Desktop/Laptop

• There’s a powerful new Linux gaming laptop on the scene

  Linux-friendly Spanish PC maker Slimbook has revealed a powerful new gaming laptop that features some of the hottest pieces of hardware around today.

  Dubbed the Slimbook Titan, the laptop is equipped with the AMD Ryzen 7 5800H processor, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, both of which boast impressive performance improvements over their rivals.

  Expectedly, the laptop isn’t cheap and is available at a discounted pre-order price of €1599. Best of all, the laptop ships with Ubuntu, though you can have it with Windows 10 for an additional cost.

• Lenovo IdeaPad 3 – Windows and Linux experience a week later

  Here we are. My initial satisfaction with the laptop’s default offering has gone down some. I am quite disappointed with how Microsoft chooses to promote Windows 10. Yes, it rules the desktop market, so it can do pretty much what it pleases, but this is a long game. And in the long game, they are not winning themselves any loyalty. If Linux ever achieves functionality parity, off I go. The same goes for Lenovo. I don’t mind a vendor offering its tools and solutions. That’s fine. But if I choose to have those tools removed, then there are no two ways about it. I’m most likely not going to buy any Lenovo machine again, because I don’t appreciate being treated like a potato.

  In this regard, Linux does a much friendlier job – to be let down by random erraticism. I’m talking about the sound config I had to handle, plus the VLC quirk. And let’s not forget Secure Boot – even though it does not affect my two installed distros at the moment. Hardware wise, the keyboard quirks are quite annoying, and the screen can do only so much. Other than that, the laptop is robust and neat, fast, and the CPU fans don’t rev too much. The battery life is pretty good, but I need more data to verify if the original numbers hold true.

  Well, there you go. This is my satisfaction report a week into the laptop’s usage. I am certain there will be more lovely surprises, twists and turns along the way, but then, part of the experience is figuring out issues early. This way, if and when I deploy software in my production setup, I will have all the right workarounds in place, and my seven-digit IQ will not be affected. Stay tuned for more good stuff. See ya.

Server

• Announcing Istio 1.8.2

  This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.8.1 and Istio 1.8.2

Audiocasts/Shows

• Minimalist vs Modern – Linux Mint 20.1

  It’s time to check out the two desktop environments built for the latest release of Linux Mint 20.1 – MATE and Cinnamon!

• Google Docs Replacement | Self-Hosted 36

  Our favorite Google Docs killer with markdown support has a big update. We explain how we host it and why we love it.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Intel “Compute Walker” Support Lands For Xe HP In Linux Drivers – Phoronix

    A new compute code path has been merged into Intel’s open-source “ANV” Vulkan and “iris” Gallium3D drivers for the forthcoming Xe HP graphics hardware.

    The initial “COMPUTE_WALKER” code has been in development at Intel for the past 1~2 years while the merge request was just submitted a few days ago to replace the “legacy” compute path from the upcoming Gen12.5 Xe HP hardware. The check is for newer than Gen12 or GEN12HP, so the new compute path will trickle down to lower-tier parts outside of the Xe HP scope moving forward after the existing Gen12 parts like Tiger Lake or the upcoming Rocket Lake still flagged as Gen12 (not 12.5).

  • AMD Sends In More “New Stuff” For Radeon Graphics With Linux 5.12 – Phoronix

    Sent in last week were many AMD graphics driver updates slated for Linux 5.12 including the likes of Radeon RX 6000 series OverDrive support. This week marks another batch of AMDGPU kernel driver changes being submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.12 cycle.

    Among the “new stuff” for AMDGPU in Linux 5.12 include more code warning fixes, enabling of GPU reset and recovery for Navy Flounder yet-to-be-released RDNA 2 SKUs, SMU workload profile fixes for APUs, various display code updates, SR-IOV fixes, various VanGogh APU updates, another Renoir device ID being added, the new bits around Secure Display TA, another Green Sardine device ID being added, and a range of other code improvements.

  • Mesa’s RADV ACO Adds Support For Rapid Packed Math – Phoronix

    Hitting the Mesa tree when Mesa 21.0 was being branched (but looks like it will still make it now part of “staging/21.0″) is support for AMD’s “rapid packed math” with the RADV driver’s ACO compiler back-end.

    Rapid Packed Math is the AMD terminology for allowing two FP16 operations within a single FP32 operation. ACO, which is the default shader compiler back-end since last year in Mesa’s RADV driver, now supports this functionality for Vec2 16-bit operations.

Benchmarks

• The Performance Of Clear Linux vs. Fedora vs. Ubuntu Over 2020

  Earlier this week we looked at the performance of Intel’s Clear Linux over the past year but how does that compare to the likes of say Fedora and Ubuntu? This article is looking at the performance of Fedora Workstation, Ubuntu, and Clear Linux on the same hardware over the past year.

  This testing off the same platform (Core i9 7980XE, ASUS PRIME X299-A, Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe SSD, 4 x 4GB DDR4-3200) is intended to provide a look at how the Ubuntu and Fedora performance has evolved since the end of 2019 to see the direction of these tier-one Linux distributions up against Intel’s performance-focused Clear Linux.
  For the EOY2019 state with Clear Linux was 31890 to 34150 for EOY2020. For the Ubuntu look was Ubuntu a 20.04 development snapshot at EOY2019 when that testing took place for a prior article to now Ubuntu 20.10 with all stable release updates. Meanwhile Fedora was from Fedora 31 with all stable release updates at end of 2019 when testing happened for a prior article to Fedora 33 with all stable release updates as of testing time.

Applications

• KeePassXC 2.6.3 Released with Argon2id, XML2 Support [PPA]

  KeePassXC, cross-platform community fork of KeePass password manager, release version 2.6.3 a few days ago with new features and improvements.

  KeePassXC 2.6.3 features Argon2id KDF and version 2 XML key files support.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to Install and Use Xrdp Server (Remote Desktop) on Linux System

  The Xrdp server is the RDP tool (Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol) for Linux distributions. You can install it on your Linux system to connect your server or desktop over the internet. The Xrdp server allows you to use the multi-channel connection through a graphical user interface (GUI). Besides these, the Xrdp server also allows you to connect and restart sessions if your connection gets lost. If you are a network engineer or a Linux system administrator, you can install the Xrdp server on your Linux system and access your server or desktop from anywhere over the internet.

  [...]

  If you are using a Linux server; probably, you might need to get a desktop environment installed on your system to use the Xrdp server on your machine. You can use either the Gnome DE or the Xfce desktop environment on your Linux server. Here, I am using a Gnome desktop environment on my Ubuntu machine.

  However, run the following command-lines given below to install your desired desktop environment on your server.

• Petter Reinholdtsen: Latest Jami back in Debian Testing, and scriptable using dbus

  After a lot of hard work by its maintainer Alexandre Viau and others, the decentralized communication platform Jami (earlier known as Ring), managed to get its latest version into Debian Testing. Several of its dependencies has caused build and propagation problems, which all seem to be solved now.

  In addition to the fact that Jami is decentralized, similar to how bittorrent is decentralized, I first of all like how it is not connected to external IDs like phone numbers. This allow me to set up computers to send me notifications using Jami without having to find get a phone number for each computer. Automatic notification via Jami is also made trivial thanks to the provided client side API (as a DBus service). Here is my bourne shell script demonstrating how to let any system send a message to any Jami address. It will create a new identity before sending the message, if no Jami identity exist already…

• PSI and Cgroup2

  In the comments on my post about Load Average Monitoring [1] an anonymous person recommended that I investigate PSI. As an aside, why do I get so many great comments anonymously? Don’t people want to get credit for having good ideas and learning about new technology before others?

  PSI is the Pressure Stall Information subsystem for Linux that is included in kernels 4.20 and above, if you want to use it in Debian then you need a kernel from Testing or Unstable (Bullseye has kernel 4.19). The place to start reading about PSI is the main Facebook page about it, it was originally developed at Facebook [2].

  I am a little confused by the actual numbers I get out of PSI, while for the load average I can often see where they come from (EG have 2 processes each taking 100% of a core and the load average will be about 2) it’s difficult to work out where the PSI numbers come from. For my own use I decided to treat them as unscaled numbers that just indicate problems, higher number is worse and not worry too much about what the number really means.

• How to Create a New Virtual Machine using VMware

• How To Install phpMyAdmin on Linux Mint 20 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install phpMyAdmin on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, phpMyAdmin is a web interface based database management tool for MySQL. Using phpMyAdmin users can interact with MySQL easily. phpMyAdmin provides the most useful functions to interact with the MySQL database.

  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 phpMyAdmin on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).

• How to install Garuda KDE Dr460nized 210107 – YouTube

  In this video, I am going to show how to install Garuda KDE Dr460nized 210107.

• How to check NetworkManager version on Ubuntu

  NetworkManager is a standard network configuration daemon for Linux, whose primary goal is to keep network connectivity active at all time. Unlike stationary server environment, typical Linux laptop/desktop can connect to the network via more than one physical (wired/wireless) or virtual (VPN, VLAN, VxLAN) network interfaces, and can switch from one interface to another dynamically, depending on locations and user preferences. That is when NetworkManager really makes your life easy by enabling automatic connection setup and migration.

• How to Install Discourse Forum with Docker on CentOS 8

  Discourse is a free and open-source platform built for the next decade of the Internet. It is a modern forum software that can be used as a mailing list, discussion forum, long-form chat room, and more. It uses Ruby on Rails for the backend, Ember.js for the front end, PostgreSQL as a data store, and Redis as a caching server. It is simple, efficient, mobile-friendly, customizable, and makes online discussion easy and fun.

• How to Install ELK stack on Ubuntu 20.04

  The ELK stack is an acronym of three popular open-source projects: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. It is an open-source and one of the most popular log management platform that collects, processes,sem

  and visualizes data from multiple data sources. It is mainly used for log analysis in IT environments. It is very helpful for a system administrator to search and analyze a large volume of data to make real-time decisions-all the time.

  Elasticsearch: It is a search engine used to store all of the collected data.
  Kibana: It provides a web-based interface used to search and visualize your data.
  Logstash: It is a data processing interface used to collect data from several sources concurrently then sends the data to your desired stash.

• Running Bash Commands in the Background the Right Way

  There’s nothing more annoying than running a command in your terminal and having it run for minutes, sometimes hours, and not be able to use your terminal again. Sure, you can use tabs, but that’s a clunky solution, and it’s not always optimal because you may want to see updates as you’re working. Here we show you a few different ways to run bash commands in the background in Linux.

• Install Wine 6.0 In Ubuntu 20.04 & Linux Mint | Tips On UNIX

  WineHQ is open-source and capable of installing Windows applications on Linux, BSD, and macOS.

  The wine team released a new Stable version 6.0 and this release represents a year of development effort and over 8,300 individual changes and it contains a larger number of improvements.

  This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install wine 6.0 in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10, and LinuxMint 20.1.

• Time lapse video from Raspberry PI camera – peppe8o

  One of most common Raspberry PI accessories is the Raspberry PI Camera. Beside common usages (like videoconferencing), RPI gives a lot of advanced functions. One of most intrigating is getting a time lapse video from Raspberry PI camera

  In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to create a time lapse video with a Raspberry PI board and Camera. We’ll use Raspicam commands to get images and ffmpeg library to create new time-lapse video.

  Before digging in technical commands, a breaf introduction in what time lapse video is.

• How to Create and Manage Archive Files in Linux – Linux.com

  In a nutshell, an archive is a single file that contains a collection of other files and/or directories. Archive files are typically used for a transfer (locally or over the internet) or make a backup copy of a collection of files and directories which allow you to work with only one file (if compressed, it has a lower size than the sum of all files within it) instead of many. Likewise, archives are used for software application packaging. This single file can be easily compressed for ease of transfer while the files in the archive retain the structure and permissions of the original files.

• How to Use Crontab to Automate Repetitive Tasks in Linux

  Take advantage of the crontab Linux command to automate various mundane and repetitive tasks, simplifying your life. This excellent and easy to use tool, combined with some scripting, can not only automate all sorts of tasks, but also help avoid simple human errors or forgetfulness.

• How To Install DokuWiki on CentOS Stream 8 with Apache and PHP 8

  In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to install and configure DokuWiki on CentOS Stream 8 with the Apache webserver and the (currently) latest PHP 8.0.

  DokuWiki is a popular open-source wiki software that you can extend and customize with lots of plugins and themes. It doesn’t use a database, it’s lightweight, and DokuWiki has great syntax.

• How to Install Linux Mint’s Cinnamon Desktop in Ubuntu

  Linux Mint is known for its cinnamon desktop environment. It is a free and open-source desktop environment designed and developed based on GNOME 3.

  If you are having Ubuntu on your desktop and get tried of using GNOME 3. Then you can easily switch to the cinnamon desktop in Ubuntu with few lines of command.

Wine or Emulation

• Linux Release Roundup #21.03: YunoHost 4.1, Mozilla VPN, Wine 6.0 & More New Releases

  Wine 6.0 is a major stable release with a bunch of improvements and a year of work.

Games

• WRATH: Aeon of Ruin launching along with Linux support this Summer, third update out now | GamingOnLinux

  WRATH: Aeon of Ruin is a dark fantasy-horror FPS powered by the original Quake engine from publishers 3D Realms and 1C Entertainment and developer KillPixel Games.

  The full release across all platforms (Windows currently supported in Early Access) has been delayed until “Summer 2021″, this is due to COVID-19 as some of their team sadly caught it and needed recovery time. Even so, they’ve managed to push out a third content update.

  “While delays are never ideal, we wanted to release one awesome final update before going heads down to knock this out of the park,” said Frederik Schreiber, Vice President of 3D Realms and Producer on WRATH. “Summer may seem far away, but we are working diligently to make WRATH the best game it can be.”

• Rocket Shipment is a slick homage to Thrust and Crazy Gravity now in Early Access | GamingOnLinux

  Rocket Shipment is a tricky, physics based, space delivery game. The game is a love letter to the old style lander games like Thrust, Solar Jetman and Crazy Gravity. After being in development for two years now, it has entered Early Access on Steam and will remain there until closer to the end of 2021 when the full content gets added in.

  It’s simple and right to the point, keeping the game mechanics nicely glued together. The main mechanic is using a physics based grappling cable to move packages and other object around, while managing your fuel levels. There’s also a built in level editor, and Steam Workshop support to upload and download extra levels.

• Valve’s Source 2 shows early teasers of Ray Tracing – weirdly in Artifact updates

  We know that Source 2 from Valve is a pretty capable game engine, and we’ve seen what they’ve been able to do with it over the years (and Half-Life: Alyx turned it up a notch) but what’s next? Ray Tracing perhaps.

• Beamdog need your help to test Enhanced Editions of Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate | GamingOnLinux

  Getting real close to release now is the huge 2.6 upgrade for the Beamdog classic RPGs now including Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear and Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition.

  They’ve gradually moved from one game to the next, opening up an opt-in Beta you can try for each right now on Steam. Each of them needing some feedback to ensure you can properly play it including double-checking the save system is working correctly.

  [...]

  Want to get involved? They need Linux testing too (the Beta is Steam only, other stores when ready).

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Whisker Menu 2.5.2 released

  Do not reparent launched programs (Issue #32)
  Translation updates: Basque, Danish, Greek

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KaOS Linux’s First ISO Release in 2021 Adds Linux Kernel 5.10 LTS and Qt 6

    KaOS Linux 2021.01 is now available for download, the first ISO release of this KDE focused and desktop oriented rolling GNU/Linux distribution inspired by Arch Linux to ship with the latest and greatest Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series, which, as expected, provides state-of-the-art hardware support.

    In addition, KaOS Linux 2021.01 is the first ISO release to ship with the latest Qt 6 open-source and cross-platform application framework, which is already used by some apps, including Poppler, Qtkeychain, Qsynth, Strawberry, and others. Qt 6 is accompanied by the PyQt 6.0 stack, which includes PyQt6-sip, PyQt-Builder, and Sip 6.

  • KaOS 2021.01

    Two weeks into the New Year, KaOS is pleased to present you with a first ISO for 2021

    For the many changes in this release, a few stand out. This is a first ISO that ships with Qt 6. Not that Plasma is ready for Qt 6, but some are (Poppler, Strawberry, Qsynth, Qtkeychain for example), so to get this distribution in good shape for the eventual Qt 6 move, any that can be built with Qt 6 are done so now.
    The KDE Applications release 20.12 saw the addition of almost a dozen new applications, some just moved from standalone releases to now a monthly release, but the addition of Itinerary (an app that provides you with all the information you need while on the road) and Spectacle using Kimageannotator for annotation tool are good improvements.
    There has been a search for quite some time for a good GUI to handle Systemd services, the used systemd-kcm has not been maintained for years. This replacement is now found and included in the ISO, Stacer (it can also be used as a system clean-up tool and handle startup applications).

Distributions

• Distrowatch is Not a Measure of Popularity

  Here’s a fun blog post where I get possibly irrationally annoyed by people who use a web page incorrectly. Let me get this off my chest and then move on to better topics tomorrow.

  Distrowatch is a popular website among Linux enthusiasts. The main page consists of reverse-chronological news articles of interest to Linux users. Often this consists of new stable and development release announcements, reviews and weekly roundups.

• New Releases

  • Security-Oriented Alpine Linux 3.13 Releases First Cloud Images With Other Improvements

    Alpine Linux is a lightweight Linux distribution that focuses on security, simplicity, and efficiency. If you have used Docker, you are probably familiar with Alpine Linux.

    If you haven’t heard about Alpine Linux before, let me give you a brief introduction.

    Alpine Linux began as a fork of the LEAF Project. LEAF is a collection of Linux distributions that began as a fork of the Linux Router Project. The creator of Alpine Linux is Natanael Copa, a software engineer at Docker.

    It is based on musl libc and busybox, making it a smaller and resource-efficient distribution. Alpine uses its own package manager called APK (Alpine Linux Package Manager) and uses BusyBox Bash as the default shell. Most importantly, includes proactive security features like PaX and SSP to prevent security holes.

    What makes it unique, is its small size. Compared to other major Linux distributions like CentOS and Ubuntu, a single container requires only 8 MB, and minimal installation to disk requires around 130 MB of Storage. This makes it a popular Linux distribution for Docker.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • Xfce 4.16 Desktop Lands in openSUSE Tumbleweed, Download Now

    If you’ve been waiting for Xfce 4.16 to land in openSUSE Tumbleweed, I have some good news today as the wait is over and you can install the desktop environment right now from distribution’s software repositories and upgrade from Xfce 4.14.

