Desktop/Laptop

• XDA ☛ Does the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon support Linux?

  The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 is one of the most powerful ultrabooks to come out in 2022. The new 2022 refreshed model comes with Intel’s new 12th gen processors, a new high-quality webcam, and more. There’s a lot to like about this particular laptop and we think it definitely deserves a spot in our collection of the best business laptops. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a Windows machine, but what if you want to run Linux on it? Luckily, you can.

• Medium ☛ 5 Reasons to Use a Rolling-Release Linux Distribution

  There is something about having access to the latest version of one’s favorite programs that makes a rolling-release user smile.

  When I first started with Linux some 25 years ago, I used Debian on its stable branch, and one of the things that always bothered me was having to wait a year or two for new versions of outdated applications. As the years passed, I would read about new and improved application versions, always available on expert-level rolling-release distributions like Arch or Gentoo, but usually far into the future on Debian, Slackware or OpenSUSE (before Tumbleweed emerged). I bounced from one fixed-releases distribution to another until 2012, when I discovered Manjaro, based on rolling-release Arch Linux without having to install Arch from scratch, at which time I discovered what it’s like to run the freshest software on a regular basis. I have been using rolling-release systems ever since.

• Ubuntu Pit ☛ Chromebook vs Laptop: Which One is Suitable For You? [Ed: Bizarre framing as 'Chrome'books are just locked-down laptops, but sometimes they can still be redeemed from Google's grip]

  Chromebook by Google Chrome is the most recent invention, and it has already started competing with Laptops. If you consider the surface and outlook, both of them share the biggest similarity. But inside, they have a lot of differences. Well, the battle of Chromebook vs Laptop can help you learn about the points where they are not the same. And that’s exactly what we are going to discuss today.

  Basically, we understand Windows PC or Macbook by the word, Laptop. But when it is about the security, interface, gaming, software availability, and storage, there are lots of dissimilarities. Windows pc can be of different brands and prices. Chromebooks also are of different brands and values as well.

  That’s the reason many of us get confused about which one to buy. Well, if you are also confused about the same fact, you are on the right track. Today we are planning to discuss the points where Chromebook and Windows laptops are different from one another. So, you can easily get your point to choose the best one from Laptop and Chromebook.

Server

• Blog: Is Your Cluster Ready for v1.24?

  Way back in December of 2020, Kubernetes announced the deprecation of Dockershim. In Kubernetes, dockershim is a software shim that allows you to use the entire Docker engine as your container runtime within Kubernetes. In the upcoming v1.24 release, we are removing Dockershim – the delay between deprecation and removal in line with the project’s policy of supporting features for at least one year after deprecation. If you are a cluster operator, this guide includes the practical realities of what you need to know going into this release. Also, what do you need to do to ensure your cluster doesn’t fall over!

• The Register UK ☛ Docker goes double unicorn with $105m Series C funding and $2.1b valuation [Ed: Making another laughable bubble from a company that cannot even make money]

  Docker hasn’t just got back in the fight thanks to its latest round of funding: it’s earned double-unicorn status, too.

  The long-suffering containerization company today announced a $105 million Series C funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures bringing its total funding to $163 million, and a company valuation of $2.1 billion. Bain’s Enrique Salem, former CEO of Symantec, will join Docker’s board as part of the deal.

  [...]

  As recent as mid-2021, the outfit was still having trouble finding its footing and a successful business model.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Video ☛ Steam Deck Just Hit A HUGE Milestone – Invidious

• Krita ☛ New Video by Ramon: The Recorder Docker | Krita

• Video ☛ Review: The BEST Linux Distro EVER! (DJL) – Invidious

  For the entire history of LearnLinuxTV, countless distributions have been reviewed. After all this time, the best distribution of Linux has FINALLY been found! In this review, we’ll take a look at the great DJL!

• Jupiter Broadcasting ☛ March Boost Battle | Jupiter Extras 84

  The Unplugged team holds a live event with a special guest, your questions, and we give away a lot of Bitcoin sats!

Kernel Space

• LWN ☛ A look at some 5.17 development statistics [LWN.net]

  At the conclusion of the 5.17 development cycle, 13038 non-merge changesets had found their way into the mainline repository. That is a lower level of activity than was seen for 5.16 (14,190 changesets) but well above 5.15 (12,337). In other words, this was a fairly typical kernel release. That is true in terms of where the work that made up the release came from as well.

• LWN ☛ Driver regression testing with roadtest [LWN.net]

  The kernel community has a number of excuses for the relative paucity of regression-test coverage in the project, some of which hold more water than others. One of the more convincing reasons is that a great deal of kernel code is hardware-specific, and nobody can ever hope to put together a testing system with even a small fraction of all the hardware that the kernel supports. A new driver-testing framework called roadtest, posted by Vincent Whitchurch, may make that excuse harder to sustain, though, at least for certain kinds of hardware.

  One of the problems with hardware is its sheer variety. Consider a device as conceptually simple as a GPIO port which, at its core, drives a single electrical line to either a logical true or false value. GPIO drivers should be simple things, and many of them are, but vendors like to add their own flourishes with each new release. As a result, there are well over 150 GPIO drivers in the kernel source, many of which can drive more than one variant of a device. There is no way to build a system with all of those devices in it; most of them are part of a larger peripheral or system-on-chip, and many of them have not been commercially available for years.

• LWN ☛ Improved response times with latency nice [LWN.net]

  CPU scheduling can be a challenging task; the scheduler must ensure that every process gets a fair share of the available CPU time while, at the same time, respecting CPU affinities, avoiding the migration of processes away from their cached memory contents, and keeping all CPUs in the system busy. Even then, users can become grumpy if specific processes do not get their CPU share quickly; from that comes years of debates over desktop responsiveness, for example. The latency-nice priority proposal recently resurrected by Vincent Guittot aims to provide a new tool to help latency-sensitive applications get their CPU time more quickly.

  Over the years, numerous approaches have been used to try to improve the response time of important processes. The traditional Unix “nice” value can be used to raise a process’s priority, for example. That can work, but a process’s niceness does not directly translate into latency; it controls how much of the available CPU time the process can consume, but not when the process can actually run. Using the realtime priorities will cause the scheduler to run a process quickly, especially if realtime preemption is enabled, but a process running at that priority can also take over the system.

  The latency-nice concept is a different approach that tries to address those problems; it applies to the completely fair scheduler used for most processes, so no realtime priorities are needed. It adds a second nice value which, mirroring the existing nice value, is a number between -20 and 19. The lower the number, the higher the priority, so the highest-priority latency-nice value is -20. As with traditional nice values, any process can increase its latency-nice setting, but lowering it requires the CAP_SYS_NICE capability.

Instructionals/Technical

• Video ☛ How to install Parrot 5.0 Home Edition. – Invidious

  In this video, I am going to show how to install Parrot 5.0 Home Edition.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install GwenView on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

  Gwenview is a simple and easy-to-use program for viewing images on the KDE desktop. It can show you full-screen slideshows, crop an image or rotate it in many different ways without much effort from yourself!

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install KPhotoAlbum on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

  When you’re looking for an easy way to organize your photos, KPhotoAlbum is the program that will make it easier than ever before. With this simple yet powerful tool in hand, there’s no longer a need to worry about what photo goes where because everything can be done through its intuitive interface, like viewing images individually or browsing by category. Best of all, taking advantage of some excellent features like seeing which ones were taken today without having them mess up any other date stamps!

  In the following tutorial, you will learn to install the KPhotoAlbum on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using three methods: apt package manager and flatpak package manager with some tips for maintaining or removing KPhotoAlbum in the future.

• How to Install SimulIDE on Debian 11

  Although in the field of engineering the applications are very varied, the truth is that most of them are only available for Windows. However, today you will learn how to install SimulIDE on Debian 11 which is a very efficient electronics simulator that is used by more and more people every day. Let’s get started.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install gThumb on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

  gThumb is the perfect tool for viewing and editing all your favorite images. It’s fully integrated with GNOME 3, so you can access it in seconds. The imaging software provides an easy way to view common formats such as BMPs GIF(including animations), JPEGs PNG TIFF, or RAW files — not just typical multimedia types like videos that are usually found on other platforms. You’ll also be able to use various metadata tags embedded inside photos including EXIF IPTC XMP which allows more customization than ever before when organizing collections across multiple devices

  In the following tutorial, you will learn to install the gThumb on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using three methods: apt package manager and flatpak package manager with some tips for maintaining or removing gThumb in the future.

• Virtualbox shared folder access denied (non-root user) from guest (Debian) to host (Debian)

• SmoogeSpace: Compiling openldap for CentOS 8 Stream

  The EL8 release did not ship an openldap-server like it did in previous releases. Instead only the client tools and some libraries are included for existing applications. Instead the focus from the upstream provider has been on other LDAP solutions.

• FOSSLife ☛ Securely Connect to your Raspberry Pi with SSH

  Many Raspberry Pi projects are “headless,” which means they don’t have an attached monitor, keyboard, or mouse. When it comes time to read the screen. Going without a monitor will keep the cost of your Rasp Pi low. You can always access the system with Secure Shell, better known as SSH.

  SSH is simply a secure, encrypted way of remotely logging in to a computer. OpenSSH, a free set of SSH tools developed by the OpenBSD project, is included in Linux distributions. If you’re using a recent version of a Linux distribution meant for the Raspberry Pi, the SSH service is almost certainly already available. The easiest way to find out without attaching a monitor and keyboard is to attempt to SSH to it.

• Russell Coker ☛ Converting to UEFI « etbe – Russell Coker

  When I got my HP ML110 Gen9 working as a workstation I initially was under the impression that boot wasn’t supported on NVMe and booted it from USB. I found USB booting with legacy boot to be unreliable so decided to try EFI booting and noticed that the NVMe devices were boot candidates with UEFI. Making one of them bootable was more complex than expected because no-one seems to have documented such things. So here’s my documentation, it’s not great but this method has worked once for me.

  Before starting major partitioning work it’s best to run “parted -l and save the output to a file, that can allow you to recreate partitions if you corrupt them. One thing I’m doing on systems I manage is putting “@reboot /usr/sbin/parted -l > /root/parted.log” in the root crontab, then when the system is backed up the backup server gets any recent changes to partitioning (I don’t backup /var/log on all my systems).

• Barry Kauler ☛ Remove duplicate screen-lock icons in ROX-mode

  Fixed. In ROX-mode the screen-lock icon will be on the desktop only. In JWM-mode it will be in the tray. Achieved by editing /root/.xinitrc
  Note, I have brought back the “show desktop” icon in the tray. It is useful.

• Using nmcli to configure a static dual stack wired network interface – nullr0ute’s blog

  I recently managed to break the network on my VM that hosts this blog. Basically I removed the NetworkManager-initscripts-ifcfg-rh package because I don’t use the old style ifcfg configuration anywhere else and I had forgotten how long I’d had this VM. So I went into the web console, manually bought up the network with ip commands and reinstalled the package but it made no difference. Oh well! Time to just move it to the new config so I just worked out the nmcli options for all the bits in the old ifcfg. This VM network is nothing special, it’s basically dual IPv4/IPv6 interface with associated DNS.

• Helpful git tips – nullr0ute’s blog

  So chatting with a colleague about some git tricks this week I discovered that not everyone was aware you could change the bash prompt to give certain git status, such as branch, and things like if you’re in merge/am/bisect modes etc. I’ve had the pieces in my .bashrc for so long I had literally got to the point it was assumed functionality that every one has enabled.

• New syslog-ng parser: flip-parser()

  The latest pull request to syslog-ng adds a really useful feature: the flip-parser(): https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng/pull/3971
  It allows you to flip the message text, reverse it, or both. As I also reported a couple of minor problems related to UTF-8 character handling, this PR most likely will not be merged today. However, you can compile it yourself, or if you use openSUSE Tumbleweed, use my packages from the openSUSE Build Service.

• OpenSource.com ☛ Monitor your databases with this open source tool | Opensource.com

  I have been using databases for a lot longer than I care to admit, and a lot of that time has been spent looking at the entrails of servers, trying to determine exactly what they were doing. Thank goodness for the engineers behind the MySQL Performance Schema and Information Schema and their efforts to provide solid information. And then came the Sys schema with handy prepackaged peeks at the server. Before the advent of those schemas, there was no easy way to get granular information about a database instance.

  But peering at tabulated displays at the information of one point in time does not allow for trend-spotting or a quick glance to ascertain a server’s status. Being able to spot a trend on a graph or have alerts sent when a threshold is reached is vital. My friends in the PostgreSQL and MongoDB worlds had the same problem. The good news is that there is an open source solution for all three databases that is easy to install and use.

• OpenSource.com ☛ How I customize my Linux window decorations | Opensource.com

  One thing I especially like about Linux is the amazing and vast array of choices in almost everything. Don’t like one application for something? There are usually several more you can choose from. Don’t like how the desktop works? Pick one of many other desktops. Don’t like the window decorations on your desktop? There are many others you can download and try.

  What if you don’t like one little thing about your choice of window decorations—and all other sets of decorations are not even close?

  One of the advantages of open source is that I can change anything I want. So I did.

  I use the Alienware-Bluish theme on my Xfce desktop. I like its futuristic look, the cyan and gray colors that match my dark primary color schemes—and sometimes my moods. It has a nice 3D relief in the corners, and the corners and edges are wide enough to grab easily, even with my Hi-DPI resolution. Figure 1 shows the original Alienware-Bluish decorations with the gradient-black-324.0 color scheme I prefer.

• A Lesson in Shortcuts – Tookmund – A place for my random thoughts about software

  Long ago, as the design of the Unix file system was being worked out, the entries . and .. appeared, to make navigation easier. I’m not sure but I believe .. went in during the Version 2 rewrite, when the file system became hierarchical (it had a very different structure early on). When one typed ls, however, these files appeared, so either Ken or Dennis added a simple test to the program. It was in assembler then, but the code in question was equivalent to something like this:

• Vitux ☛ Fix wrong Keyboard Layout in Ubuntu – VITUX

  Is the Ubuntu Keyboard layout not working? Most Ubuntu users want to use their native language as the primary input language when using their system. Using the Ubuntu preferences utility, you can add your native language as a keyboard input source. This language can be configured to be used as the default keyboard layout. This layout means that anything you type on your keyboard will be perceived by your Ubuntu system based on the keyboard layout you choose.

  This article describes how to customize the keyboard layout on the desktop to your preferred input language. It also describes how you can change it in the terminal (see the chapter on changing the keyboard layout on the Ubuntu server at the end of the article).
  We have run the commands and procedures mentioned in this article on Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04.

• Trend Oceans ☛ thefuck: Automatically Correct Previous Incorrect Command – TREND OCEANS

  thefuck is a Linux utility that comes as a python package can be installed via pip command to provide you automatic features to correct previous incorrect commands.

• What Is an Inode?

  If you are reading or learning about high-performance computing (HPC), where storage is a very important consideration, having a basic introduction to an inode is fairly important. In this article, I want to give you a high-level definition of an inode along with some additional details.

  For clarity, I’ll start with the recent evolution of filesystems. Over time, more features have been added to filesystems, creating a “spectrum” of filesystems, from the simple to the really sophisticated. Moreover, filesystems now address specific usage models, so they are not so generalized and might not be POSIX compliant. In this article, I stay with the classic filesystems that use inodes, oftentimes referred to as block-oriented filesystems, which excludes object and pure key-value filesystems.

Games

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Nightmare Reaper is a quality retro-themed FPS out now | GamingOnLinux

  Nightmare Reaper, a retro-inspired FPS that blends together elements of a looter-shooter and a sprinkle of RPG mechanics, recently left Early Access and it works great on Linux and Steam Deck. With Steam Play Proton, it’s a perfect experience. Note: key provided for me by Evolve PR.

  A blending of many ideas from classic first-person shooters, a lot of the inspiration in the graphical style and level design is clear but it has plenty of modern tweaks too. While modern shooters continue to push the boundaries of graphics, they’ve lost a lot of what made them fun — which is why games like Nightmare Reaper are just so good. Absolutely pumping action with some great visual effects.

• Boiling Steam ☛ 2000 Games On The Steam Deck, with Death Stranding Director’s Cut and Rising Hell – Boiling Steam

  A rather slow week, it took a while between the 1900 games milestone and the 2000 games mark. Overall it took Valve a bit more than 3 months to move from zero games validated to 2000.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Dead Cells ‘Break the Bank’ free upgrade out, more big updates teased | GamingOnLinux

  Motion Twin / Evil Empire have given us another great free update to the fantastic Dead Cells and teased plenty more is coming to the game. With this update you get The Bank, a brand-new optional biome that randomly appears in your run, replacing the immediately following biomes if you choose to enter it.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Point and click adventure Pants Quest gets a Linux release | GamingOnLinux

  A point and click adventure game all about finding missing clothing? Well, there’s been weirder things. Pants Quest gets a native Linux release.

  “A classic style adventure game about life and finding your pants. The more our hero tries to find them, the more things seem to spin out of control. The tone is funny but also kind of introspective, following the kind of crappy morning that makes you rethink every decision you’ve ever made while wandering around in your underwear.”

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Popular and unique musical game Rhythm Doctor gets Steam Deck support | GamingOnLinux

  Rhythm games come in all shapes and sizes, with Rhythm Doctor looking a lot more unique than some and not only does it have an Overwhelmingly Positive user score on Steam but it also got some big Steam Deck improvements.

Distributions

• IPFire Official Blog ☛ Incomplete Backups since Core Update 164

  This bug is being caused by an error in a routine which expands any globbing characters in the backup include list. Globbing is a way to use wildcards in file names like: /var/ipfire/*/settings where the asterisk character stands for any directory that the shell can find. And precisely that does not work which causes that certain files are not included in the backup.

  This is not security-relevant, but if you restore those backups, you will end up with an incomplete configuration which might cause other problems and lots of things being reset to the factory default.

  Most IPFire users won’t be impacted by this at all, since it is normally not required to backup and reinstall your system. However, because this bug has the potential to break an installation, we wanted to highlight this problem with this post.

• CrunchBang++ Linux – The Ultimate Lightweight and Stable Linux Distribution

  We review the Debian based, Openbox powered lightweight Linux Distribution CrunchBang++ Linux and guide you if you plan to use it.

• New Releases

  • The Register UK ☛ Chinese distro Deepin hits 20.5, complete with browser called Browser

    Deepin version 20.5 is the latest “Community” version of one of the best-known Chinese Linux distros, and shows an interesting blend of technological influences.

    The Debian-based distro is from the UnionTech Software Technology Co (Chinese language only) in the People’s Republic of China, however, it supports multiple languages and can be installed and used entirely in English.

    [...]

    The new version follows close behind the release of Deepin 20.4 in January. It offers no choice of desktop, because its home-grown Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE) is a big part of its appeal – as we mentioned when we looked at it and its related Ubuntu DDE remix.

    We gave 20.5 a quick spin in VirtualBox – which it complained about. Like Ubuntu Kylin, Deepin uses a lot of animations and audio effects, including a fancy animated loading screen and colourful wallpapers.

    Consequently, the installer checks if you’re running in a VM and warns you that performance will be sub-optimal. Even after installing the Guest Additions, the “Window Effect” button in Personalization Settings remained stubbornly disabled.

• BSD

  • Small OpenBSD and FreeBSD Experiment

    As I feel the need for a more minimalist and more coherent system, I downloaded OpenBSD and FreeBSD to install on a spare laptop (a Starlabs Star-lite MKII). I was baffled by the very pleasant OpenBSD installer. Clean, efficient.

    Best of all?

