06.30.22
Posted in Europe, Fraud, Patents at 8:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Bought outcome
Lucky for António Campinos that the EPO is above the law; don’t want any investigation into what happened on Wednesday…
Summary: The corruption at the EPO did not end with Benoît Battistelli‘s departure; it’s still deepening
New comment from “Experienced Examiner”:
The situation at the EPO was bad and is worsening.
The money discussion overlooks a huge number of facts:
– the salaries paid in any international organisation have to be competitive with the highest salary of a member state. Otherwise, persons from this state will not apply. Local salaries will normally be lower.
– the salaries paid have to provide the same standard of living regardless of the location. This goes back to the League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations. Some countries have higher expenses than others. This is where inflation kicks in. The point is not whether EPO employees have their salaries adjusted in line with inflation. The point is why inflation is ignored for national civil servants and also for subsidies paid (e.g. Hartz IV in Germany) or when determining how much tax you have to pay.
Law Sniffer & Bitter Worker: You have your real income nibbled away by inflation, and you seem to believe this is ok and should be done everywhere.
– The EPO has a huge surplus, see the blog. And if there still were a shortage, one may reasonably ask why the EPO share of post-grant renewal fees is only at 50%. Article 39 EPC allows to go up to 75%. The EPO share was at 60% until 1984. But the national offices want to keep this free money, and their heads are sitting in the Administrative Council.
– employees of an international organisation give up their rights. There is no fast track route involving an independent decision making body. The only such body is ILO-AT in Geneva, you get a decision roughly 6 to 8 years after the dispute has started. Justice delayed for this amount of time is justice denied.
Law Sniffer & Bitter Worker: You think it is ok to get sacked while holding a position as elected staff representative, and then you have to wait for about 5 (FIVE) years for a decision from an independent court?
– It seems to have been completely forgotten that EPO employees for about 8 (EIGHT) years were allowed to strike only after approval of the EPO President. It also seems to have been forgotten that the same President interfered with a decision from the Enlarged Board of Appeal, see G2301/16, headnote “threat of disciplinary measures against the members of the Enlarged Board”.
Whatever a President of the EPO does, the signals are clear: it will not have consequences. We see this not only in the past, but also in ongoing developments: forcing applicants and parties to opposition proceedings into video conferences – the emphasis is on “forcing”: whoever wants life oral proceedings should simply get them, for all others, video is fine.
My higher layers – as far as I can judge – live in blissed ignorance on what a patent application is, what a “search” is and how a search can and should be done (that depends on the case). The recent developments focus on machine based searches providing many documents, you have to apply some filters to reduce the number, you browse them and then you stop. This is a paradigm shift from a “finder” – someone who knows the area of technology and keeps hunting until something is found – to a “searcher” – someone who follows a predefined approach and stops regardless of the result.
Typcially, a “searcher” does not have in-depth experience in the area of technology and lacks the needed gut feeling. It takes about a decade to build this gut feeling. Frequent changes of the area of technology are not supportive. I recall a management meeting where the work of a substantive examiner was compared to the work of a post office: weighing letters, selling stamps, and so on. This comparison left me flabbergasted and insulted.
My Vice President is not technically skilled (DG1 – Steve Rowan, legally skilled, a bachelor, if I remember correctly). The person in charge of search and examination lacks the qualification necessary to understand an application. We are getting more and more instructions on procedure, probably because that is what Steve feels comfortable with. I personally disagree with this approach. Procedure is important, yes, but applicants do not file to have a good procedure. They file to have a good search and then a thorough examination. Procedural violations are very rare.
Last, if want to learn where a major problem is, please move to the EPO intranet site, “about us”-> “our leadership and management” -> “the management advisory committee”. There are way too many chiefs who do not have any purpose enshrined in Articles 10, 11 or 15 EPC. Thorsten touched on this topic in an earlier blog.
I am a member of an examining division, enshrined in Article 15 and 18 EPC. I do not need any of those chiefs to carry out my tasks. I believe we could with a quarter of those chiefs without even noting that the others have gone.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Canada is a country in North America sharing a land border with the United States in the south and in the northwest. It borders the Atlantic Ocean in the east, the Pacific Ocean in the west and the Arctic Ocean in the North.
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Server
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Netcraft ☛ June 2022 Web Server Survey [Ed: Microsoft is down even further, as usual]
In the June 2022 survey we received responses from 1,146,976,964 sites across 273,010,403 unique domains and 12,224,786 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 8.75 million sites and 583,000 domains, but a gain of 155,000 computers.
Cloudflare experienced strong growth this month, gaining 2.99 million sites and 85,000 domains, representing a 4.64% growth in its number of sites. Cloudflare experienced a significant outage on 21 June, impacting around half of the total requests made to its network. The outage lasted around an hour and a half and affected a significant number of popular sites. 20.2% of the million most visited sites rely on Cloudflare (up 1,400 sites since last month).
The three largest vendors by the million most visited sites metric—Apache, nginx, and Cloudflare—all have similar market share, though only Cloudflare gained market share this month. Apache saw the largest loss, dropping 2,190 sites (-0.96%), while nginx lost 280 sites (-0.13%).
LiteSpeed gained a significant number of sites with an addition of 2.96 million (+5.89%), and gained 171,000 (+2.21%) domains – the second largest increase this month. The number of web-facing computers using LiteSpeed also showed strong growth, increasing by 4,460 (+3.44%) to a total of 134,000.
nginx and Apache remain the two largest server vendors, though both saw similar losses of 6.52 million (-1.84%) and 6.18 million (-2.33%) sites this month. Despite this, nginx gained 795,000 (+1.06%) domains and saw continued growth in the number of web-facing computers with 158,000 (+3.44%) computers. Conversely, Apache lost 1.07 million domains (-1.71%) and 25,700 (-0.74%) web-facing computers.
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The US Department of Energy has a single 2 exaflops system up and running – well, most of it anyway – and that of course is the “Frontier” system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and two more slated for delivery, and that is the “Aurora” system at Argonne National Laboratory supposedly coming sometime this year and the “El Capitan” system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is due next year. It took a lot of money and sweat to get these machines into the field – in Intel’s case, the sweat to money ratio has been pretty high given the four-year delay and massive architectural changes involved the latest and final incarnation of Aurora.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Fedora gets serious about its server editions, our thoughts on Valve’s increased Steam Deck production, and the surprising results of booting Linux on the Apple M2 SoC.
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In this video, I am going to show an overview of KaOS 2022.06 and some of the applications pre-installed.
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What would it be like to suffer a cyberattack event, that literally closes down an entire business? That’s exactly what happened to United Structures of America, a steel manufacturing company. In this episode, Jay and Joao discuss what happened, and some of the lessons learned that should cause other organizations to take a hard look at how insecure their own systems are.
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I spent a couple of hours today playing with my Doom Emacs config. In particular, I focused on some font settings which I think help with aesthetics and with readability. In fact, I think one of the biggest reasons that I use Emacs over Vim is how Emacs renders fonts.
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Wayland is continually imporving and one aspect of that is with desktop capture but right now there’s a pretty annoying design flaw with the way this system functions but it can certainly be fixed
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Kernel Space
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A surprising three years have passed since my last article about my efforts to make a general-purpose filesystem accessible to programs running in the L4 (or L4Re) Runtime Environment. Some of that delay was due to a lack of enthusiasm about blogging for various reasons, much more was due to having much of my time occupied by full-time employment involving other technologies (Python and Django mostly, since you ask) that limited the amount of time and energy that could be spent focusing on finding my way around the intricacies of L4Re.
In fact, various other things I looked into in 2019 (or maybe 2018) also went somewhat unreported. I looked into trying to port the “user mode” (UX) variant of the Fiasco.OC microkernel to the MIPS architecture used by the MIPS Creator CI20. This would have allowed me to conveniently develop and test L4Re programs in the GNU/Linux environment on that hardware. I did gain some familiarity with the internals of that software, together with the Linux ptrace mechanism, making some progress but not actually getting to a usable conclusion. Recommendations to use QEMU instead led me to investigate the situation with KVM on MIPS, simply to try and get half-way reasonable performance: emulation is otherwise rather slow.
You wouldn’t think that running KVM on anything other than Intel/AMD or ARM architectures were possible if you only read the summary on the KVM project page or the Debian Wiki’s KVM page. In fact, KVM is supported on multiple architectures including MIPS, but the latest (and by now very old 3.18) “official” kernel for the CI20 turned out to be too old to support what I needed. Or at least, I tried to get it to work but even with all the necessary configuration to support “trap and emulate” on a CPU without virtualisation support, it seemed to encounter instructions it did not emulate. As the hot summer of 2019 (just like 2018) wound down, I switched back to using my main machine at the time: an ancient Pentium 4 system that I didn’t want heating the apartment; one that could run QEMU rather slowly, albeit faster than the CI20, but which gave me access to Fiasco.OC-UX once again.
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Applications
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After two and a half years of development, Vim 9.0 is now available, firmly focused on the new Vim9 scripting language capabilities.
In its 30-year history, the terminal-based text editor Vim has been one of the most recognizable names in the open-source world, loved by some and disliked by others. Using it has put Unix/Linux users to the test more than once.
However, Vim sticks to its original path, as evidenced by the recently released version 9.0. With that said, let’s take a look at the highlights of it.
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Let’s kick off with a collection of detailed reviews highlighting 31 essential utilities. They are small, indispensable tools, useful for anyone running a Linux machine. They cover a wide spectrum of utilities.
The following articles focus on specific topics.
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The popular Linux text editor Vim has a new version available, version 9.0. The new version debuts a revamped scripting language, dubbed Vim9 Script.
Vim 9.0 “Takes a Big Step”
Vim creator Bram Moolenaar announced the new version in a post on Vim’s official website. “After many years of gradual improvement Vim now takes a big step with a major release,” Moolenaar wrote.
While Vim already had a scripting language, Vim9 Script makes some changes to how comments, functions, and variable assignments work. While most users will want to wait until their distribution’s package manager updates Vim, Unix/Linux users eager to try the new version can download the source code from the download pageand compile it.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In this post I show you how to get the Nautilus typeahead feature back on all supported versions of Ubuntu.
GNOME developers retired Nautilus’ type ahead functionality back in 2013. Ubuntu devs continued to patch the feature back in until 2017 when they decided to switch to a more ‘vanilla’ GNOME desktop experience.
Chances are you’ve long-since adapted to life without it.
However, in the world of open source anything is possible; if you have an itch, you can scratch it yourself — and one fervent fan of Nautilus typeahead search has done just that.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Terraform on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code software tool that enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. With Terraform you can manage Cloud Compute, Networking, Load Balancers, DNS, and so on using simple Declarative Programming Language.
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 Terraform on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
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In this video, we are looking at how to install Toontown Rewritten on Pop!_OS 22.04.
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Today we are looking at how to install WPS Office 2019 on a Chromebook and some core fonts like Arial and New Times Roman. 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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A Secret is an object that contains a small amount of sensitive data such as a password, a token, or a key. Such information might otherwise be put in a Pod specification or in a container image. Using a Secret means that you don’t need to include confidential data in your application code.
Because Secrets can be created independently of the Pods that use them, there is less risk of the Secret (and its data) being exposed during the workflow of creating, viewing, and editing Pods. Kubernetes, and applications that run in your cluster, can also take additional precautions with Secrets, such as avoiding writing secret data to nonvolatile storage.
Secrets are similar to ConfigMaps but are specifically intended to hold confidential data.
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I’ve always been in complete control of my own servers¹, this mean they have all the tools I need. Recently they got me in charge of regularly backup a large site. This usually mean that I’m taking filesystem ‘snapshots’. But I’ve only have access to this large site via ftp, and my script needs rsync (and/or ssh). I need a way to do (almost) the same, after a research I’ve found lftp; this article will show you how to “rsync” with ftp.
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After deploying a platform for the storing and sharing of files and directories, one of the first things you’ll want to do is start adding and managing groups. With groups, you can better control who has access to what without having to take care of it on a user-by-user basis. By employing groups, you can add users who will inherit the permissions found within the group so it’s more efficient.
But not every platform is the same and some do require a bit of extra attention to get right. One such platform is SFTPGo. Although on the surface, it looks as though it should be very simple to manage users and groups, you do have to go the extra mile to make sure it all works.
Let me show you what I mean by walking you through the process of adding a group and then adding a user to that group.
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Recently, I showed you how to deploy CouchDB as a standalone NoSQL database server, which could serve you well in small instances. This time around, I want to show you a neat trick for deploying CouchDB as a cluster using Docker. Although this method might not be ideal for production usage, it’s a great way for developers to be able to work with CouchDB in a test environment.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Neofetch on CentOS 9 Stream. For those of you who didn’t know, Neofetch is a free and open-source command-line tool that displays system and hardware information in a visually appealing manner. Neofetch displays an ASCII logo of your Linux distribution along with information related to your system in the terminal such as OS type, kernel version, CPU, RAM, and others.
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 Neofetch command-line tool that displays the system on CentOS 9 Stream.
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Install free and open-source GIMP editor on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish Linux for editing, retouching, or optimizing your images.
The free image editor “GIMP” offers professional tools and retouching functions forIts name is actually an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program and it is one of the best free alternatives to Adobe Photoshop for private and semi-professional use.
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Have Microsoft Paint open-source alternative Pinta on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish or 20.04 Focal Fossa for image drawing and editing images.
Inspired by Paint.NET, Pinta is another open-source program for Linux users with features similar to Microsoft Paint software. It is not just limited to Linux, instead, Pinta is a cross-platform that can be installed on Windows, FreeBSD, and macOS
This bitmap image drawing tool is very straightforward and also offers drawing tools, image filters, and color adjustment tools but fewer feartures as compared to GIMP. However, GIMP is a little complicated for new users whereas this one is easy and focuses on usability which can be seen in its offerings. Such as unlimited undo history; Multiple language support; flexible toolbar arrangement, including floating as windows or docking around the image edge; also supports for image layers.
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Over the past 3 or 4 years, my colleagues and I at Red Hat have been making a set of composable command line tools for handling virtual machine disk images. These let you copy, create, manipulate, display and modify disk images using simple tools that can be connected together in pipelines, while at the same time working very efficiently. It’s all based around the very efficient Network Block Device (NBD) protocol and NBD URI specification.
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The free cross-platform Deluge BitTorrent client released version 2.1.0 one day ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04.
