Desktop/Laptop

• What the growing OEM support means for the future of Linux

  When I first started using Linux in the late 1990s, getting Linux to successfully run on a laptop was the stuff of legends. You might be able to get a distribution installed, but having functional wireless connectivity or sound might well be beyond your skill level. Sometimes it’d mean compiling a custom kernel or installing/patching firmware. No matter what route you took, it required time and effort enough that when you did finally get everything working as it should, you felt like a rock star.

  Those were the days.

  These days, Linux just works. It’s a rare occasion that I run into a piece of hardware that Linux cannot handle. Sure, you might have to install a driver now and then, but even those bits of software are readily available.

Linux Magazine

• A Go program displays song lyrics line by line

• Teaching Three Times

• Christmas fun for makers

• Kernel News

• Quick and easy with PySimpleGUI

• Simple steps for securing your Linux system

• Cloning multiple computers with Clonezilla SE

• Rsync for website backup in a shared hosting environment Back End Backup

• This month in Linux Voice.

• Essential software tools for the working scientist

• KDE neon 5.20.0 and elementary OS 5.2

• The Glitter

  This month, the Wisconsin state government declined to pay the refundable tax subsidies to Foxconn, the Taiwanese conglomerate that arrived in Wisconsin in 2017 with the promise of a plant that would make LCD TVs and monitors and employ 13,000 people. It seems this “project” never did really get off the ground. The original vision of 13,000 workers soon scaled down to 5,200; then it plummeted still further as no one seemed to have a vision for what these people were going to do. After it became clear that it wouldn’t be profitable to make LCD screens (something neither the company nor the state seriously investigated before announcing the deal), Foxconn searched for other uses of the gigantic space they had already built. Casting about for an endeavor that would allow them to hang onto the subsidies, they explored alternatives such as innovation services, fish farming, and storage. Eventually, they just started adding workers to hit the minimum target of 520 employees by the end of 2019, but the government concluded these last-minute employees, many of whom didn’t have a clear job assignment, were not eligible to be counted under the terms of the contract. As of now, there is still no plan for what to do with the space, but it seems very unlikely that anyone will ever use it for LCD fabrication or any other high-tech manufacturing.

  It is always easy to point fingers after this kind of train wreck. The administration of former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker certainly deserves some heat for their naivetÈ. The national administration didn’t help, declaring at the ground breaking that the Foxconn plant would be the “eighth wonder of the world.” And, if you’re one who believes that all Asian companies are scarily efficient and well run, the recent story of the Wisconsin project at The Verge [1] will surely disabuse you of this preconception with regard to Foxconn.

• A personal wiki for the command line

• Tips for securing your SSH server

• FOSSPicks

• A user-friendly Arch Linux derivative

• News

• Managing servers with the Cockpit admin tool

• Seven general-purpose Git utilities

• Measure system runtime with tuptime Stopwatch

• Asciidoctor: AsciiDoc with new functions Performance Enhanced

• Eureka!

• Building a database front end with Jam.py

• Distros with KDE Plasma support

Audiocasts/Shows

• Embrace The Power of GUIs With Yet Another Dialog – YouTube

  Today we’re looking at a really neat tool for building GTK dialogs from your terminal called yad otherwise as yet another dialog, this isn’t the only tool of it’s kind that exists but there is so much that you can do with it that I could just not do a video on it.

• Jill is Back! Plus Ubuntu 20.10, youtube-dl DMCA Takedown & More | Destination Linux 197

  This week we’re going to take a look at Cloud Migration & Backup Strategies and we ask the question what should your personal cloud strategy be. Then we’re going to take a look at Ubuntu 20.10 and see what new features are available in this latest release. Then we discuss the DMCA takedown of Youtube-dl tool and whether this puts other open source tools at risk or is fair game for protecting content creators revenue. In our gaming section we talk about streaming your PS4 games to Linux! Later in the show, we’ll give you our popular tips/tricks and software picks. Plus so much more, on this week’s episode of Destination Linux.

• Edging the Fox | Coder Radio 385

  Microsoft is making aggressive moves to court more and more developers. We put on our analyst hats and lay out the hard cold truth.

  Plus our trouble with Gnomes, your feedback, and martinis on the moon.

Kernel Space

• Prepare To Re-Format If You Are Using An Older XFS Filesystem – LinuxReviews

  Linux 5.10 brings several new features to the XFS filesystem. It solves the year 2038 problem, it supports metadata checksumming and it has better metadata verification. There’s also a new configuration option: CONFIG_XFS_SUPPORT_V4. Older XFS filesystems using the v4 layout are now deprecated and there is no upgrade path beyond “backup and re-format”. The Linux kernel will support older XFS v4 filesystems by default until 2025 and optional support will remain available until 2030.

  A new CONFIG_XFS_SUPPORT_V4 option in Linux 5.10. In case you want to.. still be able to mount existing XFS filesystems if/when you upgrade to Linux 5.10.

  We previously reported that XFS patches for Linux 5.10 delay the 2038 problem to 2486. That’s not the only new feature Linux 5.10 brings to the XFS filesystem when it is released early December: It supports metadata checksumming, it has better built-in metadata verification and there is a new CONFIG_XFS_SUPPORT_V4 configuration option. Make sure you don’t accidentally say N to that one if you have an older XFS filesystem you’d like to keep using if/when you upgrade your kernel.

• The Linux Kernel Looks To Eventually Drop Support For WiMAX

  With the WiMAX 802.16 standard not being widely used outside of the Aeronautical Mobile Airport Communication System (AeroMACS) and usage in some developing nations, the Linux kernel may end up dropping its support for WiMAX but first there is a proposal to demote it to staging while seeing if any users remain.

  Longtime kernel developer Arnd Bergmann is proposing that the WiMAX Linux kernel infrastructure and the lone Intel 2400m driver be demoted from the networking subsystem to staging. In a future kernel release, the WiMAX support would be removed entirely if no active users are expressed.

  The Linux kernel WiMAX infrastructure is just used by the Intel 2400m driver for hardware with Sandy Bridge and prior, thus of limited relevance these days. That Intel WiMAX implementation doesn’t support the frequencies that AeroMACS operates at and there are no other large known WiMAX deployments around the world making use of the frequencies supported by the 2400m implementation or users otherwise of this Linux kernel code.

• Linux Is Dropping WiMAX Support – LinuxReviews

  It’s no loss. There is a reason why you have probably never seen a WiMAX device or heard of it, WiMAX was a wireless last-mile Internet solution mostly used in a few rural areas in a limited number of countries between 2005 and 2010. There is very little use for it today so it is almost natural that Linux is phasing out support for WiMAX and the one WiMAX device it supports.

  WiMAX is a wireless protocol, much like IP by Avian Carriers except that it has less bandwidth and significantly lower latency.

  WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is a set of wireless standards that were used to provide last-mile Internet connectivity where DSL and other solutions were unavailable. WiMAX can work over long distances (up to 50 km), something WiFi can’t. The initial design could provide around 25 megabit/s downstream, which was competitive when WiMAX base-stations and modems become widely available around 2005. That changed around 2010 when 4G/LTE become widely available.

  The WiMAX Forum, who maintains the WiMAX standard, tried staying relevant with a updated standard called WiMAX 2 in 2011. Some equipment for it was made, but it never became a thing. WiMAX was pretty much dead by the time WiMAX 2 arrived.

  The standard NetworkManager utility GNU/Linux distributions come with supported WiMAX until 2015. The Linux kernel still supports it and exactly one WiMAX device from Intel as of Linux 5.9, but that’s about to change.

• Graphics Stack

  • Adam Jackson: on abandoning the X server

    There’s been some recent discussion about whether the X server is abandonware. As the person arguably most responsible for its care and feeding over the last 15 years or so, I feel like I have something to say about that.

    The thing about being the maintainer of a public-facing project for nearly the whole of your professional career is it’s difficult to separate your own story from the project. So I’m not going to try to be dispassionate, here. I started working on X precisely because free software had given me options and capabilities that really matter, and I feel privileged to be able to give that back. I can’t talk about that without caring about it.

    So here’s the thing: X works extremely well for what it is, but what it is is deeply flawed. There’s no shame in that, it’s 33 years old and still relevant, I wish more software worked so well on that kind of timeframe. But using it to drive your display hardware and multiplex your input devices is choosing to make your life worse.

    It is, however, uniquely well suited to a very long life as an application compatibility layer. Though the code happens to implement an unfortunate specification, the code itself is quite well structured, easy to hack on, and not far off from being easily embeddable.

  • Adam Jackson On The State Of The X.Org Server In 2020

    Adam Jackson who on Red Hat’s Graphics Team served as the X.Org Server release manager for many years and being heavily involved in the xorg-server development and related components as shared his views on whether the X.Org Server is “abandonware.”

  • Sony Engineer Talks Up Using Flutter + Wayland For Their Embedded Interfaces – Phoronix

    A Sony engineer confirmed at this week’s Embedded Linux Conference Europe that the company has begun using the Flutter toolkit atop Wayland as their means of developing user-interfaces on embedded systems.

    Hidenori Matsubayashi of Sony talked at ELCE 2020 about their evaluation of different GUI toolkits for embedded use and ultimately how they fell for Flutter and Wayland. They came to that decision when evaluating the likes of Electron, Qt, GTK, WebKit/Chromium with WebView, and the many other options out there.

    Their design requirements were needing to be able to make “beautiful” user interfaces, support easy development, exhibit low CPU and RAM requirements, work across display servers and software stacks, and the toolkit must allow use within proprietary software.

  • Linux Support Expectations For The AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series

    Lisa Su is about to begin the presentation unveiling the much anticipated Radeon RX 6000 “Big Navi” (RDNA 2) graphics cards. This article will be updated live as the event progresses but first up let’s recap the current Linux open-source driver state for these forthcoming graphics cards.

    Under the codename Sienna Cichlid, the Linux support for the next-generation Navi graphics cards have been underway going back to the middle of the year. There is initial support for the next-gen hardware within the recent released Linux 5.9 kernel and Mesa 20.2. This still puts it just out-of-reach for seeing out-of-the-box support in the likes of Ubuntu 20.10 given the 5.8 kernel so the user must manually move to the newer kernel. At least with the likes of Fedora Workstation 33 there will be Linux 5.9 as a stable release update. Also important to the driver equation is needing to be using LLVM 11.0+ for the GFX10.3 back-end target and also ensuring to have the latest linux-firmware for the binary microcode files needed for GPU initialization.

    So at least going into this launch it’s great there is at least open-source driver support available but not necessarily easy reach for all users right now. By the time of the spring 2021 Linux distributions like Ubuntu 21.04 there should be nice out-of-the-box support for those wanting good support without any hassles. Or if you are on an enterprise distribution like RHEL/CentOS or SUSE Linux Enterprise or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, AMD should be providing their usual Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver that ships updated user and kernel-space components for deploying their driver that way.

  • Mesa 20.3 Supports Intel Alder Lake Gen12 Graphics – Phoronix

    Last week Intel open-source engineers began publishing Linux kernel patches for the “Alder Lake S” graphics support. That work should be found in the Linux 5.11 cycle being christened as stable in early 2021. In user-space, Alder Lake graphics patches also appeared for their OpenCL / oneAPI Level Zero compute stack and now merged into Mesa 20.3 as well for OpenGL / Vulkan support.

    Given that Alder Lake is using Intel Xe “Gen12″ graphics as found already for Tiger Lake and Rocket Lake, the actual driver-side enablement is quite minimal thanks to employing the existing code paths. The Alder Lake “ADL-S” support was merged into Mesa on Tuesday and is just 20 lines of new code. That consists of just adding the new PCI IDs and then the family bits for the Alder Lake family and indicating they make use of Gen12 features.

Servers

• Istio / Announcing Istio 1.7.4

  This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.7.3 and Istio 1.7.4

• Kubeflow operators: lifecycle management for the ML stack | Ubuntu

  Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, releases Charmed Kubeflow, a set of charm operators to deliver the 20+ applications that make up the latest version of Kubeflow, for easy consumption anywhere, from workstations to on-prem, public cloud, and edge.

  [...]

  Kubeflow provides the cloud-native interface between Kubernetes, the industry standard for software delivery and operations at scale, and data science tools: libraries, frameworks, pipelines, and notebooks.

  Machine learning pipelines on Kubernetes, with Kubeflow pipelines, enable factory-like processes for data science teams. Data scientists can experiment and build data pipelines on a single dashboard, while the underlying operations and infrastructure work are handled by Kubernetes administrators.

Applications

• Best Music Players for Linux in 2021 [Ed: Almost the whole list is just proprietary software that spies on the GNU/Linux user. This is crazy. Many so-called music players are nowadays just mental surveillance platforms.]

  Many people enjoy listening to music to pass time and destress, and some people even listen to music while working to stay motivated and focused. Studies have shown that soft music can help employees stay motivated and increase productivity.

  If you are a Linux user who enjoys listening to music while you are on your computer, then you are in luck, because there are variety of music players available for Linux. In this article, we are going to discuss the five best music players available for Linux.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to Boot Raspberry Pi 4 from USB SSD? – Linux Hint

  Raspberry Pi 4 firmware supports USB boot. You can easily boot your favorite operating system on your Raspberry Pi 4 from a USB HDD, SSD, or a USB thumb drive instead of the traditional microSD card.

  [...]

  In this section, I am going to show you how to enable USB boot on Raspberry Pi 4.

  Before you can enable USB boot on your Raspberry Pi 4, you must update all the existing packages of your Raspberry Pi OS. So that we can update the firmware and enable USB boot.

• Monitoring Temperature in Raspberry Pi – Linux Hint

  Monitoring temperatures may be a requirement in many of your Raspberry Pi projects. It is relatively easy to do in Raspberry Pi and the components required for this project are not too costly.This article shows you how to use the DS18B20 digital thermometer module to monitor temperature using Raspberry Pi. The article also demonstrates how to create a web app to display the temperature.

• Raspberry PI VPN Server with PiVPN – peppe8o

  Raspberry PI can provide a number of linux services able to easily solve problems to manage your home network with cheap solutions. Using an OS based on Debian, it can run Open Source software and drastically help you with your home ICT needs as well as small office needs.

  A common need for increasing networking security and access your home services from outside is having a VPN (Virtual Private Network) server which grants secure access from an external network to your internal services.

  A simple solution to implement OpenVPN or WireGuard (the 2 most widely known VPN open source serices) is using the convenient PiVPN setup tool.

  In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to setup a VPN server with a cheap Raspberry PI Zero Wusing PiVPN and send certificate via email. This guide applies also to newer Raspberry PI boards.

• Understanding YAML for Ansible | Enable Sysadmin

  If you write or use Ansible playbooks, then you’re used to reading YAML configuration files. YAML can be deceptively simple and yet strangely overwhelming all at once, especially when you consider the endless possible Ansible modules at your disposal. It feels like it should be easy to jot down a few options in a YAML file and then run Ansible, but what options does your favorite module require? And why are some key-value pairs while others are lists?

  YAML for Ansible can get complex, so understanding how Ansible modules translate to YAML is an important part of getting better at both. Before you can understand how YAML works for Ansible modules, you must understand the basics of YAML.

  If you don’t know the difference between a mapping block and a sequence block in YAML, read this quick introduction to the basics of YAML article.

• Using TRIM and DISCARD with SSDs attached to RAID controllers | Enable Sysadmin

  SSDs are now commonplace and have been the default choice for performance-oriented disks in the enterprise and consumer environments for the past few years. SSDs are cool and fast but most people on high-end machines face this dilemma: My SSD is behind a RAID controller which doesn’t expose the device’s DISCARD or TRIM capabilities. How do I discard the blocks to keep the best SSD performance? Here’s a trick to do just that without having to disassemble your machine. Recent improvements in SSD firmware have made the need for the applications writing to SSDs less stringent to use DISCARD/TRIM.

  There are, however, some cases in which you may need to have the filesystem inform the drive of the blocks which it discarded. Perhaps you have TLC (3bits per cell) or QLC (4bits per cell) drives instead of the usually more expensive enterprise-class SLC or MLC drives (the latter are less susceptible to a performance drop since they put aside more extra blocks to help with overwrites when the drive is at capacity). Or maybe you once filled your SSD to 100%, and now you cannot get the original performance/IOPS back.

• How to play Among Us on Linux

  Among Us is incredibly popular, but, sadly, the game does not have a native port for Linux. Thankfully, with a little tweaking, it is possible to get Among Us working on the Linux platform!

