4 reasons to choose Linux for art and design

In 2021, there are more reasons why people love Linux than ever before. In this series, I’ll share 21 different reasons to use Linux. Today I’ll explain why Linux is an excellent choice for creative work.

Linux gets a lot of press for its amazing server and cloud computing software. It comes as a surprise to some that Linux happens to have a great set of creative tools, too, and that they easily rival popular creative apps in user experience and quality. When I first started using open source creative software, it wasn’t because I didn’t have access to the other software. Quite the contrary, I started using open source tools when I had the greatest access to the proprietary tools offered by several leading companies. I chose to switch to open source because open source made more sense and produced better results. Those are some big claims, so allow me to explain.

Google proposes way for Fuchsia OS to run Android and Linux programs ‘natively’

One of the bigger issues with making a new operating system, particularly one that’s being built from scratch like Fuchsia, is that people will rightfully want to be able to run their favorite apps on that OS. In the case of Fuchsia, which could theoretically serve as the successor to both Chrome OS and Android, people would likely expect to be able to run both Android apps and Linux apps, along with native Fuchsia apps.

Up to now, the expectation was that Fuchsia could accomplish this in the same way that Chrome OS is currently able to run Linux apps, by running a full instance of Linux in a virtual machine. Chrome OS is even set to use this same strategy for its ability to run Android apps, thanks to a project called arcvm.

However, there are some downsides to the virtual machine approach. For one, managing files between the “host” (Fuchsia, for example) and the “guest” (Android) can be tricky or cumbersome. Additionally, Fuchsia puts an emphasis on security, attempting to keep programs isolated from one another wherever possible. To maintain that level of isolation with Linux apps, Fuchsia would need to run more than one virtual machine, which could bog down performance.

Desktop/Laptop

• System76 Takes Open-Source Approach and Unveils a Configurable Mechanical Keyboard

  System76 is a US-based computer manufacturer that provides Linux-based laptops, desktops and servers. They are also the makers of one of the most beautiful Linux-based distro ‘Pop!_OS’.

  They have been teasing the launch of a completely open-source mechanical keyboard for a while now.

  [...]

  System76’s Launch Configurable Keyboard is supposed to offer a host of user-customizable options and open-source hardware and software.

Audiocasts/Shows

• JingOS Is An Ipad Inspired Linux Distro – YouTube

  JingOS calls itself the world’s first IpadOS-style Linux distribution. JingOS is a brand new Chinese distro that bases off of Ubuntu and uses a heavily modified KDE Plasma desktop that resembles iOS. In this video, I take a quick first look at JingOS 0.6.

Kernel Space

• AMD looking for Linux help

  AMD currently has several job openings on the Linux front which seem to indicate the outfit is stepping up its Linux support.

  According to Phoronix, AMD has been delivering reliable Linux support with its recent launches but it looks like there is room for improvement in areas like more timely compiler support for new processors, better alignment of its new hardware enablement for getting the code not only upstreamed but into distributions for launch-day, and similar areas.

  Looking through AMD’s job ads, Phoronix thinks it looks like AMD is serious about Linux.

• AMD is looking to hire more Linux engineers

  Chip giant AMD has issued a number of Linux-related job postings in an apparent bid to improve the support for open source software on its hardware.

  The semiconductor company’s increasing footprint in the enterprise space with its recent high-performance computing (HPC) wins, could perhaps be the reason behind the headhunting. Even on the desktop front, AMD is garnering a lot of support from Linux gamers, in terms of adoption of its processors and graphics cards with desktop PCs.

• Finding real-world kernel subsystems

  The kernel development community talks often about subsystems and subsystem maintainers, but it is less than entirely clear about what a “subsystem” is in the first place. People wanting to understand how kernel development works could benefit from a clearer idea of what actually comprises a subsystem within the kernel. In an attempt to better understand how kernel development works, Pia Eichinger (and her colleagues Ralf Ramsauer, Stefanie Scherzinger, and Wolfgang Maurer) spent a lot of time looking for the actual boundaries; Eichinger presented that work at the 2021 linux.conf.au online gathering.

  This work was undertaken to develop a more formalized model of how kernel development works. With such an understanding, it is hoped, ways can be found to make the process work better and to provide new tools. The researchers have a particular interest in safety-critical deployments of Linux. Safety-critical environments are highly sensitive; working software can make a life-or-death difference there. So safety-critical developers have to ensure software quality by any means available.

  [...]

  At this point, she has some sort of definition of subsystems, twelve of which were identified at the top level. Those twelve were the Arm architecture, drivers, crypto, USB, DRM, networking, media, documentation, sound, SCSI, more Arm stuff (OMAP architecture code, for example), and Infiniband. Along with that, she has a tool that can automate this sort of subsystem detection. It is, she said, “just scratching the surface” of the problem, but it is a start.

  There are a number of ways this work could go in the future. One would be to examine historical kernel releases to build a history of how kernel subsystems have evolved over time. This model can also be used, of course, for the original purpose of determining how well the actual kernel patch flow conforms to the maintainer model. There may be scope for applying this technique to other projects as well.

• Nouveau With Linux 5.12 Has ~5k L.O.C. Change In Preparing For Ampere – Phoronix

  With Linux 5.11 there is open-source Nouveau KMS support for Ampere GPUs — just kernel mode-setting without any form of 3D acceleration. The actual hardware acceleration requires more work and also NVIDIA to release the necessary signed firmware binaries. With Linux 5.12 there still is no 3D acceleration but a big set of patches was merged as a step in that direction.

  Nouveau still needs the signed firmware binaries for the GA100 / RTX30 Ampere acceleration but the patches queued into DRM-Next overnight are preparations for Ampere. In fact, it’s nearly five thousand lines of code changed across a number of commits and is just restructuring the open-source driver code to be able to cope with all the new engine types and instances with Ampere.

• The 11 Most Interesting Features For Linux 5.11 – Lots For AMD + Intel This Cycle – Phoronix

  Linux 5.11 stable is expected to be released on Sunday barring any second thoughts by Linus Torvalds that could lead to an eighth weekly release candidate that would in turn push the official release back by one week. In any case, Linux 5.11 will be formally out soon and it’s an exciting one on the feature front.

  Linux 5.11 has many features / new hardware enablement from both AMD and Intel, new features like S.U.D. for helping out with Linux gaming, networking enhancements, and more. Below is a look at the eleven most interesting changes to find with the imminent Linux 5.11 release.

• Sony PlayStation 5 DualSense Controller Driver Coming To Linux 5.12 – Phoronix

  For as rough of a year as 2020 was, one of the many open-source accomplishments was Sony taking up “official” maintenance of their HID driver and ahead of Christmas to much surprise they published an official PlayStation 5 DualSense open-source controller driver for Linux. That PS5 controller driver is now set to be introduced with the imminent Linux 5.12 merge window.

  That PlayStation 5 DualSense controller driver was initially published back in December, just days ahead of Christmas and fully open-source. The driver supports the PS5 controllers via USB and Bluetooth and supports nearly all of the functionality including extras like LEDs, motion sensors, battery reporting, light-bar control, rumble, etc.

• Graphics Stack

  • Wayland support (and more) for Emacs

    Jeffrey Walsh started off his 2021 linux.conf.au presentation with a statement that, while 2020 was not the greatest year ever, there were still some good things that happened; one of those was the Emacs 27.1 release. This major update brought a number of welcome new features, but also led to yet another discussion on the future of Emacs. With that starting point, Walsh launched into a fast-moving look at the history of Emacs, why users still care about it, what changes are coming, and (especially) what was involved in moving Emacs away from the X window system and making it work with the Wayland compositor.
    There were a number of good things to be found in the 27.1 release, which was a “huge jump” in functionality. Perhaps at the top of the list is support for the HarfBuzz library, which brings improved text-rendering support in multiple languages — and the support for color emoji that no self-respecting 2020s application can be without. Portable dumping was finally added, leading to faster startup and less system-dependent code. Emacs also now supports a tab-based interface, something that “had been asked-for forever”, Walsh said.

  • OBS Studio Merges Its EGL-Wayland Code To Natively Support Wayland

    OBS Studio, the cross-platform open-source solution for live streaming and screen recording, has landed the last major piece of its effort to natively support Wayland.

    The EGL/Wayland renderer code that has been under review for about one year was finally merged into OBS Studio. This follows earlier work like EGL on X11 support and other preparations while now at last the EGL-Wayland code has been merged to offer native Wayland support via the new windowing system code path.

  • OSPRay Studio 0.6 Released For Intel’s Open-Source Interactive Ray-Tracing Visualizer

    Among Intel’s many open-source software accomplishments for 2020 was introducing OSPray Studio as part of oneAPI. OSPray Studio builds atop the existing OSPray ray-tracing engine and inter-connected oneAPI Rendering Toolkit components to offer an open-source scene graph application for interactive visualizations and ray-tracing based rendering. The newest OSPray Studio is now available.

Benchmarks

• AMD Ryzen, EPYC 5~6% Faster Out-Of-The-Box With Linux 5.11

  Now with the CPUFreq fix landing this week in Linux Git, the mainline Linux 5.11 kernel in its near final state is looking in very good shape for AMD Zen 2/3 hardware from Ryzen laptops and desktops through EPYC servers. The Linux 5.11 development kernel was regressed for the better part of the past two months but now that the frequency invariance regression is addressed, not only is the regression gone but generally is performing much better compared to prior kernel versions.

Applications

• Tilix Terminal Emulator 1.9.4 Released, How to Install via PPA

  The Tilix terminal emulator released version 1.9.4 a few days ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10 via PPA.

  Tilix, formerly Terminix, is a free and open-source terminal emulator that uses the VTE GTK+ 3 widget. It features terminal screen splitting and drop-down mode support.

  After one year and a half of development, it finally announced the new release with minimal maintenance. And Tilix is looking for maintainers!

• Linux Release Roundup #21.07: Debian 10.8, Shutter 0.95, Flowblade 2.8 and More New Releases

  Flowblade is an open-source video editing software for Linux, it is beginner-friendly and contains a lot of useful tools.

  Recently, they have announced Flowblade 2.8, it comes with configurable panel positioning, new themes, new filter selection panel and more.

Instructionals/Technical

• Chromecast From a Linux PC – Allow Multicast on Firewall

  Google’s Chromecast is a great tool. I use it to cast a browser tab with stock updates to my TV while I work. However, if you are running a Linux PC you might have ran into the “No Devices Found” error. In this Linux quick tip we will show you how to connect to your Chromecast devices from Linux simply by allowing inbound multicast packets.

• Using Wireshark to Examine FTP Traffic – Linux Hint

  The previous article has provided you with an in-depth understanding of the Wireshark filters, OSI layers, ICMP, and HTTP packet analysis. In this article, we will learn how FTP works and examine FTP Wireshark captures. Before we dig deep into the captured packet analysis, we will begin with a brief understanding of the protocol.

• How to install Skin Mods in Friday Night Funkin on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install Skin Mods in Friday Night Funkin on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• systemd application firewalls by example

  An application firewall, unlike a gateway (router) or system level firewall, is meant to limit the networking of a single application. It can be used to prevent a compromised service from seeing into the local network, prevent programs from calling home, plug metadata leaks, or more tightly control a program’s network access.

• How to Install and Configure Rocket.Chat on CentOS 8

  In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to install Rocket.Chat on a CentOS 8 server.

  Rocket.Chat is a great self-hosted alternative to Slack. You can even use it as a live chat for your website.

• Fix Asus Linux laptop stuck at the logo screen

  Have you ever faced this issue where you successfully installed a Linux distribution on your Asus laptop (say Ubuntu), but when you boot your PC, it only shows a blank screen? If yes, this post is for you. We will give you a step-by-step procedure to fix the startup freeze and explain why it happens.

• Tomas Tomecek: Automake in OpenShift

  It’s Friday evening, 19:00 (7pm) and I just spent more than an hour resolving a problem in anaconda. The problem was that builds sometimes failed with:

  /bin/sh: /sandcastle/docker-io-usercont-sandcastle-prod-20210212-101715691597/missing: No such file or directory
  The irony, right? A file called “missing” is actually missing.

  Luckily, I was successful and figured it out. Beer incoming.

• Synchronize your 2FA Gmail with mbsync | FrostyX.cz

  In comparison to graphical email applications, configuring the command-line clients can be a needlessly painful experience. Not because of the client configuration itself but rather finding out the proper IMAP settings for your account. Personally, I spent more hours on moving my mail into Emacs (and previously into Mutt), than I care to admit. And in the end, it turned out that the only real obstacle was figuring out, how to get the freaking synchronization with Gmail working. Let me share my findings to potentially ease the pain for you.

• Verify package GPG signature using DNSSEC | Miroslav Suchý

  When you want to be sure that RPM packages installed on your system were not altered, you should enable

  gpgcheck=1
  gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-$releasever-$basearch
  in your repo file or in dnf.conf. The problem is how to get the file on your disk the secure way?

  We have fedora-repos and distribution-gpg-keys. This will allow you to fetch new keys. But how to fetch the very first GPG key?

  You can either manually download, verify, and rpm –import that key. Fedora has a dedicated page for its GPG keys. This process is manual and boring. Can we utilize something which we can trust? What about DNS signed using DNSSEC?

  Can we put the GPG key in the DNS record and sign it using DNSSEC? We can trust this record and can safely import it.

  This is what Martin Sehnoutka has done in his master thesis Automatic verification of software packages with help of DNS. He even provided patches for DNF, created some DNS records, but then … things stalled. I picked it up a few days ago.

  Fedora now provides GPG keys for Fedora 27+ in DNS. Want to check it?

• Ubuntu: sources list editing [Guide]

  If you need to edit the software sources list on your Ubuntu PC to add a repo, disable an existing repo, or remove a repo altogether but don’t quite understand how to do it, we can help! Follow along to learn all about Ubuntu sources list editing!

  [...]

  If you want to add a new repo to Ubuntu by editing your sources list, here’s how to do it with the Software & Updates app. First, find the “Other Software” tab in the app window and click on it with your mouse.

  After accessing the “Other Software” tab, you’ll see a list of software sources enabled on Ubuntu. Keep in mind, “Other Software” is only for non-Ubuntu repositories. Think PPAs or other third-party software repositories.

  To add a new repository to your sources list, find the “Add” button at the bottom-left corner of the screen, and click on it with the mouse. When you’ve clicked on it, you will see a window appear.

• How to Install PostGIS PostgreSQL database extender on CentOS 8

  PostGIS is a free and open-source database extender for the PostgreSQL Database Management System. It helps you to add some extra functions such as, area, union, intersection, distance, data types, and allow location queries to be run in SQL. With PostGIS, you can store the polygon and point types of the data in the PostgreSQL database.

• How to Install Ubuntu on Windows 10 – CCM

  Ubuntu is an open-source operating system (OS), based on Linux’ distribution Debia. Ubuntu is appreciated for its secure system, user-friendly interface, and low system requirements, among others. If you are tempted to try this OS, you are in the right place: this article discusses how to install Ubuntu on Windows 10 in dual boot. You can also follow the same steps in order to install Xubuntu or Linux Mint, or even on Windows 8.

• How to Install XAMPP on Ubuntu 20.04

  XAMPP is a free and open-source web server package developed by Apache Friends. The XAMPP software package comprises the Apache web server, MariaDB database server, PHP, and Perl. It is basically a localized LAMP server that gives developers a suitable environment to test websites and applications before uploading them to a production server.

  The acronym XAMPP stands for: X – Cross-platform, A – Apache server, M-MariaDB, P – PHP and P – Perl. XAMPP can run on Windows, macOS, and all Linux distributions.

  In this guide, you will learn how to install XAMMP on Ubuntu 20.04.

• How to Use Bash For Loop Commands – Make Tech Easier

  One of the best ways to make your life easier with technology, whether at work or at home, is to harness automation. Automating tasks with scripts and timed jobs is a surefire way to save you time, headache, and effort. However, it’s not immediately clear where to start. Here we show you how to use the Bash for loop command, one of the foundational tools in IT automation, to get you started.

• How to install RPM packages on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – Linux Shout

  RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) packages are meant to compile and install on RHEL and its based operating systems such as CentOS, Fedora, and more… However, we can also install RPM packages on Ubuntu by converting them to DEB packages. And here in this article, we know how?

  Many times, there are some software packages that are not available for Ubuntu (uses APT package Manager and Debian packages). Even though both RHEL and Ubuntu are Linux but the building format of packages to install on them is different.

• How to install Snap Store GUI on CentOS 7 or 8 Linux – Linux Shout

  Snap is the universal package manager and software deployment platform that is available to install on almost all popular Linux platforms. It contains hundreds of popular open-source applications that can be installed using just one command of snap. Yes, command, however, all of us are not a big fan of the command line, especially, those who are new to Linux distributions. Thus, to make searching, installing, and removing various programs on your Linux OS, Snap Store is there. It is the GUI front end that runs the snap commands in the background to download and install applications from the Snap repository, just like the iOS store or Microsoft Store.

• Setting up the perfect web-development environment using docker and ZOL – Techzim

  I have to admit I am as far from winning the world’s best web-developer as it gets, but I give it my best. And also I mostly develop for myself apart from the very rare and little WordPress PHP snippets I have shared with my even more technologically inept friends. Recently though I found myself needing to put on that web-dev fedora for a project on one of my sites.With that being said, I was rusty and even finding the right local development environment was a struggle. Usually, I just use FlyWheel’s LocalWP and Atom. That works well for my much smaller WordPress customisation projects that never seem to go beyond a single page of code but this time it was a more complex project and the limits of LocalWP became quickly apparent.

• Changing your shell from bash to zsh and back – any desktop | ArcoLinux

  It all depends on the iso you start with Arch Linux, ArcoLinux, ArcoLinuxD or ArcoLinuxB.

  ArcoLinux and ArcoLinuxB users can skip all the installations and just start using our aliases tobash and tozsh to switch.

  If you have started with ArcoLinuxD or Arch Linux you are missing packages and aliases.

• Adding Let’s Entrypt SSL to Webmin Hostname – TecAdmin

  The default Webmin listen on port 10000 with self singed SSL certificate. You will see a security warning in web browser like certificate is not trusted. Many of the organization do not allow to use self singed certificates for several reasons.

  Lets Encrypt is a free and open certificate authority by the non-profit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). Its provides free ssl certificates for the domains valid for 90 days. You can easily renew certificates before expiration manually or schedule it to renew automatically.

  This tutorial will describe you to setup Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate with Webmin hostname.

• Setting up a CI system part 2: Generating and deploying your test environment – mupuf.org

  This article is part of a series on how to setup a bare-metal CI system for Linux driver development. Check out part 1 where we expose the context/high-level principles of the whole CI system, and make the machine fully controllable remotely (power on, OS to boot, keyboard/screen emulation using a serial console).

  In this article, we will start demystifying the boot process, and discuss about different ways to generate and boot an OS image along with a kernel for your machine. Finally, we will introduce boot2container, a project that makes running containers on bare metal a breeze!

Wine or Emulation

• Wine Announcement

  The Wine development release 6.2 is now available.
  
  What's new in this release (see below for details):
    - Mono engine updated to version 6.0.0, with DirectX support.
    - Support for NTDLL debugger APIs.
    - More WinRT support in WIDL.
    - Xbox One controller fixes on Mac.
    - Various bug fixes.
  
  The source is available from the following locations:
  
  https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.2.tar.xz
  
  
  http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.2.tar.xz
  
  Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
  
  https://www.winehq.org/download
  
  You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
  
  You can also get the current source directly from the git
  repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
  
  Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file
  AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
  

• Windows compatibility layer Wine 6.2 is out now | GamingOnLinux

  A fresh biweekly development release is out for the Windows compatibility layer Wine with Wine 6.2 bundling up more of the latest and greatest into a suitable release for you to try.

  For newer readers and Linux users here’s a refresher – Wine is a compatibility layer built for operating systems like Linux, macOS and BSD. The idea is to allow other platforms to run games and applications only built and supported for Windows. It’s also part of what makes up Steam Play Proton. Once a year or so, all the development is bundled into a stable release.

• Wine 6.2 Brings Mono 6.0 Engine, NTDLL Debugger APIs – Phoronix

  What better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day weekend with some wine… Wine 6.2 is out as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot for running Windows games and applications on Linux/macOS.

  Wine 6.2 isn’t the most exciting update in recent time but does at least bring the Mono 6.0 engine and with that DirectX support.

Games

• Godot Engine – Release candidate: Godot 3.2.4 RC 2

  Godot 3.2.4 is shaping up nicely, and a number of issues have been fixed since the first Release Candidate two weeks ago. So it’s now time for a RC 2 build to give it another round of testing before the stable release!

  And rejoice macOS users, this release is the first to have the Godot editor binary signed and notarized. Thanks to Prehensile Tales for signing it on behalf of the Godot contributors. (Note: Only the “standard” build is signed for now.)

• Godot GDScript REPL

  When experimenting with Godot and its GDScript language, I realized that I missed a good old REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) to familiarize myself with the language and API.

• Defold game engine planning Linux improvements through 2021

  Defold, a free game engine with the source code available under a reasonable open license has released a roadmap for 2021 and it’s sounding pretty good.

  While not actually open source, the licensing terms are still quite friendly and still far better than some other much more closed licensing like with Unity, Unreal and Game Maker but not as open as something like Godot. Defold is progressing on though and their roadmap for 2021 mentions their plan to continue to improve their Linux support.

• Cozy management game about dying ‘Spiritfarer’ is getting a bunch of free updates | GamingOnLinux

  Thunder Lotus appear to have done well with Spiritfarer, their unique management game with a rather cozy atmosphere and a theme based around looking after the dead.

  For those who haven’t played it yet: you build a boat to explore the world, then befriend and care for spirits before finally releasing them into the afterlife. During the game you build, farm, mine, fish, talk to lots of different people and travel across the seas and eventually say goodbye to spirits you’ve looked after. In a press release they noted that three separate updates are coming that will “notably expand upon the game’s main story, as well as adding additional characters, locations, and quality of life improvements” and all will be free.

• Legend of Keepers sees a final update before it leaves Early Access | GamingOnLinux

  Legend of Keepers: Career of a Dungeon Master from developer Goblinz Studio is closing in on the final release, with a fresh big update out now for this mix of dungeon management and turn-based battles.

  It actually reminds me a little of the card game BossMonster (which is great by the way). With you in charge of the dungeon and tasked with protecting it from pesky heroes trying to get all your treasure. You need to setup room after room of traps and in Legend of Keepers you’re also dealing with your own creatures that you place in defence. Hits the mark quite well and is quite unique.

• Strange shape-shifting puzzler Altered releases on March 12 | GamingOnLinux

  Altered from developer Glitchheart is an upcoming meditative puzzle game mixing hard puzzles and a soothing atmosphere, as you move and morph yourself around small areas to complete each puzzle.

  Featuring over 80 puzzles the twist here is that you go through multiple characters / objects to control, each with a unique power of altering their form. The developer says by “understanding their powers, you will gain new intuition for solving interesting puzzles”.

• Valheim managed to sell over 1 million copies in the first week

  We did reach out to the developer to see how the Linux sales went so far but no reply yet. They’re only a small team and due to the popularity, they’ve probably got thousands of emails waiting so it’s not really surprising. A lot of it was developed on Linux too, so that’s awesome.

• X4: Cradle of Humanity and the big 4.0 update launching March 16

  Ready to explore a bigger universe? The upcoming X4: Cradle of Humanity expansion along with the big free 4.0 update for all players is now confirmed to launch on March 16.

  Taking the X series from Egosoft back to Earth, it will significantly increase the size of the game’s universe giving you new sectors to explore along with two Terran factions to X4: Foundations, along with their economy, ships, weapons and stations.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Perspective grids for comics in Krita

    I’m sharing my perspective grids (CC-0/Public Domain) and show how to use them in Krita: it’s a set of PNGs I drag’n’drop over the canvas. I hope they’ll be useful for you!.

Distributions

• [Older] Best Linux distro for developers

  Linux inherently works well for coding and testing software. For developers and programmers, almost any Linux distro will be a good fit. When it comes to picking a distro for developing, the biggest factor is just going to be personal preference. Even so, some distros offer certain features that developers may find particularly helpful for their work.

  With so many choices available, the task of choosing a distribution can be overwhelming. At the same time, jumping ship to “distro hop” is very easy to do, and shouldn’t be discouraged, as it gives you an idea of what else is available. We aim to make your choice a little easier with this guide, where we list our top picks of Linux distros for developers.

  Join us as we go over our top eight picks of Linux distros, presented in no particular order. Outside of this list, there are still many other good distros that you can try. And it’s important to remember that there is no wrong choice. Let the countdown begin.

• New Releases

  • Educational-Oriented Escuelas Linux 6.12 Distro Released with LibreOffice 7.1, New Note-Taking Software

    Escuelas Linux 6.12 comes three months after Escuelas Linux 6.11, but it’s not your usual maintenance update. In fact, the developers promise a fully update system that offers users access to the all the latest and greatest Open Source software and GNU/Linux technologies, and it’s also more stable, reliable, and secure than ever before.

    On the downside of fully updating the entire system, the ISO image grew considerably, but the developers managed to keep its size at an acceptable level by removing some of the old, unmaintained and unpopular apps from the installation media. These include Adobe Reader, Avidemux, BlueGriffon, Caph, Choqok, FisicaLab, Google Earth, Hugin, Kino, Kstars, Pidgin, Termograf, and FreeOffice.

• BSD

  • helloSystem: Pre-alpha FreeBSD project chases simplicity and elegance by taking cues from macOS

    A pre-alpha project to make a new FreeBSD-based desktop operating system has adopted a minimalist design intended to appeal to Mac defectors.

    FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system first released in 1993 based on the Berkeley Software Distribution. The core of Apple’s macOS, called Darwin, uses some code from FreeBSD. Despite its high quality, running FreeBSD as a desktop operating system has some challenges, mainly because it is less well supported by third-party vendors than Linux, which in turn is not as well supported as Windows.

    Simon Peter, based in Frankfurt, Germany, founded a project that may make desktop FreeBSD more attractive. Peter is the author of AppImage, a packaging format for portable applications on Linux. He is now working on helloSystem, which uses FreeBSD coupled with a new user interface developed with Qt to create a desktop operating system focused on ease of use.

  • FreeBSD 13.0-BETA2 Now Available

    The second BETA build of the 13.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
    
    Installation images are available for:
    
    o 13.0-BETA2 amd64 GENERIC
    o 13.0-BETA2 i386 GENERIC
    o 13.0-BETA2 powerpc GENERIC
    o 13.0-BETA2 powerpc64 GENERIC64
    o 13.0-BETA2 powerpc64le GENERIC64LE
    o 13.0-BETA2 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE
    o 13.0-BETA2 armv6 RPI-B
    o 13.0-BETA2 armv7 GENERICSD
    o 13.0-BETA2 aarch64 GENERIC
    o 13.0-BETA2 aarch64 RPI
    o 13.0-BETA2 aarch64 PINE64
    o 13.0-BETA2 aarch64 PINE64-LTS
    o 13.0-BETA2 aarch64 PINEBOOK
    o 13.0-BETA2 aarch64 ROCK64
    o 13.0-BETA2 aarch64 ROCKPRO64
    o 13.0-BETA2 riscv64 GENERIC
    o 13.0-BETA2 riscv64 GENERICSD
    
    Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without
    console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of
    freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access.  Additionally,
    the root user password is set to root.  It is strongly recommended
    to change the password for both users after gaining access to the
    system.
    
    Installer images and memory stick images are available here:
    
    https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.0/
    
    The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.
    
    If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR
    system or on the -stable mailing list.
    
    If you would like to use Git to do a source based update of an existing
    system, use the "releng/13.0" branch.
    
    A summary of changes since 13.0-BETA1 includes:
    
    o Issues with 32-bit builds have been fixed.
    
    o Shared libraries have been updated following an update to ncurses.
    
    o Support for kernel TLS offload has been added (off by default).
    
    o The mlx5en(4) driver has been included in the amd64 GENERIC kernel by
      default.
    
    o Documentation included on installation medium has been removed.
    
    o A null pointer dereference has been addressed.
    
    o Other miscellaneous bug fixes.
    
    A list of changes since 12.2-RELEASE is available in the releng/13.0
    release notes:
    
    https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/relnotes.html
    
    Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be
    updated on an ongoing basis as the 13.0-RELEASE cycle progresses.
    

• Screenshots/Screencasts

  • PCLinuxOS 2021.02 overview | So cool ice cubes are jealous.

    In this video, I am going to show an overview of PCLinuxOS 2021.02 and some of the applications pre-installed.

  • Evolution updated to 3.38.4 » PCLinuxOS

    Evolution is a mailer, calendar, contact manager and communications tool. The tools which make up Evolution will be tightly integrated with one another and act as a seamless personal information-management tool.

  • Opera Browser updated to 74.0.3911.107 » PCLinuxOS

    Opera is a Chromium-based browser using the Blink layout engine. Opera offers a free VPN, Ad Blocker, integrated messenger and private mode help you browse securely and smoothly.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

  • OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 “Argon” Officially Released with Linux 5.10 LTS, ARM64 Port

    Dubbed “Argon,” OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 comes about a year after OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 “Mercury” and it’s the first release of this Mandriva derived GNU/Linux distribution to offer a complete ARM64 (AArch64) port that lets you install it on various popular ARM devices.

    Installable images are currently provided for the Raspberry Pi 400, Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, Pinebook Pro, Rock Pi 4A, Rock Pi 4B, and Rock Pi 4C. In time, more ARM devices will be supported, such as the PinePhone Linux phone.

  • OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 is out now

    The OpenMandriva Team is pleased to announce the general availability of the latest stable version. Say hello to OpenMandriva Lx 4.2.

    OpenMandriva Lx is a unique and independent distribution, direct descendant of Mandriva Linux and the first Linux distribution using the LLVM toolchain by default since 2015.

    In the OpenMandriva Lx system the users can do anything they are used to doing with the proprietary systems, but it is free and already includes many pieces of software you have to pay for in the proprietary world, from office suites to video editors to games.

    OMLx 4.2 is now even easier to use with improved OM Welcome, the brand-name tool which makes possible to install a range of well known applications with just one click.

