Audiocasts/Shows

• Full Circle Weekly News #230

• CSD in KDE: Merging Toolbars and Titlebars? The How – Kockatoo Tube

Kernel Space

• Linux 5.16 KVM To Land RISC-V Hypervisor Support – Phoronix

  Coming with the Linux 5.16 kernel cycle will be support for RISC-V virtualization with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).

  The RISC-V ISA recently settled on its hypervisor extension and its spec is now considered frozen. The hypervisor extension to the RISC-V instruction set is outlined here. Given that it’s taken a while to freeze, there isn’t yet any performant RISC-V processors out there actually implementing the complete extension and so for now and during development it’s been a function of running it on simulators.

• Paul E. Mc Kenney: Will Your Rust Code Survive the Attack of the Zombie Pointers?

  Some of the previous posts in this series have been said to be quite difficult, so I figured I owed you all an easy one. And the zombie-pointer problem really does have a trivial solution, at least in the context of the Linux kernel. In other environments, all bets are off.

• Paul E. Mc Kenney: How Much of the Kernel Can Rust Own?

  Rust concurrency makes heavy use of ownership and borrowing. The purpose of this post is not to give an exposition of Rust’s capabilities and limitations in this area, but rather to give a series of examples of ownership in the Linux kernel.

  The first example involves Linux-kernel per-CPU variables. In some cases, such variables are protected by per-CPU locks, for example, a number of fields in the per-CPU rcu_data structure are used by the kernel threads that manage grace periods for offloaded callbacks, and these fields are protected by the ->nocb_gp_lock field in the same instance of that same structure. In other cases, access to a given per-CPU variable is permitted only by the corresponding CPU, and even then only if that CPU has disabled preemption. For example, the per-CPU rcu_data structure’s ->ticks_this_gp field may be updated only from the corresponding CPU, and only when preemption is disabled. In the particular case, preemption is disabled as a side-effect of having disabled interrupts.

  The second example builds on the first. In kernels built with CONFIG_RCU_NOCB_CPU=n, the per-CPU rcu_data structure’s ->cblist field may be updated from the corresponding CPU, and only when preemption is disabled. However, it is also allowed from some other CPU when the corresponding CPU has been taken offline, but only from within that other CPU that is orchestrating the offlining of the corresponding CPU.

  (What about kernels built with CONFIG_RCU_NOCB_CPU=y? They must also acquire a ->nocb_lock that is also contained within the per-CPU rcu_data structure.)

• Updated Zstd Planned For Linux 5.16 With Better Performance – Phoronix

  As reported on last week, an updated Zstd implementation for the Linux kernel is being re-attempted by Zstd developer Nick Terrell at Facebook. Today he sent out the latest Zstd kernel patches to provide a much newer version of the code compared to what is currently mainlined and will provide much better performance and numerous fixes.

  The Zstd code currently within the Linux kernel is out-of-date and it’s taken an unfortunate amount of time to get it updated. Fortunately, the new code is introducing a new kernels-style wrapper API around Zstd that should allow for these code updates to be performed smoother and more easily moving forward. In fact, the Zstd kernel code is working towards being automatically generated/derived from the upstream Zstd sources.

• Graphics Stack

  • RadeonSI Lands Another Big Overhead Optimization – “Substantially” Helps In Some Cases – Phoronix

    Merged to Mesa 21.3-devel this weekend was a rework to the display list interface for the Gallium3D code and Mesa state tracker and wired up for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. This latest driver overhead reduction is another sizable win for AMD’s open-source OpenGL driver on Linux.

    While these days most Linux games exclusively target the Vulkan API and efforts around Valve’s Steam Play are focused on mapping Direct3D to Vulkan, OpenGL still has a large presence particularly for workstation software. Over the past year we’ve seen AMD’s driver engineers continue to focus on many RadeonSI optimizations to benefit workstation workloads, in particular using SPECViewPerf as the baseline and often focusing on Siemens NX (Snx).

  • Vulkan 1.2.195 Introduced With Three New Extensions

    Vulkan 1.2.195 is out today as the latest weekly update to this high performance, industry standard API for graphics and compute.

    With Vulkan 1.2.195 there is the usual assortment of documentation clarifications/corrections plus this time around are three new extensions. The new extensions in Vulkan 1.2.195 include:

Applications

• September GNU Spotlight with Mike Gerwitz: 15 new GNU releases!

  anastasis-0.1.0
  bison-3.8.2
  Coreutils-9.0
  gama-2.15
  gdb-11.1
  gdbm-1.21
  gnun-1.1
  gzip-1.11
  inetutils-2.2
  mediagoblin-0.12.0
  parallel-20210922
  taler-exchange-0.8.5
  unifont-14.0.01
  wget-1.21.2
  wget2-2.0.0

• Tools to explore BGP

  Yesterday there was a big Facebook outage caused by BGP. I’ve been vaguely interested in learning more about BGP for a long time, so I was reading a couple of articles.

  I got frustrated because none of the articles showed me how I could actually look up information related to BGP on my computer, so I wrote a tweet asking for tools.

  I got a bunch of useful replies as always, so this blog post shows some tools you can use to look up BGP information. There might be an above average number of things wrong in this post because I don’t understand BGP that well.

• KShutdown 5.90 Allows to Auto Restart from Linux into Another OS | UbuntuHandbook

  The graphical auto shutdown app KShutdown released version 5.90 with feature to reboot from Linux into another OS automatically.

  KShutdown is a free open-source app that provides a simple Qt based user interface. It allows users to automatically shutdown, restart, hibernate, sleep, log-out, or run a command on certain time, after a period of time, on user inactivity or other event.

  The app is getting more and more powerful. The latest 5.90, beta for next 6.0 release, introduced experimental multi-booting support. User can now automatically reboot from Linux into another OS, such as Windows, from Grub menu entries.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to install elgg on CentOS 8 – Unixcop

  Elgg is an award-winning open source social networking engine that provides a robust framework on which to build all kinds of social environments, from a campus wide social network for your university, school or college or an internal collaborative platform for your organization through to a brand-building communications tool for your company and its clients.

• Debian 11: Solved Apt insisting that I “must” have a web browser, de-bloating my Debian install in the process. Bonus: Debian GNOME Live Installer doesn’t install a print system, but I can fix it! – BaronHK’s Rants

  So, a few days ago, I wrote that I was perplexed to find Apt screaming that I must have a web browser installed (even if it’s not the one I want), and today I think I figured out why.

  It turns out that Debian installs all the things when it comes to internationalization, non-English spell checking, non-English Firefox internationalization DEB packages, and LibreOffice help packs, and then you end up in dependency hell due to that sometimes.

• 10 Ways to Use the top Command in Linux

  The top command in Linux gives useful statistics about system resources. We can use it to view CPU and memory usage alongside process information of running services. You can also find zombie processes using top. So, mastering the top command is a must for Linux admins.

  The following section provides a simple overview of the top command and shows how to use top in real-world scenarios.

• How To Install Discord on Debian 11 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Discord on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Discord is the easiest way to talk over voice, video, and text. It was originally intended for gamers but these days, it is considered a Slack alternative even for team and community communication. Discord runs natively on all major operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of Discord on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• Proxmox VE Full Course: Class 11 – Integrated Firewall – Invidious

• How to do replacements based on multiple field values

  In a previous BASHing data post I explained how to normalise entries in a field based on the entry in another field. The same command-line method can be used to repair entries based on entries in several other fields in the same record. An example will make it a lot easier to see what this is all about and why this method is so useful.

• Htop – An Interactive Linux System Monitor/Process Viewer

  In a Linux operating system environment, a process is defined as a program in execution or one that is already running. A program only becomes a process when it starts running/executing. This program execution trail that translates to a process is associated with inputs and outputs.

  Available system resources/services are often utilized by the processes as mandatory inputs to achieve a targeted system objective (output). A PID or Process ID uniquely identifies each process on your operating system.

• Install Firefox Browser 93 In Ubuntu / LinuxMint / RockyLinux | Tips On UNIX

  This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install Firefox browser 93 in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Linux Mint 20.1, and RockyLinux.

  Mozilla Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla foundation and generally utilized by thousands and thousands of individuals in their daily actions.

• Syslog-ng 3.34: MQTT destination with TLS and WebSocket support

• Bash Indexed Array Explained With Examples – OSTechNix

  Arrays are a type of data structure that is used to store values of a certain type. You can also think array as a variable but a variable can only store one value where an array can store multiple values within it. The concept of the array is not only bound to bash. Any programming language you work with will have arrays in it but with implementation differences.

• Netlify deploy RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded [How to Fix] – howtodojo

  This morning I was deploying one of the site on our network to Netlify using the usual command:

  netlify deploy –prod
  But after the CDN diffing files I got the following error message

  RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded

• vmware esxi 6.7 and 7.0 within kvm-qemu – sb.v00 failed to decompress and admission check failed for memory resource – errors mean: need more RAM

• File Searching on Ubuntu

  This simple tutorial explains how to search files and folders on Ubuntu. This uses Files, the default file manager on Ubuntu also known as Nautilus.

Games

• Humble Choice for October 2021 lands with Amnesia: Rebirth | GamingOnLinux

  Another fresh month has landed with a cool breeze and Humble Bundle have their next set of curated games available in their Humble Choice subscription.

• A look at the top 100 Steam games and how many will work on Linux and the Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

  Across various previous articles we’ve looked at how many games are supported on Linux and how many Windows games work with Steam Play Proton, so let’s take a look at the current top 100.

• Thoughts On The Linus Tech Tips Linux Challenge – Invidious

  Linus and Luke from Linus Tech Tips announcend they were going to be doing a Linux gaming challenge and I for one think this is a really big chance to show off what gaming on linux is actually like to millions of people who have no idea.

• Godot Engine – Godot games in the Steam Next Fest (October 2021)

  As the days passes and the team and contributors work hard to deliver Godot 4.x and Godot 3.4, we want to shine a light on the amazing projects that are made using Godot.

  Our project manager Rémi already collected all of them in a Twitter thread. The list of games is reproduced below.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 42 to Introduce a System-wide Dark Style Preference, Thanks to elementary OS

    There’s still time for GNOME 42, but it looks like it will implement a system-wide dark mode preference similar to elementary OS 6.

    If you have been reading our coverages, you must have noticed mentioning it as one of the best elementary OS 6 features.

    And for all the right reasons. Unlike a GTK theme change, elementary OS 6 approached the dark style preference as an opt-in preference that application developers can detect and choose to respect.

Distributions

• The 4 Best Linux Distros for Helping You Stay Anonymous
  

  In this article, we’ll look at four Linux distros that help to keep you anonymous on the Web. The Linux operating system offers a lot of privacy options, and it’s arguably the best OS to use if online security and privacy is important to you.

• elementary OS 6 Updates for September, 2021

  We’re back with your monthly report on updates to elementary OS 6! It was another incredibly eventful month as we continued fixing reported issues and focused in especially on improvements to AppCenter and Online Accounts apps like Mail. But before we get to all the goodies, we’re proud to report that OS 6 has been downloaded from our website over 137,000 times—and as always, that’s not including downloads from third parties or direct downloads via torrent that bypass our download page.

• Qubes OS Intro on the Librem 14

  With Qubes OS now fully supported on the Librem 14 and Librem Mini, we thought it was time for a rundown of how containerization in Qubes OS makes it perhaps the most secure software design to date. Your data can be kept safe and locked away from most dangers by being in a separate VM. This video will show you how Qubes OS can bring extra security to your Librem 14 or Mini.

  [...]

  Want to learn more? Check out what Kyle Rankin has to say on the subject or dig into the docs. Want Qubes OS? Select it at checkout when you buy a Librem 14, Mini or download the Librem 14 OEM installer here.

• New Releases

  • MX Linux 21 Release Candidate Readied for Public Testing with Xfce, KDE Plasma, and Fluxbox Flavors

    Coming exactly one month after the second beta release, MX Linux 21 Release Candidate is here with some small changes, numerous bug fixes and updated translations, as well as updated components and latest security patches from the Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” software repositories.

    MX Linux 21 Release Candidate adds “thick” variants of the xfwm4 mx-comfort themes in the Xfce flagship edition, and adds new mx-comfort color schemes as part of the MX global themes to the KDE Plasma edition, which also received various improvements to the default settings.

  • EasyOS 3.0 released

    Significant structural changes, hence the version bump. Don’t want this to be announced on Distrowatch, as there could be issues. Hope to fix them, if any, for version 3.1. Also want to do a new desktop theme for 3.1.

  • EasyOS Dunfell-series 3.0

    EasyOS was created in 2017, derived from Quirky Linux, which in turn was derived from Puppy Linux in 2013. Easy is built in woofQ, which takes as input binary packages from any distribution, and uses them on top of the unique EasyOS infrastructure.
    Throughout 2020, the official release for x86_64 PCs was the Buster-series, built with Debian 10.x Buster DEBs.
    EasyOS has also been built with packages compiled from source, using a fork of OpenEmbedded (OE). Currently, the Dunfell release of OE has been used, to compile two sets of binary packages, for x86_64 and aarch64.
    The latter have been used to build EasyOS for the Raspberry Pi4, and first official release, 2.6.1, was in January 2021.
    The page that you are reading now has the release notes for EasyOS Dunfell-series on x86_64 PCs, also debuting in 2021.
    To try and keep things simple, all three, the Dunfell-series on Pi4 and the Dunfell-series and Buster-series on the PC, all are (approximately) sync’ed at the same version number.
    However, there are differences in the maturity of each. In the case of the Pi4, the hardware still has some issues. For Dunfell-series on the PC, as the packages are all compiled from source, they are not as tested as those in the Buster-series.
    The version number is for EasyOS itself, the infrastructure, support-glue, system scripts and system management and configuration applications.
    The latest version is becoming mature, though is an experimental distribution and some parts are under development and are still considered as beta-quality. However, you will find this distro to be a very pleasant surprise, or so we hope.

• BSD

  • LLVM 13.0.0 released

    Version 13.0.0 of the LLVM compiler suite is out. There is a long list of changes, as always; see the numerous sets of release notes below for details.

  • LLVM 13.0.0 released

    LLVM 13.0.0 is now available! Download it now, or read the release notes:
    
    https://releases.llvm.org/13.0.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html
    
    
    https://releases.llvm.org/13.0.0/tools/clang/docs/Release...
    
    
    https://releases.llvm.org/13.0.0/tools/clang/tools/extra/...
    
    
    https://releases.llvm.org/13.0.0/tools/flang/docs/Release...
    
    
    https://releases.llvm.org/13.0.0/tools/lld/docs/ReleaseNo...
    
    
    https://releases.llvm.org/13.0.0/tools/polly/docs/Release...
    
    
    https://releases.llvm.org/13.0.0/projects/libcxx/docs/Rel...
    
    Binaries and sources for 13.0.0 can be found on GitHub:
    
    https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/releases/tag/llvmorg...
    
    LLVM 13.0.0 would not be possible without the help of our volunteer
    release team! Thanks to all the release testers:
    
    Michał Górny, Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, Hans Wennborg, Albion Fung,
    Brian Cain, Dimitry Andric, Tobias Hieta, Diana Picus, Sylvestre Ledru
    
    Also, a big thanks to everyone else who helped identify critical bugs,
    track down bug-fixes, and resolve merge conflicts.
    
    If you have questions or comments about this release, please contact
    the LLVMdev mailing list!
    
    -Tom
    
    

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

  • Kernel Updates Available » PCLinuxOS

    The following kernels are available for PCLinuxOS. Kernel 5.4.150. Kernel 5.10.70 and Kernel 5.14.9.

  • Chromium Browser » PCLinuxOS

    The Chromium Browser has been updated to version 94.0.4606.71 and shipped to the software repository.

  • Mozilla Firefox Browser » PCLinuxOS

    The Firefox browser has been updated to 93.0 and shipped to the software repository for PCLinuxOS.

  • Brave Browser » PCLinuxOS

    Brave Browser has been updated to 1.30.87 and shipped to the software repository.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • 4 steps to make DevSecOps adoption a team effort

    Perhaps your organization is already experimenting with DevOps tools or considering how to move towards DevOps. Maybe you’re still relying on ad hoc processes. Then suddenly your C-suite or auditors raise the need to standardize on a secure and agile development process. Enter DevSecOps.

    To mitigate the challenges that come with DevSecOps adoption, you’ll need to make it a team effort. Here’s what you need to do.

  • 4 new videos about working and leading openly

    Last month, Open Organization community members took to the airwaves (or maybe the fiber optics?) to discuss some of the ways open principles are changing how we work, manage, and lead. Here’s what we shared on OpenOrgTV.

  • Designing efficient file operations at cloud scale

    Accessing and operating on data is one of the most time-consuming aspects of computing. Developers can improve efficiency by looking for ways to avoid the overhead required by standard file operations. To illustrate the possibilities, I will report on a couple of interesting cases where I designed cloud-scale services that dynamically construct files for users to consume.

    The first application was an incremental backup and restore application, and the second was part of a new OpenShift installation service that creates personalized ISO files of Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHEL CoreOS). Both applications went through similar iterations, starting with a naive implementation and gradually improving its efficiency. I will focus on the ISO design first and briefly discuss the backup and restore application at the end.

  • Printf-style debugging using GDB, Part 1 | Red Hat Developer

    Programmers often debug software by adding print statements to source code. Knowing that a certain point in the program has been reached can be immensely helpful. It’s also useful to print values of variables at various points during program execution. An obvious drawback of this technique is the need to change source code, both to add the print statements and later to remove or disable them after the bug has been fixed. Adding new code can potentially introduce new bugs, and if you’ve added many print statements, you might forget to remove some of them when cleaning up after debugging.

    You can use the popular GNU Project Debugger (GDB) to perform the same style of debugging for various programming languages, especially C and C++, without changing source files. This article is the first of a series describing how to use GDB to add print statements to your C and C++ code. We’ll start with some basics and move through more advanced ways to call program-defined functions that display data.

