Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Essentials – Public Key Authentication – Invidious

  Public Key Authentication with OpenSSH is preferred, as it’s a much stronger method of authenticating to your servers when compared to using password authentication. In fact, password authentication in OpenSSH should always be disabled. But before you can password authentication, you’ll need to set up public key authentication, and that’s exactly what we’ll do in today’s video.

• Creating Partitions In Linux Using fdisk (and other tools) – Invidious

  When it comes to command line installations of Linux (and other operating systems), the scariest part for most people is partitioning and formatting your drives. But it’s not that complicated, and tools like fdisk make it really simple.

Kernel Space

• Kernel prepatch 5.15-rc2

  The 5.15-rc2 kernel prepatch is out for testing.

• Linus Torvalds reveals the ‘true’ anniversary of Linux code

  Linux kernel creator Linux Torvalds has announced Linux 5.15-rc2, the second release candidate for the next version of the Linux kernel.

  Torvalds’s weekly Sunday wrap-up marked the progress in the Linux kernel but he has also taken the time to point out the thirtieth anniversary of Linux v0.01, which he uploaded from Helsinki on the evening of September 17, 1991.

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA 470.74 for Linux is out fixing up memory usage for Direct3D 12 with VKD3D-Proton

    NVIDIA today released the NVIDIA 470.74 driver for Linux from their “Production Branch” which includes some important bug fixes so you might want to upgrade now if you’ve been holding off.

    One issue that has been coming up for users of Steam Play Proton is that Direct3D 12 games have been seeing high system memory usage, which has caused many Windows games to become unplayable. Thankfully this driver fixes that! Thanks to that fix most people should be able to upgrade to 470.74.

  • NVIDIA 470.74 Graphics Driver Brings Support for Linux Kernel 5.14, Firefox Improvements

    Good news for NVIDIA users who want to upgrade their distributions to Linux 5.14 as NVIDIA 470.74 is here with a fix for bug that caused the nvidia-drm.ko kernel module to crash when loading with DRM-KMS enabled (modeset=1) on the Linux 5.14 kernel series.

    In addition, it improves support for the Mozilla Firefox web browser to prevent visual corruption by adding an application profile to disable FXAA (also available for FreeBSD and Solaris systems), it fixes a Vulkan performance regression that affected the rFactor2 computer racing simulator game, and addresses a bug that could cause GPU apps to exit when resuming from suspend.

  • NVIDIA 470.74 Linux Driver Released With Several Fixes – Phoronix

    NVIDIA has released their latest 470 series Linux driver point release.

    The NVIDIA 470 series Linux proprietary driver continues to mature with today’s 470.74 driver release to kick off a new week.

    The NVIDIA 470.74 Linux driver has a fix around high system memory usage for some games with VKD3D-Proton for running Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan. There is also a notable fix to ensure FXAA is disabled for Mozilla Firefox to prevent visual corruption. There is also a Vulkan performance regression fix for rFactor2.

  • Mike Blumenkrantz: Underwater

    I got a request recently to fix up the WebGL Aquarium demo. I’ve had this bookmarked for a while since it’s one of the only test cases for GL_EXT_multisampled_render_to_texture I’m aware of, at least when running Chrome in EGL mode.

    Naturally, I decided to do both at once since this would be yet another extension that no native desktop driver in Mesa currently supports.

  • xf86-input-libinput 1.2.0

    This release introduces support for touchpad gestures that will
    be available as part of X server 21.1. Additionally high-resolution
    scrolling data is now acquired from libinput if available and sent
    downstream to X server. The default scroll distance has been bumped
    to 120 in the process, but this should not affect correctly written
    clients.

  • xf86-input-libinput 1.2 Brings Touchpad Gestures, High Resolution Scrolling – Phoronix

    For those continuing to make use of the X.Org Server, xf86-input-libinput 1.2 is now available for integrating the latest functionality of libinput input handling library.

    Libinput 1.19 released last week with support for hold gesture types and high resolution wheel scrolling. The xf86-input-libinput 1.2 release for this X.Org DDX now supports touchpad gestures and high resolution scrolling data as well when pairing this driver with libinput 1.19. In the case of the hold gestures, it requires to be used in conjunction with the forthcoming X.Org Server 21.1 release.

  • NVIDIA Prepares The Linux Kernel For Future Laptops With EC-Driven Backlights – Phoronix

    NVIDIA is contributing a new open-source driver to the upstream Linux kernel for dealing with upcoming laptops where the backlight controls are handled by the device’s embedded controller (EC).

    With Linux 5.16 later this year NVIDIA is ready with the “wmaa-backlight-wmi” driver for EC-based backlight controls for upcoming laptop/notebook computers.

  • AMD Continues CRIU Work To Checkpoint/Restore ROCm Compute Workloads – Phoronix

    Earlier this year AMD went public with prototyping CRIU support for Radeon GPUs around ROCm to be able to checkpoint/freeze running compute workloads and to then restore them at a later point. This CRIU focus is driven by their big accelerator needs and forthcoming supercomputers for migrating workloads particularly within containers. AMD continues working on CRIU support for GPUs and last week provided an update on the project.

Applications

• Micro Text Editor: Lightweight and Intuitive Terminal-Based Editor

  Micro command-line text editor is designed to replace Nano as the text editor for the masses. It is modern and easy to use cross-platform text editor.

  A newcomer to the wonderful world of Linux will eventually need to place or alter some text in a file. In addition to, numerous programs and system settings in Linux are tucked away in text files. You can open these with your default text editor such as Gedit, Kate, Mousepad or Pluma, but the terminal is often faster, especially when you need administrator permissions.

  And so we come to Vi or Vim, but they are not the easiest for new Linux users. Fortunately, most Linux distributions include a text editor called Nano as a standard utility. For most uses, Nano is easy to use and it doesn’t require a significant learning curve. But you don’t have to settle on Nano. There is a middle ground. Something that is a little better than Nano, but certainly not so difficult to learn as Vim, and this is the Micro text editor.

• Pensela: An Open-Source Tool Tailored for Screen Annotations

  You may have come across several screenshot tools available for Linux. However, a dedicated screen annotation tool along with the ability to take screenshots? And, with cross-platform support?

  Well, that sounds even better!

  While you get many tools to beautify your screenshots and the screenshot tools like Flameshot, Pensela lets you focus on annotations first.

  It focuses on offering several annotation options while giving you the ability to take full-size screenshots.

  Here, I shall highlight some of its features along with my experience using it.

• Giada 0.18.2 Hardcore Loop Machine Brings New Stereo In/Out Audio Meters, Revamped Action Editor

  For those not in the known, Giada is a universal music production software that can be used as a loop machine, sample player, song editor, live recorder, FX processor, or MIDI controller. The new release, Giada 0.18.2, is here to introduce new features like stereo in/out audio meters and a revamped Action Editor for better usability and support for displaying the play head.

  For connoisseurs, it also implements queue for MIDI events, simplifies the Event Dispatcher’s event type function, moves the JACK transport operations to the new JackTransport class, adds support for always picking sample rates from the first audio device when using JACK, and adds AtomicSwapper as a git submodule.

• gThumb 3.12.0 Released! How to Install via PPA in Ubuntu 20.04

  gThumb image viewer and organizer announced version 3.12.0 as the new stable release series!

  gThumb 3.12.0 is the new stable series since the last 3.10.x, while the 3.11.x is the development release.

• If you have migrated to Linux, here are several Top Essential Linux Apps recommendations – LinuxStoney

  Either because you got tired of your operating system or you ran out of support when using old systems, if you decided that it was a good idea to move to Linux and you do not have much experience with the subject, you may be somewhat lost when it comes to installing the applications that already you used or looking for a replacement for them .

  The most important thing to keep in mind is that in some exceptional cases such as Microsoft Office and Adobe’s suite of creative apps, most of the very popular software has versions for Linux or at least one alternative that covers exactly the same needs, If not, your new favorite word must be “adaptation.”, so in this article we discover Top Essential Linux Apps

Instructionals/Technical

• Use Vagrant to test your scripts on different operating systems | Opensource.com

  I’ve been happy using Vagrant for quite a while now. I work with several DevOps tools, and installing them all on one system can get complicated. Vagrant lets you do cool things without breaking your system because you don’t have to experiment on your production system at all.

  If you’re familiar with VirtualBox or GNOME Boxes, then learning Vagrant is easy. Vagrant is a simple and clean interface for working with virtual machines. A single config file, called Vagrantfile, allows you to customize your virtual machines (called Vagrant boxes). A simple command-line interface lets you start, stop, suspend, or destroy your boxes.

• Customize GStreamer build with only the features needed for your application

  Thanks to a partnership between Collabora and Huawei is now possible to build Gstreamer with just the features required for a specific application, reducing the binary size for space-constrained embedded systems.

  Gstreamer is a very popular open-source multimedia framework used in a wide variety of projects and products, and with an impressive number of features spread over 30 libraries and more than 1600 elements in 230 plugins. This is not a problem on desktop PC and most smartphones, but the size of the binary may be too large for some systems, and until recently it was no easy way to customize GStreamer build for a specific application. But Collabora changed the code to allow gst-build to generate a minimal GStreamer build.

• Install netstat on Debian 11

  Like all packages belonging to the net-tools collection, the command netstat isn’t included in new Linux distributions such as Debian 11. This tutorial explains how to add the netstat command on Debian 11, its predecessors, and based Linux distributions such as Ubuntu.

• How to Add/Remove User Account in Manjaro

  Managing user accounts in any Linux distribution is one of the main tasks of the system administrators. The separate user accounts facilitate administrators to keep boundaries between the users and their processes on the system.

  The article illustrates how to create user accounts via GUI and CLI in Manjaro Linux. We also describe predefined user account settings and files to configure the user environment. Lastly, we describe CLI tools usermod and userdel to modify account settings and delete the account.

• How to install Xvfb on Ubuntu

  X virtual framebuffer abbreviated as Xvfb is designed for Unix/ Linux Operating System. It allows you to execute graphical apps without having to use a monitor by connecting some input device. Virtual memory is used to perform graphical operations and it allows the program to run headlessly.

• How to Export VMware Workstation Pro 16 Virtual Machines in OVA Format

  VMware Workstation Pro 16 can export virtual machines in OVF and OVA format. OVF stands for Open Virtualization Format, and OVA stands for Open Virtualization Appliances.

  If you export a VMware Workstation Pro 16 virtual machine in OVF format, it will generate multiple files. On the other hand, if you export a VMware Workstation Pro 16 virtual machine in OVA format, it will generate only a single file. In that sense, OVA is easier to import on other hypervisors as you will have to deal with a single file.

  In this article, I will show you how to export a VMware Workstation Pro 16 virtual machine in OVA format and import it on VMware Workstation Pro 16 again. So, let’s get started.

• How to use MouseTweaks on Ubuntu

  Under Ubuntu, the development of Mousetweaks was started as GSoc7 project in 2001. Mousetweaks is accessibility software and now is part of GNOME since version 2.22 is released. It adds various functionalities to your mouse settings, such as permitting a user to open the context menu by clicking and holding the left button of your mouse. So, Ubuntu users who want to manipulate one button can use this software. MouseTweaks has four click types: left-click, right-click, double-click, and drag-click. It also provides you the facility to temporarily lock the pointer on a particular area on the screen.

