Posted in America, Europe, Law, Patents at 9:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Is it still for science and innovation? Or are scientists being coopted for someone’s monopolistic business reasons?
It’s All Mein!
Summary: Patent systems are being hijacked by monopolists and plutocrats for their financial gain and protectionism; it’s a longstanding issue because it begets constitutional violations (glossed over by bought or installed “Justices”, which is another creeping threat, especially in light of recent developments in the US Supreme Court and patently, manifestly illegal actions by Team UPC)
WHO or what is patent law actually for in this century?
2 days ago the FFII’s president recalled this old page that says:
Patent (n.) A medieval economic tool by which politicians attempt to stimulate trade and wealth by banning innovation and competition in crucial areas of technology.
It is easy, but incorrect, to confuse patents with other remnants of medieval thinking such as bloodletting, witch burning, and the use of garlic to ward off infectious diseases. Patents in fact have two main functions. First, they protect inefficient and uncompetitive businesses from the ravages of the free market; second they provide an elegant model for tax avoidance, since royalties on patents are exempt of tax, or very lowly taxed, in most countries.
Techrights wrote nearly 5,000 posts about patents in Europe, but a similar number of posts concerned patents in the US (we had been covering the US affairs in earlier years). We’ve long shown Americans shaping EPO rules or deviations from the EPC for personal and corporate gain. Some weeks ago we showed how António Campinos goes to their lobbyists' events whilst openly boasting they can work around the law. He’s not shy to promote illegal software patents because he’s staying in power irrespective of his behaviour.
Today’s post concerns input from a reader, who knows the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from personal experience. It’s not about 35 U.S.C. § 101 (or Alice at SCOTUS) but about broader questions.
“Decided to punish myself and look through the USPTO report,” our reader said, “and was surprised to find that, on page 28, they address the issue of costs, but, of course, not the fees they charge, which pays for these ridiculous reports they specialize in. The 2020 annual report for the USPTO was 244 pages long, while the 2020 annual report for Apple – maybe the largest corporation in the world – was 71 pages long.”
“I’m sure they don’t read, much less heed, comments they receive, but, they do record that they receive them, apparently.”
If one looks at page 57 one finds “Adam Mossoff, Professor, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University” [sic] (Mossoff is a paid shill in “Professor” clothing; Mossoff was mentioned many times in Techrights).
“George Mason University has become a notorious radical right-wing “university” in recent decades,” our reader explains. “I actually grew up maybe 40-50k from George Mason, and I actually was accepted to attend there, but I was persuaded to try to go to a better school. It was a fairly new school in 1972, when I would have attended.”
“It has gained a horrible reputation in recent decades. I suspect it was intended to be horrible from the beginning, knowing where it is located. Just yesterday I read this article, which discussed Henry Manne and George Mason.”
After around 1970, the Koch brothers took over the intellectual leadership funding for the Republican Party and organized that Party’s billionaires to become the successors of what the DuPont brothers had created. It increasingly became known now, as “libertarianism.” One of the main universities that the Kochs funded was George Mason University, whose Henry G. Manne became, after Coase at Chicago, the main developer of “Law and Economics.” (In 2016, the Koch brothers renamed it the “Antonin Scalia Law School.”)
“The USPTO is located close to George Mason,” the reader explains, “and my first negative encounter with the USPTO – many years ago now – was with some “lawyer” named Jefferson D. Taylor and it was his refusal to resolve an issue for an inventor – me – that began everything.”
“I found his bio on the USPTO website, and he attended George Mason, and grew up very close to George Mason, and worked as a political hack for a local politician, before getting a cushy gig at the USPTO.”
“By the way, notice the D in the name Jefferson D. Taylor. I would bet you any amount of money that the D is an abbreviation for Davis, and that he is named after Jefferson Davis, the traitor who was President of the confederates states during the US Civil War.”
“A few years ago, as I was searching the web for aid in fighting the USPTO, I ran across some IP organization at George Mason, and called them – or somehow communicated with them – and they were extremely obnoxious, because an inventor – an individual – just doesn’t matter.”
The meddling by Mossoff has long been documented here. Mossoff is like a proxy for oligarchs’ interests and he presents himself in a misleading fashion.
Here in Europe we have many ‘Mossoffs’, which include Team UPC. They infest and infiltrate key institutions, making them unpleasant to honest workers and setting them well adrift, away from the original goals, charters, or laws. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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In Putin’s Russia 2023 is the year of Linux on the desktop
Tsar Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is forcing the country to switch to Linux.
According to the Kommersant newspaper, now that Microsoft will not touch Russia with a barge pole, some companies are looking for pirated software.
Russia-based web searches for pirated Microsoft software have surged by as much as 250 per cent after the company suspended new sales on March 4, according to Kommersant. In June so far, there’s been a 650 per cent surge in searches for Excel downloads, the media outlet added.
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It has been said that the Linux distribution can take in a lot of stress, and they can perform well in the benchmark result with the same hardware as the windows OS. Before running heavy software on your Linux system, you might want to run the Linux CPU stress test to determine how much stress this PC can take for better performance.
The CPU stress tests are mostly run by the developers and programmers who need to know the durability and strength of a system before releasing this publicly. As the Linux systems are free and open-source, the developers build different distributions with different-level hardware optimizations.
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Last week, AOPEN unveiled its latest Mini PC, and this tiny box is the most “Flexible” device ever to grace the ChromeOS space. Why flexible? Well, the all-new AOPEN ACE Mini isn’t a standard Chromebox. Instead, this Mini PC is a customizable Intel-based solution that can run a variety of operating systems based on customers’ specific needs. The official OS list includes Windows 10, 11, Ubuntu Linux, and ChromeOS Flex. That’s right. This is the first device to market that will actually support and offer ChromeOS Flex out of the box.
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Desktop/Laptop
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The 4K Linux laptops are coming and it looks like we will soon be able to buy one from Star Labs, which are known for their powerful StarLite and StarBook Linux notebooks, as well as the Byte mini PC.
Today, Star Labs took to Twitter to tease us with an upcoming Linux-powered laptop, the Star Labs StarFighter, which promises to ship with a 15.6-inch 4K 10-bit matte IPS display, 45W AMD or Intel processors, up to 64GB RAM, and up to 2TB SSD storage.
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Server
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Cinchy, a provider of a platform that isolates data from the applications used to create it, has released an update that adds Kubernetes support.
Cinchy CTO Karanjot Jaswal says the Cinchy Dataware Platform 5.0 makes it possible to deploy the platform on a Kubernetes cluster that accesses data on external storage systems. That capability also makes it easier to scale the Cinchy Dataware Platform up and down as required, he added.
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Microservices allow software developers to design highly scalable, highly fault-tolerant internet-based applications. But how do the microservices of a platform actually communicate? How do they coordinate their activities or know who to work with in the first place? Here we present the main answers to these questions, and their most important features and drawbacks. Before digging into this topic, you may want to first read the earlier pieces in this series, Microservices: Definition and Main Applications, APIs in Microservices, and Introduction to Microservices Security.
[...]
Certain workflows are by their own nature highly synchronous and predictable. Others aren’t. This means that many real-world microservice platforms could and probably should mix both approaches to obtain the best combination of performance and resistance to faults or peak loads. This is because temporary peak loads – that may be best handled with choreography – may happen only in certain parts of a platform, and the faults with the most serious consequences, for which tighter orchestration could be safer, only in others (e.g. purchases of single products by end customers, vs orders to buy the same products in bulk, to restock the warehouse) . For system architects, maybe the worst that happens could be to design an architecture that is either orchestration or choreography, but without being really conscious (maybe because they are just porting to microservices a pre-existing, monolithic platform) of which one it is, thus getting nasty surprises when something goes wrong, or new requirements turn out to be much harder than expected to design or test. Which leads to the second of the two general rules mentioned above: don’t even start to choose between orchestration or choreography for your microservices, before having the best possible estimate of what their real world loads and communication needs will be.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Our guest this week has more Raspberry Pis than anyone we’ve ever met. We get insights into all the projects he used them for, what’s worked great, and what’s not worked at all.
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Choosing a Linux distribution can be difficult, especially if you don’t know much about Linux. However, over the past several years I’ve tried almost every Distribution that you can choose. There are some that I have not installed, because it was just more of the same.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Kernel is a brilliant piece of software engineering. At more than a million lines of code, it is arguably one of the most complex programs that is still in active development today. Since the late 1990s, the Linux kernel has been used in both computationally intensive projects as well as barebones embedded applications.
Despite all of that, the Linux kernel is just a program that serves as a link between the hardware in your computer and the software that you use everyday. It is what allows you to use a wide range of devices for the programs that you use on a daily basis.
One example of this hardware-software linking is the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). ALSA is a sound driver framework that is built-in to the Linux kernel. It allows you, among other things, to easily install a sound card and configure it to immediately run with your favorite program.
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Applications
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The popular Vim text editor released new major 9.0 version few days ago with many new features and large number of new features.
The new release introduced Vim9 script with drastic performance improvements. The execution speed can be increased via 10 to 100 times faster. However, function must be defined with def, and the argument and return types must be specified to benefit from the speed-up.
