02.23.21
Posted in Free/Libre Software, Servers at 8:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Using Agate to start one’s own Gemini capsule (self-hosted) is a lot simpler than one might be inclined to believe; this is a detailed HOWTO, hoping to encourage more people to join Gemini space, which is fast-growing and free of garbage
THE one thing that stunned me was how easy it was to set up a Gemini server. A lot simpler than setting up a Web server. The harder part is certificates, but that too is trivial once it’s done a couple of times, potentially with errors at first.
Here’s a quick recipe for setting up one’s own instance and Gemini capsule.
First, create a new user’s account. Gemini ought to have its own account, as it’ll make things a lot simpler (backup, permissions etc.) and for the sake of this example we’ll assume the user account is “gemini” (with home directory /home/gemini)
Then, in the user’s top-level (home) directory:
mkdir gemini bin certs
This will set up directories for the capsule, the programs, and the certificates, respectively.
There’s not so much left to do now.
Go to the directory gemini (e.g. cd ~/gemini/ or equivalent using a graphical file browser)
In that directory, create or place a file called index.gmi
It can be empty or contain something simple like Hello world! (just to make sure that the server is set up and works)
Now let’s get the server software. Go to the bin directory (e.g. cd ~/bin/). For most practical purposes agate (Apache Licence) seems to be OK and it supports quite a few architectures. Unfortunately it’s hosted on GitHub (Microsoft), with latest versions shown at the top of this page. If you are not sure what architecture to choose, run uname -a
The correct binary can be downloaded using a Web browser or a tool like wget/curl. That program is quite small and needs to be placed in bin in order to stay consistent with this manual.
Unpack and set ‘executable’ (x) permission for the file, e.g. using
gunzip [binary_file]
chmod +x [binary_file]
Depending on the name of the binary file in question.
For my ARM SBC it is gunzip agate.armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf.gz and chmod +x agate.armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
All the pieces are now in place except the certificate and the service setup.
On a systemd-based operating system create a new file at /etc/systemd/system/agate.service
It should look something like this:
[Unit]
Description=agate
After=network.target
[Service]
User=gemini
Type=simple
ExecStart=[your settings]
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
Wherein [your settings] ties together the program, the root directory for hosting (capsule), and the certificate.
In the case of Techrights on ARM, it’s something as follows:
/home/gemini/bin/agate.armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf -s --content /home/gemini/gemini/ --key /home/gemini/certs/key.pem --cert /home/gemini/certs/cert.pem --hostname your hostname --lang en-GB
In our case, your hostname is gemini.techrights.org (how you set up your hostname may depend on how you manage domains and where). That hostname needs to point to your device’s IP address.
All that’s left now is certificate setup and service initiation.
Go to the certificates directory (e.g. cd ~/certs/) as this will likely involve the command line (unless you have some graphical tools that do the same).
A simple self-signed certificate ought to be sufficient:
openssl req -new -subj "/CN=your hostname" -x509 -newkey ec -pkeyopt ec_paramgen_curve:prime256v1 -days 365 -nodes -out cert.pem -keyout key.pem
That’s for 1 year. It can be set to anything.
The command then leaves the two files required by the service/server, namely cert.pem and key.pem. These can be modified and regenerated at any time, so there’s no need to worry if at any point they’re wrongly generated or made for the ‘wrong’ domain.
To get it all started, assuming systemd:
sudo systemctl restart agate
sudo systemctl enable agate
Use a Gemini browser (or Web proxy) to then test access to the hostname over gemini:// (it will attempt to connect over port 1965, so make sure there’s no firewall standing in the way at the level of the device or the network it is in). This is pretty much it, with the exception of variation for non-systemd systems. All that systemd does is, it starts the server using the suitable command and arguments, even after restarts. That command can instead be run manually, or set up for any init system of choice. The hardest part is setting up the domain, generating the key/certificate correctly, and then lowering the filters (if any) to allow access over port 1965.
We don’t typically do HOWTO-type articles, but for this one we make an exception. If you get stuck, ask us in IRC for help. Gemini needs to grow and for faster growth we need to help one another.
Agate is quite small and simple. As of the time of writing, it does not support server-side CGI scripts (for something like in-capsule search), but Gemini ought to be kept light and simple anyway; we’re not trying to just replicate the bloated Web. █
Credit: Chris Were, for some initial notes and suggestions. gemini://chriswere.uk/
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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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. The community is a cornerstone reason to use Linux.
Many a Linux user has said that the key feature of Linux is its community. That might seem strange to a new user because “community” is a pretty popular term these days. There are actual jobs for building and managing communities. With communities seemingly a dime a dozen, what makes the Linux community unique?
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Newsboat is my personal favourite RSS feed reader but it’s not the most minimal option out there but there is one program that stands out in the minimal space and that is sfeed which is barely even an RSS feed reader it’s more of an RSS feed parser.
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How Linux has dominated in 2021 and will continue to.
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A lot of people assume open source projects, as they are community driven, are completely malleable, and subject to the desires of their users. Other people think that open source means free, as in “no charge”, and others even mistake open source for “privacy respecting”.
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Kernel Space
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I'm announcing the release of the 5.11.1 kernel.
All users of the 5.11 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.11.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.11.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
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Thanks to Google engineers the Linux 5.12 kernel is providing punctual support for eMMC inline encryption that is being ratified with a forthcoming specification update and already being found within some mobile hardware.
Inline encryption for eMMC is able to enhance the storage encryption performance while also being more power efficient. This eMMC support builds off the existing Linux kernel FSCRYPT support around inline encryption. UFS support for inline encryption was upstreamed in Linux 5.9 as well while now the eMMC support is ready to make its premiere.
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Following up on our report for Linux 5.9 and 5.10, this summarizes the progress on mainline support for the Librem 5 phone and its development kit during the 5.11 development cycle.
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After a two year hiatus on the patches, VMware’s Nadav Amit has gotten back to working on current TLB flushing support for the Linux kernel in yielding a small but measurable performance improvement.
Nadav has been working on Linux patches to allow for flushing of remote and local TLBs concurrently. Back in mid 2019 numbers shared by him pointed up to a 1~4% performance improvement on average under sysbench for these patches.
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Graphics Stack
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The open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” has now enabled displayable DCC (Delta Color Compression) support that should yield some performance benefit while there still is more work to be completed.
Google engineer and RADV co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen has merged the displayable DCC support into this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver. Delta Color Compression can help with video memory bandwidth savings for both dGPUs and APUs by basically storing pixel differences within a block as a delta relative to one pixel at full precision per block, which often times c can mean measurable bandwidth savings and in turn greater performance.
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libinput 1.17.0 is now available.
A bunch of changes to the libinput record and libinput replay tools and some
general cleanup and a new tool, see below. The library itself is basically
the same it was with the last RC though.
A new debugging tool has been added: libinput analyze recording.
This tool takes the files produced by libinput record and prints the content
in a tabular form. The goal here is to make it easier to analyze and
understand what type of data a device sends.
As is traditional, the RC1 announcement email with the changes since 1.16.x
so I don't have to retype them:
The big new feature is tap-and-drag with two and three fingers. Previously,
tap-and-drag could only be used to left-click and drag, it is now possible
to right/middle-click tap and then drag with one finger while the button is
held logically down.
Wacom's AES tablets no longer have smoothing enabled, it looks like those
devices don't need it. This should make the tablets more responsive and
accurate.
The quirks system has a few new attributes that make it easier to quirk
broken devices without recompiling.
As you've seen on the 1.16.x releases, the "your system is too slow" is now
ratelimited to merely 5 an hour. There's nothing a user can usually do about
this anyway, so not spamming the logs seems a bit more user-friendly.
A new debugging tool: libinput analyze touch-down-state
This tool visualises the touch state over time (using a libinput record
log as input), making it easier to debug stuck touches or hw issues where
ghost touches are detected.
Other than that, the fixes are all over the place and it's hard to narrow it
down to useful groups. Please see the git shortlog below for details.
Peter Hutterer (18):
meson.build: drop the dummy config data and use copy: true instead
meson.build: consolidate all man pages
tools/record: correct the evdev data format in the man page
tools/record: de-inline our functions
tools/record: fix outdated comment
tools/record: print a header as first line
tools/replay: search for the first event with a timestamp
tools/replay: Enter quits if there are no events
tools/record: simplify the behavior to emulate Python's join()
utils: add a safe version of basename
tools/record: use safe_basename() to get to the hid report descriptor
tools/record: reword parts of the man page
tools/record: switch record over to using epoll
tools/record: use a helper function to get the next event for a device
meson.build: build libinput replay as well
tools: add a tool to print a libinput recording as a table
tools/record: fix two coverity complaints
libinput 1.17.0
satrmb (1):
test: add test cases for 2/3 finger movement after drag-lock
yuri1969 (1):
Fix worng quirk name in doc
git tag: 1.17.0
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Libinput 1.17 is out as the newest version of this Wayland/X.Org input handling library for the Linux desktop.
Libinput 1.17 brings improvements to the libinput record/replay tools, adds a new libinput analyze recording command to analyze recorded libinput events, and support for tap-and-drag with two and three fingers. This new tag-and-drag implementation should be more versatile and easier to engage.
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Benchmarks
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In this article, we will compare all the best and most popular Linux compression tools. This will include benchmark tests to see which compression method performs the best, and we’ll also weigh the pros and cons of compatibility and other areas. Compression methods covered will be gzip, xz, bzip2, 7zip, zip, rar, and zstd (Zstandard).
Linux gives us a lot of options when we need to compress files. While that’s definitely a good thing, it can lead to confusion about which one should be used. Let’s start by comparing each method across a few key areas.
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Applications
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Coming just a week after fwupd 1.5.6, the fwupd 1.5.7 release is here with initial support for BlueZ Bluetooth devices, which means that you’ll soon be able to update the firmware of your Bluetooth devices supporting Linux’s BlueZ Bluetooth stack.
In addition, this release adds support for the RTD21xx HDMI converter, support for more pixart devices, the ability to convert MBR types to GPT GUIDs to help find the ESP, as well as the ability to no longer update a synaptics-mst device that doesn’t have a customer ID.
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XMPP (also known as Jabber) is an open and free alternative to commercial messaging and chat providers. It is a secure battle-tested protocol developed by an independent standards organization.
XMPP was designed for real-time communication, which powers a wide range of applications including instant messaging, presence, media negotiation, whiteboarding, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, EDI, RPC and more.
The “X” in XMPP stands for “Extensible”, which means the core protocol is updated and extended with more features through a transparent process at the non-profit XMPP Standards Foundation every now and then. This results in some clients not implementing every feature of XMPP; for example, a typical instant messaging client won’t implement Internet-of-Things functionality.