  Now, you will learn about how to install and use MouseTweaks on your Ubuntu system. So let’s start!

• Ubuntu Generate SSH key step by step

  SSH is known, as Secure Shell, is the most popular network protocol that helps establish a secure connection between a server and client. Using the SSH, users can safely run commands on remote servers, forward ports, create tunnels, and perform other actions. The SSH supports different kinds of authentication techniques. One of the most common mechanisms is password authentication, and the other one is public-key-based authentication. In both, the public key-based authentication is more secure and convenient than the password authentication method and based on digital signatures.

  This article will provide you a step-by-step SSH key generation guide for the Ubuntu system. We will discuss how to generate an SSH key and set up SSH key-based authentication on Ubuntu 20.04 system. Let us dive into the details!

• How to install and configure VNC on Ubuntu

  VNC is an acronym for Virtual Network Computing; freely available, open-source and alternative for the Microsoft RDP protocol (RDP). This technology is introduced for graphically sharing your desktop system by enabling you to operate another computer remotely using your mouse and keyboard. In other words, we can say that VNC is a set of protocols utilized for sharing desktop systems. It allows users who are not comfortable with the command-line to manage their settings, applications, and files remotely.

  Now, you will learn about how to install and setup VNC on your Ubuntu system. So let’s start!

• How to Take Snapshots of Virtual Machines in VMware Workstation Pro 16

  Imagine a situation where you’re trying to perform a system upgrade, or you want to try some new software on your virtual machine, and you’re not sure how things will turn out. In these situations, you can take a snapshot of the virtual machine before performing the task, do the task, and see how it goes. If you don’t like the result, you can always restore the virtual machine from the snapshot to take the virtual machine back in time before performing the task like magic.

• Introduction to Debian Package Management

  Ubuntu and all other Debian Linux distributions offer a comprehensive set of package management systems that provides access to an organized database of over 6000 packages. The package management facilitates the task of package installation, configuration, upgrade, and removal. It also resolves the process of dependency-related issues by including the dependency resolution features.

• Left Join PostgreSQL

  PostgreSQL Join is a feature that allows you to combine columns from one table with one or more tables based on the common columns between the related tables.

• What is Coalesce in PostgreSQL?

  Coalesce is a very useful function in PostgreSQL in Windows 10. We all know that we can insert both types of values in the PostgreSQL table, i.e., null or non-null. However, at times, we do not want to see those null values while processing our data. In this case, the coalesce function can be used whose purpose is to display the first non-null value that it encounters. This discussion will mainly revolve around exploring the usage of the coalesce function in PostgreSQL in Windows 10.

• How Do I Concatenate in PostgreSQL?

  Concat means to make one or add up something. The Concat function or method has been extensively used in the database for decades to concatenate two or more words, strings, sentences, and many more. Concatenate function does nothing when applied on the NULL arguments. Within this article, we will demonstrate the operation of the Concat function within the PostgreSQL database. Let’s start by opening up the PostgreSQL GUI application named pdAdmin 4 from the start bar of the Windows 10 desktop. While it has been opened, let’s have some examples for concatenation of strings, characters, and numbers.

• How to Remove a Non-Empty Directory in Linux

  In Linux, whenever you want to delete a file, you’d use the rm command. When it comes to deleting a directory, however, things get a bit complex. To delete a directory, there’s a dedicated tool rmdir that can remove empty directories. What if the target directory contains a bunch of unnecessary files?

• Linux Wc -C Option to Count Bytes

  The Linux command wc followed by the -c flag (wc -c) can be used to count file bytes.

  This tutorial explains how to count file bytes using both wc and du commands. After reading this tutorial, you will know how to easily count bytes, lines, and words in Linux.

• Linux Bluetooth Not Working Troubleshooting

  Issues with Bluetooth connectivity in Linux go way back in time. Many users have experienced issues sharing their documents. Others have had issues connecting their PCs to their handhelds or headphones to enjoy their desired playlists or bingeing on videos. This issue still pertains to the recently released Ubuntu LTS versions. The Linux forums are full of user complaints regarding this matter. So, in this article, we provide the solution to this issue and resolve it once and for all.

• How to Use Linux Network Namespace

  Linux network namespaces are a Linux kernel feature allowing us to isolate network environments through virtualization. For example, using network namespaces, you can create separate network interfaces and routing tables that are isolated from the rest of the system and operate independently.

  To understand namespaces easily, it is worth saying Linux namespaces are the basis of container technologies like Docker or Kubernetes.

  For now, Linux includes 6 types of namespaces: pid, net, uts, mnt, ipc, and user. This tutorial focuses on Linux network namespaces.

  If you command lsns, it will display all existing namespaces in your system, as shown in the image below.

• How to use the bc command in Linux for Arithmetic Calculations?

  The bc command stands for Basic Calculator in Linux. We use the bc command as a command-line calculator. The bc command offers the capabilities of a simple scientific calculator or any financial calculator. This language allows the execution of statements interactively. Also, we can use the numbers having arbitrary precision with the bc command language.

  Arithmetic calculations are fundamental operations in programming languages. We can use the bc command language as a scripting language and an interactive shell for mathematics.

  The bc command line can perform Mathematical, Boolean, and Logical operations, and many more. The syntax of the bc command line is somehow similar to the C language.

• How to install Kali Linux 2021.3 – Invidious

  In this video, I am going to show how to install Kali Linux 2021.3

• How To Identify Operating System Using TTL Value And Ping – OSTechNix

  Did you know that we can identify which operating system is running on a remote system by simply pinging it? Yes! In this brief guide, we will see how to determine operating system with TTL value and Ping command. This method should work on any operating system that has Ping command line utlity.

  There are plenty of commands, applications, and utilities exists to find out the OS of a remote system. However, finding operating system type with TTL is super easy!

  You can quickly detect whether a system is running with Linux, or Windows or any other OS by looking at the TTL value from the output of the ping command. You don’t need any extra applications to detect a remote system’s OS.

• Install and Use G++ on Ubuntu

  While working as an application developer, it is common practice that some projects require different compiler versions for handling source code. With the rapid increase of software technology, you often find yourself where you need to use a specific compiler for a project. Today, different compiler versions are using for compiling the C programs. Here, we will talk about the G++ GNU compiler; a Linux system compiler specifically used to compile C++ programs. The file extensions of these programs are .c and .cpp that are compiled using the G++ compiler.

  This article aims to provide a detailed guide on installing and using the G++ compiler on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system. You can achieve this goal by installing some development tools named build-essential packages on your system.

• Getting started with JBoss | Enable Sysadmin

  JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) is an enterprise-grade, open source platform to deploy highly transactional and scalable web applications. It includes everything you need to build, run, deploy, and manage enterprise-level Java applications in different environments—including on-premises, virtual environments, and private, public, and hybrid clouds.

  This article explains some of what I have learned during my time with JBoss EAP, its operating modes, installing it, and managing the JBoss service. I will also show how to build and deploy a sample web application archive (WAR) file so that you can learn alongside me.

• How to scale GRUB menu on 4K displays

  Several weeks ago, I installed Kubuntu 20.04 on my IdeaPad Y50-70, a somewhat old but rather capable 15.6-inch laptop with a 4K screen resolution. Predictably, the device wasn’t usable in its native screen mode, and I had to make everything bigger, scaling and all that. In the end, I managed to create an ergonomically comfortable setup, with two exceptions – the login menu, and the boot menu.

  The former gave me some grief, but I was able to get it sorted. With GRUB, there were more problems. One, the menu wouldn’t show, even though I had a dual-boot configuration in place. Two, the menu was tiny, with the text barely readable. So I embarked on a journey of GRUB modifications, hence this tutorial. Let me show you how you can make the GRUB menu bigger on HD/UHD displays.

• Use this Linux command-line tool to learn more about your NVMe drives | Opensource.com

  NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express, and it refers to how software and storage communicate across PCIe and other protocols, including TCP. It’s an open specification led by a non-profit organization and defines several forms of solid-state storage.

  My laptop has an NVMe drive, as does my desktop. And they’re fast. I love how quickly my computers boot and how quickly they’re able to read and write data. There’s no perceptible delay.

  It also didn’t take long for me to get curious about the technology driving this ultra-fast storage, so I did a little investigation. I learned that NVMe drives consume less power while delivering much faster access to data compared to even SSD drives over SATA. That was interesting, but I wanted to know more about my particular NVMe drives, and I wanted to know how they compared with other drives. Could I securely erase the drive? How could I check its integrity?

  Those questions led me to an Internet search that yielded an open source project with a collection of tools to manage NVMe drives. It’s called nvme-cli.

• Delta Chat, Overview and Installation

  The email messenger, Delta Chat, is a Germany communication app which everyone can use and just works friends and family even without them using the same application. This article overviews it and give installation guide for Ubuntu and Android users. Let’s chat!

• How to install Node.js & NPM on Debian 11

  Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform runtime environment for developing server-side and networking applications built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. It uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient.

  NPM(Node Package Manager) is the default package manager for Node.js. It comes installed when you install Node.js. You can do almost everything with it since it provides access to thousands of packages that can be downloaded and installed in your application’s project directory through the command-line interface.

  In this article, we will learn what Nodejs is and how to install it on a Linux machine using a non-root user account.

• How to Install pgAdmin 5 PostgreSQL Administration Tool on Debian 11

  pgAdmin is a free and open-source graphical administration tool for PostgreSQL which is easy to use. It supports PostgreSQL 9.6 and above, and it can be run on multiple operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux.

• Install Filebeat on CentOS 8 – Unixcop

  Filebeat is used to ship logs to logstash or Elastic search to filter and use them as per requirement. Whether you’re collecting from security devices, cloud, containers, hosts, or OT, Filebeat helps you keep the simple things simple by offering a lightweight way to forward and centralize logs and files.

  Filebeat consists of two main components: inputs and harvesters. These components work together to tail files and send event data to the output that you specify.

  An input is responsible for managing the harvesters and finding all sources to read from.

• How to Install FreeRADIUS and Daloradius on Ubuntu 20.04 – VITUX

  RADIUS is a AAA (authentication, authorization, and accounting) protocol that helps in controlling network access. In other words, RADIUS protocol is used for connection management between the Network Access Server (NAS) and Authentication server.

  The connection between two ends(NAC-NAS or NAS-Authentication server) is initiated after a successful negotiation on the network layer by exchanging packets containing necessary information such as NAS identification, authentication port number etc.
  In simple words, it can be said that RADIUS provides authentication, authorization, and account information from an Authentication server to a device requesting access.

• Jamie McClelland | Putty Problems

  I upgraded my first servers from buster to bullseye over the weekend and it went very smoothly, so big thank you to all the debian developers who contributed your labor to the bullseye release!

  This morning, however, I hit a snag when the first windows users tried to login. It seems like a putty bug.

  First, the user received an error related to algorithm selection. I didn’t record the exact error and simply suggested that the user upgrade.

