Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 19/06/2023: Cinnamon 5.8 and Alpine Has New ISOs



  • GNU/Linux

    • 9to5Linux9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: June 18th, 2023

      This week we got a major Steam Client update that finally brings a refreshed UI and hardware acceleration on Linux, a major NVIDIA graphics driver release that brings better Wayland support and many other improvements, as well as several new distro releases including Ultramarine Linux 38, Tails 5.14, and SparkyLinux 7.0.

      On top of that, I tell you about the upcoming end of life of the Ubuntu 22.10 “Kinetic Kudu” operating system release and give you a first look at the Fedora-based risiOS distro. Read the hottest news of this week and get access to all the distro and package downloads in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for June 18th, 2023, below.

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • 9to5LinuxSystem76’s Oryx Pro and Bonobo WS Linux Laptops Get “Raptor Lake” CPUs

        As of today, System76 has finally managed to upgrade its entire line of Linux notebooks to 13th Gen Intel Core processors. After updating earlier this year the Adder WS, Darter Pro, Galago Pro, Gazelle, Lemur Pro, and Serval WS laptops, now the Oryx Pro and Bonobo WS received the “Raptor Lake” CPU treatment.

        System76’s most powerful laptop, the Bonobo WS, now finally ships with a 13th Gen Intel Core “Raptor Lake” i9-13900HX processor with 24 cores, 36 MB cache, up to 5.4 GHz clock speed, and Intel Iris Xe graphics.

    • Server

      • Amazon Linux

        Amazon Linux is an open-source, secure, stable, and optimized Linux-based operating system (OS), which is free to use, designed, maintained, and supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Amazon Linux OS is specifically designed for cloud computing applications, whether you’re running on-premises or in the cloud.

        The Amazon Linux is designed with modern architectures and includes pre-configured packages and tools to help developers accelerate the building of their applications without incurring the high costs of proprietary operating systems.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • LWNKernel prepatch 6.4-rc7

        The 6.4-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. ""Nothing particular stands out in the rc this week, unless you count the mptcp selftest changes that are about making the tests work on stable kernels too.""

    • Graphics Stack

      • Mohamed Ahmed: NVK YCbCr Support Part 0 - Hello World

        I am Mohamexiety, a (soon-to-be) 4th year electronics engineering student and a recently accepted contributor in the Google Summer of Code program with my project being implementing YCbCr support for NVK, the new open-source nouveau Vulkan driver, under the mentorship and supervision of Faith Ekstrand @gfxstrand for the X.Org foundation.

    • Applications

      • 9to5LinuxOBS Studio 29.1.3 Improves the Source Record Plugin, AMF Encoder, and More

        OBS Studio 29.1.3 is here to improve the Source Record plugin by fixing a crash that occurred when properties are deleted in the callback. It also improves the AMF (Advanced Media Framework) encoder’s reconfiguration and dynamic bitrate as they didn’t work in previous releases, as well as the AMF preset fallback to take into account the GPU reported throughput.

        Window and game capture compatibility notices have been fixed as well in this release to be displayed correctly. Moreover, OBS Studio 29.1.3 addresses a bug in audio settings where Audio Channels, Sample Rate, and Low Latency Audio Buffer Mode would sometimes fail to save properly.

      • GNOMEJuan Pablo Ugarte: Cambalache 0.12.0 Released!

        I am pleased to announce a new release of Cambalache a new RAD tool for Gtk 3 and 4!

        Version 0.12.0 packs a year’s worth of new features and lots of improvements and bugfixes.

        Workspace CSS support

        Does your application use custom CSS? Now you can see CSS changes live in the workspace. All you need to do is add a new CSS file in the project and specify if you want it to be global or for one UI file in particular.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • Ubuntu Handbook Onlyoffice Desktop Editors 7.4 is Out with New Plugin Manager
        ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors, the free and open-source offline use office suite, released new 7.4 version a few days ago.

