windows switchers, and this new release, in my opinion, cements its place as the go-to recommendation for new Linux users. Let’s see what’s new and if Zorin can earn a nice “Linux beginner” seal of approval.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • S.u.S.E., Opensuse and me

    Recently connect.opensuse.org, the openSUSE member directory and social site was shut down. You can read more about the reasons on openSUSE News. I also had my profile on the site, listing many of the things I worked on during the past two and a half decades. Reading it was quite a trip down the memory lane. It also reminded me, how the name changed over the years. Did you know that SUSE was originally an acronym for Software- und System-Entwicklung? This is why the original name is S.u.S.E.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Looking back on 30 years of Linux history with Red Hat’s Richard Jones [Ed: A look back at 38 (thirty eight) years of GNU/Linux; one has to appreciate how IBM has managed to delete GNU from history while still mentioning MINIX and it refers to “Open Source”, which did not even exist as a term in 1991, simply because it hates the F word, freedom]

    The Linux kernel and the second version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) turned 30 this year. As part of that major milestone we asked Red Hatters who have been using or contributing to Linux since the early days about their experiences. What was it like contributing to Linux, what was it like using it? Could you imagine that Linux would have the impact it’s had on the world up until now?

    Today we’re talking to Richard Jones who has been using Linux since the early 1990s, joining Red Hat in 2007. Richard is now a Senior Principal Software Engineer in Red Hat’s R&D Platform team.

  • How to accelerate Artificial Intelligence (AI): 9 tips | The Enterprisers Project

    Artificial Intelligence (AI) has moved from “when will we do it?” to “how will we speed it up?” in many organizations.

    AI passed some important tests during the pandemic, says David Tareen, director of AI and analytics at SAS. “The pandemic put AI and chatbots in place to answer a flood of pandemic-related questions. Computer vision supported social distancing efforts. Machine learning models have become indispensable for modeling the effects of the reopening process.”

    “If there’s one reason IT leaders should accelerate the broader adoption of AI, it’s the ability to uncover opportunities.”
    But the future upside of AI is still considerable. “Artificial intelligence is designed to reveal what you can’t see due to the sheer volume of data that is available,” says Josh Perkins, field CTO at digital platform company AHEAD. “If there’s one reason IT leaders should accelerate the broader adoption of AI, it’s the ability to uncover opportunities that generate real business value through insights and efficiencies where perhaps there were none.”

    That puts pressure on IT teams to deliver and work harder to overcome the challenges that exist in scaling the implementation and adoption of AI in the enterprise.

  • IT careers: 3 habits of continuous learners | The Enterprisers Project

    Increasingly, knowledge is the new currency in the IT industry. Given the rapid pace of change, knowledge management has become crucial for professionals to stay competitive and succeed. IT professionals who invest time in continuous learning (and leaders who facilitate this) will not only keep their skillset relevant, but also gain confidence in their own capabilities to embrace change.

    Continuous learners can leverage their knowledge of new trends, tools, coding languages, etc. to boost their professional growth. Both IT professionals and leaders must cultivate continuous learning habits for their teams to stay on top of the latest information.

  • Two keys to adopting AI/ML: Data excellence and collaboration

    Machine learning has many applications and benefits for a variety of businesses. However, it’s complicated and requires collaboration to bring you value. In this post, we’ll talk about how Red Hat can assist you in being successful with artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), no matter what phase of your journey you’re in.

  • New features in JBoss Tools 4.19.1 and Red Hat CodeReady Studio 12.19.1 for Eclipse (2021-03) | Red Hat Developer

    JBoss Tools 4.19.1 and Red Hat CodeReady Studio 12.19.1 for Eclipse (2021-03) are now available. In this release, we focused on improving tooling for the Quarkus framework, adding improvements for container-based development, and bug fixing. This article highlights just a few of these enhancements.

• Debian Family

  • Debian 11 Performance Uplift Is Looking Great For Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC

    This past weekend marked the release of Debian 11 “Bullseye” as the newest version of this major Linux distribution that is also the basis for many others. Given the popularity of Debian stable on servers, our first round of Debian 11.0 benchmarking is looking at the performance relative to Debian 10.10 on latest-generation Intel Xeon “Ice Lake” and AMD EPYC “Milan” hardware.

    As Debian 11 incorporates the latest upstream software releases over the past two years, it should be little surprise but it makes for often sizable performance uplift when migrating to new releases, especially if you are running newer hardware.

  • Debian 11 Bullseye Released – Download DVD ISO Images

    The Debian Linux operating system distribution is in the limelight for another significant stride. As of August 14th, 2021, it has successfully transitioned from Debian 10 Buster to the new and improved Debian 11 Bullseye. It is a stable version that accommodates various desktop applications and environments.

  • Debian vs Ubuntu: What’s the Difference? Which One Should You Use?

    You can use apt-get commands for managing applications in both Debian and Ubuntu. You can install DEB packages in both distributions as well. Many times, you’ll find common package installation instructions for both distributions.

    So, what’s the difference between the two, if they are so similar?

    Debian and Ubuntu belong to the same side of the distribution spectrum. Debian is the original distribution created by Ian Murdock in 1993. Ubuntu was created in 2004 by Mark Shuttleworth and it is based on Debian.

    Ubuntu is based on Debian: What does it mean?

    While there are hundreds of Linux distributions, only a handful of them are independent ones, created from scratch. Debian, Arch, Red Hat are some of the biggest distributions that do not derive from any other distribution.

    Ubuntu is derived from Debian. It means that Ubuntu uses the same APT packaging system as Debian and shares a huge number of packages and libraries from Debian repositories. It utilizes the Debian infrastructure as base.

  • Debian-noroot works great on new Alldocube 7-inch tablet

    Having a native Android X server is more efficient than going through a VNC connection, so I explored this some more…

    Sergii, the guy who developed Xserver XSDL, has also created a complete Debian Buster XFCE desktop, bundled with Xserver XSDL, as an Android APK package. It is simply a matter of install, tap the “debian” icon, and the Debian desktop is up and running.

    I thought that as Sergii has modified this Debian specifically to run on his Xserver XSDL, that it should be stable, and yes, it is. Used it for about an hour yesterday, no freeze, no crash. Again today, still stable.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • New Ubuntu Linux Kernel Security Patches Fix Up to Seven Vulnerabilities, Update Now

    The new Ubuntu Linux kernel security update is available for the Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo), Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system series, and addresses three security issues related to the Bluetooth subsystem and NFC implementation and affecting all three releases.

    These are CVE-2021-3564 and CVE-2021-3573, two flaws discovered in Linux kernel’s Bluetooth subsystem that could lead to a double-free vulnerability or a use-after-free vulnerability, respectively, allowing an attacker to cause a denial of service or possibly execute arbitrary code.

  • Travel Technology: Desktop-As-A-Service with Shells.com [Ed: Why would anyone want this? Controlled by the family of the man who killed Freenode]

  • Design and Web team summary – 13 August 2021

    Hey! My name is João and I’m a Senior Web Engineer on the Web Team.

    Since I’ve joined Canonical about 3 years ago I’ve had the opportunity of contributing to a lot of different projects. Those include, maintaining our websites, working with other teams across the company to build dashboards that ship as part of our products, improving continuous integration pipelines and creating tools to improve development and QA experience on the team’s projects.

    When I’m not doing any of the above, I would ideally be found traveling, trying out food, playing some tennis/padel or binge watching sports.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Pi HAT brings Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) to Raspberry Pi 4

    InnoRoute has launched its “Real-Time HAT,” a HAT for Raspberry Pi 4 that enables support for TSN and other real-time protocols. The Artix-7 FPGA-based HAT supports TSN and PoE through its 3 GbE ports.

    InnoRoute has rolled out the Real-Time HAT, a HAT that brings Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) capability to the Raspberry Pi 4. At the heart of the Real-Time HAT’s functionality is a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA and three Analog Devices ADIN13007 Gbit Ethernet transceiver PHY chips. The HAT enables precise network timing for real time protocols such as TSN and others. It can do synchronization between HATs, over the network, or with external GPS PPS. Its connectors are set up so that additional HATs can be attached on top of the Real-Time HAT.

  • $18 Tang Nano 4K FPGA board comes with HDMI output, optional camera – CNX Software

    Sipeed’s Tang Nano 4K FPGA board is an upgrade to the company’s Tang Nano FPGA board with a more powerful GOWIN GW1NSR-LV4C FPGA with 4608 LUT (instead of 1152) and a Cortex-M3 microcontroller embedded into the chip.

    Like the previous board, the new Tang Nano 4K features a USB-C port for power and downloading the bitstream, but replace the RGB LCD interface with an HDMI port, and adds support for an optional OV2640 camera.

  • Keep tabs on your daily runs with this interactive tracker | Arduino Blog

    Being able to keep oneself accountable while working out is a vital component to almost any good exercise plan, since repetition is the key to success. In response to their significant other wanting a way to track their workouts throughout the week, Instructables user smooth_jamie set out to build a highly interactive device that gives the person using it motivation to continue on after accomplishing the day’s goal.

    The project largely consists of a large rectangular enclosure, which houses a series of seven 128×32 OLED screens, along with a single push button next to each one. Just across from the displays is a string of WS2812B LEDs that correspond to that day’s achievement or lack thereof. Jamie had run into the issue of the OLEDs having hardcoded I2C address, so they were forced to use an I2C multiplexer breakout. They also wanted for the device to play a short song to really commemorate meeting that day’s goal, so a speaker and amplifier circuit was added onto the Arduino Mega.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android Auto for Phone Screens stop working for some users – 9to5Google

  • Itel A48 With Android 10 (Go Edition), Dual Camera Setup, 3,000 MAh Battery Launched In India: Everything You Need To Know

  • BIO-key Announces New MobilePOS Pro Android All-in-one

  • Onyx Boox Nova3 Color review: The ghost of a great tablet | Android Central

  • Samsung is removing ads from its One UI Android apps | Engadget

  • Why making a GTA 5 Android port would be a smart move for Rockstar

  • Realme’s new device takes one of the best Android phones and makes it even cheaper | TechRadar

  • How to Enable Android’s New Chat Bubbles

  • 10 Best Flight Tracking Apps for Android to Stay Updated About the Flights

  • Best MOBAs on Android 2021: Top Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas on Mobile – Droid Gamers

  • Best Android app deals of the day: Door Kickers, more – 9to5Toys

  • Best Android phones of 2021 | Popular Photography

  • Best Android Games of 2021 So Far – TechStory

  • Best Android Controllers for Mobile Gaming in 2021 [Buying Guide]

  • Android 12 will let you take full page screenshots in Chrome – Android Community

  • Pixels are getting Adaptive Charging improvements with Android 12

  • JioPhone Next tipped to feature up to 3GB RAM, Android 11 Go & starts at Rs. 3499 (~$47)!

  • Google bans yet another 9 Android apps, now you must delete them | Express.co.uk

  • Google Associate Android Developer Exam Dumps | The African Exponent.

