Audiocasts/Shows

• Start Gaming On Linux With This One Command – Invidious

  Setting up the packages you need to game under Linux can be a little bit overwhelming but luckily there’s an easier way, recently I was told about LibreGaming an install script that will bring in all the packages you to start playing.

• Windows Supports My Hardware, Linux Does NOT! – Invidious

  So many of you guys are switching from Windows to Linux, but many of you have run into a major issue–hardware compatibility. Windows supports all of you devices and peripherals. Linux does not! Why is this the case and what can you do about it?

Kernel Space

• Alder Lake Support Added To Intel’s TCC Driver In Linux 5.15 – Phoronix

  While much of Intel’s next-gen Alder Lake processor support appears to be in good shape for Linux 5.14, some remaining items are landing for the current Linux 5.15 cycle. The latest Alder Lake support hitting the kernel is for Intel’s TCC cooling driver.

  The Intel TCC driver is the new cooling driver merged earlier this year that allows for preemptively downclocking your CPU at a lower thermal threshold. The Intel TCC driver allows manipulating the Thermal Control Circuit offset so it’s lower than the default activation temperature. The TCC driver works with Intel CPUs going back to Skylake along with all current Intel client CPUs.

• The Latest Progress On Rust For The Linux Kernel

  While the Rust programming language support for usage within the kernel isn’t landing for the Linux 5.15 merge window ending this weekend, that effort remains ongoing. A status update on the effort was shared this week about Rust usage for the Linux kernel.

  Miguel Ojeda as one of the lead developers involved in the Rust for Linux effort — and currently working on the effort under contract for Google — presented at this week’s virtual Linaro Connect conference on the effort.

• Graphics Stack

  • CoreCtrl 1.2 Brings Support For More Sensors, Voltage Offsets – Phoronix

    CoreCtrl 1.2 was released this week as the open-source, independently-developed application for exposing more sensor support on Linux and offering various controls aroudnd over/under-clocking and other tuning. At the moment CoreCtrl is primarily focused on making the most use of AMD Radeon GPUs under Linux with some options not otherwise readily available on the platform.

  • Another Batch Of RadeonSI Optimizations Land In Mesa 21.3 – Phoronix

    Another batch of minor optimizations were merged to Mesa 21.3 for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

    Marek Olsak and other AMD developers have been working on an assortment of RadeonSI optimizations over the past number of weeks to reduce CPU overhead during certain driver operations and other improvements. The work is more than 42 patches in total.

Applications

• OpenShot 2.6.1 Released For This Open-Source Video Editor

  Released in August was the big OpenShot 2.6 video editor update while this weekend has been succeeded by its first point release.

  OpenShot 2.6 brought new computer vision (CV) and AI effects, new audio effects, continues to evolve the user-interface for this non-linear video editor, improved various video editing tools, added FFmpeg 4.x support, improved its Blender integration, and perhaps msot important strived for better performance and stability. There were also many bugs fixed in the process for OpenShot 2.6.

• KeePass 2.49 Released! How to Install in Ubuntu 20.04 / 18.04

  KeePass Password Safe 2.49 released with user interface improvements and minor new features. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu via PPA.

  According to the release note, the new release added new dedicated context menus for custom string fields and auto-type associations in the entry dialog. Allows to copy names, values, target windows and sequences, copy and paste items, and do select all and move to actions. The button “More” is present to the right of the custom string fields and auto-type associations list to show the context menu.

Instructionals/Technical

• How To Install Adobe Acrobat Reader on Ubuntu 20.04

  When we download some file from the internet, mostly there are chances that it is in pdf format so we should have a pdf reader to read that file. The most efficient and commonly used pdf reader is Adobe Acrobat Reader. It is a handy multi-platform PDF software which is used to read, comment, and perform different tasks on PDF files. The premium edition comes with additional capabilities such as editing text, annotating, converting, sharing, and signing PDFs. Here we will discuss the simple procedure for installing Adobe Acrobat Reader on Ubuntu 20.04.

• How To Install Gradle on Debian 11 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Gradle on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Gradle is an open-source build tool for the automation of applications. Gradle build scripts are written using a Groovy or Kotlin domain-specific language (DSL) instead of the XML form commonly used by Apache Maven for declaring the project configuration.

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

• How to Install and use Artha Dictionary in Ubuntu

  In today’s world, everyone significantly relies on search engines to find any information related to any subject. So if someone is looking for the meaning of a particular word, they usually do it online. But sometimes, you can’t always connect to the internet due to its unavailability, and in such a case, the offline dictionary comes handy. Also, turning pages in a hefty book is considerably slower than typing a word on your keyboard. Using a dictionary appropriately, you may discover a word’s definition, spelling, synonyms, antonyms, etc. A dictionary is a guidebook on words that defines the meanings and use of specific terms.

• How to Install h.264 decoder on Ubuntu

  We want to play a video on Ubuntu. We just went to the folder and double-clicked on the video to play it but wait, what is this? It gives an error that the playback requires an H.264(High Profile) decoder plugin that is not installed.

• How to List Installed Packages in Ubuntu With APT

  When you want to remove unwanted software from your system, having a list of all installed packages right in front of you can help. On Ubuntu, APT makes it easier for users to get a list of packages currently installed on their system.

  In this guide, you will learn how to list installed packages on Ubuntu using APT, the default package manager on Debian-based distributions.

• How to Play PC Games on Linux With Lutris

  Gaming on Linux has long been the holy grail of turning open-source operating systems into mainstream competitors to Windows.

  Linux can do everything that Windows can, except host the latest games. In an effort to solve this problem and make gaming on Linux a viable proposition, comes a gaming client, Lutris. But what does Lutris do for running games on Linux, and should you try it out?

• How to enable process accounting in Ubuntu

  As Linux administrators, one of our everyday jobs is managing and monitoring each user’s activities within an organizational infrastructure. It is also beneficial to gather data from the system and network. For instance, at our company, we have a developers team that is constantly working on servers. As a result, we will need the best utility to keep an eye on them. Isn’t it?

• How to install and use xpad on Ubuntu

  Ubuntu being the top trending distribution of Linux, provides an extended support to access several applications. Xpad is an Ubuntu application available on Ubuntu Software or you can install it using Command line support too; this application is about the sticky notes; Xpad consists of multiple text boxes and with the help of sticky notes, one can save any kind of information that you want to remember, and you think you may forget it. The Xpad application supports multiple operating systems such as Linux and macOS. In this article, we will demonstrate the installation of Xpad, as well as a detailed usage of Xpad is provided in this guide.

• How to increase the open file limits on Ubuntu

  On a Linux-based system such as Ubuntu, we occasionally face problems such as “too many open files,” especially when you install and work in platforms like Apache web server and Oracle database. The encountered error signifies that our server has opened the files up to the default maximum number. This issue occurs when the system imposes resource constraints on any user or session. For instance, the maximum size that can be locked into memory, the maximum size of created file, the maximum CPU time that can be utilized, the maximum number of processes that are allowed to execute, and the maximum virtual memory size that can be used; these are all examples of resource limitations in an Ubuntu system.

• How to install Perl on Ubuntu

  Perl is a programming language which is used for general purpose to create different algorithms. It is also used for different tasks including administration, GUI development, and Web development.

  Perl has some distinguished features such as the Perl database integration interface that supports third party databases including Postgre, MySql and Oracle. Perl works with markup languages like HTML. It can be embedded in other systems as its interpreter allows it. “The duct tape of the internet” is also associated with Perl.

• How to install Protobuf on Ubuntu

  Protocol Buffer, abbreviated as Protobuf, is an open source library developed by Google that allows to serialize or deserialize structured data. It is used to communicate with one another over a network and to store data when building applications.

  In this article we are going to install Protobuf on Ubuntu (Linux OS) by below mentioned methods, you can follow any of these methods for successful installation of Protobuf.

• How to install PuTTY on Ubuntu

  PuTTY is a widely used SSH client for windows; however, it supports various network protocols such as Telnet, rlogin. The system administrators use PuTTY as SSH and Telnet client as well. Telnet is a protocol used to establish communication between two or more devices in a network, but it was declared as an insecure protocol, so the ground for another protocol was clear. A new protocol named SSH (Secure Shell) was introduced that allows multiple devices to communicate over a network in a secure manner. PuTTY SSH client provides extensive support for well-known operating systems. In this article, we will guide you to install PuTTY as an SSH client on your Ubuntu, and before this basic working flow of the PuTTY is also described here…

• How to install and use GDebi on Ubuntu

  GDebi is a package installer to install Debian executable packages on Debian-based distribution of Linux. It is foreseen that while installing the Debian packages on Ubuntu, a dependency error comes; that won’t allow you to install the package; the GDebi package installer will resolve the dependency issue. Ubuntu uses the default software installer to install .deb packages; GDebi can also be used because it is more efficient and quicker as compared to the default Ubuntu installer. Ubuntu is well known for its resource consumption; that’s why it would be a good option to use GDebi as a default installer for .deb packages: inspired by this; we have compiled a detailed guide on installation and use of GDebi package installer…

• Symbolic Link in Linux

  Linux is one of the most stable operating systems available in the market that helps manage files and directories via command-line interface commands. You can use the Linux command-line interface command for creating, removing, or deleting a symbolic link. It also allows you to create a symbolic link called symlink or soft link and points to another file or directory. We focus on various Linux commands to get along with a symlink.

  Before moving forward, you must know about various types of symbolic links and their importance in Linux. There are two types of symlink available in Linux.

• How to install and use gThumb on Ubuntu

  The gThumb app is an open-source software image viewer, image organizer, and a well-integrated tool for GNOME desktop environments. Moreover, it is also available for most of the Linux distros; Ubuntu comes with a default image viewer named as the eye of GNOME (eog); this default app of Ubuntu has very basic functionalities; on the other hand; gThumb acts as a multipurpose tool for image handlings in Ubuntu. Therefore, it is among the list of well-known tools of Ubuntu; this article is focused on gThumb; we will guide you about the installation of this tool and the usage of gThumb in detail…

• 3 Ways to install Telegram app on Fedora Linux – Linux Shout

  Here we are using Fedora 34 Linux to install the Telegram application, however, the steps will be the same for older versions of it as well such as Fedora 33, 32, 31, 30, 29…

  Telegram is a popular chatting application that uses the internet to send messages and share media files. It comes with lots of features and better security options than WhatsApp. Hence if you already have the Telegram app on your smartphone and want to access your chats and media files directly on Desktop; then we can install the Telegram Desktop application on Linux, Windows, and macOS easily.

  We already have done a couple of articles around this subject, hence if you are a Debian based system user such as Ubuntu, then follow this link: How to install Telegram Desktop App on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

  Whereas for Fedora users, the below-given steps will work perfectly fine.

• 2 Ways to install TeamViewer on Fedora 34 Linux – Linux Shout

  TeamViewer is a freemium remote desktop application that can be used on all popular systems such as Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux. Here we will learn different methods to download and install the TeamViewer application on Fedora 34 Linux systems.

• The Smartest Ways to Send Email from the Linux Command Line

  Even though half a century has passed since the first email message was sent, we still rely on ancient technology daily. Modern email clients and services are sleek, easy to use, and packed with more advanced features than most users know how to use.

  Sometimes, however, all you need to do is send a simple text-only message, and you may not always be able to launch a GUI application or log in to a webmail interface to get the job done. In such situations, it’s handy to know how to send email from the Linux command line, and this article explains how to do just that.

• How to Install Fail2ban with Firewalld on AlmaLinux 8 – LinuxCapable

  Fail2ban is an intrusion prevention software framework that protects computer servers from primarily brute-force attacks, banning bad user agents, banning URL scanners, and much more. Fail2ban achieves this by reading access/error logs of your server or web applications. Fail2ban is coded in the python programming language.

  The guide will give a rundown on installing Fail2ban on AlmaLinux 8 and some basic setup and tips.

• How to Install Python 3.8 on Debian 11 – LinuxCapable

  By default, Debian 11 Bullseye does not come with Python 3.8 in its repositories, unlike some other distributions such as Ubuntu. Python 3.9 is now the latest stable feature release series of Python 3, with Python 3.10 still in beta.

  To run some applications or frameworks on Debian 11, you may need to install Python 3.8 on your system, for example, using the Swift programming framework given it built to utilize Ubuntu’s LTS versions that still run the older versions of Python by default. Python 3.8 is currently being worked on for security releases, but it is advisable to upgrade to newer versions if you are developing applications.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to download the latest version of Python 3.8, compile and make it on your Debian 11 Bullseye operating system.

• How to Install Linux Malware Detect (Maldet) on Rocky Linux 8 – LinuxCapable

  Linux Malware Detect (LMD), also known as Maldet, is a malware scanner for Linux released under the GNU GPLv2 license. Maldet is quite popular amongst sysadmins and website devs due to its focus on the detection of PHP backdoors, dark mailers, and many other malicious files that can be uploaded on a compromised website using threat data from network edge intrusion detection systems to extract malware that is actively being used in attacks and generates signatures for detection.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install and use Maldet on Rocky Linux 8.

• How To Install Netdata on AlmaLinux 8 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Netdata on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Netdata is an Open Source real-time server monitoring tool. Netdata allows you to monitor CPU, RAM usage, disk I/O, network traffic, Postfix, among many others. The tool is designed to visualize the now in as much detail as possible, allowing the user to get an overview of what is happening and what has just happened in your system or application.

  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 Netdata monitoring systems and applications on AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

• How to install and use Microsoft Office on Linux | FOSS Linux

  Switching from Microsoft Windows to Linux distros is not an easy task for all users, as it seems. Most users find it difficult to get used to the Linux working environment. In addition, if your work depends on applications such as Microsoft word, excel, publisher, PowerPoint, access, it won’t be easier for you to port to Linux easily.

  Linux ships in with Libre-office pre-installed. The software allows you to do all you can as you always do on Microsoft Office, but frankly speaking, it is not a Microsoft Office. The software only gives the feel and comfort of working on Microsoft-related applications.

• Install Third Party Software Using Fedy In Fedora – OSTechNix

  The Fedora project will not include any package that doesn’t comply with Fedora licensing policies in the official repositories. So, many users rely on third-party repositories like RPM Fusion to install propriety drivers, software and codecs that Fedora doesn’t want to ship due to legal and licensing reasons. In this guide, we will see what is Fedy and how to install third-party software and multimedia codecs with Fedy in Fedora Linux operating systems.

• How to play Battlefield 1 on Linux

  Battlefield 1 is an FPS game developed by DICE and published by Electronic Arts. The game is the fifteenth release in the series. It was released on Steam for Windows in 2016. However, it was never released on Linux. Here’s how to get it working on your system.

• How To Add Swap Space on Debian 11 – TecAdmin

  Swap memory is a location on hard disk to be used as Memory by the operating system. When the operating systems detects that main memory is low and required more RAM to run applications properly it check for swap space and transfer files there. In general terms, swap is a part of the hard disk used as RAM on the system.

  This tutorial will help you to Add Swap on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux system.