        The new releases feature a “Plugin Manager“, allows to easily install external functions support, such as ChatGPT, YouTube, OCR, and more. User can of course submit its own plugin to the market place for other user use.

      • Simon SerSimon Ser: Status update, June 2023

        This month Rose Hudson has started working on wlroots as part of Google Summer of Code! She will focus on reducing frame latency by implementing an adaptive frame scheduler. She already has landed new wlroots APIs to measure render time. You can follow Rose’s blog if you’re interested.

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Carl SchwanMy generic Open Source Project FAQ

          People are often asking the same questions again and again about some of my projects, so it might be a good opportunity to write a small FAQ.

          If you get redirected here, don’t take it personally; I am getting asked these questions very often, and I feel people often misunderstand how open-source projects work.

          The most likely reason is that it still needs to be implemented. It doesn’t mean that I or other maintainers are against this feature. It is just that X is a purely non-commercial project, and I and others are currently working on it during our free time. Unfortunately, Free time is a very limited and precious resource. Between our day jobs or university projects, sleeping, eating, and other social activities, little time and energy is left.

        • The Booth at Akademy-es/OpenSouthCode

          There’s no better measure of success than having a diminutive eight-year-old girl demand to know the name of the painting program she has been using for the last 20 minutes.

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • GNOMECarlos Garnacho: Getting the best of tablet pads

          In case they needed introduction, pads are these collections of buttons and tactile sensors (ring or strip shaped) most typically found along the side of drawing tablets. These devices will be the topic of today.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • New Releases

      • 9to5LinuxNitrux Devs Make It Easier to Upgrade Your Immutable Nitrux OS Installations

        Until now, upgrading your Nitrux installations to newer releases involved downloading the latest ISO image, writing on a USB flash drive, booting it on your Nitrux machine, and performing an installation using the Calamares installer where you had to make sure that it doesn’t overwrite your /home directory.

        Upgrading your Linux distro should be a straightforward process where you open a tool, check for new versions, and perform the upgrade with a few mouse clicks. Nitrux was missing such a tool until now, as the devs announced Nitrux Update Tool System, or NUTS for short.

      • Alpine Linux2023-06-14 [Older] Alpine 3.15.9, 3.16.6, 3.17.4 and 3.18.2 released
    • Slackware Family

    • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Debian Family

      • Distro WatchReview: Debian 12

        Debian is a project that I've used a lot over the years and it's one for which I have a lot of respect. Debian strives to be a "universal operating system", running on a wide range of architectures, on a wide range of hardware, and in a variety of roles. Debian can run on just about anything (from a phone, to a Raspberry Pi, to a server, to a laptop) and perform as a anything from a web server to a gaming machine. The fact Debian also offers both regular stable releases with five years of support and rolling branches means the distribution can be used just about anywhere. The project's famed stability and its flexible are key reasons behind Debian being the basis for over 120 actively maintained distributions.

        With all of that said, while Debian is a technological and organizational achievement virtually unparalleled in the open source community, using plain Debian (as opposed to one of its many children) is not a particularly pleasant experience on a desktop computer. A big aspect of this is, as I mentioned last week in my openSUSE review, some distributions act as a unified whole, a platform that feels designed. openSUSE is a prime example of that, where all the pieces are fitted together to make something greater than the sum of their parts. Debian is toward the other end of the spectrum and the distribution feels like an uncoordinated collection of components. The pieces are all in the same room, but they don't fit together, they aren't following a shared vision. Everything feels like it's trying to follow a lowest common denominator (fitting with Debian's "universal" theme). The themes are vanilla and washed out, the desktop feels awkward to navigate and requires a lot of mouse movement, nothing is automated. Updates are checked for and applied manually, Flatpak and Flathub access need to be handled manually, and there is no central configuration panel that works across all desktop environments. We even need to grant our first user admin access manually, which brings me to the system installer.

