10.28.21
Posted in News Roundup at 6:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this video, I am going to show an overview of Kubuntu 21.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.
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music, support update, stuff
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A Good Time to Use OpenZFS Slog, OpenBSD 7.0 is out, OpenBSD and Wayland, UVM faults yield significant performance boost, and more.
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AlmaLinux ELevate is a brand-new tool that makes it easy to move from RHEL 7.x and its derivatives, to any version 8.x related distribution of your choice (AlmaLinux, CentOS, Rocky Linux and etc). This tool is being developed with the open-source mindset at its core, and in this video, Jay chats with Jack from AlmaLinux about this awesome project.
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Kernel Space
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Disclosed last year by Arm was their processors affected by a straight-line speculation vulnerability. In this case the processor could speculatively execute instructions linearly in memory past an unconditional change in control flow. There has been talk about possible straight-line speculation on x86/x86_64 but without any action while now GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler developers along with Linux kernel developers are preparing such mitigation support.
Last year LLVM added mitigations around Arm’s straight-line speculation vulnerability as did GCC added SLS mitigation support for Arm. Those opt-in compiler options can be used when building important software like the kernel.
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Differences of opinion over which kernel symbols should be exported to loadable modules have been anything but uncommon over the years. Often, these disagreements relate to which kernel capabilities should be available to proprietary modules. Sometimes, though, it hinges on the disagreements over the best way to solve a problem. The recent discussion around the removal of an export for a core kernel function is a case in point.
Loadable modules, of course, are chunks of kernel code that are loaded into the core kernel after the system boots. Most modules are device drivers, but a surprising amount of kernel functionality can be built in modular form. While code that is built into the kernel can use any symbol that is accessible via the usual C scoping rules, loadable modules are rather more constrained; they can only use symbols that have been explicitly exported to them. In theory, the exported-symbol interface is tightly regulated; in practice, tens of thousands of symbols have been exported over the years without a lot of oversight. That said, the community still sees occasional disagreements when a module developer wants to use a symbol that core-kernel developers do not wish to export.
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If you happen to have a Nitrokey FIDO U2F as a two-factor authentication key, proper Linux support is about to land. While at launch it mentioned working out-of-the-box across all major browsers and platforms — including Linux — a change is needed to the kernel that’s now on the way for the 5.16 cycle.
Due to a different firmware on the NitroKey U2F and that shifting around some of the commands, the Linux kernel’s hid-u2fzero driver had to be adapted to better deal with different hardware/firmware revisions. With this patch now in HID’s for-next ahead of Linux 5.16, the less than 50 lines of code changed should get the NitroKey U2F working nicely under Linux.
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Graphics Stack
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The wlroots modular Wayland compositing library that was started by the Sway compositor now has an initial Vulkan renderer merged.
The wlroots library started to provide functionality for Sway in areas the Weston library hadn’t filled and with time this library is now used by KWinFT, Taiwins, and other Wayland compositors for providing more shared code usage and functionality across compositors.
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Applications
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Threema is one of the best secure alternatives to WhatsApp as a paid app (Swiss-based) that does not require a mobile number or email to sign up while using a decentralized architecture.
While Threema is known for its security features long before WhatsApp advertised secure messaging, it wasn’t originally open-source. However, last year, Threema worked on making all of their applications open-source on GitHub with the ability to have reproducible builds as well.
Now, it looks like Threema has introduced desktop application support for Linux, Windows, and macOS.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Here’s the scenario. You used Etcher or Rufus tools to create a bootable, live Linux USB in Windows or perhaps in Linux.
You used it to install Linux and the purpose of the USB is accomplished. Now you want to format this USB and use it for the regular data transfer or storage.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Munin on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Munin is a web-based tool to monitor system and network statistics. Munin shows this information through Graphs. It helps the system administrators to collect various system information that can be viewed via a web interface such as processor load, hard disk usage, network traffic, access to server services on one or more computers, and more.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Munin server monitoring on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
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Ruby on Rails is a free, open-source, and one of the most popular application stacks used for creating sites and web apps. It is written in Ruby programming language and follows the MVC concept. It comes with the Rails development framework that makes app development easier. There are many well-known applications based on Rails, such as Github, Airbnb, Soundcloud, etc.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to install Ruby on Rails on a Debian 11 system.
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Python is a programming language that can be used to create just about anything. From full-scale games to web applications, and even simple scripts for your PC or Mac. Python has been around since the late 1980s and continues to be one of the most popular languages in use today.
Today’s tutorial will show you how to install Python 3.9 programming language on a Rocky Linux 8 system.
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Yarn is a package manager for Javascript. It is meant to replace npm (node package manager). Yarn uses a different way to install packages. Instead of installing from the registry, it installs packages from other nodes in your network that have already downloaded the package and its dependencies. This can speed up installations, especially in projects with lots of node modules.
Yarn works exactly the same as npm, but with some benefits. First of all, it tells you which version of a package that was installed is compatible with your project. This makes it easier if you need to roll back or update packages. Secondly, it makes your packages more secure. Every package’s checksum is validated before it’s run by Yarn. This means that if a developer installs an outdated or corrupted package, Yarn will be able to detect the error, show the error in an easy-to-read format, and allow them to correct it before executing the code.
It isn’t easy to say whether the yarn is better than npm or vice versa. It’s just different. If you want an easy-to-use package manager that makes your packages more secure, the yarn might be the answer.
If you are a developer, chances are you have heard of Yarn. Installing yarn on Debian 11 can be tricky if you’re unfamiliar with the process, but this tutorial will walk you through the process step-by-step so that after reading this post, installing Yarn should be as easy as 1-2-3!
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Looking for how to record Ubuntu desktop in Wayland session? Here’s how to do it in Ubuntu 21.10 using Kooha.
Ubuntu switched to “Wayland” session since Ubuntu 21.04. However, many apps, e.g., Kazam, Peek and vokoscreen-NG, do not support it. Some apps including OBS-Studio claim to support for Wayland, but either record blank screen or just refuse to work!
The best solution in my opinion is switch back to Xorg session. To do so, simply log out, select your user and then choose “Ubuntu on Xorg” via bottom-right gear button menu. All the apps will work once you login with Xorg.
For those sticking to the default Wayland, Kooha is one of good choices until GNOME’s “in-shell” screenshot & screencast UI is out.
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This guide explains how to configure automatic updates in Ubuntu Server 20.04. This tutorial is based on the following official Ubuntu Documentation article: Ubuntu Server Guide » Package Management » Automatic Updates. If you just want to do it, scroll down to the end and copy paste the two configuration file configs and you’re done. If you want to understand it and tweak, then keep reading.
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Load Balancer falls under the EC2 services of AWS. An Application Load Balancer works at the seventh layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, the application layer. We can add and remove targets from our load balancer as per our needs without affecting the flow of requests to the application. Application Load Balancer supports for path-based routing: forward requests based on the URL in the request, host-based routing: forward requests based on the host field in the HTTP header, routing based on fields in the request, registering targets by IP address: targets outside the VPC for the load balancer can also be added. These are a few of the benefits of using the Application Load Balancer.
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Just migrating everything to bunch of new RaspberryPi 4 8GB from my VMware farm. Instead of using multiple Raspberry Pi 4, I decided to use Docker and move as many I can into each one of these. I’ve think Home Assistant (with supervisor), Pi-Hole, Pi-VPN, UnBound and my NoIP2 scripts one Raspberry Pi4 8GB Pi running Debian 11 BullsEye and docker and Plex Server onto another Pi should do the trick. Anyhow, ran into an interesting problem with Undound where I needed to edit the configuration file nano application.yaml or vi unbound.sh and it said, nano or vi wasn’t installed.
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Managing authentication and authorization in a large-scale network is a challenge: the passwords need to be set and rotated every now and then, access to certain configuration settings needs to be controlled and, finally, users’ actions need to be logged somewhere. This poses a need for a centralized controller in the network that is responsible for such functions. Modern routers and switches, which typically run Linux operating systems, support TACACS+ protocol that enables system administrators to implement flexible rules for authentication and authorization. However, TACACS+ server implementation for Linux operating system, although neat, lacks a graphical user interface which makes daemon configuration a smooth and intuitive process. In the next few paragraphs, we will discuss how to configure the TACACS+ daemon on Linux operating system and demonstrate how to deploy a simple, yet intuitive, GUI used for the configuration of the TACACS+ instance.
TACACS+, which stands for Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System Plus, is a protocol mainly designed by Cisco and standardized in RFC8907. The primary goal of the protocol is to handle authentication and authorization of commands executed on remote telecommunication hardware on a centralized server. TACACS+ is a great protocol and can be compared to RADIUS. Its key advantages are the following: it allows scrambling or obfuscating (although, not really encrypting in a cryptographic sense) the entire payload with help of MD5 hash function and a secret shared between telecommunication hardware and a central server, it supports TCP protocol for transport, and it provides the possibility of carrying out AAA functions in a flexible way. More details on the protocol can be found in the corresponding RFC.
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This step-by-step guide intended to provide practical documentation for installing InfoScale Enterprise 7.4.1 in a non-production capacity. There is a innumerable of configurations for software products and the one used in this article is only meant to be used to demonstrate InfoScale’s . In this article we are about to learn how to Install Veritas Cluster server on CentOS 8 | RHEL 8 step by step.
So The installation of InfoScale can_be performed using ISO installer, YUM, Response file, Kick start installer or from System management Satellite server.
Also In our article, we are going to accomplish the installation using ISO installer.
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This guide will show you how to install Kubernetes using MicroK8s on Ubuntu. MicroK8s makes it super easy to get going with Kubernetes. Additionally, MicroK8s is bundled with tools such as Prometheus. So you simply enable a feature if you need it.
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AnyDesk is a closed source remote desktop application distributed by AnyDesk Software GmbH. The proprietary software program provides platform independent remote access to personal computers and other devices running the host application Due to this, the program often employed by internet scammers to take control of their victims computer over the internet. It offers remote control, file transfer, and VPN functionality.
Also Anydesk has an attractive user-friendly interface and administrative tools through which you can easily manage the remote systems.
WithAnyDesk, you can record everything you see on your computer as a video file so you can play back at any time.
So In this guide, we will show you how to install AnyDesk on Ubuntu 20.04 and Linux Mint 20
After that you can easily access your team member or friend’s system.
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Games
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After being available for direct purchases for some time now, the popular pixel-art god sim will enter Early Access on Steam on December 2.
In Worldbox – God Simulator you can build your own world and fill it with life. It gives you the ability to create various forms of life including sheep, wolves, humans, orcs and even a UFO. Over time you watch and see how civilizations form and fall from the comfort of your chair. Don’t like how it’s going? Destroy them all – you’re the god.
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With Blender 3.0 releasing soon, the Blender project has published a Blender 3.x road-map outlining some of their plans for future releases.
The Blender 3.x road-map was published this morning to provide a fresh look at the changes ahead for this leading open-source 3D modeling software. Blender 3.x will see a lot of work on using the Vulkan API along with other exciting areas.
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An indie developer is reporting that his Linux users generate a disproportionate number of bug reports, and the reports are higher quality.
User-submitted bug reports are one of the main ways many developers — especially smaller ones — identify bugs and improve their apps. Despite Linux having a much smaller desktop market share than either Windows or macOS, at least one developer is crediting Linux users with being far more productive as bug reporters.
Koderski, at Kodera Software, posted his findings in a thread on Reddit.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This is an overview of deepin OS for everyone who looks for the best alternative operating systems for their computing. It is a GNU/Linux distribution that is well made, artistic and beautiful, practically easy to use, and at the same time unique no other Free Software Desktop Systems could ever thought to be. We made this review based on version 20.2.4 and hopefully this can give you pictures of deepin OS. Lastly, we still hope that deepin OS will soon be mass produced so people can just purchase a deepin laptop or deepin PC they want to start their software freedom.
We think deepin OS is artistic and unique for user’s computing with aforementioned features explained in the whole article. We, once again, wish deepin OS to be mass produced, as we believe it is ready and deserves mass production more than either Windows or macOS so millions of people could start their software freedom computing. We strongly appreciate one shop, The Linux Laptop, who sell laptops with deepin OS preinstalled and international shipping, as that would help many people who can only work with, not take care of nor install the hardware or software in their computers. Is it not good if Wuhan Deepin Technology as the organization behind deepin OS, does the same? All in all, the unique traits of deepin OS can be a good study for everybody including other Free Software Desktop Systems developers.
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On October 11, the first release candidate for Qubes OS version 4.1 was announced. Qubes OS is a security-oriented desktop operating system that uses multiple virtual machines (VMs or “qubes”) to isolate various types of functionality. The idea is to compartmentalize different applications and operating-system subsystems to protect them from each other and to limit access to the user’s data if an application is compromised. Version 4.1 will bring several important enhancements to help Qubes OS continue to live up to its motto: “A reasonably secure operating system”.
It has been nearly five years since we looked at Qubes OS 3.2, though we have checked in on it a few times since we first wrote about it back in 2010. As with much in the security world, there are tradeoffs to be made when using Qubes OS, but it provides a level of security that is hard to find elsewhere. In addition, it does so using Linux and other open-source tools, so that users can inspect and modify the system as needed.
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After eight years of development the Muen 1.0 project was released, developing the Separation kernel, the absence of errors in the source code of which was confirmed using mathematical methods of formal verification of reliability. The kernel is available for the x86_64 architecture and can be used in mission-critical systems that require an increased level of reliability and guarantee that there are no failures. The source texts of the project are written in the Ada language and its verifiable dialect SPARK 2014 . The code is distributed under the GPLv3 license.
The partitioning kernel is a microkernel that provides an environment for the execution of components isolated from each other, the interaction of which is tightly regulated by specified rules. Isolation is based on the use of Intel VT-x virtualization extensions and includes protection mechanisms to block the organization of covert communication channels. The partitioning kernel is more minimalistic and static than other microkernels, which reduces the number of situations that can lead to a failure.