• How to Change Network MAC Address in Linux

  Every network interface on your Linux operating system distribution is associated with a unique number called MAC (Media Access Control). The wireless and Ethernet network modules are examples of commonly used network interfaces on a Linux operating system. MAC serves a unique role in identifying these network interfaces through system protocols and programs.

  For example, through DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol), a network interface is assigned an IP address by a network router automatically. In this case, the MAC address acts as a reference manual for networking devices like the router so that these devices know the identity of the other network devices they are communicating with or, in this case, assigning IP addresses.

• How to Install Sysdig on Debian 11 – LinuxCapable

  Sysdig is open source, system-level exploration: capture system state and activity from a running Linux-based system such as Debian, then save, filter, and analyze that is particularly useful for system analysis, inspection, and debugging, amongst other uses. Sysdig is scriptable in Lua and includes a command-line interface and a powerful interactive UI using the command csysdig that runs in your terminal.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Sysdig on Debian 11 Bullseye.

• Installing DEB in Debian systems using GUI or Terminal – 2 Ways

  Deb packages are used to install various programs on Linux distros based on popular “Debian” that are not available in the official repositories. Here we learn two easy methods to install Deb files…

  Just like we have .exe files on Windows to install different software distributed by Microsoft or third-party developers; in the same way “.Deb” packages are meant to run on Debian and its based systems such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, MX Linux, and others.

  However, installing .exe files is way easier on Windows than on Linux, we just need to double click them. But the same is not true for all Debian systems, nevertheless, the command terminal is always there.

• How to Install Glances System Monitor on Debian 11 – LinuxCapable

  Glances System Monitor is free, an open-source command-line tool for process monitoring, system resources such as CPU, Disk I/O, File System, Load Average, Memory, Network Interfaces and processes. Glances are built with Python language. Glances support cross-platform monitoring, which can be used in conjunction with a web-based interface.

  One of the excellent features Glances supports is the ability to set thresholds in the program. You can set careful, warning, and critical in the configuration file, which will then relay information in colors that can show alerts to systems resources bottlenecks, system resources issues, and much more. Glances, by default, comes with a pre-set list of colors, but you can modify and add additional configs.

• How to Download File Using Wget via Proxy in Linux

  Most Linux users prefer to carry out their periodic file download requirements from a command-line interface. It is a convenient approach as they do not have to switch between web browsers’ GUI tabs or go through several redirecting download buttons before initiating the actual download of the files they need. This objective is achieved by using a terminal-based file download program.

  Wget is one such program. To use it, you only need to prefix the URL containing the file you wish to download with the command wget.

• How to Compare Two Files in Linux Terminal

  The need for file comparison on a Linux operating system is often overlooked but has an important role to play especially for Linux system administrators. Being able to flexibly compare two files on a Linux terminal sheds some light on how unique or different a set of files are perceived to be.

• Chrome Settings 101: How to Customize Google Chrome – Make Tech Easier

  A browser is our gateway to the World Wide Web. We use it almost daily to access web pages, making it important to personalize the browser to our needs. Google Chrome, one of the most popular browsers, offers a variety of customization settings. Let’s explore how to customize Google Chrome to suit our needs.

• Execute Commands On Remote Linux Systems Via SSH – OSTechNix

  The other day I was testing how to keep file permissions intact while copying files or directories to multiple locations and systems. When I wanted to check the file permissions on a remote system, I had to log-in to that system over SSH and check the attributes. The process of log-in and log-out from the remote system multiple times was bit annoying to me. I thought it would be better if I can be able to execute commands on remote Linux systems via SSH.

  Luckily, I find a workaround to do it after looking into the man pages of ssh command. If you ever wondered how to run a command or script on a remote system from your local system itself without having to log in to that remote system, here is how to do it.

Games

• Introducing the Boiling Steam Wiki

  Within the past year or two, Boiling Steam has grown. Two editors have now become four, and the number of articles we’re publishing has increased drastically. As a result, we’ve needed to become a little more organized.

  Ever found yourself scrounging through the search bar trying to find that hardware review that’s a few months old, and has since been buried by newer articles? Starting today, we’re hoping to eliminate that by means of our Boiling Steam Wiki. Now you can easily browse our articles in a neatly organized fashion. Articles have been divided by topic, such as game reviews, distro reviews, essays, interviews, among others. Game reviews have further been divided by genre, and you’ll be able to instantly tell whether they were reviewed using Proton or played natively. A table of contents is provided, and you can quickly switch between topics by clicking “Back to Top” at the end of each section to bring you back to said table.

• Steam Top 50 Games: 72% Work on Linux in Sept. 2021

  This is an update on the Steam Top 50 current situation, since we checked back in March how things were at the top of the charts – it used to be 70% of games working out of the box. Well, we took a look again very recently at the Steam top 50 games on Steam with the highest number of concurrent players over the past 2 weeks – you won’t see a major difference yet, but while the Steam top 50 games have changed a little bit, the overall Linux compatibility has not got worse, and may have slightly improved.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Shiny new things in Thunar thanks to GSoC 2021

  GSoC 2021 is over now and I am happy to tell you that both students working on thunar did an excellent job. Alot of nice stuff has been added thanks to them !

  In order to allow you to discover all these new features, Thunar 4.17.5 was just released. (Note that this is a development release. It still might have some rough edges)

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Frameworks 5.86.0

    KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.86.0.

    KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.

    This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

  • KDE Sees More Plasma Wayland Fixes As Plasma 5.23 Hits Its Soft Feature Freeze

    It’s been a busy start to September for the KDE project and is now under its soft feature freeze for Plasma 5.23.

    This past week saw a lot of fixes and other work to the KDE stack. KDE developer Nate Graham continues doing a wonderful job summing up the KDE development contributions on a weekly basis with some of his highlights for the past week being:

    - Support for deleting branches with Kate’s Git integration.

    - Konsole 21.08.2 will fix the issue of Konsole being very slow to close a t ab when something is written at the prompt.

  • Latte Dock v0.10.2 | Bug Fix Release

    Let’s welcome Latte Dock v0.10.2 the 2nd Official Bug Fix Release of v0.10.x branch!

  • Tag filtering, better navigation and lots of little UI tweaks — Kalendar devlog 14

    This week, we have done lots of small tweaks to Kalendar and are introducing a big, new, highly requested feature by many of you.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 41 Has Finally Arrived: A Look at What’s Changed

    GNOME 41 has been released with several new functionalities, including improvements in apps, design changes, and whatnot.

    Version 40 was a big release for the GNOME project, revamping the Activities Overview that has defined GNOME for a decade. GNOME 41 builds upon these changes to improve the free desktop for new and experienced users alike. Here are some of the big additions.

Distributions

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • [Book] Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Administration · Pablo Iranzo Gómez’s blog

    After some time working on it (about 6 months for the main work and some more time for the reviews) with my colleagues Miguel and Scott, we’ve finally made it thanks to the support from our families and Packt, as well as several members of RH teams that gave the clearance to get it out!

    The book targets users willing to learn skills to administer Red Hat Enterprise Linux or compatible systems. It is a hands-on guide to the administration and can be used as reference thanks to the real-life examples provided along the text.

  • [IBM] Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Why Do We Work So Damn Much?

    A few weeks ago, I listened to a very interesting podcast, Why Do We Work So Damn Much?, where podcast host, NY Times columnist Ezra Klein, interviewed anthropologist James Suzman. Suzman has devoted almost thirty years to studying and writing about the Ju’hoansi and other bushmen from the Kalahari Basin, who are among the world’s few remaining hunter-gatherer societies. He recently published Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, a book about his research.

    Modern humans emerged in Africa between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. Our homo sapiens ancestors were hunter-gatherers for most of those years, collecting wild plants and hunting wild animals. Starting around 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution introduced the domestication of plants and animals, leading many hunter-gatherer groups to establish agricultural communities and villages.

    The vast majority of hunter-gatherers disappeared a long time ago, but a few groups remain in isolated sections of Africa, Australia, the Amazon rainforest and the Arctic. Anthropologists have been studying these remaining hunter-gatherers to learn how they’ve been able to survive so much longer than other human groups, as well as to understand the behaviors and cultures that modern humans may have inherited from our closest ancestors.

  • IBM accused of stealing trade secrets from Chinese joint venture

    The complaint said IBM China — which Neu Cloud alleged was being directed by IBM Corp — and its Beijing-based distributor Beijing TeamSun Technology Co., a “leading integrated information technology service provider in China,” formed Neu Cloud in 2014 to “further open up the Chinese market” for hardware and software based on IBM’s Power Systems servers. Their agreement allegedly made Neu Cloud “completely reliant” on IBM for its supply and gave IBM “substantial control” of its operation.

    Neu Cloud said it submitted bid requests to IBM under their agreement that included confidential customer information, and that IBM agreed to keep it confidential.

    According to the complaint, IBM established a separate joint venture with another Chinese company, INSPUR Co, in 2017 to also develop and market Power Systems products.

• Debian Family

  • Xarchive now extracts DEBIAN control folder

    Jon (scsijon in the Puppy Forum) is helping me to get Chrome and Chromium working non-root. This has resulted in me making a discovery yesterday, about the Xarchive archiver and extraction GUI tool.

    Jon downloaded a Chrome 64-bit DEB file, and clicked on it, in a running EasyOS 2.9, to install it. The PETget installer, if sees a post-install script, will execute it. Then he got it working as user ‘spot’.

    He emailed instructions to me, including to edit script /usr/bin/google-chrome.

    DEB, opened it up using Xarchive to examine its contents, then manually copied the files to install it. It did not have script /usr/bin/google-chrome.

    The penny dropped. Xarchive does not extract the ‘DEBIAN’ control folder. This has a post-install script that creates /usr/bin/google-chrome.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Mini robots taking over

    A couple of cute mini robots have graced the blog over the last couple of weeks. One mastered dropping a straw in a glass, and the other did a brilliant Mars rover impression.

    We also met two brilliant makers: Anna Ploszajski and Geeky Faye. Both are multi-material polymaths with great stories to tell.

  • Swappable faceplates for laptops

    There is a cottage industry that manufactures stickers that are the size of the entire laptop but those are inconvenient and not particularly slick. You only have one chance to apply and any misalignments or air bubbles are going to be there forever.

    [...]

    But wait, there’s more. Corporate PR departments should be delighted with this. Currently whenever people do presentations in conferences their laptops are clearly visible and advertise the manufacturer. The same goes for sales people visiting customers (well, eventually, once Covid 19 passes) and so on. Suppose you could have this instead:

  • This YouTuber made his own battery spot welder from an old microwave using Arduino | Arduino Blog

    YouTuber Robert Dunn (known as Under Dunn) had just received a large box of loose cylindrical battery cells and therefore wanted to join them together to create a large battery pack. Ordinarily, this is accomplished by utilizing a specialized type of tool called a battery spot welder that is used to tack nickel strips onto the terminals. But Dunn didn’t want to spend the money on a new one, so he built his own DIY version using only an old microwave, an offcut of copper, some wire, and an Arduino Uno with a solid-state relay attached to control the current discharge timings.

    Dunn began by extracting the transformer from the microwave and cutting it open to expose the coils within. As a quick refresher, transformers step voltage up or down by using a pair of opposing coils inside of a magnetic field, which also causes the current to increase or decrease in an inversely proportional manner. Because Dunn wanted to maximize the current, he replaced the smaller coil with an even smaller one made from 6-guage wire that could handle the extremely high current.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • 10 Best Ringtone Maker Apps To Make Custom Ringtones Easily

  • The Best New Android Games This Week – Blon, Final Fantasy IV, Shootin Star and More – Droid Gamers

  • 12 new and notable Android apps and live wallpapers from the last two weeks including KONTXT Voice, Lenovo Smart Frame, and Facebook View (8/28/21 – 9/11/21)

  • Here’s what Android 12′s new Private Compute Core is actually going to do

  • Lost Your Android Phone? Here’re A Few Steps You Can Take To Retrieve It

  • How to pin and unpin an Android app | Android Central

  • EU is investigating if Google Assistant is being forced on Android phones

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Facebook Is Censoring People For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon

  Last November, I made a brief post to Facebook about Mastodon. Mastodon is an open-source and open social network, which is decentralized and all about user control instead of corporate control. I’ve blogged about Mastodon and the dangers of Facebook before, but rarely mentioned Mastodon on Facebook itself.

  [...]

  Wonder with me for a second what this one-off post I composed myself might have done to trip Facebook’s filter…. and it is probably obvious that what tripped the filter was the mention of an open source competitor, even though Facebook is much more enormous than Mastodon. I have been a member of Facebook for many years, and this is the one and only time anything like that has happened.

  Why they decided today to take down that post – I have no idea.

  In case you wondered about their sincerity towards stamping out misinformation — which, on the rare occasions they do something about, they “deprioritize” rather than remove as they did here — this probably answers your question. Or, are they sincere about thinking they’re such a force for good by “connecting the world’s people?” Well, only so long as the world’s people don’t say nice things about alternatives to Facebook, I guess.

• Play with model trains in OpenTTD | Opensource.com

  My father has always been fond of model trains, and I remember watching him building a track around the Christmas tree when I was young. When Lego train sets were released, he and I transitioned to them for their convenience and inherent extensibility. We built and operated Lego trains and monorail tracks over the course of many years. I’ve often imagined a possible future in which I have a garage or a basement dedicated to miniature landscapes and electric whistling trains. Then again, the probability of me diving that severely into yet another hobby is pretty low, so I was very happy to discover that virtual model railways can provide me with much of the same satisfaction. The engine for my virtualized hobby is OpenTTD, an open source simulation game based on an old ’90s game called Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

• OpenBoxes: Open Source Project For Inventory management

  Brief: OpenBoxes is a free and open-source supply Chain Management System for Linux, windows, macOS. Here, we take a look at the features and help you to get started with it.

  OpenBoxes is a management system designed to manage inventory and keep you on track with all the setting on it. It happens to be one of my top recommendations for the list of free and open-source Inventory and Warehouse Management

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Here’s Why Firefox is Seeing a Continuous Decline for Last 12 Years

      There has been a lot of discussion lately about the decline of the Firefox browser and numerous articles about it losing 50 Million users in the last two years.

      But the real decline has been over 12 years with a total loss of half a Billion users and 75% of the market share it once held.

      It all started in 2009 Q3 with the fateful decision to force…

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Best MS Office Alternatives For Linux : Free Linux Office Suite

    There is no doubt about the popularity of “Microsoft Office Packages” as MS office suite is one of the reason behind the popularity of Windows operating systems. Office suite is backbone of the modern office around the world and no one can imagine the moment without office suites or packages.

    In this blog post, we are going to list out the some of the popular and best Microsoft office alternative for Linux based operating systems that are completely free to use. You might know the price tag behind the Microsoft Office Suites but here we are going to list out the free office software for Linux based operating systems.