Legacy scripts will keep working as before. The new script syntax now looks a lot more like most programming languages. Line continuation does not require using a backslash; Function calls do not require call, assignments are done without let and expressions are evaluated without eval. And, comments now start with #.
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Microsoft Exchange Server is a mail server and calendaring server. It is proprietary software that’s not available for Linux. We recommend the following free and open source alternatives.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Since CDs and DVDs have become rather obsolete, USBs are now the primary tool for installing new operating systems. To do so, you first need to make a bootable USB with installation files on it.
On traditional PCs running Windows, Linux, or macOS, you can create a bootable USB using software like Rufus or Etcher. You can even do it through the command prompt or terminal.
If you are using a Chromebook, though, the method is a bit different. Here’s how you can create a bootable USB on your Chromebook.
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Today we are looking at how to install the PokeMMO on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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Own HowTo ☛ How to Install Atom Text editor on Linux Mint [Ed: Atom is basically dead and controlled by Microsoft. It's also bloated and useless. Why promote this now?]
Atom is an open-source text editor, built by Github, It is free. User friendly. Has a lot of extensions that you can use when coding or working on your other projects, offers multiple language-syntax support, Cross-platform editing, builtin package manager, smart autocompletion and It is fully customizable, which means you can customize/build your own custom version of Atom.
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I want to call out a stellar article that told me exactly what I needed to do in order to use virt-install and cloud-init to launch a cloud-image. The only thing I have to add is the caveat that the #cloud-config comment at the top of the user-data file is required. The system will ignore the file if it does not start with that comment. This is the easiest way I know to launch a brand new VM.
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Every so often I need to install Windows, most recently for my GNOME on WSL experiments, and to do this I need to write the Windows installer ISO to a USB stick. Unlike most Linux distro ISOs, these are true, pure ISO 9660 images—not hybrid images that can also be treated as a DOS/MBR disk image—so they can’t just be written directly to the disk. Microsoft’s own tool is only available for Windows, of course.
I’m sure there are other ways but this is what I do. I’m writing it down so I can easily find the instructions next time!
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In this video, I am going to show how to install KaOS 2022.06.
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A PSK, or pre-shared key, is a password made up of a random string of characters while encrypting and decrypting data. As the name implies, both parties engaged in the cryptographic process are aware of the key in advance, as it is required not only for decryption but also for encrypting the data.
Hackers can’t take our data over a network if we use pre-shared keys during data transfer., which is important because our security is at risk practically all of the time. Using a PSK while sharing data also ensures that only the people you wish to share it with have access to it.
In this article, I am going to explain the ways to generate the PSK keys on Ubuntu Linux with examples and commands.
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npm is a software package manager for JavaScript programming language. npm makes it easy for JavaScript developers to share the code they write. npm also provides a command-line interface to manage the dependencies in a project. Docker is a containerization platform that allows developers to package their applications and dependencies into a portable image.
npm with Docker makes it easy to package and ship Node.js applications. npm with Docker also enables developers to share their code easily. npm with Docker is an excellent tool for JavaScript developers who want to share their code with others.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenRGB on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, OpenRGB is free and open-source software used to control RGB lighting control that does not require manufacturer software. The project is focused to provide support for multiple hardware manufacturers’ products to reduce the program load, which is limited to Windows, superfluous.
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 OpenRGB on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
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One of the most popular media players is the VLC ( VideoLAN Client) that always finds its way to be on the editorial list of best Open-source players. The key reason behind its wide the acceptance is – VLC media player plays files of all important audio and video formats. A double click is enough, alternatively, you can load files into the VLC interface using drag & drop or tap a video DVD using the menu bar command.
The player supports MPEG and DivX streaming and can therefore also play videos during the download. You can also play files packed by ZIP without having to unpack them beforehand. Users can artificially increase the volume of the film up to 200 percent if the video is too quiet.
Common formats VLC supports are Formate: AAC, AC3/A52, ASF, AVI, DTS, FLAC, FLV, H.264, MIDI, MKV, MOV, MPG, MPEG (ES, MP3, MP4, PS, PVA, TS), MXF, OGG, OGM, Raw DV, Real (RAM, RM, RMVB, RV), WAV, WMA, WMV, 3GP.
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In this tutorial, we will explore how to install Android Studio on Ubuntu 22.04.
Android Studio is the Integrated Development Environment for Android app development. Whenever you want to start developing android applications, the easiest and the most effective IDE is always the Android studio. It is well tested and offers all the functionalities other code editors provide.
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WINE or Emulation
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The Wine development release 7.12 is now available.
What's new in this release:
- Theming support for Qt5 applications.
- Bundled vkd3d upgraded to version 1.4.
- Improved effect support in Direct2D.
- QWORD support in registry tools.
- Various bug fixes.
The source is available at:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/7.x/wine-7.12.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git
repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
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Games
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Another couple of weeks, another alpha snapshot from the development branch, this time with 4.0 alpha 11! Same deal as usual, lots of bugs fixed and more refactoring and feature work. We’re etching closer and closer to the beta stage, things are starting to fall into place!
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Doom was an incredibly popular video game by Id software which, six years following its release, was made open source under the GPLv2 license. Thanks to this release, combined with the solid software design and lasting legacy of backwards compatibility in C, Doom has been ported to countless platforms by countless programmers. And I recently added myself to this number 
[...]
As I was working, I gradually came to understand that Helios was pretty close to supporting all of these features, and thought that the time to give Doom a shot was coming soon. In my last status update, I shared a picture of a Helios userspace program utilizing the framebuffer provided by multiboot, ticking one box. We’ve had dynamic memory allocation in userspace working since June 8th. The last pieces were a keyboard driver and a C library.
I started with the keyboard driver, since that would let me continue to work on Hare for a little bit longer, providing a more direct benefit to the long-term goals (rather than the short-term goal of “get Doom to work”). Since Helios is a micro-kernel, the keyboard driver is implemented in userspace. A PS/2 keyboard driver requires two features which are reserved to ring 0: I/O ports and IRQ handling. To simplify the interface to the essentials for this use-case, pressing or releasing a key causes IRQ 1 to be fired on the PIC, then reading from port 0×60 provides a scancode. We already had support for working with I/O ports in userspace, so the blocker here was IRQ handling.
Helios implements IRQs similarly to seL4, by using a “notification” object (an IPC primitive) which is signalled by the kernel when an IRQ occurs. I was pleased to have this particular blocker, as developing out our IPC implementation further was a welcome task. The essential usage of a notification involves two operations: wait and signal. The former blocks until the notification is signalled, and the later signals the notification and unblocks any tasks which are waiting on it. Unlike sending messages to endpoints, signal never blocks.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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When it comes to Linux desktops, GNOME is the name that pops up the most. Why is GNOME so popular among the Linux community? And is it the best?
There are many Linux desktop environments, but among all the options, GNOME has long been the leader.
People can easily debate preferences and why they prefer one desktop over another, but GNOME’s position isn’t a matter of opinion. It appears on the largest number of Linux-powered PCs.
So here’s a look at various ways GNOME is the furthest of all the desktop environments in the free software world and some reasons why.
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Work on the next major release of the popular GNOME desktop environment, GNOME 43, is underway and we’re getting closer to the first alpha development release with lots of new features like support for web apps in Software, a new device security info panel in Settings, and support for WebExtensions in Web.
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Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 24 to July 01.
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I wrote a technical overview of the WebKit WPE project for the WPE WebKit blog, for those interested in WPE as a potential solution to the problem of browsers in embedded devices.
This article begins a series of technical writeups on the architecture of WPE, and we hope to publish during the rest of the year further articles breaking down different components of WebKit, including graphics and other subsystems, that will surely be of great help for those interested in getting more familiar with WebKit and its internals.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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There are thousands of Linux distributions to choose from, ranging from the user-friendly (such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint) to the very complicated (such as Gentoo). Every distribution that claims to be user-friendly isn’t exactly cut from the same cloth, and how a distribution is made user-friendly depends on a great number of things. Package managers, desktop environments, and pre-installed applications are all areas that every Linux distribution claiming to be user-friendly must consider.
To that end, when a new distribution arrives, claiming to be user-friendly, the first thing I do is examine those three areas. So when the developer of GeckoLinux announced a new distribution, called Spiral Linux, I did just that.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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Zoom, the cloud meeting company, unifies cloud video conferencing, simple online meetings, and group messaging into one easy-to-use platform. Our solution offers the best video, audio, and screen-sharing experience across Zoom Rooms, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and H.323/SIP room systems.
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Mozilla Firefox is a mature web browser for the PCLinuxOS desktop. It is ranked as one of the best browsers on the market.
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Mozilla Thunderbird is a mature email client for Linux and other operating systems.
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TeamViewer provides easy, fast and secure remote access and meeting solutions to Linux, Windows PCs, Apple PCs and various other platforms, including Android and iPhone.
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Shotcut is a free and open-source cross-platform video editing application for Windows, OS X, and Linux.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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This week, many of us were busy with hack week. Naturally, this took away some resources for regular Tumbleweed work, but I am sure we will see some new things coming out of that week again relatively soon. I tried to keep Tumbleweed rolling this week, which was not that difficult: stagings were never overcrowded, and some snapshots were relatively small changes. And so it comes that we have released 6 snapshots during this week (0624..0629).