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BSD
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One could consider it long overdue, but DragonFlyBSD has finally merged support for FAT file-systems with the makefs utility.
On DragonFlyBSD the makefs utility for creating a file-system image from a directory or mtree manifest can finally handle ubiquitous FAT.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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Nicolas Lécureuil, alias NeoClust, is a long time user of LinuxFr.org. He has an account on the website dedicated to Linux since 2005. Nicolas became the president of the Board of Mageia early in 2021. Nicolas has been, and still is, very active everywhere in the Mageia forums, discussion lists and the cauldron development, where new versions of the distribution are being cooked. In this interview, we will see that he is an early Mageian. Also, we will discover his ambitions and projects for this distribution, which is one of the most accessible to the general public.
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The following kernels are available for PCLinuxOS. Kernel LTS 5.4.156. Kernel LTS 5.10.76 and Kernel 5.14.15.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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Today, we are very excited to announce the acquisition of NeuVector, a leader in full lifecycle container security that delivers end-to-end security, from DevOps pipeline vulnerability protection to automated security and compliance in production. With this acquisition, NeuVector significantly enhances the enterprise-grade security capabilities in the SUSE Rancher container management platform.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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After dealing with blocker bugs the past two weeks, Fedora 35 is now confirmed for releasing next week.
The latest Fedora 35 RC compose has been declared a “GO” at today’s Fedora meeting for releasing next week. Fedora 35 will be shipping on 2 November after missing its original final target date of 19 October and follow-up of 26 October due to unresolved issues. It’s not as bad like Fedora’s notorious release delays from many years ago and at least they side with quality rather than timeliness.
Confirmation of Fedora 35 being ready to ship next week was announced today.
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Kubernetes is a complex framework for a complex job. Managing several containers can be complicated, and managing hundreds and thousands of them is essentially just not humanly possible. Kubernetes makes highly available and highly scaled cloud applications a reality, and it usually does its job remarkably well. However, people don’t tend to notice the days and months of success. Months and years of smooth operation aren’t the things that result in phone calls at 2 AM. In IT, it’s the failures that count. And unfortunately, failures don’t run on a schedule.
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Node.js offers a vast array of options to developers. This is why Red Hat and IBM teamed up to produce the Node.js reference architecture, a series of recommendations to help you build Node.js applications in the cloud. One of our recommendations is that you use Pino, an object logger for Node.js. You can visit this GitHub page for an overview of how and why to use Pino. This article demonstrates how to create and consume Pino logs with the Red Hat OpenShift Logging service.
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One of the major challenges to automation success exists right out in the open, even if people sometimes pretend otherwise. Automation stokes anxiety about how it will impact people’s jobs, including the possibility that it will make them obsolete.
These automation obstacles might be lurking a bit outside your line of sight.
We recently covered that most prominent issue with advice for IT leaders on proactively managing automation anxiety. But not every challenge is as visible.
Here are three obstacles that might be lurking a bit outside your line of sight. Factor them into your planning and execution.
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You never get a second chance to make a first impression, as the saying goes. And while a misstep on the first day is understandable and surmountable, it’s the first few months in a new role that tend to matter most. “First impressions are important in most situations in life,” says Charley Betzig, managing director at technology executive search firm Heller Search Associates, “and this is no different when you start a new job.”
This is your time to “subtly and directly impress upon your subordinates, peers and managers that you are the right person for the job.”
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As a special Halloween treat this year we wanted to provide a download to Red Hat Linux 0.9 (beta). That 0.9 isn’t a typo, that’s the first publicly distributed release that got the entire Red Hat ball rolling.
We talked about this release before on the Red Hat Blog, in a post in 2019. It was distributed with a spiral-bound book full of documentation and a single CD-ROM.
After we wrote about the Halloween release in 2019, I got a number of pings on social media and via email asking for the files or an ISO image. For a variety of reasons, including a move, reconnecting with the ISO image took a little longer than one might hope. But, just in time for Halloween 2021, it has been relocated and is ready to go.
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Groups make it easy to associate users with similar access-control requirements, so managing users and groups is a key responsibility for sysadmins. As I mentioned in my article on managing users, I like simple commands with a logical syntax. Such commands are easier to remember, particularly for new administrators.
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There is a common misunderstanding about how GitOps should be applied in real-world environments. Developers equate Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with GitOps in concept or believe that GitOps can only work with container-based applications — which is not true. In this blog, you will learn what GitOps is and how to apply its principles to real-world development and operations.
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Debian Family
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If you are running the Shift Debian build we released a few months back you will notice after updating your whole system seems broken ? panels and menus etc etc just missing… This is because Debian Testing without warning just updated to gnome 41 framework and in the same week as we were putting out the Shift ubuntu Beta. However, don’t worry, we just sent out a patch that will fix your system. simply right click on desktop, open terminal and do : “sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y” ( basically update your system ), then reboot and all will be well again
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To a great extent, Debian leaves decisions in the hands of its individual developers. A developer’s package is their castle, and they can generally manage it as they see fit. That freedom is somewhat constrained by the Debian constitution and the extensive Debian policy manual, both of which are designed to ensure that both developers and the packages they create all get along. Most of the time, this process just works, the project generates (mostly) regular releases, and users are happy.
Occasionally, though, some sort of intervention is required; two of the mechanisms provided by the project for such cases are the Technical Committee and general resolutions. The Technical Committee is empowered to make decisions on technical policy and may, in extreme cases, override Debian developers if their actions are seen as sufficiently damaging to the distribution. General resolutions can, by way of a vote of the project membership, change or override decisions made by the Technical Committee (or others), set new policies, or amend the constitution.
Voting is a key part of decision-making at levels above the individual developer. This is not particularly unusual in the free-software community; many projects make decisions by a vote of either the general membership or some sort of elected (via a vote, usually) representatives. Debian is nearly unique, though, in the way it decides what its members will vote on. Rather than simply being presented with a list of choices, Debian developers create those choices themselves, often in great number, and often with a lot of associated discussion. The creation of the ballot is the important part of a Debian resolution; the vote at the end is just calculating the final score.
This process is designed to create outcomes that reflect, as well as possible, the will of the project as a whole. Debian’s voting scheme allows a ballot to contain numerous options with small differences without fear of splitting the vote in a way that causes a relatively unpopular option to ultimately prevail. At its best, it creates ballots where developers can vote for the options they want rather than just voting against the worst case.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Juju re-imagines the world of operating software securely, reliably, and at scale. Juju realizes the promise of model-driven operations. Excellent observability is undeniably a key ingredient for operating software well, which is why the Charmed Operator ecosystem has long provided operators the ability to run a variety of open source monitoring software. We collectively refer to these operators as the Logs, Metrics, and Alerts (LMA) stack.
With the advent of cloud native software and microservices, and the resulting increase in complexity of systems, we decided it was time to create the next generation of LMA running on Kubernetes. It needed to be capable of monitoring workloads running on Kubernetes, virtual machines, bare metal, or the edge. Going back to the drawing board, we also reassessed which components would be part of this new cloud native LMA. The resulting design is composed of open source projects led or very heavily contributed to by Grafana Labs. Let us tell you why.
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The designers of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway never could have predicted that unmanned autonomous vehicles would someday race on their track – much less robots that can see the checkered flag while their ‘drivers’ kiss the bricks. But after more than a century, what started as a gravel-and-tar track hosted the most advanced driving competition to this date. And in the process, it made history. Let us tell you how.
On Saturday 23 of October, nine teams raced in Indy to see who was the fastest. A total of 21 universities from 9 countries competed, programming Dallara AV-21 racecars to win and take home $1.5M in prizes. The year-long challenge for innovating the field of autonomous vehicles started with more than 25 teams, and finished with nine finalists.
While many skilled teams took part, open-source won the day. It powered the cars and teams, helping them shape the future of autonomous vehicles. It was also seen in the collaboration between the teams, and between competitors during the weeks before the race. ROS was there, and Ubuntu as well. Focal Fossa donned his racing suit and drove in the AV-21.
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Every new version of Ubuntu comes with an exciting new wallpaper but in a soon to be upcoming version of ubuntu it’ll be shipping with more than that it’ll be shipping with a replacement to the Ubiquity installer written in Flutter. I know the joke is going to go over someone’s head, it’s dark because it has a dark mode
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Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) daily builds are now available for download. In this Ubuntu 21.10 tutorial post, we are going to show you the process of upgrading to Ubuntu 21.10 from an earlier version of Ubuntu.
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My name is Albert, I’ve been working at Canonical for little longer than a year. As a developer I am very proud to be working here, because I’ve always used a Linux based operating system while developing, and Ubuntu is my favourite distribution.
It’s the first place I got to work in an Open-Source environment. It’s a very different mentality. Everyone can see what you are coding and many times my Git commits feel like a contribution to the community rather than just another bug fix, and it’s very rewarding.
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Users of Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 boards who want to use the official Raspberry Pi Camera Module are left with a number of choices. Do they use the dedicated IO board or another carrier board? The latter is a popular option as the dedicated IO board is designed for development rather than daily use. We found Ledato’s new PiCam module listed for $40 on Adafruit, and it looks like just the thing for CM4 camera projects.
The PiCam module is the same size as the Compute Module (sold separately), and can be mounted directly on top of the board via four M2.5 screw points, with just a small offset to assemble a very small Raspberry Pi camera system, perfect for adding computer vision in small places. The Raspberry Pi 4, and the Compute Module 4 offer decent machine learning / computer vision using TensorFlow Lite, so a carrier board such as PiCam offers embedded machine learning projects a little more power over higher priced alternatives.
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The $15 “Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W” updates the tiny Zero W SBC with a SiP packaged, 1GHz, quad -A53 BCM2710A1 SoC that is up to five times faster. The Zero 2 W upgrades the WiFi/BT module to pre-certified 802.11n with BT 4.2.
Raspberry Pi has launched an updated version of the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W, which arrived in early 2017 as a wireless-enabled alternative to the similarly petite, $5 Raspberry Pi Zero. The $15 Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W maintains the 65 x 30mm footprint and ports of the W, but advances from the 1GHz, ARM11-based Broadcom BCM2836 to a SiP-packaged Broadcom BCM2710A1 with 4x Cortex-A53 cores.
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The hits keep coming from Raspberry Pi this month. Last week we saw the release of the Raspberry Pi Build Hat, which combines the flexibility of LEGO with the power of the Pi to unlock a new learning experience for educators and makers.
This week it’s the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. We are stoked to confirm that both Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Core will run on the Zero 2 W. To share the excitement, here is a rundown of the exciting aspects of the Zero 2 W and a guide on how to get started with Ubuntu Server 21.10. Users of 20.04 and Ubuntu Core 20 will have to hold tight until November, but we’ve also included a setup guide below in preparation.
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Over the years, we’ve seen a steady stream of updates for the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s flagship single-board computer (SBC), with each new release representing a significant boost in processing power and capability. But the slim Raspberry Pi Zero, released all the way back in 2015, hasn’t been quite so fortunate. Beyond the “W” revision that added WiFi and Bluetooth in 2017, the specs of the diminutive board have remained unchanged since its release.
That is, until now. With the introduction of the $15 USD Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, the ultra-compact Linux board gets a much-needed performance bump thanks to the new RP3A0 system-in-package, which combines a Broadcom BCM2710A1 die with 512 MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM and a quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 CPU clocked at 1 GHz. In practical terms, the Raspberry Pi Foundation says the new Zero 2 is five times as fast as its predecessor with multi-threaded workloads, and offers a healthy 40% improvement in single-threaded performance. That puts it about on par with the Raspberry Pi 3, though with only half the RAM.
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Today we can take a look at the brand new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W which has just been released by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. So let’s go and take a closer look.
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is a tiny low-cost computer with a massive user base that is perfect for embedded projects. But let’s start with the name. The number 2 indicating second generation and the W meaning that it’s got wireless connectivity.
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Raspberry Pi Zero W is one of the most affordable single-board computers that include wireless and Bluetooth connectivity.
While there are some differences between the Raspberry Pi Zero vs. Raspberry Pi Zero W, both were pretty solid deals considering they launched for $5 and $10, respectively.
Now, Raspberry Pi has unveiled the successor to this lineup after about six years, i.e., Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W priced at $15.
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Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is the first quad-core SBC from the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the Raspberry Pi Zero form factor. Based on the RP3A0 system-in-package (SiP) comprised of a Broadcom BCM2710A1 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor and 512MB LPDDR2, the new Pi Zero W 2 board offers the exact same interfaces as its predecessor.
This includes a MicroSD card socket, a mini HDMI port, two micro USB ports, a MIPI CSI-2 camera connector, as well as an unpopulated 40-pin GPIO header. The wireless module appears to have changed but still offers WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 4.x BLE, and it’s using the same VideoCore IV GPU to handle 3D graphics and video encoding and decoding up to 1080p30.
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So the main reasons to get a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W over a Raspberry Pi Zero W is the extra performance enabled by the quad-core Cortex-A53 processor and possibly better wireless performance. The downsides are at the new board costs $5 more, and power consumption might be higher, but this would have to be tested under various scenarios. Another reason you may end up getting the Zero 2 W board that is not shown in the specifications is the recent shortage of chips, so the new board may be more likely to be in stock at your local distributor.
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Something a lot of people don’t realise about modern smartphones is that many of them have fully-featured USB interfaces. Perhaps the best of all is the Pinephone, which is a fully open-source smartphone that gives end users total control over their phone experience. [silver] has such a phone, and set about building himself a neat keyboard setup for the platform.