• FSF

  • GNU Projects

    • Bison 3.8.1 released

      I'm very pleased to announce the release of Bison 3.8(.1), whose main 
      novelty is the D backend for deterministic parsers, contributed by 
      Adela Vais.  It supports all the bells and whistles of Bison's other 
      deterministic parsers, which include: pull/push interfaces, verbose 
      and custom error messages, lookahead correction, LALR(1), IELR(1), 
      canonical LR(1), token constructors, internationalization, locations,
      printers, token and symbol prefixes, and more. 
      There are several other notable changes.  Please see the detailed NEWS 
      below for more details. 
      

• Programming/Development

  • PostgreSQL JSON Functions

    JSON is an open-style JavaScript Object Notation used only for pairs of key-value data within the PostgreSQL database. JSON consists of many operators and functions to query the JSON information or data. In this article, we will demonstrate the working of JSON functions on some JSON data within the PostgreSQL tool. To work on JSON functions, one must have some JSON data in the database. Make sure you have PostgreSQL pgAmdin 4 installed and configured on your Windows 10 system because we have been implementing this article at Windows 10 on the PostgreSQL pgAdmin 4. Open your PostgreSQL Graphical user interface, e.g., pgAdmin, from the start bar of Windows 10 by searching it thoroughly. After that, it may require your master password and server password to get into it one after another. After adding the password, you have to tap on any database listed within the list of Servers and open the query tool to add some commands.

  • How to encode or decode a string using base64 in JavaScript

    Base64 encoding is an interesting way of representing information which is used to transform binary data into a string consisting of alphabets, digits and some special characters.
    Base64 is typically used to encode data that may be corrupted during transfer. Before eight bit bytes became a standard many systems such as SMTP (Email) used seven, six and even three bit bytes which led to data being lost during transfer between systems. So a new encoding scheme was developed which represented binary data in the form of text strings which could easily be transferred between systems without any damage to the data.

    Base64 is commonly used to encode the binary data of email attachments such as images and documents. It is also used to encode the images and audio files embedded in a webpage.

  • How to create a countdown timer in JavaScript

    Countdown timers are a kind of a virtual clocks which count the time until a specific date to mark the start or end of a special occasion. They were mostly used on the landing page of new upcoming websites but now they have found their way into e-commerce websites.

    The “time is running out” element on the countdown pages helps create urgency to generate more conversions on E-commerce websites. Timers can also be used on websites or blogs in order to display a countdown for special events i.e. anniversaries, birthdays, meetings etc. Countdown timers can also be used to count down the time till an offer becomes available

  • How to Convert a Number into a String in JavaScript

    Management of Data is a crucial task for any programmer; JavaScript is a very versatile programming language which offers multiple built-in methods to convert data into different data types. The .tostring() is one of these methods. The .tostring() method can be used to convert the data type of a variable from a number to a string. In this how-to guide we will learn to convert a number into a string using the .tostring() method in JavaScript.

Health/Nutrition

• The Waiver Of Patent Protection For COVID-19 Vaccines — On Practicability And Purpose Of Such Measure [Ed: What patent profiteers and extremists think of giving up patents in order to save literally millions of lives]

  Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), spoke of a “monumental moment” when referring to the U.S. government’s announcement on May 5, 2021, that the U.S. would support the waiver of patent protection for COVID-19 vaccines in World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations. On the very next day, the share prices of all manufacturers of approved COVID-19 vaccines slid by several percentage points, and the debate about a so-called patent waiver has dominated political and economic news around the world ever since. This article aims to shed light on the background of the debate.

  [...]

  Exporting vaccine doses already in stock to trouble spots would also have a direct impact. After the EU exported 34 million doses of vaccine months ago, the USA also announced its intention to export 60 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine that it doesn’t currently need.

  Finally, an unequal distribution of available vaccine should be addressed by strengthening the global COVAX campaign, as well as the global vaccine initiatives Gavi and CEPI behind it.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Security

    • Pysa Ransomware Gang Targets Linux [Ed: Does malware become news only the moment you can throw the word "Linux" into a headline, irrespective of what the underlying issue and how a machine is taken over by the first place?]

      The Pysa ransomware gang has created a Linux version of its malware designed to target Linux hosts with the ChaChi backdoor, using its Windows counterpart’s characteristics, according to a report by cloud security firm Lacework Labs.

Monopolies

• FOSS Patents: Federal judge awards Epic Games a mere consolation prize against Apple, which regrettably succeeded with its ‘web apps are viable’ lie

  Yesterday’s Epic Games v. Apple ruling by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (judgment, permanent injunction, and detailed Rule 52 order) amerely defers the resolution of the real competition issues facing iOS app distribution. It’s one of those situations in which either side “gets something” and could claim victory, as Apple apparently does though the stock market initially disagreed (I, personally don’t think the decision should have moved the stock at all). This makes it all the more remarkable that Epic doesn’t engage in spin but concedes defeat. It’s not that Epic achieved nothing; but for the time being, all it got is a consolation prize, and that’s why Fortnite won’t return to iOS at this stage.

• Apple still chooses not to support the industry-standard lossless audio format, even though they support it.
  

  It’s 2021, FLAC, or “Free Lossless Audio Codec” is over 20 years old, Android supports it, even Microsoft, but Apple implemented it and then deliberately made it so gimpy that you can’t really use it.

  FLAC is a simple and yet amazing audio codec. It’s simple in that it only applies highly tuned lossless compression to audio files, and amazing in that it sounds great everywhere you play it.

  While many inferior and obsolete codecs, such as MP3 and AAC (which Apple promotes) are lossy and were basically just designed to be patent minefields that would keep paying out in royalty checks for years, even if they did things in stupid and counterproductive ways, FLAC managed to avoid the patents and be an archival-quality format. A bit-for-bit replica of the original, when decompressed or played back.

  In a way, you can see another reason why Apple partnered with the “MAFIAA” to foist lossy formats on people.

• Patents

  • China to EU: we comply with the TRIPS Agreement and if you have any questions about standard-essential patent enforcement, let’s have bilateral talks

    On July 6, the European Commission, which represents the EU at the World Trade Organization (WTO) level, filed an elaborate five-page “request for information pursuant to Article 63.3 of the TRIPS Agreement” (TRIPS = Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) as a formal “communication from the European Union to China.” Styled as a request for information for transparency’s sake, the EU was expressing concerns over China’s standard-essential patent (SEP) case law, particularly global FRAND rate-setting decisions and antisuit injunctions.

    The very recent OPPO v. Sharp decision by the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) already demonstrated that the Chinese judiciary considers it stance on SEPs to be balanced and perfectly compatible with the concept of international comity (which in this context means that courts in one country respect their counterparts in another).

    Even clearer is the message that the Chinese government has for the EU. China does not believe to be under any obligation whatsoever to respond to the EU Commission’s request for information. The five-page questionnaire drew a five-paragraph response that fits on a single page.

  • Court reshuffle means three new presiding judges for Paris’ IP chamber [Ed: JUVE is boosting patent trolls such as IPCom because the site is in the litigation 'business' pocket]

    Two experienced IP judges, Carine Gillet and Florence Butin, have moved from the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris to take up new positions in other courts. Florence Butin is moving to the Paris Court of Appeal, while Carine Gillet will take a position at the Court of Appeal in Douai. French patent litigators highly respect both judges for their technical understanding in patent disputes. Gillet and Butin are now leaving the IP world for other areas of law.

    In particular, Carine Gillet established a reputation for her vast experience in technically-complex cases. A number of her decisions have attracted attention in the European patent community, such as the proceedings between Eli Lilly and Fresenius Kabi. Here, the court awarded the patent owner one of the highest damages ever seen in French patent cases.

    Gillet also made French patent history with her declaration of an anti-anti-suit injunction in the dispute between IPCom and Lenovo over the 100a patent. One lawyer said about Gillet, “She is bringing patent litigation in France to another level.”

    Thus, Gillet acquired a depth of patent expertise otherwise unusual in the French judiciary. In France, judges tend to regularly transfer between other courts and specialties.

• Trademarks

  • Disclaimers and Unitary Marks

    When can the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office require you to make a disclaimer in your application to register a mark, what does it mean, and when can you resist doing so?
    When filing a trademark application, there are multiple steps. If the examining attorney determines that there is an issue, he or she will send an office action to the applicant. There are many issues that may be raised in an office action that can prevent a trademark from being registered. One of them is a disclaimer requirement.

    A disclaimer is a statement that the applicant does not claim the exclusive right to use a descriptive, generic, geographic, or otherwise unregistrable wording, design or symbol apart from the mark as shown in the application. The reason for the disclaimer is that anyone should be free to use that component in other marks.

Kernel Space

• Habana Labs AI Driver Updates Submitted For Linux 5.15 – Phoronix

  While last week was the main “char/misc” pull request for the Linux 5.15 merge window, the Habana Labs driver changes were previously reverted from there due to opposition from the upstream kernel developers in the Direct Rendering Manager space. The concerning patches around DMA-BUF have now been removed and a new pull request submitted with updates to this AI driver for Linux 5.15.

  The original Habana Labs AI driver code for Linux 5.15 was strongly objected by DRM kernel developers as it was trying to push through DMA-BUF changes without the approval of the DRM developers and at the time also lacking any open-source user-space software.

• Paragon NTFS driver included in Linux 5.15 release

  Paragon Software’s NTFS driver has been included in the 5.15 release of the Linux kernel, bringing reliable read and write functionality for this filesystem to the kernel.

  The driver was merged by Linux creator Linus Torvalds earlier this month, after Paragon’s Konstantin Komarov requested that a branch containing code for the ntfs3 driver be included.

  Torvalds had some gripes about the way the patch was submitted but it was incorporated in the kernel.

• Linux kernel: more powerful driver for the NTFS file system integrated [Ed: Translation from German]

  Linux distributions should soon support the Windows NTFS file system better out of the box. This is thanks to a new NTFS kernel driver called “NTFS3”, which will be included in Linux 5.15, which is expected at the beginning of November. NTFS3 offers functions that have so far been lacking in the approach mostly used for NTFS support. At the same time, the new kernel code promises better performance. How significant the difference will actually be remains to be seen, however. Because the new driver has also released new energy for the developers of the driver commonly used up to now. For their part, they are working on a new version.

Applications

• 9 Best Free and Open Source Audio Analyzers

  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.

  Linux also sports a wide range of useful audio tools. This article examines audio analyzers. This type of software lets you visualize audio spectrum for real-time signals. Some of the programs also lets you analyze amplitude and phase spectrum as well. Also, you can visualize audio spectrum in FFT spectrum, 2D spectrogram, Octave spectrum, etc. modes.

• OpenShot 2.6.1 Released | Improved Crop + Translations + Bug Fixes

  Please check out the latest release of OpenShot! Lots of bugs and regressions fixed, and vastly improved language support (including 11 fully translated languages)!

• RSS Guard 4.0.2

  RSS Guard is a simple (yet powerful) feed reader. It is able to fetch the most known feed formats, including RSS/RDF and ATOM. It’s free, it’s open-source. RSS Guard currently supports Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian. RSS Guard will never depend on other services – this includes online news aggregators like Feedly, The Old Reader and others.

Instructionals/Technical

• Specifying duration in BIND’s named.conf

  When Michael asked what the leading P and PT entries in front of some times in named configuration options are, I recognized them from working with OpenDNSSEC: they are ISO 8601 duration and time period specifications.

• Exclusive: how to enable Vulkan in Crostini on your Chromebook right now

  The time has come: welcome to our exclusive guide on how you can use Vulkan in Crostini! This unlocks the full gaming power of Chromebooks by allowing more modern games to work. More importantly, it also allows Steam’s Proton compatibility layer to work at its full potential, which means the majority of Windows games will now run on Chromebooks. How cool is that?!

• How to Find out Graphics Card and Driver Installed in your system in Linux

  Some quick tips to guide you to find out about the Graphics card installed and driver in-use in your Linux system.

• How to Find and Remove Duplicate Files on Linux Using fdupes

  When working with large amounts of media and documents, it’s quite common to accumulate multiple copies of the same file on your computer. Inevitably, what follows is a cluttered storage space filled with redundant files, provoking periodic checks for duplicate files on your system.

  To this end, you’ll find various programs to identify and delete duplicate files. And fdupes happens to be one such program for Linux. So follow along as we discuss fdupes and guide you through the steps to find and delete duplicate files on Linux.

• Is Linux a Programming Language? [Ed: Severe inability to name GNU and what GNU does]

  The history of Linux is traced back to 1991 and Linux Torvalds, who upon the creation of the OS was a student at the University of Helsinki. He focused on creating an OS as a free alternative to Minix (another clone of Unix). At first, he wanted to name it Freax but then was recommended to approach it in a more personalized way. Thus, Linux is named after the creator.

• What Is LAMP Stack? What Is LAMP Used For?

  The LAMP stack is a popular software bundle using open source components to build and deliver web applications.

  Developers know LAMP because it has been a basis for web development since the late 1990s. With open-source tools for an operating system (Linux), web server (Apache), database server (MySQL), and programming language (PHP), the LAMP stack is an efficient and flexible method that enables competition with commercial software developers. Today, estimates show up to 80% of the internet uses open-source programming and software.

  This article looks at what LAMP stack is, the stack architecture, how it works, and the benefits of using LAMP to develop web applications.

• Upgrade Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 21.04 using Terminal or GUI

  Although there is no need to upgrade your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (focal fossa) to 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) if you want a Long term supported version for your applications, however those who want to try out the latest changes can go for it. By following the steps given in this article.

  Well, for those who don’t know about their Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Desktop- it is a long-term support release that will receive regular updates for 5 years whereas the latest Ubuntu 21.04 only for 9 months. It is because this non-LTS release is meant to receive the latest updates & package versions, hence if you would like to experience them then opt for it.

• How to install LibreCAD on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install LibreCAD 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.

Wine or Emulation

• Wine 6.17 Announcement

  The Wine development release 6.17 is now available.

  What’s new in this release (see below for details):
  – WineCfg program converted to PE.
  – Better high-DPI support in builtin applications.
  – More preparation work for the GDI syscall interface.
  – Improved debugger support in Wow64 mode.
  – Various bug fixes.

  The source is available from the following locations:

  https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.17.tar.xz

  http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.17.tar.xz

  Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:

  https://www.winehq.org/download

  You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation

  You can also get the current source directly from the git
  repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.

  Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
  AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.

• Wine 6.17 Released With Better HiDPI Support For Built-In Apps – Phoronix

  Wine 6.17 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release as we move closer towards the Wine 7.0 release around the start of the new year.

  With Wine 6.17 most notable is better HiDPI support for Wine’s built-in applications. Two weeks back with Wine 6.16 it brought better HiDPI theming support with enhancing Wine’s High-DPI support appearing to be a recent focus for CodeWeavers and others.

• Wine development release 6.17 is out with continued work for the GDI syscall interface

  Here we are again time to stop and re-wine. Another development release of the Wine compatibility layer has become available with Wine 6.17 having the bottle popped open today.

  For newer readers and Linux users here’s a refresher – Wine is a compatibility layer built for operating systems like Linux, macOS and BSD. The idea is to allow other platforms to run games and applications only built and supported for Windows. It’s also part of what makes up Steam Play Proton. Once a year or so, a new stable release is made.

