GNU/Linux

• Linux Links ☛ Linux Around The World: USA – Pennsylvania – LinuxLinks

  Pennsylvania is a state in the United States spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, and Appalachian regions. It borders Delaware to the southeast, Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, Lake Erie and the Canadian province of Ontario to the northwest, New York to the north, and New Jersey to the east.

• Desktop/Laptop

  • Popular Science ☛ Best Linux laptops of 2022 | Popular Science

    While Mac and Windows computers tend to dominate the discussions, Linux laptops deserve your consideration. While making the switch may involve a learning curve, Linux machines will reward you with a stable and secure operating system that offers a free, private, open-source platform. Some manufacturers still make it difficult to install Linux products on their laptops, although there are workarounds available to make almost any laptop run the OS. To avoid the potential problems of installing your own software, purchase one of the best Linux laptops that come ready to go right out of the box.

    Buying a laptop with Linux pre-installed also ensures that future software updates from the manufacturer will be supported. You won’t need to tinker with the operating system to ensure good performance. The following Linux laptops can provide solid options for professional machines, school computers, and even personal laptops for tinkering and coding.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ I bought THIS LAPTOP: Tuxedo Stellaris 15 Gen 4 Review – Invidious [Ed: Nick from The Linux Experiment already got his channel banned before... for shilling laptops. Maybe he's not afraid of it happening again.]

• Applications

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Pitivi 2022.06 Open-Source Video Editor Released with Object Tracking and Blurring

    Pitivi 2022.06 is here with more new features, including object tracking and blurring, detection of beats and snapping of clips to detected beats, a new Source blending mode, the ability to add border and shadow to the title clip text, as well as a VU meter for sound playback next to the video preview.

    On top of that, the Pitivi 2022.06 release introduces support for maintaining the aspect ratio when resizing clips, makes it easier to fade in and fade out a video clip, and lets you cut video clips to paste them at a different position.

  • Linux Links ☛ Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Adobe Dimension

    
    Adobe Dimension (formerly Project Felix and then Adobe Dimension CC) is a 3D rendering and design software. It’s designed to build brand visualizations, illustrations, product mockups and other creative work.

    Adobe Dimension is proprietary software which is not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.

  • Neowin ☛ PeaZip 8.7.0

    
    PeaZip is an open source file and archive manager. It’s freeware and free of charge for any use. PeaZip can extract most of archive formats both from Windows and Unix worlds, ranging from mainstream 7Z, RAR, TAR and ZIP to experimental ones like PAQ/LPAQ family, currently the most powerful compressor available.

    PeaZip provides fast, high compression ratio multi-format archiving – view file compression and decompression benchmarks for more information.

    PeaZip is localized in 29 languages and is capable of handling all most popular archive formats (180+ file types), supporting a wide array of advanced file and archive management features (search, bookmarks, thumbnail viewer, find duplicate files and compute hash/checksum value, convert archive files…), especially focused on security (strong encryption, two factor authentication, encrypted password manager, secure file deletion…).

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Linux.org ☛ LFCS – Network Time Protocol (NTP) | Linux.org

    We covered the Network Time Protocol Daemon a little in the article ‘https://www.linux.org/threads/lfcs-–-kerberos-authentication-centos7.39296/’, as well as in ‘https://www.linux.org/threads/lfcs-–-kerberos-authentication-ubuntu.39733/’.

    This article will go a little deeper and add in another Network Time Protocol other than NTP.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to install KVM on Ubuntu 22.04 – Unix / Linux the admins Tutorials

    KVM is an open-source virtualization technology integrated into Linux. Specifically, with KVM, you can turn Linux into a hypervisor that allows a host machine to run several isolated virtual environments called virtual machines (VMs) or guests.

    KVM stands for Kernel-based Virtual Machine, with which we can make virtual machines on Linux without too much effort.

    KVM is a solid alternative to the virtualization of other proprietary solutions such as Oracle or VMWare.

    Let’s install it and get it ready to use.

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

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Composer on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Composer is an application-oriented package manager for PHP distributed under an open-source MIT license. It functions as some sort of project manager that helps the programmer manage dependencies that will be used on a project to project basis. Composer is also commonly used to bootstrap new projects based on popular PHP frameworks, such as Symfony and Laravel.

    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 Composer 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.

  • Screen Rant ☛ How To Set Up Linux On Your Chromebook | Screen Rant

    Modern Chromebooks, particularly those released in 2019 and later, allow users to create a Linux development environment where they can install Linux apps and tools. This feature greatly improves the functionality of Chromebooks by turning them into more productive devices that can be used for writing code or creating apps.

    With Linux support on Chrome OS, Chromebooks can be used by developers to create Android and web apps for various devices, just like a Windows PC or a MacBook. And because Linux runs in a virtual machine on Chrome OS devices, issues with Linux are isolated from the main operating system.

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ 3600 Games Now On The Steam Deck with Teardown, a Great Demolition Game as Verified

    Valve has provided more verification in the past few days vs usual for the Steam Deck. We are now more than 3600 games validated (3626 games to be precise at the time of publication) on the Steam Deck – in two categories…

  • Boiling Steam ☛ The Steam Deck’s Super Power: Super Sleep

    The Steam Deck undeniably has some great features, but if it were a superhero its superpower might not be what you expect. No, it’s not the powerful processor or advanced options and software, but seemingly the complete opposite of that: the Steam Deck’s real power is its super sleep.

    First, a superpower needs to be reliable and without any big caveats. The Deck’s sleep ability is just that: every time it works quickly and flawlessly. It is a quick power button press away or in the Steam button’s power menu. In the middle of a game without a pause button (hi, Elden Ring)? No problem. Running low on battery or just need a moment to move the Deck without accidentally hitting the buttons? Or want to resume in that spare minute to get in a quick gaming fix? The Deck delivers every time. You can also set the Deck to go to sleep after some idle time, confident you won’t lose your game progress or battery life.

  • Positech Games ☛ The impossible task of country simulation in a video game – Cliffski’s Blog

    As you may know, I make the ‘Democracy’ series of video games. They are pretty serious, pretty complex, fairly in-depth simulation games where you run a real world country. At one point I experimented with fictional countries, but it turns out everyone hates that, they want to be the president of their own country, and show they can do a better job than the current leader. Fair enough.

    The only problem with this is it means that I need to simulate real world countries accurately enough that people living in them think I have made a proper effort to do so. This is staggeringly difficult to do with a single (albeit flexible and complex) model of politics and economics. What makes it way more difficult, is that it has to be politically, economically and temporally flexible as well.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • KDE Official ☛ KDE Apps Mid-Year Update

      The summer sun is here and new apps come with it — unless you live in the southern hemisphere, in which case, congratulations! You got past the winter solstice, and it’s all longer days and new app releases from here onwards.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ This Tool Allows to Customize Ubuntu 22.04 GNOME Desktop with Advanced Settings | UbuntuHandbook

      Want to configure the top-bar, dock, overview and other Gnome shell components with more settings? Shell Configurator is now updated with GNOME 41 & 42 support.

      It’s an extension for add, remove, configure, and customize GNOME Shell with advanced settings.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Asia One ☛ Canonical Ubuntu Core 22 is now available – optimised for IoT and embedded devices, Business News – AsiaOne

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

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Make Use Of ☛ Where to Find Free Schematic Drawing Software for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Other SBCs

    Circuit diagrams play a vital role in the design process for any electronics project. They give you the chance to plan your circuit before you make it and can save a lot of time and effort. But how can you make circuit diagrams to improve your designs?

    We have gathered some of the web’s most popular free schematic drawing software options for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other SBCs to make your choice easier.

  • SparkFun Electronics ☛ Summer of Jetson Nano! Great Resources & Activities for Jetson Nano Users – News – SparkFun Electronics

    SparkFun and NVIDIA are teaming up for a summer of Jetson Nano! Quizzes, prizes, educational resources, and a project showcase cap off a whole array of ways to use and learn about your Jetson Nano.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android Authority ☛ Huawei Matepad Paper review: Sorry, e-ink and Android aren’t a good fit

  • Android Central ☛ Poll: Do you care about updates on your Android phone? | Android Central

  • How to install new apps on Android Smart TV

  • TechRadar ☛ Android Auto not working on your Samsung Galaxy S22? Here’s how to fix it | TechRadar

  • Android Keyboard Not Showing (Try THIS Fix First!) – Gotechtor

  • Sportskeeda ☛ 5 Android phones with the best battery life for gaming in 2022

  • 5 best apps to live stream games from your Android phone – Phandroid

  • Android Police ☛ The Android Police podcast is still mad about the death of Inbox

  • Make Use Of ☛ 3 Android Apps to Help You Take Notes While Listening to a Podcast

  • Android Authority ☛ 5 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week – Android Apps Weekly

  • Phone Arena ☛ T-mobile begins selling Android users’ web and app data to advertisers – PhoneArena

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Life this last month

  In life, I’ve begun using XMPP more extensively for communication. This really began as my PinePhone’s microphone went caput. With XMPP, I can use multiple clients, so my communication ability is not dependant on the working hardware of the device with my SIM card in it.

• Web Browsers

  • Chromium

    • Eric Hameleers ☛ [Slackware] Chromium 103 (regular and ungoogled) available as Slackware package

      Apologies for the delay, I was out of town, but i have finally uploaded my new chromium 103 packages for Slackware 14.2 and newer. Their un-googled siblings are also available. Thanks as always to Eloston and his friends for updating the patch-set for ungoogled-chromium.
      Last week saw a Google Chromium update which addresses a series of vulnerabilities, which is nothing new of course, but in particular one security hole that has now been patched would allow remote attackers to take control of your computer and execute arbitrary code. See CVE-2022-2156. An update of your installed browser package seems in order.

• Programming/Development

  • Rlang ☛ The Poisson distribution: From basic probability theory to regression models

    Brief introduction to the Poisson distribution for modeling count data using the distributions3 package. The distribution is illustrated using the number of goals scored at the 2018 FIFA World Cup, suitable for self-study or as a classroom exercise.

  • Rlang ☛ Webscraping in R with Rvest

    Web scraping has become an incredibly important tool in data science, as an easy way to generate new data. The main advantage is the automation of some pretty repetitive tasks. Web scrapping can also be a good way of keeping up with new data on a website, assuming it doesn’t have a big change in its HTML structure.

  • Frederic Cambus ☛ Clang Static Analyzer and the Z3 constraint solver | Frederic Cambus

    Notes on using the Z3 constraint solver with the Clang Static Analyzer
    As far as static analyzers are concerned, one of the most important point to consider is filtering out false positives as much as possible, in order for the reports to be actionable.

    This is an area on which Coverity did an excellent job, and likely a major reason why they got so popular within the open source community, despite being a closed-source product.

    LLVM has the LLVM_ENABLE_Z3_SOLVER build option, which allows building LLVM against the Z3 constraint solver.

  • Matt Rickard ☛ Least Common Denominator APIs

    Often, our instinct is to build for optionality. What if we change databases? What if we change clouds? We target the Least Common Denominator (LCD) interface to avoid vendor lock-in and make sure our software is portable – after all, Optimization is Fragile. LCD interfaces look like targeting the S3 API, a generic PubSub implementation, or vanilla ANSI SQL.

    LCD interfaces are good enough most of the time, but when we need to run a specialized workload, sometimes they don’t perform how we’d like. We could solve our problem quickly by narrowing the API – coupling it to a specific cloud or managed service, but that destroys our optionality. Here, you should probably fight your instinct to stick with the pure implementation and weigh the trade-offs – how many developer-hours and pain can you save by narrowing the interface?

    Optimization and optionality are inherent trade-offs. There’s a way to architecture services to be efficient and generic but also practical.

  • Quantum computer programming for dummies

    For would-be quantum programmers scratching their heads over how to jump into the game as quantum computers proliferate and become publicly accessible, a new beginner’s guide provides a thorough introduction to quantum algorithms and their implementation on existing hardware.

    “Writing quantum algorithms is radically different from writing classical computing programs and requires some understanding of quantum principles and the mathematics behind them,” said Andrey Y. Lokhov, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of the recently published guide in ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing. “Our guide helps quantum programmers get started in the field, which is bound to grow as more and more quantum computers with more and more qubits become commonplace.”

  • Rlang ☛ Create new variables from existing variables in R

    Create new variables from existing variables in R?. To create new variables from existing variables, use the case when() function from the dplyr package in R.

  • Geeks For Geeks ☛ Construct a Perfect Binary Tree with given Height

    Given an integer N, the task is to generate a perfect binary tree with height N such that each node has a value that is the same as its depth. Return the inorder traversal of the generated binary tree.

  • Seth Michael Larson ☛ Announcing urllib3′s bounty program

    We’ve recognized that one of the biggest challenges to shipping v2.0 is not having enough time to devote to contributions. Our bounty program is hoping to spur interest from the community in the urllib3 project and fairly pay contributors for their time and experience.

    The bounty program works by marking issues with bounty amounts we’re willing to pay for anyone to complete an issue. Don’t worry if you’re not an existing contributor — new contributors are welcome and encouraged!

  • Rlang ☛ Learning from Failure – Nitinol Fracture Mechanics in R | R-bloggers

    Despite our best efforts, nitinol implants fracture and fail. Sometimes we want them to fail (on the bench, to learn).

  • Matt Rickard ☛ Every Sufficiently Advanced Configuration Language is Wrong

    Every sufficiently advanced configuration language is the wrong tool for the job.

    [...]

    The logical extreme is becoming more evident – advanced configuration in general-purpose programming languages. You can see this in the emergence of Typescript for Infrastructure-as-Code. For the most basic (and human 0×777) configuration needs, there will always be simple formats – YAML, JSON, INI, etc.).

  • Didier Stevens ☛ Another Exercise In Encoding Reversing | Didier Stevens

    In this blog post, I will show how to decode a payload encoded in a variation of hexadecimal encoding, by performing statistical analysis and guessing some of the “plaintext”.

    I do have the decoder too now (a .NET assembly), but here I’m going to show how you can try to decode a payload like this without having the decoder.

  • Didier Stevens ☛ Examples Of Encoding Reversing | Didier Stevens

    I recently created 2 blog posts with corresponding videos for the reversing of encodings.

    The first one is on the ISC diary: “Decoding Obfuscated BASE64 Statistically“. The payload is encoded with a variation of BASE64, and I show how to analyze the encoded payload to figure out how to decode it.

  • Python

    • The New Stack ☛ An Introduction to Python: A Language for the Ages – The New Stack

      For anyone just getting into software programming, one of your best friends will be Python. Why? Python is very simple to learn and easy to implement. Even better, what you can do with this language grows as you learn more. You can start with very simple text-based applications and migrate to GUI applications and much more. And because Python is supported by most major operating systems (Linux, macOS, and Windows), you can begin your journey, regardless of platform.

      Python includes support for features such as lists, tuples, functions, variables, JSON, and ranges. But where did Python come from and why is it still so important today? Let’s dig in and find out. To follow our series of introductory tutorials, start here.

    • How To Write Comments In Python

      The way you think is reflected in programming in order to convey the individual steps that you took to solve an issue utilizing a computer. Commenting your code helps clarify your thinking process, which in turn makes it easier for you and other people to comprehend the purpose of your code in the future. Because of this, you will have an easier time locating bugs, fixing them, enhancing the code at a later time, and reusing it in other applications as well.

      The act of commenting is essential to the completion of any and all tasks, regardless of how little, medium, or fairly enormous they may be. It should be considered standard procedure for software engineers since it is an important component of your workflow. Without comments, things have the potential to get quite complicated very quickly. In this post, we will cover the many techniques of commenting that Python offers, as well as how it may be utilized to automatically produce documentation for your code via the use of the so-called module-level docstrings.

