Audiocasts/Shows

• Arch Linux: PGP Signature Is Corrupted??? – Invidious

  If you want a good reason to not suggest a rolling release to a new Linux user this is exactly why, between updates of packages a PGP key expired forcing me to manually update the keys to peform a system update.

• Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo: S14E23 – Caked Credit Fame

  This week we’ve been playing Tabletop Simulator and enjoying DOOM Eternal. We’re joined by Rhys Davies to help round up the goings on in the Ubuntu Community and discuss our favourite stories from the tech news.

  It’s Season 14 Episode 23 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Rhys Davies are connected and speaking to your brain.

• BSD Now 415: Wrong OS Switch

  Wrong Way to Switch Server OS, Net/1 and Net/2 – A Path to Freedom, Permissions Two Mistakes, OpenBSD progress in supporting riscv64 platform, I2P intro, git sync murder is out, GhostBSD init system poll, and more

Kernel Space

• The Linux Kernel Begins Preparing For AV1 Decode Support

  The number of hardware platforms providing accelerated AV1 coding is still quite limited for now but with more hardware coming to market supporting encode/decode of this royalty-free video codec, the Linux kernel’s media subsystem is getting ready.

  A “request for comments” patch series was sent out on Tuesday by Collabora’s Daniel Almeida for implementing the stateless AV1 user-space API for the Linux kernel within the media subsystem.

• Intel closes security gaps in laptops, Linux drivers & Co.

  Several vulnerabilities in hardware and drivers from Intel could open the door for attackers to nestle on computers. To prevent this, those affected should install the security patches available for download.

  Most dangerous is a security vulnerability (CVE-2021-0084, “high“) in the Linux RMDA driver for the Ethernet controller X722 and 800. Due to a lack of verification of inputs, attackers could obtain higher user rights in an unspecified way. They could also leak information (CVE-2021-0002, “medium“, CVE2021-0003, “low“). The Driver 1.3.19 and 1.4.11 are secured against it.

• Linux 5.13.10

  I'm announcing the release of the 5.13.10 kernel.
  All users of the 5.13 kernel series must upgrade.
  
  The updated 5.13.y git tree can be found at:
  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.13.y
  and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
  
  https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
  
  thanks,
  
  greg k-h
  

• Linux 5.10.58

• Linux 5.4.140

• Linux 4.19.203

• Graphics Stack

  • Danylo Piliaiev: Testing Vulkan drivers with games that cannot run on the target device

    Here I’m playing “Spelunky 2” on my laptop and simultaneously replaying the same Vulkan calls on an ARM board with Adreno GPU running the open source Turnip Vulkan driver. Hint: it’s an x64 Windows game that doesn’t run on ARM.

  • An update on feature progress for V3DV

    I’ve been silent here for quite some time, so here is a quick summary of some of the new functionality we have been exposing in V3DV, the Vulkan driver for Raspberry PI 4, over the last few months…

  • The V3DV Vulkan driver for Raspberry Pi 4 is nearing Vulkan 1.1 support

    Iago Toral of Igalia has written up a blog post going over a bunch of work done for the V3DV Vulkan driver for Raspberry Pi 4 and it’s coming along nicely.

    Toral noted in the update how the V3DV driver has over the last few months added support for a good bunch more extensions, which means it’s closing in on Vulkan 1.1 support. It’s not quite confirmed yet though. Although it has all of the mandatory requirements added for Vulkan 1.1, it still needs to go through conformance testing and fix any failures that come up yet. Toral noted how “the bottom line is that Vulkan 1.1 should be fairly close now”.

  • Intel Appears Ready To Advertise Its DG1 Graphics Card Support On Linux – Phoronix

    As I have covered in many Phoronix articles over the past number of months, it’s been a lengthy road bringing up the DG1 graphics support on Linux with the Intel open-source engineers having to re-architect their “i915″ kernel graphics driver to support device local memory, getting the GuC support into good shape, scheduler changes, beginning to make use of TTM for memory management, user-space API changes, and a ton of other changes in expanding the driver’s scope from just catering to integrated graphics. But now it looks like the DG1 Linux support is about to be officially advertised.

  • AMD Van Gogh Firmware Published, Other Radeon GPU Firmware Updated – Phoronix

    AMD has upstreamed the Van Gogh binary-only firmware files necessary for the RDNA2 graphics to be initialized by the open-source driver on this forthcoming APU.’

    Hitting linux-firmware.git this morning was the updating of all the AMDGPU firmware files against the state as shipped by this week’s Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 driver package. Those firmware files from that packaged state are now in this de facto upstream repository that Linux distributions pull from for offering the firmware/microcode files needed for kernel driver compatibility.

  • AMD Adds RDNA 2-Based Van Gogh Enabling Firmware to Linux

    AMD has added firmware support for its codenamed Van Gogh accelerated processing unit (APU) to linux-firmware.git, an important Linux repository. The addition of firmware support is one of the final steps of hardware enablement in Linux. In many cases it points to an imminent release of a product.

    AMD (and other hardware vendors) ship new firmware versions for their parts in new Linux drivers, something that AMD did earlier this week with the release of the Radeon Software for Linux 21.30 package. To enable built-in compatibility with new hardware and drivers, developers of Linux distributions have to get firmware separately from linux-firmware.git, a universal repository of firmware files for various hardware. With the new driver package release and firmware upload, AMD has ensured essential support of its latest Van Gogh APU in various Linux builds, reports Phoronix.

    But while the launch of AMD’s Van Gogh may be getting closer, we still know nothing certain about this processor.

Benchmarks

• An Early Look At LLVM Clang 13 Performance On AMD Zen 3

  With LLVM/Clang 13 feature development having ended last week and the 13.0 release candidate being tagged, in starting off the benchmarking cycle first up I was looking at how well this new compiler is performing compared to LLVM Clang 12 stable on an AMD EPYC 7543 (Zen 3) Linux server.

Instructionals/Technical

• Fix Chromium signing out from Google under Linux Mint 20 :: Rafael Cavalcanti

  Recently, I started experiencing this issue on Chromium under Linux Mint 20.

  Every time I opened Chromium and tried to use a Google service, I would not be logged on them. For example, opening Gmail would show me the login page. I, then, proceeded to login, and everything worked fine until I closed the browser. Opening Chromium again would bring me back to the same problem: I was signed out from Google and prompted to login.

  This only happened to Google, other websites worked fine.

  Clearing the cache, trying different password stores and even deleting every Chromium file on my home directory and starting clean didn’t solve it.

• ow to migrate from CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux

  CentOS 8 Linux will be not supported by the end of the year 2021 and if you want to migrate it to AlmaLinux 8, follow the instructions below.

  There is no standard release of CentOS 8+ Linux going forward and CentOS Stream continues after that date, serving as an upstream branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that seats between Fedora and RHEL.

  AlmaLinux is an free and open source Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) fork developed by CloudLinux that is a great alternative to CentOS 8.

  In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to migrate to AlmaLinux from CentOS 8 using “almalinux-deploy” script.

• How to install Intellij Idea 2021 Ultimate on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install Intellij Idea 2021 Ultimate 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.

  Please take note that it comes with a 30-day free trial and afterward it is paid.

• Fix Taskwarrior autocompletion on Termux :: Rafael Cavalcanti

  If you use Taskwarrior on Termux, autocompletion doesn’t work out of the box, be it on Zsh or Bash.

  I found out that the completions are available at $PREFIX/share/doc/task/scripts, but absent on the appropriate shell completion directories.

• When 2FA on your Linux servers won’t let you in, try this fix – TechRepublic

  When your Linux servers are giving you fits, Jack Wallen has the solution for you.

• 8 Tips to Customize the Cinnamon Desktop in Linux

  Windows users looking to switch to Linux will love the familiar desktop environment provided by Linux Mint. Cinnamon enables a traditional desktop experience that is exceptionally well-suited for beginners and gives several customization options to meet different requirements.

  Are you looking for ways to tweak the look and feel of the Cinnamon desktop? If you nodded a yes in agreement, then read on to check out ways to customize your desktop in the best possible way.

• GNU Linux How To – kvm qemu shutdown all vms – start all vms with keyword in name – snapshot all vms

• Fix opening locked app from Termux on MIUI :: Rafael Cavalcanti

  Termux has the handy termux-open command, which is aliased as xdg-open. I use it to open markdown notes from Termux on Markor (a markdown editor application), by simply running xdg-open foobar.md.

  This stopped working when I set Markor to use MIUI’s “app lock” feature, which forces you to authenticate before opening selected apps. Termux would open Markor normally and the “app lock” screen would ask for my credentials. However, after logging in correctly, I would be brought back to Termux. Manually opening Markor wouldn’t show the file I opened.

• Best Way to Add Custom Inline JavaScript in WordPress Site (Better Way)

  If you are completely new to WordPress, adding inline JavaScript might not be the easiest task to figure out on your own. Sure, there are some popular methods that can help you to some extent. In this article, we are going to see best way to add custom inline JavaScript in WordPress website.

• What is termux-dialog and how I use it :: Rafael Cavalcanti

  I use Termux for several years, since I came back from iOS to Android. However, only recently I explored termux-dialog, which can really be a game changer.

• Multi-line annotations on Taskwarrior :: Rafael Cavalcanti

  When I started using Taskwarrior, one of the first things that I missed was having plenty of space for writing my annotations.

  Of course, I could add \n’s as I wished to break lines, but I wanted a comfier place to write them.

  I quickly stumbled upon a simple script that could solve that. It worked like this: you run it with the task number and your preferred editor opened with a blank screen, ready for your annotation. Now when you saved and closed it, your task was annotated. Very useful.

• Issuing valid certificates for LAN-only websites :: Rafael Cavalcanti

  The scenario: you have some websites that only face your network. You want to enable SSL on them, and the certificate to be recognized out of the box on the clients, without the need for installing on each of them. For this, you have your own domain name.

  So a self-signed certificate is not an option, and you’ll probably want to use Let’s Encrypt. However, if you try Let’s Encrypt, the HTTP-01 challenge will fail, as your website doesn’t face the internet.

  A solution may be to use the DNS-01 challenge, but your domain DNS may not support it. In that case, what can you do?

• Kubernetes with NFS Persistent Volumes – DiddleDani

  Using NFS persistent volumes is a relatively easy, for kubernetes, on-ramp to using the kubernetes storage infrastructure.

  Before following this guide, you should have an installed kubernetes cluster. If you don’t, check out the guide how to Install K3s.

• Install and access the K8s Web UI Dashboard – DiddleDani

  While I don’t find the dashboard very useful for configuring anything in the cluster, it can be helpful to find a resource you’ve lost track of or discover resources you didn’t know were there.

  Before following this guide, you should have an installed kubernetes cluster. If you don’t, check out the guide how to Install K3s.

• Openstack RDO && KVM Hypervisor: Setting up KDE Plasma on Rocky Linux 8.4 KVM/VBOX 6.1.26 Guest on Server F34

  Following below is a brief set of instructions setting up KDE Plasma on RockyLinux along with Gnome Desktop Manager which is actually needed to support graphical login, otherwise system might be started via text login followed by “startx”

• Automatically create multiple applications in Argo CD | Opensource.com

  In a previous article, I demonstrated how Argo CD makes pull-based GitOps deployments simple. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to automatically create multiple applications in Argo CD using Argo CD itself.

• How to back up MySQL databases from the command line in Linux | FOSS Linux

  The current technological evolution of every aspect of life has made data more precious than gold and silver. If you can acquire, grow, and protect data, you are one step away from being a data god. Yet, big companies that control life aspects like e-commerce, fuel, transport, and food landscapes rely on data protection to shield themselves from an inevitable collapse.

  Right now, losing data is like losing your life insurance. So the database management system you are using should have a backup orientation. If you are a MySQL administrator or a user dealing with growing data, you should consider implementing a more than frequent backup automation plan. Reason? You might end up being a victim of a data hack or even alter your data by accident.

  Such circumstances can lead to unforgiving data breaches, especially when you don’t have a database backup plan. If you are an invested MySQL user or administrator, this article is here to fix your database backup worries. We will meet two objectives. First, you will understand the implementation of exporting databases through “mysqldump”. Then, finally, we will touch on how using “crontab” can make this entire process easier through automation.

• How To Install Nessus Scanner on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nessus Scanner on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Nessus gives you malware detection, scanning of embedded devices, configurations auditing, control systems auditing, and compliance checks among other features. It is developed and maintained by Tenable. The vulnerability scanner platform can save the scan results in various formats such as plain text, XML, HTML, and LaTeX.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Nessus Scanner on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• How To Enable Full Disk Encryption on an Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop – JumpCloud

  Device security is one of the primary concerns that security professionals, developers, and other IT professionals have in the face of a growing number of cyber threats. Criminal hackers are increasingly more sophisticated in their attack vectors and constantly inventing new ways of bypassing even the most secure systems. Though some may argue that Linux is the most secure and stable operating system, it can still fall prey to the same misconfigurations and user errors that plague users of Mac and Windows devices.

  No device is foolproof, and like many things in your environment, your Linux system is as secure as its weakest point. The default configurations chosen during the first installation are not enough to harden your device, and unpatched Linux systems and the use of outdated software can significantly increase the chances of a breach. In a worst-case scenario you may find your hard drive completely wiped, with critical files inaccessible and possibly stolen without much evidence left behind. Source code stored on a Linux laptop could fall prey to malicious individuals or perhaps there is PII stored on the laptop in a local file or database; regardless of the individual use case, ensuring that your data is secure is critical.

  There are various steps you can take to safeguard Linux devices from potential breaches. One of them is enabling full disk encryption on their drive.

• 40+ open source and Linux terms you need to know – TechRepublic

  If you’re new to Linux and open source software, you will quickly find that there are many terms to learn. Or maybe you’ve come across a word or two in your journey and found yourself lost. Fortunately, TechRepublic Premium is here to help you along the way.

  We’ve collected more than 40 terms that are commonly used within the open-source and Linux communities; terms that aren’t always in the regular parlance.

Games

• How to install Flightgear on Linux Lite 5.4 – Invidious

  In this video, we are looking at how to install Flightgear on Linux Lite 5.4.

• Looks like the fresh Back 4 Blood Beta is working on Linux with Proton GE | GamingOnLinux

  Back 4 Blood is releasing in October from Turtle Rock Studios (original developer on Left 4 Dead) and they now have an Open Beta that anyone can try out and it appears to work with Proton GE.

  It’s notable because it uses Easy Anti-Cheat, and you get the EAC loading screen when you load up the game. Usually, games with EAC don’t work with Proton on Linux and just block it entirely. We know that Valve has been working with the likes of Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye ready for the Steam Deck release but it’s not entirely clear how (or even if?) it’s working right now.
  Back 4 Blood is releasing in October from Turtle Rock Studios (original developer on Left 4 Dead) and they now have an Open Beta that anyone can try out and it appears to work with Proton GE.

  It’s notable because it uses Easy Anti-Cheat, and you get the EAC loading screen when you load up the game. Usually, games with EAC don’t work with Proton on Linux and just block it entirely. We know that Valve has been working with the likes of Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye ready for the Steam Deck release but it’s not entirely clear how (or even if?) it’s working right now.

• Chaos is the name of the game in CreatorCrate as you devour everything | GamingOnLinux

  CreatorCrate from developer Jori Ryan is all about running around and causing chaos. It’s fast, totally ridiculous and a lot of fun to blast through. It just released recently with native Linux support, with the Ryan mentioning how it was actually developed on Linux using open source tooling and the Unity game engine.

  What makes CreatorCrate so chaotic is what your character is capable of. You’re basically a 3D printer that has legs, arms and an appetite for everything – and you’ve gone totally nuts. You can eat any person and object, to use as matter for printing objects or to heal up and so there’s a whole lot of eating. No only that, you can also swing around objects to throw at enemies, block fire and more – you can even pinch a downed enemy weapon to use against them.

• Linux hits 1% user share on Steam for first time in years, which is over 1 million players

  The share of Linux users on Steam has historically been pretty low [among DRM gamers]. However, it has now reached 1% for the first time in years soon after the Steam Deck announcement.

