Months after making Garuda Linux my daily driver operating system on my desktop PC, I still don’t have any regrets. It’s continued to be everything I look for in a Linux distribution (distro). Here’s why.
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With my job, though, fast access to the latest and greatest software is paramount. I don’t have time to constantly find workarounds and scour alternative software sources. Garuda solves this problem for me by granting access to the most bleeding-edge packages by default, via the Chaotic-AUR repository. App source code gets packaged and pushed to my device soon, if not immediately, after publication.
If that sounds like a threat to the stability of those apps and my PC, that’s because it is. So how can I rely on Garuda as a daily driver operating system? It’s simple: Garuda creates a snapshot of your system every time you update that you can easily restore in the case of a catastrophic upgrade. Combine that with regular backups of personal files, and you have an operating system that you can rely on for daily use and for the latest software.
In this video, I am going to show how to install Pop!_OS 21.10.
Just switched out to a 1440p with 165mhz refresh, working on scaling, mirroring for recordings, and more on the new desktop!
I'm announcing the release of the 5.15.10 kernel.
All users of the 5.15 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.15.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.15.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
If you a fan of AppImages and want a ‘centralised’ way to find, download, and update them, check out AppImage Pool.
This open source app is built using Dart and Flutter (now Ubuntu’s toolkit of choice) and it’s kind of like a one-shop app store for finding and downloading App Images on Linux.
I say kind of because AppImage Pool is a well-made frontend to the AppImage Hub. While that hub is a popular end-point for many AppImages, the packaging format’s free-roaming nature means distribution isn’t exclusive to any one place (so not every app every released as an AppImage is going to be on it).
Also, I’m not going inflict any proselytising about which app format(s) you should or shouldn’t use. That’s never been my style; use what vibes for you and ignore whatever doesn’t. If you only like to use AppImages? Have at it!
So, you finally decided to switch to Linux from Windows. You search the internet for tutorials, and halfway through the installation process, you hear about the term “Linux Swap,” wonder what it is, and one search on the internet brought you to this article. Let’s look at Swap Space is in Linux and if it’s essential or not.
Swap is similar to the memory expansion feature on smartphones recently made available by some manufacturers. In a nutshell, it uses the phone’s internal storage like RAM if the actual RAM runs out of space. Similarly, on Linux, Swap space keeps your computer from crashing by storing volatile data on its internal memory (HDD/SSD) if your physical RAM is full.
Linux operating systems are all about commands and the way you use them to complete your task. Sleep command in Linux is one of the commands you can use to delay a specific time during a script’s execution process. It benefits the developers when they want to pause the command execution for one particular time. So if you also want to learn everything about sleep commands, this article is just for you. In this article, you will learn about every possible detail of the sleep command in Linux.
In this guide we are going to install and configure Postgresql 14 in Ubuntu 20.04 using Ansible.
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.
Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows.
It is essential to keep your system up to date and to apply all security patches. If you are tasked with managing multiple servers, the process of logging in to each and every server to perform the task can be cumbersome. You can use Ansible to achieve the functionality. The Ansible apt module can be used to manage apt updates and apt upgrades. The module uses either aptitude or the apt-get command on the remote server for package management.
Similarly, if there are kernel updates that require OS reboot, it would be best to use the reboot ansible module to reboot the machine, wait for it to go down, come back up and to respond to commands
In this guide, we will create a script to update Debian based systems cache and upgrade packages installed. We will also include a task to restart the server if there were kernel updates that requires reboot.
Grafana is free and open-source software. That visualizes and monitors data from sources such as Prometheus, InfluxDB, Graphite, and ElasticSearch. The built-in sharing feature is there in Grafana. Which allows you to share data.
Today we will learn to install and secure Grafana.
PIP is a package manager used to install and manage software packages written in Python. CentOS repository allow both pip2 and pip3 for python 2 and python 3 respectively using dnf command. Python 3 is the most recent, stable, long-term supported version of Python. If you don’t specifically need Python 2 for compatibility with older applications use Python 3.
