Desktop/Laptop

• GamingOnLinux ☛ The Framework Laptop Mainboard is out as a standalone platform | GamingOnLinux

  Well this is quite interesting. Framework Computer, the company that builds the fab modular Framework Laptop has announced the release of the Framework Laptop Mainboard.

  This is available for USA and Canada with a release upcoming for the UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Austria, and Ireland sometime “soon”. What’s really fun though, is that they say it was designed in a way that you can simply use the mainboard as a standalone single-board computing platform. As they say “All you need to do is insert memory, plug in a USB-C power adapter, and hit the tiny power button on-board, and you’ve got a powered-up computer”.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Video ☛ Control Network Manager With Just Dmenu & Rofi! – Invidious

Kernel Space

• LWN ☛ Readahead: the documentation I wanted to read [LWN.net]

  The readahead code in the Linux kernel is nominally responsible for reading data that has not yet been explicitly requested from storage, with the idea that it might be needed soon. The code is stable, functional, widely used, and uncontroversial, so it is reasonable to expect the code to be of high quality, and largely this is true. Recently, I found the need to document this code, which naturally shone a rather different light on it. This work revealed minor problems with functionality and significant problems with naming.

  My particular reason for wanting documentation probably colors my view of the code so I’ll start there. Once upon a time, Linux had a strong concept of “congestion” as it applied to I/O paths. If the queue of requests to some device grew too large, the backing device would be marked as “congested” and certain optional I/O requests would be skipped or delayed, particularly writeback and readahead. As time has passed, so too (apparently) has the need for congestion management. Maybe this is because many I/O devices are now faster than our CPUs but, whatever the reason, the block layer no longer tracks congestion and only a few virtual “backing devices” continue this outdated practice.

  In Linux 5.16, the only backing device that gets marked as “read congested” is the virtual device used for FUSE filesystems. As part of a project to remove all remnants of congestion tracking, I proposed that there was really nothing special about FUSE, and it should just accept all readahead requests just like everyone else. Miklos Szeredi, the maintainer of FUSE, found my reasoning to be unsatisfactory — and who could blame him? If FUSE doesn’t want readahead requests, it shouldn’t have to accept them. Trying to understand how FUSE could safely say “no” to readahead, without having to maintain the congestion-tracking functionality in common code, started me on the path to understanding readahead — once it was explained to me that it wasn’t as simple as just changing the “readahead” callback in FUSE to return zero.

• LWN ☛ Negative dentries, 20 years later [LWN.net]

  Filesystems and the virtual filesystem layer are in the business of managing files that actually exist, but the Linux “dentry cache”, which remembers the results of file-name lookups, also keeps track of files that don’t exist. This cache of “negative dentries” plays an important role in the overall performance of the system but, if it is allowed to grow too large, its role can become negative in its own right. As the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM) approaches, the subject of negative dentries has come up yet again; whether one can be positive about the prospects for a resolution this time around remains unclear.

  The kernel’s dentry cache saves the results of looking up a file in a filesystem. Should the need arise to look up the same file again, the cached result can be used, avoiding a trip through the underlying filesystem and accesses to the storage device. Repeated file-name lookups are common — consider /usr/bin/bash or ~/.nethackrc — so this is an important optimization to make.

  The importance of remembering failed lookups in negative dentries may be less obvious at the outset. As it happens, repeated attempts to look up a nonexistent file are also common; an example would be the shell’s process of working through the search path every time a user types “vi” (Emacs users start the editor once and never leave its cozy confines thereafter, so they don’t benefit in the same way). Even more common are failed lookups created by the program loader searching for shared libraries or a compiler looking for include files. One is often advised to “fail fast” in this society; when it comes to lookups of files that don’t exist, that can indeed be good advice.

  So negative dentries are a good thing but, as we all know, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. While normal dentries are limited by the number of files that actually exist, there are few limits to the number of nonexistent files. As a result, it is easy for a malicious (or simply unaware) application to create negative dentries in huge numbers. If memory is tight, the memory-management subsystem will eventually work to push some of these negative dentries out. In the absence of memory pressure, though, negative dentries can accumulate indefinitely, leaving a large mess to clean up when memory does inevitably run out.

• LWN ☛ Private memory for KVM guests [LWN.net]

  Cloud computing is a wonderful thing; it allows efficient use of computing systems and makes virtual machines instantly available at the click of a mouse or API call. But cloud computing can also be problematic; the security of virtual machines is dependent on the security of the host system. In most deployed systems, a host computer can dig through its guests’ memory at will; users running guest systems have to just hope that doesn’t happen. There are a number of solutions to that problem under development, including this KVM guest-private memory patch set by Chao Peng and others, but some open questions remain.

  A KVM-based hypervisor runs as a user-space process on the host system. To provide a guest with memory, the hypervisor allocates that memory on the host, then uses various KVM ioctl() calls to map it into the guest’s “physical” address space. But the hypervisor retains its mapping to the memory as well, with no constraints on how the memory can be accessed. Sometimes that access is necessary for communication between the guest and the hypervisor, but the guest would likely want to keep much of that memory to itself.

• LWN ☛ trusted_for() bounces off the merge window [LWN.net]

  When last we looked in on the proposed trusted_for() system call, which would allow user-space interpreters and other tools to ask the kernel whether a file is “trusted” for execution, it looked like it was on-track for the mainline. That was back in October 2020; the patch has been updated multiple times since then, made its way into linux-next, and a pull request was made by Mickaël Salaün for the 5.18 merge window. But it seems that there will be more to the story of getting this functionality into the kernel, as Linus Torvalds declined to pull trusted_for(), at least partly because he did not like the name, but there were other reasons as well. While he is not opposed to the functionality it would provide, he also had strong feelings that a new system call was not the right approach.

Applications

• PeaZIP 8.6: new release, new improvements | Linux Addicts

  PeaZIP 8.6 has arrived, the latest version of this free, open source, cross-platform (Linux, macOS and Windows) GUI file manager and uncompressor. It arrives almost two months after the release of version 8.5, and it does so with some new features that you should know about.

Instructionals/Technical

• Reset GNOME Desktop Settings to Factory Default on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish

  Have you made customizations to your GNOME desktop environment that you later regretted? Good news, you can easily reset GNOME to the defaults and restore all the original settings. In this tutorial, you will learn how to reset your GNOME Desktop Settings to Factory Default on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. The reset will put your desktop appearance and all settings, shortcuts, wallpapers and etc. to the factory default.

• Btrfs Subvol Fix – RESEARCHUT

  There surely is need for better tooling on the BTRFS File System side.

• Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers installation on Ubuntu 22.04

  Eclipse is a free C and C++ IDE that can be installed on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. In this tutorial, we will take you through the step by step instructions to install the Eclipse C/C++ IDE on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish as well as the Java prerequisites, via command line. Then, you can use the application to import your current C and C++ projects or develop new ones.

• Disable Automatic Updates on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux

  In this short tutorial, you will learn how to disable automatic package updates on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux. You will see how to disable automatic updates via both command line and GUI. Although this goes against general security recommendations, this will prevent your package manager from being tied up in the background when you need to use it.

• TechRepublic ☛ How to install IceScrum on Ubuntu Server 20.04 | TechRepublic

  Looking to take your company’s project management to the next level? Maybe you need to start using Scrum. Jack Wallen walks you through the deployment of the open-source IceScrum platform.

• Linux Capable ☛ Install/Enable Secure NGINX with Custom Fail2ban Filters – LinuxCapable

  Fail2Ban is a great security measure to deploy for your web application server. It comes with features, default filters, and actions that can immediately impact banning bad web bots, draining your system resources, and stopping attacks, which is the most crucial part of any website.

  However, most people system admins and website owners are looking for sometimes a bit more extra than what fail2ban has to offer. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to create and use custom filters on your Nginx server, which can be fine-tuned to suit your needs and expanded later.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Redbot Discord Bot on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – LinuxCapable

  Discord is a top-rated online chatting program, especially amongst the gaming community. A popular feature with these channels is the inclusion of bots that range from moderation commands, music bots, trivia bots, leveling, and much more. Most bots are run on servers, and you can invite them. However, many of these Bots require monetary requirements to unlock more features, which can be unstable and a security risk.

  So, a growing trend lately is the rise of open-source, self-hosted free Discord bots, one of the absolute powerhouses in this field is called Red Discord Bot. Redbot comes with all features that can be enabled or disabled, along with a vast 3rdParty plugin page of community projects.

• How to upgrade to Fedora 36 | FOSS Linux

  Fedora 36 is out to the masses.

• How do you keep the Kolla Playing? | Adam Young’s Web Log

  I need to modify how the ipxe container mounts directories. Why? AARCH64 iPXE stuff. Specifically, I need to get my own version of a file into the directory that a container mounts when it is running. How do I do that? I don’t know yet, so I am going to look.

  I do know that the starting point for running a container in Kolla is the Ansible playbook that launches it, and that for the Ironic containers at least, that calls into a custom library called kolla_docker. This is implemented as python executable:kolla-ansible/ansible/library/kolla_docker.py. The vast majority of that file, however, it parameter parsing, and the real work is done in the call to DockerWorker. While this has ansible as the first stage in the package name, it is actually under the kolla_ansible repository.

• How To Create A Bootable Ubuntu 22.04 LTS USB Drive | Itsubuntu.com

  How To Create A Bootable Ubuntu 22.04 LTS USB Drive

  In this tutorial, we will show you the method to create a bootable Ubuntu 22.04 LTS USB drive in Windows. If you are reading the article, we are sure that you have a USB stick ( Pen drive) with enough space for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and software like Rufus to create a bootable USB.

• How to Install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)

  Hello Ubuntu Users, Canonical has released much awaited Ubuntu 22.04 LTS desktop operating system on 21st April 2022. Code name for Ubuntu 22.04 is Jammy Jellyfish and it is a LTS (Long Term support) release and will get updates and support for next 5 years.

  In this guide, we will learn how to install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) step by step with screenshots. Before moving to installation part, let’s see what are the new features and improvement in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

• ByteXD ☛ How to Use the Rsync (Remote Sync) Command in Linux with Examples

  talking and exchanging data, establishing communication among themselves in bits, zeros and ones, making up all the great content we get off the internet.

  From watching videos on YouTube to laughing about the latest memes shared by our friends on social media. Computers use different protocols to communicate with each other, interpreted by our operating systems and presented by our favorite browsers.

  But there are many ways computers can communicate with each other, and one of the most cherished and beloved methods by advanced Linux users is using rsync.

• Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Blender 3.1.0 on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install Blender 3.1.0 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

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

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

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

• ByteXD ☛ Add User to Sudoers in Ubuntu – ByteXD

  In most modern operating systems, there are various levels of authorities a user can have, which governs who have the power to access files on the system.

  The user with the highest authority in Linux operating system is the root user, and as the root user you can do anything to the files in the system (some of those files govern the hardware in turn) from execution to deletion, this power is only limited to the root user to prevent risky actions, or even prevent actions that expose the system to catastrophic consequences (i.e., attacks).

  Sometimes you need to execute a command as the root user (or as another user without logging-out and logging in again!), but in this case you should have the authority to do so! If you can’t that means you are not in the sudo group, neither you are in the sudoers file!, in this article, we are going to explain both ways to grant a user that authority. (Note: sudo is the acronym for Super User DO).

• Linux Shell Tips ☛ Getting Started with Alpine Linux Apk Command Examples

  Every Linux distribution has its package manager that plays a role in the installation and management of software packages. For Debian/Ubuntu we have an apt package manager.

  For RHEL and modern RedHat distributions such as CentOS, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux, the package manager is DNF. Of course, we have universal package managers such as snap and flatpak.

  In Alpine Linux, APK, short for Alpine Package Keeper, is the package management tool. It retrieves packages and information about the packages from online repositories.

• Enable Browsing with DNS Over TLS (DoT) on Ubuntu Made Easy

  Today we increasingly saw the importance of privacy and security in computing. This includes our browsing activity, which now needs protection even more than before. This tutorial will help you enable DNS over TLS (DoT) on Ubuntu using Quad9 service, an alternative technology to DNSCrypt or DoH, that helps preventing anybody to wiretap and/or hijack what website you are visiting on web browser. This feature is already built-in on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish and we do not need to install additional software.

• Vitux ☛ Managing logs with Logrotate on Ubuntu – VITUX

  The performance of a computer or server environment very much depends upon the system memory and disk usage. If something is consuming more disk space then it will lead to a system error. Likewise, increasing log file size must be controlled to reduce such risk.
  Logrotate was introduced as a system utility that rotates, compresses the log files, and mails system logs. Such management of log files reduces disk space usage and prevents system errors.

  In this article, we are going to discuss the installation process and the configuration of logrotate on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS server.

• Hackaday ☛ Linux Fu: An Odd Use For Fork() | Hackaday

  If you are a Star Trek fan, you’ll probably remember the phrase “You have to learn why things work on a starship.” The truth is, in most episodes, knowing how to override another ship’s console or make gunpowder didn’t come in very handy, but boy when it did, it really saved the day. Linux is a lot like that. There are a few things you probably don’t need to know very often, but when you do need to know, it makes a huge difference. In this particular post, I want to look at an odd use of the fork system call. For many purposes, you’ll never need to know this particular irregular use. But when you need it, you are really going to need it.

  This is actually based on an old client of mine who used Unix to run a massive and very critical report every day. The report had a lot of math since they were trying to optimize something and then generate a lot of reports. In those days, the output of the report was on old green-bar paper on a line printer. The problem was that the report took something like 14 hours to run including the printouts. If someone discovered something wrong, there was no time to run the report again because the next day’s report would have to start before the second run would finish.

Wine or Emulation

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Proton 7.0-2 out now with many more games playable on Steam Deck and Linux | GamingOnLinux

  Valve has now officially released the latest version of Proton, the Steam Play compatibility tool that allows Windows games to run on the Steam Deck and Linux desktops. Proton 7.0-2 is the new main stable version, not to be confused with Proton Experimental that was also updated recently.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Proton Experimental updated, fixes Resident Evil Revelations 2 for Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

  Other changes include a fix for Resident Evil Revelations 2 not starting on the Steam Deck, Wine Mono (a replacement for the .NET Framework) was upgraded to version 7.2.0 and dxvk-nvapi (NVAPI implementation on top of DXVK) to version 0.5.4 for a small bug fix. The changelog can be seen on GitHub.

Games

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Euro Truck Simulator 2 gets a new modern trailer and a fresh Beta | GamingOnLinux

  SCS Software are showing off all the advancements made to Euro Truck Simulator 2 over the years, with a brand new video to showcase it. Plus, there’s a new Beta available.

  Their last proper trailer was back in 2012, and with how many huge upgrades they’ve given the game it was of course very much overdue for a proper trailer to show it off. It’s not just that though, the game is approaching 10 years old (yes, really!) and so it’s a good way to mark the occasion…

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Mixing tower defense and dungeon crawling, Dwerve releases May 31 | GamingOnLinux

  After the success of their Kickstarter back in 2020 and a delay to the release, Half Human Games have now confirmed that Dwerve will launch on May 31.

  What is it? Dwerve is a tower defense dungeon game that also blends in dungeon crawling. You’re not just looking from afar placing down towers, you’re part of the action here. You play as a young dwarf tinkerer who adventures into a ruined kingdom and unearths the lost technologies of the ancient warsmiths: turrets and traps. These are the only weapons that can protect the dwarves from Witch-Queen Vandra and her army of bloodthirsty trolls and monstrous creatures hellbent on conquering the surface.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ The gorgeous looking Lila’s Sky Ark is out now | GamingOnLinux

  Monolith of Minds and Graffiti Games have today launched Lila’s Sky Ark, a feast for the eyes if you love pixel-art. The second game from Monolith of Minds, acting as a prequel to the first game Resolutiion.

  “Lila’s psychedelic world is in grave danger. Help her and her eccentric friends stop the Conductor’s minions from destroying all things musical and magical in this meditative action-adventure game. Explore this dark yet groovy world as you unravel the poetic mystery that is Lila’s story. Discover secrets, solve puzzles, and battle bizarre beasts and punishing bosses as you attempt to unite the Spirits and save the mysterious Sky Island from ruin.”

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Barry Kauler ☛ JWMDesk desktop icons fix

  Since then, I have applied fixes for running in EasyOS, version 3.5.1.1, 3.5.1.2, and now 3.5.1.3.

  In JWMDesk, “Desktop -> Icon layout”, there are radiobuttons to flip between the traditional Puppy desktop icon layout, and the standard EasyOS layout.

  I flipped to Puppy layout; however, after switching back to EasyOS layout, the icon layout was somewhat broken. That has been fixed by 3.5.1.3. The script edited is /usr/local/desksetup/func

Distributions

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Another tale of a rawhide compose bug – Kevin’s musings

    Astute observers will have noticed recently that Fedora rawhide composes stopped after 2022-04-13 and didn’t resume until 2022-04-19. A particularly odd bug was to blame. This is the story of that bug and my investigations of it.

    A bit of background first on how nightly images are made currently. There’s a cron job that calls a script (called nightly.sh) in the pungi-fedora pagure.io git repo. It does a number of small associated things (like sending message bus messages of status, sending report emails, copying results around, etc) but the big thing it does is to call pungi. pungi in turn looks at it’s config (in that same pungi-fedora repo) and does all the heavy lifting of the compose, calling mostly out to koji to do things, but also doing some things locally. For images, pungi calls koji with some parameters (use this repo and name for kickstart file, use these compose repos for packages, etc). koji then calls different tools depending on what the image is. For livemedia the tool is livemedia-creator (in the lorax package), for qcow2/raw images it calls ImageFactory/oz to do the actual image build on a builder.

  • ELinux ☛ Tuned – Automatic Performance Tuning of CentOS/RHEL Servers

    To maximize the end-to-end performance of services, applications and databases on a server, system administrators usually carry out custom performance tunning, using various tools, both generic operating system tools as well as third-party tools. One of the most useful performance tuning tools on CentOS/RHEL/Fedora Linux is Tuned.

  • ELinux ☛ Creating cgroups in RHEL/CentOS 7

    cgroups allow for system resources to be limited for certain user’s processes, which are defined in configuration files. This is useful e.g. if you wish to limit a compiler’s maximum memory usage and avoid it grinding the system to a halt.

  • Forbes ☛ New Mindsets For Digital Transformation

    I recently participated in a Red Hat online customer event that changed my thinking about how digital transformation takes place, and how digital capabilities can transform customer events. It was an intentionally intimate affair—two discussion leaders, one facilitator, and about ten customer executives. The format was an interesting one too—first a “fireside chat” with me, George Westerman of MIT, and Mike Walker, the facilitator, who runs Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs. Then we moved into a “Lean Coffee” session, in which participants suggest topics, talk about them for five minutes, and vote whether to continue the same topic for another five minutes or move to another. It’s a lively format that never gets boring. And the graphic facilitator Tricia Walker annotated the proceedings (see photo).

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Command Line Heroes: Season 9: Menace in the Middle

    Whether it’s called “man in the middle” or “meddler in the middle”, these types of attacks target communications that we assume are safe. This episode uncovers how complex this malicious form of interception has become.

  • CRN ☛ Red Hat Exec: Training Investments Reflect ‘Renewed Emphasis On Partners’

    In response to past issues raised by partners, IBM subsidiary Red Hat is investing in improvements to its training and certification offerings for partners, including free access to a range of training courses, discounts on certification exams and a new dynamic skills path experience to help with education goals, job roles and IT challenges.

  • Red Hat cloud services deliver time to value and enhance developer and operator efficiency

    In this Techaisle Take analysis, I will discuss which customer challenges Red Hat is addressing with its cloud services, market differentiation, especially VMware, and why its significant value lies in providing a consistent full-stack development and operational experience.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Project Leader election 2022, Jonathan Carter re-elected – Bits from Debian

    The voting period and tally of votes for the Debian Project Leader election has just concluded, and the winner is Jonathan Carter, who has been elected for third time. Congratulations! The new term for the project leader starts on 2022-04-21.

    354 of 1,023 Developers voted using the Condorcet method.

    More information about the results of the voting are available on the Debian Project Leader Elections 2022 page.

  • LWN ☛ Debian Project Leader Election 2022 Results

    The Debian project leader election has completed and Jonathan Carter has been reelected for his third term. For more information, see the Debian vote page. We looked at the candidates back in March.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Installed Ubuntu 22.04? Do These Things Next! – OMG! Ubuntu!

