Docker introduced Docker Extensions, Docker Desktop for Linux and the acquisition of Nestybox at DockerCon 2022. The new features received a mixed reception from industry analysts and developers.
Palo Alto-based Docker unveiled the new additions to the company's platform at this week's DockerCon 2022 virtual event. Docker Extensions includes one-click pluggables from JFrog, Red Hat and VMware and allow developers to integrate additional tools and new functionality to Docker Desktop with more ease.
Zerto's latest update to its Zerto Platform adds support for Linux data recovery, an important upgrade for Kubernetes users, and new features for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform users.
The Zerto 9.5 update, now generally available to Zerto customers, brings new features to help companies build cyber resilience and data recovery. Headlining additions in the 9.5 update include support for immutable data in Microsoft Azure, a new Debian Linux virtual appliance for managing Zerto and support for Google Cloud Platform storage.
Fedora 36 has been released and instead of looking at the flagship GNOME edition of Fedora, today I'm taking a first look at Fedora 36 i3 Spin.
Looking at a distribution that is meant for gaming and is made by one the leaders in Linux Gaming industry... Glorious Eggroll. I personally think this distribution will be BETTER than Steam OS on release.
In late 2020, Apple debuted the M1 with Apple’s GPU architecture, AGX, rumoured to be derived from Imagination’s PowerVR series. Since then, we’ve been reverse-engineering AGX and building open source graphics drivers. Last January, I rendered a triangle with my own code, but there has since been a heinous bug lurking:
The driver fails to render large amounts of geometry.
Spinning a cube is fine, low polygon geometry is okay, but detailed models won’t render. Instead, the GPU renders only part of the model and then faults.
[...]
Traditional immediate mode renderers render directly into the framebuffer. They first run the vertex shader for each vertex of a triangle, then run the fragment shader for each pixel in the triangle. Per-vertex “varying” data is passed almost directly between the shaders, so immediate mode renderers are efficient for complex scenes.
There is a drawback: rendering directly into the framebuffer requires tremendous amounts of memory access to constantly write the results of the fragment shader and to read out back results when blending. Immediate mode renderers are suited to discrete, power-hungry desktop GPUs with dedicated video RAM.
In part 1 I gave a brief introduction on what mesh and task shaders are from the perspective of application developers. Now it’s time to dive deeper and talk about how mesh shaders are implemented in a Vulkan driver on AMD HW. Note that everything I discuss here is already available as public information in open source driver code. The goal of this blog post is to elaborate on how mesh shaders are implemented on the NGG hardware in AMD RDNA2 GPUs, and to show how these details affect shader performance. Hopefully, this helps the reader better understand how the concepts in the API are translated to the HW and what pitfalls to avoid to get good perf.
In part 1 I gave a brief introduction on what mesh and task shaders are from the perspective of application developers. Now it’s time to dive deeper and talk about how mesh shaders are implemented in a Vulkan driver on AMD HW. Note that everything I discuss here is already available as public information in open source driver code. The goal of this blog post is to elaborate on how mesh shaders are implemented on the NGG hardware in AMD RDNA2 GPUs, and to show how these details affect shader performance. Hopefully, this helps the reader better understand how the concepts in the API are translated to the HW and what pitfalls to avoid to get good perf.
Portable Document Format – PDF is a popular and widely used file system for emailing, sharing, and printing documents. You may need to install a suitable Linux pdf editor for basic editing because Linux does not have a default pdf editor. There are many options available when the question comes to editing pdf in Linux, but the choice is very limited if you compare it with adobe acrobat for Windows and macOS. That’s why here I have reviewed both free, open source, and paid Linux pdf editors for fulfilling the requirement of advanced and basic options.
Chatty is a free open-source Twitch chatting app that runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS. It has a retro look that resemble classic IRC clients.
Chatty has a built-in streaming support which allows users to watch, and stream their plays with one click.
The app is built using Java programming language, and it offers packages for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
cURL is an excellent tool for network communications, it stands for 'client URL.' Virtually every device uses cURL on the globe that connects to the Internet. The widest use of cURL is to download files from a remote server in the terminal.
The initial phase of connecting to a server for any sort of communication is waiting for a response. The delay can occur due to a large variety of reasons, some of them being load on the server, network bandwidth, latency, jitter etc.
If the delay is higher than what you would like to wait, you can specify a 'timeout' duration.
