Audiocasts/Shows

• Going Linux #414 · Listener Feedback

  This episodes includes discussions about key bindings, Mastadon, Virtual Box, the Framework laptop, file permissions, astronomy programs, printers, Win-Kex, and App Outlet. There’s even more!

• Three HUGE Mistakes New Emacs Users Make – Invidious

  It’s a common story. A person hears about Emacs and wants to give it a try, but their initial experience is usually pretty bad. Why? Well, I think a lot of it has to do with three HUGE mistakes that new Emacs users tend to make.

• Hackaday Podcast 143: More Magnesium Please, Robot Bicep Curls, Malamud’s General Index, And Are You Down With EMC? | Hackaday

  Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams catch up on a week’s worth of hacks. Get a grip on robot hands: there’s an eerily human one on offer this week. If you’re doing buck/boost converter design, the real learning is in high-frequency design patterns that avoid turning your circuits into unintentional radiators. Those looking for new hobbies might want to take up autonomous boat racing. We saw a design that’s easy enough to print on the average 3D printer — and who doesn’t want to build their own jet boat? We’ll wrap up the episode by digging into magnesium sources, and by admiring the number of outfits who are rolling their own silicon these days.

• Video Editing with Linux: 5 Basic Techniques You Should Know – Purism

  Next in our video editing series for the Librem 14, Gardiner Bryant explains how to use various kinds of cuts. In this video you’ll learn about J-cuts, L-cuts, Jump cuts, and Action/Motivated cuts. While this will apply to Kdenlive, a free software video editing solution, it will also generally apply to video editing. This video will help those looking to level up their overall video production. We hope to do similar projects like this in the future, so if you have ideas for topics you’d like us to cover, please let us know!

• Alex Deletes it All | Self-Hosted 57

  Troubleshooting goes very wrong for Alex, and he puts his backups to the ultimate test.

  Plus, monitoring your freezer in Home Assistant, building a self-hosted Notion alternative, and more.

• Is elementary OS REALLY user friendly? – Invidious

Kernel Space

• Bcachefs Gets “Bad@$$” Snapshots, Still Aiming For Mainline Linux Kernel Integration

  Kent Overstreet who has been working relentlessly on Bcachefs for over a half-decade now issued his latest status update on this Linux file-system born out of the kernel’s block cache code.

  Bcachefs continues making progress with ambitions still to be mainlined in the kernel and being capable of competing ultimately with the likes of Btrfs and XFS. Today’s mailing list post offers a fresh look at the current happenings around this file-system. The core B-Tree code has been undergoing improvements with interior nodes now journalled, updating parent B-Tree node pointers on every B-Tree write, and other optimizations.

• Ryabitsev: lore+lei: part 1, getting started [LWN.net]

  Konstantin Ryabitsev introduces the “local email interface” (lei) functionality for the lore archive of kernel mailing lists…

• Konstantin Ryabitsev on lore+lei: part 1, getting started

  One of kernel developers’ perennial complaints is that they just get Too Much Damn Email. Nobody in their right mind subscribes to “the LKML” (linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org) because it acts as a dumping ground for all email and the resulting firehose of patches and rants is completely impossible for a sane human being to follow.

• Nintendo Switch Controller Driver, Sony PS5 Controller Improvements Come For Linux 5.16 – Phoronix

  The HID subsystem updates have been sent in for the ongoing Linux 5.16 merge window with some notable improvements for Linux gamers.

  As written about at the end of last month, the Nintendo Switch controller driver is finally landing! This kernel driver enables the Nintendo Switch Pro and Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers to now work with the mainline kernel. Both USB and Bluetooth connectivity is supported. Features like rumble mode, LEDs, and other functionality is working for these Joy-Cons / Pro controllers.

• Linux 5.16 Drops Support For MIPS Netlogic SoCs – Phoronix

  he Linux 5.16 kernel is doing away with hardware support for the MIPS-based Netlogic Microsystems SoCs, the network processors developed prior to being acquired by Broadcom a decade ago.

  The Linux kernel has supported the more than decade old Netlogic XLR/XLS and XLP processors used in the company’s former high-end network gear. However, as no current Linux kernel developers have access to Netlogic hardware and no clear signs there still are users out there with Netlogic SoCs and running up-to-date kernels, that Netlogic Microsystems support is being cleared out from the Linux kernel.

• Graphics Stack

  • What do you know about video decoding/encoding?

    A few weeks ago I watched Victor’s excellent talk on Vulkan Video. This made me question my skills in this area. I’m pretty vague on video processing hardware, I really have no understanding of H264 or any of the standards. I’ve been loosely following the Vulkan video group inside of Khronos, but I can’t say I’ve understood it or been useful.

    radeonsi has a gallium vaapi driver, that talks to firmware driver encoder on the hardware, surely copying what it is programming can’t be that hard. I got an mpv/vaapi setup running and tested some videos on that setup just to get comfortable. I looked at what sort of data was being pushed about.

    The thing is the firmware is doing all the work here, the driver is mostly just responsible for taking semi-parsed h264 bitstream data structures and giving them in memory buffers to the fw API. Then the resulting decoded image should be magically in a buffer.

    I then got the demo nvidia video decoder application mentioned in Victor’s talk.

    I ported the code to radv in a couple of days, but then began a long journey into the unknown. The firmware is quite expectant on exactly what it wants and when it wants it. After fixing some interactions with the video player, I started to dig.

    Now vaapi and DXVA (Windows) are context based APIs. This means they are like OpenGL, where you create a context, do a bunch of work, and tear it down, the driver does all the hw queuing of commands internally. All the state is held in the context. Vulkan is a command buffer based API. The application records command buffers and then enqueues those command buffers to the hardware itself.

  • RADV Seeing Early Experimenting With Vulkan Video Capabilities

    As another “first on RADV” for this Mesa Radeon Vulkan open-source driver compared to AMD’s official Vulkan Linux driver options, there is an early branch providing primitive, experimental support for Vulkan Video acceleration.

    Earlier this year the Vulkan Video extensions were published in provisional form. When it comes to Linux support so far there has just been the NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver exposing the video extensions, but now with a branched, not-yet-mainlined set of patches there is initial RADV support too.

  • AMDVLK 2021.Q4.1 Released As First Code Drop In Over A Month – Phoronix

    AMD traditionally has been updating its AMDVLK official open-source Vulkan driver sources publicly on a (bi)weekly basis, but that went off the wagon recently with not seeing any updates since the end of September. That changed this morning with the publishing of AMDVLK 2021.Q4.1.

    While more than one month has passed since the last AMDVLK code drop, AMDVLK 2021.Q4.1 isn’t all that exciting. AMDVLK 2021.Q4.1 updates against the Vulkan 1.2.195 headers, limits the memory size of the pipeline cache for 32-bit systems, and improves the shader cache hit rate. There are also a few fixes primarily about the Vulkan memory handling.

Benchmarks

• Intel UHD Graphics 770 / Alder Lake GT1 Linux Graphics Performance

  Published yesterday was the Core i5 12600K / Core i9 12900K Linux review looking at the exciting performance uplift provided by Alder Lake. One of the areas only talked about briefly in yesterday’s article were the UHD Graphics 770 found with these new desktop processors, due to time constraints with only having a few days so far for carrying out tests. Today the initial batch of UHD Graphics 770 / ADL-S GT1 Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks have wrapped up to show how the Intel graphics performance compares to prior generation Rocket Lake as well as AMD’s Ryzen 7 5700

Applications

• Create your own private Google Photo alternative with PhotoPrism

  If you are a professional or a hobby photographer, certainly you are using Google Photos or similar services to back up, organize and share your photo collections.

  Many open-source tools and self-hosted solutions can help you to achieve that, but today, we bring you the best there is: PhotoPrism. Let’s know why!

  PhotoPrism is a free open-source solution that helps you browse, organize and share your photo collection.

  PhotoPrism comes with built-in search support, RAW file format conversion, duplicate finder support, many videos, and file formats, and automatic image classification and location visualization support.

  While using PhotoPrism, you don’t need to worry about your data being collected or sent to big firms.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to Upgrade Fedora Linux to Latest Version

  Being able to upgrade Fedora from one version to the next is one of Fedora’s best features. Here’s how to do it easily.

  Fedora brings two major stable releases every year. If you’re using an older version, you can easily upgrade to the latest desktop or server edition. You benefit from getting the latest software, including new security patches, and all the upgraded technology that comes with a new release without having to resort to reinstalling and reconfiguring your system.

  There are two ways to upgrade to a new Fedora version, graphically or by using command line, and I will show you both ways here.

• How To Install Nano Text Editor on Debian 11 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nano Text Editor on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, GNU nano is one of the popular and easiest command line text editors used on many operating systems including Unix-based systems and BSD variants. Nano text editor supports syntax highlighting, spell checking, justifying, completion, undo/redo, and many 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 through the step-by-step installation of the nano text editor on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• How to Install GitLab on Rocky Linux 8

  GitLab is a free git repository management tool that allows you to create and manage git repositories. It provides tools for everything an open-source developer would need.

  Gitlab has everything that allows a developer to manage their project easily. You can create issues, track your bugs or comments related to your project, keep releases organized, and have much more useful features than the ones you find on GitHub. It integrates perfectly with other development tools like CodeShip, which makes deployments easy and fast.

  The difference between GitLab and GitHub is: GitHub is a web-based application while GitLab is an open-source application. GitHub is currently the most popular choice among developers.

  Both services are popular for hosting projects of any kind. However, GitHub is more popular among open-source projects. If you search on Google with “GitHub” or “GitLab”, GitLab will return almost four times fewer results than GitHub. This doesn’t mean that GitLab is not good. GitLab is the better choice for self-hosted private repositories.

• How to Start a Horizon Session from a Linux Command Line — Virtualization Review

  This is the third and final article in a series on starting the Horizon Client from the command line. In the first article, I walked through how to launch the Horizon Client to a Horizon desktop using a .bat file. In the second article, I showed how I added a .bat file to the taskbar and Start menu which could automatically log me in to a Horizon streaming application. Being that I was already down this rabbit hole, I figured it would be worthwhile to go one step further; in this article, I will go over how to start a Horizon session from the Linux command line, even if you are not on the GUI.

  If you are not familiar using the vmware-view command, I highly recommend first reading the articles mentioned above.

• How to create and attach an EBS (Elastic Block Storage) Volume to an EC2 Instance on AWS

  Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is a high-performance block storage service. It is designed for use with Elastic Cloud Compute i.e. EC2 for transactions and intensive workload. Relational and non-relational databases, enterprise applications, containerized applications, big data analytics engines, file systems, and media workflows are widely deployed on Amazon EBS. We can change types of EBS Volume, increase volume size without disrupting our applications. Amazon EBS volumes are easy to create, use, encrypt, and protect. Amazon EBS architecture offers reliability for mission-critical applications. Each volume is designed to protect against failures by replicating data on it within the Availability Zones. Amazon EBS enables us to increase storage without any disruption to our critical workloads. EBS is built to be secure for data compliance. Newly created EBS volumes can be encrypted by default with a single setting in our account.

• How to Install and Configure Ansible on Fedora 35

  Ansible is an open source IT automation engine that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and many other IT processes. It enables infrastructure as code. Ansible automates and simplifies repetitive, complex, and tedious operations. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows.

  Ansible itself is written in Python and has a fairly minimal learning curve. Ansible follows a simple setup procedure and does not depend on any additional software, servers or client daemons. It manages nodes over SSH and is parallel by default.

  In this guide, we are going to learn how to Install and Configure Ansible on Fedora 35.

• How to Install Python 2 and Python 3 on Fedora 35

  Python is among the most popular programming languages. Because of this, most scripts and tools used in linux are written on python. It iss often described as easy to learn and therefore often recommendd for beginners.

  In this guide, we are going to learn how to install Python 2 and python 3 in Fedora 35.

• pa-applet volume control for system tray

Games

• Liftoff: Micro Drones races off into Early Access on November 30

  Get ready for a race around various indoor arenas in the upcoming Liftoff: Micro Drones, as it’s now confirmed to be releasing in Early Access on November 30 with Linux support. This is the fifth game from LuGus Studios and their fourth to officially support Linux too.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• LXQt 1.0 Released For Lightweight Qt5 Desktop – Phoronix

  After eight years in development, the LXQt desktop that was created by the merging of the LXDE and Razor-qt open-source desktop projects is celebrating its v1.0 release.

