Pine64's last update of 2022 brings word of a new version of its PineTab FOSS-driven tablet after chip shortages effectively killed the first generation.
As per the December update from the Hong Kong kit vendor, the PineTab is officially dead. As we mentioned a year ago, the original PineTab was the larger sibling of Pine64's PinePhone Pro FOSS-driven smartphone. The company says:
PineTab's death was, in some part, a choice on our part as decisions were made to allocate resources to secure PinePhone's availability throughout late 2020 and early 2021.
Component supplies gradually improved this year, and the PineBook Pro laptop resumed shipping back in August, although in limited numbers. The PinePhone Pro is also trickling out. A recent tweet from Adam Pigg, a developer of Jolla's Sailfish Linux-based phone OS, shows a PinePhone Pro in its optional keyboard case, working with an unfinished port of Sailfish. Another tweet this month shows one running Kali Linux. The hardware is out there – we saw one of this pairing at last month's Ubuntu Summit, although we were sadly unable to ask the owner about it.
Now that the spec of the PineTab tablet is looking rather dated, the company is giving up on it and moving straight on to a second-generation device. This will use the same Rockchip RK3566 SoC as the company's Quartz64b single-board computer and the PineBook Pro laptop. This means a 2GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A55. There will be two models, one with 4GB RAM and 64GB flash, and a higher-end one with 8GB/128GB. The device will include both a 2MP forward-facing camera and a 5MP rearward-facing one, a microSD slot, and a headphone socket. The device will be 9mm thick.
The Linux command line is a powerful tool used to control and interact with the operating system. It is a text-based interface that allows users to enter commands and execute programs, as well as view and edit files. The command line provides access to a wide range of Linux features and commands, including system utilities and applications, network configuration, file manipulation, and more.
It is often used by system administrators, developers, and power users who need to perform complex tasks quickly and efficiently. What follows are eight main reasons why to learn Linux command line.
This is a GitHub project that installs virtual machines for more than 300+ spins of Linux, Windows, and macOS!
What are loop devices? This is a question that comes up a lot these days, especially from Ubuntu users. This is due to the fact that Snap packages are mounted as loop devices.
Let's see what kind of fun Christmas-themed apps and desktop themes are available from KDE's Discover! This video was somewhat inspired by the Vaporwave-theme I made for elementaryOS.
This week, Linux Out Loud chats about festive-themed games.
Welcome to episode 44 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.
The wlroots version of xfwm4-wayland now has partial support for the wlr-foreign-toplevel protocol.
I have now declared feature parity with the libweston version, so I have merged the wlroots branch into the wayland branch.
Link to the git repository: https://github.com/adlocode/xfwm4/tree/wayland
Regards adlo
Brief: SSH is a popular remote protocol for making secure remote connections. In this guide, we explore some of the most popular SSH clients for Linux.
SSH (Secure SHell) ranks as one of the most popular and reliable remote protocols for connecting to remote devices such as servers and network equipment, including routers and switches.
This release introduces read and write for JPEG XL images, read-only support for WebP images, support for embedded ICC profiles in exported WebP files, support for the JFIF (JPEG File Interchange Format) file extension, as well as support for updating existing pictures in Piwigo exports.
Also new in Darktable 4.2 is a Sigmoid display transform module that can be used as a drop-in replacement for the filmic and base curve modules, two new algorithms in the highlight reconstruction module (inpaint opposed and segmentation based), and a new pipe routine for the duplicate manager to calculate previews.
If you use a general purpose media player to access your music collection, you’re missing out on a wealth of features that can improve your listening experience. That’s why we recommend a dedicated music player. Linux offers a huge range to choose from which is why we put together this roundup to help save you time. But there are always new projects coming along.
Musicly is billed as a simple and elegant music player. It’s cross-platform software written in JavaScript. It’s based on Electron and React, put together with Electron React Boilerplate.
This is free and open source software.
4Pane is a multi-pane file manager for Linux that allows for customized layout, and provides quick access to traditional desktop conveniences as well as common Linux tools. 4Pane aims for speed over visual effects, and places the way you want to work above all else. In honor of its name, I've got a list of my four favorite features of this fine file manager.
At 10:00 CET (9:00 UTC) on December 21, Daniel live-streams the release presentation on twitch. This paragraph will later be replaced by a link to the YouTube version of that video.
