GNU/Linux

• Supporting Scientific Training with Cloud Resources | Newsroom

  The team quickly decided to provide the Ubuntu Linux environments within the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Each Linux system provided 16 CPUs, 104 GB RAM, and 500 GB of attached disk space to meet the computational need. Hemant Kelkar developed a custom Linux image with the tools needed for the class including R, conda, and jupyter. Final configuration and testing was completed just days prior to the start of the workshop with 30 identical custom Ubuntu Linux systems ready for student use.

• Megacable taps Oregan Networks for set-top upcycling

  Oregan says that the latest release of the Linux-based Zenterio OS enables UX performance gains, as well as enabling access to premium content applications such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video on the installed base of set-tops.

• Desktop/Laptop

  • Make Use Of ☛ 7 Ways Windows 11 Is Similar to Linux Desktops [Ed: Microsoft is basically copying GNU/Linux or KDE]

    While Windows and Linux have long since been rivals, Windows 11 is more like a desktop Linux distribution than you might think, no matter which side of the aisle you’re on. Here are some of the reasons why.

    [...]

    Linux desktops and macOS have had a similar feature. Microsoft had its own “gadgets” for a while before discontinuing the idea, but it seems to have come back. It’s the latest iteration of an “active desktop” incorporating content downloaded from the internet. It seems that Microsoft can’t give up on the idea as other OSes implement this feature.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ Ubuntu 22.04 Is Unstable & Systemd OOMD Is Why! – Invidious

    Have apps been randombly crashing on Ubuntu 22.04, you leave your system for a bit and all your work is gone, and sometimes even the Gnome shell, well cause is a new tool brought into Ubuntu 22.04 called Systemd OOMD

  • Linux in the Ham Shack ☛ LHS Episode #471: Hamshack Hotline Deep Dive (Part 1)

    Welcome to the 471st installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, we take a look into the amateur radio operator related PBX system called Hamshack Hotline. HH is a network of hams around the world connected with VoIP phones which can be used for ragchew, tactical communication, troubleshooting and more. This Part 1 episode looks at the hardware and software requirements, documentation, initial setup procedure, common features and use cases and more. Thanks for listening and have a great week. Also, try out HH. It’s a lot of fun.

  • FLOSS Weekly 685: DIDs and DIDcomm – Sam Curren, Importance of DIDs

    Sam Curren unpacks for Doc Searls and Dan Lynch why DIDs and DIDcomm are the best approach to identity—and to making people first-class citizens on the Internet. Curren also discusses the origin story of picos and the advantages of nomadic living and hacking.

  • mintCast Pocast ☛ 387.5 – If you were to build a distro… – mintCast

    00:33 Linux Innards
    33:47 Vibrations From the Ether
    42:33 Announcements

    In our Innards section we discuss how we would build our own distro

• Kernel Space

  • Make Use Of ☛ Fwupd 1.7.8 Takes the Pain out of Linux Firmware Updates

    Fwupd version 1.7.8, a tool for updating firmware from Linux, has been released. The new version adds more supported devices and improves existing hardware support.

    What’s New in Fwupd 1.7.8?

    Fwupd 1.7.8 mainly concentrates on enhancing hardware support. The new version adds support for PixArt and FlatFrog devices. There are also a number of bug fixes to improve reliability when installing firmware with certain devices.

    The program can be downloaded directly from the project’s GitHub page or installed using a standard Linux package manager.

• Graphics Stack

  • Collabora ☛ Adding secondary command buffers to PanVk

    For those who don’t know yet, Panfrost is the open source OpenGL driver for the ARM Mali Midgard, Bifrost (and soon Valhall) GPU series. This driver is in a pretty good state already (see the conformance status here). On the other hand, we have PanVk, the open source Vulkan driver), and as can be guessed from the PAN_I_WANT_A_BROKEN_VULKAN_DRIVER=1 environment variable that is needed to have it loaded properly, it is still in its early days.

    My internship, which started in December 2021 and wrapped up recently, was about getting PanVk closer to conformancy by implementing one of the core Vulkan features: support for secondary command buffers.

    But before we dive into implementation details, let’s take a step back to explain what command buffers are, why Vulkan introduced this concept, and what makes secondary command buffers different from the primary counterpart.

• Applications

  • Make Use Of ☛ The 7 Best Command-Line Music Players for Linux

    Linux has a powerful command line, and it is an essential utility for major operations in the Linux operating system. It is particularly useful for system-level administrative tasks such as installing or uninstalling software, folder or file operations, user management, and much more.

    Linux command line also provides a unique and not-so-well-known music player feature. You can listen to your favorite music using music players based on the command line.

    These music players are fast and consume less memory compared to GUI apps. So, let’s look at some of your best options for command-line music players.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • TechRepublic ☛ How to install the SFTPGo STFP server on Ubuntu 22.04 | TechRepublic

    SFTPGo is an open-source SFTP server that is highly configurable and offers plenty of features to make it a viable option for just about any type of business or even home usage. SFTPGo supports a number of storage backends, such as local filesystem, encrypted file systems, S3 Object Storage, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, and even other SFTP Servers.

    SFTPGo is available for Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and Windows. I want to walk you through the process of deploying SFTPGo on Ubuntu Server 22.04, so you can enjoy a fully-featured SFTP server on your network.

  • ZDNet ☛ How to enable Linux on your Chromebook (and why you should) | ZDNet

    A few years ago, Google made it possible to add Linux support to Chrome OS. By doing this, anyone could install Linux apps on their Chromebook and take advantage of the powerful Linux command-line interface.

    For any Chromebook user who’d like to be able to run more standard applications, this is a great way to expand Chrome OS. And, because it’s Linux, there are tons of applications that can be installed. For instance, if you prefer a regular email client, you can install the likes of Thunderbird or Geary. Want a different browser? Install Firefox. Need an image editor? Install GIMP.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install PhpMyAdmin with Free Let’s Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 22.04

    phpMyAdmin is a free, open-source, and web-based application used for managing databases via a web browser. It provides a simple and user-friendly web interface that helps database administrators to query and manage MySQL and MariaDB databases.

  • uni Toronto ☛ In general Unix system calls are not cancellable, just abortable

    One of the common wishes in environments and languages that support concurrency is for (Unix) system calls to be cancellable in the way that other operations often are. Unfortunately this is not practical, which is part of why a lot of such environments don’t try to support it (Go is famously one of them, which makes people unhappy since it does have a ‘context’ package that can cancel other things).

    All or almost all Unix system calls can be aborted, which is to say that you can interrupt them before they complete and force control to return to the program. However, when you abort a system call this way the effects of the system call may be either incomplete or indeterminate, leaving you with either broken state or unusable state (or at least a peculiar state that you have to sort out). For example, if a close() is aborted, the state of the file descriptor involved is explicitly unknown. Only some Unix system calls can be cancelled, which is to say stopped with things in some orderly and known state. Often these system calls are the least interesting ones because all they do is inquire about the state of things, such as what file descriptors are ready or whether you have dead or stopped children.

    Some interesting system calls can be cancelled under some but not all situations using special mechanisms that may have side effects. You may be able to relatively cleanly cancel certain network IO by setting the file descriptor to non-blocking, for example, but this will probably have done some IO and might affect other threads if they immediately try to do IO on the file descriptor before you can set it back to blocking.

  • Linux.org ☛ KOMOREBI – Active Desktop Wallpaper | Linux.org

    Komorebi (koh-moh-rey-bee) is Japanese for the light that filters through the leaves of the trees. This can paint a beautiful picture in the imagination.

    What Komorebi is, is a program to allow for active desktop wallpaper. Which means you can have wallpaper that is visually interactive. Moving wallpaper or live websites.

  • Linux Cloud VPS ☛ How to Install Matrix Synapse on Ubuntu 20.04 | LinuxCloudVPS Blog

    In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to install Matrix Synapse on Ubuntu 20.04 OS.

    Matrix Synapse is an open-source chat application written in Python, used for real-time communication for VOIP services and instant messaging. Synapse is developed to implement the matrix for decentralized communication which can store personal data from the chat history, user data and etc. In this tutorial, we will install Matrix Synapse with Apache as a reverse proxy.

    The installation is very easy and can take up to 30 minutes. Let’s get started!

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Hestia Control Panel on Debian 11 – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Hestia Control Panel on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Hestia Control Panel is a robust, open-source web hosting control panel that can be used to manage websites, mail servers, DNS, and other web hosting functions from one central dashboard without the hassle of manually deploying and configuring individual components or services.

    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 Hestia Control Panel on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ Hostname Command in Linux – 12 Examples with All Options

    A hostname is a name that is given to a computer and used to identify the computer in a network. In this tutorial, we learn about hostname command in Linux with practical examples.

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Ultimate Sonic Mugen on a Chromebook

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

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Make Use Of ☛ KDE Plasma 5.25 Makes Play for Mobile With Graphical, Touch Enhancements, but Will Users Bite?

      The popular Linux desktop has a new coat of paint and new touch gestures, but is it a match for Android?

      The KDE Community has announced the release of KDE Plasma 5.25, the latest version of the popular Linux desktop. The release features a number of graphical enhancements plus improved touch controls.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Cambalache 0.10.0 is out! | Juan Pablo’s Blog

      After almost 6 months of work I am pleased to announce a new Cambalache release!

Distributions and Operating Systems

• BSD

  • OpenBSD

    I’ve used Linux for a while and know my way around it and like system administration, so, to propose a challenge to myself, I’m trying OpenBSD. This is the first ever BSD I use. The closest BSD-like system I’ve used is probably Void Linux, as it resembles the BSDs with the package management inspired by ports.

    I’ve went ahead and got OpenBSD 7.1 and flashed it to my USB drive. I’ve went through the installation setup, I like the question-based installer, especially the fact that you can drop to a shell anytime and resume it. After rebooting, I took care of installing doas(1), and I went with an X session to see if I can get it all working. Compiling my suckless utilities has been fine, no problems whatsoever, the required development packages have been included in the X set and everything compiled
    fast with no issues. X ran out of the box, I just copied my xinitrc over and that was it.

  • New team member: Mehmet Mert Gunduz

    We are happy to announce that Mehmet Mert Gunduz has joined our team. He did a great job modernizing the NomadBSD website.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • LinuxInsider ☛ Ubuntu Core 22 Release Addresses Challenges of IoT, Edge Computing | LinuxInsider

    Canonical is pushing the security and usability conveniences of managing internet of things (IoT) and edge devices with its June 15 release of Ubuntu Core 22, the fully containerized Ubuntu 22.04 LTS variant optimized for IoT and edge devices.

    Combined with Canonical’s technology offer, this release brings Ubuntu’s operating system and services to a complete range of embedded and IoT devices. The new release includes a fully preemptible kernel to ensure time-bound responses. Canonical partners with silicon and hardware manufacturers to enable advanced real-time features out of the box on Ubuntu Certified Hardware.

    “Our goal at Canonical is to provide secure, reliable open-source everywhere — from the development environment to the cloud, down to the edge and to devices,” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. “With this release and Ubuntu’s real-time kernel, we are ready to expand the benefits of Ubuntu Core across the entire embedded world.”

    One of the important things about Ubuntu Core is that it is effectively Ubuntu. It is fully containerized. All the applications, kernel, and operating system are strictly confined snaps.

  • ZDNet ☛ Ubuntu Core brings real-time processing to Linux IoT

    Most of you know Ubuntu as a desktop operating system; others know it as an outstanding server Linux or as a tremendously popular cloud OS. But Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, is also a serious player in the Internet of Things (IoT) arena. And with its latest IoT release, Ubuntu Core 22, Canonical brings real-time processing to the table.

  • Neowin ☛ Canonical releases Ubuntu Core 22 designed for IoT and embedded devices – Neowin

    Canonical has announced the release of Ubuntu Core 22, a version of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS that is fully containerised and designed for IoT and embedded devices. If you have some use cases for Ubuntu Core 22, you can download it now.

    On Ubuntu Core, all of the software is containerised – this is a fancy way of saying everything comes as a snap package. This allows seamless over-the-air updates of the kernel, operating system, and applications. By using snaps, apps won’t run into any dependency issues as they are all packaged with the software. If anything goes wrong with an update, the system will automatically roll back to the previous working version.

    Canonical describes Ubuntu Core 22 as low touch because it comes with enhanced security measures out of the box. These measures include secure boot, full disk encryption, secure recovery, and strict confinement of the OS and apps. Canonical delivers 10 years of updates for Ubuntu Core 22 so once you have it in place you won’t need to mess with it for a while.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Rlang ☛ Communication & Collaboration with Contributors in an Open-Source Organization | R-bloggers

  At rOpenSci, many packages are maintained by volunteer community members, and similarly at The Carpentries lessons are maintained by volunteer community members. We’re very thankful for the effort our volunteers put into that role and our organisations could literally not run without their work. However, sometimes infrastructure changes are decided centrally. For example, requiring two-factor authentication for all GitHub organization members at rOpenSci or overhauling the foundation of the lesson infrastructure at The Carpentries. In this post, we shall share some insights from our experiences regarding how we, as staff members, best support our volunteers through these transformations.

• HaikuOS ☛ [GSoC 2022] XFS : Community Bonding Progress | Haiku Project

  I started my work with moving CRC calculation files from ext2 driver to shared folder (so that it can be used by every other filesystem that needs it) and made it fs_shell compatible. CRC’s are used to detect minor corruption in filesystem and is one of the major features introduced for xfs version 5 as metadata checksumming.

  Being a math nerd I was quite intrigued by how crc’s are getting calculated, so I thought why not study about it in depth?

  I referred to “A Painless Guide to CRC Error Detection Algorithms” book and got basic understanding of how crc is calculated, which polynomials are used, brute force method for computing crc and finally optimised tabular approach.
  Don’t go by book title though, it was anything but painless :’)

  After that I quickly moved to implementing xfs V5 superblock fields, Macros, functions for checksum verification, and other essential stuff.

  Soon I hit a bug in superblock CRC verification and it took me quite some time to get it all fixed, shoutout to PulkoMandy for helping me get all things right in crc verification for superblock and answering lots of my queries.

• GNU Projects

  • Linuxiac ☛ GIMP 2.10.32 Image Editor Comes with a Host of New Features

    GIMP 2.10.32 comes with support for 8 and 16-bit CMYK TIFF files, support for localized glyphs, and many other features.

    GIMP has traditionally been recognized as one of the best free alternatives to professional image editing software such as Photoshop. It is a bitmap/pixel-based image editing software that can be used to edit and retouch photos and create images and animations.

    While the 2.10.30 version released half a year ago was primarily a bugfix release, the new GIMP 2.10.32 focuses on improvements and new features. Let’s take a look at them.

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ GIMP 2.10.32 Released with BigTIFF / JPEG-XL Support [Ubuntu PPA]

    GIMP image editor released a new update for its stable 2.10 release series. Here’s what’s new and how to install in Ubuntu.

    GIMP 2.10.32 comes with BigTIFF file import/export support, which is an evolution of the original TIFF format allowing files bigger than 4GiB. It also supports for importing 8 and 16-bit CMYK(A) TIFF in this release.

  • Taler ☛ GNU Taler Scalability

    Anonymity loves company. Hence, to provide the best possible anonymity to GNU Taler users, the scalability of individual installations of a Taler payment service matters. While our design scales nicely on paper, NGI Fed4Fire+ enabled us to evaluate the transaction rates that could be achieved with the actual implementation. Experiments were conducted by Marco Boss for his Bachelor’s thesis at the Bern University of Applied Sciences to assess bottlenecks and suggest avenues for further improvement.

• Programming/Development

  • Earthly ☛ Validate Your YAML (with CUE)

    I’ve complained before about using YAML when a programming language is what’s needed. But, when you’ve got configuring to do, YAML is pretty useful. It’s so much nicer to read and write than the XML I had to write back in the early days of Java development. But one advantage XML had over YAML was that XML schemas were commonly used and so I wouldn’t get errors like this…

  • Rlang ☛ Exploring your database with shiny | R-bloggers

    Several of my recent blog posts have been focussed on using {purrr} and {glue} to programatically query a database.