• How to add file folders to the XFCE4 menu

  XFCE4 is an excellent Linux desktop environment, but one of its shortcomings is that users aren’t able to access folders directly from the menu like other modern desktops such as Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, etc.

• How To Install Apache JMeter on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache JMeter on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, The Apache JMeter application is open-source software, a 100% pure Java application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It was originally designed for testing Web Applications but has since expanded to other test functions.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of Apache JMeter on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.

• Introduction to Blender for Beginners – Linux Hint

  If you are a 3D computer graphics or animation enthusiast and are in search of some 3D modeling software, then you have come to the right place. There are many 3D modeling software programs available, many are good and are doing their jobs quite well, but they all come with a hefty price tag and high subscription fees. There is no need to pay heavy subscription fees when you have a free and powerful 3D creation tool at your fingertips, known as a Blender. Blender is a popular and open-source 3D creation software that can be used in 3D printer designs. It is a robust program that supports the entire pipeline of 3D creation, which includes modeling, shading, rigging, animation, and rendering. There is no need to get any supplementary programs because Blender lets you make games and edit videos.

  Blender is quite easy to learn and has a great community to support you. This article introduces the basics of the Blender software to beginners. We will discuss the Blender user interface and some essential shortcut keys. If you are a beginner and want to start 3D modeling in Blender, then this article is for you.

• How To Install Wireguard on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Wireguard on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Wireguard is an open-source, dependable, advanced, VPN tunneling software you can install and use right now to create a secure, point-to-point connection to a server. It is cross-platform and can run almost anywhere, including Linux, Windows, Android, and macOS. Wireguard is a peer-to-peer VPN. it does not use the client-server model. Depending on its configuration, a peer can act as a traditional server or client.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of Wireguard on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.

• How To Use Dockerfiles In Docker – Anto Online

  This post will explain how to use Dockerfiles in Docker. Learn how to launch WordPress and MariaDB using your own Dockerfile.

• How To Install Wine on Linux Mint 20 – idroot

  In this tutorial we will show you how to install Wine on Linux Mint 20, as well as some extra required package by Wine

• How to Extract and Open a .gz File in Linux Command Line – Linux Hint

  We know that a file in a computer system can be as small as a few Bytes or as large as a thousand Gigabytes. When you want to transmit a file from one end to another, its size plays a very important role in deciding whether you want to send it as it is or compress it. The .gz file format is a very commonly used compressed file format for the Linux operating system. Today, we will explore the methods of extracting and opening a .gz file in Linux.

• How to Install and Configure an FTP server (vsftpd) with SSL/TLS on Ubuntu 20.04

  In this tutorial, we will learn how to install and configure an FTP Server using vsftpd on an Ubuntu 20.04 based server. We will also learn how to sec…

• How to Reset Forgotten Root Password in Ubuntu? – Linux Hint

  In any UNIX or Linux system, the root account is the top in the hierarchy. It holds the utmost power over the system. For any system change, the root has to grant permission. The root user can also override any user’s permission and read or write data. Because the root account holds so much power, it is important to protect it from unwanted access.In the case of Ubuntu, the root account is disabled by default. However, you can still perform system changes. To do so, you need to know the root password. The problem arises when you have forgotten the root password.

Games

• How to Build a New PC For Linux – Make Tech Easier

  Often times you will receive a recommendation that you should install Linux on an older PC. The thing is, Linux works extremely well on a new custom built PC, too. There are many users that are looking for a brand new Linux PC for home office use, workstation use, or other specialized uses. Here we walk you through how to build a new PC for Linux.

• Build and connect more subway systems in a free Mini Metro content update | GamingOnLinux

  Mini Metro, the wonderful subway train-track building sort-of puzzle game just recently had a nice free content upgrade with more on the way. It’s something of a masterpiece, and very highly rated so it’s awesome to see it expand.

  Across multiple maps you gradually build up and design a transport network that rapidly expands, the point is to get people across to the correct station as quickly as possible. It’s a hard game to pin down to a particular genre too. Is it a puzzle game? Is it a strategy game? Well, both sort-of and it’s also both relaxing and often a little stressful too but it’s brilliant and many things more.

• Dying Light has a Left 4 Dead 2 crossover event and a free DLC | GamingOnLinux

  Love kicking ass and destroying Zombies? Check out the latest update to the excellent open-world parkour action in Dying Light with a new Left 4 Dead crossover event.

  The special experience is live now until October 29 18:00, which will see you battle the Viral Rush event which is meant to emulate the hordes that appear in Left 4 Dead. To make it a bit more interesting and unique Techland added in a “new type of shotgun ammo that gives the infected a taste of fire and brimstone”. If you don’t like it, you can turn off the special events like this in the menu.

• The Zone: Stalker Stories to offer a unique blend of exploration and deck-building | GamingOnLinux

  A thoroughly curious blend of genres this one with The Zone: Stalker Stories offering up exploration, deckbuilding, card battles and RPG elements. On top of that, you’re also getting treated to a visual novel styled story that’s being carefully crafted by industry veterans from Illuminated Games who worked on the likes of Mount&Blade, The Next World and more.

  Inspired by the likes of Slay the Spire, S.T.A.L.K.E.R and Darkest Dungeon it’s not going to be a roguelike, instead their plan is to offer a richly detailed story experience with hand-crafted environments with plenty to explore and secrets to find.

• Julius, the open source re-implementation of Caesar III has a new major release | GamingOnLinux

  Caesar III continues to live on and get improvements on modern systems thanks to open source, with the Julius game engine continuing to mature.

  On October 27, Julius 1.5.0 was released continuing to upgrade the experience. The current status is that it should be fully playable, with it largely focused on accuracy with the original game but with plenty of UI enhancements.

• Upcoming RPG ‘Moonshell Island’ will have you fight giant tomatoes with a whisk | GamingOnLinux

  You’ve faced monsters before aplenty but what about nomsters? Moonshell Island looks and sounds like a delightful and rather quirky upcoming RPG.

  Set on a whimsical island, Moonshell Island will feature a cast of charming characters, a “satisfying” action-battle system, plenty of mini-games and a “heartwarming tale of achieving dreams, supporting friends, and building a community”. On a peaceful island these strange nomsters threaten the peace so “you must journey to find the source of the trouble and recruit the islanders to a safe haven, Crabby’s Cabana Club. As the club population grows, more services become available to aid you on your quest to uncover not only the secrets of the island, but also of yourself”.

• The Last Relic is an upcoming RPG inspired by Earthbound and Chrono Trigger | GamingOnLinux

  Enjoyed classics like Earthbound and Chrono Trigger? Take a look at The Last Relic, an in-development RPG from developer Christopher Hall Guay.

  “The Last Relic follows the tale of a young girl named Ellie who is transported from her cozy, American life to a foreign realm of magic and monsters. Lost and alone, she wanders this new land aimlessly, wishing only to get back home. She’s attacked by monsters only to be rescued by a young man named Dorian. It’s here Ellie learns that she is far from Earth, in the land of Relics and Relic Hunters. Why was she brought here? And will she ever make it back home?”

Distributions

• New Releases

  • NixOS 20.09 Linux Distro Released: What’s New?

    ixOS is an operating system where everything from the Kernel, applications, system packages, and configuration files are built by the OS’s own Nix package manager. These packages are stored in isolation from one another because of which directories like /bin, /sbin, /lib are absent, and a separate directory /nix/store is maintained.

    Due to this, NixOS aims at providing great system configuration management. The latest version of the OS NixOS 20.09 brings many important and subtle changes to the mix.

• BSD

  • FreeBSD 12.2 Released: A UNIX-like Free And Stable Operating System

    In June this year, the FreeBSD team released a fifth and final version 11.4 of the FreeBSD 11-STABLE branch. Now continuing the development of the latest stable 12.x series of FreeBSD, a new production snapshot, FreeBSD 12.2, has been announced.

    Subsequently, this third point update of the 12-STABLE branch brings numerous changes and enhancements to the FreeBSD kernel, userland, bootloader, and networking.

    What’s New In FreeBSD 12.2?

    Starting with the kernel changes, it has added support for APEI (ACPI Platform Error Interfaces) and enabled ixl driver by default for FreeBSD/powerpc64. The ixl driver provides support for any PCI Express adapter or LOM (LAN On Motherboard) in the Intel Ethernet 700 Series.

    Another important update is pushed to the jail utility, which now allows you to run Linux in a jailed environment.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

  • Kodi media player updated to 18.9 » PCLinuxOS

    Kodi is a free and open-source media player software application developed by the XBMC Foundation, a non-profit technology consortium. Kodi is available for multiple operating systems and hardware platforms, with a software 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • 10 Things to Do After Installing Fedora 33

    Fedora 33 is released with many new features and updates. Here is a list of 10 things to do after installing Fedora 33.

  • Fedora 33 Now Available With GNOME 3.38

    The Fedora Project has announced the general availability of Fedora 33. Fedora 33 enhancements are aimed at improving the overall experience for both new and advanced users by integrating a more seamless design and mature filesystem.

    The latest version also provides a foundation for new use cases, like IoT and edge computing.

    The introduction of GNOME 3.38, with a new Tour application, provides an easier start for new users.

  • Fedora 33 overview | Welcome to Freedom. – YouTube

    In this video, I am going to show an overview of Fedora 33 and some of the applications pre-installed.

  • Fedora 33: Honing Linux’s cutting edge

    The new Fedora 33 Workstation comes with the greatly improved GNOME 3.38, desktop. If you aren’t already familiar with GNOME, Fedora is not the Linux you want to learn it on. Try Ubuntu or openSUSE to get to know GNOME.

    However, if you’re a fan of immutable desktops, you may want to check out Fedora Silverblue instead of Fedora Workstation.

    Silverblue tends to be more stable than other desktops. Also, if something does go wrong, you can easily reboot and rollback to the last working version. And if the rollback goes wrong, you can still download and boot any other image that was generated in the past, using the ostree command.

    All versions of Fedora are built on top of the Linux 5.8.15 kernel. For applications, it comes with the usual assortment of the latest versions of LibreOffice, office suite, and Firefox, web browser.

  • What’s new in Fedora 33 Workstation

    Fedora 33 Workstation is the latest release of our free, leading-edge operating system. You can download it from the official website here right now. There are several new and noteworthy changes in Fedora 33 Workstation.

    [...]

    Fresh Fedora 33 installations will set the EDITOR environment variable to nano by default. This change affects several command line tools that spawn a text editor when they require user input. With earlier releases, this environment variable default was unspecified, leaving it up to the individual application to pick a default editor. Typically, applications would use vi as their default editor due to it being a small application that is traditionally available on the base installation of most Unix/Linux operating systems. Since Fedora 33 includes nano in its base installation, and since nano is more intuitive for a beginning user to use, Fedora 33 will use nano by default. Users who want vi can, of course, override the value of the EDITOR variable in their own environment. See the Fedora change request for more details.

  • Fedora 33 elections nominations now open

    Candidates may self-nominate. If you nominate someone else, please check with them to ensure that they are willing to be nominated before submitting their name.

    The steering bodies are currently selecting interview questions for the candidates.

    Nominees submit their questionnaire answers via a private Pagure issue. The Election Wrangler or their backup will publish the interviews to the Community Blog before the start of the voting period. Fedora Podcast episodes will be recorded and published as well.

    Please note that the interview is mandatory for all nominees. Nominees not having their interview ready by end of the Interview period (2020-11-19) will be disqualified and removed from the election.

  • 12 Tips for a migration and modernization project

    Sometimes migration/modernization projects are hard to execute because there are many technical challenges, like the structure of legacy code, customer environment, customer bureaucracy, network issues, and the most feared of all, production bugs. In this post I’m going to explain the 12-step migration / modernization procedure I follow as a consultant using a tip-based approach.

    I have some experience with this kind of situation because I’ve already passed by different kinds of projects with several kinds of problems. Over time you start to recognize patterns and get used to solving the hard problems.

    So, I thought: Wouldn’t it be cool to create a procedure based on my experience, so that I can organize my daily work and give the transparency that the customers and managers want?

    To test this out, I did this for one customer in my hometown. They were facing a Red Hat JBoss EAP migration/modernization project. The results of the project were outstanding. The customer said they were even more satisfied with the transparency. The project manager seemed really comfortable knowing all about the details through the project and pleased with reducing the risk of unexpected news.

  • Awards roll call: June 2020 to October 2020

    We are nearly at the end of 2020 and while the pace continues to increase, we want to take a moment to acknowledge and celebrate some of the successes of Red Hat’s people and their work. In the last four months, several Red Hatters and Red Hat products are being recognized by leading industry publications and organizations for efforts in driving innovation.

  • How developers can build the next generation of AI advertising technology – IBM Developer

    As we look across the most rapidly transforming industries like financial services, healthcare, retail – and now advertising, developers are putting open source technologies to work to deliver next-generation features. Our enterprise clients are looking for AI solutions that will scale with trust and transparency to solve business problems. At IBM®, I have the pleasure of focusing on equipping you, the developers, with the capabilities you need to meet the heightened expectations you face at work each day.

    We’re empowering open source developers to drive the critical transformation to AI in advertising. For instance, at the IBM Center for Open source Data and AI Technologies (CODAIT), enterprise developers can find open source starting points to tackle some of your thorniest challenges. We’re making it easy for developers to use and create open source AI models that can ultimately help brand marketers go deeper with AI to reach consumers more effectively.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu 21.04 Is The “Hirsute Hippo”, Releasing On 22 April

    Following last week’s Ubuntu 20.10 “Groovy Gorilla” release, Ubuntu 21.04 development is now getting underway as the Hirsute Hippo.

    Succeeding the “GG” series is Ubuntu 21.04 the Hirsute (Hairy) Hippo in following their usual naming convention. This is now the third time of Ubuntu seeing a “HH” release following the Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog and Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron releases.

    The release schedule for Ubuntu 21.04 puts the official release on 22 April, the beta on 1 April, and the feature freeze on 25 February as the prominent dates of the cycle.

    The Ubuntu 21.04 toolchain upload is beginning tomorrow and expect more Debian changes to begin flowing into the Ubuntu Hirsute archive shortly. Hirsute uploads can be monitored via Launchpad.

  • Ubuntu 21.04 gets the codename ‘Hirsute Hippo’

  • The Ubuntu 21.04 Codename Revealed — It’s Hairy ‘n Huge!

  • And We’re Off: Ubuntu 21.04 Development Begins

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi based audio streamer features 5-inch touchscreen

  Orchard Audio has launched an $800 “PecanPi Streamer Ultra” that adds a 5-inch touchscreen to the Raspberry Pi 3-based audio streamer. Orchard is also prepping a “PecanPi USB/SPDIF” DAC and amp that overrides your computer or phone audio.

  Last year, Orchard Audio found success with a well-reviewed PecanPi DAC Raspberry Pi add-on and PecanPi Streamer device based on it. Now, the company has returned with a PecanPi Streamer Ultra, a larger, 195 x 120 x 100mm variant of the Streamer with a 5-inch, 800 x 480-pixel touchscreen. Orchard Audio also teased a PecanPi USB/SPDIF (see farther below).

• Xavier NX driven AI box has five GbE ports

  Aaeon’s -10 to 60°C tolerant “Boxer-8250AI” AI edge computer runs Linux on a Jetson Xavier NX along with 5x GbE ports for IP cameras plus 4x USB 3.0, 2x COM, and an HDMI port.

  Aaeon has launched a $1,116 computer for embedded AI processing that combines the Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX module of its more compact Boxer-8251AI with a feature set like its Jetson Nano based Boxer-8220AI. The new Boxer-8250AI is larger than the Boxer-8220AI at 175.8 x 100 x 39mm and similarly provides 5x GbE ports for running IP cameras.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Thought Apple’s iPhone was always faster than Android? This news will make you think again

  • Here’s what’s new with Android 11 on the Pixel 5

  • Nokia 5.3 model running on Google’s latest Android 11 OS hits Geekbench

  • How to Fix YouTube Server Connection Error [400] on Android

  • A New Ransomware Threat Kidnaps Android User Data

  • This is the list of apps that Android users should avoid downloading

  • The art of 4k android TV boxes

  • Huawei Freebuds Pro Review: One of the BEST ANC wireless earbuds for Android

  • Android Developer

  • PS5 DualSense controller will support Android

  • TCL 10 5G UW is an affordable next-gen Verizon Android smartphone

  • YouTube update brings new controls to iPhone and Android: here’s how to use them

  • ColorOS 11 Beta based on Android 11 arrives for Reno 4 Pro 5G in UAE & Saudi Arabia

  • Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 finally gets its MIUI 12 update with Android 10

  • What Are the Best Casinos With Android Apps?

