GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • TecMint ☛ A Career in Linux is What You Should Be Pursuing In 2023

    Nowadays, Linux is ubiquitous. Chances are you own a device running a Linux or Linux-based OS. Android OS, the system that primarily runs in most smartphones, tablets, and other smart devices is based on Linux. In fact, Android leads with 71.9% in the mobile OS market share followed by iOS with 27.4%.

  • ZDNet ☛ Best Chromebooks for work 2022: Top Chrome OS laptops | ZDNET

    Chromebooks offer fantastic features, such as touchscreens, fast processors, and decent storage, allowing you all the tools you need to knock out your work. And, you’ll have some fun doing so.

  • Redmond Magazine ☛ Cameyo’s Virtual App Delivery Service Now Supports Linux Apps — Redmondmag.com

    Cameyo on Wednesday announced that its Virtual App Delivery service now supports Linux applications, expanding from Windows apps support.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Cameyo unveils support for Linux virtual app delivery to reduce remote work costs – SiliconANGLE

    Virtual application delivery platform Cameyo Inc. today announced that it now supports Linux apps in order to reduce the cost of providing cloud desktops for workers during a time of remote and hybrid workforces.

    Cameyo’s existing platform already permits the delivery of Windows and software-as-a-service and internal web apps to any device. The new product, called Cameyo for Linux, offers the ability to remotely launch Linux and web apps that don’t require a Windows server.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ OpenIndiana 2022.10 overview | Community-driven illumos Distribution. – Invidious

    In this video, I am going to show an overview of OpenIndiana 2022.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.

  • Video ☛ Reborn OS | Linus Distro based on Arch – Invidious

    What’s up, Linux Community!!! In this video, I review and walk through the installation of RebornOS, a desktop-oriented Linux distribution based on Arch Linux.

  • Syslog-ng 101, part 2: Basic concepts – Blog – syslog-ng Community – syslog-ng Community

    Welcome to the second part of my syslog-ng tutorial series. In this part, we cover some of the basic concepts behind syslog-ng. You can watch the video or read the text below.

  • Tux Digital ☛ 42: Backed by the Bunch – Linux Out Loud – TuxDigital

    Welcome to episode 42 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.

  • Open Source for Broadcast

    Tim Pozar and Brian David, both veterans of broadcasting, join Doc Searls and Shawn Powers on FLOSS Weekly. Broadcasting is easier, better and cheaper than ever to do, or to get into, thanks to open source developments of all kinds. Pozar and David share great information about this space.

  • Video ☛ Linux Has Finally Lost Its MAGIC!?! – Invidious

    MAGIC numbers were a big part of Linux development for a very long time very long time but that’s finally coming to an end with a recent patch set but what are MAGIC numbers anyway

  • Video ☛ Linux Mint 21.1 Beta MATE Run Through – Invidious

    In this video, we are looking at Linux Mint 21.1 Beta MATE.

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ Linux Mint 21.1 Beta MATE

    Today we are looking at Linux Mint 21.1 Beta, MATE edition. It is based on Ubuntu 22.04, Linux Kernel 5.15, MATE 1.26, and uses about 1.2GB of ram when idling.

  • Video ☛ Why We Must Escape Gmail – Invidious

    Today we talk about some changes we have seen in gmail that is causing everyone not using their services to get caught up in spam while spammers using their network land in your inbox

• Kernel Space

  • The Register UK ☛ Longstanding bug in Linux kernel floppy handling fixed • The Register

    Linux kernel 6.2 should contain fixes for some problems handling floppy disks, a move which shows that someone somewhere is still using them.

    This isn’t the only such fix in recent years. As a series of articles on Phoronix details, there has been a slow but steady flow of fixes for the kernel’s handling of floppy drives since at least kernel 5.17, as The Reg mentioned when it came out. Which implies that there are still people actively using floppy diskettes on machines with fairly current Linux kernels on them. If you are one of them, do let us know.

    Back in July 2016, SUSE kernel developer Jiři Kosina submitted a patch. The problem arose because this change broke something else and later got reverted, and so the problem hung around.

    In July last year, he sent in a new patch that fixed it again for the 5.12 kernel, and was later back-ported to 5.10, an LTS version, and again into kernel 5.15 – another an LTS version, and the one you’re running today if you’re on the current Ubuntu LTS release, or something built from it such as Linux Mint 21.

  • What is a Kernel? | Center of Operating System?

    The kernel is the core of the system that bridges the hardware and software layers and smoothly creates interaction between them to transport data.

• Graphics Stack

  • Linuxiac ☛ Asahi Linux Brings Hardware Acceleration to Apple Silicon Systems

    Asahi Linux devs announced the first public Apple Silicon GPU driver release bringing OpenGL support to all Apple M-series systems.

    The new Apple devices based on the arm64 architecture with M1 and M2 chips are excellent but limited to the well-known macOS. However, what if you want to run Linux on them?

    Asahi is a Linux distribution on a mission to make this a reality. It is a project and community dedicated to bringing Linux to Apple Silicon Macs.

  • Four-Person Dev Team Gets Apple’s M-Series GPU Working On Linux – Slashdot

    The drivers offer non-conformance-tested OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for all M-series Apple devices. That’s enough for desktop environments and older games running at 60 frames per second at 4K. But the next target is Vulkan support. OpenGL work is being done “with Vulkan in mind,” Lina writes, but some OpenGL support was needed to get desktops working first. There’s a lot more you can read about the interplay between OpenGL, Vulkan, and Zink in Asahi’s blog post.

  • Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux – Asahi Linux

    Hello everyone! We’re excited to announce our first public Apple Silicon GPU driver release!

    We’ve been working hard over the past two years to bring this new driver to everyone, and we’re really proud to finally be here. This is still an alpha driver, but it’s already good enough to run a smooth desktop experience and some games.

    Read on to find out more about the state of things today, how to install it (it’s an opt-in package), and how to report bugs!

  • Ars Technica ☛ Four-person dev team gets Apple’s M-series GPU working in Linux | Ars Technica

    For the brave people running Linux on Apple Silicon, their patience has paid off. GPU drivers that provide desktop hardware acceleration are now available in Asahi Linux, unleashing more of the M-series chips’ power.

    It has taken roughly two years to reach this alpha-stage OpenGL driver, but the foundational groundwork should result in faster progress ahead, writes project leads Alyssa Rosenzweig and Asahi Lina. In the meantime, the drivers are “good enough to run a smooth desktop experience and some games.”

  • Liliputing ☛ Lilbits: Open source Linux graphics drivers for Apple Silicon, and Winamp plays NFTs now for some reason – Liliputing

    One of the key things that makes a Mac computer a Mac is clearly that it ships with Apple’s macOS software. But back when the company was still making Macs with Intel processors it was fairly easy to install a different operating system – Apple even offered its own Boot Camp solution for dual booting Windows and macOS.

    That changed when Apple started selling computers with M-series processors that the company developed in-house. But the folks at the Asahi Linux team have been reverse engineering Apple’s chips and developing Linux-based software capable of running on Apple’s latest computers. And now they’ve just announced a major update.

  • Web Pro News ☛ Asahi Linux Project Has Released GPU Drivers for M-Series Macs

    The Asahi Linux project has been working to bring Linux to the M-series Macs, but they have had to reverse engineer much of the low-level hardware support. The graphics drivers were one of the major sticking points, but the project has finally released a public version.

    “This release features work-in-progress OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for all current Apple M-series systems,” the developers write. “That’s enough for hardware acceleration with desktop environments, like GNOME and KDE. It’s also enough for older 3D games, like Quake3 and Neverball. While there’s always room for improvement, the driver is fast enough to run all of the above at 60 frames per second at 4K.”

  • Cult Of Mac ☛ First Linux graphics driver for Apple silicon released by devs | Cult of Mac

• Applications

  • It’s FOSS ☛ Bitwarden Adds a New Passwordless Method to Access Your Web Vault

    Bitwarden gets better every day, making things more convenient.

    Bitwarden is easily the most popular open-source password manager right now.

    It is simple to use, cost-effective, conveniently available on mobile/desktop, and secure enough for most common use cases.

    While it already supported passwordless authentication techniques like fingerprint sign-in, Face ID, PIN, on mobile/desktop, it now has a new addition.

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Fwupd 1.8.8 Brings BIOS Rollback Protection Support for Dell and Lenovo Systems

    Coming one month after fwupd 1.8.7, the fwupd 1.8.8 release is here to implement BIOS rollback protection support for Dell and Lenovo systems, add the ability to generate OVAL rules for openSCAP evaluation, add an X-Gpu category for new hardware support, and add more ChromeOS metadata to the report attributes.

    This eighth maintenance update in the fwupd 1.8 series also ensures the device name is set for Intel USB4 devices and adds support for Logitech Whiteboard cameras, several QSI docks, and more Goodix MoC devices.

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Tor Browser 12.0 Released with Multi-Locale Support, Based on Firefox 102 ESR Series

    Tor Browser 12.0 is a major update to the Firefox-based web browser powered by the Tor anonymous technologies and comes with upgraded internals based on the latest Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) series, namely Mozilla Firefox 102.

    For desktop users, the Tor Browser 12.0 release brings multi-locale support, which means that you no longer have to search and download language packages from the official website if you want to use Tor Browser in other languages than English. All supported languages are now included in the same package, without increasing its size too much.

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Use ’Ear Tag’ to Quickly Edit Audio Tags on Linux – OMG! Ubuntu!

    We’re spoilt for choice when it comes to audio tag editors for Linux, but ever heard the expression ‘sometimes less is more’?

    It sounds silly but hey: it’s a maxim that resonates with me.

    Take Ear Tag, a new music tag editor for Linux written in Python and using GTK4/libadwaita. Its a simple, straightforward tool that lets you quickly edit audio tags for individual music files.

    Unlike fully-featured MP3 tag editors like Kid3, Tagger, or MusicBrainz Picard, Ear Tag doesn’t try to manage your entire music library. And though it can edit metadata for multiple audio files at once it’s primarily designed around the task of tweaking individual music files in turn.

  • Blender 3.4 Release Notes

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Blender 3.4 is out now with Wayland support on Linux, Intel’s Open Path Guiding added | GamingOnLinux

    Blender, the absolute power-house free and open source 3D creation suite, has a big release out with Blender 3.4 and it’s awesome. Used across film and games, it’s one of the best FOSS projects around and has shown how FOSS can be a huge success.

    For Linux users Blender 3.4 is especially sweet, since it now offers native Wayland support in addition to X11. They say with this release it has been tested working across GNOME Shell (Mutter), KDE (Plasma) & Sway (wlroots) based compositors.

    One of the big overall features in this release is the inclusion of Intel’s Open Path Guiding Library, which the Blender team say adds support for “path guiding in CPU to help reduce noise in scenes where finding a path to light is difficult for regular path tracing, for example when a room is lit by light coming through a small door crack” — sounds very useful. The example they showed in the release page shows what a massive improvement it can be too.

  • Libre Arts ☛ Libre Arts – Weekly-ish recap — 7 December 2022

    Week highlights: new releases of RawTherapee, Zrythm, VCV Rack, Cardinal, a release candidate of MuseScore 4.0, and more.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install PHP 7.4 on Fedora 37 – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PHP 7.4 on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, PHP is a programming language that is widely used for web development. PHP 7.4 is the latest version of PHP, which was released in November 2020. Some of the key features of PHP 7.4 include typed properties, arrow functions, and preloading. Typed properties allow developers to specify the type of a class property, which can help improve code reliability and make it easier to catch type errors. Arrow functions, which are also known as lambda functions, allow developers to write short, anonymous functions more easily. Preloading is a performance optimization that can help speed up PHP applications by loading certain components into memory at the start of a request, so they don’t need to be loaded again later.

    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 PHP 7.4 on a Fedora 37.

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Rider 2022.2.3 on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install JetBrains Rider on a Chromebook.

  • Julia Evans ☛ Tips for analyzing logs

    Hello! I’ve been working on writing a zine about debugging for a while now (we’re getting close to finishing it!!!!), and one of the pages is about analyzing logs. I asked for some tips on Mastodon and got WAY more tips than could fit on the page, so I thought I’d write a quick blog post.

    I’m going to talk about log analysis in the context of distributed systems debugging (you have a bunch of servers with different log files and you need to work out what happened) since that’s what I’m most familiar with.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to Set Static IP Address on Rocky Linux 9 / Alma Linux 9 / RHEL 9

    In this post, you will learn how to quickly set a static IP address in Rocky Linux 9 / Alma Linux 9 / RHEL 9.

    In private networks, it is common to use static IP addresses to identify a computer within the network. Moreover, it is easier to administer and therefore manage than dynamic addressing. Although it all depends on the equipment, system and needs you have.

    This task is basic when it comes to servers and although doing it on a GUI system is easy, on servers you have to do a bit more work. For this post, we will use two important tools, such as nmcli and nmtui.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install MariaDB 10.6 on Ubuntu 22.04/20.04 – LinuxCapable

    MariaDB 10.6 is an LTS release directly after the 10.5 LTS release. It brought several significant improvements to make it the most efficient and faster version of the LTS MariaDB releases. On top of excellent performance, scalability, and support for new features such as a crash-safe replication mechanism, MariaDB 10.6 provides improved SQL compatibility for a smoother experience. Those looking to take their performance to the next level can install directly from MariaDB’s repository rather than using Ubuntu’s default – this comes with security fixes and updates as soon as they are available, which makes the system secure and up-to-date.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install or upgrade MariaDB 10.6 on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish or 20.04 Focal Fossa LTS using the command line terminal and some tips on upgrading your existing database if one exists using the MariaDB.org APT repository so you will always have the latest stable version directly to improve security and performance when releases are available.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Read Markdown Documents in Your Linux Terminal With Glow

    Glow is a terminal-based Markdown reader for Linux that comes with all the bells and whistles. Here’s how to install and use it on Linux.

    Markdown is great for writing and allows you to format a document in any text editor, using rich features including heading, code extracts, bold, italics, checklists, bullet points, tables, and more. But while Markdown is easy to write in an editor such as nano, it isn’t so easy to read in the terminal.

    Glow is a command-line utility that displays Markdown documents the way they’re meant to be read.

  • ZDNet ☛ How to locate a user’s GPG key in Thunderbird | ZDNET

    Back in October, I wrote a piece about using encrypted email in Thunderbird. If you ever have to send sensitive information via email, you should be using encryption. If you’re not encrypting those missives, the information they contain can be read by a third party.

  • Pi My Life Up ☛ How to Encode or Decode a base64 String on Linux – Pi My Life Up

    In this tutorial, you will learn how to encode or decode data using base64 on Linux. Base64 is used for encoding data for transit or storage. As one of the core utilities on Linux this tool is always available.

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ How to Check GPU (Intel/AMD/NVIDIA) Usage in Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04 | UbuntuHandbook

    Unlike Windows, Ubuntu so far does not have real-time GPU usage info displayed in its system monitor application. If you want to check how much your graphic card is in use, then this simple tutorial may help!

  • Pi My Life Up ☛ Extracting and Opening RAR Files on Linux – Pi My Life Up

    In this tutorial, you will be learning how to extract a RAR archive on the Linux system. RAR is a proprietary archiving format that allows you to compress and store multiple files. It even supports verifying contents remain uncorrupted.

  • Pi My Life Up ☛ How to Install Spotify on Ubuntu – Pi My Life Up

    Spotify is one of the most popular audio streaming services and is highly regarded as one of the pioneers in its space and is known for its range of music and its exclusive podcasts.

  • Pi My Life Up ☛ How to use the less Command – Pi My Life Up

    This tutorial will explain how to use the less command on a Linux operating system. The less command allows you to display the content of a file or output in smaller parts. This command is particularly useful when viewing large files with hundreds of lines of text.

  • Ubuntubuzz ☛ How To Import and Use Microsoft Excel Templates on LibreOffice Calc

    This tutorial will help you be more productive with LibreOffice Calc by taking benefit of the existing, thousands of Microsoft Excel’s templates on the internet. Thanks to LibreOffice compatibility features, this is possible. With this, you can quickly make invoices, receipts, project management, budget plans, financial reports, bookkeeping, teacher/student records and many more. Let’s try now!

  • ZDNet ☛ How to add ‘Do Not Track’ to Thunderbird (and why you should) | ZDNET

    In this modern age, it’s growing harder and harder to prevent being tracked. Most often this is used to better target you for advertising. That alone, for many, is an invasion of privacy. Because of that, several software types have adopted Do Not Track (DNT).

  • Learn Ubuntu ☛ Using Touch Command in Ubuntu

    The touch command is primarily used to modify the timestamp of a file. If the file does not exist, then the default behavior of the touch command is to create the file.

  • Pi My Life Up ☛ Installing Mastodon on the Raspberry Pi – Pi My Life Up

    Mastodon is a free and open-source software that allows you to self-host your own social network on your Raspberry Pi.

    This software is a microblogging platform that is very much like Twitter However, unlike Twitter, it is possible to use Mastodon to run a private social network.

    Please note that Mastodon is a relatively heavy piece of software. You will have the best experience using a Raspberry Pi 4 with at least 2GB of memory.

    Additionally, you must be using a 64-bit operating system due to the newer release of PostgreSQL we will be utilizing.

  • Pi My Life Up ☛ Installing PostgreSQL on Ubuntu – Pi My Life Up

    PostgreSQL is a relational database management system that implements the SQL language.

    It is entirely free and open-source and was developed with a focus on extensibility and SQL compliance.

    If you have ever used MySQL or MariaDB on Ubuntu, working with PostgreSQL is very familiar.

  • Learn Ubuntu ☛ Export Command in Ubuntu: How to use it?

    The export command is used for exporting environment variables so that the variable is also available to subshells and scripts you run.

  • Matthew Garrett ☛ mjg59 | Making an Orbic Speed RC400L autoboot when USB power is attached

    As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been trying to hack an Orbic Speed RC400L mobile hotspot so it’ll automatically boot when power is attached. When plugged in it would flash a “Welcome” screen and then switch to a display showing the battery charging – it wouldn’t show up on USB, and didn’t turn on any networking. So, my initial assumption was that the bootloader was making a policy decision not to boot Linux. After getting root (as described in the previous post), I was able to cat /proc/mtd and see that partition 7 was titled “aboot”. Aboot is a commonly used Android bootloader, based on Little Kernel – LK provides the hardware interface, aboot is simply an app that runs on top of it. I was able to find the source code for Quectel’s aboot, which is intended to run on the same SoC that’s in this hotspot, so it was relatively easy to line up a bunch of the Ghidra decompilation with actual source (top tip: find interesting strings in your decompilation and paste them into github search, and see whether you get a repo back).

  • How to Install Linux Kernel 6.0 on Rocky Linux 9 and Alma Linux 9

    In this beginner tutorial, we will show you how to install Linux kernel 6.0 on Rocky Linux 9 and Alma Linux 8 distributions.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Krita on Fedora 37 – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Krita on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, Krita is a free and open-source digital painting and illustration application. It is primarily used by professional digital artists and illustrators to create artwork for graphic novels, comics, and concept art. Krita is known for its powerful brush engine and advanced features, such as the ability to create custom brushes and textures, support for color management, and support for a variety of file formats. It also includes features that are specifically designed for comics and animation, such as perspective grids and onion skinning. Overall, Krita is a highly versatile and user-friendly graphics editor that is suitable for a wide range of digital art and illustration tasks.

    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 Krita digital painting and image manipulation program on a Fedora 37.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install InfluxDB and Telegraf on Rocky Linux 9

    InfluxDB is an open-source time series database written in Go.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install OpenMRS (Open Medical Record System) on Debian 11

    OpenMRS stands for “Open Medical Record System”, is a free, open-source, and efficient electronic medical record (EMR) storage and retrieval system. In this post, we will show you how to install OpenMRS on Debian 11.

  • DebugPoint ☛ Enable Automatic Firefox Translation to Translate Web Pages

    You can natively get the Firefox Translation feature – right at the browser window. You can easily translate it into English and other available languages. Here’s how. Firefox Translation is part of Project Bergamot, which was launched in 2019. It comes as a Firefox official extension.

  • Learn Ubuntu ☛ How to Merge PDF Files in Ubuntu Terminal

    In Linux, you are bound to find multiple ways of doing one thing. And same goes for merging PDF files in the command line.

  • List all files and folders with attributes

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ Ship of Fools – Seafaring Coop Roguelike, Review on Linux – Boiling Steam

    Ship of Fools, developed by Fika Productions and published by Team17, is an intuitive and lighthearted 2 players coop roguelike boat action game. It runs ok with proton experimental or GE.

  • Tedium ☛ Willow NES Retrospective: Better Than the Source Material?

  • As video games go, franchise games are often seen as the worst of the worst—they seem to exist to sell a product first, rather than being driven by being a good game. It is no coincidence that some of the worst video games of all time—think E.T. or Superman 64—are based off of existing movie or television franchises. So, perhaps it’s a little weird that this evening, I come not to bury a franchise game, but to praise it. It came out of a fantasy film directed by a major Hollywood director and produced by another. The film wasn’t the hit that it could have been, but it inspired a pretty good game. And that game is Willow, the NES action RPG that I have had a love-hate relationship with over the years, but I think I’m finally coming around to the “love” column. Today’s Tedium, in honor of the new Willow TV series on Disney+, talks about why the Willow NES game somehow transcended the film that inspired it.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • DebugPoint ☛ digiKam 7.9.0 is now out, and a peek into the future roadmap

      Arriving after four months since the prior digiKam 7.8.0 release, digiKam 7.9.0 bumps up the core packages and dependent modules with bug fixes.

      Since the application is a KDE App, it’s now compiled with the latest Qt 5.15.7 LTS and KDE Framework 5.99.0, which was released on 9th October 2022.

      In addition, image processing components are upgraded with Libraw snapshot 20221123, ExifTool 12.51 and GMicQt 3.1.6.

      Elsewhere, a total number of 97 bugs are analysed and closed in the 7.9.0 version. Major bugs include backward compatibility fixes for database schema integration, Google Photos login fixes and window position in Windows systems. Furthermore, improvement is seen in the remote album management, import of coordinates and ISO date format from image metadata.

      Along with that, translations have been updated, and digiKam now supports 57 international languages.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Make Use Of ☛ Instantbox Gives You Instant Access to a Linux Distro in a Web Browser

  Instantbox lets you create temporary Linux distros that you can access with your web browser.

  Teaching the Linux command line to students usually requires a machine running Linux, a virtual machine, an SSH client, or a live USB. It’s a lot of preparation work you and your students could probably do without.

  With Instantbox, you can easily spin up a Linux distro on your host machine and give learners access to the command line through a browser.

• New Releases

  • Linuxiac ☛ Kali Linux Is Now Part of the Microsoft Azure Marketplace

    Kali is a Debian-based Linux distribution developed, funded, and maintained by Offensive Security. Its usage is focused on advanced penetration testing and security auditing, so the distribution is aimed mainly at security professionals and Linux enthusiasts.

    Following the August release of version 2022.3, the new Kali Linux 2022.4 is the latest release for this year, bringing both internal updates and exciting new distribution capabilities.

  • ArcoLinux Beta 23.01

    Surfn-Plasma-Flow

    We host a new icon theme for Plasma.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

  • PCLOS Official ☛ Koodo Reader 1.3.9 – PCLinuxOS

    Koodo Reader is a super stylish and feature-packed, open-source and cross-platform eBook reader for Linux. It has nice organization options, and pretty much all features a typical user might want and need.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • SUSE’s Corporate Blog ☛ SUSE Obtains Two Certifications from NQA Endorsing Our Compliance with the ISO Standards | SUSE Communities

    Today’s security landscape is ripe with new threats, breaches and attacks making it critically important for businesses to meet the highest industry standards. At SUSE, we are committed to providing a secure framework that our customers, partners and the community know they can rely on and trust.