    This release comes with the latest and brightest KDE products (see below for technical details).
    This version also includes:
    LibreOffice suite 7.1.0, Krita 4.4.2, Digikam 7.2, SMPlayer 21.1.0, VLC 3.0.12.1, Falkon browser 3.1, SimpleScreenRecorder 0.4.3;
    Desktop Presets (om-feeling-like) to customize the appearance of your OpenMandriva Plasma desktop to look and feel similar to other systems you may be used to;
    Software Repository Selector (om-repo-picker) to enable additional repositories with thousands of additional Free Software packages.

• Gentoo Family

  • In Memory of Kent “kentnl” Fredric

    Gentoo mourns the sudden loss of Kent Fredric, also known to us by his IRC handle kent\n. He passed away following a tragic accident a few days ago.

    Kent was an active member of the Gentoo community for many years. He tirelessly managed Gentoo’s Perl support, and was active in the Rust project as well as in many other corners. We all remember him as an enthusiastic, bright person, with lots of eye for detail and constant willingness to help out and improve things. On behalf of the world-wide Gentoo community, our heartfelt condolences go out to his family and friends.

    Please join us in remembering Kent on the Gentoo forums.

  • Gentoo mourns the loss of Kent Fredric

    A brief post on the Gentoo site is in memory of Kent “kent\n” Frederic.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • KDE Applications, systemd update in Tumbleweed

    A minor version update of systemd and KDE’s Applications 20.12.2 were releases in openSUSE Tumbleweed this week.

    Several other package were updated over the course of four snapshots like Wireshark, Mesa, ClamAV, Inkscape and GNU Compiler Collection.

    Snapshot 20210210 updated just three packages in the last 24 hours. Web caching proxy squid had a 4.14 update that fixed a couple regressions and corrected some Web Cache Communication Protocol Security info. The two other package updates were for PyPI with python-scipy updating to 1.6.0 and python-zope.interface updating to 5.2.0, which added support for Python 3.9.

    The open source antivirus package ClamAV updated to version 0.103.1 in snapshot 20210209. The new version 0.103.1 added a new scan option to alert on broken media (graphics) file formats. The feature mitigates the risk of malformed media files intended to exploit vulnerabilities in other software. The version also fixed an issue where the freshclam database validation didn’t work correctly when run in daemon mode on Linux. The patterns-xfce package cleaned up some weak dependencies in its 20210209 update. A simple SSH multi-factor authentication was implemented with the update of the remote desktop client remmina in version 1.4.11; while not finished, a capability to load Python plugins was added. Other packages updated in the snapshot were libp11 0.4.11, video editor pitivi 2021.01, and xfce4-taskmanager 1.4.1.

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the weeks 2021/05 & 06

    Apologies for missing the review of the week 2021/05 to be sent out in time. But as you already know from the past, that does not mean the information is being lost. I’ll just give you a review of the last two weeks instead. For Tumbleweed, this means we have seen 8 snapshots being published in those two weeks (0130, 0131, 0202, 0203, 0205, 0208, 0209, and 0210).

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Red Hat OpenShift Supports Alpitour Group’s Organization-Wide Digital Transformation

    Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Alpitour Group, the Italian leader in tourism and one of the most important players in Europe, has chosen Red Hat OpenShift as the hybrid cloud platform of choice for its digital transformation as it looks to adapt faster to changing environments and be at the forefront of bringing innovative experiences to customers.

  • SD Times news digest: Dynatrace Software Intelligence Hub, npm 7 released, and Python accepts pattern matching PEP 634

    Winners included Red Hat Integration for API infrastructure, Kong for API services, SmartBear for app analytics and testing, and many more.

  • Containers, Kubernetes and Software Development in 2021

    Although mass migration to containers and management with Kubernetes is undeniable, it’s still new to many teams and can present challenges to developers, administrators and operators. Tushar Katarki, Senior Manager, Red Hat OpenShift Product Management, shares his insights on what’s driving growth, how to overcome challenges your team may face and best practices to make a part of your processes.

  • How to adopt DevSecOps successfully

    Adopting DevOps can help an organization transform and speed how its software is delivered, tested, and deployed to production. This is the well-known “DevOps promise” that has led to such a large surge in adoption.

    We’ve all heard about the many successful DevOps implementations that changed how an organization approaches software innovation, making it fast and secure through agile delivery to get ahead of competitors. This is where we see DevOps’ promises achieved and delivered.

    But on the flipside, some DevOps adoptions cause more issues than benefits. This is the DevOps dilemma where DevOps fails to deliver on its promises.

  • Fedora’s “Enterprise Linux Next” Taking Flight To Experiment With Next-Gen RHEL Changes

    Over the past year there has been much chatter about Enterprise Linux Next within the Fedora camp and now this special interest group (SIG) is finally getting underway.

  • DevSecOps: Image scanning in your pipelines using quay.io scanner

    According to the Sysdig 2021 Container Security and Usage Report, container security is a growing concern for many organizations. However, there are still some gaps. Container image scanning and privileged containers are two of the most crucial aspects.

    Podman rootless containers (see Running rootless Podman as a non-root user and Rootless containers with Podman: The basics) and OpenShift Container Platform both implement the principle of least privilege by default, which helps administrators to enforce security best practices. Red Hat quay.io and Red Hat quay container registry offerings help administrators and developers incorporate image vulnerability scanning into their CI/CD pipelines.

  • Network address translation part 2 – the conntrack tool

    This is the second article in a series about network address translation (NAT). The first article introduced how to use the iptables/nftables packet tracing feature to find the source of NAT-related connectivity problems. Part 2 introduces the “conntrack” command. conntrack allows you to inspect and modify tracked connections.

  • Developing your own custom devfiles for odo 2.0

    Odo 2.0 introduces a configuration file named devfile.yaml. Odo uses this configuration file to set up cloud-native projects and determine the actions required for events such as building, running, and debugging a project. If you are an Eclipse Che user, devfile.yaml should sound familiar: Eclipse Che uses devfiles to express developer workspaces, and they have proven to be flexible to accommodate a variety of needs.

    Odo 2.0 comes with a built-in catalog of devfiles for various project types, so you do not necessarily need to write or modify a devfile to start a new project. You can also create custom devfiles and contribute them to odo’s devfile catalog. This article explores how to create a devfile to adopt an existing development flow to run on a Kubernetes cluster. Our example project is based on Gatsby, a framework for generating websites. Gatsby comes with its own developer tools and recommended development flow, so it presents a good example for adopting existing flows for Kubernetes.

  • The journey to virtualization for cable and media

    The media functions virtualization (MFV) journey is underway at many cable and media companies. MFV can help drive greater agility and efficiency in the methods in which media content is delivered. Red Hat has helped Multiple Service Operators (MSOs) to build their MFV solutions in order to reduce costs, scale efficiently, and decrease time to market.

  • How Red Hat And Intel Are Collaborating To Accelerate 5G Innovation And Adoption

    Red Hat and Intel announced plans to expand their strategic partnership. This new wave of collaboration with Intel is aimed at enabling offerings like Edge computing, 5G radio access networks (RAN), 5G core, hybrid multi-cloud networking and more in enterprise and telecommunications service provider networks. We invited two guests to our show to discuss this collaboration. We hosted Renu Navale, VP & GM – Edge Computing and Ecosystem Enabling Division at Intel and Ian Hood, Chief Technologist, Global Service Provider Business at Red Hat.

• OpenStack

  • How the OpenStack community is collaborating during the pandemic

    The OpenStack community is BIG. From Argentina to Morocco to Israel to Vietnam, we literally span the globe, so it’s not surprising that we largely knew what to do to accommodate COVID-19′s circumstances. But it still has been a struggle to keep moving forward and adapt while still delivering Ussuri and Victoria, the 21st and 22nd releases of OpenStack.

    Even if you were working remotely before the pandemic, many things changed. I have worked remotely for over four years, but it was broken up by seeing coworkers and community members in real life roughly once a month at conferences and meetups. But now, I haven’t seen any of them in person in a year, and I have twice as many meetings as I used to. My circumstances are certainly nothing like what frontline workers face, but when screen time is your main interaction with humanity, it gets downright lonely.

  • OpenStack Ironic, Cinder volume replication and Glance multi-store – OpenStack Charms 21.01

    Canonical is proud to announce the availability of OpenStack Charms 21.01. This new release includes: a tech-preview version of OpenStack Ironic operators (charms), Cinder volume replication and Glance multi-store support for Charmed OpenStack.

Devices/Embedded

• Top 10 Best Alternatives to Raspberry Pi OS for Your Raspberry Pi Computer

  If, for some reason, you don’t want to use the official Raspberry Pi OS on your Raspberry Pi computer, you should know that there are many alternatives out there. Some of these distros are derived from Raspberry Pi OS, which in turn is based on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, but others are derived from Arch Linux, Gentoo, etc.

  Each of the alternatives showcased in this article come with various other desktop environments, such as GNOME, Unity, Xfce, KDE Plasma, MATE, LXQt, and Openbox, which you may find out they better suit your needs.

• AAEON PICO-TGU4 Pico-ITX Tiger Lake UP3 SBC Comes with 2.5 GbE, SATA, HDMI & eDP

  I’ve just written about the first Tiger Lake UP3 Pico-ITX motherboard I’ve seen with Commell LP-179 equipped with an Intel Core i7 or Celeron processor, but while doing research on the topic, AAEON PICO-TGU4 Pico-ITX SBC with “11th Generation Intel Core i7/i5/i3/Celeron U-Series Processor SoC” showed up.

• SageTea Announces the Release of XFone – a Powerful Computer Packed in a Smartphone

  …XFone – a powerful Ubuntu Linux 64 desktop / server platform packed into a bare metal rooted Class A re-certified smartphone…

• How to Homelab: 3 awesome apps to run on your Raspberry Pi – YouTube

  Following up on the previous video, where I gave you guys an overview of the Raspberry Pi in general (and why it’s a great fit for homelab) I go over three apps that are a great benefit for any homelab. OpenMediaVault, Nextcloud, and Pi-Hole are covered in this video

• Machine learning and depth estimation using Raspberry Pi

• Crouching Pi, Hidden Server | Self-Hosted 38

  Alex shocks Chris with his latest project, then lays down some quick-fire picks.

  Plus what’s wrong with OPNsense’s Wireguard setup?

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Your Own 11.2 GHz Radio Telescope | Hackaday

    We liked that this was a pretty meaty example of using GNU Radio.

  • Pebble Tracker nRF9160 GPS & cellular IoT platform connects to IoTeX blockchain (Crowdfunding)

    There’s now a new kit called Pebble Tracker that features Nordic Semi nRF9160 with NB-IoT, LTE-M, and GPS connectivity, as well as environmental, motion, and light sensors. The cellular IoT prototyping platform works with the IoTeX blockchain to design decentralized IoT solutions with higher security.

  • Arduino Day 2021: Submit your event by March 14th

    Arduino Day, which will be held on March 27th this year, is the celebration of the Arduino community and the achievements of its members. The last several years have seen more than 3,000 community initiatives, organized from project exhibitions to talks and workshops, spanning across hundreds of countries worldwide.

    In a year of social distancing, we realized (even more) the magnitude of the Arduino open-source community. Connecting us all, our community has broken down the barriers of physical distances and self-isolation. While the pandemic has made us feel further apart, Arduino has brought us a bit closer.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • This isn’t the Android 12 theming system, but it shows us how hard system themes are to get right | Android Central

  • Android 12 wallpapers in high resolution are already available for download

  • Alphabet Scoop 112: Previewing Android 12 – 9to5Google

  • Android Auto is finally getting wallpapers and Google Assistant routines | Android Central

  • Android Auto adds custom shortcuts and re-enables Google Assistant routines

  • Android Auto finally brings wallpaper support, adds a shortcut for Assistant actions – Neowin

  • Android Auto Re-Enables Google Assistant Routines

  • Android Auto Reactivates Google Assistant Routines After 2-Year Absence – Voicebot.ai

  • 9to5Google Daily 607: Android Auto wallpaper support arrives, Google Photos adds advanced video editor and puts features behind paywall, plus more – 9to5Google

  • Google launches App Quality to aid developers in building engaging Android apps – Neowin

  • The Best Stock Trading Apps For Android From Around The World In 2021

  • Best new mobile games on iOS and Android this February | Metro News

  • Top Gaming Sites Not On GamStop For Android Users

  • How to record a phone call on Android | Android Central

  • Android 12 design leak reveals radical visual overhaul – 9to5Google

  • These screenshots could reveal huge UI changes in Android 12

  • First look at Android 12 shows off updated widgets, possible system-wide theming | Android Central

  • Android 12 leaked screenshots give us a first look at how the Android update could look | TechRadar

  • This Android 12 leak looks an awful lot like iOS 14 | PCWorld

  • Android 12 leak appears to show major redesign with color-changing UI | Ars Technica

  • Android 12 rumored to get new widgets and privacy features – CNET

  • Discussion: Do you like the leaked Android 12 changes?

  • Android 12: New Notification Panel, More Privacy Features And Flexible Widgets

  • Android 12′s biggest feature should be an easy upgrade to Android 13

  • Here is the new Android 12 wallpaper for you to download – Gizmochina

  • Nokia 5.4 Android One: First impression | Deccan Herald

  • The 20 best tablet-optimized apps for Android

  • Android Auto adds wallpapers and clever Assistant shortcut feature

  • Slack users on Android aren’t too happy about changes to app fonts and notifications | Android Central

  • Using Slack on your Android phone? You should reset your password right now away

  • Slack Urges Users To Reset Passwords After Android Bug Potentially Exposed Credentials

  • Slack for Android Could Have Exposed Your Password: Here’s How to Reset | Technology News

  • Slack users on Android advised to change their passwords: Report – The Hindu BusinessLine

  • Why You Should Update Slack For Android Password As Soon As Possible

  • Slack users with Android phones need to change their passwords immediately – BGR

  • Do You Use Slack On Your Android Phone? Reset Your Password Right Now! – Tech

  • Slack says Android users’ passwords were left exposed for a month on its platform

  • Slack on Android users might have to reset their password – company says it applies to only a ‘small subset’ of users | Business Insider India

  • Google Mulling an Android Version of Apple’s New Anti-Tracking Terms – CPO Magazine

  • Military, Nuclear Entities Under Target By Novel Android Malware | Threatpost

  • Qualys expands VMDR to mobile devices with support for Android and iOS/iPadOS – Help Net Security

  • Android 12 screenshots leak showcases redesigned interface and new features – Gizmochina

  • Android 12: Expected release date, features, rollout plan, and everything we know so far- Technology News, Firstpost

  • Sony Android 11 update tracker: List of eligible devices & release date

  • This Android phone maker just patented perhaps the weirdest foldable phone yet | TechRadar

  • FAUG: How to Download on Android (APK), Release Date on App Store for iOS Phones, Requirements, Game Size, and More – MySmartPrice

  • Attention Android users – you should probably change your Slack password

  • Android TV Home 3.0 prepares for Google TV-like ‘Discover’ tab revamp – 9to5Google

  • Top 9 Best Valentine’s Day Android Apps – 2021

  • moto e6i: Motorola launches Moto E6i Android Go smartphone with dual camera – Mobiles News | Gadgets Now

  • Google Prompt 2FA UI on Android gets dark theme – 9to5Google

  • Best Free Android Apps: DroidFish – Stockfish chess engine

    There’s a strict eligibility criteria for inclusion in this series. See the Eligibility Criteria section below.

    DroidFish is a rather special chess playing app that sports an attractive interface with clear and stylish pieces.

    The app supports various playing modes. You can play against your phone, against another human, or just watch as a spectator as your phone slugs it out against itself.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• 18 ways to differentiate open source products from upstream suppliers

  In the first three parts of this series, I explored open source as a supply chain, what a product is, and what product managers do. In this fourth article, I’ll look at a plethora of methods to differentiate open source software products from their upstream open source projects.

  Since open source projects are essentially information products, these methods are likely to apply to many information-related products (think YouTube creators) that have a component of value given away for free. Product managers have to get creative when the information and material to build your product is freely available to users.

• Movim | Basic Review & Beginner’s Guide

  Once you read about Movim, immediately you will find about Xmpp. It is Jabber, also known as Xmpp, a secure, decentralized, and federated technology everyone can use to chat online existed strongly since 1990′s. To give you how great Xmpp network is, actually when you use WhatsApp you use Xmpp, so does with Google Talk and Jitsi, so when you use those you are using Xmpp. To give you a few of its benefits, Xmpp is not controlled by a single company (so unlike Twitter) it is hard to shut down by anyone.

• Daniel Pocock: Comparing private and peer-to-peer VoIP solutions

  One of the top questions people ask RTC developers around Valentine’s Day is whether we finally have a private solution people can use to communicate with their partner.

  There is fresh attention on the issue this year after Twitter and other large providers flexed their muscles and demonstrated that they are more powerful than the US President.

  [...]

  Achieving independence from cloud services doesn’t necessarily give you privacy. There are trade-offs to be made. John Goerzen recently published a blog about privacy issues in current P2P tools.

• The Apache News Round-up: week ending 12 February 2021

  Friday arrived quickly –happy Lunar New Year to those who celebrate! The Apache community has had a productive week; let’s review…

• Events

  • Register to attend the FSF’s March 22nd seminar on free software licensing

    The Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) Licensing and Compliance Lab has years of experience defending the GNU General Public License (GPL) against violations, but we do not do this work alone: we work with volunteers, lawyers, and other organizations on the compliance cases brought to us. The work the compliance team does is valuable for the future of the FSF, as well as for the future of computing. The knowledge gained and the precedents set will be lessons for the next generation of legal professionals working on copyleft and the GPL.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Karl Dubost: Browser Wish List – Bookmark This Selection

      Some of us are keeping notes of bread and crumbs fallen everywhere. A dead leaf, a piece of string, a forgotten note washed away on a beach, and things read in a book. We collect memories and inspiration.

      All browsers have a feature called “Bookmark This Page”. It is essentially the same poor badly manageable tool on every browsers. If you do not want to rely on a third party service, or an addon, what the browser has to offer is not very satisfying.

      Firefox gives a possibility to change the name, to choose where to put it and to add tags at the moment we save it.

    • Avoiding “supercookie” tracking

      The release of Firefox 85 at the end of January brought a new technique for thwarting yet-another web-tracking scheme. The use of browser cookies for tracking is well-established and the browser makers have taken steps to block the worst abuses there, but users can also take steps to manage and clear those cookies. The arms race continues, however, as tracking companies are using browser caches to store what Mozilla calls “supercookies”, which allow users to be tracked across the web sites that they visit. That has led the browser makers to partition these caches by web site in order to prevent this tracking technique.

      In the interest of faster browsing, web browsers cache lots of resources so that they do not need to make another network round-trip to obtain them. That includes such items as images, style sheets, fonts, HTTP resources (including JavaScript code), DNS query results, TLS certificates, and more. In addition, browsers reuse long-lived connections when another site makes a relevant request; that too can be abused by tracking companies. These companies then sell that information to advertisers and others, which are able to build up a truly creepy amount of correlated information about a user’s interests and activities.

      So, as described in a Mozilla security blog post that accompanied the Firefox 85 release, the new browser will be partitioning these caches and connections based on the associated top-level domain. That means there will be no reuse when other sites request the same resources (or could use existing connections). The post notes that Chrome has rolled out a similar change.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Gutter margin in Writer

    Writer now has much better support for gutter margins: not only this margin type can be specified explicitly, it’s also possible to select if the gutter should be on the left or on the top, and it works with mirrored margins as well.

    This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is fully available in desktop Writer as well.

    [...]

    Word has a gutter margin feature, and we saw that some UI-level workaround appeared to have something similar based on the LibreOffice technology. We thought it’s much better to impelement this properly, so that the result is interoperable with Word, and also available both in Online and on the desktop.

• CMS

  • Elementor to Roll Out Significant Pricing Hike for New Customers – WordPress Tavern

    Pricing changes can be a major source of friction for existing customers, as GitLab recently discovered when dropping its Bronze/Starter Tier and imposing a 5x price increase on those features in a higher tier. Although the immediate impact of pricing increases will primarily hit new customers, it’s the existing customers who have been paying for subscriptions for years who have the strongest opinions on the changes.
    Raising prices to introduce more value for customers or to account for the increased support burden is a natural evolution for companies that experience rapid growth over a short period of time. Getting existing customers to lock in their auto-renewals by offering legacy pricing is also a strategy for ensuring a more predictable financial future for the company. But Elementor’s lack of clarity regarding term length for the discounted renewal pricing is the primary reason for all the agitation in the comments on the announcement.

• FSF

  • GNU Projects

    • Carmen Bianca Bakker: Destination status quo

      I recently happened upon an article that argued against the four freedoms as defined by the Free Software Foundation. I don’t actually want to link to the article—its tone is rather rude and unsavoury, and I do not want to end up in a kerfuffle—but I’ll include an obfuscated link at the end of the article for the sake of integrity.

      The article—in spite of how much I disagree with its conclusions—inspired me to reflect on idealism and the inadequacy of things. Those are the things I want to write about in this article.

      So instead of refuting all the points with arguments and counter-arguments, my article is going to work a little differently. I’m going to concede a lot of points and truths to the author. I’m also going to assume that they are ultimately wrong, even though I won’t make any arguments to the contrary. That’s simply not what I want to do in this article, and smarter people than I have already made a great case for the four freedoms. Rather, I want to follow the author’s arguments to where they lead, or to where they do not.

      The four freedoms

      The four freedoms of free software are four condition that a program must meet before it can be considered free. They are—roughly—the freedoms to (1.) use, (2.) study, (3.) share, and (4.) improve the program. The assertion is that if any of these conditions is not met, the user is meaningfully and helplessly restricted in how they can exercise their personal liberties.

      The aforementioned article views this a little differently, however. Specifically, I found its retorts on the first and second freedoms interesting.

• Programming/Development

  • IPCDump Is A New Tool For Tracing Interprocess Communication On Linux

    Guardicore has announced the availability of IPCDump, a new open source tool for tracing interprocess communication on Linux.

    [...]

    Additional features include: Support for pipes and FIFOs, Loopback IPC, Signals (regular and real-time), Unix streams and datagrams, Pseudoterminal-based IPC, Event filtering based on process PID or name and Human-friendly or JSON-formatted output.

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSimdJson 0.1.4 on CRAN: New Improvements

    Brendan and I are happy to share that a new RcppSimdJson release 0.1.4 arrived on CRAN earlier today. RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon (also voted best talk).

  • Ravgeet Dhillon: Add Unsubscribe link in emails using Google Apps Script

    When setting up our email marketing campaigns or newsletters, one thing that is often forgot is Unsubscribe link. Not providing an option to unsubscribe from the mailing list can land our emails into spam. In this blog, we will look at how we can add an Unsubscribe link in our emails sent using Google Apps Script.

  • Perl/Raku

    • Perl weekly challenge 99

    • Perl Weekly Challenge 99: Pattern Match and Unique Subsequence

      Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days (February 14, 2021). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

    • berrybrew version 1.33 released!

      I’ve released berrybrew version 1.33. This version has significant enhancements, along with some bug fixes and handling of some uncaught exceptions. The changes reflect versions 1.30 to 1.33.

  • Python

    • Learn And Code Confusion Matrix With Python

      The confusion matrix is a way to visualize how many samples from each label got predicted correctly. The beauty of the confusion matrix is that it actually allows us to see where the model fails and where the model succeeds, especially when the labels are imbalanced. In other words, we are able to see beyond the model’s accuracy.

    • The 10 Best and Useful Tips To Speed Up Your Python Code

      If someone asks you – “What is the fastest-growing programming language in the world right now?” the answer will be simple. Its python. The worldwide popularity is due to its simple syntax and rich libraries. Nowadays, you can almost do anything with python: Data science, machine learning, signal processing, data visualization – you name it. However, many people claim that python is a little slow while solving grave problems. But the time to execute a program depends on the code one writes. With some tips and tricks, one can speed up Python code and enhance the program’s performance.

RIP Anne Feeney, Legendary Labor Songwriter, Whose Favorite Place to Sing Was on a Picket Line

Anne Feeney, the legendary Pittsburgh folk singer-songwriter and self-described rabble-rouser, has died of COVID at age 69. Her death comes a decade after she joined in the Wisconsin uprising against a draconian anti-union bill and “sang its solidarity song,” remembers The Nation’s John Nichols, who covered the protests and is based in Madison.

‘Minari’ Is a Landmark for Asian American Cinema

Minari’s power is anchored in its incidental details, the most substantial of which are unveiled upon the arrival of the film’s comic relief and catalyst: the grandmother, Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung). Visiting the remote trailer home of the Yis, the family at the center of Lee Isaac Chung’s semiautobiographical immigrant drama set in 1980s Arkansas, Soonja comes bearing gifts that struck me with the kind of ritualistic familiarity so few films do. First she pulls out gochugaru (Korean chili pepper flakes) from her suitcase, followed by anchovies, an essential ingredient that’s the base of so many Korean dishes. Her daughter Monica (Han Ye-ri), the Yi family matriarch, begins to cry; these ingredients are clearly hard to find in the Yis’ new home. “Over anchovies?” Soonja teases, though both know the significance of the gesture.

Science

• Evolution Doesn’t Give a Damn About Us, or the USA

  In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. At the end of the book, there is this wonderful passage about the power of natural selection. Darwin writes: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” The fact that you are reading this now is a product of billions of years of evolution, no small miracle in and of itself.

Education

• Iowa Bills Would Ban Teachers From Talking About Trans Issues

Health/Nutrition

• In ‘Particularly Cruel’ Act, Maine Hospital Vaccinates Out-of-State Union-Busters as Vulnerable Residents Forced to Wait

  “It’s concerning that MaineHealth would put their own anti-union agenda, and their own bottom line, ahead of the health and well-being of Maine people.”

• ‘An Outrage’: AstraZeneca Told to Justify Unequal Vaccine Pricing Amid Soaring Profits

  “Why is the global south paying more than rich countries for your #Covid19 vaccine?” Global Justice Now asks the pharmaceutical giant, which has pledged not to profit from the vaccine during the pandemic.

• Medicare for All the ‘Only Way Forward,’ Concludes Lancet Panel in Study Detailing Death and Misery Inflicted by Trump

  “Trump’s disastrous actions compounded longstanding failures in health policy in the USA. We know what it will take to create a healthy society. We just need the political will to do it.”

• Covid-19: a Nation at War?

  He added: “And as such, I directed the team to be ready to exercise all the authorities I have under the Defense Production Act, and expedite these vaccines.  And we’re using the Defense Production Act to launch a full-scale, wartime effort to address the supply shortages we inherited from the previous administration.”

  Among Biden’s first actions was to “directed relevant agencies to exercise all appropriate authorities, including the DPA, to accelerate manufacturing, delivery, and administration to meet shortfalls in these twelve categories of critical supplies, including taking action to increase the availability of supplies like N95 masks …” and other products “to accelerate the manufacture, delivery, and administration of COVID-19 vaccine.”

• Tracking the coronavirus pandemic and vaccine rollouts

  The coronavirus pandemic continues to test humanitarian responses in 2021, while the world faces new questions about how to ensure equal access to vaccines.

  Many countries have started rolling out coronavirus vaccines, but it’s unclear when – and in some cases, how – these vaccines will reach people caught in crisis zones. The COVID-19 pandemic is driving record-breaking humanitarian needs: Global aid response plans total more than $35 billion this year.

• Why there will be fewer and fewer doctors and medical practices in Germany and the health system will get worse and worse

  Please do not get it wrong, I am also for data protection, definitely, but then we would have to IMMEDIATELY SWITCH OFF Microsoft Windows Office, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Google, if the EU is serious with data protection.

  The EU GDPR is a catastrophe.

  [...]

  The result: more and more legal uncertainty, fear of doing something wrong, effort and costs for the freelance/self-employed doctor.

  Instead, there will be a centralization, there will be a handful of MVZ GmbHs, large gigantic companies that keep 100 or more doctors in the employee relationship (and will make sure that the doctor profession becomes even less attractive, as is already happening in the old people’s home, where in case of poor pay, the nurses are driven into inhuman treating patients (no time) and burnout.)

  With less and less money and at the same time more and more effort (bureaucracy), the quality of the health care system will get worse.

  In addition, there is enormous expense in billing and reimbursement of costs.

  In addition, there is an enormous staff shortage (the so-called shortage of skilled workers is actually present in the medical field and has reached an extreme extent).

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Foundations

        • Linux Foundation Newsletter February 2021: IT Training & Certification Sale, Shuah Khan & Mentorship, OpenSSF First Six Months [Ed: Nice to see that the so-called ‘Linux’ Foundation still uses Microsoft Windows for its newsletter. They reject Linux and merely exploit the brand.]

        • Orange Joins prpl Foundation As A Platinum Member

          Orange has joined the prpl Foundation as a Platinum Member. Prpl Foundation, an open-source, community-driven consortium, is dedicated to the harmonization of network architecture to accelerate greater service provider capabilities worldwide.

  • Security

    • IPFire 2.25 – Core Update 154 available for testing

      The first update of the year will be an enormous one. We have been working hard in the lab to update the underlying operating system to harden and improve IPFire and we have added WPA3 client support and made DNS faster and more resilient against broken Internet connections.

      This is probably the release with the largest number of package updates. This is necessary for us to keep the system modern and adopt any fixes from upstream projects. Thank you to everyone who has contributed by sending in patches.

      If you want to help us out, please send us a donation.

    • Security updates for Friday

      Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (ansible, chromium, cups, docker, firefox, gitlab, glibc, helm, lib32-glibc, minio, nextcloud, opendoas, opera, php, php7, privoxy, python-django, python-jinja, python2-jinja, thunderbird, vivaldi, and wireshark-cli), Fedora (jasper, linux-firmware, php, python-cryptography, spice-vdagent, subversion, and thunderbird), Mageia (gssproxy and phpldapadmin), openSUSE (chromium, containerd, docker, docker-runc,, librepo, nextcloud, and privoxy), SUSE (containerd, docker, docker-runc, golang-github-docker-libnetwork, kernel, openvswitch, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (wpa).

    • A major vulnerability in Sudo

      A longstanding hole in the Sudo privilege-delegation tool that was discovered in late January is a potent local vulnerability. Exploiting it allows local users to run code of their choosing as root by way of a bog-standard heap-buffer overflow. It seems like the kind of bug that might have been found earlier via code inspection or fuzzing, but it has remained in this security-sensitive utility since it was introduced in 2011.