The build is based around an RCA RKT773P tablet keyboard case, which uses USB to interface with a tablet via pogo pins. [silver] modified this by soldering on a USB cable to the pins, paired with a USB-C host adapter on the Pinephone. Paired with a few 3D printed parts to hold everything in place, it almost turns the assembly into a cute little Pinephone laptop.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Electronic instrument tuners have existed now for several decades, but the ones with a great amount of precision can cost over a thousand dollars to the consumer, which is far above what many are willing or able to pay. To address this issue of high prices while still maintaining a high degree of accuracy, Jan Herman built his own device that utilizes just a few relatively common parts.
Within the housing of his tuner is an Arduino Due, which was selected because of its 32-bit architecture (for precision when measuring frequencies), faster speeds, and a large amount of GPIO pins. Apart from that, Herman included an AD9833 waveform generator breakout, a PAM8302 amplifier circuit, a pair of rotary potentiometers and switches for getting user inputs, and a transducer/speaker setup along with various passive components for power input.
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Picovoice Cobra Voice Activity Detection (VAD) engine has just been publicly released with support for Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, NVIDIA Jetson Nano, Linux 64-bit, macOS 64-bit, Windows 64-bit, Android, iOS, and web browsers that support WebAssembly. Support for other Cortex-M and Cortex-A based SoCs can also be made available but only to enterprise customers.
Picovoice already offered custom wake word detection with an easy and quick web-based training and offline voice recognition for Raspberry Pi, and even later ported their voice engine to Arduino. Cobra VAD is a new release, and, like other VADs, aims to detect the presence of a human voice within an audio stream.
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Many of us learn to read clocks at a young age, however, talking clocks eliminate the need to do that entirely. [Alberto] whipped up one of his own, in this case designed with some Halloween holiday spookiness.
A basic clock movement is used to display the time in the typical fashion. However, the movement also features a built-in trigger signal, which it sends to an attached microcontroller on the hour, every hour. The build relies on the Raspberry Pi Pico for sound, chosen for its USB programming interface and its 2 MB of onboard flash storage. Sound is stored in simple 16-bit WAV files, and played out to a speaker via a PWM output. Alternatively, a CircuitPython version of the code is available that uses MP3s instead. A light sensor is used to avoid triggering any sounds at night time that could disturb one’s sleep. The entire circuit can be built on a single-sided board. [Alberto] etched one at home in the old-fashioned way, though one could also order one online, too.
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With the new Ubuntu Desktop 21.10 coming in production, I’ve found random freeze problems with my Raspberry PI 4 model B computer. After tests and googling the problem, I was able to solve it
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to fix the screen freezing problem with some Ubuntu Desktop kernels on Raspberry PI 4 / 400.
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With Passive Buzzer you can give your Raspberry PI Pico a cheap way to emit sounds and modulated them according to your needs. It is so flexible that you can also let you RPI Pico singing!
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Building a strong friend and customer relationship is a key factor to create trust and getting better life and job results. When you have a lot of contacts, it is really hard to remember all of their info. Monica CRM and Raspberry PI allow creating a cheap solution to make all these data secure (self hosted) and well organized
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to install Monica CRM on Raspberry PI with docker.
Monica is an open source CRM that helps in organizing social interactions. It is built to manage family/friends relations. But, in my honest opinion, it has great potential with managing relations with customers when it comes to creating a strong relationship and trust.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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In the north of Rwanda, near the city of Kidao, one of the country’s oldest tungsten mines is proving us right.
Fairphone started out as a campaign to prove the phone industry could stop using materials that finance conflict and human rights abuses. That we could support conflict-free materials sourcing. Today, we’re excited to be focussing on going “beyond conflict-free.” We don’t want to simply certify that we’re not putting money in the pockets of thugs, but to really ask whether a mine is improving the lives of its miners, reducing its environmental impact, and strengthening its community. We believe that raw material suppliers and purchasers, and every actor in the entire supply chain for modern phones, can wield their purchasing power to improve the health, safety, and working conditions for millions of miners and their families around the world.
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Aside from TiddlyWiki, we have been using the todo.txt format in our projects for some time now, and it is proven to be portable, reliable, and works with many clients.
In this article, we collected the best todo.txt apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
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Events
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In the field of embedded systems, a number of applications need real-time guarantees, and the Linux ecosystem has been offering for a long time a number of solutions to address those needs, either by improving the Linux kernel itself using the PREEMPT_RT approach, or by using a co-kernel approach such as the one offered by Xenomai. Bootlin training’s portfolio already has an initial coverage of these topics in our Embedded Linux system development course.
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This week sees COP26, the UN conference which is probably the last chance for humanity to mitigate the worse effects of the climate emergency.
At Akademy earlier this year KDE had a talk about Towards Sustainable Computing. Open tech can make a difference.
OpenUK will be hosting a venue on 11 November with a day of events about sustainability with technology emphasising why open tech is the most effective way to do that.
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Web Browsers
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Chromium
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The popular social networking tool Buffer has been having trouble trouble working and playing well with Chrome-based browsers today. Specifically, users of the browser plugin for Chrome are unable to use the tool’s right-click function which allows them to post links to Tweeter, Linkedin, Facebook, and other social sights. The functionality has not been affected for those using Firefox.
The functionality has been down since at least shortly before 9 am Eastern Standard Time, which is when FOSS Force discovered the problem, which seems to affect all Chrome-based browsers, including Google Chrome, Vivaldi, and Brave. FOSS Force suspects but hasn’t been able to verify that other Chrome-based browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Chromium are also affected.
Typically, the context menu brought up by right-clicking anywhere on a web page will include the option to “Buffer this page” for those who have the browser extension installed, which if selected will bring up a screen for composing posts to all social networks the user has configured to work with the tool.
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Mozilla
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We’ve taken initial steps in experimenting with the implementation of Global Privacy Control (GPC) in Firefox.
GPC is a mechanism for people to tell websites to respect their privacy rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) and legislation in other jurisdictions.
At this moment, GPC is a prerelease feature available for experimental use in Firefox Nightly. Once turned on, it sends a signal to the websites users visit telling them that the user doesn’t want to be tracked and doesn’t want their data to be sold. GPC is getting traction both in California and in Colorado. Now that we expect websites to start honoring GPC, we want to start providing this option to Firefox users.
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Mozilla’s Firefox is thrilled to be named one of the nearly 100 brands within Fast Company Magazine’s inaugural and high-profile, Brands That Matter 2021 ranking and recognition program for companies and nonprofits that have had an undeniable impact on business and culture.
Mozilla’s Firefox was recognized by Fast Company specifically for “continuing to do what it can to put itself forward as the browser that seeks to protect against disinformation and take digital responsibility as hallmarks of its brand.” Fast Company also noted that, “The Unfck campaign and YouTube Regrets work embody its mission perfectly, illustrating Mozilla’s David vs. Goliath relationship with Big Tech, and its work for people over profits and humanity over technology. As these issues become front-page concerns, Firefox’s position and brand has only grown stronger.”
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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GTK4 port of Libreoffice now supports the “widebutton” Toolbar MenuButtons that show a preview of the selected color.
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FSF
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GNU Projects
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My hope is to get Lonely Cactus up and running on a different set of technologies, as a learning exercise. Maybe a GNU/Hurd VM. Maybe Guix. Because if you’re going to do something weird, might as well go all the way.
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Licensing/Legal
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There are some other ways this lawsuit stands out from previous efforts. For one thing, it comes with an extensive press kit to help media outlets (and others) understand the suit and its ramifications. The press kit fills in some of the details from the complaint, but also provides a “Q&A” section, biographies of SFC spokespeople, quotes from various industry experts, a glossary, and more. It is an excellent summary of the background for those who are not well-versed in our community and its licenses, but there is quite a bit of interest in that document even for LWN readers and others who are generally knowledgeable about such things.
The press kit makes clear that an additional goal of the lawsuit is to educate users about their rights under the GPL and why those rights should matter to them. The lawsuit could be seen as something of an attention-grabbing effort to try to help ensure that the benefits of licenses like the GPL actually end up reaching the users who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the source-code disclosure required. Doing so is in keeping with the public-benefit role of charities like SFC, but is typically not part of the strategy embodied in lawsuits, which are clearly targeted at the legal system—and the defendant, of course.
Unlike many high-profile lawsuits, SFC’s suit is not asking for monetary damages from Vizio; instead it is asking the court to order Vizio to comply with the terms of the GPL and LGPL that cover code in its TVs. Beyond that, it is asking the court to declare that the terms and conditions of the GPL licenses require source-code disclosure, effectively determining that the GPL operates the way that the free-software community believes that it does—and that Vizio is in breach of the license. The only monetary requests are for reimbursements of the costs and attorney fees needed to pursue the lawsuit.
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Programming/Development
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The IT industry is the quickest developing industry. It is befuddling to choose the one appropriate and useful choice as it has bunches of language choices. It could be a troublesome inquiry for an entrepreneur who needs to foster a work area application or somebody new to writing computer programs is which language ought to be your inclination.
Linux on work area, Linux developers and programming engineers are investing more energy and difficult work in creating work area applications that will coordinate with applications on Windows and Mac OS X work areas. This is valid, particularly with an endless number of Linux dispersions that are centered on making it simple for new Linux clients to handily adjust to the working framework.
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We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 6 Beta2!
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As I hinted at recently, we have spent the last couple of months implementing a new clangd-based back-end of our C/C++ code model. With the second beta of Qt Creator 6 having been released, I feel we can now in good conscience ask you to enable this feature and take it for a test drive.
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Python
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Concerns over the performance of programs written in Python are often overstated — for some use cases, at least. But there is no getting around the problem imposed by the infamous global interpreter lock (GIL), which severely limits the concurrency of multi-threaded Python code. Various efforts to remove the GIL have been made over the years, but none have come anywhere near the point where they would be considered for inclusion into the CPython interpreter. Now, though, Sam Gross has entered the arena with a proof-of-concept implementation that may solve the problem for real.
The concurrency restrictions in the CPython interpreter are driven by its garbage-collection approach, which uses reference counts on objects to determine when they are no longer in use. These counts are busy; many types of access to a Python object require a reference-count increment and (eventually) decrement. In a multi-threaded program, reference-count operations must be performed in a thread-safe manner; the alternative is to risk corrupted counts on objects. Given the frequency of these operations, corruption in multi-threaded programs would be just a matter of time, and perhaps not much time at that. To avoid such problems, the GIL only allows one thread to be running in the interpreter (i.e. to actually be running Python code) at a time; that takes away almost all of the advantage of using threads in any sort of compute-intensive code.
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Rust
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Ever wanted to understand how rustc works? Me too! Doc Jones and I have been talking and we had an idea we wanted to try. Inspired by the very cool Code Reading Club, we are launching an experimental Rustc Reading Club. Doc Jones posted an announcement on her blog, so go take a look!
The way this club works is pretty simple: every other week, we’ll get together for 90 minutes and read some part of rustc (or some project related to rustc), and talk about it. Our goal is to walk away with a high-level understanding of how that code works. For more complex parts of the code, we may wind up spending multiple sessions on the same code.
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Standards/Consortia
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It’s been six years already since VESA published the Embedded DisplayPort 1.4b specification while finally it’s been succeeded by eDP 1.5.
Embedded DisplayPort 1.5 retains backwards compatibility with v1.4 but adds an improved Panel Self Refresh (PSR) protocol, better Adaptive-Sync capabilities, and more. Embedded DisplayPort is commonly used by laptop panels.
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We’ve had the HTML <video> element for over a decade. Yet, everyone still defaults to embedding YouTube frames instead of hosting their own videos. The underlying problem is that the <video> element isn’t suitable for embedding short video files on webpages.
[...]
HTML doesn’t provide web authors any affordances to send a high-resolution video to a desktop or tablet, and a lower resolution to a mobile phone. You can send an oversized video to mobile devices, but at potentially high data and battery costs. Or you can send an undersized video and scale it up (with ugly upscaling artifacts) to desktops. A 720p (720×405 px) video suitable for desktops and tablets contains ×2,25 times more pixels (roughly ×2,1 times more data) than a 480p (480×270 px) video file for mobile.
You can turn to JavaScript and have it pick the right video, but it’s a complicated problem. Choosing the right codec, handling full-screen mode switches, subtitles, adaptive quality changes, network conditions, pixel density, preloading, … it all adds up. It’s not a quick job to write the logic required to choose choose an appropriate video resolution, and handle changes on the fly.
The average JavaScript library for handling video resolutions and full-screen mode switching is about 600 KB. It’s a small overhead for a 15 minute+ video. However, it’s way too much for a short animation or a minute-long presentation.
You also have to spend time learning and integrating a complicated new library into your documents. Serving video is still relatively expensive, so you might also need a separate library to reduce the hosting costs (e.g. WebTorrent). If you’re planning on publishing many videos, it might be worth it. However, it’s too much overhead just to add a few minutes of video to a blog post every once in a while.
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Hardware
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To say the Heathkit name is well known among Hackaday readers would be something of an understatement. Their legendary kits launched an untold number of electronics hobbies, and ultimately, plenty of careers. From relatively simple radio receivers to oscilloscopes and televisions, the company offered kits for every skill level from the post-war era all the way up to the 1990s.
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Good news, everyone! Security researcher [Mordechai Guri] has given us yet another reason to look askance at our computers and wonder who might be sniffing in our private doings.
This time, your suspicious gaze will settle on the lowly Ethernet cable, which he has used to exfiltrate data across an air gap. The exploit requires almost nothing in the way of fancy hardware — he used both an RTL-SDR dongle and a HackRF to receive the exfiltrated data, and didn’t exactly splurge on the receiving antenna, which was just a random chunk of wire. The attack, dubbed “LANtenna”, does require some software running on the target machine, which modulates the desired data and transmits it over the Ethernet cable using one of two methods: by toggling the speed of the network connection, or by sending raw UDP packets. Either way, an RF signal is radiated by the Ethernet cable, which was easily received and decoded over a distance of at least two meters. The bit rate is low — only a few bits per second — but that may be all a malicious actor needs to achieve their goal.