  • Notifications – Report of Build Failures for Web Notifications – Open Build Service

    You might already use the email channel to get notified about build failures on package builds. From now on you can also subscribe to receive those notifications through the web channel and review them directly in the Open Build Service.

    The checkboxes in the my/subscription area, that used to be disabled, are now usable. Just check the ones you are interested in for the web channel and start to receive the notifications for build failures through the web interface.

• Red Hat / IBM

  • Red Hat ☛ Cryostat 2.2’s new JMX credentials keyring | Red Hat Developer

    An important security enhancement for Java applications is now available through Java Management Extensions (JMX), using open source JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) management with Cryostat. (Cryostat is a container-native JVM application that provides a secure API for profiling and monitoring containers with JFR.) This article explains how the new JMX credentials keyring offers an alternative credential management system.

  • Red Hat ☛ Cryostat 2.2 is released with enhanced Java recording features | Red Hat Developer

    Version 2.2 of Cryostat, an advanced monitoring tool for Java applications, has been released, and the new version offers a lot to talk about. A new Discovery Plugin API to make Cryostat more flexible; a new JMX credentials keyring that enhances automated rules for targets using JMX authentication and enhancing security; many user interface features and improvements; integration with the JMC bytecode agent; and improvements for OpenShift RBAC, Pod security contexts, and node scheduling.

    Cryostat 2.2 also comes with a fresh new logo and a revamped upstream project website. As always, the team is very excited to announce and publish this release, and we look forward to hearing your feedback. Watch this space for upcoming feature articles discussing the big-ticket items.

  • Red Hat ☛ How to implement single sign-out in Keycloak with Spring Boot | Red Hat Developer

    Single sign-on is often implemented with Keycloak. Few people know that Keycloak can also implement single sign-out, where logging out from one application causes Keycloak to log the user out of other applications. This article demonstrates how to enable single sign-out to clean up active sessions for security purposes. We implement these capabilities in Java and Spring Boot, but the principles apply to any language.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ How to use workflow job templates in Ansible | Enable Sysadmin

    Ansible Automation Platform’s workflow job templates amplify the power of your Ansible playbooks to improve your organization’s automation.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ IT leadership: 5 tips for smarter collaboration

    Smarter collaboration refers to how people with the right expertise and background come together – at the right time – to achieve better results than anyone could on their own. This contrasts with a “go-it-alone” approach that may seem easier in the moment but is limited by one’s own experience, perspectives, and blind spots.

    Smarter collaboration generates financial, innovation, and talent benefits across departments and functions, including IT. As business systems become more complex and technology-enabled (think cloud computing, RPA, AI), a wider range of perspectives – including those of customers, internal end-users, and company leaders – are needed to assess potential opportunities as well as issues.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ CIOs should embrace these 5 terms in 2023

    The role of the chief information officer is more critical than ever as technology continues to impact nearly all business processes. In recent years, CIOs have expanded their focus beyond implementing SaaS programs to developing longer-term operational strategies to have a multifaceted impact on today’s organizations.

    While digital transformation and cloud computing are likely already a part of every CIO’s nomenclature, here are five key terms IT leaders should know to ensure that technology drives KPIs in all departments, from customer service to human resources and risk management to logistics and procurement.

• Debian Family

  • Thorsten Alteholz ☛ Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in November 2022

    This month I accepted 292 and rejected 43 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 295.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Linux Magazine ☛ Linux Mint 21.1 Enters Beta Status – Linux Magazine

    With a new version of the Cinnamon Desktop, Linux Mint 21.1 has plenty to offer.

    The developers of Linux Mint have officially announced the upcoming release is in beta. What’s big about this news is that 21.1 will include the latest release of the Cinnamon desktop.

    The new version of Cinnamon has been tidied up to look cleaner and more modern. You’ll find more vibrant colors, a new mouse pointer, new system sounds, and some of the desktop icons have been removed and are now pinned to the panel or opened from the main menu.

    In order to achieve more vibrant colors, the developers had to use fewer accents across the UI. This change also required a number of other minor theme tweaks.

    The Linux Mint Driver Manager also received a number of improvements for the user interface and includes a more robust driver installation. Even drivers for Broadcom wireless devices are easier than ever.

  • Ubuntu ☛ Virgin Media O2 deploys Charmed OSM to accelerate network functions virtualisation for cloud workloads | Ubuntu

    The challenge of network hosting in telco clouds and the desire to shift service management to more automated systems has given rise to tools like ETSI Open Source MANO (OSM). OSM reduces the complexity of service lifecycle management and minimises errors and operating costs. Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), the UK’s largest telecommunication service provider, has chosen Charmed OSM, Canonical’s upstream distribution of ETSI Open Source MANO, as their production-ready orchestrator for hybrid workload deployments. Charmed OSM helps VMO2 reduce costs from Day-0 to Day-N by providing a generic approach to network function management and orchestration and simplifying their initial configuration and daily operational tasks. Mavenir, a cloud-native network software provider is delivering the NFV solutions to VMO2.

• Devices/Embedded

  • CNX Software ☛ Hand Gesture Recognition on ESP32-S3 with the ESP-DL library – CNX Software

    Ali Hassan Shah has deployed a deep learning model for hand gesture recognition on the ESP32-S3-EYE board using the ESP-DL library and achieved AI-powered hand recognition with a 0.7-second latency on the ESP32-S3 camera board.

    Last year, Espressif released the ESP-DL library for the ESP32-S3 microcontroller with AI vector extensions, as well as ESP32 and ESP32-S2, along with a face detection demo that ran much faster on the ESP32-S3. Ali rolled out his own solution for AI gesture recognition and provided a step-by-step tutorial along the way.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Hackaday ☛ A Tiny RISC-V Emulator Runs Linux With No MMU. And Yes, It Runs DOOM! | Hackaday

    It’s something of an article of faith, that to run Linux your computer must include a hardware memory management unit, or MMU. To an extent it’s true, in that for a Linux-based system to shine it must have that hardware, but in fact there has been support for MMU-less Linux for many years now. Prolific hacker [cnlohr] has created an emulated simple RISCV processor without an MMU, and not only does it run Linux, it also runs DOOM.

    The videos below the break go into significant depth on writing and debugging an emulator not to mention the inner workings of DOOM, but fear not if it’s not your thing. Everything can be found in a GitHub repository, and there are straightforward instructions should you wish to try it yourself.

  • Arduino ☛ Add a scale to your bike repair stand | Arduino Blog

    If you do a lot of work on bicycles then a decent repair is very valuable. They can clamp onto various parts of the frame, like the top tube or seat tube, and support the bike while you work on it. Truing a wheel, for example, is much easier with a bike stand. And if your bike’s weight is an important factor, then Dane Kouttron’s Bike Repair Stand with Built-in Scale should be right up your alley.

    The project’s title explains everything: this is a bike stand with an integrated digital scale. With a quick glance at the readout, a builder can see how much the bike weighs at any point during assembly (and deduce the weight of individual parts). It is meant to work with a wall-mounted bike repair stand. Kouttron built a base for the stand and the scale sits between the two, but it would be possible to adapt the design to keep it wall-mounted.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ 7 Best Airplay Apps for Android | Enjoy Wireless Media Sharing

    Airplay is a very popular system developed by Apple, and it is basically a wireless communication protocol suite that lets users share media without wired communication. This system is solely available for Apple product users, and that makes Android users sad and unhappy. For sure, the system, Airplay, is modern, useful, and handy.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Medevel ☛ 10 Open Source Free Airtable Alternatives

  For this article, we will list and go through a dozen of open-source self-hosted Airtable alternatives and cloud spreadsheet solutions.

• Events

  • Announcing FOSSY, July 13-16 in Portland Oregon! – Software Freedom Conservancy

    Software Freedom Conservancy is announcing our first ever Free and Open Source Software Yearly Conference (FOSSY)! Free and Open Source Software is back at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR for a 4 day conference July 13-16, 2023. Join us to celebrate and learn about what makes the FOSS community so special and unique and to discuss the most critical issues in our field. The conference will focus on community driven initiatives in FOSS like licensing and legal approaches, community development as well as technical talks from contributors from all over the world. The health and safety of our attendees is an utmost priority for us and we will be publishing information about our covid protocols in the coming weeks.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Chromium

    • Google ☛ Chrome Releases: Stable Channel Update for Desktop

      The Stable channel has been updated to 108.0.5359.98 for Mac and Linux and 108.0.5359.98/.99 for Windows, which will roll out over the coming days/weeks. A full list of changes in this build is available in the log.

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ How the Mozilla Community helps shape our products – Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

      A product is first an idea, then a project, and then a prototype. It is tested, refined, and localized so that it is accessible to users in different regions. When the product is released into the world, these users need to be supported. Of course, there are always going to be improvements, fixes, and new features, and those will also need to be planned, developed, tested…and so on, and so forth…

      What do all these stages have in common?

      Here at Mozilla, our awesome community is there every step of the way to support and contribute to our products. None of what we do would be possible without this multicultural, multilingual community of like-minded people working together to be a better internet.

      Of course, contributions to our products are not everything that the community does. There is much more that our community creates, contributes, and discusses.

      However, as a major release recently happened we want to take the occasion to celebrate our community by giving you a peek at how their great contributions helped with version 106 (as well as all versions!) of Firefox.

    • LWN ☛ Tor Browser 12.0 released [LWN.net]

      Version 12.0 of the Tor browser has been released. Changes include multi-locale support, Apple silicon support, HTTPS-only behavior by default on Android and more.

    • Tor ☛ New Release: Tor Browser 12.0

• FSF

  • FSF ☛ Join the FSF and support the tech team

    FSF tech team member Michael McMahon discusses the team’s year-round jobs and responsibilities, and how it is all done in freedom and to support and strengthen the freedom of the free software community.

    The Free Software Foundation (FSF) tech team is involved in every aspect of the FSF’s work. Besides maintaining the infrastructure for GNU and FSF, as well as virtual machines for several other important free software projects, they continually take on work to secure freedom by, for example, freeing all BIOSes of FSF’s servers, workstations, and laptops. They run livestreamed audio and video for the annual LibrePlanet conference and make sure the office and its databases run smoothly. They are also always ready to assist the other FSF teams with new scripts, tools, and platforms to service new ideas, projects, or public activities.

• Programming/Development

  • Pi My Life Up ☛ PHP Associative Arrays – Pi My Life Up

    This tutorial will cover PHP associative arrays and how you can create, edit, and access them. This array type will be helpful in many use cases, especially when you need a clear identifier for a value.

  • FOSSLife ☛ Why and How to Learn Lua [Ed: Microsoft apologists and boosters ("FOSSlife Team") only judge Lua by how many projects are controlled by Microsoft, as if nothing else exists]

    “Lua is a high-level programming language used for scripting in games and other tasks,” Samuel Ogunleke says. Additionally, “Lua is simpler than Python, and it has a very short learning curve. With its simplicity, all data structures are represented almost the same way. It is easy to write functions, conditional statements, loops, and everything,” he says.

  • Qt ☛ Qt for MCUs 2.2.3 LTS Released

    Qt for MCUs 2.2.3 LTS (Long-Term Support) has been released and is available for download. As a patch release, Qt for MCUs 2.2.3 LTS provides bug fixes and other improvements, and maintains source compatibility with Qt for MCUs 2.2.x. It does not add any new functionality.

  • Barry Kauler ☛ Kirkstone-series packages rolled back and forward

    Compiling the packages that are intended to be in the new EasyOS Kirkstone-series is a juggling act. I am having to roll some packages back to earlier versions and some forward.

    Ghostscript for example, rolled back to 9.20.

    OE Kirkstone has ffmpeg 5.0.1; however, vlc in kirkstone won’t compile. The OE devs are probably waiting for a later version of vlc that fixes it. But I think that a lot of apps that use ffmpeg are not yet ready for 5.0, due to major api changes. So I rolled back to ffmpeg 4.4.

    Kirkstone has rust 1.59; however, I discovered it has some problems, such as unable to create a ‘rustc’ that will work in the target evironment. OE master has rust 1.65, that I have rolled forward to.

  • OpenSource.com ☛ 16 reasons DDEV will be your new favorite development environment | Opensource.com

    In 2022, you have a wide variety of local development environments to choose from, whether you’re a designer, developer, tester, or any kind of open source contributor. Because most of the tools and platforms contributors use happen to run on many different operating systems, you probably even have the choice of constructing your own environment. I’m the maintainer of DDEV, and here are 15 reasons I think you’ll like it for your development environment.

  • RapidCompact version 6 update: new features – improvements

    With the RapidCompact version 6 update we’ve added impressive new features and several improvements for handling your 3D models. Let’s have a look at the most important changes.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Rakulang ☛ Day 8: I’ll Let You Know Later – Raku Advent Calendar

      Back when the web was young the only way that you could know whether a resource had changed its state was to manually re-request the page, this wasn’t really too much of a problem when there was only static pages which didn’t change all that often. Then along came server-side applications, the CGI and the like, these could change their state more frequently in ways that you might be interested in, but in effect you were still stuck with some variation of refreshing the page (albeit possibly initiated by the browser under the instruction of some tag in the page), so if, say, you had an application that kicked off a long running background task it might redirect you to another page that checked the status of the job that would periodically refresh itself then redirect to the results when the task was complete, (in fact I know of at least one reasonably well known reporting application that does just this still in 2022.)

      Then sometime around the turn of century things started to get a lot more interactive with the introduction of the XMLHttpRequest API which allowed a script in a web page to make requests to the server and, based on the response, update the view appropriately, thus making it possible for a web page to reflect a change in state in the server without any refreshing ( though still with some polling of the server in the background by the client-side script.) Then along came the WebSocket API which provides for bi-directional communication between the client and server, and Server-Sent Events which provides for server push of events (with associated data.) These technologies provide means to reflect changes in an application state in a web page without needing a page refresh.

  • Rust

    • LWN ☛ Rust support coming to GCC

      Gccrs — the Rust front-end for GCC — has been approved for merging into the GCC trunk. That means that the next GCC release will be able to compile Rust, sort of; as gccrs developer Arthur Cohen warns: “This is very much an extremely experimental compiler and will still get a lot of changes in the coming weeks and months up until the release”. See this article and this one for more details on the current status of gccrs.

Leftovers

• Security

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

    • CyberRisk Alliance LLC ☛ Linux devices compromised via PRoot utility exploitation | SC Media [Ed: This impacts devices that are already compromised some other way]

      Linux devices are being hacked in Bring Your Own Filesystem attacks exploiting the open-source Linux PRoot utility, BleepingComputer reports.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Politico ☛ France’s Mr. Privacy turns cybersnooper – POLITICO

      Eric Leandri was once the darling of France’s tech sector, lauded as a defender of digital privacy and a paragon of Europe’s ability to compete against Silicon Valley.

      Qwant — the search engine Leandri co-founded in 2011 — received more than €50 million in French and European public funding and loans. A-list politicians like French President Emmanuel Macron and European Union antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager endorsed the company over its better-known American competitor Google.

    • Ruling finds EU’s assistance to Africa failed to ensure surveillance protections | Africa Times

      The European Union failed to fully consider the potential for surveillance-related human rights violations as it equipped African nations with technologies and surveillance training through its EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTFA).

      That’s the decision of the EU Commission Ombudsman, following a formal complaint filed by a group of international human rights NGOs in October 2021.

      Privacy International, along with Access Now, the Border Violence Monitoring Network, Homo Digitalis, the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and Germany’s Sea-Watch, argued that the EUTFA program extended surveillance capacities to authoritarian governments without ensuring the same policies and protections common to Europeans.

    • Politico ☛ Operation LVMH: How a cybersurveillance firm monitored politicians, union leaders and activists – POLITICO

      LVMH was under attack.

      As the French luxury goods group was gearing up for a general shareholder’s meeting in 2021, a left-wing NGO had launched a campaign denouncing businessmen for making money from the COVID crisis. Among them: LVMH’s billionaire CEO Bernard Arnault, the world’s second richest person.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ The Decoupling Principle

      The idea is simple, yet previously not clearly articulated: to ensure privacy, information should be divided architecturally and institutionally such that each entity has only the information they need to perform their relevant function. Architectural decoupling entails splitting functionality for different fundamental actions in a system, such as decoupling authentication (proving who is allowed to use the network) from connectivity (establishing session state for communicating). Institutional decoupling entails splitting what information remains between non-colluding entities, such as distinct companies or network operators, or between a user and network peers. This decoupling makes service providers individually breach-proof, as they each have little or no sensitive data that can be lost to hackers. Put simply, the Decoupling Principle suggests always separating who you are from what you do.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • CCIA ☛ The State of State Content Moderation Laws – Disruptive Competition Project

    Amid ongoing debates at the federal level, state lawmakers began their own initiatives to regulate online content moderation around 2018. Since 2021, 38 states have introduced over 250 bills to regulate content across digital services’ platforms. States across the country — from California to South Carolina to New York — are considering or have enacted legislation. Many of these bills are unconstitutional, conflict with federal law (including Section 230), and would place major barriers on digital services’ abilities to restrict dangerous content on their platforms.

• Monopolies

  • Software Patents

    • TechRadar ☛ Amazon joins Open Invention Network to keep its Linux patents safe [Ed: There's no such thing as "Linux patents"; lies and distortions from OIN are being perpetuated by clueless people]

      Amazon and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have joined the patent non-aggression consortium the Open Invention Network (OIN).

      Founded in 2015, the OIN buys patents and then licenses them royalty-free to its members, who have all agreed not to enforce their own patents against Linux-based projects, within limits.

      This can help to fight an activity that is commonly known as “patent trolling”, where people try and enforce their patents far beyond their true legal rights, often in an attempt to extort payments.

  • Copyrights

    • Public Domain Review ☛ In Search of True Color: Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s Flawed Images – The Public Domain Review

      Archived amid Prokudin-Gorsky’s remarkable photographic survey of the Russian Empire, we find images shot through with starshatter cracks, blebbed with mildew, and blurred by motion. Within such moments of unmaking, Erica X Eisen uncovers the overlapping forces at play behind these pioneering efforts in colour photography.

      “At 9 [PM]”, Tsar Nicholas II recorded in his diary on January 22, 1911, “Prokudin-Gorsky showed us his beautiful color photos of the Volga and the Urals in the Semi-circular Hall. Dmitri and I played billiards.”1 As well as telegraphing a certain princely boredom, the entry is testament to a striking early achievement in the history of photography: the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky, an academic and scientist from Murom whose research interests had come to focus on photochemistry. At a time when black-and-white was still the dominant photographic mode, Prokudin-Gorsky had perfected a technique of capturing scenes in full color, so that he could dazzle audiences in St. Petersburg with magic lantern shows that looked to be brimming with life: plates of ruby-red berries, lush greenhouses, scale-like church roofs radiant in the sun.

    • Public Domain Review ☛ Ellen Harding Baker’s “Solar System” Quilt (1876–ca. 1883) – The Public Domain Review

      Working as an astronomy teacher in Lone Tree, Iowa, Ellen Harding Baker quilted this magnificent representation of the cosmos for her students.

      Two years after a naked-eye comet pierced the blanket of night in the spring of 1874, Ellen Harding Baker (1847–1886) began a near decade-long project to bring the stars farther down to Earth: an appliqué quilt depicting the solar system, complete with a green-tailed comet, its slingshot course plotted around the Sun. On this dreamy textile, measuring seven by eight feet, moons orbit their various planets in running stitch, asteroids clump in circular fields, and embroidered stars of wool and silk blaze out in concentric rings of yellow, blue, and red. As Maria Popova notes, Baker was born the same year that Maria Mitchell discovered her eponymous comet, and seems to embody the astronomer’s hope that sewing needles and crewelwork, rather than tack women to domestic tasks, could aid scientific perception. “The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery” — wrote Mitchell in an 1878 diary entry, at about the time Baker’s quilt was halfway complete — “will equally well bisect a star with the spider web of the micrometer.”

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AEGLUPM Wordo: DIVOT

  • Notes on an overheard conversation about locking the keys in the car

    “Finally! I’m home!”

    “Yes you are!”

    “And you didn’t answer your phone.”

    “You didn’t call!”

    “Yes I did.”

    “Oh! I see I did receive a call, but it was from a number not on my contact list. You know I don’t answer those.”

    “I was hoping you’d make an exception.”

• Technical

  • My Dream PC

    I grew up with computer surrounding me. My father was really into technology and he collected computers one way or another. Buying prebuilts, offloading broken PCs from his job (and swapping parts – you’d be surprised – 3 busted computers can equal 1 working computer). And as a child this has become magical. And “gifting” to us children his old work machines as they upgraded.

  • Builtin Commands

    A somewhat common claim is that “Z is a bash command”, presumably because Z can be called from bash. For example, “sed is a bash command”. At worst, this implies some sort of ownership or hierarchy that does not exist.

  • Notes on configuring Apache mod_md

    I’ve been tweaking my Apache configuration [1] for the past two days [2], trying to figure out what I need and don’t need, and these are just some notes I’ve collected on the process. I’m using `mod_md [3]` for managing the secure certificates, and there isn’t much out on the Intarwebs about how a configuratin for a website should look like. I can find plenty of pages that basically regurgitates the Apache documentation for `mod_md`, but nothing on how it all goes together. So here’s an annotated version of a configuration for one of my less important sites…

GNU/Linux

• Fosshost, an Open-Source Project Hosting, Is Closing Down as Its Leader Disappeared

  Volunteers of the open-source project hosting Fosshost, whose services are used by GNOME, Armbian and Debian, and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), have announced the imminent closure.

  The fact is that the head of the project, Thomas Markey, did not get in touch for more than six months, but only he had access to bank accounts and infrastructure

  [...]

  Shortly after this post was posted, YCombinator Hacker News got a clarification from one of the project’s supposed volunteers. He writes that Fosshost’s problems arose due to the sudden disappearance of the head of the project, Thomas Markey. It turned out that Marky had not been in contact for about six months, and he was the only person who had access to the bank accounts necessary for the work of the host.

• IT Pro Today ☛ 8 Linux Tools IT Operations Engineers Should Master

  Some are tried-and-true and others are newer, but all eight of these Linux tools should be in IT operations engineers’ tool belt.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • THIS is my LINUX Alternative to Windows 11

• Graphics Stack

  • Alyssa Rosenzweig ☛ Rosenzweig – Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux

    We’re excited to announce our first Apple GPU driver release!

    We’ve been working hard over the past two years to bring this new driver to everyone, and we’re really proud to finally be here. This is still an alpha driver, but it’s already good enough to run a smooth desktop experience and some games.

    Read on to find out more about the state of things today, how to install it (it’s an opt-in package), and how to report bugs!

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ NVIDIA talks up RTX IO with GDeflate (used in DirectStorage 1.1) to speed up games

    Vulkan version 1.3.233 was released back in November, and with it came two new extensions from NVIDIA designed to help speed up gaming on Linux and Windows. Their tech is even used in DirectStorage from Microsoft.

• Applications

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Blender 3.4 Released with Native Wayland Support on Linux, Many Improvements

    The biggest change in Blender 3.4, which comes exactly three months after Blender 3.3 LTS, is the enablement of native support for the next-generation Wayland windowing environment on GNU/Linux systems. Initial Wayland support in Blender landed back in 2020, as a build option, but now it’s finally enabled by default.

