Server/Kubernetes

• How to Tackle the Cloud Native Trends of 2022 | SUSE Communities

  At SUSE, we partner with several top-notch managed service providers to deliver the whole enterprise package — our open, interoperable offerings backed by their proven ops teams. We help MSPs more easily and securely deliver objectives despite the increasing complexity of the cloud and Kubernetes, while they help our enterprises get up and stay up, running faster, while cutting costs. We provide that much needed abstraction layer so they can focus on your enterprise modernizing securely.

• Securing Kubernetes at the Infrastructure Level

  Infrastructure security is important to get right so that attacks can be prevented—or, in the case of a successful attack, damage can be minimized. It is especially important in a Kubernetes environment because, by default, a large number of Kubernetes configurations are not secure.

  Securing Kubernetes at the infrastructure level requires a combination of host hardening, cluster hardening and network security.

  [...]

  I have listed 10 best practices for securing Kubernetes at the infrastructure level. While this is certainly not an exhaustive list by any means, it should give you the foundation to make a good start. I recommend reading chapter two of Kubernetes security and observability: A holistic approach to securing containers and cloud-native applications, an O’Reilly book I co-authored, to learn about these best practices in further detail and to discover additional best practices for infrastructure security.

• Should You Learn Kubernetes? – CloudSavvy IT

  Kubernetes has seen a surge of adoption over the past few years as companies have pivoted towards containers and cloud-native deployment methods. The platform’s become the leading orchestration solution for running containers in production. This means people who are skilled in using and managing Kubernetes clusters are now in-demand across the industry.

  In this article, we’ll look at whether you should learn Kubernetes based on your current role and future objectives. If you’re not being tasked with managing a cluster, the decision ultimately comes down to the skill set you want to acquire and the areas you might move into down the line.

• Declarative vs Imperative Kubernetes Object Management – CloudSavvy IT

  Kubernetes is usually described as a declarative system. Most of the time you work with YAML that defines what the end state of the system should look like. Kubernetes supports imperative APIs too though, where you issue a command and get an immediate output.

  In this article, we’ll explore the differences between these two forms of object management. The chances are you’ve already used both even if you don’t recognize the terms.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Pulling the Rug Out | Self-Hosted 63

  Alex has a new high-quality self-hosted music setup, and Chris solves complicated Internet problems.

• YouTube Shorts | Blathering – CubicleNate’s Techpad

  YouTube Shorts are the response of the Video Giant to the Tik Tok. They are 1 minute in length or less and have to be in portrait format to be a “short.” I don’t have nor do I want a Tik Tok so this sort of intrigues me, but I do wonder if it will actually go anywhere. For fun, I thought I would do some YouTube Shorts in preparation for the next Linux Saloon live stream where we will be talking about Solus, an independent Linux distribution that has been known for its speed and efficiency. I haven’t given it a spin since late 2018 so it is well over due for me. It will be quite fun to try it out and see how things have changed. I have historically liked its flagship desktop environment, Budgie but it has been a while.

• Hackaday Podcast 153: A 555 Teardown To Die For, Tetrabyte Is Not A Typo, DIY Injection Molding, And Using All The Parts Of The Trash Printer | Hackaday

  Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi on another whirlwind tour of the week’s top stories, hacks, and projects. We start off with some breaking Linux security news, and then marvel over impeccably designed pieces of hardware ranging from a thrifty Z table for the K40 laser cutter to a powerful homebrew injection molding rig. The finer technical points of a USB device that only stores 4 bytes at a time will be discussed, and after taking an interactive tour through the internals of the 555 timer, we come away even more impressed by the iconic 50 year old chip. We’ll wrap things up by speculating wildly about all the bad things that can happen to floating solar panels, and then recite some poetry that you can compile into a functional computer program should you feel so inclined.

• Live – The Return to Arch Linux – Invidious

• Linuxfx 11.1.1103 overview | Fast, stable and very safe – Invidious

  In this video, I am going to show an overview of Linuxfx 11.1.1103 and some of the applications pre-installed.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • DXVK-NVAPI 0.5.2 Released With Entry Points For NVIDIA PhysX – Phoronix

    DXVK-NVAPI as the open-source project implementing support for NVIDIA’s NVAPI within the realm of DXVK is out with a new release, which is exciting for NVIDIA Linux gamers.

    DXVK-NVAPI is an important project for NVIDIA Linux gamers enjoying Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) or outside of it as well if using DXVK otherwise. DXVK-NVAPI provides an NVAPI library implementation that can be used by the Windows games that make use of this NVIDIA API. DXVK-NVAPI is already used for Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), NVAPI D3D11 extensions, and other features.

  • Wayland Testing New Protocol Extension To Handle Session Locking – Phoronix

    Wayland Protocols 1.25 was released today as the collection of testing and stable Wayland protocols. New to Wayland Protocols 1.25 is the session-lock-v1 protocol being experimental and responsible to handle session locking.

    The session-lock-v1 protocol is the main addition of Wayland Protocols 1.25 and allows for privileged Wayland clients to lock the session and display arbitrary graphics while in the locked mode. That authenticated client is responsible for handling user authentication and interfacing with the compositor for disabling the session lock when appropriate.

  • Intel Preparing Resizable BAR Support For Their Arc Graphics On Linux – Phoronix

    Ahead of the Intel Arc “Alchemist” graphics cards shipping this year, Intel’s open-source developers have continued ironing out the Linux driver support. The most recent kernel patches are for getting their Resizable BAR “ReBAR” support in order.

    Sent out this week were a set of patches for small BAR recovery support for the Intel kernel graphics driver on Linux.

Applications

• GStreamer 1.19.90 pre-release (1.20 rc1)

  The GStreamer team is excited to announce the first release candidate for the upcoming stable 1.20 release series.

  This 1.19.90 pre-release is for testing and development purposes in the lead-up to the stable 1.20 series which is now feature frozen and scheduled for release very soon. Any newly-added API can still change until that point, although it is extremely unlikely for that to happen at this point.

  Depending on how things go there might be more release candidates in the next couple of days, but in any case we’re aiming to get 1.20.0 out as soon as possible.

• GStreamer 1.20 RC1 Released With Many Exciting Improvements – Phoronix

  The first release candidate of GStreamer 1.20 is now available for testing of this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework.

  GStreamer 1.20 is going to be a large feature release while to ensure it’s stable and in good standing, the first release candidate is out today. Among the changes worked on for GStreamer 1.20 include:

  - GstPlay as a new high-level playback library to replace GstPlayer.

  - WebM alpha decoding support.

Instructionals/Technical

• Single-command Docker environments on any machine with Multipass | Ubuntu

  Multipass has a new workflow tailored to run Docker containers on macOS, Windows or Linux. One single command, no dependencies, full flexibility.

  Multipass exists to bring Ubuntu-based development to the operating system of your choice. Whether you prefer the GUI of macOS (even on M1), Windows or any other Linux, the unmatched experience of developing software on Ubuntu is there at your fingertips, just one “multipass launch” away. Today, the Multipass team is delighted to enhance this experience for developers working with containerised applications!

• How to create fillable forms in ONLYOFFICE Docs 7.0

  ONLYOFFICE Docs is an open-source office suite distributed under GNU AGPL v3.0. It comprises web-based viewers and collaborative editors for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations highly compatible with OOXML formats.

  ONLYOFFICE Docs can be integrated with various cloud services such as Nextcloud, Seafile, Redmine, Alfresco, etc., as well as embedded into your own solution. The editors can also be used as a part of the complete productivity solution ONLYOFFICE Workspace.
  With the latest major update, the ONLYOFFICE developers added online form functionality allowing users to create, collaborate on and fill in forms to create documents from templates. Forms can be exported in fillable PDF and DOCX.

  In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to create a fillable form with ONLYOFFICE Docs.

• 10 Funny Commands in Linux

  On Linux, the Terminal is used quite often to maintain the system. But besides doing serious work, there are also some funny commands, which I will show you below.

  Here, we are using Ubuntu 20.04, but you can basically use any other Linux operating system.

• How to install Muck by Dani on a Chromebook – Updated Tutorial

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

• Let’s Try to Install Raspberry Pi 5.10 on VirtualBox!

  Today we will see how to install Raspberry Pi with VirtualBox. The famous Linux OS comes as an embedded system which usually utilized in projects. For testing and simulation environments having Pi in VirtualBox will be a good idea. As per official documentation, this Debian derivative can be a buildup for Microsoft, Apple OS, and Linux-based environments. For Linux Ubuntu can be customized as a Pi- environment. But, here we are discussing to buildup a dedicated os with the help of Virtual Box. Let’s take a brief on Pi’s features.

• How to build, run, and manage container images with Podman | FOSS Linux

  Linux Containers have been around for some time but were introduced in the Linux kernel in 2008. Linux containers are lightweight, executable application components that combine app source code with OS libraries and dependencies required to run the code in different environments.

  Developers use containers as an application packaging and delivery technology. One key attribute of containers is combining lightweight application isolation with the flexibility of image-based deployment methods.

  RHEL based systems like CentOS and Fedora Linux implements containers using technologies such as control groups for resource management, namespaces for system process isolation, SELinux for security management. These technologies provide an environment to produce, run, manage and orchestrate containers. In addition to these tools, Red Hat offers command-line tools like podman and buildah for managing container images and pods.

• How To Install ELK Stack on AlmaLinux 8 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ELK Stack on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, The ELK Stack is an acronym for a combination of three widely used open-source projects: E=Elasticsearch, L=Logstash, and K=Kibana. With the addition of Beats, the ELK Stack is now known as the Elastic Stack. the ELK platform allows you to consolidate, process, monitor, and perform analytics on data generated from multiple sources in a way that is fast, scalable, and reliable.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the ELK Stack on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.

• Install Minikube On Ubuntu 22.04 / 20.04 LTS | Tips On UNIX

  minikube is an open-source tool, also a local Kubernetes focusing on making it easy to learn and develop for Kubernetes.

  This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install minikube on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04.

• How to know which Linux Kernel Version is installed in my System – TREND OCEANS

  There are a couple of reasons why you should know your Linux kernel version, It could be a handful when you want to install the Linux header, and even it’s a pretty common error for the VMware Workstation to fail in case of a missing Linux header.

  In this article, you will see how to check the kernel version, alongside you will see the steps to install Linux header on your system.

• How to create and run a shell script in Linux and Ubuntu – Coffee Talk: Java, News, Stories and Opinions

  It’s pretty easy to run a batch file on windows.

  Just just create a file, change the extension to .bat, and either call the script in PowerShell or double click to execute it. Windows users are spoiled.

  If you want to create a script and run it in Ubuntu, a few extra steps are involved.

• Install Puppet Server & Agent on Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux 8 – Linux Shout

  In this tutorial, we will learn the steps to install Puppet Server on AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux 8 distros using the command terminal.

  Puppet is an open-source project with enterprise support, it allows admins to automate the configuration of a single server or computer to a large network of systems; Ansible and Foreman are a few of its alternatives.

  When developers and administrators have to configure multiple servers at a time with similar configurations then instead of repeating the same tasks on each system one by one they use special configuration managers such as Puppet. Ideally, many tasks can be automated with it using Puppet’s Domain-Specific Language (DSL) — Puppet code — which you can use with a wide array of devices and operating systems. It was developed in 2005 by Puppet Labs, Portland, Oregon; written in Ruby and designed to be cross-platform. Any login term enterprise operating system can be used to host Puppet servers such as OracleLinux, RedHat, SuSE, Ubuntu, Debian AlmaLinux, and Rocky Linux. Systems running Windows can also be configured and managed with Puppet, with some limitations.

• How to Use GitLab’s Built-In Sentry Error Tracking Service – CloudSavvy IT

  Sentry is a popular error-tracking platform that gives you real-time visibility into issues in your production environments. GitLab’s Error Reporting feature lets you bring Sentry reports into your source control platform, offering a centralized view that unifies Sentry errors and GitLab issues.

  The feature originally relied on an integration with an existing Sentry service, either the official Sentry.io or your own self-hosted server. This changed with GitLab 14.4 which added a lightweight Sentry-compatible backend to GitLab itself. You no longer need an actual Sentry installation to get error reports into GitLab.

  Here’s how to get started with the integrated Sentry backend. Before we proceed, it’s worth mentioning that this capability might not be right for you if you’re already acquainted with the Sentry dashboard. GitLab’s backend is a barebones solution which surfaces errors as a simple list. It’s best for smaller applications where you don’t want the overhead of managing a separate Sentry project.

• Learn to Install Android Studio Step by Step on Ubuntu

  Android Studio is Android’s official development environment. The tool is designed specifically for Android devices to help you build the highest quality apps. Android applications are built on a setup developed by Google, which is known to all Android users. The IDE replaced the Eclipse tool, which was primarily used for Android development. AS IDE has been used to develop some of the most well-known Android applications.

Games

• Google Said to Be Working on Gaming Chromebooks

  Chromebooks are great, inexpensive machines that work via a connection to Google services and seem like the perfect platform for game streaming. That’s why it’s not too much of a surprise that the rumor mill is suggesting that Google is working on gaming Chromebooks.