Games

• A new survivor has appeared in the latest Don’t Starve Together update | GamingOnLinux

  Don’t Starve Together has a new face roaming the lands. In the latest major update to the popular survival game, Klei has introduced us to Wanda with a new fancy animated short. This update follows on from Don’t Starve Together: Waterlogged that launched in August, which added more content to explore.

  Like some other characters introduced, Wanda is not actually free. While you can opt to pay for Wanda directly in a special Chest or a new Starter Pack, you can also “weave” (craft) Wanda using the in-game Spool currency which is reasonably easy to get over a few weeks.

  “Wanda has been trying to outrun her future for longer than she can remember – but after a split-second decision left her tangled up in the Constant’s timestream, it might be her past that’s finally catching up to her…”

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • This week in KDE: a random grab-bag collection of stuff

    Bit of a short list this week, but there’s much more still happening, with merge requests aplenty going through review! Plasma 5.23 is now in “soft feature freeze” and we are working hard to stabilize it for the release next month.

    Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.

  • KDE Frameworks 5.86 Improves Plasma Wayland for NVIDIA GPUs, Adds over 200 Changes

    KDE Frameworks 5.86 is here to further improve the Plasma Wayland session, this time for NVIDIA GPU users who encountered content update failures on window resize or KRunner not display search results. It also fixes two crtical memory leaks that may affect the KDE Plasma desktop environment and Plasma widgets.

    Among the improvements, this release brings back currency conversions in KRunner and the Kickoff application menu, adds support for editing the icons for all installed apps through Kickoff’s “Edit Application…” menu, displays applications launched from a global shortcut in System Monitor’s “Applications” page, and improves the shadows for Plasma pop-ups, dialogs, OSDs, and notifications to be more consistent with the shadows for app windows.

  • BorgBackup – Continued

    In my last BorgBackup post I described my new setup using BorgBackup for the backup of my private data.

    After two weeks of use, I have now first experiences on the way the incremental backups perform and some additional information how I apply this to backup a virtual FreeBSD server hosting some of my stuff.

Distributions

• [Older] Void Linux: excellent choice for more advanced Linux users

  Void Linux is one of my favourite distributions, but since it employs a rolling release model, I never really get the opportunity to highlight it. So, I’m picking this random day to talk about it.

  If you’re fairly proficient in “install and go” Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro, etc., and want to get a better insight into a Linux system without going overboard, Void is a great choice. It’s easy to install, easy to grasp and manage manually because it eschews systemd in favour of runit, it has an excellent community, and the package repository is far, far larger than you’d expect. Void also offers both GNU libc and musl versions.

  Void is a bit more hands-on than e.g. Ubuntu, but not over the top like some other distributions. Setting up a Void Linux system will teach you quite a bit about how a Linux system works, but the no-nonsense, logical layout of it all means you’re not going to be overwhelmed. It also happens to be one of the few distributions that take ppc64le seriously thanks to a dedicated community, so it’s my system of choice there.

• BSD

  • Unix derivative GhostBSD: New version 09/21/06 switches back to the rc init system [Ed: Translation from German]

    The developers of GhostBSD have released version 09/21/06 of the free Unix derivative. In addition to minor bug fixes, there is a central change: the return to the rc init system. Because while FreeBSD (and OpenBSD) consistently used the classic rc init, GhostBSD used the modern OpenRC for a while, which is also used by Gentoo, Alpine Linux and (optionally) Devuan GNU / Linux. OpenRC works on a dependency basis, but is based on the classic SysVInit and can also start services in parallel if required.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • CloudLinux Adds TuxCare Support for CentOS 8 Through 2025 | Data Center Knowledge

    Extended support will give CentOS 8 users time to determine which of the many CentOS clones will work best for them.

  • As CentOS Linux Loses Support Dec. 31, CloudLinux TuxCare Moves In to Help CentOS Users

    With official support for a stable CentOS 8 Linux operating system set to end Dec. 31 from Red Hat, dedicated, long-time enterprise users of the OS have been scrambling to determine what to do to keep their critical IT infrastructures up and running safely after the deadline passes.

    For enterprise users that are not yet ready to switch operating systems by then, CentOS alternative CloudLinux recently offered an answer to the conundrum – the company is now offering paid professional support to CentOS 8 users to take up the slack and keep their OS requirements on track.

  • Fedora Community Blog: Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2021-36

    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. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

• Debian Family

  • Virtualization: Containers and VMs with Proxmox VE 7.0 [Ed: Translation from German]

    Proxmox is unquestionably popular – but how do the Viennese manage to compete against virtualization heavyweights such as VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat? The regular and reliable updates – after all, the new Virtual Environment (VE) 7.0 appeared just two months after version 6.4 – are only part of the answer. Rather, the attractiveness of the package is to be sought in its flexibility.

    Proxmox Virtual Environment, Proxmox VE for short, is a cluster and HA (high availability) platform for the simultaneous provision of kernel-based VMs via KVM / QEMU and containers via LXC. The entire administration – even entire clusters – takes place via a central web interface or the command line. The new version 7.0 offers all storage options that are also available under Debian GNU / Linux. LVM groups, ZFS pools or simple directories on any file system can be used locally, iSCSI targets or LUNs, CIFS / SMB or NFS shares, but also GlusterFS or Ceph can be used in the network. All virtual machines and containers can be created and used on local and network-based storage devices.

Devices/Embedded

• Save orchards from pests with Raspberry Pi

• [Old] This Raspberry Pi Pico Solar System Display is Far From Orrery

  When it comes to Raspberry Pi projects, Dr2mod is no stranger. We previously covered his PS4 controller-operated robotic arm and SDR airplane monitor but today we’re monitoring things even farther away than airplanes. This Raspberry Pi Pico project displays the current position of planets in our solar system, a digital version of the classic mechanical orrery used to predict the position of planets in our solar system.

• [Old] Raspberry Pi Treat Dispenser Rewards Good Dogs

  Do you know a good dog in need of treats? This clever Raspberry Pi project from Milunova will make sure they’re consistently compensated for things outside of their control. Every time Milunova gets a follower on Instagram, a Pi dispenses a treat for their foster puppy.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Chrome 93 fixes your Chromebook’s biggest problem with Android apps | Android Central

  • These Popular Apps Might Be Slowing Down Your Android Phone

  • Google’s Material You design is coming to Gmail, Calendar, and Docs on Android – The Verge

  • Google Translate for Android preps Material You redesign – 9to5Google

  • Google Workspace apps are getting a tasty new look with Android 12 | TechRadar

  • Alphabet Scoop 133: Android 12 check-in, latest on the Pixel 6, and living with the new Nest Cam/Doorbell – 9to5Google

  • Samsung Galaxy One UI 4.0 beta release date delay with Android 12 update guarantees – SlashGear

  • AC Podcast 542: Ray-Ban Stories; Canceled TCL Foldable; Android 12 Beta 5 | Android Central

  • Nokia 3.1 and 5.1 receiving new Android Build | Nokiamob

  • How to Use the Mi Band as a Remote for Android Phones

  • Why Qualcomm’s ‘ultimate’ Android phone will leave you totally baffled | Express.co.uk

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Matrix 4, Blue’s Clues, #StarTrekDay and More — Everything That’s Old is New Again in This Week’s Top Shelf [Ed: Mozilla has nothing of value left to say. So, here are some 'tweets'...]

    • Spidermonkey Development Blog: SpiderMonkey Newsletter (Firefox 92-93)

      SpiderMonkey is the JavaScript engine used in Mozilla Firefox. This newsletter gives an overview of the JavaScript and WebAssembly work we’ve done as part of the Firefox 92 and 93 Nightly release cycles.

• Programming/Development

  • Dear open source developers

    Nowadays, regularly, more operating systems are dropping support for older architectures to only focus on amd64. This is understandable, volunteer work is limited and it’s important to focus on the hardware found in most of the users computers. But then, by doing so they are making old hardware obsolete which is not acceptable.

    I understand this is a huge dilemma and I have no solution, maybe we should need less operating systems to gather the volunteers to maintain older but still relevant architectures. It is not possible obviously, volunteers work on what they want because they like it, you can’t assign contributors to some task against their will.

    The issue is at a higher scale and every person working in the IT field is part of the problem.

  • Quadratic algorithms are slow (and hashmaps are fast)

    Hello! I was talking to a friend yesterday who was studying for a programming interview and trying to learn some algorithms basics.

    The topic of quadratic-time vs linear-time algorithms came up, I thought this would be fun to write about here because avoiding quadratic-time algorithms isn’t just important in interviews – it’s sometimes good to know about in real life too! I’ll explain what a “quadratic-time algorithm is” in a minute

    [...]

    The weird thing about quadratic time algorithms is that when you run them on a small number of elements (like 1000), it doesn’t seem so bad! It’s not that slow! But then if you throw 1,000,000 elements at it, it can really take hours to run.

    So I think it’s worth being broadly aware of them, so you can avoid writing them by accident. Especially if there’s an easy way to write a linear-time algorithm instead (like using a hashmap).

Remembering Mikis Theodorakis

This short memoir, devoted to the memory of an extraordinary man, begins nearly sixty years ago, in the spring of 1963. That was when my life-companion-to-be Ingeborg and I met Mikis, already widely known throughout Greece by his first name, at his family home.

It was a fine April day in Crete. The snow-capped peaks of the White Mountains loomed over Chania, a graceful city that still bore the imprint of the Venetians, who had ruled over Crete for several centuries before surrendering to the Ottomans, only becoming a part of Greece in 1912.

Ed Asner: The Grouchy ‘Marxist’: RIP

If he hadn’t died, of no unnatural causes, I never would have stumble-bungled across his 2017 book in my Alexandrianesque library I’ve nicknamed Abbie. In memory of the Yippie Pentagon-lifter. (“Not too high, okay, Abs?” Pentagon officials pleaded, in a punking, that would make Borat proud.) Written with Ed Weinberger, a comedy writer and former colleague on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, the book, The Grouchy Historian: An Old-Time Lefty Defends Our Constitution Against Right-Wing Hypocrites and Nutjobs. It was just the tonic I needed to detox some of the excess bile that’s been building up since the ‘80s on account of what the Right has done to a perfectly tolerable world — politics, economics and culture grown stale, febrile, corrupted and our keen exceptionalism fallen into its own footprints.

It turns out that Ed has a succinct series of reasons for all that mess and proceeds to enumerate and counterpunch with the best of them.

Life After People

George Jackson: His Liberating Reading List and His Legacy

“It put a smile on my face when I saw June Jordan’s name there,” Angela Davis said on a Zoom event to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of the celebrated, notorious author of Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family who had been behind bars in California every since 1961 when he was 20 years old.

Davis was talking about the list of books that the authorities at San Quentin typed 13 days after George Jackson was shot and killed August 21, 1971. Not surprisingly, Davis took a keen political and personal interest in the list of 99 books that were removed from the cell of prisoner A-63837.

[Old] North America responsible for the world’s container shortages

The continent’s comparatively slow handling of containers has long been a source of supply chain pain and a leading cause of empty container shortages in Asia, but never to the extent recorded today.

Before the pandemic North America was structurally responsible for 40-45% of the empty imbalance needed in Asia, according to analysis from Sea-Intelligence. Following the early pandemic volatility this changed sharply, so that North America is now structurally responsible for 55-60% of the imbalance in Asia.

Paid influencers must label posts as ads, German court rules

Social media influencers who receive money from companies to promote products must clearly label such posts as advertisements, a top German court ruled on Thursday.

If the influencers are not paid, they can show products without the advertising label, the Federal Court of Justice ruled in the cases of three influencers on Facebook’s (FB.O) social media site Instagram.

Tinder chief named new Yahoo CEO

In a statement, Yahoo said it will leverage Lanzone’s “deep media experience to drive the next generation of innovation across its world-class content and advertising platforms.”

Lanzone will succeed Guru Gowrappan, who was named senior adviser to Apollo Global Management’s private equity business. Lanzone will begin his new role on Sept. 27.

Science

• Smoke And Burnt Plastic Triggered An Alarm On The International Space Station Earlier

  Novitsky and Dubrov are scheduled to carry out a six-hour-long space walk on Thursday to continue integrating the Russian-built Nauka science lab that docked with the space station in July. Shortly after docking, the lab briefly knocked the orbital outpost out of position by accidentally firing its engines — an incident Russian space officials blamed on a software failure.

Health/Nutrition

• Pfizer Will Seek Approval of COVID Vaccine for Kids 5 & Older in “Coming Weeks”

• The Far Right Calls Biden a “Tyrant” Over Vaccine Rules Most Americans Back

• ‘Have At It’: Biden Welcomes GOP Challenges to New Vaccine Mandates

  “Have at it.”

  That’s how President Joe Biden responded Friday when asked about Republican governors’ threats to fight his administration’s new Covid-19 vaccination requirements in court. Biden rejected GOP accusations of federal overreach as the latest example of right-wing opposition to public health measures amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

• Progressive Caucus Warns Lawsuits Not Enough to Stop GOP Assault on Abortion Rights

  While applauding the Biden Justice Department for quickly suing Texas over its draconian abortion ban, the Congressional Progressive Caucus is stressing that legal action must be accompanied by a legislative push to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law if there’s to be any hope of stopping the GOP’s nationwide assault on reproductive rights.

  “We’re calling on the Senate to abolish the filibuster so we can send this urgent bill to the president’s desk.”—Rep. Pramila Jayapal

• ‘Vaccination Works’: CDC Study Shows Unvaxxed 11 Times More Likely to Die of Covid

  A study published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that people across the U.S. who were not fully vaccinated this spring and summer were 11 times more likely to die of Covid-19—and over 10 times more likely to be hospitalized—than those who were fully inoculated.

  “During April 4-July 17, a total of 569,142 (92%) Covid-19 cases, 34,972 (92%) hospitalizations, and 6,132 (91%) Covid-19-associated deaths were reported among persons not fully vaccinated, and 46,312 (8%) cases, 2,976 (8%) hospitalizations, and 616 (9%) deaths were reported among fully vaccinated persons” in the 13 states examined as part of the new study, according to the CDC.

• Opinion | 20 Years After 9/11, US Imperialism Lives But the US Empire Is Dying

  Twenty years ago, the United States sustained the first substantial attacks on the mainland since the War of 1812. It was a collective shock to all Americans who believed their country to be impregnable. The Cold War had produced the existential dread of a nuclear attack, but that always lurked in the realm of the maybe. On a day-to-day basis, Americans enjoyed the exceptional privilege of national security. No one would dare attack us for fear of massive retaliation.

• ‘Where Are the Threads Dropped With the Criminal Investigation of the Sackler Family?’

  Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Rick Claypool about OxyContin immunity for the September 3, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• Biden’s 6-Point Plan on Vaccines Will Affect Roughly 100 Million Americans

• Traffic noise increases the risk of dementia

  For the first time ever, researchers have documented a link between noise from traffic and an increased risk of dementia.