  Once the user was running the latest version of putty (0.76), they received a new error:

• How to Install Gitea with NGINX and Free Let’s Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 20.04

  In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to install the Gitea software on your VPS along with Nginx as a webserver and Free Let’s Encrypt certificate, using Ubuntu 20.04.

  install gitea with nginx and free lets encrypt ssl on ubuntu 20.04
  Gitea is software written in “Go” programing language and is similar to Bitbucket, GitHub, and Gitlab. The software is used for self-hosted Git service and is compatible with multiple operating systems like Linux, Windows, macOS, and ARM.

  The installation will take no more than 10 minutes and you will enjoy it while installing it. Let’s get started!

• How to Reset the Root Password in Linux – Make Tech Easier

  In Linux, regular users and superusers are allowed to access services via password authentication. In the case a regular user can’t remember his/her password, a superuser can reset the password of a regular user right from the terminal. However, what if the superuser (or root user) loses his/her password? They will have to recover the lost password prior to booting into the login screen. This allows any malicious user with physical access to your Linux host to gain complete ownership. This article takes a look at how to recover a lost root password in Linux using two different methods.

• How to Upgrade to Fedora 35 Beta from Fedora 34

  Fedora has released their first official beta release for Fedora 35 that was made available on the 14th of September 2021. The new OS brings quite a few changes, most notably the Linux Kernel 5.14, Gnome 41, PHP 8, Flatpack third-party repository support, New panel for multitasking settings, Power profiles access from the system tray menu, and much more.

  The tutorial below will teach you how to successfully upgrade Fedora 34 to the newly released Fedora 35 Beta.

• How to install WineHQ on Debian 11 Bullseye – Linux Shout

  “Wine” stands for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”, it is a free and popular program to run Windows applications on Linux such as Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS operating systems. As its name suggests Wine is not an emulator, but a runtime environment that ensures compatibility with Windows. It provides Windows programs a compatibility layer to work without actually having Win OS.

  Even some Windows games can be played this way under Linux. You call up the “Wine” configuration via the terminal and the command “winecfg”. The user even can specify the particular Windows version such as Windows 10 including Windows 8 and 7 as well as Vista and Windows XP.

• How To Use Steam Proton To Play Windows Games On Linux?

  There’s no denying the fact that Linux gaming is getting better each day. Thanks to the Proton compatibility layer, which translates DirectX commands on Windows to Vulkan-understandable instructions on Linux, over 16,000 games in the Steam library can be played on Linux.

  Proton is indeed a huge deal for Linux, especially with Valve using the same in its upcoming Steam Deck with Linux. But how exactly can we use Steam Proton to play Windows games on Linux? Read more to find out.

• Linux 101: What are stopped jobs on Linux and how to use them? – TechRepublic

  Have you ever gone to exit out of a Linux terminal, only to be warned there are stopped jobs? What are these mysterious things and how do you finally stop them? Let’s figure out this puzzle.

  The first thing you need to understand is what stopped jobs are. Basically, they are jobs that have been temporarily placed in the background. Say, for instance, you run the top command. Instead of actually closing it with Ctrl+C, you’d rather keep it running in the background, so you can recall it later. For that, you use the Ctrl+Z keyboard combination. When you do that, you place the command in the background.

Wine or Emulation

• DXVK 1.9.2 Improves Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Need For Speed Heat, and Other Games

  DXVK 1.9.2 is here almost two months after the DXVK 1.9.1 release and introduces more bug fixes to reduce overall CPU overhead in Direct3D 9 and address several issues, as well as to improve support for several Windows games that some of you might want to play on your favorite GNU/Linux distributions.

  Among these, there’s a fix for reflection rendering in Call of Cthulhu, a workaround for poor performance in the Crysis 3 and Homefront: The Revolution, improved gamma curve in GODS, a fix for incorrect rendering Fantasy Grounds, and a fix for blank screen in Paranormal Files.

• DXVK 1.9.2 Released With More Games In Better Shape – Phoronix

  DXVK 1.9.2 is out as the newest version of this key library necessary to the success of Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) by translating Direct3D 9/10/11 calls to Vulkan for a much more performant Windows gaming experience on Linux.

  DXVK 1.9.2 reduces the CPU overhead in its Direct3D 9 path while also contains a wide variety of fixes. There are many game-specific issues fixed in this release including for titles like Crysis 3, Homefront: The Revolution, Total War: Medieval 2, Need For Speed Heat, Payday, and other games.

• DXVK 1.9.2 Released With More Games In Better Shape – Phoronix

  DXVK, one of the major parts of Steam Play Proton that translates Direct 3D 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan has a new release out and there’s plenty of nice fixes.

  Performance has been a focus recently and this release improves on that for Direct 3D 9, thanks to a reduction in overall CPU overhead (something that will be useful for the Steam Deck). Improvements continued there for D3D9 thanks to fixes to various failures in Wine’s D3D9 tests, various issues fix for “d3d9.evictManagedTexturesOnUnlock” and also for “d3d11.relaxedBarriers”.

Games

• The Jackbox Party Pack 8 arrives on October 14 | GamingOnLinux

  It’s back again with some new games to make you laugh at your friends through. The Jackbox Party Pack 8 is set to release on October 14 along with continued Linux support.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 4 1.00 Officially Released, Based on Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye”

    As Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” has been officially released last month, it was just a matter of time until the Emmabuntüs Collective put together the final details of their Emmabuntüs Debian Edition (DE) 4 release series, which is derived from the Debian GNU/Linux 11 operating system series, of course, supporting both the Xfce and LXQt desktop environments.

    Powered by the long-term supported Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series, Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 4 1.00 features the latest and greatest Xfce 4.16 desktop environment, along with the LXQt 0.16.0 desktop environment, which you can select from the first run, an OEM install mode via the Calamares graphical installer, and new tools, including VeraCrypt, GtkHash, Linux Mint’s Warpinator, and zram-tools.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • A look at Red Hat Ceph Storage 5

    Red Hat Ceph Storage 5 is now generally available. This release includes support for NFSv4, additional disaster recovery capabilities for CephFS and RBD, as well as new security features and performance improvements.

  • Add finally tasks to Tekton pipelines – IBM Developer

    Tekton Pipeline 0.14 introduced the finally clause in the Pipeline specification. This section is ideal for running anything just before exiting the pipeline, such as cleaning up any acquired resources, sending notifications, rolling back deployments, and more.

    As defined on the Tekton website, the finally section takes a list of one or more tasks that are all executed in parallel after all tasks are finished executing — regardless of a success or a failure. The following code shows the finally section of a pipeline.

  • Developer diaries: Observability-driven development using Instana – IBM Developer

    In this episode of our Developer Diaries series, JJ & Chris do a bit of pair programming to show how developers can use Instana for observability-driven development.

  • podman build (user namespace) and Rename.

    podman build (user namespace) and Rename. It seems like Debian bullseye, if I run podman, it runs in user namespace mode if you run it inside a regular user. That’s fine, but it uses fuse overlayfs driver. Now I am yet to pinpoint what is happening, but rename() is handled in a weird way, I think it’s broken. os.Rename() in golang is copying the file and not deleting the original file.

  • Schedule soon: An update on Red Hat Certification exam extensions

    In response to the pandemic, Red Hat Training and Certification has allowed people to cancel or reschedule any previously scheduled classes or exams. Individual exam eligibilities have been extended multiple times since last year, and we have extended the period for which all certifications are considered current.

  • IT jobs: 4 tricky situations facing job hunters now | The Enterprisers Project

    It is a job hunter’s dream market right now, with job openings hitting record highs month after month. The New York Times recently called this “the job market we’ve been waiting for.” That’s especially true for technology professionals, more in-demand than ever as organizations continue to double down on digital transformation and other technology-enabled business initiatives.

    But a red-hot job market comes with its own challenges for job seekers. Combined with the potential of personal uncertainty (“Am I unhappy in my role, or just burned out?”) and macro ambiguity (“Is remote work here to stay?), tech pros on the hunt for new roles are encountering some thorny issues.

• Debian Family

  • SparkyLinux 2021.09 Released Based on Debian 12 “Bookworm”

    The SparkyLinux 2021.09 project develops a lightweight distribution based on Debian 12. The Sparky team has published a new update to the distribution’s semi-rolling branch which presents users with software from Debian’s development “Bookworm” branch.

    The project’s release announcement lists the following changes: “Sparky 2021.09 of the (semi-)rolling line is out; it is based on Debian Testing ‘Bookworm’. Changes: repositories set to Debian ‘Bookworm’ and Sparky ‘Orion Belt’; all packages updated as of September 17, 2021; new backgrounds: desktop, login manager, Plymouth & boot screen, etc.; Linux kernel 5.10.46 (5.14.6 & 5.15-rc1 in Sparky unstable repos); GCC 10 still as default, but GCC 11 is also installed; no more Sparky Advanced Installed GUI, the Advanced installer works in text mode only now, the first window lets you choose the standard version of the installer or DEV version with disk encryption and LVM support; ‘sparky-upgrade’ text based tool is also preinstalled in CLI ISO; packages removed from ISO: mc, gparted; new package installed: lfm; Calamares 3.2.43.” People already running the semi-rolling branch of SparkyLinux do not need to re-install.

  • Debian Reunion Hamburg 2021, we still have free beds

    We still have some free slots and beds available for the “Debian Reunion Hamburg 2021″ taking place in Hamburg at the venue of the 2018 & 2019 MiniDebConfs from Monday, Sep 27 2021 until Friday Oct 1 2021, with Sunday, Sep 26 2021 as arrival day.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu Linux 21.10 ‘Impish Indri’ official wallpapers now available for download

    The next new version of Ubuntu will be designated as 21.10. Why? Well, the versioning scheme of that Linux-based operating system uses a two digit year followed by a period and then a two digit month (yy.mm). With October being the 10th month, Ubuntu Linux 21.10 is merely weeks away.

    Besides knowing the version number of the next Ubuntu release, we also know the code-name — “Impish Indri.” We shared that detail with you back in April of this year. And now, the official artwork of Ubuntu Linux 21.10 “Impish Indri” becomes available for download.

    You can view the new artwork in wallpaper form at the top of this page — there are a total of four. As you can see, two of them feature a cartoon indri mascot (a type of lemur), one in grey and the other using the official Ubuntu colors. The other two wallpapers are essentially the same, but without the animal in the middle. The Ubuntu developers share proper download links here.

  • This Ubuntu Linux version of ‘Windows 11′ is available to install now

    Windowsfx is a Linux OS that borrows its look from various flavors of Microsoft’s operating system, including Windows 7 and Windows 10, and now it’s offering a version that looks just like Windows 11.

Devices/Embedded

• 3U rack mount takes up to 12 NVIDIA Jetson Nano/Xavier NX boards – CNX Software

  Myelectronics.nl has launched a 19-inch 3U rack mount taking up to twelve NVIDIA Jetson Nano or Jetson Xavier NX boards building on its experience with rack mount for Raspberry Pi introduced last year.