Leftovers

• SICP ☛ Why mock objects aren’t popular this week | Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers

  The field of software engineering doesn’t change particularly quickly. Tastes in software engineering change all the time: keeping up with them can quickly result in seasickness or even whiplash. For example, at the moment it’s popular to want to do server-side rendering of front end applications, and unpopular to do single-page web apps. Those of us who learned the LAMP stack or WebObjects are back in fashion without having to lift a finger!

  Currently it’s fashionable to restate “don’t mock an interface you don’t own” as the more prescriptive, taste-driven statement “mocks are bad”. Rather than change my practice (I use mocks and I’m happy with that from 2014 is still OK), I’ll ask why has this particular taste arisen.

  Mock objects let you focus on the ma, the interstices between objects. You can say “when my case controller receives this filter query, it asks the case store for cases satisfying this predicate”. You’re designing a conversation between independent programs, making restrictions about the messages they use to communicate.

• Getting used to consuming and preparing coffee

  Letting the brew steep for 8 to 10 minutes helps with extracting more flavours. It’s not that the coffee tastes much better after 10 minutes compared to only 4 minutes, but it certainly doesn’t get any more sour. Try to taste your coffee after steeping it for only a minute or two: it will taste sour already, and become more tasty the longer you let it steep.

• How I became a coffee drinker

  I have never considered myself a coffee drinker for most of my life. At the time of writing this, I am in my mid-thirties and started drinking coffee about a year ago.

  [...]

  One day I got myself a cuppa and some drops of coffee contaminated my chocolate. Or so I thought. But I actually liked how it tasted. So I started experimenting by adding a small Espesso to my hot chocolate, which really enhanced the flavour to my liking.
  Around that time, my dysthymia really struck me with a double depression (but I didn’t know it back then), and I was extremely tired all day long. So I thought, why not try and start drinking coffee right now, since caffeine is said to help against tiredness anyhow, and I have everything right there in front of me. Adding a new recipe to the machine was easy, to let me try different mixtures of coffee and chocolate without getting in the way of the drinking habits of my fellow colleagues.
  Unfortunately the caffeine didn’t help with my tiredness. Much to the contrary, there were times when I thought that it would rather make me dizzy in the evenings. Which turned out to not being the case, though. I had plenty of dizzy evenings, even when not drinking any coffee for several weeks.

• Science

  • ACM ☛ Engineers Create Single-Step 3D Printing Method to Make Robotic Materials

    University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) engineers and colleagues designed a one-step three-dimensional (3D) printing process for manufacturing robots.

    Critical to the all-in-one approach is the design and printing of piezoelectric metamaterials, which can change shape and move in response to an electric field, or generate electricity in response to physical forces.

    The researchers developed the metamaterials to bend, flex, twist, rotate, expand, or contract rapidly.

    They constitute an internal network of sensory, moving, and structural components that can move in response to programmed commands.

    UCLA’s Huachen Cui said the two-way piezoelectric effect permits the robots to “detect obstacles via echoes and ultrasound emissions, as well as respond to external stimuli through a feedback control loop that determines how the robots move, how fast they move, and toward which target they move.”

  • The Atlantic ☛ Google’s AI Is Something Even Stranger Than Conscious

    Last week, Google put one of its engineers on administrative leave after he claimed to have encountered machine sentience on a dialogue agent named LaMDA. Because machine sentience is a staple of the movies, and because the dream of artificial personhood is as old as science itself, the story went viral, gathering far more attention than pretty much any story about natural-language processing (NLP) has ever received. That’s a shame. The notion that LaMDA is sentient is nonsense: LaMDA is no more conscious than a pocket calculator. More importantly, the silly fantasy of machine sentience has once again been allowed to dominate the artificial-intelligence conversation when much stranger and richer, and more potentially dangerous and beautiful, developments are under way.

  • Datanami ☛ How Companies Are Using Bots in Data Management [Ed: When instead of dubbing algorithms "HEY HI" you call them "robots" or "bots"]

    Data has become the lifeblood of most organizations. It provides a wealth of information about your customers, products, finances, sales, competitors and more. But managing all that data can be a challenge without the right tools. Many organizations are turning to artificial intelligence, like bots, to aid them in data management.

  • Scanned Objects by Google Research: A Dataset of 3D-Scanned Common Household Items

    Many recent advances in computer vision and robotics rely on deep learning, but training deep learning models requires a wide variety of data to generalize to new scenarios. Historically, deep learning for computer vision has relied on datasets with millions of items that were gathered by web scraping, examples of which include ImageNet, Open Images, YouTube-8M, and COCO. However, the process of creating these datasets can be labor-intensive, and can still exhibit labeling errors that can distort the perception of progress. Furthermore, this strategy does not readily generalize to arbitrary three-dimensional shapes or real-world robotic data.

  • Fabric that can ‘hear’ your heartbeat developed by MIT scientists

    Fabric that can “hear” one’s heartbeat via high-tech fibers has been developed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The tech could also be used on clothes worn by pregnant women to help them pick up their baby’s heartbeat.

    This potentially revolutionary tech could give rise to wearable hearing aids and clothes that can speak to each other. It works by first converting sounds into mechanical vibrations before they are converted again into electrical signals, similar to how the ear works. All fabrics vibrate in response to sounds, although these responses are normally far too small to be audible.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Rlang ☛ Offload Shiny’s Workload: COVID-19 processing for the WHO/Europe

    At Jumping Rivers, we have a wealth of experience developing and maintaining Shiny applications. Over the past year, we have been maintaining a Shiny application for the World Health Organization Europe (WHO/Europe) that presents data about COVID-19 vaccination uptake across Europe.

    The great strength of Shiny is that it simplifies the production of data-focused web applications, making it relatively easy to present data to users / clients in an interactive way. However data can be big and data-processing can be complex, time-consuming and memory-hungry. So if you bake an entire data pipeline into a Shiny application, you may end up with an application that is costly to host and doesn’t provide the best user experience (slow, frequently crashes).

  • As told to Parliament (November 30, 2021): 5,579 Indian farmers died by suicide in 2020

    Some 5,579 Indian farmers died by suicide in 2020, Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Narendra Singh Tomar, told the Lok Sabha November 30, 2021.

    The figures are according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), that has published reports on farmer suicides up to 2020. These reports are available on its website.

    Tomar added that the Union government had received no report on farmers, especially in Madhya Pradesh, committing suicide due to unavailability of fertiliser.

• Security

  • Stacking the deck for computer security | Penn State University

    A new and more reliable method to defend vulnerable data on the stack, a major memory region responsible for storing computer program data for processes, has been developed by an international Penn State-led team. Such data may include local variables, such as return addresses and other objects that bad actors can exploit through memory errors to obtain access to more data.

    The researchers published their solution in the Proceedings of the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium, which took place at the end of April. The symposium was hosted by the Internet Society, an international nonprofit organization focused on keeping the internet “open, globally connected, secure and trustworthy,” according to their website.

    “Despite vast research on defenses to protect stack objects from the exploitation of memory errors, much stack data remains at risk,” said project lead Trent Jaeger, professor of computer science and engineering in the Penn State School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “There are three types of memory errors through which an adversary may access other objects than what the programmer had in mind. These errors are not specific to the stack, but our solution is.”

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Make Use Of ☛ Zoom Is Shutting Down Its Chromebook App: What This Means for Users

      Whether you’re catching up with family members, friends that stay abroad, or colleagues, Zoom is one of the go-to platforms of choice. It is also used by students on its Chromebook app to touch base on assignments, join lectures, and more. If you use Zoom’s Chromebook app, you’ll soon have to make other plans to continue using the platform.

      That’s because Zoom is shutting down its Chromebook app. Here’s why and what you can do to keep using the video conferencing app on your Chromebook.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Rubenerd: Singapore, Ukraine, and some Mahathir irredentism

    Singapore is bigger than I think people realise. For a country a quarter the size of Long Island in New York, its population is higher than that of the Republic of Ireland or any two of the Baltic states combined, and about equivalent to Norway or Finland. Like these counties, it’s understandably concerned about the power imbalance represented by larger states.

• Environment

  • Energy

    • Michael West Media ☛ They’re not shivering in Honkers: Australians’ electricity pain is two billionaires’ gain – Michael West

      As Australians pay the price for decades of poor energy planning, the two single greatest beneficiaries of high electricity prices are Hong Kong billionaires Michael Kadoorie and Li Ka-Shing. Callum Foote reports on two of the big winners from Australia’s electricity crisis.
      It’s another big week in the energy crisis. It’s clear who are the losers: Australians. We have been let down by a decade of policy paralysis on the transition to clean energy. The winners are becoming clear too. Not only have energy companies been “gaming” the market operator AEMO by withholding supply to force the operator to pay them more but they also stand to win enormous compensation payments because AEMO has shut down the market.

    • New York Times ☛ Yes, Crypto Is Crashing Again. Blockchain Will Survive.

      This week, the crypto market plummeted for the second time in a month, in tandem with a sharp drop in global stock markets. The collapse, not the first of its kind, showed again how the violent swings of a largely unregulated market warp the development of a transformative technology. But crypto is just one aspect of the larger blockchain universe. Its skeptics and fans alike must learn to see it as a technological experiment, instead of just a blatant scam or a speculative path to riches.

      Why has the market fallen apart in such spectacular fashion?

      The first recent crash, when the cryptocurrency market plunged 36 percent in a week in May, offers a clue. The collapse was largely set off by the death spiral of a cryptocurrency system called Terra Luna, made up of the coin Luna and its associated stablecoin, TerraUSD. At its dizzying heights in the spring, it represented roughly 3 percent of the total crypto market. Fear spread throughout the exchanges, and with it came panic selling.

      After the second crash this week, the cryptocurrency market is still worth in total nearly $1 trillion (about one-third of last November’s peak). Only a few of the 19,000 cryptocurrencies that have been created since 2009 are now worth billions. Most have failed. The crypto market is wildly volatile not because of cryptocurrency’s underlying technology, but because of the uneasy and often dangerously unstable junction between emerging technologies and regular money. Viewed from the long perspective of market history, this instability isn’t remotely new.

    • Geeks For Geeks ☛ Benefits of Blockchain Technology

      Blockchain is the backbone Technology of Digital CryptoCurrency BitCoin. Blockchain technology is a digital or ledger technology that evaluates the records and makes track of it in a peer-to-peer network. Each transaction is verified by the majority of participants of the system. It contains every single record of each transaction.

    • Trail Of Bits ☛ Are blockchains decentralized?

      Blockchains can help push the boundaries of current technology in useful ways. However, to make good risk decisions involving exciting and innovative technologies, people need demonstrable facts that are arrived at through reproducible methods and open data.

      We believe the risks inherent in blockchains and cryptocurrencies have been poorly described and are often ignored—or even mocked—by those seeking to cash in on this decade’s gold rush.

      In response to recent market turmoil and plummeting prices, proponents of cryptocurrency point to the technology’s fundamentals as sound.

• Finance

  • Michael West Media ☛ The great Qantas grift

    While Qantas services sank and 9000 lost their jobs, chief executive Alan Joyce engineered the biggest transfer from the public money to a corporation in Australia’s history.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Michael West Media ☛ Final seat goes to Afghan refugee as the new Senate is confirmed – Michael West

    The election count is finished and Fatima Payman, an Afghan refugee whose father came to Australia on a refugee boat in1999, is the final candidate to have her Senate seat confirmed. It’s hard to think of a better symbol of change for what this election promises.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Patrick Breyer ☛ Court ruling on passenger data: protection against general suspicion and false accusation  – Patrick Breyer

    Today, the Court of Justice of the European Union, in its fundamental PNR judgment in the case “Ligue des droits humains v Conseil des ministres (Case C-817/19)” rejected the years-long retention of flight passenger data of all citizens as contrary to fundamental rights. In principle, the data of passengers on non-European flights may not be retained for longer than six months. Passengers on flights within the EU may only be stored if there is an acute risk of a terrorist attack or if special circumstances justify storage. No black box machine-learning algorithms may be used to assign a risk value to travellers.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Stop Using Twitter For Comics

    If you’re an artist posting your comics exclusively to Twitter, please, I beg you, stop.

    [...]

    Twitter is designed to only show users the newest things. All your hard word will get buried under newer posts, and you’ll be threatened to keep rapidly churning out new content to stay relevant.

    There is no way to look at a user’s post archive. The only way to look at older comics is to take the long, slow, arduous crawl of scrolling to the bottom of the page, waiting for it to load older posts, scroll down again, repeat. This is especially bad for a series meant to be read in chronological order. If I have to do that, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to read your comic, no matter how good it looks.

  • Bryan Lunduke ☛ Browsing the World Wide Web via E-Mail. 1990′s Style.

    Back in the 1990s… browsing “The Web” was a distinctly different experience for many people.

    Some had a limited amount of time which they could be “On-Line”. Others had access to Internet E-Mail, often through a local dial-up BBS… but not the ability to use a graphical Web Browser. (Yes… “E-Mail” has a dash in it… that’s how it was in the beginning — as it is “Electronic Mail” — and that’s how it shall forever stay.)

    [...]

    To my knowledge, no such “WWW via E-Mail” servers (Agora, GetWeb, or WWW4MAIL) are still in operation. In fact, even finding the source code for some of these servers has proven challenging.

    There have been a few attempts at writing a new such server over the years — including “newAgora” written in Python. However, none seem to have any longevity to them (newAgora was last updated 9 years ago).

    This isn’t terribly surprising, as the “WWW” has become increasingly difficult to use via text-mode browsers over the last 20 years. Add on top of this the continually shifting SSL requirements of most servers… and there simply isn’t the interest (or need) to continue supporting such functionality (as people have increasingly reliable Internet connectivity).

GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Podcast 174: Breaking Into The Nest, The Cheapest 3D Printer, A Spy In Your HDMI, And AI All Over The Place

    Fresh from vacation, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams makes his triumphant return to the Hackaday Podcast! He’s joined this week by Managing Editor Tom Nardi, who’s just happy he didn’t have to do the whole thing by himself again. In this episode we’ll talk about tackling BGA components in your custom PCBs, a particularly well executed hack against Google’s Nest Hub, and why you probably don’t really want the world’s cheapest 3D printer. We’ll also take a look at an incredible project to turn the Nokia 1680 into a Linux-powered handheld computer, a first of its kind HDMI firewall, and a robot that’s pretty good at making tacos. Listeners who are into artificial intelligence will be in for quite a treat as well, as is anyone who dreams of elevating the lowly automotive alternator to a more prominent position in the hacker world.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • OSTechNix ☛ Force Users To Use Strong Passwords In Debian And Ubuntu – OSTechNix

    This brief tutorial explains how to force users to use strong passwords using Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) in Debian, Ubuntu and other DEB-based systems.

  • Trend Oceans ☛ How to Get the MAC Address of a Network Interface Card – TREND OCEANS

    You are about to learn what a MAC address is, where they are stored, how they are assigned, the relationship between MAC addresses and IP addresses, and finally, how to get the MAC address of a network interface card.

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

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install KTorrent on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, KTorrent is a full-featured BitTorrent application that allows you to download files using the BitTorrent protocol. Also enables you to run multiple torrents at the same time and comes with extended features to make it a full-featured client for BitTorrent. KTorrent is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems.

    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 KTorrent torrent client 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.

  • Ryan Kavanagh’s /dev/brain

    I’ve been using OpenIKED for some time now to configure my VPN. One of its features is that it can dynamically assign addresses on the internal network to clients, and clients can assign these addresses and routes to interfaces. However, these interfaces must exist before iked can start. Some months ago I switched my Debian laptop’s configuration from the traditional ifupdown to systemd-networkd. It took me some time to figure out how to have systemd-networkd create dummy interfaces on which iked can install addresses, but also not interfere with iked by trying to manage these interfaces. Here is my working configuration.