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Ardour 6.6 comes three months after Ardour 6.5 with two new features that make editing automation much faster and simpler than ever before. These include the ability to automatically display the automation-lane when touching a control and the ability for the auto-shown automation parameters to automatically enter touch mode when graphically adding a new control point.
This release also introduces the ability to keep track of xruns (overruns and underruns) per file when recording, support for processing MIDI sysex messages, such as MIDI Tuning Standard (MTS) messages, via the ACE Fluidsynth plugin, as well as new Lua scripts for sending arbitrary 12TET tuning (A = XXX Hz) and tuning defined in a Scala file as MTS messages.
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Want to create web apps into the portable Appimage package format? Appnativefy is a simple tool to do the job.
Appnativefy is a simple command line tool to make executable AppImage files from any website, it uses the Nativefier API in the backend, with AppImageKIt.
Appimage is an universal Linux package format. Different to other packages, you don’t need to install it. Just make it executable and run to launch program!
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With the emergence of Bitcoin and recently proposed stablecoins from BigTechs, such asDiem (formerly Libra), central banks face a choice of either leaving the field to private actorsor offering their own digital alternative to physical cash. We do not address whether a centralbank should issue a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Instead, we demonstrate how acentral bank could do so, if desired or needed. We propose a token-based system withoutdistributed ledger technology and show how earlier-deployed, software-only electronic cashcan be improved upon to preserve transaction privacy, meet regulatory requirements in acompelling way, and offer a level of quantum-resistant protection against systemic privacyrisk. Neither monetary policy nor financial stability would be materially affected because ourCBDC would replicate physical cash rather than bank deposits.
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Released yesterday was dav1d 0.8.2 as a fairly significant update to this AV1 CPU-based decoder. For those wondering what this update means for performance, here are some initial benchmarks.
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Unlike Signal and WhatsApp, Telegram didn’t offer a dedicated disappearing messages mode, until now. Telegram Desktop 2.6 lets you set messages to auto-delete for everyone 24 hours or 7 days after they’ve been sent, and the best thing is that the feature works on any chat, as well as in groups and channels where you’re an admin.
To use the new disappearing messages feature in chats or groups, you’ll have to right click on the respective chat in the chat list where you want to enable auto-delete, go to Clear History, and then click on Enable Auto-Delete. Only in chats, you can also enable auto-delete by clicking on Clear History on the right side pane.
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Instructionals/Technical
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The Linux command line allows your system to remember commands that you use—up to a limit set by your HISTSIZE variable. Since each user’s HISTSIZE is generally set to 1000, that means Linux can remember the last 1000 commands you entered and make it easy to reuse them without retyping them.
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Irssi is a terminal-based Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for *nix systems. From the Irssi man page: Irssi is a modular Internet Relay Chat client. It is highly extensible and very secure. Being a fullscreen, termcap based client with many features, Irssi is easily extensible through scripts and modules.
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When Nginx is used as a backend server for web apps like WordPress, Drupal, etc. (which are usually PHP and MySQL Database based), many users come across the error: ‘413 – Request Entity Too Large’.
This error occurs whenever a user tries to upload a file that is greater than the configured maximum upload file size. The default limit for file upload size is 1 MB as defined in the Nginx configuration.
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FUZIX is an old-school Unix clone that was initially written for the 8-bit Zilog Z80 processor and released by Alan Cox in 2014. At one time one of the most active Linux developers, Cox stepped back from kernel development in 2013. While the initial announcement has been lost in the mists because he made it on the now defunct Google+, Cox jokingly recommended the system for those longing for the good old days when all the source code still fitted on a single floppy disk.
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Since then FUZIX has been ported to other architectures such as 6502, 68000, and the MSP430. Earlier in the week David Given — who wrote both the MSP430 and ESP8266 ports — went ahead and ported it to Raspberry Pi Pico and RP2040.
So you can now run Unix on a $4 microcontroller.
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This article explains how to install the default GNOME Shell theme, Adwaita, on Ubuntu 20.04, 20.10 and 21.04 (hint: it’s trickier than you would think).
The GNOME Shell theme is the theme used for the top panel, activities overview, system dialog and notifications. GNOME uses Adwaita as its default theme for both GTK and GNOME Shell.
You may want to use the default GNOME Shell theme not only because you don’t like Yaru GNOME Shell theme, or you’re a fan of Adwaita, but also because you may want to test things using the default GNOME Shell theme (this is why I needed this actually).
Ubuntu ships with Yaru as the default GTK and GNOME Shell theme. While Adwaita GTK theme comes preinstalled on Ubuntu, the Adwaita GNOME Shell theme is trickier to install, even though you actually already have it, but it doesn’t show up in GNOME Tweaks / can’t be used by default.
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For some time, Python has included support for managing virtual environments. Python 3.3 even added the built-in venv module for creating environments without third-party libraries. Python programmers use several different tools to manage their environments, and the one I use is called virtualenvwrapper.
Virtual environments are a way of separating your Python project and its dependencies from your system-installed Python. If you use a macOS or Linux-based operating system, it very likely comes with a version of Python as part of the installation, and in fact, it will probably be dependent on that particular version of Python to function properly. But it’s your computer, and you may want to use it for your own purposes. You may need to install another version of Python than the operating system provides. You may need to install some additional libraries, too. Although it’s possible to upgrade your system Python, it’s not recommended. It’s also possible to install other libraries, but you must take care not to interfere with anything the system relies on.
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In response to increasing interest from the Oracle Linux user community in an updated certification exam, we are pleased to announce the availability of the certification exam for Oracle Linux 8. The Oracle Linux 8 Advanced System Administration Certification Exam is now available: https://education.oracle.com/oracle-linux-8-advanced-system-administration/pexam_1Z0-106
By passing this exam, a certified individual proves fluency and a solid understanding of the skills required to deploy, configure, and administer an Oracle Linux 8 production server environment. Reap the benefits of earning an Oracle Certification. Expand your knowledge base and validate your skills to appeal to potential employers. Broaden your network and join 1.8 million Oracle Certified professionals. Gain exposure to a wide variety of important features, functions and tasks to use on the job.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Wireshark on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Wireshark is a free and open-source network protocol analyzer. With Wireshark, you can capture incoming and outgoing packets of a network in real-time and use it for network troubleshooting, packet analysis, software and communication protocol development, and many more.
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 Wireshark open-source network analysis and packet investigation on a Debian 10 (Buster).
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A firewall is either a software-based or, in some cases, a hardware-based security system for networks. It automatically monitors traffic inflow and outflow on the system and blocks certain kinds of data flow based on rules, which are pre-configured.
In Linux, Firewalld and UFW are two of the most popular Firewall software. They are used for all kinds of traffic blocking; from blocking a certain website, to blocking a specific server.
Today we will learn how to use these two Firewalls to block a specific port in Linux.
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Mattermost Desktop is the client application for the Desktop systems to user their mattermost account.
You must have Mattermost server installed in your self-managed instance or signup for the Mattermost cloud. For this tutorial, I have created an account on Mattermost cloud free version. You can go with professional or enterprise edition as per your requirements.
This tutorial describe you to how to install Mattermost desktop client on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux system.
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Fildem is a global menu and HUD for GNOME Shell. It was forked from the GNOME HUD project, and then made to also support adding a global menu to GNOME Shell. This article explains how to install this on Debian / Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch Linux / Manjaro.
Using this, the menu that’s usually built into the application window is displayed on the top GNOME Shell panel. Thanks to the HUD functionality (which is brought up by using the Alt + Space keyboard shortcut), you can also use this to search through the application menu, very useful for applications with vast menus, like GIMP for example.
The Fildem global menu is set to automatically hide and only become visible on mouse over, but this can be changed, so you can have an always visible global menu if you want.
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OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine) is a super fast routing engine for OpenStreetMap (OSM) road networks. In previous tutorials, we explained the process of setting up a self-hosted OpenStreetMap tile server and how to add address lookup functionality to your map with Nominatim. This tutorial is going to show you how to add navigation functionality to your OpenStreetMap with OSRM, which provides car routing, bike routing, and walk routing.
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Ruby and Rails commonly known as “Rails” is an open-source web application framework. Ruby and Rails framework is written in Ruby programming language which helps you to create highly powerful websites and applications. Rails is a server-side web application framework that follows the MVC concept.
In the previous article, we discussed Ruby installation on Ubuntu 20.04. In this article, we are going to learn how to install the Ruby and Rails framework on Ubuntu 20.04.
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Shopware is a free and open-source platform that helps you to start your own e-commerce website to power your online business. It provides a lot of useful tools that help you to build and customize a fully responsive online store. It is very similar to Magento. Compared to Magento, Shopware is a very powerful, easy-to-use, and flexible application. It helps you to create and manage content and products easily from any device with its modern user interface.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Shopware with Nginx and Let’s Encrypt SSL on CentOS 8.
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Manage your command-line Ubuntu 20.04 or 18.04 LTS server using the web-based graphical user interface of the Cockpit server Manager.
With Cockpit, a Linux system can be conveniently administered and controlled remotely using a browser. Among other things, the admin can take a look at the systemd journal, checks the load, starts and stops services, access terminal with root rights, and more. Thanks to responsive design, the user interface automatically adapts to different screen sizes, which in turn enables convenient access via smartphones.
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WoeUSB on Debian can be used to create Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, or XP bootable USB drives with just a few clicks, Here we will learn how to install WoeUSB-ng on Debian 10 Buster or 11 Bullseye.
Although there are many USB bootable creator software such as Etcher, Unetbootin, and more for Linux distros, however, if you want to have a dedicated one to create a bootable pen drive for Windows DVD or image then WoUSB is here. Because when it comes to writing Windows ISO images, many USB bootable creator programs don’t work as they should, that’s the reason why WoeUSB is popular. You can check our out 7 Best Ubuntu live USB creators to Download & Use.
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‘usermod’ & ‘passwd’ commands are used to lock or unlock one user account at a time, but you may need to write some small shell scripts to perform this action in multiple user accounts.
In this tutorial, we will explain how to lock and unlock multiple user accounts simultaneously in Linux using a shell script.
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Red Hat OpenShift API Management is a new managed application service designed as an add-on to Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated. The service provides developers with a streamlined experience when developing and delivering microservices applications with an API-first approach.
OpenShift API Management was built on the success of 3scale API Management and designed to let developers easily share, secure, reuse, and discover APIs when developing applications. This article shows you how to install OpenShift API Management as an add-on to your OpenShift Dedicated cluster. As you will see, it takes less than 10 minutes to install, configure, administer, and be up and running with OpenShift API Management. Check the end of the article for the included video demonstration.
