Desktop/Laptop

• Linux Release Roundup #21.39: GNOME 41, Sailfish OS “Verla”, Ubuntu Touch OTA-19 and More New Releases – It’s FOSS News

  In the Linux Release Roundup series, we highlight the new distribution and application version releases in the past week. This keeps you informed of the latest developments in the Linux world.

• Full Circle Magazine #173

• Make Linux look like Windows 10

  As the days pass, Linux is on its way to becoming the go-to operating system for users. With its superior command-line interface, better security, and a helpful community that offers support and fixes for most issues, no doubt switching to Linux-based distributions seems like a tempting option.

  If you’re coming from a Windows 10 background, switching to the graphical user interface (GUI) of Linux would seem like unknown territory to you. Navigating through the unfamiliar GUI might be a little confusing.

  If we just described your situation, then fear not; the purpose of this guide is to make sure that you get that familiar OS feeling of Windows 10 on your Linux system. With all that out of the way, let’s take a look at the methods to make Linux look like Windows 10.

Audiocasts/Shows

• “Hey, DT! Windows Is Spyware But Isn’t That Normal?” (Plus Other Questions) – Invidious

• Chat With Patrons (September 26, 2021) – Invidious

• Easy Anti Cheat WORKS on LINUX – Epic’s Epic Announcement – Invidious

  Epic Games has officially announced that their Easy Anti Cheat system will be coming to Linux. There are a few caveats though, so let’s see how that’s going to work.

• Linux overview | Windowxfx 11 Preview Free Edition – Invidious

  In this video, I am going to show an overview of Windowxfx 11 Preview Free Edition and some of the applications pre-installed.

Kernel Space

• Examining btrfs, Linux’s perpetually half-finished filesystem

  Btrfs—short for “B-Tree File System” and frequently pronounced “butter” or “butter eff ess”—is the most advanced filesystem present in the mainline Linux kernel. In some ways, btrfs simply seeks to supplant ext4, the default filesystem for most Linux distributions. But btrfs also aims to provide next-gen features that break the simple “filesystem” mold, combining the functionality of a RAID array manager, a volume manager, and more.

  We have good news and bad news about this. First, btrfs is a perfectly cromulent single-disk ext4 replacement. But if you’re hoping to replace ZFS—or a more complex stack built on discrete RAID management, volume management, and simple filesystem—the picture isn’t quite so rosy. Although the btrfs project has fixed many of the glaring problems it launched with in 2009, other problems remain essentially unchanged 12 years later.

• Google is bringing Android closer to the Linux kernel

  Google has shared more details about how it aims to bring the Android kernel a lot closer to the mainline Linux kernel with the impending release of Android 12.

  The news came courtesy of a presentation at the Linux Plumbers Conference by Google’s software engineer Todd Kjos.

  Commenting on the development, Ars Technica shares that typically the mainline Linux kernel goes through three major forks before it is shipped to the end users on an Android device.

Benchmarks

• SiFive HiFive Unmatched Hands-On, Initial RISC-V Performance Benchmarks

  A few weeks ago I finally received the HiFive Unmatched from SiFive as their flagship RISC-V development board. As a reminder this is their mini-ITX development board that is powered by their U740 SoC and features 16GB of DDR4 system memory, one PCI Express x16 slot that can work with AMD Radeon graphics cards on Linux, and other features. It’s been a delight playing with this developer platform and enclosed are some early benchmarks as well showing off the U740 performance as well as how the Linux software support/performance has been evolving.

  The SiFive HiFive Unmatched is what many developers and enthusiasts have long been waiting for and began shipping this summer after being announced at the end of last year. The mini-ITX board is powered by a 24-pin ATX power supply connection, the PCI Express x16 slot (at PCIe x8 speeds) can power a graphics card if wanting to use this board as a workstation, 16GB of DDR4 is sufficient for most of today’s development needs, there is integrated Gigabit Ethernet, both microSD and NVMe M.2 storage support, one M.2 E-key slot for WiFi/Bluetooth, and four USB 3.2 Gen1 ports.

Applications

• Sepia, Search Engine For PeerTube

  Want to search for videos published at PeerTube? Now it is easy with Sepia, the search engine for PeerTube. Go to sepiasearch.org and simply type a keyword then click search to find videos. Please help us share about PeerTube, a YouTube alternative that is fully controlled by users.

How To Zoom Tmux Panes For Better Text Visibility In Linux – OSTechNix

I have been using GNU Screen and Tmux terminal multiplexers for many years now. They comes in handy when performing different tasks in multiple terminal windows simultaneously. Today I learned one of the useful feature of Tmux – Zooming panes. Yes, we can zoom Tmux panes to fit them into the full size of current Terminal window for better text visibility and for viewing more of its contents.

It is useful when you need more space or focus on a specific task. After finishing that task, you can zoom out (unzoom) the Tmux pane back to its normal position or size.

Common Apache Commands on Ubuntu & Debian – TecAdmin

Apache is the most popular web server developed by the Apache Foundation in 1995. It comes under Apache License 2.0. It is a cross-platform application available for most of the older operating systems like Linux, Windows, and macOS systems. With a 45% of market share, Apache is serving almost every second website on the internet. Which tells its popularity between users.

In this tutorial, we will discuss some commonly used commands for managing Apache servers on Ubuntu and Debian-based systems. This includes how to enable/disable a virtual host, module, or configuration file in the Apache server.

Use DVD as Local Repository in CentOS 8

Appstream (Application Stream) and BaseOS are the two repositories that ship with CentOS 8. Centos 8 has two repositories, and they are different from one another. Among AppStream’s components are software packages such as databases and dependencies. BaseOS repository provides requisite packages, which are useful for an operating system that is minimal. If you also want to use DVD as a Local repository, then go through this article because we have written everything regarding CentOS use DVD as local repo.

how to tail logs in kubectl

For container orchestration, Kubernetes has now become the industry standard. It provides the needed abstraction for successfully administering large-scale containerized systems with clear configurations, a straightforward deployment method, and scalability abilities. Like any other system, Logs allow developers to gain visibility into containers and the Kubernetes clusters they are operating on, and their importance is clear in many Kubernetes failures. However, Kubernetes presents a distinct set of logging issues. Application logs can assist you in figuring out what’s going on inside your app. The logs are very helpful for troubleshooting and tracking cluster activities. A logging feature is present in almost all current programs. Container engines, too, are built to handle logging. Publishing to standard output and standard error streams is the simplest and most often used logging option for containerized applications. These logs show you what’s happening and can be useful for debugging master node issues. Unfortunately, these logs cannot be viewed via the kubectl command; instead, they must be viewed directly from the computer. You may need to SSH into the node directly, based on where you are hosting the computer. This understanding enables you to observe the relationships between these resources and the consequences of one action upon another. In this guide, we are checking different ways to tail logs in kubectl. To execute this whole process, we are utilizing Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. We have installed and started the minikube cluster. Also, kubectl is already installed and configured on our system.

Tips to fix your drawing and linearts on Krita

The Mirror tool in Krita is cruel and reveal the truth… But, once you spot the deformation on a drawing or line-art, what method you can use to fix it? This video shows you my method within all the limit of my actual skill. You’ll know at least how I manage my correction pass over the art of Pepper&Carrot. Sorry for my french accent and english mistakes.

How to Replace Substring in Bash Natively

Here’s the scenario. You have a big string and you want to replace part of it with another string.

For example, you want to change “I am writing a line today” to “I am writing a line now”.

In this quick tutorial, I’ll show you how to replace a substring natively in Bash. I’ll also show the sed command example as an extension.

SS Command in Linux with Useful Examples

The ss tool is a CLI command used to display information about the network socket in Linux. The ss stands for socket statistics. It is a similar tool to netstat, which can display more information such as TCP and state information.

The ss tool comes with the iproute2 package. It can display stats for PACKET, TCP, UDP, DCCP, RAW, and Unix domain sockets.

In this tutorial, we learn ss command in Linux with useful examples.

Atheros Wireless in Alma, CentOS and Rocky Linux

Not that long ago, I took AlmaLinux for a second spin, this time for a more detail review of the distro on my brand-newish IdeaPad 3 machine. Things went reasonably well, except one big glaring problem. I didn’t have Wireless connectivity, right after the installation. This is major, because you can’t really use a modern system without (some) network, especially this early on.

Soon, I spent a couple of hours trying to fix this. The problem turned out to be rather quirky. Supposedly, I did have all the right drivers and whatnot, but the system couldn’t really utilize the hardware. A combination of two factors contributed to the issue, which we will solve in this tutorial.

How To Install AnyDesk on Debian 11 – idroot

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install AnyDesk on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Anydesk is a remote desktop application. It is a cross-platform software that provides platform independent remote access to different PCs and other host devices. It provides remote access, file transfer, VPN features. It provides secure and reliable access to IT professionals.

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

How Do You Check ZSH History

As Linux power users, we often come across instances where we need to rerun specific commands. Although some are simple commands that we can retype, some are complex and messy regular expression queries that will take time to reconstruct.

In such scenarios, we can use our shell command history to scroll through our previous commands or use the reverse search to search for a specific command using the up and down arrows.

This tutorial will discuss ways to find and reuse our previous commands using the ZSH command history feature.

How Do I Zoom In and Out on My Bluestacks Emulator? [Android]

Over the years, we have seen the rise and fall of many android emulators. However, there is one that has been the king: Bluestacks Emulator.

Bluestacks is an android emulator that uses virtualization technology to emulate android devices on Windows and macOS systems. It offers modern features to run modern games and applications with minimal or no compatibility issues.

Zooming in and out of Bluestacks may seem impossible, especially if you are emulating an app or game that requires a touch display.

How to Configure Apache Tomcat in Linux

Apache Tomcat, or simply Tomcat, is a free and open-source web server developed by the Apache Software Foundation to implement Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages, Java Expression Language, and web-socket technologies. It provides a ‘pure Java’ http server.

Apache Tomcat provides a default HTTP connector on port 8080, allowing you to use it as a web server such as Apache for your Java applications.

How to Configure mod_jk in Apache HTTP Server

Mod_jk is an Apache module or connector that connects the Apache Tomcat Servlet container with web servers such as Apache, IIS, and more. The mod_jk is a complete replacement of the older mod_jser module that handles communication between Tomcat and HTTP servers using Apache JServ Protocol.

We will not get into the deeper workings of the mod_jk module as it is beyond the scope of this tutorial. Instead, we shall focus on how to integrate it with the Apache HTTP Server.

How to Deploy VDO on a Disk | RedHat – Unixcop

VDO : Short of Virtual Data Optimizer and is a block virtualization technology that provides Deduplication and compression of data at a block level.

How to Do a for loop in ZSH Script

Every sysadmin should know how to implement scripts to automate their workflow. Although we have many automation tools such as Ansible, scripting remains a critical tool to automate tasks in the Linux world.

This tutorial will look at loops, a fundamental concept in scripting and programming in general. We will specifically focus on how for loops work.

How to Enable Debug Logging in Apache

As a system administrator, you will need to understand what is going on under the hood of various services in your system. Logging is probably the best way to do that.

Logs allow you to collect information about the services and applications running on your system and save that log to a file for future use.

This tutorial will learn how to collect detailed information about the Apache Tomcat service by enabling the DEBUG mode.

How to Encrypt Storage Drives Using LUKS in Linux

This article will cover a guide on using the “Linux Unified Key Setup” or LUKS encryption standard that can be used to create encrypted and password protected storage drives. During encryption, LUKS reserves a space on the storage drive and stores necessary information required for encryption and decryption on the storage drive itself. This on-disk encryption methodology ensures near plug and play compatibility across Linux distributions and easy transferability of data drives. As long as you have LUKS installed on your Linux system and you know the password, you will be easily able to decrypt any LUKS encrypted data drive on any Linux distribution.

How to Install Apache, MariaDB, PHP7 (LAMP) on openSUSE Leap 15.3 – Unixcop

In this tutorial, we will explain to you how to install LAMP stack on the latest openSUSE release. Let me just refresh your mind that LAMP is a combination of the words Linux Apache MySQL and Php.

How to Install Arch Linux: Beginner’s Step-by-Step Installation Guide

Arch Linux is not difficult to install. In this guide I will going to show you how to easily install Arch Linux with the GNOME Desktop Environment.

Many Linux users really want to give Arch Linux a try, but the general notion that Arch is difficult to learn stops many of them. When people say it’s “hard,” they really mean that it takes effort. And they’re right – you do have to put a little bit more effort into installing your system, setting everything up, and reading about how to do what you want to do.

However, you end up with a system you understand very well and set up just the way you want it. Once installed, Arch Linux is as easy to run as any other distro, if not easier.

You can install Arch Linux directly to your computer by following this guide, but you can also install it on a virtual machine by using VirtualBox. This Arch Linux how to installation guide shows the whole process in easy-to-follow steps.

How to Install SQL Server in RHEL, Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux

On March 7, 2016, Microsoft announced the introduction of the MS SQL server in Linux systems. The goal was to deliver more flexibility for users and to do away with vendor lock-in with the aim of accelerating the adoption of the SQL database server. If you didn’t know already, MS SQL is a relational database server developed by Microsoft.

How to Monitor Linux Machine via Nagios – Unixcop

Nagios is a powerful tools that allows you to monitor your IT infrastructure and notify you if any hosts, service or machine specs are malfunctioning. We will see to monitor a linux machine’s basic health check e.g. Current load, Disk Space and Ram Usage etc. in this tutorial.

How to Remove (^M) Characters from a File in Linux

A common functional uniqueness of different operating system environments is in the way they handle and process data. This functionality is in the way a file’s text data is perceived and processed.

For instance, you can have a normal text file created and populated under a Windows computing environment but once that same file is transferred to a Linux computing platform, it is processed and displayed differently.

There is a logical explanation for these transferred text file’s misbehavior. On a Windows computing environment, the OS acknowledges the presence of a new line within a text file through a specific carriage return.

While the representation of this carriage return (CR) character is hidden from the eyes of these Windows users, transferring this file to a Linux computing environment exposes it as ^M characters.

How to Rename Files in Linux (mv and rename Commands)

Renaming files in Linux is a very common operation.

In this article, we will discuss how to rename single or multiple files using the mv and rename commands in various Linux distributions.

How to Use Rc.local on CentOS 8

During the boot process of Linux, we start the script using rc.local. Due to the complex init script process, it causes the user to spend a lot of time using it. Many people look for the methods to use rc.local on CentOS 8 easily. That’s why we have written this blog to give you a brief on the ways to use rc.local on CentOS 8.

How to Use fdisk Command to Create Partition in Linux

The fdisk command utility is useful for viewing and editing hard disk or SSD partitions on Linux and its distributions, such as Ubuntu. It is one of the most powerful tools to manage disk partitions on Linux. Other tools are also available to perform disk partition on Linux, but fdisk is one of the most commonly used ones.

fdisk is a menu-driven command-line utility, and hence new users find this tool confusing and difficult to use. fdisk is not an easy tool to use and should be used with caution. You need to have root access or sudo privileges to make changes to storage partitions.

So, today in this article, I will give you a tutorial on how to create a partition in Linux using the fdisk command.

How to Use nmcli in Ubuntu

Network manager manages all the network settings of the computer. With which network a machine should be connected, which type of traffic should be allowed and how to save data from the online servers are all managed by the network manager. Network managers have different tools, for example we have nm-connection-editor, nmcli, nm Gnome etc. All the tools or utilities have their own specific functions like nm-connection-editor is used to manage the wired connections of the machine, by Gnome settings we can manage all the network settings easily, by nmcli we can do the setting by the command line mode.

This write-up will demonstrate the installation of the network manager then in detail we will discuss the nmcli command for what purpose and how it can be used.

