10.08.22

GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ Distrobox Is Basically A Linux Subsystem For Linux – Invidious

    I’ve been wanting to look at distrobox for ages now this is an incredible tool that let’s you easily setup a docker/podman container that tightly integrates into your host system allowing you install apps from any distro around and run them including GUI apps.

  • Full Circle Magazine: Full Circle Weekly News #282

    PeerTube 4.3:

    https://joinpeertube.org/en/news#release-4.3

    The twenty-sixth alpha version of 0 A.D:

    https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-26-zhuangzi/

    Release of CRUX 3.7:

    https://lists.crux.nu/pipermail/crux/2022-September/007229.html

    Release of Shotcut 22.09:

    https://shotcut.org/blog/new-release-220923/

    Bash 5.2:

    https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2022-09/msg00056.html

    KDE Plasma Mobile 22.09:

    https://plasma-mobile.org/2022/09/27/plasma-mobile-gear-22-09/

    Release of Pale Moon 31.3 and SeaMonkey 2.53.14:

    https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=28875&p=232245#p232245

    https://blog.seamonkey-project.org/2022/09/29/seamonkey-2-53-14-is-now-out/

    Beta-auto Ubuntu 22.10:

    https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2022-September/000284.html

    Release of the atomically updated carbonOS 2022.2:

    https://carbon.sh/blog/2022-09-29-release.html

    Microsoft Edge Browser with Built-in VPN:

    https://adguard-vpn.com/en/blog/vpn-built-browser-microsoft.html

    Debian proprietary firmware in installation media:

    https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2022/10/msg00000.html

  • Video ☛ Creepy bear, Steam Deck, Eggs and more – A Trendy Talk. – Invidious

  • Video ☛ Students Refuse To Give Up Phones In School – Invidious

    This morning I read a news story that absolutely horrified me. A high school in my area had all of their students walkout in protest of the school’s new ban on mobile phones during class. Apparently, this is going on in many schools all over the world…

  • E56: Add GraphQL APIs to Your Data with Hasura

    Rajoshi Ghosh & Tanmai Gopal are the Co-founders of Hasura, the platform to create GraphQL APIs with your data.

  • E55: Backend-as-a-Service with ChiselStrike

    Glauber Costa is Founder & CEO of ChiselStrike, the backend-as-a-service platform. Their core technology is open source – and also called ChiselStrike.

• Applications

  • Medevel ☛ WriteFreely: Clutter-free Self-hosted Blogging Platform for Writers

    Written in the Go programming language to offer the best performance, WriteFreely is a lightweight blogging system aimed for hobby and professional writers.

    WriteFreely supports Markdown syntax out-of-box, and offers a distraction-free interface with a limited clutter.

  • Gajim 1.5.2 – Gajim

    Gajim 1.5.2 brings another performance boost, better emojis, improvements for group chat moderators, and many bug fixes. Thank you for all your contributions!

• Instructionals/Technical

  • The New Stack ☛ How to Deploy Containers with nerdctl – The New Stack

    How many ways can you deploy a container? Shall we count them?

    Seriously, we don’t have all day.

    Really, there are more ways to deploy containers than I can count on my hands. For some, that might be a bit of an overkill situation. For those who like options, however, the idea that there are so many deployment methods is a big plus.

    To those who fall into that category, let me add yet another method to your ever-growing pile of possibilities. Said method is by way of nerdctl.

    How can you resist that name? You can’t, that’s how.

  • Ubuntubuzz ☛ LibreOffice Calc: Pivot Table Made Easy

    This tutorial will show you how to create Pivot Table using LibreOffice Calc — the complete, free spreadsheet program for everyone. We will learn with examples and pictures by using a simple sales table to create sales report with multiple pivot tables we want. Now let’s exercise!

  • Real Linux User ☛ Available now – my book – Linux for the rest of us – Real Linux User

    In my previous blog post, I already shared that my first book would almost be available for sale. This week I received my proof print for a final review and now it’s finally here. As of today, my book “Linux for the rest of us” is available worldwide through Amazon in both physical and digital formats.

