GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ Social Media Is Destroying Us (Stop The Madness!) – Invidious

    While the invention of the Internet and the World Wide Web have certainly had some positive effects on the world, I think the single biggest threat that humanity faces today is social media. Social media is harmful to the individual and to the greater community…

  • Tux Digital ☛ 63: 3D Printers Are Printing Our Way To The Future – Hardware Addicts – TuxDigital

    Welcome to Hardware Addicts, a proud member of the TuxDigital Network. Hardware Addicts is the podcast that focuses on the physical components that powers our technology world.

    In this episode, we’re going to be talking about 3D Printing and how they are paving the way to the future. 3D printed homes, food, body parts, it’s all covered in this episode. Then we head to Camera Corner where Wendy will discuss camera gimbals that will make you want to start your own vlog.

    So Sit back, Relax, and Plug In because Hardware Addicts Starts Now!

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Linux.org ☛ LFCS – Network Hostname | Linux.org

    We have gone over hostnames in previous articles, but we are going to cover it again. We’ll also be covering hostname resolution for CentOS7 and Ubuntu 18.04. Trust me, this one was difficult to get resolved (no pun intended).

    A hostname is a simple name used to represent a device on a network. It is easier to remember the hostname than an IP Address.

    On a local network, names can be something like ‘Server’, ‘system1’, ‘laptop2’, etc. On a local network, the Domain Name of the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) is ‘.local’. The FQDN could be ‘Server1.local’, ‘system1.local’, etc.

    On the Internet, you have a FQDN such as ‘www.linux.org’. The hostname is ‘www’ and the domain name is ‘linux.org’.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Use WhatsApp on Your Chromebook

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install NewCP on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install NewCP 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.

  • TechRepublic ☛ How to easily transfer files between Linux desktops with Warp | TechRepublic

    Jack Wallen shows you what might be the easiest method of transferring files between Linux desktops on the market.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to install Angular on CentOS 9 Stream

    If you want to be a Frontend developer, then you need to know how to install Angular. In this case, we have chosen CentOS 9 Stream as our system because it is a solid and new system that many developers can use for their purposes.

  • Linuxiac ☛ How to Set up Automatic Security Updates on Ubuntu (Complete Guide)

    This guide shows how to automatically set up updates on the Ubuntu system, also known as unattended upgrades.

    We know the Linux operating system is considered secure “by design.” However, regular maintenance by applying released security updates ensures that it will remain such. In addition, they address pre-existing vulnerabilities that malicious users can use to compromise the system.

    One of the most common approaches used by Linux system administrators is manually installing security updates. The problem with this approach is that it cannot ensure consistent regularity.

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

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ntopng on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Ntopng is a web-based application for true network traffic flow monitoring that is available as open freeware. It’s an improved kind of innovative Ntop that displays network use, statistics, and analytical data. Ntopng comes in professional and corporate editions with license restrictions, as well as a free open source community version. It supports major OS including Unix, Windows, and macOS.

    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 Ntopng network monitoring 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.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install AngularJS on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

    Angular is a popular, open-source web application framework for building mobile and desktop apps. It was developed in 2009 by Google to help developers design complex applications from scratch without having expert knowledge of coding languages like C# or Java which can take up valuable time when you want something simple with little functionality at first but grow as your project develops over the years.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Angular on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal using the NodeSource repositories as the source for NodeJS and NPM.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Signal Messenger on Debian 11 Bullseye

    Signal Messenger is a free, open-source messaging app that has been around for several years and specializes in end-to-end encryption. When you need to communicate securely but find it hard because of the restrictions put on traditional messaging apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, Signal messenger is one of the better forms of communication for those that require the utmost privacy.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install Signal Messenger on Debian 11 Bullseye. The tutorial will use the command line terminal with complete steps to install the official repository and tips on updating and removing the software securely and adequately.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Vue.js on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

    Vue is a progressive JavaScript framework that makes it easy for anyone with some knowledge of HTML and CSS to create beautiful web applications. With Vue’s various tools, you can build your project in no time!

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Vue.js on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal using the NodeSource repositories as the source for NodeJS and NPM.

  • Linux Capable ☛ Set Up Nginx FastCGI Cache on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

    Nginx is a powerful web application server. However, combined with LEMP situations, PHP is known to be slow with requests needing to go to PHP-FPM, which then queries MySQL/MariaDB database, then Nginx will generate a static HTML page which is then delivered back to Nginx.

    So, the overheads increase dramatically if a website server is under heavy load. However, Nginx supports a cache solution with FastCGI to reduce the overhead and allow a server to handle more page requests with in-demand files being served from a cache instead of doing the whole route of going to the database and back.

    The following tutorial will show you how to set up Nginx FastCGI Cache on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa using the command line terminal.

• WINE or Emulation

  • WINE Project (Official) ☛ WineHQ – Wine Announcement – The Wine development release 7.11 is now available.

    The Wine development release 7.11 is now available.
    
    What's new in this release:
      - Android driver converted to PE.
      - Zero-copy support with GStreamer.
      - High Unicode planes support in case mappings.
      - Various bug fixes.
    
    The source is available at:
    
    https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/7.x/wine-7.11.tar.xz
    
    Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
    
    https://www.winehq.org/download
    
    You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
    
    You can also get the current source directly from the git
    repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
    
    Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
    AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
    

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • This Week in GNOME ☛ #48 Adaptive Calendar · This Week in GNOME

      Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 10 to June 17.

    • Remembering and Honoring Marina Zhurakhinskaya, Founder of Outreachy

      It is with great sadness that we write about the death of one of the most significant contributors to Free and Open Source Software, Marina Zhurakhinskaya. Marina was a force for change and leaves a profound legacy of diversity, inclusion, equity and justice. It is impossible to imagine what Software Freedom Conservancy and Outreachy would be like without Marina.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• BSD

  • 70

    I opened port 22 on my router at home and left my RPi on so that I can
    conneect to it while I’m at my parents’. Before doing this I setup npf
    on NetBSD that is running on the RPi and also blacklistd to ban those
    who try to log in multiple times.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu ☛ New Active Directory Integration features in Ubuntu 22.04 (part 3) – Privilege Management [Ed: Canonical is 'doping' by propping up Microsoft, then wonders why so many Ubuntu users ditch for other distros]

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Synthtopia ☛ New Audio Plugin Standard, CLAP, Offers Open Source Alternative To VST & AU – Synthtopia

  Bitwig and u-he have announced CLAP (CLever Audio Plug-in API), a new open standard for audio plug-ins and hosts.

  CLAP offers modern features, innate stability, and rapid support for plug-in and host developers. The developers say that, since it’s open source and liberally licensed, CLAP is a safe bet for the future.

  CLAP 1.0 is the result of a multi-year project initiated by u-he and Bitwig, with design and implementation contributions by a group of commercial and open source audio developers.

• Events

  • Short blog post from Madrid’s hotel room – Frédéric Wang

    This week, I finally went back to A Coruña for the Web Engines Hackfest and internal company meetings. These were my first on-site events since the COVID-19 pandemic. After two years of non-super-exciting virtual conferences I was so glad to finally be able to meet with colleagues and other people from the Web.

    Igalia has grown considerably and I finally get to know many new hires in person. Obviously, some people were still not able to travel despite the effort we put to settle strong sanitary measures. Nevertheless, our infrastructure has also improved a lot and we were able to provide remote communication during these events, in order to give people a chance to attend and participate !

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • The Next Platform ☛ Bridging The Gap Between Open Source Database And Database Business

    It is relatively easy to get a group of people that creates a new database management system or new data store. We know this because over the past five decades of computing, the rate of proliferation of tools to provide structure to data has increased, and it looks like at an increasing rate at that. Thanks in no small part to the innovation by the hyperscalers and cloud builders as well as academics who just plain like mucking around in the guts of a database to prove a point.

    But it is another thing entirely to take an open source database or data store project and turn it into a business that can provide enterprise-grade fit and finish and support a much wider variety of use cases and customer types and sizes. This is hard work, and it takes a lot of people, focus, money – and luck.

• GNU Projects

  • FSF ☛ FSD meeting recap 2022-06-17

    Check out the great work our volunteers accomplished at today’s Free Software Directory (FSD) IRC meeting.

    Every week, free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on Libera.Chat to help improve the FSD. This recaps the work we accomplished at the Friday, June 17, 2022 meeting, where we saw a couple of new programs added and several entries updated.

• Programming/Development

  • Creating a cgi-bin with golang

    I’m going to create a cgi-bin called “iss” with golang.

    My plan is to get the ISS coordinates and the number of people aboard.

  • Matt Rickard ☛ Don’t Use Kubernetes, Yet

    Early-stage startups shouldn’t run on Kubernetes yet.

    But eventually, growth-stage and large companies should be running on Kubernetes in some form. Kubernetes Maximalism doesn’t mean one-size-fits-all.

    Infrastructure should progressively grow with your workloads and team. How can you choose the right technology now so that you can maximize growth and minimize pain later when you inevitably outgrow it?

  • Geeks For Geeks ☛ jQuery Cheat Sheet – A Basic Guide to jQuery

    jQuery is an open-source, feature-rich JavaScript library, designed to simplify the HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax with an easy-to-use API that supports the multiple browsers. It makes the easy interaction between the HTML & CSS document, Document Object Model (DOM), and JavaScript. With the help of jQuery, the multiple lines of code can be wrapped into methods, which in turn, can be called with a single line of code to perform a particular task. This, in turn, jQuery makes it easier to use Javascript on the website, along with enhancing the overall performance of the website.

  • PowerDNS ☛ dnsdist-1.7.2 released

• Standards/Consortia

  • HFNP: The project’s not dead! I’m working hard

    It’s been almost three weeks since I last wrote anything about Hafnium, it might seem like nothing is happening, but that’s wrong.

    I didn’t make the changes public yet, I’ll roll out the commits once I’m sure that everything works fine.

Leftovers

• сједините!

  Recently, there’s been some “union activity” around the company I work for. Some of the lowest-paid and most-public-facing workers have started agitating to join a local union. I’m all for it, I’d join if I could. We were emailed a letter today about it, take a small look. I’m paraphrasing here, I don’t want to get sacked lmao

• On Changing Someone’s Mind

  Do not tell. Do not shout. People will not change their opinion if you just tell them they are wrong. Metaphorical shouting, cancelling, no platforming, they do not work. You have to explain patiently, with understanding, with sympathy for why they think what they think.

• The Two Types of Visibility That Boost Supply Chain Resilience

  The pandemic and war in Ukraine have caused serious disruption to supply chains. Analysis by Interos shows that more than 2,100 U.S.-based firms, and at least 1,200 in Europe, have Tier 1 suppliers in Russia. In addition, more than 190,000 firms in the U.S. and at least 109,000 in Europe have Tier 2 and 3 suppliers located there.

  As companies navigate through the continued pandemic response and uncertainty caused by the war, they’re facing challenges around instability of supply, price inflation, logistics disruption and labor impacts. As a result, the traditional notion of building resiliency in supply chains is evolving — and it should. No longer can companies focus only on flexible manufacturing, increasing inventory or varying supply sources. Instead, the key to building resilience is visibility.

  Research from Accenture found that companies with greater visibility are better positioned to handle all kinds of disruptions, creating a more resilient supply chain. What may come as a surprise is that companies don’t need full visibility into everything: An intelligent view into certain product lines, customers or suppliers is often enough.

  But what is visibility — and, more specifically, “intelligent visibility” that can be achieved with the use of new technologies and analytics? Most supply chain professionals have a general ideal of what the word means, but there actually are two types of visibility that create resilience in supply chains: structural and dynamic.

• Science

  • ACM ☛ Simulating a Faster Path to Quantum

    In a bid to accelerate the development of quantum computing applications, supercomputer manufacturer Fujitsu has come up with what it says is the world’s fastest 36-qubit quantum simulator.

    Quantum simulators attempt to emulate quantum operations on a classical computer. While their speeds are slower than quantum machines, they can serve as a bridge technology before wider implementation of quantum computers, which have limited computing range and can be prone to errors.

    The new Fujitsu machine operates on a 64-node PRIMEHPC FX 700 hardware system with the same A64FX processors used in Fugaku, the Fujitsu supercomputer that was knocked off its leading position in late May in the new TOP500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ OSPO Mind Map 2.0 release is out! [Ed: The 'Linux 'Foundation is helping the 'farming' of "volunteers" (slaves) by corporations]

      TODO Group is proud to announce a new OSPO Mind Map version release. The mind map shows a Open Source Program Office’s (OSPO) responsibilities, roles, behavior, and team size within an organization. This post highlights the major improvements done by the community in this new version of the OSPO Mind Map.

• Security

  • The Register UK ☛ Unpatched Exchange server, stolen RDP logins… How miscreants get BlackCat ransomware on your network [Ed: Microsoft ought to be banned from procurement, but this became a political process, not a technical process. Microsoft is trying to blame everyone else (victims, attackers) while putting back doors in its creations. RDP has loads of holes in it, Exchange had no patches for exploited-in-the-wild critical vulnerabilities for several months, but Microsoft doesn't want to admit this. Also, ransomware is predominantly a Windows issue, statistics have repeatedly shown.]

    Two of the more prolific cybercriminal groups, which in the past have deployed such high-profile ransomware families as Conti, Ryuk, REvil and Hive, have started adopting the BlackCat ransomware-as-as-service (RaaS) offering.

    The use of the modern Rust programming language to stabilize and port the code, the variable nature of RaaS, and growing adoption by affiliate groups all increase the chances that organizations will run into BlackCat – and have difficulty detecting it – according to researchers with the Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team.

