06.17.21
Posted in News Roundup at 8:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
The RasPad 3 is a neat project that enables you to turn your Raspberry Pi 4 into a full tablet! In this video, I’ll unbox the RasPad 3 and I’ll also show you the entire assembly process. Be sure to check out my full review as well.
-
This week we’ve been learning Davinci Resolve and instrumenting our house with DHT11 sensors. We round up the goings on from the Ubuntu community and discuss our favourite picks from the wider tech news.
It’s Season 14 Episode 15 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
-
Confining the omnipotent root, Jails with ZFS and PF on DigitalOcean, NomadBSD 130R is out, KDE Plasma Wayland on FreeBSD, Firefox under FreeBSD with Privacy, Using NetBSD’s pkgsrc everywhere, and more.
-
Kernel Space
-
The io_uring subsystem, first introduced in 2019, has quickly become the leading way to perform high-bandwidth, asynchronous I/O. It has drawn the attention of many developers, including, more recently, those who are focused more on security than performance. Now some members of the security community are lamenting a perceived lack of thought about security support in io_uring, and are trying to remedy that shortcoming by adding audit and Linux security module support there. That process is proving difficult, and has raised the prospect of an unpleasant fallback solution.
The Linux audit mechanism allows the monitoring and logging of all significant activity on the system. If somebody wants to know, for example, who looked at a specific file, an audit-enabled system can provide answers. This capability is required to obtain any of a number of security certifications which, in turn, are crucial if one wants to deploy Linux in certain types of security-conscious settings. It is probably fair to say that a relatively small percentage of Linux systems have auditing turned on, but distributors, almost without exception, enable auditing in their kernels.
The audit mechanism relies, in turn, on a large array of hooks sprinkled throughout the kernel source. Whenever an event that may be of interest occurs, it is reported via the appropriate hook to the audit code. There, a set of rules loaded from user space controls which events are reported to user space.
When io_uring was being developed (which is still happening now, of course), the developers involved were deeply concerned about performance and functionality. Supporting security features like auditing was not at the top of their list, so they duly neglected to add the needed hooks — or to think about how auditing could be supported in a way consistent with the performance goals. Now that io_uring is showing up in more distributor kernels (and, in particular, the sorts of kernels where auditing is relatively likely to be enabled), security-oriented developers are starting to worry about it. Having io_uring serve as a way to circumvent the otherwise all-seeing audit eye does not seem like a good way to maintain those security certifications.
-
The realtime project has been the source of many of the innovations that have found their way into the core kernel in the last fifteen years or so. There is more to it than that, though; the wider realtime community is also doing interesting work in a number of areas that go beyond ensuring deterministic response. One example is Daniel Bristot de Oliveira’s runtime verification patch set, which can monitor the kernel to ensure that it is behaving the way one thinks it should.
Realtime development in the kernel community is a pragmatic effort to add determinism to a production system, but there is also an active academic community focused on realtime work. Academic developers often struggle to collaborate effectively with projects like the kernel, where concerns about performance, regressions, and maintainability have been the downfall of many a bright idea. As a result, there is a lot of good academic work that takes a long time to make it into a production system, if it ever does.
Imagine, for a moment, a project to create a realtime system that absolutely cannot be allowed to fail; examples might include a controller for a nuclear reactor, a jetliner’s flight-control system, or the image processor in a television set showing that important football game. In such a setting, it is nice to know that the system will always respond to events within the budgeted time. Simply observing that it seems to do so tends to be considered inadequate for these systems.
One way to get to a higher level of assurance is to create a formal model of the system, prove mathematically that the model produces the desired results, then run that model with every scenario that can be imagined. This approach can work, but it has its difficulties: ensuring that the model properly matches the real system is a challenge in its own right and, even if the model is perfect, it is almost certain to be far too slow for any sort of exhaustive testing. The complexity of real-world systems makes this approach impractical, at best.
-
The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with Fwupd has been serving on average around 40k~50k firmware updates per daay to Linux users relying on this cross-vendor, open-source firmware distribution service with FWUPD for applying firmware updates under Linux. But yesterday its usage just skyrocketed with more than 100,000 firmware updates in a single day… That’s great for adoption but the motivation for the mass firmware updates may be something rough on the horizon.
-
Intel’s Speed Select Technology introduced since Cascade Lake for providing more granular power/performance controls was done in the name of performance but it turns out an ISST Linux driver inefficiency could lead to a 10%+ performance hit for some HPC benchmarks.
Public details are scarce on this latest Intel Speed Select Technology Linux driver change but when making use of this ISST code on select systems and for unspecified HPC workloads it could lead to reported 10%+ performance penalties for some high performance computing benchmarks. The issue stems from the CPU to PCI device mapping carrying out a linear search of PCI devices on systems and in particular for massive servers this could prove to be very expensive.
-
Last week marked the end of feature work for the AMDGPU driver (and other DRM drivers) for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle. Sent out today though were the first set of AMDGPU fixes targeting Linux 5.14 that does include a recently talked about throttler status feature.
Prior feature pull requests to DRM-Next for the AMD Radeon kernel graphics driver for Linux 5.14 included the introduction of Beige Goby and Yellow Carp GPU support, HMM SVM, more Aldebaran accelerator work, PCI Express ASPM being enabled by default, GPU hot unplug support, AMD Smart Shift support for laptops, 16 bpc support, and various other changes. Linux 5.14 will be another exciting cycle for AMD Radeon open-source driver users particularly if running newer GPUs.
-
Applications
-
An HTML editor is computer software for creating web pages. As this type of editor helps to remove the frustration out of creating web pages, it represents an indispensable tool for graphic and web designers. Specialized HTML editors provide convenience and added functionality.
There are three main types of HTML editors. The most common type is the WYSIWYG HTML editor. Here the editor provides an editing interface which resembles how the page will be displayed in a web browser. This is achieved by embedding a layout engine. For example, in the case of BlueGriffon, the layout engine that is used is Gecko, which is also used in the Firefox web browser. The other types of editor are text source editors and object editors.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Are you excited about the latest Telegram Desktop features, but your Linux client is out of date? Do you need to know how to update Telegram to the latest and greatest on your Linux PC but can’t figure it out? We can help! Follow along as we go over how to update Telegram on Linux!
-
On Linux and other Unix-based operating systems, sudo is used to run a program with the privileges of another user, often root. When we need to modify a file which requires administrative privileges to be edited, if we launch our favorite text editor directly with sudo, it will run without the customization and settings we use when we invoke it normally, since the environment of the invoking user is not preserved. In this tutorial we will see how can we easily solve this problem and how we can modify system files securely by using sudoedit.
-
Plex is a streaming media server that lets you organize your video, music, and photo collections and stream your media to your computer, phone, tablet, or TV at any time and from anywhere. Plex media server can be installed on all major operating systems and devices.
This article explains how to install Plex Media Server on Ubuntu 20.04.
-
Boot disks (or bootable drives) are a vital tool for troubleshooting system issues on any operating system. They allow you to temporarily access the file system of a broken computer and fix the problem that caused the breakdown.
Moreover, bootable drives also serve as live USB drives and facilitate access to your system on any device, anywhere. To create a bootable drive, you need to flash an image file onto your removable device using an image flashing utility.
If you’re on Linux, you can use Etcher to create a bootable drive. Here’s a guide to help you through the process.
-
Today we are looking at how to install Sort The Court on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
-
System administrators, developers, and users need to work with text files, configuration files, and log files when working on Linux. Some of these files are large; some of them are small or medium. The data contained in these files frequently needs to be viewed, updated, or extracted. In this section, we will learn how to manage and manipulate text files on Linux.
-
When we execute any program, by default, its output or error is displayed on the screen. We can redirect the text output of a program to a file using the input/output redirection operator or to another program using pipes. For this, when any command is executed, there are three standard file streams (file descriptors) created and opened by the operating system. The streams are known as standard input (stdin), standard output (stdout), and standard error (stderr).
The first stream is associated with stdin (numbered as 0) used to read input from keyboard. The second file stream is associated to stdout (numbered as 1) used by program to print output on screen, and the last file stream is stderr (numbered as 2), used by our program to print errors onscreen.
-
Let’s step back and take a very basic look at DHCP. In fact, let’s look at the analogy of assigning an address to your house. Usually, this is done by the local 911 dispatch office, or some other central authority. They typically use either a survey map or a latitude, longitude pair to locate you, before they assign your house numbers from a pool of available addresses, compatible with other addresses in the area.
-
This is part of a series of posts on ideas for an ansible-like provisioning system, implemented in Transilience.
While experimenting with Transilience, I’ve been giving some thought about Ansible variables.
-
Generally, file sharing involves logging into a storage provider, manually locating the file, and uploading it via the graphical user interface of a web browser or application. While the time wasted during these intermediate steps may not seem like much, it keeps on adding up every time you wish to upload or share a file.
But sharing files doesn’t have to be tedious anymore. With the Linux terminal, you can do this in a jiffy. Thanks to tools like transfer.sh, all it takes is a simple command on your terminal to upload a file.
-
Welcome to Arcane Weekly. Today, I want to talk to you about a problem you’re not likely to encounter, but if you do, then you’d want a quick and handy solution. Tools at hand: LXD containers, Docker. Mission at hand: You want to run the two at the same time. More specifically, you want to spawn a LXD container, and then inside it, start a Docker container. Why? Why not.
Then, the problem you have is as follows. The Docker execution fails with the following error: docker: Error response from daemon: OCI runtime create failed: container_linux.go:367: starting container process caused: process_linux.go:495: container init caused: rootfs_linux.go:60: mounting “proc” to rootfs at “/proc” caused: permission denied: unknown. Lots of text there. Let’s debug this, shall we?
-
Log files are simply plain text files that contain the set of records, events, or messages about the server, applications, and services running on your Linux operating system. They are used by system administrators for troubleshooting purposes whenever an issue arises.
-
There are several reasons why your business might want to start employing a static website generator. One reason is because you need to be able to quickly roll out websites without having to bother coding them. Or, you might want to eventually get to the point of automating this process for regular static site deployment.
With tools like Hugo (which has been around for nearly 10 years), you can use pre-defined templates to generate a full static website. The pages are served very fast, so if speed is what you’re looking for, this might be the tool you need. One thing you must know about Hugo-built sites is that there’s no database backend or plugins to expand the feature set. These are static sites at their heart.
However, with the right developer magic, you can use these types of sites to bolster your companies online presence, using them in kiosks, embedded systems or just about any use-case that could benefit from lightning-fast static sites.
If this sounds like something you might want to try, you’re in luck, because I’m going to walk you through the steps of deploying your first site with Hugo.
-
Opensearch is a fork of the Elastic stack code base, made right before the license change. The first release candidate (RC1) has been released recently. Next to plain text files, Elasticsearch is one of the most popular destinations in syslog-ng, but after the license change people started to look for alternatives. I did some quick tests and using the elasticsearch-http() destination, syslog-ng seems to work fine with Opensearch as well.
Opensearch is not yet production ready. It is still in testing phase. However, if the licensing changes of Elastic makes you search for alternatives, switching to Opensearch might be the easiest. RC1 is already in a good enough shape to start testing it, so you can switch easier once it is ready for production.
You can learn from this blog how to get started with Opensearch, dashboards and syslog-ng. Another alternative that syslog-ng users explored is Grafana Loki.
Disclaimer: covering a given technology or brand on the syslog-ng blog is not an endorsement. The syslog-ng blog covers new syslog-ng features, new trends in log management or questions, problems coming up in the syslog-ng community.
[...]
From this blog, you could learn how to quickly set up a set environment for Opensearch and syslog-ng. Now comes the hard part: reading the documentation, learning how to configure individual components, rolling out your own PKI, and more. Those topics are well beyond the scope of a syslog-ng blog.
-
Application modernization developers must be able to understand database operations and transaction processes inside applications precisely. Tackle-DiVA (Data-intensive Validity Analyzer) is an open source data-centric Java application analysis tool in the Konveyor Tackle project that aims at refactoring applications to Kubernetes.
This article gives an overview of Tackle-DiVA and presents example instructions and analysis results.
-
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Microsoft SQL Server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, MS SQL is a relational database system by Microsoft that was open-sourced in 2016. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications which may run either on the same computer or on another computer across a network (including the Internet).
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 the step-by-step installation of the Microsoft SQL Server 2019 on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
-
Ubuntu lists all the available user accounts in the GDM login screen. You can however remove them to protect your privacy.
Gnome, the default desktop environment, has a hidden option to force users to type the username and then password to login. If you’re working on public places, it will be good to enable this option for privacy concern.
-
I have lost count of the number of times I have had to send a large file to someone at work, usually in a hurry. I’ve used Dropbox, ownCloud, Firefox Send (no longer available) etc. Transferring large files became a bit easier when e-mail service providers increased the size limit for attachments, but that is still not a solution for very large files. The xkcd cartoon FILE TRANSFER sums up the situation nicely.
I recently discovered the command line utility croc, which the author claims is a way to ‘easily and securely transfer stuff from one computer to another.’ I thought I’d give it a try, if only to have another tool to fall back on in an emergency. It does rely on both ends having croc installed, but hopefully that should not be a show-stopper as croc is available for Linux, Windows, macOS and BSD.
-
Sar is a system utility that gives us many ways to examine performance on a Linux system. It provides details on all aspects of system performance including system load, CPU usage, memory use, paging, swapping, disk usage, device load, network activity, etc.
The name “sar” stands for “system activity report,” and it can display current performance, provide reports that are based on log files stored in your system’s /var/log/sa (or /var/log/sysstat) folder, or be set up to automatically produce daily reports. It’s part of sysstat – a collection of system performance monitoring tools.
-
The gdu tool is created for SSD drives where parallel processing can be utilized. This tool can also work with HDD with less performance compared to SSD drives. You can also check benchmark results. There are many other similar tools and you have to play with gdu first to see if satisfy your needs.
-
The most common SELinux policy store names are strict, targeted, mcs, and mls. None of the names assigned to policy stores are fixed though, so it is a matter of convention. Hence, we recommend consulting the distribution documentation to verify what the proper name of the policy should be. Still, the name often provides some information about the SELinux options enabled through the policy.
-
Safety-critical industries can be flippantly defined as those where a software failure could kill you. Think automotive, aviation, or medical devices as examples. Safety-critical industries use heavy processes to ensure that (especially but not exclusively) software is developed in a safe manner. Heavy processes often need heavy tools. In terms of requirements management, those heavy requirements management tools (RMT*) include DOORS, DOORS Next Generation, Polarion, Jama, just to name drop a few. These heavy RMTs require a substantial investment of time and money to use properly.
I’ve been a requirements engineer for many years and I’ve done time at avionics and automotive suppliers who had the resources to deploy those heavy RMTs. I’m used to having their advanced features at my fingertips. Now I’m the requirements engineer for the Automotive Linux Team here at SUSE and it’s my job to use the resources available to me to successfully manage requirements for our automotive projects. We took a long hard look at investing resources into a heavy RMT. But we already had Jira in place, so we took up the challenge to see if it could serve as our RMT.
-
Games
-
WorldBox gives you a pixel-art god game all about doing whatever they hell you want. It’s actually fantastic and a new release is out now. They only recently started supporting Linux with it (back in April), and now we’re seeing all updates across all platforms at the same time which is great.
I wasn’t actually aware of just how popular it was until recently. The developer announced even just on their Discord, they’ve hit 200,000 people – so that gives you an idea of just how big it is. It’s available for mobile too like Android, where there it’s seen over 388,000 ratings so it’s fantastic to have it on Linux too now. Not seen it?
-
Back in March NVIDIA announced they would be supporting the GeForce RTX 30 series with Resizable BAR support via a video BIOS update for supported systems. Recently I’ve been looking at the performance of a GeForce RTX 3080 once flashing the graphics card under Linux with Resizable BAR support and the performance is quite compelling for Vulkan-based games where this functionality is working.
Like with the AMD Smart Access Memory / Resizable BAR support, it requires a compatible CPU and motherboard and having the support enabled within the system BIOS. There is also graphics driver support required for Resizable BAR. NVIDIA hasn’t talked much about the Linux driver for Resizable BAR but in fact the support is there with the latest stable driver series, assuming your video BIOS has the support available. It is important to note though the Resizable BAR support is implemented just for their Vulkan driver and not for OpenGL.
-
Loop Hero, the big hit from Four Quarters and Devolver Digital that released back in March has a major 1.1 update out now with some really wonderful additions.
Making an already great game that little bit better, you can now actually save and quit to come back during a run through the expeditions. So you no longer have to run back to camp and lose a bunch of resources just because you have to leave. That alone will make me put a lot more time into it. You can also speed the game up an additional two times, card deck switching is in, new titles and enemies and more.
-
Yet another chance to bag yourself a free game. During the GOG Summer Sale, Absolute Drift from the art of rally developer has been released on GOG and free for 48 hours.