• GitHub IS NOT for you. But here’s how you can still use software from it. – Invidious [Ed: "The Linux Gamer" needs to shun GitHub (Microsoft Proprietary Software Prison), not legitimise the misuse of it]

• Wine manager Bottles has a big new release with major overhauls | GamingOnLinux

  Managing various games and applications installed on Linux using Wine can be a hassle, and while there’s stuff like Lutris available perhaps Bottles might be a better dedicated option just for Wine directly.

  Version 2022.1.28 has rolled out, with an aim to make the experience more stable thanks to a whole new Wine backend. The new system is split across three components (WineCommand, WineProgram, Executor), that should allow for easy extensions to what Bottles can offer. One useful change with this is that you can run commands without other things interfering (like Gamescope and GameMode).

  There’s also now the ability to show / hide programs inside each Bottle, their new build of Wine (Caffe) is based on Wine 7.0 with support for the newer Futex2 code, an improved view with a search bar for installers like Epic Games and GOG Galaxy and some other minor features.

• Unavowed from Wadjet Eye Games arrives on Linux | GamingOnLinux

  Wadjet Eye Games seem to be on a roll lately for Linux support. First we saw upgrades and new ports of The Blackwell Bundle, then Gemini Rue and now we have Unavowed. A good time to be a point and click adventure game fan.

  “A demon possessed you one year ago. Since that day, you unwillingly tore a trail of bloodshed through New York City. Your salvation comes in the form of the Unavowed – an ancient society dedicated to stopping evil.

• Gemini Rue gets a fresh and up to date Linux port | GamingOnLinux

  Wadjet Eye Games continue getting their older published titles upgraded for Linux, after doing the same for The Blackwell Bundle we now have a modern port of Gemini Rue for Linux.

  “Azriel Odin, ex-assassin, arrives on the rain-drenched planet of Barracus. When things go horribly wrong, he can only seek help from the very criminals he used to work for.

  Meanwhile, across the galaxy, a man called Delta-Six wakes up in a hospital with no memory. Without knowing where to turn or who to trust, he vows to escape before he loses his identity completely.

• ‘Vampire Survivors’ patch confirms Mac and Linux ports, mocks NFTs

  Version 0.2.9 launched earlier in the week, and it includes the addition of an in-game item called the Nduja Fritta Tanto – or, NFT for short.

  “From game patch 0.2.9, the Nduja Fritta Tanto can randomly drop from candles/braziers to add 10 spicy seconds to your runs. Terrible pun, great item. We’re against NFT practices if that wasn’t clear,” reads the patch notes.

  Aside from Poncle’s choice “to jump on the hottest trends in gaming,” there are several other changes made to Vampire Survivors with the patch.

  This includes a Garlic evolution, one additional new evolution, and two more achievements.

• Bold Predictions for Linux Gaming in 2022 – Boiling Steam

  It’s time for the Linux Gaming predictions for 2022! Last year in early 2021 we collected predictions from numerous actors of the Linux Gaming Sphere, and it was a lot of fun. And very useful too: our combined predictions ended up being more right than not (as documented) and we hope to be able to repeat this feat again this year.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • A Long Overdue Update – Fractal-next – Julian’s Code Corner

    It’s been a while since I last blogged about the state of Fractal-next. Even though I’m not great at writing updates we’ve been making steady and significant progress on the code front. Before we dive into our progress I want to say thank you to all contributors, and especially Kévin Commaille.

  • #28 PrintScrn · This Week in GNOME

    Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 21 to January 28.

Distributions

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • Bash, systemd, libvirt Update in Tumbleweed – openSUSE News

    Some other noteworthy news within Tumbleweed is that Wicked is being phased out. New installations of Tumbleweed are all using NetworkManager by default. This is not only for desktops, but also for server installs. However, upgraders are not planned as of yet to be migrated away from Wicked.

    The latest Tumbleweed snapshot is 20220126. Samba updated twice this week; this snapshot brought in the 4.15.4 version, which provided a bit of cleanup and configuration changes. The 5.16.2 Linux Kernel quickly went from staging to snapshot. The updated kernel had multiple Advanced Linux Sound Architecture fixes for newer Lenovo laptops and KVM fixes for s390 and x86 architectures. The text editor vim had several fixes along with some additional changes for the experimental vim9 fork in its 8.2.4186 version. xlockmore, which is a screen saver and X Window System package, updated an xscreensaver port and fixed some modules in its 5.68 version. The 3.74 version for mozilla-nss replaced four Google Trust Services LLC root certificates, added a few iTrusChina root certificates and added support for SHA-2 hashes in CertIDs in Online Certificate Status Protocol responses.

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/04 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)

    Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

    The week has passed without any major hiccups, which also shows in the number of Tumbleweed snapshots released during this week. Not the highest count ever achieved, but we are at a solid 6 snapshots (0121.0126), with the next one already in QA.

  • SUSE unveils Rancher Desktop 1.0 for Kubernetes on your PC | ZDNet

    As Kubernetes users know, Rancher is a popular complete software stack for running and managing multiple Kubernetes clusters across any infrastructure. Now, since Linux and cloud-power SUSE acquired Rancher, it’s launched its first new program: Rancher Desktop 1.0

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Top tech conferences for sysadmins in 2022 | Enable Sysadmin

    In the pre-pandemic past, time and budget often limited which industry events people could attend. While time will always be a factor, the shift towards virtual gatherings has made that commitment much easier for many people. Pair a more flexible schedule with reduced costs for travel and tickets, and you have the most accessible industry landscape in history.

    Sysadmins are known as “jack-of-all-trades” technologists who need broad and deep knowledge to do their jobs well. But this makes it hard for them to choose which conferences—many aimed at specific tech audiences—to attend.

    Like everything in life, it comes down to your priorities. Want to focus on your automation skills this year? AnsibleFest it is. Want to bridge the gap between sysadmins and developers? Try DevConf or All Things Open (which, in my experience, leans towards developers). What about container technology? Well, there’s Kubecon for that…

    You see my point. There are a lot of events to choose from. So it raises the question, what is your number one must-attend tech event for 2022?

  • Simple Partitioning with Ansible Storage Role – Storage APIs

    There are probably not too many people that need to do disk partitioning and storage space management on a daily basis. For most of us it is something low level that needs to be set up just once and then promptly forgotten.

    Strangely enough the Ansible Storage Role can be very useful for both of these groups of people. Here, I would like to try and explain why and how to use it.

    Please remember that Storage Role operations are often destructive – the user can easily lose data if he is not being careful. Backup, if possible, think twice if not.

  • Safeguarding consumer data for banks: some guidelines for privacy engineering

    Open banking requirements add complexity to protecting customer data. Banks need to juggle the complexity of keeping customer data safe and adhering to privacy requirements and expectations — while also sharing data with authorized institutions. These regulations also inform the software development process, which must implement ever increasing functional capability and efficiencies while adhering to the prescribed directives. The question is, how?

    Software development efforts are not conducted independently of regulatory requirements. While ultimately banks must ensure that customer data is not stolen or altered in the process of sharing and that customer privacy is not compromised – violations can risk a bank’s reputation and incur financial penalties from regulators – there is a clear need for developers to contribute significantly to better privacy engineering standards.

  • IBM Emeritus Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Is It Possible to Establish Norms for Responsible State Behavior in Cyberspace?

    In mid-December, the Council one Foreign Relations sponsored a virtual roundtable with Joseph Nye, – former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, – to discuss his recent Foreign Affairs article The End of Anarchy?: How to Build a New Digital Order. Professor Nye has long been regarded as one of America’s preeminent strategic thinkers and political scientists. In the 1970s he chaired the National Security Council Group on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and over the past decade he’s brought his expertise to the study of conflict and deterrence in cyberspace.

    Cybersecurity is an increasingly important aspect of the of US national security strategy, including global trade and the protection of our critical infrastructures. In June of 2021, FBI Director Christopher Wray compared the danger of ransomware attacks on US firms by Russian criminal groups to the September 11 terrorist attacks. And, in a July editorial, the NY times said that ransomware attacks have emerged as “a formidable potential threat to national security,” given “their ability to seriously disrupt economies and to breach strategically critical enterprises or agencies,” urging governments that “It is a war that needs to be fought, and won.”

    At an MIT conference in February of 2019, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was asked if we need cybersecurity control agreements with Russia, China and other nations similar to the nuclear arms control agreements that he spent so much time negotiating during the Cold War. Dr. Kissinger replied that for arms control to be effective, the two sides needed to share information and agree to inspections. But such mechanisms are harder to apply in the digital world, because the transparency that was essential for arms control would be very hard to establish for cyber threats. In addition, while controls of physical arms are relatively explicable and negotiable, the variety and speed of cyber attacks make it much harder to develop adequate control agreements.

• Debian Family

  • GNU Linux Debian – very fast and easy semi-automatic online install Debian 11 (non-free)

    given the fact – that once installed – GNU Linux Debian can boot (almost) anywhere, the fastest and easiest way to “install” it is to simply 1:1 copy it on whatever the user wants to boot from (harddisk or usb stick (some sticks can not be made bootable, try at least 3 different vendors)).

    So… this install script 1:1 copy installs Debian 11 (non-free) on any laptop/desktop/server (depending on internet speed) very fast & easy.

    The process can be automated (on similar hardware or on hardware where /dev/sda is always the device the user wants to 1:1 overwrite).

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu is Axing the Partner Repo Nobody Uses

    Now, my psychic powers aren’t as sharp as they used to be but I can sense that most of you are staring at this page struggling to recall what this is —oh, and someone with a H in their name is reading this post in their underwear. Go put trousers on dude, honestly…

    I’ll save you scraping the back of your minds: the Canonical Partner repo is where software vendors could provide proprietary apps for easy install by Ubuntu users. Skype, for instance, used to be an apt-get away thanks to this repo.

  • What to do when App Window is larger than Screen Height in Ubuntu | UbuntuHandbook

    For Ubuntu PC or laptop with a low resolution monitor, some app windows may be bigger than screen height, thus it’s NOT fully accessible especially for the bottom part.

    This usually happens in some Qt apps and Gnome Extension settings dialog in my Ubuntu laptop with 1366×768 screen resolution. A workaround is moving the app window above the top of the screen. Here’s how to do the trick in Ubuntu!

Devices/Embedded

• Latest Raspberry Pi OS Release Adds New Options to Its Configuration Tool, Many Bug Fixes

  
  The new Raspberry Pi OS release (dated 2022-01-28) is here about three months after the previous update, which rebased the distribution on the Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series to add various improvements to the raspi-config application that lets you configure Raspberry Pi system settings.

  Both the raspi-config command-line tool and its rc_gui GTK graphical user interface received enhancements. For example, rc_gui no longer ships with the camera interface switch and features a combo box to allow users to set the resolution for VNC (Virtual Network Computing) connections. In addition, Mutter is now automatically disabled when the VNC server is running and the system falls back to Openbox.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Custom Piano Tickles the Ivories

    This electronic keyboard is completely designed and built from scratch, including the structure of the instrument and the keys themselves. [Balthasar] made each one by hand out of wood and then built an action mechanism for them to register presses. While they don’t detect velocity or pressure, the instrument is capable of defining the waveform and envelope for any note, is able to play multiple notes per key, and is able to change individual octaves. This is thanks to a custom 6×12 matrix connected to a STM32 microcontroller. Part of the reason [Balthasar] chose this microcontroller is that it can do some of the calculations needed to produce music in a single clock cycle, which is an impressive and under-reported feature for the platform.

  • Hacking A Proper Dash Into The Tesla Model 3 | Hackaday

    The build relies on a CANserver, an ESP32-based device specifically built for hooking up to the CAN bus on Tesla vehicles and sharing the data externally. The data can then be piped wirelessly to an Android phone running CANdash to display all the desired information. With the help of an aftermarket dash clip or a 3D printed custom mount, the phone can then be placed behind the steering wheel to display data in the usual location.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Samsung could speed up its Android update game in Europe – Pocketnow

  • Unlocked Samsung Galaxy Fold, Galaxy Z Flip get Android 12-based One UI 4 in the US – GSMArena.com news

  • These Xiaomi smartphones are receiving MIUI 13 with Android 12 – PhoneArena

  • Galaxy S10 series gets Android 12 and One UI 4.0 update in Canada – SamMobile

  • Xiaomi TV Stick 4K with Android 11 now available – Liliputing

  • Want To Get Most Out Of Your Android Phone? Here’s How To Do It By Changing Few Settings

  • How to use translation features in Telegram for Android

  • Trusted Recommends: Bargain buds, pricey speakers and the latest Moto Android

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Events

  • Abuse & Sex Crimes at FOSDEM and Open Source tech events

    All these people have conflicts of interest. For example, Molly herself was secretly sleeping with Chris Lamb when he was leader of Debian. Imagine a woman comes to Molly’s team to make an abuse complaint about Lamb or one of his close friends.

    [...]

    Women trusting women simply because they are women is not a good choice.

    There are numerous examples of women like Molly who have been sympathetic to or even in cahoots with male abusers.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox Nightly: These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 108

    • Celebrating Data Privacy Day

      Happy International Data Privacy Day! While January 28 marks a day to raise awareness and promote best practices for privacy and data protection around the world, we at Mozilla do this work year-round so our users can celebrate today — and every day — the endless joy the internet has to offer.