    I could choose, at install time, my keyboard layout (French Bépo) with capslock already replaced by Ctrl. Waw! Nice.

    Too bad, the installer didn’t managed to load the wifi driver (and this computer doesn’t have an RJ-45 port). Maybe I should report the issue somewhere.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • SUSE’s Corporate Blog ☛ New SUSE Certified Deployment Specialist Program

    SUSE Technical Training team introduced the new SUSE Certified Deployment Specialist (SCDS) program in February 2022. It provides certification for those specialists who are involved in product deployment and complements the existing SUSE Certified Administrator (SCA) and SUSE Certified Engineer (SCE) certification that are focused on the administration and usage of SUSE products.

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/13

    During this week, we only managed to get 4 snapshots (0324, 0328, 0329, and 0330) out of the door. Seems QA is slowing us down too much, so I decided to give up on it. To make Tumbleweed more plannable for upgraders, the new process will foresee a fixed time when a snapshot will go out – daily at 5 pm UTC. We will just ship out whatever we have built by that time. This is a minimal tradeoff between stability and plannability – after all, we all trust our developers and maintainers and we know that they test things before sending them your way. So no more need to slow down using QA!

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Video ☛ Technically Speaking (E12): GitOps with Argo CD – Invidious

    How do necessity, innovation, and Git as the single source of truth connect to our taxes? Maybe they don’t, but if you want to get started with GitOps, this video is for you. In this episode, Ed Lee of Intuit talks with Red Hat CTO Chris Wright about adopting GitOps and the Argo CD project.

  • The Next Platform ☛ Red Hat Stacks Up Software To Contain AI On Nvidia Platforms

    If you are a tech industry giant that wants to put a greater spotlight on what your technologies can do for enterprises that want to run AI workloads, you can do worse than make those statements at Nvidia’s bi-annual GPU Technology Conference. And that’s what Red Hat is doing this week, highlighting tighter integrations between its OpenShift Kubernetes platform and Nvidia’s AI Enterprise 2.0, software suite introduced last year as a way of making AI capabilities available to a wider range of enterprises, and introducing the latest release of OpenShift. Opening up AI and machine learning technologies to more companies and not just available to research labs, educational institutions and the largest organizations has been an ongoing effort of many in IT for the past few years.

  • Red Hat Handing Over Commercial Business to Partners

    Red Hat is accelerating plans to be partner-led across its commercial business. It’s also swapping traditional go-to-market for an ecosystem-led approach.

  • Securing verybad web application with only systemd

    In my last blog post I talked about verybad web application. It has multiple major security holes, which allows anyone to do remote code execution or read/write files on a server. Look at the source code to see what all you can do.

    I am running one instance in public http://verybad.kushaldas.in:8000/, and then I asked twitter to see if anyone can get access. Only difference is that this service has some of the latest security mitigation from systemd on a Fedora 35 box.

  • OpenSource.com ☛ 5 things open source developers should know about cloud services providers [Ed: Red Hat does "openwashing" + "clownwashing" all-in-one]

    “The cloud” refers to both the collective computing power of an interconnected array of servers and the software layer enabling those computers to work together to create dynamically defined infrastructure. Because many consider the cloud the new frontier of computing, it’s dominated the software industry for the past several years. Still, your individual level of involvement with it probably depends on your career and how much you acknowledge that you’re using the cloud in your computing.

    If you’re a programmer, you might be looking to move your development onto the cloud, either for work or for fun, but it doesn’t take long to realize that choosing a cloud provider can be an overwhelming prospect, especially for an open source enthusiast. I’ve written about the importance of an open cloud in the past. Luckily, there are very direct ways you, as a developer, regardless of your experience, can help ensure that the cloud fosters and strengthens open source.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ 5G edge and security deployment evolution, trends and insights

    The Heavy Reading 2022 5G Network Strategies Operator Survey provides insight into how 5G networks may evolve as operators and the wider mobile ecosystem continue to invest in 5G technology. We’ll begin by discussing some of the findings for 5G and edge computing, and conclude with a perspective centered around 5G security.

    Red Hat sponsored portions of the survey, specifically sections pertaining to service provider 5G edge computing strategies and their approach to 5G security.

  • Fedora ☛ Fedora Community Blog: CPE Weekly Update – Week of March 28th – April 1st

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

• Debian Family

  • LWN ☛ Three candidates vying for Debian project leader [LWN.net]

    Three candidates have thrown their hat into the ring as candidates for the 2022 Debian project leader (DPL) election. One is Jonathan Carter, who is now in his second term as DPL, while the other two are Felix Lechner and Hideki Yamane. As is the norm, the candidates self-nominated during the nomination period and are now in the campaigning phase until April 1. The vote commences April 2 and runs for two weeks; the results will be announced shortly thereafter and the new DPL term will start on April 21. The candidates have put out platforms and are fielding questions from the voters, Debian developers, thus it seems like a good time to look in on the election.

    While the DPL is the titular head of the project, their powers are pretty limited by the Debian Constitution; most of the power in Debian lies collectively and individually with the developers. The DPL is, to a certain extent, an administrative role more than it is an executive one. The intent is also for the DPL to be kind of a thought leader for the project, leading discussions, possibly proposing general resolutions (GRs), and consulting with the developers on how to use project money or other assets; in addition, the DPL is a catch-all for urgent decisions or those for which there is no relevant decision-making entity in the organization.

  • Russ Allbery: Updated eyrie Debian archive keyring

    For anyone who uses my personal Debian repository (there are fewer and fewer reasons to do that, but there are still some Debian packages there that aren’t available anywhere else), I’ve (finally) refreshed the archive signing key.

  • Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities March 2022

    This month I didn’t have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

  • The Anarcat ☛ Antoine Beaupré: Salvaged my first Debian package

    People not familiar with Debian will not understand anything in that first paragraph, so let me expand. Know-it-all Debian developers (you know who you are) can skip to the next section.

    Traditionally, the Debian project (my Linux-based operating system of choice) has prided itself on the self-managed, anarchistic organisation of its packaging. Each package maintainer is the lord of his little kingdom. Some maintainers like to accumulate lots of kingdoms to rule over.

    (Yes, it really doesn’t sound like anarchism when you put it like that. Yes, it’s complicated: there’s a constitution and voting involved. And yes, we’re old.)

    Therefore, it’s really hard to make package maintainers do something they don’t want. Typically, when things go south, someone makes a complaint to the Debian Technical Committee (CTTE) which is established by the Debian constitution to resolve such conflicts. The committee is appointed by the Debian Project leader, himself elected each year (and there’s an election coming up if you haven’t heard).

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • My First Trimester Tech Updates: Earbuds, Laptop and Robot

    In a previous post I shared “5 Good Laptops Under 700€ to Buy in 2022” as I was looking for a cheap laptop to run Ubuntu (that I need for academic purposes). One of the comments I received stated that for a few bucks more I could buy a MacBook Air with the powerful M1. Well, I am not interested in buying a new MacBook Air to run Linux distributions. But it gave me the idea of buying an old used MacBook for this purpose. I found a good deal on eBay, and in a few days I have my new cheap laptop.

    I have previous experience installing Ubuntu (as dual boot) on my MacBook Pro 2011 without major problems (wireless card not working, but solved with USB wireless, and everything else working as expected), so I decided it could be a good deal. Old MacBooks are still better than most cheap laptops of today, with better quality construction, better trackpad, better keyboard (including backlit), and better overall look and feeling.

    Ubuntu OS is very light, and can run really fast in old machines without much requirements from the system. My cheap laptop has an SSD disk and 8Gb of Ram, which is good enough to run Ubuntu with easy, and have an updated OS.

  • Ubuntu ☛ Design patterns and the software operator — part 1 | Ubuntu

    In the early days of software development, computers were sold with compilers and interpreters. Users wrote mostly their own small programs instead of buying software. During that time, most didn’t even consider downloading software as only a few were connected to mailboxes or the UUCP network.

    Most of the software was provided by the computer vendors and many users just required simple programs implementing calculations or little tools. As we know, this has changed quite a lot over the past decades. Technology became more complex and vendors started providing interfaces for the applications (APIs) of the users. As computers got more capable, the APIs grew over the years. Libraries, frameworks and APIs went from being mainly made and distributed by vendors to being provided by 3rd parties.

  • Ubuntu ☛ The software operator design pattern — part 2 | Ubuntu

    Over the years, the software development and programming community developed a common understanding of design patterns. A design pattern is a general solution designed to solve a repeatedly occurring problem when writing — or better, designing — software. This implies that if a design is new and has not been proven to work in production software, it cannot be a pattern. A pattern is an abstract concept covering multiple implemented solutions following that abstract concept. If there are no solutions already in place, such a pattern does not exist.

    For the software operator pattern as published by the kubernetes community, the part about existing implementations is covered, as the website clearly lists a number of frameworks and projects implementing this pattern. And – as pointed out in the first part of this blog post series – Canonical provides an implementation of this pattern as well. Interestingly enough, this implementation has been created before the publication of the operator pattern in 2017. In fact, initial steps for the Canonical implementation of the software operator pattern date back much earlier than 2013. At that time, the implementation was not named software operator framework, but Juju and Charms. Back then, operators were named Charms, while the middleware running the operators was Juju, running Charmed Operators and managing the available local, public and multi-cloud environments.

    But coming back to describing a pattern instead of only describing an interesting design, there is more to say: the motivation to talk about patterns is to let the readers, software developers or software architects understand the experience of adopting this design, its benefits and also disadvantages.

Devices/Embedded

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Jetson powered edge AI system has eight PoE ports

  The Boxer-8254AI is equipped with a hexa-core Xavier NX with 8GB LPDDR4 and 16GB eMMC running the usual Ubuntu stack with Nvidia JetPack 4.5 (and above) SDK for AI development. The system adds a microSD slot and a 2.5-inch SATA bay, and mSATA is available on the full-size mini-PCIe slot along with PCIe and USB. There is also a SIM card socket, 4x SMA antenna mounts, and an M.2 E-key slot for WiFi/BT.

• CNX Software ☛ Hardkernel launches ODROID-M1 Rockchip RK3568B2 SBC

• CNX Software ☛ Kontron Pi-Tron CM4 mini PC leverages Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 for industrial applications

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Dedoimedo ☛ My Nokia X10 upgraded to Android 12 – And we check

    
    There you have it. My depressing little review. Android 12 does have some visual merits, but they come bundled with inefficiencies, more taps, and if you care about privacy, you need to spend time undoing the default nonsense that the new version brings. The overall interface feels a bit too big, and I loathe the screenshot functionality. I also don’t like the swipe wobble – the app grid shakes ever so slightly when you swipe hard, as though the app icons are pasted on an elastic sheet rather than a rigid canvas. This will probably make someone excited, but rule no.1 in UI design is that you don’t make things change unless necessary, and this isn’t necessary.

    Yes, it works, yes the color scheme is nicer, yes things are stable, and yes, after you’re done purging the nonsense from your phone, you have a decent privacy-oriented baseline. But the whole exercise feels cheap, dirty, and I’m just too jaded for this so-called modern world of mobile phone technology. Or any would-be new technology for that matter, it seems. Because it’s not about usability, it’s all about the tiniest of margins on profits, and it feels like a cattle market, and I’m not a sheep, nor do I like being fleeced.

    Finally, I don’t really get any choice. My phone upgraded itself, I don’t get any say in this. But if I look at the various Android phones in my possession, with versions set at 4 through 12, it seems Android 10 is probably the nicest around (every version since the beginning was an improvement till then), but with the newer ones, it’s all a bit meh. Now, Android has matured nicely, but there’s only so much you can do with a piece of plastic and glass designed to be used with a finger. Anyway, enough ranting. This is an operating system review, if you want to call it that. In the end, I had to do some tweaking, I lost some basic efficiency, got some cooler colors, and the world moves on. Bye bye now.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Apache Blog ☛ Your call is important to us: The Apache Software Foundation’s Infrastructure team unveils new support line

• Apache Blog ☛ Success at Apache: My experience with the Apache Way —a perfect society? : The Apache Software Foundation Blog

  I have been working in software engineering for more than 15 years. I’ve always contributed to Open Source software as a user or a developer. But I’ve been contributing to Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects such as Apache Flink, Apache Beam or Apache Spark for nearly 6 years. It is long enough for me to say that I find the Apache Way is almost the best way to collaborate on software engineering.

  I will not describe the Apache way here as there is a lot of good information about that already. I would rather link to the official Apache documentation. I humbly suggest that you read what it is if you don’t know it already.

  My point here is to talk about the Apache Way in practice as I’ve experienced it. Of course, every Apache community is different, but what I wanted to emphasize is that applying the Apache Way by the book could lead to what I’d call a “perfect society” even if this word seems a bit naive and over optimistic, or even utopian.

• Events

  • Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ Apply for a Linux Foundation Training Scholarship by April 30 [Ed: LF lost all the events revenue due to COVID-19; it's trying to rebuild as a diploma mill, still]

    It’s that time of year – Linux Foundation Training (LiFT) Scholarships are here! Since 2011, The Linux Foundation has awarded over 1,100 scholarships for millions of dollars in training and certification to deserving individuals around the world who would otherwise be unable to afford it. This is part of our mission to grow the open source community by lowering the barrier to entry and making quality training options accessible to those who want them.

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL Developer Day 2022 / dates, call for papers & sponsors, etc.

    Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day 2022 (P2D2 2022) will be held on June 1-2 in Prague, Czech Republic. The conference focuses on topics for PostgreSQL users and developers. For more information about the event, please see the website at https://www.p2d2.cz/

    We are now accepting proposals for talks and trainings in both Czech and English. In previous years, the conference was organized as a single-track even with a mix of talks in Czech and English. This year we’re planning to organize a conference with a separate track in English, if permitted by the number of talk proposals etc.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Google says: Thank You Mrs Baker – you successfully destroyed the Firefox browser! – Alternatives to Chrome and Firefox?

      The software quality will probably get worse and worse & maybe Firefox will disappear completely. Why? two reasons. Mozilla (the company/foundation behind Firefox) had a contract with Google, Mozilla will participate in advertising revenues if Google becomes the homepage of Firefox. probably Google has also copied a lot from Mozilla and “copied” it into its own Chrome browser.

      [...]

      Thunderbird is also from Mozilla but is developed by a group of volunteers.

      [...]

      the answer should: MRS BAKER, PLEASE RESIGN & LET SOMEONE ELSE DO THE JOB, SO YOU CAN FINALLY GO SOMEWHERE ELSE AND EARN 5x MORE MONEY WITHOUT DESTROYING THE INTERNET & MOZILLA FOUNDATION! THANK YOU!

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • New LibreOffice GSOC project: resolve deadlocks using robust and efficient implementation of Ostrich algorithm – Mike Kaganski’s blog

    This year’s GSoC is coming; and this year, I suggest that we handle one big problem plaguing LibreOffice: deadlocks.

    Users know that sometimes, program hangs. Often that is because of deadlocks. It is well known that one of industry’s most widely used ways to handle this problem is Ostrich algorithm [1].

  • Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice project and community recap: March 2022

• FSF

  • Unicorn Media ☛ Stallman to Deliver ’State of Free Software’ Online April 13

    
    Although Richard Stallman seemed to be absent from this year’s LibrePlanet event, the Free Software Foundation has announced he will be livestreaming his “The State of the Free Software Movement” talk on April 13th at 2 p.m. Eastern Time.

    Just because Richard Stallman seems to have been left out of this year’s LibrePlanet, the Free Software Foundation’s annual “free software” lovefest, doesn’t mean he’s dropping out of public view. It also doesn’t mean that the FSF isn’t willing to let him speak under its banner.

• Programming/Development

  • LWN ☛ Boucher: rustc_codegen_gcc can now bootstrap rustc

    On his blog, Antoni Boucher updates the status of rustc_codegen_gcc, which “is a GCC codegen for rustc, meaning that it can be loaded by the existing rustc frontend, but benefits from GCC by having more architectures supported and having access to GCC’s optimizations”. A significant milestone has been reached: “the GCC codegen has made enough progress to be able to compile rustc itself”.

  • Drew DeVault ☛ Announcing git snail-mail

    At least, this is what I’d like to say, but I ended up cancelling the project before it was ready for April Fool’s. After my friend kline (a staffer at Libera Chat) came up with this idea, I actually did write a lot of the code! Git is mostly written in Perl, but I could not really rouse the enthusiasm for implementing this idea in Perl. I did the prototype in $secretlang instead, and got it mostly working, but decided not to try to do some sneaky half-private joke release while trying to maintain the secrecy of the language.

  • Fedora Magazaine ☛ Fedora Magazine: Using Sourcegraph to Search 34,000+ Fedora Repositories

    In October 2021, a Fedora Linux user asked a question about licensing. Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller left a response: “Since we don’t have a complete, exploded, searchable repository of all of the packages in Fedora, I don’t have a quick way to check.”

    Followed by: “…or possibly pay Sourcegraph to do it for us. They seem like nice people.” He is correct, we (Sourcegraph) are nice people, but we don’t want your money. Instead, we wanted to team up with the Fedora community.

    The Fedora Community can now search their universe of open source code—currently over 34,000 repositories and counting.

  • OpenSource.com ☛ Make a cup of coffee with Git | Opensource.com

    Git can do everything—except make your coffee. But what if it could?

    Like most people, I already have a dedicated coffee brewing device listening to HTCPCP requests. All that is left is to hook Git up to it.

  • Qt ☛ Shell Extensions in Qt Wayland 6.3

    The Qt 6.3.0 release is just around the corner, and I wanted to share some updates we have made for the Qt Wayland integration and its companion module Qt Wayland Compositor. I will also use this as an opportunity to introduce some basic concepts to those who are not already familiar with Wayland, and give some background/justification for how things currently work.

  • Status update: Adding CI Pipelines on GitLab – post #5

    This is my fifth status update for Season of KDE 2022.

    This time, I have updates on the automation side of things. I got a preliminary version of the required GitLab pipelines working.

  • Spotlight on Meson’s full-featured developer environment

    When developing an application or a library, it is very common to want to run it without installing it, or to install it into a custom prefix rather than on the system (i.e. /usr or /usr/local).

  • Perl/Raku

    • Olaf Alders ☛ Making Dynamically Required Package Names More Discoverable in Perl

      I’ve been using perlimports a lot at $work. I’m generally quite happy with perlimports, but it can get confused by modules which are being dynamically used. Consider the following case, where we are using a function to create new objects.

    • Perl ☛ Perl Weekly Challenge 158: Additive Primes and Cuban Primes

    • Perl ☛ Possible security problem in CPAN modules / Zlib CVE-2018-25032

  • Python

    • LWN ☛ A method for replacing Python tuple entries [LWN.net]

      A recent discussion on the python-ideas mailing list gives some insight into how to—or how not to—propose a feature to be added to the language. At first blush, adding a method to Python’s immutable tuple type for replacing one of its elements is not a particularly strange idea, nor one that would cause much in the way of backward-compatibility concerns. Even though there was some evidence offered that such a method might be useful, it seems pretty unlikely that the idea will go anywhere, at least in part because of the repetitive, bordering on aggressive, manner in which its benefits were argued.

  • Java

    • TecAdmin ☛ 5 Methods to Print an Array in Java

      An array is a data structure to store multiple elements of similar data types. Similar to other programming languages Java also supports Arrays. Which are stored in a contiguous location on memory. In this tutorial, you’ll learn different techniques to print the elements of a given array in Java.

