Kernel Space

• Linux Has A New Maintainer For Its CD-ROM Driver Code

  After more than two decades of maintaining the Linux CD-ROM driver code, Jens Axboe who also serves as the block subsystem maintainer, IO_uring lead developer, and filling other roles, announced he was looking for someone to take over the CD-ROM code.

  Axboe had been maintaining the Linux kernel’s CD-ROM driver code since the late 90′s as part of his early involvement in the Linux kernel. However, he doesn’t have much time to devote to it these days with everything else on his Linux I/O plate while also being employed by Facebook.

• Tachyum’s Prodigy emulator achieves first boot, runs Linux and says ‘hello, world’

  Tachyum has announced a milestone on the road to finally launching its much-vaunted high-performance “universal processor,” Prodigy, with a first-boot into Linux – but its FPGA prototype is still a long way away from proving the company’s bold claims.

  Founded in 2017 by a team made up of Skyera and SandForce co-founder Dr Radoslav “Rado” Danilak, Wave Computing co-founder Ken Wagner, engineer Igor Shevlyakov, and hardware architect Rod Mullendore, Tachyum is in the process of designing what it calls a “universal processor.’ Dubbed Prodigy, the design – originally known as the “Cloud Chip” – is claimed to be able to run programs written for x86, Arm, and RISC-V architectures as well as its own native architecture, and to do so 10 times faster than its rivals.

  In the years since its unveiling, Tachyum’s claims haven’t wavered – but they also haven’t yet been proven, something which didn’t stop the company joining an EU project to build an exascale supercomputer. Earlier this year, Tachyum announced the delivery of its first FPGA-based Prodigy system emulator – and now, around three months on, it has laid claim to a successful first run of a Linux operating system and a simple user-mode application.

• Linus Torvalds Jokes About Celebrations for Linux’s 30th Anniversary

  Despite Linux reaching its 30th anniversary, “most outside the tech industry will be unaware that Linux has reached such a milestone,” writes ZDNet, “even though the project has had a huge impact on everything from smartphones to cloud computing.”

• Linux patch disables TRIM and NCQ on Samsung 860/870 SSDs in Intel and AMD systems – Neowin

  About two years ago, several users of the Samsung 860 EVO SATA SSD started reporting issues on their drives in Linux. Later it was also established that the same or very similar problem also existed on the 870 EVO model. Linux engineers stated meanwhile that they were looking into the problem and while it took a while, earlier today, it was announced that patches for the issue have been sent upstream for final implementation.

  According to the findings, it has been determined that Queued Trim commands on the 860 and 870 SSDs are causing such issues on Intel, ASmedia, and Marvell SATA AHCI controllers and the problem has been found to be the worst on older AMD systems.

• Linux Kernel 5.15 will integrate NTFS3 driver to better support NTFS file system

  In the upcoming Linux Kernel 5.15 update, the NTFS3 kernel driver from Paragon Software will provide better support for the Microsoft NFTS file system. Last year, Paragon Software made an amazing decision: try to Mainline the NTFS3 driver that was previously only used for business.

  Considering that there are fewer and fewer organizations interested in NTFS, and more and more interest in Microsoft ‘s exFAT, and even in file systems like Android’s F2FS, we are still very happy to see that Paragon is finally willing to drive Mainline and promised Maintain it upstream and move on.

• Samsung 860/870 SSDs Continue Causing Problems For Linux Users

  While Samsung has explicitly stated before that queued TRIM works for Samsung 860 SSDs on Linux and thus leading to only older Samsung 840/850 drives being blocked from queued TRIM usage, that turns out to be inaccurate and now more quirks are added for the Samsung 860 and 870 series SSDs on Linux.

  Linux kernels of the past three years have allowed queued TRIM for the Samsung 860 while blocking its usage for 840/850 drives. However, many users continue to find issues under Linux with the 860 and 870 drives.

• Apple M1 IOMMU Driver Merged For Linux 5.15, Intel Scalable Mode By Default

  While Linux 5.13 landed initial Apple Silicon M1 support, it was just the very initial bits. Now for Linux 5.15 we are seeing another step in the bring-up with the community-created Apple M1 IOMMU driver being merged.

  Sent in as part of the IOMMU subsystem updates for the Linux 5.15 kernel is the DART IOMMU driver for Apple M1 chips. This IOMMU driver was created by the community as part of the “Asahi Linux” project.

• Comparing Linux file systems: Btrfs and Ext4

  For a long time I have been interested in the question of file systems. There are many of them, there are favorites. From time to time I come across references, comparisons, conversations, but I myself am floating in the question. So which is better and why, which to choose? … … Here I tried to answer this question.

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA Confirms Sway Wayland Compositor Works Fine With Their New GBM Driver Support – Phoronix

    Stemming from an ongoing Mesa GBM discussion over introducing new gbm_bo_create_with_modifiers2 / gbm_surface_create_with_modifiers2 functions since the original “gbm_*_create_with_modifiers” functions lack support for passing usage flags, NVIDIA confirmed that the Sway Wayland compositor is working fine with their forthcoming driver supporting GBM.

    For years NVIDIA resisted supporting GBM as used by the Mesa drivers and commonly leveraged by the Wayland compositors for buffer handling. NVIDIA’s preferred approach around EGLStreams didn’t gain much adoption besides patches they posted for the major compositors. Meanwhile, their work on coming up with a new device memory allocator API seems to be dead at this point and wouldn’t address the issue of all existing Wayland compositors needing to be adapted to make use of it.

  • Juan A. Suarez: Implementing Performance Counters in V3D driver

    Let me talk here about how we implemented the support for performance counters in the Mesa V3D driver, the OpenGL driver used by the Raspberry Pi 4. For reference, the implementation is very similar to the one already available (not done by me, by the way) for the VC4, OpenGL driver for the Raspberry Pi 3 and prior devices, also part of Mesa. If you are already familiar with how this is implemented in VC4, then this will mostly be a refresher.

    First of all, what are these performance counters? Most of the processors nowadays contain some hardware facilities to get measurements about what is happening inside the processor. And of course graphics processors aren’t different. In this case, the graphics chips used by Raspberry Pi devices (manufactured by Broadcom) can record a bunch of different graphics-related parameters: how many quads are passing or failing depth/stencil tests, how many clock cycles are spent on doing vertex/fragment shading, hits/misses in the GPU cache, and many others values. In fact, with the V3D driver it is possible to measure around 87 different parameters, and up to 32 of them simultaneously. Quite a few less in VC4, though. But still a lot.

    On a hardware level, using these counters is just a matter of writing and reading some GPU registers. First, write the registers to select what we want to measure, then a few more to start to measure, and finally read other registers containing the results. But of course, much like we don’t expect users to write GPU assembly code, we don’t expect users to write registers in the GPU directly. Moreover, even the Mesa drivers such as V3D can’t interact directly with the hardware; rather, this is done through the kernel, the one that can use the hardware directly, through the DRM subsystem in the kernel. For the case of V3D (and same applies to VC4, and in general to any other driver), we have a driver in user-space (whether the OpenGL driver, V3D, or the Vulkan driver, V3DV), and a kernel driver in the kernel-space, unsurprisingly also called V3D. The user-space driver is in charge of translating all the commands and options created with the OpenGL API or other API to batches of commands to be executed by the GPU, which are submitted to the kernel driver as DRM jobs. The kernel does the proper actions to send these to the GPU to execute them, including touching the proper registers. Thus, if we want to implement support for the performance counters, we need to modify the code in two places: the kernel and the (user-space) driver.

  • X.Org Looks To Drop DMX After Being Rather Broken For ~14 Years – Phoronix

    X.Org’s DMX DDX driver for supporting Distributed Multi-Head X looks like it will be removed from the source tree after finding out the code has been rather broken for the past 14 years.

    Back around 2007, Xdmx broke rather significantly in that if any client attempts to use OpenGL it will crash. Xdmx for distributed multi-head X serves as a proxy server so multiple displays for a desktop can be hosted from different machines / X.Org Servers. Not exactly a popular feature these days and apparently extremely rarely used given that a significant feature like OpenGL support can be broken for Xdmx clients for more than one decade.

Applications

• 9 Best Free and Open Source Audio Converters

  There is a huge range of open source free audio software available for Linux which is both mature and feature-laden. Linux has all the tools needed to be a serious contender in music production without a user having to venture into the commercial software world. Linux is a superior platform for professional audio production: rock solid, efficient, and you don’t get fleeced for software licenses. Software that creates music can often be expensive.

  Do you need to convert music files to a different audio format? Unsure of what tool is best suited for the job? To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 9 high quality free and open source Linux audio converters.

  Here’s our verdict summarized in one of our legendary ratings chart.

• Trash – a safer alternative to rm

  There are several memes circulating the Linux space: not knowing how to exit vim, invoking sudo to get someone to make you a sandwich, how Linux is the stuff clouds are made of, &c &c.

  Recently I fell victim to my own stupidity and re-created one such meme – I managed to rm -rf {$important_directory}.

  Oh, sure, I used Git, but what does Git’s history help you, if you deleted the whole repository.

  Luckily, after I made some tea and calmed down, I remembered I had working backups1, so all was fine, but lessons were learnt (for the umpfth time) …and today I will tell you how to avoid this issue in the first place. (But do set up backups still!)

Instructionals/Technical

• How To Install LAMP Stack on Debian 11 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LAMP Stack on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, The LAMP Stack is a common set of open-source tools used to host websites and applications on the web. LAMP Stack is a web development platform that uses Linux as an operating system, Apache as a web server, MariaDB/MySQL as a database server, and PHP as a scripting language. It is so widely used and provides a proven set of software for delivering high-performance web applications.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of LAMP Stack on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• How to Install PHP 8.0 on AlmaLinux 8

  PHP 8.0 is a major update of the PHP language released on November 26, 2020, a giant leap forward from the existing PHP 7.4 release. The new PHP contains many new features and optimizations, including named arguments, union types, attributes, constructor property promotion, match expression, null safe operators, JIT and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency.

• How To Install GParted on Linux Mint 20 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GParted on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, GParted or Gnome Partition Editor is a disk partition manager available for the different distro of Linux. Using GParted, we can create and manage the disk partitions. It allows us to create new partition tables, partitions, views the disk information, and many more.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the GNOME partition editor on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).

• Sync Android Phone With Linux Using KDE Connect – OSTechNix

  This guide explains what is KDE Connect and its features, how to install KDE connect in various Linux platforms and Android and finally how to sync Android phone with Linux desktop using KDE connect in order to access files and notifications from Android devices to Linux and vice versa.

• How to Concatenate Strings in Bash [Example Scripts]

  Concatenating strings can be an important part of using any programming language for practical applications.

  You can concatenate strings in bash as well. There is no concatenation operator here. Just write the strings one after another to join strings in Bash.

  concat_string=”$str1$str2″
  Don’t worry! I’ll show you various actual examples to concatenate strings in bash.

• Add ‘Open File/Folder as Root / Administrator’ in Elementary OS 6 [Update 2021] | UbuntuHandbook

  This is a step by step tutorial shows how to add “open as root (or administrator)” option in Pantheon file browser in Elementary OS 6 Odin.

  Elementary OS now is at version 6.0 based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those looking for the “Open as Administrator” function to open system file via root user permission, or do copy & paste things outside of user’s home directory, things have changed.

• How To Install LEMP Stack on Debian 11 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LEMP Stack on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, LEMP is a combination of free, open-source software. The acronym LEMP refers to the first letters of Linux (Operating system), Nginx Web Server, MySQL/MariaDB (database software), and PHP, PERL, or Python, which is popularly used for hosting extensive websites due to its performance and scalability.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of LEMP Stack on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• How to Fix : Virtual Box Guru Meditation error on Linux

  I launched Virtual Box today as usual, and thought to turn on my virtual machine, but for some reason I got this error” Virtual Box Guru Meditation”, I have to admit this was the first time I got this error, I had never seen this error before and I thought well I need to Investigate this more and hopefully I can find a solution so I can write about it for other people who may be getting the same issue.

  On the error tab it also tells you where the log file is located so you can look at it, to see exactly what caused this issue, so I went and checked the log file which was located on /home/user/VirtualBox VMs/arch/Logs, now on this folder you will find all logs related to Virtualbox and it actually helps to debug when an issue happens however in this case it did not, the error was still there.

Games

• SuperTuxKart: I’LL TAKE ON ALL THE AMERICANS!! – Invidious

  I promised we’d do a follow up SuperTuxKart stream at an earlier time and I expect that there will be as much mayhem as last time but this time I’ll make sure I spec up the server before we get started to stop the lag.

• Discover the Top 9 New Games to Play on Linux With Proton Since August 2021

  We are back with our usual monthly update! Boiling Steam looks at the latest data dumps from ProtonDB to give you a quick list of new games that work (pretty much?) perfectly with Proton since August 2021 – all of them work out of the box or well enough with tweaks…

• Pick up lots of kids games in the Humble Humongous Back To School Bundle | GamingOnLinux

  If you have younger children and want to get some family-friendly games for them, take a look at the Humble Humongous Back To School Bundle that’s filled full. Quite a good bundle this one, and I can approve of multiple titles in this that my own mini-me played through years ago. Almost all of them have Linux builds available too.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Kdenlive 21.08.1 is out

    The first maintenance release of the 21.08 series is out fixing regressions to Fade transition and Position and Zoom effect (when applied to bin clips) also, on Windows, Text to Speech is working again. This version adds the ability to import motion tracked data to the Alpha Shapes and Alpha Shapes (mask) effects.

  • This week in KDE: gazillions of bugfixes

    …Including many for the Plasma Wayland session! It’s finally reaching stability. I’m using it myself as a daily driver now. At this point my biggest annoyances are all with 3rd-party apps, not any KDE software. I know it’s taken a while, but I think we’re very nearly there!