  LXQt 1.0 targets the Qt 5.15 LTS toolkit and hasn’t yet been ported to Qt 6. LXQt 1.0 prides itself on improvements to its file manager and image viewer, a do-not-disturb mode for its desktop notifications, two new desktop themes, updated translations, and more.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Accent Color Folders in Plasma and Dolphin! – Kockatoo Tube

  • A Whole New KDE Bug Reporting Page! – Kockatoo Tube

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • #17 Hourly Backups · This Week in GNOME

    Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 29 to November 05.

Distributions

• How Open Source Operating Systems Can Be Ideal For Your Business

  In a world where Windows has become synonymous with PCs in the minds of the public, is there room for Open Source Operating Systems in your business? What many business leaders don’t realize is that even companies like Microsoft themselves are adopting Open Source technologies, mostly in a bid to tempt diehard Linux users to Microsoft. There’s many reasons that an Open Source operating system might be good for your business, however. Today we will take a look at a few of them.

• New Releases

  • New LinDoz Dev Build 05/11-2021

    We have just sent out a new Stable Development build of MakuluLinux LinDoz to testers, this ISO has also been shared with our Patreon Members. There have been significant updates to this new build, which has been marked as a stable build. You can read the Dev logs by Clicking here, We are one step closer to release. Additionally, should you wish to get access to early builds, you can always sign up to become a patreon member to help support the project, to sign up Click here to our Patreon page, and follow the sign up links.

• BSD

  • Project Trident, a Linux Distribution with BSD Roots, Shuts Down

    Project Trident, the Linux distribution that started life as a BSD operating system, is calling it quits, bringing to an end a desktop operating system saga that began with PC-BSD during the first decade of the 21st century.

    Some might remember that PC-BSD was an attempt to develop a GNU-based desktop oriented BSD operating system as an alternative to GNU/Linux. Based on FreeBSD, the OS even went so far as to develop its own desktop environment, Lumina, and for many years maintained booths at various Linux and open source conferences, where it handed out installation CDs of the operating system, hoping to get Linux users to give it a try.

    In 2016, the company that had owned PC-BSD since 2006, iXsystems, changed the OS’s name to TrueOS, and two years later dropped the desktop version to focus on servers and the enterprise, with the desktop being spun-off under a new moniker, Project Trident, that continued to produce a desktop distribution, but now based on TrueOS.

    This lasted for about a year, until in 2019 problems such as hardware compatibility and software availability (issues that were also once a roadblock to Linux desktop adoption) moved Project Trident’s developers to move the project away from BSD to adopt Void Linux, a scratch-built and systemd-free distro, as its base.

• Screenshots/Screencasts

  • Linux overview | Fedora 35 – Invidious

    In this video, I am going to show an overview of Fedora 35 and some of the applications pre-installed.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

  • Kernel Updates Available » PCLinuxOS

    The following kernels are available for PCLinuxOS. Kernel LTS 5.4.157. Kernel LTS 5.10.77 and Kernel 5.14.16.

  • KDE Plasma Applications » PCLinuxOS

    KDE Plasma Applications updated to 21.08.3 which is a service release to address a few bugs to the KDE Plasma programs.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2021/44 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)

    The weather is getting colder, days shorter, motivation to go outside is shrinking. Which leaves more time in front of the computer, helping Tumbleweed roll. And roll it did during the last week! We have published 6 snapshots (number 7 needed to be discarded due to vi installation issues). The snapshots released were numbered 1028, 1029, 1030, 1031, 1101, and 1102.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Beta — more features for users, fewer headaches for admins

    The launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 Beta today marks a bit of a change from previous releases. While it has many improvements and enhancements that customers have asked for, there are fewer changes that require admins and IT Ops to learn new ways of doing things.

    This means anyone already familiar with RHEL 8 should feel at home. Among new features are enhanced web console performance metrics, kernel live patching via the web console, and streamlined image building.

    Security and compliance improvements include smart card authentication via the web console so users can make use of smart card authentication to access remote hosts, additional security profiles to help compliance with standards like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and others. There’s also detailed logging of SSSD — the built-in enterprise single-sign-on framework — and integrated OpenSSL 3 cryptographic framework support.

  • DSE measures and improves DevOps

    Davie Street Enterprises is our fictional Red Hat customer that is working its way through real-world digital transformation problems, and this time around, it’s tackling measurement.

    Newly-promoted Director of Security Engineering Zachary L. Tureaud knew that Monique Wallace, Davie Street Enterprises’ (DSE) CIO, was impressed with the work he had led on solution design, but he still needed to ensure his DevSecOps vision was working. It wasn’t enough to just point to all the new tooling his team had put together.

    He needed to be able to demonstrate, quantifiably, that the changes were having the desired effect. Let’s see how he led DSE toward a DevSecOps practice using measured approaches from Google’s DevOps research and assessment team.

  • 4 soft skills for successful sysadmins | Enable Sysadmin

    To move up the IT ladder, it helps to be aware of where you need to improve. Half the battle is acknowledging your weaknesses, and the other half is looking for ways to improve them. Coachable people typically have a better chance to succeed in their careers. Most successful professionals do not do it alone; they have mentors to give them constructive feedback. Being coachable means you will never stop learning and improving.

    This article does not talk about coaching and mentorship, rather it highlights four soft skills I think help sysadmins further their IT careers. As a sysadmin, I use these skills almost daily to help me become a better communicator at work and make my professional life easier and more enjoyable.

  • Red Hat Forced To Hire Cheaper, Less Senior Engineers Amid Budget Freeze

    Next year, IBM’s Red Hat plans to cut back on hiring senior engineers in an effort aimed largely at controlling costs.

  • Red Hat to hire fewer senior engineers after budget frozen • The Register

  • 5 must-read Harvard Business Review articles

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

  • 3 skills of teams that succeed with containers | The Enterprisers Project

    Container adoption is a common step in the DevOps journey for many organizations. But as the number of containerized applications increases, teams become unable to manually sustain the operational processes required to manage and deploy them. Container orchestration via a Kubernetes platform enables them to automate many of these processes.

    After an organization adopts a container orchestration approach, human skills still play an important role in container success. At enterprise organizations, teams require specific skills to ensure that they can effectively problem-solve, make improvements, scale, monitor, maintain security, and more.

• Debian Family

  • Tails 4.24 Anonymous Linux OS Switches to Tor Browser 11, Improves Tor Connection Wizard

    After a two-day delay, Tails 4.24 is now available for download and ships with the latest and greatest Tor Browser 11.0 anonymous web browser, which is based on the Mozilla Firefox 91 ESR series and brings numerous new features and improvements.

    In fact, Tor Browser 11 has not even been officially released, it’s still in alpha development at the moment of writing, but the Tails developers decided to include it as the default web browser in this new release of their amnesic incognito live system.

Devices/Embedded

• AGX Xavier powers railway and self-driving car computers

  Adlink unveiled two edge AI systems that run Linux on a Jetson AGX Xavier: a rugged “AVA-RAGX” railway PC with 4x GbE with PoE, 4x USB, 2x M.2, and 2x CAN, and an “AVA-XV-V1” system for autonomous vehicles with 10GbE, GbE, and 8x GMSL2 camera ports.

  Adlink has been keeping us busy this week with new edge AI products that run Linux. After rolling out its Coffee Lake based AVA-3501 and AVA-3510 systems for autonomous vehicles, the company announced two new ROSCube-branded robotics controllers: a ROSCube Pico NPN equipped with a Jetson Nano or Jetson Xavier NX and a ROSCube Pico TGL built around Intel’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake Core processors.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Raspberry Pi DAQ HATs focus on analog

    Contec has added three new RPi HATs to it DAQ-oriented CPI Series for 12-bit, 8-ch. isolated analog in, 16-bit, 2-ch. isolated analog out, and 32-bit Up/Down counter. There is also a DIN-rail kit for its HATs and some recent “DX” Jetson edge AI systems.

    We missed Contec’s April announcement of its CPI Series HAT Size Cards for digital acquisition (DAQ), having forgotten entirely about the Japanese embedded firm, which was founded in 1975. We had to go back to our LinuxDevices archives for our last Contec report from 2011, about an Atom D510 based BX-956 embedded computer. We heard about their latest round of CPI Series Raspberry Pi HATs from this Nov. 1 MarketScreener announcement. Farther below, we also look at some recent DX-branded embedded computers based on Jetson Nano and Xavier NX.

  • TQ Embedded launches NXP i.MX RT1170 SoC module and SBC – CNX Software

    TQ Embedded (aka TQ) has just announced the availability of the TQMa117xL system-on-chip module based on NXP i.MX RT1170 crossover processor family, and as well as MBa117xL single board computer (SBC) based on the 31×31 mm module.

    TQMa117xL’s small size has been achieved thanks to a 277-pad LGA design, with the module still integrating LP-SDRAM, Quad-SPI NOR flash and EPROM, a PMIC, as well as an optional security chip.

  • Ubuntu Desktop and Raspberry PI 4: fast Home Computer Booting From SSD

    With remote activities increased due to pandemic, a lot of families needed more home computer to manage smart working, school sessions and family meetings. Ubuntu on Raspberry PI can be a fast solution for your cheap desktop computer, but only adopting certain tricks

  • Prepare For Wildfire Season With an Air Quality Monitor

    For some reason, wildfire seasons in Australia, North America, and other places around the world seem to happen more and more frequently and with greater and greater fervor. Living in these areas requires special precautions, even for those who live far away from the fires. If you’re not sure if the wildfires are impacting your area or not, one of the tools you can build on your own is an air quality meter like [Costas Vav] shows us in this latest build.

    The air quality indicator is based around an Adafruit Feather RP2040 which is in turn based on the 32-bit Cortex M0+ dual core processor. This makes for a quite capable processor in a small package, and helps accomplish one of the design goals of a rapid startup time. Another design goal was to use off-the-shelf components so that anyone could easily build one for themselves, so while the Feather is easily obtained the PMS5003 PM2.5 air quality sensor needed to be as well. From there, all of the components are wrapped up in an easily-printed enclosure and given a small (and also readily-available) OLED screen.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Google Pixel 6 Pro vs Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra: Which Android phone wins? | Tom’s Guide

  • Some Google Pixel phones suffer from battery drain with Android 12

  • 5 Android 12 features you can bring to any phone today | Computerworld

  • Moto E30 unveiled: a Moto E40 but with Android 11 Go Edition – GSMArena.com news

  • The 7 Best Mileage Tracker Apps for Android

  • The most entertaining basketball games for your Android device

  • Android Circuit: Stunning Galaxy S22 Ultra Leaks, Powerful Pixel 6 Pro Tensor Benchmarks, Surface Duo 2 Surprise

  • Xiaomi 12 Leak Could Pioneer the Snapdragon 898 in Next Android Flagship Smartphone | Tech Times

  • Android: how to find your cell phone by clapping – Market Research Telecast

  • How to Print Wirelessly on Android with Mopria Print Service – Phandroid

  • Portugal: NOS launches Android NVIDIA Shield TV |

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• 16 Top Open-source web-based photo manipulation and image editors [Ed: Some of these are proprietary, so this title is misleading]

  Photo manipulation and image editing programs like Photoshop, and GIMP are often desktop applications. However, photo editing can also be done through the web browser.

  Many web-based services offer photo editing for a price, which requires only an internet connection, a web browser, and an account.

  Although they seem limited compared to desktop programs, web-based image editing programs have proven to be reliable for many users.

  In this article, we present a collection of free web-based open-source image editing solutions that you can download, install and run on your local machine or server.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox Makes Changes to Add-on Policy to Better Protect Users

      No big deal, Philipp Kewisch, the add-ons product operations manager at Firefox’s parent Mozilla, said in a blog announcing the upcoming changes on Wednesday. The organization is mostly clarifying their add-on policies to make them easier for developers to understand — although there are a few small changes in the works.

      “While this has resulted in a substantially rewritten and reorganized document, the policy changes are modest and unlikely to surprise anyone,” he said.

