05.11.22
Posted in News Roundup at 4:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Streaming sites promised to be this incredibly convenient tool to watch media but everybody got greedy and piracy is on the rise again but it will get much harder as time goes on especially as governments start to build regulation for an internet connected world.
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NVIDIA has announced its plans for an open-source GPU driver. Christian Schaller, the Director for Desktop, Graphics, Infotainment and more at Red Hat, gives us the inside scoop on this historic announcement.
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Hello and welcome to the 466th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short-topics episode, we discuss the ARDC’s grant program for amateur radio clubs, the Hamvention mega prize, privacy in ham radio, Pop! OS, Fedora 26, Ubuntu 22.04 and a little bit about Hamshack Hotline. Thanks for listening and have a great week.
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Hector Martin of Asahi Linux schools Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett with a massive sum of fresh, deep and interesting facts about Apple’s new M1 hardware, and Asahi’s promise and progress toward doing everything on it.
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Linux Made Simple ☛ Fedora 36
Today we are looking at Fedora 36. It comes with Gnome 42, Linux kernel 5.17, and uses about 1.5GB of ram when idling.
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In this video, we are looking at Fedora 36.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA is now publishing Linux GPU kernel modules as open source with dual GPL/MIT license, starting with the R515 driver release. You can find the source code for these kernel modules in the NVIDIA Open GPU Kernel Modules repo on GitHub.
This release is a significant step toward improving the experience of using NVIDIA GPUs in Linux, for tighter integration with the OS and for developers to debug, integrate, and contribute back. For Linux distribution providers, the open-source modules increase ease of use. They also improve the out-of-the-box user experience to sign and distribute the NVIDIA GPU driver. Canonical and SUSE are able to immediately package the open kernel modules with Ubuntu and SUSE Linux Enterprise Distributions.
Developers can trace into code paths and see how kernel event scheduling is interacting with their workload for faster root cause debugging. In addition, enterprise software developers can now integrate the driver seamlessly into the customized Linux kernel configured for their project.
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Today NVidia announced that they are releasing an open source kernel driver for their GPUs, so I want to share with you some background information and how this will impact Linux graphics and compute going forward.
One thing many people are not aware of is that Red Hat is the only Linux OS company who has a strong presence in the Linux compute and graphics engineering space. There are of course a lot of other people working in the space too, like engineers working for Intel, AMD and NVidia or people working for consultancy companies like Collabora or individual community members, but Red Hat as an OS integration company has been very active on trying to ensure we have a maintainable and shared upstream open source stack. This engineering presence is also what has allowed us to move important technologies forward, like getting hiDPI support for Linux some years ago, or working with NVidia to get glvnd implemented to remove a pain point for our users when it came to the NVidia driver and Mesa fighting over the OpenGL driver .so file. We see ourselves as the open source community’s partner here, fighting to keep the linux graphics stack coherent and maintainable and as a partner for the hardware OEMs to work with when they need help pushing major new initiatives around GPUs for Linux forward. And as the only linux vendor with a significant engineering footprint in GPUs we have been working closely with NVidia for a couple of years now trying to help prepare the ground for NVidia moving to a model with an open source kernel driver. An effort that has now borne fruits in terms of todays announcement from NVidia about releasing an out of tree kernel driver for their GPU. People like Kevin Martin, the manager for our GPU technologies team, Ben Skeggs the maintainer of Nouveau and Dave Airlie, the upstream kernel maintainer for the graphics subsystem, Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst and our accelerator lead Tom Rix have all taken part in meetings, code reviews and discussions on how to make this happen with NVidia over the last Month. So let me talk a little about what this release means (and also what it doesn’t mean) and what we hope to see come out of this long term.
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NVIDIA today announced that they have started publishing their GPU kernel modules for Linux systems as open-source on GitHub as a first towards providing the community with an open NVIDIA graphics driver.
The open-source Linux GPU kernel modules have a dual GPL/MIT license and they will be available starting with the upcoming NVIDIA 515.x.x series of their proprietary graphics driver, which entered public beta testing today with an updated installer, updated RTD3 video memory utilization threshold, improved Vulkan support, updated NVIDIA X Server Settings, and other changes.
As you can expect, NVIDIA open-sourcing their Linux GPU kernel modules will open the door to new contributions from the Linux community to make the NVIDIA graphics driver usable on more systems and to provide users with an out-of-the-box user experience, with Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE as the first Open Source companies to package the new open-source GPU kernel modules for their Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise distributions.
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Applications
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Docker Desktop for Linux Available to Download, A proverb says: Better late than never. Docker complied and Docker Desktop for Linux, complementing Docker Desktop for Mac and Windows. This was the second most requested developer request on Docker’s roadmap.
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Lios stands for “Linux-Intelligent-Ocr-Solution” which is an open-source, free OCR solution that converts any text in image, PDF into a readable text.
Lios is a free and open source software for converting prints to text using either a scanner or a camera. It supports multiple languages out-of-the-box, without the need to install or configure any.
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It is closer to Apache Lucene than to Elasticsearch or Apache Solr in the sense it is not an off-the-shelf search engine server, but rather a crate that can be used to build such a search engine.
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Orange is a super lightweight open-source desktop search engine that allows you to search for and inside your local files and folders.
Its compact tiny size because it is written using Tauri; a revolutionary Rust-based framework for building desktop using web technologies.
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Instructionals/Technical
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If you’re searching for info related to the VI editor, this article is for you. So, what’s VI editor? VI is a text editor that’s screen-oriented and the most popular in the Linux world. The reasons for its popularity are 1) availability for almost all Linux distros, 2) VI works the same throughout multiple platforms, and 3) its user-friendly features. Currently, VI Improved or VIM is the most used advanced counterpart of VI.
To work on the VI text editor, you have to know how to use the VI editor in Linux. Let’s find it out from this article.
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Cockpit is a free and open-source web-based graphical interface for servers. If you are not comfortable with the command-line interface in Linux-based servers then you can use Cockpit to manage your server.
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If you have massive amounts of data to be searched, Apache Solr might be exactly what you need. Jack Wallen shows you how to deploy this useful tool.
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Docker Desktop is now available for all developers using a Linux desktop environment. Here’s how to install Docker Desktop on Ubuntu.
Linux support for Docker Desktop has been the most requested feature among the Docker community for 12 months. In response to these needs, Docker Inc. announces at DockerCon 2022, its annual conference, that Docker Desktop is now available for Linux.
Initially, Docker Desktop’s Linux version is designed for Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora.
Some Linux developers who have only used Docker Engine may be unaware of Docker Desktop, so let’s go over what Docker Desktop is.
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Today we are looking at how to install Rig of Rods 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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If you work with Linux servers, then you’d probably like to keep track of those machines from a single location. However, you probably don’t want to install a challenging application or service to make this happen.
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&&, || and ! operators can run tests and take actions based on the test results, but they can be a little tricky until you understand the logic.
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Arch Family
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The best Arch-based Linux distros provide impressive customizability. Arch adheres to a rolling release model, which means you can install it once and keep updating it till eternity.
For all its advantages, Arch remains one of the most cumbersome distros to configure and install. In fact, even though the installation process is one of the best documented ones, it’s elaborate and involved enough to scare away everyone except hardcore geeks.
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Debian Family
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According to the DebConf travel funding rules, volunteers need to buy their own tickets and then wait for a reimbursement to come later.
For DebConf18 (Taiwan) and DebConf19 (Brazil), some of the Albanian women asked to have the tickets purchased in advance. Debian changed the rules for these women but not for anybody else.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Anyone who enjoyed what Canonical was doing with the Ubuntu desktop, before it jumped ship back to GNOME, will vastly appreciate what the developers behind this distribution are doing. If you like a desktop that very much creates an efficient and elegant workflow, this might become your go-to Linux distribution.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I believe Ubuntu Unity is one of the most beautiful Linux desktops on the market. If the developers could only bring back the full HUD, I could see myself replacing Pop!_OS as my distribution of choice.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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We are almost there! We have overcome a number supply chain and manufacturing challenges for the Librem 5 USA and have been steadily shipping through orders this Spring. It’s been really gratifying to hear all of the positive feedback from Librem 5 USA customers who now have their phones. Based on the current backlog of orders we project now we will hit shipping parity (that point where a new order is fulfilled within our standard 10-business-day lead time) some time in June, and as a result we’ve reduced the lead time for new Librem 5 USA orders to a conservative 60 days.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Welcome back to the Thunderbird blog! We’re really energized about our major 2022 release and cannot wait to put it in your hands. Thunderbird 102 includes several major new features for our global community of users, and we’re confident you’ll love them. So grab your favorite beverage, and let’s highlight seven features from Thunderbird 102 we’re most excited about.
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FSF
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Licensing/Legal
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In our previous update regarding our copyleft enforcement lawsuit against Vizio, we talked about how Vizio “removed” the case to USA federal court (namely, the Central District of California), and how we filed a motion to “remand” the case back to state court. While this all seems like minor legal wrangling early in a case, this very first skirmish in our case goes to the very heart of the right for software repair for consumers. While it won’t be a final decision in the case, this motion will be the first indication whether the federal courts view the GPL as purely a copyright license, or as a contract, or as both. That question has been central to legal debate about the GPL for decades, and, thanks to our case, for the first time, a federal Court will directly consider this question.
Our view (and the view of many attorneys whose opinions we trust) and which is supported by substantial case law, is that the GPL functions as both a copyright license and a contract, and that third parties who receive distribution of GPL’d (and LGPL’d) software are third-party beneficiaries. We’ve done both copyright-based and contract-based enforcement, and both have their advantages. Contract-based enforcement as a third-party has advantages that are central to the GPL’s policy goals. Consumers are the first to discover violations in the first place. Consumers are the most likely to utilize complete, corresponding source code (CCS) to enhance their use of the products they have purchased. Third-party, contractual based enforcement gives consumers legal authority when they ask companies for access to the source code that should be available to them. In other words, this approach gives consumers the ability to ask the Court directly for the most important thing that copyleft assures: a right to receive the CCS and “the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable”. Indeed, in our suit we have asked only for access to the source code, not for any money.
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Programming/Development
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Flutter, Google’s massive cross-platform app development framework, has reached version 3, bringing Material You, Linux, & macOS support, and more.
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Perl/Raku
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The open or die idiom is fairly ubiquitous in Perl. To be useful, the exception should say something about what went wrong: open … or die “Open error: $!”, for example.
The $! built-in variable (a.k.a. $ERRNO or $OS_ERROR if use English; is in effect) gives you access to the C language errno variable, which through the magic of Perl interpolates an error message appropriate to the error given.
But there are times when some error analysis is in order. Fortunately, $! is a dualvar, so if you access it in numeric context rather than string context, you get the actual numeric value of the error code. But for both portability and maintainability you don’t want to compare $! to a numeric literal. Thus, Errno.
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Python
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Every year, just before the start of PyCon US, around 30 core developers, triagers, and special guests gather for the Python Language Summit: an all-day event of talks where the future direction of Python is discussed. The summit in 2022 was the first in-person summit since 2019, due to disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020-21.
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Over on the Python Software Foundation (PSF) blog, Alex Waygood has a report from this year’s Python Language Summit. There are reports from each of the nine sessions, including “Python without the GIL”, The ‘Faster CPython’ project: 3.12 and beyond”, “F-Strings in the grammar”, lightning talks, and more.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Today, the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Alvaro Bedoya as a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Mr. Bedoya has long been a powerful advocate for consumers and a trailblazing professor. Public Knowledge proudly welcomes this consumer champion to the FTC.
The following can be attributed to Charlotte Slaiman, Competition Policy Director at Public Knowledge:
“Congratulations to Alvaro Bedoya, who has now cleared his final hurdle to become an FTC Commissioner. Bedoya’s perspective, expertise, and experience will be a crucial addition to the Commission. I know we can trust Commissioner Bedoya to stand up to powerful corporations and look out for the interests of the most vulnerable.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Ubuntu, Windows at 3:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 7a485dbdce27b3f9d52b2fe3579d619c
Ubuntu is Helping Microsoft
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Canonical is rapidly losing its dominance among desktop/laptop GNU/Linux users (it’s still doing OK in servers); but adding insult to injury, it’s now boosting Windows instead of GNU/Linux, perhaps failing to grasp that this is in part the cause of the exodus (of Ubuntu engineers, too)
THIS is a truly sad story, but it’s not the first time, i.e. it’s not unprecedented. It’s quite a tragedy considering the first bug report in Ubuntu. It was meant to replace Windows. But Canonical is trying to appease Microsoft and spy with Microsoft. As a result, Ubuntu’s community has been reduced to nothing, users flee to other distros (many reports to that effect lately), and the power of the brand “Ubuntu” is withering away.
“Canonical is yet again promoting the competition, but we’re meant to believe that Canonical/Ubuntu is truly the alternative to Microsoft/Windows. It’s not.”I’ve decided it might be easier to cover the topic in the form of a spontaneous video as I would regret sending traffic to the pages in question (we’ve already included some in Daily Links regardless, along with critical editorial comments).
Canonical is yet again promoting the competition, but we’re meant to believe that Canonical/Ubuntu is truly the alternative to Microsoft/Windows. It’s not.
“The company’s “Product Manager” (first post Oct 19 2021) keeps shilling Windows and other Microsoft stuff.”When Ubuntu had a new LTS release (only a few weeks ago) there was “IPO” murmur/talk in Microsoft media (predicted for next year), but that might simply mean that the founder wants to exit and put the liabilities in shareholders’ hands. The interview in question was with a longtime Microsoft propagandist, so it’s hard to say what motivated it.
