This week we saw fewer Linux news, but a lot of goodies. NVIDIA GPU users got a new graphics driver release with support for the latest Linux 5.14 kernel series, especially now that Linux kernel 5.13 reached end of life, the Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 4 has been finally released for those who want to refurbish old computers, and Ubuntu Touch OTA-19 arrives for Ubuntu Phone users.
On top of that, gamers received a new DXVK update to run the latest Windows games, a new major Telegram Desktop release brought in new features and enhancements for a better chat experience, and the GNOME 41 desktop environment arrived with many goodies. You can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for September 26th, 2021, below!
Welcome to this week's Linux Weekly Roundup.
The main release in the world of Linux distros of this week is Ubuntu 20.10 Beta. Besides this, it has been a peaceful week.
I hope that you are doing well and may you have a wonderful week!
For some time now, there has been an ongoing debate over which is better between Linux and Windows. Both are popular and widely used operating systems. However, the time has proven that Linux is the beast between the two given the numerous benefits it provides over Windows.
Explore some of the top reasons why Linux is a much better option and why you should consider making a switch to Linux from Windows.
The hiking and cycling app komoot saves your traveled excursion routes. Mike Schilli shows you how to retrieve the data with Go.
In the news: System76 Updates the 15" Pangolin with Ryzen; KDE Plasma 5.23 Promises Plenty of Subtle Improvements; Gnome 41 Now in Beta; Debian 11 "Bullseye" Released; and AlmaLinux Makes CentOS SIG Repositories Available.
For a better bug report, maddog offers a refresher course on crafting a clear statement that will help get your problem fixed.
If your school's computer lab consists of Linux machines, Epoptes provides an interesting alternative to conventional management and monitoring programs.
A revamp of ls, lsd offers color coding plus revised options relevant to the modern computer.
KXStitch lets you design cross-stitch patterns with the option to automatically convert imported images.
The Sudo privilege management tool is big and complicated, with many advanced options that only an expert would need. Doas is far simpler – which might just make it safer for desktop users.
Canonical's ufw lets you configure your firewall without the hassle of the iptables tool, while reducing the risk of misconfiguration and simplifying maintenance.
There is this abiding faith within the Linux world that walled gardens and single-vendor control over global markets will eventually collapse under the weight of inefficiency. If you look at the history of the last 20 years, however, you would see a very different story.
If you need to flash the same image to multiple USB media, Popsicle saves time by letting you write in parallel.
Rechargeable lithium batteries are expensive, and manufacturing them damages the environment. Saltwater batteries offer a cheaper and greener approach to storing energy.
Ren'Py helps you create Android, Linux, macOS, Windows, and HTML5 games and apps.
Improve communication security with GnuPG and the OpenPGP smartcard.
This month Graham looks at MyGNUHealth, Sniptt, Pigiron, CudaText, KnobKraft Orm, D2X-XL, and more!
Build a simple web page in Markdown; then convert it to HTML at the command line.
HedgeDoc lets you write documents collaboratively in Markdown and publish them online.
Zack Brown reports on bug hunting and process appreciation, and refusing "useful" patches.
The Nitrokey Pro 2 is a small device that covers a wide range of cryptographic functions.
Charly makes life easier for himself by using the lean Age tool for command-line data encryption tasks.
With its point-and-click installation, Redcore aims "to be to Gentoo what Manjaro is to Arch Linux."
SiriKali encrypts files and directories with just a few mouse clicks, without the inefficiency of fixed-size containers.
In no time at all, imgp can change the resolution of images, as well as convert files from PNG to JPEG, remove metadata, and rotate images.
Josh and Kurt talk about the security of the Matrix movie series. There was a new Matrix trailer that made us want to discuss some of the security themes. We talk about how the movie is very focused on computing in the 90s. How Neo probably ran Linux and they used a real ssh exploit. How a lot of the plot is a bit silly. It’s a really fun episode.
Canonical gives Linux admins a lucky break, the details on Android's slow shift to an upstream Kernel, a breakthrough for Linux gaming, and our take on GNOME 41.
Plus how AlmaLinux just rounded out their offering.
In this video, we are looking at Ubuntu 21.10 Beta. Enjoy!
Today we are looking at Ubuntu 21.10 Beta. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.13, Gnome 40, and uses about 1.1GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
I'm announcing the release of the 5.14.8 kernel. All users of the 5.14 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.14.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.14.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
The Linux kernel support around the Nintendo Wii and Wii U game console hardware continues to improve and now a new Nintendo crypto driver is being tackled based on reverse-engineered documentation.
A set of patches were sent out last week for the new "nintendo-aes" driver providing AES support on the Wii / Wii U hardware based on prior reverse engineering done to the Nintendo crypto engine.
It's been a while since having any news to report on Bcachefs as the promising open-source file-system born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code. However, Kent Overstreet continues working tirelessly on it and has now merged Bcachefs' snapshot support.
Bcachefs is quite interesting from the technical perspective and so far continues being developed out-of-tree from the mainline kernel. This newly-merged Bcachefs snapshots support provides Btrfs-style sub-volumes and snapshots. Bcachefs snapshots are writable and designed to be highly scalable and space efficient. With the current code, snapshot creation and deletion is working and fsck work is done but other related items remain in the works.
