Desktop/Laptop

• Lambda Teams Up With Razer to Launch the World’s Most Powerful Laptop for Deep Learning [Ed: Guess what it runs...]

Server

• Announcing the First Oracle Solaris 11.4 CBE

  I’m very happy to announce that today we are releasing a new version of Oracle Solaris 11.4 for free/open source developers and non-production personal use.

  Today marks the first delivery of our “Common Build Environment” (CBE) releases for the Oracle Solaris 11.4.

  To enable us to make new features and fixes available quicker and to more systems Oracle Solaris now uses a continuous delivery model of SRU/micro releases rather than much larger minor releases every few years.

  The GA release of a major or minor was historically the release intended for non-production use for developement of free/open source software, testing, proof of concept deployments. With the switch to a continuous delivery model many new features that have been added to Oracle Solaris 11.4 are not available in a release with a non-production use license.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Tux Digital ☛ I Spent 90 Days In openSUSE Tumbleweed, This Is What Happened! – TuxDigital

  In this video we check out openSUSE Tumbleweed and all of the amazing features in Gnome 42. openSUSE Tumbleweed is proof a distro can be rolling and stable all at the same time. I love rolling distros. Hand me an Arch or even a semi-rolling Fedora and I’m a happy man. If like me you want the latest and greatest Mesa drivers, the latest kernel enablement (whether hardware or software) and you also want to be run the latest versions of software check out openSUSE Tumbleweed. For the past 90 days I’ve done my videos, streaming live on Destination Linux, recording Hardware Addicts, coding, writing, and all of my main work on openSUSE Tumbleweed to prove just how stable it can be in production.

• Linux Made Simple ☛ EndeavourOS 22.1

  Today we are looking at EndeavourOS 22.1. It comes with KDE 5.24.4, Linux kernel 5.17, and uses about 900MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!

• Video ☛ EndeavourOS 22.1 Run Through – Invidious

  In this video, we are looking at EndeavourOS 22.1.

• Video ☛ Fact Checking Common Myths About Open Source Software – Invidious

  In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been noticing a disturbing amount of comments that are factually incorrect about things that should be easily verifiable with a quick Google search. Comments like “Chrome is actually open source” and “Google actually owns Odysee.” What?!

• Video ☛ First Look At Sway WM: Welcome Home “i3″ – Invidious

  Back when I first started using Arch Linux I was usng i3 and now I’m finally trying out Sway which is intended to be a drop in replacement for i3 or i3 gaps over on the Wayland side.

Kernel Space

• Ksplice Known Exploit Detection for VM_IO Use After Free, BPF bounds checking, and more…

• Graphics Stack

  • Mike Blumenkrantz: Branch

    As everyone who’s anyone knows, the next Mesa release branchpoint is coming up tomorrow.

Applications

• 9to5Linux ☛ PeaZip 8.6 Released with More Customizable UI Layout, Improved Extraction and Archiving

  PeaZip 8.6 is here almost two months after version 8.5 to introduce a new default theme called “Main” that features icons designed to visually integrate with most of the designs of supported operating systems. In addition, new .ico and .png icons are now available in the (peazip)/res/share/icons directory to further customize the app.

Instructionals/Technical

• Emulating Raspi2 like hardware with Rasbian in 2022

• Ubuntu ☛ What is High-performance computing (HPC)? [part 1] | Ubuntu

  In this blog, we will be introducing the concept of High-performance computing (HPC) and HPC clusters. We will also introduce a few categories of practical workloads important in the HPC space.

• ByteXD ☛ How To Connect to SSH Without Typing a Password

  The SSH (Secure SHell) protocol is a remote shell protocol that creates a secure channel (by using an encrypted connection), for accessing servers on an insecure network (like the Internet itself).

• Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Pitivi Video Editor on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install Pitivi Video Editor 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.

• Tux Digital ☛ Customizing KDE Plasma: How To Edit Panels And Layout – TuxDigital

  In this video, I show you how to customize your Plasma Panels by adding and editing widgets, moving and resizing panels, creating new panels to make a macOS-like experience in KDE Plasma and much more!

• ID Root ☛ How To Install Flatpak on Linux Mint 20 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Flatpak on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Flatpak is a package management utility that allows users to install and run applications in a sandboxed or isolated environment. It’s similar to Snap apps, Flatpak aims at simplifying the management of software packages across various distributions.

  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 a Flatpak application distribution on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).

• Make Use Of ☛ How to Run Multiple Linux Distributions Inside the Terminal Using Distrobox

  If you have been a Linux user for quite a while, you probably want to use multiple distros on your machine. Now it is possible because of a great tool called Distrobox. It allows you to create a container on your Linux system using Podman or Docker. These containers are integrated with hosts to enable users to share their home directory, external storage and USB devices, GUI apps, audio, etc.

  In case you’re not familiar with Distrobox but want to know more about it, don’t worry. This guide will help you learn everything about Distrobox including how to use it with any Linux distro.

Games

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Halo: The Master Chief Collection broke on Linux and Steam Deck, here’s a quick fix | GamingOnLinux

  With a recent update to the Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Xbox Game Studios included the needed Easy Anti-Cheat file for Linux / Steam Deck to work online but they broke it in the process for some.

  It’s a very good sign that official support may come, as I pointed out on Twitter but I found that it stopped the game working entirely on both my Fedora Linux desktop and the Steam Deck. Looking around, I’m not alone in this issue. Even when trying to use the mode they included with the game to play without anti-cheat (so you can at least play offline), that doesn’t work now either.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Strategy game ‘Old World’ comes to Steam and GOG on May 19 with Linux support | GamingOnLinux

  Old World, a game that was talked up as an alternative to the Civilization series that was previously exclusive to the Epic Games Store, is heading to GOG and Steam on May 19. When it arrives on the new stores, it will also come with an expansion called Heroes of the Aegean, which will be free for anyone who purchases Old World in the first two weeks after release.

  Set in classical antiquity, Old World is a historical 4X turn-based strategy game where players select a historical leader to guide their civilization. Leaders are mortal, and once they die, the dynasty’s future depends on their heir.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• LXQt 1.1.0 Promises Major Visual Uplift and Improvements

  LXQt desktop team give us some exciting details about the upcoming LXQt 1.1.0 in the official announcement.

Distributions

• Its FOSS ☛ Amidst Disagreement, elementary co-Founder Quits and Joins Endless OS

  elementary OS co-founder Cassidy James has shared a link titled “Farewell, elementary”.

  I looked at the headline first and then the date. 1st April. I smirked. You cannot fool me. I am not going to fall for the April Fool’s joke.

• EasyOS

  • Barry Kauler ☛ EasyBlue icon set updated

    Earlier today I posted a snapshot of the EasyOS 3.3 desktop, which has ‘EasyBlue’ icons:

    https://bkhome.org/news/202204/easyblue-theme-for-gtk2-and-gtk3.html

    The ‘desk_icon_theme_easyblue’ PET needed some updating, new icons and some icons changed.

  • Barry Kauler ☛ EasyBlue theme for GTK2 and GTK3

    …the grey window decorations are a JWM theme in this snapshot. But, EasyOS 3.3 also has a light-blue JWM theme. In the above snapshot, everything inside the window is the GTK theme.

    I modified the ‘flat-grey-rounded’ theme and created a new GTK3 ‘EasyBlue’ theme. The new PET is ‘gtk_2_3_theme_easyblue-20220412.pet’, not yet uploaded.

  • Barry Kauler ☛ Oomox GTK theme designer

    Nice, it creates consistent theme for both GTK2 and GTK3. In the case of GTK2, it requires the “murrine” engine to be installed.

    Some criticisms though; the GUI has limited adjustments, mostly just colours. You copy an existing theme, then modify colours — and you can’t import a theme.

    Another criticism is that the generated theme is large, mostly because, for gtk 3.20+, it has a file ‘gtk.gresource’ that is about 5MB.

    Hmmm, yes… with GTK2, and GTK3 prior to 3.20, you could define an engine, then just apply modifications to it — or not even that — in GTK2 you can just apply changes to individual widgets, modifications to the inbuilt theme. From GTK 3.20, engines are no longer supported, and CSS rules have to be provided for every widget. Absolutely every widget — if you leave out CSS for a widget, it won’t display. There doesn’t seem to be any mechanism to fallback to the inbuilt theme.

  • Barry Kauler ☛ Flat-grey-rounded GTK theme imported from woof-ce

    I reported this morning that the GTK 3.20+ themes created by Oomox are enormous:
    [...]
    I examined some small themes that the author had developed them from scratch, rather than based on an existing theme. ‘Azure-light’ and ‘Colloid-light’ are two examples.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Fedora 36 Beta: The new Adwaita/GTK4 work breaks the world, causes confusion, but the performance is terrific. – BaronHK’s Rants

    I got bored, I guess, with Debian working, and decided to load Fedora 36 on my Thinkbook 15 ITL Gen2.

    I’m happy to report that all of the HARDWARE works wonderfully, and Fedora manages to brush all of those unsightly UEFI bugs under the rug with a spiffy boot splash screen.

    (In Debian, there’s an awkward transition between the GRUB bootloader and the Debian splash screen where Lenovo’s UEFI BIOS vomits out a couple of dozen errors, which the Linux kernel prints to the screen. They’re there even if you use Windows, but Microsoft hides them to make Lenovo look less dodgy.)

    One area where Fedora 36 really improves things is with my video performance, and another is GNOME just “feels” faster, likely because of the latest batch of work Canonical has been upstreaming to GNOME over the years to remove some of the jank and jitter of GNOME Shell.

    In some cases, GNOME 42’s shell should be able to perform twice as well as before on some Intel integrated GPUs. The Shell has historically performed rather poorly even on good graphics chips, and has leaked an embarrassing amount of memory, but the code cleanups and optimizations over the last few years have largely moved the Shell past that awful stuttering mess.

  • FOSSLife ☛ Security a Key Benefit of Open Source Enterprise Software [Ed: OK, so try using it, Red Hat]

    Security and quality are among the top benefits of open source enterprise software, according to Red Hat’s 2022 State of Enterprise Open Source report, with nearly 90 percent of respondents viewing open source as more secure or just as secure as proprietary software.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ Agile: 3 ways your organization can benefit during hybrid work | The Enterprisers Project [Ed: IBM pushing buzzwords at the expense of actual substance or science]

    Digital transformation is complicated and requires the ability to manage complex processes that are built for flexibility and quick decision-making. This is why agile project management has evolved to replace rigid and slow traditional project management methodologies.

    Agile is an approach to software development that promotes continuous iteration per regular customer feedback, with the goal of increasing development speed and improving collaboration within and between teams while maintaining focus on key objectives and deliverables.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ IT hiring: 4 tips to retain and attract top IT talent right now [Ed: “The Great Resignation” myth/narrative is being promoted by IBM, which lays off its own workforce]

    Amid the “The Great Resignation,” tech companies are hard-pressed to attract and retain talent. Most workplaces were radically disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and leadership teams have spent the past two years navigating how to support a remote workforce and ensure that their employees’ needs continue to be met.

  • Red Hat ☛ The state of static analysis in the GCC 12 compiler [Ed: Red Hat uses GNU logo while attacking the founder of GNU, defaming him to hijack his work/projects]

    Building a static analyzer into the C compiler offers several advantages over having a separate tool, because the analyzer can track what the compiler and assembler are doing intimately. As a Red Hat employee, I work on GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. Our static analyzer is still experimental but is making big strides in interesting areas, including a taint mode and an understanding of assembly-language code.

  • LWN ☛ Malcolm: The state of static analysis in the GCC 12 compiler [LWN.net]

    David Malcolm has posted an update on the state of static analysis in GCC 12.

  • Red Hat ☛ Observability in 2022: Why it matters and how OpenTelemetry can help [Ed: IBM openwashing surveillance, or spying "lite", with Microsoft proprietary GitHub (tied to NSA)]

    This article explains the basics of observability for developers. We’ll look at why observability should interest you, its current level of maturity, and what to look out for to make the most of its potential.

    Two years ago, James Governor of the developer analyst firm Redmonk remarked, “Observability is making the transition from being a niche concern to becoming a new frontier for user experience, systems, and service management in web companies and enterprises alike.” Today, observability is hitting the mainstream.

    As 2022 gets underway, you should expect to hear more about observability as a concern to take seriously. However, lots of developers are still unsure about what observability actually is—​and some of the descriptions of the subject can be vague and imprecise. Read on to get a foundation in this emerging topic.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu MATE 22.04 – New Features and Release Details

    list of new features of the Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) that includes what changed since the prior LTS release.

  • HowTo Geek ☛ What’s New in Ubuntu 22.04 ‘Jammy Jellyfish’

    Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish” will be released on April 21, 2022. This latest release of the ever-popular Ubuntu Linux distribution will havelong-term support until 2027. Is the Jammy Jellyfish worth the upgrade? Let’s find out.

  • H2S Media ☛ 3 Ways to Install Kdenlive on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy – Linux Shout

    Kdenlive is a non-linear video editor for KDE. With the help of Kdenlive, it is possible to perform simple to complicated video cuts. The range of functions stands between applications such as cinema on the one hand and professional tools such as Jashaka or Cinelerra on the other. This video editing program is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS, which means cross-platform support.

    When it comes to features it comes with extensive codec and format support. The software brings a lot of rendering power and can process multiple videos and audio tracks – lossless and non-destructive. This makes Kdenlive a real NLE – a non-linear editor that is based on MLT Video Frameworks and FFmpeg. The software offers a customizable user interface, unlimited undo steps, and functions for organizing the timeline. In addition, Kdenlive supports camcorders, webcams, and all common audio, video, and image formats and the recording of screen content.

Devices/Embedded

• CNX Software ☛ RAKwireless adds more Wisduo and Wisblock modules, launches WisToolBox configuration tool for IoT devices

• Worldline launches LINURA LP 7220 POS terminal in India

  Worldline announced it has launched one of the most advanced LINUX-based 4G POS terminal – LINURA LP 7220 with highest security protocol, Dual Core Cortex processor and 256MB RAM to enhance in-store digital payments experience in India.

• CNX Software ☛ ASRock 4X4 BOX-5000 Series mini PC features AMD Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 U-Series processor

  ASRock Industrial has announced the 4X4 BOX-5000 Series Mini PCs powered by AMD Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 U-Series with three models, namely 4X4 BOX-5800U, 4X4 BOX-5600U, and 4X4 BOX-5400U, based on respectively Ryzen 7 5800U, Ryzen 5 5600U, and Ryzen 3 5400U processors.

  The mini PCs support up to four 4K display outputs, come with up to two Ethernet (2.5GbE + GbE) ports, Wi-Fi 6E connectivity, offers M.2 Key M SSD and SATA 3.0 storage, as well as five USB 3.2/2.0 ports for peripherals.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ ASRock Industrial release new range of industrial motherboards w/ 12th Gen Intel® Core Processors

  The Taiwanese ASRock released a new line of industrial-grade motherboards equipped with Intel’s latest 12th Gen Core Processors (Alder-Lake-S) that feature 16-cores and 24 threads. ASRock expects their high-performance motherboards to be adopted in diverse applications i.e. smart cities, medical, Edge Artificial IoT, factory automation, kiosks, etc.

  ASRock motherboards rely on Intel’s Alder-Lake-S hybrid architecture which features Performance-cores and Efficient-cores with Intel® Thread Director. Compared to the previous 10th Gen Intel Core processors, the latest 12th Gen Intel® Core processors perform up to 1.36x, 1.35x , 1.94x times faster in single thread and multi thread mode (According to Intel). Intel’s UHD Graphics 770 optimized by their Xe architecture with up to 32x execution units, 4x DDR4 (3200MHz) up to 128GB to execute artificial intelligence applications seamlessly.