    Xfce 4.16 brings many goodies for fans of the lightweight desktop environment, including fractional scaling, dark mode for the Panel, CSD (Client-side decorations) support for all the Settings dialogs, a revamped About Xfce dialog with info about CPU, GPU and RAM, as well as a refreshed look with new icons and color palette.

  • Xfce, KDE Packages Flood This Week’s Tumbleweed Snapshots

    A large quantity of packages from both Xfce and KDE projects flowed into openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots this week.

    Hundreds of packages updated in the rolling release and KDE’s Frameworks, Applications and Plasma packages were the most prevalent of software package updated throughout the week.

    KDE Frameworks 5.78.0 arrived in the latest 20210113 snapshot. Frameworks added a new compass action icon in the Breeze Icons and KConfig fixed windows being inappropriately maximized on launch. User Interface framework Kirigami fixed some visual bugs for avatar controls and KDE’s data accessing package KIO fixed a shortcut reset button and the middle-click handling with the url navigation menu. Frameworks packages weren’t the only packages to update in the snapshot; the update to the 1.12.3 version of ibus-table provides a new setup tool that allows keybindings to be configured with a GUI. Fingerprint reader package libfprint fixed issues that caused problem on non-x86 machines in its 1.90.6 version update. The last package to be included in the update was the parser library mxml 3.2, which fixed handling of elements that start with a Unicode character and fixed the handling of unquoted attribute values that start with Unicode.

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2021/02 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)

    Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

    Somewhere, I read, 2021 will be the year of the Linux desktop. Do you agree? Let’s make it the year of Tumbleweed on the desktop. In any case, Tumbleweed has been steadily rolling with 5 snapshots published during this week (0107, 0108, 0110, 0111, and 0113).

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • CentOS Hyperscaler Effort Approved With Backing From Facebook, Twitter

    The CentOS board has approved the creation of a “Hyperscale” SIG spearheaded by engineers from the likes of Facebook and Twitter in aiming to make CentOS Stream more appealing to such large scale server/cloud organizations.

    As noted earlier this week, the CentOS Hyperscale(r) SIG is about shipping newer packages via a new repository and other possible modifications to package defaults in aiming to make CentOS Stream more suitable for large enterprises. Select packages might be back-ported to CentOS via a new opt-in repository, alternate policy defaults might be established, and other possible changes to be evaluated moving ahead by this special interest group. The CentOS Hyperscaler effort will still be hosted on CentOS.org and will be focused on CentOS Stream with CentOS 8 due to be EOL’ed at the end of this year.

  • Discover Fedora Kinoite: a Silverblue variant with the KDE Plasma desktop

    Fedora Kinoite is an immutable desktop operating system featuring the KDE Plasma desktop. In short, Fedora Kinoite is like Fedora Silverblue but with KDE instead of GNOME. It is an emerging variant of Fedora, based on the same technologies as Fedora Silverblue (rpm-ostree, Flatpak, podman) and created exclusively from official RPM packages from Fedora.

  • Join Us: Design Team Sessions Live!

    Just before the Christmas holidays, you may have participated in one of three impromptu live design sessions / video chats I held. In the first session, a group of Fedorans did a critique on one of the Fedora 34 wallpaper mockups. In the second session, another group of us did a collaborative design session for a custom Fedora Discourse theme. In the last session, we did a live digital painting session.

  • Fedora 34 Planning For Better Font Rendering By Enabling HarfBuzz In FreeType

    Fedora plans to flip on the HarfBuzz text shaping engine support with the FreeType font rasterization engine. In doing so, this should yield improved hinting of glyphs especially with languages that need more complicated text shaping. FreeType has supported HarfBuzz for more than a half-decade (after HarfBuzz was originally was born out of that project) while Fedora hasn’t enabled its usage until the planned change for Fedora 34 this spring.

  • Fedora 32 : Can be better? part 012.

    Pidgin is a chat program that lets you log in to accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously.
    Pidgin can be installed on multiple operating systems and platforms.
    Pidgin is compatible with the following chat networks out of the box: I.R.C., Jabber/XMPP, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, and Zephyr.

  • Driving the organization towards Digital Innovation Excellence: 5 key dimensions to consider

    In our first post we introduced the three pillars to digital innovation success (automation, hybrid cloud and cloud native), in this next post we wanted to dive a little deeper into what digital innovation excellence means.

    Across Europe business leaders we talk to say that software is central to digital innovation and that organizations must become software producers at increasing speed and scale. As organizations evolve to become producers of software, the role of software development and delivery expands.

    Not only are organizations plugging into software development and delivery capabilities to increase organizational competitiveness by controlling a larger share of digital value creation, but software increasingly becomes part of the business’s core product and services offerings. But that’s not all. Software delivery is also expanding to support the ability to scale digital distribution and monetization of digital products and services through the digital ecosystem. This means that software can be delivered as a service, through direct sales channels, via APIs, open source repositories or via developer.com style platforms. Software is truly permeating the organization and digital innovation factories and supply chains become new organization requirements for digital resiliency.

  • Ben Williams: F33-20210114 updated Live isos released [Ed: New builds of Fedora 33]

    The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated F33-20210114-Live ISOs, carrying the 5.10.6-200 kernel.

    This set of updated isos will save considerable amounts of updates after install. ((for new installs.)(New installs of Workstation have about 800MB+ of updates)).

    A huge thank you goes out to irc nicks dowdle, dbristow, luna, yogoyo, Southern-Gentleman for testing these iso.

  • Fedora 33 : Using the finch chat program.

    Finch is a TUI (text user interface) IM client for Linux which uses libpurple.
    This is very useful when you want to chat and don’t have an environment to install Fedora on.
    Finch is built using the ncurses toolkit, which is a library designed especially to built text user interfaces.
    This program lets you sign on to Jabber, GoogleTalk, IRC, and other IM networks.

  • Red Hat and Intel expand 5G collaboration as new market opportunities emerge

    IBM Corp.’s Red Hat unit and Intel Corp. today announced an “evolution” of their partnership aimed at more closely aligning their product development activities in the 5G market.

    Carriers are spending billions of dollars to upgrade their networks to the 5G standard, which enables connections up to 100 times faster than LTE. The spending spree is creating new revenue opportunities for information technology suppliers such as Red Hat and Intel.

    The new collaboration, the companies said, will have several focus areas. One is to bring 5G features faster to key open-source technologies such as Kubernetes. Kubernetes eases the management of software container-based workloads, which can make it useful for carriers that are using containers to build the software powering their 5G networks.

  • Your Easiest Decision in 2021

    The 3-way collaboration across IBM, SUSE and SAP go back many years. We have a deep engineering relationship that speaks to the dedication to customers, performance and engineering excellence that permeates all 3 company’s cultures. In 2020, even amidst this crazy pandemic, we have continued our regular working relationship – striving to provide the best product, and the best support.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu 21.04 To Expand The Use Of Phased Package Updates – Phoronix

    With this spring’s release of Ubuntu 21.04 there is more widespread use of “phased updates” for gradually rolling out new stable release updates to help avoid any regressions en masse from coming to light. For years the Ubuntu desktop has employed this phased updates strategy while now with it being plumbed into APT, Ubuntu Server and other versions will by default make use of phased updates.

    Going back a number of years in Ubuntu has been Phased Updates that wired into Update Manager has led to the gradual rollout of new stable release updates over a period of about two days. This has been done gradually to ensure that no regressions or potential big problems hit all Ubuntu users at once by over the course of many hours exposing more Ubuntu users to these updates.

Devices/Embedded

• Genode OS Planning For PinePhone Bring-Up, Better GPU Support In 2021

  For those wanting to run a micro-kernel operating system for your low-cost, open-source friendly PinePhone, the Genode OS framework plans to port to the PinePhone this year. Genode OS and its Sculpt general purpose platform are also wanting to better embrace GPU support in 2021.

  The Genode operating system framework that features an original, open-source micro-kernel abstraction layer and a set of user-space components in development since 2008, published their road-map for the year.

  Like many in the open-source community, Genode OS developers and users have been intrigued by PINE64′s PinePhone that offers an Allwinner A64-powered open-source smartphone with 2GB of RAM, 16GB eMMC, and other basics for just $149~199 USD. While there are many Linux distributions supporting the PinePhone, Genode OS wants in on the action too and plans to port their operating system framework to it this year. They want Genode on PinePhone to serve as “a feature phone, covering basic web-browsing needs, placing calls, and SMS.”

• PinePhone Mobian Edition Is Coming on January 18, Powered by Debian Linux

  I know many of you out there have been waiting on a Debian-powered PinePhone, so here it is. PinePhone Mobian Community Edition is running Mobian Linux, an embedded operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux’s ARM64 (AArch64) port.

  Mobian offers a pure Debian GNU/Linux experience on mobile devices and uses Purism’s GNOME-based Phosh (Phone Shell) user interface by default. Mobian Linux on the PinePhone has been tweaked to greet users with an installer where they can choose a password and enable full disk encryption.

• Genode OS Framework is adding PinePhone support

• H2 Net Card adds four 2.5 GbE ports to ODROID-H2/H2+ SBC

  ODROID-H2+ is already a cool single board computer with an Intel Gemini Lake Refresh processor, up to 32GB RAM, dual 2.5GbE networking, support for SATA and NVMe storage, dual 4K video output, and more.

  But in recent days, I’ve read people complaining recently announced WiFI 6 or WiFi 6E routers only had one 2.5 Gbps or 5 Gbps Ethernet jack and wanted all/more RJ45 connectors to be 2.5 GbE ports or greater. But if even the two 2.5GbE ports on ODROID-H2+ are not quite enough for your needs, Hardkernel H2 Net Card triples that amount by adding four extra 2.5 GbE to the x86 SBC. It also works on ODROID-H2, meaning you’d get the existing dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, plus the four 2.5GbE ports from the M.2 card.

• WRT54G History: The Router That Accidentally Went Open Source

  How Linksys’ most famous router, the WRT54G, tripped into legendary status because of an undocumented feature that slipped through during a merger.

  [...]

  Intentionally or not, the WRT54G was hiding something fundamental on the router’s firmware: Software based on Linux.

• Tough little Apollo Lake mini-PCs offer up to triple displays

  The mini-PCs run Linux or Win 10 on Intel’s quad-core, 1.5GHz/2.3GHz Celeron J3455 or dual-core, up to 1.1GHz/2.4GHz Celeron N3350. You can load up to 8GB DDR3L-1866 via a single socket.

• Apollo Lake maker board with dual GbE and dual SATA starts at $70

  The SBC is pre-installed with “Linux” and supports OpenWrt, LibreELEC, Android, Windows, and the open source pfSense firewall software. The project aspires to be “open,” but it is unclear if that means open source hardware or community support features.

• USB2IO high-speed interface explorer tool combines Intel Cyclone 10 FPGA and STM32H7 MCU

  USB2IO is seen as a USB HID device (virtual COM port) on the host PC that can transmit data using ASCII or RAW protocols. Both the FPGA and MCU firmware can be upgraded. The tool can be controlled from any computer running Windows. MacOS, or Linux with a GUI application, and DAB Embedded also provides Python and C++ SDKs for developers who need to implement automated testing for instance.

• Mini-ITX SBC with Tiger Lake UP3 CPU offers dual 2.5GbE, quad display support

• PinePhone Mobian Community Edition goes up for pre-order Jan 18

  The next version of the PinePhone to ship will be the PinePhone Mobian Community Edition. It goes up for pre-order from the Pine64 Store January 18

  It’ll sell for $150 and up and the phone will ship with the Debian-based Mobian operating system pre-installed.

  [...]

  The Mobian build that will ship with the PinePhone Mobian Community Edition uses a mainline Linux kernel with some patches to ensure support for the phone’s hardware and the Phosh user interface.

  Like most mobile Linux projects, Mobian is still very much a work in progress. But it already supports all of the PinePhone’s key hardware including 4G LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, cameras, and USB. You can use it to make phone calls, surf the web, install and run applications, and it supports deep sleep.

• January Update: Happy New Gear!

  Happy New Year everyone! Let us all hope that the difficulties brought about by the COVID-19 virus are now waning and that more aspects of our lives will return to normal soon.

  We start this year with announcing the last community edition of the PinePhone, an update on the Quartz64 single board computers, and with some good news regarding PineTab and Pinebook Pro production.

  You can watch a synopsis of this month’s community update on Youtube (embedded below) but also on LBRY and Peertube. Stay up-to-date with PINE64 news and make sure to subscribe to this blog (bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

• Lilbits: Linux phones and laptops, S-Pen for more phones, and an RK3566 single-board computer

  Pine64, the company behind a line of geeky, inexpensive, and hackable smartphones, laptops, and single-board computers designed to run open source software tend to only publish one blog post each month. But it’s always a doozy, and the January update is no exception.

• Librem 14 Update: Shipping Starts in February with Extended Battery

  The Librem 14 is our dream laptop and we know many of you are looking forward to getting yours. In our last post we talked about some of the final tweaks we made that resulted in shipping being delayed until January. The bad news is that we won’t be able to start shipping Librem 14s until February, but the good news is that everyone will be getting our (as of yet unannounced) extended battery option by default! Read the rest of the article for details.

  Supply Chain Challenges

  If you talk to anyone in manufacturing they will tell you that this has been a particularly challenging year for the supply chain. Whether you are talking about toilet paper, N95 masks, rubber gloves, or semiconductors, the global pandemic has made supply chains less reliable, and lead times and shipping times incredibly unpredictable. We already ran into supply chain challenges with the Librem 14 earlier when Intel announced CPU shortages, and most recently when we were preparing the first run of production Librem 14s we hit another issue: we couldn’t get the 3-cell batteries we were planning to use until after Chinese New Year! If you are familiar with manufacturing in China, you know that the entire country essentially shuts down for weeks, so this is far from ideal. However it turns out we could get our 4-cell extended battery in time.

• DIN-rail net appliances supply four GbE ports

  Axiomtek unveiled two Linux-ready DIN-rail network PCs with 4x GbE ports: the compact, rugged “iNA100” runs on Apollo Lake while the Coffee Lake based “iNA600” adds a 16-GbE port L2 managed switch and an optional PCIe x8 MXM slot.

  On Dec. 30, Axiomtek announced an iNA600 networking appliance based on Intel’s 8th Gen Coffee Lake processors. The company followed up yesterday with a much more compact iNA100 net appliance running Apollo Lake. Both systems run Linux or Windows, offer at least 4x Gigabit Ethernet ports, and can be mounted on DIN-rails.

  [...]

  The system runs a Yocto-based Linux or Win 10 on the dual-core, 1.3GHz/1.8GHz Atom x5-E3930, which has a low 6.5W TDP.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • BeagleV is a RISC-V single board PC for $150 or less

    It’s a good sign that RISC-V hardware is getting more accessible – a truly open source ISA is something we need to compete with the proprietary mess that is ARM.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Samsung unveils its new high-end 5G Android phones in answer to iPhone 12

  • Samsung is bringing SmartThings to Android Auto

  • Android Auto Is Getting Support For Samsung SmartThings

  • Samsung is bringing SmartThings dashboard to Android Auto

  • Samsung SmartThings now lets you control your car with Android Auto

  • Samsung’s SmartThings will soon be integrated with Android Auto

  • Samsung’s One UI 3 brings Android 11 and other features to your Galaxy devices

  • Sony seeding stable Android 11 to Xperia 1 and Xperia 5 units

  • CBORD Expands Mobile Credential Support to Include Android Phones

  • Google ditches dangerous Android apps from Play Store that tried to over charge users

  • Why You Should Stop Using Your Default Android Browser

  • Google alerts Android fans about critical flaw on their phones – update your device NOW

  • Google’s Android and TV leads chat Samsung, RCS and CES

  • Using Android with profiles and dual-SIMs is possible but needs work

  • iTel Vision 1 Pro with Android 10 Go launched in India: Price, features

  • T-Mobile OnePlus 8 enters Android 11 (OxygenOS 11) testing phase

  • [Updated] Over two months later, T-Mobile OnePlus 8 Android 11 update still awaited

  • OPPO ColorOS 11 update (Android 11) tracker

  • Asus Android 11 update tracker: Devices received beta/stable OS so far

  • [New incremental update] Asus ZenFone 6 Android 11 update

  • Asus ZenFone 6 second Android 11 update brings bug-fixes & VoWiFi on multiple networks

  • Asus 6Z/ZenFone 6 bags Android 11 stable update (Download link inside)

  • Android 11 is now rolling out to the OG Sony Xperia 1 and Xperia 5

  • Android 12 release date, rumors and what we want to see

  • How to hide chats in Signal app: A detailed guide for Android and iOS users

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Stenberg: Food on the table while giving away code

  Daniel Stenberg writes about getting paid to work on curl — 21 years after starting the project.

• Debarshi Ray: Toolbox — After a gap of 15 months

  About a year ago, Ondřej Míchal single-handedly rewrote Toolbox in Go, making it massively easier to work on the code compared to the previous POSIX shell implementation. Go comes with much nicer facilities for command line parsing, error handling, logging, parsing JSON, and in general is a lot more pleasant to program in. Plus all the container tools in the OCI ecosystem are written in Go anyway, so it was a natural fit.

  Other than the obvious benefits of Go, the rewrite immediately fixed a few bugs that were inherently very cumbersome to fix in the POSIX shell implementation. Something as simple as offering a –version option, or avoiding duplicate entries when listing containers or images was surprisingly difficult to achieve in the past.

  What’s more, we managed to pull this off by retaining full compatibility with the previous code. So users and distributors should have no hesitation to update.

• Rav1e 0.4 Released For Faster Rust AV1 Encoding – But Still Is Quite Slow

  Rav1e 0.4 was released on Wednesday as the latest version of this Rust-written AV1 video encoder. The rav1e 0.4 release represents a speed-up for the encoder but depending upon the preset level can still be at fractions of a frame per second.

  Rav1e 0.4 development was focused on providing faster performance for x86_64 and AArch64 (64-bit ARM) architectures. A wide variety of optimizations made faster performance possible depending upon the speed level.

• Events

  • LCA: Catch Talks by OSI Staff and Community

    Linux.conf.au (aka LCA) is a lovely community conference based in Australasia that will be entering its 22nd year in 2021. The volunteer-run event is known for getting deeply technical on topics varying from the inner workings of the Linux kernel to the inner workings of dealing with communities. This year’s event takes place on January 23rd – 25th and is accessible is digital and accessible to everyone, whether you live “down under” or not.