Adding to the growing list of Mesa 21.3 features for next quarter's feature release is Lavapipe now supporting Vulkan 1.2.
Lavapipe is Mesa's software-based Vulkan implementation akin to LLVMpipe for OpenGL. With the latest Mesa Git / 21.3-devel code, Lavapipe now exposes Vulkan 1.2 support.
All necessary Vulkan 1.2 changes are now in place with only optional extensions remaining.
With the in-development Linux 5.15 kernel there is now support for ACPI Platform Profiles on supported ASUS laptops. This ASUS laptop platform profile support joins the likes of HP, Dell, and Lenovo laptops already having this support exposed under Linux that allows users to control their power/performance preference. Here are some tests with the ASUS ROG Strix G15 AMD Advantage laptop with the platform profile options under Linux 5.15.
The ASUS-WMI driver with Linux 5.15 exposes the ACPI Platform Profile support of the hardware/firmware of supported laptops. Like with the ACPI Platform Profile support from other vendors, the control is exposed at /sys/firmware/acpi/platform_profile where users can write their supported preference for affecting the thermal/power behavior of the laptop. With GNOME 41 and KDE Plasma 5.23 there is the initial Platform Profile integration at the desktop level for easy UI-based controls around it. It's only been through the past number of kernel releases this year that the ACPI Platform Profile support has begun to be exposed under Linux and in turn now the desktop environments making it easier to manage.
The ffmpeg is free and open-source video converter software for Linux and Unix-like systems. However, on Ubuntu/Debian Linux and other distros, NVIDIA hardware-based encoding is disabled at compile time. So, naturally, you need supporting NVIDIA GPU. Apart from that, it would be best if you had CUDA support installed with GNU compilers. Let us see how to install everything one by one on a server or desktop powered by Ubuntu or Debian Linux.
Jenkins is an open-source automation and continuous integration tool that helps to automate the repetitive tasks involved in the software development process. It is written in Java used by software developers to automate different aspects of building, testing, delivering, and deploying software applications.
This tutorial will explain how to install Jenkins on Debian 11 system.
Ghost is an open-source blogging platform to help you create a professional-looking blog. It was launched in 2013 as an alternative to WordPress because it was getting overly complex. Ghost is written in JavaScript and is powered by Node.js.
In this tutorial, we will explore how to install Ghost CMS using Docker on a server powered by Ubuntu 20.04. We will also use Nginx as a proxy and Let's Encrypt SSL certificate to secure our installation.
Apache Solr is an open-source enterprise-search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, scalable and fault-tolerant, distributed indexing, replication and load-balanced querying, automated failover and recovery, centralized configuration, and more. It is written in Java and uses the Lucene library for indexing.
In this post, we will show you how to install the Apache Solr search platform on Debian 11.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to use the scp command on Linux. For those of you who didn’t know, SCP (Secure Copy) is a command-line tool in Linux and Unix-like systems that are used to transfer files and directories across the systems securely over the network. It uses the Secure Shell SFTP subsystem for data transfer, and uses the same authentication, and provides the same security as Secure Shell. Scp will ask for passwords or passphrases if they are needed for authentication. By default, the SCP command is included in Linux and Mac, so you don’t need to download anything using those OS.
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 use scp commands on Linux with practice examples.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Wine on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Wine is a free, open-source program that allows Linux users for running Windows-based applications or software on any Unix environment. As its name suggests Wine is not an emulator, but a runtime environment that ensures compatibility with Windows. It provides Windows programs a compatibility layer to work without actually having Win OS.
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 through the step-by-step installation of WineHQ on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
This is a series that offers a gentle introduction to Linux for newcomers.
It’s not uncommon for people interested in Linux to have multiple PCs in their home. Hardware comes in different shapes and sizes. They may be notebooks, tablets, home servers, media boxes, even single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi. Some of the devices may be headless (i.e. with no monitor attached). Regardless, with multiple devices, a convenient way to access them all from a central location is with remote desktop software.
This article looks at a common activity; accessing a Windows PC desktop from your new Linux machine over a local home network.
This article guides you on how to install the latest Rust programing language on a Linux system. Whether it is your desktop or server. The guide universally works with all Linux distributions so it doesn’t matter whether you use Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, RHEL, Arch, or any other. Just follow along and you will be able to install the latest Rust programing language build on your Linux system.
Rust is a general-purpose, cross-platform program language. It supports multi-paradigm and is designed for performance, safety, and concurrency. Rust is blazingly fast and memory-efficient with no runtime or garbage collector, it is best suited for performance-critical services and can run on embedded devices.
The language is used by hundreds of companies around the world. Rust makes the production fast and low-resource intensive while providing cross-platform solutions. Rust is being used from startups to large companies.
I have written about setting up the WireGuard server on Linux. I have written about setting up the WireGuard server on Linux. Today, I will share a tip that allows creating QR codes for WireGuard VPN mobile clients running on Apple iOS or Android phones using Linux command-line options.
WireGuard is a modern VPN solution for Linux, *BSD, and Unix-like systems. It is like OpenSSH, where you use public and private keys for remote login, but this one is for VPN. WireGuard config file has various config options, and typing all of them on mobile devices is challenging. Hence, creating a QR code makes deployment easy for everyone. Let us see how to make a QR code out of the WireGuard client config file on the Linux command line.
