03.16.22
Posted in News Roundup at 8:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Welcome to episode 01 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.
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When war over territory develops in the physical world, what happens to developers in the borderless networked one? Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman and Jonathan Bennett dive into that question, while also visiting other wartime tech topics, such as the new Universal Chiplet, exciting new device drivers and the first 300 Starlinks in Ukraine.
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Kernel Space
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For several years, Intel launched a project related to the Linux kernel. Since then, until now there has not been a lot of information about it; and a few thought that Intel had left it on the side. But the reality is that the company has plans to make progress. And even to step on the accelerator in projects that join this operating system with the hardware. So much so, that they have even bought a specialized software developer company from Germany, Linutronix; to give more muscle and revitalize the project, and to advance GNU/Linux.
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Graphics Stack
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Those of you in-the-know are well aware that Zink has always had a crippling addiction to seamless cubemaps. Specifically, Vulkan doesn’t support non-seamless cubemaps since nobody wants those anymore, but this is the default mode of sampling for OpenGL.
Thus, it is impossible for Zink to pass GL 4.6 conformance until this issue is resolved.
[...]
In order to replicate this basic OpenGL behavior, a substantial amount of code is required—most of it terrible.
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Applications
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Cobalt Strike was created a decade ago by Raphael Mudge as a tool for security professionals. It’s a comprehensive platform that emulates very realistic attacks. Indeed, the tool can assess vulnerabilities and run penetration tests, while most tools on the market cannot do both.
Vulnerability assessment and pentesting are two different things. The first consists of identifying vulnerabilities that could be used by hackers, not exploiting them. Pentesting involves vulnerability exploitation and post-exploitation actions – the idea is to conduct a real attack, like cybercriminals would do, except with an explicit authorization from the company in order to identify weaknesses and improve security defenses.
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Your choice of encryption software can have a major impact on the safety of this data, however. Two popular options for encryption are NordLocker and VeraCrypt.
While the two provide similar benefits, their feature sets are different enough that you’ll want to choose your software carefully based on your business’s particular needs and preferences.
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This usability comes with a cost, however. NordLocker offers a free version of the software, but it is limited compared to the premium version.
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Instructionals/Technical
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There is much more to copying and renaming files on Linux rather than cp and mv. Try out some commands and strategies to save your time.
For this purpose, users have been using cp and mv for decades. These were some of the few commands we learned and use every day, similarly, there are other techniques, handy variations, and other commands used for this purpose that provide unique options.
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It’s safe to say that the find command in Linux is one of the must-know operations for backend developers, unless you are using a Windows Server.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Fragments on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Fragments is an easy-to-use BitTorrent client for the GNOME desktop environment. If you were looking for a better user experience(UI) with all the necessary features for torrenting, this application is worth checking out.
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 Fragments BitTorrent client on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
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Python is one of the most widely used open-source, multipurpose, and object-oriented programming languages. It is gaining popularity due to its simplicity and easy-to-use syntax. It is a high-level language and is generally used in web development, gaming development, data analytics and visualization, AI, and machine learning.
At the time of writing this tutorial, Python 3.10 is the latest stable version and was released on October 04, 2021. Python 3.10 comes with some cool features including, Structural Pattern Matching, Improved Error Reporting, Security Updates, Pattern Matching, and more.
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Here are some basic skills to get started with bash, one of the best shells for preparing and using scripts on Linux.
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Today we are looking at how to install SSF2 1.3.1.2 Beta on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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Games
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The Hand of Glory, a point and click adventure from Madit Entertainment / Daring Touch has released an official Linux build. With it now available, the game is on a 55% discount until March 26, a good time to show support for another indie developer.
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From the sunny shores of Miami to the green lush Italian hills, he will have to use all the resources at his disposal in order to reveal the truth behind the kidnapping. And by that time, he’ll be past the point of no return.”
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MorphOS is actually a remarkably good and capable operating system – held back by its reliance on outdated Apple PowerPC hardware. It’s got a a robust core, a good browser, a number of great applications, and you can configure and alter every nook and cranny of the operating system (assuming you can get through the thick molasses that is several decades of Amiga-isms that make no sense to anyone who hasn’t been part of the scene for about as long).
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New Releases
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The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.15.1 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
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The developers of Zorin OS have released the latest version of their beautiful desktop Linux OS.
Zorin OS 16 was only released seven months ago and yet the developers have been busy at work to bring the first point release for the desktop distribution. The biggest change to the operating system is the inclusion of the 5.13 kernel. However, that kernel is not patched against the Dirty Pipe vulnerability. However, immediately upon installation, an update will patch the kernel, so you’re desktop isn’t in danger of falling prey to this nasty bug.
The 5.13 kernel brings better hardware compatibility for newer hardware (such as NVIDIA RTX 3050 GPUs, 12th Generation Intel Core processors, Sony PlayStation 5 DualSense controllers, the Framework laptop, and Apple’s Magic Mouse 2).
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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IBM’s Red Hat cannot prevent Daniel Pocock and his Software Freedom Institute SA from using the domain name WeMakeFedora.org, according to a ruling on Monday.
Red Hat, which sponsors the development of the Fedora Linux distribution, challenged the inclusion of the trademarked term “Fedora” in the website URL, and demanded it be given the .org domain name. But under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) established by DNS oversight body ICANN, a FORUM mediator found Red Hat’s objections wanting, and refused to order a transfer of the domain.
“There are no advertisements on the respondent’s website,” the decision states. “There is no evidence that respondent is a competitor of complainant, nor is there any evidence that respondent has operated the website for any commercial purpose. The panel rejects complainant’s submission, unsupported by evidence, that respondent’s conduct is likely to have been undertaken for commercial gain.”
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Debian Family
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We're now into the campaigning period. We have 3 candidates this
year:
- Felix Lechner
- Jonathan Carter
- Hideki Yamane
I will make his platforms available when I have received them at:
https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/platforms/
Kurt Roeckx
Debian Project Secretary
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Is Ubuntu the best Linux-based desktop operating system? That is debatable. However, I think we can all agree that Ubuntu is the most well-known desktop Linux distribution on the planet. Hell, Ubuntu even got a mention on the legendary TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory.
Today, the developer of Ubuntu, Canonical, announces some exciting news — the Linux-based operating system is getting a new logo! While it doesn’t deviate much from previous Ubuntu logos, it is definitely an improvement. You see, the logo was always suppose to look like a top-down view of three people interlocking arms — Canonical calls it “Circle of Friends.” The circles (heads) are now centered to better represent the trio of people. The logo also gets put into an orange rectangle.
“While it is important to have a respectful continuity with the previous Circle of Friends, the updated version is leaner, more focused, more sophisticated. It also makes a little more sense that the heads are now inside the circle, facing each other and connecting more directly. The rectangular orange tag is a break from the conventional square or circle, as it allows for the boldness of the orange to express itself and provides a recognisable colourful mark across media. Finally, the logo moves from a tiny superscript to a large, dynamic and leading presence,” says Canonical.
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A few days ago (2022-03-14) was pi-day to celebrate the number pi (≈3.14). Some celebrate pi-day by making videos or similar content about this number. As I already found a few mathematicians on gemini, I was sure I would at least see one article about pi popping up on that day. But there were none, what made me a little bit disappointed. Now I realize that I am something of a blogger myself, so I could just have made some content. So here is my fact about pi to celebrate pi+0.02 day:
Pi might be a normal number. That might at first sound a little boring and normal, but it is pretty cool. Note that I am saying that pi might be a normal number, as it has not yet been proven. But what is a normal number? A normal number contains any finite sequence of integers appears in the decimal places with equal density. This means any finite sequence of numbers can be found in pi. This includes your birthday, your full name if converted correctly, the Mona Lisa. How about the Linux kernel? Whatever you can think of.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Say “hello” to an affordable cellular plan, Librem SIMple, a privacy-focused prepaid service in USA
Purism expanded the Librem AweSIM pre-paid service to offer a new plan at an ever more affordable price. Librem SIMple offers digital privacy protection with a 1GB monthly data limit and a $39/month.
Traditional cellular providers in the US are selling data for advertising. They are creating unified customer identifiers. This way, they can “identify users across many devices and serve them relevant advertising.” With the Librem AweSIM and Librem SIMple, users’ personal information is never sold, disclosed, or even seen by the big telecom carriers. Purism’s Chief Security Officer at Purism, Kyle Rankin, elaborates “Most companies think data is gold. That’s why they are double-dipping from their paying customers to monetize customer data. Purism thinks data is uranium. We collect the least amount of customer data necessary to provide a service and get rid of it once we no longer need it.” Purism also offers Librem AweSIM, a premium $99/month unlimited prepaid plan. Since its launch in 2020, many customers enjoy privacy protections that AweSIM provides.
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Omni wheels are fantastic because they let a vehicle drive forward, backward, left, right, and rotate — all without a steering mechanism. There are only two catches: all four omni wheels must be driven and omni wheels don’t handle rough terrain or obstacles well. Tank tracks are perfect for rough terrain, so James Bruton thought to combine the two concepts. To test this idea, he built an Arduino-controlled robot with a triangle of tank tracks.
This robot has three tank tracks, each of which is driven by a simple geared DC motor. Burton arranged those in a triangle formation, so each track is at a 60 degree angle to the other two tracks. Normally, an arrangement like this would be a disaster, as it couldn’t drive in any direction without dragging at least one of the tracks. But Bruton lined all of the tracks with small wheels, which have axes of rotation perpendicular to the track motor axles. Those wheels rotate freely, so the vehicle can move without resistance — even when that movement is perpendicular to one of the tracks.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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In January there were 161 alerts generated, resulting in 20 regression bugs being filed on average 13.4 days after the regressing change landed.
Welcome to the January 2022 edition of the performance sheriffing newsletter. Here you’ll find the usual summary of our sheriffing efficiency metrics, followed by a review of the year. If you’re interested (and if you have access) you can view the full dashboard.
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Programming/Development
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Java
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The latest update of the Java Development Kit (JDK 18), becomes generally available (GA) next Tuesday, and though it’s not a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, there’s a lot to look forward to in this update.
JDK 18, which is the reference implementation of version 18 of the Java SE Platform (as specified by JSR 393 in the Java Community Process), is set to go GA on March 22, on schedule with the accelerated, six-month release cadence Oracle announced in 2017. JDK 17, which was the second LTS since JDK 11 went GA in 2018, was announced in September 2021.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Linux Foundation
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ZDNet ☛ Linux Foundation and CNCF launch Cloud-Native Developer Bootcamp [Ed: Steven Vaughan-Nichols has been reduced to writing obligatory SPAM for his sponsor, basically peddling a diploma mill]
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Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ STATEMENT AGAINST TEXAS DISCRIMINATION [Ed: It is worth noting that signing on behalf of the Linux Foundation right now is a full time (100%) Microsoft employee. Linux? No. Windows Foundation.]
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AsyncAPI is a project that considers that human beings have naturalized the tools that enhance their capacities. Technology can guide us and define our steps. It’s not merely daily practice. We should be more aware that we humans make technology and that we are the ones who create and determine the future it holds for us. We are the ones who build the future.
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Security
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Linux Netfilter is a Linux security program that controls access to and from Linux’s network stack.
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A vulnerability in the container runtime engine CRI-O can be exploited by a rogue user to gain root-level access on a host.
In a Kubernetes environment powered by CRI-O, the security hole can be used by a miscreant to move through a cluster as an administrator, install malware, and cause other chaos.
CrowdStrike’s threat research team discovered the privilege-escalation flaw in CRI-O version 1.19. The bug, tracked as CVE-2022-0811 and more creatively dubbed cr8escape, received a severity score of 8.8 out of 10.
CrowdStrike privately disclosed the vulnerability, and CRI-O’s developers today released a fix while recommending immediate patching. Besides Kubernetes, other software and platforms that depend on or use CRI-O – these include OpenShift and Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes – may also be vulnerable, CrowdStrike warned.
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Versions 3.3.6, 3.4.3, and 3.5.1, patched against the infinite loop denial of service condition, will appear on OpenBSD mirrors soon, LibreSSL maintainers advised.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Although computers and tablets are critical for connecting to the internet, across the U.S, more than 1 in 10 households don’t have a computer. Many more households don’t have enough devices for everyone, forcing families to make difficult choices about which family members can connect and which can’t. It’s not that these households don’t want a computer; they can’t afford one. Just 59% of households making less than $30,000 a year have a computer.
The “device divide” is every bit as problematic as the “digital divide.” While there are government programs intended to help low-income consumers access devices, none of these programs will come even close to getting a device into the hands of everyone who needs one. Thus, absent well-funded and sustainable federal programs to get devices to those in need, we won’t end the device divide or the digital divide.
[...]
In 2021, Senator Raphael Warnock and Representative Donald McEachin introduced the “Device Access for Every American Act.” That legislation would create a voucher program that enables low-income households to get up to two connected devices directly from a retailer or refurbisher. Although a version of the Device Access for Every American Act was included within Build Back Better, that legislative package has stalled, and it’s unclear if negotiations to pass a modified version will succeed.
Luckily the Federal Communications Commission is well poised to pick up where Congress left off. It has the authority to create a device voucher program, modeled off the Device Access for Every American Act, within the Universal Service Fund (USF). The USF is intended to facilitate universal access to advanced telecommunications and information services at a reasonable rate. As a part of this work, the Commission can create a new program. In fact, the FCC created the Lifeline program (which subsidizes phone and broadband service for low-income consumers) using its existing authority. It was only later that Congress codified the Lifeline program. And, the Commission has already recognized that the inability to afford devices jeopardizes universal connectivity, noting in a Lifeline proceeding that the “lack of access to affordable equipment, including computers[…] is a significant barrier to broadband adoption among low-income consumers.”
In many respects, a device voucher program within the USF would be more effective than a Congressionally-funded program. Since USF programs are funded through continuous assessments and not a one-time appropriation, a USF device voucher program should have enough funding to replace broken or outdated devices. A one-time Congressional investment, while helpful, would likely lead to a re-opened device divide as soon as the fund runs out of money and the devices offered are no longer functional.
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British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and dual national Anousheh Ashouri were freed on Wednesday after a long ordeal during which they became a bargaining chip in Iran’s negotiations with the West over Tehran’s nuclear program.