    Until now, Blender recommended Linux users use the X11 display server, but now Wayland is fully supported in addition to X11. When Wayland is detected, Blender is using it as the preferred windowing environment.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Linux Handbook ☛ Scan Ports With netcat Command in Linux

    Whether you want to use SSH on an alternate port or deploy a web application to a specific port, the first step will always be to check whether the port is being utilized.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install XanMod Kernel on Fedora 37/36/35 – LinuxCapable

    For those looking to upgrade their systems to the latest Linux Kernel, XanMod has proved to be an invaluable resource. A free, open-source general-purpose Linux Kernel alternative, it is beneficial for users looking to get the newest features and improved performance on more recent hardware to satisfy their gaming, streaming, and ultra-low latency requirements. And for those who don’t have time or patience for manual kernel installation or utilizing the Fedora kernel testing/unstable repository, Third-Party Kernels such as XanMod may be a solid option for your system. For more information on XanMod Kernel before installing, visit the XanMod Kernel features information page.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Liquorix Kernel on Fedora 37/36/35 – LinuxCapable

    The Liquorix Kernel is the go-to alternative to the stock kernel shipped with Fedora Linux. Ideally suited for various tasks, it’s ideal for gamers, streamers, and anyone needing ultra-low latency. It comes with custom settings and numerous new features designed to increase performance and give users access to the latest Linux kernels. Whether you’re after exceptional gaming experiences on your desktop or need an upgrade from your default Fedora kernel, give Liquorix Kernel a try, you may see substantial improvements.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the Liquorix Kernel on your Fedora 37/36/36 workstation or server using the copr rmnscnce/kernel-lqx repository with optional how to re-install the default kernel for users that would like to switch back.

  • TecMint ☛ How to Check Linux OS Name, Kernel Version, and Information [Ed: Updated today]

    There are several ways of knowing the version of Linux you are running on your machine as well as your distribution name and kernel version plus some extra information that you may probably want to have in mind or at your fingertips.

    Therefore, in this simple yet important guide for new Linux users, I will show you how to find out your Linux system OS version from the command line. Doing this may seem to be a relatively easy task.

    However, having a good knowledge of your system is always a recommended practice for a good number of reasons including installing and running the appropriate packages for your Linux version, for easy reporting of bugs coupled with many more.

  • It’s FOSS ☛ How to Access UEFI Settings From Linux

    Want to check the boot order or the power settings at the firmware level? You can access the UEFI settings by pressing the F2, F10 or Del buttons when your system boots.

    The problem with this approach is that you may not know the exact key and must be alert about pressing those keys at the right time.

  • TecAdmin ☛ Setup DKIM (DomainKeys) with Postfix on Ubuntu – Debian

    DKIM or DomainKeys Identified Mail is an authentication protocol used to validate the identity of a sender. It’s an important tool for preventing email spoofing, which is when a person impersonates another user and sends emails with their name and address. DKIM Key works by using an OpenDKIM or Domain Key to sign each message sent. The key is an encrypted string of characters unique to the sender and is used to verify the message comes from the sender’s domain. This makes it harder for malicious actors to send forged messages. DKIM Key also allows receivers to reject messages that fail authentication. This provides added protection against spoofing and other email-based attacks. It’s a crucial safety measure for any email server and one that can help protect your business and its customers.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Krita on Fedora 37/36/35

    Krita is an incredible tool for anyone looking for a digital painting and image manipulation program. From students to professionals, Krita offers powerful yet easy-to-use features and functions that make creating stunning images much more straightforward. Also, its wide range of supported platforms ensures users have no limitations when turning their creative vision into a reality. The fact that it’s open-source and free makes it even more attractive, making Krita one of the go-to digital painting and image manipulation options.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Krita on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux using the Fedora DNF Repository or the natively installed third-party manager Flatpak using the command line terminal, along with some tips on how to update or remove the software in the future if required.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install VSCodium on Fedora 37/36/35 [Ed: Adopting this helps Microsoft monopoly; better use something that does not help Microsoft push proprietary software]

    VSCodium is the perfect choice for web developers and software engineers looking for an open-source code editor. It leverages the same user experience as Microsoft Visual Studio Code, offering full access to its source code maintained on GitHub and licensed under the MIT License. Though you won’t have to accept extra features via plugins or extensions begrudgingly, it may come with a tiny catch – VSCodium may direct data elsewhere through third-party networks without necessarily asking your permission first, so be aware of this in the future. Nevertheless, there’s still no beating VSCodium open-source power that remains available, and an excellent option for those that may not require as many extensions and plugins with less telemetry.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to solve “An unexpected error occurred…server’s configuration” on WordPress

    When an error happens on WordPress, it’s a total headache. Something is wrong, and occasionally, we have no idea what could have happened. Today you will learn how to resolve the error “An unexpected error occurred. Something may be wrong with WordPress.org or this server’s configuration” on WordPress.

  • Linux Shell Tips ☛ What is the Difference Between ‘apt remove’ and ‘apt purge’?

    This article theoretically and practically looks at the different usage of apt remove and apt purge commands.

    apt remove vs apt purge Commands

    When addressing apt remove vs apt purge commands, there is always some confusion in their applicability. Both commands reside within Debian-based Linux distributions like Ubuntu. Also, both commands seem to perform similar functionality.

  • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 52: declaring multiple layer lists

    On day 46, I’ve explained how you can order layers by defining them in a comma-separated list first. The first layer in the list has the lowest priority and the last layer the highest.

  • Adafruit ☛ A 10-minute guide to the Linux applications binary interface #Linux #Programming @opensourceway

    ABI stands for Applications Binary Interface. One way to understand the concept of an ABI is to consider what it is not. Applications Programming Interfaces (APIs) are more familiar to many developers. Generally, the headers and documentation of libraries are considered to be their API, as are standards documents like those for HTML5, for example. Programs that call into libraries or exchange string-formatted data must comply with the conventions described in the API or expect unwanted results.

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Dwarf Fortress arrives on Steam, works on Linux desktop and Steam Deck

    Dwarf Fortress has now finally arrived on Steam, with all the shiny new bits including the new graphical tiles and audio included in Early Access. The good news is that even though it doesn’t have Native Linux support yet, it does work on Linux desktop and Steam Deck with Proton.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ The Long Dark: Tales from the Far Territory out now as the game is split up

    The Long Dark: Tales from the Far Territory is the 12-month long expansion pass for The Long Dark and it’s out now, along with the game now split into different parts.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ MineClone2 version 0.81.0 (free Minecraft-like) for Minetest out now

    MineClone2 is pretty much as close as you can get to Minecraft without playing Minecraft. It’s free, open source and runs on the Minetest voxel game engine. A new release is now available with version 0.81.0.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Fanatical running a winter festival of game bundles, like a Steam Deck Verified Bundle

    Staying in and staying warm? I am. So might as well make the most of it with a whole load of new games to fill up your Steam Library with. Fanatical are running a little festival of bundles, including one full of Steam Deck Verified games.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Heroic Games Launcher gets a big Hotfix to clean up some issues

    The Heroic Games Launcher to help manage games on Steam Deck and Linux with GOG, Epic Games and other apps you can sideload has a new release out to clean up after the recent big update. Nice to see they’ve been really quick to deal with some of the problems, including sideloaded apps not being added to Steam automatically that I pointed out.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Death Stranding Director’s Cut has an annoying issue that can reboot your Steam Deck

    Update: a follower of ours on Mastodon pointed out it’s a Mesa driver issue in the ACO shader compiler, and there’s a fix noted so hopefully Valve will update the Steam Deck AMD GPU driver soon.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Valheim: Mistlands is out now with an animated trailer

    After a pretty short testing period, the Valheim: Mistlands update is out now for everyone expanding the great survival game quite a lot.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • OpenSource.com ☛ Why I use the Enlightenment file manager on Linux

    Computers are like filing cabinets, full of virtual folders and files waiting to be referenced, cross-referenced, edited, updated, saved, copied, moved, renamed, and organized. In this series, I’m taking a look at the Enlightenment file manager for your Linux system.

    The Enlightenment desktop is designed to be a modern implementation of what’s considered a traditional UNIX desktop. There are certain elements that are considered to be characteristic of graphical UNIX, most of which were defined in the by early desktops like CDE or twm. Enlightenment implements things like a dock, an on-demand global contextual menu, flexible focus, virtual workspaces, but with an almost hyper-modern flair. Enlightenment is able to combine these elements with effects and animations because it’s also its own compositor, and the EFL libraries that the desktop uses are specific to Enlightenment and maintained by the Enlightenment team. That’s a long way of confessing that in this entry in my file manager series, I’m looking at a file manager that’s mostly inextricable from the desktop it supports. If you want to try Enlightenment’s file manager, you have to try Enlightenment. Luckily, it’s a pleasant experience, and a fun diversion from the usual desktops.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• New Releases

  • Bleeping Computer ☛ Kali Linux 2022.4 adds 6 new tools, Azure images, and desktop updates

    Offensive Security has released ​Kali Linux 2022.4, the fourth and final version of 2022, with new Azure and QEMU images, six new tools, and improved desktop experiences.

    Kali Linux is a distribution designed for ethical hackers to perform penetration testing, security audits, and cybersecurity research against networks.

  • It’s FOSS ☛ Kali Linux’s Last Update for the Year Brings a Lot of Early Christmas Gifts

    Kali Linux is an open-source, Debian-based distro focusing on penetration testing and security auditing. It consists of various tools, configurations, and automation to help you achieve that. Dubbed as the final release of this year, Kali Linux 2022.4 promises many improvements over its predecessor. Let me take you through this release.

  • The Register UK ☛ Desktop OpenSolaris fork OpenIndiana releases Hipster • The Register

    The OpenIndiana project has opened the gates on “Hipster”, its latest release and the first this year, and it includes MATE 1.26, LibreOffice, and more.

    OpenIndiana is a desktop flavor of illumos, which has been continuing development of OpenSolaris since 2010. In the project’s own words about Version 2022.10:

    Hipster is a codename for rapidly moving development branch of OpenIndiana. Hipster is using rolling-release model and only publishes installation ISOs once in a while.

    Judging by the project’s announcements page, this is the first new release the project has announced since this time last year, although in previous years there were semiannual updates. The 2022.10 release integrates over 2,500 pull requests, and updates multiple components, including version 1.26 of the MATE desktop, 64-bit LibreOffice 7.2.7, and Perl 5.36.

    The distro now includes the latest GCC 10, plus the option of GCC 11 and Clang 13. It also updates the bundled nVidia drivers, but we weren’t able to test that as the Reg FOSS desk lacks any kit with a current nVidia GPU.

• BSD

  • Undeadly ☛ lladdr-tied interface config support has been committed

    Support for lladdr-tied configuration of (network) interfaces [on which we reported earlier] has been committed. Andrew Fresh (afresh1@) made the commit: [...]

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

  • PCLOS Official ☛ React-Explorer 2.3.1 – PCLinuxOS

    React-Explorer is an electron based file manager that provides split-view, tab support, and full keyboard controls. Now available in the PCLinuxOS software repository.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Linux Links ☛ BrosTrend Linux USB WiFi Adapter AC1200 Review
    

    This review looks at the BrosTrend Linux USB WiFi Adapter AC1200 (AC1L). This small USB key retails for around £25 ($30.99) and plugs directly into a USB 3 port. BrosTrend provide Linux support for Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros. Their wifi adapter chipsets and drivers are developed by Realtek.

  • The DIY Life ☛ I Made An Only Fans Case For My Raspberry Pi

    Every time I’ve made a new case for my Raspberry Pi, there are always a few comments suggesting adding another fan or making improvements to the cooling, so today I’m going to put these suggestions to the test by building a case that has as many fans as possible to find out if more fans really result in lower CPU temperatures.

    [...]

    Given that we’re now using over 2000% more power just to run the fans and that most Raspberry Pi’s are not running flat out continuously, I’d say a single fan on a decent size heatsink like the Ice Tower or Ice Cube cooler is more than enough – even for overclocking.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Linux Gizmos ☛ Open-Source 8-Bit Gaming Console based on Arduino platform

    Kickstarter recently featured the Arduboy Mini which is an 8-bit video game console based on the Arduino platform. The tiny console includes more than 300 games and it can also be used to learn to code games using the tutorials from the Arduboy Community.

    As other Arduboy models released in the past (i.e. Arduboy FX), the Arduboy Mini is also powered by the ATmega32u4 processor (up to 16MHz) often found in Arduino Leonardo boards.

  • CNX Software ☛ Add an ePaper display to Raspberry Pi Pico W with EnkPi 2.9-inch to 7.5-inch displays (Crowdfunding) – CNX Software

    SB Components is running another crowdfunding campaign with the EnkPi ePaper display powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico W board and offered in four different sizes namely 2.9-inch, 4.2-inch 5.83-inch, and 7.5-inch.

    Each mainboard also comes with a USB Type-C port, a microSD card socket, an RTC with a backup battery holder, a buzzer, six user buttons, and a JST connector for expansion with GPIO, I2C, UART, and ADC signals.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Nokia Mob ☛ Android 13 available for Nokia X20 and Nokia X10 | Nokiamob

  • Giz China ☛ realme UI 4.0 based on Android 13 finally arrive for these phones

  • SamMobile ☛ Samsung Galaxy A32 5G Android 13 update released – SamMobile

  • Honor is rolling out MagicOS 7/Android 13 beta – Huawei Central

  • Android Headlines ☛ Guide to downloading casino apps on Android

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Jon Udell ☛ Mastodon, Steampipe, and RSS

  A first version of the dashboard, having only this data to work with, just listed the names of tags matching the search term along with corresponding URLs. Here was the initial query.

• Free Software Foundation ☛ Free Software Foundation Bulletin, Issue 41 – Fall 2022

  1. Protect your freedom by managing your privacy

  2. GHM 2022 in Turkey: A personal reflection

  3. Copyright assignment with the FSF

  4. Charting a course to a free world

  5. New upcoming release of Trisquel 11, codenamed Aramo

• Programming/Development

  • Amos Wenger ☛ Day 6 (Advent of Code 2022)

    Our input is a jumble of letters, and we’re supposed to find the position of the first substring that’s “four different characters”.

  • Doug Brown ☛ Getting ChatGPT to write a Linux kernel module for me

    I’ve been doing some Linux kernel development in my spare time over the past 6 months or so. The goal has been to get my old Chumby 8 (stock kernel 2.6.28) running on a modern kernel with custom firmware. It has been going really well and there have been lots of fun problems I’ve needed to solve along the way. I may write some posts about that process if there is any interest. It’s been a blast.

  • Matt Rickard ☛ Stack Overflow Bans ChatGPT

    Stack Overflow is “banning” the use of ChatGPT (post). I know more than a few programmers who sought to farm some free internet points by answering questions with the help of ChatGPT. It’s an obvious and existential question for Stack Overflow, which makes sense why we’re doing the thought experiment here first.

Leftovers

• The Nation ☛ Will This Ukrainian Town Be Repaired by Winter?

  Halina Egorovna has placed every bucket, pot, and pan she owns around the floor of her one-bedroom apartment. Sheets of plastic line her walls and her couch, but the floor is still soaked. A cold autumn rain drenched Kyiv Oblast the previous night, pouring rain through the holes of her building’s roof, and leaking water into her apartment.

  “Do you see how we live?” she says to me in Ukrainian, beginning to weep. “No one helps us, they only bring promises.”

• The Nation ☛ Migrants

• TruthOut ☛ Senators Set to Propose Legislation to Help Dreamers With Pathway to Citizenship

• Hackaday ☛ Rocket Mounted 3D Printed Camera Wheel Tries, Succeeds, And Also Fails

  [Joe] at BPS.space has a thing for rockets, and his latest quest is to build a rocket that will cross the Kármán Line and launch into the Final Frontier. And being the owner of a YouTube channel, he wants to have excellent on-board video that he can share. The trouble? Spinning. A spinning rocket is a stable rocket, especially as altitude increases. So how would [Joe] get stable video from a rocket spinning at several hundred degrees per second? That’s the question being addressed in the video below the break.

• Hackaday ☛ Silicone-Slapping Servos Solve Simon Says

  Most modern computer games have a clearly-defined end, but many classics like Pac-man and Duck Hunt can go on indefinitely, limited only by technical constraints such as memory size. One would think that the classic electronic memory game Simon should fall into that category too, but with most humans struggling even to reach level 20 it’s hard to be sure. [Michael Schubart] was determined to find out if there was in fact an end to the latest incarnation of Simon and built a robot to help him in his quest.

• The Nation ☛ The West’s Broken Approach to Refugees

  Almost anyone would agree that war is horrifying and peaceful countries should do their best to help its victims. The widespread eagerness to welcome fleeing Ukrainians after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded their country last February is a heartening example of such aid. But behind that altruism lies an ugly truth: Most of the countries embracing Ukrainians are simultaneously persecuting equally desperate refugees from elsewhere.

• The Nation ☛ A New Kind of Trans Poetics

  Turner’s life revolves around six things: “men, poems, rent, work, disgust, and transit.” Turner writes letters to friends in the interstitial times of commuting or after hook-ups; the reader intercepts them in between Turner’s work and leisure. Turner dilates on all of those themes, which might circumscribe the world of the contemporary educated, urban, queer, millennial misfit. Turner, whose name sounds “fake, like porn-fake,” is our queen of Bucks County.

• Hackaday ☛ Restarting The Grid When The Grid Is Off The Grid

  If you watch YouTube long enough, it seems like going “off the grid” is all the rage these days. But what if the thing that goes off the grid is the grid itself? In the video below the break, [Grady] with Practical Engineering explores the question: How do you restart an entire power grid after it’s gone offline? It’s a brilliantly simple deep dive into what it takes to restore power to large amounts of customers without causing major damage to not just the grid, but the power generators themselves.

• Science

  • ACM ☛ The Legacy of Peer-to-Peer Systems

    Looking at Google trends, we see that the concept almost faded from our lexicon. Nevertheless, the technology is still used; it evolved and became more specialized. A good portion of the fabric beneath modern data centers (web 2.0) and blockchain technology (web 3.0) evolved from early P2P research. Let’s consider some examples.

  • Hackaday ☛ The World’s Brightest Laser Pointer?

    The videos from [styropyro] are always amusing and informative. However, ironically for him, he is alarmed that many green laser pointers are more powerful than they are supposed to be. Sure, you often want a powerful laser, but if you think a laser is safe and it isn’t, you could… well… put an eye out. See the video below to see what [styropyro] claims is the brightest laser pointer in the world.

• Education

  • Times Higher Education ☛ Taking students’ phones away really does help them learn – study

    Researchers deprived students enrolled in two behavioural sciences classes at a New York-based institution of access to their phones for the duration of the courses, while their peers in two other classes were allowed to continue endlessly scrolling as normal.

    All took questionnaires upon completing the experiment, and those who could not access their phones were found to display better understanding of the course material, higher levels of mindfulness and less anxiety.

  • FAIR ☛ ‘We Need to Transform What It Means to Be an Academic Worker; the Status Quo Is Untenable’

    Janine Jackson interviewed UC Santa Barbara’s Nelson Lichtenstein about the University of California strike for the December 2, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ USB-C: Introduction For Hackers

    We’ve now had at least five years of USB-C ports in our devices. It’s a standard that many manufacturers and hackers can get behind. Initially, there was plenty of confusion about what we’d actually encounter out there, and manufacturer-induced aberrations have put some people off. However, USB-C is here to stay, and I’d like to show you how USB-C actually gets used out there, what you can expect out of it as a power user, and what you can get out of it as a hobbyist.

  • CNX Software ☛ UP Xtreme i12 Alder Lake SBC supports up to four 4K displays @ 60 Hz, Raspberry Pi HATs – CNX Software

    AAEON has just introduced the UP Xtreme i12 single board computer (SBC) with Intel 12th generation Alder Lake-P hybrid SoC with up to 12 cores/16 threads, up to 32GB LPDDR5 memory, support for four 4Kp60 displays, and equipped with high-speed interfaces such as USB 4.0 and 2.5 GbE.

    The board also features four M.2 sockets for NVMe storage, Wi-Fi 6 and 5G cellular connectivity, a SATA III port, several USB 3.2/2.0 Type-A ports, and a 40-pin GPIO header and mounting thread for Raspberry Pi HATs, which should make it especially suitable for IoT, robotics, and smart retail applications, as well as smart manufacturing with a 12 to 36V wide supply voltage range.

  • Hackaday ☛ PSA: Watch Out For White Filament

    We all know that using 3D printing filament with exotic filament that has metal or carbon fibers in it will tend to wear standard nozzles. That’s why many people who work with filaments like that use something other than conventional brass nozzles like hardened steel. There are even nozzles that have a ruby or diamond surfaces to prevent wear. However, [Slant 3D] asserts something we didn’t know: white filament may be wearing your nozzle, too. You can see his argument in the video below.

  • Hackaday ☛ How On-Frequency Are Those Cheap Radar Modules?

    If you’re partial to browsing AliExpress, Banggood, or eBay for unusual hardware, you may have seen the HB100 Doppler Radar modules. These are a PCB with a metal can on board, and their reverse side has a patch antenna array. They work on a frequency of 10.525 GHz, and [OH2FTG] has characterized a few of them to see how close they lie to that figure.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • [Old] Scientific American ☛ Why Social Media Makes People Unhappy—And Simple Ways to Fix It

    Disrupted sleep, lower life satisfaction and poor self-esteem are just a few of the negative mental health consequences that researchers have linked to social media. Somehow the same platforms that can help people feel more connected and knowledgeable also contribute to loneliness and disinformation. What succeeds and fails, scientists say, is a function of how these platforms are designed. Amanda Baughan, a graduate student specializing in human-computer interaction at the University of Washington, studies how social media triggers what psychologists call dissociation, or a state of reduced self-reflection and narrowed attention. She presented results at the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery Computer-Human Interaction Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Baughan spoke with Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas to explain how and why apps need to change to give the people who use them greater power.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Elective Surgery is the “micropayments” of health

    There’s the strict medical definition, but the general public reads it very differently. Elective sounds like voluntary, which leads people to think it’s for vanity, or worse, surgery someone could do without. It permeates discussions on everything from healthcare to politics.

  • NPR ☛ Some streets closed during the pandemic to allow pedestrians will remain car-free

    “We kept thinking that it would be, you know, three months, six months — OK, a year,” said Julia Washburn, superintendent of the park. “We just kept extending it because COVID kept going much longer than any of us had ever anticipated. During that time, some people started to say, ‘Well, why don’t we keep it closed?’ “

    “People loved it”

    In fact, people had been asking to close Beach Drive to cars for decades, but it took a global public health crisis to finally make it happen.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Patient Groups Push Congress to Combat Big Pharma Greed in Spending Bill

    “As Congress works toward finalizing an end-of-year budget package, we urge the chambers to include bipartisan legislation to address abuse of the Food and Drug Administration’s citizen petition process in order to reduce drug prices and save the government hundreds of millions of dollars.”

  • Pro Publica ☛ How to Research Your Hospice (and Avoid Hospice Fraud)

    Half of all Americans die in hospice. To qualify for the government benefit, two doctors must certify a patient as terminally ill, with a life expectancy of six months or less. When done right, hospice offers Medicare beneficiaries an intimate, holistic and vital service — one that allows them to experience as little pain as possible and to spend meaningful time with loved ones.

    But a ProPublica investigation of the hospice industry, in partnership with The New Yorker, found that the current design of the program enables some profit-seeking providers to exploit seniors with few consequences. Most hospice care takes place out of sight, behind closed doors. Because pinpointing what constitutes a “good death” is nearly as difficult as determining what makes a good life, families do not always realize when hospice is failing them.

  • Pro Publica ☛ How Prenatal Screenings Have Escaped Regulation

    Amanda wanted to warn someone. In June 2021, her daughter — the one she and her husband had tried for three years to conceive — had died after only 28 hours. With an underdeveloped nose, she had battled for every breath.

    Nobody knew why. Later, an autopsy report revealed their daughter had an extra 13th chromosome. The condition is nearly always fatal.

  • Counter Punch ☛ China’s COVID Uprising

    Western media tended to emphasize the latter agenda, pushing the possibility of regime change to the top of the news when in fact that theme was not the dominant one among the demonstrators.

    It seems that young people, especially students, were mainly the ones calling for Xi to step down, whereas most everyone else focused on easing quarantines and returning to something resembling normal life. Neither in size, breadth of support, geography, or political impact were these protests anything like Tiananmen.