FTP or File Transfer Protocol, is a popular protocol for transferring files to and from an FTP server. However, it is fraught with security risks since it sends data and sensitive information in plain text. VSFTPD ( Very Secure FTP Daemon ) is a fast, secure and stable FTP server that uses encryption to secure data exchanged with the server.
In this tutorial, we’ll install vsftpd FTP server on Debian 11.
Learning by doing refers to a theory of education expounded by American philosopher John Dewey. It’s a hands-on approach to learning, meaning students must interact with their environment in order to adapt and learn. Dewey implemented this idea by setting up the University of Chicago Laboratory School.
Linux has been around since the mid-1990s and has since reached a user base that spans the globe. To get more information from linux.com. So we could use Learning by doing with Linux.
Nagios is a free and open-source tool for monitoring systems, networks, and infrastructure. Nagios provides a web interface for viewing current network status, log files, notifications, and much more.
There are a number of different ways to install Java on your Linux desktop. An obvious route is to use the packages provided in your Linux distribution. Note that this doesn’t work for everyone; for example, some users may need a very specific version of Java.
Before you can start, you must determine “which Java” you need. Do you just need to run some .class files or a .jar file? Or are you writing some code that you need to compile?
In my case, most of the Java I run is Java that I have (at least partly) written myself, so it always makes sense to install the full Java Development Kit, or JDK, which comes with a Java compiler, libraries, and some really useful utilities. And of course, hereabouts, we give preference to the open source JDK, called OpenJDK.
In general terms and without going into too much detail, a package in Linux consists of a collection of files that allow the installation of a program and its related tasks, such as dependency scanning, pre-installation, and so on. Therefore, a package is not the application as such but the collection of files needed to install it.
The use of packages attempts to solve the problem of interoperability between distributions thanks to a small metadata file that acts as a manifest of dependencies that must be met for the packaged software to run correctly on a given computer. So for example, we can have a package for Ubuntu 20.04 that might work fine on Debian 11. If not, we will be informed during the installation process.
Although working with packages may seem simple, it is not. Imagine managing dependencies manually, it would be crazy. Fortunately, package managers were born to make it easier to use and work with packages.
If you are a follower of retrocomputing, perhaps you caught the interactive Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch when it came out on Netflix. Its portrayal of a young British bedroom coder finding his way into the home computer games industry of the early 1980s was of course fictional and dramatised, but for those interested in a real-life parallel without the protagonist succumbing to an obsession with supernatural book there’s a recent epic Twitter thread charting an industry veteran’s path into the business.
Blending together what seems like quite a few genres Hero.EXE caught my attention recently from Mystery Egg Games and publisher Top Hat.
Currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter with the goal hit and then some, you connect to the internet of other world where digital beings called A.V.As (Artificial Virtual Assistants) roam the digital world. After choosing your own A.V.A, you set off an an adventure that will apparently change both worlds. Blending elements of a tile-based battler (similar to One Step From Eden and Mega Man Battle Network) it also sprinkles in card collecting, visual novel style story scenes that's all wrapped up in a very colourful inviting style.
You probably heard recently that Valve was readying up Steam Deck developer kits and now we can see that quite a lot of developers have received one. Not just the big lot either, developers of all sorts across the world seem to be getting them and showing them off.
The thing is that for it to be a success, you don't just want the top most played games working well - you want as many as possible across every genre that developers have managed to created. Valve is clearly aware of this of course and you can see that in who they've approved for a Steam Deck dev kit.
While modern Linux systems have attractive desktop interfaces, you may be wondering whether you can use Linux without them. The straightforward answer is "yes."
What Is a Desktop Environment?
While the desktop environments on Windows and macOS are tightly integrated and built into the system, on Linux, desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, and Xfce are just collections of programs that you can install in addition to the base operating system.
And that's another ancient laptop put to the test, successfully. I am rather pleased with both these experiments. First, being able to use the Pavilion, and then, second, being able to use the LG machine with decent performance, despite its age. Nvidia drivers, 5.8 kernel, all the modern applications, and you can even stream videos and play HD content. The disk is also fully encrypted. Not bad, not bad.
I guess this article shows that buying decent hardware works well in the long run - you get more bang for your buck when you normalize it per years of usage. Also, while Linux has many problems and issues, it does have one fair advantage, and that's how it handles old hardware. That ain't a great business model, but it is a practical model, especially for people who value their properties, and/or may not want to waste money on buying new and shiny stuff, when the old one still works and delivers. Yes, 12 years of usage is pushing it by all standards, but it's still something. Anyway, good results today, and a phenomenal testimony to the flexibility of the Plasma desktop.
I did not spend a lot of time with Airyx, just a few days. Mostly this was due to the operating system not playing well with my wireless card, an issue most flavours of BSD run into. However, while my experience was brief, I will say that I see the appeal of Airyx (and by extension helloSystem). For people who like the macOS style desktop, this experience should make people feel at home. The unified application menu on the top panel, the icons, the utility and settings panels, and the overall theme all share a strong similarity with macOS.
The system installer is quite simple and can be navigated with a few mouse clicks so the barrier to entry is relatively low, assuming your computer has at least 4GB of memory for the live media. The operating system, even running ZFS, is quite light in memory and includes some standard open source tools.
