Most mini PCs are offered with Windows 10 or 11 operating systems, but MinisForum DeskMini UM350 Manjaro Edition mini PC ships with Manjaro Linux, making it one of the rare mini PCs pre-loaded with a Linux distribution.
The mini PC hardware is pretty standard with a 35W AMD Ryzen 5 3550H quad-core processor, support for up 64GB RAM, 2.5-inch SATA and M.2 2280 SSD storage, and the only real highlights are Linux support, and relatively affordable pricing.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and special guest star Jorge Castro present Bad Voltage, in which those of the team not currently having fun on a beach in Spain dig into the latest tech news, including (but not limited to)...
OpenBSD is the Perfect OS post Nuclear Apocalypse, Multiprocess support for LLDB, porting the new Hare compiler to OpenBSD, Writing my first OpenBSD game using Godot, FreeBSD 13 on Thinkpad T460s, and more.
NVIDIA has recently open-sourced a Linux GPU driver. Does that change things for the Linux gaming community? What's the next step?
NVIDIA graphics cards are well-known for their performance. In the Linux world, they’re known for something else too—frustration with drivers. So much frustration that you may have come across a video or GIF of Linux founder Linus Torvalds referring to NVIDIA with a middle finger. That’s why it’s big news that NVIDIA has finally released an open-source kernel driver for their GPUs.
Linux users are a self-sufficient bunch, but when it comes to hardware, they’re often at the mercy of enormous manufacturers to get working drivers. While Nvidia has offered proprietary drivers similar to its Windows offerings for years, the company is changing tack and will now publish open-source GPU drivers. The initial offerings are now live on Github as well as Nvidia’s self-hosted download pages.
Ever wanted your own search engine that you can host, control and make sure your searches are not leaked or recorded?. Then it is time to check Jive Search.
Jive Search is a free, open-source search self-hosted search engine that you can run on your machine or server. The app is written using the Go programming language for better performance.
this is a quick bash hack, to set an additional fixed ip to the user’s interface, this will (brute force) OVERWRITE all mess done by network managers of various origins:
(there should be only one config file to config network settings and it is: /etc/network/interfaces, instead of 10x entities inventing it’s own standard, confusing the heck out of users, just keep the standard that is already there?)
This simple tutorial shows how to enable 3-finger & 4-finger multi-touch gestures in Ubuntu 22.04, Fedora 36 and other Linux with GNOME 40+, while the desktop by default supports only few gestures.
A server can contain many important business applications. These applications can help us to deploy even a support ticket system to better manage the technical service of a company. Today, you will learn how to install osTicket on Ubuntu 20.04.
A password manager is an application that lets you generate new passwords and store existing ones securely. It eliminates the need to create and remember strong and complex passwords yourself for all your accounts.
Depending on the device and operating system you're using, you can find all kinds of password managers. Bitwarden is a free-to-use password manager that comes with all the essential password management features.
Follow along to learn how to install and set up Bitwarden on Linux.
Do you have a reliable backup solution running on your Linux servers? If not, what’s your plan for disaster recovery? The word “disaster” alone should be enough to help you realize backups are an absolutely crucial part of your organization.
If you’re in the market for a new Linux backup solution, there’s a lesser-known solution that does an outstanding job, and it’s fairly easy to install and configure. That solution is Borgmatic. This simple, configuration-driven backup solution protects your files (and even databases) with client-side encryption and even offers third-party integration for things like monitoring.
I want to walk you through the process of installing Borgmatic on Ubuntu Server 22.04. When complete, you should feel confident your important data is regularly being backed up.
Caddy is a powerful open-source web server, written in Go, that can be used to host web applications in a production environment. Caddy features built-in automated TLS certificate renewals, OSCP stapling, static file serving, reverse proxy, Kubernetes ingress and much more. Caddy can be run as a stand-alone web server, an app server or even within containers.
In this tutorial, I’m going to walk you through the steps of installing Caddy on Ubuntu Server 22.04 and then how to create a simple, static site.
I have PowerShell set as the default shell when XFCE Terminal launches. I was not able to update the PowerShell snap package while PowerShell was running. And restarting my Terminal did not cause PowerShell to update. I needed to launch a different shell and trigger an update there.