In any event, today and yesterday Ubuntu’s official blog promoted Windows and products with Windows. The company’s “Product Manager” (first post Oct 19 2021) keeps shilling Windows and other Microsoft stuff. About a quarter of his posts are Microsoft promotion and Microsoft isn’t even described as a competitor. But remember that more than a decade ago the person managing the desktop of Ubuntu was someone who had come from Microsoft (Spencer), spreading Mono and other problematic things.
“Canonical hired for WSL promotion instead of GNU/Linux promotion and now there’s endorsement of a laptop that comes with Windows (an HP debacle we’ve covered in a past video).”As noted in the video, many of the original high-calibre developers of Ubuntu have left. Not only have many left; some of them now “disparage” Canonical’s products, including some managers. Canonical hired for WSL promotion instead of GNU/Linux promotion and now there’s endorsement of a laptop that comes with Windows (an HP debacle we’ve covered in a past video).
What is Canonical trying to tell us? To buy a Windows machine instead of one with GNU/Linux preloaded?
“Ubuntu is losing its lead very rapidly and it knows it. Maybe that’s why so many people leave.”Incidentally, that same “Product Manager” keeps promoting proprietary software (most of his posts) and the rest include Steam (DRM). He wrote about Steam after the media had noted that gamers are on Arch or other distros. Ubuntu is losing its lead very rapidly and it knows it. Maybe that’s why so many people leave.
In any case, see the video; I prefer not to link to the Microsoft promotion in Ubuntu.com. Instead I just show that in the video. The CEO whose surname I forgot is Jane Silber, who worked for a weapons company prior to Canonical. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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OK, I admit Linux on servers isn’t at all surprising. In fact, to people who know of Linux but don’t use Linux themselves, a data center is usually the first thing that pops into their heads when “Linux” is mentioned. The problem with that assumption is that it can make it seem obvious that Linux ought to be great on the server, as if Linux doesn’t even have to try. It’s a flattering sentiment, but the fact is that Linux is great on servers because there’s a monumental effort across global development teams to make Linux especially effective at what it does.
It isn’t by chance that Linux is the robust operating system that powers most of the internet, most of the cloud, nearly all the supercomputers in existence, and more. Linux isn’t stagnate, and while it has a rich history behind it, it’s not so steeped in tradition that it fails to progress. New technologies are being developed all the time, and Linux is a part of that progress. Modern Linux adapts to growing demands from a changing world to make it possible for systems administrators to provide networked services to people all over the world.
It’s not everything Linux can do, but it’s no small feat, either.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this video, I am going to show an overview of Fedora 36 and some of the applications pre-installed.
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After solving a moral dilemma in our particular kind of way, Mike dishes on some ambitious plans that might kick off a new era of development for him.
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Applications
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As Peergos allows the users to organize the tasks, mark calendars, and share files, you would find a bit of similarity with NextCloud. Based on the user experience, security, and UI, the design of this open-source google drive alternative tool is top-notch, I must say. In the entire post, I have described the important features of the Peergos open source Google drive alternative tool and how you can get started with it.
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Gibbon is released under the GPL-3.0 License.
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Macast application is released under the GPL-3.0 License.
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It is a self-hosted app which means you can download the code, and run it at your device or remote server.
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Exir EMR is a new open-source EMR solution that aims to manage small clinics.
Despite it comes in a small compact size, it is packed with dozens of useful features to assist in managing the clinical workflow as patient admission, patient profile management, patient file management, and reporting.
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Pulseway recently revealed that they had improved functionality for endpoints using macOS and Linux to their RMM solution and deepened the integration to IT Glue. Enterprise Times had the opportunity to get more information about the update when it spoke to Andy Ellwood, VP of Product Marketing at Pulseway.
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Welcome to this patch release of curl, shipped only 14 days since the previous version. We decided to cut the release cycle short because of the several security vulnerabilities that were pointed out. See below for details. There are no new features added in this release.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Kerberos is an authentication method which helps improve security between systems. For systems that need to access another, such as Secure Shell (SSH), Kerberos is a great way to keep the connection secure.
If you have read the previous article on Kerberos Authentication with CentOS, this will not be too different.
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Automation is a hot topic right now. In my day job as an SRE part of my remit is to automate as many repeating tasks as possible. But how many of us do that in our daily, not-work, lives? This year, I am focused on automating away the toil so that we can focus on the things that are important.
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How To Install Pantheon Desktop On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS And Derivatives
Pantheon is the desktop environment of elementary OS. It is written in the Vala programming language. GNOME is the default desktop environment on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Previously, Ubuntu used to have a Unity Desktop Environment.
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Do you know how to scroll up and down using your Tmux application? This has been a significant concern for those getting started with this application. When I started using this app, I had similar complications, and I did not know how to scroll up and down on Tmux.
This was because it runs multiple windows simultaneously hence becoming more complex to scroll up and down. However, after a lengthy hassle and tussle, I learned how to scroll in Tmux. Therefore, if you have been experiencing the same problems, I will illustrate how to scroll in Tmux.
Tmux is a top-notch open-source terminal/shell multiplexer for Unix-based operating systems, derived from the word “terminal multiplexer.” Tmux is a program that lets you use multiple terminals simultaneously from a single application window. It comes in handy when running multiple command-line scripts or programs at once.
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For the past few decades, Microsoft Office has dominated the office suite market on computers and mobile devices. On the open-source side of things, LibreOffice has been in the limelight of that market for a couple of years after succeeding OpenOffice.
Many people, including myself, pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for software subscriptions. You can obtain most of these features without paying a single cent by using open-source software.
Recently, the compatibility of Libre Office with Microsoft office has been a severe problem. Despite having support for doc and docx formats, LibreOffice struggles to keep formatting constant on these file formats. Text may sometimes exist on another page; pictures are placed in the wrong position, among many other issues. Many people probably gave up on open source software because of these reasons. However, a new competitor has emerged in these few years to solve all these problems – OnlyOffice. It’s a free and open-source office suite almost entirely compatible with Microsoft Office formats.
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Sublime Text is a lightweight and feature-rich programming text editor available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. Sublime Text 4 is the latest version of Sublime Text at the time of this writing.
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Sed is a simple UNIX program. It does not create and edit files. It only modifies the data that passes through its input and presents the modified data on its output. Despite that, sed is considered to be one of the most powerful UNIX utilities that you will encounter in Linux, especially when it is combined with other programs in your system.
This article aims to teach the basics of how to use this tiny program. Further, it will also give a brief overview of the UNIX philosophy and how that idea is important in understanding how your computer works.
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There are tons of apps built for Windows, something that can’t be said about niche operating systems. However, this could be changing as more and more users rely on the internet and online tools to get work done.
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Do you know how well your Ubuntu Server instances are performing? Sure, they might be up and running, but do you really know the details of how well they can handle workloads? This is especially important before deploying an app or service that will place a high demand on a machine.
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Ubuntu 22.04 is the latest stable LTS version of the acclaimed Linux distribution created by Canonical. We are in the presence of one of the most important releases of the Linux year due to the great influence that this distribution has on servers and desktop. That’s why today you will see how to get it without too many problems. That is why, in this post, you will learn how to install Ubuntu 22.04.
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Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world, if not the most popular one. It is a general-purpose programming language that is mostly used for back-end web development, data science, machine learning and software development.
Python 3.11 is the newest pre-release version of Python.
In this tutorial we’ll install Python 3.11 on an Ubuntu 22.04 machine.
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To check what version of Python is installed on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer, all you have to do is run a single command. We’ll show you how to do that as well as what to do if you have multiple Python versions installed.
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Sails.js is a Javascript framework, used for building an application in real-time without writing too much code. It is an MVC(Model-View-Controller) framework based and is developed under the Node.js environment. Sails.js offers a number of features built on Express.js and Node.js enabling the applications to be fully based on javascript. It is good to be mentioned that Sails.js provides an object-relational mapping interface using Waterlin.js. In this blog post, we are going to configure Sails.js with Apache as a reverse proxy so you can access your app via a domain name instead of using an IP address and port.
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How To Install Grub Customizer On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS And Linux Distros.
Grub Customizer is a software package that allows the user to customize the grub boot menu. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install the Grub Customizer package on all Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and other Linux distros.
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Fix “bash: netstat: command not found” error on Debian/Ubuntu Linux
Solution for the “bash: netstat: command not found” error on Debian/Ubuntu Linux is here. The netstat Linux command is used by system administrators.
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A new tutorial in our series of simpler tutorials for Linux beginners: how to delete a user. In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to remove users via the command-line interface (CLI, Terminal).
For this tutorial, you’ll have to be logged in as the root user or a user with sudo privileges.
If you’re using a GUI, either open up a Terminal and use the commands below or just find the settings menu where you can delete users. For Ubuntu, it would be something like Activities -> Users -> Add or remove users -> Unlock -> Click on the user and click “Remove User”.
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If you want to try out a Linux distribution, you may want to do it in a virtual machine (VM) before dual-booting or completely overwriting your system. Choose a distribution and let’s run it in a VM using VirtualBox.
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The Secure Shell or better known as SSH is the most used method to admin remote servers.
It’s an encrypted protocol so that two computers can communicate securely over the internet or any local network.
It works on the command line, invoking any of the utilities of the openssh secure networking application suite.
In this tutorial we’ll show you how to set up SSH keys on Ubuntu 22.04. SSH keys provide a more secure way of logging into a server with SSH than using a password alone.
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The ISPConfig update script is an easy way to update an ISPConfig 3 installation. If you want to make a manual backup of ISPConfig, see the instructions at the end of the article. This tutorial applies to ISPConfig 3.0, ISPConfig 3.1, and also ISPConfig 3.2.
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This guide gives you an overview of code commenting options in PowerShell. Just like any other programming language, you can comment out code in a PowerShell script for documentation purposes.
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Fedora 36 has been released! This step by step tutorial tutorial explains how to upgrade to Fedora 36 from Fedora 35 and older versions. If you’re already using Fedora 35, you can now safely upgrade to Fedora 36 desktop or server edition for latest features, performance and stability improvements.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install AnyDesk on Rocky Linux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, AnyDesk is a remote desktop application that lets you connect to PCs and other devices running the host application from anywhere in the world. With AnyDesk, you can share your entire screen, part of it, or even individual applications with another user in real-time no matter what device they are using such as Windows, Linux, macOS, or Android.
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 AnyDesk remote desktop on Rocky Linux. 8.
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Telegram is a cross-platform chat application having end-to-end encryption and is free to use. One of the key features of this desktop messenger app is that it offers video calling and other services that are not available on Twitter or Facebook. The Telegram app also has no association with these big social media companies, so you can be sure your data will be shared with only the person you want to. This feature makes Telegram more secure as compared to other messaging applications.
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Games
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qu3e is a compact, light-weight and fast 3D physics engine in C++. It is has been specifically created to be used in games.
It is portable with no external dependencies other than various standard c header files (such as cassert and cmath). qu3e is designed to have an extremely simple interface for creating and manipulating rigid bodies.
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It did not take too long to get to 2700 games – Valve’s verification pace has picked up to where it was in March after a slow-down in April. There are now 2702 games at the time of writing working on the Steam Deck – in two categories as usual…
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Today we get some very exciting news for the Linux gaming community. And yes, smart aleck, people do play video games on Linux these days. What is the big news? Canonical has released an early-access snap version of Steam for Ubuntu and other compatible Linux-based operating systems!
What exactly does this mean? Well, Canonical is aiming to make it even easier to get Steam up-and-running on Linux. Gamers will be able to install Valve’s software from the snap store for a more elegant experience.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I will receive feedback on this review, I am sure. And some people will probably say: you know you should wait a couple of months until the first dot release for all those early bugs to be fixed. And to that I say, yes, true, but then, why release the distro now then? Why not test two months more and then unleash it when it’s ready? This is true of most “modern” systems, like the half-beta Windows 11 and whatnot. Low bar for quality is not how it should be, and Kubuntu 22.04 is no exception. There are half a dozen issues in this release, obvious ones, which never should have made it past the QA team. But then, testing software seems to be an afterthought since around 2014 or so.
Anyway, Kubuntu 22.04 is a decent system, but I also feel angry and frustrated. With my recent mission of migrating away from Windows for good (look for it in my Linux and Windows categories) in the coming years, any setback or regression in Linux, especially LTS versions of big distros, creates a great disturbance in the force, and makes me feel extra dejected. As always, always, whenever things start getting slightly better, slightly more stable, distros seem to implode, seemingly terrified of what stability might bring. It’s a self-perpetuating, self-destructive cycle. It’s getting quite boring in 2022. It was all fun and games and nerdy tinkering in 2005, but now, it feels like Groundhog Day, except it’s Penguin Day. But then, who cares anymore right.
This distro is decent-ish. It’s fast, there were no major problems, and you can tweak Plasma any which way you like, almost. Then, you have things like the unresizable main menu, screenshot borders, dubious defaults, and whatnot. Functionality wise, solid, but you have to work hard to get the best out of the system. Worst of all, there is no sense of majesty that an LTS is supposed to deliver. Just another day in the neverending grinder of code and frivolous hobbyism that is the Linux desktop. I guess 6-7/10 for now. Yes, I am sure I will eventually upgrade to this release, blah blah, and I’ll be enthused and deluded and such. But the first impression is a bit meh. We are done here, folks.
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BSD
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BSD vendor iXsystems has released the latest version of its FreeBSD-derived Network Attached Storage (NAS) OS, TrueNAS 13.0.
The company now offers three separate OS products. Two are based on FreeBSD 13: TrueNAS CORE, which replaces FreeNAS, and the commercial TrueNAS Enterprise, available on the company’s storage hardware. Complementing them is a new Linux-based product, TrueNAS SCALE.
It may not be a household name, but iXsystems, Inc is an established player which has been around in various forms for over 30 years.