How to install Apache Tomcat on Debian 11

This tutorial explains how to install Apache Tomcat on Debian 11, its predecessors, and Debian-based Linux distributions.

Before writing a tutorial for Linux Hint, I always check other blogs’ content in order to make ours better. This time I was surprised that no available tutorials on installing Apache Tomcat on Debian 11 included the apt-get installation method, which is easier to execute. Therefore I decided to include both methods: Installing Tomcat on Debian 11 using apt and Tomcat manual installation.

How to manage local storage using stratis | RedHat – Unixcop

stratis : is a new technology started in redhat enterprise linux ( RHEL 8 ) used as a local storage-management solution for Linux. It is focused on simplicity and ease of use, and gives you access to advanced storage features.

The Waydroid project develops a package to run Android on GNU / Linux

The project Waydroid has prepared a toolkit that allows you to create an isolated environment in a regular Linux distribution for loading a complete system image of the Android platform and organize the launch of Android applications with it. The code of the toolkit proposed by the project is written in Python and is released under the GPLv3 license. Ready packages are generated for Ubuntu 20.04 / 21.04, Debian 11, Droidian and Ubports .

The environment is built using standard technologies to create isolated containers such as namespaces for processes, user IDs, networking subsystem, and mount points. The toolkit is used to manage the container LXC . To run Android on top of a regular Linux kernel are loaded , the modules binder_linux and ashmem_linux .

The environment is designed to work with a session based on the Wayland protocol. Unlike the similar environment Anbox , the Android platform provides direct access to hardware, without additional layers. The proposed Android system image for installation is based on assemblies from the project LineageOS and Android 10 .

BattlEye confirms Linux support for Steam Deck, will be opt-in like Easy Anti-Cheat

Just recently we had Epic Games announce that Easy Anti-Cheat now offers proper native Linux support and in addition support for Wine and Steam Play Proton – now we have BattlEye also confirming the same readying up for the Steam Deck.

BattlEye To Support Valve’s Steam Deck / Proton

Yesterday it was Epic Games confirming Easy Anti-Cheat for Linux and Wine/Proton ahead of the Steam Deck launch and today it’s BattlEye confirming Proton / Steam Deck support.

BattlEye has already provided native Linux support albeit not widely used. Today they tweeted that they will also be supporting the upcoming Steam Deck or more specifically the use of BattlEye within Proton.

BattlEye is making this opt-in for game developers who wish to support its usage under Wine / Proton.

Epic Games Announces Easy Anti-Cheat Support for Linux, Wine, Proton, and Steam Deck

One of the main obstacles Linux Gaming faces are anticheats, which make it impossible for Open Source users to play many titles online (and in some cases also block single-player modes). Luckily, there has been an important advance in this area recently, since Epic Games has announced the support of Easy Anti-Cheat for Linux, Mac and Steam Deck (sic), covering, of course, the Wine and Proton compatibility layers (the second is nothing more than a re-implementation of the first).

Yes, as you are reading, Epic Games already gives official support for Easy Anti-Cheat for Linux and Wine, or at least that is how it has been announced on the company’s developer website . In recent years, the relationship between Epic Games and the Linux community has deteriorated considerably, mainly due to the fact that the corporation still does not give official support for its game store and the presence of the aforementioned Easy Anti-Cheat, which has made it impossible to Linux users play every title that has implemented it.

Epic Brings Easy Anti-Cheat Support For Proton and Wine On Linux!

There’s no denying the fact that Linux gaming has improved to a great extent over the past few years. This was made possible through the Proton compatibility layer, which translates Windows DirectX to Vulkan. As of today, over 16,000 games can be played on Linux.

But one of the areas where Linux gaming takes a hit is when running games with anti-cheat mechanisms. Today, that changes, thanks to Epic games bringing Easy Anti-cheat support to Proton and Wine on Linux. Here’s everything you need to know about the same.

A first Release Candidate for Proton 6.3-7 is up with more games working

Time for a weekend of testing for many of you? A fresh version of Steam Play Proton is on the way, with a CodeWeavers developer on GitHub announcing a Release Candidate build of Proton 6.3-7.

Now is the time to log issues new to this version of Proton before it rolls out to everyone. They’re only interested in issues that didn’t happen in previous versions, as they of course don’t want to roll it out with regressions.

Linux gaming just got a BIG boost! – Invidious

Big news on EAC in Linux, but there are other problems no one is talking about. Let’s go over the future of Linux Gaming!

My Top 3 HOPES For Steam Deck (+ 2 Big FEARS) – Invidious

This changes EVERYTHING for Linux Gaming! Epic Games has officially extended Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) support to Proton and Wine. Let’s talk about it.

All You Need to Know About Linux Gaming

Windows is a de facto operating system for PC gamers, and most gamers consider Linux for gaming a distant possibility. While for some gamers, it is not the first choice. But the closed source nature and handling of personal data on Windows is an off point for many. Even though Linux distributions are not as optimal for gaming as Windows, some gaming-specific distributions and platforms have open doors of possibilities.

The article explains the distant possibility of Linux gaming turning into reality by answering some potential questions of games compatibility with Linux and Linux suitability. We also discuss various platforms that support native, Windows, terminal, and browser-based games in Linux.

Thatcher’s Techbase, the Doom II mod where you take down Maggie Thatcher is out | GamingOnLinux

A mod of Doom II that we covered a week ago set in the good old United Kingdom, Thatcher’s Techbase, is out now and sees you take down Subject M4GG-13 who is none other than former prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Risen from the dead and fresh out of Hell, Thatcher is up to something and it’s your job to take ‘em down.

Gorgeous looking TMORPG Book of Travels enters Early Access on October 11 | GamingOnLinux

After repeated delays the TMORPG (Tiny Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game) Book of Travels has been confirmed now to enter Early Access on October 11. The developer is now confident enough that they’ve solved the most pressing issues.

This is only the first step for the game, with it being “Chapter Zero” of the ongoing story the game will tell which will last for at least two years during Early Access. They said to see it like other games have seasons, with this not quite technically being the first.

Subterranean survival shooter Lumencraft will have you dig deep | GamingOnLinux

Lumencraft has been announced from 2Dynamic Games and Star Drifters that promises quite an unusual blend of survival and tower defense while you dig through the terrain.

The first game from 2Dynamic, they say it has “strands of Alien Breed in its DNA, as well as nods to Darkwood, but with a tactical and survival spin to it” and it will present you with an “unprecedented level of environment interaction, along with fully destructible terrain and dynamic lighting system”.

[...]

From what we’ve been told they will have a Linux native build available at the Early Access release but not for the upcoming demo for Steam Next Fest. No exact date is being given for the release yet.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• New Book: Krita Secrets by Bohdan Kornienko

  “Krita Secrets” is a book that aims to deliver as short tutorials as possible. Each tutorial covers one specific action with its result. The tutorials range from how to do little tricks, like draw Parallel Lines, to complex tools such as Gradient Mesh. By September 22, 2021 the book contains 60 tutorials and it keeps growing.

  The intent is to create a compendium of short tutorials that each aim to solve one single problem. This way people will not have to spend a lot of time reading through pages online, or watching video after video, while figuring things out. Hopefully with the help of this book artists would spend more time creating than searching online for instructions.

Reviews

• CutefishOS: Unix-y development model? Check. macOS aesthetic? Check (if you like that sort of thing)

  One of the reasons Linux has never caught on as a desktop operating system, as Linux fans know, is that Linux isn’t a desktop operating system, it’s a kernel. And assembling it into a coherent package users can install is the job of a distribution.

  This is a very different distribution model than the one Apple or Microsoft uses, and it confuses newcomers. Windows and macOS are easier to understand, they are single things made by single companies. Canonical and Red Hat notwithstanding, Linux is not packaged and presented this way at all. I’ve long believed that this difference is one of the key stumbling blocks to wider Linux adoption.

  Apple has macOS, Microsoft has Windows, Linux has… hundreds of awkward, confusingly named options.

  This is both Linux’s greatest strength, and its greatest weakness. For those who already understand and use it the options are welcome. I’ve been a Linux user for over a decade and I’ve used several dozen distros, some of them so different from one another it’s difficult to believe they’re built from the same base. This wealth of options is great, but it’s both confusing and overwhelming for new users.

  Distributions like elementary OS are popular with people switching from macOS and Windows because elementary OS offers that same highly polished, all-in-one package that makes the transition from proprietary operating systems smoother. But this is Linux, so you can’t just have elementary OS.

  The latest distro to catch my eye is CutefishOS, which owes considerable design debt to both elementaryOS and the operating system made by that fruit company.

BSD

• MidnightBSD 2.1.0 Available to Download

  Lucas Holt has announced the release of MidnightBSD 2.1.0, the latest stable build of the project’s FreeBSD-derived operating system for desktops: “I am happy to announce the availability of MidnightBSD 2.1 for amd64 and i386.

  This is an incremental release focusing on bug fixes, improvements to the package manager and a new system compiler. LLVM updated to 10.0.1, mport 2.1.4. The majority of improvements come from the MidnightBSD package manager, mport. A number of long-standing bugs have been fixed. It now can update dependencies properly on install, update or upgrade scenarios. Previously, it would sometimes crash and force the user to do it manually. Several fixes have been made around PLIST processing. The mport utility now sets a character encoding so that extracting files with libarchive with special characters is more likely to work properly without a crash occurring. (lang/go port is a fun trigger of this bug). The libmport library no long relies on libdispatch. This is slower in a few scenarios, but most invocations are now faster as it doesn’t need to setup the thread pools or do the locking it once did.” See the release notes for a full changelog, upgrade instructions and known issues.

• MidnightBSD 2.1 Released For This Desktop-Minded BSD

  MidnightBSD 2.1 debuted this week as the latest version of one of the few desktop-focused BSD open-source operating system projects.

  MidnightBSD 2.1 updates to the (somewhat out of date still) LLVM 10.0.1 compiler stack, moves to mport 2.1.4 for a newer version of its package manager, and has a number of other bug fixes and security updates. The mport package manager update in particular should address a number of problems previously plaguing MidnightBSD users.

• MidnightBSD 2.1 Operating System Released

  There was a release of a desktop-oriented operating system MidnightBSD 2.1 , based on FreeBSD 12 with elements ported from DragonFly BSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. The basic desktop environment is built on top of GNUstep, but users have the option to install WindowMaker, GNOME, Xfce, or Lumina. A for downloading prepared 743 MB installation image ( x86 , amd64 ) has been .

  Unlike other FreeBSD desktop builds, MidnightBSD was originally developed as a fork of FreeBSD 6.1-beta, which was synchronized with the FreeBSD 7 codebase in 2011 and later incorporated many of the features from FreeBSD 9, 10, and 11. For package management MidnightBSD uses the mport system, which uses a SQLite database to store indexes and metadata. Installing, removing and searching for packages is carried out using a single command mport .

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Playing with the openqa API

  Today we are going to play a bit around with the amazing API that every openQA instance provides. The aim of this tutorial is to show how the API can be accessed using a simple language like python. More advanced topics like job posting, deletion and other methods that require authentication are possible but not covered extensively in this post. The reference for this post will be openqa.opensuse.org, but everything works pretty much with every openQA instance.

• openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the weeks 2021/38

  This week we have shipped the long-awaited glibc 2.34 update. Unfortunately, as was the case with earlier glibc updates, some containerization methods are blocking new syscalls, which can lead to issues out of the control of Tumbleweed. Our docker packages have been adjusted to handle Tumbleweed inside the containers, but many container providers might not be there yet. Besides the full rebuild snapshot with glibc, we released a total of 4 snapshots this week (0916, 0920, 0921, and 0922).

Arch Family

• Cloud Native and Arch Linux

  In this article I want to give a short overview over the current state of Arch Linux with respect to cloud native technologies. I would like to show why I think Arch Linux is perfect as a daily driver in the cloud native ecosystem and how the current state of cloud native software in Arch Linux looks like.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• Fedora Workstation: Our Vision for Linux Desktop

  So I have spoken about what is our vision for Fedora Workstation quite a few times before, but I feel it is often useful to get back to it as we progress with our overall effort.So if you read some of my blog posts about Fedora Workstation over the last 5 years, be aware that there is probably little new in here for you. If you haven’t read them however this is hopefully a useful primer on what we are trying to achieve with Fedora Workstation.

  The first few years after we launched Fedora Workstation in 2014 we focused on lot on establishing a good culture around what we where doing with Fedora, making sure that it was a good day to day desktop driver for people, and not just a great place to develop the operating system itself. I think it was Fedora Project Lead Matthew Miller who phrased it very well when he said that we want to be Leading Edge, not Bleeding Edge. We also took a good look at the operating system from an overall stance and tried to map out where Linux tended to fall short as a desktop operating system and also tried to ask ourselves what our core audience would and should be. We refocused our efforts on being a great Operating System for all kinds of developers, but I think it is fair to say that we decided that was to narrow a wording as our efforts are truly to reach makers of all kinds like graphics artists and musicians, in addition to coders. So I thought I go through our key pillar efforts and talk about where they are at and where they are going.

• Fedora 35 Workstation Installation Guide / Gnome 41 Quick Tour

  This is quick guide / tour howto install Fedora 35 Workstation / Desktop on real PC.

  Just testing Fedora 35 and everything works very smooth, even GNOME 41.0.

• Fedora Community Blog: Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2021-38

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

  Fedora Linux 35 Beta is GO!

• IBM Engineer Has Been Exploring Possible Rust Modules For GRUB

  IBM engineer Daniel Axtens presented at this week’s Linux Plumbers Conference on the prospects of using the Rust programming language for creating modules for the GRUB2 boot-loader.

  The proposal is not about rewriting GRUB2 in Rust or transitioning it in any large part to Rust, but allowing GRUB2 modules to be created in Rust if so desired by developers. Similar to the growing number of other projects adopting Rust, the motivation is on the prospects of safer code compared to C.

• Hey syadmins, what device do you update first? | Enable Sysadmin

  Undoubtedly, all the software in their house is out of date. Whether it’s a smartphone, smart TV, laptop, refrigerator, a child’s tablet, or the dreaded printer, there is always something not talking to something else. It took quite a few years for me to learn, but before I open up Wireshark to start checking dropped packets or pop open top to look around, I open something else: software updates.

• IBM’s IWB: Realizing the Economic Promise of Predictive Analytics

  Wikipedia defines predictive analytics as a set of statistical techniques, – such as data mining, business analytics, and machine learning, – “that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events.” Increasingly powerful and inexpensive computing technologies, new algorithms and models, and huge amounts of data on almost any subject have led to major advances in predictive analytics over the past two decades.

  “Worldwide revenue for ‘big data’ and business analytics solutions is forecasted to reach $274.3 billion by 2022,” wrote economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Wang Jin, and Kristina McElheran in The Power of Prediction, a research article published earlier this year. In principle, such widespread use of predictive analytics should have a positive impact of the performance of firms. “However, these investments have yet to yield productivity gains in the aggregate,” said the authors. “At the firm level, managers struggle to close the gap between the promise of predictive analytics and its performance. These concerns have been difficult to tackle empirically due to the rate of technological change and, ironically, a dearth of data.”

  To address these concerns, the authors launched a research study in collaboration with the US Census Bureau to collect information on the use of predictive analytics in a representative sample of the US manufacturing industry, – an industry that’s historically been an early adopter of leading-edge technologies.

• Fedora Magazine: PowerShell on Linux? A primer on Object-Shells [Ed: Why is Red Hat and/or Fedora pushing Microsoft lock-in so hard? This is a shot in their own foot and it is second time in a week that Fedora Magazine pushes Microsoft's PowerShell.]