It is possible to launch an application with command-line options directly from XFCE's Whisker Menu (Start Menu).
I needed the command-line name for Terminal. And I needed the command-line option to launch an alternative shell. In my case, I can just use Bash as the alternative shell.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache with Let's Encrypt on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, as well as some extra requirements by Apache
Wireshark is an open-source Network Protocol analyzer application and the most widely used application across the world.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Wireshark 3.6.5 on Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and LinuxMint 20.3.
Discord is a social-media platform whose users communicate with voice calls, video calls and text messages. Also, they can share media and files on both private chats and servers (Discord’s way of referring to communities), besides screen sharing, which is a good thing to be included in such a platform.
Another useful feature of Discord is that you can organize your server with categories and channels, which makes the server very tidy and makes information within it very accessible.
In this tutorial we’ll install Discord through a few methods on Fedora. This should work for any other RHEL based Linux distro, such as CentOS, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and others.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 offers significant new features for hybrid cloud organizations. Here's how to install it so you can start testing.
VLC media player is an open-source, cross-platform media player and streaming server developed and maintained by the VideoLan project. VLC can play most media formats, as well as media CDs.
It is available for most operating systems, both desktop and mobile phones.
In this article we’re installing it on Ubuntu 20.04, but the mentioned methods work in many versions of Ubuntu, and should work on your Ubuntu 22.04 as well.
In an attempt to stop piracy of Windows OS, the Microsoft developer team has come up with an idea to place a watermark in the corner until the users legally purchase a license and activate the Windows OS.
If you're running a pirated Windows copy in your system, you should have noticed the "Activate Windows" watermark notification in the lower bottom corner as shown in the below screenshot.
The Kali Linux is based on the Debian distribution. This operating system is famous mainly among young users, developers, and hackers. Many ethical hackers use the Kali Linux system for security and stability. The root password is the primary password that you use to install software, do repository updates, and perform other administrative tasks on the system. Usually, if you are the root user, it’s conventional that you will have access to change the root password, but most users, if they are new to Kali, face issues changing the password. There are very simple tips and tricks and methods that you can follow to change the root password in Kali Linux.
Inkscape is a free and Open Source professional vector graphics editor software that runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows desktop computers.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Inkscape 1.2 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04, Debian, and LinuxMint 20.3
It is suitable for web designers and it is an alternative to Adobe Illustrator. It supports many SVG features (markers, alpha blending, clones, etc..) and is easy to use.
 KDE Plasma 5.25 is packed with lots of new features, including full control of the Tablet Mode from both Wayland and X11 sessions, a smooth cross-fade effect when changing between old and new color schemes, a new “Crashed Processes Viewer” app, and new finger-following touchpad gestures for touch-friendly devices.
Also new is a configuration window for KRunner, support for configuring all the buttons of Wacom ExpressKey Remote devices, as well as a new floating mode for the panel that detaches it from the bottom of the screen to look more like a dock.
Today we are bringing you the preview version of KDE’s Plasma 5.25 desktop release. Plasma 5.25 Beta is aimed at testers, developers, and bug-hunters.
To help KDE developers iron out bugs and solve issues, install Plasma 5.25 Beta and test run the features listed below. Please report bugs to our bug tracker.
We will be holding a Plasma 5.25 beta review day on May 26 (details will be published on our social media) and you can join us for a day of bug-hunting, triaging and solving alongside the Plasma devs!
Ready for even more improvements to come to the KDE Plasma desktop? I know I am and Plasma 5.25 Beta is now available.
This is readying up for a full release for everyone on June 14th, and they will also be holding a special "beta review day" of May 26th where anyone can join in for a day of "bug-hunting, triaging and solving alongside the Plasma devs".
Details about the KDE Plasma 5.25 beta release with feature highlights, download instructions and bug reporting.
Added something to track the org.freedesktop.appearance.color-scheme property as used by the GNOME 42 Dark Style Preference setting. Screencast recorded with the new iteration of GNOME's screen built-in recorder which is quite snazzy.
If you are looking for a really cool Linux computing platform with lots of extras and a twist on traditional desktop design, check out Modicia OS Ultimate.