• How to play Crusader Kings II on Linux

  Crusader Kings II is a strategy game that takes place in the Middle Ages. It was developed and published by Paradox Interactive. In 2019, the CK II transitioned to a “free-to-play” model. Here’s how to play the game on Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Gear 21.08 Brings Improvements to Dolphin, Konsole, Okular, and Many Other KDE Apps

    KDE Gear (formerly KDE Applications) 21.08 is here to bring you a plethora of improvements and new features to your favorite KDE apps, starting with the most used one, the Dolphin file manager, which received animated previews of the contents of a folder, previews for files inside encrypted locations, as well as automatic and real time update of the file info presented in the Information Panel.

    On top of that, Dolphin now presents you with an easier to rename several files, using the F2 key on a selected file, or using Tab and Shift + Tab to navigate back and forward on your files, as well as to copy a file’s name to the clipboard. Moreover, Dolphin’s new KHamburger menu now makes everything easier to access.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • 7 Great-Looking Gnome Shell Themes

    Do you love Gnome Shell but hate the way it looks? Don’t worry, the Internet is chock-full of better-looking themes to choose from. There are so many, in fact, that we’ve had to filter it down to seven themes. Here are some of the best Gnome Shell themes you can use to customize your Gnome DE.

Distributions

• Top 10 new features in elementary OS 6

  Elementary OS 6 Odin is finally on the red carpet with promising updates and upgrades. This Ubuntu-inspired Linux distribution’s update and upgrade changes focus on…

  This Ubuntu-based Linux distribution release launched on an easy and user-friendly interface to control their operating system environments. The OS release also continues the crusade of user data privacy and protection.

• elementary OS 6 is Now Available

  elementary this week announced the availability of what it says is the biggest update yet to its Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, which brings ease of use, pleasant aesthetics, and a commitment to privacy. It’s called elementary OS 6 Odin.

  “It’s been a long road to elementary OS 6—what with a whole global pandemic dropped on us in the middle of development—but it’s finally here,” elementary co-founder Cassidy James Blaede writes. “elementary OS 6 Odin is available to download now. And it’s the biggest update to the platform yet! With OS 6, we’ve focused on empowering you to be in control and express yourself, continuing to innovate with new features, and making elementary OS easier to get and more inclusive.”

  New features include more pervasive support for multi-touch throughout the system, including touchpad gestures; a redesigned notification system, a new Tasks app, support for firmware updates from several PC makers (including Dell, HP, and Lenovo), and major updates to built-in apps like Web (the web browser formally known as Epiphany), Mail, Calendar, Camera, AppCenter, Files, Code (a coding editor), and Terminal.

• TalkingParabola merged in main ISO and installation medium with installer

  Last year Arch integrated the features from the TalkingArch project into archiso and some months ago they added an installer into their installation medium. As a result, and with some delay, TalkingParabola was deprecated and we added these features to our ISOs too. They are available in out download page as well.

• Screenshots/Screencasts

  • Linux overview | elementary OS 6 Odin – Invidious

    In this video, I am going to show an overview of elementary OS 6 Odin and some of the applications pre-installed.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Use automated snapshots to defend against ransomware with NetApp and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

    In this installment of our digital transformation journey with fictional company Davie Street Enterprises, learn how Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and NetApp’s ONTAP solution can come together to help you prevent ransomware attacks.

  • Understanding and verifying security of Diffie-Hellman parameters

    When we use machines to communicate over the internet, we often want those exchanges to be secure: protected against modification in transit, scrambled in a way that only we and the intended recipient can read it, and linked with a specific identity (a specific server or person) so that we know who we are communicating with.

    While there are multiple protocols that provide assurances about security, the good ones require that the parties agree on some shared secret before any user data can be encrypted and integrity protected.

    There are two methods commonly used to agree on shared secrets: have one party use some long-term asymmetric key to encrypt the secret and send it to the owner of the key (like in an RSA key exchange), or have both parties exchange messages that contribute to the computed shared secret (what we call Diffie-Hellman key exchange).

    The security of both methods depends on picking numbers that are just right. In one variant of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange one of the parameters needs to be a large prime number. Because the key exchange is vulnerable to attacks if the number is not prime, or not a special kind of prime, the Red Hat Crypto Team has developed a tool to provide mathematical proof that the numbers we distribute are indeed primes of that special type and thus aren’t the weakest link in the security of systems that depend on them. We’ve also published a set of primality certificates to allow for quicker verification of their primality.

    At the end of this article you can find instructions on how to use this tool, called ecpp-verifier, to verify the primality certificates or how to check that all the primes used by OpenSSH have matching certificates.

  • Build and deploy microservices with Kubernetes and Dapr | Red Hat Developer

    Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime) provides an event-driven, portable runtime for building distributed microservices. The project is useful for both stateless or stateful applications on the cloud and at the network edge. A new open source project from Microsoft, Dapr embraces a diversity of languages and development frameworks. The project is a natural fit for Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift. This article shows you how to install Dapr and walks you through the process of building a sample application on Kubernetes.

  • A Java developer’s guide to Quarkus | Opensource.com

    Serverless architecture has already become an efficient solution to align overprovisioning and underprovisioning resources (e.g., CPU, memory, disk, networking) with actual workloads regardless of physical servers, virtual machines, and cloud environments. Yet, there is a concern for Java developers when choosing new programming languages to develop serverless applications. The Java framework seems too heavyweight and slow for serverless deployment on the cloud, especially Kubernetes.

    What if you, Java developer, could keep using the Java framework to build traditional cloud-native microservices as well as new serverless functions at the same time? This approach should be exciting since you don’t have to worry about a steep learning curve for new serverless application frameworks.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu Blog: Orchestration in Telcos: the multi-vendor and multi-cloud environments…

    The use of NFV migration is becoming commonplace, it is made apparent there is a need for a higher degree of software management, smoother upgrades, and deployment process. Due to the complexity of the migration, Telcos have been deterred from adoption. A solution should be out there to aid businesses in managing and deploying network automation, orchestration, and managed services.

    In general, a telco network is complex and needs to be managed using multiple perspectives. For a proper deployment, a pure Open Source approach would require a great deal of work to be put in, however, commercial deployment of MANO stacks provided by vendors again raises the “vendor lock-in” question.

    Another problem faced by telcos is that after investing a lot into creating cloud services, telecom operators are unable to create a solid product to sell. With the right orchestration solution, telcos can market a pre-packaged solution and use APIs to extend the platform to meet their needs.

Devices/Embedded

• Intel’s Elkhart Lake powers three new thin Mini-ITX boards

  MiTac’s “PD10EHI,” DFI’s “EHL171/EHL173,” and ASRock’s ”IMB-1004” thin Mini-ITX boards extend Intel’s 10nm Atom x6000 with triple displays, USB 3.1 Gen2, SATA, M.2, and PCIe. DFI and ASRock also offer 2.5GbE.

  Earlier this week, ICP Germany announced a thin Mini-ITX PD10EHI board with Elkhart lake (Atom x6000, etc.) from its manufacturing partner MiTac, but the press release accidentally linked to a recently introduced, Comet Lake based PH12CMI thin Mini-ITX, which we covered. Now we are returning to the PD10EHI along with DFI’s EHL171/EHL173, which we similarly spotted on a preliminary holding page back in February when we reported on Advantech’s similarly Elkhart Lake based AIMB-218 thin Mini-ITX board. We have also uncovered an ASRock Industrial IMB-1004 board with the same combination, which we cover here.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Internet of Snitches – Purism

    Imagine an Internet of Snitches, each scanning whatever data they have access to for evidence of crime. Beyond the OS itself, individual phone apps could start looking for contraband. Personal computers would follow their lead. Home network file servers could pore through photos, videos and file backups for CSAM and maybe even evidence of copyright infringement. Home routers could scan any unencrypted network traffic. Your voice assistant could use machine learning to decide when yelling in a household crosses the line into abuse. Your printer could analyze the documents and photos you send it.

    It’s not much of a surprise to most people that their devices, especially their phones, are snitching on them to the hardware vendor (or app developer). Some people are surprised to discover just how much. I already wrote a post Snitching on Phones That Snitch on You that focused on the amount of data an idle Android and iOS device are sending to Google and Apple respectively, described how we avoid those problems on the Librem 5, and even explained how to use OpenSnitch to track any attempts by a malicious app to snitch on you.

    So we know most devices and proprietary apps track people to some degree (even for paying customers), and that the problem has extended to cars. While many people don’t like the idea of this, they also shrug it off, not just because they don’t feel empowered to do much about it, but also because their data is “only” being used for marketing purposes. Someone is profiting off of the data, sure, but their data isn’t being used against them.

    Yet we are starting to see how your data can be used against you. Police routinely get location data from data brokers to track suspects without having to get a warrant. Even private groups have paid data brokers to dig up dirt on people, leading to a Catholic priest’s resignation after location data revealed he used the Grindr app and frequented gay bars.

  • Arduino development with fast and easy debugging from Segger

    Arduino has partnered with Segger to further support developers in creating their own embedded systems, implementing compatibility of Segger debugging solutions with Portenta boards.

    Debuggers are the scalpel that allows a developer to dissect any application code running on embedded hardware. This versatile tool helps the programmer to halt programs at specific points, inspect values stored in memory units, modify CPU registers and enter test data to narrow down on buggy pieces of code. This tool comes in handy when you want to locate malfunctioning code and fix faulty program execution.

  • Sharing Arduino Education courses is easier than ever | Arduino Blog

    Over the past few years, Arduino Education has expanded, offering new learning solutions to teachers and students around the world. Today, we have more than 10 kits with exciting online courses for STEM teachers and learners ranging from middle school to university.

    When creating these products, we were delighted to collaborate with many brilliant educators, who shared with us their unique teaching styles and provided valuable feedback.

    With the pandemic dramatically shaking up the status quo in education, we now have more learning styles than ever. From large schools using hundreds of Arduino kits to smaller classes and study groups. There are even a lot of parents who use kits for homeschooling, along with an increasing numbers of self-learners.

    We’re excited to see Arduino Education products being enjoyed in so many different ways, and want to make sure our kits are easy to use and share in every situation. That said, we’re excited to announce several changes to how our educational products are shared.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • 10 Best Gacha Games for Android | Must-try for the Anime Lovers

  • Qualcomm, Samsung, and Google define next wave of premium Android experiences | Cambridge Network

  • Google launches Android 12 beta 4 with new user-friendly tools

  • Android 12 Beta 4 offers our first look at the Pixel Launcher’s much-faster search bar

  • Android 12 stable beta is here: there will be no more major changes

  • Android 12 bugs: Beta 2 introduces some rough bugs- 9to5Google

  • Android 12 Beta 4 users report VPN & banner notifications bugs

  • Quick image sharing comes to Android 12′s app switcher

  • Android 12 brings back the indispensable Wi-Fi toggle

  • Google leaked its own Pixel 6 secrets in a new Android 12 beta release

  • Google Pixel 6 Specifications Including Main Camera, Tensor SoC Details Leak via Latest Android 12 Beta | Technology News

  • Nokia G50 shows up with Android 11, will also come in Forest Black color | Nokiamob

  • Realme Narzo 10 Receiving Android 11-Based Realme UI 2.0 Update in India | Technology News

  • Realme UI 2.0 (Android 11) update rolling out to Narzo 10 | Technology

  • Chrome for Android will let you lock incognito tabs behind your lockscreen

  • Nier Reincarnation for Android review: A pretty Nier story stuck in a so-so gacha game | Android Central

  • Honor’s first Android flagship after Huawei split has a Snapdragon 888+ SoC, ceramic body | Android Central

  • GPD-XP is a modular handheld Android gaming device (coming soon) – Liliputing

  • Chrome for Android prepares to lock incognito tabs – 9to5Google

  • Android’s Find My Device to crowdsource locating phones – 9to5Google

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Events

  • Practical Open Source Information — Event Schedule Now Available! | Open Source Initiative [Ed: Open Source Initiative: Pay Us $6,000 and We’ll Present You as Supporting Diversity]

    On September 16th, 2021, the Open Source Initiative will be hosting a free, virtual half-day event on Practical Open Source Information. Geared towards open source developers, scholars, lawyers and managers interested in learning about open source in practice, this unique event will feature speakers with extensive experience in the field — with a focus towards new adopters and those looking to deepen their open source participation.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Thunderbird 91.0 Released with Native Apple Silicon Support, Multi-Process By Default

      Mozilla Thunderbird email client released new major 91.0 version with many new features and improvements.

      Thunderbird 91.0 now runs in multi-process (e10s) mode by default, which offers many advantages in responsiveness, stability, performance, and security.

      For macOS users, the release adds native support for computers with Apple silicon CPUs. There are also Latvian language support, new user interface for adding attachments, etc.

      The ‘Account Setup’ has a new look and finally move to new tab instead of a floating dialog. It also adds ability to detect and set up CalDAV calendars and address book during setup.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Call for Members for the Community Code of Conduct Committee

    This message is being sent from the Community Code of Conduct Committee, with the approval of the Core Team.

    The PostgreSQL Community Code of Conduct Committee is approaching our third year anniversary. As part of the community CoC policy, the Committee membership is to be refreshed on an annual basis.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • LibreOffice QA/Dev Report: July 2021

• Programming/Development

  • Jan Schmidt: OpenHMD update

    I’ve built a branch of OpenHMD that uses GStreamer to record the CV1 camera video, plus IMU and tracking logs into a video file.

    To go with those recordings, I’ve been working on a replay and simulation tool, that uses the Godot game engine to visualise the tracking session. The goal is to show, frame-by-frame, where OpenHMD thought the cameras, headset and controllers were at each point in the session, and to be able to step back and forth through the recording.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Open Mainframe Project Announces the Full Schedule for the 2nd Annual Open Mainframe Summit on September 22-23

          The Open Mainframe Project (OMP), an open source initiative that enables collaboration across the mainframe community to develop shared tool sets and resources, today announces the complete schedule of the 2nd annual Open Mainframe Summit. This year’s virtual event, which takes place on September 22-23, will feature keynote speakers Gabriele Columbro, Executive Director of Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS); Jason Shepherd, Vice President of Ecosystem at ZEDEDA and Chair of the LF Edge Governing Board; Jono Bacon, a leading community and collaboration speaker and founder of Jono Bacon Consulting; Steve Winslow, Vice President of Compliance and Legal at The Linux Foundation; Tracy Ragan, CEO and Co-Founder of DeployHub and Continuous Delivery Foundation Board Member, and more.

        • Microsoft & Others Form The eBPF Foundation – Phoronix

          One of the most exciting Linux kernel innovations in recent years has been eBPF for an in-kernel virtual machine allowing sandboxed programs running within the Linux kernel. The Linux Foundation along with Microsoft and other partners are now forming the eBPF Foundation.

        • Tech giants unite to drive ‘transformational’ open source eBPF projects

          Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix have teamed up to launch the eBPF Foundation, which is designed to accelerate a “transformational” technology that will “redefine” networking, security, tracing, and observability.

          The new foundation’s membership also includes Isovalent, a Google-backed startup that’s setting out to deliver an “eBPF-powered revolution” in cloud-native networking and security.

        • Facebook, Google, Isovalent, Microsoft and Netflix Launch eBPF Foundation as Part of the Linux Foundation [Ed: LF shows they are a front group for proprietary software surveillance companies and this is what the brand Linux stands for now]

        • Facebook, Google, Isovalent, Microsoft and Netflix Launch eBPF Foundation as Part of the Linux Foundation

          The Linux Foundation has announced the formation of the eBPF Foundation…

    • Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

      • Google Launches Allstar GitHub App [Ed: Google helps Microsoft proprietary software and monopoly]

      • After 15 months in preview, GitHub releases Codespaces – probably the fanciest new shiny since Actions [Ed: Microsoft Tim now shilling Microsoft proprietary software and monopoly again. Be wary of these people.]

  • Security

    • Security updates for Thursday

      Security updates have been issued by CentOS (java-1.8.0-openjdk), Debian (firefox-esr, libspf2, and openjdk-11-jre-dcevm), Fedora (bluez, fetchmail, and prosody), Oracle (edk2, glib2, kernel, and libuv), Red Hat (.NET Core 3.1), SUSE (cpio), and Ubuntu (firefox and openssh).

