6 Reasons to Pick Linux Over Windows

Almost all students do their work on laptops and PCs that run on Windows. Of course, some of you are lucky enough to afford something that runs on Apple’s macOS. While Windows is a popular OS, it’s far from being perfect. Few students are even aware that their PCs and laptops can run on various operating systems.

One of the alternatives students often overlook is Linux. Many believe that this OS is hard to manage. That’s why they prefer to either buy or, in some cases, pirate Microsoft’s creation unless it comes pre-installed on the device, of course.

It’s true that Linux is harder to install than its counterpart. But it has a lot more to offer than meets the eye. So, what exactly sets it apart?

2022 is not going to be the year of Linux on the desktop

It has been the time of year again when Linux fanboys emerge from their dust-filled server rooms to declare that 2022 might be the year that their favourite operating system will replace Windows on the desktop.

TechRepublic said that there was no “denying the continued dominance of Linux in the enterprise space and the very slow (and subtle) growth of Linux on the desktop. And in just about every space (minus the smartphone arena), Linux made some serious gains.”

Developer Tim Wells insisted that the idea of the year of the Linux desktop is that there would come a year that the free and open source operating system would reach a stage that the average user could install and use it on their pc without running into problems.

The Apache Weekly News Round-up: week ending 14 January 2022

January 2022 Web Server Survey [Ed: In Web servers, Microsoft down from 6.15% of top million domains to just 6.04% in one month]

In the January 2022 survey we received responses from 1,167,715,133 sites across 269,835,071 unique domains and 11,700,892 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 1.15 million sites, but a gain of 1.51 million domains and 31,100 computers.

nginx lost 7.33 million sites this month (-1.91%) but continues to be the most commonly used web server with 32.3% of all sites using it. Although nginx’s share has fallen, Apache is still more than eight percentage points behind after losing 3.70 million sites (-1.31%), which has taken its own market share down to 23.9%.

nginx also leads in the domains metric, where it has a share of 26.6% compared with Apache’s 23.9%. This reflects a small reduction in nginx’s share – despite a modest gain of 25,400 domains – while Apache suffered the largest loss of 287,000 domains.

The largest site and domain growth was seen by Pepyaka, which is a web server that has primarily been used by the Wix web development platform since it switched from using nginx in 2018. The number of sites using Pepyaka grew by 4.02 million to 7.30 million this month, while its domain count went up by 1.80 million to 3.30 million.

LHS Episode #448: Grounding and Bonding Deep Dive

Hello and welcome to the 448th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this deep dive episode, the hosts invite guest Ward Silver, N0AX, who literally wrote the book on the subject to discuss every aspect of grounding and bonding. Topics range from household electrical safety to relative voltage, earth grounding, lighting mitigation and much more. Hope you find this episode interesting and informative as well as entertaining and also have a great week.

Linux 5.17 Picks Up A Real-Time Analysis Tool – Phoronix

A new tool added to the kernel source tree with Linux 5.17 is rtla to serve for real-time Linux performance and tracing analysis.

Thanks to the work of kernel developer Daniel Bristot de Oliveira who is employed by Red Hat, the Real-Time Linux Analysis (RTLA) tool has been added to the kernel source tree.

RTLA makes use of the Linux kernel’s tracing capabilities to help analyze performance and tracing data. In particular, the rtla command has sub-options for reading information from the kernel’s operating system noise “osnoise” and IRQ/thread timer latency “timerlat”tracers.

Some Tablets/Convertibles With Linux 5.17 Will Now Have Working Pen Support – Phoronix

In addition to Linux 5.17 introducing Universal Stylus Initiative (USI) support for that new industry standard for styluses/pens that can work cross-device, the input subsystem updates for this kernel also add active pen support for a few more tablets.

Moving forward hopefully we will see broad adoption of USI stylus support for nice cross-device compatibility and support. But for those with current tablets relying on Goodix or Silead drivers and have an active pen, the Linux 5.17 input subsystem updates present working pen support there with their respective devices.

Lenovo USB-C 7-in-1 Hub On Linux Review – Phoronix

For those considering the Lenovo USB-C 7-in-1 Hub for connecting to your Lenovo laptop for enjoying USB-C power charging, HDMI output, and additional USB ports, it does work out on Linux. While there have been some users running into seemingly firmware-related issues, at least with my testing over the past month this $50~60 (USD) USB-C hub has been working out well under Linux.

Best of 2021 – Torvalds’ Bug Warning is a Lesson for Linux Users

A recent, widely publicized case illustrated this point; Linux creator himself, Linus Torvalds, warned against the use of the Linux 5.12 release. He described a “nasty bug,” and wrote that the situation is a “mess,” due to the use of swap files when adding Linux updates. This nasty bug, in fact, had the potential to destroy entire root directories.

Epoch-alypse now: BBC iPlayer flaunts 2038 cutoff date • The Register

Feeling old yet? Let the Reg ruin your day for you. We are now substantially closer to the 2038 problem (5,849 days) than it has been since the Year 2000 problem (yep, 8,049 days since Y2K).

Why do we mention it? Well, thanks to keen-eyed Reg reader Calum Morrison, we’ve spotted a bit of the former, and a hint of what lies beneath the Beeb’s digital presence, when he sent in a snapshot that implies Old Auntie might be using a 32-bit Linux in iPlayer, and something with a kernel older than Linux 5.10, too.

Graphics Stack

• Jason Ekstrand: Hello, Collabora!

  Ever since I announced that I was leaving Intel, there’s been a lot of speculation as to where I’d end up. I left it a bit quiet over the holidays but, now that we’re solidly in 2022, It’s time to let it spill. As of January 24, I’ll be at Collabora!

  For those of you that don’t know, Collabora is an open-source consultancy. They sell engineering services to companies who are making devices that run Linux and want to contribute to open-source technologies. They’ve worked on everything from automotive to gaming consoles to smart TVs to infotainment systems to VR platforms. I’m not an expert on what Collabora has done over the years so I’ll refer you to their brag sheet for that. Unlike some contract houses, Collabora doesn’t just do engineering for hire. They’re also an ideologically driven company that really believes in upstream and invests directly in upstream projects such as Mesa, Wayland, and others.

  My personal history with Collabora is as old as my history as an open-source software developer. My first real upstream work was on Wayland in early 2013. I jumped in with a cunning plan for running a graphics-enabled desktop Linux chroot on an Android device and absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into. Two of the people who not only helped me understand the underbelly of Linux window systems but also helped me learn to navigate the world of open-source software were Daniel Stone and Pekka Paalanen, both of whom were at Collabora then and still are today.

• Collabora pulls in Jason Ekstrand to work on Linux graphics drivers | GamingOnLinux

  Jason Ekstrand, a name that many big Linux fans will know, who previously worked at Intel until very recently has announced today the move to open source consulting firm Collabora. Writing in a blog post, Ekstrand goes through some fun background on the decision to move and how it happened.

  Ekstrand has worked on a lot of different parts of Mesa, the set of open source graphics drivers that powers AMD GPUs, Intel, ARM and more.

Mumble 1.4 Released! New Plugin Framework, TalkingUI, PipeWire & Markdown Support | UbuntuHandbook

The free open-source game chatting app Mumble released new major 1.4 version a day ago with exciting new features!

Mumble is a high quality and low latency voice over IP (VoIP) app designed for gamers. By releasing v1.4.230, the first stable in v1.4, it now uses new versioning scheme of the form major.minor.build. The third component of version numbers may now much higher and discontinuous. Because there are snapshot (beta) builds in between stable versions.

Mumber 1.4 introduced a new, general purpose plugin framework. Plugins are no longer restricted to positional data delivery and they can now be installed and updated at any time. See the documentation for more.

Mumble 1.4 Voice Chat App Released, Brings Many New Features

For fans of the Mumble open-source VoIP communication program that is popular with gamers, Mumble 1.4 was released as their first major release in the last 2 years.

Many multiplayer games offer text chat that gets in the way of gameplay by changing a player’s focus from playing the game to typing messages. Mumble is a powerful open-source client-server VoIP application that solves this problem. It’s available for all major platforms like Windows, Linux, and macOS.

While it can be used for any kind of activity, it is primarily intended for gaming. It’s optimized for low-latency communications, making it perfect for intense game situations where every second counts. With Mumble, you can voice chat with your teammates, or anyone else, allowing you to stay focused on the game.

Open source voice-chat levels up with Mumble 1.4 out now | GamingOnLinux

For those of you not wanting to use the likes of Discord for voice-chat, there’s also Mumble which is a free, open source, low latency, high quality voice chat application. It’s been around for a long time and it just had a big new stable release, the first of the Mumble 1.4.x series and it’s been over two years since the last. At least they didn’t leave us waiting ten years again like the 1.3 release huh?

So what’s new? A lot! Of course there’s plenty of bug fixes, security updates and the usual assortment of smaller thing but a few bigger features were also added into this release.

Version 5.0 of the FFmpeg audio and video toolkit has been released.

FFmpeg 5.0 Aims To Be An LTS Release

FFmpeg 5.0 has now been formally christened as for what is aiming to be a Long-Term Support (LTS) release for this widely-used, cross-platform and open-source multimedia library.

FFmpeg 5.0 was tagged this weekend while out today is the formal announcement for this updated multimedia library that is widely depended upon throughout the industry.

Mini review – Annotator is a simple but powerful annotation tool for Linux – Real Linux User

Some applications just need to be big and have to offer an extensive array of functionality to be of the right value for specific use cases, like LibreOffice, Krita. darktable and GIMP. But there are many situations that only require the right amount of functionality and nothing more. There are many very powerful mini apps available for Linux that only focus on a specific task and do that perfectly well. In this article you find a mini review for the application Annotator, a simple but powerful annotation tool for Linux.

Annotator is a single task application originally developed by Trevor Williams for the elementary OS platform, but since it is available in Flatpak format it can be used on any other Linux distribution.

Annotator is, as the name already suggests, an annotation tool. So the first question you probably have is what exactly annotation is and what do you need it for. It is actually very simple: an annotation is a note, an explanation, a side note, an indication, a clarification, or caption, which should ensure that the main text, screenshots, etc. or parts thereof are extra clarified, highlighted or brought under the required attention. The application Annotator is exactly doing that for image files (like screenshots, etc) in a simple and effective way. Annotator is not created for annotations on text files and documents.

The 8 Best Linux Download Managers for Faster Downloads

No one likes to wait for slow downloads. Install these eight download managers to get lightning-fast download speed on Linux.

But did you know that there are several open-source download managers for Linux currently in the market? As a Linux user, you must check out the following download managers that help extend the open-source ethic of Linux and rival premium alternatives in terms of efficiency and related features.

Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Atlassian Jira – LinuxLinks

Atlassian Corporation Plc is a software company founded in 2002 that develops products for software developers, project managers and other software development teams. It employs over 7,000 people and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.

Atlassian produces a range of proprietary software including software for collaboration, development, and issue tracking software for teams. Atlassian dominates several markets where it still has intense competition.

Broadly speaking, they offer software in three large buckets: These are software development tools; help desk software, or IT service management; and workflow management software. When you think of Atlassian, think project management and collaboration tools.

Many of their programs use a number of open source components. And their GitHub repositories hold lots of open source code. But their main range of software is proprietary. This series looks at free and open source alternatives to Atlassian’s products.

Micro: Modern and Intuitive Terminal-Based Text Editor

Nano isn’t good as it should be, while vim seems quite complex for the beginner. There are many Text Editor for Linux users, and choosing the best one is quite debatable.