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At times, in a computer system when applications are running the system might freeze and does not respond. This seems annoying since users are not even able to close the program by using the X icon on the UI of the application. This is because the processes/applications are not responding and they will not simply be closed by the UI method. Even continuous rebooting of your system does not seem to be a suitable solution. Sometimes, users have many critical data that could be unsaved. There are solutions to such problems that are easily adaptable and will cover them in this article.
In Ubuntu, there are many methods used to kill such frozen applications in which users are not required to reboot their systems. xkill, and system monitor utility are the famous methods used along with kill, pkill, and killall commands. In this article, I will show you 3 different ways of killing frozen applications on an Ubuntu 20.04 system using GUI as well as the command line.
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Before I knew about this utility, I preferred using a GUI program like Stacer or the pre-installed GNOME Disk usage app to check free disk space and the disk usage numbers for my system.
However, duf seems to be a useful terminal tool to check disk usage and free space that is written in Golang. Even though Abhishek suggested me to give this a try, I found it more interesting, especially considering that I’m currently learning Golang, what a coincidence!
It is fairly easy to use no matter whether you are a terminal guru or just a beginner not comfortable with the terminal. It is certainly easier to understand than the df command for checking disk space utilization.
Let me highlight some of the key features and its usage before you get it installed on your system.
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Companies are increasingly using hosted and managed services to deliver on application modernization efforts and reduce the burden of managing cloud infrastructure. The recent release of Red Hat OpenShift API Management makes it easier than ever to get your own dedicated instance of Red Hat 3scale API Management running on Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated.
This article is for developers who want to learn how to use Red Hat’s hosted and managed services to automatically import and manage exposed APIs. We’ll deploy a Quarkus application on OpenShift Dedicated, then use OpenShift API Management to add API key security. See the end of the article for a video demonstration of the workflow described.
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Games
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Godot 3.2.4 is shaping up nicely, and a number of issues have been fixed since the second Release Candidate. A few late features have also been included because they were too good to keep waiting (such as improved Inspector subresource editing and node copy-paste support). So it’s now time for a RC 3 build to give it another round of testing before the stable release!
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You’ve played plenty of farming sims by now or at least seen plenty but have you done some farming in the Stone Age? Roots of Pacha is coming to Linux and it’s live on Kickstarter.
In the game you will help your clan settle down and begin to build up a thriving Stone Age civilization. According to developer Soda Den, Roots of Pacha is first and foremost a farming game but there’s no shop to buy animals or seeds. Instead you need to connect with nature, do some exploring and discover what the world has to offer to discover and learn. Progression is done through the sharing of ideas like a prehistoric research tree, and it’s up to you to speak to clan members and agree (or not) to their ideas.
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The HID subsystem updates were sent in this morning for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window.
Most significant to the HID updates in this kernel is the introduction of the Sony PlayStation 5 DualSense controller driver. Sony published this driver back at the end of last year and is fully open-source and supporting USB and Bluetooth modes of operation and all key features from LEDs and motion sensors to battery reporting, rumble, light bar control, and more. Sony is expected to expand the hardware support handled by this driver in due course.
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Two Point Studios and SEGA just surprise released the latest expansion for the comedy building and management sim Two Point Hospital with Two Point Hospital: A Stitch in Time out now.
Everything’s getting a bit wibbly wobbly, timey wimey as the saying goes with you joining someone named Captain Yesterday who has created the Yesterizer. You’ll be jumping through time across three new levels, well, one level that you play through three different time periods.
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One day Google might catch a break with their cloud gaming service Stadia but it’s not now and perhaps rightfully so in this case. There’s a new proposed class action lawsuit filed by a New York resident over the streaming quality and display resolution on Stadia.
As pick up initially by ClassAction, the lawsuit doesn’t just involve Google. They’re taking aim at Bungie and id Software claiming they all mislead players about the expected resolution when getting people to pay upfront for the Founder’s Edition and Premier Edition bundles that came with the Stadia Controller and a Chromecast Ultra.
The lawsuit was originally filed in October 2020, with it only recently being moved from Queens County Superior Court to the New York federal court on February 12 so it’s all still ongoing and these things tend to take plenty of time.
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After being in Early Access for 18 months following a successful Kickstarter campaign, the brutal and brilliant roguelike Jupiter Hell will leave Early Access on August 5.
Acting as the successor to DRL (DoomRL which had to be renamed), It’s certainly no secret that I’m a massive Jupiter Hell fan, with it’s Doom inspired take on the roguelike genre with big moody scenes and some pretty furious action. The movement system in it is so good it almost feels real-time but it’s very much turn-based.
Not only does it now have a 1.0 release date for August 5, ChaosForge have also now announced they’ve teamed up with Hyperstrange to help them with the publishing side of things. There’s still 5 big updates due before release, and they’ve confirmed their intention to continue updating the game after release which is exciting.
[...]
Jupiter Hell performs really well on Linux too…
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Linux support is confirmed (we spoke to the publisher) and it’s planned to launch sometime later this year.
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Urban Games are showing their dedication to Transport Fever 2, as they just today release a massive overhaul to the rendering system along with adding support for the Vulkan API. The first major update since July 2020 and along with a build for macOS it includes plenty of enhancements.
With Vulkan support now in, they didn’t just remove OpenGL so thankfully anyone who has a card good enough to run Transport Fever 2 that doesn’t support Vulkan isn’t just left out in the cold as there’s a switch to go between the APIs and it will fallback to OpenGL is the Vulkan extensions aren’t around.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I have completed a lot of the server side work now . I have figured out the endpoints on which the API will work . I have decided that /post/{platform} is going to be the endpoint where platforms are hard-coded as Twitter , Mastodon and Reddit.
To complete the post you will have to call the API like this
/post/{platform}?image=
&text=
One big advantage with FastAPI is that you can just do localhost:8000/redoc to get the redocs api documentaion fo the same and no additional work needs to be on the server side.
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Using a Linux distribution that uses a KDE desktop, you will see a couple of options concerning text editors. The KDE project will officially support a couple of editors, such as Kate and KWrite. Both are graphical text editors containing several advanced features and some extra niceties found in some common standard editors. This section will describe each editor and also the features that you may use in shell scripting.
This is the basic editor for the KDE environment. It offers word-style text editing with support for code syntax editing and highlighting and is used for different programming languages. It uses color-coding to distinguish comments, constants, and functions. You should notice that the for loop carries an icon that connects the opening and closing braces. The editing window provides cut-and-paste capabilities.
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Exactly 2 months after NeoChat 1.0, the NeoChat team is happy to announce a new release of NeoChat. NeoChat is a native client for the decentralized communication network Matrix.
Aside from the many bug fixes, performance improvements, and subtle appearance improvements, NeoChat 1.1 brings many new features that will make your experience with it more convenient.
Thanks to the work of Hannah, Nicolas, and Tobias, this release also brings NeoChat to many more platforms. Nightly builds of NeoChat are now available on Android, Flatpak, AppImage, macOS and Windows. Not all of them are considered production ready, but we hope to improve the support for them in future release.
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Plasma Mobile team is happy to announce availability of tarballs for several of Plasma Mobile applications, they are available to download from download.kde.org
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KDE Plasma 5.21.1 is here just a week after the launch of KDE Plasma 5.21, which introduced a brand-new Kickoff application launchers, a new System Monitor app, a new dark theme, better Wayland support, and numerous other improvements.
This first point release is a maintenance update that fixes bugs to improve the Plasma Wayland session on Nvidia Optimus laptops so it will no longer crash on login, improve the new System Monitor app to no longer crash on launch when not using the optional systemd startup feature, and make the Task Manager let you run third-party executable programs pinned to it.
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Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.21.1. Plasma 5.21 was released in February with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Genius is a fully featured calculator somewhat similar to programs like Matlab and Octave. It is written by math professor Jiří Lebl with mathematicians in mind. The latest version supports evaluations in the range boxes in the plotting window and it has numerous minor fixes under the hood.
[...]
Genius is one of the oldest GNOME projects still being maintained. It was first released all the way back in 1997. It is programmable, it has 2D and 3D plotting, support for rational numbers and it has a it’s own programming language.
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The GNOME desktop environment is the default GUI for AlmaLinux, but it doesn’t always come pre-installed, for example if you opted for a minimal install. In this guide, we’ll give you the commands you need in order to install GNOME on AlmaLinux.
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This article will go over the step by step instructions for migrating from CentOS Linux to AlmaLinux.
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GNOME 40 beta is coming together with the GNOME Shell and Mutter components having seen new releases on Monday.
The GNOME Shell 40 Beta brings its redesign to the overview area, out-of-date extensions are now disabled by default, and a wide variety of fixes ranging from crash fixes to general bug fixes.
The full list of GNOME Shell 40 Beta changes can be found via GNOME’s Gitlab.
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Multi-monitor has come up a fair bit in conversations about the GNOME Shell UX updates that are coming in GNOME 40. There’s been some uncertainty and anxiety in this area, so we wanted to provide more detail on what the multi-monitor experience will exactly be like, so people know what to expect. We also wanted to provide background on the decisions that have been made.
Before we get into multi-monitor, a short status update! As you would expect for this stage in the development cycle, the main bulk of the UI changes are now in the GNOME Shell master branch. This was the result of a really hard push by Georges and Florian, so huge thanks to them! Anyone who is interested in following this work should ensure that they are running the master branch, and not the now redundant development branch.
There are still a few relatively minor UI changes that we are hoping to land this cycle, but overall the emphasis is now on stabilisation and bug fixing, so if you are testing and have spotted any issues, now’s the time to report them.
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Long story short, multi-monitor support in GNOME 40 will work pretty much the same as it works in the current and previous releases of the widely used desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems, but with a few adjustments to accommodate the new Activities Overview design.
Therefore, GNOME 40 will default to showing workspaces only on the primary display with the top bar and activities overview when using a dual display setup, but it will scale down the background on the secondary display to make it clear that it’s a single workspace. Check out the video below to see it in action.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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GeckoLinux is an openSUSE-based Linux distribution which focuses on overall usability and a polished experience.
[...]
With openSUSE as the base, GeckoLinux is a very secure and versatile operating system that can handle anything the user throws at it. The package offered is appealing to both, experienced Linux users and new users who are looking to explore new distributions.
Recently, the team behind GeckoLinux announced the release of an update for all of their ‘Rolling Editions‘ with updated desktop environments.
Overall, let’s have a look at what the new release has on offer.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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A common answer to the question “What’s your favorite part about Fedora?” is often “the community”. Well, what’s so special about it?
The Fedora community shares the common values of the “Four Foundations”: Freedom, Friends, Features and First. Beyond that, although there are many great minds, not all of them think alike! Everyone contributes different approaches to problems, interesting ideas, and diverse perspectives. There is a place in Fedora for anyone who wants to help.
That’s why we’re launching a new video series on the Fedora Youtube channel profiling some of Fedora’s various contributors and how they use Fedora. The goal is to get to know some community members better, especially in a time where in-person community events might not be practical.