  • This is the list of apps that Android users should avoid downloading

  • Google Pixel 4a review: Impressive camera and Android experience

  • Google’s Android Enterprise Recommended site now shows how long devices are supported for

  • Android L Will Keep Your Secrets Safer

  • Android TV: Inside Google’s TV platform

  • 30 of the scariest Android games that are perfect for Halloween 2020

  • Surf the web more securely on Chrome for Android by activating Enhanced Safe Browsing

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Will Kahn-Greene: Everett v1.0.3 released!

      v1.0.3 released!

      This is a minor maintenance update that fixes a couple of minor bugs, addresses a Sphinx deprecation issue, drops support for Python 3.4 and 3.5, and adds support for Python 3.8 and 3.9 (largely adding those environments to the test suite).

      Why you should take a look at Everett

      At Mozilla, I’m using Everett for a variety of projects: Mozilla symbols server, Mozilla crash ingestion pipeline, and some other tooling. We use it in a bunch of other places at Mozilla, too.

    • Extensions in Firefox 83 | Mozilla Add-ons Blog

      In addition to our brief update on extensions in Firefox 83, this post contains information about changes to the Firefox release calendar and a feature preview for Firefox 84.

      Thanks to a contribution from Richa Sharma, the error message logged when a tabs.sendMessage is passed an invalid tabID is now much easier to understand. It had regressed to a generic message due to a previous refactoring.

• Programming/Development

  • Qt 6 To Ship With Package Manager For Extra Libraries – Phoronix

    Adding to the list of changes coming with the Qt 6 toolkit, The Qt Company has now outlined their initial implementation of a package manager to provide additional Qt6 modules.

  • Qt for MCUs 1.5 released

    A new release of Qt for MCUs is now available in the Qt Installer. If you are new to Qt for MCUs, you can try it out here. Version 1.5 introduces new platform APIs for easy integration of Qt for MCUs on any microcontroller, along with an in-depth porting guide to get you going. Additionally, it includes a set of C++ APIs to load new images at runtime into your QML GUI. As with every release, 1.5 also includes API improvements and bug fixes, enhancing usability and stability.

  • KDDockWidgets v1.1 has been released! – KDAB – KDAB on Qt

    KDDockWidgets v1.1 is now available!

    Although I just wrote about v1.0 last month, the 1.1 release still managed to get a few big features.

  • KDAB TV celebrates its first year – KDAB

    A year ago KDAB started a YouTube channel dedicated to software development with Qt, C++ and 3D technologies like OpenGL. We talked to Sabine Faure, who is in charge of the program, about how it worked out so far and what we can expect in the future.

  • How to build a responsive contact form with PHP – Linux Hint

    Contact forms are commonly used in web applications because they allow the visitors of the website to communicate with the owner of the website. For most websites, responsive contact forms can be easily accessed from various types of devices such as desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones.
    In this tutorial, a responsive contact form is implemented, and the submitted data is sent as an email using PHP.

  • Python

    • Dissecting a Web stack – The Digital Cat

      Having recently worked with young web developers who were exposed for the first time to proper production infrastructure, I received many questions about the various components that one can find in the architecture of a “Web service”. These questions clearly expressed the confusion (and sometimes the frustration) of developers who understand how to create endpoints in a high-level language such as Node.js or Python, but were never introduced to the complexity of what happens between the user’s browser and their framework of choice. Most of the times they don’t know why the framework itself is there in the first place.
      The challenge is clear if we just list (in random order), some of the words we use when we discuss (Python) Web development: HTTP, cookies, web server, Websockets, FTP, multi-threaded, reverse proxy, Django, nginx, static files, POST, certificates, framework, Flask, SSL, GET, WSGI, session management, TLS, load balancing, Apache.
      In this post, I want to review all the words mentioned above (and a couple more) trying to build a production-ready web service from the ground up. I hope this might help young developers to get the whole picture and to make sense of these “obscure” names that senior developers like me tend to drop in everyday conversations (sometimes arguably out of turn).
      As the focus of the post is the global architecture and the reasons behind the presence of specific components, the example service I will use will be a basic HTML web page. The reference language will be Python but the overall discussion applies to any language or framework.
      My approach will be that of first stating the rationale and then implementing a possible solution. After this, I will point out missing pieces or unresolved issues and move on with the next layer. At the end of the process, the reader should have a clear picture of why each component has been added to the system.

    • Introducing AutoScraper: A Smart, Fast and Lightweight Web Scraper For Python | Codementor

      In the last few years, web scraping has been one of my day to day and frequently needed tasks. I was wondering if I can make it smart and automatic to save lots of time. So I made AutoScraper!

    • django-render-block 0.8 (and 0.8.1) released!

      A couple of weeks ago I released version 0.8 of django-render-block, this was followed up with a 0.8.1 to fix a regression.

      django-render-block is a small library that allows you render a specific block from a Django (or Jinja) template, this is frequently used for emails when you want multiple pieces of an email together in a single template (e.g. the subject, HTML body, and text body), but they need to be rendered separately before sending.

    • Pyston v2: 20% faster Python | The Pyston Blog

      We’re very excited to release Pyston v2, a faster and highly compatible implementation of the Python programming language. Version 2 is 20% faster than stock Python 3.8 on our macrobenchmarks. More importantly, it is likely to be faster on your code. Pyston v2 can reduce server costs, reduce user latencies, and improve developer productivity.

      Pyston v2 is easy to deploy, so if you’re looking for better Python performance, we encourage you to take five minutes and try Pyston. Doing so is one of the easiest ways to speed up your project.

    • Pyston v2 Released As ~20% Faster Than Python 3.8 – Phoronix

      Version 2.0 of Pyston is now available, the Python implementation originally started by Dropbox that builds on LLVM JIT for offering faster Python performance.

      Pyston developers believe their new release is about 20% faster than the standard Python 3.8 and should be faster for most Python code-bases.

    • Python int to string – Linux Hint

      Python is one of the universal languages that support various types of data types like integer, decimal point number, string, and complex number. We can convert one type of data type to another data type in Python. This data type conversion process is called typecasting. In Python, an integer value can easily be converted into a string by using the str() function. The str() function takes the integer value as a parameter and converts it into the string. The conversion of int to string is not only limited to the str() function. There are various other means of int to string conversion. This article explains the int to string conversion with various methods.

    • Python isinstance() Function – Linux Hint

      Python is one of the best and efficient high-level programming languages. It has a very straightforward and simple syntax. It has very built-in modules and functions that help us to perform the basic tasks efficiently. The Python isinstance() function evaluates either the given object is an instance of the specified class or not.

  • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

    • Applying JavaScript’s setTimeout Method

      With the evolution of the internet, JavaScript has grown in popularity as a programming language due to its many useful methods. For example, many websites use JavaScript’s built-in setTimeout method to delay tasks. The setTimeout method has many use cases, and it can be used for animations, notifications, and functional execution delays.Because JavaScript is a single-threaded, translative language, we can perform only one task at a time. However, by using call stacks, we can delay the execution of code using the setTimeout method. In this article, we are going to introduce the setTimeout method and discuss how we can use it to improve our code.

    • Removing Characters from String in Bash – Linux Hint

      At times, you may need to remove characters from a string. Whatever the reason is, Linux provides you with various built-in, handy tools that allow you to remove characters from a string in Bash. This article shows you how to use those tools to remove characters from a string.

      [...]

      Sed is a powerful and handy utility used for editing streams of text. It is a non-interactive text editor that allows you to perform basic text manipulations on input streams. You can also use sed to remove unwanted characters from strings.

      For demonstration purposes, we will use a sample string and then pipe it to the sed command.

The Very Human Labor That Powers Artificial Intelligence

In 2015, Caroline Sinders was working as a design researcher at IBM when she began to have questions about how Watson, the company’s artificial intelligence system, was being developed. AI systems like Watson must be “trained” with data sets—for example, given a large batch of confirmed photographs of stop signs from different angles, in different lighting, and of different quality to be able to recognize stop signs on their own. Sinders was curious about these data sets: The process of correctly categorizing millions of data points seemed like a herculean task in its own right; where, exactly, was all this data coming from?

Hardware

• AMD in $35 Billion All-Stock Acquisition of Xilinx

  After a couple of weeks of rumor, as well as a couple of years of hearsay, AMD has gone feet first into a full acquisition of FPGA manufacturer Xilinx. The deal involves an all-stock transaction, leveraging AMD’s sizeable share price in order to enable an equivalent $143 per Xilinx share – current AMD stockholders will still own 74% of the combined company, while Xilinx stockholders will own 26%. The combined $135 billion entity will total 13000 engineers, and expand AMD’s total addressable market to $110 Billion. It is believed that the key reasons for the acquisition lie in Xilinx’s adaptive computing solutions for the data center market.

• AMD Launches 3 High-End RX 6000-Series GPUs For 4k Gaming – LinuxReviews

  AMD has announced 3 high-end graphics cards based on the RDNA2 architecture. Their new mid-range RX 6800 card, comparable to a Nvidia 2080ti, will cost $579 when it becomes available on November 18th. AMDs new RX 6900 XT flagship GPU will cost a whopping $999 when it launches on December 8th.

  It has been more than a decade since AMD has had anything to show in the very high-end graphics market. Now they do if the marketing video AMD released today is anything to go by. Their new flagship GPU, the RX 6900 XT, is comparable to Nvidias top-of-the-line RTX 3090 graphics card if the FPS numbers AMD presented are realistic.

Health/Nutrition

• A Pandemic Pivot

  It has done just about everything wrong, from the failure to contain the virus early on to the lack of effective coordination thereafter. As the predicted second wave begins to build — the world is now adding over 400,000 new cases per day — it is truly disheartening to think that the international community hasn’t really learned any lessons from its snafu.

  Sure, some countries have successfully managed the crisis. South Korea, despite several superspreading outbreaks, has kept its death toll to below 450, which is fewer than Washington, D.C. alone has suffered. Thailand, Vietnam, Uruguay, and New Zealand have all done even better to address the public health emergency.

• Despite Court Ruling and Drift Concerns, EPA Approves Use of Dicamba Products on Soybeans and Cotton for Five Years

  One critic charged that the agency “has shown such callous indifference to the damage dicamba has caused to farmers and wildlife alike.”

• ‘Dark Winter’

  COVID-19 is the most dangerous health disaster to hit the United States since the flu epidemic of 1918. Yet Donald Trump hasn’t grasped its significance or the damage it has caused to Americans since he first learned of the disease Jan. 28 and didn’t tell us.

  And the Trump administration seemed to surrender to the disease, abandoning any attempt to control its spread and essentially serving notice it is helpless, leaving 330 million people without central leadership and that it’s everyone for themselves. Instead, it is waiting for a vaccine, which may not be widely available until the middle of next year.

• The New Humanitarian | Syria’s Idlib faces childhood hunger ‘emergency’

  Nearly a year since the height of a devastating government offensive that forced a million people from their homes in Syria’s rebel-held northwest, doctors and aid workers are warning that the region’s civilians, especially young children, face a new threat: rising hunger.
  Doctor Firas Hamdo, a paediatrician and nutrition specialist, is among those who for months have been witnessing an increase of malnutrition cases at the children’s hospital where he works in Taftanaz, a town in Idlib province.
  Among those cases is an eight-month-old baby. Her family fled the bombardment in Idlib just a month before she was born. While her mother sits nearby, Hamdo uses a measuring tape to record the circumference of her upper arm, a method used to identify the risk of malnutrition.
  At a tiny 10 centimetres, the girl’s arm is on the tape’s colour-coded red zone. She is given a dosage of F-75, the powdered milk that is one of the first phases of treatment for those diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) – the most serious and visible form of malnutrition in children under the age of five.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Openwashing

      • Cryptographic Autonomy License (CAL-1.0): My first license review [Ed: Openwashing licences (i.e. faking 'Open Source' for proprietary software nonsense)]

        The bookmark was creeping on my browser’s toolbar for months. “Cryptographic Autonomy License” CAL-1.0 on the Open Source Initiative webpage. But today, I decided it was time to do my first amateur license review. This is a fun exercise (for me). Do not take this too seriously!

        The Cryptographic Autonomy License is one of newest Open Source licenses on the block. The Open Source Initiative approved it in February 2020. This license also made ripples when it came through. But the question I had, and could not find a clear answer to, was why is it so interesting?

        This blog post is my attempt to do a casual coffee-table review of the license. If you agree or disagree, I encourage you to leave a comment and share your opinion and why!

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Open source and Linux expertise more in-demand than ever | TechRadar

          Hiring people with skills in open-source software suites such as Linux is becoming a priority for more businesses, new research has revealed.

          The 2020 Open Source Jobs Report from the Linux Foundation, prepared in collaboration with edX, which is a non-profit online learning platform founded by Harvard and MIT, found 81% of respondents confirmed that hiring open source talent is a priority for them in 2020.

          93% of hiring managers report difficulty finding sufficient talent with open source skills, up from 87% two years ago, showing that qualified open source talent is still in short supply.

          Moreover, while open source wasn’t immune to the ill-effects of the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, its impact on professionals with open source prowess was limited. As per the survey, only 4% of employers laid off open source professionals due to COVID-19.

          The good news is that hiring is already picking back up, with 37% of hiring managers saying they will be hiring more skilled IT professionals in the next six months.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Wednesday [LWN.net]

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (blueman), Fedora (nodejs), Gentoo (firefox), openSUSE (kleopatra), Oracle (java-1.8.0-openjdk), SUSE (apache2, binutils, firefox, pacemaker, sane-backends, spice, spice-gtk, tomcat, virt-bootstrap, xen, and zeromq), and Ubuntu (ca-certificates, mariadb-10.1, mariadb-10.3, netty, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, perl, and tomcat6).

    • Italian energy giant Enel hit by Windows NetWalker ransomware

      The Italian multinational energy giant Enel Group appears to have been hit by cyber criminals using the Windows NetWalker ransomware, and some screenshots of data stolen from the company has been posted on the dark web.

    • What would you risk for free Honey? | Almost Secure

      Honey is a popular browser extension built by the PayPal subsidiary Honey Science LLC. It promises nothing less than preventing you from wasting money on your online purchases. Whenever possible, it will automatically apply promo codes to your shopping cart, thus saving your money without you lifting a finger. And it even runs a reward program that will give you some money back! Sounds great, what’s the catch?

      With such offers, the price you pay is usually your privacy. With Honey, it’s also security. The browser extension is highly reliant on instructions it receives from its server. I found at least four ways for this server to run arbitrary code on any website you visit. So the extension can mutate into spyware or malware at any time, for all users or only for a subset of them – without leaving any traces of the attack like a malicious extension release.

      [...]

      In the end, I found that the Honey browser extension gives its server very far reaching privileges, but I did not find any evidence of these privileges being misused. So is it all fine and nothing to worry about? Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.

      While the browser extension’s codebase is massive and I certainly didn’t see all of it, it’s possible to make definitive statements about the extension’s behavior. Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for a web server that one can only observe from outside. The fact that I only saw non-malicious responses doesn’t mean that it will stay the same way in future or that other people will make the same experience.

      In fact, if the server were to invade users’ privacy or do something outright malicious, it would likely try to avoid detection. One common way is to only do it for accounts that accumulated a certain amount of history. As security researchers like me usually use fairly new accounts, they won’t notice anything. Also, the server might decide to limit such functionality to countries where litigation is less likely. So somebody like me living in Europe with its strict privacy laws won’t see anything, whereas US citizens would have all of their data extracted.

      But let’s say that we really trust Honey Science LLC given its great track record. We even trust PayPal who happened to acquire Honey this year. Maybe they really only want to do the right thing, by any means possible. Even then there are still at least two scenarios for you to worry about.

      The Honey server infrastructure makes an extremely lucrative target for hackers. Whoever manages to gain control of it will gain control of the browsing experience for all Honey users. They will be able to extract valuable data like credit card numbers, impersonate users (e.g. to commit ad fraud), take over users’ accounts (e.g. to demand ransom) and more. Now think again how much you trust Honey to keep hackers out.

      But even if Honey had perfect security, they are also a US-based company. And that means that at any time a three letter agency can ask them for access, and they will have to grant it. That agency might be interested in a particular user, and Honey provides the perfect infrastructure for a targeted attack. Or the agency might want data from all users, something that they are also known to do occasionally. Honey can deliver that as well.

Defence/Aggression

• Burying 1,000 Bodies and Loads of Prejudice

  Two months after Panchanathan Subramaniam’s demise, his son S. Ramesh still grieves: “When we got him admitted to Thanjavur government hospital with symptoms of Covid-19, we never imagined we would take him back lifeless.”