“This is a driving experience like no other. Journey from apprentice to master drifter as you hone your skill in a gorgeous minimalist world. Push yourself to the limit on drifting tracks and wild mountain roads while you work to unlock trophies and elite events. Compete against ghosts of the top players in the world, or refine your skills by out-scoring your own ghost. Chill out to over 3 hours of original electronic music by C41 and NYTE as you challenge your driving skills at every turn until you finally master the art of drifting.”
-
This is the part 4 of the progress reports about the TileMap and TileSet editors rework. You can find the previous report here.
We are close to the end of this huge work. Hopefully in the coming few weeks, the Tiles editors should be ready to be included in the first 4.0 alpha. Some improvements still have to be done, but we are getting close to feature completeness. Until then, here is the summary of the work done during the last two months.
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
The KDE Plasma desktop development has kicked into high gear and the latest release reflects newfound popularity and drive behind the open-source environment.
The KDE Plasma developers have been incredibly busy this cycle, refactoring code, fixing bugs, and adding new features, all of which come together to bring even more performance to the desktop environment. The developers are so proud of this release (and the work they’ve achieved) that they created a showcase site to highlight everything found in KDE Plasma 5.22.
The latest release is all about general eye candy and usability. And it shows.
One of the most exciting new features to be found in KDE Plasma is called Adaptive Transparency, which will transition between translucent to opaque, depending on if there are any maximized windows. So when an app window is maximized, the panel will be opaque. If there are no maximized windows, the panel will be translucent. Of course, users can opt-out of this feature and make the panel always translucent or always opaque.
-
GitHub Notification Actions [Ed: KDE projects that outsource to Microsoft proprietary software and help a malicious monopoly]
Calamares, a Linux system installer used by a few dozen different distro’s, is hosted on GitHub. The source code and issues live there, and the website is run from GitHub pages. This post meanders around GitHub actions – things that happen in response to changes in a project – and how I built a Matrix-notification-thing for Calamares.
-
-
SUSE/OpenSUSE
-
Time flies and another two weeks of YaST development have passed. As in the previous report, we have to mention we invested quite some time learning and experimenting with technologies that will shape the role of YaST in particular and Linux installers in general in the future.
-
IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
-
As the world digitizes and software is eating the world, there is a growing expectation to have on-demand and customizable services for both enterprise and end users. As an end user, we expect sub-millisecond latency and jitter when playing online. We want to hear the goal at the same time as our neighbor when watching a game; and above everything, we want the video and audio to be stable when doing a video call.
All these things, and many more, require a lot of automation and orchestration. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a piece to the puzzle. In this first post, we’ll provide an overview of the role it plays and how it has transformed the way communication service providers operate their network.
-
At VivaTech today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) CEO Arvind Krishna announced a new collaboration with 30 global organizations including governments, community colleges, non-profits, and employment agencies, focused on helping underserved populations improve their skills and employability.
-
Remember when people used cloud computing because it was cheaper? It (often) still is—but what began as a way to cut costs has led to a sea change in IT. Similarly, containerization, which started as an incremental shift in how code is packaged and deployed, has fundamentally altered how code is written, as well as the architecture of the services it supports. For example, most large software companies used to release new code once a month at most. Now, the most successful teams release code to production at least once a day, an acceleration made possible by containerization.
A container, in simple terms, is a bundle of everything an application needs in order to run, including libraries and dependencies. Unlike a virtual machine (VM), a container doesn’t include a full operating system kernel, relying instead on containerization platforms such as Docker, LXC, or rkt to get what it needs from the operating system layer. Containers can offer a range of benefits over VMs. For one, they generally use less memory and storage space when running applications. More broadly, they enable architecture that’s flexible and resilient, in which software runs consistently and scales smoothly.
As with most tools, however, containers aren’t a universal solution. They work best when used to fulfill specific engineering needs—something to keep in mind as we explore their advantages and disadvantages. Let’s dive in, shall we?
-
Alibaba Cloud is an important partner for Red Hat and the choice of public cloud for many of our customers in the Asia Pacific region. For those customers looking to modernize and migrate SAP workloads to SAP S/4HANA we can offer several reasons to consider RHEL for SAP Solutions in the Alibaba cloud.
Moving to SAP S/4HANA by 2027
The year 2027 is an important one – modernizing legacy SAP ERP solutions to S/4HANA means that organizations must standardize their underlying SAP databases to use SAP HANA running on Linux.
This critical migration event presents an excellent opportunity for organizations to modernize their IT infrastructure, compelling them to not only decide on which operating system to pick, but also whether or not they should move to the cloud to further streamline costs and improve business agility.
With Alibaba Cloud leading the pack among the cloud service providers in the Asia Pacific region and building on the successful availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 on the Alibaba cloud, Red Hat, SAP, and Alibaba Cloud have been working closely to bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for SAP solutions with High Availability and Update Services to the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace with on-demand pricing options for RHEL 7 and RHEL 8.
-
Back in a distant time — longer ago than he cares to admit — your editor managed a system-administration group. At that time, most of the day-to-day pain reliably came from two types of devices: modems and printers. Modems are more plentiful than ever now, but they have disappeared into interface controllers and (usually) manage to behave themselves. Printers, instead, are still entirely capable of creating problems and forcing a reconsideration of one’s life choices. Behind the scenes, though, the situation has been getting better but, as a recent conversation within the Fedora project made clear, taking advantage of those improvements will require some changes and a bit of a leap of faith.
Traditionally, getting a printer working on Linux has involved, among other things, locating and installing the appropriate printer drivers and PostScript printer definition (PPD) files to allow the system to communicate with the printer using whatever special dialect it favors. Often that involves installing a separate package like hplip, often supplied by the printer vendor. Some vendors have traditionally supported Linux better than others, but none of their products seem to work as smoothly as one would like. While printer setup on Linux has definitely improved over the years, it still easy to dread having to make a new printer work.
-
To explain why text only comes in sixteen colors, let me tell you a story about the first IBM Personal Computer. Parts of this story may be somewhat apocryphal, but the basics are close enough.
IBM released the Personal Computer 5150 (the “IBM PC”) in 1981. The PC used a simple monitor screen that displayed text in green. Because this display only worked with one color, it was dubbed monochrome (the “IBM 5151 monochrome display,” with the IBM Monochrome Display Adapter card, or “MDA”).
That same year, IBM released an updated version of the PC that sported an amazing technical achievement—color! The new IBM 5153 color display relied on a new IBM Color Graphics Adapter, or “CGA.” And it is because of this original CGA that all DOS text inherited their colors.
But before we go there, we first need to understand something about color. When we talk about colors on a computer screen, we’re talking about mixing different values of the three primary light colors—red, green, and blue. You can mix together different levels (or “brightnesses”) of red, green, and blue light to create almost any color. Mix just red and blue light, and you get magenta. Mix blue and green, and you get cyan or aqua. Mix all colors equally, and you get white. Without any light colors, you see black (an absence of color).
-
A more sustainable future should be a more open future [Ed: "Sustainable" is a pretty meaningless buzzword and no wonder IBM Red Hat embraces that for marketing and openwashing purposes]
In the first part of this extended review of The Age of Sustainable Development” by Jeffrey Sachs, I outlined the author’s argument about the environmental impacts of economic development. In the second article, I discussed the author’s argument about impacts on humans. In this final piece, I will discuss how to address those impacts. I’ll outline Sachs’ suggestions but will also further explain how taking an open organizational approach to the issues will be critical to addressing them.
-
Debian Family
-
The Debian 11 is the venerable Debian Project’s first new release in more than two years, nicknamed “Bullseye” after the Toy Story character and supplanting Debian 10 “Buster” (all Debian releases bear names from the kids’ film).
Since Debian is the source from which dozens of other distros draw, notably Ubuntu, its major updates are well worth paying attention to, even if you aren’t a Debian user. If you are a Debian user and you’ve been patiently waiting for an updated kernel to work with all the latest hardware, I have good news, the 5.10 LTS Linux kernel is here. More on that in a minute.
First, for the Linux newcomers, it might help to understand why Debian only releases new versions every couple of years when most popular distros crank out several new versions each year.
-
The start date of Debian GNU / Linux 11 in the “Full Freeze” phase has been fixed since last weekend: From July 17, 2021, packages that now want to be included in the upcoming version of the Linux distribution require explicit approval (“manual unblock”) by the Debian release team. The full freeze is followed by the publication – and there is now a date for which the developers are aiming for July 31, 2021 as well.
The Debian developers have July 17th rolled into one Post on the announcement mailing list debian-devel-announce announced. The appointment was also included in the Bullseye Freeze Timeline and Policy recorded, which depicts the total of four freeze phases. Last week, the team agreed on July 31, the cautiously targeted release date: A Mailing list post by developer Paul Gevers describes the date as a tentative release date, after possible dates in August had also been discussed.
-
A while ago, I got a request from Kentaro Hayashi on the project I use to manage funding requests addressed to Freexian. He was keen to see some improvements on the way reimbursement requests are handled in Debian. In my opinion, the idea is certainly good but he’s not part of the treasurer team and was not willing to implement the project either, so it was not really ready to be submitted to us.
To be able to fund a useful project, we need either someone that is willing to do the work and try to push it further in Debian, or we need a Debian team interested in the result of the project (and in that case, we can try to find someone willing to implement the project). In this case, it’s a bit sad that the treasurer team didn’t comment at all… but in general, what should we do with those suggestions ?
-
Canonical/Ubuntu Family
-
Two factor authentication (2FA) increases your account security further than just using a username and password. In addition to a password (the first factor), you need another factor to access your account. A great example to demonstrate this is when you withdraw money from an ATM. To access your bank account you need both your physical bank card and to know your PIN number. These are the two factors you need to withdraw money = 2 factor authentication!
Common ways to provide this extra level of security are a specific application on your phone or computer, a physical security key/USB (Yubikey, for example), or a smart card. By using more than one of these factors, you can greatly increase the security of your account or system.
[...]
After many years in beta, we have created a comprehensive code recovery experience. Following this, we are happy to announce that we will be implementing 2FA for all Ubuntu One accounts. This change is coming in the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled for instructions on how to enable 2FA for your account. With a reliable backup mode of authentication, lockouts should be a thing of the past.
-
Some weeks ago I wrote about backing up your important files on Ubuntu to Google Drive. It’s a trivial process that will save your hide on the day disaster strikes. You lose your laptop unexpectedly for example or you fall prey to a ransomware gang as has become trendy these days. But what if for some reason you cannot use Google Drive? What should you do?
I found myself in such a situation recently. While in the process of trying to add a new tool to my webhost, I later discovered the tool was not meant for sites in Zimbabwe and wanted it removed from my hosting platform. I wrote an email to the web hosts support with this request and the person who answered the ticket was a French guy. English is not his first language and he thought I wanted out of their service. He wanted to delete everything. I mean everything including the backups they had of my sites.
-
The web team at Canonical run two-week iterations building and maintaining all of Canonical websites and product web interfaces. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.
Meet the team
My name is Beth Collins and I’m a Web Engineer in the Web squad. We work on maintaining Canonical’s sites and also some web based projects. I started at Canonical in September 2020, since then it’s been a steep learning curve (in a good way) – with some exciting projects to get my teeth stuck into.
I actually studied dentistry at university, and worked in the field for a couple of years before I realised it wasn’t for me (not your usual career change – I know). But it’s surprising how many similarities there are, problem solving is problem solving whether it’s teeth or code!
When I’m not working I love running, dancing to old school disco music, going to festivals, going climbing and the occasional cold water wild swim (dip). In the past 5 years I’ve travelled and lived in many places all over the world, including Melbourne, Hanoi, India, Barcelona, but have settled and now live in a small town on the border of Wales called Oswestry.
-
-
Open Hardware/Modding
-
Last year, I wrote about Picovoice support for Raspberry Pi enabling custom wake-word and offline voice recognition to control the board with voice commands without relying on the cloud.
They used ReSpeaker 4-mic array HAT to add four “ears” to the Raspberry Pi SBC. I also tried to generate a custom wake-word using the “Picovoice Console” web interface, and I was able to use “Dear Master” within a few minutes on my computer. No need to provide thousands of samples, or wait weeks before getting a custom wake-word. It’s free for personal projects.
-
Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
-
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
Real talk: this web stuff can get confusing. And it’s really important that we all understand how it works, so we can be as informed and empowered as possible. Let’s start by breaking down the differences between the internet, browsers, search engines and websites. Lots of us get these four things confused with each other and use them interchangeably, though they are different. In this case, the old “information superhighway” analogy comes in handy.
[...]
The internet is the superhighway’s system of roads, bridges and tunnels. It is the technical network and infrastructure that connect all the computers and devices that are online together across the world. Being connected to the internet means devices, and whoever is using them, can communicate with each other and share information.
-
Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
-
CMS
-
Welcome back to WordPress 101 series. In this series, we’re learning the basics of WordPress. WordPress is used to create all types of websites such as eCommerce, Forums, Social networking sites, etc.
But majorly WordPress is known for blogging. The majority of blogs on the Internet are hosted by WordPress.
-
FSF
-
-
GNU Projects
-
As movement toward memory-safe languages, and Rust in particular, continues to grow, it is worth looking at one of the larger scale efforts to port C code that has existed for decades to Rust. The uutils project aims to rewrite all of the individual utilities included in the GNU Coreutils project in Rust. Originally created by Jordi Boggiano in 2013, the project aims to provide drop-in replacements for the Coreutils programs, adding the data-race protection and memory safety that Rust provides.
Many readers will be familiar with the Coreutils project. It includes the basic file, process, and text manipulation programs that are expected to exist on every GNU-based operating system. The Coreutils project was created to consolidate three sets of tools that were previously offered separately, Fileutils, Textutils, and Shellutils, along with some other miscellaneous utilities. Many of the programs that are included in the project, such as rm, du, ls, and cat, have been around for multiple decades and, though other implementations exist, these utilities are not available for platforms like Windows in their original form.
Collectively, the Coreutils programs are seen as low-hanging fruit where a working Rust-based version can be produced in a reasonable amount of time. The requirements for each utility are clear and many of the them are conceptually straightforward, although that’s not to suggest that the work is easy. While a lot of progress has been made to get uutils into a usable state, it will take some time for it to reach the stability and maturity of Coreutils.
The use of Rust for this project will help to speed this process along since a huge swathe of possible memory errors and other undefined behavior is eliminated entirely. It also opens the door to the use of efficient, race-free multithreading which has the potential to speed up some of the programs under certain conditions. The uutils rewrite also provides an opportunity to not just reimplement Coreutils but to also enhance the functionality of some of the utilities to yield a better user experience, while maintaining compatibility with the GNU versions. For example, feature requests that have long been rejected in the Coreutils project, like adding a progress bar option for utilities like mv and cp, are currently being entertained in this Rust rewrite.
-
We are happy to announce the publication of our policy brief on “How to issue a privacy-preserving central bank digital currency” by The European Money and Finance Forum.
Many central banks are currently investigating Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and possible designs. A recent survey conducted by the European Central Bank has found that both citizens and professionals consider privacy the most important feature of a CBDC. We show how a central bank could issue a CBDC that would be easily scalable and allow the preservation of a key feature of physical cash: transaction privacy. At the same time the proposed design would meet regulatory requirements and thus offer an appropriate balance between privacy and legal compliance.
-
Version 1.20 is available for download.
-
Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
-
The Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology (MESCYT) held the XVI International Congress of Scientific Research on “Free Software and Open Science”, an annual symposium to which this year national and international experts with vast experience were invited in the publication and dissemination of both topics.
These are conceptually articulated in the open knowledge (open knowledge).
The event was held on June 9, 10 and 11 under the direction of Dr. Manuel Madé, researcher professor and coordinator of management and scientific dissemination of the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo (INTEC).
-
Programming/Development
-
OpenCV open-source computer vision library is used in a wide variety of projects and products, and last year, the community also launched the OpenCV AI Kit (OAK) Myriad X-based hardware solution for computer vision.
However there’s a learning curve to use the library, especially in combination with artificial intelligence models, and it can be challenging and time-consuming to newcomers. So in order to broaden the reach of the solution, OpenCV has now introduced Modelplace.AI, an app store/marketplace for AI models working with the OpenCV library.
-
Perl/Raku
-
A while ago I promised a couple of people an article about Raku roles. To be frank, it was a long time ago. The plan was to cover a number of other subjects needed to better understand a few concepts behind the role model implementation in Rakudo.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be one of those perfect examples of the principle: “wanna make the God laugh? tell him your plans!” But promise is promise and a few days ago the WTF mood took me over, all actual tasks were pushed back, and my note-taking app was ready for a new draft.
-
Python
-
Annotations in Python came late to the party; they were introduced in Python 3 as a way to attach information to functions describing their arguments and return values. While that mechanism had obvious applications for adding type information to Python functions, standardized interpretations for the annotations came later with type hints. But evaluating the annotations at function-definition time caused some difficulties, especially with respect to forward references to type names, so a Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) was created to postpone their evaluation until they were needed. The PEP-described behavior was set to become the default in the upcoming Python 3.10 release, but that is not to be; the postponement of evaluation by default has itself been postponed in the hopes of unwinding things.
