Audiocasts/Shows

• Video ☛ My Favourite Open Source Project Just Vanished? – Invidious

  I’ve been a big fan of ferdi for a very long time it’s a great open source project but out of seemingly nowhere the project, the twitter, website, github and everything else completely vanished along with the open collective being archived.

• Video ☛ How to install Synfig Studio on Debian 11 – Invidious

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

• Video ☛ Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 LTS overview | Embrace the change – Invidious

  In this video, I am going to show an overview of Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 LTS and some of the applications pre-installed.

• Video ☛ Switch to these open source apps if you’re stuck on Windows or Mac OS! – Invidious

Instructionals/Technical

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

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MySQL Workbench on Rocky Linux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, MySQL Workbench is a visual database design tool for MySQL database management and administration. It provides extensive functions for daily work with the databases and can be used to design, create, edit, administrate and display databases. MySQL Workbench is available in three editions; Community, Standard, and Enterprise.

  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 MySQL Workbench on Rocky Linux. 8.

• Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Godot 3.4.4 on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install Godot 3.4.4 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.

  If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!

• Vitux ☛ Improving Notebook Battery Life in Ubuntu with TLP – VITUX

  TLP is a free, open-source, and feature-rich utility for optimizing battery consumption on laptops running Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. You can find it in both CLI and GUI versions for your convenience. TLP comes with a default configuration that is pretty much perfect for your operating system and the underlying machine. All you need to do is install and activate the utility, and you’re ready to go. The utility optimizes the power consumption of hardware devices when your laptop is running on battery and not on AC power.

• Vitux ☛ Play MP3 Files on the Ubuntu Command Line – VITUX

  If, like me, you like to do all your Ubuntu tasks from the command line, you’ll also be looking for ways to play audio files, especially mp3s, from the command line. In this article, we’ll tell you how to install and use the famous command-line program Sox to listen to mp3s in your terminal. We have run the commands and procedures mentioned in this article on an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system.

• TechRepublic ☛ How to run a single command on multiple Linux machines at once | TechRepublic

  Of course, there are apps for that. But since this is Linux, wouldn’t it make more sense to piece together your own solution? Of course, it would. After all, Linux is about choice, power and flexibility.

  Say, for example, you had several Ubuntu Servers and you wanted to run sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade on them all at once. You don’t have to log in to each of those machines to run those commands, not when there are scripts to handle that task for you.

  I’ve found such a script and have modified it in a way that you can use it to create multiple scripts for specific hosts (such as Ubuntu- or RHEL-based servers). Let’s take a look at this script and see how to make it work.

• ZDNet ☛ The basics of SSH usage | ZDNet

  If you ever have to do any remote administration, at some point you’re going to have to log into a Linux server and get to work. To do that, you’re going to need to use SSH (aka Secure Shell). For those that have never been exposed to such a tool, you’re in for a treat.

• Vitux ☛ How to Install Z-Shell (ZSH) and Oh-My-Zsh on Ubuntu – VITUX

  The Z shell is one of the most powerful shells ever developed, and it’s also one of the fastest. It offers features you won’t find anywhere else, such as built-in spell checking, syntax highlighting for code, and much more. You can even configure the command prompt to display useful information about your system status without having to type anything.

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

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install TeXstudio on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, TeXstudio is an open-source editor used for creating LaTeX documents. Some of the outstanding features of TeXstudio are an integrated pdf viewer with (almost) word-level synchronization, advanced syntax-highlighting, live checking of references, latex commands, spelling, and grammar.

  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 TeXstudio editor on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• How to Install Oracle VM VirtualBox on Manjaro Linux

  Virtualizing operating systems may read as something too complicated and only reserved for hackers or people with too much knowledge about systems, but the reality is that VirtualBox makes it effortless. So today, let’s learn how to install Oracle VirtualBox on Manjaro Linux. The procedure is pretty simple, let’s go for it.

Wine or Emulation

• Linux.org ☛ Bottles – Run Windows software on Linux with Bottles | Linux.org

  Bottles is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to aid in setting up the WINdows Emulator (WINE). Bottles has many benefits over WINE by itself.

  For anyone who uses WINE, you need to look into Bottles.

Games

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Wobbly Life looks like pure silly joy and it added Steam Deck support | GamingOnLinux

  Wobbly Life, an open world physics based sandbox that looks like a lot of fun recently had a huge update and with it comes Steam Deck support.

  There’s not exactly much of a point to this one, it’s very much a game where you decide what you’re going to do with friends. A good one to have a laugh with and it seems quite popular too, with an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam from over five thousand users. It already worked quite well on Linux with Proton but now it should be a nicer experience directly on a Steam Deck too.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Introversion classic Darwinia gets remastered with better Steam Deck support | GamingOnLinux

  Darwinia was originally released back in 2005, and now Introversion Software has done a massive remaster.

  What is it? Darwinia combines together fast-paced action with strategic battle planning. It features a novel and intuitive control mechanism, a graphical style ripped from 80′s retro classics like Tron and Defender, and a story concerning a tribe of nomadic sprites trapped in a modern 3D world.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Paradox announce Crusader Kings III: Fate of Iberia and Surviving Mars Content Packs | GamingOnLinux

  Paradox Interactive continue building up their strategy games with both Crusader Kings III and Surviving Mars having new upcoming content releases.

  For Crusader Kings III, a new free update for all owners will be releasing on May 31 bringing a new faction type to challenge your ruler, Heads of Faith that can be shared by different religions, vassal contracts for clans and a new starting bookmark that highlights interesting Iberian characters for the 867 start date.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Linux Magazine ☛ Coming of Age: Desktop Organization with Plasma Activities » Linux Magazine

    If you haven’t looked at Plasma Activities in awhile, you should take a second look. Recent updates make the tool the ultimate for organizing your desktop.

    KDE Plasma identifies multiple desktops as Activities. Plasma Activities are one of the most versatile features on the Linux desktop — and also among the least known or used. Over a decade after they were first introduced, Plasma Activities are finally coming into their own. Today, they can provide some of the ultimate in desktop customization with almost no effort.

    Activities have been overlooked for several reasons. To start with, they were part of the botched and premature release of KDE 4.0, which for months had users in open revolt. What was supposed to be a bold innovation, a sign that the Linux desktop was no longer trying to catch up to proprietary ones, became a symbol of developers ignoring the needs of users. Neither does it help that Gnome uses the term “Activities” for its overview rather than a name for multiple desktops. Just as importantly, from the beginning, Activities have been under-documented, leaving users to puzzle out how to implement them. In particular, until recently, the difference between Activities and virtual workspaces was poorly defined and settled only when each Activity was given its own workspaces, making clear that workspaces are subordinate to Activities. However, probably the major cause of neglect is that the details of Activities have changed constantly, often becoming needlessly complex. For instance, in early releases, only one Desktop file was available, meaning that all resources for all Activities had to be placed in one file, and the resources not meant for a given Activity laboriously filtered out. Similarly, early on there were several types of Activities, many whose purpose was obscure. Only in recent releases have Activities become simple enough that they could be efficiently customized.

Distributions

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • TechRepublic ☛ With Fedora 36, there might be a new gold standard for Linux distributions

    
    To experience how far Fedora has come as a desktop operating system, you really have to experience it first-hand. The ease of use, stability, performance and design elements all come together in a perfect storm of simplicity and usability that I’ve never before seen in a release from the Fedora developers.

    Am I ready to call Fedora Linux the best Linux distribution for new users? I think so. It really has improved to that level. And although it might not have the cachet of popularity that Ubuntu or Linux Mint has, Fedora is now ready to challenge any desktop operating system.

    Download a copy of the beta (or wait until the official release) and find out how simple and elegant an operating system should be.

  • AlmaLinux 9 Beta–Now Available – AlmaLinux OS Blog

    Hello, Community! AlmaLinux OS is proud to announce AlmaLinux OS 9.0 Beta for all 4 architectures: x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le and s390x, achieving architecture parity with upstream.

    As this is a BETA release it should not be used for production installations. The provided upgrade instructions should not be used on production machines unless you don’t mind if something breaks. Now if you wanna test this somehow, somewhere to see how things will work in 9.0 stable, you’re on the right track.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Liliputing ☛ Volla Phone 22 runs Ubuntu Touch or a privacy-focused Android fork… or both (crowdfunding)

    
    The Volla Phone 22 is a smartphone with a 6.3 inch FHD+ display, a MediaTek Helio G85 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. Unlike many modern phones, it also a user-replaceable battery, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a microSD card reader.

    But what really makes it stand out is the software. The phone, which is up for pre-order through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, ships with a choice of the Android-based Volla OS or the Ubuntu Touch mobile Linux distribution. It also supports multi-boot functionality, allowing you to install more than one operating system and choose which to run at startup.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino ☛ This chocolate bunny screams when it’s eaten | Arduino Blog

    Bunnies made from chocolate are staples around springtime, and unlike actual rabbits, they don’t mind being consumed. But YouTuber Repeated Failure decided to introduce a little bit of macabre humor by causing the chocolate bunnies to begin screaming as they’re devoured.

    The first challenge was figuring out how to detect that the bunny is being eaten. The first attempt involved mixing up a variety of conductive, food-safe materials that could be applied to the chocolate, but every attempt ended in failure. After realizing this goal of using ink was unfeasible, Repeated Failure opted to go with edible silver leaf instead that can hold a small electric charge. From here, an Arduino Nano was soldered to a piece of perf board along with a mini MP3 player module and a small 2W speaker. All of the electronics were then placed into a custom 3D-printed base that holds the bunny upright while also hiding the circuitry.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • India ☛ These Xiaomi, Poco And Redmi Smartphones Could Get Android 13 Update: Full List

  • SamMobile ☛ Will the Samsung Galaxy S10 series get the Android 13 update? – SamMobile

  • Phone Arena ☛ Android 12 coming soon to one of Motorola’s 2021 flagships – PhoneArena

  • India Times ☛ Android users may soon get this new file sharing feature – Times of India

  • XDA ☛ Android Developer Options Explained: Here’s everything you can do with these settings

  • Oppo Find X5 Review: The Affordable Android Flagship

  • 9to5Google ☛ Motorola MA1 for wireless Android Auto: Easy, not best – 9to5Google

  • XDA ☛ Future versions of Android may go easier on app killing

  • 9to5Google ☛ Android preps passkey support, will sync to Google Account – 9to5Google

  • Android Headlines ☛ How To Turn Off The YouTube Auto Playing Thumbnails on Android

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• My 3 weeks with the SlimeVR open source full-body tracker

  SilmeVR is an IMU-only open source full body tracker (open firmware + software) for VR. For the non-initiated, normal VR only tracks your head and hands. While full body tracking in addition tracks waist, chest, ankles, and etc.. With FBT you can sit in VR and see your avatar also sitting down, with the same pose. It adds a lot to the emersion factor. And a must have if you ever want to actually lay down and sleep in VR.

  I got mine second hand from my friend. Whom built an entire set from scratch, but didn’t use it much. His set uses 5 top of the line BNO085 IMUs for 5 trackers. I decided to buy from him instead of enjoy DIY due to the chip shortage. Which hikes the price of the IMU to some absurd price. Obviously mine aren’t the official SlimeVR set. Your milage might vary. Also I only play VRChat. Thus the following is in the context of VRChat.

• Content Management Systems (CMS)

  • WordPress 6.0 Beta 2 – WordPress News

    WordPress 6.0 Beta 2 is now available for testing!

    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 2 on a test server and site.

• FSF

  • FSF ☛ LibrePlanet workshop – May 16 – Software localization (translation) of web-based projects

    Software localization (translation) of web-based projects could be a nightmare for many developers. However, this time-consuming process can be solved easily thanks to the open-source tool Tolgee. Jan Cizmar will guide you through with his workshop named Web Application Localization Without Tears. He will show you how to manage localization texts in simple UI or how to take the advantage of the in-context localization feature, so you can just click & translate the text easily.

• Programming/Development

  • Red Hat Official ☛ ArgoCD and GitOps: What’s next?

    ArgoCD and GitOps are the topics for Technically Speaking, Episode 12, in which Red Hat CTO Chris Wright has a conversation with Ed Lee, Chief Architect of Development Platform for Intuit, about DevOps and GitOps, the birth of the ArgoCD open source project, and more.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Welcome Node.js 18

    It’s that time of year again where the Node.js community releases a new major release – Node.js 18. Following the well defined release process, this version will be promoted to long-term support (LTS) in October 2022. Before then, we need the greater ecosystem to try it out and give the community feedback. This will allow us to address any issues in advance and make sure both the release, the ecosystem, and our customers are ready when it’s promoted.

  • Imposter Syndrome | Inside Rust Blog

    Imposter syndrome is an insidious problem within software communities. Many of us, especially members of marginalized communities, struggle to shake the feeling that we aren’t as qualified as our peers. This makes us feel unqualified and undeserving compared to those around us.

Standards/Consortia

• WebAssembly 2.0 First Public Working Drafts | W3C News

  The WebAssembly Working Group maintains a list of proposals finished since the last Recommendation and monitors the progress of “in-flight” proposals.

Hardware

• Radiator Flush FAIL. DexCool Sludge plugs up my heater core after flush. – BaronHK’s Rants

  My guess is the newer cars have narrower passages on the heater cores and start plugging up from DexCool Mud a lot sooner than 14 years in. Probably do it again, but it’s out of warranty then so good luck.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • PR Newswire ☛ TARS Certification Testing Microservices Expertise Now Available [Ed: The LF “diploma mill” adds new “products”]

  • Security

    • CISA ☛ Multiple RTOS (Update E) | CISA

      CISA is aware of a public report, known as “BadAlloc” that details vulnerabilities found in multiple real-time operating systems (RTOS) and supporting libraries. CISA is issuing this advisory to provide early notice of the reported vulnerabilities and identify baseline mitigations for reducing risks to these and other cybersecurity attacks.

    • Help Net Security ☛ Advance your penetration testing skills by mastering Kali Linux – Help Net Security

      In this video for Help Net Security, Vijay Kumar Velu, Technical Director for Offensive Security and DFIR at BDO UK, talks about his latest book: Mastering Kali Linux for Advanced Penetration Testing (4th Edition).

      [...]

      This book is suitable for those who are passionate about securing things in an offensive way and can be useful for aspiring red teamers. It takes readers trough a full lifecycle of penetration testing and helps them apply the skills on the job.