      We know that data privacy can feel daunting, and the truth is, no one is perfect when it comes to protecting their data 24/7. At Mozilla though, we want to make data protection feel a bit easier and not like something else on the never-ending life to-do list. We build products that protect people online so they can experience the best of the web without compromising on privacy, performance or convenience. The internet is too good to miss out on — we’ll take care of securing it so you can focus on exploring and enjoying it.

      To accomplish this, we started with square one: our Firefox browser — enhancing its privacy and tracking protections over the past year, while improving its user experience to make surfing the web less dangerous and more carefree.

      [...]

      Despite how it sounds, you don’t need to be a hacker to make use of an encrypted connection. Whether you’re online shopping or want to make sure your login credentials are safe from attackers, we’re working on ensuring your browsing experience is secure from start to finish. That’s why, when you open up a Private Browsing tab on Firefox, you can be confident that your information is safe thanks to our HTTPS by Default offering, which ensures the data you share with and receive from a website is encrypted and won’t be able to be intercepted, viewed or tampered with by a hacker. To take this one step further, we’re also working with Internet Service Providers like Comcast and other partners through our Trusted Recursive Resolver program, to begin making DNS encryption the default for Firefox users in the US and Canada.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • What is MongoDB, and how does it work? | FOSS Linux

    MongoDB is the most common and widely used NoSQL database. It is an open-source document-oriented DB. NoSQL is used to refer to ‘non-relational’. This means that the MongoDB database is not based on tabular relations like RDBMS as it provides a distinct storage and data retrieval mechanism.

    The storage format employed by MongoDB is referred to as BSON. The database is maintained by MongoDB Inc. and is licensed under the Server-Side Public License (SSPL).

• Programming/Development

  • gst-editing-services compiled in OE

    I discovered that ‘gst-editing-services’ is another dependency of Pitivi, added to these:

    https://bkhome.org/news/202201/more-dependencies-for-pitivi-video-editor.html

    There is no recipe in OE, so I attempted to compile it on the host system. Stuffed around for about 3 hours, unable to compile, ninja is doing something stupid.

  • More dependencies for Pitivi video editor

    This morning I posted about a complete recompile in OpenEmbedded, “revision 7″:

    https://bkhome.org/news/202201/what-to-expect-in-the-next-release-of-easyos.html

    This included bumped gstreamer version, suitable to run Pitivi.

  • Wasmer 2.2 Bringing Its WebAssembly “Singlepass” Compiler To AArch64 – Phoronix

    Wasmer 2.2-rc1 is out today as the WebAssembly run-tme to “run any code on any client” with its broad platform coverage and allowing numerous programming languages from Rust to PHP to C# being able to be compiled into WebAssembly and then running on any OS or embedded into other languages for execution.

    Wasmer continues as one of the leading open-source WebAssembly runtimes with a diverse feature-set. Its project site at Wasmer.io talks up Wasmer for use from “supercharged blockchain infrastructure” to “portable ML/AI applications”. Buzzwords aside, Wasmer has been a very interesting WebAssembly open-source project.

  • Alternatives to Visual Basic

    This is a list of free/libre open source software (FLOSS) alternatives to Visual Basic (part of Microsoft Visual Studio) computer programming platform. If your school is still teaching VB 6, or if you now use Ubuntu for programming classroom, we strongly suggest you to switch to either one of these alternatives. With these, one can create computer programs visually by drag and drop as well as coding just like what one can do with VB.

Standards/Consortia

• JEDEC Publishes HBM3 Update to High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) Standard | JEDEC

  JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the global leader in the development of standards for the microelectronics industry, today announced the publication of the next version of its High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) DRAM standard: JESD238 HBM3, available for download from the JEDEC website. HBM3 is an innovative approach to raising the data processing rate used in applications where higher bandwidth, lower power consumption and capacity per area are essential to a solution’s market success, including graphics processing and high-performance computing and servers.

• JEDEC Publishes HBM3 Standard (JESD238) – Phoronix

  HBM3 memory doubles the per-pin data rate of HBM2 to now provide 6.4 Gb/s per-pin or up to 819 GB/s per device. HBM3 also doubles the independent channels to 16 while virtually supporting 32 via two pseudo channels per channel, between 8Gb to 32Gb per memory layer, symbol-based ECC on-die, and improved energy efficiency. The specs aren’t too much of a surprise with SK Hynix having announced their first HBM3 memory back in Q4. HBM3 has been in development the past several years, originally under the “HBMnext” name, for improving upon HBM2 memory.

Shelf Actualization | Hackaday

f you are old enough, you may remember that, for a time, almost every year was the year that home video was going to take off. Except it never was, until VHS tape machines appeared. We saw something similar with personal computers. Nowadays, we keep hearing about the home robot, but it never seems to fully materialize or catch on. If you think about it, it could be a problem of expectations.

What we all want is C3PO or Rosie the Robot that can do all the things we don’t want to do. What we usually get is something far less than that. You either get something hideously expensive that does a few tasks or something cheap that is little more than a toy.

Labrador Systems is trying to hit the middle ground. While no one would confuse their Caddie and Retriever robots with C3PO, they are useful but also simple, presumably to keep the cost down which are expected to cost about $1,500. The robots have been described as “self-driving shelves.” You can watch a video about the devices below.

Science

• How Claude Shannon Helped Kick-start Machine Learning – IEEE Spectrum

  Among the great engineers of the 20th century, who contributed the most to our 21st-century technologies? I say: Claude Shannon.

  Shannon is best known for establishing the field of information theory. In a 1948 paper, one of the greatest in the history of engineering, he came up with a way of measuring the information content of a signal and calculating the maximum rate at which information could be reliably transmitted over any sort of communication channel. The article, titled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” describes the basis for all modern communications, including the wireless Internet on your smartphone and even an analog voice signal on a twisted-pair telephone landline. In 1966, the IEEE gave him its highest award, the Medal of Honor, for that work.

  If information theory had been Shannon’s only accomplishment, it would have been enough to secure his place in the pantheon. But he did a lot more.

• Claude Shannon and His Influence on Machine Learning

  At a time when there were fewer than 10 computers in the world, Shannon speculated on their use beyond numerical calculation, including language translation and logical deductions, which arguably led to the rise of machine learning.

Hardware

• Tiny CNC Cuts The Metal | Hackaday

  We’re no strangers to [Ivan]’s work and this time he’s building a relatively small CNC machine using extrusion, 3D printed parts, and a Makita router. The plans are available at a small cost, but just watching the accelerated build is fascinating.

  You might think you could just attach something to an existing 3D printer frame that cuts like a Dremel tool. You can do that, but for most purposes, you need something stiffer than most desktop printers. You can see how solid this build is with multiple extrusions forming the base and very rigid axes.

• Mystery WWII Navy Gear With Magic Eye | Hackaday

  There’s an unknown piece of military electronic gear being investigated over on [Usagi Electric]’s YouTube channel (see video below the break). The few markings and labels on the box aren’t terribly helpful, but along with the construction and parts, seem to identify it as relating to the US Navy from the WWII era. Its central feature is a seeing-eye tube and an adjustment knob. [David] does a bit of reverse engineering on the circuit, and is able to fire it up and get it working, magic eye squinting and all.

  But there’s still the unanswered question, what was this thing supposed to do? Besides power, it only has one input signal. There are no outputs, except the “data” presented visually by the magic eye tube. Commenters have suggested it was used with sonar equipment, calibration tool, RTTY tuning aid, light exposure meter, etc. But if you dust off your copy of Navships 900,017 “Radar Systems Fundamentals” from 1944 and turn to page 249, there’s a section entitled Tuning Indicator that describes this circuit, almost.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Security

    • PwnKit: detect privilege escalation with CrowdSec – The open-source & collaborative IPS

      Qualys just published CVE-2021-4034 which is trivial to exploit and impacts a large variety of distributions and versions. In a nutshell, the vulnerability, also called PwnKit, allows for a local escalation of privilege (LPE), due to out-of-band writing, in Polkit’s Pkexec, an alternate solution to the “sudo” privilege management tool. Pkexec is installed by default on most popular Linux distributions. A successful exploit can lead to handing admin/root privileges to unauthorized users.

      While everybody loves a fine LPE, it’s mostly an excuse for us to take a look at another aspect of CrowdSec: pure alerting capabilities along with remediation.

    • What Is the PwnKit Vulnerability Affecting Linux Distributions?

      Linux systems are known for being solid when it comes to security. Since most Linux programs come from trusted sources and are usually reviewed by the community, it’s pretty unusual to encounter very high-impact bugs. However, this doesn’t mean Linux is free from such problems altogether. The recent discovery of the PwnKit system service bug is one such example.

      The PwnKit vulnerability is a serious bug that gives root privileges to any local user. This bug is especially dangerous because it affects almost all major Linux distributions.

    • This Week In Security: Geopolitical Hacktivism, Antivirus Mining, And Linux Malware | Hackaday

      So what’s the story with pkexec? NULL argv. OK, Linux programming 101 time. When a program is launched on Linux, it’s passed two parameters, normally named argc and argv. These are an integer, and an array of char pointers respectively. If you’re not a programmer, then think of this as the number of arguments, and the list of arguments. This information is used to parse and handle command line options inside the program. argc is always at least one, and argv[0] will always contain the name of the binary as executed. Except, that isn’t always the case. There’s another way to launch binaries, using the execve() function. That function allows the programmer to specify the list of arguments directly, including argument 0.

      So what happens if that list is just NULL? If a program was written to account for this possibility, like sudo, then all is well. pkexec, however, doesn’t include a check for an empty argv or an argc of 0. It acts as if there is an argument to read, and the way the program initialization happens in memory, it actually accesses the first environment variable instead, and treats it like an argument. It checks the system PATH for a matching binary, and rewrites what it thinks is it’s argument list, but is actually the environment variable. This means that uncontrolled text can be injected as an environment variable in pkexec, the setuid program.

    • Security updates for Friday [LWN.net]

      Security updates have been issued by CentOS (java-1.8.0-openjdk), Debian (graphicsmagick), Fedora (grafana), Mageia (aom and roundcubemail), openSUSE (log4j and qemu), Oracle (parfait:0.5), Red Hat (java-1.7.1-ibm and java-1.8.0-openjdk), Slackware (expat), SUSE (containerd, docker, log4j, and strongswan), and Ubuntu (cpio, shadow, and webkit2gtk).

    • Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 202 released

      The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 202. This version includes the following changes:

      [ Chris Lamb ]
      * Don't fail if comparing a nonexistent file with a .pyc file (and add test).
        (Closes: #1004312)
      * Drop a reference in the manual page which claims the ability to compare
        non-existent files on the command-line. This has not been possible since
        version 32 which was released in September 2015. (Closes: #1004182)
      * Add experimental support for incremental output support with a timeout.
        Passing, for example, --timeout=60 will mean that diffoscope will not
        recurse into any sub-archives after 60 seconds total execution time has
        elapsed and mark the diff as being incomplete. (Note that this is not a
        fixed/strict timeout due to implementation issues.)
        (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#301)
      * Don't return with an exit code of 0 if we encounter device file such as
        /dev/stdin with human-readable metadata that matches literal, non-device,
        file contents. (Closes: #1004198)
      * Correct a "recompile" typo.
      
      [ Sergei Trofimovich ]
      * Fix/update whitespace for Black 21.12.

    • CISA Adds Eight Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog | CISA

      CISA has added eight new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence that threat actors are actively exploiting the vulnerabilities listed in the table below. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors of all types and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Tracking Secret German Organizations with Apple AirTags

        A German activist is trying to track down a secret government intelligence agency.

        [....]

        In a similar story, someone used an AirTag to track her furniture as a moving company lied about its whereabouts.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Access Now to U.N.: it’s time for transparency in the Tech Envoy process – Access Now

  Transparency and inclusivity are critical to a successful Tech Envoy appointment, and, as applications close, Access Now is calling on the United Nations (U.N.) to publish all key information in relation to processes, candidates, and final decisions.

  Access Now shared the world’s excitement when the U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres created a new position, the Tech Envoy, to lead the U.N. into the digital age. However, the Secretary-General chose an opaque appointment process for the inaugural U.N. Tech Envoy, and the first candidate left the position ignominiously last November.

  Yesterday, January 27, marked the application deadline for the next U.N. Tech Envoy, and civil society is pushing for an improved process. Access Now joined over 90 non-state stakeholders in urging the U.N. Secretary-General to ensure an open and transparent U.N. Tech Envoy appointment process, and commit to human rights and multi-stakeholder engagement. Reiterating the joint Position Paper of November 2020, the letter underscores that transparency is integral to support a trustworthy, inclusive relationship with all stakeholders.

  “To rebuild trust, transparency that centers on the diverse voices of civil society is essential. We demand that such transparency start with the appointment process itself,” said Laura O’Brien, U.N. Advocacy Officer at Access Now.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Bangladesh: release Nusrat Shahrin Raka

  We, the undersigned 15 press freedom and human rights organizations, write to urge you to withdraw opposition to pre-trial bail for Nusrat Shahrin Raka, a homemaker and sister of exiled Bangladeshi journalist Kanak Sarwar, and to work cooperatively with Raka’s lawyers and the relevant courts to facilitate her immediate release from jail.