    Okay, so you have installed or upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS: fantastic — but now what?

    To be honest Ubuntu 22.04 is pretty perfect out-of-the-box. You get a fast, fluid OS full of the best free software and the most essential features. That said there are a few post-install tweaks I do that I think make the Ubuntu desktop experience even better.

  • Its FOSS ☛ 22 Things to do After Installing Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish

    Here is a list of simple tweaks and things to do after installing Ubuntu 22.04, to get a smoother and better experience.

    I presume that you are absolutely new to Ubuntu while sharing these tips. If you are an existing Ubuntu user, some tips may sound too elementary to you. However, you’ll still find a few good tweaks that are specific to the new Ubuntu 22.04 features.

  • Kubuntu 22.04 LTS Released

    The Kubuntu Team is happy to announce that Kubuntu 22.04 LTS has been released, featuring the beautiful KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS: simple by default, powerful when needed.

    Codenamed “Jammy Jellyfish”, Kubuntu 22.04 continues our tradition of giving you Friendly Computing by integrating the latest and greatest Free Software technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

    The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

    Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 5.15-based kernel, KDE Frameworks 5.92, Plasma 5.24 LTS and KDE Gear (formerly Applications) 21.12.3.

  • ZDNet ☛ Ubuntu 22.04: The Linux desktop for work

    Ubuntu has long been a serious desktop for the business, and this new long-term support version is better than ever for people who want a work Linux desktop.

  • Linuxiac ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ‘Jammy Jellyfish’ Released, This Is What’s New

    Canonical announced the immediate release of its flagship desktop and enterprise operating system, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ‘Jammy Jellyfish.’

    The wait is finally over. Ubuntu 22.04 has finally arrived and is available to download! Undoubtedly, Ubuntu 22.04 packs exciting new features to give a better user experience, performance, and speed than ever before.

  • LWN ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

    The Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release, codenamed “Jammy Jellyfish”, is now available. It comes in several editions (Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core) and multiple flavors (Ubuntu Budgie, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, UbuntuStudio, and Xubuntu). Lots more information can be found in the release notes.

  • Lubuntu 22.04 LTS is Released!

    Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, Lubuntu 22.04 LTS has been released. With the codename Jammy Jellyfish, Lubuntu 22.04 is the 22nd release of Lubuntu, the eighth release of Lubuntu with LXQt as the default desktop environment.

  • Ubuntu ☛ Canonical Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is released | Ubuntu

    Canonical Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is now generally available, featuring significant leaps forward in cloud confidential computing, real-time kernel for industrial applications, and enterprise Active Directory, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FIPS and FedRAMP compliance – raising the bar for open source from cloud to edge, IoT and workstations. Canonical partners with industry leaders to deliver enterprise-grade security, long-term maintenance and support on all major architectures, hardware and clouds.

    “Our mission is to be a secure, reliable and consistent open-source platform – everywhere”, said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. “Ubuntu 22.04 LTS unlocks innovation for industries with demanding infrastructure security requirements, such as telecommunications and industrial automation, underpinning their digital transformation.“

  • Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS Released – Ubuntu Studio

    The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 22.04, code-named “Jammy Jellyfish”. This marks Ubuntu Studio’s 31st release. This release is a Long-Term Support release and as such, it is supported for 3 years (until April 2025).

    Since it’s just out, you may experience some issues, so you might want to wait a bit before upgrading. Please see the release notes for a complete list of changes and known issues.

  • A jellyfish and a mainframe – pleia2′s blog

    April has been an exciting month. On April 5th, the IBM z16 was released. For those of you who aren’t aware, this is the IBM zSystems class of mainframes that I’ve been working on at IBM for the past three years. As a Developer Advocate, I’ve been able to spend a lot of time digging into the internals, learning about the implementation of DevOps practices and incorporation of Linux into environments, and so much more. I’ve also had the opportunity to work with dozens of open source projects in the Linux world as they get their software to run on the s390x architecture. This includes working with several Linux distributions, and most recently forming the Open Mainframe Project Linux Distributions Working Group with openSUSE’s Sarah Julia Kriesch.

  • The Fridge: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

  • LinuxInsider ☛ Canonical Lets Loose Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ‘Jammy Jellyfish’ | LinuxInsider

    Canonical’s Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, aka “Jammy Jellyfish,” is now generally available with features that raise the bar for open source — from cloud, to edge, to IoT and workstations.

    The desktop version is one of the biggest LTS releases from Ubuntu with respect to visual and feature changes. This major upgrade to GNOME 42 brings changes to the desktop itself in terms of layout, appearance, and how things work.

    If the Ubuntu desktop is your only connection to Canonical’s infrastructure, you can expect some mild and minor hands-on adjustments. If you deal with the rest of Ubuntu’s enterprise world, you will find a lot more hardcore improvements in security and performance for IoT and cloud computing connections.

    Canonical announced the new release on Thursday, detailing features that bring significant leaps forward in cloud confidential computing, real-time kernel for industrial applications, and enterprise Active Directory, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FIPS, and FedRAMP compliance.

  • Beta News ☛ Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish can replace Microsoft Windows 11 on your PC

    The developers over at Canonical have been busy baking a yummy new version of Ubuntu recently, and following a brief beta period, it is finally time to take the open-source operating system out of the oven. Yes, folks, the stable Ubuntu 22.04 is finally here!

    Code-named “Jammy Jellyfish,” Ubuntu 22.04 is an “LTS” version, which stands for “Long Term Support.” Yeah, that means exactly what it sounds like. The Linux distribution will be supported for a long time — five years to be exact. Very nice.

    “Our mission is to be a secure, reliable and consistent open-source platform — everywhere. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS unlocks innovation for industries with demanding infrastructure security requirements, such as telecommunications and industrial automation, underpinning their digital transformation,” says Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical CEO.

  • H2S Media ☛ How to install WineHQ on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy

    Learn the commands to install WineHQ on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish. If you don’t know about Wine then it stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator, a program that allows us to use Windows software on Linux. You do not need a Windows installation on your computer to start programs programmed for Windows with Wine.

  • Video ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 Review: It’s GOOD again! + Kubuntu, Xubuntu, MATE, Budgie… – Invidious

  • Video ☛ Is Ubuntu 22.04 The Best Ubuntu In Years? – Invidious

    The new Ubuntu LTS is out. Codenamed “Jammy Jellyfish”, Ubuntu 22.04 sports a really slick GNOME 42 desktop with some amazing themes, icons, and other nice touches that possibly makes 22.04 the best Ubuntu release in years.

  • OpenStack Yoga for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS | wrestling penguins

    The Ubuntu OpenStack team at Canonical is pleased to announce the general
    availability of OpenStack Yoga on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) and
    Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) via the Ubuntu Cloud Archive. Details of
    the Yoga release can be found at: https://www.openstack.org/software/yoga

    To get access to the Ubuntu Yoga packages:

    Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

    OpenStack Yoga is available by default on Ubuntu 22.04.

    Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

    The Ubuntu Cloud Archive for OpenStack Yoga can be enabled on Ubuntu
    20.04 by running the following command:

    sudo add-apt-repository cloud-archive:yoga
    The Ubuntu Cloud Archive for Yoga includes updates for:

    aodh, barbican, ceilometer, ceph (17.1.0), cinder, designate,
    designate-dashboard, dpdk (21.11), glance, gnocchi, heat,
    heat-dashboard, horizon, ironic, ironic-ui, keystone, libvirt (8.0.0),
    magnum, magnum-ui, manila, manila-ui, masakari, mistral, murano,
    murano-dashboard, networking-arista, networking-bagpipe,
    networking-baremetal, networking-bgpvpn, networking-hyperv,
    networking-l2gw, networking-mlnx, networking-odl, networking-sfc,
    neutron, neutron-dynamic-routing, neutron-fwaas, neutron-vpnaas, nova,
    octavia, octavia-dashboard, openstack-trove, openvswitch (2.17.0),
    ovn (22.03.0), ovn-octavia-provider, placement, sahara,
    sahara-dashboard, senlin, swift, trove-dashboard, vmware-nsx,
    vitrage, watcher, watcher-dashboard, zaqar, and zaqar-ui.

  • Xubuntu 22.04 Community Wallpaper Contest Winners « Xubuntu

    The Xubuntu team is happy to announce the results of the 22.04 community wallpaper contest!

    As always, we’d like to send out a huge thanks to every contestant. The Xubuntu Community Wallpaper Contest gives us a unique chance to interact with the community and get contributions from members who may otherwise not have had the opportunity to join in before. With around 130 submissions, the contest garnered less interest this time around, but we still had a lot of great work to pick from. All of the submissions are browsable on the 22.04 contest page at contest.xubuntu.org.

  • Xubuntu 22.04 released! « Xubuntu

    The Xubuntu team is happy to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 22.04.

    Xubuntu 22.04, codenamed Jammy Jellyfish, is a long-term support (LTS) release and will be supported for 3 years, until 2025.

    The Xubuntu and Xfce development teams have made great strides in usability, expanded features, and additional applications in the last two years. Users coming from 20.04 will be delighted with improvements found in Xfce 4.16 and our expanded application set. 21.10 users will appreciate the added stability that comes from the numerous maintenance releases that landed this cycle.

  • Ubuntu ☛ Meet Canonical at Cloud Expo Europe Frankfurt 2022 | Ubuntu

    The leading fair in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Singapore will reopen the doors to C-level experts and executives in Frankfurt. Canonical will be attending as a Gold Sponsor, presenting strategies and trends for industry leading companies.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino ☛ Train yourself to avoid using filler words with the tinyML-powered Mind the Uuh device | Arduino Blog

    Listening to a speaker who interjects words such as “um,” “uuh,” and “so” can be extremely distracting and take away from the message being conveyed, which is why Benedikt Groß, Maik Groß, Thibault Durand set out to build a small device that can help encourage speakers to make their language more concise. Their experimental solution, called Mind the “Uuh,” constantly listens to the words being spoken and generates an audible alert if the word “uuh” is detected.

    The team began by collecting around 1,500 samples of audio that ranged in length from 300ms to 1s and contained either noise, random words, or the word “uuh.” Then, after running it through a filter and training a Keras neural network using Edge Impulse, deployed it onto a Nano 33 BLE Sense. The board was connected to a seven-segment display via two shift registers that show the current “uuh” count, as well as a servo motor that dings a bell to generate the alert.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Mozilla Open Policy & Advocacy Blog: The FTC and DOJ merger guidelines review is an opportunity to reset competition enforcement in digital markets

      As the internet becomes increasingly closed and centralized, consolidation and the opportunity for anti-competitive behavior rises. We are encouraged to see legislators and regulators in many jurisdictions exploring how to update consumer protection and competition policies. We look forward to working together to advance innovation, interoperability, and consumer choice.

    • Mozilla ☛ Adopting users’ design feedback – Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

      On March 1st, 2022, MDN Web Docs released a new design and a new brand identity. Overall, the community responded to the redesign enthusiastically and we received many positive messages and kudos. We also received valuable feedback on some of the things we didn’t get quite right, like the browser compatibility table changes as well as some accessibility and readability issues.

      For us, MDN Web Docs has always been synonymous with the term Ubuntu, “I am because we are.” Translated in this context, “MDN Web Docs is the amazing resource it is because of our community’s support, feedback, and contributions.”

• FSF

  • FSF ☛ Find new ways to “live liberation” with LibrePlanet 2022 workshops

    As announced at this year’s LibrePlanet, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is hosting a series of workshops over the coming weeks. Please see the schedule below for dates, times, workshop descriptions, and registration links.

    Capacity to these events is limited, so we encourage you to register soon to ensure your spot.

  • GNU Projects

    • Recent additions I’ve made to GNU Emacs

      Here are a few new features I’ve added to GNU ELPA and upstream GNU Emacs recently. Text is adapted from the in-tree documentation I wrote for the new features. Thanks to everyone who offered feedback on my patches.

• Programming/Development

  • ZDNet ☛ Best Linux distro for programming (2022) | ZDNet

    Why would you want to go to the trouble? Because you’re a programmer, an engineer, or a system administrator who wants to get the most from Linux. Or, you’re a power user, and you want to push your computer as far as you can take it. If that’s you, then these are the distributions for you.

  • Linux.org ☛ Live – Let’s talk dev-ops – introduction | Linux.org

    It was a quick one, but I did a 22ish minute live this thursday with an intro to some great dev-ops / infrastructure tools. Check it out below. I’m going to try and do a weekly live on Thursdays at 8pm EDT. Some will be fun, some may not be! lol. Either way, join me and hop in the chat.. I love talking to you guys! Maybe we’ll do some guests as well.

  • NVIDIA transition from fir-dev

    Dear Flang Community and Supporters,

    NVIDIA’s involvement in fir-dev, the fir-dev branch on github flang-compiler/18-llvm-project, is coming to a close.

    Thank you to everyone who contributed to fir-dev and to all of the dedicated contributors and reviewers who helped upstream code to llvm-project.

    As of April 21, 2022, NVIDIA will transition to contributing directly to llvm-project. NVIDIA will no longer be contributing to or upstreaming code from fir-dev.

    Access to fir-dev will remain open. There will be no change in the access policies or permissions without consensus of the flang community. Others are free to continue to use fir-dev.

    NVIDIA will continue to contribute to llvm-project/flang with the same dedication that we have in the past. Our commitment to flang is unwavering.

  • The syslog-ng insider 2022-04: typing; sudo; Zinc; Elastic Cloud; 3.36; – Blog – syslog-ng Community – syslog-ng Community

    This is the 100th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.

  • Barry Kauler ☛ Meld file and folder diff viewer

    EasyOS has ‘xfdiff’ to see differences between two files. You can find it in the “Utility” menu. However, if you would like something more heavy-duty, that also compares folders and can generate patch files, then consider Meld…

  • Setting Up a CI System Part 4: Live patching your CI gateway – mupuf.org

    System updates are a necessary evil for any internet-facing server, unless you want your system to become part of a botnet. This is especially true for CI systems since they let people on the internet run code on machines, often leading to unfair use such as cryptomining (this one is hard to avoid though)!

    The problem with system updates is not the 2 or 3 minutes of downtime that it takes to reboot, it is that we cannot reboot while any CI job is running. Scheduling a reboot thus first requires to stop accepting new jobs, wait for the current ones to finish, then finally reboot. This solution may be acceptable if your jobs take ~30 minutes, but what if they last 6h? A reboot suddenly gets close to a typical 8h work day, and we definitely want to have someone looking over the reboot sequence so they can revert to a previous boot configuration if the new one failed.

    This problem may be addressed in a cloud environment by live-migrating services/containers/VMs from a non-updated host to an updated one. This is unfortunately a lot more complex to pull off for a bare-metal CI without having a second CI gateway and designing synchronization systems/hardware to arbiter access to the test machines’s power/serial consoles/boot configuration.

    So, while we cannot always avoid the need to drain the CI jobs before rebooting, what we can do is reduce the cases in which we need to perform this action. Unfortunately, containers have been designed with atomic updates in mind (this is why we want to use them), but that means that trivial operations such as adding an ssh key, a Wireguard peer, or updating a firewall rule will require a reboot. A hacky solution may be for the admins to update the infra container then log in the different CI gateways and manually reproduce the changes they have done in the new container. These changes would be lost at the next reboot, but this is not a problem since the CI gateway would use the latest container when rebooting which already contains the updates. While possible, this solution is error-prone and not testable ahead of time, which is against the requirements for the gateway we laid out in Part 3.

  • Python

    • How to convert ebooks in bulk with Python and Calibre – Orthodox Pirate

    • LWN ☛ A literal string type for Python [LWN.net]

      Using strings with contents that are supplied by users can be fraught with peril; SQL injection is a well-known technique for attacking applications that stems from that, for example. Generally, database frameworks and libraries provide mechanisms that seek to lead programmers toward doing The Right Thing, with parameterized queries and the like, but they cannot enforce that—inventive developers will seemingly always find ways to inject user input into places it should not go. A recently adopted Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) provides a way to enforce the use of strings that are untainted by user input, but it uses the optional typing features of the language to do so; those wanting to take advantage of it will need to be running a type-checking program.

  • Rust

    • This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 439

    • Rust Library Team Aspirations | Inside Rust Blog

      Over the past years, Rust has grown from a language used by a few dedicated users into a well-known language used by lots of highly visible projects and successful companies. As the Rust user base, the community, and the ecosystem continues to grow, we need to look forward and consider how we need to scale to adapt to the needs of the ever expanding Rust ecosystem.

      Recently, the compiler team shared their blog post detailing their ambitions for 2022, and the language team published a roadmap with their vision for Rust in 2024.

ACM ☛ Middleware 101

In computer science, systems are typically divided into two categories: software and hardware. However, there is an additional layer in between, referred to as middleware, which is a software “pipeline,” an operation, a process, or an application between the operating system and the end user. This article aims to define middleware and reflect on its necessity, as well as address controversies about when and where it applies. It also explores the application of middleware in emerging technologies such as cloud computing and the IoT (Internet of Things), as well as future middleware developments.

The term was introduced in the early 1980s. It encompasses complex software solutions that modernize legacy systems—typically mainframes—through new features such as software and application components. Initially, it was solely used to expand the layer separating the network and application layers. Subsequently, its use expanded to serve as the layer above the operating system and network layer, and below the application layer. This means that middleware could now facilitate the generic communication between the application component and the distributed network.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ The Linux Foundation Announces Conference Schedule for Open Source Summit North America 2022

        • PR Newswire ☛ The Linux Foundation Announces Conference Schedule for Open Source Summit North America 2022 – PR Newswire

  • Security

    • CISA ☛ Drupal Releases Security Updates | CISA

      Drupal has released security updates to address vulnerabilities affecting Drupal 9.2 and 9.3. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

    • CISA ☛ Cisco Releases Security Updates for Multiple Products | CISA

      Cisco has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple Cisco products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system. For updates addressing lower severity vulnerabilities, see the Cisco Security Advisories page.

    • Duo ☛ Lemon Duck Botnet Targets Exposed Docker APIs | Decipher

      While previously the botnet has targeted Microsoft Exchange servers that are vulnerable to bugs like ProxyLogon, in this current campaign Lemon Duck is achieving initial access via exposed Docker APIs. Docker, a platform used to run container workloads in the cloud, provides APIs to support automation for developers. However, misconfigured cloud instances can expose these APIs to the internet, allowing attackers to leverage them for various nefarious purposes.

Defence/Aggression

• The Register UK ☛ Yandex feeling the pain of Western sanctions • The Register

  Yandex, Russia’s Google, has withdrawn its financial guidance for 2022 due to uncertainty over what this year will yield for the corporation.

  The Moscow-headquartered business provides a search engine that has a commanding share of the local search market, as well as tools including e-commerce, mobile applications, an email service, transportation, and online advertising.

  The majority of its operations are located in Russia, the pariah state shunned by much of the world for its continuing invasion of Ukraine, and the company is feeling the squeeze of sanctions imposed by the West – even if Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is shrugging them off as a minor irritant.

  In a filing to update investors [PDF], Yandex said: “Current geopolitical tensions, their impact on the Russian and global economy, and the related stresses in broader social and business environment, have created exceptional challenges for our business.”

Environment

• Energy

  • The Register UK ☛ Google tests battery backups, aims to ditch emergency datacenter diesel [Ed: Typical greenwashing; it's not carbon-free when you're mining for material like lithium and manufacturing (let alone charging) batteries]

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Register UK ☛ Amazon to spend 11 days of annual profit developing robot warehouse workers

  Amazon today announced the creation of a $1 billion venture investment program with the aim to spur innovation in three areas close to its heart: fulfillment, logistics, and the supply chain.

  The Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund (AIIF) will be bankrolled using 11 days of the US giant’s $33bn annual net income from 2021 (or 58 days of non-AWS annual operating income.)

