Kernel Space

• LWN ☛ Linux 5.16.14

  I'm announcing the release of the 5.16.14 kernel.
  
  All users of the 5.16 kernel series must upgrade.
  
  The updated 5.16.y git tree can be found at:
  	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.16.y
  and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
  
  https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
  
  thanks,
  
  greg k-h
  

• LWN ☛ Linux 5.15.28

• LWN ☛ Linux 5.10.105

• LWN ☛ Linux 5.4.184

• LWN ☛ Linux 4.19.234

• LWN ☛ Linux 4.14.271

• LWN ☛ Linux 4.9.306

Applications

• HowTo Geek ☛ 5 Linux Alternatives for Windows PowerToys

  One of Windows’ neatest features is PowerToys, Microsoft’s open-source add-on that lets you tweak your Windows desktop to your heart’s content. Being a Linux user, though, doesn’t mean you have to miss out.

  What’s great about PowerToys is that it’s a one-stop shop for all kinds of improvements, from how you manage window tiling to preventing your PC from going to sleep for a set time to quickly resizing an image without opening a photo editing program. A lot of the features you can find in PowerToys have Linux alternatives, of course. The various Linux distributions are the ultimate in operating system customizability.

  Unlike PowerToys, however, there aren’t many one-stop shops for all those tweaks. To make life easier for former Windows users who’ve converted to Linux, or Linux users looking for a few handy tools, here’s a look at five alternatives to the features built into PowerToys.

• Medevel ☛ KeeWeb is a multiplatform password manager with a full KeePass database support

  KeeWeb is a free, open-source password manager for the desktop and the web. It is originally built by Antelle, a full-stack software developer from the Netherlands.

  KeeWeb is fully packed with useful features which makes it favorable by many active internet users.

  Beyond its desktop support, KeeWeb also works as a web application with full offline support, therefore, users can install it and run it locally or from remote servers.

  Antelle also wrote a useful KDBX (KeePass password file manager) implementation in JavaScript and released it as an open-source.

• Make Use Of ☛ Linux Virtual Consoles Explained: What They Are and How to Access Them

  Apart from the default terminal emulator, Linux has additional command-line interfaces known as virtual consoles.

  On the Linux desktop, you may mainly use the GUI, but what if you could use a mode that was just text?

  With Linux virtual consoles, you can use the computer without graphics to rescue a broken X system or even use it without a GUI entirely.

• Adriaan de Groot ☛ QuatBot 0.3 released [Ed: Well, it needs to be removed from Microsoft proprietary software prison (GitHub) and into KDE instead. Its home is hostile.]

  At Akademy in Milan – I’m pretty sure it was then – I gave a talk about “Managing meeting in Matrix”. Since then I’ve used QuatBot to run over a hundred meetings. Sometimes there’s new features that we realise are useful, so now there’s a 0.3 release.

Instructionals/Technical

• A Simple Way To Open A Port In Ubuntu 21.10

  Ubuntu, which is based on Debian’s design, provides multiple utilities, one of which allows it to open closed ports. Ports allow communication between devices. To perform their tasks, internet-facing services and applications generally listen for ports to connect from the outside. Communication between hosts via the internet is impossible without ports. Some ports are closed by default, and some are closed using a firewall. This article is about opening the ports on Ubuntu systems.

  A virtual point where a network connection begins, and stops is referred to as a port. The operating systems of computers manage ports, which are software-based. Each port is linked to a particular operation or service. Both TCP and UDP networks consist of ports. Some of the common ports are HTTP, FTP, SSSH, and so on.

• A Easy Way To Install FortiClient VPN [ Quick Tip ]

  FortiClient uses SSL and IPSec VPN to provide its customers with safe, efficient, reliable, and fast access to corporate networks and applications from virtually any internet-connected remote machine. FortiClient enhances remote user experience with built-in auto-connect and always-up VPN features.

  In today’s guide, we will show you how to install FortiClient VPN on our machine. We have used Ubuntu 20.04 as our operating system on which we will install the VPN application. Ubuntu is a very popular, efficient, fast, and reliable distribution of Linux. This distro is based on Debian. Due to its focus on user-friendliness and stability, it is widely used by both beginners as well as experts.

  Let’s get started!

• Krita ☛ Third Edition of “Dessin et peinture numérique avec Krita” published! | Krita

  The first edition was written for Krita 2.9.11 in 2016. In this 3rd edition, Timothée has updated all the text and screenshots for the interface of Krita 5.0, and some parts have been entirely rewritten to make good use of new features in Krita 5.

• Video ☛ How to install XeroLinux 2022.03.06 – Invidious

  In this video, I am going to show how to install XeroLinux 2022.03.06.

• Linux Hint ☛ How to Use Postgres Array Literal

  PostgreSQL database provides a facility to use arrays in the tables to store the same type of data in the bulk form. Arrays are the type of data that are used to store values of the same data type. PostgreSQL allows the column to store data by using multidimensional arrays. We have implemented all the examples in the PostgreSQL pgAdmin dashboard. In this tutorial, we have used many functions on the array in the tables of PostgreSQL. These functions include Data insertion in an array. The conversion of an array into the list is also explained.

• H2S Media ☛ How to Install Jupyter Notebook on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04 – Linux Shout

  Tutorial to learn the steps involve in the installation of Jupyter Notebook on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish and 20.04 Focal Fossa using command terminal.

• Linux Hint ☛ Solve Error: “WordPress stuck in maintenance mode”

  This tutorial explains how to repair your WordPress site stuck in maintenance mode.
  This error normally also prevents the administrator from accessing the dashboard. To follow the steps of this tutorial, you need FTP or hosting access to remove the file generating the error.

  All instructions described in this article include screenshots for all users to understand easily.

• Linux Hint ☛ Latex Horizontal Line

  Whenever it concerns composing and structuring a document, LaTeX has a lot of options. It’s extremely beneficial when working with numbers, but it has a lot of other uses as well. The greater complexity comes at a cost when compared to other word processors and typography applications. Yet if you want your text to appear the finest it can, LaTeX is very good enough to justify it. We can accomplish remarkably almost everything you need using LaTeX as far as you’re serious about learning a bit whenever you have to do anything such as create a straight edge.

  Let’s get started with the opening of the terminal shell in Ubuntu first with the shortcut key “Chtrl+Alt+T”.

• Linux Hint ☛ Square Brackets Latex

  Brackets are signs, some of which are usually accustomed group statements or explain the sequence in which actions are to be performed inside an algebraic equation, like as: (simple braces), {curly brackets}, [square brackets], so on and so forth.

  In mathematical formulae, parentheses and braces are particularly prevalent. This article discusses how to alter the style and size of square parentheses in LATEX. Let’s get started now with opening your command shell of the Ubuntu 20.04 Linux system. Use “Ctrl+Alt+T” to do so. After that, you need to open the Latex texmaker for editing and creating the documents. This can be achieved by the terminal shell “texmaker” command on the shell.

• Linux Hint ☛ Postgres where in array

  If you are familiar with object-oriented languages, you may have heard a very well-known concept of Arrays. Arrays are the data structures holding the same type of items or elements together on transmissible memory locations. To get the values from a specific memory location of an array, we must use some conditions in our code. The PostgreSQL database also allows keeping arrays as data in its tables. Getting values from the Arrays in PostgreSQL provides us with the “WHERE” clause to query data. If you are looking for a guide to learn about how to query data from arrays using the WHERE clause, then this guide is meant for you.

• Linux Hint ☛ PostgreSQL Fuzzy Search

  A fuzzy word leads to partial or unclear. This search deals with the result that does not see the accurate or perfect search. The fuzzy search of data in PostgreSQL contains different approaches. Either through extensions or algorithms. But the phenomenon is applied in both ways. This article will contain all possible methods to demonstrate the working and implementation of fuzzy search in PostgreSQL data.

• Linux Hint ☛ Postgres Security Definer

  Within this advanced and automated era of computers and technology, everybody wants to be secured along with their personal information. Same like that, databases are used to store information regarding a lot of things including personal information about people. Due to a lot of information, we also need to take care of our database security to not let anyone make use of it wrongly. Within the PostgreSQL database, we have to use many built-in databases to fetch some records from the tables and database. Just like many of these functions, one is the Security Definer function. As the title suggests that it must be something related to defining the security of the PostgreSQL database. As this concept is unique, complex, and new to most of the PostgreSQL users, we have decided to cover it within a whole new article. So, let’s have a little knowledge about the security definer property of methods now.

• ID Root ☛ How To Install Python on CentOS 9 Stream – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Python on CentOS 9 Stream. For those of you who didn’t know, Python is an interpreted high-level general-purpose programming language. Python is famous for its simple, easy-to-learn syntax, emphasizes readability, and reduces program maintenance costs and more straightforward conversion to newer releases.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Python Programming Language on CentOS 9 Stream.

• HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install MinIO Object Storage Server on Debian 11

  Minio is a popular open-source, self-hosted, Amazon S3 compatible object storage server written in Go. It is a very useful alternative to AWS S3 if you need more control over your object storage server. It allows us to store photos, videos, log files, backups, and container/VM images. It provides a command-line client, a browser interface and also supports AMQP. You can use Minio in large-scale deployment for continuous data replication.

  In this article, I will show you how to install the Minio server on Debian 11.

• Make Use Of ☛ How to Prevent Packages From Getting Updated in Arch Linux

  Is a package acting up after a system update on your Arch machine? Perhaps you installed the latest version of the Linux kernel but can’t get your computer to boot after. Whatever the reason is, it’s always a good idea to prevent stable packages to upgrade to their latest unstable versions.

  Pacman, the default package manager on Arch-based distros, allows you to ignore a package upgrade by simply editing the pacman.conf file. This article is all about preventing specific packages from getting upgraded on Arch Linux, both permanently and temporarily.

• Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install FNF PsychEngine 0.5.2h on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install FNF PsychEngine 0.5.2h 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.

  This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.

• Trend Oceans ☛ How to install the Latest Deluge BitTorrent Client on Linux – TREND OCEANS

  Deluge is a fully-featured cross-platform BitTorrent client which is written in Python3 with the GTK toolkit for graphical interface and depends on libtorrent-rasterbar for the BitTorrent protocols.

  It has been designed to be as simple as easy-to-use as possible. Its interface consists of a single pane of minimized windows containing an input box, a file list, a status bar, time, and a URL.

• How to Deploy a Caddy Web Server With Docker – CloudSavvy IT

  Caddy is a popular modern web server engineered for high performance and memory safety. It’s written in Go, runs with no dependencies, features built-in support for static site rendering with Markdown, and offers automatic HTTPS.

  Caddy’s focused on providing a simple server management experience that gives you useful functionality by default. It can be easier to configure and maintain than rival systems such as Apache and NGINX. In this article, we’ll show how to get your own server running with minimal set up by using Docker with the official Caddy image.

• What Is Pod Affinity and Anti-Affinity In Kubernetes? – CloudSavvy IT

  Kubernetes is a distributed system that’s designed to scale replicas of your services across multiple physical environments. In many cases this works well out-of-the-box. The Kubernetes scheduler automatically places your Pods (container instances) onto Nodes (worker machines) that have enough resources to support them.

  Despite its best efforts, sometimes the scheduler won’t select a plan you agree with. You might want Pods to be colocated if they’ll be regularly communicating over the network; alternatively, some compute-intensive Pods might be best allocated to separate Nodes wherever possible.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Swift on Fedora 36 Linux – LinuxCapable

  Swift, often referred to as “Objective-C, without the C,” is an open-source programming language developed and maintained by Apple. Swift is a general-purpose programming language built using modern safety, performance, and software design patterns. The Swift project aims to create the best available language for systems programming to mobile and desktop apps, scaling up to cloud services.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Swift Programming Language on your Fedora 36 workstation or server along with connecting to the terminal instance, maintaining and, if need be, removing Swift from your Fedora system.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install RPM Fusion on Fedora 36 Linux – LinuxCapable

  RPM Fusion is a repository of add-on packages for Fedora and EL+EPEL that a group of community volunteers maintains. RPM Fusion is not a standalone repository but an extension of Fedora’s default packages that could not be included due to Fedora being bound by the same legal restrictions as Red Hat.

  The RPM Fusion repository comes in two flavors, Free and Non-Free. The free repository contains a free version of the software that is open source and non-free, which have mostly almost all free software but are closed source and mainly proprietary.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install RPM Fusion on your Fedora 36 workstation or server to install additional open-source or proprietary packages, along with examples of using RPM in the command line terminal.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Google Chrome on Fedora 36 Linux – LinuxCapable

  Most web users need no introduction to Google Chrome as it is the most used Internet Browser software globally, with a recent update in 2022 that Chrome is currently the primary browser of more than 2.65 billion internet users and is why most websites’ code now target it first before any other browser.

  Chrome is designed to be sleek and clean in its looks and features and especially at loading website pages as it used to claim to be the fastest of all the browsers, but that is now a considerable debate with Edge leading the charge and many others have caught up, the browser competition has increased recently.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Google Chrome in three ways in stable, beta, or unstable versions on Fedora 36 Linux workstation desktop and how to maintain and remove using the command line terminal.

• Linux Handbook ☛ How to Monitor SSL/TLS Certificates with Checkmk

  It doesn’t matter if you run an online shop, a company website, or a travel blog: You need to trust that a website is safe to use and visit. Thus, HTTPS has become a standard for the world wide web and if your website is not secure, most browsers will block access to it, and your SEO ranking will also suffer. An important task for any web server administrator is therefore to manage SSL/TLS certificates and update them before they expire.