AuthPass is a KeePass compatible free Password manager for Windows, macOS, and Linux

AuthPass is a multi-platform, free, and open-source password manager for all types of users.

AuthPass is fully compatible with the popular open-source KeePass password manager, which many consider the father of open-source password managers.

The app is written with Flutter which is gaining popularity among developers building for building mobile, desktop, and web apps.

Easily Understand Your Linux RAM Usage With Smem

Linux memory usage can be difficult to interpret and hard to understand. With smem it’s easy to find out what memory a process is using, and which processes are using the most.

5 scripts for getting started with the Nmap Scripting Engine | Enable Sysadmin

Nmap is a popular tool for scanning and monitoring networks. There are many ways to find information using Nmap, from blogs and articles to formal training. Yet few of these learning tools discuss one of Nmap’s most powerful features: The Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE).

What is the NSE? This tool does two things. First, it allows the nmap command to accept options that specify scripted procedures as part of a scan. Second, it enables Nmap users to author and share scripts, which provides a robust and ever-evolving library of preconfigured scans.

Bash 02 – Variables and Such | Linux.org

Within BASH, you can use variables. Variables are names that can represent specific information. If you remember your days in math, specifically some stage of algebra, you may recall variables. There were all the letters of the alphabet, mainly X and Y. In BASH, we can use variable names, not just letters.

We will cover other topics to help manipulate the variables and even perform math functions. These can help you make better BASH Scripts that will calculate and manipulate data.

Different types of Backups

In my previous post, I explained how I recently set up backups for my home server to be synced using Amazon’s services. I received a (correct) comment on that by Iustin Pop which pointed out that while it is reasonably cheap to upload data into Amazon’s offering, the reverse — extracting data — is not as cheap.

He is right, in that extracting data from S3 Glacier Deep Archive costs over an order of magnitude more than it costs to store it there on a monthly basis — in my case, I expect to have to pay somewhere in the vicinity of 300-400 USD for a full restore. However, I do not consider this to be a major problem, as these backups are only to fulfill the rarer of the two types of backups cases.

There are two reasons why you should have backups.

The first is the most common one: “oops, I shouldn’t have deleted that file”. This happens reasonably often; people will occasionally delete or edit a file that they did not mean to, and then they will want to recover their data. At my first job, a significant part of my job was to handle recovery requests from users who had accidentally deleted a file that they still needed.

Record your terminal session with Asciinema | Opensource.com

Support calls are important and often satisfying in the end, but the act of clear communication can be arduous for everyone involved. If you’ve ever been on a support call, you’ve probably spent several minutes spelling out even the shortest commands and explaining in detail where the spaces and returns fall. While it’s often easier to just seize control of a user’s computer, that’s not really the best way to educate. What you might try instead is sending a user a screen recording, but one that they can copy commands from and paste into their own terminal.

Asciinema is an open source terminal session recorder. Similar to the script and scriptreplay commands, Asciinema records exactly what your terminal displays. It saves your “movie” recording to a text file and then replays it on demand. You can upload your movie to Asciinema.org and share them just as you would any other video on the internet, and you can even embed your movie into a webpage.

​How to Upgrade Debian 10 Buster to Debian 11 Bullseye

After more than two years of development, the new Debian stable version, Debian 11 codenamed “Bullseye”, was released on August 14, 2021, and it will be supported for five years.

This release comes with a lot of new packages and major software upgrades. Debian 11 bullseye ships with Linux 5.10 LTS kernel with support for the exFAT filesystem and includes a newer version of desktop environments.
This article shows how to upgrade your Debian 10 Buster system to Debian 11, Bullseye via command line.

How to Install and Setup MERN Stack with Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04

Since this post shares cloud strategies with awesome people like you, naturally this post may contain affiliate links for products I use and love. If you click on those links and make a purchase, I’ll earn some coffee money which I promise to drink while creating more helpful content like this.

How to Install Zabbix Agent on Rocky Linux/Alma Linux 8

A Zabbix agent is a program that runs on a remote machine that needs to be monitored through the Zabbix server. The agent collects the data on the remote server and send back to Zabbix server when requested. Zabbix agent must be installed on all the remote systems that need to be monitor through the Zabbix server.

How To Install and Configure Zabbix Agent on Ubuntu 20.04

A Zabbix agent is a program that runs on a remote machine that needs to be monitored through the Zabbix server. The agent collects the data on the remote server and send back to Zabbix server when requested. Zabbix agent must be installed on all the remote systems that need to be monitor through the Zabbix server.

How to Install Lighttpd with PHP in Ubuntu 20.04

The concept of web servers has crossed the minds of most, if not all, Linux enthusiasts; especially the ones interested in pursuing web-based projects and careers. Due to the numerous web servers offered to the Linux community, you might feel like tossing a coin or rolling a dice to find the one that ‘might’ suit your web-based needs.

Lighttpd is best attributed as a compatible, very flexible, fast, and secure web server. It is therefore optimized for high performance on whichever operating system environment hosts it.

Also, this web server is indeed light such that it needs very few resources to run or execute its functional objectives like handling AJAX applications. This web server is BSD licensed, open-source, with flawless compatibility on UNIX-like systems.

This article seeks to walk you through the installation and configuration of Lighttpd as an ideal web server for your Ubuntu 20.04 operating system.

How to self-host a Python package index using Pulp | Red Hat Developer

Find out how developer teams use Pulp to maintain and share their own Python package repositories. Examples are based on the Operate First deployment.

How To Install Kate Editor on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Kate Editor on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, The Kate Text Editor is an open-source and free text editor application that stands for KDE Advanced Text Editor. Kate lets you edit and view many files at the same time, both in tabs and split views, and comes with a wide variety of plugins, including an embedded terminal that lets you launch console commands directly from Kate. Kate editor is a cross-platform application available for Linux, MacOS & Microsoft Windows, It is available for both 32 bit and 64 bit operating systems.

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 Kate Editor 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 Change Desktop Themes on Linux Mint

Linux Mint is a great Linux distro for anyone starting out with Linux. It comes in three different flavors: Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce, each catering to a different audience.

Over the years, Linux Mint has undergone several changes, including a few cosmetic alterations that are a departure from its original visual appearance. As part of this change, Mint now lets you choose from a wide range of themes to customize your desktop to your preference.

If you’re just getting started with Mint, here’s a guide demonstrating all the different ways to change themes.

How to install and use Firewalld on Almalinux 8 – Linux Shout

Firewalls are one of the most essential parts of security when we are going online. Here we learn the steps and command to install, configure, and how to use FirewallD on AlmaLinux 8 using CLI or GUI.

Many of us who are not already Linux would already be familiar with the firewall feature on Windows, where it is very easy to turn On or Off ports or services using GUI. However, what about Linux such as CentOS, Rocky Linux, RedHat, AlmaLinux, and more… If you are using full Linux Desktop then a firewall would already be there but in most of the cases without a graphical interface. Nevertheless, Debian, RedHat, Ubuntu, and other Linux systems provide the appropriate firewall GUI software directly from their respective repository to manage things with the help of mouse clicks.

But what if you just want a basic OS installation with no graphical interface? Because minimal versions of Linux would not even have the CLI version of Firewall by default. Well, this is a very small problem, if you have an active internet connection and due to an in-built package manager under Linux, we can install a firewall with just a single command.

How to use Terraform Taint and Untaint – buildVirtual

The Terraform taint and untaint commands are important to be aware of if you are a regular user of Terraform. The Terraform Taint command allows you to manually flag a resource as tainted, which means it will be destroyed and recreated on the next terraform apply. Terraform untaint allows you to remove that tainted condition from the resource.

So, why is that useful? What are the use cases for terraform taint?

Love cracking locks? Check out Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking | GamingOnLinux

Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking is a wonderful little idea to bring together many different ways to crack locks from various styles in video games. Perhaps one of the greatest foes in gaming – the lock. Now it’s time to beat it in many different forms.

Humble decides to BETRAY Linux gamers… and the rest of their paying customers, too. – Invidious

GOG finally update their store browsing with new filters | GamingOnLinux

Game store GOG.com has finally updated the browsing experience for those of you who prefer getting your games there.

When you go to search for a game now, much like Steam, there’s plenty of new options to help sort through masses of games. It was a needed refresh too, since GOG has grown to have over 5,500 titles available across different platforms. When you go to the store pages you will now be able to filter across price range, genres, release date range, and a newly introduced tags system.

After 12 years development, business sim GearCity is officially out now | GamingOnLinux

Built with FOSS tooling, GearCity is a complex and in-depth business simulator where you run your own car company. Developed by Visual Entertainment And Technologies, which is a solo outfit of just Eric Jones who outsourced some parts to contractors for artwork, translations, music and a few other bits.

“GearCity is a realistic historically focused economic simulation of the global automobile industry. Unlike tycoon games, GearCity has not been simplified. It is a complex, realistic, in-depth management sim that will take several hours to grasp and hundreds of hours to master. Thousands of players across the globe and industry professionals from automotive engineers to economics professors have praised the game’s intricate details.”

Wii U emulator Cemu plans to go open source and support Linux | GamingOnLinux

Most emulators nowadays have their source code nicely open, and the vast majority of them fully support Linux too but Cemu has been a bit of a holdout. Not for long though.

On their official roadmap, which many people emailed in excitedly, they put up their plans and who can blame people for being excited on this? Scrolling down a bit, a Linux port is clearly mentioned. It has been an “ongoing side-project” already but quite slow as it was low-priority and it depended on other things being done. The good news is that they say it’s about “70%” of the way there already. Having Linux support of course will also be great for the Steam Deck, since it comes with SteamOS 3 (based on Arch Linux).

Popular Nintendo Video Game Emulator ‘Cemu’ Plans to Go Open-Source with Linux Support – It’s FOSS News

If you’re into retro gaming, you may have come across retro console emulators. For those unaware, they are basically software or hardware that allow the host system to run games designed for another system.

Lately, Cemu has managed to grab the attention of the open-source community. It is one of the many retro console emulators out there that lets you play games tailored for Nintendo Wii U. However, as of now, it distinguishes itself from most of them in one major aspect, its closed-source nature, but that’s about to change.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Plasma 5.24 Beta goes live with protection to stop Discover removing Plasma | GamingOnLinux

  The latest release of the KDE Plasma desktop is close with the Plasma 5.24 Beta going live now with plenty of new features and fixes for this customizable environment. A full release is planned for February 8.

  Along with a lot of bug fixes, there’s plenty of quality of life fixes across the whole desktop. The Breeze theme for example, will now properly respect your choice of accent colours for Folders, the Breeze colour scheme is now called “Breeze Classic” to distinguish from Breeze Light and Breeze Dark and more. The notification system also saw some updates. so that important notifications have a small orange strip to bring more attention to them, notifications about video files now display a thumbnail in the notification and when sending or receiving files via Bluetooth, a system notification is now always shown.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME Boxes review: no-frills and no-thrills desktop virtualization

  GNOME Boxes is an easy-to-use graphical virtual machine (VM) installer and launcher. It’s not a VM manager and offers practically no settings for micromanaging your VM. However, its easy-to-use design philosophy can also prevent its users from getting any use out of it.

  Boxes is built on top of Linux’s excellent KVM+QEMU/libvirt virtualization stack. The app is intended for users who’re overwhelmed by such alphabet-soups and just want to run a visualized operating system.

  KVM is a virtualization system from the Linux kernel project. You can expect high performance and a smoother upgrade experience compared to third-party alternatives like VirtualBox. QEMU and libvirt add management layers on top of KVM. Boxes sit on top of these tools.