Deluge is a fully-featured torrent downloading app with GTK, web UI, and command line interfaces. The app features protocol encryption, DHT, Local Peer Discovery (LSD), Peer Exchange (PEX), UPnP/NAT-PMP, web seeds, stream torrent and more.
The new 2.1.0 was released with minimum libtorrent requirement increased to v1.2. Python 2 is no longer supported! And, Python 3.6 is the minimum requirement of the programming language.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Why settle for merely burning application windows on close when you could totally incinerate them instead?
Yes, everyone’s1 favourite over-the-top desktop effect extension is back with an update, and it adds yet another epically excessive window closing animation to its pool: Incinerate.
As you can probably imagine the new Incinerate effect takes your app windows and…
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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With great pleasure we announce the release of Condres Plasma 1.0 based on Debian 11.
This first release will be followed by a full online calamares based installer, we will integrate the Control Center that was previously available in the old releases on the new Debian based version.
The new implementations will be available (some) in September / October 2022.
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With the Point Release UCS 5.0-2, another important step has been taken for further developing Univention Corporate Server towards more accessibility, better usability, as well as the integration of services and their central management. In this blog article, I would like to give you an overview of the most important new features and improvements, such as the integration of Self Services into the UCS Portal, the introduction of service-specific passwords or various performance improvements in the use of DNS and LDAP, as well as an overview of the apps made available for UCS 5.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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The last release of the Unity7 desktop environment was back in May 2016, when Ubuntu was still using Unity, but the community never let it die. Rudra Saraswat, who is known for many Open Source projects, as well as the maintainer of the unofficial Ubuntu Unity Remix flavor, is also involved in keeping Unity7 alive.
Since this is the first major release in the last six years, you can imagine that it packs a bunch of new features, starting with a redesigned dash (app launcher) and HUD to look more modern and slick featuring a flat style, improved dash rounded corners, as well as support for accent colors to Unity and Unity Control Center.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The Firefox Profiler can now sort roots in alphabetical order with a flamgraph. This is especially useful when comparing profiles with the JavaScript filter, as this ensures that the order is consistent.
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SpiderMonkey is the JavaScript engine used in Mozilla Firefox. This newsletter gives an overview of the JavaScript and WebAssembly work we’ve done as part of the Firefox 102 and 103 Nightly release cycles.
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Want to live a more fulfilling life? The internet gives plenty of advice. But finding guidance backed by research can get tricky.
That’s where The Science of Happiness podcast comes in. Co-produced by PRX and UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, the popular podcast explores science-backed strategies to cultivate a happier life. Its new series, Happiness Break, guides listeners through a practice they can follow for a few minutes during their day.
Podcast host and psychologist Dacher Keltner is curating Pocket reading lists in hopes of encouraging listeners to go deeper on subjects like fear of failure, gratitude and optimism. We chatted with him about what motivated the Happiness Break, why he thinks wellness audio content have become so popular and how he makes time for his own reading list.
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The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.62.0. Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
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Version 1.62.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include a new cargo add command, default enum variants, an improved Linux mutex implementation, a number of stabilized APIs, and more.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Really pleased to see so much work from the team, and the wider community released as Collabora Online 22.05 – a first cut of our next round of development work around the next-generation Collabora Online – quicker, slicker, better, prettier and more.
Today Collabora’s app-store experiment with LibreOffice Vanilla was ended. In time we will write up and publish the data more widely, make final donations to TDF and as/when sensible finish up some Mac work in due course. Many thanks to all those who worked hard over the years to get LibreOffice into many app-stores – you rock. Of course – you can still get Collabora Office for your Mac, and help to support FOSS development that way.
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FSF
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In the lead-up to LibrePlanet 2022, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) received more workshop submissions than ever before. And because our LibrePlanet schedule is often chock full of splendid talks already, we thought it best to present the workshops in our very first LibrePlanet workshop series, which ran after LibrePlanet so that they would not conflict with any talks.
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Professional translators are more than often taught to use proprietary tools in universities and professional groups. OmegaT has existed for 20 years as a professional Computer Aided Translation tool (CAT) and is used all around the world. This workshop will introduce participants to the concepts behind CATs and especially how they are practically put into use in OmegaT: translation memories, segmentation, exchange formats, collaborative work, etc.
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Software localization (translation) of Web-based projects could be a nightmare for many developers. However, this time-consuming process can be solved easily thanks to the free software tool Tolgee. Jan Cizmar will guide you through with his workshop named Web Application Localization Without Tears. He will show you how to manage localization texts in simple UI or how to take the advantage of the in-context localization feature, so you can just click & translate the text easily.
“The more languages your software knows, the more of a satisfied users you have”. However, current software localization in modern JS frameworks and other software is complicated and fairly time-consuming for all involved participants. Thanks to the in-context localization feature of free software project Tolgee, this tool offers easier localization process, more relevant translations delivery and finally less work for developers.
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Hosted by Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak, and Jara Rocha of The Cell for Digital Discomfort
A workshop session to map out each of our current conditions of connecting and being together, the physical-political, and technological conditions using a diagrammatic methodology.
The workshop is geared towards installing ourselves into the conference’s infrastructural spectralities by sharing, learning from and attuning to each others’ conditions for connectivity, online participation and basic computer-mediated mundane day-to-day life. We want to pose this affirmation as an initial trigger: installing is about situating — attuning to our network of (inter-)dependencies and attuning to the dependencies with our local and vernacular but also standardized and planetary networks.
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Leftovers
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Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)
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The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has issued a strong call for free software projects to give up GitHub and to move their repositories elsewhere. There are a number of problems that SFC has identified with the GitHub code-hosting service and, in particular, with its Copilot AI-based code-writing tool that was trained on the community’s code stored in the company’s repositories. Moving away from GitHub will not be easy, SFC said, but it is important to do so lest the free-software community repeat the SourceForge mistake.
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Security
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USCERT ☛ #StopRansomware: MedusaLocker [Ed: Should stop Windows then, as that's by far the biggest ransomware magnet]
CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of the Treasury (Treasury), and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), #StopRansomware: MedusaLocker, to provide information on MedusaLocker ransomware. MedusaLocker actors target vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to access victims’ networks. Note: this joint #StopRansomware CSA is part of an ongoing #StopRansomware effort to publish advisories for network defenders that detail various ransomware variants and ransomware threat actors.
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Cybersecurity researchers have found more than 900,000 instances of Kubernetes consoles exposed on the internet.
[...]
Kubernetes is a very popular container orchestration system. The name comes from the Greek word for “helmsman.” The term “K8s” or “K-eights” is also used to refer to this technology.
Many organizations manage their applications with Kubernetes using self-contained units called “pods,” which share common resources with other units without being aware of each other. For example, “npm start” or “go run” processes can be managed in pods and share some CPU and RAM.
K8s is helpful to deploy, manage, and scale containers, which often consist of micro-services and their configuration files. When the workload increases or decreases, Kubernetes can handle the situation automatically.
As a result, an important security aspect of Kubernetes is access control. Any misconfiguration can lead to unwanted disclosures and attackers could even use them to escape containers and escalate privileges. Besides, Kubernetes provides APIs, CLI commands, and user interfaces that could be attractive for hackers.
Cyble explained its scan “does not necessarily imply that all exposed instances are vulnerable to attacks or will lead to the loss of sensitive data,” but “emphasizes the existence of seemingly simple misconfiguration practices that might make companies lucrative targets for TAs in the future.”
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eSecurity Planet ☛ Hacking Linux is Easy with PwnKit [Ed: This is patched, unlike the dozens of Microsoft actively-exploited vulnerabilities that are not even patched; selective media slant]
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added PwnKit as a high-severity Linux vulnerability to its list of actively exploited bugs.
Recorded as CVE-2021-4034, with a CVSS score of 7.8/10, PwnKit was discovered by Qualys in November 2021 and can be used by hackers to gain full root control over major Linux distributions.
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AN UNUSUALLY ADVANCED hacking group has spent almost two years infecting a wide range of routers in North America and Europe with malware that takes full control of connected devices running Windows, macOS, and Linux, researchers reported on June 28.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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“Avoid disconnection, update your SIM registration details.” This is the message that Kenyans have been seeing for months. Kenyan telcos have been threatening to disconnect people from mobile phone and internet services if they do not provide new data, including facial images — part of their personal, unchangeable biometrics. The companies claimed it was required under the Kenya Information and Communications (Registration of SIM-Cards) Regulations, 2015. In fact, that’s a gross misrepresentation of the law. Collecting biometric data for a SIM card puts people at risk of privacy violations, data breaches and abuse, and even identity theft. Kenyans must say no, and oppose any new regulations to authorize it.
Privacy violations are not new in Kenya. As Access Now has previously highlighted, companies like Safaricom have not only failed to protect subscribers’ personal information, but also refused to take accountability for data breaches. Here’s a look at what’s happened so far in Kenya, details on the push to authorize biometric data collection, and what Kenyans can do now to oppose it.
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Today, the U.S. Copyright Office published its report on “Copyright Protections for Press Publishers,” concluding that the publishing industry already benefits from significant protections under existing law and does not require any new copyright protections, including a new ancillary copyright like the one currently implied in the “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act.” Public Knowledge applauds the Copyright Office for conducting a robust inquiry into the questions and providing balanced, nuanced insights into the issue.
The following can be attributed to Meredith Rose, Senior Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge:
“The Copyright Office’s report today made one thing crystal clear: Copyright law is neither the source of, nor the solution to, the crisis facing journalism in the United States. The Office also helpfully notes that creating an ancillary right (such as a right to prevent outside linking to content) would go far beyond the bounds of existing copyright law, would likely be unable to accommodate basic free speech protections, and would otherwise raise constitutional concerns.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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So the fash are on their “modern art is bad” spree again and I’m seeing a lot of comrades speaking out in defense of modern art and that’s great because I love modern art but two things:
First, the fascists started out rejecting but ended up coopting modern art (Hartwig comes to mind). Second, let’s be careful so we don’t make aesthetics education a shibboleth for gatekeeping. Uh, that came out a li’l bit jargony but what I mean is I don’t want “lol those grobians don’t get this stuff, we’re so clever” because then people who don’t get modern art will be like “oh ok I guess the left is not for me, bye“.
[...]
Like these days when we have Frozen and Doom and Jimi Hendrix and pop rocks and acid and Glass Teeth and Adventure Time and Tetris and the Monkees, now maybe cubism and modernism and neoplasticism don’t look so special but back in the day we were dropping our jaws down to the god damned basement seeing this stuff.
Haussmann’s boulevards had just obliterated Paris and subjected us to the modern city. It was an era of spirits and aliens and evolution and evil flowers and Little Nemo in Dreamland and our brains were on the god damned floor seeing this stuff.
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Technical
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When I was young, I read an excerpt from a book about a child who was becoming a pearl diver. I can’t find its source (it turns out that there are many children’s books about pearl divers), but the scene has stuck with me with a dreamlike combination of haziness and crystal-clarity.
A child (or young man?) had to choose between donning a hooded suit of cotton or covering himself with hot oil to protect himself (from what?) in the water while diving for pearls (or maybe something else?). This was presented as a momentous decision: you were either a cotton suit diver, or a hot oil diver, and whatever you picked for your first dive decided which it was going to be. I think the protagonist chose oil?
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Today we’ll talk about the Gemini server that powers this capsule and runs on an ESP32 development board. (All code is simplified and some uninteresting parts are omitted.)
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It occurred to me today that as of Monday, I’ve been using my current smartphone–the Samsung Galaxy Note 8–for four and a half years. That is quite a bit longer than I expected to use it; I’d used my previous smartphone for three and a half years, and it was in pretty bad shape by the time I retired it. My Note 8 certainly isn’t in mint condition: its battery life has been reduced to about 24 hours of standby time, its body has many scratches and scuffs, and its screen has noticeable burn-in from the keyboard and on-screen navigation buttons (a featured I always disliked). The software on the phone, however, runs quite well, and the phone shows no apparent slowdown.
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Internet/Gemini
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The host is Sean, and
I presume he the father of Gemini. This is a worrying development
in light of the fact that his capsule says:
I’m no longer involved with the Gemini development, so
all the tests and tools that were here are have been re-
moved. Why doesn’t matter. I’ve been told to shut up,
sit down, and let the adults in the room talk. You have
been warned.
Ouch.
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Programming
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Just want to share how powerful this tool is. Infer[1], or FBInfer (since it’s written by Facebook), is a static analyzer that can detect cross-function logic errors and potential data race in C, C++ and Objective-C. Which is just amazing.
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In honor of World Give Up GitHub day, here’s a quick guide to how to serve up your own git repos.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FSF at 1:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: This talk was uploaded moments ago. “Of the users, by the users, for the users…”
Licence: CC BY SA 4.0
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Kernel Space
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In the final filesystem session at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), David Howells led a discussion on a filesystem optimization that is causing various kinds of problems. Extent-based filesystems have data structures that sometimes do not reflect the holes that exist in files. Reads from holes in sparse files (i.e. files with holes) must return zeroes, but filesystems are not obligated to maintain knowledge of the holes beyond that, which leads to the problems.
Howells began by describing the problem, which he first encountered with files cached using FS-Cache, but he has found that it is actually more widespread. When there is a file on an extent-based filesystem (which is ext4, XFS, and Btrfs for Linux) that has a small gap between two extents, the filesystem will sometimes merge the extents, filling in the gap with zeroes. That is done to reduce the extent list for the file, though it increases the amount of storage used on the disk. The opposite can also happen, when the filesystem sees a huge block of zeroes in a file, it can save disk space by creating two extents with a gap between them, though that is seemingly less of a problem for Howells.
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I recently had cause to reflect on the changes to the NFS (Network File System) protocol over the years and found that it was a story worth telling. It would be easy for such a story to become swamped by the details, as there are many of those, but one idea does stand out from the rest. The earliest version of NFS has been described as a “stateless” protocol, a term I still hear used occasionally. Much of the story of NFS follows the growth in the acknowledgment of, and support for, state. This article looks at the evolution of NFS (and its handling of state) during the early part of its life; a second installment will bring the story up to the present.
By “state” I mean any information that is remembered by both the client and the server, and that can change on one side, thus necessitating a change on the other. As we will see, there are many elements of state. One simple example is file content when it is cached on the client, either to eliminate read requests or to combine write requests. The client needs to know when cached data must be flushed or purged so that the client and server remain largely synchronized. Another obvious form of state is file locks, for which the server and client must always agree on what locks the client holds at any time. Each side must be able to discover when the other has crashed so that locks can be discarded or recovered.