    • Firefox 91-94 & Additional visual and ergonomic tweaks

      Every morning, I wake up, look in the mirror, and ask myself: Am I a hipster? And since the answer is always categorically no, I know that my choices in life will be superior, aesthetically and functionally. Which meant that when I saw my Firefox 78 ESR transform into Firefox 91 ESR with its pointless Proton interface, I knew it was going to be a bad day.

      Now, Firefox is my default browser of choice on any platform, has always been and hopefully will always be, but I refuse to succumb to hipsterology trends. I’m neither a child nor do I live near the Pacific Ocean coast. Hence, clarity, contrast, good clear colors. I’ve already shown you how to undo most of Proton nonsense in a dedicated tutorial, now I’d like to give you a few more tips. Follow me.

    • Linux Release Roundup #21.45: Linux Kernel 5.15, Fedora 35, Firefox 94, and More Releases

      The well-known open-source web browser has received yet another update that contains some major features.

      Notable features include tweaks for faster performance, improved warnings on exit, and a bug fix for Ubuntu. Most importantly, the OpenGL EGL backend is now enabled by default.

      You should find all the technical details in the official release notes.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • LibreOffice 7.3 Alpha1 is ready for testing

    LibreOffice 7.3 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2022 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 7.3 Alpha1 the first pre-release since the development of version 7.3 started in mid June, 2021. Since then, 4764 commits have been submitted to the code repository and more than 760 bugs were set to FIXED in Bugzilla. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

    LibreOffice 7.3 Alpha1 can be downloaded from here for Linux, MacOS and Windows, and it can be installed alongside the standard version.

    In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ).

  • Nine more videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2021

    Here are some more videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2021! Check out the playlist, using the button in the top-right – or scroll down for links to individual videos:

    Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.

• FSF

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Luis Villa: Editing a background check policy

      A legal document is, in many cases, a part of a company’s user experience. As such, it needs to be vetted for consistency with the rest of the software, just as you’d vet any other part of the UX.

      This is hard, and easy to screw up, because let’s face it—who likes reading and re-reading legal documents? Not even lawyers, if we’re being honest. This particular document screws this up in two ways.

      First, the tool (very correctly!) encourages companies not to do a background check for every position, since that introduces a significant bias against people who may have been rehabilitated and should have a fair chance at employment. But the legal document says very plainly that “all offers of employment are contingent on … a background check” (emphasis mine). The legal terms must be brought into alignment with the software’s reality.

      Similarly, one of the benefits of this tool is that it takes care of the paperwork for you—without pens and paper. And yet the legal document says that a “signed, written consent will be obtained … in compliance with … law”. Now, good American lawyers know that under the E-SIGN Act of 2000, lots of digital things are “signatures” for the purposes of American law, but most people don’t know that. Good drafting will avoid confusing these non-lawyers by simply saying the consent will be “explicit” and recorded by the service.

      [...]

      I continue to believe that many legal documents should at least be edited (not necessarily finalized) in a Q&A style—in other words, changing each section header to a question, and making sure the section actually answers the question. I talked a bit more about that in this post about doing it for a draft of the Mozilla Public License.

• Programming/Development

  • PHPStan Reached Version 1.0 After 6 Years of Development

    PHPStan is a static analyzer for PHP focused on finding bugs in your code without actually running it. PHPStan 1.0 finally has been released, so let’s see what’s new.

    Introducing static code analysis into your process should improve the quality of your code and make the QA process more efficient due to finding errors earlier on.

    PHPStan is an open source tool with 10.4K GitHub stars and 737 GitHub forks. It is probably the most popular static analysis system for PHP projects, which finds bugs in your codebase by inspecting the source files. In other words, you don’t need to run your code or manually write tests to discover issues.

  • Dark theme for Qt online documentation

    Out of all Qt’s subdomains, https://doc.qt.io sees the most views and time spent browsing. Many users find a darker color scheme easier on eyes, especially during late-night coding sessions.

  • Perl/Raku

    • My Favorite Modules: Term::ReadLine::Perl | Tom Wyant [blogs.perl.org]

      Term::ReadLine is a core module (since Perl 5.002) that provides an extremely limited text interface of the prompt-and-type variety. Its main virtue is that you can add a back end which gives it things like command history, editing, and completion.

      The back ends live in the Term::ReadLine::* name space, and you can control which one you get by defining the PERL_RL environment variable as documented at Term::ReadLine. If this is not defined, various undocumented things are tried; if none works you get the bundled minimal interface, Term::ReadLine::Stub.

      The preferred back end (at least, according to Bundle::CPAN as of this writing) is Term::ReadLine::Perl. This is a shy, retiring module, with no POD documentation at all, which provides readline-style history, editing, and completion. By default the only completion you get is file name completion, but with some work you can expand this to do whatever you can figure out.

    • Should it mutate or not? YES! | Playing Perl 6␛b6xA Raku

      On Discord Hydrazer was looking for a list concatenation operator. That leaves the question if it should mutate like Array.push or return a new list of Slips.

    • TIMTOWTDItime | Playing Perl 6␛b6xA Raku

      On Discord flirora wished for a way to merge list elements conditional. In this instance the condition is that any element that starts with a space is part of a group.

  • Rust

    • View types for Rust

      I wanted to write about an idea that’s been kicking around in the back of my mind for some time. I call it view types. The basic idea is to give a way for an &mut or & reference to identify which fields it is actually going to access. The main use case for this is having “disjoint” methods that don’t interfere with one another.

Science

• Brain Implant Offers Artificial Vision To The Blind | Hackaday

  Nothing makes you appreciate your vision more than getting a little older and realizing that it used to be better and that it will probably get worse. But imagine how much more difficult it would be if you were totally blind. That was what happened to [Berna Gomez] when, at 42, she developed a medical condition that destroyed her optic nerves leaving her blind in a matter of days and ending her career as a science teacher. But thanks to science [Gomez] can now see, at least to some extent. She volunteered after 16 years to have a penny-sized device with 96 electrodes implanted in her visual cortex. The research is in the Journal of Clinical Investigation and while it is a crude first step, it shows lots of promise and uses some very novel techniques to overcome certain limitations.

• Luster Lost

  There’s this effect I often refer to when talking about digital photography. Old photographs, for whatever reason, tend to age themselves significantly over time, as the formats reflect older processes for making pictures, as well as the general effects of age. But digital photos, while not nearly as high a resolution as a modern pro-quality camera can take, do not age themselves quite so quickly. So as a result, pictures on Flickr that are nearly 20 years old at this point often manage to look like they were, for all intents and purposes, taken yesterday. As time goes on, the baseline for quality improves. Same with music: A pop song from 1998 generally doesn’t draw too much attention to its age on modern radio compared to a song from 1988, in part because digital recording formats like ProTools had become common by that point.

Hardware

• Back-to-the-Office Ergo Brings A Bit Of Home Sweet Home | Hackaday

  We sure do love a good one-piece split keyboard, and it’s not just because you never have to worry about the halves drifting too far apart throughout the day, though that’s a big plus. For one thing, the angles are always just right without having to mess with anything, so muscle memory gets you back to the home row every time. Usually, the only thing missing from these mono-block splits is the num pad. Well, not on the SuperLyra.

  This is [Malevolti]’s back-to-the-office build, and it’s sure to start a few conversations. While we don’t have a lot of details, there will be plenty forthcoming on the Black Cat Plasticworks website. As soon as next year, [Malevolti] plans to sell fully-assembled SuperLyras, kits, and bare-bones PCBs. We really appreciate that it allows for either MX-type switches or Chocs, depending on the hot swap sockets installed.

• Pulp-Molding: A Use For Cardboard Confetti | Hackaday

  We’re pretty sure that we don’t have to tell you how great cardboard is. You probably sing the praises yourself and use it for everything from a work surface protective layer to a prototype of your next amazing build. But if you still find yourself flush with cardboard even after all that, here’s one thing you can do with all those pieces that are too small to use for anything else– chuck them in an old blender, whip up some cardboard pulp, and press that gunk into some 3D-printed molds.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Security

    • Security updates for Friday

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (python3.5, redis, and udisks2), Fedora (rust), openSUSE (binutils, java-1_8_0-openj9, and qemu), Oracle (firefox and httpd), Red Hat (thunderbird), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), and SUSE (binutils, qemu, and systemd).

    • John the Ripper: Penetration Testing Tool Review

      Passwords are a weak link in enterprise security. As users struggle with requirements for complex passwords and password managers, bad habits multiply: post-it notes on screens, Word docs with passwords listed, retaining default passwords, reused passwords, and other workarounds.

      That’s why cyber criminals go after passwords so often. Once a hacker steals credentials, they can enter sensitive systems or wait in ambush to stage a devastating attack against a prized asset. And because users tend to reuse passwords, they attempt to crack other systems and websites with them too in password spraying and credential stuffing attacks. It’s enough to make you want to go passwordless.

      Penetration testing, therefore, pays close attention to password cracking. John the Ripper is a free, easy-to-use, open-source tool that takes the best aspects of various password crackers and unites them into one package. As such it can be harnessed by pen testers to detect weak passwords and find a way into a system or database.

    • Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 190 released

      The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 190. This version includes the following changes:

      [ Chris Lamb ]
      * Don't raise a traceback if we cannot de-marshal Python bytecode to support
        Python 3.7 loading newer .pyc files.
        (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#284)
      * Fix Python tests under Python 3.7 with file 5.39+.
      
      [ Vagrant Cascadian ]
      * Skip Python bytecode testing when "file" is older than 5.39.
      
      [ Roland Clobus ]
      * Detect whether the GNU_BUILD_ID field has been modified.
      

    • Vulnerability in Linux kernel could let hackers remotely take over systems

      Security researchers have discovered a heap overflow vulnerability in the Transparent Inter-Process Communication (TIPC) module of the kernel of Linux operating systems. Hackers could exploit the vulnerability locally or remotely within a network to gain kernel privileges.

    • This Week in Security: The Battle Against Ransomware, Unicode, Discourse, and Shrootless [Ed: Microsoft Windows TCO]

      We talk about ransomware gangs quite a bit, but there’s another shadowy, loose collection of actors in that arena. Emsisoft sheds a bit of light on the network of researchers and law enforcement that are working behind the scenes to frustrate ransomware campaigns.

      Darkside is an interesting case study. This is the group that made worldwide headlines by hitting the Colonial Pipeline, shutting it down for six days. What you might not realize is that the Darkside ransomware software had a weakness in its encryption algorithms, from mid December 2020 through January 12, 2021. Interestingly, Bitdefender released a decryptor on January 11. I haven’t found confirmation, but the timing seems to indicate that the release of the decryptor triggered Darkside to look for and fix the flaw in their encryption. (Alternatively, it’s possible that it was released in response the fix, and time zones are skewing the dates.)

      Emsisoft is very careful not to tip their hand when they’ve found a vulnerability in a ransomware. Instead, they have a network of law enforcement and security professionals that they share information with. This came in handy again when the Darkside group was spun back up, under the name BlackMatter.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Homebrewed Voice Assistant Keeps An Eye On Air Quality | Hackaday

        The system had limited goals compared to commercial competitors. [7402] was more than happy to deal with a limited vocabulary of understanding as a trade off for privacy. It’s all built around a Raspberry Pi Zero, which runs the Julius speech recognition library. Ultrasonic sensors are used to only activate the device when a person leans in and directly addresses the system.

Defence/Aggression

• Statement on the implications of the ongoing situation in the Sudan – Invidious

  ORAL STATEMENT 32nd Special Session of the U.N. Human Rights Council on the implications of the ongoing situation in the Sudan Delivered by: Marwa Fatafta, MENA Policy Manager, Access Now

Environment

• Biden announces new methane rules and launches global pledge to slash planet-warming emissions

  President Joe Biden targeted planet-warming methane emissions on Tuesday from the UN climate summit, announcing strong new US regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency and launching a Global Methane Pledge, in partnership with the European Union, that has been signed by around 100 countries.

  At the center of Biden’s US methane strategy is a rule from the EPA that would push oil and gas companies to more accurately detect, monitor and repair methane leaks from new and existing wells, pipelines and other equipment. The agency estimates the rule would cut 41 million tons of methane emissions from 2023 to 2035 — more greenhouse gas than all the carbon dioxide emitted by all US passenger cars and commercial planes in 2019.

