Purism ☛ How to Power Your CS Labs with PureOS


With PureOS and Librem hardware, you can build a premium CS lab without premium licensing fees. Using community-driven freedom-respecting software, schools can take learning beyond the classroom, into students’ homes, and ultimately into the industry.

Let’s learn how Free and Open Software like PureOS is a perfect choice for educational institutions.

Many schools are dependent on proprietary licenses with short lifecycles. As a result, IT staff and teachers are compelled to upgrade at the end of a support contract. It also makes it hard for students to get their hands on the software outside of class.

At the same time, many proprietary offerings from Windows itself to applications like Photoshop will offer discounted prices for students just to get them familiar and trained on these systems that require a lifetime of licensing.

Desktop/Laptop

• Make Use Of ☛ 7 Reasons Why Linux Isn’t Dominating the Desktop OS Market

  
  Linux is free, and that’s enough for it to capture the whole OS market like wildfire. But why hasn’t it happened yet?

  Linux is a free OS that has gained significant popularity over the last 10 years or so. It has improved a lot in terms of interface, features, and services during these years.

  Yet, as of this writing, Windows has the highest market share at 87.56%, followed by macOS at 9.54%. Linux has a market share of just 2.35%, and Chrome OS has 0.41%. Linux is pretty dominant in the server market, but we are just discussing the desktop OS here.

Videos

• Video ☛ A First Look At Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS – Invidious

  Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS has landed! Pop is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that sports a really nice GNOME desktop environment with many custom modifications created by the Pop team. In fact, Pop might be the best GTK-based desktop Linux distro available right now. Move over, Ubuntu. There’s a new king.

• Video ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 Completely Broke AppImages – Invidious

  Ubuntu 22.04 seems like a fairly positive release but it does have a slight issue, Ubuntu decided to stop shipping Fuse2 as a default so AppImages don’t work out of the box but it’s much worse than that.

• Linux Made Simple ☛ Linux Lite 6.0 RC1

  Today we are looking at Linux Lite 6.0 RC1. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.15, based on Ubuntu 22.04, XFCE 4.14, and uses about 600 – 800 MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!

• Video ☛ Linux Lite 6.0 RC1 Run Through – Invidious

  In this video, we are looking at Linux Lite 6.0 RC1. Enjoy!

• Video ☛ Xubuntu 22.04 LTS overview | elegance and ease of use. – Invidious

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

Applications

• Ubuntu 22.04: List of torrent clients

  The BitTorrent protocol is used for peer to peer file sharing and it’s an extremely efficient way of downloading and sharing files with groups of people. While file sharing with BitTorrent is normally associated with video files like movies or TV episodes, it’s also common for Linux developers to offer a torrent download of their distribution.

  Torrents are great for downloading large files because they are split into smaller chunks and downloaded from multiple peers in the torrent “swarm.” Being able to download from a lot of different sources simultaneously should mean that your download bandwidth is completely saturated, resulting in a very quick download of large files. When all of the file chunks are done downloading, the file is reconstructed automatically.

  In order to download something via BitTorrent, you need to have a torrent client installed on your system. On Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, there are quite a few options to choose from. Some have a graphical interface and some only work on the command line, but they all have their advantages and quirks. In this article, we’ll go over some top picks for torrent clients to help you choose the right one for your needs. We’ll also show how to install each of them and open up a .torrent file.

• 5 Best Mastodon Clients for Ubuntu and Other Linux

  Are you planning to leave Twitter and join Mastodon? Use these free and open-source Mastodon clients for your Linux desktop.

Instructionals/Technical

• ID Root ☛ How To Install VMware Workstation Pro on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VMware Workstation Pro on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, VMware Workstation is a widely used virtualization software that permits users to run multiple x86 or x86-64 virtual machines. With a virtual machine application like VMware, you can run another operating system inside your current operating system. Each virtual machine runs an isolated operating system environment, including Windows, or Linux variants, and uses a portion of your system processor and memory.

  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 VMware Workstation Pro virtualization on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• 15 basic Linux networking commands you should know

  Whether you are a system administrator or a person who uses Linux as the daily drive operating system, you might encounter network issues once in a while. Even if you can do some configurations from the Settings window, command-line tools are more powerful and have more features. You can use these tools to easily configure, monitor, secure, and manage networks.

• ByteXD ☛ How to install VirtualBox Guest Additions on Ubuntu

  Oracle VirtualBox is a software that lets you emulate guest systems under a virtual environment with your same hardware.

  VirtualBox guest additions is a set of drivers and applications shipped with VirtualBox that enhance the performance of the guest OS, which includes mouse pointer integration, time synchronization between the host and the guest OS and accelerated video performance, also it adds some features like bidirectional clipboard, drag and drop as well as other useful features.

  This article explains how to install VirtualBox guest additions on Ubuntu.

• How To Upgrade To Pop OS 22.04 LTS – OSTechNix

  Good news for all Pop!_OS users. The latest version of Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS (long-term support) is released on April 25, 2022, just four days after the release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. This is an LTS version, so you will get general support until the release of the next LTS version. Though pop os uses Gnome 42 as the base, system76 decided to go with the “System76 COSMIC UX” interface. In this brief guide, let us discuss what are the major new features in Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS and how to upgrade to Pop OS 22.04 from Pop OS 21.10 and older versions.

• Android Authority ☛ How to take a screenshot on any computer – Android Authority

  Taking a screenshot is a necessary functionality on computers and phones today. However, taking a screenshot on a computer can be a bit more complicated than on a phone. To help you out with that, we’ve made this guide to take a screenshot on Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, and Mac computers.

• How to Install Icinga2 on RHEL, Rocky and AlmaLinux

  Icinga2 is a feature-rich open-source network monitoring and alerting application that is a fork of the Nagios monitoring tool.

  It was built to address the shortcomings of Nagios and introduce new features such as an improved and modern user interface, a REST API for integrating new extensions without the need for making changes to the Icinga core, and additional database connectors.

  Icinga2 monitors the availability of hosts as well as services. Some of these services include SNMP, HTTP, HTTPS, and SSH. It also monitors network devices such as routers and switches.

• nixCraft ☛ How To Search Multiple Words / String Pattern Using grep Command on Bash Shell

• ELinux ☛ Some useful commands for Account migrations in Cpanel server

• Julia Evans ☛ New zine: How DNS Works!

  I mentioned earlier that my friend Marie Claire LeBlanc Flanagan and I built Mess With DNS together in December. That was really fun, so Marie and I decided to work together on this zine too – we paired on it for about an hour every weekday for almost 4 months. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have finished the zine without her.

• Ubuntu 22.04 Change login screen background

  If you are like most users, you will want to customize your Ubuntu 22.04 system to make it feel more personalized. One of the most obvious ways to do this is to change your desktop wallpaper. You can also take it one step further and change the background of your login screen.

  In this tutorial, we will go over the step by step instructions to change the login screen background on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish GNOME desktop. This will involve the download of a Bash script to allow us the ability to change it.

• Things to install on Ubuntu 22.04

  This tutorial explores various software that you can install on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. There is a variety of things that can be installed on Ubuntu 22.04, hence we have divided all the software into two categories: Ubuntu user and DevOps.

  We not only provide you with ideas of what can be installed but also link to tutorials that take you through the installation process.

• Ubuntu 22.04 GPG error: The following signatures couldn’t be verified

  The Ubuntu 22.04 GPG error: The following signatures couldn’t be verified is the most common error when attempting to include third party package repositories to the apt package manager. The GPG error should rather be treated as a warning against potential package installation from unknown sources. Therefore, the GPG error message prompts the user to verify and manually import the third party signature belonging to relevant package developer.

  In this tutorial, you will see how to remedy this error so that you can install the software from your intended PPA repository on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.

• Ubuntu 22.04 list services

  Many processes run as services managed by systemd on your Ubuntu 22.04 system. In this tutorial, you will learn how to list and change state for systemd services and unit files on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux Server/Desktop.

• Ubuntu 22.04 NTP server

  NTP stands for Network Time Protocol and is used for clock synchronization across multiple computers. An NTP server is responsible for keeping a set of computers in sync with each other. On a local network, the server should be able to keep all client systems to within a single millisecond of each other.

  Such a configuration would be necessary if, for example, the systems needed to start or stop a task in unison at a precise time. In this article, we’ll show you how to configure an NTP server on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish and how to configure a client system to sync its system time with said server.

• Install Microsoft fonts on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Desktop

  In this tutorial, we will perform the installation of Microsoft’s core TTF fonts on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Desktop. This includes fonts such as Andale Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Verdana, and Webdings. These fonts have been around for many years and see constant use in all sorts of publications, so they are great to have as an option on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.

• How to Burn ISO to DVD on Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop

  If you have an ISO file, such as Linux installation media, it is possible to create a DVD media from the file. In this tutorial, you will learn how to burn an ISO image to DVD using Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux desktop.

• How to install Kubernetes on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux

  Kubernetes is leading software in container orchestration. Kubernetes works by managing clusters, which is simply a set of hosts meant for running containerized applications. In order to have a Kubernetes cluster, you need a minimum of two nodes – a master node and a worker node. Of course, you can expand the cluster by adding as many worker nodes as you need.

  In this tutorial, we’re going to deploy a Kubernetes cluster consisting of two nodes, both of which are running Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. Having two nodes in our cluster is the most basic configuration possible, but you’ll be able to scale that configuration and add more nodes if you wish.

• Configure sudo without password on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux

  Are you tired of having to provide your administrator password when you use sudo? In this tutorial you will learn how to configure sudo without the password on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux. This means that the sudo command will not prompt you to enter password hence rendering your sudo command completely without a password.

Games

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Loop Hero gets controller support, looking good on Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

  Loop Hero, the fantastic deck-builder from Four Quarters and Devolver Digital now has controller support, making it work even better on the Steam Deck.

  A big update is on the way too, which they say stalled around the 80% mark but work on that will continue again as almost “all graphics and code are finished, mostly texts/sounds/balance remain”. Until then though, this small update to work with controllers / gamepads is a nice addition to an already great game.

  On the Steam Deck, Valve gave it a Playable rating previously but this should bump it right up to Verified status as the control system and icons were the issue which is now solved. Feels really good on Deck too, and the developer solved a problem I reported very quickly.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Classic Sonic games being delisted to make way for Sonic Origins | GamingOnLinux

  A sad day for preservation and emulation, as SEGA has announced that they will be delisting the classic Sonic games.

  Why? Well, they have Sonic Origins coming out on June 23. So they will be delisting Sonic the Hedgehog 1, 2, Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Sonic CD on May 20. If that alarms you, then you might want to grab them from the SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics collection (you can buy them individually). That whole collection supports Linux too, and comes with roms, which it appears Sonic Origins will not (on both counts).

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Dune: Spice Wars is out in Early Access, works on Linux and Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

  The battle for Spice has begun on the sandy planet, with Dune: Spice Wars from Shiro Games and Funcom officially out on Steam in Early Access. Good news for fans of 4x RTS games, as it appears to work great with Steam Play Proton out of the box with no additional tweaking needed. This has been tested on both my desktop with NVIDIA and my Steam Deck with AMD.

  “Conquer Arrakis through political maneuvering, military dominance, sabotage, and wise resource allocation. The spice must flow, but as you struggle to wrest it from the grip of opposing factions, the planet itself threatens with coriolis storms and colossal sandworms. Lead the honorable Atreides, brutal Harkonnen, opportunistic Smugglers, or survivalist Fremen, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Specialize your faction by appointing various iconic characters as your councilors.”

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • 9to5Google ☛ Android 13 removes all haptic feedback in ‘Silent mode’ – 9to5Google

  • The Verge ☛ Android 13’s beta is no longer just for developers – The Verge

  • XDA ☛ Moto G100 starts receiving stable Android 12 update in select regions

  • Phone Arena ☛ Nokia C200 Android 12 smartphone now available in the US for less than $80 – PhoneArena

  • Ford delays switch to Android Automotive until 2023 | Ars Technica

  • Gizmodo ☛ Google Play Data Safety Section Says How Android Uses User Data

  • HowTo Geek ☛ How to Merge Duplicate Contacts on Android

  • Kim Kommando ☛ Android bug causing phone battery drain – Here’s how to fix it

  • Phone Arena ☛ 5G Android smartphone sales: Samsung’s the undisputed leader – PhoneArena

  • Plasma Mobile Gear 22.04 is Out

    The Plasma Mobile team is happy to announce the release of Plasma Mobile’s updates for March-April 2022.

    Devin worked on the website and updated the homepage design, site pages, content style, as well as the screenshots page. He also created some developer documentation pages, useful for helping onboard new contributors to the Plasma stack and tools.

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ KDE Plasma 5.25 Adds a Cool Customisation Feature

    Whatever you want to do chances are KDE Plasma has a setting, switch, or a toggle for it (and if it doesn’t someone in the community has likely created one).

    This is as true for aesthetics as it is core functionality.

    This week the desktop picked up a new “auto accent” colour feature that’ll ship as part of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.25 release — and it bolsters this desktop’s burgeoning beautification credentials.

    Android and its Material You aesthetic uses dynamic colour to accentuate the user interface (and certain apps) that’s derived from a phone’s wallpaper image. It’s a small-sounding feature that has a big impact on the system, helping it feel more personal, more expressive, and more unique.

  • 9to5Linux ☛ KDE Releases Plasma Mobile Gear 22.04 with Lots of Goodies for Linux Phone Users

    
    Plasma Mobile Gear 22.04 is here with lots of goodies for Linux mobile users, starting with many improvements to the Shell, including the ability to switch homescreens, which paves the way to support for third-party homescreens in the KDE store.

    The Homescreen also received a new grow/shrink animation to make app icons feel more reactive to user interaction, and bold text for apps to improve readability. On the other hand, the Task Switcher received a new feature that lets users sort tasks by “when they were opened” instead of alphabetically.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Its FOSS ☛ Hands on With GNOME’s New Text Editor for Linux Users

    
    If you are a regular reader here on It’s FOSS, you might have read about GNOME’s plan to replace Gedit with their own text editor.

    Yes, GNOME has a brand-new text editor and it is called, well, Text Editor.

    While Gedit is still the default, this new editor has made an entry with the release of GNOME 42. I am using Ubuntu 22.04 and it is available to install from the repositories.

    Not exactly a brand-new feature of Ubuntu 22.04, this new editor is available to install in the latest Ubuntu LTS version and perhaps other distributions using GNOME 42.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Raspberry Digital Signage 18 released – Binary Emotions

    Raspberry Digital Signage is an operating system designed for digital signage installations on the Raspberry Pi: it displays a full-screen browser view restricted to a specified resource. It shows web resources from Internet, local network or local folders (so you can use the Pi itself as the source webserver).

    Raspberry Digital Signage comes with the latest Chromium builds (featuring HTML5 capabilities), so you can display more attractive resources, more easily.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Implement DevOps, agile, and SRE practices with new transformational learning curriculum

    The evolution of technology is accelerating like never before. Individuals must remain ahead of the learning curve to ensure they have the skills and tools needed to achieve success throughout their company’s digital transformation journey. Through strategic partnerships with our customers, Red Hat has built best practices around people, process and tools to match the needs of our customers’ current and future growth.

    Red Hat Training has consistently evolved our curriculum in tandem with the changing needs of our customers. Our learning portfolio has traditionally focused on product enablement, with a goal to teach customers how to operate our software.

    Recently, we launched a new category of courses aimed at transformational learning. This new curriculum sources real-world insights from our field sales and services engagements, with the intention of demonstrating how adoption of open culture, site reliability engineering and devops breeds innovation.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Even more to look forward to at Red Hat Summit 2022

    Every year, the main stage at Red Hat Summit overflows with inspirational, educational and actionable content, industry-shaping news, and innovative practices from our customers and partners. From hybrid cloud, containers and cloud-native app platforms to management, automation and more, speakers from around the world, across industries, sectors join us to share how they’re using open tools to build better solutions—for themselves and their customers.