The Fedora project will not include any package that doesn't comply with Fedora licensing policies in the official repositories. So, the Fedora users rely on third-party repositories like RPM Fusion to install propriety drivers, software and codecs that Fedora doesn't want to ship due to legal and licensing reasons. In this guide, we will see what is Fedy and how to install third-party software and multimedia codecs with Fedy in Fedora Linux operating systems.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LEMP Stack on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, LEMP Stack is a combination of free, open source software. The acronym LEMP refers to the first letters of Linux (Operating system), Nginx Server, MariaDB (database software), and PHP components to build a viable general purpose web server.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the LEMP Stack on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
Imagine you're in the middle of a cloud migration or a penetration test, and you have to enable an existing account on over 400 hosts as quickly as possible. It sounds like a big problem, but it can be easy with automation.
First things first. You must define the exact requirements you have for the task. This is the step that will help and guide your code for automation. Don't do this in code yet.
Although Windows is the most widely supported operating system, Linux is a great alternative. Thankfully, you don't have to choose between them. In this guide, we're going to show you how to dual boot Linux and Windows to get the best of both worlds — whether that's with Windows 10 or the newer Windows 11.
Icinga is an open-source network monitoring tool that was initially created as a fork of the Nagios monitoring tool back in 2009.
Icinga checks the availability of servers and network devices such as switches and routers and sends a report to sysadmins about any failures or downtime. It also provides comprehensive data which can be visualized and used for reporting.
Its scalability and extensibility make it possible to monitor small and large network environments across several locations.
In this guide, you will learn how to install the Icinga network monitoring tool on OpenSUSE Linux.
Today we are looking at how to install Xemu, Xbox Emulator, on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
By default, every command that you execute on your terminal is stored by the shell (command interpreter) in a certain file called a history file or shell command history. In Bash (the most popular shell on Linux systems), by default, the number of commands persisted in the history is 1000, and some Linux distributions have 500.
Creating nested directories when the parent directory does not exist is... impossible. But that also does not mean that you need to create the parent directory first and invoke mkdir again.
There is a faster way to achieve this; you can use the -p flag with mkdir command.
mkdir -p parent_dir/child_dir/nested_child_dir Using the -p flag will let mkdir know that it is okay to make a parent directory if it does not exist yet, and then create a nested child directory.
PHP Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. With this dependency manager, you will be able to manage the libraries that your web application requires.
One of the examples where the usefulness of Composer is best shown is when our project depends on many external libraries. Thanks to Composer, we will be able to add them, to eliminate them and to update them in a fast and simple way.
The operation of PHP Composer is quite similar to the one we give to the package managers for Linux, like APT or DNF.
The main reason for considering other mail servers like Modoboa over the likes of Gmail and Yahoo is the unlimited customization associated with your mailbox.
The Modoboa open-source mail server makes it possible to create a mailbox from a unique username and a registered domain name (username@domain-name.extension). Since Modoboa is written in Python, you will need the latest Python version installed on the Linux system intended to run/host this mail server.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MySQL on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, MySQL is an open-source relational database management system. It is developed and supported by Oracle Corporation. MySQL is available on other platforms and operating systems including Linux, Unix, Mac, and Windows.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MySQL database server on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
Today you will learn how to install FreePBX and Asterisk on Ubuntu 22.04
Asterisk is an Open-Source VOIP server to facilitate business, and other organizations’ communication in terms of Voice calls, Voicemail, call recording, interactive voice response, and conferencing calling.
The system is managed through a web browser where we create
First, we'll need some packages:
dnf install pesign mokutil keyutils (Package names are the same on most major distros, though of course your package manager won't be the same.)
Next, we create a key for signing. This uses efikeygen, from the pesign project; I prefer efikeygen because it also creates an NSS database that will be useful for pesign later.
The iPhone and Linux go together like strawberries and mustard. Apple has no interest in supporting Linux and most open-source developers hate Apple and its proprietary platforms. But some iPhone users also use Linux, and while no one would expect the same tight integration that the iPhone and Mac share, it would at least be nice to exchange the occasional file between devices.
Linux was actually ahead of Apple on smartphone integration, at least on Android. Since 2013, KDE Connect has let Linux users wirelessly share clipboards, notifications, files, URLs, text messages, and more between their Android phones and Linux desktops.
There’s no sound from the device itself, all it outputs is a USB serial connection. Software instruments connect to the grid to receive button presses and control the lights via the widely-supported protocol Open Sound Control protocol. I am using monome-rs to convert the grid signals into MIDI, send them to Bitwig Studio and make interesting noises, which I am excited to share with you in the future, but first we need to talk about software packaging.