    • How does Google Authenticator work? (Part 2)

      Authenticator apps like Google Authenticator use 2 authenticaion protocol centered around What you have paradigm.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• A Kingpin, the Mob and a Murder: The Deeper Mystery Behind the Arthur Shapiro Homicide

  In the roughly two years since Jeffery Epstein’s “suicide” in a Manhattan jail cell, some of his closest associates, friends, and “clients” continue to scramble to salvage their carefully crafted public images from the fallout of having had links to Epstein and/or the network that enabled his sex-trafficking and blackmail activities. Chief among those who have labored to keep their names out of the press is arguably Epstein’s closest associate alongside Ghislaine Maxwell, the retail billionaire Leslie Wexner.

  Wexner, the richest man in Ohio, has had his well-crafted public persona irrevocably tarnished by the association, but he has used his influence and power to keep his name largely out of the press, despite the clear ties between him and Epstein as well as the many sordid acts that are now synonymous with Epstein’s name.

  One obvious consequence of keeping Wexner’s name mostly out of the headlines has been a lack of journalistic scrutiny applied to his dealings, both past and present. While some Ohio journalists, Bob Fitrakis chief among them, have critically reported on Wexner for decades, there has been little attention given to the dark underbelly of Wexner’s empire by the mainstream press, despite his obvious and extremely close connection with Jeffrey Epstein.

  There are several historical moments when Wexner’s made-to-order persona of the “rag trade revolutionary” unravels, with the most critical being the murder of Arthur Shapiro and its subsequent cover-up. While some mainstream outlets, such as the Daily Beast, have recently attempted to dig slightly deeper into Shapiro’s death and what it reveals about Leslie Wexner, in this article reveals previously unreported implications of Shapiro’s death and how it relates to the billionaire who was Epstein’s most obvious, yet unindicted, accomplice.

  [...]

  While Berry L. Kessler may well have had a role in Arthur Shapiro’s death, it seems unlikely that he had the political pull to get police to cover up several, apparently connected, murders—those of Arthur Shapiro, Frank Yassenoff, Ella Rich, and potentially Marjorie Dyer—or the financial resources to pay for a professional contract killing. Given the evidence, it appears that Kessler was a deeply corrupt operator, but most likely only a middleman for the dirty deed if he was involved in the “hit” on Shapiro.

  Concerns about the deeper forces at work in these cases appear to be what led Columbus police investigators to produce a document like the Shapiro Murder File in the first place, and its suppression and attempted destruction suggest that the scrutiny was aimed squarely at Leslie Wexner, which was too close for comfort for those in Ohio law enforcement who sought to protect the criminal nexus ultimately responsible for Shapiro’s death. Wexner’s involvement with suspect entities and actors came to light well after the Shapiro case, but the blatant murder of The Limited’s lawyer is the first documented instance of this connection and, arguably, one of the most important.

  Wexner and many other wealthy “clients” of Jeffrey Epstein have taken great pains to develop sophisticated PR strategies aimed at keeping their reputations unscathed from the continuing fallout in the Epstein case. Wexner and others, such as Bill Gates, have pursued a narrative where all bad deeds are attributed to the now conveniently dead Jeffrey Epstein, while his enablers, accomplices, and close associate were merely duped by Epstein’s charisma or manipulated by his wiles. Many of these individuals, however, and particularly Leslie Wexner, clearly have something to hide.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• How social media became a deadly trap for a minority group in Pakistan

• Canada’s got the world’s worst internet ideas

  Canada’s government is poised to pass a “harmful content” regulation. It’s a worst-in-class mutation of a dangerous idea that’s swept the globe, in which governments demand that hamfisted tech giants remove broad categories of speech – too swiftly for meaningful analysis.

  Many countries have proposed or passed rules on these lines: Australia, France, UK, Germany, India. They are all bad, but Canada’s is literally the worst – as if Trudeau’s Liberals sought out the most dangerous elements of each rule and combined them.

Monopolies

• It’s time to decentralize the internet, again: What was distributed is now centralized by Google, Facebook, etc

• Apple settles lawsuit against Corellium as iOS platform dictatorship looks more precarious

How Linux has changed the business landscape: It’s more than you think [Ed: GNU/Linux is 38. It didn't start in 1991, so this is a distorted and self-serving narrative of LF-funded sites.]

Linux is 30 years old. I was just starting graduate school by the time Linus Torvalds began working on the project. I remember so well, back at Purdue, the first time I used email. I felt like I’d entered a magical realm where anything was possible. It was all text-based (probably Elm or Mutt) and once you knew the keyboard commands you were ready to communicate with everyone.

Little did I know, at the same time I was learning the ins and outs of email, somewhere across the globe another student was learning how to build an entire operating system.

Perspective is fun.

Back then, I had no idea how businesses ran. I didn’t really care, because the field I was studying had absolutely nothing to do with business, computers, networking, security or tech in general. Little did I know how things would change.

Back in my early days of using and covering the Linux operating system, it was a very different beast. The first Linux convention I attended was all trenchcoat-wearing hackers in fedoras and fingerless gloves. I felt as though I’d stepped into one of William Gibson’s worlds and the keyboard cowboys were doing their best to take down the giant companies that would someday trademark our brains and commodify our every thought. They’d be pushing ads directly into our brains, and we’d upload new thoughts and memories via a stem port on the back of our skulls. Those hackers were our saviors, and big business was the enemy of all humankind.

Audiocasts/Shows

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 917

  3d printing, soldering, arcade games, google maps

• Linux Kernel Security and Beyond

  Linux kernel security done right—by Google, no less—kicks. Doc Searls, Jonathan Bennett and Shawn Powers have a three-way roundtable discussion on FLOSS Weekly discussing recent open source news items. Is Microsoft making it easier than ever to run all your Windows apps and more on Linux? How’s the new Steam Deck affecting gaming on Linux? Apple says privacy advocates are “screaming” about the company’s CSAM moves. Open source in medical datasets, all of us running our own AI, Comcast fighting bufferbloat, and more are the topics this week.

• Brave Search Is Surprisingly Good, But… – Invidious

  I’ve been trying out Brave Search recently and it’s actually really good, I didn’t expect it but it’s actually a really good search engine and I’d highly recommend checking it out for yourself.

Kernel Space

• Kernel topics on the radar

  The kernel-development community is a busy place, with thousands of emails flying by every day and many different projects under development at any given time. Much of that work ends up inspiring articles at LWN, but there is no way to ever cover all of it, or even all of the most interesting parts. What follows is a first attempt at what may become a semi-regular LWN feature: a quick look at some of the work that your editor is tracking that may or may not show up as the topic of a full article in the future. The first set of topics includes memory folios, task isolation, and a lightweight threading framework from Google.

  [...]

  While the memory-management community is still not fully sold on this concept (it looks like a lot of change for a small benefit to some developers), it looks increasingly likely that it will be merged in the near future. Or, at least, the merging process will start; one does not swallow a 138-part (at last count) memory-management patch series in a single step. In mid-July, Wilcox presented his plan, which involves getting the first 89 patches merged for 5.15; the rest of the series would be merged during the following two development cycles. Nobody seems to be contesting that schedule at this point.

  Later in July, though, Wilcox stumbled across the inevitable Phoronix benchmarking article which purported to show an 80% performance improvement for PostgreSQL with the folio patches applied to the kernel. He said that the result was “plausibly real” and suggested that, perhaps, the merging of folios should be accelerated. Other developers responded more skeptically, though. PostgreSQL developer Andres Freund looked at how the results were generated and concluded that the test “doesn’t end up measuring something particularly interesting”. His own test showed a 7% improvement, though, which is (as he noted) still a nice improvement.

• Strict memcpy() bounds checking for the kernel

  The C programming language is famously prone to memory-safety problems that lead to buffer overflows and a seemingly endless stream of security vulnerabilities. But, even in C, it is possible to improve the situation in many cases. One of those is the memcpy() family of functions, which are used to efficiently copy or overwrite blocks of memory; with a bit of help from the compiler, those functions can be prevented from writing past the end of the destination object they are passed. Enforcing that condition in the kernel is harder than one might expect, though, as this massive patch set from Kees Cook shows.

  Buffer overflows never seem to go away, and they are a constant source of bugs and security problems in the kernel. That said, hardening techniques have become good enough that many types of stack-based overflows can be detected and defended against (by killing the system if nothing else). It is hard to overwrite the stack without running over boundaries (which may contain a canary value) in ways that make the problem evident. Heap-based data lacks such boundaries, though, making overflows in the heap space harder to detect; as a result, attackers tend to find such vulnerabilities attractive.

• Hole-punching races against page-cache filling

  Filesystem developers tend to disagree with each other about many things, but they are nearly unanimous in their dislike for the truncate() system call, which chops data off the end of a file. Implementing truncate() tends to be full of traps for the unwary — the kind of traps that can lead to lost data. But it turns out that a similar operation, called “hole punching”, may be worse. This operation has been subject to difficult-to-hit but real race conditions in many filesystems for years; this patch set from Jan Kara may finally be at a point where it can fill the hole in hole punching.

  Hole punching, as its name suggests, is the act of creating a hole in the middle of a file; it is performed using the FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE option to the fallocate() system call. The caller provides an offset and a length; the kernel then erases the given number of bytes in the file, starting at the provided offset. The associated blocks on the underlying storage device are freed for other uses. The length of the file does not change, though; this operation creates a hole that, if read, will return zeroes. It is, essentially, an efficient way of writing zeroes to the specified range within the file.

  Note that neither the offset nor the length must be page-aligned. The kernel will write zeroes to the partial pages at the beginning and end of the hole, should they exist; this edge work is essentially just a couple of write() calls. The efficiency gains of hole punching, though, come from its ability to simply drop entire pages from the file without writing anything; that, naturally, is also where the challenges lie.

• A GPSD time warp

  The GPSD project provides a daemon for communicating with various GPS devices in order to retrieve the location information that those sensors provide. But the GPS satellites also provide highly accurate time information that GPSD can extract for use by Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers. A bug in the GPSD code will cause time to go backward in October, though, which may well cause some havoc if affected NTP servers do not get an update before then.

  At some level, the root cause of the problem is the GPS week-number rollover that occurs because only ten bits were used to represent week numbers in the original GPS protocol. Ten bits overflows after 1023, so only 19.6 (and change) years can be represented. Since the GPS epoch starts at the beginning of 1980, there have already been two rollover events (in 1999 and 2019); there is not supposed to be another until 2038, but a bug in some sanity checking code in GPSD will cause it to subtract 1024 from the week number on October 24, 2021. The effect will be a return to March 2002, which is not what anyone wants—or expects.

  The problem was reported by Stephen Williams on July 21. It affects GPSD versions 3.20‑3.22, which is all of the releases since the last day of 2019. The upcoming 3.23 release—due as soon as August 4—will fix the problem, but it needs to be installed on all of the relevant servers. There are concerns that if the word does not get out to NTP server administrators, there could be a rather unpleasant October surprise.

• Btrfs Set To Land Support For IDMAPPED Mounts In Linux 5.15

  Introduced to the Linux kernel earlier this year with Linux 5.12 was IDMAPPED mounts that allow for different mounts to expose the same file or directory with different ownership. IDMAPPED mounts was designed with use-cases ranging from containers to systemd-homed and more as outlined in the earlier article. Btrfs is now ready to begin supporting IDMAPPED mounts.

Applications

• New features in Neovim 0.5

  Neovim 0.5, the fifth major version of the Neovim editor, which descends from the venerable vi editor by way of Vim, was released on July 2. This release is the culmination of almost two years of work, and it comes with some major features that aim to modernize the editing experience significantly. Highlights include native support for the Language Server Protocol (LSP), which enables advanced editing features for a wide variety of languages, improvements to its Lua APIs for configuration and plugins, and better syntax highlighting using Tree-sitter. Overall, the 0.5 release is a solid upgrade for the editor; the improvements should please the existing fan base and potentially draw in new users and contributors to the project.

  The Neovim project was started by Thiago Padilha in 2014 shortly after his patch to introduce multi-threading capabilities to Vim was rejected without much in the way of feedback. This event was the major trigger that led Padilha to create this fork, with the explicit aim of improving the usability, maintainability, and extensibility of Vim while facilitating a more open and welcoming environment.

• 24 Best Free Linux Terminal Emulators (Updated 2021)

  A terminal emulator is computer software which emulates a dumb video terminal within some other display architecture.

  The terminal window allows the user to access a console and all its applications such as command line interfaces (CLI) and text user interface software. Even with the sophistication of modern desktop environments packed with administrative tools, other utilities, and productivity software all sporting attractive graphical user interfaces, it remains the case that some tasks are still best undertaken with the command line.

  

Instructionals/Technical

• Oh No, My Archcraft Linux Gets XFCE PolicyKit Agent Error Notification! – Fosslicious

  I’m getting an Error on XFCE PolicyKit Agent when it finishes updating and upgrading on Archcraft Linux. And this makes me confused and frustrated. Below is a screenshot of the notification:

• Join Fedora Linux Desktop to an Active Directory domain: Here’s how

• How To Install PIP in Ubuntu 20.04 – TecAdmin

  Pip is a package installation tool that is used to get packages from the Python Package Index and various repositories.

  Pip, which stands for “Preferred Installer Program”, is a Python-based package management application that streamlines the package installation and management process. Pip is a multi-platform package manager for Python projects which assists in managing libraries and dependencies. Pip installation on Ubuntu Linux is a quick and straightforward procedure.

  The latest Python 3 is included in the standard system installation starting with Ubuntu 20.04. The source code for Python 2 may be found in the general source repository. However, users are encouraged to upgrade to Python 3. When there isn’t a corresponding package for a module, use pip to install it globally. Instead of installing Python modules globally, the Python virtual environment allows you to install them in a separate place beneath each project. You won’t have to worry about impacting other Python programs this way.

• How to Configure and Manage a Remote Git Repo on Linux – VITUX

  Today we are going to discuss how to configure and manage a Bitbucket repo on our Linux system. I am using Ubuntu 20.04 for this guide, and I’ll make sure that all commands are readily available for all related systems except Debian. The main reason is that you should not implement instructions on a Debian system to avoid any dependency issues.

• How to Find the Total Size of a Directory in Linux

  For Linux users and administrators in a server-like environment, knowing the exact size of a directory tree through the system terminal is important. It will help you compare file directory properties and determine their storage allocation when you want to copy or move these directories to a different location.

• How to Fix the WordPress White Screen of Death

  If you have a WordPress website, one of the most common errors that you might come across is the White Screen of Death(WSOD). However, experiencing it can be scary as you might be wondering about the root cause of WSOD and have no clue about the next step.

  WSOD can have several possible causes, and determining them is not that easy, especially if you are not acquainted with the technical side of WordPress. Here, we have collated some of the most effective ways to resolve WSOD for your WordPress websites. But, first, let’s understand WordPress White Screen of Death.

• How to Install Brave Web Browser Rocky Linux 8 – LinuxCapable

  Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. Brave is a privacy-focused Internet web browser, which distinguishes itself from other browsers by automatically blocking online advertisements and website trackers in its default settings. Brave has claimed its browser puts less strain on your computer’s performance than Google Chrome, regardless of how much you ask of it. Even with multiple tabs open at once, Brave uses less memory than Google Chrome-like, up to 66% less.

• How to Install Mongodb Compass GUI in Ubuntu 20.04

  MongoDB is a free, open-source, and leading No-SQL database system written in C++. By default, MongoDB does not provide any web-based interface to interact with a database. It is very difficult for any developer to manage MongoDB through a command-line interface. This is the place where the MongoDB Compass comes into the picture.
  MongoDB Compass is a graphical tool for MongoDB that helps you to create, delete, read and update the database graphically. It is very similar to phpMyAdmin which allows you to explore your data, run the queries, and interact with the database.

  In this post, we will show you how to install and use MongoDB Compass on Ubuntu 20.04 desktop.

• How to Install and Update Latest Git on Ubuntu 20.04 – LinuxCapable

  Today we will look at how to install and update to the latest version of Git. Ubuntu 20.04 comes shipped with Git in their principal repository; however, with Ubuntu 20.04 being an LTS system, the software packages are designed for being stable and do not typically include new releases with upgraded features that could break stability. Ubuntu will only ship security updates for the current LTS version of Git.