        In the past I've often pointed out that Debian's installer is awkward, slow, and unpleasant to use compared to the system installers of most other mainstream distributions. It uses about four times more screens to accomplish the same result and, as started earlier in this review, its "prompt, work, prompt, work" approach means the user is trapped interacting with it rather than entering some information and then being free to walk away. The installer also misses some popular features, such as setting the first user up as an admin, which other installers will usually provide. However, I will also acknowledge that the trade-off has been that Debian's installer has worked and worked consistently for years, largely unchanged. If you ever installed Debian 6 then you can install Debian 12 using the same steps in the same order, on either a graphical interface or a text console. The experience has been predictable and reliable.

      • Russell CokerRussell Coker: BOINC and Idle Users

        The BOINC distributed computing client in Debian (Bookworm and previous releases) can check the idle time via the X11 protocol and run GPU jobs when the interactive user is idle, so the user gets GPU power for graphics when they need it and when it’s idle BOINC uses it. This doesn’t work for Wayland and unfortunately no-one has written a Wayland equivalent of xprintidle (which shows the number of milliseconds that the X11 session has been idle in milliseconds.

        In the Debian bug system there is bug #813728 about a message every second due to failed attempts to find X11 idle time [1]. On my main workstation with Wayland it logs “Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified“.

      • Junichi Uekawa: Upgraded my main machines to bookworm.
        Upgraded my main machines to bookworm. Things look relatively eventless. Nice. Emacs is noisy. why is native-comp-async-report-warnings-errors t?

        I was a little surprised that drive01 didn't seem to know what was on drive02. Perhaps that could have been remedied by adding more remotes there? I'm not entirely sure; I'd thought would have been able to do that automatically.

      • Valhalla's Things: Shawl Calculations

        I’ve just realized that I’m not anywhere close to finishing the shawl I’m knitting, so I’ve done the perfectly logical and rational thing and started a new one.

        This one is using some yarn from the stash, so its size is limited by the available yarn, and I wanted to estimate how long it may be, so I weighted the ball of yarn at the beginning and then again after knitting 10 and 20 rows.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Open Hardware/Modding

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Terence EdenFederation is pretty cool, but kinda confusing, and maybe a little scary

      After a bit of clicking around, I figured out what had happened. A user on the Kbin social network had linked to my Mastodon profile. Thanks to the magic of the ActivityPub protocol, it filtered into my mentions - even though I've never even heard of Kbin. That's pretty cool! A user on one social network can mention a user on a different social network - neither needs to be registered on the other.

      And that is where things get a little confusing and, perhaps, a bit scary.

    • AkshayPlain Text Journaling

      I cobbled together a journaling system with {neo,}vim, coreutils and dateutils. This system is loosely based on Ryder Caroll’s Bullet Journal method.

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Nicolas FränkelEvaluating Apache APISIX vs. Spring Cloud Gateway

        Given the number of API Gateways available on the market, I’m regularly asked which is better. Better is a very subjective term. However, there’s no denying that if you’re advocating for a product, you should know your product and its competitors. In this post, I’d like to share my understanding of Spring Cloud Gateway and how it compares to Apache APISIX.

        I’m cautious when comparing products because most comparisons I read are heavily biased. That’s a risk, especially when working on one of the products one is comparing. I’ll also avoid "benchmarketing" - when you benchmark products in a context that favors your own; I’ll focus on the so-called Developer Experience.

    • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

      • Ubuntu Handbook Onlyoffice Desktop Editors 7.4 is Out with New Plugin Manager
        ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors, the free and open-source offline use office suite, released new 7.4 version a few days ago.

        The new releases feature a “Plugin Manager“, allows to easily install external functions support, such as ChatGPT, YouTube, OCR, and more. User can of course submit its own plugin to the market place for other user use.

    • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

      • Open Access/Content

        • TecAdminC Program to Check Prime Number

          A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. The first few prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and so on. To check if a number is prime or not, we can use the concept of loop structures in C programming.