• AccessNow ☛ Why the U.N. is focusing on digital rights during humanitarian crises – Access Now

  Digital rights violations enable and escalate offline violence, deepening humanitarian crises. The calculated attacks targeting digital systems – essential to people’s safety and wellbeing – are unacceptable. At this critical juncture in history, when human rights violations are rampant from Ukraine to Myanmar, we’ve prepared a new briefing on the 49th session of the United Nations (U.N.) Human Rights Council. The briefing, Digital Rights at the U.N. HRC 49 and Beyond, takes stock of the state of digital rights at the global level, exploring key digital rights issues during this session. It’s aimed at educating delegates on the impact of these issues on human rights, and guiding them in next steps for advancing global norms and standards that will protect human rights.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Public Knowledge ☛ Internet Users Score Major Victory as Ninth Circuit Upholds California Net Neutrality Case – Public Knowledge

  Today, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a petition by broadband providers to rehear the court’s decision in ACA Connects v. Bonta, rejecting yet another attempt by broadband providers to overturn California’s net neutrality law. Earlier this year, the court issued its opinion and determined the California consumer protection law could go into effect. Public Knowledge and other consumer groups filed an amicus brief in this case last year.

Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Public Domain Review ☛ Handy Mnemonics: The Five-Fingered Memory Machine – The Public Domain Review

    Before humans stored memories as zeroes and ones, we turned to digital devices of another kind — preserving knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms. Kensy Cooperrider leads us through a millennium of “hand mnemonics” and the variety of techniques practised by Buddhist monks, Latin linguists, and Renaissance musicians for remembering what might otherwise elude the mind.

8 Linux Tips for Student Programmers

You can install Linux on your machine and use it the same way you would use Windows or macOS. Or, you can look under the hood and take it as an opportunity to become a better coder. The choice is yours!

There’s one thing you should keep in mind, though: getting started with Linux might be overwhelming at first. But this feeling will quickly die down. And then, you’ll get to tinkering with the command line and fostering the curiosity that’s inherent to all coders.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Tux Digital ☛ Hardware Addicts 58: Portable Monitors & Action Cameras, Stuff A Hardware Addict Needs For The Road! – TuxDigital

  Welcome to Hardware Addicts, a proud member of the Destination Linux Network. Hardware Addicts is the podcast that focuses on the physical components that powers our technology world.

  In this episode, we’re going to be discussing portable monitors. They’re making a big come back and I think we can make the case that you need one.

  Then we head to Camera Corner where Wendy will discuss Insta360 ONE RS Action Camera and all the adventures Michael and I will be going on with this camera.

• BSD Now 451: Tuning ZFS recordsize

  Full system backups with FFS snapshots, ZFS and dump(8), tuning recordsize in OpenZFS, Optimizing FreeBSD Power Consumption on Modern Intel Laptops, remember to check for ZFS filesystems being mounted, Use tcpdump to save wireless bridge, and more

• Jupiter Broadcasting ☛ Linux Action News 237

  Our take on why Fedora’s Legacy BIOS plans have stirred up such a strong debate, how NVIDIA’s Linux strategy seems to be changing, and a surprising kernel patch from Sony.

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 951

  Joel says pass the doochie

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • mesa 22.1.0-rc2

    Hi list,
    
    At the last minute, here's Mesa 22.1.0-rc2. By far the biggest set of
    changes here are in zink. There's also fixes here for nir, radv, dzn,
    intel, anv, core vulkan, r600, panfrost, core gallium, mesa/st, and some
    CI fixups.
    
    Cheers,
    Dylan
    
    git tag: mesa-22.1.0-rc2
    

  • Do Not Let Your Memes Be Dreams

    With Mesa 22.1 RC1 firmly out the door, most eyes have turned towards Mesa 22.2.

    But not all eyes.

    No, while most expected me to be rocketing off towards the next shiny feature, one ticket caught my eye:

    Mesa 22.1rc1: Zink on Windows doesn’t work even simple wglgears app fails..

    Sadly, I don’t support Windows. I don’t have a test machine to run it, and I don’t even have a VM I could spin up to run Lavapipe. I knew that Kopper was going to cause problems with other frontends, but I didn’t know how many other frontends were actually being used.

    The answer was not zero, unfortunately. Plenty of users were enjoying the slow, software driver speed of Zink on Windows to spin those gears, and I had just crushed their dreams.

Instructionals/Technical

• » GNU Linux – run old dos games (and windo(w)s games) from wine to dosbox-x – how to compile from latest src – first problems: keyboard / some keys “:” not working | dwaves.de

  Remember Monkey Island and Tomb Raider 1? yeah… wanna play it on GNU Linux? yeeeessss!

• ByteXD ☛ How to Install Discord on Ubuntu 22.04 / 20.04 – ByteXD

  Discord is a cross-platform VoIP and chat app for gamers that allows gamers to connect with each other for gaming purposes. It’s a great app for voice and text chat for gamers of all levels of experience, from the casual player who just wants to chat with friends during their next game, to the hardcore competitive player who wants to organize and manage their gaming sessions.

  Discord has become in a relatively short amount of time the go-to chat solution among gamers. But that’s not the case anymore whereas it is rapidly expanding among non-gamers including computer science enthusiasts. The app is available on Android, iOS, Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Though the web version is also available it’s recommended to use the app.

• Install Lutris On Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux

  Lutris is a game manager built for Linux operating systems, and it does its job incredibly well. It has thousands of games in its catalog and works with very little fuss, allowing you to install games from the cloud and keep them up to date. Most games are “one click install” titles, meaning that you shouldn’t have to worry about fiddling with extra configuration to get a Windows game working on Linux. It just works.

  Lutris requires Wine in order to ensure a smooth experience. The two work really well together, and that’s because the developers of Lutris also work directly with Wine staging. Since the Lutris developers already program their installers to use the most optimal settings possible, there’s no need to fool around with Winetricks or any of the usual Wine configuration utilities.

  If you’re ready to start gaming on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, follow along as we setup Lutris and its dependencies on our system.

• VirtualBox Extension Pack installation on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux

  In this tutorial, you will learn how to install VirtualBox Extension Pack on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux. This software will allow you to extend some of the functionalities of your guest operating systems and the way you can interact with them from your host Ubuntu 22.04 system.

• Virtualbox: install guest additions on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish

  If you’re running Ubuntu 22.04 inside a VirtualBox virtual machine, installing the Guest Additions software will help you get the most out of the system. VirtualBox Guest Additions will give the machine more capabilities, such as a shared clipboard with the host system, drag and drop file transfer, time synchronization, shared folders, automatic window resizing, and more.

  This makes copying data to and from a host system much more convenient. It also changes the virutal machine’s resolution automatically when its window is resized, so you do not need to change it manually. Guest Additions will work with just about any Linux distribution, but instrutions can differ because of dependencies and package managers.

  In this turorial, we’ll be going over the step by step instructions to get VirtualBox Guest Additions installed on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. With these instructions, it doesn’t matter what host system you’re using, as long as the virtual machine is running Ubuntu 22.04. This tutorial assumes that you’ve already installed your Ubuntu 22.04 operating system in the VM correctly.

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

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GitKraken on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, GitKraken is a graphic interface for Git that allows us to manage our repositories from a comfortable and modern graphic interface. Integrations with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps make it swift and simple to clone, fork, and add remotes. Built with premium technology, Gitkraken emphasizes the modern graphic interface that makes everything easily accessible.

  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 GitKraken intuitive Git GUI & powerful Git CLI 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.

• ID Root ☛ How To Install Wiki.js on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Wiki.js on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Wiki.js is an open-source, modern, and powerful wiki application based on Node.js, Git, and Markdown (.md). Wiki.js also provides a variety of modules that can be easily integrated from the Analytical, Authentication, Databases, Editors, and many more modules.

  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 Wiki.js 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 dbWatch to Monitor MySQL Performance in Linux

  dbWatch is a powerful, multi-platform, fully-featured, and enterprise-grade SQL database monitoring and management tool that gives you full control over your database instances and system resources. It is highly scalable, secure, and designed for managing large database farms.

• ByteXD ☛ How to List All Users or User Groups in Linux – ByteXD

  Knowing how to list all user groups on Linux is a significant stride towards sustaining ownership and permissions. Since you can use several commands to list user groups, the command you choose depends on the depth of details you want to see.

  For example, use the compgen command if you are only interested in names. On the other hand, you can customize the getent command to view extensive information about user groups.

  This tutorial explains user management, listing users and their groups using several commands.

  These commands should apply to any Linux distribution, including Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Linux Mint, and others.

• ByteXD ☛ Installing Cinnamon Desktop Environment on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04

  Cinnamon desktop environment is a Linux desktop environment.

  Contrary to GNOME or KDE, it follows a more traditional desktop metaphor convention; it is more user-friendly specifically for Windows migrants because it features a Windows-like user interface, and that is the reason behind them preferring Linux Mint over other distros.

  Also, you can customize the environment using GTK theme, there are a lot of already built themes out there, and you can build your themes!

  This article explains how to install Cinnamon desktop environment on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04.

• ByteXD ☛ How to List All Installed Fonts on Linux From the Command-Line

  One thing we can be sure about in Linux is that there is always multiple ways to do the same thing. Graphical applications get rewritten by new developers in newer languages all the time and we in the Linux community benefit by always having a secondary option. But we can always count on older classic applications to do the basic. Most of the classic applications are non-graphical using the command line.

  In this article we are going to learn how to list all the fonts installed on your system using the fc-list command and explore a few of it’s options to help us filter through searches. fc-list is part of a library called fontconfig.

• ByteXD ☛ How to Install Gparted on Ubuntu 22.04/20.04 – ByteXD

  Gparted (stands for GNOME Partition Editor) is an official partition editor for Linux operating system, made and maintained by GNOME developers alongside the default software Disks.

  With Gparted you can create, delete, resize, move and check partitions without data loss, also you can edit partition flags such as boot flags, and you can also edit your partition label.

  This article explains how to install Gparted on Ubuntu 20.04.

• ByteXD ☛ How to Install and Use fzf Command-Line Fuzzy Finder

  fzf is one of the most amazing utilities written for the command line in the last few years.

  In Linux once you have gotten used to navigating the command line and discover fzf, you will never go back to not using it.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install/Configure Unattended Upgrades on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

  Keeping your system up to date is an essential factor for anyone from simple desktop users, developers, and sysadmins; let’s face it, anyone with a device primarily connected to the Internet. Ubuntu, by default, is not set up for automatic updates. However, by enabling and configuring unattended-upgrades packages, you can easily apply security, package, or even new feature upgrades if you do not always have the time to check or forget. IT is highly recommended to enable this just for security alone.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Duf Disk Usage Utility on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

  Duf disk utility, an open-source, free “Disk Usage Free Utility” written in Goland and released under an MIT license. The disk utility supports multi-platforms such as BSD, Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems.

  Duf is a command-line utility to find disk usage in Linux and Unix-like systems terminals. One of the excellent features of Duf is its ability to display the disk usage details in a beautiful, user-friendly layout in tab form. Some extra features with Duf include disk usage out in JSON output.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish by downloading the package directly from the project’s Github and installing it using the command line terminal. The tutorial will also focus on some common-use commands.

• Ubuntu Pit ☛ 20 Practical Examples of Chown Command in Linux

  In Linux, the chown command is used to change the ownership of a file or a directory with another user in the system. The full meaning of the chown command is to change ownership. The chown command can be applied to a file or directory as a soft or hard link in the Linux file system. In every Linux operating system, each file is associated with an owner of a group. If you are not the particular owner who created or modified the file, you cannot change or modify that file from another user account. But with the help of the chown command, you can easily get access to a directory or a file that you want to modify.

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

  Flask is an open-source web framework built with Python programming language. The software is a minimalistic, light, fast framework that doesn’t include ORM, form validation, and other third-party libs. Flash ships with only the essential tools to develop your web applications and maintain them compared to Django, another popular web framework development software. Flask is based on Werkzeug and uses Jinja2 as a template engine.

• Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to Install OpenSSH Server on Alpine Linux

  OpenSSH server is an implementation of the SSH protocol, which comes with a collection of networking utilities based on the SSH protocol. The SSH protocol is a secure protocol that encrypts all traffic exchanged between a client and remote host using strong encryption methods.

  By default, the OpenSSH server comes installed in modern Alpine Linux systems. However if by any chance, the OpenSSH server is not installed, then this guide is what you are looking for.

• HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Padloc Password Manager on Rocky Linux 8

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Python 3.10 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.

• ELinux ☛ How to ‘safely’ delete Mysql relay-bin log file??

  Disk is getting full. When using du, I could see my MySQL log folder is taking up all the disk. These files are not mysql-bin files, instead, these are mysql-relay-bin files. How can I truncate or purge these files?

  Mysql creates mysql-bin files which are called binary files for MySQL on the master side. It then streams the binary files to the replicas to reflect the changes. Mysql doesn’t really store the binaries on the replica side, hence it is safe to delete the relay-bin files. Although, there are other safe strategies to accomplish this or never fall into a situation of ‘out of space’.

• TechTarget ☛ How to launch an EC2 instance using Terraform

  Developers can create an Amazon EC2 instance to test software in a development or staging environment, or to deploy software to production. With Terraform, they can use code to streamline that process.

  An EC2 instance is a virtual machine that runs in the AWS cloud. AWS manages the underlying hardware, which enables users to focus on the software they’re running rather than infrastructure management tasks. Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code tool that enables IT admins and developers to programmatically provision infrastructure resources.

  In this tutorial, learn about the benefits of Terraform, and how to use it to launch an EC2 instance in AWS.

• How to redirect shell command output | Enable Sysadmin

  Learn how to process the output of shell commands within a script and send it to files, devices, or other commands or scripts.

• How to uninstall the NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux

  In this tutorial, you will learn how to uninstall the NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux, hence switch back to the open source Nouveau Nvidia drivers. Typically the proprietary drivers from Nvidia will offer better performance, but the Nouveau drivers are a good alternative if you run into issues.

• TechRepublic ☛ How to deploy a CockroachDB Cluster with Ubuntu Server 20.04

  Looking for an outstanding distributed database cluster? Look no further than CockroachDB. Jack Wallen walks you through the process of deploying this db server to a cluster.

• How to install Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Desktop

  In this tutorial we will perform the Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop installation. Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions. The reason being it’s main goal is to be the most user-friendly non-geek Linux operating system out there. As you will soon see, the Ubuntu 22.04 installation process is straightforward and simple to follow.

• HowTo Forge ☛ How to a Setup Private Docker Registry on Rocky Linux 8

  If you are working for an organization and want to keep your docker images in-house for quick deployment, then hosting a private Docker repository is perfect. Having a private docker registry allows you to own your images distribution pipeline and have tighter control over image storage and distribution.

• Workflows or how I tried to give up and love Emacs

  I’ve been going over the various things that have crept into my day-to-day computing and evaluating them. In some cases I’ve found things that needed maintenance (perhaps a future post about refactoring my mutt[1] configuration is called for), and in others I’ve taken the opportunity to evaluate alternatives.

Wine or Emulation

• 9to5Linux ☛ Proton 7.0-2 Makes More Games Playable on Linux, Fixes Numerous Bugs

  Proton 7.0-2 comes two months after the Proton 7.0-1 release and adds support for the Atelier Ayesha, A Way Out, ATRI -My Dear Moments-, Baseball Stars 2, Bright Memory: Infinite, Call of Duty Black Ops 3, Double Dragon Trilogy, Devil May Cry HD Collection, Dragon Quest Builders 2, Fall in Labyrinth, Guilty Gear Isuka, INVERSUS Deluxe, King of Fighters XIII, Medieval Dynasty, Metal Slug 2, 3 and X, Montaro, One Shot: Fading Memory, and Saint Seiya: Soldiers’ Soul video games, which are now playable on Linux.

Games

• Boiling Steam ☛ The Steam Deck Gets a Theming Plugin – Boiling Steam

  When you create a device that’s more open than the usual, you can expect good things to come from the community of tinkerers out there. This time, there’s an excellent initiative for theming, by tweaking the SteamOS interface to use different colors or looks with CSS rules injection (and probably more). Going boldly where no other handheld has gone before!

• GamingOnLinux ☛ GOG do a few more upgrades, this time adding 170 game tags | GamingOnLinux

  Finding games on GOG seems like it’s steadily getting easier, with another update to their store out now.

  After suffering losses, GOG continue to try and bring customers back to their store with a few tweaks to what they will allow on the store and a revival of Good Old Games — they’ve been improving how people search for and actually find games. This latest update is a continuation of that.

  What they’ve done now is expand store filtering with 170 new tags for games. The way they’ve done it seems slightly different to Steam, which bundles tags and genres into the same thing. GOG on the other hand seem to have separated them like Adventure having it’s own section but Point&Click just being a searchable tag. Game pages will have them, and you will be able to search using these tags now too.

• Liliputing ☛ Lilbits: Pixel Watch leak, a smartphone game controller with a cooling fan, and a pocket-sized modular laptop under development, and – Liliputing

  Smartphone gaming accessory maker GameSir is crowdfunding a new controller with a built-in fan. And the folks behind the MNT Reform modular, open hardware laptop are also working on a pocket-sized version.

Distributions

• LWN ☛ Two OpenWrt updates

  The OpenWrt 21.02.3 and 19.07.10 updates have been released. These updates contain some security fixes and improved device support. It’s noting that this is the last 19.07 update…

• New Releases

  • Nix 2.8.0 released

    We’re pleased to announce the availability of Nix 2.8.0. It will be available from NixOS – Getting Nix / NixOS.

• BSD

  • OpenBSD ☛ OpenBSD 7.1

    This is a partial list of new features and systems included in OpenBSD 7.1.

• PCLinuxOS

  • Waterfox G updated to 4.1.1.1 » PCLinuxOS

    Waterfox G is a free and open source web browser based on Firefox but with additional optimizations.

  • Telegram updated to 3.7.1 » PCLinuxOS

    Telegram is an Open Source instant messaging platform for mobile and desktop focused on privacy.

  • opera-stable-86.0.4363.23 » PCLinuxOS

    Opera Stable Browser updated to 86.0.4363.23.

  • zoom-5.10.3.2778 » PCLinuxOS

    Zoom meeting client has been updated to 5.10.3.278.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • LLVM, PipeWire, git update in Tumbleweed

    There have been three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released since last Thursday.

    If the 20220420 snapshot passes openQA, it might be released before this article publishes and push the number of snapshots released to four.

    A little less than 10 packages were updated in the 20220419 snapshot. The most updates in the snapshot came in the 5.17.3 Linux Kernel update. A few KVM fixes were made for x86; there was also one for arm64 that makes sure an event filter isn’t changed. There were also about 30 Direct Rendering Manager changes in the kernel update. Wine applications using the JACK backend should no longer crash with the pipewire 0.3.50 update. The audio and video package update also had a change that ensures Advanced Linux Sound Architecture will now only allocate a buffer size big enough to hold four times the quantum limit instead of as large as possible. The update of the libnl3 3.6.0 package added Generic Routing Encapsulation and Virtual Tunnel Interface support for IPv6 and both yast2-trans and libstorage-ng 4.5.4 updated slavic translations.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Red Hat ☛ Bind a Kafka cluster to a Node.js application the easy way | Red Hat Developer

    If you’re writing an application for Kubernetes and want to expose secrets for connecting, or binding, to external services such as REST APIs, databases, or event buses, you have traditionally needed to manually and custom-write the code for these tasks. This process can be error-prone and can slow down developers, and the community lacked a consistent and automated way to connect applications and services.

    The Service Binding Operator (SBO) provides such a solution. In this article, you’ll learn article how to use the Service Binding Operator to easily bind a Node.js application to Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Building better RHEL notifications with Red Hat Insights

    Red Hat Insights is one of the best tools Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) admins have at their disposal to manage systems at scale. With the addition of notifications and integrations, Insights is going to be an even better way to proactively manage systems and respond quickly to problems.

  • Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Contributor Tee Shirt Giveaway: Claim yours today! – Fedora Community Blog

    As we get ready to release Fedora Linux 36, another anticipated moment has arrived: the Fedora contributor tee shirt giveaway! Sending a huge “THANK YOU!!” to everyone who works to make Fedora the amazing community it is. The Mindshare Committee is excited to be able to share swag with our community to celebrate the latest release of Fedora Linux. Find the details below.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ Continuous integration: 5 key success factors

    As cloud-native architecture continues to rise, the adoption of microservices, although advantageous, can easily disrupt your continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. It’s more important than ever to stay on top of the critical success factors for software delivery. Each time a DevOps journey introduces advancements and practices, there is a new challenge to harden the software delivery process.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ Digital transformation: 4 outdated notions to move past [Ed: The terms "digital transformation" would likely mean increase complexity and buy support]

    When IT leaders and executives think of digital transformation today, they may imagine adopting agile teams, updating their infrastructure, or building and deploying a new digital product or application. But digital transformation isn’t just any one of those things – it’s all of them and more.

  • Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ Open Mainframe Project Launches Call for Proposals for the 3rd Annual Open Mainframe Summit on September 21-22 in Philadelphia, PA

  • PR Newswire ☛ Open Mainframe Project Launches Call for Proposals for the 3rd Annual Open Mainframe Summit on September 21-22 in Philadelphia, PA

  • The Register UK ☛ ‘IBM is now a very different company’ says CEO as Q1 2022 beats expectations

    Freed from the financial anchor that was its infrastructure services division – spun out as Kyndryl in November – IBM kicked off calendar Q1 of 2022 with something that has eluded it for years: decent growth.

    Big Blue has undergone some changes as it adapts to modern computing in the cloud, and CEO Arvind Krishna said trading output this quarter reflects its actions – i.e lopping off a division that dragged down IBM’s top line and sometimes ate into the operating profits of other divisions.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Video ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS overview | Fast, secure and simple. – Invidious

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

  • Video ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish” Full Review – Invidious

    The latest long-term supported Ubuntu release is here – Ubuntu 22.04 was released on April 21st. In this video, Jay will give you an in-depth look at this new release, including an overview of the new features, thoughts on the “snapped” version of Firefox, and also why Ubuntu’s GNOME implementation this time around can best be described as “FrankenGNOME”.

  • Video ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – Full Installation Walkthrough – Invidious

    With the release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish”, we have an updated desktop experience with custom features, and long-term support for three years. In this video, we’ll take a look at the installation process. Nothing much has changed in the installer, but if you haven’t seen what the process looks like yet, then this video is for you.

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Available to Download, See What’s New! | UbuntuHandbook

    Ubuntu 22.04, code-name “Jammy Jellyfish”, is out! See what’s new in this Long Term Support (LTS) release!

    Ubuntu 22.04 features Linux Kernel 5.15, GNOME 42 Desktop, New Logo, and tool-chain updates!

  • TechCrunch ☛ Canonical now hopes to IPO in 2023

  • Canonical Expands Ubuntu Container Image Portfolio – Container Journal

    As part of an update to its Ubuntu operating system, Canonical has added Grafana Loki, Apache Kafka and Apache Cassandra container images to the portfolio of images to which it provides long-term support. Those images, along with one encapsulating Canonical Ubuntu 22.04 LTS edition of Linux, can be accessed via DockerHub.

    The latest edition of Ubuntu also adds support for cloud confidential computing on the Microsoft Azure cloud, a real-time kernel for industrial applications, the Rust programming language, OpenSSL v3 cryptographic algorithms, and virtualization software on graphical processor units (GPUs) from NVIDIA.

    Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth said this latest edition of Ubuntu will cement the company’s dominance of cloud computing environments where the company claims its distribution runs on more than 100 billion instances of virtual machines a year.

  • SDx Central ☛ Canonical Ubuntu Update Gains VM Compute Confidence – SDxCentral

    Canonical fleshed out its latest Ubuntu long-term support (LTS) platform, touting expanded security and functionality updates to its widely-used Linux operating system. Company CEO Mark Shuttleworth also dusted off the vendor’s planned initial public offering pledge that sat dormant through the pandemic.

    Ubuntu is Canonical’s distribution system for Linux designed to run on computing devices, network servers, and in the cloud. The platform uses a naming scheme based on the year and month of the release, thus this latest update is dubbed 22.04. The release also earns an LTS designation, which signifies a larger platform release. The company is using a two-year cycle on these LTS updates, with the last one (20.04) released in April 2020.

  • Must Have Apps For Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

    List of best apps that you should have installed on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is the latest stable version of Ubuntu released on April 21,2022.

  • Xubuntu 22.04: New Since 21.10

    Xubuntu 22.04 “Jammy Jellyfish” will be released tomorrow, April 21, 2022. It features a modest set of updates for users coming from Xubuntu 21.10. If you’re coming from 20.04, there’s a lot more to take in. Check out the 20.10, 21.04, and 21.10 release notes to catch up!

  • Its FOSS ☛ Xubuntu 22.04 LTS Releases with Updated Theme, Whisker Menu 2.7.1, and Other Upgrades

    Xubuntu is one of the most loved Ubuntu flavours featuring the Xfce desktop environment.

    If you were looking to install the latest Long-Term release Ubuntu-based distro that is light on system resources, Xubuntu 22.04 should be a good pick.

  • Its FOSS ☛ Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 LTS Released: Fast, Elegant, And More Feature-Filled Than Ever

    Since its initial release in 2016, I’ve been an admirer of Ubuntu Budgie. With its sleek visuals, fluid animations, and solid Ubuntu base, it covers all my needs.

    Although it is relatively new compared to other Ubuntu flavors, it has already managed to gain a significant following.

    Now, with Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 LTS, this level of polish has been brought to a whole new level.

  • Its FOSS ☛ Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS Brings in a New Yaru Theme, MATE Desktop 1.26.1, and More Improvements

    Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is an exciting release already.

    While other Ubuntu-based distros should be getting ready to offer their latest versions based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu’s official flavors’ LTS releases have also landed.

    Here, we focus on Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS, featuring the latest MATE Desktop 1.26.1.

  • Beta News ☛ Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish can replace Microsoft Windows 11 on your PC

    The developers over at Canonical have been busy baking a yummy new version of Ubuntu recently, and following a brief beta period, it is finally time to take the open-source operating system out of the oven. Yes, folks, the stable Ubuntu 22.04 is finally here!

    Code-named “Jammy Jellyfish,” Ubuntu 22.04 is an “LTS” version, which stands for “Long Term Support.” Yeah, that means exactly what it sounds like. The Linux distribution will be supported for a long time — five years to be exact. Very nice.

  • Its FOSS ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is Now Available for Linux Desktop and Raspberry Pi

    Can’t wait to try Ubuntu 22.04 LTS? Well, it is finally available to download and upgrade.

    It brings in a ton of impressive features, having GNOME 42 and Raspberry Pi desktop support as its key highlights.

    Now that it is here. Let us take a moment to check out the most significant changes with this release before you decide to give it a try.

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is Now Available to Download

    Ubuntu 22.04 is front-loaded with a wealth of improvements including a new horizontal workspace switcher and app launcher, new UI accent colours, RDP support out-of-the-box, and Linux kernel 5.15.

    As the latest long-term support release this version of Ubuntu (which is codenamed “Jammy Jellyfish”) is backed by at least 5 years of ongoing support, security patches, bug fixes, and select app updates.

    Which is pretty rad.

  • Its FOSS ☛ Kubuntu 22.04 LTS Arrives with KDE Plasma 5.24

    Ubuntu 22.04 LTS has finally been released. So, you can expect all of its official flavors to offer the latest and greatest soon after that.

    And, the KDE flavour, i.e., Kubuntu 22.04 LTS is now also available to download!

    You should expect all the feature additions of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and specially tailored improvements for the Kubuntu 22.04 release.

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Official Flavors Released, Here’s What’s New

    
    Included as part of the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release, there are the Kubuntu 22.04 LTS, Xubuntu 22.04 LTS, Lubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 LTS, and Ubuntu Kylin 22.04 LTS official flavors, which are packed with all the internal changes of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

    On top of that, Kubuntu 22.04 LTS features the latest KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS desktop environment by default, which is accompanied by the KDE Gear 21.12 and KDE Frameworks 5.92 software suites, all compiled against Qt 5.15.3.

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Ubuntu Unity 22.04 LTS Released with Flatpak and Flathub Support, New Default Apps

    
    Based on the upstream Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release, Ubuntu Unity 22.04 LTS is the successor to Ubuntu Unity 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) and the second long-term support release of this unofficial Ubuntu flavor featuring the good old Unity 7 desktop environment.

    The biggest new feature of this new Ubuntu Unity release is support for Flatpak apps enabled by default. The Flathub repository is installed so you can install any Flatpak apps you want instead of native apps from the Ubuntu repositories. Also, the gtk3-nocsd issue has been fixed in this release.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is out now

    For Canonical fans, the latest release of Ubuntu is now available with Ubuntu “Jammy Jellyfish” 22.04 LTS (Long-term support). Not only is it a carefully tailored GNOME experience for normal desktops, but this also marks the first LTS for Ubuntu to come with support for the Raspberry Pi 4.

    “With Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, the entire recent Raspberry Pi device portfolio is supported for the very first time, from the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2W to the Raspberry Pi 4″, said Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi Trading. “It’s great to see a certified Ubuntu Desktop release that includes support for the 2GB Raspberry Pi 4, giving developers all over the world access to the most affordable development desktop environment.”

  • Ubuntu 22.04 Unity Desktop

    The Unity desktop environment was created by Canonical and once used as the default GUI for Ubuntu releases. It was later abandoned by Canonical and taken over by other maintainers. It remains available for installation today on the latest releases of Ubuntu, including Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. The objective of this tutorial is to install the Unity Desktop as an alternative desktop environment on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Desktop/Server Linux.

  • Ubuntu 22.04 Cinnamon Desktop installation

    By default, Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish sports the GNOME desktop environment, or no GUI at all in the server edition. If you would like to change things up and install Cinnamon instead, the GUI can be downloaded and installed directly from Ubuntu’s package repositories. In this tutorial, you will see how to install Cinnamon Desktop as an alternative desktop environment on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Desktop/Server Linux.

    Cinnamon desktop is a fork of the GNOME desktop. It has a rather conservative design and is similar to Xfce. It is uncomplicated to learn and from this reason might be a good choice for someone who is new to Linux. It was created by the developers of Linux Mint and is the default GUI on that Linux distro.

Devices/Embedded

• CNX Software ☛ BGA socket allows RAM upgrades on SBCs – CNX Software

  The BGA socket is simply soldered on the board instead of the RAM chip itself, and as demonstrated on the MangoPi MQ Pro board, you could then insert the chip on the board instead of soldering it.

• CNX Software ☛ POP32 & POP64 SIPs combine Allwinner A33 and A133 with SDRAM into a single package – CNX Software

  Allwinner A133 is also a tablet processor, but being launched more recently, it supports Android 10. I’m not so sure about Linux support. It’s listed on linux-sunxi website as a sun50i variant just like the Allwinner A64 that is well supported in Linux, but it does not have a page on its own. Again Source Parts has released a PDF datasheet for the system-in-package.

• Linux Journal ☛ Geek Guide: Purpose-Built Linux for Embedded Solutions | Linux Journal

  The explosive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) is just one of several trends that is fueling the demand for intelligent devices at the edge. Increasingly, embedded devices use Linux to leverage libraries and code as well as Linux OS expertise to deliver functionality faster, simplify ongoing maintenance, and provide the most flexibility and performance for embedded device developers.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Hello Passkeys, Goodbye Passwords: Android Is Introducing Password- Replacing Keys That Will Be In Sync With Your Google Account / Digital Information World

  • Tech Times ☛ Google is Killing ALL Android Call Recording Apps on Play Store Starting May | Here’s Why | Tech Times

  • Android Police ☛ The best Twitter apps for Android (Updated April 2022)

  • Android Police ☛ The 8 best RTS games for Android in 2022

  • 9to5Google ☛ Samsung Android 12 update: These devices have One UI 4.0 – 9to5Google

  • How to add a notification LED to any OLED Android smartphone | NextPit

  • TechRadar ☛ Motorola’s new Android phone is a cheap alternative to the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra | TechRadar

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Ubuntu ☛ What is MongoDB and why use it for modern web applications?

  Organisations of different scales and forms want to harness the power of data to identify new business opportunities and improve current business operations. Organisations that use data effectively can hold a potential advantage – the ability to make faster and more informed business decisions. However, working with data can be a long-standing problem for businesses and functions, especially in data management and software development.

• Ubuntu ☛ Customer centricity – the digital transformation driver in the logistics sector [Ed: A rather bizarre blog post from Canonical today]

• Events

  • Join us at PyCon 2022

    We are very excited to be attending our first in-person event in over 2 years! PyCon has always been one of our favorites and we are looking forward to returning

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL Conference Europe: Call for Papers

    PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2022 takes place in Berlin, Germany, on October 25-28. Our Call for Papers is now open.

    We are accepting proposals for talks in English. Each session will last 45 minutes, and may be on any topic related to PostgreSQL. The submission deadline is June 27th. Selected speakers will be notified before July 17th, 2022.

• FSF

  • GNU Projects

    • GCC ☛ GCC 11.3 Released

      The GNU Compiler Collection version 11.3 has been released.
      
      GCC 11.3 is a bug-fix release from the GCC 11 branch containing important
      fixes for regressions and serious bugs in GCC 11.2 with more than 189 bugs
      fixed since the previous release.
      
      This release is available from the WWW and FTP servers listed here:
      
      https://sourceware.org/pub/gcc/releases/gcc-11.3.0/
      
      
      https://gcc.gnu.org/mirrors.html
      
      Please do not contact me directly regarding questions or comments
      about this release.  Instead, use the resources available from
      
      http://gcc.gnu.org.
      
      As always, a vast number of people contributed to this GCC release
      -- far too many to thank them individually!
      

    • Wheeler’s Participatory Anthropic Principle and Disney’s Coco / An inquiry of inquiries

      I’m not sure how to finish this post, so I’ll just shout out “GNU tetris” a few times.

mildly infuriating

Alright. One small gripe about my job.
We are attempting to transition our batch processing and Event Stream Processing from a centralized system (Mainframe) to a Distributed computing system.

Jazzmaster – Pickguard Replacement & Re-shielding

Some time early in college I started playing acoustic instruments almost exclusively. It was just simpler that way. It’s easier to practice and perform if you have simpler needs. Rather than trying to organize a “show” and haul gear around, we took to just busking and playing in outdoor public spaces. I also began wandering the planet at that age. A little ukulele or short scale acoustic guitar makes a much better travel companion than an electric + amp + pedals etc. Anyway, in the summer of 2018 we went to the Pentaport Rock Festival in Incheon. It was the first time I had been to a rock show in years, and I fell in love with electric guitars all over again. I had forgotten what it felt like to plug in and wail, and I wanted back in! Eventually I got my hands on a used Jazzmaster and have been in love ever since. I’d like to talk about this guitar tonight after having done a little work on it this evening.

Hardware

• The Register UK ☛ ASML CEO: Mega-firm buying washing machines to rip out chips • The Register

  A large industrial conglomerate is being forced to take increasingly desperate measures to satisfy their needs for chips, according to ASML, a manufacturer of chip-making equipment.

  Talking on an earnings call this week with financial analysts, Peter Wennick, CEO at ASML, said that “width of demand” for chips was “significantly underestimated” by industry and: “I don’t think that is going away.”

• The Register UK ☛ US chip output growth a futile exercise, warns TSMC founder • The Register

  TSMC founder Morris Chang, a key player in the semiconductor industry since its inception, thinks America’s attempt to grow its domestic chip production will be “a wasteful, expensive exercise in futility.”

  Speaking on Tuesday as a guest of the Brookings Institution think tank, Chang said that the US chose a trajectory in the 1970s and 1980s that saw its manufacturing talent retraining for higher-paying jobs. Chang said that isn’t necessarily bad for America, but it is a challenge for the US chip manufacturing industry, which, in his mind, simply doesn’t have the fabrication talent pool needed to expand and succeed.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Security

    • The Register UK ☛ Five Eyes nations fear wave of Russian attacks against critical infrastructure [Ed: Microsoft Windows TCO]

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

      Security updates have been issued by Fedora (frr, grafana, gzip, and pdns), Oracle (java-11-openjdk), Red Hat (java-11-openjdk and kernel), Scientific Linux (java-11-openjdk), SUSE (dcraw, GraphicsMagick, gzip, kernel, nbd, netty, qemu, SDL, and xen), and Ubuntu (libinput, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.13, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.13, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.13, linux-hwe-5.13, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.13, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, inux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-snapdragon, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fde, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, and linux-oem-5.14).

    • New Yorker ☛ How Democracies Spy on Their Citizens [Ed: The cost of proprietary software; “Ronan Farrow has a long article in The New Yorker on NSO Group, which includes the news that someone — probably Spain — used the software to spy on domestic Catalonian sepratists,” Bruce Schneier ☛ says this]

      The parliament of Catalonia, the autonomous region in Spain, sits on the edge of Barcelona’s Old City, in the remains of a fortified citadel constructed by King Philip V to monitor the restive local population. The citadel was built with forced labor from hundreds of Catalans, and its remaining structures and gardens are for many a reminder of oppression. Today, a majority of Catalan parliamentarians support independence for the region, which the Spanish government has deemed unconstitutional. In 2017, as Catalonia prepared for a referendum on independence, Spanish police arrested at least twelve separatist politicians. On the day of the referendum, which received the support of ninety per cent of voters despite low turnout, police raids of polling stations injured hundreds of civilians. Leaders of the independence movement, some of whom live in exile across Europe, now meet in private and communicate through encrypted messaging platforms.

    • The Register UK ☛ Emotet reestablishes itself at the top of the malware world

      “Some letters that cybercriminals send to the recipients contain a malicious attachment,” Kovtun wrote. “In other cases, it has a link which leads to a file placed in a legitimate popular cloud-hosting service. Often, malware is contained in an encrypted archive, with the password mentioned in the e-mail body.”

    • The Register UK ☛ Oracle Java wins ‘crypto bug of the year’ for bypass flaw • The Register

      Java versions 15 to 18 contain a flaw in its ECDSA signature validation that makes it trivial for miscreants to digitally sign files and other data as if they were legit organizations.

    • The Register UK ☛ AWS’s Log4j patches blew holes in its own security

      Amazon Web Services has updated its Log4j security patches after it was discovered the original fixes made customer deployments vulnerable to container escape and privilege escalation.

    • The Register UK ☛ Ex-eBay security director to plead guilty to cyberstalking • The Register

      A now-former eBay security director accused of harassing a couple who wrote a critical newsletter about the internet tat bazaar is set to plead guilty to cyberstalking.

      James Baugh, of San Jose, California, was charged with conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with witnesses, alongside six former colleagues in a baffling case brought in 2020.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Register UK ☛ YouTube terminates account for Hong Kong’s presumed next head of government

  YouTube has blocked the campaign account of Hong Kong’s only candidate for the Special Administrative Region’s (SAR) head of government, John Lee Ka-chiu, citing US sanctions.

  Lee was selected by Beijing and is almost certain to replace current HK Chief Executive Carrie Lam, another Chinese Communist Party pick, after a May 8 election. At the election, 1,454 members of a committee dominated by pro-Beijing politicians and tycoons votes.

  Lee, often referred to as “Pikachu” by the Hong Kong anti-establishment faction as it sounds similar to “Lee Ka-chiu,” stepped down from his position as Secretary for Security in Hong Kong to run for the chief executive spot.

Civil Rights/Policing

• AccessNow ☛ EU Parliament’s draft of AI Act: predictive policing is banned, but work remains to protect people’s rights – Access Now

  Today, after almost a year of delays, the European Parliament’s lead committees have published their Draft Report on the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act). Access Now welcomes the much needed addition of a ban on individual risk assessment for predictive policing — a dangerous and inherently discriminatory use of AI — but flags the troubling omission of additional prohibitions on location- and group-based predictive policing, emotion recognition, and other problematic practices that undermine human rights.

  The Draft Report contains significant improvements for the protection of fundamental rights, in line with the recommendations of the joint civil society statement, An EU Artificial Intelligence Act for Fundamental Rights. These include the addition of rights for people affected by AI systems to lodge a complaint or seek judicial remedies, for public authorities to register their use of high-risk AI systems in a public database, and numerous improvements to procedures and enforcement. The rapporteurs have also resisted industry pressure to narrow the definition of AI systems or introduce loopholes for providers of “general purpose AI.” Unfortunately, civil society demands to include obligations for fundamental rights impact assessments, to fix glaring loopholes in the prohibition on remote biometric identification, as well as for broader transparency obligations, have been left out of this iteration of Parliament’s position.

• The Register UK ☛ Apple geniuses in Atlanta beat New York to the punch, file petition to unionize

  Workers in Atlanta, Georgia, have become the first US Apple Store staff to file an official request to hold an union vote with America’s National Labor Relations Board.

  “A number of us have been here for many years, and we don’t think you stick at a place unless you love it,” said Derrick Bowles, Apple Genius and Communications Workers of America (CWA) organizer.