• Red Hat and SAP Innovation Success Stories e-book [Ed: Who at Red Hat decided that proprietary software should be presented as "success stories"?]

• DevSecOps: 5 ways to learn more | The Enterprisers Project

  One upside of a new technology trend taking flight: A glut of new opportunities to learn about said trend usually follows.

  This often requires finding the more valuable signals amidst the noise, and that’s true with DevSecOps. There are increasingly abundant resources for learning more about DevSecOps culture and practices, enough so that it might seem tough to know where to begin.

  That’s why we’re here for you and your team. Below, we share five overlapping ways to dig into DevSecOps and learn more about this modern approach to secure applications and infrastructure.

• Containerized Python Flask development on Red Hat OpenShift | Red Hat Developer

  Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces provides developers with containerized development environments hosted on Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift. Having a hosted development environment that’s pre-built for your chosen stack and customized for your project makes onboarding new developers easier because everything they need is already running in a containerized workspace.

  In this article, I’ll show you how to use CodeReady Workspaces to get up and running quickly with a Flask-based Python project. We’ll set up the environment, make a few modifications to the application, then validate and verify the changes from within the containerized development environment.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Ubuntu Linux 21.10 ‘Impish Indri’ Beta is here

  Happy Friday, dear BetaNews readers! The weekend is almost here, so hopefully you can take some time to do the things you want to do, rather than the tasks your boss or teacher makes you do. For some, that means spending time with family, watching movies, or resting up. For nerdier people, it is an excellent time to test a Linux distribution!

  Today, Canonical releases the official beta version of the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 Linux distro. Code-named “Impish Indri,” the operating system features Linux kernel 5.13. Also notable, the Firefox browser that comes with Ubuntu 21.10 is a Snap rather than a typical deb — this may prove controversial for some.

  “Ubuntu 21.10, codenamed ‘Impish Indri,’ continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs,” says Brian Murray, Canonical.

• Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) Final Beta released

• Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) Final Beta released

• Ubuntu 21.10 Beta Week Has Started: Let’s Get To Testing – Front Page Linux

  Ubuntu 21.10 “Impish Indri” beta week just kicked off on September 23. This includes Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, and all official Ubuntu flavours.

  This is an excellent opportunity for everyone to help out. All Ubuntu users and members of Ubuntu communities can help a great deal by running tests and reporting bugs before final release. The more help we get, the better final products we will see on release day.

  A very useful list of tests needed by Ubuntu and its flavours can be found here. You can look and choose a few tests you can help us with, and use the same page to report your findings or file bugs: http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/milestones/427/builds

  Ubuntu ecosystem makes it quite easy and convenient to download beta ISOs, see which tests are needed, and how to send those test reports. But first of all, let’s see what is available here. Ubuntu ecosystem has been growing for a long time, and nowadays we have a wide variety of flavours.

• Ubuntu 21.10 Impish Indri Final Beta Released

  The Ubuntu team announced the release of Ubuntu 21.10 Beta, code name ‘Impish Indri’. The release features Linux Kernel 5.13 and GNOME 40 desktop.

  Ubuntu 21.10, codenamed “Impish Indri”, continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

• Ubuntu 21.10 Beta Available to Download – itsfoss.net

  Brian Murray has announced the release of a new development snapshot of Ubuntu. The project has published Ubuntu 21.10 Beta which showcases the technology of the upcoming release of 21.10.

  “The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the Beta release of the Ubuntu 21.10 Desktop, Server, and Cloud products. Ubuntu 21.10, codenamed “Impish Indri”, continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs. This Beta release includes images from not only the Ubuntu Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, but also the Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu flavours.”

• Ubuntu 21.10 Beta Available to Download with GNOME 40 – LinuxStoney

  A beta release of the Ubuntu 21.10 “Impish Indri” Beta Available to Download with GNOME 40, The release is scheduled for October 14th. Ready test images created for Ubuntu, Ubuntu Server , Lubuntu , Kubuntu , Ubuntu Mate , Ubuntu Budgie , Ubuntu Studio , Xubuntu, and UbuntuKylin (China Edition).

• Ubuntu Studio 21.10 Beta Released – Ubuntu Studio

  The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Studio 21.10, codenamed “Impish Indri”.

  While this beta is reasonably free of any showstopper DVD build or installer bugs, you may find some bugs within. This image is, however, reasonably representative of what you will find when Ubuntu Studio 21.10 is released on October 21, 2021.

  Please note: Due to the change in desktop environment, directly upgrading to Ubuntu Studio 21.10 from 20.04 LTS is not supported and will not be supported. However, upgrades from Ubuntu Studio 21.04 will be supported. See the Release Notes for more information.

• Kubuntu Impish Indri (21.10) Beta Released

  The Beta of Impish Indri (to become 21.10 in October) has now been released, and is available for download.

  This milestone features images for Kubuntu and other Ubuntu flavours.

• Ubuntu Blog: Bare metal cloud support for Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 LTS

  Whether you’re running a small or a large fleet of servers in your bare metal cloud, it’s crucial to have a way to ensure consistency and repeatability across them – not only to save time on wondering what the state of a particular machine is (and it’s operating system), but also for security reasons.

  With the Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) phase of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and 16.04 LTS, it’s worthwhile highlighting that MAAS provides automated OS image synchronisation – including for these releases as well as many others.

• Design and Web team summary – 10 September 2021

  The Web and design team at Canonical run two-week iterations building and maintaining all of the Canonical websites and product web interfaces. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.

Jetson Xavier NX and Nano carriers include a model with 5x SATA ports

Seeed has launched a pair of Leetop carrier boards for the Jetson Xavier NX and Nano: a $349 “A205” with 5x SATA, 5x USB, 2x GbE, and 6x CSI lanes, and a compact, $179 “A203” board with 40-pin GPIO.

Seeed is selling a pair of carrier boards from China-based Leetop that both support the Nvidia Jetson Nano and Jetson Xavier NX. The full-featured, $349 A205 board ships on Oct. 16, and the $179, ready-to-deploy A203 is available Sep. 30.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Arduino Nicla Sense ME makes sense of the world | Arduino Blog

  Nicla is Arduino Pro’s new family of modular, intelligent products that are easy to use, versatile and accessible – whether you are an advanced user working on industrial applications or a budding maker looking to prototype your first intelligent solution. No wonder it’s named after the Greek word for “victory of the people!”

  To herald the range, we have just released the Nicla Sense ME: a tiny but mighty board, co-developed with Bosch Sensortec to enable sensing and intelligence on the edge. With low-power sensors, a high-performance processor and small footprint, it offers a winning combination that can answer our community’s and clients’ needs and open up to opportunities for infinite new solutions.

• Captivating Clock Puts Endangered Displays On Display | Hackaday

  When you have a small stock of vacuum fluorescent displays (VFDs) straight out of the 1976 Radio Shack catalog, you might sit around wondering what to do with them. When [stepawayfromthegirls] found out that his stash of seven DT-1704A tubes may be the last in existence, there was no question. They must be displayed! [stepawayfromthegirls]’ mode of display is this captivating clock build. Four VFDs with their aqua colored elements are set against a black background in a bespoke wooden case. Looking under the hood, the beauty only increases.

• The first Arduino Education Inspiration Lab

  Arduino Education is delighted to announce its very first Inspiration Lab, in partnership with Technobel in Belgium.

• Open Source Autopilot For Cheap Trolling Motors

  Quiet electric trolling motors are great for gliding into your favorite fishing spot but require constant correction if wind and water currents are at play. As an alternative to expensive commercial GPS-guided trolling motors, [AlexAsplund] created Vanchor, an open source system for adding autopilot to a cheap trolling motor.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Google’s Android Auto Adding New Features for Phones and Cars

• How to view your Android notification history | Android Central

• Why and How to Set Up Emergency Rescue Contact Info on Android Phone – Dignited

• How To Take A Long Screenshot In Chrome On Android

• 5 Features Still Missing in iPhone 13 But Are On Android Phones – Dignited

• Top 10 Best Subtitle Apps To Enjoy Movies of Any Language

• Google is bringing Android closer to the Linux kernel | TechRadar

• Wallpaper Engine is a popular live background tool that’s making its way from Steam to Android

• Android 13 “Tiramisu” is adding support for another private DNS standard

Why Do Companies Still Have a Fear of Open Source?

Open Source Software, since its birth, has made people wonder about its effects. The debate is never-ending, and for the right reasons. Giants like Apple have often viewed Open Source skeptically because they are mostly unfounded. However, one cannot deny that these sources are functional and flexible. They are also partly responsible for bringing the technological world in the right direction. But are they worth it? In this article, we shall learn all about open source companies and why use open source software, and why open source software is still not greeted warmly by certain companies. Therefore, without further ado, let’s start right away.

Events

• Samuel Iglesias: X.Org Developers Conference 2021

  Last week we had our most loved annual conference: X.Org Developers Conference 2021. As a reminder, due to COVID-19 situation in Europe (and its respective restrictions on travel and events), we kept it virtual again this year… which is a pity as the former venue was Gdańsk, a very beautiful city (see picture below if you don’t believe me!) in Poland. Let’s see if we can finally have an XDC there!

  [...]

  Big shout-out to the XDC 2021 organizers (Intel) represented by Radosław Szwichtenberg, Ryszard Knop and Maciej Ramotowski. They did an awesome job on having a very smooth conference. I can tell you that they promptly fixed any issue that happened, all of that behind the scenes so that the attendees not even noticed anything most of the times! That is what good conference organizers do!

• Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021

  This month has been nothing short of hectic, with back to back to back conferences filling up the calendar. Following Linaro Virual Connect, XDC, and Linux Plumbers (which ends today), Collaborans will be attending (virtually) next week’s Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021.

  Connecting the open source ecosystem under one roof, the conference is “a unique environment for cross-collaboration between developers, sysadmins, devops, architects and others who are driving technology forward”. Taking place from September 27-30, the event will be held in a hybrid format for the first time, with both in-person and virtual offerings, to ensure that everyone who wants to participate is able to do so.

Web Browsers

• Chromium

  • Google Releases Security Updates for Chrome

    Google has released Chrome version 94.0.4606.61 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses a vulnerability—CVE-2021-37973—that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system. An exploit for this vulnerability exists in the wild.

  • Google Chrome 94 Released with Sharing Hub feature

    Google has unveiled the release of the Chrome 94 web browser . At the same time , a stable release of the free Chromium 94 project is available , which serves as the basis for Chrome. The Chrome browser is distinguished by the use of Google logos, the presence of a system for sending notifications in case of a crash, modules for playing protected video content (DRM), a system for automatically installing updates and transmitting RLZ parameters when searching . The next release of Chrome 95 is scheduled for October 19th.

    Starting with the release of Chrome 94, development has been moved to a new release cycle. Significant new releases will now be published every 4 weeks, rather than every 6 weeks, to accelerate the delivery of new features to users. It is noted that the optimization of the release preparation process and the improvement of the testing system make it possible to generate releases more often without compromising quality. For enterprises and for those who need more time to update, once every 8 weeks, the Extended Stable edition will be released separately, which will allow you to switch to new functional releases not once every 4 weeks, but once every 8 weeks.

FSF

• GNU Projects

  • Subject: coreutils-9.0 released [stable]

    This is to announce coreutils-9.0, a stable release.
    
    This is a new major release, with these significant changes:
      - cp has changed how it handles data
        - enables CoW by default (through FICLONE ioctl),
        - uses copy offload where available (through copy_file_range),
        - detects holes differently (though SEEK_HOLE)
        - This also applies to mv and install.
    
      - utilities are more tuned to the hardware available
        - wc uses avx2 instructions to count lines
        - cksum uses pclmul instructions for --algorithm=crc
    
      - More amalgamation of utilities
        - cksum now supports the -a option to select any digest.
        - This is the preferred interface, rather than sha*sum etc.
        - This is similar to the amalgamation of encoding utilities
          introduced in the basenc command in v8.31.
    See the NEWS below for more details.
    
    Thanks to everyone who has contributed!
    There have been 257 commits by 25 people in the 81 weeks since 8.32
      Andreas Schwab (1)              KOBAYASHI Takashi (2)
      Arman Absalan (1)               Kamil Dudka (4)
      Assaf Gordon (1)                Kristoffer Brånemyr (3)
      Ben Pfaff (1)                   Nikolay Nechaev (1)
      Benno Schulenberg (1)           Nishant Nayan (1)
      Bernhard Voelker (17)           Paul Eggert (97)
      Carl Edquist (2)                Pádraig Brady (110)
      Emanuele Giacomelli (1)         Tianjia Zhang (1)
      Erik Auerswald (1)              Tim Gates (1)
      Grigorii Sokolik (2)            Tobias Stoeckmann (1)
      Jason Kim (1)                   Zorro Lang (1)
      Jim Meyering (7)                nl6720 (1)
      Justin Tracey (1)
    
    Pádraig [on behalf of the coreutils maintainers]
    
    ==================================================================
    
    Here is the GNU coreutils home page:
    
    https://gnu.org/software/coreutils/
    
    For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
    
    https://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=shortlog;h=v9.0
    
    or run this command from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
       git shortlog v8.32..v9.0
    
    To summarize the 1615 gnulib-related changes, run these commands
    from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
       git checkout v9.0
       git submodule summary v8.32
    
    ==================================================================
    
    
    Here are the compressed sources:
      https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.0.tar.gz   (14MB)
      https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.0.tar.xz   (5.4MB)
    
    Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
    
    https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.0.tar.gz.sig
    
    
    https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.0.tar.xz.sig
    
    Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
    
    https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
    
    Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:
    
    027a318930f295cb5bbc0dd06fb47a3b8552fc80  coreutils-9.0.tar.gz
    b9TriKUVAEl3/HLX9HtAYgQJzEHfrwBBn90b4XZjxDQ  coreutils-9.0.tar.gz
    e2623469f37259d4a89ced5f91af5eaf0ab8792d  coreutils-9.0.tar.xz
    zjCs30pBvFuzDdlV6eqnX6IWtOPesIiJ7TJDPHs7l84  coreutils-9.0.tar.xz
    
    The SHA256 checksum is base64 encoded, instead of the
    hexadecimal encoding that most checksum tools default to.
    
    [*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
    .sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
    and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:
    
      gpg --verify coreutils-9.0.tar.gz.sig
    
    If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
    then run this command to import it:
    
      gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys DF6FD971306037D9
    
    and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.
    
    This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
      Autoconf 2.71
      Automake 1.16.4
      Gnulib v0.1-4937-g9aca7b673
      Bison 3.7.4
    

  • coreutils-9.0 released

    The GNU Core Utilities (coreutils) has announced the release of version 9.0 of “the basic file, shell and text manipulation utilities” used by the GNU operating system and various Linux distributions. In the year and a half or so since the last major release (8.32), various new features were added, including…

  • GNU Coreutils 9.0: cp Now Enables CoW By Default + Copy Offload, wc Now Uses AVX2

    Coreutils 9.0 is now available and it’s a significant update to this collection of common open-source utilities found on effectively all Linux systems.

    First up, the widely-used cp utility for copying files/directories has some notable changes. With Coreutils 9.0, cp now enables copy-on-write (CoW) support by default using the FICLONE ioctl. Additionally, cp now uses copy-offload where possible by means of the copy_file_range system call. The cp command also now detects holes differently, among other changes. These cp changes also apply to the mv and install utilities too.

Programming/Development

• New tool: an nginx playground

  On Wednesday I was talking to a friend about how it would be cool to have an nginx playground website where you can just paste in an nginx config and test it out. And then I realized it might actually be pretty easy to build, so got excited and started coding and I built it.

