Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 4/10/2019: DRM in Weston and International Day Against DRM (IDAD) 2019 Coming



  • GNU/Linux

    • Server

      • Highly Automated and Secured Multi-Tenancy Using SUSE CaaS Platform 4

        I notice that when it comes to using a XaaS solution, clients and solution architects are typically concerned about multi-tenancy. This post attempts to decipher why that is and how SUSE CaaS Platform helps make this a reality.

      • IBM

        • Red Hat CEO talks the next chapter of the cloud
        • Microservices, and the Observability Macroheadache

          Moving to a microservice architecture, deployed on a cloud platform such as OpenShift, can have significant benefits. However, it does make understanding how your business requests are being executed, across the potentially large numbers of microservices, more challenging.

          If we wish to locate where problems may have occurred in the execution of a business request, whether due to performance issues or errors, we are potentially faced with accessing metrics and logs associated with many services that may have been involved. Metrics can provide a general indication of where problems have occurred, but not specific to individual requests. Logs may provide errors or warnings, but cannot necessarily be correlated to the individual requests of interest.

          Distributed tracing is a technique that has become indispensable in helping users understand how their business transactions execute across a set of collaborating services. A trace instance documents the flow of a business transaction, including interactions between services, internal work units, relevant metadata, latency details and contextualized logging. This information can be used to perform root cause analysis to locate the problem quickly.

        • 5 AI fears and how to address them

          Most people don’t know what microservices architecture is, for example, even if some of the apps they use every day were built in decoupled fashion. But technical evolutions like microservices don’t tend to cause the kinds of emotional responses that AI does around potential social and economic impacts. Nor have microservices haven’t been immortalized in popular culture: No one is lining up at the box office for "Terminator: Rise of the Cloud-Native Apps."

          This speaks mainly to fears about AI’s nebulous future, and it can be tough to evaluate their validity when our imaginations run wild. That’s not particularly useful for IT leaders and other execs trying to build a practical AI strategy today. Yet you will encounter fears – many of them well-founded. The trick is to focus on these real-world concerns, not the time-traveling robot assassins. For starters, they’re much easier to defeat – er, address – because they’re often based in current reality, not futuristic speculation.

          “The types of fears [people have about AI] depend on the type of AI that we are talking about,” says Keiland Cooper, a neuroscience research associate at the University of California Irvine and co-director of ContinualAI. “The more theoretical and far off ‘general AI’ – a computer that can do all the things that humans can do – will raise more fears than those from a more realistic AI algorithm like we see being commonly used today.”

          Let’s look at five legitimate concerns about AI today – and expert advice for addressing them so that they don’t derail your AI plans.

        • CentOS 8 "Gnome Desktop" overview | The community enterprise operating system

          In this video, I am going to show an overview of CentOS 8.0.1905 "Gnome" and some of the applications pre-installed.

        • How deep does the vDPA rabbit hole go?

          In this post we will be leading you through the different building blocks used for implementing the virtio full HW offloading and the vDPA solutions. This effort is still in progress, thus some bits may change in the future, however the governing building blocks are expected to stay the same.

          We will be discussing the VFIO, vfio-pci and vhost-vfio all intended on accessing drivers from the userspace both in the guest and the host. We will also be discussing MDEV, vfio-mdev, vhost-mdev and virtio-mdev transport API constructing the vDPA solutions.

          The post is a technical deep dive and is intended for architects, developers and those who are passionate about understanding how all the pieces fall into place. If you are more interested in understanding the big picture of vDPA, the previous post "Achieving network wirespeed in an open standard manner - introducing vDPA" is strongly recommended instead (we did warn you).

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • 10/03/2019 | Linux Headlines

        PostgreSQL 12 is here with performance gains and more, Google plans to phase out mixed security content in Chrome, and a new funding source for The Document Foundation.

      • The Coffee Shop Problem | TechSNAP 413

        We peer into the future with a quick look at quantum supremacy, debate the latest DNS over HTTPS drama, and jump through the hoops of HTTP/3.

        Plus when to use WARP, the secrets of Startpage, and the latest Ryzen release.

      • LHS Episode #306: The Weekender XXXV

        It's time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.

      • Command Line Heroes season 3, episode 8: The C Change

        C and UNIX are at the root of modern computing. Many of the languages we've covered this season are related to or at least influenced by C. But UNIX and C only happened because a few developers at Bell Labs created both as a skunkworks project.

      • Reality 2.0 – Destroy This Podcast

        Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls, and Petros Koutoupis talk about ownership, freedom, and convenience in the digital world.

    • Kernel Space

      • This Newly Proposed Linux Memory Controller To Save Up To 42% RAM

        Roman Gushchin, who is part of Facebook’s Linux kernel engineering team, has discovered a “serious flaw” in the way that the current slab memory controller in Linux kernel works. He says (Via The New Stack)that existing kernel design causes low slab utilization and the reason behind it is that the slab pages are used only by one memory cgroup (Control group).

        For those who are unaware, Slab allocation in case of Linux kernel refers to a memory management system that allocates memory to different kernel objects. Slab allocation is an efficient memory management system that has the primary job of building slab caches. A slab cache is a linked list of slabs with each slab representing an array of objects. Furthermore, cgroup or control group is a Linux kernel feature that organizes processes into a hierarchical manner.

      • Systemd Starts Tapping ChromeOS For USB Devices That Support Auto-Suspend Well

        Systemd has begun harvesting the automatic suspend rules from ChromeOS for determining which USB devices support automatic suspend well out-of-the-box on Linux.

        Thanks to Google's extensive testing infrastructure and validation of devices around ChromeOS, systemd is now using rules setup by ChromeOS for also marking those same USB device IDs as fine for enabling automatic suspend under Linux. Adapting the auto-suspend rules list from ChromeOS to systemd was done by Dell's Mario Limonciello and should mean more USB devices seeing auto-suspend power savings by default.

      • Plumbers and CKI hackfest highlights

        Laura Abbott led the distribution kernel microconference. The main goal was to discuss common problems arising from maintaining a non-mainline kernel, whether it comes to keeping in sync with bugfixes, packaging or testing. A lot of the topics circled around leveraging the similar work everyone is doing and figuring out common tooling and some discussions even lead to the distribution testing BoF.

        One of the great ideas mentioned was configuration fragments in the mainline – if you want to enable a feature you have to find out what the specific set of config options to enable is. Having the options condensed based on the features in the mainline kernel itself would make this enabling/disabling simpler and cleaner for everyone (users wanting to compile their own kernels, CIs, distribution maintainers…). The initial action plan is to send various feature fragments to the automated testing mailing list to compare and discuss specifics before pushing them upstream.

        Another action item directly related to the previous one was to update upstream configuration file merging. Each distribution has its own implementation, usually in a form of legacy perl script everyone is afraid to touch but depends on heavily. Using the upstream version (once it provides the functionality distributions need) instead of maintaining scripts on top of kernel would both simplify the work of maintainers and provide an easier way to build their own kernels to users.

        The arguably most important was the testing discussion. Distributions usually carry some patches on top of the mainline or stable releases they follow but these differences are small enough that comparing test results can help with pinpointing bugs in the base. This is however easier said than done as figuring out which tests to run is hard. The suites are not linked from the actual kernel sources, tests may be failing because of kernel or test bugs, you want a stable test release but also tests for new kernel features…

      • Kernel Recipes 2019, part 2

        This conference only has a single track, so I attended almost all the talks. This time I didn't take notes but I've summarised all the talks I attended. This is the second and last part of that; see part 1 if you missed it.