  • Taking action against climate change – Developers drive worldwide Call for Code movement [Ed: IBM is greenwashing again because it has a very negative image]

    The climate crisis has become one of the most pressing issues of our time, so critical the United Nations’ Secretary-General labeled it as “code red for humanity” in response to a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. With the report predicting dramatically rising temperatures and sea levels, and more frequent drought and fire weather over the next 20 years, change and collaboration are needed to make both an immediate and lasting difference.

    Because of this urgency and consistent with IBM’s long commitment to environmental leadership, this year’s Call for Code Global Challenge invited the world’s software developers and innovators to come together to combat climate change with open source-powered technology. In particular, participants were asked to address the UN Sustainable Development Goals 2 (Zero Hunger), 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), and 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), and through them help to halt and reverse the impact of climate change.

    After months of work by teams around the world and much deliberation by our distinguished judges, we’re excited to announce the regional finalists for the global competition. Our judges have identified the top solutions from Asia Pacific; Europe; Greater China; India; Latin America; the Middle East and Africa; and, North America. Congratulations to these teams, and thank you all for your time, dedication, and ingenuity!

  • Get podman up and running on Windows using Linux [Ed: IBM is so desperate to spread its vendor lock-in that it is shilling Microsoft's attack on GNU/Linux, WSL/2. This isn't helping at all; well, it helps Microsoft and IBM.]

  • Hybrid work: 9 ways to encourage healthy team conflict | The Enterprisers Project

    That’s as true in working situations as it is in our personal lives. When you’re talking about relationships within a hybrid work team, with some employees working remotely and others in the office, maintaining good relations can be even trickier.

    “When everyone isn’t in the same room, or office for that matter, it can be easier for communication to break down,” says Dr. Sunni Lampasso, executive coach and founder of Shaping Success. “Hence, having a mixture of in-office and remote workers can create increased miscommunication and conflict avoidance opportunities.”

  • 5 must-read Harvard Business Review articles | The Enterprisers Project

    Each month, through our partnership with Harvard Business Review, we refresh our resource library with five new HBR articles we believe CIOs and IT leaders will value highly. Check out the curated pieces below, available to readers through the end of the month.

  • Using RHEL System Roles to automate the implementation of RHEL Session Recording

    It can be a challenging and time-consuming process to determine the root cause of a security incident. Because of this, Red Hat introduced the ability to record terminal sessions in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.

    This functionality, called session recordings, allows you to audit what users have done from the terminal. Recordings can be easily viewed from the command line or from the web console, and not only can you increase their playback speed, but also search for keywords and jump easily to relevant portions of the recording.

    The session recording functionality is provided by the tlog package.

    If you would like to implement session recording across your environment, you can either implement it manually or use the tlog RHEL System Role to automate its installation and configuration across your RHEL environment.

  • In community we trust: Open source software and supply chain security

    In the United States and around the globe, businesses and organizations have experienced a number of high-profile and costly security attacks over the past few years. And the sobering truth is, the attacks are not going to stop.

    According to Forrester’s report–”The State of Application Security 2021″–30% of external breaches were caused by software vulnerabilities. But as SolarWinds showed, not only are your internal operations disrupted by a breach, but your customers’ lives can be severely disrupted as a result. Even entire supply chains.

    Which is why our collective work on security is so important right now.

  • Red Hat’s Dr. Mark Little elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering

    We are pleased to announce that Red Hat’s head of Application Services engineering, Mark Little, Ph.D., has been named a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the U.K.’s national academy of engineering.

    Fellowship with the Academy is an honor given to individuals in the U.K. whose work has helped to advance and enrich the field of engineering through research, policy formation, education and entrepreneurship. According to the Academy, these individuals serve as innovation leaders and inspiring role models with remarkable achievements in business or academia.

    Mark has earned the respect of colleagues throughout the technology industry, not only as a brilliant technologist, but also as a visionary leader. Over the course of his career, he has received 100 patents, published 60 papers, and co-authored four books. As vice president of Engineering at Red Hat, he has been involved in numerous initiatives, driving the technology strategy for a broad portfolio of software tools used by enterprise organizations to create, integrate and automate critical business applications.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu Fridge | Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 703

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 703 for the week of September 26 – October 2, 2021.

  • Mir 2.5 Released With Wayland Extension Updates For Better Handling On-Screen Keyboards – Phoronix

    Canonical continues advancing their Wayland-based Mir stack for embedded and IoT use-cases. Out today is Mir 2.5 with the latest features as they work to provide better support for on-screen keyboards.

    Mir 2.5 adds support for the zwp_virtual_keyboard_v1 to allow more Wayland on-screen keyboards to work with Mir. The Squeekboard keyboard is also benefiting from this release with zwp_text_input_v3 and zwp_input_method_v2 also now supported. With these additions more on-screen keyboards should work with Mir.

Devices/Embedded

• Add an audio jack to Raspberry Pi 400 with the DACBerry 400 – CNX Software

  The Raspberry Pi 400 is a keyboard PC with most of the features of Raspberry Pi 4 SBC, with one of the exceptions being the lack of AV port. But you can now add a 3.5mm audio jack to the Raspberry Pi 400 through the DACBerry 400 S expansion board that connects to the 40-pin GPIO header.

  It’s a neater way than using a cheap USB audio dongle with microphone and headphone jacks, as it takes less space, and does not occupy any of the USB ports from the Raspberry Pi 400, and it does not prevent you from using the GPIO header. It’s also better suited for headphones with both microphone input and analog stereo audio output into a single jack, and probably comes with better audio quality than the low-cost USB dongles.

• Marvell 7040 based networking SBC features 10GbE port, 5G, and WiFi 6

  On Kickstarter: Globalscale’s $159 “Mochabin” SBC runs Linux on a quad -A72 Marvell 7040 with up to 8GB DDR4, 10GbE and 1GbE SFP, 4x GbE, WAN/PoE, 2x M.2, and an enclosure. A $199 model adds WiFi 6.

  Globalscale Technologies has announced a more powerful follow-on to its EspressoBin networking board. The Mochabin advances to a 1.4GHz, quad-core, Cortex-A72 Marvell Armada 7040, compared to the earlier quad -A53 Armada 3720, and offers more Ethernet ports including a 10GbE port. The Ubuntu or OpenWrt driven board is supported by the same EspressoBin.net community, and supports a variety of firewall, networking, SDWAN, and NAS applications.

• Pi-based doggie bot hops and trots its way to Kickstarter success

  MangDang’s open source, $279-and-up “Mini Pupper” quadruped robot dog kit for the Raspberry Pi 4 has 12-DOF agility and an Ubuntu/ROS stack for SLAM, obstacle avoidance, and self navigation.

  A Hong Kong based startup called MangDang Technology has made a big splash on Kickstarter with a quadruped robotic dog kit for the Raspberry Pi that has earned $285K with 23 days to go. Designed primarily for robotics education and inspired by the Stanford Pupper project, the Mini Pupper leverages Ubuntu and ROS to offer SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), obstacle avoidance, self-navigation, camera detection, and object tracking.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Portenta H7 Lite Connected hits another sweet spot for pro users

    We launched the powerful Portenta H7 last year. The more targeted Portenta H7 Lite just a few weeks ago. And we’re back (already!), with another new product that fills the gap between the previous two versions.

    It’s known as Portenta H7 Lite Connected, but we like to call it “the best of both worlds.”

    The Portenta H7 Lite Connected is powerful, with integrated wireless connectivity, yet remains cost-optimized. You could think of it as the H7 with only one secure element and no high-resolution video interface. Or if you prefer, the H7 Lite with the ability to connect.

  • What’s On Your Bank Card? Hacker Tool Teaches All About NFC And RFID | Hackaday

    The Flipper Zero hacker tool is a multipurpose hacker tool that aims to make the world of hardware hacking more accessible with a slick design, wide array of capabilities, and a fantastic looking UI. They are struggling with manufacturing delays like everyone else right now, but there’s a silver lining: the team’s updates are genuinely informative and in-depth. The latest update is all about RFID and NFC, and how the Flipper Zero can interact with a variety of contactless protocols.

  • Hackable Smart Watch Is Also Open Source | Hackaday

    When they first came to market, many detractors thought that smart watches would be a flop or that there wouldn’t be much use for them. Over the past few years, though, their sales continue to increase as people find more and more niche uses for them that weren’t previously considered. The one downside to most of these watches is unsurprisingly their lack of openness and hackability, but with some willpower and small circuit components there are a few options available for those of us who like to truly own our technology.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Elo’s Next Generation Android Devices Delivers Powerful Enterprise-Readines with Greater Flexibility

  • Mi 11, Mi 11 Ultra and Mi 11i start receiving Android 12 Stable update – NotebookCheck.net News

  • Lenovo almost gave us a Nintendo Switch that runs Android — here’s what it looks like

  • 9to5Google Daily 725: Android 12 arrives but not ‘fully’, Pixel 6 camera capabilities tested in new leak, plus more – 9to5Google

  • Drop the needle on YouTube Music’s new record-shaped widget, now available in Android 12

  • Firefox for Android Gets Chrome’s Best Security Feature

  • Bring home a 100+ inch display: Android Anker projectors from $200 shipped (Up to $200 off) – 9to5Toys

  • Best Android app deals of the day: Evoland 2, Float It, more – 9to5Toys

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Securing Connections: Disabling 3DES in Firefox 93

      As part of our continuing work to ensure that Firefox provides secure and private network connections, it periodically becomes necessary to disable configurations or even entire protocols that were once thought to be secure, but no longer provide adequate protection. For example, last year, early versions of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol were disabled by default.

      One of the options that goes into configuring TLS is the choice of which encryption algorithms to enable. That is, which methods are available to use to encrypt and decrypt data when communicating with a web server?

    • Mozilla Security Blog: Firefox 93 protects against Insecure Downloads

      Downloading files on your device still exposes a major security risk and can ultimately lead to an entire system compromise by an attacker. Especially because the security risks are not apparent. To better protect you from the dangers of insecure, or even undesired downloads, we integrated the following two security enhancements which will increase security when you download files on your computer.

    • The Mozilla Blog: News from Firefox Focus and Firefox on Mobile

      One of our promises this year was to deliver ways that can help you navigate the web easily and get you quickly where you need to go. We took a giant step in that direction earlier this year when we shared a new Firefox experience. We were on a mission to save you time and streamline your everyday use of the browser. This month, we continue to deliver on that mission with new features in our Firefox on mobile products. For our Firefox Focus mobile users, we have a fresh redesign plus new features including shortcuts to get you faster to the things you want to get to. This Cybersecurity Awareness month, you can manage your passwords and take them wherever you go whenever you use your Firefox on Android mobile app.

    • 93.0 Firefox Release

    • Firefox 93.0

      Firefox 93.0 has been released. With this version Firefox supports the new AVIF image format, which is based on the modern and royalty free AV1 video codec. The PDF viewer supports filling more forms, such as XFA-based forms used by multiple governments and banks. Downloads that rely on insecure connections are blocked, protecting against potentially malicious or unsafe downloads. Details on these features and more can be found in the release notes.

    • Firefox 93 features an improved SmartBlock and new Referrer Tracking Protections

      We are happy to announce that the Firefox 93 release brings two exciting privacy improvements for users of Strict Tracking Protection and Private Browsing. With a more comprehensive SmartBlock 3.0, we combine a great browsing experience with strong tracker blocking. In addition, our new and enhanced referrer tracking protection prevents sites from colluding to share sensitive user data via HTTP referrers.

    • Tab Unloading in Firefox 93 – Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

      Starting with Firefox 93, Firefox will monitor available system memory and, should it ever become so critically low that a crash is imminent, Firefox will respond by unloading memory-heavy but not actively used tabs. This feature is currently enabled on Windows and will be deployed later for macOS and Linux as well. When a tab is unloaded, the tab remains in the tab bar and will be automatically reloaded when it is next selected. The tab’s scroll position and form data are restored just like when the browser is restarted with the restore previous windows browser option.

      On Windows, out-of-memory (OOM) situations are responsible for a significant number of the browser and content process crashes reported by our users. Unloading tabs allows Firefox to save memory leading to fewer crashes and avoids the associated interruption in using the browser.

      We believe this may especially benefit people who are doing heavy browsing work with many tabs on resource-constrained machines. Or perhaps those users simply trying to play a memory-intensive game or using a website that goes a little crazy. And of course, there are the tab hoarders, (no judgement here). Firefox is now better at surviving these situations.

      We have experimented with tab unloading on Windows in the past, but a problem we could not get past was that finding a balance between decreasing the browser’s memory usage and annoying the user because there’s a slight delay as the tab gets reloaded, is a rather difficult exercise, and we never got satisfactory results.

    • Firefox 93.0 Released! Adds AVIF Support & Blocks Insecure Downloads | UbuntuHandbook

      Mozilla Firefox 93.0 was officially released today. The release features AVIF image support and further security improvements.

      The AV1 image format (AVIF) is an image file format for storing images or image sequences compressed with AV1 in the HEIF file format. It offers significant file size reduction compare to JPEG, PNG and WebP. Google Chrome added it support since version 85. By releasing v93.0, Firefox now has AVIF image support.

      Some PDF files have interactive fields to fill in data. Since Firefox 83, the built-in PDF viewer supports filling fields such as text, check boxes, and radio buttons. In the new release, it adds more forms (XFA-based forms, used by multiple governments and banks) support.

• CMS

  • The Month in WordPress: September 2021

    That was Josepha Haden on the “A Sneak Peek at WordPress 5.9” episode of the WP Briefing Podcast, talking about what goes into a WordPress release like version 5.9. Read on to find out more about updates on the latest release and the latest WordPress news from September 2021.

• FSFE

  • Google, FSFE & Child labor

    FSFE, one of Google’s mouthpieces in the free software world, has announced a dubious competition called Youth Hacking 4 Freedom.

    The target audience is between 14 and 18 years of age. Participants compete by working for free. There are numerous cases where people completed work for Google Summer of Code and they were not paid yet the rules for YH4F are even worse and the victims are younger. Google Code-In was a similar program targetting teenagers between 13 and 17 years. Google gave the child laborers t-shirts and certificates in lieu of payment. It looks like ethical concerns may have been a factor in Google’s decision to mothball the Google Code-In last year. Yet a program that is even more demanding has appeared in a Google proxy organization, the FSFE.

    A recent news story gives various examples of Google trying to obfuscate controversial employment practices. Child labor crosses a red line.

• FSF

  • Life’s better together when you avoid Windows 11

    October 5 marks the official release of Windows 11, a new version of the operating system that doesn’t do anything at all to counteract Windows’ long history of depriving users of freedom and digital autonomy. While we might have been encouraged by Microsoft’s vague, aspirational slogans about community and togetherness, Windows 11 takes important steps in the wrong direction when it comes to user freedom.

    Microsoft claims that “life’s better together” in their advertising for this latest Windows version, but when it comes to technology, there is no surer way of keeping users divided and powerless than nonfree software. Developing nonfree software is an inherently antisocial act, for it is intentionally choosing to create an unjust power structure, in which a developer knowingly keeps users powerless and dependent by withholding information. Increasingly, this involves not only withholding the source code itself, but even basic information on how the software works: what it’s really doing, what it’s collecting, and how often it’s snitching on users. “Snitching” may sound dramatic, but Windows 11 will now require a Microsoft account to be connected to every user account, granting them the ability to correlate user behavior with one’s personal identity. Even those who think they have nothing to hide should be wary of sharing potentially all of their computing activity with any company, much less one with a track record of abuse like Microsoft.

• Programming/Development

  • Can Cross-Platform Development Prepare You for the Next Chip Shortage?

    Most car manufacturers across the globe are suffering from the chipset shortage. Manufacturers in other industries are slowing down their production for the same reason. Except a few. How are they doing it? How can other companies do the same?

    Some car manufacturers – or OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) – have chosen to build their own chips. Some of them work with their governments to create a local chipset industry. But there is one strategy that could be the most effective: Flexible Chip Sourcing.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • RHEL Clones

      • CentOS Kmods SIG Working On exFAT, WireGuard Additions

        Created this year has been the CentOS Kmods special interest group for dealing with deprecated device support and out-of-tree modules. This Kmods SIG has begun crafting their initial set of extra kernel modules for use on CentOS.

        The CentOS Kmods SIG published their quarterly report today about their activities maintaining and packaging extra kernel modules for CentOS Stream.

      • What AlmaLinux Foundation Membership Means for You

        Hello Community. Today we announced that membership in the AlmaLinux Foundation is now open to everyone (It’s 100% Free). First of all, many are probably asking what is this? Second, who cares? I wanted to take a few brief moments to share some insight, some feelings and hopefully explain why this is so important.

        When CentOS was initially founded by Lance Davis in 2004 no one really knew how fundamentally important it would grow to become in the Linux ecosystem–as a concept, as a distribution and really as a lynchpin of the modern internet. The concept of a community-driven OS, which drew upon an enterprise grade base made freely and widely available was a real novelty. As far as the technical aspect, the “entOS” part of CentOS, it has been resoundingly successful.

        However, the “C” part of CentOS, Community, got lost somewhere along the way. If the plan was to ensure that it would always be in the hands of the community, the contributors and the people, to own and to control, CentOS never really managed to fulfill that ultimate purpose of community ownership.

        CentOS has never been an organization with its own standing, it was always a loose collective of people. Throughout its history (which is a topic for another time) it has been wheeled and dealed, held hostage, transferred, fought about, bought and sold from one party to the next, ultimately landing at Red Hat. They own the Intellectual Property behind CentOS and are free and able to take it in whatever direction they want, as we have seen.

      • AlmaLinux Foundation opens membership

        The AlmaLinux Foundation has opened membership to everyone.

      • CentOS Replacement AlmaLinux Becomes a Membership-Centered Project

        Today, the AlmaLinux Foundation announced a membership program as a step to assure that the Linux distribution will be a community owned and governed project that’s not subject to the whims of a single corporate sponsor.

        This was a promise that Igor Seletskiy, CloudLinux’s founder and CEO, made when he announced that his company would spend up to $1 million yearly to start and fund a new Linux distribution to replace CentOS Linux, after Red Hat announced that it was in the process of removing support for CentOS as a freely available downstream replacement for it’s flagship product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

  • Security

    • Google Launched a Secure Open Source (SOS) Program for Developers [Ed: PR stunt from company that undermines security and privacy because that's just its business model]

      Google starts the Secure Open Source (SOS) Rewards pilot program run by the Linux Foundation with initial sponsorship of $1 million.