The company was originally founded as Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDi) to sell a commercial version of BSD Unix for 386 PCs. Over the decades, it’s employed many notable Unix luminaries, and after various acquisitions, spin-offs and re-acquisitions, it now sells a range of storage-focused servers and develops the TrueNAS family of operating systems.
FreeNAS also has a complicated history, involving several forks and changes of name, but is now all grown up, complete with a smart new suit.
What used to be a separate product is now just the free tier of TrueNAS’ offerings, rebranded as TrueNAS Core; iXsystems sells the enterprise version pre-installed on its hardware.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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Stateful applications are essential to your business, and you need to ensure that your Kubernetes landscape is up to the task of supporting them. Bringing together the Ondat data plane with SUSE Rancher enables enterprises to design, deploy, and manage robust, multi-cloud Kubernetes landscapes along with scalable, highly available, and performant persistent storage. ~ Terry
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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CIQ, a company that’s setting out to commercialize a new open-source Linux distribution and CentOS-successor called Rocky Linux, has raised $26 million in a series A round of funding.
The raise comes a little more than a year after CIQ emerged from stealth (originally as “Ctrl IQ”), spearheaded by one of CentOS’s original creators, Gregory Kurtzer. Moreover, today’s news follows shortly after CIQ inked a major deal with Google to help support companies looking to deploy Rocky Linux on Google’s cloud infrastructure.
While it’s still early days for CIQ, it seems things have gotten off to a solid start — the open-source Rocky Linux project is notching up as many as 250,000 downloads in some months, and its fresh cash injection could go some way toward helping it become one of the major Linux distributions for enterprises.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux is undoubtedly a significant player in the open-source enterprise ecosystem.
If you didn’t know, IBM acquired it for $34 Billion in 2019. So, it is safe to say that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 was the last major release before the acquisition.
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The Fedora project has announced the release of Fedora 36. The new release comes with some major enhancements to its desktop environment, including an update to the default GNOME environment.
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We are excited to announce the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 (RHEL), a new release of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform — the foundation from which organizations can scale existing apps and roll out emerging technologies across bare-metal, virtual, containers and all types of cloud environments.
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Organizations can realize big benefits from a hybrid cloud approach, but strategy and planning matter, especially when working with multiple cloud providers.
We asked CIOs who recently won the 2022 Ohio CIO of the Year ORBIE Awards about the top cloud benefits their organizations are pursuing now.
Read on for their responses – and key considerations for your own cloud strategy.
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Cryostat is a tool for managing JDK Flight Recorder data on Kubernetes. Cryostat 2.1, the most recent version of the software, has a brand-new user interface for the automated rules that were previously introduced as an API feature in Cryostat 2.0. It is now much easier to manage JDK Flight Recording (JFR) on a large scale for many Java applications.
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Enterprisers Project ☛ IT hiring: Tackling the cybersecurity skills shortage [Ed: IBM had the audacity to write this while laying off some of its most talented people (and most valuable in the world) because they became "expensive"]
Across the globe, technology usage has surged to deal with the challenges brought by the pandemic. The need for remote access to essential work tools and or enhanced online customer experiences is greater than ever before.
As a result, the demand for professionals with technical capabilities in areas such as cybersecurity and coding has increased massively. As reported in the UK’s Digital Economy Council Jobs and Skills Report 2021, it’s estimated that in the UK, tech-related vacancies make up around 13 percent of all job vacancies, the second-highest by industry.
Here are four ways to tackle the skills shortage and find talent that brings success.
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Version 8.6 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now generally available, and includes a number of features and upgrade paths that will benefit developers and DevOps teams. This article covers some of the most notable improvements. Please refer to the release notes for a comprehensive list of changes.
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We’re excited to announce the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a flexible and stable foundation to support hybrid cloud innovation. Deploy applications and critical workloads faster with a consistent experience across physical, virtual, private, and public cloud and edge deployments.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 comes six months after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 and it’s here with new security features to mitigate potential risks across the hybrid cloud. These include support for Smart Card Authentication with sudo and SSH in the Web Console for performing administrative functions and accessing remote hosts, support for SAP HANA in production with Red Hat and SAP, and support for drop-in configuration files to OpenSSH servers.
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Red Hat will supply General Motors with its In-Vehicle Operating System to use as a “safety certified” Linux base for GM’s Ultifi software platform, the firms announced today.
GM will start a “phased rollout” of Ultifi in 2023, to which IBM-owned Red Hat will contribute – but the platform will move to the Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System (IVOS) at a later date.
“Ultifi will initially launch in 2023 and receive regular platform updates providing more features and system capabilities over time. When the safe Linux is ready for deployment after Ultifi’s initial launch, all capable vehicles will be able to have their systems updated over the air,” a GM spokesperson told The Stack.
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Linux has long played a role in cars. Some companies, such as Tesla, run their own homebrew Linux distros. Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, and Toyota all rely on Automotive Grade Linux (AGL). AGL is a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open platform for connected cars with over 140 members. Red Hat and GM are spring-boarding from these efforts to build a new generation of smart cars using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as their operating system.
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Just over a decade ago, Marc Andreessen pointed out that software was eating the world. We can definitively update his quote to be more accurate: “Software ate the world.” Software has taken over our businesses and how you create value for your customers.
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There is no doubt that cloud has transformed the IT industry. This transformation has only accelerated due to the global pandemic, with many organizations leaning on hybrid clouds to achieve the necessary balance of speed, efficiency and scale offered by cloud-native technologies and the reliability of existing on-premises infrastructure. As a result, how customers access cloud technology and services has evolved. Now more than ever before, customers lean on an ecosystem of diverse partners to help guide their transformation efforts and consume IT in a variety of ways to deploy innovative solutions.
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Today, most organizations rely on vast computer systems, and maintaining accurate time in those computer systems has always been a challenge for administrators. That task became easier with the introduction of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) in the early 1980s. However, NTP also introduced the need to monitor your computer systems to ensure the time is correct and there aren’t many corrections or time drift occurrences.
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Debian Family
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Here’s my (thirtieth) monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
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Here’s my (thirty-first) monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Hot on the heels of our Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release, we’ve already started building our first images for Ubuntu 22.10, codename: Kinetic Kudu.
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If you’re interested in learning more about the Khadas VIM 4 mini PC powered by a 2.2GHz Quad core ARM Cortex-A73 and 2.0GHz Quad core Cortex-A53 CPU with a 32-bit STM32G031K6 microprocessor. You’ll be pleased to know that ETA Prime has created a new hands-on video providing a look at the mini PC which features Mali G52MP8(8EE) 800Mhz GPU, supports 4K UI, 8K 24fps decoder, H.264 and H.265 encoding at 4K 50fps and multi-video decoder up to 4K x 2K@60fps and 1 x 1080p @ 60fps.
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KingNovy has introduced a small fanless firewall appliance powered by an Intel Celeron J4125 Gemini Lake Refresh processor, equipped with six 2.5GbE ports through Intel i225-V Rev 3 Ethernet controllers, and selling for as low as $230 for the barebone model.
The system supports up to 32GB RAM, mSATA and 2.5-inch SATA storage, features HDMI output and four USB 3.0/2.0 ports, plus an RJ45 console port, and is said to work with pfSense 2.5.x, OPNsense 22.1, OpenWrt, ROS7, ESXI, Proxmox, CentOS, and more.
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Nordic Semiconductor nRF5340 Audio DK is a Bluetooth LE audio development kit that enables better audio quality with LC3 codec, longer playtime, and new features such as Multi-Stream Audio and and Broadcast Audio.
Equipped with the nRF5340 dual-core Cortex-M33 SoC, nPM1100 PMIC, and Cirrus Logic’s CS47L63 Audio DSP, the kit can be configured as a True Wireless Stereo (TWS) earbud, an LE Audio USB dongle, an enterprise headset, or a broadcast receiver.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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MIPS is dead, right? Well, there’s now very little done on the architecture itself, MIPS (the company) has decided to switch to RISC-V architecture, and unveiled the eVocore product lineup currently comprised of the eVocore P8700 and I8500 multiprocessor IP cores.
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To see the data on the screen which good pixels display OLED is best to choose, it comes in two pixels 128 X 64 and 128 X 32 both have efficient results
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For YouTuber Jroobi, merely walking up to his front door, inserting a key into the lock and turning the handle was too simple, which led him come up with a very unique and high-tech design for a new type of lock. His idea was to combine several different kinds of verification/control mechanisms, including codes, RFID and voice, all into a single package.
The sci-fi-style device he created consists of two Arduino boards: a Nano that handles the physical electronic strike assembly that blocks the door from opening, as well as receiving input from a slightly modified Google Home smart switch for voice operation via the Google Assistant ecosystem. Connected to the Nano is a Due, which is responsible for driving the 7″ touchscreen and everything else within the door controller. The central screen displays smooth animations for entering passcodes and scanning RFID tags, while a string of RGB LEDs just inside the door illuminate depending on if access was granted. Lastly, futuristic-sounding instructions and effects are played with the help of a DFRobot MP3 player module.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Programming/Development
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I’m a big enemy of Github monoculture, but I feel like many of the alternatives for project collaboration and communication are somewhat lacking. Using services like Gitea[0] or Gitlab[1] provide a familiar Github-like experience, but inherit a lot of its downsides, including requiring account creation to submit patches and being enormously complex pieces of software that are challenging to self-host. Git-send-email[2] requires somewhat arduous IMAP setup and can be fiddly to get right the first few times. It often requires a custom email client to set up a proper workflow.
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I’m just about to merge the dev branch of Antenna into production. I’m hoping there won’t be any downtime because I’ll do it in two steps and it’s only CGI scripts (no app server! Yay!).
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Qt is looking for speakers, collaborators and industry thought leaders to share their expertise and thoughts with the community during the upcoming virtual Qt World Summit on November 9, 2022.
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Qt 5.15.4 release is a patch release made on the top of Qt 5.15.3. As a patch
release, Qt 5.15.4 does not add any new functionality but provides bug fixes
and other improvements.
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Rust
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LWN ☛ The malicious “rustdecimal” crate [Ed: Rust is not about security, it is about depending on Microsoft's proprietary malware delivery system, GitHub, controlled by the NSA]
The Rust Blog warns developers of a malicious crate named rustdecimal, which was evidently targeted at GitLab users who mistype rust_decimal.
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So I got to wondering, _is Springfield the most popular city name in the US (United States)?_ I know, weird question, but I’m curious. So some quick searching lead me to the United States Geological Survey Geographical Names Database [2]. With some massaging of the data, I was able to determine that there are 34 States with a “Springfield,” but it’s not alone. There are eight other cities that are also in 34 States: Arlington, Chester, Clinton, Farmington, Florence, Greenville, Milton, and Newport. Okay, maybe not the same 34 states across all those cities, but you get the idea.
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We don’t need to talk about NFTs… but on a serious note I think Blockchain is overhyped.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Google has released Chrome version 101.0.4951.64 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system.
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CISA has added one new vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: to view the newly added vulnerability in the catalog, click on the arrow on the of the “Date Added to Catalog” column, which will sort by descending dates.
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A recently disclosed F5 BIG-IP vulnerability has been used in destructive attacks, attempting to erase a device’s file system and make the server unusable.
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Some say it was overdue, some lament that it remains a missed opportunity, but the truth of the matter is, the iPod has left us, after years of neglect. The final iPod Touch was released in 2019, four years after the previous model, and essentially as a legacy model for a niche audience of people who don’t want modems in their phone-like devices—think hackers and the parents of young children. It was not what it was upon the device’s general release. But I want to take a step back with today’s Tedium to consider the many, many competitors to the digital music throne that Apple’s legacy device vanquished. There were many. And as the latest entry in my series of obscure things that “didn’t make it” or fell into modern-day obscurity, I’m covering 10.
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Linux Foundation
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The leaked email below may be a bit old but it reveals the consequences suffered by Conservancy when they began the VMware GPL lawsuit.
The key point is that a sponsor canceled a donation after signing documentation. It is believed to be Linux Foundation.
[...]
The Register already reported on a leaked copy of the email but they didn’t mention that a sponsor had reneged on a signed agreement.
Karen Sandler nominated in the Linux Foundation elections and Linux Foundation responded by removing the independent membership class, effectively expelling Sandler and all other private members in one go.
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (mutt), Fedora (blender, freerdp, kernel, kernel-headers, kernel-tools, mingw-freetype, and vim), Oracle (kernel and kernel-container), Red Hat (aspell, bind, bluez, c-ares, cairo and pixman, cockpit, compat-exiv2-026, container-tools:3.0, container-tools:rhel8, cpio, dovecot, exiv2, fapolicyd, fetchmail, flatpak, gfbgraph, gnome-shell, go-toolset:rhel8, grafana, grub2, httpd:2.4, keepalived, kernel, kernel-rt, libpq, libreoffice, libsndfile, libssh, libtiff, lynx, maven:3.5, maven:3.6, mod_auth_mellon, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, openssh, php:7.4, pki-core:10.6, postgresql:10, python-lxml, python27:2.7, python3, python38:3.8 python38-devel:3.8, python39:3.9 python39-devel:3.9, qt5-qtbase, qt5-qtsvg, rust-toolset:rhel8, samba, squid:4, udisks2, virt:rhel virt-devel:rhel, webkit2gtk3, xorg-x11-server xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and zsh), SUSE (gzip and php-composer), and Ubuntu (busybox, cairo, cron, dnsmasq, libsndfile, and nss).
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Organizations that are still running Debian 9 servers should be aware that the security support of the Debian LTS team will end on June 30th 2022.
If upgrading to a newer Debian release is not an option for them, then they should consider subscribing to Freexian’s Extended LTS to get security support for the packages that they are using on their servers.
