Desktop/Laptop

• TUXEDO’s Linux Gaming Ultrabook “InfinityBook Pro 14” Now Sports an RTX 3050 Ti and 3K Display

  Tuxedo has recently unveiled its latest and exciting revision to its InfinityBook Pro 14. Despite weighing just around one kg, this sleek-looking ultrabook packs in impressive specs and can pretty much run various AAA games. Let’s take a look at what this laptop has to offer.

  [...]

  As for the graphics side, you’ll find NVIDIA’s mid-range GeForce RTX 3050 Ti along with the integrated Iris Xe graphics. This is a power-efficient MaxQ variant that promises a TGP of 35 watts.

  Considering this as a mid-tier GPU, it should be enough for gaming with 1080p settings.

Server

• Announcing Istio 1.9.9

  This is the final release of Istio 1.9. We urge you to upgrade to the latest Istio supported version, Istio (1.11.3).

  This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.9.8 and Istio 1.9.9.

• Support for Istio 1.9 has ended

  As previously announced, support for Istio 1.9 has now officially ended.

  At this point we will no longer back-port fixes for security issues and critical bugs to 1.9, so we heartily encourage you to upgrade to the latest version of Istio (1.11.3) if you haven’t already.

Audiocasts/Shows

• The NEW Linux For Everyone Show: Meet Schykle! – Invidious

  The NEW Linux For Everyone show is coming soon, and Jason’s making room for 2 co-hosts.

• Home Assistant Turns Amber | Self-Hosted 55

  A lot is changing in Home Assistant land, and it’s almost all for the better; we break down the essential items. Chris gets wired about energy monitoring and shares his journey to get miss-formated power stats working in Home Assistant’s new Energy dashboard.

• How to install Ubuntu Budgie 21.10 – Invidious

  In this video, I am going to show how to install Ubuntu Budgie 21.10

• Can We Fix Facebook?

• Reality 2.0 Episode 88: Can We Fix Facebook?

  New episode of the Reality 2.0 podcast is uploaded and out today: Reality 2.0 Episode 88: Can We Fix Facebook? Tune in to our new episode! Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Jerry Michalski and Petros Koutoupis about Facebook, its weaknesses, relationship to its users, and impact on all of us, and what happens when it disappears for six hours.

• GNU World Order 414

  Choosing a programming language.

Kernel Space

• Asahi Linux cites progress, says that Linux is now “usable as a basic desktop” on M1-based Macs

  After almost a year of a project to port Linux to Apple’s M1-based Macs, the creators of the effort have stated that Linux is now “usable as a basic desktop.”

  According to the progress report of September, Asahi Linux is running better than ever, although it still lacks GPU acceleration on M1 Macs as the team approached version 5.16 of the software.

  The team was able to merge some of the drivers such as PCIe bindings, PCIe drive, and USB-C PD drive. Efforts such as Princtrl drive, I2C driver, ASC mailbox driver, IOMMU 4K patches, and Device Power management are still in review.

• Linux for Apple Silicon is getting closer to being usable for basic computing

  Apple’s Macs with M1 processors deliver some of the best performance-per-watt of any personal computers to date, but there’s a down side for some users – the only operating system that’s officially supported is MacOS.

  Unofficially though? Developers have been working to port Linux to play well with Apple Silicon since shortly after the first Macs with M1 chips arrived, and they’ve made a lot of progress in recent months. The developers behind the Asahi Linux project say the operating system is now “usable as a basic Linux desktop” on Macs with Apple Silicon.

• Developers finally get Linux running on an Apple M1-powered Mac

  This massive feat was achieved by having a bunch of drivers merged (or in review) for Linux 5.16, which includes drivers for the PCIe, USB-C PD, ASC mailbox, etc. If you’re wondering if any of this is legal, don’t worry. So long as no code is taken from macOS to build Linux support, it’s legal to distribute.

  “With these drivers, M1 Macs are usable as desktop Linux machines! While there is no GPU acceleration yet, the M1′s CPUs are so powerful that a software-rendered desktop is actually faster on them than on e.g., Rockchip ARM64 machines with hardware acceleration.” wrote Hector “marcan” Martin, who’s leading the development of Ashai Linux.

  Now that Linux is running, expect to see an official installer made available for download soon for anyone adventurous enough to try it themselves. Since there are still some missing features, however, tinker at your own risk.

  “Remember, there are still many missing bits (USB3, TB, camera, GPU, audio, etc.) as well as patchsets a bit too problematic to bundle as-is at this time (WiFi, which needs significant rewrites), so don’t expect this to be anywhere near the polished experience that is the goal of our project. That said, we hope this will allow those willing to be on the absolute bleeding edge to get a taste for what running Linux on these machines is like—and, for some, this might be enough for production usage.”

• Intel Continues Optimizing Linux For Optane DC Persistent Memory Servers – Phoronix

  With the Linux 5.15 kernel there is a patch to benefit tiered memory systems with a focus on servers having persistent memory. That patch is demoting pages during page reclamation to slower tiers of memory such as Optane DC persistent memory. Intel continues building on that and other persistent memory kernel work for plumbing the kernel with optimized memory placement for these modern servers.

  Intel engineer Huang Ying sent out the latest patch series this week that tunes the Linux kernel’s NUMA balancing behavior to optimize memory placement for memory tiering systems. These patches are further optimizing the kernel’s dealing of pages in the presence of persistent memory while keeping the most important pages in DRAM.

• Linux 5.16 To Add Intel Encrypted PXP, Alder Lake S Declared Stable & Ready – Phoronix

  A new batch of Intel kernel graphics driver code was mailed out today to DRM-Next for staging ahead of next month’s Linux 5.16 kernel merge window. Lots of notable changes in this pull!

  This batch of code updates for the Intel DRM kernel driver in Linux 5.16 is bringing the following changes:

  - Intel’s encrypted Protected Xe Path (PXP) is landing in mainline finally. Intel PXP works with Gen12 and newer as a hardware-protected session for clients on Xe Graphics with encrypted video memory and leveraging a trusted execution environment to protect these sessions from other clients. PXP on Linux has been in the works for a while but now is finally ready for mainline in Linux 5.16. The Mesa changes for PXP are pending and should be merged once the kernel bits are in mainline.

• Graphics Stack

  • A Big Batch Of AMD Graphics Driver Updates Just Sent Out For Linux 5.16 – Phoronix

    Building off the earlier DRM-Next staged code from last month that brought initial DisplayPort 2.0 support and other feature work, another feature pull request was submitted today of additional AMD Radeon “AMDGPU” kernel driver changes slated for Linux 5.16.

    Alex Deucher has sent out another big batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD driver updates destined for Linux 5.16. Feature work is beginning to wind down as the DRM-Next cutoff approaches ahead of next month’s Linux 5.15 merge window while we’ll see if any additional feature code tries to make it in ahead of time.

  • Radeon Gallium3D Picks Up A Nice Performance Optimization For iGPU/dGPU PRIME Setups – Phoronix

    The AMD Radeon Gallium3D driver code today landed a nice optimization for benefiting PRIME setups with integrated and discrete Radeon GPUs.

    With this latest code for Mesa 21.3-devel to the RadeonSI driver, copies from the discrete GPU to the integrated GPU for presentation on the screen are now done asynchronously. These async copies are done using the SDMA engine and in turn allows the discrete GPU to handle more work. An Async compute context is also used as a fallback to async SDMA copies. The patch summed it up quite simply, “Doing this copy using SDMA frees up the dGPU to do more interesting things while the copy is happening; for instance the rendering of the next frame.”

  • X.Org Modesetting Driver Will Now Better Handle Multi-Montior Mixed-VRR Setups – Phoronix

    The xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver that is commonly in use for systems running an X.Org Server will soon find better support if you have a multi-monitor configuration where only some displays can support variable rate refresh (VRR / Adaptive-Sync / FreeSync).

    When the X.Org modesetting driver currently encounters a multi-monitor system where some displays are VRR capable and others not, the VRR-capable property was being set simply on whatever the last added DRM output could support. So depending upon whether the VRR-capable monitor was plugged in last or not would impact whether you could make use of it with this generic driver.

  • Mesa 21.3 Enables NGG Culling By Default For RDNA2 GPUs – Phoronix

    The Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” within Mesa 21.3 is enabling NGG culling by default for Radeon RX 6000 series (RDNA2) GPUs and newer as another performance win.

    NGG culling was added to RADV this summer but initially only exposed as an opt-in feature via environment variable. This NGG-powered removal of unneeded triangles during rendering is also supported on RDNA1 / Navi 1x GPUs but is not being enabled by default — our own tests with Navi 1x have confirmed the results to be a wash while the support is in good standing for the latest-gen GPUs.

  • AMD publishes GPUFORT as Open Source to address CUDA’s dominance

    NVIDIA dominates the parallel computing industry largely thanks to its own solution, CUDA. In response to this domain, AMD has published the source code of GPUFORT , a project that will be under Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) and that aims to offer a translation tool so that large code bases in CUDA can work outside of the closed ecosystem. of the green giant.

    The domain of CUDA and the fact that it is proprietary and owned by NVIDIA greatly limits the ability of developers to migrate to an alternative, so AMD has been working for a long time on mechanisms that help migrate specific CUDA code to interfaces compatible with its parallel computing stack supported by Radeon technology.

    Most of AMD’s efforts so far have focused on code written in C and C ++. GPUFORT, for its part, is to provide support for the translation from source to source ( source to source ) of CUDA Fortran and Fortran code based on OpenACC to OpenMP 4.5+ for execution on GPU or Fortran + HIP C ++ code .

Applications

• KeenWrite – Java-based desktop text editor

  A text editor is software used for editing plain text files. It has many different uses such as modifying system configuration files, writing programming language source code, jotting down thoughts, or even making a grocery list.

  Whatever the level of sophistication of the editor, they typically have a common set of functionality, such as searching/replacing text, formatting text, undo/redo, importing files, as well as moving text within the file. However, some editors have interesting features. KeenWrite is an example of a text editor that stands out from the crowd.

• TICKR Feed Reader: An Elegant RSS Feed Reader for Linux

  An RSS feed reader is a nifty tool that aggregates content from your favorite websites on the internet into a digestible format to help you keep up with their latest updates in one place.

  While there are several RSS feed readers to choose from on Linux, the one we’re discussing today is rather unique. It’s called TICKR, and it puts your feed updates in an easy-to-view manner on the desktop so you can see them on the fly.

  Here’s a guide discussing TICKR and detailing the steps involved in installing and using it on Linux.

Instructionals/Technical

• Four essential downloads for Linux administrators, and those who want to be one

  Linux is a crucial part of the modern digital world we live in, and with good reason: It’s powerful, it can run on practically anything, and it’s open source — meaning free. For those who know how to use it, Linux is a wonderful tool. For those who don’t know how to use it, it’s as obscure as ancient Aramaic.

  Luckily, it’s not hard to master the basics of Linux, which are often enough to propel you toward mastery in no time at all. These four downloads represent some of the most essential things you need to know about Linux, like where to find support for various Linux distributions and related software, the 10 most important things to know if you want to become a Linux administrator, best practices for administering Linux and how to manage user accounts from the command line interface (CLI).

  That’s not to say these downloads are only valuable for Linux admins-to-be. Linux experts can still need a refresher every once in a while, and these could be valuable additions to a pack of personal resources.

• How to Install x11vnc Server on Fedora – TecAdmin

  Remote desktops can be used in a variety of ways to gain access to a computer for example VNC, RDP, ssh, XDMCP, ICA, and many others. The x11vnc is an example of a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) server that allows a remote client to connect to a computer running the x11vnc software and an X Window session by polling the X server’s frame buffer for updates.

  Remote desktops can come in very handy in many different ways. For example, you can access your office computer from home and even manage the entire IT infrastructure. There are many different situations where you will need the x11vnc tool to assist you.

  The x11vnc is one of the most widely used tools for remote desktops hence in this post, we will teach you how to install x11vnc on Fedora. The commands used are generic and can be used in any Linux distribution such as Ubuntu and Debian.

• How to Compile & Install Python 3.10.0 from Source in Ubuntu 21.04, 21.10 | UbuntuHandbook

  This simple tutorial shows how to compile and install Python 3.10.0 or other certain Python version in Ubuntu.

  For Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, there’s well trusted “deadsnakes” team PPA that maintains all the Python packages. For non-LTS releases, e.g., Ubuntu 21.04 and Ubuntu 21.10, you may build the programming language package manually from the source tarball.

  NOTE: Ubuntu 21.04 has Python 3.10 beta1 in universe repository, remove it if installed before doing the steps below. For Ubuntu 21.10, Python 3.10 will be soon made into the universe repository, so you may skip or install a certain version (e.g., 3.8 or 3.7) via this tutorial.

• » GNU Linux Ubuntu – setup networking with netplan on bash terminal (dhcp+multiple fixed ips (virtual interfaces) on same physical interface) | dwaves.de

  remember that discussion about ever changing non-standard ways of defining network interfaces and ip addresses under /etc/network…

  well guess what, canonical just came up with a completely new config file format X-D (guess, everything is a yaml.yml now)

• How to make snaps faster | Ubuntu

  A great user experience is (or at least, should be) an integral part of any software that involves user interaction. On the desktop, this starts with the application launch, and continues through the session. The overall time to completion of tasks as well as interactive responsiveness are a core element in this journey.

  If you’re a snap developer or publisher, the topic of speed may arise for various reasons. The differences in the overall architecture and principles of operation of snaps, in comparison to software deployed as Deb or RPM packages, can sometimes lead to a slower experience. This goes against the prime directive of desktop usage. In this article, we want to show you a number of methods and tools you can use to make your snaps snappy.

• Ian’s TechBlog: Installing Ubuntu Core onto 64-bit Bare Metal

  I have a re-purposed AMD64 laptop motherboard, ready to become an experimental Ubuntu Core server.