  “Apple is a profoundly positive place to work, but we know that the company can better live up to their ideals and so we’re excited to be joining together with our coworkers to bring Apple to the negotiating table and make this an even better place to work.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• AccessNow ☛ Vietnam’s new social media take-down rules will intensify state censorship — they must be revoked – Access Now

  Following years of silencing critical dissent and rights advocacy, Vietnam’s ruling party is fortifying its censorship arsenal by piling more pressure on social media platforms through arbitrary, unachievable new regulations.

  Yesterday, April 20, reports emerged that the government will be passing legal amendments forcing social media platforms to take down “illegal” content within 24 hours; block active “illegal” live-streams within three hours; and “immediately” remove content deemed contrary to “national security.” These extreme measures — which will reportedly come into force by July — must be revoked.

  “Vietnam’s new amendments impose near-impossible time pressures on platforms to respond to take-down orders from the authorities, giving them no space to evaluate which ones they should push back on to protect free expression — and that’s probably the point,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific Policy Director and Senior International Counsel at Access Now. “Platforms will be pushed to ‘comply-first-evaluate-later’, which will ramp up censorship online.”

• Public Knowledge ☛ Public Knowledge Commends FCC for Moving To Improve Spectrum Efficiency

  Today, the Federal Communications Commission voted to approve a Notice of Inquiry to promote more efficient spectrum use by improving receiver interference performance. Spectrum interference occurs when different spectrum users operating within the same band or in nearby bands utilize spectrum in a way that interrupts one another. Public Knowledge applauds the FCC for taking action to improve spectrum efficiency by considering all aspects of our telecommunications system.

  The following can be attributed to Kathleen Burke, Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge:

  “Most modern technologies from Bluetooth to Wi-Fi to cellular service use spectrum. Unfortunately, there are only so many bands of spectrum that these technologies can use. This makes it incredibly important to utilize our crowded airwaves efficiently while also avoiding interference issues between different spectrum users.

• Public Knowledge ☛ Public Knowledge Welcomes FCC Action To Improve Wireless Emergency Alert System

  Today, the Federal Communications Commission voted to approve a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to seek comment on proposals to bolster the effectiveness of the Wireless Emergency Alerts system. This WEA system allows federal, state, and local emergency management agencies to notify people about dangerous weather, missing children, and other critical public safety situations on their cell phones or other mobile devices.

  The WEA system has been active for a decade, and in that time more than 61,000 alerts have been issued to the public. However, there is no consistent mechanism for the FCC to collect data on the WEA system’s technical performance, which hinders the agency’s ability to make improvements to the system. Public Knowledge applauds the FCC for taking this commonsense step to ensure it has the information it needs to continue to improve the Wireless Emergency Alerts system so that people can receive the critical, and often life-saving, information they need.

Unix Men ☛ Linux in education: operating systems for learning and teaching


Nowadays, programming contributes a lot to education to make learning more exciting and easier. We are not only talking about creating many programs like an online paper writing service that undoubtedly facilitate the learning process. But also, the creation of various handy programs and extensions, virtual classes and interactive tutorials, operating systems, and distributions.

Today we will talk about how Linux contributes to education and which of its distributions are very useful for teaching.

The Linux operating system, by its nature, is very malleable, so we can adapt it to any need and task, such as education.

The purpose of an operating system is to act as an intermediary between our computer and us. To do so, it uses its programs, drivers, and libraries. In addition, we install other programs and tools to edit videos, download files, edit documents, or surf the Internet.

OpenSource.com ☛ How Linux rescues slow computers (and the planet)


As a known computer geek among my friends and acquaintances, people sometimes gift me with their old computers. They no longer want them because they are slow, so they give them to me and ask me to wipe their hard drives before taking them to the electronics recycling center a few blocks from my house. I always suggest that their three-to-five-year-old computers are still good, but they seem intent on spending money rather than learning a new operating system.

I have several old computers gifted to me. One, in particular, a Dell Optiplex 755 with a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 8GB of RAM, is particularly interesting. Its BIOS is dated 2010, so it is around 12 years old. It is the oldest computer I have, and I keep it quite busy. I have had it for several years, and it never slows down because I use Linux on it—Fedora 35 right now.

Instructionals/Technical

• uni Toronto ☛ Some bits on keeping isolated network interfaces organized (on Linux)

  My Fedora office workstation has wound up with a complicated network setup and to go with it, a complicated set of policy based IP routing rules that are intended to create interfaces with dual identity routing and isolation (see also). Right now, my workstation is on two public networks and a shifting number of internal “sandbox” RFC 1918 networks that are behind firewalls, serves as the Wireguard endpoint for my home machine’s connection, and now has a NAT’d virtual network for virtual machines. The result of this accreting complexity is that I spent a bunch of today fighting with my policy based routing rules. So now I have some thoughts on keeping things straight here.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ Ordering CSS Declarations

  What experience leads Eric to make this recommendation?

• OpenBSD 7.1: fan noise and high temperature solution

  OpenBSD 7.1 has been released with a change that will set the CPU to max speed when plugged to the wall. This brings better performance and entirely let the CPU and mainboard do the frequency throttling.

  However, it may doesn’t throttle well for some users, resulting in huge power usage even when idle, heat from the CPU and also fan noise.

  As the usual “automatic” frequency scheduling mode is no longer available, I wrote a simple utility to manage the frequency when the system is plugged to the wall, I took the opportunity to improve it, giving better performance than the previous automatic mode, but also giving more battery life when using on a laptop on battery.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Gear 22.04

    KDE Gear ⚙️ 22.04 brings you all the updates added to a long list of KDE apps over the last four months. KDE programs allow you to work, create and play without having to submit yourself to extortionate licenses and intrusive advertising, or surrender your privacy to unscrupulous corporations.

    Below you will discover a selection of the changes added in the last four months to software designed to make your life better. But remember, there is much, much more: games, social media apps, utilities for communicating, developing and creating stuff… All these things have been worked on to give you more stability and boost your productivity.

    If you want to see a full list of everything we have done, check out the complete changelog.

  • 9to5Linux ☛ KDE Gear 22.04 Is Here with Kalendar, Many Improvements for Your Favorite KDE Apps

    
    KDE Gear (formerly KDE Applications) 22.04 is here with the recently released Kalendar app, a modern calendaring and task managing application for your KDE Plasma desktop environment that features an attractive interface and also works on the Plasma Mobile platform for mobile devices.

    KDE Gear 22.04 brings many improvements to the Dolphin file manager, which now shows thumbnails for EPUB and Krita (.kra) files, and lets you drag and drop things from the Ark archive manager onto items in Dolphin’s Places panel.

  • OpenSource.com ☛ Linux KDE receives first-ever eco-certification for Okular

    
    Software can produce waste in many ways. Software that reduces this waste is software that is more sustainable. User autonomy and transparency, the pillars of Free and Open Source Software, are factors that the Blauer Engel ecolabel recognizes as critical for sustainable software.

    I can illustrate with some examples.

    A computer may be rendered hardly usable, or not usable at all, due to inefficient software design, feature creep, and other forms of software bloat that users may not need or even want. Yet vendors force users to buy newer, more powerful hardware. When updates for a device, like a mobile phone or tablet, are discontinued, most people discard the device as e-waste because continued use would be a security risk. This e-waste can have huge environmental costs.

Distributions

• [Old] Wesley Moore ☛ Alpine Linux and Docker Infrastructure Three Years Later

  Three years ago I published, Rebuilding My Personal Infrastructure With Alpine Linux and Docker, in which I described how I was hosting various applications using an Alpine Linux host and Docker on a virtual machine at Vultr. I thought it would be good to write a follow-up on how this worked out.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • The Register UK ☛ Skipping CentOS Stream? AlmaLinux 9 Beta is here

    AlmaLinux has released a beta for version 9 of its eponymous Linux distribution aimed at RHEL refuseniks still reeling from the dumping of CentOS by Red Hat.

    The beta was released last night for x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x architectures, “achieving architecture parity with upstream,” according to the team.

    The beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 turned up in November 2021 and so here we are with AlmaLinux OS 9 beta, codenamed Emerald Puma. A stated goal of AlmaLinux is 1:1 binary compatibility with RHEL, filling the gap left by Red Hat’s discontinuation of CentOS in favor of CentOS Stream.

• Debian Family

  • CNX Software ☛ Raspberry Pad 5 Raspberry Pi CM4 carrier board integrates 5-inch display for 3D printers

    
    BIGTREETECH Raspberry Pad 5 is a carrier board for the Raspberry Pi CM4 module with a 5-inch 800×480 display and mainly designed as a control panel for 3D printers, but also usable for other HMI applications.

    The carrier board also exposes a 40-pin GPIO header, and offers Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI video output, a MIPI CSI port for a camera monitoring the prints, a USB Type-C port, as well as three USB 2.0 ports for further peripherals expansion.

  • Rachel ☛ Debian/Raspbian rngd with -S0 will bite you after a week

    So, yeah, if you run Debian’s rngd with -S0, it’ll be perfectly fine for a week or so, and then it’ll go into a tight loop that’ll tie up one of your CPUs from then until the process is stopped for some reason. Lovely.

    If you’ve tried running it this way on your Raspberry Pi for similar card-preserving reasons, you might want to go look and see if you have a rngd that’s eating a core. If your uptime is more than a week, I bet it is.

    Sheesh.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Switch to Ubuntu Rolling Rhino: A Rolling Release Version of Ubuntu

    Ubuntu may be the most popular version of desktop Linux, but it’s not the best option for keeping up with the latest software. New Ubuntu releases come out every six months, with most of the software frozen in time until the next release. To receive the latest updates as soon as they’re available, many people turn to a rolling release distribution, such as Arch Linux.

    Now you don’t have to ditch Ubuntu to stay on the bleeding edge of software updates. There’s a new version, called Rolling Rhino, that brings the rolling release experience to your Ubuntu desktop.

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Canonical Releases Important Ubuntu Kernel Update to Fix Eight Vulnerabilities

    
    Coming less than a month after the previous Ubuntu kernel security update, the new kernel update is here to address CVE-2021-43976, a security vulnerability discovered by Brendan Dolan-Gavitt in the Marvell WiFi-Ex USB device driver, which could allow a physically proximate attacker to cause a denial of service (system crash).

  • 10 Things to Do After Installing Ubuntu 22.04 [With Bonus Tip]

    Try these simple ten tips after installing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish” (GNOME Edition)

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) Is Now Available for Download, This Is What’s New

    
    Dubbed by Canonical as the “Jammy Jellyfish,” Ubuntu 22.04 LTS has been in development for the past six months and comes as an upgrade to the Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) release, as well as to the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) long-term support release.

    Ubuntu 22.04 LTS comes with the latest GNOME 42 desktop environment with the triple buffering patch included, yet it still uses apps from the GNOME 41 stack due to compatibility issues between GTK4 apps included in the upstream release and Ubuntu’s Yaru theme.

  • 9to5Linux ☛ TUXEDO Stellaris 15 Is the First Linux Laptop to Come Pre-Installed with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

    
    TUXEDO Stellaris 15 continues to provide maximum performance in a compact and portable form factor with a matte black aluminum chassis and ships with Intel’s high-end “Alder Lake” Core i7-12700H and i9-12900H processors with clock speeds of up to 4.7 GHz and 5.0 GHz respectively.

    The laptop also comes with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card in its highest TGP configuration with up to 175 watts and 16 GB GDDR6 graphics memory.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Wesley Moore ☛ Monitoring My Garage Door With a Raspberry Pi, Rust, and a 13Mb Linux System

    The trouble with using a Raspberry Pi is now I have another computer I have to maintain: apply package updates, upgrade the OS, worry about wearing out the SD card, etc. Raspberry Pi OS was great for getting the project off the ground but I wanted to slim it down so it was running the bare minimum amount of software. I also wanted it to run from RAM so that I didn’t have to worry about the SD card wearing out or file-system corruption from unclean shutdowns.

    The aim was to turn the Pi into a glorified microcontroller that I could feel comfortable running for years without needing to worry about applying updates etc. Yes it’s still possible that there is a vulnerability in the limited amount of software it runs but I feel like I’ve reduced the attack surface enough that I can happily let this thing run and it’ll be fine.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • SamMobile ☛ Samsung should have played a part in Google’s Android 12L for tablets – SamMobile

  • SamMobile ☛ Samsung Galaxy M21 starts getting Android 12 update – SamMobile

  • Android Central ☛ Motorola’s Android 12 update streak continues with the Edge and Edge+ | Android Central

  • MakeTech Easier ☛ What is Android 12’s Gaming Dashboard and How to Use It

  • [Guide] 4 ways to block ads on your Android phone or tablet – TalkAndroid.com

  • Spring Cleaning – What to do with your old Android Phones – Phandroid

  • Android Authority ☛ Google will kill call recording apps on Android for good starting May 11

  • India Times ☛ Google to kill call recording apps: Android users will not be able to record calls after this day – Times of India

  • How to add a VPN to Android

  • CNX Software ☛ POP32 & POP64 SIPs combine Allwinner A33 and A133 with SDRAM into a single package – CNX Software

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• OpenSource.com ☛ 5 open source tips to reduce waste in web design

  
  I started my career in product design, when “product” meant a real thing that you could hold in your hand. When I moved into digital design 15 years ago, I was excited to design digital products that added value to people’s lives without any environmental impact. They didn’t waste energy, didn’t have any wasteful packaging and didn’t end up as waste in landfill sites at the end of their lives.

  Therefore, I was surprised to later learn that digital products can be wasteful. In this article, I explore how applying a zero waste mindset to digital design and development can help you create an internet that’s better for people and the planet.

• Linux Links ☛ 8 Best Free and Open Source Terminal Emoji Tools

  
  The internet has rapidly transformed the way we communicate. Since body language and verbal tone are not conveyed in text messages or e-mails, we’ve developed alternate ways to convey nuanced meaning. The most prominent change to our online style has been the addition of two new-age hieroglyphic languages: emoticons and emoji.

  Emoji originated from the smiley, which first evolved into emoticons, followed by emoji and stickers in recent years. Smiley first appeared in the 1960s and is regarded as the first expression symbols. Smiley is a yellow face with two dots for eyes and a wide grin which is printed on buttons, brooches, and t-shirts.

• Education

  • Moodle ☛ BigBlueButton: Web conferencing for collaborative learning

    BigBlueButton is an open source web conferencing solution for online learning that provides real-time sharing of audio, video, slides, whiteboard, chat and screen. It also allows participants to join the conferences with their webcams and invite guest speakers.

Counter Punch ☛ Meet The Founding Fathers Of 420: The Waldos

Shadowproof ☛ Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Fucked Up If True’ By Soul Glo

Hackaday ☛ Bring Precision To The Woodshop With An Electronic Router Lift

One of the knocks that woodworkers get from the metalworking crowd is that their chosen material is a bit… compliant. Measurements only need to be within a 1/16th of an inch or so, or about a millimeter, depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re on. And if you’re off a bit? No worries, that’s what sandpaper is for.

Counter Punch ☛ Young Women Athletes as Enemies of Empire: Kamila Valieva and Eileen Gu

Weir and Lipinski were disgusted.  They said she should not be there.  It was so unfair to the other skaters.  They were too sickened to even watch her.  What happened?  The Empire and its allies, based on a highly questionable positive drug test, declared her a “doper.”  She was booed, harassed.  And she finally (literally) fell.  The Russians should obviously not have the first female Olympic quad jumper.  The Russians were taking far too many gold medals.  This whole spectacle was an intersection of hegemonic American world politics and ruthless patriarchy.  Women athletes had become enemies, and thus victims, of Empire. USA!  USA!

The US has always had a need to be first—to put it mildly.  Any coverage of Olympic or international games I’ve ever watched features US athletes and almost never anyone else.  President Jimmy Carter got the ball rolling with his 1980 boycott of the Olympics in the Soviet Union.  Under Carter the Cold War had worsened because of factors like American criticism of Soviet alleged abuses of human rights and the Afghan crisis—therefore the controversial move to ignore the Olympics’ so-called non-political philosophy.  American views of Russian athletics did not improve:  the alleged Russian Doping Scandals began around 2008 and are still going. In 2008, Russian track and field athletes were suspended from competition because of supposed doping, cheating, cover-ups, even “state-sponsored” doping.

The day I met the creator of Garfield

When I saw the date today, I remembered that on this day back in 1981, I met Jim Davis [1], creator of Garfield [2]. And of course I’ve already written about this [3]. But thinking about it, I’m not sure what to make of this—that it’s been 22 years since I last wrote about it, which is longer than the time between the actual event and writing about it the first time (19 years). It’s also sobering to think it’s been 41 years since I met him, and I still remember it like it happened yesterday.

April Thoughts

Oh boy, where to start? Well we’re buying a house and moving to a new town. The main purpose of this move is to eliminate my wife’s awful commute and that goal will be fulfilled with this new house’s location. We are all excited that her commute will be cut from 1.5-2 hours down to around 15 minutes. But that’s not the only thing we’re excited about with the move. The new house is in a really nice location close to just about everything we will want to go to. Within walking distance there are 3 coffee shops, a kombucha shop, a bakery, numerous good restaurants, a really nice park with playground and splash pad, a lake with a nice walking path all the way around it, a post office and more things yet to be discovered. Within easy biking distance there are 2-3 breweries, more restaurants and many different parks and lakes.

Medieval Times

Yesterday was my 28th trip to Medieval Times, the dinner theater show with jousting knights, falcons, horse dancing, and community-theater quality sword fights. It is one of my favorite things on earth and if you haven’t had the opportunity to enjoy it before, I hope you do in the future.

Education

• Practising Programming

  When we see a world-class musician flawlessly play challenging music, it can be tempting to imagine that they were always able to do so. A moment’s thought makes it obvious that they must have had to spend huge amounts of time practising basic techniques in order to reach that level. What’s less obvious is that they have to continue spending considerable amounts of time simply to maintain that technique, let alone expand it.

  In contrast, in programming, we have only a haphazard notion of how one should go about obtaining sufficient technique to become good enough to write good software; and we have almost no notion of continued practise to maintain or expand that technique. Often overtaken by life events – notably, though not only, the requirement to earn money to support a family – many programmers implicitly finish the bulk of their learning early on, and some stop learning entirely.

• New York Times ☛ We Have a Creativity Problem

  This time the researchers found a significant difference in the results: Both groups expressed positive associations with words like “practical” and “useful,” but the group that had been primed to feel uncertain (because members were unsure whether they would receive a bonus) expressed more negative associations with words suggesting creativity.

  The reasons for this implicit bias against creativity can be traced to the fundamentally disruptive nature of novel and original creations. Creativity means change, without the certainty of desirable results.

  “We have an implicit belief the status quo is safe,” said Jennifer Mueller, a professor of management at the University of San Diego and a lead author on the 2012 paper about bias against creativity. Dr. Mueller, an expert in creativity science, said that paper arose partly from watching how company managers professed to want creativity and then reflexively rejected new ideas.

  “Leaders will say, ‘We’re innovative,’ and employees say, ‘Here’s an idea,’ and the idea goes nowhere,” Dr. Mueller said. “Then employees are angry.”

• The Telegraph UK ☛ Veil ban in schools sees Muslim girls get better grades and more mixed marriages

  Muslim women born between 1971-74, who would have completed school before the 1994 ruling, were around 13 per cent less likely to graduate from high school than their non-Muslim peers.

  This gap shrunk to just seven per cent among women born between 1987-90 who spent their education with some form of veil ban in place.

  Prof Maurin, whose findings were presented at the 75th economic policy panel meeting earlier this month, added: “When comparing women in the Muslim group to those in the non-Muslim group, the data reveals a very significant increase in educational attainment in the Muslim group for the cohorts that attended middle school and reached puberty after the ban.

• Earth Day: What is it, when is it and why is it important?

  Official Earth Day campaigns and projects aim to increase environmental literacy and bring together like-minded people or groups to address issues such as deforestation, biodiversity loss and other challenges.

• Earth Day 2022 Events That You Can Attend Around the World

  All throughout April, people celebrate Earth Day. During the month, there are all kinds of classes, events, volunteering opportunities, and more that allow people to get more involved in taking care of the planet and learn more about it. Because there’s so much to do, it can be overwhelming to figure out what’s worth going to. But we’re here with a list of some of the best Earth Day 2022 events and attractions being held around the world.