    This is something I’d been wanting to achieve for some time, but my efforts got put on hold when COVID-19 came along.

    The general approach is to use a config file to denote the relevant tables and columns, along with the server and database details.

    These then get fed into flexible SQL queries, using purrr to loop over each table then merging the results.

    Over the last few weeks at work I have been refining this and building a shiny dashboard to visualise the data.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Edward Betts ☛ Find link needs a rewrite, the visual editor broke it

    Find link is a tool that I wrote for adding links between articles in Wikipedia. Given an article title, find link will find other articles that include the entered article title but no link to the article. There is the option to edit the found articles and add the missing link.

  • Chen HuiJing ☛ CSS card shadow effects

    Card-style components are pretty much still a thing these days, and there are many ways to make a bunch of identical rectangles look prettier. I’m quite fond of the pop art, or maybe it’s more of a comic book style art direction that uses thick bold outlines and bright colours.

Leftovers

• A confession…

  I have something to confess. I don’t really know how to put this into words but I feel like a failure. It’s not because I have certain expectations of myself or because of any event that happened… It’s just that I can’t keep promises with myself.

• Creative universe

  I have been participating in an annual work-internal project contest (we call it Pet Project contest) since I moved to London and switched jobs to my current employer

• elizabeth hardwick

  Among Hardwick’s most notable contributions to American letters is The New York Review of Books. In “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” a mission statement for the periodical she would launch to such prominence, Hardwick argues for the necessity of rehabilitating the art of aesthetic judgment in literary matters.

• Science

  • Lessons From Deploying Deep Learning To Production

    When I started my first job out of college, I thought I knew a fair amount about machine learning. I had done two internships at Pinterest and Khan Academy building machine learning systems. I spent my last year at Berkeley doing research in deep learning for computer vision and working on Caffe, one of the first popular deep learning libraries. After I graduated, I joined a small startup called Cruise that was building self-driving cars. Now I’m at Aquarium, where I get to help a multitude of companies deploying deep learning models to solve important problems for society.

  • IEEE ☛ What Is Quantum Entanglement? – IEEE Spectrum

    When pushed to explain why quantum computers can outspeed classical computers, stories about quantum computing often invoke a mysterious property called “entanglement.” Qubits, the reader is assured, can somehow be quantum mechanically entangled such that they depend on one another. If more detail is needed, the reader is told that entanglement links qubits no matter how far apart they are—so long as the qubits are “coherent.”

    For the reader, things are far from coherent. Sure, entanglement is an important aspect of quantum computing. But what exactly is it?

    In a few words, entanglement is when multiple objects—such as a pair of electrons or photons—share a single quantum state. Like threads in a tangle of yarn, entangled objects cannot be described as independent entities.

    That explanation might be poetic, but it shouldn’t be satisfying. Things are not so simple or concrete. But with a little bit of high-school-level math (near the end of this story), our intuitions—based on a lifetime of classical physics—can be retrained and redirected just a bit.

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ Lenovo opens first in-house European factory in Hungary • The Register

    Lenovo has officially opened its first manufacturing facility in Europe, to locally build servers, storage systems and high-end PC workstations for customers across Europe, Middle East, and Africa.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ My own drive reliability stats

    Backblaze publishes drive reliability data at scale, but what about a random person on the Internet with his small homelab setup? For all my talk about drives over the years, I’ve never shared my own broad experience.

    These are the drive manufacturers I’ve had since 2017, with failures defined as having multiple ZFS scrubs detecting bad sectors, or the drive outright failing to turn on.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Off Guardian ☛ Pouring Poison and Planting Seeds of Dependency

    However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation, aided financially by the Gates Foundation.

    Since 2018, top agribusiness and biotech corporations have spent almost €37 million lobbying the European Union. They have had 182 meetings with European Commissioners, their cabinets and director generals. More than one meeting a week.

  • Stacy on IoT ☛ Wasting away again in Margaritaville – Stacey on IoT | Internet of Things news and analysis

    I swear at some point I will stop writing about COVID-19, but in the meantime, it keeps affecting my life. I spent this past week holed up in a hotel room in Puerto Rico while taking care of my teenager, who caught COVID on a class trip. And since this is my second forced quarantine during travel, I’ve once again been forced to question why I’m stuck in another hotel as part of a quarantine.

    In the U.S., COVID is clearly continuing to spread among the population. But while on one hand we are told to quarantine, on the other hand we are also allowed to get on planes and travel domestically without having to be tested or wear masks. That said, my focus here is not on our inconsistent (and at times incomprehensible) COVID-related travel requirements, but on our exposure notification programs, because that’s where my personal drama connects with my professional interests.

• Proprietary

  • Krebs On Security ☛ “Downthem” DDoS-for-Hire Boss Gets 2 Years in Prison – Krebs on Security

    A 33-year-old Illinois man was sentenced to two years in prison today following his conviction last year for operating services that allowed paying customers to launch powerful distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against hundreds of thousands of Internet users and websites.

  • Oli Warner: Goodbye Internet Explorer

    But what will people download Chrome with now?

    Raise a glass, kiss your wife, hug your children. It’s finally gone.

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ The death of Internet Explorer has been greatly exaggerated

    The death of Internet Explorer has been greatly exaggerated.

    Yesterday and today, there have been numerous articles about Microsoft “removing” Internet Explorer from Windows (it has never been usable in Windows “11” apparently, but has been “removed” from Windows 10).

    But like other mistakes and cruft, Internet Explorer is a part of the Win32 API and cannot be removed without bricking numerous applications and Web sites, and corporate Intranet applications, so it is still there. You just can’t use it directly.

    Microsoft has disabled about 1% of Internet Explorer, which was the part that you could visibly see, and open as an application. The other 99%, the MSHTML “Trident” engine is still there. In fact, you could write or run a Web browser that embeds it and continue to browse with it now, although that would be a serious mistake due to its infamous security history and incompatibility with standards-compliant Web sites.

    In fact, Windows now embeds MSHTML/Trident into their latest disaster, the Chromium-based Edge, which is packed with malware and spyware directly from Microsoft, including a keylogger trojan called “SmartScreen” and “Windows Defender”.

    In the sense that Windows Defender is a security program, it’s like being accused of a crime as a poor person in America and getting stuck with the public defender, which your county funds 5-10% as much as the other guys who may be trying to frame you. In the sense that it sends your keystrokes and file hashes to Microsoft, it’s malware in and of itself.

• Linux Foundation

  • Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ LightSpeed Studios Joins the Open 3D Foundation as a Premier Member to Further the Vast Potential of the 3D Ecosystem – Linux Foundation

    The Open 3D Foundation (O3DF), the home of a vibrant community focused on advancing the future of open 3D development, announces its growing ecosystem with the addition of LightSpeed Studios as a Premier member alongside Adobe, AWS, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft and Niantic.

  • PR Newswire ☛ LightSpeed Studios Joins the Open 3D Foundation as a Premier Member to Further the Vast Potential of the 3D Ecosystem

• Security

  • eSecurity Planet ☛ Rapid7 InsightIDR Testing & Review

    As companies continue to get breached by the hour, IT and security teams are constantly scrambling their defenses in hopes of eradicating attackers from their networks. The (sort of) good news is that security software and hardware vendors are overflowing with product and service offerings designed to help you. Many of them even promise to keep the bad guys and gals out of your systems 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!

    So all you have to do is get out your credit card, install one of these products and get a good night’s sleep, right? Unfortunately, during the penetration tests we do for clients around the country, we find time and time again that these expensive security solutions have considerable blind spots. Many fail to fully detect even the most basic attacks. And security products also need to be fine-tuned for your environment; default settings will not cover all concerns specific to your environment.

  • FOSSLife ☛ What Does Zero Trust Mean? [Ed: This has been turned into a cynical buzzphrase leveraged by companies that put back doors inside things]

    With the continued rise of security breaches, ransomware attacks, and other cybersecurity threats, now is the time to update and improve your security policies and practices. And, in the context of developing a cybersecurity strategy, you’ll likely see the term “zero trust” mentioned frequently, but what does it mean?

    The zero trust concept has been around for a while to describe strict security and access control policies implemented as companies have outgrown the old, perimeter-based “trust but verify” approach. In fact, NIST released a special publication explaining the basics of Zero Trust Architecture back in 2020. In this article, we’ll look more closely at what zero trust does and does not mean.

  • CSO ☛ Nebulon bakes bare-metal Linux ransomware protection into the bootloader [Ed: As if the bootloader is the risk; this is marketeering from Jon Gold, who came back just for this]

    Smart infrastructure vendor Nebulon today announced that its latest offerings provide newly hardened backups for configuration and snapshots, in an effort to add a new tool to the antiransomware arsenal for Linux systems.

    The idea, according to Nebulon, is to protect against the problem of misconfigured servers and dated server configurations in Linux systems. This is a particularly serious problem in IT shops where configuration and patch management aren’t handled in a centrally organized way.

  • Fear, Uncertainty,
    Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

    • TechRepublic ☛ New botnet and cryptominer Panchan attacking Linux servers | TechRepublic

      Panchan is going after telecom and education providers using novel and unique methods to thwart defenses and escalate privileges.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Panchcan’ P2P botnet and SSH worm actively breaching Linux servers [Ed: Here they go again blaming Go, an actual computer language, and a kernel... for having malware installed on top of it... somehow]

      Researchers at Akamai Technologies Inc. today said they have discovered a new peer-to-peer botnet and SSH worm that has been actively breaching Linux servers. Dubbed “Panchan,” the botnet and SSH worm was first spotted in March and is written in the Golang programming language.

• Defence/Aggression

  • New York Times ☛ Aware of Injuries Inside, Uvalde Police Waited to Confront Gunman

    More than a dozen students remained alive for over an hour before officers entered their classrooms. The commander feared a risk to officers’ lives, new documents show.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Xe’s Blog ☛ Site Update: Salary Transparency Page Added – Xe

    Image generated by MidJourney — hatsune miku, elden ring, dark souls, concept art, crowbar
    I have added a salary transparency page to the blog. This page lists my salary for every job I’ve had in tech. I have had this data open to the public for years, but I feel this should be more prominently displayed on my website.

    As someone who has seen pay discrimination work in action first-hand, data is one of the ways that we can end this pointless hiding of information that leads to people being uninformed and hurt by their lack of knowledge. By laying my hand out in the open like this, I hope to ensure that people are better informed about how much money they can make, so that they can be paid equally for equal work.

    Raw, machine processable data (including employer names) is available at /api/salary_transparency.json. The JSON format is not stable. Do not treat it as such. I reserve the right to change the formatting or semantics of the JSON format at any time without warning. The raw data is in /dhall/jobHistory.dhall in my site’s git repository.

• Finance

  • RetailWire ☛ Food prices are going up, up, up. Inflation is tough, tough, tough. – RetailWire

    The Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday reported that food-at-home prices rose 11.9 percent over the last 12 months, the largest increase since April 1979.

    Categories experiencing the largest price hikes were typically meal staples.

    Among categories seeing notably high inflation in May were eggs, up 32.2 percent year over year; butter and margarine, 20.2 percent; chicken, 17.4 percent; citrus fruits, 16.1 percent; milk, 15.9 percent; coffee, 15.3 percent; ground beef, 13.6 percent; baby food, 12.9 percent; and rice, pasta and cornmeal, 12.8 percent. Food-away-from-home prices rose 7.4 percent.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • AccessNow ☛ U.N. experts at RightsCon: digital rights violations enable and escalate violence during crises – Access Now

    As RightsCon 2022 — the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age — concludes, the work to drive global change continues.

    Access Now welcomes a timely U.N. Special Rapporteur joint statement that draws the world’s attention to digital rights in conflict and humanitarian crises, released at the conclusion of the 11th iteration of the global summit.

    The five U.N. Special Rapporteurs — who actively engaged at RightsCon on June 6-10 — emphasize that digital rights violations enable and escalate offline violence, deepening conflict and humanitarian crises worldwide. In particular, they shone the spotlight on “shrinking civic space and rising digital authoritarianism through internet shutdowns, targeted surveillance, cyber and physical attacks on critical broadcast and communications infrastructure, the use of drones by domestic law enforcement, as well as disinformation and smear campaigns,” during such crises — where they ultimately stressed “the need for accountability under international law.”

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Sonos sends unwanted speakers, bills customers for all of them, and then demands them back for a refund.

    According to US federal law, if someone sends you something you didn’t order, you can keep it, use it, and don’t have to pay for it, so it’s unclear how this is even legal.

    They even sent one customer who ordered five items six of each item, for a total of thirty shipments resulting in a bill for more than $15,000.

    This is actually very easy to dispute. Initiate a credit card billing dispute/chargeback, which is your right under federal law.

    Explain to your credit card company that you did not order all of the products that Sonos sent you.

    Send the card company a letter to this effect and a copy of your original invoice for what you ordered.

    [...]

    You may have to go back and forth with the card company several times explaining the FTC’s rule, but you should be able to chargeback the unapproved amount and keep the stuff.

    Then file a complaint against Sonos with the FTC and your state’s Attorney General’s office.

    When you are done, the unwanted merchandise is yours to keep, give away, donate, or sell. And it’s the law.

GNU/Linux

• Linux Links ☛ Linux Around The World: Australia – LinuxLinks

  Australia is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands.

• Desktop/Laptop

  • Linux Magazine ☛ SpiralLinux is a New Linux Distribution Focused on Simplicity

    A new Linux distribution, from the creator of GeckoLinux, is a Debian-based operating system with a focus on simplicity and ease of use.

    SpiralLinux is Debian-based Linux distribution with spins for Cinnamon, XFCE, GNOME, KDE Plasma, Mate, Budgie, LXQt, and Builder (which uses the IceWM window manager for experienced users to fully configure the system to meet their needs). Each of these spins (minus “Builder”) offers a simplified Linux experience that uses the official Debian Stable package repositories.

    SpiralLinux includes Flatpak support built-in as well as a GUI front-end for managing Flatpak packages. The distribution uses the Btrfs file system which includes an optimal subpartition with Zstd transparent compression and built-in support for automatic Snapper snapshots and even zRAM swap support.

    According to the developer, “Great effort has been expended in polishing the SpiralLinux default configuration for all the major desktop environments using the packages and mechanisms that Debian itself provides,” said the dev when asked “why another Debian-based distro.”

• Server

  • Six Keys for Platform Teams to Operate Kubernetes at Scale – Container Journal

    For organizations looking to modernize and build cloud-native apps, Kubernetes (K8s) has become the orchestration platform of choice. K8s is a great way to provide better service to customers, gain a competitive advantage when it comes to your products and services and speed up digital transformation initiatives with self-service. But building out your development infrastructure with enterprise-level Kubernetes can be complex and challenging and requires a significant investment in terms of time and resources. In this article, we will detail some of the critical requirements that make Kubernetes management more manageable and help your organization put K8s to work for you through a platform approach.

    [...]

    The good news is that with the right approach, Kubernetes is not only good at scaling—it is excellent at scale. Which brings us to our [drumroll please] six keys for platform teams to enable enterprise-grade K8s operations. These six capabilities can help your organization put Kubernetes to use without fear of growing pains, spiraling complexity or unsustainable resource needs. If you bake these six tips into your central architecture and platform, you’ll be set up for long-term success:

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • mintCast Pocast ☛ mintCast 386.5 – Interview with Flathub contributor Jorge Castro

    In our Innards section, we have an interview with Jorge Castro, community manager for Flatpak and former community manager for Canonical.

  • mintCast Pocast ☛ mintCast 387 – The Curious Case of Debian Downloads

    First up in the news: NVIDIA is transitioning, Debian talks non-free, Ubuntu has new ISOs and Docker news.

    In security and privacy: Intel has more microcode

    Then in our Wanderings: Joe lost the election, Norbert watches sci-fi and Bill sets up NextCloud.

  • Video ☛ If you’re thinking of buying an HP Dev One, watch this video first. – Invidious [Ed: HP gives a whole lots of vloggers laptops as bribes for "reviews"; bloggers also]

    I went HANDS-ON with the HP Dev One and I was SHOCKED by my time with it. It’s a brilliant piece of kit running one of the best Linux distros out there.