  You’ll likely find references to Boxes being used to manage remote desktop sessions to remote machines. This functionality has been moved into the new Connections app. I believe it was a good decision to split the two use cases into separate apps. Connections looks and behaves almost identically to Boxes.

  The app is great for managing virtual machines with other recent versions of Linux. Everything works out of the box if you choose one of its presets for popular Linux distributions. You’re presumably already running Linux, so the end-users are maybe more likely to want to emulate Windows?

Arch Family

• 5 Great AUR Helpers for Arch Linux

  Arch Linux is the kind of Linux distro that gives you a scalpel and says, “have at it” without much of the hand-holding that other distros like Debian/Fedora provide. Its initial toolset, including the core/extra/community repositories provided by its signature package manager, may be limited, but that is intentional.

  It’s up to you to add what you want to it, and that is where the Arch User Repository (AUR) comes in useful. It is a repository that allows users to make their own PKGBUILD scripts and create packages that are not included in the official repositories. If you’ve ever wondered how you could get WhatsApp for Linux, Session, Slack, or other apps working on Arch, the AUR is where all of these are located.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• Using the no-cost Developer Subscription with the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux Image Builder hosted service

  We recently published “Introducing the hosted beta experience Red Hat Enterprise Linux Image Builder,” hosted service as part of the Insights application suite. As a followup to that exciting announcement, we are pleased to share that this new service can be used with the no-cost Developer Subscription for Individuals, providing the benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Insights, and simple OS image creation to everyone!

  More information about this subscription offering is on Red Hat Developer site, “No-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux Individual Developer Subscription: FAQs.”

  Access to Image Builder requires a Red Hat account and at least one subscription of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If you do not have either of these, you can easily request them at no cost.

• Reduce the size of container images with DockerSlim | Red Hat Developer

  Containers are a great way to package your applications. Packaging your application codebase together with its dependencies creates a container image. The smaller the container image is, the faster your application will spin up for the first time, and the faster it will scale. But many container images are quite large, in the hundreds of megabytes—just search Docker Hub and prepare to be amazed at the image sizes.

  In this article, you’ll learn how to optimize Docker container images for size using a project called DockerSlim. DockerSlim, which is open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, won’t change anything in your container image, but can still reduce its size—or minify it—by up to a factor of 30. For applications written in compiled languages, the size reduction can be even more dramatic. DockerSlim also makes your packages more secure by reducing the available attack surface.

• 5 Kubernetes trends to watch in 2022 | The Enterprisers Project

  Kubernetes is growing up – and so are the teams that have been using it since its younger years.

  Those earlier adopters are coming into their own now, able to build on their experience and the growth of the cloud-native ecosystem to extend Kubernetes core capabilities in new ways.

  “We will continue to scale and expand our use of Kubernetes to address the hybrid, multi-cloud needs of our business,” says Eric ​​Drobisewski, senior architect at Liberty Mutual. “As we look ahead, the declarative API and strong reconciliation loop that Kubernetes provides will continue to be critical to unify and bring a more consistent approach to how we define, manage, and secure our digital capabilities across public and private cloud environments.”

  The Fortune 100 company’s accelerating Kubernetes usage as a platform for its broader hybrid cloud/multi-cloud infrastructure reflects one of the macro trends fueling soaring Kubernetes adoption across industries.

• Linux Foundation, Red Hat Join Supply Chain Security Summit

  Last week the White House convened government and private sector stakeholders to discuss initiatives to improve the security of open source software and ways new collaboration could drive improvements.

• Restarting and Offline Updates – Fedora Magazine

  A recurring question that goes around the internet is why Fedora Linux has to restart for updates. The truth is, Linux technically doesn’t need to restart for updates. But there is more than meets the eye. In this short guide we’ll look into why Fedora Linux asks you to restart for offline updates.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Get Ready for an Upgrade! Ubuntu 21.04 Will Reach End of Life This Week – It’s FOSS News

  Ubuntu 21.04 had a good run with interesting feature additions. Some notable changes included multi-monitor improvements, UI enhancements, GNOME 40-ready applications, and more.

  Now, it is time to upgrade!

  The support for updates in Ubuntu 21.04 ends this week i.e., January 20th.

Open Hardware/Modding

• TinyNES – An open-source game console features original or cloned Ricoh RP2A03 & RP2C02 chips (Crowdfunding) – CNX Software

  Tall Dog Electronics’ TinyNES (Tiny Nostalgia Evocation Square) is an open-source hardware game console compatible with NES cartridges and featuring the original MOS 6502-based Ricoh RP2A03 CPU (central processing unit) and the Ricoh RP2C02 PPU (picture processing unit) found in the Nintendo NES, although clones may be also used in the future due to the lack of availability.

  Designed to offer the same experience as the original Nintendo NES, the console comes with two NES controller ports, a cartridge slot, RCA video composite and mono audio outputs, and all electronics is housed in an FR-4 enclosure, the same material used for most PCBs.

• Tang Nano 9K FPGA board can emulate PicoRV32 RISC-V soft-core with all peripherals – CNX Software

  Tang Nano 9K FPGA is the third board from Sipeed based on GOWIN FPGA following the original Tang Nano board with 1K LUT and Tang Nano 4K launched last year with GW1NSR-LV4C (aka GW1NSR-4C) FPGA offering 4068 logical units and 64 Mbit PSRAM, plus an Arm Cortex-M3 hard processor.

  As its name implies, the new board comes with 9K LUTs, as well as 64 Mbit PSRAM, 32 Mbit Flash, a micro SD card, and video I/O (HDMI, RGB LCD connector) that makes it suitable to run Verilog HDL code emulating a PicoRV32 RISC-V soft-core with all peripherals.

• Open Source Replacement For EzCAD | Hackaday

  [Bryce] obtained a fiber laser engraver to use for rapid PCB prototyping last Fall. But he was soon frustrated by the limitations of the standard EzCAD software that typically comes with these and similar devices — it is proprietary, doesn’t have features aimed at PCB manufacturing, only runs on Windows, and is buggy. As one does, [Bryce] decided to ditch EzCAD and write his own tool, Balor, named after the King of the Fomorians.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Micro RPG Launching for Android on January 26th – Droid Gamers

• Samsung Android 12 update: These devices have One UI 4.0 – 9to5Google

• Android 11 on Shield TV breaks Plex for many, other issues – 9to5Google

• Oppo’s first ever Android tablet leaks once again – PhoneArena

Enforcing the pyramid of Open Source | daniel.haxx.se

The well-known log4j security vulnerability of December 2021 triggered a lot of renewed discussions around software supply chain security, and sometimes it has also been said to be an Open Source related issue.

This was not the first software component to have a serious security flaw, and it will not be the last.

What can we do about it?

This is the 10,000 dollar question that is really hard to answer. In this post I hope to help putting some light on to why it is such a hard problem. This comes from my view as an Open Source author and contributor since almost three decades now.

In this post I’m going to talk about security as in how we make our products have less bugs in the code we write and land on purpose. There is also a lot to be said about infrastructure problems such as consumers not verifying dependencies so that when malicious actors purposely destroy a component, users of that don’t notice the problem or supply chain security issues that risk letting bad actors insert malicious code into components. But those are not covered in this blog post!

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• WP Briefing: Episode 23: A letter from WordPress’ Executive Director

  As we greet a new year, WordPress’ Executive Director writes a letter to the project and community that speaks to the hopes of the year ahead.

Programming/Development

• QuatBot released – Matrix Meeting Manager

  QuatBot is a Bot for use in text-chat. So there are no pretty screenshots of it in action, or what the UI looks like: pick your favorite Matrix client (I switch between nheko and neochat depending on which has a more recent release fixing bugs that annoy me).

• AIfES releases exciting new version of TinyML library for Arduino

  Last July AIfES (Artificial Intelligence for Embedded Systems) from the Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems (IMS) was launched. This open source solution makes it possible to run, and even train, artificial neural networks (ANN) on almost any hardware, including the Arduino UNO.

  The team hasn’t stopped work on this exciting machine learning platform, and an update just landed that you’ll definitely want to check out.

• Drew DeVault’s blog: Status update, January 2022

  I also implemented an efficient path manipulation module for the standard library (something I would really have liked to have in C!), and progress continues on date/time support. We also have a new MIME module (just for Media Types, not all of MIME) and I expect a patch implementing net::uri to arrive in my inbox soon. I also finished up cmsg support (for sendmsg and recvmsg), which is necessary for the Wayland implementation I’m working on (and was a major pain in the ass). I spent some time working with another collaborator, who is developing a RISC-V kernel in our language, implementing a serial driver for the SiFive UART, plus improving the device tree loader and UEFI support.

• Project audit experiences | Will’s Blog

  Back in January 2020, I wrote How to pick up a project with an audit. I received some comments about it over the last couple of years, but I don’t think I really did anything with them. Then Sumana sent an email asking whether I’d blogged about my experiences auditing projects and estimating how long it takes and things like that.

• Hack The Web Without A Browser | Hackaday

  It is a classic problem. You want data for use in your program but it is on a webpage. Some websites have an API, of course, but usually, you are on your own. You can load the whole page via HTTP and parse it. Or you can use some tools to “scrape” the site. One interesting way to do this is woob — web outside of browsers.

• The new Qt Quick Compiler technology

  It’s been a while since we’ve heard about what goes on inside and around Qt QML, our engine to interpret the QML language (not counting the recent announcement, that is). The last post strictly about this topic was what Lars wrote in 2018.

  We’ve been so silent because we’ve been prototyping new ways to make your QML run faster, and some of them turned out to be dead ends. There is no tracing JIT after all. This isn’t cool, so we were somewhat silent. But now there is something to say. And, mind you, it’s not cool either. It’s hot. But let me take a step back first.

• Perl/Raku

  • TWC 147: Prime without Left, and Pent without Quad

  • 2022.03 RakuCon How? – Rakudo Weekly News

    Andrew Shitov is asking for the community’s opinion on whether or not to have an in-person Raku Conference in Riga in 2022 in The Raku Conference Update. Cancelling an in-person event now, means no financial risk, which seems safest.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Bash scripting(III)

    This is the third article of a series focused in Gnu Bash scripting. On the first article we’ve just created a simple script with commands, one after another. We also saw some variables use.
    The second article covered some bash control structures. This one will cover redirections, pipes, and command substitution.

A Dodgy Dial Gets A Teardown And Some Oil | Hackaday

The pulse-dial telephone and its associated mechanical exchange represents the pinnacle of late-19th and early-20th century electromechanical technology, but its vestiges have disappeared from view with astonishing rapidity. [Matthew Harrold] is a telecoms enthusiast who’s been kind enough to share with us the teardown and refurbishment of that most signature of pulse-dial components, a telephone dial. In this case it’s on a rather unusual instrument, a British GPO outdoor phone that would have been seen in all kinds of industrial and safety installations back in the day and can probably still be found in the wild today if you know where to look.

3D Printed Magnetic Switches Promise Truly Custom Keyboards | Hackaday

While most people are happy to type away at whatever keyboard their machine came with, for the keyboard enthusiast, there’s no stone to be left unturned in the quest for the perfect key switch mechanism. Enter [Riskable], with an innovative design for a 3D printed mechanism that delivers near-infinite adjustment without the use of springs or metallic contacts.

The switching itself is performed by a Hall effect sensor, the specifics of which are detailed in a second repository. The primary project simply represents the printed components and magnets which make up the switch mechanism. Each switch uses three 4 x 2 mm magnets, a static one mounted on the switch housing and two on the switch’s moving slider. One is mounted below the static magnet oriented to attract it, while the other is above and repels it.

