Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia hold these rights to be self-evident...
Hi List,
It's a bit late, but here is mesa 21.2.6. Since 21.3.0 is now available, I think this will be the last 21.2 release (there should be 21.3.1 next week), barring any serious regressions in 21.2.6.
Being that it's the night before a holiday here in the States, I'll let the press delve into all of the gory details of what's in here :) I'll see you all again as release manager next year for 22.0.
Cheers, Dylan
With Mesa 21.3 having released last week and its first point release due next week, Mesa 21.2.6 has been published as likely the last update to that N-1 series for these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.
Mesa 21.2.6 ships with various Intel OpenGL/Vulkan driver fixes, a few RadeonSI fixes, continued compatibility improvements for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan, a few ACO compiler back-end fixes, and other minor fixes throughout. The Zink changes are perhaps most significant and then mostly the other usual AMD and Intel fixing churn.
Wireshark as the very useful and powerful open-source packet analyzer for networking and other communication protocols is out with a shiny new release.
Wireshark 3.6 adds support for importing captures from text files based on regular expressions, much improved RTP player support, adding of USB Link Layer reassembly, improvements to the user's guide and documentation, support for decoding the Vector Informatik Binary Log File (BLF) file format, many protocol updates, and a lot of new protocols are now supported by Wireshark.
More as a reminder to myself, but possibly also helpful to other people who want to use Firefox on a tablet running Debian...
Without the below adjustment, finger gestures in Firefox running on a tablet result in image moving, text highlighting, etc. (operations related to copy+paste). Not the intuitively expected behaviour...
Tmux is one of the most used and useful terminal tools for Linux and Unix-like operating systems. Mostly system admins, server admins, and power Linux users use this wonderful terminal tool for more productivity and efficiency. The term Tmux is the shortened form of Terminal multiplexer that can handle multiple terminal tabs and windows simultaneously on the Linux system. The inbuilt system generates a serial number to monitor and look up each active Tmux window on the system. Though this fascinating tool was first released in 2007, from then the demand for this tool is now high. Installing and using the Tmux terminal tool is easy for both Linux server and desktop distributions.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to install WPS Office on Ubuntu 20.04/Debian 11 desktop systems. WPS Office is a lightweight, feature-rich comprehensive office suite with high compatibility. Capable of handling texts in Writer, Presentation, Spreadsheet and PDF files. It serves as a handy and professional consultant to help you improve work efficiently.
WPS can be used on Linux as perfect replace of LibreOffice and more so, saves the Linux enthusiasts of having to rely on running external Windows machines just for the purposes of working with documents only.
Aliases are one of the most interesting features provided by a Bash shell, and probably the last to be regularly adopted. Usually, they are intended as a way to create shortcuts to execute the most used commands followed by the options that are not assumed by default from the command itself. However, there is a more appealing way to write them that boost our productivity when executing either frequent or infrequent tasks.
Learn the commands that will fully Upgrade your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Desktop or Server to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS set to launch in April 2022. However, even before that if anybody would like to upgrade to test the same, here are the steps to follow.
Here in this tutorial, we will learn the simple command line and Graphical steps on how to upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04 from the previous LTS 20.04 version.
Kubernetes can be installed and configured in a variety of ways, including on personal computers, physical servers, virtual machines, and as a cloud service. We will learn how to install a single node Kubernetes cluster using Minikube in CentOS Linux.
For the purpose of this guide, we will install Minikube on CentOS 7 natively running on top of the virtual machine layer. Before installing Kubernetes, you need to have a basic understanding of Kubernetes and its architecture and containers. Please refer to our previous article attached below to know about the concepts.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Eclipse IDE on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Eclipse is an open-source integrated development environment (IDE) that helps programmers develop software applications and software components by providing developers with tools to compile code, and many more. It supports many plugins to enhance the capabilities to use for other programming languages development environments such as PHP, C++, and JavaScript.
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 the Eclipse on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a virtualization module for the Linux kernel that turns it into a hypervisor. How can I install KVM with bridged networking, setup guest operating system as the back-end virtualization technology for non-graphic Debain Linux 9.x/10.x server?
You can use KVM to run multiple operating systems such as Windows, *BSD, Linux distribution using virtual machines. Each virtual machine has its private disk, graphics card, a network card and more.
RVM- Ruby Version Manager is a tool meant to use the command line for installing and managing the various ruby versions easily. Here we see the commands for installation of RVM on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal fossa.