    • Google ☛ The More You Know, The More You Know You Don’t Know

      This is our third annual year in review of 0-days exploited in-the-wild [2020, 2019]. Each year we’ve looked back at all of the detected and disclosed in-the-wild 0-days as a group and synthesized what we think the trends and takeaways are. The goal of this report is not to detail each individual exploit, but instead to analyze the exploits from the year as a group, looking for trends, gaps, lessons learned, successes, etc. If you’re interested in the analysis of individual exploits, please check out our root cause analysis repository.

      We perform and share this analysis in order to make 0-day hard. We want it to be more costly, more resource intensive, and overall more difficult for attackers to use 0-day capabilities. 2021 highlighted just how important it is to stay relentless in our pursuit to make it harder for attackers to exploit users with 0-days. We heard over and over and over about how governments were targeting journalists, minoritized populations, politicians, human rights defenders, and even security researchers around the world. The decisions we make in the security and tech communities can have real impacts on society and our fellow humans’ lives.

    • CISA ☛ Oracle Releases April 2022 Critical Patch Update | CISA

      Oracle has released its Critical Patch Update for April 2022 to address 520 vulnerabilities across multiple products. A remote attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

Finance

• Sanctions & the End of a Financial Era with John Titus

  In this episode, Whitney and John Titus of Best Evidence discuss the major financial shifts that have occurred since the Ukraine-Russia conflict exploded in late February, including Western sanctions, the coming end of the dollar, the CBDC agenda in both Russia and the West and the “endgame” of the financial elites.

Linuxfest NorthWest VIRTUAL this weekend | www.montanalinux.org

LFNW hasn’t been in person since the start of the pandemic. I don’t think it was even held in 2020. Anyhoo, they played it safe for 2022… and put in a bit of effort with planning what will hopefully be a very successful virtual event for 2022… this weekend.

Desktop/Laptop

• The Big Linux Switch | TOWiOS

  One secondary school, 1500+ students, 350 Desktop PCs, GNU/Linux and a whole load of Free and Open Source Software… That’s right, you read that correctly!

• GNU ☛ GNU Health – News: The Free Software community mourns the loss of Pedro Francisco (MasGNULinux) [Savannah]

  These are very sad days for the Free Software and Social Justice movements. Our beloved friend Pedro Francisco has passed away.
  Pedro fought relentlessly for equity in our society. He was also a Free/Libre Software activist.
  Pedro created and managed MasGNULinux, a Spanish blog with news about Free Software and GNU/Linux. MasGNULinux was the best reference in the latest Free Software projects for the Spanish speaking community.
  Thank you for your integrity, your honesty and your dedication to make this world a better place for this and future generations. Pedro’s legacy will live on forever, in every line of code of each Free Software project.

• LWN ☛ Mourning Pedro Francisco [LWN.net]

  Luis Falcon brings the sad news that Pedro Francisco has passed on. “Pedro created and managed MasGNULinux, a Spanish blog with news about Free Software and GNU/Linux. MasGNULinux was the best reference in the latest Free Software projects for the Spanish speaking community.”

• Should I Switch from Windows to Linux OS? – LinuxTechLab

  Microsoft has done some terrible things with Windows and many people consider it a dangerous operating system. A lot of viruses and spyware exist on it. A virus is an infectious program that can damage your computer without your permission.

  It doesn’t matter what type of file you are working on, a virus can infect your computer and delete your files. Spyware is adware that monitors your internet activities. If you are not careful about what you download from the internet, you may end up downloading a spyware virus. This virus will monitor your internet activities and collect personal information about you. It is very important that you keep your software up to date. This way, you will be able to protect your computer from viruses and spyware.

  Another reason why you should switch from Windows to Linux is that Linux is free. You don’t have to pay anything to use Linux. There is no advertising or spyware with Linux. You can customize Linux to suit your needs. If you are not happy with the default programs, you can easily install different programs that you want to use. If you want to save your money, Linux is the way to go. It is really simple to use, and it won’t cost you a dime.

Server

• Ubuntu ☛ High-performance computing (HPC) clusters anywhere [part 2]

  In this blog, we will be introducing where and how clusters are currently being deployed, what these deployment methods enable, and the major players in that space.

  This blog is a part of a series of blogs on HPC where we will introduce you to the world of HPC.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Destination Linux 274: What Makes A Linux Distro Good For Beginners?

  This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to talk about what makes a Linux distro good for beginners. Then we’re going to talk about EndeavourOS’s latest release. 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.

• OMG Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu 22.04: What’s New? [Video]

  The Ubuntu 22.04 release carries a colossal crop of cumulative changes and improvements added in the previous three releases — but what are the most notable?

  That’s the question I answer in my Ubuntu 22.04: What’s New video.

  Yes, I’m back with a breathy, bi-annual bulldoze through the biggest and best embellishments on offer.

  As Jammy is a long-term support release — fun fact: > 90% of all Ubuntu users use an LTS release — there’s a lot to cover with features carried over from 20.10, 21.04, and 21.10, plus the newly new stuff that debuts in 22.04!

Applications

• Convert Audio File Formats on Ubuntu with SoundConverter – Technastic

  In this tutorial, we discuss how you can convert audio files into different formats on Ubuntu with a neat tool called SoundConverter. Before the rise of music streaming services, people bought their music DRM-free. Meaning they bought the music and it was theirs to do whatever they wished to do with, transfer the file to any number of devices, and even share it with others for free. You can see how this wasn’t so good for the music companies but it definitely was convenient for the users. Most of our music is online these days, via various streaming services.

• Its FOSS ☛ Nushell: A Flexible Open-Source Cross-platform Shell

  Even if you are not interested in using the terminal, the Linux terminal often makes some of the heavy lifting more effortless and lets you fix stuff. So, is safe to say that the Linux terminal is pretty powerful if you know what you’re doing.

  And that is true! But the problem appears when you get an error. If you don’t have enough experience using it, you won’t know how to solve it.

  While the error messages try to convey the best meaning of the problem, not every user can easily decode the fix. It usually takes a bit of research for beginners. But, if the error can have more clarity, the user could be able to fix it sooner.

  Not just limited to the error message, the structure of the output you get in your terminal to browse files, for example, is not the prettiest.

• Linux Shell Tips ☛ Skanlite – A Simple Image Scanning Tool for Linux

  Why need a Linux image scanning application? You might ask. Image scanning is a priceless endeavor for a number of Linux-based projects, especially for users that are after web-based applications.

  Such applications make it easier to not only scan images but also scan printed objects, handwriting, and texts, and afterward convert them to use digital images.

  The simplicity of the Skanlite Linux application makes it possible to effortlessly scan and save your raw images to flexibly usable digital format. By using flatbed scanners, you get more optimization in your image scanning routines.

• Long Weekend Thoughts

  The long Easter weekend was a good opportunity to relax and recharge a little, and of course test gemlogging via Lagrange in the terminal.

  [...]

  I’ve got work to do with improving keyboard focus navigation. It’s already much better with menus being keyboard-navigable, but there’s way too much Tabbing and Shift-Tabbing around. I’ll probably apply more cursor-key based navigation between UI elements, but it’ll require being careful so that the normal document navigation isn’t accidentally prevented. The really nice thing about this is that the GUI version will also benefit from the navigation improvements.

  The text editor is passable. It’s using the same input widget as the desktop GUI version, so it can do word wrapping, copy/paste, and undo. However, its current set of keybindings doesn’t really conform to any common conventions. The GUI version has the typical Ctrl+C/V/X/Z, but because I want to keep Ctrl+Z as a way to suspend the app and get back to the shell, I’ve switched the modifier key to Meta, which in practice means Escape or Alt. Having Emacs-style bindings might be a useful option to have, though.

• MakeTech Easier ☛ 7 of the Best LaTeX Editors for Linux

  Word processors are great. They can handle basic composition jobs such as writing letters and essays. However, word processors cannot easily handle documents with custom layouts and graphs.

  This is because word processors such as Microsoft’s Word and Libreoffice’s Writer are not designed for those tasks. As such, this can be incredibly limiting if you want to create documents with unusual formats and symbols.

  Knowing that, one way to get around this problem is by using a flexible document language such as TeX. From there, you can then use a preparation program such as LaTeX to output your TeX file into a printable document.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to Customize Ubuntu Touchpad Gestures – Technastic

  If you’ve ever used any modern Windows 10 laptop with a decent touchpad, or a MacBook, you know how touchpad gestures make using the laptop so much easier. In many ways, they make the touchpad even better than using a Bluetooth mouse. Unfortunately, Linux-based operating systems such as Ubuntu haven’t really caught up in that department. But Ubuntu is still Linux so, if you want something, you can have it with a little effort. Today we’ll see how you can customize Ubuntu touchpad gestures.

• FAQForge ☛ How to Install Inkscape on Ubuntu

  For graphic designers who are just starting out in the industry, paying up thousands of dollars to Adobe for their suite of applications is a monumental task. Fortunately, there are various open-source applications looking to bridge that gap for free. If you’re looking for an alternative to Adobe Illustrator to flex your vector graphic designing skills, you need not worry much. Inkscape is one of the most popular open-source vector graphic designing tools. In this guide, I will walk you through the process of installing it on your Ubuntu 20.04 machine.

• Citizix ☛ How to Install Brave Browser on Ubuntu 22.04

  In this guide, we are going through the step by step process of installing Brave browser in Ubuntu 22.04.

  So what is Brave browser?

  Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser, a Google-sponsored free and open-source web browser.. Brave is a privacy-focused browser, which distinguishes itself from other browsers by automatically blocking online advertisements and website trackers in its default settings.

  Brave browser boasts in its site to be 3x faster than Chrome and to stop online surveillance, loads content faster, and uses 35% less battery.

• Ansible Ad Hoc Commands – OSTechNix

  In our previous article, we have discussed what is ansible inventory and configuration file which lays the foundation to learn ansible. In this article, we are going to discuss ansible ad hoc commands with some examples.

• Linuxiac ☛ Top 10 Use Cases of Wget Command (with Examples)

  This guide will show you how to use the wget command through 10 commonly used examples.

  Wget is a command-line utility for downloading files from the web, created by the GNU Project. The name is a combination of “World Wide Web” and “get.”

  Wget allows you to download files using HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols. In addition, it gives you the ability to download multiple files, resume downloads, limit bandwidth, perform recursive downloads, download in the background, mirror a website, and even more.

  By the end of this guide, you’ll know everything there is to know about the wget command and how to use it to download files from the Internet.

• ID Root ☛ How To Install VSCodium on Manjaro 21 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VSCodium on Manjaro 21. For those of you who didn’t know, VSCodium is a free and open-source fork of Microsoft’s VS code editor. The source code for this product can be found on GitHub, where it is licensed under MIT license and, therefore, will always remain free.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the VSCodium free and open-source fork of Microsoft’s VS code editor on a Manjaro 21.

• Ubuntu Pit ☛ 15 Practical Examples of Locate Command in Linux

  In Linux, there are many tools to find and locate files and directories. From previous experience, we have seen some of these tools were very smooth on a large scale, and some of these tools were a bit slower, but they had a great scale to cover on the directory. Earlier, we have seen how to use the fd command and the find command in Linux to find a file. Instead of having the fd or find commands, we can use the locate command on Linux to quickly and efficiently search for a file with specific parameters.

  The main difference between the fd command and the locate command is that the locate command can quickly find files in the directory because it uses a special database for searching the queries.

  In Linux and Unix-based systems, the locate command uses the mlocate, or the merging locate database for searching the entire system. The locate command was first released in 1982 on BSD and GNU machines with the GNU privacy license.

• Authoring man pages with mdoc(7)

  Further to my post “Why i like mdoc(7) for man pages”[a], i’ve now written a quickstart guide to encourage people to use mdoc(7)[b] when authoring man pages.

• Linux Handbook ☛ Vim Color Schemes: How to Change and Use Them

  Color scheme is one of the sought after features in many code editors.

  Vim is not behind any modern code editor in terms of features. It provides different built-in color schemes for you. In addition to that, you can also use third party color themes.

  How? Let me show you.

• How to Install LibreNMS Monitoring Tool on Debian 11/10

  LibreNMS is an open-source and fully-featured networking monitoring tool that provides a wide range of monitoring features and capabilities for your network devices.

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

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ClipGrab on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, ClipGrab is a multi-platform software package for free downloaders and converters for Vimeo, Facebook, and many other popular sites. It is a cross-platform software that runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

  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 ClipGrab downloaders on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• Red Hat Official ☛ How to use inputs in your shell scripts | Enable Sysadmin

  Use variables and arguments to change, improve, and reuse your favorite shell scripts.

• Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to Open a URL in the Web Browser from Linux Terminal

  Flexibility is an underrated attribute overlooked by many users of the Linux operating system. Being a flexible Linux user implies that you can launch most; if not all, of your user and system applications from the command line interface without having to navigate and search for them from the system GUI applications’ menu.

  Also, the flexibility of your Linux OS user experience not only applies to system-based applications like installed apps but also to non-system-based applications like web apps that require a URL for access.

• UNIX Cop ☛ Setting up Etherpad on Debian

  The following article assumes you are already familiar with what Etherpad is. If that
  isn’t the case, then the wikipedia article should suffice for a quick introduction.

  Even though the Etherpad project is well documented, it isn’t always easy to make sense from just documentation. This article aims to condense some of the tutorials available on the project wiki in an easy-to-follow manner.

• UNIX Cop ☛ Network Bonding in Alma Linux

  It is a common requirement to be able to combine network interfaces into a logical interface to achieve better redundancy and possibly higher throughput. There are two methods to achieve this: NIC Teams and Network Bonding.

  NIC Teams works as a form of load-balancer with failover where you have sort of these two pipes that act as one. So if one of them fails, the other one can still handle the traffic. This way, the end user doesn’t experience any downtime. However, configuring network teams doesn’t really guarantee better network throughput. So, if you configure a team from two 1 GB adapters, youwon’t get a 2 GB throughput.

• UNIX Cop ☛ How to install Rundeck on Ubuntu/Debian Servers

  Rundeck is a free open-source tool for automation services. It is a very useful piece of software to create simple or complex tasks on a local machine or in a remote machine. So, It comes with many tools like WebAPI, CLI Tools, Web Console in order to run automation tasks. It supports multiple Database Servers like, MariaDB, MySQL , Oracle , PostgrSQL.