Proprietary

• Security

  • Security updates for Monday [LWN.net]

    Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, firefox-esr, ghostscript, libreswan, prosody, sphinxsearch, thunderbird, and uriparser), Fedora (cryptsetup, flatpak, kernel, mingw-uriparser, python-celery, python-kombu, and uriparser), Mageia (htmldoc, mbedtls, openexr, perl-CPAN, systemd, thunderbird, and vim), openSUSE (chromium and prosody), Red Hat (httpd, kernel, and samba), Scientific Linux (kernel), Slackware (expat), SUSE (ghostscript), and Ubuntu (pillow).

  • Domestic CCTV and audio recording | Pen Test Partners

    Last week, we had BBC Morning Live in to film a piece on the legalities and challenges of domestic CCTV systems. You can watch it on iPlayer here, starting at 10:30.

    It was sparked by a conversation we had with Radio 4 before Xmas, where a journalist had taken an interest in CCTV systems exposed on insecam.org.

    We had helped the journalist identify the homeowner with an exposed CCTV stream & they went to speak to them about it. Unsurprisingly, the homeowner had installed the system & left it exposed with default credentials. Whilst they could review their CCTV footage remotely on a mobile app, so could anyone else…

    It ended well though, as the homeowner took the system offline and secured it. One less exposed CCTV camera! The radio piece is here.

    As a reminder, if you don’t set a good, strong password for your CCTV system that you don’t use elsewhere, you run the risk of it being exposed and/or accessed remotely by nefarious parties.

  • Data & Society — Bounty Everything: Hackers and the Making of the Global Bug Marketplace

    In Bounty Everything: Hackers and the Making of the Global Bug Marketplace, researchers Ryan Ellis and Yuan Stevens provide a window into the working lives of hackers who participate in “bug bounty” programs—programs that hire hackers to discover and report bugs or other vulnerabilities in their systems. This report illuminates the risks and insecurities for hackers as gig workers, and how bounty programs rely on vulnerable workers to fix their vulnerable systems.
    Ellis and Stevens’s research offers a historical overview of bounty programs and an analysis of contemporary bug bounty platforms​​—the new intermediaries that now structure the vast majority of bounty work. The report draws directly from interviews with hackers, who recount that bounty programs seem willing to integrate a diverse workforce in their practices, but only on terms that deny them the job security and access enjoyed by core security workforces. These inequities go far beyond the difference experienced by temporary and permanent employees at companies such as Google and Apple, contend the authors. The global bug bounty workforce is doing piecework—they are paid for each bug, and the conditions under which a bug is paid vary greatly from one company to the next.
    Bounty Everything offers to reimagine how bounty programs can better serve the interests of both computer security and the workers that protect our digital world. Ellis & Stevens argue that if bounty programs are not designed and implemented properly, “this model can ironically perpetuate a world full of bugs that uses a global pool of insecure workers to prop up a business model centered on rapid iteration and perpetual beta.”

  • An Examination of the Bug Bounty Marketplace

  • Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2021

    Every month we review the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering. Please find the report for December below.

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

    • Malware targeting Linux systems hit a new high in 2021 [Ed: Microsoft-connected Crowdstrike spreading lots of anti-Linux FUD at the moment to sell its proprietary products and to help Microsoft]

    • New year brings bad news for Linux as 2021 saw up to 10 times more malware samples

    • Linux malware is on the rise. Here are three top threats right now [Ed: Microsoft operatives inside the media use Microsoft-connected Crowdstrike to smear Linux right now; nobody bothers to check their Microsoft connections (words taken at face value)]

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Women human rights defenders speak out after Pegasus spyware attacks – The Record by Recorded Future

      The Record by Recorded Future gives exclusive, behind-the-scenes access to leaders, policymakers, researchers, and the shadows of the cyber underground.

Senators Should Avoid Making the Digital Economy More European – Disruptive Competition Project

After years of calls from European leaders to introduce more industrial policy into competition enforcement, to promote the creation of national champions, and to assert European “digital sovereignty” (i.e. protectionism and increased barriers to trade), the European Commission introduced the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in December of 2020. The legislation is designed to create “contestability” for European digital rivals, and “fairness” for European business users of platform services, by imposing a series of obligations on companies designated as “gatekeepers”.

European lawmakers have been quite explicit in their desire to target only U.S. platforms with the law’s obligations. These one-size-fits-all obligations are designed to make the designated “gatekeepers” less competitive, to open up their technology and infrastructure to rivals (sometimes for free), to share user data, and to redesign their products and services in ways that will make it easier for European businesses to compete. The DMA would prohibit a range of behaviour that is known to be pro-competitive and to create value for platform users, effectively giving rivals a leg-up competitively at gatekeepers’ expense. The allegedly pro-competitive effects of the DMA are built on questionable assumptions, at best.

Planet Incinerating Technology | LINUX Unplugged 441

We make some last-minute changes to our server setup and catch up on a bunch of thought-provoking feedback.

Special Guests: Martin Wimpress and Neal Gompa.

GNU World Order 443

Install Linux Kernel 5.16 on Pop!_OS 20.04 – LinuxCapable

Linux kernel 5.16 has many new features, support, and security. The Linux 5.16 kernel release has a great new feature, FUTEX2, or futex_watv(), which aims to improve the Linux gaming experience, growing considerably with better native Linux porting for Windows games utilizing Wine.

Other improvements have seen write include improved write congestion management, task scheduler for CPU clusters sharing L2/L3 cache, amongst many other additions. More information can be found on the Linux 5.16 Kernel release changelog.

Rust For Linux Kernel Patches Revised With Upgraded Rust Toolchain, Build Improvements

Miguel Ojeda has published his third iteration of the patches implementing the basic infrastructure for supporting the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel.

Back in December were the v2 patches and now just over one month layer the version 3 patches are ready for testing.

The updated Rust for Linux kernel code now moves to Rust 1.58 as the compiler version targeted, automatic detection whether a suitable Rust toolchain is available, other build system improvements, and improved documentation as well as other general code clean-ups and improvements.

Developer Steps Up Wanting To Maintain Linux’s FBDEV Subsystem – Phoronix

The Linux kernel’s frame-buffer device “FBDEV” subsystem has thankfully been on the decline over the past number of years thanks to the success of the more useful DRM/KMS drivers and having FBDEV compatibility emulation support. While not actively maintained, the FBDEV subsystem and some drivers remain within the Linux kernel and are used with some interest primarily in some legacy/embedded environments. The subsystem was orphaned while now a Linux kernel developer has stepped up to serve as its maintainer.

Linux 5.16.1

I'm announcing the release of the 5.16.1 kernel.

All users of the 5.16 kernel series must upgrade.

The updated 5.16.y git tree can be found at:
	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.16.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...

thanks,

greg k-h

Linux 5.15.15

Linux 5.10.92

Linux 5.4.172

FFmpeg 5.0 “Lorentz”

FFmpeg 5.0 “Lorentz”, a new major release, is now available! For this long-overdue release, a major effort underwent to remove the old encode/decode APIs and replace them with an N:M-based API, the entire libavresample library was removed, libswscale has a new, easier to use AVframe-based API, the Vulkan code was much improved, many new filters were added, including libplacebo integration, and finally, DoVi support was added, including tonemapping and remuxing. The default AAC encoder settings were also changed to improve quality. Some of the changelog highlights…

Do you need to manage your money properly? Install Akaunting on Debian 11!

Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Akaunting on Debian 11. Thanks to it, you will be able to manage your money properly. Let’s go for

Install & Configure Gitlab on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – 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 and configure Gitlab on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa Desktop or Server, 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 and Configure Zabbix Server 5 on Rocky Linux/Alma Linux 8

Zabbix is an open-source monitoring software tool for diverse IT components, including networks, servers, virtual machines and cloud services. Zabbix provides monitoring metrics, among others network utilization, CPU load and disk space consumption. Zabbix has a rich set of features to enable users to monitor more than just hosts, offering great flexibility to administrators when it comes to choosing the most suitable option for each situation.

Zabbix uses XML based template which contains elements to monitor. The backend of Zabbix is written in C programming and PHP is used for the web frontend. Zabbix can send you alerts to notify the different events and issues based on metrics and thresholds defined for your IT environment. It supports agent-based and agentless monitoring. But Zabbix agents installation can help you to get detailed monitoring e.g. CPU load, network, disk space utilization.

As of the writting of this article, the latest Zabbix version is 5.4. In this guide, we will learn how to install and configure Zabbix on Rocky Linux 8. This guide also works for other RHEL 8 based systems like Oracle Linux 8 and Alma Linux 8.

How to enable/disable wayland on Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop

Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients. By default the Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish desktop already uses Wayland but it’s also possible to load to Xorg display server instead.

In this tutorial, you will see how to disable and enable Wayland in Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.

How to install Gnome Shell Extensions on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux Desktop

The functionalities of the GNOME desktop environment can be expanded by downloading GNOME shell extensions. These are plugins written and submitted by normal users and developers that seek to improve the desktop environment and want to share their extension with other users.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Gnome Shell Extensions on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Desktop.

How to install, uninstall and update Firefox on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux

Every Ubuntu user that uses a graphical interface will have to interact with Mozilla Firefox in some capacity, since it’s the default internet browser on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. Even if you just want to uninstall it and use a different browser, you’ll at least be dealing with it for a short time. In this guide, we’ll show you how you can install, update, and uninstall Firefox on Ubuntu 22.04.

Install Python 2 on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux

This tutorial will show how to install Python 2 for Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. Python 2 has not been the default installed version on Ubuntu versions for a few years, but it’s still possible to install Python 2 and to install Python 2.7 on Ubuntu 22.04.

Follow the step by step instructions below to see how to install Python 2 and use it as the default Python interpreter on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.

How to customize dock panel on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux

In this article, we will show you a few methods for customizing the dock panel in the default GNOME desktop environment on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux.

GNOME is the default desktop environment for Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, and one of the first things you’ll see on your desktop is the dock panel to the left of the screen. The dock panel is highly customizable, so it’s easy to tailor it to your liking.

Matthew Garrett: Boot Guard and PSB have user-hostile defaults

Compromising an OS without it being detectable is hard. Modern operating systems support the imposition of a security policy or the launch of some sort of monitoring agent sufficient early in boot that even if you compromise the OS, you’re probably going to have left some sort of detectable trace[1]. You can avoid this by attacking the lower layers – if you compromise the bootloader then it can just hotpatch a backdoor into the kernel before executing it, for instance.

Ubuntu 22.04 GUI installation

The purpose of this guide is to install a desktop environment on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, whether you already have a GUI installed and wish to use a different desktop environment, or if you are only using the command line and would like access to a GUI.

You can also use these instructions to install a GUI on Ubuntu Server 22.04, which doesn’t have a desktop environment installed by default. Follow along with the step by step instructions below to install a GUI on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Server and Desktop.

How to install Discord on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux

Discord is an application for text, image, video and audio communication, which was developed for video gaming communities. Discord runs on various Linux distributions of your choice and, in particular, on Ubuntu 22.04. The objective of this guide is to install Discord, the gamer’s chat platform, on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.

How to install Steam on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux

Steam is easily the most popular PC gaming client, and with hundreds of titles available for Linux systems, it’s no wonder why Linux gamers would want to install Steam on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. Valve, the company behind Steam, officially targets Ubuntu and Debian with their Linux support, which is great news for Ubuntu users.

In this tutorial, we will guide you through the instructions to install Steam for Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish using the standard Ubuntu repository as well as to perform a manual installation using the official Steam package.