  • PR Newswire ☛ 2022 Call for Code Global Challenge Urges Developers to Create Solutions that Accelerate Sustainability and Take On Climate Change

  • A win for open is a win for all: Interview with The Open Organization

    The Open Organization is a Red Hat-supported community project that is dedicated to exploring how open principles change the ways we work, manage and lead. We were fortunate to get to speak with Bryan Behrenshausen, Community Architect for the Open Organization in the Open Source Program Office at Red Hat, about this inspiring project and get his perspective on all things open source.

  • The Register UK ☛ Red Hat uncorks Application Foundations for cloud-native development

    Red Hat Application Foundations, a set of software services for organizations developing container-based applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, is out.

    Application Foundations builds on Red Hat’s OpenShift, which has evolved into a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for development and deployment based around containers and Kubernetes.

    This adds to the existing suite of services with the goal of providing a toolkit for integrating application and data services as part of an infrastructure modernization strategy, Red Hat said.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu ☛ LXD 5.0 LTS is now available

    
    The stable release of LXD, the system container and VM manager, is now available. LXD 5.0 is the fourth LTS release for LXD, and will be supported for 5 years, until June 2027. LXD 5.0 comes preinstalled with Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS released last week, and for Ubuntu Desktop users, it’s only a couple of commands away. This release significantly steps up LXD’s abilities in comparison to LXD 4.0 LTS, especially when operating in clustered environments.

  • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Switches Back to X.Org with NVIDIA Driver

    Ubuntu 22.04 LTS now defaults to X.Org with NVIDIA proprietary driver as requested by NVIDIA.

  • Linux Magazine ☛ Pop!_OS 22.04 Has Officially Been Released

    System76 has officially released the latest iteration of Pop!_OS. This time around, the operating system is based on Ubuntu 22.04 and includes plenty of improvements. Although the changes found in 22.04 aren’t nearly as dramatic as those in past releases, this new version still offers plenty to get excited about.

    The Pop!_OS COSMIC desktop is based on GNOME 42, but has been stripped down to align with the vision System76 has with its desktop. This means the look and feel of the desktop will remain fairly consistent with what you experienced since COSMIC was first introduced. In fact, although GNOME 42 migrated away from Gedit and GNOME Terminal, Pop!_OS is sticking with those two apps for the time being.

  • Ubuntu 22.10 Code Name Revealed – “Kinetic Kudu”

    A list of known details of the upcoming Ubuntu 22.10 release and its official code name.

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Gets First Kernel Security Update, Three Vulnerabilities Patched

    Dubbed as the Jammy Jellyfish, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS arrived last week on April 21st as Canonical’s 9th long-term support (LTS) series, which means that it will be supported with software and security updates for the next five years, until April 2027.

    The Jammy Jellyfish release is also powered by a long-term supported kernel, namely Linux 5.15 LTS, and today it was updated from the version available in the live/installation image to fix three security flaws.

  • The Register UK ☛ Ubuntu Unity and Ubuntu Cinnamon hit 22.04 too • The Register

    Two unofficial Ubuntu remixes came out on the same day as the official flavors: Ubuntu Unity, a 12-year-old wunderkind’s revival of what used to be the official Ubuntu desktop, and Ubuntu Cinnamon, which is Linux Mint’s flagship desktop environment.

    Ubuntu Cinnamon is the older of the two and first appeared in 2019, while Ubuntu Unity came out in May 2020, soon after the release of Ubuntu 20.04.

    Ubuntu Unity was created by youngster Rudra Sawaswat, and has the macOS-like desktop that was Ubuntu’s standard offering from 2011 until the company pensioned it off in 2017.

    To be fair, this was not the first unofficial remix to keep Unity going. That was UMix from TeejeeTech, whose first release was based on Ubuntu 18.04.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • My complete PinePhone setup

    In this extremely long blog post I will write about my complete PinePhone setup. This is probably not really interesting for most people, but for PinePhone-users, there may be some gems somewhere in the text. At first, the basic software-side will be described, and based on that all the applications I use daily are listed, each with one or two paragraphs about what they are doing, what is good and bad with them. Afterwards my future journey to move from my Android-phone to the PinePhone will be described, following by a short conclusion. The conclusion might also be interesting for people that do not like to read all the parts of this post.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • LWN ☛ LineageOS 19 released

    
    Version 19 of the Android-based LineageOS distribution has been released.
    With that said, we have been working extremely hard since Android 12’s release last October to port our features to this new version of Android. Thanks to our hard work adapting to Google’s fairly large changes in Android 11, we were able to rebase our changes onto Android 12 much more efficiently. This led to a lot of time to spend on cool new features, as well as adapt our additions to Android 12’s new Material You design language!
    Beyond the move to Android 12, this release includes improvements to a lot of apps, a new setup wizard, and more. Less happily, this release has had to leave a lot of older devices behind; a device must be able to run a 4.9 or newer kernel to be able to run LineageOS 19.

  • Wow, LineageOS 19!

  • TechRadar ☛ Nokia G21 budget Android phone comes with a long battery life | TechRadar

  • Android Police ☛ Android 12-based LineageOS 19 is here with all the features you love

  • Android Police ☛ How to take a screenshot in Android Auto

  • How to find your Android Version on your Device – Phandroid

  • Android Headlines ☛ How To Disable Automatic App Updates On Android

  • 5 Awesome Action Games for Android – Phandroid

  • 9to5Google ☛ Ford delays Android Automotive systems to late 2023 – 9to5Google

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Michel Alexandre Salim ☛ Goodbye Twitter: all in on the Fediverse

  Quitting cold turkey is hard, but if you’re like me and down to mostly reading certain people whose only presence is Twitter, Nitter is a Twitter front-end that let you read Twitter without maintaining your own account, or being tracked by Twitter.

  There is a nice list of bots on Awesome Mastodon that automatically post news, and BirdsiteLIVE lets you bridge any Twitter account to ActivityPub.

• Linux Journal ☛ Self-Hosted Static Homepages: Dashy Vs. Homer | Linux Journal

  Dashy is a 100% free and open-source, self-hosted, highly customizable homepage app for your server that has a strong focus on privacy. It offers an easy-to-use visual editor, widgets, status checking, themes, and lots more features. Below are the features that you can avail yourself of with Dashy.

• Medevel ☛ Best SEO Tools For Linux In 2022

  We have analyzed various professional services. This guide will learn about the best SEO software programs for Linux. This operating system is very popular among SEO professionals. We have made a list of desktop and online tools for search engine promotion for this operating system version. However, most proposed programs will also work on Windows or macOS. Therefore, you will not feel any limitations in the choice of SEO software, regardless of the computer system used.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Absolute Disgust: TransUnion’s site locks your credit report account if you use Firefox-based browsers.

      So I was looking over my credit report again yesterday, and now TransUnion locks your account and says “suspicious activity detected” if you use a Firefox-based Web browser.

      I tried dropping off the VPN, clearing cookies, and even lying about my user agent to all TransUnion domains, but the person on “support” finally got aggravated and said I should be using Google Chrome.

      So I patiently explained that Google Chrome is proprietary software, it spies on the user, and I don’t use Chrome to browse on any device I own because I shouldn’t have to. And that basically it’s turned into the new Internet Explorer.

      In the end, I installed Ungoogled Chromium from FlatHub, and copied over my username and password into it, and after he removed the account lock again, it let me log in using Ungoogled Chromium.

      Now I have to keep an entire browser around to watch my credit score and dispute anything negative that hits it that I disagree with.

      I’ve noticed that many collections agencies fail to respond to disputes. In fact, my TransUnion score is the highest of all because it tends to happen there more that you win by default. The entire delinquent car account that went to bankruptcy fell off TransUnion even though they responded to the other two bureaus.

• Content Management Systems (CMS)

  • WordPress 6.0 Beta 3 – WordPress News

    WordPress 6.0 Beta 3 is now available for testing!

    This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you test Beta 3 on a test server and site.

• Programming/Development

  • Java

    • GraalVM CE 22.1

Bike Rides, Music and Books

As we often do on Sundays we loaded the kids in the bike trailer and rode to our favorite brewery. The reason we like this brewery so much is well, the beer is good which is important but they are also kid friendly. Not just tolerates bringing your kids but actually welcome people bringing their kids. They have an inexpensive meal for kids on the menu and free watermelon slices for kids. They also have little packs of toys they will give to your kids if you ask. A while back we were there when it was a slow day and had a chat with the owner and learned that he has two kids a little bit older than ours and that this was a concerted effort he wanted to make when opening his own brewery. Pretty cool guy! The other thing we like about it is they have nice big outdoor patio area with good shade. With COVID and having young children that cannot yet get vaccinated this is pretty much the only way we feel comfortable going out anywhere. Having a large outdoor area where we can have our space. This particular day they were having a youth concert event with a bunch of bands made up of kids from grade school to high school playing alternative and rock music. The ride is a little over 20 miles round trip and the riding portion is always a nice time for my wife and I to get some one on one time to just chat about life together.

AAA is sliding fast. It takes them ~5 hours to respond to a roadside call and they want to tow you to their overpriced repair shops. – BaronHK’s Rants

AAA, or the American Automobile Association, has been around for a while.

I’m a member. Like most members, I’m mostly a member because of the roadside assistance plan. They can help you out with jump starts, lockouts, out of gas, and towing. If you have a dead car battery, they can just bring it out to where you broke down and sell it to you there and install it.

But they have prioritized keeping their costs down over quality of service, and this has led to a very low priority on the list of service calls to their partners.

They’ve also gotten into the car repair industry with a chain of their own car repair shops called “AAA Car Care Plus”. I made the mistake of letting them tow me to one a few years back when I was having trouble with the shift interlock on my Crown Victoria and couldn’t get it to shift out of park when I was in Skokie, Illinois.

They said if I got a repair done there I would save like 20% as a AAA member. What they didn’t mention, of course, is that they have like, fake high repair prices for non-members and even after the member discount, you’re paying more than if you had them tow you to a dealership.

You’re Sirius? How is SiriusXM still in business? – BaronHK’s Rants

When I had the 2008 Buick in the shop the other day they gave me a free 90 day trial of SiriusXM that you don’t need to worry about forgetting to cancel because it just requires a radio ID and then refreshing your radio.

So I’ve been listening in the car, and the programming isn’t bad. It doesn’t have those annoying commercials you get on FM. The station usually comes in clearly unless you go under a bridge for a moment.

So that’s all good.

What’s bad is that the price is very extravagant and I already have almost all of these songs that play on their 70s, 80s, and 90s, New Wave, Nu Metal, and even the Frank Sinatra and Classic Rock channels.

The Register UK ☛ USA’s plan to decouple its tech with China lacks a strategy – report

The USA’s policy of decoupling its technology industries from China lacks a strategy, a theory of success, and an understanding of how to achieve its ill-defined goals, according to a new paper by Jon Bateman from the thinktank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP).

“The United States cannot afford simply to muddle through technological decoupling, one of the most consequential global trends of the early twenty-first century,” wrote Bateman, a former senior intelligence analyst, policy adviser and speechwriter at the US Department of Defense, in the document, titled “US China Technological ‘Decoupling’, a Strategy and Policy Framework.”

Hardware

• The Register UK ☛ Arm to IoT devs: Go faster with our pre-made chip subsystems • The Register

  The belief that IoT would become Arm’s main growth engine never played out as owner SoftBank Group thought it would, but the British chip designer is still doing what it can to keep IoT developers hooked with a bevy of new offerings meant to significantly speed up development.

  On Tuesday, Arm announced its first major expansion of the Arm Total Solutions for IoT program, which consists of pre-integrated subsystem designs that take out the guesswork for chip designers, the Arm Virtual Hardware cloud service for testing Arm-based devices without needing physical silicon, and several software components developers can reuse across multiple devices.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• A pint of cream is a lot for one person

  Cream is useful. Trouble is, I seem to have some difficulty finishing it off.

  Here, heavy whipping cream:

  * comes, at minimum, in pints (473 ml)
  * says that you need to finish it off in a week after opening it

  However, there are 1,550 calories in the entire pint. If I were to finish it all off in a week, I’d be eating 221 calories/day of cream.

  Luckily, the cream I have seems to be OK after a week and a half. I’m not quite sure how I’ll polish it off before week’s end, though.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft fixes Point of Sale bug that delayed Windows 11 startup for 40 minutes

    A fresh Windows 11 patch slipped out overnight as an optional update, but contains an impressively long list of fixes for Microsoft’s flagship operating system.

    One bug addressed in KB5012643 could leave Point of Sale terminals hanging for up to 40 minutes during startup.

    The content of the release, 22000.652, had previously shown up as 22000.651 in the Release Preview ring of the Windows Insider program earlier in April.

    Microsoft did not specify the Point of Sale element in that release, simply stating: “We fixed an issue that delays OS startup by approximately 40 minutes.”

  • The Register UK ☛ US Army may be about to ‘waste’ up to $22b on Microsoft HoloLens [Ed: This is corruption. Biden is in effect giving Microsoft a bailout.]

    The US Army could end up wasting much as $22 billion in taxpayer cash if soldiers aren’t actually interested in using, or able to use as intended, the Microsoft HoloLens headsets it said it would purchase, a government watchdog has warned.

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • FOSSLife ☛ Google Submits Istio to CNCF

          Google and the Istio Steering Committee have submitted the Istio service mesh project for consideration as an incubating project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

          The Istio project, says Chen Goldberg in the announcement, is a critical element of cloud-native infrastructure, along with Kubernetes and Knative, which are already part of CNCF. “Istio is the last major component of organizations’ Kubernetes ecosystem to sit outside of the CNCF, and its APIs are well-aligned to Kubernetes.”

  • Security

    • LWN ☛ Security updates for Tuesday

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg), Fedora (htmldoc, moby-engine, plantuml, and zchunk), Oracle (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, and kernel), Red Hat (java-1.8.0-openjdk), Scientific Linux (java-1.8.0-openjdk), SUSE (kernel, mutt, SUSE Manager Client Tools, and xen), and Ubuntu (barbican and git).

    • The Register UK ☛ Homeland Security bug bounty program reveals 122 holes • The Register

      The first bug bounty program by America’s Homeland Security has led to the discovery and disclosure of 122 vulnerabilities, 27 of which were deemed critical.

      In total, more than 450 security researchers participated in the Hack DHS program and identified weaknesses in “select” external Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) systems. At the end of the hack-a-thon, the department awarded these carefully vetted bug hunters $125,600 total for finding and disclosing the flaws, which is relatively cheap considering, for instance, Google has paid out millions for similar bugs. More cash is set to come from Homeland Security, we note.

      “The enthusiastic participation by the security researcher community during the first phase of Hack DHS enabled us to find and remediate critical vulnerabilities before they could be exploited,” DHS Chief Information Officer Eric Hysen said in a statement.

    • Reproducible Builds: Supporter spotlight: Google Open Source Security Team (GOSST)

      The Reproducible Builds project relies on several projects, supporters and sponsors for financial support, but they are also valued as ambassadors who spread the word about our project and the work that we do.

      This is the fourth instalment in a series featuring the projects, companies and individuals who support the Reproducible Builds project. If you are a supporter of the Reproducible Builds project (of whatever size) and would like to be featured here, please let get in touch with us at contact@reproducible-builds.org.

    • The Register UK ☛ Coca-Cola probes pro-Kremlin gang’s claims of 161GB data theft [Ed: Seems like another victim of Microsoft Windows]

      Coca-Cola confirmed it’s probing a possible network intrusion after the Stormous cybercrime gang claimed it stole 161GB of data from the beverage giant.

      “We are aware of this matter and are investigating to determine the validity of the claim,” Coca-Cola communications global vice president Scott Leith told The Register on Tuesday. “We are coordinating with law enforcement.”

    • The Register UK ☛ DDoS attacks at an all-time-high in Q1 2022, says Kaspersky [Ed: Microsoft’s stuff is notoriously susceptible to DDOS if you cannot yet find the back doors]

      DDoS attacks, as Reg readers know, are designed to disrupt network resources of businesses and public services. They are particularly nasty when compromised systems are depended upon by the wider population.