  More so since 68-year-old Subramaniam, who retired years ago from a clerical position in the Indian Army, had no major health complaints. He was proud of his association with the military “and took good care of his fitness. He never missed his daily walks and was strict about his diet,” explains Ramesh, 40, a native of Tamil Nadu’s Kumbakonam town. “Even while admitting him to hospital, we thought he would be cured.”

• The New Humanitarian | A new election stirs violence in Côte d’Ivoire

  Côte d’Ivoire’s Alassane Ouattara is set to run for a controversial third presidential term on Saturday amid an opposition boycott and fears of post-election violence following a series of deadly clashes around the country between supporters of rival parties.
  Ouattara, who became president in 2011 and is popular among international donors, had previously ruled out standing for re-election, but reversed course in August after the sudden death from natural causes of the man he had primed to replace him.
  The main opposition parties consider the third term illegal, arguing that the country’s constitution limits presidents to two terms. But 78-year-old Ouattara claims a new constitution adopted by referendum in 2016 reset term limits, allowing him to run again.
  The opposition also questions the impartiality of the Ivoirien election commission and constitutional council, which validated Ouattara’s third term bid while rejecting 40 out of 44 rival applicants, including some of the president’s main challengers.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• DHS Appears Willing To Violate Whistleblower Laws To Shut Down Leaks

  This Administration — like the one before it — isn’t a fan of leaks or whistleblowing. This Administration seems to be leakier than most, possibly due to the Commander-in-Chief’s vindictive shit-canning of anyone insufficiently deferential. When distrust abounds, the leaks will flow.

Environment

• Researchers Worry Methane Discovery in Arctic Ocean Could Signal Dangerous New Climate Feedback Loop

  “Climate warming is awakening the ‘sleeping giants’ of the carbon cycle,” warned one researcher.

Finance

• Records Show Trump’s Border Wall Is Costing Taxpayers Billions More Than Initial Contracts

  On the same day in May 2019, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a pair of contracts worth $788 million to replace 83 miles of fence along the southwest border.

  The projects were slated to be completed in January 2020, the Corps said then. Four months into this year, however, the government increased the value of the contracts by more than $1 billion, without the benefit of competitive bidding designed to keep costs low to taxpayers.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Warning of ‘Poisonous Consequences,’ PA Secretary of State Calls on Barrett to Recuse Herself in Crucial Mail-in Ballot Case

  “It is reasonable to infer that, in Trump’s mind, Barrett must repay his appointment by refusing to recuse, and then by voting both to secure his election and to gut the Affordable Care Act,” wrote one legal ethicist. 

• Michigan Judge Accused of Jeopardizing Safety and Democracy With Reversal of Open Carry Ban at Polling Places

  Citing her “sworn duty to protect every voter and their right to cast the ballot free from intimidation and harassment,” the Democratic secretary of state vows to appeal the judge’s injunction. 

• I Am the Wolf and So are You

  The grip grew tighter as I watched people I know and love denounce real journalism as “fake news,” all while embracing conspiracy theories like “Pizza Gate.”  As the pressure built, the coronavirus acted as the metaphorical lid, slammed onto a pot that was already heating to a steady boil.  Boil over it did, spilling all of our nation’s dirty secrets: racism, murder, violence, and widespread inequity in our educational institutions.  Yet rather than lead the way, rather than turn down the heat, rather than ease the tension, the Trump administration gleefully fanned the flames of our divide.  No justice was served, only very real wildfires began to consume the coastal states.  Too many people had died who didn’t need to, too many… Trump’s embrace of the consuming chaos struck a note familiar, of the Batman’s arch nemesis Joker, of whom the wise Alfred accurately assessed stating “some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”  I began to feel crushed by the weight of it all.

  Heavier still was this administration’s attack on the environment, which, as a wildlife advocate and lifelong animal lover, hit me, again, where it hurt.  The agenda included rollbacks on the Endangered Species Act, rollbacks on the National Environmental Policy Act, and openly hostile cabinet appointments.  There has been an ongoing assault on all of our natural resources that will take years to undo, if we can undo them at all.  With Justice Ginsburg’s death, the Supreme Court is likely stacked against us. Then came a final kick while I was down, wolves will almost certainly be removed from the Endangered Species list, no longer receiving any federal protections once afforded to them.  This blow landed right in the gut, opening the door for the mass slaughter of a familial animal, one I have revered since childhood.  Like Game Thrones’ Young Wolf, Robb Stark, it felt like this story wouldn’t have a happy ending for me, or the wolves.  Yet, it was after this cumulative loss, after this dark moment of deep despair, that I remembered.  It was Batman who rose from the Pit to defeat Bane, and it was John Snow who rose from the dead to save Westeros.

• Barrett Confirmed, Post-Election Chaos Will Ensue

  As US unemployment claims rise, rent evictions accelerate, food lines grow, the prospect of a fiscal stimulus bill in Congress fades, and as a third Covid 19 wave creates record level infections & hospitalizations, each deterioration has begun reinforcing the other.

  Potentially exacerbating all the above, political instability and conflict of historic dimensions is around the corner. And the Barrett confirmation today, October 26, 2020 will put the US Supreme Court at the center of this dynamic.

• Don’t Rush to Declare Victory: Implementing a Two-Week Grace Period After November 3rd So All Voters Can Be Counted

  A demand for a grace period needs to start now to build up powerful support from a multi-partisan combination of national, state, and local candidates for public office.

• If Trump Loses, He Will Be A Ruthless Lame Duck

  Donald Trump isn’t just inside the heads of his Trumpster base; he’s long been a consuming obsession among those yearning for his defeat in November. With barely more than a week to go before the election of our lifetime, those given to nail biting as a response to anxiety have by now gnawed ours down to the quick. And many have found other ways to manage (or mismanage) their apprehensions through compulsive rituals, which only ratchet up the angst of the moment, among them nonstop poll tracking, endless “what if” doomsday-scenario conversations with friends, and repeated refrigerator raids.

• Trump Attempts One More Preelection Power Grab

• Facebook’s Threat To NYU Researchers Is A Mistake, But It’s The Inevitable Follow On To Overreaction To Cambridge Analytica

  Late on Friday news came out that Facebook had sent a cease and desist letter to researchers at NYU working on the Ad Observatory project. At issue was that the project had asked people to install a browser extension that would share data back to NYU regarding what ads they saw. Facebook — responding to significant criticism — has put forth an ad library that allows researchers to search through what ads are being shown on Facebook and who is behind them (which is good transparency!), but it does not show how those ads were targeted. This is what the researchers at NYU were trying to collect data on. And that is a reasonable research goal.

• Welcome to the Trump Tower of Terror

  Support independent cartooning: join Sparky’s List—and don’t forget to visit TT’s Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky!

• Is the U.S. Prepared to Resist a Coup?

  If Trump refuses to step down, we must be ready to not cooperate.

• Ours Is A Cold and Righteous Anger

• Why It’s Really Hard for Trump to Steal the Election

  Results of the season’s legal battles over voting rules are now ready to tally up. It’s a mixed bag, with Republicans winning late decisions over the forms of mail-in ballots, state witness requirements and the always controversial naked ballot and double-envelope rules; Democrats have largely prevailed in winning longer mail-in counting periods. Contests over drop-in boxes for mail-in ballots turned ugly, with only one allotted for the whole of Harris County, Texas, which is as large as Rhode Island.

  Perhaps the most consequential decision was the U.S. Supreme Court’s tie vote which for now lets stand a three-day extension for mail-in balloting in Pennsylvania. That could have a real impact on a swing-state’s result. In Supreme Court world, a four-four tie goes the runner, this time the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, dominated by Democrats.

• “I Don’t Believe That’s By Our Laws,” Trump Says of Counting All the Votes in an Election

  “He wants to throw out legal votes. That’s what he’s saying here.”

• Brett Kavanaugh Prepares to Upend Election Rules to Benefit Donald Trump

  Civics books tell us the winners of elections are announced after all the votes are cast and counted.

• Wake Up and Smell the Cheetos

Civil Rights/Policing

• A Soundscape of Pure Empathy

  When she talks about her music, the Welsh artist Kelly Lee Owens often invokes her experience training as an auxiliary nurse at a lung cancer ward in Manchester, England, as a teenager. Her patients were the ones who encouraged her to pursue the creative path she’s on now. “They were kind of like my career advisers,” she told The Guardian. “They had this unique perspective, of having their lives threatened by something out of their control, so I respected all of their words of advice.”

• Along the Keystone XL Pipeline, Hoping for a Miracle

  The ongoing struggle for racial justice. The future for immigrant families. The health and well-being of all Americans. The very fate of our fragile planet. The United States faces a crossroads in this year’s elections. Seeking out the stories flying under the national radar, The Nation and Magnum Foundation are partnering on What’s At Stake, a series of photo essays from across the country through the lenses of independent imagemakers. Follow the whole series here. This installment was produced with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

  On a warm afternoon in October, the leaves were beginning to change color and the sun shed a warm, golden hue across the vast landscape in Northeastern Montana. Lance Fourstar and Angeline Cheek, community organizers and activists from Fort Peck Indian Reservation, weaved their way through bumpy and rugged terrain in a dark green Ford crew cab, having driven through this land countless times before. They were headed to the Missouri River, where a large, controversial infrastructure project is planned that will cut through just south of the reservation.

• One Year after the Lebanese Protests

  Hariri was once again nominated by Lebanon’s ruling establishment Thursday, pledging to form a new government months after failure to quickly name a new prime minister ensued after deadlock and political instability pressured the seven month old cabinet of previous prime minister Hassan Diab to resign.

  Hariri, inheriting the same economic regime initiated by his father, Rafic, who oversaw the deregulated real estate development transformation of Beirut through his company, Solidere, that essentially turned the city into his clan’s privatization venture, became the face of corruption and nepotism in Lebanon for very good reasons.

Monopolies

• Apple Is Reportedly Creating Its Own Search Engine Amid Google’s Antitrust Woes

• FOSS Patents: Qualcomm’s next home run: Ninth Circuit denies FTC’s petition for rehearing of antitrust case

  Now the FTC will have to decide whether to file a petition for writ of certiorari (request for Supreme Court review). It’s quite possible that the FTC’s 3-2 majority in favor of the petition for a Ninth Circuit rehearing (consisting of the Republican chairman and the two Democratic commissioners) would also authorize a cert petition. But six of the nine justices are conservatives, three of whom were nominated by President Trump, and they would see that the Trump Administration backed Qualcomm in this dispute. They would likely also take note of the fact that two of the three judges on the Ninth Circuit panel were conservatives (and the third was a relatively conservative-leaning Democrat). But the Supreme Court also has a history of fixing issues with the patent system, particularly with the overleveraging of patents and the patentee overcompensation it leads to. That is not a partisan question, though antitrust law often is. I remember Senator Klobuchar (D-Minn.) lamenting the Supreme Court’s restrictive application of the Sherman Act in a statement she made at Justice Barrett’s confirmation hearing.

• Patents

  • Patent case: St. Jude Medical LLC v. Snyders Heart Valve LLC, USA

    St. Jude Medical failed to show that challenged claims of patent owned by Snyders had been anticipated by other patents, nor did it prove that a particular combination demonstrated obviousness.

    Claims of a patent directed to an artificial heart valve manufactured by Snyders Heart Valve LLC and a system for inserting the valve were not proven unpatentable by St. Jude Medical in either of two inter partes review proceedings, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board correctly found that St. Jude did not prove that the design and the materials used in the artificial heart valve were anticipated by other patents or that the device was unpatentable due to obviousness. However, the Board erred in finding that four of the challenged claims were unpatentable as anticipated by a prior art patent (St. Jude Medical, LLC v. Snyders Heart Valve LLC, October 15, 2020, Taranto, G.).

  • FOSS Patents: German government officially adopts patent reform proposal, says new injunction statute shouldn’t have much impact

    One step up and two steps back.

    Early last month I cheered a “spectacular turnaround” in the German patent reform process as the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection had made substantial changes to its proposal for a new patent injunction statute as compared to its first draft, which was published in January and amounted to a non-reform proposal. And a few weeks ago I reported on Germany’s most prominent (though not most powerful) patent judge’s interpretation of the reform statute. Today, Chancellor Merkel’s cabinet adopted a slightly revised version of the statute (PDF, in German), which will now be reviewed and commented on by the Federal Council (the legislative body that consists of the governments of the country’s federal states, though the Bundesrat’s role will realistically just be consultative in nature in this case, while the actual decision will be in the hands of the Federal Parliament, the Bundestag). It remains to be seen what text the legislature will ultimately adopt–if any, given that the end of the term is approaching fast.

    [...]

    Given how the German patent judiciary works, it would take something more forceful to bring about major change. The current proposal would create an opportunity for law firms to charge their clients for a lot of additional time spent on proportionality arguments. But the leverage that patent holders will have in negotiations would be roughly the same as before–provided they bypass Dusseldorf to be on the safe side. The statute would be suboptimal, but a huge improvement over the January draft, if–and that “if” is the largest part of the problem–the legislative rationale didn’t continue to endorse the Federal Court of Justice’s case law. And the patent-specialized division of that court is to German patent law what the Central Committee of the Communist Party was to the Soviet Union in the decades prior to Gorbachev’s reforms.

  • Software Patents

    • FOSS Patents: Google, SAP, Daimler (ip2innovate) botched patent injunction statute: “Singularity Killed the Reform”

      If you noticed the allusion to a band name in the headline, you might have grown up in the 80s, in which case you may also remember the famous line “I pity the fool.” Otherwise you might know the proverb “curiosity killed the cat”. Whatever, those opposing German patent injunction reform are now on the winning track as I explained in my previous post, and in the losing camp, three companies are particularly responsible for a monumental f..kup:

      Google, SAP, and Daimler.

      Volkswagen deserves credit for having started the push for patent injunction reform in Germany. The three companies listed above will go down in history as the main culprits unless there’s a second reversal of fortune. I’d like things to work out, but I increasingly doubt it. The anti-reform movement is just too sophisticated for a pathetic bunch of amateurs.

      The documents that prove what went wrong and who’s to blame are all public. So let me explain, but again, I’d like nothing more than to be proven to have been too pessimistic. Until the last moment I’ll hope that the broken German patent litigation system will be fixed.

      [...]

      It was an utter stupidity at any rate to use a term that simply isn’t a well-defined legal term. I can’t remember ever having seen a German statute that contained the word. Therefore, the first thing courts will turn to when trying to make sense of the term is, besides the context, what the legislative rationale (the official commentary provided along with the law) says. I’ll get to those two determinants–context and legislative rationale–in a moment.

      Anyway, if the plan is to inject a new term into the law that wasn’t there before, a lobby group (unless someone inside the group seeks to sabotage the effort or people don’t know what they’re talking about) would at least pick a term that has framing value. You’d want to use a term that has a connotation that suits your agenda. The last thing you’d want to do is shoot yourself in the foot like ip2innovate did.

Desktop/Laptop

• Avita Essential: Perfect Laptop for School and College Students at Rs. 17,990

  Starting with the basics, this is a thin and light notebook. The processor inside powering Avita Essential is the Intel Celeron N4000 which is not a powerful processor for windows but perfect for Ubuntu or ChromeOS. There is 4GB of LPDDR4 inside which again is not good enough for Windows but perfect for Ubuntu and ChromeOS. For storage Avita Essential has 128GB SSD. Fast storage means faster boot time but again we would highly recommend using Ubuntu or ChromeOS on this machine.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Buttered-Up Fedora | LINUX Unplugged 377

  Fedora 33 is a bold release, and we’ve put it through the wringer. We tell you what’s great, and what you should know before diving in.

  Plus our thoughts on the bigger problem exposed by the youtube-dl takedown.

• mintCast 346.5 – The Midori Story – mintCast

  In our Innards section, we talk lesser known browsers

  And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Kernel Space

• Linux Kernel 5.10 Will be the Next LTS Release and it has Some Exciting Improvements Lined Up – It’s FOSS

  Development for Linux Kernel 5.10 is in progress. It’s been confirmed to be a long term support release and it will be bringing newer hardware support among other promised features.

  Linux Kernel 5.10 will be Long Term Support Release

  Greg Kroah-Hartman, the key stable kernel maintainer, addressed an “Ask the Expert” session at Linux Foundation’s Open-Source Summit Europe and confirmed that Linux 5.10 will be the next LTS release.

  Even though there were some early speculations of 5.9 being the LTS release, Greg clarified that the last kernel release of the year will always be an LTS release.