A video aired by Iran’s Tasnim news agency, affiliated to the elite Revolutionary Guards, showed a woman dressed in black Iranian Islamic clothes, boarding an aircraft.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Protocol at 5:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 6e9c93b3822596e7d7272c36ffcd5186
Introducing Gerbil and Molasses
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The audiocast of today shows Gerbil and Molasses in action; towards the end we also show Moonlander, Telescope, Amfora, Kristall, and Lagrange (Gemini clients)
MONTHS ago we tried to show some of the many options for Gemini surfing, so we ended up comparing Moonlander, Telescope, Amfora, Kristall, and Lagrange (newer and older versions). Today we take a look at Molasses and Gerbil, which are actively being developed in GitHub and GitLab, respectively. Molasses last had a git commit 3 days ago. For Gerbil it was 4 months ago. Instructions for installing them on GNU/Linux (or downloading the binaries) can be found here and here. Gopher protocol is supported as well, but we do not focus on Gopher because it’s very old and even outdated, with many lingering deficiencies which render it impractical for our needs.
The video above shows Gerbil and Molasses in action. It’s a spontaneous video that I recorded minutes after I had tinkered with both Gerbil and Molasses (they didn’t take long to install and were very simple to install on Debian 10). There aren’t many features, but that’s a plus, assuming KISS principle or Occam’s razor.
There are many purely practical reasons to move to Gemini where (and when) possible. It’s not only about being principled, it’s about being pragmatic, putting efficiency, security, and simplicity first. The Web is going in a dark direction for a number of reasons (the Internet as a whole is under attack), and it won’t improve for reasons we’ve been covering here for a very long time. Gemini is actually a lot simpler than the Web, so embracing it should not be difficult at all. It’s different, sure, but not harder. █
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Posted in IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat at 4:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Today in the IBM-sponsored ‘news’ sites:
Microsoft is ‘courting’ us… on its own terms (spreading Microsoft’s .NET). Like trying to push people to Windows (WSL*) instead of improving WINE…
Summary: IBM (or ICBM as we increasingly call it) isn’t fighting for Software Freedom; heck, sometimes it actively helps Microsoft and Microsoft’s proprietary software agenda
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Videos at 2:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: From the official talk‘s description: “Here’s how you can get all your day-to-day computing done with free software. Alice Monsen, 11, has given multiple talks at technical conferences and will go over more than 10 programs that will replace proprietary with free software.”
Licence: CC BY 4.0
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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So many of us have asked this same question over and over. We sit and wonder, “Why is Linux still in the single-digit market share on the desktop?” Most often, the answer is a shrug and the hope that maybe this time next year we’ll finally break into double digits.
In the meantime, the faithful in the Linux community are always trying to figure out the thing that Linux needs to get over the hump. Lately, I’ve been giving this question some extra cycles in the ol’ gray matter and have come up with five ideas, none of which actually have to do with software. You see, I believe Linux has matured to the point it could easily overtake Windows as the desktop of choice for the masses. It’s that easy to use. And given that the majority of users have reached the point where nearly all of what they do is within a browser, it should be a no-brainer.
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Wading into the fad for vintage desktop aesthetics (Windows, MacOS Classic) comes Hot Dog Linux. It stands for “Horrible Obsolete Typeface and Dreadful Onscreen Graphics” and isn’t taking prisoners. Check out the Atari GEM theme! Jesus christ.
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Linux-Libre is a variation of the Linux kernel that aims to only provide a free and open source implementation of hardware drivers. It is currently maintained by the Free Software Foundation of Latin America. As such, the Linux distributions that use it also promote the use of Free and Open Source software (FOSS).
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Server
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Good day, everyone
Welcome back to the second episode of the “Meet Our Contributors” blog post series for APAC.
This post will feature four outstanding contributors from the Australia and New Zealand regions, who have played diverse leadership and community roles in the Upstream Kubernetes project.
So, without further ado, let’s get straight to the blog.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In the 21st episode of Enterprise Linux Security, Jay and Joao discuss the recent “Dirty Pipe” vulnerability, as well as Nvidia’s recent breach.
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Kernel Space
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I'm announcing the release of the 5.16.15 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
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Applications
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Kodi 19.4 Matrix is officially out and now available for download on all the supported devices such as Amazon Fire Stick, FireStick 4K, Fire TV Cube, Windows PC, Mac, Android, iOS, and Linux.
With various enhancements and bug fixes, 19.4 is expected to offer a better experience than the previous iterations of the Kodi 19 Matrix. However, do not expect any dramatic changes in the way you use Kodi. The previous version, Kodi 19.3, was released in 2021.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Fragments on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, KTorrent is a BitTorrent application by KDE which allows you to download files using the BitTorrent protocol. While offering a simple user interface, there are a lot of options that include plugins support, magnet link support, custom groups, and so on.
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 KTorrent BitTorrent client on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
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Looking for the last, best system monitor you could ever imagine for the Linux desktop? Jack Wallen is certain he’s found that tool in System Monitoring Center.
Linux has no shortage of monitoring tools. Toss a rock at a Linux desktop and you’ll probably hit a handful of monitors. That doesn’t mean, however, that every one of those monitors is worth your time. But every so often a monitoring tool comes along that does something different or packages the monitoring of services and performance in such a way that makes you realize how important these tools are.
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Up until now, the only way to define a policy in Kubewarden was to use a ClusterAdmissionPolicy which is applied to cluster-wide resources across all namespaces.
That’s why we’re thrilled to announce the new AdmissionPolicy resource. This new resource is created inside a namespace and the policies will process only the requests that are targeting the namespace where the AdmissionPolicy is defined. Except from being a “namespaced” resource, AdmissionPolicy works exactly the same as the ClusterAdmissionPolicy.
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A few days ago, I reviewed a USB 3.0 to 2.5 Gbps Ethernet adapter based on Realtek RTL8156B chip in Ubuntu 20.04, and let’s say the reliability and performance were underwhelming. I got some recommendations like changing cables, the MTU size, etc…
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The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution.
SSH applications are based on a client–server architecture, connecting an SSH client instance with an SSH server. SSH operates as a layered protocol suite comprising three principal hierarchical components: the transport layer provides server authentication, confidentiality, and integrity; the user authentication protocol validates the user to the server; and the connection protocol multiplexes the encrypted tunnel into multiple logical communication channels.
SSH was designed on Unix-like operating systems, as a replacement for Telnet and for unsecured remote Unix shell protocols, such as the Berkeley Remote Shell (rsh) and the related rlogin and rexec protocols, which all use insecure, plaintext transmission of authentication tokens.
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A file is a data storage resource in a computer that is mainly recognized by its filename. Sometimes we need the scattered data of two or more than two files in one place in an organized way. There are many commands available in Linux to combine the multiple file data in one file, but this Article is all about combining data of two files in one using the “cat’ command on Ubuntu 20.04(Linux Operating System).
As the name suggests, The “cat” command is abbreviated as “concatenate” that is used to combine the data. We can use the cat command to create single or multiple files, view their contents, merge files, and show output to a terminal screen or redirect it to files. In this article, the cat command will be used to merge data from two files into one file in an organized manner.
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A network comprises different types of traffic, including legitimate and malicious traffic. A network can also have various types of issues. To handle the network traffic-related issues, we can use the tcpdump command.
The tcpdump tool can capture traffic from various protocols, such as TCP, UDP, ARP, and ICMP. It can help us monitor, capture, and analyze network traffic. It can help us filter the traffic, which helps to speed up the traffic analysis.
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Passbolt is a free and open-source password manager based on PHP, MySQL, and OpenPGP. It is a self-hosted application server, you can install it on your server. Passbolt is primarily designed for teams, but you can also use it as a personal password manager.
Passbolt is built on OpenPGP and has an extensible API. On the client-side, you can use the Passbolt browser extension, which builds on OpenPGP.js for encryption functionality. On the server-side, Passbolt uses the GnuPG PHP extension and openpgp-php to perform key validation and user authentication. Passbolt uses the GPGAuth protocol for user authentication.
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In this guide, we will learn what is fstab in Linux, and what is the usage of fstab file, the structure of /etc/fstab file and finally how to debug fstab issues. At the end, we will also discuss a brief introduction to mtab file, its usage and how mtab differs from fstab.
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Have you ever encountered a problem in a YAML, Python or any other files that emphasizes indentation?
And later, you realized that everything in the file was correct, except for the indentation and saw that there was a line indented with 3 spaces instead of 4 spaces?
That happens often. Most IDEs let you view the special characters and identify the end of line, spaces and tabs. Vim is not behind any other IDE. It can also show you those hidden characters.
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Grep stands for (Global Regular Expression Print) is a Linux command-line utility to perform essential regular expression in the file.
Finding strings and patterns from the file and streaming the output type of operation can be performed using the grep command.
Grep can be piped with other commands. For example, you can pipe cat and grep together to search strings from files and display them on the screen.
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SuluCMS is a free, open-source, powerful and reliable content management system (CMS). It is based on Symfony and PHP and it uses MariaDB/MySQL as its backend database. Individuals and businesses can use this CMS to build dynamic websites according to their needs. It also comes with a Web Panel and many features like API, SEO Integration etc.
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After writing about Linux cursor theme Phinger a few folks asked if I had a guide on how to change cursor theme in Ubuntu.
I didn’t, so I figured I’d write one.
So this is a quick tutorial that shows you how to change cursor theme on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (and above) and how to install cursor themes available to download from sites like GNOME Look and Github.
Then, to help you put all of the information to good use, I list a couple of third-party cursor sets I think look dope on the ‘buntu desktop — but feel free to ignore these and use something else!
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In the old days, you had a computer and it did one thing at a time. Literally. You would load your cards or punch tape or whatever and push a button. The computer would read your program, execute it, and spit out the results. Then it would go back to sleep until you fed it some more input.
The problem is computers — especially then — were expensive. And for a typical program, the computer is spending a lot of time waiting for things like the next punched card to show up or the magnetic tape to get to the right position. In those cases, the computer was figuratively tapping its foot waiting for the next event.
Someone smart realized that the computer could be working on something else while it was waiting, so you should feed more than one program in at a time. When program A is waiting for some I/O operation, program B could make some progress. Of course, if program A didn’t do any I/O then program B starved, so we invented preemptive multitasking. In that scheme, program A runs until it can’t run anymore or until a preset time limit occurs, whichever comes first. If time expires, the program is forced to sleep a bit so program B (and other programs) get their turn. This is how virtually all modern computers outside of tiny embedded systems work.
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Games
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So last week we mentioned that Stadia was going to introduce a solution to run Windows games unmodified on Linux, and not using Proton as Google was apparently building their own thing.
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Godot 3.4.3 was released less than 3 weeks ago, but a few significant regressions were found in that release, so we’re fast-tracking the release of Godot 3.4.4 to solve those.
This Release Candidate adds a handful of fixes, including several regression fixes. Please make sure to test it on your projects and to report any issue, so that we can release 3.4.4 stable in the coming days.
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Love your casual games? Lazy Galaxy 2 from Coldwild Games is out now with a Linux version and it’s a wonderful idle / clicker game that also blends in some other strategy elements too.
“Lazy Galaxy is an idle/clicker game with base-building and RTS elements. Lead an evil (albeit lazy) alien race to conquer the universe! Expand your base, fight vicious foes, and conquer the galaxies. Acquire combat experience and convert into candy, the most precious alien resource!”
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Stormworks: Build and Rescue is a popular sim where you design, create and pilot your own air sea rescue service and now it should work a lot better on Steam Deck and gamepads in general.
“Stormworks: Build and Rescue is a rich and dramatic physics playground. Take your custom-designed, block-based and programmable vehicles into fierce oceanic storms. Plan and execute thrilling rescues in a variety of challenging crisis scenarios. Export and share your meticulously designed vehicles and missions with other players via the Steam workshop.”
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With gameplay that’s a fun mix of Stardew Valley, Minecraft and survival games it seems Core Keeper has become an instant hit on Steam.
In only a single week, the developer has announced that 250,000 copies have been sold which shows that if you have the right idea there’s plenty of room for indie games to push through the noise of hundreds of games releasing on Steam each month. Core Keeper seemed to come out of nowhere too, with not a whole lot said about it before release so they didn’t even have a big marketing push either.
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MacGuffin’s Curse from developer Brawsome originally released in 2012 and it just got a nice HD upgrade, along with a newly released Linux version.
A werewolf comedy puzzle adventure where players sneak and smash their way through sokoban-inspired puzzling rooms, meeting a cast of quirky quest-givers along the way. It was winner of Best Game Writing at Freeplay 2011, and was selected to be in the PAX10 at the inaugural PAX Australia.
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The third major expansion X4: Tides of Avarice and another big free update are available now for space sim X4: Foundations. Egosoft continuing showing their commitment to their fans, and for lovers of open-world space sims everywhere.
It’s an absolutely huge upgrade too, probably worth jumping back in if you bounced off it at warp speed at any time in the past. Some of what’s new includes scrap recycling, AMD FSR support, new achievements, a personal office, new capital ship designs, special NPCs that offer new mission chains, new equipment mods, an expanded Encyclopedia, new voices and the list goes on. There’s even more when you look at the DLC that brings in new factions, new areas to explore and much more.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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After the project reorganized its version numbering, GNOME 42 consolidates the ongoing modernization effort. Bear in mind, we’re describing the release candidate, so some of the details might change before it comes out.
The Reg looked at GNOME 40 about a year ago. That was a major release, and one of the big changes was new human-interface guidelines. That continued in GNOME 41 and the process is not finished yet.
The big new thing remains Gtk4, the underlying programming toolkit used to implement GNOME and all GNOME apps. Gtk4 includes a new library called libadwaita, which governs the appearance of GNOME apps. You might remember the name “Adwaita” from what used to be the default theme in earlier versions of GNOME. The word means “the only one” in Sanskrit and, in part, libadwaita is the outcome of a long-running argument about theme in the Gtk ecosystem.
One of the triggers was when the developer of a popular icon theme made a position statement that he did not provide icons for third-party applications, because he respected their own branding.
This led to a request from a group of GNOME developers asking downstream integrators to stop themeing their apps.
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There’s a good NetSpeed indicator that shows the current download & upload speed in Ubuntu panel. For those would like a floating desktop widget, a new extension is available for GNOME 40.