-
Rust
-
ISRG’s Prossimo project for memory safety aims to coordinate efforts to move the Internet’s critical software infrastructure to memory safe code. When we think about what code is most critical for today’s Internet, the Linux kernel is at the top of the list. Bringing memory safety to the Linux kernel is a big job, but the Rust for Linux project is making great progress. We’re pleased to announce that we started formally supporting this work in April 2021 by providing Miguel Ojeda with a contract to work on Rust for Linux and other security efforts full time for one year. This was made possible through financial support from Google. Prior to working with ISRG, Miguel was undertaking this work as a side-project. We are happy to do our part in supporting digital infrastructure by enabling him to work full-time on it.
We’ve worked closely with Dan Lorenc, Software Engineer at Google to make this collaboration possible. “Google has found time after time that large efforts to eliminate entire classes of security issues are the best investments at scale. We understand work in something as widely used and critical as the Linux kernel takes time, but we’re thrilled to be able to help the ISRG support Miguel Ojeda’s work dedicated to improving the memory safety of the kernel for everyone,” Dan said.
-
The Prossimo project has announced that it has contracted with Miguel Ojeda to work on Rust in the Linux kernel for the next year. Prossimo is a new name for the memory-safety projects being run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), which is the organization behind the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority (CA) project. Google provided the funds to enable Ojeda to work full-time on the project starting back in April.
-
Google said Thursday it’s funding a project to increase Linux security by writing parts of the operating system’s core in the Rust programming language, a modernization effort that could bolster the security of the internet and smartphones.
If the project succeeds, it’ll be possible to add new elements written in Rust into the heart of Linux, called the kernel. Such a change would mark a major technological and cultural shift for an open-source software project that’s become foundational to Google’s Android and Chrome operating systems as well as vast swaths of the internet.
-
-
Google wants to see Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel so much so that they have contracted the lead developer working on “Rust for Linux” as the work aims to get mainlined.
Google is going public today with their formal support for Rust in the Linux kernel to enhance memory safety and that they have contracted developer Miguel Ojeda to further his work on Rust for the Linux kernel and related security efforts. This contract is going through at least the next year.
-
Standards/Consortia
-
OpenZFS founding developer Matthew Ahrens opened a PR for one of the most sought-after features in ZFS history—RAIDz expansion—last week. The new feature allows a ZFS user to expand the size of a single RAIDz vdev. For example, you can use the new feature to turn a three-disk RAIDz1 into a four, five, or six RAIDz1.
FURTHER READING
ZFS 101—Understanding ZFS storage and performance
OpenZFS is a complex filesystem, and things are necessarily going to get a bit chewy explaining how the feature works. So if you’re a ZFS newbie, you may want to refer back to our comprehensive ZFS 101 introduction.
-
Direct3D. OpenAL. Winsock. You’ve probably heard of these, you might have even used them before, but one thing is certain: everyone who’s ever used a computer will have run a piece of software that’s made good use of them.
We’re talking about APIs — the golden fleece to programmers around the world. Join us as we explain just what an API is, and take a quick look at where and how they get used.
-
The W3C has promoted the Web Audio API to now being an official standard as a JavaScript API for creating and manipulating audio content directly within web browsers.
The W3C sums up the Web Audio API as “a JavaScript API for creating, shaping, and manipulating sounds directly in a Web browser. It is already widely deployed for the creation of music and sound effects on Web pages, for the creation of online musical instruments, for Web games, and for collaborative artworks such as sound installations.”
The Web Audio API is focused on creation and manipulation of audio rather than just audio playback. The Web Audio API was also engineered to support collaborative, multi-user environments.
-
-
Tomorrow will be the release of Pepper&Carrot episode 35! 🥳 I’m currently working on the final details of this big episode. Here is a sneak peek into page 1.
-
Science
-
There are two things a spacewalker doesn’t want to hear: “Can you turn it off and turn it on again?” and “What’s that hissing sound?”
The IT solution of the ancients reached orbit yesterday as one of a pair of astronauts tasked with fitting a new solar array to the International Space Station (ISS) had to make his way back to the airlock in order to restart his spacesuit.
NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough was not in any great danger during what the US space agency delicately called an “issue” with his spacesuit’s display and control module (designed to provide a spacewalker with information on the status of the suit). Controllers also noted a spike in the pressure reading for his sublimator (used to keep things cool) and so sent the astronaut back to the airlock to perform a restart.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
Integrity/Availability
-
A wide range of internet-connected services in Australia, including banking systems, are experiencing an outage – and it looks like a hiccup at Akamai was at the heart of the problem.
Reports of issues with news sites, gaming services, and – more critically – banking systems began to spread on Australian social media early Thursday afternoon local time. Uptime-tracking service Downdetector concurred, showing a massive spike in issues at Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, Bankwest, St.George Bank, Bank Australia, Bank of Melbourne, and others.
-
Proprietary
-
Microsoft demonstrated its deep and meaningful affection for all things penguin overnight by borking packages.microsoft.com and leaving some Linux fans bereft of the company’s wares.
For some of the hardcore, an absence of Microsoft software on their fiercely open-source setups might not be such a bad thing. For others, however, getting a 404 from an apt-get is a major workflow blocker.
The issue looks, at first glance, to be related to the Ubuntu paths as users struggled with the likes of Microsoft’s OpenJDK and its flagship .NET platform.
ODBC packages were also borked, as well as the package link for Visual Studio Code and even poor old Microsoft Edge.
Microsoft has yet to respond to our request for more information, although a software engineer at the Windows behemoth, Rahul Bhandari, posted on GitHub: “Our infra team is still working to resolve this issue. They ran into some space issues but this issue should be resolved quickly. Unfortunately, I do not have an ETA yet.”
-
Yesterday, packages.microsoft.com—the repository from which Microsoft serves software installers for Linux distributions including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and more—went down hard, and it stayed down for around 18 hours. The outage impacted users trying to install .NET Core, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft SQL Server for Linux (yes, that’s a thing) and more—as well as Azure’s own devops pipelines.
We first became aware of the problem Wednesday evening when we saw 404 errors in the output of apt update on an Ubuntu workstation with Microsoft Teams installed. The outage is somewhat better-documented at this .NET Core issue report on Github, with many users from all around the world sharing their experiences and theories.
-
Pseudo-Open Source
-
Privatisation/Privateering
-
Linux Foundation
-
-
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced new industry research, training, and tools – backed by the SPDX industry standard – to accelerate the use of a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) in secure software development.
-
The Linux Foundation has announced new industry research, a new training course, and new software tools – backed by the SPDX industry standard – to accelerate the use of Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) in development.
-
At the most basic level, a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is a list of components contained in a piece of software. It can be used to support the systematic review and approval of each component’s license terms to clarify the obligations and restrictions as it applies to the distribution of the supplied software. This is important to reducing risk for organizations building software that uses open source components.
-
Security
-
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (gnupnp and postgresql), Fedora (dino, microcode_ctl, and xen), Mageia (apache, gsoap, libgd, openssh, perl-Image-ExifTool, python-bleach, and qt4 and qtsvg5), openSUSE (chromium, containerd, docker, runc, djvulibre, htmldoc, kernel, libjpeg-turbo, libopenmpt, libxml2, spice, squid, and ucode-intel), Red Hat (dhcp and glib2), SUSE (apache2, inn, java-1_8_0-openjdk, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (nettle).
-
UChecker is part of KernelCare, a live patching solution for Linux kernels, which now rolls up under the company’s TuxCare offerings. TuxCare, which is specifically targeted for enterprises, puts the CloudLinux products KernelCare, Extended Lifecycle Support, and Linux Support Services all under one roof.
-
CloudLinux announced UChecker, a free open source tool that scans Linux servers for vulnerable libraries that are outdated and being used by other applications. This provides detailed actionable information regarding which application is using which vulnerable library and needs to be updated, which helps improve the security awareness patching process.
-
Is your computer safe? How can you protect your operating system? Should you cover your laptop camera?
In this article, we teach you how to secure your device, whether you are a Windows user or a Mac user. Or you run GNU/Linux on your system.
An operating system is an interface between software and hardware. It performs various tasks such as file management, process management and memory management.
-
-
Privacy/Surveillance
-
Pizza takeaway and delivery outfit Papa John’s has been fined £10,000 by the UK’s data watchdog for sending marketing fluff to punters without their say-so.
Following a year-long investigation, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) found that the company had sent 168,022 “nuisance marketing messages to its customers without the valid consent required by law.”
One of the unnamed complainants said they had “never [given their] consent for marketing text messages” resulting in “distress.”
Another said they had received almost 100 messages in what was described as the “textbook definition of harassment.”
-
-
Finance
-
British podcaster Peter McCormack has declared that El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin is the “real deal” after meeting with President Nayib Bukele in the presidential palace.
-
Misinformation/Disinformation
-
If you’re a regular customer of Amazon, you’re fully aware of the fake reviews. They are sometimes obviously fake. After removing its third recent major company from its online storefront, Amazon is laying the blame for the fake reviews at the feet of social media
-
Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
-
BT is suing a supplier for £72m after it delivered nearly 100,000 defective landline connection blocks that caused ADSL broadband outages, London’s High Court has heard.
Legal filings reveal that Tii Technologies is said to have supplied 95,000 faulty jack test (JT) blocks to BT over a period spanning 2006-2016. The one-time state monopoly claims these faulty blocks led to a spate of ADSL outages in the mid-2010s that mainly affected Sky Broadband’s customers – and cost BT more than £40m in engineer callouts to trace the problem’s cause.
-
I tossed that one-liner out there in an interview earlier today. It shows that I’ve been following the news a wee bit. There’s been more going on that directly impacts my situation than I like.
Previously I have mentioned that I participate in Ashtabula County’s broadband task force. That’s an effort by the county government to try to improve economic development by improving part of our local infrastructure. It has been mentined by local public radio stations looking at how we have problems with broadband in my local area as recently as March of this year.
That is why a report from Ars Technica by Jon Brodkin might have been confusing to some folks out there that saw it today. If anything I am still baffled by the situation especially when I learned of it on Wednesday from local media sources. Mr. Brodkin reported that the state legislature is proposing to outlaw municipal broadband in Ohio while also prohibiting the continued operation of municipal broadband efforts like FairlawnGig that already exist. Ohio News Connection/Public News Service also talks about the situation a bit.
Due to the offices of my local state representative and local state senator not being very responsive to any contacts I have not reached out to them. They’re both first-term backbenchers. Nobody in the statehouse press corps has been able to track down who sponsored this particular provision in the omnibus budget bill required to be passed by June 30th to cover the biennium.
-
Due to circumstances, all Xen subprojects have now moved their IRC channels off of Freenode.
The following channels have been moved to OFTC: #xendevel, #xen, #xeninfra #xcp-ng, #xcp-ng-dev. #mirage has moved to Libera Chat.
-
Monopolies
-
The US Federal Trade Commission on Friday announced the approval a consent order against Amazon that requires the company to pay $61.7m to resolve charges that for two and a half years it took tips intended for Amazon Flex drivers and concealed the diversion of funds.
The deal was proposed in February but required sign-off from the US trade watchdog. It arises from FTC charges that Amazon misrepresented both to Amazon Flex drivers and to the public what the company would pay for delivery work.
-
Patents
-
PRITI KRISHTEL’S first case as a legal aid lawyer in India was as tragic as they come. One day in 2004, she recalls a couple walking into her office in Bengaluru with their three children. Unable to afford life-saving medicine to keep their HIV infections in check, the parents were dying of AIDS. With no other options, they wanted Krishtel to draw up guardianship transfer papers: The rambunctious siblings were to be sent to an orphanage before their parents died.
Even though drugs that could save the parents’ lives were available, the cost at the time was out of reach for the couple, who were living in poverty. Krishtel and the collective of lawyers she was working with at the time went on to handle many similar cases. By 2007, she came up with a strategy to slash the cost of HIV drugs in India: On behalf of patients’ rights groups, lawyers with the nonprofit Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK) she had cofounded would challenge specific patent applications on brand-name drugs, opening opportunities for generic manufacturers. Through a combination of patent expirations and legal challenges, price competition in India drove down the cost of the most common HIV therapy by more than 80 percent between 2003 and 2008.
-
FFII has received a testimony that the European Commission has recycled an old Impact Assessment (IA) of the Unified Patent Court (UPC), in order to hide the controversial self-financed aspect of the Court, which is why the Court is too expensive for SMEs. Countries are ratifying this dangerous treaty without any real Impact Assessment of the new Court system which will exclude most SMEs with its super high costs. The Impact Assessment was recycled from old treaty project of 2009, the UPLS, with lots of changes in the meantime, similar to what happened recently with the recycling of the Impact Assessment of the Mercosur treaty.
[...]
Around early 2012, after some requests to redo the impact assessment by the Scrutiny committee of the British parliament, the representative of the European Commission Margot Frohlinger apparently refused to procure an updated one, according to a testimony we received she did not want to “redo the impact assessment because it would attract critics”. After taking this decision at the European Commission, she left to continue her career at the European Patent Office (EPO), the other self-financed administration that will grant the Unitary Patent.
A self-financed patent court is controversial, because the cost is passed on to companies that litigate in front of the court, and no courts in Europe have a self-financed objective (Art36.3 UPCA “the objective of a self-financing Court”), as courts are not companies and should not be driven by financial targets to guarantee the integrity of the justice system. If courts are driven by profit, judges will tend to apply “patent maximalism” just to guarantee their salary.
-
Software Patents
-
On Tuesday 25 May 2021, Heli Pihlajamaa, director of patent law at the European Patent Office, gave a presentation to CIPA’s computer technology committee on the Patentability of computer-implemented inventions after the Enlarged Board of Appeal’s decision in G 1/19.
G 1/19 relates to the assessment of inventive step in relation to computer-implemented simulations and considered whether to have a technical effect, a simulation must have a direct link to physical reality going beyond its implementation on a computer.
In the presentation, Pihlajamaa discussed how the decision of G 1/19 emphasised that the approach in T 641/00 applies to all computer implemented inventions including simulations. In T 641/00 it was decided that while a claim can have a mix of technical and non-technical features, novelty and inventive step can only be based on the technical features. In T 641/00 it was also stated that when assessing inventive step, the claim should solve a technical problem which the skilled person in the particular technical field might be asked to solve.
-
Trademarks
-
One year after the launch of its beta version, the first official eRegister is now live. eRegister allows access to historical records of EU trade marks and registered Community designs and allows users to see what information has been changed, when it was changed and why it was changed.
[...]
In addition, the record of any given IP right, including its history, can be downloaded free of charge as a certified copy. Records downloaded from eRegister are deemed to be authentic extracts from the EUTM and RCD Registers, and can be verified online.
eRegister can be accessed via the EUIPO’s search tool eSearch plus. Users will first need to search for a particular trade mark or design and then click on the eRegister button located towards the top right-hand corner of their screens.
-
Copyrights
-
Grouchy former Pink Floyd bassist/vocalist Roger Waters launched an expletive-laden attack on human-impersonating Facebook CEObot Mark Zuckerberg after receiving a request from Instagram to use one of his songs in a promotional film.
Speaking at an event in New York to advocate for the release of Julian Assange, Waters held up a printed piece of paper he said he received “on the internet this morning”, which included a request to use the Pink Floyd song ‘Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)’ in exchange for what Waters described as “a huge, huge amount of money.”
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 7:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: "Ms Pyjamas" from the EPO is promoting illegal software patents to a bunch of patent zealots (CIPA)
Having worked for the regime of Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos, Heli Pihlajamaa (known inside EPO as “Ms Pyjamas”) should know that the judges in Haar lack independence and should not even be in Haar. But in pursuit of money and power she carries water for the regime and we’re still seeing evidence of presidential tampering in ongoing cases. They just can’t leave the judges alone, can they?
“Does it strictly require being a liar (who is eager to violate the EPC) or is that a prerequisite in order to become an EPO official?”Less than a day ago we mentioned how “Ms Pyjamas” had been promoting ‘Hey Hi’ (AI) patents, in effect patents on algorithms. And based on this article from earlier this week, only weeks ago she also vainly promoted illegal software patents disguised as “CII” (“computer-implemented inventions”), another misleading name for software patents. It feels like a ‘collusion’ with the litigation giants, at the expense of science. To quote some passages: “On Tuesday 25 May 2021, Heli Pihlajamaa, director of patent law at the European Patent Office, gave a presentation to CIPA’s computer technology committee on the Patentability of computer-implemented inventions after the Enlarged Board of Appeal’s decision in G 1/19. G 1/19 relates to the assessment of inventive step in relation to computer-implemented simulations and considered whether to have a technical effect, a simulation must have a direct link to physical reality going beyond its implementation on a computer. In the presentation, Pihlajamaa discussed how the decision of G 1/19 emphasised that the approach in T 641/00 applies to all computer implemented inventions including simulations. In T 641/00 it was decided that while a claim can have a mix of technical and non-technical features, novelty and inventive step can only be based on the technical features. In T 641/00 it was also stated that when assessing inventive step, the claim should solve a technical problem which the skilled person in the particular technical field might be asked to solve.”