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The cybersecurity authorities of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States have released joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), Protecting Against Cyber Threats to Managed Service Providers and their Customers, to provide guidance on how to protect against malicious cyber activity targeting managed service providers (MSPs) and their customers.
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USCERT ☛ Microsoft Releases May 2022 Security Updates [Ed: NSA et al would not simply advise people and businesses to abandon Microsoft software with NSA back doors]
Microsoft has released updates to address multiple vulnerabilities in Microsoft software. An attacker can exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
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Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
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On Wednesday, May 11, 2022, Brian Behlendorf, OpenSSF General Manager, testified to the United States House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Brian’s testimony shares the work being done within the Open Source Security Foundation and broader open source software community to improve security and trustworthiness of open source software.
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CSO ☛ Stealthy Linux implant BPFdoor compromised organizations globally for years [Ed: IDG redefines "backdoor"; it's not when Microsoft puts back doors there for US spy agencies but when a system gets breached for some reason and then the intruder installs something]
Malware researchers warn about a stealthy backdoor program that has been used by a Chinese threat actor to compromise Linux servers at government and private organizations around the world. While the backdoor is not new and variants have been in use for the past five years, it has managed to fly under the radar and have very low detection rates. One reason for its success is that it leverages a feature called the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) on Unix-based systems to hide malicious traffic.
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InfoWorld ☛ Understanding Flatcar Container Linux [Ed: Simon Bisson is scattering Microsoft propaganda under headlines with the word "Linux" on them. IDG isn't a news site. It's a Microsoft operatives' network/hive.]
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Privacy/Surveillance
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When you think about government surveillance in the United States, you likely think of the National Security Agency or the FBI. You might even think of a powerful police agency, such as the New York Police Department. But unless you or someone you love has been targeted for deportation, you probably don’t immediately think of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
[...]
Most Americans probably do not imagine that their information is captured by ICE’s surveillance networks. In fact, ICE has used face recognition technology to search through the driver’s license photographs of around 1 in 3 (32%) of all adults in the U.S. The agency has access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 (74%) adults and tracks the movements of cars in cities home to nearly 3 in 4 (70%) adults. When 3 in 4 (74%) adults in the U.S. connected the gas, electricity, phone or internet in a new home, ICE was able to automatically learn their new address. Almost all of that has been done warrantlessly and in secret.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Censorship/Free Speech
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It is official. The Supreme Court has stayed the operation of Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (‘IPC’) which criminalises speech that excites or attempts to excite ‘disaffection, hatred or contempt’ against the Government established by law. Through its interim order dated May 11, 2022 (‘Order’), which goes a long way in protecting the freedom of speech and expression across the country, the Supreme Court has also put in abeyance all ongoing prosecutions under Section 124-A. This Order was issued in a batch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of Section 124-A, one of which was the petition filed by the Journalist of Union of Assam (‘JUA’). Over the past two weeks, the Supreme Court extensively heard the counsels of the petitioners, including Mr Chander Uday Singh, Senior Advocate, who represented JUA, before passing this historic order.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The best way to handle illegal questions during an interview, according to Barbara Casarin, is to say, “I’m not sure how this question is relevant to my application.” This will alert the interviewer to the inappropriate nature of the question and allow them to retract the question and move on.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Users of virtual private networks (VPNs) in India face disruptions, with providers such as Surfshark and NordVPN saying they are unlikely to be able to adhere to a new security directive from the government due to privacy policy concerns. India has more than 270 million VPN users, who use them to access company networks securely, remain anonymous, access geo-restricted content, stay safe on public Wi-Fi networks and get around internet restrictions among other things.
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Today, the Senate Commerce Committee marked up the “Consumer Protection Remedies Act of 2022,” a bill introduced by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Rev. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) to restore the Federal Trade Commission’s authority to return money to consumers victimized by illegal scams, fraud, and other unfair or deceptive practices. Public Knowledge urges Congress to pass this bill to ensure that harmed consumers receive just compensation from companies that have wronged them.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Docker Desktop for Linux was one of the most requested things on their public roadmap for future development/improvements.
With Docker Desktop on Linux, you finally get to experience a cross-platform Docker experience without much hassle.
To mention some highlights, as a developer on Linux desktop, you can now…
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Audiocasts/Shows
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First up in the news: AMD builds brand new Linux graphics driver support and Ubuntu MATE to add native Flatpak support.
In security and privacy: Arch Linux packages are… outdated? Mozilla does something really Meta, the ‘EARN IT Act’ makes a return, and FLoC was a flop, but Google has some new ideas.
Then in our Wanderings Joe gets another new to me bike, Norbert defeats distro-hopping, Moss goes international, Josh tells us about running Manjaro, and Bill is truckcasting.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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AMD has today announced the expansion of the Radeon RX 6000 Series, which includes the AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT, their most powerful card in the family. All while Intel can’t even give proper dates for Intel Arc…
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Intel are set to fully enter the dedicated GPU game soon with Intel Arc, although we’re still in for a bit of a wait. Writing in a fresh blog post, they did their own little Q&A session with Lisa Pearce, Vice President and General Manager for the Visual Compute Group at Intel.
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Hi list,
I’d like to announce mesa 22.1.0-rc5. I’ve cut another RC because:
1) there are more than 90 commits since rc4
2) I have the flu and don’t want to check that all of the issues
blocking the release are closed
As such, I’ll plan on 22.1.0 next week, unless something else comes up,
or we end up with ~100 patches again.
Cheers,
Dylan
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Applications
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A list of 10 things that you can perform after installing Fedora 36 Workstation Edition. A curated list just for you. Take a look.
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Many of their programs use a number of open source components. And their GitHub repositories hold lots of open source code. But their main range of software is proprietary. This series looks at free and open source alternatives to Atlassian’s products.
Bamboo is a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) tool that ties automated builds, tests, and releases in a single workflow.
Bamboo is proprietary software and not available for Linux. What are the best free and open source alternatives?
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Instructionals/Technical
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Hello, friends. In this very short post, you will learn how to check the Linux kernel version in CentOS 9 Stream.
Knowing the kernel version in a Linux operating system. This will help you in administrative tasks to know an essential component of the system, such as the kernel.
To achieve this, it is best to do it via the terminal because we can run it on servers and desktop systems.
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For Linux-based systems such as Ubuntu 22.04, “CURL” is a command-line utility that is used for automating the process of data transfer to or from a web server. It behaves as the backbone for extensive web-based software that is used by millions of people. This lightweight tool permits you to download the information, perform detailed analyses and sort out data on its base.
This write-up will discuss the procedure to install CURL in Ubuntu 22.04. So, let’s start!
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People all over the world utilize the Skype platform for communicating with their families and friends. This application is also used by several organizations for sending messaging, voice or video group calls, or sharing files with the team members. Skype can operate on all major operating systems, including macOS, Windows, and Linux-based systems such as Ubuntu 22.04.
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Good news for fedora users, Fedora 36 operating system has been officially released. This release is for both workstation (Desktop) and servers.
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Slack is a modern, popular, feature-rich, flexible, and secure business communication and collaboration platform. It’s an enterprise-grade tool that ships with numerous features including channels, direct messaging, huddles and clips, and Slack connect for collaboration with external teams.
In slack, every message is indexed and therefore searchable, a workflow builder allows you to automate routine actions and communications, and file-sharing is supported.
Another key feature of Slack is its remarkable support for external services and custom apps. It supports integration with well-known services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Office 365, Google Calendar, Twitter, Zoom, and 2200 others.
Besides, it supports 2-FA, Google SSO (Single Sing-On), SAML-based SSO(that gives members access to Slack through an identity provider (IDP) of your choice), and other security features.
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SSH is a protocol used to administer a remote computer from the command line. It is widely used to remotely manage Linux desktops and servers.
This article serves as a guide on how to install the OpenSSH SSH server on Debian 11 and how to configure it. Let’s get started.
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Slack is a real-time collaboration application that permits you to interact with your team members. It is considered an ideal solution for corporations and development teams where it is required to integrate multiple services, hold group meetings, and more. Thanks to Slack’s channels system, which enables its users to define topics or discuss customer issues in one channel while also supporting voice and video calls, and has file-sharing features.
This write-up will discuss the procedure to install Slack on Ubuntu 22.04 using three different methods. So, let’s start!
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Vim is a short form of Vi IMproved. It is an open-source and free tool with a command-line interface and a Graphical User Interface. This article will show you how to install vim editor on Debian 11 using the terminal.
To get started, you need to open up a terminal with root privileges and update your repositories. Run the following command.
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For a quick way to make Ubuntu feel faster you can disable desktop animations.
Better yet, turning animations off in Ubuntu is a guaranteed way to get better performance on older and lower spec’d computers. Desktop effects may be pretty but they often require beefier system resources to run smoothly.
Of course, desktop animations in Ubuntu —any major end-user OS, at that— serve a purpose. While they can seem over-the-top on occasion they’re not pointless or without merit. Transitions and other effects help make the desktop interface feel more fluid and graceful in use.
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Once the Linux desktop system is started, you see a login window. This is displayed by the Display manager. A display manager is an independent application from the desktop manager. You can install and use any display manager on your system.
This tutorial will help you to install multiple display managers on the Ubuntu desktop. Also provides you instructions to switch between display managers.
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Hello, friends. Today, you will learn how to install vim on CentOS 9 Stream. This text editor presents itself as the perfect balance between power and ease of use as a text editor on the terminal. So let’s take a look at it.
Vim is a text editor, very famous because it is for the terminal and because it has powerful key combinations, although occasionally, they can get complicated. In short, we are talking about an improved version of the legendary vi editor.
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Using GNOME Boxes tool for virtual machines but cannot figure out how to share files between the host OS and the OS in VM? This tutorial will help you with that.
GNOME Boxes is a VirtualBox and VM Ware like virtualization tool focusing on desktop Linux. It provides a simple GUI to create and manage virtual operating systems.
Virtual machines are a good way to test another operating system or distribution (in Linux context).
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All files in Linux are present as a node of a tree rooted at /. Initially, the parent directory (ext4 in default mode with Linux) is mounted to this root directory and all files added by Linux during installation are saved under this parent directory.
Any removal/non-removal storage devices can then be mounted to the root node. For example, whenever external USB flash drives are mounted to the root it becomes discoverable by the Linux file system, and files on the drive can then be accessed as it becomes part of the root.
The Linux mount command works to facilitate the attachment of the device’s file system to the root of the tree. A mount point in Linux is the directory where the mounted file system gets attached.
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Install Odoo 15 using Docker Compose, Nginx, SSL on Ubuntu 22.04 . In this tutorial you are going to learn how to install and setup Odoo using Docker and Docker Compose and configure Nginx and Let’s Encrypt SSL and also install PostgreSQL. Installing Odoo using Docker Compose is the easiest way compared to install manually.
Odoo is a management self hosted software to run a business with a top notch user experience. The applications within Odoo are perfectly integrated with each other, allowing you to fully automate your business processes easily.
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The continued use of a Linux operating system distribution takes its users to the dimension of unknowns where they discover limitless knowns about the computing world. The Linux operating system ecosystem and community carries individuals of all professions and skillsets.
Knowing the screen resolution of your Linux desktop environment is vital for Linux users that have invested their time and effort in fields related to graphic designs and web software development. Such users can be able to gauge their work or project expectations and delivery from this information.
Additionally, knowing the screen resolution of your Linux desktop OS can help users customize/adjust the computer’s display settings to fit certain project/work criteria.
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I followed this blog as a teenager, and it made me fall in love with console applications. I discovered Linux around the age of 14 if I remember correctly, after I spent most of my childhood with DOS games from ’93 or so, and learned some PHP and Pascal at the age of 13 through online tutorials in English. Console applications like the Free Pascal IDE felt very natural to use with my DOS background, and they ran very well on the old computer we had.
I remember I got a phone call from some cyber security company, at the age of 17, and they offered me a job. They said they found me online, through my open source work, and they had to work really hard to find a suitable candidate. I refused (politely) and eventually started a software engineering career at the age of 23. After a decade of pretty heavy tinkering with computers, languages and kernels, I was able to land a “senior software engineer” job as my first real job.
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As soon as I got a few pages set up in my Gemini capsule, I realized that what I was building was a blog. This presented a few other issues. How do I go about setting up a feed? How can I automate this? Can I make templates?
I started to think about how to go about this and quickly found that someone else had already set up such a tool, called gssg.
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Games
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Need some fresh games for your desktop or Steam Deck? The Humble Store Spring Sale has sprouted and there’s a huge amount of choice here.
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Transport Fever 2, the building and transport route sim from Urban Games and Good Shepherd Entertainment just got a fresh major upgrade. Released originally back in 2019, the developer has repeatedly given it major free updates including adding in Vulkan API support back in early 2021/.
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Perhaps an answer to “Deck Neck” where your neck starts to hurt staring down at the Steam Deck? I’m certainly curious to give the VITURE One XR glasses a go.
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Not exactly a big surprise given the price but the Steam Deck has managed to stay at number 1 of the Steam Weekly Global Top Sellers list.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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A few weeks ago, Shortwave 3.0, a new version of Felix Häcker’s Internet radio application, which has been in development since 2018, was released. Shortwave was preceded by the Gradio . Installed on two devices, the new version worked immediately on a notebook, but refused to work on the desktop. So I put a news on it until I found the bug. This morning I tried again and lo and behold, it worked right away. So much for ‘finding bugs’.
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Modren is a modern take on stores like GNOME Software and Discover, which includes support for APT packages, Snaps, Flatpaks from Flathub and DEB files out-of-the-box. It currently only supports Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu, but I’ll be adding support for other distros like Fedora and Arch too. Developers also be adding support for makedeb packages. Unlike the other stores, modren does not index the different databases. Instead, you can directly add/publish apps to the store, making it a way for Linux developers to easily publish their apps and make them available for everyone to use.