    Our General Manager, Deb Nicholson will be presenting on how to build and maintain kinder, gentler and more sustainable open source communities in her talk, “Move Slow and Try Not to Break Each Other.” on Sunday at 11:40am.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Including Mac and Linux, Mozilla VPN is now available across all OS-

      Mozilla has posited about the availability of its VPN solution for Linux and Mac devices from now onwards, following its iOS, Android and windows launch last year. Currently, VPN of Mozilla is been only made available for access in six countries i.e., Canada, Singapore, the UK, the US, Malaysia, and New Zealand. And would be available worldwide soon.

      Similar to many other VPN solutions, Mozilla renders encryption of network activity by using WireGuard and includes hiding of customer’s IP address. Using high-speed cryptographic primitives in Mozilla means that VPN would still experience the same benefits with fast network speed.

    • Data@Mozilla: This Week in Glean: Proposals for Asynchronous Design

      At last count there are 14 proposals for Firefox on Glean, the effort that, last year, brought the Glean SDK to Firefox Desktop. What in the world is a small, scrappy team in a small, scrappy company like Mozilla doing wasting so much time with old-school Waterfall Model overhead?!

      Because it’s cheaper than the alternative.

      Design is crucial before tackling difficult technological problems that affect multiple teams. At the very least you’re writing an API and you need to know what people want to do with it. So how do you get agreement? How do you reach the least bad design in the shortest time?

    • Mozilla Performance Blog: Performance Sheriff Newsletter (December 2020)

      In December there were 241 alerts generated, resulting in 39 regression bugs being filed on average 6.4 days after the regressing change landed.

      Welcome to the December 2020 edition of the performance sheriffing newsletter. Here you’ll find the usual summary of our sheriffing efficiency metrics, followed by a review of the year. If you’re interested (and if you have access) you can view the full dashboard.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • CIB spins off new allotropia software GmbH

    “With everyone from SMBs to governments now going fully digital, we see significant demand for integrated, secure, and GDPR-conforming digital document lifecycle solutions,” says Uli Brandner, CEO and owner of CIB labs. “We have continuously invested into LibreOffice to play an important role in our solution stack, and are now taking the next step by setting up a dedicated company with a laser-sharp focus on delivering fully cloud-based versions – in-line with our ongoing push for browser-based products.

    Being able to build on the multi-decade value of existing OpenSource solutions, as well as the equally many years of experience of our LibreOffice engineering team there, gets us both a significant head start, and the confidence to deliver quality solutions.”

    LibreOffice engineering consultancy and “LibreOffice powered by CIB” will remain an important part in CIB’s portfolio, now being served and further improved by allotropia software GmbH. “For our customers, this generates the win-win-win situation of having an established, rock-solid partner like CIB, delivering state-of-the-art opensource software, plus the agility of an innovative startup developing new solutions”, adds Uli Brandner.

• Programming/Development

  • Improve your software product delivery process performance using metrics (II)

    During the previous article I explained the process to follow, using the simplest possible model to describe a software product delivery process, to measure and improve its performance, following a data driven improvement kata as a way to promote a continuous improvement culture .

    Despite providing extremely valuable information, once we have gone through the described process for a few iterations, the limitations of such a simple model will become evident. We will need to add complexity into our model, getting closer to the real software product delivery process.

  • SEGGER’s complete J-Link software now available for Linux on ARM [Ed: Reposted from elsewhere (or press release)]

    SEGGER’s entire portfolio of J-Link software is now available for Linux on ARM, for both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms.

    This includes both the command-line programs and GUI tools such as J-Flash, J-Flash SPI, J-Scope, the J-Link Configurator and the GUI version of the GDB Server.

    “J-Link can now be used on Raspberry Pi and other ARM-based machines, without any limitations,” says Alex Grüner, CTO at SEGGER. “Small single-board ARM computers now offer the same functionality as x86 powered machines. The inexpensive Raspberry Pi and similar boards are now viable options, especially in test farms and production environments.”

  • JavaScript survey: React everywhere, Jest, Webpack on the up… if only it had static typing, sigh developers • The Register

    The 2020 State of JavaScript report, a survey of over 23,000 developers globally, has revealed growing use of WebPack and Jest, continuing high use of React, Express and TypeScript, and that top of the wishlist is no longer better browser compatibility, but rather static typing.

    JavaScript is the most used programming language according to most rankings. Originally called LiveScript and designed in 10 days in 1995 by Netscape’s Brendan Eich to work alongside Java Applets, the little language has become the universal language.

    Trends in the JavaScript ecosystem are therefore significant, but the fact that Webpack tops the list of most used technologies says a lot about modern JavaScript development. Webpack is a module bundler which runs on Node.js and has plugins for tasks such as minifying JavaScript using Terser. Webpack does tree shaking, meaning that it strips out unused code.

  • YANUB: yet another (nearly) useless blog: Taking advantage of Ruby in QSoas

    First of all, let me all wish you a happy new year, with all my wishes of health and succes. I sincerely hope this year will be simpler for most people as last year !

  • Java

    • 10 reasons to develop Quarkus applications on Red Hat OpenShift – Red Hat Developer

      Combining Quarkus with Red Hat OpenShift provides an ideal environment for creating scalable, fast, and lightweight applications. Quarkus significantly increases developer productivity with tooling, pre-built integrations, application services, and more. This article presents 10 reasons why you should develop your Quarkus applications on OpenShift.

Science

• DNA hard drives? Scientists hide a coded digital message in bacterial DNA

  Visualize, if you will, a group of bacteria cells. They are kind of silly looking, when you get right down to it: shaped like a sphere or a pill, sometimes covered in tiny hairs or spikes. While technically alive, it is hard to imagine them as being particularly intelligent, much less capable of storing information like artificially intelligent machines such as computers.

  Curiously, that’s exactly what a group of researchers just did: edited DNA inside individual bacteria cells in order to store digital data.

  [...]

  “At the moment, digital and biological systems exist without good ways of ‘talking’ with each other,” they explained. “In addition to expanding the usefulness of DNA data storage, as a proof-of-concept for direct integration of arbitrary information into living cell populations, we think this work may be important for developing future hybrid digital-biological systems.”

  CRISPR has revolutionized biology and biotech research in the past decade, making all kinds of headlines. Last year scientists were able to successfully edit SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus), a virus similar to HIV, out of the genomes of rhesus macaque monkeys. The prospect could prove promising for future HIV cure research.

• Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images

  Ubiquitous facial recognition technology can expose individuals’ political orientation, as faces of liberals and conservatives consistently differ. A facial recognition algorithm was applied to naturalistic images of 1,085,795 individuals to predict their political orientation by comparing their similarity to faces of liberal and conservative others. Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of liberal–conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item personality questionnaire (66%). Accuracy was similar across countries (the U.S., Canada, and the UK), environments (Facebook and dating websites), and when comparing faces across samples. Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity. Given the widespread use of facial recognition, our findings have critical implications for the protection of privacy and civil liberties.

• What Is K-Means Clustering? | Unite.AI

  K-means clustering is an unsupervised learning algorithm, and out of all the unsupervised learning algorithms, K-means clustering might be the most widely used, thanks to its power and simplicity. How does K-means clustering work exactly?

  The short answer is that K-means clustering works by creating a reference point (a centroid) for a desired number of classes, and then assigning data points to class clusters based on which reference point is closest. While that’s a quick definition for K-means clustering, let’s take some time to dive deeper into K-means clustering and get a better intuition for how it operates.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Open Source Management & Strategy Training Program Launched by The Linux Foundation

        • Start 2021 Off With a New Career in the Cloud! Cloud Engineering Bootcamps are on Sale

        • Instructor-Led Kubernetes Security Fundamentals Course Now Available

        • Kubernetes Security Essentials Course Now Available

        • New, Free Training Course Covering Basics of the WebAssembly Now Available

        • Tips for Starting Your New IT Career in 2021!

  • Security

    • Security updates for Friday

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (flatpak, ruby-redcarpet, and wavpack), Fedora (dia, mingw-openjpeg2, and openjpeg2), Mageia (awstats, bison, cairo, kernel, kernel-linus, krb5, nvidia-current, nvidia390, php, and thunderbird), openSUSE (cobbler, firefox, kernel, libzypp, zypper, nodejs10, nodejs12, and nodejs14), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), Slackware (wavpack), SUSE (kernel, nodejs8, open-iscsi, openldap2, php7, php72, php74, slurm_20_02, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (ampache and linux, linux-hwe, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-hwe-5.8, linux-lts-xenial).

    • Project Zero: Introducing the In-the-Wild Series

      At Project Zero we often refer to our goal simply as “make 0-day hard”. Members of the team approach this challenge mainly through the lens of offensive security research. And while we experiment a lot with new targets and methodologies in order to remain at the forefront of the field, it is important that the team doesn’t stray too far from the current state of the art. One of our efforts in this regard is the tracking of publicly known cases of zero-day vulnerabilities. We use this information to guide the research. Unfortunately, public 0-day reports rarely include captured exploits, which could provide invaluable insight into exploitation techniques and design decisions made by real-world attackers. In addition, we believe there to be a gap in the security community’s ability to detect 0-day exploits.

    • Google series on in-the-wild exploits

      The Google Project Zero blog is carrying a six-part series exploring, in great detail, a set of sophisticated exploits discovered in the wild.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The OTHER thing we should never accept by ANY political leader

  This post just starts from Jpe Biden, but only because he may be the “first responder” for the problem, and solution, that I am about to present. But it applies to every other President, King, Prime Minister or country leader, everywhere they are. Including my own prime minister, Giuseppe Conte.

Civil Rights/Policing

• NLG Demands Immediate Structural Change in Wake of Impeachment and Attempted Coup

  Last week’s white supremacist coup attempt facilitated by law enforcement makes clear that the path forward requires a serious reckoning with the conditions that caused this moment. White supremacy, though mentioned in mainstream news media more frequently in the last year, is not remotely a new phenomenon—it was the ideology the United States was founded on and remains this government’s primary political underpinning, regardless of the political party in power. For this reason, the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) demands that the political response to last week’s fascist mob looks beyond the Trump administration and enacts structural change, including an overhaul of the prison and policing systems, a firm condemnation and rejection of white supremacist ideologies, and the implementation of more progressive policies across the board.

  The NLG remains firm in our abolitionist principles, and last week further demonstrated that law enforcement not only stood down in the face of white, fascist insurrectionists, but actively aided their attempts to enter the Capitol to overturn the election. Law enforcement is, and always has been, the body that carries out the brute force of the state’s white supremacist violence. We have already seen lenient sentencing for the insurrectionists and an arrest count less than ⅓ that of arrests made this summer in D.C. during BLM protests. Yet, “anti-terrorist” legislation will only harm communities of color through the expansion of the police and surveillance state. But this moment does bring about a critical question for abolitionists: how do we effectively address systemic violence without calling for a mass prosecution? The NLG is calling for consequences to white supremacist ideology as a whole, beginning with the political expulsion of all local, state, and federal officials who pushed the narrative of a stolen election, encouraging a pro-Trump attempt to seize power. This begins with, as Missouri Representative Cori Bush put it, the expulsion of “the white supremacist-in-chief,” Donald Trump. At the same time, the NLG understands that impeachment is not enough, and neither is a return to the status quo.

Monopolies

• Patents

  • Dusseldorf Regional Court stands by CJEU referral of patent licensing questions, Nokia’s interlocutory appeal goes up to Dusseldorf Higher Regional Court

    While the four members of the panel discussion I published as a podcast earlier this week expressed a diversity of views, there was a consensus about the potentially high impact of the Dusseldorf Regional Court’s decision to refer a set of standard-essential patent (SEP) licensing questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). But those questions haven’t arrived in Luxembourg (the CJEU’s seat) yet, as Nokia brought an interlocutory appeal last month.

    The way those interlocutory appeals work in Germany is that the lower court firstly treats it as what in the U.S. would be called a motion for reconsideration. If it changes mind, the appeal has succeeded. Otherwise the appeal will go up to the next higher court.

  • Software Patents

    • $1,500 Awarded for Blyncsy prior art

      Unified is pleased to announce the PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Preeti Dua, who received a cash prize of $1,500 for her prior art submissions for U.S. Patent 10,198,779. The patent is owned by Blyncsy, Inc., an NPE. The ’779 patent generally relates to contact tracing of contagions and is currently being asserted against companies using this technology for the current Covid-19 pandemic.

• Trademarks

  • Lawyers: Mexico’s new damages court faces rough start [Ed: So-called 'journalism' in which only litigation profiteers (lawyers) are asked, but nobody else, as if no other stakeholders exist]

    Five Mexican IP lawyers reveal how they will adjust to a new law that allows Mexico’s IP office to determine damages in infringement cases

Desktop/Laptop

• What my Linux adventure is teaching me about our possible future

  I am a Linux ambassador of sorts. I’ve been using the Linux computer operating system since 2013. I can still remember the light feeling I had the day I broke free of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

  No more constant worries about viruses hijacking or corrupting my computer. No more outlays to pay for each upgrade. No more worries that the next upgrade will be really lousy and buggy and remain so for months or even years. And, above all, no more freezes in the middle of my work and work lost as a result.

  Now eight years into my Linux adventure I am wildly satisfied with that choice. That remains the case even though my most recent upgrade did not go as planned and got stretched out over several days. But this latest upgrade has made me think hard about why I stick with Linux and what the Linux way of doing things can tell us about a possible, better future.

  I think some of the principles and structures I’m seeing are found in practically every pursuit, agriculture, education, the arts, politics, and commerce. If you are growing some of your own food, you are practicing these principles and creating similar structures. If you are teaching outside existing educational systems, you are likely doing the same. If you are writing, painting, singing, dancing or somehow expressing yourself artistically, you are probably already moving toward the world that the Linux community is pioneering in its own corner. If you created a business not only to have a livelihood, but because you want to change the world, you are almost certainly on the same path.

  Let me explain a little about Linux, and then try to relate that to the broader world.

  First, I tell people who decide to try Linux that they are not merely loading a piece of software on their computer; they are joining a community. This is a very important distinction.

• Behind the Scenes of System76: Customer Happiness Team

  In this installment of our Behind the Scenes series, we spoke with head happiness guru Emma Marshall, an enthusiastic Linux, pink, and T-Swift enthusiast who helms the Support Team. Read on for an inside look at the methods—and the madness—of System76’s tech support crew.

  [...]

  I have two. Wait… I have a lot. But I’ll try to keep it to two. The Pop!_OS release in 2017, when we released the operating system and were flashing USBs, like hundreds of USBs in this side room. We were in an office building, but we were actually starting to try to manufacture things with a laser in this side room that had black curtains so no one could see what we were doing in there. So all of us bunched into this really small room and we popped champagne bottles and they were flashing the USBs. They were all over the table. It was so cool. I think we all got a little tipsy that day. Maybe a lot tipsy, actually.

  Then we had our first million dollar month. That was when our office was downtown. It was a day of celebration for everyone. It was the realization of how big we’d become. There was so much laughing and excitement, and we were a small, tight-knit team at the time. I remember that day feeling like, wow, we’re really doing well. That was a really cool feeling.

Server

• 5 reasons why you should develop a Linux container strategy

  Containerization has gained in popularity over the past few years. However, the subject still remains elusive for some. There are many different opinions revolving around this architectural paradigm, spanning from “containers are just a way to obfuscate bad code” to “you are a dinosaur if your entire infrastructure isn’t already containerized.”

  If you have one of these strong opinions, this post probably is not for you. The following is for those who have not had the time nor bandwidth to research the topic and are not sure how the architecture might help within their organization. In this article, I give a simple explanation of some of the advantages of adopting a container strategy within your infrastructure and give you some quick and simple tips to get started. There are, in fact, many advantages of containerization within your infrastructure, both from a technical perspective and the development lifecycle perspective.

• Kafka destination improved with template support in syslog-ng – Blog – syslog-ng Community – syslog-ng Community

  The C implementation of the Kafka destination in syslog-ng has been improved in version 3.30. Support for templates in topic names was added as a result of a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project. The advantage of the new template support feature is that you no longer have to use a static topic name. For example, you can include the name of your host or the application sending the log in the topic name.

  From this blog you can learn about a minimal Kafka setup, configuring syslog-ng and testing syslog-ng with Kafka.

• Announcing Istio 1.8.2

  This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.8.1 and Istio 1.8.2

Kernel Space

• 5.11 Merge window, part 2

  Linus Torvalds released the 5.11-rc1 prepatch and closed the 5.11 merge window on December 27. By that time, 12,498 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline; nearly 2,500 of those wandered in after the first merge-window summary was written. Activity slowed down in the second week, as expected, but there were still a number of interesting features that found their way into the mainline.

• Portable and reproducible kernel builds with TuxMake

  TuxMake is an open-source project from Linaro that began in May 2020 and is designed to make building Linux kernels easier. It provides a command-line interface and a Python library, along with a full set of curated portable build environments distributed as container images. With TuxMake, a developer can build any supported combination of target architecture, toolchain, kernel configuration, and make targets.

  Building a Linux kernel is not difficult. Follow the documentation, install the dependencies, and run a couple of make commands. However, if a developer wants to build for multiple architectures, with multiple toolchains, things get complicated quickly. Most developers and maintainers have a set of custom scripts that they have written and maintained to perform their required set of builds. TuxMake provides a common layer of abstraction to reduce the need for every developer to write their own build scripts.

  TuxMake publishes containers for various toolchain/architecture combinations. These containers eliminate the need for individual developers to source and install multiple toolchains and toolchain versions on their systems. It also makes builds reproducible and portable because now the environment in which a kernel is built is versioned and shareable across the internet and on mailing lists.

  TuxMake has two goals. First, remove the friction that may cause developers, especially new developers, to skip build testing for uncommon toolchain/architecture combinations. Second, to make it easier for builds and build problems to be described and reproduced.

• Linux 5.12 To Allow Disabling Intel Graphics Security Mitigations – Phoronix

  The Linux 5.12 kernel will allow optional, run-time disabling of Intel graphics driver security mitigations, which so far is just in regards to last year’s iGPU Leak vulnerability. This i915.mitigations= module parameter control is being added as part of finally fixing the Haswell GT1 graphics support that was fallout from this mitigaion.