  In this tutorial, I want to show you how to use Checkmk, the monitoring tool from tribe29, for monitoring your SSL/TLS certificates. Checkmk keeps an eye on your certificates and lets you know when you should replace them. Using a monitoring tool is a lot more reliable than just using Excel sheets or other mechanisms, allowing you to focus on other things.

  This tutorial works for any kind of website and web server application. Admin access to the web server is not required, because I am using an active HTTPS check. You do need a Checkmk site up and running and the host for the monitoring site needs a working internet connection. You can follow this tutorial on how to get started with Checkmk.

• Red Hat Official ☛ How Podman can transfer container images without a registry | Enable Sysadmin

  Here’s a complete step by step guide to set up SSL certificate monitoring with open source tool Checkmk.

• How to install windows applications in Zorin OS – Real Linux User

  Even though there are tens of thousands of great applications available natively for Linux, and Zorin OS also provides a very friendly way for users to search and install all this beautiful software by integrating package support for both .deb, Appimage, Flatpak, and Snap, it is still possible you may not be able to find an alternative for a very specific Windows application that you used before on your Windows machine. But the great thing is that you can install a lot of Windows applications easily in Zorin OS. This article as part of the Zorin OS tutorial series explains how to install windows applications in Zorin OS.

• Medium ☛ mtime, ctime and atime in Linux: What’s the Difference

  Many Linux operations are based on timestamps of files. For example, when you need to delete some old log files of a Linux server, you must pick the files based on correct timestamps to avoid deleting something unexpectedly.

• Linux Hint ☛ How do I create a multi-user site in WordPress?

  This tutorial explains how to create a Multi-User site in WordPress.

  A MultiSite allows you to create different sites and manage them from a unique dashboard. This is useful, for example, if you want a development environment or if you want to create different sites for each language. For example, you can create an English (left to right) site in your root domain or under the /en subdirectory and a different right to left (Hebrew or Arabic) site under /il or /sa subdirectories. Additionally to subdirectories, the MultiSite feature also allows you to create sites under subdomains.

  All steps described in this tutorial include screenshots, making it easy for all WordPress to apply them.

Wine or Emulation

• Linux Links ☛ Emulate the MSX home computer with Linux – LinuxLinks

  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.

  Back in the 1980s, home computers came to the forefront of teenagers’ minds. Specifically, the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Atari ST were extremely popular. They were hugely popular home computers targeted heavily towards games, but they also ran other types of software.

  The MSX was launched in October 1983. At the heart of the machine was the Zilog Z80 CPU running at 3.58 MHz with 8-512KB of RAM. The Z80 was, of course, used in popular home computers such as the Sinclair ZX81, ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC. In the graphics department, the MSX employed the Texas Instruments TMS9918 graphics chip with 16KB of RAM, and sound was provided by the AY-3-8910 chip. The MSX incorporated a high quality keyboard instead of a chiclet keyboard.

Games

• Boiling Steam ☛ 1300 Games On The Steam Deck, Including Hitman 2 as Verified – Boiling Steam

  There are now close to 1300 games working on the Steam Deck – (1296 at the time of writing but this will change hour after hour) in two categories as usual…

• Boiling Steam ☛ So, How Smooth was the Steam Deck Launch? – Boiling Steam

  So it’s been about two weeks since the Steam Deck launched and reached the hands of the first gamers, besides official reviewers. Remember the Steam Machines? Well that did not go too well. Is this time different? How smooth was the whole thing? Did Valve do well? Let’s look at a couple of metrics together.

• Gizmodo ☛ Google Stadia Could Soon Find a Savior in Windows Games [Ed: Well, this is misleading because the games run on GNU/Linux with something like WINE; the title has been changed since]

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Thoroughly odd sounding free adventure Mondealy: Day One arrives on Linux | GamingOnLinux

  Mondealy: Day One from developer uglycoal seems pretty quirky and it’s also free, although something of a prologue / demo for an upcoming bigger game.

• Video ☛ Windows 10 on Steam Deck – Invidious

• Video ☛ Is Valve winning the Revenue Split fight that Epic started? – Invidious

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Heroic Games Launcher now on Flathub, even easier to run Epic Games on Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

  Heroic Games Launcher, the community-made open source app for the Epic Games Store, is now available as a Flatpak on Flathub making it even easier to install and setup on Linux and Steam Deck.

  Work that had been ongoing for a while, with multiple upgrades and tweaks needed to get there. Initially it had a problem finding Proton and Wine versions installed that I spoke with the developer of Heroic on today and now it’s solved. Thanks to this, it makes getting both Epic Games and GOG onto the Steam Deck and Linux desktops just a few button clicks away.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Space Crew: Legendary Edition gets Steam Deck fixes, noted as Playable | GamingOnLinux

  Space Crew: Legendary Edition is another game that has been updated for the Steam Deck, with official verification noting it as Playable.

  Deck Verified for this title was done a while ago, so with these fixes it should be upgraded to Verified as the notes from Valve talked about the Launcher and Text Input. The release notes are clear that the developer solved both issues with the virtual keyboard now automatic and launcher features now directly in the game. Nice to see another developer act to improve their game!

• Ubuntu Pit ☛ 5 Best Adventure Games for Linux Desktop: Try When You Are Bored

  You can be either a racing game fan or just love the fighting games. But you can never deny your attraction to adventure games. To be specific, adventure games are like a complete package where you can explore the new land, fight the unknown, and run over the forest and mountains. So, you will feel the excitement of different games in just one. However, today’s discussion will follow the best-ever adventure games for Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Xfce accepted to Google Summer of Code 2022

  Good news, Xfce has been accepted to Google Summer of Code 2022 !

  This time not only different thunar projects will be mentored, but as well some xfce4-terminal, xfce4-screenshooter and xfce4-panel projects. Check our Xfce GSoC Wiki for a detailed list of project ideas !

  If you are not much involved into Xfce yet and interested in software development, now might be a good opportunity to contribute to Xfce while even getting payed for it !

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • My geek stuff blog: Maps and GNOME 42

    The release of GNOME 42 (and the Maps release accomplishing it) is due in a little over a week.

    I have already covered some of the more visible updates for Maps 42.0 in the last update, such as the development profile (allowing to run directly from GNOME Builder, or install “nightly” Flatpak builds, and be able to run them in parallel with a stable release (distinguished by it’s icon overlay and headerbar styling).

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Desktop Cube GNOME Extension Now Supports Background Panoramas

    Fresh off implementing drag-on-desktop-to-rotate — a workflow behaviour I lived and breathed in the early 2010s — the latest update adds another Compiz-inspired feature: “skyboxes”. These are background panoramas that replace the image behind the workspace switcher in GNOME 40 (and above), and move in motion with it.

    The result is an immersive, 360°-esque stage to spin your workspace in…

Distributions

• Help Net Security ☛ Kali Linux on bare-metal gets snapshotting functionality – Help Net Security

  The Offensive Security team has released Kali Unkaputtbar, a new feature that allows Kali Linux installed on bare-metal to make system snapshots automatically, thus enabling users to roll back to a previous system state after a botched upgrade.

• New Releases

  • Linuxiac ☛ Zorin OS 16.1 Released with Better Hardware Compatibility

    Zorin OS 16.1 is the latest stable version of this distro, which comes with updated apps and even better hardware support.

    Zorin OS is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that tries to make life easier for new Linux users. It has a beautiful user interface and includes many well-known productivity tools. This makes it an excellent alternative for both novice users and those looking for a Linux distro that just works.

    One of Zorin’s best features is its one-of-a-kind approach to managing the App ecosystem. It is likely the only Linux desktop distribution that has a Software Store that allows users to search for and install software from Flathub, Snap Store, AppImage, and the Ubuntu/Own repo right out of the box.

• BSD

  • FreeBSD ☛ FreeBSD 13.1-BETA1 Now Available

    The first BETA build of the 13.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
    
    Installation images are available for:
    o 13.1-BETA1 amd64 GENERIC
    o 13.1-BETA1 i386 GENERIC
    o 13.1-BETA1 powerpc GENERIC
    o 13.1-BETA1 powerpc64 GENERIC64
    o 13.1-BETA1 powerpc64le GENERIC64LE
    o 13.1-BETA1 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE
    o 13.1-BETA1 armv6 RPI-B
    o 13.1-BETA1 armv7 GENERICSD
    o 13.1-BETA1 aarch64 RPI
    o 13.1-BETA1 aarch64 PINE64
    o 13.1-BETA1 aarch64 PINE64-LTS
    o 13.1-BETA1 aarch64 PINEBOOK
    o 13.1-BETA1 aarch64 ROCK64
    o 13.1-BETA1 aarch64 ROCKPRO64
    o 13.1-BETA1 riscv64 GENERIC
    o 13.1-BETA1 riscv64 GENERICSD
    
    Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without
    console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of
    freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access.  Additionally,
    the root user password is set to root.  It is strongly recommended
    to change the password for both users after gaining access to the
    system.
    
    Also note, 13.1-BETA1 arm64/aarch64 ISOs, memstick images, and virtual
    machine images are unavailable due to a build failure that had already
    been investigated and corrected, and should be available for 13.1-BETA2.
    
    Installer images and memory stick images are available here:
    
    https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.1/
    
    The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.
    
    If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR
    system or on the -stable mailing list.
    
    If you would like to use Git to do a source based update of an existing
    system, use the "releng/13.1" branch.
    
    A list of changes since 13.0-RELEASE is available in the releng/13.1
    release notes:
    
    https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.1R/relnotes/
    
    Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be
    updated on an ongoing basis as the 13.1-RELEASE cycle progresses.
    
    === Virtual Machine Disk Images ===
    
    VM disk images are available for the amd64 and i386 architectures.
    Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL (or any of the
    FreeBSD download mirrors):
    
    https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/13.1-BETA1/
    
    BASIC-CI images can be found at:
    
    https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/CI-IMAGES/13.1-BETA1/
    
    The partition layout is:
    
        ~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)
        ~ 1 GB  - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)
        ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)
    
    The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image
    formats.  The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB
    respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.
    
    === Amazon EC2 AMI Images ===
    
    FreeBSD/amd64 EC2 AMIs are available in the following regions:
    
      af-south-1 region: ami-042845bca9cf4a038
      eu-north-1 region: ami-0f41f2a356b859a33
      ap-south-1 region: ami-03b33bf9670871e94
      eu-west-3 region: ami-008bbfa003d8efbbe
      eu-west-2 region: ami-0cae8002de3b52924
      eu-south-1 region: ami-0de82949c2aeeb95d
      eu-west-1 region: ami-07a77eee1b8fcf059
      ap-northeast-3 region: ami-0b7bf2e9d95b46a9a
      ap-northeast-2 region: ami-0ca4497b11d7d6fd9
      me-south-1 region: ami-0a57b28c5ee978bb5
      ap-northeast-1 region: ami-06e3e7cafd4d4a73d
      sa-east-1 region: ami-0efce5dfb9707edde
      ca-central-1 region: ami-058a71a18c00356fa
      ap-east-1 region: ami-09743d245f8cdd8cd
      ap-southeast-1 region: ami-007b663a044c85a04
      ap-southeast-2 region: ami-03934c1880860ba93
      eu-central-1 region: ami-0e7e674f3cf05287a
      ap-southeast-3 region: ami-0bc3f21dbd110ae6c
      us-east-1 region: ami-0bc47047fc0e759c1
      us-east-2 region: ami-0b3c1d3ddd126bb30
      us-west-1 region: ami-03fbc5aba0f652602
      us-west-2 region: ami-0c1601077dd94a984
    
    These AMI IDs can be retrieved from the Systems Manager Parameter Store
    in each region using the keys:
    
    	/aws/service/freebsd/amd64/base/ufs/14.0/CURRENT
    
    Amazon EC2 aarch64 AMI images are not available for this snapshot.
    
    

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/10

    Over here, the weather is getting better by the day, spring is around the corner. But the Tumbleweed developers seem not to care that much, as we managed to release a full 7 snapshots in the last week (0303…0309).

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ IT leadership: 4 ways to boost your emotional intelligence

    Whether you’re a CEO or team manager, you have likely learned that directing others and contributing to the success of a company as a leader is no easy feat. Businesses have their ups and downs, and leaders can feel added pressure as people look to them for advice and direction.

    Yet this is what makes being a leader special – diving headfirst into challenges and successes with your team. When your business is growing, you’re also growing – facing personal challenges and successes.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ IT leadership: 5 ways you could be wasting your team’s talent

    Enterprises throughout the world are facing a serious shortage of IT talent. According to a September 2021 survey from Gartner, IT executives cited talent availability as the main adoption risk factor for 75 percent of IT automation technologies. In a broad range of organizations, there aren’t enough qualified employees to deploy new technologies or keep existing systems running efficiently.

    In a world with too many open IT positions and not enough candidates to fill them, there is little margin for error as enterprises seek to make the most out of the talent they do have. With the right combination of automation and efficient workflows, IT teams can do more with less and keep operations running smoothly until more talent enters the workforce.

    But in spite of this goal, many organizations fail to make the most out of their IT talent due to a combination of large and small inefficiencies.

  • Fedora Community Blog: CPE Weekly Update – Week of March 07th – 11th

    This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat (https://libera.chat/).

• Debian Family

  • Having trouble with Sparky? Go to our forums!

    For a while someone has been trying hard to discredit SparkyLinux on Distrowatch, writing (user’s review) that there is a problem with the EFI and so, making Sparky useless in his opinion. I understand that not everyone likes SparkyLinux and it doesn’t work well on every machine, but if you are using SparkyLinux and have a problem, post it on SparkyLinux Forum – I’ll be happy to help you as much as I can.