Finance

• How a Squid Game Crypto Scam Got Away With Millions | WIRED

  On the front lines of the $SQUID “rug pull” that left investors in the lurch.

• Squid Game Cryptocurrency Scammers Make Off With $2.1 Million

• UN-Backed Banker Alliance Announces “Green” Plan to Transform the Global Financial System

  On Wednesday, an “industry-led and UN-convened” alliance of private banking and financial institutions announced plans at the COP26 conference to overhaul the role of global and regional financial institutions, including the World Bank and IMF, as part of a broader plan to “transform” the global financial system. The officially stated purpose of this proposed overhaul, per alliance members, is to promote the transition to a “Net-Zero” economy. However, the group’s proposed “reimagining” of international financial institutions (IFIs), according to their recently published “progress report”, would also move to merge these institutions with the private banking interests that compose the alliance; create a new system of “global financial governance”; and erode national sovereignty among developing countries by forcing them to establish business environments deemed “friendly” to the interests of alliance members. In other words, the powerful banking interests that compose this group are pushing to recreate the entire global financial system for their benefit under the guise of promoting sustainability.

  This alliance, called the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), was launched in April by John Kerry, US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change; Janet Yellen, US Secretary of the Treasury and former chair of the Federal Reserve; and Mark Carney, the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance and former chair of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada. Carney, who is also the UK Prime Minister’s Finance Advisor for the COP26 conference, currently co-chairs the alliance with US billionaire and former Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg.

  [...]

  With the UN now essentially a vehicle for the promotion of stakeholder capitalism, it is only fitting that it would “convene” and support the efforts of a group like GFANZ to extend that stakeholder capitalist model to other institutions involved in global governance, specifically global financial governance. Allowing GFANZ members, i.e. many of the largest private banks and financial institutions in the world, to fuse with MDBs, remake the “global financial governance system” and gain increased control over political decisions in the emerging world is a banker’s dream come true. To get this far, all they have needed is to convince enough of the world’s population that such shifts are necessary due to the perceived urgency of climate change and the need to rapidly decarbonize the economy. Yet, if put into practice, what will result is hardly a “greener” world, but a world dominated by a small financial and technocratic elite who are free to profit and pillage from both “natural capital” and “human capital” as they see fit.

  Today, MDBs are used as “instruments of power” that utilize debt to force developing nations to implement policies that benefit foreign interests, not their national interests. If GFANZ gets their way, the MDBs of tomorrow will be used to essentially eliminate national sovereignty, privatize the “natural assets” (e.g. ecosystems, ecological processes) of the developing world and force increasingly technocratic policies designed by global governance institutions and think tanks on ever more disenfranchised populations.

  Though GFANZ has cloaked itself in lofty rhetoric of “saving the planet,” their plans ultimately amount to a corporate-led coup that will make the global financial system even more corrupt and predatory and further reduce the sovereignty of national governments in the developing world.

Desktop/Laptop

• Why I use Linux to manage my yoga studio

  When I started my first yoga studio in 2000, computer technology was way out of my wheelhouse. In fact, for the first two years, I didn’t even have a website. I did everything from scratch, including collecting emails, sending newsletters, marketing events, and corresponding with my student base. I was extremely content operating my business that way; my focus was on teaching yoga and creating community.

  Since then, I have gone on quite a journey in learning to use the right technology to support my business goals. In this article, I want to give you real-life evidence that Linux is a viable operating system (OS) and share some of the ways that switching to Linux has helped my business thrive. I’m here to testify how much easier Linux has made my work life and my personal life.

Applications

• Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft Visio

  Microsoft’s stance for decades was that community creation and sharing of communal code (later to be known as free and open source software) represented a direct attack on their business. Their battle with Linux stretches back many years. Back in 2001, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously tarnished Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”. Microsoft also initiated its “Get the Facts” marketing campaign from mid-2003, which specifically criticized Linux server usage, total cost of ownership, security, indemnification and reliability. The campaign was widely criticized for spreading misinformation.

  However, in recent years, there has been a partial shift by Microsoft to embrace the open source software paradigm. For example, some of their code is open sourced. Examples include Visual Studio Code, .NET Framework, Atom, and PowerShell. They have also made investments in Linux development, server technology and organizations including the Linux Foundation and Open Source Initiative. They have made acquisitions such as Xamarin to help mobile app development, and GitHub a hugely popular code repository for open source developers. And they have partnered with Canonical, the developers of the popular Ubuntu distro. But many developers remain hugely sceptical about Microsoft and their apparent shift to embrace open source.

• HP Linux Printer Driver HPLIP 3.21.10 Adds Debian 11, Zorin OS 16 & Ubuntu 21.10 Support

  HPLIP, HP’s inkjet and laser printers Linux driver, released version 3.21.10 with new devices and Linux distributions support.

  Zorin OS, the modern Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, is finally supported by HPLIP’s official .run installer. And, it also adds Debian 11 and Ubuntu 21.10 support.

Instructionals/Technical

• Hairsplitting the Pseudo-Element Syntax

  Fast forward a few years, I remember reading an article stating that single-colon notation was some kind of backwards-compatibility artifact of the standardization process. Both were valid, but double-colon was “more right”.

• Ansible “pull mode” or “Runner” as fail-safe rollback methods

  Recall that “pull mode” means a local installation of Ansible on each node. Each node subscribes to a “repository” (of any type) and periodically pulls configuration files and playbooks from that repository, and runs them locally, as in

  ansible-playbook -c local playbook.yml

  Thanks to the fact that “pull mode” is less of a product but more of a concept everything can be fine-tuned however I wish to do this.

• How To Install EPrints on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install EPrints on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, EPrints is a free and open-source software for document management systems, which are more commonly implemented as university repositories that store scientific work documents such as theses, theses, dissertations, and research journals.

  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 EPrints on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• How To Install RabbitMQ on Debian 11 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install RabbitMQ on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, RabbitMQ is a free, open-source, and one of the most popular message broker software. It supports multiple messaging protocols and uses plugins to communicate with popular messaging solutions like MQTT. RabbitMQ supports multiple messaging protocols. RabbitMQ can be easily deployed in distributed and federated configurations to meet high-scale, high-availability requirements.

  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 the RabbitMQ on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• How To Install Ubuntu 21.10 Impish Indri to USB Flash Drive with Dualboot, BIOS and UEFI Methods

  This tutorial will explain how to install Ubuntu 21.10 into your computer. The result of this tutorial is your computer will run Ubuntu operating system and can be viewed as alternative to Windows or macOS. This installation is flexible, as you may choose to install normally (to the internal hard disk) or externally (to USB flash drive or external HDD) in either BIOS Legacy-MBR or UEFI-GPT mode, for either dualboot or singleboot purpose. You will start everything by downloading the operating system itself, make required preparations, make a bootable medium, then booting and finishing the installation procedures step by step. Good luck!

• How To Upgrade To Fedora 35 From Fedora 34 – OSTechNix

  After months of development, Fedora 35 final version has been released on November 2, 2021. If you’re already using Fedora 34, you can now safely upgrade to Fedora 35 desktop or server edition for latest features, performance and stability improvements as described in the following steps.

• How to Install FTP Server With ProFTP on Ubuntu 20.04 – ByteXD

  ProFTPD is a highly enriched flavor of FTP server. It is available on Linux and Unix-like machines but can also be used in Windows via Cygwin. It is free and open-source software.

  Its environment exposes a person to many configuration options and a person who has used FTP before on Unix system will learn this version very easily.

  It was released and distributed under the GNU Public License. This FTP version is very versatile because it can support TLS (SSL) for a secure connection.

• How to Install Prometheus on Ubuntu 20.04

  Prometheus is a free and open-source monitoring and alerting tool that was initially used for monitoring metrics at SoundCloud back in 2012. It is written in Go programming language.

  Prometheus monitors and records real-time events in a time-series database. Since then it has grown in leaps and bounds and had been adopted by many organizations to monitor their infrastructure metrics. Prometheus provides flexible queries and real-time alerting which helps in quick diagnosis and troubleshooting of errors.

• How to Install Puppet 7 Server on Rocky Linux/Centos 8

  In this guide, we are going to install Puppet 7 Server Open Source in Rocky Linux/Centos 8 Server. We will set up a Puppet server and an agent and install nginx using puppet manifests.

  Puppet is a software configuration management tool which includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. It is a model-driven solution that requires limited programming knowledge to use. Puppet operates in an agent-master architecture, in which a master node controls configuration information for a fleet of managed agent nodes.

  Puppet is distributed in several packages. These include puppetserver, puppet-agent and puppetdb. Puppet Server controls the configuration information for one or more managed agent nodes. PuppetDB is where the data generated by Puppet is stored.

• How to Install and Use Docker on AlmaLinux 8 – VITUX

  Docker is a powerful platform for developers and sysadmins that simplifies the process of deploying applications inside software containers. Containers allow you to package up an application with all its parts (code, runtime, system tools, system libraries – anything that would usually go in /usr/bin, or /usr/lib) so it will run consistently on any Linux machine. This includes the operating system kernel and other shared resources such as memory and disk space. Docker provides a portable environment for both development and production environments. You can create a container from one set of files that works anywhere else without having to worry about dependencies being different on each new server.

  Docker CE is useful for Linux users because it helps them in creating their own environments without affecting other users on the system. It also automates deployment, which eliminates configuration errors and makes it easy to manage projects across teams of developers who are working together on software applications.

  In this guide, we will take a look at how we can install Docker CE to create and manage development environments on an AlmaLinux 8 system.

• How to install aapanel 6 on Fedora 34 – NextGenTips

  In this tutorial guide we will learn how to install aapanel in Fedora 34.

  Aapanel is a free open source hosting control panel, it manages the servers through graphical user interface. It is an international version of BAOTA. aapanel provides one click function such as one click LAMP install, one click deployment of SSL, remote backup etc. It is a server software system that offers ideal support for Linux systems.

• Improve UDP performance in RHEL 8.5 | Red Hat Developer

  If you have ever tested throughput performance in a container deployment, you know that the UDP protocol is (a lot) slower than TCP. How can that be possible? After all, the TCP protocol is extremely complex, whereas UDP is simple and carries less per-packet overhead. This article will explain the not-so-dark magic beyond the superior TCP throughput performance and how recent improvements in the Linux kernel can close that gap. You’ll also learn how to use all these shiny new features in the upcoming version 8.5 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to boost UDP throughput in container deployments by a factor of two or more.

• Convert Audio File Formats on Ubuntu with SoundConverter – Technastic

  In this tutorial, we discuss how you can convert audio files into different formats on Ubuntu with a neat tool called SoundConverter. Before the rise of music streaming services, people bought their music DRM-free.

• Proxmox VE Full Course: Class 16 – High Availability – Invidious

  In the final episode of LearnLinuxTV’s Proxmox VE tutorial series, we explore the concept of high availability. This will ensure that our most important virtual machines are always running, even if one of the nodes in our cluster stops responding.

• Fedora Post Install Setup Util – Security and Linux

  A number of years ago I shared a script to help with getting your system up and running with software and tweaks when you had freshly installed Fedora (F27 I think it was at the time)

  Looking around on the internet I found that a lot of Fedorians were asking the same questions “How do I install this?” “How do I get that?” So I thought to myself I’d create a revamped version to help with this so it’s all in one place.

  I mainly use it for myself but I thought I’d release it to the public with the hope that some of you also find it useful.

  So here it is.

Games

• Watch this before you buy your Steam Deck. – Invidious

• Total War: WARHAMMER III launches February 17 – 2022, Linux port soon after | GamingOnLinux

  Creative Assembly has now confirmed that Total War: WARHAMMER III will be officially launching on February 17, 2022 but if you’re waiting on the Linux port it will be a little after.

  This was confirmed yesterday, with their official FAQ being updated to note it will “also be available as close to launch day as possible on macOS and Linux thanks to our friends at Feral Interactive – we’ll be confirming exactly when closer to release day”.

• Discover the Top 14 New Games to Play on Linux With Proton Since October 2021 – Boiling Steam

  We are back with our usual monthly update! Boiling Steam looks at the latest data dumps from ProtonDB to give you a quick list of new games that work (pretty much?) perfectly with Proton since October 2021 – all of them work out of the box or well enough with tweaks…

• OpenMW brings many new features for Morrowind in the new 0.47.0 release | GamingOnLinux

  Rejoice RPG fans! There’s a fresh and fancy new release of OpenMW, the free and open source game engine reimplementation for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. One of the best around, this enables you to play Morrowind on modern platforms (like Linux!) easily with many enhancements over the original while still keeping the original gameplay.