There were two weak points I encountered. The first was hardware support, which is often a problem I run into with flavours of BSD. Wireless and suspend support in particular tend to be missing. The other issue was the lack of a fully functioning package manager. I'm not sure why pkg has been hobbled in Airyx, but the fact it still refreshes repository information and installs packages from FreeBSD suggests to me that the limitation is unnecessary.
A near-future release of OpenSSH will switch scp(1) from using the legacy scp/rcp protocol to using SFTP by default.
Legacy scp/rcp performs wildcard expansion of remote filenames (e.g. "scp host:* .") through the remote shell. This has the side effect of requiring double quoting of shell meta-characters in file names included on scp(1) command-lines, otherwise they could be interpreted as shell commands on the remote side.
This creates one area of potential incompatibility: scp(1) when using the SFTP protocol no longer requires this finicky and brittle quoting, and attempts to use it may cause transfers to fail. We consider the removal of the need for double-quoting shell characters in file names to be a benefit and do not intend to introduce bug- compatibility for legacy scp/rcp in scp(1) when using the SFTP protocol.
Another area of potential incompatibility relates to the use of remote paths relative to other user's home directories, for example - "scp host:~user/file /tmp". The SFTP protocol has no native way to expand a ~user path. However, sftp-server(8) in OpenSSH 8.7 and later support a protocol extension "expand-path at openssh.com" to support this.
sshd(8) from OpenSSH 6.2 through 8.7 failed to correctly initialise supplemental groups when executing an AuthorizedKeysCommand or AuthorizedPrincipalsCommand, where a AuthorizedKeysCommandUser or AuthorizedPrincipalsCommandUser directive has been set to run the command as a different user. Instead these commands would inherit the groups that sshd(8) was started with.
Depending on system configuration, inherited groups may allow AuthorizedKeysCommand/AuthorizedPrincipalsCommand helper programs to gain unintended privilege.
Neither AuthorizedKeysCommand nor AuthorizedPrincipalsCommand are enabled by default in sshd_config(5).
Published the release of OpenSSH 8.8, an open client and server implementation for the SSH 2.0 and SFTP protocols. The release is notable for disabling by default the ability to use digital signatures based on RSA keys with a SHA-1 hash (“ssh-rsa”).
The end of support for “ssh-rsa” signatures is due to an increase in the effectiveness of collision attacks with a given prefix (the cost of collision guessing is estimated at about 50 thousand dollars). To test the use of ssh-rsa on your systems, you can try connecting via ssh with the “-oHostKeyAlgorithms = -ssh-rsa” option. Support for RSA signatures with SHA-256 and SHA-512 (rsa-sha2-256 / 512) hashes, which are supported since OpenSSH 7.2, is unchanged.
We are pleased to announce the availability of Red Hat Satellite 6.10 Beta. This release includes many new and updated features, including improved support for Secure Environments and new features to simplify operation and administration.
Red Hat Satellite streamlines the deployment and maintenance life cycle of Red Hat environments to enable organizations to focus on their lines-of-business applications and reduce operations overhead. In 6.10, Satellite improves the user experience by focusing on simplicity and enhancing support for secure environments.
The Open Source Strategy Forum (OSSF) is a one-day conference for experts across financial services, technology and open source to deepen collaboration and drive innovation in the financial services industry. This year, Open Source Strategy Forum is live and in-person in London organised by the Linux Foundation and Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS).
We are excited to announce that Canonical is a proud community sponsor for the OSSF 2021, London. You can meet our team at OSSF London on 5th Oct 2021 to discuss and to engage in a conversation around how financial institutions are leveraging open source software to address various business challenges.
Detractors will note that the kit of parts costs over $100 USD alone, and that after hours of work and printing, the user is left with a set of headphones made out of obviously 3D-printed parts. It seems destined to be a product aimed at the 3D printing fanbase.
I recently attended the Practical Open Source Information POSI conference, which was held on a free and open source video conferencing platform. As I attended a series of excellent talks about practical uses of open source software, I realized how commonplace video conferencing had become over the past few years.
If open source does anything, it provides choice, and now that more and more workers have the freedom of working remotely, having an option in the way you connect makes a lot of sense.
Sometimes, you need a full-featured video conferencing application with moderation, a presentation mode, and breakout rooms, while other times, all you want to do is make a quick call to a friend so that you can see each other's faces.
With tech and data safety awareness rising, open source software is becoming a go-to option for organizations of all classes more than ever. Nonprofit organizations are particularly vulnerable on the financial side while at the same time dealing with vital social and environmental issues.
This article observes the adoption of open source collaboration technologies in nonprofit organizations by using Nextcloud and ONLYOFFICE as examples.
Open source is basically democracy written in code: It liberates and democratizes knowledge, gives access to vital technology to governmental and social institutions in all communities, and pursues the idea of transparency.
People and organizations can access and reuse the software code. At the same time, contributors bear individual responsibility for the quality of their products and are more driven by initiative and ideas and much less by profit.
hile you can launch the web browser and directly use any translation service to get the job done, a desktop app can sometimes come in handy.
Dialect is a simple translation app that utilizes web services to translate while giving you some extra abilities.
Dialect is primarily an app tailored for GNOME desktops, but it should work fine with other desktop environments.