  • FOSS Activites in February 2022 · utkarsh2102

    This was my 38th month of actively contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas ‘19! \o/

    I had been sick this month, so most of the time I spent away from system, recovering, et al, and also went through the huge backlog that I had, which is starting to get smaller.

  • FOSS Activites in January 2022 · utkarsh2102

    Here’s my (twenty-eighth) monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Devices/Embedded

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Cluster-focused SBC features octa-core RK3588

  Mixtile’s stackable, $160-and-up “Blade 3” Pico-ITX SBC runs Android with a Linux container on an RK3588. Specs include up to 32GB LPDDR4 and 256GB eMMC plus 2x 2.5GbE, 8K-ready HDMI 2.1, 2x Type-C with DP, 40-pin GPIO, mini-PCIe, and a U.2 link with SATA III and PCIe Gen3 x4.

  Mixtile’s Mixtile Blade 3, which is on pre-order for $160 to $259, features Rockchip’s octa-core -A76 and -A55 RK3588 SoC. The Pico-ITX board can be used as a standalone SBC, but it is primarily designed to link up to other stacked Blade 3 boards in a cluster configuration via its PCIe Gen3 x4 edge connector. The result is a “high-performance computing” platform “with a low carbon footprint,” says Mixtile.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • XDA ☛ Android 12L fixes Widevine bug on affected Pixel phones

  • Android Police ☛ With Android 12L, Google wants developers to think tablet-first, not mobile-first

  • TechRadar ☛ This Android tablet has a tiny feature I’d love the iPad Pro or Galaxy Tab to get | TechRadar

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Turn Your Old Android Phone into a Home Monitoring System

  • Android Police ☛ How to set custom notification vibration patterns on your Android phone

  • Business Insider ☛ How to Set up Call Forwarding on an Android Phone

  • Android gets new features: Google makes your smartphone better | NextPit

  • India Times ☛ google: Google makes it easier for Android users to share files with multiple devices at once – Times of India

  • TechTarget ☛ Google improves Android message management

  • Android Central ☛ Samsung’s four-year-old Galaxy S9 is getting the March 2022 Android security patch | Android Central

  • Phone Arena ☛ Seven years old Fairphone 2 gets new Android update, leaving competitors in the dust – PhoneArena

  • 9to5Google ☛ Best Android launchers to use on your phone in 2022 [Video] – 9to5Google

  • Forbes ☛ Android Circuit: Galaxy Z Fold 4 Leaks, RealMe 9 5G Review, Impressive Pixel 6a Details

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• How members will vote for OSI directors [Ed: The OSI can do elections, at long last?]

  With the list of candidates announced for the March 2022 election, it’s time to talk about how the elections will work. This year we’ll use a “ranked choice” vote to select both Individual and Affiliate directors. Voters will receive an email with a unique link and simple instructions: go to a website, sort the candidate list in order of personal preferences, click “Vote”.

• Programming/Development

  • The most wonderful discovery: GB Studio

    I am not entirely sure how I stumbled onto this open source project. It all seems like a blur. The project name is GB Studio and it is a more user-friendly IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that allows game creators to create Gameboy and Gameboy Color games that can be exported into a ROM (to load into an emulator), flashed onto a game cartridge (with the write tools), or to HTML5 (to work on mobile devices).

  • #34 No Backup No Mercy · This Week in GNOME

    Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 04 to March 11.

  • Firefox Nightly: These Weeks In Firefox: Issue 111

  • SpiderMonkey Newsletter (Firefox 98-99) | SpiderMonkey JavaScript/WebAssembly Engine

    SpiderMonkey is the JavaScript engine used in Mozilla Firefox. This newsletter gives an overview of the JavaScript and WebAssembly work we’ve done as part of the Firefox 98 and 99 Nightly release cycles.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Use the unique Function in MATLAB

    The following article explains how to use the unique function in MATLAB®. This function will sort the elements of an array and remove duplicate values.
    Its main characteristics and different modes of use will also be detailed in this document.

    This tutorial includes practical examples, some of the most common errors, their corresponding error messages, and fixing them to make programming easier.

  • Qt ☛ Qt Creator 7 RC released

    We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 7 RC!

  • How to Use ECMAScript Modules With Node.js – CloudSavvy IT

    A standardized way to package code as reusable modules was missing from ECMAScript for most of its history. In the absence of an integrated solution, the CommonJS (CJS) approach became the de facto standard for Node.js development.

  • Scala

    • Linux Hint ☛ Scala Futures

      At times, while performing complex calculations, we expect our programs to perform different tasks concurrently for having a better speed and efficiency. This concept plays a vital role especially when we do not want the time-consuming tasks to block our entire processing. In the Scala programming language, the functionality of threads can be achieved by making use of Scala Futures and we will learn more about them in this article.

    • Linux Hint ☛ Scala Write to File

      There is a time when we need to put information into a file, and at the same time, we want to retrieve data from that file. But Scala doesn’t have any feature of writing to file. We have to import the Java.io package from the Java library to write in a file.

    • Linux Hint ☛ Scala REPL

      By now, you would be well-aware of using the different functions of the Scala programming language. You have learned to create Scala scripts and execute them through Ubuntu 20.04 terminal. However, the Scala programming language also has a command-line interpreter shell known as REPL. You can create small Scala programs and execute them directly while staying within this shell using this shell. REPL stands for Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop. Whichever Scala expression you try to execute within this shell is first read by REPL, then it is converted into an executable template. Finally, its result is computed by REPL and displayed on the shell. In this guide, we will explicate to you how you can use Scala REPL in Ubuntu 20.04.

  • Python

    • Linux Hint ☛ NumPy Astype

      To modify the data type of a NumPy array, use the astype(data type) method. It is a popular function in Python used to modify the dtype of the NumPy array we’ve been provided with. We’ll use the numpy.astype() function to modify the dtype of the specified array object. The target data type, in this case, is crucial to be passed as an argument to the calling function. All generic and built-in data types are supported by the function. The astype function is explained in detail with numerous examples below.

    • Linux Hint ☛ NumPy Pad

      The NumPy pad() will be covered in this article. We will also take a look at its syntax and arguments for better overall knowledge. Then, using a few examples, we’ll show how all of the theory elements are put into practice. But first, let’s look at the function’s definition to acquire a better understanding of it.

  • Rust

    • Rust Compiler March 2022 Steering Cycle

      On Friday, March 11th, the Rust Compiler team had a planning meeting for the March steering cycle.

      Every fourth Friday, the Rust compiler team decides how it is going to use its scheduled steering and design meeting time over the next three Fridays.

      On Friday, 18 March, we will be having a “backlog bonanza”, in a similar vein to that done by T-lang, to review the list of unimplemented or partially-implemented features. pnkfelix and Jack Huey will prepare a document to drive the meeting.

    • Linux Hint ☛ Rust Static String

      A static variable refers to a type of variable that has a fixed memory location. They are similar to constant variables except they represent a memory location in the program.

      Static variables in rust can have a destructor but that destructor is never run as they have a static lifetime. This means that they never run out of scope in the entire lifetime of the program in which they are declared.

Hardware

• CubicleNate ☛ New Commodore 64 Keycaps

  I really enjoy all the work that has been done in keeping the Commodore 64 going. In many ways, it is better cared for by the retro computing community than it ever was by Commodore itself when it was their bread and butter. Looking at all of these projects that exist today, we can actually be happy about Commodore’s mismanagement of their intellectual property. Too bad those at the top never really knew what they had. The good thing is, the heart of the community keeps this platform alive. It will likely be the study of anthropologists in the future.

  I am very excited for RetroKeyCaps.com to deliver these keycaps to us. My fingers are crossed and I am hopefully they will be available soon. I will be watching and preparing to build my own, new, specially tailored, unique to me Commodore 64.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • The New Stack ☛ The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Stack for EV Charging Infrastructure [Ed: The flailing 'Linux' Foundation is corrupting the Web and paying so-called publishers to write puff pieces: "The Linux Foundation is a sponsor of The New Stack."]

  • Security

    • LWN ☛ Security updates for Friday [LWN.net]

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (nbd, ruby-sidekiq, tryton-proteus, and tryton-server), Mageia (shapelib and thunderbird), openSUSE (minidlna, python-libxml2-python, python-lxml, and thunderbird), Oracle (kernel, kernel-container, and python-pip), Red Hat (.NET 5.0, .NET 6.0, .NET Core 3.1, firefox, kernel, and kernel-rt), Scientific Linux (firefox), SUSE (openssh, python-libxml2-python, python-lxml, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (expat vulnerabilities and, firefox, and subversion).

    • Red Hat Official ☛ Improve your hybrid cloud security with these 3 tips [Ed: 'Clown' computing is itself a security breach; you've lost control of your data]

      It goes without saying that no matter where you are in your hybrid cloud journey, security is a primary concern. In this post, we’ll look at improving your hybrid cloud security to try to avoid data breaches.

    • Engadget ☛ Samsung confirms hackers compromised its systems and stole Galaxy source code

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

      • This Week in IT – Linux Gets Its Pipes Dirty [Ed: Microsoft boosters amplify this, as it helps deflect from Microsoft]

        This week in IT, all Linux distributions are affected by a serious security flaw, called Dirty Pipe, that can completely destroy systems. Google buys cybersecurity specialist Mandiant, swiping it from underneath Microsoft’s nose. Apple unveils its new all-powerful M1 Ultra chip. And Microsoft makes it easier for startups to participate in its Founders Hub program.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Bloomberg ☛ Biden Needs to Protect Russian Internet Access, Groups Warn

• Public Knowledge ☛ Greg Guice To Testify Before FCC on Broadband Consumer Labels – Public Knowledge

  Public Knowledge Government Affairs Director Greg Guice will testify before the Federal Communications Commission Friday, March 11 at 1:30 p.m. His testimony in the hearing on “Broadband Consumer Labels” will argue that both transparency and a straightforward, consistent explanation of what consumers are signing up for are critical to helping consumers comparison shop and make informed decisions about their broadband service.

Its FOSS ☛ Linux and Open Source Companies Stopping Their Services in Russia

With Russia’s attack on Ukraine, various things have been affected economically and geopolitically.

While we do not discuss anything about the war here, the victims of war need support to survive. Many organizations and individuals have come forward to join humanitarian causes to support the Ukrainian people.

Even the Zorin OS creators announced to donate all their recent profits to help the cause.

Applications

• SecureDrop 2.2.1 Released

  SecureDrop Application and Monitor Servers will be updated to SecureDrop 2.2.1 automatically within 24 hours of the release. As with previous releases, we recommend that you update your Tails workstations to the latest version of Tails and the latest version of SecureDrop. Please see our upgrade guide for instructions.

• mintBackup – A Simple Backup and Restore Tool for Linux Mint

  mintBackup is a simple and easy-to-use personal data backup and restore tool for Linux Mint, which offers features such as selecting the directory to store your backup file, excluding files and directories, and selecting hidden files and directories. It also supports saving a list of applications installed on your system.

  mintBackup comes preinstalled on Linux Mint, to open it, simply search for the “backup”, in the system menu and click on the application called Backup Tool.

Instructionals/Technical

• UNIX Cop ☛ How to use “Yum history” to find out installed or remove packages – Unix / Linux the admins Tutorials

  Hello, friends. Yum is one of the most important package managers out there because of things like Yum history. So, we will use yum history to find out package information about installed or uninstalled packages on the system. In addition to this, yum history is used to verify transactions that have been made with this program.

• How to install RevealJS on Ubuntu 20.04 / Debian 11?

  Creating presentations for educational or work presentations was always monopolized by proprietary tools. However, thanks to CSS/HTML we now have other more flexible tools. That’s why, in this post, you will learn how to install RevealJS on Ubuntu 20.04 / Debian 11.

• How To Run Linux Commands In background : Run Process In background

  In this tutorial post, we will show you the method to run processes in the background. After this article, you will learn to Start a Linux Process or Command in Background.

• [Fixed] “Temporary Failure In Name Resolution” Issue | Itsubuntu.com

  Are you having an issue or getting the error message ‘temporary failure in name resolution’ on your terminal while trying to ping a website or while trying to update a system or apps in Linux then you are at the right place as we will show you the solution for this error.

• Linux Hint ☛ How to Install LibreNMS on Ubuntu

  Libre has managed to climb the ranks in recent years and is now notorious for its various software. It offers its very own word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation maker, database tool alongside several others aimed at making the life of the daily user more efficient.

• Linux Hint ☛ How to turn off breadcrumbs in WordPress

  This brief tutorial explains how to turn off breadcrumbs in WordPress based on different theme scenarios.
  Breadcrumbs are visible links showing the hierarchical structure of your site based on the current content the visitor is reading.

  After reading this tutorial, you will know how to disable breadcrumbs on your website. All steps in this article include screenshots, making it easy for all WordPress users to follow them.

• Trend Oceans ☛ How to Install the latest qBittorrent on Linux

  qBittorrent is an open-source peer-to-peer Bittorrent client which is available for all platforms: Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, and OS/2. You can use this as an alternative to µTorrent.

Games

• Bundle for Ukraine

  Over 700 creators have joined in support to donate their work. All proceeds from this bundle will be split between the following charities: [...]