The new ‘Screen Net Speed‘ extension adds an animated widget to your screen displays current download & upload speed. By clicking on it will toggle display its position (so far only bottom left or bottom right).
The widget is always on top. And, it automatically rises (move up) when network speed increase and sets (move down) when speed slow down. As well, a paper plane icon is present in panel to toggle display the widget.
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Arch Linux is a popular option for Linux users who want more control over their operating system.
While many experienced users customize the Arch Linux experience to provide some of the best user experiences (in terms of its UI), it could be challenging for new Linux users.
If you are not aware of the specifics about Arch Linux, you might want to read out Ubuntu vs Arch Linux comparison article.
However, some Arch-based distros aim to offer a more accessible experience without taking the control away.
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BSD
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We are happy to announce that The NetBSD Fundation is a mentoring organization at Google Summer of Code 2022!
Would you like to contribute to NetBSD or pkgsrc during the summer? Please give a look to NetBSD wiki Google Summer of Code page with possible ideas list and/or please join #NetBSD-code IRC channel on libera or get in touch with us via mailing lists to propose new projects!
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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Powered by the famous open-source multimedia framework FFmpeg and the Qt application framework, the Shotcut video editor lets you edit a wide range of video formats up to 4K resolutions and HDR, many audio formats up to 5.1 surround, as well as several popular image formats including WebP, SVG, TIFF, BMP, GIF, and others.
Some of Shotcut’s major features include frame-accurate seeking of many of the supported video formats, multi-format timeline to make it easier to mix and match resolutions and frame-rates within a project, built-in audio and video filters, audio mixing across all tracks, pitch compensation for video speed changes, deinterlacing, color correction and grading, and batch encoding with job control.
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Many view the automotive industry’s objectives as a challenging dichotomy. The industry aims to advance the concept of the software-defined vehicle by providing the latest advancements in computing technology to enable functional and safety features, while at the same time holding these features to strict ISO standards that govern the functional safety of electronic systems within road vehicles.
These opposing aims slow the development process, and limit industry access to established insiders. Open source and, in particular, automotive Linux have a potential to fulfill both of these general requirements in ways that traditional proprietary systems have not managed. Several trends are emerging in 2022 to address these challenges.
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Cloud-native architectures and containers can increase efficiency, performance, and agility for telecommunications service providers as they continue to find ways to compete in the market. Developers, architects, and others involved in the software development process can consider a shift-on-stack deployment model with vhostuser to integrate cloud-native network functions (CNFs).
In network functions virtualization (NFV) deployments, OpenShift can be deployed on top of OpenStack, but the deployment only supports exposing SR-IOV Virtual Functions to the CNF running on the OpenShift worker node (VM running on OpenStack).
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Don’t panic too much; Ubuntu’s new logo still uses the orange and white colour scheme we’re all familiar with. But the iconic Circle of Friends (CoF) motif? Well that is different, sporting a tighter and more unified look than in its earlier iterations.
Perhaps most strikingly of all is that the CoF no longer sits inside a circle (’roundel’ in design speak) but is now housed at the bottom of a solid orange rectangle…
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We’re approaching the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release and it’s that time of the cycle when everyone is watching for the first glimpse of the official mascot artwork. This release, however, also has another visual treat in store. Because this time, Ubuntu’s logo – the Circle of Friends – gets an upgrade too!
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I was an MA student at an art college, after having been an arts/humanities BA undergrad student a few years prior to that (and following a few subsequent years working my first post-college job and some time spent backpacking around the world as well). I was studying an arts/technology course, as I had an obsession with all things ‘media’ and communications theory at the time (this broadly encompassing everything from natural language, linguistics and grammar, philosophy of language, and an extension here into other aspects of arts/media practice – détournement, painting, audio-visual, etc.) At my college, in the departments where I was taking courses and hopefully beyond this as well, the flavour of OS used by staff was Linux – most often Ubuntu or other popular forms of the Linux OS. This was largely so because of the politics of free software that were aligned to by teachers at the college, as well as the complimentary nature of the *nix system with the technical skillset that formed many parts of their studies and discipline; computing, software studies, etc. This was largely my first exposure to free software and the command line, and the RasPi was the first linux-based device that I found in my possession. We had been running some RasPi’s in class for some collaborative local-access projects between a group of us, and I decided to purchase one for some experiments at home. These were really my first steps into a different relationship with software towards a creative hands-on approach through free software, server configuration (and onwards into some sysadmin, programming, git, gopher, gemini.. etc). For me, it really all began with the Pi.
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If you’re a regular around here, you might have noticed the new “For Home” option in our navigation bar up at the top of the page. But before you click it, wait a moment. We want to bend your ear about what we’re up to, and we want to pick your brains about what you think we should get up to.
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Wind River’s experience with Linux and open source over the past nearly two decades across mission-critical industries is well-known throughout the industry. In fact, according to VDC Research, Wind River is ranked as the market leader in commercial embedded Linux global revenues.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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We are excited to announce Librem SIMple: an affordable cellular plan that protects your privacy.
When we announced Librem AweSIM our goal was simple: provide a cellular service that protected your privacy. Cellular providers in the US are creating unified customer identifiers so they can “identify users across multiple devices and serve them relevant advertising.” With Librem AweSIM only we know the link between a phone number and a customer’s personal information.
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In order to be able to interface IR sensor with Arduino, it is necessary to understand what IR sensor actually is. IR stands for the infrared region. Sensors capable of working with that region of light are IR sensors. IR technology is widely used in industries and our daily life. For example in the TV remote, IR technology is used for the communication between the TV and it’s remote allowing the user to have a level of comfort by controlling the TV from a fair amount of distance rather than manual labour. Since the IR sensor uses low power that makes them user-friendly and uses widely.
In the electromagnetic spectrum, IR radiations lie in the visible and microwave region. The range of these waves is between 0.7 micrometers and 100 micrometers. IR spectrum can divide into three regions namely near-infrared, mid and far-infrared region. The range of near-infrared is between 0.7 and 3 micrometers. From 3 micrometer to 6 micrometer lies mid-infrared region and higher than 6 micrometer is a far-infrared region.
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Waveshare’s $25 “CM4-Duino” carrier for the Raspberry Pi CM4 has an Arduino Uno form factor and GPIO plus USB 2.0, HDMI, MIPI-CSI, and an M.2 M-key slot for a wireless module or NVMe storage.
Waveshare has launched a compact, Arduino-compatible carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 that sells for only $25. The CM4-Duino has a 73.58 × 53.34mm, Arduino Duo R3 like form factor and Arduino GPIO header that is said to support most Arduino shields.
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RISC-V IP leader SiFive announced it has raised $175 million in Series F financing from Coatue, which values the company at over $2.5 billion. Earlier this week, SiFive sold its OpenFive SoC design business to AlphaWave for $210 million.
SiFive announced a Series F round of $175 million led by Coatue Management, adding to previous rounds for a total of over $350 million raised since the company’s founding in 2016. The RISC-V core IP developer is now valued at $2.5 billion, a half billion more than the valuation last year when Intel attempted but then abandoned an acquisition of the company. Earlier this week, Canadian semiconductor IP designer Alphawave announced that it had acquired SiFive’s OpenFive RISC-V SoC design business for $210 million (see farther below).
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Leaving “big tech” ecosystems on the desktop is fairly easy with a Linux laptop or a manual Linux install. Smartphones, though, seem strictly the domain of Apple and Google. Do any Linux-based smartphones exist? Let’s take a look at this mostly nascent smartphone genre.
First, let’s make a technical caveat. Both iPhones and Android phones are, in a way, Linux phones, or at least related to Linux. Google built its Android operating system on top of AOSP, which is an open-source project based on the Linux kernel—the foundation of all Linux distributions. AOSP’s code is free and available for anyone to modify and use for their own purposes. The version of Android you use on your phone, however, is closed-source. That means the modifications Google has made are proprietary and not publically available.
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Browsers/Clients
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Gemini
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There is a new Android build of Lagrange that is based on the desktop v1.11 release.
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While most of v1.10 was focused on the mobile variant, this release is very much centered on the desktop. The split view mode that was added back in v1.4 is now finally expanded to also support creation of additional windows. There is also a bunch of smaller features for a better user experience.
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To me these proposals feel like Web technology. They are (relatively) complex technical solutions that are difficult to apply universally to everyone, and require (relatively) costly commitment from both gemlog authors and readers.
Gemlogs are not meant for interaction, per se. It’s a bit like having a discussion with someone by publishing open letters in a newspaper. It’s a many-to-many, open ended forum.
Gemlog discussions have a certain stress-free nature. You can just make a post and not worry about any replies, or deal with them at your leisure after a week or a month. It’s a slow, disengaged form of communication, amendable to an intermittently-offline way of life.
Should we try to build a two-way communication channel out of gemlogs? I’m leaning on “no”: it adds complexity for everyone, and it’s better to converse over existing channels that are actually designed for such interaction.
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I’m jumping directly to Offpunk 0.9 as a release candidate of Offpunk 1.0, which should be released next week.
While there are many improvements that could be made, I believe Offpunk has reached some maturity with mainly bug fixes and small improvements since the 0.4 release.
One of those improvements is that Offpunk will now avoid fetching http content above 20Mo if that content was not explicitely requested. This configurable download limit is impossible to implement with Gemini as there is no “content-lenght” information but Gemini content is recommended to be under 100Mo.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla Firefox has been one of the most popular browsers for a long time, especially for Linux users. People choose Mozilla over other popular browsers primarily for its speed, security, and other benefits. Eventually, it is the default browser for most modern Linux distributions. So, the developers of this browser always keep it updated so that users don’t have to face any issues regarding speed. Still, many of us need to speed up the Firefox browser on Linux. And today, I will share some of the most effective ways for that.
Many times, you have faced different problems that can slow down Firefox. The performance issue is one of the most common problems we often face. However, we have learned about some quick solutions to speed up the browser on the Linux system.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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The new Board of Directors of The Document Foundation has just started the two year term on February 18, 2022. Full members are: Thorsten Behrens, Paolo Vecchi, Jan ‘Kendy’ Holešovský, Emiliano Vavassori, Caolán McNamara, Cor Nouws and László Németh. Deputies are: Gábor Kelemen, Ayhan Yalçınsoy and Gabriel Masei.
Four people have been elected for the first time to the Board of Directors: László Németh and Gábor Kelemen from Hungary; Ayhan Yalçınsoy from Turkey; and Gabriel Masei from Romania.
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Programming/Development
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Go 1.18 is now generally available as a production release, with the much-anticipated generics features.
Go is an open-source programming language aimed at being simple, reliable, and efficient. It was originally designed at Google in 2007. What made Go popular is the fact that it is a general-purpose language directed at creating backends.
Go 1.18 arrives seven months after Go 1.17. It’s a big update, with improvements to the language, toolchain implementation, runtime, and libraries.
Go 1.18, which is available for download from go.dev as of March 15, adds support for generic code utilizing parameterized types. Generics have been dubbed the most significant enhancement to the Go programming language since its 2012 introduction. It was also Go programmers’ most-requested feature.
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For DTail 4, logging has been completely rewritten. The new package name is “internal/io/dlog”. I rewrote the logging because DTail is a special case here: There are logs processed by DTail, there are logs produced by the DTail server itself, there are logs produced by a DTail client itself, there are logs only logged by a DTail client, there are logs only logged by the DTail server, and there are logs logged by both, server and client. There are also different logging levels and outputs involved.
As you can imagine, it becomes fairly complex. There is no ready Go off-shelf logging library which suits my needs and the logging code in DTail 3 was just one big source code file with global variables and it wasn’t sustainable to maintain anymore. So why not rewrite it for profit and fun?
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My first goes at making a UI were in database packages like dBase. You could make menus, dialogs and other clickable things on an 80 by 25 text-only DOS screen. It seemed like a magical way to make software features discoverable and fun. Ooh, look, my popup has a drop shadow!
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Python
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Everyone knows that an application exit code should change based on the success, error or maybe warnings that happened during execution.
[...]
the situation was a little bit more complicated, some functions in other modules also exited the application, so sys.exit() calls were distributed in lots of modules an files.
Exiting the application in some random function of another module is something i dont consider nice coding style, because it makes it hard to track down errors.
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Java
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In Java, as I discussed in a previous article on Red Hat Developer, every array access is guarded by a range check, a test that guards references to array elements and protects the program from out-of-bound accesses by throwing an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException. In this article, you’ll see how HotSpot, OpenJDK’s Java Virtual Machine, can improve application performance by cleverly transforming code to eliminate the need for range checks.
Note: This article uses interval notation, which consists of parentheses and brackets, to describe ranges. If you’re unfamiliar with it, check out the table on interval notation in this document.
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Recently, I caught an episode of a show that’s been on the air seemingly forever, but is clearly on its last legs—The Goldbergs, a show about a Philadelphia-area family in 1980-something that’s overloaded with random pop culture references. One of the main stars of the show, comedian Jeff Garlin, left in a fairly dramatic way in the middle of the season, the result of HR complaints he received while on the show. Given that he’s the patriarch of the family, it’s the kind of character that would certainly be missed in any traditional family sitcom. And how did The Goldbergs handle it? They ran old footage of him, found a body double, and superimposed CGI onto the body double’s face, of course. It went over as well as you would expect—mocked by Twitter, but only about a week and a half after the episode aired—which of course raised an important question for me: Is this the worst example of an Ed Wood-style body double in film or television history? It may or may not be, but today’s Tedium is all about Fake Shemps.
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When I think about digital or computational cultures in some near-distant futures, I can’t figure out what that could or *should* look like. Does the extension of digitality drive a more commonly widespread software/coding literacy in our society? If so, what does that achieve?
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Integrity/Availability
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Basically, the SafeZone library doesn’t sufficiently randomize the two prime numbers it used to generate RSA keys. They’re too close to each other, which makes them vulnerable to recovery.
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Cryptographic keys generated with older software now owned by technology company Rambus are weak enough to be broken instantly using commodity hardware, a researcher reported on Monday. This revelation is part of an investigation that also uncovered a handful of weak keys in the wild.
The software comes from a basic version of the SafeZone Crypto Libraries, which were developed by a company called Inside Secure and acquired by Rambus as part of its 2019 acquisition of Verimatrix, a Rambus representative said. That version was deprecated prior to the acquisition and is distinct from a FIPS-certified version that the company now sells under the Rambus FIPS Security Toolkit brand.