  The drm-intel-gt-next pull request to DRM-Next for Linux 5.12 was sent in. Most notable is that fixing of the Haswell GT1 support that came from the clear residual security mitigations. Since that iGPU Leak mitigation for Gen7/Gen7.5 graphics was merged last year, Haswell GT1 graphics have resulted in hangs at boot. That’s finally fixed up. Besides being in Linux 5.12, it should also get back-ported to recent stable kernel series as well.

• Graphics Stack

  • Open-Source “Nouveau” Driver Now Supports NVIDIA Ampere – But Without 3D Acceleration – Phoronix

    Patches were sent out today that provide the open-source Linux kernel “Nouveau” driver with support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series “Ampere” graphics cards. But at the moment there is no 3D acceleration and the developers are blocked still by signed firmware requirements, so it’s basically just a matter of having kernel mode-setting display support.

    Red Hat’s Ben Skeggs sent out the pull request today that provides kernel mode-setting support for the RTX 30 “Ampere” graphics cards with the long-standing open-source NVIDIA “Nouveau” driver

Applications

• Haruna Video Player Is A Cool mpv GUI Frontend

  Haruna is a free and open source Qt / QML video player for Linux that makes use of mpv (libmpv) for video playback.

  libmpv makes it possible to embed mpv into other programs as the video / audio playback backend. New to mpv? This is a free and open source media player based on MPlayer, mplayer2 and FFmpeg, that runs on Linux, *BSD, macOS and Microsoft Windows, and there’s also an Android port.
  mpv has become quite popular in recent years thanks to features like high quality video output (using OpenGL as well as the new Vulkan API, which supports over 100 options for controlling playback quality, including the use of advanced upscaling filters, color management, etc.) with optional hardware acceleration.

• GStreamer 1.18.3 stable bug fix release

  The GStreamer team is pleased to announce another bug fix release in the stable 1.18 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

  This release only contains bugfixes and it should be safe to update from 1.18.x.

• Carbon Player – desktop media player

  My favorite pastime is to see an eclectic range of bands, solo artists, and orchestras live. It’s such a life-changing and exhilarating experience to be present. It’s one thing to be sitting at home listening to a CD or watching music videos on TV or on YouTube, but being with an audience, packed out in a stadium or music hall, takes it to another level. But it’s an expensive pastime, and still on hold given the current coronavirus pandemic. I’m therefore listening to music from my CD collection which I’ve encoded to FLAC, a lossless audio format, and stored locally.

  Linux offers a huge array of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. I’ve reviewed the vast majority for LinuxLinks, but I’m endeavoring to explore every free music player in case there’s an undiscovered gem.

  Carbon Player is a cross-platform media player written in JavaScript and uses Electron, an open-source software framework developed and maintained by GitHub. Let’s see how Carbon Player fares.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to Install IonCube Loader on Ubuntu – Cloudbooklet

  How to Install IonCube Loader on Ubuntu. IonCube Loader is a PHP extension used when you are using a PHP script that is encrypted using ionCube. IonCube needs to be installed in your webserver and made accessible to your PHP to use it.

  In this guide you are going to learn how to install ionCube loader on Ubuntu or Debian and configure your PHP or PHP-FPM and PHP-CLI to use it.

• How to Setup CentOS Stream from AWS Marketplace

  In the current trend of IT Infrastructure, Cloud Computing occupies a tremendous role. Most of the top companies are looking for Cloud Providers to have their Infrastructure. As per our requirement, we can provision our servers at any time. According to the server configuration, we will be charged per usage.

  Amazon Marketplace is the place where you can find software from qualified third-party vendors. It is like an online software store where you can buy software and use it as per your need.

  In this article, we will see the detailed steps to launch CentOS-Stream from AWS Marketplace.

• Create a MAN page for your own program or script with Pandoc – PragmaticLinux

  A MAN page is documentation for a software program or script, created in the groff typesetting system. Ever tried writing a MAN page? I bet you thought to yourself: “Yeez, there’s got to be an easier way to do this”. Luckily, there is. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to write a MAN page comfortably in Markdown. Then we’ll use Pandoc to create the actual MAN page for your program or script, properly formatted in the groff typesetting system.

• Looking into Linux user logins with lslogins

  One convenient way to list details about user logins on a Linux system is to use the lslogins command. You’ll get a very useful and nicely formatted display that includes quite a few important details.

  On my system and likely most others, user accounts will start with UID 1000. To list just these accounts rather than include all of the service accounts like daemon, mail and syslog, add the -u option as shown in the example below.

• How to Install Privacy-friendly Whatsapp Alternative Signal in Linux

  WhatsApp introduces its new privacy policy recently due to which signal emphasizing and getting much more attention for its privacy and security it offers. If you make your mind to

Wine or Emulation

• Wine 6.0 Released, Download Your Copy Now

  Finally, A new stable version, Wine 6.0 is available for the download. Wine is a software that helps you to run many Windows based apps on Linux based operating systems.

• Wine 6.0 is out with better Direct3D support and other improvements

  The team behind Wine, a compatibility layer to run Windows applications and games on systems such as Linux or Mac OS, has released Wine 6.0 to the public. Downloads, a compatibility database, and other information is available on the official project website.

  Wine 6.0 is available as source code and as binaries. Major changes in Wine 6.0 include DirectShow and Media Foundation support, improved handling of certain game copy protections, and support for an experimental Vulkan renderer for WineD3D.

• Proton 5.13-5 Fixes World Sounds in Cyberpunk 2077, Improves Fallout 76 and More

  This is Proton’s first release in 2021 and brings quite a bunch of goodies from Proton Experimental, including support for world sounds in Cyberpunk 2077, support for a new OpenXR virtual reality API to use the VR mode of the Microsoft Flight Simulator game on AMD hardware, and online play in Red Dead Online and Read Dead Redemption 2.

• Proton 5.13-5 is now up bringing in some of the experimental changes

  The Proton compatibility layer for running Windows games on Steam for Linux has levelled up some more with the latest Proton 5.13-5 now available to everyone.

  Pulling in some of the bigger changes from the Proton Experimental testing area, it has some impressive increased compatibility. You will find that Red Dead Online and the online features directly in Read Dead Redemption 2 will now work.

• Proton 5.13-5 Now Available With Cyberpunk 2077 Fixes, Microsoft Flight Simulator VR

  After experimental builds and the recent release candidates, Valve’s Proton 5.13-5 is now available as the latest version of this Wine downstream for powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.

  Proton 5.13-5 is notable in that there is expanded OpenXR virtual reality API support to now allow Microsoft Flight Simulator to work on Linux in VR mode. At the moment that Flight Simulator VR mode requires AMD graphics hardware. Also notable are fixes for sound within the game Cyberpunk 2077.

Games

• Get a free copy of Bomber Crew during the Humble Winter Sale

  How about a free game for the coming weekend? Humble Store has Bomber Crew going free during their new Winter Sale so you can pick up some other cheap games too. Bomber Crew is a really highly rated and enjoyable game too, so it’s a pretty good pick to get free!

  As for the new Humble Winter Sale, it’s a big one with lots of publishers big and small joining in. Plus there’s of course masses of fantastic indie games that deserve plenty of attention. If you want to look over what the bigger lot have take a look at the sales for SEGA, 2K, Deep Silver, Humble Games, Codemasters, THQ Nordic, Kalypso Media and also Team17 have an existing sale still on.

• Prison Architect: Going Green announced for release on January 28

  Paradox Interactive and Double Eleven have announced the next expansion and free update for Prison Architect with the Prison Architect: Going Green DLC launching on January 28.

  Seems like bit of a theme with Paradox published games. We had the Cities: Skylines – Green Cities DLC in 2017, the Surviving Mars: Green Planet DLC in 2019 and now prisons are going green too. You will be able to create a more environmentally friendly prison with farming and all sorts.

• 【Xonotic】Let The Mayhem Commence Again

  I had a lot of fun in the last Xonotic stream we did so I thought I’d be fun to try that again, I tried to test out my server with other people on it and it seems like it’s working this time but we’ll truly see when the open source arena shooter mayhem begins

• The State of Virtual Reality on Linux

  …Until after some life changes, an unexpected influx of money, and curious about all the news about Half-Life next installment (Alyx) and Valve’s own VR system, the Valve Index, and the claims that it is supported on Linux, I took the plunge and bought it. I got it on my house on April 30, 2020, an exact year after its debut.

  What happened to me next was extraordinary. I met new worlds, I felt new things, I traveled to many places in the hardest months of the Lock-downs. It is not easy to describe, since it is so linked to the senses, so real and at the same time so abstract. In this article, I’ll try to laboriously describe what I felt — without ever leaving Linux — and give numerous examples. For that, though, I have to start with boring stuff. Stay with me and you won’t regret.

  So. This article will try to convey how Virtual Reality on Linux became viable, what are its challenges and limitations, which applications and games run on it, what are the terms and technologies associated to it and what to expect from the future. And also give a light whether it’s worth investing on this technology today, instead of waiting for it to mature as most people must think.

• Valve Is Planning Something Special For Linux Gaming In 2021

  Before we get to that carrot Valve is dangling in front of us for 2021, let’s begin with a sobering observation. Despite two straight years of incredible advancements in Linux gaming — specifically Proton, the compatibility layer that lets us easily run thousands of Windows games on Linux — there has been a negligible increase in Linux gaming adoption. As marketing-centric scribe James Mawson so poignantly states, it’s a “growth so feeble, it’s difficult to separate from statistical noise; Linux isn’t even a serious threat to the Mac in this space.”

  Wow. Sobering indeed.

  Clearly We Have Work To Do

  Proton 5 now ships with the Steam for Linux client, and it introduces improved performance, support for DX12 and much more. As Valve’s informative 2020 recap points out, an increase in developers testing their games against Proton (without needing to invest huge time and resources into developing native ports) resulted in some big AAA titles like Death Stranding, Cyberpunk 2077 and others being playable on Linux at or shortly after their native Windows releases.

  That’s wonderful for gamers already immersed in the Linux gaming ecosystem, but let’s be honest with ourselves and admit that there are still many reasons to dual-boot Windows. Maybe it’s the lure of popular games that rely on anti-cheat software or invasive DRM. Maybe it’s the subpar support for brand new hardware like the Radeon RX 6000 GPUs.

• Axiom Verge gets a first ever free update six years later with the Randomizer Mode

  While work continues on the sequel, Axiom Verge has a first ever free content update following the release back in 2015 with a new Randomizer Mode. Never played Axiom Verge? You’re missing out. A true love-letter to the classic metroidvanias!

  This brand new update is currently in Beta, requiring you on Steam to opt into it in the usual way. Right click the game, go to Properties and hit Betas on the left panel and find it there. As the name of the update might suggest, it makes things a bit more random but “in a very sophisticated way”. This mode is smart enough so you won’t get stuck because of needing a certain item to progress onwards.

  How did it come about so long after release? Thanks to the speedrunning community, along with a developer of a mod that gave players an unofficial version of this but it needed a copy of the game. They teamed up to add it into the base game with the modder refusing any compensation for it. How nice for all of us!

• Stockholm to host the 2021 CS:GO Major, with the biggest ever prize pool

  Valve along with PGL have announced the return of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s next Major Championship that will take place this year in Sweden.

  Not only has competitive esport CS:GO returned, it’s coming back with a bang too. This will be the biggest single prize pool in CS:GO history with twenty four teams competing for 2 million dollars USD. Not only that, this will also be the first event that is broadcast live in 4K resolution. The main event will be during November 4-7, so they’re leaving enough time to hopefully see COVID-19 get a little more under control as this will be an in-person event with a live audience.

Distributions

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • AlmaLinux, a CentOS alternative is planned release by March 2021

    CloudLinux is announcing project AlmaLinux formerly known as Lenix by officially publishing its website and stating that the release will be available in the first quarter of this year- 2021.

    CentOS alternative Linux distros are now in quite searches after the announcement of RedHat, which is the life of CentOS 8 Linux going to end soon this year. Thus, it gave other companies and developers a chance to grab the users who will be coerced to adopt the paid licensing of RHEL.

    For example, CentOS’s initial developer and the founder of the CentOS project Gregory Kurtzer stated immediately after the RHEL announcement that they are coming soon with RockyLinux, based on RHEL code. And on the same path CloudLinux that already has its CentOS-based OS for hosting services announced a parallel project Lenix, that is finally now has been named “Alma Linux”. Alma is a Spanish word, means “the soul”.

  • Some unlikely 2021 predictions

    Support for CentOS 8 will end at the end of the year; users will have to transition to CentOS Stream or find another solution altogether. For all the screaming, CentOS Stream may well turn out to be good enough for many of the deployments that are currently using a stable CentOS build. Others are likely to find that, in this era of cloud computing, a long-term-stable distribution isn’t as important as it used to be. If the “machines” running the distribution will not last for years, why does the distribution they run need such a long life? The end of CentOS could have the unintended effect of undermining the demand for ultra-stable “enterprise” distributions in general.

    There will be attempts to recreate CentOS as it was, of course; most or all of them are likely to fail. Maintaining a stable distribution for years takes a lot of work — and tedious, unrewarding work at that. CentOS struggled before Red Hat picked it up; there is no real reason to believe that its successors will have an easier time of it. The fact that the alternative with the most mindshare currently, Rocky Linux, has no publicly archived discussions and only seems to communicate on the proprietary Slack platform is also worrisome.

    For better or for worse, the Fedora project has a well-established relationship with Red Hat. The status of openSUSE is nowhere near as clear, which is one of the causes of the ongoing strife on its mailing lists over the last year. OpenSUSE will need to better define its relationship with SUSE in 2021, even if additional stresses, such as the creation of the independent openSUSE Foundation or the rumored public offering by SUSE, don’t happen. Like Fedora, openSUSE is the descendant of one of our earliest and most influential distributions; it will be with us for a long time yet, but exactly how that will happen needs to be worked out.

• Debian Family

  • Debian ‘Bullseye’ enters final phase before release as team debates whether it will be last to work on i386 architecture

    Gevers also noted that support for the i386 architecture is no longer being waived. If a decision is made to drop it, he said, the start of the Bookworm cycle is a good moment to deal with any issues. “We’re interested in the discussion about i386 support in Debian that was going on recently,” he said.

    The discussion was kicked off by Debian contributor Andrew Cater, who questioned the future of i386. “There seems to be only one maintainer,” he said. “No one has real UEFI hardware for i386 and it’s becoming harder and harder to justify spending too much time on testing of the images as fewer and fewer machines can benefit from them.”

    Although new PCs all support 64-bit architecture, 32-bit applications are common, and there are also embedded use cases. Many older PCs also remain in service. “i386 hardware is so numerous and widely spread that [the] tiny fraction of i386 users might be more users than half of our release architectures combined,” claimed one comment to the thread.

    Studying data from a Debian telemetry package called Popularity Contest confirmed this. “There are an order of magnitude more people with i386 kernels (and thus presumably i386 hardware) than there are for every other non-amd64 release architecture combined. Further, there are more people with old i386 hardware than there are for any other arch,” said another developer.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Another Linux Kernel Vulnerability Was Patched in All Supported Ubuntu Releases

    Affecting Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla), Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and Ubuntu 14.04 ESM (Trusty Tahr), the new security vulnerability (CVE-2020-28374) was discovered in Linux kernel’s LIO SCSI target implementation.

    Due to this security issue, the LIO SCSI target implementation failed to perform sufficient identifier checking in certain XCOPY requests, allowing an attacker with access to one or more LUNs in a multiple backstore environment to either expose sensitive information or modify data.

Devices/Embedded

• Current status of EasyOS on the Pi4

  The videos seem to play OK though.

  Regarding the hanging, SM seems to be waiting on a response from youtube.com, so I don’t know if that is a problem with youtube.com or the network interface.

  Regarding point-3, sometimes just replugging the USB-stick is sufficient to get it recognized. But sometimes replugging multiple times still does not work.

• Stripped-down Raspberry Pi 3B+ SBC powers YARH.IO Micro 2 DIY handheld PC

  We’ve already seen a few DIY Raspberry Pi-based handheld computers in the past with the likes of Zero Terminal V3 or hgTerm powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero and a stripped-down Raspberry Pi 3 board respectively.

  So why not another? YARH.IO Micro 2 DIY handheld PC is based on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ SBC stripped from its Ethernet port, whose double stack USB connectors have been replaced with single stack USB connectors. The DIY computer also adds off-the-shelf parts with a 4″ touch screen display and a Bluetooth keyboard without touchpad, and gets its power from a 3,500 mAh battery.

• Get VMware on Raspberry Pi

• 2.5-inch “Industrial Pi” Pico-ITX SBC offers PoE , mini DP++ port

  The company also provides a 15mm thick heat spreader for fanless operation, and support for Windows 10 IoT Enterprise (64-bit) and Linux operating systems.

• ZimaBoard Intel Apollo Lake SBC and micro server goes for $69.99 and up (Crowdfunding)

  The board is passively cooled by its enclosure acting as a heatsink, and ships with Linux by default, although we’re not being told which distribution, possibly Ubuntu 20.04.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • BeagleV: An Affordable RISC-V Computer Designed to Run Linux

    BeagleV is a single board computer (SBC) that runs Linux out of the box. The computer has been announced by Seeed Studio and Beagleboard.org in collaboration with SiFive (Star Five).

    The BeagleV runs on a RISC-V CPU that is capable of running Linux and can also be used in edge compute applications such as training autonomous vehicles, object detection, speech processing and many more workloads related to AI.

  • 2.5-inch “Industrial Pi” Pico-ITX SBC offers PoE , mini DP++ port

    Inkplate 10 also supports Peripheral Mode which allows you to control the display from another board such as Raspberry Pi or Arduino via commands sent over a UART or USB connection.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • 5 of the best messaging apps for Android and iPhone

  • 10 Best Personal Finance Apps for iPhone and Android (Free and Paid)

  • 5 Android apps you can’t be without

  • 5 best games like PUBG Mobile Lite for 2 GB RAM Android devices in 2021

  • 4 must-have apps for your new Android phone

  • Huawei Is Gunning For Acquiring A Fifth Of Android’s Userbase With Its Own HarmonyOS!