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Proton Experimental fixes Apex Legends, Xbox login and more for Linux and Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

  Proton compatibility with Windows games is going to be an ongoing improvement for many years, and Proton Experimental is where all the latest comes in first for Linux and Steam Deck.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Even Xbox Game Studios are talking about Steam Deck compatibility [Ed: Microsoft moving in to attack Linux again]

  Yes, even a fair few games that Microsoft / Xbox publish will work out of the box on the Steam Deck. As Xbox Game Studios announced in a post on Steam, it shows just how much of a shift the Steam Deck is causing for Linux gaming as a whole to have them talk about it.

• Boiling Steam ☛ Valve Releases Windows Drivers For the Steam Deck

  If you believed that Valve was going to stop at supporting only SteamOS on the Steam Deck, well you might want to revise your opinion. They have just released some (but not all) drivers to make it easier to support Windows on the Steam Deck.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Barry Kauler ☛ JWMDesk 3.5 coming soon

  Roger (radky in the forum) is working on JWMDesk 3.5, with new features and compatibility with EasyOS 3.4.1+. Roger has designed JWMDesk to work in most pup derivatives, which is a formidable task, and I take my hat off to him for doing it.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • DietPi Released a New Version 8.2

    The March 5th 2022 release of DietPi v8.2 comes together with a new image for UTM, Proxmox, VMware ESXi, Odroid C4, some improvements to Roon software packages, Docker, Chromium, Deluge and a number of enhancements and bug fixes for several software install options.

• BSD

  • Optimizing FreeBSD Power Consumption on Modern Intel Laptops

    My current FreeBSD laptop is a 2020 14″ HP Spectre x360, which uses Intel’s 11th Gen CPU and “Evo” platform, although I previously also had the 13″ 2020 version with a similar setup (but lacked working audio on non-Windows). This article isn’t specific to HP: your shiny-new Lenovo ThinkPad, Dell XPS, or Framework Laptop can also apply.

    One thing with FreeBSD is that unlike Windows or desktop Linux, the default configuration is poorly optimized for laptops that are newer than your ancient ThinkPad T420, or maybe a T460s.

    Having run FreeBSD on TigerLake on-and-off since December 2020 on two laptops, there are a few things to keep in mind. These are: [...]

  • Undeadly ☛ mtw(4), a driver for MediaTek MT7601U Wi-Fi devices

    The firmware is available via fw_update(8).

  • Mailing list ARChives ☛ initial iwx(4) 11ac patch for testing

    This patch adds initial 11ac support to the iwx(4) driver. This means that 80MHz channels can be used. No other 11ac features are enabled yet.

    This is not yet a patch which could be committed. Apart from debug prints which need to go, there is a known issue found by dv@ where this patch causes a firmware error, sysassert 0x20101A25. The reason for this is not known. It would help to get more testing to see if more clues can be found based on where this error pops up. I cannot reproduce the error myself.

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo ☛ Gentoo accepted into Google Summer of Code 2022

    Do you want to learn more about Gentoo and contribute to your favourite free software project?! Once again, now for the 10th time, we have been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year’s Google Summer of Code!

    The GSoC is an excellent opportunity for gaining real-world experience in software design and making oneself known in the broader open source community. It also looks great on a resume. Some initial project ideas can be found here, but new projects ideas are also welcome. For new projects time is of the essence: they have to be worked out, discussed with the mentors, and submitted before the April 19th deadline. It is strongly recommended that contributors refine new project ideas with a mentor before proposing the idea formally.

• Debian Family

  • Elive 3.8.26 beta released

    The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 3.8.26

    This is probably the last version that we release based on Buster in order to move to Bullseye, so we wanted to release a last very stable and featured version first! If you want to manually upgrade to bullseye you can already do it following this small howto

  • Lars Wirzenius ☛ v-i 0.1, a Debian installer using vmdb2

    I’ve published release 0.1 of v-i, my installer for Debian based on vmdb2. It’s entirely non-interactive, dangerous, unhelpful, but fairly fast. It will remove all data from your drives. See the initital announcement for more, or the README. There is now a pre-built image available, see the tutorial.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Zorin OS 16.1 is Now Available to Download

    Zorin OS 16.1 is now available to download.

    As the first point release issued since the release of Zorin OS 16 back in august of last year Zorin OS 16.1 is “packed with improvements to help users work better, updates to apps and system-level software, and support for new hardware.”

    Chief among the updates is LibreOffice 7.3. This is the latest version of the popular open source office suite and it boasts improved compatibility with and faster opening of Microsoft Office files, a better dark mode, and a slate of smaller tweaks aimed at improving functionality and performance.

  • Zorin OS 16.1 Brings Much Needed Stability and Improvements

    Zorin OS 16.1 was released with security patches, new software and the team aims for a better cause.

    Zorin OS is popular because it gives the perfect starting point for Windows users in their Linux journey. Thanks to its simple design, elegant selection of packages and out of the box Windows looks, it’s one of the popular and sought after Linux Distribution today for all users.

    Coming after almost two months since Zorin OS 16, this first point release is now available for download and upgrades for those who are already running the 16.0 version.

Devices/Embedded

• CNX Software ☛ Pockit modular Linux computer gets a Raspberry Pi CM4 upgrade

  We first wrote about the Pockit modular Linux computer with hot-plugging magnetic blocks about a year ago. The system was based on a STM32+ESP32 mainboard with a socket for an optional Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 and included magnets and electrical contacts to snap and hot-plug modules/blocks while the computer is running.

  The developer (Anil Reddy) has made good progress with the project and added the option to use a Raspberry Pi CM4 with Pockit (provided you can find one) to improve performance, for example for computer vision. Other changes include support for AI accelerators, an improved dashboard, home automation integration, and more.

• CNX Software ☛ Lanner IIoT-I530 machine vision industrial PC comes with 6x PoE+ ports, dual 2.5GbE – CNX Software

  Lanner IIoT-I530 is a fanless machine vision IPC (Industrial PC) powered by a choice of Intel Tiger Lake UP3 processors and equipped with six PoE+ or LAN ports for IP cameras, as well as two 2.5GbE ports.

  The embedded computer also comes with up to 64GB DDR4 RAM, two COM Ports, four USB 3.0 ports, dual HDMI output, digital inputs and outputs, as well as M.2 sockets for WiFi 6 or/and 5G connectivity, plus NVMe SSD storage.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Hackaday ☛ Fumik: An Arduino Wall Drawing Robot Jellyfish

    If you’ve ever wanted to build a large format plotter but didn’t have the floor space, maybe put it up against the wall and make it cute. That’s the idea behind Fumik, the wall-drawing robot. As you might expect, the little device is just a motion base with a pen. We hope there’s paper against the wall since not everyone wants computer-generated art on their drywall.

  • How I run my blog on a Raspberry Pi | Opensource.com

    Like a lot of folks who enjoy tinkering with technology, I now have a small but growing collection of Raspberry Pi boxes around my house. I’ve used them for various projects: A PiHole network ad blocker, an OctoPi 3D print server, and a Minecraft server, among others.

    However, the most custom project I’ve done is setting up a Raspberry Pi to act as a web server to host my own blog site, mandclu.com. I got the idea while researching for an interview I did a couple of years ago.

    The project has evolved significantly since it started, so I thought it would be interesting to share.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • “Android 12 QPR3 Beta 1” brings a new level of complication to Android betas | Ars Technica

  • HowTo Geek ☛ How to Make Your Android Tablet a Laptop Replacement

  • How to mirror your Android phone to your TV – Phandroid

  • How To Force Close Android TV Apps – Dignited

  • Android app deals of the day: Chrono Trigger, and more – 9to5Toys

  • CNET ☛ The New Features Coming to Your Android Phone – CNET

  • 9to5Google ☛ GeForce NOW levels up your Android gaming [Video] – 9to5Google

  • Sony Has An iPhone SE Alternative With Android On The Way

  • Android Headlines ☛ Android’s Nearby Share Can Now Share To Groups Of People

  • The Verge ☛ Google’s CTO of Android tablets sees tablet sales passing laptops ‘in the not too distant future’ – The Verge

  • Android Headlines ☛ Top 10 Best Gas Finder Android Apps – 2022

  • Android Headlines ☛ What Percentage Of The World’s Population Uses Android Betting Applications?

  • Android Headlines ☛ Social Media, Gaming And E-Commerce Apps Continue To Dominate The Android Charts

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Content Management Systems (CMS)

  • WordPress 5.9.2 Security & Maintenance Release

    This security and maintenance release features 1 bug fix in addition to 3 security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated.

    WordPress 5.9.2 is a security and maintenance release. The next major release will be version 6.0.

    You can download WordPress 5.9.2 from WordPress.org, or visit your Dashboard → Updates and click “Update Now”.

• Education

  • [Old] Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method

    The Zettelkasten Method is an amplifier of your endeavors in the realm of knowledge work. It is highly effective, and many people report they have more fun, one even comparing it to the addictive nature of games like World of Warcraft, and have an easier time doing knowledge work overall. But this only comes as a result of putting in a high level of consistent effort.

• FSF

  • Licensing/Legal

    • The New Stack ☛ Where Does Open Source Fit into Russia’s War with Ukraine?

      When it comes to open source software, the Open Source Initiative’s definition is quite clear: there must be “no discrimination against persons or groups” and “no discrimination against fields of endeavor.” Each of these criteria applies to the license of said open source software, while the distribution of that same software may be a different matter entirely, argues Press.

      “There’s a difference between the code and the repositories where we collaborate on the code, versus the distribution channels where that code gets distributed,” said Press in an interview. “Just because you have the free permission to pull down the source code itself, versus, say, pull down a Dockerized application so that I can spin up an entire infrastructure ecosystem within my firewall and it all just works at the click of the button, those are two completely different things. Having more control over that distribution channel, that doesn’t really impact the nature of what the scope of these licenses are talking about.”

• Programming/Development

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Display Special Characters on LCD using Arduino Uno

    For better understanding of the inputs and outputs of an Arduino program they must be displayed in an organized manner. For displaying the data of the Arduino code, the most viable option is the 16×2 LCD because it is easy to interface with Arduino boards. To display the data and to make it more readable or understandable, we can take the help of the customized special characters that can be created by the user. For example, creating the symbols that indicate temperature, pressure or symbol for identification of any type of data. We have created some special characters and displayed them on the LCD in this discourse.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Fix “not declared in this scope” Error in Arduino

    When programming the Arduino learners come across various types of errors and sometimes it becomes difficult to troubleshoot the error code. The error codes mostly come when the Arduino program is compiled, and these errors are displayed in the output menu of the Arduino IDE which is at the bottom of the software. The Arduino IDE also indicates on which line of the code the error exists and it also suggests suitable actions for rectifying the error. The most common error beginners face is the “not declared in this scope” and we have discussed why such type of error arises and how we can fix this error.

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: dtts 0.1.0 on CRAN: New Package

    Leonardo and I are thrilled to announce the first CRAN release of dtts. The dtts package builds on top of both our nanotime package and the well-loved and widely-used data.table package by Matt, Arun, Jan, and numerous collaborators.

    In a very rough nutshell, you can think of dtts as combining both these potent ingredients to produce something not-entirely-unlike the venerable xts package by our friends Jeff and Josh—but using highest-precision nanosecond increments rather than not-quite-microseconds or dates.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Create 3D worlds with code on our first-ever Unity livestream

  • Rust

    • Eno Such ☛ Things I hate about Rust, redux

      Two years ago, I wrote a post with a handful of grievances about Rust, a language that I then (and still) consider my favorite compiled language.

      In the two years since I’ve gone from considering myself familiar with Rust, to comfortable in it, to thinking in Rust even when writing in other languages (sometimes to my detriment). So, like two years ago, this post should be read from a place of love for Rust, and not a cheap attempt to knock it.

Standards/WWW

• The HTML <meter> element and its (undefined) segment boundaries

  I recently found a use for the <meter element: an element to represent a scalar measurement within a known range. (That’s the unappealing language the HTML Standard uses to describe a horizontal gauge bar.) However, I was dismayed to discover that different web browsers have vastly different interpretations of a vaguely defined aspect of the <meter element. Here’s what I found and the workaround to get the same behavior in all browsers.

  [...]

  The first browser rendering (value=”3″) is shown as a short orange bar in Chrome 99, Safari 15, and Firefox 98 (current versions). The second rendering (value=”7″) is shown as a long green bar in Chrome and Safari, but Firefox shows a long orange bar.

  So, why isn’t the first bar colored red and the second green in all browsers? Alternatively, why aren’t both bars orange everywhere? Both values are set on the exact segment boundary but with different results. The underlying question is where, exactly, are the boundaries for the three color segments?

• An easier way to generate PDFs from HTML templates

  Applications frequently are required to generate invoices, reports, ID cards, and much more in PDF format. There are Java libraries and tools that developers can use to generate PDFs, including the popular JasperReports. While sophisticated, using these programs can be complicated because they support a wide range of documents.

  This article introduces a simpler tool, the open source wkhtmltopdf utility. I will show you how to use wkhtmltopdf to solve a common scenario: You have an HTML form, parameterized to accept input data, and you need to produce a PDF from the data in that form. You will learn how to set up your data and make a call to the wkhtmltopdf utility from a Spring Boot web application. We’ll use Red Hat’s Universal Base Image (UBI) 8 as a base image to simplify the application build, then deploy the final image into Red Hat Openshift 4.

• Daniel Stenberg ☛ remove leftovers on curl error

  We have just merged curl’s 246th command line option: –remove-on-error (with this commit). To be included in the upcoming curl 7.83.0 release.

  This command line option is quite simple and does exactly what the name suggests. If you tell curl to download something into a local file and something goes wrong in that transfer – that makes curl return an error – this option will make curl remove that file rather than leaving the leftovers on disk in a possibly partial file.