Ubuntu 22.04: Connect to WiFi from command line

The purpose of this tutorial is to connect to a WiFi network via the command line on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.

This could be useful if you are running a headless Ubuntu 22.04 system such as server or Ubuntu 22.04 on Raspberry Pi. Connecting from command line is done through configuration of Netplan on Ubuntu. Follow the step by step instructions below to see how.

How to Install Adobe Acrobat Reader on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux

The objective of this tutorial is to install Adobe Acrobat Reader on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.

Since Ubuntu does not have a native way to open PDF documents by default, users will need to install Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux, or some other program capable of opening the documents.

The advantage of Acrobat Reader, of course, is that it’s the official program and recommended for reading PDF documents in the way they are intended.

How to Configure IP Networking with nmcli Command in Linux

Nmcli (network manager command-line interface) is a command-line utility used to control the NetworkManager daemon which is used to configure network interfaces.

With the nmcli utility, you can display, create, edit, enable and disable network interfaces or connections. It is especially handy for servers and headless systems which do not have a GUI.

In this tutorial, we focus on how you can configure IP networking with the nmcli command in Linux.

Install Pantheon Desktop Environment on Fedora 35 – LinuxCapable

The Pantheon Desktop Environment is a free, lightweight, fast, and elegant desktop environment that stands out amongst most of its competitors in this field. Pantheon is the default featured desktop environment for elementaryOS, taking inspiration from macOS and combining it with one of the most visually appealing desktops around and a bonus for any macOS users wanting to take the plunge into Linux.

In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the Pantheon Desktop Environment on Fedora 35 Workstation.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• digiKam – digiKam 7.5.0 is released

  Dear digiKam fans and users,

  After one month of active maintenance and a huge bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.5.0 of its open source digital photo manager. This new version arrives with more than 700 files closed in bugzilla and main improvements about usability.

  See below the list of most important features coming with this release.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME Mulls ’Cleanup’ of Background Settings in Pursuit of New Features

  The plans are a work-in-progress and yet to be confirmed, but if approved they will involve “getting rid of a bunch of features” that are not currently exposed to users in the GNOME Settings app, and whose code is otherwise surplus to requirements.

  Plus, as is so often the case in situations like this, doing so will ease the maintainability burden.

The best Linux distributions for 2022

The year 2022 is upon us! That means it’s time to choose a new Linux distribution. Here’s a list of the best Linux distributions for 2022 that will help you not get lost in the variety of versions of your favorite operating system.

What Linux Distros And FOSS Projects Can Learn From Zorin OS

I don’t envy any individual or small organization that has to market a Linux distribution (or a FOSS project, or an indie game). There are currently hundreds of Linux distros in active development. 72 of those employ the GNOME desktop environment, and 77 use KDE. There are 51 Linux distributions based on Ubuntu. And Searching Google with the phrase “Linux distro for beginners” returns an astounding 9 million results.

If you think it’s challenging for new Linux users to make the right choice, imagine how challenging it is for Linux distro teams trying to be those chosen ones.

What Distribution and Version Pulled You into Linux?

I recently watched a video posted by my good friend (and former Linux Journal colleague) Shawn Powers introducing viewers to Linux and Linux distributions. And it got me thinking about my own personal experience and when I first started to dabble in the world of open source operating systems.

Reviews

• Review: instantOS Beta

  A project that has been sitting on the DistroWatch waiting list for several months is instantOS. The instantOS project is currently in its beta stage of development, but has been around long enough to review and it claims to offer a number of intriguing features. instantOS is based on Arch Linux and strives to be both light and fast. The distribution’s website reports instantOS requires less than 200MB of RAM.

  The project also ships with its own graphical environment. This custom environment is called instantWM and it reportedly offers both tiling and floating window management. This window manager seems to be the centre piece of the distribution.

  instantOS is available in a single edition for x86_64 computers and is provided through a 1.4GB download. Booting from the downloaded media brings up a menu which offers options for booting into “Arch Linux”.

  Booting into instantOS brings up a graphical environment. A thin panel is placed across the top of the screen. This panel provides access to an application menu, nine virtual desktops, a clock, and system tray. Shortly after the window manager loads we’re presented with a welcome application which looks just like a simple drop-down menu. This menu lists a handful of options, including Get Started, Install, Documentation, Settings, GitHub, Support, and Close.

BSD

• GhostBSD 22.01.12 ISO is now available | GhostBSD

  This new ISO contains fixes, improvements, and software updates. Finally, the installer hanging at the cleaning stage for ZFS installation got fixed, and OpenRC and dhcpcd were removed from the base code. Furthermore, automation configuration for HD 7000 series and older GPUs has been added. I also added the support for os-release to show GhostBSD name and GhostBSD version in applications like mate-system-monitor, python distros, pfetch, and neofetch and added a new set of wallpapers for 2022 and removed p7zip from the default selection since it is vulnerable and unmaintained.

• GhostBSD 22.01.12 Released With Automatic Detection For Old AMD GPUs

  For those wanting a desktop-friendly, easy-to-use BSD operating system to try out the GhostBSD project is one of the better bets in modern times. GhostBSD 22.01.12 is now available with a variety of fixes and improvements for this desktop-minded BSD.

  GhostBSD 22.01.12 can now auto-detect older AMD Radeon graphics cards that rely on the Radeon KMS/DRM driver rather than the newer AMDGPU driver. This helps the support for the Radeon HD 7000 series / GCN 1.0 (and should be GCN 1.1 too albeit not mentioned in the notes) with a better out-of-the-box experience on this BSD rather than needing to configure the driver manually.

• LibreSSL update

  Undeadly reached out to Theo asking whether he would share with readers an explanation of the changes. He kindly responded: [...]

• Early Days at Bell Labs

  It’s Brian Kernighan discussing the formation of Unix, starting from the back story of the creation of Bell Labs, including predecessors CTSS and Multics, and C predecessors BCPL which was modified to become B, and why Dennis Richie added types to B to make C.

  This video really hits its stride when Kernighan discusses piping and redirection, and the ease of creating wonderful things out of small parts that, and Kernighan used these words, “do one thing and do it well.”

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Lubuntu 21.04 End of Life and Current Support Statuses – Lubuntu

  Lubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) was released April 22, 2021 and will reach End of Life on Thursday, January 20, 2022. This means that after that date there will be no further security updates or bugfixes released. We highly recommend that you update to 21.10 as soon as possible if you are still running 21.04.

  After January 20th, the only supported releases of Lubuntu will be 20.04 and 21.10. All other releases of Lubuntu will be considered unsupported, and will no longer receive any further updates from the Lubuntu team.

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish” – New Features and Release Details

  It’s time to unwrap the new features of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish”. We give you all the relevant information, and you stay up to date until the final release.

• Edge ISO available for Linux Mint 20.3

  This is a quick announcement to let you know an “Edge” ISO image is now available for Linux Mint 20.3.

  This image is made for people whose hardware is too new to boot the 5.4 LTS kernel included in Linux Mint 20.3. It ships with kernel 5.13.0-25 instead.

PineNote: Linux-based eReader with a digitizer from PINE64 is now available for US$399

The PineNote is orderable, some five months after the eReader debuted. To recap, the PineNote has a 10.1-inch e-ink display with a 1,872 x 1,404-pixel resolution. The eReader also has a digitizer that supports Wacom EMR-compatible pens, along with 128 GB of eMMC flash storage and 4 GB of LPDDR4 RAM.

Additionally, the PineNote has a 4,000 mAh battery, a Rockchip RK3566 SoC, a USB Type-C port and a Wi-Fi 5-capable modem. PINE64 adds that the eReader has 1.3 W stereo speakers too, plus four microphones and a gyroscope for sensing when to rotate the device’s display.

PineNote Developer Edition mainline Linux e-Reader is now available for $399

Pine64 community has been on a tear in 2022, with the launch of the PineNote Developer Edition Linux e-reader following the availability of the PinePhone keyboard case and PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition Linux smartphone in the last 2-3 weeks.

So far a limited number of PineNote prototypes had been sent to developers, but it’s now possible to order the PineNote Developer Edition for $399 directly on the Pine64 store. As its name implies, the e-Reader is not ready for end-users, but recent progress with mainline Linux makes it suitable for developers and enthusiasts who want to play around with the device knowing much more work is needed to make it a usable device.

OpenBoard: An Open Source Interactive Whiteboard for Educators

There are several open-source tools available for education. But, not all of them are impressively well-maintained at the level of commercial software put forward for schools and universities.

OpenBoard is one such exceptional free and open-source tool that enables education without any compromises. It is an interactive whiteboard program that features all the essential functionalities along with support for a variety of hardware.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Samsung Galaxy S21 FE Gets January 2022 Android Security Patch in First Update in India | Technology News

• Samsung Galaxy Tab A8 Budget Android Tablet is Now Available for $299 – Dignited

• OnePlus 6 and 6T Will No Longer Receive Android Updates as Company Officially Ends Support

• How to Identify Large Apps Eating Storage on Android Phone: Step by Step Guide

• How to enable and schedule dark mode on your Android phone

• Why You Should Get Rid of Unused Android Apps

• Google Pixel 6 & 6 Pro keeps disconnecting from Android Auto

• Android Auto bugs, issues & problems tracker: Here’s the current status

• The Best Android Launchers

• The Best Android Tablets for Gaming

• Unlock hidden features on your Android phone using these 6 codes | Edinburgh News

• Free instead of $2.99: This Android fitness app helps you lose weight | NextPit

• You can now pre-order the Motorola MA1 wireless Android Auto adapter

• Blackberry Android apps will end by August 2022 – Android Community

• Android Automotive is finally getting the upgrade we’ve all been waiting for | T3

• Android phone users ALERT! Change these settings now

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

• Verizon is delivering an incredibly early Android 12 update to the Samsung Galaxy A42 5G – PhoneArena

• Android 12 adds an option to deactivate 2G for security reasons, but your phone may not allow it

Thousands of Students Stage Walkouts, Protest In-Person Classes Amid COVID Surge

Right-Wingers Are Pushing to Take Over School Boards in Leadup to Midterms

Biden Urged to Fire Covid Response Chief Over ‘Damning’ Failures

President Joe Biden is coming under growing pressure to fire White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients—a former private equity executive with no public health background—as the administration continues to face criticism over its slow-moving and inadequate efforts to combat Covid-19.

Watchdog groups have long warned that Zients is not qualified to take on the massive task of leading the federal government’s pandemic response given both his lack of scientific and medical experience as well as his record in the private sector, where his firm invested in a company accused of exploitative surprise billing.

Proprietary

• web3 is Centralized

  The funny thing is, web3, as it exists today and appears to be building towards, is actually more centralized than the web it seeks to replace.

• YouTube temporarily suspends, demonetizes Dan Bongino’s channel

  YouTube took action against conservative commentator Dan Bongino’s channel Friday, suspending it for violating the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy and demonetizing it for at least 30 days.

  The weeklong posting suspension stems from a video where Bongino said that masks are “useless” in stopping the spread of the disease.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Even After Release, Guantánamo Survivors Live Under Surveillance and in Anguish

    • Walmart is getting serious about the metaverse

      The retail giant filed for several trademarks on December 30th, suggesting plans to start selling virtual goods, including electronics, toys, appliances, sporting equipment, apparel, home decor, and more, as noted by CNBC. There’s mention of offering customers a digital currency, as well as the opportunity to buy and sell NFTs. Meanwhile, another application details possible “physical fitness training services” and “classes in the field of health and nutrition” that could take place in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality environments (VR) — the company made a separate filing for the use of its name and logo in VR and AR.