      Google has announced that it’s sponsoring a new open source security program hosted by the Linux Foundation. The Secure Open Source (SOS) Rewards pilot program provides financial incentives for developers working on security around critical open source projects.

    • New Program Rewards Developers for Securing Open Source Software

      Google is making a $1 million investment in the Secure Open Source (SOS) Rewards pilot program, according to a recent announcement.

      The SOS program “financially rewards developers for enhancing the security of critical open source projects that we all depend on” and is run by the Linux Foundation with sponsorship from the Google Open Source Security Team.

    • WordPress, Linux Users in Danger of New Malware: Major Warning Signs of Capoae Attack [Ed: What does this have to do with Linux???]

      A new malware has been spotted attacking Linux systems and WordPress installations. The malware called Capoae is rapidly growing as a favorite tool among hackers and threat actors because of its cross-platform capabilities, easy installation and fast infection rate.

    • ROS CVE alert; ensuring security for robotics

      Open Robotics has registered a CVE that affects ROS Kinetic, Melodic and Noetic. CVE stands for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, and it’s an international system that provides a method for publicly sharing information on cybersecurity vulnerabilities and exposures. This specific CVE affects ROS users.

      “An infinite loop in Open Robotics ros_comm XMLRPC server in ROS Melodic through 1.4.11 and ROS Noetic through1.15.11 allows remote attackers to cause a Denial of Service in ros_comm via a crafted XMLRPC call.”

      Open Robotics has already built and tested the security patch and has made the fix available to the community (e.g. Melodic update). So if you haven’t upgraded your ROS stack, please do so.

    • OpenLogic by Perforce Announces New Download Hub for Enterprise Linux [Ed: Microsoft-connected proxy]

    • A Closer Look at NSA/CISA Kubernetes Hardening Guidance [Ed: NSA involvement in Kubernetes does not make Kubernetes seem any more secure; quite the contrary and the companies involved here got exposed working for NSA (in Snowden leaks)]

      USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released, “Kubernetes Hardening Guidance” on August 3rd, 2021. The guidance details threats to Kubernetes environments and provides secure configuration guidance to minimize risk.

      The following sections of this blog correlate to the sections in the NSA/CISA guidance. Any missing sections are skipped because of limited opportunities to add anything new to the existing content.

      Note: This blog post is not a substitute for reading the guide. Reading the published guidance is recommended before proceeding as the following content is complementary.

    • Be Cyber Smart During Cybersecurity Awareness Month [Ed: They put back doors in things and then they cheer for "Cybersecurity Awareness Month"]

      CISA and the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCSA) remind users to continue to “Do Your Part. #BeCyberSmart.” during October—2021’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month!

    • Wladimir Palant: Abusing Keepa Price Tracker to track users on Amazon pages

      As we’ve seen before, shopping assistants usually aren’t a good choice of browser add-on if you value either your privacy or security. This impression is further reinforced by Keepa, the Amazon Price Tracker. The good news here: the scope of this extension is limited to Amazon properties. But that’s all the good news there are. I’ve already written about excessive data collection practices in this extension. I also reported two security vulnerabilities to the vendor.

      Today we’ll look at a persistent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the Keepa Box. This one allowed any attackers to track you across Amazon web properties. The second vulnerability exposed Keepa’s scraping functionality to third parties and could result in data leaks.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Big ID, bad idea: busting ID myths that are endangering human rights – Access Now

        Big ID programs — frequently involving biometric data collection — are being rolled out across the globe. Similar to Big Tech, Big ID refers to the market of actors selling and profiting from digital identification systems and infrastructure. They regularly aim to replace or complement government identification systems with digital ones, often endangering the human rights of those the people they’re supposed to benefit. Access Now’s new report, Busting the dangerous myths of Big ID programs: cautionary lessons from India, turns a human rights lens on these new systems, unpacking real-life case studies from India to distinguish fact from fiction. Read the full report, and the report snapshot.

        “India’s Big ID program, Aadhaar, was a bad idea that had a disastrous impact on peoples’ human rights. We must not let this be replicated around the globe,” Ria Singh Sawhney, Asia Pacific Policy Fellow at Access Now. “If we don’t seriously reevaluate Big IDs, and debunk the myths used to sell them, we are entering a dystopian future where biometric surveillance is normalized, the indignity of arbitrary exclusions are justified, and peoples’ data is no longer considered their own.”

        [...]

        India’s experience with Aadhaar underlines the dangers of these programs, and neighboring Afghanistan is showcasing how truly perilous a centralized biometric database can be. Big ID myths must be debunked before these programs spread further.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Yanis Varoufakis: Angela Merkel Was Bad for Europe and the World

  Angela Merkel’s tenure will be remembered as Germany’s, and Europe’s, cruelest paradox. On the one hand, she dominated the continent’s politics like no other peacetime leader — and is leaving the German chancellery considerably more powerful than she had found it. But the way she built up this power condemned Germany to secular decline and the European Union to stagnation.

Civil Rights/Policing

• [Older] The New Puritans

  Social codes are changing, in many ways for the better. But for those whose behavior doesn’t adapt fast enough to the new norms, judgment can be swift—and merciless.

  [...]

  The interaction between the angry mob and the illiberal bureaucracy engenders a thirst for blood, for sacrifices to be offered to the pious and unforgiving gods of outrage.

Monopolies

• Patents

  • New PatentlyO L.J. Article: The AIA at Ten – How Much Do the Pre-AIA Prior Art Rules Still Matter? [Ed: Patent maximalists hate patent quality with a passion, so of course they're still protesting AIA and PTAB (which came with it); the litigation 'industry' should have exactly zero influence in policy surrounding patents if the patent system exists for science]

    As the America Invents Act (AIA) turns 10, patent students across the country may be asking: if the law is already a decade old, why am I spending so much time learning pre-AIA law? Though patents filed before the transition date will remain in force up through March 2033, a good 10+ years away, teachers may also be wondering which regime to emphasize and for how long the pre-AIA rules will still be considered fundamental rather than footnote material. We address these questions empirically by analyzing the effective dates of patents and patent applications currently being litigated or pursued. Our analysis resoundingly confirms that both regimes matter and that the pre-AIA prior art regime appears likely to continue to be relevant for much of the next decade. But how much it matters depends: as the graphs below show, patent lawsuits overwhelmingly continue to feature pre-AIA patents. We estimate that ~90% of patent litigations initiated in 2020 included a patent with an effective filing date before the AIA transition date of March 16, 2013. But the inverse is true of patents currently being prosecuted: ~94+ of applications currently pending before the USPTO, we estimate, are governed by the AIA. In the accompanying PatentlyO Bar Journal article, The AIA at Ten – How Much Does the Pre-AIA Prior Art Regime Still Matter?, 2021 Patently-O Patent Law Journal 35, we explain our methods, sources, and approach and how pre- and post-AIA law are likely to both remain important for some time but that the distinction doesn’t necessarily matter in the vast majority of cases.

  • Court Of Appeal Upholds Validity Of Pharmaceutical Patent Claims With Functional Limitations: FibroGen Inc v Akebia Therapeutics Inc [2021] EWCA Civ 1279 [Ed: Nowadays you don't often hear about patents being UPHELD in courts because patent quality decreased a lot]

    The UK Court of Appeal has reviewed the law on insufficiency and its application to claims with both structural and functional limitations. In doing so the court has explained how the concepts of plausibility and undue burden should be applied when assessing the sufficiency of claims of this type, in particular to the requirement that it must be possible to perform the invention across the breadth of the claim.

• Trademarks

  • FRANCE.COM: Trademark Transferred to French Government without Recourse in US Courts

    When you visit the website france.com, you’ll be quickly redirected to the French government’s explore-France travel site: france.fr. But, the US-company France.com, Inc. believes that the country stole the .com site. The case is now pending before the Supreme Court on petition for writ of certiorari is France.com v. The French Republic, Docket No. 21-448 (Supreme Court 2021).

Audiocasts/Shows

• Late Night Linux – Episode 145

  Why one of us is probably switching to Xfce, and why Graham couldn’t use a proper Linux phone full-time. Plus your feedback about sandboxed apps, Vivaldi in Manjaro, and why we don’t talk about Fedora very often.

• Destination Linux 246: Linus Tech Tips Linux Challenge & Malware Found In WSL

  This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to discuss the Linux Challenge that the hosts of the WAN Show from Linus Tech Tips are doing. We’ll give our thoughts on this news and offer a helping hand to the WAN Show team. Then we’re going to discuss security concerns as Malware seems to be popping up in WSL. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.

Kernel Space

• Micron’s HSE Storage Engine 2.0 Debuts – No Longer Relies On Linux Kernel Modifications – Phoronix

  In April 2020 there was the somewhat surprising announcement of Micron announcing their own open-source storage engine designed for SSDs and persistent memory. The Heterogeneous-Memory Storage Engine (HSE) has been redesigned and on Monday debuted in v2.0 form with some fundamental changes.

  HSE was started to exploit the performance potential of speedy solid-state drives and persistent memory. The original design of HSE incorporated a Micron-developed Media Pool “MPool” for the Linux kernel to handle object storage. This MPool bypassed conventional file-systems in the name of lower overhead but added further complexity to that storage engine.

Applications

• Annotator is a Slick Annotation Tool for Linux Desktops

  Today I found an amazing app that lets me do just that.

  Annotator by Trevor Williams is something of a cross between the macOS Preview app (which has powerful markup tools built-in) and FOSS-fave Shutter.

  Indeed, until now, my go-to tool for annotating images on Linux is Shutter (or Flameshot, though it can only annotate screenshots you take using it), though its UI is a little dated and a few features are missing.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to Add a Glow Effect in GIMP?

  The glow effect could be used to enhance the quality of the image and it is added in multiple variations such as the neon glow effect, dual lighting effect, gold effect, shining effect, burning effect, dramatic color lighting, led lights, nebula star space, and so on. You can add the glow effect to the entire image, to a part of the image, to an object, to a person, to a scene, to the fonts, to the lines. It is entirely up to you and you can do it with GIMP very easily.

• How to delete an EC2 instance [Ed: But AWS is not really a skill; it’s vendor lock-in. Very widely used lock-in unfortunately.]

• How to configure auto-scaling group in AWS step by step

• How to delete S3 bucket using AWS CLI

• How to backup AWS EC2 instance

• How do I connect to AWS RDS using MySQL workbench

• How to Install TightVNC to Access Remote Desktops in Linux

• What Does ls -l Command Do in Linux

  In Linux, the ls command is one of the fundamental tools. It lists files and directories with or without various additional information. The ls command is a part of the GNU core utility package. It should be available on any Linux distro.

  This guide will showcase how to use the ls command, specifically “ls -l” in combination with other options.

• How to mount NTFS disk on Linux – Unixcop

  Before we start to dive into our topic, we need to clarify some terms and to explain some of the differences between the different file systems that OS families use in our day-to-day technology life.

• How to Stop WordPress Comment Spam with CloudFlare – LinuxCapable

  Comment Spam, the plague of the Internet with any website having any input forms, with WordPress most website owners and admins would know well how much spam can be posted daily, especially as your website grows. Currently, there are free and paid plugins, some work but with various degrees of success, then on top you it can add a delay to your site with having to load additional files for captchas which is the most effective form in reducing comment spam to date.

  A handy trick for users who run their websites behind Cloudflare reverse proxy for DDoS protection and utilizing their CDN service is to place an automatic javascript challenge on all comments posted, which is far more effective at stopping all comments spam in its track immediately. Another handy benefit, giving that bots don’t visit your site like a traditional user. All spam attempts won’t hit your site but get stopped on Cloudflare servers, giving your servers decreased load if you are severely spammed.

  The following tutorial will show you some handy tricks with Cloudflare rules which can work on any plan Free to Enterprise.

• How to Install Nginx with Let’s Encrypt TLS/SSL on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable

  NGINX is an open-source, free HTTP server software. In addition to its HTTP server capabilities, NGINX can also function as a proxy server for e-mail (IMAP, POP3, and SMTP) and a reverse proxy and load balancer for HTTP, TCP, and UDP servers. The goal behind NGINX was to create the fastest web server around, and maintaining that excellence is still a central goal of the Nginx project. NGINX consistently beats Apache and other servers in benchmarks measuring web server performance and is now the most popular used web server according to W3Tech.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Nginx on Debian 11 Bullseye using the default Debian repository or the alternative repository by Ondřej Surý with a free TLS/SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt.

• How to Install Linux Kernel 5.14 on Ubuntu 20.04 – LinuxCapable

  Linux kernel 5.14 is out and is famous for testing out with many new features, support, and security. The Linux 5.14 kernel release has gone through seven release candidates over the last two months and benefits from the contributions of 1,650 different developers. Those that contribute to Linux kernel development include individual contributors and prominent vendors like Intel, AMD, IBM, Oracle, and Samsung.

• How to Install & Configure Git on Rocky Linux 8 – LinuxCapable

  Git is a mature, actively maintained open source project initially developed in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, the famous Linux operating system kernel creator. Git is designed for developers that need a pretty straightforward version control system. Most software is collaborative efforts and sometimes can have hundreds of people with commits working on software development projects. It’s essential to track these commits customarily done in branches in most projects before being merged into the master for release. It is easy to review and track down any incorrect commits and revert, leading to a much easier development if anything goes wrong.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Git on Rocky Linux 8 in various methods.

• How to Install Foxit PDF Reader on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable

  Foxit PDF Reader is a free multi-platform PDF reader for Linux, macOS, and Windows. The PDF reader is a small, fast, and feature-rich PDF Reader to view, annotate, form-fill, and sign PDF documents. PDF Reader easily integrates with popular ECMs and cloud storage.

  At the end of the tutorial, you will know how to install Foxit PDF Reader on Debian 11 Bullseye.

• How To Install Slack on Debian 11 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Slack on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Slack is one of the most popular collaborative communication platforms in the world. The way Slack works is to create channels for your teams, topics, customers, or coworkers. slack too features voice and video calls, file sharing.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of Slack on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• Review: GAOMON M10K 2018 Graphic Tablet on Linux for Digital Painting.

  I haven’t put that in the video, because it is a bit long and backstage. But I’m happy to share it on the blog:

  Around 2018, the brand Gaomon contacted me by email for a review. But at that time they only had a driver for Windows and Mac, so I rejected their proposal because −as you know− I’m using only a GNU/Linux operating system for my art since more than ten years.

  Rejecting brands this way is something I do very often. Not daily, but easily on a monthly basis. I probably got already all existing brands of tablets reaching my mailbox thanks to the good statistic on the channel.

  A parenthesis about that: I also met a large amount of hardware sellers totally unrelated to digital art or FLOSS who pretends to like my channel, saw all my videos (be fans?). Then they offer only a Win/Mac product in a email template, or worst: a gadget totally unrelated to digital art. (a lamp for monitor! a sound system, a gamepad? etc…) Poeple working in marketing department should probably stop considering their recipient as idiots. I mean: it’s ok to sell products and propose hardware for review. But pretending to saw all videos and be fans only to flatter the ego of creators… Without having a check on the channel and content… This is the type of marketing talk I’m really deeply allergic. Parenthesis closed.

  Anyway, in all situation, I try to optimize the new contact with a minimum of FLOSS advocacy. I reply politely with a speech about why they should get a Free/Libre driver, why I’ll be happy to review if the hardware works on GNU/Linux and get in the scope of my passion for digital-art or comic. I’ll not lie, I often get no replies, or replies that try to convince me to do the review on Win/Mac (lol).

  But, In the case of Gaomon, something happened after this first ping-pong of usual proposal on one side and advocacy on my side. In fact, the marketing employee at Gaomon pushed my request to their R&D department (research and development). And so: they started to cooperate with the Digimend project on a Free/Libre Linux driver.

• How To Convert PDF File To Image on Linux – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to convert PDF files to image on Linux. Sometimes we need quickly convert a PDF file into images or save a set of images as a PDF file. To do this, we can use a couple of command-line tools such as poppler-utils and ImageMagick.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step convert PDF files to image on Linux.

• How To Install and Configure Microsoft Teams on Linux System [Ed: This is malware that should be avoided and it typically gives Microsoft (and NSA, its partner) root access to your GNU/Linux machine each time system update runs]

• How to Compile ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors on Ubuntu

  Compiling software from source code might sound frightening, especially if you have never done it before. If you are a Linux user and want to try compiling something on your own, you have come to the right place.

  In this guide, you will learn how to compile and run ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors from source code on Ubuntu using special build tools.

• How to Install Mantis BT on Ubuntu 21 – Unixcop

  MantisBT is an open source issue tracker platform designed to be flexible and user friendly and provides a tool help you collaborate with different teams to resolve bugs and issues and quickly and professionally as possible.

  Mantis also has built-in modules that extend its functionality and the platform is actively being developed. Mantis Bug Tracker allows the team to report errors and organize who can take care of them. Users are able to get started in minutes and start managing their projects while collaborating with their teammates and clients effectively.

  This Tutorial will guide you about how to install Mantis BT on Ubuntu 21.

• How to Switch Python Version in Ubuntu & Debian – TecAdmin

  Python is a high-level programming language, widely used for system programming. It is available for all popular operating systems. You can install more than one Python version on a single system. Once you have installed multiple Python versions, you can switch the default Python with the update-alternatives tool.

  All the Python developers are recommended to use a virtual environment for the applications. Which provides an isolated environment for the application with a defined Python version.

• How to install Docker Engine on Alpine Linux – Linux Shout

  Docker is a popular container platform to run virtualized lightweight machines. Here we learn how to install Docker Engine and Compose on Alpine Linux using simple commands to run Containers.

  Alpine Linux is popular for its lightweight, security, and performance, hence widely used for installing Docker for creating containers using various Images available on Docker Hub. If you are an Alpine user and want to know how to use this container platform on Linux, here are the steps to follow.