  It’s in fine condition. You can see that it boots an Ubuntu LiveUSB’s “Try Ubuntu” environment just fine. Attached to the motherboard is a new 60GB SSD for testing. The real server will use a 1TB HDD.

  But Ubuntu Core doesn’t install on bare metal from a Live USB. It’s still easy, though.

• Using Salsa with contrib and non-free – linux.codehelp.co.uk

  OK, I know contrib and non-free aren’t popular topics to many but I’ve had to sort out some simple CI for such contributions and I thought it best to document how to get it working. You will need access to the GitLab Settings for the project in Salsa – or ask someone to add some CI/CD variables on your behalf. (If CI isn’t running at all, the settings will need to be modified to enable debian/salsa-ci.yml first, in the same way as packages in main).

• List, Upload and Download files from an SFTP Server using golang

  In this guide we are going to explore how to use Golang script to do operations on an SFTP server.

  SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) is a file transfer protocol that leverages a set of utilities that provide secure access to a remote computer to deliver secure communications. It relies on SSH.

• How to use this unique method of securing SSH – TechRepublic

  The other day I was thinking of ways to secure SSH that were a bit outside the norm. Let’s face it, we’ve all configured SSH in /etc/ssh/sshd_config and /etc/ssh/ssh_config. We’ve blocked root login, we’ve set SSH to a non-standard port, we’ve installed fail2ban, and we’ve enabled SSH key authentication. What more can we do?

• A Quick Guide to Printing on FreeBSD

  Drew Gurkowski shows how to quickly set up your printer with FreeBSD.

• MySQL date format – what you need to know | FOSS Linux

  MySQL is derived from ‘My’- the cofounder’s daughter and SQL- Structured Query Language. It is an open-source type of relational database management system. This relational database system helps organize data into relatable tables, thereby enabling structural relations of different data sets.

  MySQL date is one of the temporal data types that can manage data values alongside other data types such as numeric data types, String data types, Boolean data types, date and time, and spatial data types.

  The DATE_FORMAT() function is used in MySQL to format date using the specified format value. For instance, if a date is provided, the function will format it concerning the specified parameters.

• snap Vs .deb Package

  As the number of Linux applications grows, so does the concern about security. Even though there are few recorded Linux attack incidents, it is conceivable to be attacked by viruses, hackers, or malware.

  Because Linux is open-source, those problems are fixed faster, and the community may contribute to maintaining the Linux World ready for any bug or virus that appears. When installing a vulnerable application (or app), it may require libraries that are no longer accessible on that distro’s version.
  In this article, we’ll go through the key distinctions between.deb and.snap packages.

• [Fixed] error: snap “package” not found

  Snap has grown in popularity among Linux users. Instead of using system packages, snap containerizes their dependencies. Each snap app is unaffected by whether or not a certain package is present on the system.

  Snap applications are simple to design and distribute for a variety of Linux distributions. Because snap programs package their dependencies in a bundle, they may be installed on any Linux distribution that supports snaps. Snap applications are an excellent way for novice Linux users to get past the learning curve.

  Snaps, like any other package manager, has simple commands for installing, removing, and updating snap packages. Make sure your distribution has snap installed and configured before installing a snap application. If not, use your distribution’s package manager to install snapd.

• Lsyncd – Synchronize Local Directories with Remote Linux

  Lsyncd (Live Syncing Mirror Daemon) is a lightweight Linux solution for synchronizing remote and local directories. The use of this Linux solution does not affect the performance of your local filesystem in any way.

• How To Install Ntopng on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ntopng on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Ntopng is a free and open-source software for monitoring network traffic that provides a web interface for real-time network monitoring. While professional and enterprise editions of Ntopng have licensing requirements, the community edition has none. Ntopng supports various operating systems, such as Windows, BSD, Mac OS, Linux, and UNIX

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Ntopng Network Monitoring on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• How To Install Redis on Debian 11 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Redis on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Redis is an open-source (BSD licensed) in-memory database for storing data structure, caching, and as a message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, geospatial indexes, and streams. Redis has built-in replication, Lua scripting, LRU eviction, transactions, and different levels of on-disk persistence, and provides high availability via Redis Sentinel and automatic partitioning with Redis Cluster

  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 Redis on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• How To Setup Apache, PHP & MongoDB in Ubuntu & Debian – TecAdmin

  MongoDB is a free open-source, schema-free, NoSQL database which is getting more popular day by day among web developers. It is a document-oriented database and is known for its processing speed.

  In order to use MongoDB for our projects, we will first need to install it on our system along with its dependencies and some other tools. In this post, we will learn to install and set up Apache, PHP, and MongoDB on Ubuntu and Debian operating systems.

• How to Change Comment Color in Vim – Fix Unreadable Blue Color

  Are you annoyed about the comment color in vim? The dark blue color of the comment is often hard to read.

  In this tutorial, we learn how to change the comment color in Vim. There are few methods we can use to look vim comment very readable.

• How to Install & Configure GitLab on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable

  GitLab is a free and open-source web-based code repository for collaborative software development for DevOps, written in Ruby and Go programming languages. GitLab’s main motto is “Bring velocity with confidence, security without sacrifice, and visibility into DevOps success.” It is quite a popular alternative to GitHub providing wiki, issue-tracking, and continuous integration and deployment pipeline features, using an open-source license, developed by GitLab Inc.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install GitLab on your Debian 11 Bullseye system, along with how to get started by logging in with root so you can begin setting up GitLab to your liking or for your team’s requirements.

• How to Install Brave Browser Stable, Beta, or Nightly on Fedora 34 / 35 – LinuxCapable

  Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. Brave is a privacy-focused Internet web browser, which distinguishes itself from other browsers by automatically blocking online advertisements and website trackers in its default settings. Brave has claimed its browser puts less strain on your computer’s performance than Google Chrome, regardless of how much you ask of it. Even with multiple tabs open at once, Brave uses less memory than Google Chrome-like, up to 66% less.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Brave on Fedora.

• How to Install Google Chrome Stable, Beta, or Unstable on Fedora 34 / 35 – LinuxCapable

  Google Chrome is the most used Internet Explorer software on the earth, with a recent update in 2021 that Chrome is currently the primary browser of more than 2.65 billion internet users. However, as you would know, after installing Fedora, only Mozilla Firefox is packaged with the distribution but luckily, installing Google Chrome is a straightforward task.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Google Chrome on Fedora.

• How to Install PostgreSQL and pgAdmin4 on Ubuntu 20.04 – VITUX

  If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to install PostgreSQL and pgAdmin4 in Ubuntu 20.04, this post is for you! We’ll walk you through the whole process step-by-step, so it’s easy for anyone to do.

  Postgres is an open-source, powerful relational database system that lets users create, edit, share, and store data quickly and flexibly. It supports all of SQL:2003 standards, which makes it great for storing any type of data. pgAdmin4 is a graphical user interface tool that allows users to manage their PostgreSQL databases from one place without having to use complicated command-line instructions or terminal commands like many other similar tools on the market offer.

• How to Install Redis Server on Debian 11

  Redis is a free, open-source, cross-platform NoSQL, and in-memory Key-value data structure store, used as a database server, cache, and message broker. It is written in C and developed by Salvatore Sanfilippo. It provides replication features that help you to set up highly available clusters in your production environments.

  In this tutorial, I will explain how to install the Redis server on Debian 11.

• How to Install Visual Studio Code (VS Code) on Fedora 34 / 35 [Ed: Can we stop promoting Microsoft proprietary software with surveillance and pro-GPL violations tools? Microsoft sites already do the promotion, 'Linux' sites ought not help them.]

• How to Install Webmin in Ubuntu 21 – Unixcop

  Webmin is an open-source web control panel that allows you to administrate your Linux system through a web browser. With a few clicks, you can manage your users, configure the DNS, or tweak your web server. For those who are not big fans of the command line, this tool will make your server administration smooth and easily manageable.

  In this article you’ll install and configure Webmin on your server and secure access to the interface with a valid certificate from Let’s Encrypt. You’ll then use Webmin to add new user accounts, and update all packages on your server from the dashboard.

• How to Install and Configure Postgres 14 on Centos 8

  In this guide we are going to install Postgresql 14 in Centos 8/Rocky Linux 8. This will also work in RHEL 8 and its derivatives.

  Postgresql is an open source object-relational database system with over 30 years of active development that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, feature robustness, and performance. Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the Ingres database developed at the University of California, Berkeley. PostgreSQL is used as the primary data store or data warehouse for many web, mobile, geospatial, and analytics applications. PostgreSQL can store structured and unstructured data in a single product.

• How to manage users with useradd in linux – Citizix

  In this guide we are going to explore how to use useradd to manage users in Linux. useradd allows you to add users in linux with specific properties, limitations, or comments.

  useradd command is a low-level utility that is used for adding/creating user accounts in Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

  Linux is a multi-user system, which means that more than one person can interact with the same system at the same time. These users needs to be created before they use the system.

• Using golang to create jenkins credentials

  How do I create jenkins credentials using a golang script?
  In this blog article, we are going use GoJenkins library to create jenkins Username, String and SSH credentials.

• How to run Jenkins using docker and docker-compose

  do I run Jenkins as a docker container? In this guide we are going to explore how to achieve that using docker and simplifying the process using docker compose.

  Docker is a set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels.

• How to Check Which Version of Postgres is Running/Installed

  What version of postgres client or server am I running?

  In this brief guide, we are going to explore how to check which version of Postgres is running either on your machine or in a postgres instance for both the client and the server versions.

• Running Postgresql 14 with Docker and Docker-Compose

  In this guide we are going to explore how to run Postresql 14 Locally with docker and docker compose. This can be helpful if you want to run Postgresql locally without installing it in your server or if you want to run multiple versions of Postgresql seamlessly.

• Using terraform to launch Digitaocean kubernetes cluster – Part 1

  In this guide we are going to explore how to launch Kubernetes instance in Digital Ocean.

  Digital Ocean provides a cost-effective, ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster in minutes so you can focus on building your application.

• How to Set Up SSH Keys on Debian – Cloudbooklet

  There are 2 methods to access the SSH, one is by password based and other is key based. The SSH key based authentication is meant provide a secure way to access a server with private and public key.

  In this guide you are going to learn the following ways to secure your Debian machine.

• How to add users to sudoers in Debian 11

  In Linux, sudo (super user do) is the command prefixed with any command to have the administrative rights temporarily (as an alternative to root). Whenever you want to access any system related settings or to update a system, edit the system files, you must log in as a “root” user in Linux to do so. Root users have the rights to perform any task in the system; however, sudo privileges can also be assigned to other users to act as a root.

  It is recommended to use sudo command carefully, as it has all admin rights so any misuse of this command may lead to several system’s problems. Debian is a well-known Linux distro and the latest release of this distro is Debian 11. The sudo user’s information resides in sudoers file, this file is in directory “/etc/sudoers”; the users included in sudoers file can perform all the tasks that a root can do.

  In this article, we will demonstrate the possible ways to add any user to sudoers file to assign sudo privileges to that user.

• How to decommission a system: 3 keys to success | Enable Sysadmin

  It is always an exciting day for systems administrators when we get to decommission a system. It means one less resource to maintain and potentially a successful upgrade somewhere else in the environment.

  In our rational exuberance, however, we can’t jump in and send the resource to the great data center in the sky. Too often, an “unused” system actually serves a heretofore undocumented business function, holds critical information that folks will need down the line, or provides cross-network connectivity that nobody on staff remembers configuring.

  Therefore, having a documented resource decommissioning plan is vital to making sure this process goes off without a hitch. I’ll go through some of the steps to ensure a smooth decommissioning process.

• How to install SSF2 1.3.1.1 Beta on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install SSF2 1.3.1.1 Beta on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• Data centre networking: what is SDN? | Ubuntu

  The recent contexts have shown that enterprises needed to take a different approach regarding their digital transformation and its prioritisation. They’ve experienced the need to run new configurations and operations remotely on their infrastructure. This quickly showed the benefits of automation solutions to run those changes from few central locations, which highly facilitated the task of systems and network admins. During the last decade enterprises have also been migrating to the cloud looking for quickly scalable infrastructures that the cloud service providers did take care to build and manage. Those network infrastructure capabilities in addition to a strong virtualisation approach, were key drivers to consider Software-Defined Networking (SDN) as a principal building-block of a wholly software-defined data center infrastructure.

  This blog is one of a series covering SDN and the journey to model-driven cloud infrastructures. Here, we are going to talk about software-defined networking, its evolution and the key benefits it brings to the data center and cloud industry leveraging the concept of intent-based networking. Let’s begin with what SDN is.

• Install and Set-up ELK Code Physics Software on Ubuntu Linux

  Science becomes extra difficult when you have to work with large numbers, complex equations, or when you need fast calculations. But in the recent years, these problems have been considerably reduced thanks to the computers and more specifically, thanks to the open-source projects focused on bringing a better understanding and experience at the time of making computations.

  As a student of Physics, I use several specialized tools and most of them are open source. I am going to share one of them today which is called Elk code, an open source project focused on Solid State Physics.

  Though it is available in the Ubuntu repositories, there are several dependencies you need to explicitly install and configure.

• Install XFCE Desktop on Debian 11

  Linux provides extensive support for several desktop environments like: GNOME, KDE 5, Unity, LXQt, . Moreover, desktop environments are majorly divided into two types: heavyweight and lightweight. Few desktop environments may look very interactive, but they might be ignored because they use more memory and processing power to run on Linux. For instance, GNOME and unity desktop environments fall in the heavyweight category whereas Xfce comes in the lightweight category, therefore it is better for older machines. In this article, the demonstration provides the installation of Xfce desktop environment on Debian 11:

• This is how you can add five more years of life to your Ubuntu LTS install – Neowin

  In September, Canonical announced that it would be extending the Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) of both Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS by a further two years so that their total life reaches 10 years instead of eight. Canonical touts ESM as a paid product which it relies on for revenues, however, it’s actually possible to use ESM on three personal computers for free. Additionally, if you enable it, you get Livepatch on your system so you don’t have to restart for kernel updates.