  • KDE’s Plasma Wayland Session Is “Finally Reaching Stability” Following Many Fixes – Phoronix

    KDE developers have kicked off September by landing many fixes for their desktop stack, including around their Plasma Wayland session.

    KDE developer Nate Graham continues to publish his weekly development summaries outlining the work on the project. This week he had good things to say about the state now of KDE on Wayland. Nate wrote, “gazillions of bugfixes…Including many for the Plasma Wayland session! It’s finally reaching stability. I’m using it myself as a daily driver now. At this point my biggest annoyances are all with 3rd-party apps, not any KDE software. I know it’s taken a while, but I think we’re very nearly there!”

  • Killing the dreaded hamburger menu — Kalendar devlog 13

    Since almost the beginning, Kalendar has depended on hamburger menus to access a lot of its key functionality: undoing/redoing, switching views, accessing settings, and so on. Last week, when we introduced the new sidebar, we managed to remove most of these items from the hamburger menu and place them where you could easily and quickly find them.

    We don’t like hamburger menus because they hamper UI discoverability and they slow interaction down. So this week we got rid of them on the desktop. But don’t worry, we’ve replaced them! Kalendar now has the tried and tested menu bar, faster and clearer than the hamburger.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • 20 GNOME Extensions To Perfectly Balance GNOME 40

    GNOME 40 was released a few months ago with many new features and a revamped desktop experience. Many Linux distributions like Arch and Fedora already have it in their official repositories, while others like Ubuntu are about to get it in the upcoming releases.

    In any case, you may feel somehow limited by the default GNOME desktop and the few options you have to tweak. No worries. Today, we bring you 20 different useful GNOME extensions for GNOME 40.

    So that it becomes perfectly balanced, as all things should be.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Linux From Scratch 11, a distro to learn about Linux

    Have you already been through Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, Slackware, Gentoo … and you still lack things to learn to build a Linux system from scratch? That is exactly what Linux From Scratch 11 (LFS) is about , the new version of this distrolibro with which to build a Linux system from its very base and as far as you want to go.

    Linux From Scratch is an old acquaintance of any linuxer with a minimum of experience, if only for having read the name of the distro somewhere and despite not being a distro as such, as we have already said. Linux From Scratch is a distrolbook, or an instruction manual with tools ready to get started. Something like that.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • CloudLinux: CentOS 8 can get updated support before the end of 2025

    When the parent company RedHat announced that it would shift its focus from CentOS Linux to the CentOS Stream distribution that refactored RHEL, many CentOS users felt that they were officially abandoned. Because the support period for CentOS 8 will end at the end of 2021 instead of 2029. Fortunately, CloudLinux has stepped up and announced that it will renew CentOS 8 until December 31, 2025.

  • Revitalizing US Manufacturing

    “The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored manufacturing’s role in providing products that are critical to health, safety, national security, and the continuity of multiple industries,” said McKinsey in a recent discussion paper, Building a More Competitive US Manufacturing Sector. “It has also revealed the extent to which global supply chains are exposed to shocks and disruptions. All of this has occurred at a moment when new technologies, process innovations, and demand growth are reshaping the sector worldwide. The United States can seize on these developments to make its own manufacturing sector more competitive.”

    Manufacturing jobs helped build the US middle class after WWII. In the 1950s, it accounted for roughly 30% of employment and close to 30% of GDP. But manufacturing has significantly declined in the intervening decades, now comprising only 8% of the workforce and 11% of GDP. Manufacturing growth has particularly slowed down over the past 30 years, from 4.9% in the 1990s to 1.4% in each of the past two decades.

    Despite its dramatic decline, manufacturing continues to have a disproportionate impact on the US economy, accounting for 35% of productivity growth, 55% of patents, 70% of R&D spending, and 60% of exports. According to McKinsey, these outsize economic contributions uniquely position manufacturing to strengthen the US recovery over the long term.

    The paper examined the future of US manufacturing by looking at four distinct types, each characterized by its distinct growth opportunities, competitive dynamics, investment profiles, and occupational mix.

Devices/Embedded

• NXP i.MX RT500 Cortex-M33 Crossover MCU integrates DSP, 2D GPU for wearables and IoT devices – CNX Software

  NXP i.MX RT500 is the second Cortex-M33 Crossover MCU following the NXP i.MX RT600 Series announced in 2018, and optimized for low-power HMI applications such as wearables and Smart Home & IoT devices.

  NXP Crossover MCUs are typically clocked at 600 MHz or more, but NXP i.MX RT500 Cortex-M33 is limited to 200 MHz, and combined with 200 MHz Tensilica Fusion F1 DSP as well as a 2D GPU, and power optimizations that enable long battery life of up to 40 days on a charge for wearables like smartwatches.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Raspberry Pi based Pi-KVM goes to Kickstarter

    A year after the first release, Raspberry Pi based Pi-KVM presented its own hardware on Kickstarter.

    Pi-KVM is a software and instructions project that turns a Raspberry Pi into a fully functional IP-KVM. This device connects to the HDMI and USB ports of the server, and allows it to be controlled remotely over the network, regardless of the operating system. You can turn on, turn off or reboot the server, configure the BIOS, and even completely reinstall the OS from an image on emulated virtual media. All functionality (including video transmission) is available through a web interface that does not require any additional plugins and applets, and is implemented only using HTML5 tools.

  • Meet Roamer, a companion robot that charges itself | Arduino Blog

    Tiny mobile robots are a blast to use. They are fast, fun, and can even be autonomous. However, they all suffer from a similar issue: batteries, which are notorious for running out of charge quickly when the motors are kept spinning for too long. To address this issue, Mike Rigsby came up with a small robot that has a simple “brain” but has the ability to never run out of power.

    Rigsby’s robot, named Roamer, starts off on a charging station that is comprised of a large metal plate on the bottom and a small, energized bump rail. The bot contains a spring under its base that contacts the plate, and its front plate contacts the bumper. Therefore, when the two meet, the circuit is completed, and Roamer can determine if it needs to charge.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android 12 lets users customize colour palettes for phone | Technology

  • This Android security flaw could let hackers follow all your movements | TechRadar

  • What Is Flubot Malware on Android?

  • Google Clock bug means some Android users are sleeping through their alarms | TechRadar

  • Best Realme phones of 2021: find yourself a great-value Android handset | TechRadar

  • 5 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week – Android Apps Weekly

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• The Digital Economy Runs on Open Source. Here’s How to Protect It.

  Though most people don’t realize it, much of the technology we rely on every day runs on free and open source software (FOSS). Phones, cars, planes, and even many cutting-edge artificial intelligence programs use open-source software such as the Linux kernel operating system, the Apache and Nginx web servers, which run over 60% of the world’s websites, and Kubernetes, which powers cloud computing. The sustainability, stability, and security of these software packages is a major concern to every company that uses them (which is essentially every company). But unlike traditional closed-source software, which companies build internally and sell, FOSS is developed by an unsung army of typically unpaid developers, and is typically given away for free.

  In the last few years, we have observed an increase in the active role of corporations in open source software, by either assigning employees to contribute to existing open source projects or open sourcing their own code both to allow the community to utilize it and to help maintain it. As companies have made FOSS part of their business model, they have also acquired important FOSS producers. Two years ago, IBM purchased Red Hat, one of the most successful companies built around FOSS for $34 billion. A year before that, other tech giants paid billions to acquire a stake in FOSS, most notably Microsoft (bought GitHub for $7.5 billion) and Salesforce.com (bought MuleSoft for $6.5 billion).

  The corporate world’s entry into free and open source online communities has caused some serious concerns and friction. Acquisitions of FOSS producers could lead to a crowding-out of volunteer contributors to an extent that threatens the future health of the FOSS ecosystem. Further, the world’s largest cloud providers have built multi-billion dollar businesses on top of FOSS components, leading FOSS contributors to wonder why they are spending their free time making the rich richer. Such actions can deter volunteers from contributing, threatening the underlying ethos of the FOSS community.

• Neither Windows, nor Linux! Shrine is ‘God’s Operating System’

  From that introduction, you’re probably wondering what the heck is going on. Well, it all started with a guy named Terry Davis. Before we go any further, I’d better warn you that Terry suffered from schizophrenia during his life and often didn’t take his medication. Because of this, he said or did things during his life that were not quite socially acceptable.

  Anyway, back to the story line. In the early 2000s, Terry released a simple operating system.

  [...]

  In 2013, Terry announced on his website that TempleOS was complete. Tragically, Terry died a few years later in August of 2018 when he was hit by a train. He was homeless at the time. Over the years, many people followed Terry through his work on the operating system. Most were impressed at his ability to write an operating system in such a small package.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla VPN Client Audit Results Published [Ed: They should check not the client but the VPN servers]

      Mozilla announced the completion of an independent audit of client software for connecting to the Mozilla VPN service . The audit analyzed a stand-alone client application written using the Qt library and delivered for Linux, macOS, Windows, Android and iOS. Mozilla VPN is powered by over 400 servers from Swedish VPN provider Mullvad in over 30 countries. The connection to the VPN service is made using the WireGuard protocol .

• Management

  • iRedMail: an Open-source Mail Server for enterprise

    iRedMail is a complete open-source mail suite that include a mail server, and a webmail client. It is built for enterprise use as it support Calendars management and sync, Contact Sync ActiveSync, CalDav and CardDav and more.

    iRedMail plays well with the popular webmail client and groupware: SOGo Groupware, so If you are planning to have a mail suite consider using SOGo and iRedMail together.

    It offers a rich-feature server backend, web-based dashboard and a webmail for email users.

    System setup does not require more than several minutes and works smoothly with Linux and Unix servers.

    [...]

    iRedMail is released and distributed under GPL v3.

  • Zammad: Free self-hosted ticketing support system

    Zammad is a web-based ticketing and customer support portal for teams, small and medium-sized companies. It helps the support team to manage customer issues and reports from several channels like phone, Facebook, emails, Twitter and chat.

    The project is in active development and update by a large community of developers and contributors.

    It is used as the primary support system by dozens of companies around the world.

    Zammad is a developer-friendly solution and offers a rich REST-API which makes it easy to integrate with other solutions and software. Developers also can use the API to build custom mobile, web or desktop apps based on it.

    [...]

    GNU AFFERO General Public License (GNU AGPLv3).

  • Automad: An Open-source Flat-file CMS with style

    Flat-File CMSs (content management systems) have always been a fascination for me. They don’t require database to work and usually work out-of-the-box with low-resource server and a minimal requirement.

• Programming/Development

  • How do you convert a Char Vector to a String Vector in C++?

  • Using KSyntaxHighlighting in QML

    KDE Frameworks provides a syntax highlighting engine with support for more than 300 different configuration, markup and programming languages, known for example for its use in Kate. With KDE Frameworks 5.86 this is now also directly usable from withing QML.

Health/Nutrition

• Doctor says ERs overwhelmed with people overdosing on livestock drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • A Microsoft Teams ad caused Windows 11 Insider systems to hang

  • Security

    • Car Hacking Danger Is Likely Closer Than You Think

    • Lukas Vrabec: SELinux confined users and MCS benefits

      With SELinux technology it’s possible confine not only system process (as it’s by default used in Fedora, CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux) but also linux users. We call this feature SELinux confined users.

Environment

• Energy

  • Hurricane Ida Makes a Mockery of Big Oil’s Philanthropy

    AS HURRICANE IDA wrought destruction throughout Louisiana and Mississippi this week, the companies that own the oil rigs and refineries in the storm’s path — and helped fuel this and the other natural disasters now upending life in every region of the world — said very little. While a highway collapsed, people died, homes flooded, power grids shattered, and more than 1 million homes and businesses lost power, the Twitter feeds of Exxon Mobil, Marathon Oil, Valero, Phillips 66, Chevron, and Shell remained notably inactive.

    That silence contrasts with the steady patter of positive PR the big oil and gas companies usually spout about their roles as stewards of the environment. Ida — whose power stemmed from the unusually warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, turning it into the “poster child” for climate change-driven disasters — made Big Oil’s usual pledges to help us cope with the climate crisis ring impossibly hollow.

Finance

• The 6 Best Ethereum Mining Software for NVIDIA and AMD

  Mining cryptocurrencies, especially Ethereum, has become extremely popular recently due to the sudden surge in Bitcoin’s value. More often than not, when Bitcoin is doing well, the rest of the crypto market does really well too.

  Most people take advantage of this situation and try to make some quick cash by mining Ethereum. Using your computer’s graphics card is one of the easiest ways to mine this cryptocurrency. However, you’ll need mining software to get started, even if you have all the necessary hardware.

  Here, we’ll look at the best Ethereum mining software for both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.

  [...]

  You can install NBMiner on both Windows and Linux systems, so compatibility isn’t really a problem. It works with both NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards out of the box. Besides Ethereum, you can also use NBMiner to mine other cryptocurrencies like RVN, GRIN, BEAM, CFX, ZIL, ERGO, AE, and SERO. So, even when Ethereum switches to Proof-of-stake, you still have other cryptocurrencies to mine and make money.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Algerian dissident case raises fears over Tunisian rights

  An Algerian dissident appeared in court in Algiers on Wednesday accused of terrorism, a person in court said, confirming he was no longer in Tunisia where he had held refugee status.

  Soulimane Bouhafs was accused of membership of MAK, a Kabylie region separatist group that Algeria declared a terrorist organisation last year, and was remanded in custody.

• India locks down restive Kashmir after burial of separatist leader

  Authorities in Indian Kashmir imposed curbs on the movement of people and communications until Friday, a police official said, to prevent people from gathering in the streets following the death of a veteran secessionist leader.