  So, the issue sometimes with LTS systems is that software packages fall far behind with non-security bugs occurring. Luckily with Ubuntu, we can add custom PPA’s from developers of such software that are trustworthy and typically are the ones to address security issues in the first place. Hence, in the case of Git, the chances of your system being vulnerable are very slim considering the benefits of updating for new features, improvements to non-security related issues and bugs.

• How to copy files from host to Docker container

  To copy files from your current to a Docker container, follow the steps below. One given file can be copied using the cp command to the Docker container. This can be achieved using the command below…

• How to create Bash scripts using external variables and embedded scripts | Enable Sysadmin

  There are times when a script must ask for information that can’t be stored in a configuration file or when the number of choices won’t allow you to specify every possibility. Bash is pretty good at making interactive scripts to address these kinds of issues.

• How to dual boot Windows 11 and Ubuntu [Ed: Microsoft is trying to perpetuate the idea that vapourware is already here, is usable, is great, and you must use it with GNU/Linux; Googlebombing "Ubuntu" for the mention of the vapourware/PR?]

  Do you want to dual boot Windows 11 and Ubuntu? Keep reading to learn to boot both operating systems on your PC with ease.

• How to install Webmin Server manager on AlmaLinux 8 – Linux Shout

  To manage our command line AlmaLinux 8 server running without any graphical interface we can use Webmin. It is an open-source tool that can be installed easily using few commands. It offers remote management of server network, hardware, backup, and more. The users can install various modules to extend its functionality such as adding LAMP support, Heartbeat Monitor, Squid Proxy Server, DHCP server, and more.

  Here we learn the steps to install Webmin on AlmaLinux 8 using command terminal and official repository.

• How to rename a branch in Git

  If you haven’t pushed your local branch to a remote branch in Git and you would like to rename your current local branch, you should proceed as follows…

• 15 Useful “ifconfig” Commands to Configure Network in Linux

  ifconfig in short “interface configuration” utility for system/network administration in Unix/Linux operating systems to configure, manage and query network interface parameters via command-line interface or in a system configuration scripts.

• A beginner’s guide to the Linux terminal

  There’s a café a few streets away from where I live, and I go there every Sunday for a regularly scheduled game of D&D. They have a menu, and the first few times I ordered, I looked over the menu for several minutes to see what my choices were. Being a creature of habit, I eventually stopped referring to the menu because I knew exactly what they have for sale, and I know exactly what I want. Ordering food for the table is now as easy as saying “the usual” and waiting for the cups of coffee and bowls of chips and scones to be delivered (usually inconveniently at just the moment we’ve rolled for initiative, but that’s hardly the staff’s fault or problem).

• Find the largest files and directories in Linux – Unixcop

  Sometimes it is necessary to know what file(s) or directories are eating up all your disk space. Further, it may be required to find out it at the particular directory location on filesystem such as /tmp/ or /var/ or /home/.

  Also it is very necessary to find the unnecessary junks and free up them from your hard disk.

  This tutorial describes how to find the largest files and folders in the Linux using find and du commands.

• Linux Traceroute Command, Explained with Examples

  In this article, we will discuss everything you want to know about the Linux traceroute command and how to use it in your daily practice.

  Traceroute is a command line utility that prints the route (or hops) that a packet takes to reach another host. It is used for network diagnostics. As its name suggests, the main purpose of a traceroute is to trace the IP route from a source to a destination inside an IP network, allowing administrators to better resolve connectivity issues. Traceroute will not only tell whether you have connectivity, but it will point out where is the problem precisely and why would that be happening.

  Traceroute gives you complete information about the path that your data will take to reach its destination. For example, if the your computer (source) is in Los Angeles, California and the server in New York (destination), traceroute will identify the complete path, each hop (the computers, routers, or any devices that comes in between the source and the destination) on the path, and the time it takes to go and come back.

• How to install MetaTrader 4 with the IG Broker on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install MetaTrader 4 with the IG Broker 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.

  If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!

  This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.

• How to set up Redis sentinel cluster on Ubuntu or Debian Linux

  This guide explains how to set up Redis sentinel failover cluster for caching database or any other data type in high availability node.

• How To Set Up SSH Keys With YubiKey as two-factor authentication (U2F/FIDO2)

  ll Linux and Unix servers are managed manually or by automation tools such as Ansible using ssh. For example, say you have a server at Linode or AWS. Then you copy your public ssh key to a remote cloud server. Once copied, you can now login to those servers without a password as long as ssh keys are matched. It is the best practice. Unfortunately, you are not protecting ssh keys stored on a local desktop or dev machine at $HOME/.ssh/ directory. If your keys are stolen, an attacker can get access to all of your cloud servers, including backup servers. To avoid this mess, we can protect our ssh keys stored on local dev/desktop machines using physical security keys such as YubiKey.

• How to find the number of RAM Slots in Linux – nixCraft

  The easiest way is to dig into hardware and BIOS information is to use the following two commands on Linux to understand the RAM configuration using the CLI.

Games

• Dungeon crawling adventure where you date your weapons Boyfriend Dungeon is out | GamingOnLinux

  Boyfriend Dungeon from Kitfox Games is out now and it’s highly unusual. It merges together ideas from a dungeon crawler with a dating sim in a rather unique way.

  “You move into your cousin’s old apartment, rent-free for the summer. Plus, he’ll help you solve your little problem… you’ve never been on a date in your life!

  To get some confidence and meet people, plus earn a little cash, you’re tasked with clearing the creatures in “the dunj”. Soon you discover weapons you find transform into cuties… and they’re SINGLE! (What a craaazy coincidence because you also happen to be up for grabs yourself.) But someone’s abducting weapons and leaving them damaged in the dungeon! Who could do such a thing? Will you solve the blade-napping mystery? Will you find love? Or, friendship, at least?”

• The Humble Big Brain Bundle has XCOM 2, 5D Chess, Battletech and more | GamingOnLinux

  After some strategy games? Humble have you covered with another pretty great bundle. The Humble Big Brain Bundle has some games well worth looking into. Good native Linux support this time around too with the top games.

• art of rally goes to Kenya in the latest free expansion | GamingOnLinux

  Stylish racing game art of rally has expanded again with another big free update taking the game to Kenya. This is the first new location to be added since release, and they’ve teased the next location will be “tropical”.

  This update adds in 4 news cars, 6 new stages: mount kenya, karura, homa bay, ndere island, lake baringo, lake nakuru and 1 new freeroam area: mara simba.

• Polychromatic front-end for managing Razer hardware on Linux gets an overhaul | GamingOnLinux

  Do you have some Razer hardware? You need to take a look at Polychromatic, built on top of OpenRazer, it’s a wonderful open source UI for managing all your Razer devices on Linux.

  Just released the developer emailed us to mention it’s going through a big overhaul. They’ve dropped WebKitGTK in favour of PyQt5 which they say “this means it’s no longer a hybrid web app and now functions as a traditional desktop application”. It’s also been redesigned to be cleaner and still looks great.

• Steam Deck Controls, OS Look Promising in Early Tests

• Here’s why SteamOS switched from Debian to Arch Linux

  One of the many surprises of the Steam Deck announcement concerned SteamOS. The underlying software of SteamOS 2.0 was Debian (back when Steam Machines were a thing) but that’s been dropped for Arch Linux for version 3.0. Valve says the switch will let them use Arch’s rolling updates to keep their gaming slate up-to-date.

• Lilbits: Why the Steam Deck OS is based on Arch Linux, Google’s Tensor chip has a Samsung Exynos CPU (probably), and running Windows 11 on Macs with M1 chips – Liliputing

  And a Valve representative explains why the upcoming Steam Deck handheld gaming computer will run a version of Steam OS based on Arch Linux rather than Debian.

• AMD FSR Can Be Applied to (Almost) All Vulkan Games via Proton’s FSHack

  AMD’s FSR is quickly getting unofficial implementations in several games, mods, and hacks. After the mods that added FidelityFX Super Resolution to Grand Theft Auto V and Assetto Corsa, Georg ‘DadSchoorse’ Lehmann found a way to apply FSR to (almost) all Vulkan games under the Linux environment, as part of Proton’s fullscreen hack.

• Will Valve’s Steam Deck Handheld Gaming PC Be Ready For Windows 11 At Launch? [Ed: Loaded questions as headlines with the answer not provided are provocative clickbait and should be avoided. What is this utterly bad ‘journalism’? Spamming/googlebombing Microsoft vapourware everywhere? More paid-for PR?]

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Gear 21.08

    Welcome to KDE Gear ⚙️ 21.08!

    KDE Gear 21.08 improves KDE apps across the board, bringing you quick and responsive utilities, creativity programs with powerful features, and secure tools for all your work and play needs.

    If this is your first time with KDE software, discover a whole new world of free and secure programs, packed with incredible possibilities. If you are already a KDE regular, check out all the fresh innovations we have added to your favorite apps.

    Either way, go forth and try new things!:

    Dolphin

    Let’s start with your gateway into your system: Dolphin. Officially, Dolphin is labeled as a “file manager”, but it is much more than that. Dolphin does not only let you navigate through the folders and files in your hard drive, but also share them to your phone, social media, or on your instant messaging app. The same goes for the stuff in your cloud and online services, be it Google Drive, NextCloud, DropBox, FTP servers, or Git repositories: you can access all of these services directly without ever moving from Dolphin.

    If you think managing such a wide variety of locations and data would be confusing, fear not: you can easily identify what is what with Dolphin’s file and folder previews. Hover your cursor over a file and it will show you a small preview. Do the same over a folder and it will show you pictures from the files it contains. New in KDE Gear 21.08 is that, if a folder contains a lot of previewable files, it will show you an animated sequence of previews so you can check to see if the folder contains what you are looking for. Dolphin also shows previews for files inside encrypted locations, such as Plasma Vaults. Dolphin’s preview code has also been optimized in this version and thumbnails now pop up faster.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • New GNOME Human Interface Guidelines now official – and obviously some people hate it • The Register

    Red Hat’s Allan Day, a member of the GNOME design team, has said that the project’s new Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) are now official.

    The GNOME HIG, as Day explained back in May, was “fairly out of date” both in terms of technical changes for GNOME 40 and GTK (GNOME Toolkit) 4 and also what he called “contemporary design practice.”

    GTK 4.x was released in December 2020, and GNOME 40 in March this year, though many Linux distributions are still using GNOME 3.38. Day noted on Twitter that “the new GNOME HIG is now official. There’s more work to be done, but I’m pretty pleased with it overall.”

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Say hello to Elementary OS Odin

    Elementary Inc recently released the 6th version of their popular Linux Distro, Elementary OS. In typical Elementary OS fashion, the latest version is named after a god. In this case, Odin Borson, the king of Asgard father to Thor and Hela protector of the realm Nine realms and adoptive father to the naughty god and Disney+ hit T.V show main character, Loki.

    Elementary OS aims to be simple and easy to use so it’s rather conservative when it comes to options, what you can customise and how often it is updated. The only thing that you are supposed to change after installing it is perhaps the wallpaper. This is why it’s one of my top five favourite distros. It kind of takes the Mac OS/Windows approach where the designers make something beautiful and hope it will appeal to everyone rather than GNOME’s complex approach.

  • Elementary OS 6 Odin released on a ‘pay what you want’ basis

    Elementary has released version 6 of its Ubuntu-based operating system, named Odin, on a “pay what you want” model.

    It seems that every other day another Linux distro comes along, claiming to be an easy to use alternative to commercial offerings, and likewise Elementary is billed as a “thoughtful, capable and ethical replacement for Windows and macOS.”

    The first look of Elementary OS is appealing, with a somewhat Mac-like Dock, a striking desktop background, and a minimalist user interface. There are some puzzles, though: for example, how to write a review when there is no LibreOffice or equivalent, just a programmer’s editor called Code (and no, not the Microsoft one).

• Screenshots/Screencasts

  • Elementary OS 6.0 Run Through – Invidious

    In this video, we are looking at Elementary OS 6.0. Enjoy!

  • Elementary OS 6.0

    Today we are looking at Elementary OS 6.0. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.11, based on Ubuntu 20.04, and uses about 800-900MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • OKRs: 5 metrics mistakes to avoid | The Enterprisers Project

    “An effective goal-setting system starts with disciplined thinking at the top, with leaders who invest the time and energy to choose what counts, ” writes John Doerr, OKR expert, in Measure What Matters. This gets to the heart of implementing effective OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) into an organization: It requires a thoughtful process supported and promoted from leadership.

    For leaders to run a successful OKR program and create meaningful metrics to track progress, it takes more than general knowledge or simple excitement. OKRs are a methodology rooted in collaboration and transparency. They are most effective when they are transparent and visible to an entire organization, and managed and updated on a regular basis.

  • Digital transformation metrics: 8 counterintuitive lessons learned

    Digital transformation success has always been tricky to measure – partly because the goal lines are always changing. “The primary measure of success last year was survival,” David Cushman, research director in the emerging technology practice at IT consultancy and research firm HFS Research, recently told us. Accordingly, speed was often the key performance indicator.

    But as organizations emerge from the frenzy of pandemic-fueled changes, those measures of success (and the way they are applied) may need to change. “IT leaders need to rethink [these metrics] now, otherwise they will equate their panic reaction and survival using digital tech a win,” says Yugal Joshi, vice president of digital, cloud, and application services research for Everest Group. “This will be problematic going forward.”

    How is the IT organization supporting the business outcomes?
    Where should you start with updating digital transformation metrics? “The starting point must take into account how the IT organization is supporting the business outcomes,” explains Greg Bentham, vice president, cloud infrastructure services at Capgemini Americas.

  • Nest with Fedora: 2021 – Kevin’s musings

    Last week was the 2021 edition of Nest with Fedora. Nest is the all virtual version of Flock, the annual Fedora community conference. While sad we couldn’t all get together in person again this year, the virtual version was fine. The platform again used was ‘hopin’ and it did a reasonable job overall. I did have some problems sharing my presentation for my talk, but otherwise I think everything went smoothly.

  • Kubernetes Memory Manager moves to beta | Kubernetes

    The blog post explains some of the internals of the Memory manager, a beta feature of Kubernetes 1.22. In Kubernetes, the Memory Manager is a kubelet subcomponent. The memory manage provides guaranteed memory (and hugepages) allocation for pods in the Guaranteed QoS class.

• Debian Family

  • Elive 3.8.22 beta released

    The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 3.8.22

Devices/Embedded

• UP Xtreme i11 Tiger Lake SBC launched for $299.99 and up

  Ever since the launch of Intel Atom Cherry Trail powered Up Board SBC in 2015, AAEON has kept launching more UP boards with faster, yet still low power processors, as well as complete turnkey solutions based on their x86 SBC such as the UP Xtreme Smart Surveillance kit.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Mythic Licenses Codasip’s L30 RISC-V Core for Next-Generation AI Processor

    Codasip, the leading supplier of customizable RISC-V® embedded processor IP, announced today that Mythic, the pioneering AI processor company with breakthrough analog compute-in-memory technology, has selected Codasip’s L30 (originally Bk3) RISC‑V‑based core for Mythic’s next generation Analog Matrix Processor (Mythic AMP™).

  • This lamp consists of 122 LED-lit domes on a sphere, controllable over Bluetooth | Arduino Blog

    There are already countless projects that utilize individually addressable RGB LED strips in some way or another, except most of them lack a “wow” factor. This is one problem that Philipp Niedermayer’s Sphere2 Lamp does not suffer from, as it is a giant sphere comprised of 122 smaller domes (cut ping pong balls) that are each lit by their own LED. The project uses an Arduino Nano running code with the FastLED library to output signals via its GPIO pins to the LEDs. It is controlled over its serial interface by a Nano 33 BLE Sense since the latter has integrated BLE functionality.

  • Arduino-based control panel streamlines laser cutting | Arduino Blog

    Laser cutters require quite a lot of power and laser tubes need active water cooling, which means you need a coolant reservoir and a water pump. You also need an exhaust fan to remove smoke, which will reduce the laser’s efficacy. Add in a computer, positioning laser, etc., and you’ve got quite a lot to control. That’s why Kaleb Clark used an Arduino to create a control panel for his laser cutter.