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Now that Ubuntu 22.04 has been released, the team behind elementary OS is preparing for the upcoming 7.0 release.
When James Cassidy Blaede left elementary OS, many of us assumed it would mean the death knell for the operating system. If the new leader, Danielle Foré has any say in the matter (which she very much does), the distribution will live on. The proof is in the recent news that they have not only announced updates for version 6.1, but are preparing for the upcoming 7.0 release.
Although there’s no hard release date for 7.0, they’ve announced a codename (Horus) and that the team is focusing on a swift release over adding a host of new features for the initial release. That means the evolution from 6.1 to 7.0 will be subtle.
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Another Core Update is available for testing. It comes with significant improvements to the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), various security improvements, an updated version of Linux’ firmware bundle, as well as a heap of updated packages and bug fixes.
Stefan contributed a patch series for notably improving the IPS, particularly when it comes to handling of ruleset providers. While many of the changes are done under the hood, the following are visible to the web interface…
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As has been the case recently, the Activity Report is hereby combined with my Contract Report.
This report covers hrev55992 to hrev56087.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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Fedora Linux 36 was actually supposed to be released on April 19, but the date had to be postponed twice by a week. This is very reminiscent of the old days, when Fedora usually came out a few weeks later than planned. In the last two years, things have gotten much better.
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ay introduced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, the Linux operating system designed to drive more consistent innovation across the open hybrid cloud, from bare metal servers to cloud providers and the farthest edge of enterprise networks. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is designed to drive enterprise transformation in parallel with evolving market forces and customer demands in an automated and distributed IT world. The platform will be generally available in the coming weeks.
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Candidates may self-nominate. If you nominate someone else, please check with them to ensure that they are willing to be nominated before submitting their name.
The steering bodies are currently selecting interview questions for the candidates.
Nominees submit their questionnaire answers via a private Pagure issue. The Election Wrangler or their backup will publish the interviews to the Community Blog before the start of the voting period.
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Debian Family
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WIPO has finally responded to the Debian vendetta, informing the overpaid lawyers at Charles Fussell (parody site) that their claim didn’t even reach first base.
We believe but can’t prove that the lawyers have now gone back to the Debian leader, Jonathan Carter, asking him to advance more money so they can spend more time revising their original and inadequate documents.
Who do we blame for this expensive mess?
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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One major problem is that the AppArmor profiles used to “restrict” snaps make specific assumptions about the system environment in at least two areas. The first area and the easiest to modify is where people’s home directories are. The standard Ubuntu AppArmor configuration more or less assumes everyone’s home directory is directly in /home as /home/. However, this can (theoretically) be tuned through modifying /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/home.d/site.local; for us, I think we would do something like: [...]
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Canaan launched an AI development board based on their own SoC (System on Chip) Kendryte 510 dual core RISC-V64 processor. The Canaan Kendryte 510 CRB development board seems specialized for machine learning and computing vision applications.
The Canaan Kendryte K510 SoC is composed of two RISC-V64 processors (up to 800MHz) and a RISC-V DSP (up to 3 TOP AI performance). The development board has 512MB of RAM available, 16GB of eMMC, and a MicroSD slot for additional storage.
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We’ve been running the Gender Balance in Computing programme of research since 2019, as part of the National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE) and with various partners. It’s a £2.4 million research programme funded by the Department for Education in England that aims to identify ways to encourage more girls and young women to engage with Computing and choose to study it further. The programme is made up of four separate areas of research, in which we are running a number of interventions.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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In a bid to support local PC makers and software developers and reduce the impact of any potential future sanctions from western governments, China’s government this week reiterated its order to replace foreign-branded PCs and programs used by government agencies and state-backed companies with local technology within two years.
While replacing a Dell running Windows with a Lenovo running Linux sounds tempting for Chinese companies, it looks like the country has been failing to do so up to this point, but the renewed initiative appears to have more teeth.
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The bug in the LXDE (?) implemented for Raspberry Pi OS continues to thwart basic touchscreen usage. I’m trying to discern which framework’s pop up menu throws a monkey in the wrench. Raw X apps seem to work fine. I am desirous to get this sorted soon.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Web Browsers
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Web standards aren’t exclusively about facilitating cross-browser consistency. The standardization of web platform APIs beyond the browser is coming, and I’m here for it.
Here’s a few links that have been solidifying this idea in my head as of late.
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I know I’m painting a pretty bleak picture, but the reality is that the old web isn’t lost.
It’s just buried.
Hidden beneath layers of new growth, waiting to be re-discovered. Just because the noise has gotten louder doesn’t mean the signal is lost, you just have to look a little harder. The old web—lovingly called The IndieWeb now—is still alive and kicking, and thanks to some wonderfully crafty creators, it is waiting to be discovered.
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Programming/Development
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Game of Trees is a version control system which prioritizes ease of use and simplicity over flexibility. Got uses Git repositories to store versioned data. Git can be used for any functionality which has not yet been implemented in Got. It will always be possible to work with both Got and Git on the same repository.
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Python
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I’ve been intrigued by the concept of using computers to generate audio for a long time. It turns out that you can generate audio with nothing but the standard library of Python.
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The purpose of this Python database programming tutorial is to provide a gentle introduction to using a NoSQL database as a data store for Python applications. The intended audience is beginner-level developers or intermediate-level developers who are familiar with using SQL-oriented databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, or MySQL. The demonstrations in this article will parallel the demonstrations used in other SQL Database programming articles involving Python, such as Python Database Programming with SQL Express for Beginners, and likewise, will use Python 3.
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Standards/Consortia
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The declaration was signed on the 8th of December 2020 by all EU Member States. The document builds on the political commitments of the Tallinn Declaration on eGovernment and it takes the user-centricity principles that were formulated a step further by strengthening the pioneering role of public administrations in the value-based digital transformation.
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I believe that by feeding this unsustainable industry, for instance, replacing our laptops, cell phones, or other gadgets every year, we generate a vicious cycle of false demand for always having supposedly more advanced products. End of the day, few of us are able to measure how much computing power we really need and use, so we end up not controlling our enthusiasm for new non-necessary products.
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When I called IBM, the company declined to dispute or acknowledge Rolander’s version, which has been published elsewhere. A spokeswoman said the company does not “discuss any of the specifics of the early PC development.”
But Rolander does. He did so extensively for the first time with Sir Harold Evans, who in 2004 published “They Made America,” which concludes that IBM acted in bad faith in the negotiation.
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Remember when using The Internet was a chore? You had to wait for hours before the one family computer was free, and when you finally did get on it, everything was so damn slow you had no choice but to exercise a degree of patience no child should be capable of. Email, The World Wide Web, multi-user dungeons, chat rooms… everything that we did had an air of mystery and excitement to it.
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In his biographical introduction at Durham University in the UK, where he lectures in philosophy, he writes:
I reviewed Galileo’s Error back in December 2020. He’s working on a new book. The following interview took place by Zoom on Tuesday May 3, 2022.
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The summary by Politico of 10 key passages in the decision fails to mention it and I haven’t seen it discussed in other media coverage (NY Times does not mention it either), but it struck me as an important and revealing passage, if not technically of legal significance (but the core legal principle it applies, stare decisis, or respecting precedent, certainly is).
This comes at the very end of the opinion, in the section regarding the legal notion of “reliance”, or how women and society have evolved over the last 50 years and responded to the right to abortion, which Alito summarizes as:
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Science
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Don’t feel bad if you don’t know what Cistercian numbers are. Unless you’re a monk of the Order of Cistercia, there’s really no reason for you to learn the cipher that stretches back to the 13th-century. But then again, there’s no reason not to use the number system to make this medieval-cool computer number pad.
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Even though a computer’s memory map looks pretty smooth and very much byte-addressable at first glance, the same memory on a hardware level is a lot more bumpy. An essential term a developer may come across in this context is data alignment, which refers to how the hardware accesses the system’s random access memory (RAM). This and others are properties of the RAM and memory bus implementation of the system, with a variety of implications for software developers.
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Finishing off 3D prints is a labour-intensive process, and getting a good looking, smooth surface suitable for painting takes a lot of time and plenty of practice. Deeper printing layer lines or minor surface defects can be smoother over with a variety of materials, from putties to resins, but the deeper the defect, the thicker the filler and that takes it toll on the surface details – smoothing those out and making fine details less distinct. [Darkwing dad] has another solution that looks pretty easy to achieve, by mixing acetone with glazing putty it can be airbrushed over the print surface in one go. After a little experimentation with the ratio of putty to acetone, a wide open nozzle and a low pressure, it was found that a nice even spray could be achieved. Importantly it dries in just a few minutes, enabling multiple coats to be applied in a short space of time.
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Hardware
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As with any other community, it takes all kinds to make the keyboard world go ’round. Some like them thicc — more backing for the clacking and all — but some like them sleek and prefer the slimmest possible keyboard. For now and the foreseeable future, the go-to method for making whisper-thin keebs is to use Kailh Choc switches, because that’s about all that’s out there.
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About a year ago, [Wyman’s Workshop] needed a fan. But not just a regular-old fan, no sir. A ducted fan. You know, those fancy fan designs where the stationary shroud is so close to the moving fan blades that there’s essentially no gap, and a huge gain in aerodynamic efficiency? At least in theory?
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Users who scored higher on this scale used TikTok more intensively, and although the majority of users (68.2 per cent) were classified as having “no risk” of TikTok addiction, 25.4 per cent of them were seen as being at “low risk,” and classified 6.4 per cent as being “at-risk.” TikTok currently has one billion users globally.
“Although most users appear to use TikTok in a non-problematic manner, the study demonstrates that the risk of overuse and possible problematic use exists and is associated with addiction-like behaviors that can potentially negatively impact the daily lives of sufferers,” Dr Smith told PsyPost.
“Further, the study emphasizes while similarities exist between the addictive process occurring in Facebook and TikTok there are significant differences in manifestation, predictors, and usage intensity associated with average vs problematic use. As such, a user can exhibit problematic use on a specific platform and not have the same maladaptive response with the broader category of social media.
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The TikTok algorithm is set up to track viewing habits, and to show you personalized videos that are specifically tailored to your unique interests, as previously reported by the Deseret News. A combined study done by two different Chinese universities found that highly personalized video feeds cause users to be become more attached to the app.
Brain scans done on a group of college students “showed that areas involved in addiction were highly activated in those who watched personalized videos. It also found that some people have trouble controlling when to stop watching,” reported The Wall Street Journal.
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“It also suggests that the most definitive signs of addiction are that the user become nervous, irritable, anxious, or exhibits strong feelings of sadness when deprived of access to the social networking site (withdrawal) and the user’s attempts to control participation in SNS are unsuccessful (relapse),” Smith noted.
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On May 2, 2022, CBP agriculture specialists at the Pharr cargo facility conducted an inspection on a commercial shipment of fresh fruit arriving from Mexico, which resulted in the discovery of a live pest within boxes of mangosteen. The insect was submitted for identification to a U.S. Department of Agriculture entomology laboratory and the initial identification was later confirmed as Cochabamba sp. The Cochabamba sp. is a species that belongs to what is called the leaf beetle family. This pest can cause agricultural and economic damage as their larvae skeletonize the leaf surface and adults eat plant and tree leaves and cause damage to foliage. This pest is found in central and south America and its travel pattern indicates that it is migrating north. The shipment was refused entry and returned to Mexico.
According to USDA entomologists, this pest has never been found at any of the nation’s ports of entry. CBP refused entry to the shipment and returned it back to Mexico.
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I thought again about the experiences of my wife and myself at that time on seeing trenchant criticisms in a recent inquest and in a newspaper investigation into the inadequate care given by the Priory Group, Britain’s largest private provider of psychiatric care, which receives £400m from the NHS for its services.
My own memory of the facility where Henry had a room is not particularly negative or positive – though I did make friends with a man whose deeply troubled son had been able to get out of the building and suffered crippling injuries when he jumped from the top of a multistorey car park.
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More than a dozen Nobel laureates and former heads of state urged U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday to help “lead the world out of the pandemic” by supporting a bold patent waiver and committing at least $5 billion to the global fight against Covid-19, which has ravaged poor nations that have been denied sufficient access to vaccines and therapeutics.
In a letter to the White House sent ahead of Thursday’s global coronavirus summit—an event co-hosted by the U.S.—13 Nobel Prize winners and ex-world leaders warned that “billions of people are being ignored as many parts of the rich world turn away from them,” leaving them without adequate protections against “this cruel, deadly, and debilitating disease.”
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Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders announced Monday that there will be a hearing on Medicare for All this Thursday.
“We spend twice as much per capita on healthcare as any other nation but with worse health outcomes for our people,” Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted Monday. “Does that make sense to anyone? It’s time for Medicare for All.”
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I am tired so much because of allergy meds and just having hard time to sleep because general anxiety.
What really annoys me about it is that I have drive to work on my own programming projects but no energy.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Apple announced Tuesday that it’s discontinuing the iPod Touch — the last iPod model produced by the company — marking an end for the gadget that helped shape the music listening experience for 20 years.
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The iPod Touch going away marks the end of an era. As Apple notes, it introduced the first iPod “over 20 years ago.” The original FireWire-equipped model acted as just a portable music player, and Apple made models that were pretty much exclusively for listening to audio up until 2017, when it discontinued the iPod Nano and Shuffle. While the iPod Touch has been embraced by some iPod enthusiasts as the new classic music player, it also found a following for those who wanted an iPhone-like experience but didn’t actually need a phone
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Today, in support of the European Union and other partners, the United States is sharing publicly its assessment that Russia launched cyber attacks in late February against commercial satellite communications networks to disrupt Ukrainian command and control during the invasion, and those actions had spillover impacts into other European countries. The activity disabled very small aperture terminals in Ukraine and across Europe. This includes tens of thousands of terminals outside of Ukraine that, among other things, support wind turbines and provide Internet services to private citizens.