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Applications
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Vim is a free and open-source, screen-based text editor program. The program is designed for use both from a command-line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface. Vim is released under the Vim license, which includes some charityware clauses that encourage users who enjoy the software to consider donating to children in Uganda.
The Vim license is compatible with the GNU General Public License through a special clause allowing distribution of modified copies under the GNU GPL version 2.0 or later.
Since its release for the Amiga, cross-platform development has made it available on many other systems.
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Old school editor fans, rejoice: some two and a half years after version 8.2, Vim 9 is here with a much faster scripting language.
Vim 9 has only a single big new feature: a new scripting language, Vim9script. The goal is to “drastically” improve the performance of Vim scripts, while also bringing the scripting language more into line with widely used languages such as JavaScript, TypeScript, and Java.
The existing scripting language, Vimscript, remains and will still work. Only scripts beginning with the line vim9script will be handled differently. The syntax changes are relatively modest; the important differences are in things like local versus global variables and functions, and that functions defined with :def will be compiled before they are run. This allows many errors to be caught in advance, but more significantly, compiled functions execute from 10× to 1000× faster.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Xfce is a lightweight free, open-source desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. It is designed to be fast and light on system resources while visually appealing to the default desktop environments that ship with most operating systems. Xfce is very popular with older systems, with hardware as a key feature in its design to conserve memory and CPU cycles. For example, the desktop panel will not hog resources by constantly polling for changes, and the file manager has been designed to use minimal memory and CPU cycles. In addition, Xfce includes several power management features that can help reduce your carbon footprint. Overall, Xfce is an excellent choice for users who want a fast and stable desktop environment without sacrificing visual appeal or functionality.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Xfce on your CentOS 9 Stream desktop using the command line terminal, along with some basic tips on running an update and removing the Xfce desktop environment.
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Apache Cassandra is an open-source NoSQL database management system. It is designed to handle large amounts of data across many servers and to survive the loss of any server.
Cassandra’s architectural model is quite different from relational database systems. Cassandra stores non-relational data in row key-value pairs in a distributed set of nodes so that no single point of failure exists and scales linearly by adding more nodes as necessary to meet the demands on capacity, request throughput, and storage capacity for an increasing number of users or client applications.
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LEMP is a popular web hosting stack used by developers and web hosting companies to test and host web applications. It comprises 3 components: the Nginx ( pronounced as Engine-X) webserver, MariaDB, and PHP which is a server-side scripting language.
In this walkthrough, you will learn how to install the LEMP stack on AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux 8.4.
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While you may think of Chromebooks as devices for accessing the web, they’re increasingly capable of managing local files. Chromebooks with Chrome OS versions 101 and higher can now open several common Linux file formats: ISO, TAR, and ZIP.
Here’s how you can open and use such files on your Chromebook.
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UNRAR is a powerful tool for extracting compressed files, and it is widely used amongst Windows users. RAR files are much smaller archives and compress better than ZIP for most files by compressing files “together,” saving more space. UNRAR does not come pre-installed natively on CentOS Stream and is not featured in its repositories, but it can be easily installed from a third-party repository. Once installed, UNRAR can be used to extract RAR files with a simple command. In addition, UNRAR offers a number of features for manipulating archives, such as the ability to list the contents of an archive or extract only certain files. As a result, UNRAR is a valuable tool for anyone who needs to work with compressed files.
The following tutorial will show you how to install UNRAR on CentOS 9 Stream workstation or server with EPEL, along with the most commonly used commands.
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REMI is a third-party repository that provides us with the latest PHP versions on RHEL-derived systems. However, it is not only limited to PHP but also many of its modules. If you are an active PHP developer, you must enable this repository almost mandatory. An excellent aspect of the repository and its creator is that it is very well documented, so even a newbie can set it up and update their system in a matter of minutes following the repository documentation.
Another significant advantage of using REMI over other third-party repositories or compiling PHP from the source is that it keeps the RPM packaging consistent with the official repositories. As a result, you will not have any issues when trying to install other software that has dependencies on PHP from the official repositories. All in all, REMI is an essential repository for anyone running an RHEL-derived distribution who wants to stay up-to-date with the latest version of PHP.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to import the Remi Repository on CentOS 9 Stream for users who would prefer to install the latest version of the PHP branch they have installed on their system using the command line terminal.
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Linux provides you with options to limit hardware resources as per users and groups to manage optimal performance all around users, and it is common to find limitations in shared hosting to prevent heavy usage by other tenants.
In almost every shared hosting situation, you will see the resources available to the account (bandwidth, disk space, CPU power) getting capped off by an application that was installed on the account.
A similar kind of incident happened to me a few days back when I was downloading the AlmaLinux 8.6 DVD release using the wget command. All of a sudden, files got stopped, and when I checked the reason for stopping, I found “File size limit exceeded.” Then I remembered I had added a limit for file sizes that should not exceed more than 4GB to save some space on my 250 GB SSD.
If your system also has a file size limit that you want to remove or want to extend, then this article is enough for you.
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After installing any Linux distribution, such as Ubuntu, there are basic things that you need to do: one of them is to change the value of Swappiness. But what is Swappiness, why should you change it, and how do you do it? Your time is precious (isn’t it?), so I will try to make it simple and short.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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We have a few months to go before the GNOME 43 release, but the development activity for GNOME applications is in full swing.
For instance, the support for extensions in GNOME Web 43 alpha version.
Similarly, there are a few exciting changes coming to GNOME Files (Nautilus), especially for the list view.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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Five openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots have been released since last Friday.
The snapshots had a small amount of packages in each release.
The 20220629 snapshot updated OpenSSL to version 1.1.1p. This newer version fixed CVE-2022-2068 affecting the c_rehash script, which was not properly sanitizing the shell metacharacters to prevent command injection. The script, which is distributed by some operating systems in a manner where it is automatically executed, could give an attacker execute arbitrary commands with the privileges of the script. Another package updated in the snapshot was perl-JSON 4.07, which provided some backport updates from 4.10 version. New memory device types, processor upgrades, slot types, processor characteristics and more came in the update of dmidecode 3.4. There were also several table engine updates in the snapshot like ibus-table 1.16.9, ibus-table-chinese 1.8.8 and more.
A single package was updated in snapshot 20220628. The update of mpg123 1.30.0 has a new network backend using external tools/libraries to support HTTPS and the terminal control keys are now case-sensitive.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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The Covid-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for many organizations in their digital transformations, leading companies to expedite technology initiatives, design dramatic changes to processes and reexamine culture and the role it plays in today’s new business world. As some organizations find success in their digital transformation strategies, they are able to provide additional bandwidth to their teams to focus on improving customer experience through the collection and analysis of data.
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Last week, the Linux Foundation held its North America Open Source Summit in Austin. The week-long summit included a large number of breakout sessions as well as several keynotes. Open Source Summit Europe will take place in Dublin in September and Open Source Summit Japan in Yokohama in December.
I’ve been closely involved with open, collaborative innovation and open source communities since the 1990s. In particular, I was asked to lead a new Linux initiative that IBM launched in January of 2000 to embrace Linux across all the company’s products and services.
At the time, Linux had already been embraced by the research, internet, and supercomputing communities, but many in the commercial marketplace were perplexed by IBM’s decision. Over the next few years, we spent quite a bit of effort explaining to the business community why we were supporting Linux, which included a number of Linux commercials like this one with Muhammad Ali that ran in the 2006 Super Bowl. IBM also had to fight off a multi-billion dollar lawsuit for alleged intellectual property violations in its contributions to the development of Linux. Nevertheless, by the late 2000s, Linux had crossed the chasm to mainstream adoption, having been embraced by a large number of companies around the world.
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Fedora’s objective to become the desktop Linux distribution of choice has long been hampered by Red Hat’s risk-averse legal department, which strictly limits the type of software that Fedora can ship. Specifically, anything that might be encumbered by patents is off-limits, with the result that much of the media that users might find on the net is unplayable. This situation has improved over the years as the result of a lot of work within the Fedora project, but it still puts Fedora at a disadvantage relative to some other distributions. A recent discussion on video support, though, shines a light on how some surprising legal reasoning may be providing a way out of this problem; that way may not be pleasing to all involved, however.
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As the pace of innovation quickens, companies of all sizes are racing to adopt the latest emerging technologies. IT teams are the technical trailblazers within most firms, making them the first to leverage new technologies. However, we face an ongoing and potentially prolonged talent shortage, both in IT and beyond, which threatens to leave our technical teams depleted for years to come.
Already, we only have 23 unemployed workers for every 100 job openings in the United States, according to Lightcast, and some of the most severe talent shortages are in emerging technical fields. This lack of human capital spills over to technological capital, hindering the adoption of emerging technologies and limiting the ability of organizations to extract value out of new innovations.
Here are five key challenges associated with emerging technologies that companies are facing due to the talent shortage.
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Holding people accountable is one of the most important – and sometimes one of the most challenging – aspects of a leader’s job. For CIOs, the success of a project intended to propel a company forward often depends on how well they hold their IT teams accountable.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Open-source cross-platform email and messaging client Thunderbird has hit version 102, with a new look and improved functionality, including Matrix chat support.
The latest release is the first major upgrade since version 91, which The Reg looked at last August. This is normal for the app – it follows the same approximately annual release cycle as Firefox’s Extended Support Releases, the most recent of which was also version 91. From now until the next major release, Thunderbird 102 will get a regular stream of minor updates and bug fixes.
102 has a modernized look and feel. There’s a new “Spaces” toolbar, which appears vertically on the left of the app window and lets users quickly flip between inbox, address book, calendar, task list, and chat tabs. All of these are built-in features – the former Lightning calendar add-on is now an integral part of the app, as is PGP support, which used to be an add-on called Enigmail. Thunderbird can talk to various groupware calendar and contact servers, including both private and corporate Google Mail accounts, Microsoft Exchange and Office 365, and others.
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Thunderbird 102 is here! Our annual release is full of highly-requested features, beautiful new visuals, and quality-of-life upgrades. We’re also working hard to ensure that your favorite Thunderbird add-ons are compatible. In fact, we expect the majority of add-ons to be updated within a few weeks of Thunderbird 102’s release.
We understand that certain add-ons are invaluable to your workflow. So, to help you decide the best time to update your version of Thunderbird, here’s a simple way to discover if the extensions you currently have installed are compatible with Thunderbird 102.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces that the second beta release of PostgreSQL 15 is now available for download. This release contains previews of all features that will be available when PostgreSQL 15 is made generally available, though some details of the release can change during the beta period.
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FSF
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Join the FSF and friends Friday, July 1, from 12:00 to 15:00 EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.
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Licensing / Legal
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Those who forget history often inadvertently repeat it. Some of us recall that twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a fully Free and Open Source (FOSS) site called SourceForge, proprietarized all their code — never to make it FOSS again. Major FOSS projects slowly left SourceForge since it was now, itself, a proprietary system, and antithetical to FOSS. FOSS communities learned that it was a mistake to allow a for-profit, proprietary software company to become the dominant FOSS collaborative development site. SourceForge slowly collapsed after the DotCom crash, and today, SourceForge is more advertising link-bait than it is code hosting. We learned a valuable lesson that was a bit too easy to forget — especially when corporate involvement manipulates FOSS communities to its own ends. We now must learn the SourceForge lesson again with Microsoft’s GitHub.
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Programming/Development
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Considering picking up some programming skills? Great idea!
Programming is a popular and rewarding career path, especially when you get the fundamentals right. Whether you’re considering picking it up as a hobby, or you’re eyeing up a potential job, it pays to understand the basics. Find out a bit more about what programming involves, and whether it might be for you.
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A variable declaration is simply telling the computer that a variable exists and what value it should start with. Similar to other programming languages JavaScript also allows for the declaration of variables.
There are three keywords in JavaScript that can be used to declare variables: let, var, and const. Each keyword has different rules and implications for how the variables they create can be used.
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Security, code tracing, SaaS, and more: Get the Red Hat Developer highlights for the month.
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In the finance department, they say compounding interest is the eighth wonder of the world because your money makes money. In software, IT, and open source, composability is the first wonder of the world because it allows innovation to build on innovation. This is what we mean when we say we are standing on the shoulders of giants.
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The “dunfell” icon runs a full isolated desktop, and Pup-Advert-Blocker should work there.
I have fixed so that /etc/hosts gets copied into every container at startup.That will be in the next release.
But, as I mentioned in the forum, replying to Tenoch’s post, The “Mvps.org” choice in Pup-Advert-Blocker doesn’t work.
Pup-Advert-Blocker is a very old application, created by sc0ttman, found it in the old forum:
https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=59290
I will need to fix the PET, either take out “Mvps.org” or find a replacement.
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Some kernel features last longer than others. Support for forward-edge control-flow integrity (CFI) for kernels compiled with LLVM was added to the 5.13 kernel, but now there is already a replacement knocking on the door. Control-flow integrity will remain, but the new implementation will be significantly different — and seemingly better in a number of ways.
The kernel makes extensive use of indirect function calls; they are at the heart of its internal object model. Every one of those calls is a potential entry point for an attacker; if the target of the call can be somehow changed to an address of the attacker’s choosing, the game is usually over. Forward-edge CFI works to thwart such attacks by ensuring that every indirect function call sends control to a code location that was actually intended to be a target of that call. Specifically, an indirect function call should only go to a known function entry point, and the prototype of the function should match what is expected at the call site.
The CFI implementation merged for 5.13 works by creating “jump tables” containing all of the legitimate targets of indirect function calls in the kernel; there is one jump table for each observed function prototype. Actual indirect calls are replaced with a jump-table lookup to ensure that the intended target meets the criteria; the target should be found in the jump table corresponding to the intended function prototype. If that test fails, a kernel panic results. See this article for a more detailed description of how this mechanism works.
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Python
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In Python, there are a few ways to accept user input. In this blog post, we will explore three different ways to do so. We will start with the simplest way and work our way up to the more complex methods. By the end of this post, you should have a good understanding of how to accept user input in Python. Let’s get started!
Python 3 provides a built-in function called input() that allows you to take user input. Where Python 2.x uses the raw_input() function is used to accept user input. Python 2.7 also has a function called input(). However, this function takes only one argument: the prompt string.