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Wikipedia says “The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers.” And yes, we have to admit that as incredible as it is, seeing [Automaton Robotics]’ hand and forearm move in almost human fashion is a bit on the disturbing side. Don’t just take our word for it, let yourself be fascinated and weirded out by the video below the break.
While the creators of the Artificial Muscles Robotic Arm are fairly quiet about how it works, perusing through the [Automaton Robotics] YouTube Channel does shed some light on the matter. The arm and hand’s motion is made possible by artificial muscles which themselves are brought to life by water pressurized to 130 PSI (9 bar). The muscles themselves appear to be a watertight fiber weave, but these details are not provided. Bladders inside a flexible steel mesh, like finger traps?
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As you might have already noticed from my blogs, I am a music maniac. One of the factors influencing your music listening experience is what speakers you use. I was lucky right from the beginning, my parents are music maniacs as well. In this blog I introduce you to the speakers I listened while living at my parents, and three pairs of speakers I bought myself.
I must admit that I never did a really thorough research about speakers and acoustics. I always listened to my ears, how much I like what I hear. This made my journey in listening to music a bit of a crisscross 
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Health/Nutrition
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In late 2019, the biopharmaceutical company Moderna was facing a series of challenges that not only threatened its ability to ever take a product to market, and thus turn a profit, but its very existence as a company. There were multiple warning signs that Moderna was essentially another Theranos-style fraud, with many of these signs growing in frequency and severity as the decade drew to a close. Part I of this three-part series explored the disastrous circumstances in which Moderna found itself at that time, with the company’s salvation hinging on the hope of a divine miracle, a “Hail Mary” save of sorts, as stated by one former Moderna employee.
While the COVID-19 crisis that emerged in the first part of 2020 can hardly be described as an act of benevolent divine intervention for most, it certainly can be seen that way from Moderna’s perspective. Key issues for the company, including seemingly insurmountable regulatory hurdles and its inability to advance beyond animal trials with its most promising—and profitable—products, were conveniently wiped away, and not a moment too soon. Since January 2020, the value of Moderna’s stock—which had embarked on a steady decline since its IPO—grew from $18.89 per share to its current value of $339.57 per share, thanks to the success of its COVID-19 vaccine.
Yet, how exactly was Moderna’s “Hail Mary” moment realized, and what were the forces and events that ensured it would make it through the FDA’s emergency use authorization (EUA) process? In examining that question, it becomes quickly apparent that Moderna’s journey of saving grace involved much more than just cutting corners in animal and human trials and federal regulations. Indeed, if we are to believe Moderna executives, it involved supplying formulations for some trial studies that were not the same as their COVID-19 vaccine commercial candidate, despite the data resulting from the former being used to sell Moderna’s vaccine to the public and federal health authorities. Such data was also selectively released at times to align with preplanned stock trades by Moderna executives, turning many of Moderna’s highest-ranking employees into millionaires, and even billionaires, while the COVID-19 crisis meant economic calamity for most Americans.
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A year after the introduction of COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps in Europe, Access Now and Liberties look at their impact on digital rights.…
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Whitney joined TLAV to discuss the never-ending “booster” cycle of COVID-19 injections that is already under way, and her recent article about Moderna’s mRNA shots and the miraculous timing of their “success”.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Security
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The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) has released a security advisory that addresses a vulnerability affecting multiple versions of the ISC Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND). A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause a denial-of-service condition.
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The 2021 Hardware List is a compilation of the most frequent and critical errors that can lead to serious vulnerabilities in hardware. An attacker can often exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system, obtain sensitive information, or cause a denial-of-service condition.
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Security updates have been issued by openSUSE (salt), Slackware (bind), SUSE (salt), and Ubuntu (php5, php7.0, php7.2, php7.4, php8.0).
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Are you spending time on high-impact, high-value activities, or are you constantly derailed by maintenance, support, and deployment challenges?
Does your organisation consume open-source software that needs security patching? Where do you get the security updates from, and how do you track what’s available?
Are you responsible for vulnerability management, compliance, and long term maintenance of the software running on top of Ubuntu in your organisation? Do you have reliable processes, tools, and metrics to ensure that you have the visibility needed to run all of your stack securely?
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Cisco has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple Cisco products. A remote attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system. For updates addressing lower severity vulnerabilities, see the Cisco Security Advisory
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The Reserve Bank of India’s Account Aggregator framework went live on 2nd September this year. The government has claimed that the framework will have a transformative impact on the financial ecosystem, and the financial sector is abuzz with hype about the revolutionary potential of Account Aggregators. However, are things really going to be that hunky dory? In this explainer, we take a look at what this framework really is and highlight certain issues that may arise.
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Recently, Kenya’s High Court suspended the rollout of the government’s digital ID system, Huduma Namba, citing its disregard for data protection frameworks — a win for privacy, but a warning signal that the country must do more to understand, and protect, human rights.
Kenya’s two-year-old Data Protection Act was touted as a regional standard, often compared to the EU General Data Protection Regulation. Yet, in a similar style to its European counterpart, implementation is proving to be less effective and robust than planned in the initial stages.
These legislations are central to the protection of human rights in the digital age, and decision-makers must dedicate resources to make them a success. To help pave the way for an improved, and truly rights-centric approach to data protection in Kenya, Access Now is publishing Data protection in Kenya: how is this right protected?
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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How did Democrats in the House of Representatives decide that the top House recipient of corporate PAC money should run the tax code-writing committee, or that the top recipient of defense industry cash in their caucus should be in charge of Armed Services?
There’s no way to know, because House Democrats have not made public the rules that govern its powerful Steering and Policy Committee, which nominates committee chairmen and the Democratic members of all committees besides Rules and Administration, which get chosen by the speaker. In fact, the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee has not even released its list of members.
The House Democrats’ 117th caucus rules, which were posted online this session after a lengthy campaign from government transparency activists, explains that the Steering and Policy Committee “shall adopt its own rules, which shall be in writing,” and that it “shall keep a journal of its proceedings.” Without the caucus releasing those records or someone with access making them available, these documents are inaccessible to the public because the legislative branch is exempt from federal public records law.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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There’s been much said over the past few years about the dominance of the big tech companies. This kicks the interest level up a notch when there is in-fighting between the companies. Google and Roku are currently in a dispute culminating in the search giant packing up its toys and going home. Google is pulling its YouTube apps away from Roku, a smaller player in the tech game, but a player nonetheless.
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Posted in Site News at 11:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum fcb0f8018ad1afe99a276a0593c5859f
Summary: Being at the mercy of third parties indebted to corporate patrons (or banks), sometimes in “reputation” or “political correctness” or “safety” clothing, is a topological issue; we need to teach more people to self-host and exercise full control over speech and information (never let those with money and power decide who can speak and who cannot)
THIS video seems timely for 2 reasons: one is the ‘self-censorship’ in Techrights (requests to remove some things, which we cannot do because of the way we’re technically structured) and the second is the extradition case of Julian Assange (see this new Snowden video if you’ve not seen it already).
“The Internet was designed to be mostly decentralised (to withstand and endure nuclear wars for example), but the Web is increasingly monopolistic and centralised; at the same time, a lot of people have been manipulated into joining Social Control Media as if that’s a substitute or an outlet for journalism.”The video does not focus on Wikileaks, but for analogy’s worth we use some examples from Wikileaks. One thing we’ve learned over time is that some degree of anonymity — not the same as removing actual information — might be needed. We can have operational transparency without revealing too much about the structural aspects (topology), which can make it easier to target individuals with bribes and/or threats. Over the past few years there have been many attempts of many different kinds to censor, suppress, and even de-platform us. With a bit of diplomacy we’ve managed to withstand all these attempts, but no doubt it hasn’t ended and won’t end as long as we provide a platform for suppressed views and censored (elsewhere) material. The video was supposed to be quite short, but it ended up lasting over an hour. We still have a lot of stories to tell about our experience, but the short story is, self-hosting and things like IPFS, Gemini, IRC, text-only media (e.g. bulletins) help improve robustness; moreover, they act as a sort of deterrence against SLAPP and ‘cancel culture’ (which still happens silently in big IRC networks). The Internet was designed to be mostly decentralised (to withstand and endure nuclear wars for example), but the Web is increasingly monopolistic and centralised; at the same time, a lot of people have been manipulated into joining Social Control Media as if that’s a substitute or an outlet for journalism. We need to push back against those trends. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Paul Mutton of Netcraft gives Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman an hour of wisdom, experience and stories about items we can worry about less because he and Netcraft are on the case. If you care about cybercrime, phishing, malware, or any of the many vulnerabilities that afflict us all online, this episode of FLOSS Weekly is for you—especially if you operate web servers.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Hello everyone,
The third release candidate is now available, containing again mostly
zink fixes, and a handful of patches for everything else.
Please test it and report any issue here:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/new
Issues that should block the release of 21.3.0 should be added to the
corresponding milestone:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/milestones/27
Cheers,
Eric
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The latest weekly test release of Mesa 21.3 is now available ahead of the anticipated stable debut in November.
Mesa 21.3-rc3 has amassed nearly 40 changes, but nearly half of them amount to Zink fixes for that Gallium3D code implementing OpenGL over Vulkan. A variety of different fixes were queued up for this milestone.
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After three years without a full release, X.Org 21.1.0 has finally landed with new features and a lot of bug fixes. While the next-generation for all Linux systems will eventually be Wayland, plenty still default to to it.
Developer Povilas Kanapickas announced the release on October 27, noting that they expect issues to come up once more people start using it with a 21.1.1 version patch being planned to arrive in the next few weeks rather than their usual time of a few months. For a reminder: XWayland, the project that ensures backwards compatibility with applications on Wayland is now released as its own thing.
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Benchmarks
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As a good sign ahead of the important Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release in the spring, Ubuntu 21.10 further ups the 64-bit ARM (AArch64) performance. Here is a look at some of the gains in going from Ubuntu 21.04 to the recently released Ubuntu 21.10.
Similar to the improvements seen on x86_64 and especially the much better RISC-V performance, Ubuntu 21.10 is doing real well on AArch64 too. Ubuntu 21.04 already tended to be measurably faster than Ubuntu 20.04 LTS while now with Ubuntu 21.10, the performance continues increasing ahead of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
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Applications
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Issue tracking systems cover a few different types of computer software applications which help to manage and maintain lists of issues in a number of ways. One of the most common types of an issue tracker is the bug tracking system. This system tracks issues by helping software developers keep on top of reported software bugs and acts as an aid in quality assurance. The other main types of issue tracking systems are service desk and help desk management software which help firms create, update, and resolve reported customer issues.
Issue tracking systems play an important role for any development project and collaborative venture, enabling developers and corporate project teams to concentrate on identifying issues and tasks, ensuring that they are resolved, and at the same time to stay focused on what is important.
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Instructionals/Technical
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netstat is a command-line tool used to monitor network statistics. It enables you to view network data such as the ports in use, active connections, packets that have been transferred, etc.
It’s interesting to note that this very utility is available on Windows Server editions and is very similar in usage to that on Linux.
Follow through this article to see how you can use the netstat command on your Linux system.
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OSSEC is an open source host-based intrusion detection system that can be used to keep track of servers activity. It supports most operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows, Solaris and much more. It is used to monitor one server or multiple servers in server/agent mode and give you a real-time view into what’s happening on your server. OSSEC has a cross-platform architecture that enables you to monitor multiple systems from centralized location.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to install and configure OSSEC to monitor local Ubuntu 20.04 server. We will also install OSSEC Web UI and test OSSEC against any file modification
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Welcome to part 2 of Bash Shell Scripting at a beginner level. This article will dive into some more unique aspects of bash scripting. It will continue to use familiar commands, with an explain of anything new, and cover standard output standard input, standard error, the “pipe”, and data redirection.
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If we are talking about Javascript then it is very likely that we will also find AngularJS somewhere. Today, in this post, you will learn how to install AngularCLI on Debian 11, and with this tool, you will be able to create AngularJS projects smoothly and quickly.
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GIMP is free, open-source raster graphics editing software primarily used for image manipulation and image editing, transcoding between various image formats, free-form drawing, and many more specialized tasks. GIMP is released under GPL-3.0-or-later license and is available for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.
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Swift, often referred to as “Objective-C, without the C,” is an open-source programming language developed and maintained by Apple. Swift is a general-purpose programming language built using modern safety, performance, and software design patterns. The Swift project aims to create the best available language for systems programming to mobile and desktop apps, scaling up to cloud services.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Swift Programming Language on your Fedora 35 system.
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Redis is an open-source (BSD licensed), in-memory key-value data structure store used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis supports data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperlog logs, geospatial indexes, and streams. Redis also provides high availability with Redis Sentinel software logic, creating automatic partitioning across Redis nodes with Redis Cluster.
You will know how to install and configure Redis on your Fedora 35 operating system at the end of the guide.
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Memcached is used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM. This reduces the number of times an external data source must be read, which lowers overheads and speeds up response times. The memory caching software is a free, open-source project that anyone can use.
At the end of the tutorial, you will know how to install and configure Memcached on your openSUSE Leap 15 operating system.
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Elasticsearch is a highly scalable open-source full-text search and analytics engine. It is generally the underlying engine/technology that powers applications with complex search features and requirements. The software supports RESTful operations that allow you to store, search, and analyze significant volumes of data quickly and in near real-time. Elasticsearch is well-liked and popular amongst sysadmins and developers as it is a mighty search engine based on the Lucene library.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Elastic Search on openSUSE Leap 15.
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The reputation of the various Linux operating system distributions speaks for itself. These prime operating system environments continue to be secure, open-source, open to frequent software updates, and are embraced by a growing user community and developers’ support.