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The number of Russian cyber-operations has doubled every month since December, when 15 were reported. This only includes attacks that Microsoft was able to detect in its own networks—the true number is likely to be higher. But because the Russians are conducting disruptive attacks, they are much more likely to be found out than pure espionage, such as Chinese intelligence gathering against America, reckons Benjamin Read, director of espionage analysis at Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm.
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I kid you not. No other operating system suffers ransomware attacks, though helpful security experts try to spread the burden a bit, and suck up to the big M, by claiming they have seen similar malware for Linux and the Mac.
But no attack in which a ransom has been demanded and a company put out of operation for a while has involved anything other than Windows.
This kind of money making is in keeping with Microsoft’s culture; the one thing the company possesses in spades is chutzpah. It is absolutely brazen in its bid to make money off something which its own products allow to happen.
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The attack hit the Central American state right in the middle of its presidential transition, with former president Carlos Alvarado Quesada telling journalists on April 21 that the attack had destabilized the government in a period of transition.
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The newly-inaugurated president of Costa Rica – Rodrigo Chaves – declared a state of emergency due to a devastating ransomware attack launched by the Conti group.
Following his swearing-in ceremony on Sunday, Chaves held his first government council, where he announced a national emergency and attributed it to the attack’s effects on the Ministry of Finance, which has been hit hardest by the attack.
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The US State Department says the attack “severely impacted the country’s foreign trade by disrupting its customs and taxes platforms” and offers “up to $10 million for information leading to the identification and/or location” of the organizers behind Conti. The US government is also offering $5 million for information “leading to the arrest and/or conviction of any individual in any country conspiring to participate in or attempting to participate” in a Conti-based ransomware attack.
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President Rodrigo Chaves Robles, who began a four-year term as president Sunday after winning the country’s April 4 election, signed the declaration on May 8 as one of his first official acts, according to local news outlet Amelia Rueda. The executive decree reads, in part, that Costa Rica is “suffering from cybercriminals, cyberterrorists” and that the decree allows “our society to respond to these attacks as criminal acts.”
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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After its direct listing shares skyrocketed to nearly $40, and have now returned to sub-$12 at the time of this writing.
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Without decisive regulations on what data should be considered private, how and who can access data, and clear rules about ownership and rights that ensure a buyer has physical control of a purchased device, technology firms are creating new windows into their users’ lives and then being forced to let the government peer in. In the case of connected devices, they may even let the government open the window.
If you think I’m overstating the potential for damage that could occur as technology firms and the state collide, consider some recent examples: [...]
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Yesterday, Member of the European Parliament and digital freedom fighter Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) filed an action for an injunction against the so-called chat control against Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms Ireland Limited at Kiel District Court. As a user of “Facebook Messenger”, Breyer is suing against the suspicionless automated search of private chat histories and photos. While the automated searches of personal messages and chats is so far only practised by major US providers, the EU Commission is to propose tomorrow to make this mandatory for all providers of e-mail, messenger and chat services.
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From the Internet of very broken things to telecom networks, the state of U.S. privacy and user security is arguably pathetic. It’s 2022 and we still don’t have even a basic privacy law for the Internet era, in large part because over-collection of data is too profitable to a wide swath of industries, which, in turn, lobby Congress to do either nothing, or the wrong thing.
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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is operating a digital surveillance dragnet through which the agency is able to access information about nearly every person in the United States, a two-year investigation by researchers from the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law revealed Tuesday.
“ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time.”
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For decades, advocates and organizers have been fighting to defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency plagued by inhumane conditions, a lack of accountability, and a culture of violence. In a major win for the immigrant justice movement, President Biden’s fiscal year 2023 budget includes a reduction in immigration detention beds and in funding for ICE enforcement. But even with this victory, there is a lot of work to be done to ensure that the federal government’s investments align with what our communities truly need. President Biden’s budget includes more than $500 million for ICE’s “alternatives to detention” (ATD), simply e-carceration, like ankle monitors. For many immigrants like myself that have experienced the horrors of both immigration detention and surveillance through ankle monitors, this is yet another reminder that we are still not free, we are bound, and shackled long after leaving a detention center.
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Defence/Aggression
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Al Hassan, who sat in court wearing a white headscarf, is charged with involvement in crimes including rape, torture, persecution, enforced marriages and sexual slavery committed from April 2012 until the end of January 2013.
He allegedly was a key member of Ansar Dine, an Islamic extremist group linked to al-Qaida that held power in northern Mali at the time. A French-led military operation in 2013 forced the group from power, but rebel elements have continued to stage attacks on Malian and international forces.
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“The terrorists who were glorified included Zaheer Hassan Mahmood, who attacked two people with a knife outside the editorial office of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris, France, on September 25, 2020, and Abdullah Abuyedovic Anzorov, who beheaded French teacher Samuel Paty outside the Bois d’Aulne school in Conflans Sainte-Honorine, north-east Paris, France, on October 16, 2020.” The suspects were arrested on February 24, according to a warrant leaked to El Confidencial. By posting on Tik Tok, Facebook or Instagram, they were portrayed as “heroes of Islam”, according to investigators.
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Russian political culture over the years has indulged conspiracy myths to avoid responsibility for the worst decisions and actions of the Kremlin and to tar adversaries with blame for Russia’s failures. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is no exception to this pattern, with Putin weaponizing conspiracy myths to hide the horrors of the invasion of Ukraine from the Russian public. Central to these myths has been charging the United States and Ukraine with preparing biological weapons to use against Russia. But the myth with the greatest impact on the Russian public is Putin’s charge that the United States and NATO have turned Ukraine into an armed camp in order to carve up Russian territory. Putin’s objective is to convince Russian public opinion that the United States is responsible for the war with Ukraine and represents an “existential threat” to Russia itself.
There is no way of knowing whether Putin himself believes these myths, but official U.S. statements as well as U.S. leaks to the mainstream media will help these myths gain ground in Russia as well as in foreign nations. President Biden himself has assisted Russia’s information warfare with charges of Russian war crimes and even Russian genocide in Ukraine. Biden’s emotional declaration that “For god’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” presumably alarmed an international audience familiar with the U.S. history of regime change and political assassination.
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At the same time, the conflict is conveniently distracting people’s attention away from the catastrophes of Afghanistan and Iraq and the fiscal and monetary morass in which U.S. officials have plunged our nation, in large part because of the massive, ever-growing expenditures on the military-industrial complex.
Even worse, It is also becoming increasingly clear that U.S. officials, either wittingly or unwittingly, are inexorably pushing Russia into resorting to tactical nuclear weapons to achieve victory in Ukraine.
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Among other gems, contemporary newspeak has given us the term “geopolitics.” But what does it mean? It sounds good– geo implies earth, or that which is mineral, rock-hard; followed by politics. Coined in 1902 by a Scandinavian social scientist, the term’s popularity has only grown. Despite its reference to rock (geo), “geopolitics” is actually weightless: compared to “international relations” or “diplomacy”. “geopolitics” does not carry the same implications of compromise and diplomatic negotiation–perhaps one reason why Putin and his adversaries share a fondness for the term. As a technical neologism, it implies that actions are determined mechanically, by and from the expert community, thereby surpassing popular opinion and democratic forces.
The plethora of challenges nowadays facing true internationalists, clearly cannot be solved by wording, nor by erecting yet another committee. In its current form, the United Nations proves incapable of upholding the once-pacifying promises made between international actors that enabled the end of the Cold War– the perseverance of NATO not least among these dangerous anachronisms.
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If you watched TV in the 1960s and 1970s as I did, you would undoubtedly have come away with the idea that this country’s courts, law enforcement agencies, and the laws they aimed to honor added up to a system in which justice was always served.
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Western intelligence “does not rule out” that Vladimir Putin could declare a full military mobilization. Though the Kremlin denies any such plans, and it’s uncertain whether officials in Europe and America have any real data on Putin’s plans, mobilization has long been a hot topic in Russia, where the army plainly lacks the numbers needed to continue its offensive in Ukraine. In early April, the Russian military reduced its frontline by almost half, in order to surround and smother the greater part of Ukrainian troops in the Donbas region. Still, for more than a month now, complete encirclement or any breakthrough has eluded Moscow’s fighters. Eventually, the Russian authorities might try to shift the balance by mobilizing the country’s full military might.
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On May 6, a decade ago, Moscow hosted the “March of the Millions” — a demonstration organized by the protest movement that formed in response to Russia’s December 2011 parliamentary elections. The march ended with violent clashes between protesters and police on Bolotnaya Square, ultimately resulting in the so-called “Bolotnaya Case.” Of its 30-plus defendants, most were sentenced to significant prison terms. On the 10th anniversary of the protest, Meduza special correspondent Svetlana Reiter (one of the original chroniclers of the Bolotnaya Case) spoke to left-wing activist Alexey Gaskarov, who served three and a half years for supposedly rioting.
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First of all, it is not only that this Left does not do what is obvious to any man or woman on the Left, namely to speak out against injustice and to support the victim against the perpetrator, the weak against the powerful aggressor. It is also that in trying to justify the unjustifiable, it resorts to the worst monstrosities that the Kremlin of Mr. Putin is accustomed to spout. Thus, it does not hesitate to label the crimes of the Russian army as “fake news”, “false flag operations” and “provocations”, or – in more moderate terms – to leave open the possibility that they might have been “fabricated” by the Ukrainian and Western propaganda machine. In any case, the Kremlin and its clients always have the same answer: the Ukrainians are bombing themselves or staging their bombings. Everywhere and always, exactly as it happened to the unfortunate Syrians of Aleppo who also bombed and poisoned themselves (by the chemical weapons of the Putin-Assad tandem). And all this with the active participation and complicity of thousands of eyewitnesses, i.e. civilians, even children, correspondents and war envoys, and other journalists, sound technicians, cameramen, etc., who have all learned the lesson to perfection and are participating in a disciplined way and as one man in a huge and diabolical… anti-Russian staging!
However, for there to be “war crimes”, there must necessarily be… a war. But, let’s not forget that today in Ukraine, there is no war, but a simple… “special military operation”, and the proof is that whoever uses today in Russia the forbidden word “war” is immediately arrested, “judged” and sent to prison for… “defamation of the Russian army”.
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While waging war on Ukraine, the Russian state has intensified its already tight control over the Internet, press, and opposition at home. Meanwhile, the anti-war opposition has resorted to what are essentially guerilla tactics. Many politicians, journalists, and activists were forced to leave the country to avoid being thrown in jail under Article 207.3 — a new law that criminalizes the spread of “fake news” about the actions of the Russian armed forces. Against this backdrop, contemporary Russian society is frequently compared to the late Soviet Union. To put these comparisons in context, Meduza turned to anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, the author of Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, a well-known study on the last decades of the USSR.
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Battles for Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant have been going on for nearly two months — Russian troops have been trying to seize this final pocket of Ukrainian resistance since mid-March. Russian President Vladimir Putin called off plans for the Russian military to storm the plant in late April, but Azovstal’s defenders regularly report renewed shelling and assaults. On May 7, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk announced that “all” civilians had been evacuated from the besieged steel plant. The next day, soldiers from the Azov regiment, which is defending Azovstal, said in a press briefing that they too needed to be evacuated, because they had used up all of the resources they had for waging an “effective defense.” On Tuesday, May 10, the Azov regiment published photos of their wounded soldiers and urged “the entire civilized world” to help with their evacuation. “The world should see the conditions in which the wounded, mutilated defenders of Mariupol are [living] and act,” the accompanying statement said. Meduza shares these photos here.
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After 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College disappeared in Guerrero, Mexico, in 2014, the federal government claimed that the local police had kidnapped and brought the young activists to the Cocula garbage dump where they were killed and their bodies incinerated in a bonfire. According to the government, their remains were placed in garbage bags and dropped in a nearby river. The Enrique Peña Nieto administration announced this version of the events in January 2015 and said it was based on detainee and forensic evidence. Jesus Murillo Karam, the attorney general at the time, called it “the historical truth.”1
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Kyiv, Ukraine–On May 8, the day before Russian Victory Day, the streets here were full of life. It is springtime, and red and yellow flowers have bloomed in abundance, filling the city’s green boulevards, nestled beside the occasional barricades and mounds of sand that were set up to defend the city from the Russian troops that had attempted to encircle the capital city in March.
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The Chicago Reader has just survived a near-death experience by the skin of its battered and chipped teeth. The 51-year-old alternative weekly was headed to oblivion because one of its co-owners reneged on an agreement to let it transition to nonprofit status. As a condition of signing off on the deal, he wanted the copublisher dismissed.
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A humanitarian crisis is taking place in northern Ethiopia, but you may not have read about it in the news. In fact, you may have never heard of the Tigray National Regional State, which is currently encircled by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces. Those troops are setting up blockades, burning food silos, and going from village to village committing genocidal massacres and rapes.
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Two years ago, mass protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police galvanized Americans to confront the disparate impact that a broken system of policing, arrest and incarceration had on Black and Brown communities. For the first time in a generation, nearly all Americans favored change to the criminal justice system. Today, it looks like the pendulum has swung away from reform. Police budgets have mostly grown—even in Biden’s federal budget—but conservatives blame “defunding” and reform prosecutors for rises in crime.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Environment
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The rate of global warming has tripled in the past 20 years, and the year just gone by was particularly bad.