Crypto for the Rest of Us, Part III: Smart Contracts – Copyleft Currents

Welcome to another installation of me teaching myself about crypto by writing about it! In past posts, I have discussed topics like Bitcoin mining and proof-of-stake. I’m not an expert on crypto, but I like learning about technology, and these posts are an attempt to share what I have learned at a level that is not too basic, but not too advanced, for readers who are curious, like me. Actually, this topic has a lot to do with contract law, so I am more comfortable writing about it than those prior posts.

The thing I hear repeatedly about smart contracts is that they are neither smart nor contracts. Let’s figure out why people say that, and whether it is correct.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Openwashing

      • DEV Community ☛ What even is an Open Source Program Office – with Spotify, Aiven & Wipro [Ed: Openwashing nonsense and cheesy PR stunts from proprietary firms, FOSSLife ☛ promoted by “FOSSlife”; if the openwashing PR jesters were doing in society what they do to image of corporations, they’d “resolve” racism by insisting that we refer to blacks as “white people”]

  • Security

    • MakeTech Easier ☛ Wyze Camera Has Security Flaw Company Took 3 Years to Fix

      It’s expected that any product that has the word “security” in the title would be … secure. Yet, that’s how Wyze landed in hot water after it was determined that it knew about a security camera flaw and didn’t make a move to change it for three years.

    • The New Stack ☛ Chainguard: It’s All About That Base Image

      In our container-driven tech world, it’s vital that our container’s base image, the foundation we use in creating our working container images, must be as clear of bugs as possible. Chainguard, the zero-trust security company, dove into the subject of container image security in its new whitepaper “All About That Base Image.” Alas, they’ve found that some “popular base images can have hundreds of known security vulnerabilities.” This is no way to build a container!

      It’s only common sense for developers to choose base container images wisely. If not, they’re in for security headaches down the line. Borrowing on the idea of technical debt, Chainguard describes these base image vulnerabilities as “security debt.”

      Unfortunately, from their research all too many popular base images, which have been downloaded billions of times, come with tens or hundreds of known security vulnerabilities. That’s a lot of security debt in your image to overcome before you’ve even started building your applications!

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

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (wireshark), Fedora (389-ds-base), Mageia (golang, wavpack, and zlib), openSUSE (yaml-cpp), SUSE (expat and yaml-cpp), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.13, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-aws-hwe, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-oracle, linux-intel-5.13, and tomcat9).

    • Bleeping Computer ☛ QNAP warns severe OpenSSL bug affects most of its NAS devices

      Taiwan-based network-attached storage (NAS) maker QNAP warned on Tuesday that most of its NAS devices are impacted by a high severity OpenSSL bug disclosed two weeks ago.

    • The Register UK ☛ Patch now: Zero day vuln found in Java Spring framework • The Register

      Another Java Remote Code Execution vulnerability has reared its head, this time in the popular Spring Framework and, goodness, it’s a nasty one.

      Dubbed “Springshell” or “Spring4Shell”, the vulnerability requires an endpoint with DataBinder enabled. “For example,” explained security shop Praetorian, “when Spring is deployed to Apache Tomcat, the WebAppClassLoader is accessible, which allows an attacker to call getters and setters to ultimately write a malicious JSP file to disk.”

    • USCERT ☛ Spring Releases Security Updates Addressing “Spring4Shell” and Spring Cloud Function Vulnerabilities | CISA

      The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) has released information on a vulnerability (CVE-2022-22965), known as “Spring4Shell,” affecting Spring Framework, a Java framework that creates applications, including web applications. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Tech thoughts for the week

  This one’s interesting. At first I was hesitant to use some web-based IRC client, but the layout and perma-connectivity is really nice. I might just shell out the $50 for a yearly subscription.

• The Register UK ☛ Viasat spills on the Russian attack, warns of continued risks

  It turns out the only thing Russian forces needed to knock thousands of Ukrainian satellite broadband customers offline was a misconfigured VPN.

  Viasat, whose Ukrainian satellite broadband service was knocked offline the day Russia invaded Ukraine, said its analysis of the attack revealed a poorly configured VPN appliance was used by the attacker to access the trusted management section of the KA-SAT satellite network.

  The attacker gained access to the segment of the network used to manage and operate it, and then pushed legitimate, yet malicious, commands to residential modems in Ukraine and several other European countries.

Server

• 77% of Kubernetes Users Don’t Have Protections for Data Loss

  A new survey shows that the majority of companies are “underprepared” for threats against their Kubernetes environments.

  The survey by the data storage company Veritas is on how companies are protecting their open-source Kubernetes, according to the company this month.

  Kubernetes is being rapidly deployed into “mission-critical environments,” with one-third of companies relying on it and 86% of them expecting to deploy the technology in the next two to three years.

Kernel Space

• Kernel 5.17: Solid & steady

  Our CODEC team has pushed forward VP9 hardware codec support on the Linux kernel. The fine-tuned VP9 uABI has been released, enabling decoders to enqueue encoded frames without waiting until a previous frame completes. This is due to the improved probabilities update process, which frees the userland from the dependency on the previously decoded frames.

  In addition, video decoders on Rockchip SoCs (RK3399: RkVDEC), NXP SoCs (IMX8MQ: Hantro), and several others now offer hardware support for decoding VP9 byte-streams.

  As the new Kernel drivers are stateless, the driver requires a user-space application to handle the state (picture order, references, etc.) of the decoder. There are multiple available solutions. One notable option is GStreamer, which includes support for managing a VP9 hardware decoder, a feature contributed by our CODEC team at the end of last year.

  Google’s VP9 codec, which is heavily used on YouTube, is a major competitor to the widely popular HEVC codec. It is specialized for high-resolution video and provides better compression efficiency than codecs like MPEG-4.

Applications

• smolZINE – Issue 23

  orrg is an rss/atom feed reader. You can view random feeds, recent feeds or popular feeds. Hit the view feed link to paste in any feed of your choice and view it over gemini. The software making this possible is also open source and available to be used on your own capsule.

• Its FOSS ☛ Peergos: Open-Source Google Drive Alternative for Self-Hosting

  Google Drive is one of the most popular cloud storage services.

  And, for all the right reasons, it offers flexible pricing, regional pricing, and many other advantages.

  Unfortunately, it does not offer end-to-end encryption. Moreover, it is not an open-source offering.

• Linux Links ☛ Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Adobe After Effects

  Adobe is a large multinational computer software company with over 22,000 employees. Its flagship products include Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, XD, Acrobat DC, and the Portable Document Format (PDF). The products are wrapped up and marketed as the Creative Cloud, a subscription-only way of accessing more than 20 desktop and mobile apps and services for photography, design, video, web, UX, and more.

  We are long-standing admirers of Adobe’s products. They develop many high quality proprietary programs. It’s true there are security and privacy concerns in relation to some of their products. And there’s considerable criticism attached to their pricing practices. But the real issue is Adobe Creative Cloud does not support Linux. And there’s no prospect of support forthcoming.

• xwayland 22.1.1

  Michel Dänzer (2):
  xwayland: Clear timer_armed in xwl_present_unrealize_window
  xwayland: Always hook up frame_callback_list in xwl_present_queue_vblank

  Olivier Fourdan (3):
  Xwayland: Do not map the COW by default when rootless
  xwayland/present: Fix use-after-free in xwl_unrealize_window()
  Bump version to 22.1.1

  git tag: xwayland-22.1.1

• FreeType 2.12.0

  The main new feature of this release is support for OpenType fonts with an ‘SVG’ table, using an external SVG rendering library.

• Cockpit Project: Cockpit 266

  Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly.

Instructionals/Technical

• Citizix ☛ How to install and configure monit in Rocky Linux 8

  Monit is a free, open-source process supervision tool for Unix and Linux. With Monit, system status can be viewed directly from the command line, or via the native HTTP web server. Monit is able to do automatic maintenance, repair, and run meaningful causal actions in error situations.

  In this guide we will learn how to install and configure monit on a Rocky Linux 8 server. If you are interested in setting up M/Monit, checkout How to install and set up M/Monit in Linux.

  These are some of the features of Monit.

• Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to Install Redis on Ubuntu 20.04/22.04

  What is really the hype behind Redis? Redis has created a reputation for itself as the go-to data store. It is attributed as a key-value, in-memory, and open-source data store. These attributes make Redis an ideal message broker, cache, and database candidate/application.

  Also, Redis’ resume illustrates its support for numerous data structures like Sets, Hashes, Lists, and Strings. Through features like automatic partitioning and Redis Sentinel, multiple Redis nodes and Redis Cluster provide high Redis availability.

• Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to Install OpenJDK 17 on Ubuntu 20.04/22.04

  Linux operating system distributions like Ubuntu are perfect software development platforms. The open-source nature of such operating systems makes them a safe haven for multiple programmable languages like Java, which is attributed as a class-based, multipurpose, object-oriented, and general-purpose programming language.

  It is having lesser implementation dependencies in its design footprint has majorly contributed to its popularity in the developer’s domain. The latter statement implies that a compiled Java code does not need recompilation as long as the platform running it is Java-supported. Therefore, Java’s applicability extends to cell phones, game consoles, computer applications, scientific supercomputers, and data centers.

• Linux.org ☛ DVD and Blu-Ray Conversion | Linux.org

  For many users, you may have a need to make a digital copy of a DVD or Blu-ray to view on your system. Viewing can be done remotely if you make a DLNA Server, as I covered in the article ‘Home Streaming Server’.

  The problem with making a digital copy from most discs is that they incorporate some form of protection. Using a special program, the protection can usually be bypassed and the digital copy can be made.

• Russell Coker ☛ AMT/MEBX on Debian « etbe – Russell Coker

  I’ve just been playing with Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT) [1] which is also known as Management Engine Bios Extension (MEBX).

  Firstly a disclaimer, using this sort of technology gives remote access to your system at a level that allows in some ways overriding the OS. If this gets broken then you have big problems. Also all the code that matters is non-free. Please don’t comment on this post saying that AMT is bad, take it as known that it has issues and that people are forced to use it anyway.

  I tested this out on a HP Z420 workstation. The first thing it to enable AMT via Intel “MEBX”, the default password is “admin”. On first use you are compelled to set a new password which must be 8+ characters containing upper and lower case, number, and punctuation characters.

• How to protect privacy online with tor and free vpn firmware for routers – how to setup tor node

• Matthew Garrett ☛ Matthew Garrett: ZTA doesn’t solve all problems, but partial implementations solve fewer

  Traditional network access controls work by assuming that something is trustworthy based on some other factor – for example, if a computer is on your office network, it’s trustworthy because only trustworthy people should be able to gain physical access to plug something in. If you restrict access to your services to requests coming from trusted networks, then you can assert that it’s coming from a trusted device.

  Of course, this isn’t necessarily true. A machine on your office network may be compromised. An attacker may obtain valid VPN credentials. Someone could leave a hostile device plugged in under a desk in a meeting room. Trust is being placed in devices that may not be trustworthy.

• Gizmodo ☛ How To Save an Old Laptop by Installing Chrome OS Flex

  Google has released software that can turn any old laptop into a like-new Chromebook.

• ID Root ☛ How To Install RainLoop Webmail on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install RainLoop Webmail on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, RainLoop is a modern email client created in PHP. It is quite lightweight and does not consume too many resources. It supports IMAP and SMTP and provides a user-friendly interface with a variety of features.

  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 RainLoop open-source, simple, modern, and fast Webmail 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.

• Red Hat Official ☛ How to deploy an Apache web server quickly | Enable Sysadmin

  Install, configure, and test a very basic web server deployment in just eight steps.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Upgrade/Install Nginx Stable/Mainline on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

  For those using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, you might have noticed that installing Nginx directly from its repository does not install the latest stable or mainline version. This is a common trend in most distributions that focus on the stability of packages and provide only urgent bug or security updates until the subsequent major distribution.

  For most, using the default Nginx that comes bundled with the repository will be preferred, but often many require and want the latest version of stable or mainline for updated features.

  The following tutorial will cover installing the last stable or mainline versions of Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa with two methods, both utilizing the APT package manager with importing the official repository from Nginx which is the most recommended option, or the alternative PPA model by Ondřej Surý.

Games

• GamingOnLinux ☛ GameMaker on Linux gets big improvements and Steam Deck support | GamingOnLinux

  GameMaker Studio 2 is now just GameMaker, and there’s a new update out with some dramatic improvements for Linux game exports and Steam Deck support.

  For far too long, GameMaker exports for Linux have required some very specific dependencies, which often caused issues for developers as they weren’t included directly. Game developers had to go and manually grab these files to include with the Linux games. Now, that’s not required – at least for Steam anyway.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ AI-powered map creator Dungeon Alchemist is now on Steam | GamingOnLinux

  After a successful crowdfunding campaign a while ago, Dungeon Alchemist is now available on Steam. Not a game though, however, instead it’s a special tool for creators to make really fancy looking maps to use elsewhere.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Steam Client Beta gets Linux fixes like not re-download media pre-caching files | GamingOnLinux

  It’s not just the Steam Deck that is getting upgrades, as Valve are also tweaking the main Steam client with a fresh Beta release out now. This one actually does fix some pretty annoying issues, some of which should really make things easier.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Steam Deck gets a bunch more Keyboard tweaks | GamingOnLinux

  Valve is really doing some great work on improving the Steam Deck, with another upgrade now available.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ SteamOS Plugin Manager should enable lots of fun on the Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

  This is going to be an absolute delight for people who want to hack away at the Steam Deck, and it can enable all kinds of things from music player integration to simple things like more quick-access buttons. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate just how awesome a project like this is. You don’t even need to turn off the read-only filesystem to do it, and so changes made will be persistent too through OS upgrades.

• The Verge ☛ The Steam Deck just got a dual-touchpad keyboard and some much-needed fixes

  Did I speak too soon? Two days after my one-month check-in with the Steam Deck portable gaming PC, Valve has already addressed a few of the most annoying issues I pointed out.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ HYPERCHARGE: Unboxed gets a Native Linux version, also Steam Deck Verified | GamingOnLinux

  HYPERCHARGE: Unboxed, a solo and co-op wave-based first/third-person shooter where you assume the role of a toy action figure is now officially available on Linux. Not only that, it’s also a Steam Deck Verified title.

  Being Steam Deck Verified means people can buy it without much worry, as it should perform well and look good on the smaller screen. This verification happened a little while ago but the additional big news is that they now have the officially supported native Linux version available today!

• Look Behind You, a Three-Headed Monkey NFT! [Ed: ScummVM jumps the shark by embracing an elaborate scam and legitimising it]

• Godot Engine ☛ Godot Engine – Turn an Android App into a Godot Quest VR App in 3 Steps

  Now that we’re past the clickbait title, let’s get to the meat of the matter:

  Designing and building VR applications is hard!

  It’s even more so if you are not familiar with graphics and game engine-related tools and technologies.

  This used to be my experience. My primary background was in Android mobile development and so when I initially approached the field of Virtual Reality, I was at a loss and quickly ran into a wall. Through perseverance and hard work, I was able to overcome that wall, but that experience made me realize how steep the learning curve is and how much of a barrier this is for other developers interested in the field.

• Arduino ☛ Playing Elden Ring with a TV remote | Arduino Blog

  In case you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard of it, Elden Ring is currently the hottest game in the world. It’s an open world RPG made by From Software — the same company that is infamous for making the incredibly difficult Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne games. Elden Ring is no less difficult, which is why it is amazing that ZiedYT was able to play using a TV remote converted into video game controller with an Arduino.

  While some modern remotes for smart TVs utilize Bluetooth or WiFi connections, traditional remotes work via infrared. These remotes contain an infrared emitter that pulses an invisible light in a specific pattern corresponding to a command, which the TV reads with a built-in infrared receiver. The “volume up” button, for example, will cause the remote to emit an infrared code distinct from the “channel down” button, and so on. While the code is modulated as a very rapid sequence of flashes, it is still a relatively slow process—something that spells death in any “Soulsborne” game.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Trend Oceans ☛ Deepin OS 20.5 Released with Face Recognition, can we trust?

    It’s one of the first Linux distributions that has the capability to unlock your system or authenticate sudo access with your face, and obviously you will be very happy to test out the new rolling features before anyone else, but I’m not sure whether your smiling face will turn into a pensive moment once you read this article.

  • Deepin 20.5 Released With New Features & Improvements | Itsubuntu.com

    Deepin 20.5, the latest stable release is now available for download. Deepin is a China-based Linux operating system. Deepin is the Debian-based Linux operating system that is trying to stand apart in the crowd of Linux distros.

  • Its FOSS ☛ Deepin OS Becomes the First Linux Distro to Offer Face Unlock – It’s FOSS News

    When Deepin first arrived at the scene, it blew away people with its sheer beautiful interface.

    As the time progressed and developers got more experienced, their focus shifted to include design and features users find in other commercial desktop OS offerings, i.e., Windows and macOS. Deepin was the first distro to offer Android apps support, cloud sync option and more.

    And trust me, that’s for good.

  • deepin 20.5 Release! – Deepin Technology Community

    Deepin is the top Linux distribution from China, devoted to providing a beautiful, easy-to-use, safe, and reliable operating system for global users. (Global Ranking)

    In deepin 20.5, a great of practical features collected from user feedback are developed and released, the Stable kernel is upgraded to version 5.15.24, underlying vulnerabilities are fixed, and system compatibility and security are enhanced further. Welcome to try it.

  • FreeBSD ☛ FreeBSD 13.1-RC1 Now Available

    
    The first RC build of the 13.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
    
    Installation images are available for:
    
    o 13.1-RC1 amd64 GENERIC
    o 13.1-RC1 i386 GENERIC
    o 13.1-RC1 powerpc GENERIC
    o 13.1-RC1 powerpc64 GENERIC64
    o 13.1-RC1 powerpc64le GENERIC64LE
    o 13.1-RC1 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE
    o 13.1-RC1 armv6 RPI-B
    o 13.1-RC1 armv7 GENERICSD
    o 13.1-RC1 aarch64 GENERIC
    o 13.1-RC1 aarch64 RPI
    o 13.1-RC1 aarch64 PINE64
    o 13.1-RC1 aarch64 PINE64-LTS
    o 13.1-RC1 aarch64 PINEBOOK
    o 13.1-RC1 aarch64 ROCK64
    o 13.1-RC1 aarch64 ROCKPRO64
    o 13.1-RC1 riscv64 GENERIC
    o 13.1-RC1 riscv64 GENERICSD
    
    Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without
    console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of
    freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access.  Additionally,
    the root user password is set to root.  It is strongly recommended
    to change the password for both users after gaining access to the
    system.
    
    Installer images and memory stick images are available here:
    
    https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.1/
    
    The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.
    
    If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR
    system or on the -stable mailing list.
    
    If you would like to use Git to do a source based update of an existing
    system, use the "releng/13.1" branch.
    
    A summary of changes since 13.1-BETA3 includes:
    
    o Handle interrupts racing with device suspend with the hdac driver.
    
    o Allow kern.ipc.maxsockets to be set to current value without error.
    
    o Call rtsx_init() on resume in the rtsx(4) driver.
    
    o Fixes to vfs.
    
    o Update to LLVM to fix the lang/rust port build on powerpc.
    
    o Several network-related updates and fixes.
    
    o Several Linux ABI-related updates and fixes.
    
    o The riscv64sf build had been fixed.
    
    o OpenZFS 2.1-release had been merged from upstream.
    
    o Updates and fixes to libarchive(3).
    
    o Updates and fixes to devd(8).
    
    o Various 802.11 wireless updates and bug fixes.
    
    o Various LinuxKPI updates and fixes.
    
    o The kernel build without INET or INET6 had been fixed.
    
    o Several arm64-specific fixes.
    