        • TecAdminJava Program to Check Prime Number

          A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. In simpler terms, a prime number is a number that has only two distinct natural number divisors: 1 and itself.

    • Programming/Development

      • Perl / Raku

        • [Old]ChrisWhy Perl?

          I sometimes get asked why I use Perl so much. Am I not a fan of strongly typed functional programming? Yeah, I am. Ask me to write something that is known, for sure, to become a big system and I’ll pick strongly typed functional programming without hesitation. But most of the software I write is not for sure going to become a big system. Here’s what Perl does well: [...]

      • Python

        • TecAdminPython Program to Check Prime Number

          Understanding the concept of prime numbers and how to identify them is an essential aspect of mathematics. A prime number is a number that has only two distinct natural number divisors: 1 and itself.

      • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

        • University of TorontoOne temptation of shell scripting is reusing other people's code

          Here I don't mean reusing code from other shell scripts, because you can do that in any language. Where shell scripting is unique is that you immediately get to reuse a large mass of code in the form of all of the Unix utilities out there. Some of these utilities have relatively direct equivalents in languages like Python (especially if you're willing to be brute force), but not all of them and often not as easily, and you also don't get to integrate with other utilities in the fluid way you do with shell scripts.

        • TecAdminShell Script to Check Prime Number

          A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. In this article, we will explore how to write a shell script to check if a given number is prime or not.

  • Leftovers

    • BGRVideo ads are coming to Uber, so I’m switching to a competitor

      Users will start seeing video ads when waiting for their drivers to arrive and even during their trips. For cars that have tables installed inside, they will also appear there. For the Uber Eats app, video ads will play after customers place orders and continue until their deliveries arrive. Drizly, on its way, will have them in search results on its app and website.



    • Education

      • CBCHow student loans keep some people trapped in debt

        Bonne is far from alone in his struggle with student debt; 1.9 million Canadians owed the federal government a total of $23.5 billion in student loans as of July 2022 — a number that only balloons further when including provincial loans and private debt. More than half of those who pursued professional programs such as medicine took on bank loans or lines of credit, according to a 2020 Statistics Canada report.

        Erika Shaker, the director of the national office at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, says this "gateway debt" perpetuates social inequality and prevents people from achieving financial independence.

      • uni MichiganUMich under review from High Learning Commission

        The University of Michigan is currently under review from its accrediting body, the Higher Learning Commission, following a complaint filed by the Graduate Employees’ Organization. In the complaint, GEO alleged that the University entered falsified grades for students with striking graduate student instructors as part of their plan to ensure all final grades were submitted following the end of the winter term.

    • Hardware

      • CNX SoftwareASUS PRIME N100I-D D4 – An Intel Processor N100 mini-ITX motherboard

        ASUS PRIME N100I-D D4 is a fanless mini-ITX motherboard based on the Intel Processor N100 quad-core “Alder Lake-N” processor with up to 16GB DDR4, M.2 NVME SSD and SATA storage, and three video outputs via HDMI, DisplayPort, and VGA ports.

      • HackadayIntel To Ship Quantum Chip

        In a world of 32-bit and 64-bit processors, it might surprise you to learn that Intel is releasing a 12-bit chip. Oh, wait, we mean 12-qubit. That makes more sense. Code named Tunnel Falls, the chip uses tiny silicon spin quantum bits, which Intel says are more advantageous than other schemes for encoding qubits.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • QuartzThe American Medical Association admits BMI is racist

        Body Mass Index (BMI), a seemingly simple health metric calculated by taking an individual’s weight, dividing it by their height, then squaring that number, has been the main metric to measure body fat since the 1970s

    • Proprietary

      • CS MonitorPaul McCartney says new Beatles record features AI John Lennon

        The “last” Beatles record is being made using artificial intelligence. Paul McCartney says audio engineers were able to extract John Lennon’s unfinished song from an old demo, decades after the band broke up. The new song is set to be released soon.

