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Links 17/6/2021: Cutelyst 3 and Lenovo Move Towards ThinkPad BIOS Configuration From Within Linux



  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 910

        upgrading raspberry pi to buster, sd card imaging woes, apple replacement woes, food

      • FLOSS Weekly 634: Web Development with Wasp

        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.

      • Freenode Is Now Dead: Birth Of A New Freenode

        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

      • Continued collaboration with AMD brings powerful solutions to customers

        The Oracle Linux and Virtualization team congratulates AMD for the recently released AMD EPYCâ„¢ 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.

      • VirtIO-GPIO Guest Driver Updated For The Linux Kernel - Phoronix

        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.

      • Lenovo To Support Configuring ThinkPad BIOS From Within Linux - Phoronix

        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.

      • PSA: kernel 5.12.11 is safe for bcache, again

        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

        • KDE Goals Update – June 2021

          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!

        • Mike Blumenkrantz: Suballocate Me

          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.

        • Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Hits Another "Massively Improved Performance" Milestone - Phoronix

          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.

        • OpenGL over Vulkan driver Zink gets a huge performance boost

          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

      • [Old] Tarsnap Architecture

        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.

      • SSH with a SmartCard-HSM and EC keys

        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.

      • Joey Hess: typed pipes in every shell



        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.

      • Stephen Smoogen: Working with Raspberry PI4 systems



        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.

      • How to update the Discord app on Linux

        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!

      • How to install Veloren on a Chromebook

        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.

      • How to Set Up Razer Devices on Linux for Lighting Effects

        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.

      • How To Install and Configure Drupal on Fedora 34/33 – TecAdmin

        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.

      • How to deliver decision services with Kogito | Red Hat Developer

        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.

      • How to install htop on Almalinux or Rocky 8 - Linux Shout

        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.

      • How to install Gitlab on FreeBSD - Unixcop Unixcop

        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.

      • How to install Joomla 3.9 on Ubuntu 20.04

        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.

      • How to resize and growing disks in FreeBSD - Unixcop

        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.

      • yum/dnf Package Manager Basics

        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.

      • Copy A File To Multiple Directories In Command Line On Linux

        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.

      • Defining and distributing SELinux policies - Linux Concept

        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.

      • Install NVIDIA Drivers on Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint / LMDE [Manual Install] – If Not True Then False

        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.

      • The ultimate guide to EAPI 8

        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.

      • Linux package management with dnf | Opensource.com

        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.

      • Providing more security for Linux - Linux Concept

        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...

      • Editing files with the vi editor - Linux Concept

        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.

      • Different methods to create a text file - Linux Concept

        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.

      • Managing archives and compressed files - Linux Concept

        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.

      • Micro – A Command Line Based Text Editor for Linux

        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.

      • Recover Lost Space on a USB Flash Drive [Ed: Newly updated]
      • Set up a service mesh on Istio | Opensource.com

        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.

      • 13- BASH Scripting - Creating Bash Functions for shell script - LinuxTechLab

        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

      • Godot Engine - Godot Web progress report #8: Progressive Web Apps

        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 (soonâ„¢), 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)!

      • Return a wasteland to green glory in the upcoming Terra Nil | GamingOnLinux

        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.

      • BOY BEATS WORLD is an overlooked fun and quirky rhythm action adventure | GamingOnLinux

        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

      • Windows 11 Look "Inspired" by KDE Plasma and GNOME? We try to find out.

        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.

      • Dash to Panel GNOME Shell Extension Turns GNOME 40 Into KDE Plasma or Windows 10

        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.

    • Distributions

      • elementary OS 6 Beta 2 is the First Step to Have Flatpak Apps Out-of-the-box

        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

        • Linux Mint 20.2 Beta XFCE

          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.

        • Linux Mint 20.2 Beta MATE

          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.

        • Linux Mint 20.2 Beta Cinnamon

          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

        • SUSE Linux Enterprise / openSUSE Leap Pursuing x86_64-v2 Optimized Libraries - Phoronix

          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.