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One thing I wanted to investigate during the Hackweek was trying out whether openSUSE Leap would offer my Raspberry Pi Zero 2 a nice and stable option for motion detection camera recording. I have had RPi 3 Model A+ doing this for a longer time, and a Zero model before that, but the newer RPi Zero 2 has been a bit unstable for so far unknown reason. There are also some unoptimal combinations of too old or too fresh software in the official Raspberry Pi OS releases. You can read more in my hackweek project page
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Fedora / Red Hat / IBM
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This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat (https://libera.chat/).
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As Red Hat is modernizing our approach to Compliance as Code, we are making some changes to better provide our customers with the most accurate information available. One of the recent changes involved “ATO Pathways” — the website previously hosted at https://atopathways.redhatgov.io. We’ve removed the content and instead have posted links directing people to alternate sources of information to provide our customers with the best paths forward. We explore those paths in this article.
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The IT industry not only looked very different 20 years ago, product security looked very different as well. Open source software wasn’t mainstream and the majority of vendors had full control and secrecy over their product code.
Today, however, almost every software vendor contributes to and incorporates open source software within their product or managed service (herein called “offerings”), but does this impact the security of these offerings? In particular, what is Red Hat doing to demonstrate that our offerings are developed in a secure manner and provide trustworthy solutions? Red Hat, like other software vendors, continues to monitor and participate in developing solutions which meet emerging market requirements, customer demand and ongoing cybersecurity requirements issued by governments around the world.
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Even as employers scramble to hire amid “The Great Resignation,” landing a job in an interview starts by focusing not on yourself, but on the company and your potential boss.
Companies looking to hire any position, whether it is a CIO, a C# fullstack developer, a customer success manager, or a chief marketing officer, are recruiting due to need. And the need usually comes in two forms: alleviating pain and/or leveraging an opportunity.
The pain might be replacing a person who is not working out in their role. The opportunity might be growth and meeting new customer demands.
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During the pandemic, organizations worldwide rapidly adopted digital technologies that enabled them to work, communicate, and collaborate without face-to-face meetings. These same organizations also had to quickly pivot their hiring practices, relying on video calls instead of traditional interviews. To help navigate this new normal, some hiring teams implemented automated hiring platforms.
Using an automated hiring platform provides many benefits, including increased productivity and less time spent interviewing candidates who may not have the requisite qualifications. Automated platforms can handle some of those pre-screening steps, ensuring that hiring managers meet with candidates who already possess the right skills.
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This is a common misconception. Carola is not the project name. It’s the keyword the PVA reacts to by default. It is similar to “Alexa” or “OK, Google” for those who are familiar with those products. You can configure this keyword. You can also configure other things such as your location, which applications to use by default when opening media files, what CardDAV server to use when looking up contact information, etc. These settings can be personalized for each user. Some of them can even be changed by voice command (e.g. the name, the default TTS engine, and the default apps).
In 2021 I read an article about the Speech-To-Text (STT) system Vosk[2] and started to play a bit with it. The installation was easy. But there was no use-case except for writing what one said down to the screen. A few hours and a hundred lines of Java code later, I could give my PC simple commands. After a few more days of work, it was capable of executing more complex commands. Today, you can tell him/her/it to start apps, redirect audio streams, control audio and video playback, call someone, handle incoming calls, and more.
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Debian Family
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Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” was released on June 17th, 2017, and it was superseded by the Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” series on July 6th, 2019. At that point in time, Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” support was transferred to the Debian LTS project to extend its lifetime to up to five years for those who needed it.
Those five years are now gone as the end of life was reached on June 30th, 2022.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Good news for especially determined fans of Ubuntu’s formerly in-house desktop: there’s a new version.
Unity 7.6 just appeared, although there is a more complete list of changes in the earlier announcement that it was in testing.
It has been quite a while since the Ubuntu’s Unity desktop was updated. The last time it was bundled was Ubuntu 17.04, and the last release from Ubuntu itself was v7.5.
This new release doesn’t come from Canonical: it’s from Linux wunderkind Rudra Saraswat and his UnityX project. Users of the unofficial Ubuntu Unity remix, which we looked at a few month ago, will get the new version automatically.
The Reg FOSS desk has Ubuntu Unity 22.04 running on a couple of laptops and we can report that the new version does fix a few small glitches. The Unity remix is progressively replacing GNOME components, such as the text editor and file manager, with ones from other desktop projects, in order to get back features which GNOME has removed – notably, menu bars.
So Ubuntu Unity 22.04 uses the Nemo file manager from the Cinnamon desktop, rather than GNOME’s Nautilus, and MATE’s Pluma text editor instead of GEdit. As a small example, the update makes right-clicking the trashcan in the Launcher to empty it work again, without needing to open the trashcan’s own window.
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The Web and design team at Canonical run two-week iterations building and maintaining all of the Canonical websites and product web interfaces. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.
[...]
Have you had to do dull, slow and repetitive actions at work? Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but sometimes it can also be an opportunity for a developer to rediscover what it means to be a developer and solve these situations with code.
The UA-QA tool originated from such a situation. It will help us test our Ubuntu Advantage subscription system on ubuntu.com. This also aims to improve the quality of our test scenarios: we can prepare test accounts to hold a wide variety of subscriptions just as users would have in real-world scenarios.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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ZigUNO Zigbee development board comes with an Ebyte E18-MS1 module equipped with Texas Instruments SimpleLink CC2530 8051 Zigbee microcontroller and follows Arduino UNO form for Arduino Shield compatibility.
The board works with PTVO Zigbee firmware that comes with a graphical configuration tool to select the Zigbee chip used (CC2530), configure I/O behavior (input/output, pull-up, etc…), and more. The developers also suggest using DIYRuZ projects as examples to get started.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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TileMill is a design environment developed by MapBox for cartography, constituting Mapnik as a renderer, CartoCSS as a stylesheet language, and a locally-served web interface with Node.JS as a server and based on Backbone.js for the client.
Older versions up to 0.10.x are available with a native GUI on all supported platforms.
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OmniDB is an open source browser-based app designed to access and manage many Database Management systems, e.g. PostgreSQL, Oracle and MySQL.
OmniDB can run either as an App or via Browser, combining the flexibility needed for various access paths with a design that puts security first.
OmniDB’s main objective is to offer an unified workspace with all functionalities needed to manipulate different DMBS. DBMS specific tools aren’t required: in OmniDB, the context switch between different DBMS is done with a simple connection switch, without leaving the same page. The end-user’s sensation is that there is no difference when he/she manipulates different DBMS, it just feels like different connections.
[...]
OmniDB is an open-source project that is released under the MIT license.
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Payload is a free open-source headless CMS that built on top of Node.js technologies as TypeScript, React, and Express. It uses MongoDB as a database backend.
It comes with a clean clutter-free admin control panel, a rich documentation, and a developer-friendly structure to build websites, CMS, mobile apps, eCommerce solutions, and any web apps.
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RosarioSIS is a Free & open source Student Information System (SIS), also known as School Management System (SMS) or even School ERP.
It is designed to address the most important needs of administrators, teachers, support staff, parents, students, and clerical personnel.
However, it also adds many components not typically found in Student Information Systems.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Collabora has released CODE 22.05, the new Developer Edition of its web-based corporate version of LibreOffice.
CODE is the Collabora Online Development Edition of Collabora Office, which we took a quick look at recently. The new version 22.05 offers a number of fresh features and performance improvements.
The suite now supports external grammar checkers, which you can check out using LanguageTool. This not only detects spelling errors but grammatically incorrect sentences as well as everything from errant apostrophes to duplicated words and faulty punctuation.
Spreadsheet handling got a major uplift with capability to support 16,384 columns, and the app can now generate sparklines – tiny, scaleless line graphs, inline with written text, which are an easy-to-understand way to visualize trends in data.
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Licensing / Legal
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Lately there has been a lot of discussion about various silos and their activities, notably GitHub and an up and coming alternative to Tumblr called Cohost. I’d like to talk about both to make the point that silos do not, and can not elevate user freedoms, by design, even if they are run with the best of intentions, by analyzing the behavior of both of these silos.
It is said that if you are not paying for a service, that you are the product. To look at this, we will start with GitHub, who have had a significant controversy over the past year with their now-commercial Copilot service. Copilot is a paid service which provides code suggestions using a neural network model that was trained using the entirety of publicly posted source code on GitHub as its corpus. As many have noted, this is likely a problem from a copyright point of view.
Microsoft claims that this use of the GitHub public source code is ethically correct and legal, citing fair use as their justification for data mining the entire GitHub public source corpus. Interestingly, in the EU, there is a “text and data mining” exception to the copyright directive, which may provide for some precedent for this thinking. While the legal construction they use to justify the way they trained the Copilot model is interesting, it is important to note that we, as consumers of the GitHub service, enabled Microsoft to do this by uploading source code to their service.
Now let’s talk about Cohost, a recently launched alternative to Tumblr which is paid for by its subscribers, and promises that it will never sell out to a third party. While I think that Cohost will likely be one of the more ethically-run silos out there, it is still a silo, and like Microsoft’s GitHub, it has business interests (subscriber retention) which place it in conflict with the goals of digital autonomy. Specifically, like all silos, Cohost’s platform is designed to keep users inside the Cohost platform, just as GitHub uses the network effect of its own silo to make it difficult to use anything other than GitHub for collaboration on software.