  Researchers sourced data from 2 million Danes from 2004-17 to discover that you have a 27 percent higher risk of getting Alzheimer’s and an 18 percent higher chance of developing dementia when subjected to over 55 decibels of traffic noise over long periods of time.

• Michael Moore on COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy: ‘We’re in a dark moment’

  In an interview on Hill.TV’s “Rising,” Moore argued that while human beings “are wired to be most concerned with our own,” some people are putting their own family members at risk by taking the attitude of, “I don’t care. I’m not going to get vaccinated, either for political reasons or I’m afraid to get vaccinated and I don’t believe the government anymore.”

• Eyes on Trade: Tuesday Press Conference: MoCs, Civil Society and Labor Leaders Urge Biden To Launch Global Plan to End Pandemic at Next Week’s UN Summit

Integrity/Availability

• KrebsOnSecurity Hit By Huge New IoT Botnet “Meris”

  On Thursday evening, KrebsOnSecurity was the subject of a rather massive (and mercifully brief) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The assault came from “Meris,” the same new botnet behind record-shattering attacks against Russian search giant Yandex this week and internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare earlier this summer.

• Thursday: Tesla laser, Twitter deletion, cell broadcast & Windows attacks [Ed: Microsoft blames the users for its software being broken and incapable of protecting users]

  There are no warnings of computer attacks via cell broadcast, but here: Attackers are currently targeting prepared Microsoft Office documents in circulation after opening Infect Windows computers with malicious code. According to a warning from Microsoft, it was classified as “high” security breach concerns the HTML rendering engine MSHTML of Windows. Protective measures should take effect by default, but care should be taken with prepared Office documents, as they are misused to attack Windows.

• With a Lidl bit of luck, this Windows installation will make it through the night

  The screen is now very much in English but, according to Register reader Alex, it once served a useful purpose for the locals before Windows did its thing – the classic out of box experience (OOBE).

  “At the Dutch Lidl branches,” Alex explained, “a system was placed last winter to count the number of shoppers for COVID restriction purposes.”

  The screen also previously featured Dutch comedian Thomas van Luyn exhorting customers to shop responsibly and maintain their distance while perusing the discounted goods on offer.

• Proprietary

  • Apple fires senior engineering program manager Ashley Gjøvik for allegedly leaking information

    Gjøvik has raised concerns that her office is in an Apple building located on a superfund site, meaning it requires special oversight due to historical waste contamination. She also says that she faced harassment and bullying from her manager and members of her team. More recently, she’s begun raising privacy concerns related to Apple’s policies on how it can search and surveil employees’ work phones.

  • Security

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Billions for Europe’s biometrics giants

        All travellers will soon have to submit fingerprints and facial images at the EU’s external borders. For this, large sums of money await companies offering such technologies in each member state. In an „Interoperability Package“, the European Union is spending more money on the systems.

      • Facebook Says It Violates The Terms Of Service Of Their New Snoopervision Glasses If You Cover The ‘I’m Recording You’ LED

        You’ve likely heard by now that Facebook has launched their own version of sunglasses with a built-in camera, in partnership with Ray Ban, called “Ray Ban Stories” (because, seriously, which brand is cooler right now? Facebook? Or Ray Ban?). Lots of people are comparing it to the failed disaster that was Google Glass (which gave rise to the term “Glassholes”) or SnapChat’s similar product, and lots of people are calling out the potential privacy issues associated with these snoopervision glasses. To be honest, personally I feel like at least some of those concerns are typical moral panics, akin to people freaking out when the camera itself was invented, such as this story about early Kodak cameras:

      • The Power of Privacy: the Future of Roe in Montana

        Historian Heather Cox Richardson provides the background:[2] Abortion has been a part of American history since its inception. States began to criminalize it the 1870s, with the result that by the 1960s there were hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions a year endangering women. Based on sound medical practice, states began to de-criminalize pregnancy terminations, leaving the matter to the woman and her doctor.  By 1972, (the year Roe v. Wade was handed down) 64% of Americans (59% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans) agreed with this medical model.

        The politicization of the medical model began before Roe, however.  In 1972, Richard Nixon was up for re-election and he and his advisors were paranoid about his chances of winning—fearful that Democrats and traditional Republicans would take power. Nixon formerly had no problem with the medical model (he directed military hospitals to perform abortions regardless of state law). However, in 1971, seeking to woo Catholic/Democrat and Evangelical voters and split the party’s votes, Nixon reversed course and adopted the Catholic “sanctity of human life” doctrine.   Ronald Reagan followed suit.

      • The Catalog of Carceral Surveillance: Voice Recognition and Surveillance

        In recent years, though, prison reform advocates and the families of people who are incarcerated, sick of dumping their savings into the maws of these phone providers, have worked to tip this cash cow. They made enough noise that the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) set a cap on per-minute charges on interstate phone calls. 

        So two of the largest providers of prison communications have initiated new ways of mining inmates for income.

        Prisoners know their calls while in-custody are generally being monitored. Prisoners may also be aware that they’re being recorded (both legally and not so legally). Still, it may shock prisoners that Securus and GTL are working to monetize their ability to eavesdrop on and catalogue thousands of voices traversing the phone lines of penal facilities in nearly every state every day.

      • ProtonMail Turned Over French Activist’s IP Address To Law Enforcement Following A Request From Swiss Authorities

        ProtonMail has long advertised itself as a particularly privacy-conscious email service. The free end-to-end encrypted email service promises more privacy and security than many of its competitors. But there are limits. ProtonMail operates out of Switzerland, making it subject to that country’s laws (which, to be fair, are hardly draconian). It also (at least temporarily) retains a certain amount of information about users’ emails — metadata that can be used to verify accounts in the case of a lost password.

      • Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2021

        Amends: the Surveillance Devices Act 2004 and Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 to: introduce data disruption warrants to enable the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) to disrupt data by modifying, adding, copying or deleting data in order to frustrate the commission of serious offences online; and make minor technical corrections; the Surveillance Devices Act 2004 to introduce network activity warrants to enable the AFP and ACIC to collect intelligence on serious criminal activity by permitting access to the devices and networks used to facilitate criminal activity; the Crimes Act 1914 to: introduce account takeover warrants to enable the AFP and ACIC to take over a person’s online account for the purposes of gathering evidence to further a criminal investigation; and make minor amendments to the controlled operations regime to ensure controlled operations can be conducted effectively in the online environment; and 10 Acts to make consequential amendments.

      • European Court Of Justice To Hear Cases On General, Indiscriminate Data Retention

        “The lawsuit filed by SpaceNet AG will stop the retention of information on all contacts and movements in Germany, which is an infringement on fundamental rights. Reintroducing the blanket collection of metadata leaves us, and our personal lives exposed. Indiscriminately collecting sensitive information about the social and business interactions, movements and the private lives (e.g. contacts with physicians, lawyers, workers councils, psychologists, helplines, etc.) of millions of citizens that are not suspected of any wrongdoing is a radical and unacceptable measure of mass surveillance.

      • OrNetStats

        A Tor relay’s ContactInfo is an arbitrary string which can be freely choosen by the relay operator, unfortunatelly this allows also malicious entities to impersonate other relay operators by using their ContactInfo. This is being exploited in the wild. The following relay operators did make an effort to allow for automated verification of the domain provided in their ContactInfo using the ContactInfo Information Sharing Specification version 2. Since this is a two way link (domain to relay and relay to domain), this can no longer be spoofed easily by an attacker anymore.

      • Confidentiality

        • By default, scp(1) now uses SFTP protocol

          Thanks to a commit by Damien Miller (djm@), scp(1) (in -current) now defaults to using the SFTP protocol: [...]

Defence/Aggression

• What Really Matters in the US of A

  In fact, the shock and awe(fulness) in Kabul and Washington over these last weeks shouldn’t have been surprising, given our history. After all, we were the ones who prepared the ground and dug the grave for the previous interment in that very cemetery.

  That, of course, took place between 1979 and 1989 when Washington had no hesitation about using the most extreme Islamists — arming, funding, training, and advising them — to ensure that one more imperial carcass, that of the Soviet Union, would be buried there. When, on February 15, 1989, the Red Army finally left Afghanistan, crossing the Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan, Soviet commander General Boris Gromov, the last man out, said, “That’s it. Not one Soviet soldier or officer is behind my back.” It was his way of saying so long, farewell, good riddance to the endless war that the leader of the Soviet Union had by then taken to calling “the bleeding wound.” Yet, in its own strange fashion, that “graveyard” would come home with them. After all, they returned to a bankrupt land, sucked dry by that failed war against those American- and Saudi-backed Islamist extremists.

• Biden Nuclear Posture Review Must Examine Ballistic Missile Defense

  The U.S. Department of Energy current budget for nuclear weapons is already double it Cold War budget. The NPR will lay out the course for future expansion of the nuclear arsenal—or its reduction.

  The Biden Nuclear Posture review is the fifth iteration of nuclear weapons planning since the first in 1994.

• What Next After 20 Years of War in Afghanistan? Anatol Lieven on the U.S. Legacy and the Taliban’s Rise

  For a learned perspective on what has been unfolding in Afghanistan, I turned to interview Dr. Anatol Lieven. Lieven is a senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. From 1985 to 1998, Lieven worked as a British journalist in South Asia, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and covered the wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya and the southern Caucasus.

  James W. Carden: Let’s begin with the people who launched the suicide attack on the airport on August 26. Who are the Islamic State in the Khorasan Province, or ISKP?

• 20 Years After 9/11, We’re Still Morons

  We had to do something. That was and remains the generic explanation for what we did in response to 9/11—invading Afghanistan and Iraq, directing the CIA to covertly overthrow the governments of Haiti, Venezuela, Belarus, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and a bunch of other countries, lamely legalizing torture, kidnapping via extraordinary rendition to Guantánamo and other concentration camps, building a drone armada and sparking a drone arms race.

  Acting purely on speculation, news media was reporting as early as the afternoon of September 11 that Al Qaeda was responsible. That same day, Vice President Dick Cheney argued for invading Iraq. We began bombing Afghanistan October 7, less than a month later, without evidence that Afghanistan was guilty. A week later, the Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden; Bush refused. Before you act, you think. We didn’t.

• Why We Shouldn’t Congratulate Biden on Afghanistan

  Biden’s decision to pull the American troops from Afghanistan put a bitter end to his honeymoon with the liberal press. But only because the mainstream press seems to be pulling the rug from under the President’s feet doesn’t mean that he is your friend.

  On August 15, on the verge of Kabul’s fall, Declan Walsh, a chief correspondent of New York Times tweeted: “For those who lamented ‘forever wars’ — is the phrase anything more than a comforting cop-out for epic failures of policy and the imagination? — here’s what the end looks like.”

• Belief, Truth, Science, Religion and 9-11

  Some readers believe this story is entirely true, and confirms suspicions they “have always known to be true” about 9-11 being “an inside job.” Other readers believe this story is a hoax, something like the Piltdown Man fake fossil of 1912 that was only definitively refuted in 1953. And a third group of readers vacillate maddeningly with their uncertainties between these poles of true belief and complete non-belief. The present article is my reflection on all of this.

  FIRST, about me

• Noam Chomsky and the Khmer Rouge

  In reality, the writings of Chomsky and Herman on Cambodia under KR rule had significantly more nuanced arguments than those attributed to them by their fevered right wing and sometimes liberal critics. In a June 1977 article in The Nation and their 1979 book After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, they did not deny the brutality of the Khmer Rouge. For example, in The Nation article they wrote that Father Francois Ponchaud’s widely publicized book on Khmer Rouge terror was “serious and worth reading…He gives a grisly account of what refugees have reported to him about the barbarity of their treatment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.” In After the Cataclysm, Chomsky and Herman noted that in response to their extensive criticisms of many aspects of Ponchaud’s documentation of Khmer Rouge atrocities, the introduction to the American edition of Ponchaud’s book featured praise from Ponchaud of Chomsky for correcting the former’s mistakes. However, in the book’s British edition, Ponchaud referred to Chomsky somewhat tartly and falsely claimed that the latter and Herman denied that the Khmer Rouge committed any massacres.

  Chomsky and Herman were not concerned about endorsing a particular estimate of how many Cambodians died under KR rule. They referenced US media coverage of the latter as part of their effort to show how the US media and political system covered up the war crimes and human rights violations of the US and the right wing third world dictatorships with which it allied while playing up the often real but sometimes exaggerated or fabricated crimes of official US government enemies—like the Soviet Union, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and similar states. However, because, like most Americans, Chomsky’s and Herman’s critics are indoctrinated with childish patriotic beliefs about America’s noble role in the world, they are unwilling to seriously consider the substantial evidence that Chomsky, Herman and other left-wing critics have gathered over the decades about the nefarious US role in the world. They have no interest in accepting the evidence that the US committed massive war crimes in Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere–while backing genocidal third world dictatorships like the Suharto regime in Indonesia, the Stroessner regime in Paraguay and working through various means, including death squads, to prevent third world peasants from lifting themselves out of extreme poverty. Their reflexive childish reaction to such evidence is to call people like Chomsky Communist apologists.

• Opinion | We Still Need a Post-9/11 Reckoning

  Like most New Yorkers, my life changed forever on Sept. 11, 2001. I was just 8 years old when two planes crashed into the twin towers on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday morning. At school in Astoria, teachers looked frantic, and we were just confused kids until an older student told us to look through the bathroom window. All I could see was smoke.

• Cop Who Killed A Suicidal Man Less Than 11 Seconds After Entering His House Convicted Of Murder

  It’s rare enough to see a law enforcement officer convicted of murder. It’s even rarer to see it happen twice in one year.

• Opinion | 20 Years After 9/11, Reparations for Afghanistan and an End to War

  On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was among a small group of U.S. citizens who sat on milk crates or stood holding signs across from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. We had been fasting from solid foods for a month, calling for an end to brutal economic warfare waged against Iraq through the imposition of U.N. sanctions. Each Friday of our fast, we approached the entrance to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations carrying lentils and rice, asking the U.S. officials to break our fast with us, asking them to hear our reports, gathered after visiting destitute Iraqi hospitals and homes. On four successive Friday afternoons, New York police handcuffed us and took us to jail.

• Opinion | My Memories of 9/11 and the Fool’s Errand of Destroying Terrorism With Violence

  A fateful day

• 9/11 and After: The Need Is Still for Justice, Not Vengeance

  In those first harrowing hours after planes were turned into bombs on September 11, 2001, people across the country were paralyzed with fear. Few people alive 20 years ago had experienced an attack on American soil anything close to this magnitude.

• Is the Imperial Game Up?

  Little did we imagine that someone would attack us in order to precipitate massive retaliation.

  Osama bin Laden understood that American power was vulnerable when overextended. He knew that the greatest military power in the history of the world, deranged by a desire for vengeance, could be lured into taking a cakewalk into a quagmire. With the attacks of 9/11, al-Qaeda turned ordinary American airplanes into weapons to attack American targets. In the larger sense, bin Laden used the entire American army to destroy the foundations of American empire.