• Games

  • OpenSource.com ☛ Free RPG Day: Create maps for your Dungeons & Dragons game with Mipui | Opensource.com

    It’s Free RPG Day again, and there’s no better to play a free roleplaying game than with free and open source software. In this digital era of pen-and-paper gaming, it’s still relatively unusual for adventures to include digital maps. In fact, it’s also unusual for paper adventures to include maps that are sized correctly for miniatures, and many that do have colourful and richly textured maps that look great in a glossy book but look murky when photocopied and enlarged for the tabletop. Long story short: a tabletop gamer is often in need of a quick and convenient way to produce maps. Mipui is an open source web app that enables you to create grid-based maps for role-playing games, and it works great for virtual and physical tabletops alike.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• New Releases

  • Linuxiac ☛ EndeavourOS “Artemis” Paves the Way to the ARM Version of the Distro

    EndeavourOS, one of the most popular Arch Linux derivatives, has released a new version called “Artemis.” Here’s what’s new!

    EndeavourOS has earned the reputation of being one of the best Arch Linux derivatives in recent years, and for a good reason.

    Surely, one of the first things you’ll notice about EndeavourOS is that, despite its claim to be a terminal-focused distribution, it has excellent GUI tools that make handling an Arch Linux system simple for new users. Something that considerably contributed to the success of this distro.

    Of course, being based on Arch, EndeavourOS is a rolling release Linux distro. As a result, you may find the most recent versions of practically every piece of software here.

    About two months after the previous “Apollo” release, the new EndeavourOS “Artemis” is now available for download. So let’s see what’s new.

  • EasyOS Dunfell-series 4.2

    EasyOS was created in 2017, derived from Quirky Linux, which in turn was derived from Puppy Linux in 2013. Easy is built in woofQ, which takes as input binary packages from any distribution, and uses them on top of the unique EasyOS infrastructure.

    Throughout 2020, the official release for x86_64 PCs was the Buster-series, built with Debian 10.x Buster DEBs.

    EasyOS has also been built with packages compiled from source, using a fork of OpenEmbedded (OE). Currently, the Dunfell release of OE has been used, to compile two sets of binary packages, for x86_64 and aarch64.

    The latter have been used to build EasyOS for the Raspberry Pi4, and first official release, 2.6.1, was in January 2021.

    The page that you are reading now has the release notes for EasyOS Dunfell-series on x86_64 PCs, also debuting in 2021.

    Ongoing development is now focused on the x86_64 Dunfell-series. The last version in the x86_64 Buster-series is 2.6.2, on June 29, 2021, and that is likely to be the end of that series. Releases for the Pi4 Dunfell-series are still planned but very intermittent.

    The version number is for EasyOS itself, independent of the target hardware; that is, the infrastructure, support-glue, system scripts and system management and configuration applications.

    The latest version is becoming mature, though Easy is an experimental distribution and some parts are under development and are still considered as beta-quality. However, you will find this distro to be a very pleasant surprise, or so we hope.

  • Barry Kauler ☛ EasyOS Dunfell-series version 4.2 released

    Version 4.2 has significant structural changes, so there may be some minor-version-bump releases to fix things.
    In particular, there has been one comment that the Limine bootloader might not work on some UEFI PCs.
    Write the image-file to a usb-stick and report back whether it boots on different legacy-BIOS and UEFI computers.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Holybros unveils Pixhawk 6X and Pixhawk 6C flight controllers

    Holybro has revealed two new models of the popular Pixhawk flight controller for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The Pixhawk 6X and the Pixhawk 6C use a Cortex-M7 as Flight Management Unit (FMU) and a Cortex-M3 as an I/O processor.

    The Pixhawk 6X is based on the Pixhawk FMUv6x Open Standard and the Pixhawk Autopilot Bus Standard. Both versions 6X/6C feature H7 microcontroller which consists of a Arm Cortex-M7 core (up to 480 MHz) and a single core Arm Cortex-M3 (up to 72MHz).

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Tor ☛ Arti 0.5.0 is released: Robustness and API improvements

  Arti is our ongoing project to create a working embeddable Tor client in Rust. It’s not ready to replace the main Tor implementation in C, but we believe that it’s the future.

  Right now, our focus is on making Arti production-quality, by stress-testing the code, hunting for likely bugs, and adding missing features that we know from experience that users will need. We’re going to try not to break backward compatibility too much, but we’ll do so when we think it’s a good idea.

• Programming/Development

  • Re: git clarity

    In my own case, my learning preference is somewhat influenced by a broader context: to what extent am i needing to just Get Something Done, and to what extent am i interested in the topic for its own sake?

  • [RFC] Zstandard as a second compression method to LLVM

    The LLVM project currently has support for zlib as a compression algorithm. Usage of it varies from compression of ELF debug sections, to serialization of performance stats and AST data structures.

    We would like to add Zstandard (A.K.A. Zstd) as an alternative to zlib, which tends to achieve higher compression rates while being faster across the board. Using those for internal tooling could lead to speed improvements in places where we compress AST’s etc, without sacrificing the compressed size of them.

  • Porting KCM modules from QtWidgets to QtQuick/Kirigami for GSOC 2022

    I’ve been selected for GSOC this year. My task is to redesign and port the KCMs currently in Qt Widgets to QtQuick/Kirigami

    Thanks, Nate and David for agreeing to mentor me.

  • dwaves.de ☛ Rant: One day either JavaScript or AutoComplete will start ww3

Leftovers

• Counter Punch ☛ Fire Island: a Review

  Joel Kim Booster is the main character in Fire Island. He also wrote this entertaining and thought-provoking film.

  Bowen Yang plays Booster’s best friend. He has a nice career, but alas is unable to find a mate to share his life.

• TruthOut ☛ To Build the World We Desire, We Must Dream Deeply Together

• Counter Punch ☛ Universal White Male Perspective is Destructive, says Mexican Tzotzil Filmmaker

  But Xun Sero is a Tzotzil person from Mexico’s southern Chiapas state, and he knows that when many people watch the documentary they will make it about violence within Tzotzil communities, rather than allowing it to speak to broader social issues.

  Mamá premiered in Mexico last week, and at the Canadian Hot Docs festival last month. It (see the trailer, with subtitles in English here) shows Sero and his aunties talking to his mother about how she had to run away from home as a child to avoid being married off, and about how his biological, but not-present father raped her.

• Meduza ☛ ‘The putsch made us famous’ The life and death of Siberia’s top independent television channel

  In the 1990s, TV2 in Tomsk emerged as one of the most remarkable independent media outlets in Russia. Under editor-in-chief Viktor Muchnik, the television station weathered the early years of Vladimir Putin’s reign, only to lose its broadcasting license in the aftermath of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. Nevertheless, TV2 journalists continued reporting until about a week into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Like dozens of other outlets, TV2 was forced to shut down amid the Kremlin’s wartime crackdown on Russia’s remaining free press. But its editor-in-chief remained determined to record the fallout from the war. To find out more about the rise and fall of TV2, and what its former journalists are up to now, Meduza sat down with Viktor Muchnik. 

• Science

  • Hackaday ☛ SpinLaunch And The History Of Hurling Stuff Into Space

    It’s fair to say that there’s really no phase of spaceflight that could be considered easy. But the case could be made that the most difficult part of a spacecraft’s journey is right at the very beginning, within the first few minutes of flight. At this point the vehicle’s booster rocket will be fighting with all its might against its own immense propellant-laden mass, a battle that it’s been engineered to win by the smallest of margins. Assuming the balance was struck properly and the vehicle makes its way off of the launch pad, it will still need to contend with the thick sea-level atmosphere as it accelerates, a building dynamic pressure that culminates with a point known as “Max q” — the moment where the air density imposes the maximum structural load on the rocket before quickly dropping off as the vehicle continues to ascend and the atmosphere thins.

• Education

  • Pro Publica ☛ School Board Candidates Who Criticized the Hiring of a Black DEI Educator Lose Their Elections

    Two Georgia school board candidates who criticized the hiring of a Black educator focused on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives lost their runoff elections this week. Meanwhile, a person who helped organize the effort to push educator Cecelia Lewis out of her job is narrowly losing her bid for a seat in the state House of Representatives.

    The three were described in a ProPublica story last week that detailed how Lewis was attacked in both Cherokee County and neighboring Cobb County by white parents making baseless claims that she was bringing critical race theory to both school districts. (CRT maintains that racial bias is embedded in America’s laws and institutions and has caused disproportionate harm to people of color; it’s rarely if ever taught in K-12 public school systems.)

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Mechanical Keyboards Are Over, This Device Has Won

    The desk of any self-respecting technology enthusiast in the 2020s is not complete without a special keyboard of some sort, be it a vintage IBM Model M, an esoteric layout or form factor, or just a standard keyboard made with clacky mechanical switches. But perhaps we’ve found the one esoteric keyboard to rule them all, in the form of [HIGEDARUMA]’s 8-bit keyboard. You can all go home now, the competition has been well and truly won by this input device with the simplest of premises; enter text by setting the ASCII value as binary on a row of toggle switches. No keyboard is more retro than the one you’d find on the earliest microcomputers!

  • Hackaday ☛ Adding USB-C To An IPhone 13 Is Delicate Work

    USB-C seeks to rule the roost when it comes to connectors, and even has Big Europe on its side. Apple hasn’t had to abandon Lightning just yet, but [Restore Technique] has put a USB-C port into an iPhone 13 to give us all an idea what it’s going to be like in the brave new future ahead of us.

  • Hackaday ☛ Mysterious Adder From 1960s Bendix G-20

    [David Lovett] aka Usagi Electric is taking a dive into yet another old computer design, this one from the early 1960s. He recently obtained eight mystery circuit boards on-loan for the purpose of reverse engineering them. It turns out these came from an old mainframe called the Bendix G-20, a successor to the 1965 G-15 vacuum tube model. The cards are:

  • Techdirt ☛ Ridiculous: Gov’t Contractor Copies Open Source 3D Printing Concept… And Patents It

    We’ve been talking about the importance of patent quality, and one of the points made in our podcast discussion, was that many companies felt the unfortunate need to patent something just to avoid having someone else patent it later and create problems. One thing we didn’t really get to discuss about that is that this actually makes it ridiculously difficult for any project that wants to do something innovative and donate it to the world, without patents. Because someone else might just come along and patent it themselves.

  • Hackaday ☛ An In-Depth Look At The Haptic Smart Knob

    At Hackaday, we love those times when we get a chance to follow up on a project that we’ve already featured. Generally, it’s because the project has advanced in some significant way, which is always great to see. Sometimes, though, new details on the original project are available, and that’s where we find ourselves with [Scott Bez] and his haptic smart knob project.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Hackaday ☛ A Water Leak Detector That Listens Carefully

    Water leaks can be pernicious things. Even just a few drips per minute happening undetected inside a wall can cause major damage if left unrepaired for long enough. AquaPing is a new device that hopes to detect difficult-to-find water leaks with the aid of acoustic methods. 

  • Common Dreams ☛ UN Chief Warns of Impending ‘Unprecedented Global Food Crisis’

    United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for debt relief for the world’s poorest countries on Friday as he warned that an “unprecedented global food crisis” that is already ravaging more vulnerable nations will also have severe impacts for the entire world.

    The U.N. chief said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has significantly worsened disruptions to the food supply chain that had already been hard-hit by the droughts and extreme weather triggered by climate crisis as well as the coronavirus pandemic and persistent inequality.

• Security

  • dwaves.de ☛ Russia’s Conti working on exploits for Intel ME BMC AMT IPMI – Intel ME the biggest security fuck up in computing history – sue Intel

    “The biggest network security threat today is a remote code execution exploit for Intel’s Management Engine.”

    “Every computer with an Intel chipset produced in the last decade would be vulnerable to this exploit, and RCE would give an attacker full control over every aspect of a system.

    If you want a metaphor, we are dinosaurs and an Intel ME exploit is an asteroid hurtling towards the Yucatán peninsula.” (https://hackaday.com/tag/intel-me/)

    Intel might have installed – over the course of at least a decade (to this day?) a closed source backdoor in your computer’s firmware, that might never receive updates and is hard to remove.
    Once this backdoor is fully cracked, everyone (Russia, China and North Korea) can use it.
    Having remote control over a server down to the BIOS is a neat feature.

    [...]

    another dramatic way to put it:

    “The biggest network security threat today is a remote code execution exploit for Intel’s Management Engine.”

    “Every computer with an Intel chipset produced in the last decade would be vulnerable to this exploit, and RCE would give an attacker full control over every aspect of a system.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Techdirt ☛ India’s Government Amps Up Facial Recognition Deployment, Claims The Only People Affected Are Criminals

      Prime Minister Nahendra Mohdi’s government has apparently peered over the Great Wall of China (to pedants: figuratively, of course) and liked what it was seeing. China is the world leader in pervasive surveillance — something the government uses to shield the government from criticism and to keep the people the government considers to be undesirable under the bootheel.

    • Techdirt ☛ Things Are Looking Up: Clearview Cuts Sales Staff, Dumps Chief Revenue Officer

      Clearview has never had a great reputation. Its first appearance in the public eye — via a Kashmir Hill report for the New York Times — was inauspicious, to say the least. The company’s database was composed of data and photos scraped from thousands of websites. This image database — which has now passed 10 billion images — is packaged with Clearview’s facial recognition AI and sold to whoever wants to buy it: law enforcement agencies, app developers, human rights violators, retailers, etc.

    • Techdirt ☛ US Marshal Indicted For Abusing Access To Cell Location Data To Run Personal Searches

      Give anyone access to tons of sensitive personal information and it’s bound to result in abuse. Give cops access to this data and abuse is guaranteed. Why? Because law enforcement officers — for reasons unfathomable to regular people — face far fewer consequences for violating internal policies and breaking laws.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Nation ☛ This Fascist Gang Can Shoot Straight After All

    My recap of Thursday’s January 6 hearing, headlined “The Fascist Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” went up minutes before the Supreme Court’s six-member Christianist majority struck down the constitutional right to abortion on Friday morning. I winced a little when I saw it on our site, because it suddenly seemed so wrong: When it comes to using the high court to impose minority rule, this fascist gang has been able to shoot very straight—and it will be very deadly.

  • Scheerpost ☛ A Lemming Leading the Lemmings: Slavoj Zizek and the Terminal Collapse of the Anti-War Left

    Have you noticed how every major foreign policy crisis since the U.S. and U.K.’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 has peeled off another layer…

  • Counter Punch ☛ Letter From Crimea: Stalingrad Looms Large in Ukraine

    My night train to Volgograd, which was Stalingrad in its hours of desperation, left Moscow from Paveletsky station, which when I rolled up to the main entrance was a maelstrom of people traveling for summer holidays. I had to show my tickets at several checkpoints, and men with scanner wands examined my bicycle bags for explosives, of the kinds that some years back Chechen rebels detonated around Moscow (how the enemy voted in that conflict).

    The Night Train to Volgograd

  • Counter Punch ☛ Top Gun: Maverick: The Pentagon Recruitment Drive

    The extent of such collaboration, manipulation and interference can be gathered in National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood (2017). Matthew Alford and Tom Secker argue that a number of operations mounted by the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI were designed to further “violent, American-centric solutions to international problems based on twisted readings of history.”