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Programming/Development
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Flamerobin 0.9.3.12 Snapshot released with a few Firebird 4 fixes , here is the changelog
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So my previous post introduced a trivial interpreter for a TCL-like language.
In the past week or two I’ve cleaned it up, fixed a bunch of bugs, and added 100% test-coverage. I’m actually pretty happy with it now.
[...]
Doing more than that is hard though without support for more primitives written in the parent language than I’ve implemented. The obvious thing I’m missing is a native implementation of upvalue, which is TCL primitive allowing you to affect/update variables in higher-scopes. Without that you can’t write things as nicely as you would like, and have to fall back to horrid hacks or be unable to do things.
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Perl / Raku
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Following the release of 5.36.0, we have a new Perl Steering Council (PSC). The PSC for the next year comprises Ricardo Signes (RJBS), Paul Evans (PEVANS), and Philippe Bruhat (BOOK). These three will serve until 5.38.0 is released, at which point the next PSC will be elected.
As described in a previous blog post, in 2020 we established a new governance structure for the Perl programming language. In brief, the perl5-porters (P5P) mailing list continues to be the place where the future of Perl is discussed. Anyone on the list can follow the RFC process to propose new language features. The PSC are shepherds for that process, and adjudicate where consensus doesn’t emerge.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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The Linux fold command enables you to break a string of characters into same-size chunks, but it can also be used to provide a series of characters or strings to drive a loop. This post reviews the basic command and then demonstrates how you can use it to loop through the characters or strings that it creates.
The basic use of the fold command is to take long lines of text and break them into shorter pieces. One common use is to shorten lines in a text file so that they display well in a terminal window. Lines wider than the terminal width might otherwise wrap in inconvenient places.
The fold command can also be used to create a narrower file from a file with lines that are inconveniently long.
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Java
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The Java programming language is well into its third decade, and the language and its byte code have found a home in everything from embedded chips to massive server farms. Java’s combination of a rock-solid virtual machine and a large collection of libraries make a fertile ecosystem for writing code that runs everywhere.
One area where Java has struggled, however, is the world of servers, which often must juggle connections from thousands or even millions of users. In the early years, Java tools were among the best for creating server-side applications that enforced business logic for all users. Java frameworks like J2EE, Hibernate, Spring, and the basic Java servlets model made it relatively easy to create strong web applications.
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Rust
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The Rust Language Server (RLS) is being deprecated in favor of rust-analyzer. Current users of RLS should migrate to using rust-analyzer instead. Builds of RLS will continue to be released until at least the Rust 1.64 release (2022-09-22), after which no new releases will be made. This timeline may change if any issues arise.
RLS is an implementation of the Language Server Protocol (LSP) which provides enhanced features with any editor that supports the protocol, such as code-checking and refactoring. RLS was introduced by RFC 1317 and development was very active from 2016 through 2019. However, the architecture of RLS has several limitations that can make it difficult to provide low-latency and high-quality responses needed for an interactive environment.
Development of rust-analyzer began near the beginning of 2018 to provide an alternate LSP implementation for Rust. rust-analyzer uses a fundamentally different approach that does not rely on using rustc. In RFC 2912 rust-analyzer was adopted as the official replacement for RLS.
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Leftovers
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All vehicle manufacturers are having quality control problems, but Tesla is very nearly the worst.
This is according to J.D. Power and Associates and their survey of new vehicle owners for the 2022 model year.
Buick was at the top of the list for quality control, and Tesla was near the bottom, which is also a problem because it costs too much to repair them after the warranty ends and you may not see your car for days or weeks.
Tesla is also having huge financial problems and Elon Musk is busy firing thousands of people, many over a video call that’s arranged with no notice.
Most recently, he fired the entire office in San Mateo, California which was working on “autopilot”, which crashes into things and leaves the owner liable. The “job creator” destroyed 200 jobs before breakfast that day.
Most of the complaints people have are with their Apple Carplay or Android Auto not working properly, on vendors that support it, but Tesla owners are basically stuck with some custom thing that hasn’t improved much at all since 2014, which also malfunctions.
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Science
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Microwave superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) multiplexing technology development for future x-ray observatories
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, isync, kernel, and systemd), Fedora (chromium, curl, firefox, golang-github-vultr-govultr-2, and xen), Mageia (openssl, python-bottle, and python-pyjwt), Red Hat (compat-openssl10, curl, expat, firefox, go-toolset-1.17 and go-toolset-1.17-golang, go-toolset:rhel8, kernel, kpatch-patch, libarchive, libgcrypt, libinput, libxml2, pcre2, php:7.4, php:8.0, qemu-kvm, ruby:2.6, thunderbird, and vim), and Ubuntu (curl, libjpeg6b, and vim).
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Bleeping Computer ☛ Microsoft Azure FabricScape Bug Let Hackers Hijack Linux Clusters [Ed: Microsoft media operatives and Microsoft-connected sites are quick to blame "Linux" for a Microsoft proprietary software issue; Microsoft hates Linux and constantly defames Linux. Jim Zemlin is in bed with the enemy.]
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Bruce Schneier ☛ Analyzing the Swiss E-Voting System [Ed: Voting machines will never work properly or reliably, more so if they run proprietary software in the stack and aren't audited at a binary level by multiple independent auditors. Use traditional paper ballots instead.]
Andrew Appel has a long analysis of the Swiss online voting system. It’s a really good analysis of both the system and the official analyses.
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If I can shop and bank online, why can’t I vote online? David Jefferson explained in 2011 why internet voting is so difficult to make secure, I summarized again in 2021 why internet voting is still inherently insecure, and many other experts have explained it too. Still, several countries and several U.S. states have offered e-voting to some of their citizens. In many cases they plunge forward without much consideration of whether their e-voting system is really secure, or whether it could be hacked to subvert democracy. It’s not enough just to take the software vendor’s word for it.
Switzerland is a country that wanted to do it right, fumbled, and in the process learned that an important part of getting it right is a careful (and expensive) study, that’s independent of the vendor selling the system, and independent of the governmental body that’s purchasing the system. The study wasn’t particularly expensive—about half a million Swiss francs, which is about half a million US dollars—but that’s half a million that most U.S. states or other countries have not spent before rushing to deploy a system. After the study, the Swiss government’s conclusion was, “The e-voting system currently being developed by Swiss Post has been significantly improved. However, further developments, some of them substantial, are still required.”
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USCERT ☛ CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog [Ed: This is all about Microsoft, but the page totally fails to name it even once until the third paragraph! The title too could be improved. I saw almost 10 headlines saying CISA warns about "Linux" in the past few days, but: 1) it was patched months ago; 2) it's privilege escalation; 3) they miss the bigger issues listed by CISA; 4) they are Microsoft boosters doing this; 5) it is systemd, not Linux.]
Original release date: July 1, 2022
CISA has added one new vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise.
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Security researchers have uncovered an unusually sophisticated malware that has been targeting small office/home office (SOHO) routers for nearly two years, taking advantage of the pandemic and rapid shift to remote work.
Such routers are rarely monitored or up-to-date, making them attractive targets for hackers to reach adjacent corporate networks. According to Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, this sophisticated campaign “has been active in North America and Europe for nearly two years beginning in October 2020.”
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The Black Basta ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) syndicate has amassed nearly 50 victims in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand within two months of its emergence in the wild, making it a prominent threat in a short window.
“Black Basta has been observed targeting a range of industries, including manufacturing, construction, transportation, telcos, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, plumbing and heating, automobile dealers, undergarments manufacturers, and more,” Cybereason said in a report.
Evidence indicates the ransomware strain was still in development as recently as February 2022, and only started to be used in attacks starting April after it was advertised on underground forums with an intent to buy and monetize corporate network access for a share of the profits.
Similar to other ransomware operations, Black Basta is known to employ the tried-and-tested tactic of double extortion to plunder sensitive information from the targets and threaten to publish the stolen data unless a digital payment is made.
A new entrant in the already crowded ransomware landscape, intrusions involving the threat have leveraged QBot (aka Qakbot) as a conduit to maintain persistence on the compromised hosts and harvest credentials, before moving laterally across the network and deploying the file-encrypting malware.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Microsoft already (says) they apply both laws to anyone using their products. Can you imagine how much worse Microsoft could be without them?
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It’s 2022 and women can see a witch doctor in an app and tell the state when she’s ovulating as evidence for her abortion trial.
An app called “Stardust” says it is an “astrology based period tracker”.
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When Houston resident Lauren Price read the leaked draft of the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, she emailed her period-tracking app’s customer support team to ask how they were protecting her personal health information.
The Montrose resident, 37, is an activist and data specialist for a local school district, so she worried that law enforcement or others might seek out data while investigating whether someone had an illegal abortion. The prospect is of particular concern in Texas, where a state law allows private citizens to collect a $10,000 bounty in lawsuits against anyone who aids or abets the procedure.
When Price never heard back from that company – Kindara – she decided to stop using the app.