  • Data Swamp ☛ Linux NILFS file system: automatic continuous snapshots

    Today, I’ll share about a special Linux file system that I really enjoy. It’s called NILFS and has been imported into Linux in 2009, so it’s not really a new player, despite being stable and used in production it never got popular.

    In this file system, there is a unique system of continuous checkpoint creation. A checkpoint is a snapshot of your system at a given point in time, but it can be deleted automatically if some disk space must be reclaimed. A checkpoint can be transformed into a snapshot that will never be removed.

    This mechanism works very well for workstations or file servers on which redundancy is nonexistent, and on which backups are done every day/weeks which give room for unrecoverable mistakes.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install VSCodium on Debian 11 [Ed: Bad idea to use this because it helps Microsoft's proprietary userbase]

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Akademy 2022 | espidev

      This year, I had the amazing opportunity to attend Akademy in person (@ Barcelona) for the first time!

      For context, I first started contributing to Plasma Mobile in 2020, right around when easily testable hardware (ex. PinePhone) was taking shape. I originally started with some contributions to some applications to learn Qt and C++, but have since then taken more responsibility with tasks from all around the software stack.

    • Linuxiac ☛ KaOS 2022.10 Released, Dracut Replaces Mkinitcpio

      KaOS 2022.10 comes with an improved Calamares installer and has moved to Dracut as the new initramfs infrastructure.

      KaOS is an independent rolling-release distribution inspired by Arch Linux and entirely focused on the KDE Plasma Desktop and related Qt Toolkit-based software.

      It uses Pacman as its package manager but does not rely on software repositories developed and maintained by Arch Linux. Instead, the software is available from in-house repositories and is built exclusively for 64-bit machines.

      KaOS 2022.10 is the sixth update in this year’s 2022 series for this Linux distro. So, let’s have a look at what’s new.

    • Physical Akademy 2022 in Barcelona – Kai Uwe’s Blog

      I just returned from this year’s KDE Akademy in Barcelona. After two years of only virtual sprints it has been great to finally meet up with many fellow KDE friends, most of which I haven’t seen since 2019, and also get to know some of the faces of people that have joined in-between.

      Whenever I’m using the public WiFi somewhere, I feel like there should be a hint in the network Plasmoid about logging into the captive portal. There is a persistent notification when connecting but once you close it, you can’t get it back. For implementing this, I wanted to use the NetworkConnectivity enum from our networkmanager-qt Framework. In the early days of QtQuick, however, we typically created a wrapper class for exposing enums to QML, which meant having to sync up two separate implementations.

      Qt’s tooling has evolved a lot since and nowadays it’s possible to register namespaces, too. To do so, you need to add the Q_NAMESPACE macro and annotate the enums using Q_ENUM_NS. In the networkmanager-qt case, there was a catch, though: the namespace’s meta object had to be exported since plasma-nm is a separate project. That’s what the Q_NAMESPACE_EXPORT macro is for: once added, I could just register the enum to the QML engine and use it directly from the Plasmoid UI.

    • Linuxiac ☛ Control Centre Is a New KDE Widget Inspired by macOS

      The Control Centre widget for the KDE desktop lets you quickly toggle among settings such as Network, Bluetooth, Media Playback, and more.

      KDE Plasma is a desktop environment that stands out for its nearly limitless customization options. Combined with its sleek and modern user interface, these characteristics have made it a popular choice among Linux users.

      Plasma widgets are UI elements, little pieces of software, that provide a variety of features and boost user productivity.

      Control Centre, the new kid on the block among KDE widgets, is something Plasma desktop users have been waiting for for some time. Well, now it’s a fact. So, let’s see what it has to offer.

    • Planck and QMK – Ignorance is bliss…

      Over the past two years I tried out a few different keyboards for fun.

      I started with common form factors like TKL boards, went over 75% boards like the Q1 and then to a 60% HHKB.

      For typing feel, the HHKB is really amazing, but unfortunately the programmable features of a stock HHKB board are very limited.