    The US Air Force has its own Entertainment Liaison Office in Hollywood, run by director Lieutenant Colonel Glen Roberts. “Our job,” he explained in 2016, “is to project and protect the image of the US Air Force and its Airmen in the entertainment space.” Propaganda is not a word he knows, even though he is its most ardent practitioner. He describes the involvement of his office across scripted or unscripted television, movies, documentaries, reality TV, award and game shows, sporting events and video games. Its purpose: “to present the Air Force and its people in a credible, realistic way” and provide the entertainment industry with “access to Airmen, bases and equipment if they meet certain standards set by the Department of Defense.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Compromise Gun Bill Passes Senate, Expected to Pass House on Friday

  • Counter Punch ☛ Why Trump Must be Indicted

    Now he must be indicted.

    Trump’s criminality is proven not by the words of his enemies, but by the sworn testimony of Republicans he himself appointed or hired —including his own officials and staff, his attorney general William Barr, and Republican election lawyers and campaign personnel.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Radical Supreme Court Guts State Gun Laws & Right to Remain Silent Under Arrest

    The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a century-old New York state law that limited who can carry concealed weapons in public, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the 6-3 majority that the statute violated the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. The ruling vastly expands gun rights in the U.S. just weeks after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, and represents “a revolution in Second Amendment law,” says Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern. “It declares that any restriction on the right to self-defense is presumptively unconstitutional.” In light of the Supreme Court decision, a bipartisan gun violence bill passed by the Senate is “one step forward, two steps back.” Stern also discusses a separate ruling in which the court’s conservative majority said a person who is arrested and not told of their right to remain silent cannot subsequently sue police for violating their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination — even if statements they give are ultimately used against them at trial. The decision could be setting the stage for the court to overturn the 1966 Miranda v. Arizona precedent altogether, Stern warns.

  • Counter Punch ☛ China Will Decide the Fate of Russia vs. the West

    No one knows how this meal will end. Ukraine is eager to force Russia to disgorge what it’s already devoured, while the still-peckish invader clearly has no interest in leaving the table.

    This might seem like an ordinary territorial dispute between predator and prey. Ukraine’s central location between east and west, however, turns it into a potentially world-historical conflict like the Battle of Tours when the Christian Franks turned back the surging Ummayad army of Muslims in 732 AD or the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam in 1975.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Gustavo Petro Ushers in New Era for Left in Colombia

    Colombia made history this week. Progressive former M-19 guerrilla Gustavo Petro, a current senator and former mayor of the nation’s capital Bogotá, won the presidential election. His running mate Francia Márquez Mina will be the nation’s first Black vice president. Theirs will be the first leftist presidential administration in Colombian history. The Petro/Márquez ticket garnered more votes than in any presidential race in Colombian history.

  • The Nation ☛ In Colombia, “a Government of the Callused Hands”

    By 8 am, the residents of Suarez, a township in the northern Cauca department in Colombia, are lined up from the sports arena filled with polling booths to the police roadblock, where security forces are controlling entry. Local authorities tell me they’re seeing many more people than in past elections and they expect an historic turnout. No wonder. This is the hometown of Francia Marquez, the environmental activist and now—with the support of millions of impoverished Colombians like her townspeople—the first Black woman vice president in the nation’s history.

  • TruthOut ☛ Brutal Supreme Court Rulings Rain Down on Another January 6 Hearing

  • Democracy Now ☛ Top DOJ Staff Threatened Mass Resignation as Trump Weighed Naming Jeff Clark AG to Overturn Election

    Former top officials in President Trump’s Justice Department told the House January 6 committee Thursday they threatened to resign en masse when Trump mused about appointing Jeffrey Clark, a loyalist who backed the baseless voter fraud claims, as acting attorney general. “I said, ‘Mr. President, within 24, 48, 72 hours, you could have hundreds and hundreds of resignations of the leadership of your entire Justice Department because of your actions,’” said former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue. “’What’s that going to say about you?’”

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Ukraine War’s Role in Exacerbating Global Food Insecurity

    Since February, Russia has seized some of Ukraine’s most vital agricultural regions in the eastern and southeastern parts of the country. The Russian military has also prevented Ukraine from accessing its ports on the Black Sea recently, leaving Ukraine essentially landlocked, and unable to export its food products to the international markets.

    But though the war has certainly exacerbated the global food crisis, it was preceded by the food price hikes of 2007 and 2011, in addition to the hike witnessed due to COVID-19, after decades of falling costs in real prices of food items. In 2021, data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) showed more massive increases in meat, dairy, cereals, vegetable oils, and sugar prices that exceeded the previous spike witnessed in 2007 and 2011.

• Environment

  • Counter Punch ☛ It’s a Matter of Math: Bigger Families Mean More Carbon Emissions

    New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently had that opportunity, but that’s not the opinion piece he ended up writing (“You’re Kids Are Not Doomed,” June 5, 2022), and many are disappointed.

    Instead, Klein did what Elon Musk, Mitt Romney, many growth-minded economists and dozens of other relatively wealthy white men have done. He pushed people (women, actually) to have kids. Instead of offering a nuanced response to the problems, Klein framed the issue as a simple idea about having kids, and then urged people to go forward and have them.

  • Energy

    • Counter Punch ☛ Where Will the Nuclear Waste Go?

      What, indeed, is to be done about the nuclear waste that has been produced at the two Millstone nuclear power plants which have been operating in Connecticut? (They are now the only nuclear power plants running in New England.)

      And what is to be done about the nuclear waste at other nuclear power plants?

    • Counter Punch ☛ China’s Stubborn Coal Addiction

      It took millions of years to compress the coal into a carbon rock that takes approximately 16 hours to burn in a stove or furnace.

      The resultant heat caused by burning a lump of coal is felt in the atmosphere within 95 days, which is the time it takes for its carbon emissions to trap enough heat in the atmosphere to equal the amount of heat generated when burning the lump for 16 hours in a furnace. But, it doesn’t stop there, as shall be explained in more detail.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Counter Punch ☛ Brazil, Amazon, World: “Anything Can Happen”

      In a 2019 article, Dom Phillips quoted a Macuxi spokesman, Edinho de Souza, “We are not fighting the farmer, a little garimpeiro. We are fighting the government.” As Indigenous people and environmental defenders know, “The bullets that kill journalists, activists and Indigenous people in Amazonia are bought with money from land grabs, illegal mining and logging”, high priorities of the Bolsonaro government. Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips were murdered in the remote Amazon region of Vale do Javari, Brazil’s second largest Indigenous territory, near the borders with Peru and Colombia, home to more uncontacted tribes (who reject contact) than anywhere else in the world, and also an extremely violent place because of illegal mining, logging, drug, and poaching activities. However tragic these two murders are in themselves, they’re even worse because of what they represent: the danger to anyone who tries to protect the Amazon and its peoples.

      In fact, Bolsonaro himself, delaying the search efforts and callously attempting to blame the two men for their fate, actually obeyed the compulsion to confess what Edinho de Souza and his people know all too well: “Really two people just on a boat, in a region like that, completely wild, is an adventure that is not recommended to do … Anything can happen.” If the region is “completely wild”, the Bolsonaro government has done everything possible to make it so. If defending Indigenous rights is an “adventure”, he’s proclaiming his contempt for Indigenous rights. If Phillips was “disliked” in the region, as Bolsonaro claims, the question is who disliked him (no prizes for guessing the answer: the government and its henchmen). Finally, the mainstream press, which prominently reported politicians like Boris Johnson and other eminences as expressing “deep concern” about the two men, mostly gave said concerned eminences more coverage than the valuable work Pereira and Phillips were doing. Their deaths were reported, arrests were reported, but there was little attempt to explain why they were killed and, going up the chain of responsibility, who wanted this. Bolsonaro can feel that his threat is successful.

    • Counter Punch ☛ The Wide Role Brazil’s Military Has Played in the Destruction of the Amazon

      A source from the Brazilian Amazon wrote to us at Revista Opera two years ago to warn us about something strange that was going on there: illegally mined gold was being sold at the same price as legally mined gold. “If the nugget is a big one,” said the source, “they give the miner extra [money].” There was no investigation based on this information since it would have required great resources and risks, neither of which we could afford. It was just another fascinating story that was buried in the green hell (Inferno Verde) or El Dorado—terms often used to describe the immensity of the Amazon rainforest.

      In August 2021, a study by the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in partnership with the Brazilian Federal Public Ministry (MPF) showed that in two years—2019 and 2020—28 percent of all gold that was both produced by and sold in Brazil appeared to have been mined illegally. Perhaps such a large influx of gold for some exceptional reason had an effect on the price paid out for mining it at a given time, or perhaps the information provided was fabricated by the source, we thought.

    • The Revelator ☛ The Battle Over Hunting and Predators in Greater Yellowstone

    • The Nation ☛ Honoring Mother Earth

      This quilt project was coordinated by Marietta Bernstorff. The top work was completed by Evelyne Lundberg. The bottom work was completed by a student of Andre LePage who is a professor at Washington and Lee University.

• Finance

  • Scheerpost ☛ Renters Are Being Fleeced with Huge Rent Hikes and Evictions—And It’s Only Getting Worse

    The US housing crisis has been decades in the making, but combined with an inflation squeeze and a systemic shortage of affordable housing, more renters have nowhere to go.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Ralph Nader: The Continuing Damages from Corporate-Managed so-Called Free Trade

    Photo by Laura Tancredi on Pexels.com By Ralph Nader The great progressive Harvard economist and prolific best-selling author, John Kenneth Galbraith, wrote that, “Ideas may be superior to vested i…

  • The Nation ☛ What Happens to Children Who Lose a Parent?

    If a parent dies, the burden created on their children is substantial. A bereaved child loses access to their deceased parent’s financial, emotional, and social support. This is also true if a parent is incarcerated, but it can come with additional emotional and social burdens that are less obvious. This story was produced for StudentNation, a program of the Nation Fund for Independent Journalism, which is dedicated to highlighting the best of student journalism. For more Student Nation, check out our archive or learn more about the program here. StudentNation is made possible through generous funding from The Puffin Foundation. If you’re a student and you have an article idea, please send pitches and questions to [email protected].

  • Scheerpost ☛ Rail Firms Paid Shareholders £800m Before Asking Workers to Take Wage Cut

    CEOs of the six biggest train companies also took home a combined salary of more than £5m in 2020.

  • Counter Punch ☛ A Pastor Marches for a Moral Economy

    “From unemployment to health care outcomes, virtually every issue hits poor folks the hardest,” he told me.

    As a result, pastors like him have more prayers to shepherd, more funerals to perform, and more concerns to ease — “not because it’s God’s will or because fate declared it,” he said, “but because identifiable policy choices have created burdens on people that should be lifted.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Corporate Greed Is Destroying This Economy’: Sanders Pushes for Windfall Profits Tax

    Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday slammed oil companies for raking in huge profits on the backs of U.S. consumers and reiterated his case for a windfall tax, a demand that came as President Joe Biden’s call for a federal gas tax holiday faced growing pushback from progressives and top officials in his own administration.

    “This is outrageous. Corporate profits soar, working people can’t afford to fill up their gas tank. We need to pass a windfall profits tax now.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Sanders Calls for Windfall Tax to Defend Economy Against Corporate Greed

  • Counter Punch ☛ Capitalism’s World Economic, Political and Social Crises and the Road to Fight Back

    Led by the dominant capitalist-imperialist nations, especially the U.S. and China, the system involves the capture and transfer of surplus value from workers in poorer countries to leading corporations in the advanced countries. Today, global value chain corporations that represent only 15 percent of all trading firms worldwide, capture some 80 percent of total trade.

    This unprecedented globalization and monopoly concentration of capital is driven by the inherent contradictions in the capitalist system itself. Ever declining average rates of profit, as repeatedly demonstrated by British Marxist economist Michael Roberts, have been countered worldwide by ever intensifying attacks on working people, including union-busting at home, systemic racism/sexism/LBGTQI+ discrimination, massive social cutbacks, anti-labor legislation, layoffs, speed-up, part time casualization of work, forced overtime, cuts in fringe benefits, obliteration of pensions and the imposition of multiple-tier wage systems. When these prove insufficient to stem profit declines, the ruling elite embark on massive drives to transfer production [de-industrialization] outside their borders to further free themselves from the gains workers have won during decades of struggle.

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Rhode Island Pension Tsunami

    In that newsletter, the general treasurer of Rhode Island, Seth Magaziner, addresses the collective membership of past and present public employees with vested interests in the retirement system: “so it is a great honor for my team and me to serve you and to be responsive to that feedback [about the retirement pension system].”

    Further on in his Compass message, he states that the pension fund “has grown by over $3 billion since 2015… outperformed 92% of peer public pension plans.”

  • Pro Publica ☛ Ten Ways Billionaires Avoid Taxes on an Epic Scale

    Last June, drawing on the largest trove of confidential American tax data that’s ever been obtained, ProPublica launched a series of stories documenting the key ways the ultrawealthy avoid taxes, strategies that are largely unavailable to most taxpayers. To mark the first anniversary of the launch, we decided to assemble a quick summary of the techniques — all of which can generate tax savings on a massive scale — revealed in the series.

    Our first story unraveled how billionaires like Elon Musk, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos were able to amass some of the largest fortunes in history while paying remarkably little tax relative to their immense wealth. They did it in part by avoiding selling off their vast holdings of stock. The U.S. system taxes income. Selling stock generates income, so they avoid income as the system defines it. Meanwhile, billionaires can tap into their wealth by borrowing against it. And borrowing isn’t taxable. (Buffett said he followed the law and preferred that his wealth go to charity; the others didn’t comment beyond a “?” from Musk.)

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Anatomy of Inflation

    A qualitative ‘threshold of awareness’ was reached this past week when the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, accelerated its pace of rate hikes by 75 basis points—purportedly to bring the rate of price hikes under control. Whether the Fed can succeed in taming inflation and do so without precipitating a recession remains to be seen but is highly unlikely. Taming inflation without provoking a recession is thus the central economic question for the remainder of 2022.

    Clearly some think this is possible—i.e. that further rate hikes will moderate the pace of inflation without driving the real economy into recession and result in what is called a ‘soft landing’. Clearly the Fed and the Biden administration believe that will happen. But a growing chorus of even mainstream economists and bank research departments don’t think so.  Almost daily new forecasts by global banks and analysts appear indicating recession is more than 50-50 likely—and arriving sooner in late 2022 than in 2023.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Nation ☛ Why Centrist Democrats Love Promoting Right-Wing Extremists

    It’s hardly news that Donald Trump is tightening his grip on the Republican Party by endorsing hard-right candidates in primary races across the United States. Nor is it unexpected that even in races where Trump hasn’t offered an endorsement, the passions of the MAGA movement are helping extremist candidates surge in these primaries. What is more notable is that some of these candidates have been buoyed by an unusual source: Democratic Party strategists who are spending millions to raise the profile of the most rabid Trumpists.

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Haitian Revolution Today and the Limits of Token Solidarity

    Ever since the Haitian people successfully overthrew slavery and French colonialism in 1804, the US government refused to recognize the independent Haitian republic; instead the US sided with the French government to internationally isolate Haiti and force the Haitian people to pay “restitution” to their former enslavers in France, a massive robbery well-documented in the recent NYT article “The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers”.