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Rootless Podman containers is a really cool feature that allows users to run almost all containers in their home directory without requiring any additional privileges.
Rootless containers take advantage of the user namespace, as I explained in this blog.
Sometimes the user namespace and other container security layers like SELinux make it more difficult to share content inside the container. We have seen many users who want to share system directories into their containers but fail with permission errors. These directories are usually shared via some group access, which allows the user to read/write content in the directories.
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Cloud development practices and environments are evolving faster than ever. As developers, we are no strangers to adapting to the changing technology landscape. However, with a landscape that changes this often, it’s easy for us to get caught using the techniques we’ve used in the past to create the applications of the future.
In this video, we talk out a problem in Upkar’s code where a 505 error that occurred due to miscoded credentials and ultimately discuss how we tackle problems like these with some vital app modernization tools.
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As container and Kubernetes adoption in production has grown, concerns regarding container security, monitoring, data management and networking remain. In order to address these challenges, organizations must lay a secure foundation for modern workloads. Red Hat is an established leader in security for enterprise open source solutions – container security is Linux security. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift offer a layered approach to securing containers and integrating security throughout the container lifecycle to support mission critical environments. We are continuously evolving to set new standards for security (e.g. DevSecOps) to support our partners and customers across open hybrid cloud.
Today, we’re introducing the Red Hat Vulnerability Scanner Certification: a new certification to validate how security software partners use Red Hat security-related data for Red Hat products. This enables partners to deliver more reliable, consistent reporting to customers for containers to minimize false positives and other discrepancies. As a result, customers using Red Hat Certified partner security solutions can experience a more accurate process for assessing vulnerability risks of Red Hat products and packages including Red Hat Universal Base Images (UBI).
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This year Red Hat released our 10th Product Security risk report, which reviews the vulnerabilities that affected our products during the previous year. Software, and our customers’ environments, have gotten more complex — and so has the IT security landscape.
With so much information on Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), our users have found it helpful to have one source of information about the risks posed to Red Hat technologies. And because Red Hat offers a full portfolio of technologies beyond Linux, we’ve expanded and improved the risk report to better reflect the issues that our customers care about. Now, let’s take a brief history lesson about how open source risk reporting has changed over the years.
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IBM has announced availability of Red Hat software on IBM Power Systems as well as new IBM Power Systems hardware.
IBM Power Systems now features Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Virtual Server leveraging OpenShift’s baremetal installeri, Red Hat Runtimes, and newly certified Red Hat Ansible Content Collections.
Providing clients an optimized, production-level OpenShift platform to modernize traditional environments with cloud-native applications, the IBM Power Private Cloud Rack combines on-premises hardware, a complete software stack of IBM and Red Hat technology, and installation from IBM Systems Lab Services to deliver 49% lower cost per request as compared to similarly equipped x86-based platformsii.
Today’s announcements include enhancements to IBM Power System’s capacity to scale compute capacity across the hybrid cloud on Linux, IBM i, and AIX.
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Debian Family
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Fully synced with the Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” software repositories, Tails 4.16 is the first release in the 4.x series to use the latest and long-term supported Linux 5.10 LTS kernel. This not only enables better hardware support on Tails, but it also brings new features and extra security.
In addition, the Tails 4.16 release comes with all the latest and greatest Tor technologies for anonymous communication. These include the Tor Browser 10.0.12 anonymous web browser, as well as Tor 0.4.5.5 client and server implementation for enabling anonymous communication. Also included is the Mozilla Thunderbird 78.7.0 open-source email client.
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This release fixes known security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Some of the most significant slowdowns seen on this system were with heavy multi-threaded workloads with the likes of the Intel SVT video encoder benchmarks. But with both Ubuntu 20.10 and 21.04 making use of GCC 10, one of the possible scenarios is a regression in the power management of Linux 5.10 or Intel’s Thermald. Ubuntu 21.04 currently is on Linux 5.10 from 5.8 and Thermald 2.4 from 2.3.1. In any case this was just some quick tests prior to sending back the review unit, so as the Ubuntu 21.04 release approaches in two months, I’ll be back around with tests on more hardware.
Overall though the Ubuntu 21.04 performance isn’t in bad standing if looking at the geometric mean of 223 benchmarks conducted on Ubuntu 21.04 Dev vs 20.10, the overall performance is quite close just with some regressions at least for the moment. This largely jives with what we have been seeing with other x86_64 hardware like shown in yesterday’s Ryzen desktop tests.
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Want to test Linux, but don’t want to install it traditionally on your computer? You can create a virtual machine with Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution in VirtualBox. Don’t know to do it? Check out this post.
Thanks to virtual machines, it is possible to install any operating system, and then run it in a window on our current system. This is facilitated by the VirtualBox program, which allows you to quickly create a virtual machine, allocate part of our computer’s resources to it, and then install the system of our choice, e.g. any Linux distribution. When we get bored, the virtual machine can be deleted. This does not affect our current operating system in any way.
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For those shortcut key lovers out there, here is a long list of keyboard shortcuts for Ubuntu. Most of them should work in most Gnome-based distros. Enjoy the list.
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Are you new to Ubuntu Linux? Can’t figure out how to change your monitor screen resolution? We can help! Follow along with our guide as we go over how to change monitor resolutions on each flavor of Ubuntu.
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In this video, we are looking at how to install the Brave Browser on Linux Mint 20.1.
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Shenzhen LC Technology’s Cherry Pi PC is a pseudo clone of the Raspberry Pi clone SBC Orange Pi PC. It runs Linux on Allwinner’s quad-core H3 SoC, and has 1GB DDR3, 2x USB 2.0, MIPI-CSI, 40-pin Pi-compatible connector and optional WiFi and 8GB eMMC.
In 2015, Shenzhen Xunlong introduced its Orange Pi PC, an open-spec SBC based on Allwinner’s quad-core H3 SoC. The board measures within 1mm of the Raspberry Pi 2’s size and matches its features. Now another company, Shenzhen LC Technology, has released a clone of the Orange Pi PC called Cherry Pi PC. Like the Orange Pi PC, the Cherry Pi PC also runs Linux on Allwinner’s quad-core H3 SoC which is a 1.2GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A7 device with Arm 600MHz Mali-400 MP2 GPU.
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We’ve seen a fair amount of Intel Elkhart Lake platforms including modules, 3.5-inch SBCs, Pico-ITX boards, and embedded mini PCs, but so far, I had not noticed any Elkhart Lake mini-ITX motherboard.
Advantech AIMB-218 motherboard offers a choice of low-power Atom, Celeron and Pentium Elkhart Processor, and thanks to the larger form factor plenty of I/Os including four display interfaces (DP++/HDMI/eDP/LVDS) supporting up to three display, eight USB port, six serial COM port, and dual Gigabit Ethernet.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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The first release candidate for WordPress 5.7 is now available!
Please join us in celebrating this very important milestone in the community’s progress towards the final release!
“Release Candidate” means that the new version is ready for release, but with millions of users and thousands of plugins and themes, it’s possible something was missed. WordPress 5.7 is slated for release on March 9, 2021, but your help is needed to get there—if you haven’t tried 5.7 yet, now is the time!
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The ASF is the world’s largest Open Source foundation. Apache software projects are integral to nearly every end-user computing device, benefit billions of users worldwide, with Web requests received from every Internet-connected country on the planet. Valued conservatively at more than $22B, Apache Open Source software is available to the public-at-large at 100% no cost. No payment of any kind is ever required to use, contribute to, or otherwise participate in Apache projects. The ASF depends on tax-deductible Sponsorships and donations to offset its operations expenses that include infrastructure, marketing and publicity, accounting, and legal services.
“We are proud of our Sponsors, whose generous support helps our volunteer community continue to develop essential software that keeps the world running,” said Daniel Ruggeri, ASF Vice President of Fundraising. “ASF Sponsorship allows us to make great strides towards developing and improving our projects, enriching our communities, educating and mentoring newcomers, and encouraging and facilitating participation by under-represented groups. Fiscal support today secures the groundwork to ensure future Apache benefits can be shared by all.”
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Nextcloud has announced immediate availability of Nextcloud Hub 21, adding performance improvement and important new collaboration features in Text, Talk, Groupware and Files.
According to the company, the new High Performance Back-end for Files in particular reduces server load from desktop clients and web interface polling by 90% while delivering instant notifications and file changes to users.
Optimizations to app loading and database queries as well as a range of specific scenarios like the usage of Text, Object storage, LDAP group handling and more deliver up to twice more responsive user experience.
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Web Browsers
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Several recent version of the Brave Web Browser have had a very unfortunate DNS-leak flaw in the “private” Tor-based browsing feature. The latest version 1.20.208 has a new version of the Chromium core it is based on (88.0.4324.182), a fix for DNS leaks in supposedly “private” web browser windows and two fixes specific to macOS. You should upgrade if you rely on Brave for “private” web browsing or use it to access Tor onion sites.
[...]
You should upgrade and ensure that you are using version 1.20.108 or newer if you occasionally use the Brave Web Browser to access Tor onion sites or rely on it’s “private” Tor-browsing mode for anything even remotely critical. You can acquire the latest version from brave.com.
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Mozilla
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The Picture-in-Picture feature in the Firefox browser makes multitasking with video content easy, no window shuffling necessary. With Picture-in-Picture, you can play a video in a separate, scalable window that pops out for viewing on top of all your windows. It stays and plays while you go about your other business on other tabs or do things outside of from Firefox.
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While it doesn’t appear to include any major or important changes, Firefox 87 will apparently be the first update to the popular web browser used by default on numerous GNU/Linux distributions to disable the Backspace key from working as a “Back” button when you want to navigate back to the previous page.
This change was supposed to land in the Firefox 86 release that arrived earlier today, but, for some reason unknown to me, it didn’t happen, and it looks like Mozilla delayed it for Firefox 87. Mozilla recommends that you use the Alt + Left arrow keyboard shortcut instead.
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The biggest new feature in Firefox 86 is the enablement of AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) support by default. AVIF is a powerful, royalty-free and open-source image file format designed to encode AV1 bitstreams in the HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) container.
In Firefox 86, only basic support is offered, which means that features like animated images and colorspace support aren’t supported. AVIF support was available in previous Firefox release, but not enabled by default. Therefore, you could enable it by setting the image.avif.enable option in about:config to true.
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One of the new features of Android 12 is support for the AVIF file format that provides much smaller files at the same level of quality. Jake Archibald has done a great job comparing AVIF format to JPEG, WebP, and other still picture formats, and the results are really impressive.
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State Partitioning is the technical term for a new privacy feature in Firefox called Total Cookie Protection, which will be available in ETP Strict Mode in Firefox 86. This article shows how State Partitioning works inside of Firefox and explains what developers of third-party integrations can do to stay compatible with the latest changes.