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Proprietary
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Security
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What sort of future are we working towards? I don’t like where this is going. I guess we all believe in total war, now.
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Google has released Chrome version 99.0.4844.74 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system.
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Apple has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
CISA encourages users and administrators to review the Apple security page and apply the necessary updates.
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (openssl and python-scrapy), openSUSE (chrony, expat, java-1_8_0-openj9, libqt5-qtbase, openssl-1_0_0, php7, and rust, rust1.58, rust1.59), Oracle (389-ds:1.4, httpd:2.4, libarchive, libxml2, and vim), Red Hat (389-ds:1.4, glibc, httpd:2.4, kpatch-patch, libarchive, libxml2, vim, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel), SUSE (chrony, compat-openssl098, expat, libqt5-qtbase, openssl, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, openssl1, php7, rust, rust1.58, rust1.59, and squid3), and Ubuntu (libreoffice, netkit-rsh, openssl, openssl, openssl1.0, tar, and tcpdump).
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Hacker News ☛ New “B1txor20″ Linux Botnet Uses DNS Tunnel and Exploits Log4J Flaw [Ed: Anything to distract from absolutely appalling news about Microsoft holes and exploits, in media that's partly controlled by Microsoft while distorting words like "back doors" and their meaning]
A previously undocumented backdoor has been observed targeting Linux systems with the goal of corralling the machines into a botnet and acting as a conduit for downloading and installing rootkits.
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The B1txor botnet, which is spreading via the Log4Shell flaw, enables attackers to get shell access to Linux systems and install a rootkit.
Chinese security company 360Netlab discovered and named the bot in February and publicly disclosed it this week. It takes the form of a backdoor for Linux that uses DNS tunnelling for its command and control (C2) communications.
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Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
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There are hundreds of thousands of Linux and Raspberry Pi devices connected to the internet right now, protected by nothing more than the default password.
In possession of these default passwords, cybercriminals are using numerous automated bots to scan for vulnerable devices. Once they find them, planting malware becomes relatively easy.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The 2021 Cellebrite IPO is the result of a broken public disclosure regime that actively ignores serious human rights violations around the world. The U.S. Congress must ensure the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) does its job properly so investors can evaluate the human rights impacts of their acquisitions and make sound decisions.
Last April, Cellebrite announced its intention to make an initial public offering. The company’s flagship product is the Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED), a powerful mobile data forensics tool that extracts and analyzes data stored on a phone or computer. While UFEDs can be used in the context of legitimate law enforcement investigations, Cellebrite also reportedly sells them to repressive regimes, which then employ the devices to expose journalists’ contacts, incriminate regime critics and human rights defenders, and prosecute pro-democracy protesters. As U.S. Representative Tom Malinowski put it, Cellebrite “has demonstrated a consistent disposition to sell first and ask questions later.”
Despite all of this, the Cellebrite IPO got the green light. The company won the endorsement of the SEC, got approval for its IPO plan, and is now listed on NASDAQ. So what went wrong — and how do we fix it?
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Finance
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What I mean is that, I think, there’s a lot about the problems of global capitalism that are fundamentally about how relatively minor problems can become huge and world changing when scaled up to the level of entire nations or a global economy.
A small number of people owning cars isn’t that big of a deal but when most of the industrialized world has built itself around car ownership, suddenly it’s this huge system that is self-perpetuating. Cities sprawl around roads. Neighborhoods become unwalkable. Efficient trains take a back seat to personal transit or only slightly better busses. You need a car because the world assumes cars so more people buy cars. That’s the kind of weird scaling I’ve been thinking about.
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So I have a lot of sympathy for the concept of decentralized finance. The simplest way to summarize my politics is “anarchist” and people coming together to find ways to organize and exchange resources outside of a government issued currency, as supported by the private financial sector’s special status for capitalist states, has a lot of appeal to me.
[...]
But what I worry is that this all comes down to the old adage that “you can’t solve a social problem with a technical solution”. The idea of a cryptocurrency is that it’s a trustless system. I’m not sure if I see a point to trustless systems anymore because the hard part of creating an extra-governmental system that people can use is the community building. I was thinking about this, in part, because of the recent OpenSea “hack” where people lost a bunch of their assets and are now suing in order to get compensated for their losses. I say “hack” because, of course, if we take code-is-law seriously then everything that happened was completely legitimate. People agreed to smart contracts that meant they would be giving over all of their assets. If they didn’t mean to do that, too bad for them, they should be more careful and thoughtful.
That sounds callous, right? I mean even if it’s over a bunch of, let’s be real, completely worthless pointers to jpgs on the internet it’s cruel to act like tricking someone into an agreement they didn’t intend to enter is their own fault.
But that’s what “trustless” implies! The only way a system can truly be trustless is if there’s no community accountability, no recourse, no way to actually handle conflict. But doing all of that? That’s the actual hard work, the important work! That’s the work that means we’d be capable of actually effectively organizing.
[...]
So, yes, I think I’ve reached a point where I’m feeling very pessmisstic about any attempt to actually build trustless systems and that’s why I’ve lost my sympathy for cryptocurrency projects.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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In this episode, Whitney is joined by Matthew Ehret to discuss how the Fabian Society and other groups developed a model for “penetrating” governments throughout the West and beyond long before the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders program came into existence.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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India has been responsible for more shutdowns each year than any other country. Why?
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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This week, Senators Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), and Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced the “Fair Repair Act” to protect consumers’ right to repair their own electronic products. The bill is the Senate companion to Rep. Mondaire Jones’s (D-NY) “Freedom to Repair Act.”
As consumer devices have increased in complexity, the inability to repair a device without using specialized tools or software has limited the right to repair. Device manufacturers have often restricted access to repair tools, forcing consumers to use the manufacturer’s overpriced official repair channels or purchase a newer device. The bill further secures the right to repair by helping consumers gain access to the tools they need to actually repair their devices – and on the same terms that device manufacturers offer their own authorized repair contractors.
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Copyright is artificial scarcity.
That sucks. That comes at a huge cost. Articifical scarcity enables poverty.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in Deception, FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Security, Windows at 10:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 48d07baa0acd6ca9c3d511db9726c288
Users With Passwords Like 1234
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The media keeps obsessing over long-patched bugs in Linux and even blames “Linux” for bad passwords; is the media simply trying to distract from the primary culprit, which has nothing to do with Linux?
THE use of Microsoft software, which has back doors in it, guarantees failure and high cost. At this point, the only way to ‘defend’ Windows, for instance, is to simply distract from its problems (or to make alternatives to it seem equally risky).
“The real problem is Windows, not some local privilege escalation bug that had been patched (or patches made available) before the public was even informed about it.”In the latest batch of Daily Links we included these two links [1, 2] that are only hours old. So-called ‘journalists’ want us to believe bad passwords are somehow the fault of Linux (they don’t even understand what Linux actually is (Snap is not Linux)). The real problem is Windows, not some local privilege escalation bug that had been patched (or patches made available) before the public was even informed about it. █
Latest update from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Five years ago, we were joined on the podcast by author and law professor Aaron Perzanowski to discuss his book about the impact of copyright on property in the digital age, The End of Ownership. That book touched on the issue of repairing devices and the ways companies make it difficult, but his new book, The Right To Repair, puts this topic in the spotlight. This week, Aaron joins us to discuss the history and future of the right to repair around the world.
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Kernel Space
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While debugging, it’s invaluable to be able to trace functions in the Linux kernel. There are several tools for that task: perf, ftrace (with helper tool like trace-cmd), bpftrace, etc.
For my own debug of kernel internals and in the last few years to debug the i915 module for Intel graphics, I usually use tracepoints or dynamic tracepoints (with perf probe) as the trigger for something I want to trace.
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Applications
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Corel Corporation is a Canadian software company specializing in graphics processing. They are best known for developing CorelDRAW, a vector graphics editor. They are also notable for purchasing and developing AfterShot Pro, PaintShop Pro, Painter, Video Studio, MindManager, and WordPerfect.
Corel has dabbled with Linux over the years. For example they produced Corel Linux, a Debian-based distribution which bundled Corel WordPerfect Office for Linux. While Corel effectively abandoned its Linux business in 2001 they are not completely Linux-phobic. For example, AfterShot Pro has an up to date Linux version albeit its proprietary software.
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Instructionals/Technical
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When looking for files on the Linuz desktop, you may often rely on the search feature of your favourite file manager. The conventional searching approach is to apply an exact search, so that only files or directories that are a perfect match to the search string are displayed.
A fuzzy search, on the other hand, performs an approximate search, and instead of identifying exact matches, displays matching results with each keystroke. The fzf utility identifies itself as a general-purpose fuzzy finder. Released under the MIT License, the cross-platform tool can be used across all flavours of Linux.
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Learn the commands to install Fotoxx on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish or 20.04 Focal Fossa. The software is an image management and image editing program that focuses on simple and fast operation. Beginners in particular should be offered a tool to make working with digital images under Linux much easier.
In contrast to programs like Shotwell , no internal database is used, but the existing folder structure on the data medium, as with gThumb or Geeqie. However, it should be noted that an internal index is created when the program is started for the first time so that metadata can be found more quickly. As long as this indexing is running, images can be viewed but not edited. Whether the program lives up to its reputation “for people who find F-Spot too limited but GIMP too complicated” is something you should try for yourself.
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Podman is well known for its seamless integration into modern Linux systems, and supporting systemd is a cornerstone in these efforts. Linux commonly uses the systemd init system to manage local services such as web servers, container engines, network daemons, and all of their interdependencies. Extending these more traditional Linux system administration practices with the modern world of containers is a natural evolution.
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One of the most important things to set up a Linux server is for the purposes of deploying a website(s). According to NetCraft.com’s February 2022 survey of the 1 million busiest websites in the world, roughly 23.44% of them run on Apache.
This tutorial will walk through the basics of installing and configuring a Linux server (specifically Debian 11 Bullseye) to function as a LAMP server.
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AnyDesk is a remote desktop software you can connect to your computer remotely and work from anywhere without being limited by the location of an internet connection. It is a cross-platform software that provides secure remote access for file transfer or VPN features but also works well as just another tool in professionals’ arsenal when they need more control over what’s going on their machine than someone else might offer them – whether it be family members who don’t understand how technology works yet; company executives looking at data differently because these people have much bigger picture view.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install AnyDesk on Debian 11 Bullseye. The tutorial will import the official repository and gpg key and update and remove the remote desktop software using the command line terminal.
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TeamViewer is a global remote connectivity platform that provides secure access to any device, anywhere in the world. It’s used for online meetings and file sharing between computers and controlled instrumentation such as robots or industrial machinery remotely via VPN connections (virtual private networks).
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install TeamViewer on Debian 11 Bullseye. The tutorial will import the official repository and gpg key and update and remove the remote desktop software using the command line terminal.
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Hello, friends. In this post, we will continue with some tricks for Nginx. So today, you will learn how to restrict access to directory and subdirectories in Nginx. Let’s go for it.
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PostgreSQL 12 can be considered revolutionary considering the performance boost we observe with partitioning enhancements,
Streaming replication is a popular method you can use to scale your relational databases horizontally. It uses two or more copies of the same database cluster running on separate machines. One database cluster is the primary and serves both read and write operations; the others are the replicas, which help only read operations. You can also use streaming replication to provide the high availability of a system. For example, if the primary database cluster or server were to fail unexpectedly, the replicas can continue serving read operations, or (one of the replicas) become the new primary cluster.
PostgreSQL is a widely used relational database that supports logical and physical replication. Logical replication streams high-level changes from the primary database cluster to the replica databases. You can stream changes to just a single database or table in a database using logical replication. However, in physical replication, changes to the WAL (Write-Ahead-Logging) log file are streamed and replicated in the replica clusters. As a result, you can’t copy specific areas of a primary database cluster, but instead, all changes to the primary are replicated.
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Secure your privacy while surfing online by installing Tor browser on Rocky Linux 8 RPM-based Linux using command terminal.
When it comes to accessing the notorious dark web standard browsers are not safe without any third-party technology. Well, in such situations the Tor browser is required that uses the Tor network, used by around two million people every day. It is based on Mozilla Firefox. The name Tor was originally an acronym, standing for “The Onion Router”. The reference to an onion was not accidental but was intended to indicate that the Tor network consists of several layers due that users can surf the internet anonymously.
Besides encryption features over the Tor network, modded Firefox also has some handy security add-ons pre-installed. Among others, NoScript and HTTPS Everywhere.
For technical reasons, surfing with Tor is slower than in a normal browser because every request takes a detour. This is the price one has to pay for the gained anonymity. However, if surfing with the Tor browser is really slow, you can usually take countermeasures such as Request a new identity, Switch to a new channel, use bridges, Disable JavaScript or combine Tor access with a VPN.
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The while loop in a Linux Bash script is a type of loop that continues to execute as long as the programmed condition remains true.
while loops are useful when you need to repeatedly execute a set of instructions a certain number of times, or when you want to create an infinite loop. In this tutorial, you will see various examples of while loops in a Bash script so you can learn how they are written and what kind of purpose they serve.
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Today, it is difficult for a business to achieve sustained growth without an application to help with management and planning. So today we will help you to install WebERP on Ubuntu 20.04
WebERP is an accounting and business management system designed for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)2 with appropriate features for each of them. It is built with web technology and only requires a database manager and a functional web server.
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Using a Linux distribution that has a desktop environment and graphical tools is easy, but a server is something different. That is why tools are created with which we can manage them from a comfortable web interface where we can find everything we need. So, today you will learn how to install Ajenti control panel on Ubuntu 20.04 / Debian 11.
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WonderCMS is a fast and straightforward content management system requiring no database to create websites. It offers rich features such as custom login URL, SEO friendly design with WYSIWYG elements for editing your site in plain text or HTML code formats; flexible CSS framework so you can change up the look on individual pages without affecting other parts of the webpage, including headings/font sizes, etc. Along with native markdown support, which allows users easy ways to publish articles online using only paragraphs.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install WonderCMS using Nginx and PHP along with importing up-to-date repositories or using the default version and how to create a server block and set it up using the command line terminal on Debian 11 Bullseye desktop or server.