  Syed Ali Shah Geelani was laid to rest in Indian Kashmir’s main city of Srinagar in the early hours of Thursday, with the disputed Himalayan region blanketed with troops to prevent large-scale protests.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Hands off our VPNs! #SaveTheInternet

  The Standing Committee on Home Affairs recently reiterated its stance on Virtual Private Networks or VPNs, asking for them to be permanently blocked. We wrote to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), highlighting why VPNs are important and asking for the committee’s proposal to be put through a public consultation that includes criminologists, technologists, industry and civil society organisations.

Monopolies

• Patents

  • Inventorship and Artificial Intelligence [Ed: Fraudulent ‘law’ firm Marks & Clerk (corrupt company that also pushes software patents and cheers for criminals who run the EPO) leverages or misuses buzzwords for its extreme #patent agenda

    Artificial intelligence (AI) never ceases to challenge our certainties in the field of patent law, even if it means taking us out of the summer torpor. The latest feat in this field comes from Dr. Stephen Thaler(1), who has been trying to have AI recognised as an inventor for several years.

  • Standard-essential patent royalties set to rise after unanimous Fifth Circuit judgment in Ericsson’s favor ($2.50 or 1%/$1-4 per 4G device) against HTC

    HTC’s response to the original $2.50 rate was a measly $0.10 counterproposal. The reaction to the 1%/$1-4 deal was an amended complaint.

    Why such a discrepancy? Primarily it’s due to the fact that HTC made a smallest salable patent-practicing unit (SSPPU) argument, claiming that the baseband processor should serve as the royalty base.

    Outside of the Northern District of California, SSPPU arguments don’t seem to get traction. While I believe no court would ever be inclined to let a WiFi SEP holder collect 1% of the price of an entire airplane with WiFi on board, baseband processors that aren’t fully licensed aren’t the measure–and if they are fully licensed, than the value of all IP licenses far exceeds that of the raw material.

    The district court declined to overinstruct the jury, and its approach has now been affirmed. This is also a post-term achievement for the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice under then-AAG Makan Delrahim. In late 2019, the Trump DOJ had filed an amicus brief formally in support of neither party but practically in Ericsson’s favor. Interestingly, Apple’s amicus brief in support of automotive supplier Continental’s ill-conceived U.S. case against Avanci, Nokia and others–which is pending with the same appeals court–is all about bashing the Trump DOJ.

  • In Becoming the First Country to Recognise Non-Human Inventors, is Australia a Hero of Progress, or a Chump? [Ed: Even Australian patent profiteers concerned that patents are being offers to bots or to some computer programs? This is an own goal to the patent system and its stated goals.]

    As I recently (tentatively) predicted, on Friday 30 July 2021 Justice Beach in the Federal Court of Australia handed down a judgment giving Australia the dubious honour of becoming the first country in the world to legally recognise a non-human as a valid inventor on a patent application: Thaler v Commissioner of Patents [2021] FCA 879. I would suggest that the remarkable speed with which this unnecessarily lengthy (228 paragraphs) decision was rendered, after being heard on 2 July 2021, may reflect the judge’s enthusiasm for issuing such a ground-breaking ruling. Unfortunately, I do not share that enthusiasm, and I am confident that there are many others who are equally uncomfortable with the outcome. My hope is that this includes officials within IP Australia and the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources, and that the decision will be duly appealed to a Full Bench of the court. It is, in my view, deeply regrettable that the Commissioner of Patents did not put on a stronger defence in the first instance because, even though an appeal was probably inevitable either way, the worldwide publicity that this decision is now generating is not necessarily beneficial for Australia.

  • SA becomes the first country in the world to award a patent to an AI-generated invention [Ed: This is so harmful to the patent "profession" that even some maximalists who push patents and litigation have begun worrying (it's a self-discrediting circus)]

    South Africa recently became what is believed to be the first country in the world to award a patent to an invention by an Artificial Intelligence (AI).

    An interlocking food and beverage container based on fractal geometry has been awarded a patent by South Africa’s Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC). Confirmation of the patent was published in the commission’s journal on 28 July.

  • Full Scope Written Description

    The COVID vaccines do not genetically modify your DNA, but Juno’s patented CAR T-Cell therapy certainly does. Sloan Kettering owns U.S. patent No. 7,446,190 and Juno (BMS) is the exclusive licensee. The patent claims a nucleic acid polymer (DNA/RNA) that encodes for a particular “chimeric T cell receptor.” The idea here is part of a revolutionary CAR T-Cell therapy that genetically modifies a patient’s own T-Cells so that it will be able to recognize (and thus attack) specific antigens. The inventors have been awarded numerous accolades for showing that this approach works to treat some lymphomas. Kite’s “YESCARTA” therapy was found to infringe.

    [...]

    Full Scope Written Description: The Patent Act requires that the specification include “a written description of the invention.” 35 U.S.C. § 112*(a). The specification needs to convey that the inventor had “possession” of the claimed invention as of the patent application’s filing date. Written description regularly arises with regard to genus claims — claims covering multiple embodiments. In that situation, the court is looking for possession of the “full scope” of the invention as claimed. Typically this involves disclosure of “either a representative number of species falling within the scope of the genus or structural features common to the members of the genus so that one of skill in the art can ‘visualize or recognize’ the members of the genus.” Ariad. The test is even tougher for functionally-defined genus since structure cannot be derived from the claim language itself.

  • Earlier Start Likely For Europe’s Unified Patent Court [Ed: Ian Schofield is relaying lies for Team UPC. UPC is dead, but they pretend it’s about timetables (for what, a funeral?). This is another Big Pharma-funded propaganda mill that lacks fact-checking.]

    Having cleared numerous hurdles along the way, the proposed new patent system in Europe now appears to be approaching the home straight, with completion forecast for mid-2022. But will a unitary patent with pan-European effect necessarily be the best option in all cases?

  • AI’s right to legal identity in India
    [Ed: Quit using meaningless buzzwords and start using a language that actually means something, like "treating computer program like it is a person"]

    on-human entities such as limited liability companies and their separate distinct identity are recognised by individuals and the legal system. Their identity is a creature of the phenomenon of “legal fiction”, which has been invoked in India to confer rights such as the preservation of rivers. Artificial intelligence (AI) reignites a similar debate on legal personhood. Advocates of IP and economic growth have consistently propagated the cause of recognising AI inventions in law. However, this is different from the issue that debates granting legal recognition to AI as an independent entity.

  • IP Australia appeals seminal AI inventorship ruling [Ed: Australia realises it looks idiotic to the whole world after saying granting monopolies to bots is acceptable]

    Australia’s commissioner of patents has filed an appeal against a decision to recognise an artificial intelligence tool as an inventor

  • Only Humans, Not AI, Can Be An Inventor, Va. Judge Rules

    A Virginia federal judge ruled Thursday that artificial intelligence cannot be listed as an inventor on a patent application, holding that the Patent Act makes clear that inventing is the exclusive legal province of human beings.

    Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia shut down a suit against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by AI researcher Stephen Thaler, who sued after the office rejected applications he filed seeking patents on inventions he claims were developed by an AI machine he created.

    “Can an artificial intelligence machine be an ‘inventor’ under the Patent Act? Based on the plain statutory language…
    Stay ahead of the curve
    In the legal profession, information is the key to success. You have to know what’s happening with clients, competitors, practice areas, and industries. Law360 provides the intelligence you need to remain an expert and beat the competition.

  • Only Humans, Not AI Machines, Can Get a U.S. Patent, Judge Rules
    

    A computer using artificial intelligence can’t be listed as an inventor on patents because only a human can be an inventor under U.S. law, a federal judge ruled in the first American decision that’s part of a global debate over how to handle computer-created innovation.

    Federal law requires that an “individual” take an oath that he or she is the inventor on a patent application, and both the dictionary and legal definition of an individual is a natural person, ruled U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia.

  • Software Patents

    • MPEG LA and TCL settle disputes with help from key advisors

      On 1 September, MPEG LA announced that TCL is now a licensee of MPEG LA’s AVC/H.264 licensing program. This puts an end to all patent enforcement litigation brought by members of MPEG LA’s patent pool against the Chinese company.

      According to JUVE Patent information, the pool members IP Bridge, NEC and Panasonic had filed suit at the Regional Court Düsseldorf in July 2020. The court had scheduled an oral hearing for last Tuesday. However, the companies agreed on a settlement before it could take place.

    • $2,000 for R2 Solutions, an Acacia subsidiary, prior art

      On September 1, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on U.S. Patent No. 8,190,610. The patent is owned by R2 Solutions LLC, an Acacia Research Corporation entity. The ’610 generally relates to an input data set is treated as a plurality of grouped sets of key/value pairs, which enhances the utility of the MapReduce programming methodology. It is currently being asserted against Walmart, iHeartRadio, Target, Expedia, Roku, Workday, Deezer and others.

    • Determining An Analysis Chronicle: Non-Technical [Ed: Patent zealots from Bardehle Pagenberg still pushing the lunacy of software patents, even in Europe where those patents are not allowed but the EPO has been infiltrated and corrupted to the core, including its tribunals]

      Presentation of information as such is excluded from patentability under Article 52(2)(d) and (3) EPC.

      Reduction of user distraction or disruption by selectively presenting information to the user fulfils the cognitive interests or needs of the user, which is not a technical purpose or based on technical considerations.

      A bonus effect which is at best incidental to a non-technical solution is not a technical effect on which an inventive step can be based.

    • Projection Surface With Built-In Track Pad: Technical [Ed: Totally missing the key point that those EPO boards are crooked kangaroo courts under immense pressure (threats) by the Mafia that illegally took over the office to just allow software patents]

      Initially, the Board of Appeal agreed with the Examining Board that the subject-matter of (old) claim 1 lacked of inventive step (Article 56 EPC) in view of D1 (US 2005/273345) in combination with D3 (Ammer A: “Projector-Camera System for Flexible Interactive Projections”, 2005, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden, XP002470986).

• Trademarks

  • Russian Federation: Geographical Indications In Russia: Federal Law 230-FZ Of 26 July 2019

    This article provides background information on the purpose and origins of this new legislation, then it describes the new IP object in comparison with the existing protection for Appellations of origin of goods, and finally draws a few perspectives.

• Copyrights

  • Copyrightability of a Programming Language

    This is a follow-up post on the pending SAS v. WPL appeal before the Federal Circuit. The focus of the case is copyrightability of the SAS statistical software and its outputs. SAS argues that it made a “plethora of creative choices” in developing its material, and that creativity is more than sufficient to satisfy the originality requirements of copyright law. Thus far, the courts have disagreed with SAS and rejected its copyright assertions. However, the company has now positioned its case before the intellectual property friendly Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

    [...]

    In a prior post, I wrote about the SAS appeal including a number of amicus briefs supporting their strong copyright claim. Now the other-side has had its chance to respond, including substantial amicus support. The Federal Circuit’s Google v. Oracle decisions are sitting in the background. Although the Supreme Court eventually sided with Google on fair use grounds, it did not disturb the Federal Circuit’s copyrightability decision that strongly supported copyright protection even for functional software. WPL’s amicus supporters are concerned that the Federal Circuit will reinvigorate its approach to copyrightability in SAS.

Server

• I Love LAMP

  Hey all, Ernie here with a piece from the archives on the magical power of a certain concoction of programming and server environment that is everywhere … but perhaps unloved. May you find a spot in your heart to think about how great the LAMP Stack is.

Audiocasts/Shows

• DTOS Was A Meme. Now I’m Making It A Reality! – Invidious

  For several months, I’ve talked about potentially making a deployment script or even a full-fledged ISO for my Xmonad/Emacs desktop. The project got put on hold several times, especially during this summer where I didn’t have a home computer for three months. But now that I have a home computer again, it’s time to actually get this thing started. NOTE: The deployment script and the repo are still in early stages of development.

• (Linux in the Ham Shack) LHS Episode #426: The Weekender LXXVII

  It’s time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we’re doing. We’d love to hear from you.

Kernel Space

• Linux 5.15 Has A Critical Improvement For Tiered Memory Servers – Phoronix

  Landing via Andrew Morton’s patch series today in the Linux 5.15 kernel is handling for demoting pages during memory reclaim, which can be used for punting cold pages off to slower, tiered memory devices (like Intel persistent memory) when under system memory pressure.

  The current behavior with Linux right now is when the system memory (RAM) fills up under memory pressure, some of the DRAM contents will be tossed out. For recent and future servers with tiered memory like using Intel Optane DC persistent memory, the Linux kernel may eventually fall over to start using that persistent memory if necessary for allocations but not in any intelligent manner.

Instructionals/Technical

• Stephen Smoogen: How to clone (a lot of) package spec files from CentOS 8 git.centos.org

  Recently I have had to try and work out all the dependencies on a set of packages. I am writing this as a blog, as I needed to recreate work that I had done several times in the past, but past Smoogen had not fully documented. [I went looking and found I had 3 different copies of trees of packages from Fedora and CentOS but absolutely no notes and my bash_history had cycled over the 10k lines I normally keep. Past Smoogen was a BAD, BAD sysadmin.]

• How to use 74hc595 Shift Register with Raspberry PI Pico and MicroPython

  Complex Raspberry PI Pico projects can require many connections with many sensors/devices so that the rich 40-PIN GPIO can become limited. In these cases you can get help from a simple and cheap electronic piece: the 74HC595 Shift Register, also known as Serial to Parallel Converter.

• How to Fix the “make: command not found” Error in Ubuntu

  The make command is probably one of the most widely used commands in the Linux ecosystem. This command is used to build and compile programs directly from the source code.

  You can, as a Linux user, use the make command to compile utilities, and install them using the command line. But sometimes, the system throws the error “make: command not found” while users try to build a package using make.

  By the end, you will have a brief understanding of how to fix the “make: command not found” error in Linux.

• How to install RPG Maker MV on a Chromebook

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

• How to install fail2ban on Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux – TechRepublic

  Fail2ban is one of the first pieces of software I install on Linux servers. This service will help prevent unwanted logins by banning nefarious IP addresses from gaining access to your server. Unlike installing fail2ban on Ubuntu Servers, you have to take an extra step with RHEL-based servers. I’m going to walk you through that very thing, demonstrating the process that will help you get fail2ban installed on either Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux.