• C++

  • Next generation of IBM C/C++ and Fortran compilers are now available on IBM AIX – IBM Developer

    In February 2020, IBM announced the intention to adopt open source LLVM infrastructure for the next generation of IBM XL C/C++ and Fortran compilers. As an active sponsor and strong supporter of LLVM, IBM is committed to bring the benefits and innovations from the LLVM community to our enterprise clients.

    With the launch of IBM Power10, the IBM XL C/C++ and Fortran compilers have been modernized and now rebranded to IBM Open XL C/C++ for AIX and IBM Open XL Fortran for AIX. IBM Open XL C/C++ and Fortran for AIX 17.1.0 combine Clang/LLVM technology with IBM’s industry-leading optimizations.

  • C++ String to double Conversion

    in C++, you will not end up with 49.12. In fact, the compiler should issue an error message. To have the result, 49.12, “14.25” has to be converted to a number type of double or float, and “34.87” has to be converted to a number type of double or float.

    The title of this tutorial is “C++ String to Double Conversion”. Is your aim to convert string to double; or to do all of the following, which are related?

  • C++ string append

    The word “append” means to add something at the back of another thing. A string can be declared in C++ in two main ways. Declaring a string as an array-of-chars or as a constant-pointer-to-chars is one way. Instantiating a string object data structure from the string class is another way. To instantiate a string object from the string class, the C++ string library has to be included in the program.

  • C++ String trim Methods

    C++ does not have a function to trim a string. There is a subject in computer programming called, Regular Expressions, abbreviated regex. This subject has schemes, which enable the programmer to search for a sub-string in a target string and replace the sub-string found. The sub-string found can be replaced with nothing, and so erasing it.

    The search-and-replace with nothing idea can be used to trim a string. So look for all white space characters in front of the string and all white-space characters behind the string, and replace them with nothing. Luckily, C++ has a regex library, which has to be included in the program to do this.

  • C++ String Replace

    C++ String Replace deals with locating a particular sub-string in a target string and then replacing it. A string can be created in two main ways: using a constant character pointer (char array) or instantiating it from the string class. The string class has a replace() member function. This does the locating and replacement. Locating and replacing is done with instantiated string objects and not strings created using a constant character pointer.

    The string object is a data structure, and its main component is a list. Each cell of this list has a character. The total sequence of characters forms the literal string. Each character position can be accessed by an index or by an iterator. Index counting begins from zero. An iterator is an elaborated pointer.

    The C+ string class has different variants of the replace() member function. Such a set of functions are called overloaded functions. This article explains how to use different overloaded string replace() member functions.

• Python

  • Pandas to check cell value is NaN

    The main documentation of the pandas is saying null values are missing values. We can denote the missing or null values as NaN in the pandas as most developers do. The NaN and None keywords are both used by developers to show the missing values in the dataframe. The best thing in the pandas is that it treats both NaN and None similarly. To check the missing value of a cell, pandas.notnull will return False in both cases of NaN and None if the cell has NaN or None.

    So, in this article, we will explore different methods to check whether a particular cell value is null or not (NaN or None).

• Raku and Perl

  • gfldex: Convolution

    Flavio wrote a straightforward solution to PWC-131-1 and wondered if there is a idiomatic way. Assuming, that “idiomatic” means to use language features which lesser languages refuse to require, I’m happy to deliver convoluted code.

  • Perl Weekly Challenge 131: Consecutive Arrays

    These are some answers to task 1 of the Week 131 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

    Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on September 26, 2021 at 24:00). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

  • My Favorite Modules: if | Tom Wyant [blogs.perl.org]

    My blog post My Favorite Warnings: redundant and missing touched on the use of the if module. Comments on that post made me think it deserved a top-level treatment, expanding on (though not necessarily improving on) Aristotle’s comment.

Yikes! You Call That a Pencil?

The mergers and acquisitions aspect of 1980s corporate culture made some strange bedfellows among companies. While this era gave us some now commonly known hyphenated companies, like Time Warner…

Hardware

• Told You!

  I predict the ARM deal for NVidia will fall through, due to the anti-competitive advantage it would provide them & a Monopolistic advantage at that. I highly doubt I am wrong,

• This (Obsolete Technology) Museum is (Not) Obsolete

  You know, we’re not sure how this escaped our attention for so long. Blame it on the summer heat. Did you know that [Look Mum No Computer] opened a museum of obsolete technology a few weeks ago?

• Making A Metal Hand Doorknob | Hackaday

  The finished piece looks great attached to a door knob, and we’re sure it’s quite satisfying shaking hands with your hefty metal self every time you open the door. It bears noting that the same techniques can be used with 3D printing, too! If you pull off your own great home casting project, be sure to drop us a line. Video after the break.

• Handheld Bot Takes The Tedium Out Of Guitar Tuning | Hackaday

  Luckily, technology can come to the rescue in the form of this handy open-source automatic guitar tuner by [Guyrandy Jean-Gilles]. The tuner has a Raspberry Pi Pico inside, with a microphone attached to the ADC. The program running on the Pico listens for the sound of a plucked string and determines whether the note is sharp or flat. The Pico then drives a small DC gear motor in the appropriate direction, which turns the peg the right way to bring the string into tune. The tuner makes ample use of 3D-printed parts, STLs for which are included in the project repo. [Guyrandy] has also made some updates to the project to make the tuner a little easier to use.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Found a hidden malware on Windows… in Linux? [Ed: This is a Windows problem; WSL is just Microsoft’s attack on GNU/Linux; The solution to WSL/WSL2 woes is to delete Windows completely and install/use the real thing.]

    This strange weird world of computing continues to amaze us. From ‘s Microsoft love of all that is open-source to the publication of Edge on Linux , these two worlds – once poles apart and with great feuds between their users – are increasingly mixing.

    But you have to be careful to mix things up, especially when you can’t have 100% control between the two cohabiting environments.

    [...]

    Black Lotus Labs recommends that you enable and monitor the WSL system, if you have it installed, at the time to check for suspicious activity. While waiting for this new attack vehicle to be detected as well.

  • A New Bug in Microsoft Windows Could Let Hackers Easily Install a Rootkit

  • Google Warns of a New Way Hackers Can Make Malware Undetectable on Windows

  • NYT Crossword Decision Puzzles Many | Hackaday

    Central to this issue are Across Lite .puz files, a format which hasn’t been upgraded in twenty years. Despite being aged and proprietary, an entire community of solvers, developers and checkers has sprung up around the availability of puz files, making them a de-facto standard. Not only are puz files used to distribute daily crosswords, the NYT maintains an archive of all its crosswords in puz format going back to 1993, even before online puzzles were introduced. There are various newer formats floating around, but with the entrenchment of the puz format none has emerged as a clear winner. The Across Lite team even developed a new format at the request of NYT in back 2015, but strangely, the NYT has never used it.

    [...]

    Based on the information made available so far, several things don’t make sense to many in the community. Why the sudden notice, and not a transition period to give the community time to make an orderly transition to this new “something”? Why is the archive of puz files being removed, given that the problem is with preparing puz formatted files, not maintaining them? Almost overnight, scripts have popped up to convert the NYT website crossword into puz format, and similar scripts have been around for some time. This begs the question, just how difficult is it to prepare puz files? And other than printing your puzzle on paper, this announcement ends the ability to solve puzzles offline, such as when you’re flying.

    Many third-party puzzle app and program developers have reached out to Ms. Mason asking that she reconsider.

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Cloud, Linux Top List of Open-Source Skills Desired by Companies [Ed: By Microsoft Nick]

          What kind of open-source skills do companies actually want technologists to possess? That’s a key question for technologists who are trying to deepen their open-source knowledge; after all, they don’t have time to learn everything out there.

        • Linux Foundation Announces 2 Millionth Course Enrollment On edX Learning Platform

          The Linux Foundation has announced that there have been two million enrollments to date across all of its online courses offered on the edX platform. These open source training courses have continually increasing rates of enrollment growth as the curriculum continues to expand, with offerings covering technologies like cloud infrastructure, blockchain, networking, and DevOps.

        • Results from the 2021 Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board election [Ed: Microsoft inside the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board, still]

          This year’s election for the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory
          Board had 1012 authorized voters; 237 of them cast ballots.
          The results were:

          1. Greg-KH
          2. Jonathan Corbet
          3. Steven Rostedt
          4. Theodore Ts’o
          5. Sasha Levin
          —
          6. Dave Hansen
          7. Kent Overstreet
          8. Dave Taht

          The top five will serve two-year terms on the TAB.

          Thank you to all the candidates for their nominations and to everyone
          for voting.

          If you have any questions please reach out to
          tab-elections@lists.linuxfoundation.org

          Thanks,
          Laura

        • Results from the 2021 Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board election

          The 2021 election for the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory board resulted in all five incumbent members (Greg Kroah-Hartman, Jonathan Corbet, Steven Rostedt, Ted Ts’o, and Sasha Levin) being re-elected. Of the 1,012 developers authorized to vote, 237 actually cast ballots.

  • Security

    • 5 current topics for research paper about Linux cybersecurity

      Are you a student who is studying data security in college? Are you looking for ideas for your research paper about Linux cybersecurity? You’ve come to the right place. In this article, we will talk about five current topics for a research paper on Linux cybersecurity, as well as how to approach each of them. Being a student who wants to pursue academic success is not something unnatural.

      However, along this journey, there could be many setbacks and obstacles to overcome. But these challenges will help you become better at this topic, especially because it is of high importance. As technology evolves even more, new software products, apps, websites appear.

      And so, it is increasing the possibility of a hacker attack, identity theft, and many other cyberattacks that can happen online. So, discussing Linux security in your research paper is essential, and here are five current topics.

    • This Week in Security: Somebody’s Watching, Microsoft + Linux, DDoS

      Last week we talked about the simple-to-exploit vulnerability in the Open Management Infrastructure, commonly installed on Linux VMs hosted in the Azure cloud. Botnets are already scanning the internet for vulnerable machines, and installing malware. The primary payload seems to be a Mirai variant, which among other things closes the vulnerable ports upon infection. Even though your VM doesn’t currently expose OMI to the internet, it may already be compromised. According to Caddo Security, there still haven’t been any automatic updates pushed to fix vulnerable servers, so unless a VM was manually updated last week, it should probably be assumed to be compromised at this point if it has OMI installed. This has the potential to be quite a big problem.

    • Security updates for Friday

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (mupdf), Fedora (ghostscript, gifsicle, and ntfs-3g), openSUSE (kernel and nodejs14), and SUSE (curl, ffmpeg, gd, hivex, kernel, nodejs14, python-reportlab, sqlite3, and xen).

    • The Proliferation of Zero-days

Defence/Aggression

• Invisible Enemies: Parallels Between the Anthrax Attacks and Covid-19

• 9/11 and Anthrax 20 Years On with Graeme MacQueen

  Whitney is joined by author, academic and researcher Graeme MacQueen to reflect on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 and anthrax attacks, why those events still matter today and why there remains such a stigma in many circles when it comes to questioning the official stories of those events.

• Hong Kong’s uncertain tech future

  Previously an entrepôt for western technology firms, the city-state is being bound ever closer to the economy of mainland China.

  Every morning the planes from Hong Kong touch down at London Heathrow, quickly disgorging their complement of passengers into the arrivals hall before refuelling their spent engines. Clutching British National (Overseas) passports, the line of travellers that begins to snake from border control is a testament to a new and sudden migration from this former colony to former colonizer. For almost all of these people, an uncertain future in the UK is preferable to the growing sense of political repression in Hong Kong.

  Almost 65,000 Hong Kongers have applied to settle in the UK this year, out of an eligible 5.4 million people. As a result, the city’s labour pool is beginning to dry up. “Go to schools and they’re saying they’re losing students because of immigration,” says Charles Mok, a former legislator for Hong Kong’s IT sector and now director of the think tank Tech for Good Asia. Recent figures suggest the city’s population has dropped by 1.2% in just one year. “That exodus of talent is huge, and it’s difficult for companies. Many of them are losing their employees in many sectors, including IT, including banking.”

Finance

• Bruce Schneier: I Am Not Satoshi Nakamoto

  For the record, I am not Satoshi Nakamoto. I suppose I could have invented the bitcoin protocols, but I wouldn’t have done it in secret. I would have drafted a paper, showed it to a lot of smart people, and improved it based on their comments. And then I would have published it under my own name. Maybe I would have realized how dumb the whole idea is. I doubt I would have predicted that it would become so popular and contribute materially to global climate change. In any case, I did nothing of the sort.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Facebook Oversight Board’s Palestine decision: right direction, not enough

  The Facebook Oversight Board’s latest decision on the platforms’s unjustified removal of news content related to the recent bout of violence in Palestine and Israel is welcomed, but not enough.

  “The details of the Oversight Board’s first MENA case affirms, once again, that Facebook’s arbitrary and non-transparent decisions are a feature, not a bug,” said Marwa Fatafta, MENA Policy Manager at Access Now. “We support the Board’s decision on this occasion, but demand accountability, transparency, and assurance that blatant censorship and disrespect for a people, a language, and a complex social context will never put us in this situation again.”

  On May 10, 2021, a Facebook user in Egypt shared a news item from news platform, Al Jazeera, which contained a threat of violence by a Qassam Brigades spokesperson. Facebook initially removed the content after being reviewed by two content moderators for violating its Community Standard on Dangerous People and Organizations. Although Facebook restored the content, this is emblematic of Facebook’s systematic overenforcement of this Community Standard, particularly in relation to Arab and Muslim communities.

• Canada’s online censorship plan endangers free expression – Access Now

  Today, Access Now urged the Canadian government to ensure its plan to address harmful content online complies with international human rights standards. The current online censorship proposal is an attack on freedom of expression.

Monopolies

• Microsoft is heading for a new antitrust showdown

  In July 2021, the UK government invited startups, businesses, and policymakers to a consultation about the most pressing competition problems in the tech industry, ahead of the launch of its new Digital Market Unit (DMU). One person familiar with the discussions says that something odd was happening behind closed doors. In private discussions entrepreneurs claimed Microsoft was behaving in a way they thought was detrimental to healthy competition; yet none dared to publicly call Microsoft out in the consultation.

  Most startups complained about Microsoft’s tendency to “bundle” new features in its products that directly competed with the startups’ core creations. But the source says startup founders were too scared of Microsoft’s reaction to go public with their gripes. The founder of an enterprise software startup said that Microsoft would “absolutely kill” their business if they spoke out, the source claims– implying that they feared the tech giant would make their products incompatible with Microsoft’s software ecosystem.

  The DMU consultation is slated to conclude on October 1 – whether any British startup will publicly denounce Microsoft is anyone’s guess.

  The episode is indicative of an ongoing shift. While Microsoft has been largely absent from heated discussions about Big Tech’s anticompetitive practices for nearly a decade, new entrants are increasingly worried – if not necessarily vocal – about the company’s dominance in both the enterprise software and cloud domains. Regulators in the UK and Europe might soon start taking notice of that, too.

  In the past, Microsoft’s tendency to bundle its software products – such as browsers and media players – together in a way that was considered damaging to competition was slapped down by the EU with multimillionaire fines. But since 2014, under the stewardship of CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has managed to pull off two great pivots. First, it swore off a software licence model in favour of Office 365’s cloud-based subscription-based model. Then it restyled itself as a tranquil benevolent actor, a far cry from both the second-wave tech giants routinely on the front pages of newspapers for data gluttony and fake news, and Microsoft’s own cutthroat reputation of yore. But several companies, especially in the less headline-grabbing b2b sector where Microsoft is king, think that it has not really changed.