  • Jupiter Broadcasting ☛ Make it so, Dev One! | Coder Radio 470 [Ed: It'll be hard to know if this product is genuinely good as all the reviewers so far are bribed]

    From preinstalled Linux Pop!OS to a tuned Linux keyboard with a Super key, HP Dev One is designed with powerful features and tools to help you code your way.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) ☛ Microconferences at Linux Plumbers Conference: Real-time and Scheduling – Linux Plumbers Conference 2022

    Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 is pleased to host the Real-time and Scheduling Microconference

    The real-time and scheduling micro-conference joins these two intrinsically connected communities to discuss the next steps together.

    Over the past decade, many parts of PREEMPT_RT have been included in the official Linux codebase. Examples include real-time mutexes, high-resolution timers, lockdep, ftrace, RCU_PREEMPT, threaded interrupt handlers and more. The number of patches that need integration has been significantly reduced, and the rest is mature enough to make their way into mainline Linux.

  • LWN ☛ CFP for the Kernel and Maintainers Summits [LWN.net]

    The 2022 Kernel Summit and Maintainers Summit will be held in Dublin; the Kernel Summit will run as part of the Linux Plumbers Conference (September 12-14) while the Maintainers Summit will be on September 15. The call for proposals for both events has been posted. The deadline for the Kernel Summit is tight (June 19), so this is not the time for anybody wanting to speak to procrastinate.

• Applications

  • Status update, June 2022 · emersion

    Yesterday I’ve finally finished up and merged push notification support for the soju IRC bouncer and the goguma Android client! Highlights & PM notifications should now be delivered much more quickly, and power consumption should go down. Additionally, the IRC extension isn’t tied to a proprietary platform (like Google or Apple) and the push notification payloads are end-to-end encrypted. If you want to read more about the technical details, have a look at the IRCv3 draft.

    In the Wayland world, we’re working hard to get ready for the next wlroots release. We’ve merged numerous improvements for the scene-graph API, xdg-shell v3 and v4 support has been added (to allow xdg-popups to change their position), and a ton of other miscellaneous patches have been merged. Special thanks to Kirill Primak, Alexander Orzechowski and Isaac Freund!

    I’ve also been working on various Wayland protocol bits. The single-pixel-buffer extension allows clients to easily create buffers with a single color instead of having to go through wl_shm. The security-context extension will make it possible for compositors to reliably detect sandboxed clients and apply special policies accordingly (e.g. limit access to screen capture protocols). Thanks for xdg-shell capabilities clients will be able to hide their maximize/minimize/fullscreen buttons when these actions are not supported by the compositor. Xaver Hugl’s content-type extension will enable rules based on the type of the content being displayed (e.g. enable adaptive sync when a game is displayed, or make all video player windows float). Last, I’ve been working on some smaller changes to the core protocol: a new wl_surface.configure event to atomically apply a surface configuration, and a new wl_surface.buffer_scale event to make the compositor send the preferred scale factor instead of letting the clients pick it.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Use Wget to Download Files on Linux

    GNU/Linux has many practical uses. You can easily handle all your transactions via the terminal. If you’ve read Linux-related instructions or watched videos, you must have come across the wget command. It is very easy to use and works by taking parameters.

    For example, if you know the direct download link of the file you want to download, it is possible to download this file from the console with the help of the wget command without using any extra programs or needing a browser.

    Here’s everything you need to know about the wget command including some practical examples.

  • OSTechNix ☛ Create Directories Named With Current Date / Time / Month / Year In Linux [Ed: Updated]

    Did you know we can create directories or files named with current date, time, month, and year from command line? Yes! This tutorial explains how to create a directory or file with current timestamp in the name in Linux.

    This will be helpful when you want to save something, for example photos, in directories named with date when they are actually taken. For example, if the photos were taken on October 16, 1984, you can create a folder named “16-10-1984″.

  • H2S Media ☛ How to install WPS Office on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy – Linux Shout

    Are you looking for steps to install free Office Suite WPS Office on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish Linux using the command terminal? Here is the tutorial for it.

    There is easy to use, free alternative to Microsoft Office known as the WPS office suite by Kingsoft, fulfilling the users’ need of handling popular document formats for a very long time.

    WPS Writer, Presentation, Spreadsheet, and PDF are the main tools that come in this Office suite. WPS Office is offered free of charge in the basic version. Full compatibility with Microsoft Office, PDF support, encryption, and advanced tools are only available when you pay for the software. An overview of the extent to which the WPS Office differs from that of the paid Premium Edition can be found on the Homepage of its developer.

  • Techtown ☛ Ways to Remove PPAs Package Added in Ubuntu Linux – Techtown

    Learning how to remove PPAs Package Added in Ubuntu Linux is a simple step that will help you to have a stable and functional system with only what you need. That’s why I’ll show you several ways to do it, so you have no excuses and can also do it without problems.

  • Linux Host Support ☛ How to Install and Use Ncdu for Better Overview of Disk Usage in Linux | LinuxHostSupport

    The default disk usage command from UNIX based system summarizes directories on trees’ sizes, so it includes all their contents and individual files sizes. But, it is helpful to track down space hogs on your system. In other words, it will list directories and files that consume large amounts of space on the hard disk drive.

  • RoseHosting ☛ 10 useful YUM commands in Linux – RoseHosting

    In this tutorial we are going to show you the most used 10 YUM commands in Linux. YUM is a command-line package management system that is used on CentOS and AlmaLinux.

    YUM (shortcat for “Yellowdog Updater Modified“) package manager is responsible for managing the packages from the YUM repositories located on the server at /etc/yum.repos.d/. In this tutorial we are going to install, remove, update software packages with real example.

    The YUM command examples will be explained on the CentOS 7 OS. Let’s get started!

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Ionic Framework on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ionic Framework on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, the Ionic framework is an open-source UI toolkit for building mobile and desktop applications using core web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Ionic comes with integrations for popular frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue and is one of the more popular frameworks amongst developers today in the mobile applications field.

    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 Ionic Framework 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.

  • OpenSource.com ☛ How I use LibreOffice keyboard shortcuts | Opensource.com

    I have used word processing software for as long as I can remember. When word processors moved from direct formatting to leveraging styles to change how text appears on the page, that was a big boost to my writing.

    LibreOffice provides a wide variety of styles that you can use to create all kinds of content. LibreOffice applies paragraph styles to blocks of text, such as body text, lists, and code samples. Character styles are similar, except that these styles apply to inline words or other short text inside a paragraph. Use the View -> Styles menu, or use the F11 keyboard shortcut, to bring up the Styles selector.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Send Ubuntu Logs to a Graylog Server

    Graylog is a platform centralized log management system. It’s one of the most popular log management systems in the DevOps world with multi-platform support and can be installed in a container environment such as Docker and Kubernetes.

  • H2S Media ☛ Set Up Nginx as a Reverse Proxy For Apache on Ubuntu 22.04

    In this tutorial let’s learn the steps to use Nginx as a proxy server for the Apache web server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for better performance.

    Apache is a well-established name in the server world as a web server and so the Nginx. Although, both are powering millions of hosting servers, however when it comes to performance Nginx is generally faster than Apache whereas the latter one known for a wide range of powerful features and modules.

  • Linux Hint ☛ How to Use the atq Linux Command

    “When using Linux, you will find yourself often scheduling jobs. In that case, you need a way to view the scheduled jobs. If you are a system administrator, this is helpful as you can see the jobs scheduled by all users.

    The atq command displays a list of all pending jobs and their details, such as hour, date, username, queue, and the job number. The atq command mainly works as a supplement for the at command used to schedule jobs, and we will cover how to use the atq command in this post.”

  • Mozilla ☛ How to easily switch from Chrome to Firefox

    There’s never been a better time to switch from Chrome to Firefox, if we do say so ourselves.

    Some of the internet’s most popular ad blockers, such as uBlock Origin — tools that save our digital sanity from video ads that auto-play, banners that take up half the screen and pop-up windows with infuriatingly tiny “x” buttons — will become less effective on Google’s web browser thanks to a set of changes in Chrome’s extensions platform.

    At Mozilla, we’re all about protecting your privacy and security – all while offering add-ons and features that enhance performance and functionality so you can experience the very best of the web. We know that content blockers are very important to Firefox users, so rest assured that despite changes to Chrome’s new extensions platform, we’ll continue to ensure access to the best privacy tools available – including content-blocking extensions that not only stop creepy ads from following you around the internet, but also allows for a faster and more seamless browsing experience. In addition, Firefox has recently enabled Total Cookie Protection as default for all users, making Firefox the most private and secure major browser available across Windows, Mac and Linux.

    Longtime Chrome user? We know change can be hard. But we’re here to help you make the move with any data you want to bring along, including your bookmarks, saved passwords and browsing history.

  • Own HowTo ☛ How to open ports in UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall)

    UFW is a simple firewall management tool that allows you to manage iptables/netfilter rules on your system, it is an essential tool for securing your network. If you are installing new apps on your system that will need specific ports open or closed then this tutorial is for you.

    In this tutorial you will learn how to open/close a port or multiple ports on your firewall on Linux.

  • Linux Hint ☛ Removing Untracked Files Using Git Clean Command

    “In simple words, the git clean is the “undo” option when using git. There are different options to undo in git, such as revert and reset. However, the git clean focuses on removing the untracked files. The untracked files are those yet to be added to the version control, and in most instances, they are the files generated when the code compiles.

    The git clean is an excellent command to add to your arsenal of git commands, and with it, you will quickly and effortlessly remove untracked files. Let’s see how to use the git clean.”

  • Trend Oceans ☛ Display Public IP Address using Command-Line in Linux

    
    There are two ways to retrieve external/public IP addresses for your Linux server or system. The fastest method is by resolving the DNS (dig, host), and the other is by retrieving server data through the HTTP protocol (cURL, wget).

    Today, you will learn how to display external or public IP addresses using OpenDNS and External Services.

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ Boiling Steam: Call for Contributors – Boiling Steam

    Boiling Steam has been operating as a Linux gaming focused publication for many years now (since 2014), and we have had major growth in audience in the past 2 years. We have been featured in well known publications such as PCGamer, Kotaku, Gamespot, and more. To keep increasing our coverage, both in volume and quality, we are looking for new contributors to join our team.

  • Godot Engine ☛ Godot Engine – Dev snapshot: Godot 4.0 alpha 10

    Another couple of weeks, another alpha snapshot from the development branch, this time with 4.0 alpha 10! We’re getting in 2-digit territory, both because 4.0 is a huge release that requires a lot of work, and because we’re committed to providing dev snapshots frequently so that pre-release testers can quickly access the new features and bug fixes.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • KDE Official ☛ Got something to say about KDE? Say it at Akademy 2022 | KDE.news

      Akademy 2022 will be a hybrid event, in Barcelona and online that will be held from Saturday 1st to Friday 7th October. The Call for Participation is still open! Submit your talk ideas and abstracts as the deadline has been extended until the 19th June.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • SUSE’s Corporate Blog ☛ Kubewarden is now part of CNCF Sandbox | SUSE Communities

    This is a great achievement for the whole team and is the beginning of our journey into CNCF. Also, many thanks to the CNCF TOC for the feedback they provided during the project evaluation.

  • Video ☛ How to install openSUSE 15.4 – Invidious

    In this video, I am going to show how to install openSUSE 15.4.

  • Community aims to grow communication, marketing team [Ed: openSUSE uses proprietary software for communications]]

    The openSUSE community has been having community meetings on a regular basis for some time and attendees in the latest meeting have expressed a desire to grow the communications and marketing team.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Fedora IoT Front Page update | ekidney blog

    As part of the Fedora Website Revamp project, I have a draft of the Fedora IoT front page. This page is designed to look related to Mo’s work on the Fedora Workstation front page. A lot of the elements are the same, they have just been adjusted to fit the IoT page.

    The full mockup can be found here. This is just a static mockup at the moment, links will be added in soon!

  • Red Hat Official ☛ How we use eBPF to observe OpenShift network metrics | Enable Sysadmin

    A network flow is the accumulated metrics (such as the number of packets or bytes) of the packets that pass a given observation point and share common properties (protocol, source/destination address, and port). OpenShift Network Observability is a tool that allows collecting, storing, and visualizing OpenShift clusters’ network flows.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Post-quantum cryptography, an introduction

    A new type of computer is being developed that can break many of our existing cryptographic algorithms. As a result, we need to develop new algorithms that are secure against those computers and that will run on our existing computers. This is called “post-quantum cryptography”.

  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 24 – IT Jungle

    If it seems like just about every week there is a security vulnerability within the broad and deep expanse of the IBM i platform, well it isn’t just seeming like that. It is like that. And this week we start out with four news ones that you have to contend with in the IBM i PTF Guide.

  • Ragged Flash: A Smooth Solution to a Thorny Problem – IT Jungle

    There are many benefits to using IBM’s FlashCopy services, which delivers a nearly instantaneous copy of a customer’s IBM i environment. But there are also challenges, such as when a FlashCopy is paired with an IPL, which had the habit in busy environments of throwing the source and the copy out of synch. IBM has addressed this problem with “ragged flash.”

    Ragged flash is one of the new database features delivered in IBM i 7.5 (it’s not available in 7.4). Scott Forstie, the database architect for IBM i, identified the ragged flash as one of his most favorite new database features. During the recent POWERUp 2022 conference in New Orleans, Forstie explained how ragged flash works and why it’s so cool.

• Debian Family

  • GRUB 2.06

    Today’s update on Sparky testing (7) of GRUB bootloader provides a notable change – it does not list other operating systems on the GRUB menu any more…

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu ☛ Canonical Ubuntu Core 22 is now available – optimised for IoT and embedded devices | Ubuntu

    Canonical today announced that Ubuntu Core 22, the fully containerised Ubuntu 22.04 LTS variant optimised for IoT and edge devices, is now generally available for download from ubuntu.com/download/iot. Combined with Canonical’s technology offer, this release brings Ubuntu’s comprehensive and industry-leading operating system (OS) and services to a complete range of embedded and IoT devices.

    IoT manufacturers face complex challenges to deploy devices on time and within budget. Ensuring security and remote management at scale is also taxing as device fleets expand. Ubuntu Core 22 helps manufacturers meet these challenges with an ultra-secure, resilient, and low-touch OS, backed by a growing ecosystem of silicon and ODM partners.

    “Our goal at Canonical is to provide secure, reliable open source everywhere – from the development environment to the cloud, down to the edge and to devices,” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. “With this release, and Ubuntu’s real-time kernel, we are ready to expand the benefits of Ubuntu Core across the entire embedded world.”

  • Ubuntu ☛ What you’re missing out if you don’t try Ubuntu Core 22 | Ubuntu

    Ubuntu Core, the Ubuntu flavour optimised for IoT and edge devices, has a new version available. With a 2-year release cadence, every new release is both an exciting and challenging milestone.

    Ubuntu Core is based on Ubuntu. It is open source, long-term supported (LTS), binary compatible and offers a unified developer experience. It allows developers and makers to build composable and software-defined appliances built from immutable snap container images. The goal is to offer developers a new development experience, getting away from complex cross-compilation frameworks and intricate system layers Application development is the focus with simple tools that can be used across all Ubuntu flavours.

  • Ubuntu ☛ Master IoT software updates with validation sets on Ubuntu Core 22 | Ubuntu

    If you are packaging your IoT applications as snaps or containers, you are aware of the benefits of bundling an application with its dependencies. Publishing snaps across different operating system versions and even distributions is much easier than maintaining package dependencies. Automated IoT software updates make managing fleets of devices more efficient. While you can avoid the dependency hell between software packages, how could you ensure that the diverse applications on an IoT device work well together?

    Ubuntu Core 22 introduces the feature of validation sets that makes IoT device management easier. A validation set is a secure policy (assertion) that is signed by your brand and distributed by your dedicated Snap Store. With validation sets you can specify which snaps are required, permitted or forbidden to be installed together on a device. Optionally, specific snap revisions can be set too.