• 3D Printed Wireless Joystick Controlled Animatronic Eyes – The DIY Life

  In this project, we’re going to be making a set of wirelessly controlled animatronic eyes. I’ve been wanting to do this project for a while, so when Quantum Integration launched their new Motor & Servo Driver board, this project immediately came to mind. Their new board is based on the PCA9685 driver chip, so you can also build a similar setup using an ESP32 or Arduino if you’d like.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Purism ☛ Purism Cares about Environmental Impact
    

    Longevity of tech products reduces waste. As a Social Purpose Corporation one of the areas we work toward is longevity of product along with right to repair, this allows us to be a largely different global manufacturer of digitally-responsible electronic products. Founder and CEO, Todd Weaver, enshrined in the articles of incorporation two related areas towards this goal “When considering the selection of parts, The Corporation will weigh such issues as privacy, security, freedom, ethical working conditions, environmental impact, and performance, among other factors.“. One of the best ways to reduce waste is to manufacture products that continue to get operating system updates—something Purism does with PureOS on Librem hardware— versus planned obsolescence that Apple, Google, and all other major manufacturers force upon their customers, whereby piling up unusable technology called E-waste.

  • Arduino ☛ Introducing the Arduino secure boot

    To increase the range of features and firmware safety of Arduino products, we decided to release a new bootloader based on MCUboot. Here is a quick introduction on everything you need to know about it.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• CISA ☛ Apache Releases Security Advisory for Struts 2 | CISA

  The Apache Software Foundation has released a security advisory to address a vulnerability in Struts in the version range 2.0.0 to 2.5.29. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system.

• PC Mag ☛ The Best Free Software of 2022 | PCMag

  Open-source Audacity can record and edit audio files on more tracks than you can imagine. It then outputs exactly what you need. It is perfect for noobs and pros alike, on any desktop OS.

• Syslog-ng in GSoC 2022 – Blog – syslog-ng Community – syslog-ng Community

  This year the syslog-ng project will participate in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentor organization again. If you are a university student or otherwise eligible to participate in the GSoC program, you can choose to develop a new feature for syslog-ng.

• Events

  • Document Foundation ☛ Panel Discussion on Mentorship (Fedora Mentor Summit 2022) – including LibreOffice – The Document Foundation Blog

    How do different free and open source software projects do mentorship, and how can we all learn from each other? Daniel Garcia Moreno (EndlessOS Foundation and GNOME), Emily Gonyer (openSUSE), Ilmari Lauhakangas (The Document Foundation), and Marie Nordin (Fedora) discuss this in a panel moderated by Ben Cotton…

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • TechRepublic ☛ Firefox finally has a tab management add-on worth using | TechRepublic

      I’m not gonna lie: Opera Workspaces spoiled me. Since using that feature, no tab manager has come close. Not only does it make working with a mass of tabs incredibly simple but it also works to isolate pinned tabs to specific Workspaces (a feature no other tab manager includes). Safari has come close with its tab groups feature, but even that has its weaknesses.

    • Ghacks ☛ Firefox 99.0.1 maintenance update released – gHacks Tech News

      Mozilla released Firefox 99.0.1 to the public release channel on April 12, 2022. The maintenance update addresses four issues in the browser, including one issue affecting the Zoom service and another that affected hardware video decoding for some Windows users.

    • Mozilla ☛ What’s up with SUMO – April 2022 – The Mozilla Support Blog

      April is a transition month, with the season starting to change from winter to spring, and a new quarter is beginning to unfold. A lot to plan, but it also means a lot of things to be excited about. With that spirit, let’s see what the Mozilla Support community has been up to these days…

    • Mozilla ☛ Competition should not be weaponized to hobble privacy protections on the open web
      

      Recent privacy initiatives by major tech companies, such as Google’s Chrome Privacy Sandbox (GCPS) and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, have brought into sharp focus a key underlying question – should we maintain pervasive data collection on the web under the guise of preserving competition?

      Mozilla’s answer to this is that the choice between a more competitive or a more privacy-respecting web is a false one and should be scrutinized. Many parties on the Internet, including but also beyond the largest players, have built their business models to depend on extensive user tracking. Because this tracking is so baked into the web ecosystem, closing privacy holes necessarily means limiting various parties’ ability to collect and exploit that data. This ubiquity is not, however, a reason to protect a status quo that harms consumers and society. Rather, it is a reason to move away from that status quo to find and deploy better technology that continues to offer commercial value with better privacy and security properties.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL: pgBadger v11.8 released

    pgBadger is a PostgreSQL performance analyzer, built for speed with fully detailed reports based on your PostgreSQL log files.

    pgBadger 11.8 was released today, this release of pgBadger fixes some issues reported by users since past three months and especially two fixes on new log entries detection in incremental mode.

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL: pg_dbms_job v1.2.0 released

    pg_dbms_job is a new PostgreSQL extension to create, manage and use Oracle-style DBMS_JOB scheduled job. The use and behavior is just like with the DBMS_JOB Oracle package.

    It allows to manage scheduled jobs from a job queue or to execute immediately jobs asynchronously. A job definition consist on a code to execute, the next date of execution and how often the job is to be run. A job runs a SQL command, plpgsql code or an existing stored procedure.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Caolán McNamara: GTK4: ComboBox Cell Renderers

    Custom Gtk Cell Renderer in GTK4 GtkComboBox in LibreOffice now working as hoped for.

• Content Management Systems (CMS)

  • WordPress 6.0 Beta 1 – WordPress News

    This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, and test this version of WordPress on a production or mission-critical website. Instead, it is recommended that you test Beta 1 on a test server and site.

• Programming/Development

  • Binary Coded Decimal

    Like many others I’m trying to implement a GameBoy emulator. The development is sporadic to say the least and mostly occurs when I happen to have both some time and inspiration to spare. I’m still implementing the CPU instructions, and this week I came to the one called DAA (Decimal Adjust Accumulator according to the GameBoy Programming manual). I mostly wanted to summarize my findings to have something to refer back to later, but maybe this someone out there will find it useful as well.

  • Qt ☛ Qt 6.3 released

    I’m happy to announce that Qt 6.3 has been released today. As always, the release is packed with many new features as well as a large amount of bug fixes.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Protected C++

    Like many other programming languages, C++ also provides us with the feature of data hiding for security purposes. We use access modifiers within a C++ program to protect our data at different security levels. C++ includes the public, private and protected access specifiers to secure its variables and functions. The protected access specifier is a little different from both private and public. This article will focus on the “protected” access modifier in C++ code examples. So, let’s get started. Open the shell application, create a new c++ file and open it in the editor.

  • Linux Hint ☛ REST API Authentication Using Laravel Sanctum

    Authentication is a major part of any Laravel project. Many packages exist in Laravel for implementing REST API authentication, such as Passport, Sanctum, JWT, etc. Laravel sanctum is a simple and lightweight Laravel package to implement a REST API authentication system for mobile applications, single-page applications (SPAs), and token-based APIs. It can generate multiple API tokens for the users, and the single-page application can be authenticated using the user’s session. It can be used as an alternative to Laravel Passport API. Laravel sanctum is better than Laravel Passport in many cases. It is simpler than Laravel Passport, and it does not require OAuth2 authentication like Passport authentication. The ways of implementing Laravel Sanctum authentication and checking the REST API by using postman have been shown in this tutorial.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Use of isset() Function in PHP

    It is necessary to check any variable is defined or not defined before reading the file’s content because if the variable is undefined, it will generate an error when the value of that variable is tried to read. This problem can be solved by using PHP’s isset() function. It returns true if the variable is defined and false if it is undefined. Different uses of the isset() function have been shown in this tutorial.

  • EE Journal ☛ IAR Systems brings low-code state machine design solution to Linux – EEJournal

  • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

    • Julia Evans ☛ A list of new(ish) command line tools

      Hello! Today I asked on twitter about newer command line tools, like ripgrep and fd and fzf and exa and bat.

      I got a bunch of replies with tools I hadn’t heard of, so I thought I’d make a list here. A lot of people also pointed at the modern-unix list.

    • Get an embedded Rust development environment set up without prompting Using bash

  • Rust

    • Implied bounds and perfect derive

      There are two ergonomic features that have been discussed for quite some time in Rust land: perfect derive and expanded implied bounds. Until recently, we were a bit stuck on the best way to implement them. Recently though I’ve been working on a new formulation of the Rust trait checker that gives us a bunch of new capabilities — among them, it resolved a soundness formulation that would have prevented these two features from being combined. I’m not going to describe my fix in detail in this post, though; instead, I want to ask a different question. Now that we can implement these features, should we?

      Both of these features fit nicely into the less rigamarole part of the lang team Rust 2024 roadmap. That is, they allow the compiler to be smarter and require less annotation from you to figure out what code should be legal. Interestingly, as a direct result of that, they both also carry the same downside: semver hazards.

    • CTCFT 2022-04-18 Agenda | Inside Rust Blog

      The next “Cross Team Collaboration Fun Times” (CTCFT) meeting will take place on Monday, 2022-04-18 at 9pm US Eastern Time (click to see in your time zone). You’ll find the full details (along with a calendar event, zoom details, etc) on the CTCFT website.

Quitting

So if you’ve read the last couple of entries on here you won’t really be surprised to know that I’m quitting one of my jobs, the non-profit one that’s been the source of a lot of my misery lately.

Search everything with dmenu

Yes, this is another post about my current project, mastersearch. But as progress was pretty good in the last two days, I thought I would just post a update.

New-to-me Mandolin

Many mandolins have floating bridges, which means that rather than being glued or bolted to the body like most guitars, it is simply held in place by the tension of the strings. Its position is variable and prone to misplacement by the unwitting neophyte attempting a seemingly routine string change. The bridge might also get shifted while the strings are temporarily detuned during shipping. If the bridge is not in the right place the intonation will be incorrect, and no matter how perfectly you tune it, it will be impossible to play in tune! Imagine the frustration of trying to learn to play an impossible-to-play instrument! If you have ever tried learning any string instrument, chances are you have dealt with intonation problems at some point. Knowing how to properly setup your instrument is an important part of the ongoing learning process, and it’s really not as difficult as you might think.

The Register UK ☛ Sacked source-keeper attempts revenge • The Register

Who has got your back up? Forget comments in code, what do you do when all your source has been packed into the trunk of a family sedan? Welcome to Who, Me?

Today’s story, from a reader Regomised as “Al”, concerns his time at a company in the 1980s. The company was working on a project to replace thousands of ageing “dumb” terminals with PCs. “The Great PC Invasion and Distributed Computing Revolution were under way,” Al observed.

“The company had hired a collection of experienced PC and minicomputer programmers who were led by a management team of Mainframe Gods (as they viewed themselves).”

We know just the type.

“As a bunch of hotshot PC and UN*X types,” he went on, “we demanded a version control system and a tool for backing up the source tree. In their wisdom, the Mainframe Gods chose not to invest in spurious tech like backups and version control, therefore each programmer had a personal responsibility to back up their source code.”

It went about as well as you might imagine. Some staff followed the process for a bit, but after a while nobody bothered. Nobody, that is, except for the person who did the builds. “Dave” (for that was not his name) had all the current production code on his PC. Everything. In one place.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • TechRadar ☛ Microsoft 365 is getting a rather uncharitable price hike | TechRadar

    Microsoft has announced (opens in new tab) it will soon raise the price of its office software subscriptions for non-profit organizations.

    The price hike will take effect on September 1 2022, and vary by degree depending on the specific subscription bundle. The most significant change will apply to the Office 365 E3 package, which will rise in price by almost 30% to $5.75/user/month.

    Although Microsoft has only provided specific figures for US-based customers, the company has confirmed the rise will apply worldwide, with “local market adjustments” in some regions.

  • Seeking Alpha ☛ Microsoft tumbles as UBS suggests Office 365 could see ‘gentle deceleration’ (NASDAQ:MSFT) | Seeking Alpha

    Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) shares tumbled on Monday after investment bank UBS said the tech giant could start to see a “gentle deceleration” in Office 365-related growth.

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Yahoo News ☛ Automotive Grade Linux Updates Open Source Automotive Platform with UCB 13 Release

        • PR Newswire ☛ The Linux Foundation and Google Cloud Launch Nephio to Enable and Simplify Cloud Native Automation of Telecom Network Functions

        • Yahoo News ☛ The Linux Foundation and Google Cloud Launch Nephio to Enable and Simplify Cloud Native Automation of Telecom Network Functions [Ed: Hardly about Linux at all]

        • PR Newswire ☛ Secure Open Source 5G Gains Momentum as Community Focuses on Re-aggregation, with 5G Super-Blueprints and New Members

        • Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ Secure Open Source 5G Gains Momentum as Community Focuses on Re-aggregation, with 5G Super-Blueprints and New Members  – Linux Foundation

          LF Networking, which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across open source networking projects, ​today announced continued momentum focused on re-aggregation, with updates to security, 5G blueprints, and the addition of four new Silver members: ATOS, GenXComm, Keysight Technologies, and Telaverge Communications.

          “As the LF Networking community rolls into its fourth year as an umbrella project organization, we are pleased to see robust efforts focused on securing 5G across multiple project & foundations as we welcome even more industry-leading organizations to the project,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “It’s the robust and diverse set of member companies that enable LFN’s collaborative innovation into the future of 5G and networking.”

  • Security

    • CISA ☛ Citrix Releases Security Updates for SD-WAN Products | CISA

      An attacker could exploit one of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

    • Industroyer2: Industroyer reloaded | WeLiveSecurity [Ed: Microsoft Windows TCO]

      Windows executable named 108_100.exe

    • CISA ☛ Microsoft Releases April 2022 Security Updates

      Microsoft has released updates to address multiple vulnerabilities in Microsoft software. An attacker can exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

    • SUSE’s Corporate Blog ☛ Safety RAM: Protecting variables with one’s complement [Ed: Outsourced to Microsoft proprietary software = opposite of real security]

    • Git v2.35.2 and below for CVE-2022-24765 [Ed: Git has security catastrophe only on Microsoft Windows (the NSA back doors)]

    • Bleeping Computer ☛ Critical HP Teradici PCoIP flaws impact 15 million endpoints [Ed: How come the Microsoft boosters at BleepingComputer never use similar wording like 1.5 billion Windows users impacted...?]

      HP is warning of new critical security vulnerabilities in the Teradici PCoIP client and agent for Windows, Linux, and macOS that impact 15 million endpoints.

      The computer and software vendor has found that Teradici is affected by the recently disclosed OpenSSL certificate parsing bug that causes an infinite denial of service loop and multiple integer overflow vulnerabilities in Expat.

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

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (thunderbird and usbguard), Fedora (containerd, firefox, golang-github-containerd-imgcrypt, nss, and vim), Oracle (firefox, kernel, kernel-container, and thunderbird), Red Hat (thunderbird), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), SUSE (libexif, mozilla-nss, mysql-connector-java, and qemu), and Ubuntu (libarchive and python-django).

    • CISA ☛ Google Releases Security Updates for Chrome | CISA

      Google has released Chrome version 100.0.4896.88 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system.

    • Stable Channel Update for Desktop

      The Stable channel has been updated to 100.0.4896.88 for Windows, Mac and Linux which will roll out over the coming days/weeks.

      A full list of changes in this build is available in the log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how here. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • AccessNow ☛ Costa Rica: first country to call for a moratorium on spyware technology

        Access Now supports Costa Rica’s call for a global moratorium on spyware technology, made publicly by Ambassador Catalina Devandas, Permanent Representative of Costa Rica to the United Nations in Geneva. At Protecting Defenders Online, a virtual side conversation at U.N. Human Rights Council’s 49th session, hosted by Access Now, and the United States and European Union Trade and Technology Council (U.S.-EU TTC) Partnership, Ambassador Devandas became the first state representative in the world to publicly call for the “immediate moratorium on the use of spyware technology until a regulatory framework that protects human rights is implemented.”