These are the sorts of people who keep meddling in the online Zoom ‘case’. Along with her Hungarian colleague, who lies about opponents of software patents, important decisions will be made. Does it strictly require being a liar (who is eager to violate the EPC) or is that a prerequisite in order to become an EPO official? It certainly seems so. More in the video above. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 7:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: Team UPC, or specifically Mr. Mooney, lies to the public about the prospects of the UPC; similarly, EPO and EU officials keep bringing up false claims about the UPC, so while the UPC itself has likely died for good the lies have not
ABOUT a day ago (actually a bit less than that) FFII wrote about UPC lies, reiterating the role of the European Commission and the EPO in such lies.
“Basically, Mr. Mooney decided to lobby for his money.”There seems to be — not for the first time one might add — a complete and total disregard for facts. “FFII has received a testimony that the European Commission has recycled an old Impact Assessment (IA) of the Unified Patent Court (UPC),” it said, “in order to hide the controversial self-financed aspect of the Court, which is why the Court is too expensive for SMEs. Countries are ratifying this dangerous treaty without any real Impact Assessment of the new Court system which will exclude most SMEs with its super high costs. The Impact Assessment was recycled from old treaty project of 2009, the UPLS, with lots of changes in the meantime, similar to what happened recently with the recycling of the Impact Assessment of the Mercosur treaty.”
It also noted: “Around early 2012, after some requests to redo the impact assessment by the Scrutiny committee of the British parliament, the representative of the European Commission Margot Frohlinger apparently refused to procure an updated one, according to a testimony we received she did not want to “redo the impact assessment because it would attract critics”. After taking this decision at the European Commission, she left to continue her career at the European Patent Office (EPO), the other self-financed administration that will grant the Unitary Patent. A self-financed patent court is controversial, because the cost is passed on to companies that litigate in front of the court, and no courts in Europe have a self-financed objective (Art36.3 UPCA “the objective of a self-financing Court”), as courts are not companies and should not be driven by financial targets to guarantee the integrity of the justice system. If courts are driven by profit, judges will tend to apply “patent maximalism” just to guarantee their salary.”
It says “patent maximalism” — a term we used a lot about a decade ago (based on “copyright maximalism”). The same observation is made in the comments here, citing Techrights. Basically, Mr. Mooney decided to lobby for his money. He decided to lie again about the UPC and people are reacting. The video above does too. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 8:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
upgrading raspberry pi to buster, sd card imaging woes, apple replacement woes, food
-
Martin Sosic, Co-Founder and CTO of Wasp joins Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman on FLOSS Weekly. Wasp is a simple and exciting new open-source language for developing full-stack web apps with less code. Sosic shares more about Wasp as well as where web development is going and many of the issues involved for both developers and users.
-
Andrew Lee can’t just let Freenode collapse, every step of the way he keep kicking it faster down the hill and now he has actually done it, Freenode might now be actually dead.
-
Kernel Space
-
The Oracle Linux and Virtualization team congratulates AMD for the recently released AMD EPYC™ 7003 Series CPUs, which includes one of the most powerful server processors in the world, the EPYC 7763. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and AMD teams have worked together for several years to bring high-performance solutions, based on the 1st and 2nd Generation EPYC processors, to our mutual customers and we’re doing the same with the latest offerings from Oracle and AMD.
-
There has been a number of new VirtIO driver additions recently to the Linux kernel like for sound and Bluetooth for the expanding VirtIO specification while one still in the works for mainlining is the GPIO guest driver.
The latest VirtIO-GPIO guest driver was published on Tuesday as a new GPIO driver for complying with the VirtIO-GPIO protocol and ultimately mapping from a guest virtual machine either to virtual/simulator devices or from the guest mapping to real GPIOs on the host hardware.
-
In conjunction with supported Lenovo systems, a new “Think-LMI” driver is on its way to the mainline Linux kernel for allowing some BIOS/firmware settings to be accessed and configured within Linux.
The Think-LMI driver allows for changing BIOS settings on supported ThinkPads and other unspecified Lenovo systems where the WMI interface is supported.
-
With the release of Linux kernel 5.12.11, bcache is safe to use, again. The patch bcache: avoid oversized read request in cache missing code path has been merged.
-
Graphics Stack
-
With every recent Plasma update (and especially the just released version 5.22) the list of features that are X11 exclusive gets smaller and smaller.
Conversely, many users may not be aware that the opposite is also happening: every day there are more features available on Wayland that cannot be found on X11!
There are many resources available describing the security advantages of Wayland over X11, but the ageing protocol has some other shortcomings as well. For example, the last update we highlighted was the recently released VRR support in 5.22. Among other things, this enables an important use case for me: it allows each of my connected displays to operate at their highest refresh rate. I have a 144Hz main display, but occasionally I plug in my TV, which works at 60Hz. Because of limitations of X11, for everything to work, my main display needs to be limited to 60Hz when both of them are active. But not any more thanks to Wayland!
While the KDE developers always try to bring new functionalities to all users, the above example shows that sometimes, either due to X11 limitations or for other reasons, feature parity will not be possible.
[...]
As announced on the community mailing list and the Goals matrix room, there was a meeting last Monday to discuss the way forward with the huge list of topics mentioned in the previous update.
In the meeting, the conclusion was to start with the topics regarding the different platforms we support, as well as the automation of the build/release process of apps.
Taking advantage of the upcoming Akademy, the topics will be discussed during the BoF sessions. Check out the schedule to see when you can attend! Also, don’t miss the “Creating Plasma Mobile apps” BoF!
Of course, like the other Goal Champions, Aleix will have a talk on the first day of Akademy, don’t miss it!
-
There’s a lot that goes into this item. The post you’re reading now isn’t about to go so far as to claim that zink(-wip) is usable for gaming. No, that day is still far, far away. But this post is going to be the first step.
To begin with, a riddle: what change was made to zink between these two screenshots?
[...]
A suballocator is a mechanism by which small blocks of memory can be suballocated out of larger one. For example, if I want to allocate an 64byte chunk of memory, I could allocate it directly and get my block, or I could allocate a 4096byte chunk of memory and then take 64bytes out of it.
When performance is involved, it’s important to consider the time-cost of allocations, and so yes, it’s useful to have already allocated another 63 instances of 64bytes when I need a second one, but there’s another, deeper issue that’s also necessary to address, especially as it relates to gaming: 32bit environments.
In a 32bit process, the amount of address space available is limited to 4GB, regardless of how much actual memory is physically present, some of which is dedicated to system resources and unavailable for general use. Any time a buffer or image is mapped by the driver in a process, this uses up address space in order to create an addressable region of memory that can be read or written to. Once all the address space has been used up, no other resources can be mapped, and it becomes impossible to continue normal operations.
-
The Zink component to Mesa that provides a generic OpenGL implementation built atop the Vulkan API recently hit another “massively improved performance” milestone by Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz.
Mike began work on a suballocator for Zink that is based on the Gallium3D auxiliary/pipebuffer code originally started by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. After making significant changes to that code, Zink’s new suballocator implementation is showing off significant performance improvements in just shy of 700 lines of new code.
-
We heard you like performance and it seems the new OpenGL over Vulkan driver Zink is going to bring some FPS friends whenever the next release lands. Developer Mike Blumenkrantz who has been contracted by Valve has continued hacking away at the code, and in a new blog post detailed a massive change to the driver to improve gaming performance.
Don’t know what Zink is? It’s “an OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan. Or to be a bit more specific, Zink is a Mesa Gallium driver that leverages the existing OpenGL implementation in Mesa to provide hardware accelerated OpenGL when only a Vulkan driver is available” – Collabora.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
That said, i’m also interested in tarsnap from a technical standpoint. Tarsnap manages to provide all three of compression, encryption, and deduplication, while also allowing you to delete old backups. The two other deduplicating backup systems i’ve looked at (camlistore and bup) don’t support deletion, which is an instant disqualifier for me, since i’m always running out of disk space.
-
The six year-old HSM I have has support for 2048 bit only RSA keys which is enough reason to attempt using EC keys, but as Remy pointed out when he wrote the article in 2016, OpenSSH had no PKCS#11 support for them then.
It turns out my client of choice has OpenSSH_8.1p1 which isn’t recent enough either, so I install portable OpenSSH version 8.6p1.
-
Powershell and nushell take unix piping beyond raw streams of text to structured or typed data. Is it possible to keep a traditional shell like bash and still get typed pipes?
I think it is possible, and I’m now surprised noone seems to have done it yet. This is a fairly detailed design for how to do it. I’ve not implemented it yet. RFC.
-
While my current work is aimed at ARM-64 hardware, many of the boards are not Server Ready Hardware and thus do not have things like EUFI to boot, ACPI to query the hardware stack, or various other things which are added later as firmware updates. They also end up having ‘developer kit boards’ of US$6000.00+ systems which having one at home is hard to justify. {Sorry kid, no college this semester… Dad bought himself a board that the customer may dump next week.}
In looking for proxy systems, my team has been focusing first on the classic ARM for small projects: The Raspberry Pi. The raspberry pi4 with 4 GB of ram works out as a proxy for all kinds of ‘low-end’ systems where you may need to play with a small GPU and try to make it work with a Server Ready operating system like CentOS Stream.
-
Do you use Discord on Linux? Do you need to update to the latest features but don’t know how? We can help! Follow along in this guide as we go over how to update Discord on Linux!
-
Today we are looking at how to install Veloren on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
-
You have a shiny new Razer hardware, but you cannot find the Razer Synapse software for Linux. And you end up with no proper RGB sync and do not get to customize it. What do you do?
Well, for certain functionalities, like adding macros to your mouse, you will still need access to Razer Synapse (on Windows or macOS).
But, to tweak a few other options like macros for the keyboard, changing the DPI of your mouse, or lighting effects, you can easily set up your Razer peripherals on Linux.
-
Drupal is a free and open-source content management system (CMS), is flexible for building blogs and websites. It is written in PHP programming language and uses MySQL as a backend database. Drupal is available with thousands of add-ons, which makes it highly customizable.
You can deploy Drupal on any web server that supports the PHP programming language. In this tutorial, we will provide you with steps to install Drupal with Apache on Fedora Linux systems.
-
This article is the first of two presenting new support for developing decision services in Red Hat Business Automation Manager and Red Hat Process Automation Manager. We specifically address support for the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard. Process Automation Manager now supports Kogito’s cloud-native runtime engine for creating rules, decisions, and resource-planning optimization solutions based on the Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML).
We’ll present an example using Kogito with Drools Rules Language, both backed by the KIE group. By expanding Kogito with the power of Quarkus, you can enjoy hot-reload during the development phase and compile decision services into fast, lightweight services.
For resource planning, Process Automation Manager 7.11 brings full support for OptaPlanner 8, the most recent version of this artificial intelligence (AI) constraint solver technology.
All these new features are now part of the Red Hat Process Automation stack.
-
htop is a lightweight to available for Linux systems to show a dynamic overview of the running processes and the system resources used. Compared to the classic top this process manager offers some convenient functions. Here we see the steps to install it on AlmaLinux, CentOS, 8, Rocky, Oracle, or RHEL.
The program has a ncurses interface, ncurses stands for new curses, it is a free C – program library to a character-based user interface (Text user interface – TUI) independently of the illustrative text terminal or terminal emulator display. Htop can easily be operated with the keyboard without having to type long commands. If htop is started in a terminal within a desktop environment, the mouse can also be used. If you want to use the mouse in a virtual terminal, gpm must be installed.
-
GitLab is a web based version control system and collaborative software development based on Git. Its features include things like the code repository, wiki or issue-tracking system. In this article I will show you how to install the Community Edition of GitLab on FreeBSD.
-
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS) that is used for making dynamic websites. It is open-source and is available for free under GPL (general public license). It is based on a model–view–controller framework. It powers millions of websites around the world. It can be used to develop websites for different purposes like business websites, online magazines, e-commerce, portals etc. Joomla has large community of users to provide support.
-
I work a lot with virtual nachines. In fact, most of my servers are virtual machines (last time I’ve counted, there where around 100vms) running on top of four physical servers and couple of SAN/NAS. Sometimes you -or the one who asked for the machine- underestimate the hardware resources needed. Or simply after a while you end up with a nice “Filesystem full” error.
In this article I’ll show how to resize a partition and grow the filesystem to get more free space.
-
Every modern Linux distribution comes with a set of tools for installing and updating software. Such tools are called package managers.
Package managers help you find software, download it to your computer and install or upgrade it. When a certain software package can’t work without additional components, relevant software packages will be installed automatically.
In Red Hat family of operating systems the package manager is called yum. In recent years it’s been replaced with backward-compatible tool called dnf.
-
In this brief guide, we will discuss how to copy a file to multiple directories from command line using find, cp, echo, xargs and tee commands on Linux.
The other day I wanted to copy some videos to different folders in my Arch Linux desktop. As you already know, we can easily do it by right-clicking on the file, select Copy option from the context menu and paste it on the destination directory/folder.
However, I’d like to know if there are any other way to copy the file into multiple directories in one go. I thought It would help when I want to copy a single file into number of different directories at once. I did a few web searches and come up with following solutions.
-
Enabling SELinux does not automatically start the enforcement of access. If SELinux is enabled and it cannot find a policy, it will refuse to start because the policy defines the behavior of the system (what SELinux should allow). SELinux policies are generally distributed in a compiled form (just like with software) as policy modules. These modules are then aggregated into a single policy store and loaded in memory to allow SELinux to enforce the policy rules on the system.
-
This is guide, howto install NVIDIA proprietary drivers on Debian Sid/11/10, Ubuntu 21.10/21.04/20.10, Linux Mint 20.1, LMDE 4 and disable Nouveau driver. This guide works with GeForce 8/9/200/300/400/500/600/700/800/900/10/20/30 series cards. This is alternative way to install NVIDIA drivers, because Debian based Linux distros have NVIDIA drivers directly from repos too.
-
Three years ago, I had the pleasure of announcing EAPI 7 as a major step forward in our ebuild language. It introduced preliminary support for cross-compilation, it finally provided good replacements for the last Portagisms in ebuilds and it included many small changes that made ebuilds simpler.
Only a year and a half later, I have started working on the initial EAPI 8 feature set. Similarly to EAPI 6, EAPI 8 was supposed to focus on small changes and improvements. The two killer features listed below were already proposed at the time. I have prepared a few patches to the specification, as well as the initial implementation of the respective features for Portage. Unfortunately, the work stalled at the time.
Finally, as a result of surplus of free time last month, I was able to resume the work. Along with Ulrich Müller, we have quickly prepared the EAPI 8 feature set, got it pre-approved, prepared the specification and implemented all the features in Portage and pkgcore. Last Sunday, the Council has approved EAPI 8 and it’s now ready for ~arch use.
What’s there in EAPI 8? Well, for a start we have install-time dependencies (IDEPEND) that fill a gap in our cross-compilation design. Then, selective fetch/mirror restriction make it easier to combine proprietary and free distfiles in a single package. PROPERTIES and RESTRICT are now accumulated across eclasses reducing confusion for eclass writers. There’s dosym -r to create relative symlinks conveniently from dynamic paths. Plus bunch of other improvements, updates and cleanups.
-
Installing an application on a computer system is pretty simple. You copy files from an archive (like a .zip file) onto the target computer in a place the operating system expects there to be applications. Because many of us are accustomed to having fancy installer “wizards” to help us get software on our computers, the process seems like it should be technically more complex than it is.
What is complex, though, is the issue of what makes up an application. What users think of as a single application actually contains code borrowing from software libraries (i.e., .so files on Linux, .dll files on Windows, and .dylib on macOS) scattered throughout an operating system.
So that users don’t have to worry about that veritable matrix of interdependent code, Linux uses a package management system to track what application needs what library, and which library or application has security or feature updates, and what extra data files were installed with each software title. A package manager is, essentially, an installer wizard. They’re easy to use, they provide both graphical interfaces and terminal-based interfaces, and they make your life easier. The better you know your distribution’s package manager, the easier your life gets.
-
Seasoned Linux administrators and security engineers already know that they need to put some trust in the users and processes of their system in order for the system to remain secure. This is partly because users can attempt to exploit vulnerabilities found in the software running on the system, but a large contribution to this trust level is because the secure state of the system depends on the behavior of the users. A Linux user with access to sensitive information could easily leak that out to the public, manipulate the behavior of the applications they launch, and do many other things that affect the security of the system. The default access controls active on a regular Linux system are discretionary; it is up to the users how the access controls should behave.