• Patents

  • Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court – finally happening? [Ed: More fake news from Team UPC, hoping that by lying to people they can make something impossible and illegal magically come about (also, they pay the Web sites to help spread lies)]

    The project to establish a Unitary Patent in Europe and a Unified Patent Court to handle patent infringement litigation for European patents is underway again. After several years’ further delay due to constitutional challenges in Germany, progress towards setting up this project, 40 years in the making, is again resuming. The Preparatory Committee expects the Court to open for cases in mid-2022.

  • ZTE reportedly goes on the offense, sues unnamed Chinese smartphone maker over 4G standard-essential patents: possibly Tinno or Transsion?

    The Wechat platform may be an unusual place for patent litigation information to leak, but that’s what just happened. According to this Chinese article, Chinese smartphone maker ZTE has brought a 4G standard-essential patent (SEP) case against a fellow Chinese device maker in Shenzhen. The defendant has not been announced yet–and according to the article may not even have been served yet.

    Rumor (on the same webpage) has it that ZTE is suing a company with a small market share in China but a much larger one abroad. If true, that would rule out companies like Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus. The more likely targets would then be Tinno Mobile, which is known as a contract manufacturer (Original Device Manufacturer, “OD”M) but also owns a French device maker named Wiko, or Transsion, which is huge in Africa and has a presence in South Asia. Transsion’s brands include Tecno, Itel, and Infinix.

    A recent ruling by the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) of the People’s Republic of China” laid out the criteria for Chinese jurisdictions over a global SEP dispute. At a conference hosted by Renmin University of China, IP-specialized judges discussed that case in a wider context. While it weighs in favor of Chinese jurisdiction over a worldwide FRAND matter if the implementer generates a high percentage of its worldwide sales in China, it is not an absolute requirement as other factors, particularly where products are developed and manufactured, are also considered in the Chinese judiciary’s very case-specific and fact-intensive decisions.

  • Vizio sued for TV display patent infringement
    

    According to Reuters, Maxell has alleged that Vizio infringed on a patent that includes the ability to display content from certain sources via USB, wireless adapters or digital broadcast signals. The case also accuses Vizio of infringing on a patent around the upscaling of images and image-processing technology.

    The company acquired the patents from Hitachi in 2009, and licences them along with other patents to consumer electronics brands.

    The complaint goes on to claim that Vizio had been aware of the patent portfolio since 2013 when it entered an agreement with Hitachi while being aware that two of its suppliers have licensed Maxell’s patents.

  • IPKat in conversation with Tim Moss, CEO of the UK IPO [Ed: Pushing the "Hey Hi" agenda in the context of patents is a big jar of worms. Also, UK-IPO-connected delegates opposed EPO corruption until Tim Moss was shoehorned into this role]

    This Kat was delighted to have the opportunity to chat with Tim Moss, Chief Executive Officer and Comptroller General of the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO), on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI).

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Older AMD graphics cards get ray tracing support in Linux

    The open source Mesa graphics library, which implements the OpenGL and Vulkan APIs for Linux, has received an update that brings ray tracing support to AMD GPUs that lack hardware ray tracing accelerators.

Instructionals/Technical

• A different take on the NUMA OOM killer story

  I was digging through some notes on old outages tonight and found something potentially useful for other people. It’s something I have mentioned before, but it seems like maybe that post didn’t have enough specifics to make it really “land” when someone else does a web search.

  So, in the hopes of spreading some knowledge, here is a little story about a crashy service.

• Installing a Commercial SSL Server Certificate (nginx)

  Since CACert still isn’t “Browser Trusted”, and I still don’t want to use letsencrypt, I decided to give this a try. The company resides inside the European Union and is the cheapest I could find.

• Installing a Commercial SSL Server Certificate (nginx) | dt.iki.fi

  Since CACert still isn’t “Browser Trusted”, and I still don’t want to use letsencrypt, I decided to give this a try. The company resides inside the European Union and is the cheapest I could find.

Games

• Metal Raspberry Pi Arcade Controller is as Cool as it is Shiny

  This setup is designed to connect to an external display and has female RCA jacks accessible on the back for video output. There are 8 metal buttons on the right-hand side of the controller with a custom joystick made from 16mm aluminum bar stock on the left. Illuminating the edges and matching the controller with his previous creations is a glowing display of orange LED strips.

• Linux Gamers Can Finally Play Games like Apex Legends, Fortnite, Thanks to Easy Anti-Cheat Support – It’s FOSS News

  Epic Games adds complete Linux support for its Easy-Anti Cheat service, along with official SteamPlay (or Proton) and Wine compatibility.

  Even though we expected this to happen sometime in the future, the introduction of Steam Deck changed the scene for gaming on Linux.

• Online co-op still planned for Children of Morta shown in new video plus free update | GamingOnLinux

  The awesome looking Children of Morta from Dead Mage and 11 bit studios has been out for some time now and the developer is still hacking away at getting online co-op working.

  It’s a feature that has been promised for some time but years after release we’re still waiting. In a fresh update the developer mentioned how they’re working “diligently” on it and they’re aware of ” how disappointing and difficult such a long wait has been”. Turns out they’ve found it more difficult and time-consuming than expected but to keep us going they’ve released a new video showing off an Alpha video to show it off:

• Stone Story continues being the absolute coolest ASCII-art adventure with the Quest Update | GamingOnLinux

  Stone Story RPG is an absolutely brilliant auto-RPG adventure game that has animated ASCII artwork and a big update just dropped to expand the experience. It continues to be my favourite ASCII styled game. You’ve played clickers and idle games before but nothing quite like this I’m sure.

  The game is set in a “dark and ominous world” where you go off on a quest to find 9 magical Soul Stones. You do this by repeatedly exploring areas to gather resources, fight, build things and unlock new areas. For a game with retro ASCII styling, it’s incredibly atmospheric. A big part of it is that you have no direct character control.

  A big Quest Update has rolled out with four all-new adventures and the developer promises that the content included “is only the beginning” with something new planned to be added each week.

• Urtuk: The Desolation gets a big free content boost | GamingOnLinux

  Urtuk: The Desolation is a low-fantasy, open world, tactical turn-based RPG that released back in February and it’s back with a big free upgrade for all players.

  Continuing to find lots of fans it’s still sat happily with a Very Positive rating from well over a thousand user reviews on Steam, so it’s not surprising to see the developer continuing to upgrade it. The developer says it’s a “DLC” but really it’s just a standard update. The new version includes a whole new faction, a new biome, 30 minutes of new music, new events, new items, new objectives, boss maps, new game mechanics and a whole lot of improvements across the game. Sounds like an awesome time to jump back in for another run.

• Futex2 Linux Kernel patches get another go after feedback to help Linux gaming | GamingOnLinux

  Another day, another try and getting the long-awaited futex2 patches into the Linux Kernel with another version submitted.

  For a quick reminder: this work from Collabora is designed to help Linux gaming for both native games and Windows games run through Wine and the Steam Play Proton compatibility layers. This work was cut-down to size in the hopes of getting the simpler work actually upstreamed into the Linux Kernel.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Solus Team Plans to Exit GTK and Adopt Enlightenment Desktop (EFL)

    The unique Solus Linux project plans not to invest time and effort to GNOME desktop, instead looking ahead with Enlightenment Desktop.

  • Komikku – manga reader for GNOME

    A comic book is a magazine which consists of narrative artwork in the form of sequential images with text that represent individual scenes.

    Panels are often accompanied by brief descriptive prose and written narrative, usually dialog contained in word balloons emblematic of the comics art form. Comics are used to tell a story, and are published in a number of different formats including comic strips, comic books, webcomics, Manga, and graphic novels. Some comics have been published in a tabloid form. The largest comic book market is Japan.

    Komikku is a GTK-based manga reader for GNOME. The application is is written in Python.

Distributions

• BSD

  • It’s probably not the hardware, a sysadmin lesson

    Once we noticed this, we flailed around looking at various things and wound up reforming the machine’s NTP setup to be more standard (it was different for historical reasons). But nothing cured the problem, and last night its clock wound up seriously off again. After all of this we started suspecting that there was something wrong with the machine’s hardware, or perhaps with its BIOS settings (I theorized wildly that the BIOS was setting it to go into a low power mode that OpenBSD’s timekeeping didn’t cope with).

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu 21.10 Beta Released

    Canonical has released the final beta of next month’s Ubuntu 21.10 “Impish Indri” release.

    Ubuntu 21.10 Beta is out ahead of the planned stable release on 14 October. There are 21.10 beta releases out for the Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, UbuntuKylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu.

    Ubuntu 21.10 is powered by the Linux 5.13 kernel (sadly not 5.14), upgrades to the GCC 11 compiler along with other toolchain updates, and has a wealth of other improvements. On the desktop side, Ubuntu 21.10 features GNOME 40.

  • Ubuntu 21.10 ‘Impish Indri’ Beta Released! Here’s What’s New

    Canonical has released a beta version of the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 ‘Impish Indri.’ A stable release is scheduled for October 14 this year. In this article, let’s look at the new features and changes in Impish Indri.

    Before we begin, here’s the link to the official Beta ISO of Ubuntu 21.10. Make sure to put it on download while we take you on a tour of what’s new in the build.

  • Help make the next Ubuntu version awesome with the final Ubuntu 21.10 Beta released

    Ubuntu 21.10 Beta is one of the final steps before the next release of this very popular Linux distribution. It’s time to get testing and reporting issues to ensure it’s a good one.

    One of the big highlight changes is the upgrade to GNOME 40, with all the design changes there like the new Activities Overview, workspaces are arranged horizontally and the overview and app grid are accessed vertically. With a little Ubuntu flavour of course thanks to Canonical continuing to include a dock on the left side of the screen.

    They’ve also enabled Wayland support with NVIDIA drivers, PulseAudio upgrades with support for bluetooth LDAC and AptX bluetooth and HFP profiles, upgrades to lots of the main applications like Firefox 92, LibreOffice 7.2.1 and Thunderbird 91.1.1.

Devices/Embedded

• SolidSense N8 IoT Compact gateway supports Wirepas Massive

  SolidRun “SolidSense N8 IoT Compact” is a Linux Edge gateway based on NXP i.MX 8M Nano Solo processor that offers Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 5, Bluetooth 5.0, and optional 4G LTE Cat 4 & GPS connectivity, plus Wirepas Massive (previously Wirepas Mesh networking) via a module based on Nordic Semi nRF52832 wireless Cortex-M4 microcontroller.

  The gateway comes with 1GB RAM, 8GB storage, offers optional RS485 and CAN interfaces, and targets IoT applications such as smart metering, automation, asset tracking, safety & security, and smart buildings.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • The Official Raspberry Pi Handbook 2022

  • European Processor Initiative Receives First EPAC RISC-V Sample Chips for Testing

    And today, the project has delivered its promises as the very first batch of chips are being tested in EPI’s labs. The RISC-V processors are designs containing multiple special-purpose accelerators, all centered around the RSIC-V ISA and its design principles. The processor contains four tiles of Vector Processing Units (VPUs) made up from Avispado RISC-V core designed by SemiDynamics, and vector processing elements design by Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the University of Zagreb. In each tile, there are home nodes and L2 cache for cache systems, which are the contributions of Chalmers and FORTH. For additional acceleration, there are Stencil and Tensor accelerators (STX) engineered by Fraunhofer IIS, ITWM, and ETH Zürich, and the variable precision processor (VRP) deigned by CEA LIST.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Sailfish OS ‑ Command Line Interface & Customisation

    MTP (the same protocol Android devices use) will expose the /home/nemo folder to the connecting computer, both to graphical and command line applications. But it hides some files and folders from the connected system.

  • Google moves Delhi HC against CCI over leaked Android investigation report

  • Android’s underappreciated upgrade advantage | Computerworld

  • Pixel ‘Heads Up’ mode is expanding to all Android 9+ devices – 9to5Google

  • 7 things you didn’t know your Android could do

  • Pixel 5a review, one month later: This phone craves Android 12

  • Realme Narzo 50A, Narzo 50i launched with big displays and Android 11, prices start at Rs 7,499 – Technology News

  • Best Android app deals of the day: Incredibox, Titan Quest, ATOM RPG, more – 9to5Toys

  • Top 10 Best Simulation Games For Android

  • Can You Use FaceTime On Android? | Screen Rant

  • The first Android phone was announced 13 years ago today

  • If You’re an Android User, Don’t Click on This Text Message

  • Wallpaper Engine for Android “coming soon”, according to its developer

  • New Android malware steals mobile banking data, money. Here’s how to identify | Latest News India – Hindustan Times

  • Most Popular Custom ROMs for Android: LineageOS, Pixel Experience, and more!

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• An open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange

  Microsoft Exchange has for many years been nearly unavoidable as a platform for groupware environments. Late in 2020, however, an Austrian open source software developer introduced grommunio, a groupware server and client with a look and feel familiar to Exchange and Outlook users.

  The grommunio project functions well as a drop-in replacement for Exchange. The developers connect components to the platform the same way Microsoft does, and they support RPC (Remote Procedure Call) with the HTTP protocol. According to the developers, grommunio also includes numerous interfaces of common groupware such as IMAP, POP3, SMTP, EAS (Exchange ActiveSync), EWS (Exchange Web Services), CalDAV, and CardDAV. With such broad support, grommunio integrates smoothly into existing infrastructures.

• Programming/Development

  • On bad advice

    Like many programmers, I’m largely self-taught. I’ve rarely worked with anyone more experienced than myself, especially early in my career where I spent a lot of time working with other 20-something-year-olds who also had only a few years of experience. So we all learned about how to program from advice we found on the [Internet], especially posts that were shared via sites like reddit and hacker news.

    Much of my progress since then has been unlearning all those things. In hindsight, most of the writing and discussion I read online about how to program was actively harmful to my ability to successfully produce working code.

    That’s not to say that most programmers are bad programmers. Just that it’s not automatically the case that good programmers will produce good advice, or that good advice will be more widely shared than bad advice.

  • Reflections on a decade of coding

    It’s hard to write these examples without sounding like I’m bragging, but to be very clear – I don’t think that these projects are particularly impressive in context. They are the kind of projects that someone with a decade of experience in a specialized area should be capable of.

    But they are also projects that I’m fairly confident I would have failed at even 5 years ago.

  • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

    • Fun with Redirection

      When you’re hacking in the shell or in a script, sometimes you want to change how the output of a command is routed. Today I’m gonna cover common shell redirection tips and tricks that I use every day at work and how it all works under the hood.

Standards/Consortia

• Celebrating 30 Years of Europe’s First Root Name Server

  The root name servers sit at the top of the DNS hierarchy. Today, there are 13 root name server identifiers in the world. As the first step in a DNS lookup, they are responsible for referring DNS resolvers to the appropriate Top-Level Domain (TLD) name servers. The I-root service operated by Netnod handles several hundred million DNS queries a day using anycast nodes deployed in more than 70 locations across the world. But how did we get here, and what challenges did we face in regards to the root servers in the early days of the Internet?

• Europe proposes USB-C as common port for digital devices

  In a statement, the EC, the executive arm of the European Union, said these proposals had been advanced to cut down on electronic waste and also to avoid inconvenience to customers.

  The EC said USB-C would become the standard port for all smartphones, tablets, cameras, headphones, portable speakers and hand-held game consoles.

  Another step would be unbundle the sale of chargers from devices, as the first two changes would ensure that a single charger could be used across devices.

• EU proposes mandatory USB-C on all devices, including iPhones

  In addition to phones, the rules will apply to other devices like tablets, headphones, portable speakers, videogame consoles, and cameras. Manufacturers will also be forced to make their fast-charging standards interoperable, and to provide information to customers about what charging standards their device supports. Under the proposal, customers will be able to buy new devices without an included charger.