  We also request that you cease the judicial harassment of Kanak Sarwar by dropping all unwarranted charges brought against him in relation to his journalistic work. Further, we call on the Bangladesh government to repeal the Digital Security Act unless it can be promptly amended in line with international human rights law and standards with regard to the fundamental right of freedom of expression.

  We have reviewed credible allegations that authorities have targeted Raka in retaliation for Sarwar’s criticism of the Bangladesh government on his YouTube channel, Kanak Sarwar News. The persecution of Raka signals that authorities will use drastic means to silence critical reporting, whether in Bangladesh or abroad, amid an intensifying assault on the fundamental right to freedom of expression.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Internet shutdowns in Yemen: telecommunications infrastructure is not a military target – Access Now

  We, the undersigned civil society organizations and members of the #KeepItOn Coalition — a global network of human rights organizations that work to end internet shutdowns — strongly condemn the recent targeting and destruction of telecommunication infrastructure in Hodeidah by Saudi- and UAE-led airstrikes. These unjustified attacks claimed the lives of hundreds of people while others remain missing in the rubble. Survivors have been unable to communicate with, or confirm the wellbeing of, those targeted.

  On Friday, January 21, 2022, activists and technology experts reported that internet access had dropped significantly across the country, except for people using internet service provider, AdenNet, in the region of Aden, which was not impacted by the shutdown. The telecom facility which was heavily affected by the airstrike connects Yemen to the FALCON international cable, thereby cutting off millions of people from the internet. The shutdown lasted for about three and a half days with full internet access completely restored on January 24 at approximately 01:00 local time.

• Implementing a MIME database in XXXX

  Recently, I have been working on implementing a parser for media types (commonly called MIME types) and a database which maps media types to file extensions and vice-versa. I thought this would be an interesting module to blog about, given that it’s only about 250 lines of code, does something useful and interesting, and demonstrates a few interesting xxxx concepts.

  The format for media types is more-or-less defined by RFC 2045, specifically section 5.1. The specification is not great. The grammar shown here is copied and pasted from parts of larger grammars in older RFCs, RFCs which are equally poorly defined. For example, the quoted-string nonterminal is never defined here, but instead comes from RFC 822, which defines it but also states that it can be “folded”, which technically makes the following a valid Media Type:

  text/plain;charset="hello
   world"
  

  Or so I would presume, but the qtext terminal “cannot include CR”, which is the mechanism by which folding is performed in the first place, and… bleh. Let’s just implement a “reasonable subset” of the spec instead and side-step the whole folding issue.1 This post will first cover parsing media types, then address our second goal: providing a database which maps media types to file extensions and vice versa.

• Handshake Domains: Blockchain Powered DNS Is Here, But Should You Use It? – CloudSavvy IT

  DNS is a very centralized system. The management of domain names is controlled by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. And since DNS records must be served from a server with authority, the root DNS naming zones are controlled by only a few centralized servers.

  While this works well to protect malicious actors from taking over the internet and wreaking havoc, it does present a few problems. You can’t purchase domain names directly from ICANN—you must go through an accredited registrar. This means you must give money to third party companies that you may not want to do business with, and it also means you’re subject to those companies’ rules and regulations; services like GoDaddy have been known to revoke domain names for problematic content.

  Central authority for DNS also means central control, and a big part of the cryptocurrency movement is having decentralized control through peer-to-peer networks. This is what Handshake Domains are trying to fix.

  By having the root DNS information stored in the blockchain—an immutable collection of data hosted by many individual users—DNS queries can be securely resolved without the need for any special root DNS name servers.

Kernel Space

• LSF/MM/BPF: 2022: Call for Proposals

• LSFMM 2022 call for proposals [LWN.net]

  The Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit is scheduled for May 2 to 4 in Palm Springs, California; with luck it will actually happen this year. As usual, it is an invitation-only event, with a preference for those who bring interesting topics to discuss. The call for proposals is out now, with a request for proposals to arrive before March 1.

• Linus Torvald Confesses: Is the Father of Linux also the Father of Bitcoin?

  Linux creator Linus Torvald seems to be claiming that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the father of Bitcoin. Is he joking or is this the real deal?

  This is how the drama started. Torvalds modified a single line in the Linux Kernel, which has left everyone in a spin. The modification says ‘Name = I am Satoshi.’

• Graphics Stack

  • Reverse Engineering & Open-Source Driver Work Advancing For Arm’s Valhall GPU

    The Arm Mali Valhall architecture reverse-engineering started last summer and while limited in the reverse engineering capabilities for several months, it looks like by this summer we’ll hopefully see a working driver for Arm’s newer graphics IP.

    Alyssa Rosenzweig who has spearheaded the Panfrost driver effort wrote a new blog post detailing the months-long effort so far for reverse-engineering Arm “Valhall” GPUs (Mali G57 and G78) with the goal of having a working open-source driver stack just as there is for prior Mali graphics hardware on Linux.

  • Speeding up open-source GPU driver development with unit tests, drm-shim, and code reuse – CNX Software

    Getting an Arm platform that works with mainline Linux may take several years as the work is often done by third parties, and the silicon vendor has its own Linux tree. That means in many cases, the software is ready when the platform is obsolete or soon will be. It would be nice to start software development before the hardware is ready. It may seem like a crazy idea, but that’s what the team at Collabora has done to add support for Arm “Valhall” GPUs…

Benchmarks

• WEKA dominates new SPECsolution 2020 benchmark tests – Blocks and Files

  The Supermicro configuration used 22 SK hynix 7.68TB NVMe drives attached via PCIe 4 to a SYS0-220U-TNR all-flash SuperServer with 40 Xeon cores. The system ran RHEL v8.3.

Applications

• Software Privacy Day: Use Delta Chat, an open source chat tool | Opensource.com

  It’s Software Privacy Day again, the day meant to encourage users everywhere to spare a thought about where their data actually goes when it’s posted on, over, or through the Internet. One of the cottage industries around Internet communication that seems to ebb and flow in popularity is the venerable chat application. People use chat applications for all manner of conversations, and most people don’t think about what bots are recording and monitoring what’s being said, whether it’s to effectively target ads or just to build a profile for future use. This makes chat applications particularly vulnerable to poor privacy practices, but luckily there are several open source, privacy-focused apps out there, including Signal, Rocket.Chat, and Mattermost. I’ve run Mattermost and Rocket.Chat, and I use Signal, but the application I’m most excited about is Delta Chat, the chat service that’s so hands-off it doesn’t even use chat servers. Instead, Delta Chat uses the most massive and diverse open messaging system you already use yourself. It uses email to send and receive messages through a chat application, and it features end-to-end encryption with Autocrypt.

Instructionals/Technical

• Install Anaconda Navigator Graphical Interface in centos 8

  In this article we will Install Anaconda Navigator Graphical Interface in centos 8. Anaconda is a widely-used, open-source distribution of the Python programming language. It aids in the processing of large-scale data, scientific computations, and predictive analysis. Anaconda comes with over 250 data science packages. Also, the Anaconda repository contains many open-source packages whose prerequisite is Anaconda.

  If you are working on any machine learning or data science project then this is a great environment to use. It consists of many useful python and R libraries that you might require in your project.

• How to set PassivePortRange and PassiveIP in pure-ftpd on Ubuntu to secure the app! – Unix / Linux the admins Tutorials

  Hi guys, We will talk about setting PassivePortRange and PassiveIP in pure-ftpd.

  If you run a firewall on your Linux server and want to use passive FTP connections, you have to define the passive port range in pure-ftpd .

  The following example is for pure-ftpd on Ubuntu and ISPConfig 3.

• How to Install Apache ServiceMix on CentOS 8

  In this article we will learn How to Install Apache ServiceMix on CentOS 8. Apache ServiceMix is a runtime container for service-oriented architecture components, web services or legacy system connectivity services. Apache ServiceMix is an enterprise open-source distributed enterprise service bus (ESB) based on the SOA model released under the Apache license. It is one of the most mature, open-source implementations of an enterprise service bus and an Apache top-level project. Apache ServiceMix provides an OSGi container in which we can run, configure and manage Camel and ActiveMQ instances and you can explore the other services that it can provide.

• Install Java 8 on CentOS 8s

  Hi Guys, In this guide, we’ll show you how to install Oracle’s Java 8 programming language on CentOS 8 .

  It’s an object-oriented language used for many of the applications and websites you come across today.

• How to install IMVU on a Chromebook with Crossover

  Today we are looking at how to install IMVU on a Chromebook with Crossover 21. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• 5 Ways to Improve Linux User Account Security

  The first and most crucial step towards securing Linux servers and systems is preventing malicious parties from unrequired access. Proper user account control is one of the many ways to enhance your system’s security.

  A hardened user account prevents the system from the most common attack methods of horizontal or vertical privilege escalation. Hence, as a Linux system administrator, you are also responsible for protecting your server via effective security techniques.

Wine or Emulation

• Emulate the TRS-80 home computer with Linux

  Emulation is the practice of using a program (called an emulator) on a PC to mimic the behaviour of a home computer or a video game console, in order to play (usually retro) games on a computer.

  Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single non-technical user.

Games

• Vampire Survivors is a sleeper hit on Steam, Linux version planned

  Those who have checked social media within the past few weeks or so may have heard people discussing a game called Vampire Survivors. When it first came out on Steam last December, Vampire Survivors did not gain much attention from the gaming public. However, the game’s popularity began to surge dramatically this month. It amassed around 1,000 simultaneous players come January 6, and just today, it managed to reach a 24-hour peak of over 35,000 concurrent players. At least partially thanks to the game’s low price of $2.99 USD on Steam, Vampire Survivors has become the next surprise hit on the platform, to the point where the developers plan on porting the game over to both Mac and Linux in the near future.

• ‘Welcome To Elk’ arrives on Switch and Linux next month

  The narrative indie game Welcome To Elk is launching on Nintendo Switch globally on February 10. You can pre-order the game now on the eShop for a 20% discount, which will be available until February 17. It will launch alongside the Linux release of the game, both costing £11.39.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• 2021 UI Study Results ⋅ elementary Blog

  Over the past couple of months we’ve conducted a user interface study to dig into how people multi-task on elementary OS as well as other desktop and tablet operating systems. In particular, we were interested in better learning how people use the dock, app launchers, and window management.

  As we continue to iterate on the core experience of elementary OS, we are also aware of newer technologies like Wayland that we’re actively adopting to improve privacy, security, and performance—but doing so requires reworking some components like the dock and window manager to use new protocols and APIs. As long as we’re reworking some of these technical bits, it could be advantageous to rethink and improve upon the experience itself—plus, we can ensure we’re not writing new code to support legacy designs just because that’s how things worked in the past.

  If that all sounds a bit ambitious… it kind of is! However, we’ve previously worked on a similar study around theming, dark styles, and night light modes that directly resulted in our implementation of a system-wide dark style as well as accent colors in elementary OS—and our advocacy in that realm helped influence GNOME’s adoption of a cross-desktop dark style that will work on both GNOME and elementary OS. That work has been years in the making, but the pay-off is well worth it.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Plasma 5.24 Will Be the Next LTS Release Receiving Support Until KDE Plasma 6

    KDE Plasma 5.24 (currently in public beta testing) is set to be the next LTS release of the acclaimed and widely used desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions, replacing the KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS series, which reached end of life in October 2021.

    Set to arrive on February 8th, 2022, two years after the release of Plasma 5.18 LTS, the Plasma 5.24 LTS series promises cool new features like support for fingerprint readers to unlock the screen or authenticate in apps that require administration password or with sudo on the command-line.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Sharing the computer screen in Gnome – Fedora Magazine

    You do not want someone else to be able to monitor or even control your computer and you usually work hard to cut off any such attempts using various security mechanisms. However, sometimes a situation occurs when you desperately need a friend, or an expert, to help you with a computer problem, but they are not at the same location at the same time. How do you show them? Should you take your mobile phone, take pictures of your screen, and send it to them? Should you record a video? Certainly not. You can share your screen with them and possibly let them control your computer remotely for a while. In this article, I will describe how to allow sharing the computer screen in Gnome.

Distributions

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • tzdata, the time zone database for RHEL: 2021 update | Red Hat Developer

    The past year—particularly the second half of 2021—was a busy one for the Time Zone Database (tzdata) project, which provides Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with data specific to the local time zone. Project contributors engaged in lively discussion over how to treat historical time zone data, and changes in some countries’ daylight saving time (DST) start and end dates—including one announced with less than two weeks’ notice—kept the maintainers busy.

    The tzdata package contains the data files documenting both current and historic transitions for various time zones around the world. This data represents changes required by local government bodies or by time zone boundary changes, as well as changes to UTC offsets and DST. The GNU C Library (glibc) uses the tzdata package in order to make APIs such as strftime() work correctly, while applications such as /usr/bin/date make use of this information to print the local date.

    2021 began slowly with the January release of the update tzdata 2021a, which supported time zone changes in South Sudan. However, over the subsequent months, significant changes were introduced upstream that combined or merged time zones and resulted in a lot of controversy.