• Proprietary

  • NPR ☛ Hertz will pay $168 million to customers it falsely accused of stealing its cars

    Many of the Hertz cases involved customers who had called to extend their rental agreement, but the extensions were not properly reflected in Hertz’s computer systems. Other cases involved Hertz re-renting cars that had previously been reported as stolen without rescinding the police reports, causing unsuspecting customers to be pulled over by police. At other times, stolen cars were accidentally associated with the wrong customer, resulting in an arrest warrant for someone who was out of state entirely.

  • Network World ☛ Ransomware attack knocks Rackspace’s Exchange servers offline [iophk: Windows TCO]

    Cloud services and hosting provider Rackspace Technology acknowledged Tuesday that a recent incident that took most of its Hosted Exchange email server business offline was the product of a ransomware attack. The company shut the service down last Friday.

  • IT Wire ☛ Cyberthreat cases increased by 275% in Australia during Black Friday week: Surfshark

    “Two of the most common cyberthreat categories are malware and riskware. Riskware is a program made without malicious intent but has security vulnerabilities that give it the potential to become malware. Malware is any software, product, or program created or installed onto a computer to cause harm,” notes Surfshark.

  • IT Wire ☛ Mandiant identifies Chinese threat group malware infecting USB drives [iophk: Windows TCO]

    Guest research Google cybersecurity subsidiary Mandiant has published new research on a China-based threat group using three new malware families affecting USB drives to target the Philippines and greater Southeast Asia region, which have been a focus for Chinese espionage for many years.

    Mandiant discovered an espionage campaign of a China-based threat group dating back to April 2022.

    This group, which Mandiant tracks as UNC4191, uses three types of malware families that continue replicating by infecting new removable USB drives that are plugged into a compromised system.

  • Mandiant ☛ Always Another Secret: Lifting the Haze on China-nexus Espionage in Southeast Asia [iophk: Windows TCO]

    Following initial infection via USB devices, the threat actor leveraged legitimately signed binaries to side-load malware, including three new families we refer to as MISTCLOAK, DARKDEW, and BLUEHAZE. Successful compromise led to the deployment of a renamed NCAT binary and execution of a reverse shell on the victim’s system, providing backdoor access to the threat actor. The malware self-replicates by infecting new removable drives that are plugged into a compromised system, allowing the malicious payloads to propagate to additional systems and potentially collect data from air-gapped systems.

  • Information Security Media Group Corporation ☛ Ransomware Attack in New Zealand Has Cascading Effects

    Government health services are running normally but clinicians in some areas of the country cannot access a registry of inherited cardiac diseases or bereavement care services. Approximately 8,500 bereavement records and 5,500 records on the cardiac disease register are unavailable.

    Six other health regulatory authorities whose services are hosted by Mercury IT have also been impacted. They include the Optometrists and Dispensing Opticians Board of New Zealand; the Chiropractic Board; the Podiatrists Board; the New Zealand Psychologists Board; the Dietitians Board; and the Physiotherapy Board of New Zealand.

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Vivaldi Browser Now Boasts Mastodon Integration

    Folks are flocking to this federated social networking service in droves of late, a trend Vivaldi is well aware of. Such keen supporters of decentralised social media, they even launched their own Mastodon instance “Vivaldi Social” a few weeks back.

    Now they take things a step further by integrating Mastodon inside of the browser itself.

    Don’t panic if you don’t like the sound of this: it’s a discrete implementation that is easy to ignore or not use. Like Vivaldi’s other bells and whistles — spanning everything from arcade games to e-mail client to note taking tool — users won’t notice this feature is there unless they want to use it.

• Linux Foundation

  • Linux Foundation’s Site/Blog ☛ Two new agricultural technology projects join the Call for Code community at the Linux Foundation [Ed: Openwashing with Microsoft proprietary software]

    OpenTempus provides long-term climate forecasts, and OpenHarvest provides insight into crops, fields, and yields.

    The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the release of two open source projects that help small-holder farmers use data to make more effective decisions about what, when, and where to plant. These projects join the Call for Code with the Linux Foundation.

• Security

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

    Security updates have been issued by Debian (cgal, ruby-rails-html-sanitizer, and xfce4-settings), Red Hat (dbus, grub2, kernel, pki-core, and usbguard), Scientific Linux (pki-core), SUSE (bcel, LibVNCServer, and xen), and Ubuntu (ca-certificates and u-boot).

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Terence Eden ☛ How do I revoke a FIDO / WebAuthN token from every service?

      OK, done! My wife and I spend a very boring evening going through every single account we have which supports FIDO tokens with WebAuthN – about a dozen in total. We manually paired two keys each. We put our main key on our keyrings, then drove out to the woods and buried our spares in a a waterproof box in a top secret location1.

      But what if I lost my keys?

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • India Times ☛ Microsoft mulls building ‘super app’: Report

      Microsoft Corp recently considered building a “super app” that could include shopping, messaging, news and web search services among others, The Information reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

    • India Times ☛ Meta expands AI face-scanning to Facebook dating in US

      Meta announced that it has expanded its Artificial Intelligence (AI) face-scanning tool and ID Upload tool to Facebook Dating in the US, to verify users’ age.

      The tools will make sure that only adults are using the service, preventing minors from accessing it, the company said in a blogpost on Monday.

    • Teen Vogue ☛ The China Initiative: How Chinese Academics Like Xiaoxing Xi Were Falsely Charged as Spies

      As it turned out, the US government was the one doing the spying. We found out later that the FBI, using tools designed to pursue foreign agents, had secretly surveilled my dad’s communications and used his emails about unrelated academic research to try to portray him as a criminal. My family went from living a normal, low-key life to facing the weight of our own government coming after us.

      Months later, the government’s accusations fell apart and prosecutors dropped the charges. Yet to this day, the government has refused to explain or apologize for what it did. We have been in court for more than five years seeking answers, but still haven’t found out why the FBI targeted my father with surveillance and false criminal charges, saddling us with huge legal fees and many emotional scars.

    • Computer World ☛ What you need to know about the UK’s Online Safety Bill

      Parts of the legislation closely mimic rules set out in the EU’s recently approved Digital Services Act (DSA), which bans the practice of targeting users online based on their religion, gender or sexual preferences, and requires large online platforms to disclose what steps they are taking to tackle misinformation or propaganda.

    • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | To Hold Powerful to Account, Journalists Must Be Free of Government Intrusion

      For democracy to survive, journalists must be protected from government surveillance and shielded from harassment.

    • The Gray Zone ☛ Leaked files: private spying firm targets global population with illegal spyware

    • Techdirt ☛ American Journalist First To Sue NSO Group Directly For Targeting His Phone

      NSO Group is objectively awful. For years — with the assistance of the Israeli government — NSO sold to whoever wanted powerful phone exploits to deploy against targets. Ostensibly sold to investigate violent crimes and acts of terrorism, the less-than-savory customers of NSO flipped the script, deploying zero-click malware that allowed government employees to target journalists, critics, activists, human rights lawyers, and anyone else (INCLUDING EX-WIVES) that made their lives uncomfortable.

    • Democracy Now ☛ Pegasus Spyware Maker NSO Group Sued in U.S. Court by El Faro Journalists

      A group of journalists working for the award-winning Central American independent news outlet El Faro have filed a lawsuit in U.S. court against NSO Group, the Israeli company that operates the Pegasus spyware used to monitor and track journalists, human rights activists and dissidents across the globe. The journalists of El Faro, which is based in El Salvador, allege that Pegasus software was used to infiltrate their iPhones and track their communications and movements. “We’re of course of the belief that it was the government of El Salvador who engaged in these attacks. This is weapons-grade software that is sold exclusively to governments,” says Roman Gressier, a French American staff reporter with El Faro English and one of 15 plaintiffs in the lawsuit. We also speak with Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the lead lawyer in the lawsuit, who says part of the goal is to force the courts to confirm who NSO Group’s client was. “That would send a signal to other government clients around the world that they can no longer rely on NSO Group’s assurances of secrecy when they … intimidate and persecute journalists, civil rights activists, human rights activists around the world,” says DeCell.

    • AccessNow ☛ Surveillance tech: EU Commission failed to protect human rights in Africa – Access Now

      he European Ombudsman has found that the European Commission failed to take necessary measures to ensure the protection of human rights in the transfers of technology with potential surveillance capacity supported by its multi-billion Emergency Trust Fund for Africa.

      The decision by the EU’s oversight body follows a year-long inquiry prompted by complaints outlining how EU bodies and agencies are cooperating with governments around the world to increase their surveillance powers filed by Privacy International, Access Now, the Border Violence Monitoring Network, Homo Digitalis, International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), and Sea-Watch.

      The complainants welcome the decision by the European Ombudsman and call on the Commission to urgently review its support for surveillance in non-EU countries and to immediately implement the Ombudsman’s recommendations in their entirety.

  • Confidentiality

    • Tor ☛ upcoming directory authority changes

      Later today (Tuesday) we plan to do a synchronized shift where we make two configuration changes on the directory authorities. The goal will be to make these changes while maintaining the right threshold of signatures so relays and users still get a safe network status consensus that they trust.

      For background, Tor uses a threshold consensus design, where as long as a majority of directory authorities are behaving properly, all users get the same accurate view of the Tor network. You can learn more about the design in the bottom half of
      https://support.torproject.org/about/key-management/.

      Specifically, we plan to make these changes: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ The J6 Committee Proves Themselves To Be Suspect Media Whores

    A “criminal referral” from this Committee means absolutely nothing. The DOJ will prosecute individuals and/or entities on their own. “Referrals” from Thompson, Cheney and the J6 Committee mean less than nothing legally.

  • NPR ☛ Jan. 6 committee is likely to make criminal referrals related to Capitol [insurrection]

    The committee is meeting virtually Tuesday evening to continue discussions on potential criminal referrals. They met on Friday morning behind closed doors to consider a range of topics — including whether to issue potential criminal referrals for former President Trump and others.

    The panel is expected to meet throughout this week and could share its plans on criminal referrals by Friday, Thompson said.

  • TruthOut ☛ Bennie Thompson: Jan. 6 Panel Will Make Criminal Referrals Based on Its Findings

  • Common Dreams ☛ Family of Officer Who Died After Jan. 6 Won’t Shake Hands With McConnell, McCarthy

    Relatives of the late Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick—who died a day after being assaulted by right-wing rioters on January 6, 2021—refused to shake hands with Republican leaders at a Tuesday Congressional Gold Medal ceremony to honor those who defended democracy and the complex during last year’s attack.

    Video footage of Sicknick’s family bypassing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)—who’s aiming to be the next speaker—quickly spread on social media and was called both “amazing” and “awkward.”

  • The Nation ☛ The Terminator

    That quote should be emblazoned as a grade-A specimen of insider folly on the walls of newsrooms and journalism schools that profess to take seriously the tacit mandate in the press’s designation as “the fourth estate”—i.e., the social institution tasked with ensuring democracy and public accountability actually function as something more than airless abstractions. Instead, it appears that our organs of public debate are already making the same howling mistake, not even two years after a Trump-led coup effort nearly upended the transfer of power in the wake of a free and fair election.

    The occasion for Trump’s resurgent coup plotting, scarcely any commentator has bothered to note, was Elon Musk’s much-hyped release of “the Twitter files”—a collection of intra-company documents showing the discussions among Twitter higher-ups that led to the ban of a New York Post story on the platform about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In Trump-ese, this was translated into “MASSIVE, WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION” among tech and “Democrat Party” elites, on a scale that overrides “all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

  • RTL ☛ Somalia forces recapture key town from jihadists

    The army and local clan militias known as “Macawisley” have retaken swathes of territory in the central states of Galmudug and Hirshabelle in recent months in an operation backed by US air strikes and an African Union (AU) force, ATMIS.

  • USA ☛ A Proclamation on National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, 2022

    This commemoration is also a solemn reminder that our country is capable of achieving great triumphs coming out of dark moments. From the death and destruction at Pearl Harbor came victory over the forces of fascism. Fierce battles with the Axis powers gave way to diplomatic partnerships with strong allies. And from the darkness of World War II came the light of liberty and the establishment of a rules-based international order. Today and every day, we remember that the great and defining truth about our Nation and our people is that there is nothing beyond our capacity — we do not break, we never give in, and we never back down.

  • Scheerpost ☛ US Plans To Build Jerusalem Embassy on Palestinian Land

    “Should the US proceed with this plan, it would not only be complicit with Israel’s illegal confiscation of Palestinian-owned land, but it would also become an active participant in the seizure of the land of U.S. citizens.” — Adalah

  • Meduza ☛ Despite sanctions, Russia still produces cruise missiles with imported components — Meduza

    Despite the Western sanctions, Russia is still producing cruise missiles. This was concluded by Conflict Armament Research (CAR) analysts, based on their study of missile remnants found around Kyiv after the November 23 Russian missile strikes.

  • Meduza ☛ Kremlin spokesman Peskov denies plans for new mobilization round, claims no decree needed to end draft — Meduza

    Russian President Vladimir Putin has no plans for signing a new decree to end mobilization, says the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Access of Evil

  • Counter Punch ☛ Macron’s French Nuclear Farce

    I’ve been searching for the equivalent word in French for ‘chutzpah’ but so far ‘insolence’ or ‘audace’ just doesn’t quite cover President Emmanuel Macron’s renewed pitch to sell French nuclear technology to the United States.

    Nevertheless, that was a central purpose of Macron’s state visit to the nation’s capital last week. In a mise-en-scène worthy of a Feydeau farce, he even brought a whole atomic entourage with him including representatives from the state regulator (Autorité de sûreté nucléaire) as well as cabinet members and the (bankrupt) French nuclear power industry.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Ukraine Strikes Inside Russia … Again

    The latest, including: – Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian bases inside Russia – What do the latest strikes mean for the war and US-Ukraine relations? – Macron blasted for comments about Russian security interests – European divides on whether and what to negotiate with Putin – EU prepares sanctions on Russian mining sector – Analyzing US polling data about support for Ukraine – Secret Kremlin polling data about Russian attitudes towards the war

  • Counter Punch ☛ Imperialist Wars—and What Could Be Done About Them

    Mobilizing their military forces, powerful states and, later, nations carved out vast empires at the expense of weaker or less warlike societies. Some of the largest and best-known empires to emerge over the millennia were the Persian, the Chinese, the Mongol, the Ottoman, the Russian, the Spanish, and the British.

    The standard policy for these and other empires was to absorb new, conquered lands into their domains, either as parts of the mother country or as colonies. In the 18th century, the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires used their military muscle to seize substantial portions of the Western Hemisphere from the native inhabitants. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, imperial conquest accelerated rapidly around the world. By 1913 almost all of Africa had been colonized by European powers, while Imperial Russia, having annexed its neighbors, had become the world’s largest nation. Asia, too, had fallen largely under foreign domination. Meanwhile, the United States, established by a thin string of colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America, expanded across the continent to the Pacific, mostly thanks to successful wars against Mexico and Indian nations. Thereafter it moved on to colonize Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Sanders Says He Has Enough Support to Pass Yemen War Powers Resolution

    Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday signaled that he has the votes needed to pass a War Powers Resolution that would block U.S. support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen, where more than 23 million people are suffering from one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises even amid a cease-fire.

    The Vermont Independent senator told The Intercept that he plans to bring the resolution to the Senate floor for a vote “hopefully next week,” and when asked whether he has enough support for the measure he said, “I think we do, yes.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Sanders Moves for Senate to Vote on Ending US Support for Saudi-Led War in Yemen

  • Site36 ☛ EU finances defence against „hypersonic threats“

    Russia, China and North Korea have missiles with very high velocities. The EU cannot yet combat such systems.

  • Meduza ☛ Igor Strelkov, sentenced to life in prison by Hague District Court, returns to Moscow — Meduza

    Igor Girkin, sentenced to life in prison by the Hague District Court for shooting down the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 and killing 298 passengers and crew, is in Moscow.

  • Democracy Now ☛ Jeffrey Sachs: A Negotiated End to Fighting in Ukraine Is the Only Real Way to End the Bloodshed

    With the war in Ukraine now in its 10th month, Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Joe Biden have both expressed openness to peace talks to end the fighting, as have leaders in France, Germany and elsewhere. This comes as millions of Ukrainians brace for a winter without heat or electricity due to Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. “This war needs to end because it’s a disaster for everybody, a threat to the whole world,” says economist and foreign policy scholar Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He says four major issues need to be addressed to end the war: Ukraine’s sovereignty and security, NATO enlargement, the fate of Crimea and the future of the Donbas region.

• Environment

  • New York Times ☛ If You Want to Give Something Back to Nature, Give Your Body

    As of today, five states — Washington, Oregon, Vermont, Colorado and, most recently, California — have either legalized or set a date for legalizing human composting as a means of disposition after death. In New York, one such bill has passed the Assembly and Senate. It now awaits Gov. Kathy Hochul’s signature.

    Human composting — or, as it’s sometimes referred to, natural organic reduction — fulfills many people’s desire to nurture the earth after dying. It owes much of its present form to Katrina Spade, a Washington-based designer and entrepreneur who told me that her goal is to see “composting overtake cremation as the default American death care in the next couple of decades.”

  • Taiwan News ☛ 100 university presidents sign Manifesto for Sustainable Future at SATU summit in Taiwan

    Nearly 100 presidents and representatives from the top universities of Taiwan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, and Brunei attended the Southeast Asia Higher Education Summit this week. This year, the annual summit addressed several important issues relevant to higher education, including open knowledge sharing in sci-tech fields, cross-border strategic collaboration, and sustainable development.

  • The Economist ☛ Qatar’s World Cup will emit more CO2 than any recent sporting event

    It is also likely to be a significant underestimate. A report in May 2022 by Carbon Market Watch, a climate watchdog, found that the official forecast failed to account accurately for the emissions generated from stadiums. FIFA, which insists its methodology is “best in practice”, reckons that the bulk of the emissions (52%) will come from fans and players travelling to Qatar, while less than 25% are from stadium construction. That is because organisers expect these stadiums to be used for years after the World Cup, spreading their carbon footprint way into the future.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Mining Lawsuit in Guatemala Shows System Prioritizes Big Corporations Over People

    A Nevada-based mining firm is suing Guatemala for more than $400 million, the first suit of its kind for the impoverished Central American country.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Congressional Progressives, Climate Activists Rally Against Manchin’s ‘Dirty Deal’

    Progressive U.S. lawmakers joined climate activists for a Tuesday rally in Washington, D.C. to oppose to Sen. Joe Manchin’s proposed industry-friendly fossil fuel permitting modifications, the so-called “dirty side deal” the West Virginia Democrat and his party’s leaders want to include in the next military spending bill.

    “I refuse to allow our residents in frontline communities to continue to be sacrificed for the fossil fuel industry’s endless greed.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Congress: Thank You for Rejecting Permitting Reform Bill

    We are grateful. We are grateful that, just one month ago, courageous members of Congress rejected an effort to add Senator Manchin’s destructive permitting reform bill to a continuing budget resolution, an opportunity that Senate leadership had promised him just weeks prior in exchange for a vote on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). This legislation would have gutted important environmental protections tirelessly fought for over many years, and fast-tracked fossil fuel projects, including the dangerous and unnecessary Mountain Valley Pipeline.

  • Energy

    • New York Times ☛ Ordinary Investors Who Jumped Into [Cryptocurrency] Are Saying: Now What?

      Just days later, as the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX shook the entire crypto industry, Mr. Butkus asked BlockFi for his money back. But the firm had suspended customer withdrawals, citing its close financial ties to FTX. By late November, BlockFi, too, had filed for bankruptcy.

      Mr. Butkus doesn’t know when — or if — he will see his money again. He is one of millions of individual investors around the world who poured money into digital assets, believing the cryptocurrency industry was a stable financial system. They were cleareyed about the volatility and big price swings of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But what has come as a big surprise to many is that the firms where they deposited their money lacked the basic protections offered by a brokerage or a bank.

    • Information Security Media Group Corporation ☛ Cybersecurity Analysis of the FTX [Cryptocurrency] Heist: Part One

      Brooks also shares how this incident reflects on the overall security of the web3 industry, what it means for the cybersecurity of exchanges that were exposed to FTX, how new regulations could help curb such cases in the future, the role of decentralization for cybersecurity and best practices for [cryptocurrency] exchanges.

    • Wired ☛ Tony Fadell Is Trying to Build the iPod of [Cryptocurrency]

      Fadell stops to examine a group of photos of the device: a hardware wallet called Ledger Stax. A hardware wallet is a utilitarian thing. It’s a physical lock for digital secrets. When you own cryptocurrency, your balance is protected solely by a private key that can be devilishly hard to keep safe. Ledger’s wallets, made of steel and silicon (and, OK, plastic), act as tiny vaults, but so far they have been off-putting. Much like crypto itself. Fadell is reinventing this gadget, his first major design project in years. He has come to believe that by giving it the panache of the hottest consumer gadgets, he will redirect the crypto field, just as he helped kick off digital music and the smart home.

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Foolish Lenders

      From the “no-one could have predicted” department comes David Pan’s Crypto Lenders’ Woes Worsen as Bitcoin Miners Struggle to Repay Debt. The TL;DR is that until recently companies accepted mining rigs as collateral for loans.

      [...]

      These companies did so little due diligence that they didn’t realize the collateral would be worthless in about 18 months, even if Bitcoin continued moonwards. Below the fold, the details.

    • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Does the fuel price cap have anything to do with the severe fuel shortage in Hungary?

    • DeSmog ☛ A New Era for Germany’s Gas Industry Fuels Climate Fears

      For 150 years, heavy industry has been the lifeblood of the German port of Wilhelmshaven, a hub for shipbuilding, plastics, coal and steel. Now, the city is at the forefront of the country’s dash to break its dependence on Russian gas.

      On Saturday, a newly built jetty is due to welcome the Norwegian-flagged Höegh Esperanza, a 280-metre vessel capable of offloading cargoes of natural gas supercooled into liquid form, then shipped across the ocean in specialised tankers.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Counter Punch ☛ Avi Kwa Ame National Monument

      The monument will protect almost a half million acres of the Mohave Desert between the California border and the Colorado River. Stretching from the Newberry mountains in the east to the New York, South McCullough, Castle, and Piute mountains in the west, the monument encompasses representative landscapes of grasslands, Joshua trees, and in places, even scrub oak. Wildlife native to the area includes desert bighorn sheep, Gila monster, and desert tortoises,

      It would connect other protected landscapes in California, such as Mohave Trails National Monument and Mohave National Preserve, with the Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada, creating a corridor for wildlife to move more freely across the landscape. The area within the proposed monument also includes and/or borders several designated southern Nevada wildernesses, including Spirit Mountain, Nellis Wash, Wee Thump Joshua Tree, Bridge Canyon, Ireteba Peaks, and South McCullough wilderness areas.

    • Common Dreams ☛ Global Biodiversity Summit Called ‘Make-or-Break Moment’ for Wildlife

      The day before nearly two weeks of negotiations kick off at the United Nations summit on biodiversity, campaigners warned Tuesday that the talks taking place this month in Montreal may offer humanity its last chance to mitigate the planet’s crisis of rampant species loss, and called on policymakers to adopt an ambitious framework to protect wildlife.

      More than 190 nations will be represented at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15), where negotiators will discuss a draft agreement aimed at conservation, slashing levels of toxic pollutants, and mitigating the climate crisis.

    • TruthOut ☛ Indigenous Argentineans Resist Becoming “Sacrifice Zone” for Ecocolonialism

  • Overpopulation

    • Counter Punch ☛ Facing Ourselves: Hard Truths about Sustainability

      Given the opportunity, I wanted to discuss problems that, while fairly obvious, are too often left out of discussions among liberals because they are hard to hear and hard to solve. They are hard to hear because the problem is with all of us, not just in the evil corporations and Republican voters. They are hard to solve because technological proposals that leave our economic and social systems intact will not succeed. We will need somehow to achieve a drastic alteration to our governmental policies and adjust our social relations accordingly.