  • Google Pixel 5A Review: Still the Best Deal in Android | WIRED

  • The best Android TV box of 2021, the Nvidia Shield TV, is now $20 off this week only | Android Central

  • Infinix X1 40-Inch Android Smart TV Review: Good Display At An Affordable Price Tag Pros – Gizbot Reviews

  • Elisa Estonia launches hybrid Android TV service powered by Nagra, Technicolor, Tech4home and 3SS | Daily News | IBC

  • These are all the watches being updated to Wear OS 3 | Android Central

  • Android’s beta accessibility feature will help users control phone using facial expressions

  • Bluvy Is the Android-Powered Shower Speaker of the Future

  • Google ‘Snapshot’ homescreen comes to life w/ new tool – 9to5Google

  • AYN Odin handheld game console with Snapdragon 845 and Android coming soon for $199 and up (crowdfunding) – Liliputing

  • Android Automotive OS in Volvo XC40 Recharge Could Make Android Auto and Carplay Extinct–But Too Smartphoney?

  • This cheap Android handheld could be an emulation beast

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Hacks.Mozilla.Org: Spring cleaning MDN: Part 2 [Ed: Mozilla has become somewhat of a laughing stock by outsourcing to Microsoft's proprietary software monopoly with surveillance; "It actually started before we moved MDN content to GitHub." What an awful shot in one's own foot. Mozilla is killing itself, bleeding itself to death.]

      Last month we removed a bunch of content from MDN. MDN is 16 years old (and yes it can drink in some countries), all that time ago it was a great place for all of Mozilla to document all of their things. As MDN evolved and the web reference became our core content, other areas became less relevant to the overall site. We have ~11k active pages on MDN, so keeping them up to date is a big task and we feel our focus should be there.

• Programming/Development

  • Git 2.33 released with new optional merge process likely to become the default: It’s ‘over 9,000′ times faster

    Git 2.33 has been released, including a new optional merge process called merge-ort, which the team hopes will become the default in the next version.

    Git releases are relatively frequent. Git 2.31 was released in March and Git 2.32 in June. According to the release announcement, version 2.33 “does not have many end-user facing changes and new features” aside from fixes and internal improvements – but there is one major change, described as a “new merge strategy backend.”

    The strategy in question is merge-ort, where ort stands for “Ostensibly Recursive’s Twin,” according to its creator Elijah Newren.

    A merge strategy is the mechanism used to combine code from multiple versions of the same codebase. Merging is a critical feature of distributed version control systems since it avoids the need for locking a main version when a checked-out copy is being edited. Merge mechanisms work by comparing the contents of a file with the contents of its ancestor, to identify changed sections, and then comparing the changed sections of one file with those of another.

  • John Goerzen: Distributed, Asynchronous Git Syncing with NNCP

    I have a directory that I use with org-mode and org-roam. I want it to be synced across multiple machines. I also want to keep the history with git. And, I want to use end-to-end encryption (no storing a plain git repo on a remote server), have a serverless setup, not require any two machines to be up simultaneously, and be resilient in the face of races and conflicts.

  • Top 10 Best Programming Languages to Learn in 2021 (Most In-Demand)

    Unlock your career opportunities to learn most in-demand Programming languages. In this article we have discuss top 10 best Programming languages to learn in 2021. Traditional programming languages become outdated over time, whereas the latest programming languages are introduced but never acquire momentum.

  • Perl/Raku

    • Making Taint support optional in Perl
      

      One of the changes to Perl that we’re considering on p5p (the perl5-porters mailing list) is the removal of taint support. The first step towards that is to add a Configure option that lets you build a Perl without taint support.

      In this post I’ll explain what we’re considering, and why. The purpose of this post is to let everyone beyond p5p know about this, and give you a chance to comment.

    • A dream realized

      Have you heard that they are finally putting together a proposal to add a clean modern OO system into the core of Perl?

      If you haven’t, I strongly encourage you to look over the RFC for Corrina, or at least watch Ovid’s excellent presentation on the project.

      It’s reassuring that the list of contributors to the proposed design includes some of the most highly respected names in the Perl community, many of whom have previously taken one (or more!) tilts at this particular object-oriented windmill.

      Indeed, over the past two decades I too have repeatedly attempted to design and prototype richer and more robust OO systems for Perl, starting way back in the previous millennium with a brief stint as the maintainer of Class::Struct, and continuing on though the release of modules such as Class::Std, Class::Delegation, and most recently: Dios.

  • Python

    • Python Iterators And Generators

      In this notebook, we would explore the difference between iterators and generators, how to use them and also the best use cases for each of them.

    • How to Graph in Python

      This article was contributed by Juni Learning, a learning platform for students ages 7-18 that offers 1:1 classes in computer science, math, and English. The article originally appeared on the Juni Learning website and is reposted here with permission.

      Hi, my name is Ritika and I’m a senior instructor at Juni Learning! Welcome to this basic Python data science tutorial.

      Today we’ll talk about how we can gather data and graph it in Python. Specifically, today we’ll be working with survey data that we get beforehand from friends or family by asking what their favorite food is.

      We’ll learn how to create bar graphs specifically using dataframes and the Seaborn package.

  • Java

    • Build a JAR file with fastjar and gjar | Opensource.com

      One of the many advantages of Java, in my experience, is its ability to deliver applications in a neat and tidy package (called a JAR, or Java archive.) JAR files make it easy for users to download and launch an application they want to try, easy to transfer that application from one computer to another (and Java is cross-platform, so sharing liberally can be encouraged), and easy to understand for new programmers to look inside a JAR to find out what makes a Java app run.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Linux Foundation’s InterUSS Adopted by Swiss Federal Office of Civil Aviation to Meet European U-Space Requirements for Unmanned Aircraft

          InterUSS, a Linux Foundation open source project that enables trusted, secure and scalable interoperability to advance safe, equitable and efficient drone operations, today announced the launch of the network remote identification service (NET-RID). The new feature meets the European U-Space Regulation established by the European Union Safety Council, which will be enforced beginning January 2023.

        • The Linux Foundation and the TODO Group Announce the Schedule for OSPOCon Europe 2021, Oct 6 [Ed: Between the lines now, further down in the press release, CoC also means "must carry spying device" (to prove one's vaccine status)]

          The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, along with co-host the TODO Group, an open group of organizations who collaborate on practices, tools and other ways to run successful and effective open source programs and projects, today announced the conference agenda for OSPOCon Europe 2021. The event takes place October 6 in London, England. The schedule can be viewed here.

        • The Linux Foundation and the TODO Group Announce the Schedule for OSPOCon Europe 2021, Oct 6

          In-person attendees will be required to be fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus and wear a mask while onsite at the event. Additionally, all attendees will need to comply with all on-site health measures, in accordance with The Linux Foundation Code of Conduct. To learn more, visit the Health & Safety webpage and read our blog post.

        • Google announces the Allstar GitHub app for continuous enforcement of best security practices [Ed: It is not best security practice to outsource one’s code to proprietary software of Microsoft and the NSA; Linux Foundation put a Microsoft person in charge of OpenSSF and now we see where it’s going]

        • Expanded Keynote Line-Up for Open Networking and Edge Summit + Kubernetes on Edge Day Includes Industry Luminaries

          The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, along with co-hosts LF Edge, LF Networking, and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), ​​today announced four top keynote speakers for Open Networking and Edge (ONE) Summit + Kubernetes on Edge Day, taking place October 11-12 in Los Angeles, Calif. The events will be produced in a hybrid format, with both in-person and virtual participation available, and are co-located with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America (October 11-15).

          ONE Summit is the industry’s premier open networking & edge computing event gathering developers, architects and business leaders across enterprises, government, global services providers and cloud for education, inspiration and collaboration. This year, it is joined by Kubernetes on Edge Day which gathers developers and adopters to share their lessons learned in building, breaking, and bettering their edge infrastructure on top of Kubernetes.

        • Expanded Keynote Line-Up for Open Networking and Edge Summit + Kubernetes on Edge Day Includes Industry Luminaries

  • Security

    • Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud Security enhances protection for Linux [Ed: Manila Standard reprints spammy trash for snakeoil peddler whose proprietary software poses more risk than whatever it claims to tackle]

    • HolesWarm Malware Exploits Unpatched Windows, Linux Servers [Ed: Same old pattern of trying to make “Linux” and Windows sound like they are equally vulnerable]

    • [Kubernetes] Alpha in v1.22: Windows HostProcess Containers [Ed: Microsoft is trying to steer Kubernetes into back-doored malware]

    • Security updates for Wednesday

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (haproxy), Fedora (c-ares, hivex, kernel, libtpms, newsflash, python-django, rust-gettext-rs, and rust-gettext-sys), openSUSE (c-ares and libsndfile), Scientific Linux (cloud-init, edk2, exiv2, firefox, kernel, kpatch-patch, microcode_ctl, sssd, and thunderbird), SUSE (c-ares, fetchmail, haproxy, kernel, libmspack, libsndfile, rubygem-puma, spice-vdagent, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (exiv2, haproxy, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, and linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-5.11, linux-oracle, linux-raspi).

Monopolies

• China seeks greater control over its own ‘Big Tech’

• American Federation of Teachers Sells Out to Rockefellers, Trilateralists, and Big Tech

  On May 1st, 2021, Americans for Public Trust leaked email correspondences between the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, these emails revealed how the bureaucracy of this teachers’ union was lobbying the CDC to roll back its school reopening guidelines.

  Pumping the brakes on the return to in-person learning, the AFT emails successfully petitioned the CDC to add “language” recommending that schools continue to provide “telework” and “virtual teaching opportunities” as alternatives to face-to-face education. The AFT also requested that the Center for Disease Control add a coronavirus “variant closing metric” that would renege on the CDC’s greenlight for in-person instruction “at any level of community [COVID] transmission.” By prioritizing “telework” and “virtual teaching,” while seeking to reinstate COVID lockdown measures in the event of new coronavirus variants, the lobbying efforts of the AFT basically pressured the CDC into relegating schools to prolonged virtual “distance learning” that is outsourced to private ed-tech corporations.

• Patents

  • Anixa Biosciences Announces Issuance of U.S. Patent for Ovarian Cancer Vaccine Technology

    Anixa Biosciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: ANIX), a biotechnology company focused on the treatment and prevention of cancer and infectious diseases, announced today that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued the first U.S. patent for its novel ovarian cancer vaccine technology. This technology was invented and developed at Cleveland Clinic and Anixa is the worldwide licensee. A European patent covering this technology was issued earlier this year.

    The patent is titled, “Ovarian Cancer Vaccines,” and the inventors are Drs. Vincent K. Tuohy, Suparna Mazumder, and Justin M. Johnson, all of Cleveland Clinic.

    [...]

    Dr. Amit Kumar, President and CEO of Anixa Biosciences, said, “We are pleased that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued this patent. This technology is now patented in Europe and the U.S., and we continue to prosecute the intellectual property in other jurisdictions.”