• How to install MongoDB Server on Alpine Linux – Linux Shout

  Alpine Linux is a Linux distribution optimized for resource efficiency and security. It can be installed in different versions and can therefore run completely from the RAM, for example. In addition to the latest x86 hardware, images are also available for the various Raspberry Pi models. This Linux distribution is based on musl and BusyBox and uses OpenRC for its init system and compiles all user-space binaries as position. Hence, that’s the reason users prefer it for running containers, especially Dockers.

  It is an extremely lightweight Linux operating system that aims at minimalism and high security. The standard Alpine ISO size is around 138 MB only, hence quite easy to move, if required. This makes Alpine fits comfortably on a CD-R with enough space. Alpine Linux uses a technique called location-independent executables this prevents attackers to exploit any flaw in the memory because this feature randomly locates programs in memory.

• How to install XFCE GUI on Alpine Linux – Linux Shout

  Learn the steps in this tutorial to install Graphical User Interface (GUI) XFCE Desktop on Alpine Linux using command terminal.

  Alpine Linux is popular for its lightweight, security, and performance. And that is the reason it comes out of the box with a command-line interface. However, if you want then we can install a graphical user interface on Alpine to use it as a normal Dekstop operating system. And here we learn how to do that by installing the XFCE Linux desktop environment on it.

• How to run a basic vulnerability scan on your data center Linux servers with Nessus – TechRepublic

  Nessus is one of those tools every network, system and security admin should have at the ready. Once up and running, you can easily set up scans to check your data center servers to make sure everything is on the up and up. And knowing whether or not your systems suffer from vulnerabilities is one of the more challenging aspects of your job.

  Fortunately, Nessus scans are incredibly easy to run. They do take some time to complete, but the process of launching a scan should take you no time.

  You do have to have Nessus installed and working. I’ve covered that process in How to install the Nessus vulnerability scanner on Rocky Linux. So make sure you follow that howto, so you have an instance of Nessus ready to go.

Games

• Bugvasion is a quirky comedy Tower Defense game out now for Linux | GamingOnLinux

  Aliens have come to the Earth but they’re tiny so they’ve brainwashed various bugs to invade your home, so it’s time to step up and build some towers. Note: the developer sent over a key.

  This is the first game from developer Full Screen Games that originally released back in February, however they’ve ported it to Linux just recently with it releasing a native build back in late September.

• Hexteria cleverly mixes together a tile-based puzzle game with a competitive strategy game | GamingOnLinux

  Turn tiles, spread across the board and hopefully capture all of the tiles before your opponent does. Hexteria is a game of tactics and constant thinking plus it’s rather good. Note: copy provided via our Steam Curator.

  A very simple concept, all you do is take it in turns to rotate a hexagonal tile with an arrow on it, the direction the arrow points will spread your colour to other linked tiles. All you have to do is take over all the tiles coloured in by your opponent.

  It can be surprisingly difficult because even though each match has the board set, the way it plays out can be different each time, it all depends on the first couple rotations which really gives it the unique feel.

• Pawnbarian masterfully blends Chess-like rules with a puzzle-roguelike | GamingOnLinux

  Pawnbarian is a dungeon crawling roguelike but not one you’ve played before. It’s turn-based and tile-based but your movement is based on the rules of various Chess pieces you have in cards.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 160 released

    This is the release announcement for IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 160. It comes with a large number of bug fixes and package updates and prepares for removing Python 2 which has reached its end of life.

    Before we talk about what is new, I would like to ask you for your support. IPFire is a small team of people and like many of our open source friends, we’ve taken a hit this year and would like to ask you to help us out. Please follow the link below where your donation can help fund our continued development: https://www.ipfire.org/donate.

• Screenshots/Screencasts

  • Xubuntu 21.10 Beta Run Through – Invidious

    In this video, we are looking at Xubuntu 21.10 Beta.

  • Xubuntu 21.10 Beta

    Today we are looking at Xubuntu 21.10 Beta. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.13, XFCE 4.16, and uses about 1.3GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • How to use automation to take control of your operations

    You are a system administrator on an operations team that works using agile methodologies following a framework based on scrum, kanban, or even scrumban. Your team takes care of a constantly evolving environment. On top of the daily support tickets, there are deliverables to stakeholders that must be completed according to deadlines. The workload is demanding, and the backlog is only getting longer.

    This situation creates a high-pressure environment where tasks that deliver immediate value to stakeholders are considered top priority and given the most attention. Tasks that do not provide immediate value are given a lower priority. Unfortunately, it is all too common for developing automation tools and frameworks to fall into the low-priority basket, so your team continues to do things manually. If some of this sounds familiar, you are not alone.

Devices/Embedded

• miriac AIP-LX2160A 16-core embedded platform delivers up to 130 TOPS with 5 Hailo-8 modules

  MicroSys Electronics miriac AIP-LX2160A embedded platform combines a 16-core Cortex-A72 NXP LX2160A networking processor with up to five Hailo-8 AI accelerator modules delivering up to 130 TOPS of AI inference performance.

  The board supports up to 128 GB RAM, up to 4x SATA hard drives, up to 100GbE connectivity, and appears to be especially suited to applications with multiple IP video streams requiring real-time video analytics.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android 12: When will your smartphone get the update?

  • Oppo Android 12 (ColorOS 12) update tracker: Eligible devices, release…

  • Vivo Android 12 (Funtouch OS 12/OriginOS/iQOO UI 3.0) update tracker

  • Samsung adopts Android 12′s wallpaper-based colors – 9to5Google

  • Mi 11, Mi 11 Ultra and Mi 11i start receiving Android 12 Stable update – NotebookCheck.net News

  • Android October patch fixes three critical bugs, 41 flaws in total

  • Google will add a proper shortcut to its password manager on Android, at last

  • Shield TV appears to be testing out Android TV 11 update – 9to5Google

  • Lenovo Legion Play is an upcoming Android handled console – comments

  • Samsung One UI 4.0 (Android 12) update tracker: Eligible devices & more

  • Realme GT 5G gets Android 12 closed beta in China – GSMArena.com news

  • OnePlus 9 RT will run on Android 11-based ColorOS 12 | NewsBytes

  • Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 review: The right earbuds for your Android phone | Technology News,The Indian Express

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox 93 Primed For Release With AVIF Image Support, Canonical Managing Official Snap

      While the formal announcement has yet to hit the wire, releasing today is Firefox 93.0 as the newest monthly feature update to Mozilla’s web browser.

      Though there have been some rather light releases this year out of Mozilla’s new expedited release schedule, Firefox 93 aligns with being one of the more exciting releases in recent history. After prior failed attempts, Firefox 93.0 finally has AVIF image support enabled for the release.

• CMS

  • 5 Best Free and Open Source PHP Static Site Generators

    LinuxLinks, like most modern websites, is dynamic in that content is stored in a database and converted into presentation-ready HTML when readers access the site.

    While we employ built-in server caching which creates static versions of the site, we don’t generate a full, static HTML website based on raw data and a set of templates. However, sometimes a full, static HTML website is desirable. Because HTML pages are all prebuilt, they load extremely quickly in web browsers.

    There are lots of other advantages of running a full, static HTML website.

    Here’s some of the main ones…

• Programming/Development

  • How reflection works in ****

    Note: this is a redacted copy of a blog post published on the internal development blog of a new systems programming language. The name of the project and further details are deliberately being kept in confidence until the initial release. You may be able to find it if you look hard enough — you have my thanks in advance for keeping it to yourself. For more information, see “We are building a new systems programming language”.

    I’ve just merged support for reflection in xxxx. Here’s how it works!

  • Need a New Programming Language? Try Zig

    Maybe you’ve heard of it, maybe you haven’t. Zig is a new programming language that seems to be growing in popularity. Let’s do a quick dive into what it is, why it’s unique, and what sort of things you would use it for. (Ed Note: Other than “for great justice“, naturally.)

  • C

    • How to create a linked list in C

      Linked List is another linear data type, e.g., structure data type, widely used in the C language. The main concept in the linked list is storing and binding the locations of data by Pointers. Let see how we will create a Linked list in C language by using Ubuntu 20.04 system. For that, open up the console application from the search area of the Linux desktop. On the other way, you can utilize the shortcut “Ctrl+Alt+T”.

    • Semctl System Call in C

      The C language comes up with the semctl system call in the Linux system. This system call has been widely used in the Linux system to carry out the control processes specified by the console shell on some particular semaphore set. The semaphores are known IPs widely used to give access to processes for communication with one another. Semaphore can be a variable having abstract data type for the control access of 1 resource for many procedures. Hence, the semctl system call has been used here to control the semaphore set. Let’s start by signing up from the Linux system.

      Open the console application from the search area. A quick alternative way to open the console is via “Ctrl+Alt+T”.

    • Waitpid Syscall in C

      The waitpid() system call monitors a child of the caller process for state changes and retrieves information about the child whose behavior has changed. The child was halted by a signal or resumed by a signal regarded as a state shift. Waiting for a terminated child enables the system to free the resources associated with the child; if no wait is conducted, the terminated child will remain in a “zombie” condition.

      The waitpid() system function pauses the current process until the PID argument specifies a child who has changed. The calling process is paused until a child’s process completes or is terminated. Waitpid() halts the calling process till the system receives information about the child’s status. Waitpid() returns quickly if the system already has status information on a suitable child when it is called. If the caller process gets a signal with the action of either executing a signal handler or terminating the process, waitpid() is terminated. The waitpid() function will pause the caller thread’s execution until it receives information and updates for one of its terminated child processes or a signal that will either run a signal-catching procedure or terminate the process.

    • Shift Operators in C

      In general, you should not need to worry about operations somewhere at bit level as a developer. You can conceptualize in terms of bytes, int, and doubles, and even higher-level data. However, there are instances when you would like to zoom in on a single piece. The bits in an integer variable are shifted by a defined number of positions using two shift operators. The “>>” operator changes bits to the right, while the operator changes bits left. In general, employing the left and right shift operators instead of computing and then multiplication by a power of two will result in substantially faster code.

    • Puts function in C

      Displaying the output on the screen is an important component of every programming language. The puts function in C is used to perform this. The puts () call in C is a file handling method that is utilized to print a line to the output screen. The puts () function looks a lot like the printf() function. The puts () function is being used to display the string that was read previously using the gets () or scanf() functions on the terminal. The integer value returned by the puts () function represents the number of characters written on the terminal.

      If the string contains formatting characters such as ‘% s,’ printf() will provide unpredictable results in the puts() function. Also, if “str” is a user-supplied string, using printf() could compromise security.

  • Python

    • Python 3.10.0 is available

      On behalf of the Python development community and the Python 3.10 release team, I’m pleased to announce the availability of Python 3.10.0. Python 3.10.0 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations.

    • Python 3.10 is Here, Brings Some Great New Features and Improvements

      Python 3.10 sports powerful pattern matching features, better error reporting, and more. Here’s what’s new.

      Python is a powerful multipurpose programming language. This means it’s designed to be used in a range of applications, including data science, software and web development, automation, and generally getting stuff done.

      According to the TIOBE index for September 2021, which ranks programming languages based on their popularity, has Python ranked in the number 2 slot. It only needs to bridge 0.16% to displace C from the first place.

      Python 3.10 was released yesterday, so let’s take a quick look over all the important changes.

    • Python 3.10.0 released

      Version 3.10.0 of the Python language has been released. There are a lot of significant changes in this release, including the much-discussed structural pattern-matching feature. See this article for an overview of what’s in 3.10.

    • Python 3.10 Released With Many Improvements – Phoronix

      Python 3.10 is out as the latest major update for this widely-used programming language’s official implementation.

      Python 3.10 brings support for parameter specification variables, precise line numbers for debugging and other tools, explicit type aliases, structural pattern matching, optional EncodingWarning, writing union types as X | Y, and a variety of other changes. we are also seeing some small performance improvements with Python 3.10 compared to prior versions of Python.

    • Python 3.10.0 is available

      On behalf of the Python development community and the Python 3.10 release team, I’m pleased to announce the availability of Python 3.10.0.

      Python 3.10.0 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations.

    • Python 3.10.0

      Python 3.10.0 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations.

    • How to Use Dataclasses in Python

      This article will cover a guide on using the new “dataclass” objects included in Python 3.7 and newer versions. Dataclasses are just like other Python classes, but they are especially designed to be used as data containers and provide a cleaner and shorter syntax for quickly creating data objects. If you know about “namedtuple” objects and have used them in Python, you can define them as mutable namedtuple type objects. You can create new instances of dataclasses like any other class or namedtuple type objects and access their attributes using dot notation.

    • How to Use New F Strings in Python

      This article will cover a guide on using the new “F” type string formatting syntax added to recent versions of Python. Simply termed as “f-strings” or “formatted string literals”, these expressions allow you to use Python variables, functions and statements directly in the text of a string. They also help in keeping the code clean, as you can use inline expressions without resorting to any kind of ordered substitutions that are usually part of the other string formatting techniques available in Python. F-strings are included by default in Python 3.6 and newer builds.

  • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

    • Command Line Arguments

      In many cases, bash scripts require argument values to provide input options to the script. You can handle command-line arguments in a bash script in two ways. One is by using argument variables, and another is by using the getopts function. How you can handle command-line arguments is shown in this tutorial.

  • PostgreSQL

    • How do I list all schemas in PostgreSQL?

      Postgresql is a rational and reliable database. Many features of PostgreSQL differentiate it from other databases. PostgreSQL schema is a property that allows the user to maintain and organize the objects in the current database and manage them in logical groups. The currently existing schemas are viewed in the psql and pgAdmin as well. To enlist all the schemas in PostgreSQL, there are many approaches. We have used mainly of them to explain in this article. To understand this dilemma, you need to follow some prerequisites steps like:

      Install PostgreSQL on your system and configure it. After successful installation and the configuration of Postgresql, confirm it by checking its version on the psql. When you have installed the database, now you can use it because you have privileges to access the features present in it. If you have some knowledge of databases, then it will be favorable for you to understand the schemas. Now open psql and apply the password for the user for the server connectivity.

    • Change column name Postgresql

      In PostgreSQL, while performing operations, you need to create relations. After the creation of the tables, you may want to edit the attributes you have provided. One of the examples is to modify the column name of the table. The column name can be changed in PostgreSQL by using the “ALTER” command on the table.
      First, we provide the table name and then the column name after the rename clause. Thirdly, the name that is to be placed is written.

    • Using Floating Data Types in PostgreSQL

      PostgreSQL supports multiple different data types. One such data type is the floating data type which is used to store the floating-point data. We all understand that the handling and manipulation of this particular data type is a bit tricky and complex, so the programmers find it a little difficult to use it. Therefore, in this guide, we have decided to share the method of using the floating data types in PostgreSQL in Windows 10 after sharing with you a brief introduction of this data type.

    • Postgresql temporary tables

      As the name indicates, PostgreSQL temporary tables are the tables that are created for some time and are removed manually or automatically. Manually removal deals with deleting the table. Whereas the table is automatically removed when the database session is ended. The temporary tables last till the session exists.

      The use of a temporary table helps in avoiding the overloading of data in a particular database. Whenever you think you need to enter data in a database for some time to perform operations on the data, you will go for the temporary table. So that after usage, they are removed. And your database will have sufficient free space. This tutorial will explore what a temporary table is, its working, and its usage.

    • Postgresql round to 2 decimal places

      The ROUND () function converts the number you provided in the decimal or integer form up to the given integer. It can take a single or two arguments depending upon the condition you provide.

Hardware

• USB4 vs. USB C

  The benefits we get from USB are undeniably overwhelming, but the developments in the past few years have led to confusing version numbers. The USB 3.x generation has improved specifications, leading to many variations and different names for each improved version. We have seen variations such as USB 3.1, USB 3.2, USB 3.2 Gen 1×2, Superspeed, Superspeed+, and the likes. With the arrival of the latest USB4 in 2019, everything else seems much simpler, at least for now. Dubbed as the future USB, USB4 (yes, no space in between) comes with a host of powerful features comparable to Intel’s Thunderbolt 3. At times though, it is still confused with the latest USB connector that’s becoming the standard on most devices nowadays, the USB-C. To completely avoid all the confusion, let’s clear things out by getting into the details of how USB4 relates to USB-C.

Integrity/Availability

• Facebook Is Down

  Facebook — along with Instagram and WhatsApp — went down globally today. Basically, someone deleted their BGP records, which made their DNS fall apart.

• Proprietary

  • Security

    • Security updates for Tuesday

      Security updates have been issued by Fedora (cryptopp), Mageia (kernel, kernel-linus, and sqlite), openSUSE (rabbitmq-server), Red Hat (kernel and samba), SUSE (glibc and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (containerd, docker.io, imlib2, ledgersmb, mercurial, mongodb, and node-bl).

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Read our Joint Letter with C-Help & FMES to NHA on CoWIN’s updated API

        Through a new Application Programming Interface (API) for CoWIN, the National Health Authority (NHA) wants to allow government and private entities to instantly know the status of vaccination of an individual. While this may seem to be a good initiative, there are also some major concerns that come along with it. We wrote a joint letter along with the Centre for Health Equity Law & Policy (C-HELP) and the Forum for Medical Ethics Society (FMES) to highlight our concerns.

        [...]

        A person’s COVID-19 status is their private and confidential health information. Use of this data must be fair, relevant and necessary for a specific purpose. According to the existing privacy policy of CoWIN, personal data collected will only be “used by the Government of India or state governments for the purpose of tracking vaccination progress and status, generating reports, heat maps and other statistical visualisations for the purpose of the management of COVID-19 vaccination in the country, and for generation of vaccination certificates, and to provide you general notifications pertaining to COVID-19 vaccination as may be required”. Hence, the new API is inconsistent with the existing privacy policy since it allows for data to be shared with third parties for purposes other than those which are laid out in the privacy policy.

        The privacy policy also states that, “Co-WIN is not in any manner responsible for the security of such information or their privacy practices or content of those Third – Party Sites”. Thus, sharing of vaccination data with third parties becomes alarming since the CoWIN platform is not liable in case of any breach or violation of data privacy which may take place. In the absence of a personal data protection law, allowing for such data to be shared with third parties without any safeguards in place and with no one to be held liable for misuse will only lead to grave injustice and unaccountability.