  Over a year since the last release this brings with it absolutely tons of bugs solved for the game and the editor, while also bringing with it brand new features. A fair amount of the game engine features improved and background things, some of which users won’t directly notice but keep OpenMW running smoothly.

• Proton Experimental gets Disgaea 4 & Mafia II working plus CEG startup improvements | GamingOnLinux

  More quick fixes coming in recently for Proton Experimental to get even more Windows games to play nicely on Linux with this compatibility layer. Note: to play games using CEG DRM, you should opt into the Steam Client Beta.

  Released November 4, the latest update to Proton Experimental added in improved support for Mafia II (Classic), Disgaea 4 Complete+ and Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered. On top of that, work more went into improving the new support for CEG DRM on Linux with Proton. Now you should see an improvement to the startup time of games using it, pushing it another step forwards towards being ready to roll out in a stable version of Proton.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• LXQt 1.0.0 Desktop Environment Released After 8 Years of Development, This Is What’s New

  After more than eight years of development and six months after LXQt 0.17.0, LXQt 1.0.0 is here as the first mature version of the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment, the successor of the lightweight LXDE desktop environment, but written in Qt rather than GTK.

  As you can imagine, LXQt 1.0.0 is packed with numerous new features, such as a Do-Not-Disturb mode in LXQt Desktop Notifications, a new LXQt Panel plugin called “Custom Command” that lets you run a custom command, as well as the ability to save and load Qt palettes in LXQt Appearance Configuration.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Gear 21.08.3 Released as the Last in the Series, KDE Gear 21.12 Arrives December 9th

    KDE Gear 21.08.3 is here about a month after KDE Gear 21.08.2 and it brings one last batch of bug fixes and improvements for those of you using the KDE Gear 21.08 software suite. A total of 74 changes are included in this last KDE Gear 21.08 point release across several KDE apps and core libraries.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME 41.1 Improves the New Calls and Connections Apps, Nautilus, Software, and More

    GNOME 41.1 is the first point release of the GNOME 41 desktop environment, which introduced a new Calls and Connections apps, a redesigned Software app, new multitasking and mobile connection settings, and enhanced power management features.

    Now, GNOME 41.1 builds on these changes and brings a first batch of improvements that update the GNOME Software package manager to allow searching for GNOME extensions, improve codec installation process, add the new GNOME Circle apps to the featured carousel, improve metadata support for Snap apps, and much more.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • The Raspberry Pi Build HAT and LEGO® components at our CoderDojo

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Google sets the record straight on which Pixel phones will get the Android 12L beta

  • OnePlus OxygenOS 12 (Android 12) update tracker: Eligible devices, release date

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

  • How To Add & Customize Widgets To Your Home Screen On Android 12

  • Google lets Android apps use third-party payments in South Korea

  • 10 Top Educational Android Apps in 2021 | LMSPulse

  • Best Android Phones for 2021 | Popular Science

  • Best Black Friday Android smartwatch deals | Android Central

  • Best Android app deals of the day: Vandals, QR and Barcode Scanner PRO, more – 9to5Toys

  • 7 Best Android Icon Packs to Customize Your Android Experience in 2021 – TechPP

  • How to create a signature for PDF documents on an Android phone – The Verge

  • The Latest Android Malware is Extremely Dangerous, Here’s Why / Digital Information World

  • Do Beats Fit Pro Work With Android? What You Need To Know

  • Backbone One’s Gaming Controller Now Supports Android

  • Android Auto does not appear in the Pixel 6′s app launcher – 9to5Google

  • Android Users Alert! Delete THESE 151 apps from your phones immediately: Here’s why | Technology News | Zee News

  • Netflix’s mobile games for Android users: Here’s how it works | Technology News,The Indian Express

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Why browsers are driven to offer some degree of remote control

    The bigger problem is your web browser profile, which almost always contains things that your browser will want to update (such as your history and your current cookies). If there are multiple copies of your browser running they all need to coordinate access to your profile; they need to carefully lock it for updates, and probably to notify each other that important things have been updated. Essentially it’s a shared database, and shared databases are pain points. Given the locking, it’s also a fine way for one copy of the browser to cause another copy to perform badly, as the other copy waits for an update lock or to pick up new things or whatever.

  • Mozilla

    • Thunderbird Email Client » PCLinuxOS

      Mozilla Thunderbird is a standalone mail and newsgroup client. Updated to version 91.3.0.

    • Firefox Browser » PCLinuxOS

      Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. Updated to version 94.0.1.

    • Firefox fixed with patch for libdrm

      For EasyOS 3.x there is a firefox SFS, which runs real nice. Running the latest Easy 3.1.7 (not released) with pulseaudio, starting firefox from a terminal…

      [...]

      This build of EasyOS is using pulseaudio. Although there is only the one instance of the daemon, running as root, it is still usable by non-root users (if they belong to ‘audio’ group), via the socket /tmp/pulse-socket…

    • New Release: Tor Browser 11.0a10 (Windows/macOS/Linux)

      Tor Browser 11.0a10 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

      Note: This is an alpha release, an experimental version for users who want to help us test new features. For everyone else, we recommend downloading the latest stable Windows/macOS/Linux release instead.

• FSF

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Breaking down Apollo Federation’s anti-FOSS corporate gaslighting

      Gather around, my friends, for there is another company which thinks we are stupid and we enjoy having our faces spat in. Apollo Federation has announced that they will switch to a non-free license. Let’s find out just how much the Elastic license really is going to “protect the community” like they want you to believe.

      Let’s start by asking ourselves, objectively, what practical changes can we expect from a switch from the MIT license to the Elastic License? Both licenses are pretty short, so I recommend quickly reading them yourself before we move on.

• Programming/Development

  • Python

    • An oral history of Bank Python

      Today will I take you through the keyhole to look at a group of software systems not well known to the public, which I call “Bank Python”. Bank Python implementations are effectively proprietary forks of the entire Python ecosystem which are in use at many (but not all) of the biggest investment banks. Bank Python differs considerably from the common, or garden-variety Python that most people know and love (or hate).

      Thousands of people work on – or rather, inside – these systems but there is not a lot about them on the public web. When I’ve tried to explain Bank Python in conversations people have often dismissed what I’ve said as the ravings of a swivel-eyed loon. It all just sounds too bonkers.

      I will discuss a fictional, amalgamated, imaginary Bank Python system called “Minerva”. The names of subsystems will be changed and though I’ll try to be accurate I will have to stylise some details and – of course: I don’t know every single detail. I might even make the odd mistake. Hopefully I get the broad strokes.

    • Python 3 forced its own hand so that standard input had to be Unicode

      All of this fits with Python 3′s general philosophy, of course. Python 3 really wants the world of text to be Unicode, and that includes input and output. Providing standard input as bytes and making it easy to process those bytes without ever turning them into Unicode would invite a return to the Python 2 world where people processed text in non-Unicode ways. Arguably, Unicode text processing is the reason for Python 3 to exist, so it’s not surprising that the Python developers were so strongly against anything that smelled like it.

  • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

    • Understanding Bash Variables

      So let me walk you through how variables work in bash, starting with local shell variables and then covering special and environment variables. I think you’ll find understanding the basics to be extremely helpful.

Welcome to the American Century…Even If It is Hell on Earth

And he wasn’t wrong, was he?  Eight decades later, who would deny that we’ve lived through something like an American century? After all, in 1945, the U.S. emerged triumphant from World War II, a rare nation remarkably unravaged by that war (despite the 400,000 casualties it had suffered). With Great Britain heading for the imperial sub-basement, Washington found itself instantly the military and economic powerhouse on the planet.

As it turned out, however, to “exert upon the world the full impact of our influence,” one other thing was necessary and, fortunately, at hand: an enemy. From then on, America’s global stature and power would, in fact, be eternally based on facing down enemies.  Fortunately, in 1945, there was that other potential, if war-ravaged, powerhouse, the Soviet Union. That future “superpower” had been an ally in World War II, but no longer. It would thereafter be the necessary enemy in a “cold war” that sometimes threatened to turn all too hot. And it would, of course, ensure that what later came to be known as the military-industrial complex (and a nuclear arsenalcapable of destroying many planets like this one) would be funded in a way once historically inconceivable in what might still have passed for peacetime.

A Very Special Operator: the Eddie Gallagher Story

In the not-always secretive world of special operations, few post 9/11 warriors have become better known than Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher, a chief petty officer much beloved by former President Trump. When Gallagher faced a 2019 court-martial for allegedly killing a wounded ISIS prisoner in Iraq and committing other war crimes, Trump assured his supporters that “I will always stick up for our great fighters.” True to his word, after Gallagher was acquitted of all but a lesser charge (taking a trophy shot of the dead Iraqi teenager), Trump blocked a Navy attempt to demote him and take away his Trident Pin, the coveted symbol of SEAL Team membership.

Among those joining the “Free Eddie” campaign was former Marine Duncan Hunter, a Republican Congressman from San Diego who stole $250,000 in campaign funds and then avoided jail only thanks to a Trump pardon. As Hunter argued on Fox News, Gallagher “is the kind of guy we want out there killing for us, killing bad guys. He shouldn’t be going to court at all for doing his job.”

What Passing Can Still Teach Us About Identity

Whenever talking about Nella Larsen’s classic 1929 novel, Passing, I often confuse the names of its main characters. When I mean to refer to the Black woman who grows up in Chicago’s South Side and then decides to pass as white, I rarely identify her as Clare. I regularly mistake her for Irene, the Black woman who is Clare’s childhood friend and who encounters Clare as an adult. I may just be bad with names, but I think that this mistake stems, in part, from the novel. Both light-skinned, raised in Chicago, and relatively wealthy, Clare and Irene are foils. They blur together even as each character distinguishes herself from the other.

What Saul Alinsky Learned from His “Mentor”, Al Capone

A central tenet of neoliberalism—a political theory of governmental administration—is a tendency to view the purpose of government and public processes in strictly economic terms, and to ascribe the cause of most problems to market inefficiencies and too little competition. Under this approach, all conflict is resolved by using rational, professional problem solving to find win-win, job-creating solutions. A defining characteristic of this approach is a reluctance to ascribe the cause of any problem to pervasive and systematic corruption, or to the ability of the rich and the strong to take advantage of the poor and the weak.

This theory is in sharp contrast to what activists have learned from decades of experience—a world view best summed up by Saul Alinsky (probably the 20th century’s best grassroots community organizer) who said, “We live in a world of unbelievable deceit and corruption…Giant corporations are unbelievably oppressive and follow a win-lose philosophy…. [and] will go to any length to make more money.” *

640% Kickstarter, Sponsorships, and Shipping

When it comes to shipping books internationally, the US post office provides three options.

1. Media Mail. I can get it just about anywhere in the world for less than $10. No international tracking. No guarantee of delivery. Might take months or years. Those container ships moored outside every port in the world, waiting months for an opportunity to unload? There are Media Mail packages adrift in every one.

2. First class mail. Costs $25 +/- $5-ish. Delivery guaranteed, eventually. Might take months. I can complain to the post office, and they’ll fill out a form. What they’ll do with that form is another issue.

3. International Priority Mail. Costs about $40 ($30 to Canada). Ouch. Delivers within a week or two, sort of guaranteed. Insured. Complaints are taken mostly seriously.

Hardware

• Tencent Developing Three SoCs Set to Replace Western Processors

  Chinese Internet conglomerate Tencent offers dozens of various cloud services and operates massive datacenters in China. Just like other cloud giants, Tencent has been developing its own datacenter infrastructure for a while. Now, in in a bid to increase performance, cut power consumption, reduce costs, and get a complete control over its software and hardware, Tencent has ventured into chip design.

Health/Nutrition

• Biden Gives January 4 Deadline to Employers for New OSHA Vaccine Requirements

• ‘Historic Moment’ as NYC Taxi Drivers Win Major Debt Relief Following Hunger Strike

  “By going on a hunger strike in front of City Hall, there was no way you could ignore what we were doing to our bodies in the service of this fight.”

