04.29.22
Posted in News Roundup at 8:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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There’s no shortage of DIY portable computers made by cramming a Raspberry Pi together with a small display, keyboard, and battery. But the Chonky Palmtop is one of the most unusual I’ve seen to date, thanks to its split keyboard which folds up inside the case when you’re not using it and unfolds for comfortable touch-typing when you need it.
Designed and built by Daniel Norris, the Chonky Palmtop features a 7 inch touchscreen display, a Raspberry Pi 4, a 3D-printed case, and a split keyboard based on the open source Corne Keyboard design.
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Desktop/Laptop
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ecently appeared The fourth generation of the Kubuntu Focus M2, the latest version of the professional laptop that stands out, as its name suggests, for using the member of the Ubuntu family as a pre-installed system. It is a top of the range equipment aimed at professionals, so its price is not low. In addition, it is offered with NVIDIA graphics under KDE Plasma and Xorg, which increases the chances of not having a good desktop experience.
Despite being an apparently very underground, it seems to have enough sales to stay alive and be recycled with new generations. The fact of betting on an operating system with KDE Plasma gives it a certain character of its own in a panorama clearly dominated by GNOME through Ubuntu, RHEL, Pop!_OS and more recently Fedora, which at least reared its head two years ago across some ThinkPad models .
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Audiocasts/Shows
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My biggest criticism of the Linux community and especially Linux distributions is that we don’t do a good job at educating our users. In fact, many Linux distros don’t focus at all on educating their users.
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The Steam Deck has had a huge week. Not only did the Deck have a MASSIVE update on Monday evening, but it also had one of the most eagerly awaited features land in the beta channel.
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Kernel Space
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Support for developing in the Rust language is headed toward the kernel, though just when it will land in the mainline is yet to be determined. The Rust patches are progressing, though, and beginning to attract attention from beyond the kernel community. When two languages — and two different development communities — come together, the result can be a sort of cultural clash. Some early signs of that are appearing with regard to Rust in the kernel; if the resulting impedance mismatches can be worked out, the result could be a better development environment for everybody involved.
The latest round of Rust patches was posted by Miguel Ojeda on March 17. This time around, Rust support has moved forward to version 1.59.0 of the Rust language, which has stabilized a couple of important (for the kernel) features. The patches add a new module abstracting access to hardware random-number generators. A CString type has been added for C strings. The spinlock implementation has been improved. All told, the patch series, which can be found in the linux-next repository, adds over 35,000 lines of code and documentation; it is a considerable body of work.
There has been no public discussion on just when these patches might be deemed ready to go into the mainline kernel. Rust support is still considered “experimental” even by its developers; that is likely to remain the case for some time (even after this work is merged into the mainline) until the language proves itself for kernel development.
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The ftrace and perf subsystems provide visibility into the workings of the kernel; by activating existing tracepoints, interested developers can see what is happening at specific points in the code. As much as kernel developers may resist the notion, though, not all events of interest on a system happen within the kernel. Administrators will often want to look inside user-space processes as well; they would be even happier with a mechanism that allows the simultaneous tracing of events in both the kernel and user space. The user-events subsystem, developed by Beau Belgrave and added during the 5.18 merge window, promises that capability, but users will almost certainly have to wait another cycle to gain access to it.
Kernel tracepoints are hooks at specific locations in the code. They are designed to add as little overhead as possible when they are not active, which is the case most of the time. When a tracepoint is activated, it produces a stream of structured data specific to the event being monitored; user space can read that data via a number of different interfaces. By turning on just the tracepoints of interest, user space can collect the data needed to analyze a specific situation without slowing down the kernel overall.
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Today, the Intel open-source engineering group delivered the initial batch of “DRM-intel-gt-next” updates to DRM-Next. This selection of DRM updates will make its way into the Linux 5.19 migration. The pull request is slated to offer additional updates and optimizations for the newest Linux kernel, coming this year.
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There are doubts about the future of the new read-write NTFS driver in the Linux kernel, because its author is not maintaining the code, or even answering his email, leaving the code orphaned, says a would-be helper.
It took a long time and a lot of work to get Paragon Software’s NTFS3 driver merged into the Linux kernel. It finally happened in kernel release 5.15 on the 31st October 2021. It has received no maintenance since.
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Applications
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HP printer and scanner drivers, HPLIP, released version 3.22.4 recently with a list of new devices support.
This release adds Manjaro 21.2 as well as following new printers support…
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LaTeX is one of the most popular markup languages for academic and professional use. Chances are, you are reading a LaTeX document whenever you come across either a textbook or a journal article. This is because LaTeX is a highly flexible language that can easily adapt to any situation — the logic that your document is based on stays the same across formats.
If you want to take advantage of these features of LaTeX to create documents yourself, take a look at some of the best cross-platform LaTex editors below.
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Your editor has a certain tendency to accumulate books, to the point that they crowd everything else out of the house. There is a lot to be said for books: a physical book has a user interface that has been optimized over centuries, and one can have a reasonably high degree of certainty that any given book will still work a few decades from now. Neither of those can be said for electronic books, but they do have the advantages of taking less shelf space and being more portable. So electronic books are part of the reading menu, which naturally leads to the search for a free reader for those books; KOReader turns out to be an interesting alternative.
KOReader is distributed under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License. It is, seemingly, a highly portable application, being available for Linux, Android, Windows, and a number of dedicated reader devices. The Android version is available via F-Droid, which makes this version a good starting place for anybody wanting to try out KOReader without performing surgery on a more specialized reader device. In this setting, it is a worthy alternative to FBReader (which is also a reasonable application) and, unlike FBReader, it doesn’t try to sell proprietary plugins.
Those of us who have been playing with Linux for a long time, though, remember the special adrenaline rush that comes with trying to install free software onto a device that wasn’t intended to support modification by its owner. One does not really know a piece of software until one has given it the opportunity to turn a useful device into electronic waste. So naturally your editor went quickly from the Android application to installing KOReader on his Kobo device. The Kobo, as it turns out, is a relatively open device; the installation is just a matter of mounting it as USB storage and unzipping a couple of files into it. Then comes the long, sweaty-palms pause while the Kobo meditates on the new software while presenting a blank screen.
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Instructionals/Technical
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You can perhaps guess what’s going on here. Your system doesn’t have the required media codecs installed and hence the video player cannot play that video file.
So, what’s the solution here? You install the required codec. But how?
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Learn what is causing a container permissions error and how to work around the issue without resorting to the –privileged flag.
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* Review : FreeOffice 2021
* My Opinion : First Look At Ubuntu 22.04
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Cider’s new free and open-source app allows Linux users to listen to their favorite music on Apple Music.
If you enjoy music and have more than one streaming service, you may have discovered that Apple Music was difficult to listen to from desktop apps if you are a Linux user.
As is customary, the open-source community has moved forward in search of a suitable alternative that will provide a solution to all of these people.
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Today we are looking at how to install PyCharm 2022 Community Edition on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Node.js on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Node.JS is an open-source, backend Javascript runtime environment built on Google’s V8 engine. It allows developers to utilize JavaScript to create command-line tools and server-side scripting, which involves running scripts on the server before sending the page to the user’s browser. Node.js is available for most modern operating systems including Ubuntu Linux.
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 Node.js 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, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Yarn on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Yarn is a JavaScript package manager compatible with npm that helps you automate the process of installing, updating, configuring, and removing npm packages. It is a fast, secure, and reliable alternative that any other Nodejs package manager.
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 Yarn package manager 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, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
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Password Store is a simple password storage tool for Linux. It follows the Unix philosophy and encrypts passwords with GPG. This guide will show you how to manage your passwords on Linux with Password Store.
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XeroLinux is an elegant, Arch-based Linux operating system that uses the KDE Plasma desktop. Unfortunately, it is a small project with only one maintainer. Still, if you love KDE and want to try out Arch Linux, XeroLinux is an excellent option. Here’s how to set up XeroLinux on your PC.
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Slay The Spire is a roguelike deck-building video game developed by MegaCrit and published by Humble Bundle. The game was released in 2017 for Microsoft Windows, MacOS, and Linux, with other platforms following in 2019. Here’s how to play Slay The Spire on your Linux system.
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RabbitMQ is an open-source message broker software. It’s a software where queues are defined and to which applications connect in order to transfer a message or messages. Think of it as a middle man who acts as a broker. They can be used to reduce loads and delivery times for web application servers by delegating tasks that take up a lot of resources and or time to a third party that has no other job
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Games
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Slower pace of validation? Looks like Valve is trying to prove us wrong as they have just added close to 100 games in a matter of days after the 2300 games milestone on the Steam Deck. There are now more than 2400 games (2406 at the time of writing) working on the Steam Deck – in two categories as usual
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Good Old Games, what GOG were originally known as, is a bit more than just a name it’s a commitment to keeping classics alive and easy to purchase so GOG are celebrating with a sale.
Of course, plenty of the games in their classics collection don’t have Native Linux versions because a lot of them are incredibly old. That’s fine though really, considering how good the likes of DOSBox, ScummVM and Wine are — most will likely just work out of the box with one of those ready.
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Canonical, the maker of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced the early availability of a Snap package for the PC game store Steam. The new version comes as Canonical and Steam developer Valve are making a major push into Linux gaming.
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While there’s a huge focus on Flatpak and Flathub thanks to the Steam Deck shipping with it out of the box, Canonical on the other hand continue with their own Snap packaging and they have a Steam Snap in testing for Ubuntu (and other distros, since Snap also works elsewhere).
In a fresh introduction post on the Ubuntu Linux Discourse forum (thanks OMGUbuntu), it outlines how they’re now actually “going all in on the gaming experience on Ubuntu and we’ve started building out a team dedicated to working on just that”. Part of that is reducing the need for PPAs and other solutions, and their focus now is on Steam.
The call for testing has now begun on their Steam Snap package which gives you everything you need for Native Linux gaming and for Proton too. It’s early days for the Steam Snap so expect issues but they said they will “iterate quickly, and respond to this feedback” on it.
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The Steam game store has been available on desktop Linux for many years at this point, and with the addition of the Proton compatibility layer for Windows games, it has become an invaluable tool for gaming on Linux. Canonical, the developers of Ubuntu Linux, have now introduced a new way to use Steam on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions: a Snap package.
Canonical revealed in a blog post, “we’ve been working on an important quality of life improvement for Linux gamers and today… we are happy to announce the early access launch of the Steam snap!” Canonical is listed as the developer, so it seems Valve isn’t involved in the project.
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At Canonical we’ve been anticipating “the Year of Linux Gaming” for about as long as we’ve been waiting for Half-Life 3, but it’s never seemed as close before as it does now in 2022.
Open source emulation layers like Wine and Proton have made it possible for thousands of native Windows games to run on Linux, with new titles becoming available every day. Anti-cheat services like BattlEye and Easy Anti-Cheat are also rolling out support for multiplayer games. And development tools like Unity and Unreal are bringing their industry-leading editors to Linux, with Ubuntu as a target platform.
With Jammy Jellyfish now out in the wild, the Ubuntu Desktop team is getting down to work planning for the future, and improving the gaming experience features heavily in our priorities (and hiring plan!).
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 42.1 is here about five weeks after the release of the GNOME 42 desktop environment and brings numerous improvements to the GNOME Software graphical package manager, including better handling of the Flathub repository and Flatpak apps, better support of RTL (Right-to-Left) languages, various UI fixes, as well as a fix for a bug that prevented Fedora Linux users from disabling some repositories
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Another week of work towards porting Builder to GTK 4. Since I can’t add to TWIG from IRC, I’ll try harder to drop some occasional updates here.
There are a bunch of foundational things to still get landed before I feel I can get Builder flipped over to our Nightly builds. In particular we need to land support for things like…
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Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 22 to April 29.
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After a year and a half of development , the operating system Redox 0.7 , developed using the Rust language and the microkernel concept, has been published. The developments of the project are distributed under the free MIT license. For testing Redox OS offered , 75 MB in size. The assemblies are generated for the x86_64 architecture and are available for systems with UEFI and BIOS.
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New Releases
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KaOS is pleased to announce the availability of the April release of a new stable ISO.
With the release of KDE Gear 22.04, some nice new features and enhancements are introduced. Konsole’s completely new feature is Quick Commands: open a quick commands pane from Plugins > Show Quick Commands and you will be able to create short scripts you use frequently, Konsole’s SSH plugin has been further enhanced and you can assign different visual profiles. For Kdenlive, two new options stick out: you can create customized profiles so that your rendered movie adapts perfectly to your needs, and you can also render by zones, using the guides you set up on the timeline as references.
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Coming two and a half months after KaOS 2022.02, the KaOS 2022.04 release is powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.17 kernel series and includes the most recent KDE goodies, such as the KDE Plasma 5.24.4 LTS desktop environment, KDE Gear 22.04 software suite, and KDE Frameworks 5.93 software suite, all compiled against Qt 5.15.3.
The KDE Gear 22.04 software suite introduces a new app called Skanpage, which is a simple and easy-to-use document scanning application designed for multi-page scanning and saving of documents and images.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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Week 17 was filled with snapshots – 7 of them to be precise. We have published snapshots 0421…0427 (with the next ones almost ready for QA).
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Linux and Kubernetes are the backbone of hybrid cloud infrastructure and core to the success of a mixed IT environment. With SUSE One professional & technical certifications, you can gain the sought-after skills and knowledge that will help your organization win with open source products and solutions, deliver cloud-native services, or help ease the challenges of adopting, managing and scaling containers–from SMB to the enterprise.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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TechRepublic has published an interview with Fedora project leader Matthew Miller.
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Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
The F36 Final freeze is underway. F36 Final is on track for target date #3 (2022-05-10).
I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.
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A proposal to “deprecate” support for BIOS-only systems for Fedora, by no longer supporting new installations on those systems, led to a predictably long discussion on the Fedora devel mailing list. There are, it seems, quite a few users who still have BIOS-based systems; many do not want to have to switch away from Fedora simply to keep their systems up to date. But, sometime in the future, getting rid of BIOS support seems inevitable since the burden on those maintaining the tools for installing and booting those systems is non-trivial and likely to grow over time. To head that off, a special interest group (SIG) may form to help keep BIOS support alive until it really is no longer needed.
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“Why did the Beatles become a worldwide sensation? Why do some cultural products succeed and others fail? Why are some musicians, poets, and novelists, unsuccessful or unknown in their lifetimes, iconic figures decades or generation after their deaths? Why are success and failure so unpredictable?,” these are among the questions explored in Beatlemania, a draft paper by Harvard professor Cass Sunstein that will be published later this year in the inaugural issue of The Journal of Beatles Studies.
“On one view, the simplest and most general explanation is best, and it points to quality, appropriately measured: success is a result of quality, and the Beatles succeeded because of the sheer quality of their music,” wrote Sunstein. “On another view, social influences are critical: timely enthusiasm or timely indifference can make the difference for all, including the Beatles, leading extraordinary books, movies, and songs to fail even if they are indistinguishable in quality from those that succeed.”
In 1961 the Beatles were an obscure English rock band from Liverpool, with no manager and modest prospects. They tried to release a debut single, Love Me Do, but every record label they approached rejected them and the band came close to splitting. In January of 1962 Brian Epstein became their manager. Epstein had no experience in managing artists, but he liked their music and sense of humor. He eventually persuaded EMI producer George Martin to audition the band in June of 1962, who despite feeling that they were “a rather raw group” with “not very good songs,” agreed to sign them to a recording contract.
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We are excited to announce that Shuchi Sharma has joined us as vice president and chief diversity, equity & inclusion officer (CDEIO). In her new role, Shuchi will be responsible for leading Red Hat’s DEI Global Center of Excellence, which is focused on setting our DEI strategies that align with our short and long-term business goals and partnering across our leadership, business and people practices. These practices include attracting and retaining diverse talent, career advancement and associate development. In her role, she aims to foster a culture of belonging for all associates and help make Red Hat a more open and inclusive company in the technology industry.
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Debian Family
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This is just a quick reminder for the Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 happening in a bit more than 3 weeks.
So far 43 people have registered and thus there’s still some on site accomodation available. There’s no real deadline for registration, however if you register after May 1st you might not get a t-shirt in your prefered size.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Few distributions are as absolutely stabilized in form and substance as Linux Mint, which has more than enough benefits, but don’t expect any surprises, because it doesn’t have any. That is why knowing that this year it will launch its new major version is no mystery.
However, Clement Lefebvre has taken advantage of the publication of the monthly Linux Mint news bulletin to anticipate some of the things to come, such as, mainly, the next major version of the distribution. We are talking about Linux Mint 21 codenamed ‘Vanessa’, which will be released sometime this year in the wake of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
As we all know, Linux Mint has been basing its major releases on Ubuntu LTS for years and they haven’t made a better decision than that so far. Linux Mint essentially follows a six-month release cycle, with a new major release every two years followed by incremental releases on the same basis, a stability-focused strategy that has worked like clockwork.
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Following the release of Ubuntu LTS a few days ago, the next Ubuntu release, Ubuntu 22.10, is now open for development. Kinetic Kudu has been confirmed as the codename for Ubuntu 22.10.