        Even the proposed Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 fails to adequately protect the privacy of health data. For example, it is silent on non-personal and anonymised data. Meanwhile, the Non-Personal Data Governance Framework provides an excessively wide berth for the processing of non-personal data. The Bill also lacks transparency, insofar as the data fiduciary is not required to report instances of breaches of personal data to the data principal (in this case, users whose healthcare data is now public).

      • Busting Big ID’s myths – Access Now

        In India, you must forfeit your fingerprints, face, and iris in order to receive food, healthcare, education, and social security benefits. This is all thanks to Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric identity system, and the poster child for “Big ID” programs taking the world by storm.

        Similar to Big Tech, ​​Big ID refers to the market of actors selling and profiting from digital identification systems and infrastructure. These systems often involve biometric data collection and aim to replace or complement government ID systems.

        Aadhar was supposed to improve access to public services, but instead created a privacy-harming tool for exclusion: between 1.5 to 2 million Indians lost access to benefits, including over one million children being denied access to school and women unable to access maternity care.

      • Busting the dangerous myths of Big ID programs: cautionary lessons from India

        This report turns to India’s Aadhaar Big ID program to bust some of the most common myths around Big ID programs, and underlie their dangers.

      • India’s Aadhaar proves Big ID is still a bad idea – Access Now

        Countries around the globe are building huge civil registration systems, modelled after existing Big ID programs, which endanger the human rights of the people they’re supposed to help — India’s controversial Big ID system, Aadhaar, is a shining example.

        Similar to Big Tech, Big ID refers to the market of actors selling and profiting from digital identification systems and infrastructure.

        Despite all the propaganda in favour of it, Aadhaar has had a disastrous impact on the lives of millions, as outlined in Access Now’s new report, Busting the dangerous myths of Big ID programs: cautionary lessons from India. It unpacks India’s experience over the past 10 years to help policy makers understand what is wrong with centralised, ubiquitous, data-heavy forms of digital identification, asking: why are they required? Read the full report, and the report snapshot.

        “Aadhaar was catastrophic for human rights in India,” Ria Singh Sawhney, Asia Pacific Policy Fellow at Access Now. “We had multiple chances to stop, assess, and put human rights first, but we didn’t. And now we must collectively call on the governments around the world to not mirror our broken system.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Social media giants accused of ‘silencing’ Kashmir voices | Social Media News | Al Jazeera

  A report by a Kashmiri diaspora group has accused social media giants Twitter, Facebook and Instagram of silencing Kashmiri voices in the digital spaces through the frequent suspension of the accounts of artists, academics, and journalists based in and outside the disputed region, a move termed by experts as “reprehensible”.

  A 30-page report by the Stand With Kashmir (SWK), titled “How social media corporations enable silence on Kashmir”, claims that since 2017, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms have continually silenced Kashmir-related content.

Kernel Space

• AMD SEV-SNP Development Continues Towards The Linux Kernel – Phoronix

  Since the launch of AMD EPYC 7003 “Milan” processors earlier this year there has been support for SEV-SNP as the latest evolution of Secure Encrypted Virtualization. The mainline Linux kernel still isn’t yet supporting SEV Secure Nested Paging from the upstream kernel, but the out-of-tree patches continue to be available for those interested and development work continues in getting that code ready for mainline as well as ironing out other features.

• Graphics Stack

  • Mike Blumenkrantz: A Brief Respite

    All the features I’ve previously blogged about have landed, and zink is once again in “release mode” until the branchpoint next week to avoid having to rush patches in at the last second. This means probably there won’t be any interesting patches at all to zink until then.

    We’re in a good spot though, and I’m pleased with the state of the driver for this release. You probably still won’t be using it to play any OpenGL games you pick up from the Winter Steam Sale, but potentially those days aren’t too far off.

    With that said, I do have to actually blog about something technical for once, so let’s roll the dice and see what it’s going to be

  • AMD Prepares Linux Driver Support For USB4 DP Tunneling – Phoronix

    The newest patch series by AMD open-source Linux graphics driver engineers worth mentioning is around USB4 DisplayPort tunneling support for next-generation AMD hardware supporting USB4 connectivity.

    The USB4 specification allows for tunneling of DisplayPort 1.4 (as well as DisplayPort 2.0 Alternate Mode, but not the focus of today’s patch work) and that is what this new AMDGPU driver work is about for handling DP over USB4 connections.

  • AMD Publishes Open-Source “GPUFORT” As Newest Effort To Help Transition Away From CUDA – Phoronix

    I’ve just been informed by AMD that they have now made their code public to a new project called GPUFORT. This new GPUFORT project will live under the Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) umbrella and is their latest endeavor in helping developers with large CUDA code-bases transition away from NVIDIA’s closed ecosystem.

  • Mesa 21.3 RADV Vulkan Driver Lands Ray-Tracing Support For Older AMD Radeon GPUs

    Mesa 21.3 recently landed RADV ray-tracing support for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver with RDNA2 graphics processors. Now the software-based/emulated Vulkan ray-tracing support has been merged for handling pre-RDNA2 GPUs.

    With today’s Mesa 21.3 development code is support for Vulkan ray-tracing extensions on older GCN graphics processors. This Vulkan ray-tracing support relies on emulating the support in software and thus comes at a performance penalty. The RADV ray-tracing even with RDNA2 GPUs still needs more performance optimizations and considered experimental.

Applications

• Linux Release Roundup #21.40: Fedora 35 Beta, Inkscape 1.1.1, Nitrux 1.6.1, and More New Releases

  The latest Nitrux release features Linux Kernel 5.14.8 and comes loaded with updated KDE Plasma 5.22.5.

  Feel free to check out the changelog to know more about it.

• 10 Best Linux Tools For Digital Artists [2021]

  There is no shortage of graphic design software for Linux users. While it is possible to create stunning graphics and make professional edits with several online software, today’s focus is on the most effective, memory-friendly software for Linux.

  Please note that these applications are listed randomly and not in order of their popularity, complexity, functionality, or price.

• Bumping the Store Prices for Krita 5.0

  We started selling Krita in the Steam Store in 2014. In 2017, the Windows Store followed, then in 2021 the Epic Store. With the recent improvements on macOS, we intend to put Krita in the macOS store as well (though not in the ipadOS store!) and we want to put the macOS version of Krita in the Epic and Steam stores.

  Originally, we were planning to make every new major version a new purchase, but with Krita 3 being quickly replaced by Krita 4, that didn’t seem fair.

  Krita 5 will still be an automatic upgrade for everyone who has once bought Krita in any of the stores.

Instructionals/Technical

• Upgrade to Latest Linux Kernel on AlmaLinux 8 or Rocky Linux 8

  The Linux kernel is the core component of a Linux operating system. It is the interface between the computer’s hardware and the processes of a computer.

  Linux Kernel needs to be updated periodically to improve security, bugs fix to problems, better hardware compatibility, improve speed, and new functionality.

  Each Linux distribution comes with a stable version of Linux Kernel. This version may not be the latest one. The Linux Kernel Organization distributes the Linux kernel via The Linux Kernel Archives for free of charge.

• Tomcat and Tomee Clustering Automation | RoseHosting

  Tomcat is an open-source web server and servlet container developed by the Apache Software Foundation, it was initially known as Jakarta Tomcat or Tomcat. If you want to deploy and execute Java applications that are written in Java technologies including Java Servlet, Java Server Pages (JSP), etc, then you require Tomcat. TomEE is built on top of Tomcat. It is the Java Enterprise Edition of Apache Tomcat (Tomcat + Java EE = TomEE).

Games

• 10 Best Games For Linux

  I wrote a list of the best FPS games for Linux a few years ago. At the time, there were only a few games available that could compete with Windows games. But Linux gaming has come a long way since then.

  Valve released Steam Play in 2018. Steam is the most popular gaming platform for Windows-based computers. Counter-Strike, Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, Rocket League, and all of the century’s biggest games are available on Steam.

  Steam Play allows you to play Windows-only games on Linux that would otherwise be impossible to install.

  Steam Play makes use of Proton, a Valve software solution that allows gamers to play Windows-only games on Linux. It accomplishes this through the use of Wine and a variety of other tools on the back end. When Steam Play was first released in 2018, there was a limited number of games that had been transferred to Linux, but that list has since grown.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Alexander Mikhaylenko: Dark Style Preference

    Lately, I’ve been working on having a proper dark style preference in GNOME. It’s a frequently requested feature, but also hard to get right. elementary UX architect Cassidy James Blaede did a good write-up about this, please read it if you haven’t yet (or watch his GUADEC talk if you prefer a video).

    That was more than two years ago. Since then, elementary OS has started shipping an elementary-specific implementation designed in a way that it could be standardized later without many changes. While I could introduce another preference in GNOME, it was a good excuse to standardize it instead.

    [...]

    The libadwaita API is already available in alpha 3, the libhandy one is not released yet.

    Another difference is — the dark style preference is supported by default if you’re using libadwaita. While in libhandy the default is keeping the previous behavior — apps that were always light remain always light – libadwaita goes ahead and makes following the preference the default. Since it’s not API-stable yet, it’s an acceptable behavior break, same way as macOS and iOS support it automatically when building against new enough platform libraries, but don’t do it otherwise in order to keep existing apps working.

    When porting from GTK3 and libhandy to GTK4 and libadwaita, apps are expected to start supporting this or otherwise opt out. When already using older versions of libadwaita, apps are expected to start supporting this when updating to alpha 3. When using libhandy, apps don’t get the support by default, but can explicitly opt in.

    Transitions

    Another thing libhandy and libadwaita do when switching appearance is they try very hard to block the CSS transitions that would usually occur. These transitions can take a long time and are inconsistent between widgets. For widgets with custom drawn content such as WebKitWebView this can’t work at all, so no point in trying.

    An approach that yields much better results is doing the transition on the compositor side — then it works for any content automatically:

    It’s still not perfect: GTK3 apps can take a pretty long time when doing this, and it will be noticeable: for example the GTK4 Patterns window on the video changes its appearance immediately while Settings and Web lag behind. The video was recorded in a VM though, and the transition should be smoother on bare metal.

Distributions

• BSD

  • MidnightBSD: A BSD-Based Alternative to the Linux Desktop

    The BSD community is making notable progress by bringing new OSes to the table. Check out MidnightBSD, a suitable alternative to the Linux desktop.

    While desktop Linux has a dedicated following, most people think of the BSD family as better for servers, if they think of BSD at all. MidnightBSD is a spin on FreeBSD, attempting to create a BSD system for the desktop.

    Let’s take a look at MidnightBSD and its features, and discuss whether or not it is a suitable alternative to the Linux desktop.

  • Realtek wireless firmwares imported!

    Thanks to Realtek for this change which lets us put the firmware .h file into our tree, this means Realtek wireless will work without requiring a firmware download (which is difficult over a non-working Realtek network

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

  • More on Open Source Experience

    Open Source Experience aims to bring the entire open source ecosystem together for two dynamic days. “Entire” really means entire: From communities like Mageia to all sorts of companies, from students to experts, from journalists to politicians, from investors to researchers and inventors and much more, it is for anyone with a dedication to open source. Note that it is not just about open-source software, but also about open source hardware and network solutions, consultancy, training, cloud, data centres, security, AI, IoT, etc, more than can be mentioned.

    Many interested people will visit the event, and certainly not only from France. The event will be hybrid: physical meetings on the 9th and 10th of November 2021 and a digital event platform, so (international) visitors who would otherwise be unable to attend can participate. At least one of the speakers happens to be a Mageia contributor and board member in his free time, Bruno Cornec. He will give two talks, one about an alternative for REST, the other about how (and how not) to open source a project.

• Slackware Family

  • [Old] Interview with Patrick Volkerding

    After talking with the local sysadmin at MSU, I got permission to open an anonymous FTP server on one of the machines – an old 3b2. I made an announcement and watched with horror as multitudes of FTP connections crashed the 3b2 over, and over, and over. Those who did get copies of the 1.00 Slackware release did say some nice things about it on the net. My archive space problems didn’t last long, either. Some people associated with Walnut Creek CDROM (and ironically enough, members of the 386BSD core group) offered me the current archive space on ftp.cdrom.com.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Videonetics joins Red Hat partner connect program as independent software vendor (ISV)

    Videonetics, the world’s first AI & DL powered Unified Video Computing Platform (UVCP™) development company, announced that it has joined the Red Hat Partner Connect Program as an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift in India and South Asia.

Devices/Embedded

• mediakit: Digitize education with Raspberry Pi with less than €100

  The mediakit project is an open-source project that utilize Raspberry Pi for education.

  It was released a few years ago (2019), with many interesting features. The distribution is not based on any operating system, and hence, the project stopped because there wasn’t enough support to continue and time constrain. They kept everything online for public use.

• It Seems Pop OS Linux Will Soon be Available on Raspberry Pi and Other ARM Devices

  There was a time when only lightweight operating systems were available for ARM devices like Raspberry Pi. Why? Because earlier ARM devices had low end hardware with limited RAM and CPU.

  It all changed when Raspberry Pi 4 targeted desktop users with its 8 GB variant and doubled down on it with the introduction of Raspberry Pi 400.

• 30-second blood analysis with Raspberry Pi

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • The Graffomat is a giant plotter that automates graffiti art | Arduino Blog

    An Arduino Nano was selected as the brains of the operation, and it works by reading in data packets that contain positions or commands. If a movement is needed, the Nano outputs PWM pulses to either the X or Y axis H-bridge motor driver and rotates the drill until the target coordinate is reached. There is also a way to control the machine over the Internet in real-time using a Node.js web server to receive commands and forward them to the Graffomat.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android Developers Blog: Android 12 is live in AOSP!

    Today we’re pushing the source to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and officially releasing the latest version of Android. Keep an eye out for Android 12 coming to a device near you starting with Pixel in the next few weeks and Samsung Galaxy, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Tecno, Vivo, and Xiaomi devices later this year.

    As always, thank you for your feedback during Android 12 Beta! More than 225,000 of you tested our early releases on Pixel and devices from our partners, and you sent us nearly 50,000 issue reports to help improve the quality of the release. We also appreciate the many articles, discussions, surveys, and in-person meetings where you voiced your thoughts, as well as the work you’ve done to make your apps compatible in time for today’s release. Your support and contributions are what make Android such a great platform for everyone.

  • Android 12 Now Available From The Android Open-Source Project – Phoronix

    Google announced today that Android 12 is now officially available from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

    The Android 12 sources have been pushed out to AOSP in officially releasing this newest version of Android. Android 12 features a new user-interface with redesigned widgets and other graphical enhancements, more efficient system performance, more responsive notifications, faster machine learning performance, various privacy enhancements, AVIF image support, a variety of new developer APIs, and many other enhancements throughout the mobile stack.

  • Google releases Android 12 source code (coming soon to Pixel phones) – Liliputing

    After months of developers previews and beta tests, Google Android 12 is ready to go… sort of. Google is now pushing the source code for Android 12 to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which means we’ll likely start to see phone makers and custom ROM builders update to Android 12 soon.

    But if you have a Google Pixel smartphone you’ll still have to wait a little while for an Android 12 over-the-air-update to arrive. Google says it’ll start rolling out for Pixel devices “in the next few weeks.”

  • Leaks Reveal Lenovo’s Plans to Make an Android Gaming Handheld

  • YouTube Studio for Android adds option to change currency – 9to5Google

  • How to Avoid FluBot Malware on Your Android

  • Best Android smartphones for vlogging in India | Business Insider India

  • October 2021 Android security patch here for Pixels – Android Authority

  • Android TV 11 update for Nvidia Shield TV spotted in beta

  • Oppo starts Color OS 12 global launch, reveals ho-hum update policy

  • Android 12 review: it’s mostly about the looks – The Verge

  • Google releases Android 12 source code (coming soon to Pixel phones) – Liliputing

  • Android 12 Update: These will be the first Realme smartphones to get Android 12 update – Times of India

  • OnePlus Android 12 list: These devices will be updated – 9to5Google

  • Android 12 source code pushed to AOSP – CNX Software

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• The Apache News Round-up: week ending 1 October 2021

  Welcome October –we’ve closed September with another great week. Here are the latest updates on the Apache community’s activities…

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • TenFourFox Development: TenFourFox FPR32 SPR5 available (the last official build)

      TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 32 Security Parity Release 5 “32.5″ is available for testing (downloads, hashes). Aside from the announced change with .inetloc and .webloc handling, this release also updates the ATSUI font blacklist and includes the usual security updates. It will go live Monday evening Pacific as usual assuming no issues.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • Replacing academic journals

      Replacement goal. Any solution needs to not only solve the current problems but also be capable of preventing the takeover by the corporations. Technically, there is broad agreement on the goal for a modern scholarly digital infrastructure: it needs to replace traditional journals with a decentralized, resilient, evolvable network that is interconnected by open standards under the governance of the scholarly community. It needs to replace the monopolies connected to the journals with a genuine, functioning and well-regulated market. In this new market, substitutable service providers compete and innovate according to the conditions of the scholarly community, avoiding another vendor lock-in.

    • Academic capture

      Björn Brembs and colleagues have just revealed a much darker side to this story in apreprint on Zenodo. In it, they describe what we could describe as the incipient capture of all academia by the same four publishing giants that are dominating the publishing conundrum described above. In it, they describe the shift of profits by these companies from publishing towards data. We know that Elsevier owns Scopus and so are able to drive the listing of all of their own journals therein, and ensure that they attain maximum benefit from inflation of metrics. But did you know that the new academic database on the block, Dimensions, is owned by publishing supergroup SpringerNature?

• Programming/Development

  • A Lasting Legacy: Thoughts on COBOL

    Today, COBOL is usually either the butt of cruel jokes or a mythical concept in programmer lore, the story usually being that a COBOL guru is rushed in by a massive corporation to write a few lines of program code in exchange for tremendous amounts of money, saving the world from a bug that’s just been waiting to happen since some time in 1967. Unlike many other old languages like Assembler, LISP, C, BASIC and Pascal, COBOL seems to stand for itself in discussions about software development. To many developers, it’s an afterthought – so much so that when Jonathan Blow cooks up doomsday scenarios, it’s a fictional lack of C programmers that threatens civilization rather than most IT professionals’ complete disinterest in COBOL – the language that runs both their bank accounts and their airline bookings to Very Important Conferences.