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Canonical Releases Ubuntu Core 22 for IoT, Edge and Embedded Devices

    
    Ubuntu Core 22 comes as a fully containerized variant of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) introducing a fully preemptible kernel to ensure time-bound responses and enable advanced real-time features out of the box on Ubuntu Certified Hardware from Canonical’s partners.

    New features include remodeling capabilities to allow users to change device IDs so that they can be rebranded, remodeled, or assigned to a different Snap Store, support for validation sets to help users ensure that only specific Snaps are installed and that they stay at fixed revisions, the ability to factory reset devices, and MAAS (Metal as a Service) support.

  • Venture Beat ☛ Ubuntu Core 22 brings real-time Linux options to IoT | VentureBeat

    Embedded and internet of things (IoT) devices are a growing category of computing, and with that growth has come expanded needs for security and manageability.

    One way to help secure embedded and IoT deployments is with a secured operating system, such as Canonical’s Ubuntu Core. The Ubuntu Core provides an optimized version of the open-source Ubuntu Linux operating system for smaller device footprints, using an approach that puts applications into containers. On June 15, Ubuntu Core 22 became generally available, providing users with new capabilities to help accelerate performance and lock down security.

    Ubuntu Core 22 is based on the Ubuntu 22.04 Linux operating system, which is Canonical’s flagship Linux distribution that’s made available for cloud, server and desktop users. Rather than being a general purpose OS, Ubuntu Core makes use of the open-source Snap container technology that was originally developed by Canonical to run applications. With Snaps, an organization can configure which applications should run in a specific IoT or embedded device and lock down the applications for security. Snaps provide a cryptographically authenticated approach for application updates.

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu Core 22 Released for IoT and Embedded Device Makers – OMG! Ubuntu!

    A new version of Ubuntu Core is available to download.

    For those unaware, of it Ubuntu Core is Canonical’s streamlined Ubuntu spin targeted at embedded devices, IoT, and other industrial hardware. It is a containerised version of regular Ubuntu boasting a small footprint, super-secure design, and support for transactional software updates using Snaps.

    Ubuntu Core 22 is the latest release and as you may be able to tell from its version number it’s based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. It is backed by 10 years of security maintenance of kernel, OS and application-level code updates from Canonical.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Canonical updates Ubuntu Core with support for real-time compute in robotics and industrial apps – SiliconANGLE

    The Ubuntu developer Canonical Ltd. today announced general availability of a new edition of Ubuntu Core, its fully containerized operating system for edge and “internet of things” devices.

    With the update, the operating system now supports real-time compute in robotics and industrial applications, the company said. Ubuntu Core is an OS that’s designed for low-powered devices. It’s incredibly lightweight, secure and resilient, the company claims, and it’s backed by a growing ecosystem of silicon and original design manufacturer partners.

    The key characteristic of Ubuntu Core is that it’s fully containerized, with its main components – including the kernel, operating system and applications — all broken down into packages known as “snaps.” Each of these snaps operates within an isolated sandbox that includes the app’s dependencies, ensuring it’s both portable and resilient.

  • Help Net Security ☛ Ubuntu Core 22: The secure, application-centric IoT OS is now available – Help Net Security

    IoT manufacturers face complex challenges to deploy devices on time and within budget. Ensuring security and remote management at scale is also taxing as device fleets expand. Ubuntu Core 22 helps manufacturers meet these challenges with an ultra-secure, resilient, and low-touch OS, backed by a growing ecosystem of silicon and ODM partners.

    “Our goal at Canonical is to provide secure, reliable open source everywhere – from the development environment to the cloud, down to the edge and to devices,” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. “With this release, and Ubuntu’s real-time kernel, we are ready to expand the benefits of Ubuntu Core across the entire embedded world.”

  • New Electronics ☛ New Electronics – Canonical Ubuntu Core 22 optimised for IoT and embedded devices

    The release brings Ubuntu’s comprehensive operating system (OS) and services to a complete range of embedded and IoT devices.
    IoT manufacturers face complex challenges when it comes to deploying devices, while ensuring security and remote management at scale is also becoming increasingly challenging as device fleets expand. Ubuntu Core 22 has been developed to help manufacturers by providing an ultra-secure, resilient, and low-touch OS, backed by a growing ecosystem of silicon and ODM partners.

    “Our goal at Canonical is to provide secure, reliable open source everywhere – from the development environment to the cloud, down to the edge and to devices,” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. “With this release, and Ubuntu’s real-time kernel, we are ready to expand the benefits of Ubuntu Core across the entire embedded world.”

    The Ubuntu 22.04 LTS real-time kernel, now available in beta, delivers high performance, ultra-low latency and workload predictability for time-sensitive applications.

  • Ubuntu Core 22 supports real-time compute for robotics

    Canonical today announced that Ubuntu Core 22, the fully containerized Ubuntu 22.04 LTS variant optimized for IoT and edge devices, is now generally available for download. This release brings Ubuntu’s operating system (OS) and services to a complete range of embedded and IoT devices.

    “Our goal at Canonical is to provide secure, reliable open source everywhere – from the development environment to the cloud, down to the edge and to devices,” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. “With this release, and Ubuntu’s real-time kernel, we are ready to expand the benefits of Ubuntu Core across the entire embedded world.”

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ IoT Focused Ubuntu Core 22 Available Now | Tom’s Hardware

    Edge and IoT device developers have another weapon in their arsenal of operating systems following the announcement today of the latest version of Ubuntu Core. The operating system is Canonical’s latest fully containerized Linux distro for embedded systems, robotss, Raspberry Pi (opens in new tab) boards and other smart applications.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • The DIY Life ☛ 3D Printed Raspberry Pi Case Using The Creality Ender-3 S1 Pro – The DIY Life

    I’ve been using my Raspberry Pi in this case that I 3D printed almost two years ago. It’s been a great way to protect and cool my Pi and I’ve even made up a few other varients for UPS and SSD shields.

  • peppe8o ☛ Radio Frequency (RF) communication by nRF24l01 with Arduino Uno

    To perform communication wirelessly for a shorter distance, nRF24l01 is best to be used as it has effective speed. The communication with this module is up to 10-meters in the line of sight.

    In this tutorial, the nRF24l01 wireless sensor interfaced with Arduino Uno, dealing with RF communication. This tutorial provides the coding, wiring diagram and component list. We’ll learn how to use the nRF24L01 transceiver modules to create wireless communication between two Arduino boards in this article. When utilizing Arduino, the nRF24L01 module is a common choice for wireless communication.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Qt ☛ Tests in Qt for Android Automotive

  • India Times ☛ android: Google Assistant Driving Mode vs Android Auto: What’s the same and not – Times of India

  • XDA ☛ The next One UI stable release might be based on Android 12L

  • Android Headlines ☛ Top 10 Best Coupon Android Apps – 2022

  • Giz China ☛ Best Ad Blocker Apps For Your Android Device In 2022

  • How to crop your smartphone videos on Android – Phandroid

  • Top 3 Ways to Share Live Location on Android and iPhone – Guiding Tech

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ Top 20 Best Horror Games for Android Phone in 2022

  • Gadgets Now ☛ android: How to copy text from photos on Android

  • Android Central ☛ How to use YouTube Connect with your Android phone and smart TV | Android Central

  • Android Headlines ☛ How Container Orchestration Can Help You with Android App Development

  • Express ☛ Nokia beware! New Android phone gets ludicrous features at a low price | Express.co.uk

  • The Register UK ☛ Thunderbird is go for Android – in K-9 Mail form • The Register

  • India Times ☛ Tecno Camon 19 series smartphones with Android 12, 5000 mAh battery launched – Times of India

  • Nothing Phone (1) official picture shows that this is just another Android phone after all | TechRadar

  • TechRadar ☛ Nothing Phone (1) is just another Android phone after all | TechRadar

  • Android Authority ☛ Wallpaper Wednesday: Android wallpapers 2022-06-15 – Android Authority

  • Android Police ☛ Android’s best platforming series expands today with a brand new release

  • GSM Arena ☛ Samsung Galaxy Xcover 5 is receiving Android 12 update with One UI 4.1 – GSMArena.com news

  • Notebook Check ☛ Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite (2022 Edition) launches with Android 12, a healthy performance boost and a free keyboard case for pre-orders – NotebookCheck.net News

  • CNET ☛ Wonder if Your Pixel Phone Will Get Android 13? Check This List – CNET

  • TechRadar ☛ Beware – another dangerous Android malware has had millions of downloads from the Google Play Store | TechRadar

  • The Register UK ☛ postmarketOS 22.06 aims to revive end-of-life smartphones • The Register

    A Linux distro for smartphones abandoned by their manufacturers, postmarketOS, has introduced in-place upgrades.

    Alpine Linux is a very minimal general-purpose distro that runs well on low-end kit, as The Reg FOSS desk found when we looked at version 3.16 last month. postmarketOS’s – pmOS for short – version 22.06 is based on the same version.

    This itself is distinctive. Most other third-party smartphone OSes, such as LineageOS or GrapheneOS, or the former CyanogenMod, are based on the core of Android itself.

    The project is quite different. It uses the mainline Linux kernel, and a standard userland, to support a wide variety of devices. The theory is that not needing a manufacturer’s outdated firmware or drivers means that pmOS can use more current components, direct from the various upstream Linux projects. The project’s own wiki currently lists over 200 supported devices, including phones, tablets, and e-book readers, ranging back to the venerable Nokia N900.

    They’re not all equally supported, though. Most of them can can boot, many have Wi-Fi support, but currently just two actual phones work as phones: the open-source hardware PinePhone and the Purism Librem 5. Even saying that, though, the ability to connect to Wi-Fi and use an old device as a pocketable terminal could make obsolete hardware useful again.

  • Fairphone Easy: a smartphone subscription for a fairer future

    
    The world needs a new business model. The electronics industry focuses on selling new devices as often as possible to make a profit, driving rapid product life cycles, overconsumption and waste. Fairphone knows that while profit is important, a fairer, cleaner future is most important of all; we must move towards a circular economy that makes the most of the resources we have. That’s why we love longevity and design longer-lasting, easily repairable smartphones – while encouraging others to embrace longevity too. After all, the longer you keep your phone, the lower its environmental and social footprint. That’s where our new business model comes in.

    We are proud to announce the launch of Fairphone Easy, a smartphone subscription service that takes our circular ambitions to the next level. We’re giving users in The Netherlands the option to use our most sustainable and modular phone yet, the Fairphone 4 (in green, with 8GB/256GB), for a fixed monthly fee, rather than buying it.

    Fairphone Easy subscribers don’t need to worry about replacing their phone or about fixing it when something breaks. We take care of any maintenance or upgrades needed. Users are also rewarded with lower monthly fees if they take care of and use their phone for longer: for every year the phone stays damage free, the monthly discount increases, rewarding users for taking part in our mission for smartphone longevity.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• OpenSource.com ☛ A beginner’s guide to cloud-native open source communities

  
  Some people think the cloud-native ecosystem has a high barrier to entry. At first glance, that looks like a logical assumption. Some of the technologies used in cloud-native projects are complex and challenging, if you’re not familiar with them, so you might think you need proven expertise to get involved.

  However, looks can be deceiving. This article provides a detailed roadmap to breaking into the cloud-native ecosystem as an open source contributor. I’ll cover the pillars of cloud-native architecture, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and ways to earn more.

  Most importantly, after grounding you in the basics of cloud-native practices and communities, the article provides a three-step guide for getting started.

• Medevel ☛ Waliki: a Flat-file Git-based Wiki engine written in Django

  Waliki is a wiki engine and app written using Python and Django Web framework. It is a pure file-based system that store all data in flat-files. As it is written in Django, it inherits its built-in features as its Advanced ACL system, Django admin, and customizable templates.

• Medevel ☛ Baïkal: Have your own CalDav and CardDav server

  CalDav is an internet standard and protocol used to sync calendars across devices and services. It is often used to sync your calendar events between your calendar apps, webmail, devices and services.

  [...]

  Baïkal is licensed under the GNU GPL v3 License.

• Computer Weekly ☛ The challenge of open source in the enterprise is not technical

  There is no doubt that open source is the future of software development. But IT leaders trying to instil an open source culture in their organisation may struggle due to business practices established years earlier to support commercial software contracts.

  Computer Weekly recently had a chat with Amanda Brock, the CEO of OpenUK about how enterprise software contracts have evolved with the advent of open source.

  [...]

  Brock points out that in itself, open source is not a business model. Managed services provides a commercial wrapper. But commercial open source companies are increasingly looking at SaaS as the direction they will take their enterprise software products.

• Venture Beat ☛ Open-source Mattermost expands workflow platform with 7.0 release | VentureBeat

  Since it got started as an open-source effort in 2016, Mattermost has been building out a messaging platform that has a growing number of use cases.

  Today, the company announced its Mattermost 7.0 platform that brings new voice call, workflow templates and an application framework to the open-source technology. The new release builds on capabilities the company launched with its 6.0 update in October 2021. Mattermost competes against multiple large entities, including Slack, Atlassian and Asana, for a piece of the growing market for collaboration tools. Mattermost has a particular focus, however, on developer enablement, though the platform can also be used for security and IT operations as well.

• Venture Beat ☛ Neon delivers a serverless PostgreSQL | VentureBeat

  The marketplace for structured data storage continues to boom and newcomers are racing to compete for their share of the bits. Today, Neon, a fifteen-month-old startup, moved officially out of its invite-only mode and announced that it will be delivering what it calls “serverless PostgreSQL.” What was once a “limited preview” is becoming an open “technical preview.” Now, developers can build their applications on the well-known and trusted foundation of PostgreSQL with the freedom that comes from the serverless model.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Its FOSS ☛ Mozilla Just Made Firefox the Most Secure Web Browser for All Users – It’s FOSS News

      Mozilla Firefox is one of the most secure open-source web browsers available.

      Undoubtedly, you get the freedom to customize it to harden security, which is why Tor Browser utilizes Firefox at its core.

      And, also one of the reasons why I keep coming back to Firefox.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • 9to5Linux ☛ LibreOffice 7.4 Is Now Available for Public Beta Testing, Here’s What to Expect

    
    LibreOffice 7.4 will be the fourth major release in the LibreOffice 7 series of the widely used office suite for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms, and it will introduce various new features and many improvements.

    While I can’t reveal all of LibreOffice 7.4 features until the final release in mid-August 2022, I can tell you that there will be enhancements all over the place, many of them contributed by Collabora and others by volunteers.

  • LibreOffice 7.4 Beta1 is available for testing

    
    The LibreOffice Quality Assurance ( QA ) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 7.4 Beta1 is available for testing!

    LibreOffice 7.4 will be released as final in mid August, 2022 ( Check the Release Plan for more information ) being LibreOffice 7.4 Beta1 the second pre-release since the development of version 7.4 started at the end of November, 2021. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 7.4 Alpha1, 920 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 220 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

• Programming/Development

  • Drew DeVault ☛ Status update, June 2022

    Hello again! I would like to open this post by acknowledging the response to my earlier post, “bleh”. Since it was published, I have received several hundred emails expressing support and kindness. I initially tried to provide these with thoughtful replies, then shorter replies, then I had to stop replying at all, but I did read every one. Thank you, everyone, for sending these. I appreciate it very much, and it means a lot to me.

    I have actually had a lot more fun programming this month than usual, since I decided to spend more time on experimental and interesting projects and less time on routine maintenance or long-term developments. So, the feature you’ve been waiting for in SourceHut might be delayed, but in return, there’s cool progress on the projects that you didn’t even know you were waiting for. Of course, the SourceHut workload never dips below a dull roar, as I have to attend to business matters and customer support promptly, and keep a handle on the patch queue, and the other SourceHut staff and contributors are always hard at work — so there’ll be plenty to discuss in the “what’s cooking” later.

  • Medevel ☛ JINGO is an Open-source Git-based CMS and Wiki engine

    JINGO is a git based wiki engine and CMS written for Node.js, with a decent design, a search capability and a good typography.