Web sites utilize a variety of different APIs to store data in the browser. Most famous are cookies, which are commonly used to build login sessions and provide a customized user experience. We call these stateful APIs, because they are able to establish state that will persist through reloads, navigations and browser restarts. While these APIs allow developers to enrich a user’s web experience, they also enable nefarious web tracking which jeopardizes user privacy. To fight abuse of these APIs Mozilla is introducing State Partitioning in Firefox 86.
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The Firefox web console used to include a cd() helper command that enabled developers to change the DevTools’ context to inspect a specific <iframe> present on the page. This helper has been removed in favor of the iframe context picker, which is much easier to use.
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Beginning last year, the internet began playing a bigger role in our lives than ever before. In the US, we went from only three percent of workers to more than forty percent working from home in 2020, all powered by the web. We also relied on it to stay informed, and connect with friends and family when we couldn’t meet in-person.
And despite the many difficulties we all have faced online and offline, we’re proud to keep making Firefox an essential part of what makes the web work.
Today I’m sharing two new features: multiple picture-in-picture (multi-PiP) and our latest privacy protection combo. Multi-PiP allows multiple videos to play at the same time — all the adorable animal videos or March Madness anyone? And our latest privacy protection, the dynamic duo of Total Cookie Protection (technically known as State Partitioning or Dynamic First-Party Isolation) and Supercookie Protections (launched in last month’s release) are here to combat cross-site cookie tracking once and for all.
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Today we are pleased to announce Total Cookie Protection, a major privacy advance in Firefox built into ETP Strict Mode. Total Cookie Protection confines cookies to the site where they were created, which prevents tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.
Cookies, those well-known morsels of data that web browsers store on a website’s behalf, are a useful technology, but also a serious privacy vulnerability. That’s because the prevailing behavior of web browsers allows cookies to be shared between websites, thereby enabling those who would spy on you to “tag” your browser and track you as you browse. This type of cookie-based tracking has long been the most prevalent method for gathering intelligence on users. It’s a key component of the mass commercial tracking that allows advertising companies to quietly build a detailed personal profile of you.
In 2019, Firefox introduced Enhanced Tracking Protection by default, blocking cookies from companies that have been identified as trackers by our partners at Disconnect. But we wanted to take protections to the next level and create even more comprehensive protections against cookie-based tracking to ensure that no cookies can be used to track you from site to site as you browse the web.
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With the release of Firefox 86, we are pleased to welcome many new friends of the Fox, developers who’ve contributed their first code changes to Firefox in version 86. 25 were brand new volunteers! Please join us in congratulating, thanking and welcoming all of these diligent and enthusiastic contributors, and take a look at their excellent work…
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The Firefox 86.0 release is out. New features this time include picture-in-picture video and “total cookie protection”, which appears to be a way to allow third-party cookies while preserving some privacy.
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Firefox 86.0 is out today as the latest monthly update to this open-source web browser that continues to work on ramping up its security offerings.
Firefox 86.0 introduces “Total Cookie Protection” in strict mode where every website is then bound to its own “cookie jar” to better prevent sites from tracking users site-to-site. Firefox on Linux and Android also now mitigates against stack clash attacks. DTLS 1.0 support has also been dropped from WebRTC PeerConnections support.
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It does feel like the gaps between each new Firefox release gets shorter every month — that, or I’m just getting older!
Anyway, Firefox 86 is the latest stable release. It’s proper released too, not just up on the Firefox FTP. The change-log isn’t nearly as full as the one for last month’s Firefox 85 release but there are a few goodies worth knowing about.
Top of the pile? The ability to watch multiple videos in picture-in-picture mode (PIP) at the same time. Perfect for gawking at the latest escapades of egregiously witty influencers, YouTubers, and TV show binges. Each pip (when focused) also supports keyboard arrow navigation to skip back/forward in 10 second increments.
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“Total Cookie Protection” if “Strict Mode” is enabled, AVIF image support, multiple videos in picture-in-picture mode, 12 security fixes and vastly improved WebGL performance on Linux machines with a dedicated GPU are among the highlights in Mozilla Firefox 86.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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The Documentation Team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the LibreOffice 7.0 Getting Started Guide, updated to include all LibreOffice 7.0 features.
The guide is written for anyone who wants to get up to speed quickly with LibreOffice. Readers may be new to office software, or may be familiar with another office suite. This guide is a valuable asset for all users.
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Programming/Development
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The libsoup library implements HTTP for the GNOME platform and is used by a wide range of projects including any web browser using WebKitGTK. This past year we at Igalia have been working on a new release to modernize the project and I’d like to share some details and get some feedback from the community.
[...]
Making the library smaller meant deleting a lot of duplicated and deprecated APIs, removing rarely used features, leveraging additions to GLib in the past decades, and general code cleanup. As of today the current codebase is roughly at 45,000 lines of C code compared to 57,000 lines in the last release with over 20% of the project deleted.
Along with reducing the size of the library I wanted to improve the quality of the codebase. We now have improved CI which deploys documentation that has 100% coverage, reports code coverage for tests, tests against Clang’s sanitizers, and the beginnings of automated code fuzzing.
Lastly there is ongoing work to finally add HTTP/2 support improving responsiveness for the whole platform.
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CAMSS is a V4L2 (Video for Linux 2) Linux driver which focuses on supporting the basic use cases of the ISP, such as receiving the MIPI CSI-2 signals from the sensors, decoding them, and then writing them to memory. This leaves a lot of functionality typically provided by an ISP unimplemented, but that is intentional as the development priority has been to enable the data path from camera sensor to userspace.
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Perl/Raku
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Here are solutions to this weeks challenges from the Perl Weekly Challenge.
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Rust
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All this information is great, but what I was looking for was a simple step-by-step example which also discussed memory handling and didn’t delve into the use of GObjects. I also included an opaque data type, but I’m not 100% sure if my approach is the most correct.
I’m not going to discuss the entire subject of why you would want to do this. I’m thinking that if you’re reading this, then you already know why.
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Standards/Consortia
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I used plugins for my tables (multiple plugins). I used plugins for code highlighting. Plugins for LaTeX. Plugins for table of contents, social media integration, post tagging, image captioning and formatting, spelling. You get the idea. The result of all this was I ended up with a blog post that was entirely useless in its text only form. Plugins storing the data in non-standard places so it can be processed and look fancy.
The WYSIWYG editor interface was a huge plus for me. I spent all day in front of a terminal breaking graphics and display (meaning I really was in front of an 80×24 terminal at times). I didn’t want to have to deal with fanciful layout engines or styles. Those plugins ended up destroying the WYSIWYG editor experience and I ended up doing everything in quasi markdown anyway.
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Natalie Wynn knows that people can change. After all, she sometimes jokes, she was a “male alcoholic” until 2017. A 32-year-old trans woman, she’s now a wildly popular political YouTuber. Her channel, ContraPoints, was a cultural bright spot of the Trump era, and she may be one of the few people in the left media who can credibly claim to persuade her opponents on occasion. Her videos are also—in a left-media ecosystem of scolds and ascetics—a lavish pleasure to watch.
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Over the course of 2018, the pseudonymous Italian novelist Elena Ferrante wrote a weekly column for The Guardian’s Weekend magazine. The pieces were later collected and published as Incidental Inventions, a title sufficiently vague to allow for the capaciousness of her themes; Ferrante wrote on everything from climate change, jealousy, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and botanophobia to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Soviet sci-fi classic Solaris. The 1972 film, which Ferrante admitted to rewatching “at least once a year,” follows the crew of a space station orbiting Solaris, a distant planet that appears to have the power to materialize the subconscious preoccupations and buried memories of the astronauts on board. A psychologist named Kris Kelvin is dispatched to investigate these disturbing phenomena and wakes up one morning to find his deceased wife, Hari, in his bed and very much alive. In terror, he tries to destroy the phantasm by launching Hari’s body into space, only to find her back in his room later that night. In her column, Ferrante wrote about being transfixed by Hari’s “serene yet furious refusal to be eliminated.” The film’s power, she concluded, “lies in the female character, in that memory of a woman who can’t vanish into oblivion.”
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Science
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Remote learning surely is saving some lives—of students’ elderly family members and vulnerable teachers—which, in a pandemic, should take priority over political—even economic—concerns.
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It seems I’m always writing about Section 230 or copyright or some sort of regulatory effort driven by antipathy toward technology. But one of my favorite posts I’ve ever written here is this one, “We Interrupt All The Hating On Technology To Remind Everyone We Just Landed On Mars.” Given that we just landed on Mars again it seems a good time to revisit it, because it seems no less important today than it was in 2018 when I originally wrote it. Just as it seems no less important that we just landed on Mars again. In fact, it all may matter even more now.
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Education
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Using scores on tests of recalled secondhand information to shape education policy doesn’t just invite societal suicide, it assures it.
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Hardware
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Looking to do more with your Raspberry Pi? That may be one of the best factors of single-board computers: the possibilities seem endless. And those possibilities are growing. The Ready! Model 100, an SBC enclosure, is making an appearance on Kickstarter.
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Health/Nutrition
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Covid-19 has killed nearly half a million people in the United States.
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Part of the former state hospital is now occupied by a private university with ties to an evangelical religion.
The closing of state mental-health facilities often created additional issues for mentally ill people and communities, as former residents were often jettisoned into communities in the movement toward deinstitutionalization in the 1970s. Before being cast off, many of those with mental illness were hidden away in rural settings such as this facility in upstate New York. In a society where people are expected to perform, mental illness has long had an undesirable stigma even though it is one illness among many.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Linux Foundation
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“TakeTwo” will crawl and analyze “news articles, headlines, web pages, blogs, and even code” in order to find through-crime such as not using “language recommendations” such as “inclusive terms”. IBM has already begun using this surveillance system to monitor what their employees write and they provide API access for other organizations who would like to monitor their employees to ensure that they don’t engage in wrong-think.
“Fair Change” is a more voluntary real-world surveillance system consisting of a mobile application and a back-end database. The idea is to have people record traffic stops and “other scenarios” with the potential for “racial injustice” and “systemic racism”. The system includes a map where recorded incidents can be seen. The API for capturing data is made using NodeJS.
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IBM and the Linux Foundation have announced two new projects relating to the Call for Code for Racial Justice initiative.
This initiative, which was created by David Clark Cause and launched last year, “facilitates the adoption and innovation of open source projects by developers, ecosystem partners, and communities across the world to promote racial justice” in the areas of police and judicial reform, diverse representation, and policy and legislation reform.