• What Version of Linux Am I Running? – Linux Nightly

  Asking “What version of Linux am I running?” could generate a few different answers. Do you want to know the version of the Linux kernel, or just the name of the Linux distribution that’s installed? We’ll show you how to find all the answers in this guide.

• Mount Remote Filesystem Over SSH using SSHFS – kifarunix.com

  Follow through this tutorial to learn how to mount remote filesystem over SSH using SSHFS. sshfs is a filesystem client based on the SSH File Transfer Protocol.

Wine or Emulation

• Wine 6.19

  The Wine development release 6.19 is now available.
  
  What's new in this release (see below for details):
    - IPHlpApi, NsiProxy, WineDbg and a few other modules converted to PE.
    - More HID joystick work.
    - Kernel parts of GDI moved to Win32u.
    - More work towards Dwarf 3/4 debug support.
    - Various bug fixes.
  
  The source is available from the following locations:
  
  https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.19.tar.xz
  
  
  http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.19.tar.xz
  
  Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
  
  https://www.winehq.org/download
  
  You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
  
  You can also get the current source directly from the git
  repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
  
  Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
  AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
  

• Wine 6.19 Continues Work On HID Joystick, PE Conversion

  Wine 6.19 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of Wine as the developers work towards Wine 7.0 stable in early 2022.

  Wine allows for Windows applications and games to run on Linux and other platforms. Wine 6.18 in September enabled the HID joystick code by default while Wine 6.19 has continued improving that HID joystick support. Wine 6.19 has also continued the recent trend around converting more utilities to the PE (Portable Executable) format.

Games

• Try out the new demo for the RTS game TFC: The Fertile Crescent on Steam | GamingOnLinux

  Available now until at least the end of EGX on October 10, you can try out the new demo for the Bronze Age RTS game TFC: The Fertile Crescent on Steam. This is the Steam version of the popular free game available on itch.io, with the Steam version planned to have many enhancements over the original.

  TFC is a classic base-building RTS inspired by the struggles of growth, advancement, and conquest in the cradle of civilization. Establish your village near fertile lands, and balance your food surplus against the size of your civilian and military might, as you build your village. Think of it kind-of like a pixel-art Age of Empires but with some unique mechanics.

• Fly Dangerous is an open source love-letter to the Elite Dangerous racing community | GamingOnLinux

  Racing is apparently a thing people do in Elite Dangerous and so one developer has decided to make a game as a love-letter to the community called Fly Dangerous.

  The developer mentions that racing in Elite is not particularly accessible, so the idea with Fly Dangerous is to provide a “ground-up reimplementation of a similar-enough flight model to provide a training ground and common set of tools to track leaderboards, ghosts and general tom-foolery”. Sounds like it could be fun and just recently Alpha 6 was released adding in a new ship, customization for ships, a new biome map and the start of upgrades for the Time Trial mode to have some actual maps and progression.

• Children of Morta: Ancient Spirits gives you a new character with two different forms | GamingOnLinux

  Children of Morta: Ancient Spirits is the brand new expansion that’s out now from Dead Mage and 11 bit studios, sounds like it’s pretty great too. I still can’t get over how good the art is.

  Introducing Yajouj’Majouj, a new playable character only available in the Family Trials mode. This character has two different forms allowing you to quickly switch between, allowing you to combine different attack types together.

• More Fallout New Vegas bugs on Wine with Lutris. The New Vegas Anti Crash mod fixes things, and is also compatible with Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. – BaronHK’s Rants

  So, my character on Fallout New Vegas got further into the wasteland and the game started freezing and stuttering every 10-20 minutes of gameplay.

  [...]

  However, as with most Bethesda titles, Fallout New Vegas was infamous over the years for crashing to the desktop on Windows, and not even in a way where you could pin it down entirely and say “Oh well, that’s where it started!”, because Windows itself changes internally.

  It’s really funny, because anti-GNU/Linux trolls say that GNU/Linux changes underneath and maybe some compiled code doesn’t behave as you might expect years down the road, and that Windows is so great.

  The truth is that unless an OS was to stop being developed entirely, including security patches, there would be no way to ever fully guarantee 100% compatibility forever.

• GT210 Nvidia card for old workhorse PC

  When I say “HP”, it is really a mixed-breed. Bought it second hand from a guy who had put it together as a gaming machine. HP motherboard with i5 CPU, 16GB RAM, UEFI-BIOS. Pre-USB3, so back then added a USB3 adapter card.

• Valve REALLY doesn’t want you opening your Steam Deck! – Invidious

  Valve released a video warning off their potentially deadly Steam Deck. It’s dangerous to go alone, so use their video as your guide.

• Metroid Dread: Experience the Fear … With Emulation!

  Ah, the beautiful month of October, probably my favorite month of the year. The temperature outside is just right; not too hot, not too cold. The tourist season is over. The month when most of my family members were married.

  What’s even better with this particular October of 2021, however, is that it’s been quite the month as far as game releases. Just this week we had Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl (review on that coming real soon), Far Cry 6 for FPS fans, and today marks the release of Metroid Dread. The curious part of me, of course, wanted to test to see how well Metroid Dread would run with Ryujinx, my preferred Switch emulator for Linux.

• RC model flying simulator Wings is now available for Linux | GamingOnLinux

  While celebrating the first anniversary of their game, Kitchen Sink Games have released a Linux version of their RC model flying simulator Wings.

  Not one we’ve been able to try yet so here’s what the developers say: “Wings let you experience the thrill of RC model flying from the comfort of your own home. The perfect training tool for learning to fly, or to enhance your racing skills. With online multiplayer and offline modes. We think this is the best online flight simulator experience.”.

• Closed Hands is a deep work of interactive fiction following a terror attack | GamingOnLinux

  Closed Hands is an experimental work of interactive fiction from PASSENGER, it’s recently jumped over from itch.io to Steam. For the Steam release it comes with some exclusive extras like a developer commentary, a full soundtrack, an ebook of the story and access to a library of original artwork, sketches, and example Ink scripting files.

  The story follows the lead-up and aftermath of a terror attack in a fictional UK city, as you follow five main characters. With the gameplay progressing through a free-form fragmented narrative, it allows you to make your own path through the story with it going backwards and forwards in time. Part of the aim is to “challenge wider preconceptions users have about video game storytelling” and help players “understand the complex effect extremism has on people’s perceptions of cultures and communities”.

• Kröwns and Daggers is another big free upgrade for Northgard out now | GamingOnLinux

  Kröwns and Daggers expands the ties between clans while also adding in a whole new neutral faction to Northgard.

  Featuring a new Diplomacy screen that blends together all new interactions with both clans and neutral factions. If you want to improve relations with neutral factions you can now build an offering well, Dwarves have entered the lands as the new additional neutral faction and even new spying mechanics.

• Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl Review – Boiling Steam

  Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl (NASB) is a Super Smash Bros.-style platform fighter for Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch. It’s developed in collaboration with Ludosity — the folks behind Slap City — and Fair Play Labs, published by GameMill Entertainment. Duke it out as one of your favorite Nickelodeon characters, ranging from shows you may have watched in the 90s to some of the modern day shows — Spongebob and Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants, Ren & Stimpy from the somewhat controversial show bearing the same name, Helga from Hey Arnold!, Reptar from Rugrats, Zim from Invader Zim, Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender, CatDog from said show, among many others.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Gear 21.12 releases schedule finalized

    It is available at the usual place https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_21.12_Schedule

    Dependency freeze is in four weeks (November 4) and Feature Freeze a week after that, make sure you start finishing your stuff!

  • KDE neon 5.22.5 – When you come undone

    This is a short review, yes, yes, it is. But, we learned something. KDE neon is really fast. KDE neon is pretty. KDE neon 5.22.5 also brings in regressions, which I find super-annoying. We’re talking the titlebar theming, we’re talking network manager, we’re talking scaling issues, yet again. Steam? Yup, that’s another, entirely unnecessary hurdle for the common user.

    On their own, these problems wouldn’t be an issue. Except, toss a D&D 20-sided cube, and you get your random damage points, and that’s about as arbitrary as issues that keep coming back into an otherwise solid and fun distro. I know that KDE neon is a test bed, but the User Edition is meant to be stable and robust enough. Overall, I am happy, but this wasn’t the best Plasma experience. In fact, I’m on a jinx ride. Two out of two for a less than satisfactory outcome. Now, I need to cry. The end.

  • KDE Connect vs. Warpinator: Which Is Best for File Transfers?

    Cloud storage has made the task of transferring files wirelessly simple enough to happen automatically in the background. But is it really worth giving some company access to your files just to move them from one machine to another, often in the same building? Sometimes even the same room!

    On Linux, a few apps help you transfer files between PCs in a wireless way that’s still private and secure. Two of the most popular are KDE Connect and Warpinator. Which one might you want to use, and when might you use it? Let’s find out.

Distributions

• Reviews

  • elementary OS 6 Odin Review – Beautiful and Empowering

    It’s a review of elementary OS 6, codenamed Odin, a computer operating system that proudly released with the slogan Thoughtful, capable, and ethical replacement to Windows and MacOS that’s now empowering modern laptops that ship worldwide. Let’s see OS 6 through this review.

• New Releases

  • MX Linux 21 RC Candidate Available For Testing

    The MX Linux development team has released the RC images for MX Linux 21 for testing purposes.

    MX Linux is a midweight Linux distribution that aims to be simple and stable. The distribution is available in three different flavors: Xfce, KDE Plasma, and Fluxbox. This new iteration of the distribution is based on Debian 11 (Bullseye), which includes all of the latest components and security patches.

    All three editions include a new mx-comfort theme and the developers have worked diligently to clear away as many bugs as possible for the release candidate.

  • Feren OS 2021.10 Comes with Some Visual Improvements

    Feren OS 2021.10 is a Linux distribution with focus on visual aesthetics, user interface and user experience.

    Feren OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distro running KDE Plasma. And not only does it run KDE Plasma but it has a bunch of thing added to it to make the experience better for a new user, including layouts, wonderful pre-made theming and much more.

    For a long time Feren OS was based on top of Linux Mint, but since last year, it has gone back to its original upstream distro, Ubuntu. Feren OS comes with a bunch of preinstalled layouts, but there is one which turns KDE Plasma into a Windows 11 look like and it is called “Doors”.

  • Feren OS 2021.10 Release Introduces a New Firefox Configuration and UI Improvements – It’s FOSS News

    Feren OS is a Linux/GNU distribution based on Ubuntu.

    The latest 2021.10 release, codenamed ‘Gallium’, presents new features and changes. Let’s take a look at them.

  • Zorin OS 16: Better GNOME With Much More Simplicity

    Zorin OS is one of the more endearing Linux operating systems available for both Linux veterans and computer users transitioning from Windows. But despite some stellar improvements delivered in version 16, released Aug. 17, Zorin OS falls short of offering wider user appeal to those looking beyond Windows-like computing.

    However, this latest upgrade brings several improvements and a few new features to give a satisfying Linux experience that tries to be something else. That is, of course, if you are enamored with a Windows-like desktop interface or crave another rendition of simplifying the GNOME desktop.

    Since its inception in July 2009, Zorin has seen its mission as providing a Windows clone experience as far as the look and feel of the desktop’s design is concerned. That started to change with its version 15 release in March 2020.

    Zorin OS co-founder Artyom Zorin spearheaded efforts to lean more heavily on GNOME underpinnings in this independent Ubuntu-based Linux distribution. I found Zorin 15 to be a worthy operating system filled with refinements that made using the GNOME interface much better than typical GNOME retread distros.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

  • KDE Plasma Applications » PCLinuxOS

    KDE Plasma Applications updated to 21.08.2 which is a service release to deal with security and bug fixes to the KDE Plasma programs.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed Now Offering GNOME 41

    The rolling release edition of openSUSE, Tumbleweed, now offers the latest GNOME 41 desktop environment in the Tumbleweed repositories.

    While openSUSE is known for their friendliness towards the KDE desktop, this week’s openSUSE Tumbleweed updates have made GNOME 41 available on this rolling-release distribution.

    GNOME 41 is the latest iteration of the popular desktop but has yet to reach the majority of Linux distributions. Fortunately, those anxious to give the desktop a try need to look no further than openSUSE Tumbleweed, that includes the latest and greatest software updates.

    The GNOME 41 provides significant improvements for developers, a new developer documentation website, new features in the Builder IDE and GTK4 enhancements. The software center also has a new look and makes it easier to browse and discover apps.

  • GNOME, Salt Update in Tumbleweed

    Mesa’s 21.2.3 update focused on bug fixing, which arrived in snapshot 20211005. The 3D graphics package fixed a significant performance drop on the Radeon HD 8400 graphics card. Mozilla Thunderbird 91.1.2 now warns if an S/MIME encrypted message includes BCC recipients. The email client update also fixed delivery status notifications, which were only showing for the first recipient. Another email package, mailutils, updated to version 3.13 and fixed semantics of mail sending and saving commands. PipeWire 0.3.38 made various bluetooth compatibility improvements and the audio/video package for Linux now has better description service files for systemd. The only major-version update in the snapshot was sysvinit 3.00. The sysvinit package, which is for controlling the startup, running, and shutdown of a system, now provides better device detection of bootlogd. The btrfs file system updated to 5.14.1; the updated version fixes parsing of compression (option -c) and added a workaround for old kernels when reading zone sizes. Other packages to update in the snapshot were exim 4.95, Kernel-firmware 20210928 and more.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Flatpak 1.12 Released with Better Support for the Steam Linux Runtime Mechanism, More

    Flatpak 1.12 comes eight months after Flatpak 1.10 as the new stable series that introduces numerous new features and improvements. Highlights include better support for the Steam Linux Runtime mechanism, allowing Steam to launch games with its own container runtime as /usr.