    • The Register UK ☛ India inks tech pact with EU – only the US has the same deal [Ed: The idea of outsourcing security to another (foreign) territory is ludicrous to say the least.]

      India’s government and the European Union have signed up to create a “Trade and Technology Council” – an entity the EU has previously only created to enhance its relationship with the United States.

      Details of the Council’s scope of operations have not been revealed, but the EU/US version of the entity works on standards for emerging technologies, tech supply chains (including semiconductors), information security, data governance, preventing misuse of technology when it threatens security and human rights, and SME access to and use of digital technologies.

Defence/Aggression

• From the Arab Spring to Russian censorship: a decade of internet blackouts and repression – Rest of World

  In recent years, there have been 935 internet shutdowns worldwide, and censorship has worsened. Here’s how authoritarian regimes found an off switch for dissent, using deep packet inspection, DDoS and total blackouts.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Trust ☛ Content takedowns on social media facilitate censorship in Asia

  Rules introduced in Vietnam, India, Bangladesh and Indonesia over the past year enforce shorter and stricter time frames for tech companies to remove content, to the detriment of people’s right to freedom of expression and information.

  [...]

  Last week, reports emerged that Vietnam will soon introduce rules pressuring social media platforms to “immediately” take down content that harms national security, remove illegal live-streams within three hours, and other illegal content within 24 hours.

• The Register UK ☛ Elon Musk’s Twitter mega-takeover likely imminent

Civil Rights/Policing

• Causation & Ethics

  We determine causes by Ethics, rather than any type of science.

  [...]

  People point and blame things which they want to change. The man blames the vodka in order to not blame himself. His friends have a similar tactic, but offer a tantalizing solution which promises to stop many fights in the future. The barman just wants to not deal with that guy again.

  We have no hope here of isolating a ‘real’ cause, or even a complete list of causes. If we want to list the complete causes, we would have to start with the Big Bang. Backing up a bit, and focussing only on things which affect the bar-fight, we still find innumerable causes. The song on the radio that morning could conceivably have affected the outcome, or some piece of news which was later discussed. Despite the fact that any of these things could have stopped the fight by not happening, we cannot take them seriously as causes, because we cannot blame them, and causation is all about moral responsibility.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Twitter: A Few Unsorted Thoughts

  Many on the political left are very concerned about Twitter’s purchase by South African businessman Elon Musk. I’ve seen several articles and posts from prominent sources detailing how to close one’s Twitter account or bracing for an anticipated flood or right-wing content. Some people are already leaving the platform, and others who had previously left are starting to come back.

  I stopped using Twitter in early 2018, and I closed my account in early 2020. My primary reasons for leaving were twofold: the constant rush of politically-driven negativity, and the ubiquitous tracking and violations of privacy. (Twitter is not as bad as Facebook on this front, but I find their terms of service to be chilling regardless.) I have no idea how political discourse will change on the platform, if at all, but I seriously doubt that a change of leadership will cause the tracking and surveillance to end. I thus have no intention of returning to Twitter myself.

• Elon Musk and Twitter

  What I think Elon Musk wants out of Twitter is the user graph. It’s not some ideological play about re-weighting the reach of particular ideas or speakers.

  Twitter constitutes a social graph of everyone-who’s-anyone in the English-speaking world. It increases the speed with which the elite generally adopt the same position on each issue, the way a flock of birds or school of fish appear to turn as one, despite there being no leader or co-ercion. But as well as this social graph, Twitter also mints a particular form of status by conferring blue checkmarks on favoured individuals.

  Musk’s few gnomic announcements about his plans for Twitter include a reference to authenticating the humans. Now this is taken by many, on different sides of the debate, as being anti-bot: reducing the role of covert automated participation in Twitter is seen as a good thing, and not just by establishment Left and establishment Right figures, but even by the radical fringes, since pretty much *everyone* loses from the astroturfing and feels victimised by it.

Monopolies

• The Register UK ☛ FTC probes Broadcom for anti-competitive behavior again – reports

  Chipmaker Broadcom is reportedly back under investigation with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regarding complaints it is illegally forcing exclusivity agreements with customers.

  According to The Intercept, Broadcom is justifying the actions by claiming they are necessary thanks to supply-chain issues. The FTC is allegedly in the early days of gathering information, doing so by taking testimony and collating documents.

  The report comes less than 6 months after the FTC issued an order [PDF, since deleted from the FTC's website] to curb anticompetitive behavior from the company, including exclusivity agreements or retaliation against customers who shop around for their chips.

• Copyrights

  • AccessNow ☛ EU’s political deal on the Digital Services Act step in the right direction, but some questions remain – Access Now

    The future of the EU content moderation playbook, the Digital Services Act (DSA), was decided last Friday, April 22, when EU co-legislators reached an agreement on the final text which is not yet public. While Access Now welcomes the human rights-centric framework, the brash inclusion of the Crisis Response Mechanism, and the exclusion of safeguards to encryption and the prevention of legally-mandated decision making leave gaps that must be addressed.

    Access Now has provided a series of recommendations to EU co-legislators and closely monitored the process of finalising the law since 2020. Without a doubt, the final deal on the DSA is a step in the right direction.

    “After a lot of back and forth, decision-makers have agreed on a DSA that puts people first. The human rights-centric framework will provide a clearly defined set of due diligence responsibilities for companies — placing the responsibility on the shoulders of those profiting, not on everyday people simply using these platforms, to create safe spaces to communicate,” said Eliška Pírková, Europe Policy Analyst and Global Freedom of Expression Lead at Access Now. “The final text of the DSA could be more ambitious. Many progressive measures, such as clear safeguards for end-to-end encryption in communications were either ignored or weakened during negotiations.”

Audiocasts/Shows

• Easy Steam Installation – MakuluLinux

  Easy steam installation on Makulu with Proton Support. just a few clicks …

• Tux Digital ☛ Destination Linux 275: Save The Floppy in Jill’s Treasure Hunt – TuxDigital

  This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’ve got a community favorite. One of our most requested segments is back with Jill’s Treasure Hunt! Jill will go into her computer museum and show us a piece of amazing hardware she has hidden away. Then we’re going to discuss whether or not it is time to let go of DuckDuckGo? Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.

• Late Night Linux – Episode 174

  A new Ubuntu LTS is here and it’s mostly great, the Steam Deck is a huge success, Brave proves that nuance isn’t dead, people flock to Mastodon, KDE Korner, and more.

Kernel Space

• Dev Class ☛ Asahi Linux, plus better VM support, makes Apple Silicon more compelling for devs

  In November 2020 Apple introduced the M1 processor – an Arm-based chip marking the beginning of the transition from Intel CPUs to Apple Silicon. Apple M1 machines can be good value despite the premium price if they save developers time, and the combination of excellent performance and high efficiency – leading to long battery life for those on a laptop – is a strong attraction.

• Graphics Stack

  • A driver on the GPU – Bas Nieuwenhuizen – Open Source GPU Drivers

    The title might be a bit hyperbolic here, but we’re indeed exploring a first step in that direction with radv. The impetus here is the ExecuteIndirect command in Direct3D 12 and some games that are using it in non-trivial ways. (e.g. Halo Infinite)

    [...]

    This functionality happens to be a subset of VK_NV_device_generated_commands and hence I’ve been working on implementing a subset of that extension on radv. Unfortunately, we can’t really give the firmware a “extended indirect draw call” and execute stuff, so we’re stuck generating command buffers on the GPU.

    The way the extension works, the application specifies a command “signature” on the CPU, which specifies that for each draw call the application is going to update A, B and C. Then, at runtime, the application provides a buffer providing the data for A, B and C for each draw call. The driver then processes that into a command buffer and then executes that into a secondary command buffer.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ AMD driver work ongoing to help Halo Infinite on Linux and Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

    Developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen has a new blog post up about some of the work going into the radv AMD GPU driver on Linux, and they’re taking steps towards doing “A driver on the GPU” which should help Halo Infinite get working.

    One of the problems with Halo Infinite on Linux and Steam Deck with Proton, is to do with the Direct3D 12 to Vulkan translation layer VKD3D-Proton and how a certain part of Direct3D 12 is being used in a “non-trivial” way. Getting that properly supported sounds like it has been difficult.

Instructionals/Technical

• Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to Determine MIME Type of a File in Linux

  If you are a Linux user whose intuitions are strongly allied with web technology then the concept of MIME types should be imprinted in your DNA.

  MIME types help identify file formats and formatted contents during their transmission across the internet or any other user-defined network.

  While on a web browser and you receive a webserver-sent file via HTTP before the web browser chooses a suitable method for displaying the file, the web browser will first consult the MIME types to determine the file type it is about to handle.

• Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to Shuffle File Lines Using Sort, Shuf, and Awk Commands

  Since it is already established that the Linux operating system is the jack of all computing trades through the numerous Linux command line tips and articles you have come across on this site.

  It is time to further grow the reputation of this operating system. As part of Linux file management, we will be looking at ways to shuffle lines in a file residing under a Linux operating system environment.

  Shuffling lines in a file on a Linux operating system environment can take two approaches. Under approach one, you might be looking to shuffle/rearrange the lines in a targeted file to appear in a specific required order. In such a case, a sort command is called upon.

• Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to List Shared Libraries Used by Executables in Linux

  Under a Linux operating system environment, the binary executables associated with the applications/programs you wish to run are directly linked with shared libraries loaded at runtime.

  As a curious and evolving Linux user, you will be tempted to get an idea about these shared libraries involved/linked with the binary executables you are running during a normal program startup.

  This article will walk us through several approaches to find out all shared libraries used by executables in Linux.

• Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to Join Multiple Lines into One in a File in Linux

  In today’s tutorial on Linux file management, we will be looking at valid approaches to joining multiple lines within a file into a single line. By the end of this article, you will have added some computing milestones to your Linux file management experience.

• Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to Print Duplicated Lines in a Text File in Linux

  Once you enter the Linux operating system domain, the list of computing possibilities through the Linux command line environment will seem unending. It’s simply because the more you use Linux, the more you want to learn and this craving takes you through countless learning opportunities.

  In this tutorial, we are going to look at counting and printing duplicate lines in a text file under a Linux operating system environment. This tutorial module is part of Linux file management.

  The Linux command line or terminal environment is not new to processing input text files. It is so proficient in such operations that it is yet to encounter a worthy challenge under text file processing.

• UNIX Cop ☛ Multipass Virtual Machines by using Ansible

  A Multipass virtual machine should be created according to instructions in the article Multipass virtual machine and authenticating using a private key . Note where the file containing the private key is stored.

  The second prerequisite is Ansible. Instructions on how to install Ansible can be found in the official Ansible documentation.

• UNIX Cop ☛ Kubernetes cluster using K3S with Canonical’s Multipass

  This is another Kubernetes-related notebook entry in which I will document the procedure for setting up a Kubernetes cluster using K3S in virtual machines created with Canonical’s Multipass. In addition, I will describe how to configure kubectl, the Kubernetes command-line cluster management tool to manage the K3S cluster from outside of the virtual machines in which the cluster will run.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install UNRAR on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – LinuxCapable

  UNRAR is widely known and used amongst Windows users. RAR files are much smaller archives and compress better than ZIP for most files by compressing files “together,” saving more space. UNRAR does not come pre-installed natively on Ubuntu, but it is available to install from its repository.

  The following tutorial will show you how to install UNRAR on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish on a desktop or server, along with the most commonly used commands with the command line terminal.

• UNIX Cop ☛ How to install SnapCraft on Rocky Linux 8

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Snapcraft and snap-store on Rocky Linux 8.

  Snap is a software packaging and deployment system developed by Canonical for operating systems that use the Linux kernel. The packages, called snaps, and the tool for using them, snapd, work across a range of Linux distributions and allow upstream software developers to distribute their applications directly to users.

  Snaps are self-contained applications running in a sandbox with mediated access to the host system.They are containerized software packages that are simple to create and install. They auto-update and are safe to run.

  Snaps applications packaged with all their dependencies to run on all popular Linux distributions from a single build. They update automatically and roll back gracefully.

• How To Install Ubuntu Studio DE On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS | Itsubuntu.com

  Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is the latest stable version of Ubuntu that is now available in the market. Ubuntu Studio is a desktop environment that used to be the default desktop environment on the Ubuntu Studio distro. Now Ubuntu Studio uses the Plasma Desktop by KDE. Meanwhile, In this tutorial post, we will show you the steps to install the Ubuntu Studio desktop environment on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

• Fix There Are No Enabled Repositories RHEL Solution | Itsubuntu.com

  Solution for the “There are no enabled repositories RHEL solution” error

  In this tutorial, we will show you the reason and the solution for the there are no enabled repositories RHEL solution error. This occurs when you have not enabled your RHEL subscription.

• Vitux ☛ Two commands to find files and directories in Debian 11 easily – VITUX

  Basically, everything in Linux is a file. But before you are able to edit a file, you must be able to locate it in your system.

• How to configure a Custom SSH Banner in Linux

  We know that Linux applications are quite flexible in configuration. Concerning SSH, we can also configure it to our liking and not only important configurations but also information-oriented ones like a banner. That’s why today you will learn how to configure a custom banner in SSH.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Beekeeper Studio on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – LinuxCapable

  Beekeeper Studio might be a perfect choice for those looking for an easy-to-use and comprehensive GUI electron front end for database management. This open-source database GUI can easily connect with any MariaDB or Postgres and works well alongside other popular databases such as MySQL, CockroachDB, Amazon Redshift, SQLite, and SQL DB. Currently, Beekeeper Studio only supports TCP connections for PSQL or MySQL, not the Unix socket connections.

  Beekeeper Studio comes equipped with all sorts of useful features you would expect in a quality SQL program: autocomplete functionality includes completable queries without having to make multiple trips back and forth between programs; there’s even live reflection on what your query will do right before it finishes running so that minor mistakes don’t go unnoticed while typing.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Beekeeper Studio on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish by importing the official repository and installing the application from it with the command line terminal.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Enable TCP BBR on Ubuntu 22.04 – Boost Internet Speed – LinuxCapable

  With the new TCP Bottleneck Bandwidth and RRT (BBR) algorithm, Google has finally found a way to overcome many issues that were previously present in both Reno & CUBIC. This updated congestion control algorithm achieves significant bandwidth improvements, lowers latency, and is deployed by Google.com, Google Cloud Platform, Youtube, and others.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn to enable TCP BBR on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal with some configurations and screenshots.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Upgrade to Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS & GNOME 42 – LinuxCapable

  Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, the next in the line of Long Term Releases for Pop!_OS based on Ubuntu LTS releases, is finally here and available for Pop!_OS users to upgrade to. The release has seen the Pop team focus more on building their resources and moving away from Launchpad PPA’s to their repositories with better packaging systems, hybrid graphics support, etc.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Liquorix Kernel on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – LinuxCapable

  Liqourix Kernel is a free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative to the stock kernel with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. It features custom settings and new features and is built to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware. Liquorix Kernel is popular amongst Linux Gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux Kernels, having multiple branches to choose from the stable, edge, and development.

  For users seeking to have their Ubuntu 22.04 LTS system kernel up to date and not wanting to manually install kernels or use the testing/unstable repositories, installing a third-party kernel that may be for you.

• Network World ☛ How to cheat on Wordle using Linux | Network World

  Wordle—the online game that gives you six tries to guess a five-letter word—has gone viral recently, and while it’s fun, it can also be pretty hard. So, as a bash-scripting enthusiast, I figured I’d see if I could come up with a script that would help me cheat.

  The game itself is fairly simple. After you enter a five-letter guess, the game indicates which of its letters are not in the mystery word by setting them off on a gray background, which ones are in the word but in the wrong location (orange background), and which ones are in the word and located in the right place (green background). Each guess must be a known English word, no capitals, no punctuation.

• TechTarget ☛ How to set up a MySQL database in Linux

  Every Linux admin must install and set up a database at some point. This can include deploying a dynamic website, such as for WordPress, or storing data for web applications as well as customer, client and employee records. Databases are crucial for every type of business.