    Echoing this history of the US exclusion of Haiti in 1826, the Biden Administration convened another Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, excluding Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua from participation. There was massive international attention and opposition by progressives to this measure. The Haiti Action Committee was part of this opposition and stands in full solidarity with the people of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

  • FAIR ☛ ‘The Miscarriage of Justice Catalyzed a Whole Movement Led by Asian Americans’

  • The Nation ☛ The Real Reason to Be Nervous About AI

    In recent weeks, an unlikely drama has unfolded in the media. The center of this drama isn’t a celebrity or a politician, but a sprawling computational system, created by Google, called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). A Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, was suspended for declaring on Medium that LaMDA, which he interacted with via text, was “sentient.” This declaration (and a subsequent Washington Post article) sparked a debate between people who think Lemoine is merely stating an obvious truth—that machines can now, or soon will, show the qualities of intelligence, autonomy, and sentience—and those who reject this claim as naive at best and deliberate misinformation at worst. Before explaining why I think those who oppose the sentience narrative are right, and why that narrative serves the power interests of the tech industry, let’s define what we’re talking about.1

  • The Nation ☛ Fierce Madres

  • The Nation ☛ The Fascist Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight

    “Just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

  • The Nation ☛ Boris Johnson’s Days Are Numbered

    When British Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrived at St Paul’s Cathedral earlier in June for the Jubilee Thanksgiving service, the flag-waving royalists took a break from their revelry to boo him. The next day, he received notice that the number of parliamentary colleagues calling for a vote of no-confidence in his leadership had reached a threshold, and he would effectively have to run again for his job.

  • Insight Hungary ☛ Hungarian Prime Minister’s salary doubles amid sky-high inflation

    The Hungarian Parliament has passed a law that nearly doubles Viktor Orban’s wage from 2.8 million forints ($7,380) to 4.8 million ($ 12,647). The Prime Minister’s salary is now ten times the Hungarian average and more than twenty times the minimum wage in the country, according to the Hungarian outlet, Telex. The raise comes at a time when the Central European country is suffering from a record high inflation.

    The proposal also includes paragraphs about other members of the government. Under the new law, the salaries of the political director of the Prime Minister, the State Secretary, the Government Commissioner, and other high-ranking government members will be decided by Orban.

  • Democracy Now ☛ “Pure Insanity”: Trump Pushed DOJ to Chase Absurd Conspiracy Theories to Overturn 2020 Election

    The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has revealed new details about former President Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to help him stay in power after he lost the 2020 election. In the committee’s fifth televised public hearing Thursday, former top DOJ officials testified about how Trump urged the department to seize voting machines and declare the election results corrupt. One of the former top DOJ officials who testified was Trump’s former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, who described a phone conversation with President Trump in which he tried to reject his repeated false claims. Donoghue also discussed how he and others were pushed to investigate a baseless conspiracy theory that an Italian defense contractor had hacked a satellite, switching votes from Trump to Biden.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Guess Which Republican Congressmembers Sought Pardons After Trying to Help Trump Subvert Vote

    The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol revealed Thursday that six Republican members of Congress who supported Donald Trump’s lies sought broad presidential pardons for their involvement in the campaign to discredit the election results: Mo Brooks of Alabama, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona. “The only reason I know to ask for a pardon is because you think you’ve committed a crime,” noted Republican committee member, Congressmember Adam Kinzinger.

  • TruthOut ☛ Six GOP Congressmembers Sought Pardons After Trying to Help Trump Subvert Vote

  • Craig Murray ☛ The Pointless Keir Starmer

    On Thursday, Labour under Keir Starmer got a lower percentage of the vote in Wakefield than they did in 2017 under Jeremy Corbyn. In 2017 Labour got 49.7%. On Thursday they got 47.9%. I want you to think that through.

  • FAIR ☛ Raed Jarrar on Biden’s Saudi Trip, Lindsay Koshgarian on People Over Pentagon

  • Counter Punch ☛ The G7 Prepares a Divide-and-Conquer Trap, as BRICS Countries Try to Reconstitute

    Xi announced the meeting at the end of May, just after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Pretoria. The earlier ambition was to have a post-Covid in-person BRICS summit, which logically would have been in September. That was the case in 2017, in Xiamen, the last time the BRICS met in China.

    But in recent weeks, a sense of panic must have arisen in Beijing – and perhaps Moscow – as the realization dawned that two BRICS could well be wheeled and dealed by the G7. The two could thus continue “spalling”; the construction-industry terminology refers to a process (spalling) in which – mainly due to the freezing-thawing cycle – a wall’s masonry and bricks crack, crumble, flake, and even pop out of the wall.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Marjorie and Milo: A Marriage Made in…Well, Someplace

    The prospect of such teamwork doubtless leaves most normal people muttering “what next?” What next? I’ll tell you. Like Matt “Who Knew She Was a Teenager?” Gaetz’s internship offer to Kyle “Judicial Double Standard” Rittenhouse, this latest pairing signifies parlous times ahead – specifically when Trump or some Trump wannabe prances back into the white house. Then, as happened before, all the psychos will pop out of the woodwork. We may even get Ginni “My Husband Will Fix It” Thomas testifying that radical communists eavesdropped on her pillow talk. Others of her ilk will also demand their day in the sun.

    You thought weirdos like Sydney “Chavez’s Ghost Rigged the Election” Powell, Mark “Italian Satellites” Meadows, Mike “Eliminate Voting Machines and Maybe Voting” Lindell and Rudy “Four Seasons” Giuliani were gone? Think again. They’re waitin’ in the wings. Drunk on power or just plain drunk, they thirst for the limelight, and if Joe “Sanctions, Inflation, Rinse Repeat” Biden doesn’t figure things out fast, we could be looking at a very dismal future. One that includes a billion dollars a month for weapons to Ukraine, while lots of Americans can’t cover routine expenses, and the electoral fury at Dems that this outrage ignites. Given this white house economic bumbling and the disaster of dimwit neocons with their hands firmly planted on the foreign policy steering-wheel, we’re likely headed for an ugly crash. Think President Ron “Covid Cruise” DeSantis and vice president Mo “Bullet Proof Vest” Brooks. And that’s the tamer of the two scenarios. The wilder one features a rerun of the Trump Show with someone like “They Call Me” Dr. Oz “For a Reason” as veep.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ Appeals Court: No, You Can’t Just Sue Twitter Because You’re Upset They Kicked Trump Off

    We’ve covered on here former President Donald Trump’s ridiculous lawsuit against Twitter for kicking him off the platform for violating its terms of service (a lawsuit that is not going well at all), but I had missed that some random person, Maria Rutenberg, had also sued Twitter for the same thing. No, not for kicking her off, but for kicking Trump off. She claimed (I am not joking) that it violated her 1st Amendment rights not to be able to respond to his tweets. I only wish I were joking. From the complaint:

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Common Dreams ☛ UN Human Rights Office Confirms: Israeli Forces Killed Journalist Shireen Abu Akleh

    Confirming the findings of several major journalistic investigations, the United Nations Human Rights Office said Friday that Israeli forces fired the shots that killed beloved Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and wounded her colleague last month as they covered a raid in the occupied West Bank.

    Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement that it is “deeply disturbing that Israeli authorities have not conducted a criminal investigation” in the six weeks since Abu Akleh’s killing, which sparked international outrage.

  • TruthOut ☛ UN Human Rights Office Confirms Israeli Forces Killed Shireen Abu Akleh

  • Counter Punch ☛ Why Palestine’s Sports Victories Should Inspire Us

    This accomplishment can only be appreciated within the larger context of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

    In November 2006, the Israeli military prevented all Palestine-based footballers from participating in the final match of the Asian Football Confederation qualification group stage. The news had a major demoralizing effect on all Palestinians. Even rare moments of hope and happiness are often crushed by Israel.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Nation ☛ Robed Extremists Sacrifice Women

  • Common Dreams ☛ Additional Prison Inmates Starve to Death as Crisis Worsens in Haiti

    At least eight inmates died this week at a jam-packed prison in Haiti that ran out of food two months ago, becoming the latest victims of an ongoing crisis that has killed dozens of people this year.

    Ronald Richemond, the government commissioner of the southwest city of Les Cayes, told The Associated Press on Thursday that hunger and dangerously high temperatures contributed to the deaths reported this week by the prison, which holds 833 inmates.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Rise of Fascism Feeding Off a Meaner, More Violent United States

    Blood alone moves the wheels of history.–Benito Mussolini

  • Scheerpost ☛ The Supreme Court Strips Us of Miranda Warnings

    Today, Justice Alito ruled that you have constitutional rights, but no right to know what they are.

  • The Nation ☛ Brett Kavanaugh Has Beclowned Susan Collins

    Rarely in history has a United States senator been so blatantly beclowned as Susan Collins was on Friday.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘You might think no prisons are worse than Russian ones, but you’d be wrong’ Pussy Riot activist Aisoltan Niyazova and the 20-year-old arrest warrant that won’t leave her alone

    In late May, Russian activist Aisoltan Niyazova was arrested in Slovenia; a few days later, it happened again in Croatia. She had come to both countries to take part in Pussy Riot’s charity concert tour. Niyazova began her career working at a bank, but in 2011, she was sent to prison for allegedly committing fraud; there, she met Maria Alyokhina and became an advocate for prisoners’ rights. Niyazova spoke to Meduza about her recent arrests, her introduction to Pussy Riot, and how her time in prison turned her into an activist.

  • The Nation ☛ The Radical History of the First Gay-Straight Alliance

    When Elie Lamadrid, 18, suggested starting an after-school gay youth club in the winter of 1972, George Washington High School, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, had been a source of trouble for school administrators and city officials.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Deadly Games: The Labour Casualties of Qatar’s World Cup

  • Scheerpost ☛ Nolan Higdon & Mickey Huff: Has America Lost the Key to Democracy?

    The authors of “Let’s Agree to Disagree” offer a guide to fostering critical thinking and dialogue in a society that seems to have forgotten how to engage in either.

  A sordid enterprise, nasty, crude and needless. But the World Cup 2022 will be, should anyone bother watching it, stain…

• Scheerpost ☛ Bernie Sanders Advocates for Leonard Peltier’s Release from Prison

  “I continue to support efforts to free him,” Sanders said of Leonard Peltier, 77-year-old Indigenous rights activist, in a letter obtained by HuffPost.

• Counter Punch ☛ Why Don’t Companies Care About the Uyghurs?

  Volkswagen, a company that famously used Jews as slave labour to profit during the Holocaust, recently announced that they will stop the production and suspend exports of vehicles to Russia.

  Of course, this doesn’t mean that Volkswagen plans on suspending operations in Xinjiang, an area where over one million Uyghurs are detained in concentration camps, are forcibly sterilized, and subject to abortions, rape and tortured. Not only is Volkswagen operating in the Uyghur Region, that they are using Uyghur slave labour to directly profit from largest incarceration of an ethnic minority since the Holocaust.

• Counter Punch ☛ Honor Thy Radical Mother and Thy Radical Father

  Unlike Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, Carl Oglesby, Cathy Wilkerson and other New Leftists, including Bill Ayers, the author of Fugitive Days, Bernardine Dohrn has never written an autobiography or a memoir. It’s unlikely she ever will, especially now that Mother Country Radicals tells much of her story and the stories of her comrades, such as Ayers, her husband, from both the inside looking out and the outside looking in. Autobiography isn’t Bernardine’s style. Writing essays and articles about herself isn’t her forte, either, though she has been and still is an eloquent and impassioned public speaker. “My mother always was a private person,” her son, Zayd, explains in Mother County Radicals, from Crooked Media (available on Spotify and elsewhere). Zayd adds, “Sound bites don’t capture her,” Still, the mass media has often tried to reduce her to a simple sentence or a flat phrase, much as reporters have rarely failed to describe her wearing a mini-skirt, as though the miniskirt defined her. No way.

  Zayd is the creator, executive producer and host of the “Mother Country Radicals” podcast which has just won an award for “Best Audio Storytelling in Non-Fiction” from the 2022 Tribeca Festival. To make the podcast, he had help from Jon Favreau, Sarah Geismer, Lyra Smith, Alison Falzetta, Misha Euceph, with sound design by Arwen Nicks, Stephanie Cohn, Ariana Gharib Lee, and Misha Euceph, and music by Andy Clausen.

• Counter Punch ☛ Can Workers Overseas Provide: Tips for U.S. Labor Organizers?

  What are some of the “best practices” abroad that might be reproducible in the U.S. to help strengthen workplace protections here? Two labor-oriented academics, Kim Scipes and Robert Ovetz, have recently published collections of case studies that answer that question in great detail. Their new books will be useful to both union organizers and campus-based observers of comparative labor movements.

  In Building Global Labor Solidarity (Lexington Books), Scipes brings together his own past writing on international labor struggles over the last four decades. A retired professor of sociology at Purdue, he is the author of several previous books, including KMU: Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines, 1980-1994 (New Day Publishers, 1996) and AFL-CIO’s Secret War Against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? (Lexington Books, 2010). Earlier this month in Philadelphia, he was involved in efforts to inform national AFL-CIO delegates about what’s wrong with their federation’s continuing dependence on U.S. government funding of its international operations.

• Counter Punch ☛ Champion of Justice Award to Hillary Clinton

  This did not sit well with reporters, academics and activists who have studied Secretary Clinton’s record.

  “Clinton has always been a war hawk,” said Aisha Jumaan, President of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Project. “During her tenure at the State Department, arms sales to Saudi Arabia increased by about 100%. These arms have been used against the Yemeni people since the Saudi started their aggression on Yemen in March 2015. In 2011, her aide congratulated her for pushing through arms sales to Saudi Arabia calling it a ‘Christmas gift.’”

• Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Fighting for Abortion Rights in Post-Roe America

• EFF ☛ EFF’s Statement on Dobb’s Abortion Ruling

  People should carefully review privacy settings on the services they use, turn off location services on apps that don’t need them, and use encrypted messaging services. Companies should protect users by allowing anonymous access, stopping behavioral tracking, strengthening data deletion policies, encrypting data in transit, enabling end-to-end message encryption by default, preventing location tracking, and ensuring that users get notice when their data is being sought. And state and federal policymakers must pass meaningful privacy legislation. All of these steps are needed to protect privacy, and all are long overdue.

  More resources are available at our reproductive rights issue page. 

• TruthOut ☛ 20 Black Congresswomen Urge Biden to Declare Abortion Rights Health Emergency

• Scheerpost ☛ Lights Out

  “Lights Out,” a new original cartoon by the inimitable Mr. Fish, suggest that the darkness of the SCOTUS decision to profoundly limit the rights of women is not – must not be – permanent.

• Scheerpost ☛ Michael Moore: EMERGENCY PODCAST SYSTEM: Millions Must Respond

  Abort. The. Court.

• Counter Punch ☛ Report from Capitol Hill: Still the Trump Era

  Two days ago, I spent hours in a Capitol Hill bar and restaurant doing jail support for three Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (RU4AR) activists arrested by Capitol Police outside the United States Supreme Court. I was a curious sight for US Congressmen and their obsequious staffs as I sat bedecked in green bandanas (see below), working my phone and taking notes from teeth-pulling conversations with jail officers while I downed one overpriced IPA draft after another. Unlike everyone else in the establishment, I wasn’t wearing a medium-priced suit.

  I was struck by how differently humans fall out. Earlier that morning I had beheld glorious and self-sacrificing popular solidarity as RU4AR and other abortions rights cadres made powerful, moving statements against the coming likely Supreme Court decision to re-impose the female bondage that is forced motherhood. I had made a statement myself, as I would the next day.

• Common Dreams ☛ Sanders Says End Filibuster to Combat ‘Outrageous’ Supreme Court Assault on Abortion Rights

  Sen. Bernie Sanders said Friday that the U.S. Senate must swiftly respond to the right-wing Supreme Court’s “outrageous and reactionary” decision to overturn Roe v. Wade by eliminating the legislative filibuster and codifying abortion rights into federal law.

  “Six Supreme Court justices, including some who in their nomination hearings called the case ‘important precedent,’ today did exactly what the American people did not want and overturned Roe v. Wade,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement. “This decision cannot be allowed to stand.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Progressives Rebuke Dem Leadership as Clyburn Dismisses Death of Roe as ‘Anticlimactic’

  Progressives on Friday rebuked Democratic Party leadership for showing a lack of urgency over the end of abortion rights in the country, a failure epitomized by U.S. House Majority Whip James Clyburn who dismissed the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic reversal of Roe v. Wade as an “anticlimactic” development.