Monome provide a system service named serialosc, which connects to the grid hardware (over USB-serial) and provides the Open Sound Control endpoint. This program is not packaged in by Linux distributions and that is fine, it’s rather niche hardware and distro maintainers shouldn’t have support every last weird device. On the other hand, it’s rather crude to build it from source myself, install it into /usr/local, add a system service, etc. etc. Is there a better way?
Thought it was time to share some news on Maps again.
After the 42.0 release I have been putting down some time to do some spring cleaning in Maps to slim down a little bit on the code.
This would also mean less stuff to care about later on when porting to GTK4.
First we have the “no network” view.
We used to use the network monitor functionality from GIO to determine if the machine has a usable connection able to reach the public internet to avoid showing incomplete map tile data (where some parts might be cached from earlier, while others are missing).
Unfortunately there has been some issues with some setups not playing well NetworkManager (such as some third-party VPN software). So we have had several bug reports around this over the years.
Robert McQueen, CEO of the GNOME Foundation, unveiled new initiatives aimed at attracting new users and developers to the GNOME platform. It is noted that in the past, the GNOME Foundation focused on increasing the relevance of GNOME and technologies such as GTK, as well as accepting donations from companies and individuals close to the free and open source ecosystem. New initiatives are aimed at attracting people from the outside world, getting to know the project from third parties, and looking for new opportunities to attract investment in the GNOME project.
PHP 8.1 is available off the shelf in openSUSE Tumbleweed. I will shortly prepare a PHP 8.1 / tumbleweed version of the maintaina Horde containers. These will initially be broken due to some outdated language constructs. As PHP 7.4 will EOL by the end of this year, I decided not to bother with PHP 8.0 and ensure compatibility with PHP 8.1 right away, while staying compatible with PHP 7.4 until end of year. This is not fun. PHP 8.x provides several features which allow for more concise code. I will not be able to use them.
I’m excited to be keynoting SUSECON Digital 2022 on June 7-9 2022. As we count down the days, I’m happy to share a little of what to expect from the event in a few short weeks.
AlmaLinux 8.6 was made available within 48 hours after the release of the upstream Red Had Enterprise Linux 8.6. Here’s what is new!
AlmaLinux has emerged as a popular option for Red Hat Enterprise Linux‘s free version since CentOS’s entry into the “stream.” This is the OS’s fourth stable release, proving the AlmaLinux Foundation’s commitment to delivering on its promises.
The new stable AlmaLinux 8.6 release for x86_64, aarch64, and ppc64le architectures are ready for production installations and power the computing needs and workloads. So let’s see what’s new in this release.
fedora 36 It is now available as the latest version of the community distribution sponsored by Red Hat, which is also the great pioneer of the technological advancement of Linux. This time we find more of the same, but updated, so GNOME 42 stands out, the establishment of Wayland by default for the NVIDIA driver and the update of compilers and interpreters for various programming languages.
We begin the compilation of novelties with the most obvious: the presence of Gnome 42. The close relationship between GNOME, Fedora and Red Hat is no secret, so the distribution has de facto played the role of reference for the desktop environment. here the implementation is pretty pure (there are only a few cosmetic changes), so to a certain extent it can be said that it invites the user to try the experience that it offers by default.
In accordance with our operating system upgrade policy, we should migrate our servers to Debian Buster.
As discussed in the previous post, one of the most important and successful services provided by the Wikimedia Cloud Services team at the Wikimedia Foundation is Toolforge. Toolforge is a platform that allows users and developers to run and use a variety of applications with the ultimate goal of helping the Wikimedia mission from the technical side.
As you may know already, all Wikimedia Foundation servers are powered by Debian, and this includes Toolforge and Cloud VPS. The Debian Project mostly follows a two year cadence for releases, and Toolforge has been using Debian Stretch for some years now, which nowadays is considered “old-old-stable”. In accordance with our operating system upgrade policy, we should migrate our servers to Debian Buster.
Ubuntu 22.10 daily builds are now available to download.
These are snapshot images produced daily for testing and development purposes, but there’s nothing to stop you from using them as your main OS. In fact, Ubuntu daily builds are a quick and easy way to check in on the state of development during the course the 22.10 development cycle.
It’s May 12 that I write this so development is only a few weeks in. As such, there’s not much “new” to see in the release codenamed “Kinetic Kudu”. The early part of developer is spent getting imports synced, tooling updated, and the requisite tech plumbed in and hooked up so all is working well.