In this tutorial we will install PIP 3 for python 3.
So, you finally decided to switch to Linux from Windows. You search the internet for tutorials, and halfway through the installation process, you hear about the term “Linux Swap,” wonder what it is, and one search on the internet brought you to this article. Let’s look at Swap Space is in Linux and if it’s essential or not.
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Creating Swap space is unnecessary to install Linux, but if your computer has less RAM and more storage space, you can salvage some to make some swap space as it might come in handy in some situations.
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Considering you’re already in the installer and created / and /home partitions, the next step would be creating swap space. All you need to do is create an empty partition of size depending on how much RAM you have (Minimum 2GB to 4GB of swap space if you have 8GB RAM). In the options, select “use it as swap” or any word that correlates to Swap and click on create. You can then go ahead with the installation process.
Blueberry is a new Python scripts that sets your currently playing Spotify song title and album cover as your GNOME desktop wallpaper. To use it, you need Spotify Premium.
The wallpaper includes the album cover in the center, while also using the 2 main colors from the cover to paint the rest of the wallpaper. The artist and song title are also displayed on the wallpaper.
The script changes your background to the currently playing Spotify song album cover and song title, no matter how you listen to music on Spotify. You can use the native desktop app, the Spotify snap or flatpak packages, Spotify web, using some other desktop Spotify clients, and even Spotify running on your phone.
A screenplay is the blueprint for a movie, and it used to be written on a typewriter. You bought the typewriter, and you could write a screenplay. And not just one screenplay, but lots of them. You could write screenplays until typewriters fell out of fashion.
The puzzling thing is, though, that as technology for writing became "better," the harder it got to write screenplays. There are strict formatting rules in the screenplay world implemented to help the Assistant Director (AD) on a film shoot estimate how long each scene would take to shoot. You'd think that a computer would make this easier than the exclusively manual process required on a typewriter. Yet, popular computers managed to restrict writers with expensive software that became embedded in Hollywood culture. If you didn't have the right software, you were told that you could never be a serious screenwriter.
All that changed with open source software, though, and one of the simplest methods of writing screenplays is not to use special software at all. The Fountain markdown technique requires just a plain text editor, like Atom, Kate, Gedit, or similar, and it exports to a properly formatted HTML or PDF screenplay.
First of all, what are Git tags? Tags are labels or ref’s that point to specific points in your Git history. They are generally used to mark or highlight a significant git commit in your project, for example, when you have a version release (e.g. v1.0.1 could be the tag value). When a commit is tagged it is easy to find, so if you wanted to find a particular version release, you can find it quickly because of the git tag. This tutorial will show you how you can list git tags in your code repository.
Configure Prometheus and Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka to work together, so you can get your cluster metrics all in one place.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenProject on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, OpenProject is an open-source task management system that is completely web-based written in Ruby on Rails and Angular js. It allows you to manage projects across a diversity of teams and departments. It is available in both community and enterprise editions. The community edition covers a wide range of features and plugins and is available for free.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the OpenProject open-source task management 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.
Hello, friends. We continue our series of posts about webmin. Now we will show you something very simple but that can help us on many occasions. In this post, you will learn how to manage the system logs using Webmin.
In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install and configure QEMU on Ubuntu 20.04.
QEMU is a free and open-source hypervisor, it emulates the machine’s processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest operating systems.
QEMU is capable of emulating a complete machine in software without the need for hardware virtualization support. It is also capable of providing userspace API virtualization for Linux and BSD kernel services. It is commonly invoked indirectly via libvirt library when using open source applications such as oVirt, OpenStack, and virt-manager.
I'm super stoked for the Steam Deck, but I gotta admit. I'm a bit triggered by the way the premium carrying case looks. Every indication said it should be blue inside.
Seems Valve really are expecting big things from the SteamOS 3 Linux-powered Steam Deck handheld, according to a new report from PC Gamer. Originally due to be launching this month, Valve ended up delaying it until February 2022. Due to all the worldwide shortages, many were worried about another delay but Valve appear confident in hitting that new date.