    In this post, we will reveal Jingo’s amazing features and how can you install it on your system.

  • Medevel ☛ Quiki is an Outstanding Wiki system written in Go

    Quiki is a file-based web engine and server featuring a productive source language, markdown, image generation, categories, templates, and revision tracking.

    Quiki is a fully-featured wiki suite and standalone web server that is completely file-based, instead of storing content in a database, each page is represented by a text file written in the clean and productive quiki source language.

    [...]

    Quiki is released under the ISC License.

  • Qt ☛ Qt for MCUs 2.2 LTS released

    We’re excited to announce that Qt for MCUs 2.2 LTS is now available! It is the first release of Qt for MCUs that will be long-term supported; bug fixes for it will be released for a period of 18 months. This release adds improvements to text rendering, new APIs to handle errors in GUI code, new tools to generate C++ from QML independently from CMake, and a new performance and footprint guide to help you get the best results with Qt for MCUs.

  • defragmentation — wingolog

    Good morning, hackers! Been a while. It used to be that I had long blocks of uninterrupted time to think and work on projects. Now I have two kids; the longest such time-blocks are on trains (too infrequent, but it happens) and in a less effective but more frequent fashion, after the kids are sleeping. As I start writing this, I’m in an airport waiting for a delayed flight — my first since the pandemic — so we can consider this to be the former case.

    It is perhaps out of mechanical sympathy that I have been using my reclaimed time to noodle on a garbage collector. Managing space and managing time have similar concerns: how to do much with little, efficiently packing different-sized allocations into a finite resource.

    I have been itching to write a GC for years, but the proximate event that pushed me over the edge was reading about the Immix collection algorithm a few months ago.

    [...]

    On the engineering side, there’s quite a number of choices to make there too: probably you make some parts of your collector to be parallel, maybe the collector and the mutator (the user program) can run concurrently, and so on. Things get complicated, but the fundamental algorithms are relatively simple, and present interesting fundamental tradeoffs.

  • Medevel ☛ Ace: an Open-source Code Editor for the Web

    Ace is a standalone code editor written in JavaScript. Our goal is to create a browser based editor that matches and extends the features, usability and performance of existing native editors such as TextMate, Vim or Eclipse.

    It can be easily embedded in any web page or JavaScript application. Ace is developed as the primary editor for Cloud9 IDE and the successor of the Mozilla Skywriter (Bespin) Project.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ MooseX::Extended Tutorial | Ovid [blogs.perl.org]

      There’s been a lot of work on MooseX::Extended and now it comes with a fairly extensive tutorial.

      The basics are pretty easy to learn, but it gives you a good amount of power. It also allows you to easily define custom versions so you can just slap use My::Custom::Moose; (or role) at the top or your code and it works just fine.

  • Python

    • Story of a space

      In my case the story continued for around 2 hours. Yesterday I was trying to implement something from a given SPEC, and tried to match my output (from Rust) with the output from the Python code written by Dr. Fett.

    • How to create a Modern Python Development Environment

      Although Python celebrated its 30th birthday last year (2021), it has only recently experienced the rapid acceptance, growth, and upgraded development that we’ve come to identify with the language. Many aspects of Python have remained constant since its beginnings, but with each passing year and each Python edition, new ways have come for accomplishing things and new libraries have been introduced to take advantage of those advancements emerge.

      Python has both ancient and new ways of doing things. It is all about how you understand this language and what scopes you find in it. Actually, Python app development is the most trending language nowadays as developers are finding it more suitable for their projects.

    • How To Convert A String To Int In Python

      Python comes equipped with a variety of data types, each of which may be used to differentiate a certain kind of data. For instance, strings in Python are used to represent data that is based on text, while integers are utilized to represent entire numbers. Converting values from one data type to another allows you to interact with the data in a variety of different ways, which may be useful while you’re doing programming.

      The process of converting a Python string into an integer is a frequent activity. The int() and str() built-in methods are included in Python and may be used to make the aforementioned conversions ().

      In this we will investigate the Python int() function, which may be used to transform a text into an integer.

Leftovers

• Vacation #1 and Friendship

  June is usually a very wonderful month for me. It’s even better when your mind isn’t being plagued by the misery and pessimism of the modern web and social media.

• ups, downs, all arounds

  Been having “a go” of it lately (to put it in British terminology). Meaning, psychosis symptoms/ailments have been bothering me, due to a number of issues: the endlessly noisy neighbor (I am seeing about changing apartment units (again) tomorrow, which I hope they go along with), the psych med which I currently take messing with my digestion (causing me to NOT take it, hence the symptoms – I took it today, though), the distress from lack of funds as of late (better budgeting will be happening in July), etc.

• Sweating the small stuff – Tiny projects of mine

  This blog post is a bit different from the others. It consists of multiple but smaller projects worth mentioning. I got inspired by Julia Evan’s “Tiny programs” blog post and the side projects of The Sephist, so I thought I would also write a blog posts listing a couple of small projects of mine

• twoflower

  a week ago i came across a hosting service called “tinykvm” that boasted how it was `hosting for the clueful`. in a way i thought it was a witty advert, and since they offer very small and cheap machines, i decided to support them.

• Tedium ☛ The Immigration Challenges Professional Athletes Face

  I have a sort of weird relationship with borders because I’m kind of a weird dude. As a self-anointed geography geek, I like borders because there’s not a whole lot of geography without them. And while the history behind any given border is often fascinating, I find them as a whole slightly vexing. That any imaginary line can restrict the movement of people, and often nature, is annoying if practically understandable. With borders comes customs and immigration protocols that hamper, delay, or outright deny people the opportunity to pursue their dreams and ambitions. For those with a limited window to take advantage of their skills, like professional athletes, these restrictions can be more than frustrating. They are often downright devastating. Today’s Tedium is looking at the immigration issues facing professional athletes and what this reveals about immigration in the 21st century.

• Hardware

  • CNX Software ☛ KIOXIA XFMEXPRESS XT2 tiny 18x14mm removable NVMe SSD complies with XFM DEVICE standard – CNX Software

    KIOXIA Corporation, previously known as, Toshiba Memory Corporation, has started sampling of the XFMEXPRESS XT2 removable PCIe/NVMe storage device compliant with XFM DEVICE Ver.1.0-standard with dimensions of just 18×14 mm.

    The new storage standard and device are mostly designed for space-constrained applications ranging from ultra-mobile PCs to IoT devices and various embedded applications that may require fast, removable storage.

  • The New Stack ☛ AMD Aims to Break the Disconnect Between Software Stacks – The New Stack

    AMD has emerged as a legitimate threat to Intel’s dominance in the chip market but also knows it needs a coherent software portfolio to supplement its hardware offerings.

    “We are a hardware company, but we are very clear how important the software platforms are to build out the solution set,” said the company’s CEO Lisa Su during an investor conference last week.

    The company laid down its long-term software strategy during the conference, which includes new drivers and middleware offerings to speed up applications running on its CPUs, graphics processors, AI accelerators and networking chips.

• Proprietary

  • Botched and silent patches from Microsoft put customers at risk, critics say [Ed: Delete Microsoft and delete Windows]

    Blame is mounting on Microsoft for what critics say is a lack of transparency and adequate speed when responding to reports of vulnerabilities threatening its customers, security professionals said. Microsoft’s latest failing came to light on Tuesday in a post that showed Microsoft taking five months and three patches before successfully fixing a critical vulnerability in Azure.

• Security

  • Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ SBOM – SB Doesn’t Stand for Silver Bullet [Ed: Linux Foundation admits its approach is more optics than substance]

    They are critical to keep consumers safe and healthy, they are somewhat standardized, but it is a lot more exciting to grow or make the food rather than the label.

  • LinuxSecurity ☛ Complete Guide to Keylogging in Linux: Part 3

    The kernel sets up interrupt handlers by populating Interrupt Descriptor Table, and passing it to CPU (so CPU knows which routine to call on any given interrupt). The kernel also provides a keyboard notification system, which accepts objects of **notifier_block** from other kernel modules; and calls corresponding callbacks on every keyboard event.

  • LWN ☛ Processor MMIO stale-data vulnerabilities [Ed: Intel's defective-by-design chips are a liability]

    The mainline kernel has just received a set of patches addressing a new set of (seemingly) Intel-specific hardware vulnerabilities.

  • Indian Express ☛ CERT-In may float portal for cybersecurity incidents

  • Bleeping Computer ☛ Microsoft patches actively exploited Follina Windows zero-day

    Microsoft has released security updates with the June 2022 cumulative Windows Updates to address a critical Windows zero-day vulnerability known as Follina and actively exploited in ongoing attacks.

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

    Security updates have been issued by Red Hat (.NET 6.0 and log4j), SUSE (389-ds, grub2, kernel, openssl-1_1, python-Twisted, webkit2gtk3, and xen), and Ubuntu (php7.2, php7.4, php8.0, php8.1 and util-linux).

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ M1 Chip Vulnerability – Schneier on Security

    It’s not obvious how to exploit this vulnerability in the wild, so I’m unsure how important this is. Also, I don’t know if it also applies to Apple’s new M2 chip.

  • Arp poisoning attack with ettercap tutorial in Kali Linux updated 2022

    Welcome back, you are reading Penetration Testing Tutorial and I hope to learn lots of things and enjoyed to reading my blog.

    Today I will cover the Arp poisoning attack with ettercap tutorial in Kali Linux 2.0 through these articles.

    If you want to get good knowledge about the arp poisoning attack it’s my suggestion don’t leave the article in middle read complete tutorial for best knowledge.

  • Phoronix ☛ Akamai Warns Of “Panchan” Linux Botnet That Leverages Golang Concurrency, Systemd [Ed: Michael Larabel has officially joined the anti-Linux FUD club (also blaming Go, for totally ludicrous reasons)]

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • AccessNow ☛ The right to lodge a data protection complaint under the GDPR: OK, but then what? [PDF]

    • TechRadar ☛ Myanmar’s ‘digital dictatorship’ aims to criminalize VPNs

      Increasing internet shutdowns, social media blocks, and an upcoming VPN ban: here’s what’s happening in Myanmar.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Facing a deluge of bot attacks and takedowns, Iranian feminists and political protesters say Instagram is silencing them – Coda Story

    About a month ago, the UK-based Iranian women’s rights activist Samaneh Savadi published a post on her popular Instagram account about paternal postpartum depression. Shortly after, she noticed an uptick in follow requests.

    At first, Savadi, who regularly publishes feminist and gender-related content on her account, was pleased. But then, she took a closer look at the recently added accounts. Many of them looked like bots: they had pseudonyms, newly created Instagram pages, no posts. Soon, the requests started overwhelming her page — up to 100 a minute.

    “It was never-ending,” Savadi recalled. She briefly switched her page to private, but she didn’t want this deluge of suspicious new followers to keep her from speaking out. Soon, she made her page public again and was quickly inundated with harassing messages and follow requests.

    It wasn’t just Savadi’s page that saw strange activity. Other Iranian feminist-focused accounts soon started reporting the same pattern of events — a surge in follow requests and messages – beginning at roughly the same time in mid-May.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • AccessNow ☛ RightsCon 2022: from internet shutdowns to digital repression, session videos now publicly available – Access Now

    Last week, June 6 — 10, Access Now hosted the 11th edition of RightsCon, the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age. Throughout 560 sessions, participants and speakers unpacked some of the most pressing topics at the intersection of technology and human rights from ending internet shutdowns to digital repression and resistance.

• Gemini

  • smolZINE – Issue 28

    Ben’s capsule has tons of goodies to discover. Plenty of things to read that Ben has written as well as links to other places with a lot of reading material. There are some programming projects and the capsule is home to MOAR (Massive Online Archive of Recipes).

  • PhD thesis

    It looks like my PhD thesis has been available online on the Edinburgh Research Archive since late February.

  • midnight and emacs

    I don’t think you can log in with a gemini browser (gemini can’t maintain session state by design. I think you can use client certificates for maintining server-side state but whatever). You have to use the web interface for that.

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Public Domain Review ☛ Interview with PDR’s Editor-in-Chief in *Creative Review* – The Public Domain Review

      Last week, Adam Green — our illustrious Editor-in-Chief, and creator of Affinities — conducted an interview with the print and online magazine Creative Review. In addition to the new tenth anniversary book, the conversation turned to the concept of originality and the idea of a more “democratic way of handling art history”.

    • Public Domain Review ☛ *Unai no tomo*: Catalogues of Japanese Toys (1891–1923) – The Public Domain Review

      When Brooklyn Museum Curator of Ethnology Stewart Culin visited Japan for the first time in the fall of 1909, he escaped from the harangues of curio dealers by asking them to bring him a traditional children’s toy called burri-burri. Culin knew this rare and obscure object only from a specimen in Tokyo’s Imperial Museum and another owned by the collector Seifu Shimizu. Culin’s request to the dealers quickly confirmed the toy’s rarity, as neither he nor any of his numerous assistants were ever offered one. In the end, Culin asked Shimizu to make him a copy to bring back to Brooklyn.

      Only on a subsequent trip to Japan in 1912 did Culin secure an original, from an old shop on Kyoto’s famed Shijo Street. It bore the dim painted traces of pines and storks beneath its patinaed surface, complete with a plaited cord of knotted and tasseled red silk, and was accompanied by a pair of small wooden disks. The only lore that the shop owner could provide Culin was that the burri-burri had been used in an ancient game. The designs seemed to resemble the emblem associated with the Boys Festival, and also with traditional New Year’s toys — battledores and shuttlecocks.

GNU/Linux

• Applications

  • Some Open Source Picks

    There are some great standalone RSS readers for Android but I got slightly tired of pulling out my phone when I was at my computer to catch up on news and blogs. I already had a VPS that wasn’t seeing a ton of use and had heard people talking about FreshRSS so I figured why not give it a try.

    Setup was straightforward, though anyone who hasn’t set up a web server before or isn’t familiar with Docker will have to do a bit of learning (you could also totally use DDEV!).

    I’m not sure what there is to say about an RSS reader other than it works great and it’s nice having access to all my articles on any device. It’s plenty customizable, each user can configure addons and themes that have been installed on the server. And the default keyboard shortcuts are super nice.

  • Linux Links ☛ Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Corel VideoStudio MyDVD – LinuxLinks

    Corel Corporation is a Canadian software company specializing in graphics processing. They are best known for developing CorelDRAW, a vector graphics editor. They are also notable for purchasing and developing AfterShot Pro, PaintShop Pro, Painter, Video Studio, MindManager, and WordPerfect.

    Corel has dabbled with Linux over the years. For example they produced Corel Linux, a Debian-based distribution which bundled Corel WordPerfect Office for Linux. While Corel effectively abandoned its Linux business in 2001 they are not completely Linux-phobic. For example, AfterShot Pro has an up to date Linux version albeit its proprietary software.

    This series looks at the best free and open source alternatives to products offered by Corel.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to Find and Limit File Name Length in Linux

    One fun aspect of using any Linux operating system distribution is its ability to transform us into computing wizards. With Linux, its open-source nature makes it possible to break and/or create any logical computing rule(s). Filenames’ length and limit fall under such computing rules.

    Since Linux is part of the Unix-based systems, the file name length associated with this operating system has a limit. The length limit of filenames under a Linux operating system depends on the filesystem in question.

  • Nolan Lawson ☛ Dialogs and shadow DOM: can we make it accessible?

    Last year, I wrote about managing focus in the shadow DOM, and in particular about modal dialogs. Since the <dialog> element has now shipped in all browsers, and the inert attribute is starting to land too, I figured it would be a good time to take another look at getting dialogs to play nicely with shadow DOM.

    This post is going to get pretty technical, especially when it comes to the nitty-gritty details of accessibility and web standards. If you’re into that, then buckle up! The ride may be a bit bumpy.

  • Linux Shell Tips ☛ What’s the Difference Between Vi and Vim Editors

    Text editors are important tools in the life of a Linux user. As we get used to our preferred Linux operating system distribution, we slowly transition from beginners to expert users.