        • Survey For openSUSE Leap 15.3 Release Closes

          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

        • Red Hat Shares ― Kubernetes in depth

          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.

        • Shipwright: A framework for building container images on Kubernetes | Red Hat Developer

          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.

        • Stories from the amazing world of release-monitoring.org #11 – Fedora Community Blog

          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.

        • Learn more about your Linux system with inxi | Enable Sysadmin

          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.

        • Low-code and no-code tools: 4 considerations for CIOs | The Enterprisers Project

          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.

        • Linux sysadmins: 6 reasons you should write technical articles | Enable Sysadmin

          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.

        • Write for Fedora Magazine, please!

          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?

        • The State of Kubernetes Security

          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.

        • Old school lessons for modern architectures

          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.

        • Explore Red Hat's virtual training and certification options

          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.

        • Week 3 & 4 — Madeline Peck

          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!

        • Fedora Cloud 35 Approved To Use Btrfs By Default - Phoronix

          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.

        • Deploy self-hosted GitHub Actions runners for Red Hat OpenShift [Ed: Red Hat is not competing with Microsoft and proprietary software; instead it is embracing both]

          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.

        • IT metrics: 5 measurement mistakes to avoid

          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

        • FrostWire

          There is a new application available for Sparkers: FrostWire

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • Everyone struggles!

        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/)

      • Blender 3.0 Likely Delayed 2 Months For Post-Lockdown Breather, Cycles X Might Land - Phoronix

        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

          • Top 5 Chrome-like Browsers That Are Better Than Google Chrome in 2021

            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: The ultimate Swiss knife open-source for getting insightful answers from 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

        • Did you know that you can 100% legally get & run WordPerfect for free?

          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.

        • LibreOffice 7.1.2.2 compiled in OE

          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'.

        • Hossein Nourikhah joins the TDF team as Developer Community Architect

          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

        • Open-source projects glibc and gnulib look to sever copyright ties with Free Software Foundation

          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.

        • My internship at the FSF, and the domino effect of thoughts — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software

          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 3 is out! – Dantti's Blog

          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.

        • U.S. Supreme Court sends LinkedIn data-scraping suit back to lower court

          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.

        • ProgressUI | nintyfan

          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.

        • Learning Awk Is Essential For Linux Users

          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.

        • GNU C Library Lands Year 2038 Handling For Legacy ABIs - Phoronix

          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.

        • Wasmer 2.0 Released With Significantly Faster Runtime Performance, Quicker Deserialization - Phoronix

          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.

        • Integrating sandboxed Vala apps with the host system through xdg-desktop-portals – Felipe Borges

          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

          • How to use the logging module in 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 For Loop (with Examples) – TecAdmin

            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

  • Leftovers

    • The World According to Satyajit Ray

      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 IOC Says the 2032 Olympics Are Coming to Brisbane

      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

    • Loss Runs Like a River Through My Life

      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.

    • The Streets Are Empty

      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!

    • What’s the Difference Between a Waitress and a Private Equity Partner? (Their Tax Rate)

      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

      • Git for Computer Scientists

        Quick introduction to git internals for people who are not scared by words like Directed Acyclic Graph.

      • The Sperm Count Culture War

        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.

      • What is "old" water? And what do researchers learn from the age of water?

        "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

      • Abhijith PA: Changing LCD screen of car infotainment system

        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

      • Pandemic Recovery Must Include Care Worker Protections
      • Watchdog Demands FDA Chief Resign Over 'Reckless' Approval of Biogen Alzheimer's Drug

        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

      • It's Time to End the War on Drugs Once and For All

        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.