In the new report Valve sound very bullish, with designer Greg Coomer mentioning how different their shipping will be compared to traditional consoles. Valve don't need to ship masses of boxes around to traditional stores, as it's only sold in the one place - Steam.
Sadly it seems like Insurgency: Sandstorm is not one you'll be enjoying on the Linux desktop or Valve's Steam Deck any time soon, even with Epic Games supporting Easy Anti-Cheat with Wine / Proton.
A game that originally planned Linux support, which New World Interactive decided not to do while also cancelling the planned story campaign back in 2019. The last hope was Steam Play Proton but it appears the developer will not be enabling support for it in EAC.
After multiple years working on Build 41 of Project Zomboid, The Indie Stone have now finally hooked up multiplayer for it and you can test it yourself now.
Project Zomboid did already have multiplayer but Build 41 that's available in an opt-in Beta is a massive overhaul of the entire game. It is the single biggest update the game has ever seen and it's still not done, which is why it's left in an opt-in Beta but most people generally play on that version now. Build 41 has all sorts like revamped animations and combat, a whole new sound design by some who did the incredible Alien: Isolation, a huge map expansion and the list of what's new and improved at this point is practically endless.
After a year in Early Access, the Oxygen Not Included - Spaced Out! expansion has now officially launched.
This is a pretty great looking expansion for a game that I already firmly loved, with Klei Entertainment really putting in the effort on this one to give players many reasons to go out and buy it. The idea of sending your little people off into the unknown to start another colony is great. If you were after the ability to build up a whole lot more, this is an essential purchase for ONI fans.
After five months of maintenance, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.4.0 of its open source digital photo manager. This new version arrives after 20 years of developement since the first public 0.1.0, released at Christmas 2001.
Here is the list of most important features coming with this release...
GCompris 2.0 improves classic favorites loved by children of all ages, and adds even more activities for more fun and learning.
GCompris is KDE's educational suite of more than 170 activities and pedagogical games. It is used by teachers, parents and, most importantly, children worldwide. GCompris is a fixture in classrooms and at home, giving kids the opportunity to practice a wide range of skills while having fun at the same time.
Just set the default global theme in /etc/xdg/kdeglobals and your good to go. In the last years System Settings has been gradually improved with each release featuring more pages being cleaned up, redesigned or even rewritten from scratch. In this process there was also focus on proper state handling, adding ‘Defaults’ button where missing and sensible, adding highlighting of changed settings and making sure that these systems do the correct thing. In this post I will explain how Global Themes factor into this and how their pre-run set-up is now much simpler for distributions starting with Plasma 5.24.
There was no slowing down of snapshots this week as new software continues to flow with daily openSUSE Tumbleweed releases. Tumbleweed went seven for seven this week!
Just two updates were in the 20211214 snapshot. The remote accessing package remmina 1.4.22 provided fixes for freerdp3 compatibility, and remmina also had a fix for a crash if the main window is closed. The libcap-ng 0.7.11 package, which analyzes a system for apps with too many privileges, removed unneeded rules.
“A winning digital strategy requires new twists to familiar moves,” said a recent McKinsey article, Strategy for a digital world. “Competitive differentiation, now more than ever, emerges from superior digital capabilities and technology endowment, more agile delivery, and a progressively more tech-savvy C-suite.”
According to the latest McKinsey Global Survey on digital strategy, the pandemic has sped up the adoption of digital technologies by several years. While the imperative for a strategic approach to technology is universal, the survey found that some companies are already leading the pack because they have better overall technology capabilities, talent, leadership, and resources, and their superior technology endowment is linked to better economic outcomes.
The pandemic has accelerated the pace of change of the leading technology companies as well as the industry leaders who’ve been investing heavily in new digital-enabled strategies and business models, widening the gap between these top economic performers and all other companies. At the same time, the survey showed that many of the organizations that are being left behind could be missing opportunities to catch up by investing in the areas of their business most at risk of digital advances.