  • Leading your financial services organization into the future: 8 lessons

    Hindsight is a gift, but it can also be frustrating. Often, you could have done things in different, maybe better, ways. For this article series, we asked IT and business leaders from financial services organizations who now work at Red Hat to share insights for leaders in financial services.

    No one could have predicted the events of 2020 and 2021. While there is no crystal ball to know what will happen in the future, we can learn from each other and benefit from the experience of others.

  • Congratulations to the 2022 Opensource.com Community Award recipients

    Many journeys into open source start with community interactions. Code is an important contribution, but so is sharing knowledge. The community knowledge base is often a person’s first exposure to a project.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Proposed deprecation of the Canonical partner archive

    Hi folks,
    
    One of the things we do as part of opening the new Ubuntu development series
    is to enable that series for the Canonical partner archive.[1]
    
    The partner archive has been empty for all releases since groovy.  In focal,
    the only package it contains is Adobe Flash - which will not be released in
    Jammy.
    
    The Snap Store has matured to the point that I believe it supersedes the
    partner archive, and we should remove this no-longer-used archive from
    Ubuntu systems going forward, pruning the cruft.
    
    This will require changes in several places across Ubuntu (livecd-rootfs,
    subiquity, ubiquity, curtin, cloud-init, python-apt) to remove references to
    archive.c.c, and changes to ubuntu-release-upgrader to clean up apt sources
    on upgrade between releases.  This is all doable within the space of a
    release cycle.
    
    I have already solicited input within Canonical regarding this plan and have
    heard of no blockers.  While it is unlikely that anyone in the community is
    going to have a problem with this deprecation if Canonical is not planning
    on publishing anything to it :), we want to be transparent to at least let
    know this change is coming.
    

  • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Looks To Drop Its Partner Archive In Favor Of The Snap Store – Phoronix

    Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will likely do away with the Ubuntu/Canonical Partner Archive where their software partners could upload select proprietary/binary-only software for easy access by Ubuntu users.

    The Ubuntu Partner Archive has been where various extra software packages have been offered that may be proprietary software but blessed by Canonical and with significant user interest. Past examples include the likes of the Google Cloud SDK, Adobe Flash, TI Keystone HPC, the VMware view client, and other components.

  • Understanding bare metal Kubernetes | Ubuntu

    Bare metal Kubernetes is a powerful set of technologies that builds on the best ideas behind the public and private cloud, yet abstracts away some toilsome aspects related to virtualisation management and networking. For operators and users, it provides significant benefits, making it easier and faster to ship and maintain complex, distributed applications.

Devices/Embedded

• Vu Premium 32 Smart TV With Linux OS, 20W Speakers Launched in India: Price, Specifications | Technology News

  Vu Premium 32 Smart TV launched in India as the latest television offering from the company. The new Vu television is available in a single 32-inch size option and is powered by a 64-bit quad-core processor. Vu Premium 32 Smart TV sports a 60Hz refresh rate display with up to 500 nits of peak brightness. The new model is equipped with two speakers with 20W total output and comes with Dolby Audio support. It comes with DTS TruSurround audio technology as well. The Vu TV runs on Linux operating system. Vu’s Smart Remote features OTT keys and the Smart TV supports the discovery and launch (DIAL) from YouTube and Netflix allowing people to launch media apps to the TV from primary devices.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Indian govt looking to break dominance of Android, iOS; to facilitate homegrown OS, Technology News | wionews.com

  • Google has failed us with Android updates – Phandroid

  • How to Block Texts on Android: 4 Ways

  • How to Stream Torrent Files Without Downloading on Android

  • Unlocked Galaxy Z Flip, Galaxy Fold get Android 12 update in the US – SamMobile

  • Android 12 Update Rolling Out To Unlocked Galaxy Z Flip & Galaxy Fold

  • Magisk v24 hits beta with Android 12 support

  • Nvidia’s latest hotfix for Android 11 on Shield TVs restores your Plex server

  • Motorola MA1 hands-on: Dead simple wireless Android Auto – 9to5Google

  • Android Automotive apps look different from car-to-car – 9to5Google

  • Top 10 Best Android Apps For Winter Olympic Games – 2022

  • 42 ways Google Assistant can make you more efficient on Android | Computerworld

  • Google believes ‘Android Tablets’ are ‘future of computing’ – 9to5Google

  • Google to invest over $700 Mn in Airtel to boost Android adoption

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • New Alpha Release: Tor Browser 11.5a3 (Android)

      Tor Browser 11.5a3 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

      This version includes important security updates to Firefox.

• Programming/Development

  • Prefer to change the code rather than write a workaround

    I can’t count how many times I’ve heard programmers talking about writing some new piece of code to work around the behavior of some other code which they don’t want to change. You are a programmer – you are allowed to change code! In fact, it’s your job! Just change the code to do what you want! Fix the bug! Change the behavior! Add the feature!

  • The Roots project: Implementing culturally responsive computing teaching in schools in England

The Irony of Fate

“A poem is never finished,” wrote Paul Valéry. “[I]t is only an accident that puts a stop to it—i.e., gives it to the public.” Sometimes that accident is death, but, as Valéry himself knew, having left behind some 28,000 pages of notebooks when he died in 1945, there are many ways for a poet to be posthumous, just as there is more than one way for a poem to go unfinished. One can be almost entirely posthumous like Emily Dickinson, who published only 10 poems in her lifetime, or like Isidore Ducasse, whose career as the Comte de Lautréamont, author of Les Chants de Maldoror, which had been read by only a handful of people, was cut short at the age of 24 during the Siege of Paris. One can be partially posthumous like Fernando Pessoa and Robert Walser, whose unpublished writings, discovered in a trunk and a few shoeboxes after their respective deaths, were major enough to occasion significant reevaluations of their literary output.

All she wanted was a photo of the new-born babies and asked that István and Tamás love the twins

The Old Internet Shows Signs of Quietly Coming Back

Old Computer Websites that are original and creative expressions of their creators’ personalities were the foundation of the early 1990′s Internet. In this article, I will use this as the definition of the term “old Internet”, not to imply that these websites are passe, but because their purpose and sometimes even their look has not changed since then. Although the old Internet will not replace the Internet we have today, signs point to it growing in size and visiblity as Internet users become increasingly disillusioned with the corporate-run shopping mall that today’s Internet has become.

Kinetic Art Installation Brings All The World’s Lightning To One Place | Hackaday

Lightning is a force to be reckoned with: ever since ancient times, humans have been in awe of the lethal power of lightning strikes and the deafening roar of thunder. Quite reasonably, they ascribed these events to acts of angry gods; today, modern science provides a more down-to-earth explanation of the physics involved, and a world-wide network of sensors generates a real-time record of lightning strikes around the globe.

[...]

We’ve seen several types of lightning detectors, usually based on a standard radio receiver or a specialized chip. If you’re interested in growing your own piezo crystals, we’ve covered that too.

Science

• That’s No Moon… It’s An Algae Robot | Hackaday

  When you think of a robot, you probably don’t think of a ball of underwater algae. But a team of university researchers used a 3D-printed exoskeleton and a ball of marimo algae to produce a moving underwater sensor platform. It is really at a proof-of-concept stage, but it seems as though it would be possible to make practical use of the technology.

  Marimo are relatively rare balls of algae that occur in some parts of the world. A robot powered by algae runs on sunlight and could be electromagnetically quiet.

Hardware

• MediaTek Kompanio 1380 Cortex-A78/55 processor is designed for premium Chromebooks – CNX Software

  MediaTek Kompanio 1380 is a 6nm octa-core Cortex-A78/A55 processor clocked at up to 3.0 GHz designed for premium Chromebooks such as the new Acer Chromebook Spin 513 (CP513-2H), which will compete against the company’s Snapdragon 7c based Chromebook Spin 513 (CP513-1H).

  The processor supports LPDDR4x memory, UFS and eMMC storage, up to three displays, for example, the main display plus two external HDMI displays, WiFI 6/6E, and offers high-performance interfaces such as PCIe Gen 3 and USB 3.2 Gen 1.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Political Leaders Use “Personal Responsibility” to Justify Needless COVID Deaths

• Progressives to Biden: Force Pharma to Share Vaccine Recipes Globally

  Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus on Wednesday pushed President Joe Biden to “use all legal tools” at his disposal to force U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies to share their closely guarded coronavirus vaccine recipes with the world, warning that not doing so will all but ensure the emergence of new variants.

  “As new data emerges about the quickly spreading Omicron variant, we know that the longer the global pandemic is allowed to run rampant, new, more virulent variants will continue to threaten health and economic wellbeing across the planet,” 30 CPC members wrote in a letter to Biden. “As the United States quickly approaches 800,000 pandemic deaths with roughly 1,000 deaths continuing daily, we fear the Covid-19 pandemic that has produced nearly 5.5 million deaths globally will continue ravaging the globe if inequity and apathy prevail.”

• It’s Time to Expand the COVID-19 Exception to All American Health Care

  For example, the Biden administration is now taking action—albeit a year late—to ensure that Americans have a small measure of access to COVID-19 rapid antigen at-home test kits. Without requiring congressional approval, the government launched a centralized and straightforward website for people to order free antigen testing kits. The site is stunningly easy to use, does not require any other information besides a name and address, and relies on the U.S. Postal Service for distribution.

  That effort came on the heels of an announcement that private health insurance companies would now be required to reimburse their patients for the cost of such tests purchased out-of-pocket.

• The US Needs to Start “Winning” Again

  That isn’t something that the US has done recently, despite getting rid of a deeply corrupt, narcissistic sociopath a year ago.

  Deaths from the pandemic have reached over 865,000, highlighting the government’s inability to protect its own people. Yet the US media will still criticize China to no end, even in how they handled the pandemic, despite China having almost the lowest per-capita Covid case rate in the world.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • CVE-2022-23968: Xerox vulnerability allows unauthenticated users to remotely brick network printers

    I never got to test my idea as I was hasty in the coding stage and unwittingly attempted to test the daemon with a valid multi-page TIFF container, but one where the TIFF Image Directory wasn’t correctly finalized (the pages within the TIFF were incomplete). Imagine my surprise – and anguish – when I discovered that the payload would – seemingly permanently – brick the network-attached printer! Here are the details of what happens: [...]

  • Security

    • PwnKit: Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability Discovered in polkit’s pkexec (CVE-2021-4034)

      Polkit (formerly PolicyKit) is a component for controlling system-wide privileges in Unix-like operating systems. It provides an organized way for non-privileged processes to communicate with privileged processes. It is also possible to use polkit to execute commands with elevated privileges using the command pkexec followed by the command intended to be executed (with root permission).

    • More stolen personal data is available online than ever before. A man who once ran a website that prosecutors called the Amazon of stolen identity information offers his tips on the best ways to protect your data.

      Ngô Minh Hiếu was once a fearsome hacker who spent 7 1/2 years incarcerated in the U.S. for running an online store that sold the personal information of about 200 million Americans. Since leaving prison, Hiếu has become a so-called white hat hacker, attempting to protect the world from the sorts of cybercriminals he once was.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Facial recognition and police records: European biometric systems to be expanded

        A new Prüm system will make it possible to query facial images across Europe in the future, and a central biometric EU repository will also be connected to it

      • #NoPlaceToHide…for Stupid Ideas Like Backdooring End-To-End Encryption and Undermining Privacy

        As part of its #NoPlaceToHide campaign, it has launched a new site. Although not mentioned by name, the central concern is over Facebook’s plans to add e2e encryption to Messenger and Instagram, something that the UK’s Home Secretary described as “not acceptable“. Partly as result of UK government pressure, Facebook’s plans are currently on hold until 2023.

      • Prison Profiteer Is Using Sandra Bland’s Death to Sell Surveillance Technology

      • “For the Children”: The Last Refuge of Anti-Encryption Scoundrels

        “Patriotism,” Samuel Johnson said in 1775, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” These days, it tends more toward first resort than last refuge. Both the UK and US governments have leaned into that approach for years — “TERRORISTS use encryption! You don’t like TERRORISTS, do you?” — with little success in budging public opinion.

        So, naturally, they’re moving to their true last refuge: “Child pornographers and child sex traffickers use encryption! You don’t like child pornographers and child sex traffickers, do you? End-to-end encryption must be stopped FOR THE CHILLLLLDRENNN!”

      • Tech leaders make their World Data Privacy day thoughts public on Jan 28, 2022

        World Data Privacy Day is today, January 28, although the Office of The Australian Information Commission and Stay Safe Online are celebrating a data privacy week, and this year, individuals are encouraged to “Own Your Privacy” by learning more about how to help protect the valuable data that is online, and businesses to “Respect Privacy”.

Defence/Aggression

• “There Is No Military Solution” to Russia Tensions, Progressive Lawmakers Say

• “There Is No Military Solution Out of This Ukraine Crisis”

  The State Department continues to signal that the United States is searching for a diplomatic solution to mounting tensions between Russia and Ukraine—with a senior official announcing last week, “The United States does not want conflict. We want peace.” Yet, in recent days, as media reports have amplified concerns about the threat of a Russian invasion, the United States has dispatched another $200 million in weaponry to Ukraine, and the Biden administration has entered into discussions with NATO allies about the deployment of thousands of additional US troops to Eastern European counties. At the same time, on Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats are fast-tracking proposals for devastating sanctions against Moscow and talking about dramatically increasing funding for US assistance to the Ukrainian military.