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

    Yesterday I was asked for advice on anonymously reporting a new crypto scam that a potential victim had spotted before they lost money (hint: to a first approximation all cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets are a scam). In the end they got fed up with the difficulty of finding someone they could tell and gave up. However, to give the advice I thought I would check what the National Crime Agency’s National Cyber Crime Unit suggested so I searched “NCA NCCU report scam” and the first result was for the NCA’s Contact us page. Sounds good. It has a “Fraud” section which (as expected) talks about Action Fraud. However, since 2019 this page has linked to the National Archives archive of an old version of the Action Fraud website. So for three years if you followed the NCA’s website’s advice on how to report fraud you would have got very confused until you worked out you were on a (clearly labelled) archive rather than the proper website, which is why none of the forms work.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Tedium ☛ Suggestion Box History: The Small Data Before Big Data

      In an age when it seems like we’re being solicited for feedback every time we open up an app on our phones (especially if Facebook is paying us $20 a month for the privilege of siphoning our entire lives off our phones)

    • Michael Geist ☛ Why is the Canadian Government So Indifferent to Privacy? – Michael Geist

      Over the past several weeks, there have been several important privacy developments in Canada including troubling privacy practices at well-known organizations such as the CBC and Tim Hortons, a call from business organizations for privacy reform, the nomination of a new privacy commissioner with little privacy experience, and a decision by a Senate committee to effectively overrule the government on border privacy rules. These developments raise the puzzling question of why the federal government – led by Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, and Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez – are so indifferent to privacy, at best treating it as a low priority issue and at worst proposing dangerous measures or seemingly hoping to cash in on weak privacy laws in order to fund other policy priorities.

      The privacy alarm bells have been ringing for weeks. For example, the Globe and Mail recently featured an important story on children’s privacy, working with Human Rights Watch and other media organizations to examine the privacy practices of dozens of online education platforms. The preliminary data suggests some major concerns in Canada, most notably with the CBC, whose CBC Kids platform is said to be “one of the most egregious cases in Canada and really all around the world.” The CBC responded that it “complies with relevant Canadian laws and regulations with regard to online privacy, and follows industry practices in audience analytics and privacy protection.” Yet that is the problem: Canada’s privacy laws are universally regarded as outdated and weak, thereby enabling privacy invasive practices with no consequences. Soon after, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada released findings in an investigation involving the Tim Hortons app tracking location data. First identified by then-National Post reporter James McLeod, the commissioner found privacy violations, yet Canadian privacy law does not include penalties for these violations.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Spiegel ☛ High Casualties: Russia Pulls Out All the Stops to Find Fresh Troops – DER SPIEGEL

    The Russian army is suffering high casualties in the war against Ukraine and Vladimir Putin badly needs fresh troops. He wants to avoid a general mobilization, so the military is relying on other methods.

• Environment

  • Climate Hysteria

    We only have limited resources on this rock we call home. If, for example, we can make supplies last for 10 more millenia instead of 1, or, even 9, I am all for that.

• Finance

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Wells Fargo limits online credit card payments from non-Wells Fargo bank accounts. – BaronHK’s Rants

    Wells Fargo limits online credit card payments from non-Wells Fargo bank accounts.

    I use my credit cards like debit cards. I slide them to pay the bills and then pay them back in a day or two, so debts are basically temporary and causal, most of them are for something I must do or would do anyway, and they just generate credit card points.

    To pressure people who have a Wells Fargo credit card to open a Wells Fargo bank account, they do something I have never seen another credit card company do.

    If you try to make more than like 4 payments in a month online using a non-Wells Fargo bank account, they will refuse to accept the online payment until it’s a new month, and then say “You can make further payments by calling them in over the phone to this number.”.

    Then you have to call a toll free number, tell it your Wells Fargo account number, and then tell it the bank account routing and account numbers you want to use to make the payment.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Adventure Capitalism

    Locke says that property arises when the empty, unimproved natural places are mixed with human labor. You own your body, so you own its labor and the fruits of its labor. No one owns an empty place, so when you influse your body’s labor into a place, it becomes yours.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Citizen Lab ☛ Vuyo Kwakweni Recipient of the 2022 Reset Scholarship in Social Media and Democracy – The Citizen Lab [Ed: “Scholarship in Social Media and Democracy”? Social Media and Democracy are complete opposites.

    A South African student studying at the University of Toronto, Vuyo is obtaining a double major in Mathematics and Political Sciences, and a minor in Statistics. However, it is seemingly by chance that he ended up enrolling in Ron Deibert’s first-year political science class:

    “I did not know much about Professor Deibert’s course before taking it. I was looking for a politics course and it seemed interesting from its description! I applied for the award because after taking the course, I found that I was really curious about the work that they did at the Citizen Lab. Learning about the intersection between politics and the internet (and climate change!) has been such an eye opening experience, and I wanted the opportunity to learn from a group of people who are doing important work for the world.”

    When not studying, Vuyo can be found head-first in a science-fiction/fantasy novel or exploring the parks and gardens around Toronto.

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Idiomdrottning ☛ 180s

      I went from being a copyright zealot to being a copyright abolitionist (this was in 1999 so most of y’all know me after). I realized the limitless potential of sharing & caring. Copyright abolitionism was also my gateway to anti- and post-capitalist politics.

GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • XDA ☛ The ways you can run Linux on the MacBook Air (2022)

    Apple’s newest MacBook Air made its debut at WWDC 2022 ahead of July 2022 availability. But even before it gets into anyone’s hands, there is a lot that we already know about it. For one, the spec sheet is pretty complete, and the headline act is the Apple M2 chip powering the show.

    Apple’s move to its own ARM-based silicon is heading into its second generation. Paired with macOS Ventura, also revealed at WWDC, there are a number of great features for consumers, professionals, and developers alike. It should be pointed out, though, that the MacBook Air (2022) will ship with macOS Monterey.

    For the latter, one key consideration may well be whether or not the new MacBook Air can successfully run Linux. For many developers being able to successfully boot into Linux is a key part of their workflow. On that front, there is good and bad news to consider.

• Server

  • Cisco Unfurls Observability Cloud for Kubernetes Environments

    At its Cisco Live! event this week, Cisco added an AppDynamics Cloud observability service that is optimized for microservices-based applications constructed using containers.

    Gregg Ostrowski, executive CTO for Cisco AppDynamics, says AppDynamics Cloud is designed to ingest logs, metrics, events and traces generated by both applications and the cloud infrastructure they run on to provide IT teams with a more holistic view of their environment. It initially supports managed Kubernetes environments on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with future support for Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and other cloud providers planned.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ Kaisen Linux 2.1 overview | The distribution for professional IT. – Invidious

    In this video, I am going to show an overview of Kaisen Linux 2.1 and some of the applications pre-installed.

  • Video ☛ Monica Setup on Portainer | A Personal Relationship Manager – Invidious

    Monica is an open-source web application to organize and record your interactions with your loved ones.

  • Jupiter Broadcasting ☛ 100 Days of HomeLab | Self-Hosted 73

    A special episode today as TechnoTim joins Alex to discuss everything Kubernetes and HomeLab. The #100DaysOfHomeLab initiative from Tim is just getting started, find out what it’s all about in today’s episode.

  • Video ☛ A new Deck APU driver for Windows fixes Halo Infinite regression (plus other Deck News) – Invidious [Ed: From "The Linux Gamer" to "The Valve Shill" (even Windows sometimes)]

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Real Linux User ☛ How to set up Parental Control in Zorin OS

    A Personal Computer is called a Personal Computer because it is mostly used for personal purposes. But what if this computer is intended to be used as a family computer and you do not want your children to have exactly the same possibilities as you have? Or maybe you installed a separate Linux computer for the children in their room for which you still want to be in control of what they can or cannot do with it and at what moment of the day. You probably want to set up some restrictions for your children, such as the time when they can use the computer, the duration of the time they can use it and most likely you want to limit their rights to do administrative tasks. In this article, as part of my Zorin OS tutorial series, I explain how to set up Parental Control in Zorin OS.

  • Citizix ☛ How to run Prometheus with docker and docker-compose

    Prometheus is a free open source software application used for event monitoring and alerting. It was originally built at SoundCloud. It is now a standalone open source project and maintained independently of any company.

    Prometheus collects and stores its metrics as time series data, i.e. metrics information is stored with the timestamp at which it was recorded, alongside optional key-value pairs called labels. Metrics are numeric measurements, time series mean that changes are recorded over time. What users want to measure differs from application to application. For a web server it might be request times, for a database it might be number of active connections or number of active queries etc.

  • The Anarcat ☛ Antoine Beaupré: Matrix notes

    I have some concerns about Matrix (the protocol, not the movie that came out recently, although I do have concerns about that as well). I’ve been watching the project for a long time, and it seems more a promising alternative to many protocols like IRC, XMPP, and Signal.

    This review may sound a bit negative, because it focuses on those concerns. I am the operator of an IRC network and people keep asking me to bridge it with Matrix. I have myself considered just giving up on IRC and converting to Matrix. This space is a living document exploring my research of that problem space. The TL;DR: is that no, I’m not setting up a bridge just yet, and I’m still on IRC.

  • David Revoy ☛ Fedora 36 KDE Spin for a digital painting workstation: reasons and post-install guide

    My last guide was about Kubuntu 20.04LTS, and I used it during two years. Two years!…that was splendid. So, with that success in mind, I imagined it would be a no-brainer to continue with the newest Kubuntu to the date: 22.04LTS.

    Unfortunately, I tested 22.04LTS and I disliked it. It has a slower Firefox packaged only as [Snap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(software). Also, applications installed with the command line “apt install” could come as Deb package, or as Snap package without knowing it ahead (and Snap version often comes with additional bugs). To top it all off, a Snap directory was even hard-coded in my /home directory.

    Of course, all of that pre-existed 22.04 in a lighter form, and it was easier to dodge or uninstall it. With 22.04, I felt Canonical wanted really to push Snap on me and I couldn’t see any technical advantage to impose to myself this technology. Especially when the GNU/Linux ecosystem has many other choices.

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ Linux NFS Mount Entry in fstab (/etc/fstab) with Example

    NFS stands for ‘Network File System’. This mechanism allows Unix machines to share files and directories over the network. Using this feature, a Linux machine can mount a remote directory (residing in a NFS server machine) just like a local directory and can access files from it.

    An NFS share can be mounted on a machine by adding a line to the /etc/fstab file. In this guide, we learn about NFS mount entry in the fstab file. Check what options fstab has to mount to NFS for better performance.

  • Deleted files recovery on Linux – Full guide

    Losing files is really annoying for all of us. Many think that the data they have just lost is gone for good and there is no way it can be retrieved or recovered. The good news is that there are toolsthat can do magic, .i.e. they may help recover these files. It is important to know however that the earlier you notice the deletion, the more likely these tools will be able to recover your files. When you realize you’ve deleted something, you shouldn’t try to mess up with the other files. Don’t copy, cut or paste, don’t manipulate files, don’t delete and install programs unless this is absolutely necessary as it will be the case with the tools below.

    In this tutorial, you will learn how to recover deleted files on Linux using some built-in and downloadable utilities.

  • OSTechNix ☛ Backup Proxmox Containers And VMs To USB Drive – OSTechNix

    The first thing you should do after installing a Proxmox server is to decide how to backup your proxmox containers and virtual machines and where to save those backups safely. Keeping the backups in the same system isn’t a real backup strategy and it is NOT SAFE. In this step by step guide, we will see how to backup Proxmox containers and virtual machines to an external USB drive via Proxmox web UI. We will also see how to overwrite an existing container or VM and how to restore the deleted container and VM from the backup.

    If you run Proxmox on production, you must know how to backup the Proxmox containers/VMs periodically in order to avoid data loss. Fortunately, Proxmox web dashboard makes the job even easier and quicker.

  • How to solve Docker error: no space left on device

    You will find below how to fix the Docker error : no space left on device . There are two similar solutions. The first is the long winded whereas the second is the fastest.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Back Up Your Data With Déjà Dup on Linux

    Do you have any documents or information on your PC that you can’t afford to lose? Then you should take a backup.

    A data backup protects you from losing valuable data such as family photos, travel documents, etc. in case of a disaster, hardware failure, malicious attack on your computer, etc. Let’s explore how you can back up your data on Linux using Déjà Dup, also known as Backups.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Gulp.js on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Gulp.js on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Gulp is an open-source JavaScript toolkit developed by Eric Schoffstall that helps developers to automate & enhance their workflow. Gulp is useful to make automate processes and run repetitive tasks easily. It also includes the feature of piping output to another command.

    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 Gulp.js on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

  • Citizix ☛ How to install and configure docker in Alma Linux 9

    Docker is an open source containerization platform. It enables developers to package applications into containers—standardized executable components combining application source code with the operating system (OS) libraries and dependencies required to run that code in any environment.

    Docker is a set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from one another and bundle their own software, libraries and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels.

    In this guide we are going to explore various options to install docker in Alma Linux 9.

  • OSNote ☛ How to make Google Chrome the default Browser in Ubuntu – OSNote

    Chrome is the most used web-browser across the world. Everyone, in no matter what walk of life, has at least heard of it, if not used it in any capacity. It provides a plethora of features, supporting a plethora of extensions, and developer options that make it a must have web browser for everyone. Though Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 allows you to download Chrome, they both come with Firefox as a default.

    So, if you’re like me and you are not satisfied with Firefox and want to use Chrome to scratch that itch, here is how to make chrome default browser.

• Games

  • Godot Engine ☛ Godot Engine – Release candidate: Godot 3.5 RC 4

    The upcoming Godot 3.5 is now considered feature complete, and has received a lot of bugfixes and improvements over the past weeks thanks to all the testers and developers who reported and fixed issues. We are now at the Release Candidate stage, finalizing everything so that we can release 3.5-stable for all users.