However, these Linux OS attributes and stripes do not guarantee a bulletproof status. Sometimes you do not have control of what happens or what will happen to your Linux OS filesystem.
A Linux filesystem tends to get damaged or corrupted due to unavoidable circumstances like the unsafe removal of a media or drive hosting the Linux OS, instantaneous system crashes, and unexpected power losses.
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Tor, also known as The Onion Router, is open-source, free software that enables anonymous communication when using online services such as web surfing. The Tor network directs the Internet traffic through an accessible worldwide volunteer overlay network with over six thousand relays and continues to grow. Many users want to find more ways to keep their information and activities anonymous or at least as private as possible, which has led to Tor Browser growing quite popular in recent years as it conceals a user’s location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.
The Tor network is intended to protect the personal privacy of users and their freedom and ability from conducting communication without having their activities monitored, and data were taken without their consent and used to sum it up.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest Tor Browser on openSUSE Leap 15.
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By default, openSUSE does not come with Snap or Snap Store installed as this is a feature that was built by developed by Canonical as a faster and easier way to get the latest versions of software installed on Ubuntu systems, and Snap packages are installed from a central SNAP server operated by Canonical.
Snap can be installed and, for the most part, work with most packages on openSUSE-based systems that are currently actively supported. There are a few conflicts with specific packages. The issue with snaps VS zypper package manager is that Snaps are self-contained, resulting in an increased .snap due to having all its dependencies included and various degrees of slight performance degradation compared to a natively installed application. In contrast, the zypper is much lighter than its snap counterpart because it doesn’t need to bundle dependencies.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Snapcraft and have the ability to use this feature going forward in openSUSE Leap 15.
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Those who are not comfortable with the command line can use the graphical user interface in Linux Mint 20.2, latest or previous versions to create users’ accounts and add them in particular groups. Here we show the steps on how to set up a new account in Linux Mint.
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When it comes to bash scripting, all the scripts are mainly focused on the command-line operation. Whether you need input from the user or display some messages, everything is done through the terminal. Most people writing scripts using Bash have no idea there are a set of GUI tools available. In this article, we are going to see about one such tool called Zenity – a simple program that enables you to create graphical (GTK+) dialog boxes in command-line and shell scripts.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GCC on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) is a collection of tools used to compile different programming languages’ source code into binary, executables, or libraries. GCC supports a lot of programming languages like C, C++, Java, Objective-C, Go, Fortran, Ada, etc.
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 GCC Compiler on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to setup Rsyslog on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Rsyslog is an open-source software tool for Unix-based operating systems used for collecting log messages from multiple network devices. It helps system administrators to keep an eye on all servers from the central point. Rsyslog works in a client/server model, it receives logs from the remote client on port 514 over the TCP/UDP protocol.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Rsyslog on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
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If you are using Zabbix to monitor your infrastructure you might want to receive email alerts from your local domain somewhere on a public internet domain, even if you don’t own a valid registered internet domain name with a mail server which you can configure on your own.
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Cacti is an open-source web-based network monitoring and system monitoring graphing tool. It is a frontend to RRDTool – a Time Series Database (TSDB).
Using Cacti you can monitor servers and network devices such as servers, routers, and switches. It gathers and monitors network traffic using the SNMP protocol. It can monitor various system metrics such as CPU, memory disk space, and bandwidth utilization among others. You can also set up alerts so that you receive email notifications in the event of a system outage. Furthermore, it enables a faster response time when a problem arises.
You can use LAMP stack to install Cacti on Linux Distribution. It also supports Nginx and IIS Webserver. The data collected is then stored in a MySQL or MariaDB database. The Data Collection framework is fully distributed, fault-tolerant and scalable.
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Every server which is accessible from the Internet is at great risk of brute-force and malware attacks. Hackers try to use brute-force attempts to get access to applications that are accessible on public networks.
Fail2ban is a tool that is used to protect Linux-based machines from automated attacks by improving their security. It monitors the logs for any malicious activity and allows the user to temporarily or permanently block remote IP addresses
This how-to guide will explain how to install, configure and set up Fail2ban on a Debian 11 based system.
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Yay – Yet another Yogurt is an AUR Helper written in Go. It’s objective is providing an interface of pacman with minimal user input, yaourt like search and with almost no dependencies.
Yaourt has been discontinued in favour of yay. Yaourt (Yet Another User Repository Tool) is an advanced command line tool for installing packages on Arch Linux. It is a powerful wrapper for Pacman, the standard package management utility for Arch Linux with extended features and remarkable AUR (Arch Linux User Repository) support.
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If you have multiple folders and files to hide on Linux then we can do that just using a text file, here we will know how?
Well, we can hide folders and files in Linux using a traditional method that is adding periods in front of their names. For example, if you rename the “Documents” folder as “.Documents”, it will disappear from view. The same as if you do it with any other type of file, it will be hidden.
Moreover, this method is the default on all Linux to hide folders and configuration files. To see hidden items the user can use the “Ctrl + H” key combination and the same to hide them again.
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Games
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I grew up playing Sonic on the Sega Mega Drive, so this looks like an awesome bundle for me. Humble Bundle has put up a small but nice collection with the Sonic 30th Anniversary Bundle.
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A group of 29 NFT developers and technology advocacy groups, including digital rights-focused nonprofit Fight For the Future, is asking Valve to reverse its ban of blockchain games on Steam. In an open letter, they write, “In the spirit of [Steam's] pioneering vision, we ask that you take a chance on this rapidly growing technology.”
That technology was more or less banned from Steam earlier this month when Valve added a rule prohibiting applications that “issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs.” Valve hasn’t publicly explained its reason for the decision, but according to Age of Rust developer SpacePirate, Valve doesn’t want “items that can have real-world value” on Steam.
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We continue seeing lots of quick fixes coming into Proton Experimental, the special testing version of the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer with another release up now. This is the software that enables you to run Windows games and applications on Linux with Steam. If you wish to know more about Steam Play and Proton do check out our dedicated section.
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Ready for your next super-sweet casual adventure? Alchemic Cutie is set to finally see a Steam release with native Linux support on November 12.
Alchemic Cutie is a wholesome relaxing RPG set on colourful Wimba Island. While taming wild jellies, you’ll meet villagers, enter jelly competitions and uncover the secrets of the island. With a style a bit like Stardew Valley and a setting that looks just as lovely, it’s got plenty for you to do. The jelly raising system sounds like a lot of fun with each being given unique stats, plus there’s over four thousand visual styles for them. You get to tame, breed and raise whatever you want.
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The platform will run on the company’s custom Linux based operating system called Tizen.
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New Releases
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Escuelas Linux 7.2 comes two months after Escuelas Linux 7.1 with updated internals and applications. It’s based on the Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS (Focal Fossa) point release and derived from Bodhi Linux 6.0, using the latest Moksha 0.3.4 graphical desktop environment.
Being based on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, this release comes with the Linux 5.11 kernel series by default, but it also lets users install the latest and greatest Linux kernel 5.14 using the offline script provided in the default installation.
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Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is the successor of the Raspberry Pi Zero W board and the third model in the Raspberry Pi Zero series, which has sold nearly four million units worldwide since its launch six years ago.
Powered by the same Quad-Core 64-bit Broadcom BCM2710A1 ARM Cortex-A53 processor as the first version of the Raspberry Pi 3 board, Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is bundled into a single space-saving package with 512MB LPDDR2 SDRAM, 2.4GHz IEEE 802.11b/g/n wireless LAN, Bluetooth 4.2, and OpenGL ES 1.1 / 2.0 graphics.
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the third successor of Zero series – Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, costing you just $15. We round up the announcement.
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation today is launching the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W as their newest single board computer succeeding the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W.
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is a form-factor-compatible, drop-in replacement to its predecessor but now sports a 1.0GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor as a big upgrade over the original 1GHz single-core in the original Zero W. There is 512MB of RAM like its predecessor. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is using a Raspberry Pi RP3A0 system-in-package with BCM2710A1 die that can result in 40% faster single-threaded performance and around five times better multi-threaded performance thanks to the single core to quad core jump.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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FSF
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GNU Projects
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8 new GNU releases in the last month (as of October 24, 2021):
automake-1.16.5
gdbm-1.22
gnuastro-0.16
gnuastro-0.16.1-e0f1
gnupg-2.3.3
mygnuhealth-1.0.5
nano-5.9
parallel-20211022
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Public Services/Government
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A September 2021 study on the economic impact of open source software and hardware concluded that open source technologies injected EUR 65-95 billion into the European economy. This study is timely given the current rollout of the European Union’s EUR 750 billion recovery investment, which has allotted 20% for digital transformation. Growing political efforts to understand and quantify the importance of open source in realizing EU digital sovereignty accentuate the study’s significance. The European Union sponsored the study, which was written by Fraunhofer ISI and OpenForum Europe.
During the February 2021 EU Open Source Policy Summit’s keynote, EU Commissioner Thierry Breton emphasized the European Union’s leadership in using open source software (OSS) across all technical, political, and economic domains. This study provides yet more hard economic evidence to support the commissioner’s assertion that using and contributing to open source is vital to European economic recovery—not only in terms of bolstering public sector adoption but also for industrial strategy.
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Programming/Development
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SolidRun unveiled an “i.MX 8XLite SOM” and “Hummingboard i.MX 8XLite” dev kit that run Linux on NXP’s new i.MX8X Lite SoC with up to 2x -A35, Cortex-M4F, and a V2X accelerator for automotive vehicle communications.
Earlier this month, NXP announced a headless i.MX8X Lite (or i.MX 8XLite) system-on-chip SoC for automotive telematics, V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything), and IIoT applications. Now SolidRun has followed up with a Linux-driven i.MX 8XLite System-on-Module (SOM) and a compact Hummingboard i.MX 8XLite development kit built around the SoC.
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My OS: One core can run 10 million random I/O operations per second and minify JSON at 6 GB/sec.
Also my OS: Firing up a new terminal gives a one-second delay where the shell reads its 24 MB history file, and getting ten new emails makes my mail reader reflow all threads ten times, giving jank of several seconds.
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Perl/Raku
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First, some credit is due: these are all restatements of several Perl::Critic policies which in turn codify standards described in Damian Conway’s Perl Best Practices (2005). I’ve repeatedly recommended the latter as a starting point for higher-quality Perl development. Over the years these practices continue to be re-evaluated (including by the author himself) and various authors release new policy modules, but perlcritic remains a great tool for ensuring you (and your team or other contributors) maintain a consistent high standard in your code.
With that said, on to the recommendations!
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Java
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Project Wakefield formally got off the ground in September with its focus to provide native Wayland support. Given Linux distributions continue moving away from X.Org Server based sessions by default in favor of Wayland, OpenJDK developers are working to get their Wayland desktop support in order. Initially they are working to provide good support for JDK running on Wayland within the X11 compatibility mode while the ultimate goal is to offer complete and native Wayland client support. OpenJDK developers have acknowledged this will “take years to fully complete and deliver” their native Wayland support.
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As ProPublica has reported, cybercriminals are flooding the internet with fake job ads and even bogus company hiring websites whose purpose is to steal your identity and use it to commit fraud. It’s a good reminder that you should vet potential employers as closely as they vet you.
Here are ten tips on how to spot such scams:
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Manifestoes, as a genre and a form of communication to spell out party ideologies, existed long before 1921. But it is perhaps over the decades of the twentieth century that we see a growing production of manifestoes in the artistic community. We have Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist Manifesto (1918), the manifestoes of the Guerrilla Girls (1985-1990), Le Corbusier’s Three reminders to architects (1931), Marina Abramović’s An artist’s life manifesto (1997) and many more.
While manifestoes differ in length and style, a manifesto feels like a manifesto when it is written in the staccato style, single sentences capable of declaring desires, intentions and visionary needs.
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Did you know that you can scan the entire Internet in only 30 minutes or even five? You probably thought I was joking because the Internet is as vast as our Universe. But I am serious − you can obtain any information in a few minutes if you arm yourself with the Masscan tool.
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The countdown has begun. We are now 100 days from the start of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, and pressure against staging the Games in China is mounting around the world. The reasons are myriad: from Tibet, to labor issues, to the treatment of the Uyghur people.
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Science
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Scientists have known since the 1960s that there are two seemingly separate radio structures — which are defined in astronomy as any object that emits strong radio waves — that can be definitively detected by Earth’s technology. Known as the North Polar Spur and the Fan Region, the new study posits that these radio structures resemble long ropes and are approximately 1,000 light-years long, as well as roughly 350 light-years from our planet.
The research by scientists at Penn State University also suggests that, in addition to being near Earth (relatively speaking), the two structures are connected to each other and, as a result, essentially surround us.
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Education
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Less than 1 per cent of the tens of thousands of sessional staff at Australian universities have benefited from legislation to shepherd long-term casuals into permanent employment, figures suggest.
The data emerged as 60 per cent of Australia’s public universities were being scrutinised over “systemic” underpayment of casuals.
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Hardware
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Health/Nutrition
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The Build Back Better Bill started out as a great, sprawling piece of legislation comprising the most ambitious set of social programs since the Johnson Administration. It is an attempt to actually implement a major portion of President Joe Biden’s campaign program. Such an attempt is itself a rarity in American politics where the usual practice is to relegate the presidential campaign program to the archives long before inauguration day. Even more rare is the fact that the Bill keeps the promise of the compromise reached between the winning Biden faction and the losing faction supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders at last year’s Democratic Convention.
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Right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro should be criminally charged for offenses related to his mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic—ranging from crimes against humanity to quackery—federal lawmakers who voted to approve an inquiry commission’s report said Tuesday.
“This period will sadly be remembered as Brazil’s greatest civilizational regression. The atrocities committed by this government will not be forgotten.”