    A list of changes since 13.0-RELEASE is available in the releng/13.1
    release notes:
    
    https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.1R/relnotes/
    
    Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be
    updated on an ongoing basis as the 13.1-RELEASE cycle progresses.
    

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • D-Installer First Public Release | YaST

    It is our pleasure to announce the availability of the first installation image based on D-Installer. Since our initial announcement in January, we have been working on going from a non-working proof-of-concept to something that you can actually use.

    This article aims to summarize project’s current status and what you can expect from the near future. Additionally, we will dig a bit into some internal details so you have a better overview of the path we are following.

  • Know the Visa, Health Requirements to Attend oSC22 – openSUSE News

    For people planning on attending the openSUSE Conference 2022 in Nuremberg, Germany, from June 2 – 4, there are certain health and visa requirements that need to be met for travelers.

    The openSUSE Conference will follow the Bavarian Ministry of Health’s requirements and posture regarding COVID. An FFP-2 mask and social distancing may be required. These regulations my change before or up to the day of the conference.

  • SUSE’s Corporate Blog ☛ Introducing SUSE Premium Technical Advisory Services

    Technical Advice, Counsel and Guidance to Keep You Competitive
    The skills gap is real and hiring is expensive and time consuming. You need access to a specialist to keep your business running smoothly and stay on top of technology trends. Premium Technical Advisory Services is just that. With an assigned coordinator, you can schedule time with the right specialist at the right time. So whether you need technical expertise, mentorship or guidance, Premium Technical Advisory Services provides just the right amount of service. Premium Technical Advisory Services can be the difference between surviving and thriving in today’s digital world.

  • SUSE’s Corporate Blog ☛ BTP Sextant and SUSE Rancher Deliver Enterprise-grade Blockchain Solution | SUSE Communities

    When distributed ledger technology burst onto the scene with blockchain implementations for cryptocurrency, the technological breakthrough of an immutable, multiparty ledger – a ledger that’s permanent and tamperproof – was quickly proven.

    However, aiming distributed ledger technology at business transformation and digitizing multiparty workflows and agreements needed a wider ecosystem of technologists, developers and tools to mature in order to simplify implementations, unlock the inherent value and fully realize the potential of the technology.

• Slackware Family

  • Eric Hameleers ☛ Chromium 100 available

    The Chromium version has reached a triple-digit number: I have uploaded new packages for Chromium 100 (Slackware 14.2 and newer, 32bit as well as 64bit). Specifically it is the release 100.0.4896.60 which was announced a few days ago. It fixes a number of vulnerabilities with the criticality label “high” which usually means it can crash your browser but not compromise your computer.

    Google currently maintains a release schedule for Chromium where a new major version (98, 99, 100, …) is made available every month. This means that new features are not added with a big bang after being beta-tested for months, but the browser’s feature list will evolve over time.

    [...]

    Get chromium packages here (NL mirror) or here (US mirror). The chromium-ungoogled packages are still waiting for the source code to be released. I expect that to happen any time and then I’ll build and upload those packages too.

• Arch Family

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Arch Linux’s First ISO Snapshot Powered by Linux Kernel 5.17 Is Now Available for Download

    Arch Linux 2022.04.01 is now available for download and it’s the first ISO release of the lightweight and flexible GNU/Linux distribution to be powered by Linux kernel 5.17, which brings numerous new features, better hardware support through new and updated drivers, as well as many other improvements.

    Linux kernel 5.17’s first point release, 5.17.1, is included by default in Arch Linux’s ISO snapshot for April 2022, which also includes up-to-date packages that have been released throughout March 2022.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ What’s the difference between a manager and a coach? [Ed: IBM, which perpetuates the mass layoffs, also perpetuate this big lie about lots of workers willfully resigning (nor proactively ahead of a collapse)]

    The ongoing disruption from the pandemic has resulted in a staggering 38 million workers quitting in 2021. With many roles now remote or hybrid and technology talent particularly scarce, organizations need to look at leadership through a different lens.

    People who leave their jobs often do so because of poor managers. Therefore, to retain employees, organizations must rethink what management, leadership, and coaching mean. A coach provides the support and guidance that helps individuals realize their potential. And with human connection lacking in many workplaces today, this is critical for every business.

  • IBM Old Timer ☛ What Is Web3, and Could It Usher a New Economic System? [Ed: IBM's IWB props up buzzwords and hype now]

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ 3 leadership tips for surviving workplace uncertainty

    In recent months, many IT leaders have felt pressure to prepare for uncertain events in the workplace. This uncertainty falls into various categories, including data governance/security, industrial disruption, organizational restructuring, digital transformations, and employee burnout.

    Now that uncertainty has become the norm, IT leaders are relying on their past experience to guide decisions on the unforeseeable future. The future of these leaders is predicated on the ability to survive changes that occur every day.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu Blog: MasterClass: Concept design [Ed: Canonical a week ago contradicts today’s Canonical. With “master” in their headline. Same at IBM. Double standards.]

    The purpose of a trash in this case is to allow users to undo deletions. Based on this purpose, when the main action “delete” is performed, we know that it is an action we could undo. The structure of this trash is in a folder structure, meaning, it can contain both folders and files. This is important because the structure allows us to understand which actions can be taken with this concept. Finally, we have a behaviour. The behaviour shows us that whenever we delete a file or a folder, it is actually moved to a different folder called “Trash”. This will allow us to move it back to its original directory if we changed our minds. Only if we decide to “Empty trash” will we entirely remove the files in our “Trash” folder.

  • Ubuntu ☛ Operator Day hosted by Canonical

    Software operators are crucial elements in the Kubernetes landscape. They implement operational tasks covering everyday application management. They help human operators, administrators to run their applications efficiently and effectively. On Operator Day, Canonical speakers and guests share knowledge and insights about the journey from configuration management to application management. Canonical provides an entirely OSS-based platform and framework for software operators – Juju and the Charmed Operators. The various sessions will cover software operators, what they represent, how to use them, how to create them and how we can take advantage of them. We are delighted to see the rising interest in Kubernetes Operators. And of course, we are happy to cover this demand with the fourth edition of the Operator Day for the Kubecon EU 2022. Because of the uncertainties with planning travels between countries remain, we decided to run the event entirely virtually.

  • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Beta Released

    Big news for the Ubuntu users as the road to getting Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is getting closer with the availability of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Beta edition. Yes, you heard it right as Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is now available for download.

    The latest version of Ubuntu is powered by the long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series and ships with the latest GNOME 42 desktop environment by default. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ‘Jammy Jellyfish’, will be made available on April 21, 2022.

  • Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) Final Beta released

  • Ubuntu Fridge | Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) Final Beta released

    The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the Beta release of the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Desktop, Server, and Cloud products.

    22.04 LTS, codenamed “Jammy Jellyfish”, continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

    This Beta release includes images from not only the Ubuntu Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, but also the Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, UbuntuKylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu flavours.

    The Beta images are known to be reasonably free of showstopper image build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of 22.04 LTS that should be representative of the features intended to ship with the final release expected on April 21st, 2022.

  • Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS Beta Released – Ubuntu Studio

    The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS, codenamed “Jammy Jellyfish”.

    While this beta is reasonably free of any showstopper DVD build or installer bugs, you may find some bugs within. This image is, however, reasonably representative of what you will find when Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS is released on October 22, 2021.

    Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS will be Ubuntu Studio’s first Long-Term Support(LTS) release with the KDE Plasma Desktop Environment.

  • Beta News ☛ Ubuntu Linux 22.04 ‘Jammy Jellyfish’ Beta now available for download

    Just a couple days ago, Fedora 36 Beta was released, and now, Ubuntu Linux 22.04 Beta follows suit. Called “Jammy Jellyfish,” this pre-release version of the Ubuntu operating system uses Linux kernel 5.15, Mesa 22, and the GNOME 42 desktop environment by default.

    Don’t like GNOME? Hey, that’s cool. There are several flavors of Ubuntu that use alternative desktop environments, such as Kubuntu (KDE Plasma), Lubuntu (LXQt), and Xubuntu (Xfce) to name a few.

Devices/Embedded

• Hackaday ☛ MangoPi To Bring A SD-Card-Sized Linux Module

  Today’s Diminutive Device is a small castellated System-On-Module (Twitter link, nitter proxy)from [MangoPi] called M-Core, with a quad-core A53 CPU and 1 GB of RAM. As such, it’s very capable of running Linux, and even sports an HDMI output! Taking a closer look at the devboard picture, we can spot traces for three USB 2.0 ports, what seems to be two SDIO interfaces for MicroSD or WiFi cards, and an Ethernet MagJack with its termination network. This is a decent set of interfaces, rivaling what we’d expect out of a Pi Zero!

• TechRadar ☛ Mysterious new Raspberry Pi alternative is the size of an SD card

  At a time when consumers are finding it difficult to get their hands on a new Raspberry Pi, MangoPi is teasing a new single-board computer that is slightly smaller than an SD card.

  In a recent post on Twitter, MangoPi showed off several pictures of its new unnamed module that features a Linux-capable SoC and no ports whatsoever. In addition to being much smaller than the Raspberry Pi 4B, the new device is actually even smaller than the Raspberry PiZero 2 W.

  According to a new report from Tom’s Hardware though, MangoPi’s new single-board computer could be called the ‘Linux Box” as there is both a blank product page with the name on the company’s site as well as a discussion about it on its forum.

  Based on the photos shared by MangoPi, the so-called Lunch Box will feature four Arm Cortex-A53 cores just like the Raspberry Pi 3 and the Zero 2 W. The device will also run Allwinner’s embedded Tina Linux distro which is based on OpenWRT.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Tiger Lake-U mini-PC ready for drone duty

  Aaeon’s Linux-ready “PICO-TGU4-SEMI” industrial mini-PC is available for pre-order at $809. The fanless system has an 11th Gen U-series CPU plus GbE, 2.5GbE, HDMI 2.0, 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2, M.2 M-key, and mini-PCIe with mSATA.

  Aaeon has posted a pre-order page for a 122 x 80.8 x 50.4mm embedded mini-PC based on its PICO-TGU4 Pico-ITX SBC. The PICO-TGU4-SEMI is primarily designed for drones, but also supports other edge AI applications like robotics or factory applications. The price is $809, with shipments due April 8.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Compact Elkhart Lake system features Hailo-8 NPU

  Axiomtek’s compact “Aristotle RSC101” edge AI box runs Linux or Win 10 on Elkhart Lake along with an up to 26-TOPS Hailo-8 NPU, up to 32GB DDR4, 2x GbE, 2x USB, HDMI, DIO, and 3x M.2 slots.

  Axiomtek announced its first product based on Intel’s 10nm, Atom-class Elkhart Lake SoCs and its second to feature Hailo’s Hailo-8 NPU after its octa-core Arm-based RSC100 system. The fanless, 154.4 x 111 x 49.4mm Aristotle (RSC101) is a smaller, less feature-rich box than the RSC100, and is primarily designed for edge AI smart city applications.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Screen Rant ☛ How To Pin Apps On Android | Screen Rant

  • Screen Rant ☛ How To Enable Android 12′s One-Handed Mode | Screen Rant

  • How to Clone Any Android App on Your Samsung Galaxy Phone Without Using Any Third-Party Tools « Android :: Gadget Hacks

  • TechRadar ☛ Google’s next Android phone could land a lot sooner than we’d expected | TechRadar

  • Google could be looking to build Bluetooth tracking detection into Android – Phandroid

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• ZDNet ☛ Yoga: OpenStack IaaS cloud gets its 25th update | ZDNet

  Today, the cloud is everything. But, in 2010, the cloud was barely real. Still, at NASA Ames Research Center and Rackspace, developers decided that the best way to build a cloud was to build it from open-source software. Together, by 2012 they created the first major open-source, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, OpenStack. Ten years later, OpenStack is releasing its 25th update, Yoga.

• OpenInfra Foundation Unveils OpenStack Yoga Open-Source Cloud Platform

  Among the changes included in OpenStack Yoga are a series of updates for hardware enablement and better support for Kubernetes.

• Open Source Initiative ☛ Six lessons learned from 2022 OSI elections [Ed: OSI is so defunct that now they’re celebrating merely managing to do an election without yet another blunder/incident]

  Before I mark a major project as DONE, I always take time to write down what worked, what didn’t and fresh thoughts on how to do things better next time. The OSI elections occupied my mind for almost all of Q1. Here is my hot take on the 2022 elections.

• Content Management Systems (CMS)

  • People of WordPress: Juan Aldasoro – WordPress News

    In this series, we share some of the inspiring stories of how WordPress and its global network of contributors can change people’s lives for the better. This month we feature a website developer and project manager from Argentina, who found in the software a way to live his life in the way he dreamed.

    WordPress offers something to everyone. For Juan Aldasoro, a developer and project manager for a large distributed company, it provides an opportunity to combine his different interests and skills to live the type of life he wanted.

    “I like visual, creative and technical things. The joy of WordPress is that you can do all of these things, you don’t have to limit yourself to any one aspect . You can also do this from almost anywhere in the world!”

    From working in products since 2012, Juan sees WordPress as a major part of his skillset and toolbox. He said: “It gives you an opportunity to be part of building a product which could potentially be used by thousands of people and more on your site. It encourages you to think about different languages and how you can make it accessible. It allows you to work on different platforms. Working in WordPress gives you this broad approach. Working this way on products ended up pushing me into learning about all these different things. Only in open source can you really do this and use your creative side to find solutions.”

• Programming/Development

  • Explorations in Tiny BASIC

    Lately I’ve been getting into BASIC. I was a kid in the 80s and 90s and I remember those computers that would boot into a BASIC interpreter. I didn’t have one of those but came in contact with one every year or two and played a handful of text games on them. I was aware of some of the commands and syntax, GOTO and the like, and I have looked through the classic BASIC Video Games book a number of times.

  • C++23 Will Be Really Awesome

    C++23 is feature complete and on track to be released next year. While many people are complaining that it’s, after all, a “minor” release (as the pandemic made the Committee work very difficult), C++23 still has a few very significant changes.

    In this blog post, I want to talk about what I think is my favorite feature of C++23: the really keyword. This is a brand new keyword that can be used in a number of different scenarios. Let’s explore them together to understand the usefulness of it.

  • Rust

    • Changes at the Cargo Team [Ed: The omission here is that Rust is in disarray as many people leave and the aggressive corporations control the project, censoring the community]

      We are thrilled to publicly announce that Weihang Lo and Ed Page have joined the Cargo Team!

      Weihang has been providing thoughtful and helpful replies on our issue tracker. He has often had the patience to explain to people what problem they’re hitting and how to get unstuck. He often summarizes technical conversations clearly describing the available solutions and their costs both technical and more importantly human. He has also been contributing to many improvements and code reviews.

      Ed has been a champion on many fronts. He has done tremendous work on toml_edit to push Cargo towards getting cargo add merged in cargo proper. He has brought clap to the momentous 3.0 release and continues to push on CLI improvements, more advanced testing tools, and much more!

Hardware

• Seagate launches 10-platter 20TB video surveillance disk drive

  The prior SkyHawk generation, announced in October 2020, maxed out at 18TB and had a nine-platter configuration inside their helium-filled enclosures, using conventional (perpendicular) magnetic recording (CMR). Now Seagate has squeezed an extra platter in to reach 20TB without recourse to any energy-assisted magnetic recording such as HAMR.

• Kioxia Develops 24G SAS SSD

  The memory hardware maker Kioxia America is introducing a new group of SAS SSDs.

  Kioxia’s PM7 Series of enterprise 24G SAS SSDs is available for customer evaluation, according to the company this month.

  The SSD series is intended to deliver improved performance, reliability, and security for server and storage use cases, including high-performance computing, artificial intelligence (AI), caching layer, and finance.

  The PM7 Series builds on six other generations of SAS drives. It nearly doubles the performance of the 12 Gb/s SAS SSD.

Integrity/Availability

• Bruce Schneier ☛ Bypassing Two-Factor Authentication

  FIDO2 multi-factor authentication systems are not susceptible to these attacks, because they are tied to a physical computer.

• Proprietary

  • “Ransomware Protection” in Windows doesn’t stop Ransomware, but does break old games, LibreOffice, and random applications. – BaronHK’s Rants

    “Ransomware Protection” in Windows doesn’t stop Ransomware, but does break old games, LibreOffice, and random applications.

    MakeTechEasier posted an article about Windows “Ransomware Protection” and how to enable it.

    [...]

    To Microsoft, it doesn’t matter if it is secure. What matters is that you have a lot of pretty buttons and dials and shit that say something vaguely security-related.

    Windows Web sites are even over there cheering that you can set the default Web browser again after Microsoft disabled that for a year to strong arm people with Edge. How dumb is that?

  • Google ☛ Chrome 101: Federated Credential Management Origin Trial, Media Capabilities for WebRTC, and More

    Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Learn more about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 101 is beta as of March 31, 2022. You can download the latest on Google.com for desktop or on Google Play Store on Android.

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Linux Foundation names Haiby as CTO for networking

  • Security

    • Purism ☛ Freedom From Coercion – Purism

      This past week, as part of escalating sanctions between the West and Russia because of the war in Ukraine, the FCC added the security company Kaspersky (creator of the popular Kaspersky Anti-Virus software) to its “security threat list” which means products from that company aren’t eligible for FCC funds. It’s important to note that this wasn’t due to a particular backdoor that was discovered in Kaspersky products. Instead this was because of the threat that Kaspersky (a Russian company) could be coerced by the Russian government to add a backdoor. Because Kaspersky’s software is proprietary, it would be incredibly challenging to audit the software and all future updates for backdoors.

      A Russian bank has issued a warning of its own, advising customers to avoid updating software, in response to actual malicious code a developer added to their NodeJS library. In this case, the guidance wasn’t to avoid using the software, just to avoid updating that software and if an update is necessary, to review the code carefully. This distinction is critical, and points to a fundamental freedom that free software provides (freedom 1, the freedom to study how the program works) that leads to another freedom: the freedom from coercion.

    • ZDNet ☛ Linux secure networking security bug found and fixed | ZDNet

      Nothing is quite as vexing as a security hole in a security program. Xiaochen Zou, a graduate student at the University of California, Riverside, went looking for bugs in Linux and found a whopper. This vulnerability, CVE-2022-27666, in IPSec’s esp6 (Encapsulating Security Payload) crypto module can be abused for local privilege escalation.

      [...]

      This is bad enough that both Red Hat and the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) give the hole a high Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 7.8. Or, as I like to call vulnerabilities with such high scores, it’s a “Fix it now!” bug.

Environment

• Energy

  • Why gas prices won’t go down anytime soon. – BaronHK’s Rants

    Once Trump (or someone like him, or an obstructionist Republican opposition in Congress) happens again, they can go right back to business as usual. With the added perk that they still don’t have to lower gas prices.

    Gas prices are going to affect the labor market, long term, for obvious reasons. Including the fact that if people can no longer afford to get to work, wages are going to have to go way up to compensate, or there still won’t be anyone to hire.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Digital Transparency: A Right to Information Report for March 2022

  For the month of March, 2022, IFF has filed 33 RTI applications and 17 first appeals. In responses received we discovered that NIXI wants to do a Aadhaar based EKYC for domain names to store details in a “perfect manner and a decent way”, MeitY stated it does not have a Digital Government Mission despite MoS Rajeev’s public statement, and Assam, Daman & Diu, Kerala responded that they have not imposed any internet shutdown since 10.01.2020.