    • Walmart is quietly preparing to enter the metaverse

      The big-box retailer filed several new trademarks late last month that indicate its intent to make and sell virtual goods, including electronics, home decorations, toys, sporting goods and personal care products. In a separate filing, the company said it would offer users a virtual currency, as well as NFTs.

    • Safari 15 bug can leak your recent browsing activity and personal identifiers

      As explained by FingerprintJS, IndexedDB abides by the same-origin policy, which restricts one origin from interacting with data that was collected on other origins — essentially, only the website that generates data can access it. For example, if you open your email account in one tab and then open a malicious webpage in another, the same-origin policy prevents the malicious page from viewing and meddling with your email.

    • Why you might want a secure file-sharing service now that you’re working from home

      Probably the easiest way to share a file is to just attach a document to an email, or to a Slack or other instant message. But either way invites trouble on several fronts. If you rely too much on your email or messaging system, your poorly archived files could become available to prying hackers with phishing lures. If you’re sharing traditional documents that way, you could also quickly find yourself playing the “who has the most current version” game. It’s hard to keep track of updates when multiple people are working on the same document, spreadsheet, or presentation.

    • Women human rights defenders speak out about Pegasus attacks

      A new investigation led by Front Line Defenders reveals the hacking of two women human rights defenders (WHRDs) from Bahrain and Jordan using NSO Group’s notorious Pegasus spyware. The hacking discovery comes on the heels of the Pegasus Project revelations of governments in the MENA region and beyond using the spyware to perpetrate human rights abuses and repress activists and journalists.

      The impact of surveillance on women is particularly egregious and traumatizing given how governments have weaponized personal information extracted through spyware to intimidate, harass, and publicly smear the targets’ reputations. As a result, women targets of surveillance live in a perpetual state of fear, become socially isolated and restricted in their social lives, work, and activism. As expressed by one of the victims, Ebtisam Al-Saegh, “personal freedoms are over for me, they no longer exist. I am not safe at home, on the street, or anywhere.”

    • Unsafe anywhere: attacked by Pegasus, women activists speak out – Access Now

      Women human rights defenders and activists are under attack in Bahrain and Jordan — NSO Group’s notorious Pegasus spyware is the weapon. Read Front Line Defenders and Access Now’s new report, Unsafe anywhere: women human rights defenders speak out about Pegasus attacks, that unpacks the first-hand experiences of women navigating an increasingly hostile and dangerous environment.

      “When governments surveil women, they are working to destroy them,” said Marwa Fatafta, MENA Policy Manager at Access Now. “Surveillance is an act of violence. It is about exerting power over every aspect of a woman’s life through intimidation, harassment, and character assassination. The NSO Group and its government clients are all responsible, and must be publicly exposed and disgraced.”

      Led by Front Line Defenders, the new investigation reveals the true extent of the impact invasive surveillance has on targeted women, exploring the personal journeys of human rights defenders, Ebtisam Al-Saegh and Hala Ahed Deeb.

Opinion | P5 Pledge to Avoid Nuclear War Is a Step in the Right Direction

On January 3, leaders of the five nuclear-weapon states (the US, Russia, China, the UK, and France, collectively known as P5) issued a joint statement on “preventing nuclear war and avoiding arms races”.

Opinion | Hawks Restart Deranged Push for War With Iran

Native Hawaiians Fight US Navy for Polluting Island’s Water

Texas synagogue siege: Teens held in UK as Briton named as hostage-taker

British citizen Malik Faisal Akram, 44, from Blackburn, was shot dead after a standoff with police in Colleyville.

Hostage-taker at Texas synagogue identified as British citizen

Siddiqui, 49, was convicted by a federal jury in 2010 of attempting to kill U.S. officers in Afghanistan and is currently being held at FMC Carswell, a federal prison in Fort Worth. Her sentencing was supplemented by a terror enhancement.

Opinion | Tonga’s Volcanic Tsunami Foreshadows Effects of Glacier Melt From CO2

A massive eruption in an undersea volcano, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, 40 miles north of the South Pacific island of Tongatapu on Saturday caused a low-level tsunami and flooding on the island, the most populous in the Tonga archipelago. The tsunami spread out from there, causing one- to three-foot waves in Hawaii and some one-foot waves on the West Coast of the US and down to Chile. The waves created rip tides that endangered marinas and swimmers. Further eruptions cannot be ruled out.

Energy

• [Cryptocurrency] Enthusiasts Meet Their Match: Angry Gamers

  But to some, the [cryptocurrency] craze has gone too far, too fast. Skeptics argue that cryptocurrencies and related assets like NFTs are digital Ponzi schemes, with prices artificially inflated beyond their true value. Some question whether cryptocurrencies and the blockchain, which are slippery concepts, have any long-term utility.

  Nowhere has there been more unhappiness than in the games community, where clashes over [cryptocurrency] have increasingly erupted between users and major game studios like Ubisoft, Square Enix and Zynga. In many of the encounters, the gamers have prevailed — at least for now.

Opinion | To Advance Racial Justice, Cancel Student Debt

With many of President Biden’s legislative priorities stalled, pressure is mounting on the administration to use executive authority to cancel student debts — a move that would substantially narrow racial wealth gaps.

Senate Finance Chair Accuses Rich Developers of Exploiting Trump Tax Break

As Long as Capitalism Exists, the Threat of Fascism Exists

Six short years later, there is not only much hand-wringing that Republicans are using bare-knuckle tactics that are poised to give themselves a permanent grip on power despite their minority status but there is open worry of a possible coup by fascistic elements in the Republican Party that would put an end to formal democracy. No longer, it seems, is demographics destiny; the Democratic Party, ever haughtily giving the back of the hand to its base, had believed it merely need show up to win elections.

Southern States Largely Excluded from Historic Minimum Wage Increases

Dark Money “Persuasion Machine” for GOP Raised Record Cash Before 2022 Midterms

As Sinema Defends Filibuster, Progressives Say ‘Vote Her the Hell Out’

On what would have been Martin Luther King Jr.’s 93rd birthday, voting rights advocates and progressive lawmakers rallied in Arizona on Saturday to target the first-term Democratic senator blocking legislation aimed at strengthening ballot access amid growing GOP-led suppression efforts.

In attendance at Saturday’s demonstrations in Phoenix were members of the King family, which is planning to lead a march to Washington, D.C. on MLK Day with a simple message to lawmakers: “No celebration without legislation.”

Cognitive cascades: How to model (and potentially counter) the spread of fake news

Understanding the spread of false or dangerous beliefs—often called misinformation or disinformation—through a population has never seemed so urgent. Network science researchers have often taken a page from epidemiologists, and modeled the spread of false beliefs as similar to how a disease spreads through a social network. However, absent from those disease-inspired models is an internal model of an individual’s set of current beliefs, where cognitive science has increasingly documented how the interaction between mental models and incoming messages seems to be crucially important for their adoption or rejection. Some computational social science modelers analyze agent-based models where individuals do have simulated cognition, but they often lack the strengths of network science, namely in empirically-driven network structures. We introduce a cognitive cascade model that combines a network science belief cascade approach with an internal cognitive model of the individual agents as in opinion diffusion models as a public opinion diffusion (POD) model, adding media institutions as agents which begin opinion cascades. We show that the model, even with a very simplistic belief function to capture cognitive effects cited in disinformation study (dissonance and exposure), adds expressive power over existing cascade models. We conduct an analysis of the cognitive cascade model with our simple cognitive function across various graph topologies and institutional messaging patterns. We argue from our results that population-level aggregate outcomes of the model qualitatively match what has been reported in COVID-related public opinion polls, and that the model dynamics lend insights as to how to address the spread of problematic beliefs. The overall model sets up a framework with which social science misinformation researchers and computational opinion diffusion modelers can join forces to understand, and hopefully learn how to best counter, the spread of disinformation and “alternative facts.”

Iran Confirms Again Imprisoning French-Iranian Academic

Adelkhah is one of at least a dozen Western nationals believed to be held in Iran. Rights groups accuse Iran of using foreign detainees as bargaining chips for money or influence in negotiations with the West.

Kashmiri Media Describe Toll of Legal Harassment

Shah said that cases like the one against Gul, in which reporters or media outlets are accused of sharing or posting anti-national sentiment, are increasing in Kashmir, and that the threat of legal action is having an impact in a region where journalism plays a significant role.

It’s not an isolated problem. Lawsuits against media are on the rise across India, with a growing trend of judicial harassment and intimidation against those who do not toe the line of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, said Daniel Bastard, the Asia-Pacific lead for media watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

IFF writes to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on IT on the “Bulli Bai” and “Sulli Deals” Incidents

The recent “Bulli Bai” and “Sulli Deals” incidents, a fake online auction of almost 100 Muslim women, was a blatant violation of their data security and privacy rights. It severely impacted their constitutional right to life and free speech by displaying sensitive information without consent. Hence, we have sent a letter to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology requesting them to investigate the matter to understand the reasons behind the delayed response of the relevant authorities.

States appeal a judge’s decision to throw out their Facebook antitrust case.

Nearly four dozen states on Friday asked a federal appeals court to reconsider an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook that a judge threw out last year.

In June, Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia said the states had waited too long after some of the deals under scrutiny were made to file their suit.

Download tool: Music industry is suing the host provider of Youtube DL

Whether YouTube DL facilitates copyright infringement has been the subject of heated debate for years. The Association of the US Music Industry (RIAA) had the Python library initially blocked on GitHub in autumn 2020 on the basis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After loud protests, the platform operated by Microsoft restored the directory a little later. She justified this by saying that the software did not violate the DMCA according to the assessment of her own lawyers.

Uberspace now apparently wants to fight the matter through. The value in dispute is 100,000 euros, which does not make the procedure cheap. The Youtube DL developers write on the controversial website: The hoster has already “spent thousands of euros on his legal defense”.

The New Separation of Powers Formalism and Administrative Adjudication [Ed: Enemies of patent quality still pursuing new angles for scuttling PTAB, for 'daring' to squash fake patents]

The Supreme Court has entered a new era of separation of powers formalism. Others have addressed many of the potentially profound consequences of this return to formalism for administrative law. This paper focuses on an aspect of the new formalism that has received little attention—its implications for the constitutionality of administrative adjudication. The Court has not engaged in an extensive discussion or reformulation of its separation of powers jurisprudence concerning administrative adjudication since its highly functionalist decision in Commodity Futures Trading Commission v. Schor more than three decades ago, but recent opinions of individual Justices show signs that such a doctrinal restatement may be on the horizon.

Despite the current lack of doctrinal clarity, administrative adjudication is generally valid either because Congress may vest the determination of so-called “public rights” in non-Article III tribunals or because administrative agencies adjudicate cases as adjunct factfinders for the courts. The foundation for the emergent Article III formalism, advanced most prominently by Justice Gorsuch in a pair of cases involving the legality of administrative adjudication of patent validity, is a categorical rule that Article III requires an independent judiciary to have decisional authority in adjudications that affect private property (and other protected rights), in much the same way that the unitary executive principle requires Presidential control over matters within the executive branch. Under this view, however, the judicial power is subject to a formalistic, historically defined exception for matters of public rights, which can be adjudicated without the involvement of the judiciary. This approach may be gaining traction as part of the broader resurgence of separation of powers formalism.