      Qualys reported the bug on January 26; it has been in Sudo from version 1.8.2, released in August 2011, up through 1.9.5p1, which was released on January 11. At the same time as the announcement, Sudo released version 1.9.5p2 to fix the problems. The bug has been assigned CVE-2021-3156, which Qualys has dubbed “Baron Samedit”. That name combines Baron Samedi, the name of the vodou loa of the dead, with sudoedit, which is integral to the exploit.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Gun Trafficking Investigation Shows The FBI Is Still Capable Of Accessing Communications On Encrypted Devices

        It’s been clear for some time that the FBI and DOJ’s overly dramatic calls for encryption backdoors are unwarranted. Law enforcement still has plenty of options to deal with device encryption and end-to-end encrypted messaging services. Multiple reports have shown encryption is rarely an obstacle to investigations. And for all the noise the FBI has made about its supposedly huge stockpile of locked devices, it still has yet to hand over an accurate count of devices in its possession, more than two years after it discovered it had been using an inflated figure to back its “going dark” hysteria for months.

Defence/Aggression

• Opinion | Ending the Other War in Yemen

  The global proliferation of weaponized drones is no surprise and Biden’s plea for peace in Yemen that allows for their continued use is a hollow one.

• Yemen: “Mission Accomplished”… For Now?

  Bush’s May 1, 2003 announcement on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln would turn out to be wildly overoptimistic. The US invaded Iraq in March 2003. US troops would remain in Iraq for the next eight years, until 2011. In 2014, US forces were back, this time to fight the Islamic State. In 2020, US troops left Iraq under pressure from the Iraqi government.

  US forces were in Afghanistan for nearly two decades after invading in 2001, the longest war in US history. (President Donald Trump withdrew the US from Afghanistan in 2020.)

Environment

• Biden—Handed Road Map for Action—Told US Has Moral Responsibility to Lead on Climate Refugees

  The new administration, says a Refugees International expert, needs “to understand that people are already on the move and will continue to be on the move.”

• Opinion | How Biden Can Tackle the Climate Crisis

  Joe Biden has promised to ensure climate justice, but will his administration rise to the challenge?

• Study Warns Emissions Cuts Must Be 80% More Ambitious to Meet Even the Dangerously Inadequate 2°C Target

  “And as if 2°C rather than 1.5°C was acceptable,” responded Greta Thunberg, calling the findings further evidence “that our so-called ‘climate targets’ are insufficient.”

• Energy

  • Opinion | Ad Agencies Like Wavemaker Need to Stop Greenwashing Chevron’s Climate Crimes

    The real purpose of Chevron’s deceptive feel-good advertising is to convince the public and politicians that the oil and gas giant is already acting on climate, so there’s no need to regulate them or hold them accountable.

  • Shell’s ‘Delusional’ Net Zero Strategy Commits $8 Billion to Fossil Fuels

    The oil major today revealed an “accelerated” strategy to reduce oil production and decarbonise its products by 2050.

  • Appalachian Fracking Boom Was a Jobs Bust, Finds New Report

    The fracking boom has received broad support from politicians across the aisle in Appalachia due to dreams of enormous job creation, but a report released on February 10 from Pennsylvania-based economic and sustainability think tank, the Ohio River Valley Institute (ORVI), sheds new light on the reality of this hype.

Finance

• Twitter & India Still Arguing Over Whether Or Not Twitter Accounts Supporting Farmer Protests Need To Be Removed

  Last week we wrote about the Indian government threatening to jail Twitter employees after the company reinstated a long list of accounts that the government demanded be blocked (Twitter blocked them for a brief period of time, before reinstating them). The accounts included some Indian celebrities and journalists, who were talking about the headline news regarding farmer protests. The Mohdi government has proven to be incredibly thin-skinned about negative coverage, and despite Indian protections for free expression, was demanding out-and-out censorship of these accounts. The threats to lock up Twitter employees put the company in an impossible position — and it has now agreed to geoblock (but not shut down) some accounts, but not journalists, activists and politicians.

• Annoyance Builds At Elon Musk Getting A Billion In Subsidies For Starlink Broadband

  So we’ve noted a few times how Elon Musk’s Starlink is going to be a great thing for folks stuck out of reach of traditional broadband options. Though with a $600 first month price tag ($100 monthly bill and $500 hardware charge) it’s not some magic bullet for curing the “digital divide.” And without the capacity to service more densely populated areas, the service is only going to reach several million rural Americans. That’s a good start, but it’s only going to make a tiny dent for the 42 million Americans that lack access to any broadband, or the 83 million currently stuck under a broadband monopoly (usually Comcast). Starlink is going to be a good thing, but not transformative or truly disruptive to US telecom monopolies.

• Progressives Applaud FAIR Act Reintroduction Aimed at Ending Anti-Worker, Anti-Consumer Forced Arbitration

  “There may be no more blatant example of how giant corporations like Wells Fargo, Equifax, Amazon, and Uber rig our economy than forced arbitration.”

• Opinion | Biden Could Cancel Student Debt With the Stroke of a Pen

  Canceling student debt isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s the economically smart thing to do. It would liberate millions of Americans to meaningfully participate in our economy.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• “It’s About the Future”: Democrats Say Conviction of Remorseless Trump Necessary to Avoid Insurrection Efforts to Come

  “It’s about making sure that no future official, no future president, does what President Trump did,” said Rep. Ted Lieu.

• “Dangerous to the Republic”: John Nichols Says Trump’s Senate Trial Is Most Important in U.S. History

  Democratic House impeachment managers laid out their case against former President Donald Trump on the second day of the Senate trial, releasing shocking video from inside the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection. The footage shows violent Trump supporters were just 58 steps away from lawmakers’ offices. John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation, says impeachment managers aimed to show that Trump bears clear responsibility for what happened and that the mob attack represented “a genuine threat” to the transition of power. “This is the most important impeachment trial in American history,” says Nichols. “It goes to the heart of why the impeachment power was created in 1787. It is to hold presidents to account when they act in a manner that might be that of a monarch or a king, when they take actions to perpetuate their own power that are dangerous to the republic.”

• WATCH LIVE: House Democrats Present Closing Arguments on Day 3 of Trump Impeachment Trial

  The House impeachment managers are expected to focus on the former president’s complete lack of remorse for his behavior that incited the deadly insurrection.

• ‘Your Republican Party Everybody’: GOP Senators Accused of Violating Oaths by Meeting With Trump Lawyers During Trial

  Given the “extraordinarily good job” by Democratic impeachment managers the past few days, said Sen. Dick Durbin, “I’d imagine they’re pretty desperate to come up with a good defense strategy.”

• Analysis Reveals Trump Operation Paid $3.5 Million to Organizers of Rally That Led to Deadly Capitol Attack

  “Thanks to an opaque payment scheme, we may never know the full extent of the campaign’s payments to the event’s organizers.”

• Opinion | Saving Pacifica Radio Is Critical to Building a Progressive Movement

  “We are in a battle for the heart and soul of Pacifica.”

• Belgorod university vice-rector steps down amid scandal over pro-Putin video

  The vice-rector of the Belgorod State Institute of Arts and Culture (BGIIK), Natalya Baranichenko, has resigned of her own accord in response to a scandal surrounding a pro-Putin video, reports the local news site Bel.ru. 

• Opinion | Can America’s Soul Be Saved From Poison Injected by Trump?

  Only by acknowledging the evil caused by the simultaneous presence of racism, materialism, and militarism, will it be remotely possible for the United States to take the first few halting steps toward redemption.

• The DOJ Has Released Its Clearest Evidence Yet Tying Jan. 6 Militants to Trump

• Biden Rescinds Trump’s Emergency Order Diverting Tax Dollars Toward Border Wall

• Raskin Was Right When He Said Trump’s Actions Were Worse Than Yelling “Fire!”

• Fox News Cut Off an Impeachment Manager Mid-Sentence, Censoring the Trial

• Lukashenko announces plans for Belarus to hold constitutional referendum in 2022

  A draft of a new constitution for Belarus will be ready in 2021 and it will be the subject of a national referendum early next year, announced President Alexander Lukashenko (Alyaksandr Lukashenka) at the All-Belarusian People’s Assembly in Minsk on Wednesday, February 11. 

• ‘Looks Like Trump Wasn’t Playing Around’: President Was Told Pence in Danger Just Minutes Before Twitter Attack on VP

  Latest revelation could be put to use by Democratic impeachment managers. And as one observer put it, “When the jurors are also witnesses, strange things happen.”

• Republicans Who Voted to Table Impeachment Were Visibly Moved by Jan. 6 Clips

• Faced With ‘Inarguable Facts’ of Trump’s Guilt, GOP Senators Falsely Claim Constitution Forbids Voting to Convict

  “You see, under a strict construction of the Constitution, it is constitutional for the president to try to murder Congress, but unconstitutional for Congress to do anything about it,” said one mocking critic.

• Opinion | Republicans Are Now the Party of Lawlessness and Disorder

  There really is no debating that Trump incited a deadly insurrection riot, no more so than we might debate that the earth is round. And the pending vote to convict or acquit will make clear exactly what the GOP has become.

• If Republicans Have a Conscience, They’ll Convict Trump. Most Don’t.

  If anything could change Republican minds about convicting Donald Trump for inciting the deadly January 6 insurrection, I thought on Tuesday, it would be the legal and moral arguments marshaled by House Democratic impeachment manager Jamie Raskin, and the devastating, terrifying video evidence his team presented. The violence depicted there was beyond what any of us knew happened on that scary day.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• “You Guys Are Not Immune”: Modi Government Cracks Down on Independent Media Amid Farmer Protests

  Indian farmworkers are continuing to take to the streets to demand Prime Minister Narendra Modi repeal three highly contested agricultural laws. Farmworkers say the laws, which seek to deregulate markets and allow large corporations to set prices, threaten their livelihoods. Dozens have died since the start of the protests, with many deaths caused by the harsh winter as tens of thousands of farmers have camped out in the cold on the outskirts of New Delhi and other parts of the country. The Modi government has come under harsh criticism for its response to the uprising as it raided the offices of the progressive news site NewsClick and demanded that Twitter remove hundreds of accounts as part of a crackdown on information about the protests. “The main idea of doing this is to send a warning and a message to the rest of us, the independent media, to say that you guys are not immune,” says P. Sainath, award-winning Indian journalist and founder of the People’s Archive of Rural India. “Independent media is having it as hard as it gets just now.”

• Opinion | The Fawning Coverage of Psaki’s Performance Suggests Some in the Press Have Forgotten That Spin Doctors Are Not on Your Side

  For all the calm Psaki is bringing into the White House press room after a four-year circus, as State Department spokesperson it was her job to justify the most imperial aspects of the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

• Louisiana AG Sues Journalists To Keep Them From Obtaining Documents Detailing Sexual Harassment By Top Prosecutor

  Another public official is attempting to make the public records request process even more aggravating and expensive than it already is.

• Advocacy Groups Sue Biden Admin. to Force Release of Trump-Era Family Immigration Detention Records

  “Children should be able to grow up with their families, friends, and communities—not be detained based solely on their immigration status.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Citing ‘Moral and Public Health Imperative,’ Progressive Lawmakers Press Biden on Sanctions Relief

  The 27 Democrats called for “much-needed and overdue changes to the way we use sanctions as a foreign policy tool.”

• Best friends forever Journalists link ‘Putin’s palace’ to banker Yuri Kovalchuk and a Crimean retreat built for Khrushchev

  Since Alexey Navalny released a bombshell report last month that reawakened the public’s interest in Vladimir Putin’s alleged mansion on the Black Sea coast, journalists in Russia and abroad have revealed new details about the lavish residence outside Gelendzhik. Most recently, investigative reporters at Sobesednik, Proekt, The Bell, and other outlets have linked the infamous “palace” to Yuri Kovalchuk, the principal shareholder of Rossiya Bank and one of Vladimir Putin’s oldest friends. 

• Russian law enforcement threatens more felony prosecutions ahead of pro-Navalny flashmobs planned for Sunday

  Russian federal prosecutors warned on Thursday that it is illegal to incite or participate in mass demonstrations organized in violation of public-assembly statutes. In similar statements released by the Federal Investigative Committee and Interior Ministry, Russian officials threatened felony charges against Internet users who advocate “riots.”

• Tailing Kara-Murza Bellingcat and its partners implicate FSB squad in suspected poisonings of Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza

  The FSB unit implicated in the poisonings of Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny and three other victims has now been linked to two suspected assassination attempts on Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza. A new joint investigation from Bellingcat and its partners, The Insider and Der Spiegel, reveals that FSB agents were also tailing Kara-Murza just before his near-fatal poisonings in 2015 and 2017. Meduza summarizes the findings from this new report.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Dumb New GOP Talking Point: If You Restore Net Neutrality, You HAVE To Kill Section 230. Just Because!

  As the FCC gets closer to restoring net neutrality, a new and bizarre GOP talking point has emerged. It goes something like this: if you’re going to restore some modest rules holding telecom monopolies accountable, you just have to dismantle a law that protects free speech on the internet! This of course makes no coherent sense whatsoever, but that’s not stopping those looking to demolish Section 230, a law that is integral to protecting speech online.

• Gemini: Is The Modern Web Really Too Bloated? – YouTube

  Recently a few Linux channels have been discussing Project Gemini which like Gopher is another web protocol that tries to approach the web in a fundamentally different way from what we typically see today. Whilst it’s never going to replace the current web there are use cases for it along side the existing web.

Monopolies

• Tackling the monopoly problem

  There was a time when people who were exploring computational technology saw it as the path toward decentralization and freedom worldwide. What we have ended up with, instead, is a world that is increasingly centralized, subject to surveillance, and unfree. How did that come to be? In a keynote at the online 2021 linux.conf.au event, Cory Doctorow gave his view of this problem and named its source: monopoly.

  Doctorow started by saying that many see the people who pushed technology in the last century as blind, naive optimists. In this view, technologists thought that if we just gave everybody a computer, everything would be fine; they failed to foresee how technology could become a dystopian force. He knows some of those people, mostly through his 20 years working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and he does not agree with this view. The truth of the matter is that nobody starts an organization like EFF because they think that everything is going to be great. Those founders were excited about how amazing things could be, but also terrified about how badly it could all go. They wanted to get technology into people’s hands, but also to get the technology policy right.

  [...]

  What we didn’t understand, Doctorow said, was that antitrust law was destroyed in the US by a man named Robert Bork. He is a “perfect market” theorist, who thought that monopolies were good. Laws against monopolies, he argued, only applied if it could be shown that a given situation was causing harm to consumers. At the same time, he made proving that harm nearly impossible. In this world, companies could create monopolies with impunity.

  It is fashionable now to say that the concentration in the technology industry is a result of factors like network effects, first-mover advantages, and data moats. But that is not how these companies created and grew their monopolies; when you have all the money you could need, he said, you can just buy success. Google has made “1.5 successful products” in-house (the search engine and a Hotmail clone); everything else has been bought from elsewhere. These are companies that Google would have been blocked from buying under a strong antitrust regime. Meanwhile many of the other things Google did try to create internally have ended up in the “Google graveyard”.

  Network effects are real, but they are also a double-edged sword when interoperability comes into play. One source of interoperability is technology standards, but another is what he calls “adversarial interoperability” or “competitive compatibility”. AT&T used to block interoperability by forbidding the attachment of outside equipment to the phone network; once that ban went away, the market for telephone equipment took off. Myspace had a set of captive users — until Facebook created a bot to scrape users’ information from the site and port it over.

  Given a chance, companies will create interoperability one way or another, making the market more competitive. This kind of interoperability has been criminalized, though, through mechanisms like copyright, patents, and terms of service. Oracle’s ongoing lawsuit alleging that Google violated the copyright on its Java APIs is a classic example. Companies that own this sort of monopoly are doubly fortunate, since the government will intervene to defend the monopoly against those who would try to break it.

• Patents

  • Fintiv Denials Playing a Role in Huawei Assertion Campaign [Ed: Eastern and Western Districts of Texas weaponises a bad system]

    The PTAB’s precedential Fintiv decision describes a set of factors to be considered when the PTAB decides whether to discretionarily deny an IPR based upon co-pending litigation. And the PTAB has been using discretionary denial at an increasingly high rate, leading to increases in litigation frequency and cost.

    So it isn’t surprising that many of Verizon’s petitions were denied on the basis of Fintiv. Effectively, Verizon had their IPRs denied because they had been sued and the trial could happen a few months before the IPR would conclude. There was no weight given to the likelihood of a stay if the IPR was instituted, no significant weight given to Verizon’s filing of its IPRs in a very short time frame, and no weight given to Congress’s clear intent to have the PTAB conduct reviews of patents that were asserted in parallel litigations.

    So at the end of the day, the Fintiv rule is being applied in a way that harms an American company to the benefit of a company that the U.S. government has alleged to be a national security threat. And this could simply be the start of the problem—Huawei could use its patent portfolio to try to monopolize the network infrastructure market in the same way that Qualcomm has used its portfolio to eliminate competitors in the baseband chipset market.

    U.S. patent policy can’t be protectionist—it has to consider that around half of all U.S. patents go to foreign applicants, and those patents can effectively only be asserted against companies with a U.S. presence. A patent system that goes too far may harm U.S. companies more than it helps them, allowing foreign patent owners to assert patents without concern for cross-exposure to U.S. patent suits.

    If national security is threatened by Huawei becoming a dominant player in 5G, then national security is also harmed by patent policies that make it harder for U.S. businesses to defend themselves against assertions. And national security is harmed by patent policies that make it easier for Huawei to exploit its patents to harm U.S. competitors and U.S.-based customers of competitors.

  • Intellectual property in the digital age in focus at conference held under Portugal’s EU Presidency

    EPO President António Campinos spoke about the importance of supporting innovation at the opening of a high-level online conference on IP held on 11 February on the occasion of Portugal’s EU Council Presidency. The event, entitled “The Intellectual Property Metamorphosis in the Digital Transition Age”, was organised by the Portuguese Institute of Industrial Property (INPI), with the support of the European Commission, European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), the EPO, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

  • Working together to simplify the patent system: First common practices agreed by EPO member states

    In a move to align administrative practices between the EPO and Europe’s national IP offices more closely, EPO member states have agreed on common practices under a joint initiative.

    The first two common practices – in the areas of examination of unity of invention, and designation of the inventor – were endorsed by member states at a meeting of the organisation’s Administrative Council in December 2020.

  • Ericsson VP’s dissent from European Commission’s expert group report on standard-essential patents draws mockery

    On Wednesday, the European Commission finally published the report furnished by its group of experts on licensing and valuation of standard-essential patents (SEPs). As I noted in my commentary, it’s not binding on the Commission or anyone else, and it’s a collection of different perspectives and proposals. Given that it is what it is, it came as a bit of a surprise that Ericsson vice president Monica Magnusson wrote a dissenting opinion that was published along with other materials accompanying the report. I like the fact that U.S. judges write dissents and concurrences to express minority views, but the expert group report in question was so inclusive that everyone can find something to like and something to disagree with, which should render it unnecessary to distance oneself from it. The report is equidistant from the two camps.

    Nevertheless, Mrs. Magnusson wrote her dissent, “with sadness” and despite holding her “fellow Expert Group members [...] in high esteem.” The reason she views the expert group’s as a “lost opportunity” is that it “lack[s] a common position on the current situation and future challenges” (which Reuters also noted). And she criticizes that the numerous “opinions and suggestions are often not accompanied by any empirical evidence and often include methods broadly rejected by courts.” I wouldn’t confuse an expert group for a research team, and in my observation, patent monetization-focused companies like Ericsson believe that the conclusion of license agreements under the threat of injunctions or in connection with commercial agreements constitutes “empirical evidence” of the reasonableness of certain licensing models.

    Politico Pro accurately notes that Ericsson’s dissent is driven by a desire to protect its patent licensing stream (actually, they want to grow those revenues), and goes on to question whether this kind of “drama” was needed.

    [...]

    No matter how often Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm etc. stress that cellular SEPs are typically licensed at the level of handsets and not chips (because of those companies and others doggedly refusing to license baseband chipset makers, except that Qualcomm is more equal than others and secures such licenses for its own baseband chips), the natural choice would still be to license as high up in the value chain as possible. That’s the natural way because patent exhaustion works top-down, not bottom-up.

  • Unitary patent system tipped as next biggest IP development in Europe [Ed: Team UPC continues to scatter propaganda about the UPC, which is dead and buried. They hope that by continuing to lie to the public and the politicians they can pull something off.]

    The proposed unitary patent system will proceed in spite of the UK’s lack of involvement and be the most influential intellectual property (IP) policy development in Europe over the next three years, the head of the Intellectual Property Office of Ireland (IPOI) has said.

    Speaking at an event hosted by Pinsent Masons in Dublin, Gerard Barrett said, however, that he expects talks to take place to involve the UK in a broadened unitary patent and associated Unified Patent Court (UPC) system in the longer term. EU constitutional experts previously said that “innovative legal solutions” are needed to involve the UK, as a non-EU member state, in the UPC framework.

    “Over time there will be some effort made to try to get a system in place that will include the UK, and Switzerland and [perhaps other countries], because I think it is a huge disadvantage not to have the UK participating in it,” said Barrett, who has been controller at the IPOI since 2013.

  • Richard Beddard: the challenge of scoring two top-flight companies [Ed: It says "much-delayed EU Unitary Patent," but it is not delayed, it is dead. They keep repeating their lies.]

    The benefits of the strategy are there for us all to see. It addresses risks like the much-delayed EU Unitary Patent, which for years has threatened to reduce the amount of patent translation required in Europe.

    In this year’s annual report the Unitary Patent gets only one mention in a list of potential legal and regulatory risks. The company has simply diversified away its geographical dependence on Europe and intellectual property.

  • No UK withdrawal from the EPO despite plan to join CPTPP, says government spokesperson [Ed: Saying “government’s decision to rule out membership of the Unified Patent Court and unitary patent system” overlooks the fact that it does not exist and can never exist anymore. Joff Wild continues to be little but a propaganda machine and mouthpiece of white-collars criminals who run the EPO and besiege the staff there in order to steal money and defraud the public.]

    Today’s news will reassure many in the British patent community and beyond concerned that in the wake of the government’s decision to rule out membership of the Unified Patent Court and unitary patent system, the UK’s commitment to its EPO membership might have been threatened by a desire to join the CPTPP. Leaving the organisation would put the EPO prosecution and opposition work done by UK patent attorneys under direct threat, while also forcing patent owners to fundamentally rethink their strategic approaches.

    However, some may note the use of the word “seek” in the statement and remember that it was current UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson who, as foreign secretary, originally signed the UK’s instruments of accession to the UPC, before changing his mind. Meanwhile, others might recall that the UK government previously promised the country’s businesses full and tariff-free access to the Single Market post-Brexit and no customs border between the British mainland and Northern Ireland. None of this has turned out to be the case.

    To put it delicately, the UK government sometimes says stuff that does not turn out to be entirely accurate. However, a big difference here is that the EPO is not an EU body and the EPC is an international agreement. It does not pose the same issues of sovereignty as the UPC, which gives a role to the Court of Justice of the European Union under certain circumstances, while there is no trade aspect to the EPC – it is all about patents.

  • Survey: EPO working conditions continue to deteriorate [Ed: Kluwer finally caught up with news, the real news, 10 days old. Better later than never, I guess.]

    According to the results of the survey, carried out by the French group Technologia, the situation at the EPO is deteriorating for various reasons, partly depending on the site, Job Group or Directorate General, but the lack of time is increasingly mentioned. 72% of respondents mentioned this as, against 43% in the 2016 edition of the survey. Other factors are decisions of management (83%), poor atmosphere (58%), lack of consideration (51%), difficulty of the work (16%), ergonomics of the workplace (12%).

    “As a result, the quality of the work is greatly affected. The impossibility of carrying out one’s tasks and doing quality work also impacts on the health of employees, particularly in terms of psychological distress”, according to a summary of the results.

    [...]

    The questions of the survey were almost identical to those in 2010, 2013 and 2016 editions. According to the report, “the participation rate was negatively impacted by the period of the Covid 19 health crisis in Europe and the lockdown periods implemented in various countries.” According to SUEPO, it sent the survey to EPO president Campinos and the Administrative Council, but there was no reaction. In answer to a query by Kluwer IP Law, an EPO spokesman said the EPO didn’t wish to comment on the survey.

    When António Campinos took office over two years ago, it was hoped he would normalize social relations at the EPO after the Battistelli years. The survey shows that is not the case, and in the last months there have been signs of rising tensions. Last December, for the first time under the presidency of Campinos, a strike was held. The SUEPO wrote to its members it would be the start of a year of social conflict.

  • EUIPO-EPO report shows companies with IP make more money [Ed: Managing IP is, as usual, repeating lies and propaganda from the “Mafia” that runs the EPO]

    A report released on Monday, February 8, by the EUIPO and EPO found that companies with an IP portfolio earned 20% more in revenue per employee than companies without one.

    The report, which analysed a sample of 127,000 European firms across 28 EU member states, also highlighted that IP-owning companies paid salaries that were 19% higher than their non-IP counterparts.

    Results from an econometric analysis made it possible to isolate the effect of IP ownership from other variables such as industry, size of the firm and country of operation.

    A positive association was also found between IP ownership and economic performance, with revenues per employee being 55% higher for IP owners.

    On SMEs, the report showed that only 9% of European small businesses owned any IP, but that companies that did generated 68% higher revenues per employee than similarly sized businesses without IP.

    [...]

    The referral was made during oral proceedings in appeal case T1807/15, represented by Reddie & Grose, and might mean that parties who do not wish to have their hearings heard virtually could have their cases delayed pending the outcome of the EBoA’s decision.

    Some in-house counsel told Managing IP last year that they didn’t like virtual conferences at the EPO because they could slow down proceedings if connectivity issues arose, and made it more difficult to present complex arguments in an efficient way.

    Others told this publication, however, that patent owners were inappropriately declining virtual appeals at the EPO to slow proceedings and delay the invalidation of low-quality patents.

    Virtual hearings were introduced at the EPO in response to COVID-19, and were intended to help the office avoid a backlog of cases building up while travel and social distancing restrictions were in place.

    In November 2020, the EPO issued a statement that all examination and opposition proceedings would be virtual until September 2021, and that after January 4 2021, the need for both parties to consent to virtual proceedings would be removed.

    The EBoA has yet to announce when it will decide on the legality of virtual hearings. There has also yet to be an official announcement on the status of pending virtual hearings since this referral.

  • Senator Leahy to Take Chair of IP Subcommittee

    I’ve been informed that Senator Leahy will be taking over the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, with Senator Coons moving to a newly reconstituted Privacy, Technology, and the Law Subcommittee.

    Senator Leahy was one of the authors of the 2011 America Invents Act (AIA), and may wish to refocus the committee on the changes that have been made to AIA trials like inter partes review over the past few years. He could also shift the Subcommittee’s focus away from patents and towards other areas of intellectual property.

  • Software Patents

    • Omnitek Partners patent determined to be likely invalid

      On February 10, 2021, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all 4 grounds challenging claims 1-4 (all claims) of U.S. Patent 8,224,569, owned by Omnitek Partners LLC, an NPE. The ‘569 patent generally relates to mapping systems typically used in vehicles. The patent had been asserted in litigation against Toyota and is currently being asserted against Ford, GM, Here Global B.V., Mazda, Volvo, Apple, and Alpine Electronics.

• Trademarks

  • ‘File 10, hope for one’: counsel on pharma trademarks [Ed: They not only abuse and destroy the patent system by bending it their way (at the expense of everybody else); they also make overzealous trademark policies that make it harder to compete]

    Pharma in-house counsel say a clogged up EU trademark register is an unfortunate by-product of the strict regulatory rules for approving new names for drugs

  • Tiffany case could shake up summary judgment and enforcement

    Businesses such as Coty and David Yurman weigh in on the implications of Tiffany’s eight-year trademark battle with Costco as it (hopefully) draws to a close

• Copyrights

  • Orrin Hatch, Who Once Wanted To Destroy The Computers Of Anyone Who Infringed On Copyrights, Now Lies About Section 230

    Former Senator Orrin Hatch was so anti-technology, and supportive of the anti-technology recording industry, that former music tech startup entrepreneur and sci-fi author Rob Reid referred to him as “Senator Fido” in his comic novel about the music industry, because Senator “Fido” Hatch was such a lapdog of the recording industry that he would be willing to slip whatever anti-tech language they wanted into any new regulation. Even outside of the world of fiction, Hatch was way out there in his anti-technology ideas. In 2003, when he was Chair of the powerful Judiciary Committee, he floated the idea that copyright holders should invest in malware that would literally destroy the computers of anyone who opened an unauthorized file. The suggestion was so crazy that when an exec for an anti-piracy company at the hearing where Hatch raised this idea pushed back saying “no one is interested in destroying anyone’s computer,” Hatch immediately corrected him and said that, yes, indeed, Hatch himself was very interested in that idea:

Desktop/Laptop

• System76 tease shots of their custom Keyboard and release the source code

  Linux hardware vendor and Pop!_OS Linux distribution maker System76 are getting closer to releasing their custom Keyboard, and they’ve begun teasing out a lot more info on it.

  Firstly it looks like the entire code for it is now live on GitHub which goes over quite a lot of detail about it. The System76 Launch Configurable Keyboard is “designed to provide the ultimate user controlled keyboard experience, with open source mechanical and electrical design, open source firmware and associated software, and a large number of user configuration opportunities”.

Audiocasts/Shows

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 893

  cold psa, google pixel 4a, macpi case, air frying

Kernel Space

• Story Behind Tux Penguin as the Official Linux Mascot

  We cannot 100% declare ourselves as complete Linux users or enthusiasts without having boarded the same train with the famed official Linux Mascot, Tux Penguin. There is more to why Linux chose Tux Penguin as its brand ambassador other than the fact that a Penguin has a big head and can adapt to the survival of inhumanely cold weather.

  We can relate the size of its head to the numerous adaptive commands they share with the Linux operating system. The Penguin’s adaptation to extremely uncomfortable weather is evident in the Linux operating system’s endurance.

  Other than these correlations that we just brewed from the North Pole, only Linus Torvalds, the name behind the creation and development of the Linux kernel, settled this debate. His casual declaration of Tux Penguin, in May 1996, as the winner of the Linux Mascot debate was due to his fondness of these cute, composed, and flightless birds.

• Linux 5.12 To Support USB4 “Security Level 5″ To Disable PCIe Tunneling – Phoronix

  The USB4 / Thunderbolt changes slated for the upcoming Linux 5.12 merge window have been queued into the USB-next tree.