Italy-based Modicia Web Design and Development Company recently released its latest upgrade — Modicia O.S. 22.
You probably won’t stumble on this gem in hiding if you distro hop or browse through traditional outlets for Linux operating systems; but it is definitely a discovery worth finding. It is one of the easiest Linux offerings I have used.
Modicia Ultimate installs without hassles and has no learning curve to get started. It is a great platform for personal and small business use as well. Get it here.
The popular CentOS alternative, AlmaLinux, is now available on Oracle Cloud. AlmaLinux OS Foundation on May 5 announced its availability on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure marketplace, continuing AlmaLinux’s penetration into the cloud.
seidl is a small pint query utility designed to easily list the current publiccloud images in the terminal. Pint (Public Cloud Information Tracker) is the SUSE service to provide data about the current state of publiccloud images across all supported public cloud service providers. The public-cloud-info-client is an already existing versitale client, however I find its usage a bit bulky if it comes to the task of displaying the current images. This is where seidl complements the existing client. See for yourself:
We are happy to announce our Public Release Candidate for SUSE Manager 4.3!
It is just a few short weeks until SUSECON Digital 2022, which goes live June 7-9, and I am thrilled to be delivering the Edge keynote at the show. In support of SUSE’s mission to become the most trusted and secure infrastructure stack in the market I’m going to be discussing why our Edge computing offering stands out in enabling business applications to run where they are best suited.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6, Alma Linux 8.6 and Rocky Linux 8.6 are all out now, for various platforms.
RHEL version 8.6 – codenamed "Ootpa" – arrived on May 11, and is the latest update to 2019's RHEL 8. RHEL point releases are relatively neat affairs compared to, say, Ubuntu's short-term support releases.
8.6 is a step up from last November's RHEL 8.5. It's still based on Fedora 28 and still uses the same kernel version. In this version, you get kernel 4.18-372, which has another six months' worth of bugfixes, security updates and so on.
As the first step on our way to Fedora users, we need to get the new upstream release to the Fedora dist-git.
During the pandemic shutdown, the concept of 24/7 employee availability became normalized – especially for IT professionals, many of whom who found themselves within reach of their laptops at all times. This new normal led many IT folks to experience burnout, with stress and frustration negatively impacting the quality of their work, their personal relationships, and even their mental health.
As a leader, you can help prevent your IT team from succumbing to burnout. Here are five tips to help ensure that your team stays happy, healthy, and productive.
Hybrid work is here to stay, as workers around the globe are now insisting on that flexibility. According to a Frost & Sullivan survey of global IT decision-makers, 93 percent of business leaders expect one-quarter or more of their employees to work from home moving forward, with most likely moving between home and the office.
As we look to assess the impact of this new way of working, CIOs need to set guidelines for what their hybrid workplace will look like and determine how they can help employees and employers navigate new workflows effectively and productively. Here are some questions to help start that process.
I have read Jeremy Rifkin's book The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, which has a strong connection to open organization principles, particularly community building. Rifkin also writes about the future of green energy generation and energy use in logistics. This is the second of three articles in this series. In my previous article, I examined the Collaborative Commons. In this article, I look at its impact on energy production and supply.
Within the next 25 years, Rifkin believes most of our energy for home heating, running appliances, powering businesses, driving vehicles, and operating the whole economy will be nearly free with on-site power solar, wind and geothermal energy generation. This is starting already, through both individual and micropower plants. The payback is around two to eight years.
Cryostat is a tool for managing JDK Flight Recorder data on Kubernetes. If you have Java Management Extensions (JMX) authentication enabled on your containerized Java Virtual Machines (JVMs), Cryostat will prompt you to enter your JMX credentials before it can access the JDK flight recordings on your target JVMs. On the Cryostat console, the Automated Rules, Recordings, and Events tabs will require you to enter your JMX credentials if you want to view existing flight recordings or perform a recording operation on a target with JMX authentication enabled. When monitoring multiple target JVMs with Cryostat features such as automatic rules, you may want Cryostat to remember and reuse your JMX credentials for each target connection.