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The head of the World Food Programme is urging U.S. billionaires to give just .36% of the increase in their collective wealth since the start of the pandemic to help prevent 42 million people from starving to death.
The remarks from WFP executive director David Beasley, who singled out the fortunes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, came in an interview that aired Tuesday on CNN’s “Connect the World.”
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The UK now has one of the highest per capita infection rates in the world: 4 times higher than Germany, 9 times higher than France, and 25 times higher than Spain. Last Thursday the UK recorded more than 50,000 infections in a single day, a higher number than the figure for Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal combined.
The government delayed vaccinating secondary school students, and by the start of October 1 in 20 UK schoolchildren were Covid-positive. The majority of UK Covid cases comprise unvaccinated under-18-year-olds.
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This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.
In the months since COVID-19 wreaked havoc inside California’s 35 prisons and claimed 240 incarcerated lives, practically nothing has been done to address the crowded and poorly ventilated housing units that have helped the virus spread.
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In September 2020, Netflix was in turmoil as the company battled its most significant PR scandal to date. Earlier that year, the streaming platform had acquired the worldwide rights to the French film Cuties after its lauded premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Director Maïmouna Doucouré had made the movie as a commentary on social media and the hypersexualization of young girls. But the poster Netflix released to promote it didn’t have that same self-awareness. Instead, it displayed the actors, some of whom were only 12 years old, in booty shorts and crop tops, striking provocative dance poses.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Security
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Sometimes you see a story that you just have too talk about, this Missouri governor literally thinks that opening up inspect element and looking at HTML on the webpage is the equivalent of hacking and should be investigated as such.
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Ethical hackers then report vulnerabilities to the organization and suggest ways to remediate the issues.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The paper begins by providing an explanation of the two main technologies that are used for image scanning: perceptual hashing and machine learning. From a security viewpoint, they share common problems: both can be evaded by knowledgeable adversaries, and both methods can be subverted. The experts point out that moving from the current server-side scanning of material to CSS “opens new vantage points for the adversary”. In particular, attacks that already existed on server-side scanning systems can now be executed by more actors, and on less-secure infrastructure (users’ devices rather than corporate servers). In addition, new on-device attacks become possible.
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“The distinction between “real-time” and “ex-post” is irrelevant when it comes to the impact of these technologies on fundamental rights. Ex-post identification carries in fact a higher potential of harm, as more data can be pooled from different sources to proceed to the identification,” said Francesco Ragazzi, associate professor at Leiden University and author of the study.
The study, published on Monday (25 October), was commissioned by the Green group in the European Parliament, a vocal proponent of a total ban on biometric recognition systems in publicly accessible spaces.
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Facebook has confronted whistleblowers, PR firestorms and Congressional inquiries in recent years. But now it faces a combination of all three at once in what could be the most intense and wide-ranging crisis in the company’s 17-year history.
On Friday, a consortium of 17 US news organizations began publishing a series of stories — collectively called “The Facebook Papers” — based on a trove of hundreds of internal company documents which were included in disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s legal counsel. The consortium, which includes CNN, reviewed the redacted versions received by Congress.
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The past several weeks have been difficult for the social media behemoth Facebook, with a series of whistleblower revelations demonstrating that the company knew its signature platform was exacerbating all manner of social ills around the globe, from human trafficking to sectarian violence.
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The Financial Times, which cited four people familiar with the discussions that led to the deal, said concerns were likely to be raised about a single American company hosting such a huge percentage of the UK’s secret data.
The FT story comes about a fortnight after AWS was certified as one of four cloud firms which could host Australian Government data, despite having connections to a Chinese-owned data centre.
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Executives from TikTok and Snapchat on Tuesday sought to distance themselves from Facebook during their first appearances at a Capitol Hill hearing, as senators pressed them on the impact of their platforms have on young users.
Snapchat is designed around temporary posts, and unlike Facebook and Twitters its messages and posts disappear after set times, Snapchat Vice President of Global Public Policy Jennifer Stout emphasized.
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An executive at TikTok faced tough questions on Tuesday during the video-sharing app’s first appearance at a U.S. congressional hearing, saying it does not give information to the Chinese government and has sought to safeguard U.S. data.
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Defence/Aggression
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“Regionally, the news of the (PJD) failure was greeted with jubilation,” Magdi Abdelhadi wrote on the BBC English website. “Commentators regarded the fall of PJD as the final nail in the coffin of political Islam,” he added.
Missing from such sweeping declarations is that those who greeted the defeat of the PJD with ‘jubilation’ are mostly the very crowd that dismissed political Islam even during its unprecedented surge following the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011; and the same intellectual mercenaries who unashamedly continue to sing the praises of such dictators as General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt and the various Arab monarchs in the Gulf.
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Nuclear disarmament campaigners and other peace advocates on Wednesday welcomed an Iranian official’s announcement that his country would rejoin talks aimed at reviving the Obama-era nuclear agreement unilaterally abrogated by former U.S. President Donald Trump in 2018.
Ali Bagheri Kani, Iran’s new nuclear negotiator, tweeted that he “had a very serious and constructive dialogue” with Enrique Mora, a leading European Union diplomat, and that they agreed “to start negotiations before the end of November.”
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This May, the Pentagon asked Congress to fund a $715 billion budget for Fiscal 2022—an increase of $10 billion over the previous year. Together with another $38 billion requested for military-related programs at other government agencies, this would bring total U.S. military spending to $753 billion.
But from the standpoint of most Republicans and many Democrats in Congress, this was not enough. In September, by an overwhelming margin, the House passed a $768 billion military spending bill. When the Senate votes, it is likely to raise that figure, for two Senate committees have already approved $778 billion for U.S. military programs—a five percent increase over the preceding year. These actions were taken despite the fact that, except for military spending at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, current U.S. military spending, after adjusting for inflation, is the highest since World War II.
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In dominant capitalist-imperialist media, America’s imperial crimes are airbrushed out of historical memory, like they never took place. Thus it is that CNN can without the slightest hint of irony show a clip of the late Colin Powell saying this last year: “the one word I have to use with respect to what [Donald Trump] has been doing for the last several; years is a word I never would have used before, I never would have used for any of the four presidents I have worked for: He lies. He lies about things. And he gets away with it.”
MSNBC approvingly reported the following judgement from Richard Haass, president of the US Council on Foreign Relations: Powell was “one of the most intellectually honest people I ever met.”
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An investigation by HEATED and Earther revealed Wednesday that fossil fuel industry advertising in some of the most popular U.S. political newsletters “has exploded” as Democrats in Congress prepare to grill leaders of oil majors and trade groups about their contributions to climate disinformation.
“News outlets are using their own quality reporting to sell advertisers on opportunities to spread misinformation.”
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In recent weeks, the airwaves have been full of inflammatory rhetoric over Taiwan, increasing the risk that tensions over the island’s status could provide the spark for a military conflict, even a catastrophic war, between the United States and China. On October 10, President Xi Jinping of China called on the Taiwanese to merge with the mainland in a peaceful fashion, but warned of unspecified dangers if they chose otherwise. “Those who forget their ancestors, betray the motherland, or split the country are doomed,” he said of Taiwanese “separatists.” A day later, President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan avowed that her country must “resist annexation or encroachment upon our sovereignty,” and would negotiate with Beijing only “on the basis of parity”—a stance wholly unacceptable to the Chinese leadership. On this side of the Pacific, politicians from both parties were quick to condemn Xi’s foreboding threats and to offer support for Tsai’s uncompromising posture. Many Republicans demanded an ironclad US commitment to defend Taiwan in the event it was attacked by China, and President Biden, when asked by Anderson Cooper of CNN whether the United States would defend Taiwan under those circumstances, said, “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.”
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The “Revo”
On March 13, 1979, the leaders of Grenada’s New Jewel Movement overthrew the hated and feared neocolonial puppet, Prime Minister Eric Gairy, setting in motion a memorable revolutionary experiment in Caribbean history. Those who lived through the 1979-83 Grenadian Revolution were forever transformed.
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Our conversation got me thinking about what my trolls might be seeing on their social media feeds. I wanted to see whether social media algorithms are pushing more misogyny to accounts similar to those that abuse women online. So I created a fake online persona called Barry and signed him up to the five most popular social media platforms in the UK.
All the main social media companies say they don’t promote hate on their platforms and take action to stop it. They each have algorithms that offer us content based on things we’ve posted, liked or watched in the past. But it’s difficult to know what they push to each user.
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John Eastman, the former Trump lawyer who authored the infamous “coup memo” on how to overturn the 2020 election, was caught on camera saying his coup plan would have worked if it wasn’t for former Vice President Mike Pence.
Lauren Windsor, a progressive activist who is known for posing incognito to draw out revealing statements from Republicans and conservatives, spoke to Eastman at an event hosted by The Claremont Institute, Eastman’s employer.
Pretending to be an outspoken Trump supporter, Windsor tells Eastman, “I read your memo and I thought it was solid in all of its legal arguments. And I was floored that Mike Pence didn’t do anything. Why didn’t he act on it? You gave him the legal reasoning to do that.”
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Democrats were quick to react to Rolling Stone’s report that some Republican members of Congress or their staffers were “intimately” involved in planning the Jan. 6 events that turned violent. As for the Republicans who were implicated in the story … not so much.
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The report features interviews with two anonymous organizers of the rallies who told Rolling Stone’s Hunter Walker that Stop the Steal organizers worked with members of Congress, including representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Louie Gohmert (R-TX). “We would talk to Boebert’s team, Cawthorn’s team, Gosar’s team, like, back to back to back to back,” one of the organizers told Walker.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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The purported membership of the Oath Keeper membership rolls — obtained in a hack and leaked to the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets — include more than 38,000 names. The vast majority of alleged members are enrolled in a way that leaves them somewhat anonymous: Their registrations are associated with a gmail or other private email address.
But a review by Rolling Stone identified nearly 40 memberships linked to public-sector work emails, from domains like nasa.gov, dmv.virginia.gov, and city.pittsburgh.pa.us. Rolling Stone then matched these individuals to public-source information — from LinkedIn accounts, government websites, public salary databases, etc. — to compile a list of everyday Americans who appear to have been dues paying members of the notorious right-wing organization.
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Sweden’s banking authority has closed an investigation into alleged European Union regulations infringement at Swedbank, with no comment issued. Swedbank’s Estonia branch was earlier linked to a large-scale money laundering scandal involving the now-defunct Tallinn branch of Danske.
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Environment
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The film, a creative science-fiction tale in which a mad scientist (played by Lyford) tries to bring peace to the world through climate-changing science, was shot in and around Seattle, its filmmaker just 20 years old. Though “As the Earth Turns” sat forgotten for many decades, it resurfaced through a serendipitous encounter: Seattle-area musician/composer Ed Hartman met Lyford’s grandniece Kim Lyford Bishop — the mother of one of Hartman’s percussion students — a few years ago. After watching a YouTube video in which Hartman layered his own music track on a Buster Keaton silent scene, Bishop mentioned that she was the estate owner of a film by her uncle and needed to do something with it.
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This story is part of a Covering Climate Now reporting series on climate migration called “Flight for Their Lives.” CCNow is a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
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“TIGERALERT: GET IN, GET DOWN, COVER UP. Stay where you are and stay away from windows.”
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This column is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation to strengthen coverage of the climate story.
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This story originally appeared in Scientific American and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
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We speak with one of the group of five climate activists who have entered their eighth day of hunger strike demanding President Biden pass the full $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan to combat the climate crisis and expand the U.S. social safety net. The climate programs drafted in the bill face opposition from Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who has made millions of dollars from coal companies in his home state of West Virginia since taking office. ”I’m on hunger strike for my family and my future and the promises that the president made to young people who put him in office,” says Kidus Girma, who is on the eighth day of the hunger strike. He argues the reconciliation deal President Biden is said to have cut with Manchin “is simply not enough,” and calls Biden “too much of a coward to fight for the people who actually put him in office.”
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A group of Republican members of Congress are traveling to Glasgow, Scotland, in order to attend COP26, the United Nations’ international climate negotiations meant to galvanize global action to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Several of the GOP House members, however, have a long track record of climate denial as well as of accepting large donations from the fossil fuel industry.
A review of campaign donations reveals that collectively, the five Republicans have received more than $2.5 million from the oil, gas, and mining industries throughout their elected careers. And voting records show limited support for climate legislation.
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COP26 will kick off next Sunday 31 October, following a one-year delay due to the pandemic. The past weeks have been filled with attention-grabbing demonstrations, including a sit-in outside the Dutch parliament in The Hague and a harbour blockade of Shell’s refinery in Rotterdam. The urgent underlying message from civil society to world leaders remains the same: stop talking, start doing!
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With the United Nations climate-change summit (COP26) in Glasgow less than a few days away, the prospects of forging a global consensus on transformative mitigation strategies to the climate emergency don’t look any more promising than they did in previously held rounds of international climate diplomacy.
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Upon the release of the latest dire report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (8/9/21), the Washington Post (8/10/21) published a strongly worded editorial under the headline, “Climate Doubters Lose One of Their Last Remaining Arguments.”
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It is not too much to spend on our military, however. The US will spend more than twice that on the military over the next decade.
When it comes to government spending, no amount of money is too much to prop up the American Empire.
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When world leaders gather in Scotland next week for the COP26 climate change conference, activists will be pushing for drastic action to end the world’s catastrophic reliance on fossil fuels. Consciousness about the climate emergency has skyrocketed in recent years, while government responses remain meager. But one aspect of extreme climate jeopardy—“nuclear winter”—has hardly reached the stage of dim awareness
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As critics warn the U.S. government is very much on the verge of showing up to next week’s U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland with little or nothing to show in terms of new levels of ambition to reduce its planet-heating emissions, new reporting shows how the fossil fuel industry has ramped up its political spending over recent months in order to diminish any chance of real progress on the issue.