Free VMware Workstation 17 Player for Ubuntu Linux is the latest version and upgrade of VMware 16 Player. If you are still using the older version then here in this guide we can learn how to upgrade that.
Apart from the free one for personal usage, VMware also offers a Workstation pro version with more features, however, it is paid. Although many Linux prefers to use open-source VirtualBox, VMPlayer has its own benefits. Good performance and ease to use are one of them.
With the latest release, Vmware can now support Windows 11 guest operating system to run without a TPM error. Hence, it fulfills the encryption requirement of Win 11. Apart from it, RedHat 9, Ubuntu 22.04, and other latest versions of Linux distros are now supported along with OpenGL 4.3 graphics support.
On Linux and Unix-based systems, the crontab command helps you schedule tasks so they can automatically run in the background at a specified time or interval.
When you start crontab for the first time, you’ll see a prompt asking you to choose the default text editor for editing crontab files. But what if you want to change the editor later on?
By itself, SSH is a secure way of connecting to a remote machine. However, if you are still keen to add additional security to your SSH connection, you can add two-factor authentication to be prompted to enter a random verification code when you connect via SSH. We previously showed you how to do so on various social networks and show you here how to add two-factor authentication to your SSH connection.
In the beginning, there was the command line. While modern Linux distributions include graphical desktops like GNOME and KDE, the command line remains one of the power features of every Linux system. With the command line, you can leverage a rich set of instructions to edit and manipulate files, control your system, and automate processes.
This year,€ our contributors wrote€ a lot of great articles about the Linux command line. Here are five of my favorite topics.
In Linux, PS1 is an environment variable that specifies the format of the command prompt displayed in the terminal. It stands for “Prompt String 1” and it is used to customize the appearance of the prompt.
By default, the bash prompt includes the current username, hostname, and current working directory, followed by the `$` symbol for a regular user or the `#` symbol for the root user. The prompt is displayed on the command line, and it indicates that the terminal is ready for input.
You can customize the bash prompt by modifying the value of the PS1 variable. For example, you can use special characters and codes to change the colors, font styles, and other formatting options of the prompt. You can also include other information, such as the current time or the git branch name, in the prompt.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install sysPass Password Manager on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, SysPass is a password manager that allows users to securely store and manage their passwords and other sensitive information in a central, encrypted location. It uses a combination of encryption and hashing algorithms to protect user data, and offers a range of features such as password generation, automatic login, and password sharing. SysPass is open-source software, which means that its code is publicly available and can be audited by anyone for security purposes. It is designed to be easy to use and can be accessed from any device with an internet connection.
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 sysPass Password Manager 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.
In this short tutorial, we will see how to prohibit directory listing in Linux from commandline. To put this in other words, we are going to deny the regular users from listing the contents of a directory using ls command, but still allow the users to access and modify the files from the same directory.
Executing the history command without specifying any options will give you a clean record of previously executed commands with their event numbers.
Git is a version control system that allows you to track changes to your files and coordinate work on those files with other people. One common task in Git is deleting files, either because you no longer need them or because they contain sensitive information that should not be shared. Here’s how to delete a file from Git.
Most users always seek to get more performance out of their graphics cards. One of the better ways is to install Nvidia Drivers, which depending on your installation method, comes with an open-source variant. The following tutorial will teach you how to install Nvidia Graphic Drivers on Debian 11 Buster or Debian 11 Bullseye repositories and to install Nvidia drivers directly from Nvidia repositories, with open-source and proprietary drivers available.
Linux Mint users may want to install the official Nvidia drivers if they use a Linux system for graphical design or gaming to gain more out of their current Graphics card, especially for those with impressive hardware. The following tutorial will teach you how to install NVIDIA Graphic Drivers on Linux Mint 21 or 20 with multiple methods available. Hopefully, you can install and keep these drivers up-to-date on your Linux Mint desktop.
AbanteCart is an open-source e-commerce platform based on PHP. It is an ideal e-commerce solution for small to medium businesses.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install AbanteCart on Ubuntu 22.04 OS. 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.
It is now possible to upgrade Linux Mint 21 to version 21.1.
If you’ve been waiting for this we’d like to thank you for your patience.
In the Linux system, each executed command in your terminal is taken as an event and associated with an event number (or index number) that is later found in the “~/.bash_history” file.
Now, you can use a program like cat to read the record of this file, but Linux provides a separate “history” command that gives you more features and functionality.
It involved features like viewing history records, removing single or complete records, executing a specific command from the history using its event number, and many more.