      • Linux Foundation

        • CNCF’s Envoy report card shows Google, Lyft are top of contributing class

          The CNCF has delivered a report card on Envoy, the open source edge and service proxy which is usually mentioned alongside the words Kubernetes or service mesh.

          The report comes a year after Envoy graduated from the CNCF incubation process, and the headline scores are 1,700 contributors, who have made 10,300 code commits, 5,700 pull requests and 51,000 contributions overall.

          Envoy was initially developed in 2016 at Lyft, the ridesharing giant which isn’t Uber, and this is reflected in the CNCF report. Lyft still accounts for 30.4 of the Envoy code, though Google is the biggest contributor overall, with 42.8 per cent of the code.

      • Graphics Stack

        • Intel Has Been Quietly Developing A New Backend Compiler For Their OpenGL/Vulkan Drivers

          One of the interesting reveals so far from this week's X.Org Developers' Conference in Montreal is that Intel has been developing a new back-end compiler for their OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers based upon their experiences so far with their NIR support and the lessons learned over the past number of years.

          While Valve has been developing ACO as a new Radeon compiler back-end, Intel developers have been creating "IBC" as the new "Intel Backend Compiler" for their Iris OpenGL and ANV Vulkan driver components living within Mesa.

        • The Matrix Of Software Projects Mapping Khronos APIs From DXVK To Zink & CLVK

          Neil Trevett, the president of the Khronos Group, presented at the X.Org Developers' Conference for the first time. During his presentation on Wednesday he covered their usual initiatives, how Khronos engages in open-source and open standards, and related bits -- plus a few interesting ones.

          For the most part the presentation isn't really dramatic for any veteran developer or anyone reading Phoronix for enough years. Though he did re-affirm the commitment that "open-source is vital to build ecosystems around open API standards" -- yes, many of you will find that ironic with Trevett being employed by NVIDIA. On the Khronos front, they have continued engaging and pushing forward their conformance test suites (CTS) as open-source and that's been one of the exciting developments of recent years and ensuring better quality drivers.

        • Why HDCP support in Weston is a good thing

          First I'll reiterate what HDCP is and why supporting it cannot take away any freedoms. Then I'll give some background on Weston's ideology and justify supporting HDCP in Weston with both economical and technical arguments. While I do work for Collabora, these are my personal opinions.

          [...]

          I was not participating in the project yet when the license was chosen, but I agree with it. I, with my upstream Weston maintainer hat on, want Weston to be used by companies, including in their shipping products. MIT license makes that very easy for the companies. GNU GPL or LGPL could make it hard, especially GPL v3+ which many companies just steer very clear of. This is the reality outside of our control, however sad you might think it is. Forced with a trade-off not unique to the Weston project, it chose to favour adoption over strong copyleft, as did other open source projects before, Xorg and Mesa for example.

          When Weston is used in shipping products, it is much more likely that companies will provide resources to improve Weston also in upstream. Even if companies did not directly do that, they might hire others like Collabora to work on Weston, and then Collabora can redirect some of that revenue back to Weston upstream development. That will likely benefit also other users of Weston, even the private home users and hobbyists. It is all the same reasons why hardware drivers should go into the Linux kernel upstream, just in much smaller scale.

    • Benchmarks

      • Blender 2.80 & LuxCoreRender Performance With NVIDIA RTX SUPER Comparison

        Complementing the 18-way NVIDIA GPU compute comparison from earlier this week with now having our hands on the RTX 2060/2070/2080 SUPER graphics cards, this round of NVIDIA Linux testing is looking at the Blender 2.80 and LuxCoreRender 2.1/2.2 performance for these popular rendering programs that offer CUDA acceleration.

        In looking at the Blender and LuxCoreRender performance, the following graphics cards were freshly re-tested on Linux...

    • Applications

      • Excellent Utilities: Ananicy – auto nice daemon

        This is a new series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We’ll be covering a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides. There’s a complete list of the tools in this series in the Summary section.

        It’s possible to grant more importance to a process, giving it more time on the CPU. This property of a process is called niceness. A process with high priority is said to be less nice because it’s taking more of the CPU’s time, which leaves less for everything else. Alternatively, a process with low priority (a “nice” process) gets processor time only after other processes with higher priority have been serviced.

        Prioritize applications’ CPU and IO scheduling is a good way to improve performance on what really matters. This can be actioned per command with nice and ionice commands, but there’s a better way. Ananicy is a shell daemon created to manage processes’ IO and CPU priorities, with community-driven set of rules for popular applications.

      • New in calibre 4.0
      • Calibre Open-Source eBook Management App Gets Major Release After Two Years

        Believe it or not, it's been two years since the Calibre 3.0 series was introduced, and now, the time has come for fans of the best free ebook management software to get a brand-new release that introduces new technologies and new features, along with dozens of improvements.

        "It has been two years since Calibre 3.0. This time has been spent mostly in making the calibre Content server ever more capable as well as migrating calibre itself from Qt WebKit to Qt WebEngine, because the former is no longer maintained," said developer Kovid Goyal.

      • App Outlet is a ‘Universal Linux App Store’ for Your Desktop

        Seek a Snap? You check the Snapcraft.io/store; prefer Flatpak? You forage on Flathub; angling for an AppImage? You, er, hope you come across one in the /releases page on Github?

        It’s a rub many in the free software community have tried to solve (it’s also something of a paradox). I wrote about one such effort, the Linux app store website, back in May.

        Although well received (and open source) the project vanished soon after, and the “Linux App Store” website is no longer online.

        But the notion behind aggregating apps from different stores in different formats within one, single UI hasn’t gone away.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • Total War: WARHAMMER II - The Hunter & the Beast DLC Released for Linux and Mac

        Developed by Creative Assembly and published by SEGA, the Total War: WARHAMMER II was ported by Feral Interactive to the Linux and macOS platforms on November 20th, 2018. The game launched with the Mortal Empires DLC, as well as other free or paid DLCs that where released since the initial launch of the game back in October 2017.

        The Hunter & the Beast is the latest Downloadable Content (DLC) for Total War: WARHAMMER II, bringing many new additions like two new Legendary Lords: Markus Wulfhart, who leads the Huntsmarshal’s Expedition (Empire), and Nakai The Wanderer, who leads the Spirit of the Jungle (Lizardmen). Both the new Legendary Lords come with their own faction mechanics, legendary items, quest-chains, campaign narrative, and skill-trees for the Vortex Campaign.

      • Keep an eye on 'Veloren', an open source multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust

        Move over Cube World, there's a new open source voxel RPG in town under development called Veloren and it supports Linux too so there's a bonus point for you.

        Inspired by many games like Cube World, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft it's currently under heavy development, thanks to user email tips I've been keeping a close eye on this one. I don't want to get your hopes up too high but it's already coming along well and shows a ridiculous amount of promise. I could see myself playing this for sure.

      • Lose your soul in the creepy adventure game Demons Never Lie, now with a Linux demo

        Releasing sometime around Halloween this year, the quite creepy adventure game Demons Never Lie now has a Linux demo available to try out on Steam.

      • Second Earth, the currently free base building strategy game from Free Lives had a huge upgrade

        Somewhat inspired by the satire of Starship Troopers, Second Earth is the current free prototype base building strategy game from Free Lives (developer of Broforce).

        It's a mixture of a real-time strategy game about building up a strong economy, with a tower defence like wrapping. Each map requires you to build up a strong base and then defeat waves of alien bugs. Build walls to keep you civilians safe, build weapon towers to squish all the bugs and service guarantees citizenship.