The Nation ☛ The Wonder and Horror of Delayed Adulthood

Julie (Renate Reinsve), the protagonist of Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, comes into focus in the film’s second chapter, “Cheating.” After excusing herself from a swanky publishing event for her comic-book artist boyfriend Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), she crashes a wedding reception on her way home. Julie effortlessly blends in with the guests and eventually meets Elvind (Herbert Nordrum), another loner at the party, with whom she flirts all night. Julie and Elvind mutually agree not to cheat on their respective partners, but they gleefully toe the line of infidelity without crossing it. The two part the next morning without learning each other’s surnames.

Science

• InfiniFS: Scientists claim to have solved the 100-billion-file problem

Hardware

• Hackaday ☛ Introducing The Universal Atari Keyboard Case

  [10p6] wondered what it would be like if Atari had used a standardized keyboard across its 16-bit and 32-bit computer lines in 1985. Imagination is fun, but building things is even better, and thus they set out to create such a thing. Enter the Universal Atari Keyboard Case.

• Hackaday ☛ Silent Stepper Motors Make Electromechanical Clock Fit For A Living Room

  Large mechanical seven-segment displays have a certain presence that you just don’t get in electronic screens. Part of this comes from the rather satisfying click-click-clack sound they make at every transition. Unfortunately, such a noise quickly becomes annoying in your living room; [David McDaid] therefore designed a silent electromechanical seven-segment clock that has all the presence of a mechanical display without the accompanying sound.

• Hackaday ☛ How Fast Can You Spin A LEGO Wheel By Hand?

  It’s not a question you ask yourself every day, but it’s one that the [Brick Experiment Channel] set out to answer: how fast can you spin a LEGO wheel by hand? In their typical way, they set about building an increasingly complex contraption to optimize for the very specific case of maximum RPM.

• Hackaday ☛ Remoticon 2021 // Vaibhav Chhabra And The M19 Collective Make One Million Faceshields

  [Vaibhav Chhabra], the co-founder of Maker’s Asylum hackerspace in Mumbai, India, starts his Remoticon talk by telling a short story about how the hackerspace rose to its current status. Born out of frustration with a collapsed office ceiling, having gone through eight years of moving and reorganizations, it accumulated a loyal participant base – not unusual with hackerspaces that are managed well. This setting provided a perfect breeding ground for the M19 effort when COVID-19 reached India, mixing “what can we do” and “what should we do” inquiries into a perfect storm and starting the 49 day work session that swiftly outgrew the hackerspace, both physically and organizationally.

• Hackaday ☛ Announcing: The 2022 Hackaday.io Sci-Fi Contest

  Ladies and Gentlemen, Sentient robots, Travellers from the distant future, or Aliens from the outer rim, it’s time to enter the 2022 Hackaday.io Sci-Fi Contest!

• Hackaday ☛ How Did We Get To The Speed Of Light?

  Every high school physics student knows c, or the speed of light, it’s 3 x 10^8 metres per second. More advanced or more curious students will know that this is an approximation, and the figure of 299,792,458 metres per second that forms the officially accepted figure comes from a resonance of the caesium atom from which is derived a value for the second.

• HPC Wire ☛ Nvidia Acquires Software-Defined Storage Provider Excelero

• Storage suppliers start to pull out from Russia

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Common Dreams ☛ After Yanking Covid Relief, House Approves Package With $782 Billion for US Military

  The House of Representatives late Wednesday approved a $1.5 trillion government spending package that includes $782 billion in U.S. military funding, the largest portion of the must-pass omnibus legislation.

  “Military, weapons, and detention contractors are the biggest winners in this budget,” the National Priorities Project (NPP) at the Institute for Policy Studies said in a statement. “In recent years, more than half of all military spending has gone to for-profit, private contractors. The new spending bill promises to continue this windfall, providing for even more expensive weapons system than the Pentagon requested, and promising to continue lucrative contracts for immigrant detention and surveillance.”

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘A Choice to Extend the Pandemic’: Experts Slam Congress for Dropping Covid Aid

  Experts warned Thursday that U.S. lawmakers’ failure to swiftly pass coronavirus relief funds amounts to an active decision to prolong a pandemic that has killed nearly a million Americans—and 6 million people worldwide—over the past two years and continues to wreak global havoc.

  “Congress must immediately restore the $5 billion in global Covid funding requested by the White House.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Two Years Into Pandemic, Die-Ins Will Demand End to Big Pharma’s Grip on Vaccine Patents

  Justice campaigners across the globe plan to mark the two-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring the coronavirus crisis a pandemic on Friday with die-ins and rallies to protest the intellectual property policies fueling what critics call “vaccine apartheid.”

  “Pharma’s monopoly grip on Covid vaccines… puts us at risk for the next deadly variant.”

• The Nation ☛ The Biden Administration Turns Its Back on the Pandemic

  What do the dead become but reflections of ourselves? Close to a million people have died in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic—lives that are lost to me because I did not know them, their histories, their joys and disappointments, their fears and desires. So, for me, they get added to all the dead who came before them. Too many to name. From AIDS, from hepatitis C, from MDR-TB—all the epidemics that have taken friends, family, colleagues since my 20s. But then death, suddenly, comes for people you know, and in that moment, the numbness abates, the sorrow and anger rise up.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Great British Post Office Scandal

    The scandal is the most extensive miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

    The criminal prosecutions, civil actions and extortions, resulted in criminal convictions, jail sentences, false confessions, defamation, severe loss of income, indebtedness and insolvency, marriage break-up, and suicide. Several died before they could be cleared in subsequent legal proceedings.

  • [Old] NewYorkTimes ☛ As Tanks Rolled Into Ukraine, So Did Malware. Then Microsoft Entered the War. [iophk: Windows TCO]

    “We are a company and not a government or a country,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, noted in a blog post issued by the company on Monday, describing the threats it was seeing. But the role it is playing, he made clear, is not a neutral one. He wrote about “constant and close coordination” with the Ukrainian government, as well as federal officials, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union.

  • Financial Times ☛ The secret US mission to bolster Ukraine’s cyber defences ahead of Russia’s invasion [iophk: Windows TCO]

    So far, experts who have watched the Russian cyber assaults have been confused at their lack of success, as well as the lower tempo, intensity and sophistication of what Russian-government hackers are known to be capable of.

    Ukrainian defences have proved resilient, said one European official who was briefed this week by the Americans at a [NATO] meeting, and Russian offences have proved mediocre. He said the reason was that, so far, Russia has held back its elite corps in the cyber arena, much as it has on the battlefield, perhaps by underestimating the Ukrainians.

  • CNET ☛ Big Tech’s Support for Ukraine Recasts Industry’s Global Role [iophk: Windows TCO]

    Big Tech has responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by offering assistance to Ukrainians, stymieing Russia’s disinformation campaigns and shuttering the services Moscow’s military can use on the ground, moves that make the industry a de facto participant in the hostilities.

  • The Verge ☛ Screw it, the rectangles are back

    Sure, there are some ports for Thunderbolt, Ethernet, whatever. But look at those two little rectangles to the left of the HDMI. Those two beautiful rectangles.

    These, my friends, are a new invention called “USB-A”. I’m told you can use these to connect mice and keyboards to your computer, though I’ve always just used the PS/2 port for that. The plugs only appear to go in one way, which seems like a bit of a design oversight. But overall, I’m excited to see where this standard will take us.

  • Security

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Techdirt ☛ How Tracking Someone’s Movements Can Make Them Look Guilty, Even When They’re Not

        Last month, the NY Times published a really great article by (the always innovative) tech reporter Kashmir Hill, in which she tested out a bunch of those location tracking tools by hiding them (with permission) on her husband, Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. It was a great and eye-opening article, looking both at how well (mixed bag) some of those tracking tools worked, and how easy (often much more than you’d expect) it was to hide them on someone. Here’s just a snippet, though the whole article is worth reading.

      • EFF ☛ Federal Court in Virginia Holds Geofence Warrant Violates Constitution

        The case is United States v. Chatrie, and addresses a controversial tool called a geofence warrant. The police issued the warrant to Google seeking information on every device within the area of the robbery during a one-hour period. The geographic area was about 17.5 acres (about 3 and a half times the footprint of a New York city block) and included a church, a chain restaurant, a hotel, several apartments and residences, a senior living facility, a self-storage business, and two busy streets.

        Google’s initial search identified 19 devices, with a total of 210 individual location points. Google assigned anonymizing identifiers to each device and provided their locations to the police. Following a three-step process designed by Google, the police expanded the time period to two hours to get additional location information for 9 of the devices. Ultimately, police obtained detailed, identifying subscriber information for three devices. One of those belonged to the defendant.

        Mr. Chatrie filed a motion to suppress the geofence evidence, and, after several hearings and extensive expert testimony, the court issued a thorough, 63-page order holding the warrant was unconstitutional. The court held that it’s not enough for the police to allege that a crime was committed and the perpetrator used a cellphone. If the police want to get information on every device in the area, they must also establish probable cause to search every person in the area, something that’s likely impossible in a busy area like this one.

      • EFF ☛ Utah: Urge Governor Cox to Veto This Weak Data Privacy Bill

        Strong privacy laws should help everyday people protect and manage their privacy. They should cover the companies and practices that pose the most potential for harm. They should be easy for people to use, so protecting our privacy doesn’t become an additional part-time (or full-time) job. They should ensure that people aren’t penalized if they choose to protect their privacy. And they should give people the tools to stand up for themselves if companies trample their privacy rights.

      • EFF ☛ Here’s How ICE Illegally Obtained Bulk Financial Records from Western Union

        Beginning in 2019, HSI sent eight administrative subpoenas to these financial services companies asking that they turn over all records for money transfers over $500 to or from California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico. Each administrative subpoena sought records for six-months at a time. In response, Western Union and Maxi provided 6.2 million financial records, including personal information such as names and addresses, to HSI. All of the information was entered into a database called Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC), which is run by a non-profit and facilitates law enforcement access to bulk financial data for 5 years. According to Sen. Wyden, HSI terminated the program in January 2022 after his office contacted HSI about it.

        This practice presents real-world harms to people who, for good reason, would like to keep private the transfer of money and the identifying information that goes with it. Sharing financial and other personally identifying records of domestic violence survivors, asylum seekers, and human rights activists could expose them to danger, particularly given that TRAC allows hundreds of law enforcement agencies unfettered access to these records. 

        Moreover, this kind of bulk surveillance is illegal. By statute, these administrative subpoenas must seek records “relevant” to an agency investigation. Simply put, there is no way these broad requests for bulk records would turn up only documents “relevant” to specific investigations; instead it put everyone who transferred money, including U.S. persons, under surveillance.

      • The Verge ☛ This update just made your Roomba i3 smarter

        The update follows through on iRobot’s promise that its iRobot Genius software will make your robot smarter at no extra cost to you. Smart mapping, which is done without a camera, lets the vacuum learn your home’s floor plan, so you can direct it specifically where to clean using the iRobot Home app or a voice assistant, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Prior to the update, the i3 could map your home to show you where it cleaned on its run, but it couldn’t remember the maps and use them for future cleaning.

      • ABC ☛ Virginia lawmakers OK lifting ban on facial technology use

        On Thursday, just eight months after the measure took effect, lawmakers approved a bill to lift the blanket ban. The legislation would allow police agencies to use the technology in certain circumstances, including to help identify an individual when they have reasonable suspicion that the person committed a crime. Under the bill, facial recognition also could be used for a variety of other uses, including to help identify crime victims or witnesses, sex trafficking victims and unidentified bodies in morgues.

      • CoryDoctorow ☛ How and why to break up Big Tech

        But science fiction is (as usual) way ahead of the tech narrative-generation machine. In sf, we’ve generally fallen out of love with the tycoon – where these business titans appear, they are revealed to be bumbling sociopaths whose unique talent is in ignoring their consciences as they cheat, crush and loot their way to power.

        It’s time to start thinking about the tech giants this way. It’s time to recognize that the reason that the tech giants of yesteryear – DEC, Sun, Commodore, Silicon Graphics, etc – rose and fell is that we banned them from buying their way to eternal rule. The muscular antitrust that began its slow decline with Ronald Reagan (accelerating with every administration thereafter) prevented dominant firms from merging, acquiring, or spending their way to the top of the heap. Antitrust once blocked companies’ below-cost predatory pricing to fend off rivals, horizontal mergers that increased industry concentration, and, importantly, vertical mergers that gobbled up the supply chain.

Defence/Aggression

• Common Dreams ☛ McKibben ‘Heat Pumps for Peace’ Plan Gains Traction With Biden

  The White House has reportedly put under consideration a plan floated by climate activist and author Bill McKibben for the U.S. to mass-produce heat pumps to be sent to Europe to lessen its reliance on Russian fossil fuels while also addressing the planetary emergency.

  “We can and should do this.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Omar Explains Why She Voted Against Congressional Ban on Russian Oil Imports

  Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota issued a statement Thursday explaining why she was one of just two Democrats to vote against House legislation that would enshrine a sweeping ban on Russian energy imports—including oil, gas, and coal—into U.S. law.