  Queued into USB-next yesterday were the Thunderbolt changes from Intel for the next kernel window, which also include the latest USB4 work as part of it. One of the new security options with Linux 5.12 is supporting USB4′s Security Level 5 (SL5). With this new security level, PCIe tunneling is disabled. This higher security level to disable PCI Express tunneling is normally a BIOS configuration option with supported USB4 hardware. This “nopcie” option is also being enforced when in the DisplayPort-only “dponly” mode.

• AMD Is Currently Hiring More Linux Engineers – Phoronix

  It looks like thanks to AMD’s increasing sales and continuing successes in the enterprise space with more HPC wins and the like, AMD is hiring more Linux engineers. AMD currently has several interesting job openings on the Linux front.

  While AMD has been delivering reliable Linux support with their recent launches, there is room for improvement in areas like more timely compiler support for new processors, better alignment of their new hardware enablement for getting the code not only upstreamed but into distributions for launch-day, and similar areas. Based on recent job postings, it looks like AMD is working to make such strides.

• Intel’s Project ACRN To Upstream More Code With Linux 5.12 – Phoronix

  Announced nearly three years ago by Intel was the ACRN reference hypervisor framework intended for IoT/embedded use-cases with real-time capabilities and safety-critical computing. More of the kernel bits to this “Big Little Hypervisor for IoT Development” are set to see mainline with the imminent Linux 5.12 kernel cycle.

  Back in 2019 with Linux 5.3 was initial ACRN guest support. Ultimately this ACRN Hypervisor has been continuing along not only with Intel but also organizations like LG, APTIV, Neusoft, and others under the “Project ACRN” umbrella. Now with the upcoming Linux 5.12 cycle, more of the ACRN hypervisor support is set to land.

• It’s 2021 and the Linux kernel’s floppy driver is still seeing the occasional patch – OSnews

  Floppies are awesome and I’m sure there’s tons of older machines out there – especially in corporate settings – that are still rocking a floppy drive for backwards compatibility reasons. Might as well keep the code up to snuff.

• The Origin of Linux and Reasons to use Linux

  In the start, the Linux kernel was used along with the GNU operating system. You can say that the GNU system was incomplete without the kernel. A kernel is defined as an integral component of Linux.

• Graphics Stack

  • Mir 2.3.2 Released With Better XWayland HiDPI, Copy/Paste Between Wayland/XWayland – Phoronix

    Mir, Canonical’s Wayland compositor designed for various Ubuntu-focused use-cases for easily constructing new shells, is out with a new point release that packs a fair amount of improvements as well as fixes.

    With Ubuntu 21.04 aiming to use Wayland by default there seems to be an uptick in Mir activity as well even though the Ubuntu desktop is set to run GNOME 3.38 Shell with its Mutter Wayland compositor. Mir remains an important part of Ubuntu Core and related efforts around self-contained applications, embedded / IoT, and more. Mir is being used with Ubuntu on hardware like smart exercise wall mirrors.

  • Mesa’s LLVMpipe Flips On ARB_gl_spirv, Help Sought For Lavapipe Windows Port – Phoronix

    Mesa’s LLVMpipe OpenGL software driver has now enabled ARB_gl_spirv and ARB_spirv_extensions, which now rounds it out of the major extensions needed to advertise OpenGL 4.6.

    This OpenGL software driver building atop LLVM and Gallium3D now handles the OpenGL SPIR-V extensions for being able to ingest SPIR-V shaders. The SPIR-V support was one of the big additions for OpenGL 4.6.

  • Zink Now Supports OpenGL 4.5 Over Vulkan With Mesa 21.1 – Phoronix

    It was just yesterday we were talking about Zink achieving OpenGL 4.3 support and wondering if OpenGL 4.4 or potentially even 4.5 could be buttoned up in time for Mesa 21.1… Well, as of a few minutes ago Zink now is advertising OpenGL 4.5 support for this graphics API layer built atop Vulkan.

    As noted previously there have been experimental patches going back months bringing Zink to OpenGL 4.5/4.6 albeit various hacks and improvements were needed before upstreaming. Now though Mike Blumenkrantz has been on quite a spree working under contract for Valve and getting this material straightened out and suitable for upstreaming.

Benchmarks

• Two Year Ubuntu Linux Performance Comparison For Intel Xeon “Cascade Lake”

  With this spring marking two years already since Intel introduced the 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable “Cascade Lake” processors plus with Ice Lake Xeon processors being on the horizon, here is a look at how the flagship Xeon Platinum 8280 2P performance has evolved atop open-source Linux during that duration. The benchmarks today are looking at the performance of Ubuntu 19.04 for that of roughly the shape the Linux performance/optimizations were at launch and then the performance today if moving to the in-development Ubuntu 21.04 and also shifting to the latest Linux 5.11 kernel and GCC 11 code compiler.

Applications

• Thunderbird 78 is being ported to Ubuntu 20.04

  The Ubuntu developers have made the decision to port the latest release of Thunderbird to the LTS version of the platform.

  [...]

  One of the most important aspects of Ubuntu is stability. Because of this, the platform doesn’t generally ship with the latest releases of software. And initially Ubuntu 20.04 shipped with Thunderbird 68. However, because that version is no longer supported by upstream, it would no longer be receiving security updates.

  That’s a problem.

  So the Ubuntu developers had to choose between two options. Fortunately, they opted to go with porting the latest version of Thunderbird. This will cause an issue for some users, as not all Thunderbird extensions will work with the latest release. For example, now that Thunderbird has native encryption, the Enigmail extension is not only redundant, it simply won’t install on the client. This means users accustomed to Enigmail must now get up to speed on Thunderbird’s built-in encryption technology.

• Best Map Viewers for Linux

  This article will list useful online and offline navigation and map viewer applications for Linux. These applications use a number of different API service providers to fetch maps and other real time information.

• Webcamoid, The Best Webcam App For The Linux Desktop

  One of the areas of the Linux Desktop that has left me with just a bit of disappointment is the available application options for the web camera. Sure, there are some decent options out there but my issue is that, there hasn’t been anything as intuitive as what one would experience on the mobile platforms. Some of those decent applications, Kamoso and Cheese, work well enough but I have had some crashing issues with Cheese and Kamoso lacked some of those features the kids rave about on their phones and tablets.

  On one of those days of aimlessness, where I am staring at my computer as I obviously had real things I need to do, I stumbled upon this application, Webcamoid. I poked around a bit, became familiar with its fantastic features and I am now convinced it is the best web camera application, not only on Desktop Linux but on any device I have ever seen or used.

• Use Linux to do your taxes

  In 2021, there are more reasons why people love Linux than ever before. In this series, I’ll share 21 different reasons to use Linux. Here’s how to use Linux to do your taxes.

  Unless you want to be arrested, you generally have to pay taxes. If you live outside your country of birth, you probably even have to pay taxes twice or thrice. However unpleasant, taxes are a common thread among all computer users, and so it stands to reason that a computer ought to be able to help you pay your taxes. One of the complexities of this, though, is that each country is different in its requirements. For instance, in New Zealand, my income taxes are calculated automatically by my employer and the IRD. I don’t have to account for tax rates, much less file taxes the way US citizens do.

• Voice Chat App Mumble 1.3.4 Released with Important Bug-fixes

  Mumble, voice chat app for gamer, released version 1.3.4 with important bug-fixes.

  Mumble is a free and open-source VoIP application designed for use by gamer and is similar to programs such as TeamSpeak.

  Before, the public server list registration script doesn’t have an URL scheme whitelist for the website field. So a malicious server can register itself with a dangerous URL in an attempt to attack a user’s machine. In Mumble 1.3.4, now it only allows http and https schemes in both client-side and public server lists.

  The new release also fixed an issue that applying a noise gate generates significant packet loss. Due to the mitigation for vulnerabilities discovered in OCB2, it allows some packets with specific characteristics to be dropped during encryption. It however causes packet loss issue. Now it is fixed by a workaround from contributor.

• Top 3 Command Line Ubuntu Package Manager tools

  A Package manager is a tool that automates the management process ( installing, updating, configuring, and removing) of computer programs on operating systems.

  Although we can use Ubuntu’s GUI package manager that is its Software manager app, many programs are only available through the command line or in the third-party repository. Apart from using Ubuntu’s default package manager such as APT in GUI, many powerful features that are easy to use in Terminal.

  Ubuntu consistently uses APT ( Advanced Packaging Tool ) or dpkg for package management. This means that software can be reliably installed and uninstalled in packages. Event the GUI software manager on Ubuntu uses APT. And because of its popularity among desktops and servers than other Linux distros, a huge collection of programs are available such as additional software, applications, and drivers that can be installed with the help of just a few commands.

  However, here we will not only discuss APT but also other package managers, for example, SNAP that has been another option in Ubuntu since 2014 to install the software in parallel to normal package management without conflicts. All packages that belong to the system and the desktop are still installed (exclusively) via apt.

• Paleta Changes Terminal Colors On The Fly, Independently Of The Used Terminal Emulator

  Paleta is a tool for changing terminal colors on the fly, independently of the used terminal emulator. It supports VTE terminal emulators (GNOME Terminal, Xfce Terminal, Mate Terminal, Guake, Termite, etc.), Konsole, Alacritty, Kitty, Xterm and urxvt (and probably others).

• Daniel Stenberg: curl –fail-with-body

  This is a brand new command line option added to curl, to appear in the 7.76.0 release. This function works like –fail but with one little addition and I’m hoping the name should imply it good enough: it also provides the response body. The –fail option has turned out to be a surprisingly popular option but users have often repeated the request to also make it possible to get the body stored. –fail makes curl stop immediately after having received the response headers – if the response code says so.

• 5 of the Best Web RSS Readers You Should Use – Make Tech Easier [Ed: This directs people in the wrong direction. Better to run such software locally on one's own machine.]

  When Google Reader shut down in 2013, internet users across the Web were dismayed by its closing and began desperate hunts for a replacement. Since then, numerous Web-based RSS readers have debuted in the hopes of capturing the same passion Google Reader did. With more content available on the Web than ever before, managing it all so you can read it is equivalent to moving mountains. That’s where RSS feed readers become so helpful. Let’s take a look at some of the web-based RSS readers you should be using today.

• Linux Release Roundup: Flowblade, Shutter, Kdenlive + More

  This week’s Linux release roundup covers a wide range of apps, so you may want to grab a coffee — and if you’re currently enduring arctic temperatures like I am, do make it an extra hot one — before you scroll on.

  As always, these roundups serve to highlight smaller Linux releases that aren’t quite “news-y” enough for the full article treatment. As I rely on readers like you to let me know about app releases to include, if something is missing it’s because no-one has told me about it!

• Gomuks

  There is a new application available for Sparkers: Gomuks

  [...]

  A terminal Matrix client written in Go using mautrix and mauview.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to Download Files from the Command Line Using the Wget Command?

  The Wget is a command-line utility that is used to download files and webpages from the web. Various internet protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP can be used to access and retrieve the files. We can specify the different options with the Wget command in order to perform different options.

  This article explains the use of the Wget command to download the file from the command-line. Moreover, we have explained the use of various common options with their practical examples too.

• How to install and configure Apache Tomcat on Fedora Linux – Linux Hint

  Apache Tomcat is one of the most widely used web application servers in the world. It is an open-source project of Apache Software Foundation. It is written in Java. It is used for implementing servlet containers and Java Server Pages(JSP) in Java.
  Earlier, Tomcat required a high level of expertise for configuring and administering its services, as only advanced users and developers were able to work it out. With Tomcat’s GUI installer, it has become just a matter of a few commands to administer the server as a system service.

• How to Install and configure Apache httpd on Fedora Linux – Linux Hint

  Apache web server is one of the most used web servers in the world. It is very easy to configure. It is open-source software and maintained by the Apache Software Foundation. Apache supports numerous features. Many of these features are implemented as compiled modules to expand the core functionality.

  httpd is an apache web server in Red Hat-based distros, while it is called apache on Debian distros. It depends on the OS you use. For example, in RHEL 6.2, it is called httpd, and in Ubuntu, it is called apache2.

• How to fix sudo: add-apt-repository: command not found error on Linux Ubuntu – Linux Hint

  The software applications can be installed on Ubuntu and Debian systems in many ways. The one common way to install applications is through the Personal Package Archive (PPA) Repository. The PPA’s are the external repositories that are created and maintained by developers.

• How to remove a snap package on Ubuntu – Linux Hint

  Snap packages are used in Linux distributions to offer multiple options like installing, deploying, and removing software. Snap package is beneficial for developers to use the newest versions of apps on their Linux machine.

• How To Install Grafana on Debian 10 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Grafana on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Grafana is an open-source data visualization and monitoring suite. It offers help for Graphite, Elasticsearch, Included, Prometheus, and much more databases. The application offers a stunning dashboard and metric analytics, with the potential to manage and create your personal dashboard to possess apps or infrastructure performance monitoring.

  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 the Grafana monitoring system on a Debian 10 (Buster).

• A Guide to Network Traffic Analysis Utility: TCPDUMP – Linux Hint

  Tcpdump is a network packet sniffing command-line utility. It is most commonly used for troubleshooting networks and testing security issues. Despite the absence of a graphical user interface, it’s the most popular, powerful, and versatile command-line utility.

  It is native to Linux such that most of the Linux distributions install it as a part of the standard OS. Tcpdump is a libpcap interfaced program, which is a library for network datagram capture.

  This article will demystify tcpdump by showing how to capture, read, and analyze captured network traffic in this utility. We will later use our understanding to inspect data packets with the advanced TCP flag filters.

• How to upgrade Gentoo kernel – Linux Hint

  Gentoo is a rolling release, meaning that you have new updates available at regular intervals, but there are no major updates. The idea behind this is never to have incompatible parts of the system because they belong to different major releases. You upgrade as you need to. In many other distributions, the new kernels come with the new release. In Gentoo, you have new kernels when it has been tested. You can, of course, take the latest kernel out there and run that. With the caveat that you may be quite lonely on the forums if you have problems.

• Writing a Résumé in LaTeX – Michael Lustfield

  Way back in my college days, I was trying to write the first version of my résumé. As a pedantic IT guy, I wanted to get everything perfect so that I could stand out despite having very little practical experience.
  Trying to write my résumé in OpenOffice–yes, I’m that old–proved to be quite difficult. Attempting to select text sometimes resulted in selecting the background which made it impossible to select text; trying to highlight text would sometimes result it that text disappearing; moving one little object could sometimes destroy formatting and alignment of everything else; maintaining consistent text formatting was challenging; so many other issues…

• How to Manage Startup Services with Systemd in Fedora

  Systemd is a software suite that offers an array of system components for Linux systems that can perform service configuration and system behavior management. It consists of an init system, various tools for device management, network connection management, login management, and event logging.
  In this guide, check out how to manage startup services with systemd in Fedora.

• Ways to Determine the File System Type in Linux – Linux Hint

  In computing, a filesystem is a layout or format used to store files in a storage device. A filesystem is used to logically divide a storage device to keep different files organized nicely in the storage device to be searched, accessed, modified, removed, etc. easily from the storage device.
  There are many filesystems available today. Different filesystems have different structures, logics, features, flexibility, security, etc. Some of the most common filesystems are Ext4, Btrfs, XFS, ZFS, NTFS, FAT32, etc.

  There are times when a Linux system administrator will need to determine the filesystem type to simply mount the filesystem or to diagnose problems with the filesystem. Different filesystems have different tools for diagnosing problems, checking for errors and fixing them, etc. So, you have to know the filesystem a storage device is using to determine the maintenance tool/tools to use.

  In this article, I will show you different ways you can determine the filesystem type in Linux. So, let’s get started.

• Linux Fu: Serial Untethered | Hackaday

  Serial ports used to be everywhere. In a way, they still are since many things that appear to plug in as a USB device actually look like a serial port. The problem is that today, the world runs on the network. Sure, you can buy a terminal server that converts a serial port to an Ethernet port, but what fun is that? In this article, I’m going to show you how to stream serial ports over the network using some available Linux tools. It isn’t perfect, and it won’t work for every case, but when it works it works well.

  [...]

  My original goal was to run Lightburn software for my laser cutter on a big machine using a remote desktop. I wanted the laser cutter plugged into the USB port on the local machine and have the software talk to a fake port on the bigger computer.

  Alas, as of today, Lighburn is too smart for my naughty tricks and refuses to show my virtual serial ports. There’s no way that I know of to force it to use a file name of my choice, so I can’t even try to see if it would work. However, I was able to test the setup with some other G code software and it does work. I’ve mentioned this to Lightburn, so maybe it will be fixed by the time you read this.

  The paradigm that “everything is a file” is very powerful. Unfortunately, every year it gets less true and that causes more hoops to jump through when you want to do something interesting like this. Still, in true Linux fashion, there’s always a way to get there. I have no doubt that I could trace the calls Lighburn is making to open the port and find a way to fake them for the serial client. I’m hoping, though, that I don’t have to.

• eBook: Introducing KVM Virtualization Setup Guide for Linux

  The concept of virtualization has been around for a while now and has proved quite resourceful and cost-effective technologies. Operation teams and desktop users alike can spin up multiple virtual machines and run a wide selection of operating systems without the need of installing each on a separate physical server. Virtual machines are created using a hypervisor. Two commonly used Hypervisors are VirtualBox and KVM, both of which are free and opensource.

• Dual Booting Ubuntu With Windows 10 Pro With BitLocker Encryption

  I have written about dual booting Windows and Ubuntu in the past. The process has improved so much in the last few years. Ubuntu and other Linux play very well with secure boot and UEFI now.

  So, why I am I writing about installing Ubuntu with Windows 10 once again? Because these days Windows 10 Pro version comes with BitLocker encryption and hence when you try to dual boot like normal, it either refuses or creates issue.

• Bypassing Deep Packet Inspection: Tunneling Traffic Over TLS VPN

  In some countries, network operators employ deep packet inspection techniques to block certain types of traffic. For example, Virtual Private Network (VPN) traffic can be analyzed and blocked to prevent users from sending encrypted packets over such networks.

  By observing that HTTPS works all over the world (configured for an extremely large number of web-servers) and cannot be easily analyzed (the payload is usually encrypted), we argue that in the same manner VPN tunneling can be organized: By masquerading the VPN traffic with TLS or its older version – SSL, we can build a reliable and secure network. Packets, which are sent over such tunnels, can cross multiple domains, which have various (strict and not so strict) security policies. Despite that the SSH can be potentially used to build such network, we have evidence that in certain countries connections made over such tunnels are analyzed statistically: If the network utilization by such tunnels is high, bursts do exist, or connections are long-living, then underlying TCP connections are reset by network operators.

  Thus, here we make an experimental effort in this direction: First, we describe different VPN solutions, which exist on the Internet; and, second, we describe our experimental effort with Python-based software and Linux, which allows users to create VPN tunnels using TLS protocol and tunnel small office/home office (SOHO) traffic through such tunnels.

• Adventures in Vim: Lee and Jim figure out how to change comment colors | Ars Technica

  One fine Monday morning, Ars Technica Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson came to me with a problem: the colors in his text editor, in his humble opinion, had Begun To Suck.

  In Lee’s 20 years or so of Vim usage, he’d gotten accustomed to comment lines in his code and configuration files being rendered in dark blue. But after upgrading a machine to Ubuntu 20.04, Vim started rendering comments in cyan—and since the “Identifier” syntax category also rendered in cyan, he was unhappy enough about it to decide to change the defaults.

  At first blush, Vim seems to adhere to roughly the same configuration standard that many if not most Unix-like systems and applications do—there’s a set of systemwide configurations in /etc, which can be overridden individually per user by changes made in an optional configuration file in that user’s home directory. In Vim’s case, that’s ~/.vimrc—just like Bash configurations can be overridden in ~/.bashrc.

  But when Lee tried to make his One Simple Change to Vim’s syntax highlighting—turn comments from the new cyan back into the dark blue, which he preferred—things got interesting.

• Top commands Linux admins need to know – TechRepublic

  Linux admins have a love affair with information. The more information they can gather the better. And that’s a good thing, as the more informed you are, the more apt you’ll be to make smart decisions. This applies to administration tasks, security, development, and just about anything else you can imagine.

• Ubuntu: reset root password or user password [Guide]

  Are you having trouble logging into your Ubuntu PC with the root password or your user password? Want to learn how to reset these passwords? We can help! Follow along and learn how to reset your root password or user password on Ubuntu!

• How to Check Linux Network Statistics from Command Line

  Network Load refers to the amount of data being transferred or received over a network. Since Linux distributions are very commonly used as servers, the network load on the server becomes a topic of prominence for Linux server admins or system admins.

• How to install Medibang Paint 26 on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install Medibang Paint 26 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• How to Check Java Version On Linux | Ubuntu/Debian/CentOS – LinuxBuz

  Java is one of the most popular and widely used programming languages around the globe. If you are a Java developer then you must have a knowledge of “how to check java version”. There are several methods to check which Java version installed in your system.

  If you don’t know how to install Java, you should read my guide on How to Install Java on Ubuntu 20.04.

  In the post, we will show you how to check java version on CentOS, Ubuntu and Debian operating systems.

• How to Reset Forgotten Root Password in Ubuntu 20.04

  In systems based on the Linux platform, the root account is first in the user role hierarchy. The root user has the most power over the Linux system. In these systems, users need the root user’s permission to make changes. The root user, by virtue of his exclusive rights, is authorized to change and override the permissions of other users. In the case of an Ubuntu system, the default root user account is initially disabled, but users can still make relevant changes if they know the system’s root password. The real problem occurs when users forget the root user password in their system. In this article, I will show you how to reset the root password on an Ubuntu 20.04 system by modifying the Grub boot loader configuration and booting Ubuntu into a rescue mode.

• How to Set Up Remote Access to Docker Daemon [Detailed Guide]

  I have written in detail about how to SSH into a docker container. This tutorial takes the same concept to another level by enabling remote access to Docker.

  With docker remote access, whenever you run a docker command on your local host, the effects take place on the remote server.

  Let me explain that in detail.

• How to install Google Chrome on Linux Mint 20.1 – YouTube

  In this video, we are looking at how to install Google Chrome on Linux Mint 20.1.

• How to install a LAMP stack on Oracle Linux – TechRepublic

  Since the CentOS debacle, you might be scrambling to figure out what you’re going to use as a base for a web server going forward. Fortunately, you have plenty of options, such as the soon-to-be released AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. Or, you could opt for a similar distribution that’s been around for some time and offers yet another drop-in replacement for CentOS. That distribution is Oracle Linux.

  Oracle not only offers an enterprise-quality server distribution, they also offer support contracts. Although you can use their Linux variant for free, the support contracts do come with a price, but we’re not here to talk about support. We’re here to talk LAMP.

• How to keep your Linux disk usage nice and tidy and save space | Ubuntu

  Everyone loves a clean, tidy home (hopefully). This also includes your other home – slash home, the Linux home directory. Disk cleanup and management utilities are extremely popular in Windows, but not so much in Linux. This means that users who want to do a bit of housekeeping in their distro may not necessarily have a quick, convenient way to figure out how to get rid of the extra cruft they have accumulated over the years. Let us walk you through the processing of slimming down your home.

• How to Install Kanboard Project Management Software on CentOS 8

  Kanboard is an open-source project management software that helps you to manage your projects and visualize your workflow. It uses Kanban methodology and is specially designed for small teams that focus on minimalism and simplicity. Kanban provides a simple and easy to use web interface that allows you to manage your project through a web browser. You can also integrate Kanban to external services using the plugins.
  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Kanban with Nginx and Let’s Encrypt SSL on CentOS 8.

• How to Get File Name Only With Linux Find Command – Putorius

  The Linux find command is a powerful tool with many options. However, the output always displays the full path of the file. Sometimes it is desirable to only get the filename itself. In this Linux quick tip we will discuss some methods for formatting the output to show the file name only.

  Let’s take a look at an example of find output. Here we are searching for a song named Mother in the Music directory.

• How to Access Manual Pages for Linux Commands – LinuxConfig.org

  Regular, when writing a command – both easy and complex ones – one will want to access more detailed information about the command and it’s available options. There is a wealth of information available in the Linux manual pages, and this is provided free of charge, and is available with just a few keystrokes.

• Linux Essentials – APT – YouTube

  In my “Linux Essentials” series, I go over a very specific command to give you an overview of how it works. In today’s episode, I go over the basics of the apt command, which is the official package manager for Debian, Ubuntu, and others.

Games

• For The King: Lost Civilization Adventure Pack out now | GamingOnLinux

  For The King: Lost Civilization Adventure Pack is the first ever expansion to For The King, a challenging blend of Strategy, JRPG styled combat, and roguelike elements.

  Released originally back in 2018, For The King is actually really good and its certainly a game that deserved to have a whole lot more content to play through. Popular too, as they confirmed they’ve now seen over 3 million players (although that is across all platforms).

  “This hard-as-nails fantasy experience melds challenging turn-based combat, deep roleplaying game progression and procedurally generated maps, quests and events to ensure no playthrough is the same. This potent gameplay mix is matched with a captivating artstyle and options for players to tackle the campaign on their own or in co-op with friends.”

• Crayta now free to play on Stadia and gets Crowd Play, Little Nightmares II free on Pro | GamingOnLinux

  While Google hasn’t seen the best news with Stadia lately after stopping first-party games and Terraria being cancelled, the store continues on with some fresh announcements of new games, updates and some sales.

  Firstly, a quick look at the new games. For those subscribing to the optional Stadia Pro, the just released horror adventure Little Nightmares II is going to be another game you can claim free with the sub. Additionally, Pikuniku, the colourful and quirky platformer is now live to buy in the Stadia store.

  [...]

  Crayta will also be heading to the Epic Store for the main Windows release, so no Linux desktop support – Stadia only. It will have cross-platform play and cross-progression so either way a nice boost in player numbers perhaps.

• An interview with Decemberborn Interactive for their game Cathedral

  “I’ve always been interested in writing my own games; It’s a long and weird story which has followed me through all my computers, consoles and programming languages that I’ve dabbled in over the years. When I was 9 years old, my parents had an Atari 600XL. It came with a binder full of programming examples in BASIC which I happily typed in to see what happened. I made my first (extremely crude and unfun) text adventures back then. A few years later, I got an Atari ST, where I dabbled a bit with Motorola 68k assembler. I modified existing examples that I got my hands on through magazines and shareware floppy disks, but ultimately it was a bit too much for me at that age. Later, I got a hold of STOS – an implementation of BASIC made just for games! I created a few really simple platformers and demos with this and had a lot of fun throughout the years. Even later, when my Atari got switched out for a PC, I continued games in QBasic for a while and switched more and more into C (and later C++) and assembly in DOS, where things got way more interesting. All of this of course became even more exciting when you started getting access to OpenGL and DirectX a few years down the line.

  [...]

  Apart from that, we’re actually building a completely new game engine, based loosely on the engine we wrote for Cathedral, incorporating all the things we learned along the way. It’s at the point where it’s mature enough to build prototypes in, and that’s exactly what we are doing. We have a few different ideas that we want to explore for our next game. It’ll take some time before we have anything to announce, but rest assured that it’ll have day 1 Linux support!”

• Run Prop, Run! will offer up a fun twist on prop hunting, demo available now | GamingOnLinux

  Every played the prop hunt games? Most players hide themselves as an object, with a seeker trying to pick them out. Run Prop, Run! plans to offer up another unique take on it. In development by PlayTogether Studio who previously released Mad Experiments: Escape Room.

  While the basic idea is the same, it’s been adjusted to have a bit more to it. There’s some platforming involved and a few special skills too, like props having an ability of shooting out a cloud of smoke to confuse the seeker. Different phases of each game too with props hiding, trying to escape and then becoming an extra hunter.

• Chess with lasers? That’s sort-of what you’ll get with DEFLECTION | GamingOnLinux

  Always on the look out for the next fun strategy game to sink some time into, I came across DEFLECTION and it looks pretty much like a game of Chess with a whole lot of lasers.

  Inspired directly by the classic laser chess game Khet, the idea is to move around the board and annihilate enemy pieces with your lasers. There’s a number of different pieces that have their own advantages, abilities and weaknesses you need to utilize to take them down. At the end of each turn, you have to shoot and so placement is key to victory.

• Steam Lunar New Year Sale has officially begun with tens of thousands discounted | GamingOnLinux

  Have you prepared your wallet and stocked your wishlist full of games? The Steam Lunar New Year Sale 2021 has officially begun and so there’s a lot to pick from that’s currently discounted.

  Before getting into the games, this year Valve has updated their Points Shop with a bunch of bundles so if you have plenty of points ready you can now buy big packs ans save 10%. Bundles include: Lunar New Year Oxen Bundle, CS:GO Bundle, DOTA Bundle, Half-Life Bundle and a Portal 2 Bundle.

• Two With One Blow

  To that end, as I hinted at yesterday, I began with Wolfenstein: The New Order, as chosen by Daniel Schuermann, the lucky winner of the What Steam Game Should Zink Use As Its Primary Test Case And Benchmark contest that was recently held.

  Early tests of this game were unimpressive. That is to say I got an immediate crash. It turns out that having the GL compatibility context restricted to 3.0 is bad for getting AAA games running, so zink-wip now enables 4.6 compat contexts.

  But then I was still getting a crash without any clear error message. Suddenly, I was back in 2004 trying to figure out how to debug wine apps.

  Things are much simpler now, however. PROTON_DUMP_DEBUG_COMMANDS enables dumping scripts for debugging from steam, including one which attaches a debugger to the game. This solved the problem of getting a debugger in before the almost-immediate crash, but it didn’t get me closer to a resolution.

  The problem now is that I’d attached a debugger to the in-wine process, which is just a sandbox for the Windows API. What I actually wanted was to attach to the wine process itself so I could see what was going on in the driver.

• Understanding Path of Exile’s Unique Approach to Endgame Content

  For players unfamiliar with the genre, titles like Path of Exile (PoE) can be hard to place. This is especially true as the heyday of the top-down action RPG is long passed. As an online-only experience PoE becomes even more perplexing with many assuming it to be chock full with MMO-type features.

  While PoE may be somewhat linked to modern MMOs and the old school action RPG, it is most certainly its own beast—and what a beast it is. Split into two relatively distinct half the game will first see players venture through a well-crafted story-driven adventure, then dropping them into a relatively endless amount of endgame content through the Atlas of Worlds. What’s more is that PoE offers up these hundreds of hours of content within its truly free-to-play model, meaning that there are few games to rival how much it gives you for, quite literally, nothing at all.