• How to Upgrade Linux Kernel to 5.18 Release on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

  Linux Kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking Unix-like operating system. It is the main component of a Linux operating system and is the core interface between the computer’s hardware and its processes. It makes communication possible between computer hardware and processes running on it and it manages resources effectively.

  Linux 5.18 mainline was released recently by Linux Torvalds with better new features to try out. The mainline tree is maintained by Linus Torvalds and It is where all new features are added and releases always come from.

• Linux Capable ☛ How to Install XanMod Kernel on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – LinuxCapable

  XanMod is a free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative to the stock kernel with Ubuntu 22.04. It features custom settings and new features and is built to provide a responsive and smooth desktop experience, especially for new hardware.

  XanMod is popular amongst Linux Gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements and often boasts the latest Linux Kernels before landing on most distributions. Most desktop users are not even into gaming but want a new kernel for better hardware support, making XanMod one of the more popular choices.

  For more information on XanMod Kernel before installing, visit the XanMod Kernel features information page.

• HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Outline Knowledgebase Wiki on Ubuntu using Docker

• List and Set Environment Variables in Linux

  The Linux operating system is widely used in servers to host complex applications, which have very specific system settings. When you start a new Linux shell session, a certain system configuration is read and your computer is set up accordingly. These configurations and settings are controlled by the environment variables.

• Making a Vim plugin with Python

  Vimscript is a well-designed language that is really tailored to extend Vim. Unfortunately, this language is not very powerful and quite clunky for general-purpose computing.

  Fortunately, it is possible to use other languages in your Vim plugin. For example, Python.

  Python is very easy to prototype in, and fast to write and its extensive standard library is a great help when writing Vim plugins. Thus, it is a good choice for our plugins.

• Trend Oceans ☛ Smap: Alternate Network Scanner of Nmap by shodan.io [Examples] – TREND OCEANS

  Smap now brings all required features on hand to network admin or penetration tester without overgoing to shodan.io. Smap and Nmap are identical and generate the standard output, except Smap will also fetch public open port data from shodan.io as an addon to standard Nmap.

• Trend Oceans ☛ [Solved] Getting GOPATH error “go: cannot use path@version syntax in GOPATH mode”

  Let’s keep it simple recently, I tried to install one package using golang and got an error message claiming that golang can’t load the package, as shown below.

Games

• Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games with Native Linux Clients – 2022-04-26 Edition – Boiling Steam

  Between 2022-04-19 and 2022-04-26 there were 29 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 226 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 12.8 % of total released titles.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Steam Deck gets a lock screen, window switcher and more | GamingOnLinux

  Valve has released a huge upgrade for the Steam Deck that includes some much requested features, that should dramatically improve the overall experience. The update comes in multiple parts (Client and OS), and should be done via Gaming Mode (the main Deck UI), not Desktop Mode.

• Boiling Steam ☛ Steam Deck Client and OS Update: Lockscreen, Keyboards, and Multiple Windows Support (April 2022) – Boiling Steam

  Valve has just released a new update for Steam, the OS and firmware for the Steam Deck. Podiki has had to chance to upgrade his Steam Deck following this announcement, so we can share some more details beyond the simple changelog.

• [ES] War for the Overworld: actualización gráfica

• GamingOnLinux ☛ AI War 2: The Neinzul Abyss DLC out, Arcen finished with it

  The massive-scale space RTS AI War 2 has a new expansion out with AI War 2: The Neinzul Abyss, and it seems Arcen are now finished with the game and moving onto their next project.

  Arcen say this expansion is bigger than some standalone games, and the game has lost the “Beta” status for multiplayer as it seems to all work fine now. On the game as a whole, they’re not working full-time on it now and consider it pretty much done. However, they will be around watching over it to put out bug fixes whenever they’re needed.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 reimplementation OpenRCT2 has a new save system | GamingOnLinux

  Work that has been ongoing for some time now, OpenRCT2 the free and open source reimplementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 version 0.4.0 is out now and it’s big. If you want to play it easily on Linux from Steam, you can do so with Luxtorpeda. I have a guide on using that on the Steam Deck in a previous article. Or, you can use the version from Flathub.

  With the huge change being to the save file system, one of their time previously told me that it “significantly raises pretty much all the limits the original sv6 format had and is probably the biggest milestone we have hit since OpenRCT2 started over 7 years ago”.

• GamingOnLinux ☛ Space station building and management sim orbit.industries is out now | GamingOnLinux

  Fancy a fresh take on building up a space station? orbit.industries from LAB132 and Klabater is out now. So far so good, with it having a number of positive user reviews on Steam.

  “Jump into 3 modes: Campaign with missions set in the orbit of far flung alien worlds, Endless mode where resources are limited but time is not, or Creative mode where you can let your imagination run wild in the orbital sandbox with no constraints. Orbit.industries blends inspiration from classic science fiction literature, movies, and popular space-opera TV series with actual knowledge and progress achieved in the field of space exploration, space engineering, and orbital stations development.”

Distributions

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • How to find out what a Linux command does | Enable Sysadmin

    Learn how to locate, read, and use Linux system documentation with man, info, and /usr/share/doc files.

  • Peter ‘CzP’ Czanik ☛ 21unity: serving open source software in a cloud based on OpenPOWER | Random thoughts of Peter ‘CzP’ Czanik

    The first time I heard about 21unity was when I read the announcement: 21unity Joins OpenPOWER Foundation. I immediately became interested in the company, as it combines two things I am interested in: POWER and open source. Among others 21unity has its own cloud based on the POWER platform and provides Nextcloud as a service. I tried to refresh my German knowledge and read their website, but the more I read the more interesting it got and the more questions I had. I have seen from the reactions on Twitter, that many people were happy to learn about a new company working with POWER. So, instead of a few quick questions in private, I asked for an interview. Chris Branston of 21unity answered my questions.

    [...]

    We decided, the only way to deliver consistent services with full control of what happens where and how data is handled and how secure these systems are, is to build our own data center, which is not connected to any of the big 3s networks. This idea might sound a bit crazy at first, but it has one big benefit when you build stuff from scratch: There are no messy integrations, upgrades or other legacy issues that come up, but you get to build exactly what you need and want.

  • Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Websites and Apps Objective Revamp Update: April 2022 – Fedora Community Blog

    Our websites are our face to the Fedora Linux users and the community members. We started with a successful Council objective proposal to revamp the websites and applications. As part of that, we want to revitalize and organize the community that maintains them. Allow me to share with you the things that we have been up to so far.

  • Red Hat ☛ Orchestrate offloaded network functions on DPUs with Red Hat OpenShift | Red Hat Developer

    The traditional CPU-centric system architecture is being replaced by designs where systems are aggregated from independently intelligent devices. These systems have their own compute capabilities and can natively run network functions with an accelerated data plane. The new model allows us to offload to accelerators not only the individual subroutines but whole software subsystems, such as networking or storage, with cloud-like security isolation and architectural compartmentalization.

    One of the most prominent examples of this new architecture is the data processing unit (DPU). DPUs offer a complete compute system with an independent software stack, network identity, and provisioning capabilities. The DPU can host its own applications using either embedded or orchestrated deployment models.

    The unique capabilities of the DPU allow for key infrastructure functions and their associated software stacks to be completely removed from the host node’s CPU cores and to be relocated onto the DPU. For instance, DPU could host the management plane of the network functions and part of the control plane, while the data plane could be accelerated by dedicated Arm cores, ASICs, GPUs, or FPGA IPs. Because DPUs can run independent software stacks locally, multiple network functions could run simultaneously on the same devices with service chaining and shared accelerators to provide generic in-line processing.

  • OpenSource.com ☛ 5 agile mistakes I’ve made and how to solve them

    Agile used to have a stigma as being “only suitable for small teams and small project management.” It is now a famous discipline used by software development teams worldwide with great success. But does agile really deliver value? Well, it depends on how you use it.

    My teams and I have used agile since I started in tech. It hasn’t always been easy, and there’s been a lot of learning along the way. The best way to learn is to make mistakes, so to help you in your own agile journey, here are five agile mistakes I’ve made.

  • Red Hat ☛ Red Hat Developer roundup: Best of April 2022 | Red Hat Developer

    The upcoming release of version 12 of the GCC compiler is naturally causing quite a stir for C developers working on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other platforms. In one of our most popular articles this month, David Malcolm breaks down the state of static code analysis in GCC 12. C++ specifically is getting more support in this version of the compiler, and Marek Polacek outlines the new features.

    Meanwhile, C++ is advancing on other fronts, with updates to the core standard. Jason Merrill has the highlights.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ Amazon cloud services: 5 things CIOs should know [Ed: IBM outsourced Fedora to clown computing (AWS); now it promotes the same bad ideas for others]

    IT leaders can still use a helping hand, however, in navigating the massive scope and scale of AWS while making sure their cloud strategy is tightly focused and aligned with business goals.

• Debian Family

  • The Register UK ☛ Debian faces firmware furore from FOSS freedom fighters

    A painful issue for Linux distros that are built on free software is firmware. This especially affects Debian, as outlined by former project head Steve Mcintyre here, and it’s getting worse with time.

    Firmware is only called that for historical reasons now, which we’ll go into below. It’s no longer “firm” at all, it’s just files on a disk, like the rest of the OS – but it’s unlike OS code in two important ways.

    Firstly, it doesn’t execute on the CPU. It’s uploaded into a peripheral device’s RAM, and there it runs on the processors inside the graphics card, or network controller, or radio controller, or whatever.

    The second difference is only important if the OS in question is built from open source. Most firmware is proprietary software, usually supplied by hardware vendors, in the form of binary large objects (blobs). Generally, hardware vendors provide it free of charge because you’ve already bought their device – they’ve made their money. But you need it for your hardware to function properly.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • How to Upgrade to Pop OS 22.04 LTS from 21.10 [Step by Step]

    We give you easy steps to upgrade to Pop OS 22.04 LTS from Pop OS 21.10.

  • FOSSBytes ☛ Pop!_OS 22.04 Released With Improved Pop!_Shop, Auto Updates, & More

    After staying in beta for three weeks, System76 has finally released the stable version of Pop!_OS 22.04, which is based on the recently-released Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. While the update doesn’t bring a massive overhaul to the OS, some QoL improvements make this best Ubuntu-based distro even better. Here’s everything new in Pop!_OS 22.04.

  • Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS Is Now Available For Download

    Pop!_OS Linux 22.04 LTS by System76 is now available for download.

    Based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish, Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS is powered by the newer Linux 5.16 kernel. You can find tons of new features and improvements in Pop!_OS Linux 22.04 LTS. Some of the notable new features and improvements that you will get on the new version of Pop!_OS Linux 22.04 LTS are…

  • Liliputing ☛ Lilbits: Pixel Watch, Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, TCL NXTPAPER 10S tablet, and an Anbernic RG503 handheld review – Liliputing

    Now that Canonical has released Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, we’re starting to see Ubuntu-based Linux distributions release their own updates. Case in point: Linux PC maker System76 has released Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS which brings kernel, desktop environment, and app updates, along with some new features that are specific to Pop!_OS.

  • Ubuntu Fridge | Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 732

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 732 for the week of April 17 – 23, 2022.

  • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 732

Devices/Embedded

• Ubuntu ☛ What’s new for Raspberry Pi with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS? | Ubuntu

  Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (codename: Jammy Jellyfish) is jam-packed (hey hey!) with new features for everyone’s favourite credit-card sized computer. We’ve put together some of the Raspberry Pi highlights below, but for a full overview of Jammy Jellyfish check out the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS press release and release notes.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ Cincoze’s new industrial grade computers feature Intel’s latest gen processors and support GPU expansion

  Cincoze announced today their new series of ruggedized and compact computers designed for smart manufacturing applications. These computers offer support for several Intel latest generation processors. The GM-1000 and the GP-3000 series are capable of supporting one and two GPU respectively cards while the DS-1300 offers extensive industrial I/O interfaces.

  The GM-1000 is a GPU computing platform that supports 1x MXM 3.1 GPU type A/B form factor. Its design is based on the Intel Coffee Lake processors (up to 8 cores) and it includes support for dual DDR4-2666 SO-DIMM memory (64GB max). The GPU system comes in a compact design (260 mm x 200 mm x 85 mm) optimized to operate in harsh environments (-40C to 70C).

• CNX Software ☛ E Ink Gallery 3 color ePaper offers faster refresh rate, higher resolution – CNX Software

  The company also says the Gallery 3 will have an improved resolution of 300 pixels per inch instead of just 150ppi and operate in 0 to 50°C temperature range like black and white eReaders. The new display will also support pen input in black and white, plus a few colors, with an update time of 30 ms. E Ink Gallery 3 will also feature the new ComfortGaze front light to reduce the amount of blue light reflected off the surface of the display and already found in Kaleido 3 ePaper display.

  The press release only mentions Kailedo 3 in passing, saying that both technologies would offer customers several new color options to adopt into their devices. Let’s try to find some of the differences. Under the hood, the technology is different. E Ink Gallery 3 relies on E Ink ACeP (Advanced Color ePaper) technology while Kaleido 3 relies on the Print Color ePaper technology “where a color filter array (CFA) is used in conjunction with E Ink’s Carta black and white ink film, creating a full-color device for a more fully realized eBook shopping and reading experience”.

• Senet’s embrace of Helium shows its confidence in LoRaWAN

  LoRaWAN network provider Senet said this week that it has expanded its relationship with the Helium network, a distributed peer-to-peer LoRaWAN network. Senet had started letting its customers roam onto the Helium network in September of last year, but with this move Senet has expanded the deal to include Helium’s global hotspots. And that means Senet customers can roam onto Helium’s network anywhere in the world.

  Amid the bankruptcy of Sigfox and the creation of an alternative Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) with Amazon’s Sidewalk, Senet has been plugging away, trying to build out a viable LPWAN business connecting IoT devices at prices that make sense. Helium has become a valuable part of that effort.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Hackaday ☛ The Apollo Digital Ranging System: More Than Meets The Eye

    If you haven’t seen [Ken Shirriff]’s teardowns and reverse engineering expeditions, then you’re in for a treat. His explanation and demonstration of the Apollo digital ranging system is a fascinating read, even if vintage computing and engineering aren’t part of your normal fare.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Kim Kommando ☛ Android phones are vulnerable to a years-old bug – Is your phone at risk?

  • 9to5Google ☛ How to delete apps on Android – 9to5Google

  • Upside Down Cake : Android 14 codename revealed! – Phandroid

  • Giz China ☛ MIUI 13.5 & ColorOS 13 based on Android 13 in development

  • Phone Arena ☛ LG continues to push out Android 12 updates in the US – PhoneArena

  • Phone Arena ☛ Sony rolls out Android 12 to its mid-range Xperia 10 II – PhoneArena

  • Android Police ☛ Google will make sure you know all about its latest changes to Android through Play Services

  • 9to5Google ☛ Android Auto gains one-tap quick replies to messages – 9to5Google

  • Android Headlines ☛ 10 Most Popular Altcoin Trading Apps For Android Users

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Linux Links ☛ 15 Best Free and Open Source Instant Messaging Clients

  
  Instant messaging (IM) is a form of real-time communication between two or more individuals based on typed text. The text is conveyed via devices connected over a network such as the Internet.

  There are so many different instant messaging clients available, some software supports multiple protocols, others confine themselves to supporting a single protocol only.

  This chart provides our recommendations. We only feature open source software here.

• OpenSource.com ☛ How open source and cloud-native technologies are modernizing API strategy

  
  I recently had the opportunity to speak at different events on the topic of API strategy for the latest open source software and cloud-native technologies, and these were good sessions that received positive feedback. In an unusual move for me, on this occasion, I put together the slides first and then the article afterward. The good news is that with this approach, I benefited from previous discussions and feedback before I started writing. What makes this topic unique is that it’s covered not from the usual API strategy talking points, but rather from the perspective of discussing the latest technologies and how the growth of open source software and cloud-native applications are shaping API strategy.

  I’ll start by discussing innovation. All the latest software innovations are either open source software or based on open source software. Augmented reality, virtual reality, autonomous cars, AI, machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), blockchain, and more, are technologies that are built with open source software that use and integrate with millions of APIs.