Traditional legacy companies should revisit the classic strategies that may have worked well for them in decades past but that must now be updated given the accelerated pace of digital disruption. The McKinsey article offers a road map for so doing based on five major changes.
I love a good text editor, and I was an aimless sometimes-Vim sometimes-Kate sometimes-Gedit user until I fell solidly into Emacs, thanks to a very wise boss who wanted to standardize tools within his team. I didn't intend to become a user of Emacs exclusively, but every time I used a different editor, I found myself missing an Emacs feature.
That's how text editors get you, though: You develop a subtle familiarity with an editor such that the "work" of translating thought—whether it's a network design idea, a specific configuration, or a Bash script—into text feels so natural that sometimes you have to type your thoughts just to make sense of them.
At some point, I accepted that I was an Emacs user, but I like a diverse toolset; I like alternatives and options. That's one reason I use open source! Emacs has a few key features that I consider essential, not necessarily in implementation but in concept. Here are five great text editor features I learned from Emacs and strive to implement, one way or another, in any text editor I use.
The recent 2.34 release of the GNU C library, glibc, removes libpthread as a separate library. This article explains the motivation behind this change and some consequences for developers and system administrators.
For a long time, glibc was split into multiple, separate, shared objects. For example, the threading library libpthread was contained in a shared object libpthread.so.0, and the application interface for the dynamic linker, libdl, in the file libdl.so.2. There was even a time, some twenty years ago, when there were two separate implementations of libpthread, the LinuxThreads implementation for Linux 2.4 and earlier and the Native POSIX Threads Library (NPTL) implementation for Linux 2.6 and later.
In the glibc 2.34 release, we have integrated most components that used to be in separate shared objects into the main libc object, libc.so.6. These changes have been implemented in a backward-compatible fashion, so even though libpthread is gone as a separate object, all the public functions it used to provide (such as pthread_create) are still available. In this consolidation effort, glibc follows the pioneering work of the musl C library, which provides absolutely everything (including the dynamic linker) in a single shared object.
The pressure on established enterprises to modernize and compete against agile, cloud-native startups has never been more intense – especially for those that continue to use a large amount of legacy technology. At a time when it’s crucial for organizations to address these issues to survive, leaders must find ways to bridge the skills gap between old and new.
The real solution lies in cross-training, reskilling, and upskilling IT teams now to ensure they understand both legacy environments and modern application development practices. That way, when the inevitable time comes to transform, the team will be prepared.
Your desktop!
December is, after all, the most wonderful time of the year. There’s no reason why your preferred Linux distro of choice should escape the decorative blitz — the rest of us can’t!
After you set a xmas wallpaper and open VLC to see its once-a-year easter-egg you can add a live snowing effect to your desktop.
Not only will a flurry of falling unicode characters speed up your productivity and make it fas—Okay, it won’t do any of that, but it will blanket your desktop in irresistibly seasonal sleet.
Linux Mint 20.3 Beta Download and Test before Stable Release, The Linux Mint project has published a new development release. Linux Mint 20.3 Beta introduces dark theme support for the Hypnotix video streaming application and presents a new document manager called Thingy. “The Hypnotix IPTV player looks better than ever, thanks to Dark Mode support and a new set of flags.
Although its name alludes to the American revolution in 1776, System76 is rather younger. It was established in 2005, just a year after Ubuntu released its first version. The company sells PCs pre-installed with Linux, and since 2017 has offered its own distro, Pop!_OS [sick! sorry, sic], a heavily modified version of Ubuntu – and it's just released version 21.10.
Pop!_OS (we'll just call it Pop) is probably the most substantially different Ubuntu derivative. Whether that sounds appealing or not depends on taste, and possibly on how well you know Canonical's original.
You can choose a version of the ISO which comes preinstalled with the latest version of Nvidia's proprietary graphics drivers, including support for the notoriously tricky Optimus laptop GPU-switching functionality.