  • How to connect AirPods to your Android phone

  • Moshi reveals how to get fast charging for your Android phone; updated for 2021

  • CBORD expands mobile credential support to Android phones

  • Google app for Android testing in-app browser redesign with bottom bar

  • Realme Android bootloader unlock tools & kernel source code tracker

  • Researchers Explain How Locked Android, iOS Phone Encryption Gets Bypassed

  • Android phones still need Internet security

  • [Update: Jan. 15] Waiting for Motorola One Macro Android 10 update? Here’s the status so far

  • OnePlus OxygenOS 11 (Android 11) update tracker: Devices that have received the stable

  • Sony Xperia 5 & Xperia 1 Android 11 update begins rolling out

  • [Update: Jan. 15] Sony Android 11 update tracker: List of eligible devices & release date

  • [Update: Jan. 15] Optus Android 11 (Android R) update tracker & list of eligible devices

  • Thomson launches its first TV with Android TV operating system in India

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• How open source builds distributed trust

  This is an edited excerpt from my forthcoming book on Trust in Computing and the Cloud for Wiley and leads on from a previous article I wrote called Trust & choosing open source.

  In that article, I asked the question: What are we doing when we say, “I trust open source software”? In reply, I suggested that what we are doing is making a determination that enough of the people who have written and tested it have similar requirements to mine, and that their expertise, combined, is such that the risk to my using the software is acceptable. I also introduced the idea of distributed trust.

  The concept of distributing trust across a community is an application of the wisdom of the crowd theory posited by Aristotle, where the assumption is that the opinions of many typically show more wisdom than the opinion of one or a few. While demonstrably false in its simplest form in some situations—the most obvious example being examples of popular support for totalitarian regimes—this principle can provide a very effective mechanism for establishing certain information.

• tomboy-ng – Simple Note-Taking Application for Desktops

  tomboy-ng is a free and open-source note-taking application for Linux, Mac, and Windows desktops. It is built with simplicity in mind which makes it easy to use for organizing different ideas and managing notes using typical note-taking features such as rich text markup, spell check, printing, import and export, MarkDown editing, and backup recovery.

  tomboy-ng is a fork of the now-discontinued note-taking app, Tomboy, whose best ‘selling point‘ was its ability to relate notes together thanks to its WikiWiki-like linking system. All you need to do in order to digitize your idea in an organized manner is to type a name. When you press the link button, tomboy-ng create a branch of the main idea, and all branches (as links) won’t break even when you rename or reorganize them.

• 3 plain text note-taking tools

  Markdown, created by Aaron Schwartz and John Gruber, is the format I use the most day today. From reading and writing README files, documentation, note-taking, and even source code comments, Markdown allows me to add formatting without sacrificing the ability to read the document easily.

  Additionally, Markdown has several “extended versions” to allow for items that were not part of the original design. In particular, GitHub Flavored Markdown is exceptionally popular due to its use in the eponymous source control site.

  Many file editors support Markdown highlighting out of the box with no extra add-ons or effort required.

  [...]

  I cannot leave out Org when I talk about text formatting. Originally designed for use with GNU Emacs, Org Mode has become one of the go-to plain text formats for notes, to-do lists, documentation, and more. Org can be written and used in a whole host of text editors, including Vim. Org is simple, easy to learn, and one of my favorite text formats for notes.

  At the end of the day, choosing Markdown, AsciiDoc, or Org for plain text notes is a way to make sure they can be read and updated anywhere. And if you are like me, you’ll find yourself using the same syntax when taking paper-based notes as well!

• Daniel Stenberg: Food on the table while giving away code

  I founded the curl project early 1998 but had already then been working on the code since November 1996. The source code was always open, free and available to the world. The term “open source” actually wasn’t even coined until early 1998, just weeks before curl was born.

  In the beginning of course, the first few years or so, this project wasn’t seen or discovered by many and just grew slowly and silently in a dusty corner of the Internet.

  Already when I shipped the first versions I wanted the code to be open and freely available. For years I had seen the cool free software put out the in the world by others and I wanted to my work to help build this communal treasure trove.

• Collaboration Platform “Twake” To Give 6 Months Free Access to First 10,000 Enterprises

  Twake is an impressive open-source collaboration platform offers many goodies even being in the beta stage.

  You can also check out our original coverage that we published last year to know what exactly it offers and why it looks to be a promising modern Nextcloud alternative.

  In case you didn’t know, Twake is developed by LINAGORA, a France-based open-source company. Their servers are hosted in EU, and they are GDPR compliant.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla’s post doesn’t go FAR ENOUGH!

      If you watch this video and think that I’m calling for “censorship” or think I’m some kind of “leftist,” then you obviously didn’t pay attention.

    • Another Rust-y OS: Theseus joins Redox in pursuit of safer, more resilient systems

      Rust, a modern system programming language focused on performance, safety and concurrency, seems an ideal choice for creating a new operating system, and several such projects already exist. Now there is a new one, Theseus, described by creator Kevin Boos as “an Experiment in Operating System Structure and State Management.”

      The key thinking behind Theseus is to avoid what Boos and three other contributors from Rice and Yale universities call “state spill”.

    • This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 373

    • Socorro Engineering: Half in Review 2020 h2 and 2020 retrospective

      2020h1 was rough. 2020h2 was also rough: more layoffs, 2 re-orgs, Covid-19.

      I (and Socorro and Tecken) got re-orged into the Data Org. Data Org manages the Telemetry ingestion pipeline as well as all the things related to it. There’s a lot of overlap between Socorro and Telemetry and being in the Data Org might help reduce that overlap and ease maintenance.

      [...]

      2020 sucked. At the end, I was feeling completely demoralized and deflated.

    • Reimagine Open: Building a Healthier Internet

      Does the “openness” that made the [Internet] so successful also inevitably lead to harms online? Is an open [Internet] inherently a haven for illegal speech, for eroding privacy and security, or for inequitable access? Is “open” still a useful concept as we chart a future path for the [Internet]?

      A new paper from Mozilla seeks to answer these questions. Reimagine Open: Building Better Internet Experiences explores the evolution of the open [Internet] and the challenges it faces today. The report catalogs findings from a year-long project of outreach led by Mozilla’s Chairwoman and CEO, Mitchell Baker. Its conclusion: We need not break faith with the values embedded in the open [Internet]. But we do need to return to the original conceptions of openness, now eroded online. And we do need to reimagine the open [Internet], to address today’s need for accountability and online health.

• CMS

  • Algolia Search in Jekyll

    I am relieved and delighted to have finally managed the Algolia search setup for Unix Tutorial. I’ve been looking to upgrade search for a long time but had not enough JavaScript and CSS knownledge to replace the default search with Algolia’s one.

    I’m going through a short technical course about Vue (JavaScript framework), so this must have put me into the right mindset.

• Programming/Development

  • Coming in glibc 2.33: Reloadable nsswitch.conf

    In my previous article about nsswitch.conf I talked about how simple, perhaps too simple, this config file is to use. What I didn’t cover then was how simplistic its internal implementation is. Specifically, an application only loads this file once—the first time it’s needed.

    So, what do you do when nsswitch.conf needs to change? How do you update all of the running applications? You don’t! The only way to force a reload is to stop the application and restart it. That is not always an option, especially for critical applications that might take a long time to restart.

    Recent work behind the scenes in the GNU C library will change all of this. As of glibc version 2.33, this config file now reloads and reparses each time it changes, and only the configuration is reloaded. If the configuration calls for an external shared library to be loaded, that object is only ever loaded once. It may be called in a different sequence, or not called at all, but it is never unloaded. This behavior avoids a whole class of problems related to unloading shared objects that might still be in use.

  • SEGGER’s Complete J-Link Software Now Available for Linux on ARM

    SEGGER’s entire portfolio of J-Link software is now available for Linux on ARM, for both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. This includes both the command-line programs and GUI tools such as J-Flash, J-Flash SPI, J-Scope, the J-Link Configurator, and the GUI version of the GDB Server.

    “J-Link can now be used on Raspberry Pi and other ARM-based machines, without any limitations,” says Alex Grüner, CTO at SEGGER. “Small single-board ARM computers now offer the same functionality as x86 powered machines. The inexpensive Raspberry Pi and similar boards are now viable options, especially in test farms and production environments.”

  • Bootstrappable builds

    The idea of Reproducible Builds—being able to recreate bit-for-bit identical binaries using the same source code—has gained momentum over the last few years. Reproducible builds provide some safeguards against bad actors in the software supply chain. But building software depends on the tools used to construct the binary, including compilers and build-automation tools, many of which depend on pre-existing binaries. Minimizing the reliance on opaque binaries for building our software ecosystem is the goal of the Bootstrappable Builds project.

    For example, GCC is written in C and C++, which means that it requires compilers for those two languages in order to be built from source. In practice, that generally means a distribution would use its existing binary executables of those tools to build a new GCC version, which would then be released to users. One of the concerns with that approach is described in Unix inventor Ken Thompson’s Turing Award lecture “Reflections on Trusting Trust” [PDF]. In a nutshell, Thompson said that trusting the output of a binary compiler is an act of faith that someone has not tampered with the creation of that binary—even if the source code is available.

    The Bootstrappable Builds project was started as an offshoot of the Reproducible Builds project during the latter’s 2016 summit in Berlin. A bootstrappable build takes the idea of reproducibility one step further, in some sense. The build of a target binary can be reproduced alongside the build of the tools required to do so. It is, conceptually, almost like building a house from a large collection of atoms of different elements.

  • Parasoft Accelerates CI/CD Pipeline Through Partnership With IAR Systems

    IAR Build Tools for Linux uses the leading build tools from IAR Embedded Workbench and empowers software developers who build safety-critical applications to work directly on the Linux host environment, eliminating toolchain version management.

  • Josef Strzibny: Working with decimals in Elixir

    Integers are not enough, and floats are flawed? Decimals to the rescue! A short guide of what’s important when working with decimals in Elixir.

    This post is about the Decimal 2.0 module from decimal Hex package.

    As with every module in Elixir, running h Module and Module.module_info in IEx is a good place to start.

  • Swift Deploys: Dealing with Anti-Patterns and Unresolved Issues

    In a long end-of-the-year blog post, Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of honeycomb.io, discussed lead time to deploy, or “the interval encompassing the time from when the code gets written and when it’s been deployed to production.”

  • Perl/Raku

    • Perl weekly challenge 95

      You are given a number $N. Write a script to figure out if the given number is Palindrome. Print 1 if true otherwise 0.

    • Perl Weekly Challenge 95: Palindrome Numbers and Demo Stack

  • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

    • Learn awk by coding a “guess the number” game | Opensource.com

      Once you understand these concepts, you can start figuring the rest out. For example, most languages have a “way of doing things” supported by their design, and those ways can be quite different from one program to another. These ways include modularity (grouping related functionality together), declarative vs. imperative, object-orientation, low- vs. high-level syntactic features, and so on. An example familiar to many programmers is “ceremony,” that is, the amount of work required to set the scene before tackling the problem. The Java programming language is said to have a significant ceremony requirement, stemming from its design, which requires all code to be defined within a class.

    • The terminal, the console and the shell – what are they?

      The other day, as I was going through some of my old notes, I stumbled upon something I had written about the console, the terminal and the shell on Unix-like operating systems. I have decided to rewrite these notes in order to share them here on my website. So without further ado we will now stroll down memory lane and take a quick look at the origins of the Unix terminal and shell. And I will also give my advice to new users on Linux or BSD regarding the choice of terminal emulator and shell.

Standards/Consortia

• Email is the messenger you should migrate to

  But the most important thing: Delta Chat allows you to communicate even with people who don’t use Delta Chat at all, all you need is an email address! If you write to someone without Delta Chat, they will just get a normal email. I would argue that even beats Matrix or XMPP.

  Conclusion: If you are concerned about security when chatting and would rather use a decentralized messenger (no silo), you are in good hands with email and Delta Chat.

• IMAPS specialisations – call for participation in the public review of LIMAPS, OIMAPS, SIMAPS and TIMAPS!

  The objective of this public consultation is to produce updated releases of the IMAPS specialisations, which will provide insights on specific interoperability viewpoints of the digital public service, i.e. the legal, organisational, technical and semantic interoperability viewpoints. Both IMAPS and its specialisations assess the various areas of a digital public service in terms of behavioural interoperability specifications, capabilities and manifestations. The update of the releases of the IMAPS specialisations will be based on change requests coming from stakeholders interested in the solutions.

Opulent Doom

What wholeness might contemporary literary fiction aspire to? Heavy plotting is outmoded, if not willfully retrograde. Many novelists avoid omniscience, like inept or unwilling gods. Trusty, plausible narrative structures—the picaresque, say, or the bildungsroman—are approached cautiously, as if they might collapse while one is yet inside. Coherence, difficult enough to find in life, seems even scarcer in the fictive imagination. “The vastness of sensation and experience, of history and knowledge, limits us, sends us back to the small as a relief from the incomprehensible,” Elizabeth Hardwick wrote in 1969. Half a century later, the dimensions she identified seem to have further contracted. The popular trappings of classical works—pride, guilt, Eros, the quest—have given way to something else. Truer to experience is the accumulation of apprehensive detail: fragment, digression, traumatic memory, aphorism, and the like.

We Can Do It!

No Proof, No Evidence, No Truth

All this is old news.  But, two things struck me from reading the newspaper article.

The first was the oft-repeated statement that no courts have been willing to hear these claims of fraud.  This is absolutely and unequivocally untrue.

Escaping the Singularity: Why Artificial Intelligence Will Not Save the Planet

Artificial intelligence has been touted as the next frontier in technological innovation by the world’s brightest minds and celebrity CEOs like Elon Musk, who predict a hyper-connected future where big data, smart infrastructure, and biology all fuse into what ‘futurist’ Ray Kurzweil and others call the technological singularity.

Usenet Spam: a Slice of History

The “modern era” of spam is generally accepted as having begun in 1994, when the law-firm of Canter and Seigel sent a message to 5,500 newsgroups advertising their Green Card lottery services. They said the advertisements netted them $100,000 in business for an outlay of “only pennies”, although this claim came on top of them launching a spam-for-hire business so take it with a grain of salt.

Spam on Usenet was a big deal beacuse of the way Usenet worked. It was a broadcast protocol where every message posted to Usenet got copied to every server that carried the newsgroup it was posted to. At least in theory. In practice, the system was highly unreliable and you just got used to replying to some post you never saw, except that someone’s reply to it made it as far as your server.

The cost of sending a Usenet message was tiny for you and the one server you were connected to, but the cost of storage and processing multiplied by every server in the network, plus the bandwidth costs of ferrying your message betweeen all these servers, was significant.

Health/Nutrition

• Bury Me Furious

  Losing dozens of friends in your 20s and 30s and then getting diagnosed with a deadly virus yourself when you’re young really fucks you up. I’ve lost more people than I care to count to AIDS since the late 1980s—and many of those who survived still bear the scars of those years. Some, like my old friend Spencer Cox, made it through to see the advent of treatment for HIV infection, but stopped taking his drugs a little less than a decade ago, and died. He just couldn’t find a way to live with the aftermath of what we all saw.

• ‘No Reason for This—Other Than Greed,’ Says Sanders as GAO Shows Medicare Pays Twice as Much as VA for Same Drugs

  “We can no longer allow the pharmaceutical industry to rip-off the more than 40 million people who receive prescription drug coverage through Medicare Part D and fleece U.S. taxpayers.”

• Because ‘Time for Urgent, Bold Change Is Now,’ 200+ Groups Tell Biden to End Failed War on Drugs

  “We are urging the administration to abandon criminalization as a means to address substance use, and instead ensure universal access to equitable evidence-based solutions rooted in racial and economic justice and compassion.”

• Chaotic Vaccine Rollout Leaves Seniors Frustrated and Confused

• Twitter temporarily restricts account for Russian coronavirus vaccine ‘Sputnik V’

  The Twitter account for Russia’s “Sputnik V” coronavirus vaccine, @sputnikvaccine, has been temporarily restricted due to “unusual activity.” 

• Dr. Ali Khan: U.S. Needs to Quickly Ramp Up Vaccinations as COVID Kills Over 4,000 in Single Day

  As the United States breaks all records for coronavirus cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns another 92,000 could die in the next three weeks as complaints grow over the slow distribution of COVID vaccines. Across the country, hospitals are overflowing, and ICU beds are in short supply. In Los Angeles County, an epicenter of the outbreak, a staggering one in three residents has gotten the coronavirus since the start of the pandemic, according to new data. For more on the pandemic, we speak with epidemiologist Dr. Ali Khan, dean of the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Public Health and the former director of the CDC’s Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, where he oversaw the Strategic National Stockpile. He says that despite the grim statistics in the United States, other countries with more proactive pandemic responses have shown that it is possible to bring the virus under control and largely return to normal life. “We can do that same thing here in the United States if we use good science,” he says.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Partners Feel ‘Betrayed,’ ‘Taken Aback’ By Microsoft’s Direct Calls To Customers

    A California MSP learned a lesson years ago when a software vendor tried to go direct with his end users. So when Microsoft demanded contact information for his customers, he gave them an email address that went directly to him instead. Earlier this week that email account, which was set up about 18 months ago in the hopes that it would not be used, received a message from a Microsoft business development specialist offering his customer “free training.” “That’s exactly what I would do if I was trying to steal someone else’s business,” said the MSP, who asked not to be named because he fears retribution from Microsoft for speaking out. “It’s just wrong. It’s just wrong. Plain and simple.”

  • Windows 10 bug corrupts your hard drive on seeing this file’s icon

    In August 2020, October 2020, and finally this week, infosec researcher Jonas L drew attention to an NTFS vulnerability impacting Windows 10 that has not been fixed.

    When exploited, this vulnerability can be triggered by a single-line command to instantly corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive, with Windows prompting the user to restart their computer to repair the corrupted disk records.

    The researcher told BleepingComputer that the flaw became exploitable starting around Windows 10 build 1803, the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, and continues to work in the latest version.

    What’s worse is, the vulnerability can be triggered by standard and low privileged user accounts on Windows 10 systems.

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • The Linux Foundation launches 7-part open source management training program

  • Security

    • Open source software security in an ICT context – benefits, risks, and safeguards

      In a recent report, contributors to free and open source software (FOSS) claimed they spent only 2.27 percent of their contribution time on security. In our latest blog post, we delve into open source software security, and discuss why it’s key for building robust and open interoperable networks.

      [...]

      Is open source software better than proprietary software when it comes to security vulnerabilities? Elias Levy, the person behind the infamous (vulnerability) full disclosure mailing list, Bugtraq, said two decades ago: “No. Open Source Software certainly does have the potential to be more secure than its closed source counterpart. But make no mistake, simply being open source is no guarantee of security”.