In Linux, Firefox has this bad habit of wanting to update itself when you’re not ready to perform that task. And it will not let you open a new tab or window until you allow it to apply the update. I find it very annoying. There are any number of knobs you can tune to disable this feature in about:config, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll work as expected. And if you use more than one Firefox profile, as most power users do, you’ll have to tune about:config for each profile. In this post, I’ll show you how to do it system-wide, and it’s guaranteed to work.
With the default setting, Firefox will download and install the update in the background, and then throw up the prompt shown here when you want to open a new tab or window. That means you won’t be able to open that new tab or window until you agree to restart Firefox. And that almost always happens when I’m in the middle of doing something very important and not ready to restart Firefox.
What if there was a command which would let you, in an easy-to-read format, view all of the hardware in your Linux system? Welcome to lshw, the great tool often overlooked even by seasoned Linux professionals.
Wondering how to set hostname in Docker Compose? I'll show you that.
Syft is a CLI utility that generates a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for container images. An SBOM is a catalogue of dependencies used by your image. It gives you visibility into the “materials” that form your image’s filesystem.
Producing an SBOM can help you identify overly complex package supply chains that put you at risk of dependency confusion attacks. Distributing an SBOM alongside your image informs users of what lies below the surface. This provides a useful starting point when tightening supply chain security.
Syft is developed by Anchore which also offers a complete container scanning engine. The Syft CLI is capable of extracting package lists from images using popular operating systems and programming languages. Both Docker and OCI images are supported.
Docker volume and bind mounts are used to bind directories on the host OS to locations in the container’s file system. While they’re commonly used to mount entire directories, you can also use them to symlink individual files.
Running Docker inside Docker lets you build images and start containers within an already containerized environment. There are two possible approaches to achieve this depending on whether you want to start child or sibling containers.
Access to Docker from inside a Docker container is most often desirable in the context of CI and CD systems. It’s common to host the agents that run your pipeline inside a Docker container. You’ll end up using a Docker-in-Docker strategy if one of your pipeline stages then builds an image or interacts with containers.
Build up an army and speed around the skies in your air ship in Sky Fleet, the action-based tower defense game arriving on Steam on December 17.
You build up your squad, place down various defences and engage in fast-paced real-time shoot-outs, while speeding around various floating islands. At the same time you need to deal with resources, so it plays out quite like an RTS, as you and enemies compete for them to try and assault their stronghold.
Along with a major upgrade to the base game, Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle, Season One now has native Linux support. This game was originally available via itch.io and Newgrounds, where it was quite popular, with the Steam version bundling all content together.
Update version 5 added Linux support, new animations, Steam Cloud support, improved performance for low-spec machines and various other improvements.
Iron Gate are showing off more of what's to come with the next major upgrade for Valheim, along with a small content patch. First up we have patch 0.205.5 which is out now and it includes a new armour set, along with something stirring in the swamps - oh no, it's scary enough.
The free and open source Godot Engine recently had support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution merged into the code, ready for the next big release. A wonderful case of open source tech meeting together.
What is FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR)? Put simply: a fancy upscaler. FSR allows you to bring down the rendering resolution and have FSR boost it up to a higher resolution, giving you a clear picture. The result is that you should see better performance than simply using the native resolution - something 4K users seem quite happy about.
They might not actually be the "best" but still pretty good. The Humble Best of Sandbox Bundle is live now. This time around is a pretty interesting mix, both with games that have Linux native builds and others that work just fine with the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer.
Probably one of the more exciting releases of Proton lately, with lots of what was previously in Proton Experimental now in the main release with Proton 6.3-8 out now. Be sure to check out our full Steam Play guide if you need more info.
A big addition is the start of support for BattlEye games. Before getting overly excited though, this is just the start of it with only Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord and ARK: Survival Evolved confirmed to be supported by Valve. This is what was previously announced, with developers only needing to get in touch with BattlEye to have it turned on.
We also have the older CEG DRM now hooked up and working, bringing with it more classics working that relied on it.
On top of that there's even support for NVIDIA DLSS for games that use DirectX 11 and 12, although it still needs you to make some manual adjustments to turn it on for now which includes using this launch option PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 %command% and also setting dxgi.nvapiHack = False in a DXVK configuration file.
Designers and website developers may sometimes need to check WCAG color contrast to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities.
Without using an online website each time, Linux has a stylish GTK4 app “Contrast” which allows to check whether the contrast between two colors meet the WCAG requirements.