  Even abortion rights supporter took immediately to the streets in anger and protest, the powerful South Carolina Democrat told USA Today reporter Dylan Wells that “we all expected this” and said he was considering “the extent to which we can move legislatively to respond to it.”

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘We WILL Fight Back’: Outrage, Resolve as Protests Erupt Against SCOTUS Abortion Ruling

  Large crowds of people took to the streets of cities and towns across the United States Friday evening to protest the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and to vow to fight for reproductive rights.

  In San Francisco, hundreds of youth-led protesters shouting slogans including “We won’t go back!” and “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries” rallied in Civic Center Plaza, while hundreds marched and staged a sit-in on Market Street.

• Common Dreams ☛ 80+ US Prosecutors Vow Not to Be Part of Criminalizing Abortion Care

  Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade, which had an immediate impact on pregnant people in Republican-controlled states with “trigger bans,” more than 80 elected attorneys from around the country vowed not to prosecute individuals who seek, assist in, or provide abortion care.

  “Criminalizing and prosecuting individuals who seek or provide abortion care makes a mockery of justice,” says a joint statement signed by 84 district attorneys and attorneys general. “Prosecutors should not be part of that.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Patients in Trigger-Ban States Immediately Denied Abortion Care in Post-Roe US

  The effects of Friday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade were felt almost instantaneously when patients who were scheduled to receive abortions from clinics in trigger-ban states were turned away within minutes of the 6-3 ruling.

  More than half of all U.S. states are now poised to end or drastically restrict legal access to abortions. In the 13 states with “trigger bans” that were designed to take effect as soon as the high court’s right-wing majority struck down Roe, abortion will be outlawed within 30 days, though in some cases patients were immediately denied care.

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘Tip of the Iceberg’: Thomas Says Court Should Reconsider Marriage Equality, Right to Contraception

  U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made clear in his concurring opinion regarding the overturning of Roe v. Wade that the high court has no intention of stopping its rollback of Americans’ rights, naming cases that centered on marriage equality and the right to obtain contraception as previous rulings that should be revisited.

  “This Supreme Court is out of touch with the American people and increasingly suffers a legitimacy crisis.”

• TruthOut ☛ Thousands Rise Up to Protest Far Right Supreme Court Justices’ Overturn of “Roe”

• TruthOut ☛ Now Is the Time to “Aid and Abet” Abortion

• The Nation ☛ With Dobbs, Women Are No Longer Full Citizens. We Must Fight Back

  For decades, Americans have pussyfooted around what’s at stake in the abortion debate: women’s status as full citizens, able to represent themselves. But the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization enables frank speech and can transform the “debate” into positive action, starting with the election of a Congress this November that will fulfill the people’s will and codify Roe.

• The Nation ☛ The Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade

• Scheerpost ☛ The Late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Critiqued Roe v. Wade at Chicago Law School Visit

  Ginsburg would’ve preferred that abortion rights be secured more gradually, in a process that included state legislatures and the courts, she added. Ginsburg also was troubled that the focus on Roe was on a right to privacy, rather than women’s rights.

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘We Won’t Go Back!’: Rapid-Response Protests Across US After Roe Reversal

  People and advocacy groups across the nation rushed to voice outrage and organize rapid-response demonstrations Friday after the U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority voided half a century of reproductive rights by reversing the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.

  “The SCOTUS decision is class warfare—time to hit the streets!”

• Common Dreams ☛ ‘A Dark Day for Our Nation’: Right-Wing Supreme Court Ends Constitutional Right to Abortion

  The right-wing majority of the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade on Friday, ending the constitutional right to abortion and imperiling access to reproductive healthcare nationwide.

  “A right-wing Supreme Court has stripped women and people seeking abortions of their long-held rights to control their bodies.”

• Common Dreams ☛ Pressley Leads Call for Biden to Declare Public Health Emergency as Roe Ruling Looms

  As the country braces for the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in a case challenging Roe v. Wade, a coalition of Black congresswomen led by Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Barbara Lee, and Cori Bush implored President Joe Biden on Friday to declare a public health emergency to shield abortion rights nationwide.

  “We urge you to use any and all executive authorities to address the public health crisis our nation will face if Roe v. Wade is dismantled.”

• The Nation ☛ The Supreme Court Took the Most Extreme Course Possible

  The Supreme Court has issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. It has said unequivocally, by a vote of 6-3, that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion,” and that Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey are “overruled.”

• Common Dreams ☛ In 10 Key US Senate Races, Here’s How Top Candidates Responded to Roe Ruling

  With the fate of reproductive rights for tens of millions of Americans now dependent upon federal and state lawmakers in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, Common Dreams takes a look at how Democratic and Republican candidates in 10 key U.S. Senate races responded to Friday’s ruling.

  “The court just took away a woman’s most fundamental freedom… for the first time in our country’s history, our daughters will grow up with fewer rights than their mothers had.”

• Counter Punch ☛ How a Supreme Court Ruling Impacts the Tohono O’odham Nation

  On June 8, the U.S. Supreme Court again validated this “exemption” and strengthened it. In Egbert v. Boule the court ruled to protect federal agents, particularly Border Patrol agents, from civil rights lawsuits (by making it much more difficult to do so). Central to the case was a Fourth Amendment claim. U.S. Border Patrol agent Erik Egbert entered innkeeper Robert Boule’s property in Blaine, Washington, without a warrant to check the immigration status of some recently arrived guests. When Boule protested Egbert’s presence, Egbert threw him against a vehicle and then to the ground. In its ruling in favor of Egbert, the Supreme Court wrote that “regulating the conduct of agents at the border has national security implications,” and that there would be a “risk in undermining border security.”

  As SCOTUSblog contributing writer Howard Wasserman told NPR, “Considerations of national security and foreign affairs that are endemic to immigration enforcement and immigration issues are always going to make it improper for a damages action to go forward.” As has been the case since 9/11, the broad yet ill-defined notion of national security trumps all else.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Techdirt ☛ Much Like Cord Cutting Itself, Big Media Execs Think TikTok Is A Fad That Will Just Fade Away

  For more than a decade, cable and broadcast executives brushed aside the threat of cable TV “cord cutting” (ditching traditional cable TV) as either a nonexistent threat or a temporary phenomenon. There were endless reports about how these users were poor and unimportant (they weren’t), or how the phenomenon would end once Millennials bought homes and starting procreating (it didn’t).

Monopolies

• Counter Punch ☛ To Prevent Formula Shortages, Break Up Monopolies

  There’s nothing more important to a parent than providing for their child. As a mother who was unable to breastfeed, I relied on formula. I remember once making a long drive to another town when my local store was out of the brand my child was used to.

  It was a stressful experience — and mild compared to what millions of parents are feeling right now as they face store shelves emptied of formula.

• Copyrights

  • Techdirt ☛ Bungie Unmasks One Of The ‘Does’ It Sued For Fraudulent YouTube Takedowns

    Back in March of this year, we discussed a somewhat odd story involving a bunch of DMCA takedowns for YouTube videos that included fan-content mixed with Destiny 2 music or footage. DMCA takedowns aren’t themselves strange, but in this case the makers of the game, Bungie Inc., publicly stated that it was aware of the takedowns but insisted it wasn’t them or their enforcement partner, CSC. Some of Bungie’s own official content had also been hit with claims, bolstering its defense somewhat, though it certainly isn’t unheard of for official content to accidentally get DMCA’d. Further solidifying that this wasn’t actually Bungie or CSC, however, occurred when Bungie went ahead and filed a lawsuit against 10 John Does over all of this.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Takedown Notice Wipes Game Boy Advance Emulator From GitHub

    A popular browser-based Game Boy Advance emulator with nearly 100 working games was removed from GitHub this week. The takedown request was sent by the ESA, which acts on behalf of Nintendo and other game companies. The problem hasn’t been sorted out completely, however, as nostalgic games can easily find alternatives, even on GitHub.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Digital Trails: How Bungie Identified a Mass Sender of Fake DMCA Notices

    In response to persons unknown sending large numbers of fake DMCA notices to YouTube while impersonating its anti-piracy partner, Bungie filed a lawsuit in the US seeking millions in damages. At the time the name of the ‘Doe’ defendant was unknown. This is how a Bungie investigation followed digital breadcrumbs to track down and identify that person by name and physical address.

GNU/Linux

• Instructionals/Technical

  • LinuxOpSys ☛ Fallocate Command in Linux with 5 Examples

    When you create a new file on your Linux computer, a certain amount of disk space is allocated to the file. Adding new content to this file increases the file size and accordingly, Linux allocates more space to the file. Alternatively, you can use the fallocate command in Linux to preallocate data blocks, which involves allocating the data blocks and marking these data blocks as uninitialized.

  • Linux: ZIP Files and Directories (How To Tutorial) – Linux Stans

    In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to zip files and directories/folders on Linux. This tutorial will work on most major distros, like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, etc.

    ZIP is a utility used to compress/archive files and directories on Linux. It’s available for most major distros.

    This tutorial is for the CLI/terminal. All you need is access to the command line and the root/sudo user.

    If you want to zip/compress something via the GUI (graphical user interface), then just right-click on the files or folders and click on Compress or Archive.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install MySQL Community on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable

    MySQL is a relational database management system based on SQL (Structured Query Language). It is one of the most widely used database software for several well-known applications. MySQL is used for data warehousing, e-commerce, and logging applications, but its most used feature is a web database storage and management.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install MySQL Community on Debian 11 Bullseye using the MySQL official APT repository, which will give you the latest version available on your system using the command line terminal.

  • H2S Media ☛ Install Rocket Chat server on Ubuntu 22.04 using Snap – Linux Shout

    Learn a simple command to install Rocket Chat Server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish using the command terminal.

    Rocket.Chat is an open-source platform for team collaboration and communication with live chat, video and audio conferences, file sharing, message translation, and more. With Rocket.Chat, users can use the native iOS apps and Android apps from any device with Internet access, including Windows, Mac, mobile devices, or tablet devices. People widely compare it with Slack and consider it one of the Best Alternatives of it.

    With the communication platform, employees in the company can chat, exchange files and meet in group chats. This saves mass e-mails to many addressees, as everyone can read along in the group chat and trace the communication. In addition, there is security through end-to-end encryption to keep communication confidential.

    In addition to pure text messages, video calls are also possible. Facebook, WhatsApp, SMS, and CRM can also be integrated into Rocket.Chat. From the Advanced package, the Rocket chat app even includes video conferencing and helpdesk chat. Users can go their business with the helpdesk chat for customer inquiries on their homepage with the help of omnichannel.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Sysdig on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable

    Sysdig is open source, system-level exploration: capture system state and activity from a running Linux-based system such as Debian 11, then save, filter, and analyze that is particularly useful for system analysis, inspection, and debugging, amongst other uses. Sysdig is scriptable in Lua and includes a command-line interface and a powerful interactive UI using the command csysdig that runs in your terminal.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install Sysdig on Debian 11 Bullseye using the command line terminal and basic commands for using Sysdig.

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Get a free copy of VirtuaVerse for the final part of the GOG Summer Sale

    Another free game for you to add to your collection. GOG are now giving away the sci-fi point and click adventure VirtuaVerse as part of their Summer Sale. This is the finale, so don’t expect any more to come through.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Dead Cells gets a huge free accessibility upgrade

    Dead Cells is a great game. Not only does it look great but the action is awesome. However, it is rather difficult and for some nearly impossible so the developers have put out a huge free upgrade to help more people play it.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Valve continues tweaking Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for Steam Deck

    Valve has released a fresh update to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and they continue focusing on Steam Input improvements, to make playing it with a controller and the Steam Deck a better experience.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Gorgeous turn-based tactics game Tyrant’s Blessing releases in August

    Following on from their successful Kickstarter campaign, Tyrant’s Blessing now has a release date and a brand new trailer and it’s looking rather good. Seems like a fun blending of styles from Final Fantasy Tactics and Into the Breach! It’s confirmed to be launching on August 8th with Native Linux support and there’s a demo available on Steam.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Grim Horde is chaotic and there’s a good game hiding in there

    Grim Horde is a game that released into Early Access with Native Linux support and it’s another fast-paced rogue-lite hell in a slightly similar way to the chaos found in Vampire Survivors only you control a horde of minions.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Into the Breach: Advanced Edition releases July 19th as a free update

    Subset Games have recently announced that they’re upgrading Into the Breach with a big free update in Into the Breach: Advanced Edition that releases on July 19th. Just like they did with their previous game FTL!

  • Its FOSS ☛ Linux Distros That Turn Your PC into Retro Gaming Console

    
    Steam Deck is making news for all the right reasons. It is a fantastic piece of tech, powered by a variant of Arch Linux (SteamOS 3.0) developed by Valve.

    While you can install any other operating system in it, it is best to have it as it is for convenience.

    Unfortunately, Steam Deck or anything similar is not available everywhere. So, what if you can convert your system to a Linux-powered retro gaming console using a distribution?

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Felipe Kinoshita: My week in KDE: Pomodoro and Lorem Ipsum

      This week I mainly worked on the pomodoro and lorem ipsum apps. I also fixed some bugs on general KDE stuff.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• New Releases

  • DebugPoint ☛ EndeavourOS Artemis Released with Better ARM Support and Updates

    The EndeavourOS team brings the June 22.06 release (“Artemis”) with much-better ARM support, the latest Kernel and more. We round up the release in this post.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • uni Toronto ☛ A mystery with Fedora 36, fontconfig, and xterm (and urxvt)

    As of Fedora 36, Fedora changed their default fonts from DejaVu to Noto. This changes what the standard names ‘serif’, ‘sans’, and especially ‘monospace’. When I upgraded my desktops to Fedora 36, I had a very bad reaction to the ‘monospace’ change, because the result looks really bad. It turns out that part of the reason that the result looks bad (although not all of it) is specific to xterm, and that is where the mystery comes in.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Linux Capable ☛ Download Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu – LinuxCapable

    Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) is now available on the download page as an alpha/beta release. In addition, there are other flavors, such as Kubuntu XFCE Netbook Edition, which features a KDE desktop environment instead of GNOME preinstalled on this version; however, if that’s not what suits your taste, then go ahead with the standard edition.

    The download links below allow you to try out different flavors of Ubuntu. The desktop environment installed in each flavor varies, but all are up-to-date with the latest software from this distribution’s stable release schedule and daily sync process!

• Devices/Embedded

  • CNX Software ☛ Bambu Lab X1 – A color 3D Printer with LIDAR and AI for improved accuracy, ease of use (Crowdfunding)

    
    3D printing can be time-consuming and challenging, and even today, it’s still not as easy as using a photocopier, but the team at Bambu Lab has taken it upon itself to make a better, easier-to-use 3D printer with the X1 color 3D printer combining LIDAR and AI technology to level the bed, calibrate the prints, and detect anomalies.

    The Bambu Lab X1 3D printer supports up to 16 colors, is making removing support easier with snap-away material or dissolvable filament, can handle PC and PA-CF filaments beyond the traditional PLA and PETG filaments, manage up to 500 mm/s prints, and provides better prints with features such as active vibration compensation. Oh, and you don’t need to assemble it, since it comes fully assembled and ready to use out of the box.

  • Red Hat ☛ Firmware updates, part 2: Transporting the update

    This is the second post in a series about doing device firmware updates (DFU) over the air (OTA) and continuous deployment of firmware for embedded devices. We’ll explore the different parts of a complete end-to-end system with this capability.