• 6 Climate Takeaways for Earth Day 2022

  Syracuse University assistant professor and hydrology expert Sam Tuttle provides six takeaways from the report that he views as the most important elements ahead of Earth Day (April 22). He is available for future interviews and questions.

• Earth Day 2022: Exploring the science and technology of sustainability

  Earth Day 2022 centers on the theme Invest in Our Planet, calling for individuals to “act (boldly), innovate (broadly), and implement (equitably).” In celebration, we have compiled several collections that address these areas—and today, in our first piece in the series, we focus on “innovating broadly.” These books below explore how cutting-edge technology—such as artificial intelligence, nuclear power, and carbon capture—can be used to confront climate change and help secure a more sustainable future.

• uni Michigan ☛ Heritage Project — Earth Day eve

• Los Angeles Times ☛ For centuries, the Ukrainian language was overshadowed by its Russian cousin. That’s changing

  Languages rise and fall with history, in nations and university language departments alike. In 1980, when Roman Koropeckyj stepped into his classroom at Harvard to teach Polish, he was “gobsmacked” by the dozens of students awaiting him. The Polish trade unionists of the Solidarity movement, who were defying Soviet oppression on the opposite side of the planet, had inspired Americans to learn.

  Another one of those linguistic flashpoints arrived in February, when Ukraine’s staunch resistance to a massive Russian invasion drew admirers around the world. The Ukrainian language hasn’t been taught at UCLA’s department of Slavic East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures “in a number of years” due a lack of demand, said Koropeckyj, a professor in the department. He and a Ukrainian-born colleague told the department chair it might be time to teach Ukrainian again.

Hardware

• Hackaday ☛ 2022 Sci-Fi Contest: Glowing LED Cubes Make Captivating Artifacts

  LED cubes were once an exercise in IO mastery, requiring multiplexing finesse in order to drive arrays of many LEDs. Going RGB only increased the challenge. This build from [DIY GUY Chris] shows how much easier it is these days, when every LED has a smart addressable controller on board, and serves as a great sci-fi prop to boot.

• Techdirt ☛ Honda Just Declared War On 3D Printer Makers Community

  It’s been a bit since we’ve talked about 3D printing, which I mostly took to mean that the world realized that there was no massive threat here and that we all collectively decided to make this a non-controversy. Early on there was some noise made about larger companies viewing the ability for the public to manufacture certain things at home with these printers being a copyright, patent, or trademark concern. And sure, there was some of that. Especially when it came to guns. But, by and large, 3D printing has become a full on thing for hobbyists and maker communities.

• Hackaday ☛ This Laptop Gets All The PCIe Devices

  Did you ever feel like your laptop’s GPU was sub-optimal, or perhaps that your laptop could use a SAS controller? [Rob Rogers] felt like that too, so now he has the only Dell Latitude business-class laptop that’s paired with an AMD RX580 GPU – and more. Made possible because of a PCIe link he hijacked from the WiFi card, he managed to get a SAS controller, a USB 3.0 expansion card, the aforementioned GPU and a dual-port server network adapter, all in a single, desk-top setup, as the video demonstrates.

• Hackaday ☛ A Rotary Encoder: How Hard Can It Be?

  As you may have noticed, I’ve been working with an STM32 ARM CPU using Mbed. There was a time when Mbed was pretty simple, but a lot has changed since it has morphed into Mbed OS. Unfortunately, that means that a lot of libraries and examples you can find don’t work with the newer system.

• Hackaday ☛ Commodore C64: The Most Popular Home Computer Ever Turns 40

  This year marks the anniversary of the most popular selling home computer ever, the Commodore 64, which made its debut in 1982. Note that I am saying “home computer” and not personal computer (PC) because back then the term PC was not yet in use for home computer users.

• Hackaday ☛ Turning Scrap Copper Into Beautiful Copper Acetate Crystals

  Crystals, at least those hawked by new-age practitioners for their healing or restorative powers, will probably get a well-deserved eye roll from most of the folks around here. That said, there’s no denying that crystals do hold sway over us with the almost magical power of their beauty, as with these home-grown copper acetate crystals.

• Hackaday ☛ Copper: Rectifying AC A Century Ago

  [Robert Murray-Smith] presents for us an interesting electronic device from years gone by, before the advent of Silicon semiconductors, the humble metal oxide rectifier. After the electronic dust had settled following the brutal AC/DC current wars of the late 19th century — involving Edison, Tesla and Westinghouse to name a few of the ringleaders — AC was the eventual winner. But there was a problem. It’s straightforward to step down the high voltage AC from the distribution network to a more manageable level with a transformer, and feed that straight into devices which can consume alternating current such as light bulbs and electrical heaters. But other devices really want DC, and to get that, you need a rectifier.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• TruthOut ☛ Sanders Says It’s Time to “End the Failed War on Drugs” and Legalize Marijuana

• Shadowproof ☛ In Era Of Overlapping Crises, Drug-User Organizers Share Lessons Learned Fighting Abandonment

  “THEY TALK WHILE WE CONTINUE TO DIE.”

  Out of context, those words written on a piece of cardboard that hung in a Massachusetts window in November 2021 read like a rallying cry for any number of movements. 

• Counter Punch ☛ Montana Never Was a Coal State, But It’s Now a Legal Pot State

  Montanans voted overwhelmingly to approve Initiative-190 in 2020 to legalize adult recreational marijuana use. In fact, tens of thousands more Montanans supported recreational pot than voted for Senator Steve Daines, Governor Greg Gianforte or Congressman Matt Rosendale. If “bipartisan support” means anything to the politicians that continually blather about it, the vote for legalizing recreational pot indisputably garnered votes from across the political spectrum.

  While medicinal marijuana has been legal in Montana since the voter approved passage of I-148 in 2004, adult recreational use only became legal in January of 2022. In a 2020 study titled “An Assessment of the Market and Tax Revenue Potential of Recreational Cannabis in Montana,”the University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research predicted total sales of recreational pot would be a whopping $217 million this year, producing $43.4 million in state and local tax revenues. That number was predicted to rise to $259.8 million in sales and $52 million in tax revenues by 2026.

• TruthOut ☛ Poll Finds Most Want Mask Rules to Remain, in Spite of Judge’s Decree

• Common Dreams ☛ DOJ Files Appeal to Revive Travel Mask Mandate

  The Biden administration on Wednesday appealed a federal judge’s ruling that struck down a mask mandate for public transportation.

  After a Florida-based judge appointed by former President Donald Trump killed the mask mandate on Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said Tuesday that it would appeal the decision if the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) determined the policy was still necessary given the current state of the Covid-19 pandemic.

• Common Dreams ☛ Advocates Demand Urgency From White House to Salvage Mask Mandate

  Public health advocates including people who have lost loved ones to the Covid-19 pandemic are calling on the Biden administration to act with more urgency to challenge the federal court ruling which lifted the mask mandate for public transportation on Monday.

  The national group Marked by Covid—which was started by the daughter of a man who died of the disease after Arizona’s Republican governor claimed in June 2020 that “it was safe to resume normal activities”—circulated a petition asking supporters to tell the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that they must appeal the ruling.

• NPR ☛ The judge who tossed mask mandate misunderstood public health law, legal experts say

  The administration argued that masks qualified as “sanitation” under the law, but Mizelle disagreed, opting for a much narrower definition of the term that would exclude measures like face coverings. Legal experts say her interpretation missed the mark.

  “If one of my students turned in this opinion as their final exam, I don’t know if I would agree that they had gotten the analysis correct,” said Erin Fuse Brown, a law professor at Georgia State University.

  “It reads like someone who had decided the case and then tried to dress it up as legal reasoning without actually doing the legal reasoning,” she added.

• Jacobin Magazine ☛ Emergency Room Doctors Are Organizing Against Profit-Driven Health Care

  After all, as the ER’s medical director, Chien was a legend, someone about whom everybody spoke in reverential terms. Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, California, often referred to as VMC, was the sort of place where violent assault at the hands of patients was a near-daily occurrence. Kamara, a nine-year ER nurse at the facility, had watched the 300-employee department chew up and spit out plenty of lackadaisical suburban doctors, and when he worked his first shift with Chien in 2016, he did not have high hopes. Twelve hours later, he was a believer.

• RTL ☛ Luxembourg releases more land for agriculture amid fears of wheat shortages

  Around 250 hectares of land that should normally lie fallow to benefit biodiversity have been exceptionally cleared for agricultural use amid fears of wheat shortages related to the war in Ukraine.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • IT Wire ☛ Ericsson cannot estimate impact of DOJ breach notices

    Ericsson in disclosing its first quarter results for 2022 could not estimate the impact of what actions the US Department of Justice (DOJ) might take when assessing the breach notices the DOJ issued relating to the Deferred Prosecution Agreement.

  • PC World ☛ Brave, DuckDuckGo step in to block Google’s AMP pages

    Both Brave and DuckDuckGo have taken aim at Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), either blocking Google’s tracking or allowing users to bypass AMP directly and visit the actual home pages themselves.

    Brave said this week that the company is implementing a new policy, called “De-AMP,” which will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from vising AMP pages and instead direct them to the publisher’s site. In cases where that’s not possible, De-AMP will simply step in and do the redirecting itself. The new feature is rolling out on Brave’s Nightly and Beta versions and will be enabled by default in Brave 1.38 for the desktop and Android.

  • Brave Browser ☛ De-AMP: Cutting Out Google and Enhancing Privacy

    Brave is rolling out a new feature called De-AMP, which allows Brave users to bypass Google-hosted AMP pages, and instead visit the content’s publisher directly. AMP harms users’ privacy, security and internet experience, and just as bad, AMP helps Google further monopolize and control the direction of the Web.

    Brave will protect users from AMP in several ways. Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether. And in cases where that is not possible, Brave will watch as pages are being fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP/Google code from being loaded and executed.

    De-AMP is now available in our Nightly and Beta versions and will be enabled by default in the upcoming 1.38 Desktop and Android versions, and will be released on iOS soon after. If you are on Nightly or Beta and do not see the feature enabled, you may need to restart your browser for the changes to take effect.

  • Security

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Techdirt ☛ Intel Wants To Add Unproven ‘Emotion Detection’ AI To Distance Learning Tech

        Last week, Zoom announced its plans to add emotion detecting tech to its virtual meeting platform, something it apparently felt would facilitate the art of the deal. Here’s Kate Kaye, breaking the news for Protocol.

      • CNET ☛ Netflix Is Open to a Lower Price Tier — With Ads

        After COO Greg Peters addressed the latest price hike for subscription plans, Hastings shared that Netflix is looking at ways to offset the cost for users. If it does make such a move, Netflix would be one of the last big streaming services to get into the ad game.

      • OnionShare 2.5 fixes security issues and adds censorship circumvention features

        This update greatly improves our support for bridges, which let people quickly and easily circumvent this sort of censorship. A bridge is a Tor server, generally with a secret IP address so it’s harder to block, that just forwards traffic onto the Tor network for people. So if you live in Moscow and you can’t connect to Tor because your ISP is blocking the IP addresses of public Tor nodes, you can configure OnionShare (or Tor Browser) to use a bridge. This way you’ll connect to an IP address that isn’t blocked, thus bypassing the censorship.

      • NYPost ☛ How I lost $650,000 of [cryptocurrency] in seconds

        He claims [scammers] pulled it off by getting hold of his secret 12-word “seed phrase” which is important to get into the [cryptocurrency] wallet and must not be shared with anyone.

        Little did he know, MetaMask stores a seed phrase file on iCloud automatically from his iPhone.

        So scammers must have gone in and swiped it, before emptying his account.

        “Don’t tell us to never store our seed phrase digitally and then do it behind our backs,” Iacovone said.

        “If 90 percent of the people knew this I would bet none of them would have the app or iCloud on.”

Defence/Aggression

• The Nation ☛ Ukraine’s Nuclear Flashpoints

  Until very recently, the prospect of nuclear weapons use by a major nuclear power has appeared relatively remote, enabling other issues—terrorism, climate change, Covid—to dominate the global agenda. But that period of relative immunity to Armageddon has drawn to a close and we have entered a New Nuclear Era, in which the risk of nuclear weapons use by the major powers has reemerged as a daily fact of life. We may yet escape their use and the resulting human catastrophe, but only if we oppose the nuclearization of world affairs with the same vigor and determination as has been devoted to overcoming the climate crisis.

• Common Dreams ☛ Coalition Demands End to US Military Support for Saudi-Led War on Yemen

  More than five dozen advocacy groups on Wednesday pressured Congress to cut off U.S. military support for the Saudi-led war and blockade on Yemen, highlighting that it “has helped cause the deaths of nearly half a million people and pushed millions more to the edge of starvation.”

  “Unfortunately, the U.S. continues to provide critical support for the coalition’s war effort and blockade, which has led to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.”

• Meduza ☛ Thriving in the middle Turkey finds itself caught in between Russia and the EU. That’s not such a bad place to be.

  The war in Ukraine has led Europe and the U.S. to launch an unprecedented economic blockade against Russia, deepening the rift between the putative “East” and “West” and seemingly giving rise to the return of a bipolar geopolitical world. But there is at least one regional power with significant experience balancing East and West: Turkey. The republic immediately condemned Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, but has also refused to participate in sanctions against Russia. Meduza took a closer look at how Turkey has been trying to engage in economic and traditional diplomacy, overcome its own domestic political crisis, and reduce its dependence on Russia.

• Meduza ☛ ‘This is what hell on earth looks like’ The last remaining Ukrainian troops in Mariupol call on world leaders to help them — and civilians — escape

  Sergiy Volyna, commander of the Ukrainian Navy’s 36th Separate Marine Brigade, which is currently mounting a last stand against Russian invaders from the Azovstal metalworks plant in Mariupol, released a video in which he calls on world leaders to evacuate the civilians and soldiers still hiding in the plant to a different country. Volyna posted the video on his Facebook page.

• Meduza ☛ ‘What does missing in action mean? Is my son dead?’ Meduza talks to mothers of conscripts who served aboard the sunken Russian warship Moskva

  It’s been a week since the sinking of the Russian missile cruiser Moskva. The Ukrainian side reported that it struck the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship with two Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles on April 13. In turn, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that the Moskva sustained “serious damage” after an unexplained fire caused ammunition on board to explode; as a result, the warship allegedly sank while being towed to port in “stormy” waters. How many crew members were aboard the cruiser at the time remains unknown (though presumably they numbered in the hundreds). The Russian authorities have yet to confirm any casualties. Indeed, contrary to reports that dozens of sailors were killed, Moscow asserts that the entire crew was saved. Meduza spoke to the mothers of two Moskva crew members, who — despite the Russian Defense Ministry’s statements — haven’t contacted their loved ones since the warship sank.

• Meduza ☛ Toxic positivity Desperate to convince citizens the war won’t change their daily lives, the Russian authorities are flooding the airwaves with “positive” news stories

  The war in Ukraine has been going on for two months, the list of sanctions against Russia continues to grow, and the Russian authorities are still trying to convince the world (and themselves) that the war won’t have any serious consequences for Russian citizens. In their telling, for example, the Russian economy is sure to hold strong, and the exodus of Western companies is a “historic opportunity” for Russian business owners. According to Russian government insiders, all of these messages are part of a carefully planned media campaign to “spread positivity.” Here’s how it works.

• TruthOut ☛ More Military Spending Won’t End Atrocities — We Must Focus on Preventing Them

• Counter Punch ☛ The Politics of the Russo-Ukrainian War Part, Revisited: Q&A with Lawrence Davidson and Stephen Zunes

  Daniel Falcone:  How far back historically does one go to contextualize what is happening right now with the war? Do you go back to1991 or 2014? Do you go back close to the Interwar Period or WWII?

  Lawrence Davidson: You can go back to Napoleon if you want. Russia’s view of the West has been shaped by a series of invasions.

• Meduza ☛ The new German guilt: The war in Ukraine has forced Germany to ask whether decades of its foreign policy were based on a delusion

  Over the past several weeks, German politicians and journalists have debated the question of German guilt and responsibility for the war — including for the catastrophes in Bucha and Mariupol. The most difficult questions have been addressed to Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who has spent years cultivating a special relationship between Russia and Germany. Indeed, it’s hard to explain now why Germany, which supported sanctions against Russia in 2014 for the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of the Donbas, didn’t divest from Russian energy years ago — in fact, its dependence has only grown in recent years. As a result, Berlin, fearful of wrecking its own country’s industry, feels unable to give up Russian petroleum even now — hence Ukrainian allegations that Germany is funding Russia’s war.

• Counter Punch ☛ How to End the War in Ukraine: a Solution Beyond Sanctions

  Even after Ukraine’s surprisingly strong defense forced a Russian retreat from the northern suburbs of the capital, Kyiv, Putin only appears to be doubling down with plans for new offensives in Ukraine’s south and east. Instead of engaging in serious negotiations, he’s been redeploying his battered troops for a second round of massive attacks led by General Alexander Dvonikov, “the butcher of Syria,” whose merciless air campaigns in that country flattened cities like Aleppo and Homs.

  So while the world waits for the other combat boot to drop hard, it’s already worth considering where the West went wrong in its efforts to end this war, while exploring whether anything potentially effective is still available to slow the carnage.

• The Gray Zone ☛ “A historic sham”: Zelensky’s speech to Greece’s parliament sparks national outrage, opens WWII-era wounds

• Counter Punch ☛ Ukraine Negotiation Kabuki

  Good for all of them.

  Among many of those, from left anti-imperialists to paleo-conservative realists, the discourse hinges on forgoing war for diplomacy. Let’s not send more weapons; let’s instead encourage negotiations! Negotiate, don’t escalate.

• Democracy Now ☛ Security Deteriorates in Afghanistan as Two Bombs Kill Students in Kabul at Hazara Shiite Boys’ School

  A pair of bomb blasts at a boys’ school in Kabul left at least six people dead on Tuesday, the latest in a series of attacks on the minority Shiite Hazara community in Afghanistan. While no group has claimed responsibility, it follows a pattern of aggression by ISIS-K, the Islamic State affiliate, against Shiites in Afghanistan, as well as Pakistan. “Governments, not only the Taliban, have failed to come up with a strategy where they could provide security to the Hazaras and Shias,” says Afghan journalist Bilal Sarwary. “I call it a great betrayal towards people who are extremely committed to a bright future of Afghanistan.”

• Democracy Now ☛ U.S. Welcomes Ukrainians at Border, Uses Title 42 as “Political Tool” to Block Other Asylum Seekers

  The U.S. has hit a record number of apprehensions at the border shared with Mexico, arresting over 1 million asylum seekers in the past six months alone. We speak with immigration attorney Erika Pinheiro about the Biden administration’s unequal treatment of different nationalities, as refugees from countries like Haiti, Cuba and Cameroon face harsh restrictions on asylum, but Ukrainian refugees seem to be receiving special treatment and even exemption from Title 42. “Asylum is supposed to be a universal standard protecting individuals fleeing persecution from any country, but in practice it’s always been a political tool wielded by the United States to favor those fleeing regimes that the United States opposes,” says Pinheiro.

• Counter Punch ☛ How Hypersonic Weapons Work

  I am an aerospace engineer who studies space and defense systems, including hypersonic systems. These new systems pose an important challenge due to their maneuverability all along their trajectory. Because their flight paths can change as they travel, these missiles must be tracked throughout their flight.

  A second important challenge stems from the fact that they operate in a different region of the atmosphere from other existing threats. The new hypersonic weapons fly much higher than slower subsonic missiles but much lower than intercontinental ballistic missiles. The U.S. and its allies do not have good tracking coverage for this in-between region, nor does Russia or China.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Why All Countries Should Care About the Ukraine Crisis

  The Russian war in Ukraine has dominated headlines in the United States and Europe. It has been presented as a generation-defining event and as a pivot in geopolitics that will cleave world history into a before and an after just like September 11.

• Democracy Now ☛ Melissa Lucio Faces Texas Execution Despite Innocence Claims & Bipartisan Calls to Save Her Life

  Calls are growing for Texas to stop the approaching execution of Melissa Lucio, who says she was wrongfully convicted of killing her toddler Mariah in 2007. We speak to one of Lucio’s attorneys, Vanessa Potkin of the Innocence Project, who says Lucio was coerced into making a false confession within hours of her daughter’s death and deserves a new trial based on new evidence and misleading expert testimony. There has also been historic bipartisan support for Lucio, with Texas lawmakers demanding Governor Greg Abbott commute her sentence or delay the execution until a new trial can be held.