  The new model also includes front removal mounting systems so that you can replace a Jetson board without having to completely remove the rack mount, and even without having to power off the remaining boards since the boards would have to be powered from the DC jack or (not recommended) the Micro USB port on the front panel. PoE is probably not an option, albeit available on the Nano board, due to mechanical constraints.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Raspberry Pi IoT In C – The Linux GPIO Driver

    Until recently the standard way to work with GPIO in Linux was to use the sysfs interface and you will see a lot of articles advocating its use and you will encounter many programs making use of it. Sysfs was deprecated in Linux 4.8 at the end of 2016 and is due for removal from the kernel in 2020. Of course, it takes time for Linux distributions to make use of the latest kernels. At the time of writing Pi OS, formerly Raspbian, is using Linux 4.19 released two years earlier. Nevertheless, Sysfs gpio will soon be removed and while you still need to know about it to cope with legacy software, you shouldn’t use it for new projects. You can find out how it works in Appendix I.

    Its replacement is the GPIO character device and, while this looks superficially like the old sysfs interface, it has many major differences. Although it has some advantages, it also is slightly more complex and can no longer be used from the command line – it is a program-only interface. This said, there are some simple utility programs that are fairly standard and allow GPIO control from the command line. These are covered in the first part of the chapter, even though they are unlikely to be the main way that you work with the new interface. There is also a wrapper library called gpiod which isn’t necessary for simple access to the GPIO lines. If you want to know more see – Raspberry Pi IOT in C With Linux Drivers, ISBN:9781871962642

  • Drunk Wall Clock Uses Convoluted Circuits To Display Time | Hackaday

    Here at Hackaday we can never get enough of odd clocks, and we’re delighted to see [Dan O’Shea]’s creation called the Wifi-Telnet-FPGA-NTSC Drunk Wall Clock. That mouthful is an accurate description of what it does: at the heart of the device is an ESP32 that uses WiFi to connect to a Raspberry Pi. It then telnets into the system, logs in, and requests the current time using the Linux date command. So far, so ordinary.

  • Zom-B-Gone! is an artificial sunrise lamp to combat morning grumpiness | Arduino Blog

    Almost no one enjoys being suddenly awakened by a loud, blaring alarm clock, as the sudden rush of panic can contribute to grogginess and stress. To alleviate this problem, Norwegian makers Applied Procrastination wanted to created a lamp that simulates a sunrise to give users a calmer, more natural waking up experience. They came up with a design utilizing an old LCD panel that has had its internals replaced by a string of LED lights to give a pleasant and diffused glow when activated, which they call the “Zom-B-Gone!”

  • Self Balancing Robot Needs A Little Work | Hackaday

    A self-balancing robot isn’t a new idea, but we liked the aesthetics of [Maker ATOM’s] build. The use of a breadboard and a printed bracket looks good, as you can see in the video, below.

    Like most first-time projects, though, there were some lessons learned. The power supply needs a little work and the range of balance compliance didn’t meet expectations. But those problems are soluble and, as usual, you often learn more from working through issues like these.

    The heart of the system is an MPU6050 which provides a gyroscope and accelerometer along with fusion capability onboard. The availability of libraries for the sensor and the PID controller makes the project pretty simple to finish.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Cross Compile to PinePhone Part Two

    So on part one, we managed to compile kalk with emulator, and generated ArchLinux package to install on our PinePhone. However, emulator is slow, and compiling with emulator isn’t cross compile. Today, we’ll be using real cross compiler to build kalk package.

    To be able to cross compile, we need cross compiler and target platform’s libraries. On ArchLinux, there is aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc. But it’s sysroot option is bugged so we won’t use the cross compiler from pacman this time. Instead, we’ll grab the toolchain from ArchLinux arm. The link is here. Since PinePhone is armv8, download the armv8 pre-built crosstool-ng toolchain. To keep everything nice and tidy, we store the toolchain in dedicated directory. I’m using ~/Develop/CrossCompile.

  • Sailfish OS 4.2.0 “Verla” improves the sharing of content

    The newly written function for sharing content with Sailfish OS is the most obvious change in the new version 4.2.0, whose nickname Site Verla stands for a Unesco World Heritage and refers to the history of the paper industry in Finland.

    Easier sharing

    Previously, the interface for sharing content could be found in the respective apps themselves, but it has been revised for Sailfish OS 4.2.0 and now offers a system pop-up for selecting the sharing method. In this way, many authorizations in the applications could be reduced and the apps made more secure. If it was previously not possible for providers of third-party apps to use the sharing functionality via the new API, this will be possible in the future .

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Try this Linux web browser dedicated solely to web applications

    When I’m on the go, I need everything to work as efficiently as possible. And although you might be thinking, “But a web browser is as efficient as it gets, right?” That depends on what task you’re doing and what site you’re working with.

    This is especially so in the modern age of web applications and with constantly on-the-move staff. Instead of always having a full-blown, kitchen-sink-type web browser, sometimes we need something a bit more stripped-down, a tool that is geared toward one thing and one thing only—web applications.

  • Mozilla

    • Ubuntu 21.10 makes Firefox as a Snap

      Actually, Ubuntu 21.10 “Impish Indri”, the release of which is scheduled for October 14th, is already in the Feature Freeze. Last week, however, an application was received for an exception that provides for the standard installation of Firefox in consultation with Mozilla in Snap format, as is already the case with Google’s Chromium browser.

      The measure, which has now been approved, should offer enough time to correct errors until Firefox as a snap becomes the standard for the desktop images of the next LTS version of Ubuntu in spring 2022. The snap package is to be created for the architectures amd64, armhf and arm64 . It is to be maintained by Mozilla and Canonical’s desktop team and published by Mozilla.

      The measure affects users who install Ubuntu 21.10 or update to this version. This does not (yet) affect the other versions of Ubuntu with desktop environments that differ from GNOME. Linux Mint users should also be spared the change, as the Mint developers had already introduced the not Chromium snap . As can be seen in the corresponding blog entry on Ubuntu, the idea for Firefox as a snap came from Mozilla, which see the following advantages…

    • Did you hear about Apple’s security vulnerability? Here’s how to find and remove spyware.

      Spyware has been in the news recently with stories like the Apple security vulnerability that allowed devices to be infected without the owner knowing it, and a former editor of The New York Observer being charged with a felony for unlawfully spying on his spouse with spyware. Spyware is a sub-category of malware that’s aimed at surveilling the behavior of human target(s) using a given device where the spyware is running. This surveillance could include but is not limited to logging keystrokes, capturing what websites you are visiting, looking at your locally stored files/passwords, and capturing audio or video within proximity to the device.

    • bugbug infrastructure: continuous integration, multi-stage deployments, training and production services | Marco Castelluccio

      bugbug started as a project to automatically assign a type to bugs (defect vs enhancement vs task, back when we introduced the “type” we needed a way to fill it for already existing bugs), and then evolved to be a platform to build ML models on bug reports: we now have many models, some of which are being used on Bugzilla, e.g. to assign a type, to assign a component, to close bugs detected as spam, to detect “regression” bugs, and so on.

      Then, it evolved to be a platform to build ML models for generic software engineering purposes: we now no longer only have models that operate on bug reports, but also on test data, patches/commits (e.g. to choose which tests to run for a given patch and to evaluate the regression riskiness associated to a patch), and so on.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • LibreOffice 2021 Schedule Mobile App

    The LibreOffice 2021 Schedule Mobile App is immediately available on Google Play and F-Droid. From the F-Droid page is also possible to download the APK, although by installing that way you will not receive update notifications.

    The mobile app, for Android smartphones and tablets, shows the conference schedule: by swiping right and left, the user can switch between the three rooms, while a drop down menu allows to chose one of the three days. By tapping on each of the talks, it is possible to star it to create a personal conference schedule, and to set an alarm to avoid losing the important presentations. Changes to the schedule will be immediately reflected on the mobile app, although it is always possible to force a refresh, and to show the latest changes.

• CMS

  • Episode 16: A Sneak Peek at WordPress 5.9

    In addition to this episode’s small list of big things, Josepha Haden Chomphosy reviews the upcoming 5.9 WordPress release and its Full Site Editing features.

• FSFE

  • Interviews for the German federal election 2021

    The 2021 federal election in Germany (26.09.2021) is just around the corner. Digital sovereignty, through the use of Free Software, is at the centre of our exchange with the political parties, which we have also conducted via our organisations’ election questions to the parties. We are pleased that, in a further step, we were able to talk personally with candidates from all parties with a chance of participating in the next government and ask them in more depth what they and their party would like to do to advance digitisation in Germany with Free software.

• Programming/Development

  • C++ Vector of Pointers Examples

    An ordinary vector encountered in C++ programming, is a vector of objects of the same type. These objects can be fundamental objects or objects instantiated from a class. This article illustrates examples of vector of pointers, to same object type. To use a C++ vector, the program has to include the vector library, with a directive.

    All the vector code for this article is in the main() function, unless otherwise indicated. Vector of pointers to different types, is however, addressed at the end of the article. In order to appreciate vector-of-pointers, it is good to recall the knowledge for vector of objects.

  • What Is C++ Stringstream, and How to Use It?

    A string object instantiated from the string class is a list data structure. The list is a series of characters, and it is appreciated as such. The C++ string object has many methods. However, it lacks certain operations, which are best offered if it is seen as a stream.

  • 5 Best Linux Coding Editors [Ed: Too many Microsoft suggestions (40% of these), including proprietary software with Microsoft surveillance]

    Once you learn how to code, you can start building great applications that solve a problem or join businesses and companies looking for those with stellar coding skills. An important tool you will need is a code editor. Code editors come with various features that make it easy to code, create great applications, debug code, deploy code and so much more. Today, we are going to focus on five of the best code editors for Linux users. Keeping with the theme of Linux, the code editors below are free, open-source, or both.

  • Josef Strzibny: Ruby for ebook publishing

    A lot of times, people ask what’s Ruby good for apart from Rails. Ruby is great for various tasks from several different domains, and today, I would like to share how anybody can use Ruby in publishing ebooks.

    Since I used some Ruby tasks in publishing my first-ever ebook Deployment from Scratch, it crossed my mind to write down why I think Ruby is great for publishing ebooks.

  • Qt World Summit 2021 – registration now open!

    Join online as the community meets on November 3. Qt World Summit gathers together more than 5 000 developers, designers, managers and executives from over 90 countries around the world.

  • Perl/Raku

    • Rakudo Weekly News: 2021.38 Questions, Ideas, Feedback

      Daniel Sockwell had a very busy week, asking all sorts of questions (1) (2), looking to improve the documentation on list assignments and soliciting feedback about that. And Daniel also published a blog post about the concept of labelling your code, in which they posit that “Comments are prose; labels are identifiers” (which resulted in quite a discussion on /r/rakulang). Thought provoking stuff!

  • Rust

    • Rust Lands Support For The Motorola 68000 Processors

      With the m68k community continuing to be active around supporting the vintage Motorola 68000 series with modern open-source software, Rust has now merged support for these old processors.

      With the forthcoming LLVM/Clang 13 release adding an M68k back-end, Rust that leverages LLVM is now adding support for the Motorola 68000 series processors.

  • Java

    • Quarkus for Spring developers: Getting started | Red Hat Developer

      Want to learn more about developing applications with Quarkus? Download our free ebook Quarkus for Spring Developers, which helps Java developers familiar with Spring make a quick and easy transition.