  As of now, Linux Kernel 5.4 series happens to be the latest LTS version out there which added a lot of improvements and hardware support. Also, considering the development progress with Linux Kernel 5.8 being the biggest release so far and Linux 5.10’s first release candidate being close to it, there’s a lot of things going on under the hood.

• Upcoming Linux 5.10 release will love you longterm, pushing support out to 2026

  It’s official. The upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel is destined to become the next “longterm maintenance” release for the open-source operating system.

  The news was dropped by longtime maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman during an “Ask the Experts” session at the Open Source Summit Europe.

  The first release candidate of 5.10 popped up a few days earlier, with the removal of an elderly addressing tool and tweaks aplenty (including kicking the Y2K38 problem down the road by a few centuries).

• Torvalds says no need to name successor as that will take care of itself

  Linux creator Linus Torvalds says it won’t be necessary for him to name a successor to take over from him as head of the Linux kernel project because “it will be fairly clear who it is”.

  “Not because this is some democracy and people would vote on it and there’s a clear winner, but because these things really happen on their own: a ‘successor’ isn’t somebody who gets anointed as such, they end up just doing the work and making themselves one that way,” Torvalds told iTWire during an interview this week.

  As usual, he offered views on a wide range of topics, among them the way he has coped with life during the pandemic and also about his life in a country which is split along partisan lines.

  He was interviewed by email. His answers are, as usual, given in full.

• Graphics Stack

  • AMDGPU Linux Driver To Finally Enable BACO For Hawaii – Allowing S4/Hibernation – Phoronix

    The Radeon R9 290 “Hawaii” series are about seven years old almost to the day and the AMD Linux open-source driver crew is seemingly celebrating by finally adding the few lines of code needed to enable BACO power management.

    [...]

    The patch posted on Tuesday amounts to just a few lines of code for wiring up Hawaii to the AMDGPU driver’s BACO support. It’s just a few lines of code now but it’s only been more recently that AMDGPU began squaring away its BACO support. Thus back in the early days of Hawaii it wasn’t as trivial to provide this support albeit for end-users still a pity it took so long for allowing these GPUs to support S4/hibernation.

Applications

• Now and Then: What happened to 5 promising file managers?

  It’s fun to experiment with new software that isn’t anywhere near the polished article. But there’s associated risks, even with open source software. You’ll invest time and effort in learning new software. That software might never even see a stable release, it might be a big time sink even getting it up-and-running on your system. The upside is that promising software might turn overnight into a huge success, or it might be a slow burn success. And while there’s a huge array of open source successes, there’s been awful open source failures along the way. It can be a bumpy ride!

  A file manager is software which provides a user interface to assist in the organization of files. It helps users with their daily work in managing their files on a hard drive or other storage device. With multiple terabyte hard disks becoming prevalent, file managers represent an essential tool in managing file systems.

Instructionals/Technical

• OpenVPN as default gateway on OpenBSD

  If you plan to use an OpenVPN tunnel to reach your default gateway, which would make the tun interface in the egress group, and use tun0 in your pf.conf which is loaded before OpenVPN starts?

  Here are the few tips I use to solve the problems.

• How to Setup a Firewall with UFW on Ubuntu 20.04 – Linux Concept

  Nowadays, a Firewall is an essential utility and property of any system for security; by default Ubuntu Operating system having a firewall configuration tool named UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall). UFW is a user-friendly front-end tool to manage iptables firewall rules. It provides you more straightforward methods to manage iptables as the name of this tool start from Uncomplicated.

• Install Ubuntu on a USB Hard Drive | Pen Drive Linux

  How to Install Ubuntu on a USB hard drive using live media. Believe it or not, creating a completely Portable Ubuntu Installation on USB is a relatively simple process. As a matter of fact, it’s almost as simple as a regular Ubuntu internal hard drive installation. Due to popular demand, we have decided to write a simple tutorial on the full Ubuntu USB hard drive installation procedure. So go grab an available external USB hard drive and a nice cold beverage and lets get started.

• Best Tools to Create a Bootable Linux USB Drive

  Unlike Windows, Linux distributions require a third-party tool to create a bootable USB. It is particularly handy with modern PCs which have done away with the old DVD-drives. Also, installation DVDs were quite delicate and would scratch or in worst-case scenarios, break apart under stress. This guide covers some of the best tools that you can use to create a bootable Linux USB drive.

• 5 new sudo features you need to know in 2020 | Opensource.com

  When you want to perform an action on a POSIX system, one of the safest ways to do so is to use the sudo command. Unlike logging in as the root user and performing what could be a dangerous action, sudo grants any user designated as a “sudoer” by the sysadmin temporary permission to perform a normally restricted activity.

  This system has helped keep Linux, Unix, and macOS systems safe from silly mistakes and malicious attacks for decades, and it is the default administrative mechanism on all major Linux distributions today.

Games

• Collabora’s Work On Extending The Linux Kernel To Better Support Windows Gaming – Phoronix

  Windows gaming on Linux got some love this week at the Linux Foundation’s Open-Source Summit Europe virtual event. In particular, a recap of the work that’s been done so far on extending the Linux kernel to better support Wine / Steam Play based support for Windows games running on Linux.

  Gabriel Krisman Bertazi as an engineer for consulting firm Collabora talked about their work in recent years on improving the Linux kernel for supporting Valve’s needs around running Windows games on Linux with Steam Play. Collabora has been one of Valve’s partners for this effort along with CodeWeavers and Valve employing various developers on improving the Linux graphics stack, etc.

• Collabora expect their Linux Kernel work for Windows game emulation in Kernel 5.11

  Collabora have been doing presentations during the Open Source Summit, with one particular talk from Gabriel Krisman Bertazi on the “State of Linux Gaming” being quite interesting.

  While there has been a lot of progress with the Windows compatibility layers Wine and Valve’s fork Proton (part of Steam Play), there’s still plenty of areas currently lacking and needing work. Collabora is one company extending the Linux Kernel to improve Linux gaming with these compatibility layers, thanks to Valve sponsoring the work. One of the big missing pieces of the pie is supporting the likes of anti-cheat and DRM, with anti-cheat especially causing all sorts of problems entirely breaking lots of Windows games in Wine and Proton.

  The State of Linux Gaming talk was mostly going over what anyone following would already know, as the event isn’t aimed at your typical Linux gaming enthusiast. However, it was still an interesting talk to follow. Thanks to The Linux Foundation, I was able to attend and listen to the talk (the online event requires a ticket purchase) but I’ve been told by my Collabora contact that they will all eventually be up on their own YouTube Channel which could be as soon as early next week for anyone to be able to view.

  If you want a brief overview, you can find the slides here from the event schedule. One of the key points that Gabriel Krisman Bertazi went over is their work on system call emulation, which is now required because DRM and anti-cheat tech “are issuing system calls directly from the Windows game code and that bypasses Wine because Wine is not a sandbox” and Wine currently cannot capture those system calls needed which ends up causing games to crash.

Distributions

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

  • Palemoon Browser updated to 28.15.0 » PCLinuxOS

    Pale Moon is an Open Source, Firefox-based web browser available for Linux, focusing on efficiency and ease of use. Make sure to get the most out of your browser!

  • Bonus! KDE Plasma desktop updated to 5.20.2 » PCLinuxOS

    KDE Plasma has been updated to 5.20.2 which is a bug fix update for the recently released 5.20.0. This update should arrive shortly in the software repository for those using the KDE Plasma desktop. Enjoy!

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Fedora 33 Desktop Install Guide / Tour / Review – If Not True Then False

    This is quick guide / tour howto install Fedora 33 Desktop on real PC. First create your bootable USB flash drive using Fedora Media Writer, dd or similar tool.

    Just testing stable Fedora 33 release and everything works very smooth, even btrfs file system, which replaces ext4 as a default file system.

  • Fedora 33 Officially Released: Here’s How To Upgrade Fedora Linux

    After launching Fedora 33 beta last month, the Fedora team has finally announced the release of a new stable version, Fedora 33. This is a successor to the previous Fedora 32, bringing a lot of exciting new features, improvements, and a new edition.

    With v33, Fedora Cloud Base Image and Fedora CoreOS will also be available in Amazon’s AWS Marketplace for the first time. If you want to know what’s new in Fedora 33, we have already written a separate article, which you can find here.

    [...]

    You can upgrade your Fedora Linux system using two methods: Graphical and command line. Graphical method is the simplest way to upgrade using the GNOME software center, where a notification will now be available in the Updates pane.

  • Fedora 33 Is Released – LinuxReviews

    Fedora is a short-lived GNU/Linux distribution from IBM subsidiary RedHat with releases every six months and a one-year support cycle for each release. This allows Fedora to have more bleeding edge packages than other more long-term distributions.

    The default Fedora 33 “Workstation Edition” features the latest GNOME 3.38 “Orbis” desktop environment, Linux 5.8 (though 5.9 is available in updates-testing), mesa 20.2.1 as the graphics stack, Wayland 1.18.0 as the display server, Python 3.9, Ruby on Rails 6.0, Perl 5.32 and LLVM 11. The new “welcome tour” introduced in GNOME 3.38 is present, and the desktop wallpaper is set to change depending on time of day. The system theme is the default GNOME theme which has a mix of light and dark applications. Some applications are almost white, others, like the GNOME terminal, are black. The workstation edition has option to change the system theme or customize how it looks beyond wallpapers, it is possible to change it and they have not yet removed the ability to add your own background images – one at a time, you can’t add or browse folders.

    There are a few odd changes to Fedora 33 desktop users and specially laptop users should take note of. The default for a new installation is to use btrfs, not ext4, for the file system and the installers default disk partition layout does not include a swap partition. That’s a problem if you want to hibernate to disk or use hybrid suspend on a laptop. There is no hibernation or hybrid suspend option in the GNOME desktop the workstation environment ships with even if you add a swap partition yourself, but it is possible to get that very basic functionality in the Xfce and KDE Plasma spins. Other basic functionality like the ability to change themes are also present in those spins.

  • Secure your Kubernetes secrets with smart cards and libssh

    In computer security, software implementations of cryptographic algorithms are vulnerable to side-channel attacks. This type of attack seeks to glean information from the computer system rather than from the program that it is running. As examples, Spectre and Meltdown are both side-channel attacks that target the microarchitecture of modern processors. Microarchitecture attacks are only a subset of all side-channel attacks. There are many others.

    An attacker who is able to access unauthorized regions in memory can discover private or sensitive information, including authentication secrets. A question that naturally follows is, “Where can I safely store my secrets?”

    One way to protect your Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift secrets is to store them in a hardware token. A hardware token physically separates your secret key from the host machine and the applications that it is running. You can use secret keys stored on smart cards or cryptographic tokens to authenticate to server-side applications.

    This article introduces Public Key Cryptography Standard #11 (PKCS #11), which you can use to uniquely identify objects stored in tokens. I show you how to build and use libssh with support for PKCS #11 and how to use curl to store and retrieve tokens through the secure shell (SSH) protocol.

  • IBM Advance Toolchain for Linux on Power 14.0-1 released!

    A new update release for the 14.0 series of the IBM® Advance Toolchain for Linux on Power is now available.

  • China Mobile Communications Corporation Internet, China National Offshore Oil Corporation and GREE Group Named Winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 for China

    Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 for China. China Mobile Communications Corporation Internet, China National Offshore Oil Corporation and GREE Group were honored at the Red Hat Forum China 2020 today for their exceptional and innovative use of Red Hat solutions.

• Debian Family

  • Noah Meyerhans | Debian STS: Short Term Support

    In another of my frequent late-night bouts with insomnia, I started thinking about the intersection of a number of different issues facing Debian today, both from a user point of view and a developer point of view.

    Debian has a reputation for shipping “stale” software. Versions in the stable branch are often significantly behind the latest development upstream. Debian’s policy here has been that this is fine, our goal is to ship something stable, not something bleeding edge. Unofficially, our response to users is: If you need bleeding edge software, Debian may not be for you. Officially, we have no response to users who want fresher software.

    Debian also has a problem with a lack of manpower. I believe that part of why we have a hard time attracting contributors is our reputation for stale software. It might be worth it for us to consider changes to our approach to releases.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Pop!_OS 20.10 (Ubuntu Based) Released and Available for download

    Pop!_OS is an operating system for STEM and creative professionals who use their computer as a tool to discover and create. Unleash your potential on secure, reliable open source software. Based on your exceptional curiosity, we sense you have a lot of it.

    Pop!_OS is designed for fast navigation, easy workspace organization, and fluid, convenient workflow. Your operating system should encourage discovery, not obstruct it.

  • Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) Released and Download link Included

    The Ubuntu 20.10 release is out. “The Ubuntu kernel has been updated to the 5.8 based Linux kernel, and our default toolchain has moved to gcc 10 with glibc 2.32. Additionally, there is now a desktop variant of the Raspberry Pi image for Raspberry Pi 4 4GB and 8GB. Ubuntu Desktop 20.10 introduces GNOME 3.38, the fastest release yet with significant performance improvements delivering a more responsive Experience.

    New features in Ubuntu 20.10

    Codenamed “Groovy Gorilla”, 20.10 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

    The Ubuntu kernel has been updated to the 5.8 based Linux kernel, and our default toolchain has moved to gcc 10 with glibc 2.32. Additionally,there is now a desktop variant of the Raspberry Pi image for Raspberry Pi 4 4GB and 8GB.

    Ubuntu Desktop 20.10 introduces GNOME 3.38, the fastest release yet with significant performance improvements delivering a more responsive Experience. Additionally, the desktop installer includes the ability to connect to Active Directory domains.

  • Ubuntu 20.10 – Groovy Gorilla

    It’s late October, and this means that another X.10 release of Ubuntu has just arrived: Ubuntu 20.10 – Groovy Gorilla – is now available for download.

Devices/Embedded

• Here’s a smartphone boasting a physical keyboard and it runs Linux

  F(x)tec has announced a rather unique smartphone that combines a slider form-factor, a physical keyboard, and a choice of operating systems a rare combination for 2020.

  The F(x)tec Pro1-X is an angled slider smartphone equipped with a 5.99-inch AMOLED monitor featuring a 2160×1080 resolution as well as a five-row 66-key landscape QWERTY keyboard.

  The handset is powered by a relatively outdated Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 system-on-chip that is accompanied by 6GB or 8GB of LPDDR4X memory as well as 128GB or 256GB of UFS 2.1 storage that can be expanded using a microSD card.

• F(x)tec Pro1 X smartphone runs LineageOS or Ubuntu, features a sliding keyboard (Crowdfunding)

  F(x)tec Pro1 Android smartphone was introduced last year with the main differentiating features being its sliding keyboard. The company also mentioned support for Android-based LineageOS as well as Sailfish OS, but those need(ed) to be installed by the user. FX Technology has now unveiled F(x)tec Pro1 X smartphone with similar specs, except for the blue case and the option of having additional memory and storage, as well as official support for LineageOS and Ubuntu Touch thanks to a collaboration with XDA.

• This keyboard phone runs three operating systems, including Android

  As a rule, you don’t really have a choice for operating systems for your phone. You don’t have access to a desktop-class OS if you run Android, for example, but you also won’t have the apps or simplicity of Android if you use a conventional Linux flavor. Fxtec wants to give you the option, however — it’s upgrading the Pro1 with the crowdfunded Pro1-X, an updated version of its keyboard phone with the choices of running Android, LineageOS, or Ubuntu Touch “out of the box.”

  The team-up between Fxtec and XDA Developers promises more flexibility than you might be used to from a phone. Ubuntu lets you run a full-fledged Linux desktop environment when you connect the phone to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard. This is also the first phone to ship with LineageOS, according to Fxtec, giving you a ‘purer’ take on Android with more control over apps and privacy.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino Blog » ESUB Tracks is a smart bicycle helmet with built-in electronics for enhanced safety

    Bike helmets can help minimize injuries in the event of an accident, but could a helmet also be used to help prevent a crash, or even enhance your riding experience? ESUB Tracks from WertelOberfell attempts to do both, featuring a variety of electronic enhancements which are powered by photovoltaic cells wrapped around its outer surface.

    ESUB Tracks includes a lighting arrangement on the back for turn signaling, triggered using voice commands to the helmet’s piezoelectric microphone. Additionally, it has a sensor to detect rapidly approaching vehicles from behind, warning the wearer of this condition via haptic feedback. Bone-conductive speakers are provided for listening to Bluetooth audio, and if all of that wasn’t enough, it even tightens down the straps when the buckle is fastened.