  That said, there has always been a little confusion over this split between PoE’s main narrative and endgame experience. And this was made all the more intense given its recent Echoes of the Atlas overhaul which has made the endgame even more complex—but thankfully for good reason.

• Steam Becomes Available In China, Offers 53 Whole Games To Customers

  There is no shortage of critiques for Valve’s online PC game store, Steam. That’s to be expected, frankly, given how big the platform is. Still, on the ground with individual gamers, one of the most common complaints you hear will be that the sheer volume of games on Steam is somewhat paralyzing for customers deciding where to spend their money. Steam tried to combat this for years with its Steam Curators program, where gamers put their trust in curators to pare down game search results. It never really worked, though, as the program encountered the same issue as the game: the sheer volume of curators.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Xfce 4.16 Review – Keeping the Classic Desktop Legacy Alive

  Things are looking stable in the Xfce world after the recent Xfce 4.16 release. I believe it’s the perfect time for a quick Xfce 4.16 review. Here’s the Xfce 4.16 review from DebugPoint.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Pop Shell Gets Improved Mouse-Based Window Tiling

    Pop Shell, the GNOME Shell extension for window tiling used by default in Pop!_OS 20.04 and newer, has recently been updated with improved support for mouse-based window tiling.

    With auto tiling enabled, you’ll now be able to see where you can place a window, while dragging it using your mouse. You can even create window stacks using the mouse now.

    You can preview this feature in a tweet by System76 (credits for the image at the top of this page are also for System76)…

Distributions

• BSD

  • We are now at 6.9-beta, go for snapshots, test!

    You may have missed the event during the weekend, but with this commit, OpenBSD -current turned 6.9-beta.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

  • LibreWolf Browser updated to 85.0.1

    LibreWolf is designed to minimize data collection and telemetry as much as possible. This is achieved through hundreds of privacy/security/performance settings and patches. Intrusive integrated addons including updater, crashreporter, and pocket are removed too. LibreWolf is NOT associated with Mozilla or its products.

• Gentoo Family

  • lzip decompression support for xz-utils

    As of today, the most common implementation of the LZMA algorithm on open source operating systems is the xz format. However, there are a few others available. Notably, a few packages found in the Gentoo repository use the superior lzip format. Does this mean you may end up having to have separate decompressors for both formats installed? Not necessarily.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • New openSUSE Step Project Looks to Build SUSE Linux Enterprise on More Architectures

    We’re delighted to announce a new project in the openSUSE Project family called openSUSE Step. openSUSE Step is a community effort to rebuild SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) from the released SLE sources packages. This is done openly in the openSUSE instance of the Open Build Service (OBS) with the intention to stay fully binary compatible and to be as closely source-compatible as possible with SLE.

    openSUSE Leap 15.3 inherits its base from SLE 15 SP3. On aarch64, powerpc64, and x86_64, openSUSE directly uses binary packages from the enterprise side. In addition, openSUSE also supports architectures that SLE does not provide, such as armv7hl and 32-bit x86, which is relatively popular with openSUSE users, according to results from a recent community survey. For those, we now build fully compatible binary packages from the published SLE sources in OBS.

    openSUSE Step is not intended to be an end user distribution. It does not replace, or provide an alternative to openSUSE Leap. Step is an intermediate building block (“step”) to enable derived community distributions like openSUSE Leap or other community derivatives.

  • Accelerating Atmospheric Research at NCAR with HPE and SUSE | SUSE Communities

    Having lived through many harsh winters in the mountains of Pennsylvania and dangerous hurricanes that have hit the Carolinas, I admire the research involved in monitoring climate change, data simulations and predictive analysis. As one shining example at the center of that research, NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) performs weather modeling to climatology, spanning seconds to centuries. Their research demands high performance, long-term application repeatability and high reliability.
    Community is key at all levels, from interoperable software with HPE and SUSE to collaboration with other centers (e.g., NOAA, NASA, DOE). In fact, NOAA’s EPIC (Earth Prediction Innovation Center) relies on Cray supercomputers which are at the heart of its global prediction system. NOAA and NCAR collaborate in producing global weather simulations to predict future climate shifts.
    The cohesive platform provided by HPE Cray and SUSE Linux Enterprise enables seamless U.S. and global weather simulations. Today, NCAR’s “Cheyenne” supercomputer enables scientists across the country to study phenomena ranging from weather and climate to wildfires, seismic activity, and airflows that generate power at wind farms. Their findings lay the groundwork for better protecting society from natural disasters, lead to more detailed projections of seasonal and longer-term weather and climate variability and improve weather and water forecasts that are needed by economic sectors from agriculture and energy to transportation and tourism. Later this year, NCAR will make another giant leap forward with a new HPE Cray EX supercomputer with a 19.87 peak petaflops system that will work alongside the “Cheyenne” system.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • The NeuroFedora Blog: NeuroFedora at the INCF/OCNS Software WG dev sessions

    This was originally posted on the INCF / OCNS Software Working Group (WG)’s blog here. It is a great opportunity to learn how NeuroFedora is developed.

    Ankur Sinha will introduce the Free/Open Source Software NeuroFedora project and discuss its development in this developer session.

  • About me and my life …: Fedora 33 : Meson build system.

    Meson is a build system that is designed to be as user-friendly as possible without sacrificing performance. The main tool for this is a custom language that the user uses to describe the structure of his build. The main design goals of this language has been simplicity, clarity and conciseness. Much inspiration was drawn from the Python programming language, which is considered very readable, even to people who have not programmed in Python before., see the official webpage.

  • Fedora Community Blog: Fedora Linux 35 development schedule

    Fedora Linux 34 branched from Rawhide on Tuesday. While there’s still a lot of work before the Fedora Linux 34 release in April, this marks the beginning of the Fedora Linux 35 development cycle. Work you do in Rawhide now will be in the Fedora Linux 35 release in October.

  • Basic concepts of encryption in cryptography | Enable Sysadmin

    To make your way in the IT industry, a fundamental understanding of cryptography concepts is vital. However, many still struggle when it comes to handling TLS certificates, certificate requests, and all sorts of keys. Before I start with those, let’s talk about the basic concepts of encryption in cryptography. In this article, I explain the basics of symmetric and public key cryptography to lay a strong foundation to build on. I focus on the key concepts and leave the math to the experts.

    Our protagonists throughout this article are Alice, who wants to communicate with Bob over a public channel. We also have Eve and Trudy. The following techniques should make eavesdropping impossible. Messing up the content of a message shouldn’t go unnoticed.

  • Open Source Cloud Skills Set Developers Apart

    Results from a recent survey, commissioned by IBM and conducted by O’Reilly Media, suggest that developers can benefit more from building skills around open source cloud technologies rather than focusing on skills related to a proprietary solution.

    “Over the long term, a knowledge of the most fundamental open source projects will provide major benefits in job growth and other professional activities,” the survey report says.

  • What’s the next Linux workload that you plan to containerize?

    I’m sure many of my fellow sysadmins have been tasked with cutting costs, making infrastructure more usable, making services more accessible, enhancing security, and enabling developers to be more autonomous when working with their test, development, and staging environments. You might have started your virtualization efforts by moving some web sites to containers. You might also have moved an application or two as well. This poll focuses on the next workload that you plan to containerize. What’s next on your workload list to move from an underutilized piece of hardware to a more leveraged, multi-hosted environment, such as a container host system?

  • The Level Up Hour (E24): OpenShift Tools, available everywhere, via Quay.io

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• EdgeX Foundry based edge software adds AI support

  Like EdgeX Foundry, Edge Xpert is billed as a cross-platform, OS/architecture agnostic platform. However, Linux is typically the OS in play here, and the EdgeX Foundry development kits are based on Ubuntu.

  The key new feature in Edge Xpert is the addition of computer vision and edge AI support via an add-on built around Intel’s OpenVINO AI toolkit. The computer vision capability builds on the product’s existing support for IP camera and video device connectivity and the ability to aggregate and fuse data from many industrial protocols and devices.

• Canonical Re-Releases Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS Desktop Images Due to OEM Install Bug

  A couple of days ago, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution informed users on Twitter that the ISO images of the Desktop flavor of its recently released Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS (Focal Fossa) are affected by a bug causing OEM installations via the Ubiquity installer to fail to boot due to missing kernel.

  As a reminder, Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS comes with updated kernel and graphics stacks backported from the more recent Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) operating system series. As such, this Focal Fossa point release is powered by the Linux 5.8 kernel and Mesa 20.3 graphics stack.

• Ubuntu Blog: Can AI help redefine the future of finserv?

  The last few years has been a time of major disruption in the Finserv sector. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has emerged as an important tool for providers of financial products and services to deliver more personalised and more sophisticated services to customers faster. The financial services sector is at the beginning of an exciting journey with AI – a journey that we believe will spark a revolution and redefine financial services. Kris Sharma, Financial Services Lead at Canonical has approached this subject from various perspectives.

Users Upset as Raspberry Pi OS Now Pings a Microsoft Server During Updates

Any Raspberry Pi users concerned about having the Microsoft repo installed on their computer does have options to avoid it by selecting an alternative OS. Wikipedia offers an extensive list of options. There’s also now a big question mark hanging over what else will be added to the official operating system without warning in future, and what that means for trust.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation secretly installed a Microsoft repository

Several days ago the news was released that as part of a recent update in Raspberry OS, the Raspberry Pi Foundation installed a Microsoft repository on all single board computers that trusted it, without the knowledge of their owners.

The maneuver has not gone unnoticed within the community of Linux that is stepping up to oppose lack of transparency and telemetry and Raspberry Pi board users are discussing including a call to the Microsoft repository on Raspberry Pi OS, plus the addition of a Microsoft GPG key for reliable package installation.

Raspberry Pi is calling up Microsoft

Linux people dont like it when the sources.list in Linux is modified without consent — putting it right up there with killing your first born, so they are extremely miffed.

Does your Raspberry Pi phone call home at Microsoft?

“People didn’t have the opportunity to learn about the new rap until it was added to their sources, along with the Microsoft GPG key. To put it mildly, not very transparent. And in my opinion, not how to act in the world of open source, “- wrote a Reddit user Fortysix_n_2.

Raspberry Pi OS, update install Microsoft repo: here’s how to delete it

And here’s the Microsoft repository added silently.

CuBox-M: A tiny mini-PC that supports machine learning, natural language processing, Android and Linux

SolidRun has announced a mini-PC that rivals the size of devices like the LarkBox. While the latter runs on an Intel processor, SolidRun has equipped its mini-PC with an NXP i.MX 8M processor, along with up to 4 GB of LPDDR4 RAM. The CuBox-M is available in two variants, although both have a quad-core i.MX 8M Plus chipset and 8 GB of eMMC flash storage.

The cheapest of the two costs US$99 and comes with 1 GB of RAM, with SolidRun charging US$160 for 4 GB of RAM and Bluetooth/Wi-Fi connectivity. All models come with a Gigabit Ethernet connection though, and two USB 3.0 ports for connecting peripherals. Meanwhile, an HDMI 2.0 port handles video output; SolidRun has included a microSD card reader and a micro USB port, too.

This cube-shaped Raspberry Pi alternative can run both Android and Linux

The CuBox-M is a micro desktop computer, much like the Raspberry Pi, that’s stuffed into a cube-shaped box that’s small enough to fit in your palm.

Designed by Tel Aviv-based SolidRun, the CuBox-M measures just 2″x2″x2″, but still packs enough juice to make it usable for all kinds of uses, from IoT to edge computing.

“Not everyone working on Arm-based IoT software wants an exposed SBC (single-board computer) lying on their desk with wires hanging out of it. Sometimes a software developer or machine learning researcher just wants a streamlined system to test their product on, be it an Android application or a new Edge-based AI inference algorithm,” said SolidRun’s chief systems architect Jon Nettleton.

SolidRun CuBox-M 2-inch Arm Linux/Android mini PC packs a 2.3 TOPS AI accelerator

SolidRun first introduced the tiny CuBox Arm Linux mini PC in 2011, with the device based on a Marvell Armada 510 dual-core Armv7 processor, and followed in 2013 with the launch of the CuBox-i family powered by Freescale i.MX 6 single to quad-core Cortex-A9 processor.

The company moved to NXP i.MX 8M processor in 2018 with the introduction of CuBox Pulse, and now they’ve introduced their first Cubox mini PC with a built-in AI accelerator. Meet CuBox-M mini PC powered by NXP i.MX 8M Plus quad-core Cortex-A53 processor with a 2.3 TOPS NPU.

Dev boards showcase Rockchip’s new RK3568 and RK3566

Geniatech’s “RK3568 Development Board” runs Android or Linux on Rockchip’s new quad -A55 RK3568, featuring SATA III and M.2 with PCIe 3.0. There is also a similar board based on the slightly lower-spec RK3566.

Rockchip’s premiere system-on-chip launch for 2021 will be the octa-core -A76 and -A55, NPU-equipped Rockchip RK3588, due in Q3, which we covered at the end of the intro to our catalog of 150 Linux hacker boards. Yet, perhaps even more embedded Linux systems will tap two other new quad-core, Cortex-A55 Rockchip SoCs: the RK3568 and slightly stripped down RK3566. First to show its cards is Geniatech, which has posted product pages for a pair of SBCs that tap the new NPU-equipped SoCs.

Software configuration tips for Raspberry Pi clusters & parallel-ssh command

I missed that linux.conf.au 2021 took place on January 23-25 2021, and while browsing the schedule I noticed a talk entitled “Building Raspberry Pi Supercomputers” by Federico Lucifredi, Product Management Director for Ceph Storage at Red Hat.

Keeping secrets and writing about Raspberry silicon

CloudLinux KernelCare Now Supports Raspberry Pi Platform

CloudLinux KernelCare service now supports the Raspberry Pi platform providing live patching for the running kernel with zero downtime — improving security for IoT deployments.

CloudLinux KernelCare now supports Raspberry Pi, improving security for IoT deployments

CloudLinux announced that its KernelCare service now supports the Raspberry Pi platform providing live patching for the running kernel with zero downtime — improving security for IoT deployments.

KernelCare for Raspberry Pi is a free service ensuring that IoT devices and assemblies are automatically updated and always available.

CloudLinux Expands Extended Lifecycle Support Beyond CentOS | IT Pro

CloudLinux’s Extended Lifecycle Support, which offers support for CentOS 6, is being expanded to include Oracle Linux, Ubuntu and Debian.

Open Hardware/Modding

• microZERO is a compact, Arduino compatible Microchip SAMD21 module (Crowdfunding)

  The module is not only compatible with the Arduino IDE, but also Microchip/Atmel Studio 7 and Zephyr real-time operating system. The documentation and bootloader are currently finalized and everything will be published/released in March.

• Arduino Blog » International Day of Women and Girls in Science: 6 scientists you should know about

  Science and technology empower people to change the world. At Arduino, we work every day to make them simple and accessible to anyone regardless of gender, ethnicity, age, background, nationality, and sexuality. Unfortunately, not all contributions are given the same visibility, that’s why we are celebrating the International Day of Women and Girls in Science by highlighting six scientists who were not honored enough for their achievements. Giving these women the visibility they deserve, we hope to inspire our community to innovate in a more inclusive way and to create a better future together.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Android 12 beta updates, features and what to expect from the new OS | Tom’s Guide

• Galaxy A51 5G, A71 5G, M30s, and M31s receive Android 11 update with One UI 3.0

• 4 apps you need to clean your Android to help it run like new

• Top 15 Open World games for Android | Articles | Pocket Gamer

• Android Auto now has wallpapers, here’s what they look like – 9to5Google

• Google Photos for Android gets advanced video editor

• Samsung Galaxy A series One UI 3.0 (Android 11) update status

• T-Mobile and AT&T rolling out Android 11 updates to the Samsung Galaxy S10 series – PhoneArena

• T-Mobile updates Samsung Galaxy Note 10 and Note 10+ to Android 11 – PhoneArena

• Galaxy M31s is getting Android 11-based One UI 3.0 update

• Samsung Galaxy M31s has begun to receive One UI Core 3.0 (Android 11) update – Gizmochina

• Micromax says 5G phone launch soon, Android 11 rollout for IN Note 1 in April – Technology News

• Google working on Android feature that could be exclusive to Pixel | Express.co.uk

• Google: This Kotlin tool will help your Android apps build faster | ZDNet

• Malasyian company admits to selling piracy-facilitating Android boxes in first for country – Digital TV Europe

• Download New Android 12 Wallpapers for Any Device Right Now

• Samsung brings Android 11 to Galaxy A51 5G, A71 5G, and M30s

• Samsung Galaxy M30s starts receiving Android 11-based One UI 3.0 update – Gizmochina

• One UI 3.0 with Android 11 rolls out for Samsung’s Galaxy A71 5G and A51 5G phones | Android Central

• Micromax 5G Phone to Launch ‘Very Soon’, In Note 1 to Receive Android 11 in April: Co-Founder Rahul Sharma | Technology News

• [Update: Feb. 11] Xiaomi Android 11 update bugs & issues tracker: Here’s the current status

• TCL to soon launch first Android 11-based Smart TV in India – Technology News

• Motorola Android 11 update: List of eligible devices & release date

• Samsung Galaxy M31s, Galaxy A71 5G Getting Android 11-Based One UI 3.0 Update: Report | Technology News

• Android barcode scanner with 10 million+ downloads infects users | Ars Technica

• Android App Infects Millions of Devices With a …

• Android app with over 10 million installs suddenly becomes adware — what to do | Tom’s Guide

• Popular Android app with 10 million installs turned into adware

• Barcode Scanning Android App Might Have Infected 10 Million Android Devices With Malware | Ubergizmo

• Delete this malicious Android app from your phone right now – BGR

• How to Tell Which Android ‘Barcode Scanner’ Is Malware

• Barcode Scanner App Infects 10 Million Android Users With One Update

• Lookout Unmasks State-sponsored Android Spyware Tied to India-Pakistan Conflict

• Samsung’s excellent Android tablets just got a lot more affordable, with deals offering up to $300 off

• The best Android tablet, the Galaxy Tab S7, is now available in Mystic Navy

• Major Google Fi feature finally deemed ready for primetime both on Android and iOS – PhoneArena

• 5 best fitness apps for android and iphone users in 2021 – Information News

• Huawei’s HarmonyOS Preview is Out, But it is Just Another Android Fork

• Honda add Android Auto functionality to their Africa Tw… | Visordown

• Motorola Moto E6i goes official with 6.1″ screen and Android Go – GSMArena.com news

• Android 12: Release date, previews, betas, and everything you need to know

• TCL P-Series with Android 11 TV OS to launch soon in India, could be P725 4K HDR TV – Gizmochina

• Nintendo Switch gains Android 10 w/ LineageOS 17.1 – 9to5Google

• PSA: Slack for Android may have exposed your password – 9to5Google

• How to use dark mode and custom themes in Telegram for Android and desktop – Neowin

• How to Check if Your Android Device Is Certified

• Android Auto is rolling out a selection of wallpapers to fancy up your dash

• The Best Android TV Boxes | Shopping | Empire

• Android launchers are officially exciting again | Computerworld

• Best Free Android Apps

  We’re compiling the best free Android apps you can download today, so you can find exactly the best apps without spending an inordinate amount of time exploring the Google Play Store.

  There are apps for everything you can imagine, and many of them on the Google Play Store are free to download and use. While there’s a large range to choose from, only some are quality apps. And most free apps in the Google Play Store don’t meet our eligibility criteria. The ones featured here are the cream of the crop!

  Given that finding apps that meant our high standards can be difficult, we hope you appreciate this series.

  This is a new series with apps being added on a regular basis.

• Best Free Android Apps: Google Earth – explore your planet

  There’s an eligibility criteria for inclusion in this series. See the criteria section at the bottom of this article.

  Google Earth is an app that lets you discover the world in depth.

  What can you do with Google Earth? For starters, the app lets you travel the world and explore new places with satellite imagery, 3D terrain of the entire globe, and 3D buildings in hundreds of cities around the world.

31 open source text editors you need to try

Computers are text-based, so the more things you do with them, the more you find yourself needing a text-editing application. And the more time you spend in a text editor, the more likely you are to demand more from whatever you use.

If you’re looking for a good text editor, you’ll find that Linux has plenty to offer. Whether you want to work in the terminal, on your desktop, or in the cloud, you can literally try a different editor every day for a month (or one a month for almost three years) in your relentless search for the perfect typing experience.

10 Top Open Source API Gateways and Management Tools

Are you searching for an open-source API management solution for your company? Then this guide is made just for you, continue reading.

Below, we have shared the 10 top open-source API gateways and API management solutions you can use in your IT infrastructure. Note that the following list is organized in no particular order.

Your Service is not Open Source

Open Sourcing the code to your SaaS is insufficient to make it actually be Open Source. Sounds self-contradictory?

Most services that espouse “Open Source”, do so by simply throwing the code over the wall. It’s better than nothing, but really misses the point that powers Open Source: enabling users to make a change to the software they’re using.

Some other popular services powered by Open Source software, such as GitLab.com or ElasticSearch do include the tools used to operate/deploy their service. Pause for applause

Intel Dynamic Load Balancer 2.0 Support For Linux Inches Closer To Mainline – Phoronix

The Intel Dynamic Load Balancer is a PCIe accelerator designed for use with their Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) Event Device Library and provides load-balanced, prioritized scheduling of core-to-core communication. Intel DLB aims to provide greater performance than software-based load balancing and the current generation Dynamic Load Balancer is found within the Atom P series for performance / latency optimizations for edge computing workloads. Public information still appears limited but Intel describes the current DLB simply as “Intel Dynamic Load Balancer (Intel DLB) improves performance and reduces latency by dynamically and efficiently distributing processing across up to 24 CPU cores.”

Innovators in the Open: Lessons learned telling our customers’ stories

Our customer reference team was born out of necessity. It was the early days of Linux, and Red Hat needed to prove that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) could stand up to the competition. We needed validation that enterprises were taking this operating system seriously and that mission-critical workloads could run on top of Red Hat technology. From the beginning of the customer reference team, we knew that customer content was going to be a key part of Red Hat’s marketing mix. This is how our team adapted and evolved over the years to tell innovative stories of customer success, and the four lessons we learned that can help you focus on customer storytelling.

Peter Czanik: The syslog-ng insider 2021-02: proxy protocol; sudo JSON; Kafka;

This is the 88th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.

What’s new with ownCloud in 2021?

The newest version of ownCloud, ownCloud Infinite Scale (OCIS), is a complete rewrite of the venerable open source enterprise file sharing and syncing software stack. It features a new backend written in Go, a frontend in Vue.js, and many changes, including eliminating the need for a database. This scalable, modular approach replaces ownCloud’s PHP, database, and POSIX filesystem and promises up to 10 times better performance.

Traditionally, ownCloud was centered around the idea of having a POSIX-compatible filesystem to store data uploaded by users—different versions of the data and trash files, as well as configuration files and logs. By default, an ownCloud user’s files were found in a path on their ownCloud instance, like /var/www or /srv/www (a web server’s document root).

Every admin who has maintained an ownCloud instance knows that they grow massive; today, they usually start out much larger than ownCloud was originally designed for. One of the largest ownCloud instances is Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet), a company that stores more than 100,000 users’ data.

Tomas Tomecek: Open Service as a Service in Practice

Containers and OpenShift are clear at this point and that should narrow our scope.

The next main tool which will help you is… Automation!

If you need to do manual steps to achieve parts of the development workflow, it’s just a burden which is holding you back to progress further. The automation doesn’t need to be perfect – in fact, it will never be, just make sure it’s implemented, you can always improve it with spending further development cycles on it once you are aware of the main drawbacks.

Actual tooling? Whatever fits you and your team: e.g. we are using Ansible to achieve most of the automation paired with OpenShift Jobs and expanding into GitHub actions.

Some (Red Hat) teams are using Argo CD, Tekton and Kustomize. Make sure to do your research and pick tooling which is best for your use cases.

The principle remains the same though: use continuous integration to verify the change passes automated tests and continuous delivery for users and developers to try the change before (or after) it’s merged with as little disruption in production as possible.

10 Top Open Source API Gateways and Management Tools

Microservices and APIs (short for Application Programming Interfaces) have become almost commonplace in sustainable modern application development. APIs drive microservices (an architectural design that structures an application into small, self-contained, and manageable services/pieces) and they define how a consumer (of the API) can interact with and use the underlying service.

To businesses and other organizations, APIs have become the core of digital transformation strategies. The growth in the use of APIs has increased the use of API management solutions by developers to publish their APIs to the public or external developers, internal developers as well as other partners.

Remote Software Dev: What Can Be Learned From Open Source World | IT Pro

We talked with open source developers with years of experience with remote software dev to find out what proprietary developers can learn.

Mastodon Instances, Everywhere

I knew Mastondon was popular among the Free Software world, and I’m aware of individuals who run their own private or public instances. One thing I discovered is how these instances reveal themselves to website owners, like me! This isn’t a secret, or ‘hack’ or whatever, I just found it interesting, so I’m sharing it.

When I publish a blog post, I tend to share it on Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn (sometimes) and Facebook (rarely). I don’t use a tool for this, unless “my hands” and “the keyboard” are “tools” (they are). I basically type the entry on one site and paste it on the others. Yes, tedious, but it takes seconds, and I don’t end up annoying people with stuff shared in a weird broken way that leaks back to another social network.

Events

• Device Tree 101 webinar slides and videos

  As we announced back in January, we have offered in partnership with ST on February 9 a free webinar titled Device Tree 101, which gives a detailed introduction to the Device Tree, an important mechanism used in the embedded Linux ecosystem to describe hardware platforms. We were happy to see the interest around this topic and webinar.

Web Browsers

• Brave browser adds native support for uBlock and Fanboy annoyances lists and social list – gHacks Tech News

  Brave browser’s built-in ad-blocker has been boosted by some additional options. The Chromium fork’s Brave Shield now supports three popular privacy-friendly filter lists, namely uBlock Annoyances List, Fanboy Annoyances List and Fanboy Social List.

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Localization (L10N): L10n Report: February 2021 Edition

  • Hacks.Mozilla.Org: MDN localization update, February 2021

    Previously on MDN, we allowed translators to localize document URL slugs as well as the document title and body content. This sounds good in principle, but has created a bunch of problems. It has resulted in situations where it is very difficult to keep document structures consistent.

    If you want to change the structure or location of a set of documentation, it can be nearly impossible to verify that you’ve moved all of the localized versions along with the en-US versions — some of them will be under differently-named slugs both in the original and new locations, meaning that you’d have to spend time tracking them down, and time creating new parent pages with the correct slugs, etc.

    As a knock-on effect, this has also resulted in a number of localized pages being orphaned (not being attached to any parent en-US pages), and a number of en-US pages being translated more than once (e.g. localized once under the existing en-US slug, and then again under a localized slug).

  • Karl Dubost: Whiteboard Reactionaries

    I simply and firmly disagree and throw my gauntlet at Bruce’s face. Choose your weapons, time and witnesses.

    The important part of this tweet is how Mike Taylor points out how the Sillycon Valley industry is a just a pack of die-hard stick-in-the-mud reactionaries who have promoted the whiteboard to the pinnacle of one’s dull abilities to regurgitate the most devitalizing Kardashianesque answers to stackoverflow problems. Young programmers! Rise! In front of the whiteboard, just walk out. Refuse the tiranny of the past, the chalk of ignorance.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Developers Continue New Push With LibreOffice In The Web Browser Via WebAssembly

  While there has been LibreOffice Online as a collaborative, web-based version of LibreOffice making use of the HTML5 Canvas for its UI, there hasn’t been much activity there recently outside of the Collabora Online commercial variant. But developers are working on a current port of LibreOffice to the web browser using WebAssembly.

  Developers Thorsten Behrens and Jan-Marek Glogowski presented at last weekend’s FOSDEM Online 2021 on the work being done to port LibreOffice to work gracefully with WebAssembly for running the open-source office suite within the web browser.

• [LibreOffice] QA/Dev Report: January 2021

  Ilmari Lauhakangas (TDF) reimplemented the MediaWiki Bugzilla integration as a widget, so the unmaintained extension could be removed. He also made the Help content regarding keyboard shortcuts more accurate for macOS users

CMS

• People of WordPress: Pooja Derashri

  Pooja Derashri shares the story of how she went from being an introvert from a small village in India to becoming a developer and working on international projects, thanks to the WordPress community.

  As her interest grew, Pooja started following some WordPress-based groups on Facebook, where she first heard about conference-style WordPress events known as WordCamps. She later joined her first WordCamp in Ahmedabad, India. This three day event in 2017 opened up a new world—the WordPress community—and what would become a life changing moment. “WordCamp Ahmedabad has one of the best WordPress communities in India,” she said, “and everyone, including organizers and attendees were so humble and welcoming.”

FSFE

• Show your love for free software using LibreOffice Draw

  Free Software Foundation Europe has developed an “I Love Free Software” template for the upcoming Valentine Day, to allow free open source software advocates to express the reason why they love FOSS, and they support it as volunteer contributors, or as simple users. FSFE template was developed using Inkscape, which is an outstanding FOSS application to create and manage vector images, but is also rather difficult to use if your graphics skills are limited. So, I imported the Inkscape SVG template into LibreOffice Draw, and tweaked it a bit by using Liberation Sans and Liberation Sans Narrow fonts – which are installed by LibreOffice and as such are always available to LibreOffice users, and by replacing the lines of text with a text box, to make it easier to write the personal notes and the name. I have also added a text box with instructions on how to fit the user portrait inside the heart shape, which is a rather easy operation with LibreOffice Draw.

• SFP#9: I Love Free Software Day

  For this episode of the Software Freedom Podcast we talk about the background of the “I Love Free Software Day” and how it all began 11 years ago. Discover together with Bonnie why Free Software developers, advocates, activists and contributors think this special day is so important for Free Software.

FSF

• LibrePlanet needs you: Volunteer remotely!

  LibrePlanet, the world’s premier free software conference, is coming up soon. We have two great days of talks planned, with over forty speakers from all over the globe, on March 20th and 21st, 2021. One keynote speaker has been confirmed, copyleft activist Julia Reda, and more keynote will be announced shortly. There will be workshops and lightning talks as well, and all of it will be presented remotely.

  [...]

