Audiocasts/Shows

• FLOSS Weekly 647: Gluu and Open Source Digital ID – Mike Schwartz

  Mike Schwartz of Gluu.org joins Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett on FLOSS Weekly. In a world where cloud native and containers are widely used, digital identity poses a critical challenge. No one person knows more about making digital ID work than Schwartz. Gluu is an open source option which offers secure authentication for both internal and external applications in the enterprise.

• Linus Torvalds On Why Github Merges Are Trash – Invidious

  For the longest time Linus Torvalds has hated Github pull requests and due to a recent linux contribution he want on another rant about the matter so I thought we should back at what else he has said.

• Packaging My Alacritty Config For DTOS – Invidious

  In this video, I’m going to add some extra color schemes to my alacritty config. Then, I will create and Arch PKGBUILD for my config create a installable binary package to add to my DTOS core repository.

• SparkyLinux 6.0 “KDE” Quick overview #Shorts – Invidious

• How to install Steam on Linux Lite 5.4 – Invidious

  In this video, we are looking at how to install Steam on Linux Lite 5.4.

Kernel Space

• Intel Seamless Updates could pave the way for firmware updates without a reboot

  Intel is developing technology that could reduce down time for some computers, by allowing the UEFI/BIOS firmware to be updated without the need for a reboot.

• Linux 5.14.4

  I'm announcing the release of the 5.14.4 kernel.
  
  All users of the 5.14 kernel series must upgrade.
  
  The updated 5.14.y git tree can be found at:
  	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.14.y
  and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
  
  https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
  
  thanks,
  
  greg k-h
  

• Linux 5.13.17

• Linux 5.10.65

• Linux 5.4.146

• Microsoft Adds An EGL Implementation To Mesa For Windows

  Microsoft is increasingly investing in Mesa as part of working on their Windows Subsystem for Linux graphics support as well as also getting OpenGL and OpenCL working on Windows implemented over Direct3D 12. In fact, Microsoft is one of the gold sponsors for this week’s X.Org Developers’ Conference (XDC2021).

• HP OMEN Laptops To Be Better Supported With Linux 5.16 – Phoronix

  HP’s higher-end “OMEN” laptop series is set to see better support with the next kernel cycle.

  While just missing out on the Linux 5.15 merge window, one of the early changes queued up so far this week in any of the “-next” branches is the x86 platform drivers picking up HP OMEN laptop support within the HP WMI driver.

• Orange Publishes An In-Kernel eBPF-Powered Cache – Can Speed Up Memcached By ~18x – Phoronix

  French telecommunications giant Orange has published “BMC” as the (e)BPF Memory Cache providing a cache focused on memcached usage within the Linux kernel.

  Orange’s open-source BPF Memory Cache allows for handling memcached requests before the standard network stack and is said to be crash-safe and this module requires no other kernel modules. Additionally, the memcached user-space software itself can run unmodified atop BMC.

• Graphics Stack

  • Reverse Engineering, Open-Source Driver Writing Continues For Apple’s M1 GPU – Phoronix

    Alyssa Rosenzweig spoke today at the virtual X.Org Developers Conference about the ongoing work for bringing up Linux display and graphics support on the Apple M1 graphics processor.

    While there has been much progress this year bringing up Linux on the Apple M1 SoC, the display/graphics bring-up is particularly involved and will likely prove to be the most challenging aspect from its reverse engineering to driver writing.

  • Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q3 Released For Linux – Phoronix

    AMD today released their quarterly update to the Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise graphics driver package, which includes an updated Linux build as well.

    Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q3 is their latest Linux driver package aiming to provide the latest driver support for their workstation GPUs/accelerators on RHEL/CentOS 7 and 8, Ubuntu 20.04.2, Ubuntu 18.04.5, and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3.

  • AMD Publishes Initial Firmware For Yellow Carp APUs – Phoronix

    A small but important step forward is seeing AMD recently publishing their binary firmware files in advance of new GPU/APU launches for rounding out their Linux driver support stack.

    Last month AMD published the Van Gogh APU firmware files in advance of hardware like the Steam Deck shipping at large. Now this morning the Yellow Carp APU firmware files are also published well in advance of the APUs being officially launched.

  • Raspberry Pi V3DV Driver Still Working On Vulkan 1.1 Conformance, More Performance

    Iago Toral of Igalia kicked off the first day of the virtual XDC2021 developer conference today by sharing a status update on V3DV as the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver most notably used for Raspberry Pi 4 and newer.

    The current status of the V3DV driver shouldn’t be too surprising to regular Phoronix readers as we frequently cover its milestones. In any case, this year V3DV has enjoyed seeing Vulkan 1.0 conformance, much of the Vulkan 1.1 extensions implemented but not yet officially conformant, better WSI platform integration, and a lot of work on enhancing the performance. V3DV is maturing greatly when it comes to the performance though the developers are still working to maximize its performance potential.

Applications

• Cockpit 253

  SELinux alerts can now be selected and dismissed in bulk, which is simpler than having to expand and dismiss them individualy. Having a clean alert state is especially helpful when building policies, as newer alerts become more obvious.

Instructionals/Technical

• Directory structure of the Linux operating system explained – VITUX

  Unlike the Windows system, Linux does have a lot of different directory structures which we will be discussing today. In Linux, all the directories retain from the root or base directory (/). Inside the base directory, if you use the ls command to list the file and dir you could also see some symlinks that point to other directories using ( → ). The symlinks also known for symbolic links is the type of file in Linux that points to another file or directory in the system. It is kind of similar to shortcuts in windows.

  If you are new to Linux understanding directory structure is the initial phase. Without it, you might get headaches while managing the files and directories. So this article will help you cover up and understanding the directory structure of Linux OS. To demonstrate this article I have used Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system.

• diziet | Get source to Debian packages only via dgit; “official” git links are beartraps

  dgit clone sourcepackage gets you the source code, as a git tree, in ./sourcepackage. cd into it and dpkg-buildpackage -uc -b.

  Do not use: “VCS” links on official Debian web pages like tracker.debian.org; “debcheckout”; searching Debian’s gitlab (salsa.debian.org). These are good for Debian experts only.

• Ping Command Not Found? Install Ping on Ubuntu

  Usually, the ping command is already installed on most Linux systems.

  But in some rare cases like when you have Ubuntu minimal install or you are running Ubuntu in a Docker container, the ping command is missing. If you try to use it, you will see the ping not found error.

• Build a data sharding service with DistSQL | Opensource.com

  If you’re reading this, then you’re probably familiar with the data query and programming language, SQL (Structured Query Language). It’s also used as the standard language for management systems for accessing data, querying, updating, and managing relational database systems. Like standard SQL, DistSQL, or Distributed SQL, it is a built-in SQL language unique to ShardingSphere that provides incremental functional capabilities beyond standard SQL. Leveraging ShardingSphere’s powerful SQL parsing engine, DistSQL provides a syntax structure and syntax validation system like that of standard SQL, making DistSQL more flexible while maintaining regularity. ShardingSphere’s Database Plus concept aims at creating an open source distributed database system that is both functional and relevant to the actual database business. DistSQL is built on top of the traditional database to provide SQL capabilities that are both standards-compliant and feature ShardingSphere’s functionality to enhance conventional database management.

• The experience of writing a book · Pablo Iranzo Gómez’s blog

  I wanted to write about my experience (before I forget about it), and as some colleagues asked about it… here we go…

  As published in the blog entry RHEL8 Administration book, some colleagues and I wrote a book on RHEL8 administration, which can be bought here.

  Many years ago I started one about Linux, but every time a new paragraph was added, a lot of new ‘TO-DO’ items were appended as the information growth… and as it was a ‘solo’ project, I had other stuff to work on and was parked.

  Later last year (2020), Miguel approached asking if I was interested in helping him with his book, he started it, but the schedule was a bit tight, not impossible, but, having to work on the book at night, once kids are sleeping, you might be tired of work, etc… was not the best one, so after some thinking about it, I told him that I was willing to help with the task, which automatically, duplicated the available time for each chapter.

  Not all chapters were equal, I must admit, some took me more time to ‘start’, but I think it was a good experience, I learned a lot, and I think it will help others in the future.

• What Is the curl Command in Linux and What Can You Do With It?

  The curl command in Linux is a great way to automate the process of uploading and downloading data from a server. Curl supports all significant protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, SFTP, FTP, and more.

  Features like pausing and resuming transfers, limiting bandwidth, proxy support, and user authentication make it a perfect command-line utility for data transfer.

  Let’s take a deep dive and explore what is curl and how to use it.

• How To Use Rmmod Command On Linux With Examples – Unixcop

  In this article, we’ll talk about how to use the rmmod command to remove modules from the Linux Kernel.

  rmmod command in Linux system is used to remove a module from the kernel. Most of the users still use modprobe with the -r option instead of using rmmod.

• How To Configure LAMP with Debian 11 – Unixcop

  Today, we will discuss how to configure LAMP with Debian. The LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MariaDB, and Linux. We will understand all of the installation procedures steps by step.

• Steps to Install and start with Dash on Debian 11 Bullseye – Linux Shout

  Dash is a framework from Plotly to program web apps for data analysis/visualization in Python, R, or Julia. Dash is based on React, a well-known Javascript web framework, and Flask, one of the most famous web servers in Python. Plotly also offers commercial solutions for hosting web apps, however as Dash is completely free and open-source you can install it on your own server that supports Python.

• How to Change Your Password in Ubuntu

  Passwords are probably one of the most important and complicated aspects of any operating system, and the popular Linux-based OS, Ubuntu, is no exception to this rule.

  On the contrary, further to popular belief, changing user and root passwords on Ubuntu is extremely simple, and you don’t have to put in too much effort to accomplish this task.

  Since Ubuntu offers both graphical user interface and command-line options to the end-user, you have the choice to use either method to make the desired changes to your password.

• How To Install VirtualBox on AlmaLinux 8 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VirtualBox on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, VirtualBox is a free and open-source hosted hypervisor for x86 virtualization, developed by Oracle Corporation. VirtualBox can run on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Solaris. It is an alternative to proprietary hypervisor VMware workstation and Kernel Virtual Machine.

  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 VirtualBox on AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.

• How to play Castle Crashers on Linux

  Castle Crashers is a 2D indie hack-and-slash video game developed by The Behemoth. The game was released in 2008 for Xbox 360. However, the game made it to other platforms later on. Here’s how to play Castle Crashers on Linux.

• Oracle Java 17 Released as New LTS, Here’s How to Install it in Ubuntu | UbuntuHandbook

  Oracle announced the release of Java 17 as the new Long-Term Support (LTS) release.

  Java 17 LTS comes with thousands of performance, stability, and security updates, as well as 14 JEPs (JDK Enhancement Proposals). And Oracle will provide 8-year support for the release with security, performance, and bug-fix updates until 2029.

  According to the release note, the next LTS will be Java 21 planned for September 2023, which changes the LTS release circle for every three years to two years.

• Proxmox VE Full Course: Class 7 – Creating Containers – Invidious

  LearnLinuxTV’s full course on Proxmox Virtual Environment continues with the 7 class in the series, and this time it’s all about containers. In this video, you’ll see the process of launching LXC containers through Proxmox VE.

• GNU Linux Debian 10 – kvm-qemu virtualization host – sata disk access performance problems with Windows 7 64Bit vm guest (only 32Bit works with virtio drivers crystal disk benchmark looking good)

Wine or Emulation

• Open-Source Frontend for Emulators “RetroArch” Now Available on Steam for Windows and Linux Users

  Since its release way back in 2010, RetroArch has been one of the most popular game emulator interfaces. Over the years, it has received numerous upgrades and lets you play classic games from various retro consoles ranging from the Atari 2600 to the PlayStation 2.

  While the RetroArch team has been planning to launch this on Steam for more than a year, it is finally available to the masses!

  This means you can now emulate and play your favorite retro games without having to leave Steam.

  Sure, you can download it from their official website, but launching it directly from your Steam collection proves to be a hassle-free way for most users.

Games

• Chilled puzzle game Unpacking is set to release on November 2 | GamingOnLinux

  On November 2 you’ll be able to experience the joy of sorting through boxes in a new home thanks to Unpacking. Developed by Witch Beam, known for the ace twin-stick shooter Assault Android Cactus. A very different game to what they previously made of course, nice to see developers branch out.

  “Unpacking is a zen game about the familiar experience of pulling possessions out of boxes and fitting them into a new home. Part block-fitting puzzle, part home decoration, you are invited to create a satisfying living space while learning clues about the life you’re unpacking. Over the course of eight house moves, you are given a chance to experience a sense of intimacy with a character you never see and a story you’re never told.”

• The Humble Be the Bad Guy Bundle has Dungeons 3, Postal and more | GamingOnLinux

  Ready for a another set of games to get you through the week? The Humble Be the Bad Guy Bundle is out now with some goodies to get into if you like to be on the other side. As usual it’s a varied mix so we’ll point out what will work on Linux.

• Legend of Keepers: Return of the Goddess expansion is out now | GamingOnLinux

  Legend of Keepers: Return of the Goddess is an expansion for the reverse dungeon crawler, where you’re setting up a dungeon to keep away pesky heroes.

  As a reminder: you pick a boss and build up a dungeon with various trap rooms and rooms full of monsters to defend against invasions. Once heroes invade, you then watch and hope that your dungeon and boss hold their ground. It’s pretty to get a little engrossed with it as it sucks away your time. This first expansion was not developed by the original team (Goblinz Studio / Goblinz Publishing) instead by their partners at TavroxGames, who made Neurodeck.

• Steel Assault will offer some intense looking 16-bit retro-style action on September 28 | GamingOnLinux

  Coming from Zenovia Interactive and Tribute Games Inc, Steel Assault is a retro-styled 16-bit action platformer that’s confirmed to release on September 28 and it’s coming to Linux too. Game porter and FNA developer Ethan Lee confirmed it on Twitter to say “It’s true! In addition to working as FNA support, I also brought the game to Nintendo Switch and Linux.”.

  “Punch, whip, and zipline your way through a post-apocalyptic America in this 16-bit retro-style action platformer! Play as Taro Takahashi, a resistance soldier on a revenge mission against the dictator who lords over the ashes.”

• Couch gaming Linux distribution ChimeraOS has a new release | GamingOnLinux

  ChimeraOS (originally GamerOS) is a big-screen Linux gaming experience designed for couch gaming (think like SteamOS) and there’s a brand new release available.