      That is not a defense of the existing economic or political systems; it is hard to imagine human survival if we do not transcend the obsession with growth in capitalism and create a more democratic society. Those are necessary but not sufficient conditions. From there, we will have to face ourselves.

• Finance

  • Axios ☛ Tech layoffs push H-1B visa workers into limbo

    Sweeping layoffs in tech are leaving thousands of people holding H-1B work visas stranded and scared.

    Why it matters: In the event of a layoff, H-1B holders have 60 days to find new companies to sponsor their visas. If they can’t, they can try switching to a different kind of work visa or look into non-work visas, such as a self-sponsored green card.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Oxfam Rebukes EU Over Delayed Deal on Global Minimum Corporate Tax

    Oxfam on Tuesday blasted the European Union for delaying a discussion on a global minimum corporate tax rate due to a battle with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government over military aid for Ukraine and E.U. funding for Hungary.

    “E.U. national interests have prevailed despite the cost-of-living crisis.”

  • Scheerpost ☛ NYC Advocates Fear More Police Violence, Homeless Criminalization Amid Forced Hospitalizations

    New York City Mayor Eric Adams issued a directive this week that puts police at the center of renewed efforts to remove people exhibiting signs of mental illness from public spaces.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Tax the Rich? We Did That Once

    A little history might just inspire us to try that taxing again.

  • The Nation ☛ How Houston Halved Homelessness—and What California Can Learn From It

    Every year, the regional bodies known as Continuums of Care (CoCs) conduct point-in-time counts, a census of the region’s homeless population at a particular moment. When California published its results earlier this year, it confirmed what most already suspected: Homelessness, already at emergency levels before the Covid-19 pandemic, had grown worse. Adding every regional count together, the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters found that the state’s homeless population had increased by more than 22,000 people—a nearly 15 percent jump—between 2020 and 2022. And that is almost certainly a significant undercount.

  • Common Dreams ☛ As GOP Threats Continue, Dems Told to ‘Raise the Debt Limit Before It’s Too Late!’

    As GOP lawmakers double down on their vow to hold the economy hostage to force cuts to popular federal programs such as Medicare and Social Security, progressives are reiterating their call for Democrats to raise the U.S. debt ceiling and take away Republicans’ leverage before they assume control of the House next month.

    “If the debt ceiling is not raised, our economy will come to a crashing halt.”

  • Pro Publica ☛ How Do Title Loans Work?

    Consumers across the country pledge the titles to their vehicles in order to obtain quick cash through title loans. The title-lending industry, which caters to people who are often written off as credit risks by traditional lending institutions, maintains that it provides a valuable financial service. But many consumer advocates see title lending as predatory: The loans typically carry high costs and terms that make the debt difficult to pay off. If borrowers default, they can lose their car, causing even more harm.

    ProPublica spent months reporting on how title lending works as part of a project with The Current, a nonprofit newsroom based in Georgia. We found that, even though Georgia banned high-interest payday loans, it carved out a loophole for title lending that puts borrowers at risk.

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Hungary vetoes joint loan for Ukraine

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Pro Publica ☛ Governments Call for Reforms to Honorary Consul System

    Authorities in four countries are pressing to correct breakdowns in a troubled system of global diplomacy that has elevated and protected accused terrorist financiers, violent criminals, sanctioned oligarchs and aides to some of the world’s most corrupt regimes.

    The “Shadow Diplomats” investigation, published last month by ProPublica, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 50 international media organizations, chronicled widespread exploitation by honorary consuls and the failure of governments to provide oversight.

  • Counter Punch ☛ Once Again, Democrats Side With the Bosses

    Every Union member and working class man and woman and child in the United States of America should be livid right now. President Joe Biden (a Democrat), the Democratic Party leadership in the House and Senate, and the vast majority of Democratic (& Republican) Party politicians in the Capital just fucked over Rail workers and sided with the billionaire bosses again. The Rail corporations, after years of record profits, shall not be required to pay workers if they have to miss a day of work due to illness. This is bullshit.

    No matter how the Democratic Party apologists try to spin it, Congress had the power to grant Unionized Rail workers paid sick leave, willfully chose to not do so, and then imposed a contract which was voted down by the rank & file of four Unions representing a majority of Rail workers in this country. The Democrats in the House chose to send two bills to the Senate (instead of tying the sick leave to the TA), and it was the Democrats again in the Senate who refused to abolish the filibuster (which takes a simple majority) and instead agreed to a 60 vote threshold to pass the sick leave bill. And even after the sick leave bill failed to get the 60 votes, the great majority Democrats still voted to impose the TA. And in so doing, Congress also effectively outlawed strike activity in the Rail sector for this contract cycle. Thus the betrayal of Labor falls on the Democrats.

  • The Nation ☛ Barack Obama’s Politics 101: Ridiculing Republicans Works

    If there was any doubt that Barack Obama remains the Democratic Party’s ablest campaigner, it was removed last week when the former president swept into Georgia for the final push of US Senator Raphael Warnock’s reelection bid.

  • Gabriel Sieben ☛ Nobody agrees what “Right to Repair” actually means

    Right to Repair: Almost everyone supports it, it will make our devices more repairable, but if you look closely: the definition of what Right to Repair actually is and entails constantly changes based on who you talk to.

    Note: This graph is an oversimplification of their definitions of R2R and does not include all necessary nuances to make a point. I apologize for any errors.

  • Michael Geist ☛ From Bad to Worse: Senate Committee Adds Age Verification Requirement for Online Undertakings to Bill C-11

    The Senate committee studying Bill C-11 has ramped up the hours devoted to clause-by-clause review with amendments related to user generated content currently up for debate. However, earlier today, just prior to addressing the user content issue, the committee shockingly adopted an amendment that adds age verification for online undertakings to the Broadcasting Act. The amendment comes as a policy objective, meaning that it will fall to the CRTC to determine how to implement it. The implications are enormous since broadly defined the policy would require every online service that transmits or retransmits programs over the Internet (broadly defined to include all audio and audiovisual content) to establish age verification requirements to prevent child access to programs with explicit sexual activity. If the CRTC implements, the policy will surely be challenged as unconstitutional.

  • CNBC ☛ Tim Cook says Apple will use chips built in the U.S. at Arizona factory

    The chip factories will be owned and operated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the biggest foundry company with over half of the global market share.

  • International Center for Law and Economics ☛ Journalism Competition & Preservation Act: Not What It Says on the Box

    But… This quixotic attempt to prop up flailing media firms will create legally sanctioned cartels that harm consumers, while forcing online platforms to carry and pay for content in ways that violate long-established principles of intellectual [sic] property [sic], economic efficiency, and the U.S. Constitution.

  • [Old] Free Press ☛ The JCPA Is the Wrong Solution to the Crisis in Journalism

    On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA). The controversial legislation would give broadcasters, publishers and other news producers an antitrust exemption to collectively negotiate with online platform companies like Alphabet and Meta. The bill has faced growing opposition from local news guilds as well as social-justice, media-advocacy and digital-rights groups from across the political spectrum.

    Last year, Free Press Action filed written testimony for a hearing in the House of Representatives, explaining that the JCPA is built on a big-media business model that is bad for democracy. Free Press Action urged Congress to instead adopt policies that would “support a robust noncommercial journalism sector that amplifies the voices of people of color and creates new opportunities they were never given in broadcasting, in cable, or in publishing.”

  • Techdirt ☛ How Will Elon Feel When He Realizes Congress Is Trying To Force Him To Throw Free Money At Newspapers He Hates?

    We’ve written many times about the many problems of the JCPA (the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act). As noted, the bill is a really sketchy bit of corruption: creating a link tax to force internet companies to funnel money to news organization owners for… sending them traffic. Everything about the JCPA is wrong and broken. Supporters insist it’s not a link tax nor a change to copyright law, but it is both. The fundamental argument in the bill is that large sites that link to news organizations need to pay for a license for “access.” But access to what? There’s no license for access for content put on the web for free. It’s just… the web.

  • Consumer Reports ☛ Open Letter to US Senate on JCPA [PDF]

    We write today to express our ongoing concerns with the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA), an act that would create an ill-advised antitrust exemption for publishers and broadcasters. The bill remains enormously problematic for reasons we outline below.

    The signatories to this letter represent a broad cross-section of organizations focused on protecting and advancing our democracy and its democratic values. We include civil society organizations; librarians and archivists; creators; technology companies; experts in antitrust, copyright, constitutional and digital rights law; and media and news groups. While we represent a broad range of policy positions, we join in the view that this legislation should not be passed.

  • India ☛ Facebook Warns Of Removing News From Platform In US If Congress Passes Journalism Bill

    In essence, he is claiming that Meta does not need these publishers and broadcasters for its bottomline, these publishers and broadcasters need Meta for their own bottomline. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act was introduced last year by a bipartisan group of lawmakers. Last year, Facebook took news off its feed when Australia passed a similar law and eventually Australia had to amend its law. The bill says that its goal is “to provide a temporary safe harbor for publishers of online content to collectively negotiate with dominant online platforms regarding the terms on which content may be distributed”.

  • NDTV ☛ Meta Threatens To Remove News From Facebook If US Passes Media Bill

    Meta spokesperson Andy Stone in a tweet said the Act fails to recognize that publishers and broadcasters put content on the platform because “it benefits their bottom line – not the other way around.”

  • Reuters ☛ Facebook owner Meta may remove news from platform if U.S. Congress passes media bill

    Since the News Media Bargaining Code took effect, various tech firms including Meta and Alphabet have signed more than 30 deals with media outlets, compensating them for content that generated clicks and advertising dollars, the report added.

  • ABC ☛ Meta may remove news from Facebook if US Congress passes media bill

    The JCPA would allow small and local news publishers to collectively negotiate with the largest US tech companies for compensation for access to the journalistic content that helps generates ad revenue on those platforms.

  • CNN ☛ Meta threatens to remove news content over US journalism bargaining bill

    In a letter Monday to congressional leaders, those groups said the JCPA could make mis- and disinformation worse by allowing news websites to sue tech platforms for reducing a story’s reach and intimidating them into not moderating offensive or misleading content.

    The letter also said the JCPA could end up disproportionately favoring large media companies over the small, local and independent outlets that have been hit the hardest by falling digital ad revenues.

  • The Hill ☛ Big tech and its critics lash out at journalism measure

    Meanwhile, dozens of civil society organizations including the ACLU, Public Knowledge and Free Press wrote to congressional leaders urging them to keep the JCPA out of the NDAA or any other omnibus legislation.

    The groups said the bill will “compound some of the biggest issues in our information landscape and do little to enable the most promising new models to improve it.”

  • CNET ☛ Meta Threatens to Pull News From Facebook if Congress Passes Media Bill

    More than 20 organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, have urged lawmakers to reconsider support for the “problematic” bill, warning (PDF) that it would “create an ill-advised antitrust exemption for publishers and broadcasters.”

  • BBC ☛ Meta threatens to remove US news content if new law passes

    The legislation, known as the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) was introduced in Congress by Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and has bipartisan support.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Senator Raphael Warnock: No Comparison on Climate or Choice in Today’s Runoff Election

    Today is the runoff election in Georgia between Senator Raphael Warnock (D) and his opponent, for a one-vote margin in the U.S. Senate between the Democrats who passed historic climate legislation in the Inflation Reduction Act, and the other party, which mostly denies climate change. Senator Warnock’s Climate Calculation is 81.25 as compared to his opponent’s score of 7.5 out of 100. His support for Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme court decision that legalized abortion sets Warnock apart from his opponent, who not only opposes Roe, but reportedly does so hypocritically while having paid for several abortions himself.

  • Common Dreams ☛ On Election Day, Warnock Supporters Urge Georgians ‘Don’t Walk, Run to the Polls!’

    Leading up to Georgia’s crucial runoff election on Tuesday, progressive advocates, groups, and lawmakers have reiterated the importance of stopping Republican Herschel Walker from ousting incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock.

    “A Herschel Walker win would be a huge loss for Georgia’s working people.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Georgia Breaks Voting Records in Senate Runoff Election

  • Democracy Now ☛ Warnock vs. Walker, Round 2: Georgia Breaks Voting Records in Senate Runoff Election

    Voters in Georgia cast their ballots Tuesday in the closely watched runoff election between Senator Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker. A victory for Warnock would give Democrats a 51st seat in the Senate. The election has seen a record number of early votes, especially in communities of color, but Black Voters Matter co-founder and executive director Cliff Albright says that is “partially a function of the voter suppression” in the state. A new voting law passed by Georgia last year, known as SB 202, reduced the early voting period from three weeks to one and introduced a range of other restrictions.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Warnock Defeats Walker in Georgia, Giving Democrats 51-49 Senate Majority

    Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock was declared the winner Tuesday night in Georgia’s U.S. Senate runoff race against Republican challenger Herschel Walker, giving the incumbent’s party a 51-49 advantage in the upper chamber and helping to temper the obstructionist power of the GOP and right-wing Democrats like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

    “Democrats can do a lot more with 51 Senate seats.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Georgia Voters: Fight for Social Security by Re-Electing Senator Warnock!

    Anyone familiar with me & Sha Na Na knows that I love the music of the 1950s and 60s. But despite that, I would never want to return to the time before Medicare was passed in 1965, when half of seniors lacked hospital insurance. And I certainly never want to return to the time before Social Security was passed in 1935, when over 50 percent of American seniors had incomes below the poverty line. Yet that’s exactly what the Republican Party wants to do.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘About Damn Time’: NY Jury Finds Trump Organization Guilty on All Counts of Tax Fraud

    This is a breaking story… Please check back for possible updates…

    A New York jury on Tuesday found two subsidiaries of Trump Organization, former President Donald Trump’s company, guilty on all counts of criminal tax fraud.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Biden’s Push for South Carolina Primary Is Clear Effort to Sabotage Progressive Gains Within Democratic Party

    President Joe Biden has directed the Democratic National Committee to reduce the danger that progressives might effectively challenge him in the 2024 presidential primaries. That’s a key goal of his instructions to the DNC last week, when Biden insisted on dislodging New Hampshire—the longtime first-in-the-nation primary state where he received just 8 percent of the vote and finished fifth in the 2020 Democratic primary. No wonder Biden wants to replace New Hampshire with South Carolina, where he was the big primary winner.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Patrick Lawrence: The Trans-Atlantic Rift Grows Wider

    What an occasion, President Biden’s first state dinner. Better late than not at all, given it came last Thursday evening, nearly two years after he took office. Apart from guests of honor Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron, monsieur le président et sa femme, all manner of grand people were […]

  • Scheerpost ☛ Rep. Adam Smith Says Calls for Ukraine Aid Oversight are ‘Russian Propaganda’

    Smith says concerns for greater oversight make him ‘crazy’

  • The Nation ☛ Sarah Palin Is a Faux Populist. Alaskans Chose the Authentic One.

    Back in the halcyon days of 2010, I wrote my first Washington Post column about a hockey mom from Alaska who seemed, at the time, to have a bright future ahead of her in conservative politics.

  • Counter Punch ☛ The Volatility of US Hegemony in Latin America: Challenges Ahead for the Pink Tide

    However, the countries of the region must of necessity engage in a world financial order dominated by the US, which limits the possibilities of developing their economies successfully.

    Troubled waters

  • Counter Punch ☛ If Zelensky Called Taiwan’s President Tsai After Her Electoral Rout …

    Zelensky: Tsai, how are you doing? We have not spoken in months. Sorry for the delay in answering your call earlier. We were in another photoshoot for Vogue.

    Tsai. (Sobs into the phone). Hello, Voldodya.

  • TruthOut ☛ Biden Wants to Block Presidential Primary Challenge From the Left Ahead of 2024

  • Scheerpost ☛ Our Democracy’s Future Depends on Political Activists

    Rebecca Gordon, just back from the front lines of the recent midterm elections, shares what she learned from her campaign work.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Why Iran’s National Strike Is a Huge Deal

    Juan Cole writes that the Iranian government has plenty of reasons to fear the staying power of these protests.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Russian independent TV Rain (Dozhd) loses license in Latvia

      The NEPLP fined TV Rain €10,000 for displaying a map in which occupied Crimea was marked as Russian territory and for calling the Russian army “our army” in a piece that mentioned how viewers could help provide recruits to the illegal invasion force with supplies and equipment, the Twitter account of the watchdog reported on December 2.

    • NBC ☛ Maryland bans state agencies from using TikTok and other Chinese and Russian products after NBC News report

      “There may be no greater threat to our personal safety and our national security than the cyber vulnerabilities that support our daily lives,” said Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican. “Maryland has taken bold and decisive actions to prepare for and address cybersecurity threats. To further protect our systems, we are issuing this emergency directive against foreign actors and organizations that seek to weaken and divide us.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Washington Post ☛ Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’

    As discussions of major events are filtered through algorithmic content delivery systems, more users are bending their language. Recently, in discussing the invasion of Ukraine, people on YouTube and TikTok have used the sunflower emoji to signify the country. When encouraging fans to follow them elsewhere, users will say “blink in lio” for “link in bio.”

    Euphemisms are especially common in radicalized or harmful communities. Pro-anorexia eating disorder communities have long adopted variations on moderated words to evade restrictions. One paper from the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology found that the complexity of such variants even increased over time. Last year, anti-vaccine groups on Facebook began changing their names to “dance party” or “dinner party” and anti-vaccine influencers on Instagram used similar code words, referring to vaccinated people as “swimmers.”

  • The Hill ☛ Schumer open to reforming tech liability protections amid rising hate speech on Twitter

    Section 230 grants social media platforms such as Twitter protection from legal liability for offensive, wrongful or damaging content posted on their sites.

    Schumer said he is open to revisiting that legal protection in the wake of new reports by the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Anti-Defamation League that found hate speech on Twitter has grown significantly since entrepreneur Elon Musk bought the company for $44 billion.

  • ABC ☛ Indonesia’s Parliament passes law criminalizing adultery

    It also says the promotion of contraception and religious blasphemy are illegal, and it restores a ban on insulting a sitting president and vice president, state institutions and national ideology. Insults to a sitting president must be reported by the president and can lead to up to three years in jail.

    Hiariej said the government provided “the strictest possible explanation that distinguishes between insults and criticism.”

  • BBC ☛ Indonesia’s new sex laws and what they could mean for tourism

    “It might be hotels, it might be foreign tourists… that will allow certain police officers to extort bribes or certain politicians to use, let’s say, the blasphemy law, to jail their opponents.”

  • [Old] Wix ☛ The Algorithms

    Jeff Horwitz reported on company documents that reveal an elite tier of Instagram users who face an entirely different system that monitors their content here. These ‘white-listed’ users have their content filtered through a seperate program call ‘XCheck’ that “was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists” and now “shields millions of VIP users from the company’s normal enforcement process.” The documents show that high-profile users are “rendered immune from enforcement actions—while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.” This elite group of users face an entirely different, more advanced system of checks that regular users don’t have the luxury of.

    This invisible tier of elite Instagram users included at least 5.8 million users in 2020, and unlike normal users, “if Facebook’s systems conclude that one of those accounts might have broken its rules, they don’t remove the content—at least not right away, the documents indicate. They route the complaint into a separate system, staffed by better-trained, full-time employees, for additional layers of review.” In the past Facebook has even contacted VIP users who violated the community guidelines, giving them “a “self-remediation window” of 24 hours to delete violating content on their own before Facebook took it down and applied penalties.”

  • NPR ☛ Indonesia criminalizes adultery, but the law may take up to 3 years to take effect

    Once in force, the bans will affect foreign visitors as well as citizens. They’re part of an overhaul of the country’s criminal code that has been in the works for years. The new code also expands an existing blasphemy law and keeps a five-year prison term for deviations from the central tenets of Indonesia’s six recognized religions: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. The code still needs approval from the president, and the government says it will not be fully implemented for several years.

  • VOA News ☛ Indonesia’s Parliament Votes to Ban Sex Outside of Marriage

    The amended code also expands an existing blasphemy law and maintains a five-year prison term for deviations from the central tenets of Indonesia’s six recognized religions: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism.

  • NPR ☛ Facebook’s own oversight board slams its special program for VIPs

    The board said Meta appeared to be more concerned with avoiding “provoking” VIPs and evading accusations of censorship than balancing tricky questions of free speech and safety.

    It called for the overhaul of the “flawed” program in a report on Tuesday that included wide-ranging recommendations to bring the program in line with international principles and Meta’s own stated values.

  • New York Times ☛ Inside the Face-Off Between Russia and a Small Internet Access Firm

    The digital censorship battle is reaching “an inflection point,” said Grant Baker, a research analyst for technology and democracy at Freedom House, which recently reported that internet censorship globally had reached a new high in 2022. While Russia has spent years working on a more closely controlled, sovereign internet, the controls imposed after the war are “a stark contrast” to anything Moscow had ever done before, Mr. Baker said.

    Companies rarely discuss being targeted by an authoritarian government out of fear of escalating the conflict. But Andy Yen, Proton’s founder and chief executive, said that after a period of trying to keep its “head down,” Proton wanted to raise awareness about the increasing sophistication of governments, in Russia and elsewhere, to block citizens from reaching the open web and the need for technologists, companies and governments to push back.

  • Meduza ☛ TV Rain CEO Natalia Sindeeva asks fired host Alexey Korostelev to re-join network — Meduza

    Natalia Sindeeva, the head executive of the exiled Russian TV Rain network, asked the recently fired host Alexey Korostelev to re-join the media company.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘We made a lot of stupid mistakes’ TV Rain CEO Natalia Sindeeva on the news that Latvia is stripping the network’s broadcast license — Meduza

    On the morning of December 6, Latvian authorities revoked the broadcast license of the independent Russian news channel TV Rain, which has been banned in Russia since March. Latvia’s National Electronic Mass Media Council (NEPLP) said that the network poses a “threat to national security and the public order.” The decision was made against the backdrop of a heated public debate sparked by an ambiguous on-air statement made by TV Rain host Alexey Korostelev about the war in Ukraine. Meduza special correspondent Svetlana Reiter spoke with TV Rain founder and CEO Natalia Sindeeva immediately after the decision was announced.

  • Meduza ☛ Meduza’s statement regarding the revocation of TV Rain’s Latvian broadcasting license — Meduza

    The Latvian National Electronic Media Council has revoked TV Rain’s license. The agency has banned the network from broadcasting on cable and also plans to block access within the country to its YouTube stream. According to the council’s chairman, Ivars Āboliņš, the decision was made “in connection with the threat to national security and public order.”

  • Meduza ☛ Deja vu all over again TV Rain editor-in-chief slams Latvian regulators’ decision to revoke the network’s license as a farcical repeat of Kremlin censorship — Meduza

    In a broadcast on Tuesday, December 6, TV Rain editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzyadko called Latvian officials’ decision to revoke the network’s cable license “absurd and divorced from common sense.” Latvian regulators argue that TV Rain’s content constitutes a “national security” threat, following on-air remarks last week by a news presenter (later fired for the comments) who promoted a hotline to collect information about battlefield conditions for Russian soldiers as assistance for those men. Latvia’s National Electronic Media Council also flagged TV Rain for referring to the Russian military as “our army” and for displaying a map of Russia that included Crimea. Council Chairman Ivars Abolins also accused the network of sending a representative who only spoke Russian, though Dzyadko told journalists that TV Rain had met numerous times with Abolins’ group and used Russian as the working language. When the council met in October, he says, officials suddenly asked to switch to Latvian, leaving TV Rain without enough time to find an interpreter.