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PolarBerry was successfully launched back in 2020 and is once again available from the Crowd Supply website with prices starting from $999. The system-on-module (SoM) that makes it easy to develop for and integrate Microchip’s PolarFire SoC, a low-power FPGA with a secure, four-application-core, 64-bit, Linux-capable RISC-V subsystem.
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“PolarBerry is the first production- and deployment-ready SoM with a hardened real-time, Linux-capable, RISC-V-based MPU subsystem bringing low power consumption, thermal efficiency, and defense-grade security to embedded systems. With a deterministic, coherent RISC-V CPU cluster and a deterministic L2 memory subsystem enabling Linux and real-time applications, PolarBerry is the ideal SoM for users who are looking to develop systems which are not based on ARM processors.”
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We’ve seen several hardware devices based on Rockchip RK3566 AIoT SoC that do not make use of the key features of the processor. But QNAP TS-133 1-bay NAS is different, since it relies on the native SATA and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces for network storage, and the built-in NPU is leveraged to accelerate object and face recognition by up to 6 times.
The NAS comes with 2GB of RAM, 4GB of storage for QTS 5.0 Linux operating system, USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports, and the company promotes it as a “personal private cloud & home multimedia center”.
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“Turing Smart Screen” is a low-cost 3.5-inch USB-C display that connects to systems with a USB port, and works with Windows, Linux (including Raspberry Pi), MacOS, and other operating systems that support Python3.
But contrary to my initial assumptions, it does not exactly act as a second monitor, and instead, it is an information display, originally designed to show resource utilization, e.g. CPU and memory usage, in Windows, and controlled through commands send to the USB port.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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The rapid adoption of electric vehicles over the last decade has required the installation of additional infrastructure to support them, namely high-voltage chargers that can deliver enough current to the batteries for fast recharging. But due to their potentially high cost, James Fotherby decided to design and build his own 7.2kW charging solution that was simultaneously cheap, simple, and safe to operate.
For the safety component, Fotherby had to ensure that any potential fault, such as a loose wire coming into contact with the car, would be detected in time so that power could be cut immediately. His design incorporated a coil that measures the amount of current heading to the car and the amount returning. If the two values don’t match, then an alert is triggered, and the relay switches off the power. Controlling the relay was accomplished by integrating an Arduino, which receives 5V via a series of two step-down converters.
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Usually when we use the term “solar power,” we are referring to indirect energy use: photovoltaic solar panels collect energy from the sun and then either pass it along to a device or store it for later use. But some systems can use power from the sun in a more direct manner. If you’ve ever used a magnifying glass to set fire to a twig, you were using solar power directly. YouTuber Cranktown City pushed that concept further and created an Arduino-controlled CNC engraver that takes advantage of solar power.
This machine doesn’t use energy from the sun to run the gantry motors or even the Arduino Uno board. Instead, it uses the sun and a glass lens in place of a conventional laser. Laser engravers are expensive because of the laser tubes, optics, and power supply. By replacing all of those with the sun and cheap lens, Cranktown City was able to engrave wood by burning it while saving a lot of money. He just needed a way to harness the sun’s energy and direct it with moderate precision.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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The news of Elon Musk buying Twitter has put Mastodon into the public spotlight as an alternative social network, rapidly exploding our growth with over 30,000 new users in just a single day. This is because at Mastodon, we present a vision of social media that cannot be bought and owned by any billionaire, and strive to create a more resilient global platform without profit incentives. We believe that your ability to communicate online should not be at the whims of a single commercial company.
Mastodon is used to publish 500-character messages with pictures, polls, videos and so on to an audience of followers, and, in turn, to follow interesting people and receive their posts in a chronological home feed. Unlike Twitter, there is no central Mastodon website – you sign up to a provider that will host your account, similarly to signing up for Outlook or Gmail, and then you can follow and interact with people using different providers. Anyone can become such a provider as Mastodon is free and open-source. It has no ads, respects your privacy, and allows people/communities to self-govern.
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Elon Musk’s deal to purchase Twitter has put the Mastodon social network in the spotlight, with more than 30,000 new users joining in a single day, says Eugen Rochko on the Mastodon blog.
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Funding
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Music service Spotify has introduced the FOSS Fund initiative, under which it intends to donate 100,000 euros to developers supporting various independent open source projects during the year. Applicants for support will be nominated by Spotify engineers, after which a specially convened committee will select the recipients of awards. The projects that will receive the awards will be announced in May. Spotify uses many independent open source projects in its operations and intends to repay the community for creating quality public code with the proposed initiative.
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Programming/Development
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Over the last two years, Bluetooth® audio support has steadily grown in PipeWire and has become a featureful, stable, conformant, open source Bluetooth® audio stack implementation.
Testimony to that is the fact that, as of last week (April 21), Bluetooth® A2DP audio has been qualified on the Steam Deck using PipeWire and WirePlumber. This means that it is now able to pass the conformance test suite from the Bluetooth SIG and will work against other qualified implementations.
The audio portion of Bluetooth® is split in 2 main categories: one for the stereo and (mostly) uni-directional sound (A2DP profile), and the other for the mono and bi-directional sound (HFP profile). With all the development work that has taken place, here’s a look at where things stand.
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I’ve been enjoying learning how to use a game engine for three days now. I also published my two last days on the itch.io platform for independant video games. I’m experimenting a lot with various ideas, a new game must be different than the other to try new mechanics, new features and new gameplay.
This is absolutely refreshing to have a tool in hand that let me create interactive content, this is really fantastic. I wish I studied this earlier.
Despite my games being very short and simplistic, I’m quite proud of the accomplished work. If someone in the world had fun with them even for 20 seconds, this is a win for me.
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We are happy to announce that Qt for Android Automotive (Qt AA) 6.3 has been released.
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Python
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A mega-thread in the python-ideas mailing list is hardly surprising, of course; we have covered quite a few of them over the years. A recent example helps shine a light into a dark—or at least dim—corner of the Python language: the super() built-in function for use by methods in class hierarchies. There are some, perhaps surprising, aspects to super() along with wrinkles in how to properly use it. But it has been part of the language for a long time, so changes to its behavior, as was suggested in the thread, are pretty unlikely.
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A common practice on the website Rate Your Music is for two users to make friends and thoroughly investigate each other’s ratings. After I found Karan on a thread about personality types, I saw he rated a peculiar album 1.5 out of 5. It was called Alien Rap: Songs about Life on the Planet Glumph. The cover featured a cartoon MC alien with a backwards baseball cap and bling. “There is a special message on this CD for the kids of Earth,” said the front cover. I eagerly listened to the album and it surpassed all my expectations of weirdness and badness, and to this day I don’t understand why Karan doesn’t embrace it the way I do. But I’m grateful that he showed it to me because I ended up stumbling on a fountain of knowledge, much like an alien in a UFO investigating Earth for the first time. When I saw the creator of Alien Rap was a prolific creator of meditation music and that he died shortly after Alien Rap was released, I did some digging and was distraught to find that almost no information was out there. Soon, I found myself on the phone with the creator’s son.
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Education
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I guess Betteridge’s law of headlines gives you the answer, but bear with me. 
Like most engineers, I am a layperson in statistics; I had some in high school, then an intro course in university and then used it in a couple of random courses (like speech recognition). (I also took a multivariate statistics course on my own after I had graduated.) But pretty much every practical tool I ever learned was, eventually, centered around the normal distribution; we learned about Student’s t-test in various scenarios, made confidence intervals, learned about the central limit theorem that showed its special place in statistics, how the binomial distribution converges to the normal distribution under reasonable circumstances (not the least due to the CLT), and so on.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Fedora (dhcp, gzip, podman, rsync, and usd), Mageia (firefox/nss/rootcerts, kernel, kernel-linus, and thunderbird), Oracle (container-tools:2.0, container-tools:3.0, mariadb:10.3, and zlib), Red Hat (Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.2 (python-twisted), xmlrpc-c, and zlib), SUSE (glib2, nodejs12, nodejs14, python-paramiko, python-pip, and python-requests), and Ubuntu (curl, ghostscript, libsdl1.2, libsdl2, mutt, networkd-dispatcher, and webkit2gtk).
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Apple’s stable channel update for desktop which takes Google Chrome to version 101.0.4951.41 for Windows, Mac, and Linux users provides fixes 30 security vulnerabilities.
As reported by Forbes’ Davey Winder, none of these are zero-days where attackers are known to already be exploiting the vulnerabilities. However, Chrome users are encouraged to immediately update their browsers to protect against possible future browser-based attacks.
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To start our week of vulnerabilities in everything, there’s a potentially big vulnerability in Android handsets, but it’s Apple’s fault. OK, maybe that’s a little harsh — Apple released the code to their Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) back in 2011 under the Apache License. This code was picked up and shipped as part of the driver stack for multiple devices by various vendors, including Qualcomm and MediaTek. The problem is that the Apple code was terrible, one researcher calling it a “walking colander” of security problems.
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Cybersecurity firm Red Canary is launching a new endpoint detection and response solution for Linux, designed to focus on the constraints that DevOps, engineering and security teams demand.
According to the company, the Linux EDR and MDR solution will help organizations better protect their Linux environments, which can be difficult to secure. The solution leverages Linux-optimized technology developed by the company’s engineers, analysts, researchers and customer support.
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Short passwords are weak. Long passwords are stronger but inconvenient.
Indeed we are changing from passwords to passphrases, and instead or remembering simple ‘passwords’ of 6 or 8 characters, it’s encouraged to use longer ‘passphrases’ of 16+ characters
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Privacy/Surveillance
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In the post-pandemic era, video conferencing apps (VCAs) have converted previously private spaces — bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens — into semi-public extensions of the office. And for the most part, users have accepted these apps in their personal space, without much thought about the permission models that govern the use of their personal data during meetings. While access to a device’s video camera is carefully controlled, little has been done to ensure the same level of privacy for accessing the microphone. In this work, we ask the question: what happens to the microphone data when a user clicks the mute button in a VCA? We first conduct a user study to analyze users’ understanding of the permission model of the mute button. Then, using runtime binary analysis tools, we trace raw audio in many popular VCAs as it traverses the app from the audio driver to the network. We find fragmented policies for dealing with microphone data among VCAs — some continuously monitor the microphone input during mute, and others do so periodically. One app transmits statistics of the audio to its telemetry servers while the app is muted. Using network traffic that we intercept en route to the telemetry server, we implement a proof-of-concept background activity classifier and demonstrate the feasibility of inferring the ongoing background activity during a meeting — cooking, cleaning, typing, etc. We achieved 81.9% macro accuracy on identifying six common background activities using intercepted outgoing telemetry packets when a user is muted.
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Anytime you use a video teleconferencing app, you’re sending your audio data to the company hosting the services. And, according to a new study, that means all of your audio data. This includes voice and background noise whether you’re broadcasting or muted.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison investigated “many popular apps” to determine the extent that video conferencing apps capture data while users employ the in-software ‘mute’ button.
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Environment
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Wildlife/Nature
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An about 3-meter-long giant squid was found stranded on a beach here on April 20, in what local authorities said was a rare occurrence.
At around 10 a.m., a nearby resident spotted the squid at Ugu beach in Obama, Fukui Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan coast. According to the Obama Municipal Government, the squid was still alive when it was found. It is unusual for a giant squid to be washed ashore alive, officials said.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Many phone carriers are phasing out older phone technology and replacing it with a service called interconnected Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) – a service that makes calls using the internet. In fact, the majority of phone calls made today – approximately 70% – are made using VOIP.
But, unless the FCC takes action, the ability to make certain that consumers have access to phone service that works when they need it, can call 9-1-1 for help, or can receive assistance to help pay for phone service will disappear.
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Monopolies
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Public Knowledge has the pleasure of hosting a multifaceted program focused on training and developing the next generation of tech policy experts and public interest advocates that reflects the diversity of voices and experiences in our society.
Our monthly Career Breakfast Series is designed for students & recent graduates to learn about tech policy and public interest work, careers, and its community.
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Posted in Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, Patents at 8:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Rewarding corruption
Why move away from standards and impose (using ‘fines’) Microsoft formats that involved corruption including bribery? Why does the USPTO push formats and products of just one USPTO applicant?
Summary: The Microsoft infestation in the USPTO shows no signs of stopping
WITH Microsoft Vidal [1, 2] in charge of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) we should not be surprised to see the world’s most influential patent office pushing Microsoft’s vendor lock-in more aggressively than ever before.
“I got this today from the USPTO,” a reader told us. “They are going to allow pdf back-ups*, because everybody knows DOCX doesn’t work.”
To quote:
New temporary backup option to help ease transition to DOCX
As part of our efforts to use all available technology to strengthen patents and reduce pendency times, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is transitioning to the DOCX format for patent application filings. In our latest initiative to ease the transition to DOCX, and to address concerns that the new format might result in conversion discrepancies, we have announced an interim, optional procedure.
Through December 31, 2022, applicants may upload a backup PDF version of their application with their DOCX version. There are no fees associated with this backup PDF. And, there is no obligation to provide a backup PDF. The backup PDF option will allow applicants concerned about the new format to gain confidence in the reliability and accuracy of filing applications in DOCX. Applicants can be assured that, should there be any conversion discrepancies, they can rely on the PDF to verify the substance of their original filing.
To learn more about how the transition to DOCX will improve patent quality and speed the application process, please read our latest blog. The Federal Register Notice announcing this process is available on our Patent Related Notices webpage. Please see the USPTO’s DOCX web page for more information about filing patent application documents in DOCX.
We encourage all applicants to start filing in DOCX so we can streamline the process for you and improve our ability to examine your application quickly and effectively.
They are basically imposing Microsoft on everybody. How is this even legal???
“I found patent attorneys on the Internet talking about how DOCX doesn’t work,” the reader told us. “But, as you can imagine, they never responded when I contacted them about my efforts to actually do something about the USPTO, Kappos, and Microsoft.”
“Kappos has a buddy named Bernie Knight who he installed as General Counsel at the USPTO, and Knight wrote an opinion that enabled the introduction of the $200 “electronic filing incentive” penalty, and, subsequently, the $400 penalty if DOCX isn’t used.”
“Knight is peddling himself in Washington as an “anger management” counselor. He charges $300-per-hour. Knight and Kappos have made thousands of people angry, and Kappos gets $1,000-per-hour, surely – maybe more – and Knight gets $300-per-hour for “anger management.” I never use this cliche, but, I’ll break my own rule: Only in America. Another link to Knight. █
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* Free, apparently, initially, just so people think they care.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Another temper tantrum from the “Orange Man” (not Trump or Pooh the Bear)
Summary: As we’re going to show soon, EPO President (or "Batka") António Campinos is back to shouting and cursing; he’s no better than Benoît Battistelli even when it comes to temper
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Series parts:
- From Belarus With Love — Part I: Schizophrenic EPO Policy
- From Belarus With Love — Part II: “Techwashing” an Autocratic Regime?
- From Belarus With Love — Part III: Apps From the Dictatorship
- From Belarus With Love — Part IV: “Software from Minsk” via Gilching and Rijswijk
- From Belarus With Love — Part V: From Start-Up to Success Story…
- From Belarus With Love — Part VI: “Big Daddy” Hammers the Opposition…
- YOU ARE HERE ☞ The Post-Election Crackdown
Lukashenko’s disputed election “victory” in August 2020 was followed by an unprecedented wave of public protest and a brutal crackdown as police attacked protesters with water cannons, tear gas and stun grenades.
Summary: A look back at Lukashenko’s disputed election “victory” in August 2020; the relevance to the EPO with unelected (rigged process) dictators like Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos shall become more apparent later
Following the Belarus Presidential election on 9 August 2020, Lukashenko was proclaimed the victor. According to the state Central Election Commission, he received 80% of the popular vote.
“An unprecedented wave of public protest followed, as hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens took to the streets to demand that Lukashenko step aside and that a fresh election be held.”But Lukashenko’s “victory” was disputed both by the domestic opposition and by international observers and it was widely considered to be fraudulent. The official claim that he had received 80% of the vote was rejected by many observers as implausible because of the high level of discontent with his regime.
The EU issued a statement criticising the election as “neither free nor fair” and refusing to recognise what it called the “falsified results”. The official position of the EU was that “the so-called ‘inauguration’ of 23 September 2020 and the new mandate claimed by Aleksandr Lukashenko lack any democratic legitimacy”. [Note: he is known also as Alyaksand(a)r Ryhoravich Lukashenka. Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko is more common.]
“The protests were met with a brutal crackdown by the authorities, as Belarusian police and military attacked protesters with water cannons, tear gas and stun grenades.”An unprecedented wave of public protest followed, as hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens took to the streets to demand that Lukashenko step aside and that a fresh election be held.
The protests were met with a brutal crackdown by the authorities, as Belarusian police and military attacked protesters with water cannons, tear gas and stun grenades. It is estimated that more than 35,000 protestors were arrested and thousands brutally beaten, with more than 4,000 claiming to have been tortured, according to Nash Dom, a Belarusian NGO.