• Opinion | It Sure Looks Like the US Corporate Media Wants a War With Russia

  The corporate media always carry water for the state, and they are never more dangerous than when the nation is on a war footing. Right now the United States government is sending weapons to Ukraine. One wouldn’t know that because of constant references to “lethal aid.” The euphemisms and subterfuge are necessary for a very simple reason. Everyone except the Washington war party knows that provoking war with Russia is extremely dangerous.

• To Send Weapons and Troops to Ukraine You’d Have to Be a Stupid Son of a Biden

  The U.S. government’s internal memos said that the only way to get Iraq to use its weapons if it even had any would be to attack it. The U.S. government’s public statements were that Iraq certainly had weapons and therefore must be attacked. The U.S. government itself had every single one of the weapons in question and knew Iraq used to have some of them because the U.S. had provided them.

  This was not a question of faulty information. This was not a question of political ideology. This was a question of absofuckinglute insanity.

• Pulitzer-Winning Holocaust Novel Latest Victim of GOP Book-Banning Wave

  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday countered a Tennessee school board’s decision to ban the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, directing educators to its resources for teaching about the Holocaust and warning, “It is more important than ever for students to learn this history.”

  “Maus has played a vital role in educating about the Holocaust through sharing detailed and personal experiences of victims and survivors.”

• The State of the World (and a Few Predictions)

  So I thought here still in the first month of 2022, I’d give a stab at making sense of some of the major news stories, providing just a little bit of relevant background information, of the sort that is so often not a part of even the more long-form reportage that’s out there in most of the western world’s press.  My purpose here is not to present any groundbreaking insights into geopolitics, but to bring people up to speed a little bit who may not have the time to keep abreast themselves,.

• The Pentagon We Don’t Think About

  When my husband, a Naval officer of nearly 20 years, saw this symbol on a family member’s Facebook page, he pointed out to me that, despite the Hatch Act, created to ensure nonpartisanship among federal workers, DHS employees are not always held accountable for exercising “free speech” that would violate that law. The Three Percenters claim that they’re protesting government tyranny. The roman numeral itself refers to a debunked claim that only 3% of Americans in the original 13 colonies took up arms against the British in the Revolutionary War.

  What does it mean that an employee of the Department of — yes! — Homeland Security can openly and proudly promote a homegrown militia whose members have threatened and attacked American lawmakers and police? Sadly enough, this fits all too well an agency that national security expert Erik Dahl of the Costs of War Project recently described as looking the other way in the face of rising far-right extremism. That includes anti-government, white-supremacist, and anti-Semitic groups, armed and otherwise. Such right-wing militias and extremist outfits, as Dahl makes clear, have killed an increasing number of people in this country since the 9/11 attacks, significantly more than groups inspired by foreign Islamist organizations like al-Qaeda. And yet, in both its public statements and policies, the domestic agency created after the 9/11 attacks to keep this country “secure” has consistently focused on the latter, while underestimating and often ignoring the former.

• Opinion | All Of Us Remain Hostages to the Military-Industrial Complex

  Do our “Defense Departments” really defend us? Absolutely not! Their very title is a lie. The military-industrial complex sells itself by claiming to defend civilians. It justifies vast and crippling budgets by this claim; but it is a fraud. For the military-industrial complex, the only goal is money and power. Civilians like us are just hostages. We are expendable. We are pawns in the power game, the money game.

• US Money Pays for Converting Bad News for Cubans into Good News Elsewhere

  The U.S. government pays for information that can be construed as bad news about Cuba’s revolutionary government, and pays for its dissemination within Cuba and abroad. U.S. paymasters provide money to agents who deliver it – they keep some for themselves – to real or potential government opponents inside Cuba and beyond. The latter are spurred on to find or devise information unfavorable to Cuba’s image and then spread it.  Well-founded complaints about shortages, bureaucracy, low wages, and living with the pandemic also become news items.

  Those organizations that transfer money from the United States to disaffected individuals and groups in Cuba and elsewhere – many are based in Florida or Spain – are key to the entire operation. One recalls the “bagman” who in certain U.S. cities used to deliver pay-offs from point to point within a criminal network. The parties currently handing over U.S. money are an updated version of bagmen.

• Despite U.S. Embargo, Cuba Aims to Share Homegrown Vaccine with Global South

  A 60-year U.S. embargo that prevents U.S.-made products from being exported to Cuba has forced the small island nation to develop its own COVID-19 vaccines and rely on open source designs for life-saving medical equipment such as ventilators. We speak to leading Cuban scientist Dr. Mitchell Valdés-Sosa about how massive mobilization helped produce three original vaccines that have proven highly effective against the coronavirus. “In a moment that the whole world was mobilizing to face this tremendous menace that was killing people around the world, the U.S. administration did not lift any of the 400 sanctions that were slapped on Cuba during the Trump administration plus this decades-long embargo,” says Valdés-Sosa, director of the Cuban Center for Neuroscience. “Medicines and vaccines are not a commodity. It’s not something to get rich with. It’s something to save people’s lives.”

• Taliban Detain Dozens Trying To Leave Afghanistan ‘Illegally’ By Air

  Dozens of people were stopped from “illegally” leaving Afghanistan by air on Monday, a top Taliban official said, and several women among them are being detained until they are collected by male relatives.

  Tens of thousands of Afghans fled on evacuation flights from Kabul in August as the Taliban returned to power amid the hasty withdrawal of US-led forces.

  Some nations and international NGOs have since operated irregular chartered flights extracting Afghans, but Taliban authorities have increasingly clamped down.

• Nigeria Again Worst in World in Killed, Kidnapped Christians

  Suspected Fulani herdsmen last week killed three Christians in attacks in Nigeria, where more Christians were killed for their faith last year than in any other country, sources said.

• A prison battle in Syria was a disaster long foretold

  It took almost a week for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led militia, to wrest back control. Hundreds of inmates escaped; not all have been recaptured. Dozens of people were killed in fighting inside the prison and in surrounding neighbourhoods. Some of the dead are thought to be children held in Ghweiran who were used as human shields by IS.

• EXCLUSIVE: Daring Boko Haram Terrorists Declare Borno Town As West African ‘Caliphate Headquarters’

  The terror group has caused over 100,000 deaths and displaced millions of individuals mainly in Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe states.

• Indonesian terrorists ‘infiltrating Islamic schools’

  At least 198 Islamic boarding schools have ties to terrorist networks, according to Indonesia’s National Counterterrorism Agency.

  Agency chief Boy Rafli Amar made the claim at a meeting with MPs on Jan. 25, saying the assessment was a result of the agency’s terrorism prevention efforts last year.

• France: Population with Muslim faith particularly guilty of spreading anti-Semitic ideas – Anti-Semitic prejudice stable among supporters of the left-wing party France Insoumise, sharp decline among supporters of the right-wing RN

  The general perception that there is too much coverage of anti-Semitism, while less and less shared by all French people, is persistent among certain groups of the population: those who inform themselves via blogs or [Internet] forums are the most likely to think that there is too much talk about anti-Semitism (27%, compared to 15% on average for the population as a whole), as are voters for La France insoumise (22%), the Rassemblement National (20%) and sympathisers of the anti-vaccine movement (22%).

Environment

• Gas Stoves Even Worse for Climate, Health Than Previously Thought

  As policymakers across the United States consider bans on gas hookups in new construction, Stanford University researchers revealed Thursday that gas-burning cook stoves—coveted by many homeowners—are even worse for the global climate and human health than previously thought.

  “Gas stoves warm the planet and release indoor air pollutants that you breathe—you get both.”

• LA City Council Moves to Ban New Oil and Gas Wells, Advance Phaseout

  Climate and environmental justice campaigners cheered a unanimous vote Wednesday by the Los Angeles City Council to back a ban on all new oil and gas wells, with one group calling the move “the beginning of a new era” of an “equitable transition” toward a fossil-free future for the nation’s second-largest city and beyond. 

  “This is a momentous step forward for Los Angeles, and a clear message we are sending to Big Oil.”

• ‘Climate Can’t Wait’: US Crop Losses Have More Than Tripled Since 1995

  Payouts to U.S. farmers for crops destroyed by droughts and flooding surged by over 340% from 1995 to 2020, and the cost of the nation’s federal crop insurance program is only expected to increase as the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis continues to exacerbate extreme weather and disrupt agriculture.

  “Making changes to these programs now will be key to making U.S. agriculture more resilient to the extreme weather that lies ahead.”

• Energy

  • Biden Administration Cancels Two Trump-Approved Minnesota Mining Leases

  • Bikeshares: From Provocation to Commodity

    In the 1960s, Provo was a Dutch anarchist group inspired as much by the Dadists and Situationists as by Herbert Marcuse. It warned: “Because this bureaucratic society is choking itself with officialdom and suppressing any form of spontaneity. Its members can only become creative, individual people through anti-social conduct.”  Going further, it explained its vision in provocative terms:

    One of its “heartfelt attempts” was promoted by Laurens (Luud) Schimmelpennink, a social inventor, industrial designer and politician.  He proposed the “White Bike Plan” to give away free bicycles for use in Amsterdam.

  • ‘Utterly Shameless’: Former Democratic Senators Join Fossil Fuel Lobby Group

    Environmentalists on Thursday excoriated two former Democratic U.S. senators who announced they are joining a pro-fossil fuel group that falsely promotes fracked gas as a “solution” to the climate emergency. 

    “I don’t understand how these people sleep at night.”

  • New Reports Allege Texas Oil and Gas Regulator’s Lax Enforcement

    When a Canadian company started drilling for oil and gas near Jim and Sue Franklin’s ranch in a small Permian Basin town called Verhalen, Texas, it didn’t bother the couple too much at first. But Sue suspects that it was the third well that started causing problems. “They put up these big signs that said, ‘H2S gas, danger, keep out, blah blah blah,’” she says. The well was being drilled in what’s called a sour-gas field, an oil field that naturally has a high concentration of a deadly gas called hydrogen sulfide (H2S). The company promised the Franklins that the gas — which can cause headaches, irritate respiratory systems, and even be fatal in high concentrations — would never get into their home, despite the fact that it was barely a mile away.

    Sue started waking up with “roaring headaches” and a rotten-eggs smell — a tell-tale sign of H2S — permeating the house. The Franklins complained about the poisonous gas in their home to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which regulates air pollution. The agency, which only maintains non-binding recommendations for hydrogen sulfide emissions, never followed up directly, but the Railroad Commission did. 

  • While Exxon Touts Net-Zero Promise, its Huge Plastics Complex Goes Online in Texas

    The same day ExxonMobil announced its ambition to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, word spread that its mammoth plastics manufacturing complex near Corpus Christi, Texas, had begun production. “We are up and operating. We have been for a while,” Paul B. Fritsch, site manager for ExxonMobil’s joint venture with Saudi Basic Industries Corp, (SABIC), told the governing body of the Port of Corpus Christi at its Jan. 18 meeting.

    The facility, known as an ethane steam cracker, will feed the production of nurdles – tiny pellets that serve as raw materials for plastic products. The plant’s state air permit allows it to send more than 3.5 million tons per year of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

  • Chevron’s Prosecution of Steven Donziger

    Documents obtained by The Nation reveal a close collaboration between Chevron, its law firm, and the “private prosecutor” who sent environmentalist lawyer Steven Donziger to federal prison in October. The oil giant has pursued Donziger since he won a legal case against it for contaminating a vast stretch of rain forest in Ecuador. So far, although e-mails and billing statements between Chevron, the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and the lawyer Rita Glavin do not show evidence of legal wrongdoing, they do raise questions of fairness. And Donziger’s team is exploring legal action to remedy what they regard as this latest injustice.

  • Sioux Tribe Withdraws as Cooperating Agency Over Dakota Access Pipeline Threat

    The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe on Thursday confirmed that it is no longer a “cooperating agency” for the Dakota Access oil pipeline and demanded federal action to address concerns that a leak could affect Lake Oahe, the tribe’s only source of fresh drinking water.

    “If an oil spill were to occur today, the plans submitted for remediation at Lake Oahe probably couldn’t be implemented.”

  • Green Groups Rally Against ‘Filthy Oil Train’ in Western US

    Warning of “tremendous” environmental harm, more planet-heating pollution, and the undermining of White House climate goals, over 100 advocacy groups on Wednesday urged President Joe Biden’s agriculture secretary to take action to block a proposed oil rail line in eastern Utah.

    “Increased drilling and extraction the railway seeks to induce will boost greenhouse pollution at every step in the process.”

  • Cancer Patients File Landmark Suit Over Fukushima Disaster

    Six people—aged 6 to 16 years old at the time of the Fukushima meltdown—filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Tokyo Electric Power Company, demanding millions in compensation for thyroid cancer they say is a direct result of radiation from the 2011 nuclear disaster.

    “Some plaintiffs have had difficulties advancing to higher education and finding jobs, and have even given up on their dreams for their future,” Kenichi Ido, the lead lawyer in the class action lawsuit, told Agence France-Presse.