    In fact, this new feature allows any subsandbox to have a different /usr and/or /app. Also new is support for TUI (text-based user interface) programs like GNU Debugger, support for Flatpak instances of the same app-ID to share their /tmp or /dev/shm directories, as well as their $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.

  • Flatpak 1.12 Released – Better Sub-Sandbox Handling To Benefit Steam – Phoronix

    Flatpak 1.10.4 arrived to fix a security vulnerability in the portal code that as a result of some new Linux kernel system calls not being blocked by SECCOMP rules, applications could create sub-sandboxes to confuse the sandboxing verification mechanisms of the portal. The vulnerability disclosure explained, “An anonymous reporter discovered that Flatpak apps with direct access to AF_UNIX sockets such as those used by Wayland, Pipewire or pipewire-pulse can trick portals and other host-OS services into treating the Flatpak app as though it was an ordinary, non-sandboxed host-OS process, by manipulating the VFS using recent mount-related syscalls that are not blocked by Flatpak’s denylist seccomp filter, in order to substitute a crafted /.flatpak-info or make that file disappear entirely.”

  • Looking back on 30 years of Linux history with Red Hat’s Sebastian Hetze

    The Linux kernel and the second version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) turned 30 this year. As part of that major milestone, we asked Red Hatters who have been using or contributing to Linux since the early days about their experiences. What was it like contributing to Linux, what was it like using it? Could you imagine that Linux would have the impact it’s had on the world up until now?

    Today we’re talking to Sebastian Hetze who has been using Linux since the early 1990s. Hetze joined Red Hat in 2012 and is now a Principal Solution Architect on the German Enterprise Sales team.

  • IBM CEO discusses Red Hat growth and its role in the company’s hybrid cloud strategy – Invidious

  • 3 more phases of DevSecOps transformation | Opensource.com

    Making a major operations transition must be a long-term and well-planned process. Because DevSecOps is an important step in the DevOps journey for your organization, you are more likely to find success if you introduce and implement your transformation in phases.

    In my previous article, I explained the first three phases of making this change. This article presents three additional phases of DevSecOps transformation you must work through to achieve your goals. Finishing these phases requires that you foster team collaboration to carry your organization through security changes, going live with DevSecOps, and putting the tools in place for continuous learning and iteration of your DevSecOps toolchain and processes.

  • IT leadership: 5 traits of truly digital leaders | The Enterprisers Project

    Every organization can make standalone digital investments, launch many digital transformation efforts, or even hire a team of digital executives to help them achieve digital nirvana. But actions made in isolation without fully adopting what it takes to become a digital business are destined to fail. The fact is, there’s no silver bullet for building a digital organization, nor is there a clear deadline or desired end state.

    To truly be digital – instead of just doing digital things – a business becomes a different version of itself by adopting a complete mindset and operational shift, preparing to adapt to change continuously. Becoming a digital business means accepting that change is the rule, not the exception – and that this constant state of change is the opportunity for them to stand out, not fall behind. And it takes an exceptional team. No single individual or IT leader can do it alone.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • 10 Best Icon Themes for Ubuntu (2021 Edition)

    Icon theme packs and theme sets are the easiest way to adapt the look and feel of your operating system to your taste. By extension, it is also the quickest. What is convenient about employing icon themes is the fact that you need not make any significant changes to your machine. Just install the icon pack you want (preferably along with a fitting theme), set your wallpaper, and that’s it.

    Today’s focus is on the 10 best exceptional icon themes you can apply to your Ubuntu or similar distro irrespective of your desktop environment.

  • Provisioning bare metal Kubernetes clusters with Spectro Cloud and MAAS | Ubuntu

    Bare metal Kubernetes (K8s) is now easier than ever. Spectro Cloud has recently posted an article about integrating Kubernetes with MAAS (Metal-as-a-Service.

    In the article, they describe how they have created a provider for the Kubernetes Cluster API for Canonical MAAS (Metal-as-a-Service). This blog describes briefly the benefits of bare metal K8s, the challenges it presents, and how the work by Saad Malik and the team from Spectro Cloud solves those challenges.

    The K8s Cluster API provides an abstraction layer for provisioning to underlying infrastructure such as servers and VMs. Examples of providers include public cloud providers. Now thanks to Spectro Cloud, there is also a provider for MAAS.

  • Why your snap’s name, description, summary may have been changed, and what we’re doing about it | Ubuntu

    As you may be aware, last month, a few users reported seeing some of their snaps’ metadata (description, name, summary) being overwritten by what seemed to be old information. On closer inspection, this affected snaps for which the authors had modified the metadata via the Web publisher interface, and the metadata had reverted to the version included within the snap, which may be shorter or out-of-date.

    Upon investigation, we found that a feature that was announced in June and actually enabled on August 25th is to blame for this behavior. This feature allows publishers to use the metadata included in the snap, when a build of the snap is released to the stable channel. However, it does not (or should not) upload any new metadata information if said metadata has been manually updated by the publisher through the Web interface of the Snap Store.

  • Hate Snaps? LOL! How About Now? – Invidious

    One of the main complaints from the Snap haters is that there is only one Snap Store and it is run by Canonical. Well…not anymore. In this video I will introduce ‘lol’, an open-source alternative to snap that uses its own snap server ‘lol-server’ which is separate from the official Snap Store. And you could fork ‘lol-server’ to create your own Snap server if you so choose. ERRATA: BTW, the command “./lol refresh lol” did place ‘lol’ in the PATH (/snap/bin/lol) so simply typing ‘lol’ without the ‘./’ should work after that.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi Launches New Website For Its Hardware

  In a surprise move, Raspberry Pi today announced that a new website has been created to support Raspberry Pi devices, sales and documentation. This marks a change from a single website from 2011 which served both educational outreach and sales. Another change is Raspberry Pi’s social media presence, with the original Raspberry Pi twitter account focusing on the hardware, and another representing the charity and educational outreach of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

  Raspberry Pi Trading and the Raspberry Pi Foundation have long been separate entities. Raspberry Pi Trading is responsible for the hardware engineering and sales of Raspberry Pi while Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity that provides educational outreach such as learning resources and teacher outreach program “Picademy”.

  In two blog posts, one written by Liz Upton, executive director of communications for Raspberry Pi Trading, and another from Philip Colligan chief executive of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we learn that the division is a necessary step as the user base grows and their requirements change. The new raspberrypi.com website aims to serve those interested in the Raspberry Pi hardware and software and provides documentation and links to resellers offering official Raspberry Pi boards and accessories.

• GPD XP is a modular handheld Android gaming device (coming soon)

  Chinese device maker GPD has made a name for itself in recent years with a series of handheld gaming PCs that run Windows. But GPD actually got its start making Android devices, and the company is sort of going back to its roots with the new GPD XP handheld game system… but it’s also looking to the future.

• Retro Dreamer G4A CM4 by My Retro Game Case

  Build Yourself!!! Customize it!!! Play with it!!! Retro handheld Raspberry Pi cm4 game console.

• Compact Whiskey Lake system offers optional dual-CAN module

  Kontron’s Linux-friendly “KBox A-150-WKL” embedded PC has an 8th Gen Whisky Lake CPU, up to 64GB DDR4, 2x GbE, 2x DP, 2x COM, 4x USB 3.1 Gen2, 3x M.2, and optional CAN and DIN-rail.

  Kontron has announced a fanless embedded computer with optional DIN-rail support that runs Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or Win 10 IoT on Intel’s 8th Gen Whiskey Lake processors. The KBox A-150-WKL is said to be based on a 3.5-inch SBC, which is likely Kontron’s 3.5″-SBC-WLU. The 180 x 134 x 50mm system is designed for fieldbus environments and process control, as well as for industrial firewalls and other embedded applications.

• Groovy TV Gets A Very Brady Makeover

• LEONARDO: The Hopping, Flying Bipedal Robot | Hackaday

  LEONARDO, a somewhat tortured name derived from “LEgs ONboARD drOne,” is actually just what it appears to be: a quadcopter with a set of legs. It comes to us from Caltech’s Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies, and the video below makes it easy to see what kind of advantages a kinematic mash-up like this would offer. LEO combines walking and flying to achieve a kind of locomotion that looks completely alien, kind of a bouncy, tip-toeing step that really looks like someone just learning how to walk in high heels. The upper drone aspect of LEO provides a lot of the stabilization needed for walking; the thrust from the rotors is where that bouncy compliance comes from. But the rotors can also instantly ramp up the thrust so LEO can fly over obstacles, like stairs. It’s also pretty good at slacklining and skateboarding, too.

• LEONARDO, the Bipedal Robot, Can Ride a Skateboard and Walk a Slackline

  Researchers at Caltech have built a bipedal robot that combines walking with flying to create a new type of locomotion, making it exceptionally nimble and capable of complex movements.

  Part walking robot, part flying drone, the newly developed LEONARDO (short for LEgs ONboARD drOne, or LEO for short) can walk a slackline, hop, and even ride a skateboard. Developed by a team at Caltech’s Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST), LEO is the first robot that uses multi-joint legs and propeller-based thrusters to achieve a fine degree of control over its balance.

• PICMG spec standardizes links between IoT controllers and sensors

  PICMG has ratified an “IoT.1” firmware spec for standardizing plug-and-play communications between IoT controllers and sensors and effecters. The spec works with PICMG’s recent microSAM MCU module form factor.

  PICMG, which is known primarily for its COM Express standards, has released its first draft of a firmware spec for Internet of Things connectivity at the sensor level. The IoT.1 spec is primarily concerned with microcontroller connections with sensors. However, starting with IoT.2, the spec will extend upward to industrial controllers and IoT gateways that runs Linux or Windows on COM Express modules and other PICMG form factors.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • LED Matrix Hourglass Knows Which Way Is Up | Hackaday

    The unit uses an Arduino (with ATMEGA328P) and an MPU-6050 accelerometer breakout board to sense orientation and movement, and the rest is just a matter of software. Both the Arduino and the MPU-6050 board are readily available and not particularly expensive, and the LED matrix displays are just 8×8 arrays of red/green LEDs, each driven by a HT16K33 LED controller IC.

  • Instantly test your cables by plugging them into this device | Arduino Blog

    Cables come in a wide variety of styles and attempting to diagnose a potential fault in one of their tiny wires can be tricky, especially without access to fancy test equipment. To combat this problem, TechKiwiGadgets created a small device called the Touch Screen Cable Tracer, which has several varieties of connectors on both ends that allow for a USB and RJ45 cable to be plugged in and subsequently tested.

    The board selected for this project was an Arduino Mega due to its large amount of RAM and GPIO pins. Placed on top of this was an ILI9325 2.8” TFT screen, which shows the menu for the cable tracing device and the current state of the attached cable. TechKiwiGadgets also designed, fabricated, and assembled a custom cable tracer shield that snaps onto the Arduino and exposes a mirrored set of connectors on either end.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Open Source Tax Software For Filling US Taxes

  Open source software can be useful for all types of tasks, even filling tax forms if you are a US resident.

  Taxes in the United States are a little bit complicated compared to other countries, and there are federal taxes and state taxes, and one will need to fill many different forms – depending on their current financial status – and submit them routinely so that they don’t get accused with tax evasion or tax fraud.

  Typically, people may hire some 3rd-party expert to help them in the process, or do it by their own. If they are doing it by their own, then they might depend on the help of typical proprietary tax software such TurboTax.

  However, open source alternatives to TurboTax exist, and in today’s article we’ll be seeing two of them.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Old Thunderbird installations will be upgraded to Thunderbird 91 via automatic updates now

      The Thunderbird team released two new versions of the open source desktop email client in the past two weeks. Thunderbird 91.1.2 was a smaller bug fix update for all client versions, Thunderbird 91.2.0, a security update that also included bug fixes.

      Particularly of note for Thunderbird users who are still using Thunderbird 78.x is that the team has lifted the upgrade block. Previous releases of Thunderbird 91 were not offered to devices running Thunderbird 78.x via the email client’s automatic update feature.

    • Reducing the Overhead of Profiling Firefox Sleeping Threads – Mozilla Performance

      Firefox includes its own profiler: Visit profiler.firefox.com to enable it, and the user documentation is available from there.

      The main advantages compared with using a third-party profiler, are that it’s supplied with Firefox, it can capture screenshots, it understands JavaScript stacks, and Firefox is adding “markers” to indicate important events that may be useful to developers.

      Its most visible function is to capture periodic “samples” of function call stacks from a number of threads in each process. Threads are selected during configuration in about:profiling, and can range from a handful of the most important threads, to all known threads.

      This sampling is performed at regular intervals, by going through all selected threads and suspending each one temporarily while a sample of its current stack is captured (this is known as “stack walking”). This costly sampling operation can have a non-negligible impact on how the rest of the Firefox code runs, this is the “overhead” of the Profiler. In order to be able to sample as many threads as possible with the smallest impact, there is ongoing work to reduce this overhead.

    • Lots to see in Firefox 93! – Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

      Firefox 93 comes with lots of lovely updates including AVIF image format support, filling of XFA-based forms in its PDF viewer and protection against insecure downloads by blocking downloads relying on insecure connections.

      Web developers are now able to use static initialization blocks within JavaScript classes, and there are some Shadow DOM and Custom Elements updates. The SHA-256 algorithm is now supported for HTTP Authentication using digests. This allows much more secure authentication than previously available using the MD5 algorithm.

• Programming/Development

  • 3 new features of the latest OpenPGP.js version

    OpenPGP.js is a cryptography library that implements the OpenPGP standard, most commonly used for email encryption. ProtonMail, Mailvelope, and FlowCrypt all use OpenPGP.js, to name a few. That means the OpenPGP.js library encrypts millions of users’ messages.

    The OpenPGP standard, first published in the 1990s, like almost anything, requires maintenance and updating for both security and usability. A “crypto refresh” of the standard is in the works, which adds modern encryption algorithms and deprecates outdated ones. To improve usability, various email applications now allow users to seamlessly encrypt their communication—without managing their keys or those of their contacts.