The notorious Okrestina Detention Centre in Minsk where anti-Lukashenko protestors are reported to have been tortured by Belarusian security forces.
Meanwhile, Lukashenko’s ally and “controller” in Moscow, Vladimir Putin, offered financial and military support to help him crush the protests. Putin also warned foreign powers not to interfere in the “internal affairs” of Belarus. The promise of Russian assistance bolstered Lukashenko’s confidence and his sense of impunity.
“The promise of Russian assistance bolstered Lukashenko’s confidence and his sense of impunity.”The rest of the world watched as “Batka” proceeded to cracked down ever harder on his opponents – and it didn’t do much about it. Although the US and EU initiated various sanctions, it is generally agreed that these measures had very little impact on the regime.
The protests continued throughout the autumn and winter and into the early part of 2021, but the unmitigated brutality of police and security forces meant that the opposition was eventually driven underground – or into exile. Svetlana Tikhanovskaya – considered by many to be the true victor of the election – was forced to seek refuge in Lithuania.
Belarusian military deployed to suppress protests following the 2020 Presidential elections.
Emboldened by support from Moscow, Lukashenko even dared to target “dissidents” who had gone into exile abroad. On 23 May 2021, Belarus fighter jets forced a commercial flight en route from Athens to Vilnius (Lithuania) to land in Minsk so that security services could arrest émigré activist and journalist Roman Pratasevich. Pratasevich, who was living in exile in Poland, was a wanted man in his home country because he was a key figure behind the popular opposition channel Nexta.
Activist and journalist Roman Pratasevich arrested by Belarusian security forces in May 2021 after fighter jets forced a flight en route from Athens to Vilnius to land in Minsk.
In the upcoming parts we will see how the Belarus IT sector came to play a significant role in the events of 2020. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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Looking for top Linux support, along with KDE Plasma out of the box and you need a new laptop? Perhaps have a think on the new fourth generation Kubuntu Focus M2.
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The Kubuntu Focus M2 is a high-performance laptop that ships with the Kubuntu operating system pre-installed. The first version of the laptop was released in 2019, and since then the makers of the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution have worked with their hardware partners on several updates.
The latest version is powered by a 12th-gen Intel Core i7-12700H processor and NVIDIA RTX 30 series graphics. The Kubuntu Focus M2 Gen 4 is now available for purchase for $1895 and up and the laptop should begin shipping to customers May 9, 2022.
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Server
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One of the highlights of hosting the weekly Kubernetes Podcast from Google is talking to the release managers for each new Kubernetes version. The release team is constantly refreshing. Many working their way from small documentation fixes, step up to shadow roles, and then eventually lead a release.
As we prepare for the 1.24 release next week, in accordance with long-standing tradition, I’m pleased to bring you a look back at the story of 1.23. The release was led by Rey Lejano, a Field Engineer at SUSE. I spoke to Rey in December, as he was awaiting the birth of his first child.
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Applications
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Incremental View Maintenance (IVM) is a way to make materialized views up-to-date in which only incremental changes are computed and applied on views rather than recomputing. pg_ivm provides a kind of immediate maintenance, in which materialized views are updated immediately after a base table is modified.
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The world urgently needs a free program that can subtract background music from a field recording.
The purpose is to prevent censorship of people’s video recordings of how cops treat the public.
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Poppler has had the feature of being able to fill in forms, create annotations and more recently add Digital Signatures to existing PDF files.
This works relatively well if you limit yourself to entering ‘basic’ ASCII characters, but once you go to more ‘complex’ characters, things don’t really work, from the outside it seems like it should be relatively simple to fix, but things related to PDF are never as simple as they may seem.
In PDF each bit of text is associated with a Font object. That Font generally only supports one kind of text encoding and at most ‘only’ 65535 characters (65535 may seem a lot, but once you start taking into account non latin-based languages, you quickly ‘run out’ of characters).
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Instructionals/Technical
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One of the changes in Fedora Linux 36 is that new installations will no longer support the ifcfg files to configure networking. What are those and what replaces them?
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Curl is an excellent tool for downloading files in the Linux terminal.
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Linux (or the family of Linux OSes) is one of the most popular operating systems on the planet, – although dwarfed by Windows and Mac OS X in its desktop usage numbers exclusively. Many of the familiar nerds among us are quick to make a decision for a new distro but as a new user with a myriad of options presented, it can quickly become overwhelming.
If you’re in the market for a new OS, why not give Lubuntu a try? A Linux flavor based on Ubuntu and the LXQt desktop environment, Lubuntu is a soft touch for those of us keen on GNOME or KDE feature-laden environments. Don’t get me wrong; there are perks to this orientation; after all the ability to choose are the required prereqs for any real Linux user.
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When you start using a fresh installed Ubuntu system and try to open an MP4 file to play videos, it may show you an error that reads:
H.264 (High Profile) decoder is required to play the file, but is not installed.
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How to Install LAMP Apache, MySQL, PHP in Ubuntu 22.04. In this guide you will learn how to install Apache2, MySQL and PHP 8.1.
You will also install some common PHP extensions and adjust the PHP configurations. Install PhpMyAdmin and finally you will secure your setup with Let’s Encrypt SSL and configure HTTPS redirection.
This setup is tested on Google cloud, so it will work on all cloud hosting services like AWS, Azure or any VPS or any dedicated servers running Ubuntu 22.04.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Android Studio on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Android studio is a popular tool for android application development. It provides the facility to create virtual devices to run and test your applications. Android studio is available for Windows, Linux, macOS, and Chrome OS.
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 Android Studio development environment 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, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Podman on Rocky Linux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Podman is a free and open-source daemon-less container engine that was developed by RedHat. It supports multiple container image formats, including Docker images and OCI container images. Also, Podman supports managing pods and groups of containers.
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 Podman container management tool on Rocky Linux. 8.
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KDE is an international team co-operating on development of opensource software for desktop computing. K Desktop Environment (KDE) was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich. KDE community is producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS X and Microsoft Windows systems.
Kubuntu comes with a preloaded KDE Desktop environment, which is a combination of Ubuntu + KDE Plasma Desktop.
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After installing Ubuntu 22.04 the default network interface assigns an IP address using the DHCP server. Also, the wireless network will be active and enable the networking over the wifi network.
You can also configure the network interface with static IPv4 addresses. Ubuntu 22.04 uses the Netplan as a network manager.
This tutorial helps you to configure network interfaces on Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop and Server versions. The desktop users can use any one of the below methods but the server users that have CLI only access use the second method to edit network interface configuration files.
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For some reason, acquiring some unique skills and tweaks in your Linux operating system experience will positively boost your Linux administration resume and portfolio, especially for users involved in continuous projects.
One unique skill set to add to your Linux resume and portfolio is replacing whitespaces with tabs in a file.
If you are a programmer or a user that has had some exposure to various Linux-supported code editors, then you will relate to the frustrations of dealing with whitespaces.
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On Linux, we will be able to compile programs ourselves from source code, but we have to install some vital tools on the system. These tools not only allow us to compile large applications, but are also used by other programs or configurations.
Some of these packages include gcc which is the C language compiler that GNU has created. Another such tool is g++ which is also a GNU compiler but for C++.
But not only them, also many others like make which also allows us to configure the compilation of the application.
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Games
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Following an announcement at LAS Canonical says it’s “going all in” to improve the Linux gaming on Ubuntu. As part of that effort they want to simplify and smooth out the bumps currently involved in getting a gaming setup set up on Ubuntu.
And top of their list is bringing Steam to the Snap Store.
The new Steam Snap app is packaged by Canonical and not Valve (no word on whether Valve is interested in officially supporting it if it’s successful).
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ProtonUp-Qt is great. A very simple application that allows you to download extra compatibility layers for Linux desktops and the Steam Deck and now it’s even better. This tool helps you install GE-Proton (formerly Proton-GE) and Luxtorpeda for Steam, plus it also helps with Wine-GE for the game managers Lutris and Heroic Games Launcher.
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Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries, an absolute classic strategy game originally from Enlight Software that released in the 90s and later become open source just had a surprise update. While you can buy it from stores like GOG and Steam, it’s not needed since the open source release includes the game data too. The open source release is far more advanced too, and cross-platform.
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As work continues on the major Mistlands update for Valheim, Iron Gate have given us another teaser of what’s to come for their co-op survival game.
Firstly, a video they did earlier this month that I missed, is that Valheim will have Hares hopping around in the Mistlands.
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Projekt Z from German studio 314 Arts is now live on Kickstarter, with an ambitious plan to release a free to play shooter that’s supported on Linux.
A game that I’ve followed for quite some time, as their early development blog videos were pretty impressive and they definitely left the impression of knowing what they’re doing. It will be interesting to see how the crowdfunding goes, especially since they’re asking for funds for what will be free to play.
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Owlboy, a rather sweet story-driven platformer developed by D-Pad Studio has been updated and it’s quite a major change for the tech behind it that will make it run nicely on the Steam Deck. Currently, the game has an “Unsupported” rating but this should hopefully move it over to Verified.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE Plasma Mobile 22.04 Mobile Platform Available, Published release KDE Plasma Mobile 22.04 , based on the mobile edition of the Plasma 5 desktop, the KDE Frameworks 5 libraries, the ModemManager communication framework Telepathy. Plasma Mobile uses the kwin_wayland composite server to display graphics, and PulseAudio is used for sound processing. Simultaneously, the release of the Plasma Mobile Gear 22.04 set of mobile applications, which is formed by analogy with the KDE Gear. To create the application interface, Qt is used, the Mauikit framework Kirigami from the KDE Frameworks, which allows you to create universal interfaces suitable for smartphones, tablets and PCs.
The package includes applications such as KDE Connect to pair your phone with your desktop, Okular music player VVave image viewers, Koko and Pix note calindori calendar-scheduler Index file manager buho application manager Discover , program for sending SMS Spacebar , address book plasma-phonebook , interface for making phone calls plasma-dialer , and plasma-angelfish browser messenger Spectral .
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A lot has changed since release 0.6.0! First thing, it is impossible to collect all the changes that happened since December 24, 2020 into one set of release notes, so this will focus on the highlights.
It was very important to me that this be a release targeting the foundations of Redox OS. This includes, the bootloader, the filesystem, the package manager, the kernel, the drivers, and much more. The focus was on enabling Redox OS to boot on the widest set of hardware possible.
bootloader: The bootloader was completely rewritten so that both the BIOS and UEFI versions share most of the same code, and are both predominantly written in Rust. This has led to greatly improved hardware support, and allowed for RedoxFS to be improved.
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A list of five privacy centric Linux distribution of 2022 with their feature comparison, advantages and download details.
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New Releases
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New version of Lakka has been released!
We are happy to announce the new and updated version of Lakka.
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Lakka distribution kit 4.2 , allowing you to turn computers, set-top boxes or single-board computers into a full-fledged game console for running retro games. The project is a modification of distribution LibreELEC , originally designed to create home theaters. Lakka builds are generated for i386, x86_64 (Intel, NVIDIA or AMD GPUs), Raspberry Pi 1-4, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, Hummingboard, Cubox-i, Odroid C1/C1+/XU3/XU4, etc. platforms. To install, just write the distribution to an SD card or USB drive, connect a gamepad and boot the system.
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BSD
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[REVISED]: Added change list between RC4 and RC5.
The fifth RC build of the 13.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
This is expected to be the final RC build of the 13.1-RELEASE cycle.
Installation images are available for:
o 13.1-RC5 amd64 GENERIC
o 13.1-RC5 i386 GENERIC
o 13.1-RC5 powerpc GENERIC
o 13.1-RC5 powerpc64 GENERIC64
o 13.1-RC5 powerpc64le GENERIC64LE
o 13.1-RC5 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE
o 13.1-RC5 armv6 RPI-B
o 13.1-RC5 armv7 GENERICSD
o 13.1-RC5 aarch64 GENERIC
o 13.1-RC5 aarch64 RPI
o 13.1-RC5 aarch64 PINE64
o 13.1-RC5 aarch64 PINE64-LTS
o 13.1-RC5 aarch64 PINEBOOK
o 13.1-RC5 aarch64 ROCK64
o 13.1-RC5 aarch64 ROCKPRO64
o 13.1-RC5 riscv64 GENERIC
o 13.1-RC5 riscv64 GENERICSD
Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without
console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of
freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access. Additionally,
the root user password is set to root. It is strongly recommended
to change the password for both users after gaining access to the
system.
Installer images and memory stick images are available here:
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.1/
The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.
If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR
system or on the -stable mailing list.
If you would like to use Git to do a source based update of an existing
system, use the "releng/13.1" branch.
A summary of changes since 13.1-RC4 includes:
o A fix had been implemented to correct boot failures with ZFS+GELI.
o A fix had been implemented to correct pkg(8) symbolic links for
on-disc packages.
o An update to allow if_bnxt(4) interfaces to allow vlans.
o A fix to arm64 to stop using kmem for PCPU memory.
o A fix to correct the ABI in libcxxrt.
o A fix to xhci(4) to ensure data toggle is properly reset.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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We are thrilled to announce this important milestone for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 4 labeled as PublicRC-202204.
Please check our Public SLE 15SP4 webpage out for download and other informations.
Since the Public Beta, we have been working on fixing more than 120 P1 or P2 bugs and while we are now in the Release Candidate phase, this means that we are enforcing our internal rules for submission and integration of codes and as a matter of fact, only P1 or CVE related issues will be considered for integration in the GA release in end of June.
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SUSECON is back! And once again (hopefully for the final time!) it will be a virtual conference. While many of us would love to be back together in person, there are some real benefits to hosting the conference virtually. One of these benefits is that there are no artificial limits on content, such as hotel room space, break times, etc. In a virtual conference, we can offer virtually unlimited learning possibilities!
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Slackware Family
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Earlier this week, Chromium 101.0.4951.41 was released according the announcement on Google’s releaseblog.
As usual, this release addresses several vulnerabilities of which some have the criticality label “high” – meaning it can crash your browser but not compromise your computer. Interesting again to see an impressive list of high/medium/low vulnerabilities (a total of 30 this time) for which Google paid bounties of over 80,000 dollars in total to their individual reporters.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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I think, fundamentally, the problem is that there’s not a mass-market for operating systems at all. Some people, of course, find technology at this level fascinating — probably a lot of the folks interested in reading what you and I have to say about it. But, relative to even other geeky pursuits which have become mainstream (hello, grown-ups who build cool LEGO things! hello, fellow D&D nerds!), caring about your operating system at all is pretty esoteric.
There is certainly a market for operating systems at a corporate level, in the enterprise and for millions of different technology use cases businesses need to solve. Something has to power the cloud, and there needs to be a platform for all the software that a modern electric car needs to run. Those markets have actually already decided that the answer is Linux, and those are definitely markets with a lot of money at stake.
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If you’re taking on a big, complicated project that could get hopelessly tangled up with one wrong move, it pays to seek out advice. You’d talk to every expert you knew before building a custom home, for example, and you’d probably read everything in sight before embarking on a 30-day bike trip across the western United States.
CIOs overseeing digital transformation projects have been advised by the best and the brightest – everyone from analysts to consultants to colleagues to peers – and most would say the counsel they’ve received has been helpful. But occasionally, a tip gets passed along that’s outdated or just plain wrong. While it may have made sense at one time, it would steer them off track if they pursued it today.
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Release Candidate versions are available in testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS / Alma / Rocky and other clones) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests, and also as base packages.
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This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat (https://libera.chat/).
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Red Hat is introducing a new set of connected applications services that will help accelerate the adoption of containerized application development and delivery. Red Hat Application Foundations enables companies to quickly build application and data services.
This new platform will bring key services and components that will complement Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift is a platform for modernizing applications, building cloud-native applications, streamlining development, and more.
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The software developers supporting scientific research on the International Space Station need to know their code will work as well in space as it does in a test environment.
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Why can’t we build and reuse AI models? Mo data, mo problems? Learn how AI foundation models change the game for training AI/ML and join Red Hat CTO Chris Wright and IBM Research AI VP Sriram Raghavan to explore foundation models, an emerging approach to machine learning and data representation.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ The Future of Banking is Open [Ed: They're just calling everything "open" now, even banksters]
The banking sector is facing rapid and irreversible changes across technology, customer behaviour, and regulation. While customers are demanding ever higher levels of service and value and regulations are impacting business models and economics, technology can be a potent enabler of both customer experience and effective operations.
The banking industry will look radically different in the near future as new banking models will bring a lot of product and service innovation. There is a new wave of digital-only banks across the globe challenging traditional banking players. The digital-only banks are tightening the competitive landscape and the competition would create the impetus for banks to do more with technology and provide better customer services. In this quickly shifting landscape, financial institutions of all shapes and sizes need to find every possible way to respond and compete. This is where technology and innovation matters – having an open and flexible technology architecture driving business agility.
Open source technologies and open innovation have the potential to level the playing field and accelerate the pace of digital business transformation enabling financial institutions to get products and services to market faster and help solve the challenges facing the financial services industry.