  • Assessing the licensing environment of SEPs in Japan [Ed: Notice how Managing 'IP' is nowadays receiving money to just 'plant' a bunch of 'plugs' from litigation firms; it's not journalism but marketing and the concessional 'propaganda mill' mode, including the deliberate lies for EPO, Team UPC etc.]

  • Romania: Patents Comparative Guide [Ed: “Decisions of the Examination Board can be challenged,” sure, but they’re then referred to a rigged and utterly corrupted tribunal controlled by criminals]

    The patent application can be submitted to the State Office for Inventions and Trademarks (SOIT) for national patents or to the European Patent Office (EPO) for European patents designating Romania as one of the member states for which protection is sought.

    [...]

    Decisions of the Examination Board can be challenged before the Patent Office Board of Appeals within three months of communication. Decisions of the Board of Appeals can be challenged at the Bucharest Tribunal within 30 days of communication. Decisions of the Bucharest Tribunal can be appealed to the Bucharest Court of Appeals within 30 days of communication.

  • EPO’s highest legal authority to decide if post-published data can support inventive step [Ed: This totally neglects to say that the Enlarged Board of Appeal is provably rigged, corrupted by EPO management. The litigation cartel hopes to cover this whole thing up. Now that the media is being bribed and intimidated by EPO lawyers there are parallels to be drawn between serial high-profile sexual predators and how they kept the media from reporting their crimes for years or decades, enabling further abuse of new victims.]

    The European Patent Office’s (EPO) highest legal authority, the Enlarged Board of Appeal, is about to be referred questions from the Board of Appeal (BoA) on whether data produced after the filing date of a patent application (post-published data) can be used as the sole basis to support the inventive step of a claim.

    Essentially, can the patentee utilise post-published data to support the plausibility that the technical problem has been solved over the full scope of the claim.

    The patent in question, EP2484209, has been granted and concerns insecticide compositions with the opposition raised by agrochemical giant Syngenta.

    [...]

    According to established jurisprudence from the BoA, assessment of inventive step is made on the effective date of the patent using the information in the patent and common general knowledge available to a skilled person (see e.g. decisions T 609/02, T 1329/04, T 1545/08). Moreover, there can only be an invention if the application makes it at least plausible that its teaching solves the problem it purports to solve.

    The instant Board of Appeal arrived at the preliminary view that previous BoA decisions diverge on the criteria that should be applied in determining whether or not post-published data can be taken into consideration when assessing inventive step before the EPO, and in particular whether such data are admissible in opposition proceedings.

    A previous ruling from 2005 stated that the technical effect underlying the inventive step must be plausible from the patent application as filed if the effect was not considered plausible; post-published data could not be relied upon as the sole basis for the inventive step (T1329/04). In other words, the BoA considered it a precondition for taking into account post-published data that it was already plausible at the filing date that the claimed technical effect was obtained (the ab-initio plausibility criterion).

  • Unified Patent Court will start operating within a year [Ed: Kluwer Patent Blog has just published a lie as a headline. Team UPC has gone truly insane. COVID has entered the heads of Team UPC. Lies are fine. Lie to everyone. Don’t worry. They think it’s their last chance to pull something off. It is bad enough that many people perceive lawyers as opportunistic liars. In the case of UPC, patent lawyers present themselves as people who publish “fake news” and violate constitutions. It’s probably best to refrain from linking to “fake news” from Team UPC, including totally false reports (by law firms) that UPC was ratified. This is far from the first time they intentionally say falsehoods for personal gain.]

    The Unified Patent Court will open its doors for cases around mid-2022.

    That is the expectation of the UPC Preparatory Committee, which has published a time plan for the Provisional Application Period (PAP) and start of the UPC today. According to the plan, the PAP will have to be approximately eight months “to conclude all the work that needs to be done”.

  • Asia divergence on consent letters requires adaptive strategies [Ed: These so-called 'co-existence arrangements' are just another worthless job for lawyers; they create conflicts and feuds, then try to work out settlements and "co-existence arrangements"]

    Counsel discuss the impact of disparities in IP office practice on written consent and other considerations for co-existence arrangements

  • “An Australian patent is a start. But Dabus needs the EPO to succeed” [Ed: The patent system never before looked so ludicrous and self-discrediting; stenographer and liar Amy Sandys (puff piece composer of the patent litigation cartel) looks for ways to still defend the lunacy]

    When Stephen Thaler filed the first applications designating an AI system, known as Dabus, as the inventor of two patents, it set off a chain of activity in global patent offices. The invention simulates independent thinking and creativity, which according to the inventor it can apply to the creation of inventions.

    Last month, the UK Court of Appeal examined whether the AI system owner Stephen Thaler is entitled to the grant of the patents based on Dabus not being a ‘natural person’. Now, after years of struggle, a breakthrough has emerged elsewhere in the world.

    South Africa’s patent office determined that an AI system can be named as an inventor on a patent application. This was the first time a patent office has handed down such a decision. In some corners, the AI-oriented patent attorney community reacted with excitement. Then the Federal Court of Australia delivered a similar verdict.

    The decisions, and especially Australia’s recognition of Dabus, lend credence to the development of a globally-patentable AI system. But Dabus requires the capitulation of other, stronger, patent courts to have a fighting chance of lasting global recognition.

• Trademarks

  • Gazprom Neft: meet the team with lofty trademark ambitions [Ed: What on Earth is this? Obligatory paid-for puff pieces, which Ed Conlon and Max Walters are forced to write for income? Ads as 'articles'? No wonder writers have been leaving this propaganda mill in droves.]

    The counsel at one of Russia’s leading oil producers have already notched up some trademark successes – and have plans to do much more

Linux on Mars!

On 19 April 2021, powered flight on another world took place for the first time. When a 1.8kg drone successfully lifted 3m from Mars’ dusty surface for less than a minute, it wasn’t simply another small step for humanity exploring the universe: it was also a giant leap for open-source software. For this tiny drone is powered by Linux.

The drone’s name is Ingenuity, although NASA also refers to it as the Mars Helicopter (for reasons that become obvious once you see it). The project is highly experimental, with future flights only expected to last for 90 seconds and the mission itself slated to run for 30 days, but the technology could lead to future Mars missions that deploy drones to explore and collect samples, covering a much vaster swathe of the planet’s surface than a ground-based rover could ever manage.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Zink Vulkan driver Suballocator lands in Mesa, certain games get ‘over 1000%’ more FPS

    Zink, the OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan continues to be an exciting development for Linux open source graphics drivers, with some new code landing in Mesa to improve its performance.

    The code in question relates to a Suballocator, something that developer Mike Blumenkrantz who has been contracted by Valve blogged about that we covered back in June. Even back then, Blumenkrantz showed how Tomb Raider running on Zink with this new code went from 9FPS to 91FPS (those are the last specific numbers given).

Applications

• Excellent Utilities: lsd – next gen ls command

  This is a series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We cover a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides. There’s a complete list of the tools in this series in the Summary section.

  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.

Instructionals/Technical

• Install VistA on GT.M or YottaDB

  A Mumps database (like VistA) is a series of routines and globals (a global in Mumps really means a file on disk). To load VistA into GT.M/YottaDB, you need to obtain the these from the CACHE.DAT distributed by the VA. Efforts are underway to lobby the VA to distribute the FOIA instance as a set of globals and routines; rather than in a proprietary format.

  Since the establishment of OSEHRA, each monthly update of FOIA is exported as routines and globals in zwrite format at GitHub. In addition, DSS vxVistA can be obtained from this repository and WorldVistA can be obtained from here.

  In our example, for setting up a VistA Database, we will use FOIA VistA.

• How To Install and Secure MongoDB on CentOS 8 – TecAdmin

  MongoDB is a popularly used document-oriented, NoSQL, database program. The term NoSQL refers to not only SQL which is an approach to designing databases. A NoSQL database is modeled in a way that the storage and retrieval of data are done through documents, instead of using the tabular structure (tables and rows) used in the more traditional relational databases.

  MongoDB is a general-purpose database in which data is stored in flexible JSON-like documents in key-value pairs. Each MongoDB database has collections that contain documents. These documents can have different sizes, contents, and numbers of fields. It supports an optional schema model which means that the blueprint of the database doesn’t need to be defined beforehand. The MongoDB databases are very scalable.

  The document-oriented model makes MongoDB very flexible. It is great at load balancing and duplicating data and can run on multiple servers. These features allow it to keep the system running even if there is hardware failure. Following are some of the key features of MongoDB…

• How To Mount Google Drive On Linux Operating Systems | Itsubuntu.com

  Thinking of using Google Drive in your Linux based operating systems then this tutorial is for you. In this tutorial post, we are going to show you the basic idea behind the mounting Google drive on Linux operating systems.

• How to Install Ionic Framework on Debian 11 – LinuxCapable

  Ionic Framework is a free and open-source toolkit for building performing, high-quality mobile and desktop apps. Ionic comes with integrations for popular frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue and is one of the more popular frameworks amongst developers today in the mobile applications field.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Ionic Framework on your Debian 11 Bullseye, its dependencies, create a project, and learn how to start the test application.

• How to Install KDE Plasma in Linux Desktop

  KDE is a well-known desktop environment for Unix-like systems designed for users who wants to have a nice desktop environment for their machines, It is one of the most used desktop interfaces out there.

Games

• Having VR issues on Linux? You should look to disable async reprojection | GamingOnLinux

  Virtual Reality is still a niche and doing it on Linux is a niche within a niche, that said when it works it’s brilliant but there’s a few problematic issues that have arisen recently.

  After having played a great many hours, and picking up a fan to prevent myself overheating, I feel it’s safe to say I’m now a huge fan of VR. Sadly though, there are times where updates roll out with SteamVR that cause problems on Linux and it doesn’t really seem much of a priority for Valve to fix (compared with updating Proton).

• Is AMD Ryzen Good For Gaming? The Best AMD CPUs Reviewed – Make Tech Easier

  Is AMD Ryzen good for gaming? This has been a pretty common question since the initial launch of the Ryzen series in 2015. Even today, there can be legitimate debates launched when AMD fails to compete with Intel in some way. To properly answer the question, we need to dive into the details of how AMD has competed with Intel in the CPU space and provide good Ryzen CPU recommendations.

• Among Us not connecting on Linux with Proton? Here’s a simple fix | GamingOnLinux

  Among Us continues to be a very popular game and it can run quite nicely on Linux with Steam Play Proton, however if you have issues with it not connecting or getting a black screen – there’s a really simple fix.