      • Unions Demand Pelosi and Schumer Include Lower Medicare Age, Drug Pricing Reform in Infrastructure Plan

        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

      • Delta variant spreads to 74 countries as data suggests it will become dominant coronavirus mutation worldwide

        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

        • FBI's Recovery Of Colonial Pipeline Bitcoin Ransom Highlights How The 'Ban Crypto To Stop Ransomware' Cries Were Wrong Again

          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."

        • Ryuk ransomware recovery cost us $8.1m and counting, says Baltimore school authority [iophk: Windows TCO]

          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.

        • AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive - Difficulty deleting files with accents

          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.

        • The methods and menace of the new bank robbers [iophk: Windows TCO]

          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

    • Defence/Aggression

      • After Far-Right Marchers Chant 'Death to Arabs,' New Israeli Government Bombs Gaza

        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

      • Opinion | By Your Actions Ye Shall Be Known: Implacable Israel Again Bombs Gaza, Still Shattered By Its Last Atrocities
      • Biden Urged to Embrace Top Democrat's Call to End Deadly US Sanctions Against Venezuela

        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

      • 'Great News': Biden Backs 2002 AUMF Repeal as Schumer Announces Senate Vote

        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 US Government’s Jailing Of A Drone Whistleblower

        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.

      • The Biden-Putin Summit Is an Opportunity to Ban Nuclear Weapons

        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.

      • Biden and Putin Meet in Geneva for Summit on "Mutual Interests"
      • Activists Frustrated That Biden, Putin Won't Reduce 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).

      • Masha Gessen on the Biden-Putin Summit, Alexei Navalny & the Future of U.S.-Russia Relations

        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.

      • House hearing exposes complicity of FBI and Pentagon officials in January 6 coup attempt

        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.

      • The Real Welfare Cheats Are War Profiteers

        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.

      • France Arrests 'High-Ranking' Islamic State Fighter in Mali

        According to the United Nations' Mali mission, MINUSMA, the armed men were suspected of belonging to EIGS.

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • In Alaska, Commercial Aviation Is a Lifeline. The State Is Also Home to a Growing Share of the Country’s Deadly Crashes.

        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.

      • What We Know About Alaska’s Recent Series of Fatal Flight Collisions

        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.)

      • How We Tallied Alaska Aviation Deaths

        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.

      • New York Times marks 50 years since Pentagon Papers, ignoring persecution of Julian Assange

        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

      • Mr. Trash Wheel is gobbling up millions of pounds of trash

        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.

      • Record Heat and Flimsy Power Grid Across US Illustrates Urgent Need for Green Infrastructure

        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.€ 

      • Building a Global Green New Deal

        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.

      • Scientist Who Spent Year at 'Epicenter' of Climate Crisis Warns World May Already Have Hit Arctic 'Tipping Point'

        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.

      • Laws Must Adapt for Climate Refugees
      • Rising floods threaten Danish financial system

        Stormier seas and more frequent floods can cause havoc anywhere. The Danish financial system is now growing apprehensive.

      • Planet in Distress
      • Energy

      • Wildlife/Nature

        • Was American Indian Overhunting Responsible for the Near-Extinction of the Buffalo?

          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

      • Wealth Hoarding by 'Silver Spoon Oligarchs' Is Endangering US Democracy: Report

        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

      • Generous Unemployment Benefits Are Not the Problem—Poverty Wages are

        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?

      • 25 Richest Americans Pay Few Taxes — Partly Thanks to the “Family Fund” Loophole
      • Who Pays More Taxes: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or You?

        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.

      • Progressives Push for High-Speed Rail Funding in Infrastructure Deal

        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

      • The Global COVID-19 Inequality Virus

        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.

      • Leading Manhattan DA Candidate Has Repeatedly Paid Virtually No Federal Income Taxes

        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.

      • [Old] What’s Next For Dogecoin

        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.

      • Three million job cuts coming at Indian services giants by next year, says Bank of America
    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Will Democratic Court Nominations Live Up to Biden’s Promises?

        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.

      • Vague Alternatives and G7 Summitry: The Build Back Better World Initiative

        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.”