In this article, you will learn how to configure history records, history command usages, and a few more tips that will help you in your Linux journey.
Podman added many features in 2022 that improve the user experience and flexibility to handle various container use cases.
GNOME yearly participates in both Outreachy and Google Summer of Code. These internship programs basically consist on having new contributors working on a well-scoped project alongside an experienced mentor.
Defining project ideas is not as easy as it might sound. One needs to consider the perspective of a newcomer approaching the project for the first time, having a schedule where they are expected to onboard, work, and produce contributions that benefit the project.
New desktop Hyprland
Hyprland is our first desktop that we could actually install with Wayland.
Gradually these desktops will get better.
Virtualbox and Nvidia drivers spoil the fun.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of BunsenLabs Linux Beryllium and some of the applications pre-installed.
Snapshots of openSUSE Tumbleweed are rolling out this week like a postal worker delivering presents.
The snapshots are plenty, but only a few software packages are arriving in each snapshot as developers begin to take some time off during the holiday season.
Snapshot 20221219 delivered just one package. That package was cppcheck 2.9.3, which is a static analysis tool for C/C++ code. This update brought various Graphical User Interface and premium feature handling bugfixes. The package improved the lifetime analysis with this pointers, and added debug intrinsics debug valueflow and debug valuetype to show more detail including source backtraces.
The 20221218 snapshot had just two package updates. An update of bash 5.2.15 added some upstream patches in the rolling release snapshot. The patches addressed several cases where bash is too aggressive when optimizing out forks in subshells, and how bash can leak memory when referencing a non-existent associative array element. The shell and command language package also defers processing additional terminating signals when running the EXIT trap while exiting due to a terminating signal; the patch allows the new terminating signal to kill the shell immediately. The other package to update in the snapshot was XFS filesystem utility xfsdump 3.1.12. The package contains tools to create and restore backups of directory trees, which fixed on-media inventory for media unpacking, stream unpacking, stream packing and unpacking logic.
Snapshot 20221217 had a major version update of VPN client openconnect. The 9.01 version added a webview callback and support for some of Cisco’s AnyConnect sessions and verifications. An update of pipewire 0.3.63 fixed a critical bug that caused some audio distortion in some cases when using Advanced Vector Extensions AVX2. The audio and video package for linux also fixed some crash triggers and a potential starting issue with audacity A few other KDE’s Qt5 packages were updated in the snapshot, along with osinfo-db 20221130, which added some patches for supporting LeapMicro versions.
2023 is just around the corner, and like every year, it will come with new challenges and surprises. Great leadership is a key component in a team’s ability to embrace change; therefore, it’s wise to reflect on what aspects of your leadership style are working well and what needs improvement as you head into a new year.
We asked CIOs who recently won a SoCal CIO of the Year ORBIE Award to share a top leadership lesson they learned in 2022 and how they plan to apply it to future challenges.
Read on for wisdom you can use in 2023 and beyond.
Edge computing has emerged as a rational and important use case demonstrating why hybrid cloud architectures usually win out over purely centralized cloud approaches. There are several reasons to adopt edge computing, but most involve moving compute closer to where data is created or consumed.
For example, if latency is important because some local action must be taken in response to an event – perhaps a process has drifted out of allowable parameters on a factory floor – it’s useful not to have to traverse a network to take that action.
I encourage everyone to contribute to open source projects in every company I work. If you are a developer, I am sure you know how to do that already, but what about the rest of the people who can contribute with the same impact?
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I wrote a particular article about my motivation for volunteering which you can find here. Also, some of the companies match your volunteering hours with cash incentives, so you can even do more good while doing good.
Identify what change you want to see in the world and find a way to support it with your skills, peers, money, goods, or anything they need. They can’t do it by themselves. Change is a group sport. Involve your colleagues as well!
Not all developers work in the same environment or use the same workflow. It's important to understand typical development workflows when building tools and processes or sharing your experience so that you can consider how developers using different workflows may be able or unable to apply your tool, processes, or techniques, given their situation.
Learn the components of the control plane and workers nodes, along with Kubernetes resources that developers should know.
DH2i, a provider of always-secure and always-on IT infrastructure solutions, has announced that DH2i’s DxEnterprise multi-platform smart high availability clustering software has earned Red Hat OpenShift certification on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The first point release of Linux Mint 21 is out! Code-name ‘Vera’, Kernel 5.15, Ubuntu 22.04 package base, and Cinnamon 5.6, MATE 1.26, XFCE 4.16 for each desktop edition.