Then all the interesting stuff comes.
Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu Daily Build ISO Now Available For Download
If you want to try Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu then you download the daily build ISO from the website of Ubuntu. Ubuntu 22.10 will be available on October 20th, 2022.
It has been a few weeks since Ubuntu 22.04 LTS launched.
Without a surprise, we got the codename for the next version upgrade (non-LTS release) as “Kinetic Kudu” (Kudu referring to the African species of Antelopes, Kinetic hinting at the energy/movement).
Recently, the first daily build of Ubuntu 22.10 also went live for the early testers and developers.
Ubuntu Core, the Ubuntu flavour optimised for IoT and edge devices, has now available a Beta version for the new UC22 release. You can start using Ubuntu Core 22 Beta if you’re interested in testing the new features of the upcoming GA release.
There’s nothing quite like the love little critters bring into our lives, but it’s not always easy to ensure their environment is fully optimized for their needs. That’s where maker Jamie Munro’s reptile cam project comes into play. With the help of a Raspberry Pi, he’s able to monitor his pet lizards in real-time and track important factors that can impact their well-being.
This isn’t Munro’s first foray into the world of microelectronics. In fact, he has a website that doubles as a portfolio showcasing a broad history of both microelectronics and programming projects that back up the level of quality seen in this reptile cam project.
The reptile monitor system consists of a web-based GUI that provides live stats about their environment as well as a live video feed of the enclosure. It relays information such as current temperature, humidity levels, and even has options to configure power outlets connected to things they use like heaters and lights.
Masking tape makes for a great label as its weak adhesive does not tend to leave visible residue and names can be easily sketched onto its surface, albeit quite slowly. To expedite this process, Hackaday.io user michimartini decided to design and build a machine that writes labels automatically.
The device is essentially a drum plotter, which rotates a cylinder around an axis while moving the writing head back and forth to draw. For the X axis, michi used a basic NEMA17 stepper motor in conjunction with a CNC shield connected to an Arduino Nano. And rather than creating a custom horizontal Y axis from scratch, the machine instead utilizes a repurposed linear assembly extracted from an old DVD drive carriage, while a limit switch assists in homing the toolhead. Finally, a small servo motor holds the writing utensil so that it adequately contacts the masking tape.
Firefox 100 doesn't offer new, must-have features, yet Jack Wallen explains why this iteration of the browser might be its best ever.
The open source web browser Firefox has hit a major milestone with release number 100, reports Jack Wallen.
So I enabled support for up to 16384 columns in Calc by default some time ago, but just getting it to work was not necessarily the end of the work. Making Calc have 16 times more columns means that any operation that works on entire columns is suddenly 16 times slower, or even worse. Similarly this could easily lead to 16x more memory used. So the support not only needs to work, but it also needs to be usable.
It theory adding a number of empty columns to the end of a spreadsheet should not make a difference, but in practice it does. With 1024 columns it is not as necessary to ignore those empty columns as it is with 16k, and a lot of the code dates back to the times when Calc supported even fewer colums (256?), where a being little inefficient here or there didn't show. But now it suddently did.
For example, if you protect or hide all unused columns until the end of the spreadsheet, then hitting the right arrow key on the last accessible cell makes Calc check all cells to the right for whether it's possible to go into them. And checking whether a column is hidden requires searching the list of column information, which is not trivial (it's compacted in order not to waste memory). The barely noticeable cost of this with 1024 columns got large enough to cause noticeable delays. Fortunately the ColHidden() function is smart enough to return the first and last column in the compacted range where the flag is equal, the code doing the cursor navigation just up until now didn't bother using that information, but now it needed to do so.
LibreOffice’s infrastructure team is responsible for maintaining the hardware, virtual machines and services that enable the wider community to develop, market, test, localize and improve the software. The public infrastructure is powered by around 50 kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs) spread across four hypervisors, plugged to an internal 10Gbps switch, hosted at Manitu in St. Wendel (Germany), and managed with libvirt and its KVM/QEMU driver. The virtual disk images are typically stored in GlusterFS volumes – distributed across the hypervisors – except for some transient disks (such as cache) where the IOPS requirement is higher and the redundancy less important.
As 2021 marked another “pandemic year” with only online events, the infrastructure team helped too make these a pleasant experience from home. Notably, they deployed a Pretalx instance to manage conference submissions and the schedule, and put in place a streaming backend based on Jitsi/Jibri/RTMP during the annual conference, thereby providing several participation options to chose from.