      • ReasonAnother Federal Judge Issues a Standing Order for When "AI Has Been Used in Any Way in the Preparation of Filings"

        From Judge Michael Baylson (E.D. Pa.), issued last week: If any attorney for a party, or a pro se party, has used Artificial Intelligence ("AI") in the preparation of any complaint, answer, motion, brief, or other paper, filed with the Court, and assigned to Judge Michael M. Baylson, MUST, in a clear and plain factual…

      • ReasonGoogle Comes Out Against a 'Department of A.I.'

        As the company explains, pre-market licensing would delay—or even deny—our access to artificial intelligence's potential benefits.

      • Trail Of BitsTrail of Bits’s Response to NTIA AI Accountability RFC

        By Heidy Khlaaf and Artem Dinaburg The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has circulated an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Accountability Policy Request for Comment on what policies can support the development of AI audits, assessments, certifications, and other mechanisms to create earned trust in AI systems.

      • WhichUK'My return train ticket was wrongly refused': your rights when train travel goes wrong

        I travelled to Bath on the Friday - but when I tried to return to London the following day, I was told my tickets weren’t valid. On closer inspection, I saw that the return ticket was only valid for travel on the Monday, despite the app stating I could return within three days.

      • [Repeat] Ruben SchadeOuroboros LLMs and their impending entropy problem

        But for those who care not for socially responsibility, another issue looms. I talked with a few of you on Mastodon early this year about LLMs feeding on the output of other LLMs, and what effect that might have on their quality. I’m starting to see more discussion around this, and it raises interesting questions about the tech.

        The first batch of plagiarism-as-a-service tools were trained against human-generated data. Granted, there’s always been procedurally-generated stuff on the Internet, but it was probably easy enough to filter out. Mediocre but plausibly-human sounding chatbot output now abounds, and it’s only a matter of time before it constitutes the bulk of the modern web. It’s a dim thing to be excited about, but don’t tell that to the latest shipload of charlatans who gave up peddling blockchained tulips.

    • Security

      • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

        • New YorkerPhishing Scammer or One of Your Parents?

          If the e-mail includes a zip file containing forty-five photos of the sender’s recent trip to Portugal, it’s from a scammer. Parents send way more photos than that.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Confidentiality

        • AyerThe Difference Between Root Certificate Authorities, Intermediates, and Resellers

          But none of the organizations listed above are CAs - they just take certificate requests and forward them to real CAs, who validate the request and issue the certificate. The Internet is safe - from these organizations, at least.

          In this post, I'm going to define terms like certificate authority, root CA, intermediate CA, and reseller, and explain whom you do and do not need to worry about.

          Note that I'm going to talk only about publicly-trusted SSL certificate authorities - i.e those which are trusted by mainstream web browsers.

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • New York TimesWhy the Pentagon Papers Leaker Tried to Get Prosecuted Near His Life’s End

        The charge he coveted was mishandling national security secrets under the Espionage Act, and his plan was to give me another classified document he had taken decades ago that he had held onto without authorization all this time. He wanted to mount a defense in a way that would offer the Supreme Court an opportunity to declare that law unconstitutional as applied to those who leaked government secrets to reporters. It is the same law former President Donald J. Trump is now accused of violating 31 times, though under very different circumstances.

      • GannettDaniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers leaker, had roots in metro Detroit, Cranbrook Schools

        Ellsberg, whose hair by then had turned all white, grew up in Michigan, in Highland Park — back when it was a growing blue-collar, middle-class, auto-industry suburb — and his message, in light of the then-upcoming presidential election, was to be socially and politically active.

        The 7,000-page Pentagon Papers, which Ellsberg surreptitiously released to the press, was titled, "Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force." It led to a First Amendment showdown, with the U.S. Supreme Court siding with the newspapers.