The SaaS architecture checklist is a series of articles that cover the software and deployment considerations for Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. This article discusses architectural approaches for separating and isolating SaaS tenants to provide multi-tenancy, the provisioning of services to multiple clients in different organizations. For the approaches, the type and level of isolation provided are compared, along with their tradeoffs.
The approaches laid out in different sections of the article are not mutually exclusive and can be combined to provide the levels of separation and isolation necessary to satisfy the requirements of your SaaS customers and markets. We'll also discuss how to incorporate existing single-tenant applications into a SaaS environment.
Running iotop (from "System" menu), there is a message:
CONFIG_TASK_DELAY_ACCT not enabled in kernel, cannot determine SWAPIN and IO
This problem arrived with the 5.15 kernel. It is configured with CONFIG_TASK_DELAY_ACCT, but is not activated. It has to be activated with a kernel commandline parameter. Apparently, this change was made because this feature imposes a very slight performance overhead on I/O.
Oh man, I recompiled the kernel yet again! Having very recently become enamoured of lz4, I saw that zram only has lzo and lzo-rle compression enabled. So, have also enabled lz4.
If you want to put EasyOS into Ventoy, it used to work -- only just -- now doesn't.
The Ventoy website has a tick alongside EasyOS, meaning it works. However, there is this problem...
When Easy is on its own on a USB-stick, at first bootup, the ext4 working-partition is expanded to fill the drive, then it is populated. That population includes 'vmlinuz', 'initrd' and 'easy.sfs' copied from the boot-partition to the working-partition.
 After getting comfortable with Ubuntu and getting to a point where I could find my way around and install tools that I used, I felt like I was outgrowing the simplicity. I needed something a little more robust, something more feature-packed. And that led me down the rabbit hole many Linuxers know all too well.
There are tons of distros and over the next few years, I hopped from one to another, just trying to have a feel of the developers’ mindset and goals when designing the operating systems. I dailied many of the popular ones from Manjaro, Fedora, PearOS, CutefishOS, Linux Mint, and many more.
Linux can be exciting once you nail the basics and know a few tools that cut across these distros. This, aided by the robust community forums out here means that whatever issue you run into, you’re often times mere clicks away from a solution. Also, should you not tinker with the system too much, you might never break it at all. That’s just how stable some of these distros are.
This is a collection of the mascots of all the Ubuntu releases so far.
You may have noticed that every Ubuntu release has a version name and codename. The codename is composed of two words that start with the same letter. The first word is an adjective, and the other one is (usually) an (endangered) species.
 A platform game (sometimes known as platformer or jump ‘n’ run games) is a video game genre and subgenre of action games in which the core objective is to move the player character between points in a rendered environment.
Platform games are characterized by their level design featuring uneven terrain and suspended platforms of varying height that requires use of the player character’s abilities, such as jumping and climbing, to navigate the player’s environment and reach their goal.
Let’s explore the 10 games. For each game we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screen shot of the game in action together with links to relevant resources.
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces that the first beta release of PostgreSQL 15 is now available for download. This release contains previews of all features that will be available when PostgreSQL 15 is made generally available, though some details of the release can change during the beta period.
Have you received “A polite ping, still working on this bug?” message on one of your Gerrit submissions? You can simply send an arbitrary reply to avoid the patch being abandoned within a month. Here we discuss more about Pootle bot, which is one of the QA (Quality Assurance) tools for the LibreOffice QA team to manage old submissions.
I decided to try installing Webmentions on my WordPress site. Ran into an issue that I set it up while my cache plugin was caching every page on site. Since I am not in a rush, I ran my tests with the pages that had not yet been cached when I was installing everything.
This is the start of a series of posts where I'm going to share some insights on how to adjust a QML application to get the most out of qmlsc, the QML Script Compiler. In contrast to previous posts, I won't talk about the abstract architecture or the high level picture.
This is the second installment in the series on how to adjust your QML application to take the maximum advantage of qmlsc. In the first post we've set up the environment and taken an initial measurement. I highly recommend reading that one first.
When you install and configure the PaloAlto firewall, when the firewall boots up for the first time, it does the bootstrapping process. PaloAlto uses the settings defined in the bootstrap files, including the init-cfg.txt and bootstrap.xml under the config folder to configure the initial state of the firewall.