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As with organisations in many other industries, logistics services are under intense pressure to remain competitive to face severe market disruption. Disruptive innovation has reached this industry, which is currently experiencing strong inflexion points. The logistics sector is being forced to innovate as rapidly and quickly as possible. Therefore, organisations need to stay competitive and drive innovation processes. Given that multiple innovations exist, it is crucial to identify the relevant innovation areas that fit based on business needs
Focusing on customer excellence is one of the keys to understanding market competitiveness. In the journey towards customer centricity, it is essential to use technologies that can help accelerate the organisation’s innovation. In this realm, open-source technologies can play a vital role. However, it is not enough that enterprises and businesses only have the mindset and technology; transformational work is necessary to change every thriving organisation’s culture and working methods.
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A pair of high-end in-ear wireless headphones called PineBuds are on the horizon. These includes features most would expect in 2022, like ambient and environment noise cancellation, and a lengthy battery life. The earbuds will also be end-user flashable, opening up a world of possible uses.
But first things first: as with other products produced by Pine64 the story starts with developers.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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The LibreOffice Conference is the annual gathering of the community, our end-users, developers, and everyone interested in free office software. This year, it took place online once again.
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Programming/Development
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Programming is an activity that helps implement a model. What is a model? Typically, programmers model real-world situations, such as online shopping.
When you go shopping in the real world, you enter a store and start browsing. When you find items you’d like to purchase, you place them into the shopping cart. Once your shopping is done, you go to the checkout, the cashier tallies up all the items, and presents you with the total. You then pay and leave the store with your newly purchased items.
Thanks to the advancements in technology, you can now accomplish the same shopping activities without traveling to a physical store. You achieve that convenience by having a team of software creators model actual shopping activities and then simulate those activities using software programs.
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Many IT companies do not pay attention to training employees. Many trainers say that they have worked hard to train employees only to have employees get poached by competitors. Should this happen, a company should reflect: Why can’t I keep excellent talent?
On the surface, employees are a company’s greatest asset, but enterprises regard them as components that can be replaced at any time. Software development is a design process that faces uncertainty, variability, and is not like moving bricks. Developers are not producers, but designers. The replacement cost is relatively high for the designer.
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Python
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Any application requires dummy data to be tested. Manually inserting dummy data for testing purposes takes a long time. Using the Python Faker module, this process is fairly simple. Using this software, a significant volume of bogus data of various sorts may be easily entered into the database. This article demonstrated how to install and use the Python Faker library.
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My Buick’s computer does not like Gates.
No, not Creepy Uncle Bill Gates, but rather Gates gas caps. I bought one on Amazon going “Hey, it’s $8.47 and it says it works on the 2008 Buick LaCrosse CXL.” because my Driver Information Center (DIC) said that I needed to “Check Gas Cap”.
The woman who owned the car before me somehow found a way to lose the OEM gas cap from Buick, even though it’s tethered for morons who drive off without their gas cap. (Which has somehow never happened to me in over 20 years of driving a car, even though I’ve never had a tethered gas cap before.).
So she bought a Gates gas cap. Nowhere on the cap does it say “Gates” on it, but when I examined it by request of the computer (and because you can’t pass emissions here with a loose or broken gas cap), I saw that the Gates cap on the Buick did not actually fit the filler neck properly. So I ordered the Gates gas cap from Amazon, and I ended up with the exact same cap as was on there. I put it on and drove the car around, and “Check Gas Cap” on the DIC displayed again.
[...]
On Techrights IRC, Roy laughed and said Bill Gates would be jealous of me because I’m riding a 14 year old (car, that is!).
(Bill Gates is a prolific sex pervert and was a friend of Jeff Epstein that throws his money around to control what is said about him.)
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Openwashing
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Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ How Project Lura is Improving APIs [Ed: LF is openwashing evil companies like Uber now, using the "Linux" brand or misusing it]
APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) provide exponential growth opportunities for what the web and its data and applications can do for us. Since APIs allow for sharing of data between applications, doors open to what is possible as the strengths of disparate systems are combined into a new one.
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Security
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Rapid7 security researchers have identified 2,000 internet-exposed Linux servers that appear to be impacted by a Redis vulnerability that has been exploited in attacks.
Tracked as CVE-2022-0543, the security hole has a CVSS score of 10 and is described as an insufficient sanitization in Lua. While Redis statically links the Lua Library, some Debian/Ubuntu packages dynamically link it, leading to a sandbox escape that can be exploited to achieve remote code execution.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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People care about their privacy. Some have doubted this in the past, pointing to the amount of personal information people willingly shared, often in exchange for free software or services. Yet I’ve long thought that many people simply were not aware of the privacy implications of sharing their data and how it could be misused and abused. Those who did understand the implications often didn’t feel empowered to do anything about it given the vast resources of Big Tech companies.
These privacy abuses couldn’t stay hidden forever. With the help of documentaries, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, US congressional hearings and regulatory threats from the European Union, most people today have some awareness of the ways Big Tech abuse their privacy. Big Tech noticed. Apple saw this trend earlier than most, and realized that a big differentiator between them and their main competitors (Facebook and Google in particular) was that their competitors were primarily funded by selling customer data. Privacy became a big keyword in Apple marketing, and Google and Facebook quickly followed suit.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 9:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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SER 4 4800U X is a new device from the Chinese assembler Beelink and what is its most outstanding novelty? You have already read it in the headline: he arrives with Manjaro pre-installed… and he is not the first.
Although, with exceptions, the big brands remain a bit on the sidelines, it is becoming more and more common to find computers with Linux pre-installed and, who says Linux, says some of the big desktop Linux distributions, including Manjaro, the protagonist in this occasion by reason of what was seen.
SER 4 4800U is one of Beelink’s Mini-PCs, a firm specializing in this type of product… And SER 4 4800U X is the edition of the team with Manjaro , one that has just gone on sale to give more color to the company’s catalog. company, as well as more options for customers looking for something different than usual.
But make no mistake: just because the SER 4 4800U X is a mini-PC doesn’t mean it’s a small thing. The team mounts an AMD Ryzen7 4800U Octa Core processor , including AMD Radeon Graphics, 16 or 32 GB of RAM, 500 GB NVMe SSD storage… Or what is the same, it has plenty of power for Manjaro to fly.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Arch Linux isn’t that complex to use but it can be kind of confusing to decide how often you should update your system, once a day, once a week, once a year, let’s discuss it.
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Kernel Space
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Linux 5.15 released a new NTFS driver developed by Paragon Software with which it tried to improve compatibility with Microsoft’s veteran file system, which two decades after the launch of Windows XP is still the standard. However, a few months later the driver has entered a state of apparent abandonment, a situation that has aroused the concern of kernel developers and maintainers.
Paragon Software’s NTFS3 driver was initially proprietary and distributed as a commercial product, but last year the company decided to release its code for the purpose of introducing it into the Linux kernel. Although Linux is not capable of running, at least not officially, on an NTFS partition, support for the NTFS file system is important for people who dual boot or are in a mixed Linux and Windows environment.
The state of the driver has recently started to cause concern, when it was found that it has received little attention since the release of Linux 5.15 last November. Kari Argillander, kernel developer and co-maintainer of the driver that raised the alarm, has commented through the mailing lists that she hasn’t been able to get any response from Konstantin Komarov, the maintainer of Paragon Software, so she proceeded to post the issue on the table.
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Applications
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Linux offers a huge smörgåsbord of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. We’ve reviewed the vast majority, but we’ve always got our eyes peeled hunting for a new gem.
One new program we’ve stumbled upon is termusic, a Rust-based music player that uses a terminal user interface. It’s designed for large, locally stored music collections.
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The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 211. This version includes the following changes:
[ Mattia Rizzolo ]
* Drop mplayer from the Build-Depends, it was add likely by accident and it's
not needed.
* Disable gnumeric tests in Debian because it's not currently available.
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If you are someone who loves music and has more than one streaming service or you like to change to check which catalog each one has, as a Linux user you may have noticed that Apple Music was quite complicated to listen to from a desktop apps.
In fact, the apple company itself has been trying for a few months now to calm down all those users of other operating systems than their own, who are with it and are even looking for engineers to be able to develop an application for the different operating systems. However, the news that the development begins never arrives.
This, as always, has made the open source community move looking for a possible alternative that provides a solution to all these users, despite being a paid streaming focused not only on users of the Apple ecosystem and they still do not have a robust solution. for it officially.
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Instructionals/Technical
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It does happen. Yes, it is possible to lose track of your passwords, including the root password, which is required to conduct root-privileged actions. This can happen for a variety of reasons, including not signing in as a root user for an extended length of time or having a complicated root password – in which case you should consider using a password manager to properly store your password.
Don’t worry if you’ve forgotten your root password and have nowhere to go for it. If you have physical access to your server, you may easily reset your lost root password.
Follow along as we demonstrate how to reset a lost root password in Rocky Linux / AlmaLinux.
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It’s known that btrfs behaves differently from other Linux filesystems. There are some fascinating aspects of how btrfs manages its internal structures and how common tools are not prepared to handle it.
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Deleting a Twitter account is quick and easy. You can do it from a PC or through the mobile app. Just take these steps: [...]
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You need the ability to search and manipulate text on the command line, especially when performing repetitive tasks. This is what makes sed, or stream editor, so valuable. sed is a Unix text processing and manipulation CLI tool. A stream editor takes in text from an input stream and transforms it into a specified output according to instructions. The input stream could be from pipelines or files.
sed reads input text from files or stdin, then edits the text line by line according to the provided conditions and commands. After sed performs the specified operation on each line, it outputs the processed text to stdout or a file, then moves on to the next line.
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In the first article in this series, we concentrated on selecting suitable hardware for your FreeBSD and OpenZFS-based NAS. We’re taking a build-up approach, where we first walk you through the hardware steps, and now we’re bringing up the next layer in our step-up – setting up your FreeBSD operating system. In this article we take a closer look at the operating system and the configurations, both during and after installation, to fine-tune the system for OpenZFS storage.
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I have 2 very useful shell scripts related to resizing consoles. The first is imaginatively called resize and just configures the terminal to be the requested size, neatly resizing an xterm or gnome-terminal…
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Today we are looking at how to install RStudio on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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In this video, we are looking at how to install Olive video editor on Debian 11. Enjoy! For the commands and more…
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Are you looking for the technique of scrolling through your Linux terminal? Brace yourself. This article is written for you. Today you’ll learn how to scroll up and down in the Linux terminal. So, let’s begin.
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Learn the simple steps to install Adobe’s Acrobat Reader DC using Wine on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFIsh Linux for reading PDF files.
Adobe’s Acrobat Reader DC is a program that allows us to open and read PDF files and even edit. The basic version of Acrobat Reader is free of charge and can be easily downloaded from the Internet. However, with the free version of the program, you only have access to a subset of the available tools. To use features such as protecting and converting PDF files, you need the paid version of Adobe Acrobat.
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Blogging about individual self-contained ideas is great. However, some ideas require a more structured approach. Combining simple concepts into one big whole is a wonderful journey for both the writer and the reader, so I wanted to add a series feature to my Jekyll blog. As you may have guessed already, Jekyll’s high degree of customization makes this a breeze.
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Analytics isn’t just for internal stakeholders anymore. If you’re building an analytics application for customers, you’re probably wondering what the right database backend is for you.
Your natural instinct might be to use what you know, like PostgreSQL or MySQL. You might even think to extend a data warehouse beyond its core BI dashboards and reports. Analytics for external users is an important feature, though, so you need the right tool for the job.
The key to answering this comes down to user experience. Here are some key technical considerations for users of your external analytics apps.
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Listing the differences on one page does show how radically different EasyOS is from any other Linux distribution!
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EasyOS was born in January 2017, and since then there have been bits and pieces written here and there about how and why it is different from other Linux distributions. This includes some rather technical descriptions. What is needed is a simple plain-English list, so that anyone can get a quick idea of what EasyOS is all about.
So, here goes. Do note, though, that Easy is an experimental distribution, and the features may change, and some features are a work-in-progress. These items are not listed in any particular order…
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New Releases
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Bonjour à tous.
Je vous présente Voyager 22.04 LTS Edition Explorer en version finale. Une version 2 en 1 avec pour la première fois, les bureaux Gnome et Xfce unifiés dans une unique distribution Voyager, à sélectionner à votre session. Le tout dans un style old school adventure complètement repensé pour ce duo. Le bureau Gnome 42 couplé au bureau Xfce 4.16 avec la promesse enfin réalisée, d’avoir 2 systèmes unifiés Gnome et Xfce, léger, rapide, moderne, fluide, sécurisé et performant dans un environnement hybride pour PC et Tablette. Les 2 bureaux sont bien distincts et leurs applications respectives sont pour la plupart invisibles, pour l’un ou l’autre environnement. Cette version est basée sur le noyau Linux 5.15 et la distribution Ubuntu “Jammy Jellyfish”. La 22.04 est une version LTS – Long-term support – de 5 ans pour des mises à jour jusqu’à Juillet 2027 pour Gnome et Xfce. Avec intégré, des options regroupées dans la Box Voyager comme Conky Control, Effects, Réparation, Screencast, Switch Ubuntu, Wine-staging et Steam Gaming et des extensions Gnome sélectionnées selon les besoins PC. Un profil Spécial Gaming de type GS a été créée dans xfce. Avec des Thèmes et des Wallpapers nombreux et des logiciels essentiels. Cette version contient Logiciel – Gnome Software, qui a été préféré à celui de Ubuntu, pour gérer ensemble les packages Deb, Snap et Flatpack. Firefox a été installé en deb pour une meilleur compatibilité avec les extensions gnome et encore plein d’autres nouveautés à découvrir.
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BSD
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I’m a huge fan of video games but never really thought about writing one. Well, this crossed my mind a few times, but I don’t know anything about writing a GUI software or using OpenGL, but a few days ago I discovered the open source game engine Godot.
This game engine is a full-featured tool allowing to easily write 2D or 3D games that are portables on Android, Mac, Windows, Linux, HTML5 (using WebASM) and operating systems where the Godot engine is available, like OpenBSD.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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We are thrilled to announce this important milestone for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 4 labeled as PublicRC-202204.
Please check our Public SLE 15SP4 webpage out for download and other informations.
Since the Public Beta, we have been working on fixing more than 120 P1 or P2 bugs and while we are now in the Release Candidate phase, this means that we are enforcing our internal rules for submission and integration of codes and as a matter of fact, only P1 or CVE related issues will be considered for integration in the GA release in end of June.
However, as usual, all others issues will be fixed as Maintainance Updates post GA for SLE 15 SP4.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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Fedora 36 release delayed to May 10 due to bugs in GNOME Photos, SELinux packages.
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For some time I’ve had an odd problem on my work Fedora desktop, where after I logged in the first time I ran one of a number of GUI programs, it would take more than 20 seconds to start with no visible reason for why (the affected programs included Firefox and Liferea). After that 20 seconds, everything was fine and everything started or re-started as fast as it should. This didn’t happen on my home Fedora desktop, which has an essentially identical configuration. After I realized that something was wrong and noticed the pattern, I watched journalctl logs during a first program startup and soon found some tell-tale log entries: [...]
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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And we’re off — development is now open for Ubuntu 22.10 “Kinetic Kudu”.
“We’re pleased to announce that kinetic is now open for development. auto-sync has been enabled and will run soon”, writes Ubuntu’s Brian Murray in his starting-pistol post to Ubuntu’s main development mailing list.
“As usual, we expect a large influx of builds and autopkgtests in this initial period, which will cause delays. Please help fixing any breakage that occurs,” he adds, somewhat ominously!
Art this stage in development there isn’t much “new” stuff to mention, much less see. But if you’re into bug hunting then honestly: this is prime season — jump in and enjoy.
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Soon after, we experienced the debut of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS; it’s time again that we welcome the new kid in the block – Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS. You can check out our post on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and get a hint of the features and updates. The Pop!_OS 22.04 release date is not a surprise since this Linux distro is based on the Ubuntu distribution.
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LXD stands for “Linux Container Daemon” and, unlike Docker, is a tool for operating system containers and virtual machines. It was developed at Canonical and, like Docker initially, is based on LXC, a Linux container runtime that made its way into the kernel in 2008. LXD 5.0 LTS has just been released and will be supported for five years.
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US Linux boxshifter System76 has released the new LTS version, 22.04, of its custom Ubuntu remix, Pop!_OS (or “Pop” for short). The Reg FOSS desk took it for a spin.
There are, as we mentioned recently, a lot of Ubuntu remixes out there. Some are official, some unofficial; some track every release, and some only the Long Term Support (LTS) versions. This means that every time a new Ubuntu LTS release appears, a host of other distros follow close behind. System76 is a little different from other distro remixes, though.
System76′s primary business is selling laptops, desktops, and servers specifically built to run Linux. We covered a little of the company’s history when we looked at Pop!_OS 21.10 last year. Back in 2017, it decided to do its own custom version of Ubuntu – and in a move that’s won it both publicity and popularity, it makes the remix available to everyone, not just its customers.
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Pop! OS 22.04 “LTS” has been released, bringing with it a slew of new features and optimizations. Pop! OS is an Ubuntu-based operating system built and managed by System76, a Denver-based company that creates open-source hardware, software, and firmware.