      The tools available in the Spring ecosystem make it easy to get started with building applications. However, the same is true for Quarkus, which has many additional features and capabilities aimed at improving the developer experience. A Spring developer can quickly get started working with a Quarkus project and immediately become more productive, as we’ll see in this article. Plug-ins and tooling are available for most major IDEs, including VSCode, IntelliJ, and Eclipse.

Early Selfies

Part of “slow” is transcribing the text from the slide windows; my dad’s handwriting is not always easy to decipher. It’s a good thing this picture was labeled (as “the project”, no less) and dated, so I know it’s the earliest photo of me.

Teaching by filling in knowledge gaps

I asked on twitter what people feel was easier to learn 15 years ago. One example a lot of people mentioned was the command line.

I was initially a bit surprised by this, but when I thought about it makes sense – if you were a web developer 15 years ago, it’s more likely that you’d be asked to set up a Linux server. That means installing packages, editing config files, and all kinds of things that would get you fluent at the command line. But today a lot of that is abstracted away and not as big a part of people’s jobs. For example if your site is running on Heroku, you barely have to know that there’s a server there at all.

I think this applies to a lot more things than the command line – networking is more abstracted away than it used to be too! In a lot of web frameworks, you just set up some routes and functions to handle those routes, and you’re done!

Abstractions are great, but they’re also leaky, and to do great work you sometimes need to learn about what lives underneath the abstraction.

Health/Nutrition

• Andy Simpkins: COVID-19

  Nearly 4 weeks after contracting COVID-19 I am finally able to return to work…

  Yes I have had both Jabs (my 2nd dose was back in June), and this knocked me for six. I spent most of the time in bed, and only started to get up and about 10 days ago.

  I passed this on to both my wife and daughter (my wife has also been double jabbed), fortunately they didn’t get it as bad as me and have been back at work / school for the last week. I also passed it on to a friend at the UK Debian BBQ, hosted once again by Sledge and Randombird, before I started showing symptoms. Fortunately (after a lot of PCR tests for attendees) it doesn’t look like I passed it to anyone else

  I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.

  [...]

  Even after vaccination, it is still possible to both catch and spread this virus. Fortunately having been vaccinated my resulting illness was (statistically) less bad than it would otherwise have been.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Openwashing

      • Otobo Community Edition: an open source web-based ticketing system for business [Ed: Openwashing of traps]

        Otobo is a free self-hosted ticketing system with convincing functionality AND optics. It is the most web based flexible system come to enhance The efficiency and transparency of your business communication.

        Otobo supports different communication channels which include phone, customer portal, self-managed tickets, email, and text messages.

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Welcome to LPC 2021 — Registration Closed

        • Linux Foundation survey shows companies desperate to hire open-source talent

          At the Open Source Summit in Seattle, The Linux Foundation, and edX, the leading massive open online course (MOOC) provider released the 2021 Open Source Jobs Report. In this survey of 200 technical hiring managers and 750 open-source pros, the organizations found more demand for top open-source workers than ever. On top of that, 92% of managers are having trouble finding enough talent and many of them are also having fits holding on to their existing senior open-source staffers.

  • Security

    • Kali Linux 2021.3 released with new tools

      Kali Linux version 2021.3 has been released with new tools, though its makers explain that some features which make it good for penetration testing also make it bad for general use.

      The specialist Linux distribution, based on Debian, is designed for security professionals (and also handy for administrators confronted by problems such as a standalone Windows PC and a user with a lost password). It is sponsored by a US company called Offensive Security, who do information security training and penetration testing.

    • 6 Best Ways to Improve Linux Security

      The Linux OS has historically been regarded as more secure than Windows or macOS thanks to how it handles user permissions and because it’s open-source software. One of the other big reasons for that faith in Linux’s security was the fact that it isn’t as popular among users worldwide. With Windows being the leader in terms of user adoption.

      While experts still agree that Linux is a secure OS, some very valid concerns have started popping up in recent years. For one, Linux has seen a boost in popularity as of late, paired with an increase in interest from cybercriminals. But more than that, despite its secure design, Linux is vulnerable to attack.

    • Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

      • Windows admins running Linux warned of threat [Ed: Nonsensical FUD of the typical kind. It's a Windows issue.]

        The warning comes from researchers at Lumen, who say at least one threat actor is trying to leverage a capability in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to squirm into an IT environment. WSL runs a Linux environment within Windows, allowing the use of Linux command-line tools without the overhead of a virtual machine. Among those who take advantage of it are application developers, who use it as a convenient method for pulling in open-source software.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Google and Apple, Under Pressure From Russia, Remove Voting App

  Apple and Google removed an app meant to coordinate protest voting in this weekend’s Russian elections from the country on Friday, a blow to the opponents of President Vladimir V. Putin and a display of Silicon Valley’s limits when it comes to resisting crackdowns on dissent around the world.

  The decisions came after Russian authorities, who claim the app is illegal, threatened to prosecute local employees of Apple and Google — a sharp escalation in the Kremlin’s campaign to rein in the country’s largely uncensored internet. A person familiar with Google’s decision said the authorities had named specific individuals who would face prosecution, prompting it to remove the app.

  The person declined to be identified for fear of angering the Russian government. Google has more than 100 employees in the country.

  Apple did not respond to phone calls, emails or text messages seeking comment.

• Critics warn of Apple, Google ‘chokepoint’ repression

  The global dominance of tech giants serves as a convenient online chokepoint for authoritarian governments to crack down on dissent or rig elections, critics of Apple and Google said Friday.

  The companies were facing international outrage after pulling a Russian opposition voting app off their online marketplaces in response to authorities’ escalating pressure, including arrest threats.

  Google and Apple, whose operating systems run on 99 percent of the world’s smartphones, have a stranglehold on the markets for the applications that allow users to do everything from watch movies to hail a ride.

• Apple and Google are showing Putin just how much he can get away with

  This weekend, Russia goes to the polls. Yet voters who hope to register their resistance to the ruling party, amid its efforts to restrict who can appear on the ballot, have been deprived of a crucial tool — because Apple and Google gave in to the bullies.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• This Is Why the Taliban Keeps F*cking Up Afghanistan’s Internet

  Now that the Taliban are back in control, a series of reported internet outages in Afghanistan is fueling fears among Afghan residents that the group is already using their newfound power to isolate protesters, quash dissent, and exert their influence across the country.

  In Panjshir—where resistance leader Ahmad Massoud and Afghanistan’s former vice president are working to resist the Taliban’s resurgence—the Taliban have already forced a communications and internet blackout, according to data from Access Now, a digital rights organization.

  “According to our data… the Taliban has cut off the internet, along with phone connections and all other forms of communication, in the province of Panjshir,” Felicia Anthonio, a campaigner for Access Now, which has been monitoring internet connectivity in Afghanistan, told The Daily Beast. “We believe this is in order to curtail resistance in this area, the only area that is still holding out against their takeover.”

• TRAI’s final roadmap for connectivity and broadband access is a mixed bag #AccessToInternet

  After multiple rounds of consultation, the TRAI released its final recommendations on the Roadmap to promote broadband connectivity and enhanced broadband speed. Some of the recommendations we had made during the consultations were reflected in the final report, albeit with certain modifications.

Monopolies

• Patents

  • Pinsent Masons hires former Freshfields counsel as London partner [Ed: JUVE‘s patent litigation spam; we’re meant to think that one person moving from one company to another is important news]

    Pinsent Masons has expanded its IP practice in London through the addition of Gina Bicknell (45) to its partnership. Bicknell joins from a previous role as counsel at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. She brings 20 years of experience in life sciences in the patent and IP field, with a special focus on transactions.

  • Have your say on patent office service and quality [Ed: Charlatans and frauds from IAM already prepare the next round of propaganda for EPO [1, 2]]

    The IAM Patent Office Benchmarking Survey 2021 will provide insights on the prosecution landscape at a time when many organisations are re-thinking their patent management strategies

  • MaxVal and RWS Partner to Provide Streamlined Delivery of International Filing and Translation Services

    RWS, the world’s leading provider of technology-enabled language, content management, and intellectual property services, is expanding their distribution by making their services available to customers, through Symphony, in a one-stop-shop delivery model. The combination of RWS’s services, provided through Symphony, will allow IP practitioners to more easily request translations, EP validation, and PCT/national filings, all within the one system that they use to manage their patent portfolio and IP lifecycle.

  • Levelling the playing field in ITC patent cases by identifying redesigns to a set deadline [Ed: Only patent extremists such as these (litigation giants and their overzealous mouthpiece, IAM) would promote 1) embargo and 2) design patents]

    Respondents are leaving it later and later to disclose potential design arounds that may allow them to circumvent findings of patent infringement at the ITC, write Michael Renaud, Adam Rizk, and Matthew Karambelas of Mintz Levin. But all is not lost for complainants

  • Exclusive: Senator Leahy plans to introduce new PTAB bill soon

    Several sources confirmed to Managing IP that they’d spoken to Patrick Leahy’s office to provide input on new legislation, which could come out this week

  • Unitary Patent projected to come into effect in mid-2022 [Ed: Yet another Team UPC litigation firm joins the for-for fake news and propaganda war, lying about the UPC for self-serving purposes]

    Earlier this year, the German Federal Constitutional Court rejected two applications for a preliminary injunction against the German Act of Approval to the UPCA.

    This cleared the way for Germany to ratify the Protocol on the Provisional Application of the UPCA, which provides for the institutional, organisational and financial sections of the UPCA to enter into force before the agreement becomes effective in its entirety. As the German Federal President signed the ratification bill on 7 August 2021 and it was promulgated on 12 August 2021, this ratification is expected to take place imminently.

Desktop/Laptop

• 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: September 19th, 2021

  This week was all about bug fixing and testing upcoming releases. LibreOffice 7.2 and Darktable 3.6 got their first bugfix release, and GIMP 2.10.28 and Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS also arrived as minor bugfix releases. On the other hand, we were able to take the upcoming Ubuntu Touch OTA-19 and KDE Plasma 5.23 releases for a test drive.

  On top of that, Kali Linux SparkyLinux distros got new ISO releases with some cool new features and other interesting changes, and the GNOME Subtitles app received a major update after a couple of years of silence. You can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for September 19th, 2021.

• Linux for Starters: Your Guide to Linux – Become Anonymous – Part 18

  This is a series that offers a gentle introduction to Linux for newcomers.

  It’s just about impossible to stay totally anonymous online. Online privacy, also known as internet privacy or digital privacy, refers to how much of your personal, financial and browsing information remains private when you’re online. Staying safe online can help protect you and your loved ones’ identity and personal information from risks like theft.

  You should value data privacy online in the same way as the real world.

  It’s important to remember that downloading apps using a company’s “free” email service (such as Gmail) or social networks like Facebook grabs information about you. Even visiting a website means you’re sharing data about yourself. And, as some people in your life know you better than others, online privacy exists on a spectrum: some online entities gather and store more information about you than other platforms.