“We can’t allow corporate influence to drive public policy. That’s the people’s job.”
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Energy
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The infrastructure and budget reconciliation bills moving through Congress are a mixed bag when it comes to health care, income support programs, and the care economy.
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Jørgensen said that the government would do everything it could to support Esbjerg – Denmark’s oil and gas hub – as the oil and gas industry eventually grinds to a halt.
Meanwhile, the government recently co-launched the new Beyond Oil & Gas Alliance (BOGA) initiative – an international campaign aimed at encouraging other countries to also phase out fossil fuel production.
The BOGA initiative will feature heavily in Denmark’s efforts at the forthcoming COP26 climate summit in Glasgow next week.
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Finance
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In the first years of my life, while my parents worked full-time jobs, I was looked after by my Lolo (Tagalog for “grandfather”). Handsome and charming, Lolo had immigrated to the United States from the Philippines as a young civil engineer, bringing along his wife and small children. I was his first grandchild; we were inseparable from the moment we met. My earliest memories are backdropped by the smell of his cooking and the sound of his laugh. Home videos show us just hanging out: him telling stories, me babbling in response.
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Progressive lawmakers and other advocates of economic justice welcomed new legislative text for the Billionaires Income Tax unveiled Wednesday by Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden as part of Democrats’ Build Back Better Package.
“The Billionaires Income Tax will begin to tax income from wealth like income from work.”
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“The Corporate Profits Minimum Tax would end corporate double-dealing…so that we can raise essential revenue needed to invest in families and our economy.”
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New York City taxi drivers have entered their second week of hunger striking outside City Hall to demand that the mayor grant debt relief for thousands of drivers impacted by the taxi medallion price crash. Many drivers purchased taxi medallions, the permits required to drive a taxi, for upwards of $1 million. After the incursion of ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft, as well as more recent plummeting demand for taxis due to the pandemic, they are now only worth about $100,000. Faced with massive debt and financial ruin, at least nine drivers have died by suicide. Taxi driver Augustine Tang, who has been on hunger strike for six days and personally knew one of the drivers who committed suicide, says that he is striking for medallion owners who “went into financial ruin” and saw that “there was no way out.” We also speak with Zohran Mamdani, a New York state assemblymember who joined drivers in the hunger strike. Mamdani says, “It’s important for us as legislators to bring to light what it is that people are suffering from out of view of those in the political elite.”
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Whatever talents these so-called “leaders” may have, competence in governance is not one of them.
Attorney General Knudsen went way off the legal and ethical rails last week by seriously interfering in the treatment of a hospitalized COVID patient in Helena. As reported: “St. Peter’s Health can confirm that several providers were contacted by three different public officials last week regarding the treatment of a patient in our care. These conversations were deeply troubling to our physicians and staff because they were threatened and their clinical judgment was called into question by these individuals.”
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Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal on Wednesday stressed a need for the “transformational investments in programs” that her party’s Build Back Better package stands to make and said House progressives wouldn’t “be fools” by agreeing to a vote on a pending bipartisan infrastructure bill until the legislative text for a larger social spending package was finalized.
“If we’re 90% there on the legislative text, which is what I keep hearing from the Speaker and others, then let’s finish.. and we can get both bills done,” Jayapal (D-Wash.) told MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson.
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This morning at 9:00 am, an “Open Letter in Defense of Democracy” was published, simultaneously, by The New Republic and The Bulwark (see here and here).
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I was reminded of that long ago time because of what’s happening in the Biden administration, which appears to be losing steam as it chuffs and spins its wheels against an obstructionist Trump party and some of its own stubborn conservative Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
If President Joe Biden wants to get somewhere with his far-reaching for-the-middle-class agenda and, most importantly, with resisting voting rights being stolen by Republican states, he’s got to play hardball. He needs to “stop the GOP steal.”
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The meaning of “growth” in this context is pretty obvious: Zuckerberg’s company makes a lot of money, and he wants it to make even more.
The meaning of “safety” is somewhat more nebulous. Facebook spokeswoman Dani Lever refers to “difficult decisions between free expressions and harmful speech, security and other issues” before going to a place that should chill the blood of anyone listening:
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With so much doom and gloom from pundits and most national reporters making Virginia’s state elections next week seem like a lost cause for Democrats, maybe a little counterprogramming is in order. Yes, Terry McAuliffe is in a tight race for governor with shapeshifting, fleece-vested Republican Glenn Youngkin, and the Democratic House of Delegates 55-seat majority is up for grabs. There are at least six vulnerable Democratic incumbents, and if all of them lose, Republicans would take back the majority.
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The company released a study last Thursday finding a “statistically significant difference favoring the political right wing,” when it comes to which tweets are amplified. There is nothing more sacred to any social media algorithm than engagement, which means a tweet from Ted Cruz is more likely to come across your timeline than one from Dick Durbin because Twitter thinks you’re more likely to engage with it.
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Civics for the Culture is running an eight-part video series, with a video dropping [sic] every two weeks through the end of 2021, focused on voter education and engagement targeting young Black and brown people across the South before, during, and after an election. In the second episode, premiering today with Teen Vogue, Reid and Civics for the Culture creator Chelsey Hall walk viewers through the process of making a bill become law. Think Schoolhouse Rock, but Gen Z edition.
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The dispute the Department of Justice has with Microsoft shouldn’t be judged only by antitrust regulations. It should be influenced by the unprecedented security risks to our information-based civilization. The safety of our society, not just the fortunes of Sun, Apple or Netscape, is at stake. The Microsoft defense that the company was only maximizing profits using common competitive methods is unsupportable. Business practices that may be tolerable for a small competitor are perilous when scaled up to security-threatening proportions on a national scale.
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I digress, but even if my assessment above is wrong, prominence is all that matters, and Microsoft isn’t a national security threat, individuals and organizations alike are still better off abandoning the Microsoft ecosystem on any scale in favor of more modern alternatives for the foreseeable future. Although Microsoft gets a lot of criticism for the low quality of their products, hence the persistent updates (552 in 2021 thus far) and a revolving door of CVEs, few seem to see the genius behind them. Microsoft doesn’t need to maximize quality or even compete on that field of play when they can render entire organizations dependent on products of less quality.
Because of this, organizations relying on Windows will have a hell of a time migrating away from Windows and the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem which means that they’re naturally going to drag their toes in doing so; the bigger they are, the slower any attempt at a migration will go. In turn, this means that there is plenty of time for those that can easily migrate away from the madness and insecurity of the Microsoft ecosystem as a means of sheltering themselves from a barrage of attacks safely in the shadow of Microsoft for the time being.
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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is looking into disclosed Facebook documents that indicate the company may have violated its 2019 settlement with the regulatory agency over privacy concerns, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Staff at the agency have reportedly started looking at internal Facebook research that identified ill effects of the company’s products, and whether it violated the settlement agreements, according to the Journal.
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Misinformation/Disinformation
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Facebook’s formula made it so posts that people reacted angrily to were given more weight in what users would see than posts that users reacted to with just a simple push of the “like” icon, according to documents seen by The Washington Post.
The documents showed when Facebook introduced new reaction emojis to their platform, it changed what content was more heavily promoted toward users.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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A big open question regarding Rep. Devin Nunes’ never ending series of lawsuits against the media has been who is funding those lawsuits. As a watchdog group highlighted last year, House rules require certain steps be followed if a Member is receiving free legal services, and it did not appear that Nunes had followed those steps, and if Nunes were actually paying for those legal services, House rules required that he not be receiving a discount for them, which the watchdog group noted was worth investigating.
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Another set of plaintiffs insisting social media platforms have it in for “conservative” users have lost in court. The hook for this lawsuit is the (specious) claim that government officials’ statements saying social media services should do more to curb the spread of misinformation (COVID, elections, etc.) somehow transformed these private companies into state actors. So, when they did decide to moderate the conspiracy theorists’ accounts, it was ACTUAL CENSORSHIP.
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For reasons I don’t fully understand, over the last few months, many critics of “big tech” and Facebook, in particular, have latched onto the idea that “the algorithm” is the problem. It’s been almost weird how frequently people insist to me that if only social media got rid of algorithmically recommending stuff, and went back to the old fashioned chronological news feed order, all would be good in the world again. Some of this seems based on the idea that algorithms are primed to lead people down a garden path from one type of video to ever more extreme videos (which certainly has happened, though how often is never made clear). Some of it seems to be a bit of a kneejerk reaction to simply disliking the fact that these companies (which many people don’t really trust) are making decisions about what you may and may not like — and that feels kinda creepy.
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Summary: A major challenge for global internet companies is figuring how to deal with different rules and regulations within different countries. This has proven especially difficult for internet companies looking to operate in China — a country in which many of the most popular global websites are blocked.
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The environmental and human rights lawyer Steven Donziger joins us just before he is ordered to report to jail today, after a years-long legal battle with the oil company Chevron and 813 days of house arrest. In 2011, Donziger won an $18 billion settlement against Chevron on behalf of 30,000 Indigenous people in Ecuador for dumping 16 billion gallons of oil into their ancestral land in the Amazon. Since the landmark case, Donziger has faced a series of legal attacks from Chevron and a New York federal judge, who has employed a private law firm linked to the oil company to prosecute him. Earlier this month, he was sentenced to six months in prison for contempt of court, and his request for bail pending his appeal was denied. Amnesty International and United Nations human rights advocates, along with several U.S. lawmakers, are calling for Donziger’s immediate release. “Chevron and these two judges, really allies of the fossil fuel industry, are trying to use me as a weapon to intimidate activists and lawyers who do this work,” says Donziger. “I need to be prosecuted by a neutral prosecutor, not by Chevron.”
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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Thank you all for your work in support of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and press freedom. It is an honor to be included in this weekend’s events. There are few causes that deserve more attention than the case of Julian Assange, for freedom of the press, and the public’s right to know, which is paramount to most all other concerns in purportedly free societies. Project Censored stands with you and with Julian Assange in support of a truly free press, always uncensored, and one that reports in the public interest.
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In 1791, in an attempt to stop the publication of the first part of Thomas Paine’s seminal work, The Rights of Man, the British government tried to buy up the copyright.
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Assange’s extradition was denied in January of this year when District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that ordering his extradition would put him at such high risk of suicide so as to be “oppressive.” The U.S. is appealing that ruling to the UK’s High Court on the grounds that, it argues, the judge misapplied evidence as to Assange’s mental health, and the U.S. government can assure the court that Assange wouldn’t be held under the worst and most isolating conditions if sentenced to a U.S. prison.
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“The U.S. government’s unrelenting pursuit of Julian Assange makes it clear that this prosecution is a punitive measure, but the case involves concerns which go far beyond the fate of one man and put media freedom and freedom of expression in peril.”
“Journalists and publishers are of vital importance in scrutinizing governments, exposing their misdeeds, and holding perpetrators of human rights violations to account,” Callamard said. “This disingenuous appeal should be denied, the charges should be dropped, and Julian Assange should be released.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Both actors damaged private property. Jessica Reznicek was labeled a domestic terrorist that is, “dangerous to human life.” Even after the courts deemed Bayou Bridge’s property destruction illegal, the company received no criminal charges and the company was ordered by the district court to pay a mere $150 to each objector. To understand why these two actors have received such different consequences in response to their private property destruction, we must examine their current places within existing power structures.
In July 2017, Jessica Reznicek and a friend from the Des Moines Catholic Worker community held a press conference and admitted several acts of civil disobedience which damaged the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline across Iowa. “We are speaking publicly to empower others to act boldly, with purity of heart, to dismantle the infrastructures which deny us our rights to water, land, and liberty,” they said. No one was harmed as a result of their actions.
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The increasing reliance on tech by law enforcement means the increasing reliance on private companies. It’s inevitable that tech developments will be adopted by government agencies, but a lot of this adoption has occurred with minimal oversight or public input. That lack of public insight carries forward to criminal trials, where companies have successfully stepped in to prevent defendants from accessing information about evidence, citing concerns about exposed trade secrets or proprietary software. In other cases, prosecutors have dropped cases rather than risk discussing supposedly sensitive tech in open court.
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Four years after the deadly white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a federal civil trial charges the organizers with an unlawful conspiracy to commit violent acts. Defendants include Jason Kessler, the main organizer, and Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who spoke at the event. Neo-Nazi James Alex Fields, who slammed his car into a crowd of antiracist counterprotesters during the rally and killed activist Heather Heyer, has already been sentenced to life in prison. Plaintiffs in the case cite the careful advance planning done in online chatrooms to wreak irreparable harm. We look at the details of the case with Slate legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick, who lived in Charlottesville during the 2017 rally, and also its relation to the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse now starting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where the judge has ruled the three protesters shot by the white teenager during racial justice protests last year cannot be labeled “victims.”
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We were (cautiously) optimistic, but we didn’t kid ourselves: the same bad-idea-havers who convinced the EU to mandate over-blocking, under-performing, monopoly-preserving copyright filters would also try to turn the DSA into yet another excuse to subject Europeans’ speech to automated filtering.
We were right to worry.
The DSA is now steaming full-speed-ahead on a collision course with even more algorithmic filters – the decidedly unintelligent “AIs” that the 2019 Copyright Directive ultimately put in charge of 500 million peoples’ digital expression in the 27 European member-states.
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A coalition of Amazon warehouse workers in New York City have officially filed a petition for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board on Monday.
Kayla Blado, the press secretary for the National Labor Relations Board, confirmed to ABC News on Monday that the union petition was filed in the NLRB’s Region 29. The petition must now go through the NLRB’s formal representation election process before a vote will be held.
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The trial of teenage gunman Kyle Rittenhouse begins next week, but the fix is already in. Rittenhouse, who is being tried as an adult, shot two people dead in the street in Kenosha, Wis., during the protests that followed the shooting of Jacob Blake in 2020. That he killed two people is undisputed, but Rittenhouse claims the homicides were justified acts of self-defense.