Games

• Pitting Steam Deck Against Nintendo Switch

  Portable gaming has been around for decades. Despite all the past success, one of the two dominant brands – Sony – has discontinued the PlayStation Vita a couple of years ago, leaving only Nintendo Switch in the market. That said, nothing is smooth sailing for Nintendo as the current most-used portable gaming hardware on the planet is a smartphone, especially the ones with enough processing power to run a high-profile game, it had a serious impact on the portable console market.

  There are around 6 billion active smartphones today – and statistics show that each new smartphone has a game downloaded within a week from its purchase. The variety of games on smartphones is amazing, covering everything from video slots at Spin Online Casino to shooters like Fortnite and others. Of course, hyper-casual games like the slot machines are the most played ones on smartphones – they are perfect to be played on a touchscreen, they are simple, easy to learn, and provide instant gratification.

Distributions

• BSD

  • traceroute(8) gets speed boost

    This rewrites the traceroute engine to use libevent and asr’s async DNS interface. Probes are now send every 30ms or as soon as we get an answer back. With that we got the 15 minute worse case down to about 10 seconds.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Fedora Community Blog: Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2021-35

    Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

    I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else.

Devices/Embedded

• Jetson carrier board triples up on M.2

  Geniatech announced an “NVJ100AI/AIX” carrier board for the Jetson Nano and Xavier NX with GbE, HDMI, 4x USB 3.0, and 3x M.2 sockets.

  Geniatech, which just launched a $90 XPI-iMX8MM SBC based on the i.MX8M Mini, has posted a product page for an NVJ100AI/AIX carrier board for Nvidia’s Jetson Nano and Jetson Xavier NX modules. The NVJ100AI ships with a Jetson Nano module and the NVJ100AI with the higher end Jetson Xavier NX. Otherwise, the boards are identical.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Robotic waiter learning to serve drinks

  • Raspberry Pi Retrofit heaven

    We love a good retrofit project around here, and seeing Raspberry Pi turn an original Super 8 camera into a digital device was a highlight on the blog this week.

    A classic Game Boy got the same treatment, hiding a brand new Raspberry Pi brain in its original retro shell.

  • Why the Raspberry Pi isn’t suitable for IoT

    Let’s start by praising the Raspberry Pi: it has brought cheap computing to many, has inspired and enabled education and undoubtedly been a huge benefit. I use my own Pi daily, and we have often used its flexibility to perform hardware testing, from accessing UART to reading flash memory. So why do we not recommend developers use it from a security perspective?

    It offers a flexible platform – you can develop a solution on a Pi 4, then just move that image straight to a compute module. But this rapid prototyping and development has led some vendors of smart devices to simply embed the Pi in their smart ‘thing’. Again, that’s a good thing as it has reduced hurdles to market entry, right?

  • Arduino Measures 20V Signals Using Quantizer

    Canadian electronics geek and nascent YouTuber [Technoyaki] wanted to measure 20 volt signals on his Arduino. One might typically use a voltage divider to knock them down to the 5 volt range of the Arduino’s 10-bit A/Ds. But he isn’t one to take the conventional approach. Instead of using two resistors, [Technoyaki] decides to build an analog circuit out of sixteen resistors, four op amps and a separate 6 VDC supply.

  • Wearable Scope Lets Your Fingers Do The Probing

    The scope consists of an nRF5340 evaluation board in a 3D printed mount, with an SPI-connected Adafruit 2.8″ TFT display on top. With a pair of wires run from the board’s ADC and ground pins, [aniketdhole] just needed a bit of code to glue it all together and show some basic signal visualizations on the display. It’s been tested against PWM signals generated by an Arduino and some potentiometer controlled voltages, but anything much wilder than that is probably a bit too much to ask for from this rig in its current configuration.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android Users Say Their Alarms Are Failing – Try These Apps Instead

  • Google Chrome Beta gets ‘Material You’ makeover ahead of Android 12 – MobileSyrup

  • Top 9 Best VPN Android Apps – 2021

  • NitroPhone 1: The ‘safest Android smartphone in the world’ is a Google Pixel 4a with a third-party ROM installed – NotebookCheck.net News

  • Android Auto and CarPlay are broken – here’s how to fix them | T3

  • Samsung Galaxy S20 series is receiving the September 2021 Android security patch – GSMArena.com news

  • An update on Fairphone 3

    As the saying goes “all good things must come to an end”. After a successful two-year run with the Fairphone 3, we are ending the sale of this phone. But just like what you’d expect from us, we will stick to our longevity promise to provide software and hardware support for five years from the phone’s launch. So, there is no need to worry and no need to buy a new phone or toss your Fairphone 3 into a drawer.

  • Samsung debuts first Android 12 teaser, confirms date – 9to5Google

  • OSCAL launches first best budget 3G Android 11 smartphone – Gizchina.com

  • Philips introduces OLED+ 936 and OLED+ 986 TVs with Android TV 10, 120 Hz support and HDMI 2.1 VRR – NotebookCheck.net News

  • How to Hide Apps on Android

  • How to use your Android phone as a webcam for your PC | Android Central

  • Android Auto location issues supposedly fixed – 9to5Google

  • Chrome Tab Groups on Android will act more like desktop – 9to5Google

  • What to Do About Your Broken Android Alarm Clock

  • [First look] Chromebooks to get new Android app preset window sizes to improve experience

  • Best Android app deals of the day: Cosmic Express, and more – 9to5Toys

  • YouTube makes it easy to try out experimental features on Android | Android Central

  • Android users urged to delete 8 popular apps that could steal their money | Chard & Ilminster News

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Essential open source tools for an academic organization

  As an academic open source programs office (OSPO), Open @RIT’s mission is to assist faculty, staff, and students at the Rochester Institute of Technology in creating and maintaining communities for their open projects. We accomplish this by offering consultation and documents that teach our clients the best ways to operate their communities and projects. None of this would be feasible, however, if not for the systems of digital infrastructure we have created and adopted to facilitate these interactions.

  Whether you’re starting your own academic OSPO or an open source project, finding the right tools and methods for managing your unique community can be challenging if you don’t know where to look. Therefore, in the spirit of openness, the Open @RIT team is happy to share the experiences and strategies used to build our digital infrastructure right here.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Doomscrolling, ads in texting, Theranos NOT Thanos, and more are the tweets on this week’s #TopShelf

      At Mozilla, we believe part of making the internet we want is celebrating the best of the internet, and that can be as simple as sharing a tweet that made us pause in our feed. Twitter isn’t perfect, but there are individual tweets that come pretty close.

    • uBlock Origin—everything you need to know about the ad blocker – Firefox Add-on Reviews

      Rare is the browser extension that can satisfy both passive and power users. But that’s an essential part of uBlock Origin’s brilliance—it is an ad blocker you could recommend to your most tech forward friend as easily as you could to someone who’s just emerged from the jungle lost for the past 20 years.

      If you install uBlock Origin and do nothing else, right out of the box it will block nearly all types of internet advertising—everything from big blinking banners to search ads and video pre-rolls and all the rest. However if you want extremely granular levels of content control, uBlock Origin can accommodate via advanced settings.

      We’ll try to split the middle here and walk through a few of the extension’s most intriguing features and options…

• Programming/Development

  • Perl/Raku

    • gfldex: Calling by name

      While looking for something completely different, I found that Roast really likes named callable placeholder variables.

A Return to Normalcy?

“You just feel so guilty that the one person who hadn’t left the house for three weeks was the one who succumbed to Covid,” she said to me, as I pressed the phone against my ear and peered outside, at the crowds of the people at the nearby park several stories below.

The sun looked twice its size, pressed against the bright blue sky. A group of seniors laughed while performing the cha-cha slide together. Others at the park were jogging, skipping stones across the river, or speed-walking while Whitney and The Temptations were blaring from car radios. Masks dangled under peoples’ chins and around their wrists.

Colorado Transportation Officials Asked Navigation App Providers To Plant False Information. Worse, The Providers Complied.

Well, this isn’t cool. Colorado transportation officials fed bogus information to map apps to make an open road appear to be closed.

The Village Mirror

In ancient Hellas — Greece — peasants, persons of the land, not philosophers, discovered democracy. Xenophon, student of Socrates, historian, and general, said farming was a school for training soldiers and patriots for defending the country. He had no doubt that agriculture and rural people formed civilization.

Science

• Tom Chivers and “reasonable” apologia for science denial

  Earlier this week, I discussed the prevalence of what I called “reasonable” apologists for the antivaccine movement. This description also applied to the same sort of “reasonable” apologists for those promoting antimask, anti-“lockdown,” and, of course, antivaccine COVID-19 disinformation, because the Venn diagram of antivaxxers prepandemic and COVID-19 cranks is damned near a circle. Today, I plan on being more general and discussing how the concept of “reasonable” apologist can apply to the entire spectrum of science denial, of which the antivaccine movement and the anti-public health movement that’s been energized as a result of the pandemic is only currently the loudest and most visible component.

• Study Suggests Assholes Online Are Routinely Assholes Offline

  A new study published in the American Science Review found that that if you’re an asshole troll online, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re the same way in the brick and mortar world. The researchers used representative surveys and behavioral studies from the U.S. and Denmark to try and figure out if it the novel and relatively new internet was somehow making normal human beings more hostile. But as the researchers point out on Twitter, they found no real evidence for that:

• Einstein’s Fridge: Who knew the history of thermodynamics was so much like high school?

  Boltzmann had developed a statistical approach that allowed him to sort of sneak up on the Third Law, but Mach and Planck didn’t buy it. Like high school bullies, they taunted Boltzmann at conferences, ultimately leading to the Austrian’s suicide in 1906.

Hardware

• Buying a mechanical keyboard? Consider these 6 points of caution

  If you’re considering a mechanical keyboard yourself, don’t make the same mistakes I made. Here’s everything I wish that I’d done before buying my very first model.

Health/Nutrition

• For Outdoor Workers, California Air Is Becoming Unbreathable

• ‘The Virus Does Not Know Borders’: Dems Launch Global Covid Vaccination Caucus

  A group of congressional Democrats on Friday launched the “Covid-19 Global Vaccination Caucus” to pressure fellow lawmakers and the Biden White House to accelerate the distribution of lifesaving shots to poor countries, warning that failure to do so would prolong the deadly pandemic.

  “If not now, when? After the next Greek letter variant emerges? We’ve got to tackle this right now.”—Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi

• House Dems Introduce Bill to Lower Medicare Age to 60

  In an effort to expand healthcare access to tens of millions of Americans in the continuing absence of a more ambitious universal care program, more than 125 House Democrats on Friday introduced legislation that would lower the age of general Medicare eligibility from 65 to 60.

  “Congress and President Biden should immediately deliver for the people by prioritizing the expansion and improvement of Medicare in the upcoming Build Back Better package.”—Rep. Pramila Jayapal

• ‘Activism Works’: EU to Return Covid Vaccines to Africa After Backlash

  The European Union has agreed to return to Africa millions of Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine doses that were shipped out of the continent under a contract arrangement that drew widespread backlash from vaccine equity campaigners and African officials.

  As the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, the South Africa-based pharmaceutical giant Aspen “has a contract with J&J to fill into vials and package the U.S. company’s vaccine, with some 40% of its production slated for export to Europe through September and the rest going to African countries.”

• Lower Drug Prices for Americans ‘Too Good to Be True,’ Declares Big Pharma

  Determined to shield its surging pandemic profits, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry is ramping up its campaign to stop congressional Democrats from enacting reforms to curb sky-high drug prices—a broadly popular legislative effort that one Big Pharma spokesperson dismissed as “too good to be true.”

  “Members of Congress can either vote with these drug companies or vote for reforms that lower the price of drugs for patients. Lives are on the line.”—Leslie Dach, Protect Our Care

• Opinion | It’s Time to End Religious Exemptions During Public Health Emergencies

  Just as many other universities have been doing, in August, the University of Virginia announced that it was disenrolling 238 students for the autumn semester. They could reenroll provided they showed proof of vaccination against COVID-19 or obtained medical or religious exemptions by a date certain. And therein lies a problem.

• Cancer Alley Pastor Finds Hope Amidst the Rubble When Facing Ida’s Aftermath

• DeSantis Appeals Judge’s Ruling Against His Ban on School Districts’ Masks Rules

• Opinion | Out-of-State Abortion Providers Brace for an Influx of Texas Patients

• Sotomayor’s Defiant Dissent

  Conservatives would have you believe that the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Texas’s law banning abortions after six weeks, and deputizing bounty hunters to enforce it, was a narrow and technical ruling from the high court. It was not. It was a frontal attack on the constitutional rights of women, made all the more despicable by the conservative decision to authorize the Texas attack on women without the benefit of a full, public hearing on the issues. In dissent, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Maria Sotomayor called out her conservative colleagues for all of it: their “breathtaking defiance” of constitutional order, their stunning rejection of precedent, and their flaming cowardice.

• ‘Tip of the Iceberg’: GOP-Led States Eye Texas Model to Attack Abortion Rights

  Republican lawmakers and governors in several states are planning or considering forced-birth legislation mirroring Senate Bill 8 in Texas, which the U.S. Supreme Court allowed to go into effect this week—stunning and angering abortion providers and rights advocates across the country.

  “This is not a ‘What happens in Texas stays in Texas’ situation.”—Kristin Ford, NARAL Pro-Choice America

• Opinion | A Message for Texas: Women Are Tougher Than Right-Wing Legislators

  The new ban in Texas on abortions after the detection of cardiac activity—usually around six weeks, when many women don’t even know they’re pregnant—is rightfully dominating headlines around the world.