A record of sorts was reached between March 2021 and Feb 2022, when NASA quantified that a lot of additional energy was sizzling around in the earth’s system — heating oceans, the land, the atmosphere, melting ice and getting the sea levels to swell.
According to scientists, the data shows that the earth is heating up at an unprecedented speed of 1.64 Watt per square meter (W/m²). That’s a good-sized jump from last year, when it was already equivalent to the heat generated by a million Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs every day.
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This year it stood at 1.64 W/m². To stabilize the climate, the EEI should fluctuate around 0 W/m² and to cool it needs to be negative on average.
Simons says what makes this new record even more significant is that NASA’s CERES team responsible for this satellite-based data expected the rate of heat uptake to decrease instead of increase.
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We asked wildfire scientist Molly Hunter at the University of Arizona to explain what’s fueling the extreme fire conditions and why risky seasons like this are becoming more common.
Why is this year’s wildfire season in the Southwest so early and intense?
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We humans are in something of a pickle, as we’ve put too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and caused climate change that might even wipe us out. There may still be people to whom that’s a controversial statement, but knowing something needs to be done about it should be a position for which you don’t necessarily have to be a climate change activist glueing yourself to the gates of a refinery.
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I was recently reading a copy of my local paper, the Seattle Times when I stumbled across a full-page advertisement for Bank of America. The commercial, which had commandeered the entire back page of Washington State’s most widely-read paper, boasted about how Bank of America is on track to manufacture all of its credit and debit cards from recycled plastic by 2023. Such a move, we are told, will reduce single-use plastics by 235 tons a year.
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The World Meteorological Organization warned Monday that the planet now faces a 50% chance of temporarily hitting 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial levels over the next five years, another signal that political leaders—particularly those of the rich nations most responsible for carbon emissions—are failing to rein in fossil fuel use.
“For as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases, temperatures will continue to rise.”
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Energy
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As scientists continue to express alarm about rising temperatures, a climate campaign launched Tuesday spotlights 30 corporations using the U.S. and European bond markets to drive planet-heating coal, gas, and oil expansion.
“As bank lending for coal has tightened, the bond market remains a safe haven for fossil fuel companies to fund expansion.”
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There’s a simple rule when it comes to corporate climate commitments: when they come out on Earth Day, you know they’re often too good to be true.
That’s certainly the case with Twitter’s April 22 announcement that they’ll be banning ads that contradict the “scientific consensus” on climate change in a bid to counter the climate disinformation that runs rampant across the platform.
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In April, the Globe & Mail published an article on its website extolling the virtues of natural gas appliances in people’s houses.
The story, headlined “Why natural gas is the smart choice for your new home,” has the look and feel of actual journalism. It includes statistics about Canada’s “reliable” gas industry, a photo of a young couple cooking on their gas range and quotes from Canadian homebuilders and makers of consumer products—such as grills and fireplaces—that use gas.
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Conservation groups today appealed a federal court’s decision upholding a Trump-era plan to allow 3,500 new gas wells in southwestern Wyoming.
In an April ruling, the Honorable Scott Skavdahl of the Federal District Court of Wyoming rejected the groups’ concerns that the Bureau of Land Management disregarded the harm the massive gas-field would cause by disrupting the ancient Path of the Pronghorn and preventing access to winter ranges that the animals need to survive.
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More than 50 progressive organizations on Monday urged the Biden administration to use its regulatory power to slash the massive amounts of greenhouse gas pollution associated with electricity-intensive digital currencies that are created through “proof-of-work” mining, such as Bitcoin.
“Expanding coal and gas plants to make fake money in the middle of a climate crisis is literally insane.”
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Overpopulation
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California’s drought is worsening and yet residents used more water in March than any month since 2015, defying pleas for conservation from Gov. Gavin Newsom and other authorities, state officials announced Tuesday.
Water usage jumped nearly 19% in March compared to 2020, which was one of the driest months on record. Newsom last summer asked residents to voluntarily cut water use by 15% compared to 2020. He encouraged people to water their yards less often, run dishwashers less and install more efficient appliances.
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Finance
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According to the Education Data Initiative, out of the 47 million Americans that Walton cited, about 92 percent of them (43 million Americans) have borrowed more than $1.6 trillion from the U.S. government in order to access higher education. The average federal loan size per borrower is $37,113, but when factoring in loans from private borrowers, that number rises to more than $40,000.
Because of how the income and wealth gap is so starkly delineated along racial lines, it’s not at all surprising that Black and Brown students are disproportionately represented among student borrowers. Women are also the majority of borrowers. Those at the intersection of race and gender are most impacted. “The average Black woman carries more than $35,000 in student debt,” said Walton.
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Today in America, an entire generation is burdened with a lifetime of student debt that makes them less likely to buy a home, start a new business, or even start a family.
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Sri Lanka’s prime minister stepped down Monday following weeks of street protests over the country’s worst economic crisis in its history, which has seen skyrocketing food and fuel prices in the island nation. Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s resignation came after supporters of the ruling party stormed a major protest site in the capital Colombo, attacking protesters and prompting clashes with police. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the outgoing prime minister’s brother, has declared a state of emergency and remains in power, despite protesters’ demands for the resignations of all members of the political dynasty that has dominated Sri Lanka’s politics for decades. “The gross mismanagement of our economy by this regime combined with the history of neoliberal policies is what has brought Sri Lanka to its knees,” says Ahilan Kadirgamar, a political economist and senior lecturer at the University of Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Panelists at a Heritage Foundation event on Thursday agreed that the government should not make changes to Section 230, which protects online platforms from being liable for the content their users post.
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The report veers off course in some of its reform recommendations. Specifically, Frederick invokes Section 230, the law which exempts websites from liability for content posted by its users, but she misunderstands its history and application. The report states, “digital platforms like Facebook and Google initially claimed to be neutral conduits of information, and Section 230 enshrined this claim and allowed these companies to accrue users and technical advantages under those auspices.” This is wrong: Section 230 predates both of those companies by nearly a decade and could not possibly have been drafted with either of them in mind. What’s more, Section 230 has nothing to do with a platform’s neutrality—the explicit intent of the law was to encourage platforms to moderate content.
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The billionaire’s comments prompted a rejoinder from Breton that Twitter must comply with new EU rules known as the Digital Services Act tackling illegal online content.
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To celebrate Europe Day, join us to learn more about your privacy and data protection rights at our EDPS-EDPB stand at the Digital Village in the Berlaymont Building. EDPS and EDPB staff will be on hand to answer your questions related to privacy, personal data and data protection! As a bonus, we have planned a variety of activities suitable for parents, young adults and children to take part in, with a chance for you to win goodie bags.
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In the video, Breton said he met with Musk to explain the finer points of the Digital Services Act, a forthcoming law that imposes higher content moderation standards on tech platforms.
Asked by Breton whether he felt the DSA “fits pretty well” with how Musk believes platforms should be run, the billionaire Tesla (TSLA) CEO and prospective owner of Twitter said it is “exactly aligned with [what] we’re thinking.”
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EU industry chief Thierry Breton met Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) boss Elon Musk in Texas on Monday and the two signalled agreement on EU digital media regulation ahead of Musk’s purchase of Twitter Inc (TWTR.N).
The meeting comes weeks after the world’s richest man clinched a deal to buy the social media company for $44 billion in cash. [sic]
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The two did not go into detail on the new law, which levies hefty fines on companies if they do not control illegal content. The rules ban advertising aimed at children or based on religion, gender, race and political opinions, for example.
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Bongbong’s father was the notorious strongman Ferdinand Marcos, his mother, the avaricious, shoe-crazed Imelda. Elected president in 1965, Ferdinand Marcos indulged in murder, torture and looting. He thrived on the terrain of violent, corrupt oligarchic politics, characterised by a telling remark from the dejected Sergio Osmenã Jr, whom he defeated in 1969: “We were outgunned, outgooned, and outgold.”
In 1972, martial law was imposed on the pretext of a failed assassination attempt against the defence secretary, an attack which saw no injuries nor apprehension of suspects. It was only formally lifted in 1981. Under the blood-soaked stewardship of the Marcos regime, 70,000 warrantless arrests were made, and 4,000 people killed.
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Janine Jackson interviewed the Forum‘s Chris Lehmann about media in a multi-racial democracy for the May 6, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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The Biden Administration intends to fully lift the Title 42 border restrictions, which have been in place since March 2020, on May 23. A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump, however, has ordered a two-week halt to the phasing out of those restrictions.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday added her name to a growing list of progressive politicians and groups endorsing Summer Lee and Nida Allam in their respective May 17 Democratic primary elections for the U.S. House of Representatives.
“It matters a great deal what kind of Democrats fill these seats.”
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Progressive activists occupied Democratic Sen. Bob Casey’s office in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on Tuesday, after which the historically anti-choice lawmaker announced his intention to vote for the Women’s Health Protection Act to codify the reproductive rights that are now in peril thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing majority.
“This week, I will again vote yes to advance debate on the Women’s Health Protection Act and I will support the bill if there is a vote on final passage in the future,” Casey said in a statement.
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We speak with historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, whose new book “Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands” tells the story of the often-overlooked men and women who incited the Mexican Revolution and how it relates to the rise of U.S. imperialism. The movement included intellectuals, workers and others who opposed Mexico’s dictatorial President Porfirio Díaz, who ruled for decades with support from the U.S. government and U.S. business elites. “What we have is Latinx protagonists at the center of the American story,” says Hernández, who teaches history, African American studies and urban planning at UCLA. “If you want to understand the rise of U.S. empire, you want to understand U.S. immigration history, you want to understand the issues of policing we are confronting today, we have to know that these are Latinx histories.”
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It’s becoming quite clear that Elon Musk’s approach to dealing with complex issues is not to actually understand the complex realities behind them, but to simply say what he thinks an audience wants to hear, and perhaps relatedly, to simply accept the last thing that someone presented to him as the official state of things. The latest in the long line of bizarrely contradictory and nonsensical breadcrumbs that Musk is leaving regarding his planned approach to handling content moderation on Twitter includes a full warm embrace of the EU’s highly censorial Digital Services Act, as tweeted by Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market.
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Critics responded with alarm to tech billionaire Elon Musk’s confirmation Tuesday he will end former President Donald Trump’s permanent suspension from Twitter if his purchase of the company is finalized.
“Giving someone who tried to overturn an election and helped incite an insurrection a major forum to continue undermining democracy is dangerous,” declared Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “Neither Elon Musk nor anyone else should reverse Donald Trump’s Twitter ban.”
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Amnesty International on Tuesday said the election of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte—the son of a former U.S.-backed dictator and daughter of the current president—as president and vice president of the Philippines points to an “ominous moment for human rights.”
“The new government should make a dramatic course correction and move away from the past six years under Rodrigo Duterte.”
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Censorship/Free Speech
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What follows is a tremendously personal story. It is 100% true and factual. I am publishing this in the hopes of bringing about a positive change at a Linux company that I view as historically significant and important — both to the broader open source industry and to myself.
I have kept quite about this for far, far too long.
Before we start, I want to say that there are some amazing people who work for SUSE. Both back when the events of this story take place… and nowadays. People who are brilliant, kind, and generally wonderful. People who were supportive and helpful to me during the events I’m about to talk about. To all of you: keep being the good people I know you are.
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A Turkish pop singer who on Mother’s Day posted a tweet about the situation of pregnant and sick women as well as mothers with small children in a prison in northern Turkey who were arrested on politically motivated charges had to delete her tweet after she was targeted by Oda TV, a pro-government and ultranationalist news website.
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Consortium News, founded by the late Associated Press investigative legend Robert Parry in 1995 as one of the web’s very first independent, reader-funded news outlets, reported over the weekend that PayPal had “permanently limited” its account, just as it was launching its Spring Fund Drive. According to editor-in-chief Joe Lauria — a former longtime United Nations correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and others — the company said it would hold onto the thousands of dollars accumulated in the outlet’s account for 180 days and reserved the right to seize the money entirely to pay for unnamed “damages.”
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The job of defenders of democracy would be easier if opponents of free speech never sought to disguise their efforts by portraying their goal as the preservation of the very ideals that they are suborning. It’s a lot harder to recognize the nature of the threat when those who seek to silence dissent say they are doing it for our own good because those guilty of wrongthink are bad people.
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Over the past week, the online payments company PayPal has launched a censorship campaign against independent and left-wing publishers who have been critical of the official narrative about the US and NATO war against Russia in Ukraine by arbitrarily shutting down their accounts.
On Sunday, Consortium News (CN) reported that PayPal had canceled its account without warning or explanation. Editor-in-Chief Joe Lauria reported that CN’s PayPal account was “permanently limited” just as the publication was launching its Spring Fund Drive.
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Why it matters: Even in Mexico, which is considered one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, the number of journalists killed in such a short period of time is unprecedented.
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The attack took place on 3 June in Petit-Couronne, a small town near the city of Rouen. After a violent altercation in front of the mosque, the assailant dragged the cameraman inside and kept him there by force until the police rescued him. In the course of the fight, the journalist’s camera was damaged and he lost his press badge, which was picked up and photographed by another man.
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The relationship between Hollywood and China has been increasingly intimate, if at times contentious, in the last three decades. By 2020, when the pandemic shut down American film theaters, China had become the largest film consumer in the world. On the one hand, in order to secure access to the Chinese market, Hollywood studios went through a sort of self-censor training program, learning from troubles and successes of movies like Seven Years in Tibet and Kung Fu Panda. On the other hand, many Chinese officials and filmmakers have always looked to Hollywood in its ambition to create an internationally recognized Chinese cultural powerhouse.1
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Laura Loomer still thinks she can sue her way back onto Facebook and Twitter. In support of her argument, she brings arguments that failed in the DC Appeals Court as well as a bill for $124k in legal fees for failing to show that having your account reported is some sort of legally actionable conspiracy involving big tech companies.