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When you install an application, you’re usually installing a package that contains the executable code for an application and important files such as documentation, icons, and so on. On Linux, applications are commonly packaged as RPM or DEB files, and users install them with the dnf or apt commands, depending on the Linux distribution. However, new Python modules are released virtually every day, so you could easily encounter a module that hasn’t yet been packaged. And that’s exactly why the pyp2rpm command exists.
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In a keynote at PyCon 2022 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Peter Wang introduced another entrant in the field of in-browser Python interpreters. The Python community has long sought a way to be able to write Python—instead of JavaScript—to run in web browsers, and there have been various efforts to do so over the years. Wang announced PyScript as a new framework, built atop one of those earlier projects, to allow Python scripting directly within the browser; those programs have access to much of the existing Python ecosystem as well as being able to interact with the browser document object model (DOM) directly. In addition, he gave some rather eye-opening demonstrations as part of the talk.
Wang began by introducing himself and the company that he runs, Anaconda, which he co-founded with Travis Oliphant ten years ago. Oliphant was the creator of NumPy and one of the founders of SciPy, both of which are cornerstones of the Python scientific-computing ecosystem. Anaconda has created a number of different tools that are used widely in the community, as well as founding the NumFOCUS non-profit and the PyData conferences.
There were a number of reasons why he and Oliphant chose to focus their efforts around Python, including that the language is approachable, even by those who lack a computer-science background. Another point in its favor is that the Python community is generally welcoming and pleasant to work in. That is a “really big deal if you want to keep growing the user base”.
But there is another aspect of the language that makes it so desirable from his standpoint: it can be extended with binary extensions that use an API that is written in C, but can be accessed from other languages. He likens Python to “a Honda Civic with mounting bolts for a warp drive”. So the language can be picked up by kids who can then pop open the trunk “and bolt on warp nacelles” that allows the code to run faster than C or C++ in some cases, Wang said.
That aspect is sometimes overlooked, but it means that Python can be used in ways that other, similar languages cannot. “It’s not just like Node, it’s not just an alternative to Ruby”. The reason Python was picked up by Wall Street firms ten or 15 years ago was because of this warp-drive capability, he said.
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Leftovers
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Hardware
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Vecow presented their new line of System on Module devices (SoM) at Embedded World 2022. The latest SoMs integrate MediaTek’s Genio 1200, Genio 500 and Genio 350 processors. Additionally, the company has developed carrier boards for quick product development.
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, firejail, and ublock-origin), Fedora (chromium, firefox, thunderbird, and vim), Mageia (kernel and kernel-linus), Oracle (389-ds-base and python-virtualenv), SUSE (chromium), and Ubuntu (cloud-init).
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This blog post is an overview of a talk, “ 0-day In-the-Wild Exploitation in 2022…so far”, that I gave at the FIRST conference in June 2022. The slides are available here.
For the last three years, we’ve published annual year-in-review reports of 0-days found exploited in the wild. The most recent of these reports is the 2021 Year in Review report, which we published just a few months ago in April. While we plan to stick with that annual cadence, we’re publishing a little bonus report today looking at the in-the-wild 0-days detected and disclosed in the first half of 2022.
As of June 15, 2022, there have been 18 0-days detected and disclosed as exploited in-the-wild in 2022. When we analyzed those 0-days, we found that at least nine of the 0-days are variants of previously patched vulnerabilities. At least half of the 0-days we’ve seen in the first six months of 2022 could have been prevented with more comprehensive patching and regression tests. On top of that, four of the 2022 0-days are variants of 2021 in-the-wild 0-days. Just 12 months from the original in-the-wild 0-day being patched, attackers came back with a variant of the original bug.
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Fear, Uncertainty,
Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
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Privacy/Surveillance
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So much for that touching goodbye post to Sheryl Sandberg that Mark Zuckerberg posted just 9 days ago, when after a 14-year run at Facebook — now Meta Platforms — Sandberg said she was resigning from her post as COO. At the time, Zuckerberg called Sandberg’s planned departure the “the end of an era” and spoke glowingly of her as an “amazing person, leader, partner, and friend.”
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Misinformation/Disinformation
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While it’s much beloved by its users, TikTok has been much maligned by U.S. government officials since it picked up popularity during the pandemic. The latest hit is from the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC commissioner sent a letter to Apple and Google, asking them to ban TikTok, believing the social app is a “national security threat.”
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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In November 2020, we filed an RTI application requesting the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to provide copies of all public consultation responses received by the Committee constituted for deliberation on a Non-Personal Data Governance Framework. This information was refused on the ground that the Ministry was not the custodian of any information relating to internal functioning of the Committee. When the first appeal filed against this response was also rejected, we filed a second appeal with the Central Information Commission. The matter was heard on June 23, 2022 where the CIC directed MeitY to respond to the RTI application afresh after taking certain corrective steps.
[...]
We found that the Committee’s revised report did not contain any information on the suggestions and public feedback received by them during the first round of consultation. So, we filed an RTI application on November 2, 2020 requesting MeitY to provide copies of all responses received by the Committee during the public consultation process.
When MeitY refused to provide us with this information by stating that it was “not the custodian of any information relating to internal functioning of the Committee,” despite the fact that the Committee was constituted and funded by MeitY, we filed a first appeal before the First Appellate Authority (‘FAA’). When the FAA found that the CPIO, MeitY’s response was “appropriate,” and called for no interference, we filed a Second Appeal before the Central Information Commission (‘CIC’) on February 6, 2021.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Technical
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Programming
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I wholeheartedly agree, before starting to learn something a general overview of what it is, what it can do, what it’s useful for, is needed. One great example of this is in my opinion “The AWK Programming Language” (1988) by A. V. Aho, B. W. Kernighan and P. J. Weinberger.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 7:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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There are already several serial terminal programs such as Putty and minicom, and in recent times, I’ve been using Bootterm myself. But that does not mean there isn’t room for more and Martin Lund has developed tio serial device I/O tool for Linux.
Martin found out many of the existing tools are very modem focused or a bit cumbersome to use, so he developed tio as the simpler alternative which puts less focus on classic terminal/modem features and more focus on the needs of embedded developers and hackers.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Q1 FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report 2022, Nginx on OpenBSD 7.1, Persistent Memory Allocation, Colorize your BSD shell, cgit With Gitolite and Nginx on FreeBSD 13, and more
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1:20 The News
15:47 Security and Privacy
21:07 Bi-Weekly Wonderings
35:42 The Linux Innards
56:58 Vibrations from the Ether
1:03:45 Check This Out
1:04:20 Announcements
First up in the news, Gnome wins Microsoft money, Firefox translates offline, Rocky overtakes the Red Hat pack, apps on KDE look more klear, Debian gets the Gecko treatment, Zoom gets Wayland screen sharing, Photoshop is kind-of–but not-really coming to Linux, and Nvidia contributes.
In security and privacy, Hertzbleed is coming for your CPU, and the EU is going after deepfakes.
Then in our Wanderings, Moss goes Custom, Norbert emerges, and Joe is Florida Man
In our Innards section we discuss the various licenses in the world of open source software
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Joel cannot get pizza hut delivered. Little ceasars is too far away now.
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Kernel Space
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I started my journey with the Linux Kernel in October 2021. At that time, I thought it was impossible for a 19-year-old Brazilian girl to have an approved commit at the kernel. Then, I find out about an extracurricular group at Campinas, LKCAMP. And I found out that undergraduate students were able to contribute to the kernel. Although I couldn´t go to the LKCAMP meetings, this really push me forward, cause I saw that I was able to be a part of the kernel community.
I was a Linux user for about two years, and I became passionate about the system. I was eager to contribute to the community and improve the kernel. But, I was in doubt about where to start.
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I’m a Fedora fan. I mean: I have two laptops for development, and all of them run Fedora. I also have a deployment machine. Guess what? It runs Fedora. Stickers? The Fedora Logo sticked forever on my laptop.
So, by now, you know: I’m really a Fedora fan.
So, when I started working with Linux Kernel, I really wanted to develop in a Fedora environment. But, without any kind of script, the work of a Linux Kernel developer is ungrateful. I mean, do you want to deploy to a remote machine? Be ready for network configurations, grub configurations, generate initramfs image, and tons of commands. Do you want to manage your config files? Basically, you are back to the ancient times when many save tons of config files on folders.
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Graphics Stack
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With some pushes and pulls from friends, I’ve been studying the Linux Graphical stack for some time now. After some minor patches to both Mesa and the Linux Kernel, I followed the instructions thoroughly and landed a successful Google Summer of Code proposal…
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As you can probably imagine, the Linux graphics stack comprises many layers of abstractions, from the pretty little button from which you open your Proton-able AAA Steam title to the actual bytecode that runs on whatever graphics card you have installed.
These many abstractions are what allow us to have our glorious moments of being a hero (or maybe a villain, whatever you’re up to…) without even noticing what’s happening, and – most importantly – that allow game devs to make such complex games without having to worry about an awful lot of details. They’re really a marvel of engineering (!), but not by accident!
All of those abstraction layers come with a history of their own, and it’s kinda amazing that we can even have such a smooth experience with all of those, community-powered, beautifully thought-out, moving pieces, twisting and turning in a life of their own.
But enough mystery! Let’s hop into it already, shall we?
Though in most cases we start from the bottom of the stack and build our way towards the top, here I think it makes more sense for us to build it upside down, as that’s what we’re used to interacting with.
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Instructionals/Technical
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This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install HPLIP 3.22.6 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Fedora 36, and other Linux distributions.
HPLIP – HP Linux Image and Printing, developed by HP for Printing, scanning, and faxing with HP inkjet and laser-based printers on Linux platforms.
The latest version of HPLIP 3.22.6 contains new Distro support and added support to the new printers.
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There goes a lot more behind the scenes between a browser and a server than we might think. Our browser may be handed a index.html but on processing, it (the browser) may need to get additional documents such as style sheets, JavaScript files, etc. This requires multiple connections to the server. Making a connection requires performing the TCP three-way handshake, exchanging headers, etc. all of which introduces unnecessary overhead, as well as latency to the client. It is in this context that the need for a better way to serve documents become apparent.
It wasn’t until the publication of the HTTP/2 protocol that the issue could be solved. HTTP/2 protocol, officially RFC 7540 or more recently RFC 9113, is a replacement for the older HTTP/1.1 which provides an optimized method for transportation of documents over TCP. It allows multiplexing connections so that multiple documents can be sent over the same stream. It also allows compressing the headers and many requests into a single packet. Furthermore, it provides an optional feature called server push whereby a server can send additional documents that the client may need along side the response for the document that was actually requested. For example, a server may send the style sheets and JavaScript files along side the response for the request to an HTML file.
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A Kernel is somewhat the soul of an operating system since it exists at its core. Once you start/boot your machine, the Kernel takes control of the entire system. Each RHEL 8 distribution is shipped with a custom-built kernel.
Since a Kernel is the primary bridge of communication between the hardware and software components of an entire computer system, it is responsible for such a system’s integrity and supported hardware compatibility. Also, it is the kernel that provides an interfacing link between system processes and computer hardware.
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There are new vulnerabilities being disclosed every day that put your server at a security risk. This stress of updating your system for the latest security patch or application update can be relieved by automating the update process using the dnf-automatic command.
The dnf-automatic is a command-line tool for RHEL-based distributions such as Fedora, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, etc., for automating the update process using systemd timers. It will periodically check the system for the latest release or security update and update them without your interaction as a background process.
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Learn how to use the PPA repository to install Python’s old versions such as 3.9. 3.8, 3.7, and more on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish using the command terminal.
Python is freely available for the common operating systems. The programming language is standard equipment in many Linux distributions. Python can also be used on many mobile operating systems. For web servers, WSGI (Web Server Gateway Interface) is a universal interface between the server and Python.
It offers clear syntax and good readability. It is considered easy to learn and can be interpreted in the common operating systems. Python supports several programming paradigms such as functional, object-oriented, or aspect-oriented programming and can also be used as a scripting language.
Since Python is a so-called multiparadigm language, programmers are not tied to a specific programming style. The optimal programming style can be selected for the various tasks. Python allows Python programs to be embedded in other languages as individual modules.
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Darktable (stylized as darktable) is a free and open-source photography application program and raw developer. Rather than being a raster graphics editor like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP, it comprises a subset of image editing operations specifically aimed at non-destructive raw image post-production. It is primarily focused on improving a photographer’s workflow by facilitating the handling of large numbers of images. It is freely available in versions tailored for most major Linux distributions, macOS, Solaris and Windows and is released under the GPL-3.0-or-later.
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Pinta is an open-source, cross-platform bitmap image drawing and editing program inspired by Paint.NET, a similar image editing program which is limited to Microsoft Windows. Pinta has more features than Microsoft Paint. Compared with open-source image editor GIMP, Pinta is simpler and has fewer features.
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MariaDB is one of the most popular open-source databases next to its originator MySQL. The original creators of MySQL developed MariaDB in response to fears that MySQL would suddenly become a paid service due to Oracle acquiring it in 2010. With its history of doing similar tactics, the developers behind MariaDB have promised to keep it open source and free from such fears as what has happened to MySQL.
MariaDB has become just as popular as MySQL with developers, with advanced clustering with Galera Cluster 4, faster cache/indexes, storage engines, and features/extensions that you won’t find in MySQL.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install or upgrade MariaDB 10.9 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal and some tips on how to upgrade your existing database if needed one exists.
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Sublime Merge is a git client software that comes with various features to help make working with git repositories easier. One of its most valuable features is the syntax highlighting engine, which makes it easier to read code. The custom high-performance Git reading library is also helpful, allowing you to stage changes line-by-line.
Additionally, the build-in git search function lets you quickly find commits, and the themes allow you to customize the look of the software to match your preferences. The Command Palette and Commit Editing functions are also helpful, letting you quickly execute git commands and edit commits. Finally, the Submodule Management and Git Flow Integration functions make it easy to work with submodules and manage branches. Overall, Sublime Merge is a powerful git client that can significantly improve your workflow.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Sublime Merge on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using the official Sublime APT repository using the command line terminal, along with how to launch the software and remove it in the future if required.