  While the current SteamOS is quite old and we’re waiting on SteamOS 3 being released, this is the next best thing. In many ways it’s a lot more than just booting into Steam Big Picture mode as it brings its own enhancements to work with other stores like Epic, GOG and more.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Krita September Development Update

    Not directly development related, but the scammers who registered krita.io, krita.app and getkrita.com for ransomware attacks have lost those domains. Let’s hope that also means the scammers decide they have had enough and stop spamming people. It’s been quite a chore dealing with all the enquiries, but it’s better that people ask than that they blindly go with the flow!

    The Krita development fund now has over 150 subscription members — and about 250 occasional supporters per month. We’re still quite far from making it possible to fund more developers from the dev fund instead of — always fickle — store sales, so if you aren’t a member, please consider joining!

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Why Many Linux App Developers Don’t Want Distros to Use Themes

    You may associate Linux with the freedom to make your desktop look however you want, but that’s not the case with GNOME. At least, not without knowing which extensions to install or how to read code. By default, GNOME is intended to look and feel a certain way, and many developers would prefer if Linux distributions didn’t change the appearance of their apps by using themes.

    Is it an issue when you change the theme on your own personal machine? No, you know what you’re getting yourself into. But confusion can arise when the customized experience comes presented as the default.

  • Solus abandons GTK

    One of the leaders of the Solus Linux project, Joshua Strobl, announced his intention to abandon GTK in the development of both future versions of Budgie and the entire ecosystem of applications in Solus. On his blog, he made a number of criticisms of the current state and development plans of GTK, as well as the GNOME development philosophy.

    According to him, the widespread implantation of Adwaita as the only true desktop theme and the accompanying removal of part of the API for various kinds of customization has added headaches to developers who maintain the GNOME stack in distributions or integrate their applications into it. All suggested options for customizing the look and feel of GTK-based applications and related libraries are rejected, and members of the GNOME team are insolently rude in response in tickets and social media.

    Joshua also complains that GTK4, released a little less than a year ago, slightly complicated the code for working with widgets by prohibiting direct inheritance. But he sees a much more important problem with the abolition of the X11 API, in particular for obtaining the configuration of the connected monitors. Moving towards full support for Wayland, GNOME removed the X server polling functionality, instructing the developer to write their own interfaces to access X11 directly (or to APIs of other operating systems, if the application turned out to be cross-platform).

  • Rolled back to gtk2 version of yad

    EasyOS is staying with the gtk2 version of ‘gtkdialog’, in fact, I am hanging onto gtk2 apps indefinitely.

  • Introducing Emblem

    Emblem is a new design tool that generates project avatars, or emblems if you will, for your git forge or matrix room. To set a GitLab project avatar one can put a logo.png file at the root of the project, if there is no manually set project avatar it will be picked up automatically.

Distributions

• Manjaro Vs EndeavourOS Comparison 2021 (The Differences)

  The best non-Ubuntu distros are Manjaro Linux whereas EndeavourOS is seemed to be a well-known and popular arch-based distro. The first one is quite old in the market whereas the other one has made a new entry.

  Now, you might wonder which one is good, well for this you need to follow through the Manjaro vs EndeavourOS comparison below. We shall be comparing Xfce variants as they are popular and all from the process of installation to features and how they differ.

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo eudev adopted by Eudev Project

    A recent LinuxQuestions thread discusses the depreciation of the eudev fork which was created by Gentoo a few years back in order to keep systemd at bay. This step by Gentoo sparks some serious doubts among LQ members about what Slackware should do – is the inclusion of systemd near, now that eudev is dead?

    Short recap: In November 2015 Slackware replaced its no longer maintained original udev with this new eudev (a standalone extract of udev out of the systemd sources but modified so that every dependency on systemd is removed). This change was actually my chance to announce the liveslak project as a ‘celebration to say farewell to udev‘.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Node.js circuit breakers for serverless functions | Red Hat Developer

    Using circuit breakers in Node.js applications helps mitigate failures when an application calls external services. For example, if the application calls a service to get a list of movies, and that service is not running, the circuit breaker helps the application fall back and find a different way to satisfy the request—or at least inform the user that the movie list is unavailable.

    In a previous article, I showed how to use circuit breakers with Node.js. Using circuit breakers with Red Hat OpenShift Serverless Functions introduces a new challenge, which we can solve with a slightly different implementation. I’ll explain the issue first, then show you how to solve it.

  • Dow CIO: Digital transformation demands rethinking talent strategy | The Enterprisers Project

    At Dow, we’ve been on a digital transformation journey for several years now, but over the past 18 months, we’ve had the opportunity to fast-track the use of digital capabilities across all of our business functions. We are well beyond the days when IT was leveraged primarily to drive productivity – we view IT as a core piece of the business and driver of value growth.

    Earlier this year, we announced a $400 million investment to accelerate digital throughout the company.

    We identified the key areas we know will improve the customer and employee experience while delivering the most value.
    Collaborating with our businesses and operational groups, we identified the key areas we know will improve the customer and employee experience while delivering the most value. One area I’m excited about is material science innovation and product commercialization. How we interact with our customers and innovate has completely changed during the pandemic, with the help of digital capabilities. For instance, when big in-person trade shows were put on hold, we began leveraging online forums and hosting virtual events with hundreds of bench scientists at once instead of one-off meetings, enabling customers to watch the events whenever convenient for them.

  • Take the 2021 Enterprisers Project reader survey

    2021 marks the eighth anniversary of The Enterprisers Project. Each year, we ask our readers to share feedback on the work we’re doing.

    Your responses have shaped the topics we cover, how we deliver articles, and importantly, your feedback has helped us better align our articles to your interests.

  • IT talent: 5 mentoring best practices for the hybrid work era

    CIOs who embrace a coaching role say that it’s one of the most rewarding aspects of their jobs. But mentoring IT talent looks different in a hybrid work environment.

    We asked CIOs who recently won the 2021 Capital CIO of the Year ORBIE Awards how they are creating opportunities for IT talent to stand out and rise to the next level – and how that has or hasn’t changed during the pandemic. The awards were presented by the Capital CIO Leadership Association, a professional community that annually recognizes CIOs for their excellence in technology leadership.

    Read on for CIO coaching and mentoring tips you can borrow on your team.

  • Red Hat Satellite 6.9 with Puma Web Server

    Until Red Hat Satellite 6.8, the Passenger web/app server was a core component of Red Hat Satellite. Satellite used Passenger to run Ruby applications such as Foreman. Satellite 6.9 is no longer using the Passenger web server. The Foreman application (main UI and API server) was ported to use the Puma project. In this post, we’ll provide an overview of Puma and see how the application server switch affected performance of the Satellite server.

  • Using NGINX Ingress Controller on Red Hat OpenShift

    Network engineering for the high availability of application services is nothing new. However, as Kubernetes-based environments become more widespread, companies are beginning to look for innovative deployments across multiple types of infrastructures (on-premise, AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud). They then begin to ask what achieving successful application delivery looks like for those types of deployments.

    In our series on Davie Street Enterprises (DSE), we’ve used a fictitious company to illustrate how organizations have implemented protective measures against ransomware, transformed applications, and more.

    In this post, we’ll cover how Gloria Fenderson, DSE’s Senior Manager of Network Engineering, plans to use Red Hat OpenShift and the NGINX Ingress Controller to deliver applications on a cluster running across multiple types of underlying infrastructure. Both NGINX and Red Hat solutions are designed to enable the deployment of container-based environments across multiple clouds; we’ll see now how easily this is accomplished.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • The State of Robotics – August 2021 | Ubuntu

    Robotics is everywhere. Researchers and companies are all working on groundbreaking developments, either improving robotics to be state of the art or pursuing innovative applications. That is the main aim of this monthly blog; to show you what we are capable of doing today and to inspire you to think about the bigger picture. For the benefit of your current or future robotics project!

  • Canonical’s managed services achieve MSP Cloud Verify Certification

    Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, today announced the completion of the MSP Cloud Verify Certification (MSPCV) for its support and managed services. The MSPCV certification, further strengthens Canonical’s industry-leading open source offering, reassuring customers in all industries that they can securely consume open source in a regulated fashion that complies with all the industry standards and best practices.

    Organisations have a constant demand to simplify the way they consume open source solutions, and with over 85% of enterprises having an open-source mandate to increase agility and reduce costs, managing the technical complexity has become the main source of friction.

    Canonical has created an alternative approach providing managed services from within the same organisation where the technology itself is being developed to simplify the way open source is being consumed. By ensuring managed services teams are working side by side with the engineers that develop products such as OpenStack and Kubernetes, Canonical has created an efficient operational model providing production-level SLAs at the minimum time required to resolve any issue.

  • Ubuntu Linux Fundamentals – Learn Linux Server with Ubuntu

    If you understand Linux, you understand the operating system that powers much of the Internet. This beginner-level course will take you from knowing nothing about Linux to competency. Ubuntu’s a great place to start learning Linux. It’s a well maintained, full-featured, well documented and supported, free operating system. Unleash the power of Ubuntu’s command-line tools. By the end, you’ll know: 1)Linux fundamentals, 2)Ubuntu server 3)Configuring Remote Access with Secure Shell (SSH) 4)Remote Access Overview 5)Manage and secure your Server 6)Creating a Web Server With nginx and Securing nginx All that and more in this course will have you walking with the knowledge you need to be comfortable with Linux at home or at work.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi based kit tests liquid food quality

  An open-spec, RPi 3A+ based “π-LAB” device on Kickstarter is equipped with a spectrometer, laser, 5MP camera, and touchscreen, and is designed to measure the quality of liquids such as olive oil.

  In Greece, as in much of the Mediterranean, debates about the quality of olive oil are taken seriously. To help settle such disputes and expand scientific inquiry to the masses, a photonics scientist named Georgios Violakis from the city of Heraklion on the olive-soaked island of Crete has gone to Kickstarter to launch a liquid analysis pocket lab called π-LAB (Pi-LAB).

  Powered by a Raspberry Pi Model 3A+, the open hardware/software device includes a spectrometer, laser, camera, and other components to measure and analyze liquids. It will ship with a database and AI-enhanced software optimized for testing olive oil quality but can also be used to analyze any other liquid, including coffee, honey, and wine.

• Home Assistant project launches its own Raspberry Pi CM4 carrier

  The Home Assistant project has opened pre-orders on an open-spec, $149 “Home Assistant Amber” system based on an RPI CM4 with GbE, 3x USB, ZigBee, and M.2 M-key. $99 kit versions without the CM4 include a PoE model.

  Last year, the Home Assistant project celebrated the release of Home Assistant 2020.12 by offering its popular, Linux/Python-based home automation software pre-installed on a Odroid-N2+ Home Assistant Blue bundle with enclosure. Now, to celebrate its 8th birthday, the project has gone to Crowd Supply to launch its own Home Assistant Amber development board with enclosure built around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.

• Laser Cut Plywood Raspberry Pi Case – The DIY Life

  I recently reviewed the Ortur Laser Master 2 Pro, but rather than just engrave and cut a range of test pieces, I thought I could use the laser to make something useful. I decided to make up a Plywood Raspberry Pi Case, which is loosely based on my 3D printable Raspberry Pi Desktop Case.

  Here is my video of the unboxing and setup of the laser along with the build of the case. Read on for the full written instructions.

• Topjoy Butterfly tablets with DES Slurry ePaper displays hit Kickstarter, ship in November (crowdfunding)

  Topjoy, makers of the Falcon mini laptop, are back with some new devices to share. This time around they’ve stuck to the winged creature theme with the Butterfly tablets. It’s a fitting choice, given the fact that butterflies generally have colorful, paper-like wings and the Butterfly tablets feature color ePaper displays.

  First unveiled in August, the 6 inch TopJoy Butterfly E601 and 7.8 inch Butterfly E701 tablets are expected to sell for $299 and $469, respectively when they begin shipping in November. But prices start as low as $169 and $249 during a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign that just kicked off.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Purism Librem 5 Linux smartphone is getting another (big) price hike – Liliputing

    The Purism Librem 5 is one of only a handful of smartphones designed to run free and open source GNU/Linux distributions like Purism’s custom PureOS software. It’s also one of the most expensive, currently selling for $899.

    But it’s going to get even more expensive soon. In a move foreshadowed earlier this year, Purism recently announced that prices will go up this fall due at least in part to rising supply chain costs due to the global chip shortage. Customers who place an order after November 1, 2021 will have to pay $1199. And in March, 2022 the price will go up to $1299.

  • LOLIN S2 Pico – A compact ESP32-S2 board with an OLED display – CNX Software

    If you’re into small MCU boards with an integrated display, you’re in luck as LOLIN launched the S2 Pico board with ESP32-S2 and an OLED display about at the time same as LILYGO T-Display RP2040 board we covered yesterday.

    Wemos/LOLIN S2 Pico board offers WiFi connectivity, a 128×32 OLED display, USB Type-C port for power and programming, as well as the usual GPIO headers in a compact 50×23 mm form factor.

  • Harp Uses Frikin’ Lasers | Hackaday

    We aren’t sure if you really need lasers to build [HoPE’s] laser harp. It is little more than some photocells and has an Arduino generate tones based on the signals. Still, you need to excite the photocells somehow, and lasers are cheap enough these days.

    Mechanically, the device is a pretty large wooden structure. There are six lasers aligned to six light sensors. Each sensor is read by an analog input pin on an Arduino armed with a music-generation shield. We’ve seen plenty of these in the past, but the simplicity of this one is engaging.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Status update, September 2021

    It’s a quiet, foggy morning here in Amsterdam, and here with my fresh mug of coffee and a cuddly cat in my lap, I’d like to share the latest news on my FOSS efforts with you. Grab yourself a warm drink and a cat of your own and let’s get started.

    First, a new project: visurf. I announced this a few days ago, but the short of it is that I am building a minimal Wayland-only frontend for the NetSurf web browser which uses vi-inspired keybindings. Since the announcement there has been some good progress: touch support, nsvirc, tabs, key repeat, and so on. Some notable medium-to-large efforts ahead of us include a context menu on right click, command completion and history, kinetic scrolling via touch, pinch-to-zoom, clipboard support, and a readability mode. Please help! It’s pretty easy to get involved: join the IRC channel at #netsurf on libera.chat and ask for something to do.