    At this stage we need people to test this release (and potential follow-up RCs) on as many codebases as possible, to make sure that we catch non-obvious regressions that might have gone unnoticed until now. If you run into any issue, please make sure to report it on GitHub so that we can know about it and fix it!

    This RC 4 fixes a number of recent regressions and older bugs. Notably, this fixes a potential crash on Windows 11 on scenes using specific fonts. It also significantly refactors the new navigation system to make it closer to the version in Godot 4.0, and provide the missing features that 3.5 users would require to use it fully.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Sam Thursfield: Status update, 17/06/2022

      I am currently in the UK – visiting folk, working, and enjoying the nice weather. So my successful travel plans continue for the moment… (corporate mismanagement has led to various transport crises in the UK so we’ll see if I can leave as successfully as I arrived).

      I started the Calliope playlist toolkit back in 2016. The goal is to bring open data together and allow making DIY music recommenders, but its rather abstract to explain this via the medium of JSON documents. Coupled with a desire to play with GTK4, which I’ve had no opportunity to do yet, and inspired by a throwaway comment in the MusicBrainz IRC room, I prototyped up a graphical app that shows what kind of open data is available for playlist generation.

    • Marco Melorio: GSoC update #1 – Planning

      GSoC coding period started on Monday, so this is a good time to blog about what I’ve started working on and what’s my milestone to finish the project. First off, I’ve created a simple mockup using Sonny Piers’ amazing Workbench app. This is the first step in knowing how we want the UI to look like, at least in the first iteration.

      [...]

      Some days ago I started working on a media viewer for my app Telegrand. I wanted a similar feeling of the media viewer on Telegram iOS and Android, which I’ve always found really cool to use. You can see my progress in the tweets below. The animations and the swipe gestures were liked quite a bit, so I’ve decided to add them in Fractal too, so that they can also be used in the media history viewer.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• BSD

  • OpenBSD – Part 3

    The third day of the OpenBSD transition is here and here’s my progress! Might be a bit more lengthy than the other parts.

    I learned about disklabel(6) and how to view and write disklabel partitions with it, it’s a nice utility once you get to know it.

    As usual, OpenBSD shines with security features. I found out that only users in the wheel group can attempt to become root via ‘su’, unprivileged users cannot, which is really good!

    I found out that mount(8) shows the currently mounted partitions and their options, aside from that I’ve studied its internals and how it calls mount_msdos, for example, when mounting vfat partitions. I’ve also learned that fat partitions are always on partition i. The OpenBSD partitioning scheme is beginning to make sense and I’m getting quite fond of it.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/24

    Week 24 contained again some public holidays for my place, but as in the past, this has never stopped Tumbleweed from rolling. After all, it’s all our contributor’s work making it go as smoothly as it is. And their great work has paid off once again, as we could finally, after months and months of preparation, testing, fixing, and redo, make the switch of the default python interpreter to version 3.10. This resulted in a rather large rebuild of the distro, as all python3- symbols needed to move to the correct python subpackage again. As a positive side effect, the recently introduced SOURCE_FORTIFY=3 is now enabled on all binaries. With the rebuild taking a bit longer, we have still managed to publish 5 snapshots this week (0609, 0611, 0612, 0613, and 0614)

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Community Blog: Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2022-24

    Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

    I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

  • IBM Old Timer ☛ IBM veteran Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Can We Trust Our Impressive AI Language Models?

    One of the key findings of the 2022 AI Index Report was that large language models (LLMs) are setting records on technical benchmarks thanks to advances in deep neural networks and computational power that allows them to be trained using huge amounts of data. LLMs are now surpassing human baselines in a number of complex language tasks, including English language understanding, text summarization, natural language inference, and machine translation.

    A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?, a recent NY Times Magazine article by science writer Steven Johnson, took a close look at one such LLM, the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3, generally referred to as GPT-3. GPT-3 was created by the AI research company OpenAI. It’s been trained with over 700 gigabytes of data from across the web, along with a large collection of text from digitized books. “Since GPT-3’s release, the internet has been awash with examples of the software’s eerie facility with language – along with its blind spots and foibles and other more sinister tendencies,” said Johnson.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Deploy enterprise applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in Microsoft Azure [Ed: Red Hat does not recognise an enemy and instead advertises Microsoft proprietary software while hiring from Microsoft for management positions]

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Common Security Advisory Framework (CSAF) beta files now available

    Red Hat Product Security is pleased to announce that a new security metadata offering, the Common Security Advisory Framework (CSAF), is now available in beta form. CSAF 2.0 is the successor to the Common Vulnerability Reporting Framework (CVRF) version 1.2, and contains many enhancements to the information provided in each CSAF file. Additionally, CSAF uses the JSON format instead of the XML format used by CVRF.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Using cloud, application and data services—plus other hosted tools—in the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console

    In a recent blog post, we talked about why many people are choosing to use cloud services instead of self-managed infrastructure. According to a recent report, 68% of organizations are deploying application services in cloud environments.1 Using cloud services, including application and data services, helps teams focus on the work that’s most important to them while trusted experts manage the infrastructure. Using Red Hat OpenShift cloud services―including application and data services like Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka, Red Hat OpenShift API Management and Red Hat OpenShift Data Science―helps organizations shorten development cycles. And switching to Red Hat OpenShift cloud services has been shown to improve operational efficiency by 50%.2 (Not sure what cloud services are? Read our “What are cloud services?” article.)

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu ☛ The private cloud future: Data centres as a service [Ed: There's no such thing as "private clouds"; you just mean servers. Stop calling everything "clown".]

    Even after the public cloud hype, private clouds remain to be a very essential part of many enterprises’ cloud strategy. Private clouds are simply giving CIOs more control over their budgets, enabling better security and allowing the flexibility to build best of breed IT solutions. So let’s stop here and take a step backwards, why are organisations even investing in their IT?

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino ☛ This RGB wedding dress mimics Princess Aurora’s from Sleeping Beauty | Arduino Blog

    Inspired by his Christmas tree’s RGB lights, Brett Haddoak had the idea to turn his now-wife Rachelle’s wedding dress into something out of the classic children’s movie Sleeping Beauty by embedding a series of RGB LED strips that would elegantly illuminate it just like Princess Aurora’s.

    At first, Haddoak chose to simply take the Christmas lights off of his tree and attach them to the dress, but this proved to be non-ideal since the area covered wasn’t enough. Additionally, the app that controls the string of lights was unreliable, thus making a DIY solution necessary. His initial test involved taking a couple WS2812B strips, wrapping them around a chair, and testing out a blue to pink transition animation that is performed by an Arduino Nano and the FastLED library. That concept turned out quite well, so Haddoak moved onto the next step of integrating the lights into fabric and toying with the brightness.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ Top 20 Best Camera Apps for Android Device in 2022

  • 5 Best Ways to Fix Apps Not Updating on Android TV – Guiding Tech

  • Best Android Tablet 2022: Samsung to Xiaomi and beyond | Tech Advisor

  • Hindustan Times ☛ The Xiaomi Pad 5 – Is it Android’s response to the Apple iPad? – Hindustan Times

  • Notebook Check ☛ Anbernic RG353P: New retro gaming handheld arrives that can dual boot Android and Linux – NotebookCheck.net News

  • Android Police ☛ How to find a lost Android phone or tablet

  • Android Central ☛ How to use Waze with Android Auto | Android Central

  • Gadgets Now ☛ telegram: How to change your phone number in Telegram on Android

  • Gadgets Now ☛ data: How to turn on data saver mode on Android

  • Wired ☛ The Top New Android 13 Features and How to Install It | WIRED

  • Android Central ☛ How we test and review Chromebooks at Android Central | Android Central

  • Giz China ☛ Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra – the next Android king renders is here

  • Hurry up! AppLock PRO for Android is free for a limited time | NextPit

  • Make Use Of ☛ What Do the Android Status Bar Symbols Mean?

  • 9to5Google ☛ Google Maps dark mode is broken on Android Auto right now – 9to5Google

  • Make Use Of ☛ Android Auto vs. Android Automotive: What’s the Difference?

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ The Mozilla Blog: Queer Singer/Songwriter Criibaby Finds Pride and Joy at the Intersection of Tech and Music

    • Mozilla ☛ Firefox Presents: Redefining love and identity, one viral video at a time [Ed: Mozilla is not a tech company but a leech living off of Google money to pretend choice and competition exist. When you cannot compete on tech and resort to politics or when your reputation is down the drain…]

      Every Monday and Thursday, queer comedy writer and actor Brandon Kyle Goodman asks their 176,000 Instagram followers to tell them something good or messy.

• Funding

  • LWN ☛ Tor Project 2020-2021 annual report [LWN.net]

    The Tor Project has released a new annual report.

• Programming/Development

  • InfoQ ☛ Reproducible Development with Devcontainers

Leftovers

• What’s up? 2022 edition

  I’m also actively looking for a job so my year of unemployment is about to come to an end hopefully in the next weeks. I don’t want to work when I’m only starting to find my own pace, but I need money so I can buy a piece of soil somewhere and grow tomatoes and basil on it!

• Christina’s questions for June

  I’m persuaded by the Golden Rule: treat others as you would wish to be treated. I think most people are happy with this as the basis for how to treat people, but not everyone.

• Coffee and the book “Deep Simplicity”

  What it about and why do I want to read it? Understanding science has always been “my thing” ever since elementary school. What is fire, why does it rain, what are living things, what am I, Why do people act the way they do? Im someone who likes asking questions and getting answers.

• Hardware

  • CNX Software ☛ u-blox unveils miniature MIA-M10 GPS module – CNX Software

    u-blox has introduced what could be the world’s smallest GNSS module with the 4.5×4.5mm u-blox MIA-M10 miniature module supporting GPS, BeiDou, Galileo, and GLONASS satellite navigation systems.

    The MIA-M10 is said to be about half the size of competing products and has been specially designed for size-constrained battery-powered asset tracking devices, as well as space-constrained industrial sensors and consumer goods. The company also claims its power-save modes can double the battery life by balancing position accuracy and power consumption.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Doctors for Covid Ethics

    Whitney discusses the parallels between the “rescue” of Emergent Biosolutions with anthrax (and potentially now monkeypox) and the “rescue” of Moderna and BioNTech with Covid.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Linux Foundation and Openwashing Agenda

    • Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ One Place to Manage Your Open Source Projects and Communities [Ed: Those are not communities! They're openwashing corporate incubators, cultivating the false impression that these corporations (clients of LF) are altruistic]

    • Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ A New Framework for In-Person OSPO Workshops: TODO Group Seeks Collaborators [Ed: Openwashing crock or how to farm volunteers (slaves) to work for your corporation for no salary]

      As more and more organizations adopt open source initiatives and/or seek to mature their involvement in open source, they often face many challenges, such as educating developers on good open source practices, building policies and infrastructure, ensuring high-quality and frequent releases, engaging with developer communities, and contributing back to other projects effectively. They recognize that open source is a complex ecosystem that is a community of communities. It doesn’t follow traditional corporate rules, so guidance is needed to overcome cultural change.

    • Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ The SOGNO Project Wins Prestigious Award for Focus on Modular Grid Automation [Ed: Openwashing and greenwashing of dirty energy by the so-called 'Linux' Foundation (it is not about Linux)]

• Security

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

    Security updates have been issued by Fedora (kernel, liblouis, ntfs-3g, php, shim, shim-unsigned-aarch64, shim-unsigned-x64, thunderbird, and vim), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable and golang), Red Hat (grub2, mokutil, and shim and grub2, mokutil, shim, and shim-unsigned-x64), SUSE (389-ds, apache2, kernel, mariadb, openssl, openssl-1_0_0, rubygem-actionpack-5_1, rubygem-activesupport-5_1, and vim), and Ubuntu (exempi, kernel, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-aws-5.13, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-azure-5.13, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fde, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-gcp-5.13, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-hwe, linux-hwe-5.13, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-intel-5.13, linux-intel-iotg, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.13, linux-oracle-5.4, and spip).

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Tracking People via Bluetooth on Their Phones – Schneier on Security

      We’ve always known that phones—and the people carrying them—can be uniquely identified from their Bluetooth signatures, and that we need security techniques to prevent that. This new research shows that that’s not enough.

    • Gizmodo ☛ Always-On Bluetooth Could Be Used to Track Your Phone

    • Linux Links ☛ Data Brokers: What Are They & How Do They Work? – LinuxLinks

      Data brokers do exist, and while their actual job isn’t as glamorous as fiction makes it out to be, they are gunning for you – and making a lot of money doing it. Here’s an article that may help you understand it more succinctly.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • New York Times ☛ Britain Approves Extradition Order for Assange

    Priti Patel, Britain’s home secretary, approved the order. But Mr. Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who faces charges in the U.S. under the Espionage Act, is likely to appeal.

  • CNN ☛ Julian Assange’s extradition to US approved by UK government

    UK Home Secretary Priti Patel has signed an order to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States, where he faces espionage charges, in a decision Wikileaks said marked a “dark day for press freedom.”

  • Gannett ☛ British interior minister orders Julian Assange extradition to U.S. to face espionage charges

    Britain’s interior minister ordered the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States to face espionage charges. He can appeal.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Wired ☛ Cops Will Be Able to Scan Your Fingerprints With a Phone

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Upgrading WiFi bandwidth, hardware codec for VR Expreience

    I’m a heavy VRChat player. My setup wasn’t really good for VR per se. I had a relatively weak PC and limited LAN bandwidth. The upgrade is a bit costly, but I’m happy with the money spent. Also some unexpected issues caused my the upgrade.