  • Take part in the PA Raspberry Pi Competition for UK schools

  • ESP32-S2 board targets battery-powered applications with 30uA deep sleep power consumption

    A few months ago, Olimex unveiled renders of ESP32-S2-Devkit-LiPo WiFi board that was supposed to consume as little as 2uA in sleep mode, follows ESP32-S2-Saola-1 board form factor and pinout, and adds an ultra-efficient circuitry to support LiPo batteries. The good news is that Olimex has now launched two versions of their ESP32-S2 board optimized for battery-powered applications with ESP32-S2-DevKit-Lipo and ESP32-S2-WROVER-DevKit-Lipo (with 2MB PSRAM) going for 5.56 Euros and 6.36 Euros respectively.

  • Testing PTFE Tube for 3D Printing

    Karl here. I’m back with a short article on some testing that I did on PTFE tube. When I received the Sovol SV02 3D printer it came with some baby blue replacement PTFE tube. It came preinstalled with the regular white stuff that most Bowden style printers come with. I have also been thinking about different ways to use the Retraction Calibration Tool I created.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • How to schedule your Android 11 dark theme for sunset to sunrise

  • The Redmi Note 8 finally receives MIUI 12 and Android 10 globally

  • Google: Here are 4 reasons your Android app will get booted from the Play Store

  • Google’s EU Android choice screen isn’t working say search rivals, calling for a joint process to devise a fair remedy

  • Nokia tops Counterpoint’s Android smartphone trust rankings for a second year

  • ResApp Health (ASX:RAP) launches ResAppDx on select Android devices

  • Dolby On app for Android update brings new editing tools and more

  • Google Chrome update should make using an Android smartphone much safer

  • T-Mobile Launches TVision Live TV Streaming Service for Android, iOS, Third-Party TV Platforms

  • FiLMiC Remote for Android released giving full remote camera control and monitoring

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• FSF

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Getting Real About the License Complexity of Linux [Ed: Proprietary software licensing is not complex? Ask BSA.]

      Talk about complex and tedious, but necessary. Identifying all copyright holders, licenses and license obligations within Linux is just that. Added to the already complex maze that is Linux is the fact that the accuracy of licensing information is tied to the specific version of the Linux Kernel you’re using, and older versions will have more issues than newer. Files may contain erroneous license data and subsequently make its way into your software inventory and Bill of Materials.

    • Impact of OSS and OSH – a stakeholder survey

      With this survey, the study coordinators are interested in complementing the literature, database and case study driven approach to assess impact of OSS and OSH with input from the respondents of the stakeholder survey. All together, this body of evidence will be used to derive policy recommendations.

• Programming/Development

  • Program in Arm6 assembly language on a Raspberry Pi | Opensource.com

    Assembly language offers special insights into how machines work and how they can be programmed.

  • How JavaScript became a serious programming language

    JavaScript’s humble start began in 1995, when it was created in just 10 days by Brendan Eich, then an employee with Netscape Communications Corporation. JavaScript has come a long way since then, from a tool to make websites pretty to a serious programming language.

    In its early days, JavaScript was considered a visual tool that made websites a little more fun and attractive. Languages like Jakarta Server Pages (JSP; formerly JavaServer Pages) used to do all the heavy lifting on rendered web pages, and JavaScript was used to create basic interactions, visual enhancements, and animations.

    For a long time, the demarcations between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript were not clear. Frontend development primarily consists of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, forming a “layer cake” of standard web technologies.

  • Python

    • PyTorch 1.7.0 Now Available – Exxact

      PyTorch is a widely used, open source deep learning platform used for easily writing neural network layers in Python enabling a seamless workflow from research to production. Based on Torch, PyTorch has become a powerful machine learning framework favored by esteemed researchers around the world.

      The newest stable release of PyTorch, version 1.7.0, has a number of new highlights including CUDA 11, New APIs for FFTs, Windows support for Distributed training and more.

    • Stefan Scherfke: Raise … from … in Python

    • PyCoder’s Weekly: Issue #444 (Oct. 27, 2020)

Education

• International Students Don’t Want to Study in the US Anymore

  In July, close to a million international students in the United States learned how much can change in eight days. When the Trump administration released its short-lived immigration directive on July 6, proposing unprecedented legal restrictions on academic visa holders in the country, international students—both in the country and outside of it— were forced into action.

Hardware

• AMD to acquire Xilinx as it seeks to challenge market leader Intel

  Computer processor firm AMD has reached an agreement to buy semiconductor manufacturer Xilinx for US$35 billion in an all-stock transaction as it seeks to take the fight to market leader Intel.

• AMD Announces Record High Q3 2020 Profits And $35 Billion Deal To Buy Xilinx – LinuxReviews

  AMD announced their Q3 2020 quarterly results early due to an all-stock acquisition of the American semiconductor company Xilinx for $35 billion. AMD pulled in $2.8 billion in revenue in Q3 2020, up 58% compared to Q3 2019. Their quarterly earnings were even more impressive. Q3 2020 was AMD’s best quarter in history in terms of both revenue and earnings.

Health/Nutrition

• Where the President Goes, Coronavirus Follows: Analysis Shows Spike in Covid-19 Cases After Numerous Trump Rallies

  “These rallies offer a boost to the president’s ego but risk leaving behind a trail of sickness and increased strain on local public health departments and medical systems.”

• No Drugs Should Be Criminalized. It’s Time to Abolish the DEA.

  In 1970, the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) was passed by the Nixon administration, codifying a national strategy to prohibit drug use and target certain communities. Since then, the “war on drugs” has failed to reduce supply or demand, while steadily increasing drug overdose deaths and perpetuating the stigmatization of individuals with addiction. It has fueled wide-scale militarized policing, cost taxpayers over $1 trillion since its inception, and expanded punitive institutions outside of the criminal legal system — including punishment-oriented systems embedded in schools, hospitals and social service agencies. After 50 years of failures and substantial evidence that drug prohibition is not only ineffective but also incredibly counterproductive, we clearly cannot afford another 50 years of the same. The time has come to repeal the Controlled Substances Act and transition toward a more evidence based and realistic approach to drug use in our society.

• Trump’s Failed Coronavirus Response Part 2

  America has suffered the worst rate of coronavirus deaths among all advanced countries – a death toll equal to 9/11 every three days. And, as a recent Cornell study confirmed, Trump’s blatant disinformation has been the largest driver of COVID misinformation in the world. This is not leadership. It is pure, malicious incompetence and it’s killing Americans.  

• Mutual Aid Is Essential to Our Survival Regardless of Who Is in the White House

  When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged as a crisis in the U.S. in early 2020, people all over the country started coordinating to deliver groceries and prescriptions to vulnerable people, making and distributing masks and hand sanitizer, and raising money for people who were losing jobs and ineligible for unemployment benefits. By the time the uprising against anti-Black racism and police violence brought people into the streets in early summer, the concept of “mutual aid” had gained significant traction in the media, and it was visible on the streets as people operated street medic teams at protests, offered each other free food and water, and defended each other from cops and white supremacists. COVID-19 mutual aid projects are ongoing, and as social movement groups prepare for the possibility of a contested election next week along with increasing strikes, street protests and occupations of public space, activists are gearing up to support each other.

• Not Just America: CEO Of Esports Org In India Says COVID-19 Resulted In Explosive Growth

  While we’ve covered the growth of esports throughout the world for some time, it’s also true that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in that growth accelerating with incredible speed. Back in March and April, when states began shutting down because we had — checks notes — 20k to 30k new COVID cases per day, esports really took off. Due to shut downs, IRL professional and college sports shut down too. The result is that Americans who thirst to watch competition dove headlong into esports broadcasts, with participation and viewership clipping at 20% growth month over month. An entire economy sprung up around the industry as well, with streaming companies and broadcasters catching up to the sudden rise in interest.

• Europe’s virus numbers look like they did in the spring: high and getting higher.

  The weather has turned distinctly autumnal in Europe, but the pandemic looks much like it did in the spring, with cases climbing at alarming rates in nearly every country.

  Britain, which had the greatest surge of excess deaths during the pandemic’s first peak in Europe and still holds the most reported deaths in the region, has recorded 151,391 new cases in the past seven days, according to a New York Times database.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • How Hall County is handling influx of absentee voting, effects of ransomware attack on elections office

    One of the databases the county uses to verify voter signatures on absentee ballots is not working after some county network outages due to a ransomware attack on Oct. 7. Registration Coordinator Kay Wimpye with the county elections office said employees can still verify voter signatures by manually pulling hard copies of voter registration cards, which is more time-consuming. Most voter signatures can be verified using a state database that has been unaffected by the outages, she said.

  • Vastaamo board fires CEO, says he kept data breach secret for year and a half

    On Monday the board said that an internal probe had determined that a second breach had occurred in March 2019. It appears that at that point Tapio was aware of the breaches and of shortcomings in the psychotherapy provider’s data security systems.

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Open Source Jobs Report Shows More Openings, Fewer Takers | LinuxInsider

          The Linux Foundation and learning platform edX on Monday released the latest open source jobs report which updates technology hiring since the last report two years ago. The research shows that, despite the pandemic, demand for open source technology skills continues to be strong.

          The 2020 Open Source Jobs Report reveals a spike in demand for DevOps talent, along with a continued lack of applicants with open source skills. The continuing lack of qualified candidates for unfilled Linux tech jobs is puzzling. Many companies, and The Linux Foundation itself, provide free and low-cost training to ease the recruiting shortage.

          An increasing number of companies now offer their workers free training to qualify for other tech jobs. For example, 63 percent of hiring managers said their companies continue to provide increased educational opportunities for existing staff to fill skills gaps.

          That is a significant jump from 48 percent in 2018. Still, 93 percent of hiring managers this year report difficulty finding open source talent.

        • Cloud/Container Skills Top Open Source Jobs Report

          The 2020 Open Source Jobs Report, just published by The Linux Foundation in a partnership with online learning specialist edX, finds “a shift of priorities for hiring organizations towards cloud-native technologies and increasing use of open source solutions despite the severe challenges currently facing businesses and IT pros.”

          In fact, that shift threatens the dominance of Linux itself in the open source field, where it has always been the leading vanguard of the community contribution space, as evidenced by the name of its shepherding organization, The Linux Foundation.

          For example, while Linux still reigns No. 1 as the most in-demand open source skill — just like previously — the percentage of those seeking Linux talent shrunk from 80 percent previously to 74 percent this year.

        • Linux Foundation’s AI Foundation & ODPi Merge to Support Growing Portfolio of Technologies

          LF AI Foundation (LF AI) and ODPi announced they will come together under the new LF AI & Data Foundation. The LF AI & Data Foundation will build and support an open community and a growing ecosystem of open source AI, data and analytics projects, by accelerating development and innovation, enabling collaboration and the creation of new opportunities for all the members of the community.

          As one entity under the Linux Foundation, this consolidated and focused effort will enable additional collaboration and integration in the space of AI/ML/DL and Data. With the creation of LF AI & Data, both communities will now support a growing ecosystem of artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and data technologies. AI and Data are inseparable and codependent on each other. Combining efforts in both spaces will bring developers and projects under a single roof, orchestrated by a single Technical Advisory Council and several committees (Trusted AI, BI & AI), to work together towards building the open source AI & Data ecosystem and accelerating development and innovation.

    • Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

      • RIAA’s YouTube-DL Takedown Ticks Off Developers and GitHub’s CEO

        An RIAA takedown request, which removed the YouTube-DL repository from GitHub, has ticked off developers and GitHub’s CEO. Numerous people responded by copying and republishing the contested code, including in some quite clever ways. Meanwhile, GitHub’s CEO is “annoyed” as well, offering help to get the repo reinstated.

      • You Can Now Sponsor CC’s Open Source Work on GitHub!

        CC’s small engineering team builds essential open-source infrastructure for CC-licensed and public domain content. Our tools make it easier for anyone to:

  • Security

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • EU politicians want Europe’s next big digital law to tackle micro-targeted advertising, by regulating or even banning it

        Although privacy is by its very nature personal, it is also something that concerns everyone. As a result, local data protection laws can have a global impact. That’s certainly been the case with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which has often figured on this blog. The EU is currently working on its next big law in this area, the Digital Services Act (DSA). It is intended as an update to the EU’s e-Commerce Directive, which was passed back in 2000. Clearly, the online world has moved on hugely since then, which means the relevant legislation needs a major overhaul. Although the main impetus for the DSA comes from updating the e-Commerce Directive, it will inevitably touch on many related areas, not least privacy.

      • SIS 3.0: In Germany, 2,000 new authorities are to access the Schengen Information System

        After police, customs and immigration offices, numerous non-police authorities are now connected to Europe’s largest database for security purposes. All Schengen states now have to implement three new regulations. Surprisingly, there is resistance in Switzerland. In the end, the country may even leave the network.

      • Deleting or deactivating your Facebook does the same to your Oculus account

        Facebook does not want you to stop using Facebook, it seems, because if you deactivate your account for a little break you’ll also lose access to your Oculus Profile. Perhaps worse, if you delete your Facebook account you’ll also delete your app purchases and achievements. “You will no longer be able to return any apps,” says Facebook, “and will lose any existing store credits.” So buyer beware: If you purchase an Oculus Quest 2 you’ll need a Facebook account, and that account will have to be active at all times and, presumably, in good standing if you want to use your Quest 2.

      • My toothbrush streams gyroscope data

        Since a few month I own an electrical toothbrush from Phillips called Sonicare HX992B. It connects to an mobile App using Bluetooth that tells you how well you brushed your teeth, shows the orientation in real-time, and also notifies you when to change the brush for a new one.

Defence/Aggression

• A Well-Armed and Unpatriotic Far Right

  How the war came home, big time.

• As Historic Nuclear Ban Enters into Force, It’s Time for the US to Help Put an End to the Nuclear Age

  The only nation to use a nuclear weapon in an act of war can and should take steps to end the nuclear threat for good.

• Nuclear Weapons Have Always Been Immoral. Now They’re Illegal.

  Just over three years after it opened for signature, the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) reached the 50 national ratifications needed to become international law. The government of Honduras ratified the antinuclear agreement on October 24, which means the TPNW will enter into force 90 days later: January 22, 2021.

• Nuclear Weapons Will Soon Be Banned Under International Law

  Nuclear weapons will soon be illegal under international law. Seventy-five years to the day after the founding of the United Nations, the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) began the 90-day countdown until the treaty enters into force.

• Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Was Targeted in Armed White Supremacist Plot

  This election season, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza says President Trump is “stoking fires he has no intention of controlling” and inciting far-right extremists. She was recently approached by the FBI after agents found her name on a list in the home of a white supremacist in Idaho who was arrested on weapons charges. “Racial terror has always been used as a form of control, particularly during periods of people fighting for social change,” she says.

• Alicia Garza on Being Targeted in Armed White Supremacist Plot as Trump Stokes Fires of Racism

  This election season, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza says President Trump is “stoking fires he has no intention of controlling” and inciting far-right extremists. She was recently approached by the FBI after agents found her name on a list in the home of a white supremacist in Idaho who was arrested on weapons charges. “Racial terror has always been used as a form of control, particularly during periods of people fighting for social change,” she says.

• How a key Pentagon official turned China policy over to arms industry and Taiwan supporters

• In America, far-right terrorist plots have outnumbered far-left ones in 2020

  A new report by the Transnational Threats Project at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think-tank, suggests that far-right terrorism is a much greater threat than far-left terrorism. The CSIS analysed 61 terrorist incidents reported between January 1st and August 31st and categorised them into four groups: religious, far-right, far-left and other. It drew on databases compiled by research groups and press releases from the FBI and the Department of Justice, cross-checked against criminal complaints and news reports. Hate crimes, protests, riots and civil unrest, including the disturbances after the killing of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis, were excluded.

• Turkey Sentences U.S. Consulate Employee to Over 5 Years in Jail

  Nazmi Mete Canturk, who worked as a security guard, is one of three Turkish staffers at U.S. Consulates facing similar charges, a situation that has raised tensions between the two longtime allies.

  U.S. diplomats maintain that the charges against the employees are baseless, and critics of Turkey have said they amount to political hostage-taking. Since 2017, the men have been in jail, under house arrest or under travel restrictions, despite protests from American officials.