  Please help us have the best online free software conference ever — we can’t do it without you!

Programming/Development

• IPCDump: Open-source tool for tracing interprocess communication on Linux

  The tool covers most interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms, including pipes, fifos, signals, Unix sockets, loopback-based networking, and pseudoterminals, and is useful for debugging multi-process applications and gaining transparency into how they communicate with one another in their IT environment.

  Modern applications have distinct processes that plug into one another in a black box, creating significant challenges for developers when something breaks. This issue is particularly true for debugging complex multiprocess applications. IPCDump solves this problem by tracing both the metadata and contents of apps’ communication and tracing IPC between short-lived processes.

• POSIX vs UNIX: Understanding the Difference

  POSIX is an IEEE standard that acts as a standard UNIX version. It is a consortium of vendors that helps users easily port applications across different platforms. POSIX is considered a subset of UNIX and is used to cover different Unix-like environments for many other operating systems. POSIX initially contained different environments, such as Eunice for Virtual Machines, POSIX Personality, and NT from Windows OS. POSIX is portable between different variants of UNIX. In general terms, we can call POSIX as an operating system of UNIX.

• POSIX Spawn with C Programming

  Spawn is a function used in POSIX to load and execute child processes. The currently running process in POSIX will then either continue or not continue to execute these child processes and other processes asynchronously. Whenever a new sub-process is created, it requires some specific memory that will allow the parent and child process to execute. In Microsoft Windows, UNIX, and Linux, there is a certain family of spawns; and other families of spawn functions are considered an optional extension.

• POSIX Message Queues with C Programming

  IPC is used for real-time extensions. These message queues are a part of Linux. These calls are used as a standard now but might be a part of contemporary versions. These calls are easy to implement with a much cleaner interface.

• Lambda Expressions in C++

• How to Use PyQtGraph?

  The scientific or numerical visualization tasks can be done in python easily using various Python libraries, such as Plotly, Matplotlib, Seaborn, ggplot, PyQt, etc. PyQtGraph is a useful module of the PyQt library to create a graph. This module can create graphs very fast. 2D and 3D graphics can be created by using this module. How to use the PyQtGraph module to draw different types of graphs has shown in this tutorial.

• How to Use PyQt Checkbox?

  The checkbox is used to select zero or more options from many options using the graphical user interface. A form with a checkbox can be created by using QCheckBox class in a Python script or using the QCheckBox widget of Qt Designer without writing any script.

  When a form with a checkbox is created using QCheckBox class, then stateChanged.connect() function is called to apply the action done by the user’s input. If the user checked any checkbox option, then the value of QtCore.Qt.checked will be True. Multiple checkboxes with a single selection like Radio Button can be created using QbuttonGroup class.

  How a form with a checkbox can be created by writing a Python script is shown in this tutorial.

• The Programming Foundation is on a mission to make technology inclusive

  In 2018, during his college days, Subhajeet Mukherjee from Kolkata realised that a lot of students were being taught computer programming through drag and drop tools.

  Moreover, at a time when data security is of utmost concern, Subhajeet wanted to keep the users anonymous, and democratise computer science education. This was in a bid to foster people at the grassroot level, and create a self-sustaining community of developers worldwide.

  Founded in February 2020 in Sunnyvale, California, The Programming Foundation (TPF) focuses on providing computer science education free-of-cost, without compromising data. Theodore Rolle, a Technical Account Manager with Google Cloud Professional Services Organization joined TPF as the Secretary and Technical advisor.

• KDSingleApplication: a class for single-instance policy applications – KDAB

  Another day, another blog about some of KDAB’s utility classes. Now it’s the turn of KDSingleApplication, a class that helps implement applications that follow the single-instance policy.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel: td 0.0.1 on CRAN: New Finance Data Package

  Thrilled to announce that a new package of mine just made it to CRAN: the td package accesses the twelvedata API for financial data.

  Currently only the time_series REST access point is supported, but it is already supported with all meaningful options (we skipped only ‘JSON or CSV’ which makes no sense here) so for example any resolution between 1 minute and 1 month can be requested for any stock, etf or currency symbol for a wide array of exchanges. Historical access is available too via (optional) start and end dates. We return either raw JSON or a data.frame or an xts object making it trivial to call high-end plotting functions on the data–the project and repo pages show several examples.

• Debugging C code on macOS
  

  I started to write C 25 years ago now, with many different tools over the year. As many open source developers, I spent most of my life working with the GNU tools out there.

  As I’ve been using an Apple computer over the last years, I had to adapt to this environment and learn the tricks of the trade. Here are some of my notes so a search engine can index them — and I’ll be able to find them later.

• 5 Questions to Help You Learn the Fundamentals of Programming – Make Tech Easier

  Programming is no longer a “geeks’ domain.” In reality, it never was, but more people are now taking up coding – it’s even included in some mainstream grade-school curriculums. However, to be a well-rounded programmer, you’ll need to learn a few different languages – and be able to use them.

  Fortunately, there are five questions you may ask yourself when starting to learn a new language. This article will look to answer them and set you up with a new arrow for your quiver!

• Python

  • How to read and create csv files using Python

    CSV is the acronym of “Comma Separated Values”. A csv file is a just plain text document used to represent and exchange tabular data. Each row in a csv file represents an “entity”, and each column represents an attribute of it. Columns are usually separated by a comma but other characters can be used as field separator instead of it. In this tutorial we will see how to read and create csv files using Python and specifically the csv module, which is part of the language standard library.

  • [Older] How to read and create csv files using Python – LinuxConfig.org

    CSV is the acronym of “Comma Separated Values”. A csv file is a just plain text document used to represent and exchange tabular data. Each row in a csv file represents an “entity”, and each column represents an attribute of it. Columns are usually separated by a comma but other characters can be used as field separator instead of it. In this tutorial we will see how to read and create csv files using Python and specifically the csv module, which is part of the language standard library.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Exporting Bash Variables

    Understanding variables in the Bash shell is essential in working with Linux in a professional manner. It is one of the key requirements for programming as well as achieving the Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) Level 1 [2].
    The previously published article by Fahmida Yesmin [4] gives you a wonderful introduction into Bash variables. Here we step further, and explain how to declare variables in Bash in such a way that you can use them in other environments on your Linux system, and which corresponding side effects you have to take into account.

• Rust

  • Mercurial Revision Control System Continues Rust’ing For Better Performance

    The Mercurial distributed revision control system continues to see use particularly around some large code-base projects and the developers continue working to optimize its performance in part by transitioning more of it to the Rust programming language.

    With Mercurial traditionally being a Python program and supporting C extensions in some areas, in recent years they have been turning to making use of Rust code for achieving better performance and maintainability. Mercurial’s “Oxidation Plan” ultimately calls for the main command (hg) to become a Rust binary that embeds and uses a Python interpreter when needed while Mercurial’s Python code will call into Rust code.

  • This Week in Rust 377

  • 
    Rust 1.50.0 released

    Version 1.50.0 of the Rust language has been released. “For this release, we have improved array indexing, expanded safe access to union fields, and added to the standard library.”

  • Announcing Rust 1.50.0

    The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.50.0. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

• Java

  • Enhancing the development loop with Quarkus remote development – Red Hat Developer

    Kubernetes is an established foundation layer for cloud-native microservices and serverless architectures. By automating application deployment, scaling, and management, Kubernetes changes the developer’s daily workflow in terms of inner loop development (local coding, building, running, and testing the application) and outer loop development (integration testing, continuous deployment, and security). Developers using Kubernetes also must plan for containerization, debugging code inside pods, and automating test cases.

    In this article, you’ll see how using Quarkus remote development enhances the development loop on Kubernetes. We will set up a new Quarkus project then configure it for live coding on a remote Red Hat OpenShift cluster, just like you would in your local development environment.

The W3C and IETF make WebRTC an official standard

Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC) is now an official World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard. WebRTC is a platform that provides real-time communication and collaboration services such as audio and video calling to browsers, mobile apps, and desktop apps. According to the organizations, this is especially important as the COVID-19 pandemic continues and businesses remain remote.

Why Did Mark Cuban Fold?

It was just recently noticed that the Dallas Mavericks haven’t been playing the national anthem before their games. As one might imagine, the response was not exactly tepid, especially from the right-wing blathosphere. Yet, immediately following a comment from the league offices, the pugnaciously outspoken franchise owner Mark Cuban buckled like a belt; the team issued a statement that the anthem would play. When NBA VP Michael Bass was asked about Cuban’s move, he said, “With NBA teams now in the process of welcoming fans back into their arenas, all teams will play the national anthem in keeping with longstanding league policy.” And with that, Cuban was done playing the billionaire rebel.

Opinion | I’m Here Live. I’m Not A Cat.

Container-shipping costs have surged in recent months

Containers are the building blocks of global trade. And at the moment, shippers cannot get enough of them. Surging demand for goods and a shortage of empty containers at Asian ports have sent container-shipping costs rocketing. Since November the cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Asia to Europe has risen more than three-fold, from around $2,200 to over $7,900. The price of shipping goods from North America to Asia has doubled. The Freightos Baltic Index, a measure of container-freight rates in 12 important maritime lanes, has increased from $2,200 to $4,000 per container (see chart).

Rennie Davis: Not the Boy Next Door

Unlike Abbie, Jerry and Tom, Rennie’s roots were patrician. Born in Michigan and raised in Virginia, he  belonged to a 4-H Club as a boy. His father worked in President Truman’s administration as chief of staff for the Council of Economic Advisers. I remember him as boyish, with a certain naivete.

Still, the more one looked, the less all-American he appeared to be. Something was going on beneath the surface that even he didn’t recognize. The Vietnamese did.

Without Fear

Kali Uchis’s musical approach is redolent of the past—mostly thanks to the smoky, nostalgic quality of her voice, which often feels like it’s being broadcast live from a hazy, tobacco-stained lounge. “La Luna Enamorada,” the opener from her sophomore album, Sin Miedo (Del Amor y Otros Demonios), takes full advantage of her vocals as she purrs over a rich, undulating bolero rhythm. But the song isn’t simply a chance for Uchis to show off her singing chops. It’s a cover of the Cuban classic “La Luna en Tu Mirada,” written by the composer Luís Chaniveky and performed in 1964 by Los Zafiros, a Cuban filin quartet that took inspiration from American doo-wop and harmony groups. Here, it serves as an introduction to the way Uchis explores her Latinx roots on this album, her very first release almost entirely in Spanish.

Science

• How Ethernet Works – Linux Hint

  Ethernet is a networking technology that allows computers and other devices in the same network to communicate with each other. Unlike wireless communication, signals pass through wires in an Ethernet network. This is the type of networking behind Local Area Networks (LAN), Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN), and Wide Area Networks (WAN). As the demand for faster networking speeds continues to rise, Ethernet technologies also continue to reach new heights. In its earlier days, the Basic Ethernet standard was widely implemented, but the speed that it was crawling at was a slow 10Mbps. The speed of Ethernet later significantly improved to 100Mbps with the Fast Ethernet standard. Although Fast Ethernet is still the most common standard in use today, standards supporting faster speeds, such as the Gigabit Ethernet, which can handle up to 1000 Mbps or 1Gbps, and the 10 Gigabit Ethernet are already being implemented, especially in large industries.

Education

• Why I Wrote “Educational Strategies for Youth Empowerment in Conflict Zones”

  In this book, my purpose is to call attention to non-Western societies, “beyond what might be considered the geographical bounds of a western paradigm,” that are fractured and traumatized, and that will continue to sabotage themselves unless they actively engage in the process of healing (Edkins 9-10). It is also my purpose to employ the “strategy of comparison” between traumatic histories “in order to forge links” among those “histories” that would raise the “historical” consciousnesses of peoples “and promote their sense of civic responsibility” (Ball 15). The discourse of human rights, as I underline in my classes, does not have the universality that it should. As anthropologists Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman point out, “the social processes of the recognition of persons as traumatized effectively chooses its victims. Although those who promote the concept assert that it is universal, since it is a mark left by an event, study reveals tragic disparities in its use” (282). While several non-Western nations have been mangled and pummeled by discord, and some constituencies in the West have been “Otherized,” they are not all “‘regarded’ as potentially grievable, and hence . . ., are made to bear . . . differential exposure to violence and death” (Butler 25). After quoting Judith Butler on the unethicality and “precarity” of the politicization of the discourse of human rights, Craps fittingly argues that “the sufferings of those belonging to non-Western or minority cultures must be given due recognition” (13).

  While I admit that I have greatly benefitted from the exploration of issues of trauma in Holocaust literature and testimony, my purpose is not to give greater space or credence to “Euro-American events and experiences.” On the contrary, my attempt is to highlight the heterogeneity of the identities and histories of children of the victims as well as survivors of the Holocaust. There is, nonetheless, much to learn from “qualitative” and “interpretive” studies of “survivors and their children, and the making of Holocaust consciousness” (186). Members of various victim groups can communicate with one another and learn about strategies of healing psychological traumas in  parts of the world that have been degraded by the instruments of militarization, increasing influence of the military in civilian affairs, normalization of sexual violence, insidiousness of institutional discrimination, hegemonic narratives of the state as well as insurgent movements, dehumanizing effect of incarceration and custodial torture, and those having difficulty reengaging with society. We learn to recognize cultural traumas, which occur “when members of a collective feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leave indelible marks upon their group consciousness, not because it is in some way naturally ineffaceable but because it generates a structure of discourse that normalizes it in collective life over time” (1). Cultures that internalize those negative historical events are motivated to “overcome the emotions and sentiments that accompany them,” which include “the desire to repair a damaged reputation; the aspiration to recover respect in the eyes of the world; the wish to mourn losses and recover from censure; the longing to find meaning and dignity in the face of failure; the hope to shield family and relatives from recrimination; and the urge to minimize the event and pretend it never happened (Hashimoto 5).

Health/Nutrition

• Fauci: Vaccines for Kids as Young as First Graders Could Be Authorized by September

  Children as young as first graders may be able to get the coronavirus vaccine by the time school starts in September, presuming trials are successful in those age groups, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview with ProPublica.

  “We’re in the process of starting clinical trials in what we call age de-escalation, where you do a clinical trial with people 16 to 12, then 12 to 9, then 9 to 6,” Fauci said. When asked what was the youngest age group that might be authorized for the vaccine by September, he said, “I would think by the time we get to school opening, we likely will be able to get people who come into the first grade.”

• New Lancet Report: 40 Percent of US COVID Deaths Could Have Been Avoided

• Instagram Bars Robert F. Kennedy Jr. For Spreading Vaccine Misinformation

  Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now blocked from Instagram after he repeatedly undercut trust in vaccines. Kennedy has also spread conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, accusing him of profiteering off vaccines and attempting to take control of the world’s food supply.

  “We removed this account for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” a spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram, told NPR on Thursday.

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Banned From Instagram Over Promoting Debunked COVID-19 Vaccine Claims

  “We removed this account for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” a spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram, said in a statement, cited by CNN. His Facebook page with similar claims is still up, as is his Twitter account.

• Hopes of Achieving Herd Immunity by Fall Look Dim, Biden’s Health Experts Warn

• Hospitalizations for Liver Disease Soar With Pandemic-Fueled Alcohol Use

• Opinion | We Can Push Biden for Fundamental Change at the USDA and Beyond

  Here’s a chance for progressives to rally a broad grassroots constituency to refocus the work of this huge public resource and make it The People’s Department again.

• Grifters gonna grift: Cancer quacks Ty and Charlene Bollinger pivot to antivaccine and “Stop the Steal” conspiracies

  Not too long ago, I wrote about how all science denial is a form of conspiracy theory. Ever since that concept crystalized in my mind, I’ve been finding more and more examples that reinforce just that conclusion: All science denial is conspiracy theory. Last week, CNN did a story about just one such example, the case of Ty Bollinger and his wife Charlene. I’ve written about them before, as this pseudoscience- and quackery-loving couple represent two of the most prominent members of what I like to call the “Cancer Truth” movement. That CNN story struck me as an excellent reason to check in on the Bollingers to see what they are doing in the age of COVID-19. Unsurprisingly, they’re grifting, and they’ve conveniently glommed on to the conspiracy theories of 2020 and beyond, the better to profit from promoting misinformation and conspiracy theories.

• Baby food allegedly riddled with poisonous metals—and the Trump administration did nothing about it

  The House Oversight Committee released a report on Thursday based on a congressional investigation into the potential presence of toxic heavy metals — including lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury — in baby foods. Four baby food manufacturers provided Congress with information about the amount of toxic heavy metals in their foods based on their own internal testing, including Beech-Nut Nutrition Company, Gerber, Hain Celestial Group, Inc. and Nurture Inc. Between those four companies, Congress found that the companies allow dangerously high levels of toxic heavy metals in their foods and that the foods sold by the companies frequently exceed even those standards.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Frame.io Introduces ‘Camera to Cloud’ Production System

    At launch, the system is intended to provide proxy (low resolution) uploads to the Frame.io cloud each time a camera stop rolling, so editorial and other postproduction tasks can begin in parallel while footage is still being shot (the master and back ups would be saved on set to hard drives that would be later delivered where needed.)

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Unikraft: Pushing Unikernels into the Mainstream

          While not all unikernel projects suffer from all of these issues (e.g., some provide some level of POSIX compliance but the performance is lacking, others target a single programming language and so are relatively easy to build but their applicability is limited), we argue that no single project has been able to successfully address all of them, hindering any significant level of deployment. For the past three years, Unikraft (www.unikraft.org), a Linux Foundation project under the Xen Project’s auspices, has had the explicit aim to change this state of affairs to bring unikernels into the mainstream.

        • Getting to Know the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA)

          With the recent surge in popularity of cryptocurrencies and related technologies, Square felt an industry group was needed to protect against litigation and other threats against core cryptocurrency technology and ensure the ecosystem remains vibrant and open for developers and companies.

          The same way Open Invention Network (OIN) and LOT Network add a layer of patent protection to inter-company collaboration on open source technologies, COPA aims to protect open source cryptocurrency technology. Feeling safe from the threat of lawsuits is a precursor to good collaboration.

        • Understanding Open Governance Networks – Linux Foundation

          Throughout the modern business era, industries and commercial operations have shifted substantially to digital processes. Whether you look at EDI as a means to exchange invoices or cloud-based billing and payment solutions today, businesses have steadily been moving towards increasing digital operations. In the last few years, we’ve seen the promises of digital transformation come alive, particularly in industries that have shifted to software-defined models. The next step of this journey will involve enabling digital transactions through decentralized networks.

          A fundamental adoption issue will be figuring out who controls and decides how a decentralized network is governed. It may seem oxymoronic at first, but decentralized networks still need governance. A future may hold autonomously self-governing decentralized networks, but this model is not accepted in industries today. The governance challenge with a decentralized network technology lies in who and how participants in a network will establish and maintain policies, network operations, on/offboarding of participants, setting fees, configurations, and software changes and are among the issues that will have to be decided to achieve a successful network. No company wants to participate or take a dependency on a network that is controlled or run by a competitor, potential competitor, or any single stakeholder at all for that matter.

    • Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

      • Collabora Online Community Roundup #9 (New Year Edition!) [Ed: Epic mistake! Collabora Online has outsourced to Microsoft's proprietary software trap… to develop competitor of Microsoft. Stop with the Stockholm Syndrome.]

        On 1 October 2020, Collabora Online moved to its new home on GitHub, and started settling in the new infrastructure, expanding its fantastic community, and continuing the work to deliver the latest and greatest developments in productivity and collaboration together. Check our new community website for all the details!

      • Popular open-source library SDL moving development to GitHub despite ‘calamitous design choices’ in git [Ed: Microsoft Tim promotes Microsoft imprisonment]

        The Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) project is moving development to GitHub today despite what a core developer calls “calamitous design choices” in git, for the sake of familiarity and wide tool support.

        SDL is a cross-platform and open-source multimedia library mainly written in C and widely used in game development. Previously it used Mercurial for source code version control and Mozilla’s Bugzilla for bug tracking, hosted on their own Linux Server co-located at Digital Ocean, according to a core developer Ryan Gordon.

  • Security

    • What’s most interesting about the Florida water system hack? That we heard about it at all.

      Stories about computer security tend to go viral when they bridge the vast divide between geeks and luddites, and this week’s news about a hacker who tried to poison a Florida town’s water supply was understandably front-page material. But for security nerds who’ve been warning about this sort of thing for ages, the most surprising aspect of the incident seems to be that we learned about it at all.

    • Turns out that Florida water treatment facility left the doors wide open for [attackers]

      The reality? The water treatment plant itself left off-the-shelf remote control software on these critical computers — and apparently never, ever bothered to change the password.

    • FBI Called In After [Intruder] Tries To Poison Tampa-Area City’s Water With Lye

      It started with a cursor moving on its own, sliding across a computer screen at the water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Fla. Someone had taken remote control of a plant operator’s machine – and in just a few minutes, they increased the level of sodium hydroxide in the city’s drinking water by a factor of 100. After spiking the caustic substance to unsafe levels, the hacker immediately left the system.

      The plant operator quickly reset the sodium hydroxide level back to normal parameters before the rogue action posed a threat to the water supply, officials say. But the incident, which took place Friday, is now being investigated by local authorities as well as the FBI and Secret Service, according to Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri.

    • Security vs. Compliance: What’s the difference?

      The first two posts in our compliance blog series focused on managing compliance through automation. In this third post, we take a step back to explore a more foundational — but no less important — topic: What’s the difference between compliance and security? Is compliant infrastructure secure infrastructure?

      People often talk about compliance and security as though they’re one and the same. To a certain extent, this makes sense; there is a lot of overlap between the two concepts. But compliant infrastructure is not necessarily secure infrastructure, and vice versa. I’ll use an analogy to explain the difference.

    • Microsoft issues additional patch to fix Zerologon vulnerability

      Microsoft has released an additional patch to fix the Zerologon vulnerability that surfaced last year, having first issued a patch for the flaw in August 2020 and then updated it the following month.

    • Security updates for Thursday

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (firejail and netty), Fedora (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, rubygem-mechanize, and xpdf), Mageia (gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad, nethack, and perl-Email-MIME and perl-Email-MIME-ContentType), openSUSE (firejail, java-11-openjdk, python, and rclone), Red Hat (dotnet, dotnet3.1, dotnet5.0, and rh-nodejs12-nodejs), SUSE (firefox, kernel, python, python36, and subversion), and Ubuntu (gnome-autoar, junit4, openvswitch, postsrsd, and sqlite3).

    • Intel fixes vulnerabilities in Windows, Linux graphics drivers

      Intel addressed 57 security vulnerabilities during this month’s Patch Tuesday, including high severity ones impacting Intel Graphics Drivers.

      40 of them were found internally by Intel, while the other 17 were externally reported, almost all through Intel’s Bug Bounty program.

    • Patched sudo privilege escalation vulnerability CVE-2021-3156

      A rather nasty sudo vulnerability has been making news for a couple of weeks now, apparently most of Unix and Unix-like operating systems were affected:

      sudo package had heap-based buffer overflow, allowing any user on the system to use sudoedit -s command and become root.

    • Kushal Das: Defending against side channel attacks via dependencies

      Yesterday Alex Birsan posted a blog explaining how he made a supply chain attack on various companies via dependencies. I was waiting for this blog from last August when we noticed the mentioned packages on PyPI (and removed). I reached out to Alex to figure out more about the packages, and he said he will write a blog post.

    • Breached water plant ran Windows 7, used single password for TeamViewer

      The water treatment plant in a Florida city, that was breached last week and had its sodium hydroxide levels changed temporarily before they were reversed back to normal, was running an outdated version of Windows and the password for its TeamViewer application was shared among all employees, according to an advisory from the Massachusetts state government.

    • [Cracked] psychotherapy centre Vastaamo files for bankruptcy

      “It very quickly became clear that the company’s clear, undisputed debts exceed the amount of its assets. That does not of course include possible damages that it may have to pay due to the data breach,” Nyyssönen told Yle.

    • Anyone can [crack] your Mac unless you patch it now — here’s how

      The vulnerability, detailed in our report on February 3, permits full system takeover by remote attackers or malware. The attackers or malware would have to first use other methods to first gain access to a Mac, but that’s not as hard as it sounds.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Biden Administration Reviewing Trump’s Stalled TikTok Ban

        The Biden Administration wants to pause the court battle with TikTok it inherited from Donald Trump’s DOJ.

        TikTok sued after Trump issued an Aug. 6 executive order that would bar “any transaction by any person” with its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, or any of its subsidiaries. The order cited concerns about national security, corporate espionage and censorship and relied upon authority granted by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

      • Senate panel criticises bill to give AFP, ACIC additional online powers

        A Senate panel chaired by Tasmanian Labor Senator Helen Polley has it considers the authorisation of coercive search powers for the Australian Federal Police and Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission in a current bill — the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2020 — could unduly trespass on personal rights and liberties.

      • Code is law: why software openness and algorithmic transparency are vital for privacy

        That might look like a routine application of DNA matching in order to pinpoint an individual allegedly involved in a crime. But in this case, something interesting happened. The legal defense team wanted to analyze how the TrueAllele software had arrived at the conclusion that Pickett’s DNA was present in the sample. The reasoning was that without checking the underlying software code, it was impossible to know whether that implicit accusation was valid. However, both the prosecutors and the software vendor claimed this code was a trade secret. The vendor had a commercial interest in preventing competitors from understanding and copying its approach, and claimed that this outweighed the right of the accused to check the inner logic of the program. Fortunately, an appeals court in New Jersey agreed with the defendant:

      • South Africa’s highest court bans bulk internet surveillance

        The Concourt found that many aspects of the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act (RICA), such as lack of disclosure even post-surveillance are unconstitutional. The Concourt has given the South African government three years to draft new legislation to replace RICA – but in the meantime, RICA will remain active. 

Defence/Aggression

• Biden Adopts a Trump Approach to Iran

  Some good news when it comes to foreign policy as well. You’ll remember that in Trump’s determination to “make “American great again” (MAGA), the former president decided that international organizations and cooperation were impediments to national greatness. Thus, he systematically withdrew from a number of alignments and also scorned international law. This approach appears to have been part of a MAGA scheme to subvert international order. Its nihilistic undertones were highlighted by the creepy leaders who seemed to warm Trump’s heart. He found men such as the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, along with a long list of dictators ranging from Rodrigo Duterte in Philippines to Abdel Fattah el-Sisi inEgypt, to be really congenial. There was also Trump’s warm admiration for the Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

  President Biden has saved us from this sort of delinquency. He is now operating under new and saner marching orders: “diplomacy is back” and multilateralism is in. The U.S. has recommitted to the international effort to slow down global warming and has rejoined the World Health Organization. Biden has ended all participation in the immoral Yemen civil war and, so it is reported, told the Russians to keep their invasive cyber-fingers to themselves.

• Queen of Chicken Hawks: Victoria Nuland Had A Hand in Every US Intervention in the Past 30 Years

  President Joe Biden’s nomination of Victoria Nuland for Under Secretary for Political Affairs, the third-highest position at the State Department, is a dangerous sign. Nuland exemplifies the neoconservatives who have led American foreign policy from one disaster to another for the past 30 years, all while evading any shred of accountability.

• Russia agrees to pay Alexey Navalny compensation for his detention amid the 2012 Bolotnaya Square protests

  The Russian Justice Ministry has declined to appeal a European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling from November 2020, obliging Russia to pay opposition politician Alexey Navalny compensation for his detention amid the Bolotnaya Square protests in 2012. This was reported by Interfax, citing the Justice Ministry’s press service.

• Capitol Attack: Impeachment Managers Build Case vs. Trump with Chilling New Video of Mob’s Violence

  On the second day of former President Trump’s second impeachment trial, House impeachment managers presented detailed documentation of the events leading up to the January 6 insurrection and shared dramatic new footage of the violence as it unfolded. We air excerpts of video from security cameras, which show the pro-Trump mob searching the Capitol building for lawmakers, including Republicans like Vice President Mike Pence, coming within about 100 feet of the room where he was sheltering with his family. House impeachment managers also played audio of Capitol Hill police officers seeking backup.

• Rioters’ Own Words Show Incitement By Trump, Impeachment Managers Argue

  Many of those statements appear in the criminal cases against the alleged [insurrectionists]. NPR’s Investigations team has been tracking those cases — more than 200 so far — and has created a searchable database with information about the known defendants and the charges they face. So far, NPR has found, at least 26 defendants have made specific and explicit statements that they stormed the Capitol because they believed Trump wanted them to.

• Trump impeachment trial video means GOP can’t pretend the former president is innocent

  Wednesday’s opening argument exposed a president who gleefully ratcheted up his acid rhetoric to the point of violent insurrection, and a Republican Party mostly unwilling to face the terrible cost of their attempts to undermine the integrity of our recent election. The GOP’s blindness isn’t merely symbolic: When footage was played of [insurrectionists] reading Trump’s tweets through a megaphone, multiple Republicans turned away rather than accept what their party enabled. The impeachment prosecution means GOP senators can no longer feign ignorance.

• The Case Against Donald Trump, the ‘Inciter in Chief’

  Wednesday’s arguments recreated with forensic-level detail the months, weeks, and days leading up to January 6th, as well as the sequence of events on the 6th itself, all of it through the lens of Trump’s campaign to reverse the election outcome and prevent the peaceful transfer of power. But the crux of Wednesday’s arguments wasn’t how chilling and damning the video footage was. After all, there almost surely wasn’t a senator-cum-juror in that room who doubts the severity of what happened in Washington, D.C., on the 6th. The centerpiece of Wednesday’s hearing, instead, was the effort to prove that former President Trump was responsible for the violence and mayhem on Capitol Hill that day — that he was not the commander-in-chief but the “inciter-in-chief,” as lead impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) put it.

• The Suffering Underclass of War-Torn Yemen

  Last week, President Biden pledged to end United States support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. He also reversed a Trump-era terrorist designation of an Iran-allied rebel group known as the Houthis whom the Saudis are fighting. Both moves were heralded by human rights groups as a good first start in trying to bring peace to this shattered country, which is in its sixth year of war.

• The Unreliable Superpower

  That, at least, is the story the incoming Biden administration is telling. “America is back, multilateralism is back, diplomacy is back,” as Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the administration’s nominee for U.N. ambassador, put it shortly after the election. According to this narrative of redemption, the globe’s Atlas shrugged off its burden during the four years of Donald Trump’s tenure but is now ready to reassume its global leadership responsibilities.