• How Can America Wake Up From Its Post-9/11 Nightmare?

  We have been told that the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001 “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the U.S. government’s disastrous response to them.

  That response was not preordained or inevitable, but the result of decisions and choices made by politicians, bureaucrats and generals who fueled and exploited our fears, unleashed wars of reprehensible vengeance and built a secretive security state, all thinly disguised behind Orwellian myths of American greatness.

• A 9/11 Reflection: Remember “Their” Crimes, Forget “Ours”

  “We must never forget” 9/11, when “America was attacked” (when, as cannot be said without sounding “controversial,” the United States Middle East policy blew back on the nation’s financial and political capitals).

  You must always remember that atrocity, good Americans: sear it in your minds forever. Never forget. Never stop caring. Never stop honoring the 9/11 victims and the “brave soldiers” who fought, died, and killed halfway across the world – causing massively more casualties than they suffered – in its wake. Never stop mourning (and avenging) that holy day of inherently “good” and “exceptional” America’s unjust martyrdom: 9/11/2001.

• Opinion | On Fox News, Civilians Killed by US Don’t Count

  US news outlets have reported stories about civilian casualties in Afghanistan with caution, often noting that claims from the Taliban had not been independently verified. But many outlets showed no inclination to be equally careful when evaluating the Pentagon’s line on casualties.

• 9/11 and the Politics of Fear and Self-Preservation

  The 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 is a particularly somber one, not just because of the horrific nature of events of that day reaching its second-decade milestone, but because of how little we seem to have learned in that amount of time.

• Nothing Good Came Out of It: 9-11 Twenty Years On

  The radio guy found a station reporting the news. He left it there for people in the crowd to listen to. Although confusion reigned at the radio station, the story filtering in was that the two planes appeared to be part of a terrorist incident. Thousands of workers were trapped in the Twin Towers, thousands were fleeing and attempting to flee, and first responders were flooding into the blocks around the buildings. My friend worked near the Towers at an art supply store not far from The Knitting Factory—a music venue where we had drunk a few beers the night before. I headed back to her apartment and began calling her workplace. I needed to make sure she was okay before I left town. At first, there was no answer. When I did get through, a recording told me that the store was closed due to the events occurring in lower Manhattan. I called the airline I was flying out on next. All flights were canceled. My purpose became clear. I had to find my friend. I left the apartment and headed south towards Greenwich Village. On the way, I stopped at a Radio Shack store and bought a pocket radio. While I was paying the cashier, we watched the second tower fall. Fascinating in the way a tragedy can be, neither of us said a thing. I took my change from the guy and wished him luck. He responded in kind.

  I turned on the radio and began my trek towards Washington Square Park. People were out on the sidewalks. Bars and restaurants were open. Many of them had a television sitting in a window or on an outside table broadcasting the news as it unfolded. Most of the commentary was confused and uncertain at first. By the time I got closer to the Village, that confusion was slowly being replaced by government officials telling people how they should react, various generals talking about how the US should respond, and the face of Rudy Giuliani. America’s freaking mayor was clearly taking advantage of the slaughter for his own venal purposes. It did make the scandal around his wife and his mistress playing out in Gracie Mansion second-page news. Seeing his face on every television screen from 24th Street to Washington Square Park is a memory from that day that won’t go away.

• How the US Government Stokes Racial Tensions in Cuba and Around the World

  “A Black uprising is shaking Cuba’s Communist regime,” read The Washington Post’s headline on the recent unrest on the Caribbean island. “Afro-Cubans Come Out In Droves To Protest Government,” wrote NPR. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal went with “Cuba’s Black Communities Bear the Brunt of Regime’s Crackdown” as a title.

• Opinion | The Unlearnt Lessons of 9/11, Twenty Years Out

  Twenty years after 9/11, America is less safe, a deeply troubled country, ravaged by COVID, racism, inequality, extreme weather from global warming and political strife. Its political leaders have embraced an Orwellian approach to the truth in which war is peace and large segments of our society are polarized by widely divergent concepts of reality.

• On 9/11 Anniversary, Anti-War Group Says ‘Cut the Pentagon for People, Planet, and Peace’

  As the United States prepares to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on Saturday, the women-led peace group CodePink is set to launch a new campaign this weekend featuring a webinar and White House rally “to reflect on the lessons of 9/11″ and the so-called War on Terror that followed—and continues to this day.

  On Saturday at 3:00 pm ET, CodePink and Massachusetts Peace Action will host “Never Forget: 9/11 and the 20-Year War on Terror,” a webinar examining how “9/11 fundamentally altered the culture of the United States and its relationship with the rest of the world.”

• Big Tech War Profiteers Raked in $44 Billion During ‘Global War on Terror’

  A new report just ahead of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks offers a scathing analysis of how Big Tech corporations are “complicit in” and have “profited from” the so-called war on terror by at least $44 billion since 2001.

  “When the U.S. chooses war over aid, Big Tech profits,” the publication, Big Tech Sells War, states. 

• Twenty Years of 9/11

  It’s been twenty years of a global forever war on any strain of Islam that resists western subjugation, from the Islamic Courts of Somalia to the Pashtun tribes of Afghanistan. It’s been twenty years of disastrous regime change and colonialist nation-building experiments. It’s been twenty years of sacrificing every civil liberty a plebian has ever managed to get their grubby hands on in this country on the alter of national security and law and order. It’s been twenty years of warrantless wiretaps, extraordinary rendition, and militarized police forces patrolling the inner cities in armored vehicles. It’s been a twenty-year news cycle of breathless round-the-clock fear-mongering and chest-thumping jingoism. Twenty years of being screamed at by tiny men in expensive suits about the moral priority of chasing Arab boogeymen who never quite materialize. It’s been twenty goddamn years of being held hostage by a single day in September 2001, and what have we learned?

  We’ve learned that there is no tragedy too tender for a politician to exploit for profit. We’ve learned that the same men who pounced on our terror from that day like bloodthirsty jackals were also in the perfect position to prevent it from even happening in the first place and either failed or chose to fail to do so. We’ve learned that there is no such thing as a peace party in this country and that both Democrats and Republicans are equally willing to do the bidding of the same war machine that gives our ‘indispensable’ nation its only true purpose. We’ve learned that Saudi Arabia is definitely not our friend and is at least as willing as their neocon cheerleaders to stoke the flames of Islamic extremism to line their own pockets. We’ve learned, once again, that the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan will never be tamed by white men and their tedious experiments with what they refer to as progress. And we’ve learned that terrorism has a funny habit of creeping up like vines anywhere a foreign boot meets the sacred soil of a conquered land.

• The 19th Century’s 9/11

  The events of September 11 shook this nation to its core. They stunned the citizenry, exposed our country’s vulnerabilities, and captured every headline. The events portended our nation’s deepest divide.

• I Lost My Father on 9/11, but I Never Wanted to Be a “Victim”

  “But victimhood is not—for all that we would wish otherwise—a conveniently moral condition. This is something that those who have lived in intimate proximity to loss and mourning know or have to learn.”

• Barbara Lee, Who Voted Against 9/11 “Forever Wars,” Calls for Afghan War Inquiry

• Rep. Barbara Lee, Who Cast Sole Vote After 9/11 Against “Forever Wars,” on Need for Afghan War Inquiry

  Twenty years ago, Rep. Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against war in the immediate aftermath of the devastating 9/11 attacks that killed about 3,000 people. “Let us not become the evil that we deplore,” she urged her colleagues in a dramatic address on the House floor. The final vote in the House was 420-1. This week, as the U.S. marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Rep. Lee spoke with Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman about her fateful vote in 2001 and how her worst fears about “forever wars” came true. “All it said was the president can use force forever, as long as that nation, individual or organization was connected to 9/11. I mean, it was just a total abdication of our responsibilities as members of Congress,” Rep. Lee says.

• Rwanda’s Military is the French Proxy on African Soil

  Militants from al-Shabaab (or ISIS-Mozambique, as the U.S. State Department prefers to call it) did not fight to the last man; they disappeared across the border into Tanzania or into their villages in the hinterland. The energy companies will, meanwhile, soon start to recoup their investments and profit handsomely, thanks in large part to the Rwandan military intervention.

  Why did Rwanda intervene in Mozambique in July 2021 to defend, essentially, two major energy companies? The answer lies in a very peculiar set of events that took place in the months before the troops left Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda.

• Shared Grief After 9/11: Sister of WTC Victim Meets Afghan Who Lost 19 Family Members in U.S. Attack

  On the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we revisit a conversation we hosted in January of 2002 between Masuda Sultan, an Afghan American woman who lost 19 members of her family in a U.S. air raid, and Rita Lasar, a New Yorker who lost her brother in the World Trade Center attack. Lasar would become an active member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Masuda later wrote the memoir, “My War at Home.”

• Haitians Helping Haitians

  It is commonly known that epileptic incidences have a high correlation to chronic malnutrition. She was not the only one who suffered from these bouts in Abricots. Dahline’s life and death, like so many others andeyò, literally “outside,” in the provinces, was never acknowledged. What was considered “normal” never should have been; it was a crisis that preceded the current disaster. Dahline was another casualty of the norm in Haiti machinated by a postcolonial State in service to foreign powers still trying to accumulate wealth and maintain resources through exploitation and neglect of the majority of its population, especially those in or once living in the countryside.

  In the days that followed the 2010 earthquake, Abricots’ population increased by 8,314 people (about a 25% increase) seeking safe havens with their family and friends from the earthquake. Family members opened their homes and whatever resources they had to support each other. One lakou (traditional family compound) grew from 5 to 41 people. Although the growth of many lakou was not quite as dramatic, resources were stretched thin as those fleeing Port-au-Prince were welcomed, affectionately called names like dekonm (rubble), reskape (rescue), and even depòte (deported). Nationwide, 630,000 people left Port-au-Prince to the different areas of the countryside.

• Biden Was Right to Leave Afghanistan, But Sanctions are for Sore Losers

  Immediately, however, Biden slapped sanctions on Afghanistan. The country now joins a very big club, including Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and others, of those the U.S. aims to starve into regime change. How’s that going? Well might you ask. It appears to be utterly ineffective at anything aside from tormenting ordinary people. In the face of sanctions, leaders clutch at power more ferociously than ever, because they see themselves endangered, while cancer patients can’t buy chemo.  In short, these sanctions will break Afghanistan financially, probably cause famine and will doubtless engender huge emigration, while serving no purpose besides random cruelty, because sanctions are war by economic means. The analogy is a medieval siege. Sanctions prove that Washington isn’t done with Afghanistan, just as the bloodshed on the eve of departure did.

  When ISIS-K bombed an airport gate, the media went berserk. CNN was particularly egregious, chortling over how Americans had lost faith in Biden, thus egging him on to do something abysmal. (He obliged.) You would have thought suicide bombing was new to Afghanistan, brought there by Biden’s supposedly lily-livered retreat. Well, hello? Soldiers and Afghans died in droves from all sorts of bombs during the reigns of Trump, Obama and Bush, without this media feeding frenzy. What was different this time was that corporate media was shocked by Biden’s unyielding retreat, while the world saw that the U.S. lost, was withdrawing and, while departing, was attacked.

• Strange Crusaders: Diary of the Afghan War

  The onslaughts on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are being likened to Pearl Harbor and the comparison is just. From the point of view of the assailants the attacks were near miracles of logistical calculation, timing, courage in execution and devastation inflicted upon the targets.

  The Pearl Harbor base containing America’s naval might was thought to be invulnerable, yet in half an hour 2000 were dead, and the cream of the fleet destroyed. This week, within an hour on the morning of September 11, security at three different airports was successfully breached, the crews of four large passenger jets efficiently overpowered, the cockpits commandeered, navigation coordinates reset.

• The U.S.’ Crappy Camo Pattern Which Didn’t Work (But Still Got Used)

  Isoluminance is our word for the day. Don’t know what that means? Don’t feel bad; neither does anyone running the armed forces of nations around the world. Can we blame the fall of Afghanistan on bad camo? No, but the old camouflage uniforms used by the United States during the height of the “War on Terror” years suck all the same. The price tag is bad enough; however, the fact that men and women potentially lost their lives because of shoddy camo should be an outrage. It isn’t. For whatever reason, everyone (not in the military) still seems to love it. Within a few short years, it had become the fashion du jour for patriotic Americans, millions achieving an erection every time they saw the iconic earth-tone, blocky motif.

• Opinion | Behind Every Dark Cloud of Terrorism, There’s a Silver Lining for the Wealthy

  Among the many television specials marking the 20th anniversary of 9/11, one that stood out was this week’s two-hour edition of public television’s Frontline, “America After 9/11.”

Environment

• Earth’s future ‘hinges on UN Glasgow climate talks’

  With the UN Glasgow climate talks starting next month, three Christian leaders say they will decide the planet’s future.

• US Breaks Summer Heat Record Set During Dust Bowl in 1936: NOAA

  The United States just experienced the hottest summer ever, breaking the record set in 1936 when the Dust Bowl Era took hold amid extreme heat, drought, crop failures that upended the country.

  According to data and new analysis released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):

• A Climate Disaster is Unfolding Before Our Eyes…And Politicians Still Refuse to Take Action

  But greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, and exactly 16 years after Katrina, Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana as a Category 4 storm with winds of 150 miles per hour and up to 10 inches of rain, leaving more than 1 million households in Louisiana without power. The remnants of the storm traveled up the East Coast with flash floods killing at least 15 people in New York and damaging homes and public transport infrastructure.

  While some media coverage celebrated the fact that the post-Katrina levees around New Orleans remained intact, the real story is that Ida’s behavior fits the profile of storms fueled by a rapidly changing climate, and no levees will be strong enough to provide enough protection against such relentless hurricanes year after year.

• When It Rains in Detroit

  On of the main streets that divides Detroit from its southwestern neighbor, Dearborn, doesn’t shift elevation or air pressure. A rain gauge on either side of Tireman Road wouldn’t register much difference in precipitation, and the trees that straddle its northern and southern curbs can claim no ecological advantage over their counterparts. And yet, in the age of climate crisis, streets like Tireman are where the objective science of climate change meets the subjective machinery of American urban policy to produce rifts as profound as the greatest continental divides.

• Energy

  • That Day in Lattimer

    Roughly 400 anthracite coal miners ( the vast majority of them foreign born eastern Europeans) had had enough of the darkened servitude imposed on them by the Calvin Pardee Company. The miners worked 60 hours a week underground. They were forced to live in company homes and buy what they needed to live from the company store. They had to buy their own kegs of blasting powder from the company store, which were marked up to 300% beyond what the Calvin Pardee Company paid for them. It was profiteering on top of servitude. It was inhumane. It was unjust. It was intolerable.

    So the miners organized a march to close down the Calvin Pardee Company mine operations in Lattimer, demanding a shorter work week, better wages, and an end to the three cent per day tax effectively levied against foreign born miners through passage of the Campbell Act, which discriminated against non-naturalized citizens.