• On Heels of SB 8, Texas Poised to Restrict Access to Medication Abortions

  “I’m really tired of every single session, having to come here and debate one more obstacle to a woman having a right to choose what happens to her own body and her own destiny.”—Texas State Rep. Donna Howard

• More States Are Considering Implementing Abortion Bans Similar to Texas’s

• Bureaucracies in the Most Expensive Healthcare System in the World

  I have been a Kaiser member for almost 22 years. I have had the same primary care physician, both trust him and like him and intend to continue with him. And overall my experiences with various Kaiser healthcare personnel have been positive. Just to be clear, friends in some other plans also have PCPs they trust and have had positive healthcare experiences.

  However, Kaiser administration is another story, and reflective of the divide between healthcare personnel and American healthcare administrations. The following are but three examples of problems I have experienced:

• Opioid River

  Is a struggle against the American pursuit of any happiness the solution. If only.. Dr. Cornel West has made a proposition that few people take seriously: that inherent to what we deem to be struggle in America is not only the struggle for “justice” but also against despair. He calls this blues philosophy, finding a philosophical voice in Soren Kierkegaard, who tells us that we despair without even knowing it. We even despair about the selves we have created. Despair, felt deeply by the rural blues musicians, and transposed to cities, becomes the central pain in American life, as theorized by the non-academic, the non-elite. The fight against despair leads to rock and roll, funk, etc, all as forms of civility that become dangerously corrupt when co-opted by capital. It also leads to book clubs, knitting, or what we can say is a massive swath of the American dynamic.

  How did we get here? Why don’t we have large campaigns against despair, that for example fuels an opioid epidemic like no other, like we have against the lack of justice? We got here perhaps because, given the path that we took by imposing the 1787 constitution on the natural dynamic of American life, which had produced forms of democratic socialism after 1776, it was inevitable. We got here because of the genocide of indigenous folks, because of the American color line that persists, because of our lack of feminism and regard for gender jusice. We got here because we did not intend not to get here, in other words, and so the solution would be to intend not to be here.

• Pelosi: Congress to Act on Supreme Court’s Abortion Ruling With Legislation

• SCOTUS Ruling Allows Texas to Deputize Citizens as Anti-Abortion Police

• “On the Kill Floors”: Essential Workers in Meatpacking Plants Still Lack Safety & COVID Protections

  Amid a surge in COVID-19 cases, we look at the experiences of meatpacking workers during the pandemic and beyond. Dulce Castañeda, a founding member of Children of Smithfield, a Nebraska-based grassroots advocacy group led by the children and family members of meatpacking workers, says conditions in the meatpacking plants during the pandemic remained as usual. “It was a situation where they weren’t receiving the protections that they needed,” she tells Democracy Now!, adding that workers often don’t have the time or resources to advocate for themselves. Castañeda and her family are profiled in a new book by journalist Eyal Press titled “Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America.”

• China Wants ‘Sissy Idols’ and ‘Effeminate Men’ Scrubbed From Entertainment Industry

  Announcing the measures, the Communist Party of China’s propaganda department accused some in the entertainment industry of bad influence on the young and of “severely polluting the social atmosphere.”

  One of the eight sections to one one “boycotting being overly entertaining” explained a need to put more emphasis on “traditional Chinese culture, revolution culture and socialist culture.” It said that authorities will establish a “correct beauty standard,” and boycott vulgar [Internet] celebrities.

• GoDaddy is cutting off Texas Right to Life’s abortion ‘whistleblowing’ website

  However, it now looks like Texas Right to Life may have trouble keeping a home on the web, because hosting provider GoDaddy has given the group 24 hours to find a different place to park its website. “We have informed prolifewhistleblower.com they have 24 hours to move to another provider for violating our terms of service,” a spokesperson told The New York Times and The Verge.

  GoDaddy didn’t answer a question about whether that applies to the group’s other domains, but tells The Verge that it violated “multiple provisions” of the site’s Terms of Service including Section 5.2, which reads:

  You will not collect or harvest (or permit anyone else to collect or harvest) any User Content (as defined below) or any non-public or personally identifiable information about another User or any other person or entity without their express prior written consent.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Security

    • Linux Cybersecurity Mistakes Small Businesses Commonly Make

      Running a small business on Linux doesn’t mean having a small workload. You need to take care of so many things yourself or with the help of just a few colleagues. In the midst of all of this work and stress, cybersecurity is probably the last thing on your mind. It’s not like setting up a firewall and downloading antivirus software offers any monetary value, correct?

      Everybody makes mistakes, especially cybersecurity mistakes. That’s why it’s important to be informed about the best ways to protect your small business from hackers. Hopefully, this article was helpful, and you’ll start securing your business by avoiding these 5 Linux cybersecurity mistakes.

    • From open Guest Wi-Fi to pwning a lift

      A recent engagement took quite an unexpected turn and led to me having remote control of a bunch of building services including a lift from the street outside, unauthenticated. A single firewall rule bypassed some well configured VLANs and led to an emergency change being made to assure safety, let alone security!

      I was on site and looking at a brand-new network installation in a shared office building. The ground floor offered public spaces including a café, so there was potential for any member of the public to be present.

      Sat with a cuppa, my first port of call was the open Guest Wi-Fi access point. I was presented with a landing page asking me to accept a EULA before being given an IP address and a gateway to access the Internet.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Video Briefing Wednesday: EFF and Partners Will Deliver to Apple Petitions with 50,000 Signatures Demanding End to Phone Scanning Program

      • Apple Recognizes It Jumped Too Quickly On Its CSAM Detection System; Delays Implementation

        Sometimes speaking out works. A month ago, Apple announced a series of new offerings that it claimed would be useful in fighting back against CSAM (child sexual abuse material). This is a real problem, and it’s commendable that Apple was exploring ways to fight it. However, the major concern was how Apple had decided to do this. Despite the fact that a ton of experts have been working on ways to deal with this extremely challenging problem, Apple (in Apple fashion) went it alone and just jumped right in the deep end, causing a lot more trouble than necessary — both because their implementation had numerous serious risks that Apple didn’t seem to account for, and (perhaps more importantly) because the plan could wipe away years of goodwill in conversations between technologists, security professionals, human rights advocates and more in trying to seek solutions that better balance the risks.

      • Without Changes, Council of Europe’s Draft Police Surveillance Treaty is a Pernicious Influence on Latam Legal Privacy Frameworks

        Article 7 of the Protocol is among the most troubling provisions, raising privacy concerns regarding police cross-border access to subscriber data. As we have written, Article 7 establishes procedures for law enforcement in one country to request access to subscriber data directly from service providers located in another country under the requesting country’s legal standards. This can create unjustifiable asymmetries in national law by applying to foreign authorities a more permissive, less privacy-protective legal basis to access subscriber data than what is granted to local law enforcement agencies under its own local law.

        Article 7 focuses on authorizing police access to subscriber data. Why does subscriber data matter? Your IP address can tell authorities what websites you visit and who you communicate with. It could reveal otherwise anonymous online identities, your social networking contacts and, even at times, your physical location via GPS. Police can request your name, the subscriber data to link your identity to your online activity, and that can be used to create a nicely detailed police profile of your daily habits .

        We see at least two possible scenarios for how pernicious Article 7 could be on Latam frameworks for lawful access to communications data in criminal investigations. First, this provision can serve as an influence to drive down standards in the region for accessing subscriber information (and unveiling a user’s identity). Second, it can potentially export globally a broader definition of what constitutes “subscriber information,” expanding the categories of communications data encompassed by a third-class protection standard. All in all, Article 7 contains serious flaws that should be fixed before it can serve as a robust rights-protective model to pursue and endorse.

      • Delays Aren’t Good Enough—Apple Must Abandon Its Surveillance Plans

        The features Apple announced a month ago, intending to help protect children, would create an infrastructure that is all too easy to redirect to greater surveillance and censorship. These features would create an enormous danger to iPhone users’ privacy and security, offering authoritarian governments a new mass surveillance system to spy on citizens. They also put already vulnerable kids at risk, especially LGBTQ youth, and create serious potential for danger to children in abusive households. The responses to Apple’s plans have been damning: over 90 organizations across the globe have urged the company not to implement them, for fear that they would lead to the censoring of protected speech, threaten the privacy and security of people around the world, and have disastrous consequences for many children. This week, EFF’s petition to Apple demanding they abandon their plans reached 25,000 signatures. This is in addition to other petitions by groups such as Fight for the Future and OpenMedia, totalling well over 50,000 signatures. The enormous coalition that has spoken out will continue to demand that user phones—both their messages and their photos—be protected, and that the company maintain its promise to provide real privacy to its users. 

      • Apple Has Betrayed Its Privacy Legacy – and Will Undermine End-to-end Encryption Everywhere

        Apple is a company that has always made much of its commitment to privacy, and has succeeded in turning it into a unique selling point of its products. That proud history made a recent announcement all the more shocking. Nobody could deny that Apple’s Expanded Protections for Children are motivated by the best intentions, and are tackling a terrible problem. But as commentator after commentator pointed out, in this case, in its eagerness to come up with new ways of protecting children from harmful content and online predators, Apple seems to have missed the bigger picture.

        There are three elements to the Apple’s new initiative. One – “updates to Siri and Search provide parents and children expanded information and help if they encounter unsafe situations” – is unproblematic. The other two are not. Here’s what Apple intends to do to ensure “communication safety in Messages”: [...]

      • Reddit seeks to hire advisers for US IPO: Sources

        Reddit was founded in 2005 by Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian. It became known for its niche discussion groups, lagging the popularity of other major social media platforms such as Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc.

      • Experts Raise Alarm About China’s App Data Aggregation Potential

        Social media app TikTok’s rise as one of the world’s top downloaded software is concerning experts who say the aggregate data collected across a number of Chinese-made apps will allow the Communist government to get ahead of any federal action to stem the data flow.

      • Bloomberg claims Juniper included NSA backdoor on DoD advice

        The claim was made on Thursday, by the news agency Bloomberg, which said this was done because the US Department of Defence insisted on it and some future contracts for Juniper were tied to the use of this algorithm.

        The news agency claimed this bit of information was a significant new detail that explained why Juniper used the NSA code, which later led to its own systems being breached.

      • Juniper Breach Mystery Starts to Clear With New Details on Hackers and U.S. Role

        More than five years later, the breach of Juniper’s network remains an enduring mystery in computer security, an attack on America’s software supply chain that potentially exposed highly sensitive customers including telecommunications companies and U.S. military agencies to years of spying before the company issued a patch.

        Those intruders haven’t yet been publicly identified, and if there were any victims other than Juniper, they haven’t surfaced to date. But one crucial detail about the incident has long been known — uncovered by independent researchers days after Juniper’s alert in 2015 — and continues to raise questions about the methods U.S. intelligence agencies use to monitor foreign adversaries.

      • How to Share a Secret… Secretly

        In November of 1979, Adi Shamir published the paper “How to Share a Secret” where he came up with a mathematical method for dividing data (D) into n pieces in such a way that that D is easily reconstructed from any k pieces, and yet even complete knowledge of k-1 pieces reveals absolutely no information about D.

        The advantage to this was robust key management schemes for cryptographic systems that can function securely and reliably even when misfortunes destroy half the pieces and security breaches expose all but one of the remaining pieces. This paper can be found here.

        In a time where it seems that Shamir (or derivatives from such work) Secret Sharing Protocols don’t seem practical compared to multi-signature (as seen being deployed by coin-based protocols to authorize multi-party transactions), We were pondering over the problem of practical systems that could use this without the overhead of public-key cryptography.

Defence/Aggression

• U.S. Psychology’s Unfinished Journey from 9/11

  In the days following the terrorist attacks that targeted New York City and Washington, D.C., it quickly became apparent that the White House, the Department of Defense, and the CIA were prepared to ignore well-established international laws and human rights standards in pursuit of our adversaries. But at that time, it was less immediately obvious that some members of my own profession—fellow psychologists—would choose to embrace and participate in the merciless “dark side” operations that took place at secret overseas “black sites,” at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, and beyond. And then, as events unfolded further, it became even more surprising that—through acts of commission and omission—these abusive and sometimes torturous operations would also find support within the leadership of the APA.

  At any point, the APA could have joined with concerned human rights groups in seeking to constrain a U.S. military-intelligence establishment set on unbridled retribution that brutalized prisoners and diminished the country’s moral standing around the world. But for the world’s largest organization of psychologists, that tragically proved to be the proverbial road not taken.

• The Sixties, Hollywood, and One Man’s Consideration of the Curse of Vietnam

  There are exceptions to the general trend of Hollywood trivializing Sixties history, at least in terms of the cultural side of things. For example, the Woodstock movie did the opposite. It translated a rock festival into a watershed event, a cultural milepost for both the counterculture and the United States itself. When it played in movie houses around the world, the viewings became events. In Greece, which was under a military junta at the time, the film’s audiences turned their viewing into protests against the regime, provoking crackdowns by the police.

  Recently, Hollywood has returned to the Sixties once again. The Chicago 7 and the murder of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by the police are the topics of two recent films. Both films are fictionalized versions of the history involved. Consequently, they misrepresent certain facts and personalities. The films—titled The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Black Judas and the Messiah—are captivating in style and narrative, but tend to turn what was the genuinely radical spirit of the lives being presented into something more liberal and palatable to the American myth. Beyond the decidedly false moments and dialogue present at times in both films, the overall feeling I was left with after viewing them wavered between thinking it might have been better if the films had not been made and hopeful that the Hollywood story I was seeing might propel some of today’s youth to embrace the real history behind the fiction. Both films, especially the Chicago 7 film, have generated a fair amount of swag. That includes both reprints and current takes on the subjects. The swag doesn’t sell like t-shirts at a rock concert, but it does make some money for those profiting from the past.

• What are the Prospects for Peace? An Interview With Col. Larry Wilkerson

  Larry Wilkerson is a renowned defense analyst and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government & Public policy at the College of William and Mary. He is a retired United States Army colonel and was the former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. We are extremely honored that he took the time to talk to us and share his views. His responses below are exactly as he provided.