The Linux Mint team has announced that Linux Mint 21 users can now officially upgrade to version 21.1. Linux Mint 21.1 ‘Vera’ was only released yesterday following a two-week Beta phase and now upgrades are open too. The Mint team has outlined five steps for performing the upgrade, all of which are pretty easy to follow.
Cloud gaming apps for Android are becoming increasingly popular nowadays. It’s because more and more people look for ways to access their favorite games on their smartphones and tablets. These apps let users stream high-quality video games to their devices without needing expensive hardware or device memory. Indeed, users don’t need to install games at all. With a stable internet connection and a compatible device, you can easily play your favorite games anywhere, anytime, with this kind of app.
Maybe you hate pumping gas in the cold (or heat), or you care about the environment. Maybe the latest gas prices and general inflation has you thinking more about stretching your money. Perhaps you simply think electric vehicles (EVs) look cool. No matter the reason, you're excited about your next vehicle being an EV and you're not alone! The EV market share is set to expand to 30% by 2040. The US government provides a handy comparison tool to show that the cost of ownership of an EV easily beats owning and operating fossil fuel vehicles. Despite this, EV charging costs can still hit you hard in your wallet.
One of the most elegant ways to solve cost problems in general€ is to apply open source principles to accelerate innovation. Fortunately for you, this has been done in the EV charging area to find a way to get low-cost electricity and low-cost chargers.
To control the costs of EV charging, first you need low-cost electricity. In the old days, that would mean going from oil to coal, which is not a step up. Today, as it turns out, solar photovoltaic (PV) devices that convert sunlight directly into electricity normally provide the lowest-cost electricity. Coal companies are going bankrupt because they can no longer compete with clean solar power. This is also why solar power is seeing explosive growth all over the world. Many homeowners are putting solar panels on their roofs or on ground mounts in the backyard to cover all of their home’s electric needs. But how can you charge your EV with solar energy if you have limited roof area or a small backyard?
The latest Linux Mint, version 21, has had its first point release. If you were holding off upgrading from Mint 20, now is a good time. And it's not the only new distro for Yule.
Mint 21 arrived back in August as the Franco-Irish project's take on Ubuntu "Jammy". Way back in the old days, Mint did not take too kindly to version upgrades, but it's got a lot better in recent years, and the last few times that The Reg FOSS desk has tried it, it's gone perfectly smoothly. We took a look at the beta of 21.1 at the start of this month, and now the final version of "Vera" is here.
As usual, there are three editions, and there are three separate release announcements: the flagship Cinnamon 21.1, plus MATE and Xfce 21.1. There are a few known issues in there, so it's worth your time to read them, although in testing we didn't encounter any hitches.
Unfortunately for Xfce fans, this release doesn't include the brand new Xfce 4.18, which was released last Thursday. Mint is based on the LTS releases of Ubuntu so it won't get such major component upgrades. For that, you'll have to wait for Mint 22, some time in mid-to-late 2024 after the release of Ubuntu 24.04.
Today is Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day where I spend some time taking stock of things and maybe move some projects to the done pile.
In June, I ran a Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day [1] for Mozilla Data Org because the idea really struck a chord with me and we were about to embark on 2022h2 where one of the goals was to "land planes" and finish projects. I managed to pass off Dennis and end Puente. I also spent some time mulling over better models for maintaining a lot of libraries.
Various data types are used in LibreOffice code and also in LibreOffice API. Here we discuss the some of these data types, which are important when you are working with LibreOffice code and API.
You should know that LibreOffice API can be used from many languages, but here we only focus on C++. LibreOffice uses a component model called UNO (Universal Network Objects), which is designed to provide an environment for accessing network objects from different languages. The data types that we discuss here are among UNO data types.
The job of a lighthouse is not to drift along with the currents, but to unwaveringly resist tides, storms and pressure, serving as a reference point, a guiding light, a strong foundation.
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The FSF has done a great job resisting corporate pressure and propaganda that attempts to push public opinion towards self-defeating behaviors. It has also stood strong in preserving its mission, of defending freedom for all software users, from submission to other valuable social justice causes.