  • Techdirt ☛ How KOSA’s ‘Parental Tools’ Mandate Will Almost Certainly Lead To Abuse

    There is a serious problem in the way many tech-focused bills are drafted these days. Whether it’s a lack of trust or simply a desire to punish, those working on tech-bills are not talking to the right industry people about how things actually work in practice. This leads to simple mistakes like requiring something that seems like a good idea but runs counter to how systems are designed and how they function. When these mistakes are bad enough, they can result in serious security and safety problems.

  • Techdirt ☛ Devin Nunes Gets Small, Most Likely Temporary, Victory Against MSNBC, While Also Suing CNN Again

    You might have seen some headlines recently suggesting that former congressional representative and current flailing social media CEO (and serial suer of the media) Devin Nunes had some sort of legal victory over Rachel Maddow and MSNBC. And he did get a very, very small victory while piling up more losses at the same time. Law & Crime (which consistently does excellent work) had a much more accurate headline noting that the court actually dismissed all but one claim in his lawsuit. And you could actually go beyond that. There were three separate statements that were claimed to be defamatory, and two were dismissed outright, and the third actually consisted of three separate factual claims, two of which were also dismissed. So it was basically just one-third of one claim that survived.

  • Meduza ☛ For whom how Russia bans LGBT ‘propaganda,’ the ‘imposition of information’ about homosexuality and ‘sex reassignment.’ Here’s the law broken down. — Meduza

    On November 24, Russia’s State Duma passed the third and final reading of legislation that bans all “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships.” Six days later, the Parliament’s upper chamber also approved the bills, which President Putin signed into law on December 5. The new rules enter into force immediately. LGBT “propaganda” has been banned in Russia since June 2013, but only among minors. The authorities have now significantly expanded the list of restrictions: “propaganda” and “impositions” are now prohibited in the presence of children and adults alike. The law applies to everything, including films, books, advertising, television, and social media. Below, breaks down what’s new in the cornerstone legislation that guides Russia’s state homophobia and transphobia. For a more detailed analysis of these requirements (in Russian), click here.

  • Meduza ☛ Former Meduza technical director Boris Goryachev faces misdemeanor charges for ‘discrediting’ Russian army — Meduza

    Russian authorities have opened an misdemeanor case against former Meduza technical director Boris Goryachev for “discrediting” the Russian army, he reported on Facebook.

  • EFF ☛ The Supreme Court Must Protect Internet Users’ Rights to Access Controversial Information Online

    In Twitter v. Taamneh, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that online services can be civilly liable under the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) based on claims that the platform had generalized awareness that members of a terrorist organization used its service. The Supreme Court agreed to review Taamneh and another case involving similar facts and legal claims (Gonzales v. Google) this fall.

    Although the legal issues in Taamneh primarily center on how federal courts should interpret the ATA’s language,the Ninth Circuit’s broad interpretation would have dangerous implications for the First Amendment rights of internet users and the platforms hosting their speech, according to a friend-of-the-court brief filed by EFF, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the ACLU, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and the R Street Institute.

    “These platforms and other intermediaries provide essential fora for speech and have become a primary source of news, information, and discussions across the nation and around the world,” the brief argues. But if the Ninth Circuit’s “startlingly broad construction of the ATA stands, online intermediaries will be forced to suppress protected speech.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • NBC ☛ U.S. court dismisses suit against Saudi crown prince in Khashoggi killing

    District of Columbia U.S. District Judge John D. Bates heeded the U.S. government’s motion to shield Prince Mohammed from the lawsuit despite what Bates called “credible allegations of his involvement in Khashoggi’s murder.”

    A team of Saudi officials killed Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, had written critically of the harsh ways of Prince Mohammed, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler.

  • Michael Geist ☛ How the Government Is Using Bill C-18 to Pick Media Winners and Losers

    In recent weeks, however, the government’s role in picking winners and losers has become even more pronounced. Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner’s ill-advised comment that online news outlets weren’t real news was rightly criticized (leading to an apology and near total silence from Hepfner ever since) but skeptics feared she was merely saying the quiet part out loud since the reality of Bill C-18 is that it is the lobbying product of large media outlets, who are set up as the prime beneficiaries.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Revealing New Evidence in Abu Akleh’s Killing, Al Jazeera Sues Israeli Forces at ICC

    Following an investigation that Al Jazeera said uncovered new evidence regarding the fatal shooting of Palestinian-America journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May, the international news network said Tuesday that it has filed a lawsuit against Israeli military forces at the International Criminal Court.

    “The claim by the Israeli authorities that Shireen was killed by mistake in an exchange of fire is completely unfounded.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Al Jazeera Sues Israeli Forces at the International Criminal Court

  • Democracy Now ☛ Publishing Is Not a Crime: NYT, The Guardian & More Urge Biden Admin to Drop Charges Against Assange

    The New York Times and four major European newspapers — The Guardian in Britain, Le Monde in France, Der Spiegel in Germany and El País in Spain — recently urged the Biden administration to drop all charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In a joint letter, the newspapers said, “This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.” The letter ends with the words “Publishing is not a crime.” Assange, who is jailed in Britain, faces up to 175 years in a U.S. prison on espionage and hacking charges for exposing U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. The five publications had partnered with WikiLeaks in 2010 to report on documents leaked by Chelsea Manning. “The prosecution of Assange … would set a clear and devastating precedent in the United States that could be applied to any of these organizations’ journalists, going forward,” says Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • India Times ☛ Union says Microsoft will recognise unit of videogame testers

    Voluntarily agreeing to bargain with the union would allow Microsoft to avoid a formal election overseen by the US National Labor Relations Board and the legal battles that often ensue.

  • Copenhagen Post ☛ Danish museum awarded prestigious international prize

    Arbejdermuseet (the Workers Museum in English) in Copenhagen has been awarded the prestigious Council of Europe Museum Prize for its achievement in documenting working conditions for Danish wage workers over the past 150 years and for its contributions during the development of the Danish labour movement.

  • ABC ☛ San Francisco cancels plans for ‘killer police robots’

    “The people of San Francisco have spoken loud and clear: There is no place for killer police robots in our city,” supervisor Dean Preston told ABC News in a statement. “There have been more killings at the hands of police than any other year on record nationwide. We should be working on ways to decrease the use of force by local law enforcement, not giving them new tools to kill people.”

  • The Nation ☛ The Twitter User Taking on the Chinese Government

    On November 26, a Chinese Twitter user, known to his now more than 825,000 followers as Teacher Li, received a photograph via direct message. It was of a student in Nanjing holding a piece of white A4 paper in front of a bell tower on a university campus. A fire in a locked-down apartment building in Urumqi, Xinjiang, had recently killed at least 10 residents, and commentary on the news had been censored, leading to viral social media posts that were repetitions of a single Chinese character: 好—hao, or “good”—a bitter statement about critical comments being scrubbed from the Internet, leaving “good” the only thing to say. Now, with the university student holding a blank sheet of paper, the online protests had moved to the streets. 南京传媒学院 pic.twitter.com/CPjnSTucqt—李老师不是你老师 (@whyyoutouzhele) November 26, 2022

  • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Most Effective Altruism? Igniting Positive Social Change

    For many of us, the past few years have been like a series of terrifying mass psychology experiments.

  • The Nation ☛ The Supreme Court Has Officially Launched Its War on LGBTQ Rights

    The conservative-controlled Supreme Court has already attacked reproductive rights by means of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. It’s set to revoke affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Next on its list of things to take away are LGBTQ rights.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Biden Admin Takes ‘Urgent and Necessary’ Step to Protect 100,000+ Haitians From Deportation

    Migrant rights advocates welcomed the Biden administration’s Monday extension of legal protections for more than 100,000 Haitian migrants fleeing civil unrest, as well as economic and environmental crises, in their homeland.

    “This move will protect thousands of Haitians already in the U.S. and ensure they have work authorization to live with dignity in their new communities.”

  • TruthOut ☛ “Military Intervention Will Birth Military Occupation,” Haitian Activist Warns

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump’s PAC Is Paying Legal Fees for Key Witnesses in the Mar-a-Lago Docs Case

  • TruthOut ☛ Apple Illegally Busted Union Effort in Atlanta Store, Labor Officials Say

  • Counter Punch ☛ Black Robes: White Straight Christian Male Justice

    Domestically, we live in times of all-too convenient self-righteous indignation. With nearly a public whisper, let alone outrage, like in Dobbs, under Haaland v. Brackeen the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) may soon be relegated to mere historical footnote if the Supreme Court signs off on a modern-day residential school system by gutting ICWA, an essential hedge against the intended blanch of indigenous culture, tradition and, ultimately, Tribal sovereignty throughout the United States.

    Haaland has its genesis in a challenge under ICWA by the Navaho Tribe which was subsequently joined by the Cherokee, Oneida and Quinault nations and the Morongo Band of Mission to stop an adoption of a Native child by a white Texas family which moved to have the Act struck down. Arguing that only states have power over child custody, and that “Indian” is but a racial classification and not a protected political status with direct historical roots to treaties and Congressional edicts, the Texas family contends protection of indigenous children alone violates the Equal Protection clause of the federal Constitution.

  • Papers Please ☛ TSA argues for impunity for checkpoint staff who rape travelers

    [Jonathan Corbett argues on behalf of Michele Leuthauser]

    Two years ago, at least a dozen women on a Qatar Airways flight to Sydney were ordered off the plane at Doha Airport in Qatar and subjected to forced vaginal examinations.

  • Meduza ☛ Police in Russian border town searching for possible deserter who fired at officers after emerging from forest — Meduza

    Police in Russia’s Rostov region are searching for an armed man wearing camouflage who shot at police in Novoshakhtinsk, a city on the border with Ukraine, TASS reported on Tuesday.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • NPR ☛ The Pacific island nation of Vanuatu has been knocked offline for more than a month [iophk: Windows TCO]

    Vanuatu’s government officials first discovered suspicious activity on their networks, many of which are centrally connected, on Nov. 6. They revealed the breach to local media several days later, but have so far been fairly tight lipped about the extent of the damage, the possible culprits, and what’s being done to recover service.

    Some sources have suggested the attack was ransomware, in which cybercriminals break in and take data hostage in exchange for payment, though the government has not officially confirmed whether that’s the case or addressed whether a ransom payment was made.

    Vanuatu officials did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment.

  • Counter Punch ☛ NYC Digital Redlining: a Tale of Woe

    Mayor Adams went on, noting: “Accessible broadband and phone service, it’s just not a luxury, it’s a necessity.  Just as we need electricity and heat and hot water, these same services they plan a vital role in being able to carry out our function – so to Wi-Fi.”

    The 32-foot-high Link5G towers are replacing the previous LinkNYC kiosks that were 9-feet-tall and were introduced to replace the old-fashion payphone booths.

  • Techdirt ☛ Adams Administration Finally Gets Around To Admitting They Killed NYC’s Ambitious Broadband Plan

    Back in 2020, New York City officials unveiled an aggressive plan to revolutionize broadband in the city. The centerpiece of this Internet Master Plan involved building a $156 million open access fiber network that competitors could easily join at low cost, driving some much needed competition — and lower rates, faster speeds, and better coverage — to New York City residents.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • NPR ☛ The jazzy ‘Charlie Brown Christmas’ soundtrack swings on after 57 years

    “A Charlie Brown Christmas” has aired every year since 1965, although that tradition is about to change.

    The special’s run on broadcast television ends this year. Apple TV+ bought the rights, and will stream it exclusively starting next year. While a recognition of television’s new direction, will that reduce the chances of new generations of children happening upon the story and music?

  • Variety ☛ Netflix Is ‘Not Anti-Sports, We’re Just Pro-Profit,’ Ted Sarandos Says

    “We’ve not seen a profit path to renting big sports,” said Sarandos, Netflix co-CEO and chief content officer, speaking Tuesday at the UBS Global TMT Conference in New York City.

• Monopolies

  • NPR ☛ Dozens of Taylor Swift fans sue Ticketmaster in the wake of its ticket sale fiasco

    Taylor Swift fans are dressing for revenge — or at least legal damages. More than two dozen disappointed Swifties have filed a class-action lawsuit accusing Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, of fraud, misrepresentation and antitrust violations over its botched Eras Tour ticket sale.

    Lawyers for the 26 plaintiffs, who live in 13 states across the U.S., filed the complaint in L.A. County Superior Court on Friday. It alleges that the ticketing platform has a monopoly on primary and secondary markets and accuses it of engaging in fraudulent practices and various antitrust violations, including price discrimination and price fixing.

  • The Economist ☛ If Ticketmaster is a greedy capitalist, so is Taylor Swift

    Amid the genuine angst over high-priced tickets, and the overhyped politicisation of the matter (Representative Bill Pascrell, a New Jersey Democrat, promotes the “BOSS Act” against ticket-price gouging, named before Mr Springsteen started to behave like any other fat cat), the brouhaha misses two points. The first is that it is mostly the artists, not Ticketmaster, who set the cost of the tickets. They also give the green light to the use of dynamic prices, like those used for airline seats, that allows Ticketmaster to charge more when demand outstrips supply. The second is that a big part of the price inflation comes from secondary resellers (ie, scalpers or touts) who use bots and other means to acquire batches of tickets. As a Brit, your columnist considers these strange oversights. In his home country, Ticketmaster and Live Nation have big market shares, as they do in America, but it is resellers that attract the most flak. In this transatlantic divide lie some interesting lessons about the “gigenomics” of live entertainment.

  • Patents

    • Silcon Republic ☛ Intel ordered to pay $950m in patent trial, with more cases on the way

      A federal jury in Texas agreed with VLSI’s claim that Intel’s Cascade Lake and Skylake microprocessors violated the company’s patent covering data processing improvements, Reuters reports.

      An Intel spokesperson told Reuters that the company plans to appeal the verdict, adding that the case is “one example of many that shows the US patent system is in urgent need of reform”.

    • Reuters ☛ Intel hit with $949 mln U.S. verdict in VLSI computer chip patent trial

      A federal jury in Texas on Tuesday said Intel Corp (INTC.O) must pay VLSI Technology LLC $948.8 million for infringing a VLSI patent for computer chips.

      VLSI, a patent-holding company affiliated with the SoftBank Group Corp-owned private equity firm Fortress Investment Group, argued during the six-day trial that Intel’s Cascade Lake and Skylake microprocessors violated its patent covering improvements to data processing.

    • Bloomberg ☛ Intel Hit With $948 Million Verdict in VLSI Patent Trial

      Intel Corp. owes VLSI Technology LLC $948 million after jurors in Austin, Texas, said the chip-maker infringed on a VLSI patent designed to improve computer processor performance—the latest chapter in their sprawling intellectual property feud.

      It was the third trial between VLSI and Intel over different patents related to chip-making technology. VLSI won a $2.18 billion verdict in Waco, Texas, in March 2021. Intel was cleared of infringement in a trial the following month.

      Judge Alan D. Albright of the US District Court for the Western District of Texas presided over all three trials, with the latest held in Austin, which he decided was a more convenient venue.

    • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Heartbreaking’ and ‘Pathetic’: US Obstructs Patent Waiver for Covid Tests and Treatments

      Global health campaigners denounced U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration for refusing to support a temporary suspension of patents for Covid-19 tests and treatments this year, a move that further delays the possibility of securing a World Trade Organization intellectual property waiver aimed at increasing access to lifesaving medical tools in developing nations.

      In a statement released on Tuesday morning, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said that “over the past five months, USTR officials held robust and constructive consultations with Congress, government experts, a wide range of stakeholders, multilateral institutions, and WTO members.”

  • Software Patents

    • [Old] CNET ☛ Chrome Banishes JPEG XL Photo Format That Could Save Phone Space

      Mozilla helped Google develop AVIF, and it’s built into Chrome and Firefox. Apple has begun supporting AVIF in Safari with MacOS 13 and iOS 16. HEIC, encumbered by patent licensing requirements, isn’t likely to succeed as a format on the web.

    • [Old] Dolphin Publications B V ☛ Google ends support for JPEG XL in Chromium

      According to The Register, the decision is also legal in nature. In February of this year, Microsoft obtained the patent for the basic technology for JPEG XL, despite the fact that the patent application was in an earlier stage and many industry professionals disagreed with Microsoft’s acquisition of the patent.

    • [Old] The Register UK ☛ Google kills forthcoming JPEG XL image format in Chromium

      The decision follows long-running legal maneuvering. In February 2022, Microsoft received a patent over a core technology used in JPEG XL, over a year and a half since its previous rejection and despite protests from industry specialists.

  • Copyrights

    • Techdirt ☛ ‘Nintendo Power’ Scans Disappeared From The Internet Archive

      It was only some weeks back that we were discussing how a group of hobbyists were once again doing the culture preservation work that content creators should be doing in the form of a scan of every single Nintendo Power magazine and uploading it to the Internet Archive. At the time, you could go to the link for the project and view every magazine’s contents in its full antiquated glory. I finished that post off with the following line after ruminating that the view on this by Nintendo should be that this is pure preservation and not some kind of threat to its current business operations:

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Netflix and Disney Expand Australia’s Piracy Blocklist With Dozens of Domains

      Netflix and several Hollywood studios continue their crusade against pirate sites Down Under. The companies obtained a new blocking injunction at Australia’s Federal Court today, targeting dozens of websites. The companies also obtained the first cyberlocker blocking order recently, with Mixdrop as the main target.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ ACE Anti-Piracy Expansion in Europe is More Than Just Another New Member

      The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has revealed United Media as the latest addition to its expanding anti-piracy coalition. United Media is a major broadcaster in Southeast Europe but the company has more to offer. Criminal referrals, membership of a major anti-piracy group, and links to a company with IPTV-blocking skills, make United Media a special type of partner.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Technical

  • Science

    • Drowning in AI Generated Garbage : the silent war we are fighting

      All over the web, we are witnessing very spectacular results from statistic algorithms that have been in the work for the last forty years. We gave those algorithms an incredibly catchy name: “Artificial Intelligence”. We now have very popular and direct applications for them: give the algorithm a simple text prompt (don’t get me started on the importance of text) and it generates a beautiful original picture or a very serious-sounding text. It could also generate sounds or videos (we call them “deep fakes”). After all, it generates only a stream of bits, a bunch of 1 and 0 open to interpretation.

GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • Make Use Of ☛ 5 Reasons for Regular People to Love the Linux Command Line

    The Linux command line is a powerful tool that scares many casual users. But there are ample reasons for people to fall in love with the terminal.

    Many people are afraid of the command line. They see it as the realm of software developers or computer geeks. But the command line is merely a different way of interacting with your PC, and there are some tasks so easy to do with a CLI that you will be glad you got over your fear.

    Yes, you. Even if you need to call a family member for help with app installations, you can still use the command line without breaking your machine. Even if you’re getting by just fine with your PC already, here are some reasons to consider learning a few commands regardless.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ How we keep our Linux systems patched with automation | Enable Sysadmin

    An automated patch-management system helps keep your server infrastructure patched and maintained in a timely manner.

  • ELinux ☛ What is Linux Webhosting | Linux Webhosting blog

    Second, Linux is highly customizable, which means that it can be easily tailored to meet the specific needs of your website or web application. This allows you to choose the right combination of features and capabilities to support the unique requirements of your project.

    [...]

    Overall, Linux is a powerful and versatile platform for web hosting, and it offers many benefits over other operating systems. Whether you are a small business owner, a web developer, or a large enterprise, Linux can provide the stability, security, and flexibility that you need to host your website or web application successfully.

  • The Register UK ☛ Info drips out about various vendors’ Arm-powered kit • The Register

    Arm-powered laptops and desktops are appearing on the market, but external appearances are deceptive. These are very different from familiar x86-based PCs, as the accounts of those experimenting with them reveal.

    Compared to x86 machines, which have the widest range of interchangeable, modular hardware in the history of computing, devices such as phones and tablets are almost polar opposites. A fondleslab is a relatively sealed unit, with a known combination of main processor, graphics processor, various networking interfaces and so on, designed and built to run a single OS that is customized for that hardware. If you’re lucky, several versions of that single OS.

    When it comes to the inexpensive highly integrated Arm device you are probably holding in mid air, the problems start with booting: there’s usually no standardized firmware able to load multiple unknown OSes in the typical ad hoc PC way. There’s no need if you’re building it to run just one specific payload, meaning that, from the vendor’s point of view, it’s cheaper to do without.

  • Linux Links ☛ LinuxLinks – The Home of Linux – LinuxLinks

    We’ve crafted an enormous range of articles showcasing the finest free and open source Linux software. We cover games, graphics, education, multimedia, security, and tons more. And there’s other computer related areas that we also regularly dive into such as programming, hardware, Android, and more.

    Many of these articles are published in a series. It therefore makes sense to collate all of these articles to a central location. This helps you to quickly find what you are looking for, as well as introducing you to a profusion of interesting and informative material.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Tux Digital ☛ 303: Holiday Geek Gift Guide for 2022 – Destination Linux – TuxDigital

    This week’s episode of Destination Linux, holiday gift guide for everyone . . . this is the episode you want your spouse to listen to. Then we discuss some new happenings with the Cosmic DE from System76. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!

  • Video ☛ Ubuntu Budgie 22.10 Quick overview #shorts – Invidious

    A Quick Overview of Ubuntu Budgie 22.10

  • Video ☛ That’s what a LINUX TABLET is supposed to look like! FydeTab Duo – Invidious

  • Video ☛ PopOS Has BIG PLANS For New Rust COSMIC DE – Invidious

    I have no plans to daily drive PopOS but System76 has got some crazy features planned for new rust COSMIC desktop, features that I thought I wouldn’t see on the Linux desktop any time soon

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ Linux Mint 21.1 Beta XFCE

    Today we are looking at Linux Mint 21.1 Beta, XFCE edition. It is based on Ubuntu 22.04, Linux Kernel 5.15, XFCE 4.16, and uses about 800-900 MB of ram when idling.

  • Video ☛ Linux Mint 21.1 Beta XFCE Run Through – Invidious

    In this video, we are looking at Linux Mint 21.1 Beta XFCE.

  • Video ☛ How to install Rocky Linux 9.1 – Invidious

    In this video, I am going to show how to install Rocky Linux 9.1.

  • Video ☛ How to install Arch Linux in 2023 – Invidious

  • Video ☛ Command Line Tools Setfont, Write, and Wall – Invidious

    If you spend time in the tty, especially on systems where multiple users might be logged in, there are a couple of useful commands (‘write’ and ‘wall’) to know that allow you to message the other users logged in. I also show you how to change the console font (the tty font) using the ‘setfont’ command.

• Kernel Space

  • The New Stack ☛ Rust in the Linux Kernel – The New Stack

    Not that long ago, the idea that another major language would be supported in the Linux kernel would have been laughable. Linux was C’s poster child. Sure, there have been efforts to introduce other languages into the kernel, notably C++. They failed. Badly. As Linux’s creator Linus Torvalds once said, “C++ is a horrible language.” So, why is Torvalds now welcoming Rust into the kernel? Listen, my friend, and I’ll tell you.

    Rust began as a Mozilla Foundation project. This then new scratch-built language’s purpose was to incorporate the expressive syntax and flexibility of a high-level language with the fine control and performance of a low-level language. In particular, it was meant to improve performance, parallelization, and memory safety.

  • Collabora ☛ KernelCI now testing Linux Rust code

    After waiting in the Linux-next integration tree for about 18 months, the basic Rust infrastructure will finally land in the mainline Linux kernel with the imminent release of v6.1. While this will not include any any real device drivers and only a few toy sample modules, further subsystem-specific bindings with real drivers should be added in the future.

    During the 2022 Linux Maintainers Summit in Dublin, Linus Torvalds asked CI systems to start testing the new Rust infrastructure. So, with that in mind, we are excited to announce that as of today, Rust testing has now been added to KernelCI!

    Here is a very brief review at the current state of Rust on the kernel side (which is already well documented on LWN.net, i.e. in this article or this v6.2 focused article) along with a look at the current status and future plans on the KernelCI project side, with some examples.