Applications

• Telegram Desktop 3.1 Introduces Interactive Emoji, Live Stream Recording, and More

  Telegram Desktop 3.1 is here with some pretty cool new features, such as the ability to record live streams and video chats in a group or channel with options to record video and audio or only audio, which will be saved in your admin’s Saved Messages panel, as well as support for read receipts in small groups with the option to view which group members have read it by selecting a message and right clicking on it.

  And, to make your Telegram sessions more enjoyable and fun, the Telegram Desktop 3.1 update brings 8 new themes for private chats with day and night versions, beautifully animated backgrounds, gradient message bubbles, and unique background patterns, but this can only be enabled from a mobile device if you want to enjoy it on your desktop too, and 6 new interactive emoji.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to upgrade openSUSE Leap from 15.1 or 15.2 to 15.3 – Unixcop

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to upgrade from lower openSUSE like 15.0 or 15.0 to 15.3.

  In my case, I’m using openSUSE LEAP 15.1, before starting the upgrade, we strongly advise backing your actual Data in case you are using this release in production environments.

• How to install Asterisk 18 on CentOS 8 – Unixcop

  Asterisk is a free to use, opensource and powerful communication system that is why it is used IP PBX systems, VoIP gateways, conference servers used in SMBs, enterprises, call centers, carriers and government institutions around the globe. Installing Asterisk Server is the first step towards implementation of an affordable, reliable and highly available PBX and VoIP systems because it is an open source platform so user may use it as per their requirement. In today’s guide we will be covering the installation and configuration of Asterisk 18 LTS on CentOS 8 because Asterisk 18 recently released for production use and is available for download. If you’re using earlier releases of Asterisk then it is the right time to plan for upgrade.

• How to Install Tor Browser on Fedora 34 – LinuxCapable

  or, also known as The Onion Router, is open-source, free software that enables anonymous communication when using online services such as web surfing. The Tor network directs the Internet traffic through a free worldwide volunteer overlay network with over six thousand relays and continues to grow. Many users want to find more ways to keep their information and activities anonymous or at least as private as possible, which has led to Tor Browser growing quite popular in recent years as it conceals a user’s location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.

  The Tor network is intended to protect the personal privacy of users and their freedom and ability from conducting communication without having their activities monitored, and data were taken without their consent and used to sum it up.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest Tor Browser on Fedora 34.

• How to configure Samba Server with Debian 11 – Unixcop

  Today we will learn How to configure Samba Server with Debian 11. Communication is the key point of having a server. But, what if resources are not able to communicate with each other? Yes, this could happen when you are having both Linux and Windows. Sharing resources b/w Linux and windows can be difficult. Samba is the solution for the challenge. The Samba server facilitates sharing resources in a hybrid environment.

• How to Install Handbrake (open-source video transcoder) on Ubuntu 20.04 Linux

  Handbrake is a free and open-source video converter. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. It supports the most modern codec. You can use it to process the most common multimedia files, DVD or Blu Ray sources that are not copyrighted.

• How to Compile Redis source code on Ubuntu 20.04

  This is an alternate method and Redis recommends it as it makes sure you get the latest stable version. Sometimes, the version provided by the distro’s repository may be outdated.

  So you have to download the Redis source code and compile it. Make sure GCC compiler and libc is installed on your system.

• How to Install Wine on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable

  Wine is an open-source compatibility layer that allows you to run Windows applications on Unix-like operating systems like Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS. It is an interface that translates Windows system calls into equivalent POSIX calls used by Linux and other Unix-based operating systems.

  For Linux users, Wine is a savior when running Windows-based applications on UNIX systems. However, not all Windows applications will run in Wine and may have strange crashes or bugs. The Wine AppDB is a database containing a list of applications that have been tested and confirmed to work under Wine.

• Monitoring for process completion in 2021 – Ariadne’s Space

  A historical defect in the ifupdown suite has been the lack of proper supervision of processes run by the system in order to bring up and down interfaces. Specifically, it is possible in historical ifupdown for a process to hang forever, at which point the system will fail to finish configuring interfaces. As interface configuration is part of the boot process, this means that the boot process can potentially hang forever and fail to complete. Accordingly, we have introduced correct supervision of processes run by ifupdown-ng in the upcoming version 0.12, with a 5 minute timeout.

  Because ifupdown-ng is intended to be portable, we had to implement two versions of the process completion monitoring routine. The portable version is a busy loop, which sleeps for 50 milliseconds between iteration, and the non-portable version uses Linux processor descriptors, a feature introduced in Linux 5.3. For earlier versions, ifupdown-ng will downgrade to using the portable implementation. There are also a couple of other ways that one can monitor for process completion using notifications, but they were not appropriate for the ifupdown-ng design.

• How to Merge Multiple PDF Files into One PDF in Linux

  PDF or Portable Document Format files have more to offer to its users apart from the obvious advantages of being easily printable and shareable over a network.

• How to install, configure and use Nessus Vulnerability Scanner on CentOS 8

  Nessus is one of the most popular remote vulnerability assessments trusted by more than 30,000 organizations worldwide. Nessus scans the system and raises an alert if it discovers any vulnerabilities that malicious hackers could use to gain access.

  Nessus does not actively prevent attacks, It will check security loopholes present in infrastructure. It provides detailed system security reports which will be very helpful for fixing any vulnerabilities and make the server more secure.

  Nessus is available in many different versions, In this tutorial, we will install the free version of Nessus knows as Nessus Essentials which can scan 16 IPS.

  Nessus is a cross-platform vulnerability scanner and supports many OS, but in this article, we will show you how to install Nessue Essentials on Centos 8.

• How to Install Let’s Encrypt SSL for NGINX on Rocky Linux 8

  Security is one of the top-of-mind concerns for website owners, more especially, if you are running an eCommerce store or a site that accepts users’ confidential information such as usernames and passwords. The plain HTTP protocol is insecure as data is sent in plain text and hackers can eavesdrop on the communication sent to and from the web server.

  To overcome this risk, it’s recommended to secure a web server using a TLS/SSL certificate. This is a cryptographic digital certificate that encrypts your web server and ensures data exchanged with the webserver is encrypted.

  Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate is a digital certificate provided by Let’s Encrypt CA ( Certificate Authority) to secure a web server. It’s a free TLS/SSL certificate that is valid for only 90 days, whereupon renewal is required before expiry. It’s beneficial for startups or individuals who cannot afford a premium SSL certificate for their blogs or websites.

  In this guide, we will demonstrate how you can install the Let’s Encrypt SSL/TLS certificate for NGINX on Rocky Linux 8

• Watch Logs in Real Time in Linux With Tail, Less & Multitail

  You know how to view files in Linux. You use cat command or probably less command for this purpose.

  That’s good for files that has static content. But log files are dynamic and their content change with time. To monitor logs, you need to watch the log file as its content changes.

  How do you see the content of log files in real time? Tail is the most popular command for this purpose but there are some other tools as well. I’ll show them to you in this tutorial.

• [Old] How to Use Unison to Synchronize Files Between Servers

  This tutorial will show you how to set up and use the Unison File synchronization tool on Debian systems. Using Unison, you can sync files between two different disks or directories in the same system or two other systems over the network.

• [Old] Command Line – unison

  Although unison has been around for years, chances are you have never heard of unison. For one thing, rsync and ssh tend to be the default commands for file syncing. For another, unison’s documentation is maddeningly incomplete. In the absence of man or info files or usage instructions from the creators, the existing help focuses on building a command to use at the prompt – and, considering that unison has 88 options, that is not a very attractive option, even without a command history, especially if you have several sets of files with which you regularly work. So far as I can see, the only distribution that mentions how to simplify the use of unison with preference files is Arch Linux, and even it is incomplete – as is the original documentation that Arch references. Yet once preference files are created, the number of on-the-fly options is greatly reduced, and unison becomes a handy tool for file syncing, backups, and even merging files.

Games

• The Jackbox Party Pack 8 arrives on October 18 | GamingOnLinux

  It’s back again with some new games to make you laugh at your friends through. The Jackbox Party Pack 8 is set to release on October 18 along with continued Linux support.

• As Steam Deck ships to devs, Valve plans NEW console! – Invidious

  New DOTA2 leaks show that Valve are working on TWO NEW CONSOLES.

• Laser Chess game Deflection is out now providing a fun new strategy game | GamingOnLinux

  Take down the enemy King with a great big laser, that’s the aim of the game in Deflection. It’s basically the original Laser Chess updated for modern platforms by Coreffect Interactive.

  A simple idea with you moving mirrors around that can bounce the laser, while also having different sides that are vulnerable to the enemy laser. Positioning and thinking ahead are the key to victory here and Coreffect Interactive have clearly put a lot of thought into it. It’s another case of a game that’s real easy to get into and understand, however becoming good at it is a whole different thing. It’s more than that though as there’s a few different pieces you get to use like portals to move the laser around and a disrupter to weaken pieces close to it too.

• Free and open source flight sim FlightGear is working on VR support | GamingOnLinux

  It’s currently at a stage where they consider it highly experimental, more of a proof-of-concept but if they get it all hooked up properly it could help aid other developers too since it’s FOSS.

• Open source dungeon builder KeeperRL adds a Dwarves faction in the latest big release | GamingOnLinux

  KeeperRL continues expanding as a mix of dungeon building, adventuring and RPG mechanics all blended together and now there’s a playable Dwarves faction.

  Over 7 years of development has gone into this game so far and it just keeps getting better. Alpha 33 adds in not just a whole new faction but it also overhauls some existing systems. Some of what’s new includes a special storage system with custom storage furniture for various equipment types, a new fog effect, new z-level enemies with progressing difficulty, crossbows got added, a reworked flanking/parry mechanic with visual indicators and hints, combat experience is now based on the number of unique kills, a new ‘swamp’ biome for some villains that was officially added from a mod, fast travel between z-levels in the turned-based mode and so much more. There’s even a new intro.

• Call of Saregnar is a nod to 90s party-based RPGs and it’s on the way to Linux | GamingOnLinux

  Do you miss earlier party-based RPGs? Call of Saregnar is an in development title from Damjan Mozetič inspired by the likes of Betrayal at Krondor, TES: Daggerfall and Realms of Arkania.

  The developer explains that it’s a game of exploration and investigation with an emphasis on story and characters, and that it “proudly ditches the cliches of the RPG genre and expects you to think”. What makes it real interesting is that it blends together a low-poly 3D style with the characters made from shots of real-life actors.

  [...]

  On the status of Linux support, the developer made it clear on Twitter that it’s already hooked up.

Distributions

• Arcan as Operating System Design

  Time to continue to explain what Arcan actually “is” on a higher level. Previous articles have invited the comparison to Xorg ( part1, part2 ). Another possibility would have been Plan9, but Xorg was also a better fit also for the next (and last) article in this series.

  To start with a grand statement:

  Arcan is a single-user, user-facing, networked overlay operating system.

  With “single-user, user-facing” I mean that you are the core concern; it is about providing you with controls. There is no compromise made to “serve” a large number of concurrent users, to route and filter the most traffic, or to store and access data the fastest anywhere on earth.

  With “overlay operating system” I mean that it is built from user-facing components. Arcan takes whatever you have access to and expands from there. It is not hinged on the life and death of neither the Linux kernel, the BSD ones or any other for that matter. Instead it is a vagabond that will move to whatever ecosystem you can develop and run programs on, even if that means being walled inside an app store somewhere.