It lets you quickly translate languages along with a few extra options.
At its core, it lets you choose between Google Translate or LibreTranslate as the translation service.
If you are a photographer (a pro of a hobby photographer like me) and want to make a portfolio for your work, you will look for a fast and effective way.
Most likely, you have an account at some websites like Flicker, DeviantArt, and even Instagram. These services are free, unlimited, and comes without any technical requirement.
The nanoMIPS architecture that was announced by MIPS in 2018 for embedded devices to lower power consumption and yield smaller code footprints was announced for the MIPS I7200 but since then there hasn't been much of nanoMIPS. However, MediaTek is now looking to contribute upstream the compiler support for this processor ISA into GCC.
The MIPS architecture itself is now abandoned upstream to focus on RISC-V. MIPS Technologies formerly tried unsuccessfully (never finished) to get nanoMIPS support into the upstream GCC compiler but rather relying on their out-of-tree toolchain. MediaTek though is now working on nanoMIPS compiler support. MediaTek engineers haven't mentioned why in 2021 they are working on nanoMIPS support for upstream GCC, but presumably it's due to still relying on that ISA within the control processors of their modems.
A few days/weeks later I had a nice little PDP-8 emulator running on my iPad. I found some archived binary images of ancient paper tapes and managed to load them into my emulator. This allowed me to run the suite of development tools that I had used back in those early days.
The waitress has left us dark bottles of home-brewed beer and basket of chile peppers, poblanos and serranos, little green sticks of dynamite. We eat them until our mouths are enflamed with exquisite pain.
Some ethnopharmacologists swear that you can hallucinate this way. But being novices, and wanting later to amble in a nearly erect manner across ancient ruins outside town, my friend Fremont and I decide to linger on the bright edges of consciousness, here in this beautiful and tragic place, where macaws in wicker cages hang above us like cackling white blooms. These birds of the jungle were sacred to the Anasazi, Hohokam and other people of the northern desert. I have seen petroglyphs of macaws carved into pink sandstone cliffs high above the San Juan River in Colorado, a thousand miles away from the nearest rainforest.
The Palestinians were angered at the time by the fact that Sharif was presented as an Israeli and that some of his songs were in Hebrew. Some said it was unacceptable that Israelis songs would be sung in Ramallah on the third anniversary of Operation Cast Lead. Others said they didn’t like the fact that a member of the Druse community, whose sons serve in the IDF, would appear at a party in Ramallah.
Al-Quds [Jerusalem] reports that Palestinians in the West Bank greeted President Mahmoud Abbas’s UN speech, in which he pledged to take Israel to the International Criminal Court if its squatter-settlements weren’t withdrawn within a year, with widespread acclaim.
For more than five years, I have been writing reports that document the dangers of the encroaching corporatization of public education through ed-tech privatization.
[...]
This article will also examine similar conflicts of interest between the National Education Association and the international ed-tech industry through the NEA’s liaisons with IBM, UNESCO, and Project BEST (Basic Education Skills through Technology), which was America’s domestic version of UNESCO’s “Study 11: New Technologies in Education,” which set up the global “information technology” (IT) infrastructure for the emerging Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Moreover, this article will also document how the NEA has been promoting a one-world education system through UNESCO’s Education for All initiative and UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition, which brings together an all-star team of Big Tech corporations that have partnered with the World Economic Forum (WEF) to usher in a techno-fascist Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Despite branding itself as a "people's summit," the 2021 United Nations Food Systems gathering prioritized the perspectives and interests of large corporations, shut out small producers, and peddled sham solutions to the intensifying global crises of hunger and climate change.
That's the view of an international coalition of food sovereignty advocates, which on Saturday issued a statement blasting the U.N. Food Systems Summit (FSS) for "paving the way for greater control of big corporations over global food systems and misleading the people through corporate-led false solutions."
By the time Covid-19 hit, Lily, 28, had been with her employer for four years and in her part-time role for the past two. Not once in those four years had her hourly wage moved above the state-required minimum in her upstate New York town— currently, $12.50. Lily was living with her parents to save money, and, because her job was in ticketing sales for professional sports, it was competitive. She hadn’t given much thought as to why she was paid so little; she was just grateful to work in the industry she€ loved.
Surviving childbirth means Rabia is one of the lucky ones. Afghanistan has one of the worst maternal and infant mortality rates in the world, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), with 638 women dying per 100,000 live births.
It used to be worse. Yet the progress made on maternal and neonatal care since the US-led invasion in 2001 is quickly unravelling.
"There is now a great sense of urgency and desperation. I really feel the weight of that," says United Nations Populations Fund (UNFPA) executive director Natalia Kanem.
The San Francisco company said the proposed settlement, which must still be signed off by a judge, resolves all claims against it without Twitter admitting any wrongdoing.
The term Metaverse first appears in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, which follows the futuristic adventures of Hiro, a pizza delivery driver for the Mafia who moonlights as a hacker, immersed in what’s described as “a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones.”
The book has long been a Bible for the priests of high tech. Stephenson is revered as a prophet, credited for inventing the concepts of avatars and cryptocurrency in addition to the Metaverse. Snow Crash was once required reading for Facebook’s management team. Stephenson was befriended by Bezos and hired by the augmented reality company Magic Leap in 2014 to help actually build the Metaverse.