      • Logitech Gaming Keyboards Getting A New Driver With Linux 5.5

        The Logitech G15 keyboards and related gaming keyboards from the company are seeing a new open-source driver queued ahead of the Linux 5.5 kernel cycle.

        Red Hat's Hans de Goede who has made prolific contributions to the Linux desktop support over the past decade to numerous different areas has been focusing some time recently on this new Logitech gaming keyboard driver.

      • Top 20 Most Popular Android Games To Play Before You Die

        You may find thousands of Android games on the Google Play Store. But don’t you think that it is quite difficult to find out the real gems? Yes, it seems to be very difficult. Furthermore, it is too embarrassing to find a game boring just after you have downloaded it. This is why I have decided to compile the most popular Android games. I think it may come as a great help to you if you are really willing to enjoy your leisure by playing Android games.

      • HopFrog is removing Linux support from Forager and MacOS is not coming now either

        How about a kick in the teeth with your coffee this Friday morning? Well, that's what I've got for you. Developer HopFrog has announced they will be removing Linux support for Forager and Mac is no longer coming. Forager only released in April this year too.

      • Mountain biking game Lonely Mountains: Downhill to release on October 23rd

        Megagon Industries and Thunderful Publishing have announced their rather thrilling looking mountain biking game Lonely Mountains: Downhill is releasing this month on October 23rd.

      • The handy Steering Wheel Manager 'Oversteer' has a new release out

        For those of you with a Steering Wheel and play plenty of racing games on Linux, Oversteer is one of those essential and very handy tools.

        The developer continues to update it, with a fresh release now available. The first new addition in this release is the ability to adjust auto centring strength, which makes your Wheel want to constantly go back to the centre. The developer said they added it as games without force feedback can be "more pleasant to play" with it. Testing it myself, it does work nicely and it's a really sweet option to have.

      • Train Valley 2 - Passenger Flow brings the mechanics from the original into the sequel

        If you preferred the gameplay mechanics of the original Train Valley, you should take a look at the Train Valley 2 - Passenger Flow DLC that's out now.

        In the original game, you simply had to get passengers of a certain colour code into the correct station. Train Valley 2 changed all that into a more puzzle micro-management feel with different resources and a production chain. The first DLC for Train Valley 2, Passenger Flow, is out now and brings back the original mechanic into the updated game along with new levels and locomotives for you to play around with.

      • In the multiplayer action game Foreskin Fury you get to hop around as a big wobbly penis

        Well that's a title I didn't think I would be writing. It's a real thing though, Foreskin Fury is due to enter Early Access on Steam sometime this "Fall".

      • Use GameHub to Manage All Your Linux Games in One Place

        How do you play games on Linux? Let me guess. Either you install games from the software center or from Steam or from GOG or Humble Bundle etc, right? But, how do you plan to manage all your games from multiple launchers and clients? Well, that sounds like a hassle to me – which is why I was delighted when I come across GameHub.

        GameHub is a desktop application for Linux distributions that lets you manage “All your games in one place”. That sounds interesting, isn’t it? Let me share more details about it.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Distributions

      • Screenshots/Screencasts

      • Fedora Family

        • Flatpak 1.5 Linux App Sandboxing Rolls Out with New Features, Many Improvements

          Highlights of the Flatpak 1.5 release include new "--or-update" option for the "flatpak install" command to perform an update operation if the application is already installed, as well as a new "flatpak mask" command that allows pinning of app versions and avoids automatic downloads.

          Flatpak 1.5 also introduces support for self-updates and the ability to monitor updates for apps from the Flatpak portal, support for images tagged with labels and annotations, and support for Docker mimetypes.

        • In Fedora 31, 32-bit i686 is 86ed

          The release of Fedora 31 drops the 32-bit i686 kernel, and as a result bootable images. While there may be users out there who still have hardware which will not work with the 64-bit x86_64 kernel, there are very few. However, this article gives you the whole story behind the change, and what 32-bit material you’ll still find in Fedora 31.

          The i686 architecture essentially entered community support with the Fedora 27 release. Unfortunately, there are not enough members of the community willing to do the work to maintain the architecture. Don’t worry, though — Fedora is not dropping all 32-bit packages. Many i686 packages are still being built to ensure things like multilib, wine, and Steam will continue to work.

          While the repositories are no longer being composed and mirrored out, there is a koji i686 repository which works with mock for building 32-bit packages, and in a pinch to install 32-bit versions which are not part of the x86_64 multilib repository. Of course, maintainers expect this will see limited use. Users who simply need to run a 32-bit application should be able to do so with multilib on a 64-bit system.

        • October 2019: Fedora status updates

          Welcome to the monthly set of updates on key areas within Fedora. This update includes Fedora Council representatives, Fedora Editions, and Fedora Objectives. The content here is based on the weekly updates submitted to the Fedora Council, published to the project dashboard.

          [...]

          In the past month, the Minimization team brought the “feedback pipeline” to life. Feedback Pipeline gives a quick overview of the use cases we’re targeting to minimize. It shows required packages, their dependencies, the overall size, and allows a deeper inspection with interactive dependency graphs. As part of that work, the team is working on identifying use cases to target.

          The Council approved the Minimization objective on a short-term basis. Adam Å amalík will be submitting a proposal for the next phase of this objective to the Council soon.

        • Fedora Update Weeks 35–38

          It’s been quite some time since the last update, but things have been rather calm. There’s been the usual round of updated packages, and a few new dependencies. Otherwise, there’s not been anything out of the ordinary.

        • Fedora 32 Planning To Ship With GNU Binutils 2.33

          Not particularly surprising considering Fedora tends to always ship with a bleeding-edge toolchain, but for their Fedora 32 release to kick off 2020 they are planning for GNU Binutils 2.33.

          Binutils 2.33 hasn't been released yet but is branched and will be released with plenty of time to make it into Fedora 32, which isn't due until the end of April.

        • gcc under the hood

          My background in computers is a bit hacky for a compiler engineer. I never had the theoretical computer science base that the average compiler geek does (yes I have a Masters in Computer Applications, but it’s from India and yes I’m going to leave that hanging without explanation) and I have pretty much winged it all these years. What follows is a bunch of thoughts (high five to those who get that reference!) from my winging it for almost a decade with the GNU toolchain. If you’re a visual learner then I would recommend watching my talk video at Linaro Connect 2019 instead of reading this. This is an imprecise transcript of my talk, with less silly quips and in a more neutral accent.

        • Fedora 30 : A general intro to linux signals with python.
      • Debian Family

        • Molly de Blanc: Free software activities (September 2019)

          September marked the end of summer and the end of my summer travel. Paid and non-paid activities focused on catching up with things I fell behind on while traveling. Towards the middle of September, the world of FOSS blew up, and then blew up again, and then blew up again.

        • Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in September 2019

          This month I accepted 246 packages and rejected 28. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 303.

        • Joey Hess: Project 62 Valencia Floor Lamp review

          From Target, this brass finish floor lamp evokes 60's modernism, updated for the mid-Anthropocene with a touch plate switch.

          The integrated microcontroller consumes a mere 2.2 watts while the lamp is turned off, in order to allow you to turn the lamp on with a stylish flick. With a 5 watt LED bulb (sold separately), the lamp will total a mere 7.2 watts while on, making it extremely energy efficient. While off, the lamp consumes a mere 19 kilowatt-hours per year.