  One reason we’re bringing this up, is that recently Epic Games released a new game mode for Fortnite called Fortnite Impostors. No guessing needed where they got the idea and terminology from. There’s been a lot of talk on how Epic with Fortnite has, again, copied a developer without credit. The Among Us developers don’t seem to be particularly amused by this either. Epic teams up with all sorts of brands but apparently not indie game developers.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Debian KDE/Plasma Status 2021-08-18

    Bullseye has been released, and we are in the post-release rush with lots of changes going on. On the KDE/Plasma side we are trying to move all our accumulated changes to unstable. On the OSC side, frameworks 5.85 and KDE Gears 21.08.0 have been released.

    As mentioned previously, the now released Debian/Bullseye contains KDE Frameworks 5.78, including several backports of fixes from 5.79 to get smooth operation. Plasma 5.20.5, again with several cherry picks for bugs will be in Bullseye, too. The KDE/Apps are mostly at 20.12 level, and the KDE PIM group packages (akonadi, kmail, etc) are at 20.08.

Distributions

• SerenityOS offers a Unix-like experience with 90s computing vibes

  Microsoft is busily working away on Windows 11 and its redesigned, modern interface. Andreas Kling, meanwhile, is building the wonderfully retro Unix-like SerenityOS from the kernel on up.

  Maybe Fluent has really struck a chord with you. If, however, you feel like Windows interfaces peaked with Windows 2000, you’ll love the aesthetic in SerenityOS. Kling calls the project “a love letter to 90s user interfaces,” and it’s easy to see why. There are elements of classic Windows, MacOS and NeXT UIs and there’s no attempt to accommodate touchscreens the way most of today’s desktop OSes do.

• New Releases

  • Zorin OS 16 Officially Released : Linux Alternative To Windows 11

    Zorin OS 16 is now available for the public. Based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), Zorin OS 16 has been refurbished with a new and improved appearance.You will see new artwork and desktop wallpapers on the Zorin OS 16.

    One of the interesting GUI feature that you will see on Zorin OS 16 is Windows 11-like desktop layout. Zorin OS which is one of the easy to use Linux distro now displays a blurred version of your desktop wallpaper in it’s latest version of Zorin OS 16.

  • Manjaro Linux 21.1.0 Pahvo is out with installer improvements, new desktop upgrades

    Manjaro Linux, the distribution based on Arch Linux but with an aim to make it more suitable for less advanced users, has a big new version released with Manjaro 21.1.0.

    With this release the major supported desktops have been upgraded with GNOME 40, which sees the Manjaro team tweak the layout used to more closely follow standard GNOME with “some adjustments to reduce the pointer travel for users who prefer using mouse with gnome”. However, they also supply a “legacy” layout option too which gives you a different approach if you prefer it.

Devices/Embedded

• Realtek AP-Router SDK vulnerabilities could impact millions of routers and IoT devices

  The IoT Inspector Research Lab has discovered four high and critical vulnerabilities in the Realtek AP-Router “Jungle” SDK used for RTL819x SoCs that could impact millions of WiFi routers and dongles.

  An attacker can use a network attack, e.g. without physical access to the device, to generate a buffer or stack overflow helping him access the system and execute his own code. Realtek has released an advisory (PDF) with patchsets for all four vulnerabilities so you should upgrade the firmware if you can.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Celebrating the community: Toshan

  • Introducing the PineNote

    You’ve been asking us to create an e-ink device for years, and indeed we actually looked to make one as early as 2017. I even remember publicly ping-ponging ideas with the community members at the time and researching which SoC would be the best fit for such a device. At the time we were looking to create an alternative to the entry-level Kindle and other such big-brand e-readers. We quickly learned, however, that big brands heavily subsidize their e-readers via book sales and even if we sold an open e-reader at cost (or a loss), we still couldn’t possibly match popular devices’ price tag. Thankfully, the technology landscape and what is achievable using e-ink has significantly changed since 2017. Since the announcement of Rockchip’s RK3566 we knew our opportunity to create an open e-ink device had arrived. Early this year we made the decision to create the PineNote.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Setting new expectations for open source maintainers

  For a long time, there were two basic tests for releasing open source: “Does it do what I need it to do?” and “Does it compile?”

  Sure, it was nice if it did things for others, but more than anything else, it at least needed to be fun for the developer and run at all for others. Then with the rise of package management, things leveled up a bit: “Is it packaged?” Shortly after that, the increasing popularity of test-driven development added another requirement: “Do the tests pass?”

  Each of these new requirements made more work for open source maintainers, but (by and large) maintainers didn’t grump too much about them. I think this happened for two reasons: First, the work was often aligned with skills developers needed to learn for their jobs, and second, they were broadly perceived as beneficial for all users of the software, not just corporate developers.

• A guide to database replication with open source

  In the world of constantly evolving data, one question often pops up: How is it possible to seamlessly replicate data that is growing exponentially and coming from an increasing number of sources? This article explains some of the foundational open source technologies that may help commoditize database replication tasks into data warehouses, lakes, or other databases.

  One popular replication technology is Change Data Capture (CDC), a pattern that allows row-level data changes at the source database to be quickly identified, captured, and delivered in real-time to the destination data warehouse, lake, or other database. With CDC, only the data that has changed since the last replication—categorized by insert, update, and delete operations—is in scope. This incremental design approach makes CDC significantly more efficient than other database replication patterns, such as a full-database replication. With full-database replication, the entire source database table with potentially millions of rows is scanned and copied over to the destination.

• Web Browsers

  • Browsers listening to developers or users requires them to be humble

    The reality of the modern web is that browsers currently hold all of the power, which practically speaking means that Chrome holds all of the power. What happens is in their hands, and Chrome especially has demonstrated that it will add or remove things regardless of what the standards may or may not say. This will not be changed just by changing who is involved in the standardization process; it will only be changed by Chrome and other browsers deciding to listen and then to change their plans based on what they hear, to do things they didn’t plan to do and not do things that they had planned to do.

• Programming/Development

  • Perl/Raku

    • 1994: How Perl Became the Foundation of Yahoo

      A quick note about what Yahoo was, as a product, during the year 1994. It was a simple directory of websites, structured as a hierarchy. As 1994 began, there were just 623 websites on the Web, according to a study by MIT Researcher Matthew Gray. Yes, less than 1,000 websites in the entire world! So Yang and Filo’s directory was designed to help early web users navigate this small but growing world of websites. (Incidentally, the software program Gray used to measure the size of the Web was called World Wide Web Wanderer, aka the Wanderer — and it was a Perl-based web crawler, first deployed in June 1993.)

      Thanks to some Twitter sluething by Andy Baio and Joe Crawford earlier this year, the May 1994 Perl script that generated an early version of the Yahoo directory is available to view on GitHub. Here’s a slice of that Perl code, which in this case served to create the directories: [...]

Whatever, Voice of Reason

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!

Mythos and Cliché: The Fractured History of Los Angeles

In his seminal study of Los Angeles in the boom and bust years from 1920 to 1940, Carey McWilliams memorably called Southern California “an island on the land.” Mostly he was talking about the weather. An area of approximately 275 miles, Southern California is often described as possessing the only Mediterranean climate in the United States. McWilliams disputed this; he found the region’s extreme temperateness “a freak of nature”—like nowhere else on earth—and “climatically insulated, shut off from the rest of the continent.” Alas, this insulation no longer holds: While ever a land of “sky and air and ocean breezes,” Southern California is being changed by the climate crisis just like everywhere else. Sea level rise is eroding its beaches, and, away from the coast and sand, the weather is no longer as mild, so fire season has become a year-round prospect. (This past winter was among the three driest on record.) In a globalized world undergoing a global catastrophe, nowhere is really an island after all.

Education

• Opinion | Is Higher Education a Pyramid Scheme?

  For the last decade and a half, I’ve been teaching ethics to undergraduates. Now—admittedly, a little late to the party—I’ve started seriously questioning my own ethics. I’ve begun to wonder just what it means to be a participant, however minor, in the pyramid scheme that higher education has become in the years since I went to college.

Hardware

• Amiga 500 is back! This is this replica console with gamepad and 25 games

  A whole generation of gamers grew up playing with one of these consoles, and the Retro Games company already carries a few models including the THEC64 Mini that replicates the famous Commodore 64 (as well as its original size variant). Now it is the turn of the emblematic Amiga 500, which will arrive in a reduced format thanks to the fact that, like the previous ones, it actually carries modern hardware and an emulator to run the games.

Health/Nutrition

• Joining Fight Against Line 3, Health Professionals Urge Biden to Block Project

  U.S. doctors, nurses, and other health professionals came together Tuesday for a national day of solidarity against Line 3 that included various events and a letter calling on President Joe Biden to block Enbridge’s tar sands project.

  The health professionals are pressuring Biden to “take action that climate science demands, listen to the voices of Indigenous frontline leaders,” and reverse the federal government’s permitting of Line 3 under former President Donald Trump.

• Public Education Is Set Up to Fail in the Pandemic

  The spike in Covid-19 cases in the United States, driven largely by the Delta variant, is on a collision course with back-to-school season, which will see children—who are more affected by the variant—returning to in-person instruction en masse, often without masks, vaccinations, regular testing, or better ventilation.

• The Delta Variant of Global Stupidity

  Avoiding global catastrophe from the more infectious delta variant of COVID-19 doesn’t require a huge commitment from people and governments. Richer countries just have to ensure more widespread availability of vaccines. And individuals have to get vaccinated.

  COVID-19 is not an asteroid on a collision course with the planet. It’s not an imminent nuclear war. It’s an invisible enemy that humanity has demonstrated it can beat. It just requires a bit of cooperation.

• After Banning Mask and Vaccine Mandates, GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Gets Covid-19

  Already under fire for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic—in addition to recent attacks on voting rights and immigrants—Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday, provoking fresh criticism of his anti-public health policies.

  “Our governor has been working to keep masks out of schools harder than he has worked to keep guns out of schools.”—Marked by Covid

• Feds Set to Advise an Extra Round of Vaccinations, Which Could Start Next Month

• Nearly 7 in 10 Support Mask Requirements in Schools, New Poll Shows

• Opinion | Why Does Your Right to Unmask Usurp My Child’s Right to a Safe School?

  “Daddy, I’m afraid.”

• Why no one really knows how bad Facebook’s vaccine misinformation problem is

  Researchers aren’t just clamoring for more information about Facebook, either. YouTube, Twitter, and other social media networks also have troves of data about Covid-19 misinformation that could help researchers. But because Facebook is the largest social media platform for sharing news — one where many posts are private — the company is central to the debate about transparency in Big Tech and the societal impacts of its products.

• Pesticides can amplify each other. Bees have become the victims.

  When different pesticides mix together, as they often do on farms, they can amplify the effect of one another, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. In deadly combination, they can be even more damaging to bees. Previous research has found that these “synergies” can harm fish and other creatures, too.

  What’s most troubling is that regulators in the US and elsewhere don’t take the dangers of these interactions fully into account — even though they’ve long been aware of them. The Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees pesticides in the US, effectively ignored a recommendation to determine which chemicals farmers most commonly mix together, and what risk those combinations pose to bees. Europe is making more progress, but its regulations still fall short, experts say.