        The call from Ambassador Devandas comes just weeks before the UNESCO World Press Freedom Day, an event that this year will focus on journalism under surveillance. Until now, most of the momentum demanding accountability for the use of Pegasus spyware has been driven by civil society and international organizations, while governments remain largely silent, despite regularly reported new confirmed cases of infection.

      • Video ☛ Data Brokers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) – Invidious

        John Oliver discusses how much data brokers know about us, what they’re doing with our personal information, and one….unusual way to change privacy laws.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• AccessNow ☛ FAQ: The EU’s plan to regulate political ads – Access Now

  Political advertisements can be a powerful driver for dangerous disinformation and propaganda online. It is often linked to platforms’ data-harvesting and exploitative business models.

  The EU has proposed a timely Regulation to increase transparency for political ads. The proposal however may not go far enough to protect people from covert manipulation.

  But what are political ads, exactly? What does the EU proposal say? What is its potential impact on Europeans’ rights and personal agency in the online environment? This FAQ has the answers for you.

• IFF writes to the Chief Secretary of Rajasthan urging greater scrutiny of internet shutdown orders. #KeepItOn

  Remember the Rajasthan Government’s response to our RTI, where it admitted that Rajasthan’s Review Committee does not meet to review internet shutdown orders, and only confirms them by circulation? Applicable Indian law requires governments to publish all internet shutdown orders in the public domain, and these orders must be reviewed by a committee of high-level government officials, to ensure that they are proportionate, lawful and necessary. We found Rajasthan government’s Review Committee procedures concerning and have written to the Chairperson of the Review Committee, i.e. the Chief Justice of Rajasthan urging greater scrutiny of shutdown orders.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The Verge ☛ US says internet services are exempt from Russian sanctions

  The US Department of the Treasury is exempting telecommunications services from ongoing sanctions against Russia. The move, confirmed late last week in an order, follows requests from advocacy groups who feared a disruption would cut off Russian activists’ access to the outside world. It may not, however, cause companies that voluntarily cut off access to restore it.

  The new order authorizes business transactions involving “services, software, hardware, or technology incident to the exchange of communications over the internet,” including messaging, domain registration, email, and sharing photos or videos. It does not authorize transactions involving Russian financial institutions or state-controlled entities like the Russian Ministry of Finance.

Monopolies

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • In the Limelight: Truist joins Open Invention Nework [Ed: Software patents legitimised in the name of "Linux"]

      Open Invention Network (OIN), the organization formed to safeguard open source software (OSS) and now the largest patent non-aggression community in history, announced Mondaythat Truist Financial Corporation (Truist) has joined as a community member. Truist is the sixth largest U.S. bank by assets and the seventh largest global insurance broker. As a significant user and supporter of open source, Truist is reinforcing its commitment to OSS as an enabler of advanced financial services and mobile banking platforms.

• Copyrights

  • Public Domain Review ☛ “The Rainbow for their Guide”: Mary Gartside’s *New Theory of Colours* (1808) – The Public Domain Review

    Mary Gartside’s Essay antedates James Sowerby’s and Goethe’s treatises on colour, while its illustrations have been deemed some of the earlier examples of abstraction in painting.

Server

• Ubuntu Pit ☛ Pscp in Linux System: Everything You Need To Know About

  
  There are tools for securely copying online files in Linux and web servers from one destination to another. A few tools can establish connections over a secure shell (SSH) on Linux. Putty is one of the most used, user-friendly, and efficient tools for establishing the SSH connection as an individual terminal emulator. This tool is free and open source, and you can use it as a terminal emulator; the Linux and Unix shell commands work perfectly on Putty. Here, the term pscp is defined as the Putty SCP.

  If you’re already an experienced Linux user, you might already know that the cp command is used for copying files. And, the scp is used for secure copy. In one line, the PSCP command is an efficient and effective command-line-based secure copy for the Putty tool.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Late Night Linux – Episode 172 – Late Night Linux

  Moving on from legacy BIOS and Xorg, Raspberry Pi OS finally catches up with security basics, the UK government give us more reasons to be angry, the usual KDE goodness, and more.

• Destination Linux 273: Our Takes on the Hottest Linux News of 2022

  This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re celebrating 5 year anniversary of TWIL by discussing some hand picked hot news topics this quarter in Linux or open-source. If you’ve been wanting to know what TWIL would be like with all 3 hosts…this is your week. Then we’re going to talk about an opportunity to build your career in Linux and Open Source. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.

• Video ☛ MX Linux 21.1 overview | simple configuration, high stability, solid performance. – Invidious

  In this video, I am going to show an overview of MX Linux 21.1 and some of the applications pre-installed.

• Video ☛ Enterprise Linux Security Episode 25 – News Roundup – Invidious

  In the 25th episode of Enterprise Linux Security, Jay and Joao catch up on a few things in the news, including the results of a recent Internet Crime Report, and more!

• Video ☛ YubiKey Complete Getting Started Guide! – Invidious

  Have you considered using a YubiKey? In this complete guide, you’ll learn everything you need in order to get started with these awesome security keys.

• Video ☛ Which is your preferred way to control logical flow? #programming #javascript – Invidious

• Video ☛ Mythbusting: Linux apps SUCK and they SLOW Linux growth – Invidious

• Video ☛ 30 Days in ChromeOS – Invidious

  I survived 30 days in ChromeOS as a poweruser. I don’t use Chrome Browser and I don’t enjoy using Andorid apps.

Kernel Space

• LWN ☛ Linux 4.9.310

  I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.310 kernel.
  
  All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade.
  
  The updated 4.9.y git tree can be found at:
  	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.9.y
  and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
  
  https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
  
  thanks,
  
  greg k-h
  

Applications

• Its FOSS ☛ Meet Lite XL: A Lightweight, Open-Source Text Editor for Linux Users

  
  Sure, there are plenty of text editors or code editors that you can use. Some popular ones include Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, PyCharm, Atom, IntelliJ, and Sublime Text.

  But do you want to try something interesting that’s entirely focused on giving you a minimal experience?

  Meet Lite XL editor.

• Linux Links ☛ 5 Best Free and Open Source Incident Response Tools

  
  Computer monitoring systems are used to gather data for the purpose of real-time incident notification, performance analysis, and system health verification. Without such a tool, a system administrator would have to login to each machine to collect information on a regular basis. This kind of repetitive task can be automated using a system monitoring tool.

  Interacting closely with monitoring systems are incident response tools. An incident is an event that could lead to loss of, or disruption to, an organization’s operations, services or functions.

  A good incident response tool integrates with many different IT Service Management tools. It helps organisations respond to critical issues before they impact the business.

  Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks chart. Only free and open source software is included.

• Trend Oceans ☛ 8+ Locate command usage with examples for Linux

  
  We create several files in the Linux system, and it is not possible for us to remember the locations of all the files. In such a case, you can use the “locate” or “find” command to help you find the file.

  The locate command is used to locate files and directories on your system. It can search for files and directories based on their name, content, or location.

Instructionals/Technical

• UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install Gaucho on Ubuntu 20.04

  In this tutorial, We will show you how to install Gaucho on Ubuntu systems.

  Gaucho is an open-source, customizable task launcher to run your apps, commands or scripts.

  Gaucho allows you to configure your commands once and run them in a non-intrusive interface.

  With Gaucho, You can create, modify and run tasks with a simple graphical interface.

• Paul Tagliamonte: k3xec.com/patty: Go bindings to patty

  AX.25 is a tough protocol to use on UNIX systems. A lot of the support in Linux, specifically, is pretty hard to use, and tends to be built into the reptilian brain of the kernel. xan built a userland AX.25 stack called patty, for which I have now built some Go bindings on top of.

• UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install ArangoDB on RHEL & CentOS

  So In this article, we will show you to how to install ArangoDB on RHEL and CentOS.

  ArangoDB is a free and open-source native multi-model database system developed by ArangoDB GmbH. The database system supports three data models (key/value, documents, graphs) with one database core and a unified query language AQL (ArangoDB Query Language). The query language is declarative and allows the combination of different data access patterns in a single query. ArangoDB is a NoSQL database system but AQL is similar in many ways to SQL.

• Linuxiac ☛ How to Install RHEL 8: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide

  This step-by-step guide explains how to download for free and install the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.

  Many CentOS users were dissatisfied when Red Hat announced that it would transition CentOS Linux from a stable Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone to CentOS Stream – a rolling release Linux distro.

  As a result, starting February 1, 2021, Red Hat has made RHEL available at no cost for small-production workloads, with “small” defined as up to 16 systems, to appease some of those users.

• UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install JFrog Artifactory on RHEL 8 / CentOS 8 / Rocky Linux 8

  In this guide, we will show you how to install Jfrog Artifactory on RHEL8 & CentOS 7

  JFrog Artifactory is the only Universal Repository Manager supporting all major packaging formats, build tools and CI servers.

  JFrog Artifactory is also a binary repository manager software designed to store the binary output of the build process for use in distribution and deployment. Artifactory provides support for a number of package formats such as Maven, Conan, Debian APT, NPM, Helm, Ruby, Python, and Docker.

• UNIX Cop ☛ Network Attached Storage Ubuntu

• UNIX Cop ☛ How do solve VMware ESXi common problem: “Unsupported hardware family vmx-12” during OVF import.

  If you were getting following error while importing the OVF/OVA in your VMWare ESXi server.

• Linux Hint ☛ Tar Extract to Specific Folder

  In Linux operating systems, especially in Ubuntu 20.04 system, we can use the “tar.gz” as an extension to compressed files. We can extract the “tar” files in some specific folder within the Linux operating system using the two different methods. We will discuss both of those methods in today’s article. So, let’s make a fresh start now.

• Linux Hint ☛ Tar Extract One Single File

  You may have heard about the files or folders compression. Within Windows, the compressed file is said to be the “zip” file. The compressed file is converted into a “tar.gz” extension within Linux or Unix-like systems. You have performed the unzipping of a whole “zip” file on GUI. Have you ever tried to extract one single file from the “tar” file? If not, and you are looking for the extraction of a single file from the “tar” in Linux, then this article is meant for you.

  Let’s get started by updating our system first. For this, we will be using the “update” command with the utilization of the “apt” package on the shell instruction area. Make sure to use the sudo rights. The password for the sudo account will be asked after the execution. Write your password and press the Enter key to continue. The system will get updated in a few seconds. The command and its processing are shown below. Just run the command shown in the attached screenshot on the Linux terminal.

• Linux Hint ☛ Rolling Deployment in Kubernetes

  In this post, we will look at the deployment options for using the Kubernetes container-orchestration system to deploy containers. We will have learned how to deploy in the Kubernetes cluster in a variety of ways by the end of this article. If you really want to learn more about this topic, keep reading the article. The code can be found in the sections below.

• Linux Hint ☛ Sysdig with Kubernetes

  Kubernetes provides a complete environment to design and produce service-based and scalable applications. It manages everything from container healing to load balancing, discovery, and grouping, keeping you carefree about them. The design is modern, different, scalable, and elegant, and the usage of APIs is a pleasure. When encountering a new infrastructure platform, it is important to monitor and troubleshoot it initially. Same function Sysdig performs for you.

• Vitux ☛ How to install Android Studio on Ubuntu – VITUX

  Android Studio is the most widely used Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Android mobile application development. Android Studio is developed by Google and can run on various operating systems such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. Most of the currently popular Android applications are developed using Android Studio. This tool has several built-in features that provide a stable and fast environment for developing applications.

  In this article, we will show you how to install Android Studio on an Ubuntu 20.04 Linux system using an apt repository and also how to install it using Snap.

• Vitux ☛ How to find your IP Address (IPv4 and IPv6) on Rocky Linux – VITUX

  Every computer, whether server or client, connected to the Internet has an assigned IP address and communicates with other services using the TCP/IP protocol. In this tutorial, we will learn how to find out public and private IP addresses on Rocky Linux. You can find out your IP address either through the terminal or through a GUI option. So let’s get started. The same commands work on other RHEL-based Linux distributions like AlmaLinux and CentOS too.

• Red Hat Official ☛ How to access the Linux terminal | Enable Sysadmin

  You’ve installed Linux; now what? Here’s how to access the console in text mode or with the GUI.

• Linux Hint ☛ How to Use the cp Command in Linux

  A cp is a command-line utility to copy the files along with their content from one location to another in Linux distributions. Both the files, as well as directories, can be copied using the cp command. LinuxMint is a distribution of Linux operating systems that will be used in this write-up to explain how to use the cp command in Linux.

• Vitux ☛ How to Install GNU Octave on Ubuntu 20.04 – VITUX

  GNU Octave is an interpreted high-level programming language with numerous software features intended mainly for numerical computations. It provides solutions for numerical linear and nonlinear problems and for performing various other numerical experiments with compatible languages such as MATLAB. Octave provides extensive graphical features for visualization and data manipulation. Typically it is used through its interactive command-line interface, but with Octave, you can also create non-interactive programs. Since Octave is very similar to the MATLAB programming language, the programs can be easily transferred.

• Ubuntu Handbook ☛ How to Install Google Earth Pro/Enterprise Client in Ubuntu 22.04 | UbuntuHandbook

  This simple tutorial shows how to install Google Earth Pro or Enterprise Client in Ubuntu 22.04 step by step.

  Today we can use Google Earth easily in web browser or mobile phone. For those still need a desktop app, Google’s official apt repository provides the .deb packages for Debian/Ubuntu Linux.

• Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to Install and Use Sublime Text 4 in Linux

  If you are a developer or a developer in the making, then you are well aware that the developing world cannot be complete without a renowned source code editor.

  Sublime Text 4 is a renowned candidate in the developer’s space. It is a fast and powerful editor for writing and editing developer code.

  Python and C++ programming languages are responsible for the existence of this cross-platform editor, which makes it possible to code your projects in any language as it is freely available for download and installation.

• How to Improve Linux User Account Security – LinuxTechLab

  Linux is an open-source operating system that many people and organizations find great use in, even with strong competitors like Windows and macOS. As with any other system, protecting your user accounts is critical.

  This article will explain all you need to know about protecting your Linux account and preventing outside access.

• ID Root ☛ How To Install Glances on Debian 11 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Glances on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Glances is a cross-platform monitoring tool for process monitoring, system resources such as CPU, Disk I/O, File System, Load Average, Memory, Network Interfaces, and processes.

  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 Glances command-line monitoring tools on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• How To Install XAMPP In Linux – OSTechNix

  In this tutorial, we are going to learn what is XAMPP stack and how to install XAMPP in Linux operating systems. Next, we willl discuss how to start or restart XAMPP server and how to access XAMPP test page, phpMyAdmin dashboard. Finally, we will see how to secure XAMPP installation and remove XAMPP if it is not required anymore.

• Make Use Of ☛ How to Downgrade Packages on Linux

  It’s annoying when you upgrade a package on Linux only to find out that the updated version is broken and doesn’t work properly. In such cases, you might be tempted to completely remove the package from your system, but there’s a better way to fix this issue.

  On Linux-based operating systems, you can easily switch to older versions of packages using the default package manager. Here’s how to downgrade packages on Linux and why you might need to.

• Linux command line presentation

  There is no need to install tons of software in order to create a nice and informative presentation. tpp, which stands for Text Presentation Program is a simple to use command line presentation tool which allows you to create a fancy text based slide show presentation and share it with your colleagues or students as an ordinary ASCII text file. tpp utilizes ncurses, and it supports colors, slide-in, source code output, animated command line execution and a real time command executions all available from within your terminal.

  In this tutorial, you will see how to install tpp on all major Linux distros. Then we will take you through some examples so you can see how to create and format the slides inside of your text presentation.

• TechRepublic ☛ How to list Linux services with systemctl for easier troubleshooting | TechRepublic

  Linux is an incredibly powerful system with GUI and command-line tools to meet nearly any need. Once upon a time, managing running systems was a bit more challenging on the open-source operating systems because the previous init system required administrators to use a hodgepodge of methods and tools to start, stop, run, and monitor services. With the advent of systemd, that all changed such that admins had a much easier means of controlling the multitude of services their applications and services depend on.