• UNIX Cop ☛ Security Auditing with Lynis

  I originally intended to write about how to secure a server/workstation system. However, I changed my mind after realising that there is already this battle-tested tool called lynis that does the auditing for us and also provides us suggestions.

  Lynis is a security auditing tool for Unix-based operating systems. In this article, I am going to inspect my default installation of Debian 11 with lynisand try to secure. Lynis performs an in-depth scan of the system. This includes basic checks like permissions in the filesystem to even performing specific tests of the software and libraries that are installed on a system.

  This way, it only uses and tests the components concerned with the system on which it is scanning. As an example, for a web server it will only include the web-service related tests after doing the general checkup.

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

  TeamViewer is a global remote connectivity platform that provides secure access to any device globally. It’s used for online meetings and file sharing between computers and remotely controlled instrumentation such as robots or industrial machinery via VPN connections (virtual private networks).

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install TeamViewer on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish. The tutorial will import the official repository and gpg key and update and remove the remote desktop software using the command line terminal.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Python 3.11 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

  Python is one of the most popular high-level languages, focusing on high-level and object-oriented applications from simple scrips to complex machine learning algorithms. Python is famous for its simple, easy-to-learn syntax, emphasizes readability, and reduces program maintenance costs and more straightforward conversion to newer releases. Python supports modules and packages, and one of the many is the popular PIP package manager.

• How to Install Microsoft Teams on openSUSE [Ed: But it is technically malware, so better to avoid it altogether]

  Microsoft Teams is one of the team communication tools that is all the rage these days. It is created by Microsoft and therefore fully supported by them. Today, you will learn how to install Microsoft Teams on openSUSE 15.

  We recently explained how to install Microsoft Teams on Manjaro Linux, and in that post we discussed the utilities of the tool.

  Teams is positioned as a key tool for many teams around the world thanks to its incredible features. We can use it in many circumstances, from planning a family party to real work.

• Medium ☛ How to Update Your Multi-Boot Linux Setup Like a Pro | by Michael L. Hawkins | CodeX | Apr, 2022 | Medium

  If you’re a Linux enthusiast like me, there’s no way you can make do with just one distribution on your laptop or p.c. If you’re like me, you run at least one large-capacity SSD device on your laptop, or even a second one installed in a dvd caddy. You’re able to fit 3 to 8 (or more) operating systems on these internal drives, which scratches the distro-hopping itch while challenging you to gain proficiency with multiple package managers, such as apt (Debian/Ubuntu), dnf (Fedora), zypper (OpenSUSE) or pacman (Arch and its derivatives). If you’re a fan of rolling-release distributions like me, you spend a portion of most days running system updates.

  On a multi-boot system, what is the most efficient and safe way to ensure that all your distributions stay updated, requiring the least amount of time and energy? Is a graphical user interface (GUI) the best way to go, or is the command line a better choice?

Games

• HowTo Geek ☛ 10 Fun Games to Play in the Linux Terminal

  If you want to learn to use the Linux terminal, a great way to start is by installing and playing some games. These games aren’t just fun—they also require no compatibility layer or expensive graphics cards.

Distributions

• Barry Kauler ☛ Partition icons overlap

  Flipping from JWM-mode icon-free-desktop and ROX-mode icons-on-desktop, I observed partition icons slightly non-aligned

• Barry Kauler ☛ Kernel 5.15.34 compiled

  I reported about kernels after 5.15.16 having issues, also other kernels dated from 27 January:

  https://bkhome.org/news/202202/kernel-51610-broken.html

  There has been plenty of time for the issues to be fixed, and they are. I compiled 5.15.34 and it runs fine. On my Lenovo Ideacentre PC anyway. Running it now.

• New Releases

  • AVL-MXE 21.1 and MXDE Release-a-palooza! – bandshed.net

    With the help of the MX developers Adrian, dolphin_oracle, Stevo, timkb4cq (and in a huge way… fehlix!!) I’m happy to provide an updated AV Linux MX Edition ISO synced with MX 21.1 and as a bonus I’m also debuting the new ‘MXDE’ MX + LXDE build which is new base Operating System with all the performance tweaks of AV Linux in a super lean LXDE/zzzFM formulation. These are not Respins they are built from scratch with the phenomenal antiX/MX ISO build system.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • How To Use Kerberos In Copr

    During the last release, a new authentication option was added to Copr. Now users can also log in using a Kerberos ticket. We use GSSAPI to implement this mechanism. The GSSAPI (Generic Security Services API) is a common interface for accessing the Kerberos security system. Enabling GSSAPI authentication in Copr CLI or API will allow authentication without using the API token for clients that have a Fedora account. To use GSSAPI login in WebUI, click on gssapi-login (negotiate needs to be allowed for the .fedorainfracloud.org domain in the browser, see browser configuration). It will log you in if you have a Kerberos ticket for username@FEDORAPROJECT.ORG. To enable GSSAPI, you need to obtain a Kerberos ticket first. If you want to work with Fedora Copr, you can just do:

  • Fedora ☛ Fedora Ambassadors Kick-Off Call Wrap Up: what’s next and how to get involved! – Fedora Community Blog

    The Fedora Ambassadors and other Fedora folks interested in outreach met for an hour call on Thursday, March 31st. We recorded the call and uploaded the video to YouTube. The upload is left as unlisted as the quality came out less than ideal, but the link can be shared for direct access. We have set up another meeting for Thursday, April 28th at 3 PM UTC.

    We have also put together a new whenisgood to set a permanent time and cadence for the meetings. If you are interested in participating, please fill out the whenisgood form by April 27th.

  • Fedora MediaWriter (nextgen) on MacOS – egasta Blog

    Hi, for the past few months I have been working on MacOS build and fixing USB drive restoration on Windows as well as fixing few design bugs. I fixed overflowing highlighted option background in combobox used in Adwaita style on Linux. Next design fix was updating animations when changing pages. Now when we build the new FMW on all platforms, I can say I like MacOS and Linux versions a lot more than Windows version. I don’t like design of buttons. What about your opinion?

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ Burnout busters: 5 tips to give your team motivation and purpose

    We’re living in unprecedented times. Around the world, we’re experiencing digital and technological transformations in almost every industry – some that we would have considered impossible just a few years ago.

    But with great opportunities come great challenges, and in IT, there’s rarely a day we would describe as easy.

    If you’re involved in digital transformation projects, you know that the path can be rocky and painful: endless meetings, poor leadership, constant changes of scope, cut timelines, slashed budgets, endless testing, and failings, and long working hours all make it tough to maintain your energy and motivation.

• Debian Family

  • Firmware – what are we going to do about it?

    TL;DR: firmware support in Debian sucks, and we need to change this. See the “My preference, and rationale” Section below.

    In my opinion, the way we deal with (non-free) firmware in Debian is a mess, and this is hurting many of our users daily. For a long time we’ve been pretending that supporting and including (non-free) firmware on Debian systems is not necessary. We don’t want to have to provide (non-free) firmware to our users, and in an ideal world we wouldn’t need to. However, it’s very clearly no longer a sensible path when trying to support lots of common current hardware.

  • LWN ☛ McIntyre: Firmware – what are we going to do about it? [LWN.net]

    Steve McIntyre argues that Debian needs to rethink its approach to non-free firmware.

  • ITP Prizren Platinum Sponsor of DebConf22

    We are very pleased to announce that ITP – Innovation and Training Park Prizren has committed to supporting DebConf22 as a Platinum sponsor. Also, ITP Prizren will host the Conference for all 15 days!

    The ITP Prizren intends to be a changing and boosting element in the area of ICT, agro-food and creatives industries, through the creation and management of a favourable environment and efficient services for SMEs, exploiting different kinds of innovations that can contribute to Kosovo to improve its level of development in industry and research, bringing benefits to the economy and society of the country as a whole.

    ITP Prizren is a focal point in the Balkan region for innovation, business and skills development, and a source of innovative and successful ideas.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Call for testing: 22.04 release candidate images ready!

    Hello everyone!
    
    We are now finishing building our latest batch of 22.04 release
    candidate images to the iso-tracker. From what we're seeing so far
    things seem to be looking quite nice, so fingers-crossed for those
    being our final ones!
    
    http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/milestones/432/builds
    
    Please pick your favorite flavor and start testing! And be sure to
    report your results on the isotracker.
    
    As with every recent release, we have a discourse thread for tracking
    progress which we try to keep up to date as much as possible:
    
    https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/jammy-jellyfish-22-04-release-status-tracking/27763
    
    

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Install Gnome Software as Ubuntu Software with Flatpak Support in Ubuntu 22.04 | UbuntuHandbook

    This simple tutorial shows how to replace the default Snap Store (Ubuntu Software) with Gnome Software with Flatpak support in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

    Many applications today publish Linux packages via Flatpak. However, Ubuntu’s software center (aka Snap Store) does not support this universal package format.

    If you like, Gnome Software can be a good alternative which has both Snap and Flatpak as well as Deb packages support.

Devices/Embedded

• CNX Software ☛ ROC-RK3588S-PC is the first Rockchip RK3588S SBC, supports up to 32GB RAM – CNX Software

  Rockchip RK3588S processor, a cost-down version of Rockchip RK3588 SoC with fewer interfaces, has made its way into Firefly ROC-RK3588S-PC SBC (single board computer) about the size of a credit card and equipped with up to 32GB RAM.

  The compact SBC also comes with up to 128GB eMMC flash, and offers support for NVMe storage, up to four video outputs through HDMI, USB-C and MIPI DSI interfaces, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, two MIPI CSI camera interfaces, and more.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ DFI industrial mini PC features AMD Ryzen Embedded R1000 processor

  The EC90A-GH is a compact sized computer that is designed to function as a secured AI edge computing and IoT platform. According to DFI, the device is very simple to set up and is robust enough to operate 24/7. The company plans to target commercial applications such as kiosks, smart buildings, digital signage and even arcades.

  DFi’s mini PC integrates their own 1.8″ GHF51 board which is based on the AMD Ryzen embedded R1000 series processor. The AMD Ryzen R1000 is a dual multi-threaded core processor( up to 3.5GHz) that features 3 Vega Graphics CUs powerful enough to handle 4K displays. Additionally, the mini PC is equipped with 1x DDR4 2400MHz SODIMM memory onboard (4GB – 8GB)

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Electronics Weekly ☛ Arduino turns to Linux for the heavy lifting Portenta X8

    Priced at €199, the system was created by Arduino working together with UK-based Foundries.io, in similar fashion to other partnerships – it made the recent Nicla Vision with with ST Microelectronics and the Portenta Cat M1/NB IoT GNSS Shield with Thales.

    Basically, Arduino describes the X8 as an industrial-grade System On Module (SOM) that offers the best of two approaches: flexibility of usage of Linux for the heavy lifting of high-performance duties and other processors to run Arduino code for real-time tasks.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Blackview Tab 11, a good budget tablet | Fitzcarraldo’s Blog

    There is significant commonality between the Tab 11 and Tab 10 as they both use Android 11. The Tab 10 has Blackview’s Doke OS_P 1.0 on top of Android 11, whereas the Tab 11 has Doke OS_P 2.0 which has several additional features (split screen functionality, for example).

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Programming/Development

  • Using cmake to build LibreOffice C++ SDK examples – LibreOffice Development Blog

    These days, many C++ projects are built using build tools like cmake and meson in addition to GNU make (gmake). In this blog, I have already written on how to compile and run LibreOffice SDK examples using gmake.

  • WebKit frame delivery – ChrisLord.net

    Part of my work on WebKit at Igalia is keeping an eye on performance, especially when it concerns embedded devices. In my experience, there tend to be two types of changes that cause the biggest performance gains – either complete rewrites (e.g. WebRender for Firefox) or tiny, low-hanging fruit that get overlooked because the big picture is so multi-faceted and complex (e.g. making unnecessary buffer copies, removing an errant sleep(5) call). I would say that it’s actually the latter bug that’s harder to diagnose and fix, even though the code produced at the end of it tends to be much smaller. What I’m writing about here falls firmly into the latter group.

    [...]

    One of these graphs does not look like the others, right? We can immediately see that when a frame exceeds the 16.67ms/60fps rendering budget in WebKit/WPE under the Wayland backend, that it hard drops to 30fps. Other browsers don’t wait for a vsync to kick off rendering work and so are able to achieve frame-rates between 30fps and 60fps, when measured over multiple frames (all of these browsers are locked to the screen refresh, there is no screen tearing present). The other noticeable thing in these is that the green line is missing on the WebKit test – this shows that the timestamp delivered to the frame callback is exactly the same as Performance::now, where as the timestamps in both Chrome and Firefox appear to be the time of the last vsync. This makes sense from an animation point of view and would mean that animations that are timed using this timestamp would move at a rate that’s more consistent with the screen refresh when under load.

  • HOW TO USE THE TERRAFORM SPLIT FUNCTION – buildVirtual

    You can use the split() function in Terraform to allow you to split up a string in your terraform plans. The terraform split function has two inputs, the separator character, and the string we wish to perform the split operation on. The syntax here is similar to the terraform join function.

  • Bootlin contributions to OP-TEE 3.17 – Bootlin’s blog

    As we mentioned in our last blog post about OP-TEE 3.16, Bootlin planned to and contributed some interesting features in the recently released OP-TEE 3.17 ! Here is a short presentation of our contributions to this release…

  • Install Git 2.36 on Ubuntu / Linux Mint / Rocky Linux & Fedora

    This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Git 2.36 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, LinuxMint 20.3, Rocky Linux 8, AlmaLinux 8, and Fedora 35.

    Git is the most popular Free and Open-source distributed version control system in the world. It is easy to learn and has a lightning-fast performance.

    Git is fast and built to work with the Linux kernel, the latest version of GIT is 2.36.0 and it is a stable version released on 18-APR-2022.

  • Perl/Raku

    • vrurg: A New `will complain` Trait

      Long time no see, my dear reader! I was planning a lot for this blog, as well as for the Advanced Raku For Beginners series. But you know what they say: wanna make the God laugh – tell him your plans!

      Anyway, there is one tradition I should try to maintain howerver hard the times are: whenever I introduce something new into the Raku language an update has to be published. No exception this time.