  • Ireland’s data centers are an economic lifeline. Environmentalists say they’re wrecking the planet

    If approved, it would be one of the country’s biggest. A Dublin-based company called Art Data Centres Ltd. submitted the planning application for the center in July. Not much is known about the company, which was set up in 2018. Its director and secretary have been involved in more than 6,500 other listed Irish companies — over 3,000 of which have since closed, according to the Irish company records checking site SoloCheck. CNN was unable to establish contact with Art Data Centres and its representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

    It is not clear what the data center will be used for, nor if other larger tech companies could ultimately be involved.

  • Should Environmental Activists Sabotage Fossil Fuel Infrastructure?

    The aim of fossil fuel property destruction would not be to enlighten the denialists but to inflict costs on the enemy: fossil capital. It is here that the movement in the Global North has grievously failed. Marches of a million children, divestment campaigns, parliamentary initiatives, court cases, square occupations, and road blockades are all good, and they have taken us to where we are in early 2022. But something more is needed.

    What about the second part of the argument, that tactical diversification will bring the hammer of state repression down on us? To answer this, we must be attuned to the temporality of this crisis. It will keep getting worse, which should—if there is any rationality left in the world—mean that the public appetite for fossil fuel property destruction will rise. The absurdity would be for humanity to plunge headlong into these killing fields without anyone striking blows against the responsible party. Only by ratcheting up the struggle in a crisis hardwired to worsen do we stand a chance to remain relevant and, yes, win people over. Our task is to make the impassive part of the public realize that fossil fuel property is not something indestructible like the moon. Once people reach that insight—unlikely to happen as long as such property is treated as untouchable by the climate movement—the prospects for mass unrest open up.

Finance

• Over 80 Democrats Say It’s Time for Biden to Cancel $50,000 of Student Debt

• The Federal Reserve Has Fueled Wall Street at the Expense of the Rest of Us

• The Homeless Shelter on Billionaires’ Row

  In the summer of 2019, as the 2020 presidential election loomed large and an enduring pandemic was inconceivable, a series of billboards targeting a candidate in the race appeared across Iowa. Such a series isn’t out of the ordinary for the state during an election year, but the billboards in question alluded to a battle most Iowans weren’t aware of—one that was hyper-local to New York City and targeted the city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio.

• New Report Shows How US Transportation System ‘Fuels Inequality’

  U.S. transportation policies prioritizing automobile use over public transit are leaving the poor and people of color behind, exacerbating inequality and the climate emergency. That’s according to a new report published Wednesday by the Institute for Policy Studies. 

  “For decades, the federal government has allocated about four times as much funding to roadways as it has to public transit such as buses and subways.”

• Opinion | A Ban on Congressional Stock Trading Is a No-Brainer

  There’s no good reason for elected officials to trade individual stocks at all. Unless you have special insider knowledge, buying and selling individual stocks is a terrible way to get rich. It’s gambling, plain and simple. That’s why many Americans with retirement accounts prefer to invest in index funds—which are tied to the performance of the entire stock market

• One-Day Strike Nets $5+ Hourly Raise for Mississippi Bus Drivers

  Poorly paid bus drivers in a rural Mississippi school district went on strike last Friday morning and by the end of the day, they had won an hourly pay raise of at least $5, lifting their wages to $20 an hour.

  The strike happened after the Jefferson Davis County school board authorized paying $25 per hour to drivers hired on an emergency basis, Magnolia State Live first reported Wednesday.

• “The Lords of Easy Money”: How the Federal Reserve Enriched Wall Street & Broke the U.S. Economy

  As the Federal Reserve signals it will raise interest rates in March, we talk to Christopher Leonard, author of the new book “The Lords of Easy Money,” about how the Federal Reserve broke the American economy. He details the issues with quantitative easing, a radical intervention instituted by the federal government in 2010 to encourage banks and investors to lend more risky debt to combat the recession. “The Fed’s policies over the last decades have stoked the world of Wall Street,” says Leonard. “It has pumped trillions of dollars into the banking system and thereby inflated these markets for stocks, for bonds. And that drives income inequality.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Cover-up: Brazilian Government Plot to Open Up Uncontacted Tribe’s Territory Revealed

  The cover-up involves top officials in FUNAI, the government Indigenous Affairs Agency, who have been hand-picked by President Bolsonaro. It can now be revealed that they have:

  – arranged a secret meeting with a notorious politician and Bolsonaro ally who is leading the campaign to open up the territory; – allowed him to view a confidential field report outlining new evidence of the tribe’s existence, including location data; – denied that the new evidence exists.

• A Tale of Two Presidents

  For President Joe Biden, it’s about fighting with members of Congress, including two stubborn ones in his own party and losing two big bills – voting rights and social policy/climate change. For pretend president Donald Trump, it’s fighting and mostly losing in the courts.

  For Catholic Biden, it’s been a time for mea culpa (a Latin prayer said during confession meaning “it was my fault”). For his predecessor, there’s never a time to apologize for anything.

• Because No One’s Making Them Do It, Maine Law Enforcment Agencies Aren’t Accurately Tracking Complaints Against Officers

  For three decades, the DOJ and FBI have barely tried (and always failed) to collect information about use of force by the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies. Despite occasional promises to be more thorough and do better, the FBI has, for the most part, done nothing with this opportunity — one thrust upon it by a crime bill passed in 1994.

• How the Democratic Party Alienates Young Jews: A Reply to Alexis Grenell

  Not since the epic 2007 debate between Katha Pollitt and me over the saga of jailed quarterback Michael Vick have I written a public response to a Nation colleague. But I feel obligated to register my disagreement with fellow Nation journalist Alexis Grenell’s article “How The Left Alienates American Jews.” Rather than go through her column point by point and respond to each individual charge against the pro-Palestinian left, I want to give some context to why I believe her piece has evoked such a strong response.

• Trump, While Golfing, Describes Himself as “45th and 47th” President

• Fake Electors Casting Fraudulent Ballots for Trump Could be Charged by DOJ

• US bans telecom giant China Unicom over spying concerns

  The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said it had voted unanimously to revoke authorisation for the company’s American unit to operate in the US.

  The firm must stop providing telecoms services in America within 60 days.

  The announcement comes after larger rival China Telecom had its licence to operate in the US revoked in October.

• Mainstream Media Melts Down as ‘Defeat the Mandates DC’ Rally Overcomes Political Divides

• To end Russia-Ukraine tensions, Vladimir Putin needs a way to save face

  Ukraine is a crisis that Russian President Vladimir Putin has brought on himself, and if it goes over the cliff as it could, he will have only himself to blame. But the West, especially America, must be sure that the Russian leader doesn’t drag the rest of the world, especially Europe, over the brink as well.

  This means that no matter who’s responsible at this point — and there will be plenty of time for finger-pointing once those 100,000-plus Russian troops along the border with Ukraine start heading for Kyiv, or for home — there must be some way to give Putin an off-ramp. At this point, that has been desperately lacking from President Joe Biden.

• [Old] Digital sovereignty or digital colonialism?

  Beyond tensions of privacy and security, we are witnessing today a real confrontation between control and freedom, not only of the individual, but of entire populations and regions, enhanced by technologies and massive collection and analysis of data—from predicting and influencing behaviours, to the automation of public services and the ability to fully control and disrupt those services, even remotely. From gaining access to a global communications platform to losing the ability to protect the rights of those who are interconnected through those platforms. Are we witnessing a new form of digital colonialism?

• [Old] The global digital divide is reminiscent of colonialism

  There exists a clear dichotomy between countries that produce vast amounts of digital data and countries that harness it for their benefit. Unlike the traditional North-South divide in the global economic order, the digital gap is being led by tech companies from the United States and China. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent and Alibaba together account for two-thirds of the total market value of the global digital economy. These tech giants have expanded their services to the Global South, capitalizing on the vast amounts of data produced there. Developing countries lack the infrastructure to fully exploit the data they produce.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Neil Young-Spotify row highlights podcast disinformation issues

  Neil Young’s ultimatum to Spotify that it choose between his music and the controversial star podcaster Joe Rogan has become a flashpoint in the conversation over online disinformation and corporate responsibility to moderate it.

• Bragging and Dragging: Apple Music Seizes on Neil Young’s Spotify Removal

  Apple Music seems to have a new marketing campaign: Humble bragging that it offers Neil Young’s music. The corporate snark comes after Spotify, Apple Music’s largest competitor, was forced to remove the singer’s catalog due to his objections over the platform allowing Covid misinformation to be broadcast on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

  Apple’s passive-aggressiveness has been subtle, adopting the understated spite of a toxic ex posting an Instagram thirst trap right after a breakup. The jabs started Tuesday, a day after Young published a since-deleted letter demanding his management and label remove his music from Spotify. “They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both,” he wrote. Shortly after the letter went public, Apple Music posted a thinly veiled tweet that read, “It’s always a good idea to stream @NeilYoungNYA.”

• Why Spotify can’t afford to lose Joe Rogan

  Yesterday, Young made good on his word and, along with his record label, removed his music from the service. Young then issued another letter on his website to illuminate how he learned of the issue, thank his label, and encourage others to follow suit. “I sincerely hope that other artists and record companies will move off the Spotify platform and stop supporting Spotify’s deadly misinformation about COVID,” he says.

  This marks a critical turning point in Spotify’s company narrative. It’s no longer a music company but one committed to podcasting to the point that it’ll compromise relationships with musical artists to ensure its strategy’s success. And, to be fair, we could have assumed this would play out like it did. Who was Spotify going to pick: a musician whose heyday was decades ago or a zeitgeisty comedian who causes PR headaches but also commands a minimum ad spend of $1 million?

Censorship/Free Speech

• You Don’t Have to Read ‘Em, But You Can’t Ban ‘Em

  Of course, book burning and banning is nothing new.  In what was to become the USA, the morality police were burning objectional reading material in the 1600s. And as history progressed, any number of books were banned by one moral authority or another, including, without limitation, Walt Whitman’s book of poetry, Leaves of Grass, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. And, of course, we are reminded of the stark reality of book burning in the wartime videos of the Nazi’s throwing books into a huge bonfire in May 1933.[2]

  Indeed, before I came of age, Catcher in the Rye, was among the books that was banned (I read it anyway).  And, the Catholic Church (of which I was then a member) had a list of banned books (its Index Librorum Prohibitorum) which included Les Misérables, The Count of Monte Cristo andthe Hunchback of Notre Dame (all banned, ironically, while the Church’s pedophile priests were out sexually abusing children and the hierarchy was covering it up). Anyway, I read those too.

• New Tracking Global Online Censorship Site Explains Content Moderation Practices and Impacts

  The site provides our own original research and commentary, and also curates content from key allies, popular publications, and other vetted sources. It includes detailed information on content moderation practices from each company, updated explanations of appeals processes for users, details on the laws that govern content moderation, and additional resources from partners and experts. 

  Tracking Global Online Censorship, originally launched in 2012, was created as a joint project between EFF andVisualizing Impactand collected user experiences with content takedowns. In 2014 the project was awarded the Knight News Challenge for strengthening free expression and innovation on the internet. Since that time, public awareness of wrongful content takedowns has increased. We’re excited to transition from our original mission to serve as an information hub with original content and research from our allies around the world. The updated project was generously funded with a grant from the Swedish Postcode Foundation. To see more, visit https://www.onlinecensorship.org

• EFF Launches Tracking Global Online Censorship Project to Shine Light on How Content Moderation Affects Freedom of Expression Around the World

• Mississippi Mayor Withholds $110K From Library Over LGBTQ Books

• Following the broadcast of a television programme about the Islamisation of France, one of the witnesses in the programme is threatened with beheading

  He dared to testify and is already paying the price. Public law lawyer Amine Elbahi was featured in Zone Interdite’s latest report entitled “Face au danger de l’Islam radical, les réponses de l’État” (Faced with the danger of radical Islam, the state’s responses). The programme Zone Interdite, broadcast on M6 on Sunday 23 January, focused on the city of Roubaix (northern France) where “a small radicalised minority rejects the laws of the Republic”. In it, Amine Elbahi denounces a growing communitarianism that could well tip towards fundamentalism. The day after the documentary was broadcast, the 25-year-old lawyer, who grew up in Roubaix, was a guest on BFMTV. He stated that he had been threatened with death.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Assange case & Supreme Court Appeal Decision

  On January 24 the UK’s High Court announced that it has certified a point of law for Julian Assange to be able to apply to appeal to the Supreme Court.

• UN Special Rapporteur Nils Melzer Discusses Persecution Of Assange On ‘Primary Sources’

• Off to the Supreme Court: Assange’s Appeal Continues

  This raised the thorny issue of whether a direct appeal to that body against the High Court finding would be permitted. Ease and smoothness were unlikely to be permitted – judges are not necessarily in the habit of clearing the thick undergrowth that presents itself in appellate proceedings.  Doing so would have allowed all points of law raised by Assange to be considered, a dangerous prospect for the establishment fogeys.