• Medevel ☛ SIVIC is an open-source feature-rich DICM viewer

  SIVIC is an open-source, standards-based software framework and application suite for processing and visualization of DICOM MR Spectroscopy data. Through the use of DICOM, SIVIC aims to facilitate the application of MRS in medical imaging studies.

• FSF

  • GNU Projects

    • Newcomers to Emacs and Emacs configurations

      I like to look at the Emacs subreddit and something I’ve noticed recently is people asking “should I start by writing my own Emacs config, or should I use this or that prepackaged one?” There is also this new config generator published by Philip Kaludercic. I find implicit in these the idea that one’s init.el is a singular product. To start using Emacs, newcomers seem to think, you need to couple it with a completed init.el, and so there is the question of writing your own or using one someone else has written. I think that an appropriate analogy is certain shell scripts. If you want to burn backups to DVDs you might download someone’s DVD burning shell script which tries to make that easy, or you might write your own. In both cases, you are likely to want to tweak the script after you’ve started using it, but there is nevertheless a discrete point at which you go from having part of a script and not being able to burn DVDs, to having a completed script and now being able to burn DVDs. Similarly, the idea that you can’t start using Emacs until you couple it with an init.el is like thinking that there is a process of producing or downloading an init.el, and only after that can you begin using Emacs.

      This thinking makes sense if you’re developing one of the large Emacs configuration frameworks like Spacemacs or Doom Emacs. The people behind those projects are seeking to build something quite different from Emacs, using Emacs as a base, and for many people using that new, quite different thing is preferable to using Emacs. Then indeed, until you’ve finished developing your configuration framework’s init.el to a degree that you’re ready to release version 0.1 of your framework, you haven’t got something that’s ready to use. Like the shell script, there’s a discrete point after which you have a product, and there’s lots of labour that must precede it. (I think it’s pretty cool that Emacs is flexible enough to be something on its own and also a base for these projects.)

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Carl Svensson ☛ The Future of Open Source

      What makes open source rather uniquely western is its dependence on certain cultural and legal abstractions. Apart from free speech and a rule of law of unprecedented rigor, there is for example a very western notion of privacy that in some ways runs counter to the interests of an empire, and a fairly modern notion of individuality and personal realization. Ideas such as l’art pour l’art and the long march through the institutions have surely played their part as well.

      A short explanation might be in order: I’d like to think I’m not overly naïve. There are several examples of corruption, mismanagement and even tyranny carried out by and in the west – but as far as open source goes, I have a hard time placing it in another political framing. As such, I do believe it’s the nominal values of the empire that’s enabled it. It’s an implementation of ideals the imperial elite may have paid mere lip service to and that may have resulted in tyranny in some of its client states, but which has at least earnestly (and perhaps sometimes foolishly) been shared by the citizens at its core. At risk of sounding pompous, it’s an echo of grand founding phrases, even though they in our current trying times can feel like hollow mockeries: Liberty, equality, fraternity. All public power emanates from the people. Life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

• Programming/Development

  • The Curse of Systems ThinDevelopmentDevelopmentkers (Part 1)

    Somewhere between 15 and 20 years ago, I worked for a company. It was a very prestigious company, and it was a glorious and frustrating time. The company did amazing things. Literally unbelievable achievements – from my point of view anyway. But this was coupled with levels of chaos that led to inefficiency, wasted opportunity, and needless headaches.

  • uni Toronto ☛ Some things that make shell scripts have performance issues

    One thing that does not make shell scripts slow is the basic Unix commands themselves that you use in shell scripts. Those Unix commands generally perform pretty well, and their processing speed is probably close to the fastest you could get if you wrote what they’re doing in your language of choice. Your program is unlikely to improve on the sorting performance of sort, the text transformation performance of sed, and so on. And the shell itself generally performs internal things more than fast enough for most cases. Instead, what causes shell scripts problems is the cost of starting separate programs. Sed may transform text very fast and sort may sort data very fast, but starting sed or sort is comparatively expensive. The more times you start programs and the more programs you have to start for each thing you want to do, the slower your shell script will run.

Counter Punch ☛ White Like Me, in the Oceania State

Every time this Representative from Rhode Island’s D-26 copycats legislative hatred, she continues to show her district and the state just how devoted she is to being the most ineffective representative in our legislature.

Representative Morgan had undoubtedly slipped the privileged spoon in her mouth with a hefty heap of performative pablum, when she made what amounts to rather offensive, highly inflammatory comments about critical race theory over the alleged loss of her Black friend.  Moreover, she just recently doubled down by introducing more hurtful, bigoted legislation (H7539) aimed at public education teachers.

Meduza ☛ ‘They promised to send me a video of his execution’ Olga Novikova’s son was kidnapped in Mariupol. On April 24, the captors told her she had one day to pay his ransom.

On the evening of April 24, Mariupol cinematographer Olga Novikova wrote in a Facebook post that her son, Alexey, had been taken prisoner — and that his captors were demanding 5,000 euros ($5,356) in return for his release. The kidnappers had contacted Novikova through Alexey’s Facebook account and sent her a video of him being interrogated. They promised to kill Alexey if they didn’t receive the money “by tomorrow.” Meduza spoke to Olga Novikova.

Meduza ☛ ‘Love and joy are still alive’ The story of one Kharkiv couple who got married amid their city’s ruins

Since the war in Ukraine began, more than 30 thousand Ukrainian couples have officially tied the knot. In mid-April, the Ukrainian Justice Ministry simplified the marriage registration process — soldiers can even get married over Zoom now. One wedding — that of dentist Anton Sokolov and nurse Anastasia Gracheva, both from Kharkiv — has become famous far beyond Ukraine’s borders. Photos of the couple in their wedding outfits in front of the wreckage that now makes up Kharkiv have been shared by media outlets around the world, including France24, Euronews, and Africanews. Meduza spoke with Anastasia Gracheva about she and her husband’s decision to get hitched in wartime — and how they used the wedding to help the war effort.

Counter Punch ☛ A Duck and Cover World

And don’t try to deny it! What a mess! (And yes, I do think this moment is worth more than a few exclamation points!)

Admittedly, I’m not an active, thoughtful 93 year old.  I’m a mere 77 and feel like I’m floundering in this mad world of ours. Still, like my generation, like anyone alive after August 6, 1945, when the city of Hiroshima was obliterated by a single American atomic bomb, I’m an end-of-the-worlder by nature. And that’s true whether any of us like it or not, admit it or not.

The Nation ☛ It’s Woody Guthrie’s World. We Just Live in It.

“All you can write is what you see.”—written on the first draft of “This Land Is Your Land,”dated February 23, 1940

The Nation ☛ The Zoological Nightmares of Rafael Bernal

“What method, what power, what labyrinthine perfection is displayed!” So wrote Pliny the Elder, marveling over nature’s design for the mosquito in his Natural History. But the rest of us—or at least the approximately 4 billion people regularly exposed to the deadly diseases the mosquito carries—are more likely to agree with Edmund Spenser, who bemoaned its “sharpe wounds, and noyous iniuries” in The Faerie Queene.

Copenhagen Post ☛ National Round-Up: Restless crowds get ugly outside Tivoli

Who knew everyone wanted to go to a concert so bad! It’s not like the whole city’s been cooped up at home for two whole years climbing up the walls!

Well, certainly not Tivoli, which was blown away by the interest in its concert on Friday: the second of its FredagsRock series – almost literally, but the walls held firm once it decided to close its gates.

Variety ☛ YouTube Hires Amazon Veteran Toni Reid to Oversee YouTube Shorts, Gaming, Livestreaming and Community Products (EXCLUSIVE)

Toni Reid, after 24 years at Amazon, is joining YouTube as VP of product management to lead the video platform’s Emerging Experiences and Community team.

In the role, she’ll oversee YouTube Shorts — the TikTok-like short-form video format YouTube has seen gain major traction — as well as YouTube Gaming, livestreaming and community products.

Variety ☛ Condé Nast Appoints Monica Lee, Nina Joyce to Global Communications Leadership Team (EXCLUSIVE)

Magazine publisher and media company Condé Nast has bolstered its global communications leadership team with the appointments of Thrive Global’s Monica Lee as senior VP of communications and Vice Media Group’s Nina Joyce as VP of communications for the U.K.

Science

• Hackaday ☛ 3D Printed Turbo Pump Hopes To Propel Rockets To The Sky

  There are plenty of rocket experimenters toying with various liquid-fueled contraptions at the moment, and [Sciencish] is one of them. He grew tired of using air-pressurized fuel delivery systems in his experiments due to safety reasons, and decided to create something approximating more grown up rocket designs. The result was a 3D-printed turbopump for fuel delivery.

• Digital First Media ☛ Bone found on Michigan beach ID’d with genetic genealogy

  The DNA Doe Project, working with the Michigan State Police, determined the jaw bone belonged to Ronald Wayne Jager of Fruitland Township. The DNA Doe Project is an all-volunteer, California-based group whose mission is to identify John and Jane Does and return them to their families.

• New Scientist ☛ Dingo genome suggests Australian icon not descended from domestic dogs

  The Australian dingo’s genome is substantially different from modern dog breeds, suggesting the canines have never been domesticated in the past, a detailed analysis reveals.

  The dingo is a type of dog that arrived in Australia around 5000 to 8500 years ago and now roams wild in most of the country. Some researchers believe it is descended from an ancient domestic dog breed that was introduced by Asian seafarers and then turned wild. Others, however, question whether dingoes’ ancestors were ever domesticated.

Education

• Hackaday ☛ Learning Electronics By Just Doing It

  Learning anything new, especially so broad and far reaching as electronics, can be hard. [IMSAI Guy] knows this because he gets asked regularly “how do I learn electronics?” Many of you reading this will have a few ideas to pass along (and we encourage you to share your take on it in the comments below) but there is an even greater number of people who are asking the same question, and [IMSAI Guy]’s take on it is one that this particular Hackaday writer can relate to.

• ABC ☛ Why Being Anti-Science Is Now Part Of Many Rural Americans’ Identity

  The intensely local, personal way that Arkansas Game and Fish approached this challenge is difficult, time-consuming and perhaps not always the most practical. But it shows the kind of intensity it takes to communicate an urgent problem, and may provide lessons for how to approach the next big problems — whether that’s another pandemic, an ecological disaster or something bigger and more existential, like climate change.

Hardware

• Hackaday ☛ Machine Vision Helps You Terminate Failing 3D Print Jobs

  If you’re a 3D printer user you’re probably familiar with that dreaded feeling of returning to your printer a few hours after submitting a big job, only to find that it threw an error and stopped printing, or worse, turned half a spool of filament into a useless heap of twisted plastic. While some printers come with remote monitoring facilities, [Kutluhan Aktar]’s doesn’t, so he built a device that keeps a watchful eye on his 3D printer and notifies him if anything’s amiss.

• Hackaday ☛ Software Defined Instrumentation Hack Chat

  Join us on Wednesday, April 27 at noon Pacific for the Software Defined Instrumentation Hack Chat with Ben Nizette!

• Hackaday ☛ Explosion Welding Goes Off With A Bang

  Welding is often a hot and noisy process. It generally involves some fancy chemistry and proper knowledge to achieve good results. Whether you’re talking about arc, TIG, or MIG, these statements all apply.

• Ted Unangst ☛ probing my ssd’s latency

  My SSD is probably pretty fast, but maybe a faster one would let me compile a kernel even quicker by reducing the time spent waiting for I/O to complete. First though, I need to determine its latency, and the benchmark tool available to me, dd, measures throughput not latency. We need to go deeper.

  To measure latency, we’ll have to write some code to build a custom tool. By which I mean somewhere on the order of a dozen lines, taking advantage of the capabilities of dt, btrace, and bt.

• The Register UK ☛ Taiwan to dominate chip biz for foreseeable future • The Register

  Taiwan dominates the world’s semiconductor manufacturing industry – controlling 48 per cent of the foundry market and 61 per cent of the world’s capacity to build at 16nm or better – according to market intelligence firm TrendForce.

  In 2021, Taiwan won 26 per cent of the world’s semiconductor revenue, and accounted for 64 per cent of foundry revenue.

  In 2022, Trendforce predicts the global foundry market to increase by 20 per cent, to $128.7 billion, and Taiwan’s share of that revenue will increase two points. Local hero Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will increase its share from 53 to 56 per cent and another Taiwanese firm, United Microelectronics Corp (UMC), will be steady at seven per cent while lesser-known local Powerchip Semiconductor (PSMC) will lose a point of revenue share.

• The Register UK ☛ Could a leaky capacitor be at fault on ESA’s Sentinel-1B?

  Attempts to recover ESA’s stricken Sentinel-1B satellite are continuing and one of the failure scenarios engineers are considering will be familiar to some of us: possible leakage of a ceramic capacitor.

  The satellite, launched in 2016 aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Arianespace facility at Kourou in French Guiana, remains under control. However, power problems have rendered its C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (C-SAR) instrument pretty much useless, thus defeating the point of the spacecraft.

  Sister spacecraft, Sentinel-1A, has continued to collect data despite recently having to dodge some debris.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Yes, Face Masks Are Still Needed on Airplanes

  The federal transportation face mask mandate is over. A federal judge in Florida struck it down last week, citing an overreach of statutory authority by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a violation of administrative law. All the major airlines quickly responded by dropping the mandate on their flights, leaving passengers to fend for themselves on whether to wear a face mask when traveling by air. While the ruling is being appealed by the Department of Justice, the White House encourages people to continue to wear face masks when traveling. The ruling also ended the face mask mandate on trains (like Amtrak) and public transportation, impacting millions of people each day.

• DeSmog ☛ ‘This Needs to Be Fixed’: Nuclear Expert Calls Radioactivity Levels Found Outside Ohio Oilfield Waste Facility ‘Excessive’

  Activists and scientists have found alarming levels of radioactivity in samples collected along the road and soils outside Austin Master Services, an oilfield waste processing facility with a history of sloppy practices in eastern Ohio. The facility is located just down the street from a high school football stadium and less than 1,000 feet from a set of city drinking water wells, raising public health concerns from a nuclear forensics scientist about the extent of possible radioactive contamination. 

  Last November, members of two advocacy groups, Concerned Ohio River Residents and Mountain Watershed Association, collected soil samples from outside the Martins Ferry, Ohio facility of Austin Master Services, a Pottstown, Pennsylvania-based company that operates in 10 states. Both groups are concerned about the handling of radioactive oilfield waste in their region, which has seen over a decade of intensive fracking development in the Marcellus and Utica shale formations. 

• Orac ☛ No one should be surprised at the number of antivax doctors in a new survey

  If there’s one thing about the COVID-19 pandemic that’s surprised pundits and my colleagues in the medical profession, it’s just how many vaccine-hesitant and outright antivaccine healthcare professionals there are out there. You would think that an antivax physician or nurse would be incredibly rare, but the pandemic has demonstrated that they are, unfortunately, far from rare. I’m not saying that the medical profession is dominated by antivaxxers, as in general vaccine acceptance is still higher among physicians and nurses than among the general public. However, there is a much more sizable minority of physicians and nurses out there than my colleagues would have previously guessed whose views range from vaccine-hesitant to outright antivax conspiracy theorist, as a new survey shows.

• Omicron Limited ☛ Citizens of countries that become more unequal as their economy grows are less happy, says research

  Countries that allow economic inequality to increase as they grow richer make their citizens less happy, new research shows.

  In most of 78 countries studied people were less satisfied with their lives as their country became less economically equal.

  The fall in life satisfaction occurred even where the economy had grown as a whole and people from all classes were generally richer, Dr. David Bartram will tell the British Sociological Association’s online annual conference on Thursday 21 April,

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Medium ☛ Windows 11 is officially a failure

    It failed to even do what Microsoft and its partners were obviously hoping, that is “scare” or “bully” people into getting a new PC for Windows 11. Data for Q4 2021/Q1 2022 suggest that there was no sales boost to speak of, the traditional effect a new Windows version usually has on the PC market.