      Building and delivering complex system software without security vulnerabilities requires investment and due diligence, regardless if the code is open sourced or proprietary (see figure 1, below). As the Mozilla Foundation states: “Security is a process. To have substantial and lasting benefit, we need to invest in education, best practices, and a host of other areas”.

      Tools and resources are available. With safeguards in place, OSS can be used effectively at low risk to realize its intended benefits. ICT products relying on OSS must be developed using methodologies and safeguards that ensure the expected level of security is met. OSS can accelerate innovation, reduce the development timeline, speed time to market, realize cost savings, and be secure. ICT vendors must take responsibility and practice a higher level of due diligence when using OSS components.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • It’s Business As Usual At WhatsApp

        The good news is that, overall, this update does not make any extreme changes to how WhatsApp shares data with its parent company Facebook. The bad news is that those extreme changes actually happened over four years ago, when WhatsApp updated its privacy policy in 2016 to allow for significantly more data sharing and ad targeting with Facebook. What’s clear from the reaction to this most recent change is that WhatsApp shares much more information with Facebook than many users were aware, and has been doing so since 2016. And that’s not users’ fault: WhatsApp’s obfuscation and misdirection around what its various policies allow has put its users in a losing battle to understand what, exactly, is happening to their data.

        This new terms of service and the privacy policy are one more step in Facebook’s long-standing effort to monetize its messaging properties, and are also in line with its plans to make WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram Direct less separate. This brings serious privacy and competition concerns, including but not limited to WhatsApp’s ability to share new information with Facebook about users’ interactions with new shopping and payment products.

        To be clear: WhatsApp still uses strong end-to-end encryption, and there is no reason to doubt the security of the contents of your messages on WhatsApp. The issue here is other data about you, your messages, and your use of the app. We still offer guides for WhatsApp (for iOS and Android) in our Surveillance Self-Defense resources, as well as for Signal (for iOS and Android).

      • Apple’s new privacy labels show how data hungry Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are

      • ‘We found a wiretap’ Lyubov Sobol’s campaign team head released from custody with bugged cell phone

        In her latest video for “Navalny Live” opposition figure Lyubov Sobol revealed that her campaign manager, Olga Klyuchnikova, found a listening device planted inside her cell phone following her release from jail at the end of December 2020. According to Klyuchnikova, her iPhone was “noticeably malfunctioning” when she was allowed to use it while still in custody, leading her to believe that FSB officers had “clumsily” tampered with the device. She now plans to appeal to state investigators to open a criminal case for violation of privacy.

      • The State of IPv6 support on the Tor network

      • Govt steps into WhatsApp row, ‘examining’ data-sharing update

        The government has stepped into the raging privacy controversy over WhatsApp’s latest update and has started an “examination” of the new mandate that the company has asked users to agree to by February 8. “We are collecting details,” official sources told TOI, in an indication that the government is keeping a watch over the concerns around potential privacy violations in WhatsApp’s new updates that involves sharing certain business/transactional data with Facebook, the parent of the world’s biggest messenger.

        WhatsApp’s new privacy terms give it the right to share user data, including location, phone number, contacts list and usage pattern, with Facebook and its units such as Instagram and Messenger. The move has been questioned by privacy advocates, entrepreneurs such as Tesla founder Elon Musk, and certain government agencies abroad, citing Facebook’s poor track record in handling user data.

      • WhatsApp New Policy And the Backlash From “Common” People Will Cooldown

        Just a week ago the internet was hit with the news about WhatsApp privacy policy updates. Everyone was talking about such a major update in the policy and how it could affect WhatsApp users. In this article, I will not only discuss the change in the policy but how it will change the majority of its users.

      • Help Quit WhatsApp

        Recently, people got awareness to leave popular proprietary software WhatsApp. We even saw # Delete Whatsapp hashtags on social networks. For Ubuntu users who want to switch away from it here’s alternatives, namely Telegram and Element, which are free and easy, and available for Ubuntu too. Fortunately, today both are also available for users who use Debian, Mint GNU/Linux, and other Ubuntu-family computers. For Android users, both are already available at F-Droid. They are Free Libre Open Source Software also known as FLOSS. We hope these will always be friendly and useful for us forever. Please share this with your friends!

Defence/Aggression

• Opinion | A Layman’s Guide to Spotting Sedition, Treason, and Lunacy in General

  The words people speak have consequences—but maybe not what you think.

• Opinion | There’s Nothing Vegan About War

  As more and more people rethink their consumption of animal products, it is inevitable that the world’s military forces will increasingly use veganism to appear progressive, trendy, and virtuous. My plea to my fellow vegans: don’t fall for it.

• Klete Keller: From Gold Medalist to Capitol Insurrectionist

  An Olympic medalist, his United States Olympics red, white, and blue team jacket worn with pride, was part of the fascist mob that marauded through the Capitol building last week. His name is Klete Keller, a swimmer who medaled at the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Olympics, including winning golds. Keller wasn’t just a passive observer. He has been indicted in US District court for his part in the attempted insurrection.

• The Capitol, Fortified

  Washington, D.C.—On the evening of the Capitol attack, when authorities finally began beating back the mob, rioters were defiant. “We’ll be back!” I heard one Trump supporter yell at police last Wednesday. Another shouted, “This isn’t over, bitches!”

• ‘Famine Not Seen in 40 Years’: UN Warns Pompeo Decision in Yemen Could Lead to Hundreds of Thousands—If Not Millions—Dead

  “It literally is going to be a death sentence,” said the World Food Programme chief about the U.S. Secretary of State’s decision to label the Houthis a terrorist organization.

• ACTION ALERT: What Can ‘Now Be Told’ by NYT About Pentagon Papers Isn’t Actually True

  The day New York Times journalist Neil Sheehan died, the Times ran a story (1/7/21) with the headline, “Now It Can Be Told: How Neil Sheehan Got the Pentagon Papers.” It purports to be the true story of how the paper obtained the Defense Department’s classified history of the Vietnam War that had been secretly photocopied by former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg. Here’s what Sheehan told reporter Janny Scott in 2015, on the condition that it could not be published until after Sheehan’s death:

• What It Meant to be Conflicted During the Vietnam War

  The history of how the Pentagon Papers, the history of how the government of the US lied to the people of the US and the rest of the world, about the conduct of the Vietnam War, had its final denouement in apartments and a copy business in the greater Boston, Massachusetts area. That Daniel Ellsberg, a hero of that epoch was conflicted over giving those papers he had copied from the Rand Corporation to the late journalist and author Neil Sheehan (“After 50 years, the Pentagon Papers give up their final secrets,” Guardian, January 10, 2012) was not so different than the angst that millions of us felt during that war. And there were great penalties that could have been paid for those courageous enough to step over the line and do the right thing.

  I met men who had done the right thing during a trip to Montreal, Canada in April 1970, only weeks after returning home from basic and advanced training in the military. These men had already paid a great price for their decision to leave the US and it was on every face in that office for war resisters near the campus of McGill University.

• Russian military investigators formally refuse to examine alleged FSB involvement in Navalny poisoning

  Russia’s Military Investigative Committee (a department subordinate to the country’s federal investigative agency) has formally refused to examine allegations that FSB officers were involved in the August 2020 poisoning of opposition figure Alexey Navalny. 

• The Trump Administration’s Parting Outrage Against Cuba

  In the six years since, Trump’s State Department could not point to a single act of terror sponsored by Cuba. Instead, Secretary Pompeo based his decision on Cuba’s alleged support for the ELN (National Liberation Army – Colombia’s second-largest guerilla group) and the harboring of a handful of U.S. fugitives wanted for crimes committed in the 1970s, including renowned Black revolutionary Assata Shakur. Lacking more specific accusations, the State Department criticized Cuba for its supposed “malign interference in Venezuela and the rest of the Western Hemisphere.”

  These claims don’t stand up to scrutiny. Regarding the ELN, the gist of the story is that the Trump administration is punishing Cuba for its role in attempting to bring peace to the long-simmering conflict in Colombia. ELN negotiators arrived in Cuba in 2018 for peace talks with the Colombian government. As part of the protocols for these meetings, ELN negotiators were allowed entry into Cuba and promised safe passage back into Colombia after their conclusion. Guarantor countries, including Cuba and Norway, assumed responsibility for their safe return. The talks collapsed in January 2019 following an ELN car bombing in Bogotá that killed 22 people. Colombia requested the extradition of the negotiators, but Cuba refused because the Colombia government will not honor the previous government’s commitment to guaranteeing the negotiators’ freedom upon returning home.

• America Has Entered the Weimar Era

  Yet America’s largely self-inflicted COVID-19 disaster may be eclipsed by the country’s political unraveling, which has proceeded with warp speed in the last few weeks, with the once celebrated American way of succession in power via the ballot box dealt a body blow by a large sector of the electorate that has marched in lock step with their leader in refusing to accept the results of the presidential elections.

  Joe Biden will be seated this time around, but he may be regarded as illegitimate in the eyes of the 74 million Americans under the spell of Donald Trump. Future electoral contests for power may well end up being decided by a strong dose of street warfare, as the U.S. goes the way of Germany’s ill-fated Weimar Republic. The violent storming of the Capitol by a Trumpian mob underlined the face of crises to come.

• Bond Modification Sought After Alleged Kenosha Killer Kyle Rittenhouse Drinks Beer, Flashes White Power Signs With So-Called ‘Proud Boys’

  “The defendant’s continued association with members of a group that prides itself on violence, and the use of their symbols, raises the significant possibility of future harm.”

• Opinion | We Must Defeat the Far-Right Insurrectionist Movement. Here’s How

  We need to mobilize like never before.

• POW Nation

  “POWs Never Have A Nice Day.” That sentiment was captured on a button a friend of mine wore for our fourth grade class photo in 1972. That prisoners of war could never have such a day was reinforced by the sad face on that button. Soon after, American POWs would indeed be released by their North Vietnamese captors as the American war in Vietnam ended. They came home the next year to a much-hyped heroes’ welcome orchestrated by the administration of President Richard Nixon, but the government would never actually retire its POW/MIA (missing in action) flags. Today, almost half a century later, they continue to fly at federal installations, including the US Capitol as it was breached and briefly besieged last week by a mob incited by this country’s lame-duck president, ostensibly to honor all US veterans who were either POWs or never returned because their bodies were never recovered.

• POW Nation: When Will America Free Itself From War?

  Remembering the sacrifices of our veterans is fitting and proper; it’s why we set aside Memorial Day in May and Veterans Day in November.  In thinking about those POWs and the dark legacy of this country’s conflicts since World War II, however, I’ve come to a realization.  In the ensuing years, we Americans have all, in some sense, become prisoners of war.  We’re all part of a culture that continues to esteem war, embrace militarism, and devote more than half of federal discretionary spending to wars, weaponry, and the militarization of American culture.  We live in a country that leads the world in the export of murderous munitions to the grimmest, most violent hotspots on the planet, enabling, for example, a genocidal conflict in Yemen, among other conflicts.

  True, in a draft-less country, few enough Americans actually don a military uniform these days.  As 2021 begins, most of us have never carried a military identification card that mentions the Geneva Convention on the proper and legal treatment of POWs, as I did when I wore a uniform long ago.  So, when I say that all Americans are essentially POWs, I’m obviously using that acronym not in a legal or formal way, but in the colloquial sense of being captured by some phenomenon, held by it, subjected to it in a fashion that tends to restrict, if not eliminate, freedom of thought and action and so compromises this country’s belief in sacred individual liberties.  In this colloquial sense, it seems to me that all Americans have in some fashion become prisoners of war, even those few “prisoners” among us who have worked so bravely and tirelessly to resist the phenomenon.

• Violent Right Wing Forces Have Been Activated, It Requires Strategic Action to Stop Them

  It is important in times of crisis like this to pause, take a deep breath and think about the ramifications of our responses given the present makeup of the US political structure. It is also necessary to look past the events of January 6 to the conditions that created the environment in which this type of action could occur and what it will take to change them.

  The inauguration of President Joe Biden on January 20 is not the end of the era referred to as Trumpism. Violent right-wing forces have been activated and they are not going away unless major actions are taken to divide them and remove the material conditions that gave rise to them. That is our task going forward.

• What to Expect in the Final Days of Trump’s Fascist Reign

• UN expert: crippling US sanctions on Syria are illegal and hurting civilians

• New Analysis Shows US Police 3 Times More Likely to Use Violence Against Leftist Protesters Than Far-Right

  The report’s findings came as a surprise to virtually no one. 

• Police Are Three Times More Likely to Use Force Against the Left, Data Shows

• FBI and DHS Were Warned About Jan. 6. They Didn’t Prepare a Threat Assessment.

• Trump Supporters Blame Antifa, Not the President, for Capitol Chaos Last Week

• Opinion | Can Biden Achieve Progress Where It Matters While Avoiding a New Cold (or Hot) War?

  President Biden’s China conundrum.

• Biden’s China Problem: Resisting a New Cold War in Asia

  There is a story that Washington policy-makers like to tell about America’s relationship with China, a narrative of the betrayal of naive hopes that is closer to a fairy tale than a sober analysis of history. The fable goes something like this: Once upon a time, there was a hermit kingdom called China, poor, angry, and isolated. Two visionary statesmen, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, visited this unhappy land and opened it up to the world. With diplomacy and trade, successive American leaders helped build up China, with the dream that, as it grew richer, it would join the United States in upholding a harmonious global order. But engagement proved a false dream: As China grew richer, it remained despotic, undercutting America with sharp trade practices, repressing its own people, and threatening its neighbors. Suddenly America found itself confronting a monster. Shortly before he died in 1994, Nixon told The New York Times, “We may have created a Frankenstein.”

  Nixon’s invocation of the Frankenstein monster reveals the emotions underlying this historical myth: the creation that betrays its creator. To get a glimpse of Dr. Frankenstein at the height of his hubris, it’s worth revisiting former deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick’s 2005 speech calling on China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the American-led international order. The paternalistic assumption was that the United States and China had no deep-seated disagreements, and provided China put aside any ambitions to challenge US hegemony, it could evolve into a junior partner in empire.

• Russian prison officials say they are ‘obliged’ to arrest Navalny upon his return to Moscow

  In a statement released on Thursday, January 14, Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) said it is “obliged take all actions to arrest” opposition figure Alexey Navalny upon his return to Russia, pending a court decision on revoking his probation and replacing it with a prison sentence.

• Unpacking the Aftermath of Trump’s Coup Attempt With Brian Becker

  As more details of the apparent conspiracy headed by President Donald Trump to storm the U.S. Capitol building and prevent the electoral college certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory come to light, the United States finds itself on a dangerous precipe. 

• A Parler archive is being converted into an interactive map of the Capitol building attack

  A developer going by the name of Patr10tic has created an interactive map using GPS metadata and videos from the app Parler to offer a glimpse of what was happening inside and around the Capitol building during the violent protest on January 6th (via Motherboard).

  The project is an expansion on similar maps like the one Gizmodo created to illustrate just how many Parler users were part of the mob that occupied the Capitol building, based off an archive created by a researcher known as @donk_enby. Patr10tic’s map (currently named “Y’all Qaeda”) uses the same archive and connects GPS coordinates with actual video, offering a map of red icons placed around the Capitol for each associated video post.

• Some among America’s military allies believe Trump deliberately attempted a coup and may have had help from federal law-enforcement officials

  Multiple European security officials told Insider that President Donald Trump appeared to have tacit support among US federal agencies responsible for securing the Capitol complex in Wednesday’s coup attempt.

  Insider is reporting this information because it illustrates the serious repercussions of Wednesday’s events: Even if they are mistaken, some among America’s international military allies are now willing to give credence to the idea that Trump deliberately tried to violently overturn an election and had help from some federal law-enforcement agents.

• Huawei patent mentions use of Uighur-spotting tech

  The filing is one of several of its kind involving leading Chinese technology companies, discovered by a US research company and shared with BBC News.

  Huawei had previously said none of its technologies was designed to identify ethnic groups.

  It now plans to alter the patent.

• Huawei’s patent for technology identifying Uighurs by facial recognition uncovered

  Huawei’s patent, originally filed in July 2018 in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, describes advanced artificial-intelligence techniques that identify various features of pedestrians photographed or filmed in the street. It is mainly concerned with how different body postures, such as whether someone is sitting or standing, affect accuracy. However, it also lists “attributes” that can be used to target specific individuals, including ethnicity.

Environment

• Carbon capture and storage won’t work, critics say

  Carbon capture and storage, trapping carbon before it enters the atmosphere, sounds neat. But many doubt it can ever work.

• Arrests in Minnesota After Water Protectors Chain Themselves Inside Pipe Section to Halt Line 3 Construction

  “Enbridge’s last-ditch effort to build fossil fuel infrastructure is killing people and the planet.”

• ‘That Is Not Justice!’ Outrage as Snyder Hit With Just Two Misdemeanor Counts Over Role in Flint Water Crisis

  The charges come as new reporting indicates the former Michigan governor was aware of a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak linked to the water crisis months before he acknowledged it in public.

• Energy

  • Decoding the Hype Behind the Natural Gas Industry’s Hydrogen Push

    In December, ABC News ran an article with the headline “Why green hydrogen is the renewable energy source to watch in 2021.” And as Bloomberg has reported, Airbus is betting big on hydrogen as a fuel for its planes. Meanwhile, South Korea’s SK Global just announced an investment in U.S. hydrogen fuel cell producer Plug Power; in the past year, the company’s stock value has increased ten-fold.

  • Over 75 Indigenous Women Urge Biden to Stop Climate-Wrecking Pipelines and Respect Treaty Rights

    “Joe Biden, we are asking you to stand on the right side of history and humanity by putting an immediate end to the deadly pipelines destroying our Earth, our communities, and all life.”

  • Samsung put the final nail in the box that used to contain a charger

    There are still some arguments why smartphone companies should keep bundling power bricks with their new devices, like how there will always be some people who’ve never owned a phone before and won’t have a charger. Many will also point out that these companies are doing it for selfish reasons — still charging you the same amount or more for a phone while giving you less value in the box. (It’s fun to rag on these companies’ duplicity, too.) But like my colleague Dieter said succinctly last June, I don’t care: let’s get rid of 300,000 tons of e-waste and help the world’s remaining brand-new USB-C smartphone buyers get their chargers elsewhere.