  “Next time folks wonder why I’m stubborn, it’s because we’re constantly told our requests are impossible or unreasonable until we wind up accomplishing it anyway through hard work and organizing,” tweeted Ocasio-Cortez. “When we organize people, the people win!”

• A COVID Memorial Mixtape Revisited

• COVID Vaccine Rollout for Children Ages 5 to 11 Comes With Familiar Challenges

• Here’s Why Rapid COVID Tests Are So Expensive and Hard to Find

  A few weeks ago, a ProPublica reporter decided to test his kids for COVID-19. They had the sniffles, and with a grandparent set to visit he wanted to minimize the risk that they were infectious.

  This was the problem that quick, cheap COVID-19 tests were supposed to help fix. No need to go to a clinic or wait days for results. Just pick up a pack of tests at a local pharmacy whenever you want, swab your nose and learn within 15 minutes if you’re likely to pass the virus along.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • ‘Tis the Season for the Wayward Package Phish

    The holiday shopping season always means big business for phishers, who tend to find increased success this time of year with a lure about a wayward package that needs redelivery. Here’s a look at a fairly elaborate SMS-based phishing scam that spoofs FedEx in a bid to extract personal and financial information from unwary recipients.

  • Facebook skirts Apple’s App Store fees with custom subscription links for creators

    Facebook is operating in a gray zone under Apple’s rules for the App Store, though a spokesperson said the social network believes its approach has always been allowed on iOS. The App Store currently forbids iOS apps from offering alternative payment options for purchasing digital goods, but in this case, it’s the creator, not Facebook, the app developer, that will be sending people to pay for a subscription on the web. The spokesperson for Facebook confirmed the social network isn’t removing the ability for users to sign up for a creator subscription using Apple’s native payments system.

  • Sinclair Broadcast Group says ransomware incident not ‘fully resolved’ weeks after breach

    Employees of the Maryland-based company — which is the second-largest broadcast company in the U.S., owning or operating 185 television stations in 85 markets, multiple national networks, and 21 regional sports network brands — reported at the time that the attack had caused “major technical problems” and made it difficult for some stations to get on the air. The company also reported that [crackers] had taken data in the attack.

  • Security

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Seventh Circuit Says Riley Doesn’t Apply To Searches Of Parolees’ Phones

        In 2014, the Supreme Court extended Fourth Amendment coverage to the contents of cell phones. Prior to that ruling, cops had successfully argued that searching the contents of someone’s cell phone was no different than searching the contents of their pockets when arresting them. Claims — bad ones — were made about “officer safety” and, for the most part, courts tended to agree. If the pants pocket argument didn’t work, cell phones — with their wealth of personal information and private communications — were analogized as the digital equivalent of car trunks or address books.

      • Document Freed By FOIA Shows How Much Data The FBI Can Obtain From Cellphone Service Providers

        An internal FBI document shared with Joseph Cox of Motherboard by Ryan Shapiro of Property of the People gives a little more insight into law enforcement’s data grabs. The Third Party Doctrine — ushered into law by the Supreme Court decision that said anything voluntarily shared with third parties could be obtained without a warrant — still governs a lot of these collections.

      • The Metaverse: Gateway to Unanimous Consent and Panarchy?

        The metaverse is a decades-old concept. Neal Stephenson coined the term in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, but versions of it appear in much earlier speculative fiction. Think of it as virtual reality on steroids, a computer/Internet environment into which humanity could, and might, effectively move most of its social activities.

        To some, this sounds utopian. Others (especially writers of fiction) treat it as at least potentially dystopian. Either way, it’s coming, and the political possibilities are intriguing.

      • Planned regulation: EU Commission postpones mandatory screening of encrypted chats

        Providers of messengers and cloud services will be allowed to voluntarily screen for child abuse content worthy of prosecution, which is to become mandatory across the EU. The Council and Commission are pushing for an extension to other crime areas. Next week, the EU interior ministers will publish a declaration on this.

      • “Complexity is Fraud”: Why We Must Drop Micro-Targeted Ads to Help Publishers and to Protect Online Privacy

        Against those massively well-financed and well-connected groups, the fight to rein in micro-targeted advertising might seem hopeless. Nonetheless, there are efforts to counter those powers. Privacy News Online wrote about one of them back in July. The Tracking-Free Ads Coalition is “a coalition of political leaders, civil society organisations and companies from across the EU that are committed to put an end to the pervasive tracking advertising industry that dominates the internet today.” It includes 24 Members of the European Parliament from a range of parties. Recently, they took the unusual step of writing to leading businesses that use targeted advertising:

      • Data Privacy Is The Price Of The Latest Antitrust Proposals

        In the wake of data breaches at Target and Equifax where hackers compromised the personal information of millions of Americans and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, customers and policymakers are increasingly worried about the privacy and security of our personal information online. Unfortunately, policymakers often confuse these privacy and data security concerns with broader anti-tech fervor against America’s leading technology businesses. But simply put, kitchen-sink anti-tech responses could exacerbate, not ease, concerns regarding data privacy and security.

      • Open-source browser fingerprinting startup FingerprintJS raises $32M

        Open-source browser fingerprinting startup FingerprintJS Inc. said today it has raised $32 million in new funding to accelerate the development of additional developer tools, including a JavaScript bot detection application programming interface.

        Craft Ventures led the Series B round. Also participating in the round were Nexus Venture Partners and Uncorrelated Ventures.

      • Digital privacy of correspondence: ePrivacy Regulation

        Because of the very sensitive nature of personal communications, location and internet usage data, the 2002 ePrivacy Directive guaranteed special data protection for telephone and internet communications, which goes far beyond the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). The ePrivacy Regulation is intended to replace this 2002 Directive, for better or for worse. Mass intelligence surveillance, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and potentiallywrongful convictions based on false telecommunications data inDenmark show how urgently better protection of our telephone and [Internet] use is needed.

      • Confidentiality

        • Thinking through the threat models when encrypting your backups

          Here is a simple seeming question you might wind up asking someday. Suppose that for some reason you need to keep encrypted copies of your backups. Does it matter if you use symmetric encryption for this (where the encryption key is also the decryption key), or do you need some form of asymmetric encryption (where the encryption key is not the decryption key)? Well, it depends on what your threats are (a threat model, in the jargon).

        • [Crackers] are stealing data today so quantum computers can crack it in a decade

          Faced with this “harvest now and decrypt later” strategy, officials are trying to develop and deploy new encryption algorithms to protect secrets against an emerging class of powerful machines. That includes the Department of Homeland Security, which says it is leading a long and difficult transition to what is known as post-quantum cryptography.

        • Tens of thousands of medical school records found on misconfigured cloud storage

          The student data was found on a single, open Amazon Web Services Inc. S3 storage bucket. The 157 gigabytes of student data covered an estimated 27,000 to 50,000 students and included personally identifiable information, national ID cards, academic records and more.

Defence/Aggression

• Denial of Wrongdoing in Deadly Kabul Strike Reveals ‘Systemic Problem’ at Pentagon: Critics

  Following a Pentagon official’s assertion Wednesday that the August 29 airstrike in a Kabul neighborhood that killed 10 innocent Afghan civilians, including seven children, was not the result of misconduct or negligence, human rights advocates reiterated that the United States’ remote-controlled assassination program is “rotten” from top to bottom and called for a moratorium on drone warfare.

  “We need to shut down these strikes until we figure out what the hell is going on.”

• Opinion | In Praise of People (Even Me) Who Were Right About the Failed Afghan War From the Beginning

  I waited almost three months for some acknowledgement, but it never came. Not a bottle of champagne. Not a congratulatory note. Not an email of acknowledgement. Not one media request.

• It is Time For General Mark Milley to Step Aside

  The real “Sputnik moment” in 1957, when the Soviet Union was the first to launch a vehicle into space, had international and national consequences for American national security policy.  Physicists and engineers around the world know that hypersonic weapons do not represent a revolution in the strategic arsenal.  Writing in “Scientific American” in August 2021, David Wright and Cameron Tracy noted that many of the claims regarding hypersonic weapons are exaggerated or simply false.  They are not game-changers.  The Pentagon and the Congress should not be allowed to use this canard to drive a new arms race and escalate the chances of conflict.

  Over the past year or so, the Department of Defense has delivered a series of statements that exaggerate the power and influence of China in order to increase U.S. defense spending and to “strengthen deterrence” against China.  Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia and the Pacific Ely Ratner outlined a plan in June 2021 to deploy a permanent naval squadron to waters surrounding Taiwan that would include an aircraft carrier task force.

• Citing Failure to Prosecute Trump and Cronies, Legal Group Calls On AG Garland to Resign

  Frustrated by the U.S. attorney general’s failure to investigate or take legal action against former President Donald Trump and his associates for various potential crimes, Free Speech for People argued Thursday that because Merrick Garland “is unwilling to step up, it is time for him to step down.”

  “Garland is no longer fit to serve as attorney general.”

• What the CIA is Hiding in the JFK Assassination Records

  To understand what they are still hiding and why they are still hiding it, it’s necessary to go back to the 1990s during the era of the Assassination Records Review Board — and even further back than that to November 22, 1963 — the day that Kennedy was assassinated. 

  People often say that if the CIA and the Pentagon had orchestrated the assassination of President Kennedy, someone would have talked by now. 

• “I Would Like to See The New York Times Wash the Blood Off Its Hands”

  Mohammed El-Kurd is a Palestinian poet, writer, and activist who grew up in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. When he was 11 years old, settlers carrying rifles and backpacks, and supported by the Israeli army, took over half his house.

• Controversial term: German Ministry of the Interior sneaks „Gefährder“ into the EU

  In order for state protection departments to be able to cooperate better at EU level in the area of politically motivated crime, they need common definitions of the persons to be prosecuted. A corresponding initiative to this end comes from Germany. This way, threats are prosecuted that have not even occurred yet.

• The Supreme Court Is Poised to Give a Giant Gift to Gun Nuts

  On a winter night in 1984, Bernhard Goetz brought his handgun on the New York City subway and shot four young unarmed black men he claimed were trying to rob him. The people he shot were never charged with attempted robbery, which they would have been had Goetz had any evidence of the crime. Goetz claimed he had bought the gun for self-defense after being attacked on the subway three years earlier. The story drew national attention. Some people hailed him as a hero, others damned him as a villain. Goetz was eventually charged with assault and attempted murder but was only convicted on one count of carrying an unlicensed firearm. He served eight months in prison and, as far as I know, is still out there somewhere in the world, armed and dangerous.

• Former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed on Climate Risk & Surviving Assassination Attempt

  We speak to Mohamed Nasheed, the former president of the low-lying island nation of the Maldives, at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow. Nasheed is one of the world’s leading climate advocates, who once held a cabinet meeting underwater to bring attention to the threat of global warming, pledged to make the Maldives the first carbon-neutral country and installed solar panels on the roof of his presidential residence. Now serving as speaker of parliament, Nasheed survived an assassination attempt earlier this year that required 16 hours of surgery. As a result of the sea level rising four millimeters a year in the Maldives, Nasheed says the country faces devastating consequences such as contaminated water, loss of biodiversity, inclement weather and coastal erosion. “We want to see countries agree that this is an emergency, and we want to see countries do things that they do in an emergency,” he says.

• Dems Urge Biden to ‘Reduce Nuclear Weapons Risks’ in Summit With Chinese President

  Four congressional Democrats on Thursday urged U.S. President Joe Biden to make reducing nuclear weapons risks a “top priority” in his upcoming virtual summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, emphasizing the important context of the United States’ huge arsenal.

  The message to Biden from Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) as well as Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and John Garamendi (D-Calif.) came a day after the Pentagon projected that China’s cache of deliverable nuclear warheads could increase fivefold to 1,000 by 2030.

• Warnings of ‘More Death and Suffering’ in Yemen as US Moves to Sell Saudis Missiles

  Anti-war activists on Thursday accused the Biden administration of throwing fuel on the flames of the Saudi-led war in Yemen after the U.S. State Department notified Congress it approved a new $650 million missile sale to the repressive Middle Eastern monarchy.

  Defense News reports the Pentagon said the Saudi government requested to purchase 280 AIM-120C-7/C-8 advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles and 596 LAU-128 missile rail launchers in a deal that would also include spare parts, support, and logistical services. The missiles would be fitted to Saudi warplanes including Eurofighter Typhoons and McDonnell-Douglas F-15s.