• Monopolies

  • as days pass by — Help the CMA help the Web

    As has been mentioned here before the UK regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, are conducting an investigation into mobile phone software ecosystems, and they recently published the results of that investigation in the mobile ecosystems market study. They’re also focusing in on two particular areas of concern: competition among mobile browsers, and in cloud gaming services.

  • Property

    I’ve seen many discussions in socialist and Marxist thought about two different kinds of property: private property and personal property. Usually the demarcation between these is given by example: personal property includes things like a video game console or a set of plates, while private property includes things like a tractor trailer, an aircraft or a railroad. Socialists and Marxists use this distinction to differentiate between things that should retain individual ownership and things that should have common ownership.

  • Computer World ☛ The death of Internet Explorer: Good riddance to bad rubbish

    Microsoft took the threat seriously. Netscape CEO James Barksdale would later testify that in a June 1995 meeting, Microsoft proposed that the two companies split the browser market, with Internet Explorer being the only Windows browser. If Netscape didn’t comply, Microsoft would crush it.

    “I had never been in a meeting in my 33-year business career in which a competitor had so blatantly implied that we should either stop competing with it or the competitor would kill us,” Barksdale said during the Department of Justice’s 2001 antitrust trial against Microsoft.

    Despite that warning, Netscape continued to lead the technology revolution. Netscape Communicator was where the real innovation happened. JavaScript, for example, is arguably the most popular programming language globally, and JavaScript was a Netscape creation. But, Microsoft, in all fairness, had its moments too. For example, IE 3.0 was the first browser to adopt Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in 1996.

    But the real reason we’re saying goodbye to IE only today, long after Netscape became history, is that Microsoft exploited its illegal PC/Windows monopoly to block Netscape from computers. Microsoft strong-armed PC vendors into putting the new operating system and its browser on all their PCs. The goal was not so much to kill off other PC operating system vendors; there wasn’t any real OS competition in the mid-‘90s. The goal was to destroy Netscape.

    The courts agreed. The DoJ won in its lawsuit against Microsoft because the company’s PC monopoly made it impossible for Netscape to compete with IE. Unfortunately, the government gave Microsoft a slap on the wrist rather than breaking it up into separate companies or open-sourcing its code. And Netscape died, just as Microsoft had threatened back in 1995.

    So it was that many of you grew up with IE as the browser you knew and loved. You didn’t know any better.

GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • TechRepublic ☛ Dev One laptop review: System76 and HP strike the perfect balance of form and function | TechRepublic

    I never hesitate to heap praise over System76. After all, they have not only produced some of the best Linux hardware on the market, but they’re also the creators of my daily Linux distribution (Pop!_OS) as well as a proud champion of open-source technology.

    I’ve been using a Thelio as my primary desktop for several years, and I’ve been anxiously awaiting the company to produce the perfect laptop. Don’t get me wrong, the laptops they currently offer are stellar, but I’ve always been less of a fan of Linux on laptops than I have been of it on the desktop. That’s not to say there’s nothing wrong with Linux on a laptop, but there’ve been certain issues that I believe have prevented it from excelling as it should.

    The new effort by System76 and HP has changed my mind on that stance. Not only have the two powerhouses proven they can work together to create a stunning piece of hardware, but they’ve also made it quite clear the power and flexibility of Linux can be harnessed for mobile devices to brilliant effect.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • FSFE ☛ SFP#15: All about Upcycling Android – FSFE

    In November 2021 the FSFE has launched the new campaign “Upcycling Android”. If you haven’t already upcycled your phone or you are curious to learn more about the campaign listen to our new Software Freedom Podcast episode with the campaigns manager Erik Albers.

• Applications

  • Linux Links ☛ timg – Terminal Image and Video Viewer

    
    One of our favorite adages is “A picture is worth a thousand words”. It refers to the notion that a still image can convey a complex idea. Images can portray a lot of information quickly and more efficiently than text. They capture memories, and never let you forget something you want to remember, and refresh it in your memory.

    Images are part of every day internet usage, and are particularly important for social media engagement. A good image viewer is an essential part of any operating system.

    timg is different from the vast majority of image viewers. It’s a small command-line program to view images from the terminal. Not only does it display images in a terminal, it also supports the Kitty Graphics Protocol. This allows you to view high resolution images direct in a terminal. And the software also lets you watch animations and videos within the terminal.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Tips On UNIX ☛ Install Apache NetBeans IDE 14 On Ubuntu / AlmaLinux & Fedora | Tips On UNIX

    This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Apache NetBeans IDE 14 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Linux Mint 20.3, AlmaLinux 9, Rocky Linux 8, and Fedora 36.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Google Chrome on Fedora 36 – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Google Chrome on Fedora 36. For those of you who didn’t know, Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser that was created by the company Google. It is a fast and solid browser with a good security record. It has some unique features and is generally pretty light on system resources. Chrome was available on Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android.

    This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Google Chrome web browser on a Fedora 36.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Podman Compose or Docker Compose: Which should you use in Podman? | Enable Sysadmin

    Both projects let you run multiple Podman containers on a single machine. But their differences might make one more appealing than the other.

  • How to install Terraform on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool that provides a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of cloud services. Terraform codifies cloud APIs into declarative configuration files.

    In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install Terraform on Ubuntu 22.04.

    Infrastructure as code (IAC) tools allow you to manage your infrastructure with a configuration file rather than through a graphical interface. IAC allows you to build, change and manage your infrastructure in a safe, consistent, and repeatable way by defining configurations that you can version, reuse and share.

  • Citizix ☛ How to install Apache Kafka on Alma Linux 9

    Apache Kafka is a distributed event store and stream-processing platform. It is an open-source system developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Java and Scala. The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds

    It is an open-source distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications.

  • Citizix ☛ How to Install and Configure Kibana on Ubuntu 22.04

    In this guide, we will learn how to install and configure Kibana on Ubuntu 22.04.

    Kibana is a proprietary data visualization dashboard software for Elasticsearch, whose open source successor in OpenSearch is OpenSearch Dashboards. It is a data visualization and exploration tool used for log and time-series analytics, application monitoring, and operational intelligence use cases. It offers powerful and easy-to-use features such as histograms, line graphs, pie charts, heat maps, and built-in geospatial support. Kibana also acts as the user interface for monitoring, managing, and securing an Elastic Stack cluster — as well as the centralized hub for built-in solutions developed on the Elastic Stack.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Waterfox Browser on Debian 11 Bullseye

    Waterfox is fresh air for those who want to maintain their privacy and security online. This browser has been made explicitly with 64-bit processors in mind but also runs on ARM devices like smartphones or tablets without any issues! In addition, it can be found across multiple platforms, including classic desktop systems and recent ones such as Mac OS X/ Linux interfaces, where users will enjoy its fast performance thanks to an open-source codebase that ensures stability over time.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Waterfox Browser on Debian 11 Bullseye desktop using the command line terminal with tips about maintaining and removing the browser versions.

  • Trend Oceans ☛ Display History with Date and Time in Linux

    
    The history command is one of the essential utilities for the Linux administrator, usually used to track all the shell commands you execute in a series.

    When you execute the command, the shell captures it and then stores it in the separate file of the user’s home directory at ~/.bash_history. When the history command is executed, it fetches the data from this file and displays it as an output with the command and ID on the terminal screen.

• Games

  • Fedora Magazaine ☛ Fedora Workstation’s State of Gaming – A Case Study of Far Cry 5 (2018) – Fedora Magazine

    First-person shooter video games are a great proving ground for strategies that make you finish on the top, reflexes that help you to shoot before getting shot and agility that adjusts you to whatever a situation throws at you. Add the open-ended nature brought in by large intricately-designed worlds into the mix, and it dials the player experience to eleven and, with that, it also becomes great evidence of what a platform is capable of. Needless to say, I have been a great fan of open-world first-person shooter games. And Ubisoft’s Far Cry series happens to be the one which remains closest to my heart. So I tried the (second) most recent release in the long-running series, Far Cry 5 which came out in 2018, on Fedora Workstation 35 to see how it performs.

    Just like in my previous case study, the testing hardware has an AMD RDNA2-based GPU, where the video game was configured to the highest possible graphical preset to stress the hardware into performing as much as its limiting factor. To ensure that we have a fair comparison, I set up two environments – one with Windows 10 Pro 21H2 and one with Fedora Workstation 35, both having up-to-date drivers and support software such as MSI Afterburner or MangoHUD for monitoring, Steam or Lutris for video game management and OBS Studio for footage recording. Adding to that, the benchmarks were ensured to be both representatives of a common gameplay scenario and variable enough to address resolution scaling and HD textures.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Tyler Cipriani ☛ Cool Desktops Don’t Change

    Working on my old ThinkPad x220 feels easy because I’ve used the same software for over a decade.

    And while it’s tempting to switch to one of the endless new apps out there, there are good reasons to trust old tools.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Neowin ☛ Kdenlive 22.04.2

      Kdenlive is an acronym for KDE Non-Linear Video Editor. It works on GNU/Linux, Windows and BSD. Through the MLT framework, Kdenlive integrates many plugin effects for video and sound processing or creation. Furthermore Kdenlive brings a powerful titling tool, a DVD authoring (menus) solution, and can then be used as a complete studio for video creation.

      Kdenlive supports all of the formats supported by FFmpeg or libav (such as QuickTime, AVI, WMV, MPEG, and Flash Video, among others), and also supports 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios for both PAL, NTSC and various HD standards, including HDV and AVCHD. Video can also be exported to DV devices, or written to a DVD with chapters and a simple menu.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Ubuntubuzz ☛ Download deepin 20.6 with Mirrors, Torrents, and Checksums

  Deepin 20.6 released this June. This is the latest release of the Chinese-origin computer operating system that is beautiful, unique, easy to use, as well as Free Libre and Open Source Software. In this page you can download it with alternative links and checksums added for complete experience.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • Community work group update post oSC22

    The community workgroup (CWG) for the Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) would like to update you on what has happened since the [openSUSE Conference 2022]((https://events.opensuse.org/conferences/oSC22). Make sure to check the panel discussion with the ALP steering committee and other talks from oSC22 as they become public.

    First, there is a new official communication channel! We’re using the “openSUSE ALP” matrix channel, bridged with https://discord.gg/opensuse and ircs://libera.chat/#opensuse-alp. We’ve got you covered! This is the best way how to consume updates.

    We have revisited the way we would like to communicate updates on ALP. The idea is to switch away from a digest report for all workgroups to something a bit easier to follow and more exciting to read.

    We’ve invited SUSE’s newly appointed Engineering Director Marco Varlese to the weekly ALP CWG meeting, and we have great news to share!

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Community Blog: CPE Weekly Update – Week 24 2022

    Purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Android Police ☛ This guy installed Ubuntu Linux on his Google Nest Hub

    The 2nd-gen Google Nest Hub is Google’s smartest smart display yet, offering sleep tracking, passable performance, and all the Assistant intelligence you could need. For all its smarts, the Nest Hub still isn’t a full computing device, though — the OS is far too limited. While Google is hard at work building a Pixel tablet as an alternative, it will still take some time until it sees the light of day. In the meantime, an avid hacker has managed to turn the existing Nest Hub hardware into a device that actually runs Linux distribution Ubuntu, teaching Google some security lessons while at it.

    As spotted by Mishaal Rahman, San Diego-based security researcher Frédéric Basse published a report on this Nest Hub vulnerability. He details how it’s possible to exploit security loopholes in the Nest Hub’s boot process to sidestep security measures, allowing him to install a stripped-down version of Ubuntu on the device. To achieve this, he had to pry open the base of the Nest Hub, revealing a hidden USB port meant for debugging or repairs, which he connected to a USB device to boot from. A software bug in the open-source “U-Boot” bootloader allowed him to bypass secure boot, and the rest is history, as you can see in the GIF below.

  • The Register UK ☛ Ubuntu releases Core 22: Its IoT and edge distro • The Register

    Canonical’s Linux distro for edge devices and the Internet of Things, Ubuntu Core 22, is out.

    This is the fourth release of Ubuntu Core, and as you might guess from the version number, it’s based on the current Long Term Support release of Ubuntu, version 22.04.

    Ubuntu Core is quite a different product from normal Ubuntu, even the text-only Ubuntu Server. Core has no conventional package manager, just Snap, and the OS itself is built from Snap packages. Snap installations and updates are transactional: this means that either they succeed completely, or the OS automatically rolls them back, leaving no trace except an entry in a log file.

    Combined with Core’s read-only root filesystem, the idea is that the operating system is always in a known-good state, and should be able to quickly and reliably recover from a power outage or a failed package installation, without the risk of disk corruption. As such, the OS can safely update itself, and is configured to do this automatically as soon as you start it. Finally, as shipped, you can only access Core over SSH: you can’t log in on its console.

  • CNX Software ☛ Beelink SER3 & SEi8 mini PCs review – Part 2: Ubuntu 22.04

    
    Previously, I reviewed Beelink’s new SEi8 and SER3 mini PCs running Windows 11, so in this part, I will cover Ubuntu 22.04.

    The SEi8 is an actively cooled Intel mini PC that physically consists of a 124 x 113 x 41 (4.88 x 4.45 x 1.61 inches) square metal case with a plastic top and uses Intel’s 14++ nm Coffee Lake Refresh Core i3-8109U processor from 2018 which is a dual-core 4-thread 3.00 GHz mobile processor boosting to 3.60 GHz with Intel’s Iris Plus Graphics 655.

    In comparison, the SER3 is an AMD mini PC and is physically very similar, consisting of a 126 x 113 x 40mm (4.96 x 4.45 x 1.57 inches) square metal case. It is also actively cooled and uses AMD’s 14 nm Zen Ryzen 3 3200U Picasso processor from 2019 which is a dual-core 4-thread 2.6 GHz mobile processor boosting to 3.5 GHz with Radeon Vega 3 Graphics.