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Confidentiality
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With many activities carried out in the business environment taking place digitally, the amount of sensitive and confidential data that organizations use and store is also increasing. The protection of private data in medical fields, which can be considered as one of the most sensitive of these data, has also gained great importance. In this direction, organizations continue to make efforts to keep their data at the highest level of security.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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On Wednesday, June 29, 2022, Wai Phyo Myint, our Asia Pacific Policy Analyst, addressed the United Nations (U.N.) Human Rights Council regarding the escalating digital threats faced by the people in Myanmar during the Interactive Dialogue with the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Myanmar
Myint highlighted how targeted communications blackouts are being used by the military junta in regions where people’s resistance has been most intense. She illustrated why losing connectivity in Myanmar is life-threatening – because people cannot get critical information for their safety, contact their families, or expose serious human rights violations.
In her oral statement, Wai Phyo Myint also raised the alarm that the military could be requiring the (International Mobile Equipment Identify) IMEI number of phones to be registered. Linking data from IMEI number and SIM card registration will potentially give the military the power to collect data needed to track and locate people anytime they want.
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Monopolies
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This past Monday June 27th, Concurrences partnered with the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) to present an event titled Rulemaking Authority of the Federal Trade Commission. This event focused on the rulemaking authority of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as the agency seems to be tipping away from the economics-driven antitrust enforcement of the past 40 years and more towards neo-brandeisian policies. The event also included the presentation of a new publication, Rulemaking Authority of the US Federal Trade Commission, which analyzes the “myriad questions raised by the prospect of notice-and-comment rulemaking to make major changes in antitrust law.”
Of primary concern in this debate was the overall role of the FTC, its balance of rulemaking and case-by-case antitrust adjudication, its relationship with Congress, and finally the agency’s potential pursuit of problems in the economy outside of the realms of antitrust.
Throughout the event, panelists warned of the misuse of guidelines and rulemaking by the Commission and weighed in on the potential harmful effects of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (S.2992 or AICOA).
[...]
In contrast, Richard Pierce, Professor of Law at George Washington University, argued that the FTC should rely on the tools it knows how to use best. “There are incremental ways of improving antitrust law that can improve it greatly. Go for the kinds of changes where you have solid empirical support for what you want to do.” Many panelists throughout the day warned of passed rules and the FTC itself falling prey to partisan activity upon the change of leadership. Maureen Ohlhausen, Partner at Baker Botts, asserted “the way the FTC has changed antitrust law is through case-by-case adjudication, a solid record of solid enforcement based on evidence.” Ohlhausen emphasized that this takes time and patience, but the FTC was created to make that sort of change. James Rill, Senior Counsel at Baker Botts, echoed Ohlhausen’s point, stating that “we have an evolutionary aspect to antitrust and it is complex and takes time. We trade off the difficulty of the method for the building of a proper foundation in time.”
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Technical
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The first edition of the challenge consisted into spending a week (during your non-work time) using an old computer, the recommended machine specifications were 1 core and 512 MB of memory at best, however some people enjoyed doing this challenge with other specifications and requirements, and it’s fine, the purpose of the challenge is to have fun.
While experimenting the challenge last year, a small but solid community gathered on IRC, we shared tips and our feelings about the challenge, it was very fun and a good opportunity to meet new people. One year later, the community is still there and over the last months we had regular ideas exchange for renewing the challenge.
I didn’t want to do the same challenge again, the fun would be spoiled, and it would have a feeling of déjà vu. I recently shared a new idea and many adopted it, and it was clear this would be the main topic of the new challenge.
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Internet/Gemini
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I really appreciate all the ways community is built into the fabric of geminispace. It’s nice being able to search for an article and see right there what pages referenced it and continued the conversation. I like all the aggregators that have popped up and let me engage with gemlogs I probably wouldn’t have found on my own. I love that it’s all built out of long established technologies (all you need is an atom XML).
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Programming
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According to my git logs I switched to Vim about six years ago. It was probably initially an experiment to see “how the other side lived” that became permanent once I fell in love with its operation. Vim clicks with me because at it’s core it is a large collection of verbs that can act on a smaller collection of nouns (words, paragraphs, code blocks, etc). Learning it is a lot more like learning a spoken language than a collection of keybinds.
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So I decided to go dig in the Lisp 1 Programmer’s Manual (1960) and the Lisp 1.5 Programmer’s Manual (1962). I’m sure there’s lots of computing history buried in those pages, from how real programming on the IBM 704 is done to how they made a full-featured interpreter and self-hosted compiler work on such a system. But we don’t have time for that, so I just grepped for “association list” and “property list”.
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It works on the fact that kamalatta.ddnss.de keeps a list of work-
ing gopherholes. This script downloads the list, and picks one at
random using the shuf command.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 10:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Applications
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The table above shows our articles published in June 2022.
For our entire collection, check out the categories below. This is the largest compilation of recommended software. The collection includes hundreds of articles, with comprehensive sections on internet, graphics, games, programming, science, office, utilities, and more. Almost all of the software is free and open source.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Get easy steps to Install Master PDF Editor on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish using the command terminal for editing PDF files on Linux.
The “Master PDF Editor” is a comprehensive PDF program that contains a lot of functions. In addition to creating and editing PDF documents, the software also allows converting to various formats.
The software provides you with a host of useful functions for creating PDFs, Text, images, shapes, buttons, checkboxes, and converting XPS files into PDFs, and fillable shapes are only a small part of the options available in “Master PDF Editor”.
Furthermore, the program allows you to insert handwritten signatures under PDFs. Also, no problem for the tool is the secure encryption of your documents with the 128-bit standard.
However, the free edition is limited in features and allows only the creation of new PDF documents, filling PDF forms, adding and/or editing bookmarks in PDF files; commenting and annotating PDF documents; Split and merging PDF documents.
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A web server is essential in the completion phases of a web application project. It lets users simulate, monitor, and assess the performance of their web application projects in a real-world environment. The choice and performance of such web servers sometimes depend on the main programming language used to create the project.
Apache Tomcat is a fused implementation of Jakarta Expression Language, Jakarta Servlet, and WebSocket technologies. It is an ideal HTTP web server environment for pure Java coders. The Apache Software Foundation is responsible for Apache Tomcat’s development and maintenance.
This article guide will walk us through the installation of an open-source java-based Apache Tomcat 10 web server on RHEL 9 Linux.
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For me, a good tabletop role-playing game (RPG), sometimes called a pen-and-paper RPG, is the perfect hobby for getting away from my computer. The classic editions of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), for example, were released well before PDFs and eBooks existed, so I bring hardcover books and paper character sheets to my gaming table.
In recent years, however, I’ve also started gaming online using Mumble voice chat. At first, I treated these games the same as my in-person games, but as more games started integrating online maps like Mythic Table, I found switching back and forth between keyboard-and-screen and pen-and-paper became a little frantic. When I’m running a player character (PC), most of what I need to refer to is on a character sheet, a document that lists my special abilities and powers. To get to that information quickly while managing a bunch of other applications, I use the pc command.
The pc command parses RPG character sheets written in the INI format. It works with any RPG game system, as long as that system’s character sheet data can be expressed as basic INI (most of them can be).
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You can find hundreds of browser extensions that let you fine-tune the playback speed for all YouTube videos. I’m happy with the default speed of 1× for most videos (and music). However, I want to speed up some channels without having to tweak the speed dial every time. Enter Samuel Li’s Speed Controller extension.
I tend to fine-tune the playback speed to somewhere between 1,05× and 1,35×. By default, YouTube only lets you increase the playback speed by increments of 0,25×. This design decision has led to the creation of hundreds of extensions for fine-tuning and setting speeds other than the defaults.
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In this guide, we will learn how to use terraform to launch Confluent Cloud resources such as environments, clusters, topics and ACLs.
Confluent Cloud is a fully managed, cloud-native service Kafka service provider for connecting and processing all of your data, everywhere it’s needed.
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In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install the Sublime Text 4 code editor on Ubuntu 22.04.
A sublime Text editor is a shareware cross-platform source code editor, it supports almost all the programming languages.
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In this article, I am going to list a few such Linux commands. You may still find a few of them in your distribution. It’s possible that your distribution is still providing it for backward compatibility or has created a new implementation underneath or plans to remove it in the newer versions.
But it’s good to know them as an informed Linux user. Here we go!
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Games
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Apple Chess is a traditional chess game played on a well rendered board with a set of realistic 3-D pieces. It’s actually a Unix-based chess program, Sjeng, that Apple packaged up in a new wrapper. It supports chess variants such as crazyhouse and losing chess.
The software is published under the Apple Sample Code License. Apple Chess doesn’t run under Linux. And there are far superior open source alternatives. We recommend the following software.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Devices/Embedded
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Whenever someone finds an open source solution, an angel gets its wings. The irony is that I was pushed into finding a non-proprietary solution by one of the biggest closed source companies on the planet. What I love most about the system I’ve created is that I am in control of all aspects of it, good and bad.
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We’ve seen a lot of camera slider builds here at Hackaday, and for good reason: having one really lets you take your project documentation, especially videos, to the next level. It’s one of those force multiplier builds — after you’ve completed it, it can help you make all your future projects just that much better. But we’re also no strangers to seeing these projects become overly complex, which can often make it difficult for others to replicate.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Licensing / Legal
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The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit focused on free and open source software (FOSS), said it has stopped using Microsoft’s GitHub for project hosting – and is urging other software developers to do the same.