Pop! OS has the same release cycle as Ubuntu, with a new version every six months. With each release, the corporation makes minor adjustments to the system to improve it, such as upgrading the system core to the most recent version of Ubuntu, the desktop environment, and so on.
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The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship event, KubeCon & CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 is going to be held this year in Valencia, Spain from 16 – 20 May 2022. The event will also be held virtually on the same days.
As the world is slowly getting back to its pre-pandemic habits, we expect KubeCon attendance to follow the same trend, with attendance reaching 5-digit numbers and one of the most vibrant communities in IT going back to sharing insights and collaborate on pushing the boundaries of cloud native computing. Canonical will be there during the full week, main event and co-located events included. If you want to explore the full schedule of KubeCon 2022, you can find the details here and book a meeting with us.
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We continue talking about the latest release of Ubuntu and what I’m going to haunt you about, brunette, is that if traditionally the LTS versions of the Canonical distribution give a lot of play, this is no exception. If yesterday the topic was Flatpak support on Ubuntu, today it is about NVIDIA and Wayland, although with a different tone.
We gave you the news in the middle of last month and was daring : Ubuntu 22.04 LTS would use Wayland by default even with NVIDIA, an important leap for the system, which finally ventured to offer said graphic configuration by default and in an LTS, for more signs.
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This is my second Home Assistant for Insteon post, and I will be writing a couple more to help anyone that is trying to get their Insteon smart home back up and running.
Earlier this month, Insteon unexpectedly ceased trading and disabled all its cloud server functionality, effectively making the Insteon hub useless.
Not all is lost, though. You can still control the devices using services such as Home Assistant, which connects to your devices using the Insteon API available on the hub. It is essential that you do not reset the hub or your devices.
Unfortunately, one reader pointed out that my quick and easy method to get Home Assistant up and running wasn’t quite as easy as expected.
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MontaVista Software has teamed up with UK embedded software developer Foundries.io for a ready-to-deploy embedded Linux operating system with commercial grade support and maintenance options.
MVEdge is a version of Monte Vista’s carrier-grade Linux specifically aimed at gateway-style devices for edge computing. This allows system developers to focus on the software on top of Linux, with MontaVista providing the full development environment from source to deployment, including a pre-integrated security framework for the run-time platform, support for production security processes and over the air (OTA) updates. This makes use of the container-based FoundriesFactory build system developed by Foundries.io in Cambridge.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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[Jeff Geerling] saw the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and its exposed PCI-Express 1x connection, and just naturally wondered whether he could plug a GPU into that slot and get it to work. It didn’t. There were a few reasons why, such as the limited Base Address Register space, and drivers that just weren’t written for ARM hardware. A bit of help from the Raspberry Pi software engineers and other Linux kernel hackers and those issues were fixed, albeit with a big hurdle in the CPU. The Broadcom chip in the Pi 4, the BCM2711, has a broken PCIe implementation.
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Arducam’s latest Raspberry Pi camera module, Hawk-eye, is now available for pre-order, somehow cramming 64 megapixels into a sensor measuring just 7.4mm x 5.55mm. Its lens has full autofocus, a maximum aperture of f/1.8, and sees an angle of view of 84 degrees – the same as a 24mm lens on a full-frame camera.
[...]
Arducam’s new device uses the same libcamera library, ribbon connector, and dimensions as the official Raspberry Pi camera module 2.1, so it can slot into existing Pi camera setups, and you can use up to four of them with a single board to create a multiplexed depth-mapping system. The camera can capture still images at up to 9152×6944 pixels on a Raspberry Pi 4 or Compute Module 4 (16MP on older boards and Zeros), and video at up to 1080p30 on a Raspberry Pi, though you may be able to take it higher on other boards, up to 9152×6944 at 2.7 frames per second.
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This issue in particular, with over 490 comments as of this writing, documents dozens of failures in one central location, to the point where they could be categorized and worked around in a set of patches to the open source radeon driver.
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MacCurdy, along with doctoral students Brandon Hayes and Travis Hainsworth, published their results April 14 in the journal Additive Manufacturing.
3D printers have long been the province of hobbyists and researchers working in labs. They’re pretty good at making plastic dinosaurs or individual parts for machines, such as gears or joints. But MacCurdy believes they can do a lot more: By mixing solids and liquids, 3D printers could churn out devices that are more flexible, dynamic and potentially more useful. They include wearable electronic devices with wires made of liquid contained within solid substrates, or even models that mimic the squishiness of real human organs.
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Making circuits or working on different projects for educational purposes Arduino is one of the best platforms that you can use. This platform gives you a variety of boards that you can choose based on the specification of your project.
Further to make the process of choosing the Arduino boards the Arduino has classified its boards in categories based on the specifications. The Arduino Nano and Micro are the boards that are suitable for entry level projects, and we have compared both the boards in detail that will help you in selecting the board that is right for you.
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Most of us are familiar with virtual machines (VMs) as a way to test out various operating systems, reliably deploy servers and other software, or protect against potentially malicious software. But virtual machines aren’t limited to running full server or desktop operating systems. This tiny VM is capable of deploying software on less powerful systems like the Raspberry Pi or AVR microcontrollers, and it is exceptionally fast as well.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Android by bringing, for example, a new photo picker, themed icons and a new permission for Wi-Fi. However, in this update of Google mobile operating system, the user will be able to run several operating systems through the virtual machine feature (virtual machine or VM), being possible, for example, to run Windows 11 or Linux on the Android smartphone.
Reported by the androidauthority website, the experience of using other operating systems such as Windows 11 was demonstrated by a user on Twitter named “kdrag0n” (Danny Lin). Using Google Pixel 6, Danny showed that the phone running Android 13 Windows 11 Arm. See below for screenshots attached to his tweet.
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I’m very glad that Mastodon (and by extension, the fediverse) is as popular as it is. When I started, I had not expected this. All I thought I would accomplish is conquer the niche of people who were already using GNU social by creating a more polished product, but instead Mastodon managed to attract new blood, even non-technical people; it completely overshot and overshadowed its predecessors and entered the fringes of mainstream perception.
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I jumped into the story in August 2015. At this point GNU social and its predecessors had already been around for years. I found out about it because a friend was setting up a server for the local linux users group. By my estimate there were thousands of active users and the community was diverse enough that they discussed all kinds of topics. The first test of any new communication software is whether it’s used to talk about anything other than itself. They’d long since achieved that.
Mastodon wasn’t going to exist for another year but we already had the federated universe, or fediverse. This was the word used to describe the different types of software on different servers that all spoke the same protocol. You could make an account on one server then follow and communicate with people on any other server.
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Mastodon is an open-source, decentralized social network founded back in 2016. It has seen a surge of new users over the last 24 hours.
Mastodon saw a similar spike in popularity in response to Twitter’s content moderation practices in 2019, particularly from users in India.
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Mastodon functions a lot like Twitter, but it operates as a decentralized social network through thousands of independent servers that each have their own rules. “Anyone can become such a provider as Mastodon is free and open-source,” Rochko added. “It has no ads, respects your privacy, and allows people/communities to self-govern.”
However, Mastodon itself is a nonprofit, so it doesn’t have the resources of a major tech company like Twitter or Facebook. Its user base also remains small. Rochko estimates Mastodon has over 3 million registered users; Twitter has 217 million daily active users.
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Musk’s vision has fueled uncertainty about what the future of Twitter may look like. But many of those ideas are already at work on another social network, one that thousands of people have flocked to in recent days: Mastodon.
Mastodon emerged in 2016 as a decentralized alternative to Twitter. It is not one website, but a collection of federated communities called “instances.” Its code is open source, which allows anyone to create an “instance” of their own. There is, for example, metalhead.club, for German metalheads, and koyu.space, a “nice community for chill people.” Each instance operates its own server and creates its own set of rules. There are no broad edicts about what people can and cannot say across the “fediverse,” or the “federated universe.” On Mastodon, communities police themselves.
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Web Browsers
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Chromium
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Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Learn more about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 102 is beta as of April 28, 2022. You can download the latest on Google.com for desktop or on Google Play Store on Android.
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Programming/Development
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Today we are going to give prominence to a technology that has been well known in the world of software development for years, but to which we have not dedicated any post until now in MuyLinux : Node.js. Sticking to its most basic features, it is an execution environment for JavaScript that works at the backend level and is open source (MIT) and cross-platform. It uses Chromium V8 as its engine and allows JavaScript code to be executed outside of a browser.
Node.js version 18 has recently appeared, which will be promoted as LTS in October, after spending 6 months as a ‘Current’ release. Once it has been promoted as LTS , it will be designated ‘Hydrogen’ as a code name and will be supported by those responsible for the official branch until April 2025 .
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Harelang is FOSS programming language which simple to build.
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Every free and open source project should probably make a release from time to time. Every release should be accompanied by release notes so that people interested in the software know what has changed, and what to expect from the new version.
Release notes can be massive enough to sub-projects of their own. This can be necessary for very large projects, such as Linux distributions. For projects more on the individual developer scale, release notes can be small and simple. My own preference is to include a file called NEWS (or NEWS.md) in the source tree, which lists the major, user-visible changes in each release. I structure mine as a reverse log file, pre-pending the newest release at the beginning. I don’t delete old releases, unless the file grows very big.
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WiFi is ubiquitous. It’s in our homes. We look for it in our coffee shops. We expect it whenever we go to an airport or check into a hotel. For most people, simply knowing it’s there is enough. But for many of us, especially from engineers to makers to students, we want to know more. What exactly is WiFi and how does it work? But more importantly, how can I use WiFi in my projects?
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We distrust the browser because we’ve been trained to. Years of fighting browser deficiencies where libraries filled the gaps. Browser enemy; library friend.
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When the Recursor receives a query from a client it answers it by first finding the name server that is authoritative for the domain in question. It does that by starting at a root name server and then walking DNS delegations to find the name servers (and their addresses) that are authoritative for the question asked. Once it knows which name servers are authoritative for the domain, it picks a specific name server address and asks the question to that name server. After the Recursor receives the answer, it will pass it on the the client asking the question.
To be able to answer fast, the Recursor caches information it receives from authoritative name servers. Both information about delegations and specific queries is stored in the record cache, which can be seen as a local in-memory copy of parts of the global DNS tree.
The recursor also has a few other caches, for example the Packet Cache and the Negative Cache, but these are not the subject of this post.
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Knuth’s optimization is a very powerful tool in dynamic programming, that can be used to reduce the time complexity of the solutions primarily from O(N3) to O(N2). Normally, it is used for problems that can be solved using range DP, assuming certain conditions are satisfied. In this article, we will first explore the optimization itself, and then solve a problem with it.
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Python
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When it comes to learning a particular language like Python, books can be the best way to let you grasp even a single concept. Books build the foundations and reading gives more objective and descriptive information. When you spend time reading something, it makes you more clear and concise. You pay a lot of attention while reading and thus it lets you know everything in detail.
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Photogrammetry is a great way to produce accurate 3D models of real objects. A turntable is often a common tool used in this work as it helps image an object from all angles. [Peter Lin] wanted a way to run the photogrammetry process with minimal human intervention, and set about building an automated turntable setup.
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Plastic is a remarkable material in many ways. Cheap, durable, and versatile, it is responsible for a large percentage of the modern world we live in. As we all know, though, it’s not without its downsides. Its persistence in the environment is quite troubling, so any opportunity we can take to reduce its use is welcome. This 3D printed machine, although made out of plastic, is made out of repurposed water bottles that have been turned into the filament for the 3D printer.
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There’s never time. Maybe you feel like you’ll have time, so you start something today. It’ll just be a few hours this week and then it’s done.
NO! That is most decidedly not how it goes. A couple of hours in you realise you started off in the wrong end and need to re-do everything. Or, actually, it’s just that something else crops up and you won’t have time again until next week at the earliest but really you will just never, because this weekend you’ll find another cool thing to just have a quick look at and off we go again.
By the way, that thing you put on the shelf a year ago because screw that it’s just really not worth the effort? Well, you accidentally saw someone on the internet mentioning something a tiny bit like it and suddenly it feels like a fun thing again. You just have to squeeze it in somewhere. Just, y’know, an hour a day for the next, uh, week? Month? Year? Who knows?
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Last week, I found an interesting piece of phishing based on a PDF file. Today, most of the PDF files that are delivered to end-user are not malicious, I mean that they don’t contain an exploit to trigger a vulnerability and infect the victim’s computer. They are just used as a transport mechanism to deliver more malicious content. Yesterday, Didier analyzed the same kind of Word document[1]. They are more and more common because they are (usually) not blocked by common filters at the perimeter.
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I’m really doing this. I’m moving out of non-profit edtech work into something both weirder and cooler.
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A few months ago I mused at how there are many people who like trains (anoraks), roads (odologists), cars (petrol-heads) and even buses (just “bus fans”, it seems like). Soon I will write another article about how these compare in general, but in this entry I want to discuss how I end up taking some properties of all of these, and how in general, much of my outside interests lie in the roads.
However, as should be clear after these little stories, I think it should be clear that these also tie into my other interests with regard to language and notation. So as it turns out, a lot of things do end up going there.
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Over the last few epochs, I’ve noticed a tendency in people to go to great lengths to justify the things they do, be those things hobbies, work, ways of thinking or even the amount of Leche de Cabra Semidesnatada they place in their English Breakfast tea in the morning. I ask myself why. I suspect it has to do with one of the greatest contradictions of occidental culture I’ve noted. As an infant, I was taught, as I am sure many others are, that we are innocent of any *crime* until *proven* guilty. I’ll abstract the word *crime* here to *any action that one goes to lengths to rationalize TO OTHERS*. Seemingly, as our infancy peters out, we grow into a culture that pushes us to justify our every preference, our every move.
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My last post mentioned that I’ve seriously curtailed my social network use. Since then, I’ve pulled back a bit more; I’m participating less in several group chats in Signal these recent weeks. These folks are my friends (many of them irl — at least before Covid), and they’ve been a much-needed lifeline during the pandemic. Maybe it’s just depression, but it feels so clear that many of my interactions with the internet are just bad for my brain.
I don’t need to argue with bigots and other cruel idiots online. I don’t want to watch my friends argue with them either.
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Congrats, support team member – you have a bullshit job.
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I have an account with Amazon. I seldom used that account of mine, but the other day I got interested in a new battery for my dumb-phone. I found it there, but when I tried to login they sent me an https link to complete the signing-in process. It was not something like a 6-digit code, but a link. Trouble is that I do not use the phone to browse the web. I tried to contact their support via e-mail, but in the response they asked me that I contact Amazon Customer Service directly, and for that I have to sign in and get the link again.
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Science
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The MARE team is trying to gather information with minimum disturbance to the birds and the colony. But, currently, the researchers have to physically capture and tag the birds on their backs. The tags are a Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) system—which works the same way as the microID chips in pet dogs. The only way to retrieve the data from those tags is by getting close enough to the birds to rescan the device, says Zitterbart.
While the colony at Atka Bay is conveniently about five miles from the German Antarctic station, it’s still easy to miss the penguins out in the field, he says. Even if the researchers know the approximate time in the season penguins will be at the Atka Bay site, they might be out at sea foraging for days or weeks. Plus, the huge expanse and harsh, unpredictable weather conditions make the Southern Ocean a challenging environment for human exploration and study.
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“Research” is a much broader term than most of us who consider ourselves to be researchers realise. My occasional interactions with people in very different disciplines (e.g. biology) have tended to involve a series of culture shocks to both parties. Even within computing, there are significant differences between sub-disciplines. These seem to mostly go unnoticed or, at least, uncommented on, which is a pity: at the very least it’s worth knowing that the way we do things isn’t the only possible way. One of the most surprising differences, at least to me, is where people expect to find the problems that they then work on.
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Astronomers predict that one out of every 15 points of light in the night sky will be a satellite within a decade. With new megaconstellations of satellites, and increasing amounts of space junk, scientists are likening the congestion to freeway traffic. Observations that could lead to more discoveries about space are being obstructed due to light and glare from the satellites, even with attempts by companies like SpaceX to dim them. Space pollution is already happening in public view, observable from Earth.
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Starlink is the name of a satellite network developed by the private spaceflight company SpaceX to provide low-cost internet to remote locations. SpaceX eventually hopes to have as many as 42,000 satellites in this so-called megaconstellation.
The size and scale of the project flusters astronomers, who fear that the bright, orbiting objects will interfere with observations of the universe, as well as spaceflight safety experts who now see Starlink as the number one source of collision hazard in Earth’s orbit. In addition to that, some scientists worry that the amount of metal that will be burning up in Earth’s atmosphere as old satellites are deorbited, could trigger unpredictable changes to the planet’s climate.
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There’s plenty of concern about the proliferation of privately owned satellites in space, and controversy in astronomical circles about the impact low-orbiting satellites have on the night sky itself.
In 2019, shortly after the deployment of Starlink’s first broadband satellites, the International Astronomical Union released an alarm-sounding statement warning of unforeseen consequences for stargazing and for the protection of nocturnal wildlife.