  • Java

    • OpenSource.com ☛ 7 guides for developing applications on the cloud with Quarkus | Opensource.com

      Which programming language comes to your mind first for business applications development on the cloud?

      If you answered Java, I suggest you experience the benefits of Quarkus.

    • Red Hat ☛ Best practices for Java in single-core containers | Red Hat Developer

      An increasing number of Java applications run in containers. The exact number is hard to determine, because adoption of containers depends upon the market segment and cloud maturity of each particular team or company. However, some data is available—for example, data from New Relic suggests that over 62% of their customers’ Java workloads run in containers. Like all data points, this one is an imperfect proxy for the market as a whole, but the report demonstrates that a significant subset of the Java market has already moved to container-based environments. Anecdotal data also tells us that this migration trend is far from over.

      Teams using Java need to pay special attention to some aspects of container-based deployments and adopt a couple of best practices. This article focuses on the choice of garbage collector (GC) and how the default choice is based on available CPUs and memory.

    • Red Hat ☛ Java 17: What’s new in OpenJDK’s container awareness | Red Hat Developer

      OpenJDK has been aware of Linux containers (such as Docker and Podman, as well as container orchestration frameworks such as Kubernetes) for some time. By container awareness, we mean that OpenJDK detects when it is running inside a container. In this article, you’ll learn why container awareness is useful, what has changed recently in that area of OpenJDK, and what diagnostic options are available to help developers gain insight into how the JVM determines settings.

      OpenJDK’s container awareness detection uses Linux’s control group (cgroup) filesystem to detect enforced resource quotas. As of this writing, Java 17 is the only long-term support release that supports both cgroups v1 and cgroups v2 configurations. Note, however, that there is currently work ongoing to backport cgroups v2 support to OpenJDK 11.

      OpenJDK detects whether certain resource quotas are in place when running in a container and, if so, uses those bounds for its operation. These resource limits affect, for example, the garbage collection (GC) algorithm selected by the JVM, the default size of the heap, the sizes of thread pools, and how default parallelism is determined for ForkJoinPool.

    • Linux Hint ☛ How to Sort an Array in Java

      In programming languages, sorting plays a very significant role as it reduces the complexities. In Java, the term sorting means arranging the elements/values in a particular order i.e. ascending or descending. If we talk about array sorting, it can be achieved using some built-in methods, user-defined methods, using loops, etc. These sorting approaches are capable of sorting any type of array such as numeric, or alphabetic.

Todo Lists

I read through most of the documentation before starting this migration in earnest, and was actually a bit overwhelmed. This tool is *huge*. You can configure (per command or with a configuration file) *everything* and add metadata for anything: foreground and background colors for different task states; coefficients for anything you can think of that affects how the tool calculates a task’s urgency. A few times I have been tempted to change the defaults of some of these coefficents, but then I realized there was another piece of metadata I could add that would put the task at just the right order in my list.

Bringing Back the Symposium

My friends had a spirited debate after too many spirits. I suggested bringing back the Greek-style symposium, and it lead to a far more interesting debate.

First, we agreed on time – two minutes. Then someone kept the time, and motioned to indicate when only thirty second remained.

Everyone felt heard, nobody interrupted each other (well they did a bit, but the timekeeper added more time to account for it), and we suffered far less repetition. When a subject arose I didn’t have any care for, I remained silent, which shortened the debate.

One important rule; once someone has said their piece, they should not raise the subject for the remainder of the night. Once you finish, you finish, and anyone who cannot state their point within two minutes shouldn’t say anything at all.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Security

    • Anna Collard on the Essence of Improved Cybersecurity in this 5G Era

      The FluBot mobile malware operates just like the flu. It infects the device using a blended attack of smishing using an SMS or WhatsApp message followed by a voicemail. Users click on the link, download the malware and then their systems are not only compromised, but used as a platform from which to inundate their contacts with the virus. It is fast, and so convincing that even sophisticated users fall prey to it.

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

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (gzip and xz-utils), Fedora (dhcp and rsync), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), openSUSE (chromium), SUSE (gzip, openjpeg2, and zabbix), and Ubuntu (klibc).

    • Wladimir Palant ☛ Wladimir Palant: Adobe Acrobat hollowing out same-origin policy

      It’s unclear whether all the countless people who have the Adobe Acrobat browser extension installed actually use it. The extension being installed automatically along with the Adobe Acrobat application, chances are that they don’t even know about it. But security-wise it doesn’t matter, an extension that’s installed and unused could still be exploited by malicious actors. So a few months ago I decided to take a look.

      [...]

      Companies don’t usually like security reports pointing out that something bad could happen. So I went out on a quest to find a Cross-site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability allowing third-party websites to abuse the privileges granted to documentcloud.adobe.com. While I eventually succeeded, this investigation yielded a bunch of dead ends that are interesting on their own. These have been reported to Adobe, and I’ll outline them in this article as well.

      TL;DR: Out of six issues reported, only one is resolved. The main issue received a partial fix, two more got fixes that didn’t quite address the issue. Two (admittedly minor) issues haven’t been addressed at all within 90 days from what I can tell.

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

      • Finding #1: Security is open source developers’ most urgent challenge, while complying with government requirements is a rising concern [Ed: Tidelift is joining the Microsoft-led FUD campaign; Tidelift is a longtime Microsoft booster, in effect trying to reform the image of a company that commits crimes and attacks Free software [1, 2]; Regarding TideLift, it’s funded by ‘former’ Microsoft as the General Manager of General Catalyst (Quentin Clark). He was at Microsoft for 20 years.]

        In December of 2021, Tidelift fielded our annual survey of technologists who use open source to build applications at work. Nearly 700 people shared how they use open source software today, what holds them back, and what tools and strategies help them use it even more effectively.

      • IT Web ☛ Sophos unveils powerful Cloud Workload Protection advancements with new Linux, container security offerings [Ed: No, proprietary software from an awfully dodgy firm like Sophos will make you worse off when it comes to security, not better. Sophos: buy our rubbish secret software. You’ll be safer. Or LESS safe! This was just over a year ago and there are more examples.]

      • USCERT ☛ CISA Releases Secure Cloud Business Applications (SCuBA) Guidance Documents for Public Comment [Ed: CISA cannot be taken too seriously (NSA agenda) if it floats this clown computing lunacy; this is where spies are collecting a lot data.]

        In accordance with Executive Order 14028, which is aimed at improving security for federal government networks, CISA’s SCuBA project aims to develop consistent, effective, modern, and manageable security that will help secure agency information assets stored within cloud operations.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • “We Value Your Privacy”

        No you don’t. If you did you wouldn’t have to hand me a long list of vendors and purposes and so called “legitimate interests” (what does that even mean, anyway?) that I have to manually disable. In fact you wouldn’t have any of those in the first place.

Defence/Aggression

• Digital war: How real-time images from Ukraine impact U.S. democracy

  Before any shots were fired, the Biden White House took a rare step of revealing sensitive U.S. intelligence about Russia’s intentions – that President Vladimir Putin intended to send a large amount of forces to invade Ukraine, that he would send troops to topple Kyiv and that the capital city would quickly crumble under Russian assault.

  The detailed information surprised some, as it was largely accurate, save for a key point: Russia has so far failed to gain control of Kyiv.

  “What the West has chosen to do in this war is to be open in an unprecedented way in order to deter Russia’s behavior, but also to show the world that Russia has had time to take an off ramp, to change its mind,” said Berzina.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• STATEMENT ON REPEATED INTERNET SHUTDOWNS IN VARIOUS STATES IN RESPONSE TO VIOLENCE

  Internet shutdowns are becoming the government’s routine response to communal clashes and violence. State governments and union territories have been issuing internet suspension orders in derogation of the letter and spirit of the Anuradha Bhasin directions and the applicable law.

  Suspension of the internet, even temporarily, adversely impacts the fundamental rights of the people of India. Therefore, an internet suspension order must follow due process of law. IFF will write to Chief Secretaries and the Home departments of all the States and Union Territories demanding compliance with the Supreme Court directions and the law applicable to internet suspensions.

Monopolies

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • Yahoo News ☛ Advantest Joins Open Invention Network [Ed: Software patents shored up by hostile corporations that create pools instead of abolishing fake patents]

    • Electronics Weekly ☛ Advantest joins Open Invention Network for Linux cooperation [Ed: While many of us fight to abolish software patents Keith Bergelt and other people who never ever use Linux are trying to 'normalise' such patents]

      OIN’s community, according to the Network, agrees non-aggression in patents in core Linux and adjacent open source technologies by royalty-free cross-licensing of Linux patents to one another. Patents owned by the Network are similarly licensed royalty-free to any organisation that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux System.

      [...]

      “By joining OIN, Advantest is doing its part to mitigate global patent risk for open source,” said OIN CEO said Keith Bergelt. “The benefits inherent in the cooperatively competitive business model that is harnessed through open collaboration are unmatched.”

Desktop/Laptop

• Razer x Lambda Tensorbook: Blade on Linux

  Aimed at developers and researchers working in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, this computer features an 11th generation Intel Core i7 processor, an Nvidia RTX 3080 Max-Q graphics card, a 2TB NVMe PCIe SSD 4.0 storage and 64GB of RAM, all supported It has an 80-watt battery with a capacity of 1440 pixels and 165 Hz with a 15.6-inch diagonal screen. Professionals who take advantage of it will be able to count on full connectivity: an HDMI 2.1 output, two Thunderbolt 4 compatible USB-C ports, three USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports, an SD card reader, and even Wi-Fi 6e and Bluetooth 5.2 for connectivity. 35.5 x 23.5 inches for 1.69 inches thick and 2.02 pounds on the scale.

Applications

• Linux Links ☛ 5 Best Free and Open Source C# Object-Relational Mapping Software

  
  Object–relational mapping (ORM) is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems using object-oriented programming languages. This creates, in effect, a “virtual object database” that can be used from within the programming language.

  In essence, ORM is a design pattern for converting (wrapping) that data stored within a relational database into an object that can be used within an object oriented language. It creates a layer between the language and the database, helping programmers work with data without the OOP paradigm.

Instructionals/Technical

• UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install MusicBrainz Picard on RHEL | CentOS | Rocky Linux

  In this guide, we will show you how to install MusicBrainz on RHEL | CentOS | Rocky Linux systems

  MusicBrainz Picard is a free and open-source software application for identifying, tagging, and organising digital audio recordings. It developed by the MetaBrainz Foundation, a non-profit company that also operates the MusicBrainz database.

• Remy Van Elst ☛ Proxmox VE 7 Corosync QDevice in a Docker container

  For a cluster (in any sense of the word), you need at least 3 nodes, otherwise there is no quorum. Meaning, if one node goes down, it (and the other node) cannot know if the problem is at their side or the other side. With an uneven number of nodes, one node can always ask another node, hey, it is just me or do so see the issue as well? If it receives no reply, it knows it’s their problem, if the other node does reply, they know it’s the third node that has the problem. Corosync, the cluster software used by Proxmox, supports an external Quorum device. This is a small piece of software running on a third node which provides an extra vote for the quorum (the extra vote) without being a Proxmox VE server. Any cluster with a even number of nodes can get such a split-brain situation, and in my experience, those are bad.

• [Old] The Domain Name System (6/6)

  When you typed blog.bithole.dev into your browser, it sent a request addressed towards my server at 142.93.26.121, which replied with this blogpost. But how did it know where to send the request? The answer is the domain name system, or DNS. Let’s see how it works.

• uni Toronto ☛ Where Linux’s load average comes from in the kernel

  Suppose, not hypothetically, that you have a machine that periodically has its load average briefly soar to relatively absurd levels for no obvious reason; the machine is normally at, say, 0.5 load average but briefly spikes to 10 or 15 a number of times a day. You would like to know why this happens. Capturing ‘top’ output once a minute doesn’t show anything revealing, and since these spikes are unpredictable it’s difficult to watch top continuously to possibly catch one in action. A starting point is to understand how the Linux kernel puts the load average together.

Games

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Steam Deck Client Update out, plus Valve dev clarifies a tweak for Gaming Mode | GamingOnLinux

  Two bits of official Steam Deck news to cover this morning, as there’s a new small Steam Deck Client Update out plus we now know what special performance tweak is done in Gaming Mode compared with Desktop Mode.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Game manager Lutris continues Flatpak improvements | GamingOnLinux

  While it’s not quite ready yet, proper support for Flatpak is coming for Lutris which will make it work easily on the Steam Deck and a new update is out now.

  For those who haven’t used it: Lutris is an app that allows you to have one place to launch all your games from on Linux. This includes Steam, GOG, Origin, Ubisoft, Emulators and more. Regardless of them being Native Linux titles, Windows games run through Wine and more.

• Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games with Native Linux Clients – 2022-04-19 Edition – Boiling Steam

  Between 2022-04-12 and 2022-04-19 there were 21 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 190 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 11.1 % of total released titles.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Erik Wolpaw to Valve on Portal 3 — ‘we should just do it’ | GamingOnLinux

  Erik Wolpaw, a writer on the likes of Half-Life 2, Portal, Portal 2, Half-Life: Alyx and more thinks Valve really should just go ahead and make Portal 3 already.

  Wolpaw recently spoke on the KIWI TALKZ podcast on various topics, and had some pretty firm words to give to Valve on getting moving making games again. Some of what Wolpaw said during it included: “I would love to work on Portal 3 in a second, but I can’t do it unfortunately by myself. […] The problem is with 300 employees and I don’t know exactly the breakdown, like how many of them are on the production side versus Steam business side versus legal versus whatever, there’s a lot of opportunity cost taking 75 people and trying to get a game made.”. The conversation goes on to point out employees are always doing something, so they would be pulled from something else of course.

• [Old] The games Nintendo didn’t want you to play: Tengen

  Recently, I took a look at Nintendo’s MMC line of mappers, and some other boards. All boards for the NES’ western releases had to be manufactured by Nintendo, and so they generally met certain standards set by Nintendo. But these rules were enforced by technology, not by law. And the company that had previously killed the American game industry decided to break those rules. Madness? No. This… is Tengen.

Distributions

• Puppy Linux – A Collection of Multiple Linux Distributions

  
  First of all, let me say that I am a big fan of Puppy Linux. The reason for this is simple: Puppy and its multiple variations with support for application packages from bases ranging from Ubuntu to Slackware and Arch Linux while being one of the most commonly used operating systems for Linux laptops reign supreme.