• Why it’s so hard to be a nurse in America, according to two nurses

  The roughly 3 million registered nurses (RNs) currently employed in the United States are, in Sara’s words, “the eyes and the ears and hands and feet of providing health care.” But nurses are leaving the profession at a staggering rate. According to a 2021 report from Nursing Solutions, the turnover rate for registered nurses last year was close to 20 percent. This leaves hospitals understaffed: About 10 percent of hospital RN positions were vacant last year, the same report found, perpetuating a cycle of burnout and likely worsening the quality of care for patients.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Redaction Failure Shows Grayshift Is Swearing Cops To Secrecy About Its Phone-Cracking Tech

    Law enforcement loves its new tech advances. It also hates to talk about them, operating under the assumption that the business of serving the public isn’t the public’s business. When pressed, officials will say something about staying one step ahead of criminals. But more often the opacity is nothing more than antagonism directed at people who expect transparency from those cashing publicly funded paychecks.

  • LockBit 2.0 Ransomware Proliferates Globally

    The LockBit ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) gang has ramped up its targeted attacks, researchers said, with attempts against organizations in Chile, Italy, Taiwan and the U.K. using version 2.0 of its malware.

    Attacks in July and August have employed LockBit 2.0, according to a Trend Micro analysis released on Monday, featuring a souped-up encryption method.

  • Top researcher slams Microsoft over ‘astonishingly bad’ security advisories

    A well-known security researcher has slammed Microsoft for its “astonishingly bad” security advisories, pointing to the wording in a TCP/IP remote code execution vulnerability released on 10 August this year as an example.

  • BlackBerry software flaw could impact cars, medical devices – U.S. agencies

    The warning came after the Canadian company disclosed that its QNX Real Time Operating System has a vulnerability that could allow an attacker to execute an arbitrary code or flood a server with traffic until it crashes or gets paralyzed.

    The software is used by automakers including Volkswagen, BMW and Ford Motor in many critical functions including the Advanced Driver Assistance System.

  • Security

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Speak Out Against Apple’s Mass Surveillance Plans

        Last year, EFF supporters spoke out and stopped the EARN IT bill, a government scheme that could have enabled the scanning of every message online. We need to harness that same energy to let Apple know that its plan to enable the scanning of photos on every iPhone is unacceptable. 

      • Good News: Twitter Announces An Excellent Lead For The Bluesky Decentralized Social Media Protocol Project

        It has been nearly two years since Jack Dorsey announced plans to explore switching Twitter from its current setup as a centralized platform controlled by one company to a distributed protocol project that anyone can build on — called Bluesky. This was especially exciting to me, since some of Jack’s thoughts were inspired by my “Protocols, not Platforms” paper. There hasn’t been that much news on Bluesky since then — leading many to insist that the project was going nowhere. However, there have been plenty of things happening behind the scenes — at least somewhat complicated by the whole pandemic thing. In January of this year, an “Ecosystem Review” document was published.

      • Jewel v. NSA: Americans (Still) Deserve Their Day in Court

        Though we filed our our landmark Jewel v. NSA case in 2008, no court has yet ruled on the merits – whether the mass spying on the Internet and phone communications of millions of Americans violates U.S. constitutional and statutory law. Instead, despite the enormous amount of direct and circumstantial evidence showing our clients’ communications swept up by the NSA dragnet surveillance, along with those of millions of other Americans, the trial and appeals courts still found that the plaintiffs lacked legal “standing” to challenge the practices.

        As we said in our brief to the Ninth Circuit, this dismissal “hands the keys to the courthouse to the Executive, making it impossible to bring any litigation challenging the legality of such surveillance without the Executive’s permission.  It blinds the courts to what the Executive has admitted: the NSA has engaged in mass surveillance of domestic communications carried by the nation’s leading telecommunications companies, and this surveillance touches the communications and records of millions of innocent Americans.”

        This fight has been long and hard. But we remain determined to ensure that the network we all increasingly rely on in our daily lives—for communicating with our families, working, participating in community and political activities, shopping, and browsing—is not also an instrument subjecting all of our actions to NSA mass surveillance. We are evaluating the options for moving the case forward so that Americans can indeed have their day in court.

      • Palantir Buys Gold Bars as Hedge Against ‘Black Swan Event’

        The company spent $50.7 million this month on gold, part of an unusual investment strategy that also includes startups, blank-check companies and possibly Bitcoin. Palantir had previously said it would accept Bitcoin as a form of payment before adding precious metals more recently.

      • Business Round-Up: Cashless future closer thanks to corona

        Vendors are obliged to accept cash between 06:00 and 22:00, but if they are located in an area deemed vulnerable to robberies, a card-only policy is legal during midnight hours.

      • Pegasus row: SC issues notice to Centre, says govt need not disclose anything which compromises national security

        A bench headed by Chief Justice N V Ramana sought the Centre’s response on the pleas and said it will take up the matter after 10 days and see what course should be adopted.

Defence/Aggression

• Opinion | We Are the Least Trustworthy People On the Planet: Another Ghastly Retreat From Empire

• Opinion | When Will We Stop Letting Our Presidents Lie America Into Wars?

  Let’s never forget that what we are watching happen right now in Afghanistan is the final act of George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection strategy.

• Progressive Critics Say Investors in US Weapon-Makers Only Clear Winners of Afghan War

  As the hawks who have been lying about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan for two decades continue to peddle fantasies in the midst of a Taliban takeover and American evacuation of Kabul, progressive critics on Tuesday reminded the world who has benefited from the “endless war.”

  “Never has it been more important to end war profiteering.”—Public Citizen

• Opinion | We Can’t Let Pro-War Generals Who Lied About the Afghanistan War Define Its Legacy

  The horrific culmination of the 20-year U.S. occupation of Afghanistan should be cause for sober reflection on the imperial hubris and bipartisan pro-war consensus that enabled such a ruinous military intervention to grind on for so long. But instead of a reckoning, the very architects of the war are getting the final word on its legacy—a kafkaesque conclusion to a remarkably cruel chapter. This dynamic adds fresh insult to the disastrous conditions Afghans now face, as the Taliban seizes control of Afghanistan, and the United States implements callous closed-door policies toward people attempting to flee the country, leading to ghastly scenes at Kabul’s airport.

• Opinion | A Thoughtful Response to the Tragedy in Afghanistan

  As my husband and I ate dinner Sunday evening and reflected (as we do each night) about what we are grateful for, I was simultaneously aware of our abundance of unearned good fortune and sick to my stomach thinking about the people— especially the girls and women—in Afghanistan. I can only imagine their terror and despair, and imagining leaves me overwhelmed.

• Biden Forfeits His Afghan Victory by Defending His Deep State Advisors

  The effect was to show how drastic his own misconceptions are, and how he will continue to defend neocon adventurism. What seemed for an hour or so as a public relations recovery is turning into a denouement of how U.S. fantasy is still trying to threaten Asia and the Near East.

  By throwing all his weight behind the propaganda that has guided U.S. policy since George W. Bush decided to invade after 9/11, Biden blew his greatest chance to burst the myths that led to his own bad decisions to trust U.S. military and state officials (and their campaign contributors).

• Azmat Khan: Deadly U.S. Air War in Afghanistan Helped Taliban Gain New Recruits Who Wanted Revenge

  Investigative journalist Azmat Khan, who has reported extensively in Afghanistan, says President Joe Biden has not yet addressed the chaos unleashed by the collapse of the Afghan government. In remarks on Monday, Biden “really focused on the decision to end the war” and ignored criticism about chaos at the Kabul airport and the abandonment of thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. over the last 20 years. “None of that was really discussed in any detail,” Khan says. She also discusses why the Afghan military fell so quickly to the Taliban, its overreliance on U.S. air power, how civilian casualties weakened support for the U.S.-backed government, and the massive profits the two-decade-long war generated for U.S. defense contractors.

• Last Charge for the Dead Enders: Blame Biden for Leaving Afghanistan

  Never mind that the U.S. national-security establishment had twenty long years to achieve its goal of bringing a model society to Afghanistan. 

  Never mind that U.S. officials sacrificed the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Afghans in their quest to bring “democracy” and “enduring freedom” to Afghanistan.

• The Death of the “Lima Group” and Re-Birth of the Latin American Anti-Imperialist Left

• Taliban Vow ‘No Revenge’ Against Fellow Afghans Who Worked With US Forces

  During their first press conference since retaking control of Afghanistan, Taliban representatives on Tuesday vowed not to seek retribution against fellow Afghans who worked with U.S. occupation forces and said the new government will respect the rights of women—with the caveat that they must adhere to the group’s interpretation of Sharia law.

  “Whoever has worked in the military, in translation, we have given amnesty to everybody. There is no revenge,” Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said from the capital of Kabul as the U.S. resumed evacuation flights for Americans and some Afghans who worked with U.S. forces, which have been in the country since the disastrous 2001 invasion.

• Opinion | American Wars: Blood in the Sand

  The magnitude of the United States’ failure in Afghanistan is breathtaking. It is not a failure of Democrats or Republicans, but an abiding failure of American political culture, reflected in US policymakers’ lack of interest in understanding different societies. And it is all too typical.

• It is Government Weakness, Not Taliban Strength, That Condemns Afghanistan

  The speed of the Taliban success has caught the world by surprise – as no doubt it was intended to do. There has been no “decent interval” between the US departure and the Taliban attack, as there was in South Vietnam between the final US withdrawal in 1972 and the defeat of the South Vietnamese government by the North Vietnamese army in 1975.

  The fact that everything the US and Britain fought for in Afghanistan over two decades is collapsing at such a pace underlines the extent of the Western defeat and will reinforce the belief that the era of the US as the sole super power is coming to an end. As with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, failure in Afghanistan has global implications far beyond the country where the war is being waged. In fact the defeat is more complete than that suffered by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, but after Soviet withdrawal the Communist government in Kabul survived for several years, in sharp contrast to the present debacle.

• One Year of Afghanistan War Spending Could Fund Resettlement of 1.2 Million Refugees

  As the Biden administration faces criticism for not doing enough to assist those fleeing Afghanistan, an analysis released Monday showed that the roughly $19 billion the Pentagon budgeted for the U.S. occupation of the country in 2020 alone could cover initial resettlement costs for 1.2 million refugees.

  “We have a duty to save lives—and to do so, we must welcome many, many more refugees as quickly as possible.”—Rep. Cori Bush

• Corporate Media Are Erasing US’s Long-Term Culpability for Afghanistan War

• Deadly US Air War in Afghanistan Helped Taliban Gain New Recruits

• White Feminists Wanted to Invade

  On a March evening in 1999, a wealthy Hollywood socialite named Mavis Leno, the wife of late-night superstar Jay Leno, held a fundraiser to which she invited her rich and/or famous friends. The event was to benefit the Feminist Majority Foundation’s campaign to “End Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan,” which highlighted the barbaric conditions of women living under Taliban rule. (Nowhere, of course, did anyone point out that the Taliban owed its strength at least in part to US foreign policy.) Before long, actresses like Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep signed on and made the issue a cause célèbre.