The Linux discretionary access control (DAC) mechanism is based on the user and/or group information of the process and is matched against the user and/or group information of the file, directory, or other resource being manipulated. Consider the /etc/shadow file, which contains the password and account information of the local Linux accounts…
-
The vi editor is the most popular editor used to edit or create new files from a shell prompt. It comes in text-based as well graphical interface form, with extended features. This text-based editor is used to write a script, edit system configuration files, or develop the source code of a programming language. The name vi is pronounced as vee-eye.
The vim (short for vi improved) version of the vi editor comes with many enhancements to make working with the vi editor easier. It supports extended features, such as syntax highlighting for many configuration files and programming languages. Whatever we learn about vi editor is applicable to vim also, so we will learn about the vi editor in this section.
-
Text files can be viewed and edited using any text editor that exists in Linux. However, before learning the editing part, we must have a basic understanding of different ways that can be used to create plain text files. Depending on the requirement, different methods can be used for text file creation. The most popular ones are described next.
-
Archiving is the process of fetching multiple files from the same or different locations and putting them into a single file bundle. It is generally done together with compression, or immediately followed by compression. This helps in streamlining the backup process, as discussed in the following section.
-
Tired of using a Nano text editor? Then surely you have to try Micro – is a simple terminal-based text editor written in Go Language and released under MIT license.
-
-
Service mesh and serverless deployment models represent the next phase in the evolution of microservice architectures. Service mesh enables developers to focus on business feature development rather than managing non-functional microservices capabilities such as monitoring, tracing, fault tolerance, and service discovery.
Open source service mesh projects, including Istio, LinkerD, and Kuma, use a sidecar, a dedicated infrastructure layer built right into an app, to implement service mesh functionalities. So, for example, developers can improve monitoring and tracing of cloud-native microservices on a distributed networking system using Jaeger to build an Istio service mesh.
-
In our last tutorial, we discussed advanced uses of I/O redirection & we will now learn to create functions for our Bash / shell scripts. Learning how to create a function is an important skill required for BASH scripting.
When we are writing our scripts, we might see ourselves using a section of the script over and over again like using a loop that is checking a condition many times in a script. So rather than writing a section of the script over & over again, we will create that section of script as a Functions aka Bash Functions also.
-
Games
-
Howdy Godotters! Time for another update on the status of Godot on the web.
It’s been a while since the last web report as we were busy releasing Godot 3.3 and the following hotfixes, but as we move onto preparing for Godot 3.4 and the first alpha of Godot 4.0 (soon™), I’m happy to announce that starting from Godot 3.4 you will finally be able to export your HTML5 game as a Progressive Web App (PWA)!
-
Terra Nil is an absolute gem you can play right now on itch.io free (which is now named as the Prototype) but it’s also getting a total rewrite to be a full commercial game and the new Terra Nil is coming to Linux. Developed by Free Lives, who are at this point a pretty well-known name that created the likes of Broforce and Genital Jousting but this is a very different game. No violence, only the greens.
Compared with the prototype it’s going to be a much bigger and more open-ended strategy game where you progress through multiple stages of restoration, including cultivating biodiversity, fixing the climate and even recycling the buildings you use along the way. You will do this across a whole planet as you restore different geographical regions, each with their own unique challenges, flora, and fauna.
-
Underrated and criminally overlooked, the rhythm action adventure BOY BEATS WORLD is officially out now. Note: our key was provided by the developer.
At first glance, BOY BEATS WORLD really doesn’t look like much. The graphical style is very simplistic but if you do actually give it a go, you will find a bizarre yet completely charming musical adventure that really is worth playing through. There’s not a whole lot of modern releases like this and the music is pretty good too. It’s got a really great vibe going that will have you happily tapping along to the music to defeat all sorts of weird enemy types.
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
The images of the upcoming Windows 11 Operating system from Microsoft resemble a mixture of our beloved KDE Plasma and GNOME. How much they are similar? We try to find out.
-
If you’ve been waiting for Dash to Dock to support GNOME 40, you’ll have to wait a little longer, but there’s another great extension that now supports the latest version of the popular desktop desktop environment, Dash to Panel, which is an icon taskbar for the GNOME Shell.
Once installed, Dash to Panel automatically moves GNOME’s Dash to the GNOME Panel, which is moved to the bottom of the screen to create a look similar to that of the KDE Plasma desktop environment or Windows 7 or later systems.
-
-
elementary OS 6 “Odin” beta release gave us a sneak peek on a variety of interesting things that are in motion for the final release.
Now, the second beta release, i.e. elementary OS 6 Beta 2 is starting to make sense of the ambitious plans that the development team has for the stable release soon.
[...]
First, the improvements to the installer.
There are a few UI tweaks to the installer for a cleaner and consistent look. You will also find a subtle animation with the installation progress instead of a static icon.
-
Screenshots/Screencasts
-
Today we are looking at LinuxMint 20.2 Beta, the XFCE edition. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.4 (upgradeable to 5.8), XFCE 4.16, and uses about 900MB of ram when idling.
-
Today we are looking at LinuxMint 20.2 Beta, the MATE edition. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.4 (upgradeable to 5.8), MATE 1.24.0, and uses about 900MB of ram when idling.
-
Today we are looking at LinuxMint 20.2 Beta, the Cinnamon Edtion It comes with Linux Kernel 5.4 (upgradeable to 5.8), Cinnamon 5.0, and uses about 900MB of ram when idling.
-
SUSE/OpenSUSE
-
In addition to the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed looking at HWCAPS / x86-64 feature levels for being able to provide greater out-of-the-box performance by selectively loading more tuned libraries depending upon the CPU in use, SUSE Linux Enterprise / openSUSE Leap are also looking at offering similar functionality that may turn up in time for the next point release / service pack.
On the table for openSUSE Leap 15.4 / SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4 is offering x86_64-v2 enabled libraries of important base system packages. The developers admit though that this might not all come to pass until the second update from now, Leap 15.5 / SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP5, given the work at hand.
-
Our survey about the release of openSUSE Leap 15.3 has ended and the results will be discussed in a release retrospective at the openSUSE Conference in the coming days.
“I’d like to give big thanks to all of those who participated…,” wrote release manager Lubos Kocman in an email. “We’ve received 605 responses, which is almost 200 more than in 15.2. I’m grateful for the increased participation as it shows us that it makes sense to have this type of feedback loop.”
Kocman will give a talk at the openSUSE Conference on June 19 at 09:00 UTC and discuss the results.
-
IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
-
According to the 2021 Kubernetes Adoption Survey by Portworx (PDF), 68% of IT professionals increased their Kubernetes use due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, the third-annual Red Hat State of Enterprise Open Source report found that the use of containers and Kubernetes is likely to continue growing throughout this year.
-
The container ecosystem explosion began with developers running docker build and docker push on their local machines. But increasingly, developers have discovered the benefits of building container images remotely in the cloud, such as better automation, supply chain security, visibility and observability, increased efficiency from caching, and more.
With supply chain security becoming a hot topic in 2021, operators don’t want to manage and secure a separate bespoke build infrastructure. In the past, this “build infrastructure” has sometimes been as simple as a shared computer running under a developer’s desk. However, that build environment was difficult to manage, upgrade, and secure. Furthermore, often, it ran with very privileged access to production environments, making it a prime target for attackers.
Instead, operators want to lean on the tools and experience they’ve gained to secure and observe their production environments running on Kubernetes. Moving container image builds into the cluster is a natural fit, but running docker build in a cluster can be very hard to secure properly.
To meet this need, engineers from the Red Hat OpenShift build and IBM Cloud Code Engine teams developed Shipwright.
-
The sun is shining on the land as I walk through the streets of one of the cities on Anitya. My staff is doing clinking sounds on the stone road under my feet. Everything looks peacefully and seems to be in order. This is how I like it.
Not many citizens have noticed my humble presence. The life here is too busy and I’m a frequent guest in these parts. My steps are going towards the local tavern. I know who will wait for me there and this makes my heart happy. Traveler is always coming back to visit me and his visits are always good way to spent my time.
The tavern is a little dark like most of the taverns in these parts of the land. I looked around searching the faces sitting here, looking for the one that seems familiar to me. I found it! Traveler was sitting in corner sipping his pint of beer and looking at the fire crackling in the heart of the tavern. I came closer to his table: “Hello traveler, it’s nice to meet you again. It was few months till we saw each other last time. The times were busy, but I have plenty of good news for you. I know you want to know what is happening around. So let’s begin.” I sat on the stool beside his table and started talking.
-
Gathering information about Linux systems is an essential sysadmin task. There are many tools that can help in this regard. However, one command that can gather a lot of information with only a few options and parameters is inxi.
The inxi tool is a full-featured CLI utility that displays all kinds of system information in your console/terminal/shell or in your IRC client. It gathers this information from a variety of sources about your system, so you can see what you want in an easy-to-use format.
-
As CIOs look for ways to help their teams maximize software delivery efforts, low-code/no-code tools offer a compelling solution for some organizations. In addition to empowering “citizen developers” with few or even no development skills, low-code/no-code tools can help experienced developers maximize outputs and scale.
For the CIO, the decision to adopt low-code/no-code depends on organizational challenges, risk management, and needs among DevOps teams. To get some high-level insights, I asked several DevOps Institute Ambassadors for some factors CIOs should consider when it comes to low-code/no-code adoption.
-
My goal is to convince you to write articles—specifically, technical articles. The six reasons to write technical articles also apply to other types of written pieces, such as documentation and project proposals. I can’t promise that you’ll become a billionaire or that this will improve your romantic life, but the benefits for you will be higher than for those who choose not to write.
Why should you put effort into something that is voluntary work and (apparently) won’t help you pay your bills?
Below, I give you six reasons to write, or in some cases, remind you of what you already know.
-
Fedora Magazine is always looking for content to publish from the Fedora Community as well as from Fedora Project. This content comes from the community members like you. I’d like to begin with how I got started writing for Fedora Magazine, highlighting the community interaction that led to it, and finishing with my thoughts on the results. Also, the content itself, what is it Fedora Magazine is looking for specifically? What steps does a community member need to take to contribute? What is the process that an article follows?
-
Twice each year for its State of Kubernetes Security report, StackRox examines how companies are adopting Kubernetes, containers and cloud-native technologies while meeting the challenges of securing these environments.
Prior to being acquired by Red Hat, StackRox surveyed more than 500 DevOps, engineering and security professionals for the summer 2021 report, uncovering new findings about what keeps IT leaders up at night when it comes to containers and how organizations are embracing DevSecOps initiatives to protect their cloud-native environments. The full report is available here and we’ve highlighted some of the key findings below.
-
More than a decade ago, the launch of public cloud services was the beginning of a seismic shift in the foundation of IT architectures. It was a natural evolution – the first SaaS services started in the late 1990s and virtual machines (which had been around since the 1970s) began growing in popularity for optimizing physical server resources. But virtual machines and even SaaS still had the central core of a traditional IT infrastructure, building on physical systems in server rooms and data centers.
Public cloud introduced a new, decentralized architecture with built-in services and self-service catalogs. The adoption has changed the nature of IT infrastructure. Red Hat’s 2021 Global Tech Outlook report shows that a majority of our customers have a cloud strategy that involves one or more public clouds and 17% that have a private cloud strategy.
But cloud services introduce other challenges for system administrators (and for IT leaders planning projects or trying to manage budgets) because the very thing that makes cloud so easy to adopt makes it very difficult to manage.
-
If there’s one thing the past year has taught professionals across the globe, it’s that it is time to rethink how they work. Virtual has become a standard method of working and learning, and its flexibility has made it the new norm. Red Hat Training and Certification has sought to adapt to how global events have changed the requirements of our audience. This post will highlight some enhancements we’ve made to help you and your organization remain competitive in today’s economy.
As software becomes more and more complex, IT teams have to keep up with the increasing demands of their organization. Maintaining high technical proficiency can help ensure success, both individually and organizationally. Therefore, high-quality technical training is imperative for developing the skills necessary to keep up with industry trends and practices.
Whether teams or individuals are expanding on a current skill set or looking to develop an entirely new one, Red Hat Training and Certification can help you on any technical professional development journey.
-
Decided to combine two weeks into one blog post because unfortunately my grandmother passed away on the 4th and I took some time off to help and be with my family.
Last week I was able to talk to Gabbie about the details for the Research Podcast thumbnails! Super exciting but I’m just awaiting the reference photos of the first few guests and then I can draw up a proper schedule.
I’ve been chugging along on the Kubernetes coloring book.
[...]
I worked on the new pride fedora logo and I came up with these below but honestly, they were relatively simple. Going over the previous ticket there was some debate about how much could be done with the logo, and my skills with Inkscape are still slowwwww and simple since I use it for drawing the majority of the time. Honestly, the worst thing is when you know it’s possible to do something in a program but not sure how, and Google is your best friend. But the ticket is here and Mo has come up with some really great variations!
-
Last month plans were published for Fedora Cloud 35 to use the Btrfs file-system by default, similar to Fedora Workstation using Btrfs by default for several releases. That plan has now been signed off on by FESCo allowing for this change to happen.
-
To date, Red Hat has released a series of GitHub Actions and an OpenShift starter workflow to ease integrating Red Hat OpenShift with GitHub’s popular CI/CD platform. Since the initial announcement, we’ve been hard at work responding to community feedback to improve our existing actions as well as adding a few new ones.
In addition to our direct work, we’ve implemented a way to self-host GitHub Actions runners on a Red Hat OpenShift cluster so you can run workflows on your own cluster instead of GitHub’s.
-
In a world fueled by data, enterprises that aren’t measuring and analyzing their performance are doomed to fall behind their competitors. Without the consistent refinement enabled by accurate, insightful measurements, companies are likely to stagnate and miss opportunities for growth.
However, not all technology metrics are created equal, and a poor measurement strategy can be nearly as problematic as having no strategy at all. Even the best tools are useless in the hands of an inept craftsman, which is why modern enterprises must develop a well-considered measurement approach tied to business outcomes.
[...]
On the other hand, collecting too few measurements could lead to biased or distorted results. Zeroing in on just a couple of performance metrics leads to a lack of context, meaning the insights provided by these data points could lead your enterprise astray. Finding the right scope of measurements for your team means finding a number that is manageable but that provides a balanced view of your innovation apparatus.
-
Debian Family
-
There is a new application available for Sparkers: FrostWire
-
-
JingPad A1 is an ARM-based tablet powered by JingOS an especially developed open-source Linux distribution.
Chinese startup Jingling has been promoting the upcoming tablet for a few months, and now the company has launched a crowdfunding campaign with Indiegogo. At the time of writing this post 171 backers have pledged a combined total of almost $102,000. With 59 days left to go this figure is sure to rise.
The consumer tablet market is saturated with either Google’s Android and Apple’s iPadOS as the only valiable oprions for OS. However, this changed back in March, when JingLing Tech, the Chinese startup company, unveiled a tabled running JingOS. JingOS is a convergent Linux-based open source OS. It offers a brand new way to merge mobile and desktop experiences. It can run both Linux apps and Android apps. JingOS is adapted to run naturally with touch screen, stylus, keyboard, and trackpad. The Linux distribution will open the door to all types of use but not necessarily to applications designed for touch.
-
After months of teasing one, Chinese company Jingling has launched its crowdfunding campaign for the JingPad A1 Linux tablet on IndieGoGo.
And within mere hours of the effort going live the JingPad reached its (peculiarly modest) goal of $20,000.
-
There have been Linux tablets in the market for years if you consider that Android is Linux-based. There have also been attempts to put “proper” Linux flavors on phones and tablets, but most of those have been aimed at developers and tinkerers. Linux mobile devices that are designed specifically for the consumer market are far and few in between, making the JingPad Linux tablet a rather interesting venture, one that seems to have resounded with quite a few backers on Indiegogo.
-
Edge AI solves the latency and security issues through on-device AI acceleration for optimal computations at a low power supply. Xilinx announces its Versal AI Edge Series which is 4th member of the Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform (ACAP) family. The versal series consists of seven models ranging from VE2002 to VE2802 with the processor fabrication on 7 nm silicon technology.
-
TI’s 16nm Sitara AM64x offers up to 2x -A53, up to 4x Cortex-R5F, and a Cortex-M4F core for FuSa and ships with a Linux SDK and choice of $99 and $299 eval kits. Phytec, SolidRun, and TQ have also unveiled AM64x based modules.
The Texas Instruments Sitara AM64x was announced on Embedded Computing in early May, but we did not hear about it until TQ Embedded sent us an announcement this week for a TQMa64xx module based on the new SoC. Then we saw that TI quietly announced the industrial-focused AM64x in a February blog post and has posted “preview” product pages for the 5x AM64x models. We also see that Phytec has posted a product page for a PhyCore-AM64X module and SolidRun has a page for an AM64x SOM.
-
NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier is the most powerful module from the Jetson family packing 32 TOPS of AI inference performance. But with some customers wanting to use the embedded AI computer in harsher conditions, the company has now introduced a rugged version of the module with NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier Industrial.