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SQLite is a free, lightweight relational database management system (RDBMS) in a C library. SQLite is not a client-server database engine. Instead, it is embedded into the end program. Primarily all programming languages support SQLite, which how languages embed the program is with a file with .sqlite3/.sqlite/.DB extension. The software is popular for local/client storage such as web browsers, Android devices, etc. The list is quite extensive.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install SQLite 3 with CentOS 9 Stream using the command line terminal using the standard DNF package manager or manually installing straight from the project’s Git.
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Here’s how to configure Linux superuser access so that it’s available to those who need it—yet well out of the way of people who don’t need it.
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This beginner-focused article discusses how you can hide files and folders from normal view in Linux. Both GUI and command-line methods have been discussed.
There will be times when you need to hide files in Linux.
No, I am not talking about those ‘special files’ that you don’t want your family to see. Although you can hide these special files, it is better to lock them with a password for an extra layer of protection.
Back to hiding files. Any file or folder whose name begins with a . (dot) is “hidden” in Linux.
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Many Fedora users are unaware of the fact that you do get an option to choose other Desktop Environments apart from the default GNOME which we are used to downloading directly from their download page.
Apart from the default GNOME, you do get an option of KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXQT, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, SOAS, and even i3.
So through this guide, we will be showing you how you can install XFCE Fedora spin on your system in the easiest way possible but before that, let’s discuss why you should even consider using XFCE instead of GNOME.
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Displaying hidden files in Linux is quite easy. You use the ls command in this manner:
ls -a
That’s fine. You can see the hidden files with their names starting with a dot (.).
But you see all the files in the current directory, the hidden ones and the regular ones.
What if you want to ONLY see the hidden files, not the regular ones?
There is no ready-to-use option like -a and -A. However, you can always find a way to achieve things by combining a few commands through the wonderful pipe redirection.
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In this article, we will show you how to install PlayOnLinux on Ubuntu systems.
PlayOnLinux is a graphical frontend for the Wine software compatibility layer which allows Linux users to install Windows-based video games, Microsoft Office (2000 to 2010), Microsoft Internet Explorer, as well as many other applications such as Apple iTunes and Safari.
While initially developed for Linux-based systems, it is also used on macOS and FreeBSD under the names PlayOnMac and PlayOnBSD, respectively. It can also be used on other operating systems supported by Wine.
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I watched Jeremy’s talk at CSS Day 2022 titled “In And Out Of Style” and, as always, I had my notepad ready. Here are a few points that stood out to me.
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However, if you have a multi-homed host, a host with multiple interfaces and IP addresses, this approach to routing outgoing traffic can create a situation where outgoing and incoming packets for the same connection (or flow) use different interfaces. To have this happen you normally need at least two of your networks to be routable, which is to say that hosts not on those networks can reach them and hosts on those networks can reach other networks.
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Courtney Allen has published a blog post about how to run a website and blog almost exclusively on things that are in the OpenBSD base system already, only adding AsciiDoc to the mix.
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A few months ago, a friend of mine mentioned that they still, in the year 2021, used RSS feeds to subscribe to the blogs they liked. I was incredulous? RSS? That orange button I used to see on websites years ago? The one that returned XML if you accidentally clicked it? People still used that? People still provided that?
Apparently the answer was yes. My friend also said that if I implemented RSS on my blog, they would subscribe to it. So I thought about it, and decided to do it. I forgot about it until today, but when I did remember it didn’t take long to implement at all.
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I have fallen in love with a recent combination of software to make good looking websites, and having an easy to manage web server. I’m a minimalist in many ways. Really, I find that it makes my life easier. I like to keep my blog up here and don’t want to deal with database updates, language exploits, weird migrations, and so on. I also manage my church’s website. I can’t be having complex solutions that require large amounts of maintenance at multiple times a month because of a dozen pieces of software requiring version upgrades or what have you. Sure, some people have needs for elaborate content management systems, but sometimes you only need a simple site too, and why overcomplicate it?
This is why I like my current combo:
1. OpenBSD
2. AsciiDoc
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Games
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It’s been 50 years since Nolan Bushnell co-founded Atari, which brought video games to the mainstream. To celebrate, we asked Bushnell what he learned during the early years—and what we’ve lost sight of since then.
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Valve made a change to the specifications of the top two versions of the Steam Deck last month, which it seems plenty of people (including me) completely missed. It’s not a massive change but still one to be aware of as not all Decks are the same.
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AOKZOE will be jumping in the handheld ring with their upcoming AOKZOE A1 AMD Ryzen 7 6800U portable that will offer either Windows 11 or SteamOS to perhaps rival the Steam Deck. They’re a rather new company, so everything they’re talking about and showing off should be taken with a rather large pinch of salt.
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While installation of RHEL 9, the installer recommends we choose a complex password and while making the password complex enough, the chances of forgetting our password are quite high. And things get even more complex when your user is not even added to the wheel group (which allows a normal user to elevate root privileges for a small amount of time).
This tutorial will guide you on how you can change your forgotten root password in 3 scenarios and we are quite sure that you’ll be able to recover your forgotten password at the end of this guide.
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GNU Nano is an editor that has a minimal learning curve and hence is widely used for beginner-level guides.
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The action-adventure genre is a video game genre that combines core elements from both the action game and adventure game genres. They engage both reflexes and problem-solving in both violent and non-violent situations.
There are many games that can fall into this genre given that the action genre, itself, is very wide encompassing. Other games that can fit into this genre are covered in the series.
There is an eligibility criteria that needs to be met to be included in this round up (see below).
Let’s explore the 10 games. For each game we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screen shot of the game in action, together with links to relevant resources.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME Web (Epiphany) is one of the best browsers available for Linux users.
It offers a minimal, and a unique user experience.
Unfortunately, the uniqueness does not incentivize users to use it as their primary web browser.
But, it looks like that could change soon…
GNOME Web is finally adding support for WebExtensions, as revealed by one of the developers (Patrick a.k.a TingPing).
This is all a part of the GNOME 43 feature set.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Debian Family
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Personally, I’ve done an enormous amount of work promoting Debian over more than 25 years without receiving any payment in return. I couldn’t help noticing the news that Debian is now paying a lawyer to silence critics, in other words, contradicting the Debian Social Contract. The lawyer’s west London mansion in Pinner has really emphasized the injustice of this situation.
News today tells us the UK is planning to cut off gas supplies to some European countries so that traditional British mansions like this can stay warm. This could be avoided if Mr Cohen used some of his Debian money to insulate his house.
I had a quick look at the pictures that have been circulating online, they provide valuables lessons for all homeowners in the UK and Ireland.
[...]
With all the money he has received from Debian in the last year, this type of deep retrofit will be easily within reach for Mr Cohen.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Autonomous Raspberry Pi robots navigate their environment without bumping into things. Using an ultrasonic sensor, such as the HC-SR04, to detect obstacles is a fairly common tool for Pi-based robots and cars but this robot car project, created by maker and developer エス ラボ (S Lab), is going even further by mapping out a room with the help of a LiDAR sensor.
The car has a Raspberry Pi 4 4GB at its core and as it drives around, LiDAR sensor data is transmitted from the Pi to a nearby PC which uses a SLAM-based (simultaneous localization and mapping) system to create a virtual, 3D replica of the room surrounding the Raspberry Pi. The program also provides a virtual representation of the car in Unity to estimate its position in the room.
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Pine64, maker of many fine SBCs including the Rock64 and Quartz64 (opens in new tab), is preparing to dip its toe into the choppy waters of RISC-V, including news of an upcoming “powerful, yet affordable” board based on the versatile open-source architecture in its most recent product update (opens in new tab).
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Hello and welcome, everyone! We are back, yet again, with a handful of new products here at SparkFun Electronics! We’ve heard your requests for kits for our mikroBUS boards to include a few hookup accessories (specifically Click boards™) so we took both of our boards and made them easier to get started with! Following that, we have a new WiFi HaLow HAT from ALFA Network that we expect to really help your Raspberry Pi get connected to a new type of IoT network. Now, let’s jump in and take a closer look at all of this week’s new products!
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Solid hardware, good software, and Wi-Fi access see this incremental update elevate the Raspberry Pi Pico to a truly versatile development board.
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New product alert! In January last year, we launched the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico, our first product built on silicon designed here at Raspberry Pi. At its heart is the RP2040 microcontroller, built on TSMC’s 40nm low-power process, and incorporating two 133MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ cores, 264kB of on-chip SRAM, and our unique programmable I/O subsystem.
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I was expecting the next official Raspberry Pi board to be either an update of Raspberry Pico with WiFi and Bluetooth or with a machine learning accelerator and the new $6 Raspberry Pi Pico W delivers that wish through the addition of 2.4GHz WiFi 4.
Having said that, I was actually expecting a competitor to ESP8266 or ESP32 with a new Raspberry Pi wireless microcontroller, but it did quite happen that way as the Raspberry Pi Pico W features the same Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core Cortex-M0+ microcontroller found in Raspberry Pi Pico board coupled with an Infineon CYW43439 chip that’s supposed to support both 2.4 GHz WiFi 4 and Bluetooth LE 5.2. Bluetooth is not enabled right now, but may be at a later stage.
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A while ago I did a bit of an experiment to compare the sound level between TMC2208 and A4988 stepper motor drivers. At the time, A4988 drivers were more commonly used on 3D printers and other hobby CNC devices. Since then, most 3D printer and CNC laser manufacturers have moved towards replacing at least the X and Y axis motors with the silent TMC2208 stepper motor driver or some other variant of silent motor driver. A question that has come up quite a lot in the video’s comments was how these drivers manage to drive the motors with such a significant sound reduction and if there was any trade-off.
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In this blog post, I reverse-engineer a hybrid module that was used for ground-testing of equipment from the Apollo space program. But first, some background. During the Apollo missions to the Moon, NASA could send digital messages to the spacecraft from the ground. These data messages could perform specific tasks: control spacecraft equipment by activating relays, send commands directly to the Apollo Guidance Computer, or even set the spacecraft’s clock. Onboard the Command Module, these messages were decoded by the Up-Data Link, a drab bluish box (below) mounted in the equipment bay.
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Logitech’s Driving Force Shifter is a very common piece of kit for those who enjoy racing games, as it connects to a Logitech Racing Wheel and allows the player to control their car in a more realistic fashion. However, this accessory’s DB-9 connector must be connected to a proprietary base within the racing wheel or else it fails to work. So as a way to circumvent this annoying problem, Parts Not Included’s Dave Madison created his own custom adapter, which translates the signals from the shifter into commands over a USB port on the host PC.
To begin this endeavor, Madison purchased a DB-9 connector with the rear leads exposed, and after quickly modifying them, plugged the X/Y axis wires into analog input pins and connected the binary reverse pin into a digital input pin on the Arduino Leonardo. In terms of software, this setup requires both the Arduino Joystick library and the Sim Racing library. The latter converts X/Y values into shifter positions in order to determine the current gear, while the former communicates with the host as an emulated HID device.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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With the update to version 102, Firefox now automatically strips tracking parameters from some URLs, including those shared on Facebook. However, as reported by Bleeping Computer, it’s just a handful, and in some light, quick testing, it won’t cover all the sites you might visit during the normal course of a day.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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I chose SQLite for the database that supports this dashboard, which in early 2021 when I built this system, seemed like a perfect choice for what I thought would be a small, niche application that my teammates and I can use to improve our blogging. But almost a year and a half later, this application tracks daily traffic for close to 8000 articles across the Twilio and SendGrid blogs, with about 6.5 million individual daily traffic records, and with a user base that grew to over 200 employees.
At some point I realized that some queries were taking a few seconds to produce results, so I started to wonder if a more robust database such as PostgreSQL would provide better performance. Having publicly professed my dislike of performance benchmarks, I resisted the urge to look up any comparisons online, and instead embarked on a series of experiments to accurately measure the performance of these two databases for the specific use cases of this application. What follows is a detailed account of my effort, the results of my testing (including a surprising twist!), and my analysis and final decision, which ended up being more involved than I expected.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Access/Content
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Michael E. Karpeles, Program Lead on OpenLibrary.org at the Internet Archive, spotted an interesting blog post by Michael Kozlowski, the editor-in-chief of Good e-Reader. It concerns Amazon and its audiobook division, Audible:
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Programming/Development
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The first step to eliminate bugs is to find a way how to reproduce them consistently. Wait… what?
Test suites are great for that, since they can simulate very specific behavior in a timely manner. IGT GPU Tools is a collection of tools for development and testing of the DRM drivers, and, as such, it can help us to find and reproduce bugs.
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Recently I’ve heard from a friend that his professor simply doesn’t believe that free software should be profitable, so I’m making this blog post.
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Being part of the community, is more than just writing code and sending patches, it is also keeping track of the IRC discussions and reading the mailing lists to review and test patches sent from others whenever you can.
Both environments are not the most welcoming, but there are plenty of tools from the community to help parsing them. In this post I’ll talk about b4, suggested by my GSOC mentor André, a tool to help with applying patches.
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Each “source” in the above diagram represents a single encoder. To the sinks it provides a position and velocity, along with various validity indications for that data. Each has three basic configuration components: where to get the raw data, how to transform that raw data, and the low-pass filter configuration. We’ll cover each in turn.
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The command set wasn’t always well thought out, and then over the years it grew by accretion, with new stuff piled on top of old stuff that couldn’t be changed because Backward Compatibility. The commands are non-orthogonal and when two commands perform the same task they often have inconsistent options or are described with different terminology. Even when the individual commands don’t conflict with one another, they are often badly-designed and confusing. The documentation is often very poorly written.
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Leftovers
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When [bornach] browsed through his office’s free-cycling box he found an old novelty toy that lets you play simple tunes on miniature steel drums. Such a thing is probably fun for about five minutes – if it’s working, which this one wasn’t. But instead of throwing it away, [bornach] spotted an opportunity in the capacitive touch pads on top of those little drums: they looked perfect to be modified into an unusual mouse cursor controller.
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Over the past two decades, Pierre Senges has emerged as one of France’s most important and celebrated writers. At the age of 54, Senges has published 16 novels, mostly with Éditions Verticales, an experimental imprint of Gallimard, the most storied publishing house in France, as well as some two dozen radio plays. Since his 2000 debut, Veuves au Maquillages, a dark comedy about a man with a fetish for women who have murdered their husbands, he has won a number of prestigious literary prizes. Yet despite the efforts of a handful of devoted translators and small presses, he remains little-known among Anglophone readers.