Environment

• The Revelator ☛ Ten New Environmental Books Offering Inspiration, Insight and Ideas

• Common Dreams ☛ Study Warns Use of Geoengineering to Fight Climate Crisis Risks Malaria Surge

  A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications warns that attempting to fight the climate crisis using geoengineering—a method often promoted by the fossil fuel industry—could have the devastating consequence of exposing a billion additional people in vulnerable countries to the mosquito-borne disease malaria.

  “Simulations found that a billion extra people were at risk of malaria in the geoengineered world.”

• Gannett ☛ Tunnel Fire burns nearly 20,000 acres near Flagstaff; state of emergency declared

  It appears Tunnel Fire is burning through a part of the scar of Schultz Fire, which burned over 15,000 acres of forest and was the largest wildfire in Arizona in 2010. The Schultz Fire led to floods that damaged or destroyed 85 homes and killed a 12-year-old girl, Shaelyn Wilson, who fell into a wash and was swept away by the water carrying boulders and wreckage.

  The National Weather Service issued a Red Flag Warning for parts of northern Arizona, including Flagstaff, between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. Thursday due to high winds and low humidity.

  Tony Merriman, a meteorologist with NWS Flagstaff, told The Arizona Republic that the area is expected to have high winds with gusts up to 35 mph. Merriman said that the winds, coupled with low humidity, create an environment where a wildfire could quickly grow out of control.

• Rolling Stone ☛ The Climate Fight Isn’t Lost. Here Are 10 Ways to Win

  The climate crisis is here, and heartbreak is all around us. The early promise of dramatic action from President Biden is sinking in the old mud bog of fossil-fuel politics. Meanwhile, despite 40 years of warnings from scientists and the decline in the cost of clean energy, carbon pollution is still increasing and the world is heating up as fast as ever. The final sentence of last February’s U.N.’s latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the impacts of that warming is stark and unequivocal: “Climate change is a threat to human well-being and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.” Or as U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres put it after an IPCC report on the mitigation of climate change was released this month: “Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness.”

• The Conversation ☛ Climate change triggering global collapse in insect numbers: stressed farmland shows 63% decline – new research

  The world may be facing a devastating “hidden” collapse in insect species due to the twin threats of climate change and habitat loss.

  UCL’s Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research has carried out one of the largest-ever assessments of insect declines around the world – assessing three-quarters of a million samples from around 6,000 sites.

• Nature ☛ Agriculture and climate change are reshaping insect biodiversity worldwide

  Several previous studies have investigated changes in insect biodiversity, with some highlighting declines and others showing turnover in species composition without net declines1,2,3,4,5. Although research has shown that biodiversity changes are driven primarily by land-use change and increasingly by climate change6,7, the potential for interaction between these drivers and insect biodiversity on the global scale remains unclear. Here we show that the interaction between indices of historical climate warming and intensive agricultural land use is associated with reductions of almost 50% in the abundance and 27% in the number of species within insect assemblages relative to those in less-disturbed habitats with lower rates of historical climate warming. These patterns are particularly evident in the tropical realm, whereas some positive responses of biodiversity to climate change occur in non-tropical regions in natural habitats. A high availability of nearby natural habitat often mitigates reductions in insect abundance and richness associated with agricultural land use and substantial climate warming but only in low-intensity agricultural systems. In such systems, in which high levels (75% cover) of natural habitat are available, abundance and richness were reduced by 7% and 5%, respectively, compared with reductions of 63% and 61% in places where less natural habitat is present (25% cover). Our results show that insect biodiversity will probably benefit from mitigating climate change, preserving natural habitat within landscapes and reducing the intensity of agriculture.

• Warming climate and agriculture halve insect populations in some areas

  The study published in Nature is the first to identify that an interaction between rising temperatures and land use changes, is driving widespread losses in numerous insect groups across the globe.

  Lead author Dr Charlie Outhwaite (UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research, UCL Biosciences) said: “Many insects appear to be very vulnerable to human pressures, which is concerning as climate change worsens and agricultural areas continue to expand. Our findings highlight the urgency of actions to preserve natural habitats, slow the expansion of high-intensity agriculture, and cut emissions to mitigate climate change.

• BBC ☛ Climate change and farming driving insect decline

  The combined pressures of global heating and farming are driving a “substantial decline” of insects across the globe, according to UK researchers.

  They say we must acknowledge the threats we pose to insects, before some species are lost forever.

  But preserving habitat for nature could help ensure vital insects thrive.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Extreme Heat Is Coming: What Policies Are in Place to Protect Workers?

  As I write this, it’s 83 degrees Fahrenheit in Washington, DC, and I can’t help but long for those years when I was a kid, when spring felt like spring and seasons were demarcated. Each year, summer-like temperatures arrive all too soon during spring, thanks to human-induced climate change. Research finds that even if we halt heat-trapping emissions, we’ll be locked into a summer season that consumes half of the year by 2100. While that may seem far in the future, the current conditions are enough to cause alarm.

• Energy

  • TruthOut ☛ Fossil Fuel Industry’s Favorite Climate Solution Risks Malaria Surge, Study Says

  • Counter Punch ☛ Do Cars Dream of an Electric Future?

    Take the case of General Motors (GM), who apparently envision “a world with zero crashes, to save lives; zero emissions, so future generations can inherit a healthier planet; and zero congestion, so customers get back a precious commodity – time.”

    Recall this is the same company that backed President Trump to the hilt to undermine America’s already poor environmental policymaking — a foul legacy they have been quick to distance themselves from now that the Democrats are back in charge. Indeed, GM’s commitment to degrading our ecosystems is matched only by their efforts to attack their employees organising in their factories.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | California Briefly Runs on 97% Renewable Energy—Reveals a Future in Which Oil and Gas Dictators Can Be Defunded

    California’s energy mix was powered 97% by renewable energy on Sunday, April 3 at at 3:39 p.m., the highest contribution of renewables to the state’s grid on record, according to David Knowles at Yahoo News.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Database Shows Rich Governments Funding Fossil Fuels Over Clean Energy

    A new online tool launched Wednesday by a U.S.-based advocacy group details how international public finance is continuing to fuel the climate emergency rather than sufficiently funding a just transition to clean energy.

    “Between 2018 and 2020, G20 international public finance institutions provided at least $63 billion per year ($188 billion in total) for oil, gas, and coal projects.”

  • Futurism ☛ [Cryptocurrency] Stocks Are Doing Absolutely Horribly

    In other words, consumer interest may be waning, with trading volumes falling significantly lately. After all, companies like Coinbase, which is still the number one US crypto company by market cap, rely on transaction fees to make money.

  • [Old] Yanis Varoufakis on [Cryptocurrency] & the Left, and Techno-Feudalism

    When ‘Bitcoin maximalists’, as you call them, wax lyrical about the inability to print money (and celebrate this inability as Bitcoin’s feature, rather than its bug), they are being terribly unoriginal – banal, I dare say. Capitalism nearly died in 1929, and tens of millions did die in the war that ensued, because of this toxic fallacy that underpinned the Gold Standard then and Bitcoin now. Which fallacy? The fallacy of composition, as John Maynard Keynes called it.

    Its essence is a tendency to extrapolate from the personal realm to the macroeconomic one. To say that if something is good for me – if a practice is sound at the level of my family, business, etc. – it must also be good for the state, government, humanity at large. For example, yes, parsimony is a good thing for me, personally. If I can’t make ends meet, I need to tighten my belt; otherwise, I shall sink more and more into debt. However, the exact opposite holds for a macroeconomy: If, in the midst of a recession, the government tries to tighten its belt as a means of eliminating its budget deficit, then public expenditure will decline at a time of falling private expenditure. And since the sum of private and public expenditure equals aggregate income, the government will be – inadvertently – magnifying the recession and, yes, its own deficit (as government revenues fall). This is an example of one thing (belt-tightening) being good at the micro-level and catastrophic at the macro level.

  • Reason ☛ Europe Targets Self-Hosted Bitcoin Wallets—and Financial Privacy

    As inflation and economic disruption increase around the world, ostensibly stable governments look to increase controls on cryptocurrency. In particular, states loathe what they call “unhosted wallets,” meaning cryptocurrency that is totally owned and maintained by an individual, as opposed to a regulated business that they can control.

    The European Union is making moves to crack down on such self-hosted cryptocurrency wallets. What they are proposing would be equivalent to making businesses maintain dossiers on anyone who chooses to pay with cash. It’s an incredible ratchet in financial surveillance and an unjustifiable attack on individual privacy.

  • Anders Borch ☛ Don’t buy NFTs

    If you ever needed reasons not to buy NFTs, here are a few. And remember, friends don’t let friends bet on stock markets, currency exchanges, or NFTs.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Counter Punch ☛ Restoring the Grizzly to the Southwest: Aldo Leopold’s Escudilla, Revisited

    Escudilla was a mountain that one could see from almost any quarter in northern Arizona, and what made it special was the big bear. Leopold wrote of how whenever anyone rode up on Escudilla, they often encountered the tracks of Bigfoot and they always thought of the bear.

    Then one day, a government trapper came to the area, seeking to slay dragons and predators to make the country safe for cows. Unfortunately, Bigfoot occasionally killed a cow, so Bigfoot became his target. Finally, after a month’s effort, he killed the grizzly.

  • YLE ☛ Endangered Baltic ringed seals star in WWF livestream

    Ringed seals tend to choose quiet, wind-sheltered spots on the shoreline when they lie in the sun. The archipelago live stream will be provided by two different cameras, each at slightly different positions. The camera angles can also change in line with wind direction and the seals’ positions.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | To Help the Environment, Look to Women

    Sara Inés Lara, leader of Colombia-based bird conservation organization Fundación ProAves, got her first taste of conservation’s potential more than 30 years ago. She grew up in one of the most biodiverse places in the world, seeking refuge in the forests, mountains, and pools of the Andes. Then, in 1998, she learned about the yellow-eared parrot.

Finance

• Counter Punch ☛ Student Loan Forgiveness is Not a Working Class Priority

  The college-educated elite is today’s Democratic Party’s base. That’s why Joe Biden ran on the campaign promise of forgiving their student loan debt. (And like nearly all of his campaign promises he never had any intention of actually keeping that promise.)

  Basically student loan forgiveness would be a big handout to the college-educated class (costing between $373 billion and $1.6 trillion, depending on the plan); if Democrats fail to keep this promise they risk alienating a substantial part of their base, which could mean even bigger losses at the polls in 2022 and 2024.

• Common Dreams ☛ Mexican Lawmakers Approve Bill to Nationalize Lithium

  Mexican lawmakers this week passed legislation to nationalize lithium, a mineral needed to manufacture rechargeable batteries for electric vehicles and other devices.

  Mexico’s Senate approved the mining reform bill by a margin of 87 to 20, with 16 abstentions, on Tuesday, one day after it was advanced by the country’s lower house of Congress.

• Culture Wars

  It’s so disappointing to see people who don’t realize they’re being used to deliberately divide people. Smart, caring, thoughtful people whose hearts are umdoubtedly in the right place so frequently get caught up in culture-war bullshit that is just so obviously designed to divide people or to create new subcultures and identities for capitalists to market to.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Common Dreams ☛ South Carolina Supreme Court Pauses State’s First Firing Squad Execution

  The South Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday granted a temporary stay of execution to a condemned prisoner who was set to be the first in the state to be killed by firing squad.

  The Associated Press reports the Columbia court paused the state’s scheduled April 29 killing of 57-year-old Richard Bernard Moore, who was found guilty of the 1999 murder of Spartanburg convenience store clerk James Mahoney. The state high court said it would release further details later.

• Common Dreams ☛ Sanders Has ‘Not Ruled Out’ 2024 White House Run: Memo

  U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders has not ruled out a third run for the White House if President Joe Biden does not run in 2024, according to a top aide’s campaign memo viewed by The Washington Post.

  “The central fact remains true, which is that Sen. Sanders is the most popular officeholder in the country.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Real Reason Behind Israel’s Routine Violence Against Palestinians

  Another Ramadan, another attack on Palestinian worshipers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem. In explaining the Israeli attacks, the majority of Euro-American politicians, media analysts, and commentators, exemplified in this predictably inane CBC report, are emphasising the “high tensions” that come along with the confluence of three major religious events, and framing Israeli actions as a response to the “Palestinian terrorist attacks” in four Israeli cities.

• Techdirt ☛ Devin Nunes Loses Yet Again In His Quixotic, Censorial SLAPP Cases

  For a while there in 2019, it seemed like a month couldn’t go by without (then) Rep. Devin Nunes suing some critic or another (including, somewhat infamously, a satirical cow). After kicking it off by suing mocking livestock, he quickly moved on to suing news organizations. A big one was suing CNN, a favored punching bag of Republicans, which he sued in December of 2019.

• Project Censored ☛ Former Neo-Nazi Leader Now Holds DOJ Domestic Counterterrorism Position – Validated Independent News

  In the 1980s and 1990s, Haughton played drums with the Arresting Officers, one of the most influential neo-Nazi bands of the time, which was named for the belief that arresting officers had the best jobs since they could assault people of color. He also played for Break the Sword, another neo-Nazi punk band around the same time. Beyond music, Haughton had connections to members of the Aryan Republican Army, a neo-Nazi gang that robbed twenty-two Midwest banks in the mid-1990s and is suspected of having helped to fund the Oklahoma City Bombings. Haughton’s direct connections to the neo-Nazi skinhead scene appear to have ended around January 1995, when he joined the Philadelphia Police Department, where he worked until December 2017.

• Project Censored ☛ US Transportation System “Fuels” Inequality – Validated Independent News

  This imbalance in priorities is a result of corporate lobbying influence on transportation policies. “For the oil and gas industry in particular,” Sen reported, “highway-centric transportation is a gift that keeps on giving.” Political contributions by the oil and gas industry totaled $140 million in the last election cycle alone, with hundreds of millions more since 2012.

• Project Censored ☛ St. Jude Hoards Billions While Running Misleading Advertising about Financial Support for Its Patients – Validated Independent News

  St. Jude has long been a fundraising juggernaut, raising a combined $7.3 billion in the five previous fiscal years, including $1.7 billion in 2019 and $2 billion in 2020. As ProPublica documented, in 2019 St. Jude raised more money than “the rest of the top 10 children’s hospitals for cancer—combined.” As a result, St. Jude’s massive reserve account grew by 58 percent during that time period. On average, twenty percent of St. Jude’s revenue went to its reserve fund, thirty percent went to its fundraising operations, and the remaining fifty percent went to caring for patients.

• TruthOut ☛ Poll Finds 81 Percent of Voters Say Supreme Court Needs Stronger Code of Ethics

• TruthOut ☛ Dem Lawmaker Calls Out GOP Fundraising Email That Includes Derogatory Attacks

• Common Dreams ☛ Lawmakers, Former Jurors Demand Clemency for Texas Death Row Inmate Melissa Lucio

  Lawmakers and criminal justice reform advocates are calling for clemency for Melissa Lucio, a woman who is set to be executed by the state of Texas on April 27, 15 years after being convicted of murdering her two-year-old daughter—a conviction that resulted from a misunderstanding of an accident and a coerced false confession, Lucio’s attorneys say.

  Lawyers with The Innocence Project are calling on the Texas Board of Pardons to recommend that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott either commute Lucio’s sentence or establish a reprieve of at least 120 days so authorities can examine evidence that was not available to jurors during Lucio’s trial in 2007.

• TruthOut ☛ Don’t Forget Trump Got 74 Million Votes in 2020. The Reelection Threat Is Real.

• TruthOut ☛ Biden Administration Considers Extending “Failed” Immigration Policy, Title 42

• TruthOut ☛ The US Has Arrested Over 1 Million Asylum Seekers in the Past 6 Months

• The Nation ☛ Good Trouble

• The Nation ☛ Wearing Down Joe Manchin and His Fossil Fuel Allies

  “You are wearing people out,” complained Senator Joe Manchin at a March 4 hearing of the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which he chairs. The West Virginia senator, who reportedly receives $500,000 a year from the coal company he founded and that’s now run by his son, was reprimanding three commissioners of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the little-known, immensely powerful agency that regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, methane gas, and oil. FERC’s approval is required before private companies can install an oil or gas pipeline, build a liquid natural gas terminal, or construct other types of fossil fuel infrastructure. In the past, that approval has almost always been given: Since 1999, FERC has approved 99 percent of the gas industry’s project applications, which is no small reason why the planet is dangerously overheating.

• The Nation ☛ How Can Feminists Stand in Real Solidarity with Afghan Women?

  I have been engaged in grassroots work for the rights and well-being of Afghan women for two decades. Given the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban on August 15, 2021, the question I am wrestling with—which every women’s rights activist who has worked in Afghanistan is wrestling with—is: What do we do now? Do we refuse to work in Afghanistan because this would require engaging with the Taliban, whose brutal history we know intimately and whom we fought for over two decades?

• The Nation ☛ The Damning Legacy of Clintonism

  In the 1970s, a new kind of Democrat began to appear on the scene. For a while, they went by different names. At first, they were the “Watergate Babies,” a misnomer because their primary opponent was not the Republican Party of Nixon, but their own. Then, as the 1980s came into view, they became the “Atari Democrats.” Young and elite-educated, they promised to make the postindustrial economy grow by encouraging entrepreneurship, investing in the burgeoning tech sector, and giving the market freer rein. Writing in 1982, Charles Peters of the Washington Monthly called them “neoliberals.” In 1984, when they decided to form an organization, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)—following the brief, meteoric rise of one of their own, Colorado Senator Gary Hart, in that year’s Democratic presidential primary—they embraced the label “New Democrats.” They aimed at nothing short of remaking the Democratic Party as it had been constituted for the previous half century: to reorient its electoral base away from organized labor and the Black working class, and toward affluent knowledge workers and white suburbanites; to make “leaner” a welfare state they believed had grown fat and to refashion the role of government in accordance with the logic of the market.

• Counter Punch ☛ How Socialists Can Avoid Dividing and Conquering Themselves Over Race vs Class Embroilments

  This would entail embracing universal social democratic programs in ways that mitigate shame-slinging identity-group oriented politics on one side, and political pigeonholing practices on the other. And it concerns avoiding according the top-priority ideological position to an aspirational – ‘all-struggles against oppression’ uniting – intersectional socialism, wherein a second-class status is imputed to large-scale identity groups that are believed to hold the most societal privilege.

  Simultaneously, it’s about coming to terms with a politics where socialists veer away from each other in practice, more than in their front-stage discourse, regarding which large-scale identity groups to give the highest priority to (e.g., the working-class or the racially oppressed). On the flipside, it’s about reconnecting through a majoritarian-oriented – ‘all large-scale identity groups’ freedom and equality struggle-sharing – focus on opposing the comparatively smaller-scale identity groupings of the 1%, and self–described white supremacists and ultranationalists.

• Pro Publica ☛ Here’s How We Analyzed the Data Underlying Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Claims About His Border Initiative

  One of the most basic functions of data journalism is to independently verify government officials’ claims.

  So when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and state officials started to boast that Operation Lone Star — a now multibillion-dollar initiative launched in March 2021 to battle cross-border crime — had resulted in thousands of arrests, multiple drug seizures and numerous referrals of unauthorized immigrants to the federal government for deportation, we asked for the underlying data. It was immediately clear that examining the operation’s achievements would be a challenge.

• Counter Punch ☛ Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Drama: A Hand Overplayed?

  As this week’s drama unfolds on Twitter, many brows have, no doubt, been raised. The Securities and Exchange Commission is already probing Musk’s past misuse of social media.

  Gene Munster of Loup Funds suggests Musk could get help from politically aligned private equity sources, as “[c]ompanies that have a political basis are winning investor support.” Tesla board members such as Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder who has donated to Morgan Ortagus, the Trump-endorsed candidate for Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District, could also be of interest as private equity partners.