I didn’t want to write about this change quite so soon as a) it’s not finished or final and the code hasn’t landed in Ubuntu 22.04 daily builds yet. However, people have noticed and I don’t want to look like I’m behind.
So, you may remember that last cycle Ubuntu’s community-based design team were instructed to remove purple (aka aubergine) from the Yaru GTK theme (as it is being dropped from the Ubuntu colour palette). While the great ‘de-purpling’ task didn’t end up happening in time for Indri it does appear to be happening for Jammy.
For the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 release, the Yaru developers are removing the aubergine (eggplant) color from the default Ubuntu theme, replacing it with orange, since libadwaita will only allow Ubuntu to use one accent color.
The work for this has already started, with orange now being used throughout the Yaru GTK and GNOME Shell theme for every element that was previously aubergine - sliders, switches, checkboxes, etc. What's more, the orange from the window close button was also removed, I assume also due to libadwaita.
A year packed with news and events. A year where great competitions came to an end. A year that made us dream with new robots. 2021 inspired us to reach new heights and pursue new breakthroughs.
As we power millions of robotics developers with Ubuntu and our robotics open source tools, we present a recap of what marked this year. Discover the victories and defeats of 2021. Those product launches that made the front page. Our best tutorials and whitepapers. And the work of the R&D community that captured our imagination. This was 2021!
In mid-2017, a small group of techies banded together and formed a team that would specialize in creating community-supported snaps of applications for which there was or would be no upstream support. This team called itself: Snapcrafters.
Over time, it slowly, gradually grew, attracting more people and bringing yet more snaps under its umbrella, some fairly popular ones, others a bit more obscure. Then, for a while, the effort lost some of its momentum, and the Snapcrafters settled into a steady rhythm, with a few passionate contributors who couldn’t really cover it all. Fast forward to early summer 2021, the community veterans felt it was their make it or break it moment. They could close shop, or try to infuse their team with a breath of fresh ideas and work. They decided on the latter, and thus the Snapcrafters community effort was revived.
It's heeeeeee-re. I've completed the pull-up of the POWER9 Firefox JavaScript JIT to the current ESR, Firefox 91. As a bonus I also completed the second-stage Baseline Compiler (Baseline Interpreter being the first-stage compiler) at the same time for a reason I'll explain in a minute. The build process is the same as Firefox 91, using the 91ESR tree, but requires adding --enable-jit to your .mozconfig and applying this patch and set of files. Please note that POWER9 remains the only supported architecture (Power10 grudgingly, but it should work), and only on little-endian. If you compile big-endian, the JIT should statically disable itself, even with --enable-jit. If you compile with -mcpu=power9, which is recommended, the JIT is statically enabled with --enable-jit and becomes slightly faster because there are fewer runtime checks. If you don't explicitly specify POWER9, or do something like -mcpu=power8, but still specify --enable-jit, then runtime detection should be enabled (which right now disables the JIT). I have not tested this on POWER8 because I don't have a POWER8, so I can't fix it myself. If this doesn't work or builds a defective Firefox or JavaScript shell, please submit a correction and I'll incorporate it.
Work with document files either imported from programs like MS Word, Excel and other office tools or created natively in formats like ODF or PDF compatible with modern and open standards. Editing, copying and incorporating data in databases is possible.
LibreOffice is an open-source free alternative to heavy commercial office suites like MS Office. While having generally the same functionality, LibreOffice is more open to modification and updates, making it a more attractive suite if you want a comfortable and adjustable tool for working with documentation.
Ever since its release in late 1999, GNU Nano has set new standards for ease-of-use for terminal-based text editors. Since then, it has seen multitudes of releases, the latest of which is the brand-new version 6.0.
While not necessarily the most feature-packed release, it does have a few key improvements. Let’s take a look at some of them!
Complying with the cadence of a major release every year (although this time rushing), we already have among us GNU Nano 6, the new major version of the well-known console text editor that is pre-installed in many Linux distributions.