    This post will be about the different networks and how you can manage firmware updates using them.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android Central ☛ One UI 5 beta testing (Android 13) for the Galaxy S22 series could be on the horizon | Android Central

  • Android 12 for Nokia G20 available in more markets – Nokiapoweruser

  • A Quick Guide on How to Use Android’s Lookout App – Phandroid

  • How to move Android apps onto an SD card – Phandroid

  • CNET ☛ Turn Your Android Into a Wireless Mouse and More. Here’s How – CNET

  • How to add your COVID vaccination certification to Android – Phandroid

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Programming/Development

  • Geeks For Geeks ☛ Learn C++ Programming Step by Step – A 20 Day Curriculum!

    Although there are numerous programming languages available in the market to work upon, but C++ has never lost its charm since its inception and still has a strong impact in the development world. As per the reports, C++ comes under a few top programming languages across the world. Alike the C programming language, C++ also makes it easier for you to understand the underlying architecture of programming, although it also supports other additional features such as object-oriented programming, exception handling, etc. Moreover, various IT giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. offer numerous career opportunities to C++ professionals, hence you’re strongly recommended to give it a try and start to learn C++ Programming.

  • RIPE ☛ Security by Diversity: Designing Secure, Reliable and Robust Systems

    This is the first in a series of blog posts on Security by Diversity. Here we’ll focus on the scaling properties of reliability through diversity. Later blog posts will introduce the business and economic aspects of security through diversity and discuss not only technical security but also how to secure coordination and similar organisational aspects.

Leftovers

• Björn Wärmedal ☛ Human Made Internet Content Hidden in Plain Sight

  I think most of us have experienced how hard it is to find personal and human made content on the internet these days. Bot generated content runs galore and SEO weights search results in favour of enterprise pages.

  But some of us intentionally make some of our stuff a little harder to find. It’s a way to cater to specific interest groups, I guess. Or participating in smaller communities. Sometimes it’s about making a statement or just trying out something new.

  The irony of this introduction sounding like a corporate “best X of 2022″ blog is not lost on me. Maybe I meant it to, or maybe I’m damaged by the common pages I’m served on a daily basis. I don’t really know.

  Anyways! I dug a little bit (really not much, since these things are already within or adjacent to my social circles) to find semi hidden communities that most people probably haven’t heard of.

• Hardware

  • Computers Are Bad ☛ thermostats

    Let’s discuss the humble thermostat. You probably have one in your house, and it probably connects to a set of wires. If you’ve ever replaced your thermostat, you’ve probably found those wires a little irritating due to the lack of well standardized nomenclature for identifying them. This is particularly clear in the new generation of smart thermostats which attempt to be “consumer-friendly” to install, and thus must have sort of complex install wizards (InstallShield (R) for Thermostats) just to generate your hookup instructions. So what’s up with that?

    Well, let’s take a step back.

• Proprietary

  • New York Times ☛ App Rules Are Twisted to Absurdity

    Apple and Google have twisted their decade-old rules for their app stores like a pretzel to the point where they may no longer make sense. This has made buying digital stuff in apps convoluted as heck.

    One example: In theory, although not yet in reality, you can use your Amazon account to buy an e-book from Kindle’s iPhone app. You cannot buy an e-book in the Android version of the app. Until recently, Kindle purchases were effectively a no-go under Apple’s rules but fine under Google’s. Now it’s the opposite.

    Confusing? Yep. Apple and Google have written long, complicated guidelines for apps and have frequently revised those rules to protect their own interests. (I’ve noted before that Apple’s app rules are much longer than the United States Constitution.)

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ The world’s biggest surveillance company you’ve never heard of

      Established in 2001, Hikvision was perfectly placed to capitalize on the trend toward upgrading security in the aftermath of 9/11. It started by selling video capture cards that are used in surveillance systems, but it introduced its own video cameras in 2007. Today, it sells everything from software to hardware, usually at prices much cheaper than international competitors’.

      Its founding team consisted mostly of engineers at China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, a state-owned company that makes electronic products for both civilian and military uses. In 2008, Hikvision transferred 48% of its shares to CETC, making Hikvision officially a subsidiary of a state-owned firm.

    • YLE ☛ Identification in Finland may soon be digital

      The identification app will work for both in-person and online interactions.

      [...]

      The legislative proposals concerning both digital identity and personal identity codes are expected to reach Parliament this autumn.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Frontpage Magazine ☛ Iranians Increasingly Oppose the Theocratic Dictatorship

    Khastar’s statement came approximately 19 months after the first in an ongoing series of nationwide uprisings which revealed the depth of popular support for regime change in Tehran. At the end of 2017, a protest began in the city of Mashhad over the state of the Iranian economy, then began spreading rapidly while also taking on an increasingly political tone. By early January 2018, the movement encompassed well over 100 cities and towns, with each of them providing an outlet for unusually provocative slogans including “death to the dictator”. At the height of that uprising, Khamenei delivered a speech which acknowledged that the MEK had played a leading role in promoting those slogans and facilitating the constituent protests.

  • NPR ☛ Jan. 6 hearings use TV tricks to great effect even as critics call them show biz

    The headlines and stories that have emerged are clear-cut. “Trump knew plan was illegal,” The Washington Post told readers atop its paper after one hearing. “Jan. 6 committee leaders say Trump broke the law by trying to pressure Pence,” said NPR. “Trump, Told It Was Illegal, Still Pressured Pence to Overturn His Loss,” The New York Times reported.

    To achieve that, the hearings relied on subtle television news techniques and choices, rather than sensationalism. And they did so in two ways.

    The first involves how the material is shaped.

  • NPR ☛ ‘Just say it was corrupt’ and 3 other takeaways from Thursday’s Jan. 6 hearing

    Donoghue, who took contemporaneous notes on that conversation, and several others with the former president, emphasized that it was an “exact” quote. Trump made the remarks in the transition period between the 2020 presidential election he lost and the Jan. 6 insurrection.

• Environment

  • Energy

    • NPR ☛ Cryptocurrency tech is vulnerable to tampering, a DARPA analysis finds

      The report was commissioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the work was done by the software security research company Trail of Bits.

      Trail of Bits CEO Dan Guido says blockchain — the public ledgers that keep track of cryptocurrencies, which are replicated on computers around the world — isn’t the egalitarian tech its advocates claim.

  • Overpopulation

    • The Conversation ☛ Celibacy: its surprising evolutionary advantages – new research

      Surprisingly, we also found that men with a monk brother had more children than men with non-celibate brothers; and their wives tended to have children at an earlier age. Grandparents with a monk son also had more grandchildren, as their non-celibate sons faced less or no competition with their brothers. The practice of sending a son to the monastery, far from being costly to a parent, is therefore in line with a parent’s reproductive interests.

    • Overpopulation ☛ The Overpopulation Project

      In the old fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, people denied the emperor’s nakedness because they wanted to be seen as smart. Today people deny overpopulation because they want to be seen as moral. It is a form of virtue signaling: are you for justice and equity and families and being nice to refugees, or are you one of “The People Who Hate People”? Few look at the data to see whether their position actually favours those goals, or whether, indeed, they are having the opposite effect, obstructing progress toward a fairer, more peaceful and sustainable world. How did it come about that so many people became so passionately misinformed?

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • New York Times ☛ As Midterms Loom, Elections Are No Longer Top Priority for Meta C.E.O.

    Safeguarding elections is no longer Mr. Zuckerberg’s top concern, said four Meta employees with knowledge of the situation. Instead, he is focused on transforming his company into a provider of the immersive world of the metaverse, which he sees as the next frontier of growth, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly.

    The shift in emphasis at Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, could have far-reaching consequences as faith in the U.S. electoral system reaches a brittle point. The hearings on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot have underlined how precarious elections can be. And dozens of political candidates are running this November on the false premise that former President Donald J. Trump was robbed of the 2020 election, with social media platforms continuing to be a key way to reach American voters.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • NTC orders block to access of websites of CPP-NPA, alternative media, progressive groups

    The National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) has ordered internet service providers to immediately block access to websites linked to the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army-National Democratic Front (CPP-NPA-NDF) and its alleged affiliates following the request of National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon.

    Esperon’s request, dated June 6 and publicized on Wednesday, sought to prohibit access to websites that are directly linked to the CPP-NPA-NDF. These are the National Democratic Front of the Philippines site, the official publication of NDF; and the website of CPP founder Jose Maria Sison, who is a designated terrorist under Anti-Terrorism Council Resolution No. 17 issued in 2021.

  • Nasdaq ☛ Festival screening of two films axed under Hong Kong censorship law

    Hong Kong passed a censorship law last year to bar films that “endorse, support, glorify, encourage and incite activities that might endanger national security”.

    The censorship law followed a national security law that Beijing imposed on the former British colony in 2020 that sets out punishment for anything deemed subversion, secession, colluding with foreign forces and terrorism, ending pro-democracy protests that rocked the city for months.

  • Static Media ☛ Why These Sci-Fi Movies Are Banned Around The World

    Since the dissolution of the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, in the late 1960s, film censorship has been relatively uncommon in the United States. However, several other countries still actively ban films. Though science fiction is less of a target than other genres, there are still many notable examples of sci-fi films that ran afoul of censors, and behind each case lies a deeper story. Ironically, these bans end up revealing more about the perpetrators and their politics than any sci-fi film ever could. Aliens may be wacky, but they aren’t as real as the skeletons in your closet.

  • SCMP ☛ Indonesian bar faces blasphemy heat after free drinks for Muhammad promo backfires

    In a now-deleted post, the Holywings bar offered a free bottle of gin for men named Muhammad and women named Maria every Thursday if they showed their ID cards

  • Coconuts ☛ This free drinks for Muhammad promo didn’t go down well in Indonesia

    The group also plans to file a formal blasphemy complaint against Holywings with the Jakarta Metro Police. Under Indonesian law, religious blasphemy is punishable by up to five years in prison.

  • Malay Mail ☛ Indonesia nightlife chain Holywings accused of blasphemy after using ‘Muhammad’ in marketing campaign

    In the now-deleted post, Holywings promised a bottle of Gordon’s dry gin for men named Muhammad while women who are named Maria would get a bottle of Gordon’s Pink Gin every Thursday, reported Coconuts Jakarta.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Taliban’s unending crackdown on Afghan female journalists

    According to a joint survey conducted by media watchdog, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), and the Afghan Independent Journalists Association in December 2021, 84 percent of women journalists and media workers had lost their jobs since August 2021. Another survey carried out by the Afghan National Journalists’ Union in March 2022, found that 79 percent of Afghan women journalists claimed to be insulted and threatened under the Taliban rule, which includes physical and verbal threats by the Taliban representatives. Afghan female broadcasters have also reported being “blacklisted” by the Taliban officials.

  • HRW ☛ Afghanistan’s Taliban Crack Down on Vloggers

    On June 7, Afghan vlogger Ajmal Haqiqi – well known for his YouTube channel and modeling shows – appeared in a very different kind of broadcast. Taliban officials arrested Haqiqi and his three colleagues and released a video showing the men, with bruised faces and clearly under duress, apologizing for encouraging “prostitution” and “insulting verses of the Quran.”

    On May 28, the four had posted a YouTube video in which they recited Quranic verses in Arabic in a comical tone. Within a week, the Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) had detained them.

  • RFERL ☛ Belarusian Philosopher Handed Five-Year Prison Term As Journalist, Blogger Go On Trial

    Well-known Belarusian philosopher Uladzimer Matskevich has been sentenced to five years in prison over his active participation in public events questioning the official results of the August 2020 presidential poll that handed victory to authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka.

    The Minsk regional court sentenced Matskevich on June 23 after finding him guilty of participating in unsanctioned events that disrupt social order, creating an extremist group, and insulting Lukashenka online.

    Matskevich was arrested in August last year.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Ukrainian photojournalist ‘executed in cold blood’ by Russians, group says

    The press freedom group, known by its initials in French as RSF, sent two investigators to Ukraine to gather evidence about Levin’s death on the northern outskirts of Kyiv.

    The probe, including at the site of Levin’s charred car, indicated the two men “were executed in cold blood by Russian forces, probably after being interrogated and tortured,” RSF said Wednesday, citing photos, testimonies, bullets it collected from the site and other information it gathered.

  • RFERL ☛ HRW Demands Immediate Release Of Two Tajik Bloggers

    In a statement on June 22, HRW said that Abdullo Ghurbati and Daleri Imomali, who were detained on June 15 and sent to pretrial detention for two months three days later, “are being targeted for their professional activities, despite being protected by Tajikistan’s laws and international obligations on freedom of expression and media freedom.”

    “Criticizing state institutions is not a crime, and the bloggers should be released immediately and all charges against them dropped,” HRW’s Central Asia researcher, Syinat Sultanalieva, said in the statement.

  • Don’t Extradite Assange ☛ Free Assange Open Top Bus Tour Protest

    When: Friday, July 1, 2022 at 11am BST (arrive 15minutes early if you want to secure a seat on the bus).Where: Home Office, 2 Marsham St, London SW1P 4DFRegister https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/free-assange-open-top-bus-tour-rally-tickets-373210561837

  • Counter Punch ☛ Merrick Garland: Drop the Charges Against Julian Assange

    The unmistakable fact is that Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is still actively pursuing the extradition of Julian Assange, in order for him to face charges under the Espionage Act and spend the rest of his life in prison. This is the same Espionage Act that the Nixon administration considered using against Daniel Ellsberg, for leaking what became known as the Pentagon Papers, which were published in the New York Times and elsewhere.

    Unlike Ellsberg, Assange did not himself steal, hack, or otherwise make off with secret documents that exposed US war crimes. He only facilitated the leaking of these documents, and the eventual publication of redacted parts of them by Wikileaks, the New York Times, and most of the rest of the world’s media. But unlike with Ellsberg, the government is going ahead with prosecuting someone — a journalist and editor named Julian Assange — under the Espionage Act.

  • The Nation ☛ America’s Lapdog Britain Moves to Extradite Julian Assange

    Ellsberg, like Assange, was put on trial for spying. Ellsberg, like Assange faced a lifetime in prison, only for the charges to be dismissed because of government misconduct against him.

    He told the London Court that he felt an immense fellow feeling with the Wikileaks founder.

    In an important statement, Ellsberg—the doyen of whistleblowers—explained that while he was serving in Vietnam, detailed knowledge of US war crimes remained confined to a tiny circle.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Roaming Charges: the Anal Stage of Constitutional Analysis

    + PEN America on Julian Assange’s extradition: “The Biden Administration must return to its stated principles and drop these charges, in the interest of press freedom and the United States’ global standing with respect to human rights.”

    + The key thing in American politics is to be the first to wrongly interpret a result (ie., the recent elections were a clear rebuke to criminal justice reformers) and to loudly stick with your take long after it has been disproven.

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Assange Animus and the Spy Trial Ahead

    The second example is after Wikileaks was mysteriously gifted the CIA’s full set of hacking tools known as Vault 7, which they proceeded to publish. Fowler speaks with CIA management regarding and writes, “The documents provided an insight into the CIA’s operations, according to security analysts, but they did not give away the organisation’s key capabilities.” Nevertheless, the Agency over-reacted, although Fowler doesn’t call them on it. He continues: [...]

  • Free Assange? Yes, But That’s Not Nearly Enough.

    While Assange obviously has more skin in the game than anyone else in this particular case, he’s not the real target. The real target is the next journalist who catches the US government acting illegally. The goal is to make that journalist think twice before telling you about it.

    For that reason, stopping the extradition of Julian Assange isn’t enough. Nor should we settle for an acquittal in court or a presidential pardon.

    Crimes have been committed, and examples DO need to made of the criminals who committed them.