  • ‘The Tide Has Shifted’: Harvard to Divest From Fossil Fuels After a Decade of Pressure

    Nearly a decade of tireless grassroots activism led by students, alumni, and faculty members culminated in Harvard University’s announcement Thursday that it is ending its investments in planet-warming fossil fuels, a decision campaigners celebrated as a major victory for the climate movement.

    In an open letter posted to the university’s website, Harvard President Lawrence Bacow wrote that the Harvard Management Company (HMC) “has no direct investments in companies that explore for or develop further reserves of fossil fuels” and “does not intend to make such investments in the future.”

  • Harvard Will Divest From Fossil Fuels After a Decade of Pressure

  • The Gritty Reality of Solar Power

    Unfortunately, mainstream climate visions have strayed far from confronting the existential necessity to banish fossil fuels. They simply assume that the buildup of renewable energy will automatically chase fossil fuels out of our lives and fully replace them, watt for watt and Btu for Btu. These visions hold out the promise of a world in which a pristine, Sun-powered economy fulfills any and all of our material desires far into the future—a delicious, guilt-free cornucopia. But the green-growth promise is a mirage, and the realities of a high-production, wind- and solar-powered world will be much less tasty.

    Any industrial installation, including solar and wind farms, profoundly disrupts the landscape on which it sits. If it were possible to fully satisfy the bloated energy appetites of affluent nation by covering hundreds of millions or billions of acres of the Earth’s surface with power-harvesting hardware, the result would be irreparable ecological damage.

  • Big Oil’s Tactics to Delay Climate Action Are the New Climate Denialism

  • The ‘Big Lie’ of Blue Hydrogen Starts With Ignoring Basic Economics

    As the oil and gas industry achieves success in pushing the world towards widespread adoption of methane-based blue hydrogen, some unexpected voices are calling out the industry on its deception of selling blue hydrogen as an affordable and clean source of energy. 

    In August, Chris Jackson resigned as head of the UK Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association, calling blue hydrogen an “expensive distraction.” 

  • UK Ministers Met 1-on-1 with Fossil Fuel and Biomass Producers Nine Times as Often as Renewables Since Kwasi Kwarteng Took Energy Portfolio

    Policymakers have been meeting with fossil fuel and biomass producers nine times as often as with their renewable energy counterparts, DeSmog can reveal, raising fresh concerns over the depth of the government’s commitments to reaching net zero emissions by 2050.

    Analysis of the government’s latest transparency data shows ministers at the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) held 130 one-on-one meetings with energy producers between July 22, 2019 and March 31, 2021, of which nearly half (63) were with producers of high carbon energy.

  • ‘Twisting Words’: UK Oil Industry and Business Department Using Climate Change Committee to Justify New Drilling

    The UK’s Business Department and the country’s leading oil and gas industry body have both been accused of citing the Climate Change Committee “out of context” in a bid to justify new developments in the North Sea.

    Campaigners say the industry is “twisting the words” of the government’s independent climate advisers in a “shameless” attempt to promote its growth plans. 

  • Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index

    One key reason why the CO2 emissions per Bitcoin transaction can be so extreme is that the underlying blockchain isn’t just built on an energy-demanding algorithm, but it’s also extremely limited in terms of transaction processing capacity. A block for Bitcoin’s blockchain can contain 1 megabyte of data. As a new block will be generated only once every 10 minutes on average, this data limit prevents the network from handling more than 7 transactions per second. In the most optimistic scenario Bitcoin could therefore theoretically handle around 220 million transactions annually. Meanwhile, the global financial system is handling more than 700 billion digital payments per year (and a payment provider like VISA can handle over 65,000 per second if needed). Bitcoin’s maximum transaction capacity represents only 0.03% of this (rapidly growing) number. This is less than the total number of electronic payments processed in a country like Hungary (more than 300 million per year), not even considering that cash still makes up for two thirds of all payment transactions here. With such an incredibly low limit, Bitcoin is simply incapable of achieving any form of mainstream adoption as a global currency and/or payment system. Unlike the network’s transaction limit, the energy consumption of the network isn’t capped. The price of Bitcoin is the main driver of the network’s environmental impact, and there’s no limit to how high this can go. Because of this, the Bitcoin network can consume several times as much electrical energy as the entire country of Hungary (which consumes 43 TWh annually).

  • Why has El Salvador officially adopted bitcoin as its currency?

    Every Salvadoran has been gifted $30 in bitcoin (the US dollar is the nation’s other official currency) and can now shop or pay their taxes with it. Companies must accept it by law, but are permitted to instantly swap all bitcoin to dollars once received. A Panamanian congressman has now proposed legislation that would see the country follow in El Salvador’s footsteps.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • ‘Momentous’ Moratorium on Deep Sea Mining Adopted at Global Biodiversity Summit

    “Member countries of the ISA, including France which hosted this Congress, need to wake up and act on behalf of civil society and the environment now, and take action in support of a moratorium.”—Matthew Gianni, Deep Sea Conservation Coalition

• Overpopulation

  • Vanishing: Avatars of Sweetness

Finance

• “It’s Not Just a Loss of Electricity” — Ida Left People Houseless and Jobless

• Four CEO Pay-Related Taxes in Play on Capitol Hill

• Pressley Urges $30B for Public Transit After “Inadequate” Infrastructure Bill

• The Economic Recovery: Where Are We Now?

• ‘Historic Victory’: California Passes Bill to Improve Conditions for Amazon Workers

  “A.B. 701 is how we start winning our power and safety back.”—Athena

• ‘We’ve Structured Our Economy to Redistribute a Massive Amount of Income Upward’

• Amazon, Space X Throw Hissy Fits As They Bicker Over Government Contracts, Subsidies

  We’ve noted a few times that the Space X, Starlink satellite broadband service isn’t going to be quite as disruptive to telecom as many people might think.

• The Unemployment Insurance System Is Set to Get a Tech Makeover — but It Needs Much More, the Biden Administration Says

  The technologists who once overhauled the federal government’s HealthCare.gov website after the disastrous rollout of Obamacare are now being deployed to help modernize and streamline the nation’s aging unemployment insurance system, which buckled under a pandemic-driven wave of legitimate and fraudulent claims.

  The U.S. Digital Service, an arm of the White House that works across the federal government to tackle big technological challenges, has embarked on a reconstruction that will cover the entire UI system, from initial claim filing to benefit appeals, according to a memo and presentation obtained by ProPublica through a public records request. “We envision a future in which the federal government provides software that states may use to fully administer their UI program,” the agency said in the June memo to state UI systems.

• Supermarket Food Shortages Will Be Permanent, An Industry Leader Has Warned

• Supermarket food shortages will be over by Christmas, Downing Street says

• [Old] Elon Musk Accused of Bitcoin Market Manipulation By Top Economist

  Just last week, news broke that Tesla had purchased $1.5-billion in Bitcoin to ‘maximize returns on cash,’ and somewhat unsurprisingly, eyebrows are being raised. As reported by Markets Insider, Economist Nouriel Roubini is accusing Elon Musk of market manipulation and stating that the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) should investigate.

• 
  El Salvador’s bitcoin experiment splits crypto community amid major price decline

  The accession of bitcoin to the status of a legal currency in El Salvador was viewed by many cryptocurrency investors as a watershed moment, but the rocky rollout of the country’s digital wallet and growing concern over President Nayib Bukele’s tactical approach to the bitcoinization of his country’s economy has caused some supporters to warn that the episode will prove to be a major setback.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Katie Porter Pans Manchin for “Fiscally Irresponsible” Opposition to $3.5T Bill

• The California Recall Election Is Up for Grabs

• Opinion | This Republican Party of Anti-Democratic Vigilantes Is an Existential Threat

  The recent passage of Texas bill SR 1, and its peremptory validation by the Supreme Court’s far-right conservative majority, has generated widespread and justified horror and outrage. As many have explained much better than I could ever do, the law is doubly despicable. It institutes a “fetal heartbeat” limit on abortion that virtually abolishes all legal abortion in the state and that radically overthrows approximately fifty years of settled jurisprudence following the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. And it cynically seeks to get around jurisprudential constraints by empowering private citizens rather than state officials to enforce the criminal law, and establishing draconian civil penalties to be paid to these vigilant citizens upon criminal convictions of “offenders” in court.

• Public Health Experts Praise Biden’s New Vaccination Requirements

  With U.S. Covid-19 deaths rising and over a quarter of the eligible population still unvaccinated, President Joe Biden’s sweeping new rules aimed at boosting vaccination rates have provoked predictable backlash from Republican lawmakers, right-wing voices, and anti-vaccine commentators but also widespread applause from public health experts and medical professionals.

  “Your freedom stops when you’re impacting other people’s freedoms and rights.”—Dr. Aaron Glatt, Mount Sinai South Nassau

• War Criminals and 9/11: How We Achieve Accountability

  According to the statute’s definition, Bush also committed a crime of aggression when he decided to illegally invade Iraq. As president of the United States and commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, Bush was certainly in a position to “direct the political or military action” of the country when he and other high-level officials “plann[ed], prepar[ed], initiat[ed], and execut[ed]” a war of aggression.

  Bush holds responsibility for the torture and inhumane treatment of detained people, willfully causing great suffering and serious injury. According to Bush himself, he authorized the use of several “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, which the U.N. has declared a form of torture. Furthermore, he facilitated enforced disappearances. The Open Society Justice Initiative reported that, after 9/11, Bush authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to establish a secret detention program under which people were held in CIA prisons (“black sites”) outside the U.S., where torture was carried out. The report adds that Bush granted the CIA the authority to engage in “extraordinary rendition,” defined as the transfer of a detained person — without legal process — to the custody of a foreign government for purposes of detention and interrogation. The operations involved brutal torture.

• 9/11 brought Americans together. Why is the pandemic tearing them apart?

  Social media’s innate tendency to balkanize users into discrete political and social groups led to a profoundly different media consumption during the pandemic. Of course, Instagram wasn’t around in 2001; nor was Twitter, or Facebook. Can you imagine how 9/11 would have unfolded differently had it occurred twenty years later?

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Brazilian President Bans Social Media Companies From Removing Disinformation & Abuse

  Ah, great. Just after Australia made it clear that media organizations are liable for comments on social media (demonstrating one aspect of a world without intermediary liability protections), Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has announced new social media rules that effectively force social media sites to keep all content online (demonstrating the flipside to a world without intermediary liability protections). The two most important things that Section 230 does — limiting liability for 3rd party intermediaries and freeing websites of liability for moderation choices — each going away completely in two separate countries in the same week.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Geofence Warrants Threaten Civil Liberties and Free Speech Rights in Kenosha and Nationwide

  Geofence warrants require companies to provide information on every electronic device in a geographical area during a given time period. ATF used at least 12 geofence warrants issued to Google—the only company known to provide data in response to these warrants—to collect people’s location data during the Kenosha protests. The center of each geographic area was a suspected arson incident. However, the warrants reach broadly and require location data for long periods of time. One of the warrants encompassed a third of a major public park for a two-hour window during the protests. The ATF effectively threw a surveillance dragnet over many protesters, using “general warrants” that violate the Fourth Amendment and threaten the First Amendment right to protest free from government spying.

  Police can use geofence warrants to collect information on and movements of innocent people at protests. This can include device information, account information, email addresses, phone numbers, and information on Google services used by the device owner, and the data can come from both Android and Apple devices. Someone who goes to a protest and happens to be nearby when a crime occurs may get caught up in a police investigation. Police in Minneapolis, for example, used a geofence warrant during the protests over the killing of George Floyd. The public only learned about it because the dragnet, centered around a property damage incident, caught an innocent bystander filming the protests, and Google notified him (which it doesn’t always do). The police can also use this data to create dossiers on activists and organizers.

  In this way, geofence warrants also eliminate anonymity that people may rely on in order to protest or otherwise freely associate in public spaces. Law enforcement’s ability to catalogue the location of peaceful protestors will chill their exercise of their First Amendment rights. This is especially problematic when, as with the August 2020 protests in Kenosha, people are taking to the streets to hold the police themselves accountable.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• The Bloody US Withdrawal From Afghanistan and the Persecution of Julian Assange: an Interview With John Pilger

  John: Thank you, Dennis, very good to be back

  Dennis: Yes, indeed.  Well can we start in Afghanistan?  Can I get you to respond to the bloody and disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after  20-years of a bloody, senseless and illegal occupation?

• Xavier Bettel commits to improving information access for journalists

  According to a statement issued by the ALJP, the prime minister said he was well aware of the issues regarding access to information for members of the press. Some civil servants and public administration workers whose job it is to provide information to respective press officers have occasionally misinterpreted the so-called “Bettel circular” newsletter.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Susan Collins, Brett Kavanaugh, and Texas’s Abortion Ban

  Susan Collins recognizes that the Texas law banning abortion after the first six weeks of a pregnancy, even in cases of rape and incest, is “extreme.” The senior senator from Maine admits that the US Supreme Court’s refusal to strike down the law—which encourages bounty hunters to sue anyone who helps a pregnant person to exercise control over their body for $10,000—is “harmful.” On Thursday, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Texas, challenging the law’s constitutionality.

• The Justice Department Strikes Back

  US Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice have filed a complaint against the state of Texas in an attempt to stop enforcement of the state’s anti-abortion law, which empowers bounty hunters to deprive women and pregnant people of their constitutional rights.

• Notes on a Cold-Hearted Labor Day in San Francisco

  Unite Here is a union representing some 270,000 US and Canadian workers in what’s called “the hospitality industry.” Its members are mostly women and people of color.

  Bon Appetit is a for-profit company based in Minneapolis that provides “full food-service management to corporations, universities, and specialty venues.” The Giants contract with them to run the concession stands at Oracle Park.

• We Have to Stop Limiting Our Focus to Courts in the Defense of Abortion Rights

• Opinion | Law Enforcement, Including ICE, Perpetuates White Supremacy

• MEMORY HOLES

• ‘A Win for Civil Rights’: Federal Judge Blocks Florida GOP’s Anti-Protest Law

  Civil liberties and racial justice advocates are celebrating after a federal judge ruled Thursday that Florida’s anti-protest law is unconstitutional and therefore unenforceable.

  In his 90-page decision (pdf) granting civil rights groups’ request for a preliminary injunction, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker said the law—passed by Florida’s GOP-controlled House and Senate and signed in April by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in response to demonstrations against police violence and racial injustice—violates rights to free speech and peaceful assembly as well as due process protections.

• A Chill Wind: Texas Unleashes Bounty Hunters on Women

  Thanks to the Supreme Court, the state is now unleashing another wave of newly minted bounty hunters — this time on women.

  The Supreme Court has let stand the Lone Star State’s latest attack on women — a law that criminalizes abortion after six weeks, before most women realize they are pregnant, with no exceptions for rape or incest.

• To End White Supremacy, Liberals Must Surrender Liberalism to the Absolute of Love

  To know I am somebody is identity based not upon social or economic identifiers but on an ontological recognition of one’s valid being, one’s inclusion in the interdependent whole. It is revolutionary: it affirms self-worth against the identity provided illegitimately by the top-down system. And it is subversive in its refusal to accept the authority of that system that excludes our in-commonness. Instead, the authority for “somebodyhood” is inclusive, the larger Being contacted via the soul.