GNU Nano 6 arrives with some interesting news. To start we have the option ‘–zero’, which allows launching the program so that the title bar, the status bar and the help lines are hidden, thus using all the lines of the terminal as the editing area. The title bar and status bar can be toggled with ‘M-Z’.
Colors can now be specified with three digit hexadecimal numbers following the RGB format, allowing you to choose from 216 index colors. As an alternative, non-handymen handling hexadecimal numbers have fourteen new color names available to them: Pink, Beet, Plum, Sea, Sky, Slate, Teal, Sage, Brown, Ocher, Sand, Fawn, Brick, and Crimson , which in English are rosy, beet, plum, be, sky, slate, teal, sage, brown, ocher, sand, tawny, brick Y crimson.
Sleep is enabled by default as of GNU Nano 6, being callable through the combination ‘^ T ^ Z’ (without quotes). The options ‘–z’, ‘–suspendable’ and ‘set suspendable’ have been marked as obsolete, so they are ignored. If you want to suspend the editor with a click, you can place the phrase “bind ^ Z suspend main” (without quotes) in the file ‘nanorc’.
We’re not aware of any authoritative metrics on such things, but it’s safe to say that the Ender 3 is among the most hackable commercial 3D printers. There’s just something about the machine that lends itself to hacks, most of which are obviously aimed at making it better at 3D printing. Some, though, are aimed in a totally different direction.
As proof of that, check out this Ender 3 modified for electrochemical machining. ECM is a machining process that uses electrolysis to remove metal from a workpiece. It’s somewhat related to electric discharge machining, but isn’t anywhere near as energetic. [Cooper Zurad] has been exploring ECM with his Ender, which he lightly modified by replacing the extruder with a hypodermic needle electrode. The electrode is connected to a small pump that circulates electrolyte from a bath on the build platform, while a power supply connects to the needle and the workpiece. As the tool traces over the workpiece, material is electrolytically removed.
Everyone has their preferred method of making (and consuming) coffee. While modern coffee makers are starting to come standard with IoT and ‘smart’ capabilities, owners of older models should fear not, as [Andreas Skoglund] shows how just about any old machine can be upgraded with the latest automation wizardry.
The most involved part of this conversion is removing the electronic guts of the Dolce Gusto donor machine, leaving just the original heater, pump and the control levers. With safety in mind, the user must make the machine ‘hot’ by configuring the levers and replacing the coffee capsule manually, otherwise no automated coffee magic can take place.
Looks like Microsoft is hell bent on pushing Edge. Swallow the Edge pill, will you??
Windows 11 update leaves you little choice but to use Microsoft Edge
As someone who has spent their entire career in open source software (OSS), the Log4Shell scramble (an industry-wide four-alarm-fire to address a serious vulnerability in the Apache Log4j package) is a humbling reminder of just how far we still have to go. OSS is now central to the functioning of modern society, as critical as highway bridges, bank payment platforms, and cell phone networks, and it’s time OSS foundations started to act like it.
Organizations like the Apache Software Foundation, the Linux Foundation, the Python Foundation, and many more, provide legal, infrastructural, marketing and other services for their communities of OSS developers. In many cases the security efforts at these organizations are under-resourced and hamstrung in their ability to set standards and requirements that would mitigate the chances of major vulnerabilities, for fear of scaring off new contributors. Too many organizations have failed to apply raised funds or set process standards to improve their security practices, and have unwisely tilted in favor of quantity over quality of code.
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 197. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ] * Drop unnecessary has_same_content_as logging calls.
[ Mattia Rizzolo ] * Ignore the new "binary-with-bad-dynamic-table" Lintian tag. * Support pgpdump 0.34 in the tests. and testing the fix.