• US Policy Toward Afghanistan Was a Recipe for Collapse From the Start

• A Year’s Worth of Afghanistan War Spending Could Resettle 1.2 Million Refugees

• The United States, Afghanistan, and the Doctrinal Boundaries of Permissible Reflection

  Hence, while there is contestation in U.S. media and political culture over how to respond to the flood of migrants seeking entrance to the United States on the nation’s southern border, there is little if any serious mainstream media discussion and critique of the long and many-sided role that U.S. capitalist imperialism has played in imposing abject misery on millions of people across Central America and Mexico.

  The US invasion of Vietnam (and Cambodia) and Iraq could be criticized in dominant US media as bad strategy, as mistakes, but never as monumentally mass-murderous, racist, and imperialist war crimes and crimes against humanity.

• Afghanistan: Taliban Victories Explain the Wisdom of US Withdrawal

  The US occupation’s puppet president, Ashraf Ghani, blames his government’s debacle in progress on the “abrupt” withdrawal of US forces. Apparently 20 years of the US doing his heavy lifting — contributing not just troops but money, training, and support for his own army — followed by 15 months’ notice of withdrawal, then a three-month extension of the withdrawal deadline, just didn’t give him time to prepare.

  American hawks aren’t complaining about the “abruptness” of the withdrawal timeline. They’re appalled that the US would ever, under any circumstances, consider withdrawing at all. The fiction they’d have us subscribe to is that until and unless Afghanistan becomes a western-style “liberal democracy,” withdrawing means that the 2,500 Americans killed there will have “died for nothing.”

• AOC Stresses Moral Obligation to Afghan Refugees as Fox Revives Racist Tropes

• If Liz Cheney’s Assigning Blame for an “Epic Failure” in Afghanistan, She Can Start With Her Father

  “This has been an epic failure across the board, one we’re going to pay for for years to come,” declared Representative Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, as she denounced Joe Biden’s decision to complete the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.

• ‘Why Isn’t ‘Afghanistand’ Leading The News?’ Sky’s US Troop Withdrawal Coverage Is Going About As Well As You’d Expect…?

  As distressing scenes emerge from Afghanistan of a panicked population trying to flee slaughter, it’s comforting to know that Sky News has worked out who is to blame. Chris Graham suspends reason and accountability to bring you this special report.

• Rather Than Focus on How the US Got Out of Afghanistan, Focus on How It Got In

  While politicians and pundits debate “who lost Afghanistan,” that question will likely seem very distant from many Americans’ lives. Indeed, more than two-thirds supported the decision to withdraw. If anything, most Americans might wonder how the United States came to be in the position to “lose” Afghanistan in the first place.

• Ret. Col. Ann Wright on Reopening U.S. Embassy in Kabul in 2001 & Why She Supports Troop Withdrawal

  Retired U.S. Army colonel and former State Department official Ann Wright, who helped reopen the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in December 2001 and later resigned in protest, says the United States should reopen its embassy now and needs to maintain a diplomatic footprint in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover. “If the United States really wants to help the people of Afghanistan … we’ve got to have a presence in Afghanistan,” says Wright.

• Afghan Scholar: The U.S. Can’t Distance Itself from Chaos Unfolding Now After 20 Years of War

  Thousands of Afghans who worked for the United States and other foreign countries remain stranded in Kabul two days after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan. Military flights out of the Kabul International Airport have resumed a day after thousands of Afghans raced to the airport with hopes of leaving the country. President Joe Biden has defended his decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation and criticized the U.S.-trained Afghan military for collapsing “without trying to fight” the Taliban in many cases. Afghan law professor Haroun Rahimi, who was en route to Kabul when he heard the news of the Taliban takeover and stayed in Turkey, says Biden must take responsibility for the U.S. role in Afghanistan. “He was not willing to accept any responsibility. It’s as if the U.S. was there as a bystander,” says Rahimi. “The way that President Biden was distancing the U.S. from everything that happened over the past two years was just disingenuous and just inaccurate.”

• War Powers: immense profits for arms dealers, incalculable losses for Australians

  The economic cost to Australia are in the billions of dollars.

  But of course that price tag is nothing compared to the millions of lives that have been lost, lives of Australian defence personnel and civilians.

  The number of defence personnel killed does not even include the 500 veteran suicides in Australia since the start of the Afghanistan war.

• Profits and poppy: Afghanistan’s illegal drug trade a boon for Taliban

  Despite the threats posed by Afghanistan’s illicit drug business, experts noted, the United States and other nations rarely mention in public the need to address the trade – estimated by the UNODC at more than 80% of global opium and heroin supplies.

• The Afghanistan War And The Dissenters We Should’ve Listened To

  This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter. Become a paid subscriber and help us expand our coverage of whistleblower stories.

  President Joe Biden delivered a speech where he stood by the withdrawal of United States military forces from Afghanistan, but he crudely blamed the people of Afghanistan for the chaos that has unfolded over the past several days.It was a lie to assert the war in Afghanistan was never about nation-building. Neoconservatives in President George W. Bush’s administration, who launched the war, deployed troops for an open-ended mission to establish a government that could secure the country against the Taliban and be a reliable ally in the region.Biden also lied about opposing a surge in Afghanistan when he vice president in President Barack Obama’s administration. He backed sending an additional 20,000 troops but was opposed to sending more than 20,000 like Obama did.The president had nothing to say about the Pentagon and CIA’s resistance to adequately planning for withdrawal, even though that could have helped avoid some of the scenes of panic which were broadcast.As Matthew Hoh, former State Department official who resigned in protest against Obama’s surge, put it in a CODEPINK webinar, the speech reflected the willingness and ease in which U.S. officials can lie and get away with it. They do not have to fear being called out or confronted. And that has allowed “all wars throughout the Muslim world to continue” and evolve into wars that are hidden and secret. (But of course, not secret and hidden to the people suffering from their impacts.)Plenty of time should be spent sifting through the lies and delusions spread about the Afghanistan War because many of those lies and delusions contributed to a collective shock as the Taliban took control of Kabul. However, just as important are the truths that were uttered by dissenters against the agenda of perpetual war promoted by war hawks and craven politicians.So let’s elevate those voices that were right and remember to seek out such voices next time a presidential administration—with the support of legislators—moves toward launching a war.

Environment

• A Climate Stat We Can’t Afford to Overlook: CEO Pay

• Postcard From Thermal: Surviving the Climate Gap in Eastern Coachella Valley

  The first thing to know about Thermal, California, is: It’s really damn hot. Already, at this early date in our planetary crisis, 139 days a year are over 95 degrees Fahrenheit in Thermal. Over the next 30 years, temperatures will rise 4 to 5 degrees more, and by the end of the century, more than half the year there will be hotter than 95 and nearly a quarter will be hotter than 112.

  The second thing to know about Thermal, California, is: It’s a cartoonishly horrible expression of a moral and practical issue that exists, at some level, in every society on earth. The climate crisis is an inequality magnifier. The heat and the hurricanes, the flooding and the wildfire smoke, slam down with full force on the disadvantaged. Meanwhile, the more privileged remain comparatively safe, protected by money and power. That difference in suffering is known as the climate gap, defined by researchers in a foundational paper on the subject as “the disproportionate and unequal impact the climate crisis has on people of color and the poor.”

• Daily Mail and Telegraph ‘Well Behind the Curve’ on Reporting Climate Change Accurately

  Right-leaning UK newspapers provide some of the least scientifically accurate coverage of climate change among outlets analysed in a new study, with the Daily Mail and Telegraph “well behind the curve”, according to one of its authors. 

  Researchers at the Technological University of Munich, the University of New England, and the University of Colorado Boulder looked at nearly 5,000 articles published between 2005 and 2019 in 17 print media outlets in the English-speaking world. 

  Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts

• Three in four say climate ‘tipping points’ close

  The survey, conducted before the publication of a bombshell UN climate science report last week, showed that more than half (58 percent) of respondents in G20 nations feel very or extremely concerned about the state of the planet.

  Scientists are increasingly concerned that some feedback loops in nature — such as irreversible melting of icesheets or permafrost — may be close to being triggered as mankind’s mind-boggling carbon emissions show no signs of slowing, despite a pandemic.

  The IPCC report warned that Earth is on course to be 1.5C hotter than pre-industrial times around 2030 — a full decade earlier than it projected just three years ago.

• Refugee Advocates Demand US Stop Deportations to Haiti Following Earthquake

  As Haitians reel amid the aftershocks of a major earthquake, a tropical storm, political upheaval, and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, refugee advocates this week are calling on the Biden administration to stop deporting people back to the ravaged nation and to extend its Temporary Protected Status designation.

  “It is unconscionable for the U.S. government to forcibly remove anyone to Haiti right now.”—Blaine Bookey, CRGS

• Damaged Hospitals in Haiti Struggle to Help Earthquake Survivors as Death Toll Tops 1,400

  We get an update from Les Cayes, Haiti, not far from the epicenter of Saturday’s earthquake, as Tropical Storm Grace drenched parts of the country and the death toll has now climbed to more than 1,400, with nearly 7,000 suffering from injuries amid overwhelmed hospitals. The impact from the latest earthquake is “just as great” as the devastation from the 2010 earthquake, says Jacqueline Charles, Haiti and Caribbean correspondent for the Miami Herald. “Haitians are not sitting around and waiting for international aid. They’re not waiting for their national community to come and rescue them,” Charles says, noting the presence of many makeshift hospitals despite medical supply shortages. She also describes how Haiti is is grappling with the aftermath of the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse.

• Haitians Ask for Solidarity as Storm Makes Landfall Days After Earthquake

• Ireland faces future of climate change division

  Ireland, known as the Emerald Isle for its verdant pastures, may soon lose its title as climate change division takes hold.

• ‘Hard to Imagine Worse Idea’: Biden to Resume Fossil Fuel Leases on Public Lands and Waters

  Climate groups are expressing deep concern following an Interior Department announcement Monday that the Biden administration will resume oil and gas drilling leases on public lands and waters—a practice President Joe Biden vowed to ban during his 2020 run for the White House—in response to a federal court ruling.

  “The climate emergency reality we are facing demands immediate action, not acquiescence.” —Nicole Ghio, Friends of the Earth

• Opinion | The Glasgow Climate Talks Are a Vital Deadline for Action

  It’s only 76 days until world leaders convene in Glasgow, Scotland, for some of the most important international negotiations in history. What happens during the twelve days of the Glasgow Climate Talks (known by climate wonks as COP26) will go a long way to determining the fate of much of the Paris Climate Agreement―which is another way of saying the fate of much of life on earth.

• Climate Change is a Public Health Emergency

  According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 2020 was Earth’s second hottest for the past 140 years. Furthermore, 19 of the warmest years on record have occurred since 2000. There has been a considerable impact of these increasing global warming trends on people of all ages.