• Reviews

  • A low-key good experience for Thor-oughly new penguins: Elementary OS 6, aka Odin

    Elementary OS is one of my favourite distros to review because it always brings interesting new ideas to the Linux desktop. It’s a very opinionated distro and not for everyone, but so long as the elementary vision aligns with your own, I think it’s one of the nicest, most polished distros around.

    The key is aligning visions. If you like to endlessly tweak and customize your desktop experience, this is not the distro for you. Technically there is a “tweak” tool, similar to Gnome Tweaks, which allows you to do things like add a minimise button to elementary OS’s windows and make other changes. That’s helpful if there’s just one or two things that are stopping you from loving elementary OS, but it’s not going to make customising everything viable.

    If, on the other hand, you just want a clean, attractive desktop that you don’t have to fiddle with, offers most of the basic applications you need out of the box, and can be a set-it-and-forget it system, elementary OS Odin is an excellent choice.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • 5 DevSecOps myths, explained

    New ways of doing things tend to beget new myths and misunderstandings about those emerging methods. A common example: As newer work processes and cultures get popularized, people commonly begin to tout a single correct way to implement them.

    In all likelihood, though, there’s more than one “right” way to do it – and that’s true for DevSecOps, as it was with DevOps before it.

    Demystifying DevSecOps, then, is actually a meaningful (if not wholly necessary in some organizations) step toward a successful implementation. That’s because DevSecOps, like DevOps, is as much a matter of people and culture as anything else.

    As Red Hat associate principal solutions architect Mike Calizo wrote over at opensource.com, “DevSecOps encourages security practitioners to adapt and change their old existing security processes and procedures. This may sound easy, but changing processes, behavior, and culture is always difficult, especially in large environments.”

  • Red Hat’s Upstream Contributions Are Making For A Great Fedora Workstation 35 – Phoronix

    Fedora Workstation 35 will hopefully be out at the end of October (currently the beta is running behind schedule) and when it does ship it’s once again at the bleeding-edge of Linux features. Fedora Workstation 35 is shaping up to be another great release for those interested in a feature-rich desktop experience.

    Fedora Workstation 35 test builds have been working out great on the few systems I’ve tried so far in the lab. More Fedora Workstation 35 testing and benchmarks will be coming up in the weeks ahead. In anticipation of the upcoming Fedora 35 Beta, Red Hat’s Christian Schaller once again published a new blog post outlining some of the big changes on the Fedora Workstation side for this six-month update.

  • Rajeesh K Nambiar: A new set of OpenType shaping rules for Malayalam script

    TLDR; research and development of a completely new OpenType layout rules for Malayalam traditional orthography.

    Writing OpenType shaping rules is hard. Writing OpenType shaping rules for advanced (complex) scripts is harder. Writing OpenType shaping rules without causing any undesired ligature formations is even harder.

  • The NeuroFedora Blog: Next Open NeuroFedora meeting: 13 September 1300 UTC

  • Next Open NeuroFedora meeting: 27 September 1300 UTC

Devices/Embedded

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Nokia Android 12 update tracker: Eligible devices, release date, & more

  • What is Private Compute Core in Android 12 | Beebom

  • Android 12 | This is the list of Samsung models that may have the operating system | SPORTS-PLAY

  • An Android 11 feature’s coming to your Galaxy phone… without Android 11 – SamMobile

  • Surface Duo update comes with September security update; Android 11 still not in sight – PhoneArena

  • Xiaomi Mi 11 series now getting MIUI 12.5 (Android 12) internal beta -

  • Hisense 55-inch QLED TV (55U6G) with Dolby Vision, Android 10 launched in India: price, specifications – Pricebaba.com Daily

  • Accsoon M1 Interface connects Android phone for Monitoring, Livestreaming, and Recording – Newsshooter

  • PAX chooses Sektor to distribute Android payment terminals in A/NZ

  • Best Android Apps Week 37 from Google Play Store

  • Privacy and permissions functionality will come to previous versions of Android – How smart Technology changing lives

  • Notice for Android users. Delete this program immediately

  • Google to Auto-Reset Unused Android App Permissions for Billions of Devices

  • India’s antitrust watchdog says Google abused Android dominance; company responds | TechRadar

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Programming/Development

  • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

    • Oil Has Multi-line Commands and String Literals

      In June’s post Recent Progress on the Oil Language, I wrote that Oil has Python-like multi-line string literals, but enhanced like the Julia language.

      Here are examples from the Oil Language Tour.

Standards/Consortia

• Nokia has recommenced participation in the O-RAN Alliance

  The O-RAN Alliance said it became aware of concerns regarding some participants that may be subject to U.S. export regulations, and has been working with O-RAN participants to address these concerns. The O-RAN Board has approved changes to O-RAN participation documents and procedures. While it is up to each O-RAN participant to make their own evaluation of these changes, O-RAN is optimistic that the changes will address the concerns and facilitate O-RAN’s mission, the Alliance said.

• Nokia and O-RAN: an unwavering commitment

  Nokia has long been a believer in – and champion of – open and interoperable technologies. We believe that Open RAN technology has the potential to enrich the mobile ecosystem with new solutions and business models, and an expanded multi-vendor ecosystem. This is what customers and consumers want – and it is something we are committed to seeing through.

Hitchcock’s Sabotage: Film as Terrorism

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Tesla and the Anthropocene

Anyway, that 25K price tag got me thinking. When I can afford a Tesla, should I get one? First, I’m taking a due diligence drive. May I show you the sights?

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As a Korean American Professor, Here Is What I Think “The Chair” Gets Right

Bad Boy Bobby: Herald Sun Discovers Concept Of ‘Heritage Value’ In Precisely The Way You Might Expect

It’s one of the perplexing things about right-wingers. They hate change, but they love knocking old shit over to make way for newer shit. Hence the confusion over a story that cropped up in the Herald Sun overnight railing against developers in Melbourne.

Education

• Terrorists Use Children In Burkina Faso Attacks

  Insecurity and attacks on schools, students and teachers had forced the government to close 2,500 schools before schools closed nationwide in mid-March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

  Experts say the roots of conflict in the Sahel have shifted from political to economic.

  Poverty is among the factors that have Burkinabe children both “in supply” and “in demand” by extremist groups, according to Christopher M. Faulkner, a national security affairs fellow at the U.S. Naval War College, and Center for Strategic and International Studies researcher Jared Thompson.

Hardware

• Q&A With Co-Creator of the 6502 Processor

  Mensch, an IEEE senior life member, splits his time between Arizona and Colorado, but folks in the Northeast of the United States will have the opportunity to see him as a keynote speaker at the Vintage Computer Festival in Wall, N.J., on the weekend of 8 October. In advance of Mensch’s appearance, The Institute caught up with him via Zoom to talk about his career.

Health/Nutrition

• Opinion | Biden Pledged to Protect People and the Environment From Toxic Chemicals—Now It’s Time to Act

  When President Biden took office, he pledged to protect people and the environment from toxic chemicals now poisoning communities across the United States. If he is serious about that promise, then his administration must align its foreign policies with its domestic commitments when it participates in the next meeting of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, an international treaty that prohibits dangerous pollutants that persist in the environment.

• ‘I Had a Duty of Care’: Doctor Praised for Violating Texas’ New Abortion Ban

  “I provided an abortion to a woman who, though still in her first trimester, was beyond the state’s new limit. I acted because I had a duty of care to this patient, as I do for all patients, and because she has a fundamental right to receive this care.”

  Dr. Alan Braid, who provides abortion care in San Antonio, explained his decision to violate Texas’ new law in a Saturday opinion piece for The Washington Post, drawing praise and gratitude from reproductive rights advocates and healthcare professionals nationwide.

• ByteDance’s New TikTok for Chinese Kids Sets Strict User Limits

  ByteDance Ltd. introduced a TikTok-style service for China’s youth that sets strict controls on daily usage after Beijing stepped up efforts to protect minors from the [Internet]’s risks.

• China’s Version of TikTok Limits Kids’ Screen Time to 40 Minutes Per Day

  TikTok owner Bytedance is set to bring in screen time caps for Douyin, the Chinese version of the phenomenally successful app, for users under 14 years old as Beijing continues to crack down on the influence of tech companies in the country

• California moves closer to decriminalizing psychedelic drugs

  The legalization movement that brought upmarket marijuana shops to Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco is now focused on psychedelic drugs. A voter initiative to decriminalize magic mushrooms was recently approved for signature-gathering, and a legislative proposal is set to be considered next year.

• America’s car crash epidemic

  Cars killed 42,060 people in 2020, up from 39,107 in 2019, according to a preliminary estimate from the National Safety Council (NSC), a nonprofit that focuses on eliminating preventable deaths. (NSC’s numbers are typically higher than those reported by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) because the NSC includes car deaths in private spaces like driveways and parking lots, and it counts deaths that occur up to a year after a crash.)

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Please Stop Closing Forums And Moving People To Discord

    A few days ago Eurogamer closed their forums, bringing to an end over 20 years of community discussion. The site explained the move like sites and companies always do (only a few are still using them), and it made sense the way it always does (that’s a lot of money for not much gain), but that doesn’t mean the process itself isn’t something that sucks.

  • Security

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Opinion | Facebook Has Known for Over a Year That Instagram Is Bad for Teens, Despite Claiming Otherwise

        Facebook officials had internal research in March 2020 showing that Instagram—the social media platform most used by adolescents—is harmful to teen girls’ body image and well-being but swept those findings under the rug to continue conducting business as usual, according to a September 14, 2021, Wall Street Journal report.

      • Why you need a personal laptop

        I’ve been there. Surveys have shown that over half of workers use work-issued devices for personal tasks — whether sending personal messages, shopping online, accessing social media, or reading the news. The prospect of using your work laptop as your only laptop — not just for work, but also for Netflixing, group chat messaging, reading fanfiction, paying bills, and emailing recipes to your mom — is understandably tempting, especially for folks who work from home. Keeping work tasks and personal tasks in one place may feel like an easy way to simplify your life, and it might save space on your desk. Most of all, it may seem like a good cost-saving measure.

        But I’m here to be the bearer of bad news: Don’t do that. Please, I’m begging you, don’t do that.

      • Facebook: Wall Street Journal series ‘contained deliberate mischaracterizations’

        The five-part series, which ran last week, examines how Facebook has handled a number of issues including anti-COVID-19 vaccine rhetoric, the effects of Instagram’s app on younger users and the company’s response to employees who raised concerns about human traffickers and drug cartels on the platform.

        The Journal’s reporting was based on internal documents such as online employee discussions, research reports and presentation drafts.

Defence/Aggression

• The War on Terror, Twenty Years and Counting

  As Sarsour noted, the past two decades have been devastating for people within the U.S. but especially for those living abroad, especially those in the Central Asian and Middle East region. From the drone strikes of weddings to now, leaving a political vacuum for groups like the Taliban to re-emerge and reconquer, U.S. involvement, justified by the War On Terror, has left countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, utterly “decimated”, Sarsour said.