    The programming language is also doing well. Following the codegen rewrite we have completed some long-pending refactoring to parts of the language design, which we intend to keep working on with further refinements in the coming weeks and months. We also developed a new frontend for reading the documentation in your terminal:

  • Chromium

    • Update your Chromium to 93.0.4577.82

      Today, I uploaded a set of Chromium 93.0.4577.82 packages for Slackware 14.2 and -current (32-bit as well as 64-bit).

      According to yesterday’s official announcement on the Google blog, this release patches a number of vulnerabilites and two of them are zero-day vulnerabilities that are actively being exploited online.

    • Chromium SFS runs as user chromium in EasyOS 3.0

      I downloaded one of peebee’s Chromium SFSs, and copied the contents to a folder named ‘chromium_93.0.4577.63-bk1_amd64′. I changed usr/lib64 to usr/lib, usr/bin/chromium to a symlink to usr/lib/chromium/chromium, and made sure that usr/share/pixmaps/chromium.png (48×48) exists.

  • Mozilla

    • Data@Mozilla: Data and Firefox Suggest

      Firefox Suggest is a new feature that displays direct links to content on the web based on what users type into the Firefox address bar. Some of the content that appears in these suggestions is provided by partners, and some of the content is sponsored.

      In building Firefox Suggest, we have followed our long-standing Lean Data Practices and Data Privacy Principles. Practically, this means that we take care to limit what we collect, and to limit what we pass on to our partners. The behavior of the feature is straightforward–suggestions are shown as you type, and are directly relevant to what you type.

    • Get where you’re going faster, with Firefox Suggest

      Today, people have to work too hard to find what they want online, sifting through and steering clear of content, clutter and click-bait not worthy of their time. Over time, navigation on the internet has become increasingly centralized and optimized for clicks and scrolling, not for getting people to where they want to go or what they are looking for quickly.

      We’d like to help change this, and we think Firefox is a good place to start.

      Today we’re announcing our first step towards doing that with a new feature called Firefox Suggest.

      Firefox Suggest is a new discovery feature that is built directly into the browser. Firefox Suggest acts as a trustworthy guide to the better web, surfacing relevant information and sites to help people accomplish their goals.

    • Open Letter to Mozilla – Google’s Browser dominance – is Firefox not listening to user’s needs/requests? – Linus view on it-security

    • Niko Matsakis: CTCFT 2021-09-20 Agenda

      The next “Cross Team Collaboration Fun Times” (CTCFT) meeting will take place next Monday, on 2021-09-20 (in your time zone)! This post covers the agenda. You’ll find the full details (along with a calendar event, zoom details, etc) on the CTCFT website.

    • Support.Mozilla.Org: What’s up with SUMO – September 2021

      September is going to be the last month for Q3, so let’s see what we’ve been up to for the past quarter.

    • Mozilla VPN adds advanced privacy features: Custom DNS servers and Multi-hop [Ed: Mozilla has chosen to post this on the same day it said it collects data on Firefox users to push ads (sorry, I mean “suggestions”) to them]

      Your online privacy remains our top priority, and we know that one of the first things to secure your privacy when you go online is to get on a Virtual Private Network (VPN), an encrypted connection that serves as a tunnel between your computer and VPN server. Today, we’re launching the latest release of our Mozilla VPN, our fast and easy-to-use VPN service, with two new advanced privacy features that offer additional layers of privacy. This includes your choice of Domain Name System (DNS) servers whether it’s the default we’ve provided, our suggested ad blocking, tracker blocking or ad plus tracker blocking DNS server, or an alternative one, plus the multi-hop feature which allows you to add two different servers to give you twice the amount of encryption. Today’s Mozilla VPN release is available on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android platforms (it will soon be available on iOS later this week).

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Call for Members for the Community Code of Conduct Committee Extended

    This message is being sent from the Community Code of Conduct Committee.

    As part of the community CoC policy, the Committee membership is to be refreshed on an annual basis.

    We are seeking up to three (3) volunteers to serve on the Committee for the coming year, October 1, 2021 – September 30, 2022. Members serve a minimum of one year, and a maximum of three years.

    We are extending the original call for volunteers issued in August in order to increase the diversity of the candidate pool. We are seeking people who reflect the demographics of the PostgreSQL community, with the goal to have members from multiple countries and varied demographics.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • The transition of LibreOffice to ODF 1.3 is finished

    Earlier this year, allotropia software GmbH was awarded the Tender to finish transition of LibreOffice to ODF 1.3 (ODF 1.3 delta) (#202010-01) by The Document Foundation (TDF).

    The implementation is now finished, has received quite a bit of polishing and testing, and is available for production use in the LibreOffice 7.2 release.

    While ODF 1.3 support is widely available across the LibreOffice ecosystem since the beginning of this year, there was a number of improvements now possible, after the ODF TC cleaned up and improved the standard.

    [...]

    We would like to thank The Document Foundation, and their countless donors, for funding these improvements to LibreOffice!

• CMS

  • Ticketit: Open-source Laravel-based Ticketing System

    Laravel is a trending open-source modern PHP framework for building enterprise and complex as well as small apps.

    As Laravel becomes the number one PHP framework with its large community and rich ecosystem, developers may require to add a ticketing and support system to their apps. Well, with Ticketit it takes no time.

    Ticketit is a free self-hosted Laravel-based ticketing system. It can be integrated smoothly with other Laravel projects.

    Even though, the project is archived on GitHub, many Laravel developers are forking it and integrating it in their projects.

  • OpenSupports: A lightweight web-based support ticket system for SMB

    OpenSupports is a free web-based open-source ticket support system that combines simplicity and productivity.

    It offers a complete user system, a knowledge base with a frequently asked questions (FAQs) database, multi-languages support, and more.

  • QuickDesk: A Self-hosted Open-source Ticketing system [Ed: This one is no good because in spite of its silence it requires proprietary software ("...developed by ASP.NET MVC and uses SQL server.")]

    QuickDesk offers different level of users and views, It starts with super admin users who can modify and configure the system, system users like technical supports and agents.

    Another primary feature for QuickDesk is its custom reporting and report types and the ability to export them in spreadsheet formats.

    [...]

    QuickDesk is released under GNU General Public License v3.0

  • A Guide to 5 Fair Selections of Open Source Ticketing Tools for Linux

    A customer trouble ticketing (help desk) is an assistance resource to solve a customer query. Companies often provide customer support using email, website, and/or telephone. The importance of ticketing software is a crucial part for any business to be successful.

    Your business can’t run properly without a satisfied client base. Increased customer retention is what businesses need. Right ticketing tools help ensure the best customer service for any business.

    Linux makes sure enterprises get the best possible customer service software for their businesses to have sustainable growth. Because a powerful set of ticketing software provides undivided support that the businesses deserve.

• FSF

  • GNU Projects

    • New Intel Tremont Optimizations Heading To The GCC Compiler

      The GNU Compiler Collection has already supported Intel’s Tremont cores as used by the low-power Jasper Lake platform. Now though coming to GCC are some optimizations to further enhance the performance when targeting the Tremont micro-architecture.

      The new GCC Tremont patches include updating the memcpy/memset inline strategies, updated handling around vector and SSE conversions, switching to using the Haswell scheduling mountain, enabling a number of other options.

    • Unifont 14.0.01 Released

      14 September 2021 Unifont 14.0.01 is now available. This adds glyphs for all new ranges in Unicode 14.0.0 Plane 0 and Plane 1.

• Programming/Development

  • Steinar H. Gunderson: plocate in Fedora

    It seems that due to the work of Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, plocate is now in Fedora Rawhide. This carries a special significance; not only in Fedora an important distribution, but it is also the upstream of mlocate. Thus, an expressed desire to replace mlocate with plocate over the next few Fedora releases feels like it carries a certain amount of support on the road towards world domination.

  • Qt Creator 5.0.1 released

    Qt Creator 5.0.1 released

  • Perl/Raku

    • My Favorite Warnings: redundant and missing

      The redundant and missing warnings were added in Perl 5.22 to cover the case where a call to the printf or sprintf had more (redundant) or fewer (missing) arguments than the format calls for. The documentation says that they may be extended to other built-ins (pack and unpack being named specifically) but as of Perl 5.34.0 only the printf() built-ins are covered.

  • Python

    • 10 Python Code Challenges for Beginners

      One of the best ways to test and practice your skills with Python is by solving coding challenges. You can learn a lot from books and online courses, but coding isn’t an armchair activity. You have to write some code to make genuine progress.

      Coding challenges are perfect for this. Coding challenges are small problems you can solve with code. Just because they’re small doesn’t mean they won’t put your knowledge to the test. Each bite-size challenge will focus on skills that you’ll use later working on complete software projects.

    • Python (numpy && matplotlib) solving one relatively difficult math problem

      The problem itself is to find all solutions of the following equation on real axis

      cos (cos (cos (cos (x)))) – sin (sin (sin (sin (x)))) = 0

      We intend to prove that equation above doesn’t have any solution via creating a python script importing NumPy and Matplotlib. Just recall that the function understudy has a period of 2*pi .

  • Java

    • Oracle adds improvement cream to the newest LTS version of Java

      Long in the making, Oracle has finally released JDK (Java Development Kit) 17. This is the first long-term support (LTS) release to see the light of day since JDK 11 three years ago. True, new versions of Java appear every six months, in March and September. But they’re only supported until the next one arrives. Java 17, on the other hand, will be supported for eight years.

Science

• A way to spot computer-generated faces

  A small team of researchers from The State University of New York at Albany, the State University of New York at Buffalo and Keya Medical has found a common flaw in computer-generated faces by which they can be identified. The group has written a paper describing their findings and have uploaded them to the arXiv preprint server.

  Over the past couple of years, deepfake pictures and videos have been in the news as amateurs and professional editors alike have created images and videos that depict people doing things that they never actually did. Less reported but related is the increased use of computer-generated images of people that look human but who have never actually existed. Such images are created using generative adversary networks (GANs), and they have reportedly begun showing up on fake social media user profiles, which allows for catfishing and other types of nefarious activity.

Hardware

• Take a Look at This Optical Keyboard

  Making keyboards is easy, right? Just wire up a bunch of switches matrix-style to a microcontroller, slap some QMK and a set of keycaps on there and you’re good to go. Well, yeah, that might work for cushier environments like home offices and Hackaday dungeons, but what if you need to give input under water, in a volatile area, or anywhere else you’d have to forego the clacking for something hermetically sealed? Mechanical switches can only take you so far — at some point, you have to go optical.

• The Many Ways To Solve Your Enclosure Problems | Hackaday

  Most projects around here involve some sort of electronics, and some sort of box to put them in. The same is true of pretty much all commercially available electronic products as well.

  Despite that, selecting an enclosure is far from a solved problem. For simple electronics it’s entirely possible to spend more time getting the case just right than working on the circuit itself. But most of the time we need to avoid getting bogged down in what exactly will house our hardware.

  The array of options available for your housing is vast, and while many people default to a 3D printer, there are frequently better choices. I’ve been around the block on this issue countless times and wanted to share the options as I see them, and help you decide which is right for you. Let’s talk about enclosures!

Health/Nutrition

• The case of the missing consultation response: missing submissions to the Agristack consultations

  Responses to our RTIs indicate that our submissions, as well as those from other organisations, on the Agristack consultation paper were not received. Together with the All India Kisan Sabha, we wrote to the Agristack Working Group and the Department of Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmers Welfare, re-submitting our suggestions and asking why they were not received in the first place.

  [...]

  The PLCP is an important constituent of the law-making process. The policy is the only way citizens can have a direct impact on the framing of legislation, as the policy allows citizens and organisations to contribute their perspectives on potential legislation and provides them with a way to remedy any problems that they perceive.

  Consultations must be held with the aim of genuinely listening to feedback. Now, if consultations start being held only for the sake of “ticking off the checklist”, India’s democratic law-making process will be severely impacted. Moreover, when the suggestions of key stakeholders, such as, in this case, a farmers’ union like the AIKS, are ignored or not even registered, it is clear that the PLCP is being followed only in letter and not in spirit.

  In light of this situation, IFF and AIKS have written to the Chairperson of the IDEA Task Force and the DACFW, re-submitting our consultation responses and asking them why our earlier consultation responses were not received. The regulatory and technological framework proposed by the Agristack is radically different from what has existed hitherto, and so it is important the comments of the key stakeholders in this sector i.e. the farmers of India are engaged with.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Windows 96, wtf?

    Mikesoft Windows 96 is a seriously fun effort to re-create classic MS Windows inside your browser. It’s actually a bunch of efficient JavaScript code making good use of your browser’s WebGL and WebAssembly capabilities. The project has a Wiki that explains the workings and gives more background if you are curious.

    The web page loads fast and the Windows experience is uncanny. The Internet Exploder browser that’s included won’t load all pages I tried but at least it loads this blog

  • Former Intel, Defense Officials: House Bills Threaten Competitiveness [Ed: Proprietary software with back doors is a big part of the problem, but those officials are partly responsible for it, so they'll never admit it]

    Today a dozen prominent former intelligence and defense officials wrote U.S. House leadership to raise concerns about the security implications of the controversial House ‘breakup bills,’ in a letter first reported by Axios. The letter, signed by multiple former Directors or Deputy Directors of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency, among other critical roles, explains that “[r]ecent congressional antitrust proposals that target specific American technology firms would degrade critical R&D priorities, allow foreign competitors to displace leaders in the U.S. tech sector both at home and abroad, and potentially put sensitive U.S. data and IP in the hands of Beijing.”

    The former officials’ comments reinforce the severity of the threats that were apparent when the White House convened industry leaders to address cybersecurity risks in late August. Foreign threat actors pose a growing threat to U.S. national and economic security, and leading digital services are at the forefront of the U.S. response to that menace. Following high-profile attacks like the Solarwinds breach, President Biden labeled the issue a “core national security challenge” in remarks on August 25.

    That challenge stands to be compounded at both an individual and national level if the wide-ranging bundle of tech regulatory proposals acted upon by the House Judiciary Committee earlier this year are enacted into law. As previously discussed here, these breakup bills threaten a panoply of collateral damage, including online trust & safety programs designed to keep Internet users safe, small business users of e-commerce services, and the ad-supported Internet writ large.