Encouraging people to share projects and tutorials has always been central to Arduino’s mission of democratizing technology. Learning from the work of others is very important as we always felt that most makers like to start from an existing project and evolve from their own creation. If you’ve been following Arduino for a while you know we went through a few tools in our history, from “Playground” to “Scuola” arriving at our current “Project Hub” in search of always simpler and better ways to share.
In 2014, we collaborated with Hackster.io to establish “Project Hub”, based on the Hackster platform. Together we grew a space that hosts thousands of well-documented projects submitted by all of you. Although this partnership is very important to us, Arduino will move Project Hub in-house. Building our own project sharing platform allows us to further integrate with Arduino Cloud and better align with our new features.
The end-of-life (EOL) for PHP 7.4 was Monday, November 28, 2022. If you’re like me, that date snuck up much faster than anticipated. While your PHP 7.4 code isn’t going to immediately stop working, you do need to begin making plans for the future of this codebase.
Everyone, for sure, must have heard or read about the number of characters that make a password secure. Experts recommend that the minimum required to create a secure password is twelve characters.
Malicious programs rely on the hardware power of the PC to crack the codes. The longer the password, the more processing power is required and the more time it takes the software to crack the password.
To detect and handle errors in a bash script, you can use the `set -e` and `trap` commands, as well as the `if` and `case` statements and the `||` and `&&` operators.
You can use the set -e command at the beginning of your script to enable this behavior, or you can use it before individual commands to enable it only for those commands.
It’s important to note that the `set -e` command only affects the exit status of individual commands. It does not catch errors caused by syntax errors or other issues in the script itself. To catch these types of errors, you can use the `set -o` errexit option instead.
The rsync command is a utility that is used to synchronize files and directories between two locations. It is a powerful tool that is commonly used for backups, data synchronization, and transferring files between servers. rsync is particularly useful because it only transfers the differences between files, rather than transferring the entire file. This makes it much faster than other file transfer utilities such as cp or scp.
The SCP (Secure Copy) command is a powerful tool that allows you to securely copy files between servers or between a local machine and a server. It is similar to the cp command, but it uses Secure Shell (SSH) to transfer the files, which means that the data is encrypted and secure during the transfer.
In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the basic syntax of the SCP command and some examples of how to use it.
People hate advertising. Year after year, advertising professionals are routinely cited in Gallup surveys of dishonorable professions. Ask users how to improve almost any entertainment experience and removing ads is the most common suggestion. Near universal disdain for advertising belies how massive the industry really is. With billions spent on advertising annually, companies will pay a premium to get their products onto your favorite content. But can an ad agency be so effective as to get people to pay for their ads? Or at the very least, not mind the ads in the first place? Today’s Tedium is looking at Foote, Cone, and Belding, a legendary advertising agency that helped a greeting card company transform into a media juggernaut with the power of Christmas.
Qualcomm QCX216 is a new IoT-optimized LTE Cat1 bis modem with a data rate of up to 10 Mbps at ultra-low power and support for WiFi-based terrestrial positioning thanks to the company’s database of billions of geolocated beacons.
LTE Cat1 bis is an update to LTE Cat1 that does not require software and hardware upgrades to the base stations, enables smaller, simpler, and cheaper designs with a single antenna, and delivers higher speeds than LTE Cat M1 typically used in IoT applications. Qualcomm QCX216 LTE IoT modem will be used in smart utility meters, trackers, e-mobility solutions, parking meters, home automation and security equipment, and other location-based solutions.
We’ve previously covered the EdgeBox-RPi4 industrial controller powered by a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and plenty of I/Os such as RS485, RS232, digital inputs and outputs, and connectivity options such as Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 5, Bluetooth 5, and 4G LTE.
But if you don’t quite need the power of a Linux controller, the EdgeBox-ESP-100 industrial edge controller based on an ESP32-S3 dual-core WiFi and Bluetooth microcontroller and offering a similar set of features, albeit with twists, may be an interesting option.
As the destructive effects of climate change become more apparent, “we need to fight climate change with both sword (cutting our emissions to fight further increases in warming) and shield (protecting ourselves from climate change’s increasing effects),” says the World Economic Forum.
Both control and mitigation approaches must be pursued, and “everyone must be involved in deciding how societies will adapt,” says this COP27 report.
One way to get involved is through open source. For example, we previously mentioned the Protontypes website as a valuable resource for finding projects that are actively working toward a more sustainable future. The site provides a comprehensive, curated list of open technology projects that can provide key information and help shape critical climate solutions.