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In terms of popularity and domination in server-side programming, PHP has made a name for itself. It is the go-to programming language for the development of dynamic and responsive web applications and CMS platforms like Magento, Drupal, and WordPress.
Therefore, if you wish to run such web-based applications or host CMS applications on your Ubuntu system, you must consider a proper PHP 8 installation guide.
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AngularJS is the extensible Javascript framework that plays well with your HTML without abstraction. The primary appeal of Angular is that it works like the dynamic component HTML never had. AngularJS simplifies the process of getting started with development especially if you have the prerequisite met.
With the lack of abstraction like other frameworks and fluid interoperability with HTML, AngularJS extends your control with features that include data binding, controller, and models based on plain javascript.
Additionally, AngularJS is bundled with features such as directives that enable you to invent your own HTML syntax that may be specific to any application you may be developing.
Secondly, AngularJS simplifies the management of complex DOM structures with the reusable component, and lastly, localization is advertised as one of the main features due to the ability to configure your app with aware filters with corresponding building blocks that make your app available in multiple locales.
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Games
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I can’t believe that in the Twenty First Goddamned Century, some lunatic Playstation hacker went and implemented an ftp server, when rsync was sitting right there. Are you ok, guy? Do you hate yourself that much?
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE’s universal document viewer Okular is the first software to be awarded the Blue Angel ecolabel. The FSFE congratulates Okular to this milestone that confirms more environmental benefits of using and developing Free Sofware. Together with our Upcycling Android initiative we campaign for universal user freedoms in the EU in the upcoming months.
Free Software comes with multiple benefits regarding user’s freedoms, transparency, modularity and control – just to mention a few. Beyond these rather technical aspects, control over technology directly influences our societies and democracies. Ultimately, the reason why the FSFE is your charity to empower people to control technology.
Less well-known are the benefits that Free Software offers towards a more sustainable digital society. Contemporary research shows an increasingly problematic correlation between the ongoing digitization and its impact on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Most of these greenhouse gas emissions stems from the production of hardware, its worldwide delivery, the energy to run that hardware and the energy needed for data flow and to connect all these devices aka Internet and streaming.
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Okular, KDE’s popular multi-platform PDF reader and universal document viewer, has officially been recognized for sustainable software design as reflected in the recent award criteria for software eco-certification. In February 2022 Okular was awarded the Blue Angel ecolabel, the official environmental label awarded by the German government. Introduced in 1978, Blue Angel is the world’s earliest established environmental label, and Okular is the first software product to be certified with its seal. What is more, Okular is the first ️ever eco-certified computer program within the 30 organizations of the Global Ecolabelling Network! This network, of which Blue Angel is a member, represents over 50 countries.
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All it takes is installing Kali Linux version 2022.1 or newer with btrfs as the file system and to enable snapshotting after installation and you will get: [...]
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BSD
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Following a request-for-testing thread on tech@, Stefan Sperling (stsp@) has committed some IEEE 802.11ac support to iwx(4): [...]
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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In the Fedora project there is/was a proposal to introduce a curl-minimal package (and its companion libcurl-minimal) by default, as a way to provide default packages with smaller security risk areas. The full curl version packages would then be offered next to the minimal ones and require users to opt-in. (Related article on lwn.net)
curl-minimal would disable lesser used protocols and features. The discussion around exactly which parts it should disable is ongoing. The proposal was at least initially shut down by the Fedora Steering Committee on March 8, 2022 but I get the sense the curl-minimal idea have not died yet.
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Kubernetes adoption is on the rise. Due to its unique challenges and benefits, it is a popular conversation starter among IT professionals today. While your IT organization has the potential to be highly productive with Kubernetes by easily building, scaling, and monitoring containers, the transition to Kubernetes is very complex and can be difficult to manage.
The Upskilling 2021: Enterprise DevOps Skills report identified cloud, modern compute tech and architecture, OS and container orchestration, and app technologies as skills that DevOps professionals must have. However, when it comes to these technical skills, many individuals and teams fall short. Addressing these skills gaps is essential to reaping the benefits, so it’s important to understand how to do that.
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The pandemic has made digital transformation a business necessity, with many organizations turning five-year plans into two-year mandates. But as companies expedite their digital initiatives, are they neglecting the “human element?”
To ensure that all your employees can reap the benefits of digital transformation in their own jobs, here are five critical mistakes to avoid:
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The previous installments in this series explored the motivations behind different community-supported runtimes for Apache Camel and enumerated in detail the benefits of each runtime. This final installment gives you a simplified and opinionated decision flow containing basic questions to help you identify which Camel runtime will work best for you.
The obvious first question is what happens if your organization mandates all aspects of the development process, including the technologies and runtimes to use. If that’s the case, the guidance in this series of articles would appear of no use. You can, however, suggest what in your view could be a positive change to their current choices.
[...]
Apache Camel is known as the Swiss knife of integration, and you probably grasped by now that Camel goes even further than that. It offers a wide variety of different runtimes that help propagate a solid foundation for integrations.
It’s helpful to understand Camel’s timeline and how it has evolved, continuously looking at new horizons. You can then find out which Camel runtime fits better in your world and take advantage.
You can undoubtedly integrate systems with arbitrary languages and frameworks, but that’s like random shooting from recoil. Apache Camel is like harnessing standard light energy to provide you with a sharp laser-pointing focus.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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1-Stream is an IPTV streaming platform with smart load balancing that allows providers to scale their service and integrates geo-location to ensure content delivery from the closest available server for quicker load times and less buffering.
One popular professional IPTV platform used to be Xteam Codes for which I wrote a detailed four-part review but they started having trouble on September 18, 2019 with Xtream Codes IPTV Panels having a legal dispute related due to piracy, despite not providing any streams, and it seems they may never come back online, as their latest update contesting the claims date from January 2021.
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Ubuntu ☛ Cloud Adjacent Storage [Ed: New buzzwords for storage layer with surveillance built in -- basically a massive regression peddled by companies that work for spy agencies]
Put simply, cloud adjacent storage is just a privately owned and operated storage system, within network reach of a cloud provider’s region, but without the pay-as-you-grow and access charges found in public clouds.
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looking modular portable Linux computer has gotten a 64-bit RISC-V module based on Allwinner D1 1GHz SoC and offers an alternative to existing Arm-based modules such as Raspberry Pi CM3, or alternatives powered by Allwinner H6 or Rockchip RK3399 SoC’s.
The new DevTerm Kit R-01 modular & portable terminal has exactly the same specifications with a 6.8-inch IPS screen, a keyboard with 67 keys, and a battery module, all connected to ClockworkPi v3.14 carrier board, but replaces the Arm modules with the R-01 module equipped with the Allwinner D1 processor and 1GB of RAM.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Are you a math aficionado in need of a new desk toy? Then do we have the project for you. With nothing more than an Arduino and a seven-segment LED module, [Cristiano Monteiro] has put together a little gadget that will slowly work its way through the digits of Pi forever…or until you get bored of looking at it and decide to use the parts for something else.
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The end of the world seems closer now than ever before, even in the 1980s. But you, dear Hackaday reader, will want more than just a bug-out bag full of C-rations and waterproof matches. You will need the technological version of a bug-out bag — a mil-spec-esque cyberdeck, which is exactly what [hammerandhandmi] is in the middle of perfecting.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Emacs and I have been together for 22 years now and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. Emacs itself is getting better and better with initiatives such as native-compilation and the Pure GTK patches. Its package ecosystem is in excellent condition and packages such as org-mode and eglot / lsp-mode make even the most demanding programming languages a joy to work with in Emacs.
Here’s to another 22 years Emacs!
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Matt’s point of view is that the world is better off when the web is open and fun, and Automattic builds and acquires products that help that goal along. That bet is perhaps most pronounced with WordPress itself. Around 43 percent of all the websites on the internet run on WordPress, which is a piece of open-source software anyone can download and use for free. It is officially administered by the WordPress Foundation, but if you don’t want the hassle, you can just go to WordPress.com and pay Automattic to do most of the work for you. It is an absolutely fascinating model that has obviously worked really well, and I wanted to know more about why Matt set it up that way and what the challenges of that structure are.
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Education
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We are excited to invite you to the first edition of the Fedora Mentor Summit. It’s an yearly event for our community members interested in mentorship as a practice. The event is on April 1st and 2nd – 1300 UTC to 1700 UTC. Registration is open now!
This community members lead event is full of agenda of intriguing discussions, interesting talks and fun activities that everyone can be a part of. While the final schedule is still being planned, you can see the draft at the event fedocal.
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EuroBSDCon is the European technical conference for users and developers of BSD-based systems. The conference is scheduled to take place September 15-18, 2022 in Vienna, Austria. The tutorials will be held on Thursday and Friday to registered participants and the talks are presented to conference attendees on Saturday and Sunday.
The Call for Talk and Presentation proposals period will close on May 26th, 2022. Prospective speakers will be notified of acceptance or otherwise by June 1st, 2022.
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But most people, particularly beginners, won’t use the Raspberry Pi to whip up crazy creations. There are near-endless practical uses for this bare-bones kit, from media streaming to extending the range of your Wi-Fi network, as the following 10 projects demonstrate. Time to put that $35 computer to real work. Heck, many of these will work just fine even on the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero.
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Programming/Development
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Now fixed. The problem was caused by the xserver-xorg moving from autotools to meson. I also had to apply a patch to xephyr source, as reported in the above-linked post.
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IBM and its Red Hat subsidiary are working with Microsoft to port the .NET Framework to Power, IT Jungle has learned. The project has been underway for a while, and the first bits of beta code should be available for developers to play with later this year.
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The Qt Less Traveled [Ed: The worse issue is, that's proprietary so you cannot fix bugs in Qt]
Qt is a high quality library, but it is also massive in number of features. This massive number results in a higher likelihood that there are bugs that go unnoticed lying around in its less frequently used features or combination of features.
Our friends at qgis.org hired us to solve some of those issues that had been affecting them for a while. QGIS is an open source geospatial information system (an application which allows users to design maps, analyze spatial data, and perform various ETL tasks) that makes use of the Qt library for its GUI components and relies on the QPainter framework for all of its map rendering and exporting functionality. Instead of trying to workaround these issues in their downstream project, the QGIS leadership instead invested some project funds to contract KDAB to fix these rare issues which were specifically affecting the QGIS application. Keep reading to follow our adventures through those less often traveled paths.
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It’s not old code that’s technical debt, it’s lightly-designed code. That thing that seemed like the solution when you first thought of it. Yes, ship it, by all means, but be ready to very quickly rewrite it when you learn more.
Some of what people mean when they say “we need to bring our technical debt under control” is that kind of technical debt, struggling under the compound interest of if statement accrual as multiple developers have added behaviour without adding design. But there are other things. Cutting corners is not technical debt, it’s technical gambling. Updating external dependencies is not technical debt repayment, but it does still need to be done. Removing deprecated symbols is paying for somebody else’s technical debt, not yours: again you still have to do it. Replacing last month’s favoured npm modules with this month’s is not technical debt, it’s buying yourself a new toy.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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Using operators in a Bash script is how you determine whether a condition is true or not. And testing for conditions is how we program a Bash script to be dynamic by giving it the ability to respond differently depending on a scenario.
Creating conditionals is why it is essential to know the various Bash operators. Operators let us test things like arithmetic functions, compare strings, check if a file exists, and a lot more.
In this tutorial, you will learn about all of the operators that can be used in a Bash script on a Linux system. We will go over examples so you can learn how to use each type of operator in real context.
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In some Bash scripts, there is an option to pass arguments to the script when you are executing it. This allows the user to specify more information in the same command used to run the script.
This is yet another way for us to accept input in a Bash script, and make our script more interactive with the user executing it. Command line arguments are specified as extra bits of information (or flags/options) that are passed to the script.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to accept command line arguments in a Bash script on a Linux system. Follow along with our example below to see how it works.
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The ability to automate tasks with Bash scripts in Linux is one of the operating system’s most powerful components.
However, due to the sheer amount of scripting components, it can be intimidating for newcomers. Even longtime users may forget something every once in a while and that is why we have created this Bash scripting cheat sheet.
For times like these, it’s very handy to have a compiled list of Bash scripting components that have been sorted by category. That way, it only takes a few moments to reference the list whenever you forget the exact syntax of an operator or conditional statement, etc.
In this tutorial, we’ll present you with a curated list of the most handy things to know for Bash scripting. These are some of the most useful components, but they aren’t easy to remember for everyone. Next time your mind is blanking when writing a Bash script, take a look at the Bash scripting cheat sheet below for some quick help.
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Bash scripting and Python are two different ways to program and automate tasks on a Linux system. Many Linux users choose to learn one or the other, and some even learn both.
Although they have a lot of overlap in the purposes they serve, Bash scripts are mostly just shell commands that have been chained together, sometimes along with loops or conditional statements, and Python is a full fledged programming language, capable of creating everything from basic automation scripts to programs with graphical user interfaces.
In this tutorial, you will learn about some of the differences between Bash scripting and the Python programming language, specifically in the context of what both are capable of and used for on a Linux system.
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Bash is the command interpreter for Linux systems and is well known as a tool that can be used for automation and repetitive tasks via Bash scripts. PowerShell serves the same purpose, but for Windows systems.
With so much overlap in their functionalities, and with both being installable on a variety of operating systems, the inevitable questions of “which one is better” and “what are the differences” around bound to come up.
In this tutorial, you will learn about some of the differences between Bash scripting and the PowerShell scripting, as we compare the two across a few key areas.
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Rust
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Java
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When you install Java, it’s part of the installer’s job to tell your system where to find the right language when it’s needed. That’s why you’re able to run Java applications—in fact, you may sometimes run Java applications without ever realizing what language they’ve been written in.
Put simply, it just works, just as when you install Python to run a Python application, C to run an application written in C, and so on.
But what happens when you install more than one version of Java on your system? In that case, you’ll have to take on the extra responsibility of understanding where each version’s JAVA_HOME is located.
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Four hundred drones were suspended over the city during the South by Southwest festival to form a giant, hovering … QR code?
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I didn’t know Flores but I watched him play in high school in Brooklyn. He was in my daughter’s class and everyone there held him in the highest regard, an outstanding young man with a bright future before him. My daughter kept me up on his career: Boston College, Belichick’s New England Patriots, then the Dolphins.