  • There is currently no way to run iTunes 12 on Ubuntu Linux

    Before I begin, I need to make clear to all the Apple fanboys that this is not me trying to ruin Apple’s product launch where they unveiled the latest iterations of the Mac, iPhone and whatnot. This is me being genuinely frustrated over something that shouldn’t be so hard. I just wanted to redeem an Apple/iTunes gift card. It’s supposed to be simple but thanks to strange decisions by Apple, it turned out to be a nightmare.

    It all began when I bought an iTunes Gift card so that I could pay off my Apple TV+ account. I do have a debit card linked to these accounts but I didn’t want to pay bank/card charges each time I am billed. Buying the card was easy, all I needed to do was open my banking app, tap on a few buttons and the card was delivered to my email.

  • Security

    • Kali Linux 2021.3 Released, Download ISO Now

      Offensive Security announces the general availability of Kali Linux 2021.3. You will find the support for OpenSSL, Kali-Tools, Kali Live VM Support, and most interesting feature or support that you will see on Kali Linux 2021.3 is support for Kali NetHunter Smartwatch.

    • Kali Linux 2021.3 Adds New Tools, Introduces Kali NetHunter Smartwatch

      Kali Linux 2021.3 is here and now you can even run this new version of Kali Linux on your TicHunter Pro smartwatch as well.

      Kali is a Linux distribution based on Debian, strongly focused on security and specifically designed for computer forensics and advanced penetration testing. It contains several hundred tools that are well-designed towards various information security tasks, such as penetration testing, security research, computer forensics and reverse engineering.

      Kali Linux, which follows a rolling release model, has now been updated to version 2021.3, replete with updated tools, polished themes and new Kali Tools site.

    • Kali Linux 2021.3 Available to Download – itsfoss.net

      Kali Linux 2021.3 Available to Download, Kali Linux 2021.3 is a Debian-based distribution with a collection of security and forensics tools. The project has published a new release, Kali Linux 2021.3, which introduces changes to the OpenSSL software. “OpenSSL – Wide compatibility by default – Keep reading for what that means.

    • Security updates for Wednesday

      Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium, element-desktop, element-web, firefox, ghostscript, and hedgedoc), Fedora (kernel and openssl), openSUSE (ghostscript, htmldoc, and openssl-1_0_0), Oracle (libtirpc), Red Hat (cyrus-imapd, kernel, and kernel-rt), SUSE (ghostscript), and Ubuntu (apport, curl, and squashfs-tools).

    • Cybercriminals recreate Cobalt Strike in Linux [Ed: The media hardly talked about it until the likes of ZDNet could say "Linux"]

    • The SSID Stripping Vulnerability: When You Don’t See What You Get

      AirEye’s research team in collaboration with the Computer Science faculty at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have found a vulnerability, dubbed SSID Stripping, which causes a network name – aka SSID – to appear differently in the device’s “List of Networks” than its actual network name.

    • PureBoot Security Flaw for Librem 14 Patched – Purism

      PureBoot is our high-security boot firmware we offer on our Librem computers. In combination with a Librem Key, PureBoot allows you to detect tampering in the boot firmware itself, and in your OS’s kernel and other boot files.

      It detects tampering first by sending measurements of the boot firmware as it boots (containing among other things a trusted GPG keyring corresponding to keys on your Librem Key) at boot time to the computer’s TPM, and if the measurements match, the TPM releases a shared secret that PureBoot converts to a 6-digit HOTP code and sends to the Librem Key. If the code matches what the Librem Key itself generated, the Librem Key blinks green, letting you know the firmware can be trusted. If it doesn’t match, the Librem Key will blink a steady red LED indefinitely, warning you the firmware might be tampered with.

Defence/Aggression

• U.S. to hold $130 mln of Egypt’s military aid over human rights -State Dept

  The Biden administration will withhold $130 million worth of military aid to Egypt until Cairo takes specific steps related to human rights, a State Department spokesperson said on Tuesday.

  Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s move is a break with his predecessors’ policy of overriding a congressional check on military aid to Egypt. In the past, an exception was granted to free up Foreign Military Financing for Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government, worth $300 million this fiscal year, on the basis that it was in the interest of U.S. national security.

  But rights groups, which had called on the administration to block the entire $300 million aid, expressed disappointment at the decision, saying it was a “betrayal” of the U.S. commitment to promote human rights.

Environment

• Environmental threats are biggest challenge to human rights -UN

  The U.N. rights chief said the “triple planetary crises” of climate change, pollution and nature loss represented the biggest threat to human rights globally at the opening on Monday of a month-long session set to prioritise environmental issues.

  “As these environmental threats intensify, they will constitute the single greatest challenge to human rights of our era,” said Michelle Bachelet, referring to recent “extreme and murderous” climate events such as floods in Germany and California’s wildfires.

  “We must set the bar higher – indeed, our common future depends on it,” she added.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Philippines’ Duterte accused of stifling scrutiny in senate probes

  Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered members of his cabinet to get his consent before appearing at senate investigations, fuelling accusations from activists and some politicians of an attempt to stifle scrutiny.

  Duterte gave the directive in a recorded televised address aired on Tuesday after he said senators probing hisgovernment’s use of more than $1 billion in pandemicfunds were using the hearings to further their political ambitions. read more

  “I will require every cabinet member to clear with me any invitation, and if I think he will be called…to be harassed, berated…I will not allow (them to attend),” Duterte said.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• German Experiment Shows Horses Beating Local Internet Connections

  Thus, the experiment kicked off from the house of photographer [Klaus-Peter Kappest], who started an Internet transfer of 4.5GB of photos over the Internet. At the same time, a DVD was handed to messengers riding on horseback to the destination 10 kilometers away.

Audiocasts/Shows

• mintCast 369.5 – The LMDE to Be

  2:02 Linux Innards
  23:36 Vibrations from the Ether
  44:48 Check This Out
  50:36 Announcements & Outro

  In our Innards section Debian 11, and what that means for LMDE

  And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

  Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit. Youtube.

• Success is not Illegal | Coder Radio 431

  The more you read into it, the worse it gets.

  At least we have new devices to keep us happy.

• What Makes a Linux User? | LINUX Unplugged 423

  Why it might be time to re-think who is and who is not a Linux user, plus we do a reality check on the state of Linux phones.

Applications

• Plasma System Monitor and FreeBSD

  Arjen and David – also other KDE contributors, but I’ll name those two because they suffered the brunt of my questions and merge requests – have come up with KDE Plasma System Monitor, which is an application for monitoring system resource usage, sensors and processes. It is a successor to the venerable ksysguard (14 years between those two posts), and promises better pluggability and a nicer UI.

  In packaging System Monitor for FreeBSD, we had forgotten some bits and pieces, so until today the application would start, but not actually display anything useful. There’s lots of new code, and there is a code being moved from one library to another, so here’s a comparison shot of the old libraries and old UI (KSysGuard) and the new tools…

• Darktable 3.6.1 Open-Source RAW Image Editor Improves Camera Support, Fixes Bugs

  Released in early July, Darktable 3.6 arrived as a major release that introduced numerous new features and improvements, and now, Darktable 3.6.1 is here as the first point release to fix some nasty issues and also add support for new digital cameras.

  First, Darktable 3.6.1 adds base support for the Leica C-Lux (3:2), Nikon D6 (12-bit compressed, 12-bit uncompressed, 14-bit compressed, and 14-bit uncompressed), Nikon Z fc (12-bit compressed and 14-bit compressed), Sony Alpha 7R III (ILCE-7RM3A), and Sony Alpha 7R IV (ILCE-7RM4A) cameras. Second, it introduces a noise profile for the Ricoh GR III camera.

• Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft Yammer

  Microsoft’s stance for decades was that community creation and sharing of communal code (later to be known as free and open source software) represented a direct attack on their business. Their battle with Linux stretches back many years. Back in 2001, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously tarnished Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”. Microsoft also initiated its “Get the Facts” marketing campaign from mid-2003, which specifically criticized Linux server usage, total cost of ownership, security, indemnification and reliability. The campaign was widely criticized for spreading misinformation.

  However, in recent years, there has been a partial shift by Microsoft to embrace the open source software paradigm. For example, some of their code is open sourced. Examples include Visual Studio Code, .NET Framework, Atom, and PowerShell. They have also made investments in Linux development, server technology and organizations including the Linux Foundation and Open Source Initiative. They have made acquisitions such as Xamarin to help mobile app development, and GitHub a hugely popular code repository for open source developers. And they have partnered with Canonical, the developers of the popular Ubuntu distro. But many developers remain hugely sceptical about Microsoft and their apparent shift to embrace open source.

• Linux Top 4 Apps that any Ubuntu user should install

  Ubuntu is one of the best Linux distros, both for those who take the first steps within this operating system and for those users already initiated within this ecosystem. This system, developed and maintained by Canonical, has its pluses and minuses, like everything else, but overall it offers a balance between usability, ease, and the ‘Linux experience’, which over the years has gained the trust of many users. and have one of the largest communities.

  As standard, Ubuntu comes with the GNOME desktop and a series of additional programs that allow us to start using our computer from the first moment. However, if we really want to get the most out of it, it is necessary to install other interesting applications by hand. Let’s see what some of them are.

Instructionals/Technical

• File Permissions in Linux – Read/Write/Execute

  File permissions, ownerships control the access level of files and system process specific to users. This makes sure that the authorized users and process can only access the specific files and directories.

  In this guide you are going to learn how to assign permission access rights to different classes of users.

• How to install Krita on Ubuntu 20.04

  Many Open Source applications are very popular even within Windows or other proprietary systems. One of them is Krita. That’s why we’ll show you how to install Krita on Ubuntu 20.04

• How to Pass Password to SSH Command in Linux

  The only way a user can accomplish a complete Linux operating system experience is if this user has had a partial or full glimpse of both sides of the Linux environment. Linux operating system exists both as a desktop environment and as a server environment.

• Install Zoom on Ubuntu

  Zoom is a secure ( lol ), reliable propriety video teleconferencing software program developed by Zoom Video Communications, Inc.

  The free plan allows up to 100 concurrent participants, with a 40-minute time restriction. Users have the option to upgrade by subscribing to a paid plan. The highest plan supports up to 1,000 concurrent participants for meetings lasting up to 30 hours.

  It supports all the popular OS and device platforms.

• How to Pass Password to SCP Command in Linux

  As you progressively graduate in your Linux operating system user experience, you are bound to either find yourself in a Linux desktop-to-server or Linux server-to-server entanglement. In most cases, these scenarios are related to prioritized OS objectives such as the transfer of useful files and directory copies.

• How to Install Fail2ban on Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux

  Written in Python, Fail2ban is a free and open-source Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) that protects the server against brute-force attacks.

  After a specified number of incorrect password attempts, the client’s IP address is banned from accessing the system for a specified period or until the system administrator unblocks it. This way, the system is safeguarded from repeated brute-force attacks from a single host.

• Here’s what happens when you run sudo rm -rf / in Linux? – Invidious

• How to Install Oracle Java 17 LTS On Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint Or Pop!_OS Via APT PPA Repository – Linux Uprising Blog

  Oracle Java 17 LTS has been released recently, and is now available to install from the Linux Uprising Oracle Java PPA on Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux distributions based on these, such as Pop!_OS, Linux Mint, Zorin OS, etc.

  Java 17 is the latest long-term support (LTS) release, and with it, the license has changed, the binaries being free (no cost) to use in production and free (no cost) to redistribute until a full year after the next LTS release. Previously (from Oracle Java 11 until now), Oracle Java used a commercial license that allowed downloading and using it at no cost for development and testing only, but it required paying a fee to use in production.

• How to Install and Use Ansible on Debian 11

  Ansible is a free, open-source, and one of the most popular configuration management tools. It is a cross-platform tool that simplifies cloud computing, configuration management, package installation, and service configuration. It uses a YAML file that contains the steps which the user wants to run on a particular machine. With Ansible, you can configure and manage more than hosts with a single command. Ansible is an alternative to the other configuration management tools like Chef and Puppet.

  In this article, I will show you how to install and use Ansible configuration management tool on Debian 11.

• How to Install Rust on Rocky Linux 8 – LinuxCapable

  Rust is an open-source systems programming language that focuses on speed, memory safety, and parallelism. Developers use Rust to create a wide range of new software applications, such as game engines, operating systems, file systems, browser components, and simulation engines for virtual reality. Rust is syntactically similar to C++ but can guarantee memory safety by using a borrow checker for validating references.

  For users, especially developers wanting to try out Rust Programming language, you will know how to install Rust Programming Language on Rocky Linux 8.

• How To Install iRedmail on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install iRedmail on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, iRedMail is an open-source mail server solution. The right way to build your mail server is with open-source software. iRedMail allows you to create as many mailboxes as you want through their built-in web interface. It provides a web-based interface for managing mails, folders, sieve filters.

  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 iRedmail free and open-source mail server solution on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• A guide to web scraping in Python using Beautiful Soup

  The simple answer is this: Not every website has an API to fetch content. You might want to get recipes from your favorite cooking website or photos from a travel blog. Without an API, extracting the HTML, or scraping, might be the only way to get that content. I’m going to show you how to do this in Python.

• Handling filenames with spaces in Linux – TecAdmin

  It’s normal that we make files and directories (or we can say folders) in our machines to keep them organized, so when we need to, we can easily search for them. Sometimes we save them with the names having spaces, for example, we save a file with the name “my file” now in this case the Linux terminal will create an error. Can files not be saved with spaces in Linux? Yes! we can but they will be accessed differently in the terminal.

  This write-up is focussing on what errors we face while accessing files and directories with space in their names and how to avoid such errors.

• How to check for update info and changelogs with rpm-ostree db – Fedora Magazine

  This article will teach you how to check for updates, check the changed packages, and read the changelogs with rpm-ostree db and its subcommands.

  The commands will be demoed on a Fedora Silverblue installation and should work on any OS that uses rpm-ostree.

Games

• Linux Gaming Guide: How To Easily Install And Update Proton GE

  If you’re a PC gamer, or you’ve been tracking the news around Valve’s Steam Deck, you’ve probably heard about Proton, a “compatibility layer” built into Steam that makes Windows-only games playable on Linux. Valve and Codeweavers (the company behind WINE) are responsible for this wizardry that makes Linux gaming surprisingly awesome.

  Perhaps you’ve also heard rumblings about Proton-GE, or you’ve seen YouTube videos with references to “Glorious Eggroll.” Glorious Eggroll is also known as Thomas Crider, a senior engineer at Red Hat. And he creates a custom version of Proton that is immensely useful.