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ DDoS attacks on Estonian state sites continued over weekend [iophk: Windows TCO]

    RIA Cyber ​​Incident Handling Department (CERT-EE) director Tõnu Tammer said that: “At the same time, we must be prepared for attacks to continue for some time, while their volume may increase. We cannot rest on our laurels, but rather consider how to better mitigate the success of such attacks.”

    While sites are still under attack, malicious queries are being intercepted before they can negatively affect the systems, RIA says

    RIA says the attacks which had begun Thursday last week continued through Saturday.

  • Security

    • Bleeping Computer ☛ CISA adds 7 vulnerabilities to list of bugs exploited in attacks [Ed: This is a misleading summary. 5 out of 8 of the latest are Microsoft.]

      The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added seven vulnerabilities to its list of actively exploited security issues, including those from Microsoft, Linux, and Jenkins.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Techdirt ☛ Secretive Private Company Shows No One — Not Even The NSA — Is Immune From Always-On Surveillance

        In recent months, a lot of attention has been paid to private companies who assist governments with surveillance. Most of this has been focused on companies like Clearview (a company that scrapes the public web for data to sell to its customers) and NSO Group (an Israeli company that sells powerful cell phone exploits to a variety of human rights abusers). Other reports have focused on data brokers who use info harvested from phone apps to provide location data to US law enforcement, allowing them to circumvent the protections erected by the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision.

      • Tor ☛ Malicious relays and the health of the Tor network

        Running relays is a significant contribution to our project and we’ve designed that process so that the barrier of entry is low, making it possible for a variety of people with different backgrounds to participate. This openness is important as it makes our network (and the privacy guarantees it offers) more robust and resilient to attacks. However, that low threshold of contributing to our network also makes it easier for malicious operators to attack our users, e.g. via Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks at exit nodes.

        This blog post explains what we’re doing to detect malicious actors (and remove their relays), how we developed these strategies, and what we’re working on to make it harder for bad operators to run attacks. Additionally, we want to shine some light on this part of our day-to-day work at Tor. Because this is an arms race, we have to balance being transparent with effective detection of malicious actors. In this post we hope to offer more transparency about our approach without compromising the methods we use to keep our users safe.

      • India Times ☛ PM Modi exhorts people to switch from cash payments to digital transactions

        PM Modi exhorted people to switch from cash payments to digital transactions in the latest edition of his radio broadcast Mann Ki Baat on Sunday, saying this will not only boost the country’s digital economy, but will also lead to an environment of honesty and transparency.

      • Futurism ☛ Facebook Employees Say Mark Zuckerberg Is Weirdly Obsessed With The Metaverse

        According to the report, Zuckerberg is focused solely on metaverse content creation but says the project will take a decade or more to complete, likely requiring improvements to the Oculus Quest 2, also called Meta Quest 2 since Facebook purchased Oculus and later changed its name. Despite the project’s scope, Zuckerberg isn’t giving employees a clear strategy, but he still wants to inform every department company-wide about the pivot to focusing on the metaverse.

      • Business Insider ☛ Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse obsession is driving some current and former Facebook employees nuts: ‘It’s the only thing Mark wants to talk about’

        Facebook has renamed itself Meta. Last year, it lost $10 billion on its Reality Labs segment, which handles metaverse projects. It intends to spend that much this year, too, and possibly for many years to come. Zuckerberg has said the metaverse is a long-term project that won’t be fully developed for a decade or more.

        So far, there’s little to show for so much money spent, according to another employee who recently left. “There’s still not much to touch or look at, much less use,” the person said, “for all of its metaverse proclamations.”

      • CNN ☛ This man is trolling his airline with Power

        Luckily, Sharod had a secret weapon: Airtags.

        He’d bought three of the Apple products, which emit tracking alerts via Bluetooth, and hidden one in each suitcase.

        “I did it because our itinerary was quite robust — we were traveling through multiple airports,” he says. “It was more for security on the way down — the wedding dress and suit weren’t in our cases, but it was for peace of mind.”

        So he and Helen had watched in real time, relieved, as their cases arrived planeside at Frankfurt. Just one problem — when they checked again, the cases had moved to a gate area at Frankfurt. They’d never been loaded onto the plane.

Defence/Aggression

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Duck-and-Cover Horrors: A New Cold War and the Climate Crisis

  Face it, we’re living in a world that, while anything but exceptional, is increasingly the exception to every rule. Only the other day, 93-year-old Noam Chomsky had something to say about that. Mind you, he’s seen a bit of our world since, in 1939, he wrote his first article for his elementary school newspaper on the fall of the Spanish city of Barcelona amid a “grim cloud” of advancing fascism. His comment on our present situation: “We’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history.”

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘Oil Fuels War’: Greenpeace Campaigners Block Russian Tanker in Norway

  Campaigners with the international group Greenpeace risked arrest Monday when they blocked a Russian tanker from delivering 95,000 tons of fuel near Oslo, Norway, calling for a ban on tthe import of fossil fuels from the country that is waging war in Ukraine.

  Several of the climate advocates unfurled banners reading “Oil fuels war” and “Stop fueling the war” as others pulled a small boat up to the tanker and chained themselves to the vessel, which was leased by Russian oil company Novatek.

• Meduza ☛ Russian FSB claims to foil ‘Ukrainian assassination plot’ against propagandist Vladimir Solovyov

  The Russian FSB claims to have foiled an alleged assassination plot against prominent Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov and other state television personalities. According to a statement released on Monday, April 25, FSB agents arrested a group of “neo-Nazis” who Ukraine’s Security Service (the SBU) allegedly hired to carry out the murders. 

• Common Dreams ☛ Global Military Spending Tops $2 Trillion for First Time in History

  Global military expenditures surpassed $2 trillion for the first time ever last year, with the United States spending more on its war-making capacity than the next nine nations combined, according to new data published Monday.

  “Spending 12 times as much on our military as Russia didn’t prevent a war in Europe. It just deprived us of resources at home.”

• Counter Punch ☛ The War in Ukraine is Beginning to Look More and More Like Syria

  But it should already be clear that the end of the war, if it comes at all, is more likely to be brought about by politicians – as difficult as that might be – and not by soldiers because the chances of either Russia or Ukraine winning a decisive victory have already disappeared.

  The key question now is how and when the fighting will cease – or have the chances of a compromise peace already been overwhelmed by the sheer momentum of military conflict and the hatred it inspires?

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Two-Plus Decades of ‘Othering’: Muslims and the War on Terror

  The phrase “War on Terror” invokes many different feelings and images depending upon one’s position in America and the world. While many understand it merely as a descriptor for a new frontier in American foreign policy and war, for others it has meant a new set of violent interventions and disturbances to their way of life.

• Common Dreams ☛ Execution Halted, Melissa Lucio’s Legal Team Vows to ‘Continue Fighting’

  Lawyers representing Melissa Lucio vowed to “continue fighting” to prove her innocence after a Texas appeals court on Monday granted the mother of 14—who advocates say was wrongfully convicted of murdering her two-year-old daughter in 2007—a stay of execution, two days before she was scheduled to be killed by lethal injection. 

  “All of the new evidence of her innocence has never before been considered by any court.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Sweden and Finland Will Simultaneously Apply to Join NATO: Reports

  Officials in the traditionally neutral Nordic nations of Sweden and Finland confirmed Monday that the countries will simultaneously apply to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization amid increased public support for the move as Russia continues its brutal invasion of Ukraine.

  Two newspapers—Finland’s Iltalehti and Sweden’s Expressen—reported that the countries’ applications could occur as soon as the middle of next month. The Swedish daily Aftonbladet reported that Sweden has received concrete promises from the United States and the United Kingdom regarding protection and political support during the NATO application process.

• The Gray Zone ☛ US weapons, European supplicants block peace in Ukraine

• Rolling Stone ☛ ‘Yes Sir’: Sean Hannity Took Direct Orders From Mark Meadows on Election Coverage

  We all knew Sean Hannity was doing the bidding of the Trump administration. We found out Monday he was doing it literally.

  CNN on Monday published a slew of text messages between Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and prominent Republican lawmakers and conservative figures — including Hannity. The Jan. 6 committee has already released several texts exchanged between Meadows and Hannity, but the ones released Monday are particularly striking, demonstrating just how firmly the White House had Hannity secured under its thumb.

• NBC ☛ Trump allies’ secret work to overturn 2020 election detailed in new text messages

  A new tranche of text messages published Monday between former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and allies of former President Donald Trump, sent in the months after the 2020 election, offers new insight into the efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory.

  The text messages, which were obtained by CNN, help illuminate how far the Trump White House and its allies secretly tried to go to overturn the 2020 election, including failed efforts by Meadows to contact Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

• CNBC ☛ How Ukraine’s mud became a secret weapon in its defense against Russia

  It’s a phenomenon familiar in the history books: Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Russia in 1812 was famously slowed by the mud, as were Hitler’s armies, which invaded the then-Soviet Union in 1941 and encountered the same logistical problems posed by the mud and inhospitable terrain that Russian troops have faced in the last few weeks.

• Bridge Michigan ☛ Ballot measure to decertify Michigan 2020 election decried as ‘silly,’ illegal

  Former Republican lawmakers and experts say the measure — based on unverified claims the election was stolen in Michigan — is unconstitutional and wouldn’t change the election outcome even if it somehow passed.

• Al Monitor ☛ Islamic State announces ‘revenge’ attacks during Ramadan

  Multiple attacks this week in Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria, Libya, Uzbekistan, and other locations have been claimed by the group since the announcement of the campaign, which comes amid Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. In the first three days of the campaign, 42 attacks were reported in nine countries.

• Medforth ☛ Attack on Jews by Islamist mob in the middle of Berlin – and German mainstream media remain silent

  The video shows shocking images: Raging young people – apparently of Arab descent – loudly insult a reporter from the “Bild” newspaper who was reporting on the scene. The pro-Palestine protesters shout “dirty Jew” and “Jews out”. 600 people had come to this march through the Kreuzberg district of Berlin.

• London mosque hosts hate preacher who called 9/11 and Charlie Hebdo attacks ‘comedy’

  MP demands to know how Egyptian-born Dr Omar Abdul Kafi, who has also given sermons about getting ‘revenge’ on Jews, was allowed into the UK to speak at Finsbury Park mosque in north London.

Environment

• Futurism ☛ Man Who Set Himself On Fire To Protest Climate Change Has Died

  A man who set himself on fire in front of the US Supreme Court to protest climate change died this week, according to an NBC report published yesterday.

  Metro Police identified the man as Wynn Alan Bruce of Boulder, Colorado. Police said he died from his injuries on Saturday. According to NBC, Bruce started the incident at around 6:30 pm. Within minutes a medical helicopter took him to a local hospital, but he did not survive. The man’s friends posted memories and farewells on his Facebook page in response to recent posts.

• The Revelator ☛ Dam Accounting: Taking Stock of Methane Emissions From Reservoirs

• Counter Punch ☛ Earth Day Ain’t What It Used to Be

  With a few hundred tomato and lettuce plants getting acclimated to the soil in the high-tunnel structure other seedling signaled the need for re-potting. Such were my sketchy contributions to Earth Day….. that, and writing this column.

  The original Earth Day occurred in a simpler time, before Business-as-Usual became utterly hegemonic. Inspired by a 1969 UNESCO conference, Senator Gaylord Nelson proposed a “nationwide environmental teach-in be held on April 22, 1970.”  (Wikipedia) So-called “teach-ins” had become an organizing/educational activity stateside during the  U.S. war against Vietnam. The notion struck a chord. “More than 20 million people poured out on the streets, and the first Earth Day remains the largest single-day protest in human history.“ (Wikipedia)

• Energy

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘We Will Stop the Excavators’: Thousands Rally to Save German Village From Coal Mine Expansion

    A small German village was the site of a large demonstration over the weekend, when thousands of activists gathered to protest the slated demolition of Lützerath that would allow for the expansion of the already gargantuan Garzweiler open-pit coal mine.

    Lützerath is slated to suffer the same fate as other nearby villages that have been destroyed in western Germany as the country’s major power producer RWE, which operates the mine, continues to dig up the lignite, also known as brown coal.

  • ABC ☛ Pro football investor pleads guilty in cryptocurrency scheme

    In a statement, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said that as part of the [cryptocurrency] scheme, Fowler “helped process hundreds of millions of dollars of unregulated transactions on behalf of numerous cryptocurrency exchanges, skirting the anti-money laundering safeguards required of licensed institutions that ensure the U.S. financial system is not used for criminal purposes.”

    Prosecutors also alleged that Fowler lied to AAF executives by claiming he controlled bank accounts with tens of millions of dollars from real estate investments and government contracts that he could use to invest in the league.

  • Common Dreams ☛ As Pump Prices Soared, Big Oil CEOs Enjoyed Windfall Pay Days

    Research out Monday reveals that CEOs from 28 of the top oil and gas companies enjoyed a combined $394 million in total compensation in 2021, including through “eye-popping” bonuses that together topped $31 million.

    The analysis from Accountable.US, first reported by The Guardian, comes as inflation-hit consumers see gas prices soaring while fossil fuel companies stand accused of making “gobs of money” off the global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Steven Donziger Walks Free After 993 Days of ‘Completely Unjust’ Detention

    Human rights lawyer Steven Donziger walked free Monday after 993 days of detention stemming from his decades-long legal fight with Chevron, which deployed its vast resources in a campaign to destroy Donziger after he won a $9.5 billion settlement against the fossil fuel giant over its pollution of the Amazon rainforest.

    “Corporations must not be allowed to continue abusing the U.S. justice system to silence and intimidate human rights defenders.”

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Counter Punch ☛ Keeping the Wild Rogue Wild

    The river begins at Crater Lake and flows about 200 miles to the sea by Gold Beach. The river passes through lands administered by both the BLM and Forest Service. The existing Wild Rogue Wilderness encompasses 36,453 acres. The proposed addition would include the Zane Grey Roadless Area, the largest forested BLM roadless area in southern Oregon and northern California.

    The Wild Rogue Conservation and Recreation Enhancement Act establishes a 98,000 National Recreation Area and expands the existing Wild Rogue Wilderness by 59,000 acres.

Finance

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘Just Cancel It’: 85% of Young US Voters Want Action on Student Debt

  Nearly nine in 10 young Americans want the government to address the student loan debt crisis, with a plurality—but overall minority—supporting full cancelation, according to the results of a national survey published Monday.

  The survey, conducted by Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics (IOP), found that 85% of respondents under age 30 “favor some form of government action on student loan debt.”

• TruthOut ☛ GOP States Gutting Unemployment Didn’t Bring Workers Back Faster, Study Shows

• Counter Punch ☛ Now Would Be a Good Time for the IMF to Do Away with Unfair and Unnecessary Surcharges

• Counter Punch ☛ While JPMorgan Chase Was Getting Trillions of Dollars in Loans at Almost Zero Percent Interest from the Fed, It Was Charging Americans Hit by the Pandemic 17 Percent on their Credit Cards

  Thus far, the numbers stack up as follows: a trading unit of JPMorgan Chase borrowed $6.19 trillion from the Fed’s repo loan program from September 17, 2019 through March 31, 2020. (Those are cumulative, term-adjusted figures.) A significant chunk of that money was borrowed at interest rates as low as 0.10 percent. The loans were collateralized with mostly treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS).

  A trading unit of JPMorgan Chase also borrowed $400 billion in cumulative, term-adjusted loans from the Fed’s Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) during 2020. All of those loans were made at a fixed rate of 0.25 percent even though the Fed accepted lower-grade collateral, such as asset-backed securities, for some of the loans.

• Counter Punch ☛ From France, an Unexpected Call for a Ceiling on CEO Pay

• The Register UK ☛ Elon Musk set to buy Twitter in $44b deal, promises stuff

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘A Real Threat to Democracy’: Musk Buys Twitter for $44 Billion

  Rights advocates, public health experts, and media critics were among those on Monday who warned that the purchase of  Twitter by mega-billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, creates a direct threat to democracy and the common good by putting the outsized power of the social media platform used by hundreds of millions worldwide into the hands of one man.