A vulnerability ( CVE-2021-39685 ) has been identified in USB Gadget , a subsystem of the Linux kernel that provides a programming interface for creating client USB devices and software simulation of USB devices that could lead to a kernel leak, crash, or arbitrary code execution at the kernels. The attack is carried out by an unprivileged local user through manipulation of various device classes implemented on the basis of the USB Gadget API, such as rndis, hid, uac1, uac1_legacy, and uac2.
The problem has been fixed in the Linux kernel updates 5.15.8 , 5.10.85, 5.4.165, 4.19.221, 4.14.258, 4.9.293 and 4.4.295 published the other day . In distributions, the problem remains unresolved ( Debian , Ubuntu , RHEL , SUSE , Fedora , Arch ). An exploit prototype has been prepared to demonstrate the vulnerability .
Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel), Fedora (dr_libs, libsndfile, and podman), openSUSE (fetchmail, log4j, log4j12, logback, python3, and seamonkey), Oracle (go-toolset:ol8, idm:DL1, and nodejs:16), Red Hat (go-toolset-1.16 and go-toolset-1.16-golang, ipa, rh-postgresql12-postgresql, rh-postgresql13-postgresql, and samba), Slackware (xorg), SUSE (log4j, log4j12, and python3), and Ubuntu (apache-log4j2 and openjdk-8, openjdk-lts).
The much awaited Joint Parliamentary Committee Report (‘JPC Report’) on the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 (‘PDPB’) is finally here. We have updated you on the key takeaways from the JPC Report. In this post we present a bird’s eye view of how user rights are dwindling from the Srikrishna Committee to PDPB to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Data Protection.
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In 2017, a month before the Supreme Court pronounced it’s judgment in Justice K.S.Puttaswamy (Retd.) vs Union Of India AIR 2017 SC 4161], the Union Government constituted a Committee of Experts to deliberate on a data protection framework. The Committee was headed by Justice BN Srikrishna. In 2018, it published its report along with a draft of the legislation on data protection (‘2018 Bill’). In 2019, the Union Government introduced the PDPB and referred it to a Joint Parliamentary Committee (‘JPC’) consisting of 20 members. After almost two years, the JPC has tabled its report which contains the Draft Data Protection Bill, 2021. We have already updated you on the key takeaways from the JPC Report. In this post, we explain how the Srikrishna Committee Report (‘Srikrishna Report’), the PDPB and Draft Data Protection Bill, 2021 have proposed different data protection regimes. We do this because these three documents are significant milestones on India’s long and protracted road towards a data protection legislation
As our analysis below demonstrates, the proposed law has become increasingly less respectful of individual rights, and more concerned with the impact of the regulation on the Union Government. For example, the Srikrishna report provided for a data protection authority (‘DPA’) which is entirely independent of executive control. In contrast, the Draft Data Protection Bill, 2021 made the Union Government the sole authority to determine the composition of the DPA despite the fact that the DPA will regulate government agencies. Read our analysis on 8 key metrics to see how the proposed law has evolved and how far it has strayed from the ruling of the Supreme Court in Puttaswamy.
As 2021 comes to an end, it has been more than five months since Telenor announced the cut-and-run of its Myanmar operations. Their decision to sell to M1 Group — an investor with a disastrous human rights record — remains in a quandary. What is clear, however, is that Telenor’s users still have no answers to how their rights will be protected. This is unacceptable.
“For months, Access Now and civil society has continued to pressure Telenor to address the rights risks the disposal will generate, to no avail,” said Dhevy Sivaprakasam, Asia Pacific Policy Counsel at Access Now. “While our questions linger unanswered, human rights in Myanmar languish on the chopping block.”
In July, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) submitted a complaint on behalf of 474 civil society organizations to — and now accepted by — the OECD’s Norwegian National Contact Point, breaking down how the sale failed to meet OECD’s responsible disengagement standards. In August, Access Now and 44 organizations addressed a letter to Telenor’s Board, highlighting how Telenor had “dumped the Myanmar outfit at a discounted rate, failed to provide any kind of risk assessment [or] indication of how it would deal with the repercussions of such a risky and irresponsible sale.”