    Why is that, exactly?

  • Introduction to Recurrent Neural Networks

    Recurrent Neural Networks, This is a follow-up to one of our previous posts, which you can read here if you missed it.

    Let’s look into Recurrent Neural Networks and the different types of issues that they may handle. RNN is a deep learning technique that attempts to overcome the difficulty of modeling sequential data.

  • GCC 12 Compiler Squaring Away Its AVX-512 FP16 Support – Phoronix

    In recent weeks the AVX-512 FP16 support has been landing within the GNU Compiler Collection codebase for next year’s GCC 12 release.

    This summer Intel posted public documentation around AVX-512 FP16 that allows for full-speed handling of FP16 values compared to the existing AVX-512 support for larger data types. Intel is adding AVX-512 FP16 to future Xeon processors (seemingly with Sapphire Rapids) to help with machine learning workloads and other cases where half-precision floating point numbers are sufficient and this will allow for greater performance.

  • Python

    • Learn Python Functions – TecAdmin

      While programming we often perform the same task repeatedly, such as performing the addition of numbers or printing the same statement with different inputs. These are general examples, but for these would you rather write the same code 10 times or just once?

      That’s the purpose of functions, they’re pieces of code only defined once for a particular task and come with reusable functionality so that users can call them whenever they want to perform a task. This makes your program understandable and debugging easier.

      Sometimes functions require some input and sometimes they may or may not return some value, but all of these vary from function to function and the task assigned to that specific function. In Python, functions are essential parts that may be user-defined or built-in. In this article, we’ll discuss functions in Python, types of functions, how to define them along examples for your better understanding.

Opinion | Wrestling With Infinity

I use walking sticks when I walk nowadays, kind of like cross-country skiing in late summer, but I had no idea doing so would connect me with a guy named Joe and open a flow of aching love and the deep desire to matter.

True Colors

Jimmy Carter’s favorite word when he was president was “sacrifice.” Using UC Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project database, I calculate that he uttered it 479 times in speeches and statements during his four-year term. According to the same database, John F. Kennedy, who famously advised Americans to “Ask what you can do for your country,” used it only 60 times in his own public pronouncements.

There May Be A New Boss At The DOJ, But The Government Still Loves Its Indefinite Gag Orders

Despite the DOJ recently drawing heat for its targeting of journalists during internal leak investigations, a lot still hasn’t changed about the way demands for data are handled by the feds. Over the past couple of decades, the DOJ and its components have been asking for and obtaining data from service providers, utilizing subpoenas and National Security Letters that come with indefinite gag orders attached.

Apparitions

Some 20 years ago, in Beyond the Shadow of Camptown, a book about Korean military brides in the United States, the historian Ji-Yeon Yuh devoted considerable attention to food. The women brought stateside in the first decades after the Korean War found themselves in “the proverbial land of plenty,” she wrote, yet they wasted away, complaining that “here, there was nothing to eat.” They “not only longed for Korean food, they also searched for it, invented ways to replicate it, and gave it an emotional loyalty they never developed for the American food they ate out of necessity.”

[Old] I hope WebDAV dies

I’m hoping to replace WebDAV in my personal infrastructure as far as possible. It probably won’t ever go away, but at least I can try. I’ve also extended vdirsyncer so I can use it to synchronize a CalDAV/CardDAV-server with a remoteStorage-server. It’s still a work-in-progress, but at least it’s not a Sisyphean task like writing a CalDAV/CardDAV-client that actually works.

Shock of the Old

Art isn’t meant to be one-size-fits-all, and a book’s popularity is always less about its worthiness than its marketing budget. We all know this. But the problem—particularly for Sally Rooney, whose two novels and two TV deals have sent critics scrambling to theorize her success—is that hype is easily mistaken for claims to preeminence or universality. Which leads people to blame the hyped novelist, rather than the hype itself, for not living up to their highly personal tastes or expectations.1

The Least Sympathetic People in the Entire World?

23 Gone, Countless More to Save

Education

• Universities Are Shunning Their Responsibility to Democracy

  The dearth of civic education is corrosive. According to an Associated Press–GfK survey, from 1984 to 2014, the share of American adults who said that staying informed about current affairs and public issues was “not an obligation that a citizen owes to the country” more than tripled, from 6 to 20 percent. Over roughly the same period, according to Cambridge University’s Centre for the Future of Democracy, dissatisfaction with democracy among young people has risen precipitously, particularly in the United States.

Hardware

• EPSRC and InnovateUK launch £8M Digital Security by Design – CHERI/Morello Software Ecosystem funding call

  For a bit over a decade, SRI International and the University of Cambridge have been working to develop CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions), a set of processor-architecture security extensions targeting vulnerability mitigation through memory safety and software compartmentalisation. [...]

Health/Nutrition

• Big Pharma Fights Back

  Naturally, no one expects to be able to get $50 billion a year out of the hide of a huge industry without a serious fight. The pharmaceutical companies surely have all their lobbyists working overtime courting members of Congress (primarily Democratic members) whose votes are needed to pass legislation allowing for Medicare to negotiate the prices it pays. They are also flooding the airwaves with ads telling us the horrors that would face us if the industry got lower profits.

  Megan McCardle gave us the essence of their message in her Washington Post column today. McCardle cited a report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that projected that negotiated drug prices in Medicare could save $500 billion over the course of the decade. (The idea is to get our drug prices in line with what Germany, Canada, and everyone else pays.)

• McKinsey Never Told the FDA It Was Working for Opioid Makers While Also Working for the Agency

  Since 2008, McKinsey & Company has regularly advised the Food and Drug Administration’s drug-regulation division, according to agency records. The consulting giant has had its hand in a range of important FDA projects, from revamping drug-approval processes to implementing new tools for monitoring the pharmaceutical industry.

  During that same decade-plus span, as emerged in 2019, McKinsey counted among its clients many of the country’s biggest drug companies — not least those responsible for making, distributing and selling the opioids that have ravaged communities across the United States, such as Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson. At times, McKinsey consultants helped those drugmaker clients fend off costly FDA oversight — even as McKinsey colleagues assigned to the FDA were working to bolster the agency’s regulation of the pharmaceutical market. In one instance, for example, McKinsey consultants helped Purdue and other opioid producers push the FDA to water down a proposed opioid-safety program. The opioid producer ultimately succeeded in weakening the program, even as overdose deaths mounted nationwide.

• Dr. Vinay Prasad goes full Godwin over COVID-19 public health measures

  Dr. Vinay Prasad has made a stir on social media again, and it’s made me look back to the past. Longtime readers might remember a couple of shticks that I used to use fairly frequently back in the early days of the blog. The first was known as the Hitler Zombie. From his first appearance 16 years ago, Hitler Zombie posts quickly evolved to be written as a series of faux horror stories featuring the rotting corpse of Hitler shambling around looking for brains to eat. When the zombie found a suitable brain to quench his hunger, the victim would soon end up spouting really dumb Nazi or Holocaust analogies. Over the years, the Hitler Zombie’s meals included the brains of Erik Rush, Harry Belafonte, James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, Michael Kay (over baseball, yet!), Adolph Mongo (a local Detroit political activist), Alan Stang, Richard Dawkins, Ben Stein, and many others prone to likening their opponents to Hitler and the Nazis and their ideas to the Holocaust. After a while, quite honestly, I ran out of ideas—there are, after all, only so many variations on the concept of a zombie eating people’s brains and causing them to spew nonsense before repetition sets in—and retired the monster. In retrospect, the device was never really nearly as funny or clever as I thought it was at the time, anyway, although I do think the one about baseball was pretty amusing.

• Instagram’s Mental Health Emergency

  For years psychologists have been warning the public that social media, and Instagram in particular, were contributing to large increases in depression and anxiety in teenagers, especially girls. Jean Twenge, psychology professor at San Diego State University whose research looks at generational trends found in very large data sets, described in her 2017 book, “iGen,” sharp decreases in behaviours that prepare young people for adulthood such as driving, dating, socialising at parties, and working.

• ‘System Is Blinking Red’: Experts Condemn Facebook’s Profit-Seeking Algorithms

  Following whistleblower Frances Haugen’s Sunday night allegation that Facebook’s refusal to combat dangerous lies and hateful content on its platforms is driven by profit, social media experts denounced the corporation for embracing a business model that encourages violence and endangers democracy—and urged the federal government to take action.

  “The government must demand full transparency on how Facebook collects, processes, and shares our data, and enact civil rights and privacy policies to protect the public from Facebook’s toxic business model.”—Jessica J. González, Free Press

• Facebook to take center stage at whistleblower hearing

  Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, came public for the first time in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday night, which expanded on the bombshell series of internal documents she leaked to The Wall Street Journal.

  “The choices being made by Facebook’s leadership are a huge problem — for children, for public safety, for democracy — that is why I came forward. And let’s be clear: it doesn’t have to be this way. We are here today because of deliberate choices Facebook has made,” Haugen will say, according to a copy of her testimony reported by The Washington Post.

• Futuristic farm may use 250 times less water than normal

  The impressive shot, taken by photographer Alastair Philip Wiper, shows the grow hall at Nordic Harvest, a 14-storey vertical farm on the outskirts of Copenhagen in Denmark. Instead of relying on sunlight and soil to grow its crops, Nordic Harvest employs a less conventional approach: it uses robots to seed mainly leafy vegetables, such as salad leaves and herbs, in a nutrient-rich gel substrate that dissolves in water as the plants grow.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Cloud [cracking]: India now 2nd most targeted nation after US [iophk: Windows TCO]

    The most targeted sectors by ransomware in Q2 of 2021 were the government, followed by telecom, energy, and media and communications.

    Spam showed the highest increase of reported incidents — 250 per cent — from Q1 to Q2 2021, followed by Malicious Script with 125 per cent and Malware with 47 per cent.

  • The case of the insecure printer

    The latest way to make sure the vendor calls the shots is to insist that printers won’t print a page unless they have internet connectivity and are linked to an “HP Smart” account. According to HP, you must connect your HP LaserJet M209dwe, MFP M234dwe, M234sdne, and M234sdwe printers to an HP Smart account before they’ll work. (I expect other printers will soon face the same annoying requirement.)

    I’m not happy about this. And it’s not just because I’m sure this will monitor my ink or my laserjet cartridge. I’m ticked off because this is a major security hole in my network. I do not want an unauthorized connection to printers in my network reporting who knows what to HP.

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

      • Github Removes GTA Fan Projects re3 & reVC Following New Take-Two DMCA Notice

        After Take-Two Interactive sent a legal letter to Github referencing a copyright infringement lawsuit against the people behind the popular re3 and reVC Grand Theft Auto fan projects, Github has now removed the repositories for a second time. Take-Two has also demanded the removal of many project forks and wants Github to take action under its repeat infringer policy.

  • Security

    • Google commits $1M to new Linux Foundation open source security rewards program | VentureBeat

      Google has announced that it’s sponsoring a new open source security program hosted by the Linux Foundation. The Secure Open Source (SOS) Rewards pilot program provides financial incentives for developers working on security around critical open source projects.

      Open source software plays a key role in many essential infrastructure and national security systems, but recent data suggests “upstream” attacks on open source software have increased in the past year as bad actors seek new ways to infiltrate the software supply chain. Moreover, countless organizations — from government agencies to hospitals and corporations — have been hit by targeted software supply chain attacks, leading U.S. President Biden to issue an executive order outlining measures to combat them.

    • Google’s New Spyware in Chrome 94

      Google’s at it again.

      A few weeks ago when Google released Chrome 94 for desktop and Android, a new “feature” added by Alphabet all but slipped under the radar. The feature takes the form of a new API the company is calling Idle Detection. It’s not a feature added to benefit users, but is another way for website owners to keep tabs on you.

      Google says the feature is primarily designed for collaborative multi-user applications such as online games, meetings, and chat boxes.

      “The Idle Detection API notifies developers when a user is idle, indicating such things as lack of interaction with the keyboard, mouse, screen, activation of a screensaver, locking of the screen, or moving to a different screen. A developer-defined threshold triggers the notification,” the company said on a web page devoted to all of the gee-whiz stuff that’s included in its ad serving platform web browser.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Hacking the World – Part 1: Hacking Basics

      • The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 103: Privacy Reform Comes to Canada – Chantal Bernier on the Passage of Quebec’s Bill 64

        Canadian Press, Bains Explains Update to Canada’s Digital Privacy Law

      • What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, & WhatsApp?

        Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.

      • Australian Police Can Now Spy On Citizens, Disrupt Their Computers, Take Over Their Online Accounts, and Change Their Data

        The Australian Digital Rights Watch group calls this a “new mass surveillance mandate“. Perhaps the most detailed description of the law’s new powers comes from the Australian Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS), which produced a 189-page review of the legislation, also available online by section. It draws on numerous submissions made to PJCIS from a wide range of stakeholders. One of the most authoritative voices, which features prominently throughout the report, is the Law Council of Australia, which represents some 65,000 Australian lawyers. The PJCIS report quotes the Law Council’s summary of why these powers are “extraordinary” in their reach:

      • Facebook Users Union Launches #FireZuck Campaign

        Last night, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told 60 Minutes that Facebook is misleading the public about lies, hate and disinformation on its platform. We wish we were surprised. Time and time again, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has put Facebook’s profits ahead of truth, safety, health and democracy.

        That’s why today the Facebook Users Union launched a #FireZuck campaign telling Facebook that it’s time for Mark Zuckerberg to go. They launched petitions on several platforms and are calling for a protest outside of Mark Zuckerberg’s house in Palo Alto on October 17.

      • Facebook chooses ‘profit over safety,’ says whistleblower

        The world’s largest social media platform has been embroiled in a firestorm brought about by Haugen, who as an unnamed whistleblower shared documents with US lawmakers and The Wall Street Journal that detailed how Facebook knew its products, including Instagram, were harming young girls, especially around body image.

      • EDRi and 39 human rights organisations call on the European Parliament to reject amendments to AI and criminal law report

        In our open letter, we urge the MEPs to support the LIBE Committee’s original report, which we strongly believe took the most balanced and proportional stance on artificial intelligence (AI) in law enforcement from a fundamental rights perspective. AI in the field of law enforcement offers particular challenges for fundamental rights, in particular rights to liberty, security, privacy, a fair trial and non-discrimination, and as such, require particular fundamental rights scrutiny and democratic oversight.

      • Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Back Online

        Reuters news agency reported that users could not access Facebook because they were not being directed to the correct place by the Domain Name System. It said Facebook controls that system, suggesting the problem was an internal one.

      • Facebook, Instagram Go Down: Users See Error Messages on Both Platforms

        The cause of the outages across Facebook’s apps appeared to be related to a configuration change in the company’s domain name system (DNS) entries. The DNS is a critical piece of the internet’s infrastructure that translates human-readable names (like variety.com) into numeric IP addresses for computing devices.

        According to cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, the DNS records for facebook.com and instagram.com “got withdrawn this morning from the [internet’s] global routing tables,” he wrote in a tweet. Krebs added that the reason for the DNS change is unknown at this point, saying it “could well have been the result of an internal, system-wide change or update that went awry.”

      • Explaining Protocol Failure That Triggered Facebook’s Outage

        Commonly known as DNS, it’s like a phone book for the internet. It’s the tool that converts a web domain, like Facebook.com, into the actual internet protocol, or IP, address where the site resides. Think of Facebook.com as the person one might look up in the white pages, and the IP address as the physical address they’ll find.

      • What is BGP, and how might it have helped kick Facebook off the internet?

        At a very basic level, BGP is one of the systems that the internet uses to get your traffic to where it needs to go as quickly as possible. Because there are tons of different internet service providers, backbone routers, and servers responsible for your data making it to, say, Facebook, there’s a ton of different routes your packets could end up taking. BGP’s job is to show them the way and make sure it’s the best route.

      • Test-takers busted for using Bluetooth-connected flip-flops to cheat

        Dozens of people taking an exam to be teachers in India were caught using flip-flops with wireless communication devices hidden inside. The cheaters wore small Bluetooth earpieces deep in their ear to avoid detection.

      • Cheating on Tests

        Interesting story of test-takers in India using Bluetooth-connected flip-flops to communicate with accomplices while taking a test.

      • Confidentiality

        • Let’s Encrypt root certificate expiry causes issues for some

          The expiry on 30 September of a root certificate, IdentTrust DST Root CA X3, belonging to the provider Let’s Encrypt has led to some big websites facing problems verifying certificates.

        • Modern TLS has no place left for old things, especially clients

          Regardless of what one things about this situation with modern TLS, it exists (as demonstrated recently in the Let’s Encrypt related issues). TLS things that are old today are going to be less and less functional over time; TLS things that are current now but stop being updated will also be less functional over time, but it will take longer for it to really happen. And there’s no real prospect of this changing any time soon.

Defence/Aggression

• Our Foreign Policy Elite Has Learned Nothing From Afghanistan

  Bush and Cheney sold the war, Obama normalized it, Trump disowned it, and Biden had the courage to end it.

• Waiting Periods and Background Checks

• Algerian Judoku Fethi Nourine Suspended: A Brave Individual Pays the Price for Institutional Failure

  As these words are being written, Palestine and those who support freedom and justice commemorate the horrific murder of Muhammad al-Durrah and serious wounding of his father Jamal by Israeli forces in Gaza. It was September of 2000. The video of the killing of 12-year-old Muhammad and wounding of his father, who was trying to shield him, became one of the symbols of the second Palestinian Intifada.

• Ex-Facebook manager alleges the social network fed the Capitol [insurrection]

  A data scientist who was revealed Sunday as the Facebook whistleblower says that whenever there was a conflict between the public good and what benefited the company, the social media giant would choose its own interests.

  Frances Haugen was identified in a 60 Minutes interview Sunday as the woman who anonymously filed complaints with federal law enforcement that the company’s own research shows how it magnifies hate and misinformation.