Some changes included a slightly lower performance (30 TOPS) to cater for an expanded temperature range, a dual-core Cortex-R5 cluster in lockstep, ECC memory, and compliance with shock and vibration standards.
-
-
Open Hardware/Modding
-
The next major release of the PureOS operating system that ships with the Librem 5 smartphone will bring a number of new features and improvements.
Code-named Byzantium, the new version of PureOS will bring a handful of new applications plus user interface tweaks that let you do things like enable automatic screen rotation, toggle WiFi, Bluetooth, or cellular functionality, or change keyboard styles.
And while some of those features are likely tied to the hardware of Purism’s $799 smartphone, it’s likely that some may eventually find their way to other Linux distributions for other phones, because Purism is the lead developer of the Phosh user interface that’s also available for other mobile Linux distributions including postmarketOS, Manjaro, Mobian, Arch, openSUSE, and Fedora.
-
-
Recently my 4 year-old stepson saw a kid with an RC racing car in a park. He really wanted his own, but with Christmas and his birthday still being a long way away, I decided to solve the “problem” by combining three things I’m really passionate about: LEGO, electronics and programming.
In this short series of blogs I’ll describe how to build one such car using LEGO, Arduino and a bit of C++ (and Qt, of course!).
-
Skateboards are great for going in a straight line, or gently curving one way or the other, but Proto G Engineering’s “omnidirectional board” takes things to a whole new level. Thanks to four 3D-printed Mecanum-style hub wheels, this device can not only move forwards and backwards, but can slide left and right and even spin like a tank!
The system is powerful enough for human riders, but currently has some issues carrying such a load at low speeds, making it a mostly unmanned vehicle for the time being. Steering is handled by a remote control unit while a GoPro camera setup provides a first-person view. An Arduino Nano is implemented on each of the hub motors to translate RC PWM signals into the proper driver format. The Nanos also control the forward/reverse/brake pin input on the motor drivers, making this unique board possible.
-
Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
-
-
It’s been 3 weeks since I started the Outreachy internship, I’ve done a lot but at the same time, I don’t think I’ve done anything.
In the first week, it was that week of setup machine, fighting with IRC to be able to send messages, sending some information necessary for Outreachy organizers. I also needed to configure my blog’s RSS Feed (yes, at a time when I was in doubt whether I wanted to work with backend or frontend, I decided to learn how to develop a blog) as I use Gatsby as the base of the blog, it was relatively easy to configure the RSS (Hooray!! One thing worked \o/)
-
The wildly successful Blender 3D open-source modeling software has been working hard towards its Blender 3.0 release but will likely now be proactively delayed to allow developers more time to relax with COVID-19 lockdowns/restrictions loosening, the possibility of developer meetups pre-3.0, and letting more changes flow into this big feature release.
-
Web Browsers
-
Chromium
-
Want to switch away from Google? But, looking for something potentially better than Google Chrome (and similar) for your Linux system?
Fortunately, there are multiple Google Chrome alternatives that you can try.
Each of them brings something interesting to the table, while also keeping the fantastic compatibility Chrome is known for. Read on to find out more about these browsers.
-
SaaS/Back End/Databases
-
Metabase is a no- and low-code open-source (Libre) project that removes all hassle of getting insightful data from databases. It does a lot without having to deal with SQL code or even know any SQL to begin with.
It is built for anyone with basic technical skills, as well as data engineers and scientists. That makes it the right tool for marketeers, sales managers, project planners and marketing strategist.
Metabase helps user to learn from their data by asking meaningful questions which it translates into a complex SQL queries in the background.
Currently, we are using it to work with several databases, and we recommend it to some of our clients.
-
Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
-
In fact, there are two free versions: one for Classic MacOS, made freeware when WordPerfect discontinued Mac support, and a native Linux version, for which Corel offered a free, fully-working, demo version.
But there is a catch – of course: they’re both very old and hard to run on a modern computer. I’m here to tell you how to get them and how to install and run them.
-
The last time that I compiled LibreOffice (LO) in OpenEmbedded (OE) was in the Pyro-series. My port of OE back then is still on github, search for “oe-qky-src’.
-
Next week, Hossein Nourikhah will join the team at The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice, as Developer Community Architect. Hossein is a developer, university lecturer and FOSS advocate. He writes programs, teaches programming to students, and is an advocate for the use of free software applications, because they have a huge positive impact on the quality of our life by providing the essential freedoms that we all deserve.
Hossein has a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering (Software) from Isfahan University of Technology, and a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Information Technology from Amirkabir University of Technology, also called the Tehran Polytechnic. Since 2016 he has been an instructor at the Amirkabir University of Technology, teaching various courses including C/C++ programming, operating systems, software design, and many others.
Hossein started programming in BASIC and Pascal when he was 12, and after two and a half decades he is still involved in programming for fun and profit. He has worked with several programming languages, including C/C++, Java, Pascal, PHP and many more.
-
FSF
-
The GNU C Library (glibc) and GNU Portability Library (gnulib) are laying the groundwork to divorce themselves from the troubled Free Software Foundation by removing the requirement for copyright assignment.
This move follows in the footsteps of the same shift by the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) on 2 June.
Like many projects under the GNU umbrella, glibc and gnulib – the GNU Project’s C standard library and a collection of subroutines designed to ease cross-platform porting respectively – allow anyone to contribute code. Those doing so are asked to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation – for now, at least.
-
Hello! My name is Panos Alevropoulos. I was born in and live in Thessaloniki, Greece, and I am a law student at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. This is my introductory post in the course of my internship at the Free Software Foundation. Specifically, I will work remotely with the campaigns and licensing teams, contributing to areas that could benefit from someone with legal experience. The campaign I will focus on most is End Software Patents, a legal topic that I find particularly fascinating, and which I hope to delve into. In this short article, I would like to briefly recount how I came to know about free software.
In general, I have had a great interest in technology since I was a young child. I started using a computer at the age of about four (an old Mac), and then my father bought me my first personal computer when I was seven (a Windows XP system). From a very early age, I became familiar with the logic of computers, and felt the need to adapt my system to my liking (for example, I wanted the word “start” in Windows XP to be changed to spell my name — I managed to do it by tweaking the Windows Registry). For many years, I used Windows, but slowly I realized that I was using a very closed system. The ability to configure Windows seemed to be minimal to none; when I encountered a technical problem, the information available to solve it was laconic and inadequate. Then, if I wanted to research a particular technical aspect on the Internet, I only came across Windows support sites, with bland and vague answers that not even the most familiar Windows user would understand. I could not provide any answer as to why the world’s most widespread operating system felt like a black box. However, for many years, I truly believed that there was no alternative.
-
Programming/Development
-
Cutelyst, the C++/Qt web framework just got a new major release.
Under the hood it now has both Qt5 and Qt6 support, but because of this a few things had to be changed, the most important one was QMap usage as a multi-key container had to be changed to QMultiMap, if you used ParamsMultiMap types or auto when assigning there’s probably little to do, one major exception is that if you still use Grantlee it might not work well, but Cutelee is there with fixes and is almost ported to Qt6.
-
The justices threw out a lower court ruling that had barred LinkedIn from denying hiQ access to the information that LinkedIn members had made publicly available.
At issue is whether companies can use a federal anti-hacking law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits accessing a computer without authorization, to block competitors from harvesting or “scraping” vast amounts of customer data from public-facing parts of a website.
The justices sent the dispute back to the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider in light of their June 4 ruling that limited the type of conduct that can be criminally prosecuted under the same law. In that case, the justices found that a person cannot be guilty of violating that law if they misuse information on a computer that they have permission to access.
-
Recently, I nearly create ProgressUI – tool to setup triggers (condition/action pair) related to task of programs. Currently It’s very simple, because it supports only one kind of action – running external program. User must also type program name and parameters. In future, we would read .desktop files and allow to select from dropdown list (for example). Also, I will add possibility to invoke DBus method and allow to define method name/path/etc. in special files, so user could also select method. Also, I must enhance my set of tools in other ways – for example allowing to send watch fd to daemon, so It could report exit code of application.
-
One of my favorite command line utilities is “awk” which is a text-processing program. It is mostly used for pattern scanning and processing. In this video, I will give examples of some of the basic awk commands, and show you some of the ways that I often use awk.
-
The GNU C Library (Glibc) saw another batch of Year 2038 “Y2038″ preparations on Tuesday for the Unix timestamp for when the time since 1 January 1970 can no longer be stored in a signed 32-bit integer.
There were several Y2038 patches to be merged to Glibc in the past day but ultimately the main highlight is support for 64-bit time with the legacy ABIs.
-
Going along with a number of other recent WebAssembly interpreter/run-time releases, Wasmer 2.0 has been released as this popular WebAssembly WASI and EmScripten run-time.
Following the recent RC, Wasmer 2.0 is now officially available. Wasmer 2.0 is quite exciting on the performance front with more optimal float handling with LLVM leading “up to +50% faster runtime speeds!” and usage of their Cranelift back-end providing another “+40% faster runtime speed.” These big items plus other smaller enhancements make the Wasmer 2.0 run-time all the more exciting and performant.
-
Portals are a mechanism through which applications can interact with the host environment from within a sandbox. They give the ability to interact with data, files, and services without the need to add sandbox permissions.
Examples of capabilities that can be accessed through portals include opening files through a file chooser dialog, or printing. More information about portals can be found in Sandbox Permissions.
Some portals, such as the FileChooser one, provide an almost seamless experience without much extra code on the app side. For other portals, you usually need some code to talk to the portal’s DBus interface or use libportal.
Vala was designed specifically for the development of GNOME apps, and it has some nice syntax-sugar that makes the communication with DBus pretty simple to implement.
-
Python
-
The logging module in Python has five different log levels as standard, which can be used depending on the type and severity of the program error.
-
Python is a general-purpose programming language, which emphasizes making programming easy, efficient coding, and unleashes the user’s potential. Loops are the vital part of programming as it allows the user to repetitive use a set of codes using loops. So in the following article, we will see how to use for loops in python.
-
Rust
-
-
Yes, it’s the one-hundrerth anniversary of Ray’s birth, but the Indians are not celebrating the occasion very enthusiastically. The director, who was born in 1921 and who died in 1992 at the age of 70, belongs in large part to an India that Indians want to believe no longer exists. Call it a world of poverty where men, women and children go barefoot, live in what might be described as “hovels,” and subsist on a meager diet of rice. They eat with their hands, not knives, forks and spoons.
I spent two weeks in and around New Delhi a couple of years ago, breathed the terribly polluted air, spent hours stuck in traffic and saw mile after mile of Indians living in cardboard shacks along the sides of roads. I also visited modern Hindu and Moslem universities, met students who spoke English with a British accent and called me “sir” at every possible opportunity, a legacy I assumed of the British Empire and its insistence on hierarchy.
-
The Olympic Games are in the midst of their biggest crisis in decades. With more than 80 percent of the population in Japan in staunch opposition to this summer’s Tokyo Olympics and the winter Games arriving in less than eight months in China, an indisputable human rights violator in plain sight, you’d think the International Olympic C0mmittee might slow down and engage in a little introspection
-
Dedicated to my mother, Janet Cyril; my wife, Alana Devich-Cyril, my aunts Sandy and Marion, my godsister Kafi, my Uncle Tony, my cousins Javana, Njuzi, and BJ; my friends Margo, Sia, Art, Yulanda, Elandria, Lana, Rahwa; and all those lost but here, unnamed.
-
Just as globalization moved jobs first to the US South and then to Southeast Asia, the Far East, and Mexico, never to return, I fear that any hope for peace or movement toward peace and funding domestic needs are relics of the past also never destined to return.
Nuclear weapons are refurbished and modernized and US weapons pour into the tinder box of the Middle East. Biden is the consummate cold warrior and is no better than Trump when the light of day shines on the US military budget, up $10 billion from FY2021 at $705 billion to FY2022 at $715 billion. And it’s anybody’s guess how much money goes to secret operations around the world carried out by the CIA and other agencies? It’s mind- boggling!
-
The ostensible rationale for allowing PE partners to pay a lower tax rate on their carried interest is that these payments involve risk. If the funds don’t meet some threshold rate of return, then they don’t earn any money.
The New York Times had a major piece on tax avoidance and evasion by private equity partners, which gave this rationale. However, the piece neglected to point out that millions of workers take this sort of risk, since they get paid, in large part, on commission. This list would include realtors, car salespeople, and waiters and waitresses. In all of these cases, the money earned as a commission is taxed as normal income. It is only PE partners, or hedge fund and venture capital partners, that get to pay a lower tax rate.
-
Science
-
Quick introduction to git internals for people who are not scared by words like Directed Acyclic Graph.
-
Before deconstructing their argument, it’s helpful to understand the political and ideological prism through which the Harvard-MIT team views this issue in particular, and science in general. Neither Boulicault nor Richardson is a scientist. Both are philosophers, who openly proclaim their fealty to feminist scholarship—the focus of the GenderSci Lab, a cooperative started by Richardson in 2018.
-
“If, for example, pesticides seep into the ground and then penetrate further into the groundwater, one would like to know how long they remain there and when the groundwater reservoir was replaced with new water”, says Pfister.
-
Hardware
-
I have a 2013 model used car that I bought two years ago. It came with a 7 inch touch screen infotainment system on its dash board with features like navigation, Bluetooth phone connectivity and a good FM AM radio. Except the radio I rarely use navigation or Bluetooth phone sync. After couple of months the touch started to become non-responsive. Since all important things such as call termination, mute and volume control have physical switches, I was happy with it.
During a periodic car check up on a local workshop, mechanic pulled battery terminals making the infotainment system locked. Now it ask for 4 digit pass code. Its one of their ant-theft mechanism and in order to enter those digits you need a touch responsive screen. So now I am completed locked out.
I visited service center of this car to get it changed, turns out they don’t repair it and only change by the unit. And will cost me Rs 50,000. Considering my usage is restricted to radio. That price is way too much.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
-
A leading consumer advocacy group on Wednesday demanded the immediate resignation or removal of the acting head of the Food and Drug Administration as well as other U.S. government officials involved in the recent approval of Biogen’s aducanumab, a purported Alzheimer’s treatment whose effectiveness has been widely questioned by independent experts.
“This decision is a disastrous blow to the agency’s credibility, public health, and the financial sustainability of the Medicare program.”—Dr. Michael Carome, Public Citizen
-
Fifty years ago this month, on June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “full scale attack” on drug use. It was the beginning of the War on Drugs.
-
Echoing earlier demands from progressive groups and lawmakers, over 100 labor unions and their allies on Wednesday called on the Biden administration and Democratic congressional leaders to include expanded Medicare eligibility and prescription drug pricing reform in the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, part of President Joe Biden’s three-part Build Back Better economic and infrastructure proposal.
“The Biden administration and Congress have a chance to deliver important progress at a crucial time.”—Dan Bauer, CWA
-
The Delta variant of the coronavirus, first detected in India, has now spread to at least 74 countries, according to reports aggregated by the World Health Organization, threatening a massive resurgence of the pandemic as reopenings worldwide continue apace.
The variant was first sampled last October, and is most likely responsible for the 35-fold increase in cases reported in India from February to May, reaching a peak of more than 390,000 cases each day, with a corresponding 45-fold increase in daily deaths, topping out at 4,500 reported fatalities. To date, India has suffered 29.6 million known coronavirus cases and at least 377,000 officially counted deaths, a number widely understood to be far lower than the actual death toll.
-
Integrity/Availability
-
Proprietary
-
Last month we highlighted what seemed like a fairly silly Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing that banning cryptocurrency was the best way to stop ransomware, in response (mainly) to the well publicized ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, which resulted in the company shutting down the flow of oil while it sorted things out. As we pointed out, not only was the idea of banning cryptocurrency unworkable, it was unlikely to do much to stop ransomware. Unfortunately, it appears that a number of other cryptocurrency haters jumped on this moment to push the idea even further, claiming that “society has a Bitcoin problem.”
-
An organisation whose network was infected by Ryuk ransomware has spent $8.1m over seven months recovering from it – and that’s still not the end of it, according to US news reports.
The sum, spent by Baltimore County Public Schools, will doubtless raise some eyebrows and the public breakdown of the costs will be eye-opening for the infosec industry and potential corporate ransomware victims alike.
A spreadsheet obtained by Fox 45 News Baltimore, a TV station, revealed the $8.1m spending and also broke it down into individual line items.
-
And to the second point, it gets more complicated with S3 Glacier Deep Archive, because I’m used to some operations taking 12 hours or longer, so I got lazy and didn’t double-check on the delete operations.
-
Such activity represents the handiwork of a new breed of bank robber. Forget the hold-ups of yore. Today’s smartest [crackers] are likely to be backed by rogue states, such as North Korea and, to a lesser extent, Iran, or tolerated by countries such as Russia and China. They benefit from unprecedented resources and protection from law-enforcement agencies. As well as attempting to empty accounts, they also target data for insider trading.