Desktop/Laptop

• [Old] Unix Sheikh ☛ My 70 year old mother has been using Linux on the desktop for the past 21 years

  More and more people are migrating from Windows to Linux for very valid reasons such as better privacy, better security, open source, and to avoid all the crap that Microsoft is pulling with Windows 11. But the gaming industry is actually holding people back. I know many people, young as well as old, who wouldn’t dream of using Windows where it not for the gaming aspect. Some use a multi-OS setup which 2 different hard drives, one for Windows and another for Linux and they then only use Windows for gaming, some still dual boot, but many just don’t bother with Linux because they mainly game. It’s not that they don’t want to use Linux, it’s just too much of a hassle to run both OS’s when they mainly game.

Instructionals/Technical

• uni Toronto ☛ Why a (Linux) service delaying its shutdown is a bad thing

  One of the things that goes wrong in shutdown on systemd based systems is when some daemon (more generally, some service or even a session) refuses to shut down immediately. On systemd based systems, things that don’t shut down trigger what is by default a 90 second timeout (this is system.conf’s DefaultTimeoutStopSec). As covered in TimeoutStopSec, systemd will wait this long before forcefully killing the service’s processes and letting the reboot continue. In other words, the reboot takes an extra minute and a half (at least), so your machine is out of service for an extra minute and a half (at least).

• PC World ☛ What’s ray tracing? Here’s everything you need to know

  Ah, ray tracing. Although it’s been around for a long time in the film industry, it’s still a rather perplexing term, especially where video games are concerned. Essentially, it’s a technique that makes light behave in a realistic way. The idea is to make games more realistic and immersive. Wouldn’t you be spellbound by the light bouncing off of objects in a natural way? The indistinguishable line between reality and fantasy is no doubt appealing.

  If you’d like to better understand ray tracing and its impact on games and a computer system, at a high level rather than descending too deeply into tech gobbledygook, keep on reading.

• Make Use Of ☛ How to Install a Custom Dock in XFCE

  The default desktop setup of XFCE comes with a panel instead of a dock. However, XFCE is highly customizable and gives you the liberty to install a dock to your system to imitate the desktop layout of GNOME or macOS.

  In this article, we’ll explore how to install and set up Cairo Dock and the Plank dock, two of the most-used custom docks on XFCE.

• Video ☛ How to install Godot 3 on Debian 11 – Invidious

• Ubuntu Handbook ☛ How to Display Battery Percentage in Ubuntu 22.04 System Tray | UbuntuHandbook

  Running Ubuntu laptop without power supply? It’s wise to keep an eye on the battery percentage. And, here’s how to make Ubuntu 22.04 display the info in top-right corner just besides the battery icon.

• Make Use Of ☛ How to Install Apache Tomcat 10 on Ubuntu 20.04

  Apache Tomcat, also known as Tomcat Server, is an open-source web server with the Servlet container to launch Java-based web applications. Tomcat includes JavaServer Pages (JSP), WebSocket, Java Servlet, Java EL, etc., for an entirely Java HTTP web server environment to run the Java code.

  The great community of skilled developers maintains the Tomcat server under the management of the Apache software foundation. Therefore, the Tomcat server provides excellent accessibility to work on the Java-based application efficiently. Cross-platform support means that it’s available for both Windows and Linux. The latest version of Apache Tomcat is 10.0.18, so in this guide, we will explain how to install Apache Tomcat 10 on Ubuntu 20.04.

• TechRepublic ☛ How to scan your websites for malware with ISPProtect | TechRepublic

  If you are a website admin, you know full well how important it is to keep your sites free from malware. After all, you don’t want to be serving up malicious code to unsuspecting users. So, what do you do? Do you rely on a typical malware scanner and hope it is capable of doing specific scans for specific file types on your web server’s document root (or your site’s data directory)? And what if your websites are being served up on the Linux platform (which they probably are)?

• TechRepublic ☛ How to install the MongoDB GUI Adminer on AlmaLinux | TechRepublic

  Need a simple-to-use GUI to help manage your MongoDB databases? Jack Wallen shows you how to install Adminer for just that purpose.

• Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Second Life on a Chromebook – Updated Tutorial

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

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

• Make Use Of ☛ How to Capture and Edit Screenshots on Linux With Flameshot

  Linux has a growing number of screenshot apps. While some of these apps deliver well on the performance front, they fall short on features and functionalities.

  Flameshot comes in as an exception here. It’s a free and open-source screenshot app that manages to strike the right balance between features and performance. So if you’re on the lookout for a screenshot app for your Linux desktop, Flameshot makes for the perfect choice.

  Keep reading as we check out Flameshot and the instructions to install and use it on Linux.

• TechRepublic ☛ How to benchmark a website with the Siege command-line tool | TechRepublic

  If you’re a web admin, one of your constant challenges is optimizing sites so they perform their best. After all, a slow website could easily turn off clients and customers. To optimize those sites, you might want to first benchmark them to know how well (or poorly) they perform.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Linux Kernel 5.17 on Linux Mint 20 LTS

  Linux Kernel 5.17 has been released with support for recursive id-mapped mounts; CO-RE support that creates compiled BPF programs more portable; a replacement P-state driver for contemporary AMD CPUs; the random number generator switched to BLAKE2s and got much faster; a replacement Real-Time Linux Analysis tool; the fscache networking caching backend was rewritten; new fanotify flag to interchange some inotify patterns; support for giving names to anonymous memory mappings.

• ID Root ☛ How To Install XnView MP on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install XnView MP on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, as well as some extra required packages by XnView

• HowTo Forge ☛ How to Add Ubuntu system to OpenLDAP Server

• Fedora ☛ How to rebase to Fedora Silverblue 36 Beta – Fedora Community Blog

  Silverblue is an operating system for your desktop built on Fedora Linux. It’s excellent for daily use, development, and container-based workflows. It offers numerous advantages such as being able to roll back in case of any problems. Let’s see the steps to upgrade to the newly released Fedora 36 Beta, and how to revert if anything unforeseen happens.

• H2S Media ☛ How to install FireDM on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04 LTS

  Let’s manage our downloads by installing FireDM on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04 LTS using the command terminal.

  FireDM is an open-source (Internet Download Manager) for Windows and Linux operating systems. It is developed in Python, hence we can install it using the PIP package manager. As per the developers of this program, it can handle multi-connection and offers a high-speed engine to download general files and videos from youtube and tons of other streaming websites. It requires “LibCurl”, and “youtube_dl” to work properly.

• ByteXD ☛ How To Install and Run Android Apps on Ubuntu using Anbox

  Have you ever thought of running Android applications on your Linux system? Well, that’s what we will show you in this article.

  If you have used the Windows operating system or macOS, you must have encountered Bluestacks or Nox, which allows you to run Android applications on your PC.

  Unfortunately, they don’t have any releases for Linux platforms – that’s where Anbox comes into play.

• FAQForge ☛ How to Install Deepin Screenshot Tool on Ubuntu

  Deepin is an advanced screenshot tool, I use it personally on my Ubuntu system. It takes screenshots easily and it also includes drawing tools to enhance the images.

  This tutorial shows you how to install and use Deepin on Ubuntu 20.04. But they should work on the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 as well.

• How to configure static IP address on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Desktop/Server

  The purpose of this tutorial is to configure a static IP address on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux. When it comes to IP addresses on Ubuntu 22.04, you have two main options for how you configure your network interfaces. You can either obtain an IP address automatically with DHCP, or configure the system to use a static IP address, which never changes.

  In this tutorial, we’ll show how to configure a static IP address on Ubuntu 22.04. This can be done either through GUI or command line, and we’ll be going over both methods. Once a static IP address is configured, it won’t change again unless you manually change the IP address later, or turn DHCP on.

• Ubuntu 22.04 PostgreSQL Installation

  PostgreSQL is a database management system, similar to MySQL in many respects but with some key differences. Like MySQL, it’s commonly hosted on Linux. In this guide, we’ll show how to run a PostgreSQL server on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, as well as installing the client version in case you just need to connect to an external PostgreSQL database.

• How to disable IPv6 address on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish

  IPv6, Internet Protocol version 6 is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP). It is a communications protocol which is used for identification and location for computers on networks. Its purpose it to route traffic across the Internet. This tutorial will show you how to temporarily or permanently disable IPv6 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.

• Install and Use ClusterSSH on Ubuntu 22.04/Ubuntu 20.04 – kifarunix.com

  This guide describes how to install and use ClusterSSH on Ubuntu 22.04/Ubuntu 20.04. ClusterSSH is a cluster administration tool that allows system admins to manage multiple Linux servers from a single administration console for example running a similar command across a cluster of systems. When run, ClusterSSH opens up an administration console and xterm terminals on every other host in a cluster. Any text typed into the administration console is replicated to all terminals. One can also type into all the windows directly. This tools is so handy in the sense that it reduces the laden of having to run similar commands on each host.

• How to find largest directories in Linux

  When it comes to tidying up your hard drive on a Linux system, either to free up space or to become more organized, it’s helpful to find the largest directories on the system. In other words, the directories that are consuming the most storage space.

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to find the largest directories on Linux, through both command line via the du command, and through a GUI application as well.

• How to remove directory and contents in Linux

  The purpose of this tutorial is to show how to remove a directory and all of its contents on a Linux system. Being able to delete directories (sometimes called folders) is an essential part of managing your file system. Linux allows us to remove any directory that our user has permissions on.

  While this is a pretty basic function, there are some important caveats to keep in mind. In this tutorial, you will see how to remove a directory and all of its contents from command line and GUI. You will also see how to deal remove directories that you do not have write permissions on by using root privileges.

• How to install and use snaps on Fedora

  Developed by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, and originally meant to be used on the latter, the Snappy package manager is a free and open source software used to install and manage snap packages. The purpose of Snap packages, just like flatpaks, is to distribute sandboxed and self-contained applications (applications are packaged together with their dependencies).

  The Snappy package manager and its infrastructure landed on distributions other than Ubuntu. In this tutorial we see how to install it and used it on the latest version of Fedora.

• ByteXD ☛ Enable VMware Copy/Paste When Clipboard Not Working – ByteXD

  In this very short tutorial we’ll enable copy/paste for a VMware virtual machine.

  I struggled a bit to get copy/paste to work using VMware Workstation.

  The official docs gave an accurate solution, but it didn’t get to the point so I assumed they wouldn’t address my issue.

• ByteXD ☛ VMware Tools Install Error: /usr/bin/perl: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

• CNX Software ☛ How to Install a DNS server on your Linux computer – CNX Software

  As you may have noticed in recent days, my domain registrar (HostFast) suspended cnx-software.com domain for what I believe are dubious reasons, meaning the site was inaccessible to the outside world and myself. I cannot do much about the latter and I’m held hostage to what the domain registrar’s will, but I was able to access my own website with my domain name after installing a DNS server through dnsmasq on my Ubuntu 20.04 laptop.

• VNC Tinkerings

  The past few days have been spent giving Manjaro on Raspberry Pi a go.
  I have had a Raspberry Pi 4 kicking around mostly acting as a
  noiseless bridge between my PC and Icom IC-705 for digi-modes. It
  feels like a waste for all those times I am not playing with amateur
  radio.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Kate ate KWrite

    Kate & KWrite always existed as pair in the last 20 years.

    KWrite was there first, a SDI editor already shipped with very early KDE versions.

    Kate was started by me to have a MDI variant of KWrite.

    KWrite was kept untouched, more or less, over the last 20 years beside minor improvements and bug fixes.

    Naturally a lot features slipped in due to the fact that it uses KTextEditor as editor component.

Distributions

• Unix Sheikh ☛ How security is handled by package maintainers

  I will not consider small dependent Linux distributions, small BSD variants, or one-man projects, because the question almost becomes irrelevant in very small projects. Often they simply cannot keep up with upstream security updates if their project has even a small amount of third party packages.

  Regarding the major Linux distributions and BSD variants, such as e.g. Debian Linux, Arch Linux, Artix Linux, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD, generally speaking, a package maintainer or ports maintainer is not a programmer and as such he or she cannot do any coding. The package maintainer is only responsible for making sure that the package is installable and working and that it is updated according to the project guidelines.

• New Releases

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Deepin 20.5 Released with Face Unlock Feature, Screenshot Pinning, and More

    Deepin 20.5 is here a little over two months after Deepin 20.4 and introduces a ground-breaking new feature that no other GNU/Linux distribution currently offers, facial recognition to unlock your computer, as well as to authenticate in various apps that require sudo authentication.

    Another interesting feature in the Deepin 20.5 release is the ability to pin screenshots to the desktop, which will remain sticky on top of windows.

  • IPFire Official Blog ☛ IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 166 released

    This is the release announcement for IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 166. It fixes the recently introduced backup issue and patches a security vulnerability in zlib.

    zlib memory corruption on DEFLATE
    CVE-2018-25032 has been assigned to an issue that allowed an attacker with some chosen content to crash the compressor. We do not believe that this is exploitable in IPFire.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • Tumbleweed updates sudo, systemd, ibus

    A total of four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were delivered this week to rolling release users.

    Tumbleweed has consistently been releasing daily snapshots; a four-day period between two snapshots this week is the longest duration between snapshots since the fall of last year. Impressive.

    The most recent snapshot, 20220320, updated just one package. The tiny update of perl-Mojolicious to version 9.23 enabled gzip compression by default with the Mojolicious renderer.

• Debian Family

  • Unix Sheikh ☛ The delusions of debian

    What I don’t understand is why these projects aren’t open and clear about the problems they are facing rather than writing this misleading information to their users!

    Stop saying that you focus on security. Stop saying that you provide long term support. Stop lying to your users, because it is a lie.

    These Linux project could learn a lesson from both OpenBSD and FreeBSD in which all the maintenance problems of both the operating systems themselves and third party packages are out in the open. In OpenBSD, prior to version 6.5, no third party package would receive any kind of bug fix or security update unless you where running with OpenBSD current. Since 6.5, the normal release also gets important bug fixes and security updates, but OpenBSD has always been very open about how that is handled: [...]

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu ☛ OpenStack Yoga on Ubuntu LTS delivers highly performant infrastructure for telcos and researchers with SmartNICs and DPUs

    Canonical today announced the general availability of OpenStack Yoga on Ubuntu 22.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Beta and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. This new version of OpenStack sets a foundation for next-generation, highly performant infrastructure as needed by telco NFV, media streaming, traffic analysis and HPC services, using SmartNIC cards and integrating them with the Neutron Open Virtual Network (OVN) driver. With OpenStack network components running on SmartNICs, users benefit from lower latency, higher throughput, and better quality of services.

Devices/Embedded

• Trend Oceans ☛ MangoPi new hardware is smaller than an SD Card

  The world is moving toward nanotechnology. Did anyone ever think that we could use computers the size of an SD card, which we use in DSLRs to capture photos? The first IBM hard disk stored 3.75 MB of data, and metaphorically, it was compared to approximately the size of two medium-sized refrigerators.

  Recently, MangoPI SBC shared an image on Twitter where they compared their product with the size of SD card, and new hardware of MangoPi is smaller than an SD card. Surprisingly, it’s running on Tina-Linux.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Unicorn Media ☛ SiFive Becomes Open Source RISC-V’s First Unicorn Company

    The fabless processor designer SiFive has another feather in its cap. It’s become the first startup focused primarily on the open source RISC-V processor specification to reach unicorn status. A couple of weeks back the company announced that it had raised $175 million in a Series F financing round, which values the company at over $2.5 billion, which is well over the $1 billion valuation needed to be considered a unicorn.

    Actually, the successful fundraising round, led by the investment firm Coatue Management, was the least of the good financial news coming from the seven-year-old Silicon Valley startup this month. Two days earlier it announced it was selling its OpenFive connectivity business to Alphawave for $210 million, in order to focus on its RISC-V CPU cores.

  • SCMP ☛ Chinese villager with no engineering expertise stopped from ‘test-flying’ home-made helicopter by alarmed police

    Chen Ruihua has no aeronautic or engineering qualifications, but has so far built three home-made helicopters, he says

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • TechRadar ☛ YouTube Music is bringing an incredibly useful feature to Android | TechRadar

  • HowTo Geek ☛ How to Change Your Autofill and Password Manager on Android

  • 9to5Google ☛ How to use Gboard’s Emoji Kitchen on Android – 9to5Google

  • Kim Kommando ☛ 5 hidden Google Assistant tricks for your Android

  • Android Central ☛ Best kids games for Android 2022 | Android Central

  • Tech Times ☛ ImpactWayv Leading Social [Impact] Media Platform, Expands Its Global Reach With Android Launch | Tech Times

  • 9to5Google ☛ Google taking Android 12 QPR3 Beta feedback from Pixel – 9to5Google

  • 9to5Google ☛ Play Protect removes permissions of unused Android apps – 9to5Google

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• The Register UK ☛ SerenityOS: A remarkable achievement for a small project

  SerenityOS, which started out as a one-man project in 2018, has now got to the point where its creator proudly announced that its web browser passes the Acid3 browser test.

  This is a remarkable achievement for a very small, hobbyist project. Acid3 is relatively old now – it dates back to 2008. However it was and is quite demanding, testing Javascript, the Document Object Model and more.

  Its creator and lead developer, Andreas Kling, started the project as a distraction while coping with substance withdrawal, a growing issue in the tech industry even before COVID-19. Its name is a tribute to the “Serenity Prayer” used in several 12-step programs. Last year, though, he was able to quit his job to work on it full time.

• Programming/Development

  • Lars Wirzenius ☛ A year of README reviews

    A year ago I published an offer to review the README of free and open source projects. I didn’t expect much interest, but someone posted the link to Hacker News, and I got enough requests that it was a little overwhelming. I’ve now reviewed 196 READMEs, my queue is empty, and I’m suspending the offer for now, even if it has been fun.

    I especially wanted to help people new to FOSS development, and I know that for one’s first project it can be scary to open oneself up for critique. Thus I made it possible to request a review in private, and sent my feedback in private, and I haven’t published the projects I reviewed. However, I feel it might be of interest to read a summary of my experience doing this.

    Overall, I was pleasantly surprised at how good the READMEs were. People put in a lot of effort into them. There might be some selection bias here: someone who doesn’t care about making a good README probably won’t ask for a review, either.

  • PlanetScale ☛ Generics can make your Go code slower

    This blog post does not take sides in that debate, or advise where and when to use Generics in Go. Instead, this blog post is about the third side of the generics conundrum: It’s about systems engineers who are not excited about generics per se, but about monomorphization and its performance implications. There are dozens of us! Dozens! And we’re all due for some serious disappointment.

  • Perl/Raku

    • Olaf Alders ☛ Making Dynamically Required Package Names More Discoverable in Perl

      I’ve been using perlimports a lot at $work. I’m generally quite happy with perlimports, but it can get confused by modules which are being dynamically used. Consider the following case, where we are using a function to create new objects.

      We’ll be using Git::Helpers::CPAN to look up the Git repository for a CPAN module (or distribution).

The Nation ☛ Dixie League Baseball Is Built on Racism and Heartbreak

Two hundred thousand boys and girls will be in uniform when Dixie Youth Baseball begins its 66th season this spring. Everyone will stand for the national anthem. Players will be introduced by name before the home team takes the field. The players’ parents, grandparents, brothers, and sisters will fill the bleachers and cheer as families have done for decades—and the players’ uniforms will never again be as white as they are before the first game.