  • Finland demonstrates ice technology expertise with innovative and sustainable icebreaker vessel

    Danfoss Editron’s hybrid-electric system is powering the removable bow with two generators, built as a DC system, and two propulsion systems. The company has also provided a front supercapacitor so that peak powers can be efficiently controlled. The EDITRON software also cuts fuel and delivers high efficiencies as the diesel generators in the DC system can be driven at variable speeds. The power plan and propulsion system of the removable bow have been designed to be operated from the pusher tug wheelhouse, while the machinery can operate unmanned.

  • Finland demonstrates ice technology expertise with innovative and sustainable icebreaker vessel

    As winter temperatures in Finland can plummet to -30°C, icebreakers are a necessity even during mild winters. Introducing hybrid electric power in icebreaking operations will help the country meet its target to lower emissions by 40% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Western Wolf Coalition Files Lawsuit Challenging Nationwide Wolf Delisting

    The most recent data from the Service and its state partners show an estimated 4,400 wolves inhabit the western Great Lakes states, but there are only 108 wolves in Washington state (with only 20 outside of eastern Washington), 158 in Oregon (with only 16 outside of northeastern Oregon), and a scant 15 exist in California. Nevada, Utah, and Colorado have had a few wolf sightings over the past three years, but wolves remain essentially absent from their historical habitat in these states.

    “As a direct result of human persecution, wolves became functionally extinct across the contiguous U.S. in the 1960s,” said Sarah McMillan, conservation director at WildEarth Guardians. “Wolf reintroduction into Yellowstone in the mid-1990s was the start of an amazing effort to restore this keystone species to its historic range, an effort that is nowhere near completion. The Service may not claim victory and throw up its hands in the middle of recovery efforts, even if wolf management is challenging and has become a political hot potato. This directly contradicts the plain language and the intent of the ESA.”

  • Conservationists File Lawsuits to Stop ‘Death Sentence to Wolves’ Ordered by Trump

    “This delisting decision is what happens when bad science drives bad policy.”

  • The nature effect in motion: visual exposure to environmental scenes impacts cognitive load and human gait kinematics

    In conclusion, the two studies reported here present compelling evidence that nature and urban image material pose different demands on cognitive processing that can be quantified on a moment-to-moment basis, using reaction times or gait kinematics as measures. This opens a new line of research to further our understanding of the causal mechanisms underlying health benefits through exposure to nature. What exactly is it in green spaces or nature more generally that promotes restorative effects on cognition, and how much exposure is needed to obtain such effects? With the ability to use changes in gait kinematics as a promising way to objectively quantify and track environmentally induced cognitive load, our results point toward a powerful new approach for addressing these important questions at the nexus of research in cognition and environmental design.

Finance

• After Biden Vowed ‘$2,000 Checks Will Go Out the Door’ Ahead of Georgia Wins, Relief Plan Reportedly Includes Just $1,400

  A $1,400 direct payment on top of the recently approved $600 would total $2,000. But as one critic argued, “I don’t think that’s what Biden promised. And I know it’s not what most people heard.”

• Donald Trump Built a National Debt So Big (Even Before the Pandemic) That It’ll Weigh Down the Economy for Years

  One of President Donald Trump’s lesser known but profoundly damaging legacies will be the explosive rise in the national debt that occurred on his watch. The financial burden that he’s inflicted on our government will wreak havoc for decades, saddling our kids and grandkids with debt.

  The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country.

• War of the (Financial) Worlds

  We all know, of course, that we’re living through a once-in-a-century-style pandemic; that millions of people have lost their jobs, a portion of which will never return; that the poorest among us, who can withstand such acute economic hardship the least, have been slammed the hardest; and that the global economy has been kneecapped, thanks to a battery of lockdowns, shutdowns, restrictions of various sorts, and health-related concerns. More sobering than all of this: more than 360,000 Americans (and counting) have already lost their lives as a result of Covid-19 with, according to public health experts, far more to come.

  And yet, as if in some galaxy far, far away, there also turns out to be another, so much more upbeat side to this equation. As Covid-19 grew ever worse while 2020 ended, the stock market reached heights that hadn’t been seen before. Ever.

• Trump Rule Aimed at Forcing Banks to Fund Gun Makers and Big Oil Called ‘Parting Gift’ to Corporate Cronies

  “We call on the Biden administration to pursue all available courses of action to ensure that this rule never takes effect.”

• US debt surged by $7 trillion under Trump. It will go much higher under Biden

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Opinion | Will the Senate Confirm Coup Plotter Victoria Nuland?

  Nuland would be a ticking time-bomb in Biden’s State Department, waiting to sabotage his better angels much as she undermined Obama’s second-term diplomacy.

• Sheryl Sandberg Makes Disingenuous Push To Argue That Only Facebook Has The Power To Stop Bad People Online

  While Twitter is opening up to have the difficult conversation about how content moderation and the open internet should co-exist at a time when the President of the US has inspired an insurrection, Facebook, perhaps not surprisingly, has taken another approach. It’s one that is condescendingly stupid, and simultaneously self-serving.

• Opinion | A Second Trump Impeachment Has Not Lessened the Current Danger

  This move by House Democrat is insufficient to forestall the possibility of further Trumpist-incited violence.

• There Can Be No ‘Unity’ With Seditious Republicans

  “Unity” is the word that white people use when they want to accommodate and appease the forces of white supremacy. It’s what made antislavery whites in the North compromise and unite with rapists and murderers who held human beings as farm animals, in order to have a Constitution. It’s what made Abraham Lincoln, the so-called Great Emancipator, offer “charity” instead of “malice” to the violent insurrectionists he had just beaten. It’s the word white people invoked when they advocated the imprisonment of “outside agitators” like Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis during the civil rights era. “Unity” is what oppressors always call for when they seek amnesty for their actions.

• Opinion | Insurrection, Pandemic, and Censorship

  Democracy requires an informed citizenry and reliably informative media. 

• McConnell Continues to Refuse Reconvening Senate Following House Impeachment

• ‘Being Neutral in the Face of a Fascist Threat Is Not an Acceptable Journalistic Value’

  Janine Jackson interviewed political scientist Dorothee Benz on the January 6 insurrection for the January 8, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• Judge Not Impressed By Parler’s Attempt To Force Amazon To Put It Back Online

  It appears that Parler’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon for suspending its AWS account isn’t off to a very good start. In an emergency hearing on Thursday to see whether or not the judge would order Amazon to turn AWS back on for Parler, the judge declined to do so:

• QAnon Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene Threatens Joe Biden With Impeachment

• White Nationalist Barbarians Storm the Gate(s) of the U.S. Capitol

  In terms of those who have already be identified and arrested, where more should follow, shouldn’t all who entered the Capitol building also face murder charges? Let’s consider this scenario: Two people rob a store, where one of them kills the clerk and the other one steals the money. In this case, typically, both will be charged with different degrees of murder, apart from armed robbery and other charges. Why should those who engaged in an attempted coup, a more serious crime, be treated any differently? I’m sure if the seditionists were brown or black, as many others have articulated, the brutal nature of the State and its agents of suppression would’ve been on full display. If they were Muslims, this scenario would’ve provided Trump with a false pretext to invade Iran, like in the case of 9/11 with former President George W. Bush and Iraq.

  As we focus our national attention on the culprits behind this attempted coup, let’s not forget the strong and powerful supporters of Trump, where they should also be held accountable (or eternally shamed at minimum), like the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, for the vitriol rhetoric and events leading up to the violent and deadly attack on the Capitol. This includes, among others, Trump’s immediate family (especially Donald Jr., Jared and Ivanka!); Trump subordinates, like Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and the guy who didn’t get hugged as a kid, Stephen Miller; soon-to-be-disbarred Rudy Giuliani; idiotic and immoral Republican leaders in Congress, like Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Devin Nunes (R-CA),  Jim Jordan (R-OH), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), etc.; and, let’s not forget the estimated 74 million people who voted for the most incompetent and deranged President in U.S. history.

• No Tears For Twitter Trump

  That’s why the left needs to forget all seemingly large disparities in answers and instead unite around asking the moral questions. The left need not be divided on the lines of specifics but rather reach solidarity through the common act of care. For every person caring looks different. This is a beautiful thing and the existence of this diversity of opinions is part of the leftist project of anti-hierarchy generally.

  To split the difference here I would say that the argument in favor of free speech generally assumes that if we let the powers that be come for the right then they will come for the left next. But this is exactly the opposite of what is going on. If people of color stormed the Capitol there would have been a massacre. The fact that it took inciting a riot for Twitter to ban Trump shows that censorship only reaches the right far after it has already done its damage on the left.

• Trump and His Billionaire Enablers

  But what about the billionaire donors to Trump’s campaign and his victory PACs?  Especially those who gave substantial donations in 2019 and 2020, when it was clear that Trump was causing a crisis in our democracy?

  Unlike those who gave to the 2016 campaign but distanced themselves from Trump after seeing him in action, will there be any accountability for these most recent billionaire enablers of Donald Trump who saw what damage he caused–but still stood by him?

• Twitter’s Ban on Trump will Deepen the US Tribal Divide

  The flaws in this reasoning need to be peeled away, like the layers of an onion.

  Twitter’s decision to permanently ban Trump for, among other things, “incitement of violence” effectively cuts him off from 88 million followers. Facebook has said it will deny Trump access to his account till at least the end of his presidential term.

• Resolution to Expel House GOP Who Voted to Overturn Election Is Gaining Momentum

• Genetic Engineering, Agriculture and Brexit: Treachery in Our Midst

  In the wake of Brexit, he attacked the EU’s stance on genetic engineering in agriculture by saying:

  Eustice’s statements form part of a long-term pro-genetic engineering-deregulation propaganda campaign. It follows on from Boris Johnson’s first speech to parliament as prime minister in 2019 in which he proclaimed:

• A glitch in the system: The rise and fall of Sardana Avksenteiva, once the most popular mayor in Russia

  Sardana Avksentieva is stepping down after almost two and a half years as the mayor of Yakutsk, a port city in eastern Siberia. Until January 11, she was (and technically still is) the only sitting head of a Russian regional capital who won office by defeating a candidate from United Russia, the country’s ruling political party. Sometimes called the “people’s mayor,” Avksentieva was popular beyond her hometown. As soon as she took office, she sold off the city government’s expensive SUVs, then lowered public transportation fares, and last year she announced plans to transfer city employees to open offices on the outskirts of town. She also voted against constitutional amendments that could extend Putin’s presidency and voiced support for the self-proclaimed shaman Alexander Gabyshev, who’s repeatedly attempted treks to Moscow, where he plans to “exorcize” Vladimir Putin. The “people’s mayor,” however, has now named Yevgeny Grigoryev, a member of United Russia and the winner of the Kremlin’s “Leaders of Russia’’ contest, as her successor. Sources told Meduza that the Kremlin spent years engineering Avksentieva’s resignation.

• Impeachment Too Good for Trump

  He was the first among our 45 presidents to be impeached twice by the House of Representatives. This time, for “incitement of insurrection.” More than well-deserved for a narcissistic, sociopathic madman who turned our country upside down for four chaotic years, something different, much of it bad, coming daily.Trump will get the attention he so craves by being long mentioned in history, but as a disgrace to his country. The vote to impeach was 232-197, including 10 members of his Republican party. But impeachment, even twice, is too good for him. He should be in prison.

  The Senate should try him before he leaves office Wednesday. But the all-powerful Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, reportedly has said he won’t recall the senators until Thursday, a day after Trump leaves office. McConnell was Trump’s enabler-in-chief.

• Trump Was Impeached Twice Within the Span It Takes a Giraffe to Gestate a Calf

• Department of Redundancy: Trump Racks Up Another Impeachment

  Call it what you want—coup attempt, attack, riot, insurrection, whatever—the event that occurred on January 6th at the Capitol and Donald Trump’s role in inciting it make this round of impeachment hearings quite simple.  Although there is little room for wiggling on the trumpists’ part, one can be certain that the Jim Jordans of the House will do their best to turn the fascist assault into something it clearly was not.  That’s why Trump gives people like Jordan medals; because not only will they lie for him no matter what he does, because they don’t know they are lying the lies are even more convincing.

  In the prelude to this impeachment hearing, a few Republicans denounced them as adding to the divisions in the nation.  This approach seems especially disingenuous given the past four and a half years where every goddamn Republican in power encouraged the very same divisions they are decrying now.  As I write, there’s a GOP clown representing Utah telling the PBS reporter that there needs to be an investigation before there is a vote on the single charge of inciting the riot.  He tells the world that he needs more proof that Trump was involved in the incitement.  His argument is as convoluted as one might think.  It is no real argument, just a twisting of everything we saw with our own eyes not only on January 6th, but also in the weeks leading up to the election and in the weeks between.  If you recall, Trump insisted (and continues to insist) that he won the election no matter what the courts, the electors and the votes themselves said.

• ‘Damning’ New IG Report, Says ACLU, Shows Just How Far Trump Team ‘Was Willing to Go to Destroy’ Immigrant Families

  “Just when you think the Trump administration can’t sink any lower, it does.”

• Constitutional Lawyer: Trump Is a Clear & Present Danger, a Senate Impeachment Trial Is Needed Now

  The House of Representatives has voted to impeach President Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in a bid to overturn Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, and Trump will end his term in office with the distinction of being the first U.S. president to be impeached twice. Ten Republicans joined Democrats in the 232-197 vote to impeach, and Trump now faces a trial in the Senate. Constitutional attorney John Bonifaz says the House “did its duty” and that the Senate must move quickly to take up impeachment proceedings. “Those who did not vote to convict last time are responsible, in part, for allowing this president to stay in office, someone who has clearly abused his power time and time again, leading to this violent attack on the U.S. Capitol,” says Bonifaz, co-founder and president of Free Speech for People.

• Impeachment Comes as Violence and Racism at Heart of Trump Era Boils Over

• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Impeachment Is Late Attempt to Curb Violence & Racism at Heart of Trump Era

  We look at the fight for accountability after a white supremacist mob attacked the U.S. Capitol and as President Trump is impeached for a historic second time for his incitement of violence. Supporters who took part in the January 6 attack — including current police officers — have been arrested across the U.S. for their involvement in the insurrection. Ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration, the FBI is warning police chiefs around the country to be on high alert for right-wing domestic terror attacks. The Pentagon said it’s increasing the number of National Guard soldiers deployed to the nation’s capital to 20,000 — twice the combined number of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan — in stark contrast to the response to last week’s riot. “The impeachment yesterday is a culmination of sorts of the kind of violence and racism that has been at the heart of the Trump administration that finally boiled over,” says Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University and contributing writer at The New Yorker magazine. “We have a government that has completely spun out of control at the hands of Donald Trump.”

• Bibi and Jonathan Pollard: Two Anti-American Peas in Their Own Pod

  We need to be reminded of the reasons for Pollard’s unusually long jail sentence.  First of all, he was not a zealous Zionist trying to protect Israeli national security.  Before trying to sell sensitive documents and intercepts to Israel, he tried to sell sensitive intelligence to Libya’s Muammar Qadhafi and others.  Second, some of Pollard’s materials ended up in the Soviet Union, which begs serious questions about Israel’s security forces that have never been answered.  Third, Pollard’s perfidy compromised important collection activities that led to a failure to prevent acts of terrorism against Israel, resulting in loss of life.

  These are presumably the reasons why then secretary of defense Casper Weinberger ignored a previous agreement with the courts and made sure that Pollard received a life sentence under the Espionage Act, the only American who ever received such a sentence for passing intelligence to a so-called ally.  Pollard claimed falsely that he committed espionage only because the United States “collectively endangered Israel’s security by withholding crucial information.”  In fact, I participated as a CIA analyst in numerous intelligence exchanges with Mossad, and can certify that the U.S. intelligence community could not have been more generous with its intelligence sharing with Israel.  It took more than a decade for Israel to acknowledge that Pollard was on the Israeli payroll.

• Ripe for Fascism: A Post-Coup d’Trump Autopsy of American Democracy

  Most legacy media outlets sought to persuade voters to choose Joe Biden for president because “democracy is on the ballot” and once Trump was out of office, things would return to normal, we could all go back to “brunch.” However, this analysis overlooks the crucial realities of how we got here and, as Lau Tzu might suggest, where we have been and are heading. The “return to normal” rhetoric distracts from the reality of American democracy: it is in such an emaciated state that a more adept and sophisticated version of Trump could easily come to power. It was our infatuation with what passes for “normal” that brought about this historical moment. The Democracy Index rates the U.S. as a “flawed democracy,” which means that the elections are free and fair, basic civil liberties are respected, but there are underlying issues (e.g. the erosion of the free press and suppression of opposition political parties and viewpoints). Prior to Trump, scholars noted that the U.S. was an oligarchy, not a democratic republic. However, rudimentary corporate news media narratives concerning the so-called “coup” at the U.S. Capital January 6th leave out crucial realities that can easily lead audiences to glean that Donald Trump and his followers single handedly undermined the American democratic experiment. To be clear, Trump as a person and as a symbol has been responsible for the proliferation of dangerous and disgusting attitudes and behaviors in the U.S. However, we have been heading here for decades. To alter where we are heading, we need to confront certain realties that media narratives distract attention from on a ritual basis.

  The first reality is that we have to focus our energies on helping citizens discern fact from fiction. Trump’s behavior is unequivocally reckless, but his rhetoric would have been unsuccessful sans a significant population whose material decline, after 50 years of neoliberal policies, became susceptible to the fake news that permeates the internet. Indeed, their behavior illuminates a rarely discussed aspect of so-called fake news: it is particularly dangerous when it leads people to believe they must take aggressive actions they deem are morally justified. For example, the people at the Capitol would be heroes if there was actually well-sourced, demonstrable factual evidence that 2020 election was stolen. So too would the individual who shot up the restaurant in Pizzagate, to expose a pedophilia ring. In both cases, individuals showed concern for children and democracy, but reacted to false or incomplete information. That is to say, someone is not necessarily a bad person for engaging with fake news, but it can lead them to engage in horrific behavior. We saw this from left leaning voters as well. When it came to Russiagate, the Democrats repeatedly red-baited with the baseless and disproven claims that the Russians aided Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign, colluded with Trump’s 2016 campaign, shut down a Vermont power plant, put a bounty on U.S. soldiers, hacked the Democratic Party’s emails in 2016, and released Hunter Biden’s computer. People who engage with fake news are not bad people, but too often lack the skills to evaluate and analyze content critically.