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Cuban rapper Maykel Castillo and visual artist Luis Manuel Otero who helped compose and record last year’s Latin Grammy-winning “Patria y Vida,” a bitter viral rap song that gave voice to the accumulated rage and resentment of some disaffected Cubans, received harsh prison sentences last Friday.
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I think a lot about the lifecycle of websites. I’m frustrated by so much of the short-term thinking I see in the world today, and the way we think about websites is a part of that: it’s “normal” for them to just go up in smoke as soon as their authors stop paying attention. People switch platforms and providers and break links without a second thought. It pains me to see people build websites with no feeling of obligation to them — when you put something out into the world, it is your responsibility to care for it.
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I would like to propose a new term: outrage dividend.
Outrage dividend is the boost in reach that content which elicits strong emotional responses often gets on social media and other content sharing platforms.
This boost can be related to human nature — an outrage-inducing article will get shared more. It can also be caused by the particular set-up of the platform a given piece of content is shared on — Facebook’s post-promoting algorithm was designed to be heavily biased to promote posts that get the “angry” reaction.
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According to The New York Times, some of the employees laid off were involved in human resources and writer support. The report also says that Substack recently halted efforts to secure funding from investors, but that its revenue is still growing.
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Education
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I’m not here to defend him but it appeared to me that he wasn’t necessarily looking to attack or hurt his team (I could be wrong) but to stop them from limiting themselves, to prevent them from settling for less, to force them to push themselves to think outside of the box, to “think differently”.
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In August 2020, Boise State University chose a doctoral student in public policy, Melanie Fillmore, to deliver what is called a “land acknowledgment” speech at a convocation for incoming freshmen. Fillmore, who is part Indigenous, would recognize the tribes that lived in the Boise Valley before they were banished to reservations to make way for white settlers.
Fillmore considered it an honor. She was devoted to Boise State, where she had earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, taught undergraduate courses and served on job search committees. She also admired Marlene Tromp, a feminist literary scholar who came from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2019 to become Boise State’s first female president. Tromp had been hired with a mandate to promote diversity, and including an Indigenous speaker in the ceremony marking the start of students’ higher education would advance that agenda.
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Hardware
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Like today’s Intel-AMD duopoly, the market for home computer CPUs in the 1970s and ’80s was dominated by two players: Zilog with their Z80, and MOS Technology with their 6502 processor. But unlike today, even if two computers had the same CPU, it didn’t mean the two were software compatible: differences in memory layout, video interfaces, and storage media meant that software developed for an Atari 2600 wouldn’t run on an Apple I, despite the two sharing the same basic CPU architecture.
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An Analogue to Digital Converter (ADC) is at its core a straight-forward device: by measuring an analog voltage within a set range and converting the measured level to a digital value we can use this measurement value in our code. Through the use of embedded ADCs in microcontrollers we can address many essential use cases, ranging from measuring the setting on a potentiometer, to reading an analog output line on sensors, including the MCU’s internal temperature and voltage sensors.
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While some decent lasers are out there for under $400 USD, they tend to be a little small. What if you wanted something a little nicer but didn’t want to jump to the $2,000 category? The answer for [Owen Schafer] was to build it with parts he had lying around and a few strategic purchases.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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The number of new infections declined as herd immunity was established, marking a turning point in the effort to stop epidemic polio. The success of this decades-long campaign was one of the greatest US achievements in the 20th century. Not that it did me any good at the time as I was admitted to St Finbarr’s fever hospital in Cork city on 30 September.
When I was released three months later, I was at first confined to bed or was in a wheelchair and learned to walk again with metal callipers on my legs and wearing a plastic waistcoat to keep my back straight. Though my mobility improved markedly over the years, I could not run and have always walked with a severe limp.
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From time to time, there are dubious studies that pop up that I mean to discuss and, for whatever reason, never get around to or, having failed to discuss them in a timely fashion, decide that no one cares any more and don’t come back to. On the other hand, sometimes there are studies like what I just described that keep bugging me, that keep coming back in a niggling fashion in such a way that eventually I just say, “WTF?” and discuss them, even though I probably should have done so a week or two ago. A new study by Peter Doshi and colleagues that purports to be a reanalysis of the adverse events data from the original phase 3 clinical trials of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines that the companies used to gain Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for their products over a year and a half ago is one such study, and last night I just gave in.
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Flint residents expressed disappointment and disgust after the Michigan Supreme Court on Tuesday determined former state officials were not indicted properly—yet again delaying accountability for the city’s water crisis.
“No more excuses. No more delays.”
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Proprietary
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I think what we’re facing is an instance of the Two-Worlds Problem that’s now everywhere in US society. It’s where the vast majority of people are feeling pain from an issue, but there’s an elite that lives in a reality where the problem doesn’t exist.
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Norway’s public and private sector websites were temporarily down on Wednesday following a cyberattack that targeted the country’s national data network, forcing it to suspend online services for several hours.
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The distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attack targeted a secure national data network forcing the temporary suspension of online services for several hours, the Norwegian National Security Authority said.
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Security
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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Now if I break another YubiKey, or brick my phone, I can always generate codes using the secret key, or easily re-add it to my new phone. But also, now a new option is open for me: I can programmatically generate the OTP tokens.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Israeli phone malware manufacturer NSO Group has plenty of customers. Or at least it did until the Israeli government edited the company’s list of approved customers and the US government slapped sanctions on it.
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According to the Republican FCC commissioner, TikTok violates policies dictating the app stores of Apple and Google covering user data. He cites Apple’s guidelines stating that an app developer “must provide access to information about how and where the data [of an individual] will be used” and “data collected from apps may only be shared with third parties to improve the app or serve advertising.” Of Google’s app store, Carr argues that TikTok violated rules requiring developers to disclose an app’s access, collection, use and sharing of data.
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The app is run by ByteDance, a company that is “beholden to the Communist Party of China and required by Chinese law to comply with the PRC’s surveillance demands,” read the June 24 letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sunder Pichai.
“It is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due to its extensive data harvesting being combined with Beijing’s apparently unchecked access to that sensitive data,” said Carr, calling it a wolf in sheep’s clothing. “At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data” such as search histories, keystroke patterns and biometric identifies.”
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This issue is not resolved yet
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Defence/Aggression
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Any honorable foreign policy dedicated to the betterment of the human condition must begin by wresting control of the policy process, from inception to execution, away from the elites who now control it.
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The spate of mass shootings we’ve witnessed over the past few weeks has jolted our minds and broken our hearts. The killings come in rapid-fire sequence, leaving us hardly a pause to catch our breath. In May alone, ten people at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York; nineteen children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas; four at a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and three at a church in Ames, Iowa. Over the first weekend of June, a medley of gun deaths dotting the country’s landscape. Mass shootings, it seems, have become an American pastime.
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Mitchell Zimmerman’s June 22, 2022 column explored a similar theme. This newer column contains significant new information.
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No one who watched, listened to, or read about the Jan. 6 committee’s most recent hearing could possibly believe Trump’s big lie of a stolen election for one second. The Attorney General, acting Attorney General, and the entire top echelon of the U.S. Department of Justice did their jobs, investigated the potential for voter fraud across the nation and came to a unanimous agreement on one thing — there was no evidence of any actions by any individuals in any state, county, or municipality that could possibly affect the reality that Donald Trump simply lost his re-election bid.
Despite threats of physical violence — including intrusions into the homes of voting election officials — the witnesses at the hearing bravely told the nation that they stood their ground, followed the law, and did their jobs. Hardcore Republican conservatives — who admitted they wanted Trump to win — testified that they could not and would not break their oaths to uphold the constitution to cast doubt on the integrity of the American election system for Donald Trump. Even when threatened with dismissal and replacement they refused to claim there was a shred of truth in Trump’s Big Lie — despite his demand that they “just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”
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As my friend and colleague John Nichols wrote right after Tuesday’s shattering January 6 Committee testimony, Donald Trump assaulted his security detail as he was trying to illegally hold on to the presidency. Trump said, “I’m the fucking president. Take me up to the Capitol now!” when he was told he could not personally lead the insurrectionists into the seat of government. Trump then attempted to grab the steering wheel of the presidential limousine and, when he was stopped by Bobby Engel, the leader of his Secret Service detail, Trump tried to strangle Engel.
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A day after a key witness dropped “bombshell after bombshell” during a surprise hearing of the panel probing last year’s insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the committee on Wednesday subpoenaed former White House Counsel Pasquale “Pat” Cipollone for “on-the-record testimony.”
Cassidy Hutchinson—an ex-special assistant to Mark Meadows, former President Donald Trump’s last chief of staff—testified Tuesday that Cipollone urged her to prevent Trump from joining a violent mob of his supporters at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
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Former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, revealed Tuesday to the House January 6 committee that Meadows and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani both sought pardons after the insurrection. Meanwhile, in a video deposition with Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn, who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, Flynn repeatedly refused to answer questions from committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney. Cheney concluded the hearing by presenting evidence of possible witness tampering by allies of Trump.
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A Russian missile strike hit the Amstor shopping center in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, late in the afternoon on Monday, June 27. According to the latest reports, the attack killed up to 20 people and injured 59 others; at least 21 people are still missing. Ukrainian Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky said on Wednesday that rescue workers are still recovering body parts from the wreckage, but there is no longer any hope of finding survivors. Journalist Shura Burtin, who is reporting for Meduza from Ukraine, traveled to Kremenchuk on Monday to cover the immediate aftermath of the strike. Here’s what he saw.
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Members of the president’s cabinet were so disgusted with his actions that they seriously contemplated invoking the 25th Amendment, which would have removed the president from power. The next day, Mr Trump had to be dissuaded from mentioning the possibility of pardons for those who had taken part in the attempted insurrection. Mr Meadows and Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer (who filed frivolous lawsuits about voter fraud and put pressure on state legislators to decertify lawful election results), would later both seek presidential pardons.
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An April circular by the Chinese Ministry of Education on student admission criteria at Tibetan universities has been harrowing and discriminating to say the least.
The circular said that prospective students must state their “political attitude and ideological morality” to be considered for admission.
It also said that students should not be involved in religious movements and students who are proficient in Marxist theory should be preferred.
Since Beijing started occupying Tibet, it has meticulously introduced policies to dismantle the Tibetan education system, which is closely tied to its rich monastic tradition, and has even pulled students from Afghanistan and eastern Europe to Tibet.
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While Chinese-state propaganda says the reason for the move is to get the people away from “harsh weather and relatively backward production and living conditions”, the real consequences would be the end of the traditional Tibetan way of life. Farmers and nomads have made a sustainable way of life high on the Tibetan plateau for centuries and those being relocated are often not given an opportunity to stay or even given full information about what will happen to them as they are forced into a completely alien way of life.
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Lithuania’s National Cyber Security Centre said on Monday afternoon that the most serious incidents had been brought under control, but warned that attacks might continue.
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Contrast that with the cowardice of retired Gen. Michael Flynn, one of the insurrection schemers, whose testimony the committee aired, to chuckles:
“Do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified morally?”
“Take the Fifth.”
“Do you believe the violence on January 6th was justified legally?”
“Fifth.”
“Do you believe in the peaceful transition of power?
“The Fifth.”
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According to ex-aide Stephanie Grisham, she personally sent a text to Melania on Jan. 6 asking “Do you want to tweet that peaceful protests are the right of every American, but there is no place for lawlessness & violence?”
Melania’s response was a simple “No.”
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Instead of exploiting this crisis to expand even further, NATO should suspend all new or pending membership applications until the current crisis has been resolved.
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Stoltenberg could have looked all the way back to when the U.S.S.R. was dissolving, and highlighted a 1990 State Department memo warning that creating an “anti-Soviet coalition” of NATO countries along the U.S.S.R’s border “would be perceived very negatively by the Soviets.”
Stoltenberg could have reflected on the consequences of all the broken promises by Western officials that NATO would not expand eastward. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous assurance to Soviet President Gorbachev was just one example. Declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted by the National Security Archive reveal multiple assurances by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and 1991.
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In Vienna, a total of 65 countries with many others as observers and a large number of civil organisations…
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Sweden and Finland agreed not to support Kurdish militant groups and to lift export controls on Turkey.
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When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, I was easing my way into a new job and in the throes of the teaching year. But that war quickly hijacked my life. I spend most of my day poring over multiple newspapers, magazines, blogs, and the Twitter feeds of various military mavens, a few of whom have been catapulted by the war from obscurity to a modicum of fame. Then there are all those websites to check out, their color-coded maps and daily summaries catching that conflict’s rapid twists and turns.
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The repercussions of the open sectarian war sparked by the U.S. invasion of Iraq can still be felt throughout the region, says As`ad AbuKhalil, partly because of Iran’s inaction.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Environment
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A congressional committee is investigating whether portable generator manufacturers have done enough to protect the public from deadly levels of carbon monoxide emitted by their products.
Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-N.Y., who leads the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, sent letters to top executives at four major generator companies on Tuesday requesting copies of records documenting why they have not implemented potentially lifesaving safety upgrades in many generator models for sale. Maloney also asked for messages sent or received by officials at the companies — Generac Power Systems, DuroMax Power Equipment, Firman Power Equipment and Champion Power Equipment — related to any injuries or deaths connected to their products.
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Just about the time that this half-century-long campaign to enshrine the right to a safe environment kicked off, a story about the horrific violation of this same human right and its cover-up emerged in a community near my own childhood home in Southern California. In 1979, a UCLA student named Michael Rose uncovered evidence of a partial nuclear meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL) in the Simi Hills outside of Los Angeles. The SSFL, formerly known as Rocketdyne, played key government roles throughout the Cold War, developing and testing rocket engines and conducting experiments with nuclear reactors. Today, as the result of a recently published peer-reviewed study that represents the dogged efforts of both professional researchers and a team of specially trained citizens, we have solid evidence of the spread of dangerous contamination from that site.
Working with nuclear safety expert and then-UCLA professor Daniel Hirsch, Rose discovered documentation that the partial nuclear meltdown had occurred at SSFL twenty years earlier in 1959, releasing up to 459 times more radiation into the environment than the infamous meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania. Unlike the Three Mile Island facility, the SSFL reactors lacked containment structures—those tell-tale concrete domes that surround commercial nuclear power plants to prevent radiation spread in case of a nuclear accident.