    • Translations available for KDE unstable packages | dennogumi.org

      As many readers of this blog are aware, openSUSE has been offering packages of git snapshots from KDE since quite a while. They are quite useful for those wiling to test, report bugs, and / or hack on the code, but also for those who want to see what’s brewing in KDE land (without touching their existing systems). However, a major drawback for non English speakers was the lack of translations.

      [...]

      KDE translations are not hosted on the community’s git repositories, but are instead stored in KDE’s SVN server. The main reason they were not moved to git was to preserve the existing workflows of the translation teams (who might not be as technical as the actual hackers). Translations are then placed in tarballs at the times of betas / RCs / releases.

      This unfortunately means that having a git checkout, like what the OBS does when building the unstable packages, will not carry any translations whatsoever. Worse, existing -lang packages for stable versions will raise dependency problems if present (because they require the exact same version of their corresponding binary paclage).

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Make Use Of ☛ Manage GNOME Extensions Like a Pro With Extension Manager

      
      The free and open-source GNOME desktop environment has long supported extensions, which expand on what the interface can do. But for years, GNOME didn’t do a great job of helping you find and install these extensions. The process involved going to a website, installing a Firefox extension, and crossing your fingers.

      Now there’s an app that takes all the pain out of the process. Extension Manager vastly simplifies the experience of discovering, installing, and managing GNOME extensions. This one app can make using GNOME extensions a joyful experience.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Liam Proven ☛ I’ve been playing with OS/2 again — more on that soon — but it was doomed from a young age

  OS/2 2.0 came out in April 1992.
  Windows 3.0 came out in May 1990, 2 whole years earlier. It already had established an ecosystem before 32-bit OS/2 appeared.

  Secondly, OS/2 2 really wanted a 386DX and 4MB of RAM, and a quality PC with quality name-brand parts. I owned it. I ran it on clones. I had to buy a driver for my mouse. From another CONTINENT.

  Windows 3.0 ran on any old random junk PC, even on a PC XT class box with EGA. At first only high-end users of high-end executive-class workstations got the fun of 386 Enhanced Mode, but that was all OS/2 2.0 could run on at all.

  OS/2 died when OS/2 1.x was a high-end OS with low-end features, and a cheapo low-end 386SX PC with 1 or 2MB of RAM, with MS-DOS and DESQview (not DESQview/X, just plain old text-mode DESQview) could outperform it.

  (Remember the 386SX came out in 1988 and was common by the time Windows 3.0 shipped.)

  But as soon as OS/2 1.x was a flop, MS turned its attention back to Windows, and before even the first betas of Windows 3.0, there were rumours in the tech press that MS was going to abandon the project. This was widely discussed in the media at the time.
  In my then-job, around 1989, my boss sent me on a training course for 3Com’s new NOS, 3+Open, which was based on OS/2 1.0.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Make Use Of ☛ EuroLinux: An Enterprise-Grade Linux Distro Based on RHEL

    EuroLinux is a free-to-use RHEL-based Linux distribution, similar to CentOS and AlmaLinux, specifically geared toward businesses.

    Linux distributions are widely known to cater to every type of user out there. EuroLinux is no surprise, as it supports enterprise-wide usage, making it ideal for offices, companies, public institutions, and private users.

    Based on the RHEL source code, EuroLinux has often been on top of its game since its launch in 2013. If you are an avid user of Windows or macOS, you will feel right at home with EuroLinux.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • The Register UK ☛ RISC-V’s greatest ally in the datacenter might be China

  • SparkFun Electronics ☛ On The Shoulders of Giants

    This week, Sparkfun launched our 2022 special edition board – the Constellation MicroMod Kit. It makes for a fun backdrop or might remind you of the night sky, but humanity has a long history of scientific discovery that started just by looking up, and that spirit has continued to live on in those of you out there who use our products to discover things about the world around you.

  • SparkFun Electronics ☛ What’s Your Favorite Constellation?