  Don’t believe it, though. Much of the rest of the world seems visibly queasy at the prospect of sitting on America’s shoulders, since who’s to say that Atlas won’t shrug again?

• Biden admin smears Nicaragua as ‘dictatorship’ for forcing US-funded, coup-plotting NGOs to register as foreign agents

• New US Military Base in Northeast Syria Latest of Biden’s Warlike Moves

  The U.S.-government funded outlet Voice of America has confirmed rumors that a new military base is being built in northeastern Syria. A convoy of 40 troop carriers and other vehicles arrived and began setting up shop in the city of Hasakah near the Turkish and Iraqi borders over the weekend. “The U.S. flag is now raised over a building,” said journalist Jindar Berekat, a native of the city, “it is not clear how many American soldiers will be stationed at this location, but their armored military vehicles are here and it looks like they are still constructing parts of it.”

• A Death on the Anniversary of the Iranian Revolution

  Lajevardi was educated inside the country and received her Ph.D. from Tehran University in political theory. Her brilliance was noted when the same department that granted her degree hired her as an assistant professor after she submitted her doctoral dissertation. In addition to her own scholarship, she established herself as an influential public intellectual with her work at Aarghanun, a journal dedicated to literary criticism, philosophy, art critique, and political theory.

  From 1995 to 2006, as a board member, she regularly contributed to the journal by careful translations of texts by theorists who influenced her own work. The long list of her translations include works by Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Richard Rorty, Paul Ricoeur, Hand Georg Gadamer, Paul Valéry, and many others. She played a key role in introducing a whole new generation of Iranians to critique as an intellectual vocation.

• China, Papua New Guinea and Australia’s Backyard Blues

  Last week, the Australian press were particularly excited by “leaked” documents revealing a proposal from Hong Kong registered company WYW Holding Limited to create a “New Daru City” comprising an industrial zone, seaport, business and commercial zone.  To this would be added a resort and residential area. In total, the entire enterprise would cover 100 square kilometres.  A very PRC sort of thing in terms of massive promise.

  The proposal was apparently outlined in a letter to PNG Prime Minister James Marape in April 2020 by the company’s chief executive Terence Mo, containing an “investment and development plan” stressing the development of PNG’s Western Province. It would involve “an agreed Sovereign Guarantee based on a long-term BOT [Building Operate Transfer] contract.”

• When It Seemed as If the World Took Notice

  The death of protester and Chicago 7 (Chicago 8  with Bobby Seale) defendant Rennie Davis is yet another example of how long the echoes of the antiwar movement sends ripples into the present (“Rennie Davis, ‘Chicago Seven’ Antiwar Activist, Dies at 80,” New York Times, February 4, 2021). The Chicago trial of protesters was in answer to the antiwar protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention and resulting police riot. The guilty verdicts against protesters were overturned on appeal.

  Some criticized Rennie Davis’ post-antiwar interests, but that is beside the point here, because the power of the antiwar movement was so great for so many of the post-World War II baby boom generation that it was almost impossible to escape its grasp and the incessant criticisms of its former members.

• Biden: “Boxed-In” by the Military Establishment?

  Senior general officers are lobbying for increased defense spending even before President Biden has expressed his own budget preferences.  The Washington Post last week carried an oped by the U.S. Air Force chief of staff and the U.S. Marine Corps commandant, both four-star generals, bemoaning the fact that the “U.S. military no longer enjoyed global primacy” and advocating that it “build a more lethal and modern force.”  In order to justify increases for an already bloated defense budget, the generals rewrote the rules for “readiness,” applying readiness to future wars instead of the commonly accepted view of the availability of forces for immediate deployment.

  The mainstream media, particularly the New York Times, is relying on general officers with their worst-case views to justify increased military deployments around the world.  Last week, Eric Schmitt, a veteran reporter, quoted the commander of the Central Command, another four-star general, taking credit for deploying additional fire power to the Middle East and the Persian Gulf in order to deter Iran.  This provocative “fire power” included sending B-52 strategic bombers on 36-hour round-trip, show of-force missions from North Dakota to the Gulf.  An aircraft carrier was kept in the Middle East far beyond its normal rotation.  The commander explained that these moves were designed to “tell [Iran] this is not the time to provoke a war.”  In actual fact, Tehran for the past several months has been signaling interest in working with the Biden administration to restore the Iran nuclear accord in return for sanctions relief.

• Trump impeachment: Democrats say Trump left those at Capitol ‘for dead’

  Using Mr Trump’s own words and tweets against him, Democrats prosecuting the case argued he had acted as “inciter-in-chief” on the day and beforehand.

  In at times emotional testimony, impeachment managers methodically pieced together the violence.

  Unreleased security footage also showed how close [insurgents] came to US lawmakers.

• Graphic New Videos Show Violence at US Capitol Last Month

  The videos showed hundreds of insurgents – Trump supporters the former U.S. leader had urged to go to the Capitol to try to stop the official certification of his reelection loss – storming through the building and into both chambers of Congress. Some of the rioters rifled through documents lawmakers had left behind as they fled to safety.

• Syria ‘finds body of archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad beheaded by IS’

  Syrian authorities believe they have found the body of a top archaeologist who was killed by the Islamic State (IS) group in 2015 while he tried to protect the ancient city of Palmyra.

  Militants publicly beheaded Khaled al-Asaad, 82, after he refused to disclose the location of valuable artefacts.

• Denmark: “Our Goal is Zero Asylum Seekers”

  “The fight against Islamism is about the survival of the welfare state. Denmark must not adapt to Islam. Islam must adapt to Denmark.” — Danish Immigration Minister Mattias Tesfaye.

• How Long Can Democracy Survive QAnon and Its Allies?

  A central question, then, is how distant from the rest of the American electorate the voters who align themselves with the radical wing of the Republican Party are.

• Suspected Islamists kill ten in eastern Congo machete attack

  Reprisal attacks against civilians increased sharply since the army began an operation against the ADF in November 2019, dislodging it from several bases in mountainous jungle near the Ugandan border.

• The New Humanitarian | 25 years of sexual exploitation and abuse

  Last year, our investigation with the Thomson Reuters Foundation uncovered allegations of extensive sexual exploitation and abuse during the 2018-2020 Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was far from the first time we had reported on this widespread, chronic problem – whether at the hands of aid workers or UN peacekeepers.
  From Bosnia to Haiti to Central African Republic, such abuses have long stained the reputation of the UN and international NGOs, undermining basic trust in the institutions meant to protect and assist people in crisis. The crux of the issue often comes down to imbalances of power – and the power relations between those providing the aid and those receiving it could not be more stark in humanitarian relief.
  Beginning in the 1990s, this timeline exposes a long cycle of impunity: grave abuses followed by statements of shock and outrage, then belated efforts to stem the problem before another revelation of abuse, either in the same country or in a different part of the world.

• The New Humanitarian | Humanitarian access stalled in Ethiopia’s Tigray region

  Lack of humanitarian access is fast becoming a defining issue in Ethiopia’s three-month conflict in Tigray: The UN and aid agencies say they’re not allowed to move sufficient personnel and goods into and around the region, and are being denied visas to bring in new international staff.
  Aid workers, NGO managers, and others involved in the response told The New Humanitarian the rules on access keep changing, and agreements with the government have not delivered as hoped, leading to a state of paralysis in the relief effort.
  In a statement today, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said: “Ending the suffering in Tigray and around the country is now my highest priority. This is why I am calling for the United Nations and international relief agencies to work with my government.”
  But even the Ethiopian Red Cross, which enjoys relatively good access, said this week that it could only reach 20 percent of the people in need in the Tigray region.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• To Conspiracy Theory or to Not Conspiracy Theory (That is the Question)

  Whether the CIA did or did not intentionally use those words, conspiracy theory, to discredit those who were non-believers of the official Warren Report line, we will never know. And that’s the thing about a conspiracy theory, as to its truth, we may never know. What should be known however, what we would be better to believe, is that in this world of intrigue, deception, black-ops and lies, that there are without a doubt conspiracies. If the CIA ever had the desire to de-legitimize someone or some entire group, then or especially now, this moment is certainly ripe for supplying them with all the necessary ingredients for pulling off a grand conspiracy of mass de-legitimization of those they see as being political rabble-rousers.

  The group who stormed the capitol on Jan.6th is one such group who follow conspiracy theories but although they are unique in being the ones who stormed the capitol, they are not unique in their beliefs in conspiracy theories. It might be hard, if one were to look, to find someone who does not believe in some conspiracy theory or another and it would be right for that to be the case because surely, one or the other of those theories is true, based on facts and even provable if the right material evidence could be produced. In this world of intrigue, deception, black-ops and lies however, it is sometimes very hard, impossible even for most of us, to get our hands on the right material evidence and those shady CIA operators are loving it. Nothing produces the environment where conspiracy theories thrive like reams of hidden or redacted evidence.

• Clapper permanently bans QAnon-related content

  Clapper CEO Edison Chen told The Verge on Thursday that the company will permanently ban QAnon-related content going forward. As of publication, Chen said Clapper has removed over 400 videos and 20 accounts for spreading QAnon or anti-vax misinformation and has increased its number of content auditors from around a dozen to 20. It will take Clapper up to 10 days to complete a full audit of its over 1 million videos, Chen said.

• Fox News Should Pay for the Lies and Slander It Helped Promote

  What makes Smartmatic’s case particularly strong is that the technology was not widely used during the 2020 election. Only one county, Los Angeles county, used Smartmatic, and that county was not actually disputed by Trump or the Republican party. So even if a person somehow believed that there was massive election fraud, led by the makers of voting machines, lumping Smartmatic in with that conspiracy was incredibly irresponsible. (Dominion has filed a separate lawsuit against Giuliani, Powell, and Newsmax, but not Fox.) It’s like accusing Dominos and Pizza Hut of putting loneliness in your pizza when there’s no Pizza Hut operating within 100 miles of your house.

• Twitter permanently suspends ‘Project Veritas’ group

  Founded in 2010, Project Veritas is a right-wing group that routinely published undercover sting videos, some of which have been accused of deceptive editing. Last October the group was criticized after claiming to have uncovered a witness to voter fraud in Minnesota only for the witness to backtrack on his claims days later and accuse Project Veritas operatives of trying to bribe him, according to multiple reports.

• Outgoing Washington Post editor finally, begrudgingly admits mistakes in Trump coverage

  On his way out the door, Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron is conceding that he, the Post and other top journalists failed to sufficiently hold Donald Trump accountable for his lies.

  But the admission, in which Baron used the vague pronoun “we,” was grudging. There was no sign of remorse. Baron cast journalists as the victims of a president who exploited their “good principles.” And then he insisted that it didn’t really matter anyway.

Environment

• Carbon-free future is in reach for the US by 2050

  America could have a carbon-free future by 2050 with a big switch to wind and solar power, say US government scientists.

• After 9th Circuit Decision, Youth Climate Campaigners Vow to Take Landmark Case to Supreme Court

  “The 9th Circuit failed to correct the legal errors in the panel decision,” said the lead attorney in the case, who added that the case is now up to the nation’s highest court.

• Opinion | With Environmental Justice, the Devil Is in the Details

  If we invest enough, and we invest right, our communities—Black, Indigenous, Latinx, all of us—will finally get a taste of the good life that America has forever promised.

• Small may prove beautiful for the nuclear industry

  The nuclear industry in much of the world is struggling to survive. Reverting to small reactors may be its best hope.

• ‘The US Has Been Obstructionist in Chief in Global Climate Talks’

  Janine Jackson interviewed IPS’s Basav Sen about rejoining the Paris accords for the February 5, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• Utility Companies Owe Millions to This State Regulatory Agency. The Problem? The Agency Can’t Track What It’s Owed.

  The California Public Utilities Commission does not have a good understanding of how much money it’s owed or even who owes it money, a new state audit found, validating some of the concerns raised by the agency’s former executive director, who was fired last year after alleging that $200 million in fines and fees was missing.

  The audit, conducted by the state’s Department of Finance, found that much of the $200 million that former executive director Alice Stebbins said could not be accounted for had been collected, but it called the agency’s billing system “inaccurate and incomplete.”

• Energy

  • The Fire Next Time: Climate Change, the Bomb, or the Flame of Hope?

    With each passing year, the state’s fire season arrives earlier and does greater damage. In 2013, a mere eight years ago, fires consumed about 602,000 acres and started significantly later. That January, CalFire reported only a single fire, just two in February, and none in March. Fire season didn’t really begin until April and had tapered off before year’s end. This past December, however, 10 fires still burned at least 10,000 acres. In fact, it almost doesn’t make sense to talk about a fire “season” anymore. Whatever the month, wildfires are likely to be burning somewhere in the state.

    Clearly, California’s fires (along with Oregon’s and Washington’s) are getting worse. Just as clearly, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s exhortations to do a better job of  “raking” our forests, climate change is the main cause of this growing disaster.

  • Colorado’s Fracking Secessionists

    According to the associated press, Colorado’s Weld County, the state’s fracking epicenter, has once again had enough of us freedom-hating scoundrels living to the south of them.  They’re tired of our belly aching about air quality. If you want pickups and diesel fuel, you gotta have gas, and Weld is gassing us. And don’t forget the jobs, and the children’s lunch buckets, and the backpacks, and the pencils the oil industry provides to kids in Weld. Is this not a wondrous bonding of industry and people in pursuit of the common good?  Why do we want to destroy all that?

    Tired of the criticism from Denver parents who are jealous their kids don’t get free lunch buckets and pencils from the industry, they want liberation, and they want it now. They want to be Wyoming where coal is cheap, gun-racks are bountiful, and all the children leave as soon as they can drive. We don’t know how many “they” is, but it’s at least one ruffled gentleman who threatens secession, once again.

  • Bitcoin consumes ‘more electricity than Argentina’

    Cambridge researchers say it consumes around 121.36 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year – and is unlikely to fall unless the value of the currency slumps.

    Critics say electric-car firm Tesla’s decision to invest heavily in Bitcoin undermines its environmental image.

  • Bitcoin’s wild ride renews worries about its massive carbon footprint

    Bitcoin has a carbon footprint comparable to that of New Zealand, producing 36.95 megatons of CO2 annually, according to Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, an online tool created by data scientist Alex de Vries. It consumes as much power as Chile — around 77.78 TWh — according to Digonomist’s estimates.

    The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, a separate tool from researchers at Cambridge University, shows a much larger figure of 110.53 TWh — more than the entire annual energy consumption of the Netherlands.

  • Bitcoin to Come to America’s Oldest Bank, BNY Mellon

    BNY Mellon said it would allow digital assets to pass through the same plumbing used by managers’ other, more traditional holdings—from Treasurys to technology stocks—using a platform that is now in prototype. The bank is already discussing plans with clients to bring their digital currencies into the fold.

  • Oldest US bank BNY Mellon to hold Bitcoin for clients

    Regelman noted to the Journal that before this development, banks had used separate custodians for cryptocurrency holdings.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Why Indigenous Knowledge Matters to the Future of Fisheries

  • Of Mexican Wolves and Their Habitat

    What the Department hasn’t been readily admitting is that predicted habitat availability and restoring a sustainable wolf population on the ground are separate things. Models that predict suitable habitat and sufficient prey do not address the question of the feasibility of wolf recovery success in Mexico. Mexico has far fewer protected public lands than the United States. Most of the best habitats in Mexico are on private lands and long-term protections in place on those lands vary. Mexico’s wolf recovery program is staffed by tenacious, dedicated biologists, but it is only recently succeeding again after a few years of uncertainty with regard to federal priorities and funding. These complexities cannot be overlooked because the ESA requires that conservation efforts are “sufficiently certain to be implemented and effective.” The United States has no authority over the sovereign nation of Mexico and should not expect them to shoulder the weight of species’ recovery as a way to avoid thorny politics in our own country.

    We need to put our own house in order – and soon – if we intend to meaningfully recover this subspecies north of the international border. The wolves in the wildlands of Arizona and New Mexico are, on average, as closely related as brothers and sisters. The genetic bottleneck facing this population is real and threatens their persistence.

Finance

• SF Giants Owner Rakes in $815 Million During the pandemic

  Workers at Oracle Park, where the Giants play, have been taking it on the chin during the pandemic, but the pandemic apparently hasn’t taken any skin off Johnson’s nose.

  These numbers come from a February 2021 report by the Institute for Policy Studies (ITEP), aptly titled Pandemic Super Bowl 2021: Billionaires Win, We Lose.

• Texas Teen Was Forced to Use College Savings to Prevent Mom’s Eviction

• Explaining India’s farmer uprising, the largest strike in human history

• The American Example Is Shakier Than Ever

  The nightmare is over. The vanquished beast has crawled back to Mar-a-Lago to lick his wounds. The heroes are hard at work repairing the damage. As America returns to the international stage, the world heaves a collective sigh of relief.

• Media Frames Teen Using College Savings To Save Mom From Eviction as Uplifting Puff Piece

  A Texas teenager has been forced to use her entire college savings to prevent her single mother from being evicted after she lost her job amid a raging pandemic. Alondra Carmona of Houston made the appeal on crowdfunding site GoFundMe, noting that she had been accepted into prestigious New York university Barnard College, but that she used the money she had saved for tuition in order to save her mother.

• The Drive for a Wealth Tax in Washington State

  According to the state’s Department of Revenue, the tax would raise an estimated $2.25 billion in 2023 and $2.5 billion in 2024. At a February 2 hearing, House Finance Committee chair Noel Frame said it’s time to put a new “tool in the toolbox for comprehensive structural tax reform.” The state’s current tax system places an enormous burden on Washington’s working class.

  At the February 2 virtual hearing, over 40 witnesses lined up to testify in support of HB1406, an act to “improve the equity of Washington state’s tax code” by creating a wealth tax and “taxing extraordinary financial intangible assets.”

• ‘Maybe We Ought to Go to $20 an Hour. Why Stop at $15?’ Scoffs House Republican Arguing Against Wage Hike

  The Republican lawmaker didn’t acknowledge that had the federal minimum wage kept pace with productivity, it would be around $24 an hour today.

• Opinion | GameStop Fiasco Proves We Need a Financial Transaction Tax

  America is over-financialized and needs a tax on speculation.

• America ‘Should Be Ashamed’: Texas Teen Forced to Use College Savings to Prevent Mom’s Eviction

  “Americans owe $70 billion in back rent that they won’t be able to pay. If we don’t get them relief, there will be millions of stories like these.”

• Opinion | Why Should U.S. Citizens’ Tax Dollars Be Diverted to Enriching the Manufacturing Base of Other Nations When Americans Need Jobs?

  The President’s plan to reinforce the Buy American Act is the first step in reviving the U.S. industry.

• With Nods to Country’s Free Tuition and Paid Maternity Leave, Norwegian University Delivers Epic Response to Will Ferrell’s Super Bowl Ad

  After the comedian noted that per-capita sales of electric vehicles are higher in Norway than in the U.S., a video from the Scandinavian country pointed out a few more reasons why life is better with social democracy.

• NYC Taxi Drivers Shut Down Brooklyn Bridge in Demand for Debt Forgiveness

  “We shut down the Brooklyn Bridge because only direct action will get us what we need: medallion debt forgiveness now!”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The GOP Is Over

  George H.W. Bush won it back in 1988, thanks to his campaign’s use of the black parolee Willie Horton’s committing rape to upend what had been a sure victory for Michael Dukakis. Prior to the Horton campaign ad, Dukakis had a 17 point lead, but went on to lose by 8 percentage points in the popular vote. The only GOP win of the presidential popular vote since 1988, George W. Bush’s 2004 victory, was fueled by pro-war, post-9/11 propaganda. Both father and son used racialized fear to win the popular vote, the latter towards African Americans and W. towards dark-skinned Muslim “terrorists.”

  In recent history Republicans have struggled to win presidential elections, due to their decrease in national popularity. Nevertheless, the electoral college system has allowed the GOP to eke out presidential victories in 3 out of 8 presidential elections since 1988.

• The Legal Attempt to End the Fabiani Farce

  Lady Dorrian in the High Court this morning described a position taken by the Scottish Parliament’s legal advisers, on the publication and inclusion of Geoff Aberdein’s and Alex Salmond’s evidence, as “an absurd interpretation of the court order”. She also stated that “The answer is for the committee to take a robust attitude to the question of publication and redaction. But this is not the place for that. It is not my job to tell them that.”

• ‘Independent, Culturally Relevant, Trusted Local Sources Are the Way’

  Janine Jackson interviewed Movement Alliance Project’s Hannah Sassaman about Prometheus v. FCC for the February 5, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• Impeachment: Why the Senate Will Acquit Trump

  Even Trump’s most ardent opponents hold out little hope of conviction. That would require the votes of 67 US Senators, at least 17 of whom would have to be Republicans. And 45 of 50 Republican Senators have already voted against holding the trial at all, on grounds that it would be “unconstitutional” because Trump is no longer president.

  It’s not unconstitutional. The Constitution’s plain language,  precedent in both US and pre-revolutionary British practice, and a common sense holding that the founders would not prescribe a penalty (disqualification from future office) that could be rendered toothless by resignation, make it clear that an official can be tried (and impeached) after leaving office. In fact, some Republicans advocated doing exactly that to former Vice-President Joe Biden only months ago over his alleged corruption vis a vis Ukraine and Burisma.

• How Has The Nation Changed Since The Insurrection At The Capitol?

  Today’s topic: How has the nation changed (or how has it not) since the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump?

• Facebook oversight board received 9,000 comments on Trump suspension case

  Facebook, along with other social media giants such as Twitter, suspended Trump’s access to his account following the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol breach, which some say he incited.

• Facebook Helped Government Identify Capitol Rioters From Photos

  Bickert said Facebook removed posts from several militant groups in the lead-up to the violent event and continued to remove content celebrating the riots and planning future violence after Jan. 6. The company said it didn’t use its facial recognition software to help the government identify people, but passed along data in response to requests.

• Trump’s Senate Trial “Goes to the Heart” of Why Impeachment Was Created

• Trump Call Shows He Kept Inciting Capitol Mob After Learning Pence Was in Danger

• Michigan GOP Leader Caught on Tape Saying Capitol Attack Was a “Staged” Event

• Trump’s Lawyers Mocked Democracy and Reasoned Debate

  On the opening day of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial there was a striking chasm, a gulf as large as the Grand Canyon, between the two legal teams. The House managers, a team of congressional Democrats who made the case for conviction, were well-briefed, cogent, focused, and eloquent. Trump lawyers were fun-house mirror opposites: ill-prepared, meandering, incoherent, and, perhaps worst of all, threatening.

• Keep America

• Trump Must Be Held Accountable for Inciting the Capitol Insurrection

• Jamie Raskin’s Passionate Prosecution Is Convicting Trump in the Eyes of History

  When students of the American story ask 100 years from now how the United States began to find its way back from the mob violence, destruction, and death that Donald Trump unleashed on this country, they will recall the prose and poetry with which Representative Jamie Raskin damned the former president who incited insurrection against democracy.

• Opinion | Co-Conspirators, All

• At Confirmation Hearing, Bernie Sanders Calls Out Neera Tanden’s History of ‘Vicious Attacks’ on Progressives

  The chairman of the Senate Budget Committee also pressed Tanden on her think tank’s prolific fundraising from such corporate giants as Amazon, Walmart, and JPMorgan Chase.

• Media outlet founded by journalist Irina Slavina shuts down months after her death

  The Nizhny Novgorod-based outlet Koza.Press, founded by independent journalist Irina Slavina, has shut down four months after her death. This was announced by Slavina’s daughter, Margarita Murakhtaeva, in a Facebook post on Wednesday, February 10. 

• Local Georgia Prosecutor Launches Criminal Probe Into Trump’s Request to ‘Find’ the Votes

  The former president also faces the ongoing U.S. Senate impeachment trial as well as civil and criminal probes in New York.

• Only One GOP Senator Changed His Mind About Trump’s Trial After Haunting Video

• Trump’s Legal Defense Is Embarrassingly Bad, But the GOP Is Still Backing Him

• Watch: Dramatic Video of Capitol Attack & Trump’s Incitement Kicks Off Impeachment Trial in Senate

  The Senate has voted 56 to 44 to proceed with the impeachment trial of Donald Trump for inciting the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Six Republicans joined Democrats in rejecting arguments from Trump’s defense team that it is unconstitutional for a former president to face an impeachment trial. Trump is the first president to ever be impeached twice and the first to be tried after leaving office. We air highlights from the first day of Trump’s historic second impeachment trial, including clips from a dramatic video mixing Trump’s words on January 6 with scenes of rioters breaking into the Capitol.

• WATCH LIVE: On Day Two of Trump Trial, House Dems Set to Unveil New Footage of ‘Extreme Violence’

  The new footage, said one Democratic aide, “shows a view of the Capitol that is quite extraordinary.”

• Fossil Fuel and Other Polluters Gave Tens of Millions in Campaign Cash to GOP Lawmakers Opposing Biden’s Leasing Freeze

  “Our elected officials are sold out to Big Oil,” said Public Citizen.

• For Russian leftists, Western favorite Navalny represents same corrupt elitism

• Opinion | Washington Post Curates the Memory of George Shultz

  By exclusion or distortion, establishment obituaries rewrite history to make the official heroes fit for adoration.

• The Socialist Glossy That Wants You to Have It All

  Sarah Leonard and Marian Jones met at the Democratic Socialists of America’s socialist-feminist reading group (held in The Nation’s conference room!) in 2017, after Donald Trump’s election prompted a surge in membership in the 40-year-old organization. Now, along with several other editors and an art director, they are members of the Lux collective, named for the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. The first issue of its print magazine hits mailboxes this month. I spoke with Leonard and Jones about the future of left feminism, solidarity versus sisterhood, and why Lux is a glossy.

• ‘I loved this country’: Meduza talks to the architect behind ‘Putin’s palace’ about his career in Russia — and how it came to a sad end

  For many years, Italian architect Lanfranco Cirillo had a brilliant career in Russia — most notably, he designed the luxurious residence featured in Alexey Navalny’s “Putin’s Palace” investigation. But despite the president granting him Russian citizenship and the fact that he had many lucrative business projects in Russia, the 62-year-old left the country several years ago. For Meduza, journalists from the media project “Sector Four’’ spoke to Lanfranco Cirillo to find out more about how “Putin’s palace” was built and why he decided to leave his Russian career behind and return to his native Italy. 

• A Pro-Cairo Lobby is Spending Big to Make Sure Biden Doesn’t Cut Aid to Egypt’s Dictatorship

  Under Donald Trump’s presidency, Egypt, as well as Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UAE, and other repressive regimes, had virtually free reign to commit unchecked human rights abuses without worry that they might be chastised or lose U.S. diplomatic and financial support. But when Joe Biden won the 2020 election, President Sisi of Egypt started to worry. That’s when he contracted lobbying powerhouse Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck for $65,000 a month.

• Trump Campaign Paid Millions to Organizers of Rally That Led to Capitol Rampage

• Journalists Praising Psaki Should Remember: Spin Doctors Are Not on Your Side

  One arena of US executive power that the media establishment is glad to have return to its pre-Trump mode is White House press relations, embodied in Joe Biden press secretary Jen Psaki. Former President Donald Trump’s press secretaries, like Sean Spicer with his iffy Holocaust history (Vox, 4/11/17) and mendacious Kayleigh McEnany (Vanity Fair, 1/26/21), turned any given White House press conference into a Terry Gilliam fever dream. Any spokesperson for the new administration might seem like a bit of fresh air after such lunacy. But let’s be cautious.

• The Questionable Characters Behind the Kushner-Linked Insurance Giant Oscar Health

  Why are the founders of the largest gaming company in Latin America building a telehealth giant in the United States? The answer to this question will not be readily apparent for another few years when the links between big business and the gamified marketplace are clear for everyone to see. In the meantime, Oscar Health, a health insurance start-up co-founded by Jared Kushner’s brother and a German-born computer scientist, filed for an initial public offering last week in what is expected to be one of the largest IPO hauls in history, projected to rake in almost $34 billion.

• Hidden in Plain Sight: The “Unimpeachable” Offenses

  The question is the flip side of one that Republican Gerald Ford candidly addressed when he was the House minority leader 50 years ago: “What, then, is an impeachable offense? The only honest answer is that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

  By narrowly defining which offenses are impeachable, political elites are implicitly telling us which offenses aren’t.

• Brexit, One Month After

  The government describes these as “teething problems”, but it is clear that some of them are inbuilt into the Brexit deal, and will be there for the duration.

  As expected, the Northern Irish border is one of them. Northern Ireland is part of the UK, but remains in the EU’s economic orbit because it shares a border with the EU-member Republic of Ireland.

• On the Relative Vileness of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, Liz Cheney and Marjorie Taylor Greene

  There is no great moral distance between Bush as Texas governor mocking the plea for mercy by a death row female prisoner who’d become a born-again Christian in 1998, and Trump as candidate mocking a handicapped reporter for criticizing him in 2016.

  Or between Bush as president ordering, in a threatening tone, his international terrorism advisor Richard Clarke in 2001 to “look into Iraq, Saddam” in connection with 9-11 and Trump’s order to the Georgia secretary of state to find the missing votes he needs to win the election. Both former presidents are ignorant, callous, amoral, misanthropic monsters. Human scum, in the pithy Korean expression.

• The Case for Blue-State Secession

  On January 6, an armed mob sought to overturn an election and install a president who had lost the popular vote. But this was just a violent version of the pervasive constitutional embedment of minority rule in our country. The Confederate flags waved during the Capitol Hill riot followed planning for the insurrection in a Facebook group called Red-State Secession, amid a wave of demands for secession by red-state leaders and conservative commentators.

• On Trump’s Next Absurd Acquittal

  On Wednesday, January 6th of this year, with 14 days left in his fascist presidency, after months of trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election, a rabid Donald Trump sent thousands of his frothing minions to the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. The animating idea behind the Trumpist rampage that broke into the Capitol complex was belief in the baseless fascist lie that Biden and the Democrats had stolen the election from its supposed rightful winner, the demented oligarch Donald Trump.

  Five people died in the assault while members of Congress hid for their lives. The body and casualty count could easily have been much higher. The overwhelmingly white male mob, including Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, neo-Nazis, military veterans, and law enforcement personnel, spoke of lynching Congresspersons and Vice President Mike Pence. The marauders were equipped to kill and take hostages for the purpose of keeping their Dear Leader, Donald Trump, in power.