    First released in 2014, OpenPGP.js began based on an early prototype called GPG4Browsers, which is based on several scripts by Herbert Hanewinkel (among other contributors). The second version of OpenPGP.js, released in 2016, was completely reworked to use Uint8Arrays instead of strings (which significantly increased its performance) and modern ES6 modules rather than CommonJS modules internally. Versions 3 and 4, both released in 2018, added support for Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) and streaming, respectively.

  • GCC, Clang[d], LSP client, Kate and variadic macro warnings, a short story

    Kate has had an LSP plugin for sometime now, which uses Clangd. It’s a great plugin that brings many code navigation/validation features, akin to those available in Qt Creator and KDevelop.

    So naturally since I got it to work, I’ve been using it. At some point I found out about the Diagnostics tab in the LSP Client tool view in Kate, which displays useful information; however I also saw that it was plagued by a spam of the following warnings…

  • GCC 12 Enables Auto-Vectorization For -O2 Optimization Level – Phoronix

    The change merged today is enabling the auto-vectorizer at the -O2 optimization level rather than only at -O3 and above. The auto-vectorizer is enabled by default with -O2 and using its “very cheap” cost model. The very cheap model enables vectorization if the scalar iteration count is a multiple of four, it is the “cheapest” of these cost models. Meanwhile the default cost model for vectorization at -O3 is “dynamic” for having more checks to try to determine if a vectorized code path will be faster.

  • Jon Chiappetta: Reddit Refresher Javascript Bookmark

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppGSL 0.3.10: Small Updatex

    A new release 0.3.10 of RcppGSL is now on CRAN. upload](https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2020/06/21#rcppgsl_0.3.8). The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL by relying on the Rcpp package.

    This release brings a requested configure.ac update (just like RQuantLib yesterday and littler two days ago, along with the at-work tiledb update today). It also adds a small testing improvement. No user-visible changes, no new features. Details follow from the NEWS file.

  • Rust

    • Lang team October update

      This week the lang team held its October planning meeting (minutes). We hold these meetings on the first Wednesday of every month.

    • This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 411

Education

• School World Order with John Klyczek

  Whitney is joined by professor, author and Unlimited Hangout contributor John Klyczek to discuss how teachers unions and the US education system are selling out to Big Tech as well as the oligarch class and their long-standing plans to exploit students to advance the 4th Industrial Revolution. Originally published on 10/05/21.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Twitch Data Leak 2021 Includes 125GB Private Data

    Another breach of the year 2021 is the Twitch Data Leak, which comprises 125GB of company data as well as the platform’s source code. An anonymous member on 4chan leaked the data on October 6, 2021.

    Twitch confirmed the incident on Twitter yesterday, following the release of the data. Twitch has not revealed any information about the incident, such as how the hacker stole such sensitive information.

  • Windows 11 bugs slow down AMD processors, AMD and Microsoft are working on a fix [Ed: More people now realise that Vista 11 is even worse than Vista 10 because bribe-by-Microsoft media cannot quite control the narrative anymore]

    Microsoft released Windows 11 this week as a free update from Windows 10 for compatible PCs. However, if you are running an AMD processor and haven’t updated yet, you may want to hold off as two performance bugs have identified.

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • The Linux Foundation and Fintech Open Source Foundation Announce Keynote Speakers for Open Source Strategy Forum New York 2021

          The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, along with co-host Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a nonprofit whose mission is to accelerate adoption of open source software, standards and best practices in financial services, today announced keynote speakers for Open Source Strategy Forum New York (OSSF). The event takes place November 10, preceded by a FINOS Member event on November 9, in New York City. The schedule can be viewed here and the keynote speakers can be viewed here.

          OSSF features an agenda covering recent developments and the direction of open source in financial services across a wide range of topics and domains. The event promotes deeper collaboration across finance, open source and technology and drives innovation across the industry in order to deliver better code, faster.

        • The Linux Foundation and Fintech Open Source Foundation Announce Keynote Speakers for Open Source Strategy Forum New York 2021 [Ed: Not too shocking that the floundering PR firm, "Linux" Foundation, is floating and spreading pseudo-novel buzzwords like "Fintech"]

        • The Linux Foundation and Fintech Open Source Foundation Announce Keynote Speakers for Open Source Strategy Forum New York 2021

        • The Linux Foundation and Fintech Open Source Foundation Announce Keynote Speakers for Open Source Strategy Forum New York 2021

  • Security

    • Hackers could force locked iPhones to make contactless payments

    • NSA Releases Guidance on Avoiding the Dangers of Wildcard TLS Certificates and ALPACA Techniques [Ed: NSA releasing security advice if like Pentagon using peace consultations]

      The National Security Agency (NSA) has released a Cybersecurity Information (CSI) sheet with guidance to help secure the Department of Defense, National Security Systems, and Defense Industrial Base organizations from poorly implemented wildcard Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates and the exploitation of Application Layer Protocols Allowing Cross-Protocol Attacks (ALPACA). A malicious cyber actor with network access can exploit this vulnerability to access sensitive information.

    • Security updates for Friday

      Security updates have been issued by Fedora (libssh), Mageia (firefox), Slackware (httpd), SUSE (xen), and Ubuntu (firefox and mysql-5.7).

    • Chris Lamb: Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains (2021)

      I didn’t blog about it at the time, but a paper I co-authored with Stefano Zacchiroli was accepted by IEEE Software in April of this year.

    • Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 187 released

      The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 187. This version includes the following changes:

      * Add support for comparing .pyc files. Thanks to Sergei Trofimovich.
        (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#278)
        

      You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • IFF submits its comments on the Draft Aadhaar (Pricing of Aadhaar Authentication Services) Regulations

        We have provided our comments on the Draft Aadhaar (Pricing of Aadhaar Authentication Services) Regulations 2021. In our comments, we have called attention to significant issues of exclusion, privacy and surveillance that exist with the Aadhaar programme and highlighted non-compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision in the Puttaswamy judgement. Finally, we recommend that Aadhaar authentication charges be scrapped and private entities be barred from acting as ‘requesting entities’ for authentication.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• DDNS with Hetzner DNS

  Some of the services I host are hosted behind dynamic DNS. There are lots of services to automatically update the dns records if the IP changes, but most of them are not free or require regular confirmation of the domain.

  I wanted to have a solution that is as standard as possible, so ideally without any CNAME aliases pointing to a subdomain of a DDNS provider.

  Luckily, Hetzner has a free DNS server hosting with a nice API. So what I ended up doing was regularly sending requests to the Hetzner DNS API to update the IP-address To reduce the amount of requests going to hetzner, the request is only sent when the IP really changed. The IP can be fetched from an external service like Ipify or a very simple selfhosted service if you have another server that is reachable on the internet.

Kernel Space

• Linux 5.14.10

  I'm announcing the release of the 5.14.10 kernel.
  
  All users of the 5.14 kernel series must upgrade.
  
  The updated 5.14.y git tree can be found at:
  	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.14.y
  and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
  
  https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
  
  thanks,
  
  greg k-h
  

• Linux 4.4.287

Applications

• How To Choose The Best Electronic Signature Service For Linux

  If you work for a large company or corporation, dealing with contracts and agreements often requires the use of digital signatures. Such signatures ensure that both parties are protected under their own sets of laws, enabling them to conduct business efficiently. However, choosing an electronic signature service can be difficult.

  Here’s a list of things to look out for when trying to choose the best electronic signature for Linux…

Instructionals/Technical

• The OpenSSH server has limits on what user authentication you can use

  We’ve recently deployed multi-factor authentication for SSH access to some especially sensitive machines, which has caused me to become much more familiar with how OpenSSH’s sshd and MFA interact with each other and the limits on that. Unfortunately these limits mean that some combinations of authentication methods are not really available (or not available at all). For example, in many situations you can’t require people to use their Unix password and then either a public key or MFA authentication.

• Things Learned Blogging

  It might seem like an obvious point but if you want to blog, blog. Don’t work on the technology that powers your blog. Work on the content of your blog. A blog is content first, technology only incidentally.

Distributions

• Forget Windows, Linux or MacOS: Our choice of the best alternative operating systems

  Built from the ground up but designed to be backward-compatible with its classic quarry, Haiku follows BeOS’ lead in its entirely modular design, allowing different components of the OS to be developed concurrently. It’s been a while since the OS had a stable release. In fact, even the second beta release of its under-development branch was released almost two years after the previous one.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu Frame Aims to Power Ubuntu Core-Based Kiosks

    Ubuntu Frame aims to power graphical applications for embedded devices like interactive kiosks, smart retail solutions, and so on.

    Ubuntu Frame supports Flutter, Qt, GTK, Electron, and SDL2, as well as HTML5 and Java apps. Its main goal is to provide all components developers need in an embedded graphical application, including secure communication, touch screen support in addition to mouse and keyboard, and so on, to allow them to focus uniquely on the display content.
    Security is enforced by running the client and server apps in separate containers that can only communicate with Ubuntu Frame using a secure socket.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Perspectives on supporting young people in low-income areas to access and engage with computing

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Google details new enterprise features in Android 12 – 9to5Google

  • A Handful of Games Now Support Android 12’s Game Mode API

  • OnePlus 9 RT to run Android 11 out of the box, pricing tipped – GSMArena.com news

  • Best battery widgets for Android – Phandroid

  • Moto G Pure Vs. Moto G Play: Which Cheap Android Phone Should You Buy?

  • How to Remove Learned Words From Your Android Keyboard

  • How to Hard Reset Android Phone? – The Teal Mango

  • How to play AAA games like Far Cry 6 on your Android phone – 9to5Google

  • Best Android app deals of the day: OK Golf, Dandara, more – 9to5Toys

  • Top 9 Best Drawing Android Apps – 2021

  • Oppo Color OS guide: Everything you need to know – Android Authority

  • Verizon’s Working On A New Android TV Soundbar

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Programming/Development

  • Python

    • Software at Scale 34 – Faster Python with Guido van Rossum

      We discuss Guido’s new work on making CPython faster (PEP 659), Tiers of Python Interpreter Execution, and high impact, low hanging fruit performance improvements.

Channeling Spirit of Revolution, Chileans Are Drafting a Democratic Constitution

The Grotesque and Sublime Transformations of Titane

Before you could slip the world in your pocket and conjure its sleek apparitions with a thumb on glass, David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome envisioned the body’s encounter with technology as a grotesque collision: cassette tapes plunged into a yonic gash where the stomach should be; a firearm made literal as mottled flesh grows over a gun, claiming its contours like moss would a stone. Such fears of technological corruption well predate Videodrome, but the film’s ragged suturing of human and machine centers a long-standing anxiety about the body and its boundaries: where it begins, where it ends, and how much of its wants and needs are really its own. These are also the stakes of Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or–winning Titane, a film teeming with the kind of carnal metamorphoses that Cronenberg once called “the flesh undergoing revolution.” Bodies leak, tear, and erupt, but in Titane, the flesh’s revolt begins long before the bursting viscera. In the very first scene, an accident inflicts a wound so indelible that the rest of the film leaves us to wonder if there can be a life—or a self—forged apart from its deepest traumas.

A Candidate for Mixtecos in California’s Republican Heartland

Madera County has been a stronghold for the Republican Party in California’s San Joaquin Valley for decades. Billboards this fall lined rural highways, urging the recall of Governor Gavin Newsom, pasted over peeling Trump/Pence posters. If Newsom’s fate had rested on Madera County, he would no longer be governor—60 percent of county voters went against him. Fifty-six percent went for Trump in 2020, slightly more than 2016. In fact, the last Democratic presidential candidate to win the county (barely) was Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Wrestling With Infinity

“Can I give you a cane?” he asked.

This was in the alley two blocks from my house. I was pushing myself along — I love to walk in alleys for some reason, maybe because I never know what I’ll come upon — and I passed an older guy (around my age, that is) whose garage door was open. He was working at his bandsaw. As I walked past him, he turned and called out his cane offer to me.

They/Them Film and Panel | One Climber’s Story

Texas

Neiman Marcus Breach Exposes Data Of 4.6 Million Users

Another day, another massive privacy breach nobody will do much about. This time it’s Neiman Marcus, which issued a statement indicating that the personal data of roughly 4.6 million U.S. consumers was exposed thanks to a previously undisclosed data breach that occurred last year. According to the company, the data exposed included login in information, credit card payment information, virtual gift card numbers, names, addresses, and the security questions attached to Neiman Marcus accounts. The company is, as they always are in the wake of such breaches, very, very sorry:

Twitch [Breach] of 135 GB of Data Includes How Much Its Biggest Streamers Make

On Wednesday, the poster published a link to a torrent of 135 GB, calling it “an extremely poggers leak” which allegedly includes source code for all Twitch clients for different operating systems, an unreleased Steam competitor, and internal tools that Twitch’s security team uses.

Science

• My PhD supervisor just won the Nobel prize in physics – here’s how his research on complex systems changed science

  This prize for Professor Parisi, split with trail-blazing meteorologists Professor Manabe and Professor Hasselmann, is an amazing recognition of an entire research area – perhaps a little less glamorous than the likes of general relativity or string theory – that attempts to understand and model what we in physics call “complex systems”.

  These include things like climate ecosystems, financial systems, and biological phenomena, to name a few. The sheer variety of complex systems – represented in fluctuating markets and flocking starlings – makes it very hard to derive any sort of universal rules for them. Parisi’s work has allowed us to derive unprecedented conclusions about such systems that, on the surface, look random, unpredictable and impossible to model theoretically.

Health/Nutrition

• Some States Are Rationing Who Gets COVID Care Once Again

• Opinion | The Sound of Silence: In the Age of Covid, Where Have All the Heroes Gone?

  “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio / our nation turns its lonely eyes to you / woo, woo, woo!”—Simon & Garfunkel.