    Internally each has a replaceable M.2 2230 Wi-Fi 5 (or 802.11ac) Intel Wireless-AC 3165 card and an M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 3.0 SSD drive with the SEi8 review model including a 512 GB Intel 660p drive and the SER3 review model including a 500 GB Kingston drive.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android Police ☛ Google rushes out Android 13 Beta 3.2 with some real bug fixes this time

  • XDA ☛ Android 13′s Nearby Unlock feature spotted in latest Google Play Services update

  • BGR ☛ Nothing Phone (1) just showed us the ugly side of Android

  • Samsung Set to Launch New “Rugged” Android Devices Soon – Phandroid

  • Computer World ☛ 12 handy hidden tricks for Google Calendar on Android | Computerworld

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Don’t be that open-source user, don’t be me

  Before I was a maintainer of open source software I was a user of open source software, and I sometimes behaved badly.

  While using some application or library I would discover a bug or something would break my workflow with a new release and I would head to GitHub to report it. Sometimes when I got there I would find that it has already been reported, so I would comment on the issue to add anything else I thought was useful and to add weight to the report. I also occasionally returned to issues that hadn’t been resolved to see if I could add any more useful information or to ask if there was an ETA on a fix. I felt I was being helpful.

  What I didn’t consider was that my interactions were taking time/attention/resources/patience from the project. User support is a cost.

  If you take anything away from this post I hope it is that these costs need to be paid by someone, the maintainer.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ curl is REUSE compliant | daniel.haxx.se

    The REUSE project is an effort to make Open Source projects provide copyright and license information (for all files) in a machine readable way.

    When a project is fully REUSE compliant, you can easily figure out the copyright and license situation for every single file it holds.

    The easiest way to accomplish this is to make sure that all files have the correct header with the appropriate copyright info and SPDX-License-Identifier specified, but it also has ways to provide that meta data in adjacent files – for files where prepending that info isn’t sensible.

• Programming/Development

  • Qt ☛ Qt 6.4 Beta Released

    Qt 6.4 adds three modules compared to Qt 6.3 and of course brings multiple new features and improvements within the existing modules. New modules Qt 6.4 are Qt HTTP Server and Qt Quick 3D Physics, both available as a technology preview. We also restore Qt Text to Speech module, which is now updated and ported to Qt 6.4. Additionally to these, we have a new Qt VNC Server module providing remote UI functionality for Qt 6.4. The new Qt VNC Server module is available for selected commercial licenses.

    There are many important and exciting features within existing modules coming with Qt 6.4 as well – such as iOS style for Qt Quick Controls and spatial audio support for Qt Multimedia – and a lot more. One highly requested item is support for Qt for WebAssembly we have been working on via multiple technology previews in earlier Qt 6.x releases. With Qt 6.4 we are fully supporting Qt for WebAssembly as a new platform.

  • Qt ☛ What can the automotive industry can learn from video games?

    At a glance, the traditional automotive and creative video games industries seem worlds apart with very little in common. However, when you look beyond the surface, there are many similarities between where the automotive industry is right now and where the game industry was a decade ago.

  • Qt ☛ Qt Creator 8 Beta released

    We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 8 Beta!

  • Qt New Chief Maintainer

    The voting period for the new Chief Maintainer has ended yesterday. I’m really happy to say that we have elected a new Chief Maintainer.

    Before getting to the results, I’d like to thank both candidates for stepping up and their willingness to take over the role.

    The vote ended with 24 votes for Volker and 18 for Allan.

  • The computers are fast, but you don’t know it

    Humans have a shit sense of measurement, especially for quantities that they can’t biologically perceive. For example, you intuitively know how much more heavy a 10kg object is than a 1kg object.

    For such quantities, your sense of measurement can improve if you have some way to translate them into signals that the brain is familiar with. For example, have you seen these videos?

  • Cargo Culting Software Engineering Practices

    Three months into my first Big Tech gig I was talking to a mentor about the overhead involved with the way the organisation worked. Meetings for standups, tech huddles, refinements, retros and product reviews; Processes such as limiting work in progress, desk checks, spikes, stories, and tasks. Coming from a startup we delivered high quality software without all of that labelled process. The mentor lent me his copy of Extreme Programming by Kent Beck, and that book gave me a framework to develop my own philosophy on software delivery and engineering practices.

Leftovers

• The Register UK ☛ SpaceX staff condemn Musk’s behavior in open letter

  A group of employees at SpaceX wrote an open letter to COO and president Gwynne Shotwell denouncing owner Elon Musk’s public behavior and calling for the rocket company to “swiftly and explicitly separate itself” from his personal brand.

  The letter, which was acquired through anonymous SpaceX sources, calls Musk’s recent behavior in the public sphere a source of distraction and embarrassment. Musk’s tweets, the writers argue, are de facto company statements because “Elon is seen as the face of SpaceX.”

• Proprietary

  • Help Net Security ☛ CyberArk Endpoint Privilege Manager protects Linux systems by enforcing least privilege policies [Ed: Proprietary software can add more holes though]

  • CRN ☛ Proofpoint: ‘Potentially Dangerous’ Flaw Could Allow Ransomware Attacks On Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive

    A Proofpoint team of researchers says their findings show ‘ransomware actors can now target organizations’ data in the cloud and launch attacks on cloud infrastructure.’

  • Dev Class ☛ Why is there a .NET dustup? Microsoft introduced closed-source C# extension for VS Code [Ed: Proprietary software is the only thing Microsoft promotes. GitHub is proprietary, VS Code is proprietary, and now this]

    Microsoft will introduce a closed-source extension for C# in Visual Studio Code as an alternative to the existing open source OmniSharp, according to a post yesterday by principal product manager Tim Heuer. This prompted a sharp retort from Miguel de Icaza, of Gnome, Mono and Xamarin fame, who declared it was “truly disappointing that Microsoft would subvert an active open source project by ramming in a proprietary extension to continue to lock down .NET.”

• Security

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

    • Novel Panchan botnet sets sights on telecoms, education firms’ Linux servers | SC Media

      First identified in March, Panchan does not only conduct typical SSH dictionary attacks but also facilitates SSH key collection for lateral movement, with the SSH configuration and keys gathered from the host machine’s running user HOME directory, according to an Akamai Security Research report. The findings also showed Panchan’s utilization of a “godmode” communication and admin panel within its binary, as well as its ability to download cryptominers in the form of memory-mapped files in an effort to evade detection. Meanwhile, most Panchan attacks may have been targeted at the education sector because of lacking cyber hygiene and prevalent SSH key sharing across different academic institutions, said Akamai researcher Stiv Kupchik.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • AccessNow ☛ End the impunity: police surveillance and hacking in India must be eradicated – Access Now

      Digital safety, human rights, and democracy itself, are in peril in India — the Indian parliament and the judiciary must immediately initiate independent and transparent investigations into the use of illegal hacking and surveillance.

      In 2021, it was reported that malware was used to plant “evidence” in an attempt to manipulate ongoing court cases against activists and human rights defenders. This week, a new Wired exposé revealed the latest findings from security firm SentinelOne linking the police in India to the “long-running hacking campaign, which the company has called Modified Elephant.”

      “These outrageous — and blatantly illegal — hacking and surveillance revelations by law enforcement to target activists and human rights defenders in India are an attack on the foundations of democracy,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific Policy Director and Senior International Counsel at Access Now. “This impunity that has empowered authorities to take such bold actions to threaten fundamental rights must be met with immediate investigation, accountability, and surveillance reform.”

    • CNX Software ☛ SONOFF POW Elite ESP32 WiFi power meter switch handles up to 20A load [Ed: Surveillance device spun as "smart"; connects to listening devices]

      SONOFF POW Elite is an ESP32-powered smart power meter switch that can handle up to 20A max load to monitor the power consumption of all appliances in a whole room.

• Finance

  • The Register UK ☛ Cisco pulls back on hiring with an eye on economic outlook • The Register

    Networking kingpin Cisco is hiring more cautiously to indicate that it, like many peers, is taking note of macroeconomic red flags.

    “It’s a time to be prudent,” Richard Scott Herren, Cisco senior veep and chief financial officer told the Nasdaq Investor Conference. “I think it is a time for everyone to be prudent… so we’re doing the same.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – UK approves Assange extradition to US, WikiLeaks says it will appeal

    British Home Secretary Priti Patel has approved the extradition of WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange to the US to face criminal charges there. The extradition order was issued on 20 April and sent to Patel for her approval.

    The announcement was made on Friday evening, ending a long-running saga after the Australian hacker was arrested in 2019 and jailed at the maximum security prison in Belmarsh after he had been given refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Medium ☛ The Cult in Google.

GNU/Linux

• Applications

  • Fish Shell ☛ fish 3.5.0 (released June 16, 2022)

    The large number of forks relative to bash are due to fish’s insanely expensive default prompt, which is unchanged in my version. If we switch to a prompt comparable to bash’s (lame) default, the forks drop to 16 with trunk, 4 after our changes.

  • Help Net Security ☛ Metasploit 6.2.0 comes with 138 new modules, 148 enhancements and features – Help Net Security

    Metasploit is the world’s most used penetration testing framework. It helps security teams verify vulnerabilities, manage security assessments, and improve security awareness. Metasploit 6.2.0 is now available. It includes 138 new modules, 148 enhancements and features, improvements, and 156 bug fixes.

    [...]

    CVE-2022-21999 SpoolFool Privesc by Oliver Lyak and Shelby Pace, which exploits CVE-2022-21999: A local privilege escalation targeting the spool service on Windows 10 or Server builds 18362 or earlier.

    Dirty Pipe Local Privilege Escalation via CVE-2022-0847 by Max Kellermann and timwr, which exploits CVE-2022-0847: A module targeting a privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel starting with version 5.8. The module leverages the vulnerability to overwrite a SUID binary in order to gain privileges as the root user.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • H2S Media ☛ How To Install SFTPGo on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy – Linux Shout

    Install Secure File Transfer Protocol SFTPGO on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish server or desktop to get HTTP, WebDAV, and FTP/S support.

    Transferring files is one of the most important tasks in the administration of a server or a web space. Of course, there are many different tools and protocols available for these – one of them is the Secure File Transport (SFTP). Compared to other methods such as the frequently used File Transport Protocol (FTP) or the Server Message Block or Common Internet File System (SMB/CIFS, Samba), it has specific advantages and disadvantages that do not share with any other standard.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install and Use Sysdig on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

    In this guide, we will show you how to install and use sysdig on Ubuntu systems.

    Sysdig is an open-source, system-level exploration application that capture, save, filter, and examine the real-time events of Linux systems. In a nutshell, it’s a robust performance analysis meth. You can integrate Sysdig with ansible, puppet, and logstash to extend the functionality.

  • Citizix ☛ How to Install and Configure Elasticsearch 8 on Ubuntu 22.04

    In this guide, we will learn how to install and configure Elasticsearch on Ubuntu 22.04

    Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch has quickly become the most popular search engine and is commonly used for log analytics, full-text search, security intelligence, business analytics, and operational intelligence use cases.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to Install OBS Studio on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

    In this guide, we will show you how to install OBS Studio in Ubuntu 22.04

    OBS Studio is Free and open source software for video recording and live streaming.

    OBS Studio (formerly Open Broadcaster Software or OBS, for short) is a free, open-source, and cross-platform screencasting and streaming app. It is available for Windows, macOS, Linux distributions, and BSD. OBS Project raises funds on Open Collective and Patreon

  • Linux Shell Tips ☛ How to Install MariaDB Server in RHEL 9 Linux

    MariaDB is a free and open-source Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) that is a fork of MySQL. It’s a widely used database server and a household name among developer circles. From novices to intermediate and advanced database administrators, MariaDB has stamped its authority as one of the leading SQL databases in the industry.

    In this guide, we will demonstrate how to install MariaDB on RHEL 9. We will install the community version which is free to download and use.

  • Techtown ☛ How to install Open Source API Gateway – Kong in Ubuntu 20.04 – Techtown

    In this tutorial, you will learn how to install and configure Kong in Ubuntu 20.04. Kong is one of the most important API tools we can find in the world.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ Migrate MariaDB to MySQL

    MySQL first appeared in 1995 as an open-source project and was later acquired by Sun microsystems. Finally, Oracle acquired sun, leading to MySQL becoming an Oracle product. Many of the biggest names in the industry, like Facebook, Github, etc., use MySQL for their day-to-day operations. MySQL provides a comprehensive SQL shell that can even interpret Python and Javascript. In addition, MySQL supports JSON as table fields and allows users to query based on JSON keys.

    It provides a secure authentication layer with support for very granular field-level controls for reading and writing. MySQL supports table encryption as well as binary log encryption. Development processes in MySQL are more closed when compared to MariaDB and the issue trackers refer to many oracle internal sources that are closed for the public.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ Nginx – Optimizing Performance (Part 1)

    In this series of articles, we’ll be looking at the various configuration options that we can tweak in order to improve performance in Nginx. Since there can be a lot to talk about regarding performance, I won’t be covering everything in just one article.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ Serving PHP Files in Nginx

    Nginx has been one of the most widely deployed web servers today. However, at its core it is merely just a reverse proxy. It can only serve static pages, and all of the dynamic content needs to be handled by other processes. In this article, we’re going to look into setting up our web server so that we can also serve PHP web pages.
    Whenever nginx receives a request for a PHP file, it should pass it to another process. In the case of PHP, it is commonly the php-fpm program. We can do this using a number of different protocols. However, the most commonly used one turns out to be FastCGI. FastCGI is a binary protocol created for interfacing dynamic applications with a web server. It improves upon the earlier Common Gateway Interface (CGI) protocol with better performance.