• “This Cannot Be the Future of America”: Rep. Jamie Raskin Gives Moving Account of Capitol Attack

  Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the lead Democratic impeachment manager in former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, closed the first day of proceedings in the Senate with an emotional speech describing the terror of the January 6 Capitol attack. “All around me people were calling their wives and their husbands, their loved ones, to say goodbye,” said Raskin.

• Opinion | If You Want Healing, Get Off My Bike

  Do we, as a people, want the events of January 6th to be seen by history as the beginning of national healing, or will we allow it to be the start of an even worse time of division and violence in our nation?

• Ibram X. Kendi & Keisha Blain on Impeachment, White Supremacist Violence & Holding Trump Accountable

  As the impeachment trial of Donald Trump proceeds, we speak with two historians about the importance of accountability for the January 6 insurrection and white supremacist attacks in the United States. The scenes of violence at the U.S. Capitol were “familiar” to Black people, says Ibram X. Kendi, author, professor and founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. “We have consistently, over the course of 400 years, faced white supremacist mob violence.” We also speak with Keisha Blain, an author and associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, who says Trump must be held accountable for inciting the Capitol insurrection. “We cannot hold back and play games here,” she says. “Whatever decision we make in this moment will determine the future of this nation.”

• ‘Shameful’: Fox News Cuts Away From Senate Trial as Shocking Footage Emerges

  Instead, the network aired segments on a viral kitten filter video and the Dallas Mavericks national anthem controversy. 

• A Little Light Into The Murky World of the Guardian

  Nathan Robinson lost his employment as a Guardian columnist on US politics for these tweets:

• Star Wars severs ties with The Mandalorian star Gina Carano

  Carano has recently come under scrutiny for several posts published on social media, including an anti-Semitic post on her Instagram. Some of the content from Carano’s tweets are captured in screenshots, seen below in this tweet. Lucasfilm’s spokesperson denounced Carano’s social media posts, telling The Verge, “her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

• Two Iranian [cracking] groups appear to be actively snooping on critics around the globe

  Two suspected Iranian government-connected [cracking] groups are actively spying on dissidents around the world in renewed eavesdropping campaigns, researchers said in reports out Monday morning.

  One of the groups, known as Domestic Kitten or APT-C-50, notched victims in seven countries, Check Point Research found: Iran, the U.S., the U.K., Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey,and Uzbekistan.

  The other, known as Infy or Prince of Persia, snooped on dissidents in 12 countries, Check Point found in joint research with SafeBreach. Both companies were founded in Israel, which counts Iran as one of its chief nemeses. The U.S. also counts Iran among the handful of its biggest adversaries in cyberspace.

Censorship/Free Speech

• China Bans BBC World Service, Following U.K. Ban Of Chinese Network

  China’s broadcasting regulator has banned the BBC World Service from airing there, according to a report in Chinese state media. The news follows a move by Britain’s communications regulator last week to strip the state-run China global television network of its broadcast license in the U.K.

• How To Think About Online Ads And Section 230

  There’s been a lot of consternation about online ads, sometimes even for good reason. The problem is that not all of the criticism is sound or well-directed. Worse, the antipathy towards ad tech, regardless of whether it is well-founded or not, is coalescing into yet more unwise, and undeserved, attacks on Section 230 and other expressive discretion the First Amendment protects. If these attacks are ultimately successful none of the problems currently lamented will be solved, but they will create lots of new ones.

• Content Moderation Case Study: Twitter Attempts To Tackle COVID-related Vaccine Misinformation (2020)

  Summary: Following on its efforts in tamping down on election-related misinformation, Twitter’s latest moderation efforts target misleading posts about COVID and the coronavirus, with a specific focus on vaccine related information.

• Saudi Activist al-Hathloul Released After 1,000 Days in Prison”

  Saudi activist Loujain al-Hathloul was released from a Saudi prison Wednesday, after spending nearly three years behind bars, according to her family.

  Hathloul, a 31-year-old activist who has called for reforms to laws governing women, was arrested in 2018 and sentenced to six years in prison on terrorism charges that the United Nations had deemed “spurious.

• Hustler founder and free-speech activist Larry Flynt dies aged 78

  Flynt then won the case with a unanimous 8-0 verdict, which reinforced free speech rights and protections for satire in the US.

  His business empire extended into other areas of entertainment and was thought to have a $150m turnover at one point, according to Reuters.

• Larry Flynt ‘Hustler’ Founder Dead at 78

  Many of these First Amendment battles were chronicled in the Oscar-nominated 1996 film, “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” starring Woody Harrelson.

• Why questions of free speech – and its limits – roil US politics

  However, free speech is not an absolute right, note First Amendment experts. Mr. Trump’s words would not be protected if a court case determined they led to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

  Prosecution of incitement is not easy, however. Ken White, a First Amendment litigator and criminal defense attorney at Brown, White & Osborn LLP, says that in court the former president would be held to the same standard as all Americans: the Brandenburg test.

  Under Brandenburg the government may prohibit advocating the use of force or crime if the speech meets both elements of a two-part test: The speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” and the speech is “likely to incite or produce such action.”

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Loujain al-Hathloul: Released Saudi activist’s family ‘want real justice’

  They want the travel ban lifted, reparations for time spent in prison, and Saudi newspapers held accountable for what they say was a campaign of defamation.

  But above all Loujain al-Hathloul wants those who she maintains tortured her in prison held accountable. Chief among them, she claims, is Saud al-Qahtani, the former close aide to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

• Alexey Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, has reportedly left Russia for Germany

  Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of imprisoned opposition politician Alexey Navalny, has left Russia, Interfax reported on Wednesday, February 10, citing an informed source.

• Russian court arrests Navalny’s chief of staff in absentia

  On Wednesday, February 10, Moscow’s Basmanny District Court arrested in absentia Leonid Volkov, the chief of staff to imprisoned opposition politician Alexey Navalny.

• ‘Free Assange’ Demands Grow as Biden DOJ Says It Will Continue to Seek Extradition

  “None of this is inevitable. At every step of the way, individuals with agency are actively choosing to continue the political case against Julian Assange that will have alarming consequences for journalism around the world.”

• Ignoring First Amendment Pleas, Biden’s DOJ Will Seek Extradition of Assange

Civil Rights/Policing

• Fatou Bensouda: A Daring Prosecutor Who Challenged the US, Israeli Impunity

  Pro-establishment sovereigntists (pests)—political elites, the corporate media, money-pouring lobbyists, and conservative think tanks—operate in unison to claim sovereign immunity for the international crimes that the US and Israeli nationals perpetrate in the Middle East and Asia. However, the same Pests work overtime to undermine other nations’ sovereignty through invasions and air attacks, champion spiteful sanctions against countries that confront the US-Israel hegemony, and propose to criminalize, overthrow, and kill the “terrorist” leaders of defiant nations.

  Undoubtedly, the Pests will join hands, as they have done before, to resist and disrupt the prosecutorial investigations under the ICC’s auspices.

• Alexander Hamilton Meets RBG and the Supremes

  Contrary to Hamilton’s wishes, the judiciary, and especially the U.S. Supreme Court, has exercised both force and will for hundreds of years. While it has rubber stamped freedom for corporations and the few, it has often annihilated life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the many.

  In fact, the court has acted not only as judge, but also as a jailer and as executioner. Five days before Biden became president, the Supremes issued an order that made possible the execution of Dustin J. Higgs, a 48-year old African-American sentenced to death for murder. Higgs was the 13th person executed by the state between July 2020 and January 21. Justice Sonia Sotomayor called it “a spree of executions.”

• Police Deployed Potentially Lethal Chemical During Black Lives Matter Protests

• ‘Cycling for a Free Tibet’ campaign takes off in Taiwan

  The Human Rights Network for Tibet and Taiwan (HRNTT), a coalition of NGOs based in Taiwan, on Wednesday (Feb. 10) launched the annual Cycling for a Free Tibet event to raise awareness of Beijing’s human rights violations in the autonomous region.

  During a press conference held outside the Legislative Yuan, HRNTT President Tashi Tsering (札西慈仁), independent legislator Freddy Lim (林昶佐), and Democratic Progressive Party legislator Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) expressed hope that both the coronavirus and the ill-treatment of Tibetans can end soon. They also said they hope for a visit by the Dalai Lama following the pandemic.

  With Feb. 10 marking the 62nd anniversary of Tibetan National Uprising Day, a dozen Taiwanese bicyclists took to the streets of Taipei early Wednesday morning, traveling from 228 Peace Memorial Park to Taipei 101. Each of them carried a Tibetan flag and shouted “Free Tibet,” reported CNA.

• Impeachment Won’t Stop Threat Trump’s Allies Pose to Global Reproductive Rights

• Latest Anti-Accountability Move By Cops Involves Playing Music While Being Recorded In Hopes Of Triggering Copyright Takedowns

  Cops tend to dislike being recorded. They don’t care much for their own recording devices. They routinely disable equipment or conveniently “forget” to activate body cameras.

• ID demand was unconstitutional, but sheriffs get “qualified immunity”

  [Dashcam video of George Wingate being wrongly arrested by Stafford County, VA Deputy Sheriffs, April 2017]In its 2004 decision in Hiibel v. Nevada, 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a demand for a pedestrian to identify himself to police only on the basis that (1) there was already a reasonable articulable basis for suspicion that he had committed some crime before the police demanded that he identify himself, and (2) the state law at issue, as interpreted by the Supreme Court,  required only verbal self-identification (“My name is John Smith”) and not the production of ID credentials or other evidence of his identity.

  You might think that a precedent established by the Supreme Court would be “clearly established”. But that would often be wrong, at least in the topsy-turvy world “qualified immunity“.

  Some Federal Court of Appeals have held that police who unconstitutionally demand ID can be held liable for violating the civil rights of their victims — as, of course, they should be.

• Loujain al-Hathloul Released After Over 1000 Days in Prison

  Loujain Alhathloul is a hero. She successfully campaigned for women to have the right to drive in Saudi Arabia. Her arrest for campaigning for womens’ driving rights occurred just before the Kingdom gave women the right to drive. From her arrest in May 2018, Loujain was mostly held in pre-trial detention where she has faced immense abuse, including waterboarding, electroshock, beatings, and threats of sexual assault. If those injustices were not enough, the Specialised Criminal Court of Saudi Arabia sped through her trial. This included sudden hearings, where Loujain’s family was only given a day’s notice before the next step of her trial.

  “Loujain’s family is asking people to not use the term ‘freedom’ to describe Loujain’s release. It’s true that she is not free just yet, we need to keep advocating for the conditions of her release to be dropped so Loujain can speak and move freely,” Danaka Katovich, the Yemen coordinator for CODEPINK, said.

• ‘The Fight Is Not Over’: Prominent Women’s Rights Activist Loujain al-Hathloul Released From Saudi Prison

  “Her ordeal remains a flagrant miscarriage of justice.”

• Opinion | All Undocumented Americans Deserve a Pathway to Citizenship

  Years of advocacy have made DACA the floor of what’s possible, not the ceiling.

• Historians Say “Decades of Medical Racism” Led to Unequal COVID Impact on Black & Latinx People

  Historians Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha Blain dedicate their new book, “Four Hundred Souls,” to the “Black lives lost to COVID-19.” They put the content of their book in the context of the disparate impact of the pandemic on the African American community in the United States. “This has been in the making for decades. Even though this is a new virus, … it connects to a larger history of racial inequality, and we wanted to make sure that was clear,” says Blain. Kendi is a cancer survivor and notes Black and Latinx are more at risk from preexisting conditions because of a history of racist policies, but “Americans don’t know that history.”

• Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Stoned Love’ By The Supremes

  Mary Wilson, a founding member of The Supremes, sadly passed away at the age of 76 on February 8.Along with being apart of one of the most successful vocal groups of all-time, she was considered a style icon and an activist.

  Billboard published her final interview, where she discusses the challenges of touring during the days of segregation. She also draws comparisons to the civil rights movement of the 1960s with what is currently taking place with the Black Lives Matter protests.

• “Four Hundred Souls”: Ibram X. Kendi & Keisha Blain on History of African America from 1619 to Now

  As the U.S. deals with the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, we speak with Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha Blain, co-editors of a new book that situates the white supremacists who rallied around Trump in the longer arc of U.S. history. “Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019” brings together prominent Black writers to collaborate on what they call a “choral history” of Black American life in 80 short essays, including by the renowned scholar and activist Angela Davis, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and others. “We wanted to bring together so many different voices from so many different backgrounds within the Black community to really share the history of this incredibly diverse and complex community,” says Kendi, director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. Blain, associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, says despite the mammoth undertaking in the midst of the pandemic, all the contributors were excited to take part. “They shared our enthusiasm,” she says. “They recognized the significance of this project as a work of history — being history in and of itself.”

• Why are the toilets in Russian jails such shit? Human rights activists have spent 30 years fighting for better privacy and cleaner facilities, but ‘holes in the floor’ persist

  In recent weeks, the Russian authorities arrested thousands of demonstrators at protests across the country, sentencing hundreds to several days or weeks in jail. For many of these people, behind bars for the first time in their lives, state custody was a uniquely upsetting experience — particularly the “hole-in-the-floor” squat toilets located in plain sight of all the other cellmates. Meduza special correspondent Maxim Solopov looks at Russian jails’ failure to keep pace with modern comfort and privacy when it comes to pooping and peeing.

• Ex-governor Sergey Furgal reportedly under investigation for suspected misappropriation of state bank funds

  The Russian Investigative Committee is actively looking into jailed former governor Sergey Furgal for alleged involvement in misappropriating funds from MSP Bank, reports Kommersant.

• Don’t Make Parents Raise Kids in a World without Encryption

  Luckily, encryption has our back. Whether it’s sending a confidential message to a friend, videoconferencing with grandparents, or submitting an assignment to a teacher, platforms and services that use end-to-end encryption can help keep our children safe by keeping the line of communication private between the sender and receiver.

  Despite this, some governments, law enforcement agencies, and even some child protection agencies are trying take away the strongest digital tool we have as parents to keep children safe online. The United Kingdom, Germany, the European Commission, and the United States are all considering proposals threatening to ban or weaken encryption – by requiring companies to create ways for law enforcement to get “backdoor access” to communications to catch the bad guys.

  Here’s the problem: there’s no way to create access to encrypted communications for the good guys without also giving it to the bad guys. So what does that mean? Think of all the private information about your children’s interests, schedule, health, and activities being shared over the Internet with people in positions of trust: parents, educators, friends, and healthcare providers. Do we really want any government saying we can’t use the strongest locks possible to keep that information private?

• Mother of 2 Girls Killed in Honor Killing Speaks Out

  It was New Year’s Day 2008 when investigators say Yaser shot and killed his daughters in his taxicab. Though Owens initially denied claims it was an ‘honor killing,’ she now believes the crime was motivated by Yaser’s anger over their daughters dating non-Muslim boys.

• Middle East: Murdered because of Snapchat?

  This week, a hashtag reading “Save Manal, sister of Qamar,” circulated widely on Arabic-language social media. The activists who spread the it were referring to a woman in the central Saudi Arabian province of Al-Kharj whose 26-year-old sister, Qamar, was reported missing on January 19.

  Qamar’s body was later found buried in the desert and Manal suspected her conservative brothers of killing her, writing online that they had murdered Qamar because she had a public Snapchat account.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Senate panel not expected to propose changes in news media code bill

  A Senate committee that has held public hearings into the Federal Government’s news media code is unlikely to propose any changes to the bill before it.

• Microsoft president backs Australian media code for other countries too

  Microsoft would support the implementation of a law similar to the Australian news media code in other countries, including the US, the company’s president, Brad Smith, says.

• ‘Lex Luthor Of The Internet’: Meet The Man Keeping Far-Right Websites Alive

  While Epik provides domain registration to Parler, it also has the capability to host Parler. Monster would not comment on why Epik is not doing so.

• 16 States Ask The FCC What The Hell Is The Point Of The Verizon Tracfone Merger

  Late last year, Verizon announced it would be acquiring Tracfone for around $6.2 billion. As we noted when the deal was first announced, it was yet another example of the “growth for growth’s sake” mindset that has long infected US industry, particularly the telecom sector. There are really no real benefits to be gleaned from further consolidation in the space (especially in the wake of a T-Mobile Sprint merger that immediately resulted in layoffs and reduced US wireless competition by around 25%). Yet we really adore pretending otherwise as the government rubber stamps deal after deal.

• Toronto could build a city-wide broadband internet network

  Toronto might soon be building its own broadband internet network.

  The program, called ConnectTO, has already been adopted by an executive committee and tomorrow (February 2), city council is set to debate the idea.

  As the pandemic has shown, there is a major digital divide in the city leaving many of the most vulnerable residents out of education, employment and general social connection.

  Municipal broadband would offer cheaper, faster internet and extend connectivity to people in the city falling between the cracks of the major telecom companies.

Monopolies

• Google does not rule out pulling additional services from Australia

  Google has refused to rule out the possibility that it will pull other services apart from search from Australia in the event that the Federal Government goes ahead and legislates its News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code which was introduced into Parliament in December last year.

• Snippet Taxes Not Only Violate The Berne Convention, But Also Betray The Deepest Roots Of Newspaper Culture

  Last week Techdirt wrote about Australia’s proposed News Media Bargaining Code. This is much worse than the already awful Article 15 of the EU Copyright Directive (formerly Article 11), which similarly proposes to force Internet companies to pay for the privilege of sending traffic to traditional news sites. A post on Infojustice has a good summary of the ways in which the Australians aim to do more harm to the online world than the Europeans:

• Trump And Oracle’s Dumb TikTok Cronyism Falls Apart

  Remember when America spent a year and a half hyperventilating about a Chinese teen dancing app instead of securing American infrastructure from Russian hackers or other threats? Remember when a bunch of GOP officials with a long track record of not caring whatsoever about consumer privacy or internet security exploited xenophobic fears about the app to land political allies Oracle and Walmart a major windfall? Remember when 90% of the press couldn’t be bothered to inform readers this was all performative cronyism by an unqualified nitwit? Good times.

• Patents

  • FOSS Patents: European Commission’s expert group report on standard-essential patents uses misnomers “license to all” and “access to all”

    Yesterday evening by Central European Time, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for the Internal Market (DG GROW) published (expand the part entitled “Group of experts on licensing and valuation of Standard Essential Patents”) the long-awaited standard-essential patent (SEP) expert group report.

    When the expert group was formed in 2018, I was extremely skeptical. It looked to me like the deck was stacked against SEP implementers. I was very vocal about that concern, but the report that has been published is all about pluralism, not a particular agenda. It reflects a diversity of views and ideas, an Ericsson executive wrote an official dissent, which I regards as a very positive sign as I tend to disagree with Ericsson on SEP matters. Maybe I was wrong in 2018 to suspect an effort to rubberstamp pro-SEP-holder policies–or, which I can’t rule out for lack of knowing what exactly happened in all those expert group meetings, the dynamic changed at some point. One way or the other, my concerns were unfounded, a fact that I simply have to acknowledge in all fairness.

    On a similar note, no matter how much I may disagree with EU internal market commissioner Thierry Breton on SEP matters, I like his Digital Market Acts proposal (a bill that will hopefully be improved in the further legislative process, but which is a great starting point and tackles the most important tech policy issue at this time). I hope he’ll fight for that potential game changer of historic proportions even harder than he’s been fighting for Nokia and Ericsson’s patent monetization interests.

  • Implementors must be given access to FRAND agreements: Delhi High Court, Part 1

    Recently, the High Court of Delhi passed a decision in the heated FRAND dispute between InterDigital and Xiaomi concerning confidentiality clubs. [1]

    The Court held that that Xiaomi’s employees must necessarily have access to InterDigital’s third party patent license agreements, so that Xiaomi may put up an adequate defense in the suit filed by InterDigital with respect to the infringement of its 3G, 4G Standard Essential Patents (SEPs).

    The Court also held that though InterDigital can redact information from confidential documents, it cannot rely on any information which is redacted, while establishing its case for an injunction against Xiaomi.

    The order and the reasons cited by the Court has the potential of harming the interests, both commercial and contractual, not just of owners of SEPs as implementers who have executed or engage in bona fide negotiations for the execution of a license on Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms.

    This article provides a quick overview of the facts before the Court, the reasons behind the Court’s decision, the errors which the authors consider exist in the decision and finally, the Pandora’s box that the decision has burst open.

  • Customer Value Not Just Limited to the 20 Year Patent Term.

    Maritz is in the business of designing employee incentive plans and other reward programs. The company’s U.S. Patent No. 7,134,087 claims a computer system for using “award points” to purchase goods at a regular store by using a “shadow credit card.” cxLoyalty is a competitor — focusing primarily on customer loyalty. Their creepy motto: “we increase customer lifetime value.” At least they’re not focused on true zombies.

    Maritz sued cxLoyalty for infringement back in 2018. In response, the defendant filed a petition for covered-business-method review (CBM) and argued that the claims lack patent eligibility.

    [...]

    On appeal, the Federal Circuit has reversed — finding that none of the claims recite patent eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. 101 and Alice.

  • Skinny-labels; Carveouts; and Inducing Infringement

    In 2020, the Federal Circuit issued an odd decision in this ANDA case. The patent on the drug at issue (carvedilol) has expired, but GSK holds a patent on using the drug for treatment of congestive heart failure. Teva began selling the drug for other approved uses, such as hypertension and ensured that congestive heart failure was not part of its product label. Of course, its generic product is still prescribed for that purpose. AND, in 2011 the FDA required Teva to list congestive heart failure as one of the drug treatments — since Teva’s approval was based on GSK’s original new drug application the FDA required a label that was identical-in-content. The result — $234 million in lost profit damages for inducing infringement. That damage award included pre-2011 acts even with the label carveout since Teva had (accurately) described its product as the generic equivalent of GSK’s product. On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed (split decision).

    [...]

    The Court has not asked for new briefs and will be holding oral arguments later this month. The case has already generated substantial amici support.

  • Skyventure and ISG overcome turbulence in skydiving centres dispute

    Skyventure withdrew the appeal in the grant procedure for European patent EP 22 87 073, which protects vertical wind tunnel freefall simulators

  • The Toolgen Interference: Preliminary Motions Lists [Ed: It's incredible that even in 2021 it's still not clear that patent law should not cover nature and life and was never supposed to be corrupted in this way, either]

    Senior Party Toolgen and Junior Parties The Broad Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University (collectively, “Broad”) in Interference No. 106,126 and University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, “CVC”) in Interference No. 106,127, each filed Lists of Proposed Motions that the Board considered last week and responsive thereto will issue its rulings shortly (see “The CRISPR Chronicles: Enter Toolgen”). The Toolgen lists have sufficient similarities that they will be the subject of this post, with the individual Junior Parties’ lists being the subject of later posts.

    As a reminder, an interference proceeds in two stages. The first stage involves the parties presenting motions that can modify the count, have certain claims declared outside the scope of the count (or vice versa), seek to establish an earlier priority date, and ask for a finding that their opponents’ claims are invalid under any of the provisions of the patent statute. If these motions are not decided in a way that would disqualify one or both parties, then the interference will move to a second stage, where in each Interference the Junior Party (Broad, in the ’126 Interference and CVC in the ’127 Interference) will present its proofs of conception and reduction to practice and the Senior Party Toolgen will be permitted to oppose and/or present its own priority evidence. The Senior Party is under no obligation to present proofs earlier than its earliest filing date unless the Junior Party evinces evidence of (at least) earlier conception. In practice, the parties can both be expected to submit their priority evidence.

  • Diagnostics firms want American Axle to drive S 101 change [Ed: When they say "clarity" they always mean to say they pretend not to understand that patents in some domains are simply disallowed]

    In-house patent teams hope SCOTUS will resolve a case from the Federal Circuit and bring much-needed clarity to diagnostic patent eligibility

  • Software Patents

    • WB Games’ Nemesis System Patent Was Approved This Week After Multiple Attempts

      Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment, publishers of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its 2017 sequel, Shadow of War (both developed by Monolith Entertainment), have finally managed to secure a patent for the franchise’s signature Nemesis System.

      The US Patent and Trademark Office released an issue notice on February 3, 2021, stating that the patent would go into effect on February 23 of this year. Warner Bros. has the option to maintain the patent through 2035, providing they keep up with the necessary fees.

    • ETRI Chinese patent challenged

      On February 10, 2021, Unified Patents filed a Chinese invalidity challenge against CN104219523. The CN’523 patent is owned by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI). The CN‘523 patent is related to patents that are designated essential to the HEVC Advance patent pool as well as SISVEL’s AV1 and VP9 patent pools. It is also related to U.S. Patent 8,867,854, which Unified challenged in the recently instituted IPR2020-01048.

    • Another GEVC Chinese patent challenged

      On February 10, 2021, Unified Patents filed a Chinese invalidity challenge against CN105187829. The CN’829 patent is owned by GE Video Compression (GEVC) and is related to the CN’755 challenge that Unified filed on February 4, 2021. The CN‘829 patent is related to patents that are designated essential to the HEVC Advance patent pool as well as SISVEL’s AV1 and VP9 patent pools.

    • KCG Technologies LLC patent held unpatentable

      On February 10, 2021, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. KCG Technologies LLC holding all challenged original claims of U.S. Patent 9,671,955 unpatentable. The PTAB also denied their motion to amend, finding proposed substitute claims 14-26 unpatentable as well. The ‘955 patent is generally directed to virtual smart phones used in in-vehicle systems.

      KCG had asserted this patent against CarMax. The case is now closed. The ‘955 patent has been held to be directed to patent ineligible subject matter by the Federal Circuit.

• Copyrights

  • Is This Beverly Hills Cop Playing Sublime’s ‘Santeria’ to Avoid Being Live-Streamed?

    Assuming that Fair wasn’t just trying to share his love of ’90s stoner music with the citizens of Beverly Hills, this seems to be an intentional (if misguided) tactic to use social media companies’ copyright protection policies to prevent himself from being filmed.

    Instagram in particular has been increasingly strict on posting copyrighted material. Any video that contains music, even if it’s playing in the background, is potentially subject to removal by Instagram.

  • Court Orders Telegram To Block Pirated Movies, TV Shows and Music

    A court has ordered Telegram to block access to pirated movies, TV shows and music following a lawsuit filed in Israel. Local anti-piracy group ZIRA complained that the messaging platform does not properly respond to takedown notices, contrary to Telegram’s claims that it does. Telegram is now working with rightsholders to implement the injunction.

  • Are Cops Playing Music While Being Filmed to Trigger Copyright Filters?

    Copyright helps creators to protect their works from being used without permission. However, this right can also be abused. According to Los Angeles activist Sennett Devermont, a Beverly Hills cop used copyrighted music to prevent being filmed, perhaps hoping to trigger copyright filters. While the true motive remains unconfirmed, this isn’t an isolated incident.

  • Open Sharing Is Caring: A Valentine’s Day Challenge

    This Valentine’s Day, we want you to share something a little different: your creative work. 

  • A Snapshot in Time: A Look at the Creative Commons Global Network

    We drafted a research brief in April 2019 which set out what aspects we wanted to learn about and how to collect the information. Open community member Isla Haddow-Flood from South Africa conducted a survey and interviews between December 2019 and February 2020. Many of our CCGN members were involved in this and we are grateful! In this blog, we’ve outlined some of the findings. For the full report, please follow this link. For the executive summary, follow this link. 

  • New copyright chief reveals plans for office she’s ‘always loved’

    More collaboration with the USPTO and implementing the CASE Act are some of Shira Perlmutter’s priorities as register of copyrights

  • [Guest post] Is it a sculpture or a monument? Copyright litigation reaches Russian Supreme Court

    Following a competition for the best design of a city monument, a contract was signed between the administration of one of the major Russian cities and a local sculptor to create a sculptural and artistic object – a monument to the founders of the city (pictured below).

    [...]

    The Court of First Instance confirmed that a photo of the monument had been placed in the guidebook without the consent of its author and sided with the plaintiff. The Court of First Instance also noted that the agreement concerning the creation of the monument was a commissioning agreement, by which the sculptor would be regarded as the creator and owner of the exclusive rights to the monument. The exclusive rights to the monument had thus not thus been transferred to the administration of the city.

    Subsequently, the Court of Appeal overturned the decision at first instance, also accepting the counterclaim for invalidation of the contract regarding the transfer of powers to the plaintiff to manage the exclusive rights to the monument. The Court of Appeal found that the objective form of expression of the disputed monument, in accordance with the terms of the contract, was a group of sculptures in soft material (clay, loam, plasticine). In this regard, the sculptor had the exclusive rights to that part of the monument. It was declared that the sculptures included in the guide were the result of the work of the author’s team: the monument as a whole includes both the group of sculptures related to an object of fine art and an object of architecture (a plinth) created by a team of authors. Simultaneously, the Court of Appeal stated that the objective form of expression of the group of sculptures, in accordance with the terms of the contract, was the sculptures in soft material. In this regard, the sculptor had the exclusive rights to the group of sculptures in soft form.

    The Court of Cassation upheld the findings of the Court of Appeal, noting that the monument included both an object of fine art (the group of sculptures) and an object of architecture (a plinth), and the image used by the publishing house included both objects.

  • Still Life: Art That Brings Comfort in Uncertain Times

    For many, our lives have become more still—the patterns of daily existence are bounded more than ever by the interior walls of our homes. Therefore, finding comfort in the everyday can bring about some internal peace. At its essence, the still life form has meaning far beyond the physical objects it depicts: it deals with the human condition and life itself. For most of human history, the comfort found in still lifes during precarious times would have been exclusive to those who owned these paintings, hanging them on their walls or keeping them locked away in safes. Today, however, due to the internet and the public domain, millions more have access to these comforting images.

  • Search Engine Ordered To Pay Copyright Damages For Embedding Sports Clips

    A court has ordered leading Russian search engine Yandex to pay damages to sports rightsholder TeleSport for copyright infringement. According to TeleSport, Yandex embedded clips from Italian soccer matches in its own pages and monetized them with advertising, rather than sending visitors to the source sites where the content was licensed for distribution.

  • Hollywood Warns Against Jailbreaking Exemption for Video Streaming Devices

    A coalition of copyright holder groups, including Hollywood’s MPA, are urging the US Copyright Office not to grant a jailbreaking exemption for video streaming devices. The proposal, which was submitted by the EFF last year, will harm creators and copyright holders by making it easier to transform ordinary streaming boxes into piracy tools, they argue.