The app has a simple user interface that displays one color as background and another as font color of the text. By clicking on the double arrow icon between two color codes, it reverses background color as text font and font color as background.
The compact Linux distribution Alpine has gained the latest LTS Linux kernel with the update to version 3.15, but fans must say goodbye to support for the MIPS64 architecture.
The release is the first in the 3.15 stable series and, as well as the 5.15 LTS Linux kernel, received a raft of updated tools and components, including the 16.13 LTS version of Node.js (version 17 is also included) and GNOME 41.
There is also some initial support for UEFI secure boot on x86_64, but the time has come to say goodbye to the MIPS64 port.
"The architecture is EOL," notes the release blog. "The mips64 builder is gone. There is no way we can build any packages anymore, we can no longer fix any security issues, so it's prudent to officially decommission mips64."
MX Linux 21 was officially unveiled last month while introducing a new Fluxbox edition. However, the Advanced Hardware Support (AHS) ISO was not a part of it.
Recently, MX Linux announced the availability of MX Linux 21 AHS and a new AHS repo for existing MX Linux 21 users.
In this article, let us explore more about it.
Endless OS is a Debian-based Linux distro that focuses on bundling several important applications and resources to help make the most out of your computer without needing an internet connection.
It is primarily tailored for education and for users who do not have constant access to the internet. And, if you are connected to the internet, there are tools to help you browse the web and stay in touch with friends/family.
And, their latest release, Endless OS 4.0, is a Long-Term Support version that comes with several improvements. Let us take a brief look at it.
Rebuilt on the base of Debian 11 Bullseye, Endless OS 4.0 is here with improved app grid navigation, fast user switching, and many other improvements.
The developers of Endless OS have just announced the release of Endless OS 4.0. It’s a major update and it focuses mainly on helping users to take advantage of their internet connection when they suppose to have it.
What's new in this major release of Endless OS?
Added to the Arch Linux install media back in April was Archinstall for easy and quick installations. It's worked very well for basic Arch Linux installs in a matter of minutes while with Archinstall 2.3 now available it has even more features.
For the last eight years, Red Hat Ceph has been at the heart of Workday’s storage strategy, in a collaboration that has spawned upstream contributions from the Workday and Red Hat engineering teams that the entire community benefit from.
This is the second article in a two-part series about an authorization cache we developed for the Envoy open source proxy as a part of Google Summer of Code 2021. The first article in the series showed the design of our cache, based on Proxy-Wasm and integrated with Red Hat 3scale API Management. In this part, we focus on the implementation aspect of the design described in the previous article (check it out if you haven't already).
Container technologies have created a de facto industry standard for developing, deploying, and shipping applications. Containers make it possible to provide more maintainable and self-sustaining runnable units that can be directly managed using cluster orchestrators such as Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift.
This article is for developers interested in using intelligent package management to control the quality of container images and provide more robust containerized runtime environments. Our discussion is based on Project Thoth for Python, one of the world's most popular programming languages. The ideas we present can be generalized to other language ecosystems.
Your company can have the most innovative tech on the block, but it won’t amount to much if you don’t have a solid team behind you that feels supported. The Great Resignation is at least somewhat reflective of people finally realizing their worth and proves how important it is for leaders to show employees how much they are appreciated.
Showing gratitude is especially pertinent this year as many employees work from home and don’t get to experience the camaraderie of in-office relationships and support they may have previously enjoyed. Sharing your thanks with employees helps to boost morale. And gratified employees will take more pride in their work.
When you say "automation," some IT people picture job-stealing robots. IT leaders will need to know how to allay that worry in the months and years to come. But here's a piece of good news: Some forward-looking IT leaders are finding automation actually has talent retention benefits, as David Egts, chief technologist, North America Public Sector, Red Hat, recently wrote.
"Automation is an effective way to help businesses become more resilient, but it also helps retain the key talent you have and attract new talent to up-level your team," Egts notes. How? Teams that have made progress on the automation journey are seeing benefits including an increased sense of belonging, for example:
"Many organizations have gone from siloed automation to automation communities of practice that span these silos. Instead of tasks being manually executed or even automated in isolated pockets of an organization, an automation community of practice lets everyone share their best ideas and build on each other’s work.
So rather than belonging to the employee, the processes belong to the community of practice with authorship attribution back to the author. Plus, the community contributors identify with the community because their contributions and spans of influence visibly and positively impact the entire organization in ways they couldn’t do as individuals," said Egts.