        • SolydXK Delivers Rock Solid Linux Performance

          SolydXK is a well-designed and well-managed Linux distro. You can not go wrong with SolydXK. It provides a state-of-the-art Linux platform.

          I particularly like its emphasis on no-nonsense computing without bogging down users in mundane setup and tinkering. I constantly look for Linux distros that do not try to reinvent the wheel. SolydXK will not discourage newcomers and will not turn off seasoned Linux users.

          This distro takes something old and makes it new again. It is a very workable combination.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

        • Ubuntu 19.10 is Out in Two Weeks, But Will You Upgrade? [Poll]

          As a short-term release hopper I (naturally) plan to upgrade to Ubuntu 19.10 as soon as it arrives — but what about you: do you plan to upgrade?

          You can check out our overview of the Ubuntu 19.10 release for a more detailed look at what’s new and improved in the upcoming release. Goodies on offer include GNOME 3.34, an experimental ZFS install option, and the “will-it-won’t-it” Yaru light theme.

          But call me nosey — or call me predictable as, hey: I ask this question every release — but I want to know what your upgrade plans are once the Eoan Ermine is egregiously evident for everyone to experience.

        • The smart dump plugin

          A typical use case where the dump plugin brings value is for developers who already have created and packaged code in the past. For instance, if you have already built your application as a Debian package, you may be dismayed by the notion of having to start all over again when building snaps. But this does not have to be so.

          You can specify existing files available for different distributions as the source in the plugin declaration in the snapcraft.yaml file, and the contents will be automatically unpacked for the particular part. You may want to do this if you require a particular library that is not available in the distribution repository archives, or you need an old library that is no longer supported – a practical requirement for legacy applications.

          Moreover, you may have a standalone application that bundles all its dependencies inside a single archive, and you just want to see whether it will work when packaged as a snap. Here, the dump plugin can be quite useful, as it lets you create and test a snap within minutes. It’s not only Debian packages, though. The dump plugin works with a range of sources, including rpms as well as zip and tar archives!

          [...]

          The dump plugin may look like a simple helper tool, but it gives developers quite a bit of flexibility in how they package and test their software. If you already have compiled code, you can use it for quick & dirty tests, to assess compatibility, to retrieve libraries and legacy components that are not available in standard software channels, or even build custom applications that may contain data samples, tutorials or similar.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • Quantum computing, the open source way

        The quantum vision of reality is both strange and mesmerizing at the same time. As theoretical physicist Michio Kaku once said, "Common sense has no place in quantum mechanics."

        Knowing this is a new and uncommon place, we can expect quantum innovations to surpass anything we have seen before. The theory behind it will enable as-yet-unseen capabilities, but there are also some hurdles that are slowing it from being unleashed into the real world.

        By using the concepts of entanglement and superposition on quantum bits, a quantum computer can solve some problems faster than a classical computer. For example, quantum computers are useful for solving NP-hard problems, such as the Boolean satisfiability problem, known as the SAT problem. Using Grover's algorithm, the complexity of the evaluation of a boolean proposition of $n$ variables goes down from $O(n2^{n})$ to $O(n2^{n/2})$ by applying its quantum version.

      • What's in an open source name?

        GNOME, Java, Jupyter, Python. If your friends or family members have ever eavesdropped on your work conversations, they might think you've made a career in Renaissance folklore, coffee roasting, astronomy, or zoology. Where did the names of these open source technologies come from? We asked our writer community for input and rounded up some of our favorite tech name origin stories.

        There are many more projects and names that we have not included in this list. Be sure to share your favorites in the comments.

      • Why GatsbyJS' corporate success is really about the individual developer experience

        It turns out lots (and lots) of developers love GatsbyJS. It also turns out that the reasons for that love are somewhat consistent: GatsbyJS, a React-based static site generator, comes with fantastic documentation, high performance, a lovely developer experience, and a robust community. There's one other thing that GatsbyJS has going for it that sometimes gets lost in the modern era of open sourcing everything: It's useful to the solo developer building a personal website in her spare time. This personal convenience, it turns out, can pave the way for corporate adoption.

        [...]

        In a phone interview with Marc Ammann, founder of design agency Matter Supply, offered additional insight. While the company, whose clients include Nike, Impossible Burger, and others, tends to build with a compact suite of tools, Ammann suggested that an employee discovered GatsbyJS in his personal time and recommended it for the work with Impossible Burger. Over the course of that engagement Ammann praised GatsbyJS for many of the same reasons listed above, but gave one more: When they had to migrate Impossible from GatsbyJS 1.0 to 2.0, instead of the two months allotted it took two weeks. That sort of deployment surprise rarely happens with tech.

      • Questions on the future of Open Source

        For a lot of these products even to this day, the only way the developers ever got compensated for their innovative work was through the salaries and equity they got from their employers, and the name recognition that made them more desirable to be hired. But a few of the major projects (Kafka and the Hadoop ecosystem being easy examples) decided to go the venture capital route, creating startups (and eventually public companies) built around these technologies. Ideally, this allows the products to be developed more reliably, funds an ecosystem of experts, consultants, trainers who can teach other developers how to effectively use and run these projects, and most importantly provides major rewards for the creators of the projects that are tied to the success of the project itself in a core way, and not just the success of the business that, as a side effect, produced the project.

        Along comes the cloud. Now, fewer and fewer people are actually taking this open source software and running it themselves. Sure, the cloud providers employ a lot of engineers, but overall they shrink the demand for widespread knowledge about the operational details of these projects. Furthermore, they capture the lion's share of the value that otherwise might have gone to the creators of the project if they were able to successfully spin the project into a company.

        As the article linked above says, the cloud providers are incentivized to hire the people who created these successful projects in the first place, or the major contributors. And they do pay well, perhaps on average a better outcome for many contributors to these projects than any startup-driven outcome might be. Economically, this might be overall good for our open source creators.

      • Web Browsers

      • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

        • Allow-overlap shape property in Writer

          Writer now has a new "allow overlap" shape property for anchored objects, which can ensure that objects with overlapping positioning properties don’t actually overlap.

      • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

      • BSD

        • Milky Way v0.3 release

          Added
          LibreSSL as the default provider of SSL and TLS protocols
          Xenocara as the default provider of display server for the X Window System

        • sysupgrade(8) Added to OpenBSD 6.5

          In a move bound to be greeted with great enthusiasm, the newly-released Patch 012 for OpenBSD 6.5 adds sysupgrade(8) to the system.

      • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

        • 9 essential GNU binutils tools

          Imagine not having access to a software's source code but still being able to understand how the software is implemented, find vulnerabilities in it, and—better yet—fix the bugs. All of this in binary form. It sounds like having superpowers, doesn't it?

          You, too, can possess such superpowers, and the GNU binary utilities (binutils) are a good starting point. The GNU binutils are a collection of binary tools that are installed by default on all Linux distributions.

          Binary analysis is the most underestimated skill in the computer industry. It is mostly utilized by malware analysts, reverse engineers, and people working on low-level software.

        • Sign-making party at the FSF office to prepare for IDAD 2019!

          The International Day against DRM(IDAD), organized yearly by the Defective by Design campaign, is promising to be an exciting day of protest against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). This year we are standing up for readers' rights against the restrictive behavior of DRM-encumbered textbooks and digital learning environments from groups like Pearson, and our protestors will collect at the Pearson Education offices in Boston on October 12th, 2019.