'Get plugged into education!' with Moodle will be the first project in a series of hackathons part of a joint initiative launched by The United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) and the Directorate-General for Informatics of European Commission (DG DIGIT). These hackathons will aim to improve and contribute to open source projects that have an impact on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).
More than a month after preparing the default compiler for openSUSE Tumbleweed to be switched to GNU Compiler Collection 12, the latest snapshot passed openQA and is making GCC12 the default compiler for the rolling release.
A complete rebuild of snapshot 20220510 is syncing with the mirrors and should soon be a zypper dup away from users changing their rolling release’s default compiler. Being a complete rebuild, it might take some time to sync with the mirrors, but developers can soon have the newest GCC for their development.
We strive to make the concepts and impacts of software freedom accessible to everyone. We are thus so pleased to show you our new video! This video (deftly narrated by our own Executive Director, Karen Sandler) explains what we do. Our charity has a very specific focus — and so many outside of the FOSS community don't know yet how our work defends their rights. Software freedom belongs to everyone, and we seek to reach all kinds of people.
Google's Flutter development framework finally achieved its cross-platform aspirations with a stable release of Linux and macOS support.
Flutter 3.0, announced at Google's I/O developer conference, provides developers with a way to write apps for the six major consumer-facing platform targets using the Dart programming language. And that's not to mention embedded devices.
"With Flutter 2.0, we shipped web support, and just recently we shipped support for Windows," said Tim Sneath, director of product and user experience for Flutter and Dart, in an interview with The Register.
"And now with Flutter 3.0, we finally reached the point where we have completed that journey. We have all of the six major platforms – iOS, Android, web, Windows, macOS, Linux – all supported as stable parts of the Flutter framework."
For macOS, that means Intel and Apple Silicon support, via Universal Binary builds, as well as Apple Silicon support in development. Thanks to Dart's support for Apple Silicon, compilation is faster.
Some time ago, I wrote a post about integrating Qt’s associative containers with the fancy new C++ features, range-based for loops with structured bindings.
Artificial intelligence has emerged as the defining technology of our era, as transformative over time as the steam engine, electricity, computers, and the Internet. AI technologies are approaching or surpassing human levels of performance in vision, speech recognition, language translation, and other human domains. Machine learning (ML) advances, like deep learning, have played a central role in AI’s recent achievements, giving computers the ability to be trained by ingesting and analyzing large amounts of data instead of being explicitly programmed.
Deep learning is a powerful statistical technique for classifying patterns using large training data sets and multi-layer AI neural networks. Each artificial neural unit is connected to many other such units, and the links can be statistically strengthened or decreased based on the data used to train the system. But such statistical methods are not equally suitable for all tasks. Tasks that are particularly suitable for machine learning, exhibit several key criteria, such as the availability of large data sets of well-defined input-output pairs for training ML classifiers, - e.g., carefully labeled cat, not-cat pictures for cat recognition classifiers, and english-french document pairs for machine translation algorithms.
[...]
The paper introduces LIME, - Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations, - a novel method for explaining the predictions of any ML classifier in order to increase human trust and understanding. “By explaining a prediction, we mean presenting textual or visual artifacts that provide qualitative understanding of the relationship between the instance’s components (e.g. words in text, patches in an image) and the model’s prediction.”
Let me briefly summarize how LIME works.
Using LIME, you can approximate the behavior of any machine learning model, no matter how complex, with a series of simpler local models whose predictions are similar to those of the original model. And you can select the local models by perturbing or varying the inputs, seeing how the predictions change, and then selecting the simpler local models whose predictions are closer to the prediction of the original model. Being considerably simpler, the local models should be understandable and make sense to humans. Thus, while understanding the original machine learning model is a daunting task, it should be much easier to understand the simpler local models whose predictions are similar to the original.
MediaTek has introduced the Genio platform for AIoT devices, and unveiled the first chip of the Genio family with the Genio 1200 Octa-core Cortex-A78/A55 processor with a 4.8 TOPS NPU, 4K video support, and designed for premium AIoT products.
The chip is manufactured with a 6nm processor, is said to consume less than 8W, supports dual 4Kp60 video output and up to 48MP @ 30 fps video capture, and WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2 and 5G connectivity can be added through add-in chips. Targets applications include Smart Home appliances, HMI, industrial IoT, robotics, and more.