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In the global sting, organised crime gangs were sold encrypted phones with software called ANOM that law enforcement officials could monitor. Authorities said in June that it had led to more than 800 arrests and the confiscation of drugs, weapons, cash and luxury cars.
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Europol is to be allowed to carry out „discreet“ manhunts and request large amounts of data from private companies, using „artificial intelligence“. In addition, the police agency coordinates special units and cooperated with foreign secret services.
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The 10-month Operation Dark HunTOR targeted vendors who operated on the DarkMarket site, which was taken down by police in January, the insider told DW.
German prosecutors at the time said DarkMarket came to the fore during a major investigation against the web hosting service Cyberbunker, located in a former NATO bunker in southwest Germany.
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Police earlier this year alleged murder plots, weapon purchases and mass drug trafficking were openly discussed on the encrypted online platform, called ANOM, by Australian crime figures and reality TV stars alike.
But unbeknownst to them, their alleged dodgy dealings were being covertly monitored by the US FBI through an app that they all thought was encrypted.
Not only was it not encrypted, ANOM was developed by the FBI – and in a terrible irony for alleged bikies, the mafia and Asian crime gangs, they even paid the FBI a subscription fee to maintain the app that would ultimately destroy them.
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Women in the professional, scientific and technical services industry face a pay gap of 22% compared to their male counterparts, an advocacy group for professionals says following a nation-wide survey.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Earlier this year, we noted how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr had launched a bad faith effort suggesting that “big tech” gets a “free ride” on the internet, and should be forced to fund broadband expansion. Carr’s argument, that companies like Google and Netflix somehow get a free ride (they don’t) and should “pay their fair share,” is a fifteen year old AT&T lobbyist talking point. AT&T’s goal has always been to “double dip”; as in not only get paid for bandwidth by consumers and businesses, but to get an additional troll toll simply for, well, existing.
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Being a full participant in the world will eventually depend on access to gigabits of broadband capacity. That capacity will depend on fiber optics. Over the years, EFF has researched and advocated for policy changes at the local, state, and federal levels—all towards the goal of delivering universal fiber to everyone in the country. Part of that work has required us to look back at the mistakes made in the past, how they’ve led to the problems of today, and how to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
One of the biggest mistakes has been overly relying on large, publicly-traded, for-profit companies to deliver universal access. For decades, policymakers have given billions in subsidies to the likes of AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon to build out their networks, with the goal that the existing companies serve everyone. These companies were gifted with countless regulatory favors designed for and often by the largest corporations. Their lobbyists were given front-row status in guiding policy decisions in Congress, state legislatures, and the Federal Communications Commission. In return for nearly two decades of favoritism, still more than half of the country lacks 21st century-ready broadband. Millions in the United States remain unserved.
A new study, funded by EFF, explains why that is and how we can reorient our public investments into broadband infrastructure able to connect all people to the gigabit future. Put simply, the biggest mistake in broadband policy has been in subsidizing broadband carriers, hoping they would build infrastructure, as opposed to focusing directly on future-proof infrastructure development. As a result, when we spend $45 billion—and counting—on supporting any service reaching a bare minimum metric of 25/3 Mbps (the federal definition of broadband), we fail to build long-term infrastructure, while squandering resources on dated copper, cable, and long-range wireless solutions. With another $45 billion potentially getting queued up by Congress, now is the time to rethink how we spend those new funds, and focus not on getting just any service to people, but on getting infrastructure to them that will sustain us for decades.
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For more on community broadband:https://www.eff.org/document/community-broadband
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“The [Internet] should be open and available for all. That’s what net neutrality is about,” Rosenworcel said in an October 2020 statement. “It’s why people from across this country rose up to voice their frustration and anger with the Federal Communications Commission when it decided to ignore their wishes and roll back net neutrality.”
She added that she views the rollbacks to net neutrality as a way to “make it easier for broadband companies to block websites, slow speeds, and dictate what we can do and where we can go online.”
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Positron Access President and Chief Technology Office Pierre Trudeau discusses the current “fiber frenzy,” why multiple-dwelling units sometimes suffer because of uncertainty surrounding the costs of building and some of the solutions available to get better broadband to MDUs.
In this interview with Broadband Breakfast Editor and Publisher Drew Clark, Trudeau also explains how Positron Access provides fiber-builders with a solution to serve otherwise costly or difficult to deploy fiber infrastructure, through a device they refer to as “Gigabit Access Multiplexer,” or a “GAM” for short.
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Monopolies
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The European Commission has opened a formal competition investigation into Nvidia’s acquisition of chip designer Arm. The deal, which would see Nvidia purchase the UK-based company from SoftBank for $40 billion, was announced in September 2020.
In a press release, the EU’s Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager said that Nvidia buying Arm could make it harder for other manufacturers to access Arm’s technology, hurting much of the semiconductor industry (which is already facing supply problems). At the heart of concerns is Arm’s neutrality. Arm licenses its chip designs to a broad range of companies including Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm, many of which compete with one another and Nvidia. There are fears that having Nvidia control Arm may result in Nvidia’s competitors being put at a disadvantage.
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The Microsoft advertisement is deceptive on three counts: Microsoft, with only 0.19% of the GDP, shouldn’t represent that damage to itself could potentially injure the entire economy. Microsoft shouldn’t claim for itself the accomplishments of the entertainment industry. Nor should Microsoft claim that IT is somehow responsible for 25% of the nation’s economic growth based on fictional metrics when that number — on a cash basis — is much lower.
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Microsoft now sets its sights not only on the control of local computing but also on the sources from which all program code and data originate. Upgrading Microsoft software has been a logical choice for customers who wished to keep up with changes in technology. The risks of an integrated family of operating systems running all global computers, a declared Microsoft objective, make selecting a Microsoft platform more than a purely technical choice. An all-encompassing operating system bares itself to hostile exploitation of paralyzing security flaws. The presence of a fatal defect is unavoidable as the complexity of Microsoft systems expands to bizarre proportions with each new release. It is the search for such a fault that occupies the minds of some of the brightest computer experts. Finding a crack through which one could induce mayhem with only a few keystrokes would be worth a great deal of money, especially when supporting an act of terrorism.
It’s only a question of time before the ubiquitous presence of Microsoft operating systems, supported by a software-updating network, reaches a level of interconnectivity that makes a universal systems crash feasible.
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Patents
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Software Patents
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I hope you never get sued by a troll but if you do, take a deep breath. Realize you’re not powerless. The more we all realize that and the more we band together, the more they go away.
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So how does this end? For the troll? Badly. Unified Patents’ IPR [sic] is extremely likely to succeed in invalidating one of the troll’s two patents. Mycroft’s IPR [sic] is likely to succeed in invalidating the relevant claims of the other. In the meantime the trolls have to pay their counsel ( assuming their “counsel” are actually “counsel” and not investors/directors/officers of the shell company ) and associated fees and costs for defending the IPR. [sic] But that’s not the end of it. Mycroft is pursuing damages against the trolls under a Missouri statute designed to defend Missouri companies from trolls. And the dismissal of the troll’s infringement case? It makes Mycroft’s case for damages extremely strong.
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Copyrights
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The US Copyright Office is expanding a legal shield for fixing digital devices, including cars and medical devices. This morning, the office submitted new exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bars breaking software copy protection. The resulting rules include a revamped section on device repair, reflecting renewed government pressure around “right to repair” issues.
The Register of Copyrights recommends Section 1201 “anti-circumvention” exemptions every three years, a process that has offered legal protections for everything from unlocking cellphones to ripping DVD clips for classroom use. In addition to renewing these and several other exemptions, this latest rulemaking adopts repair-related proposals from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, iFixit, and other organizations. The Librarian of Congress adopted the recommendations in a final rule that will take effect tomorrow.
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Some cops play copyrighted music while you record them so that it gets taken down by YouTube or Facebook.
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Copyright groups regularly criticize Cloudflare for shielding the hosting locations of pirate sites but in a rebuttal the company paints a different picture. Organizations such as the RIAA and MPA are part of Cloudflare’s “trusted notifier” program through which they can get information about accused sites within hours, including IP addresses. However, not all rightsholders treat this privacy-sensitive information with care.
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After filing a lawsuit in the summer against the operator of IPTV services including Area 51 and Altered Carbon, last month several Hollywood studios, Netflix and Amazon, demanded $16.35m in damages. In a judgment handed down this week, the movie and TV show companies were awarded ‘just’ $272,500 and recovered just a fraction of their claimed legal costs.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Examination unit:
Justice unit (compulsory ‘ViCo’):
An hour ago:
Summary: The rule of law is being thrown out the window/door, people send rude letters [PDF], and we’re meant to think that this is the “new normal” (laws and regulations ceasing to exist); brought by the same people who try to force-feed people all around Europe the unlawful UPC
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FSF, Videos at 6:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: The new bits (in Spanish) start at 14m:42s from the start
Source/credit: GNU Video Recordings
Talk title: Software libre, tu libertad, y tu ciberseguridad (Free software, your freedom, and your cybersecurity)
Location: Online event (BigBlueButton)
Organizer: 8.8 Chile Enteka
Hosts: Gabriel Bergel, 8.8 Chile Enteka
Date: October 23, 2021
Language: Spanish
Duration: 1 hour 53 minutes
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0)
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Posted in Europe, Patents, Videos at 6:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: We’re long mentioned the 'conspiracy of silence' regarding EPO corruption (bribes and threats from Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos contribute to this silence), so the above video, which is new, seems relevant to us
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 6:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 8b72e815e3b2e6f31c87a271c530e4c0
Summary: Contrary to what staff may be led to believe, allowing folks to work from home is just a workaround (as the law forbids some human-to-human contact/interaction) and pretext for screwing the workers a little bit more while crushing basic rights, such as strike and protest abilities (exercising or expressing dissent)
LAST year Europe went into “lock-down”, so we wrote many articles about the EPO‘s workers being forced to work from home (it was imperative, not a choice). To many of these people it’s not even home because they work outside their country of origin, having sometimes taken their family with them (to a country with a foreign language they cannot speak and where they cannot work).
“Once it is no longer a requirement or an expectation to have a physical, central office with staff in it the alluring/seductive prospects of sending the jobs overseas are seriously being considered.”I’ve personally worked from home for many years, so the subject is close to my heart. And let me say it bluntly to EPO stuff: you’re being robbed and exploited. The way this thing was implemented favours the monopolies and their “moles” inside the EPO’s management; it has barely improved things for patent examiners in any meaningful way, only shallow ways. And now the EPO is hiring people at 3-5 less in terms of salary. It opened things up to outsourcing — the very same thing which happened in the technology sector because of the Internet. Once it is no longer a requirement or an expectation to have a physical, central office with staff in it the alluring/seductive prospects of sending the jobs overseas are seriously being considered. It’s about lowering salaries. IBM is one example of it. That’s the best known example in the sector I work for, even predating the pandemic.
“From an organisational point of view, they’re making unionisation and protesting harder.”Setting all that aside, they’re taking away basic benefits (sick leave, days off) based on the false premise that home-working is a gift (it’s not “remote” when one works from one’s own home, so “remote working” is misleading — that’s just a misnomer which makes staff feel inadequate). Think about it for a moment or two; getting people to work from midnight to 5am in the name of “flexibility” (without paying another hourly rate for the exceptional hours worked) is a regression — one that isn’t beneficial to staff’s mental fulfilment and occupational health, never mind domestic life and family relations. It can lead to more confrontation, distraction, etc.
From an organisational point of view, they’re making unionisation and protesting harder. They keep workers isolated and thus too helpless and too disorganised to exercise collective action (or bargaining). They’re typically lowering salaries (excuses like, “you don’t need to drive anymore”), asking for more working hours (with “commuting” time leveraged as a fig leaf), and while they’re reducing expenses spent on staff (e.g. canteen) they’re not passing the savings to staff but to stock market speculations (which reward corrupt management). In short, while it may seem (on the thin surface) like a win-win for workers, in practice the management is increasing the extraction (e.g. hours spent on actual work) whilst imposing even more spying, refusing to increase salaries (to keep up with inflation at the very least), and possibly even taking things like pensions away, as shown above in the video. They’re trading one thing for another.
“They’re trading one thing for another.”The EPO’s management did not decide to let staff work off-site because of generosity; they must work remotely to comply with the law anyway and instead of letting workers relax for a bit (the EPO has a large cash pile anyhow, so it can afford this) the management wants to grant more patents, including notorious vaccine patents — in effect a privatisation of work funded by the taxpayers.
In the video I use the example of a breakfast (spontaneously, so not a great analogy); the point is, they don’t really give the staff true choice in answering. By picking one seemingly desirable option (not your own choice; you only get to pick a number) you take up to 5 other “poison pills” that come ‘bundled’ with that false choice. It’s a rather farcical survey, but that’s what one might — perhaps even should — come to expect as we noted yesterday and earlier today.
“By picking one seemingly desirable option (not your own choice; you only get to pick a number) you take up to 5 other “poison pills” that come ‘bundled’ with that false choice.”As a side note, sometimes people ask me about my accent and I need to remind them there’s no “English accent” per se but loads of them, even more so in Britain (than AU/NZ/CA/SA/US). I try to stick to an accent that maximises clarity, without swallowing words or parts of words. To give a simple example and a very common 5-letter name, some people over here say “Peter” with rhotic R, albeit most people without rhotic R (except in parts of the south and Northern Ireland), some swallow the R completely, some swallow the T as well (“pi-ha”), so the name can be pronounced in many totally legitimate way albeit the last form of it obsures most of it. The same is true for the word “butter”, which some just read out as “ba-ha”. I try very hard to avoid all that as it’s almost a dialect of its own. █
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