As one of the first industries to offer online transactions, banks have been fending off [crackers] since the dawn of the [Internet]. They spend more on cyber-security than any other sort of firm—$2,691 per employee—and manage to foil a lot of the attempted thefts. Nonetheless, since 2016, no industry has suffered more from attacks than banks (see chart).
-
Security
-
Authorities in Ukraine this week charged six people alleged to be part of the CLOP ransomware group, a cybercriminal gang said to have extorted more than half a billion dollars from victims. Some of CLOP’s victims this year alone include Stanford University Medical School, the University of California, and University of Maryland.
-
Security updates have been issued by Debian (prosody, python-urllib3, and xen), Fedora (dino, dotnet3.1, dotnet5.0, and vmaf), Oracle (gupnp, kernel, and kernel-container), Red Hat (gupnp), Scientific Linux (kernel), SUSE (java-1_8_0-openjdk, kernel, snakeyaml, and xorg-x11-libX11), and Ubuntu (bluez).
-
Microsoft Teams exploit exposed sensitive files, emails and chat logs
-
Privacy/Surveillance
-
FBI Director Chris Wray needs to shut the fuck up about encryption.
-
Confidentiality
-
Cybersecurity researchers in Europe say they have discovered a flaw in an encryption algorithm used by cellphones that may have allowed attackers to eavesdrop on some data traffic for more than two decades.
In a paper published Wednesday, researchers from Germany, France and Norway said the flaw affects the GPRS – or 2G – mobile data standard.
-
Researchers discovered a flaw in a 2G mobile encryption algorithm that leaves cellphones vulnerable to attackers.
-
The vulnerability in the GEA-1 algorithm is unlikely to have been an accident, the researchers said. Instead, it was probably created intentionally to provide law enforcement agencies with a “backdoor” and comply with laws restricting the export of strong encryption tools.
-
Defence/Aggression
-
Just hours after far-right marchers chanted “Death to Arabs!” during a demonstration in the streets of Jerusalem, Israeli war planes bombarded the occupied Gaza Strip early Wednesday morning in the first series of airstrikes launched by the new government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a former IDF officer who once boasted that he has “killed a lot of Arabs.”
“This is a genocidal chant. Let’s call it what it is.”—U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman
-
-
Advocates for more a more humane U.S. foreign policy are urging President Joe Biden to embrace Rep. Jim McGovern’s call for an end to “all secondary and sectoral sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the Trump administration.”
“If something is a war crime when people are shooting and dropping bombs, it is an equally serious crime when there is technically no war taking place.”—Mark Weisbrot, CEPR
-
Just ahead of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announcing a vote on repealing the Iraq war authorization later this year, the White House this week declared its support for legislation to end the 2002 measure—a development welcomed by Democratic lawmakers and progressive groups that have demanded an end to “endless wars.”
At issue is Rep. Barbara Lee’s (D-Calif.) H.R. 256, which would repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 that passed in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The repeal measure—whose supporters now include even right-wing groups like Americans for Prosperity—has 134 bipartisan co-sponsors. The House is set to vote on the bill Thursday.
-
The following was published as part of The Dissenter Newsletter, a project of Shadowproof. Become a subscriber here.
When the United States government had drone whistleblower Daniel Hale arrested and the judge revoked his bail, they deprived him of the ability to tie up loose ends and prepare for incarceration before his sentencing in July.
-
Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin meet Wednesday for a summit that will discuss strategic stability, which includes nuclear weapons. The summit takes place in Geneva, the international city renowned for advancing peace and disarmament, and will be held between two individuals who control 90% of the world’s nuclear arsenals.
-
-
Anti-nuke campaigners around the world expressed frustration on Wednesday after U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Geneva and released a joint statement but did not commit to cut down their nations’ nuclear arsenals—let alone full disarmament.
“Following the Geneva summit, Presidents Putin and Biden have made no further commitments to reduce their nuclear arsenals in line with the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and global opinion,” said Beatrice Fihn, executive director of International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
-
President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin are meeting in Geneva for a closely watched summit between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. Topics expected to be discussed include nuclear arms, cybersecurity, Syria, the Iranian nuclear deal, Afghanistan, Ukraine, the Korean Peninsula, Putin’s crackdown on dissent inside Russia and the U.S. military presence near the Russian border. The two world leaders are coming to the summit with fundamentally different goals, says Russian American journalist and writer Masha Gessen. Putin “accomplishes what he has come to Geneva for by simply having the summit,” Gessen says. “Biden is concerned … with finding areas of common interest, and he is alone in that. He is alone in actually trying to negotiate in good faith.” Gessen also discusses the ongoing imprisonment of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, Russia’s low vaccination rate and their own experience with COVID-19.
-
On Tuesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held its second hearing on “Unexplained Delays and Unanswered Questions” regarding former President Donald Trump’s attempted coup on January 6. The hearing featured stunning revelations related to the refusal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to issue an intelligence bulletin or threat assessment prior to January 6, despite having received detailed reports on plans for violence at the Capitol from the social media company Parler.
In addition to taking testimony from FBI Director Christopher Wray, the committee questioned two top generals who, in the midst of the violent attack on Congress, ignored multiple appeals from besieged lawmakers, as well as then-D.C. National Guard Commander William Walker and then-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, for authorization to deploy National Guard forces to clear the mob from the Capitol.
-
As my friends and I have noticed, President Joe Biden remains super-glued to the same old post–World War II agreement between the two major parties: They can differ vastly on domestic policies, but they remain united when it comes to projecting US military power around the world and to the government spending that sustains it. In other words, the US “national security” budget is still the third rail of politics in this country.
-
According to the United Nations’ Mali mission, MINUSMA, the armed men were suspected of belonging to EIGS.
-
Transparency/Investigative Reporting
-
On a clear day in May 2019, the tourist season was just starting up in Ketchikan, Alaska, a southeastern city of 8,000 that had become a cruise ship hot spot. For Randy Sullivan, that meant another day — his fifth in a row — of flying sightseeing tours and charters.
Sullivan and his wife, Julie, owned Mountain Air Service, a single-plane family business that had allowed Randy to realize his dream of becoming his own boss. Randy was born and raised in Alaska. He grew up in Ketchikan and had been flying in the area for more than 17 years. He, more than most, knew the dangers of commercial aviation in the state.
-
Even though much of Alaska has uncongested airspace, in recent years it has seen a series of midair collisions involving commercial operators.
In the past five years alone, there have been five such fatal collisions. There haven’t been any in the rest of the U.S. since 2009. (There was one fatal midair collision involving a for-hire sightseeing plane in Idaho last year, but it flew under the Federal Aviation Administration’s regulations typically meant for private aircraft.)
-
A KUCB and ProPublica analysis has found that in recent years, Alaska has accounted for a growing share of the country’s fatalities from crashes involving small commercial aircraft.
Since 2016, 42% of the country’s deaths in these crashes occurred in Alaska, up from 26% in the early 2000s. And in recent years, the state has seen a series of midair collisions involving commercial flights, a type of crash that has largely been eliminated in the rest of the country thanks to greater oversight by the federal government and advances in technology.
-
This week marks 50 years since the publication in the New York Times of the Pentagon Papers, which played a significant role in galvanizing popular opposition to the Vietnam War. The manner in which the Times itself chose to commemorate the anniversary provides a case study in the profound shift to the right by the media and the entire political establishment in the intervening five decades.
Nowhere is this shift expressed more nakedly than in the newspaper’s stony silence on the case of the imprisoned WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange, whose persecution by the US and British governments pose the issue of basic democratic rights to free speech and a free press even more sharply than the events of 50 years ago.
-
Environment
-
Trash interceptors are becoming more common in large cities, helping to stop garbage as it floats down waterways. Mr. Trash Wheel is the pride of Baltimore, helping to make a cleaner, more beautiful city waterfront.
-
With states across the southern and western United States facing record high temperatures weeks before the hottest months of the year, scientists and progressive lawmakers on Wednesday doubled down on calls for green infrastructure to ensure the nation is prepared for increasing levels of extreme weather on a rapidly warming planet.
For the second time in four months, state regulators in Texas on Monday warned residents that the demand for energy was straining the state’s power grid, asking millions to set their thermostats to 78 degrees or higher, turn off lights, and avoid washing clothes and cooking.
-
The Senate recently demonstrated that the only adhesive capable of uniting the two parties is a good, old-fashioned enemy. Although the Democrats and Republicans continue to bicker over the Biden administration’s infrastructure legislation, they achieved rare accord in passing a major technology bill that directs investment into key sectors of the economy.
-
The atmospheric scientist that led a major year-long Arctic research expedition said Tuesday that the world may have already hit one of the so-called climate “tipping points.”
“The disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is one of the first landmines in this minefield, one of the tipping points that we set off first when we push warming too far,” said Markus Rex of the Alfred Wegener Institute, reports Agence France-Presse.
-
-
Stormier seas and more frequent floods can cause havoc anywhere. The Danish financial system is now growing apprehensive.
-
-
Energy
-
-
A Trump-appointed federal judge on Tuesday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a temporary pause on new leases for oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters, a decision the Interior Department said it “will comply with” amid warnings about the order’s potentially destructive climate impact.
“This is a deeply dangerous order that heightens the imperative for bold, urgent climate action on our public lands and ocean.”—Randi Spivak, Center for Biological Diversity
-
Wildlife/Nature
-
My first encounter with this trend was with Frank Furedi’s sect in the early 90s that published a magazine called Living Marxism, better known as LM. (They still exist as Spiked today, long after dispensing with the idea that they are Marxist.) When I saw an LM article around that time denouncing Survival International as a group that sought to keep the Brazilian indigenous peoples “preserved in amber” like in the Museum of Natural History, I could not believe my eyes. The Yanomami were in danger of extinction as a result of mining and ranching excursions into their territory and these self-described Marxists were attacking the main group trying to protect them.
Furedi’s group in England was called the Revolutionary Communist Party that shared a name with Bob Avakian’s cult in the USA but little else politically except their belief that the left should not believe in the “noble savage”. In a debate with leaders of the American Indian Movement in 1980, Avakian’s spokesman referred to the “second harvest”, a practice from around 7,000 years ago when some indigenous peoples stored dried feces so that in the event of a famine, they could extract undigested seeds and other products for food. In other words, Indians ate shit.
-
Finance
-
The growing concentration of wealth in fewer hands—including among corporate robber barons’ descendants who continue, after multiple generations, to wield the “financial, political, and philanthropic clout” afforded by enormous inheritances to “advance their dynasty-building agenda”—intensifies working-class suffering in the U.S. and poses a threat to society and democracy.
“By 2020, the 50 families had amassed $1.2 trillion in assets. By comparison, the bottom half of all U.S. households—an estimated 65 million families—shared a combined total wealth of just twice that, at $2.5 trillion.”—IPS
-
Ending enhanced unemployment benefits has become the signature economic agenda for the GOP, a party with little else to promote. Unfortunately the largely low- key response of the President on this issue has been disappointing. The failure to mount a vigorous defense of these benefits is bad ethics, bad policy, and bad politics. As for ethics, let us assume for the minute that some workers lie around idle at home while enjoying the extra $300 from the government. Should economic leaders cut off any additional assistance to all workers who currently cannot find any job at all, in order to incentivize the return to the workplace of the few who could?
-
-
While Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, “I have a dream,” it was full of lofty ethical stuff like “justice for all” and … well, it was so 1963.
-
Clean transportation supporters in Congress joined with environmental and labor advocates for a Wednesday rally to demand funding for high-speed rail, a call that was echoed in a new letter from five Democratic lawmakers amid ongoing infrastructure talks.
“High-speed rail connects communities. It brings people together. It’s the way of the future.”—Rep. Seth Moulton
-
Thanks to the wonders of global capitalism, globalisation, neoliberalism and adjacent ideologies, we live in a world where nearly half of humanity is forced to scrape by on less than $5.50 a day – roughly the price of a Big Mac in the USA. Worse, during the last 40 years – around the same time neoliberalism was introduced – the wealthiest 1% more than doubled their income, leaving the rest behind. Still worse, the global elite (1%) causes twice as much carbon as the bottom half of the world.
Just before the coronavirus pandemic started to bite, over three billion people did not have access to healthcare, 75% of all workers had no access to social protection like unemployment benefits and sick leave. Moreover, over 50% of all workers were part of the precariat and working poor in low and middle-income countries.
-
The leading candidate to take over the investigation relating to former President Donald Trump’s taxes paid virtually no federal income taxes in four of six recent years.
Tali Farhadian Weinstein, who is married to hedge fund manager Boaz Weinstein, is running for Manhattan district attorney in the Democratic primary, in which early voting has already begun. She and her husband reported income as high as $107 million in 2011, and she recently donated $8.2 million to her campaign — more than her seven Democratic rivals have raised in total.
-
Now if you want to get a little bit more in-depth, the Dogecoin code is based on Luckycoin, which is derived from Litecoin. It was used as a randomized reward for block mining, and it was changed to a static reward in March of 2014. Dogecoin uses Litecoin’s scrypt technology and is a proof-of-work coin.
Scrypt is a password-based key derivation function that was created by Colin Percival and was for the Tarsnap online backup service. The algorithm was designed with the intention of making it costly to perform large-scale custom hardware attacks, where they required a large amount of memory to efficiently execute.
-
-
AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
-
During his four years in office, former President Donald Trump reshaped the courts, successfully pushing through a record number of young, deeply conservative judges to fill lifetime positions throughout the country. He left the White House having appointed 234 judges to the federal bench, including 54 appellate judges and a third of the Supreme Court—a legacy that will shape the country for decades to come. Now, Democrats are prioritizing their judicial confirmation effort, confident that they can work faster than they did in the Obama era, while making good on President Joe Biden’s promise to diversify the courts.
-
Never let contradiction get in the way of such a united front. Babbling about liberal democratic values matters little when it comes to crusty realpolitik. The UK and the US continue to supply armaments to their favourite theocracy, Saudi Arabia, even as they take issue with Russia and Chinese actions they deem aggressive, cruel or authoritarian. Germany’s position on dealing with Russia remains distinct within the grouping, not least on the issue of energy politics and the Nord Stream 2 gas project. Nor does the G7 necessarily share the same attitude in dealing with China, each having had its slant in coping with Beijing’s actions in recent years.
The China Syndrome has produced some form of united response at the summit. Welcome, then, to the Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative. This will entail, according to a White House factsheet, “a values-driven, high-standard, and transparent infrastructure partnership led by the major democracies to help narrow the $40+ trillion infrastructure need in the developing world, which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.” The initiative will also involve “the G7 and other like-minded partners” coordinating and mobilising “private-sector capital in four areas of focus – climate, health and health security, digital technology, and gender equity and equality – with catalytic investments from our respective development finance institutions.”
-
To contest the global criticism of its policies inside and outside the country, China appeals to sovereignty. At various international organizations, including the U.N. Security Council and the U.N. Human Rights Council, China summons sovereignty and the related concepts of “territorial integrity,” “political independence,” “sovereign equality,” and non-interference “in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” These are indeed the fundamental principles of the 1945 U.N. Charter, a global treaty now ratified by 193 nations.
As a matter of legal rhetoric, China is the chief proponent of sovereignty in international affairs. However, China is most vociferous about non-interference when the human rights organizations and U.N. special rapporteurs point out systematic human rights violations of ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. In addition to contesting the “truth” of allegations, China makes the legal argument that the world has no lawful basis to investigate what China does within its sovereign borders.
-
New York state Senator Alessandra Biaggi recently said something that so completely encapsulated American patriarchy at this moment, it should be tattooed on every woman’s exhausted face: “We’ve got to move on past talking about the bad behavior of below-average men.”
-
Media coverage has focused on the fading fortunes of former presidential candidate and tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang, the dearth of progressives in a wide field and the new, confusing ranked-choice voting scheme. (I have a lot of doubts about ranked-choice voting, which I will enumerate in this space at another time.)
A New Yorker by choice most of my life and, unlike Yang, a guy who moved back to the city during the COVID-19 pandemic while others were running for the exurbs, I’ve been thinking a lot about what the next mayor should prioritize and what I would do if I were in charge of the city. Most of my readers don’t live in New York. But most do live in urban areas. Many who live in rural regions work and shop in cities. So New York’s problems are your problems too.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Ohio congressional candidate Nina Turner said Wednesday that “the establishment is doing everything they can to stop our movement” shortly after erstwhile Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton publicly threw her support behind Shontel Brown, the leader of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party and Turner’s biggest competitor in the race to fill the vacant U.S. House seat in the Buckeye State’s 11th district.
“I’m not taking any corporate PAC or lobbyist money.”—Nina Turner
-
A tumultuous Israeli parliament narrowly approved a government aiming at centrism Sunday, an unprecedented alliance that included an Arab party for the first time in Israel’s 73-year history that brought down the 12-year reign of a right-wing divisive prime minister.