• Make Use Of ☛ How to Make Firefox Feel Native on Linux Desktops

  Mozilla Firefox is the default web browser on many, if not most, Linux distributions. Firefox is also the largest and most well-known free and open-source web browser in the world. This may give the impression that Firefox would feel absolutely at home on the Linux desktop.

  Functionally, Firefox works just fine on Linux. It’s in the appearance department where inconsistencies start to show. Firefox feels ever-so-slightly out of place on most Linux desktop environments, but with a few tweaks, you can make the browser feel more like a native app.

• TechRepublic ☛ How to use the Firefox tagging system | TechRepublic

  If you’re looking for a way to better organize your Firefox bookmarks, the built-in tagging system might be a big help. Learn how to take advantage of this feature.

• TechRepublic ☛ How to use Ghostery’s privacy-minded Dawn browser | TechRepublic

  You’d like to be able to browse the web with some measure of privacy. That’s not an easy task with the major browsers. Instead, you can turn to a lesser known but more privacy-minded browser, and one candidate is the Ghostery Dawn browser.

  Made by the people behind the Ghostery browser privacy extension, Dawn tries to limit the information that is typically monitored and recorded when you use one of the major browsers. Toward that end, Dawn offers ad blocking, anti-tracking and an ad-free search engine. Ghostery Dawn is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android.

  The Ghostery browser offers free access and paid plans. With free access, you will see private sponsored links in the search results, which the company said helps it pay the bills while still preserving your privacy. To bypass the sponsored links and unlock other products and features, a paid subscription will run you $4.99 a month billed monthly or $3.99 a month billed annually.

• MakeTech Easier ☛ How to Install Your Own Federated Twitter with Pleroma – Make Tech Easier

  Microblogging is a wonderful way to express your thoughts. It is short, succinct and sweet. In this regard, Twitter has been one of the most popular microblogging platforms in the world. However, relying on this particular company for your microblogging needs not be the best solution for everyone.

  Fortunately, there are alternatives such as Pleroma which is a self-hosted Twitter. This is a lightweight federated microblogging platform. Using federation allows the platform to communicate with other federated instances which means that you do not need to gather a lot of people for your own private Twitter to start sharing information. This article aims to help you get started with Pleroma.

• How to use Gerrit code review effectively

  Any code submission to LibreOffice should pass Gerrit code review in order to get merged into the LibreOffice codebase. This is possible using the code review tool Gerrit.

• Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Install Grub Customizer to Configure the Boot Menu in Ubuntu 22.04 | UbuntuHandbook

  For Linux users want to configure the boot menu screen, Grub Customizer is always a good choice for beginners.

  I’ve written quite a few tutorials about the default boot-loader, which is called Grub, including set default OS to boot, install themes, add kernel parameters for hibernate, custom screen resolution, etc. All of them can be done via Grub-Customizer besides editing the configuration file.

• Linux Handbook ☛ What are Vim Modes? How to Change Them?

  Vim is a powerful text editor, and is also referred to as a modal text editor.

  What does “modal text editor” mean? It means that Vim is a text editor that has a mode-based workflow. Each keystroke is paired to a command in Vim. This is in contrast to other editors where each keystroke is registered as text and is written to a text file.

  So, what are these modes in Vim? Let’s have a look at them.

• How to Send and Download Files Using Rsync – RoseHosting

  Rsync stands for “remote synchronization”. Rsync is the most robust, versatile and flexible tool to transfer files if compared to other alternatives like SCP. It is a great tool for daily server operations like backup and restore, and general file operations between two or more local and remote machines. In this article, we will show you how to send and download files using rsync.

• Improve the table configuration in LibreOffice Writer – LibreOffice Design Team

  Configuring tables is an every day task for word processors. Most users likely insert a table via menu or toolbar and size the columns per mouse. This usually wont result in a satisfying precision and the table properties dialog would be the next step. But here the problems begin for real since using a certain width for all columns is not possible unless the “Adapt table width” is checked, which requires to change the “Automatic” alignment on a different tab to something else.

• Linux.org ☛ LFCS – Kerberos Authentication (CentOS7) | Linux.org

  Kerberos is an authentication method that can assign a user a ‘ticket’ after the first sign-on. Once a user has entered a correct password, then they are granted a ‘ticket’ to allow connection again without a password. The key thing to remember is that the ‘ticket’ expires after a certain amount of time.

  Kerberos Authentication is a security measure that adds a level of security between two network systems. Once granted, the two systems ‘trust’ each other.

• ID Root ☛ How To Install Java on Rocky Linux 8 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Java on Rocky Linux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Java is a high-level programming language designed to be portable and to have as few dependencies as possible to run on any system. The general purpose of the Java programming language is to let developers write programs or applications once, but the application itself can be run on any system across multiple operating systems. Java has been around since 1995. It was released by Sun Microsystems as a programming language for “smart” consumer devices, particularly those with multimedia capabilities.

  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 Java on Rocky Linux. 8.

• Video ☛ How to install Flightgear on Debian 11 – Invidious

  In this video, we are looking at how to install Flightgear on Debian 11.

• Video ☛ How To Install Arch Linux With NO INTERNET – Invidious

  Most Arch Linux installers including the primary iso require an internet connection to complete the installation process but what if you don’t have one well you’re in luck because Arch Boot exists.

• Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install PreMID and Discord on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install PreMID and Discord 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.

• Jussi Pakkanen ☛ Jussi Pakkanen: Getting web proxys and certificates working on Linux or “if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather take a thousand years of the Sarlacc pit, thankyouverymuch”

  When web proxies originally came to being, people added support for them in the least invasive and most terrible way possible: using environment variables. Enter http_proxy, https_proxy and their kind. Then the whole Internet security thing happened and people realised that this was far too a convenient way to steal all your traffic. So programs stopped using those envvars.

  Oh, I’m sorry, that’s not how it went at all.

  Some programs stopped using those envvars whereas other did not. New programs were written and they, too, either used those envvars or didn’t, basically at random. Those that eschewed envvars had a problem because proxy support is important, so they did the expected thing: everyone and their dog invented their own way of specifying a proxy. Maybe they created a configuration file, maybe they hid the option somewhere deep in the guts of their GUI configuration menus. Maybe they added their own envvars. Who’s to say what is the correct way?

  This was, obviously, seen as a bad state of things so modern distros have a centralised proxy setting in their GUI configurator and now everyone uses that.

  Trololololololooooo! Of course they don’t. I mean, some do, others don’t. There is no logic which do or don’t. For example you might thing that GUI apps would obey the GUI option whereas command line programs would not but in reality it’s a complete crapshoot. There is no way to tell. There does not even seem to be any consensus on what the value of said option string should be (as we shall see later).

  Since things were not broken enough already, the same thing happened with SSL certificates. Many popular applications will not use the system’s cert store at all. Instead they prefer to provide their own artisanal hand-crafted certificates because the ones provided by the operating system have cooties. The official reason is probably “security” because as we all know if someone has taken over your computer to the extent that they can insert malicious security certificates into root-controlled locations, sticking to your own hand-curated certificate set is enough to counter any other attacks they could possibly do.

• Purism ☛ Definitive Guide to User Documentation for Librem Devices – Purism

  Because all Librem computers share are built on base OS/PureOS, there are many crossovers when it comes to software. Here is the guide you can use for all Librem Computers.

• Make Use Of ☛ How to Install and Run Ghidra on Linux

  Kick-start your journey to be a master reverser with the tools and analytical prowess of Ghidra SRE. Here’s a guide on how to install and set up Ghidra on your Linux machine.

• HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Supabase with Docker on Debian 11

  Supabase is an open-source Firebase alternative that provides you with all the tools needed to develop your applications. Supabase offers a PostgreSQL database, user authentication, storage and a real-time API and integrates with popular frameworks and tools such as Angular, Flutter, Next.js, React, Svelte and Vue.

• Linux command line presentation

  There is no need to install tons of software in order to create a nice and informative presentation. tpp, which stands for Text Presentation Program is a simple to use command line presentation tool which allows you to create a fancy text based slide show presentation and share it with your colleagues or students as an ordinary ASCII text file. tpp utilizes ncurses, and it supports colors, slide-in, source code output, animated command line execution and a real time command executions all available from within your terminal.

  In this tutorial, you will see how to install tpp on all major Linux distros. Then we will take you through some examples so you can see how to create and format the slides inside of your text presentation.

Games

• Valve Steam Deck can run Bitwig’s DAW and the VCV Rack 2 Pro synth as a plugin: a gaming handheld that music producers should be interested in, too? | MusicRadar

  Linux-based portable gaming PC has a few creative tricks up its sleeve

• Halo MCC update breaks the game on Steam Deck and Proton

  Halo MCC may be ‘unsupported’ on the Steam Deck, but plenty of players have been able to get the game’s campaigns up and running on Valve’s handheld (albeit on their lonesome). However, it appears that the most recent update to the game has rendered the FPS game unplayable on the portable gaming PC and other Linux Proton systems.

• Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games with Native Linux Clients – 2022-04-12 Edition – Boiling Steam

  Between 2022-04-05 and 2022-04-12 there were 25 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 195 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 12.8 % of total released titles.

Distributions

• Its FOSS ☛ EndeavourOS Apollo Release Introduces a new Worm Window Manager

  EndeavourOS is an Arch-based distro that focuses on a terminal-centric user experience along with all the other goodies.

  With its latest Apollo release, the EndeavourOS team has made efforts to improve the community editions, resolve some existing issues, and add a new window manager.

• Make Use Of ☛ MX Linux Casually Drops Version 21.1, Codenamed “Wildflower”

  
  The latest version of MX Linux sports updated software, a new kernel, and a tool to make Samba sharing easier. All with the minimum of fuss.

  The MX Linux project has announced the 21.1 release of its Linux distribution, known as “Wildflower.” It arrives with the minimum of fuss and fanfare, but enough new features to be worth checking out.

• New Releases

  • Archcraft April Release Available

    April release brings few minor changes to the ISO, removed a bunch of stuff, programs, scripts etc.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • SUSE’s Corporate Blog ☛ Accelerate Your Cloud Vision. JOIN SUSE at SAP Sapphire Orlando [Ed: SUSE is pushing SAP's proprietary software]

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Red Hat Official ☛ How to deploy, run and monitor Microsoft SQL server on RHEL [Ed: What are you doing, IBM Red Hat?]

  • OpenSource.com ☛ The path to an open world begins with inclusivity [Ed: Says the company where older colleagues get labeled "dinobabies" and dismissed]

    For the past few weeks, collaborator Brook Manville and I have been offering our thoughts on (and analyses of) Johan Norberg’s Open: The Story of Human Progress. My first article simply explained what the author means by the word “open.” Thinking alongside Norberg now, I’d like to discuss future ways we might apply open organization principles to bring about prosperous societies globally. Norberg hints at such directions, but I believe further detail is required if we’ll be able to set up action plans for the future.

  • Enterprise Open Source Adoption Is Growing: Red Hat Report [Ed: Red Hat uses proprietary software here. Red Hat loves “Open Source” so much that sometimes it even uses it itself. Sometimes…]

    Red Hat, the enterprise open source solution provider, recently released its findings from the 2022 State of Enterprise Open Source report which surveyed 1,296 IT leaders. This is the fourth year Red Hat has run the survey, which aims to help Red Hat get a better understanding of how IT leaders view enterprise open source software.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Red Hat named to Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list for the fourth year in a row [Ed: This ladder must be fake and sold considering how many workers, including managers, are fleeing Red Hat]

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • ZDNet ☛ How to upgrade Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 before it’s officially released | ZDNet

    Ubuntu 22.04 should be released on April 21, 2022, and it looks to be one of the best releases from Canonical to date. Although there aren’t any awe-inspiring new features, there’s so much polish that the desktop distribution feels fresh.

    If that’s enough to pique your interest, you’ll be glad to know you can always upgrade your current release to 22.04 without much hassle.

  • TechRepublic ☛ How to upgrade Ubuntu Server from 20.04 to 22.04 | TechRepublic

    The official release of Ubuntu 22.04 is almost upon us. Jack Wallen walks you through the process of upgrading version 20.04 to the new LTS, so you’re primed and ready for the big day.

  • H2S Media ☛ How to Install Bottles on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy – Linux Shout

    Run your Windows Application on Linux but in a new way by installing Bottles on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish using the terminal.

  • TechRadar ☛ The next major Ubuntu release is here, with a bunch of handy upgrades | TechRadar

    Ubuntu 22.04, the next version of the famous Linux (opens in new tab) distro, is now available to download in beta.

    Codenamed Jammy Jelly fish, Ubuntu 22.04 is the next Long Term Service (LTS) release and comes bundled with a number of handy upgrades. The final version is set to go live later this month.

    An LTS version is usually relevant for about five years, giving businesses long-term peace of mind. Many things can go wrong when a new version of an OS is released, from unsupported hardware, to driver issues and beyond. Knowing that this version will be supported with updates and tweaks for such a long time helps admins prepare for the future.

  • H2S Media ☛ How to install .NET Core (dotnet) on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS [Ed: Not a good idea though]

  • H2S Media ☛ Install and setup Plex Media Server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – Linux Shout

    Learn the simple commands to install Plex Media Server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish for creating your streaming server.

    Plex was started as a hobby project but with time, it developed into a professional streaming server software to manage various types of media files. Users can install and use it to access their videos, music, and images remotely using the internet or locally over a local network; even you can share them with friends while on the move.

    The basic version of the Plex Media Server can be used free of charge, but it only has a limited range of functions. You can get additional functions by purchasing Plex Pass at $4.99/month. As is usual with paid subscriptions, the price decreases as the term increases. The annual subscription costs $39.99 annually whereas if you are already a user of Plex and want a lifetime commitment then it offers a lifelong subscription for a one-time fee of $119.99.

  • H2S Media ☛ How to install FlareGet on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – Linux Shout

    Start managing your downloads on Linux by installing FlareGet on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish LTS. FlareGet is able to work with different protocols: in addition to HTTP, it can also handle HTTPS and FTP. In addition, downloads can also be interrupted and resumed later without a loss. Thanks to a scheduler, you can plan exactly when and to what extent you want to use the available bandwidth.

    FlareGet is not open-source software, that’s because the tool is proprietary licensed, closed-source software. However, apart from the pro (paid) version, the free version is also available to install on Windows, Linux, and macOS from its official website.

  • The Fridge: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 730

  • Ubuntu Fridge | Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 730

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 730 for the week of April 3 – 9, 2022. The full version of this issue is available here.

Devices/Embedded

• CNX Software ☛ Qualcomm Edge AI Vision kit combines Qualcomm QCS610 SoC & Sony IMX415 4K ultra low light camera

  
  The kit also comes with a micro-coaxial cable to connect the camera module to the carrier board, a camera lens, a USB Type-A to Type-C cable to connect the kit to a host/development machine, and a 12/3A power adapter.

  On the software side, e-con Systems provides a Yocto-build Linux image with a GStreamer based camera application for “HDMI streaming”, H.264 network streaming over Ethernet and WiFi, snapshot image capture in JPEG and RAW Bayer, H.264 video recording, and adjustment of camera features like white balance, gain, exposure, and so on. Engineers can make full use of the AI capabilities of the kit using Qualcomm neural processing SDK for AI, Neural network API (TFLite models), GStreamer plugin (DLC models), and GStreamer TFLite plugin. Software and hardware documentation is available after free email registration.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • PIA ☛ Get Google out of Your Mobile Life with /e/OS

    Is there any way to truly stay private with an Android? Actually, yes. /e/OS from /e/ Foundation is one of the very few Android-based operating systems that doesn’t send any information back to Google. I’ve tried and tested the software to see whether it’s worth using, and if complete privacy comes at the expense of functionality.