          The day's success is dependent on the amount of people showing up, and, of course, on the visuals that we provide to supplement our message. And so, we're inviting you to our sign-making party at 17:30 on October 9th, at the Free Software Foundation (FSF) office in downtown Boston! We will provide a light dinner, art materials, and instructions to make your own protest signs, so all you have to do is join in the fun!

        • International Day Against DRM (IDAD) 2019

          Defective by Design is calling on you to stand up against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) on the International Day Against DRM (IDAD) on October 12th, 2019. This year we will be focusing specifically on everyone's right to read, particularly by urging publishers to free students and educators from the unnecessary and cumbersome restrictions that make their access to necessary course materials far more difficult.

          For thirteen years, we have used IDAD to mobilize actions that stand up for the freedom of users everywhere. This year, we'll be continuing the fight by bringing in a round of in-person actions, guest bloggers, organizing tips, and a few surprises that you won't want to miss. Follow along with us at the Defective by Design Web site, join the DRM Elimination Crew mailing list, and read about our past actions, such as last year's IDAD, and our protest of the W3C's decision to embed DRM into the core framework of the Internet.

        • Join us in Boston to fight DRM and get crafty! October 9 & 12

          The International Day against DRM (IDAD), organized yearly by the Defective by Design campaign, is promising to be an exciting day of protest against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). This year we are standing up for readers' rights against the restrictive behavior of DRM-encumbered textbooks and digital learning environments from groups like Pearson, and our protestors will collect at the Pearson Education offices in Boston on October 12th, 2019.

          The day's success is dependent on the amount of people showing up, and, of course, on the visuals that we provide to supplement our message. And so, we're inviting you to our sign-making party at 17:30 on October 9th, at the Free Software Foundation (FSF) office in downtown Boston! We will provide a light dinner, art materials, and instructions to make your own protest signs, so all you have to do is join in the fun!

      • Licensing/Legal

        • Oracle demands $12K from network biz that doesn't use its software

          Merula Limited, a UK-based network service provider, recently received a bill from Oracle for $12,200 for using the company's proprietary VirtualBox Extension Pack, which provides extra capabilities for the free GPL-licensed VirtualBox hypervisor.

          For Richard Palmer, director of the company, this was a perplexing demand. As he explained to The Register, "Merula does not operate or manage any computer using VirtualBox or any Oracle software."

          Oracle provided the company with a range of IP addresses, more than 100, that it claimed had been using its proprietary VirtualBox Extension Pack in conjunction with VirtualBox installations.

          It's claimed that Oracle's software phones home to report where it's being used, though the company may be repurposing VirtualBox telemetry for its audits. Or it may simply be checking the IP addresses associated with downloads of the software and contacting address registrants to seek payment.

      • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

        • Open Hardware/Modding

          • The rise of open-source computing

            is a set of open-source designs for microchips that was initially developed a decade ago at the University of California, Berkeley. These days it is attracting attention from many big technology firms, including Google, Nvidia and Qualcomm (see article). In August IBM made its Power chip designs open-source. These moves are welcome, for two reasons.

      • Programming/Development

        • Autowire MicroProfile into Spring with Quarkus

          Eclipse MicroProfile and Spring Boot are often thought of as separate and distinct APIs when developing Java microservices. Developers default to their mental muscle memory by leveraging the APIs that they use on a daily basis. Learning new frameworks and runtimes can be a significant time investment. This article aims to ease the introduction to some popular MicroProfile APIs for Spring developers by enabling them to utilize the Spring APIs they already know while benefiting from significant new capabilities offered by Quarkus.

          More specifically, this article covers the scope and details of the Spring APIs supported by Quarkus so Spring developers have a grasp of the foundation they can build on with MicroProfile APIs. The article then covers MicroProfile APIs that Spring developers will find helpful in the development of microservices. Only a subset of MicroProfile is covered.

          Why Quarkus? Live coding is one reason, where any change is automatically reloaded whether MicroProfile, Spring, or any other Java API. Just run mvn quarkus:dev. That’s it. A second compelling reason is that the example project‘s Person service, which compiles Spring, MicroProfile, and JPA APIs to a native binary using GraalVM’s native-image, starts in 0.055 seconds and uses ~90MB of RAM (RSS) after hitting the application RESTful endpoints. Run mvn package -Pnative to compile to a native binary. That’s it.

        • PyGotham 2019: Talking Python in NY!

          We are arriving at New York! Part of our team is on their way to PyGotham 2019, the biggest event of the Python community in New York. The experience last year was amazing, so we decided to come back. We are also sponsoring it this year, so if you are going to the event make sure to stop by our booth, we are bringing lots of cool swags and some brazilian coffee!

        • Intel MKL-DNN 1.1 Released, Now Branded As The Deep Neural Network Library

          Intel's open-source crew has had a busy week with their first public OpenVKL release, OSPray 2 hitting alpha, and now the release of MKL-DNN where they are also re-branding it as the Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL).

          The MKL-DNN crew today did their version 1.1 release while now calling it the Deep Neural Network Library. MKL-DNN is the interesting Intel deep learning effort we've been benchmarking since earlier this summer and experienced good results. This performance-oriented library provides the "building blocks for neural networks optimized for Intel IA CPUs and GPUs." MKL-DNN/DNNL is designed to work with PyTorch, Tensorflow, ONNX, Chainer, BigDL, Apache MXNet, and other popular deep learning applications.

        • A Message to Our Readers

          We ask for your help in getting the word out (in addition to hopefully buying the issue when it's released). We know there are many thousands out there who no longer have bookstores that carry 2600 in their neighborhoods or who live in parts of the world where getting our publication has always been, at best, a challenge.

          Please show your support and buy this issue which you can then enjoy forever - and let everyone know what we're doing. Because if this is a success, we will be able to invest more into the magazine (paper and digital) to make it even better, as well as support more projects like HOPE.

        • Binary Hardening in IoT products

          Unfortunately, with few exceptions (notably Synology) we see there is very little coverage, and even Synology struggles to adopt basic hardening features like ASLR and stack guards.

          A perfect score, where all binaries had all 5 basic safety features, would result in a chart that looks like a regular pentagon. Instead, in most vendors’ cases, they struggle to achieve polygon status at all.

  • Leftovers

    • People Are Typing on Their Smartphones Almost as Fast as on Keyboards Now [iophk: like playing a kalimba?]

      A good typist can type around 100 words per minute (WPM) on a desktop keyboard, but most of us only type around 35-65 WPM. According to the research, people using two thumbs can achieve typings speeds averaging 38 WPM on smartphones.

    • The Secret to Digital Transformation is Human Connection

      Organizations must build and deliver exciting new software applications, faster than ever before. They must continuously innovate, adapt and stay ahead of the never-ending demands of digital data, experiences and channels. These demands have contributed to the meteoric rise of cloud computing, DevOps methodologies, open source technologies, predictive analytics, AI and many other innovations.

      However, even with all these investments, more than half of all new software or IT projects still fail. In fact, according to a study by Forbes Insights, 75% of executives say they’re still waiting to reap tangible benefits from disruptive technology. Here’s why: Technology alone does not solve digital transformation. It doesn’t address some of the most fundamental issues that inhibit or enable transformational success nor the most critical dependency, which is people.

      To truly transform, organizations must go beyond just technology to embrace the human elements of this evolution. We’ll look at six factors driven by the human side of the business, and how each of these can help, not hinder, digital transformation when properly addressed.

    • Security (Confidentiality/Integrity/Availability)

      • Yahoo Engineer Used Insider Access to Get Private Photos of Women

        According to a statement released Monday by the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, Reyes Daniel Ruiz admitted to cracking user's passwords and using internal Yahoo systems to access around 6,000 accounts. He also compromised the iCloud, Facebook, Gmail, DropBox, and other online accounts of those users, looking for more private content.