  • SparkFun Electronics ☛ Kit Up with Machinechat

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Google Play Store 32.6.15 version is up for Android – Huawei Central

  • Android Central ☛ Google is keeping some of Android’s best features behind a Pixel paywall | Android Central

  • Android Police ☛ Tackle food waste with these environmentally-friendly Android apps

  • SlashGear ☛ Here’s How To Find Your Downloaded Files On Android Phones

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

  • Linux Phone Apps ☛ New apps of LinuxPhoneApps.org, Q3/2022 – 400! 🎉 | LinuxPhoneApps

    It’s October, its time for another quarterly update! Let’s get started with some good news: LinuxPhoneApps.org now lists over 400 apps, and hit the 400 apps milestone before the end of the quarter. Now how did we get there?

    [...]

    Overall, maintenance could be better. Sadly my personal life has changed in ways that I (linmob) have a lot less time to maintain the listings – and at the same time, with more and more listings, there are more projects to watch and maintain. This requires better tooling (e.g., a checker for dead links, or a simple way to follow project releases / commits on “unreleased” projects via RSS/ATOM feeds), that’s almost impossible to build for me in the few scraps of time I have in an average work week.

    Sadly, due to spammers, framagit has enabled account moderation – signing up for a new account is not instantaneous and may take days. But you can of still contribute quickly: Just clone the repo, create a patch and send it to our devel mailing list!

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• PowerDNS ☛ First Beta Release of PowerDNS Recursor 4.8.0 | PowerDNS Blog

  We are proud to announce the first beta release of PowerDNS Recursor 4.8.0.

• PowerDNS ☛ First release candidate for Authoritative Server 4.7.0 | PowerDNS Blog

  This is the first release candidate for Authoritative Server 4.7.0. We hope it will also be the last

  4.7.0 brings support for Catalog Zones, developed by Kees Monshouwer. As part of that development, the freshness checks in the Primary code were reworked, reducing them from doing potentially thousands of SQL queries (if you have thousands of domains) to only a few. Installations with lots of domains will benefit greatly from this, even without using catalog zones.

  4.7.0 also brings back GSS-TSIG support, previously removed for quality reasons, now reworked with many stability improvements.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Windows High Contrast Improvements

    Spent a little time this week to explore our Windows accessibility High Contrast support because I was working on a GTK High Contrast issue by coincidence when xisco mentioned the Windows one in the regular ESC.

• Programming/Development

  • Jamie Brandon ☛ 0028: HYTRADBOI jam, sqllogictest in a week, how safe is zig again, rr on alder lake, google maps jank, links

    Typing is still a bottleneck. I make a lot of errors. Correcting the errors sometimes breaks my concentration, and then take a while to recover what I was doing. I’m particularly bad around special characters. Some of this is caused by my new laptop having a slightly different keyboard layout. It might be worth spending a few minutes a day working on typing exercises, focused on the keys that are in different places or have different shapes on my new keyboard.

  • D Lang ☛ DIP1000: Memory Safety in a Modern Systems Programming Language Part 2

    The previous entry in this series shows how to use the new DIP1000 rules to have slices and pointers refer to the stack, all while being memory safe. But D can refer to the stack in other ways, too, and that’s the topic of this article.

  • Francesco Mazzoli ☛ Lánczos interpolation explained

    When you resize, rotate, or in any way transform an image; or more generally when you resample some discrete signal, the software you are using must _interpolate_ between the discrete points to produce a result.

  • Mastering Debugging in R

    One major thing that I learned throughout the years is the power of debugging. Irrespective of the programming language I use, debugging is for me key when it comes to understanding the functionality of code (also for code written by someone else). One of the very first steps when digging into a new coding basis is always turning the debugging mode on – it guides you so nicely through the functions that were written (and that show you how they are connected)

  • Just commit more!

    Over new years this past year I made dura. It’s like auto-backup for Git. It tries to stay out of the way until you’re in a panic, trying to figure out how to rescue your repository from a thoughtless git reset –hard. It makes background commits, real Git commits that you don’t normally have to see in the log, by committing to a different branch than the one you have checked out. Overall, it’s been a blast. I’ve learned a lot from the contributors, like how to write well-formed Rust as well as a bit about Nix.