SENSE is a compact multi-sensor board supporting measurement of air quality, sound, light intensity, temperature, proximity, etc… and designed by Zack Seifert, a seventeen-year-old electronics enthusiast and president of his school’s robotics team.
I got ”inspired” by my writing of the previous blog post, and wrote in a channel about my experience some time ago. So why not also do a blog post about doing a blog post :)
So… I was planning to use GitLab’s Pages feature via my Hugo fork as usual to push it through. So like, concentrate on writing and do a publish, right, like in good old times? I did so, but all I got both locally and in remote pipeline was stuff like…
Since I was unable to travel for a couple of years during the pandemic, I decided to take my new-found time and really lean into Rust. After writing over 100k lines of Rust code, I think I am starting to get a feel for the language and like every cranky engineer I have developed opinions and because this is the Internet I’m going to share them.
The reason I learned Rust was to flesh out parts of the Xous OS written by Xobs. Xous is a microkernel message-passing OS written in pure Rust. Its closest relative is probably QNX. Xous is written for lightweight (IoT/embedded scale) security-first platforms like Precursor that support an MMU for hardware-enforced, page-level memory protection.
In the past year, we’ve managed to add a lot of features to the OS: networking (TCP/UDP/DNS), middleware graphics abstractions for modals and multi-lingual text, storage (in the form of an encrypted, plausibly deniable database called the PDDB), trusted boot, and a key management library with self-provisioning and sealing properties.
One of the reasons why we decided to write our own OS instead of using an existing implementation such as SeL4, Tock, QNX, or Linux, was we wanted to really understand what every line of code was doing in our device. For Linux in particular, its source code base is so huge and so dynamic that even though it is open source, you can’t possibly audit every line in the kernel. Code changes are happening at a pace faster than any individual can audit. Thus, in addition to being home-grown, Xous is also very narrowly scoped to support just our platform, to keep as much unnecessary complexity out of the kernel as possible.
Andrew 'bunnie' Huang has posted an extensive review of the Rust language derived from the experience of writing "over 100k lines" of code.
I came across an article on SoraNews24 titled "Japanese netizens vote for the top 20 anime they want an on-air sequel to."
The cars are identical, so it's mostly a test of ability. They nominally have teams, but no one takes any notice of that, so again it's focussed on drivers and what they can do.
In 2016, the Global Future Councils of the World Economic Forum (WEF) posted a video entitled “8 Predictions for the World in 2030,” which infamously forecasted a technocratic New World Order in which “[y]ou’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to ponder how WEF oligarchs plan to roll out “sustainable development” policies which will ration consumer goods in a global “sharing economy” that employs transient “gig” workers who will be rendered into propertyless serfs under a techno-communitarian rendition of neo-feudalism. But how will the globalist technocrats of the WEF sway the virtual peasant class to be happy with their permanent state of digitally indentured servitude?
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (microcode_ctl, rubygem-nokogiri, and vim), Mageia (htmldoc, python-django, and python-oslo-utils), Red Hat (container-tools:2.0, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, and pcs), SUSE (ardana-barbican, grafana, openstack-barbican, openstack-cinder, openstack-heat-gbp, openstack-horizon-plugin-gbp-ui, openstack-ironic, openstack-keystone, openstack-neutron-gbp, python-lxml, release-notes-suse-openstack-cloud, autotrace, curl, firefox, libslirp, php7, poppler, slurm_20_11, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (bind9, gnome-control-center, and libxrandr).
Kubernetes, despite being widely regarded as an important technology by IT leaders, continues to pose problems for those deploying it. And the problem, apparently, is us.
The open source container orchestration software, being used or evaluated by 96 per cent of organizations surveyed [PDF] last year by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, has a reputation for complexity.
Witness the sarcasm: "Kubernetes is so easy to use that a company devoted solely to troubleshooting issues with it has raised $67 million," quipped Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at IT consultancy The Duckbill Group, in a Twitter post on Monday referencing investment in a startup called Komodor. And the consequences of the software's complication can be seen in the difficulties reported by those using it.