  The questions here are not philosophical or abstract. They focus on the realities of the international power struggle unfolding in real time. They directly address the role of the U.S. in the escalating tensions and its capacity to reduce them. We also probe the role of everyday citizens in affecting the relationship the U.S. now has and will have with the rest of the world community.

• Roaming Charges: Revenge Tragedy

  + Ralph Nader: “Biden went through the history of the 20-year war on Afghanistan. Never mentioned the starters of this unconstitutional war, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. He mentioned striking back at ISIS this week but couldn’t find one sentence to express sympathy and regret for the innocent Ahmadi family whose 10 members, including 7 children, were wiped out by an errant U.S. drone. Mr. Ahmadi worked with an American aid group. As for his mentioning constitutional government preventing endless wars, forget it. Empire as usual.”

  + True, but it’s an empire in retreat.

• When Will They Ever Learn? Out of Afghanistan, Into the Mire

  And the photographs of these young men in the Post and other papers and on the internet brought back memories of the protest songs of the Sixties and most especially Pete Seeger’s Where have all the flowers gone?, of which one rendition goes:

  There are countless graveyards in this world of self-destructive humans, and over the centuries they have expanded as monuments to the lunacy of mankind.

• On Propaganda and Failed Narratives: New Understanding of Afghanistan is a Must

  The framing of the US ‘military intervention’ in Afghanistan, starting on October 7, 2001, as the official start of what was dubbed as a global ‘war on terror’ was left almost entirely to US government strategists. Former President, George W. Bush, his Vice President, Dick Cheney, his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld and an army of spokespersons, neoconservative ‘intellectuals’, journalists and so on, championed the military option as a way to rid Afghanistan of its terrorists, make the world a safe place and, as a bonus, bring democracy to Afghanistan and free its oppressed women.

  For that crowd, the US war in an already war-torn and extremely impoverished country was a just cause, maybe violent at times, but ultimately humanistic.

• Opinion | The War in Afghanistan Is Over, It’s Time to Face the Truth

  My son, Ryan, was an Army Infantry Officer who served 13 months, at the height of President Obama’s Afghanistan surge in Zhari District, Kandahar Province. His men were sent into the heart of the fight, in the place referred to as the Heart of Darkness, the spiritual home of the Taliban. 

• Kids Die Last as Biden Plays Tough Guy

  That terrorist attack was followed by a drone rocket revenge attack ordered by President and Commander in Chief Joe Biden. It was an attack which by all accounts went spectacularly and horrifically awry, killing not an IS-K terror plotter as initially claimed by the Pentagon, but a family of 10 including a US interpreter, all of whom — both three adults and seven children including a child of only 2 — had been given papers allowing them to get on one of the US evacuation flights at the Kabul Airport, but they had been unable to get through all the various checkpoints to accomplish that.

  There were fabricated reports from the US of secondary explosions intended to suggest that the van that was struck had been carrying terrorists wearing explosive belts — stories which were completely untrue according to US and other foreign reporters who went to the scene. There were also reports of secondary explosions in an adjacent building, which were also false and self-serving from those in Washington trying to deny the disastrous error.

• Lessons from Afghanistan

  Behind the withdrawal of the remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan are deeper questions about the selling of the American Dream. The assumption in the second phase of the U.S. presence was the construction of Afghan society along American, liberal democratic lines. After the initial phase of counter-terrorism in reaction to September 11, the second objective was nation-building to re-make Afghanistan in America’s image.

  The second phase assumption was that Americans know how societies should be organized. Moreover, it assumes that everyone recognizes, admires and wants part of that organization. It assumes that Americans can go – invade, interfere – wherever they want because people all over the world welcome U.S. outreach. Quite simply, it assumes that non-Americans want Starbucks and the Golden Arches.

• “A Real Flood of Bacteria and Germs”: Communications Intelligence and Charges of U.S. Germ Warfare During the Korean War

  In order to provide a documentary backdrop to a history of the war from an intelligence point-of-view, the CIA also released hundreds of declassified top-secret communications intelligence (COMINT) reports, as well as assorted formerly secret intelligence analyses, and open-source reports from the Agency’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS).

  The CIA likely did not set out to document the COMINT history of the North Korean and Chinese response to what appeared to be U.S. and/or U.N. attacks by biological, bacteriological, or ”germ” weapons, but that is in effect what happened.

• At the End of this Hated War, We Need Truth

  In the days following the attacks on September 11, the United States was called on to declare war against an enemy those in Congress who voted for it couldn’t even name.  Policymakers asked American citizens to sacrifice civil liberties for security and give the military money that was so desperately needed to solve the country’s social problems.

  Congress did those things with only one dissenting vote: Barbara Lee’s. Now it’s time to look at historical truth, to understand how the United States got this 20-year war, with its ignominious end at the Kabul airport, and how the overarching framework of U.S. policy was responsible for creating it.

• Afghanistan: Farewell to Arms, Predator Drones, Night Raids…?

  With the horrors of 9/11 still fresh in our hearts and minds, we were told that attacking Afghanistan was a just and legitimate response to al-Qaeda’s terrorism and to Afghanistan’s role in harboring the terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, one of the founders of al-Qaeda. But there were a few things omitted from mainstream coverage of the invasion and its official justification. Even in the present, I wonder how many Americans remember, for instance, that at one time the U.S. courted the Taliban, the rulers of Afghanistan from 1996-2001. In fact, in the late 1990s, when Clinton was president, U.S. oil and gas executives and State Department officials hosted a delegation of Taliban leaders. The purpose of those meetings was to convince the Taliban to allow a pipeline to run through the country. The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAPI), as it was known, would transport natural gas from landlocked Central Asian nations, particularly Turkmenistan, to India. The most direct route to India is from Iran to Pakistan and then India. But the U.S. wanted to prevent Russia from getting its hands on the natural resources of Central Asia, a strategically vital region. (Whichever country dominates this region would have enormous leverage over rival economies.) The U.S. also sought to isolate Iran and restrict its ability to profit from much-needed supplies of natural gas. To transport this fuel to India and bypass both Iran and Russia, the pipeline would need to cross Afghanistan, and for this to happen, the U.S. would need the consent of the Taliban.

  Long before the “courtship” began and while the Cold War was still in play, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security advisor, wanted to give the Soviets their own Vietnam. The plan? Concoct a strategy to lure them into Afghanistan where right-wing militants, financed, trained, and armed by the West, would accomplish what the Vietnamese had done in their struggle against the U.S. military. In the case of Afghanistan, a prolonged war against the Mujahadeen, (fundamentalist Islamic fighters) would surely sap the resources of the Soviet Union and trigger its inevitable collapse, thus ending the Cold War in a glorious victory for the West. Such an outcome, desired by both Republicans and Democrats in the U.S., would allow our most precious export—the “free-market” system—to flourish throughout the world, no longer hampered by the insidious spread of communism, the socio-political equivalent of the kudzu weed, or so its detractors might have imagined. Perhaps equally important was the chance to acquire unfettered access to the region’s energy sources, including oil, natural gas, and minerals.

• Opinion | End Military Extremism By Ending War

• Revisiting 9/11, Ward Churchill and Those “Little Eichmanns”

  “If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it,” wrote Churchill in his 2003 book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.

  Churchill’s “little Eichmanns” was an obvious reference to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she detailed the trial of Adolf Eichmann for his role in orchestrating the Holocaust, coining the phrase “banality of evil”. Eichman, Arendt contended, was not particularly sinister or demented, but a thoughtless dupe in service of mass murder. He was simply carrying out orders, she contended, never weighing their moral implications.

• Under Pressure From Victims’ Families, Biden Orders Release of 9/11 Documents

• “Rogue Nations” and “Failed States”: America Doesn’t Know the Difference

  A constant feature of the disharmony between the United States and Europe is Washington’s obsession with the use of force against so-called “rogue” states in the Third World.  The past five U.S. administrations, including Biden’s, don’t know the difference between a “rogue” state and a “failed” state.  The hegemonists in the Bush administration were obsessed with the notion of rogue states, the so-called “axis of evil” that included Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.  Then-Senator Hillary Clinton supported Bush’s rhetoric by emphasizing that “every nation has to be either with us, or against us,” which channeled such Cold Warriors as the Dulles brothers in the 1950s or the brothers Rostow and Bundy in the 1960s.

  U.S. and Israeli military force has created havoc the world over.  The removal of Saddam Hussein led to the creation of the Islamic State; Israel’s invasion of Lebanon led to the creation of Hezbollah; U.S. intervention in Afghanistan led to the Haqqani and Hekmatyar networks and greater violence; the use of force in Libya in 2011 led to chaos in North Africa.  U.S. wars since 9/11 have cost trillions of dollars and have led to tens of millions of refugees, which has fostered dangerous nationalism in European politics.  There have been thousands of U.S. combatant deaths in the wars since 9/11, thousands of severely wounded survivors, thousands of suicides by veterans and active-duty personnel, and tens of thousands of civilian fatalities.

• Now Close Gitmo, Too

  President Biden was right to end the war in Afghanistan and follow through on a deal that his predecessor Donald Trump had negotiated with the Taliban. As Biden explained, “After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.”

  Although the fighting in America’s longest war may have ended, Biden must address the war’s lingering wounds to the people of Afghanistan and to our own country’s ideals of justice and the rule of law.

• Want Regime Change with Plausible Deniability? Call Creative Associates International

• Opinion | Global Cooperation, Not Endless War Should Be Future of US Foreign Policy

• A CIA Drone Analyst Apologizes to the People of Afghanistan

  As the United States ends a 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, a former intelligence analyst for the CIA’s drone program offers an apology to the people of Afghanistan “from not only myself, but from the rest of our society as Americans.” During deployments to Afghanistan, Christopher Aaron says he was able to see “the human toll, the resource toll of these wars, as well as the fact that the policy of dropping ‘guided missiles’ at people from remote controlled airplanes was not allowing us to actually win the war.” We also speak with Eyal Press, who profiles Aaron in his new book, “Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America.” He says the U.S. has developed a military strategy of carrying out drone strikes and wars “in the shadows: doing it out of sight, out of mind.”

• Google locks down Afghan government accounts as Taliban looks for access: report

  Google has locked down Afghan government accounts as the Taliban is attempting to access the former officials’ emails, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.

  An employee of the former government told Reuters the Taliban asked him in late July to save data on the ministry he formerly worked for on servers the group could access.

• ‘Very Brutal’: In Ethiopia, Tigray Forces Accused of Abuses

  As they bring war to other parts of Ethiopia, resurgent Tigray fighters face growing allegations that they are retaliating for the abuses their people suffered back home.

  In interviews with The Associated Press, more than a dozen witnesses offered the most widespread descriptions yet of Tigray forces striking communities and a religious site with artillery, killing civilians, looting health centers and schools and sending hundreds of thousands of people fleeing in the past two months.d

• Taliban death squads ‘trawl porn sites to compile kill list of Afghan prostitutes after US withdrawal’

  Security sources told The Sun Online that videos featuring Afghan prostitutes have made their way onto niche porn sites and have been discovered by the jihadis.

  Our source said the Taliban are now “hell-bent” on “hunting down” the prostitutes to publicly execute or “humiliate for their own pleasure”.

  They added the women face being gang-raped by the terror nuts before being “beheaded, stoned or hung”.

• A Man Is Shot Dead By New Zealand Police After He Attacks 6 In A Supermarket

  Coster said there would be questions about whether police could have reacted even quicker. He said that the man was very aware of the constant surveillance and they needed to be some distance from him for it to be effective.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Israeli officials cautioned Biden against heavy criticism of Egypt, Saudi Arabia

  Israeli officials have cautioned their counterparts in the Biden administration against being overly critical of the Saudi and Egyptian governments, due to concerns that that such criticism might lead Riyadh and Cairo to turn to countries like Iran, China and Russia for support, a source familiar with the matter told The Times of Israel on Wednesday.

Environment

• Flooded cars are a problem for their owners — and future car buyers

  In the months to come, meanwhile, some of those flood-damaged vehicles may show back up on the used vehicle market through an appropriately named scam known as “title washing.” Someone buying one of those vehicles could be in for a number of headaches.

  When a vehicle is submerged, it is subject to developing all sorts of issues, starting with mold. Body panels and other components can rust. Water can damage engines. And then there are all the electronic circuits that control everything from power windows to a car’s safety and infotainment systems. They can suffer intermittent or complete failures.

  “A car that’s been in a flood, with the engine emerged for any length of time, will never be the same,” said Carl Sullivan, a veteran inspector for California-based AiM Mobile Inspections.

• Erdogan’s AKP: We Didn’t Start the Fire

  The Turkish government’s relief efforts for this summer’s forest fires in the country’s southern regions have been widely condemned as insufficient. Without an immediate, aggressive statewide response—and with temperatures climbing over 104 degrees Fahrenheit—the fires were able to burn more than 150,000 hectares of forest over the course of just two weeks, killing eight people.

  Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have attempted to politicize the disaster, blaming the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey and the United States consider a terrorist group, for sabotage and local municipalities for their lack of response. The government also criminalized a social media campaign—#HelpTurkey—that aimed to raise money for the areas affected, with prosecutors investigating posts using the hashtag. Erdogan and his supporters argued that the campaign aimed to make the government look weak, and they started a rival campaign—#StrongTurkey—that lauded the federal response to the fires.

• “People Will Lose Their Lives”: Texas Isn’t Doing Enough to Prevent Carbon Monoxide Deaths, Critics Say

  AUSTIN — More than five hours into a legislative debate on voting restrictions and border security last week, a Texas lawmaker made a last-ditch attempt to strengthen the state’s power grid and, in the process, prevent carbon monoxide deaths.