I shuddered also because I knew how pro football “disappeared” people. My neighbor and good friend Will (Willie) Smith had been disappeared. One day he was an exceptional lineman; in the prime of his career, he had started every game in his two seasons of pro football. The next day it was over; he never heard from the league again.
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Education
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Teachers are caught in the crossfire of a political and cultural conflict, and it’s threatening their ability to do their jobs, warns a new statement from five national groups representing tens of thousands of educators.
In their first-ever joint statement, the four professional organizations for teachers of particular subject areas, along with an anti-censorship group, condemned the widespread efforts to curtail classroom discussions about so-called “divisive topics.”
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But OCCA isn’t only a school, or even a network of schools. It’s just one facet of a national movement driven by the vision and curriculum of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in southern Michigan that has quietly become one of the most influential entities in conservative politics.
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Hardware
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Among the plans are the investment of an initial €17 billion into a leading-edge semiconductor fab mega-site in Germany, the creation of a new research and development and design hub in France, and investment in research and development, manufacturing and foundry services in Ireland, Italy, Poland and Spain.
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Arm CEO Rene Haas, who only joined the company in February this year, told staff on Monday that between 12% to 15% of staff will be made redundant as a result of the cuts, according to an internal memo seen by the Daily Telegraph.
Arm employs 6,400 people worldwide, meaning between 768 and 960 jobs could be cut, primarily to UK- and US-based employees. The cuts won’t impact employees in engineering roles.
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Arm embarked on a rapid hiring spree after SoftBank acquired the company for £24bn in 2016, promising to double staff over five years. The legally-binding jobs pledges it had made to the Takeover Panel at the time expired in September.
Simon Segars, Arm’s former chief executive, had warned that its levels of investment would not be sustainable if the company was forced to go public instead of being sold to Nvidia.
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We’ve talked about project Breakthrough Starshot which aims to send a solar sail probe to Alpha Centauri within 20 years. A little basic math and knowing that Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light years away means you are going to need to travel over 20% of the speed of light to make the trip in that time. Some new papers have proposed ways to address a few of the engineering problems.
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There was a time when calculators became so powerful it was hard to tell them from little computers. The same thing seems to be happening now with multimeters. They now often have large screens and basic oscilloscope functionality. The specs keep getting better. While early cheap scopemeters were often relatively low frequency, many are now claiming bandwidths that would have cost quite a bit a few decades ago. A case in point is the Mustool MDS8207 which [IMSAI Guy] reviews and does a teardown of in the videos you can see below. It claims a 40 MHz bandwidth with 200 megasamples per second on a single channel.
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When you think of machines you see around you every day, you probably think about your car, computer, or household appliances. However, the world is full of simple machines. One simple machine in particular, the inclined plane, shows up a lot. For example, think of the humble nail. If you are a woodworker or even a homeowner you probably have bags of them. They certainly are all around you if you are indoors and maybe even if you are outdoors right now. Nails have been the fastener of choice for a very long time and they are a form of a wedge which is a type of inclined plane.
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[Jeremy Cook] writes to us about a project of his – a bouquet of LED cube flowers. The flowers are PCB cubes made out of small castellated PCBs, each of those having an individually addressable LED in its center. Castellations hold the cubes together mechanically, and thanks to a cleverly chosen pinout, only two different kinds of PCB need to be ordered for building such a flower!
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It seems there’s a service for everything, but sometimes you simply learn more by doing it yourself. If you haven’t enjoyed the somewhat anachronistic pleasures of running your own server and hosting your own darn website, well, today you’re in luck!
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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In a legislative session highlighted by culture war battles and redistricting, Florida lawmakers gave a measure of mercy to a group of parents whose children died of catastrophic birth-related brain injuries.
Following up on action taken last year, the Legislature voted to give $150,000 stipends to parents whose children were once enrolled in a state program called the Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Association, or NICA, but had been dropped from the rolls when the children died.
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The Senate unanimously approved a measure Tuesday that would make daylight saving time permanent across the United States next year.
The bipartisan bill, named the Sunshine Protection Act, would ensure Americans would no longer have to change their clocks twice a year. But the bill still needs approval from the House, and the signature of President Joe Biden, to become law.
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The bill has bipartisan backing including several Republican and Democratic cosponsors.
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The Senate passed a bill Tuesday that would make daylight saving time permanent across the U.S. beginning in 2023. The so-called Sunshine Protection Act of 2021 was approved by unanimous consent, but would still require House approval and President Biden’s signature to become law.
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So on Tuesday, with almost no warning and no debate, the Senate unanimously passed legislation to do away with the biannual springing forward and falling back that most Americans have come to despise, in favor of making daylight saving time permanent. The bill’s fate in the House was not immediately clear, but if the legislation were to pass there and be signed by President Biden, it would take effect in November 2023.
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New research adds to evidence that trained dogs could help screen crowds to identify people infected with the coronavirus.
At two community screening centers in Paris, 335 volunteers getting traditional PCR tests also provided sweat samples. Overall, 78 people with symptoms and 31 people without symptoms tested positive by PCR. Given the sweat samples to smell, the dogs were 97% accurate at detecting the infected patients, and 100% accurate at detecting infection in the asymptomatic patients, according to a report posted on Tuesday on medRxiv ahead of peer review. They also were 91% accurate at identifying volunteers who were not infected, and 94% accurate at ruling out the infection in people without symptoms.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Lois van Baarle, a digital artist based in the Netherlands, joined Vimeo 13 years ago as a student studying animation, back when it was still an indie creator platform. When van Baarle started making subscriber-only Patreon content in 2020, Vimeo seemed like the best option for hosting her videos — Patreon itself didn’t offer video hosting, and YouTube didn’t have the same features to protect her work, like controlling where her videos could be embedded.
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The Verge ☛ Microsoft says Windows 11 File Explorer ads were ‘not intended to be published externally’ [Ed: This is how Windows will die. And users of Windows will not be able to concentrate or be productive. Microsoft is lying to the media. But it also bribes the media. So a lot of the media repeats the lies.]
Microsoft appears to be testing a new type of ad inside File Explorer on Windows 11. Microsoft MVP and Twitter user Florian Beaubois discovered an ad in the latest test build of Windows 11, prompting users to check out the Microsoft Editor. While the ads might have appeared for some Windows 11 users, Microsoft says it was a mistake.
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Security
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FOSSLife ☛ What Is Shadow IT? [Ed: Letting people use Windows? That sounds like much greater a shadow than what’s described here. Windows is designed to be not secure.]
When employees use unauthorized personal devices for work or when teams download unapproved software for internal use, these activities are part of a practice known as shadow IT, which has growing security and compliance implications for organizations.
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Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
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Findings from a Bulletproof report highlight the issue posed by poor security hygiene as automated attacks remain a high security threat to businesses. The research gathered throughout 2021, showed that 70% of total web activity is currently bot traffic.
With attackers increasingly deploying automated attack methods, default credentials are the most common passwords used by these bad actors, acting in effect as a ‘skeleton key’ for criminal access.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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ICE wants data and doesn’t care how it gets it. Its recently-elevated pursuit of all things not considered naturally American has increased its demands for information on… well, everybody. It works with private sector data brokers and data analysts to hoover up location info — something not strictly limited to movements at or near borders. Nor is it limited to the non-Americans ICE believes should be tracked, captured, and ejected.
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Spain will become an important link for Meta’s development in Europe as its two subsea cables connecting the region with the Americas and Africa will land in Spain and the company plans to build a data centre in Castile-La Mancha in central Spain.
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As of 2016, almost 2,000 people a day were allowed through TSA checkpoints at US airports either without showing any ID at all, or with other forms of ID that the TSA or its contractors initially considered “unacceptable”.
According to an internal TSA presentation, there were 149,068 calls (an average of 407 per day) “ID Verification” calls to the TSA’s ID Verification Call Center (IVCC) in 2016.
The previous year, 2015, there were 112,016 such calls (an average of 306 per day).
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Dutch digital identity verification system DigiD has announced the phasing out SMS as second factor. That way they require citizens to install a smartphone app in order to use digital services from the government, municipalities, the health sector and others. These applications only work on iOS and Android phones, with reliance on third party services.
Plenty of members of our community choose not to use a device that is tied to vendor-specific services. There is a threat our community will practically be locked out of the digital infrastructure the government has set up for us to use. Official alternatives are to ask a friend with the app for help or go back to snail mail and physical meetings.
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Defence/Aggression
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We speak with Joshua Yaffa, longtime Moscow correspondent for The New Yorker, who has just left Ukraine after reporting on the Russian invasion for the past two weeks. He says Russian attacks in Ukraine are becoming increasingly indiscriminate as the army is unable to take over the capital of Kyiv to facilitate Putin’s goal of a regime change, noting, “Putin has raised the stakes for himself so extraordinarily high that I don’t think he’ll be convinced to back down based on something like street protests.” He also describes support from Ukrainian civilians for a no-fly zone, which many fear could start a war between the U.S. and Russia and increase the likelihood of a nuclear disaster.
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The mayor of Kyiv has declared a 36-hour curfew after a series of Russian missile strikes hit residential areas of the capital of Ukraine on Tuesday. Meanwhile, talks are resuming today between Ukraine and Russia, and the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia are traveling to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. We get an update from outside of Kyiv from Peter Zalmayev, director of the Eurasia Democracy Initiative, on the Russian invasion. “They’re not having any military successes, so they’re just bent on revenge and anger that they’re venting on civilians,” says Zalmayev. He says if Russian attacks continue on the same trend, Ukraine could see up to 50,000 civilians killed in the war, and that any agreement between the two countries will be flawed, as “the Russian side has shown that they cannot be trusted.”
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Aleksei Burkov, a cybercriminal who long operated two of Russia’s most exclusive underground hacking forums, was arrested in 2015 by Israeli authorities. The Russian government fought Burkov’s extradition to the U.S. for four years — even arresting and jailing an Israeli woman to force a prisoner swap. That effort failed: Burkov was sent to America, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to nine years in prison. But a little more than a year later, he was quietly released and deported back to Russia. Now some Republican lawmakers are asking why a Russian hacker once described as “an asset of supreme importance” was allowed to shorten his stay.
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The head of the United Nations warned Monday that Russia’s assault on Ukraine is pushing the global food system to the brink of disaster as wheat prices skyrocket and key supply chains are thrown into chaos, threatening a hunger crisis in Europe and well beyond.
“Russia and Ukraine represent more than half of the world’s supply of sunflower oil and about 30% of the world’s wheat,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in remarks to the press in New York City. “Ukraine alone provides more than half of the World Food Programme’s wheat supply… All of this is hitting the poorest the hardest and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe.”
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Authorities in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv announced a 35-hour curfew beginning Tuesday evening as the city braces for the most intense Russian assault yet, with the mayor warning that “a difficult and dangerous moment” is looming.
“It is prohibited to move around the city without special permission, except to go to bomb shelters,” Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Tuesday, noting the curfew will begin at 8 pm local time and remain in effect until Thursday morning.
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Many now recall that Ukraine once, briefly, had a massive nuclear weapons arsenal—and then gave it up.
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SÃO PAULO – During the last two weeks, a small group of Brazilian bolsonaristas became social media celebrities as they crossed the border into Ukraine to fight against Russia – posing with assault rifles on Instagram, reciting prayers to the special forces, and sharing video monologues praising the brotherhood of people from around the world who had gathered in a training base near the Ukrainian city of Lviv to kill Russian “communists.” The group’s inexperience was demonstrated by the fact that most of their social media posts included their geo-location information.
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The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the CIA, the diplomats who played one country off another on the world’s chessboard, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalism with freedom. In the name of national security, the Cold Warriors, many of them self-identified liberals, demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism.
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The Russian Federation, President Vladimir Putin, and Russians in general emerge as the latest contenders, the comic strip villains who those in the broadly designated “West” can now take issue with. According to a Meta spokesperson, the Russian attack on Ukraine had made the company make temporary “allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders.’” Cryptically, the same spokesman goes on to say that, “We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians.” Meta gives us no guidelines on what would constitute a “credible call”.
Twitter has also permitted posts openly advocating homicide and assassination. US Senator Lindsey Graham was caught up in the bloodlust of permissiveness, using the platform to ask whether Russia had its own Brutus. “Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?” The only way to conclude the conflict was “for somebody in Russia to take this guy out.”
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That is why they have resurrected it.
The decision to spurn the possibility of peaceful coexistence with Russia at the end of the Cold War is one of the most egregious crimes of the late 20th century. The danger of provoking Russia was universally understood with the collapse of the Soviet Union, including by political elites as diverse as Henry Kissinger and George F. Kennan, who called the expansion of NATO into Central Europe “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”
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Over five days from 25 August, German soldiers looted and burned the town of Louvain, killing hundreds of its inhabitants and destroying its medieval library, one of the greatest in Europe, which was filled with irreplaceable books and manuscripts.
The massacres in Belgium – the German policy of Schrecklichkeit or frightfulness aimed at preventing popular resistance – outraged the world, having a particularly powerful impact in Britain where the atrocities fostered support for the war and led great numbers to volunteer to fight. On 2 September, just as the sack of Louvain was coming to an end, Rudyard Kipling published a poem reflecting the general anger, four lines of which read: ‘For all we have and are/ For all our children’s fate/ Stand up and take the war/ The Hun is at the gate!’
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Lviv, Ukraine—A Russian air strike on a military base in the far west of Ukraine on Sunday was Moscow’s closest attack yet to NATO territory. The International Peacekeeping and Security Center, near the town of Novoyavorivsk, is only 12 miles from the Polish border, and was hosting up to 1,000 foreign fighters, who had crossed the border to fight in the newly formed Ukrainian Foreign Legion. According to Ukrainian officials, at least 35 people were killed in the strike and some 134 were wounded. The Russian government says that, in fact, it killed 180 foreign fighters. “The destruction of foreign mercenaries who arrived on the territory of Ukraine will continue,” a representative of the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement online. Additional translation work by Nikolai von Bismarck.
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The White House on Tuesday confirmed reporting that U.S. President Joe Biden will head to Brussels next week to meet with European leaders about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ongoing and deadly war on Ukraine.
“While he’s there, his goal is to meet in person face-to-face with his European counterparts and talk about, assess where we are at this point in the conflict in the invasion of Ukraine by Russia,” said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. “We’ve been incredibly aligned to date.”