  “There is no meaningful principle at play in a decision to ban Russian oil but seek it from Saudi Arabia instead.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Being This Close to Nuclear War Should Not Be Possible

  Could the Russian invasion of Ukraine escalate to nuclear war? It’s unlikely but not impossible. That should terrify us.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | From Russia to Brazil, Chubb Is Insuring Deadly Oil and Gas Expansion

  Without insurance, no new polluting energy project can be built, or even financed. Chubb, an insurance giant based in NYC, is one of the biggest providers of these insurance policies, underwriting the risks of digging new coal mines, building tar sands pipelines, and expanding oil and gas drilling in sensitive ecosystems across the world.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Urgent Diplomacy Needed to Save Ukraine From Further Suffering and Catastrophe

  Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is horrific and barbaric. Yet it could still be ended with a diplomatic solution in which Russia withdraws its forces in exchange for Ukraine’s neutrality. Putin signaled his openness to this possibility in his recent call with French President Emmanuel Macron: “this is first and foremost about demilitarization and neutrality of Ukraine, to ensure that Ukraine will never pose a threat to Russia.” Translated into action, this could mean that NATO and Ukraine would forswear Ukraine’s future membership in the Alliance if Russia immediately withdraws from Ukraine and forswears future attacks.

• Counter Punch ☛ Russia’s Economic Weapons, China Buying Russian Firms, and US Biolabs in Ukraine?

• Counter Punch ☛ When Did the Ukraine War Begin?

  The conception that the war started on February 24 of this year is like viewing the “invasion” by the US and its allies of Normandy in June 1944 against the “sovereign” and “democratic” Vichy French as the start of World War II. Never mind that the Vichy government was a puppet of the Nazis; that the opportunities to negotiate had long been rejected; that the war had been raging for years; and that the only option for stopping the Nazis was militarily.

  The US imperial army

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Biden’s Sanctions on Afghanistan Could Kill More Civilians Than Two Decades of War

  When President Joe Biden decided to withdraw the U.S. military from Afghanistan last year, much of America’s news media came down on him like a ton of bricks. Republicans piled on, calling the withdrawal an “unmitigated disaster.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Ukraine Humanitarian Crisis Worsens as Russian Attacks on Civilians Intensify

  Amid new reports Thursday of noncombatants killed and wounded by Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, human rights advocates joined United Nations officials in expressing their horror and accusing Russia of possible war crimes.

  “We don’t understand how it’s possible in modern life to bomb a children’s hospital. People cannot believe that it’s true.”

• TruthOut ☛ Far From “Denazifying” Ukraine, Russian Invasion May Empower Ukrainian Neo-Nazis

• Counter Punch ☛ A Profile in True Courage

  His bravado against overwhelming odds is a shining example of a battle for freedom and national dignity, a true mouse that roared, and refuses to surrender, often telling Western allies that salute him that he is a target of assassination.

  “He is standing strong, but pleaded for more help,” Rep. Jim Hines, D-Conn., told The New York Times after hearing Zelensky on a Zoom call to about 300 members of Congress last week. “Planes, oil embargo, continued military aid.”

• TruthOut ☛ After Russia Accused of Bombing Maternity Hospital, No Progress Toward Ceasefire

• Counter Punch ☛ Sunday Colloquy: We, the People, and Our Wars (Ukraine, Edition)

  Indeed, “We, the People” agreed that after the Soviets chased out the Japs (along with the now-hated Kim family’s help) that Korea would be handed back to the Koreans, but “We, the People” reneged, leading to the split-state horror of today. And when “We, the People” occupied Okinawa permanently, “We, the People” told the Japs Never Again, and that “We, the People” would now be their overseers, and would defend Taiwan (next door) against the Chinese and no one was to touch our friendly little “spark plugs” the Phillipinos. America was the new Clint Eastwood in town, and the Chinese and Soviets were the Ugly and the Bad. The Asian Pivot is actually 75 years old. If we’d let Kim have South Korea instead of bringing a war still in play (only an armistice keeps the peace), they’d have been united again, as they had before the war for thousands of years, and probably happily eating Mickey D burgers. If we’d let the Chinese have Taiwan, they’d be united now. The occupation of Okinawa would be pointless. That’s the point.

  So, what’s this got to do with Ukraine, you might wonder.  In a word, my friend: Hegemony.

• Hungary ☛ NATO troops in Hungary, opposition protests against public media, madame President and 400 HUF/EUR

  Hungary’s government issued a decree on Monday allowing NATO troops to be deployed in western Hungary and weapons shipments to cross its territory by land or by air to other NATO member states.

  The decree was signed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and published in the official gazette on Monday.

• Mint Press News ☛ US Admits to Funding Biological Laboratories in Ukraine, with Dilyana Gaytandzhieva

• Mint Press News ☛ The West’s Hands in Ukraine Are as Bloody as Putin’s

  There is a discursive nervous tic all over social media at the moment, including from prominent journalists such as Guardian columnist George Monbiot. The demand is that everyone not only “condemn” Russian president Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine, but do so without qualification. 

• Counter Punch ☛ Why Sanctions Could Deal a Fatal Blow to Russia’s Already Weak Domestic Opposition

  Most consequentially, key Russian banks have been cut out of the SWIFT payments messaging system, making financial transactions much more difficult. The United States, European Union and others also moved to freeze Russian Central Bank reserves. And U.S. President Joe Biden is weighing a total ban on Russian oil imports.

  These sanctions are aimed at generating opposition from both Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and everyday Russians. As a scholar who studies regime change, I believe the risk is that they will actually drive the Kremlin’s weak opposition further into obscurity.

• TruthOut ☛ The Proud Boys Gained 29 Chapters in the Year Since Capitol Attack

• TruthOut ☛ War in Ukraine Needs to Be Understood in Context of New Russia-China Alliance

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Mike Pence Says GOP Will Rip Up Any Nuclear Deal With Iran

• The Nation ☛ Russian Army Men

• Common Dreams ☛ Ukraine and Russia Fail to Reach Ceasefire Deal as Crisis Worsens

  This is a developing news story… Check back for possible updates…

  Talks between Ukraine and Russia’s top diplomats ended Thursday without a ceasefire deal or an agreement to establish a humanitarian corridor allowing civilians to flee the besieged city of Mariupol, where hundreds of thousands of people have been trapped for days in rapidly deteriorating conditions.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | From Ukraine to the War on Terror: How Imperialism Turns Displaced People Invisible

  A March 6 New York Times article entitled “Ukrainians Find That Relatives in Russia Don’t Believe It’s a War” provides accounts of Ukrainians—distressed and in the midst of evacuations—calling their Russian relatives. They find out that their relatives tend to deny that bombs are raining on Ukraine, and revert to Russian propaganda on the need of Russia to liberate the country from a gang of drugged-up Nazis.

• The Nation ☛ Mexican Journalists Are Being Killed. Why Aren’t People Rising Up to Help Them?

  In the first six weeks of 2022, five journalists were assassinated in Mexico. Two of those, Margarito Martínez and Lourdes Maldonado López, were colleagues of Jorge Nieto’s in Tijuana. Nieto, a journalist and fixer with 19 years of experience in the region, spoke with me in Spanish from Brisbane, Australia, where he has been reporting remotely since the beginning of the pandemic. The thousands of miles separating Nieto from his home have made it safer for him to discuss the violent conditions that have claimed the lives of his friends and threaten independent journalism in Mexico.

• Counter Punch ☛ The Global Age is Upon Us: Our Ukraine Wake-Up Call

  How different this sense of potential damage is than that expressed when, in the wake of 9/11, America went to war globally with its invasion of Afghanistan and its war on terror.  As the president of that moment, George W. Bush, insisted so confidently in 2001, Americans should simply “go shopping” and not be distracted by the country’s distant battles. As he later put it, “We will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.”

  At the heart of those claims was the thought that foreign wars could be fought by a great power without damage at home — or put another way, that the theaters of conflict for the Global War on Terror were somehow eternally separable from the daily lives of Americans. But tell that to the country that elected Donald Trump as president 15 years later and has been coming apart at the seams ever since.

• Counter Punch ☛ Ukraine War is Another Against Women and Children

  It is unavoidable. In Ukraine Putin is maximizing suffering and targeting those who are most precious and vulnerable.

  It is also nothing new. Civilian casualties are considered among the many costs of war. On the whole noncombatants (despites laws to the contrary) are killed in much greater numbers than combatants, and women and children make up an overwhelming majority of those numbers.

• TruthOut ☛ Leaked Video Shows Madison Cawthorn Calling Ukraine’s Zelenskyy a “Thug”

• The Gray Zone ☛ VIDEO: Congress screws American workers to escalate war on Russia

• The Gray Zone ☛ Why Rep. Thomas Massie stood against “stand with Ukraine” resolution

• Counter Punch ☛ Advertising Gimmicks: Australia’s Nuclear-Powered Submarines

  The prolonged, costly nightmare of Australia’s submarine policy took another turn on March 6.  The Defence Minister Peter Dutton could barely contain his excitement with the announcement that the Morrison government would soon be unveiling which nuclear-powered submarines it would acquire. “We will have an announcement within the next couple of months about which boat we are going with, what we can do in the interim.”

  To the ABC’s Insiders program, Dutton oozed unsubstantiated hope.  “Both the US and UK understand the timelines, they understand what is happening in the Indo-Pacific, and they are very, very willing partners.”  The minister was even willing to wager that the submarines would be operational before 2040, when his career and those of his colleagues will be confined to the dust of history.  “We are going to acquire the capability much sooner than that.”

• Democracy Now ☛ Attack on Maternity Ward is a War Crime: David Miliband on Russia’s Bombing of Mariupol

  Russian forces reportedly killed at least three people when they bombed a children’s hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol on Wednesday, shelling a humanitarian corridor and breaking a ceasefire deal that was was meant to allow residents to flee. The actions constitute a violation of international humanitarian law and, therefore, a potential war crime, says David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee. The mayor of Mariupol says there have been over 1,200 civilian deaths since the start of the war. Russian forces have also cut off the city’s water supply and electricity. “This is a strangulation of the city,” says Miliband.

• Democracy Now ☛ “I’m Ready to Be Arrested”: Activist in Moscow Says Mass Russian Protests Can Stop Putin’s War

  We go to Moscow to look at the growing antiwar movement in Russia, where activists are risking a brutal crackdown to oppose their government’s assault on Ukraine. Arshak Makichyan is a climate activist who recently joined protests against the invasion and says the actions of the Russian government do not reflect the will of the people. He says Russian citizens suspect President Vladimir Putin could declare martial law soon, as part of a broader campaign to suppress dissenting voices. Meanwhile, U.S. sanctions have unintended consequences on peace activists, whose access to virtual private networks and foreign social media platforms has been hurt, leaving them less able to find alternative sources of information. “It’s difficult and dangerous to fight this regime,” says Makichyan.

• Democracy Now ☛ Calls Grow for Ceasefire in Ukraine as Millions of “Extremely Vulnerable” Refugees Flee to Europe

  Poland continues to be a vital destination for refugees fleeing the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, who risk cold winter temperatures and travel for days to cross the border into safety. Humanitarian aid relief workers are calling for the European Union to put more pressure on Russia to agree to a ceasefire and find a diplomatic solution to end the war. Speaking from Lublin, Poland, Becky Bakr Abdulla of the Norwegian Refugee Council says that as the world focuses its attention on Ukraine and Russia, refugees from countries such Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen are experiencing less hospitable treatment. “Let’s not also forget tens of millions of other refugees and displaced people around the globe that need equal amount of support,” she says.

• Democracy Now ☛ Report from Ukraine: Russian Forces Carry Out “Vindictive and Deliberate” Attacks on Civilians

  The Russian military invasion of Ukraine has devastated civilian centers such as schools and hospitals. Over 2.2. million people have fled the country, resulting in a dangerous refugee crisis in Europe as Russia refuses to guarantee the “humanitarian corridors” promised for civilians to safely evacuate. “What we’re talking about is repeated attacks on civilian infrastructure, which is illegal under international law,” says Bel Trew, independent correspondent for The Independent, who has been reporting on civilians being targeted in other Ukrainian cities.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Rolling Stone ☛ ‘I Want to Kill Putin’: Meet the Russian Journalist Defending Ukraine From His Own Countrymen

  The Ukrainian resistance is drawing droves of foreign fighters to Kyiv — including an award-winning Russian writer who long interpreted the Kremlin for American readers. “I have burned my bridges,” says Sergei Loiko. “If I go home, they will try me as a traitor and put me behind bars for 15 years.”

Environment

• European Parliament ☛ New rules on batteries: MEPs want more environmental and social ambition

  During the debate on Wednesday, MEPs underlined the crucial role that batteries have in the transition to a circular and climate-neutral economy and for the EU’s competitiveness and strategic autonomy. The draft legislation was adopted on Thursday with 584 votes in favour, 67 against and 40 abstentions.

  MEPs are in favour of overhauling the current legislation to take into account technological developments.

  They propose stronger requirements on sustainability, performance and labelling, including the introduction of a new category of “batteries for ‘light means of transport’ (LMT)”, such as electric scooters and bikes, and rules on a carbon footprint declaration and label. By 2024, portable batteries in appliances, such as smartphones, and batteries for LMT must be designed so that consumers and independent operators can easily and safely remove them themselves, MEPs say.

• Common Dreams ☛ Environmental ‘Sacrifice Zones’ Require Ambitious Action: UN Expert

  Unveiling a new report on the devastating impacts of pollution, a United Nations expert on Thursday called for “urgent and ambitious action” to ensure that everyone on the planet experiences “a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.”

  “Pollution and toxic substances affect the enjoyment of many human rights, especially the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.”