In a blog post on Thursday, Denver Gingerich, SFC FOSS license compliance engineer, and Bradley M. Kuhn, SFC policy fellow, said GitHub has over the past decade come to play a dominant role in FOSS development by building an interface and social features around Git, the widely used open source version control software.
In so doing, they claim, the company has convinced FOSS developers to contribute to the development of a proprietary service that exploits FOSS.
“We are ending all our own uses of GitHub, and announcing a long-term plan to assist FOSS projects to migrate away from GitHub,” said Gingerich and Kuhn.
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Leftovers
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The Northman, a medieval nordic epic written and directed by Robert Eggers, begins with a familiar setup: a young prince loses his family and kingdom in an act of fraternal betrayal. King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) is assassinated by his brother, Fjölnir (Claes Bang), while his young son Amleth watches; the young prince also sees Fjölnir kidnap his mother, Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), as part of a bloody coup to seize Aurvandil’s title and land.
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You don’t happen to own and operate your own turbojet engine, do you? If you do, have you ever had the urge to “kick the tires and light the fires”? Kicking tires simply requires adding tires to your engine cart, but what about lighting the fires? In the video below the break, [Tech Ingredients] explains that we will require some specialized hardware called a re-heater — also known as an afterburner.
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Let me clarify right away: the translator Peter Lownds is a writer, poet, actor (he worked in Kramer versus Kramer, for example), a youthful friend of Jack Kerouac. And a thoroughly likable person, even from me. Eric A. Gordon is a writer, editor, militant, and comrade, translator of nine books of fiction by Alvaro Cunhal, who published novels under the pseudonym Manuel Tiago. And as if such references were not enough, Eric A. Gordon was the person who made it possible for my novel to be published at International Publishers.
In his interview with Peter Lownds, I cut out the passages that speak directly about “Never-Ending Youth”. Below.
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Industrial machines have all kinds of moving parts that require regular lubrication in order to prevent wear and damage. Historically, these would require regular visits from maintenance personnel to keep them greased up and slippery. Automatic lubricators eliminate that job by regularly dosing machines with fresh grease, and [Big Clive] decided to see what makes them tick.
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Yehoshua was one of my literary idols. When I lived in New York City, I had seen him in action a few times: a book reading, a lecture. The A.B. Yehoshua who appeared on my computer screen—a startling thing for those of us not entirely acclimated to Zoom–was visibly ill and had aged dramatically. Shortly before my interview, I had viewed The Last Chapter of A.B. Yehoshua, Yair Qedar’s superlative documentary. Much of the film’s contents were stark: Yehoshua was in failing health. His wife had died, ending a decades-long marriage. (Strangely enough, the plot of Molkho—his novel published in the United States in 1989 under the title Five Seasons—hinges on the protagonist’s newfound status as widower.) And with the loss of his close friend and colleague, Amos Oz, he was more than aware that his literary cohort was passing from the scene.
Yehoshua couldn’t have been more gracious during our meeting. Voluble and expressive in English, a language very much not his own, he immediately set the agenda for our talk, as befitted someone used to expounding and having his words treated with a great deal of gravitas. But, of course, I had come to listen.
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Science
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We make no apologies for being hardware focused here at Hackaday, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t occasionally impressed by a particularly inspired feat of bit wrangling. For example, [t3ssel8r] has taken a break from his game to discuss his procedural animation system and the beautiful math behind it.
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Hardware
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Case modding took off in the late 90s, and taught us all that computers could (and should!) look awesome. Much of the aesthetic went mainstream, and now tons of computer cases come with lights and windows and all the rest. [WysWyg_Protogen] realized those simple case windows could be way cooler with a neat LCD hack, and set to work.
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Airless tires have been “a few years away” from production for decades now. They’re one of the automotive version of vaporware (at least those meant for passenger vehicles), always on the cusp of being produced but somehow never materializing. They have a number of perks over traditional air-filled tires in that they are immune to flats and punctures, and since there aren’t any airless tires available at the local tire shop, [Driven Media] decided to make and test their own.
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There are some tings that should be possible, so just have to be tried. [Action Retro] has a great video showing just such an escapade, the creation of a large RAID 0 array using a pile of USB floppy drives. Yes, taking one of the smallest and most unreliable pieces of data storage media and combining a load of them together such that all the data is lost if just one of them fails.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Eight years after the deadly Flint water crisis began, the state’s Supreme Court has thrown out charges against former Governor Rick Snyder and eight other former officials for their complicity in the public health emergency. Snyder’s administration made the decision to switch the city’s water source from the Detroit system to the Flint River as a cost-saving measure and then failed to protect residents from the resulting lead and bacterial poisoning in the majority-Black city. “It really feels like justice is becoming an illusion for Flint residents,” says Nayyirah Shariff, director of Flint Rising. “No one is being held accountable, no one is seeing justice, no one is seeing reparations in Flint,” adds her fellow activist and Flint resident, Melissa Mays. Democracy Now! first spoke to the two organizers in 2016 in our documentary, “Thirsty for Democracy: The Poisoning of an American City.”
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Security
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Italian malware developer Hacking Team began making headlines in 2014. Infections uncovered by researchers at Toronto’s Citizen Lab and Russia’s Kaspersky Lab were traced back to servers located in the United States, Canada, UK, and Ecuador. The US servers topped the list. The second place finisher, however, was Kazakhstan.
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On July 1st 2017, exactly five years ago today, the OSS-Fuzz project “adopted” curl into their program and started running fuzz tests against it.
OSS-Fuzz is a project run by Google and they do fuzzing on a large amount of open source projects: OSS-Fuzz aims to make common open source software more secure and stable by combining modern fuzzing techniques with scalable, distributed execution.
That initial adoption of curl into OSS-Fuzz was done entirely by Google themselves and its fuzzing integration was rough and not ideal but it certainly got the ball rolling.
Later in in the fall of 2017, Max Dymond stepped up and seriously improved the curl-fuzzer so that it would better test protocols and libcurl options deeper and to a higher degree. (Max subsequently got a grant from Google for his work.)
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If you are using software or operating systems in your business that are at the fourth stage of the life cycle phase, you may not be able update them as the manufacturer stops releasing security patches. But you’ll still need support. If you’re a CentOS user facing CentOS 7 EOL, you can still find support and security for the products that have an end-of-life date of 2024.
Firms such as TuxCare are helping Linux users with issues in security, stability, and support.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The answer is no. And in an amicus brief EFF intends to file today in Colorado, we explain why these searches are totally incompatible with constitutional protections for privacy and freedom of speech and expression.
The case is People v. Seymour, and it is perhaps the first U.S. case to address the constitutionality of a keyword warrant. The case involves a tragic home arson in which several people died. Police didn’t have a suspect, so they used a keyword warrant to ask Google for identifying information on anyone and everyone who searched for variations on the home’s street address in the two weeks prior to the arson.
Like geofence warrants, keyword warrants cast a dragnet that requires a provider to search its entire reserve of user data—in this case queries by more than one billion Google users. As in this case, the police generally have no identified suspects when they obtain a keyword search warrant. Instead, the sole basis for the warrant is the officer’s hunch that the suspect might have searched for something in some way related to the crime.
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So, should you delete your period tracking app? The short answer is: not necessarily. You may want to review your choice of app, along with other digital practices depending on what kinds of privacy invasions and threats you are most concerned about. Abortion seekers face much more urgent threats right now, and period tracking apps are not at the top of the list of immediate concerns. In the meantime, the companies behind period tracker apps have some serious shaping up to do, and legislators must move forward common-sense privacy legislation to protect not only health-related data but the full range of consumer data that could be weaponized against abortion seekers.
Right now, the most common scenario in which people are criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes is when a third party—like hospital staff, a partner, family member, or someone else they trust—turns them in to law enforcement, who may pressure them into a device search. The most common types of evidence used in the resulting investigations are text messages, emails, browser search histories, and other information that could straightforwardly point to someone’s intention to seek an abortion. This type of criminalization is nothing new, and it has disproportionately affected people of color and people dependent on state resources.
With that immediate scenario in mind, think carefully about who you trust with information about your pregnancy. Use end-to-end encrypted messengers with disappearing messages turned on whenever possible. This functionality is available on both WhatsApp and Signal, and we have step-by-step guides for how to turn it on for Signal on iOS and Android. Refer to our security tips for people seeking an abortion and Surveillance Self-Defense guides for the abortion movement for information about other privacy considerations and steps.
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Make sure you never miss an issue by signing up by email to receive EFFector as soon as it’s posted! Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression.
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A week or two ago we noted how there was a mass panic because TikTok was found to be sharing U.S. user data with executives at the company’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance. This was in stark contrast to the strict, U.S.-based data management controls the company claimed to be implementing, and, to be clear, was not a good thing.
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China is choked by surveillance. It’s everywhere and it touches every aspect of its citizens’ lives. The government uses it to stifle dissent, control the population, and persecute undesirables.
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CUSTOMERS OF SOME phone companies in Germany, including Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom, have had a slightly different browsing experience from those on other providers since early April. Rather than seeing ads through regular third-party tracking cookies stored on devices, they’ve been part of a trial called TrustPid.