      • Matthew Garrett: Investigating the security of Lime scooters

        I've been looking at the security of the Lime escooters. These caught my attention because: (1) There's a whole bunch of them outside my building, and (2) I can see them via Bluetooth from my sofa which, given that I'm extremely lazy, made them more attractive targets than something that would actually require me to leave my home. I did some digging. Limes run Linux and have a single running app that's responsible for scooter management. They have an internal debug port that exposes USB and which, until this happened, ran adb (as root!) over this USB. As a result, there's a fair amount of information available in various places, which made it easier to start figuring out how they work.

      • Aircrack-ng: Pen Testing Product Overview and Analysis

        Aircrack-ng is the go-to tool for analyzing and cracking wireless networks. All the various tools within it use a command line interface and are set up for scripting. This is good news for veteran security professionals, but an open-source Linux orientation may challenge those more used to proprietary tools running on Windows platforms.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Pakistan’s support to the Taliban is a threat to peace

        Following the collapse of the United States-led engagement with the Afghan Taliban, Pakistan is once again fishing in the troubled waters of Afghanistan to position itself as a player in the war-torn country and shut out India. On Thursday, Pakistan’s foreign ministry rolled out the red carpet for a Taliban delegation led by Abdul Ghani Baradar, which was received by the foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and the Inter-Services Intelligence agency chief Faiz Hameed.

      • Myths about Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir

        In contrast to Kashmir valley, in PAJK, the Indian army was outnumbered by the Pakistani army and its supporters. This is clearly evidenced in the official document — History of Operations in Jammu & Kashmir (1947-48) — by the military historian, S.N. Prasad, cited by A.G. Noorani in a journal on August 30, 2019, who states, “The enemy (Pakistan) had in December 1948 two infantry divisions of the regular Pakistan Army, and one infantry division of the so-called Azad Kashmir army fighting in theatre. These comprised fourteen infantry brigades; or 23 infantry battalions of the Pakistan army and 40 infantry battalions of Azad Kashmir besides 19,000 Scouts and irregulars... Against this, the Indian army had in J&K only two infantry divisions, comprising twelve infantry brigades; a total of some 50 infantry battalions of the regular army and the Indian state forces, plus 12 battalions of the J&K (some with only two companies) and 2 battalions of the East Punjab militia.”

      • Pakistan’s history is not serving it well

        These historical parallels are of value because they are illustrative of how deeply public opinion in Pakistan has internalized a narrative of Indian oppression. The Pakistani state also goes to considerable lengths to disguise and deny its own involvement in J&K especially to its own citizens.

        To this day, the 1965 India-Pakistan war is represented as “Defense of Pakistan” when in fact what had led to the war was a large and well-planned infiltration by the Pakistan army.

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • Trump’s Whistleblower Attack ‘Undermines’ U.S. Global Accountability Push

        But Pompeo’s stern message—he wrote that actions at the aviation agency “do not reflect a commitment to UN best practices on whistleblower protection”—has been muddied by U.S. President Donald’s Trump efforts to discredit and unmask the identity of the White House whistleblower in the ongoing impeachment probe. Trump has called the whistleblower, who said the president used the power of his office to pressure Ukraine to investigate unsubstantiated claims of corruption by one of his Democratic rivals, a “spy” and said on Wednesday, “This country has to find out who this person was.”

      • What is a "whistleblower" and who can be one? A primer

        Most often, whistleblowing is an act of courage. Always, it slows down the organization or the public surrounding it to take stock—to determine if there is a moral or legal problem that must be addressed directly before the ordinary production or governing process cranks up again. In that sense, whistleblowing is a tremendously important safety check on power, and whistleblowers serve the very institutions whose leaders most often find them to be an annoyance.

      • How Should TV News Deal With Guests Who Lie to the Media?

        "It’s hard not to book him," Hahn says of Giuliani. "However, he should be held to the same or higher standards. Hosts need to call out his lies and contradictions."

        While even Giulani's critics acknowledge his relevance, Lewandowski's fitness for television is a "pretty open-and-shut case," Klein says, after the former Trump campaign manager copped to lying to the media earlier this month.

        "I have no obligation to be honest with the media," Lewandowski told a congressional panel on Sept. 17 after being confronted with video evidence of his deceit: an interview he gave to MSNBC's Ari Melber in February.

    • Environment

      • My Community Is Warming Three Times Faster Than the Rest of the World

        A longer warm season has been causing a lot of rapid growth in the shrubs and the willows, so a lot of the areas we used to travel are growing in faster now. This is actually having an impact on the animals; the caribou have used the same trails for thousands of years but the trails are growing in, so they’ve started to change how they’re migrating.

        Vuntut Gwitchin coexist with the Porcupine caribou herd. They were called the Porcupine caribou because they would always cross the Porcupine River to go to their wintering grounds. Climate change has changed their migration patterns. The past few years, we’ve noticed that they’ve been going over to Alaska and not even passing the river. They have even started to change when they’re migrating. Sometimes they’ll come a little earlier.

      • An Unstoppable Movement Takes Hold [iophk: most of those politicians will be gone long before even 2030, so they are just kickign the can down the road]

        More than 70 countries committed to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, even if major emitters have not yet done so. More than 100 cities did the same, including several of the world’s largest.

    • Finance

      • Colonial-era Indian royal family wins right to $45 million stashed in London since 1940s

        A decades-old legal dispute between the state of Pakistan and colonial-era Indian royalty has finally been settled, with the U.K. High Court recognizing the rights of the Indian royals to $45 million that has remained untouched in a London bank account since 1948.

      • What Is a Blockchain? Everything You Need to Know

        Of late, you may have noticed many people drop the term “blockchain” in conversations, mostly in relation to cryptocurrency transactions.

        Even if you own bitcoins, you may not entirely understand how its foundation technology – the elusive blockchain – works. The only thing that matters is liquidity, which is why the concept of secure and anonymous transactions is gaining dozens of followers. Each minute, to be precise.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Atlantic Calls on Hollywood to Produce More Government Propaganda

        The Atlantic (9/15/19) published a curious plea for more propaganda in Hollywood movies. The essay, by Boston College’s Martha Bayles, is ostensibly a warning about the growing power of China over the US film industry...

      • "Both sides" fever strikes again: Why does New York Times insist on doing favors for Trump?

        The New York Times has yet again taken a story that should, objectively speaking, be damaging to Donald Trump and found a way to put some spin on the ball so it looks like a problem for the Democrats. This time, it came in the form of a breathless headline designed to make House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a man whose sense of moral rectitude would put Captain America to shame, look look like a scofflaw.

      • How Authoritarian Governments Are Exploiting Interpol to Harass Political Enemies [iophk: Sweden, too]

        But the same agency that has helped catch thousands of criminals is increasingly being exploited by authoritarian regimes such as Russia and Turkey to harass their political enemies who live in exile, according to U.S. officials, lawmakers and immigration attorneys.

        Their weapon of choice? The Red Notice, an alert issued by Interpol to member countries that a person is wanted for arrest and extradition. Any member country can file a Red Notice as long as it complies with Interpol’s rules. The agency does little vetting. Last year, Interpol issued 13,516 Red Notices, many suspected to be persecutory.

      • If Republicans Ever Turn On Trump, It’ll Happen All At Once

        Who goes first matters, too, because if we’re talking about a monumental sea change, it isn’t moderate Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine or Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah who will lead the GOP parade.