    One recurring quesion has been, “why don’t you just commit more”?

  • choroplethr 3.7.1 is now on CRAN – AriLamstein.com

    When I took my first software engineering job at Electronic Arts 20 years ago someone told me “More time is spent maintaining old software than writing new software.” Since my project at the time (“Spore”) was brand new, and I was writing brand new code for it, I found that hard to believe. My experience with my R package choroplethr, however, has proven that saying to be correct.

    A few weeks ago CRAN emailed me saying they detected minor problems in an HTML file in the package, and asked me to fix them. Since I had not touched the package in over two years, and the error seemed minor, I ignored the message. I also ignored their followup message. They then sent me an email saying that if I did not fix the issue they would archive the package. That got my attention.

  • rstudio::glimpse() Newsletter – RStudio

    So many new learning resources have been created this month! There’s information on tools, deploying models, Quarto presentations and blogs, neat tables and so much more. I love how these show so many different types of things you can do, because with code, so much is possible. That combination of learning what you can do, and the ‘how-tos’ of creation, give us the ability to use data to answer the questions we have. I’m so excited to see everyone continue to explore what’s possible.

  • Do you need a Strong Leader?

    “Strong” is often used as a metaphor for capable, competent, effective leadership.

    Strength is not always the most helpful metaphor for leadership skills.

    Listen to how people describe strong leaders, sometimes there are connotations at odds with effective leadership. Sometimes even hints of toxic masculinity. What does it say about our gender biases that we so often use strength as a metaphor for leadership effectiveness?

    If you stopped pouring petrol onto the fires, maybe you would not need such experienced firefighters.

    [...]

    “We need a strong leader” implies “we need a different leader”.

    What is causing the current leadership (whether vested in a single person explicitly or distributed) to be inadequate?

    Changing or adding one person with authority can be a quick fix, but isn’t guaranteed to work; especially if you don’t have a diagnosis that explains the need for a new leader. Do you really need a superhero to save you?

    What are your best hopes for what a new leader will do? What stops you doing those without them?

  • Gentoo ☛ Clang in Gentoo now sets default runtimes via config file – Michał Górny

    The upcoming clang 16 release features substantial improvements to configuration file support. Notably, it adds support for specifying multiple files and better default locations. This enabled Gentoo to finally replace the default-* flags used on sys-devel/clang, effectively empowering our users with the ability to change defaults without rebuilding whole clang.

    This change has also been partially backported to clang 15.0.2 in Gentoo, and (unless major problems are reported) will be part of the stable clang 15.x release (currently planned for upcoming 15.0.3).

    In this post, I’d like to shortly describe the new configuration file features, how much of them have been backported to 15.x in Gentoo and how defaults are going to be selected from now on.

  • Linux On Mobile ☛ LINMOB.net – Contributing for (advanced?) Dummies

    I vaguely recalled that Tokodon had had one bug that really annoyed me when I had last tried it a few weeks or months ago, and when using it I noticed that it was still there – unsurprisingly since I never had reported it: When composing a toot, the text would not wrap when reaching the end of the text field, but go on and on unless you would add a manual line break, which then would look bad in the resulting toot unless I would remove them.

    Since I keep hitting any character limit a service has, I, unsurprisingly, was more likely to run into this than others. I was annoyed, but when I first encountered it while briefly trying out Plasma Mobile on the Pocophone F1 on a release that wasn’t the latest, I just lazy-searched the project, did not find any issue or merge request on the topic and went “well, surely this is fixed in the latest release, I don’t want to annoy people”.

    I then later discovered that this wasn’t the case when re-evaluating Tokodon after Tootle’s archival. So I figured: Ok, time to file an issue – but how do I describe this? I could not find the word, was stuck in my native German, thinking “Was heißt Zeilenumbruch auf Englisch?”

  • Steve Kemp ☛ Steve Kemp: Trivial benchmarks of toy languages

    In the real world? It just doesn’t matter. For me. But I was curious, so I hacked up a simple benchmark of calculating 12! (i.e. The factorial of 12).

    The specific timings will vary based on the system which runs the test(s), but there’s no threading involved so the relative performance is probably comparable.

    Anyway the benchmark is simple, and I did it “fairly”. By that I mean that I didn’t try to optimize any particular test-implementation, I just wrote it in a way that felt natural.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Eagle’s Path: Tie::ShadowHash 2.01 (2022-10-08)

      Tie::ShadowHash is a small Perl module that allows one to stack an in-memory modifiable hash on top of a read-only hash obtained from anywhere you can get a hash in Perl (including a tied hash), functioning much like an overlay file system with the same benefits.

  • Rust

    • Linux Links ☛ 9 Top Free and Open Source Rust Frontend Web Frameworks – LinuxLinks

      “We need a strong leader” implies “we need a different leader”.

      What is causing the current leadership (whether vested in a single person explicitly or distributed) to be inadequate?

      Changing or adding one person with authority can be a quick fix, but isn’t guaranteed to work; especially if you don’t have a diagnosis that explains the need for a new leader. Do you really need a superhero to save you?

      What are your best hopes for what a new leader will do? What stops you doing those without them?

• Standards/Consortia

  • Patrick Breyer ☛ Pirates: Common charger a win for users and the environment

    Today, Members of the European Parliament approved the outcome of the trilogue negotiations on the Common Charger directive. A strong position of the European Parliament warrants that in addition to mobile phones, the USB Type-C cable will become the common charging port for other small and medium-sized portable electronic devices by autumn 2024, and by spring 2026 for larger ones, as well.

Leftovers

• Tedium ☛ Getting A-head of The Season

  Most of us probably don’t remember too many of our middle school reading assignments. Among that pile of forgotten homework and pristine storybooks probably resides an old short story called The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (sometimes erroneously referred to as The Headless Horseman). Whether you read it or not, you may have at least seen the old cartoon version or otherwise discovered it another way—even if it was via that bizarre Tim Burton film. One way or another, the Headless Horseman myth has perpetuated itself into the pop culture of the twenty-first century. The hideous supernatural creature that so terrified poor Ichabod Crane is rooted in reality. The Headless Horseman story continues to live in our collective memories even today. But Washington Irving’s macabre tale—or at least the creature playing the titular role—has its origins in folklore. In today’s Tedium, we’re dissecting an ancient legend, and some of the pop culture it helped to create. So hang on to your hats (if you’ve got ‘em) because today we’re exploring the real story of The Headless Horseman

• Security

  • Hacker News ☛ Hackers Exploiting Unpatched RCE Flaw in Zimbra Collaboration Suite

    A severe remote code execution vulnerability in Zimbra’s enterprise collaboration software and email platform is being actively exploited, with no patch currently available to remediate the issue.

    [...]

    Zimbra said it expects the vulnerability to be addressed in the next Zimbra patch, which will remove the dependency on cpio and instead make pax a requirement. However, it has not offered a specific timeframe by when the fix will be available.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Michael West Media ☛ Will a body with teeth bite off more than we can chew? – Michael West

    A bit of sunlight to disinfect our politics. Or the star chamber in friendly garb? While the pros of adding another layer to the oversight of our MPs seem obvious, Mark Sawyer sees a few cons, particularly the demise of deal-making.

    The wait is over. The federal integrity watchdog is coming. Three decades after the Independent Commission Against Corruption in NSW introduced the concept to Australia, the NACC (National Anti-Corruption Commission) is finally coming to Canberra.
    The body has long been advocated by the growing numbers of cross-bench MPs (Greens and independents). It was backed by the Labor opposition, so it became inevitable once Anthony Albanese’s ALP unseated the Coalition government on May 21.

• Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Michael Geist ☛ The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 141: Why the Online News Act is a Bad Solution to a Real Problem, Part Five – My Appearance Before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage

      The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage launched its hearings on the Online News Act (Bill C-18) with a pair of hearings late last month. At this stage, it remains unclear whether the committee will undertake the extensive study the bill deserves. I appeared in the very first hearing, using my opening statement to touch on four key concerns: the definition of “use”, government intervention, the risk of increased misinformation, and the breaches of Canada’s trade and treaty obligations. Coinciding with National Newspaper Week, this week’s Law Bytes podcast features an introduction to the bill and audio clips from the appearance. The podcast can be downloaded here, accessed on YouTube, and is embedded below. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcast, Google Play, Spotify or the RSS feed. Updates on the podcast on Twitter at @Lawbytespod.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Why the Online News Act is a Bad Solution to a Real Problem, Part Six: CBC Eligibility Harms News Competition and Its Public Interest Mandate

      The blog series on why Bill C-18, the Online News Act, is a bad solution to a real problem continues with the first of several posts on the eligibility rules, starting with the decision to make the CBC eligible for the system that could lead to mandated payments. The inclusion of the public broadcaster should be opposed by its critics and supporters since it harms both competition and the public interest role of the public broadcaster. Indeed, critics will rightly note the market distortion it creates for private entities who stand to lose further advertising-related revenues to the CBC, while supporters should be concerned that the bill undermines the CBC’s claim to a public interest role and makes an ad-free version of the service even less likely. [Previous posts in the series: the risk to the free flow of information stemming from mandatory compensation for linking, how the bill encourages clickbait and other low quality news given the absence of standards in the definition of “news content”, the unprecedented government intervention in a sector where independence is essential, how the bill undermines Canadian copyright law and Canada’s international copyright law obligations, and a Law Bytes podcast episode based on my appearance before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.]

    • Walled Culture ☛ Interview | Glyn Moody: Walled Culture – A Journey Behind the Copyright Bricks – Walled Culture

      Glyn Moody has been writing about copyright, digital rights, and the Internet for 30 years. He is the editor of the Walled Culture project and author of Walled Culture – the Book (freely available as ebook). He previously wrote ‘Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution’. He explains how the Walled Culture project is a reflection on digital copyright going wrong, and how copyright and the Internet have shown to be fundamentally incompatible. Glyn highlights how there’s no escaping copyright in an online world. He shares some copyright absurdities, with big content fighting the visually impaired and initiatives like Project Gutenberg and Google Books. He talks about how Big Content put on shackles on libraries thanks to Digital Rights Management (DRM), and reflects on the injustice of the Big Publishers’ suing the Internet Archive.

      Glyn points out how Big Academic Publishers hijacked the shift towards open access to benefit their bottom line, while pointing out that diamond open access shows that we can move away from the academic publishing business. He recalls how Big Record Labels went on a rampage, suing grandmothers and children, neglecting the opportunity to give consumers what they wanted. Glyn describes Big Content’s push for copyright enforcement, from the French three strikes mechanism to the SOPA and ACTA battles, while emphasising how copyright laws got skewed towards Big Content. He talks about the failures surrounding the EU Copyright Directive and the looming dangers of upload filters. He further highlights how copyright no longer promotes culture but harms it, and how it’s about protecting Big Content, not creators. Glyn concludes by reflecting on a possible way forward: building on creators’ true fans.

    • Walled Culture ☛ Ed Sheeran must face yet another music copyright trial, even more outrageous than the others

      Back in April, Walled Culture wrote about Ed Sheeran’s victory in a case alleging copyright infringement. Unfortunately, the copyright world’s obsession with ownership means that Sheeran can’t simply relax now. In fact, he has already been hit with another lawsuit. What makes this case worse is that it is alleged he copied his hit song “Thinking out loud” not from a living artist, but from “Let’s get it on”, by Marvin Gaye, who died in 1984.

    • Walled Culture ☛ Coming soon: the next phase of copyright maximalism – destroying the public domain

      The public domain is the natural state of creative material. It’s where creations end up once copyright’s monopoly has expired. Crucially, it is the quid pro quo for that monopoly. The deal is that the creator of a work is granted a government-enforced intellectual monopoly for a limited period, after which the work enters the public domain for anyone to use for any purpose, including commercial ones. That’s the bargain, but it seems that the copyright maximalists in the French Parliament want to renege on it.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Politics

  • UN 2050

    I see that the UN is setting goals for 2050 💁🏻‍♀️ How cute ♥

    In this case it’s a zero greenhouse goal for all world-wide air travel by 2050 (somehow also gonna fix the issue that releasing stuff at that altitude, even if it would’ve normally been released at ground level, such as decomposing or burning plants, is extra warming.

    They’re also betting on tech that doesn’t exist yet to come save us. Why not, then, hold off on their flights until that mythical tech exists? This is something I see again and again and again: “In the future there will be a safe way to do it so let’s do it now 😜” “Oh, I see potato chips are gonna be on sale next Saturday so let’s buy some bags now!” It’s beyond wrong. Of course, it’s wrong like a fox because they don’t really believe that the tech is gonna come. They’re just kidding themselves (and the public) so they can keep flying.

    All this 2030, 2050 stuff is cheaper than cheap since it’s all talk. I wanna see “OK, starting next month, we will…” I wanna see changes in our present time.

• Technical

  • Simpler Linux self-hosting with tmux and bubblewrap

    Let’s say you want to self-host a Gemini capsule and a weblog. Maybe you’ll use a Raspberry Pi or VPS server. Typically, you’d install (or get a pre-installed) operating system, like Debian/Ubuntu. You might then `apt install` a webserver like nginx, and `pip3 install` a Gemini server like JetForce.

  • Why it’s OK that PGP sucks

    Don’t get me wrong; if you’re in a position to make email encryption work better, please keep up the good work.

    It’s just that if you’ve heard the cool kids say “I have such-and-such super supreme secure cipher app, that’s what people should use for communication, and email shall be insecure”, I’m like… what I hear is someone saying “I’ve got locks on my house so I don’t need to wear pants in public”. It’s kind of a non-sequiteur. Of course we want secure email.

    A couple of really good things have happened since the era of PGP. Remember, PGP preceded SSL and TSL (and with them HTTPS). It was released in 1991 when an email was less secure than a postcard. Everyone could read everything, and spoof as anyone.

  • Science

    • Re: Pocket Calculator

      evenfire likes calculators

      And so do I.

      In high school I had a math teacher, Mr Anderson, who no one liked. He looked like he was right out of IBM or NASA wearing dress slacks, a white button down short sleeve shirt and a pocket protector. He had been a math teacher for so long he actually taught my dad. While most people hated his class, he was one of the reasons I love math and spent half my time in college in math classes.

  • Announcements

    • Finally Solving TLGS Socket Descriptor Leak

      After months of on and off work, I finally figured out what’s causing TLGS’ crawler to experience socket leak. I’ve a gemlog 4 months ago[1] detailing how I solved it. Well, kinda. I found a misuse of `shared_ptr` and timers causing references to TCP connections not released properly. Solving that drastically reduces how fast open socket count grows – that still makes no sense, but good enough for the time. Sockets should not be growing as I limit the crawler to 16 or 24 concurrent connections at a time in production.

  • Programming

    • The stupid socket file descriptor leak in Dremini

      TLGS’[1] crawler has had a crashing issue from the very beginning. The crawler tries to open too many sockets at the same time with the error message “sockets::createNonblockingOrDie: too many open sockets”. The crawl dispatcher already limited how many concurrent craws can happen at any time. First I thought it was because I make the dispatcher lock free and I screwed up, but no edge cases were discovered after days of simulation and testing. So I made a compermise, the crawler would count open sockets periondically and wait for some to close before continuing asynchronously. Just so I can still claim everything is still lock free. That solves the crawler crashing, but in return the crawler hangs after some time. It’s apparent this is due to some sockets not closing, thus it never drop below the threshold to continue crawling. It’s much less often so I took it and just restart the crawler every time it hangs.

    • Security bug in diohsc versions earlier than 0.1.12

      Today I noticed a very stupid security bug in my Gemini client, diohsc, which could potentially be used to circumvent TOFU and run a MitM attack.

      If you use diohsc, please upgrade to the latest version (0.1.12); typically you can do this by running “cabal update && cabal install diohsc”.