  Annual deaths as a result of climate change are estimated in 150,000 by the World Health Organization (WHO). Between 2030 and 2050, this number could be as high as 250,000 additional deaths. Most of those deaths will be due to heat stress, and to malnutrition, malaria and intestinal and respiratory infections, particularly in children from developing countries.

• Cheap Talk From the Fed on Global Warming?

  My favorite remedy for the bubble was talk, or more specifically, talk from Alan Greenspan and other top Fed officials, about research documenting the housing bubble. The point I tried to make in those years was that the hard data showed we had a bubble. It wasn’t an issue of crystal ball reading.

  We had an unprecedented divergence of house sale prices and rents. While house sale prices were soaring, rents were moving along roughly in line with the overall rate of inflation. At the same time, the vacancy rate for housing units was hitting record highs. These facts were hardly consistent with a story of house prices being driven by an increased demand for housing.

• Energy

  • Scraping the Bottom of the Sea: the Movement to Stop Deep Sea Mining

    Instead it’s a seasonal rite where fishers paddle out from shore and summon sharks with noise and motion makers—and then they hope, capture them. It’s supposed to ensure shark harvests for peoples who depend in part on this source of protein. It’s actually one of many such ceremonies that take place in this area of the Pacific.

    Although the Kono Village festival hadn’t been observed for years, it has been revived this year with an added fillip. It’s being held to rally the campaign to stop the relentless attempt by deep-pocketed mining investors called the Solwara 1 project to tear up the local sea bed in search of minerals. Local groups such as the West Coast Development Foundation and the Alliance of Solwara Warriors have been battling Solwara for years, but the latest mining push in the form of a new company called DeepGreen has heightened the struggle.

  • One in Three Directors at Australia’s Major Banks Have Ties to Oil, Gas, and Mining

    Nearly one in three directors of Australia’s largest banks have worked for firms operating in the oil, gas and mining industries, DeSmog research has revealed, prompting concerns about a “vested interest” on the banks’ boards that campaigners fear could delay action to address climate change.

    DeSmog’s research analysed director CVs on company profiles, LinkedIn pages, official filings and news clippings to log the past and present work experience of 38 current directors across Australia’s “big four” banks: ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, and National Australia Bank (NAB), 

    Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts

  • Texas’s Fossil Fuel Elite Is Driving Us to Climate Disaster

    Oil and gas donors have spent $100 million on elections in Texas. Now storms made worse by climate change have flooded the state capitol building in Austin.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Photo Essay: In the Company of Bison

• Overpopulation

  • Greed and Consumption: Why the World is Burning

    In Via Appia, bins are overflowing with garbage, often spilling over into the streets. The smell, especially during Italy’s increasingly sweltering summers, is suffocating.

    Meanwhile, many parts of the country are literally on fire. Since June 15, firefighters have reportedly responded to 37,000 fire-related emergencies, 1,500 of them on July 18 alone. A week later, I drove between Campania, in southern Italy, and Abruzzo, in the center. Throughout the journey, I was accompanied by fire and smoke. On that day, many towns were evacuated, and thousands of acres of forests were destroyed. It will take months to assess the cost of the ongoing destruction, but it will certainly be measured in hundreds of millions of euros.

  • ‘Loudest Alarm Bell Yet’: Unprecedented Water Shortage Declaration for US West

    As the climate emergency offers repeated signals it’s an extreme new world, federal officials on Monday declared a record first “Tier 1″ water shortage for Lake Mead, citing historic drought affecting the Colorado River basin.

    The declaration from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was triggered by its projection that Lake Mead’s elevation at the end of the year will be 1,065.85 feet, an estimate below the 1,075-foot threshold for the water shortage determination.

  • Colorado River: First-ever shortage declared amid record US drought

    Around 40 million people in the US and Mexico rely on the river for water.

    Lake Mead, which was created near Las Vegas after the building of the Hoover Dam, supplies water to Arizona, Nevada, California and Mexico. The lake is now at its lowest level since it was first formed in the 1930s.

  • Overpopulation and poverty

    Rajyogi Brahmakumar Nikunj Ji postulates that the steadily increasing numbers on our planet may spiral into a serious concern of disastrous proportions.

  • Why we must become fewer people and consume less – and suggestions to improve the situation

    The mainstream media rarely report about the role of population growth in environmental and climate disruptions, but the Op-Ed below was actually published in the high-circulating Swedish Social Democratic newspaper Aftonbladet a week ago. The original Swedish text is available here. The article gives a broad overview, ending with an unusual suggestion. There were 250 on-line comments, and the author expands on his idea after the translated text below.

Finance

• Corporate Property-Buying Spree May Make Housing Even Less Affordable Amid COVID

• Are Bezos and Musk Launching Us Into a New Space Age, or Just a U.S. Space Grab?

  Behind this apparent show of rich kids playing with their expensive space toys, there are bigger forces at play—namely, that big capital is entering spaceflight, hitherto the exclusive domain of nation-states. While it appears that three men with deep pockets are funding their respective space ventures, the reality is that it is the U.S. taxpayers who are funding these space efforts. In this new space age, the U.S. is also proposing to ride roughshod over the space agreements that space is a “global commons.” The U.S. would like to convert space into its “final frontier,” under the premise that space belongs to any country that can mine its riches.

  Many people take for granted that the U.S. was the winner of the space race against the Soviet Union, since they beat the Soviets to the moon. But what is overlooked in this narrative is that the space competition is not simply about who sent the first man to the moon, but also about who built the better rockets.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A Right-Wing Call For Rough Men

• Why Is The Republican Party Obsessed With Social Media?

  “In 1970,” observes Edmund Fawcett in his recent survey of political conservatism, “the best predictor of high conservative alignment in voting was a college education.” “Now,” he notes, “it is the reverse.” Many other statistics sing this tune of political realignment. Whereas the counties Al Gore won in the 2000 election accounted for about half the nation’s economic output, for instance, the counties Joe Biden won in 2020 account for more than 70 percent of it. Many observers have tried to capture this shift’s cultural significance. You could say that the Republicans have rejected Apollo for Dionysus. You could conclude that they have embraced Foucault and postmodern philosophy. Or you could sting to the quick, as David Brooks does, and acknowledge that “much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality.”

• Governor Cuomo Resigns

• ‘No Time for Amateur Hour’: Pelosi Signals Plan to Steamroll Right-Wing Dems

  Progressives commended House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for signaling late Monday that she does not intend to cede to conservative Democrats who are demanding passage of a bipartisan infrastructure bill before any vote on a $3.5 trillion budget resolution, a centerpiece of the party’s social spending and climate agenda.

  “This is no time for amateur hour,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) reportedly said during a private call with her leadership team, in an apparent reference to the nine conservative House Democrats who are publicly threatening to tank the budget resolution that—if passed—will set the stage for the construction of a sweeping reconciliation bill.

• West Virginia Activists Are Coming for Joe Manchin

  In 2017, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin dared a group of local activists to mount a primary challenge against him. “What you ought to do is vote me out,” he told the activists, who were asking him to hold a public town hall for his constituents. “Vote me out! I’m not changing. Find somebody else who can beat me and vote me out.”

• GOP Removes Page Praising Donald Trump’s ‘Historic’ Peace Deal With Taliban

  The Republican National Committee has removed a webpage from 2020 in which it praised Donald Trump for signing a “historic peace agreement with the Taliban.”

  David Weigel, of The Washington Post, was the first to spot that the page had been removed with the web address redirecting to a 404 error page featuring the quip: “It looks like you’re as lost as Biden is.”

• RNC post on Trump peace deal with Taliban among pre-2021 items offline during site maintenance

  Internet archive site Wayback Machine shows a Sept. 15, 2020, post praising former President Trump’s “historic peace agreement with the Taliban.” The post is no longer on the RNC site, nor are any posts from that section of the website before Jan. 1, 2021.

• Republicans delete webpage celebrating Trump’s deal with Taliban

  RNC officials did not respond to an emailed request for comment on the deletion.

• GOP takes down 2020 page touting Trump’s ‘historic peace agreement with the Taliban’

  In researching his new book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, Spencer Ackerman spoke in 2020 with retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former Joint Special Operations Command and Afghanistan War commander, and asked him if the War on Terror had been worth it. “It would be impossible to argue that it was,” McChrystal answered, Ackerman writes at The Daily Beast. “The outcome just hasn’t been positive enough to argue that.”

• Facebook’s Taliban Policy Could Delete a Lot More Than Just Pro-Taliban Content

  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube take different approaches to Taliban content. Facebook considers the Taliban a terrorist group and will continue to ban pro-Taliban content from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, the company confirmed. Content moderators will continue to block not only content from Taliban-associated accounts but all pro-Taliban content, regardless of who is sharing it.

  “The Taliban is sanctioned as a terrorist organization under U.S. law and we have banned them from our services under our Dangerous Organization policies,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “This means we remove accounts maintained by or on behalf of the Taliban and prohibit praise, support, and representation of them.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Bill Maher on free speech, comedy, and his haters

  I recently spoke to Bill Maher, an acclaimed stand-up comedian and the longtime host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, for an episode of Vox Conversations. Maher’s a political comic, and clearly a liberal, but I’ve always enjoyed his work because I’ve never really considered him a partisan, even though conservatives are the butt of most of his jokes. For all of his anti-Republican bits, you also get jabs at the left, like his recent segments on “progressophobia” and “cultural appropriation.”

• Moscow Court Levels More Fines Against Google For Failing To Delete Banned Content

  A Moscow court has leveled more fines against Google for violating Russia’s rules on banned content.

  The five fives handed to the U.S. technology giant on August 17 amount to a total 14 million rubles ($190,398), a minute fraction of the company’s $180 billion in revenue last year.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Imprisoned Chinese citizen journalist not well, lawyer says

  A Chinese citizen journalist serving a four-year sentence after reporting on the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in the city of Wuhan is in ill health after staging a long-running hunger strike, according to a lawyer who spoke with her family.

  Zhang Zhan was hospitalized on July 31 and now weighs less than 40 kilograms (90 pounds), according to a message sent by Zhang Zhan’s mother to a group on Chinese social media. Authorities notified the family that she was in poor health and told them to come to the prison, said Peng Yonghe, a lawyer who spoke with Zhang’s mother about the visit.

  Her parents and brother went to Shanghai on August 2 but were only permitted to speak with her over the phone.

• U.S. Lawyers Challenging U.K. Decision to Block Julian Assange’s Extradition

  U.S. prosecutors have indicted Assange on 17 espionage charges and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of leaked military and diplomatic documents a decade ago. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.

• Mob attacks journalists covering Istanbul protest and police beat, detain two reporters

  Derya Saadet, a reporter with the leftist news website Sendika.org said that about 20 people charged at the protest and the journalists covering it in an interview with leftist broadcaster Artı TV, which the outlet posted to Twitter. Saadet said in the interview that she fell to the ground but when she tried to get up roughly eight men hit her and kicked her after identifying her as a journalist until other reporters dragged her away.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Is Surviving Assault a Conflict of Interest?