    In the course of this transition, we find ourselves leaning more and more towards this operating system’s non-graphical user interface. Reason? This Linux OS environment hosts numerous computing tools associated with it. This non-graphical user interface is none other than the Linux command-line environment.

    Linux application packages and utilities bound to the command-line environment are resource-friendly and faster in their executive power in comparison to the ones bound to the graphical user interface like the Linux Desktop environment.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Setup a Centralized Log System with Graylog on Debian 11

    Graylog is a free and open-source log-management platform for capturing, storing and enabling real-time analysis of your data and logs. It’s written in Java and built on top of other open-source software like MongoDB and Elasticsearch.

  • Trend Oceans ☛ Error resolved: 1698 (28000) Access denied for user ‘root’@’localhost’

    
    This error is very common when you try to log in to your MySQL for the first time.

    Personally, I too faced this issue multiple times, maybe because we were not following the right way to install MySQL, or we forgot to set a password, or else we didn’t get the options to set a password.

    Similarly, there may be many other reasons for the above error, but the solution to this error is pretty simple and easy. In this article, you will find a way to resolve 1698 (28000) Access denied for user ‘root’@’localhost’.

    There are two ways to resolve this error. First, you will see a simple and less time-consuming method. If the first method didn’t work in your case, then go to the second one.

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ AMD announce Radeon Memory Visualizer support for Linux

    AMD announced yesterday that they’re now supporting the Radeon Memory Visualizer on Linux, as a result of “the rising popularity of gaming on the Linux OS”.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Them’s Fightin’ Herds has a big 3.0 update out now

    Crazy animal fighting game Them’s Fightin’ Herds has a huge 3.0 update out now, bringing with it some new super abilities and some DLC pulled into the main game for everyone.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Turbo Golf Racing could be the next multiplayer hit

    With a demo currently available in Steam Next Fest, the racer game Turbo Golf Racing is one to watch. Tested on Fedora Linux and Steam Deck, it works out of the box with Proton 7.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Proton Experimental updated for June 14th, more video playback and bug fixes

    Another smaller update is now available for Proton Experimental, the special version of Proton that has all the latest fixes first for you to try. Info: Proton is the compatibility layer you can use on Linux and Steam Deck to run Windows games.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Monster collecting game Cassette Beasts shows off the powerful fusion system

    Cassette Beasts is an incredibly exciting looking upcoming monster collecting game, one that will offer a rather unique take on the genre and a new trailer is up showcasing the fusion system.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ 20 Minutes Till Dawn is like Vampire Survivors with guns — goodbye free time

    20 Minutes Till Dawn is what you get when you take the basic action-survival idea that Vampire Survivors made popular again, makes it really dark and puts a gun in your hand. Note: personal purchase.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Kandria is a promising 2D hack and slash open world action RPG

    You’re an android who awakens in a ruined future, this is Kandria. A new upcoming 2D hack and slash open world action RPG. Developed by Shirakumo Games / Nicolas Hafner, you’ll be exploring a world full of caverns, tunnels, and ruined buildings while also fighting off hordes of enemies and there’s plenty of challenging platforming thrown in too.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Arctic Awakening is an upcoming cold narrative-adventure mystery

    With an initial setting that seems a little like The Long Dark, the upcoming Arctic Awakening seems like a thoroughly interesting story-focused exploration adventure. Shown off during the Future Games Show summer showcase, the developer confirmed to me today their plans to have it release with a Native Linux build.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Proton 7.0-3 is out further improving compatibility on Steam Deck and Linux

    Proton 7.0-3 is the latest stable version of the compatibility layer, that allows you to run Windows games on Steam Deck and Linux and it’s out now. Here’s what’s new. Not to be confused with Proton Experimental, the special testing version you can try, which was also updated today.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GamingOnLinux ☛ KDE Plasma 5.25 is out now, here’s some of what’s new

      Ready to get the latest and greatest from the KDE team? The awesome Plasma 5.25 release is officially out now. This is the desktop environment used on the Steam Deck when in Desktop Mode! Hopefully Valve will update it at some point.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• BSD

  • Mailing list ARChives ☛ OpenBGPD 7.4 released

    We have released OpenBGPD 7.4, which will be arriving in the OpenBGPD directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Red Hat ☛ Best practices for successful DevSecOps | Red Hat Developer

    In a recent Red Hat survey, summarized by our 2022 State of Kubernetes security report, a broad majority of the more than 300 correspondents reported that they are incorporating security into DevOps processes and pipelines, a practice called DevSecOps.

    This article draws on the report as well as a Red Hat white paper, How to automate DevSecOps in Red Hat OpenShift, to show the rate of DevSecOps adoption and the factors that we believe make it work well.

  • Red Hat ☛ OpenSSL 3.0: Dealing with a Turkish locale bug

    Changes in libraries have a risk of breaking things in unpredictable places. Debugging a crash is usually simple. But recently, in the late stages of working on the curl utility for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, I encountered a bug report that looked rather strange. In this article, I will discuss how this report led me to implement a localization bug fix during the late stages of RHEL 9 development.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ Using automation to improve employee experience [Ed: Here is Red Hat (IBM) promoting the "Great Resignation" mythology while sacking its workers and making life more miserable for people]

    Successful digital transformation hinges on the continuous improvement of people, processes, and technologies. We often treat these three components as independent silos: We’ll mutually exclusively upgrade our technologies, enhance our processes, or improve the work lives of our people.

    These are all important and necessary, but what if we linked all three together? What if we could automate our processes to integrate our technologies to enhance the efficiency and satisfaction of our people?

    Let me give you an easy example of how we’re doing this at Red Hat.

    We all know how the Great Resignation, physical isolation from coworkers, and return-to-office anxieties contribute to what many call the Great Reprioritization. Employees want to make a difference and a visible impact and are re-evaluating their place in the organization and looking for meaning and purpose in their work.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ 3 IT talent shortage challenges and how to solve them [Ed: IBM keeps laying off many of its most talented and skilled workers while advancing the same old lie about shortages. What some corporate press and corporations call "great resignation" is actually layoffs, followed by people panicking about further layoffs and checking safer options elsewhere. But what's really going on is mass layoffs.]

    In 2022, almost 50% of developer-focused recruiters testified to having difficulty finding qualified candidates.

  • Getting A Firm Handle On Power Systems And Storage Firmware

• Devices/Embedded

  • CalyxOS, Rock Pi 4A, KOReader

    The pinephone has lost most of its appeal, mainly because the keyboard case doesn’t charge (itself or the phone) consistently.

    This wouldn’t be a problem if the phone could be in the keyboard case and be powered off. But since the keyboard case is a power supply, the phone will immediately boot up again.

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ BeagleBone AI-64 comes with TDA4VM SoC from Texas Instruments

    The BeagleBoard community released a new BeagleBone board yesterday. The new model is called the BeagleBone AI-64 which builds on the BeagleBone AI SBC released a few years ago. The new Single Board Computer is equipped with the TDA4VM System on Chip (SoC) produced by Texas Instruments.

    The SoC implemented for the BeagleBone AI-64 consist of two ARM Cortex-A72, six ARM Cortex-R5, a PowerVR Rogue 3D GPU, 4GB LPDDR4, 16GB of eMMC storage, one MicroSD card socket, one GbE LAN port, and many other peripherals.

  • Hackaday ☛ The RP2040 Doth A Motor Controller Make

    When the Raspberry Pi people launched their RP2040 microcontroller, it seemed as though it might be destined as a niche product for those areas in which the Pi has traditionally been strong. But during the global semiconductor shortage, it has remained almost alone among microcontrollers in having plenty of fab capacity to keep the supplies rolling. That, and its very vanilla set of ARM peripherals alongside those programmable state machines have thus seen it find a home in many places it might not otherwise have seen. Take the dual RP2040 motor controller from [Twisted Fields] as an example, would it have been more likely to have sported an STM32 in previous years?

  • CNX Software ☛ Nordic Thingy:53 is a dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 platform for IoT prototyping – CNX Software

    As one should have expected after Nordic Thingy:52 and Thingy:91 IoT devkits were introduced in 2017 and 2019 respectively, the Norwegian company has now launched the Thingy:53 platform based on Nordic Semi nRF5340 dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 SoC for IoT prototyping with Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread, Matter, Zigbee, IEEE 802.15.4, NFC, and Bluetooth mesh RF protocols.

    The development kit also incorporates the nPM1100 PMIC and nRF21540 Front End Module (FEM), a power amplifier/low noise amplifier (PA/LNA) range extender, as well as multiple motion and environmental sensors, as well as a rechargeable 1350 mAh Li-Po battery for power.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Hackaday ☛ LMN-3: Putting The ‘OP’ In Open Source Synthesizers

    Some projects you come across simply leave you in awe when you look at the thought and the resulting amount of work that went into it, not only for the actual implementation, but everything around it. Even more so when it’s a single-developer open source project. [Stone Preston]’s synth / sampler / sequencer / DAW-in-a-box LMN-3 absolutely fits the description here, and it seems like he has set his heart on making sure everyone can built one for themselves, by providing all the design files from case down to the keycaps.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • The Register UK ☛ Thunderbird is go for Android – in K-9 Mail form • The Register

      The cross platform email client Thunderbird is to launch an Android version, which will be based on the existing K-9 app.

      A month after Thunderbird’s product manager, Ryan Lee Sipes, tweeted that a mobile version of the email client was “coming soon”, the project has announced how it will do it.

      It has acquired the FOSS Android email client and one-time Register app of the week K-9 Mail, which will become Thunderbird for Android.

      The Thunderbird Foundation has hired Christian Ketterer, known online as “cketti”, developer of K-9.

      Thunderbird users have been asking for an Android version for years. This is an unexpected route to get there, but it’s a viable one: K-9 is a well-regarded app, and one of the very few Android apps to handle traditional bottom-posted email.

    • PC World ☛ Mozilla Firefox locks its browser’s cookie jar

      On Tuesday, Mozilla and its Firefox browser announced Total Cookie Protection, a powerful way for Firefox to preserve privacy while allowing websites to recognize you and provide customized experiences.

      Total Cookie Protection is rolling out to all Firefox users worldwide, the company announced on Tuesday. It will be on by default.

    • Tor ☛ Volunteer as an alpha tester

      Tor Browser receives hundreds of changes a year: from updates to Firefox – the underlying browser on which Tor Browser is based – to entirely new features designed to help protect at-risk and censored users. However, each change made to Tor Browser has the potential to introduce new and sometimes elusive bugs.

      In order to find and fix these bugs before they reach the majority of our users, we apply updates to an early version of Tor Browser known as Tor Browser Alpha before releasing them more widely. Then, as a small nonprofit, we rely on a community of volunteer testers to try out our alphas before their general release in order to keep Tor Browser available on so many platforms.

• Education

  • Sysadmin 101 for (new) relay operators – June 4th @ 1900 UTC [slides]

    The Art of Running a Tor Bridge or Relay: enhancing your contribution with sysadmin fu

• Programming/Development

  • Hackaday ☛ Linux Fu: Up Your GDB Game! [Ed: GDB is GNU, not Linux]

    If you want to buy a car, there are plenty of choices. If you want to buy a jetliner, there are fewer choices. If you want to use the Large Hadron Collider, you have a choice of exactly one. The harder something is to create, the less likely there is to be many of them. If you are looking for a Linux debugger, there are only a few choices, but gdb is certainly the one you will find most often. There is lldb and a handful of non-open commercial offerings, but for the most part you will use gdb to debug software on Linux.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Thoughts on the Spring ’83 protocol draft

    Right this morning when I woke up, before I even had a glass of water, I started reading a blog post by Maya discussing a new protocol. I was immediately intrigued, and starting reading the original post, Specifying Spring ’83. After reading through the blog post, I excitedly moved on to the actual spec draft. I was amazed. Possibly because it was the first thing my brain had processed all day, but still, I really loved the idea. What follows is some thoughts on the spec draft, to add to the ongoing discussion.

    [...]

    Please don’t use YAML for the peer list. YAML is not great. A simple JSON list would be better. A separate Markdown file can provide human-readable metadata if needed.

Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ Recreating A Camera Shot

  People rolling off shields and spears clashing against swords as the camera zooms in and out wildly makes the hallmark action sequences in the movie 300 so iconic. Unfortunately, achieving this effect wasn’t particularly easy. Three cameras were rolling, each with a different lens (100mm, 50mm, and 21mm) to capture a different view of the same scene. In post-production, you can dramatically switch between the three cameras since the shot is synchronized. The folks over at [Corridor Crew] wanted to recreate the effect, but rather than create a custom mount to hold three expensive cameras, they 3d printed a custom mount to hold three costly smartphones.

• Mere painful history

  You can easily go stomping once your foot is through the door.

  It’s easy to throw love to someone who can trust in whom it’s for

  but not as easy being into those who don’t show what they feel.

  It’s been weeks since you last called me so I think I see the deal.

  You have a way with words to make us sound like such a thrill.

  You have this way of losing me when you feel you’ve had your fill.

  You shelter me from rainstorm when you want and when you care,

  then forget me in the downpour as if “li’l me” ‘s not there.

• New Apartment

  My wife and I just received the keys of the apartment we bought back in late January. The (grumpy) tenant left in early May after she agreed to terminate the rental contract early, but the previous owner was on vacation (and then, on another vacation), so we received the keys only now.

• What day is it today?

  So I was playing a game this evening. But then it started lagging. I decreased graphics quality from “high” to “med”, from “med” to “low” – it didn’t become much better – maybe even worse. I set game on pause and fired up task manager – it showed 100% CPU usage and 100% disk usage. I waited a few minutes with game on pause – numbers didn’t change. I would assume that whatever game needs to load (like textures for a next level) – being paused, it should eventually load them and stop the disk activity?

• The Nation ☛ Love and Pride

• Scheerpost ☛ A Mazing Grace

• Science

  • The Economist ☛ Artificial neural networks today are not conscious, according to Douglas Hofstadter

    Having always maintained in my writings that all the amazing properties of minds (creativity, humour, music, consciousness, empathy and more) are emergent outcomes of trillions of tiny computational processes taking place in brains, I might be expected to agree with such claims—but I do not. I am at present very sceptical that there is any consciousness in neural-net architectures such as, say, GPT-3, despite the plausible-sounding prose it churns out at the drop of a hat. Let me explain my viewpoint through a few examples.

• Education

  • David Rosenthal ☛ Where Did The Number 3 Come From?

    All this is to say that there is no strong theoretical justification for the criterion for safety being three, or any other number. In theoretical computer science there is a very strong theoretical result dating from 1982, called Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT). This proves that 3f+1 replicas can in the worst case survive f simultaneous failures. This would lead to the idea that, to be safe against one failure, four replicas are needed. Or to be safe against two failures, seven replicas are needed.

  • The Nation ☛ The Growing Campus Gender Gap

    In the last week of her life, my mother extracted a promise from me. “Make sure,” she said, “that Orion goes to college.”

  • Project Censored ☛ Going Remote – The Project Censored Show

    Adam Bessie teaches literature, English composition, and critical thinking at a community college in Northern California.  Peter Glanting is an illustrator and product designer based in Portland, Oregon. Their book is scheduled for release in early 2023, from The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Behold The Mighty Floppotron 3.0

    If anyone has been struggling to get hold of a 3.5″ floppy drive lately, we think we’ve got a clue as to why — behold, the mighty floppotron 3.0 by [Paweł Zadrożniak.] With an utterly bonkers 512 floppy drives, four flatbed scanners and sixteen hard disks of various sizes, the floppotron 3.0 MIDI synthesiser is possibly the biggest such retro hardware synthesiser so far. Since every part of the system is motor-based, nobody is going to be surprised that to power the show is quite an undertaking, with nearly twenty switched-mode PSU modules needed to keep up with the demand, averaging 300W but rated at 1.2kW peak!

  • Hackaday ☛ Odd Inputs And Peculiar Peripherals: The Morse Keyboard

    When it comes to rendering text input into an electronic form,the newest keyboards use USB for wired interfacing, while the oldest Morse keys use a single conductor. Shall the two ever meet? For [Matthew Sparks] the answer is yes, with his “The Gadget” Morse-to-USB HID interface which presents a Morse key to a computer as though it were a USB keyboard.