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (connman, firejail, kernel, python-django, roundcubemail, and wpa_supplicant), Fedora (gdk-pixbuf2 and gdk-pixbuf2-xlib), openSUSE (python3 and tomcat), Scientific Linux (xterm), SUSE (postgresql12 and postgresql13), and Ubuntu (gdk-pixbuf, openldap, python-django, and qemu).
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Ubuntu has automatic updates enabled by default. Ordinarily, this is a convenient feature that helps our system stay up to date with the latest features, and protected with the newest security patches.
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KeePass is a tried and tested open-source encrypted password manager available for Windows. You can also use one of the many forks for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and other operating systems. KeePass has created the defacto standard for encrypted password vault/database files (.kdbx). Syncing the vault files between your computers and Android can cause problems with some KeePass apps, however.
KeePass (and its many forks) stores your passwords encrypted in a secure vault/database file. Unlike other password managers like LastPass and Bitwarden, you’re solely responsible for storing and backing up your password vault. You can transfer the vault file between computers with Syncthing, Resillio, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, a floppy diskette, or however you prefer moving your files around. Multi-computer set-ups with file synchronization introduces the risk of file synchronization delays and conflicts.
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The recent fiasco with Nvidia trying to block Hardware Unboxed from future GPU review samples for the content of their review is one example of how they choose to play this game. This hatred is not only shared by reviewers, but also developers and especially Linux users.
The infamous Torvalds videos still traverse the web today as Nvidia conjures up another evil plan to suck up more of your money and market share. This is not just one off shoot case; oh how much I wish it was. I just want my computer to work.
If anyone has used Sway-WM with an Nvidia GPU I’m sure they would remember the –my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia option.
These are a few examples of many.
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Defence/Aggression
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“Thankfully, the repeal of the death penalty by its leading practitioner gives hope that work for justice is not in vain.”
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Saturday Night Live (SNL) has come in for a storm of criticism after airing a joke critical of Israel’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout policy. The show’s anchor Michael Che quipped that “Israel is reporting that they vaccinated half of their population. And I’m going to guess it is the Jewish half.” Despite addressing the topic for fewer than seven seconds before moving on, Che’s words sparked a chorus of denunciations from conservative Jewish groups and supporters of the Middle Eastern nation.
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Like Gregor Samsa, the never-to-be-forgotten character in Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis,” we awoke on January 7 to discover that we, too, were “a giant insect” with “a domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments” and numerous “pitifully thin” legs that “waved helplessly” before our eyes. If you prefer, though, you can just say it: We opened our eyes and found that, somehow, we had become a giant roach of a country.
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Those who keep an eye on the American right couldn’t help but take notice of the news that L. Brent Bozell IV was arrested last Tuesday for participation in the January 6 riot. Leo Brent Bozell IV, to give the name in full, is no ordinary ruffian but a young princeling whose bloodline unites the two most important reactionary dynasties in America, the Buckleys and the Bozells. Over the past century, stretching across four generations, these intertwined families have promoted antidemocratic politics, a push that often shaded into violence.
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Environment
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“Texans are living through the collapse of a 40-year experiment in free-market fundamentalism, one that has also stood in the way of effective climate action. Fortunately, there’s a way out.”
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Extinction is for ever, but not inevitable. Some threatened species are now surprising survivors. Can others follow suit?
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Energy
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“Texas is the perfect example of what happens when our politicians cater to fossil fuel executives instead of the young people who have been… warning of an impending climate emergency like this.”
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“Charity can’t replace policy,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez acknowledged, “but solidarity is how we’ll face climate change and build a better world.”
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“The people of Texas should not have to pay these outrageous bills. Exorbitant costs should not be passed on to consumers who are not responsible for poor planning by state officials.”
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His honesty was like catching a glimpse of a rare animal in the wild. “Sink or swim[,] it’s your choice!” he wrote, without bothering to couch his words in euphemisms. Boyd added, “The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING!” For such an exhortation to come from the elected leader of a city—a man literally chosen by his people to ensure that local government works for them—was shocking.
Just as they pay their mayor, Colorado City’s residents also pay authorities to provide them with basic necessities like electricity and water. But apparently, Boyd thought an expectation of services was out of line. He conjectured, “If you don’t have electricity you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe.” Many Texans have tried to do just that, running their car engine in their garage to warm their homes. So far in Harris County, there have been at least 50 cases of carbon monoxide poisoning and several people have died.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Even before anyone imagined a world in lockdown, getting a job in conservation was next to impossible.
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Finance
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“This decisive defeat once again shows that no one—including Donald Trump—is above the law.”
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When Trump failed to separate himself from his businesses—and in fact used the presidency to increase his business earnings—he made it clear that his top priority was his personal profits.
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The strategy exploits a loophole that Congress unintentionally left open when it passed provisions related to grantor retained annuity trusts, or GRATs, in 1990. Use of these trusts already has cost the IRS—by one estimate—well over $100 billion in just the last two decades. A recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management reveals that the firm’s longtime CEO, Leon Black, relied on Epstein’s assistance to extract more than $500 million of tax savings from GRATs.
GRATs—which combine a trust and an annuity to generate supercharged tax benefits—are entirely legal. But they make no sense from a policy perspective, and they only work because Congress in 1990 enacted a valuation formula that defies economic reality. While GRATs aren’t responsible for Epstein’s predation, the appearance of GRATs in the most recent Epstein revelations is one more reminder that Congress and the Biden administration should scrap this tax shelter.
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We need Guaranteed Jobs. President Biden’s proposed Civilian Climate Corps is a positive step in this direction.
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If Haaland follows through on the actions the oil and gas industry and their allies in Congress are worried about, she will be the most effective Interior Secretary in recent memory.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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As the Cato Institute’s David J. Bier notes, “Biden has been in office for less than a month. Many people keep saying ‘give him time.’ But what’s concerning isn’t that Biden hasn’t ‘gotten around to immigration yet.’ It’s that he has, and is intentionally choosing to perpetuate one of the worst immigration regimes in American history.”
That’s true of both his early executive orders (yes, he cut off misappropriated funding for Donald Trump’s “border wall” boondoggle, but boondoggles being boondoggles, the wall wasn’t stopping anyone anyway) and the legislative proposal he unveiled on February 18 (he wants a “path to citizenship” and is asking for some visa caps to be raised, but not for immigration freedom).
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Sycophantic antics of Republican members who opposed Trump’s impeachment.
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“The world’s going to have to get vaccinated either way,” said Peter Maybarduk of Public Citizen. “The longer we delay, the more the pandemic is going to cost everyone.”
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One advocacy group urged Biden to instead “nominate someone who will put the public interest ahead of corporate interests.”
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Then came another reversal pressed by President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Democratic leaders told the House managers to huddle privately with Trump’s defense lawyers to strike a deal. They did. They would place a mere statement from Rep. Beutler into the trial record and call no witnesses. The Republicans couldn’t have been more delighted, knowing that the Democratic leadership wanted the trial over that day before Congress went on a week-long vacation.
Before the deal, Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) predicted on NPR that there would be a call for witnesses, requiring a deferral of the trial for two weeks. How mistaken he was about his Party’s defeatism and rejection of going forward with a full hand.
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Outspoken former American Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul was in hot water yesterday after internet sleuths found pictorial evidence contradicting his claims that he never met Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny.
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The importance of this is in direct proportion to the massive state attempts to block it.
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Ministerial resignations should be the least of the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic procurement corruption scandal. Ministers, MPs and their corrupt mates who benefited from these contracts should be in the dock and looking at lengthy periods of imprisonment. This blog was ahead of mainstream media in breaking details of some of these contracts which simply beggared belief, like the £250 million contract for PPE awarded to Ayanda Capital.
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At the beating heart of the Big Lie—the deranged fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen from its loser, Donald Trump—is the Republican belief that the votes of Black people shouldn’t count. In lawsuit after lawsuit after the election, Republicans asked the courts to throw away votes that had been cast in predominantly Black communities. In Michigan, they literally singled out Detroit and threatened to refuse to certify its votes. The GOP’s entire postelection strategy was to reinstitute race-based voter disenfranchisement all the way up to January 6, when 147 Republican lawmakers voted to straight-up overturn the results because Black people had overcome the white supremacy baked into the Electoral College.
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Position Available: Leader of national political party. National Chief Executive starting 2024. Listing Number: 1-30-1933
We are excited to announce a search for the position of Leader (Führer) of a major, national political party. The party, soon to be re-branded the Grosse Alte Partei (GAP), is seeking a man or woman of iron will to represent the interests of the national racial community, as well as fossil fuel companies, pharmaceutical giants, insurance companies, the financial services industry, and the gaming, hotel, tourist and leisure industries, especially golf. The new Party name is inspired by the achievements of the Dritte Reich from the early 1930s – when they made Germany great again — until the early ‘40s, when they may have lapsed into error.
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As retired Army Major Danny Sjursen recently pointed out, when it comes to foreign policy, President Joe Biden’s new cabinet and advisers are well stocked with retired generals, reconstituted neocons, unapologetic hawks, and similar war enthusiasts. Biden himself has taken to asking God to protect the troops whenever he makes a major speech. (How about protecting them by bringing them home from our pointless wars?)
“Defense” spending, as war spending is generally known in this country, remains at record levels at $740.5 billion for fiscal year 2021. Talk of a new cold war with Russia or China (or both) paradoxically warms Pentagon offices and corridors with yet more funds. The only visible dove of peace at Biden’s inaugural was the giant golden brooch worn by Lady Gaga.
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The Republican Party is shrinking. It’s lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight Presidential elections. Since Trump’s attempted coup, more Americans are abandoning it every day.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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A group of Russian lawmakers has prepared amendments to draft legislation that would make it a felony to insult World War II veterans. One of the authors of the proposed censorship clause is State Duma Deputy Speaker Irina Yarovaya, the same politician who spearheaded controversial “counter-terrorism” legislation in 2016 that broadly expanded police powers and data collection.
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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The flap centers around an investigative journalism piece titled “Apocalypse Cow: The Future of Life at Point Reyes National Park,” which ran in The Bohemian and the Pacific Sun, two local weekly newspapers that serve the counties surrounding Point Reyes National Seashore, and subsequently in Counterpunch. The article characterizes the Park Service analysis of environmental effects of cattle ranching on Point Reyes as “deeply flawed scientifically, culturally and ethically” and “politicized.” It’s a long and in-depth article, covering the politics of Point Reyes, and highlighting the ecologically harmful confinement of elk behind a massive fence on sometimes-waterless Tomales Point, the negative impact that cattle operations are having on climate change, commercial ranching’s destructive influence on rare and protected species of fish and wildlife, water contamination by livestock manure, and the contrast between coastal Miwok stewardship of Point Reyes’ native ecosystems and today’s destruction of those ecosystems at the hands of commercial ranching. Based on responses to the article, the locals seem to appreciate the insightful reporting.