For more than 20 years, the typical image of personal music included an Apple iPod and wired headphones. But that picture has slowly been changing. Now you’re more likely to see a smartphone and wireless earbuds. Apple and Google closed the coffin on two items this week to permanently change that picture. Apple announced it is discontinuing the iPod, and Google announced its new Pixel 6A smartphone will not have a headphone jack.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, postgresql-11, postgresql-13, and waitress), Fedora (curl, java-1.8.0-openjdk-aarch32, keylime, and pcre2), Oracle (gzip and zlib), Red Hat (subversion:1.10), SUSE (clamav, documentation-suse-openstack-cloud, kibana, openstack-keystone, openstack-monasca-notification, e2fsprogs, gzip, and kernel), and Ubuntu (libvorbis and rsyslog).
Adobe has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
Apparmor is an LSM (Linux Security Module) that allows us to restrict applications’ capabilities with per-program profiles. It supplements the traditional Unix Discretionary Access Control (DAC) model by providing Mandatory Access Control (MAC). It can be seen as an easier alternative to NSA’s SELinux.
In this article, I go over the basic setup of apparmor. The credits for the documentation go to the Arch Wiki.
In April, the Indian government dropped a hard pill to swallow for VPN services and their users.
According to India's new data retention law, security software firms will be forced to keep users' data for up to five years. What's more, providers will need to be ready to hand over this information to authorities upon request, too.
The news sparked a chasm of discontent across the VPN industry, privacy advocates groups and internet users.
"One way or another, it will have a negative impact on people’s privacy and digital security," Laura Tyrell, Head of PR at Nord Security - the company behind the popular NordVPN - told us.
While, in a tweet, digital rights NGO Access Now wrote: "VPNs are necessary in a country with rampant shutdowns and surveillance, and no data protection law. Authorities must stop what they’re doing, and consult with security researchers, civil society, and cybersecurity experts on what to do instead."
Access Now, Free Press, and UltraViolet delivered nearly 5,000 petition signatures to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) calling on the agency to initiate a privacy and civil rights rulemaking. With Alvaro Bedoya’s confirmation to the FTC, at long last the agency has the votes to create new data protection rules.
How data is collected, processed, and shared has a direct impact on economic opportunities and falls squarely within the FTC’s authority. Companies use personal data to enable and even perpetuate discriminatory practices against people of color, women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, religious minorities, people with disabilities, and other marginalized groups.
“Bedoya’s confirmation is a win for human rights,” said Willmary Escoto, U.S. Policy Analyst at Access Now. “He supports robust data minimization principles and understands how big data impacts vulnerable communities. For years we have called on Congress to protect our data, to no avail, and now the FTC can finally move forward with a rulemaking that defends the rights of marginalized people in the U.S. and around the world.”
The European Union Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AI Act) aims to promote the uptake of trustworthy AI and, at the same time, protect the rights of all people affected by AI systems. While EU policymakers are busy amending the text, one important question springs to mind: whose rights are we talking about?
In the current proposal, the EU AI Act fails to address the impacts that AI systems have on non-EU citizens and people on the move, such as people fleeing from war. In fact, the proposal does not include the manifold uses the EU puts to AI systems in the migration context. From purported “lie detectors” to biometric identification systems, EU migration policies are more and more underpinned by the use of AI which the EU AI Act seeks to regulate.
In this blog post, we present three steps policymakers should take to make the AI Act an instrument of protection for people on the move. These steps are based on our proposed amendments on AI and migration developed by Access Now jointly with EDRi, PICUM, Petra Molnar, and Statewatch.
Today, Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) introduced the “Digital Platform Commission Act.” The bill would create an independent agency to serve as a digital regulator for the technology sector in order to enhance competition, protect consumers, and promote civic discourse and democracy. The bill draws on regulatory concepts first articulated by Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld in his 2019 book, “The Case for the Digital Platform Act,” as well as advocacy by Public Knowledge President and CEO Chris Lewis, Public Knowledge Policy Counsel Alex Petros, Competition Policy Director Charlotte Slaiman, and former Public Knowledge President Gene Kimmelman. Public Knowledge commends Sen. Bennet for creating a digital regulator to be the “cop on the beat” to serve the public interest and foster a healthier, more competitive digital marketplace.
While I've still been active with elpher development, my phlog has slipped off the radar a bit. And that's okay! Slow internet and all that.
Besides elpher, much of my hobby programming projects have taken a bit of a back seat over the last few months. Some of this is because of work, which has been a bit more intense as we move back to the office; but it's also due to the fickle winds that drive how I spend my free time.