  • Hackaday ☛ Kved: An Embeddable Key/Value Datastore

    At some point when developing embedded applications, you’re going to want to store unique values in non-volatile memory, values that can’t be fixed at compilation time. Many microcontrollers have a small amount of EEPROM memory for this very purpose, but it’s usually rather limited if it’s provided at all. Even if you do have a bit of space on an EEPROM at your disposal, actually formatting your values into the memory and dealing with the pesky problem of wear leveling (necessary for parameters that need to change often) can be a bit of a hassle.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Common Dreams ☛ Ilhan Omar Says 49 Million Facing Famine ‘Should Be the Biggest Story in the World Right Now’

    The combination of a worsening climate emergency and Russia’s war on Ukraine has helped push the number of people at risk of famine globally to an all-time high of up to 49 million, according to a study by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Program.

    “This should be the biggest story in the world right now,” U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali refugee, tweeted Monday in response to The Washington Post’s story on the United Nations study, which warns that tens of millions of people in 46 countries are in need of “immediate life and livelihoods-saving assistance.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Medicare for All Could Have Prevented More Than 338,000 US Covid Deaths: Study

    Covid-19 has killed more than one million people in the United States over the past two years, but more than 338,000 of those lives could have been saved if the country had a universal single-payer healthcare system such as Medicare for All.

    “Universal single-payer healthcare is both economically responsible and morally imperative.”

  • DeSmog ☛ The UK Government’s Food Strategy Lacks Teeth

    The UK government has finally published its long-awaited response to the independent National Food Strategy. Two years in the making, there were high hopes this would be a comprehensive plan of action. But when the document appeared on Monday, these hopes were dashed.

    The strategy falls short on a number of fronts. The first: climate. Food is responsible for over a third of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, and industrialised agriculture is the leading cause of wildlife decline, antibiotic resistance and pollution. But the strategy did not set out a plan to transform our food system in line with limiting global heating to 1.5C – and providing a liveable planet for current and future generations.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Mexican Official Says Flawed WTO Proposal on Vaccine Patents ‘Worse Than None at All’

    As a major World Trade Organization meeting continued on Tuesday, a top Mexican official called out rich governments for obstructing a pathway to waive patent protections for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments “in order to put the profits of Big Pharma over people’s lives.”

    “Global health is on its deathbed.”

  • Scheerpost ☛ Dealing With the Disease that Never Seems to Leave Town

    Nina Burleigh takes you behind the scenes of her own life to offer one of so many millions of Covid-19 dramas that played out in these years — and, of course, it hasn’t ended yet.

  • Meduza ☛ Russia’s new drug problem Despite foreign companies continuing to supply drugs to Russian patients, the war is wreaking havoc on the country’s pharmaceutical market

    For years, Russian patients have been suffering from a medication shortage. After the country invaded Ukraine in February, the situation only got worse as drug prices rose. At first, this was due to a surge in demand, and drugs that initially disappeared began to return to the shelves. But despite the authorities’ attempts not to allow essential drugs to run out, problems remain. Their sources include a supply chain broken by sanctions, the departure of raw materials necessary for production from the market, and many Western companies’ refusal to conduct clinical trials in Russia. And the things still aren’t looking up: the future likely holds more supply chain disruptions, a drop in quality, rising prices, and a market closed to new drugs. Meduza explains what’s going on with Russia’s healthcare industry.

• Proprietary

  • Common Dreams ☛ Calls to ‘Stop the Deal’ as US Military Contractor Moves to Buy NSO Group

    Digital rights advocates sounded the alarm on Tuesday following reports that U.S. military contractor L3Harris Tech plans to acquire NSO Group, a private Israeli firm widely condemned for selling surveillance technology to repressive governments across the globe.

    “The spyware peddled by NSO Group is unsafe in any hands.”

  • Krebs On Security ☛ Microsoft Patch Tuesday, June 2022 Edition

    Microsoft on Tuesday released software updates to fix 60 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software, including a zero-day flaw in all supported Microsoft Office versions on all flavors of Windows that’s seen active exploitation for at least two months now. On a lighter note, Microsoft is officially retiring its Internet Explorer (IE) web browser, which turns 27 years old this year.

  • Krebs On Security ☛ Ransomware Group Debuts Searchable Victim Data

    Cybercrime groups that specialize in stealing corporate data and demanding a ransom not to publish it have tried countless approaches to shaming their victims into paying. The latest innovation in ratcheting up the heat comes from the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group, which has traditionally published any stolen victim data on the Dark Web. Today, however, the group began publishing individual victim websites on the public Internet, with the leaked data made available in an easily searchable form.

  • NBC ☛ Internet Explorer’s run finally comes to an end

    Microsoft released the first version of Internet Explorer in 1995, the antediluvian era of web surfing dominated by the first widely popular browser, Netscape Navigator. Its launch signaled the beginning of the end of Navigator: Microsoft went on to tie IE and its ubiquitous Windows operating system together so tightly that many people simply used it by default instead of Navigator.

    The Justice Department sued Microsoft in 1997, saying it violated an earlier consent decree by requiring computer makers to use its browser as a condition of using Windows. It eventually agreed to settle the antitrust battle in 2002 over its use of its Windows monopoly to squash competitors. It also tangled with European regulators who said that tying Internet Explorer to Windows gave it an unfair advantage over rivals such as Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera and Google’s Chrome.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Vice ☛ Woman Allegedly Used Apple AirTag to Track and Kill Her Boyfriend

      When the cops arrived, Morris and Smith were still in the parking lot. He was declared dead just short of 1:00 a.m. Detectives took statements from multiple witnesses and asked Morris if she had placed an AirTag in Smith’s car. She initially denied it, but relented when detectives threatened to get a search warrant for Smith’s car. “Morris then admitted that she had a tracker on his car, and stated that she placed it in the backseat of his vehicle near the cup holder,” according to the affidavit.

    • Vice ☛ Facial Recognition Failures Are Locking People Out of Unemployment Systems

      On Twitter, there are dozens of complaints about ID.me per day, and local news articles all over the country have detailed the problem over the course of months. In California, 1.4 million unemployment beneficiary accounts were abruptly suspended on New Year’s Eve and the beneficiaries were required to re-verify their identity using ID.me, a process which many found difficult and resulted in them waiting for weeks to reactivate their accounts while they struggled to make ends meet.

    • India Times ☛ A dark web version of the metaverse and the security risks associated with it

      We also foresee an evolution of a dark web version of the metaverse due to its very nature of interaction through avatars. The dark web is an anonymous world where people interact through unmapped virtual identities. Here nobody will be interested to know the real identity of anyone, but will still engage with each other commercially or personally. The metaverse DNA is very well suited to the dark web and that’s why I see it as a real security challenge. The dark web version of metaverse will also grow faster than the real world version of metaverse.

      Though Meta is the main company developing metaverse for users and players to be in the vast network of real-time 3D virtual worlds while maintaining their identity and payment history, the other top 10 companies that are integral to build this are NVIDIA. Epic Games, Microsoft, Apple, Decentraland, Roblox Corporation, Unity Software, Snapchat, and Amazon

    • EDRI ☛ Belgium’s data retention law must not undermine people’s right to privacy – European Digital Rights (EDRi)

      The EDRi network welcomes the attempt by the Belgian lawmakers to set up a legal framework in conformity with the Court of Justice of the European Union’s (CJEU) case law for the retention of traffic and location data. Data retention regimes that are illegal under EU law must be abandoned and replaced as soon as possible with solutions that pass the strict necessity and proportionality test established by courts.

      It is therefore essential that the new draft law that Belgium’s Parliament is currently discussing does not introduce measures that would replicate the effects of the previous law on fundamental rights and that would be contrary to the Belgian Constitutional Court’s and the CJEU’s rulings.

      Unfortunately, this draft law, as it is and if adopted without adequate adjustments, would pose a threat to people’s rights, such as the right to privacy and data protection, freedom of expression and information, press freedoms and professional secrecy guarantees, and would potentially set a dangerous precedent for other Member States.

    • EFF ☛ Senator Declares Amazon Ring’s Audio Surveillance Capabilities “Threaten the Public”

      This has disturbing implications for people who walk, bike, or even drive by dozens of these devices every day, not knowing that their conversations may have been captured and recorded. It may be even more problematic for people who live in an apartment building where neighbors have installed Ring cameras indoors, where echoey hallways might amplify conversations that could be recorded even beyond line of sight with the device. A surveillance doorbell owner may even have their own private conversations caught on tape if the device is triggered and captures voices drifting through open windows.

      In his letter to Amazon, the senator writes: 

      In the UK, a judge ruled in October 2021 that the audio capabilities of Ring cameras amounted to a violation of the Data Protection Act when a neighbor put up multiple cameras aimed at a communal parking lot.

    • EFF ☛ Victory! New York’s Vaccine Privacy Bill Heads to Governor’s Desk

      A. 7326/S. 6541 protects the confidentiality of medical immunity information by limiting what data can be collected or shared, who it can be shared with, and how long it can be stored. In New York, bills must have identical versions in each chamber in order to move forward; these passed the Senate and Assembly on June 2 and 3, respectively.

      New Yorkers are often required to present information about their immunity—like vaccination records or test results—to get in the door at restaurants, gyms and entertainment venues. This bill protects them from that information being misused by private companies, the government, or other entities that wish to track their movements or use their private medical information to punish or discriminate against them. Assuring people that their medical information will not be used in unauthorized ways increases much-needed trust in public health efforts. 

      This bill expressly prohibits immunity information from being shared with immigration or child services agencies seeking to deport someone or take away their children based on vaccination status. It also requires that those asking for immunity information must accept an analog credential, such as a paper record.

    • EFF ☛ EFF Urges Congress to Strengthen the American Data Privacy and Protection Act

      American consumers need a strong federal privacy law. EFF appreciates the Committee highlighting the national conversation over how the government should protect us from businesses that harvest and monetize our personal information, and address the racial and other bias that excludes consumers of color from opportunities. To achieve these goals, the discussion draft of the American Data Privacy and Protection Act needs to be strengthened in several areas listed in our letter.

      This draft might be a step in the right direction on many privacy concerns – assuming it is amended, as discussed in the letter, to ensure strong private enforcement in court, and to not undo other privacy laws at the federal and state levels.

      We look forward to working with the sponsors to improve this legislation and strengthen the necessary protections. 

• Defence/Aggression

  • TruthOut ☛ Poll: Most Americans Think Trump Bears Responsibility for Jan. 6 Violence

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump’s Site Truth Social Has Been Banning Users Over Posts on Jan. 6 Hearings

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Our Silence Is Complicity When It Comes to Palestinian Rights

    Watching live videos of young Israeli Jews in Jerusalem chanting, with unbridled venom and violence: “Death to the Arabs,” “May your village burn,” and other epithets (that belie a breath-taking inhumanity), is beyond heartbreaking. How can one not feel shaken to your core watching this?

  • TruthOut ☛ SCOTUS Is Violating the 10th Amendment by Not Letting States Enact Gun Control

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | This ‘Bipartisan’ Gun Deal With Senate Republicans Is Worse Than Nothing

    In the wake of the horrors of Uvalde, it looks like Senate Democrats are about to make a “bipartisan” gun deal with Senate Republicans that will likely accomplish next to nothing except let Republicans off the hook for opposing even minimal gun safety laws. Here’s what the deal does not include:

  • The Nation ☛ The Senate’s Gun “Deal” Won’t Stop Mass Shootings

    I don’t know who said “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” but I doubt if that person got a look at the Senate’s “framework” for gun safety in the wake of the Robb Elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Tex. The bipartisan agreement is as likely to stop the next school shooting as an AR-15 would be at stopping the 1st Armored Division. That’s because the framework feels more like a Republican attempt to avoid the issue of gun violence than a Democratic attempt to solve it.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Pure Insanity’: Ohio Gov. Signs Bill to Arm Teachers After 24 Hours of Training

    The Democratic candidate for governor in Ohio was among the critics condemning Gov. Mike DeWine’s decision on Monday to sign a bill permitting teachers to carry a gun to class after just 24 hours of firearms training—pointing out that educators will need far more training to renew their teaching licenses than to bring a deadly weapon into their classrooms.

    “Teachers will need 180 hours to renew their teaching license so they can teach your kids, but only up to 24 hours of training to carry a gun around with them,” Nan Whaley, who was the mayor of Dayton in August 2019 when a mass shooting there killed 10 people and injured 27, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “That is insane.”

  • China Global Television Network ☛ Remote Killing: Former Google employee reveals U.S. plan to apply AI to drones

    In September 2017, Google won the Project MAVEN contract from the Pentagon. Under the plan, Google was to build a monitoring system based on footage taken by U.S. drones and help the U.S. military quickly evaluate the drone footage using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Pentagon analysts were to monitor images of vehicles, people, land features and large crowds of the “entire city.”

  • Pro Publica ☛ Google Says It Bans Gun Ads. It Actually Makes Money From Them.

    For roughly two decades, Google has boasted that it doesn’t accept gun ads, a reflection of its values and culture. But a ProPublica analysis shows that before and after mass shootings in May at a New York grocery store and a Texas elementary school, millions of ads from the some of the nation’s largest firearms makers flowed through Google’s ad systems and onto websites and apps — in some cases without the site or app owners’ knowledge and in violation of their policies.

    Ads from gunmaker Savage Arms, for example, popped up on the site Baby Games, amid brightly colored games for children, and on an article about “How to Handle Teen Drama” on the Parent Influence website. Ads for Glock pistols loaded on a recipe site’s list of the “50 Best Vegetarian Recipes!” as well as on the quiz site Playbuzz, on the online Merriam-Webster dictionary and alongside stories in The Denver Post, according to Adbeat, which aggregates data about web and mobile digital ads.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ China vows ‘fight to the end’ to stop Taiwan independence

    China will “fight to the very end” to stop Taiwanese independence, the country’s defence minister vowed Sunday, stoking already soaring tensions with the United States over the island.

    The superpowers are locked in a growing war of words over the self-ruled, democratic island, which Beijing views as part of its territory awaiting reunification.

  • RFA ☛ Statesman or shark bait? — Radio Free Asia

    After blanket denials that China is building a naval facility for its use at Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base, Cambodia is now saying Chinese forces will not have exclusive use of the structure at the Gulf of Thailand base.

  • Defence Web ☛ US Office of Security Cooperation in Zambia is not a military base [Ed: Misses the point that the US Army appropriates the military bases of some of those countries which is occupies, including the UK]

    In the last few weeks, defenceWeb has confirmed that the recently created United States’ Office of Security Cooperation in Zambia is not to be confused with a US military base, amid opposition from some quarters.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Victory reimagined: Toward a more cohesive US cyber strategy [Ed: Until they remove the last Microsoft deployment they're just beating the bushes]

    A strategy to defeat US adversaries in cyberspace is not the same as, nor sufficient for, securing cyberspace. US policy is on two potentially divergent paths: one that prioritizes the protection of US infrastructure through the pursuit of US cyber superiority, and one that seeks an open, secure cyber ecosystem. Defend Forward was a compelling and necessary shift in thinking, but it is just one of many policy tools available to implement the US cyber strategy. In the new National Cyber Strategy, policymakers and practitioners should heed the costly lessons of a generation of counterinsurgency and ensure that efforts to defeat adversaries in cyberspace do not displace efforts to secure it. In an article published by Foreign Affairs, National Cyber Director Chris Inglis and Harry Krejsa, assistant national cyber director for strategy and research, emphasized, “security is a prerequisite for prosperity in the physical world, and cyberspace is no different.”1 A revised national cyber strategy should: (1) enhance security in the face of a wider range of threats than just the most strategic adversaries, (2) better coordinate efforts toward protection and security with allies and partners, and (3) focus on bolstering the resilience of the cyber ecosystem, rather than merely reducing harm.