• We’re Losing Our Humanity, and the Pandemic Is to Blame

  Kurt Thigpen clenched his hands around the edge of the table because if he couldn’t feel the sharp edges digging into his palms, he would have to think about how hard his heart was beating. He was grateful that his mask hid his expression. He hoped that no one could see him sweat.

  A woman approached the lectern in the center aisle, a thick American flag scarf looped around her neck.

• Federal Judge Blocks Texas Abortion Ban, Blasts “Offensive Deprivation of Such an Important Right”

  A federal judge has temporarily blocked Texas’s near-total ban on abortions, granting the Justice Department’s emergency request to halt the law while courts consider its legality. In his ruling, Judge Robert Pitman slammed the Texas ban’s unconstitutionality, writing, “This Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right.” “Judge Robert Pitman ruled and said what advocates in Texas and clinics operators in Texas have been saying all along … a near-total ban on abortion in the state of Texas is flagrantly unconstitutional,” says Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation. Abortion clinics in the state are already moving quickly to resume abortions.

• High Drug Prices and the Refusal to Talk Seriously About Debt and Deficits

• UN Chief Says Vaccine Apartheid Is ‘Best Ally’ of Covid-19 Pandemic

  Decrying inequities in coronavirus vaccine distribution as both “immoral” and “stupid,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Thursday implored rich countries to live up to their vows to deliver lifesaving shots to billions of vulnerable people in poor nations around the world.

  “Vaccine equity will accelerate the end of the pandemic.”

• The Buffalo Hospital Strike Is the Latest in a New Wave of Labor Unrest

  Buffalo, N.Y.—At 6 am last Friday, more than 2,000 health care workers at Mercy Hospital here—part of the Catholic Health network—took to the picket line in part of a growing wave of labor unrest in Western New York and the nation.

• F. Diane Barth Facebook’s whistleblower is prompting some users to log off — forever

  Facebook represents some of the most difficult and complex conflicts of our time. The concerns are not new, but they have taken on new power in recent days, underscored by Tuesday’s congressional hearing and Sunday’s “60 Minutes” segment. As Haugen, a data scientist who has worked at Facebook and other social media giants, told CBS interviewer Scott Pelley: “The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”

  The conflict between self-interest and public interest is not exclusive to Facebook, of course. But the decision to stay or leave the site is made harder by the fact that attachment to others is a basic human need, and Facebook has offered an opportunity for many of us to meet this need. So do we stay to feed our personal need for connection? Do we leave to make a “statement,” or because we can no longer stomach being part of an organization that, through self-interested manipulation, is contributing to some of society’s worst problems?

• Moderna: A Company “In Need Of A Hail Mary”

  Those analyzing the COVID-19 crisis and its effects have mostly focused on how its disruptive nature has led to major shifts and recalibrations throughout society and the economy. Such disruption has also lent itself to a variety of agendas that had required an event of “reset” potential in order to be realized. In the case of the vaccine industry, COVID-19 has led to dramatic changes in how federal agencies manage the approval of medical countermeasures during a declared crisis, how trials for vaccine candidates are conducted, how the public perceives vaccination, and even how the term “vaccine” is defined.

  Such shifts, though obvious, have provoked praise from some and sharp criticism from others, with the latter category being largely censored from public discourse on television, in print, and online. However, in objectively analyzing such seismic changes, it’s clear that most of these shifts in vaccine development and vaccine policy dramatically favor speed and the implementation of new and experimental technology at the expense of safety and thorough study. In the case of vaccines, it can be argued that no one benefitted more from these changes than the developers of the COVID-19 vaccines themselves, particularly the pharmaceutical and biotechnology company Moderna.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Microsoft is disabling Excel 4.0 macros by default to protect users

  • Unlike POWER9, IBM’s new POWER10 processors are not completely open source

  • Windows 11 bug could reduce Ryzen CPU performance by up to 15%, AMD says

  • Windows 11: Just say no

  • Why calls for ‘right-to-repair’ rules are revving up again for vehicles in Canada

    While most Canadians can get their vehicle fixed wherever they want these days, she worries that independent shops could be left behind by new cars — linked wirelessly to manufacturers — capable of limiting access to data that helps technicians diagnose and fix a problem.

  • Planned obsolescence – how Big Tech manipulates consumers to spend again and again

    Planned obsolescence is an integral part of their strategy. The policy of designing a consumer product to fail before its natural lifespan. The purpose of this is to compel consumers to buy the newer model within long before they really need to.

    For example, your smartphone has a built-in frailty that will force it to fail in approximately 2-3 years. This isn’t because the phone itself will reach the end of its natural life in that time, but rather because it fits the manufacturer’s marketing plans and sales quotas.

  • Russian-speaking hacking group scaling up ransomware attacks on hospitals [iophk: Windows TCO]

    Cybersecurity organization Mandiant labeled the group “FIN12” as part of a report detailing the group’s activities, with Mandiant noting that it has been in existence since at least 2018, but was increasingly hitting organizations in North America with annual revenues of more than $300 million with ransomware attacks. Many of these companies made even more, with the average annual revenue of North American groups targeted at just under $6 billion.

  • Tesla is moving its headquarters to Austin, Texas

    Musk said Tesla will continue to operate its electric vehicle factory in Fremont, CA, and that he even plans to try and increase production there by 50 percent. “Just to be clear, though, we will be continuing to expand our activities in California,” he said during the company’s annual shareholder meeting. “So this is not a matter of Tesla leaving California.”

    The move means Tesla’s home will no longer be the state where its vehicles are the most popular; instead, Tesla will be headquartered in a state where it can’t legally sell its cars directly to consumers.

  • Ireland’s status as tax haven for tech firms like Google, Facebook, and Apple is ending

    Ireland said Thursday it would join an international agreement that sets taxes on profits for multinational corporations at a minimum rate of 15 percent. This is a major shift for the country that is the European headquarters for many large US pharmaceutical companies, as well as tech firms, including Google, Apple, and Facebook.

    An increase from Ireland’s current 12.5 percent to 15 percent may not seem that large by itself. The so-called Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Inclusive Framework agreement, outlined in July, is actually a two-pillar plan aimed at helping end tax avoidance and making international tax rules fairer and more transparent. The OECD has estimated that a 15 percent tax rate would generate some $150 billion in global tax revenue annually and would help to stabilize the international tax system.

  • Security

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Pioneer Awards Ceremony 2021 Recap: Privacy Defenders Unite

        On September 16, EFF held the 30th Annual Pioneer Award Ceremony, a yearly celebration of our digital heroes. The Barlows this year went to a selection of individuals who have worked to protect privacy in unique, impressive, and successful ways, from the streets of Harlem and Boston to Mumbai. If you missed the awards, you can watch it online. You can also read the full transcript.

        EFF’s Executive Director, Cindy Cohn, kicked off the event by pointing out that the world may be changing shape–this is our second online Pioneer Award Ceremony, after all–but EFF was built for change, and we’ve had significant successes over the past year: our fight to keep dangerous scanning software off Apple devices; passing one of the largest state investments in public fiber broadband in U.S. history in California; developing guides to help observe visible and invisible surveillance at protests; our pressure on Amazon Ring, which finally added a variety of protections as well as visibility into its partnerships with police; and of course, our win at the Supreme Court, which overturned an overbroad interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. 

        It was also a challenging year, as we lost two luminaries who made important and influential impressions on the digital rights landscape. Cindy gave a touching tribute to Sherwin Siy, who passed away in July. Sherwin was “a brilliant advocate and strategist dedicated to protecting and preserving the web as a place for creativity and innovation and sharing.” We also lost Dan Kaminsky, who “showed work and security are linked and it is our responsibility to respect users in the tools we built.” Sherwin and Dan remind us that “we define technology and that we are not helpless. We help each other. Each one of us has the power to grow, nurture and inspire others in our own ways.” 

      • Face Recognition Technology: Commonly Used Terms

        For more information on government use of face recognition and how to end it in your community, visit EFF’s About Face resource page.

        Face detection: Determines whether an image includes a human face. Some government agencies use face detection to aid in obscuring identifiable faces before releasing video footage in response to requests for public records. As a result, many bans on government use of face recognition technology specifically exclude face detection for this purpose, provided that no information about the faces is collected or stored. Generally, this use does not raise significant privacy concerns.

        Face recognition: Any collection and processing of faceprints, including both face matching and face analysis (two terms defined below). Face recognition raises significant digital rights concerns.

      • Face Recognition Isn’t Just Face Identification and Verification: It’s Also Photo Clustering, Race Analysis, Real-time Tracking, and More

        We disagree. All forms of face recognition are a menace to privacy, free speech, and racial justice. This post explores many of the various kinds of face recognition, and explains why all must be addressed by laws.

        At the most basic level, face recognition technology takes images of human faces and tries to extract information about the people in them.

        Here’s how it usually works today:

      • The Facebook whistleblower says its algorithms are dangerous. Here’s why.

        Frances Haugen’s testimony at the Senate hearing today raised serious questions about how Facebook’s algorithms work—and echoes many findings from our previous investigation.

      • Facebook Can’t Be Saved

        Facebook has experienced years of intense scrutiny over the exact issues that are being discussed in the wake of Haugen’s revelations, and has only succeeded in making its inherent problems worse. During the hearing, Haugen compared fixing Facebook’s issues to mandating that cars come with seatbelts. But maybe Facebook doesn’t need a seatbelt. Maybe it just needs to stop being given more chances.

      • Google now tells criminals when Chrome users are ‘idle.’ What could go wrong?

        “The Idle Detection API notifies developers when a user is idle, indicating such things as lack of interaction with the keyboard, mouse, screen, activation of a screensaver, locking of the screen, or moving to a different screen. A developer-defined threshold triggers the notification,” Google said in a blog post. “Applications that facilitate collaboration require more global signals about whether the user is idle than are provided by existing mechanisms that only consider a user’s interaction with the application’s own tab.”

Defence/Aggression

• Stop Calling the Military Budget a ‘Defense’ Budget

  The misleading first name of the Defense Department doesn’t justify using “defense” as an adjective for its budget. On the contrary, the ubiquitous use of phrases like “defense budget” and “defense spending” — virtually always written with a lower-case “d” — reinforces the false notion that equates the USA’s humongous military operations with defense.

  In the real world, the United States spends more money on its military than the next 10 countries all together. And most of those countries are military allies.

• Far Right Cable Channel Peddling Trump’s Election Lies Is Funded by AT&T

• The Best Speech I Never Gave

  On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I tromped to the National Mall in Washington to make a speech on the evils of the War on Terror. Antiwar demonstrators had organized Camp Democracy, a few blocks in front of the U.S. Capitol on the Mall. The speaking gig was arranged by a lady from the Veterans for Peace who I met at the 2004 National Libertarian Party convention. After she nudged hard for a freebie, I told her, “If there is a good audience, I’m willing to waive my usual speaking fee.”

  “Sure – we can do that,” she assured me. She wanted to have at least one libertarian on the program.

• As CBO Shows How to Cut $1 Trillion From Pentagon, Progressives Urge Spending on ‘True Security’

  Progressive foreign policy experts on Thursday pointed to a new Congressional Budget Office report that concludes it is possible to slash a trillion dollars in military spending over the coming decade without reducing force effectiveness as further proof that the United States can and should prioritize investments in tackling pandemics, inequality, and the climate crisis.

  “The U.S. military budget is now higher than it was at the peak of the Vietnam War, the Korean War, or the Cold War,” said Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). “This report shows that there are viable options for immediate, substantial reductions to the Pentagon budget.”

• A Guantanamo Detainee’s Case Has Been Languishing Without Action Since 2008. The Supreme Court Wants to Know Why.

  The Supreme Court on Wednesday waded into the case of Abu Zubaydah, a terrorism suspect whose request that the U.S. release him from Guantanamo Bay or charge him with a crime has languished without action for more than 13 years.

  The court was hearing a case on another issue: Whether the U.S. government could cite “state secrets” to prevent Zubaydah’s lawyers from taking depositions from the CIA contractors who subjected Zubaydah to waterboarding and other methods of torture.

• Abu Zubaydah Was Tortured for Years at CIA Black Sites. Biden Is Trying to Keep the Abuse Secret.

  The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in a case brought by Abu Zubaydah, the Guantánamo prisoner who was the first subject of the CIA’s torture program. Zubaydah’s legal team has spent years trying to obtain testimony from two psychologists who helped the CIA design and implement his torture, and the Biden administration is continuing the Trump’s administration strategy to keep key information about Zubaydah’s torture in Poland classified despite the fact that the two psychologists are willing to testify. Several justices contradicted the Biden administration, suggesting Zubaydah, the only witness besides the psychologists to the torture in Poland, testify himself, and expressing frustration that Zubaydah is still being held incommunicado at Guantánamo. We speak with Abu Zubaydah’s attorney, Joe Margulies, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Raymond Bonner, who has long followed the case. “The legal justification for continuing to hold [Guantánamo detainees] has disappeared,” says Margulies.

• Opinion | War, Torture, and Mass Death: On the US Refusal to Apologize for Its Post-9/11 Carnage

  The anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was marked by days of remembrances — for the courageous rescue workers of that moment, for the thousands murdered as the Twin Towers collapsed, for those who died in the Pentagon, or in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, fighting off the hijackers of the commercial jet they were in, as well as for those who fought in the forever wars that were America’s response to those al-Qaeda attacks.

• Joint exercise in Israel: German Luftwaffe take part in training with armed drones for the first time

  Soldiers from four NATO countries have exercised with the Israeli Air Force in the use of „live-fire munitions“ with drones. A German squadron took over the reconnaissance. All drones ordered by the Bundeswehr in Israel are to be delivered this month. The new Bundestag will decide on their armament.

• Why the World’s Eyes Are on the Afghanistan-Tajikistan Border

  Earlier this summer, Rahmon mobilized 20,000 troops to the border, and held military exercises and discussions with Russia and other members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Meanwhile, the spokesperson for the Afghan government—Zabihullah Mujahid—tweeted pictures of Afghan troops deployed to Takhar province on the border of the two countries. The escalation of harsh language continues. Prospects of war between these two countries should not be discounted, but—given the role Russia plays in Tajikistan—it is unlikely.