      • [Old] The Olof Palme Memorial Fund2018 – Daniel Ellsberg

        More than four decades later Daniel Ellsberg again takes on the Pentagon€´s secret war plans. He warns us of a nuclear holocaust, caused by the refusal of the nine nuclear states to comply with the binding commitment of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to further the goals of a nuclear-free world.

      • QuartzThe World Bank has spent $37 billion since 2020 on "climate mitigation" projects. Most have little to do with climate

        According to an analysis by the Breakthrough Institute and the Center for Global Development, the majority of climate projects funded by the World Bank between 2020 and 2022 turned out to have little to do with climate at all.

    • Environment

      • Energy/Transportation

        • New York TimesIn Sam Bankman-Fried Case, U.S. Withdraws New Charges

          They said they were willing to proceed to trial in October without pursuing charges they filed after Mr. Bankman-Fried was extradited from the Bahamas.

        • [Repeat] New York TimesBinance Reaches Deal With Government to Avert U.S. Shutdown

          After filing fraud charges against Binance on June 5, the S.E.C. moved to freeze the firm’s U.S. assets in a move that the exchange’s lawyers said would put it out of business in the United States.

          But in a court filing on Friday, the S.E.C. said that the two sides had reached a compromise after several days of court-ordered mediation. On Saturday morning, Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is overseeing the case in federal court in Washington, signed off on the deal.

        • New York TimesHe Went After [Cryptocurrency] Companies. Then Someone Came After Him.

          When he woke up the next morning, Mr. Roche says, he felt groggy. He couldn’t remember much aside from being pretty sure he had spotted Mr. Villavicencio’s business partner, a Norwegian named Christen Ager-Hanssen, lurking at a nearby table. The brain fog was odd because he didn’t think he’d had all that much to drink. As he flew back to Miami a few days later, Mr. Roche couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss.

      • Wildlife/Nature

      • Overpopulation

        • Omicron LimitedSatellites show gains in California water

          While surface water basins are filling, underground stores of fresh water (aquifers) that are tapped for irrigation and other needs could take years to fully recharge. "One good winter of rain and snow won't make up for years of extreme drought and extensive groundwater use," said Felix Landerer, GRACE-FO project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The GRACE-FO team will continue to track how California's water storage evolves through the summer after the snowpack melts and water levels in the state's lakes, rivers, and reservoirs start to recede during drier weather.

        • The Straits TimesInstagram partly to blame for South Korea’s record-low fertility rate, says star math lecturer

          The lecturer criticised the trend of Instagram users "flexing" their fancy lifestyle habits.

        • uni StanfordForest Bathing

          “Many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not the fish they are after.”

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • New York TimesCreeping Shariah Has Nothing on the Woke Mob

        How conservatives went from demonizing Muslims to wooing them.

      • France24Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over 'partygate', says parliamentary committee

        Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson deliberately misled Parliament about the lockdown-flouting parties that undermined his credibility and contributed to his downfall, a committee of lawmakers said Thursday after a year-long investigation

      • France24Starbucks ex-manager awarded $25.6 million for wrongful dismissal after arrest of Black men

        Jurors in federal court have awarded $25.6 million to a former Starbucks regional manager who alleged that she and other white employees were unfairly punished after the high-profile arrests of two Black men at a Philadelphia location in 2018.

      • The Register UKMegaupload programmers cop a plea in New Zealand to avoid extradition

        Yesterday, two of those associates – Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, both programmers for Megaupload – pled guilty in New Zealand's High Court.

        As the sentencing notes [PDF] in the case explain, the pair's role as developers meant they understood Megaupload's operations and intentions. After years of legal action they agreed to plead guilty, and assist US authorities, in return for extradition proceedings ending.

      • European CommissionArtificial intelligence: in Europe, innovation and safety go hand in hand | Statement by Commissioner Thierry Breton

        On the contrary, the challenge is to act quickly and take responsibility for exploiting all the advances while controlling the risks. And it is regulation that gives start-ups the legal certainty they need to innovate.