    This control panel provides several toggles switches, which Clark can flip to turn on the water pump, the air assist, and so on. Each switch has a corresponding WS2812B individually-addressable RGB LED indicator light. There are also status lights that tell him if the air pressure and water flow are in the correct range. Instead of messing around with extension cords and outlets, he can flip all the switches in sequence and then start cutting. When the job finishes, he can flip them all back off.

  • Why build a Raspberry Pi Cluster?

    But before we get to specifically why some people build Pi clusters, let’s first talk about clusters in general.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Google launches Android 12 beta 4, hitting the platform stability milestone – TechCrunch

  • Android 12: News, Features, Release Date, And More

  • google Android 12 beta 4: Google launches Android 12 beta 4 with new user-friendly tools, Telecom News, ET Telecom

  • Nokia 3.4 may get Android 11 next as it appears on Geekbench running the update | Nokiapoweruser

  • OnePlus 6 and 6T are now receiving the finalized stable update to Android 11 – GSMArena.com news

  • Poco Android 11 update status & release date

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

  • What time is it? Time for a spiffy new look for setting Android reminders, that’s what

  • How to Remove Unwanted Pre-Installed Apps on Android Without Root

  • How Samsung and Google reunited to save Android smartwatches | British GQ

  • Android Phone Slowing Down? Here Is How To Speed It Up And Save Money

  • Watch out Samsung and Sony, the ultimate Android was just revealed | Express.co.uk

  • Stadia for Android/Google TV passes another big install milestone in the Play Store

  • A look inside some rugged Android phones reveals the shortcuts some phone makers are willing to take | Android Central

  • Android App Visualizes On-Device and Cloud-Stored Photos on a Map | PetaPixel

  • New BlueStacks beta finally supports Android version beyond Nougat – Android Authority

  • Galaxy Z Fold 3 shows more tablet apps on Android – 9to5Google

  • New features announced for Teams Rooms on Android

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Roll your own Slack alternative

  Having an effective communication strategy is vital for every business, especially in the post-pandemic hybrid work environment.

  As IT teams scurried to draw up a list of collaboration tools to mobilize the remote workforce, Slack emerged as the favorite medium for communication due to its ease of use and cross-platform availability.

  But Slack isn’t the only game in town. Rocket.Chat is a viable alternative that is chock full of features. While Slack is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) app, you can host Rocket.Chat on your own IT infrastructure, without much effort.

• Redis Labs Rebrands as Simply “Redis” – Database Trends and Applications

  Redis Labs has announced the company is now registered as Redis, dropping “Labs” from its name. According to the company, the change signals the maturation of the company and the Redis open source project, which it has contributed to since 2011 and sponsored since 2015.

  In addition, the company says, the name change also reflects the company’s mission to continue the growth of Redis as a real-time data platform. The company is focused on leading and steering alignment across the community, including individual contributors, customers, and partners, to deliver solutions to technical challenges and maintain its enduring popularity.

  The company adds that the renaming will not affect the licensing of open source Redis, which has always been and will continue to be BSD licensed, nor the governance model, which was introduced last year.

• Redis Labs Becomes, Simply, Redis

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Thunderbird 91 is a Major Upgrade That Could Help Reclaim its Position as the Default Linux Mail Client

      Thunderbird, the popular open-source email client, has a major new upgrade. Thunderbird 91 release promises many improvements, some of which we will be looking at here.

      Overall, the release focuses on adding import/export support for Thunderbird profiles, various user-interface improvements, improved Gmail account integration, improved calendar settings, tons of bug fixes, and smaller improvements.

      Read on for a look at all these new features and more.

    • Thunderbird 91 is Finally Here with A Lot of Improvements

      After more than a year of development since Thunderbird 78, Thunderbird 91 arrives full of changes, news and improvements of all kinds.

      Thunderbird is a completely free and open source program originally designed by Mozilla (the company responsible for Firefox) as a complete organization suite. This program consists of an email client, a calendar, a to-do list and a chat tool to talk with other colleagues.

      The current version of Thunderbird is 78, which was released in July last year. However, those responsible are going to jump directly to version 91 to match the version of Firefox and try to speed up the development of the program a bit.

    • Thunderbird 91 Released With Big Improvements For This Open-Source Mail Client – Phoronix

      Thunderbird 91 is now available as the first major update in a year for this Mozilla mail client that is succeeding the Thunderbird 78 series.

      Thunderbird 91 is finally set to offer import/export support for Thunderbird profiles, various user-interface improvements, improved GMail account integration, improved calendar settings, and tons of bug fixes and smaller improvements. The user-interface work includes enhancing the message reading UI, the message compose window has also been revamped, calendar UI improvements, and more.

    • Thunderbird Release Notes

      Thunderbird version 91.0 is only offered as direct download from thunderbird.net and not as an upgrade from Thunderbird version 78 or earlier. A future release will provide updates from earlier versions.

    • Thunderbird 91 Arrives with Improved Set-Up Wizard, Better Calendar Support – OMG! Ubuntu!

      Fans of the Thunderbird email client will be eager to go hands-on with the latest release, which is now available for download.

      So what’s new?

      Quite a lot, based on the sheer length of the official Thunderbird 91 release notes!

      And it seems that this release is such a major upgrade that users of Thunderbird 78 —you’re not misreading; that is the preceding version number— can not upgrade directly to the new build, not yet anyhow.

      A future release will re-enable in-place upgrades to allow users to upgrade Thunderbird 78 to 91. But for now, those who want to try the latest features (and there are a lot of them) need to download Thunderbird 91 directly.

    • Firefox 92 Beta Takes Flight With AVIF Image Support

      With this week’s release of Firefox 91, like clockwork the beta for Firefox 92 is now available to facilitate wider testing of this next browser release to debut in September.

      Exciting us the most about the Firefox 92 Beta is AVIF image support by default. After previously trying to ship it by default but only to later revert that, Mozilla developers believe their AVIF support is now in good standing and is ready to premiere for Firefox 92.

      The AVIF image format is based on the open-source, royalty-free AV1 video codec. The AV1 Image File Format supports both lossy and lossless compression, multiple color depths, transparency on images, HDR support, and other modern features. Google has supported AVIF within Chrome since last year and various other applications already supporting this image specification while Mozilla was late to the party.

    • Firefox 92.0beta

    • The Talospace Project: Firefox 91 on POWER fur the fowk

      Firefox 91 is out. Yes, it further improves cookie isolation and cleanup, has faster paint scheduling (noticeably, in some cases), and new JavaScript and DOM support. But for my money, the biggest news is the Scots support: aye, laddie, noo ye kin stravaig the wab lik Robert Burns did. We’ve waited tae lang fur this.

      Anyway, Firefox 91 builds oot o the kist oa, er, Firefox 91 builds out of the box on OpenPOWER using the same .mozconfigs for Firefox 90; I made a wee change to the PGO-LTO patch since I messed up the diff the last time and didn’t notice. The crypto issues in Fx90 are fixed in this release.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL 13.4, 12.8, 11.13, 10.18, 9.6.23, and 14 Beta 3 Released!

    The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released an update to all supported versions of our database system, including 13.4, 12.8, 11.13, 10.18, and 9.6.23, as well as the third beta release of PostgreSQL 14. This release closes one security vulnerability and fixes over 75 bugs reported over the last three months.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Fixing an Interoperability Bug in LibreOffice: Missing Lines from DOCX (part 3/3)

    In LibreOffice, interoperability is considered a very important aspect of the software. Today, LibreOffice can load and save various file formats from many different office applications from different companies across the world. But, bugs are inevitable parts of every software: there are situations where the application does not behave as it should, and a developer should take action and fix it, so that it will behave as it is expected by the user.

    What if you encounter a bug in LibreOffice, and how does a developer fix the problem? In these series of articles, we discuss the steps needed to fix a bug. In the end, we will provide a test and make sure that the same problem does not happen in the future, again.

  • What did Hamsters team do for last 20 days as LibreOffice QA?

    As I wrote before, the Hamsters QA team is trying to decrease a number of unconfirmed bug reports in LibreOffice’s Bugzilla. There are 20 persons in the team.

• CMS

  • Kiwi TCMS: Kiwi TCMS 10.3

    We’re happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 10.3!

• Programming/Development

  • The meaning of “hysteresis” and how it relates to alerts

    There’s a lot of things in system administration where we want to prevent ‘unwanted rapid switching’, or unwanted rapid triggering of something, or the like. One way to do this is to not switch (or trigger or etc) if we’ve already done this recently. This means that the current state of the system depends partly on its history (whether there’s been a recent switch), which is hysteresis.

  • Qt

    • Qt Design Studio 2.2 Beta released

      We are happy to announce the beta release of Qt Design Studio 2.2.

    • Qt Creator 5.0 RC released

    • Qt Creator 5.0 Nears With New Features – Phoronix

      Qt Creator 5.0 is offering experimental use of Clangd as the back-end for Qt Creator’s C/C++ code model. Clangd will ultimately be used for its code model rather than their existing libclang-based solution. Clangd can be used for providing code completion and other features with the Language Server Protocol. Qt Creator 5.0 is also bringing experimental support for building and running applications within Docker containers. The initial Docker integration is limited to Linux and with code-bases built using CMake.

Remembering John Wesley Powell in a Dry Year

One such prophet was Major John Wesley Powell, who embodied all the virtues of the mythical westerner — rugged individualism, independence of mind and spirit, and love of outdoor adventure.

But, he possessed one quality not included in the aura of true Westerners: he was a natural scientist, largely an autodidact, when in the post-Civil War nation, scientific careers were not limited to exhaustive knowledge of the genome of one or two species. Powell had scope, and his decades of exploration of the West, presented in his 1879 masterpiece, Report on the lands of the arid region of the United States with a more detailed account of the land of Utah with maps, enunciates one of the core scientific facts of the continental United States: West of the 100th Meridian to the Pacific is an arid region. Powell had ideas about how to develop such a delicate area, which involved changes in land laws like the Homestead Act to bring it into accord with the realities of making a living in the remarkably different environments occurring in the West.  Powell even suggested changes in the maps of Western political jurisdictions to organize human political groups around watersheds rather than traditional counties. And he did not believe that rain followed the plow, a common real estate hustle of Western expansion in agrarian times.  But he did believe in disinterested public service and federal support and sponsorship of science. He founded the Bureau of Reclamation and was the second director of the US Geological Survey.  His studies of Native Americans had major influence on American cultural anthropology. Powell also believed in democracy and knew that in the West that must take a certain form or else …it would turn out the way it has turned out, agrarian feudalism and urban plutocratic kleptocracy.

Cultivated Delusions at the Tokyo Olympics

It would have been interesting had they noted the militaristic, political echo that follows the beginning, and end, of each Olympic Games.  “In the Olympic Opening ceremony,” remarked Australia’s foremost sporting journalist Gideon Haigh in 2016, “serried ranks of well drilled, well resourced, uniformed national exemplars march behind their country’s flag.  Nothing could be a more political event than that.”

And political it was.  The torch relay was not, as the intoxicated romantics on the International Olympic Committee payroll claim, a creature of Greek antiquity but one of Nazi creativity. Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler and his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels were enamoured with the idea, though it was Carl Diem, secretary general of the organising committee of the 1936 Berlin games who first proposed it.  That great German armaments institution, the Krupp Company, did its bit, creating and sponsoring the torches which were intended to burn for ten minutes. “The first torch manufactured,” writes German sports historian Arnd Krüger, “was used to ignite a new furnace for the production of long-range Krupp canons.”

Education

• California Requires Covid-19 Vaccines or Tests for Teachers as US Education Secretary Backs Mandates

  As embattled Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday that California will be the first state that requires all school staff to either prove they are vaccinated against Covid-19 or submit to weekly testing, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona endorsed such policies.

  “Vaccinations are how we will end this pandemic.”—California Gov. Gavin Newsom

Health/Nutrition

• Opinion | Rise Up Patriots and Resist: A Third of the Country Has Finally Achieved Herd Stupidity, and It’s Killing Us

• YouTube Bans Rand Paul for Urging People to Defy Basic Public Health Guidelines

• Opinion | Libertarians and the Vaccine: Give Me Liberty and Give Them Death

  As the super-contagious Delta variant of Covid rips across the country, in no small part due to the behavior of the millions of Americans who have so far chosen to remain unvaccinated, the question of whether to make jabs mandatory is becoming urgent. A lot of libertarians are still voicing opposition. What gives?

• Opinion | Pandemic Shows Why We Need a Global Green New Deal

  The future of the climate crisis does not look pretty if the coronavirus pandemic provides any indication of our collective ability to cope with shocks. 

• The Choice to Vaccinate Has Never Been Free

  The uneven toll of the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed preexisting fault lines within the United States—between who gets sick and who gets well, who receives care and who goes without, and those whose behaviors are rewarded—or punished—in the ongoing effort to maintain, or return to, some version of “normalcy.”

• Australia’s Lockdown Troubles

  As Corona death rates still remain rather low, they are on a recent upward trajectory. Simultaneously, what goes down rather rapidly in Sydney is the government’s ability to trace those people who wandered around carrying the virus and infecting unvaccinated others. In the last week of July, the state of New South Wales had 780 Corona infections where the source of the infection could had been traced to its origin. In a further 384 cases, this was no longer the case.

  A week later (early August), the state already had 641 cases where the origin of the Corona virus infection was no longer known – almost double the number. In other words, we increasingly no longer know where Corona infections in NSW’s eight million people (of which 5.4 million live in Sydney) come from.

• As DeSantis Bans Mask Mandates, Florida Asks Feds for Help With Covid Surge

  With a lagging vaccination rate and the highly contagious Delta variant combining to produce a spike in Covid-19 infections, Florida’s Department of Health and Human Services recently requested hundreds of ventilators from the federal government—and the Biden administration reportedly approved a shipment earlier this week.

  When asked on Tuesday about the state health department’s request, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis insisted that he was unaware of it.

• 200+ Scientists, Groups Implore Biden to Ramp Up mRNA Vaccine Production for the World

  More than 200 scientists, public health experts, and global civil society organizations demanded Tuesday that the Biden administration pull out all the stops to ramp up U.S. production of mRNA coronavirus vaccines and distribute the doses to Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and other undervaccinated regions struggling to combat the highly virulent Delta mutation.

  “In a pandemic that kills one person every 5.4 secs, we can’t afford to wait any longer.”—PrEP4All

• Medicare Won’t Cover Most Vision, Dental and Hearing. Dems Want to Change That.

• Is city noise making us sick?

  “It’s invisible, it’s colorless, it’s odorless, it’s a physical property rather than a chemical that you can actually smell in the air,” says Rick Neitzel, an exposure scientist at the University of Michigan. “But the European Union and the World Health Organization have accurately recognized this is a pollutant like any other in that it is an environmental hazard that can cause harm to human health.”

Integrity/Availability

• Achieving SOC2 Compliance for Teleport Cloud with Teleport On-Prem

  SOC2 has a few control areas related to SSH management. Teleport goes beyond what’s typically required, and we hope that SOC2 requirements will eventually be updated to make using certificates the expectation.

• Proprietary

  • Retail sector top target for ransomware attack in 2020: Report [iophk: Windows TCO]

    The global retail sector faced the highest level of ransomware attacks during 2020, with 44 per cent of organisations hit (compared to 37 per cent across all industry sectors), according to a report by UK-based cybersecurity firm Sophos on Wednesday.

  • Consulting group Accenture hit by cyberattack

    Global consulting group Accenture confirmed Wednesday that it had been hit by a cyberattack, becoming the latest in a string of organizations in recent months to be targeted.

  • Another big company hit by a ransomware attack

    Accenture (ACN)’s encrypted files will be published by the group on the dark web on Wednesday unless the company pays the ransom, LockBit claimed, according to screenshots of the website reviewed by CNN Business and Emsisoft, a cybersecurity firm.

    Stacey Jones, an Accenture spokesperson, confirmed a cybersecurity incident to CNN Business on Wednesday, but did not explicitly acknowledge a ransomware attack.

  • Zoom’s new focus mode could keep students from distracting each other

    Zoom has announced a new Focus mode, which it says is meant to keep students from getting distracted while in a virtual classroom, while still allowing the teacher to keep an eye on everybody. When activated, Focus mode will make it so that a meeting’s participants won’t be able to see each other’s videos or screen shares, while the host is still able to see everyone’s webcams. It provides some of the control found in Webinar mode, without the complexity and lack of flexibility that comes with it — for instance, a teacher could turn on Focus mode while presenting, and then turn it off when it’s time for a class discussion. And, while hosting a Webinar costs money, Focus mode appears to be available to free accounts, based on my testing.