• More than 50 years later, Mexicans refuse to forget the Tlatelolco Massacre

  And so, on October 2, 1968, just days before the opening of the Games, thousands of university and high school students decided to take advantage and hold a massive rally in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco neighborhood, at a square that represents the Mexican nation’s “Three Cultures” — indigenous, colonial and modern — with the architecture that surrounds it.

  It would take thousands of words to describe what happened that day, and there is still fierce debate as to what exactly came to pass. The few things not in debate: there was military in the area, whose presence increased as the event went on; there were thousands of students and other activists in the square that did not end the rally despite the growing military presence; shooting started.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Tesla ‘Self-Driving’ NDA Hopes To Hide The Reality Of An Unfinished Product

  There isn’t a day that goes by where Tesla hasn’t found itself in the news for all the wrong reasons. Like last week, when Texas police sued Tesla because one of the company’s vehicles going 70 miles per hour in self-driving mode failed to function properly, injuring five officers.

Environment

• Environmentalists Demand End to Offshore Drilling as California Faces Oil Spill

• Leak stopped, but major oil spill closes Southern California beaches

  The oil slick originated from a pipeline connected to an offshore oil platform known as Elly, Foley said on Twitter. Elly is connected by walkway to another platform, Ellen, located just over 8.5 miles (about 14 kilometers) off Long Beach, according to the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.

  Foley said Newport Beach Mayor Brad Avery told her that he encountered the oil slick while in a boat traveling back to the mainland from Santa Catalina Island. “He saw dolphins swimming thru the oil,” Foley tweeted.

• TikTok Hero and Chevron Foe Donziger Gets Six Months in Jail

  Steven Donziger, the disbarred lawyer who once won an $8.6 billion judgment against Chevron Corp. over contamination of the Amazon rain forest, was sentenced to six months in jail for defying court orders.

• ‘I’ve Been Targeted With Probably the Most Vicious Corporate Counterattack in American History’

  Steven Donziger has been under house arrest for over 580 days, awaiting trial on a misdemeanor charge. It’s all, he says, because he beat a multinational energy corporation in court.

• Is Chevron’s Vendetta Against Steven Donziger Finally Backfiring?

  Steven Donziger, the human rights lawyer who spent nearly three decades fighting Chevron on behalf of 30,000 people in the Ecuadorian rainforest, has been sentenced to six months in federal prison for “criminal contempt.” On October 1, in a lower Manhattan federal courtroom, Judge Loretta Preska justified imposing the maximum penalty by asserting that Donziger, now 60, had not shown contrition. She said, “It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law.”

• Siberia’s Hot Streak

  Meanwhile, the Siberian hot streak theoretically threatens the entire planet with methane-induced runaway global warming, the dreaded monster of the North that takes no prisoners. As it’s happening now, in real time today, Siberia is demonstrating the impact of deadly serious climate reactions to too much heat, too soon. This fiasco cannot be dismissed or ignored. It should be at the top of the agenda for COP26 in Glasgow this coming November.

  Moreover, it should also be at the top of the agenda for every leader of every country that attends COP26, or does not attend. The underlying message is straightforward and simple: Clean up the fossil fuel death warrant or risk a red-hot planet with concomitant premature deaths of complex life at lower latitudes by the bucketful. And, that’s just for starters.

• “Blah, Blah, Blah”: Youth Climate Activists Slam Political Inaction at U.N. Summit Ahead of COP26

  Thousands of youth climate activists marched through the streets of Milan last week demanding world leaders meet their pledges to the Paris Climate Agreement and keep global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. The protest came at the end of a three-day youth climate conference, ahead of the United Nations’ COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. Activists at the Youth4Climate conference slammed political inaction on the climate crisis and world leaders’ vague pledges to reduce carbon emissions. “Historically, Africa is responsible for only 3% of global emissions,” said Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate. “And yet Africans are already suffering some of the most brutal impacts fueled by the climate crisis.” Swedish activist Greta Thunberg mocked the jargon politicians use to talk about climate and the environment. “Net zero, blah, blah, blah. Climate neutral, blah, blah, blah. This is all we hear from our so-called leaders: words — words that sound great but so far has led to no action,” said Thunberg. “Our hopes and dreams drown in their empty words and promises.”

• Youth Climate Activists Slam Political Inaction at UN Summit Ahead of COP26

• Watch the 2021 Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards

  The Nation cofounded Covering Climate Now with Columbia Journalism Review in 2019, forming a consortium that now has over 450 member organizations all working to nurture more—and better—climate journalism. On October 6 at 4 pm ET, join NBC News’ Al Roker and Savannah Sellers as they host the first annual Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards honoring extraordinary climate journalism produced by newsrooms large and small around the world.

  The 2021 Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards special provides a global snapshot of the climate emergency as told through the exemplary work of the world’s best climate journalists. Special guests Vanessa Nakate, a climate justice activist from Uganda, and Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy, underscore the essential role of journalists at this moment that UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has termed a “code red for humanity.”

• Opinion | Climate Crisis: Failure Is Not an Option on Reconciliation

  One hundred million Americans experienced climate disasters this year. Hundreds of people died in unprecedented heat, the West burned and the East choked on its smoke, and again, we’re running out of letters for hurricanes. It’s like the climate is asking “can you hear me now?” and Congress is studiously ignoring it as they toy with failing, again, to take bold climate action. We cannot let them fail us.

• UK Chancellor Criticised for ‘Silence’ on Climate Change in Party Conference Speech

  Shadow business secretary Ed Miliband has labelled Rishi Sunak a “climate delayer” after the UK chancellor said almost nothing about climate change in his speech at the Conservative Party conference today.

  Sunak spoke about the post-pandemic economic recovery and promising new jobs in science and technology, but campaigners said the virtual absence of climate change was a “damaging sign” ahead of the COP26 summit due to start in Glasgow in under a month.

• Opinion | Beware Big Ag’s Sleight of Hand on ‘Net Zero’

• ‘We Don’t Have 30 More Years’: McDonald’s Rebuked for Greenwashing Climate Pledge

  “If McDonald’s changed its menu immediately it would make a big difference but waiting until 2050 is insufficient to avoid climate catastrophe.”

• Global Religious Leaders, Scientists Issue Joint Call for ‘Radical’ Climate Action

  Dozens of religious leaders and scientists came together in Vatican City on Monday to demand “urgent, radical, and responsible action” to address the climate emergency and related challenges that threaten humanity and “life on our beautiful common home.”

  “We have inherited a garden: We must not leave a desert to our children.”—Joint appeal

• Making a Living

  We have named the era of runaway climate change the “Anthropocene,” which tells you everything you need to know about how we understand our tragic nature. Human beings are apparently insatiable consuming machines; we are eating our way right through the biosphere. The term seems to suggest that the relentless expansion of the world economy, which the extraction and burning of fossil fuels has made possible, is hard-wired into our DNA. Seen from this perspective, attempting to reverse course on global warming is likely to be a fool’s errand. But is unending economic growth really a defining feature of what it means to be human?

• Energy

  • ‘Speeding in the Wrong Direction,’ Fossil Fuel Demand Tops Pre-Pandemic Levels

    Climate campaigners and energy experts are responding to a recent rise in fossil fuel demand by reiterating the necessity of rapidly transitioning to renewable sources like solar and wind, with Swedish activist Greta Thunberg warning Monday that “we are still speeding in the wrong direction.”

    Thunberg yet again took aim at world leaders’ empty promises to combat the climate emergency, including through policies and investments provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic. As she put it: “So much for ‘building back better’ and a ‘green recovery.’”

  • Biden Admin Slammed for Plowing Ahead With ‘Illegal’ Lease Sale Amid Offshore Oil Spills

    Less than 48 hours after one of the worst oil spills in Southern California history was first spotted—and as officials continue to monitor oil leaks that started weeks ago when Hurricane Ida collided with the Gulf Coast’s extensive fossil fuel infrastructure—the Biden administration on Monday confirmed its plan to expand offshore drilling, provoking resistance from environmental advocates.

    “This is a continuation of the prior administration’s reckless and unlawful behavior.”—Brettny Hardy, Earthjustice

  • ‘Tear It Down’: Climate Campaigners Arrested Outside New England’s Last Coal Plant

    Activists with 350 New Hampshire and the No Coal No Gas campaign on Sunday blockaded the entrance to New England’s only remaining coal plant without a shutdown date, where they declared that they’ll “do what must be done to close Bow and stop the climate crisis.”

    Video and photos shared on social media of the event outside the Merrimack Station in Bow, New Hampshire show a row of seated protesters with their arms locked together and standing demonstrators holding a banner that read, “Tear it down.” Between those groups were two activists with pickaxes breaking up the pavement where the group subsequently planted flowers.

  • Another Major Oil Spill Hits the Southern California Coast

    The inevitable happened Saturday when a major oil spill off the Orange County coast reportedly dumped at least 126,000 gallons of oil into coastal waters and local wetlands.

    The source of the 13-square mile spill was apparently from a leak from a pipeline connected to Platform Elly, located five miles off the Huntington Beach and just over 7 miles off Long Beach. The offshore rig is one of three operated off the coast by Beta Offshore, a Long Beach, California-based unit of Houston-based Amplify Energy Corporation. Royal Dutch Shell PLC installed the platforms in 1980.

  • The age of fossil-fuel abundance is dead

    The potentially inflationary upheaval will not be good for a world that still gets most of its energy from fossil fuels. But it may at least accelerate the shift to greener—and cheaper—sources of energy.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Public Lands Open to Livestock Grazing Should Not Count Toward 30×30 Goals

    While much of the public (and apparently some in the Biden administration) might not know the difference between a national park, national forest, or BLM-administered public lands, the differences are stark. Most importantly, Forest Service and BLM lands are not necessarily managed to protect native wildlife and clean water or sequester atmospheric carbon, despite agency claims that they manage their lands for “long-term sustainability.” While the Forest Service’s Deputy Chief Chris French says “the majority of National Forest System lands meet the conservation goal” laid out in 30×30, history and reality demonstrate this statement is not based in reality.

    For instance, there is a particular project in the Medicine Bow National Forest in Wyoming called the Landscape Vegetation Analysis Project, which will allow for cutting of up to 288,000 acres over the next 15 years. This includes the ability to clearcut up to 86,000 acres and bulldoze in up to 600 miles of “temporary” logging roads. The notion that national forest lands like these should be included in the America the Beautiful Program or the 30×30 Initiative would be unacceptable by the American public.

  • Can the BLM be Fixed? Tracy Stone-Manning Takes the Helm of a Broken Agency

    Director Stone-Manning steps into an agency that has been gutted of many of its career professionals during the Trump administration. The Trump administration enforced an Orwellian Newspeak, removing the use of “climate change” on official documents and websites with the goal of reversing the progress toward clean, renewable energy and to fast-track fossil fuel production on public lands and the federal mineral deposits beneath private lands. Then, a much-ballyhooed move of the Washington, DC agency headquarters to an oil and gas industry office building in Grand Junction, Colorado caused more than 87% of the headquarters staff to quit. The senior staff that survived the purge is heavily skewed in the image of the anti-conservation and pro-industry Trump administration, and according to polling three-quarters of agency staff think the agency is headed in the wrong direction.

    There are the longstanding land management issues that got the agency derisively branded as the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining” by author Edward Abbey, and vigorously scalded in the more recent book, This Land. Stone-Manning faces problems old and new, taking charge of a bureaucracy that has historically let commercial industry run roughshod over public lands with hardly a pretense for conserving land health, native wildlife, or public recreation opportunities.

Finance

• Megarich Democratic Donor Says ‘Tax Rich People Like Me’ or He’s Done With the Party

  Amid ongoing negotiations over how wealth will be taxed to fund the proposed safety net and climate package known as the Build Back Better Act, one superrich Democratic donor suggested he’s ready to stop writing checks to the party unless it passes the legislation with a $3.5 trillion price tag—not less—and with the proposed tax increases on the wealthy and corporations.

  The proposed tax hikes, tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer wrote in an essay published Monday at The New Republic, offer common-sense benefits.

• Warren Introduces Bill to Protect Bank Customers, Small Banks From Consolidation

• Opinion | 5 Key Things to Know About the Pandora Papers

  This week we are closely watching the disclosures emerge from the Pandora Papers, a massive leak of secret data about the illicit financial activities of the super-wealthy from 200 countries. In the days to come, we will learn more about the tax avoidance of billionaires and the ways states like South Dakota and Florida have become U.S. tax havens.

• Bombshell Leak of Tax Haven Info Exposes US as “Peddler of Financial Secrecy”

• Biden Slams GOP For Obstructing Debt Limit in Wake of “Reckless” Trump Agenda

• Corporate Media Want Us to Think Biden “Lost” to Progressives on Infrastructure

• To Lower Bill’s Price Tag, Says AOC, Shorten Duration But Don’t Gut Programs

  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York argued Sunday that the best way to lower the price tag of Democrats’ emerging reconciliation package may be to shorten the duration of proposed social programs instead of gutting their funding—or removing them from the bill entirely.

  Acknowledging that dropping the legislation’s top-line price tag below $3.5 trillion over a decade will likely be necessary to win the must-have votes of Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), and other corporate-backed conservative Democrats, Ocasio-Cortez said that “one of the ideas that’s out there is: fully fund what we can fully fund, but maybe instead of doing it for 10 years, we fully fund it for five years.”

• Ocasio-Cortez Rejects Means Testing, Saying It Leads to “Red Tape” and “Waste”

• Opinion | From Empire to Global Oligarchy, Pandora Papers Expose UK’s Insidious Capitalism

  Perhaps more than anything else, the Pandora Papers—the tranche of documents published Sunday night, which reveal the secret wealth of the world’s rich and powerful—tell a story about Britain.

• Top Democrat Says Postal Banking Pilot Is ‘Welcome,’ But DeJoy Must Still Be Fired

  News Monday that the U.S. Postal Service recently rolled out a pilot program in four cities allowing limited payroll and business check-cashing services was welcomed by a top Democrat who called it a “welcome start” to fuller postal banking services but stressed that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy must still be fired.

  “Today would be a great day to fire the Trump appointees on the postal board of governors and then fire Louis Dejoy. They all need to be fired.”

• USPS Pilot Program Could Lead to Restart of Agency’s Nationwide Banking Services

• US Denounced as ‘Biggest Peddler of Financial Secrecy’ After Pandora Papers Leak

  The leak of an enormous trove of tax haven files over the weekend offered a further glimpse into the secretive world of offshore finance—a system facilitated by the U.S. and other rich nations—and prompted calls for immediate changes to global rules that let the powerful hide their wealth, skirt their obligations, and starve governments of crucial revenue.

  “This is where our missing hospitals are,” Susana Ruiz, the tax policy lead at Oxfam International, said in a statement. “This is where the pay-packets sit of all the extra teachers and firefighters and public servants we need. Whenever a politician or business leader claims there is ‘no money’ to pay for climate damage and innovation, for more and better jobs, for a fair post-Covid recovery, for more overseas aid, they know where to look.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Why Did a US Envoy Meet With the Head of a Fascist Militia in India?

  The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government led by Modi has committed egregious human rights violations against wide swaths of the Indian population. In just the two years since getting reelected in 2019, the government has changed naturalization laws to discriminate against Muslims and charged critics of this new law with sedition.

  It has escalated the conflict in Kashmir, used pellet guns against peaceful protesters (which can cause serious eye injuries leading to blindness), and detained thousands (including children) without trial under cover of a complete news, landline phone, mobile phone, and internet shutdown that lasted seven months.

• Former Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham Says She Regrets Enabling Trump’s Lies

• Canberra told to backpedal on cybersecurity intervention

  The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security has recommended that a bill amending the 2018 Security of Critical Infrastructure Act be split into two, with further consultation on parts of concern to universities.

  The act gives Canberra a role in protecting the online security of ports, energy and water utilities. The amendment, introduced late last year, would beef up the government’s powers and extend them to other sectors including higher education.

• Why this Facebook scandal is different

  Facebook has already responded to the allegations with defense from a familiar playbook, similar to its response to President Joe Biden’s criticism that the platform was “killing people” because of the spread of Covid-19 misinformation on the platform. The company and its leaders are arguing that the allegations are sensationalized and untrue, that information is being taken out of context, and that Facebook isn’t the only one to blame for the world’s problems.

• Why the Media Is (Mostly) Screwing Up What’s Happening With Democrats

  Second, it’s not the left’s agenda; it’s Biden’s. It’s exactly what he proposed during the 2020 campaign. The “left’s” version of the reconciliation bill totaled $6 trillion; it was already cut back to $3.5 trillion, with Biden’s encouragement. In fact, Manchin and Sinema even voted to proceed to debate that $3.5 trillion bill, while making clear that they still had some issues with it (and still not making clear what those issues were). The actual “left agenda” includes Medicare for All, free college, an ambitious Green New Deal, higher tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy… and so on. Biden’s not with them on a lot of that agenda.

  [...]

  So it’s actually the progressives who have compromised; they are the pragmatists. The so-called “moderates”—let’s call them Conservadems; they’re anything but moderate—are in fact the whiny, take-it-or-leave-it babies here. In short, alliance with progressives is the only way for Biden to achieve his agenda; it is the Conservadems who put it at risk.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Infrastructure And Content Moderation: Challenges And Opportunities

  The signs were clear right from the start: at some point, content moderation would inevitably move beyond user-generated platforms down to the infrastructure—the place where services operate the heavy machinery of the Internet and without which user-facing services cannot function. Ever since the often-forgotten incident when Amazon stopped hosting Wikileaks after US political pressure took place in 2010, there has been a steady uneasiness regarding the role infrastructure providers could end up playing in the future of content moderation. 

• Swedish ‘Mohammad’ cartoonist Lars Vilks killed in car crash

  Since the publication of the cartoons, Vilks had been living under round-the-clock police guard following threats against his life. He had a bounty put on his head and his house was fire-bombed.

  In 2015, one person was killed in Copenhagen, Denmark, at a meeting meant to mark the 25th anniversary of an Iranian fatwa against British writer Salman Rushdie, which Vilks attended.