  Puppy Linux is a distribution created by Barry Kauler, Larry Short, Mick Amadio, and the Puppy community. It is a lightweight Linux distribution that focuses on ease of use and minimal memory footprint.

  If you’re interested in learning more about Puppy Linux, take your time to read through this article.

• BSD

  • Operating systems battle: OpenBSD vs NixO

    While I’m an OpenBSD contributor, I also enjoy using Linux especially the NixOS distribution which I consider a system apart from the other Linux distributions because of how different it is. Because I use both, I have two SSDs in my laptop with each system installed and I can jump from one to another depending on the task I’m doing or which I want to use.

    My main system, the one with all my data, is OpenBSD, unfortunately the lack of an interoperable and good file system between NixOS and OpenBSD make it difficult to share data between them without using a network storage offering a protocol they have in common.

• Debian Family

  • Ghacks ☛ Linux Mint’s Upgrade Tool is now available for beta testing

    A few months ago, developers of the Linux Mint team announced that they would release an Upgrade Tool soon to improve major Linux Mint version upgrades.

    The graphical user interface tool would add an option to the upgrade process to make it more comfortable and easier for many of the operating system’s users. Instead of having to run commands from Terminal windows, most Linux Mint upgrades could be completed using just the tool.

  • Unicorn Media ☛ Linux Mint Releases LMDE Upgrade Tool for Beta Testing

    On Monday, Linux Mint announced that it has released a beta version of a new Linux Mint Debian Edition upgrade tool that can be used to upgrade LMDE 4 to LMDE 5. The tool is available through the Mint repository by running apt install mintupgrade after refreshing your cache (apt update).

    The blog announcing the availability says that the tool ships with a graphical user interface, but is launched from the command line by running sudo mintupgrade. After running the software and successfully upgrading your system, remove the tool and reboot your computer by running apt remove mintupgrade followed by sudo reboot.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Vs Ubuntu 20.04 LTS: What’s Changing?

    list of 10 significant feature differences between Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for users transitioning from LTS to LTS.

Devices/Embedded

• CNX Software ☛ SkiffOS minimal Linux for embedded containers now supports Sipeed Nezha RISC-V board

  SkiffOS minimal Cross-compiled Linux for embedded containers has just added support for Sipeed Nezha RISC-V single board computer, and work on the smaller Sipeed Lichee RV board has started.

  Wait… What is SkiffOS? I’ve never heard about it… That’s how the abstract from the white paper describes it…

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Unicorn Media ☛ Is Freedom Phone the Trump University of Mobile Devices?

    Forget about building a better mousetrap. Wave a big enough U.S. flag, yell “freedom” loud enough, and the MAGA crowd will beat a path to your door.

    That’s the theory, anyway.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ REVIEW: Tiny 2040

    To achieve a smaller footprint, a few compromises have been made. Most notably, the Tiny 2040 only has a total of 16 pins versus Pico’s 40, plus a debug header. Of these, there are 12 GPIO pins, compared to 26 on Pico. So it won’t be compatible with most Pico add-on modules. As with Pico, there’s no wireless connectivity.

    On the plus side, the Tiny 2040 does break out a fourth ADC input – which is connected to an on-board temperature sensor on Pico.

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ Raspberry Pi Wacky Inflatable Tube Guys Keep Students in Line

    As exciting as this Pi-powered dance party is, the project serves an even greater purpose in the world of education. Thecaptnjim is a high school graphics teacher and wanted to find a way to stop students from logging out of their machines before class is over. So instead of using something simple like an alarm clock or notification prompt, Thecaptnjim opted for a more entertaining solution.

    The idea was to create a visual-based warning system accompanied by sound. The result is a timer that plays a “hurry up” soundbite from one of the Super Mario Brothers games, followed up 30 seconds later with the activation of a pair of wacky waving inflatable tube men that dance to a random song—signaling to the students that class is over. After that, it’s okay to start packing up.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • 9to5Google ☛ Google may revive Wallet name for Android’s cards & passes – 9to5Google

  • Android Police ☛ Google is testing a combined Security & Privacy menu for Android 13

  • GSM Arena ☛ Motorola Edge 20 Pro is now starting to receive the update to Android 12 – GSMArena.com news

  • India Times ☛ These Realme smartphones to get early access of Android 12-based Realme UI 3.0 – Times of India

  • CNX Software ☛ ROC-RK3588S-PC is the first Rockchip RK3588S SBC, supports up to 32GB RAM – CNX Software

  • Android Headlines ☛ Top 8 Best Motorola Android Smartphones

  • 5 mistakes everyone makes with Android Auto | T3

  • These 5 Android games are kinda like playing Skyrim on your phone | Pocket Gamer

  • Best Automation Apps for Android in 2022 – TechPP

  • How To Clear Your Android Phone’s Cache

  • 9to5Google ☛ How to play Trivia Quest on Android TV – 9to5Google

  • How to Speed Up Slow Internet on Your Android Phone – Gotechtor

  • GSM Arena ☛ Here is how a Lightning port was grafted onto an Android phone – GSMArena.com news

  • Why Do My Apps Keep Crashing In Android

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• FSF

  • GNU Projects

    • Bryan Lunduke ☛ Richard Stallman – “The state of the Free Software movement” – April 13, 2022

      Though, truthfully, I highly recommend listening to the whole thing. There’s no denying the massive influence Richard Stallman has had on the software world (Free Software in particular, obviously), and hearing his thoughts on the current state of the computer software world is both important and enlightening.

• Programming/Development

  • Brian Callahan ☛ I wrote a peephole optimizer (for QBE), part 3: Studying the LLVM and GCC optimizers

    Let’s keep working on O, our peephole optimizer for cproc and QBE. Our previous posts resparked some attention over on the QBE mailing list. Today, I want to look at the inc and dec operations and see if it makes sense to replace adds and subs by one with incs and decs. If such replacements are sensible, does QBE already do this? If not, then that’s a new set of optimizations that we can teach O.

  • Mark Dominus ☛ Let’s go find out!

    I just went through an extensive job search, maybe the most strenuous of my life. I hadn’t meant to! I wrote a blog post asking where I should apply for Haskell jobs, and I thought three or four people would send suggestions. Instead I was contacted by around fifty people, many of whom ran Haskell-related companies and invited me to apply, after it hit #1 on Hacker News. So I ran with it.

  • Python

    • Rlang ☛ Linking R and Python to retrieve financial data and plot a candlestick

      I am way more experienced with R than with Python and prefer to code in this language when possible. This applies, especially when it is about visualizations. Plotly and ggplot2 are fantastic packages that provide a lot of flexibility. However, every language has its limitations, and the best results stem from their efficient combination.

      This week, I created the candlestick below, and I think it’s an excellent case study to illustrate a few things: [...]

The Nation ☛ Outgunned

Hackaday ☛ Movie Prop Electronics Hack Chat

Join us on Wednesday, April 20 at noon Pacific for the Movie Prop Electronics Hack Chat with Ben Eadie!

Hackaday ☛ Ask Hackaday: Would A Scooter Get You Back To The Office?

So we’re two plus years into the pandemic at this point. Are you still working from home in the most comfortable clothes ever sewn? We figure that of the lot of you who said goodbye to that drab, tiled carpet in 2020, most have probably heard rumblings about returning to the office. And probably a good portion have at least been forced into a hybrid schedule.

Hardware

• Hackaday ☛ 2022 Sci-Fi Contest: Schrödinger’s Trigger Is Trained On Electrons, Not Cats

  While it’s true that Hackaday scribes and their families are sadly unable to compete in our contests, Hackaday alum are more than welcome to throw their hat in the ring. [Legionlabs] even made a game of it — they used only parts from the scrap heap, and even played beat the clock to build a real, science-fictiony, working thing in eight hours or less.

• Hackaday ☛ Honey, Did You Feed The Lamp? Company Wants To Create Living Light Bulbs

  The BBC’s [Peter Yeung] had an interesting post about a small French town experimenting with using bioluminescent organisms to provide lighting. A firm called Glowee is spearheading the effort in Rambouillet and other towns throughout France, using a variety of biological techniques to harness nature’s light sources.

• Tom’s Hardware ☛ Russian Government’s New Semiconductor Plan: Local 28nm by 2030

  As it’s being ostracized and sanctioned by much of the world for its war against Ukraine, Russia is building up plans to revive its ailing local manufacturing of semiconductors, since it cannot get chips from the usual suppliers. The country’s new chip plan involves a rather massive investment over the next eight years, the goals don’t exactly sound ambitious. For example, while TSMC plans to hit 2nm by 2026, Russia wants 28nm local chip manufacturing by 2030.

• Hackaday ☛ Gun Safe Made Safer With Lithium Battery Upgrade

  A proper gun safe should be difficult to open, but critically, allow instant access by the authorized party.[Dr. Gerg] got a SnapSafe and discovered that, while it was quite easy to use, it would also lock the owner out easily whenever the batteries would run out. Meant to be used with four AAA batteries and no way to recharge them externally, this could leave you royally screwed in the exact kind of situation where you need the gun safe to open. This, of course, meant that the AAA batteries had to go.

• Hackaday ☛ The Epic Journey Of Repairing An HP 9830A Desktop Computer From The 1970s

  We love our retrocomputers here at Hackaday, and we’re always delighted to see someone rescue an historic artefact from the landfill. Sometimes, all it takes is replacing a broken power switch or leaky capacitor; other times you need to bring out the oscilloscope and dig deeper into internal circuitry. But the huge amount of work [Jerry Walker] put into bringing an HP 9830A back on its feet is something you don’t see very often.

• Hackaday ☛ Build Your Own Cat – Some Assembly Required

  Robotic pets are sci-fi material, and [Kevin McAleer] from [Kev’s Robots] is moving us all ever so closer towards a brighter, happier, more robotic future. One of his latest robot builds, PicoCat, is a robot cat with servo-driven paws. It follows in the footsteps of the OpenCat project made by Dr. Rongzhong Li back in 2016, and we’re always happy seeing someone pick up where another hacker left off. [Kevin] took heavy inspiration from the OpenCat design – rebuilding it with hardware more friendly and accessible for makers today.

• Common Dreams ☛ Biden Urged to ‘Fight Like Hell’ for Global Covid Funds as New Summit Announced

  As the White House on Monday announced the convening of a Second Global Covid-19 Summit next month, a leading public health advocate called U.S. President Joe Biden’s response to the crisis “late and anemic,” while urging his administration to “fight like hell” for congressionally imperiled funding to combat the ongoing pandemic.

  “Five billion dollars is the bare minimum; far less than what is needed. The White House needs to fight like hell for that money and much more.”

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Counter Punch ☛ Consumer Protection Progress and Regress – From the Sixties to No

  Let’s look at the record. Motor vehicles are much safer, less polluting, and more fuel efficient now, but not nearly what they should be. Today, consumers have warranty rights, recall rights, equal credit opportunity rights they did not have back then. Labeling has also improved. There is no more lead in gasoline and paint, though lead water pipes still contaminate some drinking water systems.

  From being King tobacco over 50 years ago, cigarette companies are more regulated and daily tobacco smoking is down from 45% of adults to less than 15% of adults. But now there is vaping. Deadly asbestos is out of most products.

• Common Dreams ☛ Right-Wing Judge Kills CDC Mask Mandate for Travel

  A federal judge on Monday struck down the Biden administration’s mask mandate for public transportation, which has required one to wear a protective face covering while waiting for and traveling on planes, trains, and buses.

  “There should be a mandatory course in public health in our nation’s law schools.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Thousands of Sutter Health Nurses Stage 1-Day Northern California Strike

  Thousands of nurses at 18 Northern California Sutter Health hospitals and medical facilities on Monday began a one-day strike to protest what their union called the healthcare provider’s refusal to address “proposals about safe staffing and health and safety protections” amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

  “We have tried repeatedly to address the chronic and widespread problem of short staffing that causes delays in care and potentially puts patients at risk.”

• Orac ☛ Is it even possible to design high quality acupuncture trials?

  Last week, I tried to argue how the case of how ivermectin, the antihelminthic medication that is used in both animals and humans to prevent and treat diseases caused by roundworms, became the focus of “miracle cure” claims for COVID-19 based on its in vitro antiviral activity, was an excellent illustration of how science-based medicine isn’t just for highly implausible treatments being embraced by so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM, or, as it’s now more frequently called, “integrative medicine”). I won’t rehash the argument, given how long last week’s post was, other than to point out that ivermectin always had a very low plausibility and probability of working in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in humans because the concentration required to produce antiviral activity in cell culture was at least 50-fold higher than the highest concentration that can safely be achieved in vivo in human beings. Unsurprisingly, high-quality trials increasingly find that ivermectin is indistinguishable from placebo when used to treat COVID-19. As great a medicine as it is for roundworm infestations, ivermectin just doesn’t work against COVID-19. There’s no good reason to have expected that it would either, at least if you take basic science (specifically, basic pharmacology) into account. I even compared ivermectin to acupuncture, an even more improbable treatment for which high quality RCTs increasingly find no effect distinguishable from placebo/sham treatments but for which advocates have pivoted to lower quality evidence.

• Project Censored ☛ COVID-19 Natural Immunity vs. Vaccine Induced Immunity – Validated Independent News

  The CDC report acknowledges what many prior studies have suggested — that surviving COVID-19 provides excellent natural immunity not only to repeat infection but also to hospitalization and death. This was especially the case after the Delta variant, with natural immunity clearly being more protective against infection than vaccination.

• Project Censored ☛ COVID-19 Vaccine Safety and Data Integrity Concerns – Validated Independent News

  According to the CDC, vaccine development normally takes 5-10 years, while the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out in one year, with clinical trials completed in three overlapping phases to expedite final authorization by the FDA.

• Project Censored ☛ In Push for Profits, Pfizer Pre-Empting National Governments’ Powers – Validated Independent News

  Based on a study of Pfizer’s unredacted contracts with various nations, Public Citizen’s report, “Pfizer’s Power,” reveals that Pfizer has tried to “silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk and maximize profits in the middle of a global public health crisis.”  The report confirms and extends the investigation conducted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published in February 2021, which highlighted Pfizer’s “bullying” negotiation tactics.  Zain Rizvi, author of Public Citizen’s report, told Democracy Now! that Pfizer is “expected to make $30 billion this year from the COVID vaccine alone.”