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ Square Enix Announces Final Fantasy VII Remake for Steam and the Steam Deck for June 17th – Boiling Steam

    This is almost an historic moment for the Steam Deck! Square Enix has had a worldwide series of announcements to make yesterday (16th of June) as they were celebrating the 25th anniversary of Final Fantasy VII (man, that long ago already!) and lo and behold they announced the availability of Final Fantasy VII Remake on Steam for the 17th of June, along with the fact that it will work from the get go on the Steam Deck!

    [...]

    Overall great exposure for the Steam Deck, and we should expect more publishers to follow suit as the Steam Deck gains popularity and expands in unit sales.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • DebugPoint ☛ Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) May Replace openSUSE Leap

    The openSUSE Leap and Enterprise may get replaced by the Adatable Linux Platform (ALP) and Leap may get discontinued.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Linux 36 election results – Fedora Community Blog

    The Fedora Linux 36 election cycle has concluded. Here are the results for each election. Congratulations to the winning candidates, and thank you all candidates for running in this election!

  • OpenSource.com ☛ What scrum masters can learn from dancing [Ed: IBM said the word "masters" should be avoided; the double-standards are again showing...]

    Many scrum masters have an obsession with quickly turning their teams into what they want them to be. Once their expectations are not met within some arbitrary time limit, or someone resists their ideas, then the fight begins.

    But the fight takes energy, time, and resources, and most of the time it doesn’t solve the problem. In fact, most of the time it worsens the problem. When this happens, it’s time for some reflection about the role of the scrum master.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ The 4-day workweek: 3 things development team leaders should prioritize instead | The Enterprisers Project

    The pandemic has forever changed the workplace, causing many in the tech industry to now question the traditional five-day workweek. One proposed solution is a four-day workweek, which some believe promises to redefine workplace productivity and employee happiness. Research shows those working four days per week report higher well-being, less burnout, and improved productivity.

    But the four-day workweek is not a one-size-fits-all model, and adopting one could be detrimental to teams that overlook underlying issues in their workplace culture. In cases where teams experience high friction in their development processes, compressing the workweek and removing flexibility may exacerbate burnout.

    For instance, when software developers spend significant time in meetings – upwards of ten hours per week on average – a four-day workweek may actually lead to longer, more stressful days as developers struggle to find time to code.

    The impact of friction on development teams is measurable. Recent data from more than 250,000 developers reveals developers code about 52 minutes per day – about 4 hours and 21 minutes during the workweek. A four-day workweek may have the unintended consequence of further reducing that average.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ Hybrid work: 4 ways to strengthen relationships

    More of us are working remotely or hybrid than ever before, and the benefits are clear: better work-life balance, less travel and a smaller carbon footprint, and more flexibility, to name just a few.

    There are days, however, when hybrid workers can feel disconnected. They see their teammates’ faces on the screen but miss the energy and culture they once experienced daily at the office.

    Here are four things my team and I do to keep our connection strong, wherever we are working:

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Its FOSS ☛ Ubuntu Runs on a Google Nest Hub, Wait, What? – It’s FOSS News

    Yes, a hacking attempt made this possible.

    A cybersecurity professional, Frédéric Basse, broke the secure boot on Google Nest Hub (2nd gen) and managed to run Ubuntu.

    Of course, Google Nest Hub does not officially support booting a custom OS. But, a security vulnerability allowed Fred to use an exploit and run Ubuntu.

    While this is fun, it is also a severe problem for an always-connected smart home display by Google.

  • Linux Shell Tips ☛ The History of Ubuntu Linux Distribution System

    Ubuntu is one of the most popular and widely used Linux distributions in the world, thanks to its user-friendliness, elegant and simple UI, and a large online community that provides support and solutions to common user problems. As a result, over the years, Ubuntu has become one of the most recommended Linux distributions for beginners.

    Ubuntu Linux derives its name from ‘Ubuntu’, a South African word that means ‘I am because you are’. This is a translation to mean that we become who we are through other people and denotes the spirit of togetherness.

    Ubuntu was the first Linux distribution to have scheduled releases on a predictable cycle. Starting October 2004, a new release of Ubuntu is typically released every 6 months.

    In 2006, Ubuntu made a slight adjustment to its release cadence. The fourth release, which would be made after every two years would receive long-term support (LTS) for production and large scale-deployments. This is the genesis of the acronym LTS.

• Devices/Embedded

  • CNX Software ☛ CrowPi L is a $200 laptop shell for Raspberry Pi 4 – CNX Software

    Two years ago, we reviewed CrowPi 2 Raspberry Pi 4 laptop designed for STEM education with embedded electronics modules and Letscode software with step-by-step tutorials to learn Scratch and Python programming.

    I found it quite good, but many people were mostly interested in having a Raspberry Pi 4 laptop, and the price tag was a bit high at the time. That’s probably why Elecrow has now designed for CrowPi L laptop shell for Raspberry Pi 4 based on the CrowPi 2 but without all the electronics modules, and with a built-in battery to operate more like an actual laptop.

  • Liliputing ☛ CrowPi L kit transforms a Raspberry Pi into a laptop (little assembly required) – Liliputing

    The CrowPi L is a small laptop computer shell designed to be powered by a Raspberry Pi. It has a display, keyboard, battery, and other components… but it’s the Raspberry PI you stuff inside that will serve as the actual brains of the computer.

    Made by the same folks who delivered the CrowPi and CrowPi 2, the new model is again aimed at the education space and comes with 96 courses on programming for beginners. But unlike earlier models, you don’t need to back a crowdfunding campaign this time – the CrowPi L is up for pre-order from the Elecrow website for just over $200, and it’s expected to begin shipping June 30, 2022.

  • Hackaday ☛ Turing Pi 2: The Low Power Cluster

    We’re not in the habit of recommending Kickstarter projects here at Hackaday, but when prototype hardware shows up on our desk, we just can’t help but play with it and write it up for the readers. And that is exactly where we find ourselves with the Turing Pi 2. You may be familiar with the original Turing Pi, the carrier board that runs seven Raspberry Pi Compute boards at once. That one supports the Compute versions 1 and 3, but a new design was clearly needed for the Compute Module 4. Not content with just supporting the CM4, the developers at Turing Machines have designed a 4-slot carrier board based on the NVIDIA Jetson pinout. The entire line of Jetson devices are supported, and a simple adapter makes the CM4 work. There’s even a brand new module planned around the RK3588, which should be quite impressive.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino ☛ Can Arduino help with tightrope walking? | Arduino Blog

    Walking a tightrope does take skill and natural balance, but it is really a matter of inertia. This is why you see acrobats carrying long poles on the high wire — the weight and length of the pole creates inertia that gravity must overcome in order to topple the performer. But those poles are unwieldy. To find out if he could achieve the same thing in a more compact package, James Bruton built this strange Arduino-controlled balancing backpack.

    Bruton has something of a fascination with self-balancing robots. His experience in that arena carried over here, because the backpack works a lot like a self-balancing robot. A weighted reaction wheel spins either clockwise or counter-clockwise, which will create rotational inertia to compensate for roll (left or right tilt). But instead of keeping a robot upright, this inertial mechanism sits on a backpack that Bruton can wear to stay upright as he attempts to walk along a beam.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Tor ☛ The Tor Project 2020-2021 Annual Report

  Hello Tor community,

  On behalf of the team, I am thrilled to share with you the Tor Project’s latest Annual Report!

• Programming/Development

  • The Anarcat ☛ building Debian packages under qemu with sbuild – anarcat

    I’ve been using sbuild for a while to build my Debian packages, mainly because it’s what is used by the Debian autobuilders, but also because it’s pretty powerful and efficient. Configuring it just right, however, can be a challenge. In my quick Debian development guide, I had a few pointers on how to configure sbuild with the normal schroot setup, but today I finished a qemu based configuration.

  • Ricoh GR IIIx 802.11 reverse engineering

    I just got a fancy new camera: Ricoh GR IIIx. It’s pretty great, and I strongly recommend it to anyone that wants a truly pocketable camera with fantastic image quality and full manual controls. One annoyance is the connectivity. It does have both Bluetooth and 802.11, but the only official method of using them is some dinky closed phone app. This is silly. I just did some reverse-engineering, and I now have a functional shell script to download the last few images via 802.11. This is more convenient than plugging in a wire or pulling out the memory card. Fortunately, Ricoh didn’t bend over backwards to make the reversing difficult, so to figure it out I didn’t even need to download the phone app, and sniff the traffic.

    When you turn on the 802.11 on the camera, it says stuff about essid and password, so clearly the camera runs its own access point. Not ideal, but it’s good-enough. I connected, and ran nmap to find hosts and open ports: only port 80 on 192.168.0.1 is open. Pointing curl at it yields some error, so I need to figure out the valid endpoints. I downloaded the firmware binary, and tried to figure out what’s in it:

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ My Favorite Modules: File::stat | Tom Wyant [blogs.perl.org]

      File::stat overrides the core stat() and lstat() functions. Instead of arrays, the new functions return an object having methods corresponding to the elements of the arrays returned by the original functions. This module has been in core since Perl 5.004.

Leftovers

• Counter Punch ☛ The Critical Theory of Pope Francis II: The Gospel of Creation (Laudato Si)

  In Laudato Si: Our care for our common home (2015), Pope Francis most assuredly rejects the idea that God as Creator has vanished from human consciousness throughout the world. One might say, to over-simplify, that two forms of human consciousness co-exist in tension in our world: secular and religious. This article focuses on chapter two, “The gospel of creation.” Francis begins by raising the question of why a document addressed to “all people of good will” should include a “chapter dealing with the convictions of believers?” (p. 50). He observes that there are those who “firmly reject” the idea of a Creator as irrelevant in areas of politics and philosophy or dismiss as irrational the “rich contribution which religions can make toward an integral ecology and the full development of humanity.” However, Pope Francis insists that “science” and “religion” can “enter into an intense dialogue fruitful for both” (ibid.).

  One possible entry-point for a secular person might be to choose to enter into the “religious imaginary;” then consider the created world “as if” a creator had fashioned it. This is a kind of “spiritual thought-experiment” that acknowledges that we, as human beings, have an interior and spiritual life. This interior subjectivity is awakened, if you will, by the “cultural riches of different peoples, their art and poetry …” (ibid.). These riches include the sacred scriptures of numerous faith-communities. Pope Francis reminds us, rightly, that the resolution of the ecological crisis requires various branches of the sciences and other forms of wisdom, including religious and poetic languages. But Francis’ fundamental purpose in Laudato Si is to “show how faith convictions can offer Christians, and some other believers as well, ample motivation to care for nature and for the most vulnerable of their brothers and sisters” (p. 51). He is not taking us through the intricate maze of “theologies of creation.”

• Counter Punch ☛ Cautionary Tale From an Irish Republican

  Yes, I’ve known bomb-makers and rebels with guns and dynamite, but I’ve never known anyone like John Crawley, an American citizen who joined the Marines, learned about weapons and how to use them, and then crossed the Atlantic and gave all he could give to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the organization that sought the liberation of Ireland from British rule and the British empire.

  Crawley tells much of his story in The Yank, (Melville House; $28.99), though surely not all of his history. To do so would jeopardize the freedom of former comrades. The Irish called Crawley “The Yank” because he was an American citizen, though he didn’t like the label. So why did he borrow their word for the title of his book? He doesn’t say. Yank is a cautionary tale. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine anyone reading this memoir and deciding to take up arms and deliver blows to any empire, or authoritarian regime. Crawley failed at the missions that he undertook, including gun smuggling and a crazy plot to blow up an electrical grid in England and bring the London economy to a halt. Call him delusional. He was arrested twice and served long prison terms, which he describes in a cursory way.

• The Nation ☛ THE RUPTURE TENSE

• Hackaday ☛ There’s A LEGO Suspension Dyno Now

  When it comes to the development and testing of performance suspension, it’s helpful to have a test apparatus that lets you recreate certain conditions reliably. This LEGO suspension dyno does just that, and it’s clearly a big help for those doing R&D on minifig motorcycle suspension.

• Hackaday ☛ Comparing 3D Printed Tires: Resin Vs. TPU

  Many robot builders and RC enthusiasts find themselves turning to 3D printed tires. The benefit is you can make them in any size and style you want, and they’re as readily available for as long as your home printer is still working. [Michael Rechtin] printed some up and decided to see how long they’d actually last in use.

• Hackaday ☛ 1200 Addressable LEDs Make For The Perfect First Dance

  The first dance of a newly married couple at the wedding reception is both a sentimental and memorable event, so why not make it even more so with something a bit special? Hackaday alumnus [Brett Haddoak] and his wife [Rachelle] certainly achieved that, with 1200 addressable LEDs turning her wedding dress into a real-life reproduction of Princess Aurora’s color changing dress from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.

• Hackaday ☛ Automated Blinds Can Be A Cheap And Easy Build

  Blinds are great for blocking out the sun, but having to get up to open and close them grows tiresome in this computationally-advanced age. [The Hook Up] decided to automate his home blinds instead, hooking them up to the Internet of Things with some common off-the-shelf parts.

• Science

  • Insight Hungary ☛ Katalin Novak awards Jordan B. Peterson with Order of Merit

    President of Hungary Katalin Novak awarded Jordan B. Peterson with the Order of Merit.“In recognition of his distinguished scientific work in the field of clinical psychology and his exceptional commitment to protecting the freedom of creativity and education of young people”.

    The Canadian psychologist and writer gave a lecture at the office of Novak this week. The President praised the conservative figure on her Facebook: “Jordan B. Peterson, a world-renowned thinker, and clinical psychologist gave an exciting lecture in our midst today. The Sándor Palace is more than an office. It is a symbolic place that also provides space for thinking. And building a broad-minded community that understands each other.”