      • China’s Flawed Claims to Internal Sovereignty

        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.

      • Mediocre Men Have Failed New York

        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.”

      • What I'd do as NYC Mayor

        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.

      • After Weeks of Wasted Time, Senate Democrats Demand Action on Infrastructure
      • Ayanna Pressley Calls Out Biden's DOJ for Moving to Reinstate the Death Penalty
      • Chomsky: Republicans Are Willing to Destroy Democracy to Retake Power
      • Schumer and Pelosi Are Urging Fellow Democrats to Go Easy on Joe Manchin
      • Leaked Call Reveals Manchin Colluding With Wall Street to Preserve Filibuster
      • Nina Turner Kicks Off '$27 Dollar Donation Challenge' After Hillary Clinton Endorses Establishment Candidate in Ohio

        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

      • Close Encounters of an Unprecedented Kind

        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.

      • New Israeli Government, Same Israeli Apartheid

        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.”

      • American Backstory, While Biden Struts Abroad

        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.

      • Boris Johnson Toadies Up to Biden at the G7

        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.

      • Why The Two-Party System Is Wrecking American Democracy

        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.

      • Survey: 1 in 3 US Election Workers Feels Unsafe

        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.”

      • Amazon says it's all social media's fault for letting fake review schemes thrive
      • 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

      • Content Moderation Case Study: YouTube Relocates Video Accused Of Inflated Views (2014)

        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 Weiwei’s artwork in support of Julian Assange rejected by Firstsite UK exhibition

        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

      • Zimbabwe Court Grants Bail to New York Freelancer After 3 Weeks in Prison

        "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

      • Advocates Cheer DOJ Reversal of Trump Policy Denying Asylum to Victims of Violence

        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

      • The Demand of Freedom

        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.

      • Trump Toady Mark Meadows Is Running a Legal Group That Promotes White Rights

        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.

      • A GOP Lawmaker Wants to Ban Critical Race Theory -- Without Knowing What It Is
      • GOP Attack on Education Continues as Texas Bans Teaching of 'Critical Race Theory' in Schools

        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.€ 

      • FBI Ignored Its Own Warrant And Search Policies To Seize Millions From People's Safety Deposit Boxes

        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:

      • Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Zami’ By Moor Mother

        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”:

      • Shake Shack manager accused of poisoning shakes sues NYPD officers, union for defamation

        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

      • AT&T Whines About Biden Focus On Community Broadband

        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.

      • Null and Void: Speaker of the House of Commons Strikes Down Numerous Bill C-10 Amendments

        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.

      • Symmetrical Gigabit Internet Attracting Business, Municipalities Attest

        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.

      • Funny how Sir Tim Berners-Lee, famous for hyperlinks, is into NFTs, glorified hyperlinks

        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

      • FOSS Patents: Former Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim, fighting for his legacy, says yet-to-be-named successor should have 'regulatory humility' in face of court rulings

        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

        • Think Tech Companies Are Too Monopolistic? Then Stop Giving Them Patent Monopolies

          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

        • Miley Cyrus can use name as trademark in Europe after long-running row | Reuters

          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

        • "Destiny 2" Creator Bungie Sues Cheat Seller AimJunkies for Copyright Infringement

          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.

        • Court Sentences Operator of Danish Torrent Trackers to Prison

          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.



Recent Techrights' Posts

Comparing U.E.F.I. to B.I.O.S. (Bloat and Insecurity to K.I.S.S.)
By Sami Tikkanen
New 'Slides' From Stallman Support (stallmansupport.org) Site
"In celebration of RMS's birthday, we've been playing a bit. We extracted some quotes from the various articles, comments, letters, writings, etc. and put them in the form of a slideshow in the home page."
Thailand: GNU/Linux Up to 6% of Desktops/Laptops, According to statCounter
Desktop Operating System Market Share Thailand
António Campinos is Still 'The Fucking President' (in His Own Words) After a Fake 'Election' in 2022 (He Bribed All the Voters to Keep His Seat)
António Campinos and the Administrative Council, whose delegates he clearly bribed with EPO budget in exchange for votes
Adrian von Bidder, homeworking & Debian unexplained deaths
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Sainsbury’s Epic Downtime Seems to be Microsoft's Fault and Might Even Constitute a Data Breach (Legal Liability)
one of Britain's largest groceries (and beyond) chains
 