      • Connor TumblesonThe Reddit Drama

        As June started an article spread like wildfire in the technical communities and it was this thread on Reddit: "Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing. Bad news for third-party apps, their announced pricing is close to Twitter's pricing, and Apollo would have to pay Reddit $20 million per year to keep running as-is."

        The title basically summarizes this issue, but we need to turn back the clock to understand what Apollo is and why this spread quickly.

      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • RFERLBelarusian Singer Who Refused Lukashenka Scholarship In 2020 Faces Criminal Charges

        Belarusian singer Patrytsia Svitsina, who in 2020 refused to accept a scholarship from authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka, citing her "moral principles," is facing a charge of "actively participating in actions that blatantly disrupt social order."

      • GizmodoWebsite Owners Say Traffic Is Plummeting After a Facebook Algorithm Change

        It’s a troubling change in an increasingly frail digital news business, where companies have little choice but to rely on social media’s biggest gatekeeper. Publishers say they deserve transparency, but as with similar changes in the past, there’s been no communication from Meta, Facebook’s parent company. In fact, Meta did not respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment on the matter.

      • ANF NewsTwo arrested over attack on journalist Sinan Aygül in Tatvan

        Journalist Sinan Aygül, who had been writing about the corruption and land sales of the municipality of Tatvan for a while, was targeted by a violent attack on Saturday.

        Aygül wrote on his Twitter account: "I was attacked by the armed bodyguards of mayor Mehmet Emin Geylani in Tatvan a little while ago. They got out of the municipal vehicle, hit me on the head from behind, insulted and threatened me to death. I am being taken to Tatvan State Hospital."