• Israel Dossier on Palestinian “Terror” Groups Offers No Proof

  A SECRET DOCUMENT distributed by Israel to justify its terrorist designations of six prominent Palestinian human rights groups shows no concrete evidence of involvement in violent activities by any of the groups.

  The designation of the Palestinians groups, which was met by international outrage from defenders of human rights, was announced on October 22 by Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz. Gantz cited alleged links between the groups and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP, a left-wing Palestinian political party with its own military wing.

  Despite the severity of the declaration, Israel has yet to publicly present any documents directly or indirectly linking the six groups to the PFLP or to any violent activity.

Environment

• Biden keeps pressure on OPEC+ to boost output, citing inflation

  The pressure on OPEC+ is unusually strong. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed, the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday to press for increased production. Other oil-consuming nations are pushing hard as well, with Japan and India wanting more production as the energy crisis threatens to undermine the economic recovery in Europe and Asia.

  As gasoline prices pose increasing domestic political risks, the issue came up on the sidelines of the Group of 20 meeting over the weekend in Rome, with Biden administration officials calling for more production when producers meet on Thursday.

  Members including Kuwait, Iraq, Algeria, Angola and Nigeria have indicated that they want OPEC+ to stick with its current plan to increase output gradually.

• COP26: The Clock Is Ticking

• More Than 20 Nations Vow to End Funding for Overseas Fossil Fuel Projects

• Climate Change and the Limits of Economic Growth

  Not all ecologists or economists are enthusiastic about this “green growth” alternative. According to these critical views, which have now begun to move into the mainstream, the planet simply can’t sustain the current pace of growth and even renewable energy sources like solar hit up against significant resource limits. The only effective way to control carbon emissions, as well as related problems of pollution and biodiversity loss, is to address “overshoot,” the unconstrained use of energy and material resources well beyond planetary limits, particularly in the richer parts of the world. These arguments pick up from some of the earliest computer modeling of resource limits highlighted in the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report in 1972, but now with a climate crisis twist.

  With the fiftieth anniversary of the Club of Rome report approaching, a number of scientists and economists gathered in early October to assess the current state of play of the zero-growth argument, its traction in the mainstream, and how best to call attention to the data supporting these positions. They looked at this question from various angles—physics, geology, biology, economy, ecology—and discussed the major obstacles to greater acceptance of more critical approaches to economic growth as well as ways of overcoming these obstacles.

• ‘Global warming is not a problem’ says Net Zero Watch Board Member Lord Lawson During COP26

  A board member of a new MP-backed ‘Net Zero Watch’ campaign group has said today that “global warming is not a problem”, defended burning fossil fuels, and said carbon dioxide’s “principal effect” is the growth of plants.  

  Net Zero Watch (NZW), which launched last month, presents itself as a reasonable campaign to scrutinise the impact and cost of the UK government’s net zero policies. The group has been quoted in the media and retweeted by prominent anti-net zero MPs Steve Baker and Craig Mackinlay.  

• Italy’s First Climate Lawsuit Seeks Bold Emissions Target in Effort to Protect the Planet and Human Rights

  Martina Comparelli’s pollen allergies have been getting worse. Sometimes it’s so bad that she has to spend whole afternoons in bed with her windows closed. As the planet heats up, allergy seasons are getting longer and the climate crisis is “violating” her “right to health” said Comparelli, a climate activist in her 20s with Fridays for Future Italy.

  Above all, though, Comparelli is afraid. She is afraid that when her parents are older, they will be subjected to the tremendous heat waves climate scientists say are already becoming more common. She is afraid for her own future. And her country isn’t doing anything to protect them. That is why Comparelli is suing. 

• Kick Fossil Fuel Interests Out of Climate Policy Process, Campaigners Urge

  World leaders must bring in stricter criteria to exclude fossil fuel companies from decision-making, campaigners have urged, as talks at the crucial COP26 summit enter their fifth day.

  A broad coalition of 138 green groups submitted an open letter in Glasgow on Wednesday, calling for decision-makers to address the “elephant in the room holding back global climate ambition: the fossil fuel industry and its lobbying”. The letter calls on leaders including UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, COP26 President Alok Sharma and head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Patricia Espinosa to revoke the sponsorship of two of the companies officially partnering the event – National Grid and Scottish energy provider SSE. 

• Just Two Countries Mention Need to Cut Fossil Fuel Production at COP26 ‘Greenwashing’ Stands

  GLASGOW, SCOTLAND – Only two of the 35 stalls lauding countries’ green credentials at the COP26 UN climate summit mention the need to cut fossil fuel production — the chief cause of the carbon emissions driving climate change. 

  The summit’s official “blue zone” includes large corporate-style pavilions run by some of the world’s leading producers of oil, gas, and coal, including the United States, Australia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Arab Emirates, Germany, and Qatar. They highlight the countries’ environmental efforts while failing to mention their massive and ongoing trade in fossil fuels.

• Activists Push for World Leaders to Join Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty

• ‘Enough Is Enough’: Sunrise Movement Confronts Manchin on Climate Policy Outside His Yacht

  Over a hundred climate activists confronted Sen. Joe Manchin outside his Washington, D.C. houseboat on Thursday to protest the West Virginia Democrat’s obstruction of climate policy in the Build Back Better Act.

  The activists from the youth climate group Sunrise Movement, some who have been participating in a hunger strike to demand a $3.5 trillion climate and jobs package, corralled around Manchin as he walked to his parking garage from his yacht to leave for a committee meeting.

• ‘The Big Tobacco of Our Generation’: Study Shows Huge Scale of Facebook Climate Lies

  A new study published Thursday by a pair of watchdog groups shows Facebook is allowing climate misinformation to proliferate widely—and profiting from it—even as its newly rebranded parent company vows to curb such lies on the massive social media platform.

  “Facebook cannot and will not police themselves. We need real, independent, transparent outside oversight and regulation.”

• US Lawmakers Praised for Pushing Sanctions to ‘Crack Down Climate-Destroying Activities’

  A quartet of congressional progressives was applauded by the nonprofit EarthRights International on Thursday for urging members of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet to use “targeted sanctions as a method of deterring reckless, climate-destroying behavior.”

  “Those who destroy the planet for profit, such as fossil fuel companies, need to face the consequences.”

• Energy

  • Ruralist Lament: The Ghost (and) the Machine

    While they burn gas or off-road diesel, their castings were forged many decades ago. Their life cycle contributions to today’s “carbon budget”are (I think) fairly modest——especially compared to the much larger machines manufactured today using fracked fossil energy products pulled out of the Earth’s crust at great financial/environmental cost.

    Most every calorie of food energy in America has long come at the cost of  fossil energy, As Michael Pollan pointed out in his 2008 public “(Letter) To the Farmer-in-Chief,”  we now have. “…. transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel to produce a single calorie of supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gasses.”

  • Shell CEO: We Need to Keep Extracting Oil to Stop Extracting Oil

    Declaring that “cash comes from our legacy business,” the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell has asserted that continuing the company’s oil operations is necessary to help it transition away from non-oil energy operations.

    Ben van Beurden made the remarks in an interview with the BBC published online Thursday.

  • Energy Ministers To Mingle With CEOs of High-Carbon Companies at COP26 Business Dinner

    UK energy ministers attending the COP26 climate summit will tonight socialise with the CEOs of highly-polluting companies, including HSBC and Heathrow Airport.

    Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng and Scotland secretary Alister Jack are among the 600 expected attendees at the Confederation of Business Industry (CBI) event in Glasgow, Politico reported earlier today.

  • Experts Sound Alarm as Coal and Gas Surge Pushes Emissions Close to Pre-Pandemic Levels

    After falling in 2020 due to coronavirus-related shutdowns, global carbon dioxide emissions are on pace to nearly reach pre-pandemic levels this year as powerful nations—including the United States—continue to burn fossil fuels at a dangerous clip.

    “To stop further global warming, global CO2 emissions must stop or reach net-zero.”

  • ‘Welcome Progress’: 20+ Nations Vow to End Funding for Overseas Fossil Fuel Projects

    More than 20 countries across the globe—including the U.S., Canada, Finland, Portugal, and Ethiopia—vowed Thursday to cut off public financing for international fossil fuel projects by the end of next year, a pledge climate campaigners hailed as a positive step that must be accompanied by action.

    “All governments need to urgently end all support for fossil fuels and ensure a just transition.”

  • Court Suspends ‘Copyright Troll’ Lawyer From Practicing Law in New York

    Due to repeated misconduct, copyright lawyer Richard Liebowitz is suspended from practicing law in the State of New York, effective immediately. The Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court took this drastic decision following a similar order from the Southern District of New York last year, which has since spilled over to other states too.

  • Police Arrest Six in Connection With Private Torrent Sites & Seedboxes

    Following criminal referrals by anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, authorities in Denmark have arrested six men believed to be “ringleaders” or central staff at torrent sites including DanishBytes and ShareUniversity. Police have seized computers and other IT equipment plus money claimed to be profits from the supply of seedboxes.

  • How a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Can Guide a Global Just Transition & Emission Cuts

    We speak with Harjeet Singh, senior adviser with the Climate Action Network, who is at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow. Activists like Singh are pressuring world leaders to join the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would supplement the Paris Agreement by directly targeting the fossil fuel industry and outlining clear actions that every country could take to drastically decrease carbon emissions. “This treaty talks about ending fossil fuel expansion, phasing out, and also just transition,” says Singh. He also speaks about his home country of India, which has only recently become one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases and has fewer resources to adapt while “rich countries have been polluting for more than 100 years.”

  • Meet the Climate Lawyer Who Helped Write 2015 Paris Agreement & Superglued Herself at Shell’s U.K. HQ

    We speak to Farhana Yamin, one of the most prominent climate lawyers in Britain, who has been deeply involved in international climate negotiations for decades, including the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, and has also engaged in direct action to effect change. Yamin is currently working with the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a group that represents 48 of the countries most threatened by the climate crisis, at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow. We last spoke with Farhana in 2019 after she was arrested for supergluing her hands to the ground outside Shell’s headquarters in London as part of an Extinction Rebellion action. She applauds the demonstrators outside the conference who are bringing political pressure on those inside. She says the net zero emissions goal that many global leaders are discussing “has to have emissions that are real, and those emissions cannot be bought at the expense of vulnerable people and countries.”

  • 100+ Peace, Green Groups Back Barbara Lee’s Resolution to Cut Pentagon’s Climate Impact

    More than 100 peace and environmental groups are supporting a resolution issued Wednesday by U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Lee demanding that the U.S. military account for its carbon impact, and establish targets for reducing its emissions in line with the Paris climate agreement.

    “The climate crisis is past the point where the U.S. can just take symbolic action, nor can we accept military greenwashing.”

  • If Fighting Climate Crisis Is the Goal, Critics Say COP26 Coal Reduction Deal ‘Falls Spectacularly Short’

    COP26 officials on Thursday are heralding developments they say signal that “the end of coal is in sight”—but advocates for strong climate action suggest holding the applause.

    “An agreement that only tackles coal doesn’t even solve half the problem.”

Finance

• Progressives to Biden: If You Want to Be Popular, Take On Corporate Greed

  Following Terry McAuliffe’s Tuesday night loss in Virginia’s gubernatorial election and amid the White House’s ongoing failure to enact redistributive legislation due to obstruction from Republicans and right-wing Democrats in Congress, progressives are urging President Joe Biden to fully embrace and use his executive authority to challenge corporate power, which they say might give people a reason to vote for his party in next year’s midterms.

  “If… Democrats refuse to fight for the people, the people will seek fighters elsewhere.”

• Opinion | A World Without Money

  And climate change begins . . .

• American Tax Policy in the Age of Trillionaires

• With Only 23 Percent of Rental Aid Distributed, Warren and Bush Demand Answers

• Opinion | The United States of Tax Havens

• For Migrant Families, COVID-19 Made Precarious Housing Much Worse

  As the national lockdown went into effect in March 2020, Susana, a Latina woman in her early 60s, was living alone on the Northside of Minneapolis. She had been getting by as a childcare provider for an affluent family. But when her employer began working from home, that source of income became impromptu at best—and, more importantly, unsustainable. Susana’s decade-long source of income came to a close. 