People Don't Just Kill Themselves (Same for Other Animals)
And recent reports about Boeing whistleblower John Barnett
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 18, 2024
IRC logs for Monday, March 18, 2024
Suicide Cluster Cover-up tactics & Debian exposed
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 19/03/2024: A Society That Lost Focus and Abandoning Social Control Media
Links for the day
Matthias Kirschner, FSFE: Plagiarism & Child labour in YH4F
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Linux Foundation Boasting About Being Connected to Bill Gates
Examples of boasting about the association
Alexandre Oliva's Article on Monstering Cults
"I'm told an earlier draft version of this post got published elsewhere. Please consider this IMHO improved version instead."
[Meme] 'Russian' Elections in Munich (Bavaria, Germany)
fake elections
Sainsbury's to Techrights: Yes, Our Web Site Broke Down, But We Cannot Say Which Part or Why
Windows TCO?
Plagiarism: Axel Beckert (ETH Zurich) & Debian Developer list hacking
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 18/03/2024: Putin Cements Power
Links for the day
Flashback 2003: Debian has always had a toxic culture
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
[Meme] You Know You're Winning the Argument When...
EPO management starts cursing at everybody (which is what's happening)
Catspaw With Attitude
The posts "they" complain about merely point out the facts about this harassment and doxing
'Clown Computing' Businesses Are Waning and the Same Will Happen to 'G.A.I.' Businesses (the 'Hey Hi' Fame)
decrease in "HEY HI" (AI) hype
Free Software Needs Watchdogs, Too
Gentle lapdogs prevent self-regulation and transparency
Matthias Kirschner, FSFE analogous to identity fraud
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 18/03/2024: LLM Inference and Can We Survive Technology?
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, March 17, 2024
IRC logs for Sunday, March 17, 2024
Links 17/03/2024: Microsoft Windows Shoves Ads Into Third-Party Software, More Countries Explore TikTok Ban
Links for the day
Molly Russell suicide & Debian Frans Pop, Lucy Wayland, social media deaths
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Our Plans for Spring
Later this year we turn 18 and a few months from now our IRC community turns 16
Open Invention Network (OIN) Fails to Explain If Linux is Safe From Microsoft's Software Patent Royalties (Charges)
Keith Bergelt has not replied to queries on this very important matter
RedHat.com, Brought to You by Microsoft Staff
This is totally normal, right?
USPTO Corruption: People Who Don't Use Microsoft Will Be Penalised ~$400 for Each Patent Filing
Not joking!
The Hobbyists of Mozilla, Where the CEO is a Bigger Liability Than All Liabilities Combined
the hobbyist in chief earns much more than colleagues, to say the least; the number quadrupled in a matter of years
Jim Zemlin Says Linux Foundation Should Combat Fraud Together With the Gates Foundation. Maybe They Should Start With Jim's Wife.
There's a class action lawsuit for securities fraud
Not About Linux at All!
nobody bothers with the site anymore; it's marketing, and now even Linux
Links 17/03/2024: Abuses Against Human Rights, Tesla Settlement (and Crash)
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, March 16, 2024
IRC logs for Saturday, March 16, 2024
Under Taliban, GNU/Linux Share Nearly Doubled in Afghanistan, Windows Sank From About 90% to 68.5%
Suffice to say, we're not meaning to imply Taliban is "good"
Debian aggression: woman asked about her profession
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 17/03/2024: Winter Can't Hurt Us Anymore and Playstation Plus
Links for the day