• Hungary ☛ Mi Hazánk may help fulfill Orbán’s dream, but it may also bring on a political showdown

  The prime minister referred to the fact that the right-wing Mi Hazánk has made it into parliament a novel development, and admitted that for now he isn’t sure what to expect from them. It may not be by accident though, that Orbán has recently often spoken about uniting the nation beyond party lines, and about peaceful disagreement. The position of Mi Hazánk is not an easy one: being a constructive opposition may lead to becoming boring, and choosing a non-conformist approach may lead to taking Fidesz on head-on.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Joe Biden: Stop Telling People You’re on Their Side and Start Showing Them You Are

  For years, as ever-bigger corporate combines grabbed ever-bigger chunks of market power, America’s political, media and academic establishment scoffed at critics, drowning them out with jolly rounds of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” But the concentration of corporate power can no longer be dismissed, for it’s all too real. It wreaks real havoc on entire economic sectors, workaday families, communities and our nation’s essential uniting value of fairness. Pontificators of the status quo can coo all the free-enterprise platitudes they want, but a rising grassroots majority (including supposedly conservative farmers and ranchers) is experiencing corporate repression firsthand. Those families are doing their own kitchen-table tabulations and realizing that the game has been deliberately rigged against them. A mad-as-hell moment is percolating at the grassroots.

• The Verge ☛ Brave Search no longer requires you to append ‘Reddit’ to your searches

  Brave Search has rolled out a new feature that makes it easier to find conversations from forums like Reddit in your search results. This means you’ll no longer have to add “Reddit” to your searches when you’re looking for thoughts from actual humans, not empty answers from websites just trying to get clicks.

• The Nation ☛ Jared Kushner’s Saudi Side-Hustle Merits a Full-On Criminal Inquiry

  Kushner, the famously incompetent real estate developer whose name has become synonymous with nepotism, was frequently accused of doing the bidding of the Saudi royal family while he “served” as senior adviser in an administration headed by his wife’s father. Kushner ardently defended the prince, known as MBS, in the face of an international outcry over the grisly murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which US intelligence agencies determined had been approved by the monarch. Kushner dismissed concerns about the horrific assault on Yemen by the Saudi military. He arranged to expand US military support for the dictatorship. And he pushed to dramatically increase US weapons sales to the Saudis, promoting a $110 billion deal even as outrage over the Khashoggi murder mounted.

• The Verge ☛ This firm made Republicans go viral — now it’s falling apart

  But while that pitch has made Arsenal one of the most talked-about campaign shops in Republican politics, workers inside the company tell a different story. Six former employees who spoke to The Verge described a chaotic working environment, rife with internal bullying, toxic HR practices, and an intense culture of secrecy. That uncertainty has seen three employees leave the company in the last two weeks, and many insiders suspect the company’s problems are just beginning.

  Most urgently, some contractors say they aren’t being paid. Karl Slater started doing freelance editing work for Arsenal in May 2021 — but he quickly noticed irregularities in the way the company handled money.

• Mandatory Planet-Wrecking

  Right wing think tanks (like ALEC and TPPF) are pushing laws that would prevent state agencies from contracting with financial companies unless they prop up fossil fuels, and Texas has already signed into law an implementation of their model bill.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• Counter Punch ☛ Old Nazi and New Conspiracy Fantasies

  Whether Internet has fueled conspiracy fantasies or not, virtually all conspiracy fantasies have a few common parameters that practically all of them share. Perhaps one of the most important signifier of conspiracy fantasies is the fact that those who create and believe in conspiracy fantasies are convinced that nothing happens by chance – not in society, not in politics, not in the economy, and not in history.

  Secondly, conspiracy fantasies connect things that are not connected. The fact that something can happen “out of the blue” is impossible to comprehend for the advocates of conspiracy fantasies, and even more so for those who invent, sell, and broadcast conspiracy fantasies.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Mint Press News ☛ Say No To Censorship: Here’s How We’re Rebuilding Alternative Media

• Project Censored ☛ Book Donation Bans in US Prisons Restrict Prisoners’ Rights, Generate Corporate Profits – Validated Independent News

  States including Iowa and Michigan issued bans on book donations, in 2021 and 2018, respectively. Similar efforts to block book donations to prisoners in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington only failed after “public outcry,” Skopic reported. Advocates of book donation bans cite smuggling of contraband as the justification for restrictions, even though a 2018 study found that most contraband items in prison came from prison guards and staff.

• New York Times ☛ I’m a High School Junior. Let’s Talk About ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘Mockingbird.’

  At that moment, I had a long-overdue realization: How we as Americans approach restrictions on literature curriculums is not only flawed but also wholly reactionary. My experience at that meeting and others convinced me that the problem is not that we disagree but how. We need to shift focus away from reflexive outrage about restrictions and bans and toward actual discussions of the merits and drawbacks of the individual books.

• Times Higher Education ☛ Russian universities expelling large numbers of anti-war students

  On 9 March, Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs reportedly ordered Saint Petersburg State University to expel 13 students who participated in anti-war protests, in what academics have said is an escalation of the crackdown on free speech.

  While no official figures exist, hundreds of students have likely been expelled for their opposition to the war, estimated Vladimir Ashurkov, a Russian activist and executive director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a Moscow-based non-profit established by opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘Journalism Is Not a Crime’: Outrage as Judge Approves Assange Extradition to US

  A British judge on Wednesday officially approved the U.S. government’s request to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who faces espionage charges for publishing classified material that exposed war crimes by American forces.

  “The charges against Assange should never have been brought in the first place.”

• The Dissenter ☛ Dark Day For Press Freedom: British Court Orders Assange Extradition

  Mark Summers QC, an attorney for Assange, asserted there were “fresh developments” in the case and bemoaned the fact that the defense was not permitted at this stage to raise this evidence, according to Computer Weekly’s Bill Goodwin.

• Shadowproof ☛ Dark Day For Press Freedom As British Court Orders Assange Extradition

  This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter. Become a monthly subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism.A British magistrates court ordered the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States and sent the request for his extradition to Home Office Secretary Priti Patel for approval. The order came a little more than a month after the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom refused to hear Assange’s appeal. In December, the UK High Court of Justice granted the US government’s appeal and overturned a district court decision that spared Assange. Chief Magistrate Senior District Judge Paul Goldspring contended he was “duty-bound” to send the extradition request to Patel. Goldspring also told Assange he had a right to appeal if the Home Office approved the extradition before issuing the order.

  Mark Summers QC, an attorney for Assange, asserted there were “fresh developments” in the case and bemoaned the fact that the defense was not permitted at this stage to raise this evidence, according to Computer Weekly’s Bill Goodwin.

• IT Wire ☛ Assange extradition order issued, sent to home sec for approval

  Commenting on the court’s decision, Amnesty International secretary-general Agnès Callamard said: “The UK has an obligation not to send any person to a place where their life or safety is at risk and the government must not abdicate that responsibility.

• BBC ☛ Julian Assange’s US extradition order sent to Priti Patel for final approval

  In a hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court, the judge who oversees extradition requests authorised the case to be sent to Priti Patel.

  The Wikileaks founder is expected to appeal to the High Court if she approves his extradition.

  Mr Assange is wanted in the US over documents leaked in 2010 and 2011.

• uni Michigan ☛ 5 bills to watch in the Michigan state legislature: April 2022

  First introduced in April 2021 by state Rep. Luke Meerman, R-Coopersville, House Bill 4705 requires state public bodies to record audio for all meetings, excluding closed-session meetings, and to make them available to the general public. The bill amends Michigan’s 1976 Open Meetings Act, which requires legislative and governing bodies to make certain meetings open to the public in a place that is accessible to everyone.

  The bill requires all public bodies, such as state licensing boards, commission panels and other governing boards — including the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents — to provide either a sound-only capture or audio and video recordings of their meetings. The bill also requires these recordings to be available for at least one year following the date of the meeting in a format that would comply with a Freedom of Information Act request. FOIA provides citizens with the ability to request and access public agency records and information.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Techdirt ☛ John Oliver Explains How Cops Lie To People To Rob Them Of Their Freedom

  God help you if you lie to a cop. We’re not even talking about court, where everyone swears to tell the whole truth, etc. before being subjected to testilying by law enforcement officers.

• The Nation ☛ Wheelchair Users Block the Seoul Subway as the Right Takes Power

  Seoul—April 15 marked the 91st day of a dramatic confrontation at Hyehwa station in the middle of the South Korean capital. Disability rights activists, many of them in wheelchairs, have been staging subway protests to demand accommodations on public transit. And on this day the demonstrators chained themselves to each other and to a portable ladder, reenacting a 2001 protest where activists chained themselves to the subway tracks. Now they shouted, “Pass a budget for disabled citizens! No rights without a budget!” They boarded trains in groups, which requires transit workers to install and uninstall wheelchair ramps, thus causing delays. A few of the activists had recently shaved their heads in public, a monkish ritual of sacrifice.

  Lee Hyoung-sook, who leads a local advocacy group, was among those with her head shaved. At Gyeongbokgung station, she tried to board the train en route to Hyehwa station. Subway workers brought out a ramp so her wheels wouldn’t get stuck in the large gap between the platform and the car. Four more wheelchair users waited their turn to board in other sections of the train. While workers moved their one ramp around to get every wheelchair activist on board, the subway doors kept closing in on them. “Fellow citizens, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience,” Lee told her fellow passengers.

• Techdirt ☛ TSA Now Looking To Make It Impossible For People Wrongly Added To Terrorist Watchlist To Travel On The Ground

  Apparently, it’s not enough to prevent hundreds or thousands of people with “no known affiliation” with terrorist groups from flying — a list that includes children who have yet to enter kindergarten. Even though the TSA long ago admitted (albeit, not publicly) the threat to airline flights was almost nonexistent, it still needs to look like it’s doing something useful to ensure continued funding.

• Common Dreams ☛ Doctors Group Urges Biden to Redress Victims of Trump-Era Family Separation

  Parents forcibly separated from their children during then-President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration crackdown continue to suffer enduring trauma and should be justly compensated by a Biden administration that’s instead defending its predecessor in court, according to a report published Tuesday by a prominent human rights group.

  “Separated families continue to endure significant distress, functional impairment, and mental health disorders.”

• Counter Punch ☛ The Amazon Labor Union Victory – Lessons for All of Labor

• Common Dreams ☛ Sanders to Visit Amazon Workers in NYC on Eve of Second Union Election

  Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the labor movement’s most vocal champions in Congress, is planning to visit Amazon workers in New York City on Sunday as a second Staten Island warehouse prepares to vote on whether to form a union.

  Voting at the 1,500-employee LDJ5 facility, which is located across the street from the JFK8 warehouse that scored a historic union win earlier this month, is set to begin on April 25, a day after Sanders’ (I-Vt.) planned visit.

• Common Dreams ☛ Amid Backlash, Democrats Consider Banning Consultants From Anti-Union Activity

  The Democratic Party’s governing body is reportedly considering a plan to bar its consultants from anti-union activity following backlash over revelations that Amazon hired Global Strategy Group—a prominent Democratic polling firm—to assist its union-busting campaign in New York City.

  “Democrats should ban consultants from not just specifically working on anti-union activity, but also working for actively anti-union corporations.”

• TruthOut ☛ Thanks to Union Pressure, Democrats May Crack Down on Consultants’ Union-Busting

• Common Dreams ☛ Atlanta Apple Store Workers File for Company’s First Union Election in US

  Workers at an Apple store in Atlanta filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday, becoming the first to do so at any of the Silicon Valley giant’s 272 retail locations across the United States.

  “Somebody has got to be the first to do something.”

• The Verge ☛ Apple store workers in Atlanta file for the company’s first union election

  An Apple retail store in Atlanta has filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The workers at the Cumberland Mall store, which includes salespeople, technicians, creatives, and operations specialists, would be represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA). More than 70 percent of the group of about 100 eligible workers signed the union authorization cards, according to a news release — the minimum required is 30 percent.

  If a majority of the workers vote to unionize, the store would be the first unionized Apple store in the US. Their petition now goes for formal review by the NLRB.

• [Old] Wesley Moore ☛ ASCII-centric Usernames

  I’m working on a web-based side project in my spare time. The great thing about side projects is you get to make all the choices and question the common wisdom. Recently I’ve been building out the sign-up flow and I started thinking about usernames—specifically the characters that they may be comprised of.

  I poked around a few sites to see what they did: Twitter, GitHub, Discourse all restrict your username to a mostly ASCII alphanumeric character set, perhaps with -, _, and . thrown in.

• NPR ☛ An autopsy shows Patrick Lyoya was shot in the back of the head by a Michigan cop

  Spitz said he believes the gun was pressed against Lyoya’s head when the officer fired.

  Lyoya was killed after a traffic stop in western Michigan on April 4. He and the white officer physically struggled on the ground before the 26-year-old refugee from Congo was shot.

• BBC ☛ Sudan anger over racist slur caught on air at Bashir trial

  The Arabic word for slave, “abd”, is often used in Sudan to refer to people whose perceived roots are thought to be African instead of Arab – and is a derogatory term used to describe black people.

  The comment, about three hours into the hearing, had nothing to do with the trial being aired on Sudan TV and the YouTube and Facebook pages of the Sudan News Agency (Suna).

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Thanks to Gemini

  Just a thought that came up now that I tried out Gopher a bit myself, and enjoyed browsing around via Lagrange and Kristall, as well as bombadillo and sacc, of course …

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Techdirt ☛ Netflix Pivots From Innovator To Turf Protector As Executives Whine About Password Sharing

  Maybe it’s a weird personal flaw or something, but one of the most fascinating things in business to me is watching one-time pesky disruptors inevitably pivot into powerful turf protectors. As well as all the executive finger-pointing, shenanigans, and denialism that process usually entails.

• Hollywood Reporter ☛ Netflix’s Cratering Stock Drags Down Its Rivals Too

  But on Wednesday, the day after the streamer disclosed it had lost subscribers for the first time in a decade — and forecasted losses in the millions during the second quarter — Netflix’s reputation as a top-performing stock appeared to shatter. The company’s shares tumbled more than 35 percent, and schadenfreude ensued in some entertainment industry corners, with I-told-you-so’s on offer from executives who’d expressed skepticism of the streamer’s seemingly limitless potential for growth.

  But the Netflix hangover is also overhanging other big entertainment and streaming stocks. Competitors like Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount and Roku all dropped between 5 and 8 percent at market close on Wednesday.

• Variety ☛ Obamas to End Exclusive Deal With Spotify

  Higher Ground, President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama’s media company, is ending its exclusive podcast deal with Spotify and is shopping for other partners in the podcasting space, Variety has confirmed.

  The Obamas are exiting their exclusive pact with Spotify, originally inked in 2019, after being frustrated with the company’s exclusive terms — primarily, they want to have their podcast programming distributed as widely as possible, according to two sources familiar with the situation. Higher Ground also has disagreed with Spotify over how many of its shows would feature the former president and first lady, as first reported by reported by Bloomberg.

• PC Mag ☛ Smart Home Company Insteon Shuts Down Servers Without Warning

  Home automation company Insteon appears to have quietly shut down without warning. The abrupt service termination left users with broken smart home setups and plenty of questions.

  A PCMag reader, who has an Insteon hub and several dimmer and appliance plug-in switches, directed us to a forum post on openHAB.org in which multiple people were complaining about losing access to their Insteon hubs, which now display a solid, red LED.

• The Verge ☛ Insteon’s troubles are a smart home tale as old as time

  Revolv, Iris, Insignia, Staples Connect, Wink, and now Insteon and iHome: the graveyard of dead or dying smart home ecosystems that promised so much yet failed to deliver is getting crowded. Smart home company Insteon has apparently turned off its cloud servers for good, according to unconfirmed reports from Stacey on IoT, and device maker iHome has also shut down its servers, confirming to The Verge that its iHome cloud services were terminated on April 2nd.

  This feels like a good time for a reflection on the state of the smart home. Is it all over? Or is this cloud carnage simply necessary to clear the way for a brave new world, one where the smart home is no longer a curiosity but something that actually matters?

  What those companies mentioned above have in common is a reliance on a proprietary cloud server to deliver at least part of the experience customers signed up for. When the company’s business model changed and the cost of running that cloud was deemed unnecessary, consumers were left in the lurch.

• IT Pro ☛ Insteon customers forced to rely on open source fixes after apparent collapse of IoT firm

  First investigated by IoT reporter Stacey Higginbotham, Insteon’s community forums appear to be down and a number of its high-profile executives have removed all reference to their Insteon employment from their LinkedIn profiles.

  IT Pro has contacted Insteon for clarification but did not receive a response.

  Insteon CEO Rob Lilleness has removed all references to his Insteon employment from his profile, nor can any mention of Smartlabs, Insteon’s parent company, be found either.

• Lighting Controls Become Bricks as Smart Home Company Disappears

  But what happens when the lighting failure is not simply an isolated bad driver or a broken trim? What happens when an entire system of lighting products simultaneously goes defunct because the smart lighting manufacturer and gatekeeper to its cloud servers just disappears without notice?

  That’s exactly what happened to an estimated 1 million+ installations of smart home products from Insteon. According to multiple reports, the company’s smart home products stopped working, leaving users with broken smart home setups. And company executives have reportedly scrubbed their LinkedIn profiles, too.

• Insteon is down and may not be coming back

  Is your Insteon smart home system down? I’m getting reports from dozens of Insteon users that as of Friday their smart home hubs have stopped working. So far, none of them have heard from the company, and Insteon’s Twitter account hasn’t been updated since June 2021. I reached out to Rob Lilleness, the president and chairman of Smartlabs, the company that owns Insteon and have not yet heard back.

• With Insteon down, possibly for good, what options do you have for your devices?

  This hasn’t been a good week for the smart home as yet another connected device service seems to have disappeared. It appears anyone using Insteon products has faced a dead-end as the company’s cloud service has gone silent. So too has the company up to this point. What are Insteon device owners and service users to do?

  The first thing is: If you have an Insteon hub, make sure you don’t factory reset it! Doing so will render your Insteon hub useless because it won’t be able to connect to the Insteon servers.

Monopolies

• Patents

  • Counter Punch ☛ Corruption in Drug Patents: Take Away the Money

    As the editorial notes, the worst patent abuses occur with prescription drugs. Drug companies routinely garner dozens of dubious patents for their leading sellers, making it extremely expensive for potential generic competitors to enter the market.  The piece points out that the twelve drugs that get the most money from Medicare have an average of more than fifty patents each.

    The piece suggests some useful reforms, but it misses the fundamental problem. When patents can be worth enormous sums of money, companies will find ways to abuse the system.

• Trademarks

  • Techdirt ☛ ‘Cristal’ Champagne People Opposing Trademark For Oregon Winery’s ‘Crystal Visions’ Wine

    What is it about producing champagne that turns you into a trademark bullying jackwagon? Readers here will know that the Comite Champagne, or CIVC, is purely a trademark bully for champagne producers out of France, policing the rest of the world to ensure nobody dares call anything not produced by one of its constituents anything remotely resembling “champagne.” But this ownership culture that must certainly have been learned from the top down in this micro-industry has also spilled over at the winery level.

• Copyrights

  • Creative Commons ☛ Meet the Judges #CCSharesCulture: Yana Buhrer Tavarnier

    Creative Commons’ Open Culture Remix Art Contest #CCSharesCulture is open until 30 April 2022. So there’s still plenty of time to remix existing art and turn it into something fresh and exciting under the theme “Love Culture? Share Culture!”

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Piracy Poses Concern as Netflix Subscribers Drop for the First Time

    For the first time ever, Netflix has reported a drop in subscriber numbers. The streaming giant lost over 200,000 subscribers during the first quarter of the year and expects to lose two million more in the next quarter. While this drop isn’t blamed on piracy, illegal downloading and streaming pose a serious concern in the competitive streaming business.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ MPA Signs New Anti-Piracy Deal Committing to “Rolling Site-Blocking Regime”

    The Motion Picture Association and the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines have committed to developing a piracy monitoring system and “rolling site-blocking regime” to disrupt access to pirate sites. The promise is to provide a transparent system but according to the US government, a lack of transparency in the Philippines is a barrier to trade.

  • Creative Commons ☛ ‘Towards Better Sharing of Cultural Heritage’ Workshop — Help us develop a CC Open Culture Guide for Policymakers

    This digital workshop will continue the work of the newly released paper “Towards Better Sharing of Cultural Heritage — An Agenda for Copyright Reform”. We will bring together policy experts and open culture enthusiasts from around the world to help shape the first ever CC Open Culture Guide for Policymakers.

  • Creative Commons ☛ Meet the Judges #CCSharesCulture: Laliv Gal

    Creative Commons’ Open Culture Remix Art Contest #CCSharesCulture is open until 30 April 2022. So there’s still plenty of time to remix existing art and turn it into something fresh and exciting under the theme “Love Culture? Share Culture!”