• EU Proposes New Legislation That Would Force Apple to Bring USB-C to iPhones, iPads, and AirPods

  The proposed legislation would force all consumer electronics, not just Apple, which sell devices in Europe, to incorporate USB-C ports in a variety of products, ranging from smartphones, tablets, headphones, cameras, portable speakers, handheld consoles, and others. Calling it the ‘common port,’ the European Union claims that switching all products to USB-C would not just have benefits to the environment, but annual monetary savings for consumers that mount to $293 million.

The Battle for Thacker Pass

To the west of the northern Nevada town of Orovada (population 155), State Route 293 cuts onto public lands near Thacker Pass, a section of high desert in the caldera of an extinct super-volcano. Around mile marker 20, an unassuming dirt road detours into the hills, where protesters have been camped out at the site of a proposed lithium mine for the past eight months. When I visited the camp in August, the air was thick with California wildfire smoke.

Within 10 minutes of my arrival, a group of Indigenous activists from the West Coast showed up with donated supplies. This was just one stop on their way up to Minnesota, where more than 700 demonstrators had recently been arrested for blocking traffic, chaining themselves to equipment, and other acts of civil disobedience aimed at stopping Enbridge Energy from replacing the Line 3 crude oil pipeline that runs from Alberta, Canada, to Wisconsin. After a round of pleasantries, campers and their visitors shuffled into a human chain to move food, medical supplies, and water into a storage tent.

Billy Mitchell Lets His Site Lapse, With A Critic Of His High Score Claims Swooping In To Take It Over

It’s been a minute since we last discussed Billy Mitchell, the man with the self-propelled reputation as an immense gamer with many high scores on record. He has also demonstrated a willingness to be quite litigious towards anyone who disagrees with this assessment of his gaming prowess. A couple of years back, he threatened to sue the Guinness Book of World Records for — checks notes — , huh, defamation. This defamation appeared to amount to the GBoWR rescinding his “record” for a high and perfect Pacman score, noting that there were evidenced claims that Mitchell had not earned the videotaped score on an official arcade cabinet, but rather using an emulator. These records were later reinstated, with GBoWR indicating it didn’t have enough evidence to refuse the record. Mitchell also sued Twin Galaxies, an organization that acts as something of an arbiter for gaming records like this. That case failed to get dismissed on anti-SLAPP grounds and appears to still be active.

Dog Years

Our beloved dog Echo died last week. She was almost 15 years-old, or about 87 in human years. In addition to grief and fond remembrance, her death prompts thoughts about the many historical changes that happened in her lifetime.  So many in fact, that it seems like she really was born Lincoln’s “four score and seven years ago.”  Has historical change become so accelerated it must be counted in dog years? Is the average length of dog’s life now the best yardstick to measure the unfolding crisis of capitalism?

December 3, 1975

Na golden shovel My mother wakes early to go to church. Dawn redux. Her áo dài is Virgin Mary blue. Her hair is still long, reflecting light. A border control officer filters through her documents, preparing to send her through to their new home destination. The casting call goes out in the meantime: Paid extras needed for jungle defoliation scene. Apocalypse Now and Hearts of Darkness play across the screen of my mother’s face. I glimpse a flicker, a flare, then the sudden foul odor of napalm & oil in the swamp.

The Fate of Cassandra: Dire Predictions Go Unheeded

The fate of Cassandra seems particularly relevant today, for there has been ample warning about three developments that threaten continued human existence—preparations for nuclear war, climate change, and disease pandemics—without, however, adequate measures being taken to safeguard human survival.

Ever since the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945, prophetic voices have warned of doom if the world does not ban nuclear weapons. And yet, the nine nuclear powers are currently engaged in a new nuclear arms race to build ever faster, more devastating weapons that, if used, will annihilate nearly all life on earth.

Dear Death

The Apple Tower

I realize that I overthink everything, but it is beyond me how we put university administrators with little classroom experience in charge of educational reform when they have made careers of avoiding teaching. By running away from teaching, some even repeat that stupid saying: “those who can’t do, teach.” My retort: “those who can’t teach, go for the money.” At CSUN, impaction was advanced by an administrator, Dr. Elizabeth Adams, who has gone up the ranks. As thousands of first-generation students of color are being rejected, the sale of a campus building is a common practice—going to the highest bidder, where the name of the building has no historic or significant meaning.

Many of the changes taking place at the California State University (CSU) are included in the 2021-2022 state budget. This includes the conversion of Humboldt State University into a polytechnic with a $25 million special allocation by the state. I don’t know how administrators work with public budgets, but it is costly to build a new program where there are a lot of special interests who have their hands out. Apple Inc. also appears to be investing in the CSU. I wonder if they’re getting a deal reminiscent of the Trump’s obsession to put his name on everything. Hopefully the outcome will not be the same as the failed Trump casinos in Atlantic City.

Don’t Count On Heroes!

We forget the history that places very real heroes in harm’s way where they either save the day or go down to heartbreaking defeat. Oskar Schindler was one such hero who saved 1,200 Jews in the former Czechoslovakia during the Holocaust.

But attention to hero worship often misses the larger story when the sometimes awful consequences of human behavior condemn masses of innocent people to war, famine, disease, grinding poverty, and ignorance. As long as heroes exist, then the consequences of sometimes vicious human behavior are often hidden.

Science

• A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea

  We present evidence that in ~ 1650 BCE (~ 3600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea. The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. [...]

• A giant space rock demolished an ancient Middle Eastern city and everyone in it – possibly inspiring the Biblical story of Sodom

  Getting answers required nearly 15 years of painstaking excavations by hundreds of people. It also involved detailed analyses of excavated material by more than two dozen scientists in 10 states in the U.S., as well as Canada and the Czech Republic. When our group finally published the evidence recently in the journal Scientific Reports, the 21 co-authors included archaeologists, geologists, geochemists, geomorphologists, mineralogists, paleobotanists, sedimentologists, cosmic-impact experts and medical doctors.

  Here’s how we built up this picture of devastation in the past.

Education

• File not found

  Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

  Professors have varied recollections of when they first saw the disconnect. But their estimates (even the most tentative ones) are surprisingly similar. It’s been an issue for four years or so, starting — for many educators — around the fall of 2017.

Hardware

• Repairability of laptops

  I’ve (begrudgingly) come to accept a future of soldered CPUs and RAM in my laptops, but I agree with Michael Dexter of Call for Testing and the BSDFund that storage is a bridge too far. Unlike the former two, storage has the potential to contain things that are irreplaceable to their owner. Robust tooling like OpenZFS also exposes just how flaky and unreliable storage can be relative to other system components. It’s also something you can run out of.

Health/Nutrition

• Pandemic Aid Was Supposed to Go to Small Businesses, But Big Companies Cashed In

• FL Republican Wants to Review All Mandatory Vaccinations, Which Includes Polio

• Peru’s Leftist President Calls for Global Agreement to End Vaccine Apartheid

  Peruvian President Pedro Castillo—the leader of the country with the highest Covid-19 mortality rate in the world—is calling for an international agreement between nations and pharmaceutical companies to ensure equal, universal access to the coronavirus vaccine in an effort to combat massive inequities in distribution.

  In his remarks at the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week, Castillo argued that the fight against Covid-19 has “demonstrated the inability of the international system to cooperate under the principles of efficiency and solidarity.”

• Evil Doers: The Pharmaceutical Industry and the Pandemic

  Some may find this description of the pharmaceutical industry abhorrent, after all they develop life-saving drugs and vaccines, most recently the vaccines against the coronavirus which have saved millions of lives. But the industry’s storyline gives us a very incomplete picture of what it does and how.

  Probably the best way to think about the pharmaceutical industry is to imagine an incredibly corrupt fire department. Most of the money that the fire department gets to buy new trucks and other equipment goes right into the pockets of the department’s commissioner and his closest friends. The department may still do its job in the sense that they rush to fires and rescue people trapped by flames, but it costs way more than it should.

• Pfizer CEO—Biden’s ‘Good Friend’—Is Privately Working to Tank Drug Price Reforms

  Hours after President Joe Biden called Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla a “good friend,” Politico revealed that the pharmaceutical executive has been urging his employees to fight Democrats’ plan to let Medicare directly negotiate prescription drug prices—a popular proposal that Biden has endorsed.

  Politico obtained a copy of a three-minute video message in which Bourla echoes common—and misleading—pharmaceutical industry talking points against the Medicare negotiation plan, which top Democrats are working to include in a budget reconciliation package despite the objections of several Big Pharma-backed lawmakers.

• In ‘Landmark’ Decision, EPA Finalizes Rule Cutting Use of Super-Pollutant HFCs

  “I applaud President Biden’s actions to cut down these super-pollutants while strengthening our ability to compete in a global clean energy market.”—Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.)

• UN Is Prioritizing Corporate Profiteers Over Global Hunger, Activists Say

• How big corporations and Bill Gates took over the UN food Summit

• The Globalized, Corporate-Led Food System Is Failing Us: Boycott Grows of U.N. Food Summit

  More than 500 civil society groups boycotted the United Nations Food Systems Summit in New York for giving corporations an outsized role in framing the agenda. We speak with leading food advocates in Ethiopia, India and the United States, who lay out their concerns: Million Belay, general coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa; Raj Patel, journalist and research professor at the University of Texas at Austin; and Shalmali Guttal, executive director of Focus on the Global South. “There is growing hunger in the world, and there is growing inequality and growing poverty and unemployment,” Guttal says. “This industrialized, globalized, corporate-led food system is failing us.”

• You Can’t Lead With A Forced Jab: The Cost Of Coercion Over Conversation

  You might have already made your mind up on vaccinations, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still crucially important conversations we can all participate in, writes Fenelle McLaurin.

• Contradictory Cries for Freedom: Vaccinations and Abortions

  How can it be that someone can be free to choose to be vaccinated or not but cannot choose to have an abortion? The freedom to not be vaccinated limits the government’s right to intervene; the Texas limitation on the freedom to abort shows the power of the government to limit the mother’s freedom.

  How can the same people hold differing views on freedom?

• Has Big Pharma Bought Enough Democrats to Derail Biden’s Plan?

  A West Health/Gallup survey in June put the level of Democratic support for the proposal at 97 percent, and announced that “nearly all Democrats…support empowering the federal government to negotiate lower prices of brand-name prescription drugs covered by Medicare.”

  Since polls have margins of error, it’s reasonable to speculate about whether any grassroots Democrats oppose using the power of government to cut drug prices.

  Unfortunately, a handful of congressional Democrats do oppose acting on the issue. Because Democrats control the House and Senate by narrow margins, this opposition threatens necessary reforms. If that threat becomes a reality, it could doom Democratic prospects for retaining control of Congress in 2022.

• Facebook to testify in Senate after report finds Instagram harms mental health

  A Facebook executive will testify in front of the Senate after reports from The Wall Street Journal showed the social media giant downplayed the toxic impact its Instagram platform has on teenage girls.

  Facebook’s Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis is scheduled to testify before the Senate Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection on Sept. 30, The Washington Post reported.

  The Wall Street Journal reported that research conducted by Facebook “repeatedly” showed that Instagram negatively impacted teenage girls’ mental health while executives continued to downplay this impacts, including in remarks before Congress.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Apple Will Not Reinstate Epic’s Fortnite Developer Account, but Epic’s Other Developer Accounts Remain Active

    Sweeney posted a letter from Apple’s attorneys to Epic’s. It reads: [...]

  • FBI Sat On Ransomware Decryption Key For Weeks As Victims Lost Millions Of Dollars

    The vulnerability equities process meets the FBI’s natural tendency to find and hoard illegal things until it’s done using them. And no one walks away from it unscathed. Welcome to the cyberwar, collateral damage!

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Growing Demand For Open Source Talent

  • Security

    • 65% of users still re-use passwords across accounts: Report

      New Delhi, While 92 per cent of people know that using the same password or a variation is a risk, 65 per cent still re-use passwords across accounts, drastically increasing the risks to their sensitive information, a report said.

      According to a report by LogMeIn, consumers have a solid understanding of proper password security and the actions necessary to minimise risk, but they still pick and choose re-used information.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Massachusetts Supreme Court Being Asked To Decide Whether Cops Can Engage In Warrantless Surveillance Of Social Media Users

        The top court in Massachusetts is asking itself (and legal counsel representing both sides) questions that — on the surface level — don’t really appear to be that difficult to answer. Here’s how Thomas Harrison sums it up for Courthouse News:

      • Appeals Court Says State Secrets Privilege Means NSA Can Avoid Wikimedia Foundation’s Unlawful Surveillance Allegations

        The Snowden leaks exposing NSA dragnet surveillance prompted a lot of litigation. Cast a wide enough net and you’re bound to snag it on some people’s rights. The Wikimedia Foundation was one of several parties who sued over the NSA’s seemingly unconstitutional collection efforts, targeting the agency’s “upstream” harvesting of all data and communications straight from internet backbones.

      • Colorado Supreme Court Rules Three Months of Warrantless Video Surveillance Violates the Constitution

        Last week, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled, in a case called People v. Tafoya, that three months of warrantless continuous video surveillance outside a home by the police violated the Fourth Amendment. We, along with the ACLU and the ACLU of Colorado, filed an amicus brief in the case.

        The police, after receiving a tip about possible drug activity, attached a camera to a utility pole across from Rafael Tafoya’s home that captured views of his front yard, driveway, and back yard. The back yard and part of the driveway were enclosed within a six-foot high privacy fence, which obscured their view from passersby. However, the fence did not block the view from the high vantage of the utility pole. The police could observe a live video feed of the area and could remotely pan, tilt, and zoom the camera. They also stored the footage indefinitely, making it available for later review at any time.

        At trial, Tafoya moved to suppress all evidence resulting from the warrantless pole camera surveillance, arguing that it violated the Fourth Amendment. The trial court denied the motion, and Tafoya was convicted on drug trafficking charges. A division of the court of appeals reversed, agreeing with Tafoya that the surveillance was unconstitutional.

      • The NSA and CIA Use Ad Blockers Because Online Advertising Is So Dangerous

        Lots of people who use ad blockers say they do it to block malicious ads that can sometimes hack their devices or harvest sensitive information on them. It turns out, the NSA, CIA, and other agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) are also blocking ads potentially for the same sorts of reasons.

        The IC, which also includes the parts of the FBI, DEA, and DHS, and various DoD elements, has deployed ad-blocking technology on a wide scale, according to a copy of a letter sent by Congress and shared with Motherboard.

      • ExpressVPN Employees Question Company About Exec Working for UAE Spy Unit

        In the wake of that news, ExpressVPN employees asked management a wave of questions about Gericke, what ExpressVPN knew about his employment, and how this will affect the company’s perception in the cybersecurity industry, according to a copy of the messages submitted through an online form and obtained by Motherboard.

      • WHONIX On OPENPOWER

        Developer Jeremy Rand wrote in to report his functioning port of Whonix 16 to OpenPOWER. (I should point out that all links in this article are “clearnet.”) Whonix is a second operating system based on Kicksecure (a Debian derivative formerly known as “Hardened Debian”) that runs within VMs on your existing OS (compare with Tails). All connections within it are forced through Tor, using different paths for different applications; additionally, it uses kloak for keystroke anonymization and secure network time synchronization instead of NTP, has higher quality RNGs, and enables AppArmor and hardened kernel profiles to prevent against other types of attacks.

      • Facebook algorithm boosts pro-Facebook news

        Thanks to a history of anticompetitive mergers – Whatsapp, Instagram, Onavo and more – based on fraudulent promises to antitrust regulators, Facebook has grown to nearly three billion users – except FB doesn’t have users, really – it has hostages.