Apparently, no one in Silicon Valley has a sense of irony. Snow Crash is a dystopian novel, not a utopian one.
"The first probe will examine TikTok's data protection requirements as they relate to the processing of personal data in the context of platform settings for users under age 18 and age verification measures for persons under 13," the commission informed.
The second probe will focus on transfers by TikTok of personal data to China.
In remarks ahead of the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons on Sunday, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned that humankind remains "unacceptably close to nuclear annihilation," with roughly 14,000 atomic bombs stockpiled across the globe.
"Now is the time to lift the cloud of nuclear conflict for good, eliminate nuclear weapons from our world, and usher in a new era of trust and peace," said Guterres, who observed in a statement last week that hundreds of nuclear bombs are just a "pushed button away from being launched."
From time to time during the latter parts of World War II, my staunchly Protestant grandparents accommodated Nazi POWs, who labored in the fields alongside my father. The soldiers received no pay, but were rewarded with fresh Lucky Strike cigarettes at the end of the rows they harvested. Guards were always nearby, rifles in hand, ensuring there was no drastic escape for the POWs. Years later, my grandmother, Lydia, would tell me these young Germans were always good workers and kept to themselves. She was never afraid of them, she admitted, and when I would often confront her, “but they were real live Nazis!” she would always counter with something like “they were just young kids, and didn't know any better.” To read this article, log in here or Subscribe here. In order to read CP+ articles, your web browser must be set to accept cookies.
I never liked that term, "war on terror." Terrorism is a tactic; it is not the enemy we fought every day. The term has done more to confuse us than enlighten us.
As strange as it sounds, Salafi-jihadi groups’ primary goal is to govern — they want to destroy the Muslim world’s existing governments and build their own states that knit together into a global caliphate.
This ideology is inherently antagonistic to the West. But this does not mean that attacking the West is always their top priority.
They see themselves as moving between stages, sometimes focusing on building local strength and other times initiating the fight.
Ethiopian federal forces, abetted by special forces, paramilitary groups, militia and police acting under the authority of the Amharan regional government, locked up in multiple locations hundreds of children of all ages — and even pregnant women, infants and toddlers — along with thousands of Tigrayan adults and senior citizens. These people appear to have been held in harsh conditions, systematically starved and beaten because of their ethnicity and with no judicial process or valid legal pretext. That is the definition of a concentration camp. This is a previously unreported part of an ongoing genocidal campaign led by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — ironically enough, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate — against various ethnic groups, including Tigrayans, Kimant, Gumuz, Ogaden (Somalis), Agew, Irob, Afar and Sidama, as well as Oromo people who fight to exercise the constitutional right to self-administration within a federal system.
Climate Change Minister James Shaw said Thunberg is correct to say New Zealand’s emissions haven't yet decreased.
Ten Chinese agencies, including the central bank and banking, securities and foreign exchange regulators, have vowed to work together to root out "illegal" cryptocurrency activity.
While China has been putting in place increasingly stricter rules on virtual currencies, it has now made all activities related to them illegal and sent a signal of intent they plan to get even tougher on enforcing the rules.
China's central People's Bank of China (PBoC) said it was illegal to facilitate cryptocurrency trading and that it planned to severely punish anyone doing so, including those working for overseas platforms from within China.
The National Development and Reform Council (NDRC) said it would launch a nationwide crackdown on cryptocurrency mining as it tries to phase the sector out entirely.
The report, Climate Impacts & Fishing Industry Profits From EU Fuel Tax Subsidies, which estimates the fossil fuel tax subsidies received for the entire EU fishing fleet, and features case studies from France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and The Netherlands, finds that the destructive and fuel-hungry fishing vessels benefit the most from these perverse subsidies, while the climate, fisheries, and small-scale fishers suffer the consequences.
Officials at the Electric Reliability Corporation of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the state's grid, showed its board a timeline Wednesday of events leading up to the grid’s near-collapse. That timeline showed the grid was just 4 minutes and 37 seconds away from a cascading series of events that could have left Texas in the dark for weeks — if not more.
Still more power plants went offline because of the weather. And by 1:43 a.m. Monday, the frequency of the grid was falling to dangerous levels. At about 1:51 a.m., the grid dropped below 59.4 hertz. That may not sound much different than 60 hertz, but if the frequency stayed under that threshold for 9 minutes or more, ERCOT officials said, it would trigger that cascading failure of the grid.
In fact, it was a crisis years in the making. Texas’s power grid is famously independent — and insular. Its self-contained grid is powered almost entirely in-state with limited import ability, thereby allowing the system to avoid federal oversight. It’s also an energy-only market, meaning the grid relies on price signals from extreme power prices to spur investments in new power plants, batteries and other supplies.
There’s no way to contract power supply to meet the highest demand periods, something known as a capacity market on other grids. There are no mandates or penalties compelling generators to make supply available when it’s needed, or to cold-proof their equipment for storms like the one that slammed Texas last weekend.
[...]
“Contrary to some early hot takes, gas and coal were actually the biggest culprits in the crisis,” said Eric Fell, director of North America gas at Wood MacKenzie.