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In a statement Monday, the IAU said large satellite constellations like Starlink could have unforeseen consequences for advancing our understanding of the universe and the protection of nocturnal wildlife. “We do not yet understand the impact of thousands of these visible satellites scattered across the night sky and despite their good intentions, these satellite constellations may threaten both,” the statement reads.
The IAU shared the above image, which shows bars of light from Starlink satellite trails in the field of view captured by Arizona’s Lowell Observatory. The trails obscure the view of galaxy group NGC 5353/4.
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While Nasa’s Perseverance rover had the best-documented Mars landing in history, with cameras showing everything from parachute inflation to touchdown, and the rover also imaged debris from the parachute and the blackshell earlier, scientists say the new images from the helicopter provide more detail and “a different vantage point”.
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Instead, the wreckage is the work of NASA, a component called a backshell that detached during the landing of the Perseverance rover on the surface of the red planet in February 2021.
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Education
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A kid spit on my husband Patrick yesterday. That sentence just keeps running through my head. The student was up on a windowsill at school and, when instructed to come down, he spit.
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Hardware
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Most crystal radio receivers have a decidedly “field expedient” look to them. Fashioned as they often are from a few turns of wire around an oatmeal container and a safety pin scratching the surface of a razor blade, the whole assembly often does a great impersonation of a pile of trash whose appearance gives little hope of actually working. And yet work they do, usually, pulling radio signals out of thin air as if by magic.
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Imagine if you had some magic glowing beads, that would emit beautiful colors without any wires tangling them up. They exist, in the form of wireless induction-powered LEDs, and [Debra] of Geek Mom Projects has been experimenting with them in a new way.
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The shortage of semiconductors in the US will persist for at least the next two years, the chief executive of Intel says, as the company reported 13% less revenue from PCs for the first three months of 2022.
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StackSmith lamented^ that brown switches in a Das-4 keyboard do not have enough feedback to prevent bottoming out. This leads to excessive travel of the switch and jarring taps when the key travels its full distance.
Years ago I purchased a Code full-size keyboard with brown switches. At the time I knew nothing about mechanical keyboards, and I bought brown switches simply because someone told me they were less tiring on the fingers. I also found the feedback insufficient; I would consistently slam the keys all the way down as I typed, which wore out my hands after a short time.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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A government watchdog revealed Thursday that Medicare Advantage plans—which are offered by private companies but required to follow rules set by the government healthcare program—deny medically necessary care to tens of thousands of enrollees each year.
“It couldn’t be more clear that these problems are systemic and widespread in Medicare Advantage.”
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Over the past few years, we’ve seen a flurry of activity centering around video game emulation. Much of that has been focused on how a few companies, namely Nintendo, have reacted to emulation sites. Almost universally, these companies see emulation as a threat and try to get them shut down. Often times those same companies use the market demand in the public that those emulation sites created to sell inferior versions of these older or emulatable games. In other words, the lesson learned here is that the default gaming industry position on emulation is that it must be destroyed so that the company’s wares can only be bought and used in the manner in which that company desires, market demand be damned.
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Security
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Peace advocates reacted to Thursday’s request by U.S. President Joe Biden for $33 billion in additional aid to Ukraine by warning against what they called a dangerous escalation and by accusing the administration of misplaced priorities.
“How can this not lead to escalation?”
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TechTarget ☛ Why companies should focus on preventing privilege escalation [Ed: Was this multi-part series scheduled to coincide with Microsoft FUD? The timing seems odd or a tad suspicious. They publish lots of these parts about “privilege escalation” all of a sudden (when far more potent threats exist).]
Ahmed wrote Privilege Escalation Techniques to train red and blue team members on the importance of recognizing privilege escalation vulnerabilities and to teach security teams how to protect against privilege escalation attacks in Windows and Linux systems.
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Jump Cloud ☛ April ’22 Newsletter [Ed: Proprietary snake-oil for Linux; they probably target managers who have no clue...]
Our new Ubuntu Linux OS patch policies came just in time for the Ubuntu 22.04 release, so you can easily and quickly automate your updates whenever you’re ready.
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CISA ☛ Delta Electronics DIAEnergie (Update B) [Ed: Severity 9.8 (out of 10!) and it's Microsoft Windows (DLLs), as usual. But the media is obsessing over "Linux", citing Microsoft as "source"... as if we should all thank Microsoft for the FUD]
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The Ingress may be one of the most targeted components of Kubernetes. An Ingress typically defines an HTTP reverse proxy, exposed to the Internet, containing multiple websites, and with some privileged access to Kubernetes API (such as to read Secrets relating to TLS certificates and their private keys).
While it is a risky component in your architecture, it is still the most popular way to properly expose your services.
Ingress-NGINX has been part of security assessments that figured out we have a big problem: we don’t do all proper sanitization before turning the configuration into an nginx.conf file, which may lead to information disclosure risks.
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According to the latest order, data centres, virtual private server (VPS) providers, cloud service providers and virtual private network service (VPN Service) providers need to register the accurate information related to subscriber names, customer hiring the services, ownership pattern of the subscribers etc, and maintain them for five years or longer duration as mandated by the law.
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“Yet it tells us little about the impact of these operations, especially on the strategic level. The report is clear about this, noting ‘Microsoft is not able to evaluate their broader strategic impact’.”
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The real question is whether those captured utterances are at meaningful risk for being accessed by an attacker or an insider. First, anything saved in volatile memory is lost — theoretically — the instant the machine restarts or shuts down. Therefore, we are looking at the exposure after the utterance is made and before that machine restarts. Depending on the user’s behavior, that timeframe might be a few hours, a couple of days — possibly multiple weeks.
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Today the Irish DPC has settled a case with noyb over a gross delay in two cases on Instagram and WhatsApp. 47 months after the filing of the cases on Facebook’s “consent bypass”, the DPC agreed to pay tens of thousands in costs for a Judicial Review over delays. While the GDPR requires a decision “without delay” the DPC takes the view that four years for producing a draft decision is reasonable. In most EU Member States the law requires a decision within 3 to 12 months.
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The results followed Meta’s dismal financial report in February, when the company also posted falling profits and slowing user growth. The next day, Meta’s stock plummeted 26 percent and its market value plunged more than $230 billion in the company’s biggest one-day wipeout ever.
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And yes, fediverse admins can read your DMs. That’s not news to anyone. Every person with some knowledge of how internet and web application/services work knows that a sysadmin and those with access to databases control everything and in this example, can read your direct messages.
Even with encrypted services, a sysadmin can disable encryption or do various series of attacks to get your encryption keys/passwords. I posted something on Mastodon the other day about the irony of people using Gmail to sign up for Mastodon (or generally any other social network/online service) and then being worried about the privacy of their DMs.
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While proposals to protect access to cash put forward by the banking industry, such as shared banking hubs, could play a role in preserving access to it, Which? believes they must be targeted and of sufficient scale to plug the gaps left by bank closures.
Ultimately these measures are voluntary and are therefore subject to change based on commercial decisions made by individual firms. At present, there is nothing to prevent banks from withdrawing from these measures at any point.
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They’re currently on 2G – a tactic the government uses to suppress communication
India’s government has announced it will permit upgrades of mobile networks from 2G to 4G in regions claimed to be hotbeds of a Maoist insurgency.
The nation’s Ministry of Home Affairs prefers the term “left-wing extremists” but says the dominant ideology among such groups is a form of Maoism that “glorifies violence as the primary means to overwhelm the existing socio-economic and political structures.” The Ministry therefore operates a division dedicated to preventing such extremists from building capacity.
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Defence/Aggression
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This pathetic scandal is about much more than the sexual anxieties and refined digestive systems of men who wield weapons. To quote poet Paulo César Pinheiro, it’s an “orgy of crooks”, true heirs of more than two decades of military dictatorship, for whom no crime is too foul when it comes to protecting their privileges. For them, the 1984 Diretas Já movement and the 1988 Citizen Constitution must be erased and suppressed by all means possible. Bolsonaro has therefore revived celebrations commemorating the military coup of 31 March 1964 against democratically elected president João Goulart, thus reversing a 2011 decision by then president Dilma Rousseff ordering the military to end any celebration of the coup, which was also a rejoicing over the removal from office of 4,841 elected representatives, the torture of some 20,000 people (including Dilma Rousseff), and the death or disappearance of 434 people, crimes for which no one has ever been held accountable.
These crimes are publicly endorsed by Bolsonaro. “I’m pro-torture, and the people are too” … “You’ll only change things by having a civil war and doing the work the military didn’t do… Killing. If a few innocent people die, that’s alright.” … “The dictatorship’s mistake was just torturing and not killing.” Making light of the high fatality rates of police violence in Rio de Janeiro, he insinuated that a policeman’s manly willingness to murder is the mark of his worth: “Policemen that don’t kill are not policemen.” These statements and Bolsonaro’s fanatical sex and masculinity obsessions may create a convenient smokescreen covering up his evident corrupt incompetence, but this isn’t just some exotic Brazilian or Bolsonaro aberration.
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A coalition of two dozen organizations on Thursday urged President Joe Biden to overhaul U.S. policies regarding economic sanctions and blockades so that they no longer amount to “unjust collective punishment of civilian populations around the globe.”
“These policies ultimately worsen global public health and put at risk countless millions across the world, depriving them from their right to health, lifesaving medical care and equitable access to Covid-19 treatments and vaccines.”
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On April 21st, President Biden announced new shipments of weapons to Ukraine, at a cost of $800 million to U.S. taxpayers. On April 25th, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced over $300 million more military aid. The United States has now spent $3.7 billion on weapons for Ukraine since the Russian invasion, bringing total U.S. military aid to Ukraine since 2014 to about $6.4 billion.
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When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, the price of gold rose sharply and dozens of weddings were postponed or cancelled in Syria according to Saeed Ali, a 46-year-old goldsmith and currency trader in Qamishli in north east Syria.
“A relative of mine had a provision in his marriage contract to buy 50 grams of gold for his fiancée,” he says.
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In 2008, William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia and now CIA director, cabled from Moscow, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin) …I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” As Burns’ cable suggests, Ukraine has distinctive geopolitical significance for Russia. It is the next-largest country in Europe, after Russia, dominates the northern border of the Black Sea, and has a 1,227-mile land border with Russia. Nonetheless, at the end of the 2008 Bucharest NATO Summit, when expansion to Russia’s borders was virtually complete, NATO, led by the US, declared agreement on its completion: “We agreed today that these two countries [Ukraine along with Georgia] will become members of NATO.” In 2011, a NATO report noted, “The Alliance assists Ukraine … in preparing defence policy reviews and other documents, in training personnel, … modernising armed forces and making them more interoperable and more capable of participating in international missions” — international cooperation that had already included a joint Black Sea naval exercise with the US.
On February 22, 2014, large, increasingly militant months-long protests centered in Independence Square in Kyiv led to the deposition and flight to Russia of a president who had depended on strong electoral support from autonomous Russophone regions in the east and had sought to balance cooperation with NATO with positive relations with Russia, opposing integration with the EU. A strongly pro-Western government came to power, with the composition hoped-for in vigorous US efforts to “midwife” it, as the US ambassador put it in a Russian-intercepted phone conversation. Russia occupied Crimea and sent military support to secessionist forces in the east.
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The call was about his younger brother, Nasser, who, as he told me, was more than a sibling to him. He was also a close friend. Nasser was polite and caring. He loved music, sang, and played the guitar. Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, and Bob Marley were his favorites.
Abdullah finally found Nasser near the village of Al Awaynat. Or, rather, he found all that remained of him. Nasser and 10 others from their village of Ubari had been riding in three SUVs that were now burnt-out hunks of metal. The 11 men had been incinerated. Abdullah knew one of those charred corpses was his brother, but he was at a loss to identify which one.
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Przemyśl, Poland—The train station in the Polish border town of Przemyśl no longer has the crowded and frantic scenes of refugees arriving from Ukraine that it had at the start of the war. Although people continue to arrive, the chaos has subsided. There are no more makeshift beds or soup kitchen stations. But every day a line forms outside of the platform for the train headed east, back into Lviv. Women tugging their children along in secondhand clothes and men in the heaviest boots they own are returning home, waiting for hours for the one train that leaves daily into Ukraine.
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The Biden administration has pledged billions in military aid to Ukraine since Russia invaded in late February, and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said this week that the U.S. goal was “to see Russia weakened.” Author and analyst Anatol Lieven, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, warns that unless there is a commitment to finding a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it could become a U.S. proxy war with “very, very dangerous potential consequences.”
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“Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
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Anti-war campaigners warned that British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss’ aggressive rhetoric at an event in London Wednesday could dangerously provoke Russian President Vladimir Putin, who warned the same day that further intervention by NATO countries in the war in Ukraine will be met with “lightning-fast” retaliation.
Truss suggested to a gathering of government officials that Western allies must go further than just supporting and helping to defend Ukraine two months into Russia’s invasion, urging the West to view a Ukrainian victory as a “strategic imperative” for NATO and Europe.
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After in Malta, the EU border agency is now stationing a long-range drone on Crete. There is contradictory information on the surveillance technology on board.
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Since the first days of the war, Russia’s Belgorod region has been on the frontline. The regional center is located just 39 kilometers (24 miles) from the Ukrainian border, and its suburbs are even closer. Uniformed men and military equipment patrol the streets of Belgorod, where tent hospitals now stand alongside coffee shops and parking lots. Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov regularly reports incidents of shelling, but life goes on. In this joint report, Meduza and Russian news outlet 7×7 explore how everyday life has changed in the Belgorod region, and whether local residents are afraid of war.
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After two months of Moscow waging all-out war on Ukraine, it’s become clear that it will take more than Western sanctions to stop the Russian army. But after years of Putin’s regime tightening its grip on the country, neither Russian society, nor the elite, appear to have any influence on the Kremlin’s policy of aggression. How did Russian elites become so powerless? Could depriving Russia of oil and gas revenues bring about regime change? And is there any hope left for a democratic Russia? For answers to these and other questions, Meduza turned to economist Daron Acemoglu — a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the co-author of Why Nations Fail: Origins of Power, Poverty and Prosperity.
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I vividly recall the day in November 1989 when the Berlin Wall, the preeminent symbol of the Cold War, was breached. I was then an Army officer serving in West Germany. In the blink of an eye, the world order that I had come to accept as permanent simply vanished.1
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When the Islamist extremist group Ansar al-Sunna began spreading terror in the Cabo Delgado province of northern Mozambique in 2017, its fighters brandished machetes. Today, the insurgents carry assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs).
Battlefield losses are a major reason for this.
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The trend of recent attacks in northern Nigeria suggest it has now become an aggravated threat, driven by a nexus of banditry, arms, drugs and terrorism.
There is evidence of a tacit synergy between terrorist elements and bandits in northern Nigeria, a synergy based on tactical opportunism or pragmatism.
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Tanks and ships are inherently lumpy. Up to now they’ve managed to get by with more or less acceptable loss rates because the offensive weapons they face have generally been just a little too slow in arriving or a little too inaccurate to completely overwhelm the defences. But it’s also clear that the speed and accuracy of weapons systems are still improving, with the added complication of the ubiquity of drones of various shapes, sizes and lethality. It’s always possible to develop new defensive systems, but they tend to be more expensive than the weapons they are defending against and they drive up the unit cost of the platforms they protect without providing any additional offensive value.
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Environment
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Aboard the trawler, Michael said the crew was routinely forced to perform illegal fishing tactics, such as “saiko,” the transshipment of fish at sea. Saiko typically occurs when fish is transferred from a trawler to a large canoe to hide the origin of the catch. The canoes can carry about 450 times more fish than an artisanal fishing canoe.
In 2017, saiko took 100,000 tons of fish from Ghanaian waters, costing the country millions of dollars in revenue and threatening food security and jobs, according to the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF). The foundation also reported that 90% of trawlers engaged in saiko in Ghana are Chinese-owned, usually through local front companies.
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That’s the takeaway from a study published Thursday in the journal Science, which found that many ocean creatures could face conditions too warm and with too little oxygen to survive if we don’t turn things around. The more warming, the fewer species are likely to survive, the results show.
The new analysis applies what the research team previously learned about the “Great Dying” 252 million years ago — when more than two-thirds of all marine life in the Permian Period went extinct — as well as other historic extinctions to today’s climate projections. Under a high emissions scenario, the results were disturbing.
“If we don’t act to curb emissions, that extinction is quite high. It registers on the geological scale among the major biotic collapses of diversity in the Earth’s history,” said Curtis Deutsch, an author of the paper and a professor of geosciences at Princeton University.
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More than a billion people on the Indian subcontinent have been suffering for weeks amid a record-breaking heatwave, and with temperatures expected to approach 117ºF in the next few days, observers are warning that such deadly conditions are likely to become the norm in the absence of immediate and far-reaching climate action.
“Residents have described daily life as hellish, taps are starting to run dry, and soaring demand for electricity to power air conditioners has caused long and regular power cuts,” The Times reported Wednesday. “In northern India, forest fires are destroying agricultural land. Vulnerable people have been advised to stay indoors.”