• Project Censored ☛ Establishment News Bias in Reporting Debate on COVID-19 Origins – Validated Independent News

  In August 2021, the long-awaited U.S Intelligence Assessment on Covid-19 Origins had announced that both hypotheses remained “plausible” and that the intelligence community “remains divided on the most likely origin of COVID-19.”

• Project Censored ☛ Regulatory Capture of the FDA and CDC – Validated Independent News

  The 2016 BMJ study assessed the “revolving door” between FDA regulators and the pharmaceutical companies the agency is charged with regulating. The study found that the “majority” of the FDA’s hematology-oncology reviewers who left the agency (15 of 26) “ended up working or consulting for the biopharmaceutical industry,” Jacobs reported.  The 2018 Science article  found that 11 of 16 FDA reviewers who worked on 28 drug approvals and subsequently left the agency subsequently took positions working at or consulting for the companies they had recently regulated.

• Vox ☛ The secrets hidden in sewage

  But in the future, the potential for human waste to tell us about what is happening with our community’s health could extend far beyond the novel coronavirus.

• Wales UK ☛ My skin was irritated, red and blotchy for years until I found out why because of lockdown

  Eventually I purged my house of everything and the skin was doing great. Then I went back to the office (I had not been in for a while due to Covid). Within a few hours of being in the office my skin started to burn and by that night I was back to square one. I was so bloody upset. How the hell had this happened? It was then I remembered that inside the gents toilet there was one of those automatically spraying air freshener things. Knowing that chemical one was very common in air fresheners I checked with the landlord of our building. Turns out the spray did contain the chemical meaning that every minute, three of these sprays were essentially waterboarding my face with something I was super allergic to.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Security

    • Krebs On Security ☛ Conti’s Ransomware Toll on the Healthcare Industry [Ed: Microsoft Windows kills]

      Conti — one of the most ruthless and successful Russian ransomware groups — publicly declared during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that it would refrain from targeting healthcare providers. But new information confirms this pledge was always a lie, and that Conti has launched more than 200 attacks against hospitals and other healthcare facilities since first surfacing in 2018 under its earlier name, “Ryuk.”

    • PIA ☛ Interview With Marco DeMello – PSafe

      Marco DeMello: What motivated us, initially, was to create a security solution that would protect mobile users from cyberattacks — and now we’re the largest privately-held cybersecurity company in Latin America.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • GnuPG ☛ The 6th OpenPGP Email Summit, May 2022

        This is an event open for anybody involved in the development of email clients using OpenPGP for encryption.

      • Techdirt ☛ French President (Again) Calls For An End To Online Anonymity

        A world leader not known for shying away from truly terrible ideas about speech and the internet is back at it again. A few years ago, French President Emmanuel Macron delivered, as Cathy Gellis put it, “a speech only an autocrat would love,” decrying pretty much everything that’s good and open about the internet while trying to portray his ideas as necessary to societal development.

Defence/Aggression

• Counter Punch ☛ Righting the Record: Claims that SDRs “Help US Enemies” Are Baseless

  Last year’s allocation came at zero cost to the United States, and has proved invaluable for developing countries around the world. Already, 99 countries — including Ukraine — have made use of their allocation to stabilize their currencies, shore up reserves, pay off debts, or finance health care and other urgent needs.

  But for many, last year’s allocation was not nearly enough. On top of the continued fallout from the pandemic, the repercussions of the Russian invasion of Ukraine will reverberate around the world, with rising food and fuel prices hitting developing countries hardest. The need to get more SDRs into the hands of developing countries — both through a new allocation and through the transfer of existing SDRs from wealthy countries to poorer countries — is as urgent as ever. But misinformation, and one falsehood in particular, keeps coming up.

• Counter Punch ☛ The Non-Proliferation Treaty, Joe Biden and the Nuclear Taboo

  Though the 2022 NPR maintains the decades’ long theory that nuclear weapons deter WMD and nuclear attacks, it does contradict the campaign statements of Candidate Biden who promised to reduce the role nuclear weapons  in our national security strategy. Biden also proffered that he could see no role for a  U.S. nuclear first strike.

  “President Biden would take other steps to demonstrate our commitment to reducing the role of nuclear weapons. As he said in 2017, Biden believes the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring—and if necessary, retaliating against—a nuclear attack. As president, he will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with our allies and military.

• The Nation ☛ America’s Militarism Will Be Its Downfall

  I recently participated in a commemoration of Martin Luther King’s address “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence,” originally delivered on April 2, 1967, at New York City’s Riverside Church. King used the occasion to announce his opposition to the ongoing war in Vietnam. Although a long time coming in the eyes of some in the antiwar movement, his decision was one for which he was roundly criticized, even by supporters of the civil rights movement. He was straying out of his prescribed lane, they charged, and needed to get back where he belonged.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Climate Change Is Also a Major Casualty of the War in Ukraine

  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has seen the return of state-on-state warfare on European soil for the first time since the end of the Second World War. The Balkan wars of the 1990s, which stunned Europe and claimed over 200,000 lives, have been attributed, rightly or wrongly, to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the resurgence of old conflicts between ethnic groups.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Pentagon Contractors Seizing New Gold Rush to Cash in on the Ukraine Crisis

  The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought immense suffering to the people of that land, while sparking calls for increased military spending in both the United States and Europe. Though that war may prove to be a tragedy for the world, one group is already benefiting from it: U.S. arms contractors.

• Common Dreams ☛ Ukrainians Used Cluster Bombs in Russian-Controlled Village: NYT

  Arms control advocates on Monday condemned a report that Ukrainian forces deployed cluster munitions in the village of Husarivka in Kharkiv Oblast in March—apparently Ukraine’s first verified use of cluster bombs since Russan forces invaded the country in late February.

  “Cluster munitions are unacceptable weapons that are killing and maiming civilians across Ukraine.”

• TruthOut ☛ McCarthy Defended Trump Effort to Freeze Ukraine Military Aid, Now Blames Biden

• Counter Punch ☛ Habermas on the Kantian Vision of Perpetual Peace

  Kant’s program for peace

  To set out logically Kant’s exciting (and controversial) program for perpetual peace, Habermas defines Kant’s goal for the “sought-for-‘lawful condition’” (p. 166), describes the actual project, discusses the appropriate legal forms of a federation of nations and queries whether the “philosophy of history” remains a convincing solution. For Kant, the primary goal is the abolition of war: “There is to be no war,” and the “heinous waging of War” must come to an end. While not focusing explicitly on the victims of war, Kant accords primary importance to the “horrors of violence” and the “devastation”, and above all, to the plundering and impoverishment of the country resulting from the considerable burdens of debt that arise from war, and he mentions as possible consequences of war, subjugation, the loss of liberty, and foreign domination. In addition, there is the corruption of morals when subjects are instigated by the government to commit such criminal acts as spying and spreading false information or to commit acts of treachery, for example, as snipers or assassins” (pp. 166-7).

• Counter Punch ☛ Latin America, the Caribbean and the War in Ukraine

  Latin America and the Caribbean, the region hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, is by no means removed from this phenomenon and its sharpening effect on the levels of violence and poverty. Yet its political leadership lacks proactive initiatives for confronting the coming wave and seems incapable of evaluating and coordinating joint approaches in the wake of recent events.

  The region has lost relevance in recent decades as an international political actor in terms of its participation in world trade, its national capacities, and its involvement in multilateral organizations, among other activities. In 2019, its political leadership allowed the U.S. government to deactivate the South American Union of Nations (Unasur) and replace it with an entelechy called the Forum for the Progress and Integration of South America (Prosur). It was unable to prevent Mauricio Claver-Carone, then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s national security adviser for Latin American affairs, from becoming the president of the Inter-American Development Bank in 2020, thus breaking the tradition of filling the post with a Latin American. Nor did it jointly back (as the African Union did) a proposal put forth by India and South Africa in the framework of the World Trade Organization to suspend the patents of Covid-19 vaccines until the entire world population was vaccinated.

• Counter Punch ☛ The China “Threat” and the Solomon Islands

  In a quick visit to Honiara to have discussions with Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, Seselja stated that Australia remained dedicated to supporting the security needs of the Solomon Islands, and would do so “swiftly, transparently and with full respect for its sovereignty”.  The Pacific country remained a friend, part of the “Pacific family”.

  While not specifically condemning the waywardness of the Sogavare government in forging closer ties with Beijing, Seselja explicitly mentions that discussions included “the proposed Solomon Islands-China security agreement.”  Using the familiar talking point of pushing regional familial ties, the Minister insisted that “the Pacific family will always meet the security needs of our region.”  In a tone suggesting both plea and clenched fist, Seselja went on to claim that Solomon Islands had been “respectfully” asked to reject the pact and “consult the Pacific family in the spirit of regional openness and transparency, consistent with our region’s security frameworks.”

• Meduza ☛ ‘A faded semblance of my old life’ Doxa editor Alla Gutnikova on the year she spent under house arrest — and what she plans to do next

  On April 12, Moscow’s Dorogomilovo District Court sentenced four former editors from the student magazine Doxa to two years of corrective labor and banned them from “administering websites.” The pretext for the case was a video showing the editors condemning the persecution of other students for supporting opposition politician Alexey Navalny. The editors spent the following year under a “ban on certain activities”; for example, they were prohibited from leaving their apartments for more than two hours a day and from using the Internet. Meduza spoke with Doxa editor Alla Gutnikova about what life was like under the ban.

• Counter Punch ☛ How Pentagon Contractors Are Cashing in on the Ukraine Crisis

  Even before hostilities broke out, the CEOs of major weapons firms were talking about how tensions in Europe could pad their profits. In a January 2022 call with his company’s investors, Raytheon Technologies CEO Greg Hayes typically bragged that the prospect of conflict in Eastern Europe and other global hot spots would be good for business, adding that “we are seeing, I would say, opportunities for international sales… [T]he tensions in Eastern Europe, the tensions in the South China Sea, all of those things are putting pressure on some of the defense spending over there. So I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.”

  In late March, in an interview with the Harvard Business Review after the war in Ukraine had begun, Hayes defended the way his company would profit from that conflict:

• Pro Publica ☛ Examining Nearly Two Decades of Taxpayer-Funded Border Operations

  In October 2005, Texas Gov. Rick Perry traveled to the border city of Laredo and announced Operation Linebacker, a new initiative that he said would protect the state’s residents from terrorist groups such as al-Qaida.

  Without pointing to evidence, Perry said such terrorist groups, along with drug cartels and gangs, were attempting to exploit the U.S.-Mexico border. A press release from the governor’s office said Perry warned that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, criminal organizations could “import terror, illegal narcotics and weapons of mass destruction.”

• Meduza ☛ At least thirty-seven dead Parents of Russian sailors aboard the Moskva leak information about their sons killed in Ukraine’s missile strike

  According to a source close to the command of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, 37 crew members died aboard the Moskva — the warship that sank in the Black Sea last week, after it was hit by multiple Ukrainian cruise missiles. Meduza reviews what we know about the deaths and disappearances of the warship’s sailors (several of whom were draftees).

• Meduza ☛ ‘I can do whatever I want to you’: Russian soldiers raped and murdered Ukrainian civilians in the village of Bogdanivka

  The world continues to learn about the atrocities committed in Ukraine’s Kyiv region in the weeks before Russian troops retreated from the area in late March. Together with news outlet Astra, Meduza discovered that in one village alone — Bogdanivka, in Kyiv’s Brovary district — at least three murders and two rapes occurred during the Russian occupation. To get an accurate picture of these (and other) crimes, we spoke with local residents, compared their accounts, and reconstructed the events that occurred in the village between March 8 and March 29, when Russian troops were in Bogdanivka.

• Democracy Now ☛ “Colonial Violence Is the Norm”: Israel Raids Al-Aqsa Mosque, Injuring 160+, Arresting Hundreds

  At least 19 were injured around occupied Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque on Sunday after a violent crackdown by Israeli police cleared out worshipers from the compound. It was the second raid since Friday, when Israeli police used rubber bullets, stun grenades and tear gas on unarmed Palestinians, resulting in the arrest of more than 300 and at least 158 injuries. This latest violence in Jerusalem comes as the holy days of Ramadan and Passover overlap. Meanwhile, Western media has been describing the attacks as “clashes” and using other obfuscatory language “as if there is no imbalance of power here, as if there is no nuclear state using its rubber-coated bullets and tear gas against worshipers at a mosque,” says Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• uni Columbia ☛ The Watergate Affair at 50th: The scandal that shook the nation

  Veniste, former chief of the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Watergate Task Force, shares his first-hand knowledge of the origins of the break-in on the 17th of June 1972, the attempts of the Nixon Administration to stymie the investigation, and the legacy of the scandal in the US Political system.

• IT Wire ☛ Anti-Labor public Twitter lists found on ABC presenter’s account

  Public Twitter lists under the names Labor Trolls and Lobotomised Shitheads have been discovered on ABC weekend news presenter Fauziah Ibrahim’s account, listing a number of people who make pro-Labor comments on the social media platform.

• IT Wire ☛ AFR shows it does not know difference between poll and focus group

  The Australian Financial Review, which claims to be one of the country’s top newspapers, does not appear to know the difference between data from a poll and a focus group, judging by a report written by its political editor, Phil Coorey, on Thursday.

• [Old] Dutch News ☛ Where tolerance finds its limits: Murder in Amsterdam

  Van Gogh was intensely critical of religion, and Islam in particular. Shortly before his death, he had produced a 10 minute film critical of Islam called Submission, together with the Somali-born Dutch-American activist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

  On November 2, 2004, van Gogh was cycling to work in Amsterdam when he was shot by Mohammed Bouyeri several times. Van Gogh managed to move behind a car, where witnesses said that he begged for his life before Bouyeri stabbed him in the chest with a machete, killing him. Bouyeri then pinned a death threat against Ayaan Hirsi Ali to van Gogh’s body.

Environment

• Heritage Project — Earth Day eve

  In February 1970, students from some 50 colleges and universities came to Ann Arbor for a workshop on how to hold Earth Day teach-ins on their own campuses. ENACT passed out materials with point-by-point instructions.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Auto Workers, Climate Groups in Joint Push to Electrify Postal Fleet

  After nearly 30 years in the labor movement, Cindy Estrada is well familiar with the corporate playbook. “As soon as wages and benefits are decent, they want to move that work somewhere else.” That’s what happened, the United Autoworkers Vice President explained at a recent rally, after Oshkosh Defense secured a huge contract to build postal vehicles.