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Energy
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Higher energy prices are a significant political problem for US president Joe Biden and many other world leaders, who face strikes and protests. One way world leaders might seek to lower prices is work to increase the global supply of oil. Biden especially has a significant opportunity in his hands to boost global production by breaking with Trump’s failed “maximum pressure” campaigns, and ending unilateral — and likely illegal — sanctions against Iran and Venezuela. These potential increases in oil production amount to about 2.6 million extra barrels per day, which dwarfs increases Biden is likely to get directly from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the cartel that coordinates oil production in many countries.
To show the potential benefits of abandoning the Trump administration’s failed policies toward Venezuela and Iran, it is useful to compare their potential oil production to that from OPEC Plus, an expanded and loosely organized group of oil-producing countries. Biden, along with other world leaders, have been extensively lobbying OPEC Plus to increase production. A recent announcement from the group included an agreement to accelerate planned increases in oil production for July and August. For these months, the total production increase will now be 648,000 barrels per day — but this does not represent a new commitment to increase total supply. Rather, increases scheduled for over three months have been condensed into two months, meaning that production levels in July and August will be about 200,000 barrels above what they would have been. The increase represents 0.4 percent of global demand for these months.
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Several environmental groups sued the Biden administration on Tuesday for resuming oil and gas leasing on public lands despite ample evidence that doing so will exacerbate the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis.
“Our climate can’t afford any new fossil fuel developments.”
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Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but the most likely eventual conclusion of changing it from one form or another will be relatively useless heat. For those that workout with certain gym equipment, the change from chemical energy to heat is direct and completely wasted for anything other than keeping in shape. [Oliver] wanted to add a step in the middle to recover some of this energy, though, and built some gym equipment with a built-in generator.
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To advocates, scaling up the markets where companies go to offset their greenhouse gas emissions will unlock billions of dollars to plant forests, restore ecosystems, and spur a global roll-out of machines to scrub carbon dioxide (CO2) from the sky.
To critics, a long history of failed projects suggests that the chief beneficiary may not be the climate — but the bankers and brokers betting that carbon trading is on the cusp of exponential growth.
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Ultimately, the climate ministers hope their proposed package of laws will help the EU meet its target of a 55 percent greenhouse gas emissions reduction by 2030.
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Plans are being made to adapt micro-mobility vehicles to suit existing laws and regulations under the aegis of local governments and the Road Transport Department (JPJ). Upon finalisation, the plan will be forwarded to the Housing and Local Government Ministry (KPKT) as well as the MOT.
Such micro-mobility devices are currently banned from use on Malaysian public roads, gazetted under the Road Traffic (Prohibition of Use of Certain Microbility Vehicles) Rules 2021 and in effect since December 17, 2021. The ban covers mopeds, personal mobility aids (i.e. motorised wheelchairs, mobility scooters) and personal mobility devices (i.e. e-scooters, hoverboards, skateboards, kick scooters).
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If you had ventured down a dirt road running through remote marshland along the Gulf Coast in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, at just the right time back in late February, you might have come across a pit of gray muck. Down in that pit, you’d find a contractor welding a steel cap about the size of a dinner plate onto a stub of pipe jutting up from the mud below.
That pipe was the last visible sign of an old oil and gas wastewater well that once dropped over a half-mile deep into the earth, now plugged up and sealed by contractors hired by the state.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Finance
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The leaders of the seven most powerful imperialist countries are meeting in the Alps. These seven men stand for environmental destruction and militarism like no one else. That’s why protests were g…
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It truly is astonishing to watch the G-7 and NATO summits which are theaters of the absurd; meetings of rouge bandits laughing away while their policies lead to death and destruction on a global scale. Highway robbery does not describe adequately what the US-Europe have done with Russian foreign assets or those of other nations (Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan) at the receiving end of the US sanctions regime. Further, as the United States and its NATO puppets continue to punish Russia for its military activities in Ukraine, the end result of the deadly gambit is to send to the slaughter more Ukrainians as Russia methodically moves to liberate Luhansk and Donetsk, and fortify its gains in the south of Ukraine.
Arsenal of Stupidity
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Like most of the previous six phases of sanctions the purpose of the latest is to deprive Russia of revenues from exports. So far sanctions haven’t been all that successful in that regard, at least in the shorter term. While the USA has banned Russian oil and gas imports to the USA, those amounts and their respective revenue impact on total Russian export revenue is insignificant. Moreover, the ban on Russian oil exports to Europe do not begin until December 2022, while there’s no ban on Russian natural gas imports whatsoever. So little net impact on Russian energy export revenues from Europe either.
The sanctions on oil & gas Russian exports to Europe have been quite minimal to date. Meanwhile, Russia’s exports to China, India and rest of the world have been rising. As have global energy prices in general. With accelerating global prices for oil and gas, and an increase in Russian energy exports to India, China and elsewhere, Russia’s revenues have been actually rising.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman on Wednesday urged the Department of Transportation to levy hefty fines against airlines that schedule flights they’re unable to adequately staff, causing the kinds of mass cancellations that have thrown travelers into chaos in recent months.
“Government has a responsibility to hold these airlines accountable.”
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Armageddon comes November 8. Pundits and progressives have been warning Democrats for months that if they don’t change course and achieve significant legislation promised in 2020, they will go down in flames on election day, along with our democracy. The tone of these warnings is imbued with the implication that the party, and especially President Biden, either doesn’t believe this or that it is flummoxed on how to avoid the calamity. But is this case?
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—Kendrick Lamar, N95
Beware of those saying Putin is a communist. Beware of those saying Putin is fighting Nazis. Beware of those cancelling Amber Heard. Beware of those telling you they are cancelled when you give them a monthly subscription. There is some very spooky shit going on. Socially distance for clarity when necessary. Socially distance for health when necessary. Thank your friends. Thank your enemies but only on the inside.
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In mid-June, the European Commission voted against recommending that Georgia receive EU candidate status, recommending instead that it be granted the “European perspective.” Now, if Georgia wants to join the EU, it will have to take specific steps that, according to the EU, will strengthen its democracy. After the announcement, protesters from Georgia’s Sirtskhvilia (“Shame”) movement led thousands of people in a rally they called Going Home — to Europe. Another rally followed the European Parliament’s official refusal to grant the country EU status. That time, the protesters demanded the resignation of the government — and gave them an ultimatum.
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The new bid for Scottish Independence is started. It does not matter how each of us got here, who had which idea first, what might be a better plan, who stabbed who in the back. It is gone. Let it be.
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In explosive testimony Tuesday, Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, revealed new details to the January 6 select committee about the events leading up to the “Stop the Steal” rally. She indicated then-President Donald Trump and his inner circle, that included personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, expected the event to grow violent and did little to stop it. Hutchinson described how Trump demanded that the Secret Service allow his supporters wielding weapons to enter the Ellipse in order to make his rally seem better attended. “They’re not here to hurt me,” Trump said in dismissing safety concerns, Hutchinson testified. We feature her extended remarks.
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Minutes after rioters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows seemed unperturbed and reluctant to act, according to live testimony from his former aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, at the public hearing on Tuesday. Then-President Donald Trump, rather than calling off his supporters, defended their chants to hang Vice President Mike Pence for validating the election results. “I remember thinking in that moment, Mark needs to snap out of this,” recalled Hutchinson. “I don’t know how to snap him out of this, but he needs to care.” Hutchinson also notes Meadows and Rudy Giuliani both sought pardons after the insurrection. Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney presented evidence of possible witness tampering by allies of Trump. Meanwhile, in a video deposition with Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn, who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, Flynn repeatedly refused to answer questions from Cheney.
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In one of the most dramatic revelations at Tuesday’s hearing of the House committee investigating the January 6 attack, star witness Cassidy Hutchinson described how then-President Trump intended to join his supporters in the march to the Capitol and lunged at his Secret Service agent, who tried to prevent him from doing so, and grabbed the steering wheel of the presidential limousine, before he was driven back to the White House. Hutchinson was aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows at the time. She also describes another temper tantrum by the president weeks earlier, after Attorney General Bill Barr said publicly there was no election fraud, saying Trump threw a plate of food, leaving “ketchup dripping down the wall.”
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State Rep. Delia Ramirez trounced Chicago Alderman Gil Villegas in the Democratic primary for Illinois’ newly drawn and solidly blue 3rd Congressional District, besting an influx of spending by billionaire-backed organizations working to defeat progressive candidates nationwide.
“Tonight, the Illinois 3rd Congressional District has spoken—we are rooted and we are ready,” Ramirez said after she was officially declared the winner. As of this writing, Ramirez leads Villegas by a margin of 65.8% to 23.7%.
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A former leftwing guerrilla—Gustavo Petro—has been elected to Colombia’s highest office.
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One does not need to look very far into the past to find evidence of collective targeting of known political detractors. For example, over 4,000 activists, leaders, and presidential candidates of the first openly leftist and oppositional party, Unión Patriótica, were systematically assassinated after achieving some initial electoral success at the local and regional level in the mid-1980s. Supporters, too, were targeted. Civilians were forcibly displaced or killed by illegal armed groups with the explicit goal of violently reorganizing districts and municipalities to deny Unión Patriótica a local or regional base of support. Traditional political elites and their wealthy patrons made it clear that alternative political projects grounded in social justice were not to be tolerated even in a competitive democracy.
And while the threat of political violence has not ceased, analyst and current Colombian Senator Ariel Ávila recently remarked that the struggle to create a political space for the excluded and marginalized has resulted in the ascendancy of Petro and Márquez. As an Afro-Colombian environmental activist, Márquez and her connections to grassroots social movements increased Afro-Colombian and indigenous voter participation in the Pacific region of the country, ensuring a strong base of support for an egalitarian political program, that guaranteed their victory.
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Civil rights advocates on Tuesday decried the U.S. Supreme Court’s reinstatement of Louisiana’s Republican-drawn congressional map, which a federal judge said will cause “irreparable harm” to Black voters in the 2022 midterm elections and likely violates the Voting Rights Act.
“We won’t stop fighting in court until Louisiana has a fair congressional map.”
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Warning that U.S. President Joe Biden may lose his chance to confirm more circuit and district court nominees after the midterm elections if Republicans win a Senate majority, legal scholars are calling on Democratic lawmakers to immediately ramp up confirmations of federal judges.
“It’s lunacy not to fill [judicial seats] immediately and by any means necessary.”
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U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday endorsed a pair of House Democrats in their primaries against challengers backed by the nation’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby—which is spending heavily to defeat progressive candidates who advocate for Palestinian rights.
Sanders (I-Vt.) endorsed Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Andy Levin, both of Michigan, tweeting that the former “has taken on powerful special interests and fought for working people” while the latter “is a strong labor voice” who is “taking on right-wing-funded super PACs.”
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Misinformation/Disinformation
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Such herbs have become the focal point of a new wave of discourse on TikTok focusing on herbs that can induce abortion. In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned last Friday — prompting an onslaught of terror and protests from reproductive rights advocates across the country — people on social media are taking matters into their own hands by offering grassroots solutions to those seeking abortions. Some of these solutions, such as a TikTok trend set to the Chainsmokers’ “Paris,” with women in blue states offering to help people in red states procure abortions, have been helpful; yet medical experts are concerned about the growing trend of TikTok creators promoting these herbal abortifacients — some of which can also have devastating health effects.
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However, social media is structured in a way that encourages one’s interactions with an issue to awareness alone. It is designed to encourage users to spend hours scrolling through automated feeds. Users can like a single post from an eco-influencer and feel the gratification of having taken a stand against climate change, then move on to watching cat videos.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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And the ease with which Meta seems to have simply flipped a switch to block information about abortion pills reminds us that the company can effectively cut off access to harmful postings if it wants to — like, for example, expressions of hate. Over 40% of Americans have been victims of online harassment, according to a 2021 Pew Research survey. So what seems to be missing here is the will to better protect users from abuse. (Meta, for its part, claims to work hard to remove such content.)
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On the one hand, content moderation at the scale modern social media companies operate at is an impossible nightmare. Companies are always going to lack the staff and resources to do it well (raising questions about the dangers of automation at scale), and they’re always going to screw things up for reasons well discussed.
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“He could be seen sharing Tibet’s history and authentic Tibetan culture with the tourists, so I think that may be the reason for his arrest. His family has no idea where he is imprisoned at the moment,” the source has said, requesting anonymity for safety reasons.
His persecution is seen as arbitrary and in keeping with China’s ongoing crackdown on intellectuals, artists, critics, and activists who are seen as antithetical to President Xi Jinping’s sweeping Sinicization drive being implemented across the Tibetan Plateau.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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As we’ve discussed before, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas really does not like the “actual malice” standard required to make a defamation claim against a public figure, as laid out in the extremely important NY Times v. Sullivan case. The actual malice standard confuses many people, because it’s not actually about malice. The standard is that for there to be defamation of a public figure, it needs to be expressed while the speaker knows that the claims are false, or with “reckless disregard” for whether it’s true. And even the “reckless disregard” part is often misunderstood. It’s a much higher bar than simply being negligent. It means that that the speaker had serious doubts at the time of expression that the speech was false.
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Bottom line: You cannot trust its future rulings to be based on neutrality. Respect for it, chiefly among the most vulnerable and who conservatives sneeringly describe as “libs,” has vanished.
The court has been slip-sliding in the direction of extremist Republican conservatism since its opening in October with a new 6-3 right-wing majority, three of the six appointed by Trump, the disgraceful and disgraced nemesis of most Americans.
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A Mexican reporter was shot dead on Wednesday in the violence-plagued northeastern state of Tamaulipas — the 12th journalist killed so far in a particularly bloody year for the country’s press.
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The high-profile Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial ended with what seemed like a split decision: Both were found to have defamed each other. But with the jury awarding millions more in damages to Depp than to Heard, the outcome suggests that she defamed him more. The chilling effect of the ruling on survivors of domestic violence who want to speak out against their abusers is clear, but the damage from the case extends to all issues that depend on unfettered discussion in a free press.
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The way the JCPA is supposed to work is by giving an antitrust exemption to news sites, allowing them to negotiate as a bloc with sites like Google and Facebook, with the goal of getting paid every time those sites link to news articles. There are a few major, fundamental problems with that premise. For one, creating a new cartel to deal with existing monopolists is not competition, it’s the opposite. For another, creating an implicit right to control linking in any context won’t preserve journalism, it will let it rot away. Finally, the focus on getting paid for links makes even less sense when the problem, historically, has been the domination of the digital ad market by a few huge players. The Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act actually targets that specific problem much more effectively than the JCPA.