CISA has released an analysis and infographic detailing the findings from the 112 Risk and Vulnerability Assessments (RVAs) conducted across multiple sectors in Fiscal Year 2021 (FY21).
The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) has released a security advisory that addresses a vulnerability affecting version 9.18.0 of ISC Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND). A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause a denial-of-service condition.
An assertion failure can be triggered if a TLS connection to a configured http TLS listener with a defined endpoint is destroyed too early.
A surprising number of websites include JavaScript keyloggers that collect everything you type as you type it, not just when you submit a form.
A surprising number of the top 100,000 websites effectively include keyloggers that covertly snag everything you type into a form.
I'm starting a new job on June 1st! By that time I'll have been unemployed for a little less than two months. It's the longest period I have ever involuntarily gone without a job, but also the first time I've been unemployed and only looking for high skill jobs.
Aside from the slight hassle with the unemployment agency described earlier it's been a generally rewarding experience. I've had the opportunity to rest, for one. I've done a lot of programming, especially in the first couple of weeks. The kind of projects that had been bottled up and waiting for some free time to be realised.
Capital One decided in favor of Batteries Plus Bulbs in my credit card dispute. It isn’t safe to depend on the bank to rule correctly.
I supplied a mountain of evidence to prove that I was cheated by the owner of the Batteries Plus Bulbs location in Gurnee, Illinois when he sold me a defective car key and deprogrammed my car’s remote control when he failed to fix it, and that he then proceeded to threaten to call the police on me when I asked for my money back, forcing me to spend even more of my money taking my car to a Buick dealer to get the job right.
As I observe the results of the 2022 primary elections in several U.S. states, it seems that the Overton Windows continue to move to both extremes. Not long ago, the Overton Window of the Democrats and that of the Republicans largely overlapped. Now it seems that these windows have moved farther apart, with no overlap in the middle. This trend began during the Obama era, with the beginning of the Tea Party movement on one side, and the Occupy Wall Street movement on the other, as they both increasingly demanded more radical solutions. At first, they were laughed off by the establishment politicians as fringe elements. Soon, many of their ideas have become mainstream. Now both sides of the aisle are digging in their heels and refusing to compromise. Those who do, such as Liz Cheney and Joe Manchin, are swiftly condemned as "traitors" -- not to their country but to their party.
For most of the U.S. history, the politics have been dominated by a bipartisan paradigm. Federalists and Anti-Federalists. Whigs and Democrats. Republicans and Democrats. The modern concept of political parties, however, is thought to have originated in Great Britain. In the Westminster parliamentary systems, the executive branch is chosen from among the majority and the minority party is called the "Queen's loyal opposition." In the U.S., the presidency is semi-directly elected by the voters (technically, elected by the electors of state electoral colleges) regardless of the Congressional majority. This sets the government up for confrontational and adversarial relationship with Congress, if the party of the president is not in majority in either chamber of Congress (most of the Obama presidency was marked by the Tea Party Republican obstructionism).
I might revise and republish some or all of these here, but the problem is that my thoughts and opinions often tend to evolve or shift over time. So for now I am preserving these Tumblr sites for the sake of historicity.
Some companies such as Facebook and Twitter do not presently comply with Chinese regulations, and their platforms are blocked by China’s national firewall. Other companies operate their platforms in China but fragment their user bases. For instance, Chinese tech giant ByteDance operates Douyin inside of China and TikTok outside of China, subjecting Douyin users to Chinese laws and regulations, while TikTok is blocked by the national firewall. Users of one fragment of the platform are not able to interact with users in the other. Finally, companies can combine user bases but only subject some communications to censorship and surveillance. Tencent’s WeChat implements censorship policies only on accounts registered to mainland Chinese phone numbers, and, until 2013, Microsoft’s Skype partnered with Hong Kong-based TOM Group to provide a version of Skype for the Chinese market that included censorship and surveillance of text messages. Platforms with combined user bases often provide users with limited transparency over whether their communications have been subjected to censorship and surveillance due to Chinese regulations.