  The social media company accepted Musk’s offer to purchase Twitter for $44 billion, or $54.20 per share—leading some critics to note other ways the enormous sum of money could have been spent rather than on what Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.) called “a vanity project boondoggle to silence” Musk’s critics.

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘Dangerous’: Twitter on Verge of Accepting Musk’s $43 Billion Buyout Offer

  Twitter is reportedly on the verge of announcing a deal as soon as Monday to sell the company and its massive social media platform to mega-billionaire Elon Musk—the richest man in the world—for around $43 billion in cash, a move that critics say could have dangerous implications for free expression and democracy itself.

  Reuters reported that “Twitter may announce the $54.20-per-share deal later on Monday once its board has met to recommend the transaction to Twitter shareholders.” The outlet, whose reporting was confirmed by the Wall Street Journal and other sources, stressed that “it is always possible that the deal collapses at the last minute.”

• EFF ☛ Twitter Has a New Owner. Here’s What He Should Do.

  The core reality is this: Twitter and other social networks play an increasingly important role in social and political discourse, and have an increasingly important corollary responsibility to ensure that their decision-making is both transparent and accountable. If he wants to help Twitter meet that responsibility, Musk should keep the following in mind: 

  Musk has been particularly critical of Twitter’s content moderation policies. He’s correct that there are problems with content moderation at scale. These problems aren’t just specific to Twitter, though Twitter has some particular challenges. It has long struggled to deal with bots and troubling tweets by major figures that can easily go viral in just a few minutes, allowing mis- or disinformation to rapidly spread. At the same time, like other platforms, Twitter’s community standards restrict legally protected speech in a way that disproportionately affects frequently silenced speakers. And also like other platforms, Twitter routinely removes content that does not violate its standards, including sexual expression, counterspeech, and certain political speech.

  Better content moderation is sorely needed: less automation, more expert input into policies, and more transparency and accountability overall. Unfortunately, current popular discourse surrounding content moderation is frustratingly binary, with commentators either calling for more moderation (or regulation) or, as in Musk’s case, far less.

• Techdirt ☛ Ways In Which Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Could Be Good

  With it looking almost certain that Elon Musk will own Twitter in the very near future, a lot of people are freaking out, and I did think it was worthwhile to explore ways in which this might actually be good. At this point, I think it’s quite clear that Elon Musk’s comments about Twitter show an incredible disconnect from how any of this works, and he’s about to discover that his ridiculously naïve ideas about how Twitter should work, will not work in practice. I stand by the idea that his beliefs for how Twitter should work are unlikely to be good in the long run, if implemented in the manner he claims to want them implemented. And, of course, Musk’s reputation for how he treats workers at his companies remains reprehensible. His views towards many marginalized groups seems equally disgraceful, and I know many people are — for good reason — fearing that they will be put at risk. Other tech companies are going to lead a feeding frenzy on Twitter’s best employees, and a ton of important and useful institutional knowledge is going to rush out the exits. And a lot of it is going to be the institutional knowledge that could help Musk realize why he’s wrong on so much of this.

• Unicorn Media ☛ Take Our Poll on Elon Musk’s Twitter Deal

  Updated 4/25/2022 4:45 p.m. EDT: The New York Times and CNN are both reporting that the deal is done and that Elon Musk is buying Twitter. Says the Times:

  Please take our poll anyway as it’s still relevant.

• The Nation ☛ Americans Can’t Afford More Student Loan Payments

  The past two years have seen record job growth, rising wages, and increasing bargaining power for workers. But for millions of Americans, the enormous burden of debt is overshadowing those gains—and the struggles are more intense for women, and for Black and brown borrowers.

• The Telegraph UK ☛ Elon Musk buys Twitter for $44bn

  In the wake of the acquisition, Twitter imposed a temporary ban on employees making any changes to its platform, Bloomberg reported. Product changes will require approval from a vice president to avoid staff who may be unhappy about the deal from “going rogue”.

  Parag Agrawal, who took over as Twitter’s chief executive from founder Jack Dorsey last year, now faces uncertainty about his position. Mr Musk has said he does not have confidence in the company’s management, although the announcement did not say what would happen to its executives.

• PC World ☛ Elon Musk buys Twitter for $44 billion

  Musk, who is already the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, and the founder of the underground tunnel company the Boring Company, now adds the social media giant Twitter to his stable. Musk’s commitment toward Twitter was never fully established until now. His on-again, off-again stance begun in 2018 with a tweet Musk issued that claimed that he was securing financing to buy Twitter and take it private, a tweet he later said was a joke after an SEC investigation. Of course, those are the very actions Musk took today.

• The Verge ☛ Twitter CEO tells employees no layoffs planned ‘at this time’ following Elon Musk buyout

  Layoffs aren’t planned “at this time,” Agrawal said, according to a person who heard the remarks and who asked to remain anonymous. Agrawal also said that he’d remain as CEO until the deal’s close, but he didn’t comment about what would happen after that. The company’s board will dissolve once the deal closes, said Brett Taylor, the board’s independent chair.

• The Verge ☛ What Twitter employees are saying about Elon Musk

  At the same time, many Twitter employees receive half or more of their compensation in stock. At an all-hands meeting on Monday afternoon, they were told that employees will not receive equity once the company goes private. As a result, one person told me, “group chats are scrambling to see if working at Twitter makes economic sense first and foremost.”

• NBC ☛ Elon Musk reaches deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion

  Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock once the transaction closes. It’s a 38 percent premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1 — the last trading day before Musk disclosed his approximately 9 percent stake in Twitter.

• Hollywood Reporter ☛ Done Deal: Twitter Agrees to Sell Itself to Elon Musk

  Once the deal is completed, the richest person in the world will own arguably the most influential social platform in the world, though from a business and user standpoint Twitter is significantly smaller than companies like Facebook or TikTok.

• Hollywood Reporter ☛ Elon Musk Is Twitter’s New Ruler: Expect Grand Plans (and Chaos) Ahead

  The social media company has always had influence far beyond its user base (which is small compared to platforms like Facebook and Instagram) and beyond its revenue (which is meager compared to tech competitors like Netflix, Google or Amazon), and Disney thought owning that influence could be powerful.

  By that point, the platform had made addicts of its power users, among them politicians (including one notable former president in particular who has since been banned from the platform), journalists, entertainers and executives. That included Iger himself, who has long tweeted regularly on the platform (on Dec. 31, his last day at Disney, he tweeted his goodbye note).

• Hollywood Reporter ☛ $978M for Jack Dorsey and $39M for Parag Agrawal: Twitter Execs Could See Massive Paydays If Elon Musk Takeover Closes

  That would set Dorsey up for a $978 million cash payout should the deal be completed.

• Los Angeles Times ☛ Seven proposals for how Elon Musk should run Twitter

  With Twitter headed toward private ownership, here are seven outside opinions on how the billionaire should serve as caretaker of the speech rights and safety concerns of millions of the service’s users.

• India Today ☛ What will Elon Musk do with Twitter? Blue ticks for all, open source algorithms and purging of bots

  Once the deal competes, which is supposed to happen by the end of 2022, Twitter will cease to exist as a publicly listed company. Instead, it will become a private company fully owned by Elon Musk. Only time will tell which way Twitter will go, but as far as Musk’s plan is concerned, he wants to turn it into a true town square where everyone can debate and say things without risking censorship or blocking.

• Computer World ☛ Elon Musk buys Twitter: What’s ahead for business users?

  Yet in the immediate aftermath of the Monday announcement, it’s difficult to say precisely how a Musk-led Twitter will differ from its shareholder-owned iteration. Musk’s statement announcing the go-private deal hinted at several possible changes, including “authenticating all humans,” defeating spam and “enhancing the product with new features,” but details remain to be clarified.

• BBC ☛ Elon Musk strikes deal to buy Twitter for $44bn

  The move comes as Twitter faces growing pressure from politicians and regulators over the content that appears on its platform. It has drawn critics from left and right over its efforts to mediate misinformation on the platform.

• IT Wire ☛ Twitter board accepts Musk bid, company to go private after sale

  Tesla chief executive Elon Musk is the new owner of Twitter after his offer to buy the company for US$54.20 (A$75.55) a share made on 14 April was unanimously approved by the board on Monday.

• India Times ☛ Elon Musk buys Twitter for $44 billion and will privatize company

  Elon Musk reached an agreement to buy Twitter for roughly $44 billion on Monday, promising a more lenient touch to policing content on the platform where he promotes his interests, attacks critics and opines on social and economic issues to more than 83 million followers.

  The outspoken Tesla CEO, who is also the world’s wealthiest person, has said he wanted to buy and privatize Twitter because he thinks it’s not living up to its potential as a platform for free speech.

  Musk said in a joint statement with Twitter that he wants to make the service “better than ever” with new features, such as getting rid of automated “spam bots” and making its algorithms open to the public to increase trust.

• Variety ☛ Elon Musk Clinches Deal to Buy Twitter for $44 Billion

  Elon Musk is set to become the new owner of Twitter, after a fast flurry of negotiations left the company’s board with no choice but to accept the multibillionaire’s $44 billion takeover proposal.

  Under the terms of the deal, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of the company’s common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction. The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Musk, who is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, disclosed his approximately 9% stake in Twitter.

  Upon completion of the transaction, expected sometime in 2022, Twitter will become a privately held company.

• Teen Vogue ☛ Elon Musk Buying Twitter, Explained: Trump, “Free Speech,” More

  Let’s start here: Twitter is a key part of our news [sic] media infrastructure. Just count how many times I use the word(s) “tweeted” or “on Twitter” in this article. Indeed, think back to the aftermath of the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection, when Twitter was the first to ban Donald Trump, influencing the decisions of Facebook and other digital platforms.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Counter Punch ☛ Take the Gloves Off

  The larger import of McMorrow’s courageous pushback should not be lost: Democrats need to respond, with controlled anger and potent language, to the deliberate lies and bullying the far right is using these days to win power.

  Democrats seem to think facts speak for themselves. Any intelligent person can surely see through the baseless far-right charges. But polls suggest that most conservatives want to believe them, must believe them if their candidate is to succeed.

• TruthOut ☛ Meadows Texts Show How Even Trump Loyalists Felt He Was Responsible for Jan. 6

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Time Has Come for Progressives to Rescue and Renew American Democracy

  “America needs something more right now than a ‘must-do’ list from liberals and progressives. America needs a different story… the leaders, and thinkers, and activists who honestly tell that story and speak passionately of the moral and religious values it puts in play will be the first political generation since the New Deal to win power back for the people.”  —Bill Moyers, “A New Story for America” (2006)

• Democracy Now ☛ Florida to Michigan to Missouri: Hear Speeches of Gay Legislators & Allies Fighting Anti-LGBTQ Bills

  Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law is part of a nationwide push by Republicans to score political points by attacking gay and transgender students. We speak with Democratic Florida state Senator Shevrin Jones, Florida’s first openly gay state senator, about how the controversial measure, which bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity for children in kindergarten through third grade, is considered another effort by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis to drum up support for his anticipated 2024 presidential run by marginalizing gay and transgender students. We also feature the viral speech from Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow denouncing her opponents for accusing her of “grooming” children, and remarks by Missouri state Representative Ian Mackey, who spoke out against a bill to allow school districts to vote on whether to ban trans student athletes from youth sports.

• TruthOut ☛ DeSantis Ban on Math Books Financially Benefits Another Anti-CRT GOP Governor

• TruthOut ☛ DeSantis’s Attack on Disney Shows Desperation of Right-Wing Culture Warriors

• TruthOut ☛ Warren Warns Democrats They’ll Lose Midterms If They Don’t “Get Up and Deliver”

• TruthOut ☛ Judge Holds Trump in Contempt With Daily $10K Fine Over Financial Investigation

• TruthOut ☛ Florida’s Gerrymandered Map Is Now Law — Practically Guaranteeing GOP Victories

• Democracy Now ☛ Florida Lawmaker Says Gerrymandered State Maps Are Part of Racist Strategy, “Not Just a Culture War”

  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed into law a gerrymandered voting map that virtually guarantees Republicans four more seats in Congress while likely cutting the number of Black Democrats elected. The measure passed along party lines Thursday but was delayed when Black Florida lawmakers staged an impromptu sit-in protest. “Republicans cannot continue to disenfranchise Black voters,” says state Senator Shevrin Jones, a Democratic member of Florida’s Legislative Black Caucus who took part in the protest and who calls the gerrymandering part of a larger suite of “racist tactics” enacted by Republicans across the country.

• Common Dreams ☛ Warren Delivers Midterm Warning: ‘Democrats Are Going to Lose’ Without Urgent Action

  Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts delivered a sharp warning to members of her party on Sunday: “If we don’t get up and deliver, then I believe that Democrats are going to lose.”

  Warren’s remarks to CNN came months out from the 2022 midterms, elections that will determine whether Democrats maintain control of Congress or relinquish it to the increasingly authoritarian Republican Party, which has unified over the past year to obstruct action on coronavirus relief, renewable energy investments, voting rights, and more.

• Meduza ☛ Russia’s next ‘foreign agents’ law Under new legislation, you won’t have to receive foreign money to be declared a ‘foreign agent’

  Russian parliamentarians have drafted a new bill on “foreign agents.” The proposed legislation, titled “On monitoring the activities of individuals under foreign influence,” was submitted to the State Duma on April 25. RBK and Izvestia have reviewed the bill’s text.

• Common Dreams ☛ Trump Held in Contempt of Court for Failing to Comply With Subpoena in Fraud Case

  This post has been updated.

  New York Attorney General Letitia James marked a “major victory” in her case against former President Donald Trump Monday as a state judge held Trump in contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena.

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Ongoing GOP Attack on Democracy

  On March 28, 2022, a federal judge found that former President Donald Trump and attorney John Eastman engaged in “a coup in search of a legal theory.” The court concluded that, more likely than not, their efforts to overturn the presidential election were federal crimes.

• Common Dreams ☛ Prosecutions of Corporate Criminals Hit Record Low Under Biden: Report

  Despite the Biden administration’s pledges to be tougher on corporate crime than its business-friendly predecessor, a new report published Monday shows that corporate prosecutions reached a record low in 2021, continuing a decline that accelerated under former President Donald Trump.

  “The Trump administration’s soft-on-corporate-crime enforcement policies are having a holdover effect.”

• TruthOut ☛ Although Macron Won French Election, Far Right Le Pen Increased Her Vote Share

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Macron’s Centrist Win Over Le Pen Also Shows Why Neoliberalism Strengthens the Right

  French President Emmanuel Macron’s re-election by a comfortable margin against an opponent with whom he shares a mutual dislike almost obscured a certain co-dependence between their political camps. Macron and his opponent, the far-right Marine Le Pen, may loathe each other, but they have developed a type of political symbiosis that provides crucial insights into the current predicament in France, Europe, and beyond.

• Democracy Now ☛ Macron Defeats Le Pen in French Election Amid “Tremendous Amount of Dissatisfaction” Among Voters

  French President Emmanuel Macron won a second five-year term on Sunday, triumphing over far-right challenger Marine Le Pen and becoming the first French president since 2002 to be reelected. Macron beat LePen by a 17-point margin, though over a quarter of voters abstained from voting and Macron’s victory was much narrower than in 2017 — pointing to growing support in recent years for Le Pen’s openly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim platform. “The 17 percentage point margin of Macron isn’t really as comfortable of a margin as it looks,” says Paris-based journalist Cole Stangler, citing a “tremendous amount of dissatisfaction” among working-class immigrant voters. “Some people, frankly, are struggling to see the difference between Macron and Le Pen,” continues Stangler, who says Macron has enacted a “very right-wing policy program.”

• Craig Murray ☛ The Advocates of Death

  There is a completely crazed article by Simon Tisdall in the Guardian – worrying its “most shared” – calling for “direct, in-country military support” by western powers in Ukraine against Russia.