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Openwashing

      • Simplify Embedded-System Development with Open-Source Software [Ed: Paid-for openwashing "Sponsored by Texas Instruments"]

      • Does anyone really know what time it is? Facebook does [Ed: ZDNet is openwashing Facebook now. When you bribe the Linux Foundation you also buy yourself paid placements in media partners such as ZDNet.]

      • Open Compute Project to design open silicon and optics in Strategy 2.0 [Ed: Simon Sharwood is openwashing Microsoft and other surveillance firms. Oopenwash is a big problem…]

  • Security

    • Fundamental Flaw in RNGs Affects Many IoT Devices | Decipher

      The hardware-based random number generators used in most modern IoT devices have a serious fundamental weakness that undermines the security of the encryption keys they generate for communications: The RNGs don’t really generate random numbers.

      That’s a fairly serious issue when the whole function of the RNG is to generate random numbers, which are then used as seeds for encryption keys. Researchers from Bishop Fox found that the overwhelming majority of the tens of billions of IoT devices in use today have flawed RNGs, a vulnerability that is not limited to a group of vendors or specific IoT operating systems. It’s a widespread problem that security researchers have been discussing in various forms for some time, and there’s no simple way to address it.

    • Comparing macOS vs. Windows security [Ed: Apple+Microsoft false dichotomy. Both are proprietary and both admit to providing state-controlled back doors]

    • Network Server Management: Datadog vs. NetCrunch

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Hacked Facebook Users Forced To Buy $300 Oculus VR Headset Just To Talk To Customer Support

        Back in 2014 when Facebook bought Oculus, there were the usual pre-merger promises that nothing would really change. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who has since moved on to selling border surveillance tech to the Trump administration, made oodles of promises to that effect before taking his money and running toward the sunset. Among those promises was the promise that users would never be forced to use a Facebook login account just to use your VR headset and its games, and that the company wouldn’t track your behavior for advertising.

      • Techdirt Podcast Episode 293: Understanding California’s Digital Vaccine Records

        The pandemic has brought us face to face with important questions about (among many things) the roles of technology and government in our lives, and especially the intersection of the two. One interesting example that is worth exploration is California’s new digital vaccine record system, and who better to discuss it with than the person who spearheaded the project: California’s Chief Technology Innovation Officer Rick Klau, who joins us this week to discuss tech, government, and what happens when the two manage to work well together.

      • If You Build It, They Will Come: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship Around the World

        For years, countries around the world have asked for access to and control over encrypted messages, asking technology companies to “nerd harder” when faced with the pushback that access to messages in the clear was incompatible with strong encryption. The Apple child safety message scanning program is currently being rolled out only in the United States. 

        The United States has not been shy about seeking access to encrypted communications, pressuring the companies to make it easier to obtain data with warrants and to voluntarily turn over data. However, the U.S. faces serious constitutional issues if it wanted to pass a law that required warrantless screening and reporting of content. Even if conducted by a private party, a search ordered by the government is subject to the Fourth Amendment’s protections. Any “warrant” issued for suspicionless mass surveillance would be an unconstitutional general warrant. As the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has explained, “Search warrants . . . are fundamentally offensive to the underlying principles of the Fourth Amendment when they are so bountiful and expansive in their language that they constitute a virtual, all-encompassing dragnet[.]” With this new program, Apple has failed to hold a strong policy line against U.S. laws undermining encryption, but there remains a constitutional backstop to some of the worst excesses. But U.S constitutional protection may not necessarily be replicated in every country.

        Apple is a global company, with phones and computers in use all over the world, and many governments pressure that comes along with that. Apple has promised it will refuse government “demands to build and deploy government-mandated changes that degrade the privacy of users.” It is good that Apple says it will not, but this is not nearly as strong a protection as saying it cannot, which could not honestly be said about any system of this type. Moreover, if it implements this change, Apple will need to not just fight for privacy, but win in legislatures and courts around the world. To keep its promise, Apple will have to resist the pressure to expand the iMessage scanning program to new countries, to scan for new types of content and to report outside parent-child relationships.  

      • Pegasus and the Global Surveillance Business

        Purportedly developed to track criminals and terrorists, Pegasus is also being widely used to hack into the smart phones of human rights activists, journalists, and their political opponents at home and even abroad.

        Who is using Pegasus to track enemies? Only a fraction of the 50,000 hacked phone numbers so far obtained have been examined, but that’s enough to reveal that governments from left to right have made use of Pegasus. Among them: Saudi Arabia, India, and Hungary.

      • VPNs Are Not A-OK: Turkmen Internet Users Forced To Swear On Koran They Won’t Use Them

        Internet users in the tightly controlled Central Asian nation of Turkmenistan say they are being forced to swear on the Koran that they will not use virtual private networks (VPNs).

        Several Internet users across the extremely isolated former Soviet republic told RFE/RL that they were instructed by the authorities to swear on the holy book of Muslims that they will never use VPNs after they applied for an Internet connection in their homes.

      • Apple Adds a Backdoor to iMesssage and iCloud Storage

        This is pretty shocking coming from Apple, which is generally really good about privacy. It opens the door for all sorts of other surveillance, since now that the system is built it can be used for all sorts of other messages. And it breaks end-to-end encryption, despite Apple’s denials: [...]

Defence/Aggression

• ‘There were no KGB officers on the plane’ Detained Russian national Sofia Sapega appears in Belarusian state television interview

  On the evening of August 10, Belarusian state television aired a brief interview with Russian national Sofia Sapega. The 23-year-old was detained in Minsk alongside Belarusian opposition journalist Roman Protasevich on May 23, shortly after the forced landing of a Ryanair plane. After spending weeks in a detention center run by Belarus’s intelligence agency (the KGB), Sapega and Protasevich were transferred to house arrest in late June. They are now awaiting trial on multiple felony charges. In conversation with television host Ksenia Lebedeva, Sapega recounted their circumstances surrounding the arrests. Among other things, she underscored that “there were no KGB officers on the plane.”

• Opinion | Biden Must Call Off the B-52s Bombing Afghan Cities

• Documents Show No One In The Defense Department Is Doing Much Vetting Of Law Enforcement Requests For Military Gear

  We’ve covered the Defense Department’s 1033 program several times here at Techdirt. The program allows law enforcement agencies to acquire surplus military gear at low, low prices in exchange for little more than their claim to need anything from filing cabinets to grenade launches to mine-resistant armored personnel carriers (MRAPs).

• US Foreign Policy Adrift: Why Washington is No Longer Calling the Shots

  “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,” Goldberg wrote, quoting Ledeen.

  Those like Ledeen, the neoconservative intellectual henchman type, often get away with this kind of provocative rhetoric for various reasons. American intelligentsias, especially those who are close to the center of power in Washington DC, perceive war and military intervention as the foundation and baseline of their foreign policy analysis. The utterances of such statements are usually conveyed within friendly media and intellectual platforms, where equally hawkish, belligerent audiences cheer and laugh at the war-mongering muses. In the case of Ledeen, the receptive audience was the hardline, neoconservative, pro-Israel American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

• Give Cubans a Chance

  Let’s see. It hasn’t improved an iota the situation of the Cuban people. It hasn’t broken the Castro brothers authoritarian ruling of the country. It hasn’t fostered a popular uprising against the regime leading to its downfall. It hasn’t improved the U.S. image in the world. It hasn’t led to a better communication and a mutually convenient commercial exchange with the Cuban government. And we could go on…

  If anything, the embargo has succeeded in subjecting Cubans to a miserable standard of living. On several visits to the island on UN-sponsored public health missions I was able to see the limited food choices available to Cubans. Going into a bodega was an exercise in frustration. Store shelves were emptier than an unlucky beggar’s cup –not so the stores for the diplomatic corps or for the government elite and its favored artists or sports figures.

• Taliban’s Sweeping Offensive in Afghanistan Was “Inevitable” and Stems from Brutal U.S. War

  The Taliban have continued to seize territory in Afghanistan as the U.S. completes its withdrawal of ground troops from the country, with the militant group now controlling a majority of Afghanistan’s districts and a quarter of provincial capitals. The strength of the Taliban offensive in recent weeks has put the future of Afghanistan’s government in doubt. “This kind of a crisis was inevitable whenever the U.S. pulled out, whether it had been 10 years ago, 19 years ago or 10 years from now,” says foreign policy scholar Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. “This was rooted in the nature of the U.S. occupation that began in 2001.” Congressmember Ro Khanna calls American involvement in Afghanistan a “fool’s errand” that should have ended years earlier.

• The tale of the lost tablet BBC investigation sheds new light on Russian mercenaries’ presence in Libya

  Journalists from the BBC published a new investigation (available in English and Russian) about the operations of the Russian mercenary group Wagner in Libya. The report is largely based on information obtained from an electronic tablet that was allegedly retrieved from a battlefield in western Libya. A local contact handed the device over to the BBC back in February. Upon gaining access to the information on the tablet, the journalists discovered that it contained dozens of files, including maps indicating Wagner positions, fighters’ codenames, and the locations of mines. The BBC also obtained a separate 10-page document from a Libyan intelligence security source that allegedly “hints” at who could be funding the Wagner group.

• It might still be possible to save Afghanistan

  America’s rush for the exit has allowed the Taliban to drop the pretence of negotiations and redouble their campaign to remove the government by force. The insurgents did not control any of the 34 provincial capitals last week. They have since seized nine. Three of the country’s biggest cities, Herat, Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif, are under attack. America no longer has any military aircraft based in Afghanistan able to repel such assaults. Instead, it is dispatching them from distant bases in the Gulf and carriers in the Arabian Sea—a much less effective arrangement. And many of the mechanics who were helping maintain the Afghan air force’s planes have left with the Americans, further reducing the government’s firepower.

  That has led to a rout which, if it continues, will be a disaster. When the Taliban last ran the country, in the 1990s, they kept girls out of school, confined women to their homes and beat anyone who listened to music or wore the wrong clothes. They have not changed much since then. In areas they now control, they are murdering civil servants and NGO workers, and ordering families to hand over single women to “marry” their troops.

• How is the Taliban gaining so fast in Afghanistan?

  Over the past few days, Taliban fighters have reportedly taken over nine provincial capitals. The siege comes after a relentless, monthslong offensive in the country that has stretched Afghan government forces. Since the US began withdrawing its troops from the country at the start of May, the Taliban has swept through about half of Afghanistan’s 400 districts.

• Brighton man appears before Old Bailey judge on charge of encouraging terrorism

  A Brighton man has appeared before a judge at the Central Criminal Court – better known as the Old Bailey – in London on a charge of encouraging terrorism at a Brighton mosque.

  Abubaker Deghayes, 53, of Arundel Drive East, Saltdean, is alleged to have spoken about armed jihad in a speech at the mosque in Dyke Road, Brighton, in November last year.

• Bangladesh: Muslim Mob Vandalizes and Loots Hindu Temples, Shops, Homes

  But the ire of the Muslim mob was not placated by the desecration of these Hindu temples alone. They shifted their ire to human beings and their livelihood. Dozens of shops belonging to the Hindus, including Ganesh Mallick’s drug store, Sourav Mallick’s tea and grocery store, Srivastava Mallick’s grocery store, Anirban Hira’s tea shop and his father Majumdar’s shop situated in the local marketplace, were plundered; over fifty-five Hindu houses were ransacked and emptied of valuables. The jihadi crowd also looted milching cows and other cattle belonging to the Hindus, which provided a source of nutrition as well as income to the hapless people from the marginalized community. Numerous unarmed Hindu villagers were assaulted and suffered severe injuries in this clash; many were brutally beaten when they tried to defend their shops from the jihadist plunderers.

• Jihad murder is having a successful trial run in Nigeria- and the media are ignoring it

  Since 52 Muslims were killed by a white supremacist in New Zealand, heinous crime has rightfully become a world event. But absolute silence surrounds the daily slaughter of thousands of Christians by Muslim militants in Africa, the media preferring rhetorical stunts such as the demolition of statues because they would be instruments of “white supremacy”, such as a clock in England and a monument to the Boer war these days, or demonstrations in America for the removal of Confederate statues.

  “All the news that’s fit to print”, reads the famous slogan of the New York Times, the manual of all the European mainstream media. The massacre of Christians is never among this news. Why?

• Amnesty reports widespread rapes ‘with impunity’ in Tigray

  Dozens of women have described shocking sexual assaults by Ethiopian soldiers and allied forces in the country’s Tigray conflict, says an Amnesty International report published Wednesday, and its researcher calls it striking how the perpetrators appeared to act without fear of punishment from their commanders.

• Sexual violence used as weapon of war in Ethiopia’s Tigray, Amnesty finds

  As the conflict has deepened, the humanitarian toll has spiked, with aid workers struggling to reach cut-off populations and 400,000 people facing famine-like conditions in Tigray, according to the UN.

Environment

• Drax Denies ‘Conflict Of Interest’ Over Lobbyist’s Climate Advisory Role

  The question of Drax’s influence on national climate policy has come under renewed scrutiny after it emerged for a second time in two months that a senior PR executive advised on government climate strategy with an apparent conflict of interest.

  Rebecca Heaton, Drax’s head of sustainability and policy, announced in July she would be stepping down four months early from her position on the Climate Change Committee (CCC). Heaton had faced mounting pressure from campaigners questioning the compatibility of her role on the CCC’s mitigation committee with her position at the taxpayer-funded biomass company.

  Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts

• ‘Utter Lack of Credibility as a Climate Leader’: Biden Pressures OPEC to Pump More Oil

  Two days after U.S. President Joe Biden responded to the IPCC’s latest report about how fossil fuel emissions are intensifying extreme weather by saying, “We can’t wait to tackle the climate crisis,” the White House on Wednesday urged the oil-producing giants of OPEC to increase production as a way to bring down gasoline prices.

  National security advisor Jake Sullivan said in a statement that “higher gasoline costs, if left unchecked, risk harming the ongoing global recovery.”

• World shudders at ‘terrifying’ UN climate report

  Frans Timmermans, the European Union’s deputy climate chief, said the 3,500-page report proved “it’s not too late to stem the tide and prevent runaway climate change”.

• UNICEF Urges Fight Against Climate Change

  “We must act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and invest in adaptation and community resilience because all children deserve a livable planet,” the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Executive Director Henrietta Fore said via Twitter.

  According to UNICEF “approximately two billion children live in areas where air pollution levels exceed standards set by the World Health Organization (WHO) ─ causing them to breathe toxic air and putting their health and brain development at risk. Every year, over half a million children under the age of 5 die from air-pollution-related causes.”

• 3 Things To Know About What Scientists Say About Our Future Climate

  More than 200 climate scientists just released a stark look at how fast the climate is warming, showing heat waves, extreme rain and intense droughts are on the rise. The evidence for warming is “unequivocal” but the extent of future disasters will be determined by how fast governments can cut heat-trapping emissions. Here are the top findings from the report.

• Capitalism Is What’s Burning the Planet, Not Average People

  Unlike the IPPC report’s assessments of likely degrees of warming, anticipated extreme heat, and predicted sea level rises, the suggestion that humanity in general is to blame is not a scientific claim. It is an ideological one. In this instance, it insulates the ruling class from blame.

  This is unlikely to be the explicit intention of the scientists at the IPCC. The popular tendency to talk about human-caused climate change is surely a response to well-funded climate denial. However, climate denial is now no longer the main blockage — instead, it’s the delay and inaction of the capitalist class.

  It is capitalists who profit from the climate crisis while the poorest suffer. It is the capitalist system putting profit above all else that blocks decarbonization while the world burns. Of course, it is technically correct to say that climate change is human-induced. As far as I know, the capitalist class are all human (unless David Icke knows something we don’t). But this doesn’t mean that all humans have played a role in producing the crisis.