        Rather, it’s rank-and-file Republican senators up for reelection in solidly red states, like Bill Cassidy from Louisiana or Jim Inhofe from Oklahoma, whom you should watch. If they waver, that will signal that Trump’s days are numbered. Of course, the rub is that neither have spoken out against Trump — in fact, they’ve stuck by him — but that’s the point. If Republicans do abandon Trump over impeachment, it will be because of the senators least likely to strike out against Trump balked.

      • Hong Kong’s Lost Generation

        Hong Kong’s youth are rallying around the protest movement. Police and government actions have transformed a generation of young people into activists and antagonists who will plague Beijing’s increasingly heavy-handed rule over the city, possibly for decades into the future.

      • Xi’s embrace of false history and fearsome weapons is worrying

        Other countries may have more to fear from Mr Xi’s embrace of false history. By telling his people that Communist China has never taken a wrong turn, he is stoking an impatient, hair-trigger nationalism in which criticism from abroad equates to hostility.

      • Social media giants caught in 2020 vise

        “The prevailing view from both sides now is that these companies have become so large and so important in political and social life that there needs to be some sort of government intervention,” said Shannon McGregor, a professor of communications at the University of Utah. “What that looks like could depend on the outcome of the election.”

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • Facebook must delete 'illegal' comments globally, ECJ rules

        The ruling, which is in stark contrast the ECJ's landmark 'right to be forgotten' decision last month, states that while Facebook is exempt from actively policing all of the content on its platform in Europe, the social network must remove user comments that European courts have deemed illegal.

        "EU law does not preclude a host provider like Facebook from being ordered to remove identical and, in certain circumstances, equivalent comments previously declared to be illegal," the ECJ said in a statement.

        "In addition, EU law does not preclude such an injunction from producing effects worldwide, within the framework of the relevant international law."

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • On TikTok, There Is No Time

        While creators say the absence of time stamps can be frustrating, the design choice almost certainly helps boost engagement for Bytedance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company and one of the highest-valued startups in the world. TikTok's feed is endless, and it's dangerously easy to lose hours watching videos on the app. But the experience is unlike scrolling through Instagram, where signposts remind you that you've delved three years into someone's past. If TikTok gave similar guidance, "that would interrupt our consumption of that endless stream,” says Ben Grosser, a professor of new media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the artist behind Demetricator, a tool that strips social media sites of metrics such as likes, shares, and time stamps.

      • Ears on with Microsoft's Surface Earbuds: Tapping the cloud for transcription and more

        At $249, the Surface Earbuds are $50 more than the Apple AirPods—which will inevitably be seen as a competitor even if Microsoft’s earbuds do much more. Microsoft may also have a shot at putting a Cortana-powered earbud on the market before Amazon launches the Amazon Echo Buds at the end of the month for $129.99.

      • French watchdog warns about govt plan to monitor social media for tax fraud

        The proposal, Darmanin’s brainchild, has caused concern for the country’s data protection watchdog group, the National Commission for Data Protection and Liberties (CNIL). If enacted, it could infringe on freedom of thought and expression, according to a warning the CNIL issued on September 12 that was made public on September 30.

        The government must provide “strong guarantees” and “rigorous evaluation,” the CNIL cautioned, adding that the massive collection of data could have a significant impact on people’s personal lives. The worry is that data could be mined automatically rather than gathered in a targeted manner.

      • ‘Is It a Crime to Expose Crimes Already Committed?’

        Reading Edward Snowden’s new memoir in the midst of the current scandal raging in Washington, the famous Iraq War whistle-blower explains why all whistle-blowers deserve our protection.

      • Logs were our lifeblood. Now they're our liability.

        Second, GDPR landed. In Europe this has been an enormous deal. Google’s already been fined for violating it. Smaller companies have floundered. Third-party advertising and tracking is down.

        In the United States, GDPR hasn’t made much of an impact aside from littering people’s inboxes with notifications. But CCPA will. CCPA is the California privacy law that goes into effect in January.

        Far and away, this Act is the strongest privacy legislation enacted in any state at the moment, giving more power to consumers in regards to their private data. With a variety of major tech giants based in California, including Google and Facebook (both of which have recently suffered data breaches), AB 375 is poised to have far-reaching effects on data privacy. AB 375 will go into full effect on January 1st, 2020.

        When it does, companies operating in California will essentially have to be able to fully notify consumers what they’re collecting on them, and allow them to opt out by deleting all of their data. That means deleting hundreds upon thousands of logs, and figuring out how to re-platform the log collection system to be able to delete data.

      • FBI using Facebook ads to gather Russian intelligence: report

        The FBI is reportedly using Facebook ads to gather intelligence on Russia, specifically targeting those who may be or know Russian spies.

      • Exclusive: The FBI is running Facebook ads targeting Russians in Washington

        The ads direct to a page on the FBI Washington DC field office's website that has details in English and in Russian about the counterintelligence team and the address of the FBI field office in the city, "visit us in person," it reads.

        The FBI had three ads in Russian running on Facebook when they were discovered by CNN earlier this week, but a source familiar with the ad-buy confirmed they have been running throughout the summer.

      • Hong Kong Takes Symbolic Stand Against China’s High-Tech Controls

        Since then, Hong Kong protesters have smashed cameras to bits. In the subway, cameras are frequently covered in clear plastic wrapping, an attempt to protect a hardware now hunted. In August, protesters pulled down a smart lamppost out of fear it was equipped with artificial-intelligence-powered surveillance software. (Most likely it was not.) The moment showed how at times the protests in Hong Kong are responding not to the realities on the ground, but fears of what could happen under stronger controls by Beijing.

    • Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

      • International community has 'failed' in the aftermath of Khashoggi's death

        Khashoggi's disappearance and death brought unwanted attention to the Saudi regime. It has also challenged world leadership to take a stand for human rights, press freedoms and rule of law. It's a responsibility that has been largely shirked on this grim anniversary, say Cengiz and others, with little international action to hold Saudi Arabia to account and continued close relations with the oil-rich kingdom.

      • Petition filed at ICC to probe Saudi ruler MBS for role in murder of Jamal Khashoggi

        The document states, in part, that MBS, the de facto ruler, has engaged in "a widespread... systematic attack directed at civilian political opponents" in and out of the kingdom, through which he is "guilty of murder, torture, rape, extortion, illegal detentions, wrongful prosecutions, and the death penalty, i.e., crimes against humanity as defined in Article 7 of the Rome Statute."

        "A component of the crown prince's systematic attacks or persecution of his opponents," the filing states, "was his order to assassinate courageous journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which was executed by the Saudi Raid Intervention Group by killing and dismembering... him in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey."

        "Even if he said he did not order the assassination of Mr. Khashoggi, the law makes him culpable for it," Fein told Al Jazeera. "As someone who knows everything of significance in Saudi Arabia, MBS should have known about the planned murder even if he was not supervising his thugs."

      • Petition to investigate Saudi crown prince for crimes against humanity sent to ICC

        Attorneys Bruce Fein, a former associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, and W. Bruce DelValle drafted the petition on behalf of the National Interest Foundation, a Washington nonprofit frequently critical of US policy in the Middle East, saying Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman "has ruthlessly and systematically persecuted his political detractors, opponents, or rivals," since being elevated to his position in June 2017. The petition was submitted in July but had not been made public.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Trump’s War on Asylum-Seekers is Endangering Pregnant Women

        The view from the Matamoros, Mexico side of the Rio Grande — just across from Brownsville, Texas — reveals an unsettling scene.