• Many players report that Splitgate is crashing for them on Linux

  Splitgate is one of the latest titles that gained massive popularity after its recent release on the Xbox and PlayStation. Built using Unreal Engine 4, it is a combination of Portal and Halo.

  The developers, 1047 Games, soon grew from a team of just 4 people and managed to raise $10 million in a recent funding round. While the developers welcomed the sudden influx of money, it also resulted in the game being pushed to an August release date.

• Intellectual Pinball

  Hey there, Ernie here with a piece from Michael Bentley, who knows a ton about the intersection between trivia and technology. The two avenues crossed paths in a big way in the mid ’80s.

• Bringing a Ruined Game Boy Cart Back To Life with Tons of Soldering

  The cartridge was badly corroded, with many of the traces eaten through, rendering the game inoperable. First, all the components were removed, and the board was cleaned. This allowed easy access to the traces across the whole board. Then, the job was to delicately remove some solder mask from the parts of the traces still remaining, and bridge the gaps with fine copper wire. Even worse, several vias were damaged, which [Taylor] tackled by feeding jumper wires through the board and executing a repair on each side.

  It’s a simple enough repair for the experienced hand, but virtually magic to a retro gaming fan that doesn’t know how to solder. [Taylor] has given us a great example of how to deal with corroded carts properly, with enough detail to be quite educational to the beginner.

• Steam Deck might only be able to run 72% of the top 50 games on Steam

  Ever since Valve announced its Steam Deck handheld console, there’s been questions over how much of Steam’s huge library the device will be able to run – and it appears that, out of the box, it may struggle to run some of the most popular games.

  As Toms Hardware reports, a recent survey by the Boiling Steam website found that of the current top 50 games on Steam, only 72% can be played on Linux, either natively or using Proton, the compatibility layer that allows Windows games to run in Linux.

• How Making Video Games Became a No-Win Situation

  In May 2012, the video game company headed up by former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling shut down. 38 Studios had only just relocated from Massachusetts to Rhode Island thanks to a $75 million loan brokered by then-Governor Don Carcieri, a Republican, who hoped to transform the state into an East Coast Silicon Valley. The company expanded rapidly to meet the terms of the deal, co-launching the fantasy role-playing game Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning while lining up the release of its own ambitious online RPG, code-named Copernicus. But the money ran dry, and at the time of its demise, Schilling’s studio listed an eye-watering $150 million in debt, $22 million in assets, and $320 in petty cash. Its nearly 400 employees were fired abruptly over e-mail, unable to claim their last paycheck.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME Subtitles Free Subtitle Editor Software Gets a Major Update After Two Years of Silence

    If you never heard of GNOME Subtitles before, let me tell you that it’s a powerful subtitle editor for the Linux desktop, supporting most common text-based subtitle formats and offering features like subtitle translation, synchronization of times and frames, as well as built-in video previewing.

    The new release, GNOME Subtitles 1.7, is here to rewrite the GStreamer media playback engine to support newer and modern video formats. In addition, it improves audio and video playback support by allowing users to open an audio file after a video file display the last played frame, fixes video player stutters, fixes an issue with the side bar resizing itself during video playback, and disables VAAPI by default to prevent playback issues.

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Debian 11: Moving forward while standing still

    For those who are new to Linux, I’d love to be able to recommend Debian 11 to you. However, because the installation isn’t nearly as simple as is that of, say, Ubuntu, you’d be best served either having someone with more experience install Debian for you, or wait it out until you have a bit more familiarity with Linux under your belt. Although you won’t be asked to manually partition your drive, there are questions about mirrors and domains that could easily trip you up. So if you’re new to Linux and you insist on experiencing the remarkable stability that is Debian 11, I’d suggest you do a bit of research into the Debian installer before you do.

    However, you shouldn’t let that warning put you off. Even those without any Linux experience could muddle their way through installation, I’d hate for someone new to Linux to be turned away because the Debian installation isn’t a two- or three-click process. So if you are new to Linux, grab a friend who has installed Linux and let them walk you through the process.

    Trust me, Debian 11 is worth the smallest bit of extra effort you might have to go through to complete the installation. It’s that good. In fact, it’s one of the few instances where I can say a Linux distribution moves forward while standing firmly in place.

    Download your copy of Debian 11 now.

Devices/Embedded

• TopJoy ButterFly is a Full-Color DES Screen e-Reader with Android 11 (Crowdfunding)

  TopJoy ButterFly is a full-color DES screen e-Reader running Android 11 on a quad-core Cortex-A55 processor that appears to be the same Rockchip RK3566 processor used in the upcoming PineNote e-reader.

  Two models of the e-Reader are offers with E601 fitted with a 6-inch display and E701 with a larger 7.8-inch display both offering 300 PPI for black & white content and 150 PPI for color, and equipped with 2GB RAM & 32GB storage by default, an option for 4GB RAM and 64GB storage for the larger display.

• ASUS Tinker Board 2S SBC launched for $120 and up

• Free computer science courseware and hardware for American educators

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • 3 new time-saving Assistant tricks to try on Android | Computerworld

  • The 7 Best SEO Apps for Android to Help Boost Your Search Engine Ranking

  • Google Pixel Android 12 bugs, problems, & issues tracker

  • Oppo Android 12 (ColorOS 12) update tracker: Eligible devices, release…

  • Poco Android 11 update status & release date

  • Motorola Moto E20 announced with Android 11 Go and affordable pricing – GSMArena.com news

  • Fairphone’s upcoming ‘ethical’ 5G Android phone leaks in first official renders | Android Central

  • [Updated] Want to disable Tab Groups in Chrome on Android? Here’s how

  • iPhone 13 is missing 5 useful features you can get on Android phones – CNET

  • Xiaomi returns to Android tablets with the 11-inch Pad 5 – The Verge

  • BenQ’s new portable projectors have Android TV and 2.1 channel audio built right in

  • Xiaomi 11T Pro is an affordable Android flagship with 120W charging, Snapdragon 888 SoC | Android Central

  • Latest Signal for Android beta improves media send UI and brings payments to more countries

  • 10 Useful F-Droid Apps Recommendation

    This is our FLOSS apps recommendation for Android users who use F-Droid alternative play store. You will find many of these apps similar to what we Ubuntu users already benefit from for years. Enjoy!

    In F-Droid you do not find Firefox. We recommend Fennec, it is the Firefox Mobile for Android with ability to use Firefox add-ons and got proprietary software stuffs removed.

  • 4 Best Linux Phones for Privacy in 2021

    As the demand for internet connectivity keeps growing, so has the need for data privacy. In order to efficiently deliver their services, there is a tendency for some companies to collect and store personal data from their users. Sadly, some applications and platforms violate their users’ privacy by leaking their data which finds its way to other platforms. This can often lead to users being inundated with adverts or worse still, data breaches

    Linux-based phones are built on free and open-source software. Going for the privacy-focused phone will mean that may lose out on some of the first-party applications offered by Google or Apple.

    In this tutorial, we have recommended some of the top Linux phones in 2021 that guarantee a user’s privacy.

  • Micromax In 1b Users in India Get Android 11 OS Update | Technology News

  • Android Auto preps redesign with quicker notification access – 9to5Google

  • Best Android app deals of the day: Doom and Destiny, more – 9to5Toys

  • Android had 120Hz years before the iPhone 13 Pro – 9to5Google

  • 10 best gamer chat apps for Android – Android Authority

  • Top 9 Best Math Problem Solving Android Apps – 2021

  • Blackview Tab 10 tablet review: Android 11 for only $190 USD – NotebookCheck.net Reviews

  • The iPhone 13 won’t make me switch from Android — here’s why | Tom’s Guide

  • Top Android Crypto Trading Apps In 2021

  • Want to download and share Google Photos album with other Android users? Here’s how you can do it – Information News

  • How to access the Android 12 Easter egg | Android Central

  • Realme UI 2.0 (Android 11) update released for Narzo 10A | Technology

  • New Anker Nebula Android TV Dongle Launches With Remote

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• A conversation about open source design and ethical funding

  Penpot does exist because at some point—six or seven years ago—Kaleidos was a very developer-centric company and didn’t have UX or UI in-house. We saw the potential for multi-functional teams where you would have design—UX/UI design, in general—and code working together, but we needed to use open source because that’s our ethos. Kaleidos would use open source as an end in itself but also as a means to an end.

  We started by creating Taiga, which is a project management platform. We’re all about processes and how to do stuff, not just what, but how we achieve things and team management and all that. We were happy to have that agile mindset built in a tool for teams like ourselves. But as you can imagine, at some point, designers at Kaleidos, being open source proponents, said: Look, we are not first-class citizens in open source. We are happy with Inkscape, GIMP, and some tools, but you developers have everything to choose from. You can choose the best of the best. You live in this paradise world where you don’t know how privileged you are. We agree with you. We are all about open source, absolutely, but you have to understand that we are frustrated with the professional quality of some tools. We want to achieve parity with you developers.

• Zathura – An Open Source Document Viewer for Linux

  Zathura is a plugin-based customizable and functional document viewer. It features a minimalistic user interface and is built to be light on resources. The feature that makes Zathura stand out is its flexibility as it can be customized all the way from its UI to its functionality.

  Zathura got its name from the 2002 book Zathura which had a film adaptation, Zathura: A Space Adventure, released in 2005. A lot of its usage focuses on keyboard interactions due to its Vi-type key bindings – a feature that has made it popular among veteran Linux users.

• ‘Indian tech biz must fund FOSS developers’

  India has the second largest number of developers in the world, and many of them use and collaborate on open source projects. But very few open source projects originate in India. Given that much of the world’s backend software now runs on open source, developing an indigenous FOSS ecosystem is seen to be crucial. “In China, there’s been an exponential rise in quality open-source projects over the last five years,” Kailash Nadh, CTO of Zerodha, said. Nadh and Mehta together founded the FOSS United Foundation a year and a half ago with the objective of building the ecosystem in partnership with the Indian tech industry.

• Programming/Development

  • Java

    • Java 17 LTS Released

      Java 17 with Extended Support (LTS) has been released. The previous version with extended support, Java 11, was released in 2018.

      The most notable change in this release is that support for sealed classes and interfaces has moved out of the preview stage and is now ready for use.

      Sealed types are classes or interfaces that impose constraints on other classes or interfaces that can extend or implement them. To declare a sealed class or interface, use the modifier sealed… The list of subtypes can be listed by declaring a sealed class or interface after the keyword permits… If the subtypes are in the same package or module, the compiler itself can display the list of subtypes and permitscan be omitted in a sealed class or interface declaration.

Double-Crossed

Spain Hopes to Lure Digital Nomads to Save Dying Villages

Campaigners have now saved the hamlet by attracting five permanent residents, many working remotely or coming for short stays.

Spain hopes to help save struggling communities like Sárnago by offering visas and tax incentives to digital nomads, who work from their laptops around the world, to encourage them to live in what many here have come to describe as España Vacia, or “Empty Spain.”

The draft start-up law will offer 12-month visas to non-European Union residents.

Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch Calls TMZ Buy “Very Modest”

Praising TMZ’s digital presence, Murdoch told a Bank of America conference Tuesday that “when we look at TMZ, we see a business that we were not in, in terms fo celebrity or entertainment news, but can absolutely fit alongside all of our other brands and platforms, and can help drive it across the board.”

Amid Workplace Tumult, Activision Blizzard Hires Disney, Delta Execs in Top Roles

Activision Blizzard on Tuesday revealed the hiring of Julie Hodges and Sandeep Dube, who will take the positions of chief people officer and chief commercial officer, respectively.

Britney Spears deletes Instagram following engagement news

Spears, 39, chose to deactivate her account and take a break from her preferred social media platform, NBC News confirmed Tuesday.

Education

• How Republicans Turned “School Choice” Into a Losing Issue

  Concord, N.H.—Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo was back in New Hampshire, his day filled with the sorts of activities befitting a wannabe president in the home of the first-in-the-nation primary. He’d hobnobbed with state GOP members and toured a local defense contractor in the state’s booming southern suburbs. Here at the state capital, Pompeo is tag-teaming with another former Trump secretary, Betsy DeVos, at an event to promote a signature issue for the GOP: school choice.

Hardware

• A ThreadRipper Pro is coming.

  In case you think I can put a regular ThreadRipper on the board, nope only will take a Pro. What is the difference between a ThreadRipper and a Pro, other then twice the money? Took 2 years before I could build one. Leveno was evidently exclusively licensed to be able to do that. VERY expensive. I am only about $2,600.00 into the build & I can see it getting very extravagant.

Health/Nutrition

• The “Advantage” War Against Medicare

  It’s also one of the most effective ways that insurance companies could try to kill Medicare For All, since about a third of all people who think they’re on Medicare are actually on these privatized plans instead.

  Nearly from its beginning, Medicare has allowed private companies to offer plans that essentially compete with it, but they were an obscure corner of the market and didn’t really take off until the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress rolled out the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. This was the GOP’s (and a few corporatist Democrats’) big chance to finally privatize Medicare, albeit one bite at a time.

• Dilapidated Buildings Increase Risk of COVID Transmission as School Year Begins

• Federal Judge Blocks Enforcement of Iowa Mask Mandate Ban

• Experts Warn Biden’s Global Vaccine Plan Lacks Ambition Crisis Demands

  Public health campaigners and experts warned Tuesday that the Biden administration’s new strategy to bolster lagging global Covid-19 vaccination efforts is nowhere near ambitious enough to meet the life-or-death needs of poor nations, which are home to billions of people who have yet to receive a single dose.

  “We need a real strategy, not just a vague commitment to expand manufacturing.”—Zain Rizvi, Public Citizen

• UN Report Calls for ‘Repurposing’ $470 Billion in Agriculture Support to Serve People and Planet

  Ahead of three upcoming summits, a trio of United Nations organizations on Tuesday released a report highlighting how billions of dollars in governments’ support for agriculture worldwide could be repurposed to transform the global food system in a way that benefits both humanity and the planet.