• Right-Wing Commentator Dan Bongino Runs Into Florida Anti-SLAPP Law, Now Owes Daily Beast $32,000 In Legal Fees

  Venue selection matters, as right-wing political commentator/defamation lawsuit loser Dan Bongino is now discovering. He sued the Daily Beast over an article about his apparent expulsion from the National Rifle Association’s video channel, NRATV. After trying (and failing) to get a comment from Bongino about this ouster, reporter Lachlan Markay published his article, updating it later when Bongino decided he did actually want to talk about it.

• Trump Sues to Restore Twitter Account Ahead of Likely 2024 Presidential Run

• In Josh Hawley’s World, People Should Be Able To Sue Facebook Both For Taking Down Stuff They Don’t Like AND Leaving Up Stuff They Don’t Like

  Last year, Josh Hawley introduced one of his many, many pathetic attempts at changing Section 230. That bill, the “Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act” would create a private right of action allowing individuals to sue any social media company if they were unhappy that some of their content was removed, and to seek a payout. The obvious implication, as with a ton of bad faith claims by populists who pretend to be “conservative” is that websites shouldn’t do any moderation at all.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• The CIA Plan to Poison Assange Wasn’t Needed. The US Found a ‘Lawful’ Way to Disappear Him

  Shocking as the revelations are – exposing the entirely lawless approach of the main US intelligence agency – the Yahoo investigation nonetheless tends to obscure rather than shine a light on the bigger picture.

  Assange has not been deprived of his freedom for more than a decade because of an unimplemented rogue operation by the CIA. Rather, he has been held in various forms of captivity – disappeared – through the collaborations of various national governments and their intelligence agencies, aided by legal systems and the media, that have systematically violated his rights and legal due process.

• US appeal on Assange extradition to be heard on 27 and 28 Oct

  A hearing on an US appeal to strike down a court decision and allow the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will be held on 27 and 28 October at the High Court in London, according to a message from the Don’t Extradite Assange campaign.

• Finland supplements its reply on Sanoma’s complaint concerning YLE

  According to the supplementary reply, the complaint is largely based on false assumptions about the market and does not sufficiently take into account general market trends and the special status of YLE.

  Due to EU legislation and its implementation, correspondence with the Commission is, as a rule, confidential. However, the Ministry of Transport and Communications aims to address the matter as openly and transparently as possible.

  When Finland sent the supplementary reply, it requested the Commission’s permission to release a public version of it. Finland is currently waiting for the Commission to response to the request. After having presented a corresponding request in spring 2021 with regard to the first reply, Finland received a permission from the Commission to publish those documents.

• [Old] Slovenian authorities should halt the deterioration of freedom of expression and media freedom

  The Commissioner warns that some steps taken by the Slovenian government in recent months risk undermining the ability of independent voices to speak freely. She stresses that hostile public discourse, as well as smear campaigns and intimidation targeting civil society activists and those who express critical opinions, harm free expression and can have a chilling effect on media freedom.

  The Commissioner calls on the Slovenian authorities to take action to appease tensions in society and to encourage mutual respect in the exchange of opinions. Noting the specific responsibility of political leaders in this regard, she calls in particular on members of the government to make a responsible and dignified use of social media platforms. “Members of the government must refrain from making stigmatising and misleading comments about the work of civil society, and should publicly condemn such discourse by others”, said the Commissioner.

Civil Rights/Policing

• ‘Milestone Moment’ for Labor as 98% of Major TV-Film Union Votes to Strike

  Close to 100% of the 60,000-member film and television production employees union voted Monday to approve a strike in the coming days if studios don’t agree to a fair deal for the lowest-paid workers who make movies and television shows possible.

  “Our people have basic human needs like time for meal breaks, adequate sleep, and a weekend.”—Matthew Loeb, IATSE

• Massachusetts Chief of Police Sends Racist Emails to Town Officials, Keeps Job

  “I couldn’t resist!!!”

  That’s the last line of a particularly racist email sent by Leyden, Massachusetts Police Chief Daniel Galvis to town officials and fellow officers on March 8, 2016.

• Cori Bush Among Advocates Demanding Clemency for Ernest Lee Johnson Ahead of Scheduled Execution

  “Like slavery and lynching did before it, the death penalty perpetuates cycles of trauma, violence, and state-sanctioned murder in Black and brown communities.”—Reps. Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.)

• Native Americans: the First and Forgotten Slaves

  As a full-time substitute teacher in a school system on the Eastern US seaboard, I am assigned to cover for state-certified teachers who are absent from duty. I’ve had many assignments over the past couple of years including working with special education/students with disabilities, and monitoring Spanish, Math, Art, and US History classes. It was the content, or lack thereof, of the US History class that was the impetus for this article.

  Students in the US History class were learning about the various Native American tribes located across the United States. The assignments included determining former tribal locations on a blank map of the United States using crayons, and writing a postcard about the hunting, foraging and tools/technologies of assorted tribes such as the Lakota of the Great Plains, the Iroquois of the Northeast Forests, and the KwaKiutl of the Pacific Northwest.

• In ‘Major Victory’ for Abortion Rights, Biden to Reverse Trump-Era Domestic Gag Rule

  Supporters of reproductive rights on Monday celebrated the Biden administration’s decision to reverse a Trump-era policy barring health clinics that get federal family planning funds from providing referrals for abortions—a policy that critics had called the “domestic gag rule.”

  “We thank the Biden-Harris administration for swiftly ending the harmful policy and prioritizing access to sexual and reproductive healthcare.”—Alexis McGill Johnson, PPFA

• Bans Off Our Bodies: Planned Parenthood Pres. on Abortion Bans, Bills in Congress & the Supreme Court

  After thousands of people marched in hundreds of rallies across the United States to protest against tightening abortion restrictions, we speak with Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson, who says the weekend actions represent “a movement moment” for reproductive rights. “More than 80% of Americans believe that Roe should be the law of the land,” she says. “And yet, in state after state, these horrific restrictions and bans are continuing to further erode our ability to access our constitutional right.”

• Your Body My Choice?

  It takes a minute to explain, but I use going to the bathroom as an example. It is good for a laugh, but students remember the recent efforts to decide who gets to use which bathrooms, and obviously we want to be careful about our waste, and so on…

  There is good reason people cannot walk out into the middle of a traffic, pull down their pants, and urinate between passing cars. It would create a hazard and threaten everyone’s safety.

• “We Demand Better”: Reps. Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal & Barbara Lee Share Their Own Abortion Stories

  Thousands marched Saturday in more than 600 demonstrations across the United States to protest increasing state restrictions on abortion. The “Bans Off Our Bodies” rallies were sparked in part by a near-total ban on abortion that went into effect in Texas on September 1, which bans the procedure after about six weeks and lets anyone sue the doctor and others who help a person obtain an abortion. Ahead of Saturday’s nationwide actions, several Democratic House members shared their own experiences getting abortions during a hearing Thursday, including California Congressmember Barbara Lee, who said she was just 16 when she had to travel to Mexico for a so-called back-alley abortion in the days before Roe v. Wade, and Congressmember Cori Bush, who described getting an abortion after she was raped at 17. “To all the Black women and girls who have had abortions and will have abortions: We have nothing to be ashamed of,” Bush said. “We deserve better. We demand better. We are worthy of better.”

• Catharsis

  We are thrilled to announce that we have reached an agreement to settle the charge against Amazon at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleging that the company illegally fired us for speaking up about warehouse workers’ conditions during COVID. This is a win for protecting workers rights, and shows that we were right to stand up for each other, for justice, and for our world. Amazon will be required to pay us our lost wages and post a notice to all of its tech and warehouse workers nationwide that Amazon can’t fire workers for organizing and exercising their rights.

• Digital Transparency: A Right to Information Report for September, 2021

  Since our last report for the month of August, IFF has filed 26 RTI requests and 3 First Appeals. Here, we give you an overview of the requests filed and an analysis of the responses we have received from the different public authorities. This report highlights why demanding transparency and accountability from Government authorities is one of the key elements in our fight to protect digital rights.

  [...]

  The Right to Information Act, 2005 was enacted to promote transparency and accountability in the working of every public authority by ensuring that citizens are able secure access to information under the control of public authorities. Facilitating such access is necessary to ensure that democratic processes are not subverted by public authorities acting under private interests. Where transparency is not upheld as a value of public decision-making, citizens are at a disadvantage when it comes to keeping a check on abuse of power by the public authorities.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• South Korean ISP Somehow Thinks Netflix Owes It Money Because Squid Game Is Popular

  We’ve noted for a while how the world’s telecom executives have a fairly entrenched entitlement mindset. As in, they often tend to jealously eye streaming and online ad revenues and assume they’re inherently owed a cut of those revenues just because at some point they traveled on their networks. You saw this hubris at play during AT&T’s claims that “big tech” gets a “free ride” on their networks, which insisted that companies like Google should pay them significant, additional troll tolls “just because” (which triggered the entire net neutrality fight in the States).

Monopolies

• Opinion: EU must grasp DSA opportunity as changes trickle in [Ed: "Opinion" means "we sell this agenda for our sponsors"]

  It is probably both good and bad in equal measure that getting EU legislation over the line appears tougher than even the most gruelling of marathons.

  The Digital Services Act (DSA), which concerns consumer safety online, is currently experiencing this.

  The European Commission tabled its long-awaited proposals at the end of last year, but only now are suggested amendments beginning to creep in from three European Parliament committees: Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO), Legal Affairs (JURI), and Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs.

• Facebook Outage Shows Risks of Its Monopoly, Ocasio-Cortez Says

  The Federal Trade Commission has sued Facebook, alleging that the company engaged in an anticompetitive strategy of buying companies, including the photo-sharing service Instagram and the messaging platform WhatsApp, to neutralize them as potential competitors. The FTC initially approved both deals but now says they should be unwound.

• Korea Antitrust Regulator Steers Away From Harsh Tech Crackdown

  Regulators will impose only the minimum necessary regulations and intervene solely where it is imperative to do so, Joh Sung-wook, chairperson of the Korea Fair Trade Commission, told Bloomberg Television in Seoul. The agency’s priority is to prevent companies with dominant market power from abusing it and hurting competition, she added.

• Patents

  • 10 Tips for Implementing AI and IP in to Your Business [Ed: Combining two lies/acronyms/buzzwords in one headline to put together patent paid-for propaganda for patent litigation conglomerates]

    Last week, Nick McDonald, Peter Finnie and Mark Nichols hosted a webinar on 10 Tips for Implementing AI and IP in to Your Business. They discussed key considerations for businesses around the development and protection of AI solutions, obtaining and using input data and protecting AI outputs.

  • Trouble Arises In Legal Documents On Intellectual Property Rights Related To AI [Ed: No, there's no such thing as "Hey Hi" and "Intellectual Property Rights" is just three lies in a row. Lies have become the norm and buzzwords are the language of thieving litigation fanatics.]

    AI systems rely heavily on data. The access to data and the use of data to set up AI systems can cause intellectual property problems when the data is protected by copyright and related rights. Accordingly, artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are not just for Big Business but it’s a problem that all businesses will embrace in the coming future.

    In computer science, artificial intelligence or AI is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence of humans. Typically, the term “artificial intelligence” is often used to describe machines (or computers) that are capable of mimicking the “cognitive” functions that humans would normally associate with the mind, like “learning” and “problem-solving”.

    [...]

    The methods for strengthening the harmonization between AI and IP may consist of setting up agreements, contracts of assignment for data containing the IPR of others. In addition, data sets created by enterprises themselves for AI or ML practice need to be identified, labeled, and apply security measures and restrict access.

    Businesses can also apply similar measures to principles, structures, algorithms, methods that can help ML to develop self-learning capability which can make AI and ML aggregate data, analysis, and predictions. However, this method is not optimal because it limits the cooperation and development of AI and ML.

    In addition, if an enterprise creates its software using AI, it is advisable to register for copyright protection of that software right away because protecting the AI system is sometimes more important than the products created by the AI system themselves.

  • A comparison of patent law development [Ed: Patents were meant to advance science, but now the media and this entire system is dominated by parasitic litigation firms, trying to change law in the name of 'harmony' (i.e. changing things always in their own favour, just like munition manufacturers pushing for wars)]

    Patent legislation across Asian jurisdictions is constantly catching up with the pandemic’s demands, with stronger protection, foreign filing and higher compensation being common themes. However, the gaps persist, and businesses need to fathom the domestic barriers to stay ahead.

  • Developments re Fintiv Discretionary Denials of IPR Petitions [Ed: PTAB throws out loads of fake patents and the coy patent litigation firms cannot contain their toxic bias]

    As we’ve noted in earlier blog posts, following the Fintiv decision, the PTAB has been denying petitions where a federal court is likely to decide validity before a final would be reached by the PTAB. A study by Unified Patents shows that 38% of petition denials in 2021 are due to Fintiv.

    Many believe Fintiv goes against the intent of the America Invents Act, to allow determining patent validity in the Patent Office, before technical examiners who are best qualified to evaluate validity. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), a co-author of the original Leahy-Smith America Invents ACT, announced on Weds., Sept. 29 that he is introducing a bill that would restore the IPR process to what Congress intended. Among other reforms, it reportedly would overrule Fintiv, and replace it with a list of limited factors for discretionary denial.

  • Move quickly to ratify patent court, IBEC urges [Ed: Propaganda arm of Team UPC, owned by Team UPC, spreads lies and blackmails politicians based on intentional falsehoods. They attack science to promote more litigation billing.]

    Business group IBEC has called on the Government to move quickly to ratify an agreement that creates a unified patent system across Europe.

    A Unified Patent Court is expected to begin operating next year, and Ireland had previously committed itself to establishing a local division of the court.

  • DABUS Again Denied in the US and the UK, Part III – Implications for Australia [Ed: Patent attorney from Australia recognising that only Australia was gullible or dumb enough to not understand patent law and in turn offer patents or monopolies to mere bots. Hilarious.

    In both the US and the UK, patent offices have refused to allow applications filed by Dr Stephen Thaler to proceed, on the basis that the named inventor – an ‘AI’ machine dubbed DABUS – is not a human being. In the first article in this series I looked at the US approach to the role of the inventor in patent law and practice, and at the recent decision of Judge Leonie M Brinkema in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (‘EDVA’) upholding the USPTO’s decision. In the second, I discussed the split decision of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, which upheld (by a 2-1 majority) the decisions of the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) and the High Court.

    In Australia, the Patent Office also refused to allow a corresponding application by Dr Thaler to proceed. In contrast to the US and the UK, however, that decision was overturned by Justice Beach in the Federal Court. The Commissioner of Patents has now appealed that ruling to a Full Bench of the Court (case no. VID496/2021). In this article, I will be looking at the potential implications of the recent US and UK decision for the conduct and outcome of the appeal in Australia.

  • Adhera Receives European Patent Covering MLR-1019 and Derivatives for Treating Dyskinesias [Ed: Waste of press release money when one announces the granting of a European Patent given the chaos in the EPO. One has to wonder aloud if Adhera has been keeping abreast of the news (what’s left of it) and is aware that today’s EPO grants loads and loads of fake patents just to collect money]

  • Negative sentiment around Biden IP policies grows, survey reveals [Ed: Think tank and propaganda mill IAM is lobbying Biden into putting patent litigation moles everywhere, attacking science for the lawsuits industry’s gain]

    IAM’s panel of global IP business leaders deliver a scathing judgment on the Biden Administration’s patent policies in our Q3 benchmarking survey, but likes what it sees in Europe

  • After years of delay the Unified Patent Court and Unitary Patent might be just around the corner [Ed: This is classic fake news (paid-for too) from Carpmaels & Ransford LLP]

    The Unified Patent Court (UPC) is gaining momentum and looks increasingly likely to come into force in 2022 following a flurry of recent developments.

    For the UPC to come into force, a number of EU Member States need to approve an administrative update (the Protocol on the Provisional Application of the UPC Agreement, or “PAP-Protocol”) to enable a “soft-start” period to commence. Following the resolution of a third constitutional challenge in Germany, a number of significant and positive steps have been taken by participating Member States which mean we are increasingly sure the court is finally on its way.

  • A Year and 3.5 Million Deaths Later, ‘Greed Is Triumphing Over Human Life’ in Vaccine Fight

    A full year has now passed—and roughly 3.5 million people worldwide have died—since India and South Africa first introduced their proposal to temporarily suspend patent protections for coronavirus vaccines, part of an effort to boost the inadequate global supply of lifesaving shots.

    “It is simply shameful that a handful of wealthy governments continue to monopolize vaccine supply.”

  • Software Patents

    • Dominion Harbor entity, Sovereign Peak Ventures, patent likely invalid [Ed: Microsoft-connected patent trolls 1, 2] with their fake patents]

      On October 4, 2021, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 9,042,457, owned by Sovereign Peak Ventures, a Dominion Harbor entity. The ’457 patent relates to video processing and has been asserted against LG and TCL.

    • Preclusion; Customer Lawsuits; and the Kessler Doctrine [Ed: Litigation firms-funded Dennis Crouch and patent trolls he ‘sympathises’ with]

      This is a core civil procedure case pending before the Supreme Court. Of course, procedure can and often does have a major impact on substantive rights. The Supreme Court has now issued a Call for the Views of the Solicitor General (CVSG)–seeking the government’s input on whether to hear the case. Although certiorari is certainly not guaranteed, CVSG is generally seen as a major step in that direction.

      [...]

      Preclusion cases always involve two lawsuits, and the question is whether something that happened in the first lawsuit precludes a party from taking some action in the section lawsuit. Here, PersonalWeb sued Amazon for patent infringement back in 2011 based upon Amazon’s use of its S3 cloud storage services. However, after a narrow claim construction, PersonalWeb stipulated to dismissal of its case with prejudice. In 2018, PersonalWeb sued a number of Amazon customers for post-2011 activities. The courts dismissed the case — holding that the action was barred by the Kessler Doctrine.

• Copyrights

  • ‘Hacker Used Victim’s Email Address to Sign Up with Pirate Site YTS’

    A group of independent movie companies continues its quest to hold VPNs and their hosting partners responsible for piracy. The latest target is Datacamp, also known as CDN77 and DataPacket. As part of this lawsuit, the film companies note that one alleged pirate used a “hacked” email address to steal money and register a YTS account.