  • A problematic figure

    The 91,000 documents on Afghanistan, covering 2004-2009, were leaked in July 2010 and published in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, which argued that the global public had a right to know what was happening. The Times wrote that the leak “offers an unvarnished and grim picture of the Afghan war.” The Guardian called the material “a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared, and NATO commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.” Der Spiegel wrote that the recipients of the leak were “unanimous in their belief that there is a justified public interest in the material.”

    The Iraq war logs consisting of nearly 400,000 documents and covered the same period. They were leaked in October 2010 to the same three newspapers plus al-Jazeera, Le Monde, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and the Iraq Body Count website. These documents revealed that the US war had caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths, human rights abuses, arrests and disappearances. One video showed a US helicopter gunship firing on insurgents seeking to surrender while another pictured two Apache helicopters shooting down 10 men, including two Reuters journalists, in a small square in Baghdad. The torture and beatings administered to detainees at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad (which I visited in 2004) were investigated only after after being revealed by WikiLeaks.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Arab News ☛ Girls arrested for removing hijab at Iran skateboarding event: media

    A number of girls “removed their hijab at the end of the sports event without observing the religious considerations and legal norms,” state news agency IRNA quoted Shiraz police chief Faraj Shojaee as saying.

    “With the coordination of the judiciary, a number of perpetrators and people related to this gathering were identified and arrested on Thursday,” he said.

  • Medforth ☛ Germany’s top lifeguard advises against visits to open-air swimming pools because of violence committed by migrants

    After the shocking brawl in an open-air swimming pool in Berlin last weekend, the President of the Association of Lifeguards, Peter Harzheim, has now commented in the newspaper “Bildzeitung” on the transformation of our open-air swimming pools into no-go areas.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | End of Roe Will Have Far-Reaching Consequences

    After half a century, Americans’ constitutional right to get an abortion has been overturned by the Supreme Court.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Republicans Won’t Stop at Roe

    Bans on abortion, birth control, and same-sex marriage are at stake in November’s elections.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • RIPE ☛ Content vs Carriage – Who Pays?

    At the same time, a number of European carriage providers appear to be adopting the Korean line of argument and putting pressure on the policy makers for measures to force content streamers to pay to have their content streamed to users. Their argument appears to be that these content streaming models have placed undue pressure on the carrier’s infrastructure investment models and the carrier is left with the incremental costs of infrastructure upgrades while the content provider is reaping the commercial benefit.

    These representations relating to the of big tech enterprises appear to have struck a sympathetic chord at the European Commission (EC), and in May, the EC’s Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, noted a need to consider the broader issue of a ‘fair contribution to telecommunications networks’. A study released by the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) at the time noted that the ‘big 5’ (Alphabet, Facebook, Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft) collectively accounted for more than 56% of all Over the TOP (OTT) network traffic and are implying that they have not contributed their ‘fair share’ of the costs of infrastructure to handle that volume of traffic.

• Monopolies

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Report: EU plans to investigate Broadcom’s proposed acquisition of VMware

    The European Union is preparing to launch an antitrust investigation into Broadcom Inc.’s proposed $61 billion acquisition of VMware Inc., the Financial Times reported today.

    Broadcom is a major chipmaker that supplies processors used in data center switches, Apple Inc.’s iPhone lineup and many other devices. The company has over the past few years also established a presence in the enterprise software market. To accelerate its enterprise software strategy, Broadcom last month inked a deal to buy VMware for $61 billion.

GNU/Linux

• The case of the collapsing calendar

  Recently I quit my job to become ‘retired’. This leads to a lot of changes, some more predictable than others. The lock down period and working from home during the last two years already brought some changes, like not having to commute every day and being able to have lunch with my wife.

• Kernel Space

  • Foundries.io looks to $1bn IPO – eeNews Europe

    The Cambridge-based company provides an embedded Linux distribution with a security and update framework for devices that connect to the Internet of Things. For example its Foundries Factory software is used in an electric scooter in Germany to run both the IVI in-vehicle infotainment system and the motor controller.

  • Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) ☛ Linux Plumbers Conference: Microconferences at Linux Plumbers Conference: Open Printing

    Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 is pleased to host the Open Printing Microconference

    OpenPrinting has been improving the way we print in Linux. Over the years we have changed many conventional ways of printing and scanning. Over the last few years we have been emphasizing on the fact that driverless print and scan has made life easier however this does not make us stop improving. Every day we are trying to design new ways of printing to make your printing and scanning experience better than that of today.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install AngularJS on AlmaLinux 9 – LinuxCapable

    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. It 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 AlmaLinux 9 using the command line terminal using the NodeSource repositories as the source for NodeJS and NPM.

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

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nextcloud on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, NextCloud is a free open-source self-hosted cloud storage solution. It is very similar to other cloud storage solutions like Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, etc. NextCloud also returns the control and security of your sensitive data back to you, thus eliminating the use of a third-party cloud hosting service.

    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 Nextcloud 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.

  • Techtown ☛ How to install Slim PDF Reader on Ubuntu / Linux Mint? – Techtown

    Slim PDF is a PDF reader application that stands out for being quite lightweight, making it ideal for computers that are a bit tight on hardware.

    It has a free version that you can use for your daily use, but without as many capabilities as you will have if you decide to pay for it.

    With an active development, Slim PDF Reader has incorporated a series of renewed features that increase its potential.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Git on Rocky Linux 8 – LinuxCapable

    GIT is a free and open-source version control system that can efficiently manage small projects or huge ones. It enables multiple developers to work together on nonlinear development, as it tracks changes in source code for each branch of our project’s history. Hence, we never lose anything by going back through old stages if something goes wrong!

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest or upgrade GIT on Rocky Linux 8 using the command line terminal and basic commands and tips.

  • Trend Oceans ☛ How to Install and Use dig and nslookup Commands in Linux

    
    The dig and nslookup are network administration command-line tools. They are both helpful for network troubleshooting and gathering information related to Domain Name Server (DNS).

    The “Domain Information Groper” (dig) command is an essential tool for gathering information or interrogating the DNS name servers to troubleshoot DNS issues.

    The “Name Server Lookup” (nslookup) command is a network administration command-line tool for querying and obtaining crucial mapping information between a domain name and an IP address.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Install Fall Guys on Linux With Multiplayer Support

    Fall Guys is an online multiplayer game featuring an obstacle course-style battle royale concept. The lack of support for Easy Anti-Cheat has always been a huge roadblock for successful multiplayer gaming on Linux. But with Easy Anti-Cheat now compatible with Linux, gamers can now play their favorite multiplayer games online, including Fall Guys, with other players on the internet.

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Google Web Designer on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install Google Web Designer 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.

  • Make Kali Linux look less suspicious by making the desktop look more like a windows machine

  • Spawn a retro style terminal emulator.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Nate Graham ☛ This week in KDE: a mad bugfixing spree – Adventures in Linux and KDE

      Plasma 5.25’s first bugfix release came out a few days ago, and the next one is due early next week. Hopefully most of the bugs you folks found will have been fixed! And among those are few 15-minute bugs too.

      Occasionally people ask, “Jeez, it feels like you guys are fixing bugs all the time… shouldn’t they all be fixed by now? Why is your software so buggy?” Thing is, that’s the nature of software. There are always more bugs to fix, no matter how long you work at it. And the more people who use it, the more bugs they’ll find. This is universal, for every piece of software. The best metric is not really “number of bugs fixed,” but rather “egregiousness of bugs fixed.” You want to see that the bugs we fix get weirder and more esoteric over time, which indicates that the basics are becoming more reliable. We’re not all the way there yet, but I believe we are making progress!

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Builder GTK 4 Porting, Part VII – Happenings in GNOME

      It’s been another couple weeks of porting, along with various distractions.

      The big work this time around has been deep surgery to Builder’s “Foundry”. This is the sub-system that is responsible for build-systems, pipelines, external-devices, SDKs, toolchains, deployments-strategies and more. The sub-system was starting to show it’s age as it was one of the first bits of Builder to organically emerge.

      One of the things that become so difficult over the years is dealing with all the container layers we have to poke holes through. Running a command is never just running a command. We have to setup PTYs (and make sure the TTY setup ioctl()s happen in the right place), pass environment variables (but to only the right descendant process), and generally a lot more headaches.

      What kicked off this work was my desire to remove a bunch of poorly abstracted bits and we’re almost there. What has helped considerably is creating a couple new objects to help manage the process.

      The first is an IdeRunContext. It is sort of like a GSubprocessLauncher but allows you to create layers. At the end you can convert those layers into a subprocess launcher but only after each layer is allowed to rewrite the state as you pop back to the root. In practice this has been working quite well. I finally have control without crazy amounts of argument rewriting and guesswork.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Reviews

  • 9to5Linux ☛ First Look at EndeavourOS ARM on the Raspberry Pi 4

    
    The EndeavourOS team started working on their ARM port for the distribution about two years ago. Until now, installing EndeavourOS on ARM devices required you to write the latest EndeavourOS ISO image on a microSD card, download the EndeavourOS ARM installation script, and then run the text-based installer that had several stages.

    The previous ARM installer script, which is still available for unsupported devices, was for advanced users, but now anyone can try EndeavourOS on a supported ARM device (Odroid N2/N2+ and Raspberry Pi at the moment of writing this article) thanks to the new ARM installer.

• New Releases

  • 9to5Linux ☛ EndeavourOS Artemis Launches with ARM Installer, Linux 5.18, and Latest Calamares

    EndeavourOS Artemis is here about two and a half months after EndeavourOS Apollo to bring you an up-to-date installation medium that contains all the latest and greatest GNU/Linux technologies, starting with the Linux 5.18 kernel series and Mesa 22.1 graphics stack, and continuing with the latest Calamares (3.2.60) graphical installer.

  • Artemis is launched

    We are proud to present you the Artemis release, named after the upcoming NASA mission to the moon and I do refer to that mission for a reason but more on that later.

    Artemis is our regular ISO refresh release, so users who already are running EndeavourOS don’t have to install this release, you already are up-to-date.

    Besides the regular updates and improvements on the ISO and the installation process is this release the first ISO that brings EndeavourOS ARM closer to the main release.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • XPath for libvirt external snapshop path | Adam Young’s Web Log

    The following xmllint XPath query will pull out the name of the backing file for a VM named fedora-server-36 and an external snapshot named fedora-36-post-install,

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Expanding U.S. healthcare travel benefits for access several healthcare services

    Red Hatters should be able to access quality healthcare no matter where they live. We’re working with our U.S. benefits provider to reimburse associates and their dependents covered by a Red Hat medical plan for travel to access several healthcare services that may not be available everywhere.

    Effective July 1, 2022, our U.S. benefits provider will cover up to $10,000 maximum (lifetime) in travel expenses for an associate and a companion if they must travel greater than 60 miles from their home to access in-network care.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• FSF

  • FSF ☛ Flock over to Mastodon on July 8 for an interactive session — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software

    As you probably know, the FSF is on Twitter (with caveats), Mastodon, and GNU Social. We simultaneously post to all three microblogs. You can read all the details about this at https://fsf.org/twitter, which has been updated recently to include more information about centralization, decentralization, and microblogging exclusively with free software.

  • FSF ☛ Mastodon Hour on Mastodon: Friday, July 8 starting at 16:00pm EDT (20:00 UTC)

    Join the FSF for discussions around “Helping others find their reason to support free software” and “on the freedom ladder” Friday, July 8, from 16:00 to 17:00pm EDT (20:00 to 21:00 UTC).

  • FSF ☛ FSD meeting recap 2022-06-24

    Check out the great work our volunteers accomplished at today’s Free Software Directory.

    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 28, 2022 meeting, where we saw a couple of new programs added and several entries updated.

• Programming/Development

  • Guile foldr example

    I just wanted to try out my understanding of foldr in Scheme.

    The test is to take a list of ints and return another list of ints. The resultant should contain only even integers, and they should be duplicated in the output.

  • finding binary differences « codeblog

    As part of the continuing work to replace 1-element arrays in the Linux kernel, it’s very handy to show that a source change has had no executable code difference.

  • Linux Links ☛ 5 Top Free and Open Source Erlang Web Frameworks

    One of the types of software that’s important for a web developer is the web framework. A framework “is a code library that makes a developer’s life easier when building reliable, scalable, and maintainable web applications” by providing reusable code or extensions for common operations. By saving development time, developers can concentrate on application logic rather than mundane elements.

    A web framework offers the developer a choice about how to solve a specific problem. By using a framework, a developer lets the framework control portions of their application. While it’s perfectly possible to code a web application without using a framework, it’s more practical to use one.

    Erlang is a general-purpose, concurrent, declarative, functional programming language and runtime environment developed by Ericsson, a Swedish multinational provider of communications technology and services. Erlang is dynamically typed and has a pattern matching syntax. The language solves difficult problems inherent in parallel, concurrent environments. It uses sets of parallel supervised processes, not a single sequential process as found in most programming languages.

    Let’s explore the 5 Erlang web frameworks. For each program we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources.

Leftovers

• Tedium ☛ In Defense of “One Week”: A BNL Take That’s Not for Haters

  As many of our regular readers are probably aware, both Ernie and I are massive fans of Canadian folk rock band, Barenaked Ladies. Throughout my youth, teenage years, and early adulthood, their music provided a significant part of the soundtrack of my life. I loved everything the band released and held them in high esteem alongside the likes of “Weird Al” Yankovic and They Might Be Giants. The first BNL song I ever heard was “The Old Apartment,” which I found on one of those CD samplers of relatively new/not yet known records (it also contained “Peaches” by PUSA and “Quiche Lorraine” by the B-52s; I don’t remember where I acquired it). A recent article in Stereogum, part of writer Tom Breihan’s exhaustive look back at every number-one song in Billboard history, took an unbelievably harsh approach, a level of hatred rarely seen outside the Nickelback commentary genre. The takedown, to be blunt, tackled me, and I still have the rugburns on both my knees. As a result, we felt like the time for rebuttal from actual BNL fans was in order. So put on your favorite BNL record (editor’s note: this one is a good choice) and get ready for a blast from the past as we talk about the late ’90s radio hit, “One Week.”

• Security

  • Hacker News ☛ Hackers Exploit Mitel VoIP Zero-Day in Likely Ransomware Attack

    The disclosure arrives less than two weeks after German penetration testing firm SySS revealed two flaws in Mitel 6800/6900 desk phones (CVE-2022-29854 and CVE-2022-29855) that, if successfully exploited, could have allowed an attacker to gain root privileges on the devices.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • AccessNow ☛ The end of Roe v. Wade — Privacy again under attack in U.S. – Access Now

      Today, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed federal constitutional protection of abortion rights in the United States. Access Now condemns the Court’s decision, which has catastrophic implications for human rights in the digital age.

      “With the end of Roe, surveillance capitalists are in a position to weaponize our decision to access reproductive healthcare,” said Jennifer Brody, U.S. Policy and Advocacy Manager at Access Now. “What we search online and where we go can be used to strip our right to autonomy over our body, expression, and life. As surveillance technologies — from smart watches to virtual assistants — continue to proliferate and monitor our every move, our health and humanity are at risk of irreparable damage.”

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Internet Freedom Foundation ☛ SnTHosting urges MeitY to withdraw CERT-In directions

    On April 28, 2022, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) issued Directions under Section 70B of the Information Technology Act, 2000 regarding preventing, responding and reporting cyber incidents. These Directions will become effective on June 27, 2022. SnTHosting, a VPN service provider, has addressed legal representation to MeitY seeking recall of the Directions as they compel a range of entities, including SnTHostings, to surveil their users and collect their personal data, and mandate them to make such data available to CERT-In on demand. IFF has provided legal support in drafting the representation.