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘No Wars, No Warming’: Extinction Rebellion Marches on NYC

  As part of a series of actions this spring, climate activists rallied and marched in New York City on Monday “to demand that our tax money stop being used to fund endless war and environmental destruction.”

  “We demand a liveable future.”

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Counter Punch ☛ Mosquitoes and Wildfires: How To Live With Both

    I’ve lived with mosquitoes for decades, sometimes in almost unbelievable numbers. Though I have occasionally encountered hordes of mosquitoes in the lower 48 states—the Everglades, for instance—nothing matches the blizzard of bugs I’ve encountered in the Far North.

    I can recall one backpack trip I made across the Brooks Range in Alaska. The mosquitoes were so thick that my pants, arms, and the rest of my clothes were covered so much that I could grab a handful of the churning mass of winged tormentors from my leg or arm and make a snowball from their bodies.

  • Science Alert ☛ We Just Found a Secret Trait That May Help Redwood Trees Survive Climate Change

    Redwoods, it turns out, have two types of leaves that look different and perform very different tasks. This previously unknown feature helps the trees adapt to both wet and dry conditions – an ability that could be key to their survival in a changing climate.

  • The Revelator ☛ Six Ways to Talk About Extinction

  • Counter Punch ☛ Climate Change is Killing Trees

    Henk Visscher, PhD, Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University makes a living studying exposed fossil beds of the transitional period of the Permian to Triassic era, aka: “The Great Dying.” Significantly, layers of fossils prior to the great extinction event contain lots of pollen, typical of a healthy conifer forest. But, in the Permo-Triassic boundary the pollen is replaced by strands of fossilized fungi, representing an exploding population of nature’s scavengers feasting on dead trees.

    A dreaded repeat performance of tree deaths of 252 million years ago may be starting to re-appear. Throughout the world trees are dying en masse. It’s troubling. Scientists are studying this strange phenomenon in the context of a rugged past event of 252 million years ago.

Finance

• Counter Punch ☛ Why the Buffalo Bills Stadium Deal is One of the Worst Ever Made

  As a sports economist who has studied stadium deals for over two decades, I am not exaggerating when I write that the New York Legislature has managed to craft one of the worst stadium deals in recent memory – a remarkable feat considering the high bar set by other misguided state and local governments across the country.

  Study after study has shown that stadiums are terrible public investments. The taxpayers financing them rarely want to pay for them. So why are governments willing to subsidize them?

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Obvious Solutions to the Global Inflation Crisis

  I hate to tell you this, but the cost of living crisis wasn’t caused by Brexit. It’s global. Annual consumer price inflation (CPI) stands at 7% in the UK, 8.5% in the US and 7.5% in the Eurozone. In India, it’s 7%; Russia 16.7%; Argentina 52.3%; and Turkey 61.1%. It didn’t start with the war in Ukraine either, although the grinding conflict is sending commodity prices to their sharpest rises since records began in 1970.

• Common Dreams ☛ Progressive International Outlines Four Ways to End IMF’s ‘Abuse of Power’

  Ahead of this week’s meeting of the International Monetary Fund, which comes as vaccine apartheid and the war in Ukraine exacerbate global poverty and hunger, Progressive International is demanding far-reaching changes to end what it describes as the IMF’s “illegality, impunity, and disregard for human rights.”

  “The IMF is a public institution that lends public money with a mandate to serve public purpose—but it answers to no one.”

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘Stain on Democracy’: Tax Day Study Shows US Billionaires Now Own $4.7 Trillion

  An analysis released Monday to mark Tax Day in the United States shows that the country’s 735 billionaires have seen their collective wealth soar by 62% over the past two years while worker earnings have grown just 10%, modest gains eaten away by the rising costs of food, housing, and other necessities.

  “We reject the narrative that this country cannot afford to invest in a better world.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Warren Says Windfall Profits Tax Can Help Dems Avert ‘Big Losses’ in Midterms

  With the pivotal 2022 midterms just months away, Sen. Elizabeth Warren warned in a New York Times op-ed Monday that Democrats are “headed toward big losses” if they fail to deliver on the promises that helped them win control of Congress and the presidency—including tax hikes on massive corporations.

  The Massachusetts Democrat argued that “passing a windfall profits tax” on the fossil fuel companies benefiting massively from global energy chaos—a proposal that is overwhelmingly popular with U.S. voters—would be a “good start” as the majority party looks to prevent the GOP from retaking the House and Senate in November.

• TruthOut ☛ Warren Argues Windfall Profits Tax Can Help Democrats Avert Big Midterm Losses

• Project Censored ☛ The Progressive Effects of Canceling Student Debt – Validated Independent News

  According to Mother Jones, opposition to student debt cancellation stems from a 2021 paper written by two finance professors from University of Pennsylvania and University of Chicago, who drew on household income data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. The professors’ main argument stated that, because high-income graduates have the most debt due to taking out loans for graduate school, cancelling debt yields greater benefits for wealthier people with student loan debts.

• Project Censored ☛ One-Third of Child Care Workers in US Going Hungry Despite Labor Shortage – Validated Independent News

  In 2019, a study found that 42 percent of early care and education workers (ECE) in Washington and Texas experienced food insecurity, and 20 percent experienced very high food insecurity, meaning their eating patterns were disrupted and their food intake was reduced. A separate study found that 40 percent of child care workers in Arkansas were impacted by food insecurity.

• Project Censored ☛ Poor Infrastructure, a Legacy of Discriminatory Redlining, Inhibits Rural Black Americans’ Internet Access – Validated Independent News

  Lack of infrastructure and financial resources available to these areas contribute to this “digital divide.” The Thomson Reuters Foundation that passage of a $1.75 trillion infrastructure bill would direct $65 billion to expanding broadband access, making it “the biggest broadband investment in our history to close the digital divide,” according to US Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO). (In November, 2021 the House of Representatives passed this bill, the Build Back Better Act—but it stalled in the Senate when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) withdrew his support.)

• Counter Punch ☛ Tax Day and the Fate of the Earth

  What part of civilization to they represent? Just who exactly is helped by nuclear weapons? The current situation in Ukraine shows clearly that the old excuse – they deter the aggressive inclinations of other nations – is not valid. It also shows that – far from providing security – their presence in the hands of the Russians is preventing the NATO nations from protecting Ukrainians from attack.

  Polls repeatedly show that most Americans would prefer the elimination of nuclear weapons by all nations. Why then, in a country “of the people, by the people, for the people,” are we still shelling out tens of billions every year for these death machines that we do not want? Why are we not joining much of the rest of the world in signing the UN Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons? Behind and beneath all the security rhetoric lies the truth. If we “follow the money,” we can see it immediately.

• TruthOut ☛ Leaked IRS Data Show the Very Richest Pay Lower Tax Rates Than the Merely Rich

• IT Wire ☛ Murdoch, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Brin, Page are all A-okay. But Musk???

  The objections to Elon Musk buying Twitter can be distilled down to one simple thing: his policies will remove the objections to the return of Donald Trump to the platform. Which for the mainstream in the US — and hence the mainstream in all acolyte countries — means the end of civilisation as we know it.

• Coffee Can Investing

  Robert Kirby introduced the term “Coffee Can portfolio” in a 1984 article where he argues that “You can make more money being passively active than actively passive”. The latter is a reference to index fund investing, which Kirby was not a fan of (but this book does recommend investing in low-cost index ETFs).

• At the Chevrolet dealer to get the Buick fixed, I noticed that nobody was in there to buy a car. – BaronHK’s Rants

  At the Chevrolet dealer to get the Buick fixed, I noticed that nobody was in there to buy a car.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Counter Punch ☛ Heroic Venezuela

  On the 13th of April 2002, the people of Venezuela rose up, without any formal organization, without any leaders directing the crowds, to demand the return of the president they legitimately elected, Hugo Chávez. He had had been kidnapped on April 11 by a cabal of the wealthy, right-wing elite that had hitherto run the country for decades in their own interests while poverty and misery soared for the people.

  The capital, Caracas, is in a valley surrounded by low lying hills where mostly the poor live in ramshackled barrios. The poor came down from those hills, like a human sea, on foot, blocking all the roads making it imposible for cars to transit. In the thousands they went to stand outside the presidential palace, demanding the return of their president.

• Counter Punch ☛ Brazil’s Parallel Reality

  But you don’t have to be a movie buff to see that this has been the ideal of the fascist government in Brazil. And not only from the changes – “reinterpretations” – of the dictatorship past that fascism has made in our history. But also in the civilizational achievements that we have obtained in the Lula and Dilma governments, such as the transformation of the world of work, the advances of the Universal Health System, universities for all, funding for the arts and cinema.  The fascists in power have destroyed the past in order to exterminate the people of Brazil, such as the destruction of the Amazon forest, the handing over of indigenous lands to mining, and thus destroying more than half of Brazilian life.

  No need to be clairvoyant, the evil is exposed and developing. For Parallel Reality is the political reality in Brazil under Bolsonaro. There have been crimes, disrespect, mockery, ridicule, theft and robbery with punishment and penal framework, but a Congress chained by millionaire funds excuses, prevaricates, pretends that nothing happened, in its cynical reinterpretation of the crimes committed by the presidency. None of this should come as a surprise, however. This is a nightmare that is so predictably self-fulfilling. Where is the outrage that fascism acts like fascism?

• Common Dreams ☛ Progressives Say Climate Inaction, Student Debt Explain Biden’s Drop in Support Among Young Voters

  Progressive political observers on Monday said that beltway pundits should not be surprised by President Joe Biden’s plummeting approval rating among voters under the age of 34, considering the Democratic Party’s failure to pass anti-poverty measures or climate action, and address the student debt crisis after the president garnered significant support from young people in the 2020 election.

  Polling by online survey company Civiqs showed Sunday that while only 36% of voters between the ages of 18 and 34 disapproved of Biden the day he was inaugurated in January 2021 and 48% approved, those numbers have now shifted significantly, with 55% of respondents saying they feel Biden is doing a poor job as president.

• Common Dreams ☛ DOJ Urged to Probe Whether Trump ‘Willfully Mutilated and Destroyed’ Jan. 6 Call Logs

  A few weeks after the revelation that White House documents turned over to the panel probing the attack on the U.S. Capitol contains a seven-hour-and-37-minute gap in call logs, a pair of U.S. groups on Monday called for an investigation into whether former President Donald Trump “willfully mutilated and destroyed critical records of his presidency before leaving office.”

  “The public must have confidence that all individuals—including former President Trump—will be thoroughly and fairly investigated and be held accountable.”

• TruthOut ☛ Efforts to Build Trust in Elections Face Thriving 2020 Election Denier Community

• Counter Punch ☛ Noam Chomsky and Jeremy Scahill on the Russia-Ukraine War, the Media, Propaganda, and Accountability

• Counter Punch ☛ Ousted Pakistani Leader, Imran Khan, Was Challenging Investment Treaties That Give Corporations Excessive Power

• Mint Press News ☛ The Ouster Of Imran Khan: How Much Involvement Did the US Have in Pakista’s Coup?

  Following weeks of high drama and controversy that have racked the nation, Imran Khan has been removed from office. The Pakistani prime minister suffered a vote of no confidence and a loss in the supreme court, ending his rule after less than four years. Coalition partners abandoned him, leaving his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party in the minority.

• NYPost ☛ Woke Ariz. diversity activists falsely accuse black DJ of wearing blackface

  Two local diversity advocates in Arizona are taking heat after calling a school district racist for hiring a DJ to perform in black face — but it turns out the DJ was black.

  Stuart Rhoden and Jill Lassen — who specialize in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — lambasted the Scottsdale Unified School District’s Hopi Elementary PTA for their decision to hire Kim Koko Hunter, 56, a local black DJ, at a charity event.

• Scottsdale’s DEI Gurus Accuse Black DJ Of Wearing Blackface

  This week, an ASU instructor, and a librarian, who hold themselves out as being Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) gurus, falsely accused a Black DJ of wearing blackface during a charity event for the Scottsdale Unified school district.

  Stuart Rhoden and Jill Lassen attacked the Scottsdale Unified School District’s Hopi Elementary PTA for hiring Koko Kim Hunter to host their charity auction. The two were informed after their attack that Mr. Hunter is, in fact, a Black man, who was not wearing blackface.

• New York Times ☛ As Final Vote Nears in France, a Debate Over Islam and Head Scarves

  Ms. Le Pen, a nationalist with an anti-immigrant agenda, has vowed to ban the wearing of the head scarf in public if she is elected in the second round of voting next Sunday. She says that it is “an Islamist uniform,” or a sign of adherence to an extremist, anti-Western interpretation of the Muslim faith.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• The Atlantic ☛ SNL Really Wants to Say Something About TikTok

  Last night marked the third time SNL has lampooned TikTok this season. Besides a cold open last month that took aim at TikTok creators’ role in combatting misinformation about the war in Ukraine, the show also spoofed the video-sharing app in December, when the pop star Billie Eilish hosted. Yesterday, the host and musical guest Lizzo, alongside nearly all available cast members, parodied TikTok again: There was a folksy rendition of the infuriatingly catchy Kars4Kids jingle, a wealth of acting and dance challenges set to music, and an older user (Cecily Strong) who didn’t fully grasp how to use the platform.

• ABC ☛ Alex Jones’ Infowars files for bankruptcy protection

  Infowars filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as the website’s founder and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones faces defamation lawsuits over his comments that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.

  The bankruptcy filing Sunday in Texas puts civil litigation on hold while the business reorganizes its finances.

• New York Times ☛ Alex Jones’s Infowars Files for Bankruptcy

  Because of the falsehoods, families of the victims have found themselves routinely accosted by those who believe those false claims. Among those are the parents of Noah Pozner, who have moved nearly 10 times since the shooting, and live in hiding.

• NPR ☛ InfoWars files for bankruptcy in the face of lawsuits over Sandy Hook shooting denial

  InfoWars, which described itself in court records as a “conspiracy-oriented website and media company,” said it had $50,000 or less in assets and between $1 million and $10 million in liabilities.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Techdirt ☛ Fascinating New Study Suggests (Again) That Twitter Moderation Is Biased Against Misinformation, Not Conservatives

  Behold! An actually interesting academic study exploring whether or not Twitter moderation has an anti-conservative bias! This is something many of us have been asking for for a while, but it’s a very difficult thing to study in any meaningful way. The results of this study are actually really fascinating, but it’s important to dig into some of the background first.