  Panjshir Exiles

• Finland opens investigations after migrants from Belarus arrive via Estonia

  The Finnish Coast Guard has launched seven criminal investigations after migrants who crossed the Belarusian border were found in Finland. Some had arrived on ferries from Estonia.

• Islamic State families evacuated from Syrian camp and back in Denmark

  It is thought likely the women will face terror charges that will result in prison sentences of three to five years if they are convicted.

  All three travelled to Syria in 2014 to join up with their husbands and the IS movement. Nine of their 14 children were born in Denmark, and the other five were born in Syria.

• White terror: Millions of Americans say they’d support violence to restore Trump to power

  As I have argued before, such reactions are shortsighted and ill-advised — another example among many of the way America’s political class, news media and the public at large still does not understand the nature of the threat they face from the Republican-fascist movement and the larger white right.

  Experts on domestic terrorism have repeatedly warned that in the aftermath of Jan. 6 many militant Trumpists and other neofascists are operating more covertly, perhaps by breaking up into small cells that are difficult for law enforcement to track and apprehend. Right-wing militants and terrorists are more likely to attack “soft targets” as opposed to widely publicized events and locations where law enforcement is sure to be present.

  As seen in Michigan and elsewhere, right-wing militants are likely to focus their attention at the state and local level where law enforcement assets are more porous and likely targets are, in general, more vulnerable to attack.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Accidentally Unsealed Document Shows Feds Are Using Reverse Warrants To Demand Info On Google Searches

  Not only is the government using “reverse warrants” to rummage around in your Google stuff, it’s also using “keyword warrants” to cast about blindly for potential suspects.

• Pandora Papers: is the world’s biggest leak the world’s biggest cover-up?

  But where are the US politicians? Where are the Wall Streeters? Where are the Big Four, the masterminds of global tax avoidance PwC, EY, KPMG and Deloitte?

  Conspicuously absent, that’s where. Again.

Environment

• Google, YouTube to demonetize climate denial content

  Google announced a new policy Thursday prohibiting the monetization of content that contradicts the scientific consensus on climate change.

  That means that Google advertisers and publishers and YouTube creators will not be able to make ad revenue off of climate denialism.

• Google and YouTube will cut off ad money for climate change deniers

  Google will no longer allow advertisers, publishers, and YouTube creators to monetize content that denies the existence of climate change. The company detailed the changes in a support document on Thursday.

• Modest Reforms Won’t Bring Us a Green Revolution

  It was supposed to be the greatest transition of modern times.

• Climate-Change Transition in the Age of the Billionaire

  Practically overnight, a dirty, inefficient, and unjust system that encompassed 11 time zones was to undergo an extreme makeover. Billions of dollars were available to speed the process. A new crew of transition experts came up with the blueprint and the public was overwhelmingly on board. Best of all, this great leap forward would serve as a model for all countries desperate to exit a failed status quo.

  That’s not what happened.

• ‘No Place for Science Denial’: Google, YouTube Ban Monetization of Climate Misinformation

  Digital rights advocates on Thursday welcomed a report that Google and its YouTube video platform are prohibiting the monetization of climate misinformation.

  Google advertisers and publishers and YouTube creators will be banned from receiving advertising revenue that contradicts “well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,” company officials said in a statement reported by Axios.

• ‘Pivotal Moment’: IEA Says Cutting Methane From Fossil Fuels 75% by 2030 ‘Essential’

  Building on a “bombshell” release from earlier this year, the International Energy Agency on Thursday published a report on pathways to cut planet-heating methane emissions from fossil fuels 75% by 2030, which the IEA calls “essential” to combating the climate emergency.

  “It is inexcusable that massive amounts of methane continue to be allowed to just seep into the air from fossil fuel operations.”

• Formosa Case Study Spotlights Plastics Industry’s ‘Staggering’ Global Devastation

  For roughly six decades, Formosa Plastics Group has prioritized profits and flouted labor, environmental, and public health regulations in multiple places around the globe, from the Gulf Coast to Vietnam to Illinois—leaving in its wake a trail of deadly accidents and pollutants that exemplifies the entire petrochemical industry’s worldwide threats to human rights and the biosphere.

  “The scale of Formosa Plastics’ abuse is staggering.”

• ‘No Time to Waste’: Climate Leaders Call for Passing Reconciliation Bill Before UN Summit

  “Climate inaction is not an option, the climate emergency is here and we are living it… We cannot miss this once-in-a-generation opportunity to act for a cleaner, healthier future.”

  “Biden cannot go to COP 26 to negotiate global cooperation on climate, when he cannot even cut a good deal for climate and pass his own Build Back Better agenda here at home, with his own party.”

• To Avert ‘Uncontrollable Climate Chaos,’ Scientists Tell Biden to Stop Backing Fossil Fuels

  With an open letter expressing “the utmost alarm about the state of our climate system,” over 330 scientists on Thursday urged President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency and swiftly put an end to a fossil fuel-based energy system.

  “When scientists across the U.S. are imploring the president to get the country off fossil fuels,” said Dr. Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, “it’s time to listen.”

• Energy

  • George Osborne’s Banking Job a ‘Conflict of Interest’ With New Role at BP-Sponsored British Museum

    George Osborne’s work for an investment bank that counts BP among its major clients presents a “glaring conflict of interest” with his new role as chair of the British Museum, campaigners have said.

    The former UK chancellor is currently employed as a full-time partner at “boutique” investment bank Robey Warshaw, which has worked with the oil giant in recent years, including on its £7.7 billion purchase of US shale assets from BHP Group in 2018.

  • Indigenous Environmental Defenders Shut Down Peruvian Crude Oil Pipeline

    “Not a single drop of oil is going to come out of the Amazon until the government takes care of us,” said AIDCBY.

    “Now we’ll see the real face of the executive who campaigned about supporting Indigenous peoples.”

  • Bitcoin Miner Facing $5.6M Fine for Starting Rogue Power Plant

    It started with a mysterious humming noise that sounded like a wave “but 100 times more annoying,” according to local reports. Then residents of an estate in Alberta, Canada did some investigating and found out that the weird racket was actually a Bitcoin mining power plant—one that was running without anybody’s knowledge.

    The power plant had been set up by Vancouver-based data center and power firm Link Global to mint new tokens of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency. The problem: they built the thing without obtaining planning permission.

  • 2021-10-06 street lighting and nuclear war

    Addendum: I am not personally a fan of aggressive street lighting. It tends to create a substantial light pollution problem that is thought to contribute to health problems in humans and environmental disturbances. Further, it’s been the common wisdom for some time now that street lighting is likely not actually effective in reducing crime. That said, a recent 2019 study conducted in New York City is the first randomized controlled trial of the impact of additional street lighting on crime, and it actually did find a reduction in crime, and not a small one. That stands in opposition to a history of studies that have not found any crime reduction, but none of those studies were as rigorously designed. Hopefully more research will be conducted on this question.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Federal Court Rules Soldier-Butler Logging is Illegal, Halts Massive Logging and Road-Building Project in Ninemile Valley

    The Soldier-Butler Project, located about 30 miles northwest of Missoula, Montana, called for logging and/or burning on 9,975 acres, including 114 acres of clear-cuts, The logging plans called for building at least 7 miles of new roads and adding and reconstructing over 37 miles of “undetermined roads” to the National Forest road system.

    This was another enormous “landscape-scale” logging and road-building project that encompassed more than 70 square miles and added well over 44 miles of new roads to this already highly-roaded landscape. And let’s be clear here. What the Forest Service calls “undetermined roads” are often illegal, user-created roads that the agency is now legitimizing by including these roads in its official road system. This only incentivizes yet more illegal and unplanned user-created roads, which are highly detrimental to grizzly bears and elk habitat security. This is exactly the opposite of what the Forest Service should be doing to protect our public lands and national forests.

  • ‘Protect Our Coast,’ Wildlife Defenders Say as California Oil Spill Puts Species at Risk

    “Wildlife and coastal economies cannot continue to be jeopardized by dangerous offshore drilling. It’s past time to permanently protect our coast.”

  • ‘Planetary Health Declaration’ Issued Ahead of Key Biodiversity Summit

    Just ahead of a major United Nations summits on biodiversity and the climate—and amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic—a global consortium has launched a planetary health declaration in which they “raise an alarm that the ongoing degradation of our planet’s natural systems is a clear and present danger to the health of all people everywhere” that must be countered with a fundamental paradigm shift transforming nearly every aspect of society.

    “The planetary health science is clear,” the São Paulo Declaration on Planetary Health, published Tuesday at The Lancet, states. “We can no longer safeguard human health unless we change course.”

• Overpopulation

  • New protections for California’s aquifers are reshaping the state’s Central Valley

    For 100 years in California, anyone could dig a well on their land and pump as much as they wanted. Farmers got most of it. They pumped so much water that the underground water table fell by more than 100 feet in some places. The ground itself subsided as water was pumped out from underneath it.

    All that’s supposed to end. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), passed in 2014 but just now going into effect, treats the aquifer like a bank account that has to stay in balance. There can be withdrawals of water, but they cannot exceed the rate at which the aquifer is replenished.

Finance

• To Understand the Debt Ceiling Crisis, Observe the Far Right Clown Show in Idaho

• This Week’s Worst Influential American

• Opinion | People Don’t Become Homeless. This Cruel Society Makes Them Homeless.

  Shelter is a basic survival need, along with food, clothing and health care. But it’s even more than that. It’s also a psychic and spiritual need. As the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote: “A home shelters daydreaming, a home protects the dreamer, a home allows us to dream in peace.”

• Auguries of Late Capitalism

  To see evolution in a bee’s flight And biodiversity in a leaf of grass. To know Gaia from the passing of day to night And complexity from the biomass.

• Investigation: Majority of Directors of World’s Top Insurance Companies Tied to Polluting Industries

  Just over half of all directors at 30 of the world’s largest insurance companies have affiliations to polluting companies and organisations, reveals an investigation by DeSmog, including several individuals holding senior roles at some of the world’s largest energy companies.

  The findings raise concerns over a potential pervasive conflict of interest on the boards at a time when the international insurance sector is under pressure to halt its support for the fossil fuel industry.

• Opinion | Let’s Not Blow This Historic Chance to Fight Childhood Poverty

  American families have struggled for decades to make ends meet with stagnant wages and a decimated social safety net. The U.S. now spends less on children than nearly any other wealthy nation.

• The Child Tax Credit Is a Proven Boost to American Families, So Why Are Conservative Democrats Trying to Stop It?

  This year there was a small glimmer of hope that such a trend might be halted and even reversed. Democrats, using their razor-thin control of the Senate and marginal control of the House, passed an expanded child tax credit (CTC) in March 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan that not only increased the tax refund received by families with young children but also began sending them a monthly advance instead of making them wait until they filed their annual tax return.

  By any measure, the amounts are embarrassingly modest and only offer an increase of $1,000 to $1,600 over the entire year. Families whose incomes are low enough to qualify and have children aged 6 through 17 are now receiving $3,000 a year instead of $2,000, while those with children younger than 6 are getting checks that add up to $3,600 a year.

• Biden: The Interesting Debt Master-Slave Dialectic

  Everything that moved me about goodness in the world and in the idea of communion, and provided me with a sense of exaltation and the sancta simplicitus of the Golden Rule and becoming, introjecting Christ through transubstantiation — was all due to these brothers who were there for me. They weren’t bookish monks, but happy, smart, and activists (I felt like I had my own squad of Berrigan Brothers assigned to save my soul). I’ve heard many tales growing up of priests bringing evil to childhood and desecrating the Vibe, but my Catholicism, though now long lapsed, was a joyous intersection that saved my life.

  My life as a Catholic boy, while not as fraught as that described by Jim Carroll on his album by the same name, was still full of sin and worry (including the time some LaSalette brothers got me shitfaced at a steakhouse when I was 12); but it was also an introduction to Latin, rituals, Bach and Handel, homilies and the sympathetic empowerment of the priesthood, and of the curious practice of money in little brown enveloped being coughed up when the basket came around. (I was once with an adult at Mass who put a button in the basket; presumably he’s now Satan’s seamstress in Hell.) All such memories, vague as they are now, proved a useful and rather interesting filter through which to read Ben Schreckinger’s new book, The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power. Biden is only the second Catholic elected president (JFK was the first) and Schreckinger imbues the narrative with references to his faith that enrich his political life.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Opinion | Democrats Will Have No Excuse If They Blow Chance to End Child Poverty

  The Biden administration has a plan that is estimated to cut child poverty in half. And it’s already in place.

• Trump Asked DOJ Nine Times to Overturn Election, Says ‘Damning’ Senate Report

  The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday released an exhaustive report that describes in new detail how then-President Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly pressured the U.S Department of Justice to overturn his 2020 election defeat and reveals the extent to which high-ranking government officials responded to the coup attempt by threatening to resign.

  Based on an ongoing investigation that includes interviews with former top DOJ officials, the 394-page interim report—entitled Subverting Justice—contains findings that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), chair of the committee, called “damning.”

• NY State’s Redistricting Might Just Save Joe Biden’s Presidency

  It’s hard to remember a time when anyone beyond the borders of New York state cared about how the state’s congressional districts were redrawn. Bleeding population and House seats every decade, New York had long been something of an afterthought, ignored in heated debates over how states like Texas, Florida, and Ohio carve out their maps.

• Sanders Asks If Manchin Thinks Seniors Having Dental Care Is an “Entitlement”

• Opinion | An Open Letter to Biden: Feminists Call for an End to the War on Terror

  Twenty years ago today, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan under the guise of  “saving Afghan women” from the Taliban. The U.S. ignored warnings from pro-peace feminists that military action would further endanger Afghan women and set back women’s rights, leading to more deaths, violence and  destruction. After two decades of a failed militarized foreign policy, the U.S. must uphold its responsibility to offer care and repair to the Afghan people, including women in whose names it went to war.