As I’m closing out my first full year as executive director of the Open Source Initiative, I’m amazed by what our small team has accomplished. I’m proud to end the year with a solid 20% growth in revenue from sponsors and an even more impressive increase of the total number of corporate sponsors, to a whopping 51 up from 36 last year!
Security updates have been issued by Debian (xorg-server), Fedora (samba, snakeyaml, thunderbird, xorg-x11-server, and xrdp), Slackware (libksba and sdl), and SUSE (cni, cni-plugins, java-1_7_1-ibm, kernel, openssl-3, and supportutils).
This isn’t a new problem and it isn’t a Russian problem. Here’s a more general article on the problem from 2020.
Out on the frontline, near the eastern Ukrainian city of Lyman, on 8 November at 15.10, a Russian serviceman called Andrey decided to ignore the orders of his superiors and call his mother with an unauthorised mobile phone.
Shutdown is a history of the world macroeconomic response to COVID-19, covering 2020 and the very beginning of 2021.
For a year and a half, phone calls to people trying to survive one of the world’s worst wars didn’t go through. Now, as phone lines start to be restored to parts of Ethiopia’s Tigray region after a fragile peace deal, some Tigrayans are relieved while others grieve.
“I have been dreading receiving phone calls,” said a Tigrayan living in Norway, who like others spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals against his relatives. “You want to speak to your family, but you don’t know what kind of stories you will hear, in terms of who is still alive.”
The conflict between Ethiopian and allied forces against the Tigray side is estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of people since late 2020, according to the United Nations and the United States, citing academic research. The U.N. secretary-general has said more people have died in this conflict than in Ukraine’s.
The policy team at IFF participated in 13 consultations with Union and State governmental bodies as well as non-governmental bodies, sent 103 letters and tracked 126 Facial Recognition Technology (“FRT”) systems. Through sustained advocacy, we came one step closer to successfully safeguarding sanitation workers from workplace surveillance and were able to get IRCTC to roll back its plans to monetise passenger’s digital data. On the one hand we authored 6 public briefs, explainers and summaries, while on the other, we collaborated with various organisations with the aim of increasing collaborative public output on digital rights issues. In our efforts to strengthen Parliament’s commitment towards a more secure digital environment for all citizens, we continued and expanded our engagement with Members of Parliament through routine publications and dialogue.
The aim of the policy vertical remains unaccomplished unless we are truly able to widely disseminate information as well as analysis regarding key, and often complex, policy issues. To that end, we adopted several tools to get the conversation started such as rapid responses, attention grabbing twitter threads, video explainers, citizen campaigns and pledges, etc. We are extremely grateful to our community for consistently engaging with and supporting our work and we promise to continue the hard work and do our best in the coming years.
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The journey to a data protection framework at the national level has been long and full of roadblocks. While we have in the past and continue to advocate for a comprehensive national data protection law, this year we put on our policy-analysis lenses to check how states are faring when it comes to data protection policies. We compared and contrasted state-level data policies of 7 states, namely, Punjab, Odisha, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Sikkim, Telangana, and Chandigarh.
While the results were enlightening to say the least, we observed that Tamil Nadu fared better as compared to the other states. Thus, we wrote to the Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency, providing our inputs on the Tamil Nadu Data Policy, 2022 (TNDP, 2022). A great outcome of this initiative was that IFF was invited to a closed-door round table discussion by ICRIER to partake in this consultation meeting wherein the Tamil Nadu IT Dept were seeking comments on their data policy with a special focus on issues related to data sharing, pricing, and monetisation. This was for us a tiny, incremental win, as we were able to open lines of engagement with the Tamil Nadu state government in a meaningful manner.
Today, the Federal Communications Commission voted to approve a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to promote equal access to broadband in every community by seeking comment on potential rules preventing digital discrimination. The Commission’s new effort, as directed by Congress in the “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,” is to prevent and eliminate digital discrimination, which occurs when broadband providers underinvest in low-income and marginalized communities. Public Knowledge commends the FCC for moving to create a more connected and creative future.
The following can be attributed to Jenna Leventoff, Senior Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge:
“We applaud the FCC’s effort to meet the congressionally mandated deadline to create rules preventing and eliminating digital discrimination, although we’ll still need to fill the fifth Commissioner seat to achieve this goal. The Commission’s forthcoming rules around digital discrimination, if implemented correctly, could prove one of the most effective mechanisms available to ensure that everyone has access to affordable, reliable internet service.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.