One of the assumptions baked deeply into US society (and many others) is that people are largely defined by the work they do, and that work is the primary focus of life. Even in Marxist analysis, which is otherwise critical of how work is economically organized, work itself reigns supreme. This has been part of the feminist critique of both capitalism and Marxism, namely that both devalue domestic labor that has traditionally been unpaid, but even that criticism is normally framed as expanding the definition of work to include more of human activity. A few exceptions aside, we shy away from fundamentally rethinking the centrality of work to human experience.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has reportedly told her Democratic colleagues that she will not support any tax hikes on corporations or wealthy individuals, a stance that could derail the party's plan to fund its sprawling safety net and climate package.
"The right-wing Dems are carrying water for big corporations and billionaires who don't want their taxes to go up."
Ardoino, Tether’s chief technology officer, took note. Typically, when savvy cybercriminals make off with cryptocurrency, they transfer the assets among online wallets through difficult-to-trace transactions. And poof — the money is lost. Ardoino sprang into action and, minutes later, froze the assets. “We were really lucky,” he said. “Minutes after we issued the freezing transaction, we saw the hacker attempt to move out his Tether. If we had waited five minutes more, all the Tether would be gone.” Two weeks later, Tether released the money to its rightful owners. And after threats from Poly Network, the online bandit gave up the rest. The seizure pokes a hole in the long-held belief that cryptocurrency is impossible to trace. Cryptocurrency is computer code that allows people to send and receive funds, recording the transactions on a public ledger known as a blockchain, rather than retaining account holder info. Because of the lack of user data, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have been hailed as a safe haven for criminal activity. Fueled by anonymity, the shadowy industry allows hackers, tax evaders and other bad actors to launder money secretively, outside of the traditional banking system.
This outstanding, lavishly illustrated film history book definitively covers the waterfront of this shadowy brand of pictures that explores the seamy underside of life – and death. Muller is the world’s leading authority on Film Noir, who has written three nonfiction books on the genre and hosts the weekly€ Noir Alley€ series on Turner Classic Movies (TCM Noir Alley). In terms of text and layout, Muller’s revised, expanded Dark City, The Lost World of Film Noir (Running Press) is a movie history masterpiece.
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It’s time to be blunt. The right-wing political alliance anchored by the Republican party and Trumpism coheres around a single concrete objective—taking absolute power in the U.S. as soon and as definitively as possible. And they’re more than ready, even seemingly want, to destroy the social fabric of the country to do so.
Carles Puigdemont, the former separatist leader of Spain’s Catalonia region, was arrested by the Italian police Thursday night on the island of Sardinia, his office said in a statement, on an arrest warrant issued by Spain’s top court on charges of sedition.
Mr. Puigdemont, a member of the European Parliament, had been traveling to the Sardinian city of Alghero from Brussels, where he had fled to avoid the charges, first brought in 2017.
He had gone to Sardinia to attend a Catalan folk culture festival known as the Adifolk Conference, the statement from his office said. When he arrived at the airport, he was detained by the Italian police.
The circumstances under which Puigdemont was taken into custody were not immediately clear. Boye wrote on Twitter the ex-regional president was detained under a 2019 European arrest warrant, even though it had been suspended.
A Wisconsin high schooler on Friday won her lawsuit against a sheriff's deputy who allegedly threatened her with arrest if she did not take down several social media posts related to COVID-19.
U.S. District Judge Brett Ludwig ruled that Amiyah Cohoon’s free speech rights had been violated when a Marquette County deputy said she needed to remove posts saying she had COVID-19 or face possible prison time, The Associated Press reported.
Sajat was charged in January for violating Sharia laws and insulting Islam, and faces up to three years in prison if convicted under Sharia law, which has broad jurisdiction for Muslim citizens. On a live broadcast to her Instagram followers months before her arrest, Sajat revealed that she had been targeted by transphobic people and received death threats after she announced her intention to leave the faith. Her accounts, with followings into the tens of thousands, have since been deactivated following her departure from Malaysia.
Meanwhile, watch this video, in which he enthusiastically endorses the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death fatwa against Rushdie. Does he look as if he is being “framed” by a “sharp-toothed journalist”?
But will he ever come clean and apologize? Almost certainly not. Islamic supremacists never do. Whatever wrongdoing they commit is always someone else’s fault.
Both companies bowed to Russian government pressure to delete content relating to a tactical voting campaign promoted by Navalny during elections last weekend that saw Russia's ruling pro-Putin party retain its majority amid accusations of widespread ballot-rigging and a crackdown on anti-Kremlin opposition.
"If something surprised me in the latest elections, it was not how Putin forged the results, but how obediently the almighty Big Tech turned into his accomplices," Navalny said on Twitter on Thursday -- a message written from prison and published by colleagues.
We wrote to the officers of the Rajasthan Government expressing concerns about the unlawful, unnecessary, disproportionate and improperly ordered internet shutdowns in various districts of Rajasthan on September 26, 2021, purportedly ordered to prevent cheating in the Rajasthan Eligibility Exam for Teachers 2021. We highlighted that the orders for internet shutdown did not comply with the procedure prescribed under the Telecom Suspension Rules and the guidelines issued by the Supreme Court in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India. In our representation, we urged the Rajasthan Government to ensure that internet shutdowns were ordered by properly authorised officials, that such orders were prominently published, and followed the Supreme Court guidelines. We have also previously written about internet shutdowns in Rajasthan and also made a representation to the Government of Rajasthan on February 6, 2021.