      • Twitter Rolls Out Tipping Feature to All Adult Users, Adds Bitcoin as Payment Method

        The social media platform began testing its Tips feature earlier this year with a select group of users, and payments could be processed via Bandcamp, Cash App, Chipper, Patreon, Razorpay, Wealthsimple, Venmo or GoFundMe, depending on the user’s choice. With Thursday’s updates, U.S. users will also get to use Strike, a payment app built on the Bitcoin Lightning Network that lets users send and receive Bitcoin.

      • De-anonymization is a threat to all of us. – Invidious

Defence/Aggression

• Ocasio-Cortez Slams Congress for “Senselessly” Boosting Defense Budget Each Year

• Washington Institute for Near East Policy Honors a UAE War Criminal

  Bin Zayed (popularly known as “MBZ”) has been the Emirates’ de facto ruler since his brother’s stroke in 2014.  In 2015, bin Zayed joined the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at the head of a coalition of Arab states which intervened in Yemen, ostensibly at the request of Yemen’s government, after Iranian-backed Houthi rebels overthrew Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi.  Bin Zayed’s crucial role in launching an unprovoked war is not mentioned in WINEP’s press release naming him as the latest recipient of their Scholar-Statesman Award.

  The United States abets the Saudi-UAE coalition with intelligence, targeting assistance, spare parts for coalition aircraft, arms sales, and (until November 2018) in-flight refueling of coalition warplanes.  Nobel Peace Prize laureate President Barack Obama took the US into the war in order to mollify the Gulf states who opposed Obama’s prospective Iran nuclear deal.  Yemenis speak of the “Saudi-American war.”

• United States of War: How AUKUS Nuclear Submarine Deal Could Inflame Tension, Provoke War with China

  Criticism is growing of AUKUS, a new trilateral military partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States that the countries say is needed to counter China’s growing power in the Indo-Pacific region. As part of the agreement, the U.S. has agreed to help Australia build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, replacing a previous deal Australia had with France. China has denounced the deal, saying the countries are “severely damaging regional peace and stability, intensifying an arms race, and damaging international nuclear non-proliferation efforts.” Anthropologist David Vine, who tracks U.S. military bases overseas, says AUKUS will not only intensify regional tensions but also grow the U.S. military footprint in Australia. “There is no reason to be building new military bases in Australia or any part of the world,” he says.

• Democrats File Bill to Abolish “Flagrantly” Wasteful Trump-Formed Space Force

• As Bids to Slash Pentagon Budget Fail, US Military Spending Slammed as ‘Height of Absurdity’

  Anti-war groups on Thursday lamented the failure of two progressive-led amendments to the fiscal year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act that sought to slash the Pentagon’s funding by tens of billions of dollars, with one peace campaigner calling the $780 billion U.S. military budget a “national shame.”

  “Americans want to see our leaders invest in solutions to today’s most pressing issues—not line the pockets of wealthy arms-makers at the expense of working families.”—Erica Fein, Win Without War

• Opinion | Women’s Rights: Afghanistan and Beyond

  Suddenly there’s major concern across the country—from the mainstream media to every last rock-ribbed Republican—for the rights of Afghan women and girls to be able to work, to go to school.

• Opinion | Who Represents Afghanistan: Genuine Activists vs ‘Native Informants’

  Scenes of thousands of Afghans flooding the Kabul International Airport to flee the country as Taliban fighters were quickly consolidating their control over the capital, raised many questions, leading amongst them: who are these people and why are they running away?

• Are the Motives of War Profiteers Driving Us to the Brink of a New Cold War?

• School Shootings Are More Than Just an American Issue

  Scenes familiar to Americans filled the Russian media on the morning of September 20. The country watched as Perm State University students ran to safety. Inside, a shooter went on a murderous rampage, resulting in at least six dead and 20 injured. The shooting, the second one this year, was carried out by a freshman. Just a few months earlier, on May 11, 2021, there was a massacre at a school in the city of Kazan, which ended in the deaths of seven eighth grade students and two teachers.

• Meet the Biden Advisor Who Wants a Cold War with China

  A similar betrayal took place recently when President Joe Biden calledPresident Xi Jinping of China on September 9, 2021, to work toward rapprochement as tensions in the western Pacific had reached a fever pitch. The very next day, Biden’s call was undermined by inflammatory information provided on September 10 to the Financial Times by anonymous officials from his own administration. It drew immediate ire from Beijing.

  By calling Xi, Biden’s goal had been to ratchet down the brinkmanship that has been accelerating tension in the region for years. His key offering to Xi was the reassurance that the U.S. would continue to respect the One China policy—the red line that Beijing has insisted must remain uncrossed.

• Taliban Cops vs American Cops, Who’s Worse?

  Criticizing how a nation treats its prisoners or responds to internal dissent implies that the behavior being discussed falls outside international norms. If your own country does the same thing and you don’t mention it, your lie of omission strips your story of context.

  There have been many examples of such journalistic malfeasance in coverage of the Taliban since their takeover of Afghanistan.

• Opinion | A Parable of (All-American) Violence

  As a religious studies professor, I know a parable when I see one. Consider the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the final events in this country’s war in Afghanistan as just such a parable taken directly from the history of our moment.

• ‘This Is Big’: House Passes Amendment to Cut US Complicity in Saudi Bombing of Yemen

  Anti-war groups on Thursday welcomed the U.S. House’s passage of an amendment to the annual defense bill that would cut off the flow to Saudi Arabia of U.S. logistical support and weapons “that are bombing civilians” in Yemen.

  “This is BIG,” tweeted the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) following the afternoon 219-207 vote, which fell largely along party lines, with just 11 Democrats voting “no.”

• Praised for ‘Braving the Smears,’ Tlaib Votes Against $1 Billion in Military Aid to Israel

  As the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to approve $1 billion in funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, Rep. Rashida Tlaib was lauded by human rights advocates—and lambasted by some of her pro-Israel colleagues—after explaining why she cast one of only nine votes against the measure.

  The House voted 420-9 in favor of the stand-alone Iron Dome funding bill (pdf) days after progressive Democrats including Tlaib (D-Mich.) blocked the military aid from a broader spending package. Eight Democrats and one Republican—Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.)—voted against the measure on Thursday, while Reps. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) voted “present.”

• WhatsApp, social posts helped lead Haitian migrants to Texas

  It also reflects the power of Facebook, YouTube and platforms like WhatsApp, which migrants use to share information that can get distorted as it speeds through immigrant communities, directing migration flows. That’s especially true for tight-knit groups like the Creole-and-French-speaking Haitians, many of whom left their homeland after its devastating 2010 earthquake and have been living in Latin America, drawn by Brazil and Chile’s once-booming economies.

• Many Haitian migrants in Texas border town of Del Rio being released into U.S.: AP

  Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s foreign relations secretary, said Tuesday he had spoken with his U.S. counterpart, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, about the Haitians’ situation. Ebrard said most of the Haitians already had refugee status in Chile or Brazil and weren’t seeking it in Mexico.

Environment

• New Legal Campaign Aims to Protect People and Nature From Polluters’ ‘Irreparable Damage’

  Frontline communities in Latin America and advocacy groups on Thursday announced a new global campaign that targets major polluters and aims “make the right to a healthy environment an internationally recognized human right” through court action.

  Launched ahead of United Nations climate talks scheduled for next month, the campaign kicked off with a pair of lawsuits filed in Chile and Colombia by the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and member organizations in each country.

• Thunberg to join mass German climate strikes before vote

  As Germany’s top parties hold final rallies ahead of Sunday’s vote, the Fridays for Future youth marches will make the case that the political class has let down the younger generation.

  “The political parties haven’t taken the climate catastrophe seriously enough,” Luisa Neubauer, who runs the group’s German chapter, told AFP.

  Neubauer said “big change” would only be possible “if we create pressure from the streets” and tell the major parties “now there are no more excuses”.

• Greta Thunberg Is ‘So Tired of Talking About the Climate’

  “I’m so tired of talking about the climate right now,” Thunberg told host Noah, in a wider conversation about the lack of governmental action on the climate crisis — including the need to treat it like a crisis.

  “I think people haven’t really understood [the crisis] until the pandemic, because I think in the light of the pandemic, we really see that we can actually treat a crisis like a crisis,” Thunberg observed, responding to complaints that climate solutions are too expensive, or to other excuses that defer taking action.

• ‘A Choice Point for Humanity’: Women Demand Visionary Shift at UN Climate Talks

  “As the world prepares for one of the most important climate talks since the Paris Agreement, we know solutions exist to mitigate the worst impacts, and that women are leading the way.”—Osprey Orielle Lake, WECAN International

  “We can act now and we must act now, which is why WECAN is hosting the Global Women’s Assembly for Climate Justice to uplift women, gender-diverse and community-led solutions, strategies, policies, and frameworks to address the climate crisis,” said Lake. “It is code red and we are drawing a red line to say no more sacrifice people and no more sacrifice zones. This is the time to unite together to build the healthy and just future we know is possible for each other and the Earth.”

• Congress’s Climate Bill Is a Major Story. Journalists Are Missing the Most Important Part.

  This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

• Raj Patel: Climate, Conflict and Capitalism Drive Global Hunger. COVID Made It Worse

  With hunger growing across the globe during the pandemic, the United Nations is holding its first Food Systems Summit, but the gathering is facing fierce criticism for giving corporations an outsized role framing the agenda. The United Nations’ own experts on food, human rights and the environment released a statement warning the summit could “serve the corporate sector” over the needs of workers, small producers, women and Indigenous peoples around the world. U.N. figures show the pandemic has increased the number of hungry people to 811 million, and nearly one in three people worldwide — almost 2.4 billion — lack access to adequate nutrition. “When you’ve got conflict, climate and capitalism compounded with COVID, you see a really apocalyptic situation,” says journalist and academic Raj Patel, author of “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System.”

• Energy

  • Rapid Shift to Clean Energy Could Save ‘Trillions.’ But Corporate-Backed Groups Are Fighting the Transition in US Budget Bill

    A slow transition away from fossil fuels would be “more expensive” than a rapid shift to renewable energy, according to a new study, a conclusion that stands in sharp contrast to fossil fuel industry talking points aimed at heading off aggressive climate policy currently being shaped in Congress.

    An accelerated clean energy transition would lead to “net savings of many trillions of dollars,” a calculation that does not even take into account the damages from unchecked climate chaos, the recently released study from Oxford University found. On economics alone, the logic of a rapid shift to renewable energy is obvious and necessary. 

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Is There a Better Way to Tell the Story of Non-Human Life?

    In 1856, English art critic John Ruskin published the third volume of Modern Painters, which in the course of its roving aesthetic inquiry takes to task a commonplace literary convention: the personification of the natural world. According to Ruskin, describing flowers and oceans as if they are people is by no means an innocuous meaning-making device. Rather, the impulse emerges from the “pathetic fallacy,” in which “violent feelings…produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things.”

  • An Unbelievably Awful Logging Project for Grizzly Bears

    The Ripley logging project calls for almost 17 square miles of commercial logging (10,854 acres) including 5 square miles of clearcuts (3,223 acres).  Plus the project is a huge money-loser —  by the Forest Service’s own estimate, it will cost taxpayers $643,000 to subsidize this further degradation of an already-degraded landscape,  Much of that cost will be to rebuild and maintain an astounding 93 miles of logging roads, 13 miles of new permanent logging roads, 6 miles of new so-called “temporary” logging roads, an additional 11 miles of illegal, user-created roads that will be officially added to the legal road system, and conversion of a four-mile illegal motorized trail into an authorized motorized trail, and construction of a one or two acre parking area.

    It’s astounding the Forest Service would even consider such a massive logging and road construction project in an area just two miles from the official Cabinet-Yaak Grizzly Recovery Zone, and less than one mile from the Cabinet Face Bears Outside Recovery Zone.

Finance

• Southwest’s Bizarrely Antagonistic Lawsuit To Stop Consumers From Finding Better Deals

  This lawsuit is a couple months old, but I’m clearing out some older stories, and thought it was worth writing up still. Southwest Airlines is regularly ranked as a favorite of consumers. While it’s generally relatively low cost as airlines go, it has kept up a reputation of stellar customer service — contrary to the reputations of some other low cost airlines. However, earlier this year, Southwest not only decided to be particularly anti-consumer, but to go legal about it. The company decided to sue the site Skiplagged.

• Opinion | NDP Should Push Liberals for Public Hearings on Popular Wealth Tax

  In a recent article, a young freelance journalist expressed the familiar lament that she and other millennials won’t be able to own their own homes or have financial security.

• ‘You Tell Me What We Should Cut’: Sanders Not Budging on $3.5 Trillion

  In a speech on the Senate floor Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont argued the United States needs “every penny” of the reconciliation package that is currently taking shape in Congress amid ongoing fights over its size and scope.

• Be rlin Votes on Whether to Expropriate Corporate Landlords

  Berlin—When party campaign posters suddenly blanketed Germany last month, the standard half-smiles and safe slogans seemed to reflect the blandness of the upcoming federal election—described by many as a competition for who can carry on Merkel’s careful, centrist legacy. Here in Berlin, however, the unmistakable yellow-and-purple multilingual signs of a different grassroots initiative have been touting a more radical idea for months: expropriation. The campaign, Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen (Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen and Co.), wants the Berlin Senate to seize the assets of the largest private real estate companies in the city, turning hundreds of thousands of apartments over to public ownership.

• Indictment, Lawsuits Revive Trump-Alfa Bank Story

  In October 2016, media outlets reported that data collected by some of the world’s most renowned cybersecurity experts had identified frequent and unexplained communications between an email server used by the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, one of Russia’s largest financial institutions. Those publications set off speculation about a possible secret back-channel of communications, as well as a series of lawsuits and investigations that culminated last week with the indictment of the same former federal cybercrime prosecutor who brought the data to the attention of the FBI five years ago.

• Opinion | Simple, Effective, and Popular: Tax the Extremely Rich to Invest in America

  As lawmakers scramble to finalize a historic jobs and infrastructure package, huge fights are underway to figure out how to fund it.

• Reminiscences of a Wall Street Occupier

  “Revolutions are not unplanned and leaderless events. Nor do they happen like ‘spontaneous combustion.’ The mass protests that have erupted in Cairo’s Midan Tahrir square, and are close to toppling Mubarak’s regime, were orchestrated by a handful of Internet savvy organizers known as the April 6 Youth Movement. For two years they planned, strategized, thought things through. Their first act surprised even themselves: in the wake of Tunisia, they called for a day of protest and 90,000 supporters showed up. It was this initial mass, backed by popular enthusiasm, that then propelled the uprising.”

  And indeed, there was some leadership and orchestration behind the creation of the Occupy Movement. Adbusters co-founder Kalle Lasn and senior editor, Micah White, sent an email to subscribers in June telling them, “America needs its own Tahir.” Lasn’s story is interesting. Born in Estonia in 1942, his family fled the Soviet Army during World War II and spent time in a German refugee camp before emigrating to Australia. There, Lasn earned a degree in applied mathematics, then relocated to Tokyo, where he spent five years running his own market-research firm. He made a lot of money, travelled the world and moved to Canada, where he devoted himself to experimental filmmaking and environmental protection. In 1989, when the Canadian Broadcasting Co. refused him airtime for a thirty-second “mind bomb” aimed at the forestry industry, Lasn realized that he would never get a fair shake from corporate mass media. So, with Bill Schmalz, an outdoorsman who had worked with him as a cameraman, he founded Adbusters. Among other things, Lasn used the magazine as a platform for strident criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, His most controversial moment came in 2004, when he wrote an essay on Jewish influence on U.S. foreign policy. Lasn included a list of powerful neoconservatives, with asterisks next to the names of those who were Jewish. Realizing that he was courting charges of anti-Semitism, Lasn wrote:

• ‘Hold Strong’: Coalition Urges House to Reject Bipartisan Bill Until Reconciliation Package Passed

  Endorsing the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ ongoing efforts to secure passage of the Build Back Better Act, more than 90 social and environmental justice groups sent a letter Thursday urging House lawmakers to reject the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the more ambitious reconciliation package that includes anti-poverty measures and climate action is approved.