Previous research has demonstrated a growing number of companies that have either accidentally or intentionally enabled censorship and surveillance capacities designed for China-based services on users outside of China. Our analysis of Apple’s filtering of product engravings, for instance, shows that Apple censors political content in mainland China and that this censorship is also present for users in Hong Kong and Taiwan despite there existing no written legal requirement for Apple to do so. While WeChat only implements censorship on mainland Chinese users, we found that communications made on the platform entirely among non-Chinese accounts were subject to content surveillance which was used to train and build up WeChat’s political censorship system in China. TikTok has reportedly censored content posted by American users which was critical of the Chinese government. Zoom (an American-owned company based in California) worked with the Chinese government to terminate the accounts of US-based users and disrupt video calls about the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Recently, there has been some discussion among the geminauts about meaningful conversation and technology. I think nomadpenguin (see references) has excellent points in that 1. 'vapid conversation' has always been a thing, 2. 'vapid conversation' is useful...
I'm going to change some router settings tonight at 18:00-18:30 UTC. It will hopefully take less than that. My domain warmedal.se will be unreachable for a little time. Please bear with me.
Microsoft will revise its licensing deals and make it easier for cloud service providers to compete, its president Brad Smith said on Wednesday, as the U.S. software giant sought to dodge a lengthy EU antitrust probe into its cloud computing business.
Today, Public Knowledge released my new paper, “A Lesson From the Landmark AT&T Breakup: Both a Sector-specific Regulator and Antitrust Enforcers Were Needed.” The paper traces how antitrust enforcers and a regulatory agency with jurisdiction over telecommunications, each working independently in pursuit of its own defined mission, produced a competitive telecommunications industry with the attendant benefits for competitors and consumers and society – lower priced and higher quality goods and services. A similar dual approach of a regulatory agency with jurisdiction over Big Tech and the vigorous application of existing and enhanced antitrust laws aimed at the industry can do the same for Big Tech.
For the past several years, a number of macro-level public policy debates have been swirling around Big Tech. One debate has been about whether the antitrust laws, perhaps with some strengthening or new provisions specifically designed to reach Big Tech, are sufficient to address the dominance of companies such as Facebook (Meta), Google, Amazon, Apple, and some others. Indeed, whether Section 2 of the Sherman Act, antitrust’s main anti-monopolization law, can be effective for at least part of meeting this challenge is currently being tested in antitrust cases against Facebook (Meta) and Google.
Today, we’re happy to announce our newest white paper, “A Lesson From the Landmark AT&T Breakup: Both a Sector-specific Regulator and Antitrust Enforcers Were Needed,” by Public Knowledge Senior Fellow Al Kramer.
The paper discusses how the work of regulators and antitrust enforcers, working independently and with separate mandates, nevertheless complemented each other, to lead to the breakup of the AT&T Bell phone monopoly in 1984—marking a win for consumers and telephone competitors alike. The paper offers a deeper understanding of the history of the breakup, providing a blueprint for how both regulation and antitrust enforcement will be necessary to develop key remedies for curbing the problems Big Tech creates for consumers and innovation today. The paper also demonstrates how antitrust and regulation in the technology sector complement each other and proposes that regulation can lay the groundwork for both more effective antitrust enforcement and the advancement of other public interest benefits.
Today, Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) 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 follows Sen. Michael Bennet’s (D-CO) nearly identical bill of the same name.
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 Rep. Welch 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.
One of the biggest hidden challenges facing the software and technology world is the evolving conflict between old electronics vendors and the new software-defined universe. It’s arising because of patents embedded within international standards. We think it needs fixing because it especially affects Open Source.
It may come as a surprise to find that some supposedly “open“ standards – including those ratified by standards development organizations (SDOs) like ISO, CEN and ETSI – can’t be implemented without going cap-in-hand to the world’s largest companies to buy a license. This is because both the SDOs and regulators allow so-called SEPs – “standard-essential patents” – to be tolerated due to the legacy approach of standards in hardware contexts.
Built for his son from the scraps of daily life — matchboxes, beef bones, nutshells, and plaster — Paul Klee’s hand puppets harbour ghosts of human feelings, fragile communications from a world most adults have left behind. Kenneth Gross compares these enchanted objects to angelic figures, in Klee’s artworks and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, helping us dance as well as wrestle with their visions of innocence.