• What Sex Workers Want Kamala Harris to Know

  “On the issue of finding a safe place for sex workers, I’m a huge advocate. I always have been,” Vice President–elect Kamala Harris said in a February 2019 interview with The Root. But if you ask sex workers, they’ll give you a different story.

• Facebook’s ‘stop the steal’ ban misses 90 groups promoting election misinformation: analysis

  Ninety groups on Facebook promoting debunked claims about election fraud remained on the platform as of Wednesday, after the social media giant said it would remove content containing the phrase “stop the steal,” according to an analysis released Thursday by nonprofit advocacy group Avaaz.

• Atop the Powerful Budget Committee at Last, Bernie Sanders Wants to Go Big

  Republicans have long feared the prospect of Mr. Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist from Vermont, taking the helm of the powerful committee given his embrace of bigger government and more federal spending with borrowed money. With Democrats reclaiming the Senate, that fear is about to become a reality. Mr. Sanders, the most progressive member of the chamber, will have a central role in shaping and steering the Democrats’ tax and spending plans through a Congress that they control with the slimmest of margins.

• Illegal Quran Statue in Swedish City Defaced in ‘Artistic Performance’

  The City of Malmö said they had no previous knowledge of the deployment, are unaware of the authors’ identity, and remain undecided about its future.

• On US Capitol Security — By Someone Who Manages Arena-Rock-Concert Security

  When there are enough outliers in a crowd, it throws the normal dynamics of crowd control off; everyone in my business knows this. Citizens tend to hold each other to certain standards ­ which is why my 40,000-person town does not have 40,000 police officers, and why the 8.3 million people of New York City aren’t policed by 8.3 million police officers.

• The Capitol Police were so unprepared this week that an event planner like me could tell

  Many members of the mob who marched on the Capitol clearly telegraphed their intentions in advance. Some, terrifyingly, had even professed they were ready to die for the cause. Importantly, some professed this before they arrived. And yet, the Capitol Police appeared to plan for a mostly courteous crowd (and local law enforcement continue to say they had no idea what was openly being planned).

  The failure of those in charge to realize this crowd would be destructive was astounding.

  Although the staffing at the Capitol appeared to be disastrously light regardless of the crowd size — Trans-Siberian-Orchestra-concert light — from my perspective as an event planner, the issue at hand that should have driven more of the security protocols was less the size of the crowd and more the very specific brand of “the rules don’t apply to me” attitude that some of the attendees embraced. It’s a scary trait in a person that gets exponentially scarier when a large proportion of a crowd is made up of those outliers and others are willing to follow their lead.

• Oppose Certification of the ES&S ExpressVote XL Voting Machine

  My name is Howie Hawkins. I have been on statewide New York ballot seven times as a candidate for the Green Party: for Comptroller in 1998 and 2002; for US Senate in 2006; for Governor in 2010, 2014, and 2018; and for President in 2020.

  New York now uses the gold standard for election integrity: voter-marked, machine-scanned paper ballots that can be readily audited and recounted in public view to ensure an accurate count of the vote.

  I urge Board of Elections not to lower New York’s standards of election integrity by certifying the ES&S ExpressVote XL Voting Machine.

  At at time when so many Americans do not believe the results of the presidential election in part because of distrust of electronic voting machines, it is particularly important that New York state not lose the confidence of the voters in election results. That could happen by switching to touch-screen ballot-marking devices that security experts warn, and election experience has shown, are prone to mistakes and malicious hacking.

  I have many additional specific concerns with the ExpressVote XL machines, but I will focus on three here:

  1. The printout of the voted ballot ExpressVote XL machine gives a barcode for the votes that the machine reads but the voter can’t read and verify. Security experts warn that this system creates opportunities for mistakes or deliberate manipulation to alter election outcomes. The ExpressVote XL machines miscounted tens of thousands of votes elections in Northampton County, Pennsylvania in 2019.

  2. Touchscreen voting causes long lines because only one person can mark their ballot at a time per machine as opposed to many people voting on hand-marked ballots at the same time. Long lines make voters feel pressured to hurry up and not check to see if their vote was properly recorded on the paper ballot under the glass by the machine.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Jack Dorsey Explains The Difficult Decision To Ban Donald Trump; Reiterates Support For Turning Twitter Into A Decentralized Protocol

  Last Friday, Twitter made the decision to permanently ban Donald Trump from its platform, which I wrote about at the time, explaining that it’s not an easy decision, but neither is it an unreasonable one. On Wednesday, Jack Dorsey put out an interesting Twitter thread in which he discusses some of the difficulty in making such a decision. This is good to see. So much of the content moderation debate often is told in black and white terms, in which many people act as if one answer is “obvious” and any other thing is crazy. And part of the reason for that is many of these decisions are made behind close doors, and no one outside gets to see the debates, or how much the people within the company explore the trade-offs and nuances inherent in one of these decisions.

• Dominion Voting Systems Files Defamation Lawsuit Against Former Trump Lawyer, Sidney Powell

  We write a lot about defamation suits here at Techdirt. Most of what we cover are baseless lawsuits — lawsuits featuring powerful people “punching down” in hopes of silencing critics.

• Parler’s CEO Promises That When It Comes Back… It’ll Moderate Content… With An Algorithm

  Parler, Parler, Parler, Parler. Back in June of last year when Parler was getting lots of attention for being the new kid on the social media scene with a weird (and legally nonsensical) claim that it would only moderate “based on the 1st Amendment and the FCC” we noted just how absolutely naive this was, and how the company would have to moderate and would also have to face the same kinds of impossible content moderation choices that every other website eventually faces. In fact, we noted that the company (in part due to its influx of users) was seemingly speedrunning the content moderation learning curve.

• Section 230 Year-in-Review for 2020

  Section 230 had such a drama-filled year that I decided to do a separate roundup, in addition to my annual Internet Law wrapup coming soon. (I know 2020 feels like it was a decade ago…) Trigger warning: this post is a shitshow. My list of Top 10 Section 230 developments of 2020: [...]

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• 20 years a blogger

  It’s been twenty years, to the day, since I published my first blog-post.

  I’m a blogger.

  Blogging – publicly breaking down the things that seem significant, then synthesizing them in longer pieces – is the defining activity of my days.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Opinion | How We Came to Build A Progressive Ground Game

  After Bernie’s campaign ended, we were determined to stay in the fight. We built our own structure which was key in the freedom and guidance in making our actions effective.

• “No One Took Us Seriously”: Black Cops Warned About Racist Capitol Police Officers for Years

  When Kim Dine took over as the new chief of the U.S. Capitol Police in 2012, he knew he had a serious problem.

  Since 2001, hundreds of Black officers had sued the department for racial discrimination. They alleged that white officers called Black colleagues slurs like the N-word and that one officer found a hangman’s noose on his locker. White officers were called “huk lovers” or “FOGs” — short for “friends of gangsters” — if they were friendly with their Black colleagues. Black officers faced “unprovoked traffic stops” from fellow Capitol Police officers. One Black officer claimed he heard a colleague say, “Obama monkey, go back to Africa.”

• So-called “Consent Searches” Harm Our Digital Rights

  Police use this ploy, thousands of times every year, to evade the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that police obtain a warrant, based on a judge’s independent finding of probable cause of crime, before searching someone’s phone. These misleadingly named “consent searches” invade our digital privacy, disparately burden people of color, undermine judicial supervision of police searches, and rest on a legal fiction.

  Legislatures and courts must act. In highly coercive settings, like traffic stops, police must be banned from conducting “consent searches” of our phones and similar devices.

  In less-coercive settings, such “consent searches” must be strictly limited. Police must have reasonable suspicion that crime is afoot. They must collect and publish statistics about consent searches, to deter and detect racial profiling. The scope of consent must be narrowly construed. And police must tell people they can refuse.

• PASP Decrees: first battle lost against the massive registration of political activists

  On 4th January 2020, the Conseil d’Etat (the French highest administrative authority) rejected the appeals urgently lodged by several associations (to which we had contributed) against the three decrees PASP, GIPASP and EASP (more explanations can be found here). Therefore the massive registration of political activists, their entourage, their political opinions as well as their health data will not be suspended. Indeed, since the files are being extended by a regulatory text, only the Conseil d’Etat had the power to stop the government’s security ambitions – which it has just refused to do, at least for now. This refusal reveals the failure of the system which claims to supervise police files: the only counter-power placed against the ambitions of the police is a Conseil d’Etat which, on security issues, is regularly lacking independence vis-a-vis the government and showing permissiveness in the application of the law (as in this decision, with a legal demonstration as brief as confusing).

• Detained, interrogated, and driven home: Marina Chaika shares her official statement to investigators detailing her recent abduction

  Marina Chaika, the ex-wife of Russian businessman Artyom Chaika (the son of Russia’s former attorney general) has confirmed to Meduza that she was in fact abducted, detained, and interrogated earlier this week. In addition, Chaika has shared a copy of the official statement she submitted to state investigators with Meduza’s correspondent. Here’s what Marina Chaika said in her formal account of the kidnapping.

• Christian convert killed in Mayuge district

  Yusuf Kintu, a 41-year-old former Imam of Macca Mosque in Dolwe Island, Mayuge district was attacked and killed by a Muslims mob a few days after he renounced Islam to follow Christ.

  International Christian Concern (ICC), a persecution watchdog located in Washington, DC, whose concern is the human rights of Christians and religious minorities, released a report yesterday confirming Kintu’s death.

  The organisation said the father of four (4) succumbed to his injuries on December 7, 2020 after he was seriously beaten and left unconscious by a local Muslim community in the area that was upset in him for leaving Islam and becoming a Christian.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• House Lawmakers Question Telecom Giants Over Broadband Price Gouging During A Pandemic

  House lawmakers say that telecom giants are exploiting a national health and economic crisis to make an extra buck.

• Ericsson chief asks his own country to lift Huawei ban

  It may take some time to digest this, but the the head of Sweden’s telecommunications equipment vendor, Ericsson, is lobbying the government to lift ban on his main competitor, China’s Huawei.

• T-Mobile to Expand and Advance the Nation’s Largest 5G Network with New 5-Year Agreements

  Building on two decades of partnership, the Un-carrier will work with Ericsson and Nokia to expand its nationwide 5G network for better 5G coverage and future game-changing experiences, and advanced network capabilities like 5G carrier aggregation. T-Mobile launched the world’s first nationwide standalone 5G network last summer, and recently pulled off the world’s first 5G standalone (SA) data session with New Radio Carrier Aggregation (NR CA). T-Mobile is the first and only U.S. provider to combine the power of Extended Range and Ultra Capacity 5G, boosting speed and performance. T-Mobile also plans to add advanced technical capabilities like voice over 5G (VoNR), network slicing, and multi-user massive MIMO to its 5G network.

Monopolies

• Amazon hit with antitrust lawsuit alleging e-book price fixing

  Amazon is accused of fixing the price of e-books sold on the e-commerce site through anticompetitive agreements with the nation’s top five publishers, according to a complaint filed Thursday.

  The class action lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York alleges that Amazon and the publishers entered into price fixing agreements in 2015, allowing the publishers to increase their e-book prices by up to 30 percent while protecting Amazon from price competition from other e-book retailers.

  The lawsuit also alleges Amazon violated antitrust and consumer-protection laws through the agreements with the publishers known as the “Big Five,” made up of Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin-Random House and Simon & Schuster.

• Patents

  • Superhero status?: the European Commission and its IP Action Plan
    [Ed: "Readers of our blog will know that the Unitary Patent System has had a chequered and controversial past." Because it's illegal? And unconstitutional? And promoted using lies, bribes, lobbying... ]

    As part of the Commission’s drive to reducing the complexity of the existing IP framework, the Action Plan proposes a rapid roll out of the Unitary Patent system in 2021 to create a one-stop-shop for patent protection and enforcement across the EU. Readers of our blog will know that the Unitary Patent System has had a chequered and controversial past. As a casualty of Brexit, the UK government announced that it will be withdrawing from the Unified Patent project (see Lens post here). We are still waiting to see if Germany’s recent re ratification will survive further constitutional challenges (see Lens post here).

  • What the UK-EU trade deal means for intellectual property rights [Ed: “There is no mention of the UK’s continued participation in the Unified Patent Court (“UPC”)” is misleading as there’s no UPC and there never will be. They pay to spread this.]

    The section of the trade deal devoted to patents is very short indeed, reflecting the fact it is not an area of harmonised law. There is no mention of the UK’s continued participation in the Unified Patent Court (“UPC”) even though Prime Minister Theresa May ratified the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court in April 2018. Indeed, in February 2020, a government spokesperson confirmed that the UK would no longer be participating in the near EU-wide patent scheme (Spain, Poland and Croatia are also not part of it). This is presumably because the European Court of Justice has a role in that system which is politically unacceptable to the current UK government. It means that Unitary Patent proprietors will not benefit from UK coverage within the new system when it launches (potentially at the end of 2021).

  • This week in IP: Samsung top PTAB petitioner, UPC faces more delay, Michael Jordan wins in China [Ed: "UPC faces more delay" is a lie; UPC will never materialise, but UPC boosters carry on spinning and lying]

    The fabled unitary patent and concurrent Unified Patent Court look set to be delayed again, at least in the short term, following a request from Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court to pause the final ratification step.

    On Wednesday, January 13, the FCC asked Germany’s president Frank-Walter Steinmeier to refrain from signing the country’s ratification into law while it considers two new constitutional complaints challenging ratification that were filed with the court in December.

    The court will now decide whether to throw out the complaints as inadmissible or unfounded in the short term, or consider one or both of the challenges. If the FCC opts for the latter option it could severely delay the UPC coming to fruition, or even put an end to the plans.

    Sources have told Managing IP that the president’s agreement to delay signing the bill is not an indication of the case’s strength, but is a procedural matter. The FCC has not commented on the contents of the complaints.

    Ingve Stjerna, the German attorney who filed the first constitutional complaint against the UPC in 2017 – and which the FCC partially allowed in 2020, has confirmed he submitted one of the latest cases.

    The identity of the second complainant is unknown, but one organisation that has previously indicated it would challenge the UPC is the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure. In March last year, the FCC declared that the act approving the UPC Agreement had not been signed off by a required two-thirds majority in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament. At the end of November last year, the Bundestag approved the act with the necessary qualified majority.

  • “UK patent boutiques must be bold about closer links with Europe”[Ed: UPC boosters in ‘journalist’ clothing — that is what JUVE has become]

    Brexit has finally begun. On 31 December, the UK officially bid farewell to 47 years of membership of one of the world’s biggest trade blocs. Much UK and European patent jurisprudence, such as the European Patent Convention, operates outside the EU’s realm. The UK remains fully involved in the European Patent Office. Nevertheless, for Europe’s IP community, the loss of the UK as a member state is a blow.

    In some respects, consequences of Brexit such as the UK government’s withdrawal from the Unified Patent Court system are already having a tangible affect. The UK’s withdrawal from the EU has established two important but separated litigations hubs in Europe. One is the UK, the other the continental system. The latter includes a potential UPC.

    At some patent litigation firms – and especially UK patent boutiques – their existing European links will determine future success. However, London’s patent courts and reputation of its judges remain secure. This more than anything should be enough to fix the capital as a future patent litigation hotspot.

• Copyrights

  • Member of SPARKS Scene Piracy Group Pleads Guilty

    One of the key members of Scene piracy group SPARKS has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. The US Government signed a plea deal with Jonatan Correa, who admitted being part of the notorious Scene group. While the offense is punishable by a maximum sentence of five years in prison, both parties agreed to a guideline of 12 to 18 months.

  • The Pirate Bay is Pretty Broken Right Now But Can Be Coaxed Back to Life

    The Pirate Bay retained its position as the world’s most popular torrent site at the start of 2021 but all is not well. While the site is up and accessible for most, the index is suffering significant technical problems that due to their confusing nature, have many users scratching their heads. Nevertheless, there are still options to coax it back to life.

  • Scholars fume as PhD theses sold as e-books on Amazon

    Scholars have condemned “unlawful” attempts to sell their PhD theses without permission on Amazon’s Kindle service.

    The outcry follows the discovery by academics who took their doctoral studies at Durham University that their PhD dissertations had been scraped from the university’s online thesis repository, where they are freely available, and were being sold as individual titles for as much as £9.99.

    Around 2,000 PhD theses – many of which appeared under the authorship of ‘Durham Philosophy’ – had been made available as Kindle e-books, according to Sarah Hughes, vice-chancellor’s research fellow in human geography at Northumbria University.

  • Royalty distribution in Nigeria: Must collective management organisations distribute royalties only to members whose works were used? [Ed: The copyright cartel goes after poorer countries as well]

    A distinction must be made between prohibiting “general distribution” as contrary to a CMO’s memorandum and articles of association and, one prohibiting “general distribution” as illegal by virtue of Regulation 15 of the CMO Regulations. Regrettably, the learned trial judge did not pronounce on how Regulation 15 should be applied but relied on an interpretation of the company’s (i.e. COSON) memorandum and articles of association. It is thus safe to assume that the court’s decision was with respect to the plaintiffs’ case rather than an interpretation of Regulation 15 specifically. In this Kat’s opinion, a CMO cannot distribute royalties to reflect usage with precision. It can only ensure that royalty distribution reflects use “as nearly as possible” [per Regulation 15(1) of the CMO Regulations]. This is because deductions may be made from royalties and applied to other purposes outside direct distribution to members. That some deductions are applied to other purposes other than distribution to members, whose works were used in a given year, may be gleaned from Regulation 10 of the CMO Regulations. Regulation 10 permits CMOs to “withhold from the amount collected or received by it such deductions necessary to cover any expenditure incurred in the fulfillment of its functions” subject to a maximum limit of “30% of the total royalties and fees collected during the year in which the deductions are made”.

    Perhaps, the problem with “general distribution” was that it was still referred to as “royalties” distributed directly to members alongside “specific distribution”. [Apart from “general distribution”, COSON makes “special distribution” to members whose works were used in a given year.] But, that should not mean that a CMO cannot apply certain portions of royalties received towards the welfare of its members.

    It would have been helpful if the court explicitly interpreted Regulation 15 of the CMO Regulations vis-à-vis the rationale for the practice referred to as “general distribution”. That opportunity having been missed, it is hoped that in the meantime, the Nigerian Copyright Commission as the regulatory agency for the copyright sector can issue some directives to clarify things. CMOs should be able to, with its members’ approval, deduct a percentage of royalties received to cater for the welfare of its members as well as to other socio-cultural functions.