  With living expenses rising and few job opportunities, Susana, her two adult daughters, and four grandchildren doubled up in a three-bedroom apartment to cut costs. A new routine developed: Susana’s daughters would go to work, regardless of COVID surges, and she would stay with the grandkids while they tried to make the most of online schooling. 

• How These Ultrawealthy Politicians Avoided Paying Taxes

  As a member of Congress, Jared Polis was one of the loudest Democrats demanding President Donald Trump release his tax returns.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• “We’re Going to Win”: Charles Booker Officially Files Campaign to Oust Rand Paul

• Opinion | No Time to Lose: Why Democrats Should Include Voting Rights In Their Build Back Better Compromise

  It seems like “last minute” negotiations about President Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislative agenda have been dragging on for months. Even now, after Biden outlined his “bottom line” before heading for Rome, disagreements persist, about details and about the timing of a vote. Each time it appears that a common understanding has been reached, Joe Manchin recoils.

• Corporate News Conveniently Piles Blame for Virginia on Progressives

• Opinion | Is There a Republican Alive Who Still Believes in Democracy?

  Investigative accounts of the Trump administration, like the recent Washington Post feature on the January 6 insurrection, routinely write about three kinds of conservatives.

• Schumer Suggests Filibuster Reform After GOP Blocks John Lewis Voting Rights Act

• Kristof’s Moralistic Journalism Was Often Full of Holes

  New York Times columnist and two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Nicholas Kristof has ended a four-decade career of globe-trotting and covering poverty, war and strife. He is choosing to return to his native Oregon, where he grew up on a farm, with an eye toward running for governor as a Democrat (New York Times, 10/14/21).

Censorship/Free Speech

• Content Moderation Case Study: Facebook Struggles To Correctly Moderate The Word ‘Hoe’ (2021)

  Summary: One of the many challenges with content moderation is the flexibility of language. When applying blocklists — a list of prohibited terms considered not appropriate for the platform — moderators need to consider innocuous uses of words that, when removed from their context, appear to be violations of the platform’s terms of use.

• Throwing gas on the fire of Iranian internet suppression

  In reality, the bill’s goal is to increase state control over cyberspace by further localizing services and platforms that Iranian users rely on. It would allow the Iranian government to place bandwidth restrictions on any international services that do not comply with authorities’ demands (namely, to localize their data in Iran). By making it even harder for ordinary Iranians to use common international messaging apps, social media platforms, and other communication tools, lawmakers hope to drive users onto state-controlled Iranian alternatives like local cloud services and messaging apps, thus, making future shutdowns of communication even easier. The bill would also place full control of the internet gateway into the hands of the General Staff of the Armed Forces–Iran’s version of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—turning Iranian cyberspace into an extension of the police state.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• WikiLikes: Writers Association Honors Julian Assange And Calls For His Release

  “Assange has been in solitary confinement in London’s maximum security prison in Belmarsh since April 2019, after applying for asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 and living there as a political refugee for almost seven years,” the German PEN Centre said.

• WikiLeaks: To obtain the extradition of Julian Assange, the United States seeks to reassure his fate

  At a hearing scheduled until Thursday, the United States hopes to convince the High Court of London to overturn the decision rendered last January by Vanessa Baraitser. The magistrate had rejected the American request for extradition, putting forward a risk of suicide. U.S. government attorney James Lewis insisted on assurances from Washington that Julian Assange would not be subject to special measures or be held in the dreaded ADX super-security prison in Florence, Colo. nicknamed the “Alcatraz of the Rockies”.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Opinion | How I Triggered Bill Maher by Writing About White Supremacy and Standardized Tests

  Bill Maher is mad at me.

• Culture Wars: “The Great Male Renunciation”

  The issue posed a critical question: “Freed from the binary of boy and girl, gender identity is a shifting landscape. Can science help us navigate?”

  Provocatively, a number of articles profiled male gender identity in the U.S., including a trans boy, a gun-toting youth and a father raising two newborns. These stories suggest the range of maleness beginning to reshape masculine identity in a traditionally patriarchal society.

• Democrats’ Paid Family Leave Plan ‘Keeps Getting Worse,’ Policy Expert Warns

  “The Democrats modified the eligibility rule to ensure that the lowest earners in the workforce cannot claim benefits from the program.”

• Cleo Smith and the Lost Child Syndrome

  For eighteen days, four-year old Cleo Smith could not be found.  She had gone missing from the Quobba Blowholes Shacks campsite north of Carnarvon in Western Australia, “last seen,” according to a notice, “at 1.30 am on 16thOctober 2021”.  The Western Australian government had promised a $1 million reward for information on her disappearance.

  There was a feast of coverage.  Google’s search engine was cluttered (the latest search reveals some 85.5 million results).  Bounty hunters, melting at the prospect of a reward, moved in.  There were stretched claims that 65,000 “average Aussies” were deployed in the search effort.  That number was taken from the Bring Cleo Smith HomeFacebook group, established to drum up publicity for the cause.  In the social media age, such voyeuristic engagement can count as physical participation.  The administrators of the group were keen that only acceptable members join: anyone questioning holes in the account, inconsistencies and motives (the Daily Mail charmingly called them “liars and trouble-makers”) were blocked.

• The Confederacy Votes for A White Supremacist—Is That News?

  It’s not the end of democracy. That ended years ago. Like George Bush’s hanging chad victory in 2000 and Donald Trump’s electoral but not popular vote win in 2016, it’s just another nail in the coffin. Or like Joe Biden’s win in 2020, where the corporate leadership of the Democratic Party twisted arms, promised paydays to politicians and otherwise forced the left-leaning primary candidates into a line behind Joe. Just like it is doing now in Congress as it morphs a bill designed to help working people into one that will mostly help the corporations that give most people in Congress their true payday.

  Columnists fret, progressives fret, even leftists who focus on electoral politics fret. How can we stop the reactionaries from taking over everything? How can we stop the US fascists—the Trumpists and their allies—from total victory? While I don’t have the answer to that, I do know that it’s not by trying to be more like them. Fascism is a real possibility in the United States. It always has been. Wall Street knows this better than most liberals do. Wall Street would ultimately have no problem with a fascist regime in DC. Like German capital in the 1930s, US capital understands that an authoritarian state run for the benefit of profiteers is a great way to make money. The fact that so many of the Democrats in power are part of the same economy that would easily lie with the fascists compromises their opposition. They put their bank accounts and their potential for cashing in ahead of their commitment to the people who elected them and the democracy they claim to live in. Their party cannot overcome the fascists as long as it serves the same masters.

• ‘Outrageous’: Nearly All-White Jury Chosen for Ahmaud Arbery Murder Trial

  Relatives of Ahmaud Arbery, their attorneys, and racial justice advocates expressed shock and indignation Thursday following the selection of a nearly all-white jury—even after the presiding judge accused the defense of “intentional discrimination”—in the trial of three men accused of murdering the unarmed Black jogger in Glynn County, Georgia last year.

  “Is the KKK serving as jury consultants in the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial?”

• Gun Rights at the Supreme Court

  The crux of the issue before the court is captured by a debate that Thomas Jefferson had with himself at the time of the founding.

  When Jefferson was drafting a proposed constitution for his home state of Virginia in June 1776, he suggested a clause that read “No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”

• “There Should Be No Statute of Limitations on Stolen Land”

  On September 30, the California legislature passed Senate Bill 796, which made it possible for a government entity to return property that had been unjustly taken from Black property owners. At issue was a former Black-owned resort in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County. In 1912, Black entrepreneurs Charles and Willa Bruce opened Bruce’s Beach on two previously undeveloped waterfront lots. Black Americans from California as well as around the country soon flocked to the resort, because it was one of the few beaches in the United States that Black people could legally patronize. Not surprisingly, the white Manhattan Beach community resented the success of Bruce’s Beach. In 1924, the City used eminent domain to force Charles and Willa Bruce and other nearby Black property to sell their beachfront land for a fraction of its value on the pretense that it was needed for a public park.

• The Working Class Is on Strike

  Across the country we are witnessing a historic strike wave, with over 22,000 US union members on strike right now. From our BCTGM Local 374G right here in Lancaster, Pa., on strike against the greed of Kellogg’s, to the 10,000 UAW workers at John Deere plants walking off the factory floor, the Ironworkers Regional Shop Local 851 on strike against Erie Strayer Company in northwestern Pennsylvania, or the 24,000 health care workers at Kaiser Permanente on the west coast who have overwhelmingly authorized a strike, workers have had enough, and they are taking action.

• Voters Reject Policing Overhaul in Minneapolis — But Activists Aren’t Deterred

• Abortion Rights ‘In Peril’ as Ohio GOP Proposes Total Ban Modeled on Texas Law

  “The future of reproductive freedom is in peril.”

  “It is past time to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act and safeguard the legal right to abortion.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The GOP Is Mad Because New FCC Appointment Gigi Sohn Actually Defends Broadband Consumers

  So after the longest (and completely unexplained) delay in FCC and NTIA history, last week the Biden administration finally got around to fully staffing the nation’s top telecom regulator. While the selection of fairly centrist Jessica Rosenworcel is expected to make it through the confirmation process, the same can’t be said of Gigi Sohn, a popular consumer advocate:

Monopolies

• Patents

  • Moderna Reports ‘Obscene’ Profits From Covid Vaccine Funded by US Taxpayers

    After Moderna announced Thursday that it expects to deliver up to 300 million fewer coronavirus vaccine doses this year than previously anticipated despite posting large profits, public health campaigners ramped up pressure on President Joe Biden to force the U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant to share its recipe with the world.

    Despite the lower delivery forecast, Moderna said it still expects to rack up between $15-18 billion in sales this year from its vaccine, which was largely funded by the U.S. government and developed in partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

  • Software Patents

    • Senators Push To Study “Unstable” Patent Law, While Patent Trolls Cheer Them On

      That would be Alice v. CLS Bank, the Supreme Court case that made it clear you can’t get a patent on an abstract idea just by adding in generic computer language.

      As we’ve told Congress before, the only ones experiencing “uncertainty” because of the Alice precedent are people and companies using weak software patents to demand money from others.

      For people who actually work with and on software, the Alice precedent has produced more certainty than ever before. Software innovation in the past seven years has been extraordinary. In the U.S., since Alice, the software industry is experiencing record profits and levels of employment. It certainly helps that more baseless patent lawsuits are being thrown out by courts. Truly innovative companies that build stuff—rather than rely on software patents—are thriving.

• Trademarks

  • King.com Opposes ‘Candy Crunch’ Trademark Application… From Actual Fruit Varietal Maker

    King.com and its flagship product, mobile game Candy Crush, have made it onto our pages several times in the past. The most common reason for that is that King appears to enjoy playing trademark bully. Fighting with the folks behind hit game Banner Saga, not to mention picking fights with any other game maker that uses the word “candy” in their titles, have become the norm. Notably, some of the time, when there is a severe public backlash over its antics, King has also shown that it is capable of running away from such disputes.

  • Facebook Stole Our Name and Livelihood

    For the last three months, Facebook lawyers have been hounding us to sell our name to them. We refused their offer on multiple bases. Namely, the low offer wouldn’t cover the costs of changing our name, and we insisted on knowing the client and intent, which they did not want to disclose.

    At least two law firms were involved: One in the USA that requested our trademark and domains (Kilpatrick, Townsend & Stockton), and the other in Europe aggressively contacting trying to get us to sell our domain registrations (Hogan Lovells).

    On October 20th, 2021, during a phone call with Facebook attorneys, we declined their low offer and maintained our requirements. At this point, we presumed it was Facebook and identified them on the call. The attorney representing Facebook declared they would respect our existing right and registration.

    On October 28th, 2021, Facebook decided to commit trademark infringement and call themselves “Meta”.

• Copyrights

  • Internet Archive Would Like To Know What The Association Of American Publishers Is Hiding

    Last year when a bunch of the biggest publishing houses sued the Internet Archive, in the midst of a pandemic, over their digital library program, I was a bit surprised that the announcement about the lawsuit came not from any of the publishers themselves directly, but rather from the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which is officially not a party in the lawsuit. That alone felt a bit… sketchy.