• Education

  • Pro Publica ☛ White Parents Rallied to Chase a Black Educator Out of Town. Then, They Followed Her to the Next One.

    In April of 2021, Cecelia Lewis had just returned to Maryland from a house-hunting trip in Georgia when she received the first red flag about her new job.

    The trip itself had gone well. Lewis and her husband had settled on a rental home in Woodstock, a small city with a charming downtown and a regular presence on best places to live lists. It was a short drive to her soon-to-be office at the Cherokee County School District and less than a half hour to her husband’s new corporate assignment. While the north Georgia county was new to the couple, the Atlanta area was not. They’d visited several times in recent years to see their son, who attended Georgia Tech.

  • Pro Publica ☛ A Teen Was Ticketed at School for a Theft She Says Didn’t Happen. Years Later, She’s Still Fighting.

    From the moment Amara Harris was accused of stealing another student’s AirPods at Naperville North High School, she has insisted that it was a mix-up, not a theft.

    She told a school dean that she thought the AirPods were her own, having picked them up a few days earlier in the school’s learning commons, where she said she thought she had left her own set. Her mother repeatedly told officers that her daughter hadn’t stolen the wireless earbuds, records show.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ 3D-Printed Gear Press Can Squash Stuff, Kinda

    A press is a useful thing to have, whether you like destroying stuff or you simply want to properly install some bearings. [Retsetman] decided to build one from scratch, eschewing the typical hydraulic method for a geared design instead.

  • Hackaday ☛ Will The Real Commodore Please Stand Up?

    The Commodore 64 is a much-loved 8-bit retro computer that first appeared in 1982 and finally faded away around a decade later. The Commodore company started by [Jack Tramiel] went on to make the Amiga, and eventually ceased trading some time in the late 1990s. All history, now kept alive only by enthusiasts, right? Well, not quite, as the C64 has been the subject of a number of revivals both miniature and full-sized over the years. The latest came in the form of a Kickstarter for the C64x, a seemingly legitimately-branded Commodore 64-shaped PC, but it seems that has now been paused due to a complaint from an Italian company claiming to be the real heirs of Commodore. So will the real Commodore please stand up?

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Counter Punch ☛ My Pandemic in Three Acts

    I’d like to believe we’ve learned a lesson about our species-wide vulnerability, our planetary connectedness. But in fact, we seem more atomized and arrogant than ever. The pandemic arrived just as technology was driving us collectively mad and pushing us further into our black mirrors.

    Researching and writing a book about the science and politics of the pandemic, I lived with it up close and personal.  But my book’s last page wasn’t the conclusion for me — or anyone else. Here I offer my personal Covid tale, organized in three acts only because my storyteller instinct demands a beginning, middle, and end… when in truth, there is no end, not yet anyway.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Diving Down to Earth

    There are quite a few reasons why explaining why small farms are dying has been a problem, and a little poke-around into those reasons may be interesting. What we seem to have here is—so far—a failure to communicate, to use an expression we all understand. To use an expression that conveys the miscommunication that buzzes ceaselessly in our lives.

    Since I’ve discovered a well-connected historical dinosaur—not exactly invisible—that’s lived by a multimillennial addiction to its founding diseases (diseases Arnold J. Toynbee diagnosed after a lifelong study of civilization’s family history, including its medical records), I’ve also learned that pointing it out is received with well-conditioned skepticism. Why? Because its history is to be grasped from the bottom up this time, not from the top down. And we’ve been well-trained in top down.

  • The Nation ☛ Have We Really Learned Nothing From the Pandemic?

    On New Years’ Eve 2019, Americans celebrated the advent of the roaring ’20s with fireworks and champagne, amid ominous news alerts from China. Surely that virus would stay on the other side of the planet. I cringe at how entitled we felt then. Covid-19 has now wiped out more than a million of us (by far the worst record on Earth when it comes to wealthy countries). Up to a third of all survivors suffer the sometimes disabling effects of long Covid, with implications for society that will outlast the pandemic—if it ever ends.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Tip of the Iceberg’: Groups Tell EPA Much More Needed on Toxic Forever Chemicals

    While applauding the Biden administration’s new “baby steps” to address “forever chemicals” in drinking water, green groups this week also emphasized that far more sweeping action is needed to protect people and the planet.

    “The EPA needs to go much further by implementing strong, enforceable regulations on the entire class of PFAS chemicals.”

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Techdirt ☛ Yes, Section 230 Also Matters In The Fight Over Abortion Rights

      We’ve already discussed how the expected overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court may impact the debate on encryption, but it has a likelihood of impacting lots of other important tech debates as well. Senator Ron Wyden has written a thoughtful piece over at Slate, explaining how important Section 230 is in a post-Roe world as well. As he notes, for all the nonsense claims from Republicans about how they’re supporting free speech, their actions show the exact opposite.

    • TruthOut ☛ Abortion Funds Are Preparing For a Storm. To Help, “Get in Where You Fit in.”

    • Common Dreams ☛ Warren Leads Charge to Ban Sale of People’s Health and Location Data

      Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday called on the U.S. Senate to protect Americans’ “most private information” by banning data brokers from selling people’s health and location data, which is constantly collected and stored by tech companies.

      Introducing the Health and Location Data Protection Act as the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to soon overturn Roe v. Wade and take away the right to abortion care for millions of Americans, the Massachusetts Democrat said “it is more crucial than ever for Congress toprotect consumers’ sensitive data.”

• Defence/Aggression

  • Meduza ☛ The criminals in the Kremlin Historian Yaroslav Shimov explains why the Putin regime defies rationality and how the West helped make the war in Ukraine possible

    Several months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the global discussion about the war has divided into two opposing camps. In Ukraine and across the West, as well as in Russia’s own antiwar movement, the dominant view is that Vladimir Putin’s regime started the conflict in order to expand Moscow’s power and reclaim lost imperial territories. According to this theory, Russia seeks to subjugate or even destroy Ukraine but won’t stop there. The other camp blames the “Collective West” for provoking the war by ignoring Russia’s objective interests. Historian and journalist Yaroslav Shimov says the war is the result of the Putin regime’s peculiarities as a “mafia state” and the failure in Europe and the United States to understand their counterparts in Moscow.

  • The Nation ☛ We Must Keep Fighting to Stop the Arms Race

    Forty years ago, 1 million people gathered in Central Park demanding an end to the nuclear arms race. It was not only the largest antinuclear demonstration, but also the largest political demonstration in American history.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘Leave a cross so they can find the body later’ A dispatch from Mariupol, a city now covered in graves

    Since March 2022, group chats between neighbors in Mariupol have been full of messages about victims of the war whose neighbors buried them — sans funerals — in the courtyards next to their apartment buildings. Russia’s invasion has turned the city into a giant cemetery among the ruins. Journalist Kirill Rukov tells the story of three of Mariupol’s countless fresh graves.

  • Meduza ☛ At Alexey Navalny’s new prison, torture is rampant. At least two past inmates died after being beaten

    Alexey Navalny has been moved from a medium-security prison in Pokrov to a high-security penal colony in the town of Melekhovo in Russia’s Vladimir region. This was confirmed to Meduza by one of Navalny’s lawyers. On June 15, Navalny said in a Telegram post that he was being transferred to Melekhovo’s IK-6 prison, writing, “Hello from a high security zone!”

  • Democracy Now ☛ $1B More in U.S. Military Aid to Ukraine: Weapons Expert Urges Negotiation vs. “Military-First Approach”

    The U.S. has announced another $1 billion in military equipment to Ukraine, adding to billions in military aid to Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion. Support for a “military-first approach” to Ukraine is fueled by the mainstream media and not only undermines ceasefire talks but also funnels profits directly into the pockets of weapons manufacturers, says William Hartung of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “The United States is a major player here, and its only policy shouldn’t be sending weapons without some sort of diplomatic strategy to go with it.”

  • Meduza ☛ ‘​​Russia is a prison of the lousiest kind’: Vladislav Nikitenko is the first Russian to face charges for ‘discrediting’ the army. He’s been fighting the system for 20 years.

    A Blagoveshchensk resident named Vladislav Nikitenko has become the first person charged with “discrediting” the Russian armed forces — a new felony offense that was created after the war began. For years, Nikitenko has been submitting official complaints to Russian courts for a wide variety of reasons; in his own words, he “genuinely loves the Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code, despite the fact that they were signed by Putin.” He’s been under house arrest since late May.

  • TruthOut ☛ Chomsky: US Is Playing With the Future of Civilization in Order to Weaken Russia

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Embracing the Complexity of Peace

    “Just imagine for once if we led the world in funding peace and not wars.”

  • The Nation ☛ In Ukraine’s Cultural Capital, Giselle Goes to War

    Lviv, Ukraine—Here in the cultural capital of Ukraine, the statues have been wrapped in plastic. The windows and facades of the neoclassical buildings that have led many a writer to describe this city as a “jewel box” have also been covered. This may be enough to protect them from the shrapnel from Russian bombs and shells, but it won’t be enough to shield them from a direct hit. Taken as a metaphor, these veiled figures convey a message: Art and culture are under wraps, at least until the invasion of Ukraine is over.1Anna Ivanova contributed reporting and translation.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Scott Ritter: Turkey Rains on NATO’s Parade

    In opposing the application of Finland and Sweden, Erdogan has disrupted the military alliance’s effort to further provoke Russia with even more expansion.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Certifiably Crazy’: Jan. 6 Panel Highlights How Team Trump Pushed Pence to Overturn Election

    Thursday’s public hearing of the House January 6 committee focused largely on former President Donald Trump’s futile attempt to convince Mike Pence, his vice president, to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

    “There was no basis in the Constitution or laws of the United States at all, for the theory espoused by Mr. Eastman.”

  • Counter Punch ☛ ‘Show’ Trial of Foreign Fighters in Donetsk Breaks with International Law and Could Itself be a War Crime

    Sentencing came on June 9, 2022, at the end of what has been dismissed by observers in the West as a “show trial” involving the three – two British citizens and a Moroccan national in Ukraine fighting alongside the country’s troops.

    In many ways, proceedings like those the three were subjected to were inevitable. Indeed, in an earlier article questioning the wisdom of Ukraine’s conducting its own war crimes trials of Russian prisoners of war during ongoing hostilities, I suggested that it might incentivize the Russians to do likewise. And now the Russians have responded in kind, but with a cynical twist I hadn’t then contemplated: outsourcing the dirty work.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Progressive Democrats Don Helmets, Embrace US-Russia Proxy War

    Congress has appropriated $54 billion for the Ukraine war – $13.6 billion in March and $40.1 billion on May 19 – of which $31.3 is for military purposes.  The May vote was 368-57 in the House and 86-11 in the Senate.  All Democrats and all Massachusetts Representatives and Senators voted for the war funding, while a substantial number of Trumpist Republicans voted no.

    Previously antiwar Democrats like Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Jim McGovern, Barbara Lee, Pramila Jayapal, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Ed Markey, have uncritically embraced the Administration’s escalating proxy war against Russia.  They have said little to explain their actions; only Cori Bush released a statement questioning the level of military aid, even while voting for it.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Can We Finally Start Dealing With Gun Violence?

    More than a thousand miles away the breaking news just before our class started, “17 Dead in School Shooting,” was unavoidable. As a class we pivoted to the current event, we shared stories, and I did my best to make a teachable moment out of the horror.

    I shared with students about my experiences with gun violence. In 2017 I watched a live stream as a gunman opened fire onto a Las Vegas concert crowd. Friends at the concert were in harm’s way, two of the nicest people I know were hit and luckily survived, and with the sometimes horrifying miracles of modern technology I was watching it in real time.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Why Peace and Disarmament are at the Heart of Nonalignment

    The struggle for a genuinely multipolar world, aligned only with the world’s people, not military blocs, has peace and disarmament at its heart: this is as true now as it was 60 years ago when the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was founded. As well as opposition to colonization and economic subjection, those founding the movement championed self-determination and equality in states’ relations, and they also agreed on their opposition to military blocs, their commitment to world peace, and a very strong advocacy of global nuclear disarmament. That thread has remained a constant ever since, and today we continue to see the countries of the Global South leading global disarmament initiatives.

    Virtually the entire Global South is self-organized into internationally recognized nuclear-weapons-free zones, originating in the 1960s. In 1968, a nuclear-weapons-free zone was established by 20 countries in Latin America, renouncing the acquisition and siting of nuclear weapons on their territories. Signatories to this treaty, the Treaty of Tlatelolco, also agreed to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) jurisdiction over their nuclear power facilities. In return, nuclear weapons states agreed not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against any of the signatory states. The Treaty of Rarotonga was signed in 1985, and prohibited nuclear explosive devices in the South Pacific, as well as banning the testing and use of nuclear explosive technologies. The African nuclear-weapons-free zone was formalized in 1996 by the signing of the Treaty of Pelindaba, following the disarmament by South Africa of its apartheid-era nuclear weapons.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Only in Top Gun Can the US Military Solve Our Multitude of Problems

    Somewhere at a theater near you, Top Gun: Maverick is serving up a feel-good drama about a plucky U.S. Navy pilot who dispatches some unnamed bad guys before he gets the girl.

• Environment

  • TruthOut ☛ Almost Every Square Inch of the US Is Being Battered by Climate Change Today

  • Energy

    • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The People vs. Petrocracy

      The United States is moving fast on climate change—in the wrong direction. The Energy Information Agency forecasts that by 2023, the nation will set a new annual record for oil extraction: 4.6 billion barrels. Plans to build more than 200 new natural gas power plants are in the works. More than 130 new oil and gas pipelines now under development will carry enough fuel to increase national emissions by 10 percent—560 million metric tons per year.  