• UK’s Labour Party Conference, Back to the 1990s

  Two items dominated the pre-conference headlines: (1) how would Jeremy Corbyn, still a party member, but having to sit as an independent MP thanks to the whim of the Labour leader Keir Starmer, conduct himself? Corbyn is deeply popular with the party’s grassroots’ membership, and the party leadership was concerned about the protests against Starmer that were likely to take place; and (2) Starmer has been embarking on a Blairite restoration throughout his 18 months as party leader, and there was a strong chance that open hostility towards this could erupt at the conference.

  The cornerstone of the Blairite restoration has been to wrest power from the ordinary membership and put it in the hands of the parliamentary party and its big donors, with key-decision-making confined to a small “kitchen” cabinet or coterie of trusties (as Blair himself did when he became party leader, which led to accusations that he was conducting himself like a US president).

• Biden Should Be Selling His Plan, Not Compromising Away Its Promise

  Media coverage of the fight over a pair of infrastructure bills—one physical, one social—has become so chaotic that the truth is getting lost amid a cacophony of arguments over price tags and party factions.

• Tucker Carlson’s Nightly Toxicity Is Poisoning His Brain

  Tucker Carlson continues to lose it. I’ve watched him losing it for a while. His white nationalism is on display nightly. But he ratchets it up when he pushes his “Great Replacement theory,” which holds that white Americans are being “replaced” by nonwhite immigrants, and Democrats are pushing open immigration policies to accelerate the process—because they expect these nonwhites to vote for them, giving them an eternal lock on political power.

• Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

  A share of the opprobrium heaped on Facebook is incoherent. Politicians are angry but so far seem incapable of co-ordinating reform to rein it in. And investors have kept buying the stock, regardless of the bad headlines. Yet the company should take no comfort from this. The blind fury unleashed shows that its reputational problems have got out of hand.

• Controversial whistleblower Chelsea Manning fighting to be let into Canada

  Manning appeared virtually today in front of the Immigration and Refugee Board for an admissibility hearing. The administrative tribunal makes decisions about who can enter and stay in Canada.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• QAnon followers allege photo of Biden’s White House “set” proves Trump is still in charge

  “QAnon John” whipped other followers of the conspiracy theory into a frenzy this week, when he shared a photo of the virtual White House set used by President Joe Biden on the social media app Telegram.

Censorship/Free Speech

• CNN Shutting Down Its Facebook In Australia Shows How Removing 230 Will Silence Speech

  It remains perplexing to me that so many people — especially among the Trumpist world — seem to believe that removing Section 230 will somehow make websites more likely to host their incendiary speech. We’ve explained before why the opposite is true — adding more liability for user speech means a lot fewer sites will allow user speech. But now we have a real world example to show this.

• Trump, Twitter and the Digital Town Hall

  But cellaring, hiding, suppressing unsavoury viewpoints are the very things social media platforms are getting more enthusiastic about, much of it pushed on the censorious lobby that claims to have a monopoly on veracity and good behaviour.  In the name of misinformation, offence and incitement, users will be either suspended, barred or subjected to digital excommunication in the name of safety.

  Which brings us to the fascinating nature of Trump’s latest legal action against Twitter.  In January, the former US president was banned from the platform following the January 6th riot at the Capitol building inspired by supporters riled by claims that the election had been stolen.  It began as a temporary ban of 12 hours for “repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy”.  Two days later, the ban was made permanent.  “In the context of the horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would permanently result in this very course of action,” Twitter claimed in its January 8 statement.  “The company’s “public interest framework” existed to permit “the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly.”  But this role did not exist “above our rules entirely” and could not be used “to incite violence, among other things.”

• Trump Asks Court To Reinstate His Twitter Account ASAP

  There were a bunch of headlines this weekend claiming that Donald Trump had just “sued” Twitter to get his account reinstated. This is untrue. There were also some articles suggesting that he was using Florida’s new social media law as the basis of this lawsuit. This is also false (what the hell is wrong with reporters these days?).

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Chris Hedges: The Anonymous Executioners of the Corporate State

  Judge Loretta Preska, an advisor to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York.

• Filecoin Foundation Ensuring That SecureDrop Can Continue To Help Whistleblowers And Journalists

  Earlier this year we were excited to see the Filecoin Foundation give the Internet Archive its largest donation ever, to help make sure that the Internet Archive is both more sustainable as an organization, and that the works it makes available will be more permanently available on a more distributed, decentralized system. The Internet Archive is a perfect example of the type of organization that can benefit from a more distributed internet.

• US, EU Urge Russia to Find, Prosecute Mastermind in Journalist’s 2006 Killing

  Politkovskaya was shot to death in an elevator of her Moscow apartment building on Oct. 7, 2006. The 48-year-old investigative reporter for Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta had been an outspoken critic of Russia’s longtime president, Vladimir Putin.

  She gained prominence for her coverage of human rights violations committed during Russia’s war with separatists in its constituent republic of Chechnya in the 2000s.

  Her killing coincided with an intensification of a Kremlin crackdown on freedoms of speech and the press in Russia, recalled Jeffrey Trimble, an Ohio State University political science lecturer who had been a senior manager at VOA sister network Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty at the time.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Women’s March

  Shops along Main Street and on adjoining streets are reminiscent of a time past and resemble the so-called head shops and avant-garde clothes shops of decades ago. With a nearby cannabis retail outlet, the quaintness of a head shop is like something out of ancient history.

  Marches and rallies defending women’s rights and defending against the decades-long attack against women’s reproductive rights are anything but quintessential! Like the mostly defunct peace movement, the defense of women’s reproductive rights has been one of primarily rear-guard actions and responses to horrific assaults on women’s health clinics during past decades.

• Inspector General Says CBP’s Device Search Program Still A Mess, Still (Ironically) Mostly Undocumented

  The CPB continues to increase the number of electronic devices (at least temporarily) seized and searched at border crossings and international airports. Basic searches — ones that don’t involve any additional tech or software — can be performed for almost any reason. For deeper searches, the CBP needs only a little bit more: articulable suspicion.

• Corporate-Backed Police Foundations Pose ‘Threat to Democracy and Black Lives’: Report

  Many of the same corporations trumpeting their support for Black lives are duplicitously bankrolling police violence via little-known but powerful police foundations in cities across the United States, a new report released Thursday revealed.

  “Many police foundations’ top corporate sponsors made public statements in support of Black Lives Matter while providing a corporate slush fund for police.”

• Chomsky: It’s Life and Death — Intellectuals Can’t Keep Serving the Status Quo

• Opinion | The US Supreme Court’s Crisis of Legitimacy

  As the U.S. Supreme Court embarks on a new term, Justice Samuel Alito is feeling angry and hurt. The hallowed institution on which he has served since 2006 is experiencing a crisis of legitimacy not seen since the early 1930s. 

• More Than 5 Million People in Ethiopia Are in Need of Humanitarian Assistance

• Ethiopia: New Reports Expose Ethnic Cleansing & Illegal Arms Shipments on Commercial Flights

  Amid the mounting humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia, the Ethiopian government has been using the commercial airline Ethiopia Airlines to shuttle weapons and military vehicles from neighboring country Eritrea since the beginning of their civil war, according to a new CNN investigation. This comes as the United Nations estimates more than 5 million people in the country’s Tigray region are now in need of humanitarian assistance in order to survive, but U.N. officials say Ethiopia’s government is blocking the movement of medicine, food and fuel into Tigray. In response, Ethiopian officials expelled seven senior U.N. officials from Ethiopia last week, giving them just 72 hours to leave the country. We look at the latest developments with Nima Elbagir, award-winning senior international correspondent for CNN, and also air her full report documenting ethnic cleansing.

• ‘Crime Is Defined and Constructed by Police and Other Elite Interests’

  Janine Jackson interviewed Alec Karakatsanis about the “crime surge” for the October 1, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• Opinion | Immigration Cruelty Goes Far Beyond the Border

  Images of Border Patrol officers on horseback whipping Black migrants shocked many Americans. President Biden called them “outrageous” and “wrong” and promised an investigation. Many members of Congress also spoke out.

• Judge Shoots Down Texas Abortion Ban in Legal Challenge by Biden Administration

• ‘This Is Not the End’: Dire Threat to Abortion Rights Remains as Judge Blocks Texas Ban

  A federal judge late Wednesday temporarily blocked enforcement of Texas’ near-total abortion ban, issuing a scathing order that condemns the recently enacted law as an “unprecedented and aggressive scheme” to strip state residents of their reproductive rights.

  “We already know the politicians behind this law will stop at nothing until they’ve banned abortion entirely.”

• Court Awards Qualified Immunity To Florida Deputy Who Arrested A Driver For An ‘I EAT ASS’ Window Decal

  When the First Amendment meets a law enforcement officer’s ability to be offended on the behalf of the general public, the First Amendment tends to lose.

• US police have killed more than 30,000 people since 1980

  Moreover, researchers discovered that more than half of fatal encounters with police in the United States went unreported at the same time. The study estimated 55 percent of deaths from police violence were not reported or were misclassified in official government databases between 1980 and 2018. These unreported killings represent more than 17,000 deaths at the hands of US police that were kept from public view over a period covering almost 40 years. However, this troubling statistic is still likely an underestimation of the real impact of police brutality.

  The new study provides a clearer picture of the issue of police violence in the United States. However, it does not fully account for the real social toll. What’s missing from this report is the untold number of victims that are brutalized by police but survive the physical and emotional scars bore by the victims and their families and the immeasurable suffering inflicted on families and communities that lose a loved one at the hands of police.

• Pressure on government to increase teleworking days to 47

  From 2022, Belgian cross-border workers will be entitled to 34 days working from home. Now, 19 elected officials from France’s Grand Est region are pushing to add a further 18 days for employees working from home.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Securing Critical Infrastructure: New Regulations Mandate Control

  As written by OpenKRITIS, the RCE “is the resilience baseline for EU operators”. EU nations have parameters to determine whether or not an organisation can be classified as ‘critical infrastructure’. Examples are energy suppliers, transport services, water and waste water, financial institutions, the health sector, public administration, and more. Such organisations will be subjected to a scan to see if its digital resilience and risk management is up to par. If it isn’t, or is lacking in certain areas, it can face a fine.

  Now, before any IT team might hastily start checking their assets, it’s important to note that the regulation is not yet in effect. OpenKRITIS: “RCE is EU legislation that still needs to be enacted by the EU. It will then be transposed into national law by EU member states.” That might not happen for a little while. It’s likely that EU member states start actively regulating the critical infrastructure as of 2022+, depending on internal processes. Still, both the NIS2 and RCE need to be transposed into national law within 18 months.

Monopolies

• Critics Warn Moderna Plan for Covid Vaccine Factory in Africa Is a ‘PR Gimmick’

  Moderna’s pledge Thursday to build a coronavirus vaccine factory in a yet-to-be-determined location in Africa at some unspecified point in the future was met with immediate skepticism from public health campaigners and analysts, who warned that the U.S.-based company’s new announcement may be nothing more than a “PR gimmick.”

  “The U.S. government has the power to order Moderna to share this essential technology with WHO and the world.”

• Anti-trust suspicion: Japan to take a good look at Apple, Google

  A report published by the Nikkei Asia website quoted JFTC secretary-general Shuichi Sugahisa as informing the media on Wednesday that views would be sought from operators, app developers and smartphone users.

• Copyrights

  • *The Ascent of Mont-Blanc* (ca. 1855) – The Public Domain Review

    John MacGregor’s four “views” of Mont Blanc, printed in color by George Baxter, reveal a different side of the mountain when compared to well-known Romantic depictions.

  • Cloudflare Defeats “Repeat Infringer” Copyright Lawsuit in US Court

    Cloudflare has defeated a lawsuit from two wedding dress manufacturers that accused the company of failing to terminate the accounts of repeat copyright infringers. According to a California federal court, neither Cloudflare’s CDN service nor its IP-address obfuscation system materially contribute to the alleged copyright infringements of its customers.

  • Triller: H3 Podcast Can’t “Steal” Jake Paul Fight Video & Claim Fair Use

    After Triller sued the popular H3 Podcast for $50m claiming that the people behind it had pirated the Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren fight on YouTube, the defendants sought to dismiss the “fatally flawed” complaint. Now Triller is shifting its approach, claiming that it’s not suing over a commentary video but the underlying ‘stolen’ fight hosted on YouTube. As such, fair use defenses fail.

  • Seuss Estate And ComicMix Copyright Case Settles In The Saddest Possible Way

    Readers here will know that we’ve followed the trademark and copyright lawsuit filed by the estate of Dr. Seuss against ComicMix LLC, creators of the mashup book Oh, the Places You’ll Boldly Go! The entire thing has been a multi-year rollercoaster designed to be serpentine, with ComicMix arguing that the mashup book was transformative and covered by fair use, and winning on that front, only to have the copyright portion of the argument overturned on appeal. Go and read Cathy Gellis’ writeup on the appeal; it’s incredibly detailed and informative.

  • Apparently Someone Doesn’t Want You To Buy Our Copymouse Shirt

    You may remember that, a couple years ago, our line of Copying Is Not Theft t-shirts and other gear was suddenly taken down by Teespring (now just called Spring) — first based on the completely false assertion that it contained third-party content that we didn’t have the rights to use, then (after a very unhelpful discussion with their IP Escalations department) because it apparently violated some other policy that they refused to specify. That prompted us to open a new Techdirt Gear store on Threadless, where we’ve launched many of our old designs and all our new ones since the takedown. But we also kept the Spring store active for people who preferred it and for some old designs that we hadn’t yet moved — and a few weeks ago the site’s takedown regime struck again, wiping out our line of Copymouse gear that had lived there for nearly five years. So, once again, we’ve relaunched the design over on Threadless: