10.10.22

GNU/Linux

• Kernel Space

  • The Register UK ☛ Linus Torvalds’s faulty RAM slows kernel development • The Register

    If the next version of the Linux kernel emerges a little slower than usual, blame a dodgy DIMM in Linus Torvalds’s AMD Threadripper-powered PC and the vagaries of the memory market.

    In a post responding to a kernel developer inquiring if he had missed a Git Pull, Torvalds on Sunday revealed the request was still in his queue as “I’m doing merges (very slowly) on my laptop, while waiting for new ECC memory DIMMs to arrive.”

    Torvalds needs the DIMMs because over the last few days he experienced what he described as “some instability on my main desktop the … with random memory corruption in user space resulting in my allmodconfig builds randomly failing with internal compiler errors etc.”

    The Linux boss’s first thought was that a new kernel bug had caused the problem – which isn’t good but sometimes happens.

    His instinct was wrong.

    “It was literally a DIMM going bad in my machine randomly after 2.5 years of it being perfectly stable,” he wrote. “Go figure. Verified first by booting an old kernel, and then with memtest86+ overnight.”

• Instructionals/Technical

  • TecMint ☛ [Reposted as new] mStream – A Personal Streaming Server to Stream Music from Anywhere

    mStream is a free, open-source, and cross-platform personal music streaming server that lets you sync and stream music between all your devices. It consists of a lightweight music streaming server written with NodeJS; you can use it to stream your music from your home computer to any device, anywhere.

    Importantly, mStream Express is a special version of the server that comes with all the dependencies pre-packaged and in this article, we will explain how to install and use mStream to stream your home music anywhere from Linux.

  • TecMint ☛ Useful Tools to Monitor and Debug Disk I/O Performance in Linux

    A key performance metric to monitor on a Linux server is disk I/O (input/output) activity, which can significantly impact several aspects of a Linux server, particularly the speed of saving to or retrieval from disk, of files or data (especially on database servers). This has a ripple effect on the performance of applications and services.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install SMPlayer on AlmaLinux 9

    As the world of technology becomes increasingly complex, it can be hard to keep up with the latest software trends. However, one Program that has stood the test of time is SMPlayer. This free, open-source media player was first released in 2006, and it has since become a favorite among users thanks to its simple interface and powerful features. One of the most popular features of SMPlayer is its ability to play a wide range of audio and video formats. It also comes with a host of other features, such as support for subtitles, an equalizer, and a skins system that allows users to customize the player’s look.

    The following tutorial will teach you how to install SMPlayer AlmaLinux 9 using one of the two third-party repositories RPM Fusion Free or Flatpak package manager, with the command line terminal.

  • Linux Nightly ☛ Install GUI on Ubuntu 22.04 Server & Desktop

    Although GNOME is the default GUI, there are many different desktop environments available for Ubuntu. If you want to try a different desktop environment, or need to install a GUI because you don’t have one yet, we’ll show you how in this guide.

    These instructions will also work for Ubuntu Server, which doesn’t have a GUI by default and only uses the command line.

  • uni Toronto ☛ Linux NFS clients (normally) make only one TCP connection to each fileserver

    Suppose that you have a Linux NFSv3 client that mounts a large number of filesystems from a much smaller number of fileservers, which naturally means it mounts a bunch of filesystems from each fileserver. Modern NFS is TCP based, and TCP requires one or more connections in order to make things go. In this situation, you might wonder how many connections the kernel makes; for example, is it one connection per filesystem, or one connection per N filesystems, or so on.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Python 3.8 on Linux Mint 21 LTS

    Python 3.8 is an LTS release that is currently receiving security-only updates of the Python programming language that is now. It was released on October 14, 2019. Python 3.8 includes several new features and improvements from its predecessor, such as support for assignment expressions, improved type checking, and more.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Linux Kernel 6.0 on Rocky Linux 9

    Rocky Linux, as many know, focuses on stability, which often means it is incredibly stable but usually has very outdated packages in terms of new features, such as the latest mainline stable Linux Kernel. Currently, Rocky Linux features kernel 5.14, but some users may require a more recent kernel for better hardware compatibility, among many other things.

  • Linux Nightly ☛ How to Move a User’s Home Directory on Linux

    A home directory is a user’s default directory when they log into Linux. It’s normally created automatically inside of the /home directory, such as /home/username. In this tutorial, you will learn how to change the home directory for a user in Linux by using the usermod command.

    Step 1. You can alter a home directory with the usermod command and the -d flag. This command must be executed with root permissions. Also keep in mind that the user must be logged out when you are attempting to change their home directory.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to install Spyder IDE on Ubuntu 22.04

    Python is a multipurpose high-level language with which we can create applications of all kinds. But specifically for the scientific section, there is an IDE with which you can take advantage of Python. So, in this post, you will learn how to install Spyder IDE on Ubuntu 22.04.

  • LinuxTechi ☛ How to Pass Command Line Arguments to Bash Script

  • LinuxTechi ☛ How to Dual Boot Linux Mint 21 alongside Windows 11

    In this guide, we explore how you can implement a dual-boot setup of Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa) alongside Windows 11.

    If you are running Windows on your PC and want to try out Linux, one of the options is to install a hypervisor on which you can create and run Linux VMs. While this is okay, it does not allow you to reap the full benefits of your Linux system. This is because some of the features are unavailable or do not work as expected in a virtual environment.

    The other alternative is to install Linux alongside Windows in such a way that only one operating system can run at a time. During boot time, you can choose which OS to login into and run. It’s also worth noting that both systems are installed on separate partitions on the hard drive. As such, no conflict arises between the two systems. This is known as a dual-boot setup and is precisely what we are going to look at.

  • Linux Shell Tips ☛ Install WebSSH to Connect Linux Terminal from Web Browser

    This article guide demonstrates the installation and usage of WebSSH (a web-based SSH client) for users to be able to easily authenticate and connect to SSH servers from web browsers.

    For most Linux users, the traditional approach of connecting to remote servers via an SSH client has always been through a command-line environment. However, WebSSH simplifies client-to-server SSH connection by providing an easy-to-use web interface, which is written in Python and based on xterm.js, paramiko, and tornado.

  • Linux Nightly ☛ How to Check GNOME Version – Linux Nightly

    In this tutorial, you will learn how to check the installed version of GNOME desktop environment on your Linux system. This can be accomplished through command line or via GUI as you will see below.

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ My current little wish-list for Steam Deck upgrades

    The Steam Deck has been out for a while and it’s now easy to purchase with no reservation queue, the long-delayed Steam Deck Docking Station is also here!  Valve has put out a lot of updates but there’s plenty they could improve. Honestly, it’s vastly different to how it felt at release.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Old VCR ☛ Going where BeOS NetPositive hasn’t gone before: NetPositive+

  This is a real 133MHz BeBox running otherwise stock BeOS R5, surfing Hacker News and Lobste.rs using a modified, bug-fixed NetPositive wired to offload encryption to an onboard copy of Crypto Ancienne (see my notes on the BeOS port). NetPositive is the only known browser on the PowerPC ports of BeOS — it’s probably possible to compile Lynx 2.8.x with BeOS CodeWarrior, but I’ve only seen it built for Intel, and Mozilla and Opera were definitely Intel/BONE-only. With hacks for self-hosted TLS bolted on, NetPositive’s not fast but it works, and supports up to TLS 1.2 currently due to BeOS stack limitations.

• Reviews

  • Distro Watch ☛ Review: Ubuntu Unity

    Earlier this year the Unity 7 desktop, which was originally started by Canonical, celebrated its first release in a long time. The desktop environment has found a new lease on life as a community project. Back in May I tried Unity for a few days on Lubuntu to see how it would perform. The experience was largely underwhelming, but it was nice to see someone was making an effort to modernize the Unity 7 desktop environment.

    In early September, I read that Ubuntu Unity, a spin of Ubuntu featuring the updated Unity desktop, may become an official community edition of Ubuntu. I was curious to see how this potential community edition would perform and set about testing the latest release.

    I tried downloading the latest stable release, Ubuntu Unity 22.04.1. Once the download had completed (apparently successfully) I ran its checksum and found the download was corrupted. I erased the original ISO file, which is a little over 3GB in size, and tried downloading it again along with its checksum. The transfer was once again corrupted. I’m not sure if the published MD5 was wrong, the file was corrupted on the server, or damaged in transit. However, I decided to look for an alternative.

    I next looked at the next most recent version, 20.04.5, and discovered its directory on the official Ubuntu Unity download mirror was empty. Going down through the list: 20.10 is no longer supported, 21.04 is no longer supported, 21.10 is no longer supported, and 22.04 failed its checksum again. I went back a bit further and found version 20.04.4 was available on the download mirror and the downloaded file passed its MD5 checksum. By process of elimination, this was the version I decided to install and run.

    [...]

    Most of my trial with Ubuntu Unity took place just before the announcement of the new 22.10 Beta release which also let people know this spin was becoming an official community edition of Ubuntu. As a result, the bulk of this review was based on past stable releases rather than the new beta.

    However, in an effort to cover all the bases, I did download the new 22.10 Beta and gave it a whirl. The packages and wallpaper have been updated. However, the same problems remain. Performance is still on the lower end of the scale and almost every time I opened the dash, Unity crashed. Often times launching a program or performing a search resulted in a crash. Adjusting the panel in the Unity settings caused a crash. Browsing directories in the Files utility caused a crash. At one point within the span of five minutes, I managed to cause three desktop crashes, bringing my exploration to a short pause each time.

    I still very much like the overall design of Unity and the way everything is oriented to the upper-left corner of the display, but the state of the implementation (even in the new beta snapshot) is in a poor condition.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 41 [Ed: Site sponsored by IBM for marketing]

    Just a reminder in case you didn’t see it last week: End of Marketing for IBM i 7.3 is 4/28/23 and end of standard support for IBM i 7.3 is 9/30/23. You can read IBM’s support statement about it here and you can see our related coverage on it there.

  • Integrated Does Not Have To Mean Included And Invoiced [Ed: "Let’s start by saying we love that the IBM i system is integrated" but then again IBM pays you to love everything IBM or at least pretend to]

    Let’s start by saying we love that the IBM i system is integrated…

  • Thoroughly Modern: Simplify IBM i Application Management and Extract Key Insights – IT Jungle [Ed: "The media" is so badly bribed that most of the time it's best off just ignored]

    IBM i developers and managers understand all too well that application documentation is often out of date – if it even exists. A study from the Singapore Management University says that developers only spend 5 percent of their time writing new code. They spend 20 percent of their time modifying legacy code, and they spend 60 percent of their time trying to understand the code before they modify it.

  • It’s A Good Thing For IBM That Samsung Makes Chips And Also Runs A Foundry – IT Jungle [Ed: This is a patent hoard, not a charity]

    Over the decades, Big Blue has invested an enormous sum of money – easily equal to hundreds of billions of dollars in inflation adjusted 2022 dollars – to figure out clever ways to etch transistors on silicon wafers and to package them up into chips that it and other companies used in commercial and consumer products. It was a great business right up to the minute it wasn’t, mostly because IBM’s chip volumes were getting smaller and smaller at the same time the cost of creating successively smaller transistors was getting larger and larger.

• Debian Family

  • FOSS Activites in September 2022

    This was my 45th month of actively contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas ‘19! \o/

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Tom’s Hardware ☛ World’s Fastest Supercomputer Can’t Run a Day Without Failure

    While on paper, the Frontier supercomputer looks exceptionally good, and hardware parts of the machine system have been delivered, it seems like problems with hardware keep chasing the machine from coming online and being available to researchers requiring performance of around 1 FP64 ExaFLOPS.

    “We are working through issues in hardware and making sure that we understand (what they are),” said Justin Whitt, program director for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), in an interview with InsideHPC (opens in new tab). “You are going to have failures at this scale. Mean time between failure on a system this size is hours, it’s not days.”

  • CNX Software ☛ Intel Horse Creek platform showcased with SiFive P550 RISC-V CPU, 8GB DDR5, PCIe Gen5 – CNX Software

    When SiFive introduced its Performance P550 64-bit RISC-V processor in 2021, we were told that Intel would use it in the Horse Creek platform with “leading-edge interface IP such as DDR and PCIe” and manufactured with Intel’s 7nm process.

    We now have more details about the Horse Creek platform, as a development board was showcased for the first time in public at the Intel Innovation 2022 Developer Conference, and according to a report by Wikichip, the Cortex-A75 class quad-core RISC-V processor runs at up to 2.2 GHz, supports DDR5-5600 memory and eight PCIe 5.0 lanes, and was taped out with Intel 4 process.

  • CNX Software ☛ Pine64 Ox64 SBC to feature BL808 64-bit/32-bit RISC-V multi-protocol WiSoC with 64MB built-in RAM – CNX Software

    Pine64 Ox64 is an upcoming single board computer powered by Bouffalo Lab BL808 dual-core 64-bit/32-bit RISC-V processor with up to 64MB embedded RAM, multiple radios for WiFi 4, Bluetooth 5.0, and 802.15.4 (Zigbee), as well as an AI accelerator.

    The board also features up to 16MB XSPI NOR flash, a MicroSD card socket, a USB 2.0 OTG port with support for a 2-lane MIPI CSI camera module, and two 20-pin GPIO headers for expansion. It measures just 51 x 21mm, or in other words, is about the size of a Raspberry Pi Pico W.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• SANS ☛ Wireshark 4.0.0 Released

  Many new features, changes and updates. First one you’ll notice is the layout: [...]

• Programming/Development

  • Sean Conner ☛ What is a “unit test?”

    Since most of the coding I do is in C, a “unit” would most likely be a function, or maybe a collection of functions known colloquially as “a library.” The various components I worked on, like “Project: Lumbergh” or “Project: Sippy-Cup” aren’t libraries, and most functions in those projects are single use that exist just for organizational sake, so of course the “unit” ended up being the entire program.

  • D Lang ☛ DIP1000: Memory Safety in a Modern System Programming Language Pt. 2

    This is pretty much all that there is to manual DIP1000 usage. But this blog series shall not be over yet! DIP1000 is not intended to always be used explicitly—it works with attribute inference. That’s what the next post will cover.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ Perl Weekly Challenge 185: MAC Address and Mask Code

Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ Relax And Have A Nice Cup Of Teeth

  Halloween is just around the corner and what better way to add a little spooky decor than to 3D print [DaveMakesStuff]’s Teeth Cup.

• Hackaday ☛ TRX-Duo Is A Red Pitaya Clone For Software Defined Radio

  If you’ve noticed the TRX-DUO software-defined radio transceiver, you might have wondered how it stacks up to other choices like Red Pitaya or HackRF.  [Tech Minds] obliges with a review of the Red device in the video below.

• Education

  • IDA ☛ Lisa Heschong to present keynote at 2022 Under One Sky Conference

    We are pleased to announce that Lisa Heschong is a keynote speaker for the International Dark-Sky Association’s 2022 Under One Sky Conference. The virtual conference will take place across 24 hours from November 11-12. During the Under One Sky 2022, you’ll hear from experts and storytellers in the dark sky movement, connect with passionate individuals from IDA’s global network, and learn about hands-on activities and tools that you can use to protect the night through engagement workshops. Lisa will present during the Global Opening. Registration for the conference is free but required.

  • American Chemical Society ☛ Chemistry professors decry firing of colleague at NYU

    Jacobsen adds that there needs to be a better way to evaluate professors than the current one, which relies heavily, if not entirely, on student evaluations.

    He and others also note that Jones’s dismissal highlights a common—and some say problematic—system of teaching organic chemistry in which chemistry majors and nonmajors take separate classes. The latter group, often heavily populated by premed students who are required to take the course, is seen as focused primarily on grades. Many who signed the petition at NYU were premed students.

    Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a chemistry and computer science professor at the University of Toronto, says the student petition points to a “premed culture” that needs to change. Jacobsen, on the other hand, says he views the challenge of teaching a nonmajor course as a welcome opportunity to get premed students engaged in a field vital to their intended career.

    Aspuru-Guzik points to the problem of a “TikTok generation” whose habits have been impacted by time spent online at the expense of textbook study. He also sees the university’s action as a threat to academic freedom.

  • NYPost ☛ NYU’s firing of Professor Maitland Jones Jr. should frighten every American

    New York University fired Maitland Jones Jr. because his organic chemistry course was “too hard.” The man wrote the textbook on the subject, now in its fifth edition, and had been a star teacher at Princeton. He went out of his way to tape his lectures, at his own cost, to mitigate some of the attendance problems attributed to the pandemic.

  • CNN ☛ Opinion: This fired chemistry professor’s example shows what’s wrong with academia

    For his part, Jones says that he noticed a decline in student ability about a decade ago. He made his exams easier; an unusual number of students still did poorly on them. Then, the pandemic hit. “In the last two years, they fell off a cliff,” Jones wrote in a grievance letter to NYU. “We now see single digit scores and even zeros.” Jones isn’t alone in observing this dynamic. A great many experts in education have observed and quantified grade inflation and lowered academic standards. And the pandemic does seem to have turbocharged existing problems, while creating brand-new ones. Remote learning was a spectacular failure. Students in districts that closed down the longest during Covid-19 have experienced the most significant learning losses, studies and tests show.

    Students who completed their high school years during the pandemic, Jones observed in the Times report, seem to have no idea how to study. And some of the student complaints laid out in the petition might strike those of us who went to college in the Before Times as a bit unrealistic: They noted that Jones did not offer extra credit and that he did not make his lectures available via Zoom.

  • Reason ☛ NYU Chemistry Professor Fired After Students Said His Class Was Too Hard

    Not anymore: NYU has fired Jones after students circulated a petition protesting that his class was too hard.

    But according to Jones, the students weren’t putting in enough effort—and had become disengaged, anxious, and indolent as a result of the pandemic.

    “They weren’t coming to class, that’s for sure,” said Jones. “They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions.”

    Jones is profiled in a recent New York Times article that chronicles his firing. The piece also raises uncomfortable questions about elite institutions of higher learning and their utter devotion to appeasing unreasonable student demands. Organic chemistry is the bane of medical students everywhere, precisely because it is such a hard class. But many doctors would argue that that’s the point: The class is designed to act as an effective gatekeeper, preventing underqualified students from entering the field of medicine.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ DIY E-Reader Has Hot Swap Mechanical Keys

    In the early days of e-readers, most devices had physical buttons to turn pages and otherwise navigate the device. [bwkrayb] longed for these halcyon days before touchscreen e-readers and improved on the concept by adding mechanical keyswitches.

  • Hackaday ☛ RotBot Adds A Extra Dimension To 3D Printing, With A Twist

    It always seemed to us that the Z-axis on a 3D printer, or pretty much any CNC machine for that matter, is criminally underused. To have the X- and Y-axes working together to make smooth planar motions while the Z-axis just sits there waiting for its big moment, which ends up just moving the print head and the bed another fraction of a millimeter from each other just doesn’t seem fair. Can’t the Z-axis have a little more fun?

  • Hackaday ☛ A Cold Light To Warm Your Heart

    Halloween is coming fast and what better way to add to your Halloween ornamentation than [Wagiminator]’s cute NeoCandle tea light simulator.

  • Hackaday ☛ This Eye Is Watching You From Its Tiny CRT

    The days of cathode ray tubes, or CRTs, are firmly behind us, and that’s generally a good thing. Display tubes were heavy, bulky and fragile, and needed complicated high-voltage electronics in order to work. But not all of them were actually large: miniature display tubes were also produced, for things like camcorder viewfinders, and [Tavis] from Sideburn Studios decided to turn one of those into a slightly creepy art project.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Head Topics ☛ Streamer Breaks Back In Two Places After TwitchCon Foam Pit Accident

    the attraction—a promo collaboration between Intel and Lenovo—has since been closed, both because of injuries but also because attendees using it had been “breaking rules”.Attendees like EdyBot say a potential cause of the injuries was the shallowness of the pit; she describes it as being “like three cubes deep”, while Grayson says “the pit itself goes up a little past my knee” and that it’s “shallow af”.

  • Game-News24 ☛ Twitch streamer breaks his back jumping into a foam pit at TwitchCon

    TwitchCon was held all weekend in San Diego, to celebrate a top streamer’s soaring success. And it was all by itself, even the worst event since a heavy blow out, and numerous serious injuries have been reported in the foam pit.

  • [Old] NIH ☛ Accelerating dynamics of collective attention

    With news pushed to smart phones in real time and social media reactions spreading across the globe in seconds, the public discussion can appear accelerated and temporally fragmented. In longitudinal datasets across various domains, covering multiple decades, we find increasing gradients and shortened periods in the trajectories of how cultural items receive collective attention. Is this the inevitable conclusion of the way information is disseminated and consumed? Our findings support this hypothesis. Using a simple mathematical model of topics competing for finite collective attention, we are able to explain the empirical data remarkably well. Our modeling suggests that the accelerating ups and downs of popular content are driven by increasing production and consumption of content, resulting in a more rapid exhaustion of limited attention resources. In the interplay with competition for novelty, this causes growing turnover rates and individual topics receiving shorter intervals of collective attention.

  • [Old] CNET ☛ TikTok dethrones Google as this year’s most popular domain

    TikTok landed the top spot for a few days spread between February, March and May of this year, but after Aug. 10, it “took the lead on most days,” CloudFlare said in a blog post.

  • [Old] Cloudflare ☛ In 2021, the Internet went for TikTok, space and beyond

    The following will show the way Cloudflare saw Internet traffic focusing on specific domains (some of which have many websites aggregated into them) and their highs and lows in our global popularity ranking.

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Healthcare companies are licking their chops about the ‘commercialization’ of COVID vaccines and therapeutics. | BaronHK’s Rants

    Healthcare companies are licking their chops about the “commercialization” of COVID vaccines and therapeutics.

    Right now, the US federal government pays about $16.50 per dose of COVID-19 vaccine under the Warp Speed deal with Moderna, according to CEO Stéphane Bancel.

    However, he was “optimistic” that they’d get $60 per dose out of Medicare.

    Medicare only tends to pay about 60-70% of what private insurance does, so that means your insurance will end up “negotiating” to get to $80 or more per dose.

    The companies are really jonesing to fleece the American public.

    They were not happy that the “vaccine passports” and mandates went away, because their thinking obviously was that they could come back every year and lock us all in our houses until we paid for the annual booster and some app on our phone turned green again.

    The situation as it stands now is that the monoclonal antibody therapies have already gone that way. No more clinics where you can go get them free of charge, and the vaccines will be this way next year.

    Since the monoclonal antibodies have to be administered in a clinic, not at a pharmacy, you know what that’s going to cost. Get ready to start seeing $60,000 bills again if you pass up the vaccine and have to go to the Emergency Room for the antibodies.

• Proprietary

  • Axios ☛ Meta finds 400 mobile apps out to steal Facebook login info

    About 40% of the apps were disguised as photo editing tools. The others fell into a range of categories including gaming, lifestyle, business utility and virtual private networks.

  • RNZ ☛ Education Ministry puts record keeping software on hold due to cybersecurity concerns

    The Education Ministry paused the roll out of Te Rito, a system that would help early childhood centres, schools and the ministry share and store information about students, in the middle of last year.

    The ministry said it reviewed schools’ systems for storing student information after major cyber security breaches in New Zealand in June last year.

• Security

  • Open Source Security (Audio Show) ☛ Episode 344 – Python tarfile – 2022 is nothing like 2007 – Open Source Security

    Josh and Kurt talk about a newly rediscovered old python vulnerability. It raises a lot of questions about what was OK in 2007 vs what’s OK in 2022. The issue is very complicated and has a wild story surrounding it. There is no reason to not fix this in 2022.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Data from old attack on Optus parent Singtel surfaces on Web forum

    Data stolen from Singapore’s multinational telecommunications conglomerate Singtel on 20 January last year, during an attack through a file-sharing system from Accellion that was close to end-of-life at the time, has surfaced on a forum on the clear Web. Singtel owns the Australian telco Optus which recently suffered a massive data breach.

    The Singtel data was posted on 7 October and may have been put up now in order to capitalise on the news around Optus which announced on 22 September it had been breached.

    Asked about the data, a Singtel spokesman told iTWire: “[This] refers to data stolen during the 2021 zero-day attack on Accellion’s (now known as Kiteworks) file-sharing application, which affected many companies worldwide including Singtel.”

    The individual who posted the Singtel data claims that there is a total of 74.7GB of data. Some of the files released to satisfy likely buyers as to their authenticity appear to be genuine.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EDRI ☛ Securing privacy: Privacy International on end-to-end encryption

      EDRi member Privacy International’s (PI) report on end-to-end encryption (E2EE) analyses and defends expanding the use of E2EE to protect our communications. It defines E2EE, delves into its human rights implications, briefly addresses some prominent proposals for government access to E2EE content, and concludes with PI’s recommendations regarding E2EE.

    • EDRI ☛ Football fans are being targeted by biometric mass surveillance

      Biometric mass surveillance involves the indiscriminate and/or arbitrary monitoring, tracking, and processing of biometric data related to individuals and/or groups. Biometric data encompasses, but is not limited to, fingerprints, palmprints, palm veins, hand geometry, facial recognition, DNA, iris recognition, typing rhythm, walking style, and voice recognition. Though often targeted at specific groups, the use of mass surveillance technologies is becoming prevalent in publicly available spaces across Europe. As a result, football fans are increasingly impacted by them.

      Apart from its undemocratic nature, there are many reasons why biometric mass surveillance is problematic for human rights and fans’ rights.

    • Axios ☛ The walletless future is closer than ever

      Over two days, I managed to take two flights, check into a hotel room and pay for meals — all from my phone. Everything worked, but there were some asterisks involved.

• Defence/Aggression

  • ADF ☛ Facing Unrelenting Violence, Sahel Countries Turn To Drones

    In the Sahel, drones might be more valuable as reconnaissance tools than for their weaponized capabilities.

    “What is most important for a drone is to know where to send it,” journalist Wassim Nasr, a specialist in extremist violence, told Agence de Presse Africaine. “It’s the equivalent of a flashlight, armed or not, that lights up a specific target.”

    Most observers believe that drones can help in some scenarios, but fights against extremism ultimately will be decided by traditional military force and other on-the-ground, counter-extremism programs.

  • Africa Center for Strategic Studies ☛ Five Zones of Militant Islamist Violence in the Sahel

    More than 80 percent of all violent events took place in 30 districts of northern and central Mali in 2017. In 2022, more than two-thirds of the violent events linked to militant Islamist groups in the Sahel took place outside of Mali, mostly in Burkina Faso.

  • [Old] Middle East Institute ☛ The Schism of Jihadism in the Sahel: How Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are Battling for Legitimacy in the Sahelian Context

    As the Sahel region becomes the latest scene for jihadist infighting, this has serious implications not just for jihadist operations against local and foreign troops, but more importantly for local civilian populations. In neglected areas of the Sahel, with weak or non-existent government presence and feeble public services, groups like ISGS and JNIM are offering themselves as a strong alternative to the state, providing local constituents with essential goods and services.

    Against this backdrop, this paper examines the prospects of jihadist expansion in the region and its implications for security actors and civilian populations alike. More specifically, the report investigates the role of propaganda and public discourse narratives in bolstering jihadist group legitimacy and advancing attempts by groups seeking to generate local embeddedness and mass support. In doing so, the article offers a nuanced perspective of inter-jihadist contestation, one that goes beyond mere focusing on security operations and clashes and delves more deeply into group framing and identity.

  • The Defense Post ☛ Sahel Military Coups Only Help Jihadists: Analysts

    Coups only compound problems in countries where the armed forces are already accused of inefficiency and mismanagement, and security forces are often under-equipped, he and others said.

  • Meduza ☛ Zaporizhia subject to massive shelling. 13 people are dead, over 80 injured — Meduza

    By the latest count, 13 people have been killed and another 87 injured by shelling in the city of Zaporizhia during the night of October 9, the Zaporizhia regional military administration reports to Ukrainian broadcasting company Hromadske.

  • Meduza ☛ Belarus claims that Ukraine is planning an attack. Ukraine calls it provocation — Meduza

    The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs claims that, on the evening of October 8, Ukrainian ambassador Ihor Kyzym was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Belarus, in Minsk, where he was handed a diplomatic note. 

  • Meduza ☛ Police arrest fifth-grader during class A Moscow school principal reported her student for a yellow and blue profile picture — Meduza

    The human rights organization OVD-Info reports that a school principal in Moscow contacted the Ministry of Internal Affairs about a fifth-grader who used a yellow and blue profile picture while messaging with her classmates. In response, police pulled the girl out of school and brought her and her mother in for questioning. The inspector for juvenile affairs has placed the family on a “preventive register,” apparently because of the school’s concerns about their “civic position.”

  • Meduza ☛ Putin: the Crimean Bridge explosion was an ‘act of terrorism’ by Ukrainian security service — Meduza

    Russian president Vladimir Putin announced that Ukrainian security services were responsible for planning and executing yesterday’s explosion on the Kerch Strait Bridge, Interfax reports.

  • Meduza ☛ FSB claims that border regions were shelled 100 times last week — Meduza

    The FSB claims that over the past week, Ukrainian Armed Forces have shelled 32 settlements over 100 times in the Bryansk, Kursk, and Belgorod regions, all of which lie on the border with Ukraine.

  • Meduza ☛ What we know about the bridge The facts, and the theories, about the explosion on the Crimean Bridge — Meduza

    Around 6:00am on Saturday, October 8, an explosion occurred on the only bridge between Russian and the annexed territories of Crimea. By most accounts, a truck crossing from the Russian side exploded, causing several sections of roadway to collapse into the water. The explosion also ignited a train hauling oil tanks on the neighboring railway part of the bridge, damaging a long stretch of track. Meduza gathers the latest facts and theories on what happened, how, and who did it.

• Environment

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Common Dreams ☛ Acquittal of Activists Who Saved Dying Piglets From Smithfield Sets ‘Right to Rescue’ Precedent

      The not-guilty verdict—a landmark decision establishing the legal “right to rescue” distressed animals in need of care—is “the culmination of a more than five-year pursuit that multiple agencies, including the FBI and the Utah attorney general’s office,” The Intercept’s Marina Bolotnikova reported.

• Finance

  • TruthOut ☛ US Is Overcome With Debt and Death. Let’s Fight Inequality to Stop This Crisis.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | American Billionaires Show US Is #1 in Creating Grotesque Inequality

    Spin a globe, then stop it with any finger. Some fantastically rich individual will most likely be living—or yachting—somewhere close to wherever your finger lands.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Straight Up Fraud’: Data Confirms Private Insurers Use Medicare Advantage to Steal Billions

    “Medicare Advantage shouldn’t exist.”

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Chinese state-sponsored [crackers] have become more brazen, prompting an NSA advisory

    China has become “really brazen, doubling down on their activities to steal intellectual property [sic] and compromise sensitive networks,” Joyce told reporters Thursday. “They establish persistence and move laterally across the interconnected networks so malicious state sponsored activity is a major threat to U.S. critical infrastructure, election systems, national security systems and the Department of Defense along with the defense industrial base that we help protect.”

  • Axios ☛ Democrats’ swing-state local news ploy

    The intrigue: “About Us” pages for each of the sites say they’re run by a company called Local Report Inc., which was formed in Florida last year.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ The data privacy deal driving the future of the US-EU commercial relationship

    The deal replaces the 2016 US-EU Privacy Shield agreement, which, according to the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) 2020 ruling, failed to protect the EU citizens’ data from US government surveillance. It also left in jeopardy the future of transatlantic data transfers and the more than $250 billion worth of digital services trade that took place between the United States and the EU in 2020.

    In practical terms, today’s executive order seeks to address the ECJ’s concerns with the previous data privacy framework by increasing transparency into the use of EU personal data by US authorities and national security justifications behind it. It also creates a mechanism for EU individuals to seek a review and redress if they feel their personal data was used in violation of established privacy protections.

    Will the new agreement be viable? Our experts break down the details of the DPF and tell us what to expect next.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Poll Workers Will Play Key Role in Midterm Elections

    With our democracy being challenged in unprecedented ways, it is imperative to strengthen free and fair elections. Poll workers are vital to achieving this goal. These individuals—who temporarily staff polling stations and perform other election administration duties, often voluntarily—help ensure that elections run smoothly and that their communities have a meaningful voice in the democratic system.

  • TruthOut ☛ Outside Spending on Federal 2022 Midterm Elections Tops $1 Billion

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Supreme Court poised to rewrite how social media confronts disinformation

      Taken together, the outcome of the four cases could fundamentally alter the flow of information online and dramatically exacerbate the global disinformation problem.

      “After 20 years of not telling us much of anything, the Supreme Court will finally decide the future of the [Internet],” said Alan Rozenshtein, a senior editor at Lawfare and a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Law. “These fundamental questions have not been addressed.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • SCOTUS ☛ BRIEF OF THE ONION AS AMICUS CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONER [PDF]

    ARGUMENT ……………………………………………….. 4

    I. Parody Functions By Tricking People Into Thinking That It Is Real ……………………… 4

    II. Because Parody Mimics “The Real Thing,” It Has The Unique Capacity To Critique The Real Thing …………………………………… 8

    III. A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody ……………………………………………….. 10

    IV. It Should Be Obvious That Parodists Cannot Be Prosecuted For Telling A Joke With A Straight Face …………………………… 15

  • TruthOut ☛ Let’s Build Leftist Academic Solidarities to Rebuff Far Right Attacks

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Scheerpost ☛ Chris Hedges: The Puppets and the Puppet Masters

    The judicial proceedings against Julian Assange give a faux legality to the state persecution of the most important and courageous journalist of our generation.

  • TruthOut ☛ Thousands Demand Release of WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Journalism is dead. Now it’s just “some idiot on TikTok says” this or a Bill Gates puff piece.

    There’s been an even bigger drop in quality of “the news” lately.

    Consider that with all of the disasters going on in the world, these three things came up on my phone.

    I’ve “enhanced” the headlines.

    TikTok Karen didn’t get her vegan meal on an airline flight.

    Crazy Texas Karen says don’t watch Hocus Pocus 2 because they’ll put a spell on you through the TV. (And now you’re mine!)

    Bill Gates is frustrated that people who aren’t Bill Gates won’t eat bugs and totally give up on having a home to solve “climate change”.

    I mean. This is f***ing bullshit and the people posting it should be fired. Finding a news story is getting to be a real chore these days.

    The Web is crap. It’s all crap all the time. With GeminiSpace being the size of the Web (by page and site count) in 1996, I wonder if the real people will just all ultimately end up there.

    [...]

    The Bill Gates article was pretty bizarre. He started openly fantasizing about remaking the United States of America into something where the average person has the living standard of North Korea. That’s been underway since about 1999.

    [...]

    I suppose the advantage of living in North Korea is that they’re walled off from the global Internet and don’t have to hear a news story that appears on a dozen different sites about Bill Gates and how his morning shit went.

  • North Wales Pioneer ☛ Human chain to be formed around Parliament in support of Julian Assange

    Thousands of people will form a human chain around Parliament on Saturday calling for the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

    He is being held in Belmarsh prison in London amid a lengthy legal battle to avoid extradition to the United States.

  • The Wire ☛ IFJ Urges Journalists’ Unions To Call for Julian Assange’s Release

    The IFJ said it is gravely concerned about the impact of Assange’s continued detention on media freedom and the rights of all journalists globally. It has asked all media unions and press freedom organisations to urge their governments to secure Assange’s release. “Irrespective of personal views, his extradition will have a chilling effect, with all journalists and media workers at risk,” the IFJ said in a statement.

  • RSF ☛ UK: RSF leads a coalition of 16 organisations in urging Home Secretary Suella Braverman to urgently intervene in Assange extradition

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has led a coalition of 16 organisations in urging the new UK Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, to intervene in the US government’s request to extradite Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange. These groups, representing press freedom, free expression, and journalists’ organisations, have also requested a meeting with Braverman to discuss concerns in the case, after a request for a meeting with former Home Secretary, Priti Patel, went unanswered. The full text of the letter is below.

  • WSWS ☛ Assange’s wife Stella Moris demolishes US warmonger John Bolton on live TV

    A segment on Piers Morgan’s “Uncensored Program” yesterday provided its mass audience with a rare and unvarnished demonstration of the two sides in the case of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who is imprisoned in Britain and faces extradition to the United States for exposing American war crimes.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Lake County, Illinois Black Lives Matter Founder Arrested At City Council Meeting | BaronHK’s Rants

    The mistake that led to McLemore’s arrest appears to be that he used foul language and gave them an excuse to have him arrested so that he would stop annoying them while they figure out how to raise our taxes and spend the money digging up more perfectly good streets and then tear into them again next week for some reason while they let the main roads continue degrading into rubble.

    It does not appear to matter where you are. The cops are the cops. The job attracts……a certain kind of person. Little to the right of Hitler.

  • USA ☛ A Proclamation on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, 2022

    On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we honor the sovereignty, resilience, and immense contributions that Native Americans have made to the world; and we recommit to upholding our solemn trust and treaty responsibilities to Tribal Nations, strengthening our Nation-to-Nation ties.

  • The Gray Zone ☛ Iran’s anti-morality police protests: a different view from the ground

  • TruthOut ☛ More Than Two Dozen Abortion Clinics Closed in the First 100 Days Post-Roe

  • TruthOut ☛ Prison Strikers Across Alabama Demand Change Despite Severe Retaliation

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Filmmakers Should Tell the Truth About Slavery: A Critique of “The Woman King”

    When the musical film Black is King was released in 2020, African audiences and some critics said it defamed and distorted the continent’s culture and history.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Central American Anti-Corruption Activists Are Facing Criminal Prosecution

    Three activists are facing criminal charges for allegedly painting graffiti on the walls of the Guatemalan congressional building during protests on November 21, 2020. But the case against these protesters has been marked by the manipulation of information and due process. 

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Zimbabwe to get fibre optics, renewable energy funding from Africa50, is this a big deal?

    Zimbabwe is one of 29 shareholder countries in Africa50.

    Let’s be honest. There are so many organisations with similar sounding mission statements I could have switched them up and no one would have been the wiser. So, with low expectations, let us find out what Africa50 is cooking up for Zimbabwe.

• Monopolies

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire – Apple gets €1.1b French anti-trust fine reduced to a third

    Apple has managed to get two-thirds of a fine of €1.1 billion (A$1.7 billion) levied on it by French authorities knocked off by a court.

    The company will now have to pay €372 million.

    Apple was fined by the French anti-competition watchdog in 2020 for alleged anti-competitive behaviour against its distribution and retail network, the news agency Reuters reported, citing two sources who were said to have knowledge of the matter.

  • Copyrights

    • Zimbabwe ☛ How to avoid copyright strikes on audio in your YouTube videos

      Every YouTube content creator has faced this before. A seemingly harmless background track is added to a video and uploaded to the channel. Then after publishing the video you are slammed with a copyright strike. And I have even experienced this with music downloaded from supposed royalty-free music websites. Even had to make some appeals to which some were heard but others weren’t. And the obvious frustration with this is that your video can get demonetized because of such copyright strikes essentially interfering with the bag. Well, there are a couple of ways to get around this.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ European Union Imposter Uses Russia Sanctions to Target ‘Escape from Tarkov’

      Earlier this year the European Commission sent a series of removal requests to Google, asking it to remove Russian news sources RT and Sputnik from its search results. After Google took action, a similar request targeted videogame ‘Escape from Tarkov’ and its Russian developer Battlestate Games. However, there appears to be an imposter at work.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • neil in gemini space

    i am living in a site shed/office for a few months. i had not previously used the exped air pillow ul camping and decided to use it instead of conventional pillows. trading weight for size i have the medium (m) size.

  • catching up, again – 2022-10-09

  • 21 Hours

    I woke up at 01:00 (am, for those not using 24 hour time) yesterday and had trouble falling back asleep. Eventually I decided to get up, mostly because I was getting hungry.

    Of course I spent most of the day being pretty tired, but boy did I get things done before I went to bed at 22:00. Apart from chores, of which I did more than I thought I would do during the entire weekend, I made very much progress on my tea mod for OpenTTD. In fact I made so much progress that I could have been done by now if I hadn’t had “bright” ideas. I blame sleep deprivation.

  • Long Day Traveling

    Oh, nice, I found a wormhole in space time! It says WLAN on the entry. And after fiddling a while with three lines of magic incantations, I am able to send messages through without being sucked in! Great!

• Technical

  • Thoughts on workflows and graphical tools

    I’ve had a sort of rough sketch of an application in my mind that continues popping up every once in a while. The idea isn’t yet fully formed, but it’s a very persistent idea.

    Those who have been around in the Unix world for more than a few years no doubt remember when Konqueror was the default filemanager/webbrowser/documentviewer in KDE. I’ve often wondered why they got away from this concept. I imagine the scope of the project was probably a bit unwieldy to be sure, but I still fondly remember it.