  “By shifting to more nature-positive, equitable, and efficient agricultural support, we can improve livelihoods, and at the same time cut emissions, protect and restore ecosystems, and reduce the use of agrochemicals.”—Inger Andersen, UNEP

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • OMIGOD: Azure users running Linux VMs need to update now [Ed: They need to abandon Microsoft Azure and get reprimanded by the employer for ever choosing this NSA company as a host in the first place]

  • Microsoft September 2021 Patch Tuesday: Remote code execution flaws in MSHTML, OMI fixed

  • Microsoft Patch Tuesday, September 2021 Edition

    Microsoft today pushed software updates to plug dozens of security holes in Windows and related products, including a vulnerability that is already being exploited in active attacks. Also, Apple has issued an emergency update to fix a flaw that’s reportedly been abused to install spyware on iOS products, and Google‘s got a new version of Chrome that tackles two zero-day flaws. Finally, Adobe has released critical security updates for Acrobat, Reader and a slew of other software.

  • Apple Patches Up Devices In Response To The Exposure Of Yet Another NSO Group Exploit

    Israeli digital arms merchant NSO Group continues to sell its malware to a wide variety of governments. The governments it sells to, which includes a bunch of notorious human rights abusers, continue to use these exploits to target dissidents, activists, journalists, religious leaders, and political opponents. And the manufacturers of the devices exploited by governments to harm people these governments don’t like (NSO says “criminals and terrorists,” long-term customers say “eh, whoever”) continue to patch things up so these exploits no longer work.

  • It’s not just you: Emergency software patches are on the rise

    Researchers raised the alarm Monday about a big one: The Israeli spyware company NSO Group, which sells programs for governments to remotely take over people’s smartphones and computers, had figured out a new way into practically any Apple device by sending a fake GIF through iMessage. The only way to guard against it is to install Apple’s emergency software update.

  • Apple Rushes Out Emergency Update to Stop ‘No Click’ Spyware

    The flaw, disclosed Monday by Citizen Lab, allowed a hacker using NSO’s Pegasus malware to gain access to a device owned by an unnamed Saudi activist, according to security researchers. Apple said the flaw could be exploited if a user on a vulnerable device received a “maliciously crafted” PDF file.

  • Security

    • Kali Linux 2021.3 Released: OpenSSL, Virtualization Improvements, And More

      Offensive Security has released Kali Linux 2021.3. The new build brings wide OpenSSL compatibility, better Virtual Machine support, new tools, and a lot more. Here’s everything you need to know.

      The new build comes with a wide OpenSSL compatibility by default. This enables Kali to talk to ancient systems that are still using legacy protocols like TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1. Old ciphers are also enabled by default. It’s a great addition as it’ll allow the OS to talk to more systems.

    • Kali Linux 2021.3 released with new pentest tools, improvements

      Kali Linux 2021.3 was released yesterday by Offensive Security and includes a new set of tools, improved virtualization support, and a new OpenSSL configuration that increases the attack surface.

      Kali Linux is a Linux distribution designed for cybersecurity professionals and ethical hackers to perform penetration testing and security audits.

      With this release, the Kali Linux Team introduces the following new features…

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Protestors Nationwide Rally to Tell Apple: “Don’t Break Your Promise!”

        The last time EFF held a protest at an Apple store, in 2016, it was to support the company’s strong stance in protecting encryption. That year, Apple challenged the FBI’s request to install a backdoor into its operating system. This year, in early August, Apple stunned its many supporters by announcing a set of upcoming features, intended to help protect children, that would create an infrastructure that could easily be redirected to greater surveillance and censorship. These features would pose enormous danger to iPhone users’ privacy and security, offering authoritarian governments a new mass surveillance system to spy on citizens. 

      • EFF and Allies Urge Council of Europe to Add Strong Human Rights Safeguards Before Final Adoption of Flawed Cross Border Surveillance Treaty

        At the highest level, the current Protocol should establish clear and enforceable baseline safeguards in cross-border evidence gathering, but fails to do so. Though new police powers are mandatory, corresponding privacy protections are frequently optional, and the Protocol repeatedly defers to harmonised safeguards in an active attempt to entice states with weaker human rights records to sign on. The result is a net dilution of privacy and human rights on a global scale. But the right to privacy is a universal right. International law enforcement powers should come with detailed legal safeguards for privacy and data protection. When it comes to data protection, Convention 108+ should be the global reference. By its recommendations to the Council of Ministers, PACE has an opportunity to establish a commonly acceptable legal framework for international law enforcement that places privacy and human rights at its core.

        Substantively, we have concerns regarding Article 7 of the Protocol, which permits direct access by law enforcement in one country to subscriber identity information held by a company in another country. In our opinion, Article 7 fails to provide, or excludes, critical safeguards contained in many national laws. For example, Article 7 does not include any explicit restrictions on targeting activities which implicate fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression or association, and prevents Parties from requiring foreign police to demonstrate that the subscriber data they seek will advance a criminal investigation.[1]

        We are particularly concerned that Article 7’s explanatory text fails to acknowledge that subscriber data can be highly intrusive. Your IP address can tell authorities what websites you visit and what accounts you used. Police can also request the name and address associated with your IP address in order to link your identity to your online activity, and that can be used to learn deeply intimate aspects of your daily habits. Article 7’s identification power undermines online anonymity in a context that embraces legal systems with widely divergent approaches to criminal justice, including some governments that are autocratic in nature. The resulting threat to journalists, human rights defenders, politicians, political dissidents, whistleblowers and others is indefensible.

      • Messaging And Chat Control

        But this is not the end of the story: For autumn 2021, European Commission announced that it will propose a follow-up legislation that will make the use of chatcontrol mandatory for all e-mail and messenger providers. This legislation might then also affect securely end-to-end encrypted communications. However, a public consultation by the Commission on this project showed that the majority of respondents, both citizens and stakeholders, oppose an obligation to use chat control. Over 80% of respondents oppose its application to end-to-end encrypted communications. As a result, the Commission postponed the draft legislation originally announced for July to

        September December 2021 (page 4 of the pdf).

      • TikTok’s lead EU regu lator opens two data privacy probes

        TikTok’s lead data privacy regulator in the European Union has opened two inquiries into the Chinese-owned short-video platform related to the processing of children’s personal data and transfers of personal data to China.

        Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which is lead EU regulator for many of the world’s top internet firms due to the location of their regional headquarters, is allowed to impose fines of up to 4% of global revenue.

      • TikTok: Social media giant to roll out support for users’ mental health

        A report by the Education Policy Institute and The Prince’s Trust earlier this year found that teenagers’ mental health was being damaged by heavy social media use.

        It was linked to negative wellbeing and self-esteem, regardless of a young person’s mental state, with more girls experiencing feelings of depression and hopelessness, the study said.

      • Forget video, Zoom wants to fuse Slack and Teams

        This is part of what Zoom calls “continuous collaboration,” where you’ll be able to chat about a task, exchange documents, drop into a video call, and even share automated video transcriptions and translations—a feature that Microsoft Teams helped pioneer, and now Zoom is adding, too. Zoom also said that it’s partnering with Microsoft SharePoint and Box to allow you to share files. Finally, Chat is adding a “Huddle View” for closer team collaboration.

Defence/Aggression

• George W. Bush Spent This 9/11 Moralizing. What About His Own Big Lie?

• ‘Dismaying’: Human Rights Groups Blast Biden Plan to OK Millions in Military Aid for Egypt

  Left-leaning Democratic lawmakers joined human rights groups Tuesday in decrying the Biden administration’s reported decision to withhold a small portion of the $1.3 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Egypt over human rights crimes perpetrated by the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

  “Egypt has 60,000 political prisoners. They torture political dissidents. The administration should have held back the full $300 million. This half-measure sends a muddled message about our commitment to human rights and democracy.”—Sen. Chris Murphy

• Canadian Imperialism in Africa

  On Twiter K. Diallo recently posted a map of the continent with the sum of Canadian mining investment in each African country under the words “75% of mining companies globally are now Canadian. Canada is a great source of corporate neocolonialism expansion.” The tweet received 25,000 likes and 8,500 retweets.

  But the map is dated. It said there was $31.6 billion worth of Canadian mining investment in Africa yet Natural Resources Canada put the number at $37.8 billion in 2019. The scope of Canadian resource extraction on the continent is remarkable. Many companies based and traded here have taken African names (African Queen Mines, Asante Gold Corporation, Tanzanian Royalty Exploration, Lake Victoria Mining Company, Société d’Exploitation Minière d’Afrique de l’Ouest, East Africa Metals, International African Mining Gold (IAMGOLD), African Gold Group, etc.).

• Opinion | The True Lessons of the Afghan War

  Disagreements over how to assess the American exodus from Afghanistan have kept the pundits busy these last weeks, even though there wasn’t much to say that hadn’t been said before. For some of them, however, that was irrelevant. Having overseen or promoted the failed Afghan War themselves, all the while brandishing various “metrics” of success, they were engaged in transparent reputation-salvaging.

• A Journey With the Last Survivor of an Amazon Massacre

• Never Forget Victims of the Drone Program

  The US military surveilled 43-year-old Zemari Ahmadi throughout his final day. He went about his normal routine as a Kabul-based employee of the aid group Nutrition and Education International. Ahmadi dropped off his co-workers at various locations throughout Kabul, filled water cartons at his office, and drove home to a residential compound where he lived with his family and his brother’s family. As his own children and his brother’s children ran to greet him, a US air force Reaper drone launched a missile at his car, incinerating him and the nine loved ones gathered around him.

  This is the story that The New York Times uncovered through extensive interviews with Ahmadi’s neighbors, colleagues, and medical experts. The Washington Post did its own extensive reporting and reached the same conclusion of the events. The story that US joint chiefs of staff chair, Gen. Mark Milley, gave to the public to justify the strike is very different.

• Tulsi Gabbard Uses 9/11 Anniversary to Spread Islamophobic Message of Hate

  Tulsi Gabbard on Saturday used the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to promote an anti-Muslim message, the latest in a series of moves by the former congresswoman aimed at courting the right-wing.

  “Let us #NeverForget that it was the Islamist ideology which inspired the terrorist attacks and declaration of war against America on 9/11,” Gabbard tweeted. “And it is this Islamist ideology that continues to fuel terrorist attacks around the world and is the foundation for so-called ‘Islamic’ countries like Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia’s discriminatory policies against Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists, etc.”

• By Letting Saudi Arabia Off the Hook Over 9/11, the US Encouraged Violent Jihadism

  The Saudi Arabia embassy in Washington this week issued a statement detailing its anti-terrorist activities and ongoing hostility to Al-Qaeda. This was briskly rejected by the lawyers for the families of the 9/11 victims who said that, “what Saudi Arabia desperately does not want to discuss is the substantial and credible evidence of the complicity [in the attack] of their employees, agents and sponsored agents”.

  Saudi Arabia claims that the 9/11 Commission Report, the official American inquiry published in 2003, cleared it of responsibility for the attacks. In fact, it found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials as individuals had funded Al-Qaeda. But this is not an exoneration since the Saudi government traditionally retains deniability by permitting Saudi sheikhs and wealthy individuals to finance radical Sunni Muslim movements abroad. A former Taliban finance minister, Agha Jan Motasim, revealed in an interview with the New York Times in 2016 that he went to Saudi Arabia several times a year to raise funds from private donors for his movement.

• 9/11′s Border Legacy: Razor Wire, “Smart” Surveillance, and Billions in Security Contracts

  By “inherited,” I do not mean just from Trump. What I’m referring to is $332.7 billionthat the US federal government has dedicated to Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement since the Department of Homeland Security opened for business in 2003. This is nearly an eight-fold increase over the previous 19 years (1984–2002), which totaled $42.7 billion under the Immigration and Naturalization Service. When Trump took office in 2017, this cumulative juggernaut of federal money and private contracts formed an arsenal of more than 20,000 agents, 650 miles of walls and barriers, and billions of dollars in deployed technologies. Even though he spent his 2016 presidential campaign claiming there was no enforcement on the border, the annual budget for border enforcement had already ballooned to $17 billion under President Obama, having steadily grown every year since 2001. Trump’s own CBP/ICE budget in 2017 was $20 billion. The product of age-old xenophobic rhetoric about our southern border, Trump benefited from a bipartisan industrial complex, without which he could not have so easily torn children from their parents and incarcerated them in crowded cells or even have built hundreds of miles of a 30-foot wall.

  Biden repudiated this cruel system during his campaign. “Trump has waged an unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants,” he said. “It’s wrong, and it stops when Joe Biden is elected president.”

• Anger After UAE Soldiers Torture, Kill Yemeni-American Student Abdulmalek Alsanabani

  As his hope that the Sana’a International Airport will be reopened has faded, smiley-faced Abdulmalek Anwar Alsanabani — a 25-year-old Yemeni-American living in Fresno, California — finally decided to take the risky journey across the south of Yemen in order to see his family in Sana’a. Al-Sanabani had gone eight years away from his loved ones. On Wednesday, he arrived at southern Yemen’s Aden Airport, where he shared his last Facebook post before his smiley face became bloodied and bruised.

• “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire”: Deepa Kumar on How Racism Fueled U.S. Wars Post-9/11

  According to the Costs of War Project, the wars launched by the United States following 9/11 have killed an estimated 929,000 people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. The true death toll may never be known, but the vast majority of the victims have been Muslim. “Racism is baked into the security logic of the national security state in the U.S., as well as in terms of how it operates abroad,” says Islamophobia scholar Deepa Kumar, a professor of media studies at Rutgers University. “The war on terror was sold to the American public using Orientalist and racist ideas that these societies are backward.” Kumar is the author of “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: 20 Years After 9/11,” an updated version of her 2012 book that examined how the war on terror ushered in a new era of anti-Muslim racism.

• 3 former U.S. intelligence operatives to pay over $1.6 million to resolve mercenary [cracking] charges

  Three former U.S. intelligence operatives, who went to work as mercenary [crackers] for the United Arab Emirates, will pay over $1.68 million dollars to resolve federal charges of conspiring to violate [cracking] laws, the Justice Department announced on Tuesday.

• Pence Had to Ask Dan Quayle If American Democracy Should Continue

  The authors write that Pence sought advice from Dan Quayle, the only living Republican vice president who had been in the position of certifying an election where his ticket was the losing one. And it was Quayle — the same man who has been something of a national punchline for a decade — who talked Pence off the ledge and into doing the right thing.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Dallas PD Hid Massive Data Deletion For Months From City Officials, District Attorney’s Office

  No one does a coverup like a cop shop. When a bunch of data — including criminal evidence — was deleted, the Dallas, Texas city council was pretty much the last to know about it.

Environment

• It Was The Deadliest Year Ever For Land And Environmental Activists

  Ntshangase is one of 227 activists that the group says were killed last year in connection to their grassroots environmental efforts, according to a report released Monday.