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• Opinion | US Admits Strike Killing 10 in Kabul Was a ‘Mistake’—But It Is Not a New Problem

  The Associated Press reports that the survivors of family members killed in a U.S. hellfire missile strike on a civilian vehicle after U.S. troops and Afghan evacuees were killed at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul are not satisfied with the apology issued by the U.S. military. They want compensation.

• Russia and Belarus Are Using Migrants as a Weapon Against the EU

  In July, journalists from Belsat TV, the independent channel broadcasting from Poland to Belarus, revealed that Belarusian secret services were conducting an operation to transfer migrants from the Middle East via Belarus to Lithuania. Agnieszka Romaszewska-Guzy, director of Belsat TV, explained explained to Foreign Policy that, “The state-owned company Centrkurort belonging to the President’s Affairs Board, which cooperates with Iraqi travel agencies, is responsible for bringing migrants from Iraq to Belarus. These people get Belarusian tourist visas and after landing at the Minsk airport, they are placed in hotels in Minsk and finally transported to the borders.”

  In the border zone, an elite special unit called OSAM, in which Lukshenko’s sons once served, is reportedly directly involved in the physical transfer of migrants to the other side of the border.

• Turkey Doubles Down on Atatürk’s Genocidal Legacy

  “It’s not possible for books being used for instruction in our schools to portray Kemal Atatürk as a paradigm of a moral leader who ‘benefited the people,’” the Greek Cypriot Education Ministry said in a statement. “Because, as it’s well known, Ataturk and the Young Turks are responsible for crimes against people like the Armenian Genocide, of the Pontian Greeks, the Assyrians.”

• Iranian guards sexually assaulted female IAEA inspectors – report

  Iranian security guards made female International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors remove clothing and then inappropriately touched them at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, according to The Wall Street Journal.

  At least four separate incidents of harassment were reported since early June, one diplomat told The Wall Street Journal, while another diplomat said that there had been five to seven. The most recent incident was reported in the past few weeks.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• South African whistle-blower: I don’t feel safe

  The recent murder of South African civil servant Babita Deokaran, who blew the whistle on government corruption, has highlighted the dangers for those who speak out against the mounting problem, writes the BBC’s Pumza Fihlani.

Environment

• Care Workers Demand Federal Support as First Responders in Climate Crises

• Opinion | Tribal Solar Projects Provide More Than Climate Solutions

  In August 2021, two wildfires surrounded the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in central Montana. By August 11, more than 175,000 acres were ablaze, and all residents of Lame Deer, the largest town on the reservation, were asked to evacuate. Several communities lost power and cell service, and the local Boys and Girls Club set up door-to-door food delivery. Some of those forced to evacuate were staff at Covenant Tribal Solar Initiative, a nonprofit that supports tribal communities’ transition to solar power and development of renewable energy workforces. Wildfires like those surrounding Northern Cheyenne—which may get worse because of climate change—exemplified the urgent need for Covenant’s work.

• Opinion | Welcome to the Pyrocene: Fossil Fuel Combustion Has Thrust Us Into a New Fire Age

  Fire in the West is expected, and not so long ago, it seemed something the West experienced more than anywhere else. Nationally, big fires were treated as another freak of Western violence, like a grizzly bear attack, or another California quirk like Esalen and avocados.

• Energy

  • Why skippers aren’t scuppered

    The troubles began in 2020, when firms that had idled production in the expectation of a slump instead faced heavy demand for cars, electronics and home-exercise equipment. Generous stimulus, in America especially, kept order books full while the pandemic skewed spending toward goods rather than services. Producers of computer chips have been unable to keep up with the rush. The shipping industry had no spare capacity and has faced a series of disruptions, from the saga of the stuck ship Ever Given, to the closing of ports amid outbreaks of covid-19 and storms like Hurricane Ida. With the system stretched thin, a mishap anywhere affects the movement of goods everywhere. Experts reckon it may take a year or more for conditions to return to something like normal.

Finance

• Report on Revolving Door and Tax Policy Sparks Calls for Federal Probe and Reforms

  As congressional Democrats are working out tax hikes targeting corporations and rich individuals for the Build Back Better package they hope to pass in the coming weeks, The New York Times on Sunday shone a spotlight on the revolving door between accounting firms and the U.S. government that benefits companies hoping to avoid taxes.

  “If any of the officials had arrangements for future employment with their former employers while meeting with the employers, they committed a crime under the conflict of interest law.”—Walter Shaub, POGO

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Sanders, Top Dems Optimistic Party Will ‘Come Together’ for Reconciliation Package

  In a series of Sunday television appearances, key congressional leaders seemed optimistic that the Democratic caucuses of both chambers would join forces to pass both a bipartisan infrastructure bill and a Build Back Better package to advance President Joe Biden’s agenda—even if it requires missing a rapidly approaching deadline.

  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), in order to advance the budget resolution for the broader package last month, struck a deal with a small group of right-wing Democrats that the chamber would “consider” the bipartisan bill by September 27, which is a week from Monday.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Rhetoric and frame analysis of ExxonMobil’s climate change communications

  This is the first computationalassessment of how ExxonMobil has usedlanguage to subtly yet systematicallyframe public discourse about climatechange. We show that ExxonMobil usesrhetoric mimicking the tobacco industryto downplay the reality and seriousnessof climate change, to present fossil fueldominance as reasonable and inevitable,and to shift responsibility for climatechange away from itself and ontoconsumers. Our work is relevant tolawsuits, policy proposals, andgrassroots activism seeking to hold fossilfuel companies accountable fordeceptive marketing.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Navalny App Gone from Google, Apple Stores on Russia Vote Day

  Jailed Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny’s Smart Voting app disappeared from Apple and Google stores Friday as Russians began voting in a three-day parliamentary election marked by a historic crackdown on the opposition.

  “Removing the Navalny app from stores is a shameful act of political censorship,” top Navalny ally Ivan Zhdanov said on Twitter.

  The app promoted an initiative that outlines for Navalny supporters which candidate they should back to unseat Kremlin-aligned politicians.

• The Data Is In — Trigger Warnings Don’t Work

  A recent Inside Higher Ed piece by Michael Bugeja, an Iowa State journalism professor, is emblematic of this shift. In light of the tumultuous times (a “mental-health pandemic,” ongoing sexual violence and racism, the anxiety of returning to in-person instruction), Bugeja says that trigger warnings are needed now more than ever. All faculty members should follow his lead, he argues, and include detailed trigger warnings on their syllabi accompanied by the following note: “You don’t have to attend class if the content elicits an uncomfortable emotional response.”

  Bugeja’s article prompted us to review the latest research on the efficacy of trigger warnings. We found no evidence that trigger warnings improve students’ mental health. What’s more, we are now convinced that they push students and faculty members alike to turn away from the study of vitally important topics that are seen as too “distressing.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Nabisco Strike Ends After Union Members Approve New Contract

  A strike that started last month in Portland, Oregon and spread to other Nabisco bakeries and distribution centers across the United States ended Saturday after unionized workers voted “overwhelmingly” in favor of a new collective bargaining agreement.

  Though some Portland employees opposed ratifying the four-year contract, calling for better terms, it ultimately garnered the necessary support from workers there and at facilities in Aurora, Colorado; Richmond, Virginia; Chicago, Illinois; and Norcross, Georgia.

• I’m Fighting for Ethnic Studies in My Community So My History Won’t Be Erased

• YIMBY Movement Is Not the Answer to Housing Crisis, Grassroots Activists Say

• French court acquits imam who quoted text commanding Muslims to kill Jews

  “Even when you kill a Jew you’re not convicted but considered crazy,” Teboul told France Bleu. “So you tell thousands at a mosque to kill Jews and hide behind a centuries-old text to avoid conviction.”

  Muslim community leaders praised the court’s acquittal.

• Fascism Makes a Comeback — But Nothing About Its Methods Is Especially New

• Texas Abortion Ban Architect Takes Aim at LGBTQ Rights, Urges Reversal of Roe

Monopolies

• Patents

  • 
    The Unified Patent Court. Do we finally have a predictable timeline? [Ed: Team UPC is still in control of IP Kat (what’s left of it), posting fake news]

    After the Order of the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) dated 23 June 2021 (see here the IPKat post) it is now clarified that Germany is able to participate in the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPCA) and the Protocol on the Provisional Application of the UPCA (the PAP-Protocol).

    [...]

    According to the current timeline of the Preparatory Committee, the UPC will be fully operational by mid-2022.

  • U.S. District Court Adopts Expansive Definition of aBLA “Submitter” – Kluwer Patent Blog

    Submission of an abbreviated Biologics License Application (“aBLA”), under the Biosimilar Price Competition and Innovation Act of 2009 (“BPCIA”), for a biosimilar version of an already-approved biologic drug constitutes an “artificial act of infringement” for which the biologic’s patent owner may file suit.[1] In the recent AbbVie Inc. v. Alvotech hf.[2] decision, the district court adopted an expansive definition of what it means to “submit” an application, and allowed infringement claims to be brought against the foreign parent company of the applicant listed in the aBLA. This decision has important implications for cases where the biosimilar manufacturer is based outside of the United States.

    [...]

    The Hatch-Waxman Act was passed in 1984, twenty-five years earlier than the BPCIA. Based on this significant gap, there is far more case law in the ANDA than the aBLA context. It is thus possible that other courts will borrow other principles from Hatch-Waxman litigation as further cases are adjudicated under the BPCIA.

    Critically, those developing biosimilars should be aware that non-U.S. parties may be named as defendants consistent with the Alvotech court’s expanded definition of “submitter.” Entities that created or prepared the information in the aBLA, or entities that will participate in manufacture, distribution, marketing, or importation of a biosimilar may be subject to a suit for patent infringement, even if they are not named in the aBLA. For BLA holders, this decision may allow suit to be brought in a more favorable venue. Additionally, for foreign corporations at arms-length from the U.S. entity named in the aBLA, it will be important to factor into any contracts or licensing arrangements the associated potential liabilities and costs, as well as control of the litigation and its settlement.

  • Why ex-parte reexams are picking up at the USPTO

    Counsel at Cisco, Unified Patents and elsewhere unpick data that shows how patent challengers are turning to old procedures, often after discretionary denials

  • CVC Files Opposition to ToolGen Substantive Motion No. 1 [Ed: The latest on the truly insane campaign (lobbying more so than lawyering) to get patents, i.e. monopolies, on life, nature, genetics]

    On July 15th, Junior Party the University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, “CVC”) filed its Opposition to Senior Party ToolGen’s Substantive Motion No. 1 for benefit of priority to U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/837,481, filed June 20, 2013 (“P3″ or “ToolGen P3″), or alternatively, International Application No. PCT/KR2013/009488, filed Oct. 23, 2013 (“PCT”), in Interference No. 106,127.

• Copyrights

  • DMCA Takedown Errors Can Make it Harder to Find Movies Legally

    Copyright holders have sent billions of takedown requests to Google. Their goal is to make it harder for people to find pirated content through the search engine. However, in some cases, takedown requests make it harder to find legal content too.

  • Meet the CC Summit Presenter: Ebenezar Wikina

    Based in : Port Harcourt, Nigeria