  Whiteness & Endangered humanity

• Highlighting Why Congress Must Codify Roe, OK Gov. Holds Ceremony for New Anti-Choice Laws

  With all eyes on Texas Thursday as the U.S. Justice Department sued the Lone Star State over its new abortion ban, Republican Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt held a ceremonial bill signing for nine so-called “pro-life” measures he approved during this year’s legislative session—highlighting the need for Congress to protect reproductive rights at the federal level.

  Stitt, who was flanked by anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser and GOP state lawmakers for the event, said that “I promised Oklahomans I would sign every piece of pro-life legislation that came across my desk and I am proud to keep that promise.”

• Marjorie Cohn on Texas Abortion Law, Kimberly Inez McGuire on Abortion Realities

• The Forgotten Black Heroes of 9/11: More Evidence of Discriminatory Denial

  But the sacrifices of these Black heroes will receive no recognition during the commemorations around America for the 20th Anniversary of what is considered the most tragic terrorist attack ever conducted on America soil.

  These heroes, William Parker and his colleagues, confronted terrorists on 9/11 in defense of freedom and liberty – professed pillars of democracy in America.

• The Other 20-Year Anniversary: Freedom and Surveillance Post-9/11

  The public centerpiece of our effort to increase government surveillance in response to the attacks was the passage of the Patriot Act, which will have its own 20th anniversary on October 26. But much more happened, and far too much of it was not revealed until years later.  Our government developed  a huge and expensive set of secret spying operations that eviscerated the line between domestic and foreign surveillance and swept up millions of non-suspect Americans’ communications and records. With some small but critical exceptions, Congress almost completely abdicated its responsibility to check the power of the Executive. Later, the secret FISA court shifted from merely approving specific warrants to a quasi-agency charged with reviewing entire huge secret programs without either the knowledge or the authority to provide meaningful oversight. All of these are a critical part of the legacy of September 11.

  Yet even after all of these years, there’s no clear evidence that you can surveil yourself to safety.

  Of course, we did not invent national security or domestic surveillance overreach 20 years ago. Since the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the early twentieth century, and the creation of the National Security Agency in 1952, the federal government has been reprimanded and reformed for overreaching and violating constitutionally protected rights. Even before 9/11, the NSA’s program FAIRVIEW forged agreements between the government agency and telecom companies in order to monitor phone calls going in and out of the country. But 9/11 gave the NSA the inciting incident it needed to take what it  has long wanted: a shift to a collect-it-all strategy inside the U.S. to match, in many ways, the one it had already developed outside the U.S., and the secret governmental support to try to make it happen. As for those of us in the general public, we were told in the abstract that giving up our privacy would make us more secure even as we were kept in the dark about what that actually meant, especially for the Muslims and other Americans unfairly targeted. 

• Police Department Caught Falsifying Evidence Logs Used In Trial Of PD Employee Who Was Caught Falsifying Evidence Logs

  The Miami Beach Police Department is so full of what we colloquially call “bad actors” that it can’t even make its way through a criminal trial of one of its employees without implicating even more employees. Proper evidence handling? Chain of custody? These are things the Miami Beach PD can’t be bothered to concern itself with.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• How I Research Stuff

  When I first started Tedium six years and nine months ago, I wanted to see how far I could get with it before I reached the point where I forgot that I had written about something previously. I feel like I’m finally at that point, where there are probably things that I’ve written about that I likely will not remember unless I look them up, like this Charlie Sheen-inspired piece about alternative medicine, or this piece on bottle deposits. I have been at this long enough that there are pieces in my archives that I first wrote in 2015 that I wish I could completely rewrite knowing what I know now. (Example: I totally burned through numbers stations less than a month after the first issue, which I’m still kicking myself about.) There’s always a risk of getting meta when it comes to Tedium, but for today’s issue I wanted to explain how I actually go about researching the things I choose to write about, in hopes that it might help someone who needs some editorial inspiration or who wants to become a better researcher. Maybe you might get better at writing after reading this. — Ernie @ Tedium

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• With Brian Robbins, ViacomCBS Bets a Kids’ TV Veteran Can Bring Paramount Into a Streaming Future

  And then there are questions about ViacomCBS’s own future in the firmament of media companies. Shari Redstone has said that the company her family built has the resources it needs to compete with the entertainment leviathans that cast a shadow over the entertainment world. However, many observers believe that she’ll have no choice to sell the company to an Apple, Amazon or another tech giant upending the way that movies are made and distributed.

  “I don’t think she’ll have much choice but to sell in two or three years,” says Vogel. “There’s tremendous competition out there and with Netflix and Disney and Apple and Amazon out there, it’s hard to find a niche.”

Monopolies

• Judge Loosens Apple’s Grip on App Store in Epic Decision

• Apple Mostly, But Not Entirely, Wins Against Epic; No Antitrust Violation, But Must Tweak Practices To Comply With CA Law

  If there’s something that’s been made clear over the last year or so in the world of antitrust it’s that just because some people don’t like big companies and their practices, that doesn’t mean it’s an antitrust violation. It rarely is. In the well, rather epic lawsuit that Epic brought against Apple, we initially described it as a contract negotiation by lawsuit and predicted that it didn’t seem likely to actually meet the bar for an antitrust violation. It seems that District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed with us, rejecting the antitrust claims entirely. As the judge wrote:

• Apple Risks Losing Billions of Dollars Annually From Epic Games Ruling

  In a ruling Friday, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said the company must give developers the option of bypassing its commission on in-app purchases — a cut that runs as high as 30%. That includes letting iOS apps use “buttons, external links or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing methods” other than Apple’s payment system.

• Apple dealt major blow in Epic Games trial

  A court in Oakland, California, has ruled that Apple cannot stop app developers directing users to third-party payment options.

  Apple had argued that all apps should use Apple’s own in-app payment options.

  In a high profile trial, Epic Games had challenged the up-to-30% cut Apple takes from purchases – and argued that the App Store was monopolistic.

• Apple can no longer force developers to use in-app purchasing, judge rules

  The ruling says that Apple cannot bar developers from providing buttons or links in their apps that direct customers to other ways to pay outside of Apple’s own in-app purchase system, which charges developers commissions of up to 30 percent. The ruling also said that Apple cannot ban developers from communicating with customers via contact information that the developers obtained when customers signed up within the app.

• The future of the App Store depends on the difference between a ‘button’ and an ‘external link’

  Specifically, the court said that “Apple is engaging in anticompetitive conduct,” and that “Apple’s anti-steering provisions hide critical information from consumers and illegally stifle consumer choice.”

  To fix that, the court issued the following permanent injunction barring Apple from having rules against other payment systems. I’ve bolded the most relevant bit: [...]

• Apple must allow other forms of in-app purchase, rules judge in Epic v. Apple

  In short, iOS apps must be allowed to direct users to payment options beyond those offered by Apple. The injunction is scheduled to take effect in 90 days — on December 9th — unless it is enjoined by a higher court.

• R&D, IP & Standardisation are key elements for an innovative India [Ed: Complete propaganda as some of these are obstacles designed to give advantage to foreign firms. "This is a partnered post." Conflict of interest.]

• European Union: File It Or Lose It [Ed: Litigation giant Finnegan (, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, LLP): PAY US OR THE SKY WILL FALL]

  Absolute deadline for filing corresponding UK Applications expires on 30 September 2021

  If you are the owner of an EU Trade Mark Application or Registration that was pending on 1 January 2021, and if the UK is a territory of interest to you, then please sit up and take note.

  The deadline to take action and to file corresponding UK Applications will expire on 30 September 2021. This deadline is absolute. If you don’t take action, your EU Mark will no longer have effect in the UK.

• Patents

  • Broad Files Opposition to ToolGen Substantive Preliminary Motion No. 1 [Ed: Latest in the saga wherein #patent litigation fanatics (profiteers) try to justify patents on life and nature (yes, it's as incredulous as that sounds)]

    On May 20th, ToolGen filed its Substantive Motion No. 1 for benefit of priority in Interference No. 106,126, which names ToolGen as Senior Party and as Junior Party The Broad Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the President and Fellows of Harvard College (collectively, “Broad”). On August 6th, Broad filed its Opposition to this Motion.

    As set forth in ToolGen’s motion, the Board had granted ToolGen the benefit of its U.S. provisional application, Serial No. 61/717,324, filed October 23, 2012 (“P1″), resulting in ToolGen having an earlier priority date than Broad. ToolGen submitted this motion to be accorded benefit of priority to two later-filed, related applications: U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/837,481, filed June 20, 2013 (“P3″ or “ToolGen 5 P3″), or alternatively, International Application No. PCT/KR2013/009488, filed Oct. 23, 2013 (“PCT”). In its motion, ToolGen explains that it is submitting this motion contingent on the Board granting CVC’s Substantive Motion No. 2, which attacks ToolGen’s entitlement to priority to the P1 priority document in Interference No. 106,127. The brief sets out graphically the relationship of these priority documents:

  • C.R. Bard, Inc. v. Medline Industries, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2021)

    In a nonprecedential decision, the Federal Circuit gave a mixture of success and failure to the parties in four separate inter partes review decisions by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, in C.R. Bard, Inc. v. Medline Industries, Inc.

    The case arose in IPRs instituted in response to a challenge by Bard involving three Medline Patents: U.S. Patent No. 9,745,088 (wherein claims 1, 2, 6–10, 16–19, 25–58, 60–74, 76–90, and 92 were challenged); U.S. Patent No. 9,808,596 (claims 7–16 and 21–22 challenged); and U.S. Patent No. 9,795,761 (claims 1–19 and 22–25 challenged). The claims are directed to trays designed to store urinary catheterization tools, which include a lubricant syringe, an inflation syringe, and a fluid receptable.

  • PTAB Affirms Patentability of Parus Claims [Ed: Issuing a whole press release just to announce that one's patents aren't deemed fake in PTAB's eyes (it can be appealed to CAFC, still]

    Parus Holdings, Inc., a pioneer in voice-enabled technologies, is pleased to announce today that it has won an important victory against Apple in a patent dispute over its voice-user interface technologies for retrieving information. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected in its entirety Apple’s attempt to invalidate key Parus patents.

  • Register for the European Inventor Award virtual roadshow [Ed: EPO wasting money again, bribing the media, bribing host nations (vote-buying), and distracting from its many crimes; sometimes it promotes frauds too]

    As the 1 October deadline draws nearer, time is running out to nominate an inventor for the 2022 edition of the European Inventor Award. Each year, the Award casts a spotlight on the individuals who are driving change that benefits society and next year will include the new sustainability-focused Young Inventors prize for early career innovators By submitting a nomination, you will help identify and celebrate these inspiring inventors.

  • English Court of Appeal brings sufficiency test into line with EPO case law [Ed: EPO case law is patently rigged and oughtn’t be copied anywhere]

    A recent judgment, overturning the high threshold standard for sufficiency set out in a High Court decision, is good news for owners of patents in the UK claiming large numbers of compounds…

  • JW Bioscience’s sepsis diagnosis wins European patent

    The company has secured an advantageous position in the global in-vitro diagnostic market with the current registration and patents obtained in the U.S., Japan, and China.

    JW Bioscience, a subsidiary of JW Life Science, plans to continue filing a patent in European countries and complete the final registration.

    The company is preparing a clinical trial with Severance Hospital to develop a diagnostic device using WRS to receive approval from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety and plans to apply for authorization by the end of 2021.

  • US Judge Gets It Right: AI Doesn’t Get Patents

    A month ago, we wrote about a perplexing (and dangerous) decision down in Australia ruling that an AI can be listed as the inventor of a patent. As we had explained, there was a concerted effort by a small group patent lawyers and this one dude, Stephen Thaler, to seek out patents for “inventions” that an AI created by Thaler called Dabus (“device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience”). As we explained in that and earlier posts, the entire point of the patent system is to provide incentives to humans to invent. An AI does not need such incentives. As we’ve highlighted in the past, the USPTO and the EU patent office have both rejected AI-generated patents. Australia’s patent office had done the same, but a judge there rejected that and said an AI could be listed as an inventor.

  • Software Patents

    • $2,000 for Consumeron prior art

      On September 9, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 10,115,067, owned by Consumeron, LLC, an NPE. The ’067 patent relates to a method for remote acquisition and delivery of goods involving a server in communication with a customer’s computer through a user interface via the Internet. The patent has been asserted against MapleBear Inc. d/b/a Instacart.

• Copyrights

  • Hosting Company Quadranet Asks Court to Dismiss ‘VPN Piracy’ Lawsuit

    Hosting company Quadranet has asked a Florida federal court to dismiss the “VPN piracy” lawsuit that was filed by several independent film companies. The hosting company argues that it can’t be held liable for the pirating activities of LiquidVPN subscribers, simply because the VPN provider happens to lease servers at Quadranet.

  • Former Student Sentenced For Selling Pirated Social Worker Textbooks

    A former student who sold pirated digital copies of textbooks has been sentenced by a court in Denmark. Over a 21-month period the woman sold access to 38 different copyrighted books used in the social worker sector. An anti-piracy group referred her crimes to the country’s State Prosecutor for Serious Economic and International Crime and yesterday a court determined her fate.

  • Open Minds Podcast: *Special Episode* Meet 3 of our CC Global Summit Keynotes

    In anticipation of the Summit, we’re doing something a little different in this episode. Pack your bags and prepare for a short (audio) tour around the world, join CC’s Ony Anukem as she speaks to three of our wonderful Summit keynote speakers. First up in Nairobi, Kenya, where we sit down with Angela Oduor Lungati, Executive Director at Ushahidi. Ushahidi is a global non-profit technology company that builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering barriers for individuals to raise their voices. Angela was also recently appointed to the Creative Commons Board of Directors. Next, we’ll arrive in Bangalore, India, where you’ll hear from Shuttleworth Fellow and Coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, Achal Prabhala. AccessIBSA is a project set up to expand access and speed up the discovery of new drugs in India, Brazil and South Africa. Our final stop on the tour will be in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where we will catch up with Cecília Olliveira, Executive Director of Fogo Cruzado. Fogo Cruzado aims to expand a community-driven open data platform and reduce the impact of armed violence to build a more just society. She is also a fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation.

  • Meet the CC Summit Presenter: Lisa Macklem

    Based in: London, ON – Canada

  • Huge GTA4 Mod Started In 2014 Shuts Down Due To ‘Hostility’ From Take-Two Interactive

    For some reason, it seems that there is an industry issue heating up among video game developers and publishers over their modding communities. We’ve begun to see a flurry of stories on the topic lately and perhaps the most impressive thing about those stories is how wildly binary they are. Nintendo tends to Nintendo, for instance, where control is valued over building a community of fans. Other publishers, like CD Projekt Red and Bethesda go the completely opposite direction and not only embrace the modding communities for their games, but also sometimes simply hire talented modders directly to their payroll.