• What the Beheading of a French School Teacher Should Tell Us

  A teacher herself in a state school in Seine-Saint-Denis in the north of Paris, a district often cited as the most deprived in France, she was profoundly shocked by the death of Monsieur Paty. Naturally, she has nothing but sympathy for his family but she had no wish to stand shoulder to shoulder with politicians, intellectuals, the judiciary and members of an education authority who for years have offered her profession little or no support in their struggle against Islamic extremism.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• CBP Is Asking The National Archives For Permission To Destroy Misconduct Records

  The CBP and ICE likely have loads of misconduct records. Not that they mean much. These records are compiled and stashed someplace where it’s inconvenient to find them for FOIA requesters. No one at the CBP or the DHS seems to have much interest in punishing misconduct, much less investigating it, so the records are far from complete and tend to be rubberstamped with EXONERATED.

• Whistleblower Who Exposed Ex-EPA Chief’s Scandalous Conduct Sues EPA Over Retaliation

  An Environmental Protection Agency whistleblower, whose disclosures ultimately led to former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s resignation, filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging his free speech and due process rights were violated.The lawsuit [PDF] says Kevin Chmielewski was a political appointee and worked as Pruitt’s deputy chief of staff for operations. He faced a retaliatory investigation from the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General that “falsely accused” him of “not having a security clearance and covering up a past arrest.”It claims Corey Lewandowski, a former official for President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, told the whistleblower that Pruitt “knew about his disclosures.” After Chmielewski refused to “violate laws and federal rules and made disclosures to officials outside of the EPA,” Pruitt assigned his responsibilities to another employee.Furthermore, according to the lawsuit, Charles Munoz, the White House liaison for the EPA, informed Chmielewski on February 12, 2018, “Pruitt wants you to resign effective immediately.” He was urged to “sign a resignation form” because if he was fired he would “lose his clearance and never get another job in the federal government.”The EPA allegedly sent Chmielewski documents on April 20, 2018, that falsely represented he resigned from his job.Helena Wooden-Aguilar, the EPA deputy associate administrator for the Office of Policy, and Justin Fugh, the EPA senior counsel for ethics, both warned “[Pruitt’s] chief of staff Ryan Jackson not to make statements to the effect that plaintiff was removed because he went to Congress, human resources, or other officials.”Oversight of Pruitt’s “compliance with expense, budgetary, personnel use, record keeping, and email policies and regulations” were not duties assigned to Chmielewski. Nor was it part of his job, according to the lawsuit. He simply did not want to be part of this misconduct.He demands that his employment at the EPA be reinstated or that the Energy Department hire him to a position he was promised earlier in 2020.

  Multiple scandals erupted around Pruitt’s abuse of taxpayer dollars and how he used the position to enrich himself and his family.The disgraced EPA administrator was too much of a liability for the Trump administration and resigned on July 5, 2018.Chmielewski accused Pruitt of violating federal statutes, regulations, and EPA policies when he spent funds on travel, “office improvements,” and used staff for “personal tasks.”“[Pruitt] spent more than $120,000 of public funds during a June 2017 trip to Italy that an EPA lobbyist organized under the guise of a meeting with environmental ministers from G-7 countries,” the lawsuit declares. “This trip included a $30,500 security detail and nearly $90,000 spent on food, hotels, commercial airfare, and an $11,000 military jet used by the Administrator and nine of his staffers.”Although commercial flights were available that were “faster and cheaper,” Pruitt still had the EPA shell out $11,000 for this flight that took him and his staff from Cincinnati to New York for the trip to Italy.Chmielewski “objected that travel logistics or expenditures were not allowed,” and Pruitt allegedly replied, “I don’t care. I’m a Cabinet Secretary. Make it happen.”Pruitt also approved a first-class return trip from Morocco for an EPA official. But Chmielewski insisted that violated regulations and refused to sign paperwork for the trip.While Pruitt ran the EPA, he issued a “blanket waiver” so officials could fly first class. He stayed in some of the “most expensive hotels in violation of the travel policies and regulations. His travel often exceeded the prescribed 150 percent per diem rate without appropriate justification and approval.”

• Google Runs Ads on Election Conspiracy Theory Sites, Study Finds

  Google has placed advertisements on six websites that violate the company’s own rules by publishing “misinformation and potentially dangerous claims about the electoral process,” according to a new report from a digital watchdog.

  Center for Countering Digital Hate, CCDH, a British non-profit, analyzed articles from right-leaning websites that questioned the legitimacy of mail-in voting and suggested Democrats and the “Deep State” were rigging the election. Experts have repeatedly debunked theories about voter fraud, and U.S. national intelligence officials have reassured voters about the integrity of the election.

Environment

• US Coast Guard to tackle China ‘illegal’ fishing in Pacific

  The United States said Friday it will deploy Coast Guard patrol ships in the western Pacific to counter “destabilizing and malign” activities by China in disputed fishing grounds of the South China Sea.

• Energy

  • As Election Nears, Polling Shows 82% of Voters Believe 100% Clean Power Should Be Primary US Energy Goal

    The survey also found that over seven in 10 Americans support legislation to eliminate fossil fuel emissions from the transportation, electricity, buildings, industry, and agricultural sectors by 2050.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • African desert is home to abundant forest growth

    Researchers have found an unknown wealth of trees in an African desert zone supposedly too arid for green growth.

Finance

• Donald Trump Is an Existential Threat to Social Security

  The contrast between the two parties on Social Security has never been clearer. Every working family that has contributed to Social Security has a stake in this fight. All of us should vote accordingly.

• The Trump Tax Reform Helped the Billionaire Class, Not the Working Class

  If that rally crowd had been packed with billionaires, they would’ve had good reason to applaud. But for ordinary working families, the 2017 Republican tax law is nothing to cheer about.

  Trump’s tax cuts for the rich are a major factor in the stunning growth in U.S. billionaires’ wealth — even as millions of other Americans are suffering. The billionaire class enjoyed a 6.6 percent reduction in their top marginal income tax rate, leaving them with even more money to cash in on stock market gains spurred by the law’s 40 percent cut in the corporate tax rate.

• Any True Recovery Must Include US Workers

  From March through mid-October, as Covid-19 spread, the wealth of US billionaires collectively increased some $931 billion—or nearly one-third. The very richest grew even richer as more than 225,000 Americans have died and lost work. The pandemic is not, as some expected, a “great equalizer.” It has exacerbated the cruel inequities of the US political economy, preying on the vulnerable while plutocrats profited.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• ‘Drop It Off. Drop It Off. Drop It Off’: USPS Deadline to Mail Ballots Is Today, But Voters Urged Not to Rely on DeJoy-Led Postal Service

  “Don’t put it in the mail. Not at this point. If you can drop it off in person, drop it off in person.”

• ‘Should Be Ashamed’: After Installing Barrett, McConnell Adjourns Senate for Recess With No Covid Relief in Sight

  “Small business owners, workers, and families are desperate for support—and lawmakers and the president abandoned them in order to focus on jamming through a historically non-transparent and extreme Supreme Court pick.”

• Should Trump Be Held Accountable? A Harvard Academic Says No

  The elites rush to the defense of the status quo.

• Why Amy Coney Barrett Must Recuse Herself From Election-Related Cases

  The choice is simple: She must recuse, and welcome Trump’s scorn.

• ‘Expand the Court’: Ocasio-Cortez Leads Charge With 3-Word Democratic Strategy After Barrett Sworn In

  “Republicans do this because they don’t believe Dems have the stones to play hardball like they do,” said the New York Democrat. While admitting “for a long time they’ve been correct,” she indicated those days would soon be over.

• “He’s Down to Steal This Thing”: Kavanaugh Parrots Trump Mail-In Ballot Lies as Supreme Court Bars Extension of Wisconsin Deadline

  “Kavanaugh is announcing to the world that if it will help Trump win he will join a decision to not count votes.”

• After Supreme Court Guts Expansion of Mail-In Voting in Wisconsin, Fears Grow of Similar Rulings in Pennsylvania and North Carolina

  Republicans and the Trump campaign are hoping the Supreme Court will reject efforts to extend the deadline for receiving absentee ballots.

• Adrift Amid the Right-Wing Obscenity

  Facing a new wave of Covid-19 and a presidential election that will prove both Emma Goldman and Philip Berrigan right about the futility of US elections, I feel like the boxer who has lasted either 10 or 12 rounds. A hero, Mohammed Ali, comes to mind. He suffered catastrophic head injuries by outlasting his opponents. The personal injuries he suffered by taking on and outlasting the most powerful government in the world on moral grounds during the Vietnam War are another matter.

  There’s no doubt that countering a government during a war causes what lawyers and psychologists might call personal injury. A person can’t remain unscathed! My case went on for 51 years and it left its mark.There may be some who can remain unaffected. There’s Bill Clinton with his obfuscation of the military during the Vietnam War, George W. Bush with God knows what, Donald Trump with his notorious bone spurs, and people I know and knew who used every subterfuge to get out of coming within 12,000 miles of Vietnam and whom I once respected, but now often see in a much different light. Civil disobedience requires a genuine sacrifice. A physician friend of a friend’s physician father wrote my friend out of the military draft for a minor skin irritation and that does not qualify as paying a moral price. The great teachers pointing in the direction of moral choices were Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. It comes as no surprise to those who protest that they paid with their lives for their vision and actions.

• In the Eye of the Storm

  Is it possible that they know something that the rest of the world does not know, or is it that they hope to use some illicit subterfuge to win this election, handing Trump the presidency? The extent of the influence Russia used to achieve this result in the past election is unknown, but Russia’s past and present election meddling has been confirmed by the US intelligence agencies.

  Trump is smart, but he has a perverse intelligence, the result of his narcissism with sociopathic traits. Anyone who thinks this is an exaggeration should read the book written by Mary Trump, his niece and a clinical psychologist, who makes a stark analysis of her uncle, whom she considers a fraud and a huge danger to the country and the world.

• Now Is No Time for Cowardice. Abolish the Filibuster and Expand the Court.

  Mitch McConnell and his cohort of conservative allies believe the elevation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court is the capstone move in their long game. Between Barrett creating a meaty 6-3 conservative majority on the high court and the more than 200 right-wing judges the GOP senate has elevated to the bench, they think they have cemented the rule of a wealthy, white minority for another generation at least.

• How to Reverse This Craven GOP Power Grab

  The most ambitious structural reform would be to rebalance the Senate itself, as well as the Electoral College.

• Reversing the GOP Power Grab

  The vote on Barrett’s confirmation occurred just eight days before Election Day. By contrast, the Senate didn’t even hold a hearing on Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, who Obama nominated almost a year before the end of his term. Majority leader Mitch McConnell argued at the time that any vote should wait “until we have a new president.”

• Get Trump, But Biden is Next, So Lose the Kumbayas

  This means voting for, and even piling votes on for, Joe Biden. Biden has been making that prospect slightly less onerous than it used to be – not so much by being less of a mainstream Democrat, but by keeping his doofus side under control and by being, or seeming to be, less doddering.

  Also, as Election Day approaches, he seems to have become a tad less wedded to the (neoliberal) austerity politics that made him even worse than the average Senate Democrat.

• Federal Judge Denies Motion to Substitute DOJ for Trump in Rape Accuser’s Defamation Suit

  “President Trump defamed our client because she was brave enough to reveal that he had sexually assaulted her, and that brutal, personal attack cannot be attributed to the office of the president,” a lawyer for E. Jean Carroll said. 

• Want to Win Rural Voters? Fight Big Ag.

  Wisconsin dairy farmer Sarah Lloyd believes she has the answer to a question that has convulsed the Democratic Party for the past four years. “People from the coasts are always like, ‘What’s going on with Wisconsin? How could they have possibly voted for Obama and then voted for Trump?’” she asks, putting on a falsetto to conjure the hysteria she often hears in such voices. On a chilly, overcast October afternoon, she lays out her theory at the 400-cow Columbia County farm she runs with her husband, which the couple recently considered shuttering after years of unsustainably low milk prices. A Democrat with a PhD in rural sociology, this third-generation farmer believes her party is sorely out of touch with an issue that resonates deeply in conservative heartland communities: countering the monopolistic level of corporate power that has emerged in agribusiness over the past 40 years.

• AOC Pushes for Dems to “Expand the Court” After Amy Coney Barrett Confirmation

  Following the confirmation by the United States Senate of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) sent out a tweet that expressed her view of how Democrats should proceed from this moment onward.

• Trump’s Broken Promises to U.S. Factory Workers

  This proved such an effective political tactic that Trump continued to use it to garner support even after his election victory. In December 2016, speaking at a Carrier plant in Indianapolis, Indiana, the president-elect touted a deal he had struck with the air conditioning corporation to keep its jobs from moving to Mexico. “These companies aren’t going to be leaving anymore,” he promised. Visiting Lordstown, Ohio in early 2017, after General Motors announced some layoffs at its 4,500-worker auto plant, Trump urged workers not to move or sell their homes for, during his administration, those jobs were all going to be “coming back.”

  In fact, rather than manufacturing jobs returning during the Trump administration, they have been departing. Admittedly, in the Trump presidential years before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the nation added approximately 500,000 manufacturing jobs. But this gain was more than offset by the loss of 647,000 manufacturing jobs since that time.

• ‘We. Will. Vote. Her. Out.’: Maine Progressives Not Fooled Even a Little Bit by Susan Collins’ Cynical Vote on Barrett

  “Senator Collins has continued to enable Trump and McConnell’s anti-choice, anti-freedom agenda. This vote is too little, too late.”

• US appears to have hit peak paranoia ahead of presidential poll

  With the US elections a week away and warnings of Russian, Iranian and other foreign involvement pouring out from every conceivable source, the US appears to have hit peak paranoia mode.

• As Trump Says ‘Must Have Vote Total’ on Nov. 3, Nearly 400 ‘Protect the Results’ Rallies Planned to Fight Election Night Theft

  “We think the likelihood of activation is high,” the Protect the Results coalition says. 

• Kavanaugh Issues Ominous Opinion Regurgitating Trump Mail-In Ballot Lies

  The U.S. Supreme Court late Monday delivered a victory for the Republican Party by barring the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin from extending its Election Day deadline for the arrival of absentee ballots amid the pandemic, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh issuing an ominous concurring opinion that echoes President Donald Trump’s false narrative on mail-in voting.

• What the Election Should Have Been About

  The U.S. suffers from state-sponsored opacity surplus. In their own ways and at different times, Bill Moyers and Daniel Patrick Moynihan bemoaned excessive governmental secrecy, security state secrecy particularly, and were right to do so. Whether in protection of sources-&-methods or “national security” itself, we know that the Church Commission and Freedom of Information Act have been largely thrown on the ash heap of history. For every Panama Deception and Hazel O’Leary, there are untold instances of mum’s the word, nothing to see here. For every Pentagon Papers and Extraordinary Rendition, there is a movie starring Tom Hanks or Adam Driver instead of a real-live public reckoning. The effect is to increase business for the “true crime” section at Barnes & Noble, and, as noted, fuel a subgenre of Hollywood films (safely produced well after the shooting). But secrecy also undermines public confidence in public veracity and with it the legitimacy of public institutions. They may be wacko, but at least QANON followers exhibit a deep-seated desire to know the truth. If they are not getting it from the White House or Capitol Hill or Pentagon briefing room, then they will look elsewhere.

  Let us be clear that this problem is structural. The growth of the U.S. state during the Great Depression and Second World War gave us a form of national state unprecedented in human history. In terms of scale and integration with economy and culture, in terms of its command over nuclear weapons, in terms of its Cold War machinations, the post-war American state is the root source of our opacity surplus, and, in some ways, its chief beneficiary. We can read Charles Beard, C. Wright Mills, Sheldon Wolin, or even Gary Wills, and come away with a good sense of it. But my undergraduate mentor, Robert A. Solo (he the economist author of the little known The Positive State), drummed into me and I have never forgotten, the need for a systems-oriented, structuralist perspective to understand the full dimensions of what FDR et al. bequeathed to their progeny.

• NPR and the Corporate Criminal Element

  For a hint as to why, pick up the most recent NPR annual report, and flip through the listing of corporate criminals and other major recidivist law violators on the corporate sponsor page.

  ExxonMobil (guilty plea Exxon Valdez oil spill), Lumber Liquidators (guilty plea environmental crimes), Panasonic (guilty pleas antitrust crimes) and Tyson Foods (guilty plea clean water violations).

• The Circle of Amnesiacs

  Today was a particularly interesting meeting of the Holyrood Inquiry into the mishandling of the Salmond affair, with two senior civil servants, Judith Mackinnon and Barbara Allison, who both had very convenient and complete failures of memory, about key points which just happened to be the very points on which the committee had previously been lied to.