• Opinion | “This Was Avoidable,” Climate Activists Say About Apocalyptic UN Climate Report

  The United Nations COP 26 climate summit this November was already set to be one of the most important diplomatic gatherings in history, a meeting where world leaders will, without exaggeration, decide the future of life on earth. In a landmark report released Monday by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), some of the world’s foremost climate scientists added further urgency to the summit by clarifying that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), as envisioned in the Paris Agreement signed at the last major climate summit in 2015, is imperative. Temperatures have already risen by 1.1 degrees C; current trends point to a rise of a ruinous 3 degrees C later this century. 

• From California to Greece to Siberia, Wildfires Rage Worldwide—and More Expected

  Officials from the Pacific Northwest in the U.S. to Southern Europe are warning of extreme heatwaves expected in the coming days, sparking fears of even more wildfires like those that have laid waste to millions of acres worldwide in recent weeks, including in Oregon, California, Greece, Turkey, and Siberia.

  The prime minister of Portugal warned Wednesday that with temperatures expected to reach 104 degrees Fahrenheit this week, officials are bracing for potential wildfires like the ones that killed more than 100 people in 2017. 

• Seeing the Climate Crisis Through the Eyes of Henry Thoreau

  The path to Walden, as you walk north along the western edge of Adams Woods, comes to a fork just beyond the Concord line. If you’re heading to Henry Thoreau’s most famous pond, take the trail to the right for a half mile or so, keeping the swampy Andromeda meadows below you on the left, until you cross the tracks of the Fitchburg railroad and you’re standing on the shore looking north across the water toward Henry’s cove, his cabin site hidden in the dense woods on the higher ground.1Excerpted from Now Comes Good Sailing: Writers Reflect on Henry David Thoreau, edited by Andrew Blauner. Copyright © 2021 by Andrew Blauner. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

• Climate: Time to Saw Through Our Ankle

  That prompted me to this:

  At the end of the Mad Max movie (the very first one), Max cuffs, by the ankle, one of the psychopaths that killed his family, to an overturned car whose ruptured gas tank is leaking, dripping. He props a lit cigarette lighter near the drip, and tosses the prisoner a hacksaw. Max says: “Those cuffs are made of high tensile steel, it takes about 10 minutes to saw through them, the gas should explode by then. It only takes about 5 minutes to saw through your ankle.” He then drives away slowly. In the distance through his rearview mirror he sees a big explosion, the prisoner never emerged.

• Oil & Gas UK Says It ‘Backs’ IPCC Report While Claiming Sector Can Be Part of the Solution

  The UK’s offshore oil and gas industry body has been accused of “sneakily” blocking action to cut carbon emissions after claiming it supports a major new report on climate change – but adding that oil and gas should continue “to 2050 and beyond”.  

  Oil & Gas UK released a statement saying it “backs” Monday’s report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “for adding new impetus to the transition to low-carbon energy”. 

  Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts

• Wildlife/Nature

  • What Happens to Wildlife Swimming in a Sea of Our Drug Residues?

  • Amazonia’s forests leak carbon they once stored

    Once vital barriers to climate change, Amazonia’s forests now show how that and other human action can harm the rainforest.

  • The 2021 Capture the Dark Winners and Honorable Mentions

    Photography is one of the most powerful tools in dark sky advocacy. A photograph has the power to spark conservation awareness and reveal how beautiful and functional dark sky-friendly lighting can be. To celebrate, we recently hosted the second annual Capture the Dark Photography Contest. We received a staggering 1,122 entries from 66 countries. Our panel of esteemed judges reviewed the photos using criteria that included technical skill, composition, connection to the category theme, and ‘wow’ factor and the results are in!

Finance

• Judge Says House Can View Trump Taxes to See If He Profited From Being President

• Wealthiest Netted Billions From Trump Tax Cut They Helped Write: Report

  A ProPublica investigation published Wednesday shows how Republican lawmakers and industry groups maneuvered to secure in the 2017 GOP tax law provisions that delivered billions in tax cuts benefiting the nation’s uber-wealthy, including top political donors.

  “The flurry of midnight deals and last-minute insertions of language resulted in a vast redistribution of wealth into the pockets of a select set of families, siphoning away billions in tax revenue from the nation’s coffers,” wrote Justin Elliott and Robert Faturechi.

• Without Single GOP Vote, Senate Approves $3.5 Trillion Budget Blueprint

  The U.S. Senate approved a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint with a party-line vote in the early hours of Wednesday morning, a key step toward passage of sprawling legislation that would expand Medicare, establish paid family and medical leave, and make substantial investments in green energy.

  The chamber’s approval of the budget framework came after the hours-long spectacle known as “vote-a-rama,” a process during which senators are allowed to offer an unlimited number of largely meaningless, non-binding amendments to the resolution.

• Forget a New Cold War, the US and China Need to Fight Against Inequality

• ‘There Is a Fundamental Imbalance in the Power of Employers and Employees’

  Janine Jackson interviewed Economic Policy Institute’s David Cooper about the “we all quit” phenomenon for the August 6, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

• Secret IRS Files Reveal How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Tax Cut”

  In November 2017, with the administration of President Donald Trump rushing to get a massive tax overhaul through Congress, Sen. Ron Johnson stunned his colleagues by announcing he would vote “no.”

  Making the rounds on cable TV, the Wisconsin Republican became the first GOP senator to declare his opposition, spooking Senate leaders who were pushing to quickly pass the tax bill with their thin majority. “If they can pass it without me, let them,” Johnson declared.

• Duran Duran’s Simon LeBon Says Streaming is Killing an Entire Generation of Artists

  That’s because all of the money is paid out to rights-holders, who then divvy up the pot according to percentages. The BBC reports that recording artists only receive about 13% of the revenue they generate, with labels and publishers keeping the rest. 13% of $0.003 per stream does not pay artists enough to keep making music.

• The Economist On Cryptocurrencies

  They don’t seem to understand that, just as the whole point of Uber is to evade the rules for taxis, the whole point of cryptocurrency is to “evade financial rules”.

• [Cryptocurrency] industry seeks to build momentum after losing Senate fight

  Cryptocurrency leaders say that even though they failed to change language related to the regulation of their industry in the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, the heated floor fight over it underscores their growing power in Washington.

  They’re gearing up to use that momentum to push back on the bill in the House and take the lead on future cryptocurrency rules.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• ‘A Five-Alarm Voting Rights Fire’: Senate Urged to Fight Back After GOP Blocks For the People Act Again

  After GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas blocked a trio of bills on voting rights, gerrymandering, and campaign finance disclosure early Wednesday, progressives called on congressional Democrats and President Joe Biden to share their plans to protect U.S. democracy.

  “Democrats and the Biden administration… must outline a path forward to ensuring our freedom to vote, and not let an arcane Senate rule impede progress.”—Wade Henderson, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

• Poll: Majority of US Voters Want Biden to ‘Fight’ for Key Voting Rights Bill

  Hours after the Senate GOP once again blocked debate on the For the People Act, progressive organizations on Wednesday released the results of a survey showing that a majority of U.S. voters—including nearly three-quarters of Democrats—want President Joe Biden to “take a more active role in the fight” to pass the sweeping voting rights legislation.

  “Americans need—and want—a president who will do whatever it takes to protect the freedom to vote, end partisan gerrymandering, and reduce the role of big money in politics.”—Adam Eichen and Kevin Rissmiller

• No Bipartisan Deal Without Reconciliation Bill, House Progressives Insist

• One Country, Two Systems

• California Gubernatorial Recall Could See Newsom Replaced by a Republican

• Russian billionaire Mikhail Gutseriev transferred RussNeft stake to his brother prior to sanctions

  Russneft founder Mikhail Gutseriev, who recently came under EU and UK sanctions, transferred his 37.15 percent stake in the oil company to his younger brother Sait-Salam Gutseriev back in June.

• Alexey Navalny indicted for creating an organization that infringes on Russian citizens’ rights

  The Russian investigative Committee has indicted jailed opposition politician Alexey Navalny for creating a nonprofit organization that infringes on the liberties and rights of Russian citizens.

• On $3.5 Trillion Package, McConnell Meets Defeat — But the Fight’s Not Over

• “The End of Neoliberalism”: Rep. Ro Khanna Hails “Historic” $3.5 Trillion Budget Plan

  Senate Democrats passed a $3.5 trillion budget resolution early Wednesday morning that would vastly expand the social safety net, increase taxes on the rich and corporations, improve worker rights and include measures to combat the climate crisis. The budget blueprint passed 50-49, less than 24 hours after a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill was approved 69-30 in the Senate. Both spending packages now go to the House of Representatives, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indicated she will not bring the bipartisan bill to the House floor unless the reconciliation bill is considered at the same time. California Congressmember Ro Khanna calls the budget bill “a historic piece of legislation” that marks “the end of neoliberalism” in the United States. “It is a major investment in the American people,” Khanna says.

• The Real Question Is Why Andrew Cuomo Took So Long to Fall

  For the 11 years Andrew Cuomo was governor of New York, he acted like a caricature of someone drunk with power, a boy-king gifted the position by his father’s name, greedy for acclaim and control. He grabbed everything for himself, literally and figuratively. He harassed and assaulted state employees and other women because he thought he could—and that no one would dare speak up. He retaliated against the smallest slight. He used state workers to grab himself a multimillion-dollar book deal. He lied about people’s deaths, trampling on the sacred with an entitled shrug. And he lied for the simplest and grossest of reasons: because telling the truth about nursing home deaths would take the shine off his glory, and cost him his book deal and his victory lap.

• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo Resigns After Sexual Harassment Probe

• “A Petty Tyrant with Too Much Power”: Former Cuomo Rival Zephyr Teachout Responds to Resignation

  Law professor Zephyr Teachout, who challenged Cuomo for the New York Democratic nomination for governor in 2014, describes Cuomo as “extraordinarily vengeful” and applauds the bravery of the women who spoke up about his behavior. “He never hesitated to use the power of the state, state resources, to serve his own ends,” says Teachout.

• Gov. Cuomo Resigns After Sexual Harassment Probe; Critic Says He Is “Still Gaslighting New Yorkers”

  New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced his resignation, effective August 24, after a week of intense pressure from fellow Democrats for him to step down. Cuomo, who has been in office since 2011, had few allies left after an investigation by New York’s attorney general found he had sexually harassed at least 11 women — allegations he continues to deny. “Governor Cuomo is still gaslighting New Yorkers,” says Yuh-Line Niou, a member of the New York State Assembly representing Manhattan, who says Cuomo must still be impeached. “Impeachment means that New York will not be paying Andrew Cuomo’s pension for the rest of his life. Impeachment means that Governor Cuomo will not be able to run for office again.”

• Corporate Liberalism is No Match for Trumpism

  Anti-democratic ducks are being lined up in Republican-run state legislatures to deliver the White House to the party nominee. Driven by Trumpian mindsets, it’s a scenario that could become a dystopian reality.

  In early June, the New America organization issued a Statement of Concern, signed by 199 eminent “scholars of democracy” in the United States, warning that “Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures in response to unproven and intentionally destructive allegations of a stolen election. Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk.”

• More Cheap Fun: Job Growth, Trump v. Biden

  So, here’s where we stand now. After yesterday’s big jobs number, Biden has now created 4.1 million jobs in the first six months of his presidency.  Trump lost 2.9 million jobs over his four years in office.

  This originally appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

• Cash Rules

  The title of Julia Cagé’s The Price of Democracy will prompt Americans to think of the obscene cost of their elections. The amount spent on the 2020 federal races is said to have been a staggering $14 billion (more than twice the price tag for 2016). State elections consumed close to $2 billion. Almost 90 percent of the House candidates who spent the most money ended up winning.

• Opinion | Gerrymandering: The Upcoming Redistricting Battle

• Thwarting the Republican Backlash Against Democracy

  My father, Athan G. Theoharis, passed away on July 3. A leading expert on the FBI, he was responsible for exposing the bureau’s widespread abuses of power. He was a loyal husband, dedicated father, scholar, civil libertarian, and voting rights advocate with an indefatigable commitment to defending democracy. He schooled his children (and anyone who would listen, including scholars, journalists, and activists from a striking variety of political perspectives) to understand one thing above all: how hard the powers-that-be will work to maintain that power and how willing they are to subvert democracy in the process. His life is a reminder that much of American politics in 2021 is, in so many ways, nothing new.

• New State-by-State Scorecard Details GOP Assault on Voting Access

  As Texas Republicans sought the arrest of Democrats blocking voter suppression legislation and U.S. senators left Washington, D.C. without passing a major pro-democracy bill on Wednesday, a new state-by-state report detailed the GOP’s ongoing assault on ballot access.

  “Voting rights legislation must be passed urgently by Congress when they return from reces s before more damage is done.”—Caleb Jackson, CLC

• Koch Network Infiltration of Public Schools ‘Harms Students, Teachers, and Our Democracy’: Report

  A new report published Wednesday reveals how the Koch network—a shadowy group of wealthy capitalists acting to push the U.S. in a more conservative direction—is methodically working to undermine and privatize public education for financial gain.

  “The Koch network has financed local, state, and national mechanisms to create multiple crises, only to turn around and cite these same crises as reasons to adopt their free market solutions.”—UnKoch My Campus

• Tennessee Compiled Secret Dossiers on Civil Rights Protesters

• A nation committing suicide: Sweden

  Thus opens a dramatic account in the weekly The Economist on Sweden. According to a recent report by the National Crime Prevention Council, Sweden has recorded the highest death rate from shootings in Europe in the past 15 years. Analyzing data on 22 European countries provided by Eurostat and the World Health Organization, council researcher Klara Hradilova-Selin calculated that Sweden ranks first. Most of the victims are men between 20 and 29 years old.

  “The murder rate per firearm in Sweden is two and a half times the European average”.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• You damn, dirty apes Facebook bans a network of accounts coordinated from Russia that spread disinformation about Western coronavirus vaccines in multiple languages

  Dr. Zaius and Charlton Heston first battled for the fate of mankind more than half a century ago, but the original Planet of the Apes made something of a comeback in 2021, albeit mangled by online anti-vaxxer propaganda. In part at least, that is one of the revelations in Facebook’s latest report on disinformation. Meduza breaks down how a Russia-linked ad agency recycled a monkey meme for a juvenile but apparently serious campaign against the West’s coronavirus vaccines.

• Physicians who promote COVID-19 and antivaccine misinformation should lose their medical license

  Long before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I not infrequently went on record arguing that physicians who promote antivaccine misinformation should lose their license to practice medicine. The most recent example I could find occurred nearly a year before things started shutting down due to COVID-19, when I noted the case of Dr. Larry Palevsky, who had recently spoken at a rally opposing vaccine mandates issued in response to measles outbreaks that had been occurring due to low MMR vaccine uptake. (Truly it was a simpler—and far less lethal—time two years ago.) At the time, I argued that antivaccine physicians, particularly antivaccine pediatricians like Dr. Palevsky, should be subject to sanctions by their state medical boards, up to and including losing their license to practice medicine. Before that, I had applauded the Medical Board of California for having suspended the license of Dr. Robert Sears (who like to go by “Dr. Bob”) for deficiencies in practice related to vaccination, among other things), having said at the time action was first taken that “it was about time” and then approving of the sanctions the board finally issued, while lamenting that, not only did Dr. Bob get off easy, with just a suspension of his license, but he was being defended with massive false balance.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Laura Loomer Owes $124k In Legal Fees After Losing Lawsuit Over Having Her Twitter Account Reported And Banned

  Alt-right “personality” (I guess?) Laura Loomer keeps filing lawsuits and losing them. Loomer seems to believe it’s legally actionable to be moderated by social media services. No court has agreed with her. Between Section 230 and the First Amendment, Loomer doesn’t have a case. Oblique approaches — like claiming getting kicked off Twitter is tortious interference in a (nonexistent) business relationship (Loomer and Twitter, according to Loomer, but definitely not according to Twitter) — haven’t been any more successful.

• Bad Faith Politicians Are Using Social Media Suspension To Boost Their Own Profiles

  You may have heard that conspiracy theorist and nonsense-spouting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has, not for the first time, been temporarily suspended from Twitter for passing along conspiracy theory nonsense regarding vaccines. She’s unable to tweet for 7 days. I, unfortunately, can’t find the tweet now, but back in July when she was similarly suspended for just 12 hours, I saw someone jokingly note that temporarily suspending someone like Greene was the equivalent of Twitter throwing her a fundraiser, since she would immediately turn around, play the victim, and get her gullible, duped followers to throw more money at her. And, no doubt the same is true with this suspension as well. She’s already put out a statement and the usual “conservative” media orgs are already talking about how “Twitter can’t handle the truth” or some such nonsense.