  Defeated by District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s ruling on January 4, 2021, an unphased US Department of Justice appealed, furnishing the High Court of England and Wales with after-the-fact assurances that they claimed Baraitser could have sought.  Assange, it was promised, would not be subjected to Special Administrative Measures, or be sent to the vicious ADX Florence supermax facility.  He would also receive sufficient medical attention to mitigate the risk of suicide and could serve the post-trial and post-appeal phase of his sentence in Australia.  Each one of these undertakings were made subject to the conduct of the accused, ignoring the point that discretion at the hands of the authorities remains total.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Black Left Tradition: Its Enduring Lessons and Insights

  He stated, unequivocally, “[…] excepting the African slave trade, nowhere has history recorded any more unnecessary bestial and ruthless human carnage than the British suppression of the non-white Indian people.”

  Despite, at times, being an extremely frustrating and contradictory political figure, preaching self-help while condemning King for somehow not being “radical” enough, a major consistency in Malcolm X’s worldview was his insistence that the struggle for justice was always a global one. That black people in the U.S. had much in common with Africans and Asians and others who had experienced similar types of abuse and exploitation.

• German activists receive asylum in Venezuela

  After Interpol already withdrew an arrest request, two leftists now finally escape persecution by the German justice system

• A gaping hole in the criminal code Torture is endemic in Russia today. Here’s what can be done about it.

  There is no article on torture in the Russian Criminal Code. However, torture itself, unfortunately, remains a widespread practice: reports of brutal violence in prisons and police stations appear with frightening regularity. We believe that the use of torture is absolutely unacceptable, and we strive to ensure that as many people as possible are aware of this issue. The following text explains why the Russian Criminal Code needs to be changed — and how introducing a separate article on torture could influence the situation in the country. 

• Are We Any Closer to Shutting Down Guantánamo?

  More than 20 years after its opening, that American offshore symbol of mistreatment and injustice the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is still open. In fact, as 2021 ended, New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg, who has covered that notorious prison complex since its first day, reported on the Pentagon’s plans to build a brand-new prefab courthouse at that naval base. It’s intended to serve as a second, even more secret facility for holding the four remaining trials of war-on-terror detainees and is scheduled to be ready “sometime in 2023.”

• Ocasio-Cortez Says Backing Progressive Over Sinema Would Be “Easiest Decision”

• ‘When You Don’t Change People’s Lives, People Get Upset,’ Says AOC

  “When you don’t change people’s lives, people get upset.”

  That’s how New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez succinctly explained the reason behind President Joe Biden’s plummeting approval rating, which fell to 41% this week, as she countered claims Wednesday night that progressives have harmed the president’s ability to maintain voters’ confidence.

• Stumbling on Chilean Stones—and Chilean History

  Last week, a few days after I returned to my native Chile from a prolonged, pandemic-induced absence, my face suffered an unfortunate accident. During an early morning walk, I stumbled on an uneven pavement and, staggering to regain my balance, ended up bashing my nose violently against the window of a parked car. Nothing broken, but blood galore drenched my aching face and body and a deep gash opened just above my nasal septum that required stitches, antibiotics, and an anti-inflammatory injection.

• Afghanistan in Crisis

• Opinion | The Anguished Wails of Jim Crow

  “The concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”

• Alabama Town Has 1,253 People, Nine Cops, And Generates $600,000 A Year From Traffic Stops

  Small towns strapped for cash sometimes decide to use their law enforcement agencies to generate a steadily increasing revenue stream. Towns that otherwise would never have been noticed by non-residents have achieved national notoriety by unofficially rebranding as Speed Trap, USA.

• How the 13th Amendment’s Fatal Flaw Created Modern-Day Convict Slavery

  And one group of people are disproportionately, though not solely, criminalized – descendants of formerly enslaved people.

  “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,” the amendment reads, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

• Mother’s Lawsuit Attempts To Hold Snapchat, Instagram Responsible For Her Daughter’s Suicide

  In the wake of a tragedy, it’s human nature to seek some form of justice or closure. The feeling is that someone should be held accountable for a senseless death, even when there’s no one to blame directly. This tends to result in misguided lawsuits, like the multiple suits filed by (far too opportunistic) law firms that seek to hold social media platforms accountable for the actions of mass shooters and terrorists.

• The Many Remarkable Black Women Who Could Replace Stephen Breyer

  Justice Stephen Breyer is stepping down from the Supreme Court, effective at the end of the term. This means that President Joe Biden can now fulfill one of his boldest campaign promises: to put a Black woman on the Supreme Court.

• Opinion | Regardless of Breyer’s Replacement, This Supreme Court Will Still Belong to Trump

  The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has developed a love/hate relationship with Donald Trump. Simply put, the majority loves the disgraced ex-President’s social and political agenda, but hates his inflated claims of executive authority and personal grievance.  

• Exiting Breyer Quotes Lincoln: ‘We Are Now Engaged in a Great Civil War’

  Officially announcing his retirement Thursday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer quoted former President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as the outgoing jurist suggested the country was embroiled in something like the “great civil war” of the nation’s past.

  “This is a complicated country,” said the justice, adding that the U.S. was conceived as “an experiment” as he held up a copy of the U.S. Constitution.

• Stephen Breyer to Retire, Giving Biden Chance to Nominate First Black Woman Supreme Court Justice

  Liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is retiring after nearly three decades on the bench, giving President Biden a chance to fulfill a campaign promise to nominate the first Black woman in history to serve on the high court. Those worried that identity politics will hinder the most qualified candidate should consider that 108 of 115 justices since the nation’s founding have been white men, says Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation. Breyer’s retirement comes as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell threatened to stall any nominations that Biden put forth later in the year. Breyer leaves “an institution that I think he really idealized as beyond politics, and at the same time, it’s so, so clear that politics drove him out right now,” says Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor and senior legal correspondent for Slate, who has interviewed Breyer.

• CIA Funded Experiments On Danish Orphans For Decades

  This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter, a project of Shadowproof. Become a paid subscriber and help us expand our work.

  An extraordinary Danish Radio report exposed how scores of children in Denmark, many of them orphans, were subject to CIA-funded experiments for at least two decades.

• Electronic Frontier Foundation Is Looking for a Few Good People

  Here at FOSS Force we’re always keeping our eye out for open source community oriented job openings that might be of interest to our FOSS readership, and last week a couple from Electronic Frontier Foundation caught our attention.

  For those who aren’t familiar, EFF is a nonprofit organization defending online privacy and free expression. While it’s not an open source organization, it shares many of the same values as the FOSS and free software communities, and advocates for change in areas that are very important to our communities — such as it’s ongoing battle to have issues with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act changed or removed.

• ‘No More Hiding’: Sanders Says Make GOP Vote on Popular Policies

  Voicing exasperation with months of fruitless backroom talks over the Build Back Better Act, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday demanded floor votes on individual pieces of the stalled legislation in order to force Republicans—and right-wing Democrats—to go on the record opposing policies with widespread public support.

  Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, wrote in an op-ed for The Hill that “amazingly, there have been no votes” in the Senate on the Build Back Better package, the House-passed version of which includes an extension of the boosted child tax credit, a plan to lower sky-high prescription drug prices, and significant investments in renewable energy, child care, housing, and other Democratic priorities.

• Wealthy Progressives Back Primaries Against Dems Tanking Party Agenda

  A group of wealthy progressives announced Thursday that it will support primary challenges against Rep. Henry Cuellar, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, and other right-wing Democrats who have actively obstructed President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda and, in the process, potentially boosted the GOP’s chances of retaking Congress.

  “These radical moderates have done more damage to President Biden’s agenda than Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz combined,” Erica Payne, president of the Patriotic Millionaires, said in a statement announcing the organization’s endorsements for the looming 2022 midterms—and its plans to back campaigns to unseat right-wing Democrats in this year’s elections and beyond.

• NYT Twists Stats to Insist We Need More Policing

  The New York Times handed over its popular The Morning daily newsletter on January 18 to new hire German Lopez, formerly of Vox. His debut edition of the data-driven newsletter (usually helmed by David Leonhardt) was headlined “Examining the Spike in Murders.”

• Islamic Extremist Terrorists Kill, Kidnap Christians in NE Nigeria

  Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) terrorists on Thursday (Jan. 20) attacked Pemi village, killing a Christian identified as Blan Gutto, kidnapping 17 Christian girls ages 10 to 13 and burning down a Church of the Brethren in Nigeria (EYN) building, said area resident James Nkeki. They also burned the shop of Ayuba Bulus, also a Christian, he said.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Musk’s Starlink Continues To Struggle With Very Basic Customer Service

  We’ve noted a few times that Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband service is going to have a hard time meeting expectations. One, while the service is often sold as a near-magical cure for the estimated 20-42 million Americans without broadband access, it only has the capacity to serve somewhere between 500,000 and 800,000 users. Due to additional supply chain issues, only about 150,000 users have received access so far. And those who’ve paid the company $100 to wait in line say the company is incapable of giving them any kind of timeline of when they can expect service.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Automakers Continue Efforts To Scuttle Popular Mass. ‘Right To Repair’ Law

  In late 2020, Massachusetts lawmakers (with overwhelming public support) passed an expansion of the state’s “right to repair” law. The original law was the first in the nation to be passed in 2013. The update dramatically improved it, requiring that as of this year, all new telematics-equipped vehicles be accessible via a standardized, transparent platform that allows owners and third-party repair shops to access vehicle data via a mobile device. The goal: reduce repair monopolies, and make it cheaper and easier to get your vehicle repaired.

• Apple CEO: ‘We Don’t Make Purely Financial Decisions’ About Apple TV Plus Content

  Apple has shelled out untold millions on original content for Apple TV Plus. And CEO Tim Cook acknowledged that it isn’t necessarily looking for a financial payback on that investment.

• Netflix Must Face ‘Queen’s Gambit’ Lawsuit From Chess Great, Judge Says

  A judge on Thursday refused to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a Georgian chess master who alleged that she was defamed in an episode of the Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit.”

  Nona Gaprindashvili, who rose to prominence as a chess player in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, sued Netflix in federal court in September. She took issue with a line in the series in which a character stated — falsely — that Gaprindashvili had “never faced men.” Gaprindashvili argued that the line was “grossly sexist and belittling,” noting that she had in fact faced 59 male competitors by 1968, the year in which the series was set.

Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • Are Overly Aggressive Trademark Lawyers Learning Not To Be Such Assholes All The Time?

    It’s been just over 17 years since I coined the phrase “The Streisand Effect,” which has totally taken on a life of its own. A key reason for naming it was to hopefully wake up overly aggressive lawyers to the fact that sending a nasty, threatening cease and desist letters to try to suppress information or stop someone from doing something wasn’t a good idea. A few years later, a lawyer friend of mine mentioned that he thought that the concept of The Streisand Effect had done its job — and that many, many corporate lawyers were much more averse to sending out such aggressive letters, recognizing that there might be a better approach. However, I still find it’s pretty typical for many lawyers to immediately go for the the nasty threat letter, so it seemed like perhaps the lawyers hadn’t quite gotten the message.

• Copyrights

  • Dr. Seuss Enterprises Promotes Susan Brandt to President and CEO

    Susan Brandt has been promoted to CEO of Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the privately held company that manages the rich vault of books and IP [sic] associated with the beloved author.

    Brandt has been with the San Diego-based Dr. Seuss Enterprises for 24 years, most recently serving as president. 2021 marked the company’s highest revenue-generating year since its founding in 1993. Brandt is credited with expanding the company’s reach and helping to keep Seuss characters relevant to contemporary kids and their parents through partnerships, including notable ventures with Netflix, Warner Bros., PBS and Universal Studios through the Seuss Landing installation at the Islands of Adventure theme park in Florida.

  • Nintendo Sics Lawyers To Take Down Fan-Made FPS ‘Pokemon’ Game Footage

    At this point, posts about Nintendo getting fan-made games or content removed from the internet over IP concerns are evergreen. Nobody should be surprised by this shit any more, though you should still be either very angry about it, or at least disappointed. The company is almost a caricature of an IP maximalist company: anything and everything that even comes close to touching its IP gets thrown at the company lawyers to deal with. It’s bad enough to be parodied by the general public. This is where I remind you that companies like Nintendo have a wide spectrum of avenues for responding to fanworks. Depending on the IP in question, the company could do any of the following besides going legal: let fans have their fun, issue zero-dollar or cheap licenses to fans to legitimize their work, or incorporate fanworks into official releases by either licensing or employing these fans. Plenty of other companies have taken these routes, or others, and have survived just fine. Nintendo never does this.

  • BeIN First to Use New Anti-Piracy Law to Block 18 Pirate Streaming Sites

    Broadcaster beIN Sports has become the first company to obtain a pirate streaming site blocking order under new French legislation. The injunction requires local internet service providers to block access to 18 sites that offer live sporting events to the public without appropriate licensing. Any mirror sites that subsequently appear will be quickly blocked too.

  • Pirate Site Traffic Surged in 2021, Research Finds

    A new report published by Akamai shows that the number of visits to pirate sites rose in 2021. TV shows are the most sought-after content and represent nearly half of all pirate site traffic, with an average of more than 7 billion visits per month. The report concludes that piracy continues to be a major threat but this presents opportunities as well.

  • Huge Pirate IPTV Crackdown Hits Network Supplying 500,000 Users

    Authorities in Italy say they have dismantled a huge pirate IPTV network that serviced 500,000 subscribers. In addition to searching the homes of 20 suspects believed to have violated copyright law, the operation also identified the administrator of CyberGroup, an internet service provider whose servers were used by several IPTV suppliers.