    • TruthOut ☛ Biden Tells Oil Refinery Companies It’s Unfair to Pass Gas Costs Onto Americans

    • Common Dreams ☛ To Ease Pain at the Pump, Biden Urged to Declare Emergency Halt of US Oil Exports

      With gas prices surging to unprecedented levels across the United States, President Joe Biden on Thursday faced fresh calls to use his authority to temporarily halt crude oil exports that—in addition to damaging the climate—have contributed significantly to rising costs at the pump.

      In 2015, the Republican-controlled Congress crammed into an omnibus spending bill a provision that ended the four-decade ban on U.S. crude oil exports, a decision backed by the oil and gas industry. Democratic President Barack Obama signed the measure into law despite pushback from climate advocates.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Scheerpost ☛ Tracy’s Travesty: New Boss Same as Old Boss at Bureau of Land Management

    • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Species Extinction Is a Choice’: Groups Urge Strong Global Pact to Save Life on Earth

      Ahead of a global summit next week, a global coalition of conservationists Thursday called on world leaders and policymakers to forge a concrete and meaningful agreement to urgently address the crisis of biodiversity and species loss that is rapidly “unraveling the fabric of life” on planet Earth.

      In a letter addressed to parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity—set to kick off its next round of talks on June 21 in Nairobi, Kenya—the more than 100 groups say the “global community is living through an unprecedented biodiversity crisis” that must be urgently addressed.

• Finance

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘A Big Mistake’: Economists Warn Fed Rate Hikes Risk Plunging US Into Recession

    The Federal Reserve’s decision Wednesday to hike interest rates by 75 basis points—the largest increase since 1994—heightened fears among economists that the central bank’s attempt to tame inflation risks plunging the U.S. economy into recession and inflicting more pain on vulnerable workers.

    The Fed’s move came on the heels of worse-than-expected federal data showing that inflation jumped 8.6% in May compared to a year earlier, prompting central bank officials to pursue more aggressive federal-funds rate increases, the Fed’s blunt tool to rein in consumer prices.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Fed Is Making a Big, Big Mistake

    The Federal Reserve just raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point, the biggest single increase in interest rates since 1994. It’s another move in the Fed’s effort to tackle the fastest inflation in four decades.

  • Scheerpost ☛ 100 Million People in America Are Saddled With Health Care Debt

    A KHN and NPR analysis discovers the picture of health debt in the U.S. is bleak.

  • TruthOut ☛ More Than 100 Million People in US Have Health Care Debt, Study Shows

  • Scheerpost ☛ The Rotten Roots of the IMF and the World Bank

    A conversation with Jamie Martin about the imperial origins of the world’s economic governance, imagining an alternative to these institutions, and his new book, The Meddlers.

  • TruthOut ☛ Progressive Economists Say Interest Rate Hikes Are Wrong Approach to Inflation

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | A Mask-Less World: How the Corporate-Capitalist War on Humanity Is Wreaking Havoc

    At the end of May, as I was waiting to board a flight from Newark to Geneva, I overheard a high-decibel monologue being delivered by an older American businessman to a fellow passenger of undetermined nationality. The topic of the monologue was the coronavirus, which the American’s daughter—a nurse in New York—had just contracted for the first time since the onset of the pandemic in 2020.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • TruthOut ☛ To Win Midterms, Sanders Tells Democrats to Take Fight Directly to GOP

  • TruthOut ☛ Does the Future of US Democracy Hang on Talks Between Clarence and Ginni Thomas?

  • Common Dreams ☛ As Jan 6. Committee Eyes Ginni Thomas’ Role, Fresh Calls for Justice Thomas to Resign

    Progressive advocacy groups on Thursday intensified calls for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to resign or face impeachment after new reporting revealed that his wife, right-wing activist Ginni Thomas, corresponded with former President Donald Trump’s attorney in the weeks between the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

    The Washington Post revealed that the House committee investigating the insurrection has received emails between Thomas and John Eastman that were sent around the time that the attorney pushed then-Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay the certification of the election results.

  • The Nation ☛ Trump’s “Big Lie” Was Also a Big Grift

    On Monday, the January 6 Select Committee revealed that former president of the United States Donald J. Trump may have committed wire and mail fraud, to the tune of $250 million. The committee alleged that Trump and his campaign sent out fundraising letters asking people to donate to the “Official Election Defense Fund.” But, as the committee’s chief investigative counsel, Amanda Wick, said in video testimony, “no such fund existed.” The money Trump raised was instead funneled to a Trump leadership PAC and other Trump-adjacent organizations, the committee claimed.

  • The Nation ☛ Kevin McCarthy Is Still Trump’s Accomplice

  • The Nation ☛ The William Buckley and Edgar Smith Saga

    “While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him”—so goes a famous aphorism often attributed to Dostoyevsky. The figure of the evildoer seems to cry out for either condemnation or interpretation. We can’t just let an evildoer be; we can’t just turn our eyes away from him until we’ve managed to satisfy ourselves that he is different from us. Murderers, having indulged in the greatest evil, exercise this magnetism to the greatest degree.

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Orbán: We want peace, but we will fight against “proposals that defy common sense”

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Preschool teacher by day, nail tech by night – just to make ends meet

    According to the statistics, women in Hungary achieve a higher average level of education than men, yet they have a lower employment rate. Overall, they assume lower-ranking positions and earn less in comparison as well. But the problem is much more complex than the pay gap. Invisible labor, old age, working after childbirth, caring for elderly family members – the causes of this glaring inequality are manifold, but with the proper measures, awareness, and actual willpower, they could be gradually reduced.

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Orbán government keeps silent about Russian residency bond owners – even as the EU prepares to end the practice

  • The Nation ☛ Word On The Street

  • Scheerpost ☛ Khashoggi’s Fiancée Wants Biden to Ask Saudis: ‘Where is Jamal’s Body?’

    “I’ve been forced to live in a world where his murderers have not only gone unpunished but have also been rewarded,” lamented Hatice Cengiz.

  • Common Dreams ☛ House Dems Urge Biden to Work With Cuba to Vaccinate the World

    Citing the “enormous potential” of Cuban Covid-19 vaccines to tackle enduring global inequities, a group of 26 House Democrats on Thursday urged President Joe Biden to review U.S. policy toward the long-embargoed nation to ensure that sanctions do not impede its international vaccination campaign.

    “We ask that you review U.S. policy towards Cuba in order to facilitate greater global vaccine equity.”

  • The Nation ☛ Why the Hell Isn’t Mike Pence Testifying at the January 6 Hearing?

    The most chilling revelation from the first public hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol was the reaction of President Donald Trump to news reports that the insurrectionist mob he had incited was proposing to execute his vice president.

  • TruthOut ☛ Photo Shows Pence and His Family Hiding From Trump Mob on January 6

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Revelations of the Jan. 6 Hearings Must Be Communicated Better If US Democracy Is to Survive

    The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol has now completed its second two-hour hearing, with its third hearing Thursday. The Committee has clearly done much important work, and its presentation of its findings is off to a good start. At the same time, unless the Committee finds ways to communicate more broadly and deeply, so that its hearings and findings become politically actionable, there is a danger that its important task of public enlightenment and activation will fail. In that event American democracy itself, such as it is, will be placed in even greater danger.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation

    • Meduza ☛ ‘He had a bag over his head and a broken face’ Russian mother identifies conscript son in video appearing to show Ukrainian troops shooting prisoners of war

      In late March, a video surfaced online that appeared to show Ukrainian soldiers shooting Russian prisoners of war in the legs. Western journalists quickly sought to verify the footage and managed to pinpoint the Ukrainian town where it was filmed. In turn, Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said that Kyiv would punish those responsible if an investigation confirmed the alleged abuse of prisoners of war. Nina, who lives in a small town in Russia’s Omsk region, first saw the footage in early April — and she immediately recognized one of the prisoners as her 20-year-old son Ivan Kudryavtsev. According to Nina, Ivan was conscripted into the Russian military in October 2021 and allegedly signed an enlistment contract after less than two months of service. But whether Ivan actually enlisted as a professional soldier remains unclear — the Russian Defense Ministry has only confirmed that he is considered missing.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Common Dreams ☛ Israeli Cops Won’t Be Punished for Attack on Shireen Abu Akleh’s Funeral

    No Israeli police officers will be punished, despite brutally assaulting mourners at last month’s funeral procession for slain Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a leading newspaper in Israel reported Thursday.

    “We all know what happened, and we demand accountability for Israel’s murder of Shireen Abu Akleh.”

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Justice Is Blind. And So Is Merrick Garland

    Punch for punch, the debasement of Attorney General Merrick Garland is without historical correlate. The self-defeating adherence to ideological centrism (often indistinguishable from passivity in the face of elite resistance), paired with his masochistic devotion to the status quo, represents the kind of Blue Dog/New Dem totem that could have only emerged from a lab. Corporatist Democrats believed during the Obama years, as they do now, that through the ritual sacrifice of their Democratic ideals, they could resurrect the corpse of a forgotten age when left and right joined hands to strangle the everyday citizen. That union never happened after the GOP realized they could simply steamroll Democrats like Garland who refuse to open their eyes to the Conservative onslaught, even when it was punching them in the face.

  • Techdirt ☛ Another Drug Test Relied On By Law Enforcement Is Wrong Nearly 30 Percent Of The Time

    Field drug tests are notoriously unreliable. False positives abound. But law enforcement agencies still use them. First and foremost, they use them because no court, policy, or legislation has told them they can’t.

  • Techdirt ☛ Chicago Judge Reminds City’s Mayor That The Presumption Of Innocence Still Exists

    Well, this is ugly. Lots of states and cities have considered bail reform in recent years, given the system’s propensity for punishing the poorest people while allowing the more fortunate to buy their way out of jail.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Absolutely Terrifying’: Criminal Defense Attorneys Warn About Impacts of Roe Reversal

    With the U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing majority expected to overturn Roe v. Wade any day now, criminal defense attorneys are preparing to defend a flood of clients facing abortion-related charges—and warning about the looming decision’s likely consequences.

    “We’re not talking about just fines like a traffic ticket.”

  • Scheerpost ☛ UK’s ‘Unlawful’ Deportation Flight to Rwanda Halted After European Court Intervenes

    Seven asylum seekers were due to be deported to Kigali on Tuesday night before the flight was canceled after a day of last-minute legal challenges and critical direct action protests

  • The Nation ☛ The “Wobblies” Documentary Reminds Us Why Bosses Are Still Scared of the IWW

    In 1913, Irma Lombardi, a silk weaver in a Paterson, N.J., joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). She wanted a living wage as well as recognition for her labor, and she saw in the IWW an organization that connected the two: “work, good wages, and respect. That’s what they wanted for the workers. To be people, not nobodies.” Lombardi is one of 16 members of the IWW interviewed in the recently rereleased documentary Wobblies (the 1979 film directed by Deborah Shaffer and Stewart Bird had been available for free online, but since its rerelease by Kino Lorber is available on proprietary streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime). The film recounts the union’s philosophy, culture, and strategies during the 15 years between its founding and its suppression, a time when gross inequality was the rule and several decades of negotiation and legal reform had failed to improve the position of most workers. Composed of documentary footage, songs from the IWW’s Little Red Songbook performed by folk singer Utah Philips, interviews, and narration by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) founder Robert Baldwin, Wobblies is an important correction to the conventional wisdom that the IWW was a failure—as well as a reminder that its successes were the result of its willingness to take radical positions.

  • The Nation ☛ Abortion, On Screen and Off Screen

  • Common Dreams ☛ In ‘Crisis Moment’ for Abortion Rights, Biden Weighs Declaring Public Health Emergency

    With the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court expected to overturn Roe v. Wade as soon as this month, President Joe Biden is reportedly weighing a number of executive orders to protect abortion rights at the federal level—including declaration of a national public health emergency—as progressive lawmakers and rights groups push him to act.

    The New York Times, citing unnamed administration officials, reported Thursday that “some of the ideas under consideration include declaring a national public health emergency, readying the Justice Department to fight any attempt by states to criminalize travel for the purpose of obtaining an abortion, and asserting that Food and Drug Administration regulations granting approval to abortion medications preempt any state bans.”

  • Socialism

    “Socialism” can mean a couple of different things, thanks to the life-changing magic of semantics.

    In one meaning, it is about different ways workers can control the means of production (for example, through cooperatives) instead of being hired by an owner class. Opinion differs on where to draw the line between personal property vs private property, the former being defined as like the sweater on your body or the pillow under your head, the latter as factories or fields where people are working. The idea is to bring about economic democracy, having a say in how your workplace is run and how to distribute its gains. This type of socialism is to address capitalism’s exploitation problem.

    Taken a little bit more broadly, it’s a general view of a society where people help each other, a more broadly diminished or abolished owner class. “Socialized medicine”, like most countries do have (get with it, United States), is an example. We used to have socialized postal services here in Sweden, too. Until some corrupt politicians sold it off and pocketed the profits (in the name of “liberty”). Frustratingly, these institutions have been just as hierarchical and exploitation-prone as most private corporations. This type of socialism is to address capitalism’s inequality problem.

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Techdirt ☛ Nintendo Shuts Down Musician’s YouTube Videos Of Metroid Covers

      Nintendo’s war on its own fans’ love of Nintendo game music continues. The company has certainly made headlines over the past few years (with a big ramp up recently) by going on DMCA and threat blitzes for YouTube videos and channels that have uploaded what are essentially just the music from various Nintendo games. The blitzes started by taking down 3-figure numbers of videos, then reached the thousands by 2022. Notably, this has pissed off tons of Nintendo fans, many of whom pointed out that Nintendo was disappearing all of this music that was almost entirely unavailable through legit means.