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

    • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Monopolies



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Keeping Productive This Christmas
We've (pre)paid for hosting till almost January 2026 and fully back on the saddle
IBM and Canonical Leave Money on the Table Because Microsoft Pays Them Not to Compete and Instead Market Windows, WSL, Microsoft 'Clown Computing', and TPMs
Where are the regulators?
Other Editors Who Agree "Hey Hi" (AI) is Just Hype But Won't Say So Publicly as It Might Upset Key Sponsors
Some media would gladly participate in a scam to make money
IBM (and Red Hat) is a Patent Troll, Still Leveraging Software Patents to Extract Money Out of Other Companies by Suing Them
Basically, when it comes to patents, IBM is demonstrably part of the problem, not the solution
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, December 17, 2024
IRC logs for Tuesday, December 17, 2024
[Meme] When the People Who Falsely Accuse You of Pedophilia Turn Out to be Projecting
When you attack something or someone using falsehoods, as happens a lot to Richard Stallman (RMS), there's risk that the attacks will backfire, badly
In Some Countries, Such as Greece, Almost 80% of Windows Users Are on Vista 10 and About 85% Need to Move to GNU/Linux for Security Patches
Vista 11 was a failure
[Meme] They Don't Want the Public to Know What "Responsible Encryption" Really Means
They also blame "China" for their own back doors (because China learned how to exploit those)
The Linux Foundation's Certificate Authority (CA) Significantly and Suspiciously Raises the Number of Certificates It Issues (Quantity Increase/Inflation) by Lessening Their Lifetime in the Name of 'Security' (That Barely Makes Sense!)
LE made 3 months the "standard" for most, soon to become just 6 days instead of 6 months?
Why I Continue to Believe That at the End Software Freedom Will Win
a short and incomplete list of factors which I believe contribute to the sentiment that we can - and will - win the battles over hearts and minds in the "Tech" realm
Links 17/12/2024: More China Sanctions, GOP Scheming to Prop Up Fentanylware (TikTok)
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/12/2024: The Streisand Effect and Productivity-systems Desiderata
Links for the day
Technology: rights or responsibilities? - Part X
By Dr. Andy Farnell
Links 17/12/2024: More "Tesla Autopilot" and "Hey Hi" (AI) Blunders
Links for the day
Instead of Promoting GNU/Linux (or Ubuntu) Ahead of Vista 10's EoL Canonical is Marketing Microsoft's Proprietary Software
It's like Canonical employs people who work for Microsoft, not for Canonical
Links 17/12/2024: Many Abuses by Microsoft and War Updates From Ukraine
Links for the day
Content Management Systems (CMS) Bloat/ Static Site Generators (SSG) Trouble
some Web site management stories
DEI Room at fedoraproject.org Pretty Much Dead
We're not against diversity but against its weaponisation by greedy people who do not value diversity at all
The "Latest Technology News" at BetaNews is Slop About Slop
This is at the very top of the "news" (front page) at the moment
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, December 16, 2024
IRC logs for Monday, December 16, 2024
Gemini Links 16/12/2024: Invisibles and 20 Years of GNU/Linux on the Desktop
Links for the day
Microsoft's Windows Fell From 98% to Less Than 15% (in 15 Years in Africa)
Operating System Market Share Africa
Swaziland: GNU/Linux Leaps to 7.24%, Based on statCounter
Remember that Microsoft had many layoffs this year in Africa
A Birthday Wish
My birthday is a few hours away
[Meme] Definitely Not Your Role Models
Hypocrite Neckbeard Meme
Changes or Variation of Logo at the FSF as 40th Anniversary is Near (Months Away)
Next year the FSF turns 40
Mobile Usage Nearly 90% in Maharlika (Philippines)?
Microsoft has become just a footnote
Push Back and Become More Vocal for LLM Abuse and Misuse to Stop
We hope that more people out there (sites too) will call out the people who saturate particular topics on the Web with machine-generated junk
The Media Failed to Hold GAFAM Accountable (and Now It Suffers From It and For It)
This recognition of the problem emboldens us to carry on
Botswana: New Highs for GNU/Linux, All-Time Lows for Microsoft
No wonder Microsoft has so many layoffs in Africa this year
Links 16/12/2024: Skinnerboxes ("Smart" "Phones") and Control Social Media Blamed for Fights
Links for the day
Reminder: The Microsoft Person Who Used OpenAI for En Masse GPL Violations Told the Whistleblower to Kill Herself
The evidence (real message)
Links 16/12/2024: emacs, Drawabox, “You Should Have Your Own Website”
Links for the day
In Some Parts of the World, Like Central America and South America, Microsoft is Irrelevant on the Web
Nadella has bet the farm on a Ponzi scheme
[Meme] Microsoft is Not a Country
Reporting crimes is essential for democracy
There's Not Much Time Left for President Biden to Pardon Julian Assange and Signal to Journalists That Exposing States' Crimes or Rich People's Misbehaviour is Lawful
Apathy towards this is part of the problem
Image Fusion is Not 'AI' (LLMs Aren't Either)
Such fakes can (and always could) be done by a digital artist, it's just a little more expensive and time-consuming
GNU/Linux at New Highs in Bosnia And Herzegovina
Quite a few Balkan nations show high adoption rates for GNU/Linux
From Scientists to Pigeons: The EPO Has Turned Patent Examination Into a Process Made by Computers and Improperly Trained Staff Which Doesn't Meet the Requirements of the European Patent Convention (EPC)
Might as well abolish this entire system if this is the current trajectory
Razik Menidjel Will No Longer be Chief Operating Officer Operations at the EPO
What does the EPC say about slop and should it be updated to deal with trouble such as slop?
Underpaid and Inexperienced Workers Overwhelm the EPO, Granting Many Invalid Patents and Placing Pressure on Veteran Examiners
So-called "production" (giving monopolies) pressure is "compromising the quality of our products" [sic] according to a new report
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, December 15, 2024
IRC logs for Sunday, December 15, 2024