TrustPid allows mobile carriers to generate pseudo-anonymous tokens based on a user’s IP address that are administered by a company also named TrustPid. Each user is assigned a different token for each participating website they visit, and these can be used to provide personalized product recommendations—but in what TrustPid calls “a secure and privacy-friendly way.” It’s that “privacy-friendly” part that has raised critics’ hackles.
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Defence/Aggression
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Analyzing the coups that brought to dictatorial power Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799 and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in 1851, Karl Marx made this critically relevant remark: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” We are now confronting a nightmare bequeathed to us from the past – a past informed by the politics of a slave republic. Indeed, this dead weight is about to crush any remaining pretences of a democracy based on majority rule.
Of course, the framers of the US Constitution were both fearful of democracy and wedded to white supremacy. These two overlapping orientations were evident not only in the foundational documents of the new nation, but also bred into the political institutions and traditions that haunt us even today. While the reactionary Republican Party has created even more of a nightmare in contemporary US politics through their manipulation of these institutions, the inability and even unwillingness of the Democratic Party to challenge inherent inequities and antidemocratic nature of these political institutions and traditions only reinforces the dead weight of the past.
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Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kharkiv has been one of the hardest hit cities in Ukraine. Due to regular airstrikes and its proximity to the frontline, blackouts and a nightly curfew have been in effect for months. The authorities have asked residents to avoid turning on the lights in their apartments and the city’s streets are no longer lit. As a result, on a clear night, you can see thousands of stars over the city — and even the Milky Way. Seizing on the opportunity, photographer and astronomy fan Pavlo Pakhomenko captured remarkable snapshots of night-time Kharkiv without light pollution. With the author’s permission, Meduza shares his photos here.
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Journalists from the investigative news site Proekt have analyzed all of the statements made by Russian Defense Ministry representative Igor Konashenkov since the start of the war. They found a number of inconsistencies — specifically regarding the order in which Russia captured Ukrainian territories and the amount of Ukrainian equipment Russia claims to have destroyed.
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Beijing criticized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Thursday after the U.S.-led military alliance asserted that China poses “serious challenges” to global stability.
NATO listed China as one of its priorities in the so-called 2022 Strategic Concept that leaders approved Wednesday at a summit in Madrid. This marked a first, as the alliance’s previous blueprint, published in 2010, made no mention of the East Asian country.
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Increasingly, it seems, Americans have an anger problem. All too many of us now have the urge to use name-calling, violent social-media posts, threats, baseball bats, and guns to do what we once did with persuasion and voting. For example, during the year after Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, threats of violence or even death against lawmakers of both parties increased more than fourfold. And too often, the call to violence seems to come from the top. Recently, defendants in cases involving extremist violence have claimed that an elected leader or pundit “told” them to do it. In a country where a sitting president would lunge at his own security detail in rage, I guess this isn’t so surprising anymore. Emotion rules the American political scene and so many now tend to shoot from the hip without even knowing why.
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The United States announced at a NATO summit in Madrid plans to build a permanent military base in Poland, as it formally invited Sweden and Finland to join the military alliance after they applied for membership in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We look at the impact of prolonged U.S. military presence in Europe and the overemphasis on Russia or China as enemies to the West at a time when threats to Western liberal democracy seem to be primarily internal. The Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven also discusses possibilities for a peace settlement to end the war in Ukraine. “It’s quite impossible now for Russia to win a total victory in Ukraine, but it does also look very unlikely that Ukraine will be able to win a total military victory over Russia,” says Lieven. “We’re going to end up with some sort of compromise.”
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Whichever side you’re on, you
* agree with weapons-maker propaganda that the available actions in the world are (1) war, and (2) doing nothing;
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David Cameron kept bombing Colonel Gaddafi’s forces in Libya after the UK military realised a banned terrorist group stood to gain from regime change.
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Vijay Prashad speaks with Dr. Fred M’membe of the Socialist Party about the reach and impact of the United States Africa Command in Zambia.
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One contingent in these war games will stand out: a lone frigate bearing the name of Antonio Luna, the firebrand Philippine revolutionary army general who led the military resistance against invading US troops during the Philippine-American War. This warship will represent the present-day Philippine armed forces, now allied with, trained, and funded by its former military foe.
Such a paradox, however, does not seem out-of-place in an event such as RIMPAC, whose stated goal is to ensure “the safety of sea lanes and security on the world’s interconnected oceans” by flexing America’s war muscle, intimidating rivals, and reaffirming the subservience of vassal states, particularly the Philippines.
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Environment
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The U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing majority handed down a decision Thursday that will severely limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, undermining the federal government’s ability to combat the climate emergency.
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Progressive lawmakers and activists are demanding an emergency response from the Biden administration and congressional Democrats following Thursday’s 6-3 ruling in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency.
“The Supreme Court will not stand in the way of the fight for a livable planet.”
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The defining moment of The Fighting Soul, Ari Rabin-Havt’s telling of the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, comes but four pages into the preface, with Sanders in an ambulance, having just suffered what will be determined to have been a heart attack. As the then deputy campaign manager is thinking, “There is no way our campaign survives this,”the candidate is asking the EMTs in the ambulance about their job—”Did they have health insurance? How did they view health care in this country?” Never off message!
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Energy
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Climate and conservation groups filed a lawsuit today challenging the Biden administration’s resumption of oil and gas leasing on public lands, the first auction since the president paused leasing shortly after taking office.
The lawsuit challenges the Department of the Interior and U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) approval of today’s oil and gas lease sales in Montana, North Dakota, Nevada and Utah. These lease auctions will be immediately followed by sales in Colorado, New Mexico and Oklahoma and Wyoming. Collectively, these sales will open more than 140,000 acres of public land to fossil-fuel production.
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Should the US approve 25 proposed liquefied methane gas—often referred to as LNG—export terminal projects, we could see an additional 90 million tons of greenhouse gasses (GHG) released into the atmosphere per year, according to a recent analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP). EIP says, “That’s as much climate-warming pollution as from about 18 million gasoline-powered passenger vehicles running for a year—more than from all the cars and trucks in Florida or New York State.”
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The world is experiencing unprecedented fuel price increases, energy blackmail between countries, up to 7 million air pollution deaths per year worldwide and one climate-related disaster after another. Critics contend that a switch to renewable energy to solve these problems will create unstable electricity grids and drive prices up further. However, a new study from my research group at Stanford University concludes that these problems can be solved in each of the 145 countries we examined—without blackouts and at low cost using almost all existing technologies.
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As the U.S. Department of Interior this week resumed lease sales for fossil fuel extraction on public lands in several Western states following a year-and-a-half-long pause on onshore auctions, progressive critics warned Thursday that increasing oil and gas drilling will exacerbate the climate emergency while doing nothing to ease pain at the pump for millions of Americans.
“The more public lands sacrificed to Big Oil, the more economic damage, death, and destruction are baked into our future.”
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A coalition of climate campaigners and progressive congressional allies on Thursday responded to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that drastically limited the government’s authority to reduce greenhouse emissions by urging Congress to expand the high court from nine to 13 justices.
“Congress must act—not just by passing critical climate justice legislation, but by also addressing the six existential threats in judicial robes who brought us this appalling decision.”
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You know things are going just great in crypto-land when a cryptocurrency company has to post a vague cease-and-desist letter to its own blog. Everything about this is bizarre, but it culminated in this very strange cease-and-desist blog post by Nexo.
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Wildlife/Nature
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The Amazon rainforest, our scientists tell us, essentially works as our world’s lungs.
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Finance
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The results were startling, including a significant drop in hospitalizations and an improvement in high school graduation rates. After four years, however, money for the experiment dried up, and this early example of universal basic income (UBI) was nearly forgotten.
Today, such UBI projects have become more commonplace. In the U.S. presidential race in 2020, Andrew Yang made his “freedom dividend” of $1,000 a month a centerpiece of his political campaign. Several pilot projects are up and running in California. In fact, at least 28 U.S. cities currently give out no-strings-attached cash on a regular basis (since the recipients are all low-income, these programs aren’t technically “universal”). In other countries, too, basic income projects have become more popular, including a new citizen’s basic income project in the Brazilian city of Maricá. Basic income programs were in place, briefly, in both Mongolia and Iran. Civil society organizations like the Latin American Network for Basic Income have pushed for change from below.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The decision, delivered with an arrogant casualness before another international sojourn by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, centered on the staffing arrangements for the newly elected independent members of parliament. Prior to getting on a plane, Albanese sent a letter to independent members promising to cut the staffing allocation for crossbench MPs and Senators from eight to five each. Of the five would also be one advisor, down from four in the previous Morrison government.
On the surface, the government did not see it as problematic, because those in government tend to see the absurd as entirely normal. Albanese himself was found defending a series of spurious positions, citing “fairness and equity” and lack of sustainability. In a classic conceptual misunderstanding, the Prime Minister seemed to think that a government backbencher was somehow equivalent to an independent representative. It was not fair, for instance, that the independent MP Zali Steggall “should have double the representation in terms of staff of electorates in the same region.”
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The Democrats in the U.S. Senate have at least temporarily lost their slim-as-could-be majority as Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont heads into surgery Thursday after suffering a broken hip.