• Techdirt ☛ Former Reddit CEO: Content Moderation Teams Don’t Care About Your Politics, They Just Want You To Stop Being A Jerk

  Last week, about the same time I posted by giant post on all the things that Elon Musk didn’t understand about content moderation, former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong posted a really long, but completely worth reading thread about content moderation on social networks. I’m not going to go through the whole thing, but did want to point out some key points that are worth repeating.

• [Old] New Statesman ☛ Ayaan Hirsi Ali: “If you disagree with the left, you’re punished”: The author and activist on culture wars, immigration and misogyny.

  There are other ways she diverges from progressive orthodoxy. In a newly launched podcast advocating “critical thinking and common sense”, Hirsi Ali has turned her attention to “wokeness”. Rejecting the claim that it represents something progressive, she told me the censorious nature of some on the left reminded her of “Islamists, because if you disagree with them, you’re cancelled, you’re out, you’re punished”.

• [Old] Gatestone Institute ☛ “Everyone Was Afraid to Be Branded as a Racist”: Interview with Mona Walter

  When I came from Somalia to Sweden, I experienced a huge clash of cultures, because Islam here is more extreme and fanatical than in my country. What is very important – we were Islamized after 1991, here in Sweden. In these closed areas, immigrant ghettos are deprived of democracy.

• Medforth ☛ Spain: An umpteenth Catholic procession is pelted with stones by a gang of allegedly isolated underage Muslim refugees, several similar attacks took place this Holy Week

  A group of unaccompanied minor refugees from the Bermúdez de Castro hostel in Granada disrupted the Catholic procession in the early hours of Holy Thursday morning (…) Fortunately, the quick intervention of the police prevented serious incidents.

• [Old] CBN ☛ Ex-Muslim: Koran Revealed a Religion I Did Not Like

  But in politically correct Sweden, Walter has come under attack for simply repeating what is in the Koran.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• OWP ☛ Julian Assange To Be Given Extradition Order In Three Days

  Almost every major human rights and free speech organization has opposed this attempt to silence Assange. Amnesty International has urged the U.S. to drop the charges. “By charging someone with espionage who has no non-disclosure obligation, is not a US citizen and is not in America, the US government is behaving as if they have jurisdiction all over the world to pursue any person who receives and publishes information of government wrongdoing,” the organization says.

  Many journalists have also voiced concerns about Assange’s case. “Julian did not commit a crime … the people who did commit the crimes which he exposed have never been charged,” said Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. (Hedges, who was forced out of American journalism for expressing dissident anti-war views in the early 2000’s and began a program called On Contact with Russian state-supported television network R.T., just had six years of his show’s episodes removed from YouTube.)

• India ☛ A requiem for fine journalism

  RONALD L Haeberle was a combat photographer with the US army whose pictures exposed the horrors of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1969. Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, at peril to his life, leaked the papers revealing the cover-up of US perfidies in Vietnam. Mordechai Vanunu was an Israeli scientist who shared his country’s nuclear secrets with a British newspaper. Israel kidnapped him and put him in jail. US soldier Chelsea Manning handed over 750,000 secret military documents to WikiLeaks and was court-martialled for it. She went to prison.

• As Biden Pursues Julian Assange, a Major Test of Press Freedom Looms

  Since the inception of WikiLeaks, organizations devoted to civil liberties, press freedom and human rights have argued that any government infringement on WikiLeaks’ right to publish would violate the First Amendment. Many journalists and commentators across the political spectrum have also maintained that prosecuting WikiLeaks would mean that any journalist who received unauthorized information about governments, individuals or corporations from a source and then published it could be prosecuted.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Nation ☛ “The Great Resignation” Is a Great Exaggeration

  In November of last year, I was managing the checkout area of a large grocery store in Utah when a 22-year-old bagger quit on the spot. It was a busy night a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving. Customers wanted to get in and out quickly while my exhausted colleagues and I were urging the clock to tick a little faster. Staff turnover had always been high, but a coworker walking out in the middle of a shift was a first. This piece was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

• The Nation ☛ Amid the Uprisings

  On the morning of December 17, 1979, several Miami police officers stopped Arthur McDuffie on a 1973 Kawasaki. The initial police report said McDuffie had run a red light, forcing officers on a high-speed chase through Miami, and falsely characterized the incident as a bike accident and a scuffle with officers. McDuffie was taken to the hospital with multiple skull fractures; four days later, he was dead.

• The Nation ☛ “Multiple Things Can Be True”: Understanding the Roots of Anti-Asian Violence

  Jason Wu is a public defender, attorney-in-charge at the Legal Aid Society’s Harlem Community Law Office, and cochair of GAPIMNY, a community organization that works to empower queer and trans Asian Pacific Islanders to create positive change.

• The Nation ☛ Sex, Death, and Empire: The Roots of Violence Against Asian Women

  On March 11, a man with a football player’s build assaulted a 67-year-old Asian woman in Yonkers, N.Y. As she walked past him, he called out, “Asian bitch!” She ignored him. He followed her into her building and punched her from behind, knocking her to the ground. Then, over the course of one minute and 12 seconds, Tammel Esco roundhoused his fists into her—mechanically, unwaveringly—pummeling her over 125 times. He then stomped on her seven times and spat on her before walking away. The victim, whose name has not been released, was hospitalized with broken bones in her face, bleeding in her brain, and cuts and bruises across her head. Esco has been charged with attempted murder.1

  Four weeks before that, in the early hours of February 13, Christina Yuna Lee, a 35-year-old Korean American woman, was murdered in her apartment in New York City’s Chinatown after returning from a party. Someone had followed Lee into the building and forced his way into her apartment. One hour and 20 minutes later, she was found dead in her bathtub by police, naked from the waist up, with 40 stab wounds to her body. Her attacker, 25-year-old Assamad Nash, an unhoused man, had tried to sexually assault her. Lee died fighting back.2

• Common Dreams ☛ Report Details How Community Utilities Can Usher In Green Energy Transition

  Publicly and cooperatively owned utilities offer a better transition path to a fossil-free power grid than their corporate-owned counterparts—as long as they are properly reformed and regulated—the authors of a report published Monday argue.

  “It is time to reignite the radical history of community utilities to herald the transition to a genuinely democratic, equitable, and clean energy system.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Starbucks Workers Urge Congress to Grill CEO Howard Schultz on Union-Busting

  A group of two dozen Starbucks workers is calling on the Democratic-controlled House labor committee to seek testimony from billionaire CEO Howard Schultz on the coffee company’s relentless—and, according to employees and organizers, blatantly unlawful—efforts to crush unionization drives at shops across the United States.

  In a letter dated April 15 and first publicized Monday by the progressive media outlet More Perfect Union, 24 Starbucks employees from Arizona and California urged Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) to use his “authority as chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor” to “invite Howard Schultz to appear before your committee and answer to this behavior and disregard for federal labor law.”

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘A Dereliction of Duty’: No Federal Charges for Chicago Cop Who Murdered Laquan McDonald

  Less than three months after Jason Van Dyke was released from prison, U.S. Attorney John Lausch’s office announced Monday that the former Chicago police officer who murdered 17-year-old Laquan McDonald while on the job in October 2014 will not face federal charges.

  “A white officer shooting 16 bullets into the body of a 17-year-old Black child—and then reloading his gun with more—warrants federal charges.”

• TruthOut ☛ When It Comes to Prison Education, Some Who Need It Most May Be Left Behind

• TruthOut ☛ A Survivor of Violence and Her Sibling Share How the Legal System Punishes Them

• Democracy Now ☛ Abortion Bans Pass in GOP-Led Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma & Tennessee as SCOTUS Set to Overturn Roe

  Republican-led states are enacting a wave of new abortion restrictions, including Tennessee, Florida, Kentucky and Oklahoma just last week. Reproductive rights are under attack as the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, says Caroline Kitchener, who covers reproductive rights for The Washington Post. We also speak with Kitchener about Lizelle Herrera, the Texas woman arrested for disclosing an attempted abortion with her doctors.

• Democracy Now ☛ Cameroonians Win Temporary Protected Status After Outcry Over “Double Standard” for Ukrainians

  In a win for immigrant rights, the Biden administration has granted temporary protected status, or TPS, to Cameroonians living in the United States. The move allows around 40,000 Cameroonians to become eligible for the relief, which would protect them from deportation back to a politically unstable state and grant them permission to work in the U.S. for at least 18 months amid escalating violence in Cameroon between government forces and armed rebels. The long fight for Cameroonians to gain protections so swiftly granted to Ukrainians fleeing Russian attacks reveals the U.S. “double standard” when it comes to a “universal protection that was supposed to go out for everybody who was experiencing similar situations,” says Daniel Tse, co-founder of Cameroon Advocacy Network.

• Christian Post ☛ Uganda: Muslims abduct teacher, burn him inside mosque for praying in Christ’s name

  Mwanje told the school leadership he had been praying from his house.

  At around 3 a.m. on April 1, an unnamed staff person overheard Mwanje praying in Christ’s name and recorded him. The following morning, the staffer gathered other schoolteachers to eavesdrop on him.

  “As I finished the prayers at 4:45 a.m. and began preparing to go to the mosque to pray, I heard a knock at the door,” Mwanje said. “As I opened the door, there were people outside my door. They began shouting, ‘Allah akbar [“Allah is greater”]! Allah akbar! Allah akbar! This is a kafir [infidel], this is kafir…They grabbed me and took me inside the mosque and started beating me badly and accusing me of heading a Muslim school, yet I had converted to Christianity. Others shouted, ‘A liar, a liar, a liar. … He deserves the death penalty.”

• Morning Star News ☛ Head of Islamic School Burned, Fired for Becoming Christian

  The headteacher of a private Islamic school in eastern Uganda suffered third-degree burns and was fired after staff members heard him praying as a Christian, he said.

  Yusufu Mwanje led Ibunbaz Primary School in Bugiri town, Bugiri District until he lost his job after the attack on April 2.

• Jacobin Magazine ☛ Unions Must Fight for a Universal Welfare State

  The relative success of the welfare state in Europe owes much to its trade union history. Across western Europe, the trade union movement evolved out of artisan forms of organization inherited from the guild system. While these organizations took on various forms, by the late nineteenth century, increased mechanization had unified artisans and general laborers on the factory floor. Consequently, the exclusive craft associations of the eighteenth century transformed into industrial organizations that represented the interests of both highly trained workers and general laborers.

• [Old] The Federalist ☛ Black Feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali Raises The Alarm Over Importing Muslim Migrants To The West

  It is at this inauspicious moment that Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s latest book, “Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights,” is remarkably prescient. Ali is an immigrant success story. Surviving the suffocating pieties of Islamic fundamentalism across the Middle East and Africa, Ali sought sanctuary in the Netherlands.

  Unfortunately, Europe was not the safe harbour she envisioned. Her collaboration with filmmaker Theo van Gogh to document the mistreatment of Islamic women led to the documentarian’s assassination at the hands of a radicalized Dutch Moroccan Muslim. Ali fled to America, renounced her Islamic faith, and went into hiding with around-the-clock bodyguards.

• Morning Star News ☛ Muslim Sheikh Poisoned after Converting to Christianity

  Initially Sadiki was diagnosed with food poisoning, and doctors began treating him for ptomaine poisoning. His wife and three children, however, were not affected by the same food, and Sadiki did not respond to medications as his conditions grew worse, the pastor said. Further tests indicated his food was tainted with a toxic substance related to organophosphate insecticides used to kill rats, he said.

• Gannett ☛ Turning points in the Grand Rapids police encounter with Patrick Lyoya

  Video used in this report was released by the Grand Rapids police. It came from four sources:

  A body camera worn by the officer

  A camera mounted to the dashboard of the officer’s patrol car

  A doorbell camera on a nearby home

  A cell phone used by the passenger in the vehicle that was stopped

  Here’s what those experts noted about key points in the footage: [...]

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Techdirt ☛ New Study Shows Section 230 Protects Small Companies Much More Than Big Ones

  We’ve tried to make this point many times before. A few months back I wrote a detailed post in response to a famed economist who kept insisting that repealing Section 230 would hurt Facebook, that the reality is the opposite. If you understand the mechanisms by which Section 230 actually works, the key is that it gets frivolous and wasteful lawsuits kicked out of court much earlier — when the costs are still intense, but more bearable. Without Section 230, the end result of the court case may be the same — where the company wins — but the costs would be much, much higher. For Facebook and Google that’s not going to make a huge difference. But for smaller companies, it can be the difference between life and death.

• Techdirt ☛ Cox Cable Customers Bond Together To Fight Bullshit Fees

  We’ve long covered how cable and broadband companies use a rotating array of bullshit fees to covertly jack up advertised rates, hitting you with a much higher bill after you’ve subscribed. We’ve also noted how new streamlined technologies have been turning the binding arbitration process on its head, making it easier and more affordable for consumers to bury companies with arbitration complaints.

Monopolies

• Patents

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Corruption in Drug Patents: Take Away the Money

    The New York Times had an editorial about the corruption of the patent system in recent decades. It noted that the patent office is clearly not following the legal standards for issuing a patent, including that the item being patented is a genuine innovation and that it works. Among other things, it pointed out that Theranos had been issued dozens of patents for a technique that clearly did not work.

• Copyrights

  • Techdirt ☛ Cops Are Still Playing Copyrighted Music To Thwart Citizens Recording Their Actions

    Cops may have only the vaguest grasp on the laws they use to initiate stops, but they sure as hell understand copyright law. With algorithms doing the heavy lifting to prevent copyright infringement, cops have deployed a new tactic in hopes of preventing accountability activists from livestreaming or uploading their interactions with officers.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Freelance Torrent Site Admin’s Life Still in Turmoil, 5 Years After Arrest

    In 2017, a special police force arrested the alleged mastermind behind french torrent site T411. The Ukrainian man, who lives in Sweden, describes himself differently as a freelance systems operator. Today “Alex” is sharing his account of what happened, including the dramatic arrest, a family tragedy, and his encounters with pirating police officers.