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The United Nations’ annual Commission on the Status of Women opened Monday with a warning that women and girls in Ukraine are paying “the highest price” for Russia’s invasion of the country, as millions of people are forced to flee the country and those who have remained face daily intensifying violence.
“All crises and conflicts exact their highest price from women and girls; from Myanmar to Afghanistan, from the Sahel to Haiti, from Palestine to Syria, to Somalia, to Yemen, to Ethiopia,” said Sima Bahous, undersecretary-general and executive director of U.N. Women. “The horrifying war in Ukraine now joins this list.”
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In the weeks since Russian President Vladimir Putin initiated the invasion of Ukraine, Brown and Black people fleeing Ukraine continue to experience racism and violence, including in neighboring EU countries. Romanian police officers aggressively removed Ukrainian Roma women from refugee-dedicated rooms just recently. Polish police officers also pointed guns at African students. This war, a looming humanitarian catastrophe, has unleashed new, overt, and cruel manifestations of racism on the continent, revealing longstanding double standards at the global level.
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Russia’s deadly assault on Ukraine is a bonanza for arms manufacturers, which are lined up to profit as the United States and its allies increase military spending in an effort to bolster Kyiv’s forces.
“The spiraling conflict over Ukraine dramatizes the power of militarism and the influence of defense contractors.”
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As part of sanctions against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States, United Kingdom, and other European Union nations are cracking down on Russian oligarchs, freezing assets and tracking the yachts, private jets, and luxury real estate holdings of oligarchs.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a speech Tuesday that his country “must recognize” that NATO membership is not a feasible goal, nodding in the direction of one of Moscow’s longstanding demands as Russia’s military continues its devastating invasion.
“For years we heard about open doors, but we understand that we cannot enter,” Zelenskyy said during a video address to leaders of the United Kingdom’s Joint Expeditionary Force as Russia ramped up its assault on the capital city of Kyiv.
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The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the CIA, the diplomats who played one country off another on the world’s chess board, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalism with freedom. In the name of national security, the Cold Warriors, many of them self-identified liberals, demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism.
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NATO was one part of a plan by Washington to assimilate the countries of Europe into its imperial sphere. The other big part of this plan was known as the Marshall Plan, after then-Secretary of State George Marshall, an Army General. This plan focused on the economic integration of Europe into the expanding imperial sphere of Washington—a situation that was largely a result of the United States not only surviving the war mostly unscathed, but profiting greatly from it. In the beginning, this “integration” was much closer to subjugation, as Washington imposed its designs on the mostly destroyed European economy.
The Marshall Plan was simple in design. It provided grants and loans to seventeen nations in Europe to rebuild infrastructure, create capitalist-oriented economies, and insure those economies allegiance to Wall Street and Washington. Although the offer to join was also made to the USSR and other countries in so-called eastern Europe, Moscow and its allies considered the terms to be untenable with their desires for independence from the capitalist nations. Given the rabid anti-communism of Washington and other western governments, Moscow was certainly correct in its analysis and wise to reject the “invitation.”
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The threats come amid the fraying of nuclear arms control agreements between the two nuclear superpowers that had stabilized strategic relations for decades.
As an arms control expert, I see the war in Ukraine as an added strain but not a fatal blow to the system that has helped to keep the world from nuclear devastation. That system has evolved over decades and allows U.S. and Russian officials to gauge how close the other side is to launching an attack.
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But getting out was the right move.
In fact, the real mistake was the opposite: The Biden administration did not end the war, but continued it by other means, which are turning out to be more violent and destabilizing. The economic sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies are causing widespread, severe hunger in this desperately poor country.
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But to think so would be mistaken. As the military and humanitarian situation in Ukraine deteriorates, Thomas Friedman writes, “it will become more and more obvious that our biggest problem with Putin in Ukraine is that he will refuse to lose early and small, and the only other outcome is that he will lose big and late.”
Putin can’t stand to lose, which means a preference for total destruction of Ukraine rather than a settlement. More devastation will confront the US and NATO with frightening choices.
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Russia is three weeks into a test that the internet has never seen before: A major economic and global power is nearly isolated online after international sanctions cut off many services from abroad and the Russian government clamped down harder on online speech and access inside its borders.
How the situation plays out is likely to shape the future of the [Internet], not only for everyday Russians but also for the collective understanding of what was supposed to be a global network, not one divided by a “digital iron curtain.”
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Nearly 80 percent of global oil sales are priced in dollars, and since the mid-1970s the Saudis have exclusively used the dollar for oil trading as part of a security agreement with the U.S. government, according to the Journal.
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Environment
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Going beyond the headline figures of rising temperatures and sea levels, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) captures the full scale of the threat to human life in a heating world. It explains how extreme weather, drought, habitat and species loss, urban heat islands, and the destruction of food sources and livelihoods are all intensifying. And the scientific community is now more certain that climate change is having a direct influence on migration.
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Seven young people on Tuesday launched a new climate case against the Utah government, arguing that fossil fuel development violates their state constitutional rights.
“Utah’s fossil fuel development policy poses an existential threat to Utah’s children, sacrificing their health, safety, and lives for the short-term profits of the fossil fuel industry.”
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Sarah Bloom Raskin withdrew her nomination as Federal Reserve vice chair for supervision on Tuesday, prompting progressive condemnation of the fossil fuel-funded U.S. senators—especially right-wing West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin—who fiercely opposed her prospective appointment.
“Days before helping Republicans sink Sarah Bloom Raskin’s Fed nomination, Joe Manchin told fossil fuel executives that they should seek a ‘return on investment’ from the politicians they fund.”
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That level of 1,900 ppb is triple the pre-industrial level of 700 ppb. Furthermore, it is suddenly mysteriously accelerating over just the past 13 years. In turn, this exceptional acceleration could hasten global warming considerably. Of even more concern, the acceleration appears to be regenerating on its own accord sans human influence.
“Methane levels are growing dangerously fast,” according to Euan Nisbet, Earth scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London. (Source: Scientists Raise Alarm Over “Dangerously Fast “Growth in Atmosphere Methane, Nature, February 8, 2022)
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While millions of working people have been hurt by surging gas prices, a new analysis out Tuesday shows that 25 of the world’s biggest fossil fuel corporations collectively pulled in an “eye-popping” $205 billion in profits last year—and Big Oil is exploiting Russia’s war on Ukraine to charge even more at the pump in 2022 and advance its financial interests.
“All this money helps to line the pockets of wealthy oil executives who receive massive chunks of their compensation in company stock.”
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The Biden administration’s rhetoric about confronting the climate crisis obscures a frightening reality: Joe Biden’s policies are keeping us on a path to climate catastrophe. The latest report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that the climate crisis is happening faster and more intensely than predicted. We need urgent action, instead, we have the Biden administration.
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Energy
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Such logic is based on the idea that oil companies have no control over the price of oil and that high prices are stemming, almost “naturally,” from an imminent scarcity of oil as a result of a ban on Russian energy imports.
Whether or not this is true, an economy based on a source of energy that is so fickle will always be vulnerable. So where are the calls for ending our dependence on oil and gas?
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More than 100 environmental and human rights groups on Tuesday sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden urging him to pardon Steven Donziger, the attorney under house arrest for refusing to hand over privileged client information in a high-profile environmental case.
“Powerful interests are… trying to send a chilling message to environmental activists around the world that fighting against corporate interests can cost them their liberty and more.”
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Boards should prepare for legal action based on their response to climate change, a DeSmog investigation has found.
Lawyers, insurers, and campaigners have been anticipating litigation against company directors for some time and say the chances are only growing as corporate requirements to address climate risks get tougher.
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Wildlife/Nature
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As long as we consider them ours, can we save them? Here are four thoughts about protecting bees for bees’ sake.
Thought 1. Honey is bee food.
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Finance
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The National Labor Relations Board on Tuesday filed a complaint on behalf of Starbucks Workers United—a labor group helping employees at nearly 140 U.S. Starbucks stores to unionize—alleging the coffee giant retaliated and discriminated against union leaders in Phoenix, Arizona.
According to Bloomberg, the Phoenix NLRB regional director formally accused Starbucks of illegally surveilling and retaliating against workers seeking to unionize.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The redemptive quality of Donald Trump is that he is a real sado-masochist. He, like us, will overplay his hand until his death, or his defeat, which he will not accept. The thing that separates us from Donald Trump is that he has no consequences for his actions and those of us who do can live vicariously through his success. There are a number of obvious reasons we shouldn’t do this but what is the alternative?
Trumpism is here to stay and we are seeing that a man who ran on being “not Trump” is like him in many ways he doesn’t even realize. Trumpism then is a structural phenomenon on both sides of the aisle. What is Trumpism? An expression of a failed state.
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Last Summer, the government published its Plan for Digital Regulation, which set out our commitment to developing a strategic, pro-innovation approach to digital regulation. Now that we are outside the EU, we have the flexibility to design our regulatory approach in a way that unlocks innovation, delivers the full benefits of the digital economy, and promotes UK leadership on the world stage.
The DRCF has a vital role to play in delivering on this vision through its work to create a more coherent regulatory ecosystem. I therefore wanted to highlight the government’s priorities for the digital regulatory landscape, as well as cross-cutting policy areas relevant to the DRCF’s work, for your consideration as you finalise the DRCF’s work plan for 2022/23. There are a number of areas where the government thinks the DRCF can make a vital contribution, whether in terms of strengthening industry and consumer confidence, or in sharing its expertise and research.
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The Security Legislation Amendment (Critical Infrastructure Protection) Bill 2022 addresses outstanding elements of new cyber laws passed by the Parliament last year, as recommended by the PJCIS in its Advisory report on the Security Legislation Amendment (Critical Infrastructure) Bill 2020 and Statutory Review of the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018.
The Committee will hear from witnesses representing a range of industry sectors including: IT, telecommunications, education, health care, logistics, energy, utilities, and key union groups – and also hear from key government agencies, such as the Australian Signals Directorate and the Department of Home Affairs.
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It is uncomfortable to admit that the manifesto, while the product of a morally unjustifiable actor, is not the ranting of a lunatic. Violence doesn’t need to be justifiable to be comprehensible. As citizens of an imperial power, we are in fact quite good at understanding and even justifying violence—in the name of progress, democracy, economic stability, the rights of women—so perhaps we should be a bit more curious about the function of our parallel and ghoulish obsession with the supposedly inexplicable violence of psychologically aberrant individuals. While Kaczynski was certainly disturbed, repeated popular attempts to “understand” his individual problems (there have been four feature-length films and two Netflix series since his capture, not to mention innumerable plot arcs organized around similar characters) seem more like anxious efforts to ignore something else.
Like all manifestos, “The Industrial Society” is extreme, unspecific, and problematic, but it contains remarkable moments of cogency. Its popularity with anarchists, radical environmentalists, and other black-bloc types makes sense. Its opening lines are not out of place 27 years on: [...]
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Misinformation/Disinformation
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Similar claims have been circulated by Facebook users here, here and here. The image has also been shared alongside a similar claim on Twitter, Reddit and Tik Tok.
However, the image has been doctored.
An eBay spokesperson told AFP in a March 10 email the image does not show a genuine ad found on eBay. “These posts do not represent images of actual, recent eBay listings,” the spokesperson said.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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In 2021, Columbia Law professor Philip Hamburger, whose own website at the school describes him as “one of the preeminent scholars writing today on constitutional law,” beclowned himself in the pages of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages (which seem always open for a beclowning, so long as the beclowning supports Rupert Murdoch’s blinkered worldview).
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Russia has long been a dangerous place for independent journalists. But in the past week, President Vladimir Putin’s government has swiftly stamped out any remaining semblance of press freedom, in an attempt to prevent its populace from learning the truth about its brutal invasion of Ukraine.
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Marina Ovsyannikova, the woman who crashed Russia’s state news broadcast Monday night to protest the war, was fined 30 thousand roubles, or around $280, and released on Tuesday.
Ovsyannikova ran onto the set of Russia’s main state news broadcast with an anti-war sign. She stood behind the anchor on the Channel One show with a sign that said “Stop the war” and “Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here,” in English and Russian.
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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The UK’s euphemistically named Online Safety Bill is a disaster waiting to happen. The crux of the bill: any time anything bad happens online, we blame internet companies for it and take some of their money. As the bill has continued to go through discussions, it’s been getting worse and worse. The latest is that in an effort to criminalize the sending of unsolicited dick pics, the UK is going to add that to the Online Safety Bill. They refer to it as “cyberflashing” and liken it to other forms of indecent exposure.
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Journalists will apparently have an “expedited right to appeal if their content is removed”, though this leaves open the issue of who gets to be identified as a journalist and who does not.
Free speech advocates, as well as Conservatives like David Davis are also concerned about the Bill’s attitude towards ‘legal but harmful’ content which could be suppressed. Dorries is seeking to reassure people with these concerns, saying that:
“Companies will only be required to remove “legal but harmful” content if it is already banned in their own terms and conditions. This only applies to the biggest platforms carrying the highest risk, and we are updating the legislation to ensure platforms focus on priority categories of harm that are set out in secondary legislation.”
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At question is pending legislation called the “Online Safety Bill,” which ostensibly punishes social media companies that allow harassment. Yet it may be expanded to include new criminal penalties for individuals who engage in mean speech online.
“Trolls could face two years in prison for sending messages or posting content that causes psychological harm under legislation targeting online hate,” the Times of London reports. “The Department for Culture, Media & Sport has accepted recommendations from the Law Commission for crimes to be based on ‘likely psychological harm.’ The proposed law change will shift the focus on to the ‘harmful effect’ of a message rather than if it contains ‘indecent’ or ‘grossly offensive’ content, which is the present basis for assessing its criminality.”
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U.S. broadcaster Fox News on Tuesday announced that cameraman Zakrzewski had died in Ukraine. Kuvshynova, a 24-year-old Ukrainian journalist, also was killed in the same attack.
Zakrzewski, 55, was killed when the vehicle the news crew were in was struck by incoming fire in Horenka, near Kyiv, according to a memo shared with the broadcaster’s staff.
Kuvshynova, a Ukrainian journalist who was with them at the time, also was killed, said Anton Gerashchenko, the adviser to Ukraine’s minister of Internal Affairs.