“I’ll be back,” defeated former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset, in a line from the Terminator.
-
In 2013, as Middle East peace talks were set to resume after a five-year freeze, Bennett reportedly proclaimed to Israeli National Security Adviser Ya’akov Amidror, “I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there’s no problem with that.”
In 2014, Bennett, who had previously been the director of the Yesha Settlements Council, contradicted Netanyahu by asserting that all Jewish Israelis living in the West Bank, even those living in outposts that violate Israeli law, should remain under Israeli sovereignty, and called for more settlement construction. “This is the time to act,” he said. “We must continue building in all corners of the Land of Israel, with determination and without being confused. We are building and we will not stop.”
-
U.S. President Joe “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” Biden on Sunday boasted in England that “America is back at the table,” leading the charge against grave challenges like “China.”
Let’s take a look back at some facts of U.S.-American life that are escaping serious “free press” attention (imagine) during Joe Defender of the Status Quo Biden’s visits with the cartoon Queen of England and the ostensible heads of European states.
-
BoJo made the 210-mile journey from London to Cornwall by private plane, for which he was widely criticized on social media. Many thought it was a bit rich of him to travel by plane to a conference highlighting action on climate change (there are regular train services between London and the location of the summit).
BoJo has spent his life ignoring any measures or rules that could apply to him; these are for the little people, not His Eminence. So, it was the private plane and not a train. Trains are for plebs and tree huggers like Greta Thunberg and her ilk.
-
The new scholarship on comparative polarization is crucial in understanding this dynamic. In one sense, it offers a very depressing view: Given the current binary structure of American party politics, this conflict is mostly locked in. No level of social media regulation or media literacy or exhortation to civility is going to make much of a difference. But it also offers a kind of master key: If the structure of a party system is as crucial as these studies suggest it is, then the solution is obvious: The U.S. may want to change its voting system to become more proportional.
-
Many of the election officials surveyed blamed false information spread by social media for their problems — much of it making baseless claims of widespread voting fraud. According to the study, 78% of officials said social media made their jobs “more difficult,” while 54% percent said they believed social media made their job “more dangerous.”
-
-
Edelman PR and the Manufacturing of “Trust” [Ed: Microsoft propaganda firm, bribery instrument, and a source of entryism and infiltration operations (also inside LF)]
“We need to regain trust” is the theme of the year, according to remarks made by the World Economic Forum’s executive chairman Klaus Schwab in January 2021. But trust may be hard to engineer in an age of professional disinformation campaigns by governments, the mainstream media, and a handful of powerful elite public relations companies.
Edelman, an American public relations and marketing consultancy firm founded by Daniel J. Edelman in 1952, is the largest public relations firm in the world by revenue, and some would also say by reputation. Today, the company is run by Daniel Edelman’s son, Richard Edelman. It is a firm with a rich history of controversial efforts to completely change the narrative of some of the most contentious modern issues. It also boasts close ties to the World Economic Forum and the Forum’s attempt to engineer “trust” in its various agendas.
Edelman is often found representing organizations experiencing what could be best termed as public relations nightmare scenarios. Edelman, with its previous experience representing the American Petroleum Institute—the trade association for the oil and gas industry that lobbied for the Keystone XL pipeline and the fossil fuel exploration of the Canadian tar sands—is no stranger to advocating for companies stuck in atypical negative PR situations with little, if any, possible positive outcomes. If you are a giant corporation with a reputation to launder, then Edelman is the go-to professional firm to help your organization rebuild its image or to simply help mitigate as much reputational damage as possible.
Edelman has worked on behalf of some of the most powerful businesses in the corporate world, including Microsoft, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, Wal-Mart, and General Electric to name just a tiny fraction of their past and present clientele. The company is one of the largest PR firms in the world for a reason: it fights dirty, and in doing so it often uses imaginative, yet underhanded, methods of manufacturing public consent.
-
Censorship/Free Speech
-
Summary: The internet is the way that many new musical artists get discovered these days, with perhaps the most famous story being that of that of Justin Bieber on YouTube. Some of this came from finding undiscovered musicians who had talent, and some of it came from finding otherwise unsigned artists who had managed to build large followings themselves.
-
Ai’s Postcard for Political Prisoners was explicit in its aim to enlist support for Assange, under conditions in which days before the exhibition was to open Assange had just undergone a show trial in London, with the US government seeking his extradition on Espionage Act charges that could see him locked up forever with a 175 year prison sentence.
Ai said he was “honoured” by the rejection, which “gave a real meaning to my artwork.” He explained, “I think the reason is related to Assange who has been incarcerated in HM Prison Belmarsh in London since his arrest on 11 April 2019, and that they don’t want to touch on a topic like Assange.”
-
Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
-
“It’s a typical tactic which is used to extend the detention of prisoners after they have been granted bail, which is why the legal team specially requested to see the warrant of liberation before leaving the Magistrates Court,” Coltart said. “That request was denied, which is why when prison officials started claiming that there was an error on it late in the evening last night (Tuesday) again, the legal team requested to see the warrant of liberation. That request was again denied.”
-
Civil Rights/Policing
-
Immigrant rights advocates hailed the Wednesday reversal by U.S. Attorney Merrick Garland of a Trump-era rule denying asylum in the United States to victims of domestic or gang violence as a “critically important” step toward restoring the right of refuge to migrants fleeing countries where their lives are often in danger.
“This was the right move. We are thrilled for our client and for the many deserving individuals fleeing persecution who will have a fair chance to seek refuge in the United States.”—Karen Musalo, CGRS
-
Racism is not regional. I often hear people refer to it as though it were trapped in the South. White Northerners who are appalled by the blatant racism around them will say things like “This isn’t Mississippi” or “Take that attitude back to Alabama.” But whether white Northerners like to recognize it or not, slavery was in every colony in the United States for more than a century and a half. It was part of the fabric of America—all of America. After Charleston, South Carolina, New York City had the largest urban enslaved population; by the mid-18th century, one in five people in the city of New York was Black. It is important to note that the North was not the utopian refuge that public memory likes to romanticize it as. Prosperous Black communities in places like Philadelphia during the antebellum period were more the exception than the rule. And even the City of Brotherly Love experienced several major anti-Black riots in the 1830s and ’40s.
-
Most recently seen in public (via e-mail, anyway) hawking a conspiracy theory that Italian satellites stole the 2020 election for President Joe Biden, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows actually has a terrible new project: working with Stephen Miller on an effort called America First Legal, which should really be called Whites First Legal. On behalf of white Texans who run at least one of the 25 restaurants in the Lost Cajun chain, they recently succeeded in getting a federal judge to stop the Small Business Administration’s disbursement of restaurant Covid relief funds that prioritized businesses owned by women, veterans, and people of color, blocking money already approved for almost 3,000 struggling businesses.
-
-
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott became the latest Republican state leader to approve legislation aimed at controlling public school teachers’ ability to accurately teach U.S. history and discuss current events, signing a bill late Tuesday that bars educators from including “critical race theory” in their classroom work.
Under Senate Bill 2202, starting on September 1 public school teachers in Texas will be required to “give deference to both sides” when discussing current events like the racial justice uprising which began last spring following the police killing of George Floyd In Minneapolis.
-
This brief clip from an FBI training film helps explain the actions undertaken by agents during a raid on a secure storage facility earlier this year:
-
The following post was originally published at Ongoing History of Protest Music.Experimental musician and acclaimed spoken word artist Camae Ayewa had a prolific 2020 with the free jazz project Irreversible Entanglements and a few projects released under her spoken word alias Moor Mother. As Moor Mother, Ayewa released “Circuit City,” her punk-inspired “True Opera” album featuring producer Mental Jewelry, and her collaboration with rapper Billy Woods.“Zami’” is Moor Mother’s first release in 2021, and since announcing that she has signed to the record label ANTI-. The short but powerfully ominous tune gets its name from Audre Lorde’s 1982 book.According to Ayewa, “‘Zami’ speaks to a number of different themes. Using the lenses of Black Quantum Futurism, the lyrics speak to time and space, injustice, racism, erasure of African identity.”“‘Zami’ speaks of agency and something beyond freedom. It speaks of another future. It speaks about connections free from the stains of colonialism. It speaks about the expansive temporalities of Afro Diasporan people around the world,” Ayewa added.Black Quantum Futurism refers to the collective Ayewa co-founded with Rasheedah Phillips, dedicated to “a new approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future’s reality. “This vision and practice derives its facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics and Black/African cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space.”Through various artistic expressions, the collective seeks to “explore personal, cultural, familial, andcommunal cycles of experience, and solutions for transforming negative cycles into positive ones usingartistic and holistic methods of healing.”Listen to Moor Mother’s “Zami”:
-
The manager of a New York City Shake Shack restaurant said he was unlawfully detained by police and “taunted” after he was falsely accused last year of poisoning three officers’ milkshakes.
The manager, Marcus Gilliam, is now suing members of the New York Police Department, the City of New York, as well as the unions that represent police and detectives. Gilliam’s lawsuit is seeking damages for alleged defamation and deprivation.
-
Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
-
We noted how while the Biden broadband plan was arguably vague, a big part of its core focus was community broadband. In stark contrast to the Trump administration and GOP — which think such efforts should be banned — the Biden administration seems to recognize such efforts are a helpful and organic local response to market failure. While such efforts aren’t a mystical panacea, they’re a helpful way to both drive some needed regional broadband improvements to underserved areas, and force regional telecom monopolies to try just a little harder.
-
Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault and the government can undo the Speaker ruling by bringing back the null and void amendments for a vote, but the government, the Minister and the Liberal, NDP and Bloc Heritage committee MPs cannot undo their embarrassing conduct in which they sacrificed democratic principles for the sake of rushing through Bill C-10.
-
Municipalities have been attesting to the allure of symmetrical gigabit internet and voice-over internet protocol services to keeping businesses in cities across the United States.
Experts on a panel discussing municipal broadband on Tuesday discussed advanced technologies that have attracted businesses and, as a consequence, jobs to their cities.
-
Internet trailblazer Sir Tim Berners-Lee is auctioning off a link to his very early World Wide Web browser and server source code in the form of a non-fungible token.
Yup, another NFT. These are tokens that are embedded in a blockchain, and can be sold for millions and exchanged between traders. Buyers really aren’t getting much. Typically, the data they paid for isn’t actually stored in a blockchain, they just get a token, and the tokens include a link to the material they represent that anyone can see and access. It’s a receipt stored in an append-only database. You’re essentially bagging bragging rights for stuff that’s public.
And in the case of Sir Tim’s code, it’s definitely public: you can find at least his earliest WWW browser code here for free, web server code here for free, and the first website he crafted at CERN recreated here for free.
-
Monopolies
-
As the keynote speaker of a Concurrences webinar held today (and ongoing as I write this post), former Antitrust Assistant Attorney General–and now UPenn professor–Makan Delrahim gave an impassioned speech. He’s trying to dissuade his successor, who (as Mr. Delrahim noted) has yet to be named almost eight years after the elections, from undoing his patentee-friendly policies.
[...]
In today’s webinar speech, Mr. Delrahim mostly focused on access to injunctive relief over SEPs, but he twice referenced the Ninth Circuit’s FTC v. Qualcomm decision, in which case Qualcomm’s refusal to grant exhaustive SEP licenses to chipset makers played a key role. The former U.S. antitrust chief also lauded a couple of European high-court rulings: the UK Supreme Court’s Unwired Planet v. Huawei and the German Federal Court of Justice’s Sisvel v. Haier opinions.
Mr. Delrahim’s position is that the “ability to exclude” is a key “incentive” for filing for patents, and this right should not be limited except by the legislature. He does say–as he could hardly claim the opposite–that FRAND commitments should be enforced under contract law. That works in the U.S., which recognizes third-party beneficiaries’ rights, but in some jurisdictions it would not even be an option. Judge Hoffmann noted toward the end of today’s webinar that in Germany the courts have no problem applying the antitrust laws to a duty to extend licenses, and Germany’s seminal Orange-Book-Standard case involved a de facto standard without a FRAND commitment. Microsoft v. Motorola Mobility is an example Mr. Delrahim mentioned for the enforcement of contractual rights. But violations of a FRAND pledge “do not somehow conjure up an antitrust violation,” said Mr. Delrahim. He went on to stress that a breach of a FRAND contract “should NEVER be a violation of the antitrust laws.” And this line of thought culminated in the view that “using antitrust law with its triple damages and hammers in [his] view is a misuse.”
-
Patents
-
There is a lot of sturm and drang in the halls of government these days about corporate mergers – or, at least, tech company mergers (oddly, this ire doesn’t seem to necessarily extend to all mergers). But despite all the gnashing and wailing there’s not a lot of understanding of why they happen. Which is strange, because if you think there’s a problem, it would help to understand WHY there is a problem, because that understanding will give clues on how to fix it.
-
Trademarks
-
U.S. pop star Miley Cyrus has won the right to use her name as a trademark on a wide range of products in the European Union, after Europe’s top court on Wednesday annulled a decision by the EU patent office to limit the scope of her brand.
The case dates to 2014 when the 28-year-old “Wrecking Ball” singer’s company Smiley Miley Inc. sought to trade mark MILEY CYRUS with the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) for audio and video discs, mobile phone cases, e-books, electronic board games, calendars and other goods.
-
Copyrights
-
Game developer Bungie has filed a lawsuit against cheat seller AimJunkies.com for offering the popular ‘Destiny 2 Hacks’ suite for sale. The complaint, filed at a federal court in Seattle, also targets the alleged maker of the cheats. All defendants stand accused of various forms of copyright and trademark infringement.
-
A 50-year-old man was handed a four-month prison sentence this week for his involvement with the Danish torrent trackers Asgaard and NordicBits. The man, who is seen as one of the ringleaders behind the now-defunct sites, helped to arrange servers and provided customer service, among other things. The Danish prosecution, meanwhile, warns that users of these sites can be targeted too.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, FSF, GNOME, GNU/Linux, IBM, Microsoft, Windows at 5:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: The media is full of Microsoft fluff and technical blog posts still focus on the Freenode fiasco, among other things that don’t matter all that much; but we certainly need to talk about steps undertaken to undermine the FSF’s power because long-term ramifications may be huge
THIS past week, especially the past few days, may have seemed rather turbulent. Microsoft has resorted to vapourware (they really could use a distraction from all the scandals, which extend to and include Bill Gates) and many projects that rely on IRC are (or were) still on Freenode, so there’s a big debate about what happened and what to do next.
“It’s about giving more control to monopolies.”Sadly, I worry that many people lost sight of what GNU C Library (glibc) and GNU Portability Library (gnulib) are doing — a subject we covered here before. There are efforts to weaken the FSF, in effect giving more control (over GNU projects) to companies such as IBM. We’re talking about this at this very moment in IRC. There’s a lot at stake because licensing and copyright assignments are a very big deal from a legal perspective. As somebody put it this week, “MsPL has a clause added specifically and only to make it incompatible with the GPL and related licenses.” It’s about giving more control to monopolies. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The laughable state of the EPO‘s EBA (or EBoA) is rarely commented on anymore, not even in so-called ‘IP’ blogs; maybe they’re just so eager to see patents on everything, even European software patents, so tyrants [1, 2] who destroy the courts (with UPC lobbying and removal of EBA independence) don’t bother them so much anymore
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 4:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: Opponents of European software patents are clearly being mischaracterised by EPO officials, who also use meaningless buzzwords to promote such patents; as an aside or footnote that relates to our ongoing series we’re making this quick video, which is days late
Due complete catastrophes associated with IRC, notably Freenode, we didn’t make any videos yesterday and the day before that. We lost a ton of time (and sleep) over the urgent need to set up contingencies and regain control over the “new” Freenode. The new deployment has caught up with about 60 users who are still on it, but they don’t say much. IRC isn’t about the number of users and how much they talk, however, but how many say something and how many say something of value (to retain high s/n ratio).
“In the meantime, those wishing to join us in IRC are encouraged to come to irc.techrights.org (default port numbers).”In any event, this video is my personal view about recent parts of the EPO series about António Campinos ‘hatchets’ inside the Boards of Appeal and the Enlarged Board of Appeal’s hearings [1, 2, 3]. I have had a lot more to say, but we lost an incredible amount of time this week. We won’t be catching up fully any sooner than Monday.
Tomorrow we’ll continue with Virtual Injustice — Part 10. This series is by far our highest priority. Some time in the future we’ll write about Freenode and explain things never covered elsewhere (we have some exclusive inside knowledge).
In the meantime, those wishing to join us in IRC are encouraged to come to irc.techrights.org (default port numbers). This is the predictable network that won’t be scrapped overnight and/or become unavailable for a whole day. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 2:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Shovelling up lots of patents, even worthless patents such as software patents, dooms the EPO (EPC violations, lawlessness), dooms European professionals, but the wrong people have been put in charge and courts are being intimidated by them
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »
Content is available under CC-BY-SA