The Nation ☛ Nadav Lapid’s Cinema of Shame

Nadav Lapid has the uncertain honor of being the most acclaimed Israeli film director. A perennial favorite at festivals around the world, his autobiographical works explore the machismo of the Israeli regime, the moral predicaments of its artists, and the “sickness” in the souls of its citizens. Lapid wants to be seen as the state’s enfant terrible, a so-called critic whose characters launch epithets at their home: “odious,” “repugnant,” “fetid,” “obscene,” “vulgar.” But Lapid’s art also betrays a tortured affinity for Zionism, complicating his christening as an Israeli punk and perhaps explaining why he has thus far been unwilling to cross the one line that would render him an enemy of his state. His most recent film is Ahed’s Knee, and it is about the knee of a 16-year-old Palestinian girl named Ahed Tamimi.

Common Dreams ☛ Report Shows DeJoy Owns Stock in Maker of Covid Tests Delivered by Postal Service

A watchdog investigation published Thursday revealed that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy owns stock in the manufacturer of rapid coronavirus tests that the U.S. Postal Service has been delivering to households as part of the Biden administration’s pandemic response.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) discovered DeJoy’s Abbott Laboratories holding in an examination of the scandal-plagued postmaster general’s financial filings, which the group notes “show no evidence of him having fully divested that stock,” leaving him positioned to profit off Abbott’s partnership with the White House.

Counter Punch ☛ Eleanor Marx: The Last Word

During the first pandemic year, I wrote my own song about an Eleanor: Eleanor “Tussy” Marx, who died on this day, March 31, 1898. I found myself reading Mary Gabriel’s Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution which tells the epic story of Karl, his wife Jenny von Westphalen, and their daughters, Laura, Jenny (Jennychen), and Eleanor. There were others too — Karl and Jenny in fact had seven children but only three survived into adulthood. All three daughters — and their spouses — played a role in the socialist movement, but it was Tussy who was closest to Marx and Engels and the most active politically.

From Rachel Holmes’ biography, I learned that Eleanor Marx had done the first English translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and figured it was high time I read that too. The novel was scandalous for its depiction of adultery and the newspaper that serialized it was tried for obscenity in 1857. It created a stir in England too, where it was secretly blacklisted even into the 1950s, with government files showing that police constables were under orders to purchase and destroy copies they found.

New York Times ☛ Want to See the Weirdest of Wikipedia? Look No Further.

Her followers often pitch her Wikipedia pages to feature, but these days it’s hard to find an entry that will impress Ms. Rauwerda. “If it’s a fun fact that’s been on the Reddit home page, I’m definitely not going to repost it,” she said. “For example, there are only 25 blimps in the world. I’ve known about that for a long time, and it went around Twitter a couple days ago. I was shocked. I was like, ‘Everyone knows this.’”

She is choosy in large part because many of her followers rely on @depthsofwikipedia for unearthing the hidden gems of the [Internet].

Science

• New York Times ☛ Turing Award Won by Programmer Who Paved Way for Supercomputers

  In the late 1970s, as a young researcher at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, Jack Dongarra helped write computer code called Linpack.

  Linpack offered a way to run complex mathematics on what we now call supercomputers. It became a vital tool for scientific labs as they stretched the boundaries of what a computer could do. That included predicting weather patterns, modeling economies and simulating nuclear explosions.

Education

• Matt Rickard ☛ On Standardized Tests

  I’m first-generation college graduate. I’m not sure I would have been accepted if it weren’t for my test scores. I didn’t have an impressive list of extracurriculars or any athletic achievements. I came from a public school that rarely sent students to my college. A local college would have paradoxically been much more expensive (my college provided full need-based financial aid). For graduate school, testing came in handy again.

Hardware

• Hackaday ☛ Texture Map GCode Directly In Blender With NozzleBoss

  We’ve seen this funky dual disk polar printer already recently, but [Heinz Loepmeier] has been busy working on it, so here’s an update. The primary focus here is nozzleboss, a blender plugin which enables the surface textures of already sliced objects to be manipulated. The idea is to read in the gcode for the object, and convert it to an internal mesh representation that blender needs in order to function. From there the desired textures can be applied to the surfaces for subsequent stages to operate upon. One trick that nozzleboss can do is to create weight maps to tweak the extrusion flow rate or print velocity value according to the pixel value at the surface — such ‘velocity painting’ can produce some very subtle surface effects on previously featureless faces. Another trick is to use the same weight maps and simply map colours to blender text blocks which are injected into the gcode at export time. These gcode blocks can be used swap tool heads or extruders, enabling blending of multiple filament colours or types in the same object.

• Hackaday ☛ Modern, Frugal PCB Breathes New Life Into Soviet-Made LED Watch

  The first electronic digital watches were admired for their pioneering technology, if not their everyday practicality, when they were introduced in the 1970s. Their power-hungry LED displays lit up only when you pressed a button, and even then the numbers shown were tiny. Their cases were large and heavy, and they drained their batteries rather quickly even when not displaying the time. Still, the deep red glow of their displays gave them a certain aesthetic that’s hard to replicate with today’s technology.

• Hackaday ☛ Making Windshield Wipers Rock To The Beat

  When you’re driving around, you might occasionally notice your indicators or windscreen wipers sync up fortuitously with the music. [Cranktown City] wanted to ensure his wipers would always match the beat, however, and set about making it so. 

• Hackaday ☛ Rural Hacker De-Crufts And Rebuilds Hydroelectric Generator

  YouTuber [Linguoer] has a knack, and it’s one that we don’t often see on the pages of Hackaday: rewinding and rebuilding dilapidated motors and generators. In the video below, you’ll see [Lin] take a hydroelectric turbine and generator that looks like it’s been sitting at the bottom of a lake, and turn it into a working unit, all while wearing her trademark blue and yellow denim jumpsuit.

• Hackaday ☛ Circuit VR: The Wheatstone Bridge Analog Computer

  We are always impressed with something so simple can actually be so complex. For example, what would you think goes into an analog computer? Of course, a “real” analog computer has opamps that can do logarithms, square roots, multiply, and divide. But would it surprise you that you can make an analog device like a slide rule using a Wheatstone bridge — essentially two voltage dividers. You don’t even need any active devices at all. It is an old idea and one that used to show up in electronic magazines now and again. I’ll show you how they work and simulate the device so you don’t have to build it unless you just want to.

• Hackaday ☛ Know Which Way The Wind Blows, Whether Weather Boosts Your Mood

  As a quantified-self experiment, [Ayan] has tracked several daily habits and moods for a couple of years and discovered some insights. Too much coffee is followed by anxiety while listening to music leads to feelings of motivation and happiness. There was a strong correlation in the data, but [Ayan] wondered if external factors like the weather and air quality also played a role.

• Hackaday ☛ REMOTICON 2021 // Hal Rodriguez And Sahrye Cohen Combine Couture And Circuitry

  [Hal Rodriguez] and [Sahrye Cohen] of Amped Atelier focus on creating interactive wearable garments with some fairly high standards. Every garment must be pretty, and has to either be controllable by the wearer, through a set of sensors, or even by the audience via Bluetooth. Among their past creations are a dress with color sensors and 3D-printed scales on the front that change color, and a flowing pantsuit designed for a dancer using an accelerometer to make light patterns based on her movements.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Common Dreams ☛ Amid Renewed Medicare for All Push, Study Shows 112 Million Americans Struggle to Afford Healthcare

  As progressives in Congress cast attention on Medicare for All legislation this week, research published Thursday highlighted that Americans are frustrated and struggling due to the for-profit U.S. healthcare system.

  “We must begin to change this trajectory with smarter policies that put patients over profits.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Senate Urged to Pass Broader Reforms After House Approves Insulin Price Cap

  After the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed a bill to cap insulin prices, a leading patient advocacy group renewed its call for broader action to limit the costs of prescription drugs.

  “In order to deliver on their promises to all patients—including those who depend on insulin—the Senate must act urgently to approve the broad provisions already passed by the House.”

• The Gray Zone ☛ How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy

• Pro Publica ☛ New York State Failed to Provide Legally Required Mental Health Care to Kids, Lawsuit Claims

  New York state has failed to provide children on Medicaid with the mental health care they are entitled to by law, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court Thursday by two adolescents acting on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Medicaid-eligible kids.

  As a result, the lawsuit alleges, young people with serious mental health conditions suffer unnecessarily, ending up in hospitals and residential treatment programs because they don’t have access to services that would keep them safe at home.

• Democracy Now ☛ Calls Grow for Medicare for All; Uninsured & Communities of Color Hurt Most by End of COVID-19 Funds

  With COVID-19 coverage ending for the uninsured, we look at how uninsured people and communities of color will bear the impact of the end to free COVID-19 testing, treatment and vaccines, and how the pandemic has led to a renewed push for Medicare for All. We are joined by Dr. Oni Blackstock, primary care and HIV physician and founder and executive director of Health Justice, and Dr. Adam Gaffney, critical care physician, professor at Harvard Medical School and immediate past president of Physicians for a National Health Program.

• The Hill ☛ House set to pass marijuana legalization Friday

  The House is set to pass legislation on Friday to legalize marijuana nationwide, an effort that has unprecedented levels of support in both chambers of Congress.

  The bill is likely to pass the lower chamber largely along party lines, with most Republicans expected to oppose it.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Krebs On Security ☛ Fake Emergency Search Warrants Draw Scrutiny from Capitol Hill

    On Tuesday, KrebsOnSecurity warned that hackers increasingly are using compromised government and police department email accounts to obtain sensitive customer data from mobile providers, ISPs and social media companies. Today, one of the U.S. Senate’s most tech-savvy lawmakers said he was troubled by the report and is now asking technology companies and federal agencies for information about the frequency of such schemes.

  • IT Wire ☛ Apple forced to issue emergency fixes for two zero-days

    Exploitation could allow an attacker to read kernel memory and this could the enabling of apps to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges.

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Pay a monthly fee to use a phone that you’ll never own? Apple thinks that could work

    Apple wants to take this instalment thing even further and are reported to be working on a hardware subscription service. The service is expected to launch later this year or early 2023. They want to sell the iPhone and other Apple devices as subscription services.

    It would work like Netflix does. On Netflix you pay $9.99 a month and get to browse through their video catalogue but you don’t own any of the videos. If you fail to pay in a particular month, you are cut off.

    Imagine that for a phone. You would lease an iPhone from Apple and pay your ‘rentals’ each month. The phone would never become yours, you’d merely be paying for the privilege of using it.

  • Security

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • PIA ☛ Phishing, Smishing & Vishing: What You Need to Know & How to Protect Yourself

        On an almost daily basis, the business networking company — helping professionals connect and show off their work history — has informed me that execs from Dell, JP Morgan, Metlife, and Philip Morris International have been checking out my info. I’m in demand and can probably expect to receive unsolicited offers for jobs with a six-figure salary any day now.

      • EFF ☛ Colombian ISPs Show Steady Commitments to User Privacy But Key Transparency Gaps Remain

        ¿Dónde están mis datos?” (“Where Is My Data?”) evaluated seven leading internet and cell phone companies: Claro (América Móvil), Movistar (Telefónica), Tigo (Millicom), ETB, DirecTv, Emcali,  and Avantel. Karisma also included satellite internet companies Hughesnet and Skynet for their role in connecting rural areas.

        Today’s report is Karisma’s seventh annual ¿Dónde Estan Mis Datos? for Colombia—an assessment of telecommunication companies’ commitment to transparency and user privacy. As in prior years, Karisma looked at whether companies’ transparency reports provide detailed information about government requests for user data and content blocking, how strong their data protection policies are, and whether they adequately disclose content blocking practices and data breaches.

        In these categories, Colombia’s internet and cell phone companies were steady, mostly meeting, or exceeding, levels achieved in the last few years. Movistar was the overall top performer, with 15 out of a possible 16 points, followed by Tigo with 13 points, and Claro and Avantel, each with 10 points. ETB scored 8 points, DirectTV earned 7 points, Hughesnet and Emcali each earned 5 points, while Skynet earned 3.

      • Port Swigger ☛ ‘Dangerous’ EU web authentication plan threatens to undercut browser-led certification system, detractors claim

        An EU proposal to force browsers to accept web certificates created by the bloc risks “upsetting a carefully curated set of rules and technologies that undergird almost all privacy and security online”, according to a leading cybersecurity expert.

        Joseph Lorenzo Hall, distinguished technologist at the Internet Society, is among 38 signatories to an open letter addressed to the European Parliament that criticizes the plans.

        Other signatories include academics, security engineers, and security researchers in the US, Canada, UK, France, and Germany.

Defence/Aggression

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | I Fear War With Iran Is Coming If Nuclear Talks Do Not Succeed

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Save the Planet! Behead the Pentagon Budget!

  Americans “need to imagine their vote has an impact on policy, an illusion the media encourages them to believe in.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | We Cannot Drill and Pump and Burn Our Way Out of the War in Ukraine

  While the Ukrainian people bear the lethal brunt of Russia’s invasion, shockwaves from that war threaten to worsen other crises across the planet. The emergency that loomed largest before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began — the heating of the Earth’s climate — is now looming larger still. The reason is simple enough: a war-induced rush to boost oil and gas production has significantly undercut efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

• Counter Punch ☛ Backyard Jitters: Australia, China’s Military and the Solomon Islands

  The Canberra establishment got antsy: What were those wicked freedom-hating representatives of the Middle Kingdom up to?  This was, after all, part of the Australian backyard they were poking their noses in.  The response was predictable and quick: a promise of AU$20 million in extra aid, the creation of a spanking new radio network, budget support and an extension of the Solomons International Assistance force.

  Spoon-full measures about sovereignty were readily distributed through the press outlets and public.  Australian Trade Minister Dan Tehan, the sober side of government paranoia, suggested that The Solomons was at risk of losing its sovereignty to China.  Australia, in contrast, had made sure that everything it had done enhanced “the sovereignty of Pacific nations, to make sure everything we’re doing is to help and support them when it comes to their sovereignty.”  The great regional helper, and local hope.

• Counter Punch ☛ The Costs of (Another) War, When We Could Be Fighting Climate Change

  They’re both feeling the strain of a warming planet.

  “Is the earth going to get so hot that we can’t survive?” my young son asked me last summer as we plodded through the woods behind our Maryland home. I wasn’t certain, I replied hesitantly. (Not exactly the most reassuring answer from a mother to a question I ask myself every day.) We had just left my younger child at home, because she started wheezing when she stepped into that already more than 100-degree July morning.

• Counter Punch ☛ Is the Nuclear Taboo Stronger Than Ever?

  Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said yesterday that “Russia would only use nuclear weapons in the case of a threat to his country.” As ominous as this sounds, during  the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the use of nuclear weapon to defend one’s country mirrors United States’ nuclear weapons policy.

  Nuclear weapons have not been detonated in war for seventy seven years. During that period The United Nations adopted as Article 1 its first official act, calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Various other international treaties have called for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, the banning of nuclear weapons testing, banning nuclear weapons in space, the banning of missile defense systems (no longer in effect) and the banning of entire classes of missile delivery systems (no longer in effect).

• Counter Punch ☛ McCarthyism v2.0

  The cruel truth, however, was that Joseph McCarthy never made a successful case against anyone; he managed to push several people out of their jobs and influenced public opinion by selling lies.

  There is a general expectation that politics is a dishonest practice; even Donald Trump’s legendary “30,573 false or misleading claims” (as tracked by Washington Post) seemed to fall within allowable limits given his ability to lie and keep his base.

• Counter Punch ☛ A Modest Proposal for Peace in Ukraine

  President Biden has called President Putin a war criminal because under the law of war it is a crime to invade another nation. That is correct: wars of invasion are criminal. President Putin, apparently offended by the charge, has called US diplomats in to challenge the charge.

  The facts are clear. A war of invasion has occurred, so what possible challenge could President Putin seek to assert? It has been said “truth is the first casualty of war,” so maybe the truth of this crime is dying unmourned in some bomb crater?

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘Stop Fueling the War’: Kayakers Block Transfer of 100,000 Tonnes of Russian Oil

  Braving frigid ocean temperatures off the coast of northern Denmark, Greenpeace activists on Thursday attempted to block a Russian oil shipment and urged countries around the globe to stop buying the fossil fuels that are funding Moscow’s war on Ukraine and to pursue an ambitious clean energy transition for “peace and safety.”

  “We shouldn’t just switch to using more oil, coal, and gas from other countries.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Amid Reports of Radiation Sickness, IAEA Says Russia Has Withdrawn From Chernobyl

  The International Atomic Energy Agency said Thursday that Russian forces have almost entirely left the site of the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, where officials said they were exposed to “significant doses” of radiation since taking over the site in late February.

  The BBC reported that some soldiers are being treated in Belarus for radiation sickness, which can cause a range of symptoms depending on the level of exposure including nausea, vomiting, skin damage, and seizures or coma in extreme cases.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Why We Must Continue to Say ‘No’ to a No-Fly Zone in Ukraine

  As Russia’s war on Ukraine drags on, calls have grown for the United States to impose a “no-fly zone” over the country. 

• Meduza ☛ Filling the void: Putin’s administration no longer hopes to take Kyiv. The Russian president has yet to make a final decision.

  Earlier this week, the Russian Defense Ministry announced a shift in its stated military objectives in Ukraine. Russian forces, the ministry’s spokesman claimed, would “drastically reduce” their assault on Kyiv and Chernihiv (this has yet to materialize) and concentrate on seizing the Donbas. According to Meduza’s sources, this decision was made for both military and political reasons. For one, Russian officials aren’t sure how the country can survive under harsh Western sanctions. 

• The Gray Zone ☛ Partnering with neo-Nazis in Ukraine: an inconvenient history

• The Nation ☛ Russia’s War in Ukraine Has Shattered the Old World Order

  The war in Ukraine is in its fifth week, with casualties on both sides continuing to mount. Unexpectedly stiff resistance by the Ukrainians has so far prevented Russian forces from seizing Kyiv and other key cities. One danger of the current stalemate—that Russia’s frustration will lead to escalation—can be seen in the relentless bombardment of Mariupol. But Russia’s failures on the battlefield also create real opportunities for peace, possibly involving some form of regional autonomy for the Donbas along with neutrality for the whole of Ukraine.

• Pro Publica ☛ St. Louis’ Murder Total Has Fallen, but Some Killings Went Uncounted

  When the final numbers showed that St. Louis had reduced its murders last year while other big cities were hitting records, city officials said their success was due to smart use of crime data and effective anti-violence programs.

  But over the past two years, St. Louis has quietly lowered its murder count in another way: classifying more than three dozen killings as what are termed justifiable homicides, sometimes in apparent violation of FBI guidelines for reporting crimes, a ProPublica/APM Reports investigation found.

• Democracy Now ☛ Russia Plots Major Donbas Offensive in Eastern Ukraine as Putin Calls for 134,500 New Conscripts

  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned Wednesday Russia is preparing a major offensive in the eastern Donbas region. This comes just two days after Kremlin officials announced plans to “fundamentally” cut back military operations near Kyiv and the city of Chernihiv, though attacks have continued on both cities. We speak with Anatol Lieven, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and Simon Schlegel, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, who say the future of peace largely hinges on the fate of the Donbas region. Schlegel also speaks about the growing humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, where now a quarter of the population is displaced, and Lieven talks about the domestic backlash President Vladimir Putin faces from ultranationalists opposed to any peace talks.

• US News And World Report ☛ In Assertions About Putin’s ‘Isolation,’ Biden Reveals U.S., U.K. Information War

  In response to continued questions from reporters, however, Price acknowledged that the latest U.S. statements about Putin’s activities are based on open-source information, not necessarily on intelligence assessments.

  “Right now we’re speaking to public reports,” Price offered. “I am not speaking to intelligence in this case.”

• Frontpage Magazine ☛ Should Western Christians Provide Life Support to Islam?