The Park Service is doing its utmost to discredit the piece. On its webpage, “Frequently Asked Questions about the General Management Plan,” the Park Service has a section called “Corrections regarding misinformation published in the press.” The Park Service alleges errors; The Bohemian checked the verity of the article and stands behind it as factual reporting.
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The reason Alexey Navalny’s nationwide political movement has struggled to mobilize in Russia’s North Caucasus became immediately clear on February 19, when local campaign manager Ruslan Ablyakimov was jumped in a suburb outside Makhachkala, hours after “Team Navalny” announced that it will soon open an office in Dagestan. The attack was hardly surprising; Ablyakimov says he was being followed beforehand and anticipated something like this. In an interview with journalist Vladimir Sevrinovsky for Meduza, Ablyakimov explained the risks of political activism in the region, the goals of Navalny’s campaign office in Dagestan, and his own personal feelings about Navalny himself.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Having seen that appointed judges refuse to toe the party line at the federal level, the GOP has decided to employ partisan gerrymandering to change the way judges are elected at the state level.
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I was a civil rights lawyer in the 1960s. As I watched GOP senators shrug off a racist coup attempt, I thought: We’ve seen this before.
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The racism at the foundation of this country is no longer in dispute. And if the country is based on racist oppression, that attitude is going to characterize its institutions as well, not least of those institutions being colleges and universities. Higher education has traditionally been the privilege of the social and economic elite. It wasn’t simply that most people couldn’t afford to pay tuition. Most people couldn’t afford not to be actively earning money. Most people had to work.
The exception, of course, was hereditary aristocrats, the social and economic elite, nearly all of whom, if not actually all, were white. They had the time and money to go to college. So with a very few exceptions, they were the only people who did. Since they were the only people who got advanced degrees, they were the only people who got teaching positions at universities. The system of academic privilege perpetuated itself, generation after generation. Things changed somewhat after WWII, when the GI Bill made it possible for veterans of all social classes to go to college. Even then, though, few of those who benefitted from the GI Bill could afford to continue their education beyond the undergraduate level. So academic privilege continued to be reserved for whites, and primarily white men.
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Police in Krasnodar have opened a misdemeanor case against Alexey Navalny’s local campaign coordinator, charging Anastasia Panchenko with illegal “gay propaganda” for sharing two photos on Instagram showing same-sex couples kissing during protests on February 14. According to her lawyer, Mikhail Benyash, Panchenko faces a fine as high as 100,000 rubles ($1,340), if convicted. Officials say the images violate Russia’s ban on “promoting non-traditional sexual relations among minors” because Panchenko’s Instagram page is accessible to minors.
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The state of Minnesota returned 114 acres of land to the Lower Sioux tribe after the final vote of the Minnesota Historical Society completed the last step in a four-year process that capped off a long fight by the sovereign Dakota nation to recover official title to their original home.
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It’s not just a home surveillance system. It’s a surveillance system.
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“Dianna walked through the very worst of hell and came out with love… Her legacy is a witness to nonviolence and to love in the face of evil and to redemption. That’s her legacy, to teach us that that’s possible.”
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Global News, Justin Trudeau Speaks on Canadians Detained in China, Combating Online Hate
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We need strong public-media laws that prioritize a free press, civic-minded news production and the interests of the communities news outlets are supposed to serve.
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As with previous thugs of mercenary trade (the Dutch East India Company and its British equivalent come to mind), Facebook is keen to make the rules it likes, and ignore those of the commonweal. It is a plundering pioneer in the world of surveillance capitalism, which has led to what Shoshana Zuboff calls an “epistemic coup” with “unprecedented computational concentrations of knowledge and power” gathered by extracting data elitists. These elitists, in turn, trash such concepts as the rule of law and democracy in the name of profits.
As she explained in her keynote speech at last year’s EU Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Assessment panel, “These corporations are not publishers, they are not distributors, they are not merely adtech providers; they are indiscriminate, radically indifferent all-you-can-eat extractors of everything forever, all for the sake of prediction that become more lucrative as they approach certainty.”
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Monopolies
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Brands can take internal action to tackle grey-market goods in Asia, but they must have more appetite for change at a political level
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According to Wikipedia, Scott Forstall “involuntarily” resigned as senior vice president (SVP) of iOS software in the fall of 2012. Since then, he’s kept a very low profile. Based on his past responsibilities for iOS, Epic Games would very much like to ask him some questions.
[...]
In the same court filing, Apple admits that it had originally “indicated that it expected its counsel to represent Mr. Forstall at his deposition.” Apple says it’s OK with the deposition if it takes place before March 10, but doesn’t want Epic to “hold discovery open indefinitely while it seeks to locate, serve, and depose another witness.” The discovery cutoff date was last week.
If the parties can’t work it out until then, this issue may come up during tomorrow’s discovery hearing before Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson (who is not presiding over the actual case but effectively handling certain matters, particuarly discovery-related ones, for Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Judge Hixson has a strong antitrust background, which probably comes in handy with respect to Epic Games v. Apple.
March 10 is approaching fast, so the question is whether Epic can locate Mr. Forstall in time, and compel him to testify, ahead of that deadline given by Apple. Ultimately, it’s for the court–not Apple–to decide. The trial is still on track to go forward in May, and Epic appears convinced that the trial date wouldn’t be affected by this additional deposition.
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I asked the press office of the Oberlandesgericht München (Munich Higher Regional Court) yesterday whether Google’s appeal already had a case number and, maybe, a hearing date. They said an appeal had not been filed yet. But I’m sure that’s going to happen shortly. If Google’s PI appeal failed, it would theoretically still be possible for the full-blown main proceeding to have a different outcome, but it would be unlikely in this case, where the facts are pretty straightforward and the legal questions are crystal clear. However, in the main proceeding Google would be able to seek the equivalent of cert, while the regional appeals court is the final destination on the PI track.
I’m admittedly biased here because my own app development company is going to sue Google and maybe also Apple in Munich with direct references to certain holdings in NetDoktor v. Google (which I guarantee will not change a thing about how I view Apple’s and Google’s patent cases–in fact, I continue to keep my fingers crossed for Apple and Intel’s joint antitrust action against Softbank-owned Fortress Investment). Given my own interest in antitrust action over gatekeepers using the critical nature of public health as a pretext for treating web publishers (in the NetDoktor case) and app developers (both Google and Apple) unfairly, it’s all the more reassuring to see that totally impartial experts, too, heap praise on the NetDoktor PI decision:
Professors Justus Haucap (an economist the former chairman of Germany’s Monopoly Commission, which advises the federal government on antitrust matters) and Rupprecht Podzsun (a legal scholar who is by now the undisputed number one among German competition law professors with respect to technology markets) awarded five stars to the Munich decision in the latest edition of their competition law podcast.
Both professors teach at the University of Dusseldorf. I met Professor Podszun at his previous university (Bayreuth) in 2014. That day I also had the honor to speak at his then-university alongside Judge Dr. Klaus Grabinski of the Federal Court of Justice about certain patent litigation topics.
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Patents
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The chart also shows a trend toward ever more protracted litigation. A trend reversal is possible: maybe they’ll be able to settle sooner this time around, but I wouldn’t hold my breath, given that Ericsson is ever more dependent on patent licensing revenues and now more concerned than ever about competition from Samsung in its core business (mobile base stations).
Samsung’s approach to those disputes–including the one with Huawei a few years ago–is “tit for tat”: if you sue them somewhere over X patents, they’ll countersue (unless you have zero exposure for lack of products) over the same number in the same jurisdiction. Only against Apple, almost exactly ten years ago, Samsung was first to file infringement cases in some countries, responding to Apple’s initial action in the Northern District of California with a bunch of intercontinental standard-essential patent (SEP) assertions. And even then, there was nothing that Samsung wanted more than to be left alone and compete on the merits of their products–something that Ericsson failed to do in the handset market and is increasingly struggling with in the network infrastructure business.
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Software Patents
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On February 3, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $1,500 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claims 43, 47, 48, 51, 52, 55, 56, and 62 of U.S. Patent 8,200,203. The patent is owned by StratosAudio, an NPE. The ’203 generally relates to a system and method for a broadcast response generally employing RDS, DARC, or similar technology, including a method for responding to a broadcast comprising of extracting an event identifier from a broadcast signal; detecting a response by a user to the broadcast signal; polling a communications device to determine a user identifier; and communicating the event identifier and the user identifier when the user response is detected. It is currently being asserted against Volvo, Hyundai, Subaru, Volkswagen, and Mazda.
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Posted in Deception at 9:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Slavery is to the word “master” mostly disconnected; it might, however, be closely connected in the minds of racists or the agenda of highly racist corporations (profiting from racism) that look for ways to distract from their racism
As we've just noted, the word “abuse” seems to be the latest to lose its meaning. People who expose real abuse are being accused of “abuse” and last night Daniel Pocock published an article which explains that in relation to "main" and "master". We recently did a number of articles and videos about that, seeing that the Linux Foundation lends the trademark “Linux” to racist companies, ever so eager to mislead the public and rewrite their dark past/history.
“There I was thinking that we generally live in a society where older people could be “masters” to the young ones, where schools have “headmasters”, Web sites have “webmasters”, and one could enroll for a Masters Degree, even in Racial Studies.”I personally did not realise that the word “master” was so racially sensitive until corporations — or think tanks of large corporations — told me so (with corporate media as their outlet of choice). There I was thinking that we generally live in a society where older people could be “masters” to the young ones, where schools have “headmasters”, Web sites have “webmasters”, and one could enroll for a Masters Degree, even in Racial Studies.
We moreover have the word “master” everywhere in sound engineering, in cooking (e.g. master chef, which can be of any race, age, or gender), and there are metaphors that oughtn’t offend anyone, e.g. “mastermind” and many more examples here, assuming Wikipedia is sort of objective (which it is not). It has a whole article dedicated to the “master/slave” issue. It seems like more of a political article and it is heavily guarded.
Let’s examine the origin of the word “master”, as per British dictionaries. Oxford Dictionary gives about a dozen different meanings and Cambridge Dictionary has this very long entry, including:
…an original of something, such as a document, recording, or film, from which copies can be made
Nothing even remotely racial about this.
On the origin of the word we have this from an authoritative source or sources:
late Old English mægester “a man having control or authority over a place; a teacher or tutor of children,” from Latin magister (n.) “chief, head, director, teacher” (source of Old French maistre, French maître, Spanish and Italian maestro, Portuguese mestre, Dutch meester, German Meister), contrastive adjective (“he who is greater”) from magis (adv.) “more,” from PIE *mag-yos-, comparative of root *meg- “great.” The form was influenced in Middle English by Old French cognate maistre.