As mentioned above, competition doesn’t flourish when a group—even one of smaller newsrooms—are allowed to form a cartel. It just means that both sides of this fight are now huge. Proposed changes to the bill will limit the organizations that could get compensation under this scheme to publications with 1,500 employees or fewer. But that won’t preserve competition, because the loss of local and independent news has already happened. Many smaller publications are now owned or backed by large corporations and venture capital funds. And the industry is consolidating at a rapid rate.
The large corporations and investment vehicles that dominate online journalism took advantage of the mess created by Facebook and Google’s ad domination. And the JCPA would allow them to reap the rewards of buying up, laying off, and click-baiting these newsrooms. That’s infuriating.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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“We are the actors, stunt performers, and stable hands of Medieval Times in Lyndhurst, New Jersey joining together in union to create a fairer, safer, and more enjoyable workplace,” the group said in a statement. “With a supermajority of support, we are excited to be forming our union with the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA).”
The American Guild of Variety Artists, which is affiliated with the AFL-CIO, represents live act performances at theaters and theme parks across the country. Notable performers they represent include entertainers at Disneyland and the Radio City Rockettes.
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Bruce’s Beach was purchased in 1912 to create a beach resort for black people at a time of racial segregation in southern California.
Located in the desirable city of Manhattan Beach, it was forcibly taken by the local council in 1924.
But on Tuesday, Los Angeles officials voted to return the land to the family.
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A Kansas City hospital system on Wednesday reversed its decision to stop providing emergency contraceptives like Plan B following assurances from Missouri’s top elected officials that the morning-after pill does not violate the state’s restrictive abortion ban.
“First it’s abortion. Next it’s contraception.”
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Roe v. Wade is now history, and with it the U.S. constitutional protection of a woman’s right to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term. A half century of medical practice, normative evolution, and legal precedent has been overturned by a Supreme Court stacked with conservative, Trump-appointed judges who have long made clear their opposition to the idea that reproductive freedom is a fundamental right.
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Make no mistake. This Supreme Court decision is a huge disaster for women, minorities, and all those who want a freer and more democratic society.
The wording of the ruling, penned by the fanatic Federalist Society Catholic theocrat Samuel Alito, makes it clear that it is based upon an “original intent” concept of the Constitution where laws are evaluated for their constitutionality on the basis of what the white property-owning, and in many cases slave-owning founding men of the Constitutional Assembly believed to be the natural order of things. That so-called natural order included slavery, the genocide of North America’s Indigenous people, second-class status of women and freed blacks, the denial of voting rights to people — even white people — who owned no property, and the right to a public trial by a jury of one’s peers (except to those excluded populations, who weren’t even allowed in courtroom public galleries, much less in a jury box).
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Appalled by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade and concerned about the dark money-fueled global assault on abortion rights, advocacy groups from 28 European countries demanded Tuesday that their leaders take immediate steps to shield and strengthen access to reproductive care throughout the continent.
Expressing “profound solidarity” with people across the U.S. who will be or already have been harmed by the right-wing high court’s unpopular ruling, the groups noted in an open letter that several European countries—including Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, and Poland—also have in place “highly restrictive laws in disregard of international human rights obligations and public health evidence.”
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Less than a week after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, women across the United States are facing the painful chaos and confusion of a new reality in which they are being forced to continue unwanted pregnancies as clinics end abortion services and struggle to help patients get the care they need.
The court’s ruling last Friday immediately triggered abortion bans in nine states that are home to 16 million women of reproductive age. Lower courts have blocked the bans for now in two of them, Louisiana and Utah, but several more states are expected to impose bans soon.
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The Dobbs opinion overturning Roe. v. Wade is another marker on the road to where Republicans and the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative super-majority are taking the country. Millions of Americans cheer the journey. But a lot of them won’t like the final destination.
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Let’s not kid ourselves. The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade, is going to be a catastrophe. There’s a German proverb that translates roughly as “the soup is never eaten as hot as it’s cooked,” meaning things won’t be as bad as you fear. Sometimes that’s true, but it wasn’t for the Germans, and it won’t be for us.
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Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe vs. Wade, I want to share my experience as a woman who had to turn to an illegal abortion to end a pregnancy. The experience was frightening, degrading, and painful. It was frightening because I was not sure who would be preforming the abortion. Degrading because I was blindfolded during the procedure. Painful because the abortion was performed with very little anesthesia. No woman should have to go through what I went through, and no woman should have to overcome barriers to obtain a safe abortion.
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Less than three hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Elyssa Klann sat down at her kitchen table, her phone plugged into the wall, two laptops open in front of her. Klann is a psychologist who has volunteered for the All-Options Talkline for seven years, supporting callers who are making decisions about their pregnancies and connecting them to resources when they ask for them.
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In November of last year, I froze 16 eggs. I had met the man I now plan to marry a few months earlier, but if the relationship hadn’t worked out, I was prepared to become a solo parent. I was tired of feeling like I’d fucked up by failing to find a suitable romantic partner during my peak childbearing years. The women of my generation have more education and workforce participation (pre-pandemic) than at any time in history, but none of the social affirmation or infrastructure to support our ambitions. Even the heterosexual millennial men who are our peers aren’t necessarily interested in a financially or professionally successful partner if she doesn’t put his career first. And I wasn’t terribly interested in doing that.1
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Indigenous leaders on Wednesday condemned a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allows authorities in Oklahoma and other states to prosecute certain crimes on sovereign tribal land, a narrowing of a landmark 2020 decision affirming Native treaty rights.
“The right and power of tribes to rule themselves is being dismissed in favor of state power.”
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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I’m continuing my coverage of dangerous Internet bills in the California legislature. This job is especially challenging during an election year, when legislators rally behind the “protect the kids” mantra to pursue bills that are likely to hurt, or at least not help, kids. Today’s example is AB 2273, the Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (AADC),
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Donald Trump promised to take the social media world by storm with his Truth Social Twitter-clone for the MAGA world. “Free speech!” he claimed as he banned anyone who criticized him. Of course, from the beginning, many suspected that this was all a very sketchy grift, using a SPAC to try to cash in on gullible MAGA folks willing to pump up a shell company stock well beyond what it could possibly be worth.
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The world can be an awful, horrible place. Lately, it feels like, in America, things are only getting more difficult. And, because my country loves its scapegoats, the internet has been routinely blamed for all the country’s, perhaps the world’s, ills. Insurrections, political radicalization, obesity, poor socialization, literally any sub-optimal thing to do with children: blame the internet.
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The terrible, awful, no good, horrible plans to regulate the internet keep coming faster and furiouser these days. So, it’s worth remembering a time back when Congress passed one of the worst laws about the internet: the Communications Decency Act. Yes, these days we talk about the CDA more reverently, but that’s only because we’re talking about the one part of it that wasn’t declared unconstitutional: Section 230. Section 230, of course, was never even supposed to be a part of the CDA in the first place. It was crafted by then Representatives Chris Cox and Ron Wyden as an alternative approach to the ridiculousness that was coming out of Senator James Exon in the Senate.
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom does not seem like a happy man right now. After accusing two of his former colleagues of facilitating Chinese spying, Dotcom says that a report is being produced to show that mass infringement is taking place on Mega, a company he co-founded. Surprisingly, he says it will include live pirate links to content posted by Mega users.
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The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, the world’s most powerful anti-piracy coalition, has announced further expansion. ACE/MPA chief Charles Rivkin says the addition of two new members – Hong Kong-based streaming platform Viu and Thailand’s leading cable satellite TV provider True Visions – will strengthen ACE’s global reach. But the coalition doesn’t plan to stop there.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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There’s a small patch of grass alongside the Djerring trail just after the Huntingdale station car park, almost every time I ride past during the day I can see a couple of pairs of Galahs[1] foraging around, probably digging up the roots of the grass. Sometimes just a pair, other times one or two groups of three or four, today was a small flock of nine, and the closest less than a metre from the path. They look up when I ride past, but barely stop feeding . I guess they’d pay more attention if I stopped
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The moment when someone asks me for how I’m feeling, and then it’ll take me serveal minutes to figure out how I’m actually feeling, and to think about if I’m ok to express how I’m fine with expressing for some other minutes.
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Only a couple of days after the winter solstice and its still very dark when we get up in the morning, the sun doesn’t rise until after 7.30.
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Technical
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I just discovered the Berty messengers. It’s an open-source (Apache 2.0 & MIT) offline-first messenger that looks like it has a lot more potential and polish than others. A messenger designed to function even without an internet connection, falling back to Blutooth to connect devices directly.
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At The Enterprise, QA (Quality Assurance) asked if they could have a tool that starts all our stuff up so they can do some performance tests (there are reasons they’re asking for this, and why I agree with them that go beyond the scope of this entry). I replied I would see what I could do—it can’t any harder than what I’ve done so far [1]. And I came across an interesting bug.
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Firefox [1] was giving me fits. It would work fine except when I quit the application, then it would just sit there consuming over 100% of the CPU (Central Processing Unit) (not hard given I have multiple CPUs on the machine).
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Whenever someone uses the term “trickle-down” in a performative (usually economic) sense it invokes a feeling of warm apathy, like a high profile politician promising the passive benefits of his high nutrient diet as he smiles and pisses against your leg.
That being said, there is one instance of trickle-down theory where I do believe that that the benefits are actually passed on from the top to the bottom – and that’s: technology.
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Science
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A metrology geek will go to extreme lengths to ensure that their measurements are the best, their instruments the most accurate, and their calibration spot-on. There was a time when for time-and-frequency geeks this would have been a difficult job, but with the advent of GPS satellites overhead carrying super-accurate atomic clocks it’s surprisingly easy to be right on-frequency. [Land-boards] have a GPS 10 MHz clock that’s based around a set of modules.
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How can a few grams of battery, geared motor, and some nifty materials get a jumping robot over 30 meters into the air? It wasn’t by copying a grasshopper, kangaroo, or an easily scared kitty. How was it done, then?
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Internet/Gemini
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The original web was a revelation. It may be lo-fi compared to what we know today, but it was a dream for academics, scientists, and indie hobbyists. The Internet connected computers and people around the world.
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Libraries helped normalize programming for the web. Then the frameworks had frameworks. And configuration of configuration. Soon frameworks rewrote browser mechanics inside the browser instead of dealing with browser compatibility and shortcomings.
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While we were waiting on our test suites, browser vendors worked together and got their act together. Performance gains, standardized APIs, increased user security and privacy, and native components. The sun rises on the platform.
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Programming
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algorithms, machine learning or not, are already better than people at many things. the main problem is that the current machine learning algorithms are limited to pretty specific domains and it’s a pain to teach them how to learn new things unless you have lots and lots of data. the next big leap for AI would be creating an algorithm that learns how to learn. this means that AI entities would eventually be able to replace all the engineering jobs that were used to create the itself as well as continue to progress at a much faster rate than humans due to various advantages computers have over human intellect.
so what will you do with your life if AI powered algorithms and robots can do anything you can do but better?
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Emacs is a Lisp machine. Lisp is a programming language from the 1950s but it’s good. It looks different from C or JavaScript or shell scripts but just like them, you can make functions, and functions can be marked as interactive so they can be called as commands. Don’t worry, it comes with a huge amount of ready-made commands.
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I can see how that might work. But I’m too lazy to read a whole book to find out how to use soure control because I came to git simply as another replacement for the (many) previous source control things. Conceptually, though, I was reading from chapter 1, but pretty soon with git I found myself thinking “that can’t possibly work” and having to find out some of the chapter 10 stuff. So… I want to read both ends??
I think there may be a pre-book stage that’s important but often ignored. I knew what git was before I used it, but often that’s not the case. For example, today I saw a mention of Jupyter notebooks.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in IRC Logs at 2:56 am by Needs Sunlight
Also available via the Gemini protocol at:
Over HTTP:
Enter the IRC channels now
IPFS Mirrors
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IRC log for #boycottnovell
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IRC log for #boycottnovell
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IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
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IRC log for #boycottnovell-social
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IRC log for #techbytes
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IRC log for #techbytes
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IRC log for #techrights
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IRC log for #techrights
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Bulletin for Yesterday
Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmSGNyqayw9Kb8GtH2D4DicRMEG9NuJ9kQEJo4KgFc1NeH
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06.29.22
Posted in GNU/Linux, KDE at 10:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum
Installing Software in KDE Neon
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: GNU/Linux is easy to use and extend; the above demonstrates how new software gets installed, removed, and updated in KDE Neon
THE ability to install Free software of one’s choice without providing credit card details etc. is something Apple and Microsoft can only envy.
“When it comes to managing software packages, GNU/Linux is in some sense better and more robust than what Apple and Microsoft provide.”We in the GNU/Linux world have long enjoyed the freedom to install tens of thousands of packages, only a click or two away. There’s no need for the command line (unless one insists on using it) and even some proprietary software is suitably prepackaged for many distros. There are numerous packaging methods that have made this possible.
The above shows an experimental distro (KDE Neon, which targets enthusiasts wishing to always use the latest and greatest, at risk of instability). I seem to have stress-tested it a little too much, so there was an error when attempting to retrieve previews of new fonts.
When it comes to managing software packages, GNU/Linux is in some sense better and more robust than what Apple and Microsoft provide. It’s also a lot more secure. In some distros it’s already simplified to the level of “app” mentality (like Android and iOS). █
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Posted in Site News at 10:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 6fffaec6071679dac44c49991e435b3a
Moving While Working
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Avoiding long periods of sitting down is important for one’s health, especially in sedentary lifestyles or jobs
THE notion of a standing desk is not new as it predates computing; moreover, as Wikipedia puts it: There is a significantly higher mortality rate among people who regularly sit for prolonged periods, and the risk is not negated by regular exercise, though it is lowered.”
“In addition, I’ve set things up so that the headphones and external speakers play music at the same time (this means that if I move around I can still hear the music).”I recently started working while standing at least some of the time; sometimes I also exercise while reading. I recently shuffled around my work layout a bit (removed one laptop as well) and reconfigured things for more mobility and movement. In addition, I’ve set things up so that the headphones and external speakers play music at the same time (this means that if I move around I can still hear the music). This is my personal story, I’ve heard many other stories, and maybe it can inspire other people to sit less while still working on the computer/s. The video above is neither planned nor scripted. It’s not edited either and it’s raw footage from a portable, wired webcam. So pardon the low quality. █
Photo (illustrative image) in the public domain
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