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“Whether Julian is extradited or not, which is the same as saying whether he lives or dies, is decided through a process of legal avoidance—avoiding to hear arguments that challenge the U.K. courts’ deference to unenforceable and caveated claims regarding his treatment made by the United States, the country that plotted to murder him,” declared Stella Moris, his partner.
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District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser initially ruled on January 4, 2021 against the US, finding that Assange would be at serious risk of suicide given the risk posed by Special Administrative Measures and the possibility that he would end his days in the ADX Florence supermax facility. It took little to read between the lines: the US prison system would do away with Assange; to extradite him would be oppressive within the meaning of the US-UK Extradition Treaty.
The US Department of Justice appealed to the High Court of England and Wales, citing a range of implausible arguments. Baraitser, they argued, could have sought reassurances from the prosecutors about Assange’s welfare. A number of diplomatic reassurances were duly offered after the fact. Assange would not be subjected to SAMs, or spend his time in the supermax facility. Adequate medical attention to mitigate the risk of suicide would also be provided. Just to sweeten matters, the publisher would be able to serve the post-trial and post-appeal phase of his sentence in Australia.
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Press freedom advocates are heralding what one called a “heartbreaking” statement by the fiancée of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after the U.K. Supreme Court on Monday rejected the imprisoned journalist’s attempt to appeal his pending extradition to the United States, where he faces up to 175 in prison for espionage charges.
“Julian was just doing his job, which was to publish the truth about wrongdoing.”
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With Julian still, for no rational reason, held in maximum security, the legal process around his extradition continues to meander its way through the overgrown bridlepaths of the UK’s legal system. Today the Supreme Court refused to hear Julian’s appeal, which was based on the grounds of his health and the effect upon it of incarceration in the conditions of the United States prison service. It stated his appeal had “no arguable legal grounds.”
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“Just this morning on our way to school, our four-year-old son asked me when daddy will come home. Julian’s life is being treated as if it were expendable. He has been robbed of over a decade of liberty, and three years from his home and his young children who are being forced to grow up without their father. A system that allows this is a system that has lost its way.
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Britain’s highest court has rejected an appeal from Julian Assange, who is seeking to block his extradition to the United States. The ruling means British Home Secretary Priti Patel will have the final decision on whether to turn Assange over to the Biden administration. Assange faces espionage charges that could bring up to 175 years in prison, after he published classified U.S. documents on WikiLeaks that exposed war crimes. Assange’s lawyers argued he could face prolonged solitary confinement in a U.S. supermax prison — conditions tantamount to torture. This is Simon Crowther, a legal adviser with Amnesty International.
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Under the next steps in the legal process, the case will now be remitted to Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, whose function thereafter is limited to referring the decision for extradition to the Home Secretary. The minister then decides whether to order or refuse extradition to the United States on a number of statutory bases. The defence is entitled to make submissions to the Home Secretary within the following four weeks, in advance of her making any decision.
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What they’re saying: The U.K. said the appeal was denied because “the application does not raise an arguable point of law.”
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Home Secretary Priti Patel is then expected to make a final decision. If she approves the extradition, that is the stage when Mr Assange could make his fresh challenge, said his lawyers Birnberg Peirce.
Mr Assange faces an 18-count indictment from the US government, accusing him of conspiring to hack into US military databases to acquire sensitive secret information relating to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which was then published on the Wikileaks website.
The Wikileaks documents revealed how the US military had killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents during the war in Afghanistan, while leaked Iraq war files showed 66,000 civilians had been killed, and prisoners tortured, by Iraqi forces.
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The extradition decision will now need to be ratified by interior minister Priti Patel, after which Assange can try to challenge the decision by judicial review. A judicial review involves a judge examining the legitimacy of a public body’s decision.
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The possibility of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange facing trial on espionage charges in the United States increased Monday when a top British court refused to hear his extradition appeal.
A three-judge panel of Britain’s Supreme Court ruled that Assange’s appeal of a December High Court decision allowing his extradition to the United States did not “raise an arguable point of law,” his attorneys said.
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“We were silent in 2014 when it all started,” she said, referring to the year when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. She said the silence continued when Kremlin critic and opposition activist Alexei Navalny was poisoned. “We just silently watched this anti-human regime,” she said, “and now the entire world turned their backs against us.”
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The brave Russian journalist who stormed her TV network’s studio to speak out against the invasion of Ukraine was found guilty Tuesday of flouting laws against protesting in the country.
Marina Ovsyannikova was fined 30,000 rubles after being detained Monday over the fearless stunt, Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported.
Her lawyer posted a photo to Twitter Tuesday showing Ovsyannikova appearing in court.
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The journalist who crashed a Russian state-run news broadcast to protest the invasion of Ukraine says she was interrogated for 14 hours and denied access to her lawyer and was not able to contact her family.
Marina Ovsyannikova made the remarks at a brief news conference on Tuesday following an appearance in court. Kevin Rothrock, an editor at Meduza, an independent Russian and English-language news outlet, reports that Ovsyannikova was fined 30,000 (about $280) for inciting protests and released. Ovsyannikova says she will speak more on Wednesday after she gets some sleep.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The New York Post editorial team has apparently decided some rights are more important than others. The Post has the First Amendment right to publish its opinion on other rights, even when it’s clearly in the wrong. And it’s willing to do so because it has long enjoyed an unhealthy relationship with the city’s police force, which often makes the Post appear to be part of the NYPD’s PR unit.
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Reproductive rights advocates are calling on Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little to veto the forced-pregnancy legislation passed by the state House on Monday, which made Idaho the first state in the country to pass a “copycat” proposal modeled on S.B. 8 in Texas.
Like S.B. 8, Idaho’s S.B. 1309 takes enforcement of the restriction out of the hands of the state and places it with ordinary citizens by allowing them to sue abortion providers who provide care after six weeks of pregnancy—before many women know they are pregnant.
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Ana María Archila never imagined she’d actually run for office. It was daunting enough coming to a new country, learning a new language, and figuring out how to organize her fellow immigrants in a place that often treated them like second-class citizens. “I didn’t aspire to do traditional politics from the inside,” she said.
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It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. For months now, Republican Party leaders have trumpeted their intention to run hard on parent grievances en route to routing the Democrats in the midterms. According to this narrative—partially based on the 2021 elections in Virginia, then endlessly echoed by Democratic pundits—parents frustrated over school shutdowns, Covid restrictions, and the focus on race and social justice in schools are the new swing voters, poised to flee the Democratic Party.
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Brittney Griner, one of the most recognizable basketball players on earth, is in a Russian prison on marijuana possession charges. But anyone who thinks she is there solely because of the racist war on drugs is living in a fantasy land.
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“If you look at the face of Congress, you don’t see the country. You see only one class of people,” Howardena Pindell told me recently. Fine art, she added, also “tended to be that way.” Major art institutions remain Congress-like assemblages of white, male elites, and Pindell, 78, has never given up her fight to change that.
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The New Left of the 1960s is often seen as a transatlantic, if not global, rebellion of the young against the cultural and political values of their parents’ generation as well as the Vietnam War. Part of what made this New Left “new” was its adherents’ disillusionment with existing political organizations and parties: Social democratic reformism, traditional labor parties, and the Soviet bloc were seen as either too bureaucratic or not sufficiently democratic. In general, the New Left, which championed numerous causes (the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, environmentalism, etc.) pursed nonhierarchical associations based on direct democracy. Given its anti-authoritarianism and desire to resist hierarchies, the New Left sought a politics of permanent democratic renewal. A key challenge facing it, then, involved the risk of succumbing to the very institutional formalization that it sought to resist. Indeed, it’s typical to ascribe the New Left’s undoing by the 1970s to its inability, if not refusal, to wield institutional political power.
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She almost didn’t notice them anymore, all the white men staring out from portraits on the walls of Yale University’s halls. No darker faces. No female faces. But when Pamela Price entered Yale as a proud Black nationalist with an Angela Davis–style afro in the freshman class of 1974, culture shock hit hard. It wasn’t just the class differences, though those were huge. Coming soon: This article was adapted from Sherry Boschert’s 37 Words: Title IX and Fifty Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination (The New Press).
Low, moat-like walls surrounded the stone residence colleges and many other Yale buildings, sending a subliminal message to “keep out.” Somehow the school made Black students feel like foreigners, which alienated her. Black students got the message that they were at Yale only because of affirmative action, as though invisible asterisks were affixed to their records. Price could feel people assume that she was inferior because she was a Black person and assume that she wasn’t serious because she was a woman. She knew that Yale had accepted Black students only because people fought and raised hell for their right to be there, to not be excluded. Price had seen worse; she would find her way through this too.
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The mass execution of 81 people in one day by Saudi Arabia, condemned by activist groups as a “massacre,” has prompted fresh fears that the kingdom’s human rights record will once again be overlooked amid the global energy crisis.
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The U.S. is refusing to directly condemn Saudi Arabia after the kingdom announced on Saturday it executed 81 people, including seven Yemeni men and one Syrian man. Rights groups say many of those executed were people arrested for participating in human rights demonstrations and that many of the defendants were denied access to a lawyer, held incommunicado and tortured. This comes as the U.S. is said to be in talks with Saudi officials about upping the kingdom’s oil supply to ease gas prices in the West. “It’s very clear that the Saudi government thought that they could take advantage of the Ukraine crisis to quietly carry out this execution,” says Sarah Leah Whitson of Democracy for the Arab World Now. Whitson says President Biden’s continued attempts to negotiate with Saudi Arabia while condemning the human rights abuses perpetrated by Russia are “pathetic,” undermining international law and U.S. credibility on human rights. She also says the Saudi government is trying to pressure the U.S. to scrap a lawsuit she is leading on the state-sanctioned murder of the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in exchange for increasing oil production.
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Prominent international human rights groups and defenders on Tuesday condemned Saudi Arabia’s recent execution of 81 people in a single day and called on the fundamentalist monarchy to enact a moratorium on capital punishment and commute the death sentences of all condemned prisoners.
“The death penalty is incompatible with fundamental tenets of human rights and dignity, the right to life, and the prohibition of torture.”
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As leftists, most want to be believers. We want to believe that through our work we’re helping others and all boats will rise in terms of social and economic gains. Once again, this time during the war in Ukraine, I’m wrong again and wrong in a way that hurts both emotionally and intellectually. Unions were traditionally the way the lives of many people were improved, but that refrain was lost long ago in the chilly winds of globalization and supply side economics. Each worker had to fend for himself/herself in the global economy and take on the elite and bosses individually rather than collectively.
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), of which I’m a retired member of its affiliate, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), recently hosted a fundraiser by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). The aim of the fundraiser was to help support Ukrainian families in the war now being fought there. Not a bad idea on its face. One organization in the ITUC is the Free Trade Unions of Ukraine, an AFL-CIO partner. Sounds good, but as Shakespeare observed, “ay, there’s the rub.” The CIA and the State Department are in on the support of this labor organization that includes the neo-Nazi Ihor Kniazhansky of the neo-Nazi Battalion (“The AFL-CIO’s Nazi Friendly Union in Ukraine,” Covert Action Magazine, March 10, 2022). All the reader needs to do is go back to the political landscape of 2013-2014 to today and a host of fascist organizations are present in the Ukraine. Many countries of Eastern Europe are populated with far-right elements both in and out of governments there. Hungry and Poland are two nations that come to mind.
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Bharat Financial Inclusion Limited (BFIL), a subsidiary of IndusInd Bank recently admitted to disbursing 84,000 loans without getting customers’ consent recorded owing to a ‘technical glitch’. Though the bank took corrective steps upon the receipt of the complaints, there is very little regulatory oversight and acknowledgement of these instances in general.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Last week we noted how telecom backbone provider Cogent had decided to “punish Putin” for slaughtering Ukrainian civilians by severing the company’s transit routes to Russia. Cogent insisted that sanctions and an “uncertain security situation” made it “impossible for Cogent to continue to provide you with service.”
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Monopolies
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There are lots of reasons to have fallen in love with Wordle. The simple nature of the game. The ability to post spoiler-friendly brags for how you did on any given puzzle. The clean design. But here at Techdirt, we obviously became smitten with how Wordle’s creator, Josh Wardle, professed no interest in the ongoing monetization combined with zero interest in wrapping any IP around the game. In fact, the couple of times that other folks out there attempted to build Wordle clones or apps that had similar names and monetize them, Josh handled it all as kindly as possible.
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Public Knowledge Government Affairs Director Greg Guice will testify before the U.S. House Committee on Energy & Commerce Wednesday, March 16 at 10:30 a.m. His testimony in the hearing on “5G and Beyond: Exploring the Next Wireless Frontier” will argue that we must use every spectrum access tool available – along with expert agency coordination – to meet the nation’s growing spectrum demand. The testimony will also urge Congress to ensure that our spectrum policy prioritizes the public interest as we move into the next wireless frontier.
The following is an excerpt from the testimony:
“The environment for exploring spectrum opportunities has greatly evolved over the last few decades. The ‘connectivity revolution’ has changed the way we engage with our world. [T]he number of connected devices per home rose from 11 in 2019 to 25 by 2021 – a growth of over 100% in 3 years. That number is shocking until we consider the devices beyond our smartphone and laptop that are now connected. Televisions, watches, earbuds, speakers, doorbells, and alarms all rely on a connection to spectrum, much of which depends on unlicensed technologies.
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Patents
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While welcoming a possible “major breakthrough” in talks to temporarily waive intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines, global justice campaigners on Tuesday also expressed frustration with reporting that the deal does not extend to tests and treatments for the deadly virus.
“The progress made has only come because developing country governments stood firm and because so many ordinary people campaigned.”
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Copyrights
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After being sued by a coalition of major Hollywood studios and Netflix, pirate streaming giant PrimeWire has moved to yet another new domain. According to its operators, the action was taken to counter domain seizures. In an additional twist, all links to copyrighted movies and TV shows have also been removed but the MPA believes that PrimeWire is playing games.
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The Patent and Market Court of Appeal has overturned the prison sentences of three men who were criminally prosecuted for their involvement with IPTV service ATN. The Swedish court ruled that, while the service broadcasted copyrighted content from beIN in 2016, these rights are not enforceable as Qatar hadn’t signed up to the Rome Convention at the time.
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