Enable Sysadmin has published hundreds of articles; these are the favorites sysadmins turn to month after month.
This post will be short. Recent FreeIPA versions contain ACME server implementation, which makes TLS certificate issuance a breeze.
3.18.1 fixes a number of bugs and adds support for glibc-2.34, and for new platforms x86/FreeBSD and amd64/FreeBSD. Debuginfo reading is faster, and Rust demangling has been improved. For PPC64, ISA 3.1 support has been completed, and some newer ARM64 and S390 instructions are also supported. See the release notes for details of changes. Note, 3.18.0 had no formal release — it was pulled at the last minute due to a packaging problem.
Purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work. It’s responsible for services running in Fedora and CentOS infrastructure and preparing things for the new Fedora release (mirrors, mass branching, new namespaces etc.). The ARC (which is a subset of the team) investigates possible initiatives that CPE might take on.
Ten million Arduino UNO boards have been shipped since its launch in 2010, and the Arduino team has designed the Arduino UNO Mini Limited Edition to celebrate the impressive milestone.
The Arduino UNO Mini has basically all the same features as the original Arduino UNO but uses a quarter of the area, and features a USB Type-C port for programming the board with the Arduino IDE.
Here’s another ESP32 3D printer controller board with the Phi MainBoard 5LC powered by both an ESP32-S3-WROOM module and a Microchip SAME51 Cortex-M4F microcontroller, and providing Ethernet and WiFi connectivity.
Designed by Likha Labs from the Philippines, Phi MainBoard 5LC is pre-loaded with RepRapFirmware firmware running the Duet Web Control interface that allows users to upload G-code files, configure settings, start jobs, control the device, and monitor prints. Besides 3D printers, the developers explain the board can also be used to drive other digital-fabrication equipment, such as CNC machines.
The Raspberry Pi CM4 may only have a one PCIe x1 Gen 2 interface, but this has not stopped ALFTEL from designing Seaberry, a mini-ITX carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with eleven slots and sockets making use of the single 5 Gbps PCIe Gen 2 interface.
The board also offers two SATA ports, one Gigabit Ethernet port, one RJ45 console port, two HDMI ports, a micro SD card slot, two USB 2.0 ports, as well as the usual 40-pin GPIO expansion header, besides the PCIe x16 slot, a PCIe x1 side slot, and M.2 and mPCIe sockets.
Imperas Software Ltd., the leader in verification solutions for RISC-V, and Codasip, the leader in customizable RISC-V processor IP, today announced that Codasip has adopted Imperas reference designs and the Imperas DV solution for Codasip IP. Codasip has invested heavily into processor verification to deliver the industry’s highest quality RISC-V processors.
Codasip has included Imperas golden reference models in its DV testbenches to ensure an efficient verification flow that accommodates a wide range of flexible features and options while scaling across the entire roadmap of future cores to enable rigorous confirmation of functional quality.
Released in mid-August 2021, the LibreOffice 7.2 office suite series comes with many new features and improvements, such as native support for Apple M1 machines, improved interoperability with the MS Office document formats, and dozens of UI enhancements for a better user experience.
LibreOffice 7.2.3 is here today one and a half months after the LibreOffice 7.2.2 point release to fix even more bugs and security issues. A total of 112 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility are included in this update.
The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 7.2.3 Community, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 7.2 family targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, which is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. This version includes 112 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.
LibreOffice 7.2.3 Community is also available for Apple Silicon from this link: https://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/7.2.3/mac/aarch64/.
For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.
LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, the result of years of development efforts with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud.
Our team has finished translating the LibreOffice Draw Guide 7.1. As usual, it was a team effort, namely: translations by Petr KubÃâºj, ZdenÃâºk Crhonek, Radomír Strnad, Ludmila Chládková; text corrections by Marcela Tomešová, Martin Kasper, Eva Kmochová, VÃâºra Dvoà â¢áková; localized pictures by Roman Toman; and technical support from Miloš à  rámek. Thanks to all of the team for their work!
Educational games are games designed to teach people, typically children, about a certain subject or help them learn a skill as they play. Sometimes this type of software is known as games edutainment because they combine education and entertainment.
This type of software aids the ‘normal’ learning process, either by helping the individual to absorb new information, or as a support for recalling information already learned. Educational programs, especially those for the youngest students, are often designed with the idea of ‘learn through play’. Many children are easily bored, and they are much more likely to be attentive if they find the activity or task to be enjoyable.