We argue, however, that Justice Gorsuch’s approach is flawed because it does not account for the structural role of the Article III judiciary. Although the cases have long recognized that Article III has both structural and individual rights components, separation of powers is ordinarily understood primarily in structural terms. Article III analysis therefore must account for the structural role of the Article III courts and protect the structural interests of the federal judiciary. Focusing on the structural issues raised by non-Article III adjudication highlights two essential points. First, the status and character of the non-Article III tribunal is critical to the separation of powers analysis—a point that is typically ignored under current doctrine. Second, the structural interests of the federal courts may be implicated even when the adjudication of a matter does not implicate any individual right to an Article III court, especially in light of the courts’ role in protecting the rule of law. The rule of law applies even when executive action does not deprive anyone of a private right.

Building on these points, our core argument is that, properly understood, most administrative adjudication is fully consistent with separation of powers formalism because it involves the execution of law by officials within the executive branch. In other words, the initial implementation of statutory provisions by agencies using quasi-judicial procedures is executive in character. This understanding brings coherence to the public rights doctrine that has long governed the constitutionality of administrative adjudication. It also reveals that the critical separation of powers question for administrative adjudication is the availability and scope of judicial review, rather than the propriety of initial administrative adjudication. It is the availability and scope of judicial review which determine the extent of any encroachment on the exercise of judicial power under Article III.

Inventing While a Black Woman: Passing and the Patent Archive [Ed: Patent as class and race warfare, using "law" as excuse for oppressing other people]

This Article uses historical methodology to reframe persistent race and gender gaps in patent rates as archival silences. Gaps are absences, positioning the missing as failed non-participants. By centering Black women and letting the silences fill with whispered stories, this Article upends our understanding of the patent archive as an accurate record of US invention and reveals powerful truths about the creativity, accomplishments, and patent savviness of Black women and others excluded from the status of “inventor.” Exposing the patent system as raced and gendered terrain, it argues that marginalized inventors participated in invention and patenting by situational passing. It rewrites the legal history of the true inventor doctrine to include the unappreciated ways in which white men used false non-inventors to receive patents as a convenient form of assignment. It argues that marginalized inventors adopted this practice, risking the sanction of patent invalidity, to avoid bias and stigma in the patent office and the marketplace. The Article analyzes patent passing in the context of the legacy of slavery and coverture that constrained all marginalized inventors. Passing, while an act of creative adaptation, also entailed loss. Individual inventors gave up the public status of inventor and also, often, the full value of their inventions. Cumulatively, the practice amplified the patent gaps, systematically overrepresenting white men and thus reinforcing the biases marginalized inventors sought to avoid. The Article further argues that false inventors were used as a means of appropriating the inventions of marginalized inventors. This research provides needed context to the current effort to remedy patent gaps. Through its intersectional approach, it also brings patent law into broader conversations about how law has supported systemic racism and sexism and contributed to societal inequality.

Jamaica joins Madrid Protocol

WIPO has announced that Jamaica deposited its instrument of accession to the Madrid Protocol on 27 December 2021, meaning that the Protocol will enter into force in the country on 27 March 2022.

[...]

- in accordance with Article 8(7)(a) of the Madrid Protocol (1989), the Government of Jamaica, in connection with each international registration in which it is mentioned under Article 3ter of the said Protocol, and in connection with the renewal of any such international registration, wants to receive, instead of a share in the revenue produced by the supplementary and complementary fees, an individual fee.

[Guest Post] Mercado Libre’s second Transparency Report [Ed: Misuse of terms like IP (not Internet Protocol) and calling it a "right", which is also outright false]

What will property look like in the Metaverse? [Ed: It is not property and it's ludicrous hype like Second Life was]

Amongst many other things, writer Neal Stephenson is famous for having coined the term “Metaverse” in his 1992 cyberpunk novel “Snow Crash”, but he has also written a lot about virtual worlds in some of his later work, particularly the novel “Reamde“, which is a techno-political thriller which introduces a popular virtual world called T’Rain. To me, T’Rain is one of the most interesting depictions of the Metaverse in fiction, it’s an open world MMO that has been designed with geologically-accurate terrain, it is vast, and has an in-game currency that is exchangeable with “real” fiat currencies. The game is designed with scarcity in mind, value is derived from the difficulty in getting things done, from transportation to gold mining, everything takes a some effort, which justifies the economic value of the currency.

A Look Back at India’s Top IP Developments of 2021 [Ed: The term "IP" is misleading]

Here’s wishing all our readers a very happy, safe, and healthy new year!

Continuing our annual tradition of recounting the significant developments that impacted the Indian IP landscape in the year that has been, we bring you a round-up of 2021’s developments.

Bulgaria: 7 Common Mistakes Businesses Make In The Field Of Intellectual Property And How To Avoid Them [Ed: There's no such thing as "Intellectual Property" and using this lie discredits the motivation of the messenger]

Intellectual property rights are valuable assets to any business. A patent or utility model protects new technologies and methods and establishes a monopoly over them. Trademarks protect a brand and ensure that only the brand owner can use it. Industrial design rights, in turn protect the exterior appearance of a product and establish a monopoly over that particular design. Owning IP rights can lead to significant commercial advantages and in turn, higher revenues and profits.

Unfortunately, many businesses do not fully take advantage of IP rights. In this article, we will list some of the most commonly encountered mistakes that businesses make in this field, and we will give some suggestions on how to avoid them.

Patents

• Apple Accidentally Reveals iPhone Breakthrough Feature In New Patent [Ed: Breakthrough? Hardly. What a joker.]

• Senate committee advances Biden’s USPTO, Federal Circuit picks [Ed: Biden is about to put a software patents booster from Microsoft’s team in charge of USPTO]

  Two of President Biden’s key nominations related to intellectual property law moved closer to confirmation on Thursday, when the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee advanced them to the full Senate for a final vote.

  The committee voted 17-5 to advance Winston & Strawn partner Kathi Vidal to lead the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and voted 16-6 for District Judge Leonard Stark to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears patent appeals from around the country.

  During her career as a patent litigator, Vidal has represented companies including Microsoft, Tesla, and Intel. She led Fish & Richardson’s litigation group before joining Winston in 2017.

  Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana voted against Vidal based on her ties to major tech companies, an issue he said he also had with the past three PTO directors.

• ‘The system worked:’ Canadian CEO of Sonos hopes his takedown of Google inspires other upstarts

  The Canadian executive who won a David-and-Goliath fight over patent infringement with Alphabet Inc.’s Google last week said he hoped his victory would inspire more technology upstarts to invest in intellectual property.

  “To take on one of the world’s most powerful companies and be able to win just shows you that we were well prepared, we are the true inventor of the category and the system worked,” Patrick Spence, CEO of Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Sonos Inc., the company that introduced smart speakers to a mass audience, said in an interview.

• SCOTUS okays Medtronic’s $112 million loss in patent contract case [Ed: Misleading title; they just declined an intervention or escalation]

  The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined a request by medical-device maker Medtronic Inc to review a case involving surgical-screw patents, letting stand a $112 million verdict against the company for breaching a royalty agreement.

  Medtronic had argued that the case, brought by a spinal surgeon in 2014, didn’t belong in state court because it arose under federal patent law, which is reserved exclusively for federal courts.

  The company argued the high court should hear the dispute because lower courts are divided on how to determine when an issue of patent law requires a case to be heard in federal court.

• Nike sues Lululemon for patent infringement over Mirror home gym
  

  Nike Inc. has launched a lawsuit against Lululemon Athletica Inc. accusing the athletic apparel maker of patent infringement with its new Mirror home gym.

  The American fitness giant claims Vancouver-based Lululemon’s electronic device for streaming workout classes and its accompanying mobile applications violate Nike’s “robust portfolio of patents” protecting decades of digital sport innovations.

  [...]

  It comes on the heels of Lululemon’s lawsuit against Peloton Interactive Inc. that accused the stationary bicycle maker of selling “knock-off” bras and pants.

  Lululemon acquired Mirror in 2020 as the pandemic catapulted the at-home fitness market to new heights.

• PODA Granted US Patent for Closed Bottom Vaporizer Pod

  - PODA HOLDINGS, INC. (“Poda” or the “Company”) (CSE: PODA) (FSE: 99L) (OTCQB: PODAF) is pleased to announce that it has been granted a US Patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office concerning US Application 16/340,058 for Poda’s Closed Bottom Vaporizer Pod. US Patent 11,206,869 B2 was granted on December 28th, 2021.

• U.S. Chief Justice Roberts pledges to review patent venue rules [Ed: US patent courts going rogue -- to the point where the Supreme Court steps in]

  In a year-end report on the federal judiciary, U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts said he would direct the Judicial Conference of the United States to address how venue is chosen for patent cases.

  Calling the issue “arcane but important,” Roberts acknowledged concerns that patent plaintiffs are funneling cases into a Waco, Texas federal court, and promised the Judicial Conference would work with Congress to make changes if needed.

  The ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, had asked Roberts in November to review potential patent forum shopping, citing the “extreme concentration of patent litigation” in U.S. District Judge Alan Albright’s court and the “unseemly and inappropriate conduct that has accompanied this phenomenon.”

  The senators said nearly 25% of all U.S. patent litigation is pending before Albright, and that he has solicited cases at lawyers’ meetings and “repeatedly ignored binding case law” in denying transfer motions, among other things.

  Critics say Albright’s patent-owner friendly policies attract alleged “patent trolls” to his court.

• Covid sparks surge in innovation with 5,070 new patent applications [Ed: Patent lawyers' death cult, celebrating the deaths of millions for the sake of patent profits; innovation as in what? Death?]

  5,070 global patent applications* relating to Covid-19 have been published since the start of the pandemic, shows a new analysis by leading intellectual property law firm Mathys & Squire.
  The most common type of patent application relates to Covid testing and diagnosis, accounting for 1,668 patents (33% of the total). 325 patents related to face masks (6%), while just 55 related to sanitizer and 38 to ventilators/respirators.
  Mathys & Squire says a key reason why testing is the most common subcategory of Covid patents is the growing acceptance that the virus has become endemic and societies will have to learn to live with it. As a result, Covid testing has become a viable long-term business model.
  The law firm says many more Covid patent applications can be expected this year, as it can take up to 18 months for the patent publication process to be completed.

• New Motorola phone with wrap around display receives patent [Ed: So much fascination with patents (could be vapourware) instead of actual products)]

  Motorola has recently applied for a patent for a wrap-around screen display designed for a smartphone device. The patent has been brought to life in new renders that show the screen seamlessly stretching around both sides and edges of the handset.
  Back in June 2020, Motorola applied for a patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for a device with a wrap-around display. The actual name of the patent filing reads “Unitary pre-formed fascia tension at least two sides of an electronic device housing and corresponding methods and devices.”
  The patent, published on December 23, 2021, describes in detail the manufacturing process of a smartphone that is completely wrapped with a flexible display screen.

• The ‘loneliness’ of starting your own IP firm [Ed: There's no such thing as "IP" and these "professionals" likely claim to cover things they know nothing about, using this fictional, nebulous umbrella, much like "clown computing"]

  Managing IP speaks to five IP professionals about what they’ve learned from going out on their own

• Opinion: France’s six-month IP plan is welcome but too ambitious [Ed: Max Walters speaks of “‘business-backed’ UPC”, but what business? Litigation business? American patent cartels that profit from letting COVID-19 spread and mutate?]