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A coalition of green groups sued the U.S. Postal Service on Thursday over Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s plan to buy a new delivery fleet composed almost entirely of gas-powered trucks, a move that climate advocates say was justified by a “deeply flawed” environmental impact analysis.
“Ninety percent of the new trucks would be combustion vehicles with a worse fuel economy than a gas-powered Ford F-150.”
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Over two years into the Covid-19 crisis, an analysis revealed Thursday how the climate emergency is expected to push wild animals into regions more heavily populated with humans, conditions that could spread viruses across species and even lead to future pandemics.
“When a Brazilian free-tailed bat makes it all the way to Appalachia, we should be invested in knowing what viruses are tagging along.”
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Energy
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As congressional Democrats held a press conference Thursday to discuss legislative proposals to reduce gasoline prices and crack down on fossil fuel corporations that are raking in record amounts of money amid Russia’s war on Ukraine, a progressive group redoubled its call for a windfall profits tax on Big Oil—calling it the “right solution” that is popular and “already under their noses.”
“The clearest and most popular way to get direct relief to the public and to check Big Oil’s rampant war profiteering is with a windfall profit tax.”
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Texaco operations in Ecuador from 1962 to 1994 dumped 70 billion litres of “wastewater”, heavily contaminated with oil and other chemicals, into the Amazon rainforest, plus over 650,000 barrels of crude oil. They polluted over 800,000 hectares.
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Combining findings from more than 2,000 scientific and government studies, a report published Thursday details how hydraulic fracturing has “dire impacts on public health and the climate.”
“Fracking swings a wrecking ball at our climate.”
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Indigenous women leaders and more than 200 advocacy organizations sent a letter Wednesday demanding that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers block federal permits for an expansion of Enbridge’s Line 5, a 645-mile-long pipeline that currently transports millions of gallons of crude oil and natural gas liquids per day from Wisconsin to Ontario, Canada.
“The Army Corps and Biden administration must put people over profits.”
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On the last day of the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami Beach, comedian Donnell Rawlings starts his routine by noting there are a lot of white people in the audience and then asks if we were involved in storming the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. He’s just warming up. “I’m at a Bitcoin convention, and I don’t even know what the fuck a Bitcoin is,” Rawlings says. “I don’t know nothing about [cryptocurrency], but I know some of the bangingest parties I’ve been to is some [cryptocurrency] parties.”
He goes on: “I know I’m fucked because they paid me in [cryptocurrency], and I don’t even know how to cash out.” [Cryptocurrency] has to be popular because he can count the number of people sitting in his set, and he knows “I should not be getting the amount of money I am getting paid tonight.”
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The Cyclists’ Federation estimated that the decline in mobility witnessed during the pandemic has been distributed unevenly between different modes of transport. While passenger volumes on public transport were about a third lower last year than before the pandemic, data from traffic counters along highways indicates that the volume of car traffic began to rise last year after dipping in 2020.
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Finnish Customs has selected brokers for its cryptocurrencies. Both operators participated in the last stage of the competitive negotiated procedure for the procurement. Through the tendering process, an operational model was created to ensure the safest possible realisation of the cryptocurrencies forfeited to the authorities. The aim is to sell the cryptocurrencies in Customs’ possession, for which there is a legally valid judgment of forfeiture to the state, in the spring or early summer.
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Through competitive negotiated procedure, Finnish Customs searched for a cryptocurrency broker, who safely and reliably can carry out the sale of cryptocurrencies forfeited to the State. Of the interested parties, Coinmotion Oy and Tesseract Group Oy were invited to participate in the negotiated procedure and both submitted an offer.
– We decided to award contracts to both operators who participated in the negotiations. Both parties have their own strengths when it comes to trading in cryptocurrencies, and we believe that the extensive expertise will be beneficial for the realisation of the cryptocurrencies in Customs’ possession, says Pekka Pylkkänen, Director of Financial Management.
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Wildlife/Nature
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For the past 30 years conservationists have worked to knit this huge stretch of land together under the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. Y2Y seeks to make room for wildlife in connected landscapes that give animals the ability to move across large areas – whether they are following age-old migration patterns or responding to a changing climate.
Throughout this huge region, hundreds of partners – conservation groups, private landowners, businesses, government agencies, tribes and scientists – have worked to knit landscapes together and make it possible for animals to move across it. Participants have constructed wildlife road crossings, conducted “bear aware” campaigns to reduce clashes between people and animals, placed conservation easements on private lands and supported Indigenous efforts to protect sacred spaces.
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The destruction of tens of thousands of square miles of Earth’s tropical forests in 2021 underscores the challenge of fulfilling a pledge made by nations at last year’s United Nations Climate Conference to halt deforestation by the end of the decade, a report published Thursday asserted.
“We have to dramatically reduce emissions from all sources.”
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Overpopulation
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The MWD and the State Water Project (SWP) usually irrigate water from local deposits to 26 public water agencies, distributing this resource to about 19 million people.
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On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California said it’s implementing a program that will restrict outdoor watering to one day a week in parts of Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties.
Using words like, “crisis,” “unprecedented,” and “drastic,” the water supplier said the restrictions will take effect on June 1 and impact some 6 million residents.
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“We don’t have enough water supplies right now to meet normal demand. The water is not there,” district spokesperson Rebecca Kimitch said. “This is unprecedented territory. We’ve never done anything like this before.”
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The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) declared the water shortage emergency Tuesday and ordered limits to “reduce nonessential water use” to parts of Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties. The move includes the unprecedented measure of restricting outdoor watering to one day a week for about a third of their region.
The water district attributed the emergency declaration to its “reliance” on “severely limited” water supplies in Northern California, which is also enduring extreme drought. It comes as the state has experienced a lack of precipitation and abnormally high temperatures in recent years.
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Former Head of the National Council for Population Amr Hassan commented to Al Watan newspaper that the rate of population increase must not surpass the state’s ability to secure basic services in the appropriate quality or influence the average share per capita of natural resources, such as water, energy, and agricultural land.
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Ultimately, the world population would be too big to feed itself.
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Nearly eight percent of the jobs in Bangladesh are concentrated in Dhaka city, and 40 percent are concentrated in the greater Dhaka region, which includes Gazipur and Narayanganj cities. Such extreme concentration of people and economic activities in the capital are having negative impacts on the national economy, according to a new study. The study found that some 31.9 percent of Bangladesh’s urban population live in Dhaka, whereas the country’s major cities that have over a million inhabitants contain only 3.5 percent of the urban population. In the last 10 years, Dhaka’s population has increased by more than 50 percent.
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Finance
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Less than 24 hours after news broke that President Biden is seriously considering canceling tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, organizers mobilized.
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Though corporate America would like us to believe otherwise, the retail prices of essential goods like food and energy are not set by simple supply and demand.
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Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is a prisoner to many promises; if he could, he would retain the fixed utility costs, the single-rate tax, and price freezes, but something has to be done about the ballooning deficit and severe inflation.
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Son of a mutual fund entrepreneur, Johnson took over from his father and, according to CNN, “helped revolutionize the way Americans save and plan for retirement by making Wall Street more accessible to all investors.” Yes, you the little guy could now play the stock market with help from Fidelity Investments.
CNN quotes Sanjiv Mirchandani, a former president of Fidelity Investments’ National Financial Services, from a company memorial video.
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TLDR: Spotify is starting a Free and Open Source Software Fund (FOSS Fund) to pay maintainers of independent projects. This new initiative is about giving back to open source developers and is one of the ways we are investing in a more sustainable open source ecosystem for all of us. The fund will start at 100K EUR, with Spotify’s engineers nominating what projects should receive funds and our fund committee making the final selections, which will be announced in May.
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The Free and Open Source Software Fund (FOSS) will help pay developers of projects that benefit everyone. The fund is starting with 100K EUR and Spotify’s engineers will nominate which FOSS projects should receive funds. Spotify’s fund committee will make the final selections and those will be announced next month.
Spotify says it uses open source software to help power its audio experience for both creators and listeners. “In fact, we are like many other tech companies who rely on open source. And yet, open source developers often make these projects available for us to use without any compensation,” Spotify adds.
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Announced on Monday, Apr. 25th, via the company’s internal blog, Spotify is setting aside €100,000 for its new support fund entitled Free and Open Source Software Fund (FOSS Fund). The money is intended to aid specific open source development projects and is Spotify’s way of targeting more free and open source concepts to better the world of technology.
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When I got the Buick, I started shopping around for car insurance again.
I decided to ask “Jerry”, the app I blogged about previously, what it would cost to insure the Buick. Again, they recommended Mercury Insurance (which has a lot of customer complaints and is apparently infamous for hardballing and delaying claims, ranking 11 out of 12 in customer satisfaction according to J.D. Power’s 2021 comparison of insurance companies, so it won’t even be good insurance if you buy it and pay a fortune), which they said would be about $50 a month for the Buick, and then when I clicked through and Mercury actually gave me the quote, it was more like $100 a month.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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And yet, in a world where every culture, every legal system, every religion, every set of moral principles views stealing as wrong, a crime and something for which people should be punished, there is a lot of stealing taking place. The brutal war crimes, killing, destruction and various forms of outright thievery taking place in Ukraine, as bad as they are, are just the latest in a long line of organized stealing committed by, in and against every nation on the planet in one way or another dating back as far as the mind can venture. Very often it is not just small possessions or money that is stolen, but people’s homes, lands and properties, the very cornerstones of their lives and livelihoods. However, in terms of remedies or restitution for stolen housing, land and property (HLP), the de facto reality in most of the world is not all that different to cases involving the murder of another human being whereby if one murders one other person they will likely go to prison for life no matter where the crime took place. If they happen to murder 10,000, 25,000 or even 100,000 people in a war or through the practices associated with dictators desperate to maintain power, however, they will be far more likely than not to live out their days in control over their population or in the unlikely event their reign comes to an end or they are otherwise overthrown, they will spend the rest of their days in exile, protected as a former head of state and able to enjoy all the stolen riches they took during their period as dictatorial autocrats.
Even before the illegal war of aggression by Russia and resultant killing spree and displacement crisis in Ukraine, since the end of the Second World War, the world had already never counted more displaced persons – both refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) – than there exist today. According to the United Nations (UN) refugee agency, UNHCR, as of 2021 there are more than 82 million people officially registered as refugees and IDPs, a number soon to surpass 100 million if displacement trends continue apace.[2] If those not officially considered persons of concern to UNHCR, including those displaced by environmental, climatic and other forces are added to this total, these numbers expand into the many hundreds of millions, with further hundreds of millions threatened with looming climate displacement as global climate conditions worsen.[3] As such, notwithstanding how displacement is measured, there are now many tens of millions of refugees and internally displaced people throughout the world who are seeking durable solutions to their displacement, many of whom dream of returning to their original homes, even if these homes are damaged or illegally occupied by others or if return would be dangerous. International law and practice increasingly recognizes that all people who have seen their homes destroyed or arbitrarily occupied by members of opposing political, ethnic or religious groups, must be legally entitled to re-possess and return to their homes, lands and properties through the process of HLP restitution, and when return is either dangerous or materially impossible, that control should be able to be re-established over these HLP resources by the displaced and where required adequate compensation or reparations be paid.[4] Unresolved restitution cases span the globe, leaving tens of millions of people with legally outstanding (and thus, unresolved) restitution claims and no remedies available to rectify this state of affairs. These people are waiting for justice, but most have nowhere to turn to have their case heard and their interests represented.
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The endorsement of Congresswoman Shontel Brown against Turner in their upcoming May 3 rematch came just five months after Brown took office following last year’s special election in a Cleveland area district. In last August’s Democratic primary, Brown defeated Turner with the help of funding from big corporate, Republican and hawkishly pro-Israel donors — as well as support from Republicans who voted for Brown in Ohio’s open primary. (Brown’s two most notable national endorsers were Hillary Clinton and Rep. Jim Clyburn.)
Brown is such an establishment politician that she didn’t just join the Progressive Caucus — she also quickly joined the rival New Democrat Coalition, an alliance of the most corporate Democrats in the House.
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One chamber of Congress, led by Democrats, is passing important legislation and delivering for the people. But Republicans in the Senate, and a handful of corporate Democrats, are hell-bent on grinding the gears of government to a halt.Why are Senate Republicans doing this? Because their midterm strategy depends on it. Republicans are blocking crucial legislation so they can point to Democrats’ supposed inability to get anything done, and claim they’ll be able to deliver if you give them majorities. Don’t fall for it.
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So there has been lots of talk about Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter. I’ve written multiple things about how little he understands about free speech and how little he understands content moderation. I’ve also written (with giant caveats) about ways in which his takeover of Twitter might improve some things. Throughout this discussion, in the comments here, and on Twitter, a lot of people have accused me of interpreting Musk’s statements in bad faith. In particular, people get annoyed when I point out that the two biggest points he’s made — that (1) Twitter should allow all “legal” speech, and (2) getting rid of spambots is his number one priority — contradict each other, because spambots are protected speech. People like to argue that’s not true, but they’re wrong, and anyone arguing that expression by bots is not protected doesn’t understand the 1st Amendment at all.
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In response to the acquisition, there was a subset of Twitter users that claimed they would leave the platform, or at least sought to imagine how things could be better than they are today. Those exiting have gravitated toward Mastodon, a decentralized alternative that started in 2016 and gets renewed attention every time left-leaning people get mad at Twitter, but which has never really caught on. It’s unlikely that will change even with Musk taking the helm.
When considering alternatives, the suggestions often amount to a return to some moment in the Web’s past that was perceived to be better: the early days of the Web, the moment when many people used Tumblr, or the time immediately before the dominance of today’s platforms when blogging was popular. While the revival of the blogosphere may seem appealing, proposals to turn back the clock to an idealized period in the history of the Internet fail to consider how the structural incentives of the Web have shifted.
Since those moments, the Internet has undergone a further process of consolidation and commercialization, which allows capitalists to exert more power and extract greater returns from what we do online. Centralization has also made the Web easier to use and provided certain benefits for users. To reverse course, or to get off a track that’s sending us toward the dystopias of a [cryptocurrency]-based Web3 or the metaverse, those incentives would need to be fundamentally altered — something that would require a policy response that itself takes aim at the underlying capitalist forces driving those developments.
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Yet it seems the US Department of Defense’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) doesn’t share the Army’s enthusiasm, nothing that many soldiers are having issues with the devices. “Procuring IVAS without attaining user acceptance could result in wasting up to $21.88 billion in taxpayer funds to field a system that soldiers may not want to use or use as intended,” it wrote in an audit report (via The Reg).
The report states that there has been both positive and negative user acceptance to the IVAS from soldiers. It never went into a lot of detail, though much of the content has been redacted. “If soldiers do not love IVAS and do not find it greatly enhances accomplishing the mission, then soldiers will not use it,” the OIG concludes.
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(U) Procuring IVAS without attaining user acceptance could result in wasting up to $21.88 billion in taxpayer funds to field a system that Soldiers may not want to use or use as intended.
[...]
(U) Program officials stated that, if Soldiers do not love IVAS and do not find it greatly enhances accomplishing the mission, then Soldiers will not use it.
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The deal, which could be worth as much as $21.88 billion over 10 years, follows a contract Microsoft received to build prototype headsets for the Army.
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Misinformation/Disinformation
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Censorship/Free Speech
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It’s tough to talk about freedom of speech.
While the famous First Amendment right appears simple on paper — “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” — its interpretation is something Americans have been arguing over ever since the rule was ratified. It’s a complex, nuanced topic, so it’s not surprising that many people get confused about what “free speech” actually protects, especially now that so many conversations are happening on social media.
“Most people don’t think they’re confused. They’re pretty sure they know what free speech is, and they’re often wrong,” said Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology project, in a recent “Ask the Expert” podcast discussing freedom of speech.
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I have the opposite concerns. I worry that we won’t be able to count on Musk to stick to his stated principles when they come into conflict with his profits. More importantly, it’s absurd that we live in the kind of capitalist hellscape where the only hope for reasonable norms protecting free speech online is that we get lucky and the right kind of billionaire purchases our digital public square. It’s as if we lived in a kind of libertarian dystopia where every inch of every city was private property, and we could only hold protest marches on sidewalks that happened to have been bought by billionaires who were personally friendly to free speech.
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Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) is launching a new campaign today, titled Books UnBanned, to help teens combat the negative impact of increased censorship and book bans in libraries across the country. For a limited time, young adults ages 13 to 21 nationwide, will be able to apply for a free eCard from BPL, unlocking access to the library’s extensive collection of eBooks.
“Access to information is the great promise upon which public libraries were founded,” said Linda E. Johnson, President and CEO, Brooklyn Public Library. “We cannot sit idly by while books rejected by a few are removed from the library shelves for all. Books UnBanned will act as an antidote to censorship, offering teens and young adults across the country unlimited access to our extensive collection of ebooks and audiobooks, including those which may be banned in their home libraries.”
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Turkish producer Cigdem Mater, known on the festival circuit for backing arthouse titles such as the 2013 Venice competition drama “Sivas,” has been arrested and sentenced to 18 years in prison on trumped-up charges, along with other activists, in connection with the 2013 Gezi Park anti-government protests.