It is the European Week for Waste Reduction, a week that is dedicated to promoting the reuse of products and materials and to helping save resources and reduce waste in everyday life. The FSFE joins in with the new initiative "Upcycling Android" - an initiative to help saving resources by reusing one of our most valuable devices of our daily life, our phones.
Every year, manufacturers produce 1.5 billion phones worldwide - and unfortunately, probably almost as many are thrown away after what is usually a far too short hardware lifespan. The short lifespan of these phones often stems from so-called "software obsolescence", the situation in which users are faced with the dilemma of either buying new hardware or living with outdated software. The environmental consequences of these short hardware lifespans can be dire. To help users in overcoming this problem, with Upcycling Android we enable people to upcycle Android phones with Free Software. Every time we keep using our current phone instead of buying a new one we help avoid the production of new phones and the growing disposal of e-waste.
The north-German state of Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch to open-source software, reports Mike Saunders from LibreOffice.
By the end of 2026, Microsoft Office is to be replaced by LibreOffice on all 25,000 computers used by civil servants and employees (including teachers), and the Windows operating system is to be replaced by GNU/Linux.
Apparently it is a done deal and already codified by the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament.
The state's digital minister Jan Philipp Albrecht said that part of the transition to open source is already in the works, and pointed out that 90 percent of state administration conferencing is conducted using the open source video conferencing platform Jitsi.
The German state of Schleswig-Holstein has decided that it's done with closed, proprietary Windows and is moving to open-source Linux/GNU by the end of the year 2026.
The first step will be in the form of migrating around 25,000 computers to The Document Foundation's LibreOffice from Microsoft's Office suite of applications and then eventually moving all these devices over to Linux by dumping Windows entirely. These 25,000 computers are going to be "used by civil servants and employees (including teachers)" essentially implying that a large part of the state-run administration and the education sector will be embracing the open-source way.
Last week NVIDIA announced the Image Scaling SDK as an open-source, cross-platform GPU image upscaling implementation that with their own hardware makes use of DLSS. Following the brief exposure over the past week, NVIDIA Image Scaling SDK 1.0 has been formally christened.
The NVIDIA Image Scaling SDK can work on the likes of Intel and AMD Radeon hardware via the SDK's generic compute shaders that are MIT licensed. Integrating the NVIDIA Image Scaling SDK does require integration on part of the game/engine developer.
When I started writing, I did it primarily for the purpose of documenting for myself. When it comes to programming, I'm incredibly forgetful, so I began to write down useful code snippets, special characteristics, and common mistakes in the programming languages I use. This article perfectly fits the original idea as it covers common use cases of formatting when printing to console from C++.
As top-level team leads, project directors to the Foundation, and core team members, we are actively collaborating to establish next steps after the statement from the Rust moderation team.
Over recent years, legislation has started to emerge to protect consumers from unethical behaviour from IoT vendors. Far too many smart devices didn’t charge for a subscription to the online platform that made the device ‘smart’. As a result, manufacturers had a perverse incentive to end-of-life product in order to sell you their next great smart thing.
A good example of this was the Revolv home hub: Google’s Nest division acquired the firm behind the $300 hub. Two years later, they shut the platform down, leaving consumers with a pile of useless electronics, orphaned from the platform. Uproar ensued, resulting in the US FTC investigating. Fortunately for Revolv owners, the FTC ruled in their favour and made Google compensate hub owners.
Sonos owners will recall a similar kerfuffle around their ‘recycle mode’ that killed the device when one traded up for a newer product, among many negative press stories around the length of product support.
Existing and planned regulation for IoT is increasingly having manufacturers state up front how long they will support the product for. Whilst some legislation is focussed on the longevity of product security updates, others focus on length of platform support.
This is good: it will allow consumers to make informed decisions about the smart products they buy. I, for one, don’t expect to be replacing a smart door lock after a couple of years simply because the manufacturer wanted to sell me a newer version.
A now-patched vulnerability affecting Oracle VM VirtualBox could be potentially exploited by an adversary to compromise the hypervisor and cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition.