Under the leadership of then-Director Mike Pompeo, the CIA in 2017 reportedly plotted to kidnap—and discussed plans to assassinate—WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange, who is currently imprisoned in London as he fights the Biden administration's efforts to extradite him to the United States.
Citing conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials, Yahoo News reported Sunday that "discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred 'at the highest levels' of the Trump administration."
The lengthy report says the spy agency was angry about the leak of some of its hacking tools that year, which the whistleblower organisation called Vault 7.
Assange is currently in Belmarsh Prison in the UK, awaiting the outcome of an appeal by the US against a British court verdict that said he could not be extradited to America to face espionage charges.
Turkish journalists are often targeted and jailed for their journalistic activities. Turkey is one of the world’s biggest jailers of professional journalists and ranked 153rd among 180 countries in terms of press freedom, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
According to the Stockholm Center for Freedom’s “Jailed and Wanted Journalists in Turkey” database, 174 journalists are behind bars in Turkey and 167 are wanted and either in exile or at large.
I don’t expect them to give a clear and convincing argument for why. Do you?
Siddiqui was arrested by the ATS, which is probing the racket, at around 9 pm on Tuesday and was brought to the agency's headquarters in Lucknow after being produced in a court, Additional Director General (ADG), Law and Order, Prashant Kumar said.
Mission Network News said the four Christian men were actually on their way to join a larger convoy set to leave Afghanistan when ISIS stopped them for interrogation on their religious status. A certain Nehemiah of the FMI revealed the four men were asked if it was true they were no longer Muslims. When the men admitted being Christians, the ISIS then killed them but released their families.
Events over the past few years have revealed several human rights violations associated with increasing advances in artificial intelligence (AI).
Algorithms created to regulate speech online have censored speech ranging from religious content to sexual diversity. AI systems created to monitor illegal activities have been used to track and target human rights defenders. And algorithms have discriminated against Black people when they have been used to detect cancers or assess the flight risk of people accused of crimes. The list goes on.
As researchers studying the intersection between AI and social justice, we’ve been examining solutions developed to tackle AI’s inequities. Our conclusion is that they leave much to be desired.
Australia is an outlier on the question of whether an artificial intelligence system (AI) can be named as an inventor on a patent application. In Thaler v. Commissioner of Patents, the Federal Court of Australia found that an AI could be an inventor. Thaler explained that, under Australian law, “if only an artificial intelligence system could be said to have created the output, but you only permit of human inventors, you may not have an inventor. Hence one may not be able to patent the invention.” Id. at €¶ 132. This result differs from other jurisdictions which have addressed the question, with the U.K. High Court, and U.S. Federal Court for the Eastern District of Virginia finding against it in, respectively, Thaler v. The Comptroller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks and Thaler v. Hirschfeld. The U.K. High Court indicated that, in cases involving putative AI inventorship, “the argument that the owner/controller of an artificially intelligent machine is the ‘actual deviser of the invention [was not] an improper one.” Thaler v. Comptroller General at €¶ 52. This is consistent with a report issued in October of 2020 by the USPTO which found that, even where an AI was involved in the invention process, activities such as choosing data to provide to the AI, developing the algorithm for the AI, or designing the architecture for the AI could still qualify a human as an inventor.
[...]
AI inventorship is an emerging area of law, and as technology continues to advance more situations such as that addressed in the Thaler cases will arise. Ultimately, addressing the challenges posed by these situations may require changes in national patent laws to establish procedures to prevent differences between jurisdictions from precluding protection. In the meantime, applicants who seek protection across jurisdictions with the inconsistent treatment of AI inventors should be aware of the pitfalls in this area and take active steps to ensure that they are not caught up.
Mr Justice Mellor gave two judgments in relation to requests expedited trials, each with a different result
In a duo of judgments in August 2021 Mr Justice Mellor was called upon to decide two requests for expedited trials. With such requests becoming more frequent in the Patents Court the decisions give a good overview of the relevant factors the court will consider when faced with such applications and how two requests, seemingly concerning the same issue, can be decided very differently.
[...]
It can be seen that the facts of these two cases are quite different. In the first decision the issue of asymmetry coupled with the fact a primary reason for expedition was to have a decision from the Patents Court to put before the German infringement court was not something which the judge considered could pass the hurdles set down in the case law. However, as shown in Advanced Bionics, where there is a real effect in the UK the court will seek to expedite cases.
It is also of note from the Abbott/Dexcom case that the court will actively seek a solution which may be amenable to both parties. The proposal of undertakings from the judge in this case is a good example of how the court takes a pragmatic approach to disputes.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the Advanced Bionics case is currently part of the shorter trials scheme (STS), where trials would usually be listed to be heard not more than eight months after the CMC. It also concerns only one patent and, given it is part of the STS, has an estimated trial length of four days. The Abbott/Dexcom case involved 12 patents in total and Abbott’s application sought expedition of a trial with an estimated length of eight to nine days. This is a hefty ask and, given speeding up one case may result in another losing its place in the court queue, one can see why the Court needs to consider the granting of expedition with care. After all, we are British and jumping the queue will only be acceptable for a good reason.