  “We strongly support the position of the Congressional Progressive Caucus that two bills must pass together, as a critical step on the journey toward tackling the climate crisis and furthering racial and economic justice.”—Coalition’s letter

• The Government Gave Free PPP Money to Public Companies Despite Warning Them Not to Apply

  As Congress launched a historic bailout to keep businesses afloat at the outset of the pandemic, government officials stressed that the loans were for mom-and-pop operations that didn’t have another easily available lifeline.

  “This was a program designed for small businesses,” then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said, as companies like Shake Shack and Potbelly made headlines for grabbing millions from the newly created Paycheck Protection Program. “It was not a program that was designed for public companies that had liquidity.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Opinion | Outlive Mitch McConnell and Save America

• Boris Johnson’s Cabinet “Night of the Long Knives”

  A presidential cabinet in the US is usually dominated by big donors and loyalists (the major ambassadorships are awarded on the same basis), with not too much work expected since the position is largely titular.

  The slight exceptions in the US president’s cabinet tend to be the Treasury Secretary (always a former Wall Street banker, regardless of the party in power), Secretary of Defense (a Cheney- or Rumsfeld-like figure with ties to the military-industrial complex, or even a retired general), and Secretary of State/foreign minister (hopefully someone who speaks a language in addition to English— though John Kerry was regarded with suspicion because he is fluent in French).

• Cuban and Mexican Presidents Strengthen Solidarity in Remarkable Display

  This year, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, commemorating that important day, had a surprising guest. Cuba’s president Miguel Díaz-Canel was at his side and they both spoke. Shared goals and strong friendship were evident. The extraordinary encounter may portend new substance and heightened commitment for efforts to free Cuba, at long last, from aggressive U.S. interference with Cuba’s sovereignty.

  The Cuban president later joined president López Obrador in reviewing Mexican armed forces assembled in the Zocalo, Mexico City’s central plaza. No visiting foreign president had ever done so.

• Germany’s Who With Whom Elections

  But those ballots can be very, very long – and making  the right choice for your crosses could raise problems. 47 parties are in the running for seats in the Bundestag; it might be wise to brush up on arithmetic, maybe even calculus. This year Berlin has its own state election as well, with 34 parties competing for its House of Representatives and for all sixteen borough councils too. A good pencil-sharpener might be useful (or a ball-point). Mostly they are small, even tiny, like the Animal Rights Party, the Liberal-Konservativ Reformer, or a party run by the German widow of Lyndon LaRouche, an American provocateur of past years. Or the little German Communist Party. Few reach 1%.

  Just six have been major rivals in recent years, three of them on the right. The Christian ”Union” (CDU-CSU), a double party with its special Bavarian twin sister, now lacks the motherly attraction of Angela Merkel. Its main candidate, conservative Armin Laschet, wants in general to “follow the same course,” but has close to zero charisma. Until recently it was in the lead but then, partly due to CDU confusion in the Corona crisis and the flood catastrophe, it drooped to a sickly 20%. Laschet being caught on TV with a private laugh while the president condoned with flood victims didn’t help him. His frantic efforts to reverse the trend consist mainly of red-baiting about “dangers from The Left”.

• Opinion | By Crushing Its Own Members, Labour May Sign Its Own Death Warrant

  Imagine the scene.

• An Experiment to Stop Online Abuse Falls Short in Germany

  Free-expression groups criticize the law on other grounds. They argue that the law should be abolished not only because it fails to protect victims of online abuse and harassment, but also because it sets a dangerous precedent for government censorship of the [Internet].

• Misinformation/Disinformation

  • Opinion: Censorship will never be able to stop the spread of viral misinformation on social media – here’s an idea that might work

    As a computer scientist who studies the ways large numbers of people interact using technology, I understand the logic of using the wisdom of the crowds in these algorithms. I also see substantial pitfalls in how the social-media companies do so in practice.

  • Wikipedia’s next leader on preventing misinformation: ‘Neutrality requires understanding.’

    Last week, the Wikimedia Foundation, the group that oversees Wikipedia, announced that Maryana Iskander, a social entrepreneur in South Africa who has worked for years in nonprofits tackling youth unemployment and women’s rights, will become its chief executive in January.

    We spoke with her about her vision for the group and how the organization works to prevent false and misleading information on its sites and around the web.

  • Wondering why society went off-kilter during the pandemic? It was all predicted in this book

    But it turns out this denial behavior is not only normal, it was totally foreseeable, according to Steven Taylor, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C.

    Taylor would know because he predicted it. He wrote a remarkable little book back in 2019 called “The Psychology of Pandemics.” Its premise is that pandemics are “not simply events in which some harmful microbe ‘goes viral,’” but rather are mass psychological phenomena about the behaviors, attitudes and emotions of people.

    The book came out pre-COVID and yet predicts every trend and trope we’ve been living for 19 months now: the hoarding of supplies like toilet paper at the start; the rapid spread of “unfounded rumors and fake news”; the backlash against masks and vaccines; the rise and acceptance of conspiracy theories; and the division of society into people who “dutifully conform to the advice of health authorities” — sometimes compulsively so — and those who “engage in seemingly self-defeating behaviors such as refusing to get vaccinated.”

  • John Stossel Sues Facebook Alleging Defamation Over Fact-Check Label, Seeks at Least $2 Million

    In one video, “Government Fueled Fires,” about the 2020 wildfires in California, Facebook and its fact-checking partners “falsely attributed to Stossel a claim he never made, and on that basis flagged the content as ‘misleading’ and ‘missing context,’ so that would-be viewers would be routed to the false attribution statement.” The complaint says that Stossel’s video “explored a scientific hypothesis” that “while climate change undoubtedly contributes to forest fires, it was not the primary cause of the 2020 California fires.” Per the suit, Stossel says he never made the claim that “Forest fires are caused by poor management. Not by climate change,” which was in Facebook’s fact-check.

    On the second video, “Are We Doomed?”, Facebook added a “partly false”/“factual inaccuracies” label. That video questioned claims made by those Stossel refers to as “environmental alarmists,” including “claims that hurricanes are getting stronger, that sea level rise poses a catastrophic threat, and that humans will be unable to cope with the fallout.” Stossel claims the Facebook fact-check didn’t actually challenge any facts in the video, and he argues that the company’s fact-check process “is nothing more than a pretext… to defame users with impunity, particularly when Defendants disagree with the scientific opinions [sic] expressed in user content.”

    The lawsuit alleges that “Stossel was given no meaningful avenue to contest these unilateral decisions about the truth of his journalism. Meanwhile, his viewership plummeted due to both Facebook’s censorship and the reputational harm caused by the false labels.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Content Moderation Beyond Platforms: A Rubric

    For decades, EFF and others have been documenting the monumental failures of content moderation at the platform level—inconsistent policies, inconsistently applied, with dangerous consequences for online expression and access to information. Yet despite mounting evidence that those consequences are inevitable, service providers at other levels are increasingly choosing to follow suit.

  • The Little Nation That Could (Stand Up to China)

    Most vocal of late is Lithuania (population 2.8 million). The Baltic country this week told consumers to ditch Chinese smartphones, after alleging that a Xiaomi Corp. model can detect and filter terms including “Free Tibet,” “Democracy Movement,” and “Long live Taiwan’s independence.” That capability has been switched off for devices sold in the EU, but can be remotely enabled at any time, Lithuania’s National Cyber Security Centre found. Handsets from Huawei Technologies Co. were also flagged as having security vulnerabilities. Xiaomi “does not censor communications to or from its users,” it told Reuters. Huawei also rejected the criticism, Agence France-Presse cited a company spokesman as saying.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Museum Workers Are Joining the Growing Labor Movement

  • Civil Rights Leaders Decry Senate’s Failure to Pass Police Reform Bill

    Civil rights campaigners on Thursday decried the collapse of bipartisan congressi onal negotiations on a sweeping police reform bill following last year’s murder of George Floyd as “a failure for our democracy,” while vowing to continue the fight to hold law enforcement accountable for misconduct.

    “The failure of this legislation to move forward is a failure for our democracy.”—Sherrilyn Ifill, NAACP LDF

  • As Other States Try to Copy Texas, SCOTUS Asked to Find Abortion Ban Unconstitutional

    While Republican lawmakers in several states are working to replicate an abortion ban recently enacted in Texas, healthcare providers and reproductive rights advocates on Thursday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider blocking the “patently unconstitutional” measure.

    “For 23 days, we’ve been forced to deny essential abortion care for the vast majority of patients who come to us,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, president and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health and Whole Woman’s Health Alliance, in a statement about the new request (pdf).

  • US Diplomat to Haiti Resigns, Citing “Inhumane” Deportations

  • Biden’s Envoy to Haiti Resigns in Protest Over ‘Inhumane’ Deportations

    In a blistering resignation letter submitted Wednesday, the United States Special Envoy to Haiti quit in protest over the federal government’s “deeply flawed” treatment of the impoverished Caribbean nation, including the Biden administration’s recent escalation of deportations and its continuation of a longstanding pattern of political intervention.

    “What our Haitian friends really want, and need, is the opportunity to chart their own course.”—Daniel Foote, former U.S. Special Envoy to Haiti

  • Florida Republican Proposes Texas-Style Anti-Abortion Law

  • Collins Says She’s Pro-Choice — But Won’t Back Bill to Protect Abortion Rights

  • Biden Wasn’t Elected to Scold Racist Border Agents—He Was Elected to Stop Them

    How many immigrants can the Joe Biden administration whip until the beatings are his fault and not the former guy’s? How many inhumane policies can he continue before he owns them? How many evil sociopaths devoid of human empathy can work for Homeland Security head Alejandro Mayorkas before refusal to fire them can be called approval of their actions?

  • Opinion | Abusing Migrants While on Horseback Fits With the Border Patrol’s Long History of Brutality

    Ghastly images and videos this week showed Border Patrol agents on horses, using their reins aggressively to intimidate Haitians, including small children, on the riverbank in Del Rio, Texas.

  • Digital Rights Updates with EFFector 33.6

    Make sure you never miss an issue by signing up by email to receive EFFector as soon as it’s posted! Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and now listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression. 

  • Building a coalition for Digital Dignity

    In 2020 EDRi started to build the ‘Digital Dignity Coalition’, a group of organisations and activists active at the EU level dedicated to upholding rights in digital spaces and resisting harmful uses of technology. We’ve been organising to understand and resist how technological practices differentiate, target and experiment on communities at the margins – this article sets out what we’ve done so far.

  • Biden Set to Admit Even Fewer Refugees Than Trump’s Record Low

    In the face of record high global displacement, the U.S. is on track to admit a historic low number of refugees for the fiscal year 2021—a lower admission rate than his notoriously xenophobic predecessor, Donald Trump.

    As of the end of August, according to the latest figures released by the U.S. State Department’s Refugee Processing Center (RPC), the U.S. has admitted a total of 7,637 refugees.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Survey Suggests Eager Starlink Users Don’t Understand Service Will Have Limited Reach

    So we’ve noted more than a few times that while Elon Musk’s Starlink will be a good thing if you can actually get and afford the service, it’s going to have a decidedly small impact on the broadband industry as a whole. Between 20 and 42 million Americans lack access to broadband entirely, 83 million live under a monopoly, and tens of millions more are stuck under a duopoly (usually your local cable company and a regional, apathetic phone company). In turn, Starlink is going to reach somewhere between 300,000 to 800,000 subscribers in its first few years, a drop in the overall bucket.

  • AT&T Quickly Ditches Pledge Not To Fund Congressional Insurrectionists

    Much like the company’s dedication to women, AT&T’s dedication to not funding people eager to overthrow democracy appears to be somewhere between inconsistent and nonexistent. Shortly after January 6 a number of companies, including telecom giants like AT&T, publicly crowed about how they’d be ceasing all funding to politicians that supported the attack on the Capitol and the overturning of, you know, fucking democracy. Of course that promise was never worth all that much, given the the umbrella lobbying orgs companies like AT&T used never really stopped financing terrible people.

  • At the 2021 Asia-Pacific Community Networks Summit: Innovating Policymaking to Connect the Unconnected

    Connecting the hardest-to-connect remains a major challenge, particularly in areas where it is not commercially viable for network operators. In recent years, community networks (CNs) have emerged as a viable—and practical—way to connect under- and un-served communities, using a low-cost community driven approach. These initiatives support universal access goals and equip communities with the tools they need to benefit from digital opportunities, including online education and access to e-government services.

  • Cable Giant Altice USA Losing Broadband Subscribers in Third Quarter, CEO Says

    Supino added: “Operationally, over the last three quarters, Altice added just 8,000 organic broadband net adds. Operational trouble seems to run deeper — consensus earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization forecasts for Altice USA began declining in 2018, and in the second half of 2019 Altice struggled with key operational initiatives.”

  • Facebook will open its fiber networks to expand broadband access in rural Virginia

    The project began with fiber networks Facebook was already building to connect its data centers in Virginia, Ohio, and North Carolina. With that fiber already laid, Facebook partnered with Appalachian Power and GigaBeam Networks to extend the networks to roughly 6,000 households in Grayson County, VA. The homes are projected to have high-speed broadband access by the end of this fall.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Universal Music is a hit

    Keeping the hits coming will therefore rely on conquering emerging markets, where revenues are lower (Spotify costs the equivalent of $4 per month in South Africa, less than half what Americans pay), and on licensing music to new forms of media. This year Universal has signed deals with TikTok and Snap, allowing the apps’ users to sample clips from Universal’s back catalogue in their videos. Future deals with gaming, streaming and other entertainment platforms are likely. “Fortnite”, an online game, and Roblox, which lets users make their own games, have already become popular virtual-concert venues. Next year ABBA, a troupe of septuagenarians on Universal’s books, will appear in a series of gigs in London as digital “ABBA-tars”. As the streaming boom slows, labels will need new ways of bringing in money, money, money.

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Sony Pictures, Defenders Of The Creative Industry, Appears To Be Using Fan Art Without Giving Credit

      It will come as no surprise that we have done many, many posts at Techdirt that involve Sony. While not all of those posts are critical of the company, many of those posts deal with Sony wielding IP law about while claiming it is doing so to “protect creators” of content. We’ve also discussed instances where some of these IP-wielding companies, that are supposedly the vanguards of the creative community, also have managed to use the art created by their own fans without bothering to credit them. To be clear, that likely doesn’t run afoul of copyright law, given that the fan art typically uses IP owned by these companies. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s both quite hypocritical to not bother even crediting the fan that created the art, as well as being just plain shitty.

    • Wow! Asks Court to Dismiss Filmmakers’ Piracy Liability Lawsuit

      Internet provider Wide Open West, better known as WOW!, has responded to a piracy liability lawsuit recently filed by several filmmakers. The Internet provider brands the movie companies as copyright trolls and asks the Colorado federal court to dismiss their complaint. According to Wow!, the rightsholders failed to back up their claims.

    • Prominent DDL Piracy Site Snahp.it Shuts Down Citing Security Concerns

      For the past five years, piracy release site Snahp.it has provided information and links to all kinds of pirated content including movies and TV shows. The site operated in the so-called DDL niche, relying on content hosted elsewhere to service its users. Citing safety and security concerns, the site has now shut down, despite healthy levels of traffic.