  • Arduino ☛ Keeping algae in check with a DIY pond monitor | Arduino Blog

    For element14 user christophesky, his garden’s pond acts as a meeting point for a wide variety of animals, including frogs, birds, and insects. However, sudden algae blooms can turn the once-clean pond into a toxin-filled pool that is harmful to its visitors, which is what caused Christopher to think of a solution as part of element14’s Just Encase Design Challenge. His idea was to float a comprehensive monitoring system on top of the water, capable of taking regular readings and letting him know what needs to be changed.

  • Arduino ☛ This MKR WAN 1300-powered rover was inspired by the orb-weaver spider | Arduino Blog

    Orb-weaver spiders are often found in gardens and are famous for the intricate webs they spin to catch pre, and as the name implies, this web is in the shape of a circle. In keeping with the theme, element14 user Miloš Rašic had the idea to build a small rover taking inspiration from the orb-weaver spider and NASA’s latest rovers in that it “casts” a net of small sensor boxes within a circular area that each report data to a central receiver, and it would do so autonomously.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Digital Trends ☛ YouTube picture-in-picture remains Android exclusive for now | Digital Trends

  • India Times ☛ Vivo launches its first Android tablet: All you need to know – Times of India

  • SamMobile ☛ Samsung Galaxy M31 Android 12 update has been released – SamMobile

  • Android Headlines ☛ 11 Of The Best Measurement Apps For Android

  • FOSSBytes ☛ Google Separated Emoji From Android Update And You Should Be Happy

  • Sony Android 12 update tracker: List of eligible devices, release date & …

  • SamMobile ☛ Can Samsung please stop releasing flagships with older Android versions? – SamMobile

  • How to set up emergency SOS on Android – Phandroid

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• OpenSource.com ☛ Try this open source alternative to Salesforce

  
  CiviCRM is an open source constituent relationship management (CRM) system designed to help you manage information about your organization’s contacts, members, donations, and events. It’s built specifically for nonprofits, so you won’t find yourself having to try to shoehorn your organizational workflow into a business-oriented model (as some find themselves doing when using similar CRMs).

  Even better, it’s built to be extremely flexible and customizable. You can create custom fields, location types, contact sub-types, relationship types, financial type and more. Best of all, it’s customized to your nonprofit’s specific needs. There are no hard-coded limits on the number of contacts you can store—and likewise, no arbitrary limits or thresholds that trigger a higher monthly fee. (I’ve heard an unfortunate story of a group that started out with, for example, a “Nonprofit Success Pack” on a proprietary CRM. When they outgrew it, they were trapped in what turned out to be a very expensive system, or they wanted to expand functionality with “apps” that ended up unexpectedly costing hundreds of dollars a month.)

• Market Screener ☛ Dynatrace : Managed release notes version 1.238

  To take advantage of performance improvements, the latest security-vulnerability enhancements, and bug fixes, we’ve upgraded JRE for Cassandra and Elasticsearch. Both, Cassandra and Elasticsearch will now use JRE 8u322. Other components will now use JRE 11.0.14.

• 9 Best Free Open Source Firewall in 2022 – Windows/Linux – DekiSoft

  Firewalls are made to protect the network from any threat by filtering both the in and outbound traffic and ensuring network security as well. The first thing when we talk about the 9 best open source firewalls is that they are free, well let us explain such a term for software that is distributed under a license. These are compatible with various Linux distributions along with Windows 10/11.

• Apache Blog ☛ The Apache Weekly News Round-up: week ending 8 April 2022 : The Apache Software Foundation Blog

  Hello, everyone –let’s review the Apache community’s activities from over the past week

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • 
      Firefox Nightly: These Weeks In Firefox: Issue 113

• Education

  • Gilles Castel ☛ My Mathematics PhD research workflow

    Earlier this year I started a PhD in pure mathematics at KU Leuven in Belgium and in this blog post I discuss my research workflow. I talk about how I take daily notes, both handwritten ones and ones in LaTeX and how I handle references, featuring a way to instantly add clickable references to my notes.

    Doing pure mathematics research is quite unlike other scientific research. I don’t run experiments, nor do I have data to crunch through. A computer is surprisingly often of little to no help. It’s just you and pencil and paper. Or in my case, me, my laptop and a Wacom tablet.

    My research workflow is hybrid: it consists both of (digital) handwritten notes and typed LaTeX notes. I like having these two options. Handwritten notes allow me to think completely freely, while taking notes in LaTeX forces me more to write down things neatly, which sometimes results in finding mistakes in the handwritten notes.

• Programming/Development

  • SUSE’s Corporate Blog ☛ Glimpse reduces time-to-launch with agile DevOps strategy [Ed: A buzzwords strategy]

    “SUSE Rancher offers painless Kubernetes upgrades, native Kubernetes experience and is also really easy to use.” Predrag Aleksić, Team Lead – System Engineer, Glimpse.

  • Techstrong Group ☛ 3 Must-Haves When Implementing DevSecOps [Ed: Implementing buzzwords]

    The term DevSecOps is already more than a dozen years old. DevOps—the practice of combining software development with IT operations to deploy applications faster—was first coined in 2008 and refined in a historic conference presentation in 2009. DevSecOps—the concept of baking in security at every stage of Agile development, rather than tackling it at the end—followed soon after.
    Despite a huge amount of industry conversation and activity around DevSecOps, it has been hard to tell just how much traction the movement has been gaining.

  • Perl/Raku

    • A Subset of Red | Playing Perl 6␛b6xA Raku

      SmokeMachine reported on IRC to have found an unusual use of subset.

    • Rakulang ☛ 2022.15 Wordling – Rakudo Weekly News

      Tyler Limkemann returns (after an extended absence) with a very nice article about how they used the Raku Programming Language to solve Wordle challenges. With plenty of code and theoretical background.

  • Python

    • Pragmatic Linux ☛ Read a file line by line using Python – PragmaticLinux

      Did you ever encounter a situation where you needed to just make a small change in a file? Perhaps even quite often, to the point that you want to automate this task? A basic script written in the Python programming language does the trick. You just need to know how to read a text file line by line, using the Python programming language. This Python tutorial explains exactly that: How to read a text file line by line.

  • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

    • Network World ☛ Demystifying &&, ||, and ! on Linux

      The &&, ||, and ! operators allow you to run a lot of useful commands on Linux, but you first need to get used to syntax that is a little trickier than the if-then-else command you might normally use.

Counter Punch ☛ How the Nation-State Crushed the Region and Created Our Global Survival Crisis

The map of the world today is covered by splotches of color indicating the boundaries of nation-states. Though the world has had empires for over four millennia, the nation-state is a relatively new animal, beginning to gain form in Western Europe in the 1300s, and over following centuries rising to replace the city-states and multi-ethnic empires that preceded it. Originating in France and Britain, the nation-state became an engine to impose an unprecedented level of cultural and political uniformity on what had been a more diverse landscape. In doing so, it obscured the more fundamental reality of the region.

Nation-states tend to be large abstract concepts, none more so than the United States, which was born of a set of concepts.  But the foundations of every nation, its constituent elements, are vital places and regions.  Advanced geographers, in fact, have declared the region the cellular unit of the global economy.  The region is where life really happens, where economies take shape in the form of specialized economic clusters, where basic decisions are taken concerning transportation systems, land use, energy supplies, knowledge acquisition and cultural development.

Counter Punch ☛ How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times

Guzmán argues that creating and sustaining a discussion is very achievable in her book I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. Guzmán shows we can participate in less hostile conversations if we are open to listening and understanding why others have different beliefs.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Counter Punch ☛ Why is the Earth Flat?

This article gave me one of the explanations, or perhaps the explanation, of why the round Earth became flat. Now, if in elementary questions of mathematics, the general public does not know that 1/3 is greater than ¼, or that the third part of a whole, 0.333…. is greater than 0.25, the fourth part of that whole, what can we say? What kind of world are we in? Worse yet, which already enters the realm of the terribly comical, if people don’t know that the number 64 is smaller than the number 80, what can we say?

But this reality is very close to us, today, all over Brazil.  I will tell you now – in the sense of telling, narrating – about a case that happened to me. This week I stood in one of the vaccination lines against covid. One of the attendants, “to organize” the first line, appeared from time to time and announced the numbers of vaccination tickets – the numbers, again! -that would be attended to. And it was so organized that sometimes the people with their files did not answer the call. So the organizer started calling by the hundreds. So: “From 200 to 290, stand over there. And then, “400 to 490…”. Then I protested: “Wouldn’t it be 291 to 380 now?”. Believe me, the young woman stammered to the point of stammering: “Huh? And she reacted: “I am calling for hundreds!”. Then, in the most serious and respectful way, I answered her: “But after 290 comes 291, 292, 293… not 400”. She conceded contrarily and shouted: “291! 292! 293! ….”. Terrible, To me, clearly, she expressed an absolute lack of manners – that outside the books of good manners.

The Nation ☛ Emily St. John Mandel’s Neatly Designed Worlds

It doesn’t pay to think too hard about the nuances of fictional time travel. Let the rickety carapace of the plot fall away—the clutter of paradoxes, loops, body doubles—and the stories within are pure parables: determinism versus agency, choices followed by consequences (intended and unintended), the past affecting the future. They are about romantic fatalism (The Time Traveler’s Wife), loving your dad (About Time), loving your wife (Needle in a Timestack), the struggle to control intellectual property (Primer). Following the logistics too rigorously just gets you tangled up in the leash. As a lissome French physicist advises in Tenet (which is about loving your bro), “Don’t try to understand it. Just feel it.”

Counter Punch ☛ What’s Going On in Buffalo?

Counter Punch ☛ Workers, Members of Congress Join Forces to Save Senate Cafeteria Jobs

Project Censored ☛ K-12 Cafeteria Staff are Severely Underpaid – Validated Independent News

A February 2022 report by the Economic Policy Institute considering K-12 staff shortages more widely explains that poor cafeteria staff pay is likely a major reason for a shortage of cafeteria staff. They made an average of just $331 per week (in 2020 dollars) between 2014 and 2019 according to an analysis of Current Population Survey data, though there are slight discrepancies in the average hourly pay and weekly pay figures due to methodology. In contrast, the median American worker made $790 per week, more than double the average K-12 cafeteria worker.

Counter Punch ☛ Political Appointments: Downgrading the Australian Human Rights Commission

This smugness did not convince the international standards body on human rights, which has found that the Australian Human Rights Commission should be downgraded in its standing.  The reason: seemingly political appointments, without a rigorous selection process, of Ben Gauntlett to the position of Disability Discrimination Commissioner in 2019 and Lorraine Finlay to the position of Human Rights Commissioner last year.

The Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions, which conducts the review every five years, considers whether the body in question meets the UN Principles on National Institutions which considers institutional independence for the purpose of ensuring the effective promotion and protection of human rights.

Science

• Hackaday ☛ Trenton Computer Festival Makes YouTube Debut

  While it doesn’t have the recognition of DEF CON or even HOPE, the Trenton Computer Festival (TCF) holds the record for the longest continually running computer convention, dating all the way back to 1976. TCF has offered vendor spaces, a swap meet, workshops, and keynote talks for almost as long as the personal computer has existed. But until now, all that knowledge was only available to those in the Northeast US that were willing to follow the itinerant event as its bounced between venues over the decades.

Education

• Common Dreams ☛ Right-Wing College Expanding Charter School Network to Combat ‘Progressive’ Teaching

  Hillsdale College, a small conservative undergraduate institution in southern Michigan with ties to Republican elites, is expanding its nationwide network of K-12 charter schools in an attempt to take its battle against what it calls “progressive” and “leftist academics” to an even younger audience, The New York Times reported Sunday.

  Thanks to donations from right-wing benefactors, Hillsdale has helped open about two dozen so-called “classical” charter schools, which “emphasize the centrality of the Western tradition,” in 13 states since 2010. This endeavor is on the cusp of more than doubling in size, the Times reported, because Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee recently invited the college to start 50 schools in the state using public funds, including $32 million earmarked for charter facilities.

Hardware

• Hackaday ☛ A V2 Rocket Inspired Steam Turbine Skateboard Is Just Around The Corner

  [Integza] never fails to amuse with his numerous (and sometimes really sketchy) attempts to create usable thrust, by pretty much all means possible and the latest video (embedded below) attempting to run a reaction turbine from decomposing hydrogen peroxide, doesn’t fail to disappoint. The inspiration came from the WWII V2 rocket, which used Sodium Permanganate to breakdown Hydrogen Peroxide. This produced high pressure steam, which spun a turbine, which in turn drove the turbopumps that delivered the needed huge quantity of alcohol and liquid oxygen into the combustion chamber.

• Hackaday ☛ This Chariot Is Pulled By A Team Of Motorcycles

  We’re fans of unusual forms of transport here, so when we saw an article featuring a home-made motorcycle chariot we knew we had to share it with you. You’ll probably notice it comes from the keyboard of our colleague [Lewin Day] as he moonlights writing for The Drive, and he’s brought along a lot of context and history to the dual-Husqvarna chariot built by [Jack Field].

• Hackaday ☛ Blood Pressure Cuff Hacked Into Water Level Sensor

  We often write a post and then learn something new and cool from the comments. The same thing happened when [Andreas] posted a video about monitoring fluid levels. Commenters told him that the best fluid level sensor was a hacked blood pressure monitor. He didn’t know that, and we didn’t either, until we watched his video, below.

• Hackaday ☛ Quick Hacks: Countersinking Screw Heads With 3D Laser Engraving

  Here’s a fun quick hack from [Timo Birnschein] about using the 3D laser engraving (or ‘stamp’ engraving) mode of certain laser cutter toolchains to create a handy countersink shape in a laser-cut and engraved workpiece. Since [Timo] uses a small laser cutter to cut out and mark project boards for their electronics builds, having an extra messy, manual countersinking operation with subsequent clean-up seemed like a waste of time and effort, if the cutter could be persuaded to do it for them.

• Hackaday ☛ Glow In The Dark Computer Memory Illuminates The Fundamentals

  Computer memory has taken on many forms over the years, from mercury-based delay-line tubes to handwoven magnetic core. These days, volatile storage using semiconductors has become ubiquitous with computing, but what if there was a better way? [Michael Kohn] has been working on a new standard for computer memory that uses glow in the dark stickers.

• Lexicon Architectural Rubberducking

  I’m going to think out loud for a moment about a problem I’m considering.

  RAM is a precious resource on any server. Look at VPS servers, and you’ll be hard pressed to find one with much more than 32 Gb. Look at leasing a dedicated server, and it’s the RAM that really drives up the price. My server has 128 Gb, and it it’s so full it needs to unbutton its pants to sit down comfortably. Anything I can offload to disk is great.

  A significant amount of the memory usage is in the lexicon. The lexicon is a mapping between search terms, words (sometimes N-grams) to a unique numeric ID, as these IDs are a lot more space-efficient than indexing words as strings.

  The contract for the lexicon is that every time you enter a specific string, you get the same number back. This number is unique to the string.

  At the moment of writing, the lexicon has about 620,000,000 entries.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Counter Punch ☛ What’s Driving the Avian Flu Epidemic in Domesticated Birds

  Avian influenza (AI) is a contagious virus that affects all birds. There are two groups of AI viruses that cause disease in chickens: highly pathogenic AI and low pathogenic AI.

  HPAI viruses cause high mortality in poultry, and occasionally in some wild birds. LPAI can cause mild to moderate disease in poultry, and usually little to no clinical signs of illness in wild birds.

• TruthOut ☛ The BA.2 Subvariant Is Now Dominant, and Weary as We Are, We Can’t Dismiss It

• Project Censored ☛ The Library of Things Movement—Cutting Waste, Reclaiming Local Economies and Community – Validated Independent News

  In the age of COVID policies and politics, Libraries of Things are one solution to a world fragmented by economic hardship, social division, and a diminishing sense of community. More than just access to stuff, Libraries of Things foster community, relationship building, and local empowerment by offering classes and spaces where people can share not just things, but also ideas and skills. The best Libraries of Things start out building a place to borrow and share things—and end up become a place for community, from workshops, events, public forums, to game nights.