  Her killing was one of two in South Africa in 2020 attributed to environmental activism. However, the group says many more occurred elsewhere, with more than half occurring in just three countries: Colombia, Mexico and the Philippines.

• Climate Inaction Has Left Majority of Young People Believing Humanity Is ‘Doomed’

  “If this isn’t a wake up call for world leaders, what is?” —Avaaz

  The survey “shows eco-anxiety is not just for environmental destruction alone, but inextricably linked to government inaction on climate change. The young feel abandoned and betrayed by governments,” Hickman told the BBC. “Governments need to listen to the science and not pathologize young people who feel anxious.”

• 2,180+ Scientists Worldwide Demand ‘Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty’

  As the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly begins Tuesday amid an unrelenting wave of extreme weather, thousands of academics from around the globe are urging governments to negotiate an international treaty to bring about a rapid and just transition away from coal, oil, and gas—”the main cause of the climate emergency.”

  “This is a global emergency. It requires global coordination to quickly eliminate the immediate cause: deadly fossil fuels.”—Peter Kalmus, NASA

• Reporting on Climate Injustice in One of the Hottest Towns in America

  Two years ago, a friend and I went on a weekend trip from San Diego up to Joshua Tree National Park. We took the scenic route, through the deserts east of the California coast and past the Salton Sea, an aptly named saline lake. Dust blew across the road. Sometimes we could see people racing dune buggies over the rocks and sand. Other times, the horizon was empty but for a few scrappy bushes.

  It felt like another planet.

• Opinion | There Is Little Doubt the Climate Crisis Is Here—Now What Do We Do About It?

  Record fires in Oregon and California. Floods in Houston and New York. Deadly winter storms in Texas. Droughts across much of the west.

• 10 Days After Hurricane Ida, Historic Black Louisiana Town Contends With Scattered Coffins As Floodwaters Drain from the Streets

  Ten days after Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana as a Category 4 storm, Wilkie Declouet, a former law enforcement officer, and lifelong resident of Ironton, posted photos to social media of coffins and tombs scattered around his neighborhood. 

  Earlier that day, local officials were telling residents that the town was still inaccessible, but Declouet knew better than to take what they said on face value and checked for himself — and found a way back in. Like the rest of the community, he evacuated before the storm hit. 

• Energy

  • Indigenous-Led Logging Blockade Is Canada’s Largest Act of Civil Disobedience

  • Oil Industry Wages Major Lobbying Campaign to Kill Proposed Methane Fee

    The oil industry has launched an all-out pressure campaign to kill an attempt by Congressional Democrats to tax methane – an extremely powerful greenhouse gas – for the first time. 

    The American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil industry’s most powerful lobbying group, enlisted over 130 state-level chambers of commerce, oil lobbying outfits, and labor groups, and together they wrote a letter on September 7 to U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which is considering the methane fee as part of the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill. 

  • House Democrats’ Tax Plan Fails to Eliminate Domestic Fossil Fuel Subsidies

  • Fairy Creek: Indigenous-Led Blockade of Old-Growth Logging Is Now Canada’s Largest Civil Disobedience

    Tension is rising between Canadian police and activists who have been staging a months-long anti-logging resistance in Vancouver Island’s ancient forests. The protest has been underway for two years, led by environmental and First Nations activists, and is considered to be Canada’s largest act of civil disobedience ever. Canadian authorities have arrested nearly 1,000 people at Fairy Creek in British Columbia, and the protests show no sign of slowing down. “We have a long history of asserting ourselves as coastal people, where our inherent right is not only based in our relationship to our communities but is based on our relationship and our legal systems and with the land,” says Kati George-Jim, a Coast Salish and Nuu-chah-nulth woman who joined the blockade in September 2020 and has been arrested numerous times. “The police have no jurisdiction, and industry don’t have jurisdiction, on stolen land,” she says. We also speak with lawyer Noah Ross, who says police have used excessive violence to break up protests. “There’s been many, many instances where people of color have been specifically targeted,” says Ross.

  • How Students Pressured Harvard to Divest From Fossil Fuels– and Won

    For nearly a decade, we petitioned, protested, and politicked. We met with members of the Harvard Corporation, several of whom have personally profited from the fossil fuel industry, only to hear them repeat the same empty talking points. We risked and incurred arrest storming the Harvard-Yale field in the largest university divestment protest ever. Most recently, we filed a legal complaint against Harvard with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office. What did we get from Harvard in return? A whole lot of obfuscation and some half-measures. Or so it seemed until last week. In a surprise announcement last Thursday, Harvard finally announced that it would divest from fossil fuels.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Smoke from wildfires kills thousands annually

    Smoke from wildfires, linked to climate, grows daily more of a threat. Now science can see the direct human health cost.

  • Inside a Timber Sale Scam

    Amazingly the Forest Service claims that if they don’t log the forest (killing the trees with chain saws), the trees will die from root rot, beetles, and other “calamities” In other words, death by chainsaws is acceptable, but mortality by natural agents is not.

    Killing trees because they “might” die is analogous to killing people at 40 years old because they “might” die from a heart attack or cancer.

• Overpopulation

  • Water crisis could lead to conflicts in the Middle East

    Water crises have been ranked in the top five of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks by Impact list nearly every year since 2012. The phenomenon of “water refugees” has made its appearance, as the population is displaced due to water shortages. In 2017, severe droughts contributed to the worst humanitarian crisis since World War Two, when 20 million people across Africa and the Middle East were forced to leave their homes due to the accompanying food shortages and conflicts that erupted.

  • Fresno County towns with no drinking water drown in debt while residents wait for new well

    Now, with the drought, those well projects are in a race against dropping groundwater levels as farmers, cut off from surface water supplies, are leaning more heavily on the aquifer.

  • We Need to Talk About Overpopulation: An Interview with Nandita Bajaj

    Nandita: There is no dearth of media reports on “baby bust” alarmism. Such reports perpetuate the narrative that our economies and elderly-care costs will greatly suffer if we don’t keep adding more people. Certainly, we have to ensure that with what is ultimately a necessary reduction in population, we attend to the challenges that will arise, but the current alarmist narrative assumes a model of perpetual population growth on a planet with finite resources. We must remember that with population growth comes environmental degradation; habitat loss and destruction of other species; increased global warming and frequency of climate-related disasters such as fires, floods, droughts, coral bleaching, melting glaciers, and desertification; increased vulnerability to pandemics and epidemics; as well as an increased vulnerability to global supply shocks.

    Let’s remember, we are adding about 80 million people a year, which is about 1 million people every five days. While the global fertility rate has halved from an average of about 5 children per woman to about 2.5 children per woman since 1950, we have three times as many people giving birth today, meaning we are adding to our numbers faster than ever and are on pace to hit 9.7 billion by 2050 and 10.9 billion by 2100, according to UN projections. All this would be less problematic if our current 7.9 billion wasn’t already consuming more resources than the Earth can sustainably provide.

  • Letter: Overpopulation is cause of every environmental problem we face

    I am dismayed by the lack of interest by the media and those they support in the real cause of every environmental problem we face — overpopulation of the human species. Instead they push treatment of symptoms, such as the human contribution to greenhouse gases (only one of the three major contributors of climate change).

Finance

• Amid Give-Back Demands: Workers Can Still Safeguard Pensions

  This book will be a critical resource for defending retirement security at the bargaining table and in the political arena. The Labor Guide is not only a highly readable account of retirement plan financing and administration, with a handy glossary of layperson explanations of sometimes confusing technical terms. It’s also a call for labor action to strengthen “our national pension plan,” aka Social Security, which is the sole source of retirement income for 1 out of 4 recipients and a perennial target of privatization efforts.

  Now a professor at Portland State, the author first got involved in pension struggles when his own individual retirement account, as a Connecticut public employee, took a hit in the Great Recession of 2008. Russell helped lead a successful campaign to allow state workers, with inferior 401(k)-style coverage, make a rare switch to a defined-benefit plan with better benefits. (For more on that fight, see Russell’s previous book, Social Insecurity: 401(k)s and the Retirement Crisis, (Beacon Press, 2015).

• How One Little-Known Loophole Fuels Toxic Dynastic Wealth

• Who Pays for Eldercare in the US? Women and the Economy

• ‘Incredible’: Covid Stimulus Funds Reduced Overall US Poverty in 2020

  Despite the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing spike in unemployment, poverty in the U.S. declined by roughly 2.6% from 2019 to 2020 as a result of the federal government’s expansion of the social safety net, new data released Tuesday shows.

  “When government responds to the needs of the working class, millions of families are lifted out of poverty.”—Sen. Bernie Sanders

• Why SDRs Belong to States, Not Central Banks

  Since SDRs are relatively unknown to many policymakers in Latin America, Latindadd, a civil society organization who works on tax, debt, and development, put out a handbook for the fiscal use of SDRs in August to help guide policy in this area. As they noted, SDRs represent an international reserve asset that was created by the IMF in 1969 to help facilitate balance of payment settlements. Even so, SDRs themselves do not constitute debt or loans, but potential claims on the freely usable hard currencies of other IMF members. Historically, these claims have been used on occasions to pay back IMF loan programs. This implies the assets are, and always have been, closely connected to fiscal budgets.

  Nonetheless, in Mexico, the country’s central bank, known as Banxico, recently published a statement asserting that it, rather than the government, should maintain control over the $12 billion worth of SDRs the state has received in the latest IMF issuance. Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, disagrees. He believes the SDRs should go to the government’s budget.

• The History of Wealth Extraction in the US: a New Online Educational Tool

• Up to Half of Pentagon Spending Since 9/11 Has Gone to War Profiteers

• Warren Says Reconciliation Bill Should Include Wealth Tax

• ‘A Monumental Mistake’: Wyden Warns House Democrats’ Tax Plan Lets Billionaires Off Easy

  Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, warned Tuesday that House Democrats’ newly released tax plan would let U.S. billionaires off the hook by omitting key reforms that progressive lawmakers, advocacy organizations, and President Joe Biden have embraced.

  “The nurses, firefighters, and teachers who pay their taxes with every paycheck know the system is broken when billionaire heirs never pay tax on billions in stock gains.”—Sen. Ron Wyden

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Congress – Collectively Less Than An Inkblot

  1. Congress has abdicated its duties and constitutional authorities to the president regardless of party affiliation. Presidents start wars, spend unauthorized money recklessly, defy congressional subpoenas, snoop unlawfully on their citizens, and lazily enforce the laws against corporate outlaws flouting the status of an indifferent Congress.

  2. Since 1992, Congress has let the Pentagon violate a federal law requiring all federal departments to provide auditable data for its annual budget. By far the DOD has the largest operational budget in Washington and it is ridden with waste and is unauditable, thanks to a weak-willed Congress.

• Compromise Bill on Voting Rights Includes Disenfranchising Voter ID Requirements

• Ray McGinnis and Ken Jenkins – The Project Censored Show

  Notes: Ray McGinnis is the author of the new book “Unanswered Questions: What the September Eleventh Families Asked and the 9/11 Commission Ignored.” He is a freelance writer and writing instructor. Ken Jenkins is an independent video producer and long-time 9/11 researcher. He holds a degree in electrical engineering, and has also extensively studied psychology.

• For Joe Manchin, It’s Always About Joe Manchin

  Joe Manchin is at it again.

• Opinion | SCOTUS Is Definitely Not A Bunch of Partisan Hacks Says Partisanest Hack Ever

• Opinion | So-Called Democratic “Moderates” Are Actually Right-Wingers Who Have Always Thrown Up Roadblocks to Social Progress

  How is it possible that the world’s largest economy has a crumbling  infrastructure (“shabby beyond belief”  is how the CEO of Legal & General, a multinational financial services and asset management company,  described it back in 2016), and ranks in the lower half of second tier countries, behind economic powerhouses Cyprus and Greece, on the 2020 Social Progress Index?

• Senate Dems Urge Biden to Redirect Billions of Unspent War Funds to Help Afghan People

  While applauding the recent “decision to end America’s longest war,” five Democratic U.S. senators on Tuesday sent President Joe Biden and top Cabinet officials a letter urging the reallocation of more than $6 billion earmarked the Afghanistan War to fund the urgent humanitarian needs of the Afghan people.

  “Incredibly, the nearly $300 million we dedicated for humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan this fiscal year is approximately the same as the amount our military spent in Afghanistan every single day.”—Senators’ letter

• “Send It Back” — Squad Tells Senate to Reject Rahm Emanuel’s Ambassadorship

• Larry Elder Claims “Fraud” Before California Even Publishes Recall Results

• Opinion | To Avert Failure, Biden Should Listen to the “Radicals”—Not Corporate Media

  If President Biden fails to act boldly and quickly in improving the material lives of poor, working-class and struggling middle-class Americans of all colors, the right wing is likely to come storming back into power through the 2022 and 2024 elections. 

• ‘Unacceptable’: 3 Corporate Dems Threaten to Block Drug Pricing Reform in Reconciliation Bill

  “Without this key reform, we’ll continue to pay unsustainable amounts for prescription drugs, and have less money for key investments like expanding Medicare benefits, fighting climate change, and more.”—Indivisible

• Filibuster Only Obstacle After Senate Democrats Unveil New Voting Rights Bill

  As Senate Democrats on Tuesday announced a compromise voting rights bill backed by the entire caucus, advocates of election reform were quick to press Sen. Joe Manchin—who was part of the negotiations after opposing a previous broader proposal—to drop his resistance to reforming or abolishing the filibuster.

  “It’s time for our senators to put Americans’ freedom to vote ahead of the Jim Crow filibuster.”—Sean Eldridge, Stand Up America

• US Accuses Russia of Stonewalling on Cybercrime [iophk: Windows TCO]

  The Kremlin has repeatedly denied any role in a series of ransomware and cyberattacks against U.S. companies and infrastructure.

• Not an equal world: Facebook shields VIPs from some of its own rules

  Facebook exempts certain celebrities, politicians and other high-profile users from some its own rules for posts as part of a program launched as a quality-control mechanism, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

  The program, referred to as “cross check” or “XCheck,” shields millions of elite users from rules that Facebook claims to apply equally at the social network, according to a report citing internal documents.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Tennessee pastor Greg Locke accused of spreading false info about COVID banned from Twitter

  Controversial Tennessee pastor Greg Locke, who has repeatedly been accused of spreading misinformation about COVID-19, was banned from Twitter on Tuesday.