A statement from Leahy’s office said the 82-year-old lawmaker “will undergo surgery to repair a broken hip that he suffered as a result from a fall at his house in McLean, Virginia, Wednesday night.”
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Immigrant rights advocates on Thursday welcomed the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of a challenge to the Biden administration’s move to end a Trump-era program under which asylum-seekers arriving at the southwestern border are forced to remain in Mexico while their cases are decided.
“This is a bittersweet victory after so many lives have been lost to atrocious immigration deterrence policies.”
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez applauded President Joe Biden’s endorsement Thursday of a filibuster carveout for legislation to codify abortion rights into federal law, but stressed that much more action is needed from the administration as the Supreme Court and Republican legislatures trample basic constitutional freedoms.
“Now we’re talking!” the New York Democrat tweeted in response to Biden’s remarks to reporters. “Time for people to see a real, forceful push for it. Use the bully pulpit. We need more.”
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As SCOTUS-watchers scrambled to stay abreast of a rush of rulings affecting climate, immigration, Indigenous rights, and other policy areas, the nation’s highest court on Thursday said it would hear oral arguments this October in a case involving a controversial legal theory that one advocacy group says is “threatening the future of voting rights.”
“Today’s news from the U.S. Supreme Court makes one thing clear: This fall, the future of multiracial democracy is at stake.”
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Censorship/Free Speech
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In April, Donald Trump insisted he had no interest whatsoever in getting back on Twitter (in response to questions about whether or not Elon Musk would allow him back, should he ever close his Twitter purchase). In May, Donald Trump lost his lawsuit trying to force Twitter to reinstate him. In June, Donald Trump (who again, insists he wouldn’t even go back to Twitter if he were allowed to) decided to appeal the loss in his lawsuit in order to try to force Twitter to reinstate him.
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The court said that content involving Natalia Denegri, a former socialite trapped in the orbit of football superstar Diego Maradona, fell within the public interest.
The Argentine Supreme Court denied celebrity Natalia Denegri’s petition to have content about a scandal she was involved in more than 25 years ago removed from search engines on Tuesday. It is the first ruling by a Supreme Court in Latin America on the “right to be forgotten,” which allows the public to control their online history.
The decision comes three months after the court listened to arguments about the right to privacy made by Natalia Denegri, and those about freedom of information made by Google. The current case escalated to the highest court after Google previously appealed a ruling in March, after the Buenos Aires Court of Appeals ordered the company to comply with Denegri’s request.
Denegri, a former socialite trapped in the orbit of football superstar Diego Maradona in the late 90s, wanted news articles and YouTube videos removed from search engines concerning a scandal that happened when she was 20. Denegri approached Google in 2016 with a list of 22 links she wanted taken down in Argentina. She was not only a public figure at the time, but the scandal involved a high-profile corruption case, including the involvement of one of Argentina’s top judges. The Court of Appeals ruled that links to the corruption case would be exempt, while the Supreme Court found that all of the links would be exempt.
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More than one million bots have flooded the Instagram accounts of prominent Iranian feminist activists, in a coordinated harassment campaign that started mid-April, according to a new report released by Qurium, a digital forensics nonprofit. Almost all the activist accounts are connected to Iran’s #MeToo movement, which rose to the fore of the national conversation in March, after several accusations of sexual harassment and assault in the Iranian film industry made headlines. A number of the accounts have been posting content about sexual abuse allegations in the country over the past few months.
Account holders impacted by the campaign told Rest of World that the deluge of notifications from bots makes it incredibly challenging for them to see comments and DMs from their core audience, making it difficult to accept requests from genuine followers after the holders went private and to focus on their own political work and content. “There is someone who wants to silence you, and I can’t stop thinking about, Who can that be? Why are they here? What do they want to do? What are these bots?” Samaneh Savadi, a prominent Iranian gender equality activist based in the U.K, who has been active in the #MeToo movement, told Rest of World. “It’s that feeling of an invisible enemy. Someone wants to attack me, but I can’t see it; I can’t name and shame it, and therefore, I can’t have a strategy to defend myself.”
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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We’ve written about Rappler, the very successful Filipino investigative news organization founded by reporter Maria Ressa, multiple times over the past few years. Rappler was very critical of the Rodrigo Duterte administration, but it’s reporting was solid. Back in 2018, the Filipino SEC announced that it was going to shut down Rappler, in a move that was clearly political retaliation for Rappler’s reporting.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Fallon caterwauled that I had “authored pieces in various places criticizing [Holder] on civil liberties, relations with law enforcement, civil asset forfeiture and media subpoenas. In the past, Bovard even has articulated a conspiracy theory involving Mr. Holder and the incident at Waco in the 1990s.” (Waco was only “the incident… in the 1990s”? No wonder Fallon loathed me.) Fallon groused, “I don’t understand why USA Today would provide a platform on repeated occasions for his Holder bashing.”
Mastio never flinched. He replied, “As an opinion section, much of what we publish is written by writers with agendas…. Just as our door is open to writers who want to say nasty things about the attorney general, our door is wide open to the attorney general when he wants to write about the top issues of the day.” Mastio also declared, “The guarantor of balance in the opinion section is that we are open to a wide variety of views.”
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As the Supreme Court ends its term, Justice Stephen Breyer is officially retiring, and Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson takes his place as the country’s first Black woman justice, joining a court dominated by conservatives. We speak to ACLU national legal director David Cole about what can be done in the face of lifetime judicial appointments to the nation’s highest court who often rule counter to majority opinion in the country. “This is a radical court that is intruding upon our liberties,” says Cole. “It’s doing it all in the name of a commitment to a historic vision of the Constitution as it was drafted, when it was drafted, and imposing that on the American people, notwithstanding the fact that two centuries have intervened and circumstances are dramatically different today.”
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“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”
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President Joe Biden has reportedly struck a deal with Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to nominate an anti-abortion lawyer to a lifetime federal judgeship in Kentucky, news that comes less than a week after the U.S. Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion.
“Lifetime appointments to federal courts for people with records like Chad Meredith are unacceptable.”
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When I was in my early 20s and naïve, and I would lament petty things to my mother, she would say, “Why don’t you go back and live in Iran for two years, and then let me hear you complain.” It was her attempt to tell me, harshly but lovingly, that we had it good because everything in America was better than the restrictions we had left behind in Iran, especially as women.
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US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas pronounces himself “heartbroken,” but doesn’t seem inclined to apologize for the “unprecedented” operation he launched less than three weeks ago in “an all-of-government effort to attack the smuggling organizations.” As of that time, DHS bragged, nearly 2,000 smugglers had been arrested in the previous eight weeks.
Texas governor Greg Abbott declares that “these deaths are on [US president Joe] Biden” — not because Biden is ultimately responsible for the “unprecedented operation” leading directly to outcomes like this, but because (in Abbott’s vivid imagination, anyway) Biden pursues “open border” policies.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Sudan’s government has shut off the internet across the country ahead of massive protests organized to pressure the military into handing power back to civilian leaders.
Several organizations monitoring internet access across the world confirmed that the internet was severely limited on Thursday morning.
Alp Toker, director of NetBlocks, told The Record that a shutdown order was circulated on Wednesday in anticipation of demonstrations and by Thursday morning, the organization was registering disruptions in connectivity.
The shutdowns were in full force by 8 am local time on Thursday, Toker said.
“[This] has become standard procedure by the post-coup authorities in anticipation of demonstration days — the procedure is straight out of the authoritarian playbook,” Toker explained.
“The shutdown has nation-scale impact and covers both fixed-line and cellular services. While impact isn’t total, the vast majority of users have been sent offline.”
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Gemini* and Gopher
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum b958f79c9d1bfbe08aa43769f9075da9
The Campinos Blowback
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: As predicted, people are infuriated by the decision of the Administrative Council to give Campinos several more years to destroy the EPO and its reputation (while moreover pushing a totally illegal and unconstitutional patent court system, which severely harms the image of the European Union)
THIS morning SUEPO reacted to the news about António Campinos maintaining his position at the EPO. “EPO management should be elected based on merits, not political or financial favours,” Thorsten Bausch (Hoffmann Eitle) wrote. We urge people to read the comments; some of these are very good.
“The EPO is nowadays embracing elements of monarchy like Saudi Arabia and it’s attacking journalists.”The EPO has meanwhile changed the subject again, pushing Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) and other items of the litigation lobby, in two (warning: epo.org link) seprate pages. (warning: epo.org link)
An attempt to distract the public from the anger and rage? Maybe. Hard to prove intent.
Either way, the EPO sends the wrong message again. We have managers at EPO insisting that the Office supports women and gay people, but then they're partnering with Saudi Arabia, which abuses both groups. As we put it earlier this year in response to a similar “press release” from the EPO: “EPO: We Support Women and Gay People, But We Also Support People Who Behead Them (in the Interest of Patent Profits)“
The EPO is nowadays embracing elements of a monarchy like Saudi Arabia and it’s attacking journalists. Like the Saudi regime bribing nations in all sorts of ways, the EPO uses its money (derived from illegal patent grants) to bribe national delegates, NPOs, and sometimes journalists/publishers/scholars too. This results in self-censorship for reasons other than fear.
“EPO is not a monarchy,” someone reminded us, “though it might act like one…”
Who’s going to stop that? █
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