  • LWN ☛ KernelCI now testing Linux Rust code (Collabora blog) [LWN.net]

    Over on the Collabora blog, Adrian Ratiu writes about the addition of the kernel’s Rust code to the KernelCI automated kernel testing project. The blog post looks at what it took to add the support and on some plans for future additions, as well.

  • Linux 6.1 Gets an Extra Week of Testing as it Prepares to Launch Latest Version [Ed: It used to say "Linux Prepares to Launch Unix Version 6.1-rc8"]

    One of the most anticipated new features of Linux 6.1 is the merging of the Rust infrastructure code. However, support for the Rust programming language is only very limited, so it will not be able to be used practically for the time being. If you want to try 6.1 before the stable release, you can download the candidate release from kernel.org. Just remember not to use it in a production environment.

• Applications

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Audacity 3.2.2 Adds Realtime Capabilities to VST2 Effects, Improves Accessibility of Meters

    Audacity 3.2.2 comes two months after Audacity 3.2.1, which was a small update fixing a startup crash, a crash when applying Waves Berzerk Distortion Mono to a mono track, and a freeze that occurred when playback was started or stopped very quickly, and two and half months after Audacity 3.2, the major update that added support for VST3 and real-time effects, FFmpeg 5.0 and WavPack support, and much more.

    The Audacity 3.2.2 update is here to enable real-time capabilities for VST2 effects and to add support for additional plugins that you can download from plugins.audacityteam.org. Moreover, Audacity no longer quietly discards changes in real-time effects, asking users if they want to save their work before quitting instead.

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ G4Music is a GTK4 Music App for Linux Desktops

    Visually, G4Music bears more than a passing resemblance to Amberol, a minimally-minded GTK4/libadwaita music app I’ve written about a few times this year. That’s no bad thing. But where Amberol focuses largely on ‘play-as-you-go’ listening (ergo, less focus on library browsing) G4Music provides extra features that enable it.

  • DebugPoint ☛ Inkscape 1.2.2 release brings more stability with a handful of bug fixes

    Inkscape 1.2.2 is a maintenance and bugfix release that offers several improvements. It includes four crash fixes, over 25 bug fixes, five fixes for extension bugs, and 13 improved user interface translations.

    The OpenClipart import feature is now available to all users, regardless of the selected packaging format or operating system. In addition, spellchecking now works on macOS, and performance has been improved (in exchange for dithering being disabled by default).

    Additionally, extensions that modify colours can also modify colours in patterns again. We’ve also fixed some issues with the measure tool, the DXF14 export, and hairline strokes for our maker community.

    While looking into detail about the fixes, notable bug fixes include export options fixes bugs related to export area catering to four issues. Also, the raster images now open on the visible canvas, not in the bottom left corner.

    The import and export module gets some minor yet important fixes. The TIFF export now supports transparency, and JPG/TIFF raster image files preserve the DPI attributes while exporting them.

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Inkscape 1.2.2 is out! OpenClipart import works in AppImage & Windows | UbuntuHandbook

    The free open-source Inkscape vector graphics editor got a new maintenance release for the 1.2 series.

    The is the second update for Inkscape 1.2, which finally makes OpenClipart import available for Windows and Linux user using AppImage. And, Color extensions works on patterns again.

    For macOS, spellchecking finally works and undo/redo options are back in the menu. For Linux, the snap package is no longer possible to install with –classic option. Meaning the snap won’t be able to access data outside of user’s home directory.

  • 8 Best Free Evernote Alternatives for Linux 2022 – Notes on the go – DekiSoft [Ed: Page updated for this year]

    No doubt that Evernote is a good app to take notes that can be used across Windows, macOS, and other smartphone OS such as Android. The only problem it caters is that it does not have an official Linux note-taking app, that is sad I know! It too has ignored it like many others. You might use it in the browser but it does not provide offline capability.

    As it decided not to entertain users of this platform, it does not mean you are left out! Today I have put together a list of the top 8 best Evernote Linux alternatives for 2022 that are both open-source and free to download just because of that.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • RoseHosting ☛ Configure PHP-FPM with Nginx on Ubuntu 22.04 – RoseHosting

    In this tutorial, we are going to explain how to configure PHP-fpm with Nginx on Ubuntu 22.04.

    Nginx is a web server used for serving web requests on our website. It can be used as a reverse proxy, mail proxy, HTTP cache, or load balancer. Nginx is a free and open source software that can be configured with the PHP module PHP-fpm and improve the website loading and handle a huge amount of traffic in no time.

    Configuring PHP-fpm with Nginx on Ubuntu 22.04 is a very easy and straightforward process that can take up to 15 minutes. Let’s get started!

  • Make Tech Easier ☛ Claws Mail Keyboard Shortcuts – Make Tech Easier

    Claws Mail is a simple yet powerful e-mail client for the Linux desktop. Its developers designed the program as an intuitive graphical client that can act as a general task organizer. Like Emacs, Claws Mail can work as your mail reader, news aggregator, and RSS reader.

  • Linux Handbook ☛ Using the Make Utility and Makefiles in Linux [Guide]

    This is a complete beginner’s guide to using the make command in Linux.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install ERPNext on Ubuntu 22.04

    ERPNext is a free and open-source ERP software used by manufacturers, distributors, and services. It is built with Python, JavaScript, and Frappe Framework. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ERPNext on Ubuntu 22.04 server.

  • DebugPoint ☛ How to Find a Process ID and Kill it in Linux [CLI - GUI]

    A simple tutorial demonstrates how to find a running process ID and kill it using the terminal and GUI method for various Linux distros.

    The running applications in your Linux system can slow down your system, especially if you have a low-end system. In Linux (plus all OS), programs or apps contain a specific PID (process ID) by which you can identify them easily.

    However, as a beginner, many Linux users don’t know how to find a running process in Linux and kill it. So in this guide, we will explain different approaches to kill the currently running processes in Linux. That includes the terminal and GUI methods.

    Remember, you should only kill the process when it is not responding, or you are in a situation where the normal application closing is not working (for GUI-based apps).

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Create a Linux Thread in C

    Using the pthread library, you can perform low-level thread management for high-performance programming.

    On Linux, you can create and manage threads in C/C++ using the POSIX thread (pthread) library. Unlike other operating systems, there is little difference between a thread and a process in Linux. That’s why Linux often refers to its threads as light-weight processes.

    Using the pthread library, you can create threads, wait for them to terminate, and terminate them explicitly.

  • OSTechNix ☛ How To Resize LVM Partitions In Linux – OSTechNix

    In the previous article, we have covered what is LVM and how to create Volume group and Logical volumes in Linux. This article will teach you how to resize LVM partitions i.e. extend a Volume Group and Logical Volume’s size and reduce/shrink Logical Volume’s size in Linux.

    When you want to increase the size of your logical volume, you should check if there are any unallocated spaces in the free pool (i.e. Volume Group).

    If there is no space left in the free pool, then you have to go with any of the below steps to increase the space.

    Check if any volume group has space that can be utilized. In this case, add the space back to the volume group and increase the new volume size.
    Add a disk, initialize it as physical volume and add it to the volume group using which you can extend the logical volume size.

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

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ISPConfig on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, ISPConfig is an open-source hosting control panel for Linux distributors. It features a wide variety of options to help you control your server and allow other users to maintain their websites. ISPConfig supports Linux-based operating systems like CentOS, Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu.

    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 ISPConfig control panel 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.

  • How to Use Here Document (HereDoc) in Linux Shell Script

    While writing shell script, you might get stuck in the situation where you want to redirect a block of lines from your script to an interactive command like sed, cat, ssh, or ftp.

    The purpose of this redirection might vary from situation to situation.

    For example, you want to copy the block of lines from the script to a new file, replace the word, or the block of lines are commands that you need to execute in the remote system via ssh.

    There is no doubt you can achieve this manually; however, “here document” will make this process way easier than you might think.

  • Linux Nightly ☛ How to Mount an ISO File in Xfce – Linux Nightly

    Learn how to mount an ISO file in the Xfce desktop environment GUI on Linux.

  • Vitux ☛ How to Install and Run Chromium Web Browser on Debian – VITUX

    Chromium is a free and open-source web browser developed in collaboration between Google and Microsoft.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Jellyfin Media Server on Rocky Linux 9

    Jellyfin is a free and open-source media server that allows you to stream content that can be accessed from anywhere.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Google Chrome on Ubuntu 22.10/22.04/20.04 – LinuxCapable

    Chrome is built upon the open-source Chromium Project. For those who have not heard of Chromium before, it is a free and open-source software project developed by Google. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Android and works well on Ubuntu-based distributions. Google Chrome web browser has been downloaded over 1 billion times and praised for its speed among its top features. Most users familiar with Linux know that Google Chrome is not installed by default on Ubuntu-based systems, but with a few easy steps, you can install the famous browser.

    In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Google Chrome on Ubuntu 22.10/22.04/20.04 Linux in three alternative ways: stable, beta or unstable versions using the command line terminal with cli commands, along with how to remove the browsers.

  • DebugPoint ☛ How to Install Microsoft Teams in Ubuntu, Fedora, and Other Linux [Ed: This is Microsoft spyware; installing it typically involves giving Microsoft root access to one's machine. Don't do it.]

  • Red Hat ☛ How to build a Quarkus app on RHEL using Microsoft SQL Server [Ed: Red Hat is once again marketing proprietary software of Microsoft. It's not even running on Linux 'proper'. Red Hat promotes Red Hat, not GNU/Linux.]

    Quarkus offers libraries, development tools, and a testing environment for modern Java applications, particularly those aimed at containers and the cloud. This article demonstrates how to implement a Quarkus application that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and connects to a Microsoft SQL Server database. With the help of Podman (a container-building tool similar to Docker), we will also containerize the Quarkus application to become more portable and ready to be deployed on Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift.

  • ZDNet ☛ How to customize the Firefox homepage on Android | ZDNET

    Firefox is a great alternative browser for the Android platform that offers plenty of options, such as the customization of the homepage. Find out how you can make Firefox even better with this option.

  • Android Police ☛ How to install ChromeOS Flex on a Chromebook

    Chromebooks are great devices that have long software support lifetimes. When your Chromebook reaches the end of its life, it’s probably time to take a look at one of our favorite Chromebooks and recycle your old device. However, what if there was a way to use ChromeOS Flex to breathe new life into your Chromebook? Or maybe you want to turn an old Windows and Mac computer into a Chromebook. Let’s dig in.

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Pycharm Community 2022.2.3 on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install JetBrains Pycharm Community on a Chromebook.

    If you have any questions, please contact us via a Rumble comment and we would be happy to assist you!

    Please use the video as a visual guide, and the commands and links below to install it on your Chromebook.

  • Citizix ☛ How to run Grafana OSS in docker and docker-compose

    Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources.

• Games

  • FEX ☛ FEX 2212 Tagged! – FEX-Emu – A fast linux usermode x86 and x86-64 emulator

    A lot of good work this month with the highlight being that we have started working on our AVX implementation and started optimizing our IR to be more efficient.

  • Video ☛ Valve Steam Deck fanboyism and elitism RUNNING WILD within the gaming community! (RANT) *Reaction* – Invidious

  • Boiling Steam ☛ Top 14 New Games You Can Play on Linux with Proton – December 2022 Edition – Boiling Steam

    We are back with our usual monthly update! Boiling Steam looks at the latest data dumps from ProtonDB to give you a quick list of new games that work (pretty much? see ratings) perfectly with Proton since they were released in November 2022 – all of them work out of the box or well enough with tweaks…

  • Ubuntubuzz ☛ Simple List of FOSS Games on Ubuntu

    This list will help you recognize, get and play FOSS games on Ubuntu. By FOSS we mean no Valve Steam, only Free/Libre Open Source Software ones. Among them are widely known such as Freedoom and Super Tux Kart, and some of them also need more introduction such as Speed Dreams and Tux Math. Most of them can be added to Ubuntu via Software. We include both categories of educational and recreational ones here. This compilation is hoped to be helpful for teachers in teaching computing with FOSS including the games. Happy reading!

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • 9to5Linux ☛ digiKam 7.9 Open-Source Photo Management App Released with Various Improvements

      digiKam 7.9 is here about three months after digiKam 7.8 and it’s a maintenance update that only brings some improvements to the core functionality of the software. For example, it improves importing of coordinates from image metadata and improves the performance of album management from a remote database.

      It also improves the management of faces location from image metadata, fixes Google photo login and remote album management, improves ISO date format support from image metadata, improves importing and merging of tags from image metadata, and improves backward compatibility for database schema migration.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• New Releases

  • 9to5Linux ☛ Kali Linux 2022.4 Ethical Hacking Distro Arrives with Linux 6.0, Official PinePhone Support

    Coming almost four months after Kali Linux 2022.3, the Kali Linux 2022.4 release is the first in the Kali Linux 2022 series to add support for the latest and greatest Linux 6.0 kernel series. This means that Kali Linux should now work on and support more hardware if you use the latest ISO images.

    While Kali Linux sticks to the lightweight Xfce desktop environment as its default graphical session for the live ISOs, the Kali Linux 2022.4 release also brings support for the latest GNOME 43 and KDE Plasma 5.26 desktop environments.

  • Kali Linux ☛ Kali Linux 2022.4 Release (Azure, Social & Kali NetHunter Pro) | Kali Linux Blog

    We are now including a QEMU image with our pre-generated images. We hope this makes it easier for the people who use self-hosted Proxmox Virtual Environments (VE), virt-manager, or libvirt!

    On that subject, elrey (alex) from the community has added libvirt support to our kali-vagrant build-script.

    In Kali 2022.3, we have produced a Generic Cloud image. The idea of this image is that it should work in “most” cloud providers This is coming from our kali-cloud build-scripts. So if you are self-hosting OpenStack, this is a great way of getting Kali loaded up!

  • Help Net Security ☛ Kali Linux 2022.4 released: Kali NetHunter Pro, desktop updates and new tools – Help Net Security

    Offensive Security has released Kali Linux 2022.4, the latest version of its popular penetration testing and digital forensics platform.

    [...]

    Kali NetHunter, the distro’s mobile (Android) pentesting platform, now has internal Bluetooth support and added support for some devices, as well as other improvements.

    There’s also the new Kali NetHunter Pro – “a ‘true’ Kali Linux on the mobile phone” – supporting the Pine64 PinePhone and PinePhone Pro open source smartphones, which allow the user to have full control over the device.

    “First of all we make available SD card images for the PinePhone and the PinePhone Pro to dual boot alongside the main OS. Soon we will release alternative versions with Plasma Mobile as well as installers so you can install Kali NetHunter Pro onto the internal flash memory,” the devs shared.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

  • PCLOS Official ☛ Audacity 3.2.2 – PCLinuxOS

    Audacity is an easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder for Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. Audacity is free, open source software.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • Post-mortem: Downtime on December 5, 2022 – Open Build Service

    After yesterday’s deployment, we faced a downtime on our reference server. In the lines below you will find a detailed explanation of what happened.

• Fedora / Red Hat / IBM

  • Fedora Project ☛ Community Blog monthly summary: November 2022 – Fedora Community Blog

    In November, we published 14 posts. The site had 8,371 visits from 5,444 unique viewers. 1,971 visits came from search engines, while 1,222 came from Fedora Magazine and 116 came from Distrowatch.

  • December 2022 | Packit

    Week 48 (November 29th – December 5th) # packit propose-downstream now uploads all remote sources (those specified as URLs) and the source specified by spec_source_id (whether remote or not) to lookaside. Previously, only Source0 was uploaded. Source0 is no longer treated specially, but as spec_source_id is Source0 by default, Source0 is still being uploaded by default unless spec_source_id is overriden. (packit#1778) A VM image build can be triggered inside a PR via a comment command /packit vm-image-build (the job needs to be defined in the configuration).

  • Hari Rana ☛ Where Fedora Linux Could Improve | TheEvilSkeleton

    The Fedora Project is a great organization to gain experience no matter the team you are in. I am currently a part of the Fedora Websites & Apps team improving my technical writing, communication and design skills.

    With all the things the Fedora Project does well, there are several places that, in my opinion, need to be improved. I’d like to go over some key areas where we could improve Fedora Linux from a user perspective without breaking the Fedora Project’s core philosophies.

  • Enterprisers Project ☛ IT transformation: 3 lessons for CIOs | The Enterprisers Project

    IT transformation, similar to the lifecycle of a living creature, is complex and often evolves through different stages. As an IT leader focusing on transformation at the enterprise level, you must consider multiple factors that may arise along the way, keeping in mind that digital maturity doesn’t happen overnight.

    Consider these three lessons to ensure your company’s IT transformation is ready to take off.

  • Red Hat ☛ Implementing C++20 atomic waiting in libstdc++ | Red Hat Developer

    In this article, I will cover the current implementation approach for atomic wait/notify, as these are basis operations required to implement the remaining coordination primitives introduced with C++20. Subsequent articles in this series will cover the details of the other types.

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Red Hat Summit call for proposals now open

    In case you missed it, Red Hat Summit is coming back to Boston, Massachusetts on May 23-25, 2023 and we’re excited to announce that our call for proposals is now open!

  • ZDNet ☛ RHEL and its Linux relatives and rivals: How to choose [Ed: Missing disclosure is, this site is funded by IBM, so there's a conflict of interest]

    There’s a whole family of Red Hat Enterprise Linux variants, each with its own users. We’ll break down the family tree and explain what’s suited for dfiferent needs.

  • Red Hat ☛ Top Kubernetes and OpenShift resources of 2022 | Red Hat Developer

    The year is coming to a close, and we’ve rounded up some of our favorite Kubernetes and OpenShift content from 2022, including stories about microservices and container optimization, as well as top announcements.

• Debian Family

  • Linuxiac ☛ SparkyLinux 2022.12 Rolling December Update Is Here

    SparkyLinux 2022.12 updated its LXQt, MATE, Xfce, and KDE rolling editions, featuring kernel 6.0.10 and an updated package base.

    SparkyLinux is a Debian-based lightweight Linux distribution that aims to be easy on system resources to breathe new life into aging computers.

    One of its distinctive aspects is the wide range of editions available. So, they can easily confuse a new Linux user, so let’s list them quickly.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Neowin ☛ Linux Mint 21.1 ‘Vera’ Beta arrives with new theme and cursors – Neowin

    If you were reading Neowin at the weekend, you may have seen that the Linux Mint 21.1 Beta ISOs were undergoing testing before release. For those eager to try out the Beta, the wait is now over. The Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce editions are now available for download. While they should all be pretty stable, they are Betas, so you may encounter bugs, which you should report.

    The main change in this update is the theming used. In this update, the Mint team has opted to make colours more vibrant but reduced where they are used, making sure they’re not too distracting. In this update, accent colours have been removed from the panel and in menus and folders are now yellow. Controversially, the Mint team has also opted to use the blue Aqua theme by default, taking away the familiar mint colour.

  • Beta News ☛ Ubuntu-based Linux Mint 21.1 ’Vera’ BETA ready for testing

    The Linux Mint developers are targeting Christmas as the release date for version 21.1 of the operating system. Before Santa Claus delivers the stable version, however, we will first need a BETA to test for bugs. And so, today, that is exactly what we get.

    Code-named “Vera,” Linux Mint 21.1 BETA can be downloaded immediately for testing with your choice of three desktop environments – Cinnamon (5.6), MATE (1.26), and Xfce (4.16). Vera is based on the rock-solid Ubuntu 22.04 and comes with Linux kernel 5.15. The stable version will be supported until 2027.

    Much of the excitement surrounding Linux Mint 21.1 is simply on the surface. The developers share that there are refreshed icons, a new default mouse pointer, more vibrant accent colors, better wallpapers, and new themes.

  • HowTo Geek ☛ Linux Mint 21.1 ‘Vera’ Now in Beta: Here’s What’s New

    Linux Mint is one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions around, and version 21 was released earlier this year. The next update, a minor release, is now available for beta testing.

    Linux Mint 21 was a significant update, with an Ubuntu 22.04 core platform and major changes to all the desktop environment options. Linux Mint 21.1, nicknamed “Vera,” is a smaller-scale upgrade based on the same release of Ubuntu. The system requirements also remain unchanged — 2 GB RAM (4 GB recommended), 20 GB of disk space (100 GB recommended), and a screen resolution of at least 1024×768 resolution.

    The main improvement in this release, at least for the Cinnamon desktop variant, is the inclusion of Cinnamon 5.6. It has a new Corner Bar applet in the panel enabled by default, which hides all windows and shows the desktop when clicked — similar to the desktop button in the Windows 7 and Windows 10 taskbar.

  • Linux Mint ☛ Linux Mint 21.1 “Vera” Xfce – BETA Release – The Linux Mint Blog

    Linux Mint 21.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2027. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

  • Linux Mint ☛ Linux Mint 21.1 “Vera” MATE – BETA Release – The Linux Mint Blog

    Linux Mint 21.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2027. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

  • Linux Mint ☛ Linux Mint 21.1 “Vera” Cinnamon – BETA Release – The Linux Mint Blog

    Linux Mint 21.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2027. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

  • HowTo Geek ☛ 5 Ubuntu Linux Features You Should Be Using

    Ubuntu needs no introduction. It’s the most popular Linux distribution for home users, hands down. It’s the distribution many Linux users cut their teeth on. Regardless of what distribution people might be using nowadays, chances are they started on Ubuntu, or at least detoured onto Ubuntu at some point in the Linux explorations.

  • Ubuntu ☛ Canonical joins SOAFEE SIG | Ubuntu

    Canonical is delighted to announce that it is joining the Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge (SOAFEE) Special Interest Group to contribute towards a safe, secure and software-defined automotive future.

    “As the demand for computing from car to cloud is rapidly growing, the automotive industry is looking towards standardisation to reduce development complexities and spur innovation. The SOAFEE initiative is perfectly positioned to address these challenges“, said Gordan Markus, Director Silicon Alliances at Canonical.

    “Canonical is excited to bring subject-matter expertise in managing complex open-source software at scale, and empowering automotive companies to shape their software-defined vehicle strategies around safe and secure open-source solutions. Contributing with its unique insights in cloud-native computing, Canonical will be working with SOAFEE initiative members to unlock agile innovation and improve time-to-market across the automotive industry.”

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Notebook Check ☛ Sipeed M1s DOCK: PINE64 Ox64 rival launches for US$11 with microSD card expansion – NotebookCheck.net News

    The Sipeed M1s DOCK is another RISC-V-based single-board computer (SBC) that runs RTOS or Linux-based software. Sipeed sells the M1s DOCK for US$11 or as the M1s module for US$7 without a carrier board.

  • Arduino ☛ Build an affordable color mixer box for photography | Arduino Blog

    Lighting is the single most important factor when it comes to capturing good photos. For a conventional setup, you probably want diffuse, indirect light in a natural color. But you can get more creative with the use of colored light. RGB box lights let you set whatever hue you want, but they aren’t cheap. Arnov Sharma’s color mixer box is both affordable and versatile.

    This is a relatively small light box and so it alone isn’t suitable for lighting an entire scene, unless you want a dark and moody feel. But it is perfect for adding colored highlights or illuminating small objects in close-up photos. Three knobs let you adjust the color channels, so you can dial in the exact hue you want. An OLED display shows each channel’s set brightness and that makes it easy to reproduce colors that you set in the past. Power can come from either a USB cable or a battery pack.

  • Arduino ☛ Being a PLC engineer just became a lot easier! | Arduino Blog

    With the demand for PLC programming rising due to the spread of automation in a wide range of industrial fields, we felt we had to step up for our community of budding and experienced engineers!

    That’s why we have just launched a dedicated Arduino PLC IDE, which supports the five languages defined by the IEC 61131-3 standard: Ladder Diagram, Functional Block Diagram, Structured Text, Sequential Function Chart and Instruction List.