• The Nation ☛ No Good Can Come From Downplaying Covid

  Throughout the 21st century, Democrats have identified as the party of science, and that has served them well. Against the threat posed by Republicans who deny climate change, thwart stem cell research, and ridicule infectious disease protocols for public spaces, Democrats have argued that Americans need to respect scientific data and the health and safety standards that protect us all. Yet as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to vex the United States, with the death toll moving toward 1 million, Democrats lack a coherent strategy for projecting their seriousness about tackling a lingering health care challenge—which is one variant away from again becoming a crisis—and for holding to account those who failed to take it seriously in the first place.1

• Orac ☛ SBM versus ivermectin and other implausible treatments

  A couple of weeks ago while discussing the science-based medicine (SBM) behind it, I likened ivermectin to acupuncture. The reason why the comparison came to me is because the reaction of those promoting ivermectin as a highly effective treatment—miracle cure, even—for COVID-19 is the approach to evidence. As more and more high-quality evidence from randomized clinical trials has failed to find a therapeutic effect from using ivermectin to treat COVID-19, increasingly its advocates point to positive studies that are less rigorous, such as observational and uncontrolled clinical studies. This is, more or less, exactly what acupuncture advocates have been doing as more and more high-quality studies with appropriate sham acupuncture placebo groups fail to find a detectable benefit for acupuncture for treating anything. They’ve been citing lower quality “pragmatic” studies, which might not be blinded (much less double-blinded), placebo-controlled, or, in some cases, even randomized. As I explain time and time again, though, citing pragmatic studies is putting the cart before the horse. Pragmatic studies are intended to see how well a treatment that’s been shown to work in high quality randomized controlled clinical trials works “out in the wild” outside of clinical trials and all the rigid protocols and selection criteria, a situation where the indications for the treatment inevitably expand as well even as the rigor with which the protocol is followed declines. Ivermectin advocates even use the same sorts of excuses, too, when randomized controlled trials (RCTs) fail to show a benefit when ivermectin is used to treat COVID-19, such as claiming that medicine is biased and there is a double standard. (There is a double standard, but it doesn’t favor what acupuncture and ivermectin advocates think it does.)

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Bloomberg ☛ Microsoft Customers Decry Cloud Contracts That Sideline Rivals [Ed: Microsoft is bribery and the author of this article is Microsoft's media mole for nearly 15 years already]

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Unicorn Media ☛ OpenSSF Protecting Open Source Security as Cold War Turns Hot [Ed: Years ago FOSS Force spoke about the corruption of Linux Foundation. Now, after getting money from Linux Foundation, it does puff pieces for the corrupt Linux Foundation. SJVN effect.]

  • Security

    • LWN ☛ Security updates for Monday

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (gzip, libxml2, minidlna, openjpeg2, thunderbird, webkit2gtk, wpewebkit, xen, and xz-utils), Fedora (crun, unrealircd, and vim), Mageia (389-ds-base, busybox, flatpak, fribidi, gdal, python-paramiko, and usbredir), openSUSE (opera and seamonkey), Oracle (kernel and kernel-container), Red Hat (firefox), Scientific Linux (firefox), Slackware (libarchive), SUSE (389-ds, libsolv, libzypp, zypper, and python), and Ubuntu (python-django and tcpdump).

    • CISA ☛ CISA Adds Eight Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog | CISA [Ed: Microsoft, Microsoft... more than anything else]

      CISA has added eight new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: to view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow on the of the “Date Added to Catalog” column, which will sort by descending dates.

    • Extracting Credentials from Multifunction Devices – Hurricane Labs

      Hurricane Labs pentester Steve Benson walks us through extracting SMTP mail service credentials from two different types of MFDs.

    • Ruby 3.1.2 Released

    • Ruby 3.0.4 Released

    • Ruby 2.7.6 Released

    • Ruby 2.6.10 Released

    • CVE-2022-28738: Double free in Regexp compilation

    • CVE-2022-28739: Buffer overrun in String-to-Float conversion

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Peerverse ☛ Let’s talk about Bluesky

        It’s amazing to me how much FUD is being spread about the Fediverse in that post. Consider this backhanded insult towards Mastodon: [...]

Defence/Aggression

• Counter Punch ☛ The Rise of Digi-Fascism

  Despite its horrific past – or perhaps “because of its past” – today’s version of fascism is doing rather well. In fact, in some quarters it has even become something of a life-style idea exemplified by those who invaded Capitol Hill on 6th January 2021; right-wing extremists camouflaging themselves as Canadian truckers; some sections of the anti-vaxxers during the Coronavirus pandemic; politicians who claim that the Charlottesville Neo-Nazis are very fine people – this list goes on.

  In short, the world of real fascism (1920s to 1940s), today’s reality of offline neo-fascism, and its latest mutation of online digi-fascism remains a simple world defined by good-vs.-evil emotions. It still is just as Nazism’s Aryan master ideologue – Carl Schmitt – once claimed, those who are identified as evil and as the enemy must be destroyed.

• Counter Punch ☛ Standing Together for the Sacred

  Let this man’s spirit flow across the whole planet.

  War is hell, and when we wage it — when we dehumanize an enemy, thus allowing ourselves to commit mass murder — we dehumanize ourselves. This unknown Russian man, in posing as someone killed in Ukraine, is bringing awareness home: Look what we’re doing! Let us reclaim our humanity.

• Counter Punch ☛ Oklahoma State Officials Resist Supreme Court Ruling Affirming Tribal Authority Over American Indian Country

  State officials have also repeatedly refused to cooperate with tribal leaders to comply with the ruling, issued in 2020 and known as McGirt v. Oklahoma. Local governments, however, continue to cooperate with the tribes and show how the ruling could actually help build connections between the tribal governments and their neighbors.

  In the McGirt ruling, the Supreme Court held that much of eastern Oklahoma is Indian country under the terms of an 1833 treaty between the U.S. government and the Muscogee Creek Nation. Based on that treaty and an 1885 federal law, the ruling effectively means that the state of Oklahoma cannot prosecute crimes committed by or against American Indians there. Federal and tribal officials are the only ones who can pursue these cases.

• Counter Punch ☛ Washington’s Wedding Album From Hell

  This week, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to call for an investigation of the war crimes now being committed by the Russians in Ukraine. “We rise today not as Republicans, Democrats, but as Americans, as a united Congress on behalf of the American people condemning these atrocities,” said Representative Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas. He’s the co-author of the bill which seeks to “preserve evidence and information related to war crimes and other atrocities committed during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

  But the House is never going to gather information on that young boy, that old man, or those 19 civilians torn apart by gunfire, because those crimes were committed in late 1967 and early 1968 by American soldiers in South Vietnam. The evidence in those cases was collected by military criminal investigators decades ago. It supported murder charges in five incidents against nine suspects, but no one was ever court-martialed, much less convicted.

• Common Dreams ☛ US Limits on ICC Complicate Biden’s Aim to Aid Putin War Crimes Probe

  As the Biden administration debates how much it can—and should—support the International Criminal Court’s investigation into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s alleged war crimes in Ukraine, critics of U.S. foreign policy on Monday took aim at what they called American double standards regarding the Hague tribunal.

  “The U.S. cannot support the ICC only when it prosecutes people we do not like.”

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘He’s Cashing In’: Kushner Firm Gets $2 Billion From Saudi Fund Run by Crown Prince

  A private equity firm created by former White House adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner has reportedly secured a $2 billion investment from a sovereign wealth fund directed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a deal that watchdog groups and lawmakers viewed as part of Kushner’s effort to cash in on his favorable treatment of the brutal Saudi regime.

  “Just because the breathtaking corruption occurs in public doesn’t make it not breathtaking.”

• Meduza ☛ ‘They’ve written us off’: A Ukrainian officer says the national authorities have abandoned Mariupol’s last-standing defenders

  The last remaining soldiers still defending Mariupol against complete Russian occupation say they’ve been left without the Ukrainian authorities’ support. In a message shared through its Facebook page on April 11, the 36th Separate Marine Brigade of the Ukrainian Navy declared, “We’ve been defending Mariupol for 47 days now. They’ve bombed us from planes and fired at us with artillery, tanks, and other weapons. We’ve held the line with honor, achieving the impossible. But all resources eventually run out.” Meduza examines what the Facebook message says, and how others in the war have responded.

• Meduza ☛ ‘He’s not a person, he’s a biorobot’: How State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin mastered the art of pleasing Putin

  Since the beginning of Russia’s war in Ukraine, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin has been even more vocal about his devotion to Vladimir Putin than usual. In daily posts and speeches, Volodin has denounced public figures who oppose the war as “traitors,” demanded Russia be paid for natural gas and other goods in rubles, and described U.S. President Joe Biden as “sick and miserable.” All of these statements have had one purpose: to please the president. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev tells the story of how Volodin learned to understand the Russian leader’s mood — and became a role model for other pro-government politicians.

• Meduza ☛ ‘Stolen lives, stolen hopes’: Borodyanka Mayor Georgiy Yerko on how Russian forces occupied his town and left it in ruins

  Borodyanka is a small town in the Kyiv region, on the right bank of the Dnipro River. When the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, the towns and villages surrounding Hostomel’s Antonov Airport, including Irpin and Bucha, took the brunt of the assault from the Russian troops moving toward Kyiv from Belarus. Borodyanka, which is a little further west, also came under occupation. When Russian forces retreated from the Kyiv region about a month later, Ukrainian authorities said the state of Borodyanka was worse than the horrors uncovered in Bucha. Those who survived the occupation spoke of tanks shooting at residential buildings at point-blank range, while civilians hid in their basements. Constant gunfire made rescue operations impossible during the occupation. Today, the bodies of the dead are finally being extracted from the ruins. Speaking to Meduza, Borodyanka’s acting Mayor Georgiy Yerko tells the story of how Russian forces destroyed his town.

• Common Dreams ☛ Zelenskyy Claims ‘Tens of Thousands’ Dead in Mariupol as City Braces for ‘Last Battle’

  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed Monday that tens of thousands have been killed in Mariupol as Russian forces bear down on the city, prompting warnings from Ukrainian soldiers that the “last battle” for control of the strategic port is imminent.

  In a speech to South Korea’s parliament, Zelenskyy characterized the humanitarian situation in Mariupol as “the worst” of the war and reiterated his call for more weaponry as ongoing diplomatic talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations fail to produce a peace deal.

• Common Dreams ☛ Buffalo Cops Who Shoved 75-Year-Old Peace Activist to Ground Cleared of Wrongdoing

  Two Buffalo, New York police officers were cleared of any wrongdoing on Friday related to their actions knocking an elderly peace activist to the ground, causing him a fractured skull and weeks in the hospital, amid protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd nearly two years ago.

  The arbitrator’s decision stems from officers Aaron Torgalski and Robert McCabe’s actions toward then-75-year-old Martin Gugino at a June 4, 2020 Black Lives Matter protest outside City Hall.

• Mint Press News ☛ US Lawmakers Welcomed Notorious Georgian Warlord Now Boasting of War Crimes in Ukraine

  Having taken up arms against Russia for a fifth time, Georgian Legion commander Mamuka Mamulashvili has bragged on video about his unit carrying out field executions of captured Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

• Common Dreams ☛ Mehdi Hasan Asks Official Why Biden Can Call Putin a War Criminal—But Not MBS

  During a televised interview late Sunday, journalist Mehdi Hasan pressed a State Department official on U.S. President Joe Biden’s willingness to call Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” while sending weapons to Saudi Arabia as the kingdom wages war on Yemen.

  “How come Joe Biden can call Vladimir Putin a war criminal but not others, for example, the crown prince?”

• Counter Punch ☛ India Proves Isolating Russia isn’t Easy

  U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh, who visited New Delhi on March 30-31, warned of consequences for any country seeking to “circumvent or backfill” sanctions on Russia, and further stated the United States would disapprove of any rapid acceleration of India’s energy and other commodity imports from Russia.

  One week later on April 6, Brian Deese, director of the White House National Economic Council, announced that the consequences of a “more explicit strategic alignment” with Moscow would be “significant and long-term” for India.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Will Russia Be Held Accountable for War Crimes in Ukraine?

  Something singularly unexpected happened in the war in Ukraine last weekend. After more than six weeks of artillery fire and missiles raining down on Kyiv, combined with slow ground encroachment by armour and infantry, Russian forces suddenly withdrew over 2-3 April. Their retreat was anything but orderly and left behind huge destruction, with ever more evidence emerging of troops torturing, raping and killing civilians.

• Counter Punch ☛ Imran Khan’s Removal is a Blow, Not a Victory for Pakistan’s Democracy

  The vote came after a dramatic week in which the Supreme Court of Pakistan deemed unconstitutional a move by the deputy speaker, a member of Khan’s party, to block the no-confidence motion.

  While Khan is the first Prime Minister to be removed by the parliament in such a way, his removal continues the tradition of holders of the post not finishing their terms, with the list coming to nineteen and counting.

• Democracy Now ☛ Pakistan Chooses New Prime Minister After Ousting Imran Khan, Who Alleges U.S.-Backed Coup

  Shahbaz Sharif was chosen as Pakistan’s new prime minister on Monday after Imran Khan was removed in a no-confidence vote in Parliament on Sunday. Khan’s ouster came after the nation’s Supreme Court ruled Khan’s attempt to dissolve Parliament earlier this month was illegal. Khan blamed his removal on a “U.S.-backed regime change” plot backed by his opposition, and lawmakers of his party have resigned en masse. We go to Islamabad to speak with Tooba Syed, a member of Pakistan’s left-wing Awami Workers Party, who says Khan’s allegations aren’t substantiated by evidence and come amid Khan’s tendency to use anti-American sentiment to strengthen his populist platform while upholding policies that hurt working-class Pakistani people and women. We also speak with historian Tariq Ali, who says the major Pakistani political parties are ravaged by corruption and overinfluenced by the military and financial incentives. Both Ali and Syed agree the election of establishment politician Shahbaz Sharif will not change conditions in Pakistan.

• Democracy Now ☛ Tariq Ali on Russia’s War in Ukraine & Europe’s Double Standard on Accepting Refugees

  We speak with historian Tariq Ali about the ongoing war in Ukraine, where more than 4.5 million people have fled since the start of Russia’s invasion. Ali says the only peace settlement he sees working would be if Ukraine’s Donbas region “becomes some federated republic with Russia” while allowing the rest of Ukraine independence and neutrality. He also says the war should bring attention to Western-fueled wars in non-European countries like Yemen, where refugees are essentially blocked from escaping violence because of what Ali attributes to racism.

• Counter Punch ☛ Another Genocide: Bucha Joins Guernica and Babi Yar

  It took an impromptu and unplanned event in Washington on March 16th for President Joe Biden to refer to Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a “war criminal.”  A week later, Biden’s national security team assessed that Russia was indeed guilty of war crimes.  (While drafting this essay, I learned that a Russian precision missile with an inscription “for the children” struck a railway station, killing at least 50 women, children, and elderly men seeking humanitarian shelter.)

  Biden’s pronouncement that Putin “cannot remain in power,” was also impromptu and unplanned.  In view of the well known paranoia and xenophobia of the Russian political culture and Putin’s role as a posture child for that culture, it triggered a particularly harsh reaction from the Kremlin.  Russian leaders (as well as the “useful idiots” in the United States who support Russian propaganda) believe that the “color revolutions” between 2003 and 2005 in three former Soviet republics (e.g., Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan) were inspired and led by the United States.

• Counter Punch ☛ The Trial of Thomas Sankara’s Killers

  At the conclusion of a historic trial and a decades-long pursuit of justice, Burkina’s former president Blaise Compaoré, Sankara’s erstwhile comrade and friend, has been sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty, in absentia, of complicity in the murder of his predecessor Sankara.