  France boldly throws its weight behind ‘business-backed’ UPC, but the next six months is unlikely to see the project come to life

• Exclusive: IP5 joint meeting with TM5/ID5 scrapped
  

  The EPO will still host the next IP5 meeting in June, but trademarks and designs won’t be on the agenda as planned

• UK: When Does A Disclosure Invalidate A Patent? [Ed: EPO violates confidentiality, discrediting the whole system]

  This brief article explains why and when a public disclosure invalidates a patent. Most inventors and designers do understand that new developments need to be kept confidential prior to making a decision as to whether to apply for legal patent protection or not.

  The confidentiality requirement in many territories around the world is required by law, and the UK is one of these.

  To be granted a valid patent, one of the requirements is that your invention must be novel. Disclosing your invention publicly in any form before the filing date of your patent application can prove fatal to your patent application (or granted patent).

  However, before taking the leap into patenting an idea, the designer will often want to first test their development. One or more prototypes are therefore often required.

• Software Patents

  • [Older] UK: Drafting AI Patent Applications For Success At The EPO (1) – Patent Eligibility And Claim Drafting [Ed: k00ks and patent lawyers referring to patents on algorithms, which aren't permitted, as "AI inventions"]

    In this article, we take a practical look at the different types of AI inventions that might be encountered and how to formulate claims for each category in view of the European Patent Office’s patent eligibility requirements.

    [...]

    At the far left of the figure sit the Applied-AI inventions. These are where the invention lies (as the name would suggest) in the manner in which a known AI algorithm is used. These correspond to the second of the EPO’s two dimensions – inventions that the EPO considers technical by means of “adaption to a field of technology”.

    The blue box represents inventions that amount to “a better classifier”. For these inventions, machine learning may be used to improve or automate known processes. Classifying medical images as containing lesions based on a corpus of annotated training images would be an example of this kind of invention.

    The green box represents inventions where AI is incidental to the invention, and merely one way that the invention might be realised. For example, the invention might involve a step of “predicting”, in which case the predictions may be made using a machine learning model (but might also be performed using other methods). For Inventions of this type, AI is an implementation detail, but not the main invention.

    The yellow box represents perhaps the most interesting inventions that, whilst not representing improvements to fundamental AI algorithms, are only possible because of the advent of AI. Real-time camera effects and interactive filters are a good example of inventions of this type. Others include models for performing robotic surgery or self-driving vehicles.

  • The Economic Case Against Licensing Negotiation Groups in the Internet of Things [Ed: Well, many of these are just bogus patents disguised as buzzwords because software patents would not pass muster]

    Competition policy generally prohibits coordination among buyers or sellers, especially coordination on price, price-related inputs, and output. In licensing markets for standard-essential patents (“SEPs”), it has been periodically proposed that this rule should be relaxed to permit the formation of licensing negotiation groups (“LNGs”), which is expected to reduce transaction costs and the purportedly “excessive” royalties paid to SEP licensors. Based on the economic structure of wireless technology markets, and empirical evidence from over three decades of SEP licensing, this policy intervention is likely to degrade, rather than enhance, competitive conditions in wireless communications and other 5G-enabled markets encompassed by the “Internet of Things.” In the short term, LNGs would most likely result in a redistributive (not an efficiency) effect that shifts economic value from innovators to implementers in the wireless technology supply chain without necessarily passing on cost-savings to consumers. In the medium to longer term, LNGs are liable to impose significant efficiency losses by endangering the viability of licensing-based monetization models that have funded continuous R&D investment, promoted broad dissemination of technology inputs, facilitated robust entry in device production, and enabled transformative business models across a wide range of industries. While LNGs may reduce the transaction costs of SEP licensing, pooling structures have a demonstrated record of having achieved the same objective in patent-intensive information technology markets at a substantially lower risk of competitive harm.

Trademarks

• A day in the life of a trademark litigator: Brett Heavner [Ed: Finnegan pays this publisher and gets spammy ads/marketing in exchange, albeit it's disguised as "news" or "reporting"]

  The Finnegan partner tells Managing IP about TTAB challenges, fighting dangerous counterfeits and why he’s stayed at his firm for 25 years

• Cyberspace and courts: where TM battles will be won or lost [Ed: Monopolies-loving trademark maximalists left in disarray as social control media is hard to police]

  Sources suggest more IP disputes will go viral in 2022. But what do brand owners need to consider before engaging in a social media war?

• Fighting fire with fire: how to combat new-age counterfeiting [Ed: Trademark tackles copycats; stop saying "IP owners" and other such nonsense, as that short buzzword contains no less than 3 lies]

  Sources from China and India explain how counterfeiters are using technology to boost their business, and how IP owners can fight them

• Denmark: No likelihood of confusion between trademarks based on the same fictional character

  On 5 November 2021, the Danish Maritime and Commercial High Court (the Court) issued a ruling between Kejser Sausage ApS (‘Kejser Sausage’) and Keyser KBH ApS among others (‘Keyser’).

  The case concerned Kejser Sausage’s gourmet hot dog stand in Copenhagen, which used the trademark ‘Kejser Sausage’. Elsewhere in Copenhagen, Keyser used the name ‘Keyser Social’ for its restaurant. The question at hand was whether ‘Keyser Social’ infringed Kejser Sausage’s trademark right.

  First, the Court concluded that the trademark ‘Kejser Sausage’, although the element “sausage” was descriptive (given that the hot dog stand sold sausages), in its entirety was distinctive and consequently protectable under the Danish Trademark Act and the Danish Marketing Practice Act. In this regard it should be noted that under Danish law, a trademark can be established either by registration or by commencement of use, provided that the extent of the use has more than mere local significance.

• May The Attractive Force Be With You

  Unregistered rights are protected by the law of passing off in the UK. In the recent decision of the IPEC in Stone v Wenman, the court reiterated and applied some key principles in the law of passing off.

  The Claimant in the case, a spiritual author and holistic therapist, applied for and registered the mark ARCHANGEL ALCHEMY in 2019 in relation to training courses. She then brought a claim against the Defendant, active in the same field, for infringing her registered right. The Defendant filed a counterclaim in passing off, claiming that she had in fact been using the sign ARCHANGEL ALCHEMY since 2010 to offer her services.

  The first key issue was whether the Defendant had generated sufficient goodwill prior to the relevant date in the sign ARCHANGEL ALCHEMY to succeed in her counterclaim for passing off. The relevant date for the counterclaim was the date of first use by the Claimant of the mark, which the court found be in September 2019.

  The Claimant’s first argument was that the phrase ARCHANGEL ALCHEMIST was only an allusive or descriptive way for the Defendant to advertise a module of her training courses. However, the judge noted that the Claimant herself had advised the court that she chose the mark ARCHANGEL ALCHEMIST due to its originality. Although the sign had sometimes used to describe the Defendant herself as THE ARCHANGEL ALCHEMIST or her methods as ARCHANGEL ALCHEMY, this did not necessarily mean that use and other evidenced use of the phrase did not constitute use as a sign.

  [...]

  The second key issue was whether the Claimant’s use therefore infringed under the law of passing off. In seeking to make out her trade mark infringement claim against the Defendant, the Claimant had admitted that she herself had used the mark in trade, that the services provided by both parties were identical, and that the customer base of both parties were one and the same. There was therefore no question of whether the Claimant’s use of ARCHANGEL ALCHEMY would mislead consumers under passing off.

  This case reminds us that goodwill, or the “attractive force that brings in custom”, does not need to be substantial, only more than trivial. The judge was particularly persuaded by testimonials from the Defendant’s customers who described knowing the Defendant by her brand. The detailed discussion of the evidence is a lesson for brand owners that keeping good records of brand use is essential for claiming reputation or goodwill. It also reminds us that when facing a counterclaim based on prior rights, a Claimant should carefully consider the pros and cons of making admissions in relation to the similarity of the marks, goods and services, and average consumer.

Copyrights

• Copyright law and football matches: impossible to match? (Part II)

  These choices, which may distinguish the broadcasting and filming from the underlying unprocessed facts of the game, can be expressed in various creative stages, as noted in the CJEU’s Painer decision (C-145/10, par. 89): in the preparation phase, when filming the event and by making editorial choices after the filming phase.

  Choices and constraints: is originality hidden in the details?

  Both the filming and the broadcasting of the match consist of a complex combination of choices and decisions made at various levels, often in collaboration between several contributors.

  The sports director decides on the camera position and the coverage plan for each camera, the visual logic to be followed, what kinds of shots and camera movements to use during the production, and the development of animated wipes used for replays and transitions. They also instruct the technical director how to select the images coming from multiple cameras according to the “storytelling” opted for. Multiple camera operators “propose” shots for selection to the control room. The sports director or the technical director acting on the instructions of the sports director (and possibly in creative collaboration with them) will continuously select the images that will be broadcast live from the “gallery” of video monitors displaying all camera sources.

  Even though constraints regarding shot selection are imposed by the rules and the purpose of the game itself, the director’s choices create a specific viewer experience which has been designed by the director. For instance, the audiovisual representation of the game may be characterised by wide and barely interrupted filming, placing the emphasis on the fluidity of the game, the visibility of tactics, the animation of the system and collective movement without the ball; or the focus could, more individualistically, be on the player who carries the ball, where shots are multiplied so the fluidity of the game is more often interrupted, while the techniques and skills of the individual players are emphasised.

• Copyright law and football matches: impossible to match? (Part I)

  At the same time, a global paradigm of online piracy enabling the retransmission of sports events on a worldwide basis has dynamically emerged. In this context, an important question is whether the classic copyright and related rights protection offers a solid legal basis for combatting online piracy, specifically regarding the broadcasting of live sports events, or whether the sports industry should be granted additional exclusivity through the establishment at EU level of specific protection, as is the case in certain Member States (currently Bulgaria, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Slovakia and Spain provide specific audiovisual rights, see: European Audiovisual Observatory, Mapping report on national remedies against online piracy of sports content, 17 December 2021).

  This post is divided in two parts. In the first part, the application of the EU concept of work in football matches is discussed (Part I). The second part explores the possible sources of originality in the filming and broadcasting of the match (Part II).

• Around the IP Blogs

  The Kluwer Copyright Blog wrote about the EU concept of work in relation to football matches (see here) and the possible sources of originality in the filming and broadcasting of the match (see here).

• Bombay HC Clarifies the Contours of Copyright Infringement and Confidentiality Law

  The Bombay High Court in Tarun Wadhwa v. Saregama India Ltd & Anr deliberated upon the intersection of copyright infringement and confidentiality law and held that ideas cannot be copyrighted but can be protected through the application of confidentiality law.

  [...]

  A major portion of the judgment is spent on explaining the application of confidentiality law through contracts and in equity to hold that when seeking protection for information what is necessary is that such information should not be in the public domain and there must be precise identification of such proprietary information. Particularly, “precision, originality, and completeness of disclosure” was held to be essential to a case of confidentiality. The requirement in confidentiality law is the novelty of information.

  Elaborating further regarding this distinction, the judge noted the breach of confidentiality and infringement of copyright are closely connected. Claims that cannot be covered under copyright infringement are often brought under breach of confidentiality. Hence, it was noted that “an idea, in particular, cannot be the subject of a copyright infringement action; but it may be the subject of breach of confidentiality”.

• Around the IP Blogs – The IPKat

  SpicyIP analysed a recent decision from the Bombay High Court, in which it was decided that ideas cannot be copyrighted but can be protected through the application of confidentiality law.

• Columbia Pictures Targets “Spider-Man” Leak Coverage with DMCA Notice

  An anti-piracy outfit, acting on behalf of Columbia Pictures, asked Google to remove our news article on the “Spider-Man: No Way Home” leak. And that’s not the only error. The same notice targets several other news sites and even the website of competitor Sony Pictures is flagged as a pirate operation.