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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The Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday, and among the winners was the Futuro Media and PRX team behind the seven-part podcast series “Suave” that follows acclaimed journalist Maria Hinojosa’s decades-long friendship with David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez, who received a life sentence without parole at the age of 17 for first-degree homicide. Gonzalez met Hinojosa in 1993, and they continued to stay in touch through letters, visits and phone calls that Hinojosa recorded, eventually forming the foundation of the podcast. The series chronicles Gonzalez’s journey as he is eventually given the opportunity to experience life on the outside for the first time as an adult, after the 2016 Supreme Court ruling that mandatory sentences of life without parole on juveniles are unconstitutional. “Here is a stranger telling me, a lifer, that I could be the voice for the voiceless. I was lit,” Gonzalez said when he spoke to Democracy Now! in 2021 when the series was first released. Hinojosa credited the success of the podcast to their open and honest relationship. “Suave and I were just very real with each other, over decades,” she said. “I never imagined that it would end up being a podcast that is getting this amount of attention.” Hinojosa founded Futuro Media in 2010 and said Monday it is now “leaving its mark in American history.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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As the pandemic pushed our health care system to the brink of collapse, images of overworked nurses were plastered all over the media. But difficult working conditions existed long before [COVID]. What’s changed is that nurses have decided to fight back, with a wave of strikes and labor organizing sweeping across the industry. There were 76 strikes in health care between January 2021 and mid-April 2022 alone, including a nearly year-long strike last year at St. Vincent Hospital in Massachusetts over unsafe staffing, which may be the longest nursing strike the country has seen in at least three decades. But despite the fierce labor activism and a new public interest in the plight of essential workers, nurses are still at a breaking point.
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If there was any hope that the Taliban would pay heed to repeated calls from Afghanistan’s civil society and the international community to uphold women’s rights, the Islamic fundamentalist group’s latest decree for women to cover their faces in public has dashed it.
The latest order to make veil compulsory is one of the harshest controls on women’s lives in Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power in August last year. It is also reminiscent of the Islamist outfit’s strict Shariah-based rule in the late 1990s.
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In effect, while Amazon was doubling down on its union busting, the Biden administration was delivering a massive federal contract to the company, signaling to Amazon executives that he is so far not interested in fulfilling his pledge to use the government’s purchasing power to be “the most pro-union president.”
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“Two women appear in a taxpayer-funded forum of the Federal Agency for Civic Education and declare that Islam is per se feminist. More appropriate than this farce would be a critical reflection of the religious bullying that forces young women and girls to veil themselves – in very many cases against their will. The obvious contradiction between these conditions, which stem from the misogynist tradition of fundamentalist Islam, and the attitude displayed here should be palpable to many ordinary citizens. They might equally wonder why their tax money is being politically misused by the Federal Agency for Civic Education for Islamist narratives.The accusation that feminism is ‘too white and too privileged’ is downright cynical, considering that Muslim activists in particular are often enough the ones who brand any criticism of fundamentalist Islam and its structures as ‘racist’ and like to cover up grievances in Islamic milieus with a cloak of silence for ideological reasons. In this way, they share responsibility for the structural oppression of women who do not want to live as the men in their milieus pretend to do.
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A picture of the future when the Republican right has secured control of all three branches of the federal government, and is pushing its agenda across red and blue states alike? No. It is a little known history that unfolded in the years leading up to the Civil War, though with relevance to that future scenario.
Richard Kreitner tells the story in his book, Break It Up: Secession, Division and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union. Told from a progressive angle by a contributing writer to The Nation, this recent work details the many breakaway movements in U.S. history, from even before the Revolution and down to the present day. This is not a full review, but a focus on the drive for Northern secession led by slavery opponents over the first half of the 19thcentury. (I hope to cover more from this important book in future posts.)
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In news that is altogether so unsurprising it needs a “resigned sob” emoji attached, a Reuters investigation has found that far-right extremists are training cops because of course they are.
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Rev. Dr. William Barber on Tuesday slammed the North Carolina Supreme Court for declining to hear his appeal of a conviction stemming from a May 2017 protest at the state Legislative Building in support of Medicaid expansion.
“In essence, we were arrested because someone said our message bothered them.”
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EFF members have joined forces to fight for civil liberties and human rights online for over 30 years. Our movement has never been an easy one, but the future of technology depends on our determination. EFF members power EFF’s attorneys, activists, and technologists every day. Together, we can make a difference for every tech users’ right to privacy, free speech, and digital access. Will you sustain the cause with a modest recurring donation?
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James Mickens—a lifelong hacker, perennial wisecracker, and would-be philosopher-king who also happens to be a Harvard University professor of computer science—says we must educate computer scientists to consider the bigger picture early in their creative process. In a world where much of what we do each day involves computers of one sort or another, the process of creating technology must take into account the society it’s meant to serve, including the most vulnerable.
Mickens speaks with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien about some of the problems inherent in educating computer scientists, and how fixing those problems might help us fix the internet.
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I joined a noisy, peaceful protest outside the Supreme Court Building last Monday night after right-wing Justice Samuel Alito’s draft ruling striking down Roe v. Wade became public. As I’ve written, for a while the rowdy, empowered crowd chanted “Fuck Alito!” I’m honestly not sure if I joined in; it was all a blur of grief and rage. But I probably did.
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Sen. Susan Collins summoned the cops to her house over the weekend to complain about a sidewalk chalk message urging her to vote for the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would codify the abortion rights now in peril thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing majority—something the Maine Republican played a key role in solidifying.
Police arrived at Collins’ home at 9:20 p.m. ET on Saturday, The Bangor Daily News reported Monday. The message, which Bangor police spokesperson Wade Betters described as “not overtly threatening,” said: “Susie, please, Mainers want WHPA ⇒ vote yes, clean up your mess.”
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The Supreme Court decision establishing a broad decriminalization of abortion throughout the United States has been unusually resilient for such a contentious subject. For nearly half a century, the verdict seemed as settled as any could be in American politics, with those favoring greater restrictions content to limit access de facto, rather than risk pushback against drastic changes to what is allowed de jure.
Yet the legal status of such a controversial topic remaining stable for such a period of time was the exception, not the rule. Beneath the long detente lay decades “of compromising, and dickering, and trying to keep what was as it was, and to hand sops to both sides when new conditions demanded that something be done, or be pretended to be done” — words written more than half a century before Roe, about the issue of slavery.
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Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade asserts that women have no constitutional right over their own bodies that man or law must respect.
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With the U.S. Supreme Court at the forefront of the nation’s attention as right-wing justices appear ready to overturn Roe v. Wade, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced legislation Tuesday that spotlights the powerful judicial body’s complete lack of binding ethics rules—and proposes a number of solutions to tackle the high court’s “corruption.”
“People deserve impartial judges and justices who aren’t beholden to special interests or to their personal agenda.”
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In a post-Roe world, service providers can expect a raft of subpoenas and warrants seeking user data that could be employed to prosecute abortion seekers, providers, and helpers. They can also expect pressure to aggressively police the use of their services to provide information that may be classified in many states as facilitating a crime.
Whatever your position on reproductive rights, this is a frightening prospect for data privacy and online expression. That’s the bad news.
The good news is there is a lot companies—from ISPs to app developers to platforms and beyond—can do right now to prepare for that future, and those steps will benefit all users. If your product or service might be used to target people seeking, offering, or facilitating abortion access, now is the time to minimize the harm that can be done.
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That’s why EFF supports California’s A.B. 2091, authored by Asm. Mia Bonta and sponsored by Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California. This bill seeks to stop information about people seeking abortions in California from flowing across state lines and used by prosecutors or private actors under other states’ anti-abortion laws.
Specifically, it prohibits health care providers and service plans from releasing medical information related to people seeking or obtaining an abortion, in response to a subpoena or request based on another state’s law that interferes with reproductive freedom protected by California law. The bill also prohibits a person from being compelled to provide information that would identify someone who has sought or obtained an abortion, if it is being requested in this scenario. While EFF is not a reproductive rights advocacy group, our history of work on digital privacy—particularly health privacy—compels us to support this bill.
This issue also falls squarely within our organization’s work on limiting the collection and use of government data for purposes other than it was collected. Governments collect information for many reasons. But, all too often, data collected by the state is misused and weaponized for other purposes. The ones who suffer most are often vulnerable minority groups. This sad legacy of data misuse stretches from census data being used for Japanese-American internment during World War II, to license plate data being weaponized against immigrants today.
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Political grief can resemble personal grief, and what apparently is the close-to-final draft of the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade has produced that sense of a cataclysmic plunge. What has died, however, is not only or even primarily a principle of law. We did not win Roe and keep it alive for 50 years because one side wrote better briefs than the other. Nor is that why we lost it. Roe was the product of one powerful political movement, and its impending death will be the product of another. What died in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is the last vestige of constitutional romanticism.
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The end of Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood is the story of a death oft foretold. Ever since Amy Coney Barrett took Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court, the extinguishing of a constitutional right to abortion was predictable. Yet somehow the Biden White House seemed sideswiped on Monday, May 2, when Politico posted a leaked draft from Justice Samuel Alito of a majority decision ending Roe and Casey.
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Progressives are intensifying calls for the U.S. Congress to pass legislation codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law to counter Republicans’ plan to overturn the landmark abortion rights ruling, but on Monday evening Senate Democrats’ attention was on a bill aimed at protecting the U.S. Supreme Court justices’ family members from protests like those held over the weekend.
“One problem with the idea that Democrats will benefit from a backlash to Roe being overturned is that the party leadership don’t seem to like the idea of there being a backlash to Roe being overturned.”
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The draft decision will likely represent former president Donald Trump’s historical legacy revealing the importance of “court packing” in American life. More troubling, it demonstrates just how powerful the conservative movement has been in a long-term plan to remake both the state and federal judiciary.
The Court’s likely decision raises a critical question: what other critical or landmark prior decisions could it overturn?
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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This week the Biden administration spent some time celebrating its accomplishments on broadband. The nation’s about to invest $42 billion in expanding broadband access (even though we still haven’t mapped broadband accurately). The administration also implemented the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which doles out a $30 discount on broadband for qualifying low income households.
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We’ve talked a fair bit about Australia’s ridiculous “News Bargaining Code,” which is literally nothing more than a tax on Facebook and Google for sending traffic to media organizations. Again, the law requires Facebook and Google (and just Facebook and Google) to pay media organizations for sending them web traffic. This is, of course, backwards to any sensible set up. Why should anyone have to pay for sending traffic to a website? Here, the answer appears to be, because Rupert Murdoch wants to get paid and is jealous of the success of Facebook and Google. The best summary of the whole thing comes from the Australian satirical video maker, The Juice Media:
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On the morning of May 9, the Russian video platform Rutube reported that it had fallen prey to a “powerful cyberattack.” Rutube assured that work was underway to restore access to its site and an hour later claimed to have “localized the incident.” Around 6:00 o’clock that evening, the Rutube press office reported that user data had been saved and that technical work was ongoing. A similar error message was published on the website.
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For some reason, I am having a really good time setting this thing up. I feel like I am back in the old days of the internet—a time when we never could tell who was looking at our site. In reality, probably no one was looking at it, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were creating content and that it was fun to maintain.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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What John Deere did to Russian looters, anyone can do to farmers, anywhere.
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Monopolies
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Here’s the crux: “The FTC and DOJ will host a series of listening forums to hear from those who have experienced firsthand the effects of mergers and acquisitions beyond antitrust experts, including consumers, workers, entrepreneurs, start-ups, farmers, investors, and independent businesses.”
If you aren’t chest-deep in weird antitrust lore, this probably seems like it’s par for the course. But believe me, this is a hell of a moment – a moment of restoration, a return to a vital, long-dormant principle in American governance: the idea that corporations should not be allowed to ruin the lives of the people around them.
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A worsening shortage of baby formula in stores across the U.S. is highlighting the urgent need for antitrust regulations, progressives said Tuesday.
While Republicans are have attempted to lay blame for the crisis with the Biden administration, J.D. Scholten of the American Economic Liberties Project is among those pointing out that with just a few corporations controlling the majority of the infant formula market, families impacted by a recent recall by one of those companies have few options when looking for affordable alternatives.
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Patents
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Over a year ago the Biden administration endorsed the idea that there should be enough Covid-19 vaccines for everyone in the world and that patents and international trade agreements should not be allowed to prevent that goal. But the administration has not taken the decisive leadership position to achieve it, and those barriers continue to block access to the vaccines for billions of people.
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Copyrights
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After 10 years of legal battles following the closure of Megaupload, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk have reached a deal with the authorities that will see them avoid extradition and face charges in New Zealand instead. Kim Dotcom says he won’t accept “injustice” and will keep fighting against extradition to the United States.
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A man who was wrongfully accused of pirating several adult films has finally recouped $108k in fees and costs from copyright holder Malibu Media. After the company failed to pay the full amount voluntarily, the defense had to hire a collection attorney to get the money indirectly through Malibu’s payment processors.
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The WIPO SCCR is a major normative forum, shaping laws and policies that influence access to and sharing of knowledge, and observer status is a prerequisite for participating in such discussions. Creative Commons (CC) condemns the rejection of the applications of the six Wikimedia chapters. This decision could set a worrying precedent, as it opposes established practices and criteria for the admission of observers to the WIPO.
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Last week the European Union’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), handed down its judgment on whether upload filters should be allowed as part of the EU Copyright Directive. The answer turned out to be a rather unclear “yes, but…“. Martin Husovec, an assistant professor of law at the London School of Economics, has published an opinion piece exploring the ruling, which he sums up as follows:
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