  • Purism ☛ Extended till 10 December 2022: Special Year End Promotion for Librem 5 USA [Ed: Promoting Librem based on nationalism instead of actual freedom]

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Kim Kommando ☛ Universal Clipboard for Android: you won’t believe how useful it is

  • Liliputing ☛ TCL launches NXTPAPER 12 Pro mid-range Android tablet with a 3:2 display (in Russia) – Liliputing

  • Android Central ☛ It seems not many Android Auto users have gotten their hands on the Coolwalk redesign | Android Central

  • Pocket Lint ☛ Google TV gets its big design refresh on Android

  • Android Police ☛ Android TV development has its eyes on the future, as old ADT-3 box gets the boot

  • Android Police ☛ 8 of the best file managers on Android in 2022

  • Geeky Gadgets ☛ Lenovo Yoga Paper E Ink Android tablet – Geeky Gadgets

  • 9to5Google ☛ Google Pixel updates will speed up with these improvements

  • GSM Arena ☛ Samsung rolls out OneUI 5.0 with Android 13 to Galaxy A22 and A23 LTE/5G – GSMArena.com news

  • 9to5Google ☛ Samsung expands Android 13 to several more devices

  • Phone Arena ☛ Samsung brings Android 13 One UI 5 to one of its cheapest 5G phones – PhoneArena

  • Nokia Power User ☛ Nokia X20 5G also receiving Android 13 update now – Nokiapoweruser

  • Android Headlines ☛ How to disable location tracking on Android

  • 9to5Google ☛ How to create themed icons for any app on Android

  • The Sun ☛ Silent notifications are a ‘vampire drain’ on your Android battery – how to turn them off | The US Sun

  • The Benefits of Using Proxies on Android Phones – Business Review

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ 7 Best Anime Streaming Apps for Android Devices

    The anime world is growing daily, and many new viewers are joining the active anime-loving communities. So, anime-watching apps are in high demand; most of them are using mobile devices to consume them daily. Here, we have come up with some of the Best anime streaming apps for Android for your convenience.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Three great examples of open source product roadmaps – /home/jwf/

  In my daily reading, I came across three product roadmaps from Proton, developers of several open source, privacy-centered products. These include products like Proton Mail, Proton VPN, and Proton Drive. The product roadmaps shared by Proton play a tactical role. They inform consumers and engaged customers about exciting changes yet to come. It gets people excited about the product’s future. Additionally, it builds an engaged user base that is more willing to experiment and try new features.

  Product roadmaps are something many projects struggle with. It fits into the communications and outreach umbrella, which unfortunately is typically an underresourced part of many open source products. They are one small part of a larger strategy around openness and transparency. If customers and stakeholders know what to expect, they gain more confidence in the product and company mission. For instance, this is especially true when the company continuously delivers on its roadmaps and meets its ambitions. As a result, delivering on those ambitions leaves a strong impression.

• FSFE ☛ 5 reasons why your contribution is crucial for the promotion of Free Software [Ed: FSFE trying to steal the FSF’s lunch by falsely disguising itself as “FSF”]

• OSI Blog ☛ The Fediverse unlocks a world of composable distributed apps – Voices of Open Source

  There’s an old story about someone in the dark feeling the trunk of an elephant and believing it’s a snake because they can’t see the whole animal. It’s happening again, as people spooked from the Twitter crash try to feel their way around the Fediverse.

  [...]

  This is the most important dimension of the Fediverse, and the one we need to develop. We need ActivityPub federated software tools of all kinds, cutting the link between my choices and your choices without also cutting our ability to interact with each other.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL: Pgpool-II 4.4.0 is now released.

    Pgpool Global Development Group is pleased to announce the availability of Pgpool-II 4.4.0. This is the first stable release of Pgpool-II 4.4.x.

• GCC and FSF

  • GCC ☛ 0/19 modula-2 front end patches overview

  • GCC ☛ modula-2 front end patches overview

    Here are the latest modula-2 front end patches. Since the posting in

    https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2022-October/603161.html

    I’ve rewritten the python3 documentation scripts (feedback from
    patchset 16) and applied all the suggestions from the feedback in
    patchset 15 (gm2-lang.cc).

  • GCC ☛ Rust front-end patches v4

    This patchset contains the fixed version of our most recent patchset. We
    have fixed most of the issues noted in the previous round of reviews, and are
    keeping some for later as they would otherwise create too many conflicts with
    our updated development branch.
    
    Similarly to the previous round of patches, this patchset does not contain any
    new features - only fixes for the reviews of the v3. New features will follow
    shortly once that first patchset is merged.
    
    Once again, thank you to all the contributors who made this possible and
    especially to Philip Herron for his dedication to the project.
    

  • GCC ☛ [GCC] Rust front-end patches v4

  • FSF ☛ Fall Bulletin: Fully shareable, fully lovable

    2022 Fall “Free Software Foundation Bulletin” is here! Read about how to protect your privacy, a reflection on this year’s GNU Hackers’ Meeting, what’s new in Trisquel 11, and more!

    As the seasons change, and those in the northern hemisphere prepare for the cold of winter, we continue our annual cadence of software freedom advocacy. Sent from the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) cozy Boston office, the physical printed pamphlets have been mailed out to supporters around the world, and issue forty-one of the Free Software Foundation Bulletin is now also available online!

• FSFE

  • FSFE ☛ EU Declaration of Digital Rights and Principles falls short of its ambitions

    Member states, the European Parliament, and the Commission have reached a consensus on the Declaration of Digital Rights and Principles. Although it aims to serve as a reference point for the digital transformation of Europe, it instead descends into murky waters, causing ambiguity. Its wording is unclear and it overlooks existing good proposals.

    [...]

    It is also not clear if the declaration is consistent with existing frameworks. According to its text, it is built upon previous initiatives such as the Berlin and Tallinn declarations. These aforementioned frameworks already refer to Free Software when it comes to digital sovereignty and interoperability, while they also require more use of Free Software, and strengthening the requirement for its use. However, when it comes to interoperability, Free Software is not explicitly mentioned in the Declaration of Digital Rights and Principles.

• GNU Projects

  • GNUnet ☛ GNUnet 0.19.0 released

    We are pleased to announce the release of GNUnet 0.19.0.

    GNUnet is an alternative network stack for building secure, decentralized and privacy-preserving distributed applications. Our goal is to replace the old insecure Internet protocol stack. Starting from an application for secure publication of files, it has grown to include all kinds of basic protocol components and applications towards the creation of a GNU internet.

    This is a new major release. It breaks protocol compatibility with the 0.18.x versions. Please be aware that Git master is thus henceforth (and has been for a while) INCOMPATIBLE with the 0.18.x GNUnet network, and interactions between old and new peers will result in issues. 0.18.x peers will be able to communicate with Git master or 0.19.x peers, but some services will not be compatible.

    In terms of usability, users should be aware that there are still a number of known open issues in particular with respect to ease of use, but also some critical privacy issues especially for mobile users. Also, the nascent network is tiny and thus unlikely to provide good anonymity or extensive amounts of interesting information. As a result, the 0.19.0 release is still only suitable for early adopters with some reasonable pain tolerance.

• Programming/Development

  • KDAB ☛ Hotspot v1.4.0 – KDAB

    Hotspot 1.4.0 has been released!

    Hotspot is a replacement for perf report. It’s a GUI for the perf profiler that takes a perf.data file, parses and evaluates its contents, and then displays the result in a graphical way.

    This feature release contains close to 400 commits since the last stable v1.3.0 release. It comes with its usual assorted list of bug fixes and performance improvements along with new features.

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ Faster base64 in curl | daniel.haxx.se

    This adventure started with an issue where a user pointed out that the libcurl function for base64 encoding actually would allocate a few bytes too many at times.

    That turned out to be true and we fixed it fairly quickly.

    As I glanced at that base64 encoder function that was still loaded and showing in my editor window, it struck me that it really was not written in an optimal way.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Rakulang ☛ Day 7: .hyper and Cro – Raku Advent Calendar

      So, I’m a programmer and I work for a government TI “e-gov” department. My work here is mostly comprise of one-off data-integration tasks (like the one in this chronicle) and programming satellite utilities for our Citizen Relationship Management system.

    • Rakulang ☛ Day 6: Immutable data structures and reduction in Raku – Raku Advent Calendar

      For a little compiler I’ve been writing, I felt increasingly the need for immutable data structures to ensure that nothing was passed by references between passes. I love Perl and Raku but I am a functional programmer at heart, so I prefer map and reduce over loops. It bothered me to run reductions on a mutable data structure. So I made a small library to make it easier to work with immutable maps and lists.

    • Rakulang ☛ Raku Advent Calendar: Day 6: RedFactory

      Recently I had the experience of playing with Ruby and its tools. One of the tools I liked to learn about was factory_bot.

  • Python

    • Venture Beat ☛ PyTorch 2.0 release accelerates open-source machine learning | VentureBeat

      Among the most widely used machine learning (ML) technologies today is the open-source PyTorch framework.

    • PyTorch 2.0 | PyTorch

      Introducing PyTorch 2.0, our first steps toward the next generation 2-series release of PyTorch. Over the last few years we have innovated and iterated from PyTorch 1.0 to the most recent 1.13 and moved to the newly formed PyTorch Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation.

      PyTorch’s biggest strength beyond our amazing community is that we continue as a first-class Python integration, imperative style, simplicity of the API and options. PyTorch 2.0 offers the same eager-mode development and user experience, while fundamentally changing and supercharging how PyTorch operates at compiler level under the hood. We are able to provide faster performance and support for Dynamic Shapes and Distributed.

    • FOSSLife ☛ PyTorch 2.0 Announced

      PyTorch developers have announced version 2.0 of the popular open source machine learning framework, with a major new feature called torch.compile.

  • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

    • What is Shell in Linux?

      The shell is nothing more than a program that carries the user typed commands or instructions from the terminal and converts them into something that the kernel can understand.

      If you’re using popular operating systems like Ubuntu, Kali Linux, Fedora, or Manjaro, you’re already interacting with Shell, knowingly or unknowingly.

      But before deeply understanding the shell, you must understand the workings of the kernel.

    • What is Shebang (#! /bin/bash) in Linux Shell Script

      If you have been using Linux for a while, then you have definitely spotted this “#! /bin/bash” line at the beginning of an shell script.

Leftovers

• Hardware

  • The Next Platform ☛ Can Anyone Make Money From Modern Storage?

    In the past three decades, there has been no shortage of companies with interesting ideas to solve very specific data storage and retrieval problems associated with high performance computing in some form or another. Many of them raised tons of money, and most of them got eaten by platform incumbents such as Dell, IBM, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise who desperately need something new to sell every couple of years.

    What we have not seen, however, is one of these companies break away from the pack and do what EMC did with its Symmetrix RAID 5 disk arrays or Network Appliance did with its eponymous NFS network storage back in 1the 1990s. And that was to make a lot of money reasonably fast and then pull a fair amount of it down to the bottom line fueling further growth and acquisitions that kept them relevant.

  • CCIA ☛ Industry Players – Lawmakers Are Chipping in to Bolster America’s Semiconductor Supply – Disruptive Competition Project

    As 2022 wraps up, the impacts of the pandemic and supply chain issues are still being felt, but the outlook for the chip shortage looks better in the coming years.

    The pandemic slowed semiconductor production and contributed to the subsequent chip shortage. From consumer goods to auto-making, a lack of semiconductors has stymied production and held back innovation. However, legislative developments this year such as the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act (also known as the CHIPS Act) have begun to alleviate that shortage and pave the way for greater innovation and emerging technologies here in the U.S.

    In 1990, 80% of the world’s semiconductors were produced in the U.S. and Europe. Today, 80% are produced in Asia, where countries provide substantial incentives to domestic semiconductor industries. The CHIPS Act is one of the most significant competition and innovation policies in a generation. Investments made possible by the CHIPS Act will allow the U.S. to once again competitively pursue the production of semiconductors — decreasing our dependence on global supply chains during a time of geopolitical uncertainty.

    [...]

    With more companies turning towards semiconductor production here in the U.S. and abroad, there will likely be an uptick in lab-to-fab (research to the design and manufacture of semiconductor products) supply chains. There will also be support for innovation in the industry through partnerships similar to the U.S. National Science Foundation and Intel’s collaborative efforts to train and build a skilled semiconductor manufacturing workforce. To see continuing success, the U.S. semiconductor industry will need to better handle long-term investment in R&D as well as talent acquisition, training, and retention.

    This landmark investment in U.S. competitiveness in the semiconductor industry has sweeping benefits not only for the semiconductor industry, but also for the tech industry at large. Semiconductor production drives competition and innovation not only around the production of more chips but the many industries that chips support. From consumer goods to automaking, a lack of semiconductors has stymied production and held back innovation. A greater emphasis on supplying our own chips will support the creation of new technologies and foster a culture of innovation here at home.

• Proprietary

  • Kaspersky ☛ CryWiper: fake ransomware [Ed: Lesson of the story is, don't run Windows]

    Our experts have discovered an attack of a new Trojan, which they’ve dubbed CryWiper. At the first glance, this malware looks like ransomware: it modifies files, adds a .CRY extension to them (unique to CryWiper), and saves a README.txt file with a ransom note, which contains the bitcoin wallet address, the contact e-mail address of the malware creators, and the infection ID. However, in fact, this malware is a wiper: a file modified by CryWiper cannot be restored to its original state — ever. So if you see a ransom note and your files have a new .CRY extension, don’t hurry to pay the ransom: it’s pointless.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ CryWiper Data Wiper Targeting Russian Sites

    Kaspersky is reporting on a data wiper masquerading as ransomware that is targeting local Russian government networks.

  • Ars Technica ☛ Never-before-seen malware is nuking data in Russia’s courts and mayors’ offices [Ed: This shallow report fails to say that this is a Windows problem]

    CryWiper shares a separate commonality with ransomware families known as Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Xorist and Trojan-Ransom.MSIL.Agent. Specifically, the email address in the ransom note of all three is the same.

  • Bleeping Computer ☛ New CryWiper data wiper targets Russian courts, mayor’s offices [Ed: This Microsoft boosters’ site also fails to highlight the role of Windows here. If this was a “Linux”-affecting issue, the word “Linux” would be all over headlines and more (also, Jim Zemlin would join in the FUD, as usual)].]

    A previously undocumented data wiper named CryWiper is masquerading as ransomware, but in reality, destroys data beyond recovery in attacks against Russian mayor’s offices and courts.

    [...]

    CryWiper is a 64-bit Windows executable named ‘browserupdate.exe’ written in C++, configured to abuse many WinAPI function calls.

• Linux Foundation

  • Dark Reading ☛ OpenSSF Membership Exceeds 100, With Many New Members Dedicated to Securing Open Source Software

  • PR Newswire ☛ OpenSSF Membership Exceeds 100 with Many New Members Dedicated to Securing Open Source Software

• Security

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

    Security updates have been issued by Ubuntu (binutils and ca-certificates).

  • XSAs released on 2022-12-06 | Qubes OS

    The Xen Project has released one or more Xen security advisories (XSAs). The security of Qubes OS is not affected. Therefore, no user action is required.

  • Google ☛ Chrome Releases: Beta Channel Update for ChromeOS / ChromeOS Flex

    The Beta channel is being updated to 109.0.5414.29 (Platform version: 15236.27.0) for most ChromeOS devices. This build contains a number of bug fixes and security updates.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Ars Technica ☛ Meta needs explicit user consent to run personalized ads, EU watchdog rules

• Finance

  • Silcon Republic ☛ Intel staff in Ireland offered unpaid leave as cost-cutting commences

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ How do you solve the problem that is Twitter? • The Register

    It’s a toss-up between Elon Musk’s management misadventures and Twitter’s technical troubles as to which will cause the most damage.

    Twitter is in trouble. I mean, who blunders his way into a fight with Apple only to later claim it was all a misunderstanding? But, as idiotic as that is combined with alienating advertisers, Elon Musk’s wreaking havoc with Twitter’s technical staff may end up causing more damage in the long run.

    True, Twitter is still up and running, but some people have already seen smaller failures. For example, Twitter’s SMS-based Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) has already failed for some users.

    As a reminder, the Titanic didn’t sink immediately after hitting the iceberg. It took its own sweet time. And, many passengers still thought all would be well until their feet were awash in the frigid North Atlantic waters.

  • Joe Brockmeier ☛ Where does Mastodon fit with social media policies?: Dissociated Press

    Mastodon is an odd beast. This has been discussed a lot from the user’s point of view, but not so much from the organizational point of view. Specifically, should organizations provide users with branded/hosted instances, and what kind of policies apply for this new breed of social media?

    (Note: I’m going to use “Mastodon” here, but this really applies to any kind of federated social media over ActivityPub or similar where users are identified in the “@user@organization.tld” format.)

    Most people think of Mastodon as a Twitter replacement, but organizations don’t provide users with Twitter accounts. In fact, it’s not uncommon for people to state on their Twitter profile that their opinions are their own. Organizations do provide people with user@organization.tld accounts for email, but (generally) email isn’t “social media” and not meant to be posted publicly.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • DDNet Funded for 2022 – DDraceNetwork News

    Thanks to all donors donating a total of 3253 € and sponsoring servers DDNet is now fully funded until the end of 2022!

    I’m happy to announce we don’t take donations any more until next year! Thanks to everyone for donating money and time to make DDNet better!

• Monopolies

  • Software Patents

    • The Register UK ☛ Cisco wriggles out from $2 billion bill for ‘willful and egregious’ patent infringements

      Cisco has managed to avoid a $2-plus billion payment for patent infringement on a technicality that has nothing to do with the patents.

      The case has its roots in 2018 when an outfit named Centripetal Networks alleged Cisco had stolen tech Centripetal described to it under a non-disclosure agreement.

      Centripetal sued and won. US District Judge Henry Morgan described Cisco’s behavior as “willful and egregious” and slapped it with over $2 billion in fines and royalties.

      Then came a twist.

      During the conduct of the case the judge learned that his wife held $4,688 worth of shares in Cisco, a potential conflict of interest. The judge and his wife moved those shares into a blind trust. He then ruled for Centripetal and said most of his thinking in the case had been done well before he realised the shares could be a problem.

      That judgement was appealed, not because of any error in reasoning regarding payments but over the issue of whether hanging onto the shares represented a “harmless error” that could be excused, or a conflict of interest that could not be ignored.

    • ZDNet ☛ Amazon joins Open Invention Network [Ed: Software patents conglomerate promoted by SJVN. Amazon should work to abolish software patents. “Joining” OIN is almost the opposite of that; it is cementing or endorsing such patents. SJVN should promote Linux rather than the agenda of Linux Foundation, which is predominantly controlled by Linux- and GPL-hostile companies. But SJVN’s employer is funded by the latter interests.]

      Patent trolls are the bane of companies large and small. So, it should come as no surprise that Amazon and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) — the world’s largest patent non-aggression consortium.

  • Copyrights

    • Walled Culture ☛ A database of public domain works could reduce upload filter overblocking; it’s absurd we need one – Walled Culture

      One of many problems with the upload filters that Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive will bring in is that they are likely to overblock. That is, they will stop perfectly lawful materials from being uploaded because of flaws in the filters’ algorithms. Among those blocked lawful materials will certainly be public domain items.

      The public domain is often merely defined as where copyright materials end up after copyright has expired, or where a creator expressly chooses to place a work without copyright (as with Walled Culture the book). That definition of “not in copyright” is hardly something that can be used reliably in upload filters.

    • Public Domain Review ☛ *Mighty Mikko: A Book of Finnish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales* (1922) – The Public Domain Review

      Mighty Mikko contains twelve stories loosely based on Finnish tales, illustrated with vibrant block prints by Jay Van Everen.

      With the assistance of his Finnish speaking friend Lydia Tulonen, Parker Hoysted Fillmore (1878–1944) wandered “through the byways of Finnish folklore”, glossing his volume Mighty Mikko as “the traveler’s pack I have brought back home with me filled with strange treasures”. Rather than translating the folklore in a manner faithful to their original language, which, he thought, could sound “stiff, bald, and monotonous” to English ears, Fillmore retells these stories in his own idiom. Like Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, who would author his “Morphology of the Folktale” six years after Mighty Mikko appeared, Fillmore recognized that these tales shared a deep structure with stories told the world over. They are nevertheless “dramatic and picturesque”, colored “with a wealth of charming detail which is essentially Finnish”. Yet unlike, for example, the European literary cycle of Reynard the Fox, where beasts are substitutes for political and legal figures, Fillmore believes that his creatures are “plain downright Finnish peasants, sometimes stupid, often dull, frequently amusing, and always very human”.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • Returning to Reading

    I read many technical documents, from man pages to textbooks to reference works, but in the last several years I’ve read precious little fiction. I bought an e-reader at the start of 2022 partially to change this. However, for the first several months, I only used it to reread a few childhood favorites, then I largely stopped using it. My wife, on the other hand, is an avid reader: almost every tie we stop at a book store together, she leaves with at least one new title.

    Around April my wife and I stopped at a used book store as usual. I used to read quite a few Star Wars books in what is now knows as the “Legends” canon, so I decided to peruse the fantasy and sci-fi section of the store. I picked up a copy of the Thrawn trilogy, some books from the New Jedi Order, and one book unrelated to Star Wars at all: a fantasy novel called The Stone and the Maiden, written by Dennis Jones.

  • “Being In Nothingness: Virtual Reality and the Pioneers of Cyberspace” by John Perry Barlow

    This is my second post on the blog, still testing things and always polishing them. In other website news, I’m troubleshooting issues with how the site displays on different devices and resolutions. Things seem to break enough now, so if you’re one of the five people at most using this website, feel free to leave me a comment about it in Site Chat.

  • The smell of paper

    I haven’t seen that topic earlier in the Geminispace, despite it’s connected with an overall retro and nostalgic theme, which I think is near the Gemini origins. Probably many of us prefer to read paper magazines or newspapers rather than their electronic versions. There is some kind of magic, which is connected with the smell of paper. Not that real one, although sometimes the smell of printing ink is a catalyst for memories, but that feeling that we can read the real paper thing held in our hands.

• Technical

  • OpenBSD for Gaming?!?!

    Is OpenBSD an option for gamers? How do I squeeze out the last bit of performance? I have noticed questions in that vein coming up, maybe more than there used to be since gaming of OpenBSD has become a little more visible. Let’s examine the current state.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Mastodon

      A short note regarding Mastodon. I know everyone and their cousin has already weighed in with their opinion on the recent matters of Mastodon and Twitter and all this Musquerade, so why not add my own perspective to the pile?

      I’ve been a Twitter user for a year or two I think, several years ago. Then I got fed up and removed it. Of course, I’ve been interested in Mastodon, so I registered an account this March just so I had one, wanted to look what it’s like.

    • A side entrance from the big web

      Not from the front door. Nor the one that’s in the back, if you go through the kitchen past the sink. This door opened up from a completely nondescript section of the wall. You’d hardly know there was door here, if I hadn’t opened it.

      I verify that this is the Midnight Pub I know. I see the familiar face of ~bartender, and Smudge is curled up on an armchair. No, this is definitely the Midnight.

    • Hello world!

      Hi gemspace, this is my first log post, kind of as a test. It will remain to be seen how often I update this, but I think everything should work fine, and I’ve created a second log for when I want to write one in toki pona. Hopefully it motivates me to practice?

      I’ve been eyeballing Gemini for a while now and originally wanted to host my own server on a raspberry pi, but it hasn’t panned out that way yet because I’m dirt poor… but in a fit of maybe mania (maybnia?) I committed myself to a KVM VPS for like $8/mo maybe a month ago. I got it so I could run my own Pleroma instance and, incidentally, my own personal site. It’s definitely been a learning curve since I’m ~passively techy~ but have never done any kind of server admin before. But everything’s been running pretty smoothly for a while now, and I’ve been spending my spare time (re: unemployment; all of the time) working away at learning PHP and stuff so that I can use my personal site to host all my own art with minimal effort and in a user-friendly way.