• Energy

  • Common Dreams ☛ Dems Introduce Windfall Tax on Big Oil So Companies ‘Pay a Price When They Price Gouge’

    Congressional Democrats on Thursday introduced the bicameral Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax to target price gouging by profit-gorging fossil fuel companies amid Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

    “We need to curb profiteering by Big Oil and provide relief to Americans at the gas pump—that starts with ensuring these corporations pay a price when they price gouge.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Progressives Denounce Big Oil for ‘Shamelessly’ Price-Gouging Amid Ukraine War

    With gas prices surging even higher in the wake of the White House’s new prohibition on U.S. imports of Russian fossil fuels, progressive lawmakers on Wednesday night called on Congress to swiftly pass legislation to prevent Big Oil from further price-gouging, ramp up investments in a clean energy transition, and raise wages and lower the costs of necessities for working households.

    “Putin’s war is causing gas prices to rise, but this is no excuse for large oil companies to pad their bottom line with war-fueled profits.”

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Fukushima Disaster Ruined Their Lives

    Iitate is approximately 50 kilometers away from the nuclear site, but quickly became one of the most radioactively contaminated places as a result of the Fukushima disaster. Yet, residents were told little and it took more than a month for an evacuation order to be issued for Itate. Many did not leave until late June.

    Mr. Hasegawa himself stayed on in Itate for five months after the disaster, tending to his cows until all of them were put down. Meanwhile, he kept a visual record of conditions there, taking more than ten thousand photos and 180 videos (in Japanese).

  • DeSmog ☛ Nigel Farage’s ‘Net Zero Referendum’ Drive is Steeped in Climate Science Denial

    Nigel Farage’s campaign for a “Net Zero Referendum” is led by and backed by climate science deniers, despite his repeated claims to care about the environment, DeSmog can report.

    This week the GB News host and former UKIP leader said he was launching a campaign for a public referendum on the UK’s net zero policies, under the slogan “Vote Power, Not Poverty”. 

  • DeSmog ☛ Six Months After Hurricane Ida, Recovery for Many In South Louisiana Remains Aspirational While The Risks From Climate Change Increase

    “It is like it’s an environmental war zone,” Traditional Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe, told me outside her new home in Chauvin, Louisiana, about 70 miles southwest of New Orleans. 

    On August 29, Hurricane Ida destroyed the dream home she and her husband had almost finished building. The stormed slammed into Louisiana with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph, just shy of a Category 5 hurricane. 

  • DeSmog ☛ Carbon Market Governance Body Yet to Appoint Indigenous Members

    A new governance body set up to regulate how private companies offset carbon emissions has failed to appoint Indigenous board members months after pledging to do so, amid ongoing concerns over representation in the carbon marketplace.

    The Integrity Council for Voluntary Carbon Markets (IC-VCM), which launched last year, has acknowledged it is “essential” to represent the communities that are home to the majority of “nature-based projects”, which carbon trading relies on.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Putin Is a Fossil-Fuel Gangster. Clean Energy Could Cut Him Off at the Knees

    This was pretty much business as usual in the twilight of the fossil-fuel age. Oil and gas have long been controlled by petro-state thugs who use their money and power in unsavory ways, from throttling global economic growth to sabotaging international agreements to reduce carbon emissions (and if inquisitive journalists like Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi ask too many questions, they end up cut into pieces with a bone saw). Meanwhile, Western leaders ritualistically vow to break their dependence on fossil fuels with hollow calls for “energy independence,” while at the same time showing no reservations about invading Middle Eastern countries like Iraq to secure oil supplies. Here in the U.S., rallying cries like “Drill, baby, drill” just fatten the bottom line of Big Oil while deepening our addiction to fossil fuels.

  • New Scientist ☛ Chernobyl power cut sparks fears of potential for radiation leaks

    Fears of a potential radiation leak at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are growing after a power cut at the site. Without electricity it will be difficult to cool ponds that contain hazardous nuclear waste and to filter the air inside the vast containment building that houses the remains of the reactor that was destroyed during an infamous disaster at the site in 1986.

    Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, warned in a tweet that reserve diesel generators will operate for only 48 hours. “After that, cooling systems of the storage facility for spent nuclear fuel will stop, making radiation leaks imminent,” he wrote.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Counter Punch ☛ Water on Her Mind: Jane Wolff, Global Ecologist Extraordinaire

    A magna cum laude graduate from Harvard and Radcliffe, and now an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, Wolff learned heaps when she worked at the San Francisco Exploratorium from 2007 to 2014. Before that, she served as a research and design consultant in New Orleans and also as a Fulbright-Hayes Scholar in the Netherlands. She has delivered lectures from Amsterdam to Zurich and from Berkeley to Sydney, Australia.

    In the Mississippi Delta, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, as Wolff explains in her books and in her essays, nature and culture have conspired to create recipes for disaster: “inevitable cities in impossible places.” Still, her work suggests ways to avoid the kinds of catastrophes that the author Raymond Dashmann spelled out in his depressing 1965 book, The Destruction of California. Prognosticators have been echoing him ever since then.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Conservationists Say Congress Underfunding Species Protection by Hundreds of Millions Despite Biodiversity Crisis

    More than 150 environmental groups on Thursday urged federal lawmakers to make “bold investments” to stem the biodiversity crisis by increasing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s budget for endangered species conservation by more than $400 million in the 2023 fiscal year.

    “Tragically, hundreds of species are being left at the brink of extinction simply because there isn’t enough money to recover them.”

  • Counter Punch ☛ Montana’s Two National Embarassments

Finance

• Common Dreams ☛ US Corporations Boost Profits With Crushing Price Hikes Blamed on Inflation

  Many of the most profitable U.S. corporations are raising prices under the pretext of inflation to boost profits and shareholder returns at the expense of consumers, an analysis published Thursday revealed.

  “Despite what they claim, these highly profitable businesses do have a choice, and they’re choosing to fatten their bottom line rather than keep consumer prices stable.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Sanders Welcomes End of Major League Lockout But Slams ‘Baseball Oligarchs’

  As Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association announced Thursday that they’d come to terms on a new collective bargaining agreement, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders welcomed news that the 99-day lockout was over and the full 162-game season would be saved and promised to introduce a bill aimed at ending the “baseball oligarchs’” antitrust exemption.

  While Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement that he is “delighted to see an agreement reached so that the Major League Baseball season can start,” he slammed the “unacceptable behavior” of team owners, who he said “negotiated in bad faith for more than 100 days in a blatant attempt to break the players’ union.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Republicans Don’t Want to Talk About the Real Culprit of Inflation: Corporate Greed

  It seems like the price of everything from used cars to ground beef is up these days, and right-wing politicos and pundits are all over President Joe Biden for failing to stop the pain. But one wonders: What would these GOP squawkers do if they were in charge?

• FAIR ☛ ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’

  Janine Jackson interviewed Debt Collective’s Braxton Brewington about student loan debt cancellation for the March 4, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• The dumbest feature of Walmart+ and a banking app joke. – BaronHK’s Rants

  Walmart+ is basically Walmart’s solution to Amazon Prime. If you’re going to exclusively shop at Walmart, it’s not really a bad idea. For $98 a year, you get unlimited free delivery of any order size (which saves gas, which is EXPENSIVE), and you get 5 cents a gallon off at Murphy or Walmart gas stations (which can be nice since it stacks on top of your credit card rewards. I get 5% back at gas stations already).

  But the dumbest feature is the awkward “scan and go”.

  It does not work like Amazon’s stores where you just scan things with your phone and then walk out.

  [...]

  Some teller at the bank told me it’s easier to deposit a check with an app. I says to the guy, I says…. “You realize you’re recommending that I help put you out of a job with an app that barely works, right?”

  He stares blankly for a second. “Corporate makes us say this.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Common Dreams ☛ Texas Mail-In Ballot Rejection Rate Skyrockets Under GOP Voter Suppression Law

  It used to be rare for mail-in ballots to be thrown out in Texas, but thanks to the GOP’s new voter suppression law, more than 27,000 of them were flagged for rejection during the state’s recent primary election, according to a new analysis published Wednesday by The Associated Press.

  For Texans who cast ballots by mail, the initial rejection rate was 17% across 120 counties, based on preliminary figures reported by election officials after votes were counted in the state’s March 1 primary. Although Texas has 254 counties, the vast majority of the nearly three million people who participated in the nation’s first primary of 2022 reside in the 120 counties that provided early data.

• Common Dreams ☛ Critics Warn Florida GOP Bill Designed to ‘Criminalize’ the Voting Process

  Florida is poised to establish a first-of-its-kind police force dedicated to stopping and investigating so-called “voter fraud” following the passage on Wednesday of a bill further overhauling the state’s voting system, a year after sweeping changes to election laws sparked outcry among voting rights advocates.

  “So now we’re criminalizing certain acts around the elections process that most folks, particularly in the Black community, have long held as a way to assist those in need.”

• Counter Punch ☛ Biden Neglects to Make the Crucial Request to the Citizenry for His Program

  But, as President Biden has done many times in public speeches and addresses, he failed to engage the people as his allies to confront his policy opponents in Congress.

  All his priorities – social safety net protections, rebuilding community infrastructure or public works, more aggressive action against climate crises, and paying for these programs by repealing the Trump tax escapes for the large corporations and the super-rich, are being blocked by 50 GOP Senators and two Democratic Senators.

• TruthOut ☛ Georgia Republicans Propose Their Own Version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” Bill

• TruthOut ☛ Republicans Who Attacked Refugees Under Trump Are Pivoting for Ukrainians

• Hungary ☛ Katalin Novák to be next president of Hungary

• NDTV ☛ This Country To Rename Street With Russian Embassy As ‘Free Ukraine’

  Albania will rename a street in its capital Tirana where the Russian and Ukrainian embassies are located as Free Ukraine to honour Ukraine’s resistance to war, the mayor said on Sunday.

  Since Russia invaded Ukraine, NATO member Albania has joined other European countries in introducing economic sanctions and banning Russian aircraft from its air space.

• Variety ☛ Spotify Sees 1.5M Subscriber Cancelations Amid Russia War, Impact of Joe Rogan Controversy Minimal, CFO Indicates

  Spotify has suspended premium service in Russia after the country launched its war on Ukraine — a move that the audio streaming powerhouse expects to result in a loss of about 1.5 million paying customers in the first quarter of 2022.

  That’s according to Spotify CFO Paul Vogel, who spoke at Morgan Stanley’s 2022 Technology, Media and Telecom Conference on Wednesday. According to a Spotify spokesperson, the loss of its business in Russia is not material: The country represents less than 1% of total revenue.

• FAIR ☛ Saudi PR Pays Off at the Atlantic

  A glowing profile of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Atlantic (3/3/22), promoting him as a reformer in the notoriously repressive kingdom, has raised questions about the magazine’s ethical integrity.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Trump’s crooked Census deliberately missed 19 million Americans.

  They made absolutely no attempt whatsoever to contact me or my spouse. They told me to wait for a mailer, which never arrived, and then I ended up going to the Census website to voluntarily be counted.

  According to the Census Bureau, Trump’s crooked Census under-counted black, Native American and Hispanic people especially, and over-counted non-Hispanic whites.

• Common Dreams ☛ As Feared, 2020 Census Significantly Undercounted Minorities

  Latino Americans were significantly undercounted in the 2020 U.S. Census, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Census Bureau—a result which advocacy groups said was what former President Donald Trump’s administration intended to happen when it attempted to change the decennial survey.

  “This was intentional.”

• The Telegraph UK ☛ The problem with Prince William’s ‘racist’ comments? They’re fake news – he didn’t say them at all

  A royal source said the spreading of the misheard conversation around the world on social media had been “unfortunate”, but added the “video speaks for itself” in correcting the record.

• The Verge ☛ Twitter makes it harder to choose the old reverse-chronological feed

  The design change, which lets you swipe between your Home (algorithmically served) and Latest (reverse chronological) timelines, was announced Thursday. To set it up, you tap the sparkle icon in the top right corner, and you’ll see the option to pin your “Latest timeline,” and if you select that, you’ll see both “Home” and “Latest Tweets” tabs at the top of the iOS app. If you use pinned lists on the iOS app, the layout might look familiar. The feature is available first on iOS, and it’s coming “soon” to Android and the web, Twitter says. (The company began testing the feature in October.)

• The Hill ☛ Twitter removes Russian embassy tweets over Mariupol hospital bombing, victim

  In the post, the embassy claimed “the maternity house was long non-operational” and alleged it had been used by Ukrainian “armed forces and radicals.” The post also included two photos presumed to be related to the bombing with the word “FAKE” in red printed over the images, according to a screenshot included by The Guardian.

• NewYorkTimes ☛ 4 Falsehoods Russians Are Told About the War

  Here is what the war looks like to Russians, based on a review of state news articles, channels on the popular chat app Telegram, and input from several disinformation watchdogs who are monitoring Russia’s propaganda machine.

• The Washington Post ☛ Opinion: Zelensky is going viral, but Putin is winning the information war that counts

  The war in Ukraine is being fought not only with tanks and missiles, but also with propaganda and censorship. It’s true that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal and unprovoked invasion is not going well on the ground. And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has given the performance of his life in videos that have kept the world riveted to his nation’s fierce resistance. But even so, Putin appears to be winning the information war where it counts: at home, and in China.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Techdirt ☛ Appeals Court Smacks Down Unconstitutional Injunction Obtained By A Lawyer To Silence Someone Who Left A Negative Review

  Tennessee has long been home to a truly astounding amount of First Amendment violations, some of which were enabled by courts’ willingness to entertain far too many bogus defamation lawsuits. And Daniel Horwitz has been a constant thorn in these courts’ sides, securing wins for clients facing bogus lawsuits.

• Disney scrubs LGBT people out of any movie they publish.

  According to Pixar, Disney edits out LGBT characters or references from all movies that Disney publishes.