Mater, who is also a journalist, was incarcerated on Monday in Istanbul at the conclusion of a trial during which Turkish philanthropist Osman Kavala, who was already in custody, was sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of “attempting to overthrow the government” of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by allegedly financing the protests.
Mater and six other activists are accused by the Turkish court of supporting Kavala and being behind the protests that were prompted by construction of a mall in an Istanbul park. The protests snowballed and grew into nationwide anti-government unrest. Mater is also specifically accused of trying to raise financing for a documentary about the Gezi Park movement that was never made.
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan heads to Saudi Arabia on Thursday for a two-day visit as Ankara seeks to warm ties with the kingdom following years of strain over the 2018 killing of a journalist.
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The Istanbul trial was suspended during a new spell of economic turmoil in Turkey, which has suffered from soaring inflation and a spell of winter street protests that hurt Erdogan’s popularity ahead of a general election next year.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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But this day was a bit different. There was an election to fight, and Australia’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, was going to make the most of the occasion. There were fibs to be told, myths to hail. This was no occasion to talk about interest rates, rubbish and roads. There were veterans, families, and school children to convince or inculcate. The message: go home, those who cherish peace, and prepare for war. There were those who came before; there are more to come.
Yet again, it was a day for Morrison to use a naff analysis of the global political situation. “An arc of autocracy is challenging the rules-based order our grandparents had secured, and democratic freedoms.” An odd statement to make on a day born from a failed invasion of a sovereign entity, itself cooked up as part of a military gamble by the fiendishly adventurous Winston Churchill.
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Why, then, do most of them favor legal abortion in cases of rape (as the nation as a whole does overwhelmingly). Surely a fertilized egg conceived from rape is as innocent as any other. And since anti-choicers consider abortion to be no less than murder, surely they shouldn’t let political expedience trump efforts to prevent that crime. Why, indeed, wouldn’t they be frothing for the death penalty, or at least life imprisonment, against women and their abortion providers?
Some are, and though they’re still in the minority, things are indeed headed that way, as shown by the barbaric anti-choice laws recently passed in Texas, Oklahoma and Idaho, with many others pending. Some would allow even a rapist’s relatives to sue abortion providers or anyone deemed to have facilitated an abortion. And, to quote Ronald Reagan quoting Al Jolson, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
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Although the bill is mostly geared toward tackling copyright infringement, the way it does so would have serious adverse effects on both privacy and freedom of speech.
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The courthouse lobby echoed like a crowded school cafeteria. Teenagers in sweatshirts and sneakers gossiped and scrolled on their phones as they clutched the yellow tickets that police had issued them at school.
Abigail, a 16-year-old facing a $200 penalty for truancy, missed school again while she waited hours for a prosecutor to call her name. Sophia, a 14-year-old looking at $175 in fines and fees after school security caught her with a vape pen, sat on her mother’s lap.
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Do police in your Illinois school district give students tickets for truancy, vaping, fighting or other violations of local ordinances? Search our interactive database to find out.
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A bill that would place strict limits on the use of solitary confinement for youth in Louisiana unexpectedly advanced out of a legislative committee on Wednesday after legislators heard testimony from people who had been held in isolation as children.
Testimony during the hearing also included descriptions of conditions in a facility that was the subject of a recent investigation by ProPublica, NBC News and The Marshall Project. Teens at the Acadiana Center for Youth at St. Martinville were locked behind solid steel doors around the clock for weeks at a time, alone and frequently in the dark, and were handcuffed and shackled when they were allowed out to shower or make phone calls. Conditions were so punitive that one expert described them as child abuse.
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Harvard University released a 134-page report this week that detailed the school’s extensive ties to slavery and pledged $100 million for a fund for scholars to continue to research the topic. The report documents dozens of prominent people associated with Harvard who enslaved people, including four Harvard presidents. Harvard commissioned the study in 2019 as part of a wave of schools reckoning with their pasts and the ongoing legacy of racial discrimination. “Harvard’s ties to slavery begin with the founding of the institution,” says MIT historian Craig Steven Wilder, author of “Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities.” Wilder says that while this history is not new, Harvard worked for decades to erase its complicity in slavery. “We’re really only beginning to reconcile and to really struggle with the deep ties that this institution has to slavery,” he says.
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Bogus lawsuits are a form of bullying. (Hence the need for a federal anti-SLAPP law.) Some lawsuits are merely frivolous, filed by people who have no idea how the law works. Others, like this one, are filed solely to silence critics and remind them who actually has the power in this relationship.
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The Biden administration participated in a prisoner swap with Russia this week, freeing a Russian pilot who was jailed in Connecticut on drug charges in return for a Marine veteran imprisoned in Russia since 2019. Meanwhile, the fate of jailed basketball player Brittney Griner remains unclear. The Phoenix Mercury center is one of the biggest stars of the WNBA, but both the league and the Biden administration have said little about her case since she was arrested at a Russian airport on February 17 on allegations of carrying vape cartridges containing cannabis oil. “There are signs that this is clearly politically motivated from the start, but the White House and the State Department seem to be giving the WNBA this advice to remain silent,” says journalist Maya Goldberg-Safir, who wrote about the lack of public attention on Griner’s case in a recent article for Jacobin. “We know that in order to get Brittney Griner home, the White House will need to intervene.” Goldberg-Safir also notes that Griner, like many WNBA players, plays abroad during the off-season for extra income, and her arrest highlights the gender pay gap in professional sports that may have placed her at additional risk.
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The country awaits the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that challenges Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. In Texas, residents still live under the restrictions of Senate Bill 8, a law that bans most abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected. The Supreme Court ruled, in December, that abortion providers can challenge SB 8 but that enforcement of the law can continue as providers pursue their case. This decision further fueled speculation that the court is on its way to overturning Roe v. Wade, which established that abortion is protected under the right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution. Now, with Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s elevation to the court, reproductive justice organizers are wondering how the bench’s shifting composition will impact the movement for universal abortion access.
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In hindsight, social change is remembered in watershed moments like mass protests, legislative breakthroughs, and independence days. Gal Beckerman’s The Quiet Before is a book about social change that shies away from the fanfare of those events, attentive instead to how groups of people come together and share ideas in those long stretches of time before change gains the solidity of a defined shape and structure. Beckerman amasses a wide-ranging and eclectic array of anecdotes: His book opens with a retelling of how, in 1635, the French astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc coordinated a dozen observers stationed in places as disparate as Egypt, Quebec, and the Netherlands to collect data on the lunar eclipse. The aim was to confirm longitude with greater precision, which would allow Peiresc to calculate the exact length and width of the Mediterranean Sea. This endeavor—which involved pestering his participants with months of sustained letter-writing and assiduous instruction—is significant, for Beckerman, because it represented the assembly of a global, cross-denominational network organized according to the logic of the scientific method. In an era when Galileo was being persecuted for heresy, Peiresc’s prolific written correspondence was an enactment of a new worldly sensibility that would become a hallmark of the Enlightenment.
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Children don’t just abuse EDRs, they’re also abused with EDRs. Facebook, Apple, Google, Snap, Twitter and Discord have all been tricked with fake EDRs into giving up sensitive information about underage children, according to a Bloomberg report by William Turton.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-26/tech-giants-duped-by-forged-requests-in-sexual-extortion-scheme?sref=ylv224K8
These EDRs were wielded by “sextoritionists” – sexual criminals who blackmail their victims into performing sex acts on camera; videos of these sex acts are used as leverage for increasingly extreme extortion demands.
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The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China’s former chairperson Lee Cheuk-yan, and former vice-chairpersons Albert Ho and Chow Hang-tung, appeared in front of Principal Magistrate Peter Law at the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts on Tuesday.
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Tibetan exile leader Penpa Tsering has met with senior State Department official Uzra Zeya for discussions on the status of the Himalayan region in the first of a series of talks this week with U.S. Congressional and government representatives.
Tsering – the Sikyong or elected head of Tibet’s India-based exile government the Central Tibetan Administration – will be in Washington until April 29 at the invitation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and will be following his talks there with visits next week to Canada and Germany.
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So Senator Bernie Sanders says it is time for the president to keep his campaign promise and “sign an executive order to prohibit companies like Amazon that have violated labor laws from receiving federal contracts paid for by the taxpayers of America.” In a letter sent to Biden on Tuesday, Sanders argued that, Amazon “is the poster child as to why this anti-union busting Executive Order is needed now more than ever.”
The letter noted, over the past 18 years, “Amazon has received thousands of federal contracts worth billions of dollars. The Washington Post, also owned by Mr. Bezos, reported that Amazon is in line to receive a cloud contract from the National Security Agency worth up to $10 billion—a contract that it should not receive as long as it continues to violate labor laws. Another Bezos-owned company, Blue Origin, may also receive a contract from NASA worth up to $10 billion to fly a spaceship to the moon after more than 20 current and former employees alleged that this company repeatedly discriminated against workers and did not adhere to safety protocols.”
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Executions in Iran rose alarmingly by 25% last year and surged after hardline cleric Ebrahim Raisi was elected president, two campaign groups say.
At least 333 people were put to death, according to Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and France’s Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM).
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Consumer rights defenders are warning that telecom companies and lobbyists are taking advantage of the U.S. Senate’s delay in confirming Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to pressure corporate Democrats to vote against the longtime public advocate.
“There’s an unseemly amount of money being spent to promote disinformation about her,” Greg Guice, director of government affairs for Public Knowledge, the group founded by Sohn, told MarketWatch this week. “These criticisms aren’t based in fact whatsoever.”
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The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) set aside $42.5 billion to be spent by the states on expanding access to affordable broadband. But state by state, telecom lobbyists are working hard to ensure that this money only goes toward “unserved” locations, and can’t be used to potentially create competition in markets they already serve.
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For more than a decade, cable TV executives brushed aside the idea of cable TV “cord cutting” as either a nonexistent threat or a temporary phenomenon that wound end once Millennials started procreating. Of course, none of that wound up being true, and consumer defections from the bloated, pricey traditional cable TV bundle continue to set records during the COVID crisis.
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I’ve made a tool for generating LaTeX from text in Gemini format. LaTeX can yield pretty good PDF output, so there is now a Gemtext to PDF pipeline. It’s important for the adoption of Gemini that there be good tooling for converting documents in and out, and this new tool adds an important pair of edges in the graph of format convertibility.
As the gemini text that I’ve written so far isn’t particularly extensive, I’m a bit short of examples, so I have to choose a slightly substandard example. I cut-and-pasted a bunch of lost webpages about “YURLs” into a single Gemini document. This document exercises all the various features of Gemini text, as a mashup of various HTML originals, it’s not really the best example, but it’s the most *complete* example, so I’ve linked the PDF output below.
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The reality is the deal will most likely sail through because ours is a world where major communication platforms, the infrastructure necessary to provide digital goods or services, and nearly every other aspect of the digital world—just like the analog one—is structured with private interests and profits prioritized above all else. Musk taking over from another set of wealthy individuals and corporations is not necessarily a better or worse circumstance, but it does reveal the framework that Twitter always sat within, even if it’s recently become popular to refer to it as a “town square” akin to a public good, mostly driven by aggrieved right-wingers who believe that social media is a liberal plot.
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The United States, the European Union, and dozens of other countries on Thursday launched a global Declaration for the Future of the Internet vowing online protection of human rights, respect for net neutrality, and no government-imposed shutdowns that was applauded by progressive advocates for a more open and democratic web.
“If acted upon,” the declaration “would ensure that people everywhere can connect, communicate, organize, and create new and amazing things that will benefit the entire world—not entrench the power of unaccountable billionaires and oligarchs.”
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Today, at a hybrid ministerial meeting organized by the White House’s National Security Council, over 60 partners from around the world signed A Declaration for the Future of the Internet.
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More than 55 countries have launched a declaration for the future of the internet, the White House said on Thursday, adding that the doors are still open for countries like India which have not joined it.
The Declaration for the Future of the Internet is in part a response to a rising trend of digital authoritarianism, including Russia’s actions to block credible news sites and promote disinformation during and leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, the White House said in a fact sheet.
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The United States, all European Union member states, and 32 non-EU countries have announced a “Declaration for the Future of the Internet” that lays out priorities for an “open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure” [Internet]. It highlights goals like affordability, net neutrality, and removing illegal content without curtailing free expression — although it offers few specifics for achieving them.
The three-page declaration, also summarized by the White House and the European Commission, offers a broad vision of the net as well as a mix of more specific issues for its 61 signatories. “We are united by a belief in the potential of digital technologies to promote connectivity, democracy, peace, the rule of law, sustainable development, and the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms,” the document begins. But “access to the open [Internet] is limited by some authoritarian governments and online platforms and digital tools are increasingly used to repress freedom of expression and deny other human rights and fundamental freedoms.”
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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If you’re still not sure whether you’re downloading the correct version, however, you can always go straight to Audacity’s download page and get the latest version yourself, in either a 32-bit or 64-bit version for Windows. Audacity 3.1.3 was released last December, with up to 50 percent performance improvements compared to the previous version.
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However, it bears mentioning that March brought with it “a brief service outage that caused users to be involuntarily logged out of Spotify,” per higher-ups. Consequently, execs “believe certain affected users created new accounts to log back in, resulting in approximately 3 million additional MAUs in the quarter.”
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Most of the 10-person Tudum culture and trends team was let go, according to one person with knowledge of the situation. They said the staff was given no prior warning of the layoffs, and other workers found out their colleagues were laid off via Twitter. Many of the writers were experienced journalists that Netflix lured from other outlets, the person says. The person also claims news of layoffs on other teams is forthcoming. [...]
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Monopolies
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Patents
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World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus will present a shareholder resolution Thursday calling on the U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant Moderna to make its coronavirus vaccine technology available to the world, a first-of-its-kind move from the U.N. agency as the global pandemic rages on.
“It is an unprecedented appearance for an unprecedented pandemic,” Peter Singer, a special adviser to Tedros, told Reuters ahead of Moderna’s annual shareholder meeting, where Tedros will present the resolution as vaccine equity campaigners prepare to hold die-ins and other demonstrations at the company’s headquarters in Boston.
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As major pharmaceutical executives and investors convened virtually on Thursday for their annual shareholder meetings, campaigners took to the streets in the U.S., the U.K., India, South Africa, and elsewhere to condemn major drug companies for hoarding technology and prioritizing profits over equitable distribution of coronavirus vaccines.
“Thousands of people are still dying every day because protections against the coronavirus have not been made accessible to all.”
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The Times editorialists excoriated Big Pharma for abusing the American intellectual-property system to jack up prices on drugs and medical procedures. The editorialists wrote that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has “long since devolved into a backwater office that large corporations game, politicians ignore and average citizens are wholly excluded from. As a result, not only is legal trickery rewarded and the public’s interest overlooked, but also innovation—the very thing that patents were meant to foster—is undermined.”
This high-profile attention on the PTO—and the general role of patents, trademarks, copyrights, and the like in driving America’s obscenely high drug and medical device prices—is overdue and commendable. But it’s strange that the Times’ just outrage hasn’t been echoed on Capitol Hill.
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Copyrights
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Content ID isn’t really the villain here. But it’s an accomplice.
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The winners of the 40th Hungarian Press Photography Competition’s Grand Prizes were announced on 26 April, and the winners of the previously announced categories were awarded their certificates at this time. Telex photojournalist, János Bődey was awarded the André Kertész Grand Prize for the best people-centered documentary photography series, and our colleague Szabolcs Barakonyi (along with his co-authors) received the Mihály Gera Award for the most beautiful photo album of the last five years, entitled: Fortepan Masters.
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Welcome to episode 25 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we hear from Susanna Ånäs, GLAM Coordinator of AvoinGLAM, the Finnish OpenGLAM community, which brings together work from Wikimedia, Open Knowledge, and Creative Commons. Susanna’s curiosity for networked histories initially drove her to join the international community of Wikimedians and OpenGLAM activists, and she has been working with open cultural heritage for over a decade.
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Welcome to episode 25 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we hear from Iolanda Pensa, president of Wikimedia Italy, and a senior researcher and head of research for “Culture and Territory” at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI). Iolanda is interested in strengthening the visibility of archives and research content through collaborative knowledge building, innovative interfaces, and educational tools like Creative Commons and Wikipedia. She was previously the scientific director of WikiAfrica from 2007 until 2012, and in 2011 conceived and directed “Share Your Knowledge: Wikipedia and Creative Commons for cultural institutions.”
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The USTR has released its 2022 Special 301 Report on Intellectual Property Protection and Enforcement. Online copyright infringement of movies, TV shows, and music remains a key concern, with several countries being called out by the United States for failing to do enough to curb pirate IPTV services and camcording in cinemas.
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A federal court in Seattle has dismissed Bungie’s copyright infringement claims against cheat seller AimJunkies.com. While it’s not disputed that ‘Destiny 2 Hacks’ were offered for sale, the court is not convinced that these are copyright infringing. The trademark claims are intact, however, so the case is far from resolved.
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