• Everyone will be able to clone their voice in the future

  Cloning your voice using artificial intelligence is simultaneously tedious and simple: hallmarks of a technology that’s just about mature and ready to go public.

  All you need to do is talk into a microphone for 30 minutes or so, reading a script as carefully as you can (in my case: the voiceover from a David Attenborough documentary). After starting and stopping dozens of times to re-record your flubs and mumbles, you’ll send off the resulting audio files to be processed and, in a few hours’ time, be told that a copy of your voice is ready and waiting. Then, you can type anything you want into a chatbox, and your AI clone will say it back to you, with the resulting audio realistic to fool even friends and family — at least for a few moments. The fact that such a service even exists may be news to many, and I don’t believe we’ve begun to fully consider the impact easy access to this technology will have.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Commentator Insists That Fact Checking Is An Attack On Free Speech

  There are some really bizarre ideas out there — and one that has popped up a bunch recently is the idea that fact checking is antithetical to free speech. We’ve seen a few faux “conservatives” arguing that fact checkers should be regulated and that they’re not protected by the 1st Amendment. This is wrong of course. Fact checking is (1) speech, and (2) stating an opinion on the veracity of some other content. It’s quintessential protected opinion.

• Beijing Targets Megastars and Their Fan Clubs

  By September 2, China’s National Radio and Television Administration had published a new set of guidelines banning artists with incorrect politics, purportedly to protect youth from “bad influence” and the “social atmosphere” from “severe pollution.” The directive also advocated for “professional, authoritative critiques” of performers and putting “political correctness and the socialist values above all forms of arts.”

  Akio Yaita, a onetime Beijing correspondent and Taipei bureau chief for a conservative Japanese newspaper, told VOA Mandarin that the crackdown reflects power struggles between President Xi Jinping and his opponents.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Writers Guild East Election: Candidates Who Back Digital Media Organizing Growth Win Council Seats

  With a two-year term ahead of them, the union’s new top officers and Council members will lead the Guild both through the identity issues regarding digital journalists that many Council candidates talked up in their campaigns and its next Minimum Basic Agreement negotiations in 2023. After current president Beau Willimon decided not to seek re-election this year after four years in the role, Winship, initially reluctant, was persuaded by other union members to run for the role. During the campaign, he told The Hollywood Reporter that when in office he will work with Solidarity Slate writers “with an eye toward how we can all work together and move forward in very good and positive ways.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• In America, Where There’s Religious Smoke, There’s Usually A Capitalistic Fire

  Since the beginning of contemporary history (or post World War II) that kind of religious fervor has quelled substantially. Even the religious patriarchal gaze still aimed at Islamic women, in stable Middle Eastern societies, is beginning to blink profusely – as their women advocate for equality, under a new empowering and ever-developing 21st century status quo, inspired by the unflinching feminism pervading the G 7 countries of the world. This modern devout reality makes the recent legislative bullet, fired at the distaff citizens of Texas, by a hegemonic catholic regime, rather unconventional and hard (for ME) to fathom.

  For forty-eight years the women of the Lone Star State (and abroad) have utilized their “Right to Privacy,” allotted via Roe versus Wade, with grace and diligence. So this antiquated regurgitation of “right to life,” for me, reeks of nothing more than typical American subterfuge. Being ensconced in the abundantly generous Information Age, political chicanery, even under the honorable guise of religious conviction, is not difficult to recognize. To do so, all one has to do is dwell, intellectually, in the chasm between statistics and intuition – while never relinquishing the inescapable fact that America was constructed with the inhumane mechanism of, cheap labor.

• The United States’ Recent Failures in War and Fighting Racism Should Serve as a Warning to Its Allies

  Right on schedule, the nation’s finest intelligence analysts delivered their report to the White House on August 24 and released an unclassified summary three days later. The once hotly anticipated story landed like a damp squib and was buried by the regular news cycle in less than a day. In part, this was due to the inconclusive nature of the findings: four intelligence community (IC) elements and the National Intelligence Council assessed “with low confidence” that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from “natural exposure,” another IC element leaned “with moderate confidence” toward lab leak, and three others did not commit either way, though they naturally all agreed that “Beijing… continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information and blame other countries, including the United States.” But what really doomed the report to oblivion was a signal failure of U.S. intelligence—and the entire imperial apparatus—on a far grander scale: the utter rout of the United States’ puppet regime in Afghanistan by the Taliban, who in 10 days capturedevery provincial capital (save one), including Kabul.

  One underexplored throughline linking both events is Biden’s fraught though largely earnest attempts to restore the traditionally multilateral basis of the U.S. empire, drawing a sharp distinction with his predecessor Donald Trump. While Trump dramatically withdrew the United States from the WHO at the height of a global pandemic in 2020, alleging an entirely illusory pro-China bias, one of Biden’s first acts in office was to rejoin the organization. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus duly celebrated the restoration of U.S. funding by contradicting the WHO mission’s own assessment, as part of a joint study with China, that “introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway.”

• Germany’s Secret Success: Turning Immigration Into a Nonissue

  Berlin—A visitor wanted to know about the upcoming elections here: How would concerns about migration affect the outcome? They wouldn’t, his host replied, because migration wasn’t an issue in the elections.

• ‘Reproductive Freedom’ Defenders Demonstrate Outside Brett Kavanaugh’s House

  A group of pro-choice activists directed outrage Monday at Supreme Justice Brett Kavanaugh, bringing banners, loudspeakers, and demands for his resignation to the right-wing justice’s Washington, D.C.-area home.

  The event was organized by ShutDownDC, which said that between 50 and 70 people took part. Photos showed protesters holding signs with messages including “Repro Freedom for All,” “Kavanaugh resign,” and “Safe abortion is a human right.”

• Boycott Texas

  I’m not a big fan of state boycotts. They’re such a blunt instrument. They risk hurting ordinary people just trying to make a living, including people in the very category you’re trying to help. (I’ll never forget the e-mail I got from the gay owner of Replacements, a wonderful north Carolina seller of china and other table ware, pleading with online customers not to boycott his store over the anti-gay “bathroom bill.“) Boycotting conventions and tourism can mean you ding the rare blue dot in a red state. And then there is the question of whether boycotts reinforce the target state’s orneriness and sense of persecution.

• Opinion | DOJ Pushback on Texas Abortion Ban Is a Welcome Sign

  Like nearly everyone else on the left, I’ve been waiting for U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and the department he leads to repair the rule of law in the aftermath of the Trump presidency.

• DOJ Says Federal Agents Will Start Wearing Body Cameras

  At long last, Department of Justice agencies are joining the 21st century. Years after many local law enforcement agencies (with budgets that amount to rounding errors for DOJ components) have adopted body cameras, the DOJ is finally getting into the act.

• Forfeiture Case Shows Cops Don’t Even Need Drug Dogs To Alert To Engage In A Warrantless Search

  Another magical drug dog case has surfaced, showing yet again why cops like having “probable cause on four legs” on hand to turn stops into searches and searches into seizures. This forfeiture motion [PDF] — highlighted by Brad Heath — starts with a stop and quickly devolves into ridiculousness.

• NYT OpEd Celebrates Labor Day By Proving It Knows Nothing About Sex Work

  Throughout MacKinnon’s reductive essay – which among other cringe-worthy mistakes, falsely blames the media for popularizing the term “sex work,” (in reality, a sex worker and activist named Carol Leigh coined the term in the late 1970s, which is still widely favored today), consistently confuses sex work with trafficking, and claims sex work can never be consentual as it’s selling one’s body (just wait until she learns about manual labor jobs!) — there is one thing missing: A single f—ing scrap of nuance.

• Apple Fires Manager Who Complained; She Gains Right to Sue

  Apple Inc. employee Ashley Gjovik, who filed allegations with the U.S. National Labor Relations Board last month, said she was illegally fired in retaliation and will continue pursuing her legal complaints against the tech giant.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• I Am Rupert Murdoch’s Total Lack Of Shame: Now Demanding Intermediary Liability Protections For News Corp.

  Let’s talk a bit about Rupert Murdoch. To his slight credit, in the early 2000s, he seemed to realize that the internet would be big for media. He also realized that he might be missing out. He went on an internet buying spree. It got to the point where Newsweek was praising Murdoch’s “smart bets” on the internet. The cornerstone of Murdoch’s digital empire was MySpace; a site that was once so dominant, the media insisted that no one could ever surpass it — not even a dumpy little startup like Facebook.

• Biden ‘Competition Council’ Urges Biden FCC To Do Things It Can’t Do Because Biden Hasn’t Fully Staffed It Yet

  Back in July, the Biden administration signed an executive order creating a new “competition council” tasked with taking a closer look at competition and monopoly issues in various business sectors. One of those sectors was telecom, which remains dominated by a handful of politically powerful regional monopolies, resulting in decades of spotty broadband service, high prices, and terrible customer service.

Monopolies

• US Media Support Tech Regulation—Unless It Comes From China

  Recently, US media have been aghast at legislation affecting China’s tech sector.

• The McMystery That’s Getting the Feds Involved

  It also comes down to simplicity, as Boston.com and the WSJ suggest. “There are a couple reasons behind this phenomenon, though only one has the FTC interested. As these ice cream makers are “so over-engineered it is silly. Sometimes simple is just better.” Making ice cream in a bag might be a better option at this point if we’re talking real simple. (Don’t act like you’re too good to scoop handfuls of bagged Oreo soft serve in your mouth.) As most of the machines are only manufactured by Taylor Commercial Foodservice LLC, which doesn’t exactly make it easy for an employee to try their hand at fixing it. (It is rumored that legally, employees doing so is forbidden.)

• Epic’s win over Apple is actually an Apple victory

  A big factor in the decision was the definition of the “market” Apple allegedly had a monopoly over. This was a sticking point in the trial: Apple argued that the market was all gaming platforms; Epic said the market was just Apple’s App Store. Gonzalez Rogers said during the trial that she thought the market might be all mobile gaming, which would include other mobile platforms and stores like Google Play. And that’s the definition she went with in her ruling. It’s hard to prove that Apple is a monopoly when the judge’s definition of the market also includes its competitors.

  The one victory Epic Games did achieve was a limited one: Though Gonzalez Rogers ruled that Apple had to allow developers to show app users links where they can make purchases outside of the App Store (purchases Apple won’t get a cut of), Epic is still not allowed to insert its own payment method in the app itself, nor can it place its own app store on Apple devices.

• Patents

  • Update: Federal Judge Rules That Only Natural Persons Can Be Inventors [Ed: Court just states the obvious, but that's not good enough for patent maximalists]

    The case arises from an appeal filed by Stephen Thaler and his legal team concerning the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (“USPTO”) treatment of U.S. Patent Application Nos. 16/524,350 (“the ‘350 Application”) and 16/524,532 (“the ‘532 Application”). Thaler is the creator of an artificial intelligence machine known as “Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience” aka “DABUS. An Application Data Sheet (“ADS”) was filed in each case identifying a single inventor with the given name “DABUS” and a family name “Invention generated by artificial intelligence”.[1] The ADSs also identify Stephen Thaler as the Applicant and Assignee. In both cases, the USPTO responded by issuing a Notice to File Missing Parts of Nonprovisional Patent Application (“the Notice”) and asserted that the ADS did not identify each inventor by his legal name.[2] A subsequent petition to request supervisory review of the Notice and vacate the Notice was then filed by Thaler and dismissed by the USPTO.[3] Thaler then appealed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia seeking, among other things, a reversal of the USPTO’s decision on the petition.

  • Critics Of Patent Waivers Are Claiming They Were Right… Despite No Patent Waiver Actually Issuing Yet

    We were surprised, but pleased, when the US announced plans to support a patent waiver for COVID-19 treatments and vaccines (over Hollywood’s strenuous objections). As you’ll recall, the TRIPS agreement (an onerous, oppressive set of “intellectual property” rules that many countries have agreed to) includes a “waiver” process, in which the WTO will effectively waive international patent protection on certain patented items in an emergency situation. The COVID-19 crisis seemed to fit the exact intent of the waiver process, and yet there’s been a lot of pushback from patent and copyright maximalists who hate the very idea of waiving copyright or patent monopoly rights on anything for any reason at all.

  • Ex-Heads of State, Nobel Laureates Urge Merkel’s Successor to Back Vaccine Patent Waiver

    More than 140 Nobel laureates and former heads of state signed an open letter Tuesday urging the next German chancellor to throw their support behind a proposed patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines, a step the nation’s outgoing leader has steadfastly refused to take.

    Addressed to Annalena Baerbock, Armin Laschet, and Olaf Scholz—the leading contenders in Germany’s September 26 election—the letter stresses the urgency of ramping up vaccine production and distributing doses to low-income countries that have been denied the resources necessary to inoculate their populations, leaving billions of people vulnerable to the coronavirus and its dangerous variants.

  • Software Patents

    • Cryptocurrency world must protect itself from ‘low-quality patents’ says Square lawyer as biz joins Open Invention Network • The Register

• Copyrights

  • ‘Black Widow’ vs. ‘Shang-Chi’ Piracy and the Return of Disney’s Box-Office Exclusives

    After simultaneously releasing several movies in theaters and on its streaming platform, Disney is granting an exclusivity window to the box office again. Simultaneous releases trigger a piracy surge, which becomes clear from a comparison between the ‘Black Widow’ and ‘Shang-Chi’ piracy numbers.

  • Hollywood Demands $16.35m From Operator of Pirate IPTV Services

    A coalition of Hollywood studios, with the addition of Amazon and Netflix, are demanding $16.35m in damages from the operator of Altered Carbon, Area 51, and several other pirate IPTV services. In addition to a permanent injunction, they also seek execution of an earlier settlement agreement that wasn’t honored plus $332,600 in attorney’s fees.

  • Kickstarter For Hand-Drawn Video Game Manuals Shuts Down Due To IP Threat

    You may recall that about a year ago we discussed one man’s attempt to digitize the game manuals for really old games. Notably, that project didn’t appear to face any threats over copyright laws by the normal companies — Nintendo, Konami, etc — though that almost certainly was partially the result of the project not being a commercial endeavor, but a simple attempt at art preservation that would clearly be covered by fair use. But the overall point is that there is a thirst for this sort of thing, especially when you realize that some of these game manuals are endangered species, close to being lost for all eternity.