  Unofficially, there’s been a “gay month” at Disney World for years, and they’ve never balked at taking the money. Disney also had absolutely nothing to say about the anti-gay bill that passed in Florida this month that has schools out kids to homophobic parents who very well might kill them or put them on the street.

  I can still remember my aunt talking with my mother about how “grossed out” she was that there were men showing affection for each other at Disney World in the 90s “in front of the children”.

• China censors online Ukraine debate, bars calls for peace

  Lu Xiaoyu, an assistant professor of international relations at Peking University, wrote an article last week urging common sense. “Being seen as an ally of Russia will be a step towards losing global popular support,” he wrote in the article, which was widely reposted on WeChat. The original article can no longer be found.

  Weibo and Tencent Holdings, which owns WeChat, did not respond to requests for comment on why such material had been removed or accounts suspended.

• Irish Times ☛ United Nations advises staff against using ‘war’ or ‘invasion’ regarding Ukraine

  The United Nations’ Department of Global Communications instructed staff of the international organisation not to refer to the situation in Ukraine as a “war” or “invasion”, in a move to balance political sensitivities as powerful member state Russia cracks down domestically on those who use the words.

  Instead, UN staff were instructed to use the terms “conflict” or “military offensive” to describe Russia’s invasion of its neighbour, which has killed hundreds of civilians and forced two million people to flee the country.

  In an email to a staff mailing list on Monday with the subject line “Ukraine crisis communications guidelines”, the director of the United Nations Regional Information Centre instructed employees not to describe the situation as a war and not to add the Ukrainian flag to personal or official social media accounts or websites.

• Russian Warfare on Press Freedom Continues with VK’s Blocking of VOA

  The blocking of VOA’s VK page was preceded by Russian efforts to block Voice of America’s website in Russian, as well as other news websites and social media platforms that refused to submit to Moscow’s censorship orders. This is another indication of the country’s efforts to muzzle the free press and keep their own citizens in the dark about the war in Ukraine.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• CPJ ☛ ‘Censor yourself or don’t work at all’: Why squeezed Russian journalists are fleeing in droves

  When the legislation against “fakes” was introduced, it became clear that we would need to leave, that we wouldn’t be able to work in Russia anymore.

  I opened this newsroom to get away from censorship, to be independent. If we stayed, we would have had to start censoring ourselves. And if we didn’t, members of our newsroom would be imprisoned. That’s why we decided to evacuate our journalists from Russia.

  However, while we’ve left the country, we do not want to, and will not, stop working. We want to make sure that people can still read about what is actually taking place. Working from outside Russia is the only thing that makes sense.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Techdirt ☛ First Amendment Group Tells Appeals Court University Officials Shouldn’t Have Access To Qualified Immunity

  Qualified immunity has been heavily criticized for what it allows law enforcement officers to get away with. The Supreme Court-created doctrine excuses officers from civil rights lawsuits even when it’s been shown rights were violated… so long as the rights violation hasn’t been previously ruled a rights violation by other courts with jurisdiction over the case. That means cops are free to violate rights repeatedly until a court rules otherwise, clearly establishing the violation.

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘Racist’ New Israeli Law Bars Naturalization of Palestinian Spouses

  A new law passed Thursday that effectively bans the naturalization of Palestinian spouses of Israeli Jews was condemned by human rights advocates in Israel and around the world, some of whom called it the latest manifestation of an apartheid regime.

  “Israeli apartheid is a crime against humanity.”

• TruthOut ☛ In Blatantly Fascist Move, Florida GOP Passes Bill to Form Election Police Force

• TruthOut ☛ MO Lawmaker Wants to Imprison Those Giving Abortion Meds for Ectopic Pregnancies

• Pro Publica ☛ Shackles and Solitary: Inside Louisiana’s Harshest Juvenile Lockup

  ST. MARTINVILLE, La. — Lawyers and a judge gathered in an East Baton Rouge juvenile courtroom last October for an update on a teenager detained after joyriding in a stolen car. The teen appeared on a screen, alongside a caseworker who stunned everyone by describing conditions in the lockup where he was held.

  The 15-year-old was being kept in round-the-clock solitary confinement. He was getting no education, in violation of state and federal law, nor was he getting court-ordered substance abuse counseling, according to two defense attorneys present. And no one in the room that day — not the judge, not the prosecutor, not the defense lawyers — appeared to have heard of the facility where Louisiana’s Office of Juvenile Justice was holding him, the Acadiana Center for Youth at St. Martinville.

• Pro Publica ☛ Southwestern States Make Changes to Welfare After ProPublica Investigations

  Across the Southwest, states are reconsidering how they approach welfare, with several legislatures enacting or considering new laws to ensure that more assistance is made available to low-income families struggling to afford rent, child care, groceries and diapers. The moves follow months of ProPublica reporting on punitive and outdated welfare policies in this part of the country and come amid a yearslong surge in the region’s cost of living.

  In New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Wednesday signed into law a budget that will allow an estimated $6.96 million in child support to go directly to children instead of to the government. Until now, the state had intercepted these dollars as reimbursement for the custodial parent previously having received welfare, as ProPublica reported in September.

• The Nation ☛ Why Is Biden Letting States Like Missouri Defund Planned Parenthood?

  Two Planned Parenthood affiliates sued the state of Missouri today, seeking to prevent the Republican-led state from kicking them out of the Medicaid program because they offer abortions.

• The Nation ☛ In Poland, a Refugee Center for Those Farthest From Home

  Warsaw, Poland—The refugee center that Dr. Tade Daniel Omoshoto set up in a southwestern residential neighborhood of Warsaw doesn’t look like much. A nondescript building with a white plaster front and an iron gate, it was previously a bare-bones hostel with six rooms with bunk beds, fluorescent lights, and no decoration. But for African refugees coming from Ukraine, it is a place to rest after an arduous journey. He walks me through, showing me 20 simply made beds that can be stretched to accommodate 10 more. There are only three boys from Nigeria staying there, all medical students from Kyiv University under 20 years old. Omoshoto’s phone rings, and he says, “Sorry, I have to take this.”1

• Michigan News ☛ Ann Arbor human rights group calls for transparency in police traffic stops

  Ann Arbor’s Human Rights Commission is calling for creation of a new city ordinance requiring police to collect and report specific details of traffic stops.

  The commission voted unanimously Wednesday, March 9, to approve a resolution asking city officials for a local law requiring the Ann Arbor Police Department to make a wide range of data about traffic stops in the city available to the public.

• NDTV ☛ Flipkart Apologises For Women’s Day Message Promoting Kitchen Appliances

  Flipkart has apologised for a marketing misfire which saw the e-commerce platform promoting kitchen appliances on Women’s Day. On International Women’s Day 2022, which was observed yesterday, Flipkart sent out a message that many social media users found to be tone-deaf and sexist. “Dear Customer, This Women’s Day, let’s celebrate You. Get Kitchen Appliances from Rs 299 [sic],” read the message. The message reinforced negative stereotypes about women belonging in the kitchen, many social media users felt.

• Teen Vogue ☛ Dakota Language Keeper Akiša Peters Is Committed to His Community

  In January, at the start of the U.N. International Decade of Indigenous Languages, Peters spoke with Teen Vogue about the importance of protecting Indigenous mother tongues, and how Dakota is connected to health, climate change, and tribal sovereignty.

• Counter Punch ☛ In Pursuit of Justice for Black Americans: an Interview With Laura Coates

  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

  Explain why a colleague described working for the U.S. Attorney’s Office as “human misery.”

• TruthOut ☛ Three More Starbucks Stores in Buffalo Area Vote to Form Union

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Techdirt ☛ Academics, Civil Society, Internet Companies All Explain Just How Ridiculously Dangerous SHOP SAFE Is

  Last fall we had a whole series of blog posts explaining just how dangerous Rep. Jerry Nadler’s SHOP SAFE bill would be. It’s one of those bills that if you just hear what it’s about — stopping the sale of counterfeit goods online — sounds good. But only if you don’t understand how basically anything actually works in the real world, including the laws around liability and counterfeiting. SHOP SAFE would upend concepts related to intermediary liability and basically lock in Amazon as one of the only companies that could probably handle the massive compliance costs associated with SHOP SAFE.

• EFF ☛ How the NTIA Can Fund Future-Proof Open Access Fiber

  The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has big decisions to make in its effort to implement the new federal broadband infrastructure program. If done right, and with the right state policies in place, a great number of Americans will obtain access to multi-gigabit broadband in the coming years.

• Techdirt ☛ Comcast’s And Charter’s Broadband Monopoly Continues To Grow

  Fun fact: about 2,950,000 new subscribers signed up for broadband last year, and roughly 95 percent of them signed up with the biggest cable companies (primarily Comcast and Charter). These two cable giants’ market share continues to grow not really because they’re good — but because they’re the only option countless Americans have if they want modern-era broadband speeds.

• Techdirt ☛ Cloudflare Says Shutting Down In Russia Would Give Putin What He Wants

  We’ve already noted how several of the business decisions to shut down integral parts of the Internet to “punish Putin” aren’t really punishing Putin, but the Russian public.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Variety ☛ TikTok Launches SoundOn, Platform to Let Artists Directly Upload and Monetize Their Music on the App

  The company, owned by Chinese internet giant ByteDance, said it is paying SoundOn creators 100% of the royalties for music in the first year and 90% after that, with no administrative fees. TikTok said artists will be compensated “based on how often your music is used in TikTok videos,” but didn’t say specifically how much it will pay per listen.

Monopolies

• EFF ☛ Big Tech Pay-Outs to European ISPs Would Just Concentrate Their Power

  On Valentine’s day, an open letter from the CEOs of Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, Vodafone, and Orange surfaced. In the letter, the heads of Europe’s biggest telecommunications providers called “for large content platforms to contribute to the cost of European digital infrastructure that carries their services.” Claiming that the current situation is “not sustainable” for their companies, they argued that “Europe will fall behind” if this situation is not addressed.

  The request for large platforms to pay telecom providers to carry their content is not new. In 2011, the same group (absent Deutsche Telekom) attempted to levy charges on Google and other content providers, suggesting an overhaul of how data travels across the internet. In 2013, Orange struck a deal with Google under which Google would pay an undisclosed amount to the carrier for the traffic sent across its networks.

  For years, telecom operators have tried to catch up with innovation, but with little real success. In the beginning, it was their inability to identify ways to diversify their centralized business models within the internet’s more decentralized environment. Instead, they have used their political capital to keep pushing, unsuccessfully, for proposals based on the simple idea that everyone else should have to pay up. They even went as far as the

• Copyrights

  • Walled Culture ☛ A further spate of lawsuits demonstrate how copyright is antithetical to creativity

    The basic claim in these lawsuits is broadly the same: that portions of songs by the famous musicians are similar to those of pre-existing works. What this ignores is the fact that all art builds on what came before: every tune, chord and cadence that is part of the today’s standard musical vocabulary, was invented by someone at some point in history. Furthermore, in the past, before copyright corrupted many people’s views about the creative process, it was not only common but expected for musicians to borrow and re-use existing melodic ideas – great composers like Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven all did so throughout their lives.

    The recording industry has not only sought to re-define this practice as plagiarism, it also tries to police its view through a constant flow of often costly legal actions. Seeking to penalise musicians that draw inspiration from existing works, companies not only impoverish society through the loss of new variations put together using music’s toolkit, they also demonstrate clearly that copyright is antithetical to creativity.

  • The Nation ☛ Covid and Canceled Gigs Have Left Musicians High and Dry

    In January, I performed with a group of musicians and dancers at the Salle Jacques Brel, a 400-seat venue on the outskirts of Paris. We’d rehearsed a program of Haitian-based music and dancing for two days, were excited to be playing again—it was my first gig in Paris since the pandemic—and honored to be included in a festival line-up with such great musicians as David Murray, Sylvie Courvoisier, and William Parker.

  • Creative Commons ☛ Episode 12: Open Culture VOICES – Maja Drabczyk

    Welcome to episode 12 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we’re joined by Maja Drabczyk, Head of Policy and Advocacy at Centrum Cyfrowe in Poland. Maja is a sociologist, researcher, manager of cultural projects in the field of heritage and new technologies. She is passionate about investigating and further strengthening the social value of cultural heritage institutions, and supporting both cultural and educational sectors in shaping their, user-focused, digital strategies.

  • Creative Commons ☛ Episode 11: Open Culture VOICES – Alwaleed Alkhaja

    Welcome to episode 11 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we’re joined by Alwaleed Alkhaja, Senior Intellectual Property Librarian at the Qatar National Library. Alweed manages the Library’s open access fund and serves as its representative on the SCOSS Board. Before joining the Library, Alwaleed worked in open access publishing with QScience.com / HBKU Press. He holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Göttingen / International Max Planck Research School, and an MBA from the Alliance Manchester Business School.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ ACE Says It ‘Shut Down’ Two Pirate Sites But That’s Not Quite The Full Story

    This week the piracy investigation unit of the MPA revealed that in 2019, 1,400 pirate sites existed in North America but by 2021, that number had reduced to 238. “We will find you and shut down your servers,” pirates were warned. Soon after, the Alliance for Creativity revealed the “shut down” of two more “streaming sites” but that isn’t quite the full picture. Some pirates are well prepared.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ UEFA Wants Ukraine to Increase Anti-Piracy Protection, After The War

    European football federation UEFA wants Ukraine to offer effective protections against live streaming piracy. Ideally, pirated streams should be taken offline within 105 minutes, before “the damage is fully inflicted.” The comments were made while many Ukrainians fight for their lives. UEFA is aware of the situation and notes that the requests are subject to a resolution of the military conflict.