  When tyrannies are appeased, they tend to grow. That seems to be one of the more reliable lessons of history. Yet, societies continue to appease aggressors in the hope that, maybe this time, appeasement will work.

• France24 ☛ Last surviving Paris attacks suspect tells court he chose not to detonate his bomb

  The last surviving suspect in the November 2015 attacks in and around Paris apologised to the court on Wednesday, saying he chose not to detonate his suicide belt that night but felt ashamed for not doing so: “I was afraid of the looks from the other jihadists,” he said.

• Modern Diplomacy ☛ South Sudan: ‘hellish existence’ for women and girls

  According to the UN Commission, sexual violence has been instrumentalized as a reward and entitlement for youth and men participating in conflict.

  The goal is to inflict maximum disruption of the fabric of communities, including through their constant displacement, the report continues.

• The Jewish Chronicle ☛ Youtube whistleblower: My warnings over terror videos were ignored

  Former moderator Khaled Hassan, 31, who was employed to identify extremism in Arabic language videos until two months ago, accuses YouTube of “shirking its legal and moral responsibilities”.

Environment

• Modern Diplomacy ☛ We are sleepwalking to climate catastrophe

  “Keeping 1.5 alive requires a 45 per cent reduction in global emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by mid-century”, he said, highlighting how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatened to become a huge setback for the concerted effort to speed up climate action.

• The Economist ☛ India grapples with the new realities of the global oil market

  India has refrained from condemning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, even as the West has imposed sanctions. But big Russian banks have been cut off from the SWIFT messaging system used for cross-border transactions and American measures have largely blocked the use of dollars, complicating trade. Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, was due to visit Delhi on March 31st, after we wrote this. One item on the agenda was expected to be finding ways to work around sanctions to enable Russian oil sales to India.

  Oil-and-gas firms in the two countries already work together. ONGC Videsh, the Indian government’s overseas oil-and-gas exploration and production arm, is involved in three projects in Russia, for instance; Rosneft, a Russian state-owned giant, owns 49% of Nayara Energy, a Mumbai-based firm with 6,000 filling stations and a large refinery in Gujarat.

• Counter Punch ☛ Why Arctic Greening Won’t Save the Climate

  Some theories suggest that this “Arctic greening” will help counteract climate change. The idea is that since plants take up carbon dioxide as they grow, rising temperatures will mean Arctic vegetation will absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, ultimately reducing the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.

  But is that really happening?

• Counter Punch ☛ The Upcoming IPCC Report on Mitigation and Reality

  Will the report even mention regulating a phase out of fossil fuel production? Despite the increasing severity of climate impacts and the daunting timeline for mitigation needed to have even a fifty-fifty chance of staying climate safe? Or will supply-side pathways and policies and their supporters remain outside the fence as they were at COP26 ?

  The third IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), this time on climate mitigation, is scheduled to be released in early April. Mitigation is crucial. There is a new appreciation of how close human induced warming is taking us to ‘dangerous climate change‘, a potential cascade of feedbacks, and even as a threat multiplier in a nuclear armed world. Effective mitigation – the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – is imperative. The Working Group III (WGIII) report on the science of climate mitigation is eagerly awaited.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Renewables for Peace: Don’t Replace Russian Gas With Someone Else’s

  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shaken many long-held Western assumptions about the foundations of peace in Europe. Among other things, it has renewed policymakers’ focus on energy dependence as a key strategic issue.

• TruthOut ☛ Transition to Zero-Emission Vehicles Would Save 110,000 Lives, Report Finds

• The Nation ☛ The Climate Crisis Doesn’t Acknowledge Borders

  What do a 6-year-old in the United States and an 85-year-old in Russia have in common besides being on opposite sides of a war?

• Common Dreams ☛ Climate Groups Warn Biden Oil Reserve Release Will Open Drilling ‘Floodgates’

  President Joe Biden’s Thursday announcement of a record release from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve alongside a boost in domestic oil production was denounced as a disastrous response to soaring U.S. gasoline prices by advocates of urgent climate action.

  “Biden is tragically missing the moment to fully deploy his authority under the Defense Production Act to turbocharge renewable energy.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Conservationists to Biden: ‘Clean Energy Transition Cannot Be Built on Dirty Mining’

  Environmentalists and Indigenous communities are sounding the alarm on President Joe Biden’s plan to use his executive authority to boost U.S. production of minerals for clean energy storage—a move officially announced Thursday after a week of reporting on its development.

  “The government should use its purchasing power to maximize reuse of recycled content and build a circular materials economy.”

• Energy

  • Common Dreams ☛ Big Oil Is Creating ‘Pain at the Pump’ to Boost Profits: Report

    As President Joe Biden on Thursday ordered the release of one million barrels of oil per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for six months in a bid to reduce surging gas prices, Public Citizen released a report that details how Big Oil is intentionally creating “pain at the pump” to boost profits.

    “Numerous executives have emphasized that shareholder profits, rather than expanding domestic production, is their top goal.”

  • Counter Punch ☛ China’s Evolving Energy Policies in Africa

    Toward Africa in particular, Beijing has signaled equally significant shifts. At the December 2021 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation ministerial, China substantially reduced its infrastructure investments in Africa for the next three years. It also cut its assistance in agriculture, climate, health, peace and security, and trade promotion by 80 percent and in capacity-building by 90 percent. At the same time, the Vision 2035 document released in conjunction with the ministerial promised “a new green growth model for common eco-development of China and Africa.”

    At an off-the-record meeting with representatives of African NGOs, three experts on Chinese law, investment strategies, and energy transition connected to Africa shared their insights on this evolving relationship. They offered different ways of interpreting the new Chinese policies and provided recommendations for how African civil society could advance their agendas with respect to various Chinese entities: the state, multilateral financing institutions, and enterprises.

  • DeSmog ☛ As Oil Giants Turn to Bitcoin Mining, Some Spin Burning Fossil Fuels for Cryptocurrency as a Climate Solution

    Flaring — or the burning of stranded natural gas directly at an oil well — is one of the drilling industry’s most notorious problems, often condemned as a pointlessly polluting waste of billions of dollars and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas.

    In early March, oil giant ExxonMobil signed up to meet the World Bank’s “zero routine flaring by 2030” goal (a plan that — when you look just a bit closer — doesn’t entirely eliminate flaring but instead reduces “absolute flaring and methane emissions” by 60 to 70 percent.)

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ The Impact of Data Science on the Energy Industry

    Algorithms, data tools, sensors, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, machine learning, and data mining approaches have all advanced dramatically. As a result, it has been demonstrated that big data analysis can give a data-driven approach in: [...]

• Overpopulation

  • Project Censored ☛ Indigenous Communities Using Data Sovereignty To Solve Food Insecurity – Validated Independent News

    “For the first time, we’re going to take ownership of our data, and also the messaging and how the data is going to be interpreted,” said Stranger-McLaughlin.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | There Is a Major Food Crisis Looming in the Middle East

    The crisis provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is upending the global political order and underlying trade structures.

Finance

• Counter Punch ☛ Recession Fears: Real and Imagined

  This is a classic case of confusing correlation with causation. (For those not familiar with football, when a team is ahead, it generally uses running plays to take lots of time off the clock. They run because they are winning, they don’t win because they run.) This distinction is important when considering various predictions for a recession in the current environment.

  There are many features of an economy that we commonly see before a recession. For example, we typically see higher prices for oil, wheat, and other commodities before a recession. We also often see an inverted yield curve, where the interest rate on short-term Treasury debt (e.g., 90-day or 2-year notes) exceed the interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds.

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘Their Inflation Strategy Is Working’: Corporate Profits Soared to Record High in 2021

  Federal data released Wednesday shows that U.S. corporate profits jumped 25% to record highs in 2021 even as the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc on the nation’s economy, disrupting supply chains, hammering low-wage workers, and helping to push inflation to levels not seen in decades.

  “Megacorporations are cashing in and getting richer—and consumers are paying the price.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Financialized Care Is Not Care at All: Maximizing Profits at the Expense of Those in Need

  The promise of 300 million jobs in care as a key feature of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is a tempting invitation for investors seeking new profit opportunities, especially if more public monies are committed. Mature segments of the care sector that have received massive private investments—such as health care, nursing homes, and long-term care—tell us that we need democratised finance to build a care economy that ensures alignment of women’s rights, workers’ rights, and care receivers’ rights.

• Techdirt ☛ Satellite Broadband Options Like Starlink Shouldn’t Be Getting Precious Broadband Subsidies

  While Elon Musk often crows about his disdain for subsidies, Musk companies routinely hoover up billions in government assistance. For example, Starlink gamed the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) subsidy auction to nab nearly a billion dollars to deploy broadband to areas that didn’t need it: including some airport parking lots and a few parking medians.

• TruthOut ☛ Colorado Is on the Verge of Passing Free Pre-K for All

• The Nation ☛ Medicare for All Is Not Enough

  We have long advocated for single-payer national health insurance. By eliminating private insurers and simplifying how providers are paid, single-payer would free up hundreds of billions of dollars now squandered annually on insurance-related bureaucracy. The savings would make it feasible to cover the uninsured and to eliminate the cost barriers that keep even insured patients from getting the care they need. And it would free patients and doctors from the narrow provider networks and other bureaucratic constraints imposed by insurance middlemen. We still urgently need this reform.

• The Nation ☛ Biden’s Billionaire Tax Is Smart Politics for the Midterms

  Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed during the 2020 presidential race to implement an “Ultra-Millionaire Tax,” which would pull in $3.75 trillion over 10 years. “Think about how that money could be used,” her campaign said. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders upped the ante with his proposed “Tax on Extreme Wealth,” which aimed to establish a graduated wealth tax for billionaires.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘Body Blow to Working People’: Right-Wing Democrats Reject Biden Labor Nominee

  Economists and workers’ rights advocates on Thursday condemned the latest setback for working people dealt by right-wing Democratic lawmakers, three of whom joined every Republican senator in opposing President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division after being aggressively lobbied by business interests.

  Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) voted against allowing Dr. David Weil’s nomination to move forward Wednesday evening, several months after the former Obama administration official was first nominated for the top wage regulatory role.

• Common Dreams ☛ Sinema Under Fire for ‘Directly Enabling’ New GOP Voter Purge Law in Arizona

  Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema faced fresh backlash from civil rights groups on Wednesday after the Republican governor of her home state of Arizona signed into law a bill that could purge hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls.

  “Sinema and Manchin are directly enabling the erosion of civil rights and liberties by right-wing governors.”

• Counter Punch ☛ Family Matters Frustrate Attempts to Enforce Political Ethics

  Meanwhile, under pressure from a public beginning to notice the striking correlation between membership in Congress and a sharp eye for the best investments, Democrats in the House and Senate have introduced bills to ban members and their families from buying and selling stocks while in office.

  The  overlap of these two sets of ethics problems — a judge’s possible prejudice in favor of his spouse’s views and affiliations versus an elected official’s potential ability to trade (or have a spouse or child trade) stocks based on inside legislative scoop — is the family angle. That creates a third ethics problem running in the other direction.

• Counter Punch ☛ Did Biden Eff It Up?

  Gaffy Duck Joe was back with two mal mots. First, he tried to come off as JFK to the Berliners (we now know how that ended). Then he’s quacking to the 82nd Airborne, the famed special forces outfit, that for some unidentified reason finds itself lunching in NATO’s Poland on kielbasa, one spop seemingly ecstatic about his sausage dressing. Quack, quack. He begins (source: White House),

  Only the developmentally disabled — MAGAs and anti-MAGAs alike, intentionally dumbed down by the MSM and pols trash talking — believe the Old Joes any more. For fuck’s sake , he comes from a tax haven state for banks that make fortunes off debt slaves. Probably half the soldiers in front of him joined for a better life — the military being America’s one certain growth industry. Plenty of work ahead. Power of our example?

• Common Dreams ☛ Citing Likely Racist Motives, Federal Judge Blocks Florida GOP’s Voter Suppression Law

  Civil rights defenders on Thursday welcomed a ruling by a federal judge who struck down parts of a Florida voter suppression law, calling racism “a motivating factor” in the GOP-backed legislation’s passage.

  “Today’s decision is a huge win for Florida voters.”

• Common Dreams ☛ With Payments Resuming Soon, Dems Tell Biden to ‘Cancel Student Debt Now’

  Nearly 100 congressional Democrats on Thursday urged President Joe Biden to extend a pause on federal student loan repayments through at least the rest of the year, while calling on him to ultimately “provide meaningful student debt cancellation” for millions of indebted Americans.

  “Your administration must act as quickly as possible to extend the pause and make clear to the American public your intention to cancel a meaningful amount of student debt.”

• Project Censored ☛ Dark Money Interference in US Politics Undermines Democracy – Validated Independent News

  The influence of dark money, which cannot be easily traced, presents a major challenge to the swift functioning of the judicial nomination and confirmation process, and the American government as a whole. Dark money deeply influences political decisions in favor of select individuals’ or groups’ agendas rather than in support of the American people’s best interests. Most recently, dark money groups were heavily involved in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, donating money to politicians such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who were key players in advancing Judge Barrett’s confirmation. Critics called Judge Barrett’s confirmation process unusually quick, making the interference of dark money all the more unsettling.

• The Nation ☛ It’s Come to This: I Believe John Bolton

  Trying to decide whom to trust when the choices are between Donald Trump and his former neocon-hawk adviser John Bolton can induce a political shame spiral. Why are these my choices? Why do I have to care about these has-beens? And why am I the one feeling shame, when both men should have been shamed off the public stage decades ago? I don’t trust either.

• The Nation ☛ Supreme Injustices

• TruthOut ☛ This Little-Known Foundation Is Pushing “The Big Lie” and Voter Suppression Laws

• TruthOut ☛ Trump Calls on Putin to Release Dirt on Biden Family

• Hungary ☛ Opposition votes die by fire, V4 in recess, Russian hackers in the MFA, polls favor Orbán

  A reader of Atlatszo.ro, the Romanian edition of Átlátszó, found some 30 filled out ballots in Transylvania, near Jeddar, which were undoubtedly cast for opposition parties.

  Pictures taken from the ballots show a bunch of ballot papers cast for opposition parties United for Hungary and the Mi Hazánk opposition party, along with the envelopes in which they should have reached the counting centers.

• Counter Punch ☛ Biden Promised to Stop Supporting Saudi Aggression in Yemen. He Lied.

  This is yet another journalist who has been taken in by Biden’s February 4, 2021 promise to end US support for “offensive operations” in Yemen.  Biden has done no such thing.  At most, Biden has merely reduced US support for the bloodbath that Yemenis call the “Saudi-American war.”  Far from ending US support for the Saudi-UAE coalition, the US need for cheap oil following Biden’s March 8 ban on imports of Russian crude may give Saudi Arabia an ideal opportunity to pressure Biden to return US military assistance to its previous level.

  Biden has betrayed Yemen.  During the November 20, 2019 Democratic presidential debate, Joe Biden called Saudi Arabia a “pariah state”; vowed to make the Saudis “pay the price” for the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi; and vowed to sell no more weapons to the kingdom.

• Counter Punch ☛ The MADness of the Resurgent U.S. Cold War on Russia

  The United States and NATO have used similar forms of force and coercion against many countries. In every case they have been catastrophic for the people directly impacted, whether they achieved their political aims or not.

  Wars and violent regime changes in Kosovo, Iraq, Haiti and Libya have left them mired in endless corruption, poverty and chaos. Failed proxy wars in Somalia, Syria and Yemen have spawned endless war and humanitarian disasters. U.S. sanctions against Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela have impoverished their people but failed to change their governments.

• Counter Punch ☛ Putin’s No Saint, But He Didn’t Emerge Out of a Clear Blue Sky. Rather, His Rise Took Place in a Context Engineered by the West

  It has been left to independent media, therefore, to provide some modicum of balance and nuance in the face of this growing tide of Russophobia and willful distortion. Thankfully, many others have addressed issues such as: president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s integration of a neo-Nazi paramilitary group into Ukraine’s national armed forces; NATO encroachment onto Russia’s borders; the West’s failure to honor agreements that Ukraine would not join NATO in the post-Cold War era; the fact that Putin’s actions are supported by (overwhelmingly Russian-speaking) secessionist movements in Ukraine’s eastern provinces due to the Kiev government’s failure to honor the Minsk Agreements; and, perhaps most importantly, the incredible hypocrisy of US sanctions policy given Washington’s not just passive ignoring but active enabling of similar wars waged by its allies such as Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, not to mention its own disastrous debacles in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia.

  But one aspect of the situation that has seemingly received little attention is the background of how and why a man like Putin could have become Russia’s leader in the first place. My intention is not to defend Putin nor to discount the many criticisms one might have of him and his actions in Ukraine. But there is nonetheless a historical context that created the conditions that led to his rise to power. In order to understand this context, we must travel back much further in time than those pushing the Western narrative dare go. We must examine the formation of the present Russian state, which took shape in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic conditions that prevailed in its wake.

• Hungary ☛ Thrown out Hungarian mail-in ballots found near Târgu Mureș, Romania.

  An entire sack filled with thrown out and partially burned Hungarian election ballots was found at a landfill near Târgu Mureș, Romania. A report from our colleagues at Transtelex.

• Hungary ☛ Introducing: the secret weapon of online smear campaigns

  Enormous amounts of money are spent in politics on online ads. In Hungary, on Facebook alone, billions of forints have been spent on pushing the various parties’ messages. There are various ways to do this. In this article, we are introducing one which has remained hidden up until now. We have found a total of 45 Facebook pages, specifically created for smear campaigns against opposition candidates. Most of them are followed by negligibly few people which makes the large amounts of money spent on attacking their targets hard to justify. Translation by Dominic Spadacene.

• Hungary ☛ Márki-Zay: Ukraine is fighting our war

  The united opposition held its local campaign closing event in Pécs on Wednesday evening. Other than the local opposition candidates, Péter Márki-Zay, as well as vice president of DK, Ágnes Vadai were present.

• The Verge ☛ A Facebook bug led to increased views of harmful content over six months

  In addition to posts flagged by fact-checkers, the internal investigation found that, during the bug period, Facebook’s systems failed to properly demote probable nudity, violence, and even Russian state media the social network recently pledged to stop recommending in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine. The issue was internally designated a level-one SEV, or site event — a label reserved for high-priority technical crises, like Russia’s ongoing block of Facebook and Instagram.

• The Nation ☛ Silicon Valley Founders Are Not the Protagonists of Reality

  Theranos, Uber, and maybe WeWork could be described as technology companies, but insofar as they represent “tech” to the viewing public, it’s because they were capital-driven start-ups. All three companies raised investment wildly disproportionate to their revenues, as “angels” and venture capitalists bet on their plans and forked over the cash to realize them. To get to the next level of funding—from millions to tens of millions, to hundreds of millions—founders didn’t need to demonstrate corresponding income; they just needed to spend the previous round and tell a good story about where it went. Instead of growing by pouring profits back into their companies, they looked to take bigger and bigger tranches from professional asset managers before (hopefully) making an initial public offering and handing over the bag to retail investors. Expensive parties look less cumbersome on start-up balance sheets than employee benefits do, so people who threw expensive parties rose to the top. Like market mechanisms come to life, these founders found shortcuts (bluffing, cheating, and fraud).

• Techdirt ☛ Facebook-Hired PR Firm Coordinated Anti-TikTok Campaign To Spread Bogus Moral Panics

  Late last year, a coordinated messaging campaign emerged on the anniversary of the repeal of net neutrality. Numerous pundits and right-wing news outlets all simultaneously issued reports on the same day claiming that because the Internet hadn’t exploded in a rainbow, that the FCC’s extremely unpopular 2017 decision to gut oversight of predatory telecom monopolies must not have mattered (it mattered).