• Louisiana & Alabama Attorneys General Set Up Silly Hotline To Report ‘Social Media Censorship’ They Can’t Do Anything About

  While various states are pushing unconstitutional laws to try to compel social media websites to host content they don’t want to host, it appears that some state Attorneys General are seeing what kinds of questionable things they can do even without a law. Florida’s law was already declared unconstitutional, but other states are still trying to pass these laws. One feature seen in a bunch of them is the ability for residents in a state to complain to the Attorney General and to ask the AG to investigate.

• Instagram apologizes for Almodóvar film’s poster censorship

  Instagram has apologized for removing the official poster for Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s new film from the social network because it showed a female nipple, after the poster’s designer complained of censorship.

  Instagram’s parent company Facebook told The Associated Press on Wednesday that several images of the poster for “Madres Paralelas,” which shows a lactating nipple, were removed “for breaking our rules against nudity” after they were uploaded on Monday.

• Instagram ‘sorry’ after pulling poster for new Almodovar film

  Spanish designer Javier Jaen, who created the poster, had hit out in a post on the network saying: “You should be ashamed of yourselves, Instagram.”

  He accompanied the text with a screen grab of a message he received from Instagram on Monday stating that the image had been taken down because it violated the network’s rules.

• Instagram says sorry for removing Pedro Almodovar film poster

  The film, which will open the Venice Film Festival on 1 September, stars Penelope Cruz as one of two women whose paths cross in hospital as they prepare to give birth.

• Turkish influencer prosecuted ‘for photos at Amsterdam sex museum’

  Merve Taskin, 23, shared pictures of sex toys she bought at the museum during a birthday trip to the Netherlands in January last year.

  A few months later she says she was arrested in Turkey, where sharing obscene content is considered a crime.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• ‘He protected us’: Remembering Yassen Zassoursky, the journalism scholar who midwifed Russia’s post-Soviet free press

  Yassen Zassoursky helped shape generations of Russian journalists. Earlier this month, he died at the age of 91. Before becoming the president of the journalism department at Moscow State University (MSU), Zassoursky served as dean from 1965 to 2007. Students who graduated during his tenure now occupy positions across Russia’s political spectrum, from liberal intellectuals like Sergey Parkhomenko and Dmitry Bykov to United Russia State Duma deputies like Pyotr Tolstoy and Alexander Khinstein. Andrei Richter was a long-time professor at MSU’s School of Journalism who now serves as an adviser at the OSCE Office of the Representative on Freedom of the Media and as a professor researcher at Comenius University in Bratislava. At Meduza’s request, he shares his thoughts about Yassen Zassoursky’s life and legacy.

• Five photojournalists sue NYPD over ‘assaults’ and ‘arrests’ during Black Lives Matter protests

• Economy dominates Zambia’s general election

  The situation is exemplified by the state of press freedom in the country. A newspaper and a TV station critical of the government were closed under pressure from the authorities. Government intimidation attempts against journalists and direct attacks on them have increased, according to the organization Reporters Without Borders.

  “To prosecute journalists, the government either uses financial pretexts (such as non-payment of taxes) [...] or the various laws regulating defamation and sedition,” reads a Zambia detail page on the RDF website.

  In the organization’s Press Freedom Index, Zambia has dropped an average of 30 places since 2015.

• Further Blow to Press Freedoms as US Wins Appeal in Effort to Extradite Julian Assange

  As Britain’s High Court on Wednesday handed the United States a win in its bid to extradite Julian Assange, press freedom and other human rights defenders renewed calls for the Biden administration to drop all charges against the WikiLeaks founder.

  “It is now time for President Biden to do the right thing and help end this farcical prosecution which should never have been brought in the first place.”—Nils Muižnieks, Amnesty International

• In Assange Extradition Case, British High Court Expands US Appeal

  This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter. For a limited time, take 25% off a monthly subscription and help us boost our coverage of the Assange case.

  WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was astounded by Britain’s High Court after it reversed a prior decision and permitted the United States government’s appeal on grounds related to his health.

• U.S. allowed to expand scope of Assange appeal

  In January of this year, the District Court blocked Assange’s extradition to the United States on the grounds that sending the WikiLeaks publisher to the harsh conditions of U.S. imprisonment would put him at grave risk of suicide. In the final days of the Trump administration, prosecutors acting on behalf of the U.S. filed an application to appeal that decision to the UK’s High Court, requesting permission to appeal on five lines of argument. A High Court judge granted the U.S. limited permission, on three of the five grounds for appeal, and today two separate High Court judges heard arguments over whether to allow the remaining two grounds.

• Julian Assange: US still pushing for extradition

  As German Green Party MP Margit Stumpp explained to DW: “The judge rejected his extradition solely on humanitarian grounds, citing the poor conditions in US prisons.” However, she added: “She (the judge) did not reject or even question any of the reasons cited by the US to justify their case. The implication is that Assange can still face extradition if the American authorities deliver credible assurances that the prison conditions he would likely face would not be detrimental to his health or a threat to his life.”   

  This issue will be at the center of the retrial. The High Court judges accepted three out of five reasons for the appeal. Wednesday’s initial hearing will deal with the remaining two to determine whether or not they will also be accepted. 

• Julian Assange’s partner seeks end to ‘nightmare’ of ‘threats and intimidation’

  At Wednesday’s hearing, Lord Justice Holroyde ruled in favour of the US authorities and allowed them to expand their arguments for the main appeal, which will take place over two days in October.

• U.S. tries again to extradite Wikileaks’ Assange from Britain

  Lawyers for both sides agreed that the full appeal hearing should be scheduled for October 27 and 28.

• Cambodia to use “ethics committee” to censor journalists

  Several Cambodian journalists told RSF they were concerned about the impact this ethics committee could have. “I wonder how they will judge journalists’ performance,” Voice of Democracy journalist Min Pov said. “Because there are media outlets that question the government’s performance that are already on a blacklist.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Opinion | The “Impossible” Rebellion

  The summer of 2021 has seen a delayed Olympics where humanity has guardedly emerged from a global pandemic which has claimed over four million lives. Records have been broken in water and on land, but sadly Olympic venues are not the only places where records have been obliterated. 

• Good Fire / Bad Fire: a False Paradigm

  The assumption is that fuels are the problem is widespread and repeated over and over by the media and agency folks so this mantra is nearly internalized in the public mind.

  A new twist on the same theme is the left’s social justice movement new found interest in Native American burning, which many suggest was a “good fire”that reduced fuels and thus prevented large fires.

• Police Arrest 10 People as Mountain Valley Pipeline Protests Top 932 Days

• Abortion and the Culture War

  Having said this, I do not want the reader to believe that there is no moral question when it comes to abortion. From an evolutionary standpoint, the fetus is a potential human being upon conception and may well have a “moral right” to that life trajectory. Yet that right exists within a broader context which requires that it should be balanced against a woman’s “moral right” to control her own body and the child’s “moral right” not to be born into an environment where he or she is basically unwanted. If we were to deal with this issue logically, the real answer to the dilemma of competing rights is surely free and universally available contraception—along with sensible sex education.

  Anti-Abortion and Gun Mania—An Eerie Connection

• At Risk in Israel’s Backlash Against Ben and Jerry’s? The Right to Protest.

  Ben and Jerry’s recently announced that it will not renew its agreement with its Israeli licensee when it expires in 2022, stating that it is “inconsistent” with the brand’s values “to be sold in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).” The decision, which has created tension between the brand’s independent board and its British parent company, Unilever, was the culmination of years of pressure from Palestine advocates and, more recently, the Movement for Black Lives, which views the fight for Palestinian rights as integral to the struggle for Black freedom.

• UN Official Decries Biden’s ‘Troubling’ Deportations Under Pretext of Pandemic

  Citing the imperative for all governments to uphold applicable international law, the United Nations refugee agency on Wednesday expressed concern over the Biden administration’s continued use of a Trump-era “expedited removal” process by which families seeking asylum in the U.S. are flown back to Mexico under pretext of mitigating the Covid-19 pandemic.

  “These expulsion flights of non-Mexicans to the deep interior of Mexico constitute a troubling new dimension in enforcement of the Covid-related public health order known as Title 42.”—Matthew Reynolds, UNHCR

• Do We Need Police?

  A s a former career police officer, I know that good police want the same things that most abolitionists do: safe, healthy, and empowered residents and investments in programs that prevent crime from occurring in the first place. The question is: How do we get there? Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Get The Nation’s Weekly NewsletterFridays. The best of the week. By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.

• Alaskan Law Requires DNA From Accused Criminals, but Officials Failed to Collect Samples From 21,000 People

  Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy said Tuesday that state law enforcement agencies had failed to collect the DNA of more than 21,000 people arrested for a variety of crimes, a task officials were required to perform under Alaska law.

  The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reported in December that some law enforcement agencies were not aware of the law or were not following it. As a result, authorities neglected to collect DNA swabs that might have solved cold cases and put serial offenders behind bars.

• Belarus imprisons kickboxing champion extradited by Russia

  Belarusian kickboxing champion Alexey Kudin (Aliaksei Kudzin) has been handed a prison sentence in Belarus, just weeks after Russia delivered him to Minsk. On August 11, a court in the Belarusian city of Maladzyechna sentenced Kudin to two and half years in prison for resisting arrest at a protest rally, the Viasna Human Rights Center reported. 

• TX Voting Rights Fight Takes Ugly Turn as House GOP Vote to Arrest Dem Lawmakers

• End of the line for Uber

  Uber is a bezzle (“the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it”). Every bezzle ends.

  Uber’s time is up.

  Uber was never going to be profitable. Never. It lured drivers and riders into cars by subsidizing rides with billions and billions of dollars from the Saudi royal family, keeping up the con-artist’s ever-shifting patter about how all of this would some day stand on its own.

• The West is a featherweight

  When the Taliban raided an Afghan district this month, they terrorized residents and ransacked businesses, but then they did something even more troubling: they asked for the names and ages of girls and women who they would marry the fighters. They forced the residents to show them the closets with their clothes to determine the age of the girls and women who lived there. Terrified women packed their bags, rented cars and freight wagons, or simply set out to escape their worst nightmare: being kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by the Taliban. They regard women as “kaniz” or commodities, and as “qhanimat”, the spoils of war.

  And all of this is happening for one reason only: “The West has betrayed Afghan women,” writes Shabnam Nasimi in the Daily Telegraph. “Afghanistan: the West’s route”, headlines Le Point on the cover. The Taliban have resumed stoning women. “If you are married and commit adultery, you must be stoned,” Mullah Maulavi Inayatullah Baleegh said during a sermon at the Pul-e Khishti mosque, the largest in Kabul.

  And while the glitterati of “inclusion” are jubilant for Tokyo’s transgender craze, the Taliban was spreading a fatwa: “We want all girls over 15 and widows under 45″.

• [Old] The West has betrayed the women of Afghanistan

  While two generations of American and [NATO] troops fought and bled in the Hindu Kush, the country changed dramatically. Since 2007, I have made several trips to the country of my birth and seen the difference that the West has made. I was astonished when I spoke to fathers who proudly said, “my daughter works as a doctor”, or “my daughter works as a teacher”, or “my daughter is top of her class” in a country that, prior to 2001, wouldn’t even allow women out of the house without a man accompanying her.

  Under western protection, the extent to which large parts of Afghanistan had shaken off some of the awful practices that defined the Taliban years is underappreciated. Millions of girls are now in school. There are women at the top of politics – with a combined 28 per cent representation in the House of the People and the House of the Elders, Afghanistan has a higher proportion of national parliament seats held by women than the United States. In the major cities, for the first time in decades, it has been possible for women to live largely independent lives.

  All of this is now under threat, as the West leaves precipitately and unnecessarily – allowing the Taliban to return without a fight and telling the people of Afghanistan to deal with it on their own. The past few months have seen thousands of assassinations targeting human rights advocates, journalists, civil servants, and other young Afghans who had seized the opportunities created by the American-led intervention in their country in 2001. It is a campaign of demoralisation designed to signal that the Taliban’s return is an inevitability.

• Alibaba fires manager accused of sexually assaulting colleague

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• LibreSpeed.org, An Alternative to Ookla’s Speedtest

  Did you use Speedtest.net to test your upload download speed? Now you can use LibreSpeed.org instead, a lightweight alternative to it, that just works without Flash and Java. Let’s try it and share!

Monopolies

• Patents

  • Bell Labs descendant sues Apple for infringing on clutch of patents

  • Graf von Westphalen wins appeal for Hörmann against Assa Abloy over industrial doors

    The subject of the dispute between Assa Abloy and Hörmann was the latter’s patent EP 2 103 771 B2, which protects a warehouse door with a wicket door. This has a low threshold to prevent tripping and thus meets the requirements for an escape door.

    The European Patent Office had upheld the patent in modified form during opposition and subsequent appeal proceedings in early 2020. Defendant Assa Abloy was one of eight opposing parties, and one of the three appellants.

    Assa Abloy Entrance Systems manufactures sectional doors, which are used in warehouses. In one of its product catalogues, the Swedish manufacturer offered them in two possible versions. One version features a cap on the threshold of the escape door, which raises its threshold. The second version lacks this element and, according to Hörmann, infringes its EP 771.

    [...]

    However, the Higher Regional Court Düsseldorf ruled that the alternative door design, where the threshold is covered with a steel cap and thus has a trip hazard, did not infringe the patent.

• Trademarks

  • Manchester United Becomes Manchester UFC In ‘Football Manager 22′ Over Dumb Trademark Spat

    It won’t be a massive surprise that Manchester United, the famed Premier League football club, has made it onto our pages before. As the “Yankees of European soccer”, it would be shocking if the club hadn’t at some point taken aggressive action in the technology and IP space. Still, there isn’t a great deal of posts in there, so you would be forgiven if you thought of Man-U as generally not bad on this sort of thing.

• Copyrights

  • UK-based song-investment fund Hipgnosis has officially acquired the 115-track catalog of Fleetwood Mac vocalist and keyboardist Christine McVie.

    Hipgnosis just recently unveiled the high-profile deal, which represents the latest in a decidedly long line of multimillion-dollar plays for the entity. To be sure, the Merck Mercuriadis-founded business dropped north of $1 billion on music IP [sic] in the 2021 fiscal year (covering the 12 months ending on March 31st), including all or part of catalogs from Beats by Dre co-founder Jimmy Iovine, Shakira, L.A. Reid, and Chrissie Hynde, to name just some.

    Though the financial specifics of Hipgnosis’s Christine McVie agreement haven’t been publicly revealed – the same is also true of the three-year-old company’s other IP [sic] investments – higher-ups previously stated that they pay an average acquisition multiple of 15 times catalogs’ market valuations. Some industry estimates have placed said multiple at over 20 times for marquee catalogs.

  • Apple Drops iPhone Copyright Lawsuit Against Cyber Startup Corellium

    Just as the two-year-long legal tussle between Apple and a cybersecurity startup Corellium looked set to go to trial, the pair have settled out of court.

    Back in August 2019, Apple accused Corellium of both violating its copyright and breaching the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by creating “virtualized” versions of the iPhone. Corellium had caused a stir in the security community in 2018 when Forbes revealed its plans to allow researchers to spin up iPhones on their laptops to start probing iOS for security weaknesses or usability flaws.

  • Netflix Intensifies ‘VPN Ban’ and Targets Residential IP-addresses Too (Updated)

    Netflix has stepped up its efforts to ban VPN and proxy users from bypassing geographical restrictions. The streaming service is now blocking residential IP addresses too, since some unblocking tools use these to bypass restrictions. This isn’t without collateral damage as many regular Internet users without a VPN now report “missing content” on Netflix.

  • YouTuber Receives Strikes For Reviewing Legal Video Apps Available on Google Play

    TechDoctorUK is experiencing some interesting problems with YouTube’s policies that ban discussion of ways to bypass payment for digital content and services. The popular YouTuber has had tutorial videos for legal apps downloadable from Google Play flagged numerous times and is currently suspended from YouTube for ‘banned’ content that doesn’t appear to be illegal.