  On Aug. 27, state Rep. Erin Zwiener, a Democrat from Driftwood, just outside of Austin, offered an amendment that would redirect $250 million from a $1.8 billion border security bill to improve the reliability of the power grid. The measure, she told her colleagues, could keep “our citizens from dying during a winter storm from carbon monoxide poisoning.”

• Opinion | Don’t Call This Storm Ida: It Should Have Been Called ‘Hurricane Exxon’

  It was 20 years ago that French-speaking fishermen first told me that Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Ida were coming to Louisiana. These Cajun oystermen and shrimpers didn’t know the actual names, of course. They just knew that historically massive storms would soon wipe out the state as sure as the sun sets over the Gulf of Mexico.

• Opinion | Fifteen Insurers Cut Ties With Massive Pipeline

  This week, Hurricane Ida left over a million people without power, and shocking flooding is rocking the Northeast of the United States. More than 80 million Americans were under a flood watch or advisory, with the majority associated with Ida’s heavy rains. Simultaneously, 43,400 Californians have been forced to flee their homes because of the deadly wildfires tearing across the region. Earlier this summer in Madagascar 400,000 people were headed for famine from severe drought. The climate crisis is here, and it is devastating, though communities are doing everything they can to care for one another in this time of overlapping crisis.

• New Climate Study: Arctic Heat Fueled Deadly February Texas Freeze

  New research published Friday suggests that melting Arctic sea ice caused by global heating may be responsible for the deadly deep freeze that devastated much of North America and plunged millions of Texans into darkness in February.

  “Large changes in the Arctic are not just a local concern—they also have wide-ranging impacts across North America and parts of Asia.”—Judah Cohen and Mathew Barlow, study researchers

• Guilty of Ecocide

• German Groups Sue Major Carmakers for Fueling the Climate Emergency

  A pair of climate advocacy groups on Friday announced lawsuits against BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen for fueling the climate emergency, hoping to force the German carmakers to stop selling internal combustion vehicles and cut their carbon footprints 65% by 2030.

  “With our lawsuits, we want to achieve the exit from the internal combustion engine.”—Barbara Metz, DUH

• Energy

  • The Squad Protests Line 3 in Minnesota: ‘We Are Here Because the Climate Crisis Is Here’

    Members of the progressive “Squad” held a press conference in Minnesota on Friday to draw attention to the Indigenous-led fight against Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline, which water protectors and environmentalists have been battling on the ground and in court.

    “We are here to shed light and spread awareness about this egregious violation of tribal sovereignty and environmental injustice—and to hear directly from those whose voices have been ignored throughout the process.”—Rep. Ayanna Pressley

  • One Hospital’s Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign Shows Why Biden Should Reverse Trump-Era Pro-Oil Pension Rule

    I am a surgical technologist (the “pass the scalpel guy” in the operating room) at one of the country’s most prestigious hospitals: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Unknown waters ahead puzzle marine modellers

    Climate change will alter the blue planet on an almost global scale. Marine life will change in the unknown waters ahead.

  • Biden Should Put Science, Not Policy Positions, in the Driver’s Seat on Wolves and the Endangered Species Act

    The cozy relationship between U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service professionals and arch- game and fish agency officials from conservative and anti-carnivore states has led to multiple premature de-listings that served neither endangered species recovery nor the best interests of science-based decisionmaking. On wolves, the political pressure has historically been so extreme that western senators even passed legislation to override the Endangered Species Act and block federal protections for gray wolves in the Northern Rockies. This anti-science legislation even baked in a provision that blocked the courts from judging whether this listing decision was legal or not.

    The recent news story asserting the Biden administration’s support for ending wolf protections didn’t actually quote President Biden, nor any of his key appointees. Instead, it quotes the very same career official, who was the architect of wolf de-listing in the first place, concluding that he was right all along. He and other U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials testified in a 2013 hearing that removing Upper Midwest gray wolves from the Threatened Species list – and indeed throughout the continental U.S. – was completely justified. But the following year, a federal court rejected that argument, re-listing wolves in the Upper Midwest on the basis of violations of the ESA by the Fish and Wildlife Service. The federal government appealed, and the DC Circuit Court rejected their arguments again, keeping wolves on the list.

• Overpopulation

  • Brazil’s Fierce Drought

    Moreover, the planet is becoming a drought-besieged planet (see- Drought Clobbers the World, August 27, 2021). As for the Amazon, according to NASA, it has been battered by serious bouts of drought every 5 years 1998, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020-21. As such, the normally resilient forest does not have a chance to catch breath and repair damage.

    Sassan Saatchi, NASA JPL claims; “The old paradigm was that whatever carbon dioxide we put up in (human-caused) emissions, the Amazon would help absorb a major part of it… The ecosystem has become so vulnerable to these warming and episodic drought events that it can switch from sink to source depending on the severity and the extent. This is our new paradigm.” (Source: NASA Finds Amazon Drought Leaves Long Legacy of Damage, Capitals Coalition)

Finance

• The Which Way is Up Problem in Economics

  I’ll get to the contradiction in a moment, but first I want to explain why I think the debate which was the focus of the Times article is rather silly. The essence of the debate in the Neil Irwin piece (the Times reporter who wrote the article) is over whether inequality is leading to lower interest rates, which generates greater wealth inequality, or whether the big problem is the low interest rates themselves causing wealth inequality.

  To my mind, this is a silly debate, starting with the idea that we should be concerned about inequalities in wealth resulting from low interest rates. That one is a bit hard for me to see.

• Facing Corporate Blitz, Progressives Urge Unity to Defend $3.5 Trillion Package

  Faced with the deadly impacts of the climate emergency and a “massive” corporate lobbying blitz, 11 progressive groups on Friday called for Democratic Party unity in Congress to pass an ambitious and sweeping $3.5 trillion Build Back Better reconciliation bill.

  “Now, all eyes are on the reconciliation bill and progressives need to up their game.”—11 groups

• Amazon, “Economic Terrorism” and the Destruction of Competition and Livelihoods

  Walmart entered into India in 2016 with a US$3.3 billion take-over of the online retail start-up Jet.com. This was followed in 2018 with a US$16 billion take-over of India’s largest online retail platform, Flipkart. Today, Walmart and Amazon control almost two thirds of India’s digital retail sector.

  Amazon and Walmart have a record of using predatory pricing, deep discounts and other unfair business practices to attract customers to their online platforms. A couple of years ago, those two companies generated sales of over US$3 billion in just six days during Diwali. India’s small retailers reacted by calling for a boycott of online shopping.

• There Is No Greater Threat to Worker Rights Than This Republican Party

  With the approach of another Labor Day, it is clear that American workers could use some help. There are jobs to be had—but without a living wage or the workplace protections that are more necessary than ever in this pandemic age. The federal minimum wage is stuck at $7.25 an hour, no higher that it was in 2009. And working people who want to form unions and bargain for better pay are constrained in the majority of states by so-called “right to work” laws that empower multinational corporations like Amazon to thwart organizing drives.

• More People Are Turning Down Low-Paying Jobs With Bad Working Conditions

• ‘Catastrophe’ Feared as 35 Million People Are Set to Lose Jobless Aid in 3 Days

  Millions of jobless workers are set to lose critical unemployment benefits in roughly 72 hours—and neither Congress nor the Biden administration seem prepared to do anything about it.

  “Around 35 million people (10% of the U.S. population) live in households that are scheduled to lose unemployment income.”—Matt Bruenig, People’s Policy Project

• Dirty Work: Eyal Press on Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America

  Ahead of Labor Day, we speak with journalist and sociologist Eyal Press about his new book, “Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America.” Press profiles workers like prison guards and oil workers — people who make their livelihoods by doing “unethical activity that society depends on and tacitly condones but doesn’t want to hear too much” about, he says. “This work is largely hidden, and we rarely hear from the people on the frontlines who are delegated to do it,” Press tells Democracy Now! “The powerful and the privileged really don’t do the dirty work in America — they not only don’t do it, they don’t see it.”

• Rick Claypool on OxyContin Bankruptcy, Dean Baker on Economic Disconnects

• 35 Million People Are Set to Lose Unemployment Benefits on Labor Day

• Ocasio-Cortez Slams Manchin for $3.5T Bill Opposition, Points Out Exxon Ties

• Haiti and the Debt of Independence

  After winning their liberation from slavery and colonial rule in a war that killed half the population, Haitians were forced to pay their former masters an astronomical sum for their freedom. This oppressive debt Haiti paid to secure its independence is finally becoming part of the mainstream narrative about that country’s impoverishment. In a startling example of the media recognizing the debt of independence, a 200-word Journal de Montréal introduction to Haiti’s vulnerability to earthquakes noted: “Earthquakes as devastating as that of Saturday in Haiti have already occurred in 2010, 1887, 1842, 1770 and 1751… This poverty is due in large part to the exorbitant debt Haiti had to pay France for its independence. Converted into today’s money, the debt is equivalent to $30 billion Canadian.”

  In recent weeks CNN, Reuters, the New York Times, CBC and others have all referenced the debt of independence. More in-depth reports have also appeared in the Miami Herald (“France pulled off one of the greatest heists ever. It left Haiti perpetually impoverished”), France 24 (“France must return the billions extorted from Haiti”) and ABC News (“How colonial-era debt helped shape Haiti’s poverty and political unrest”).

• R.I.P. Ed Asner, Man of Spunk and Socialism

  Of course, most bosses are just the opposite; they take sensitivity seminars to learn how to talk as if they are very concerned for your welfare, but really, they couldn’t care less. In fact, they think welfare is for bums.

  Lou Grant was a different kind of boss, the crusty curmudgeon with the heart of gold, perhaps a dying breed, and Ed Asner was a very special kind of actor. Sadly, he just passed away at the age of 91. I imagine him grabbing a bunch of balloons like old Carl the grumpy but romantic balloonist he voiced in “Up,” soaring up-up-and-away into the clouds to meet Karl Marx, F.D.R.and Mary Tyler Moore.

• Rethinking Trade – Season 1 Episode 37: Hyperglobalization, COVID and Failed Supply Chains: Now What?

  In our very first episode, we looked at how corporate-led globalization has fueled shortages in our medical supply-chains and limited our ability to fight COVID-19

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Handmaid’s Jail

• What’s Left of Communism in China?

• Abandoned and Alone: Lamenting the US-Australian Alliance

  This unequal and distinctly unhealthy relationship has been marked by a certain outsourcing tendency.  Australian foreign policy is a model example of expectation: that other powers will carry its weight: processing refugees; aiding Australians stranded or persecuted overseas; reliance on that fiction known as the extended nuclear deterrent.  Self-reliance is discouraged in favour of what Barry Posen calls a “cheap ride”.

  In recent years, the Australian security-military apparatus has been more than ingratiating regarding its alliance with Washington, despite such sombre warnings as those from the late Malcom Fraser.  In 2014, the former prime minister argued that Australia, at the end of the Cold War, was presented with an opportunity to pursue a policy of “peace, cooperation, and trust” in the region.  Instead, Canberra opted to cling on to a foreign war machine that found itself bloodied and bruised in the Middle East.  Now, Australia risked needlessly going to war against China on the side of the US.  Best to, he suggested, shut down US training bases in the Northern Territory and close the Pine Gap signals centre as soon as feasible.

• ‘That’s the Biggest Lie, That We Started Out Great and We’ve Been Getting Better Ever Since’

  The August 27, 2021, episode of CounterSpin included an archival interview Janine Jackson conducted with James Loewen about lies historians tell us. The interview originally aired July 3, 2015. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• Texas Groups File Suit Against ‘Unconstitutional, Anti-Democratic’ Voter Supression Law

  A lawsuit against a widely criticized voter suppression law in Texas was filed Friday by a group of civil rights organizations who argue the new restrictions imposed by Republican lawmakers in the state violate core constitutional protections.

  “For democracy to work, it must include all voices. SB 1 is an extremist anti-voter bill that raises even more barriers to voting and specifically targets vulnerable communities, especially voters with disabilities, voters of color, and elderly voters.”

• The Campaign to Destroy Venezuelan Socialism

  Unlucky Colombia has served as a laboratory for U.S. counterinsurgency for decades. It also functions as NATO’s toehold in Latin America. That toe, however, has a fungus that infected the country’s entire power structure with murderous violence. But that’s not how North American sachems view things. U.S. politicos and military bigwigs drool over Columbia with love and would like nothing better than to refashion Venezuela in its image. Nevertheless, Colombia remains a byword, an evil omen of the death and destruction that the empire rakes across the Global South.

  In the early 2000s, the U.S. supported Colombian fascist president Alvaro Uribe’s bloodletting, which included the “false positives” scandal. In that, “the army killed 10,000 or more completely innocent noncombatants to boost the death toll they could report of guerillas.” And that death toll was already substantial. “Thousands of Colombians were disappeared during each year of Uribe’s rule: 15,732 in 2002, 12,577 in 2003 and 9,759 in 2004.” Indeed from 2000 to 2010, the Columbian civil war never let up, as Uribe, “who held office from 2002 to 2010 kept ramping the conflict up, promising victory against the guerillas.” Notably, Uribe’s demobilized paramilitaries have confessed to 32,909 crimes, most of them murders.

• Nokia leaves Open RAN project after US blacklists suppliers

  Set up 18 months ago by the Trump administration to counter the dominant position enjoyed by Chinese equipment vendor Huawei Technologies — which the US claims is a security threat — the Open RAN coalition aims to avoid the use of proprietary components, including those used by Nokia and Ericsson, in favour of generic parts and software.

• O-RAN an also-ran to Huawei 5G

  Nokia dropped out of the O-RAN Alliance this week in response to an American decision to put some of Nokia’s Chinese partners on the entity list that sanctions Chinese companies whose activity is deemed threatening to US national and security interests.

  Nokia was concerned that continued collaboration with the O-RAN coalition in the US could expose it to American sanctions because of its business dealings with sanctioned Chinese companies.