"Easily exploitable vulnerability allows high privileged attacker with logon to the infrastructure where Oracle VM VirtualBox executes to compromise Oracle VM VirtualBox," the advisory reads. "Successful attacks of this vulnerability can result in unauthorized ability to cause a hang or frequently repeatable crash (complete DoS) of Oracle VM VirtualBox"
Single Sign-On and zero trust networks depend on securely passing identification details back and forth between users, identity providers, and service providers. SAML is the glue that lets that happen.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (busybox, getdata, and php), Mageia (couchdb, freerdp, openexr, postgresql, python-reportlab, and rsh), openSUSE (bind, java-1_8_0-openjdk, and kernel), SUSE (java-1_7_0-openjdk), and Ubuntu (icu).
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) developed the OSI model in 1984.
OSI model is an acronym for Open System Interconnect.
The OSI model is a model that allows us to categorize network communications and divide different activities of the network in seven conceptual layers. This model tries to explain how the data of an application passes through the device and out in the physical network using the seven conceptual steps or layers.
In simpler words, it explains how one application performs different steps to communicate its data to another application running on a different device.
The OSI model was created for creating a common industry standard, which could have helped inter-operability between different vendors.
However, this model did not gain a lot of popularity. So it is used as a reference or a teaching tool today. The OSI model does not directly match the networking systems we use in reality, but it is still useful because it describes the several processes used in electronic communication.
Security researchers have discovered a new remote access trojan (RAT) for Linux that keeps an almost invisible profile by hiding in tasks scheduled for execution on a non-existent day, February 31st.
Dubbed CronRAT, the malware is currently targeting web stores and enables attackers to steal credit card data by deploying online payment skimmers on Linux servers.
The newly-agreed German government coalition has called for a Europe-wide ban on public facial recognition and other biometric surveillance. This echoes the core demands of the Reclaim Your Face campaign which EDRi has co-led since 2020, through which over 65 civil society groups ask the EU and their national governments to outlaw biometric data mass surveillance.
Today, 24 November 2021, the new German government announced their highly-anticipated coalition deal, including the strongest commitments seen so far in Europe to “rule … out” “biometric recognition in public”. They further called to “reject comprehensive video surveillance and the use of biometric recording for surveillance purposes”.
The center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the environmentalist Greens and the business-focused Free Democrats (FDP) jointly emphasised the vital importance of anonymity in public as well as online. Their statement echoes the demands of over 65 groups in the Reclaim Your Face campaign, co-led by EDRi.
The People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL), with IFF’s legal assistance, had filed an application in the Supreme Court (SC) seeking directions to ensure that authorities do not prosecute individuals under S.66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act, 2000), which the SC had struck down in Shreya Singhal vs Union of India (2015). On Aug 8th, 2021, SC issued notice to all States/UTs and High Courts. 8 HCs and 6 States have replied to the application and they demonstrate the widespread non-compliance with the decision in Shreya Singhal. We await responses from other States/UTs and High Courts.
[...]
In March 2015, S.66A was declared unconstitutional by the Hon’ble Supreme Court in Shreya Singhal v. Union Of India as it violated the right to freedom of expression guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India. The Court found that S. 66A was vague and could be arbitrarily interpreted to penalize even innocent speech. Significantly, the Court found that the provision was not ‘severable’ i.e., no part of the section could be saved and the provision as a whole was declared unconstitutional. This means that the provision was void ab initio i.e was deemed to never have existed on the statute books. The effect should have been that Courts ought to have dismissed all pending cases under S.66A, and authorities ought not to have instituted fresh cases under S. 66A.
However, the story did not end there. In 2018, a study by Apar Gupta and Abhinav Sekhri highlighted that authorities continued to prosecute individuals under S.66A even after Shreya Singhal. Subsequently, in 2019, PUCL, one of the original petitioners in Shreya Singhal, approached the Supreme Court seeking directions to ensure the implementation of Shreya Singhal. In February 2019, the Supreme Court directed the Union of India to ensure compliance with its decision by making available copies of the judgment to Chief Secretaries of States/UTs across the country. The Chief Secretaries, in turn, were directed to sensitise police departments across the country.
ccess Now and the #KeepItOn coalition are demanding that the government of Burkina Faso reinstate internet access for all, and without exception.
It has now been five days since authorities shut down the internet on November 20, citing vague “public safety” and “national defence” reasons. Today, the Kaboré government has extended the blackout until November 27.
“The #KeepItOn coalition is outraged that the government of Burkina Faso shut down the internet,” said Felicia Anthonio, Campaigner and #KeepItOn Lead at Access Now. “Authorities made a bad decision earlier this week when they disconnected millions, but today’s 96-hour extension truly reflects their blatant contempt for human rights.”