• Barrett Confirmed: Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Alicia Garza on GOP’s Supreme Court Power Grab

  As right-wing judge Amy Coney Barrett is sworn in as the ninth justice to the Supreme Court of the United States, just 30 days after President Trump announced her nomination and eight days ahead of the November 3 election, we speak with Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, who says the rushed confirmation shows that the Supreme Court “is not a neutral body — it is incredibly political.” Barrett’s confirmation to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just six weeks after her death seals the court’s 6-3 conservative majority potentially for decades to come and could have major consequences for reproductive rights, civil rights, environmental protections, the Affordable Care Act and the 2020 presidential election. “It is concerning that Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed yesterday, particularly given her complete lack of qualifications for the role, but also considering her extreme views on everything from reproductive justice and reproductive rights to civil rights and racism,” says Garza, the principal at Black Futures Lab and co-founder of Supermajority.

• Facebook’s Election-Week War on Accountability is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

  A legacy of the 2016 U.S. election is the controversy about the role played by paid, targeted political ads, particularly ads that contain disinformation or misinformation. Political scientists and psychologists disagree about how these ads work, and what effect they have. It’s a pressing political question, especially on the eve of another U.S. presidential race, and the urgency only rises abroad, where acts of horrific genocide have been traced to targeted social media disinformation campaigns.

  The same factors that make targeted political ads tempting to bad actors and dirty tricksters are behind much of the controversy. Ad-targeting, by its very nature, is opaque. The roadside billboard bearing a politician’s controversial slogan can be pointed at and debated by all. Targeted ads can show different messages to different users, making it possible for politicians to “say the quiet part out loud” without their most extreme messaging automatically coming to light. Without being able to see the ads, we can’t properly debate their effect.

• (Part of) What I Shared with the FBI

  On July 28, 2016, something happened that would eventually lead me to the FBI.

  I’m going to explain part of that story now. I’m explaining it for several reasons. I had promised myself I wouldn’t let another election pass without sharing what happened. Even now, I can’t entirely make sense of it — that was part of the point, confusion. But the release of documents in the wake of the Mueller investigation has provided a great number of public details (some of which I laid out in my Rat-Fucker Rashomon series) with which this story might be consistent. I can’t prove that this story explains the unanswered questions about the Roger Stone story (and Bill Barr’s intervention in the Stone sentencing seems to have shut down some parts of any ongoing investigation to do so). But at least I can share details that may provide an explanation.

• Google Sued Over Purged Conservative YouTube Channels

  A group of YouTubers whose channels were deleted earlier this month amid a purge of conspiracy theory content from the site are suing the tech giant for allegedly violating their First Amendment rights to broadcast political speech on matters of public interest — and they’re seeking an emergency injunction to regain access to the platform.

• This Is What Stealing an Election Looks Like

  If you’re still finding it a little hard to believe that the nation’s most venerable court is in the bag for the president, look no further than the concurring opinion submitted by Brett Kavanaugh, the beer-loving conservative Trump and Senate Republicans jammed onto the court under controversial circumstances in 2018. In ruling to block the federal order, Kavanaugh parroted the president’s talking points about the ills of absentee voting, while indicating that he is fully prepared to rule that any votes not counted on or before Election Day are illegitimate, so long as Trump’s re-election necessitate such a ruling.

Censorship/Free Speech

• German authorities want large porn sites to implement age verification or be blocked via DNS

  Internet service providers (ISPs) in Germany may soon be forced to apply DNS blocks to stop users from accessing porn sites like Pornhub, xHamster, and YouPorn. German authorities, led by a State Media Authority director named Tobias Schmid, have been pushing for large porn sites like those previously mentioned to implement age verification of the upload-your-ID-type. These demands are coupled with the threat of bans if age verification isn’t implemented – which it hasn’t yet been.

• Zuckerberg And Facebook Throw The Open Internet Under The Bus; Support Section 230 Reform

  This shouldn’t be much of a surprise, unfortunately, but it appears that once again Facebook is the first to crack under political pressure, and has decided to sell out the open internet and free speech online. In testimony Mark Zuckerberg is planning to give tomorrow to the Senate Commerce Committee, he’s going to say a few nice things about Section 230, immediately followed by him saying the company now supports reforming the law. The praise for Section 230 is accurate, but it doesn’t much matter when he takes it back immediately:

• Justice department bid to reinstate WeChat ban dismissed by court

  An appeals court in the US has dismissed a request from the Department of Justice that it be allowed to institute an immediate ban on Apple and Google offering the WeChat app for download in their respective mobile app stores.

• Sacha Baron Cohen Demands Facebook Remove Conspiracies; Flips Out When Facebook Removes His Article With Conspiracy Images

  Nearly a year ago, Sacha Baron Cohen presented a polemic speech to the Anti-Defamation League about how Facebook was evil for refusing to take down (loosely defined) “bad stuff” on their platform. We wrote a fairly thorough rebuttal, while simultaneously suggesting that SBC misunderstands his own comedy — which is often held up as revealing the inner prejudices of the people he parodies. While that may be true in some cases, I think the stronger argument is that in many cases, the people playing along with his schtick are simply trying to be nice to the awkward idiot that SBC is playing in front of them. In non-consequential social interactions, this is how many people will reasonably act. Rather than lecturing the idiot on why what he’s saying is ignorant bigotry, they’ll just humor him. Under this interpretation, many of the people SBC confronts are not ignorant, bigoted hicks, but people trying to be nice and humoring him.

• Zuckerberg to express openness to Section 230 reform

  Ranking member Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) released a report earlier Tuesday criticizing Big Tech’s “destruction” of local news outlets, hinting at where her questioning will focus.

• China’s Tencent Confirms Taste for International Film-Making

  Tencent Pictures, the film-making arm of Chinese tech giant Tencent, has the potential to be hugely influential on its home turf due to parent company’s domination of social media and gaming. Tencent’s massive scale – market capitalization over $700 billion makes it one of the world’s largest corporations – means it has the potential for huge overseas impact as well.

• Academic mobbing is even more damaging than you think

  Over the three years this was going on, I couldn’t help but reflect on how the academic mob, including former colleagues, worked tirelessly to exaggerate the situation. At one stage, I went to see a psychologist, partly to better understand the behaviour of stalkers. Research in this area indicates that it is often the success of the victim that triggers jealousy and spiteful behaviour.

  Many other colleagues, it should be noted, saw the academic mobbing for what it was, and I am, of course, grateful to the people who reached out and told me of the diverse workplace issues they had also had with members of the mob. But, while I am still a working academic today, the experience has made it much more challenging for me to perform my duties.

  I can’t resist concluding with one final irony. My accuser and the wider academic mob who turned against me often write about issues of equity and inclusivity, as I do. When I told a senior academic about the mobbing behaviour and how easily people can be led astray, she kindly reassured me that “the ones that preach the most about social justice are often the biggest bullies”.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• USAGM CEO Criticized Over Move to Rescind Firewall Regulation

  Republican and Democratic lawmakers sharply criticized the head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media for his late-night action to repeal a rule meant to protect the Voice of America and other U.S.-funded news networks from editorial interference.

  In a statement on the USAGM website and emailed to staff late Monday, CEO Michael Pack said he was using his powers as chief executive to roll back the regulation, known as the “firewall” rule, because it was harmful to the agency’s and national interests.

• Trump Appointee Seeks to Turn U.S. Media Agency Into a Political Cheerleader

  The head of the U.S. broadcasting agency has eliminated a recent firewall provision established to ensure the independence of news operations at Voice of America (VOA) and other government-sponsored news outlets and to shield their journalists from the interference of political leadership.

  In a Monday night memo, Michael Pack, the CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees VOA’s news operations, issued the repeal of a June federal regulation that limited political interference in U.S. government broadcasting.

  For VOA staffers, the memo represented the clearest sign yet of Pack’s effort to remake the government news agency into a state propaganda network for Trump.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Protests Rise in Philly After Police Murder Black Man Amid Mental Health Crisis

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—West Philly saw a quickly escalating situation develop on 4 p.m. Monday afternoon and dragging into the evening and overnight. In a graphic and disturbing video circulating on social media, two white Philadelphia Police (PPD) officers are seen repeatedly shooting a Black man in front of his mother from several feet away as he walked while holding a knife. Neither of the two officers in the video seemed to attempt to use their taser, and they appeared to have fired around ten bullets while they were several arms lengths away from the man they shot.

• “Movements Are Not Just About Protests”: BLM Co-Founder Alicia Garza on How to Build & Wield Power

  In her new book, “The Purpose of Power,” Black Lives Matter co-creator Alicia Garza lays out how people can build power and effect change. “Movements are not just about protests,” she says. “Movements are absolutely about how we get more power into the hands of more people.”

• Why is this election so painful? Because voting isn’t real political power

  You certainly don’t want me to tell you that none of that stuff will actually go away, no matter what happens on or after Nov. 3. Or that electing Joe Biden and a bunch of Democratic senators won’t actually fix anything about our broken political system or resolve the deep-rooted social and economic contradictions that got us here.

• What we’re voting for: democracy

  At least 14 states have reported some kind of voter intimidation, ranging from inconveniences to outright felonies. In Florida, armed security guards appeared outside a polling station, claiming to be working for the Trump campaign. (The campaign denied any involvement, although President Trump has encouraged supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully.”) In North Carolina, a Republican county commissioner was charged with misdemeanor assault after shoving a poll worker. In Boston, a ballot drop-off box was set on fire in an apparent act of political arson.

  Other forms of vote suppression are entirely legal. Early voters have faced hours of waiting in Atlanta, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Houston — as always, centered mostly on Black and Latino neighborhoods. The rules for how ballots will be counted in Pennsylvania are still unclear, pending an appeal to the Supreme Court. A growing chorus of analysts expects that election results will be disputed, if not outright resisted.

• Californians vote on the future of Uber

  At issue is whether their freelance drivers, couriers and other gig workers should be treated as employees, entitled to benefits such as unemployment insurance and sick leave. More fundamentally, “Prop 22” is a stab at balancing worker protections with the gig industry’s flexibility, which lets people work when they want while ensuring that customers never have to wait long for a ride or a meal delivery.

• A Teacher, His Killer and the Failure of French Integration

  But the nation, broadly, has balked at the suggestion from critics, many in the Muslim community, that France’s model of integration, including its schools, needs an update or an overhaul.

• Is the Culture War Lost? A Letter Exchange Between Sarah Haider and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  In an ongoing public letter exchange on Letter, two of the most important advocates of universal liberal humanism—Sarah Haider and Ayaan Hirsi Ali—are currently discussing woke culture. Drawing on their extensive work fighting for the rights and freedoms of ex-Muslims, one of the most persecuted but fastest growing groups in the world, and against censorship, totalitarianism, religious bigotry and sexual oppression, especially when inspired by Islam, these two exceptionally courageous, outspoken women talk about the new cultural and social orthodoxy that is Critical Social Justice, commonly known as wokeism, with its censorious opposition to freedom of expression, its moral grandstanding, its identity hierarchies and the turgid gobbledygook of its constantly mutating terminology. Ayaan argues that this is a temporary phenomenon, rejected by most, and that its own patent absurdity, together with the staunch opposition of true liberals, will soon lead it to be debunked. Sarah, by contrast, points to the way in which the main cultural institutions of the west have already been captured by this illiberal ideology and advocates a radical approach to combating this, since, she writes, “we are not meeting the barbarians at the gate; we are rebelling against the empire.”

  Here is Sarah’s opening letter. You can read Ayaan’s reply, Sarah’s response to Ayaan and follow this on-going conversation at Letter’s own site here.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• FCC Accused of Prioritizing Corporate Interests Over Needs of American People by Doubling Down on Net Neutrality Repeal

  “This remand order callously dismisses the valid concerns of public-safety officials, competitive broadband providers, and millions of disconnected low-income families who can’t afford to get online.”

• FCC Ignores The Courts, Finalizes Facts-Optional Repeal Of Net Neutrality

  Just about a year ago the courts partially upheld the FCC’s hugely unpopular net neutrality repeal. But it also kicked some aspects of the repeal back to the FCC. Most notably, the courts stated the Ajit Pai FCC couldn’t ban states from protecting consumers if the FCC is no longer interested in doing so. The courts also noted that the FCC (surprise!) did little to no research into how the repeal would impact public safety or efforts to bridge the digital divide (the latter being kind of important in a massive pandemic in which affordable access is essential to survival) and urged the agency to try again.

• The Last Smash and Grab at the Federal Communications Commission

  AT&T and Verizon secured arguably one of the biggest regulatory benefits from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with the agency ending the last remnants of telecom competition law. In return for this massive gift from the federal government, they will give the public absolutely nothing. 

  A Little Bit of Telecom History 

Monopolies

• Patents

  • FOSS Patents: Apple and Intel defend their amended complaint against Fortress patent troll conglomerate, announce further allegations of FRAND abuse

    With respect to its App Store terms and policies, Apple is now arguably the most prominent antitrust defendant in the tech universe. Simultaneously, Apple is pressing antitrust charges–through private litigation–particularly in connection with abusive patent-leveraging practices. While the issues are very distinct, having the shoe on one foot today and on another foot tomorrow requires Apple, which is represented by different law firms (Wilmer Hale against Softbank-owned Fortress Investment, Gibson Dunn and Orrick against Epic Games and various class action plaintiffs), to espouse a more flexible approach to antitrust enforcement in one context than in the other. Case in point, a Ninth Circuit panel’s wholesale acquittal of Qualcomm took a more restrictive and limiting perspective on how to apply the antitrust laws (particularly–but not only–in connection with patents), and the panel opinion contained legal statements that Apple can and does cite to as it defends itself against Epic, but complicate matters in its joint case with Intel against Softbank’s Fortress.

    In the summer, San Francisco-based Judge Edward M. Chen of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California granted Fortress’s first motion to dismiss Apple and Intel’s complaint, but also allowed the plaintiffs to amend the complaint. The absolute low of the Trump Administration’s involvement with patent policy was when the Department of Justice intervened on behalf of that foreign-owned patent troll group that has been bringing many dozens of vexatious lawsuits against not only Apple, but also others, notably Google. That was the very opposite of “Make America Great Again.” It was anti-American, and unfortunately the matter doesn’t have the prerequisite high profile that lawmakers would have raised questions (plus, there are some Democrats on Capitol Hill who are beholden to the world’s patent trolls, such as “Looney Coons”).

    Apple and Intel amended their complaint, and Fortress–not unexpectedly–brought a renewed motion to dismiss, on which the court will probably decide in December. Fortress alleged that Apple and Intel had failed to cure the deficiencies identified by the court in its order to dismiss without prejudice.

  • Risk of Encouraging Infringement while Awaiting Appeal

    This case has been ongoing since 2010. Back in 2011, the district court issued a narrowing claim-construction with the result of a stipulated dismissal of non-infringement. The Federal Circuit reversed that outcome in 2013 with a broader construction — setting up the eventual 2018 trial.

    TecSec’s theory focused on both direct and induced infringement. Just before trial, the district court granted Adobe’s motion in limine to prevent TecSec from presenting any inducement evidence from between the 2011 claim construction and the 2013 reversal.

  • Software Patents

    • Patent Docs: New USPTO Study Shows Rapid Growth, Regional Spread of AI-Based Patenting

      Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office released a study entitled “Inventing AI”, which highlights the increasing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI)-based patent applications in the U.S. over the past few decades. The study, released by the Office of the Chief Economist of the USPTO, surveyed publicaly available granted U.S. patents and U.S. patent application pre-grant publications (PGPub) published from 1976 through 2018.

      In a very “meta” analysis method, the study authors utilized a machine learning neural network classification model to identify patent documents relevant to AI. The author’s neural network classifier identified patent documents that fit into one or more of eight “AI component technologies”: Knowledge processing, Speech, AI hardware, Evolutionary computation, Natural language processing, Machine learning, Vision, and Planning and control. Once the relevant patent landscape was identified, the study examined various patent trends and diffusion across technologies, inventor-patentees, organizations, and geography.

• Copyrights

  • Where is Canada’s News Media Lobby Promoting Its Link Licensing Plan for Facebook? On Facebook

    What is notable about the self-interested media campaign is not just the power of large Canadian publishers to re-use the same coverage in markets across Canada both big and small, but that under  their proposal, they argue that Facebook should be required to pay them for including links to their articles that they themselves have posted. In fact, the lobby group also demands that their original content should be prioritized on Facebook (with a regulator to determine what is entitled to priority), even though the same, original content is repeated again and again across multiple papers and in dozens of Facebook posts. Canadian Heritage Minister has described Facebook as “immoral” for linking to content without payment, but in light of what actually takes place, the comment might be better directed at lobbying campaigns that demand payments for content that the media lobby posts itself to social media.