  The three sanctioned Chinese companies, Inspur, Kindroid and Phytium, are relatively minor players in the global communications market. Phytium manufactures chips, Inspur makes computer servers and related products and Kindroid is a subsidiary of Kyland Technologies, a manufacturer of Ethernet switches and industrial controls.

• Martha Lee: Is France Getting Serious about Islamism?

  The bill has two key financing provisions: Religious organizations receiving foreign funding – as many mosques in France do – are required to publicly declare donations of more than 10,000 euros. Moreover, organizations that receive public funds now have to “sign a contract agreeing to respect the values of the Republic and to abstain from any action that would threaten the public order” said Lee, and risk forfeiture of the funds if they violate these terms.

  This latter provision is not easy to enforce, as Islamist organizations have often given lip service to the ideals of the Republic while promoting extremism behind closed doors. However, Lee noted that such deception is more likely to be exposed when the public is highly sensitized to Islamist threats, as is the case in France. The French press has been diligent in exposing radical organizations that claim to be moderate so as to receive funds under false pretenses, though she acknowledged that major offenders are more likely to be exposed than smaller organizations.

• Biden Moves to Declassify Documents About September 11 Attacks

  President Joe Biden signed an executive order Friday directing the declassification of certain documents related to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a supportive gesture to victims’ families who have long sought the records in hopes of implicating the Saudi government.

  The order, coming little more than a week before the 20th anniversary of the attacks, is a significant moment in a yearslong tussle between the government and the families over what classified information about the run-up to the attacks could be made public.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Challenge In Content Moderation And Politics: How Do You Deal With Bad Faith Actors?

  We talk a lot about the various challenges of content moderation all the time here on Techdirt, but there’s one aspect that really comes up all the time and is rarely addressed: how do you deal with bad faith actors? So much of the debate around content moderation tends to be based on the idea that there is merely a legitimate difference of opinion on what is and what is not appropriate — or what is and what is not “misinformation.” And there are important debates to be had about all that.

• Afghan YouTuber Killed in Airport Bombing Days After Saying Goodbye to Her Viewers: Report

  Najma Sadeqi, a 20-year-old journalism student who made videos for the YouTube channel Afghan Insider, was killed in what officials have described as an ISIS-K suicide bombing outside of Kabul’s airport Thursday, according to CNN.

  Two of Sadeqi’s colleagues confirmed her death.

• An Afghan YouTuber was killed at Kabul airport. Many more fear the worst.

  “Since we are not allowed to work and go out of our homes, we all had to record you a last video,” she began. “And through this video say goodbye to you all.”

  She told viewers she was too scared to walk the street, and asked them to pray for her. “Life in Kabul has become very difficult, especially for those who used to be free and happy,” she said. “I wish it is a bad dream, I wish we can wake up one day,” she added, stopping at times to stifle tears. “But I know that it is not possible …. and it is a reality that we are finished.”

  Days later, Sadeqi was killed in a terror attack outside Kabul’s international airport, two of her colleagues told CNN. At least 170 Afghans died in the atrocity, while trying desperately to flee the country.

• Who were Xulhaz and Tonoy?

  Their deaths were part of a series of murders of freethinkers, including secular and atheist writers and members of religious minority groups, in Bangladesh at the hands of religious militants.

• Unconstitutional Texas social media bill attacks human rights

  Yesterday, September 2, the U.S. state of Texas’ legislature passed a bill that aims to stop social media companies from “censoring conservative views.” This bill and others like it across the United States have been drafted in direct response to platforms’ removal of misinformation, incitement to violence, and other content that platforms have deemed in violation of their community guidelines. The legislation includes vague, sweeping language prohibiting platforms from banning or blocking a person based on viewpoint or geographic location, attempting to give judges broad powers to overturn social media platforms’ decisions about their own content moderation policies.

  The bill now awaits approval from Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who is expected to sign off even though the legislation violates the U.S. Constitution and would further harm marginalized communities. Additionally, there is no evidence of anti-conservative bias on social media platforms.

• No Access: LGBTIQ Website Censorship in Six Countries – The Citizen Lab

  Online spaces are critical for safely identifying information and resources, establishing social connections, and engaging in rights advocacy and movement-building. For marginalized populations in particular, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) people, the ability to virtually connect and securely communicate is a lifeline. Yet, state-sponsored online censorship is on the rise globally, targeting LGBTIQ activists, human rights defenders, journalists, and political dissidents, among others.

  Website censorship is often implemented alongside other restrictions (e.g., lawsuits and arbitrary arrests) that constrain civil liberties and curtail human rights movements. Countries that are engaging in censorship are in violation of international human rights norms and principles. In 2018, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) affirmed “that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression.”[1] Moreover, Article 19(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) stipulates that restrictions on freedom of expression can occur only in limited circumstances and must adhere to the principles of legality, legitimacy, and necessity.[2] Of the six countries studied in this report, Indonesia, Russia, and Iran have ratified the ICCPR.[3]

  As digital technology continues to advance, website censorship, along with efforts to circumvent it, are dynamic. This leads to a persistent game of cat-and-mouse between governments and users, both of whom are trying to stay ahead of the other. Governments are also applying ever-more sophisticated means to curtail the work of rights activists around the world, including LGBTIQ activists, using Internet blocking, bandwidth “throttling,” surveillance, and other means.[4]

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• ‘Chilling the Press Has Consistently Outraged Me’

  Linda Tirado, a 39-year-old writer and photographer who covers poverty and social justice movements, has been blind in one eye for more than a year. That’s a year with only one eye to use to evaluate her surroundings while covering a protest. That’s a year with only one eye to watch her 8- and 11-year-old daughters.

• Installation Commemorates Murdered Journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Saudi Crown Prince’s Birthday

  Biden’s affirmation stands at odds with his decision to refrain from holding MBS accountable for Khashoggi’s murder despite the damning intelligence report commissioned by his administration. According to the New York Times, White House officials said they decided that the cost of penalizing Saudi Arabia with sanctions would be “too high.”

  The temporary installation was part of the Freedom First campaign, a project by human rights organizations the Freedom Initiative and Amnesty International focusing on Saudi human rights abuses.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Opinion | In Times of Great Despair, We Must Double Down on Our Activism

  Some Americans feel like we’re living through a “last days” biblical Revelation kind of scenario.

• Ten Seconds Of Doing Nothing Is Reasonably Suspicious, Says The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court

  How much does it take to establish reasonable suspicion needed to subject a person to an at least temporary removal of most of their rights? Not much, says the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court, which appears willing to keep poking the SCOTUS bear with its mind-boggling interpretations of Constitutional rights and the power of law enforcement to bypass them.

• The Staggering Costs of Sexual Harassment

  It might feel as if workplace sexual predators are finally getting their due. After New York Attorney General Letitia James meticulously investigated sexual harassment claims against Governor Andrew Cuomo and released a scathing report containing evidence that he harassed 11 women, he resigned from office effective August 24.

• Racial Socialism

  In this flip-flop of race theory, responsibility has shifted from the individual to society, and solutions have shifted from human morality and conscious intention (rooted in personal guilt and punishment), to mass social engineering (designed to reconfigure intersections to redistribute equal outcomes, all in the name of social justice). What you think doesn’t matter. It’s who you are socially that counts.

  To reconfigure intersections is to rewrite the rules by which most institutions and common social practices function. The cause celebre for early CRT thinkers on reconfiguring intersections was a 1974 supreme court case, Millekan vs. Bradley. The court’s earlier landmark l954 decision in Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, KS, outlawed outright segregation in public schools, but failed to address other factors apart from legally instituted segregation which might result in de facto segregation.

• Nationwide Nabisco Strikes Demonstrate Growing Strength of the Labor Movement

• Imprisoned in Sundown Towns: the Racial Politics of My Domestic Exile

• Curfew and Cops Are Not Hurricane Relief for the Poor, Says Mutual Aid Activist

• A Plea for Help from New Orleans: Curfew & Cops Are Not Aid for the Poor After Ida, Says Malik Rahim

  As the death toll from the remnants of Hurricane Ida in the northeastern United States climbs to 46, President Biden is visiting New Orleans, which is under curfew enforced by police and the National Guard as most of the city remains in the dark amid sweltering temperatures. “This is truly déjà vu,” says Malik Rahim, who joins us by phone from the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans, where he co-founded the mutual aid group Common Ground Collective after Hurricane Katrina. “This hurricane happened when it was the worst time in America to be poor.”

• Berkeley in the ’60s: Epicenter of the Counter Culture

  Arriving for my freshman year at SFO, I met a “typical” out-of-state student—barefoot, covered in political buttons, carrying a guitar case. “What organizations do you belong to?” she asked me. She was the perfect entre to the place and set me to worrying if I would measure up: Was I cool enough for Berkeley? It was a question that would haunt me the entire time I was there. The answer was invariably no, but held out the promise that by the time I graduated I just might be.

  Coming from conservative, conventional Washington, D.C., the Bay Area was a hotbed of energy, progressive ideals, and activism, the likes of which I’d never seen. The Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland several weeks after I arrived, in October of 1966, and quickly spread to other cities around the country. In November of 1969, Native Americans began their occupation of Alcatraz, and although it ended after a year and a half, it was considered instrumental to the restoration of thousands of acres of tribal lands, including the famed Blue Lake behind the Taos Pueblo.

• Opinion | Texas GOP To Taliban: Hold My Beer and See Privatized Fascism At Fervent Work

• Biden Administration Should Grant Clemencies and Oppose Racist “Risk Assessment”

• The cops started it

  As the candidates arrived one by one that Tuesday morning, each came to me sick with despair and grief. All four were on the phones all night long with constituents and community. The Minneapolis police had killed someone again. It was bad. Grotesquely bad. There was a video. A Roosevelt student recorded it. It happened at 38th and Chicago.

  That last part hurt. It was unsettling. Things were loaded. I thought of Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, Justine Damond. I thought about the cycles of anger and outrage each of those murders generated. Actions and reactions. Repercussions compounding over the years.

• Oppose co-ed policy: Jamiat to non-Muslims

  Prominent Muslim body Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind on Monday advocated setting up of separate schools and colleges for girls and said non-Muslims should also refrain from giving co-education to their daughters to “keep them away from immorality and misbehaviour”.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Digital Advertising: Another Unintended Casualty of the House Breakup Bills?

  As with several other business models, advertising-supported Internet services and their users are on the list of potential collateral damage from the House package of tech regulatory proposals introduced earlier this summer. This legislative package, collectively dubbed the ‘breakup bills’ for their focus on government structural interventions to solve perceived ills, stands to make digital advertising less safe and less useful.

Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • “Holly+” unsettles narratives of voice ownership and offers a vision of communal music making

    In July 2021, Berlin-based electronic musician Holly Herndon launched a new project called Holly+. Holly+ is an artificial intelligence voice model that, when fed any song or recording, outputs a version “sung” in Herndon’s voice–like an audio deepfake. The model has been trained on Herndon’s vocal recordings, creating a “vocal puppetry” effect that bears resemblance to Herndon’s real voice but retains a unique “machine learning, scratchy kind of neural net sound.” In essence, Holly+ turns Herndon’s voice into an instrument from which to build new pieces of music.

    Anyone can feed a song into Holly+ for free and publish the resulting track. If a user wants to use the track for commercial purposes, negotiations move onto the blockchain. Control and rights over Holly+ in commercial settings are controlled using a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) on the blockchain. The DAO–currently composed of Herndon’s friends, family, supporters, and artists contributing to Holly+–makes the decisions about licensing agreements and commercialization of Holly+ works. The profits are split between the new artist, DAO members, and Herndon. If a song is approved by the DAO, it will be minted as a non-fungible token (NFT) and sold via the blockchain-based Zora auction house.

  • Meet CC Summit Presenter: Dr. Kavita Batra

  • Take-Two Sues Enthusiasts Behind GTA Fan Projects re3 & reVC

    Take-Two Interactive has sued several programmers and enthusiasts said to be behind the popular re3 and reVC Grand Theft Auto fan projects. The lawsuit says that after the company filed a DMCA takedown notice to remove the projects from Github, the defendants filed a bad faith counter notice to have the content reinstated, thus triggering this copyright infringement lawsuit.

  • Anti-Piracy Alliance Calls For a ‘Staydown’ Requirement in EU’s Digital Services Act

    The Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance has compiled a list of amendments to improve the Digital Service Act proposal, which is the official successor to the E-Commerce Directive. The group calls for staydown requirements, to ensure that pirated material stays offline. In addition, it would like to see repeat copyright infringers being permanently disconnected.

  • Sony Music Says DNS Service Is Implicated In Copyright Infringement At The Domains It Resolves

    One of the characteristics of maximalist copyright companies is their limitless sense of entitlement. No matter how much copyright is extended, be it in duration, or breadth of application, they want it extended even more. No matter how harsh the measures designed to tackle copyright infringement, they want them made yet harsher. And no matter how distantly connected to an alleged copyright infringement a company or organization or person may be, they want even those bystanders punished.

  • Mystery Over Fake Section 1201 Takedown Claims Sent By ‘Video Industry Association of America’ Deepens

    It was only a week or so ago that we discussed the latest example of the type of fake DMCA notices that Google gets to delist certain URLs from search results. In this instance, a couple of factors made these DMCA notices even more problematic than usual. For starters, they claim to be coming from the U.S. Copyright Office, which very much does not send in DMCA notices like this. On top of that, the notices claim they are being sent by the U.S. Copyright Office on behalf of the Video Industry Association of America which, as I noted in my original post, doesn’t seem to actually exist. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these are notices for Section 1201 claims, which deal with anti-circumvention aspects of copyright law, that target mostly stream-ripping sites and sites that cover or guide legit uses of those sites. Notably, Google does not have an appeal process for 1201 notices, leaving anyone who got delisted basically screwed.