• BBC ☛ Facebook in ‘bare-knuckle’ fight with TikTok

  Internal emails, apparently seen by the Washington Post, allegedly suggested Targeted Victory’s campaign aimed to show TikTok “as a danger to American children”.

• Silicon Angle ☛ Meta embraces dirty tactics by paying a Republican firm for a nationwide anti-TikTok smear campaign

  Facebook Inc.-owned parent Meta Platforms Inc. paid a prominent Republican consulting company to smear its rival TikTok, according to a report published by the Washington Post today.

  The report states that the firm, Targeted Victory, was hired by Meta to taint the reputation of the Chinese social media app, planting op-eds, news stories and letters in newspapers around the U.S. with the message that TikTok was a danger to the well-being of the young people who use it.

  This news comes just after Meta announced a disappointing first quarter that included a large stock loss and, for the first time in 18 years, a reduction in monthly active users. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg tried to put a positive spin on matters, but the lack of growth at the company worried investors.

• Variety ☛ Right-Wing Media Outlet Daily Wire Claims It Will Invest $100 Million in Kids’ Content to Counter ‘Woke’ Disney Fare That Is ‘Brainwashing’ Children

  The Nashville-based company announced Wednesday that it plans to invest at least $100 million over the next three years into live-action and animated kids’ content. The right-wing outlet’s first content targeted at children is supposed to launch on Daily Wire’s subscription platform in the spring of 2023; it didn’t detail any kids’ shows or movies that it may have in the works.

  Americans are “tired of giving their money to woke media companies who want to indoctrinate their children with radical race and gender theory,” Daily Wire co-CEO Jeremy Boreing said in announcing the initiative. “But they want to do more than just cancel them. They want alternatives.”

• International Business Times ☛ Facebook’s Meta funded attack campaign against TikTok: report

  Facebook’s owner Meta has hired a consulting firm to carry out a US campaign denigrating its fierce rival TikTok, according to a Washington Post report Wednesday partially confirmed by AFP.

  The campaign reportedly includes placing letters in major US news outlets and promoting negative stories about TikTok, allegedly using the type of tough tactics familiar to Washington politics.

• Futurism ☛ Facebook Busted Paying Consulting Firm To Turn Users Against Tiktok

  Now, it turns out that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth company was so jealous of TikTok’s success with younger audiences that it started paying one of the United States’ largest consulting firms to wage a media war on the competition, according to a new report published this morning in the Washington Post.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Project Censored ☛ Scared Straight: TikTok Teens and Children Battling War Anxiety – Validated Independent News

  “My 11-year-old was extremely frightened yesterday and asked whether there was going to be war soon,” said one parent online.

• Hong Kong Free Press ☛ ‘I won’t stop talking’: Ukrainians in China fight disinformation, trolls and censorship

  Their mouthpieces are a website called “Ukraine News”, a Chinese edition of state news agency Ukrinform, and channels on messaging app WeChat and YouTube.

  It is for the consumption of a Chinese audience otherwise fed a limited diet of broadly pro-Russian news on the invasion of Ukraine, in a country whose leaders are among Moscow’s few remaining friends.

• RFA ☛ Interview: ‘I can see how the Russian propaganda machine works here’

  RFA’s Vietnamese Service interviewed Natalya Zhinkyna, interim representative of the Ukraine Embassy in Hanoi about her country’s struggle under the Russian invasion and her work in the capital of Vietnam, a traditional ally of Russia, a number of whose people have turned out to support Ukraine. In a wide-ranging interview, she thanked the Vietnamese public for participating in recent charity events that raised more than $100,000 for humanitarian relief. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

• Frontpage Magazine ☛ Did Anti-Muslim Bigots Really Plot to Blow Up a Chicago Mosque?

  The Waterville, Maine Morning Sentinel says “Waterville man, 18, planned to use explosives for ‘mass murder’ at Chicago mosque.” Chicago’s WLS reports “Maine teen recruited 2 others to help commit ‘mass murder’ at Chicago area mosque: feds.” CNN has the same slant: “Maine teen accused of plotting to attack a Chicago area mosque.” But the real story is that the chief perpetrator, Xavier Pelkey, and his fellow plotters are Sunni Muslims who were planning a jihad massacre at a Shi’ite mosque.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Hubbard Broadcasting ☛ Historian sues NY prisons over ban of Attica uprising book

  The author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the revolt at the Attica Correctional Facility in 1971 sued New York state prison authorities on Thursday, saying they’ve unconstitutionally banned her book behind bars.

  Author Heather Ann Thompson, a University of Michigan professor, brought the lawsuit in Manhattan federal court over the treatment by New York State Department of Corrections officials of her book: “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971,” published in 2016.

  Named as defendants were the department’s acting commissioner and a second official with decision-making authority regarding censorship determinations.

• Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Estonian government to leave symbols of aggression undefined

  According to the minister, the use of these symbols would first and foremost be a misdemeanor. “We will not be defining which symbols are banned and which are symbols of aggression,” she explained. “Symbols can change over time, and the use of symbols is very precisely dependent on the context in which it is used.”

• RTL ☛ Cuba sentences protester to 5 years for ‘enemy propaganda’

  A Cuban man who staged a rare protest over the detention of a dissident rapper has been slapped with a five-year prison term for disobedience and “enemy propaganda,” according to a sentencing document seen by AFP on Wednesday night.

  In December 2020, Luis Robles took to a central street in Havana with a handwritten sign reading: “Freedom, no more repression / free Denis” — referring to the jailing of Cuban rapper and activist Denis Solis over a music video about repression on the island.

• Internet Society ☛ Closing Off the Internet Won’t Silence Governments, But It Will Silence Everyone Else

  Partitioning the Internet closes off that traffic and loses us the opportunity to hear common voices. It is tempting in a moment of crisis to close off anything that you can, as a demonstration that you have done something. But this action empowers those who want the world to act in darkness and feeds the endless hunger of autocracy for control. Simply put, partition hands control to those who want their people to have no independent vision of current events or independent access to other voices. It will not silence governments; it will silence everyone else.

• Minnesota lawmakers need to pump the brakes before they break the internet – Disruptive Competition Project

  Last year, lawmakers in dozens of states introduced bills to restrict companies from enforcing their terms of service related to the removal of content on their platforms. This was an impulse reaction by conservative lawmakers seeking to punish digital services for taking action against former President Trump’s accounts for violations of terms of use on January 6th. Opponents cautioned that these bills would make it more difficult for companies to remove inappropriate, misleading, or even dangerous information, and that they violated platforms’ First Amendment rights by forcing them to host all user-generated content, regardless of what risks that content presented. Despite warnings, policymakers in Florida and Texas proceeded to pass legislation and both states are now wasting taxpayer dollars fighting — and losing — legal battles over the constitutionality of bills.

  This year, a similar situation is playing out in Minnesota, where, in an effort to protect children online, lawmakers are pressing forward with legislation that they have been warned might in fact do just the opposite. A bi-partisan sponsored bill to prohibit the application of algorithms used to select which content to share with users under 18 is quickly making its way through the Minnesota legislature. While nearly all Americans can agree that it is absolutely critical for companies to take additional steps to protect youth online, the state’s approach is shortsighted in that it aims to restrict companies from using the very tools they rely on to keep their users safe.

• Despite warnings, Republicans poised to stick Peach State with steep legal tab for political stunt – Disruptive Competition Project

  Republican lawmakers are about to advance a bill that will waste hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars while making the Internet less safe for Georgians. The ‘Common Carrier Non-Discrimination Act,’ which passed in the Senate earlier this month, is part of a broader effort by Republican legislators to punish digital services for enforcing their policies with respect to the social media accounts of former President Trump.

  This bill would force digital services to carry all users’ content neutrally, irrespective of what risks that content creates. By doing so, it would put Georgians at greater risk to everything from foreign disinformation and propaganda from Russian agents and extremist content from anti-American jihadists, who, according to the Senate bill, all deserve equal treatment.

  This law would bind digital services’ hands, preventing them from standing between American Internet users and the torrent of foreign disinformation, Communist propaganda, and extremism propagated by adversaries abroad. Digital services need the flexibility this law would take away to fight those evolving online threats.

  Some Georgia lawmakers appear to believe private businesses have to give access to any speaker. But Internet services have made commitments to their users to try and protect them from certain problematic content, and that is itself a speech interest. A digital service saying “we don’t want to host Nazi Party candidates” is exercising its own First Amendment rights, and Internet users can choose services whose communities and norms best align with their own preferences.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘Travesty of Justice’: Turkey Seeks Transfer of Khashoggi Murder Trial to Saudi Arabia

  Human rights advocates were stunned but not surprised Thursday after a Turkish prosecutor asked a court to move the trial of 26 Saudi men accused of murdering journalist Jamal Khashoggi to Saudi Arabia—whose Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is widely believed to have ordered the assassination.

  “Turkey will be knowingly and willingly sending the case to a place where it will be covered up.”

• BBC ☛ Jamal Khashoggi: Call for Turkey murder trial to be halted

  Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist critical of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was killed by Saudi agents inside the country’s consulate in Istanbul.

  The head of Amnesty International accused Turkey of “betraying” him.

  Khashoggi’s former fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, said in a statement that she was “heartbroken” by the prosecutor’s request, according to Reuters news agency.

  “No good will come of sending the case to Saudi Arabia,” she warned. “We all know the authorities there will do nothing. How do we expect the killers to investigate themselves?”

• VOA News ☛ Prosecutor Seeks End to Khashoggi Murder Trial in Turkey

  he Turkish prosecutor in the case against 26 Saudi nationals charged in the slaying of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi made a surprise request Thursday that their trial in absentia be suspended and the case transferred to Saudi Arabia, raising fears of a possible cover-up.

  The panel of judges made no ruling on the prosecutor’s request but said a letter would be sent to Turkey’s Justice Ministry seeking its opinion on the possible transfer of the file to Saudi judicial authorities, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported. Trial was adjourned until April 7.

  The development comes as Turkey has been trying to normalize its relationship with Saudi Arabia, which hit an all-time low following Khashoggi’s grisly October 2018 killing. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in an interview on Thursday that Saudi authorities were more cooperative on judicial issues with Turkey, but did not elaborate.

• American Oversight ☛ Eight Steps To Strengthen FOIA

  Over the past five years, American Oversight has filed FOIA requests with more than 75 federal agencies or offices and has been forced to go to court dozens of times to compel the release of records after those agencies failed to comply with the law. Through that experience, we have identified several common agency practices and legislative barriers that make it difficult for FOIA to best serve its central purpose of making government records promptly available to the public.

• NPR ☛ China holds espionage trial of Chinese Australian journalist

  Chinese Australian journalist Cheng Lei went on trial in Beijing on Thursday on espionage charges, with diplomats denied permission to attend the proceedings.

  Australian Ambassador Graham Fletcher told reporters outside the court that he was told he could not be present on the grounds that the trial involved state secrets.

• VOA News ☛ ‘No Safe Place’ in Ukraine, Says Correspondent Hit by Shrapnel

  Tsaplienko hadn’t expected the area he was in to be targeted. The village didn’t appear to have any military target, he added. Just civilians.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Techdirt ☛ Policy Building Blocks: What Do We Mean When We Talk About Liability

  In tech policy, as with any policy, we often talk about liability. Basically, should X liable to Y, why, and with what consequence? Figuring out good policy is often a matter of figuring out how those questions should be answered. Because sometimes it might be good for society if X could be held liable for certain actions – after all, if a harm has occurred, we might want it to be remediated, and one reason we have the legal notion of liability is to find a way to cause such remediation to happen. On the other hand, sometimes it might be bad for society if liability could too easily attach, because liability isn’t entirely about righting a wrong: it is often about deterring behavior through the fear of potential liability.

• Techdirt ☛ Courthouse News Service Sues Texas Courts Administrator For Withholding Filed Documents

  Courthouse News Service (CNS) is (again) suing to block court administrators from deliberately withholding filed documents from the press. CNS has sued several other state court systems over the same misbehavior by clerks and the administrators overseeing them.

• Techdirt ☛ An Increasing Number Of Cop Shops Feel The General Public Shouldn’t Have Access To Crime Stats

  For decades, local law enforcement agencies have blown off requests from the FBI and DOJ to report use of force incidents by officers. This has led to a very incomplete picture of force deployment in the United States — a form of proxy opacity that has allowed agencies to ignore problematic cops and problematic actions.

• Counter Punch ☛ New Mexico Teeters on Edge of a New Era of CoExistence: Trapping Ban on Public Lands Goes into Effect April 1

  Along with Roxy’s Law, New Mexico has recently taken other meaningful steps toward protecting wildlife. In 2019, the state banned gruesome coyote-killing contests, events that reward indiscriminate and senseless massacres. Currently, the state is rolling out its plan for projects to protect wildlife from vehicle collisions along heavily used movement and migration corridors.

  These are signs of a new era across the Land of Enchantment. An era in which coexistence is the norm, exploitation and cruelty are waning, and native foxes, bobcats, beavers, badgers, and wolves are revered for their ecological roles and honored for their intrinsic value, not persecuted as inconveniences. We are leaving behind nearly two hundred years of primarily viewing wildlife as merely something to slaughter and sell.

• TruthOut ☛ European Anti-Migrant Policies Gave Rise to Horrific Refugee Jails in Libya

• TruthOut ☛ Some Guantánamo Prisoners Fear Transfer to US Prisons Due to Brutal Conditions

• An Inquiry Into Islam ☛ Hundreds of Americans Were Captured and Enslaved

  For more than two centuries, the Barbary countries of Morocco, Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli had been harassing Christian ships, seizing cargo and capturing citizens. Algiers once boasted more than 30,000 Christian slaves, including one Miguel Cervantes, before he wrote Don Quixote. European powers in the 1500s and 1600s fought ferocious battles against Muslim pirates like Barbarosa. However, over time, a cynical system of appeasement had developed. The nations of Europe paid tribute — in money, jewels, and naval supplies — to remain at peace. England and France — in endless wars — found it cheaper to bribe the Barbary pirates than to devote a squadron to perpetually trawling the sea off Africa. At its core, expediency outweighed national honor.

  When the thirteen American colonies split off from mother England, they lost British protection. The United States found itself lumped in the pile of potential Barbary victims, alongside the likes of Sardinia and Sicily. (From 1785 to 1815, more than six hundred American citizens would be captured and enslaved. This nuisance would prove to be no mere foreign trade issue but rather a near-constant hostage crisis.)…

• Modern Diplomacy ☛ Taliban’s backtracking on girls’ education, ‘deeply damaging’

  Following a U-turn over re-opening girls’ secondary schools in Afghanistan on Wednesday, the UN human rights chief shared her “profound frustration and disappointment” that six months after the Taliban seized power, high school girls have yet to return to the classroom.

  “The de facto authorities’ failure to adhere to commitments to reopen schools for girls above the sixth grade – in spite of repeated commitments towards girls’ education, including during my visit to Kabul two weeks ago – is deeply damaging for Afghanistan”, High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet said in a statement.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Wired ☛ The Ghost of the Soviet Union Still Haunts the Internet

  The internet had barely escaped the lab in 1990, when the Soviet Union was awarded .su as its country code, joining domains like France’s .fr and the United Kingdom’s .uk. By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union was dead.

  But not its country code.

  Thirty years later, the Soviet Union endures in the imagination of a former KGB officer now in the Kremlin—and on the internet, where you can still register a domain like stalin.su. As you might expect, the domain is a nostalgia zone for fans of Communism and a favorite haunt of those who oppose a democratic and independent Ukraine and use the .su domain to express their hopes for Ukraine’s future incorporation into Greater Russia. Big .su users also include spammers and other cybercriminals who like the lack of actual government supervision. Given its lack of positive value (and the happy end of Communist terror) it is long past time for the .su domain to be consigned to the digital graveyard.

Monopolies

• Patents

  • Common Dreams ☛ Covid-19 Vaccine Equity Index Reveals ‘Failure of Historic Proportions’

    Amid ongoing criticism of deeply uneven access to Covid-19 vaccines, a new index measuring G20 nations’ commitment to global equity for the life-saving jabs shows the world’s wealthiest countries have fallen well short of sufficient action.

    “The fair global distribution of vaccines isn’t about charity; it is about justice… it is about doing what is right.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Civil Society Groups Reject ‘Legally Unsound’ and ‘Problematic’ TRIPS Waiver Proposal

    Top civil society groups on Wednesday denounced a potential deal on Covid-19 vaccine intellectual property rights, calling on the World Trade Organization, the European Union, and U.S. President Joe Biden to reject the proposal.

    “Your goal of saving lives worldwide from the ravages of Covid-19 will not be furthered by accepting this text.”

• Copyrights

  • Techdirt ☛ Why The Snippet Tax In The EU Copyright Directive Is Pointless And Doomed To Fail

    The EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market contains two spectacularly bad ideas. One is the upload filter of Article 17, which will wreak havoc not just on creativity in the EU, but also on freedom of speech there, as algorithms block perfectly legal material. The other concerns the “snippet tax” of Article 15, more formally known as ancillary copyright..

  • Creative Commons ☛ Episode 18: Open Culture VOICES – Stacy Allison-Cassin

    Welcome to episode 18 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we hear from Stacy Allison-Cassin, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in the LIS program at the University of Toronto. Her work is centred in the areas of knowledge organization, metadata, and knowledge equity. A Citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario, she engages in work and research related to Indigenous matters in libraries and the larger cultural heritage sector. With a deep interest in increasing access and visibility for non-textual materials and marginalized knowledge, Stacy is a passionate advocate for change in information structures and metadata systems within the library profession and across the wider GLAM sector.

  • Creative Commons ☛ Episode 17: Open Culture VOICES – Patricia Díaz Rubio

    Welcome to episode 17 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we hear from Patricia Díaz Rubio, a Chilean social communicator (Universidad de Chile) passionate about collective work and social impact. Since 2018, she has been working at Wikimedia Chile, promoting local and open content on the Internet.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Dutch Pirate Site Blocklist Expands with RARBG, YTS, EZTV and Others

    Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has obtained a new blocking order in the Netherlands targeting 1337x, LimeTorrents, YTS, RARBG, Kickasstorrents and EZTV. The order was issued against the local ISP Delta but, as a result of a blocking agreement, other ISPs will follow suit. The same order will likely trigger Google to take action as well.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Russia’s Site-Blocking System Isn’t Performing & Could Even Collapse

    Russia’s site-blocking systems aimed at restricting access to copyrighted content and anything else deemed undesirable are not performing to the standards the government demands. Blocking access to internet resources requires lots of hardware but due to sanctions, there are fears in Russia that a breakdown in systems operations may be just months away.

  • Techdirt ☛ Basically Everyone Tells Senators Tillis & Leahy That The SMART Copyright Act Is An Incredibly Dumb Copyright Act

    We’ve already detailed why the latest bill from Senators Thom Tillis and Pat Leahy, the SMART Copyright Act, is dangerous to the future of the internet. You can read that earlier article, but the short summary is that it would deputize the Copyright Office every three years to arbitrarily bless certain “technological measures” that websites, that host 3rd party content, would need to use. The not so hidden agenda here, pushed by Hollywood basically since the internet came on their radar, is that the Copyright Office will say that any site hosting user uploaded content will need to purchase an upload filter to scan each upload to make sure it doesn’t include any of Hollywood’s content.