      • A Multigenerational Fight for Tribal Recognition Is Almost Over

        The Little Shell—a polyethnic people primarily of Chippewa, Cree, Assiniboine, and Métis descent—are one of more than 400 unrecognized tribes across the United States. Many of these tribes have been denied federal recognition through administrative and legislative processes that are notoriously slow and unresponsive. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has only recognized 18 tribes since 1978, when the US first established a procedure for administrative acknowledgement. Until recently, Congress provided a more productive path, recognizing 38 tribes over the same time period. But most of those successes happened early: Since 1995, Congress has passed only two bills—recognizing seven tribes between them—while more than 80 tribal recognition bills have died.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Courts Mostly Back FCC Assault on Net Neutrality

        While the court backed much of the FCC’s order with a 2-1 vote, it did send several parts back to the FCC for reconsideration. The court noted that the FCC didn’t bother to consider the impact the repeal would have on public safety or the FCC’s Lifeline program, which doles out a modest $9 monthly subsidy for low income phone and broadband users.

        Most importantly, the court shot down a portion of the order attempting to block states from passing their own state net neutrality rules, saying the FCC lacked the legal authority to limit state rights in such a fashion.

    • Monopolies

      • Mark Zuckerberg Is Scared Elizabeth Warren Will Ruin Facebook’s Destiny

        Elizabeth Warren is a threat to this vision, but so is China (as Facebook is keen on reminding us). It took commentators far too long to realize that China’s Great Firewall was ultimately a bid to keep out Silicon Valley long enough to build and control an alternative Internet. How long until we realize that Facebook is also engaged in a similar (albeit more ideological) project to convince us that there is no alternative to the [Internet] it envisions for all of us—and how long until we start asking whether we actually want it?

      • Trademarks

        • CN Tower's management company claims that any picture of the landmark building is a trademark violation

          This is a remarkably stupid theory, but it's also a remarkably dangerous one. It's telling that the CN Tower embarked on its trademark trolling career by attacking a small press author who was unlikely to have the resources to defend himself. As we've seen with other trolling efforts, targeting a string of small-time victims can allow a troll to amass a trophy-wall of companies that seem to have acknowledged the validity of their claims, and these trophies can be used to convince a succession of ever-larger targets that they, too, should pay.

          If the CN Tower succeeds in this gambit, you can be sure they won't be the only ones who try it: their example could lead every owner of every notable Canadian building to follow suit, so that a picture of the Toronto skyline taken from a harbour ferry could require fifty separate licenses before it could be published, and the same would be true for every Canadian city's skyline.



Recent Techrights' Posts

Red Hat: Thank You, Microsoft. Here's Your Paid-for Puff Pieces From Our Media Partner!
Sort of like "money laundering" (or funnelling of bribes) for bribed "journalists"
Links 13/12/2024: Military Buildup Around Taiwan, More Health Problems Associated With Social Control Media Illuminated
Links for the day
 
Links 14/12/2024: Adobe's Shares Collapse, Apple Publishes Fake News With LLMs
Links for the day
Links 14/12/2024: ChatGPT Down, Microsofter Bracing for Layoffs
Links for the day
Gemini Links 13/12/2024: Firing at Work, jujutsu, and Gemini Mode
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, December 13, 2024
IRC logs for Friday, December 13, 2024
Links 13/12/2024: British Journalism Awards and Censorship by Copyright Misuse
Links for the day
Gemini Links 13/12/2024: "Virtue Signaling", Gopher, HTML and the 90s Web Aesthetic
Links for the day
Maybe - and Hopefully - More News Sites Will Go "Static" (More New Material Published But Established Pages Served Directly From the File System)
Keeping things simple and light is important for the sake of scaling
[Meme] Vendor Capture for 'Civility's Sake'
"I CoCed him already"
[Teaser] The EPO is Still Calling Monopolies "Products"
Coming soon
Anonymity for Sources
At the moment we can learn about stories in person or in encrypted voice chat
What Topics We Prioritise
On fishing for topics to cover
Why We Cover the Topics That We've Long Focused on (by Choice)
We'll continue to cover suppressed issues because such issues are usually obstructed
[Meme] The Reasonable Man
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world"
Oligarch-Owned Media Twists the Narrative and Demands More Surveillance
Corruption is the real issue here
Windows Falls to Single-Digit "Market Share" in Benin
Windows has fallen even further
[Meme] Doing Online Activism in Social Control Media
Dictators have always loved lists
Gemini Links 13/12/2024: Creative Moods, Berkeley DB, and More
Links for the day
Microsoft Windows Falls to New All-Time Low in Guatemala (Less Than a Quarter)
When it comes to operating systems, we don't think we've mentioned it before
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 12, 2024
IRC logs for Thursday, December 12, 2024
[Meme] Leave My /home Alone
A new version of Systemd
There's a New Version of Lagrange (Gemini Reader) and Its Developer is Making an IDE/Editor
I share or reciprocate almost anything I can through Gemini Protocol
International Troll Alert by Helen Plews
Helen Plews from Cybershow has this new article
Nick's Job at OSI: Promote Microsoft, Promote Proprietary Software
This is what Microsoft pays him to do
[Meme] Award-Winning Back-stabbing Opportunists
part of the rebel alliance
The FSF (Free Software Foundation, Inc.) Can Reach Its Funding Goal of $400,000. This Bothers the Imposters and Foes of the FSF.
Software Freedom is something we must perpetually fight for
Azerbaijan Rejects Microsoft
Azerbaijan seems to have very little interest in Microsoft
Linux Foundation Pays for LLM Slop (Puff Pieces Made by Bots) About the Linux Foundation
The so-called Linux Foundation is responsible for the production of spam and slop
[Meme] You Just Grab Him by the CoC
Sponsors of Python Software Foundation... "You don't like Python's corporate sponsor?"
Explaining What Deb Nicholson Does to the Python Software Foundation
Of course the OSI, which Nicholson also occupied, still helps Microsoft attack copyleft
IBM Said to Be Firing People Days Before Christmas
IBM is entering taboo territories
Microsoft Falls to Just 11% in Ivory Coast
Microsoft tried hard to catch up in mobile
General Consultative Committee (GCC) Meeting at the European Patent Office (EPO) Shows Existing Problems
the "real problems" and why "digitalisation" doesn't solve them
Links 12/12/2024: Shell Settles With Greenpeace, DOJ Whistleblower Pilot Program
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/12/2024: AuraGem TV and Advent of Code 2024
Links for the day
Fake "Linux" News, Produced by Microsoft Chatbots in 'Brittany Day' or "LinuxSecurity" Clothing
She's back at it
Microsoft OSI Promoting GitHub, Which is Proprietary and a Massive GPL Violator
OSI works for Microsoft, speaks for Microsoft, promotes proprietary software
Links 12/12/2024: Another 'Self-driving' Cars Dead End, Infowars Sale Blocked by Court
Links for the day
Links 12/12/2024: "Hey Hi" Hype Debunked, ActivityPub and Gemini Software on Same Server
Links for the day
Google Has Only Solidified Its Search Monopoly in Africa Since Microsoft's Chatbot/LLM Hype Started
Africa is basically a "Failed Market" to Microsoft
[Teaser] EPO is Running Out of Brains
EPO has been in the business of offering fake patents
South Korea Has Its Own Alternative to IBM's Proprietary RHEL
Owing to the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA)
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, December 11, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, December 11, 2024