From late 12c. as “man eminently or perfectly skilled in something,” also “one who is chief teacher of another (in religion, philosophy, etc.), religious instructor, spiritual guide.” Sense of “master workman or craftsman, workman who is qualified to teach apprentices and carry on a trade on his own account” is from c. 1300. The meaning “one charged with the care, direction, oversight, and control of some office, business, etc.” is from mid-13c.; specifically as “official custodian of certain animals kept for sport” early 15c. (maister of þe herte houndes; the phrase master of the hounds is attested by 1708). As a title of the head or presiding officer of an institution, late 14c.; as “captain of a merchant vessel” early 14c.
In the broadest sense, “one who has power to control, use, or dispose (of something or some quality) at will,” from mid-14c. Also from mid-14c. as “one who employs another or others in his service” (in which sense the correlative word was servant, man, or apprentice); also “owner of a living creature” (a dog, a horse, also, in ancient contexts a slave); paired with slave in the legal language of the American colonies by 1705 in Virginia.
That last sentence, alluding to 5 centuries later, indicates that master (putting aside its Latin and French origins) in relation to slave was a very belated concept or context.
In a world where corporations increasingly imprison people (and prisons too have become private corporations) it’s likely we’ll need both terms, “master” and “slave”, at least in some contexts. Letting them be monopolised for reasons like sensitivities/sensibilities would lead to restriction on language and limitation on the expression of particular ideas, such as resistance to corporate takeover (sometimes in service of genocide). █
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software at 8:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: It is looking like the word “abuse” has been extended to basically mean all sorts of things including the act of actually exposing real abuse
FREE software requires free speech or begets free speech (vice versa, too). The relationship between those two things goes beyond the word “free”, which is often elucidated further just to clarify that “free software” isn’t “freeware” or “shareware”. It’s not about price but about freedom. “Think about free speech, not free beer…”
“In the Free software community, people who never coded and hardly contributed anything meaningful have spectacularly been promoted to (or parachuted into) the very top roles.”Last night Daniel Pocock published an article about the classification of words and occasional extension of words (to mean things they did not originally mean). He focused on the word “abuse”. Pocock, an Australian, is a natural English speaker, unlike the people who run the FSFE. He’s an Internet communications expert/specialist in the technical sense (things like WebRTC) and he is also a reasonably good speaker, who knows how to communicate difficult subjects and illuminate controversial issues, ethical dilemmas, conflict of interest and so on.
The way we see it, It’s Pocock having a skill or an edge in conveying important issues that makes him a scapegoat or a convenient target for corporate ‘cancel culture’. They’d rather have in charge people too weak to speak out against infiltration, bribes, misuse of funds, and even worse things. We covered this before. Incidentally, we recently became aware of a sort of silent ‘cancel culture’ happening inside the Free software community. Prominent members and longtime contributors to the movement are being targeted for literal deletion (e.g. from Wikipedia). Some people would rather reshape the history and the fabric of our community in a way more convenient to corporate power, leaving in powerful positions rather powerless individuals who allow corporations to fill the vacuum. See the OSI and Linux Foundation for instance. In the case of the EPO, people who barely understand patents (notably Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos) have somehow been shoehorned into the very top position of Europe’s largest patent office. In the Free software community, people who never coded and hardly contributed anything meaningful have spectacularly been promoted to (or parachuted into) the very top roles. It is a recipe for disaster. Except to those looking to undermine the mission statement. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: EPO staff and former staff (pensioners) aren’t happy and the it’s the responsibility of the Administrative Council to do something before it’s too late (the reputation of the Office is already severely harmed and it’s unable/unwilling to recruit suitable and qualified people, both as examiners and managers, respectively)
AS noted earlier this morning, the EPO‘s President António Campinos continues to resemble Benoît Battistelli, whose recruits and family members seem to be telling Campinos how to run the Office. The latest letters aside, I’ve decided to record my personal views and interpretation of the current situation. In a lot of ways, as is gradually becoming evident, Campinos quickly becomes an “empty suit” or a lame duck. He doesn’t have the charisma or the authority it takes to run the Office and we predict that the Administrative Council will seriously consider whether his time is running out. He has clearly failed to establish a meaningful social dialogue with his staff.
“It’s the responsibility of the Administrative Council to correct this.”These scenarios typically escalate in several stages. First, the Administrative Council needs to recognise that Compinos has indeed failed to secure peace at the Office. Workers were on strike a couple of months ago. Second, it needs to understand that this is the fault of Compinos and his cabal (mostly people not qualified for the job). Then, finally, steps need to be made to signal to him that his time is running out and his term becomes ‘probational’. Based on months-old reports, some prominent delegates in the Administrative Council are already asking some tough questions.
Will campinos be ousted by the Administrative Council before the end of his term? Will they terminate his contract prematurely (with compensation)? Will the Administrative Council finally recognise that a change of President alone is insufficient? A decade or so of nepotistic influx has harmed not only the credibility of the Office but the way it is (mal)functioning. It’s the responsibility of the Administrative Council to correct this. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The Campinos 5-year plan
Summary: The Central Staff Committee of the EPO highlights the grim situation or the deadlock reached after totally dysfunctional Office management somehow managed to kill off channels of communication, in effect going back to where things were back in 2018 under Battistelli
THE ‘Orange Man’ of EPOnia is no king and no champion of dialogue. More and more members of staff are aware of it. He was all along an overhyped dud or “fig leaf”.
“…Campinos has delivered nothing; nothing.”Now that there’s a real issue that needs to be tackled (in terms of diplomacy) Campinos is M.I.A. He seems to have lost his tongue. “Cancelled video conferences to be rescheduled,” says the Central Staff Committee, but according to the Chairman the EPO’s President António Campinos continues to just stonewall as if the EPO no longer listens to staff at all (prior to that it pretended to listen but would not adopt or implement any proposals). Mr. Benoît Campinos has delivered nothing; nothing. As we’ve just noted, he’s pushing proposals for the "one percent", so posturing is of no use anymore. Here’s the letter dated yesterday:
Reference: re21020cl-0.3.1/4.4
Date: 22.02.2021
European Patent Office | 80298 MUNICH | GERMANY
Mr António Campinos
President of the EPO
ISAR – R.1081
OPEN LETTER
Continuation of social dialogue?
Dear Mr President,
We take note of your letter dated 16 February 2021 informing the CSC about the developments in social dialogue with SUEPO and your decision to conduct all social dialogue with SUEPO “by written exchange only” instead of face-to-face meetings. We regret this decision.
In an intranet announcement you also announce that “face-to-face meetings on social dialogue issues will continue with Staff Representatives.”
We would like to refer back to our open letter of 12 February, in which we asked for the reasons for the cancellation of many videoconference meetings with the CSC and for the corresponding invitations to submit comments in writing only1. We also requested to re-schedule the cancelled meetings. These questions remain unanswered.
We look forward to a prompt reply.
Yours sincerely,
Alain Dumont
Chairman of the Central Staff Committee
____
1 See also our intranet announcement.
Lack of reply is the modus operandi of Battistelli. Too busy stacking up wine bottles in his rack.
“In a letter dated 16 February 2021,” the Central Staff Committee of the EPO says, “the President informed us about the developments in social dialogue with SUEPO and his decision to conduct all social dialogue with SUEPO “by written exchange only” instead of face-to-face meetings. We regret this decision.”
“Campinos is already a “lame duck” and he knows it.”He probably does too. There was nothing for him to gain/benefit from it. And it increasingly seems or feels like he’s not really in charge of the Office. What a total embarrassment.
“In an intranet announcement,” continues the Central Staff Committee, “the President also announced that “face-to-face meetings on social dialogue issues will continue with Staff Representatives.””
“In our open letter of 12 February,” it’s noted, “we asked for the reasons for the cancellation of many videoconference meetings with the CSC and for the corresponding invitations to submit comments in writing only. We also requested to re-schedule the cancelled meetings. These questions remain unanswered.”
There’s similar wording in the open letter to the President, in which they “ask for a prompt reply to these questions.”
Don’t expect any answers. Campinos is already a “lame duck” and he knows it. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Out of 2,237 EPO workers who expressed their position on the SAP, which in essence lowers their salary, only 31 expressed support for it (that’s 1.385%)
“Final results of the petition” regarding the SAP, say the staff representatives to the people whom they represent (EPO workers), show that 2191 workers are against the SAP, only 31 are in favour of the SAP, and 15 have chosen to abstain.
“The EPO Pensioners’ Association has also prepared a similar petition and more than 1000 of its members have signed it,” say the staff representatives. As a reminder, the EPO President António Campinos goes after pensioners (past workers), not just current workers. Some say this policy started with a controversial hiring in 2017 under Benoît Battistelli, the plunderer in chief.
“We strongly believe,” say the staff representatives, “that the combined effect of the two petitions and the December 2020 strike give a strong signal which cannot be ignored.”
“Some say this policy started with a controversial hiring in 2017 under Benoît Battistelli, the plunderer in chief.”“In this open letter,” they note, “we informed the Heads of Delegation of the Administrative Council of the results.”
Here is the full letter:
Reference: sc21023cl – 0.3.1/3.1/0.2.4
Date: 19.02.2021
To the Chairman and
The Heads of Delegation of the
Administrative Council of the European
Patent Organisation
OPEN LETTER
Staff Petition against the Implementation of the New Salary Adjustment Procedure
Dear Mr Chairman,
dear Heads of Delegation,
More than 2000 EPO employees have voted in favour of the attached petition against the implementation of the new Salary Adjustment Procedure (SAP). This is remarkable, especially in view of the circumstances under which it took place1.
The final results of the petition are as follows:
2191 against the SAP
31 in favour of the SAP
15 abstentions
In accordance with the terms of the petition the CSC is urging the Delegations in the Administrative Council:
• to postpone the application of the capping mechanisms of the new Salary Adjustment Procedure,
• to maintain in the meantime the Salary Adjustment Procedure without capping,
• to reopen the discussions with the Staff Representation with a view to finding a workable agreement on an amended new Salary Adjustment Procedure which respects the principles of parallelism with salary evolution of national civil servants and equality of purchasing power in all places of employment taking into account in a commensurate manner the long-term sustainability of the EPO.
1 E.g. teleworking associated with the pandemic, the refusal by the Office to let us inform all colleagues on an individual basis using their official email address
For your information the EPO Pensioners’ Association has also prepared a similar petition and more than 1000 of its members have signed it.
We strongly believe that the combined effect of the two petitions and the December 2020 strike give a strong signal which cannot be ignored.
Yours sincerely,
Alain Dumont
Chairman of the Central Staff Committee
Annex: Petition
The petition from the Central Staff Committee was circulated a long time ago and reposted here as HTML. It’s inevitable that some of its many recipients would want us to see it.
We can’t help wondering who voted in favour (or why). Roberta Romano-Götsch and the likes of her? █
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