• Hungary ☛ How a journalist who was doing her job became the victim of a smear campaign

  In the run-up to the Hungarian parliamentary elections held in early April, burnt Hungarian election mail-in ballots were found at a landfill near the Romanian town of Târgu Mureș. One of the first journalists to report on this was Boróka Parászka of transtelex.ro. Since then, maszol.ro (the Hungarian-language news site in Romania supported by the Hungarian government) has been carrying out a defamation campaign against Parászka, who has even received death threats.

• The Verge ☛ Jeff Bezos is already testing Elon Musk’s commitment to free speech by trolling

  His commitment is getting a mild test thanks to a fellow tech billionaire / rocket enthusiast / media mogul. Jeff Bezos quoted a New York Times reporter’s tweet pointing out that Tesla’s business interests in China could give the government leverage over Twitter via its new owner, saying, “Interesting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?.”

• Tell the Senate: A Filter Mandate Would Devastate Internet Creators

  Not content with the raft of imperfect and terrible filters voluntarily used by Big Tech platforms, a new proposal would change the copyright regime online, mandating filters and removing speech at all levels of the internet. This would be good only for a terrible cadre of the biggest companies in the country: the monopolistic ISPs like AT&T and Comcast, Big Content like Warner and NBC-Universal, and the Big Tech companies that already have filters like Google and Facebook.

  For the rest of us, for internet creators, users, and small to medium businesses, this would be a disaster. Tell your senators to stand against big corporations and with free expression and reject the Strengthening Measures to Advance Rights Technologies Copyright Act.

• AccessNow ☛ Elon Musk’s Twitter buyout must not come at the expense of human rights

  Following today’s announcement that Elon Musk will acquire complete ownership of Twitter in a cash sale of around 44 billion USD, pending shareholder approval, Access Now urges Twitter’s Board, employees, and shareholders, along with Elon Musk and investors backing the sale, to take immediate steps to affirm and strengthen Twitter’s commitments, policies, and practices to uphold human rights on the platform. Unless the necessary human rights protections are included in the terms of the sale — which are yet to be disclosed — Twitter shareholders should vote against the agreement in defense of the platform’s most vulnerable users.

  Musk plans to take Twitter private immediately following the sale, asserting privatization is the only path forward for Twitter’s growth and future as a platform for free speech. In practice, however, this move reduces opportunities for transparency and accountability, including on matters of content governance, data protection, and corporate governance. “Spyware companies and other sections of the tech industry with troubling human rights records have used this type of regulatory darkness to act with impunity,” said Peter Micek, General Counsel at Access Now.

• MakeTech Easier ☛ After Musk’s Twitter Deal, Users Rush to Mastodon

  Unless you’ve stayed away from social media and the news the past few days, you’ve undoubtedly heard that Elon Musk bought Twitter. Frankly, if you haven’t heard, you probably don’t care. Many that do care seem to be taking part in a mass exodus. After the Twitter deal was finalized, the servers at competitor Mastodon hit a traffic surge, and Twitter employees started asking questions.

• Newsweek ☛ Elon Musk Photo With Ghislaine Maxwell Floods Twitter After Deal

  Twitter users flooded the site with pictures of Elon Musk and Ghislaine Maxwell after the Tesla CEO bought the social media giant, taking the company private in a deal valued at roughly $44 billion.

  On Monday, users rushed to post a 2014 photo of Musk and Maxwell, who was convicted on charges tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring last year, poking fun at Musk and suggesting that Twitter’s new owner would soon ban the image from the platform.

  “Post this image while you still can” and “Post this f**kin photo as much as you can,” users wrote alongside the picture.

  The deal, which is expected to close this year, is the height of a weeks-long saga between Musk and Twitter.

  In the span of less than a month, the billionaire became one of the company’s largest shareholders and was also offered and turned down a seat on its board.

Censorship/Free Speech

• EFF ☛ Plaintiffs Press Appeals Court to Rule That FOSTA Violates the First Amendment

  The plaintiffs, Woodhull Freedom Foundation, Human Rights Watch, The Internet Archive, Alex Andrews, and Eric Koszyk, have been challenging the law since it was enacted in 2018. The district court hearing their challenge dismissed the case last month, ruling that FOSTA did not violate the First Amendment.

  The plaintiffs are disappointed in the district court’s ruling and disagree with it. As they have repeatedly argued, FOSTA is one of the most restrictive laws governing online speech and it has resulted in significant harm to sex workers and their allies, depriving them of places online to advocate for themselves and their community.

  FOSTA created new civil and criminal liability for anyone who “owns, manages, or operates an interactive computer service” and creates content (or hosts third-party content) with the intent to “promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person.” The law also expands criminal and civil liability to classify any online speaker or platform that allegedly assists, supports, or facilitates sex trafficking as though they themselves were participating “in a venture” with individuals directly engaged in sex trafficking.

• Mint Press News ☛ An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm

  Google has sent a warning shot across the world, ominously informing media outlets, bloggers, and content creators that it will no longer tolerate certain opinions when it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• WSWS ☛ London bus drivers speak out against smears and censorship of World Socialist Web Site by defenders of Unite

  To deflect attention away from this debacle, the union activists then launched a smear campaign against the WSWS over its article, “‘Activists’ promote Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham in Arriva London South pay dispute.”

  The purpose of their hysterical response was to spread confusion over the 2021/2 pay claim at Arriva London South in order to make respectable a below inflation deal and legitimise censorship of the WSWS.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Counter Punch ☛ Bernard Collaery’s War Against Secret Trials

  Assange’s case is notorious and grotesque enough: held in Belmarsh for three years without charge; facing extradition to the United States for a dubiously cobbled indictment bolted to the Espionage Act of 1917 – a US statute that is being extra-territorially expanded to target non-US nationals who publish classified information overseas.

  Collaery’s is less internationally known, though it should banish any suggestions that Assange would necessarily face much fairer treatment in the Australian justice system.  The barrister is being prosecuted under section 39 of the Intelligence Services Act 2001 (Cth) for conspiracy to reveal classified information.  He was consulted by now convicted former intelligence officer Witness K, who was responsible for leading a 2004 spying operation conducted by the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) that led to the bugging of cabinet offices used by the East Timorese government.

• Counter Punch ☛ Corporal Anselmo in the Series “In Search of Anselmo”

  I immediately point out that the documentary maker Carlos Alberto Jr. is a filmmaker. This is not so obvious. I mean: the shots he makes, the places where he takes Anselmo,, the scenes he films, are those of a movie man. At the beginning of the first episode, when Anselmo refers to the codenames he used to infiltrate and deliver militants to their deaths, he laughs. This is definitive as a presentation of the traitor’s cynicism. Masterful.

  Carlos Alberto is a journalist who did his homework, studied, researched, what journalism had not done until today with Corporal Anselmo. Examples of this are the terrible liar’s book “Eu, Cabo Anselmo”, by Percival de Souza and all previous interviews.  But for the viper that Carlos Alberto saw and interviewed, for the documented serpent, there are, even so, restrictions to the filmmaker’s method: if the interviewers before Carlos Alberto Jr. sinned by ignorance of the great liar of the agent of repression, in Carlos Alberto there was what I would call excessive respect to the lies of the interviewee. I mean: Carlos Alberto doesn’t interrupt him, except rare times, because he lets the lie go. Even if the documentary maker counters Anselmo’s statements with statements that contradict him in a cut with other interviewees, Calos Alberto doesn’t interrupt him with his own voice, which would be very interesting to show Anselmo’s contradictions alive in his own speech.   This is clear when Anselmo visits the headquarters of the former Deops in São Paulo, today Memória da Resistência. There, in an unfortunate chance for the traitor, he passes in front of a wall where the six murdered in the Granja de São Bento in Pernambuco are displayed with photos.  There, in front of two planes, with images of the press that published what the repression ordered, as here.

Civil Rights/Policing

• TruthOut ☛ Dark Money Networks That Attacked Justice Jackson Are Also Attacking Schools

• Pro Publica ☛ What We Lose When We Conflate Child “Abuse” and “Neglect”

  I was raised on a rural route at the edge of the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. I didn’t know a single rich person growing up; we were all varying degrees of middle-class and poor. Still, I knew at a young age that some of the kids at my school went without some of the most basic necessities, let alone such extras as a new outfit from Walmart to start the school year. But it would be years before I fully realized the harshness of rural poverty — in particular, the ways isolation exacerbates financial challenges, as well as the lack of medical and social service providers and long distances necessary to travel to find them, often without any form of reliable public transportation. When poverty persists in a region, other problems take root.

  After spending several years reporting in other states, in 2014 I returned to the region I had long called home. Since then, I’ve heard about how child abuse rates are higher in rural Southern Illinois than any other part of the state. And I wondered why these trends persist.

• Project Censored ☛ Special Guests Valena Beety, Geoff Davidian, and Dr. Margaret Flowers – The Project Censored Show

  Notes: Valena Beety teaches law at Arizona State University, and previously worked at Innocence Projects in two states (Mississippi and West Virginia). Geoff Davidian is a reporter with over 40 years’ experience, including at the Milwaukee Journal, Arizona Republic, and Houston Chronicle. Margaret Flowers is a retired pediatrician and a long-time advocate for universal single-payer health coverage. She’s a member of the steering committee for HealthOverProfit.org, a group that campaigns for “a national improved Medicare for All healthcare system.”

• Techdirt ☛ Vietnam Government Pushing Law That Would Require Social Media Companies To Remove ‘Illegal’ Content Within 24 Hours

  Feeling the crunch of this economy? Why not leverage government power to create a sustainable revenue stream? That’s the plan in Vietnam, a country not unfamiliar with regular deployments of censorial efforts by the government.

• Hackaday ☛ 2022 Sci-Fi Contest: A Mac-Based Droid Named R.O.B.

  Droids and robot assistants are still not really a part of our daily lives, even if they started showing up in movies many long decades ago. [Rudy Aramaryo] perhaps hopes that will change one day, and is pursuing this goal with their own droid build named R.O.B.

• The Nation ☛ Pro Life?

• Counter Punch ☛ A Historic Deal for Union Doormen

• TruthOut ☛ Starbucks May Soon Face Legal Consequences for Union Busting

• Apple hires anti-union lawyers in escalating union fight

  Apple is working with anti-union lawyers at Littler Mendelson in an escalating fight with retail workers in Atlanta who have filed for a union election. Though the company has not publicly stated its stance on Apple Stores unionizing, the move sends a strong signal that it plans to oppose workers organizing for better pay and working conditions.

  Littler is currently representing Starbucks in its efforts to fight off worker organizing. It previously helped McDonald’s avoid responsibility in a 2014 case that alleged the company, as a joint employer, violated labor laws by retaliating against workers who participated in the Fight for $15 campaign.

• Malay Mail ☛ Shariah court sentences Petaling Jaya MP Maria Chin to one week jail for ‘insulting’ Islamic judicial system

  The Kuala Lumpur Shariah High Court today sentenced Petaling Jaya MP Maria Chin Abdullah to one week in jail for contempt of court over her statement that had reportedly “insulted” the Islamic judicial system.

  Free Malaysia Today reported that the decision was over Maria’s statement on September 5, 2019, in which she remarked that Muslim women in Malaysia are still being discriminated against under the shariah judicial system here.

• WSWS ☛ Demonstrations in Lansing and Detroit demand officer who killed Patrick Lyoya be charged and prosecuted for murder

  Both demonstrations expressed the widespread anger and disgust of the public toward the brutal execution-style killing that was captured completely on smartphone video by the passenger, who was in Lyoya’s car when he was pulled over at 8:10 a.m. in a residential neighborhood on the southwest side of the city in western Michigan.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Techdirt ☛ New York State Embraces Community Broadband

  We’ve noted for a long time how data makes it clear that, contrary to claims by telecom monopolies, community broadband networks are hugely beneficial. They generally offer faster speeds at lower prices with better customer service than regional monopolies, and they also tend to push said monopolies to try a little harder to compete on price, and expand and improve service.

• Techdirt ☛ Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: UK Regulator Dings Clever Ads As Being Too Good

  For many, many, many years we’ve been talking about the idea of advertising as content and content as advertising on Techdirt. The basic idea is that in today’s world, where there are so many things competing for our attention, rather than trying to force annoying ads on people, advertisers should look to turn their advertising into good content that people actually want to see. And the related concept of “content is advertising” is that any good content advertises something else in some way or another (whether it wants to or not). But the key point is that rather than relying on the idea of a captive audience, it makes sense to focus on trying to create advertising that people want to see.

Monopolies

• The Register UK ☛ Apple’s grip on iOS browser engines disallowed under latest draft EU rules

  Europe’s Digital Markets Act – near-finalized legislation to tame the internet’s gatekeepers – contains language squarely aimed at ending Apple’s iOS browser restrictions.

  The Register has received a copy of unpublished changes in the proposed act, and among the various adjustments to the draft agreement is the explicit recognition of “web browser engines” as a service that should be protected from anti-competitive gatekeeper-imposed limitations.

  Apple requires that competing mobile browsers distributed through the iOS App Store use its own WebKit rendering engine, which is the basis of its Safari browser. The result is that Chrome, Edge, and Firefox on iOS are all, more or less, Safari.

  That requirement has been a sore spot for years among rivals like Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft. They could not compete on iOS through product differentiation because their mobile browsers had to rely on WebKit rather than their own competing engines.

• Patents

  • EFF ☛ Our Fight To Prevent Patent Suits From Being Shrouded in Secrecy

    That’s why EFF, along with the Public Interest Patent Law Institute, and the assistance of Columbia Law School’s Science, Health, and Information Clinic has filed a motion to intervene and unseal documents in a patent case, Uniloc v. Google, in the Eastern District of Texas. When Google filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, the parties filed their briefs and documentary exhibits entirely under seal, keeping even basic facts about those documents (like their length) secret. Worse, the parties did not file any sealing motions or make any other attempt to justify their excessive sealing requests. This conduct violated the public’s access rights under the Constitution and common law as well as the standing order of the presiding judge, Judge Rodney Gilstrap. It also undermines earlier efforts by EFF to ensure greater transparency in patent cases in this Texas federal court, which has one of the largest dockets of patent cases in the country.

    These sealed documents are important: they go to whether Uniloc has a legal right, known as standing, to bring lawsuits based on these patents. As one of the country’s most prolific patent litigants, Uniloc’s right to sue affects the freedom of countless technology makers and users.

    Many of the documents that Uniloc filed under seal in Texas were already unsealed in another case—yet in Texas, they remain sealed in their entirety. There is no justification for that. Once information is public, it cannot be sealed. Hoping the parties would recognize that as well, EFF and PIPLI asked Google and Uniloc to unseal those already public records and to file motions to seal any information they could justify keeping sealed.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ RIAA & Homeland Security’s IPR Center Team Up to Fight Online Piracy

    The RIAA and the US Government’s National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to coordinate public and private sector efforts to disrupt online piracy. Criminal prosecutions for music piracy are relatively rare, so the partnership may signal changes ahead.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ EU Reaches Agreement on Digital Services Act, Including New Takedown Rules

    The EU has reached an agreement on the final text of the Digital Services Act (DSA). The new legislation sets clear guidelines for how online platforms and services must prevent abuse and the spread of illegal and harmful content. The DSA will help to keep “big tech” accountable and also comes with some new rules and requirements for takedown notices.

  • Techdirt ☛ The EU Copyright Directive Is So Bad It’s Proving Really Hard To Transpose Into Decent National Laws

    We’ve written numerous posts about the EU Copyright Directive, because it contains two extremely harmful ideas. The first is the “snippet tax“, an attempt by some press publishers to make sites like Google pay for the privilege of displaying and linking to newspaper publishers’ material – an assault on the Web’s underlying hyperlink technology. The second element is the upload filter, probably the worst development in the copyright world of the last few decades.

  • Creative Commons ☛ Creative Commons welcomes landmark agreement in Europe on Digital Services Act

    According to official press releases outlining the contours of the agreement, these services will have to take measures to protect their users from illegal content, goods and services. This includes transparent advertising and rules to mitigate disinformation. In short, what is illegal offline is also illegal online – a principal [sic] Creative Commons (CC) fully endorses.