  Compaoré, who sought refuge in Ivory Coast after he was overthrown in a coup in 2014 (he had tried to change the constitution to allow him to rule in perpetuity); was tried along with his former security chief Hyacinthe Kafando (who was also tried in absentia as a fugitive from justice) and Gilbert Diendéré, one of the army commanders during the 1987 coup, already imprisoned in Burkina Faso for his part in an attempted coup in 2015.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Long-Lasting Danger of Cluster Bomb Use

  Russian forces have used cluster munitions in populated areas of Ukraine at least two dozen times since they started the invasion of that country on February 24, 2022, said UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet. Some cluster munitions may lie dormant for decades, thus posing danger for generations of civilians. Studies of cluster munitions use have found that between one-quarter and two-thirds of the victims are children.

• Counter Punch ☛ Raytheon John: So Black and White!

  Even the bigoted Delusional Unionist Party (DUP) of God & Ian Paisley paid homage.  Since John Hume, a Maynooth Seminary graduate, took biblical scripture seriously and so always rendered unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.  He was a croppy who laid down.

  For his servility to empire the Nazi Pope Benedict made him a Knight Commander in 2012.  The Norwegians, ever pranksters, gave him and David Trimble Nobel Peace Prizes.  Vietnamese diplomat Lê Đức Thọ, a real national anti-colonial revolutionary, turned his down.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Dostoevsky Was Not a Villain—Neither Are the War Resisters Within Russia

  One month ago, the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture, supported by several individuals from the Ukrainian art world, called for sanctions to limit the Russian presence in the international cultural space. The call not only includes “all projects which involve the Russian Federation, including projects implemented with Russian money” but would also ban all Russians from taking part in international competitions, exhibitions, forums, and other cultural events. In short, everyone should “stop covering Russian culture in the media.”

• Saudi Arabia ☛ Iran’s president vows to continue nuclear activities

  Raisi’s comments came as talks between Iran and world powers in Vienna to revive the 2015 nuclear deal have stalled. There is concern that Iran could be closer to being able to construct an atomic weapon if it chose to pursue one.

• ITV ☛ Ali Harbi Ali found guilty of murder of MP Sir David Amess in Southend, Essex

  Ali Harbi Ali stabbed to death the veteran MP at a constituency surgery last year in a “cold and calculating” attack, the Old Bailey heard. Ali, 26, attacked 69-year-old Sir David, the MP for Southend West, at Belfairs Methodist Church in Leigh-on-Sea on 15 October. Jurors returned a guilty verdict just 18 minutes after they were sent out on Monday lunchtime.

• The Telegraph UK ☛ Ali Harbi Ali found guilty of murdering Sir David Amess

  He will be sentenced at the Old Bailey on Wednesday.

• Local World ☛ Sir David Amess murder trial: Ali Harbi Ali found guilty of murdering Conservative MP

  During the trial, prosecutors said Ali, who is From Kentish Town in north London, had spent years planning to kill an MP. They said he had previously considered attacking Cabinet minister Michael Gove and MP Mike Freer.

• NPR ☛ An Islamic State supporter is found guilty of killing U.K. lawmaker David Amess

  Opening the trial, prosecutor Tom Little said the case was “nothing less than an assassination” carried out because of a “warped and twisted and violent ideology.” “It was a murder carried out by that young man who for many years had been planning just such an attack and who was, and is, a committed, fanatical, radicalized Islamist terrorist,” he said. Little said Ali bought the knife used to attack Amess five years earlier, and that Ali tricked his way into meeting Amess by pretending to be one of his constituents.

• ABC ☛ Islamic State morphs and grows in Pakistan, Afghanistan

  The region is also increasingly inhospitable to America. Political turmoil has fueled anti-U.S. sentiment in Pakistan. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are imposing a rule that harks to their harsh government of the late 1990s. China is a major player in the region, quickly outstripping U.S. influence. IS-K is not the only extremist group in the region. Others include Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is largely India-focused, China’s Uyghur rebels of the East Turkestan group and Central Asia’s rebel Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.The threat from IS has only become more fluid and difficult to control.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• FAIR ☛ ‘You Have to Laugh at the Ways Agencies Will Evade Giving You Information’

  Janine Jackson interviewed EFF’s Dave Maass about transparency and journalism for the April 22, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Environment

• Common Dreams ☛ Despite Big Oil Roadblocks, Poll Shows Majority in US Support Climate Action

  A survey published Monday shows that most adults in the U.S. support six proposals to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that lead to rising temperatures and increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather, a finding that comes as congressional lawmakers who own tens of millions of dollars worth of fossil fuel industry stocks continue to undermine climate action.

  Gallup’s annual environment poll, conducted by telephone from March 1 to 18, measured public support for a half-dozen policies designed to mitigate the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘We Won’t Stop’: Climate Scientists Vow to Keep Fighting After Global Mobilization

  After wrapping up a worldwide civil disobedience campaign to call for a “climate revolution,” scientists on Monday pledged to keep fighting for the ambitious action they warn is necessary to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of the fossil-fueled global emergency.

  “Listen to the scientists. Hear the voices of activists. Climate justice now.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Nationalize the US Fossil Fuel Industry—Now!

  If you want to trigger a conservative, just suggest nationalizing the US gas and oil industry.  “Venezuela!” they’ll scream hysterically, perhaps adding a few, “Iran!” squeals. (Somehow, they always forget to yell about Norway…)

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Putin’s Aggression Shows Why Defeating Autocracy Is Key to Combating Climate Crisis

  At first glance, last autumn’s Glasgow climate summit looked a lot like its 25 predecessors.

• The Nation ☛ Autocracies and Fossil Fuels Go Hand in Hand

  This story originated in The Guardian and is part of “Climate & Democracy,” a series from the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

• Project Censored ☛ Corporations Increasingly Held Accountable for “Greenwashing” – Validated Independent News

  The Advertising Standards Authority has clamped down on several big companies in recent years over greenwashing ads, including the airline Ryanair, the carmaker BMW, and the oil and gas company Shell. In the fashion industry, brands that violate consumer protection laws by making false or misleading environmental claims are being forced to change their advertising or face court cases, the Guardian reported in January 2022. The fashion industry faces increasing pressure to reduce its environmental impacts; studies indicate that the clothing industry accounts for two to eight percent of global carbon emissions.

• Counter Punch ☛ Scientists Hit the Streets

  Overnight, civil disobedience by climate scientists erupted in 25 countries on every continent enraged that the IPCC report was “watered down” at the behest of governments that are “unwilling to phase out fossil fuels.”

  Wednesday, April 6th will go down in history, as Global Warming Bastille Day marked by the world’s largest ever protests by scientists sick and tired of mealy-mouthed responses by governments that cater to the fossil fuel wealth syndrome that intentionally misled the public and pays off politicians to keep pumping oil regardless of massive ecological destruction.

• Energy

  • Common Dreams ☛ Solar, Wind Surge in 2021 ‘Another Testament of Renewable Energy’s Resilience’

    Solar and wind energy had another good year for global expansion, the International Renewable Energy Agency said Monday, declaring that “the global shift to renewables is underway” but must accelerate.

    The intergovernmental agency released its latest Renewable Capacity Highlights, which showed that total global renewable generation capacity in 2021 was 3,064 GW, reflecting a 9.1% increase from the year before.

  • Project Censored ☛ Fossil Fuel Industry Subsidized at Rate of $11 Million Per Minute – Validated Independent News

    Pricing fossil fuels to cover both their supply and environmental costs—in other words, not subsidizing the industry—would mean that fossil fuels are priced at what the IMF paper called their efficient price. In fact, currently no government prices all fossil fuels at their “efficient” price such that the price is high enough to cover both the fuel’s supply and environmental costs. An estimated 99 percent of coal, 52 percent of road diesel, 47 percent of natural gas, and 18 percent of gasoline are priced at less than half of their efficient prices.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • The Revelator ☛ Lessons for the Long Term: Tom Lovejoy’s Legacy for Life on Earth

• Overpopulation

  • TruthOut ☛ Palestine’s Wheat Reserves Could Soon Run Out Amid Ukraine War, Oxfam Warns

  • Common Dreams ☛ Aid Group Warns Palestine Wheat Reserves Could Soon Run Out Amid Ukraine Crisis

    The humanitarian group Oxfam International warned Monday that wheat flour reserves in the occupied Palestinian territories could run out within the next three weeks as Russia’s assault on Ukraine continues, pushing prices to all-time highs and throwing the global grain market into chaos.

    “Palestinian households are being hit hard by rising global food prices, and many are struggling to meet their basic needs.”

Finance

• Counter Punch ☛ Elon Musk is Hiding the Ball Again on Taxes

• Meduza ☛ ‘Who caused this unemployment — Nazis or our government?’: The Dagestani soldiers dying in Putin’s war

  In Russia’s Republic of Dagestan, a federal subject in the North Caucasus, many young men are eager to join the military. Not only is it considered the right — and manly — thing to do, it’s also one of the only available means of economic mobility. In the past, federal quotas have put a limit on the number of soldiers who can come from each Russian region, leading some Dagestani men to go as far as bribing the draft board to take them. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, however, the government has been actively recruiting Dagestani contract soldiers — and many have already returned home in coffins. According to one source from the Republic’s enlistment office, over 130 soldiers from Dagestan have died. Journalist Vladimir Sevrinovsky traveled to Dagestan to learn how residents view the war — and how they’re mourning their lost sons and grandsons.

• Krebs On Security ☛ Double-Your-Crypto Scams Share Crypto Scam Host

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Economic Shock Therapy for Neoliberals

  The fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reminded us of the unforeseeable disruptions constantly confronting the global economy. We have been taught this lesson many times. No one could have predicted the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and few anticipated the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, or Donald Trump’s election, which resulted in the United States turning toward protectionism and nationalism. Even those who did anticipate these crises could not have said with any precision when they would occur.

• The Nation ☛ Shrinking the Economy to Save the World

  America, I’m afraid to report, teeters on the precipice of inexorable decline. Our once limitless horizon is suddenly contracting, our outlook increasingly grim. Ross Douthat, The New York Times’ preeminent moral handwringer, lives in fear of the “stagnation, loneliness, alienation” our future has in store.1

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Counter Punch ☛ After Putin

  Any one of these factors could mark the end of an ordinary political leader. Yet Russian President Vladimir Putin has not only weathered these challenges, his popularity has actually risen. According to the independent Levada polling center, Putin has improved his support among Russian citizens from a 69 percent approval rating in January to 83 percent in recent days. That’s significant even when you discount the steady impact of government propaganda on the Russian capacity for critical thinking.

  The bump up in Putin’s ratings results not just from the “rally around the flag” effect. Russian citizens think of their leader as the only person who stands between them and the complete ruin of their country. Such faith gives new meaning to the word “absolutism”—absolute fidelity to an absolutist leader to prevent absolute collapse.

• Counter Punch ☛ The Reagan and Biden Booms

• TruthOut ☛ Trump’s Records of Gifts From Foreign Leaders Are Missing, State Dept. Reveals

• FAIR ☛ Documenting the Struggle Against a Hedge Fund Stripping Journalism for Parts

  The hedge fund Alden Global Capital is notorious for plundering newspapers, relentlessly creating “news deserts” and “ghost papers.” The news is disturbing to anyone who cares about journalism. Indeed, most journalists agree that Alden, the nation’s second-largest newspaper owner by circulation, is a major threat to the existence of good, strong and enduring local journalism in America.

• Counter Punch ☛ The New York Times and Macron

  The piece implied that Macron’s presidency, which involved rolling back the welfare state in many areas, has been a great economic success. While it tells stories about start-ups booming, the only piece of economic data it shares is that France’s current 7.4 percent unemployment rate is the lowest in a decade.

  This is not evidence of great success. France still had not gotten its unemployment rate down to its pre-recession lows. In the United States, which had a slow recovery from the Great Recession, the unemployment rate had fallen below its pre-recession low by the middle of 2017.

• Common Dreams ☛ Defeated French Left Urges Voters to ‘Block the Far-Right,’ Reelect Macron

  Sunday’s first-round French presidential elections left progressives with the unsavory choice of right-wing and extremist candidates in a decisive runoff later this month, with some defeated leftist contenders urging their supporters to avoid a far-right takeover by casting their ballots for incumbent President Emmanuel Macron.

  “The situation is serious—never has the far-right been so strong in France.”

• TruthOut ☛ Far Right Threat Looms in France as Macron Faces Marine Le Pen in Runoff

• Democracy Now ☛ Will the Far Right Win in France? President Emmanuel Macron to Face Marine Le Pen in Runoff

  French President Emmanuel Macron and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen are headed to a runoff on April 24 after winning the most votes in France’s first round of presidential elections on Sunday. We speak with Rokhaya Diallo, French journalist and writer, who says France’s political landscape is now dominated by three parties — the far-right, the liberal right and the left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who urged his supporters to not vote for Le Pen in the following election. Diallo also explains how Le Pen — who ran against Macron in the last presidential election — has since softened her xenophobic rhetoric. “She has hidden in a way the real agenda of the National Rally, which is explicitly anti-immigrant, xenophobic and also sexist,” says Diallo.

• New York Times ☛ [Cryptocurrency] Industry Helps Write, and Pass, Its Own Agenda in State Capitols

  At least 153 pieces of cryptocurrency-related legislation were pending this year in 40 states and Puerto Rico, according to an analysis by the National Conference of State Legislatures. While it was unclear how many were influenced by the crypto industry, some bills have used industry-proposed language almost word for word. One bill pending in Illinois lifted entire sentences from a draft provided by a lobbyist.

• Hungary ☛ Fact-check: Have Hungarian researchers proven that Covid “escaped” from a lab? Not quite.

• Hungary ☛ NGOs to be fined for encouraging invalid votes at the Hungarian government’s child protection referendum

• The Nation ☛ Wit, Grit, and Grace: The Remarkable Confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson

  The United States will have a new justice on the Supreme Court, and it will be Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.

• The Nation ☛ How Biden Can Save Democracy From the GOP

  The president’s party nearly always loses congressional seats in midterm elections, and so Democrats must buck history to hold back an increasingly authoritarian Republican Party. Thus, it is only a little melodramatic to call the time between now and November 8 the last chance to save American democracy.

• The Nation ☛ Do We Value Our Children’s Lives?

• The Nation ☛ Russia’s War in Ukraine: How It Could End

  Anatol Lieven is a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He wrote the book Ukraine and Russia. His writing has appeared in Jacobin, the Financial Times, The American Prospect, and The Nation. This transcript has been edited and condensed.

• Counter Punch ☛ Corporate Media Ignores Senate Hearing on Corporate Greed and Inflation

  Although the hearing covered bread and butter issues, the mainstream corporate media ignored it. Massive coverage of the war in Ukraine does not offend advertisers, while the corporate war on consumers directly involves corporate advertisers.

  Corporate greed takes hundreds of thousands of American lives every year (think the opioid disaster, the tobacco cancer business, the toxins in the air and water), not to mention injuries and illnesses stemming from corporations that put extra profit over concerns about public health and safety.

• Presidential elections in France, round 1

  This sunday occured the first part of our once-every-5-years grand ruckus and maybe you would like to know more from an objective and neutral source, in which case I’d advise looking somewhere else!