  • Meduza ☛ Why is the Kremlin so committed to this war? Sociologist Alexey Levinson outlines the thinking behind Russia’s war in Ukraine

    In early June, the independent polling agency the Levada Center published survey data showing that three quarters of Russians believe the “special military operation” in Ukraine is “progressing successfully.” Almost 25 percent expect a Russian victory in “less than six months,” while about 20 percent expect it to come in about a year, and another 20 percent expect victory in over a year. In the 20 years that the Levada Center has been operating, experience has shown that there’s often a wide gulf between the expectations of the Russian public and the worldviews of those who lead the organization. In this essay for Meduza’s “Ideas” section, Alexey Levinson, the Levada Center’s social research director, lays out his view of what Russia is hoping to achieve with this war.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘Compromises won’t save you’: Zhanna Nemtsova on the degradation of freedoms in Russia and awarding Zelensky the Boris Nemtsov Prize

    On June 12, the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom awarded its annual prize to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. All of the award’s past recipients have been Russian opposition politicians and activists. In 2021, for example, it was awarded to Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny shortly after the Russian authorities imprisoned him. To find out more about the decision to honor Zelensky, and how Russia’s war against Ukraine has impacted the Nemtsov Foundation’s work, Meduza sat down with the foundation’s co-founder, Zhanna Nemtsova. 

  • The Nation ☛ The January 6 Committee Investigates the Origins of the “Big Lie”

    Even before day two of the January 6 committee hearing began, it broke news: Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Bill Stepien canceled his planned testimony at the last moment. The news launched a thousand jokes invoking The Godfather movies and dark humor suggesting Stepien had been threatened, perhaps by Trump; it turned out his wife had unexpectedly gone into labor. The last-minute news forced the committee to scramble a bit, but the day’s agenda had always been clear: to showcase the sober white men around Trump who would testify that they told him the truth in real-time—that he’d lost the election. Stepien was one of many Trump aides and lawyers who came to be known as “Team Normal.”

  • Democracy Now ☛ “Detached from Reality”: Barr Says Trump Embraced Lies & Conspiracy Theories After His Election Loss

    One of the key witnesses who testified live at Monday’s hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol was former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt, who led the the Fox News decision to become the first network to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in November 2020. Fox fired Stirewalt months later. Answering questions from Congressmember Zoe Lofgren, Stirewalt said Trump’s chance of winning was virtually zero. His comments were supported by Trump’s former Attorney General William Barr. The committee also heard testimony from Trump’s former campaign manager Bill Stepien, who said he had contradicted false election victory claims by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and was part of what he called “Team Normal.” Former Attorney General Barr told the committee about how he became “demoralized” after the 2020 election when he tried to counter allegations of voting fraud with then-President Trump.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Trump’s “Big Lie Was Also a Big Ripoff” as He Raised $250 Million from Supporters After 2020 Loss

    Monday’s January 6 committee hearing ended with closing statements from January 6 committee vice chair, Republican Liz Cheney and Democrat Zoe Lofgren describing how the Trump administration raised over $250 million from his supporters, off of the lie that the 2020 election results were fraudulent, for an election defense fund that didn’t exist.

  • TruthOut ☛ Rudy Giuliani Was Drunk When He Urged Trump to Declare Victory, Aides Testify

  • Democracy Now ☛ A Drunk Rudy Giuliani Urged Trump to Declare Victory on Election Night, Trump Aides Testify

    We spend the hour featuring highlights from the second public hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Main witnesses were ex-President Donald Trump’s former inner circle, including campaign manager Bill Stepien, Attorney General William Barr, campaign adviser Jason Miller and his own daughter Ivanka Trump, who all said Trump ignored them on election night in November 2020 when they argued against declaring victory. They described how Trump instead turned to his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who they said was drunk when he urged Trump to claim he’d won and say the election was being stolen.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Captain Zelensky and the War Crimes that Never Happened

    The corporate media landscape has saturated our feeds with images of NATO allies as superheroes, science fiction and fantasy protagonists, and pop culture icons.

  • Scheerpost ☛ America’s Gun Fetish | Chris Hedges

    Author and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Chris Hedges, explains America’s gun fetish, why people in America cling to its guns, and what we must do if we ever hope to change this culture.

  • TruthOut ☛ Covert US Operations in Africa Are Sowing the Seeds of Future Crises

  • TruthOut ☛ Democrats Introduce Bill to Slash $100 Billion From Pentagon Budget

• Environment

  • Common Dreams ☛ UN Climate Chief Warns Trump Win in 2024 Would Spell Disaster for Planet

    The outgoing United Nations climate chief warned Monday that a victory by Donald Trump—or any other Republican ally of the fossil fuel industry—in the 2024 U.S. presidential election would represent a fatal setback for efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century.

    “Well, yes,” Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), told Politico when asked whether Trump or another Republican president similarly hostile to climate action would spell doom for the Paris Agreement’s lower-end warming target.

  • Common Dreams ☛ House Swept Into Yellowstone River as Record Flooding Offers Yet Another Glimpse of Climate Crisis

    Footage circulating on social media Tuesday showed a home in Gardiner, Montana crashing into the flooded Yellowstone River after rushing water undermined the foundation and broke the house’s stilts, offering what climate campaigners warn is a picture of the kind of catastrophe likely to become more common as the climate crisis worsens.

    “A hot world means more rain,” said author and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben in response to the video.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | How Fossil Fuel Executives Overheated US Public Classrooms

    As brutal heat waves creep further into the school year, cash-strapped school districts that previously didn’t need cooling systems are struggling to afford the air conditioning they now need to keep students safe in the face of climate change.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘The New Normal’: 100 Million+ People Across US Face Extreme Heat

    The climate crisis continues to bite in the U.S. this week with nearly one-third of people in the country living under heat advisories and warnings on Tuesday as high temperatures were reported from the Gulf Coast to the Upper Midwest and across the Southeast.

    More than 107 million people are being advised to stay indoors as possible to avoid record-setting heatwaves that have been reported across the country in recent days, moving eastward and expected to continue for at least the next two weeks.

• Finance

  • TruthOut ☛ Poll Shows Confronting Corporate Greed Is Biden’s Best Anti-Inflation Message

  • Meduza ☛ ‘A difficult time’: World leaders and business titans set to skip Putin’s annual economic forum in Saint Petersburg

    The 25th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) is set to kick off tomorrow, June 15. Its official topic? “New Opportunities in a New World.”

  • Robert Reich ☛ Robert Reich…

    Did you know Joe Biden can help American workers right now, even without Congress? He can sign three executive orders, affecting a fifth of the economy and transforming millions of workers’ lives. 

  • Common Dreams ☛ New Survey of Voters Has Message for Biden: Fight Corporate Greed to Rein in Inflation

    With inflation running rampant in the United States and the Biden administration scrambling for a solution to what’s become a major political and economic crisis, new polling data and swing-state focus group results shared exclusively with Common Dreams suggest one approach would be especially effective: Challenging corporate greed.

    Conducted by the research firm GBAO on behalf of Fight Corporate Monopolies, the recent national surveys and focus groups in two key battleground states show that voters are particularly responsive to and supportive of messaging that connects price hikes to profiteering by big business.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Patreon API

    The Patreon API is buggy bullshit, and they will provide no support. Can someone explain to me how to use it properly?

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Why I Quit Being a Banker to Join Extinction Rebellion

    For almost 30 years, I worked on the trading floors of banks around the world—mainly in London, but also Hong Kong, Tokyo, Madrid and Bangkok. Being well paid can in itself convince you and your colleagues that your work is important and socially useful. We were creating the money the world needed to trade. We were primary wealth creators.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘The American People Support Me, Not You’: In Fox Debate, Sanders Makes Case for Progressive Agenda

    In an Oxford-style debate Monday with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sen. Bernie Sanders argued that progressive policy goals such as Medicare for All, Social Security expansion, and a higher minimum wage are “what the American people want” and blasted the political establishment—including his GOP colleague—for ignoring the most important crises facing the United States, from the climate emergency to obscene levels of economic inequality.

    “If we don’t stand up and say that we need a government that represents working people and the middle class, I worry very much about the future of this country.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Bernie Sanders Blasts Lindsey Graham and Political Establishment in Fox Debate

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • VOA News ☛ China Wins Battle of Perception Among Young Africans

    By contrast, U.S. influence has dropped by 12% since 2020, according to the survey of more than 4,500 Africans 18 to 24 years old and living in 15 countries across Africa.

    Seventy-seven percent of young Africans said China was the “foreign actor” with the greatest impact on the continent, while giving the U.S. an influence rating of just 67%. In a follow-up question on whether that influence was positive or negative, 76% said China’s was positive, while 72% said the same of the U.S.

  • Scheerpost ☛ John Kiriakou: The Triumph of “Bloody Gina,” the CIA’s Torture Queen

    Described in the media as a “seasoned intelligence veteran,” Haspel had been at the CIA for more than 30 years, both at Headquarters and in senior positions overseas. And throughout that entire period, she tried hard to stay out of the public eye. Then-outgoing CIA director and Mike Pompeo at the time lauded her “uncanny ability to get things done” and said that she “inspires those around her.” I’m sure that was true for some, but many of the rest of us who knew and worked with Gina Haspel at the CIA called her “Bloody Gina.”

    The New York Times and Washington Post have written extensively about Haspel’s background, especially overseas. The CIA will not let me repeat her resume here, calling it “currently and properly classified.” I won’t go down that road. But I will say that it was Haspel who carried out her master’s instructions to destroy videotaped evidence of the torture of Abu Zubaydah, mistakenly thought to have been the third-ranking person al-Qaeda. And that was after the White House Counsel specifically told her to not destroy it. She made no apologies. I would call that “obstruction of justice,” a felony.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Trump Isn’t on Trial—All of Us Are

    The House Select Committee on Jan. 6 has detailed what at some level we already knew. Trump lost the election. He knew it. His advisers knew it. His Justice Department knew it. The courts confirmed it. There was no evidence of voter fraud. Trump lied—and continues lying to this day.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Indefensible’: White House Confirms Biden Expected to Meet With Saudi Crown Prince

    U.S. President Joe Biden faced a firestorm of criticism Tuesday after the White House confirmed he will visit Saudi Arabia next month and is expected to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

    Concerns have mounted in recent weeks in response to reporting during the planning stage of Biden’s mid-July trip, given the kingdom’s human rights record and the 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi—which U.S. intelligence officials concluded was approved by the crown prince, or MBS.

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Fidesz group leader urges secret service to monitor NGOs and media platforms funded from abroad

  • The Nation ☛ Why Prosecutorial Reform Will Outlive Chesa Boudin’s Recall

    Dead on arrival.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Pennsylvania GOP Election Official Tells Jan. 6 Comm. His Family Faced Death Threats Because of Trump

    The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack heard live testimony Monday from Al Schmidt, the sole Republican on the Philadelphia County Board of Elections in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state in the 2020 election. He described how he found no evidence of voter fraud in 2020, and said he and his family received death threats after Trump lashed out at him on Twitter for not halting the vote count due to false claims of fraud.

  • TruthOut ☛ Garland Says DOJ Is Watching Jan. 6 Hearings, Could Decide on Charges Later

  • Scheerpost ☛ Patrick Lawrence: Biden’s Summit of No-Shows

    This could prove an historic shift, reversing more than a century of usually coercive influence in Latin America.

  • TruthOut ☛ Republican Witnesses Are Making a Damning Case Against Trump… 17 Months Late

  • Meduza ☛ Anatomy of a fake: Someone published a speech attributed to Putin’s ‘domestic policy czar,’ but was it to smear him or to test his vision for eastern Ukraine?

    On June 12, when Russians celebrated “Russia Day,” the pro-government newspaper Izvestia published an article signed by Sergey Kiriyenko, Vladimir Putin’s first deputy chief of staff and domestic policy czar. The text, titled “Sergey Kiriyenko’s Message on Russia Day,” said that “all Russia will rebuild the Donbas, which has been destroyed by the fascists” at the expense of trillions of taxpayers’ rubles, “even at the cost of a temporary decline in the nation’s living standards.” The article quickly disappeared, and the newspaper later attributed the text itself to hackers. Multiple sources told Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev that they believe Kiriyenko’s rivals at home (including opponents of the invasion of Ukraine) could be responsible for hacking Izvestia (though some wonder if he didn’t engineer the incident himself to speak publicly with plausible deniability).

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Hill ☛ Wikipedia appeals Russian court order to remove information about Ukraine invasion

    The court also found that the foundation operates inside Russian territory, which would require it to comply. However, Wikimedia asserts that the country does not have jurisdiction over the organization.

    The foundation also argues that the requests for the removal of information “constitutes a violation of human rights.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ European rights court rules against Russia’s foreign agent law

    The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday said a law that allows Russian authorities to crack down on NGOs, media outlets, and others — by designating them “foreign agents” — violates its human rights convention.

    Russia uses the term to label organizations that it claims are engaged in political activity with foreign support.

  • VOA News ☛ Zimbabwe Court Convicts NY Times Freelancer of Flouting Country’s Immigration Laws

    A court in Zimbabwe has found a New York Times freelance journalist guilty of flouting immigration laws and sentenced him to a suspended two-year prison sentence and a $1,000 fine.

    A court in the city of Bulawayo convicted and sentenced 37-year-old Jeffrey Moyo to two years in prison, suspended for a fine of about $1,000, at the official rate. Beatrice Mtetwa, one of Moyo’s lawyers, spoke to VOA from Bulawayo, via WhatsApp.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Light Blue Touchpaper ☛ Reporting cybercrime is hard: NCA link to Action Fraud broken for 3 years

    I reported this problem yesterday and I do not expect it to have been fixed by the time of writing but this problem going unresolved for three years is a clear example of the difficulties faced by victims of cybercrime.

  • Quillette ☛ Do Animals Have Rights?—A Roundtable

    Editor’s note: Quillette asked three scholars to reflect on the debate about animal rights. If you would like to contribute to this discussion, please send a response of ~800 words to pitch@[...]

  • Common Dreams ☛ UK’s Deportation of Asylum-Seekers to Rwanda Halted—But Fight ‘Not Over Yet’

    Human rights campaigners celebrated late Tuesday after a European court ruling led to the cancellation of a flight to deport asylum-seekers from the United Kingdom to Rwanda as part of a controversial deal the governments unveiled in April.

    “We will continue the fight tomorrow and against EVERY racist deportation.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Grassroots Organizing: 4 Reasons Starbucks Workers Have Been So Successful Unionizing

    Starbucks Workers United won its 100th election on May 27, 2022—fittingly, in Seattle, the company’s hometown. And the union has notched another 46 victories in the just over two weeks since then. It comes six months after organizers won their first two union victories, in Buffalo, New. York.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • EDRI ☛ The European Commission threatens to undermine the core values of the free and open [Internet]

    The proposal will harm freedom of expression, freedom to access knowledge, and freedom to conduct business and innovation in the EU. It will hurt Europe’s [Internet] economy and create unprecedented bureaucratic barriers that will slow growth in a recovering economy. That’s why 34 civil society organisations urge Commissioner Vestager and Commissioner Breton to challenge the short-sighted and self-interested demands of the telecom industry and to ensure a free and open [Internet].

• Monopolies

  • Trademarks

    • The Verschwörhaus is moving and needs your help!

      Since then we have had many exhausting, nerve-racking and sadly also personally draining negotiations with the administration – unfortunately not on equal footing. All our efforts have now failed. The city administration showed no understanding for voluntary commitment and even registered “Verschwörhaus” as a trademark behind our backs – against which we filed an objection.

      Now the city administration is also throwing us out of the space at the Weinhof. We decided not to sign the city’s “contract of use” at our last community meeting. The city wanted to force us to give up our name and our public channels (website, email address, etc.), and to give us hardly any room to shape the content of what happens under the label “Verschwörhaus” in future. We cannot agree to this.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Publishers & Internet Archive Both Seek Piracy Lawsuit Win Without Full Trial

      In 2020, publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley and Penguin Random House sued the Internet Archive claiming that its mass scanning and lending of print library books is straightforward piracy. With the defendants relying on a fair use defense, both sides are now asking the court to decide the case in their favor, without need for a full trial.