  When sexual assault allegations came out against then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, former Washington Post political reporter Felicia Sonmez expected to cover the story. But, according to a discrimination lawsuit she recently filed, editors said she couldn’t, partially because she had just made public statements recounting being sexually assaulted the year prior.

• Illinois Governor Signs Law Banning Cops From Performing Background Searches On Public Speakers

  The Chicago PD has a host of problems. Ones that have gone unaddressed for years and appear to remain unaddressed even after the federal government has been forced to step in. Misconduct goes unpunished, investigations into officers are left uncompleted, the PD buys surveillance tech with forfeiture funds to dodge its oversight, and it operated a CIA-style black site in the city where arrestees and their rights vanished with alarming regularity.

• Dems Unveil Key Voting Rights Bill Amid Calls to Pass For the People Act

  As Democratic U.S. lawmakers and progressive advocates welcomed Tuesday’s reintroduction of H.R. 4—the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—they stressed that neither it, nor the more sweeping For the People Act, can be passed unless the Senate ends the filibuster.

  “Our demands are clear: Eliminate the filibuster and pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Washington, D.C. Admission Act.”—Declaration for American Democracy

• “Nobody is Above the Law” – Except The “Big Boys”

  They should all be charged in varying degrees with manslaughter. Note how the definition fits the facts on the ground:

  “Reckless homicide is a crime in which the perpetrators were aware that their act (or failure to act when there is a legal duty to act) creates significant risk of death or grievous bodily harm in the victim, but ignores the risk and continues to act (or fail to act), and a human death results.”

• Gig Companies Are Bringing the Disastrous Prop 22 to a State Near You

  The measure follows the Prop 22 model. It proposes to enshrine ride-hail and delivery-app drivers’ status as contractors rather than employees in state law, excluding them from minimum-wage and overtime laws, as well protection against discrimination and injury, among other important hard-won standards. In return, it promises health care stipends and a minimum wage, but only for time spent driving, not the significant amount of time spent in between tasks or rides. In California, a UC Berkeley study found the minimum offered in exchange for permanent exclusion from actual minimum-wage and overtime laws works out to a paltry $5.64. As for the promised health care plan, it is a pittance, should a driver even hit the high hourly hurdle required to qualify.

• [Old] Forced Marriage Affects All of Us

  The broad impact of forced marriage has fostered a widespread response from within all communities. Tahirih’s Forced Marriage Initiative works alongside committed advocates and survivors from all backgrounds who together are striving to end forced marriage. Many of whom have joined together in a National Forced Marriage Working Group. Together we share best practices for serving clients, collaborate to raise awareness within the mainstream movement to end gender-based violence, and advance public policy to end forced marriage.

• Woman Survives Attempt on Her Life for Becoming Christian

  Neighbors soon arrived, including the area chairperson, who called Kasasira police. Officer Afande Hire responded quickly and rescued her, Nanzala said. As police took Mugooda away, he was shouting that he would attack again, Hire said.

  “After my release, I will kill Harriet for renouncing Islam, the religion of Allah,” Mugooda said, according to Hire.

  Police have charged Mugooda with threatening violence, an area source said.

• Mother Beaten Unconscious for Leaving Islam, Marrying Christian

  A mother of four children in eastern Uganda remains in pain after her Muslim father beat her and forced her to take mosquito repellant when he learned that she had left Islam and her Muslim husband and married a Christian, sources said.

• Afghanistan’s female footballers make tearful calls for help

  Popal stopped playing in 2011 to focus on coordinating the team as a director at the Afghanistan Football Association. But the threats continued and she was eventually forced to flee Afghanistan to seek asylum in Denmark in 2016.

  “My life was in great danger,” she said.

  But she never abandoned the female footballers, helping to expose physical and sexual abuse, death threats and rape that implicated the Afghanistan federation leadership. The corruption in the sport was reflective of the shaky foundations of a country that has deteriorated rapidly after the withdrawal of troops from the U.S.-led mission.

• The world must not look away as the Taliban sexually enslaves women and girls

  In early July, after Taliban leaders who took control of the provinces of Badakhshan and Takhar issued an order to local religious leaders to provide them with a list of girls over the age of 15 and widows under the age of 45 for “marriage” with Taliban fighters. It’s not yet known whether they’ve complied.

  If these forced marriages take place, women and girls will be taken to Waziristan in Pakistan to be re-educated and converted to “authentic Islam.”

  This order has caused profound fear among women and their families living in these areas and forced them to flee and join the ranks of internally displaced persons, adding to the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Afghanistan. In the past three months alone, 900,000 people have been displaced.

• New Orleans Man Fights the Federal Government for His Life Savings

  Like many others, Kermit lost his job at the historic Roosevelt Hotel due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So he decided to turn his part-time scrapping business into a full-time job. But on a trip to Ohio to purchase a tow truck for the business, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents took his life savings. Months later, the federal government filed a civil forfeiture case with flimsy allegations that the money is somehow connected to the drug trade. Kermit’s case demonstrates the abusiveness of civil forfeiture, which requires property owners to effectively prove their own innocence in court.

  “Traveling with cash is not a crime, but DEA and TSA continue to treat innocent travelers like criminals and take their hard-earned money using civil forfeiture,” said IJ Senior Attorney Dan Alban. “These abuses disproportionately harm those of modest means and people of color. Like Kermit, many victims are blue-collar workers who are traveling to buy used vehicles or other equipment for their business from people they’ve never met; they have to pay cash to close the deal.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Zittrain On Internet Rot

  I spent two decades working on the problem of preserving digital documents, especially those published on the Web, in the LOCKSS Program. So I’m in agreement with the overall argument of Jonathan Zittrain’s The Internet Is Rotting, that digital information is evanescent and mutable, and that libraries are no longer fulfilling their mission to be society’s memory institutions. He writes:

  People tend to overlook the decay of the modern web, when in fact these numbers are extraordinary—they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts. Libraries exist, and they still have books in them, but they aren’t stewarding a huge percentage of the information that people are linking to, including within formal, legal documents. No one is. The flexibility of the web—the very feature that makes it work, that had it eclipse CompuServe and other centrally organized networks—diffuses responsibility for this core societal function.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Netflix’s Ramped Up War On VPNs Comes With Collateral Damage

  As Netflix has grown internationally, the company has increased its crackdown on “content tourism,” or the act of using a VPN to trick Netflix into letting you watch content specifically licensed for other countries. If you take a look at what’s available per country, the motivation to use a VPN to watch content not available in your market becomes abundantly obvious.

Monopolies

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • U.S. trade agency finds Google infringed five Sonos patents

      A U.S. trade judge ruled on Friday that Alphabet’s Google infringed five patents belonging to Sonos that concern smart speakers and related technology, a decision that could lead to an import ban.

      The brief ruling from Charles Bullock, the chief administrative law judge of the U.S. International Trade Commission, did not explain why Google’s sale of the products violated a 1930 federal tariff law, commonly known as Smoot-Hawley, designed to prevent unfair competition.

    • U.S. trade judge finds Google infringed five Sonos patents

      Friday’s ruling is subject to review by the full ITC, scheduled for Dec. 13 according to the commission’s website.

      The ITC case is part of an array of litigation between the two companies, including cases in California, Texas, France, Germany and the Netherlands, according to regulatory filings.

• Copyrights

  • Gen Saleh’s empty gift to artistes, list of rights for music industry

    The truth is, their assertion is based on a deliberately wrong interpretation of the copyright law in regards to collecting societies under the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act, 2006, and the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Regulations of 2010.

    The law states, in part, that only one licensing agency is mandated to manage a specific bundle or set of rights associated with any given artisan sector, a phrase that is amateurishly understood by UPRS to refer to a monopoly of management, which is false.

    The bundling does not mean the issuance of performing rights licences in a given artisan sector should monopolistically be under one public performance licenser, but rather it is meant to parcel up the rights of related entities within a given artisan sector for ease of management.

  • Reflections from my first year as Creative Commons’ CEO

    However, as I sit and write this reflection, I know for so many in our global community and network that our thoughts and prayers are with the women and girls in Afghanistan with whom I want to express my solidarity. I sincerely hope the international community will do all that it can to support women and girls in Afghanistan to exercise their basic human rights against a backdrop of chaos, violence and uncertainty. 

  • Techdirt Podcast Episode 294: When Your Art Projects Keep Getting Cease & Desist Letters

    We’re continually amazed that so many companies still think they can get away with abusing the law to take down parodies, satire, and criticism without invoking the Streisand Effect and making things worse on themselves. One person who has a lot of experience being on the receiving end of these foolish threats is artist and culture hacker Danielle Baskin, whose recent Brand-Aid project is just the latest in a series of works that drew the ire of Johnson & Johnson. This week, Baskin joins us on the podcast to discuss what it’s like when your art is constantly hit with demands to cease and desist.

  • The Conservative Election Platform: Freedom of Expression Commitment Tainted By Support for Payments for Links, Restrictions on Fair Dealing

    Given the rest of the platform, the Conservatives could have recommended pro-innovative copyright reforms such as the right to repair to support the agriculture sector, an exception for AI, limitations on digital lock rules, and the repeal of crown copyright. Instead, they bizarrely supports link taxes and restrictive fair dealing, both of which would have a negative impact on the very freedom of expression the platform otherwise supports.

  • Federal Court Orders Pirate Box Sellers To Pay US$23.6m in Copyright Damages

    Bell Canada, Videotron, Group TVA and Rogers Communications have been awarded in excess of US$23.6m in copyright damages by a judge at Canada’s Federal Court. The long-running case was filed against retailers involved in the distribution of set-top boxes configured to access TV content, without compensating the relevant rightsholders.

  • Amazon, Facebook and Google Paid Millions to Pirates, Study Finds

    A new report published by the Digital Citizens Alliance suggests that pirates sites earn more than a billion dollars in revenue per year, while pirate apps are good for another quarter. Part of the money comes from big brands such as Amazon, Facebook and Google. While Amazon appears to take the problem seriously, the report sees plenty of room for improvement at Google’s end.

  • Court Urders Injunction Against RomUniverse To Permanently Shut Down, Destroy Nintendo ROMs

    What a ride for RomUniverse and its owner, Matthew Storman. By way of background, 2019 saw Nintendo start an all out assault on ROM sites, websites where users could download ROMs of old Nintendo games to play on emulators. When the company set its eyes on RomUniverse, Storman attempted to crowdfund a legal defense, which failed, only to represent himself in court and make a lame argument that somehow first sale doctrine allowed him to commit mass copyright infringement. When that all failed miserably and RomUniverse lost in court, Storman was ordered to pay $2.1 million in damages in monthly $50 installments. He failed to make even those payments.