  I’ll try to keep it short here, and if time allows it after the second round I can try to write more about what the hell is going on if there is some interest.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Techdirt ☛ UK Politician Who Had Shows On Russian TV Channel Threatens To Sue Twitter For Noting His Connections To Russian Media

  George Galloway is a UK politician with, well, something of a reputation. Anyway, recently, he got very, very upset, because Twitter labeled his account as being “Russia state-affiliated media.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Meduza ☛ ‘Self-censorship leads to impotence’: Ahead of ‘Doxa case’ verdict, Meduza publishes editor Armen Aramyan’s final statement in court

  On April 1, a Moscow court debated the case of four editors from the student magazine Doxa on trial for charges of inciting minors to take part in protests. The grounds for the criminal prosecution of Armen Aramyan, Alla Gutnikova, Natalia Tyshkevich, and Vladimir Metelkin was the publication of a video in January 2021, in which they called on university administrators stop threatening students who were participating in rallies in support of jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny. At the hearing on April 1, the prosecutor asked that the accused be sentenced to two years of correctional labor. The defendants in the case also delivered their final statements. The verdict is set to be handed down tomorrow, April 12. On the eve of the sentencing hearing, Meduza has published the final statement of Doxa editor-in-chief Armen Aramyan. 

• Techdirt ☛ Despite What Fox News Tells You, A New Study Did Not ‘Prove’ That Gmail Is Targeting Conservatives

  Some of you may recall that, back in July of 2020, there was one of those interminably long “tech CEO” hearings in front of Congress that appear to serve only to make politicians look foolish, out of touch, and technically illiterate. Among the most laughable moments was when Rep. Greg Steube wasted everyone’s time by whining to Sundar Pichai of Google that some of his campaign emails were being flagged by Gmail as spam. As tons of people pointed out in response (1) perhaps the problem was that Steube’s campaign emails were spammy, and (2) spam filters mess up all the time. Amusingly, I’ve had multiple emails sent by people employed by Google get lost in my spam filter. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well, and the first and best example we have of that is the spam filter.

• Project Censored ☛ Facebook’s Blacklist of ‘Dangerous Individuals and Organizations’ Stifles Public Debate – Validated Independent News

  Facebook’s DIO consists of three tiers of banned users. Tier 1, the most strictly limited group, includes alleged terror, hate, and criminal groups and their members. Facebook defines “terror” as “organizing or advocating for violence against civilians” and hate as “repeatedly dehumanizing or advocating for harm against” people with protected characteristics. The terrorist category comprises seventy percent of Tier 1 and “overwhelmingly consists of Middle Eastern and South Asian organizations and individuals,” Biddle reported. Most of the entities in the terrorism category come “directly from the U.S. government.” Facebook does not permit users to express “anything deemed to be praise or support about groups and people in this tier, even for nonviolent activities,” Biddle wrote.

• Medforth ☛ France: Politician who denounces an imam’s inflammatory sermons is threatened with murder and rape

  Isabelle Surply claims that she got “hundreds of messages threatening her with death, rape and beheading”. She filed several complaints, but they were ” fruitless “. The police gave her a “direct contact number” on Friday April 8 to warn her of an imminent threat. On April 15, she will be questioned by the judge in connection with the defamation case.

• ABC ☛ UB Police investigating reports of harassment following politician’s visit

  Once outside students followed West. Purcell said more than 100 students followed her to her car. “They quickly started running after me, and screaming at me,” said Purcell. “I sprinted away, and I darted to the men’s bathroom.” Purcell said a friend was punched in the ear, and kicked. UB told 7 News as of Friday afternoon, the only reports campus police received are of harassment, not assault.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Don’t Extradite Assange ☛ Progressive Leaders call on US President Joe Biden to drop the charges against Julian Assange

  Today also marks the three year anniversary of when Julian Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London by the Metropolitan Police, arrested, and put in Belmarsh Prison. He is being held there while the UK courts deliberate on the request to extradite him to the United States where he will stand trial for the 18 charges, many of which are under the Espionage Act, and where he faces a maximum sentence of 175 years.

• Don’t Extradite Assange ☛ Three years since Julian Assange’s arrest from the Ecuador Embassy – Reactions & Statements

  “The charges against Assange are an affront to journalists everywhere and a threat to press freedom. “The US Government must see reason and drop these charges, and the Australian Government should be doing all it can to represent the interests of an Australian citizen.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Global Progressive Leaders Urge Biden to Drop US Charges Against Assange

  A coalition of progressive leaders from across the globe demanded Monday that the Biden administration immediately drop all charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is currently jailed in a high-security London prison as he fights U.S. extradition attempts.

  “Freedom of expression, freedom of thought, and freedom of the press constitute an instrument that can controvert the interests of any government.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Counter Punch ☛ Beauty and the Culture War Beast: Buycott Beats Boycott

  Disney’s having a moment at the center of the latest culture war dust-up, with the allied forces of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” base and the old “religious right” arrayed against an equally motley crew of something they call the “radical woke left.”

  Under pressure from the latter, Disney spoke out against Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, a bit of fentanyl-laced red marketing meat tested on the former’s support base there, and now spreading to other states.

• TruthOut ☛ A Survivor of Violence Is Being Punished in “the Best Place to Live in America”

• Techdirt ☛ Supreme Court Deals Blow To Lying Cops, Lowers Bar For Malicious Prosecution Lawsuits

  I’ll admit this recent decision sort of passed me by. My brief read of it suggested nothing more was happening than an affirmation of preexisting law via lots of procedural discussion. There are plenty of hoops people who have been falsely accused of crimes need to jump through before a court will even entertain their complaints. And there’s plenty of immunity — some qualified and some absolute — that stands in the way of seeking justice. Most of these claims fail. And for obvious reasons. Plenty of inmates feel they’ve been falsely accused. Few actually have been. Even fewer still can actually prove it.

• The Nation ☛ Can Biden Minimize the Cruelty of the Public Charge Rule?

  When President Joe Biden took office, he immediately began using executive actions to unravel the worst of the Trump administration’s bureaucratic rulings. One of Biden’s first targets was the “public charge” rule, a policy of denying permanent residency or citizenship to people who are likely to rely on the state to meet their basic needs. But over the years, its enforcement has been variable and often limited.

• TruthOut ☛ Labor Officials Find Starbucks Illegally Fired 7 Union Organizers in Memphis

• TruthOut ☛ If the State of the World Makes You Want to Scream, You’re Not Alone

• Robert Reich ☛ How the Supreme Court Could Make Your Life More Dangerous

  Beware. If Republican appointees on the Supreme Court succeed in gutting regulatory agencies, we all lose. This agenda is anti-worker, anti-consumer, and anti-environment. The only thing it’s good for is corporate profits.

• Techdirt ☛ Appeals Court Calls Out FBI For Treating Rich People Better Than Poor People

  We may supposedly be a nation of equals but some people will always be more equal than others.

• Counter Punch ☛ I Won’t Cancel Will Smith (Not a Comedy Bit)

  Why should I cancel Will Smith? Because in these people’s minds he is toxic masculinity. But don’t all these comedians spend their time complaining about feminists and Lia Thomas destroying feminism? Imagine if instead of Will Smith we had Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accept the invitation the Oscars gave him. These same people would have been begging for him to make a joke about killing Russians.

  Not only does every Hollywood movie pass a Pentagon censor test it also celebrates personal acts of violence like Will Smith’s slap heard around the world. Every time a plot escalates in Hollywood the hero throws a punch on the other man who has gone too far. We clap. But that’s the tame version. Most of the time these films are explicit propaganda for the military-industrial complex.

• Counter Punch ☛ Women in Punjab: Pushed to the Sidelines

• Project Censored ☛ Johnson and Johnson Paid to Inject Prisoners with Asbestos, Unsealed Documents Reveal – Validated Independent News

  Kligman conducted at least two experiments on prisoners funded by Johnson and Johnson. The first happened in 1968, when fifty prisoners, forty-four of them Black, had talc powder from various containers rubbed on their skin, to observe whether the type of container had any sort of effect. The second Johnson and Johnson funded experiment was in 1971. In that experiment, Kligman recruited ten prisoners who each had tremolite asbestos, chrysotile asbestos, and talc powder injected into their backs. When asked for comment about these new revelations by FiercePharma, an industry publication, Johnson and Johnson noted that they regretted what had occurred, while at the same time defending their actions, stating in part, “at the time of these studies, nearly 50 years ago, testing of this nature among this cohort set was widely accepted, including by prominent researchers, leading public companies, and the U.S. government itself.” On the other hand, certain plaintiffs’ attorneys argued that Johnson and Johnson’s experiments demonstrate that the company has for decades been concerned with asbestos contamination in its baby powder.

• Democracy Now ☛ After Outcry, Texas Prosecutor Drops Murder Charges Against Woman Arrested for “Self-Induced Abortion”

  In Texas, the Starr County district attorney said he will drop murder charges against Lizelle Herrera, a 26-year-old Latina woman who was arrested Thursday and accused of causing the “death of an individual through a self-induced abortion.” Herrera was detained on a $500,000 bond and released from jail Saturday evening, hours after activists with the Rio Grande Valley-based La Frontera Fund held a protest outside the Starr County Jail. We speak with La Frontera Fund’s founder, Rockie Gonzalez, who says Herrera requested care from medical professionals who then turned her in to law enforcement. Gonzalez says that while details of the case are sketchy, the highly publicized arrest of Herrera will further intimidate pregnant people from accessing medical care in the age of anti-abortion laws like S.B. 8. “People are going to be afraid to share potentially lifesaving information with medical professionals for fear of arrest,” says Gonzalez.

• Pro Publica ☛ Child advocates are suing New York for a program they say would create an unlawful shadow foster system that deprives families of their rights, saying a ProPublica investigation made the dangers “abundantly clear.”

  Spurred by a ProPublica investigation, three organizations that represent children in foster care filed a lawsuit last week in New York State Supreme Court against the state’s Office of Children and Family Services over new regulations that establish a “Host Family Homes” program, charging that they create a shadow system that will deprive children and parents of their rights.

  The ProPublica story, published in collaboration with The New York Times Magazine in December, documented how, across the country, caseworkers are diverting children from formal foster care into what some scholars call “shadow foster care,” in which the legal protections of the formal system disappear. Parents who are investigated for allegedly mistreating their children agree, sometimes under coercion, to place their child with a relative, friend or volunteer family as an alternative to government foster care. Child welfare departments then often skirt their legal duty to keep children at home or thoroughly monitor the informal arrangements; the shadow system also strips families of access to free lawyers, judicial oversight and court-mandated services to attempt to reunite families.

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘A Disgrace’: UK Labour Party Slammed for Seeking Injunction Against Climate Activists

  The United Kingdom’s ostensibly leftist Labour Party came under fire Monday after calling for nationwide injunctions to block direct actions by climate campaigners that shut down oil terminals to demand an end to new fossil fuel investments.

  “Those protesting against fossil fuel giants should be applauded, not arrested.”

• EFF ☛ Podcast Episode: Making Hope, with Adam Savage

  Adam Savage—the maker extraordinaire best known from the television shows MythBusters and Savage Builds—is an outspoken advocate for the right to repair, to tinker, and to put creativity and innovation to work in your own garage. He says a fear-based approach to invention, in which everyone thinks secrecy is the path to a big payday, is exhausting and counterproductive.

  Savage speaks with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien about creating a world in which we incrementally keep building on each others’ work, keep iterating the old into new, and keep making things better through collaboration.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Techdirt ☛ U.S. Buries Fact It Gave Elon Musk $3 Million To Send Satellite Dishes To Ukraine

  A couple months back, Starlink and Elon Musk got several weeks of press adulation for shipping thousands of low orbit satellite terminals to Ukraine. The units, generally capable of 100 Mbps speeds with low latency, were likely a huge help to locals struggling to maintain Internet access while under Russian assault (with the small caveat that they could inadvertently act as beacons for Russian airstrikes).

• Project Censored ☛ Expansion of Wireless 5G Technology to Oceans Threatens Wildlife – Validated Independent News

  Whereas wireless data transmissions on land and in space rely primarily on radio waves, sonar is “the go-to technology for transmitting and receiving data wirelessly in the ocean,” they wrote. “The commercial sector would use it for mining for minerals, seismic drilling for oil and gas, commercial shipping, and recreational travel,” according to Burke and Heel. Similarly, researchers are expected to use the Smart Ocean to gather data for monitoring weather, climate change, and wildlife. Military applications could include employing sonar to guide autonomous underwater vehicles, and for communications and reconnaissance. “Without balance,” Burke and Heel wrote, “the ocean will likely become a booming seabed of technology, noise, and pollution with dire consequences” for marine life. According to their report, a Smart Ocean will ultimately increase the likelihood of war and facilitate increased resource extraction and consumption.

• AccessNow ☛ #KeepItOn: Turkmenistan rips a page from the authoritarian playbook, digitally disconnects nation – Access Now

  Barely a month after Turkmenistan’s President, Serdar Berdimuhamedow, came into office — amidst international criticism that the election was neither fair nor free — the new leader is plunging the country’s six million people into a complete informational vacuum. The international community must learn from recent history, and fight this move snatched directly from the authoritarian playbook.

  Due to the nature of internet shutdowns, information on the country’s most recent blackout is scant, but Cloudflare Radar registered a significant drop in internet traffic beginning on Sunday, April 10. To date, people in Turkmenistan remain cutoff.

  “We cannot abandon the internet as a mere toy to be played with in the hands of dictators,” said Anastasiya Zhyrmont, Regional Outreach Coordinator (Eastern Europe & Central Asia) at Access Now. “As the international community, we have a responsibility to ensure that people in Turkmenistan — and in all countries across the region — have access to free, open, and secure internet to fight government disinformation and propaganda, and to resist authoritarianism.”

Monopolies

• Techdirt ☛ Illinois, Missouri, and New York Lawmakers Are Helping Telecom Monopolies Block Broadband Competition

  We’ve already noted how U.S. broadband maps aren’t just terrible, they’ve laid the foundation for terrible policy. When your maps falsely overstate competition and broadband coverage, it makes it easy to downplay or ignore the primary reason U.S. broadband stinks: regional monopolization and the state and federal corruption that protects and enables it.

• Patents

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Leaked WTO Covid Patent Waiver Text Is Very Bad

    In October 2020, South Africa and India’s governments tabled a bold proposal (PDF) at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to temporarily waive intellectual property (IP) protections for producing COVID-19 vaccines and other coronavirus-related medical tools for the duration of the pandemic.

  • Software Patents

    • Truist Joins the Open Invention Network
      

      Open Invention Network (OIN), the organization formed to safeguard open source software (OSS) and now the largest patent non-aggression community in history, announced today that Truist Financial Corporation (Truist) has joined as a community member. Truist is the sixth largest U.S. bank by assets and the seventh largest global insurance broker. As a significant user and supporter of open source, Truist is reinforcing its commitment to OSS as an enabler of advanced financial services and mobile banking platforms.

• Trademarks

  • Techdirt ☛ Stone Brewing, Fresh Off Trademark Win Against Keystone, Sued For Blatant TM Infringement

    You may have heard that Stone Brewing Co., once a scion and protector of the craft beer industry, won a trademark lawsuit against Molson Coors due to the latter’s rebranding of its “Keystone” brand to more prominently feature the word “STONE” on cans and labels. We didn’t write about the case, though that doesn’t mean I didn’t have opinions on the matter. Frankly, I found the whole thing quite silly. Craft beer buyers, or fans of Stone Brewing, weren’t suddenly going to think that a Keystone beer was from Stone Brewing because it had a big “STONE” on the can. Especially when the word “KEY” was still on the labels and the rest of the trade dress was notably different. And, yet, a jury awarded Stone Brewing $56 million for this “infringement.”

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Piracy Numbers Drop After Indonesia Blocks Over 3,500 Pirate Sites

    The Government of Indonesia continues to crack down on piracy. The country’s list of blocked sites and services has grown to more than 3,500 domain names. According to the Coalition Against Piracy, these actions resulted in a 75% decrease in pirate site traffic, while the use of legal alternatives has tripled.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ ACE Finally Seizes Pirate Streaming Domains After Years of Legal Action

    In 2013, pirate streaming site Afdah began offering a comprehensive library of infringing movies to millions of users. This attracted the attention of rightsholders and ever since there have been efforts to disrupt its activities. After reporting the site to the United States government in 2021, Afdah’s domains have now been ‘seized’ by the Alliance For Creativity and Entertainment.